vail_kagami
in
ohsam
Foreign Languages
Title: Foreign Languages
Author: vail_kagami
Genre: gen
Characters: Sam, Dean, Bobby, Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 6742
Warnings: insanity, self-harm, allusions to past torure, abuse, and attempted suicide
Spoilers: Set past 6.11, now AU.
Summary: When Sam's soul returned from hell, so did his visions of death and destruction. Dean really wishes they hadn't.
Note: Witten for this prompt by thelocation at the h/c prompt challenge.
The worst… The absolutely worst happened on one of Sam’s good days, and that fact alone would have been enough to set the event straight up to the top of Dean’s list of the most disturbing, heartbreaking and plain wrong things he had ever seen, if there had been anything that could have made this any worse than it had been anyway.
The worst happened on one of the good days, when Sam was awake and aware and calm, and Dean had been frustrated and bored and at the same time happy enough with his brother’s state that he forgot the eggshells. Forgot the broken pieces of china he was walking on whenever Sam was present. For a few minutes he was content enough to pretend things were fine, that everything was back to normal and just acted like himself, and it wasn’t even a big thing. It was just him, flopping down on Bobby’s worn couch and groaning his frustration out to the world.
“It’s been too fucking long,” he declared. “I’m not dead yet. I want sex, dammit!”
And Sam was fine enough, himself enough that day that Dean expected him to roll his eyes. To throw Dean’s own dirty socks at him, which he had conveniently left in the kitchen sink because Bobby wasn’t there to cut his balls off for it. He expected Sam to bitch about the amount of information that was appropriate to share with the world. Dean simply expected, and didn’t think.
But even if he had thought he wouldn’t have expected to find Sam kneeling on the ground before him only seconds later, his head bend and all his clothes shed in a heap behind him.
It took Dean precious seconds to take in the sight, process what he was seeing and what it meant, and to react. Within less than a minute after the damn, thoughtless words had left his mouth he had Sam wrapped in a blanket and held against him, telling him, “Never,” and “Don’t do that!” Trying his best not to yell, not to sound too harsh but too freaked out to quite succeed.
In his arms Sam wasn’t listening. He was shaking like a leaf, and crying soundlessly, griped by a quiet panic ever since he heard Dean’s words, but he hadn’t hesitated for one second, and perhaps that was the worst thing of all.
It was closely followed on the terribleness-scale by the way Sam never made a sound. His tears fell soundlessly. He didn’t sob, didn’t say anything, not even in that cursed language only Cas understood. Even screaming would have been better than this silence.
Dean didn’t know what his brother expected to happen if he made a sound, but he could guess.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured when he pulled Sammy to his feet and led him to the bedroom in the back. “So fucking sorry.” Sorry for yelling. Sorry for ever having opened his mouth. Sorry for everything Lucifer and Michael had done to his brother.
Sorry he’d let him go, let him fall.
Sam didn’t resist. He let himself be led and dressed in boxers and a t-shirt because Dean couldn’t stand the sight of his brother naked and vulnerable like that. He refused the drink Dean offered and never stopped shaking or crying, and it took Dean far too long to realise that he was still terrified and falling to pieces.
No matter what he did, Dean couldn’t clam him down. In the end he got the tranquilizer from the locked cabinet and injected it in Sam’s arm because it seemed to be the only way for this to be over.
Sam curled up on his bed and didn’t stop crying even in his sleep.
-#-#-
Fire, and ice, and fire again. It was boiling his brain - his head was hurting so badly the pain became incomprehensible and unimportant. Then thunder, and someone died.
Sam saw the man fall, then roll down the slope and into the river. He didn’t know him (thank God!) but there were others, already in the water, drifting downstream. It was raining, steadily, quietly. Another thunder, further away, striking down more men, women and children. None of them was Dean. (Dean!) None of them was Bobby or Cas but they were all dead and there was another thunder and.
(dean dean dean dean dean)
It sounded like Lucifer, laughing because Sam’s eyes were melting out of his head. The piercing pain left him breathless. The fire was burning him only from the inside before everything froze over and disappeared.
-
Dean had been outside. Getting fresh air, on Bobby’s insistence, and now he cursed himself for it. Of course Sam had to have an episode while he was gone. Of course he did. Dean should have known because things always, always went wrong for them.
When he entered the room, Sam was trashing on the floor, clutching his head and wailing in pain. Dean recognized the symptoms of another vision and cursed even more, even as he fell to his knees beside his brother and helped Bobby hold him still so he didn’t hurt himself.
It seemed to take ages, but eventually, finally, Sam calmed down. His trashing subsided and for a (blessed) moment, he lay still and unresponsive, breathing hard, his eyes closed and his face white as paper.
When Sam opened his eyes, they looked straight at Dean, aware and full of panic. Whatever he saw, it had shaken him. But when he opened his mouth to tell them, warn them, none of the words were in a language either of them could understand.
-
They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand. Sam yelled at them, told them over and over because this was important, so fucking important, but they only stared at him blankly, and then Dean put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and told him to calm down, and that everything would be okay.
Sam pushed him away, screamed in frustration. People were going to die - hundreds, maybe thousands - and they did nothing to stop it because Sam couldn’t make them understand.
He was the only one to know, and couldn’t tell anyone. So he was the only one who could do something, but when he tried to leave they held him back and down and in the end they dragged him back to the bed no matter how much he fought them.
In the end there was darkness again. Lucifer found it all very funny.
But Sam was better when he returned to the room with the washed-off white wallpapers and the tiny window too high in the wall. He was calmer, and he couldn’t remember the words Dean would understand, but he could think clearly again and knew they wouldn’t let him go. Wouldn’t let him go, someone had to do something, and he had to tell them. It was so simple. Lucifer told him not to bother, but Sam was not in the mood to listen. He always lied anyway.
-
Dean prayed more these days than he ever had, but he had never again bothered calling to God since the one time he had tried and found his prayers ignored in the empty hurt inside him and Sam’s screams sounding from the panic room. These days he only ever prayed to Cas, and he didn’t even know if it really counted as prayer since it basically served the same function as a phone call.
Sometimes Cas even answered.
He better should. After all, he and his war benefitted from Sam’s damn visions, and sometimes - rarely - Dean felt guilty for ever thinking this might be the only reason Cas bothered to come.
He knew it wasn’t. He’d seen the angel sit with Sam for hours after receiving all the information he could hope for, one hand half on Sam’s forehead and half in his hair, calming him in a way Dean couldn’t even understand, let alone hope to imitate. Sometimes it made him a little jealous, and that jealousy made him resent his angelic friend, though not nearly as much as he resented him whenever Sam was screaming and crying or just plain unreachable in nameless panic and Castiel didn’t so much as bother to fax down his business hours.
Of course, Dean knew that Castiel had to have good reasons not to come. Probably, he was just this moment engaged in combat and would be struck down by another angel’s sword if he allowed himself to be distracted by Dean’s desperate prayers for help. (Also, he had to know that he was probably missing a good opportunity to piss on Raphael’s leg if he didn’t come, but Dean didn’t actually think that, because that would be a kind of dickish thing to do.) Still, he couldn’t help but curse the angel when he refused to show up, no matter how long and fiercely Dean prayed to him.
He couldn’t forget Sam trying to run, struggling against them while screaming incomprehensible words out into the world. Without doubt there was something very important he needed to tell them, but to be perfectly honest, all Dean cared about was for Sam to get better and stop hurting. And if that meant finding a way to shut down those visions forever and thus cutting off any way Cas might have of gaining an advantage over his enemies, Dean would take it in a second.
But there was no such way, or at least none he knew of. Sam kept suffering and Cas wasn’t even here to benefit from it and it was all so damn hopeless.
