Fic: Supernatural; Absolution; PG; post 4x22
Title: Absolution
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2056
Warnings: mild angst, gratuitous references to the pilot ^_^
Pairing/Characters: Sam Winchester, Castiel, Dean Winchester
Spoilers: All of Season 4 especially the second half including 4.22
Disclaimer: Sadly, I still don't own Supernatural, or any of its characters. If I did the show wouldn't be half as interesting because I would never be able to be as evil as Kripke.
Author's Note: I felt like writing Sam and Castiel coming to understand each other a bit more and this is what came out. Betaed awesomely by just_ruth to whom many thanks and cyber cookies go.
Summary: Post 4.22. Sam asks Castiel to help him rid the demon blood from his body, but it doesn't go quite as he had hoped.
Sam can’t help but flinch when Castiel’s palm comes up to rest on his forehead. He’s seen the angel touch a man like this before and burn out a demon with holy light, leaving a hollow shell behind.
Sam can feel the demon inside him; he’s felt it all year, but when he went that final step and drained the nurse, he felt something tip inside of him, like a set of scales that have been weighted too heavily on one side. He’s not human anymore, and he’s not sure whether the scales can tip back the other way.
Dean’s standing in the corner of the room, and Sam can tell he’s ready to try and hurl the angel away if it even looks like he’s doing something to Sam that they didn’t ask for. They both know Dean won’t be able to stop him, and to be honest, right now, Sam doesn’t care. Castiel could send him to hell; could eradicate him completely from existence. Sam broke the final seal; Sam set Lucifer free. He is responsible. He wants the angel to kill him.
Cast - Jimmy’s hand is warm on his forehead, not burning. He doesn’t feel ecstasy or rapture, he doesn’t feel searing pain. He half expects the pain he felt when Meg swallowed that shot of holy water in his body, only harder, fiercer. He half expected to see Castiel glow, or grow, or at least for there to be wings. Dean said he saw wings in that barn when this all started. Strangely, there’s a part of him - maybe the part that came to him as his younger self when he was locked in that panic room - that doesn’t want to die without seeing an angel’s wings. Perhaps, if he could see that…
It’s getting uncomfortable now, just standing here with an angel staring into his eyes and touching his hand against his forehead. He shifts from foot to foot, sudden pins and needles there for no apparent reason.
Dean’s trying so hard not to look worried, like it’s every day his brother asks an angel to burn the demon blood out of him, but it’s not working. His fingers are twitching and his jaw is tight. Sam’s not looking at him directly - he can’t drag his eyes away from Castiel’s - but he can tell out of the corner of his eye. His brother’s standing like he does before a fight, or when the person they should be saving is too close to danger and they can’t do a damn thing about it.
Sam never thought of himself as one of the people they saved. He has always thought of himself as the hunter, and the people they rescue as normal. He always thought Dean saw it the same way, but maybe he never did. Maybe his big brother has always seen him as on the other side. Not the Winchesters saving people and hunting things, but Dean saving the world alone.
His forehead is beginning to itch where Castiel’s hand is resting on it. The angel doesn’t have sweaty palms, and for some reason that makes Sam want to laugh. It seems such an unimportant thing to notice, but Castiel’s hand is warm and dry, and it’s Sam that’s sweating.
When Lilith died and Ruby revealed everything she had been planning, all of it, and Dean pounded on the door desperately, he felt the bottom of his stomach drop away, like there was a bottomless pit inside him. He’s felt guilt before, but never to this extent, never anything like this. It’s so intense that he can’t imagine it ever ending, but he has to admit that he’s hoping that if the angel does this, if he burns away everything in him that Azazel and Ruby (and himself) put there, maybe he might be able to see the bottom again.
Dean’s shifting from foot to foot, Sam can hear the creak of his shoes, and Castiel moves his head infinitesimally down, his eyebrows drawing together slightly. Sam has the horrible feeling that the angel is seeing right through him, the same feeling he had when they first met and Castiel greeted him as ‘the boy with the demon blood’, like the man (angel… thing) could tell what he’d been doing.
There’s something in the way they look at you that makes you feel unworthy.
