The Sticking Point, 6/12
Title: The Sticking Point, 6/12
Author: sowell
Genre: Angst, action, slash
Characters/Pairing: Sam/Dean, secondary Dean/Cas, and Meg/Cas if you squint
Rating: NC-17, eventually
Word count: This part 3,767
Warnings: Language, Wincest, see spoiler warnings
Spoilers: Assumes knowledge of all aired episodes. Very general S8 spoilers:
[here there be spoilers]
Dean gets himself out of Purgatory and Sam has gotten out of the hunting game
Disclaimer: Sooooo not mine
Summary: Dean comes back from Purgatory, but there are consequences attached to his return. Sam and Dean try to reconnect to keep each other safe.
A/N: 1) Unbeta’d - all mistakes are my own. 2) Watson, AR is a real place, but I’ve never been there and thus all details are one hundred percent made up. 3) Beware some nonsensical appropriation of biblical mythology. 4) Comments and concrit are always welcome.
Masterpost
Chapter 6
Friday
Dean woke gasping. The vision was a horrific echo in his brain, pressing in.
“Dean?” Sam asked sleepily.
“I’m fine,” Dean said. “Go back to sleep.”
He waited until Sam’s breathing settled into soft snores again, and then he pulled himself to his feet and made his way silently out of the cabin.
Cas was standing by the parked Impala behind the cabin, hands in the pockets of his coat. He stared at Dean’s approach like some eerie sentinel.
“Yo,” Dean said, and Castiel nodded.
Dean opened the door and reach in the driver’s side compartment to pull out a fifth of Jim Beam. He twisted open the plastic cap and seated himself on the hood while Castiel watched. He held out the bottle in what he considered a pretty damn generous offer. It was the middle of the night, and there was still someone else’s blood sloshing around inside his head, and he didn’t share his booze very freely on the best of days.
“I don’t see the point,” Castiel said sincerely. Dean shrugged and kept drinking.
“You had another vision.” It wasn’t a question.
“Give the guy a prize,” Dean said around the burn in his throat.
“They’re getting worse.” Also not a question. Dean had spent eighteen months living back-to-back with Cas in Purgtory; he’d get to the point when he was ready.
“What do you see?” Castiel asked, cocking his head, and Dean chuckled darkly.
“Same thing I saw when I was there. A bunch of freaks of nature tearing each other apart. Only now…”
“Now what?”
“I feel it,” Dean said. “Some vamp gets decapitated, I get decapitated. A shifter sheds his skin, I shed my skin. I know what they think. I’m not just in Purgatory, I’m in them.”
“That’s…upsetting,” Castiel said, eyes narrowed, and Dean toasted him with the open bottle. The alcohol was making its way through his blood, turning his muscles loose and numb.
“You know,” Dean said. “At first I saw you.”
That got Cas’s attention. He frowned. “Me?”
“Yup. Well. I was you. Talk about creepy.”
“You felt what I felt,” Castiel said, like it bothered him. Dean wasn’t sure why. Castiel had never hesitated to vent exactly what was in his mind over the last year and a half. Especially when it concerned Dean and Dean’s shitty choices.
“Do you still…?”
“Nope. Purgatory-only deal. Once you got out, my brain moved on.”
Castiel sat down next to him on the car, very carefully. It was unnerving to see him make such a casual movement. Castiel crouched when he needed to spring, sat if he was drained, flickered from one place to another for attack or escape. When he wasn’t moving, he stood and stared. There was no reason for him to slide next to Dean, to put himself close enough that Dean could almost feel the whisper of his wings. It was something new, and uncomfortably human.
“You should tell your brother that it’s getting worse.”
“Why, so he can furrow his eyebrows at me all day? Forget it.” Dean discarded the idea immediately and thoroughly, ignoring the little spark of panic that idea started in him.
“He has a right to know what will happen…if you fail.”
“Nothing will happen,” Dean said, final and flat. “If I fail, I go back. End of story.”
“The risk - ”
“There’s no risk, Cas.” His voice had risen, he realized. He forcefully unclenched his shoulders and took another drink. Castiel was looking at him, always staring, except this time he looked pitying.
“Look,” Dean said, controlling his voice with effort. “I’m not gonna do anything stupid. Neither will Sam, as long as you keep your trap shut.”
Cas didn’t look away, and it was like a shiver on Dean’s skin. “All right,” he said finally.