At least they didn’t have to sedate Sam this time. He passed out on his own, worn down by the vision and the pain that came along with it. It happened often, especially when Sam was agitated, and right now he was sleeping, dead to the world, while Dean was pacing up and down the corridor, calling Castiel with increasing frustration. Because he knew this wasn’t over. Depending on the nature of the vision, it could be hours or even days before Sam found back to the present enough to express himself in a way that made sense, and this had been a big one. But Dean also knew Sam wouldn’t calm down before he knew someone was taking care of whatever it was he had seen, because despite everything, he was still Sam.
There was one time so far when they hadn’t been fast enough. Castiel hadn’t shown up in time and Sam had become increasingly frantic and desperate until he’d hidden his face in his hands and wailed as if someone was physically hurting him. A lot.
Then he’d seized. And then he’d stopped breathing. And then, eventually, finally, he’d passed out. But even that break hadn’t lasted long.
It had been later that same day, when Sam was sleeping under heavy sedation and Dean felt like crying, that he and Bobby had seen the report about the fire that had come seemingly from nowhere and taken out an entire village in less than one hour, and learned that the outbreak of the fire had coincided with Sam’s first seizure.
Sam had fallen sick after that and withdrawn into himself for so long Dean had feared he’d finally snapped completely and wouldn’t come back. He hadn’t been interested in Cas’ excuses. He might have told the angel, at some point, that he’d kill him if he ever put Dean’s brother through something like that again.
Which meant said angel should better show his scrawny ass down here, and pronto!
But Cas didn’t show at first, and after the second and third try Cas still didn’t show up. Dean lasted for nearly an hour before he gave up, sending one more prayer up to a chaotic heaven to let Cas know how very pissed he was, and no, he didn’t give a shit about any explanations so Cas shouldn’t waste time on them when he finally did show up.
The first thing he did after that was checking on his brother, but he didn’t even make it to Sam’s room before Bobby’s shout let him know that he should never have left him alone in the first place, not even for as long as it took to pace up and down the hall to hiss at the empty air.
Sam had been out of it, and he should have stayed out for the rest of the night at least, exhausted as he was. But Bobby’s shouts for Dean to get his ass over there and fast indicated that either he wasn’t, anymore, or he’d died in his sleep.
Dean didn’t even think about the second option.
He expected Bobby to be inside the room with Sam but the older hunter was in the doorway, clutching his nose with blood seeping through his fingers, so either Sam was still alive and kicking, or he was one of the more violent corpses Dean had encountered in his life.
He still wasn’t thinking about that, though, and he didn’t have to, because Sam was still alive, even though he didn’t seem too keen on keeping that state.
Dean didn’t stop for even a heartbeat to take in the sight that greeted him, the blood on the walls and on the floor and the crazed intensity with which Sam focused on his work, mindless of anything else. He didn’t run to his brother so much as fell towards his centre of gravity, sliding to his knees behind Sam and wrapping his arms around him from behind.
As expected, Sam didn’t react well to the interruption of his work. He wailed, screamed out his protest in incomprehensible words and struggled against Dean’s hold with the single purpose of going back to what he was doing. But other than Bobby Dean was prepare for his violent reaction, and while still stronger in his agitation than his appearance led to believe, Sam was no match for the strength of Dean’s arms. Not anymore.
And certainly not after having lost so much fucking blood.
Bobby came to his aid in seconds, taking hold of Sam’s bloody hands in spite of the blood still running down his own face. Together they managed to hold Sam down until his struggling receded as his strength ran out, and his voice, already hoarse from screaming, died in a harsh coughing fit. Even after he had seemingly calmed down, Dean kept his guard, though, because Sam was a sneaky bastard who just waited for the right opportunity.
But even if he was, there was no opportunity this time. Bobby went and came back with the cursed tranquilizers they had to use far too often and another set of bandages. They took care of Sam’s arms still sitting on the floor because the bed was pretty much the only part of the room not soiled with blood and they wanted to keep it that way. It didn’t matter in the end - Dean didn’t want to stay in this room as long as it was looking and smelling like this, and he didn’t want Sam to stay here either.
Bobby offered his own bedroom, but Dean declined. They were taking advantage of their friend’s hospitality enough as it was. In the end they settled for a makeshift bed in the living room, because the couch was too short for Sam to rest on comfortably and the only other alternative was the cot in the panic room.
Dean also declined Bobby’s offer to help him get Sam downstairs. The older hunter insisted that Sam was too tall for Dean to carry on his own but Dean simply slid his arms under his brother’s back and knees and proved him wrong. It wasn’t even particularly hard; Sam was a fucking skeleton these days, since he was too fucked up to feel like eating most of the time and what he ate rarely stayed down.
It bothered Dean beyond words to see his brother like this. It didn’t bother him that he had to devote his time to taking care of him. Not at all. He thought it should, and he would be lying if he said there never were moments he’d rather do something else, have some time to himself, but in the end this was where he belonged, and a Sam who depended on him was a thousand times better than no Sam at all.
Taking care of Sam was what he did. What he had done all his life, and those times he was free of his little brother and left to his own life were not something he cared to remember. Dean had no illusions concerning the fact that he needed Sam just as much as Sam needed him.
Besides, Sam was getting better. He wouldn’t always be like this, and as soon as he was up to it, they would hit the road and get back to the world and all it had to offer.
For the moment, however, Bobby was setting up a bed on the floor so Sam wouldn’t have to sleep in a room smelling of his own blood, and Sam was lying limply in Dean’s arms as he sat on the couch, waiting for Bobby to be done. But they would get there. Eventually. No matter how long it took, or how much Sam’s condition seemed to insist on not improving at all.
Sam stirred weakly when Bobby was finally done and Dean picked him up to place him on the mattress. By all rights he should have been under deep from the sedatives and the goddamn blood loss - Dean and Bobby shared a worried look, not for the first time wondering what the hell they’d do if Sam developed some sort of resistance to their only way of keeping calm when he was like this.
But Sam’s eyelids barely fluttered open, and when he tried to reach for Dean’s shirt, he didn’t quite make it.
He managed to speak, though; one single word that sounded weird, the vowels coming out all wrong as if Sam had forgotten how to wrap his tongue around the sound. But Dean recognized his name anyway. He always knew when Sam called for him.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I understand. I’ll take care of it, promise.”
It seemed to be the right thing to say, because Sam finally let go and allowed the drugs to drag him to sleep. Dean stood, sighed, and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do. Wondered when fate would decide that his little brother had finally suffered enough.
Eventually, while Bobby nursed his damaged nose, he climbed up the stairs to have a look at Sam’s room and try to figure out what it was Sam deemed so important it motivated him to fight off enough sedatives to take out a horse.
Standing in the doorway, he stared at the lines of blood all over the walls. “Well, fuck,” he muttered.
-#-#-
Bobby hated angels with a passion. He couldn’t help it. He was well aware that not all angels were the same, and there were exceptions to his hatred, but at the present time those exceptions only included Castiel, and even that only when that particular angel had the grace to actually show up and be useful.
Listening to Sam screaming out his pain and terror in garbled words no one understood, it was hard not to hate someone for it.
They didn’t lock Sam in the panic room anymore, not even when he was at his worst. Too dark, too much like a prison. Dean didn’t want it, and Bobby was inclined to agree. It wasn’t like Sam was a danger to anyone, or like they had to keep anything away from him. The only one he had to be protected from was himself, and they could do that by never leaving him alone.
Mostly it was Dean staying by his brother’s side. Day and night, even when Sam seemed to be fine. Even when he was sleeping peacefully. They had made the mistake of leaving him out of their sight when he was well and aware and just Sam exactly once.