Still the divine light doesn’t come down, it seems he is to be denied his road to Damascus, because he’s still standing there with an itchy forehead (and nose now) and an angel looking into his soul. He has been judged and he has been found wanting. Apparently he is beyond redemption.
Castiel draws his hand away, and Sam brings his own up immediately to replace it, scratching at the skin that is still a bit itchy, and wiping away the sweat that is clinging to his skin.
“So, I guess it can’t be done,” he says after a pause, trying to smile as though it doesn’t matter. Castiel looks at him again, confused now, like there’s some part of Sam he doesn’t understand. He’s not the only one, either.
“It has been done,” the angel says. It takes a moment for the words to filter through Sam’s mind and their meaning to make sense. He tries to sense something different, tries to remember something happening that felt holy or righteous, but there was nothing but a hand against his head.
“But I don’t feel… nothing’s changed,” he says, trying to feel inside himself, a little frantically, but there’s still that feeling of disgust and the emptiness inside him. He feels dark and wrong and lonely. “Are you sure you did it right? Try again!” He reaches out and grabs Castiel’s hand, pulling it back to his forehead. “Please… you’ve got to. Take it out of me.”
“I have.”
“No… I can still feel it. Cas… please. It’s there.”
“There is nothing left in you that is not human, Sam Winchester.” Castiel tells him, reaching up one hand to rest on his shoulder, awkwardly. He is not used to comforting people.
Suddenly Dean’s at his side, holding him up, and Sam hadn’t even realised that his legs were buckling.
“Then… if that’s not the demon…” he says, more to himself than anyone else. Not to Dean or to Castiel, or the ghosts that hang around in his head. “If it’s not the demon… then it’s just me.”
Ruby’s words echo in his head, you didn’t need the feather to fly, you had it in you the whole time, Dumbo.
He’s shaking. He can’t get his hands steady, and somewhere over the top of him Dean is demanding an explanation from Cas, yelling that this is his fault. What did he do with his angel mojo? What did he do?
Sam knows that he didn’t do a damn thing though. It was Sam all along: every death, every drop of blood. He remembers taking that knife and slitting open Ruby’s arm, watching the blood flow out and feeling the hunger.
“I told you that if you hurt him I would kill you myself!” Dean’s yelling, and Sam wants to tell him the truth. But it’s so much easier to let him believe that Sam was under the influence, that none of it was really his fault. He wants his brother to think that Ruby pushed him down the rabbit hole and dragged him along the yellow brick road. He wants to believe it himself.
Everything goes quiet all of a sudden and black, pitch black.
There’s nothing around him, above him or below him, and it takes Sam a moment to realise that he must be asleep; as soon as he does, everything slides into place and he’s standing back in that chapel again - St Mary’s convent, Ilchester - where part of him will probably be standing forever.
Ruby and Lilith are not there, and the floor isn’t stained with blood. Lucifer’s light does not flood the place. He is just standing there, on his own.
Seconds later, he hears footsteps behind him and he turns, but he isn’t afraid.
Halfway between him and the door, Castiel is standing, watching him patiently.
“I can’t go back, can I?” he asks, even though he already knows the answer.
“You can’t erase what happened,” Castiel tells him. “I have purged the demon blood from your system, but you must live with the knowledge of what you have done, as Dean must live with the memories of what he did in hell.”
“That’s different,” Sam argues. Dean was tortured for years. He was in hell, his actions should be forgiven, but he never lets anyone even try. Sam wants to be forgiven, but he knows there aren’t any excuses.
“Every situation is,” Castiel moves to stand where Lilith was standing when she… when Ruby… when Sam killed her and brought hell on earth. “The demon was not lying when she said that it was you who did what you did, not the demon blood.”
“Then I was always evil?” Sam can hear his voice crack slightly, and he pulls himself together. He is not going to let the angel see him break in here.
“No more than any other human is,” Castiel pauses looking down at the floor, Sam’s not positive, but he thinks that it might be the exact point from which Lucifer rose. “You must understand, Sam, your choices led you to this point.”
“I know…”
“That does not make you evil,” Castiel is still in front of the altar, but he looks back up at Sam, staring directly at him so that Sam is held in place by his gaze alone. Suddenly he is reminded that this is an angel, and that there is power there that he’s not even sure he wants to see.
