A Womb of His Own - 10/21
Masterpost
Since Sam was going to get some rest (men older than four and younger than seventy didn’t nap), Dean figured he had some time. He drove a mile away from the motel and then pulled the car over, closed his eyes, and called for Cas again.
“I have other things to do than respond to you and Sam every hour,” Cas griped after materializing in the passenger seat. “Have you forgotten Raphael and the war in heaven?”
He kind of had. “No, just - man, you’re the only one who knows about this stuff, so you gotta help me.”
“I told Sam everything I know.”
Dean bit his lip. “Yeah, uh, I might need you to repeat some of it.”
Castiel gave a very put-upon sigh, the kind Dean knew from the years they’d been friends meant he was annoyed but also fondly amused. “Where do you want me to begin?”
“Um, you said Sam’s gay sex made the soul baby? How? I mean, if you tell me that magical jizz makes babies, I think -”
“Embryos are created from sperm and egg. Physical beings. A soul is not a physical being.”
“But some dude gives it to another dude, and - wait, are souls gay? So God waves the pride flag, huh? Wow, that is -”
“Love,” Cas cut him off. “Love makes souls.”
Dean pondered that for a second. “How did you know it was with a dude?”
Castiel narrowed his eyes as if he was trying to read between the lines. “Does it matter to you that your brother had homosexual relations?”
Cas made it sound like Dean was going to shave his head or don a white hood. “No,” he said, and he meant it. “Sam can have sex with whoever he wants.” That part he didn’t mean. “He’s my brother, Cas. I don’t care what - or who - he does.”
“I see.”
It was Dean’s turn to narrow his eyes, wondering what exactly Cas had seen and how much he knew. “You didn’t answer my question,” he pointed out. “Why did another dude make a soul with him?”
Castiel gazed at the woods outside the window. “I assumed it had been a homosexual act because the soul was implanted in Sam. Something had to penetrate him.”
Dean rubbed his eyes. What Castiel wasn’t saying directly, maybe because he didn’t have the human lingo for it, was that Sam got knocked up because he was a big gay bottom. No wonder Sam was freaking out. And he’d only actually bottomed the one time.
A chill ran up his spine. “Cas, what if the dude was a monster?”
“If the monster and Sam loved each other, then a soul could still be created.”
“But a monster -”
“Monsters have souls, Dean.”
Monsters had souls. Yes, of course, because they’d met that alpha vampire who told them that monsters went to purgatory when they died. So, okay, when Dean was a vampire, he still had a soul. Dean as a vampire had had a better moral compass than his human-but-soulless brother. Crazy world.
“But what about, like - the soul won’t be messed up?”
“Biology,” Cas reminded him. “Souls don’t have vampire teeth.”
Dean looked at Cas, nearly certain the angel knew a hell of a lot more than he was letting on, but before he could suss it out, Cas added, “Or shapeshifting abilities or werewolf claws. Those are biological qualities.”
So there was no danger of the thing being deformed. That was a relief.
“What if -” He had fervently hoped conversations that made him want to say fuck my life would end after he put Sam’s soul back in. “What if Sam had done the, you know, penetrating?”
“If the other ‘dude’ had a soul, most likely nothing would have happened.”
Well, on the bright side, they weren’t looking at twins.
“And some skeezy one-night stand won’t make a soul? Because it has to be…love?” If he kind of choked on the last word, it was only because he was really thirsty.
“Dean -”
“And what about condoms? I mean, if the…dude had used a condom, would that have prevented -”
“You’re still thinking in strictly biological terms,” Cas reminded him.
“I don’t know how else I’m supposed to be thinking!” Dean pounded the steering wheel with his fist and then smoothed his hand over it in apology. It wasn’t the car’s fault they were in this mess. It was his. Him and his stupid penis and his stupid brother’s soullessness and his sacrifice, and, of course, something like this had happened because something always happened to them. Fate always found a way to screw them over whenever they thought they’d managed to come out on top.
And, damn it, that was such an unfortunate expression. He could practically hear Soulless Sam drawing it out - come out on top - with that vacant but hungry look in his eye and a half-smirk curving one side of his mouth upward.
He shook himself. It wasn’t going to do a lot of good thinking about that guy anymore. He was gone. He just needed to remind himself what a good thing it was.
“All right, enough with the how, just tell me what I’m supposed to do. What does Sam need right now?”
“Souls are powerful, Dean. They are nearly pure energy when fully formed. But they require large amounts of energy to grow. Sam will need increased nutrition and rest.”
“Done. What else?”
“That’s all I know.”