The bottle was nearly a quarter empty, and Dean had been sober for too long for that amount of whiskey to leave him untouched. It washed over him in increments, shaking his nerves loose. This had been his father at forty, Dean realized. Too many secrets and mistakes, too much grief not to hit the bottle when he could.
Castiel looked away eventually, tipping his face up to the starry sky, and Dean followed the white line of his throat. He had put his mouth there just weeks ago, pressed dents into Cas’s side to see if he could bruise an angel. Cas remained always pristine, steady and untouched, no matter what Dean did.
“You’re happy to be with Sam again,” Castiel said. Another not-question that Dean wasn’t going to bother with. The whiskey was playing havoc with his hormones. He’d blown his payload into Sam’s throat hours ago, but he couldn’t stop remembering Castiel pinned under him on the hard-packed ground, the flicker in his blue eyes at every new sensation. Dean had never been good at celibacy, and thank god he’d taken one of the pretty angels with him to Purgatory. He thought he might have gone insane if Cas hadn’t been there.
“I never said thank you,” Dean said gruffly, shaking himself out of it. “I probably would have died in there without you. So…thanks.”
“You don’t have to thank me for anything,” Castiel said. “I wouldn’t thank me, if I were you.”
Dean knew he was remembering blood on his own hands, innocents slaughtered. Dean had been there often enough to recognize the look. Cas’s betrayal had been sharp and unexpected, surprisingly painful. Now, though…
It was an old wound. It ached, but it was just a shadow of the anger that had once been. Cas was forgiven, and Dean wondered if he’d ever be able to say that out loud, if Castiel would even believe him.
He offered what he could, instead. “The visions are changing,” he said. “It’s like…they’re multiplying. Two things happening at once, sometimes more.”
“That’s the side effect of the deal you made. It will keep getting worse. You might die before your month is up.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it or anything,” Dean said dryly.
“What would you have me say?” Castiel asked, the barest edge of annoyance in his voice, and this at least was familiar territory.
“Yeah, I know,” Dean said. “You told me so.”
The moon was gone, the sky still pitch, and almost a quarter of the bottle had disappeared.
“I need sleep,” Dean said. “Watch my baby. Don’t let the vampires get her.”
He left Cas on the hood of the car, hands lost in the folds of his trenchcoat, staring at the night sky.
*****Sam figured it out, just like he eventually figured out everything Dean had ever tried to hide from him, ever.
Dean started to vibrate with impatience as the hours passed. He was a caged animal, pacing his way around their confined space in way that drove Sam insane. Sam gave him tasks: go re-fill the water bottles, sharpen the machetes, wash his damn socks before they all died of the stink. A twitchy Dean worked best with direct instruction.
Sometimes Sam sent Meg with him, just so Dean could take his ADHD out on someone else for a few hours.
“Plan B,” he said to Castiel, while Dean and Meg were re-organizing the weapons cache for the twelfth time. “What is it?”
Cas looked at him blankly. “I don’t understand.”
“Back-up,” Sam said impatiently. “This can’t be it. Cas - we’re going up against a whole nest. Even if the stone is there - which is a big if - they’ll probably squash us before we even get close. We need another option. In case.”
“You should ask Dean,” Cas said, not meeting his eyes.
“I’m asking you.”
“I don’t have an answer for you.” Castiel was never a very good liar. Sam guessed it came with being a servant of God, and all.
Sam watched him calmly. Not threatening. Not yet. “What do you know?”
“I don’t know what you’re - ”
“Don’t screw with me, Cas. Not about this.”
Castiel finally lifted blue eyes to his. Caught. Guilty.
“There’s no Plan B,” Castiel said. “The stone is your only option. And Dean knows that.”
*****Sam lost it when he confronted Dean. Dean in turn lost it with Cas, and Meg laughed at them all.
Only it wasn’t really funny.
“He fails to send himself back, and the two parts of his soul separate,” Castiel had said.
“What does that mean?” Sam asked wildly.
“It means he dies,” Cas said. “And in the process, tears open a hole between the two worlds.”
“Opens the gate for whatever wants out of there and into here,” Sam said numbly.
“Possibly,” Castiel said calmly. “Or possibly the whole wall comes down. No Purgatory, no Earth, just one big dimension full of every monster God and Eve ever brought forth.”
There weren’t enough hunters in the world, Sam thought. Humans would be gone within a week.