“I feel…” Sam doesn’t know how to finish that sentence, there aren’t any words that seem strong enough, guilt, fear, anger, self-loathing, disgust. Castiel doesn’t seem to think it needs completing though, because there is a twitch of his lips as he almost smiles.
“Then you are still human,” he says. Sam’s never been so grateful to hear anything in his life, and he almost laughs in relief. They hold each other’s gaze for a second before, suddenly, light floods the room and Castiel is bracketed by the shadows of two huge wings.
Sam can’t bring himself to say anything as the wings flicker out of sight and Castiel is still watching him with that small smile.
He sees - just a little bit - why his brother’s actually beginning to trust the son of a bitch, and it makes him feel a little better.
*
When he wakes up, Dean’s looking sitting on the opposite bed reading, and Castiel is standing by the window. Both of them look around to see him pull himself into a sitting position.
“You back with me?” Dean asks. If Sam didn’t know him, he’d probably take the question at face value, but he knows there’s more to it than that, questions that Dean refuses to ask.
“Yeah...” he says, his head still a little foggy, but the darkness is less dark now, he can see it for what it is.
“Good… “ Dean pauses, the way he does when he’s about to say something that he feels might be a little too revealing. “Cause I can’t do this alone.”
“Yes you can,” for the first time in a year, Sam actually believes that.
“Yeah… well, I don’t want to.” Castiel’s still standing by the window, politely averting his eyes, and Sam thinks that maybe, even if he couldn’t bring himself to do this, then Dean wouldn’t really be alone, but that’s not what his brother means.
“Jerk,” Sam says, automatically, testing the water. Days ago, he had his hands clasped tight around his brother’s throat, he can still see the bruise marks there, make out every finger. But Dean just smirks.
“Bitch,” he replies, and it’s as close as Sam’s going to get to absolution, but it’s enough.
Castiel looks back at them, clearly confused by the idiosyncrasies of human relationships and clears his throat.
“We have work to do,” the angel says seriously, and his eyebrows pull together again when the Winchesters can’t quite keep themselves from laughing.
-
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2056
Warnings: mild angst, gratuitous references to the pilot ^_^
Pairing/Characters: Sam Winchester, Castiel, Dean Winchester
Spoilers: All of Season 4 especially the second half including 4.22
Disclaimer: Sadly, I still don't own Supernatural, or any of its characters. If I did the show wouldn't be half as interesting because I would never be able to be as evil as Kripke.
Author's Note: I felt like writing Sam and Castiel coming to understand each other a bit more and this is what came out. Betaed awesomely by just_ruth to whom many thanks and cyber cookies go.
Summary: Post 4.22. Sam asks Castiel to help him rid the demon blood from his body, but it doesn't go quite as he had hoped.
Sam can’t help but flinch when Castiel’s palm comes up to rest on his forehead. He’s seen the angel touch a man like this before and burn out a demon with holy light, leaving a hollow shell behind.
Sam can feel the demon inside him; he’s felt it all year, but when he went that final step and drained the nurse, he felt something tip inside of him, like a set of scales that have been weighted too heavily on one side. He’s not human anymore, and he’s not sure whether the scales can tip back the other way.
Dean’s standing in the corner of the room, and Sam can tell he’s ready to try and hurl the angel away if it even looks like he’s doing something to Sam that they didn’t ask for. They both know Dean won’t be able to stop him, and to be honest, right now, Sam doesn’t care. Castiel could send him to hell; could eradicate him completely from existence. Sam broke the final seal; Sam set Lucifer free. He is responsible. He wants the angel to kill him.
Cast - Jimmy’s hand is warm on his forehead, not burning. He doesn’t feel ecstasy or rapture, he doesn’t feel searing pain. He half expects the pain he felt when Meg swallowed that shot of holy water in his body, only harder, fiercer. He half expected to see Castiel glow, or grow, or at least for there to be wings. Dean said he saw wings in that barn when this all started. Strangely, there’s a part of him - maybe the part that came to him as his younger self when he was locked in that panic room - that doesn’t want to die without seeing an angel’s wings. Perhaps, if he could see that…
It’s getting uncomfortable now, just standing here with an angel staring into his eyes and touching his hand against his forehead. He shifts from foot to foot, sudden pins and needles there for no apparent reason.