Sam, when he could, complained about the lack of privacy, about their oppressing protectiveness, but Bobby knew he also felt guilty; a burden to keep them from whatever they’d rather be doing. He was right insofar as that all of them had plenty of things they would rather be doing than watching him sleep to make sure he didn’t slit his throat upon waking. It kind of went without saying.
It also went without saying that this was a sacrifice Bobby, not to mention Dean, were more than willing to make for him.
Ironically, it was Castiel whose help they needed most when things got really bad, because when things got really bad, when the wall became too thin and the memories bleeding through overpowered everything else, Sam got lost in two hundred years of angels being the only people speaking in his presence. And they were not speaking English.
Bobby and Dean didn’t know if Sam entirely lost the ability to understand their language when he was like that. What they did know was that he didn’t seem to be able to speak it. The first time, it had taken them far too long to realise that the broken fragments of sentences Sam was screaming at them were anything but glibberish.
Even Castiel understood only about half of the ancient Enochian, spoken in this form only by the archangels, but it was better than nothing. Sometimes he could help. Sometimes he could only listen.
At least that he did, when he had the time. Bobby knew the angel did what he could to help, but whenever Castiel fluttered off because he had something better to do, Bobby couldn’t help but resent him a little bit. Not for being an angel. Just for being generally useless.
But then, they all were.
Listening to Sam’s screams when he scratched and pounded the walls until his fingers were bleeding, it was hard not to hate anyone.
And those weren’t even the worst days.
-#-#-
“You have been calling me,” Castiel said in greeting. Perhaps he should have said something else, or announced his presence in some other way, for it seemed to startle Dean despite the fact that he had requested it in the first place.
Hearing Castiel’s voice right behind him, Dean turned around, took a step backwards at the same time and very nearly ended up falling into the kitchen sink.
“Fucking hell, Cas!” Dean cursed. He regained his balance and threw the kitchen towel at Castiel’s chest, where it bounced off ineffectively. “I called you three hours ago.” He lifted his hands before Castiel could reply. “Yeah, I know. You were busy.”
“I was.” Castiel looked around. “Where’s Sam?”
Dean snorted. “Not in the kitchen.”
“You called because of him.”
“You got that part, huh? I guess you might be interested this, actually. He had a vision again, and got pretty worked up over it, but since our angel-speak interpreter wasn’t around, I have no idea what it was about.”
Castiel turned around to hurry out of the room. “I’ll speak to him.”
“You won’t,” Dean said behind him, his words at the same time information and a warning. “We pumped him so full of tranquilizers it’ll be a miracle if he wakes up within the week.”
That didn’t have to be a problem, as Castiel could raise Sam from any drug induced sleep, no matter how deep. Something told him that Dean wouldn’t appreciate that, though, and it probably wouldn’t do Sam any good either. So Castiel would leave this option as a last resort.
He didn’t know what the alternative would be, though.
“I need to know what the vision was about,” he explained as he entered the living room, where he found Sam sleeping on a mattress on the floor. He was unnaturally pale, covered in a fine sheen of sweat, and blood was seeping though the white bandages wrapped around his arms.
Castiel turned to look at Dean in question. His friend smiled without humour. “I’ll show you,” he said.
What he showed Castiel was the room in which Sam, and therefore also Dean, usually slept. Now it was deserted and pictures were painted all over the once largely white wallpaper. The once red colour had by now dried to a reddish brown, but Castiel at once recognized it as blood, and he didn’t need to ask whose blood it was.
“Sam did this?”
“Like I said, he seemed rather set on letting us know what he had seen in his vision. Unfortunately, neither me not Bobby were able to figure this out.”
Castiel stepped into the room to have a closer look at the pictures. Sam was not a great artist at the best of times, but the angel was able to recognize a river, a forest in the background and the buildings of a nearby city. On another wall he saw jagged lines coming down from the sky, like lightning. Another picture showed people, little more than stick figures, lying around in heaps. He walked over to the next painting.
“Do you recognize that place?” Dean asked from the doorway, obviously reluctant to enter the room. “We had no luck. Sam’s not exactly Picasso.”
“I know the city. It’s in Colorado,” Castiel answered absent-mindedly. With every picture he managed to make sense of, he got a clearer idea of what they were dealing with and why Sam was so desperate to tell them about it.
“I have to go,” he finally said and few off before Dean could stop him.
He hoped that he wouldn’t be too late.
-
Dean watched the news. It was all he could do after Castiel had disappeared on him and he could only hope the angel had gone to take care of whatever Dean had promised his little brother would be taken care of. The news would tell him if anything of apocalyptic proportions happened. They probably would not tell him if anything of apocalyptic proportions did not happen because Cas prevented it, so no news were good news, Dean hoped. (Unless Cas had gone off to do something else and whatever Sam wanted stopped wouldn’t happen for another hour or so.)
Meanwhile, Sam slept, and Dean kept watch, and at some point Bobby started cleaning the room upstairs. Dean heard him curse and complain and eventually he came down declaring only a wallpaper change would help at this stage. Dean promised to help - but not right now. Someone needed to stay with Sam.
Bobby huffed at that and went to make himself coffee. There was no hurry. They wouldn’t get that room done today anyway. Dean was already looking forward to spending the night on the couch.
He tried to get Bobby to leave. Drive into town, get drunk, do something fun or whatever, because he felt guilty that on top of occupying Bobby’s spare room and his kitchen, they also blocked his living room now, not even giving him a chance to watch tv on that ancient little screen Dean was still surprised actually had colour.
Bobby, naturally, refused. As long as they didn’t know what state Sam would be in when he woke up it would be better if they were both nearby. Just in case.
Eventually, though, Dean managed to talk Bobby into taking a break and go to his bedroom with a book, where no doubt he would fall asleep in no time. The last day had been stressful.
Hell, the last couple of weeks had been stressful. Even Sam’s good days were, because they never knew how long they lasted. And no one was more affected by this than Sam, who felt their stress on top of his own. Dean could see how it weighed him down. He feared that the constant tension stood in the way of any meaningful recovery, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
He sighed, and reached down to run a hand through his brother’s hair. Sam looked sick and frail and vulnerable, and Dean just needed him to get better.
He needed to know that everything would be alright, eventually.
“Sammy,” he murmured, then stopped because he didn’t know what to say next.
The news were on mute and Dean kept an eye out for anything that seemed important. Nothing came up, though, and eventually Dean dozed off. He woke up what felt like only seconds later to find Castiel sitting on the mattress beside his brother, one hand resting on Sam’s head. He didn’t look up to acknowledge Dean.
“Your brother saved a lot of people today,” the angel said quietly.
‘Yeah, well, that’s because he’s kind of awesome, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Dean thought. Aloud he asked, “You did it, then?”
“I was able to stop what Sam has seen in his vision, yes.”
“Well. That’s great.” And it was. But it also was damn unfair that Sam had saved the world and ended up a half-insane wreck, and now he continued to save people and still suffered for it. There was no justice anywhere in that, and Dean would have given up all of those people Sam had saved today and all those days before if it meant his brother would just be fine again.
“He’s supposed to get better,” he heard himself say. “Not worse.”
Castiel let out a heavy sigh. He never took his hand out of Sam’s hair. “You knew it wouldn’t be easy for him,” he reminded Dean, and Dean supposed that was marginally better than ‘I totally told you so!’ “If it’s any consolation, it could be a lot worse. He hardly has any conscious memories of the cage, most of the time.”
“It’s not much of a consolation, no.” Dean ran a hand over his face, feeling tired and weary. “I know those visions are awfully handy for your war, but I still wish you’d find a way to stop them. They’re killing him.”
“He is not going to die from them,” Castiel assured him, proving he didn’t quite get what Dean was talking about. “But I agree they’re not doing him any good. I can’t make you believe me, but if I could make it stop, I would.”
