Fic: nothing in between me and the rain
nothing in between me and the rain (ao3 link)
Pairing/Characters: Dean/Cas; Sam POV
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: 7.23
Word Count: 2200
Summary: Tricksters and fairy tales are a dangerous combination.
The morning dawns stormy and dark the day that Dean returns from purgatory. He and Cas part tersely, with few words spoken. Sam wonders about Cas' mental state, but he’d been there and gone too quickly for Sam to assess. He'd hoped that taking care of Dean in that place would force him to pull himself back together and protect Dean from any harm. Sam tries to ask about it, in a round-about way, but Dean has nothing to say about Cas and even less about their time in Purgatory.
The clouds hold for two weeks without a single drop of rain falling to alleviate their dismal cast. The gloomy weather follows them through three states and two cases, matching the expression that rarely leaves Dean's face. Sam’s questions get more direct, but Dean won’t speak a word about his time away.
“Goddamnit,” Dean says one morning, in the suburbs outside of Madison, Wisconsin as he fishes a tiny green playing piece out of his cereal, finding a yellow one in his jacket pocket at he fishes out his keys a few days later.
“Isn’t that from the game Sorry?” Sam asks.
“Yeah,” Dean answers, flicking the yellow one out the window as they drive through Minnesota, only to find a red one perched on his pillow when they stop at a new motel that night, like a mint at one of those fancier hotels that they can’t afford to stay in.
Sam watches, concerned, as Dean picks it up with a tissue and flushes it down the toilet like a squashed bug.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on here?” he asks, suspecting it has something to do with Cas.
Dean’s stony silence on the subject doesn’t break. He shrugs, says, “I gotta piss,” and shuts the bathroom door in Sam’s face, and that, as they say, is the end of that.
Their newest case involves a town full of suspicious happenings, some ending in deaths, some not.
Sam feels a slight tingling shiver of familiarity down his spine. “You thing we’re dealing with a trickster here?” he asks.
“Probably,” Dean answers.
Neither of them speak Gabriel’s name.
A few days later and they’re catching up to a woman with a sweet tooth who always seems to be conveniently at the scene of the crime -afterwards at least - when they interview her for the third time.
She’s on to them too, or so they realize when they arrive back at their motel to find her waiting for them. She’s perched, legs delicately crossed, on the bed farthest from the door, scantily clad in a little black dress that leaves very little to the imagination.
“Not so fast,” she says, waggling a finger with tipped by a bright red lacquered nail back and forth at them as Sam pulls out the sharpened pine stake they’d recently sharpened just for this purpose and Dean goes for his gun. With a wave of the same hand, both the weapons appearing on her lap. “Not that they would hurt me anyway.
“Surprised to see me?” she asks, flashing a predatory smile when neither of them answer.
“We got a plan?” Dean hisses at Sam, and Sam waves a hand discretely for Dean to shut up and let him think.
“I expected you wouldn’t be, no. I have something for you though,” she says, snapping her fingers. “Call it a present, of sorts.”
After the snap, there’s an otherworldly shimmer of the air, the one that tricksters seem to employ, and suddenly there on the other bed lies Cas, prone and unmoving.
“Jesus Christ,” Dean swears, “Cas,” taking a step forward only to have Sam hold him back with an arm across his chest.
“We don’t know if that’s really him or just an illusion,” Sam cautions and Dean stops, uncertain but clearly yearning to keep going.
“Oh, it is. What better way to keep you off my tail than to put your angel sidekick under duress?” the trickster asks.
“Were you the one behind the game pieces?” Dean snaps.
“That? Oh no, that was all - Cas, was it you called him? It did, rather conveniently I must say, lead me to him as your weakness.”
“Since when do regular trickster have any power over angels?” Sam asks.
The trickster’s eyes - if that’s what she in fact is - flash black in anger while the shadow of dark wings flash on the wall behind her as the light bulb in the lamp beside the bed flares a brilliant white before it stutters and explodes. “There is nothing regular about me or my kind,” she snaps. “You can't honestly think mere pagan gods have the power to become tricksters? You have met my brother after all, or so I’ve been told. He may have chosen his place and run away from his duty, but the rest of us, those angels that followed Lucifer, were cast out. No longer of Heaven and not of Hell, but a curse upon the very humanity who stole our Father's love.”