Dean’s trying so hard not to look worried, like it’s every day his brother asks an angel to burn the demon blood out of him, but it’s not working. His fingers are twitching and his jaw is tight. Sam’s not looking at him directly - he can’t drag his eyes away from Castiel’s - but he can tell out of the corner of his eye. His brother’s standing like he does before a fight, or when the person they should be saving is too close to danger and they can’t do a damn thing about it.
Sam never thought of himself as one of the people they saved. He has always thought of himself as the hunter, and the people they rescue as normal. He always thought Dean saw it the same way, but maybe he never did. Maybe his big brother has always seen him as on the other side. Not the Winchesters saving people and hunting things, but Dean saving the world alone.
His forehead is beginning to itch where Castiel’s hand is resting on it. The angel doesn’t have sweaty palms, and for some reason that makes Sam want to laugh. It seems such an unimportant thing to notice, but Castiel’s hand is warm and dry, and it’s Sam that’s sweating.
When Lilith died and Ruby revealed everything she had been planning, all of it, and Dean pounded on the door desperately, he felt the bottom of his stomach drop away, like there was a bottomless pit inside him. He’s felt guilt before, but never to this extent, never anything like this. It’s so intense that he can’t imagine it ever ending, but he has to admit that he’s hoping that if the angel does this, if he burns away everything in him that Azazel and Ruby (and himself) put there, maybe he might be able to see the bottom again.
Dean’s shifting from foot to foot, Sam can hear the creak of his shoes, and Castiel moves his head infinitesimally down, his eyebrows drawing together slightly. Sam has the horrible feeling that the angel is seeing right through him, the same feeling he had when they first met and Castiel greeted him as ‘the boy with the demon blood’, like the man (angel… thing) could tell what he’d been doing.
There’s something in the way they look at you that makes you feel unworthy.
Still the divine light doesn’t come down, it seems he is to be denied his road to Damascus, because he’s still standing there with an itchy forehead (and nose now) and an angel looking into his soul. He has been judged and he has been found wanting. Apparently he is beyond redemption.
Castiel draws his hand away, and Sam brings his own up immediately to replace it, scratching at the skin that is still a bit itchy, and wiping away the sweat that is clinging to his skin.
“So, I guess it can’t be done,” he says after a pause, trying to smile as though it doesn’t matter. Castiel looks at him again, confused now, like there’s some part of Sam he doesn’t understand. He’s not the only one, either.
“It has been done,” the angel says. It takes a moment for the words to filter through Sam’s mind and their meaning to make sense. He tries to sense something different, tries to remember something happening that felt holy or righteous, but there was nothing but a hand against his head.
“But I don’t feel… nothing’s changed,” he says, trying to feel inside himself, a little frantically, but there’s still that feeling of disgust and the emptiness inside him. He feels dark and wrong and lonely. “Are you sure you did it right? Try again!” He reaches out and grabs Castiel’s hand, pulling it back to his forehead. “Please… you’ve got to. Take it out of me.”
“I have.”
“No… I can still feel it. Cas… please. It’s there.”
“There is nothing left in you that is not human, Sam Winchester.” Castiel tells him, reaching up one hand to rest on his shoulder, awkwardly. He is not used to comforting people.
Suddenly Dean’s at his side, holding him up, and Sam hadn’t even realised that his legs were buckling.
“Then… if that’s not the demon…” he says, more to himself than anyone else. Not to Dean or to Castiel, or the ghosts that hang around in his head. “If it’s not the demon… then it’s just me.”
Ruby’s words echo in his head, you didn’t need the feather to fly, you had it in you the whole time, Dumbo.
He’s shaking. He can’t get his hands steady, and somewhere over the top of him Dean is demanding an explanation from Cas, yelling that this is his fault. What did he do with his angel mojo? What did he do?
Sam knows that he didn’t do a damn thing though. It was Sam all along: every death, every drop of blood. He remembers taking that knife and slitting open Ruby’s arm, watching the blood flow out and feeling the hunger.