They sat still for a moment, both looking out the windshield. It was quiet enough to hear the wind rustling the trees and the occasional bird chirping.
Dean wasn’t going to cry. He needed to sack up and clean up his mess, not indulge in his emotions.
“I’m kind of freaking out here, Cas.”
“I’ll make inquiries, but I highly doubt there’s a precedent.” Cas pursed his lips like he wanted to say something else but changed his mind.
“Spit it out.”
“It would be helpful to know who the other party was.”
“Soul paternity test?”
“It had to be someone compatible, of course, but the extent of that compatibility might tell us more about how long we can expect it to take for the soul to develop and how its development will impact Sam’s body.” Dean’s eyebrow shot up, but Cas quickly added, “I don’t believe Sam is at risk. I just - Dean, for this to happen, it had to have been someone whose soul was extremely compatible with Sam’s.”
The tree just to the left of the rearview mirror about twenty yards away was absolutely fascinating. The bark was deep brown with all sorts of texture. Dean had never seen a tree quite like it. Then again he’d never needed an excuse to avoid telling an angel that he’d fucked his soul mate brother.
“Dean,” Cas said, his voice deep as ever but shimmering with compassion, “souls aren’t babies.”
“You said that already.”
“They can’t have genetic defects. They don’t suffer abnormalities. They just are.” Cas knew. Cas knew, and he was giving Dean the chance to say it first. It was probably the most considerate thing Cas had ever done. Dean was just about ready to confess, but then Cas added, “And they’re made from love.”
Dean turned his attention back to the tree and wondered how he felt about that. He did love Sam, of course, always had and always would. It didn’t matter if Sam was drinking demon blood or if Sam became Lucifer. He would never not love Sam. Those were the facts.
But he suspected Cas wasn’t talking about that kind of love. From the way Cas was hedging, Dean thought he meant something else, something less honest and less noble, something perverse that maybe Dean had locked in a dark corner and didn’t want to bring into the harsh light of day.
“Dean.”
He couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. “What do you want me to say? Sam’s gonna hate me. Do you think - God, I don’t even have to ask. I know I’m messed up.”
Although Castiel was being uncharacteristically sympathetic, Dean fervently wished it was Bobby sitting in the passenger seat. Not that he wanted Bobby to know what had happened. But Bobby would understand how broken and confused Dean felt. Bobby would understand how Dean sometimes made choices and regretted them and knew he’d make them all over again anyway. Bobby understood love.
Bobby was three hundred fifty miles back east with chopped liver for a liver.
“You knew he was soulless when it happened?” Cas asked.
“Yes.” The guilt in the pit of his stomach bubbled its way up to his chest, filling all the space around his lungs until he couldn’t breathe.
“How long ago?”
Dean wiped his left eye with his jacket sleeve. He wanted to tell the whole truth, that it happened as long ago as the day after Sam saved him from the crazy genie juice and as recently as right before Death put Sam’s soul back in. But Cas only needed to know about the one time that had caused this. “November.”
“Didn’t you notice any changes in Sam since then?”
“What do you mean?”
Castiel frowned. “After the soul was created, you should have begun to see its influence on him.”
After Dean had found out that Sam wasn’t Sam, he’d catalogued the myriad ways in which T-1000 was different. There were a few times when two and two didn’t make four, like the time Sam petted Dean’s hair and tried to reassure him that everything was all right when he was doing a Dracula impersonation. Dean had thought at the time that Sam just really knew how to play his cards in order to get what he wanted, but actually he’d never seemed to want to be fucked before. Only ever seemed interested in doing the fucking.
And then there was that scene after Bobby got stabbed. Sam had almost been crying. He’d said it was Dean’s influence, and half of Dean thought that was just more skilled manipulation, but half of him wanted to believe that he really was helping his brother come back to life. That the sex and the moral lessons - all of it was helping Sam learn how to be a regular human again.
What a narcissistic asshole he was.
“I gotta get back. He’s expecting food.”
“I’ll make inquiries.”
When Dean arrived back at the motel, Sam was sitting on his bed with the laptop across his legs and his cell phone in one hand. He was furiously typing a text message with one hand, frowning at the tiny screen, and then he leaned over to look at something on the laptop. The sound of the door caught his attention, and he slammed the laptop closed and buried his phone under the covers.
Okay, strange, but whatever. Dean held up the bag of tasty Chinese.
“Did you find it with tofu?”
“There are lines, Sam.” Before he could say anything else, the phone under the blanket buzzed, and Sam got the deer-in-headlights look. “Are you sexting?”
“What? No!”
Sam peeked at the screen of his phone and started to reach for the laptop. He stopped halfway, though, giving Dean an embarrassed half-smile.
