Chapter Text
When someone asked Dean how he had ended up doing what he was doing, he would usually shrug and say that was just how the cards had fallen. Really, all in all, he’d gotten lucky – once upon a time, being dragged around the country by Dad, it had seemed likely that he would end up at the other side of the law, and instead he was a private detective with his very own office.
Fine, a small room in a somewhat dilapidated building he rented for cheap, but still.
In truth, he’d simply looked around once he’d been old enough and had quickly realized there was a lot of potential when it came to this part of the population. Most of them, when certain… well… when they were inconvenienced… they preferred not going to the police, just like the police preferred not to have to deal with them. And Dean couldn’t really blame them – the police consisted of humans, most of them had never even met a magic user, not officially, anyway, and so had no idea what to do when confronted with something of that kind.
And hone it came to those who had magic… there were simply certain traditions, certain Wayas of doing things they had grown used to over the – millennia, to be honest, so why should they suddenly start calling I the force like they were just any other citizen? Or, well, human – which really meant the same the way some people looked down at anyone who wasn’t “Normal”. Dean had never been one of those for the simple reason that his upbringing had been far from “normal” either.
He'd realized pretty soon after barely finishing school – and that only because Bobby, who had taken them in when dean was sixteen after Dad had wrapped himself around a lamppost, thankfully and miraculously not in the Impala, had insisted he do so – that a normal job was not fort him. He was not made for this kind of thing, the nine-to-five, gossip at the watercooler, dinner with business partners style of life. He would have started screaming within weeks. No, he needed a certain something, a certain excitement, and so, he’d gone looking for it and found it just as he had been about to give up and go work in the scrapyard after all.
It was during one of his odd jobs – night watchman in a computer firm. Charlie, who he had not known then by her name, of course but had turned into one of his best friend’s form then on, had broken in because she needed a certain type of cable to “get the quarter into the 21st century”, and that had bene that – he’d thought about the quarter earnestly for the first time.
The quarter. Nearly every town had one, and even though they were all different, they operated in the same way – a kind of lawless zone in which creatures of all kinds, magic users and those who simply didn’t want to live amongst ordinary humans anymore rubbed along.
And, of course also a place where there were problems and mayhem and chaos and everything in between.
From the very first time eh had considered it like that, it had felt like home to him.
And so, he had started looking around for a job, only to realize that eh could do everything and nothing, and then settled for something that he thought was needed. There had to be something.
As it turned out, he had been right. His job description, the one that he would owe up to, was eclectic at best – he could be called because a pet had run away as well as for an attempted murder – but he did make money off of it, and he was never bored, and, much as Sammy did not want to believe it, many inhabitants of the quarter had become close friends. Benny the vampire, Charlie, her girlfriend Glinda, the witch Rowena, Mel the water wraith… all of them strange in their own way, if you thought in human standards, but he loved and cared for them all, and he was never bored.
One of the things he had made a habit of very early in this invented career of his was taking a stroll through the quarter at least two times a week, three if he could – to see if anything new popped up, as was bound to happen when magic was used in abundance around a certain place.
And now that it was close to Halloween, or Samhain as he was supposed to call it here… better be careful. One never knew.
And so it proved today although it was nothing like the bigger challenges he had faced – the fully-grown dragon of this time last year was something he wasn’t going to forget so quickly.
Really, what was yet another a magic shop in comparison?