“I told you that if you hurt him I would kill you myself!” Dean’s yelling, and Sam wants to tell him the truth. But it’s so much easier to let him believe that Sam was under the influence, that none of it was really his fault. He wants his brother to think that Ruby pushed him down the rabbit hole and dragged him along the yellow brick road. He wants to believe it himself.
Everything goes quiet all of a sudden and black, pitch black.
There’s nothing around him, above him or below him, and it takes Sam a moment to realise that he must be asleep; as soon as he does, everything slides into place and he’s standing back in that chapel again - St Mary’s convent, Ilchester - where part of him will probably be standing forever.
Ruby and Lilith are not there, and the floor isn’t stained with blood. Lucifer’s light does not flood the place. He is just standing there, on his own.
Seconds later, he hears footsteps behind him and he turns, but he isn’t afraid.
Halfway between him and the door, Castiel is standing, watching him patiently.
“I can’t go back, can I?” he asks, even though he already knows the answer.
“You can’t erase what happened,” Castiel tells him. “I have purged the demon blood from your system, but you must live with the knowledge of what you have done, as Dean must live with the memories of what he did in hell.”
“That’s different,” Sam argues. Dean was tortured for years. He was in hell, his actions should be forgiven, but he never lets anyone even try. Sam wants to be forgiven, but he knows there aren’t any excuses.
“Every situation is,” Castiel moves to stand where Lilith was standing when she… when Ruby… when Sam killed her and brought hell on earth. “The demon was not lying when she said that it was you who did what you did, not the demon blood.”
“Then I was always evil?” Sam can hear his voice crack slightly, and he pulls himself together. He is not going to let the angel see him break in here.
“No more than any other human is,” Castiel pauses looking down at the floor, Sam’s not positive, but he thinks that it might be the exact point from which Lucifer rose. “You must understand, Sam, your choices led you to this point.”
“I know…”
“That does not make you evil,” Castiel is still in front of the altar, but he looks back up at Sam, staring directly at him so that Sam is held in place by his gaze alone. Suddenly he is reminded that this is an angel, and that there is power there that he’s not even sure he wants to see.
“I feel…” Sam doesn’t know how to finish that sentence, there aren’t any words that seem strong enough, guilt, fear, anger, self-loathing, disgust. Castiel doesn’t seem to think it needs completing though, because there is a twitch of his lips as he almost smiles.
“Then you are still human,” he says. Sam’s never been so grateful to hear anything in his life, and he almost laughs in relief. They hold each other’s gaze for a second before, suddenly, light floods the room and Castiel is bracketed by the shadows of two huge wings.
Sam can’t bring himself to say anything as the wings flicker out of sight and Castiel is still watching him with that small smile.
He sees - just a little bit - why his brother’s actually beginning to trust the son of a bitch, and it makes him feel a little better.
*
When he wakes up, Dean’s looking sitting on the opposite bed reading, and Castiel is standing by the window. Both of them look around to see him pull himself into a sitting position.
“You back with me?” Dean asks. If Sam didn’t know him, he’d probably take the question at face value, but he knows there’s more to it than that, questions that Dean refuses to ask.
“Yeah...” he says, his head still a little foggy, but the darkness is less dark now, he can see it for what it is.
“Good… “ Dean pauses, the way he does when he’s about to say something that he feels might be a little too revealing. “Cause I can’t do this alone.”
“Yes you can,” for the first time in a year, Sam actually believes that.
“Yeah… well, I don’t want to.” Castiel’s still standing by the window, politely averting his eyes, and Sam thinks that maybe, even if he couldn’t bring himself to do this, then Dean wouldn’t really be alone, but that’s not what his brother means.
“Jerk,” Sam says, automatically, testing the water. Days ago, he had his hands clasped tight around his brother’s throat, he can still see the bruise marks there, make out every finger. But Dean just smirks.
“Bitch,” he replies, and it’s as close as Sam’s going to get to absolution, but it’s enough.
Castiel looks back at them, clearly confused by the idiosyncrasies of human relationships and clears his throat.
“We have work to do,” the angel says seriously, and his eyebrows pull together again when the Winchesters can’t quite keep themselves from laughing.
-