Dean didn’t like it one bit. “Sorry I interrupted your - whatever this is…”
“Tweeting,” Sam explained.
Dean was pretty sure he’d never encountered that in the Casa Erotica series. “Sam, you kinky bastard.”
“You have no idea what that means, do you?” Dean shrugged. “You write messages.”
“How is that not sexting?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s not about sex. The messages go to a website. Anyone online can see them.”
“Why the hell would you want anyone online to see what you write?”
Sam shrugged. “That’s how it works.”
There was decent Chinese food getting cold while Sam was involved in whatever he was doing, and Dean didn’t like that. Nor did he like that Sam hadn’t said who was he talking to.
“You gonna eat or not?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, sliding off the bed to join him. “So tofu?”
“Chicken.” In truth he hadn’t even asked if the place had tofu. Nobody was turning vegetarian on his watch.
Sam huffed a little until his phone beeped again.
Dean stabbed a chopstick into his Mongolian beef. “Really?”
“Just a second.”
Dean gritted his teeth while Sam showed off his dexterity with one-thumbed typing. “Who are you ‘tweeting,’ anyway? And can we call it something else?”
“I’m following this priest who writes about souls. He’s doing a webinar.”
It didn’t sound very kinky after all. “You’re not having cyber sex with this guy?”
“No! I’m just trying to learn more,” Sam confirmed. “I thought it might help us. It’s really fascinating. Father Halverson just at-mentioned me and said -”
Dean snatched Sam’s phone from his hand and chucked it across the room. “Fuck tweeting,” he grumbled. He pointed at Sam’s food. “Eat.”
Sam took a few bites of his chicken kung pao. “Tastes gamey,” he complained, but he kept eating, which Dean assumed meant it was just fine without tofu. “Dean, what Cas said today - it doesn’t change what you think about me, does it?”
Dean didn’t look up from his food, but it was a lot harder to swallow it. “No.”
The food was decent, but it wasn’t that hot, so their mouthfuls came in rapid succession without a lot of chatter in between. At last Sam pushed his carton away with a sigh.
“You don’t have any idea who the guy was?”
The whole truth was not an option, but neither was lying completely to Sam’s face. He deserved better. “Yeah, I do,” he answered carefully.
“Who?”
“No. You already know way more than you should.”
“Please. It’s just - I just have this feeling that it was…special? Don’t laugh,” he cautioned, not that Dean would. “It’s, like, right there, like if I just think hard enough about it, I’ll be able to -”
“Knock it off, Sam. You scratch the wall, and you’re going to remember a lot more than just some gay one night stand.”
Dean rounded up their dinner garbage and threw it away. When he turned around from the trash can, Sam was right in his personal space, the green-brown-yellow-blue slanty eyes so close Dean could read every emotion in them. They said his name was Sam Winchester and everybody always gave into him in the end. Two months earlier, that look would have pissed Dean off, then turned him on and resulted in him giving Sam exactly what he wanted.
That’s why they were in this mess in the first place.
“Sam,” he warned.
“I can’t remember anything about the last year, but I have these, like, little flashes. They’re not memories really. I can’t see any details. But they’re, like, these waves of sensations. Like I remember how certain things felt. Which is kind of strange, since I was soulless and all.”
Then he launched himself at Dean and tried to hoover Dean’s face off with his giant pink lips. “Yeah,” he said, rubbing a strain of saliva off the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, that was familiar, all right.”
They were frozen for a second, staring at each other in shock. Then Sam shook his head and turned away.
“Sam -” Dean took a half-step, his arm outstretched.
“No,” Sam growled. He raced around, from the bathroom to the dresser, frantically gathering up stuff and shoving it in his backpack. Half of the shirts he grabbed were Dean’s, but that didn’t seem quite so important as preventing him from walking out the door.
“Please, can we talk about this?”
Sam paused in the doorway. “What can you possibly say?”
“Please, just, sit down, and I’ll tell you everything, I swear.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll use the hell wall as an excuse to avoid telling me the truth, and we’ll be right back here. But I can’t -” He shook his head in disgust - “I just can’t believe that you’d…I can’t even look at you right now.”
Sam started out the door.
“What about the soul, Sam? Don’t I get a say in anything? Sam!”
Dean waited for about an hour, watching the parking lot turn orange as the street lights came on. He wondered vaguely if bears would wander in through the open door. He heard a car pull up and hoped it was Sam hitching a ride back from wherever he’d gone, but the two people who got out went into a different room and closed the door behind them. Dean took it as his cue to close his own door. Sam wasn’t coming back.
Next