Dean knew he should feel guilty for throwing out accusations like that, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He wanted to hurt Cas because Sam was hurt and Dean couldn’t help him, which hurt Dean and he needed someone else to hurt as well, just for the sake of it. “Right,” he muttered. Then he asked, “Can’t you at least heal him? Physically, I mean?”
Cas looked particularly regretful. “You know I can’t.”
“Of course not.” Dean sighed, feeling even more tired than before and knowing he wouldn’t get a break anytime soon. Sam’s soul had come back soaked full with hell, and it had contaminated his body and made it largely resistant to Castiel’s powers. Cas wasn’t happy with this phrasing when Dean had first tried to summarize for his own sake what his angelic friend had tried to explain to him, but it made sense to Dean so Cas could stuff it.
In the end, Dean hadn’t even been surprised that day, when Sam had gotten blood poisoning after his first suicide attempt and Cas had been unable to heal him. It was just another confirmation that the universe hated his brother, and in turn, Dean too.
-#-#-
Sam felt like broken glass whenever Castiel touched him; even when he seemed fine the damage always lay just beneath the surface. But Castiel didn’t see him often when he was fine, because Dean only called him when he wasn’t, and because Sam wasn’t fine very often.
Death’s wall was intact. It was still holding back most of what would destroy Sam completely once it got to him. The angel didn’t think that Dean was aware of this. That he knew eventually it would be so much worse.
The first time Castiel had heard Sam speak Enochian, he had been surprised. He shouldn’t have been, perhaps - Lucifer and Michael were unlikely to explain themselves and their actions to Sam in a way he would understand, and Sam always was a fast learner.
But this was a lesson he wasn’t supposed to remember. It was supposed to be hidden behind the wall, and Castiel knew better than anyone what it meant when Sam remembered how to speak Enochian, but not English.
It happened more often now.
It happened only after Sam had had another vision, and Castiel could only guess that this was because the visions, dormant for so long, were part of the part of Sam that had always belonged to hell.
He could not even guess how it came that those visions that tore down the wall a little more every time they occurred almost always showed Sam hints of where to find the weapons that had been stolen from heaven, or told him of Raphael’s next plans. The very thing that destroyed Castiel’s friend was aiding him in a war he would otherwise have no hope of winning, and the angel couldn’t help but wonder if this was his Father’s doing; giving something good in return while once again Sam suffered for their benefit.
Castiel desperately wished he could go back to the days when he was unable to suspect God of such cruelty.
-#-#-
Dean didn’t like to speak of ‘suicide attempts’ in regard to Sam, because they really weren’t. Sam didn’t want to die, and he never made any conscious plans to end his life. It was just that sometimes, when things were especially bad and a vision or particularly vicious nightmare had pushed him right to the wrong side of the wall, he didn’t quite know what he was doing. He just wanted his suffering to end. Other than at those times, he was fine - or as fine as he could possibly be, all things considered.
Therefore Dean also didn’t like it when Bobby spoke of medication and ‘professional help’ and hospitals. There were no pills against Hell trauma, and Sam’s story wasn’t something they could tell a psychiatrist. A hospital would only be another prison, and if Bobby wanted to get rid of them, he just had to say so. Dean could take care of Sam in a motel room, if he had to.
To say Dean had gotten angry at the suggestion would have been an understatement. But his reaction had made Bobby get angry too, and there had been no one to keep a level head and clam them down.
A life-long friendship had nearly ended that day. It showed Dean, looking back, that he wasn’t the only one who felt the strain. Bobby didn’t usually let himself be provoked like that.
Sometimes, Dean felt incredibly tired. He never felt like giving up. He’d learned his lesson what left like a lifetime ago, when he had tried to give up and Sam had simply carried on for both of them until Dean was ready to join him again.
He’d felt incredibly tired when Castiel had shown up in Bobby’s living room, but in this case it had to have been more of a physical reaction, since Sammy had just saved the day and that was no reason to want to crawl into a corner and cry, Dean was sure. He was also sure that no matter how tired he felt, he wasn’t tired enough to just fall over like that, out cold from one moment to the next, so Cas had to have helped. Dean didn’t appreciate it when he woke up in the light of early morning, feeling rested but groggy and longing for coffee.
He blinked lazily, rolled over and didn’t fall off the couch. After a moment, his brain registered that he wasn’t on the couch and his annoyance level raised another notch.
Getting up, he found himself in the room he usually shared with Sam. It was clean and sporting new wallpapers and even smelled good. No doubt another of Castiel’s services, though Dean doubted Bobby wanted to rip him open for this one.
Sam was nowhere to be seen, his bed untouched. Dean wasn’t worried as such, knowing Cas wouldn’t put him to sleep out of worry only to let his brother come to harm afterwards, but he would have felt a lot better if he could see him.
So he went downstairs, in search of Sam and coffee. Mostly Sam, though. Even right after getting out of bed, Dean had his priorities in order.
He found both Sam and coffee in the living room where he’d last seen them. Cas was there, too, sitting on the couch with Sam sitting beside him. They were discussing something over a map on the table. Dean stopped in the doorway to stare, and eventually Sam noticed him and threw him a weak smile.
“Hey,” he said.
Dean wanted to ask how he was feeling, if he’d had any nightmares, if by any chance he felt any better in general than he had before this latest episode. He nodded at the pot on the table.
“Any coffee left?” he asked.
Sam gestured to the pot. “Help yourself. Can’t promise it’s still hot, though.”
“Where’s Bobby?”
“Grocery shopping.”
Dean flopped down on the couch and reached for the pot, refilling Sam’s mostly empty cup and taking a long gulp of lukewarm coffee. He leaned back and for a moment revelled in the normalcy of the scene. Research. Grocery shopping. Sam.
“Hey, Cas,” he said with the sweetest smile he could summon. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Cas eyed him critically. “Are we going to have a fight about me taking you to bed?”
There were so many dirty jokes Dean could have made in answer to that, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. Not when he did indeed think a fight might be necessary. Again.
“Please tell me it was his own bed he’s taken you to,” Sam said. “Otherwise I hope you at least changed the sheets.”
Cas stared at him, the Frown of Incomprehension on his face for the first time in ages, and Dean spontaneously decided that fighting was overrated.
“We didn’t feel like changing the sheets,” he replied with a lazy grin. “So we used your bed.”
“I don’t understand why the sheets should need changing,” Cas said, sounding slightly irritated. “And it was his own bed I took him to.”
Dean couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t even that funny, but he found himself grinning from ear to ear, and even Sam’s lips twitched suspiciously. “Was it any good, at least?” he asked.
“Heavenly.” Dean leaned forward to have a look at the map and before Cas could explode on them out of confusion or actually figure out what the joke was, he asked, “So, what’s the matter this time?”
They explained about the hunt Cas stumbled over when he secured his latest weapon. It had nothing to do with his war and Dean didn’t know why he stayed around, but he didn’t ask about it.
The sleeves of Sam’s shirt were rolled down for once, mercifully covering the bandages around the wounds he had torn into his arms with his teeth, and Dean ignored, for the moment, that he knew they were there. This moment - this was normal. It was what he wanted and he simply accepted it as the gift it was. He drank his coffee and made fun of Cas and ignored how Sam’s laughter sounded a little forced, how the tension never completely left his body. He ignored the way the clothes hung off his little brother’s body and the lack of colour in his skin, knowing the moment was far too brittle to stand the pressure of too much attention.
So he complained about the coffee and about Bobby taking so long, stretched out on the couch like he owned it and tried to find out if he could unnerve Castiel by staring at him none stop so he wouldn’t have to see the shaking of Sam’s hands as he drew lines on the map that seemed to mark absolutely nothing.
