Work Text:
Warnings; swearing
If Dean was being honest, just doing a regular old salt and burn was a relief. They’d spent such a long time dealing with the world ending that this boring regular hunt was kind of like a holiday. (it probably said something about their lives that stopping a murderous ghost was his idea of a holiday).
That was, at least, until the teenagers showed up.
He has no idea what they are doing at a haunted house in the middle of the night, let alone waltzing in like they are meant to be here. Sure they occasionally ran into teens mucking about in abandoned buildings but those were rarely armed, especially not with swords.
Dean shines his torch at them. “What the hell are you doing here?”
One of them, a tall, skinny kid in a kind of stupid coat, unsheathed his sword and pointed it at Dean. “I could say the same of you.”
“Yeah right” Dean scoffs “you’re a kid.”
“Exactly” the other one, a girl with a weirdly massive backpack says, gesturing at her sword “we’re Agents.”
Long Coat kid reaches forward like he's waiting for a handshake “exactly, we’re Lockwood and co, your hauntings are our business!”
Just as Dean is attempting to figure out what the hell he means by that and Sam opens his mouth to presumably ask a barrage of questions, a third kid walks into the room, nerdy looking with glasses.
“Who are they?”
“That's what we’ve been trying to figure out, George,” long coat kid says cheerfully.
“Hang on” Sam says “let's start with some introductions and then figure out what's going, I’m Sam” he gestures at Dean with his free hand “and this is my brother Dean.”
Dean vaguely acknowledged Sam’s introduction with a nod of his head. His brother kept talking. Sam had always been much better at the talking first, shooting second thing then Dean had. “You said you were agents? Of what?”
“Ghost hunting?” backpack girl says, confused.
“Have you been living under a rock?” George says “the problems have been a thing for like 50 years at this point!”
“Hang on” Dean says “isn’t that the weird British ghost thing?”
(sue him for not knowing what's going over the ocean. He had bigger problems, like the end of world)
George rolls his eyes “sure, let's go with that,”
He mutters something under his breath that sounds vaguely like a string of insults.
Deans pretty sure Sam has talked about it before and he's also pretty sure that he wasn’t listening at the time but at least one of them has a clue about what's going on. Dean sure doesn’t but it can’t be more insane than anything else going on in their lives.
“That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here,” he says.
“Maybe we should start with our side of the introductions” the suit jacket kid says. “I’m getting the sense that this is going to take some explaining. I’m Lockwood.”
The girl sighs. “Lucy,” she says.
The other kid introduces himself as George, which Dean already knew, since that was what Lockwood had called him.
(Personally Dean thinks that instead of introducing themselves they should be telling these kids to scram, even if they do seem convinced that they should be here).
“You want to explain what you’re doing here?” Dean says.
They are all extremely lucky that the ghost didn’t show up while they were explaining because they would have been completely screwed. Sure salt would have provided some safety but Sam was distracted and Dean forgot and who knows what the kids know.
The breakdown seems to be that there has been such an uptick in ghost cases in the US that the government asked for some agents to be sent over to deal with them. And Lockwood and co (which is the name of the agency these kids run, seemingly without any adults, which Dean had so many questions about) got sent over. Dean is not sure why, as there are definitely bigger and probably more responsible agencies out there, ones with adult supervision for example (he definitely doesn’t get the sense that it's because nobody likes them).
In the agents' favour, they seemed to take the ‘monsters are real’ thing extremely well, better than most. Maybe seeing ghosts your whole life made ‘other things that go bump in the night are real and also they all want to kill you’ seem much more plausible. Dean’s vote was for them to leave and let him and Sam finish the case by themselves but he doesn’t get listened to. Not that Sam didn’t agree with him, it's just that these are some stubborn teenagers.
Dean is far from happy about it so the sooner they grab this ghost the better for him.
Turns out that while they have the same goals in theory, the two groups have very different ways of going about it.
Dean would prefer it if these kids would get out of the damned blasting zone and leave the danger to the professionals. Lockwood and co or whatever they call themselves would probably insist that they are the professionals.
Sam and George seem to be getting along fine, after the kid asked a question about how they get rock salt to work in a gun that promptly turned into a geek out session between two massive nerds.
Lucy and Lockwood snarked with each other (in a way that verged towards flirting but that wasn’t Dean's business), at least when Lockwood wasn’t arguing with Dean over who was in charge here. He didn’t care about how much experience these kids had or that it was their jobs; they were children and they shouldn’t be anywhere near a hunt. (Dean conveniently ignored the fact that he’d been hunting by the age lockwood and co are. He’d rather not unpack that).
It's starting to get on Dean’s nerves.
At least it's not going to take long to wrap up this case.