Dean, who’s never cared much for explanations beyond what’s the best way to kill the supernatural son of a bitch, demands, “What the hell did you do to him?” tone tense and angry with just a hint of desperation soaking through.
The trickster shrugs, studying her nails. “Nothing serious, really. Not for him at least. A favor really.” She looks up and fixes them with demon black eyes. “It was you, Sam, after all, who broke him, with your messy human pain and emotions,” she says, spitting out the word human like disgusts her to even have to speak the word. “He went into a restorative sleep, which the two of you broke early by finding the Word of God. I simply put him back into it.”
“Wake him up,” Dean demands.
She smiles, a shark’s smile. “I don’t think so,” she says. “He’ll wake up on his own, as he should have the first time around. A thousand years from now.” She pauses, inspects her nails again. “Unless, of course, we were to make a deal?”
“What kind of a deal?”
“I’ll give you three days,” she says, “to discover my name. Go off and be good little research bees. That will give me enough time to wrap up my business here and keep the two of you out of my hair long enough for me to do it. Should you discover my name, I’ll tell you how to wake him. If not, well, I’m no worse for the wear and of course, you’ll see him again when he wakes on his own. That is, if you’re still alive in 3012.” She smiles again - that predatory shark’s smile, full of teeth - and vanishes before Dean or Sam can say a word. But, of course, there’s nothing for them to say - they’ll agree to her demands. They can't not when the stakes are so high.
Dean pushes away from Sam and bends over Cas. He brushes his thumb across the hollow of Cas’ neck. “He’s breathing,” he says, holding his hand there as Cas’ chest rises and falls, “and his heart is beating.”
“I guess we’d better start researching,” Sam says, and goes to get his laptop. They spend the rest of the night in the motel room, awake all night, Sam glued to his laptop screen and Dean absently flipping through pages in an ancient text, glancing down at the pages before looking up to stare, helpless and silent, at Cas.
The next morning, Sam insists they leave the room and go to the library - surreptitiously because he needs a few more books that they don’t have on them, but mainly because he doesn’t think that Dean spending the whole day with his eyes fixed on Cas is doing either of them any favors.
They stay at the library until it closes, their only stop a quick fast food restaurant for Sam to eat, Dean to get more coffee. Sam, exhausted from research, the digital letters on his computer screen blurring into incomprehensible shapes, tries to stay awake a long as he can, eventually falling asleep where he sits, laptop open on the table in front of him, the book he’d been reading falling unnoticed to the floor. Dean, on the other hand, stays awake all night, sitting in a chair beside Cas’ bedside and standing guard while he sleeps, watching for the smallest of changes - a flicker of his eyelids, the twitch of his hand, anything.
The next day, they’re back at the library, aware that they’ve found nothing useful and are starting to run out of time. Dean taps an idle rhythm against the table with his pen. “Isn’t there a fairy tale like this? Where the girl has to find out the bad guy’s name?”
“Rumpelstiltskin,” Sam answers instantly. He pauses. “You don’t think that’s it, do you? Her name?”
“No, but… three days? Isn’t that like, what’s the word, a trope? Something that happens a lot in fairy tales?”
“Or a motif. Yeah, it is.”
“So, I’m just thinking, she likes fairy tales.”
“Yeah, so?” Sam is unclear where Dean is going with this.
“There’s something I have to try,” Dean says, standing up from his chair without warning and heading towards the front doors.
“Wait,” Sam calls after him, gathering up his laptop, cord and the couple of books he had checked out and stuffing them into his bag as he chases after Dean. Thunder rattles the glass doors and Sam pushes them open, and the rain from the dark clouds finally opens into a deluge that pours down over them in huge, stinging drops. Sam does his best to protect his laptop with his body, stuffing it into his coat and hunching over to keep it dry until he can reach the car. He throws the bag into the back as gently as he can and climbs in, Dean already in the driver’s seat, keys in the ignition, his head turned, left hand on the wheel and right arm slug over the back of the seat ready to back out of the parking space as soon as Sam shuts his door.
“Where are we going?” Sam asks.
“Back to the motel,” Dean answers, windshield wipers creaking as they whip water from the windshield at top speed.