February 5, 2011
Author: vail_kagami
Genre: gen
Characters: Sam, Dean, Bobby, Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 6742
Warnings: insanity, self-harm, allusions to past torure, abuse, and attempted suicide
Spoilers: Set past 6.11, now AU.
Summary: When Sam's soul returned from hell, so did his visions of death and destruction. Dean really wishes they hadn't.
Note: Witten for this prompt by thelocation at the h/c prompt challenge.
The worst… The absolutely worst happened on one of Sam’s good days, and that fact alone would have been enough to set the event straight up to the top of Dean’s list of the most disturbing, heartbreaking and plain wrong things he had ever seen, if there had been anything that could have made this any worse than it had been anyway.
The worst happened on one of the good days, when Sam was awake and aware and calm, and Dean had been frustrated and bored and at the same time happy enough with his brother’s state that he forgot the eggshells. Forgot the broken pieces of china he was walking on whenever Sam was present. For a few minutes he was content enough to pretend things were fine, that everything was back to normal and just acted like himself, and it wasn’t even a big thing. It was just him, flopping down on Bobby’s worn couch and groaning his frustration out to the world.
“It’s been too fucking long,” he declared. “I’m not dead yet. I want sex, dammit!”
And Sam was fine enough, himself enough that day that Dean expected him to roll his eyes. To throw Dean’s own dirty socks at him, which he had conveniently left in the kitchen sink because Bobby wasn’t there to cut his balls off for it. He expected Sam to bitch about the amount of information that was appropriate to share with the world. Dean simply expected, and didn’t think.
But even if he had thought he wouldn’t have expected to find Sam kneeling on the ground before him only seconds later, his head bend and all his clothes shed in a heap behind him.
It took Dean precious seconds to take in the sight, process what he was seeing and what it meant, and to react. Within less than a minute after the damn, thoughtless words had left his mouth he had Sam wrapped in a blanket and held against him, telling him, “Never,” and “Don’t do that!” Trying his best not to yell, not to sound too harsh but too freaked out to quite succeed.
In his arms Sam wasn’t listening. He was shaking like a leaf, and crying soundlessly, griped by a quiet panic ever since he heard Dean’s words, but he hadn’t hesitated for one second, and perhaps that was the worst thing of all.
It was closely followed on the terribleness-scale by the way Sam never made a sound. His tears fell soundlessly. He didn’t sob, didn’t say anything, not even in that cursed language only Cas understood. Even screaming would have been better than this silence.
Dean didn’t know what his brother expected to happen if he made a sound, but he could guess.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured when he pulled Sammy to his feet and led him to the bedroom in the back. “So fucking sorry.” Sorry for yelling. Sorry for ever having opened his mouth. Sorry for everything Lucifer and Michael had done to his brother.
Sorry he’d let him go, let him fall.
Sam didn’t resist. He let himself be led and dressed in boxers and a t-shirt because Dean couldn’t stand the sight of his brother naked and vulnerable like that. He refused the drink Dean offered and never stopped shaking or crying, and it took Dean far too long to realise that he was still terrified and falling to pieces.
No matter what he did, Dean couldn’t clam him down. In the end he got the tranquilizer from the locked cabinet and injected it in Sam’s arm because it seemed to be the only way for this to be over.
Sam curled up on his bed and didn’t stop crying even in his sleep.
-#-#-
Fire, and ice, and fire again. It was boiling his brain - his head was hurting so badly the pain became incomprehensible and unimportant. Then thunder, and someone died.
Sam saw the man fall, then roll down the slope and into the river. He didn’t know him (thank God!) but there were others, already in the water, drifting downstream. It was raining, steadily, quietly. Another thunder, further away, striking down more men, women and children. None of them was Dean. (Dean!) None of them was Bobby or Cas but they were all dead and there was another thunder and.
(dean dean dean dean dean)
It sounded like Lucifer, laughing because Sam’s eyes were melting out of his head. The piercing pain left him breathless. The fire was burning him only from the inside before everything froze over and disappeared.
-
Dean had been outside. Getting fresh air, on Bobby’s insistence, and now he cursed himself for it. Of course Sam had to have an episode while he was gone. Of course he did. Dean should have known because things always, always went wrong for them.
When he entered the room, Sam was trashing on the floor, clutching his head and wailing in pain. Dean recognized the symptoms of another vision and cursed even more, even as he fell to his knees beside his brother and helped Bobby hold him still so he didn’t hurt himself.
It seemed to take ages, but eventually, finally, Sam calmed down. His trashing subsided and for a (blessed) moment, he lay still and unresponsive, breathing hard, his eyes closed and his face white as paper.
When Sam opened his eyes, they looked straight at Dean, aware and full of panic. Whatever he saw, it had shaken him. But when he opened his mouth to tell them, warn them, none of the words were in a language either of them could understand.
-
They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand. Sam yelled at them, told them over and over because this was important, so fucking important, but they only stared at him blankly, and then Dean put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and told him to calm down, and that everything would be okay.
Sam pushed him away, screamed in frustration. People were going to die - hundreds, maybe thousands - and they did nothing to stop it because Sam couldn’t make them understand.
He was the only one to know, and couldn’t tell anyone. So he was the only one who could do something, but when he tried to leave they held him back and down and in the end they dragged him back to the bed no matter how much he fought them.
In the end there was darkness again. Lucifer found it all very funny.
But Sam was better when he returned to the room with the washed-off white wallpapers and the tiny window too high in the wall. He was calmer, and he couldn’t remember the words Dean would understand, but he could think clearly again and knew they wouldn’t let him go. Wouldn’t let him go, someone had to do something, and he had to tell them. It was so simple. Lucifer told him not to bother, but Sam was not in the mood to listen. He always lied anyway.
-
Dean prayed more these days than he ever had, but he had never again bothered calling to God since the one time he had tried and found his prayers ignored in the empty hurt inside him and Sam’s screams sounding from the panic room. These days he only ever prayed to Cas, and he didn’t even know if it really counted as prayer since it basically served the same function as a phone call.
Sometimes Cas even answered.
He better should. After all, he and his war benefitted from Sam’s damn visions, and sometimes - rarely - Dean felt guilty for ever thinking this might be the only reason Cas bothered to come.
He knew it wasn’t. He’d seen the angel sit with Sam for hours after receiving all the information he could hope for, one hand half on Sam’s forehead and half in his hair, calming him in a way Dean couldn’t even understand, let alone hope to imitate. Sometimes it made him a little jealous, and that jealousy made him resent his angelic friend, though not nearly as much as he resented him whenever Sam was screaming and crying or just plain unreachable in nameless panic and Castiel didn’t so much as bother to fax down his business hours.
Of course, Dean knew that Castiel had to have good reasons not to come. Probably, he was just this moment engaged in combat and would be struck down by another angel’s sword if he allowed himself to be distracted by Dean’s desperate prayers for help. (Also, he had to know that he was probably missing a good opportunity to piss on Raphael’s leg if he didn’t come, but Dean didn’t actually think that, because that would be a kind of dickish thing to do.) Still, he couldn’t help but curse the angel when he refused to show up, no matter how long and fiercely Dean prayed to him.
He couldn’t forget Sam trying to run, struggling against them while screaming incomprehensible words out into the world. Without doubt there was something very important he needed to tell them, but to be perfectly honest, all Dean cared about was for Sam to get better and stop hurting. And if that meant finding a way to shut down those visions forever and thus cutting off any way Cas might have of gaining an advantage over his enemies, Dean would take it in a second.
But there was no such way, or at least none he knew of. Sam kept suffering and Cas wasn’t even here to benefit from it and it was all so damn hopeless.
