justprompts: "Smoke and Mirrors"

Image Prompt:

Title:  Smoke and Mirrors
Characters: Dean Winchester and Quinn O'Connor (irishfirebrand )
Timeline/Verse: Brave New World verse @sixwordstories  ; Tuesday night, March 23rd.
Location: New York City, NY
Disclaimer: I wish I owned Supernatural, but I don't. :(  It belongs to Kripke and co.  Quinn O'Connor, on the other hand, is all mine to use and abuse.  No profit made from this.  Dean is likedillinger , and Quinn is irishfirebrand .  The other mentioned chars are:  Sam Winchester (getyourownpie ), Claire "Dolphin" Bennet (excheerleader ), Demon!Dean Winchester (roads_end ), Other-Dean (startswinging ), Other-Dean's Elle (blueshocks ), Elle Bishop (snarky_blonde ), Brooke Davis (ihadmittenson ), Sylar (intuitivelyapt ), and Sam's Claire (autophoenix ).
Synopsis:  Brandi and I were talking about the things Quinn, my pyrokinetic OC who recently joined the Company, has in common with Dean, and we started speculating what a meeting between them would be like.  I decided to make it happen, so here are the events of Dean's Tuesday night.  Dean and Quinn meet in a bar in NYC, and get in a dick-measuring contest trying to pick up a random barslut.



Nursing his beer, Dean rolled his left shoulder backwards slowly and tried to mask the resulting wince.  It still ached like a sonuvabitch.  He had to admit though: the physical damage from his fight with Demon Him had been nothing compared to the damage to his ego.  He was still mad he hadn’t just reset the dislocated shoulder himself rather than muck about with doctors and questions and fake Ids in the ER.  But he’d known that if he’d done that, Claire would have insisted on babying him when he wanted to be left alone, or he’d had to have asked Sam for help in resetting it, and hell if he was gonna do that when he was still pissed at him.

To be honest, it was more than just the damage his demonic self had wreaked on him that had bruised his sense of self-worth this week.  He was actually a lot more pissed off by the shit everyone else was pulling.  Sam, choosing not to kill the thing - the demon - because it looked like Dean, even when he was practically begging his brother to wipe it out.  Sam’s girlfriend and Sylar flipping out on him about how'd he never understand what it was like to be a 'freak' like them - while simultaneously being pissed off about it being implied they were freaks to begin with.  Which hadn't been his goddamn point at all - powers or not, it was dangerous and stupid for Claire to let Sylar poke around in her brain.  Freakish, on the other hand, he could live with.  He did every goddamn day.

And then there was the talk he'd had with that other Dean's Elle - the one who'd actually had a sorta relationship with other-him or whatever.  He'd felt simultaneously vindicated and sickened by finding out his duplicate had cheated on her - on one hand, he'd been right all along, that he was just too messed up for love, but on the other hand...

He'd told her she deserved much better, and he believed it.  She'd been through enough BS.  All the Elles had.

( Anyway, that was all part of why he was here, in one of the dingiest bars he could find, scoping out the female scenery. )