The rest of the drive is completely in silence, Dean’s full attention on the road and any other drivers crazy enough to be out in such conditions. As soon as the car is parked in the drive, he’s out the door again, jogging up to the motel room door. He pauses just long enough to turn back to Sam and ask, “You think you can stay out here for a minute?”
Sam nods and waits as Dean unlocks the door, rubbing the water from his face with one hand and pushing the door closed with the other as he walks, pace just as quick as it had been in the library, inside. The motel room door swings on it’s hinges but doesn’t latch, leaving open a crack large enough for Sam to peer into - which he does, considers it his brotherly duty. Dean had asked for privacy, but Sam has got his back, and if something goes wrong - that whatever he tries doesn’t make Cas wake up, but hurts him in some way, some precaution that the trickster has placed to keep them from trying something without her approval - he’s going to be there to help.
What happens is this: Dean shrugs out of his coat, tosses it absently at the chair in which he’d spend the last two nights but misses and the coat falls, unnoticed by him, to the floor. He kneels down beside Cas, smooths a hand that Sam can just make out as shaking slightly, down the blanket he’d draped over Cas that first night, either to dry it or assure himself that Cas is still breathing, Sam doesn’t know. He leans down, and his mouth moves, forming words too soft for Sam to hear over the downpour, then kisses Cas. Sam is shocked and for a moment, all is still, except the perpetual fall of rain, until Cas’ hand moves. Just a twitch at first, then a flex as he comes more into wakefulness. His eyes open, fix on Dean above him - mouth still firmly attached to his own - and flutter closed again, both his hands coming up to frame Dean’s face and pull him deeper into the kiss.
“Holy crap,” Sam breathes as he backs away, pulling the door fully closed as he goes, and turns back to the still running Impala.
Dean and Cas - it’s not something he’s ever thought about before, but now that he does, it makes a surprising amount of sense. He has a feeling that - like the clouds that are loosing themselves over the city in such a heavy down pour - that gloomy, brooding expression that has been so at home on Dean’s face lately will clear up like the sky after the rain.
“Kiss of true love, huh?” he muses, directing the Impala out of the parking lot and turning right towards the nearest coffee shop, intent on giving his brother and his angel some privacy, and smiles.
.end
Pairing/Characters: Dean/Cas; Sam POV
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: 7.23
Word Count: 2200
Summary: Tricksters and fairy tales are a dangerous combination.
The morning dawns stormy and dark the day that Dean returns from purgatory. He and Cas part tersely, with few words spoken. Sam wonders about Cas' mental state, but he’d been there and gone too quickly for Sam to assess. He'd hoped that taking care of Dean in that place would force him to pull himself back together and protect Dean from any harm. Sam tries to ask about it, in a round-about way, but Dean has nothing to say about Cas and even less about their time in Purgatory.
The clouds hold for two weeks without a single drop of rain falling to alleviate their dismal cast. The gloomy weather follows them through three states and two cases, matching the expression that rarely leaves Dean's face. Sam’s questions get more direct, but Dean won’t speak a word about his time away.
“Goddamnit,” Dean says one morning, in the suburbs outside of Madison, Wisconsin as he fishes a tiny green playing piece out of his cereal, finding a yellow one in his jacket pocket at he fishes out his keys a few days later.
“Isn’t that from the game Sorry?” Sam asks.
“Yeah,” Dean answers, flicking the yellow one out the window as they drive through Minnesota, only to find a red one perched on his pillow when they stop at a new motel that night, like a mint at one of those fancier hotels that they can’t afford to stay in.
Sam watches, concerned, as Dean picks it up with a tissue and flushes it down the toilet like a squashed bug.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on here?” he asks, suspecting it has something to do with Cas.
Dean’s stony silence on the subject doesn’t break. He shrugs, says, “I gotta piss,” and shuts the bathroom door in Sam’s face, and that, as they say, is the end of that.
Their newest case involves a town full of suspicious happenings, some ending in deaths, some not.
Sam feels a slight tingling shiver of familiarity down his spine. “You thing we’re dealing with a trickster here?” he asks.
“Probably,” Dean answers.
Neither of them speak Gabriel’s name.
A few days later and they’re catching up to a woman with a sweet tooth who always seems to be conveniently at the scene of the crime -afterwards at least - when they interview her for the third time.