At least they didn’t have to sedate Sam this time. He passed out on his own, worn down by the vision and the pain that came along with it. It happened often, especially when Sam was agitated, and right now he was sleeping, dead to the world, while Dean was pacing up and down the corridor, calling Castiel with increasing frustration. Because he knew this wasn’t over. Depending on the nature of the vision, it could be hours or even days before Sam found back to the present enough to express himself in a way that made sense, and this had been a big one. But Dean also knew Sam wouldn’t calm down before he knew someone was taking care of whatever it was he had seen, because despite everything, he was still Sam.
There was one time so far when they hadn’t been fast enough. Castiel hadn’t shown up in time and Sam had become increasingly frantic and desperate until he’d hidden his face in his hands and wailed as if someone was physically hurting him. A lot.
Then he’d seized. And then he’d stopped breathing. And then, eventually, finally, he’d passed out. But even that break hadn’t lasted long.
It had been later that same day, when Sam was sleeping under heavy sedation and Dean felt like crying, that he and Bobby had seen the report about the fire that had come seemingly from nowhere and taken out an entire village in less than one hour, and learned that the outbreak of the fire had coincided with Sam’s first seizure.
Sam had fallen sick after that and withdrawn into himself for so long Dean had feared he’d finally snapped completely and wouldn’t come back. He hadn’t been interested in Cas’ excuses. He might have told the angel, at some point, that he’d kill him if he ever put Dean’s brother through something like that again.
Which meant said angel should better show his scrawny ass down here, and pronto!
But Cas didn’t show at first, and after the second and third try Cas still didn’t show up. Dean lasted for nearly an hour before he gave up, sending one more prayer up to a chaotic heaven to let Cas know how very pissed he was, and no, he didn’t give a shit about any explanations so Cas shouldn’t waste time on them when he finally did show up.
The first thing he did after that was checking on his brother, but he didn’t even make it to Sam’s room before Bobby’s shout let him know that he should never have left him alone in the first place, not even for as long as it took to pace up and down the hall to hiss at the empty air.
Sam had been out of it, and he should have stayed out for the rest of the night at least, exhausted as he was. But Bobby’s shouts for Dean to get his ass over there and fast indicated that either he wasn’t, anymore, or he’d died in his sleep.
Dean didn’t even think about the second option.
He expected Bobby to be inside the room with Sam but the older hunter was in the doorway, clutching his nose with blood seeping through his fingers, so either Sam was still alive and kicking, or he was one of the more violent corpses Dean had encountered in his life.
He still wasn’t thinking about that, though, and he didn’t have to, because Sam was still alive, even though he didn’t seem too keen on keeping that state.
Dean didn’t stop for even a heartbeat to take in the sight that greeted him, the blood on the walls and on the floor and the crazed intensity with which Sam focused on his work, mindless of anything else. He didn’t run to his brother so much as fell towards his centre of gravity, sliding to his knees behind Sam and wrapping his arms around him from behind.
As expected, Sam didn’t react well to the interruption of his work. He wailed, screamed out his protest in incomprehensible words and struggled against Dean’s hold with the single purpose of going back to what he was doing. But other than Bobby Dean was prepare for his violent reaction, and while still stronger in his agitation than his appearance led to believe, Sam was no match for the strength of Dean’s arms. Not anymore.
And certainly not after having lost so much fucking blood.
Bobby came to his aid in seconds, taking hold of Sam’s bloody hands in spite of the blood still running down his own face. Together they managed to hold Sam down until his struggling receded as his strength ran out, and his voice, already hoarse from screaming, died in a harsh coughing fit. Even after he had seemingly calmed down, Dean kept his guard, though, because Sam was a sneaky bastard who just waited for the right opportunity.
But even if he was, there was no opportunity this time. Bobby went and came back with the cursed tranquilizers they had to use far too often and another set of bandages. They took care of Sam’s arms still sitting on the floor because the bed was pretty much the only part of the room not soiled with blood and they wanted to keep it that way. It didn’t matter in the end - Dean didn’t want to stay in this room as long as it was looking and smelling like this, and he didn’t want Sam to stay here either.
Bobby offered his own bedroom, but Dean declined. They were taking advantage of their friend’s hospitality enough as it was. In the end they settled for a makeshift bed in the living room, because the couch was too short for Sam to rest on comfortably and the only other alternative was the cot in the panic room.
Dean also declined Bobby’s offer to help him get Sam downstairs. The older hunter insisted that Sam was too tall for Dean to carry on his own but Dean simply slid his arms under his brother’s back and knees and proved him wrong. It wasn’t even particularly hard; Sam was a fucking skeleton these days, since he was too fucked up to feel like eating most of the time and what he ate rarely stayed down.
It bothered Dean beyond words to see his brother like this. It didn’t bother him that he had to devote his time to taking care of him. Not at all. He thought it should, and he would be lying if he said there never were moments he’d rather do something else, have some time to himself, but in the end this was where he belonged, and a Sam who depended on him was a thousand times better than no Sam at all.
Taking care of Sam was what he did. What he had done all his life, and those times he was free of his little brother and left to his own life were not something he cared to remember. Dean had no illusions concerning the fact that he needed Sam just as much as Sam needed him.
Besides, Sam was getting better. He wouldn’t always be like this, and as soon as he was up to it, they would hit the road and get back to the world and all it had to offer.
For the moment, however, Bobby was setting up a bed on the floor so Sam wouldn’t have to sleep in a room smelling of his own blood, and Sam was lying limply in Dean’s arms as he sat on the couch, waiting for Bobby to be done. But they would get there. Eventually. No matter how long it took, or how much Sam’s condition seemed to insist on not improving at all.
Sam stirred weakly when Bobby was finally done and Dean picked him up to place him on the mattress. By all rights he should have been under deep from the sedatives and the goddamn blood loss - Dean and Bobby shared a worried look, not for the first time wondering what the hell they’d do if Sam developed some sort of resistance to their only way of keeping calm when he was like this.
But Sam’s eyelids barely fluttered open, and when he tried to reach for Dean’s shirt, he didn’t quite make it.
He managed to speak, though; one single word that sounded weird, the vowels coming out all wrong as if Sam had forgotten how to wrap his tongue around the sound. But Dean recognized his name anyway. He always knew when Sam called for him.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I understand. I’ll take care of it, promise.”
It seemed to be the right thing to say, because Sam finally let go and allowed the drugs to drag him to sleep. Dean stood, sighed, and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do. Wondered when fate would decide that his little brother had finally suffered enough.
Eventually, while Bobby nursed his damaged nose, he climbed up the stairs to have a look at Sam’s room and try to figure out what it was Sam deemed so important it motivated him to fight off enough sedatives to take out a horse.
Standing in the doorway, he stared at the lines of blood all over the walls. “Well, fuck,” he muttered.
-#-#-
Bobby hated angels with a passion. He couldn’t help it. He was well aware that not all angels were the same, and there were exceptions to his hatred, but at the present time those exceptions only included Castiel, and even that only when that particular angel had the grace to actually show up and be useful.
Listening to Sam screaming out his pain and terror in garbled words no one understood, it was hard not to hate someone for it.
They didn’t lock Sam in the panic room anymore, not even when he was at his worst. Too dark, too much like a prison. Dean didn’t want it, and Bobby was inclined to agree. It wasn’t like Sam was a danger to anyone, or like they had to keep anything away from him. The only one he had to be protected from was himself, and they could do that by never leaving him alone.
Mostly it was Dean staying by his brother’s side. Day and night, even when Sam seemed to be fine. Even when he was sleeping peacefully. They had made the mistake of leaving him out of their sight when he was well and aware and just Sam exactly once.