Sam had basically already figured out the identity of the ghost but it turns out that George had already tracked down the identity of the ghost that haunted the house, while Sam had already searched the local graveyards and recognised the name. Which meant that they could skip over the normal part of the case where they slam into walls and get possible brain injuries that normally came alongside such a case.
It's only once they are all standing around an open grave (surrounded by iron chains, which the kids promise will stop the ghost from attacking them if it decides to show up), does Dean even slightly appreciate having anyone else around. If only because having more than two people to dig a six feet hole is a whole lot easier.
Sam cracks the lid of the coffin open as they all stare down at it, before jumping out the open grave. Dean flicks the lid of the can of gasoline.
“Ready to light this bad boy up?” he says.
“Don’t we need to take this source to be disposed of?” Lucy says, arms crossed “we don’t exactly need more reasons for DEPRAC to hate us.”
“No” Dean said, a confused and mildly annoyed look on his face “why’d we do that when we could just burn them now?”
“I forgot that you aren’t agents,” Lockwood mutters (Dean rolls his eyes internally, he was getting annoyed by Lockwood’s attempts to take charge). “Normally what we’d do is box these bones up and send them off to the furnaces to be burnt,” Lockwood continues, louder this time.
“Yeah well” Dean scoffed “maybe that's how it works back with your fancy agencies but that's not how things work over here.”
He flicked the lighter down into the grave and the bones caught alight instantly.
All of them stand and stare down at the burning remains below them in silence, mildly hypnotised by the flickering light. After what felt like a very long time but was probably just a moment, Dean pulled his shovel out of the dirt.
“Right” he says, tossing the shovel in his hands “we’ll rebury this bad boy and you lot can go home to bed.”
(internally he thought ‘and hopefully we never see you again’)
The Lockwood and co kids didn’t protest this decision (Dean would blame them, digging up and then reburying the bones was the worst part of every ghost case), and awkwardly said their goodbyes.
As they were walking away, Sam called out “Wait!”
The Lockwood and co kids paused for a moment.
“How about we meet up at that diner that we passed on our way here tomorrow for breakfast? To share info”
The kids yelled back their agreement, or at least George did. Lucy seemed a whole lot more reluctant. Personally Dean agreed with her.
Once the kids were outside, Dean turned to Sam “What the hell Sam!”
“I know you didn’t like them Dean,” Sam starts.
Dean cuts him off “No shit I didn’t! They were idiots and way too young to be mixed up in the hunting business!”
“Hear me out for half a second,” Sam says. “They’ve got some info that we don’t have and so do we! We can warn them so that if they do run into anything more dangerous than a ghost, they’ll have at least some idea of what they're doing.”
“Fine” Dean crossed his arms “But I’m getting the greasiest burger I can and you can’t say a word.”
He stared down at the pile of dirt next to him “Now let's rebury this body.”
Dean’s body makes its protest very much known when he drags himself out of bed the next day but he does eventually do it, tossing on his clothes from yesterday and barely running his hand through his hair before they’re headed out the door.
When he pulls up outside the diner, the Lockwood and co kids are already waiting for them. The first thing Dean does is grab the menus, not even bothering with a greeting. Sam slides into the booth next to him.
“So” Lucy says, an aggressive tint to her voice “Why’d you want to meet?”
“Information” Sam Says “But how about we discuss that once everyone has food in front of them?”
When Dean sinks his teeth into the burger (finally) it's so good that he almost missed the start of conversation.
“- England may be mostly monster free” Sam is saying when Dean finally zones back in (vaguely wondering what the British men of letters are doing about this ghost outbreak), “but America isn’t, so if you’re going to keep poking around with the supernatural.”
“Of course” Lockwood says “that's our job.”
Sam continues “then you’re going to need to know what's out there and what to do,”
George pulls a notebook out of his pocket.
Sam continues speaking, with Dean occasionally dropping in advice and warning between mouthfuls. Occasionally Sam’s explanation is interrupted by questions ranging from the deeply nerdy to the very silly(depending on who's asking) or some scientific jargon fact about the supernatural that Dean tunes out and Sam scribbles down on a napkin.
Turns out there's three types of ghost. Sam and Dean only ever deal with the second, type ones being too small to catch their attention and type three being super duper extra rare. This of course means that he and Sam will run into one at some point because ‘running into the impossible’ seems to be their luck.
It goes better then Dean assumes it would and he will give them one singular piece of credit; the idea to use chains instead of salt circles to protect against ghosts is pretty clever, given how prone salt circles are to be blown away.
Still, when they leave that diner, Dean would be happy if he never saw them again but he does, maybe find them slightly less annoying.
(at least it was a pretty peaceful case)