She’s on to them too, or so they realize when they arrive back at their motel to find her waiting for them. She’s perched, legs delicately crossed, on the bed farthest from the door, scantily clad in a little black dress that leaves very little to the imagination.
“Not so fast,” she says, waggling a finger with tipped by a bright red lacquered nail back and forth at them as Sam pulls out the sharpened pine stake they’d recently sharpened just for this purpose and Dean goes for his gun. With a wave of the same hand, both the weapons appearing on her lap. “Not that they would hurt me anyway.
“Surprised to see me?” she asks, flashing a predatory smile when neither of them answer.
“We got a plan?” Dean hisses at Sam, and Sam waves a hand discretely for Dean to shut up and let him think.
“I expected you wouldn’t be, no. I have something for you though,” she says, snapping her fingers. “Call it a present, of sorts.”
After the snap, there’s an otherworldly shimmer of the air, the one that tricksters seem to employ, and suddenly there on the other bed lies Cas, prone and unmoving.
“Jesus Christ,” Dean swears, “Cas,” taking a step forward only to have Sam hold him back with an arm across his chest.
“We don’t know if that’s really him or just an illusion,” Sam cautions and Dean stops, uncertain but clearly yearning to keep going.
“Oh, it is. What better way to keep you off my tail than to put your angel sidekick under duress?” the trickster asks.
“Were you the one behind the game pieces?” Dean snaps.
“That? Oh no, that was all - Cas, was it you called him? It did, rather conveniently I must say, lead me to him as your weakness.”
“Since when do regular trickster have any power over angels?” Sam asks.
The trickster’s eyes - if that’s what she in fact is - flash black in anger while the shadow of dark wings flash on the wall behind her as the light bulb in the lamp beside the bed flares a brilliant white before it stutters and explodes. “There is nothing regular about me or my kind,” she snaps. “You can't honestly think mere pagan gods have the power to become tricksters? You have met my brother after all, or so I’ve been told. He may have chosen his place and run away from his duty, but the rest of us, those angels that followed Lucifer, were cast out. No longer of Heaven and not of Hell, but a curse upon the very humanity who stole our Father's love.”
Dean, who’s never cared much for explanations beyond what’s the best way to kill the supernatural son of a bitch, demands, “What the hell did you do to him?” tone tense and angry with just a hint of desperation soaking through.
The trickster shrugs, studying her nails. “Nothing serious, really. Not for him at least. A favor really.” She looks up and fixes them with demon black eyes. “It was you, Sam, after all, who broke him, with your messy human pain and emotions,” she says, spitting out the word human like disgusts her to even have to speak the word. “He went into a restorative sleep, which the two of you broke early by finding the Word of God. I simply put him back into it.”
“Wake him up,” Dean demands.
She smiles, a shark’s smile. “I don’t think so,” she says. “He’ll wake up on his own, as he should have the first time around. A thousand years from now.” She pauses, inspects her nails again. “Unless, of course, we were to make a deal?”
“What kind of a deal?”
“I’ll give you three days,” she says, “to discover my name. Go off and be good little research bees. That will give me enough time to wrap up my business here and keep the two of you out of my hair long enough for me to do it. Should you discover my name, I’ll tell you how to wake him. If not, well, I’m no worse for the wear and of course, you’ll see him again when he wakes on his own. That is, if you’re still alive in 3012.” She smiles again - that predatory shark’s smile, full of teeth - and vanishes before Dean or Sam can say a word. But, of course, there’s nothing for them to say - they’ll agree to her demands. They can't not when the stakes are so high.
Dean pushes away from Sam and bends over Cas. He brushes his thumb across the hollow of Cas’ neck. “He’s breathing,” he says, holding his hand there as Cas’ chest rises and falls, “and his heart is beating.”
“I guess we’d better start researching,” Sam says, and goes to get his laptop. They spend the rest of the night in the motel room, awake all night, Sam glued to his laptop screen and Dean absently flipping through pages in an ancient text, glancing down at the pages before looking up to stare, helpless and silent, at Cas.
The next morning, Sam insists they leave the room and go to the library - surreptitiously because he needs a few more books that they don’t have on them, but mainly because he doesn’t think that Dean spending the whole day with his eyes fixed on Cas is doing either of them any favors.