Sam, when he could, complained about the lack of privacy, about their oppressing protectiveness, but Bobby knew he also felt guilty; a burden to keep them from whatever they’d rather be doing. He was right insofar as that all of them had plenty of things they would rather be doing than watching him sleep to make sure he didn’t slit his throat upon waking. It kind of went without saying.
It also went without saying that this was a sacrifice Bobby, not to mention Dean, were more than willing to make for him.
Ironically, it was Castiel whose help they needed most when things got really bad, because when things got really bad, when the wall became too thin and the memories bleeding through overpowered everything else, Sam got lost in two hundred years of angels being the only people speaking in his presence. And they were not speaking English.
Bobby and Dean didn’t know if Sam entirely lost the ability to understand their language when he was like that. What they did know was that he didn’t seem to be able to speak it. The first time, it had taken them far too long to realise that the broken fragments of sentences Sam was screaming at them were anything but glibberish.
Even Castiel understood only about half of the ancient Enochian, spoken in this form only by the archangels, but it was better than nothing. Sometimes he could help. Sometimes he could only listen.
At least that he did, when he had the time. Bobby knew the angel did what he could to help, but whenever Castiel fluttered off because he had something better to do, Bobby couldn’t help but resent him a little bit. Not for being an angel. Just for being generally useless.
But then, they all were.
Listening to Sam’s screams when he scratched and pounded the walls until his fingers were bleeding, it was hard not to hate anyone.
And those weren’t even the worst days.
-#-#-
“You have been calling me,” Castiel said in greeting. Perhaps he should have said something else, or announced his presence in some other way, for it seemed to startle Dean despite the fact that he had requested it in the first place.
Hearing Castiel’s voice right behind him, Dean turned around, took a step backwards at the same time and very nearly ended up falling into the kitchen sink.
“Fucking hell, Cas!” Dean cursed. He regained his balance and threw the kitchen towel at Castiel’s chest, where it bounced off ineffectively. “I called you three hours ago.” He lifted his hands before Castiel could reply. “Yeah, I know. You were busy.”
“I was.” Castiel looked around. “Where’s Sam?”
Dean snorted. “Not in the kitchen.”
“You called because of him.”
“You got that part, huh? I guess you might be interested this, actually. He had a vision again, and got pretty worked up over it, but since our angel-speak interpreter wasn’t around, I have no idea what it was about.”
Castiel turned around to hurry out of the room. “I’ll speak to him.”
“You won’t,” Dean said behind him, his words at the same time information and a warning. “We pumped him so full of tranquilizers it’ll be a miracle if he wakes up within the week.”
That didn’t have to be a problem, as Castiel could raise Sam from any drug induced sleep, no matter how deep. Something told him that Dean wouldn’t appreciate that, though, and it probably wouldn’t do Sam any good either. So Castiel would leave this option as a last resort.
He didn’t know what the alternative would be, though.
“I need to know what the vision was about,” he explained as he entered the living room, where he found Sam sleeping on a mattress on the floor. He was unnaturally pale, covered in a fine sheen of sweat, and blood was seeping though the white bandages wrapped around his arms.
Castiel turned to look at Dean in question. His friend smiled without humour. “I’ll show you,” he said.
What he showed Castiel was the room in which Sam, and therefore also Dean, usually slept. Now it was deserted and pictures were painted all over the once largely white wallpaper. The once red colour had by now dried to a reddish brown, but Castiel at once recognized it as blood, and he didn’t need to ask whose blood it was.
“Sam did this?”
“Like I said, he seemed rather set on letting us know what he had seen in his vision. Unfortunately, neither me not Bobby were able to figure this out.”
Castiel stepped into the room to have a closer look at the pictures. Sam was not a great artist at the best of times, but the angel was able to recognize a river, a forest in the background and the buildings of a nearby city. On another wall he saw jagged lines coming down from the sky, like lightning. Another picture showed people, little more than stick figures, lying around in heaps. He walked over to the next painting.
“Do you recognize that place?” Dean asked from the doorway, obviously reluctant to enter the room. “We had no luck. Sam’s not exactly Picasso.”
“I know the city. It’s in Colorado,” Castiel answered absent-mindedly. With every picture he managed to make sense of, he got a clearer idea of what they were dealing with and why Sam was so desperate to tell them about it.
“I have to go,” he finally said and few off before Dean could stop him.
He hoped that he wouldn’t be too late.
-
Dean watched the news. It was all he could do after Castiel had disappeared on him and he could only hope the angel had gone to take care of whatever Dean had promised his little brother would be taken care of. The news would tell him if anything of apocalyptic proportions happened. They probably would not tell him if anything of apocalyptic proportions did not happen because Cas prevented it, so no news were good news, Dean hoped. (Unless Cas had gone off to do something else and whatever Sam wanted stopped wouldn’t happen for another hour or so.)
Meanwhile, Sam slept, and Dean kept watch, and at some point Bobby started cleaning the room upstairs. Dean heard him curse and complain and eventually he came down declaring only a wallpaper change would help at this stage. Dean promised to help - but not right now. Someone needed to stay with Sam.
Bobby huffed at that and went to make himself coffee. There was no hurry. They wouldn’t get that room done today anyway. Dean was already looking forward to spending the night on the couch.
He tried to get Bobby to leave. Drive into town, get drunk, do something fun or whatever, because he felt guilty that on top of occupying Bobby’s spare room and his kitchen, they also blocked his living room now, not even giving him a chance to watch tv on that ancient little screen Dean was still surprised actually had colour.
Bobby, naturally, refused. As long as they didn’t know what state Sam would be in when he woke up it would be better if they were both nearby. Just in case.
Eventually, though, Dean managed to talk Bobby into taking a break and go to his bedroom with a book, where no doubt he would fall asleep in no time. The last day had been stressful.
Hell, the last couple of weeks had been stressful. Even Sam’s good days were, because they never knew how long they lasted. And no one was more affected by this than Sam, who felt their stress on top of his own. Dean could see how it weighed him down. He feared that the constant tension stood in the way of any meaningful recovery, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
He sighed, and reached down to run a hand through his brother’s hair. Sam looked sick and frail and vulnerable, and Dean just needed him to get better.
He needed to know that everything would be alright, eventually.
“Sammy,” he murmured, then stopped because he didn’t know what to say next.
The news were on mute and Dean kept an eye out for anything that seemed important. Nothing came up, though, and eventually Dean dozed off. He woke up what felt like only seconds later to find Castiel sitting on the mattress beside his brother, one hand resting on Sam’s head. He didn’t look up to acknowledge Dean.
“Your brother saved a lot of people today,” the angel said quietly.
‘Yeah, well, that’s because he’s kind of awesome, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Dean thought. Aloud he asked, “You did it, then?”
“I was able to stop what Sam has seen in his vision, yes.”
“Well. That’s great.” And it was. But it also was damn unfair that Sam had saved the world and ended up a half-insane wreck, and now he continued to save people and still suffered for it. There was no justice anywhere in that, and Dean would have given up all of those people Sam had saved today and all those days before if it meant his brother would just be fine again.
“He’s supposed to get better,” he heard himself say. “Not worse.”
Castiel let out a heavy sigh. He never took his hand out of Sam’s hair. “You knew it wouldn’t be easy for him,” he reminded Dean, and Dean supposed that was marginally better than ‘I totally told you so!’ “If it’s any consolation, it could be a lot worse. He hardly has any conscious memories of the cage, most of the time.”
“It’s not much of a consolation, no.” Dean ran a hand over his face, feeling tired and weary. “I know those visions are awfully handy for your war, but I still wish you’d find a way to stop them. They’re killing him.”
“He is not going to die from them,” Castiel assured him, proving he didn’t quite get what Dean was talking about. “But I agree they’re not doing him any good. I can’t make you believe me, but if I could make it stop, I would.”
Dean knew he should feel guilty for throwing out accusations like that, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He wanted to hurt Cas because Sam was hurt and Dean couldn’t help him, which hurt Dean and he needed someone else to hurt as well, just for the sake of it. “Right,” he muttered. Then he asked, “Can’t you at least heal him? Physically, I mean?”
Cas looked particularly regretful. “You know I can’t.”
“Of course not.” Dean sighed, feeling even more tired than before and knowing he wouldn’t get a break anytime soon. Sam’s soul had come back soaked full with hell, and it had contaminated his body and made it largely resistant to Castiel’s powers. Cas wasn’t happy with this phrasing when Dean had first tried to summarize for his own sake what his angelic friend had tried to explain to him, but it made sense to Dean so Cas could stuff it.
In the end, Dean hadn’t even been surprised that day, when Sam had gotten blood poisoning after his first suicide attempt and Cas had been unable to heal him. It was just another confirmation that the universe hated his brother, and in turn, Dean too.
-#-#-
Sam felt like broken glass whenever Castiel touched him; even when he seemed fine the damage always lay just beneath the surface. But Castiel didn’t see him often when he was fine, because Dean only called him when he wasn’t, and because Sam wasn’t fine very often.
Death’s wall was intact. It was still holding back most of what would destroy Sam completely once it got to him. The angel didn’t think that Dean was aware of this. That he knew eventually it would be so much worse.
The first time Castiel had heard Sam speak Enochian, he had been surprised. He shouldn’t have been, perhaps - Lucifer and Michael were unlikely to explain themselves and their actions to Sam in a way he would understand, and Sam always was a fast learner.
But this was a lesson he wasn’t supposed to remember. It was supposed to be hidden behind the wall, and Castiel knew better than anyone what it meant when Sam remembered how to speak Enochian, but not English.
It happened more often now.
It happened only after Sam had had another vision, and Castiel could only guess that this was because the visions, dormant for so long, were part of the part of Sam that had always belonged to hell.
He could not even guess how it came that those visions that tore down the wall a little more every time they occurred almost always showed Sam hints of where to find the weapons that had been stolen from heaven, or told him of Raphael’s next plans. The very thing that destroyed Castiel’s friend was aiding him in a war he would otherwise have no hope of winning, and the angel couldn’t help but wonder if this was his Father’s doing; giving something good in return while once again Sam suffered for their benefit.
Castiel desperately wished he could go back to the days when he was unable to suspect God of such cruelty.
-#-#-
Dean didn’t like to speak of ‘suicide attempts’ in regard to Sam, because they really weren’t. Sam didn’t want to die, and he never made any conscious plans to end his life. It was just that sometimes, when things were especially bad and a vision or particularly vicious nightmare had pushed him right to the wrong side of the wall, he didn’t quite know what he was doing. He just wanted his suffering to end. Other than at those times, he was fine - or as fine as he could possibly be, all things considered.
Therefore Dean also didn’t like it when Bobby spoke of medication and ‘professional help’ and hospitals. There were no pills against Hell trauma, and Sam’s story wasn’t something they could tell a psychiatrist. A hospital would only be another prison, and if Bobby wanted to get rid of them, he just had to say so. Dean could take care of Sam in a motel room, if he had to.
To say Dean had gotten angry at the suggestion would have been an understatement. But his reaction had made Bobby get angry too, and there had been no one to keep a level head and clam them down.
A life-long friendship had nearly ended that day. It showed Dean, looking back, that he wasn’t the only one who felt the strain. Bobby didn’t usually let himself be provoked like that.
Sometimes, Dean felt incredibly tired. He never felt like giving up. He’d learned his lesson what left like a lifetime ago, when he had tried to give up and Sam had simply carried on for both of them until Dean was ready to join him again.
He’d felt incredibly tired when Castiel had shown up in Bobby’s living room, but in this case it had to have been more of a physical reaction, since Sammy had just saved the day and that was no reason to want to crawl into a corner and cry, Dean was sure. He was also sure that no matter how tired he felt, he wasn’t tired enough to just fall over like that, out cold from one moment to the next, so Cas had to have helped. Dean didn’t appreciate it when he woke up in the light of early morning, feeling rested but groggy and longing for coffee.
He blinked lazily, rolled over and didn’t fall off the couch. After a moment, his brain registered that he wasn’t on the couch and his annoyance level raised another notch.
Getting up, he found himself in the room he usually shared with Sam. It was clean and sporting new wallpapers and even smelled good. No doubt another of Castiel’s services, though Dean doubted Bobby wanted to rip him open for this one.
Sam was nowhere to be seen, his bed untouched. Dean wasn’t worried as such, knowing Cas wouldn’t put him to sleep out of worry only to let his brother come to harm afterwards, but he would have felt a lot better if he could see him.
So he went downstairs, in search of Sam and coffee. Mostly Sam, though. Even right after getting out of bed, Dean had his priorities in order.
He found both Sam and coffee in the living room where he’d last seen them. Cas was there, too, sitting on the couch with Sam sitting beside him. They were discussing something over a map on the table. Dean stopped in the doorway to stare, and eventually Sam noticed him and threw him a weak smile.
“Hey,” he said.
Dean wanted to ask how he was feeling, if he’d had any nightmares, if by any chance he felt any better in general than he had before this latest episode. He nodded at the pot on the table.
“Any coffee left?” he asked.
Sam gestured to the pot. “Help yourself. Can’t promise it’s still hot, though.”
“Where’s Bobby?”
“Grocery shopping.”
Dean flopped down on the couch and reached for the pot, refilling Sam’s mostly empty cup and taking a long gulp of lukewarm coffee. He leaned back and for a moment revelled in the normalcy of the scene. Research. Grocery shopping. Sam.
“Hey, Cas,” he said with the sweetest smile he could summon. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Cas eyed him critically. “Are we going to have a fight about me taking you to bed?”
There were so many dirty jokes Dean could have made in answer to that, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. Not when he did indeed think a fight might be necessary. Again.
“Please tell me it was his own bed he’s taken you to,” Sam said. “Otherwise I hope you at least changed the sheets.”
Cas stared at him, the Frown of Incomprehension on his face for the first time in ages, and Dean spontaneously decided that fighting was overrated.
“We didn’t feel like changing the sheets,” he replied with a lazy grin. “So we used your bed.”
“I don’t understand why the sheets should need changing,” Cas said, sounding slightly irritated. “And it was his own bed I took him to.”
Dean couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t even that funny, but he found himself grinning from ear to ear, and even Sam’s lips twitched suspiciously. “Was it any good, at least?” he asked.
“Heavenly.” Dean leaned forward to have a look at the map and before Cas could explode on them out of confusion or actually figure out what the joke was, he asked, “So, what’s the matter this time?”
They explained about the hunt Cas stumbled over when he secured his latest weapon. It had nothing to do with his war and Dean didn’t know why he stayed around, but he didn’t ask about it.
The sleeves of Sam’s shirt were rolled down for once, mercifully covering the bandages around the wounds he had torn into his arms with his teeth, and Dean ignored, for the moment, that he knew they were there. This moment - this was normal. It was what he wanted and he simply accepted it as the gift it was. He drank his coffee and made fun of Cas and ignored how Sam’s laughter sounded a little forced, how the tension never completely left his body. He ignored the way the clothes hung off his little brother’s body and the lack of colour in his skin, knowing the moment was far too brittle to stand the pressure of too much attention.
So he complained about the coffee and about Bobby taking so long, stretched out on the couch like he owned it and tried to find out if he could unnerve Castiel by staring at him none stop so he wouldn’t have to see the shaking of Sam’s hands as he drew lines on the map that seemed to mark absolutely nothing.
February 5, 2011