They stay at the library until it closes, their only stop a quick fast food restaurant for Sam to eat, Dean to get more coffee. Sam, exhausted from research, the digital letters on his computer screen blurring into incomprehensible shapes, tries to stay awake a long as he can, eventually falling asleep where he sits, laptop open on the table in front of him, the book he’d been reading falling unnoticed to the floor. Dean, on the other hand, stays awake all night, sitting in a chair beside Cas’ bedside and standing guard while he sleeps, watching for the smallest of changes - a flicker of his eyelids, the twitch of his hand, anything.
The next day, they’re back at the library, aware that they’ve found nothing useful and are starting to run out of time. Dean taps an idle rhythm against the table with his pen. “Isn’t there a fairy tale like this? Where the girl has to find out the bad guy’s name?”
“Rumpelstiltskin,” Sam answers instantly. He pauses. “You don’t think that’s it, do you? Her name?”
“No, but… three days? Isn’t that like, what’s the word, a trope? Something that happens a lot in fairy tales?”
“Or a motif. Yeah, it is.”
“So, I’m just thinking, she likes fairy tales.”
“Yeah, so?” Sam is unclear where Dean is going with this.
“There’s something I have to try,” Dean says, standing up from his chair without warning and heading towards the front doors.
“Wait,” Sam calls after him, gathering up his laptop, cord and the couple of books he had checked out and stuffing them into his bag as he chases after Dean. Thunder rattles the glass doors and Sam pushes them open, and the rain from the dark clouds finally opens into a deluge that pours down over them in huge, stinging drops. Sam does his best to protect his laptop with his body, stuffing it into his coat and hunching over to keep it dry until he can reach the car. He throws the bag into the back as gently as he can and climbs in, Dean already in the driver’s seat, keys in the ignition, his head turned, left hand on the wheel and right arm slug over the back of the seat ready to back out of the parking space as soon as Sam shuts his door.
“Where are we going?” Sam asks.
“Back to the motel,” Dean answers, windshield wipers creaking as they whip water from the windshield at top speed.
The rest of the drive is completely in silence, Dean’s full attention on the road and any other drivers crazy enough to be out in such conditions. As soon as the car is parked in the drive, he’s out the door again, jogging up to the motel room door. He pauses just long enough to turn back to Sam and ask, “You think you can stay out here for a minute?”
Sam nods and waits as Dean unlocks the door, rubbing the water from his face with one hand and pushing the door closed with the other as he walks, pace just as quick as it had been in the library, inside. The motel room door swings on it’s hinges but doesn’t latch, leaving open a crack large enough for Sam to peer into - which he does, considers it his brotherly duty. Dean had asked for privacy, but Sam has got his back, and if something goes wrong - that whatever he tries doesn’t make Cas wake up, but hurts him in some way, some precaution that the trickster has placed to keep them from trying something without her approval - he’s going to be there to help.
What happens is this: Dean shrugs out of his coat, tosses it absently at the chair in which he’d spend the last two nights but misses and the coat falls, unnoticed by him, to the floor. He kneels down beside Cas, smooths a hand that Sam can just make out as shaking slightly, down the blanket he’d draped over Cas that first night, either to dry it or assure himself that Cas is still breathing, Sam doesn’t know. He leans down, and his mouth moves, forming words too soft for Sam to hear over the downpour, then kisses Cas. Sam is shocked and for a moment, all is still, except the perpetual fall of rain, until Cas’ hand moves. Just a twitch at first, then a flex as he comes more into wakefulness. His eyes open, fix on Dean above him - mouth still firmly attached to his own - and flutter closed again, both his hands coming up to frame Dean’s face and pull him deeper into the kiss.
“Holy crap,” Sam breathes as he backs away, pulling the door fully closed as he goes, and turns back to the still running Impala.
Dean and Cas - it’s not something he’s ever thought about before, but now that he does, it makes a surprising amount of sense. He has a feeling that - like the clouds that are loosing themselves over the city in such a heavy down pour - that gloomy, brooding expression that has been so at home on Dean’s face lately will clear up like the sky after the rain.
“Kiss of true love, huh?” he muses, directing the Impala out of the parking lot and turning right towards the nearest coffee shop, intent on giving his brother and his angel some privacy, and smiles.
.end