He yelled at Dean (Why didn’t you tell me?) and Dean yelled at Castiel (How could you tell him?), and when they were both screamed out, staring each other down, red-faced and hostile, Sam said, “How do we stop it?”
“That,” Dean said darkly. “That right there is why I didn’t tell you. We don’t stop it, Sam. We get the stone. End of story.”
*****Sam researched. He sat in the Impala, because he was too angry to look his brother in the face, and he scoured every supernatural site he could find for something, anything that might help.
His phone rang steadily - Becca, the bar, the college - and he ignored it.
After the sun had set, Dean slid into the passenger side of the Impala. It was disorienting to see Dean in the shotgun seat. It only happened when he was bleeding or asleep, and he was neither at the moment.
“Stop it,” he said. “Sammy, stop. You’re gonna drive yourself crazy.”
Sam ignored him like he ignored his phone. One impatient look, and then he tuned it out.
“There’s no way around it. You don’t think I looked?”
Sam brought up a spectacularly graphic message board about blood bonds and didn’t answer. Dean reached over and hit the power button, wiping the screen blank.
“If you think turning the computer off will make me stop looking, then you’re a complete fuckwit,” Sam said, staring straight ahead.
“They know, Sam,” Dean said, hand rubbing his face. “They know who you are, who we are. The Nephilim - this is why he offered this deal to me. He knew you’d go off half-cocked. He’s counting on it.”
“Is that what Cas said?” Sam asked, low and clipped. He was still angry. He was more than angry. He was fucking terrified, even more than when this had begun. He realized that in the back of his mind, he’d always been counting on some fallback plan. Some miraculous last minute ass-pull that would save Dean. Even if they failed with the nest, he’d believed Dean would be all right, just like always.
Now, the stone was it. Full stop.
“Yeah,” Dean said, resigned. “Cas said it. A lot. Loudly. But he didn’t have to. I knew anyway. I knew when I took this deal that there was only one way out.”
“I don’t believe that,” Sam said stubbornly, and Dean reached over and put a hand on his thigh.
“Don’t try to distract me,” Sam warned, and Dean huffed a laugh. He leaned into Sam, hunched over the gearshift, knees bumping into the side of Sam’s thigh. Sam put a hand in his hair and clutched, because he couldn’t help it.
He thought Dean might slide into his lap, lower the seat and press them both down. Instead, he pushed up Sam’s shirt and put his mouth on Sam’s stomach, sucking hotly. Sam held him there with two hands, let his tongue work over ridged skin until Sam felt like he might pop out of his jeans.
He was painfully hard, laptop abandoned on the dashboard.
“I hate you so much,” Sam mumbled, even as Dean was moving up, tongue over his nipple, hands pressed to the window and the leather seat to hold himself up.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean said, vibrating against his skin. “Keep talking.”
*****John Winchester had taught both his boys to lie with a fluency and frequency that would have shocked any other parent. Dean had never questioned it when he was growing up. He could easily swallow his father’s explanations - for Sammy’s safety, for everyone’s protection. Besides, they were Winchesters. They were different. School room morality didn’t apply to ghost-battling, gun-wielding, monster-fighting superheroes.
They had practiced their cover stories with their father over and over until he was satisfied with their performance, and they had watched him lie to the people around him more than he ever told the truth. He charmed their teachers, talked his way around Social Services, and hustled more pool than Dean could keep track of.
They had both learned from a master, and maybe that was why they could never lie to each other.
Sam thought he was being sneaky, keeping his laptop turned just away from Dean’s view, surreptitiously following Cas into the back bedroom, sliding a sheet of paper to cover the title of some clunky book he’d been lugging around. Dean snuck a peek at the title when Sam’s back was turned, but it was in some weird language Dean couldn’t read, so he wasn’t sure why Sam had bothered.
Sometime, when he walked into the room, Sam and Castiel stopped talking and jerked their eyes away from each other so quickly that they might as well have waved a neon flag in Dean’s face that read, “We’re hiding something! Ask us what!”
Cas was usually an easy mark, but the way he kept his eyes averted told Dean he’d better find an alternate source of truth. Luckily, they’d brought along one irritatingly long-lived demon with a hard-on for Winchester drama. She’d have to do.
“Okay,” Dean said, cornering her while Cas and Sam were having a supposedly covert powwow by the Impala. “What’s going on? Why are Cas and Sam sneaking around like Bill and Monica?”
“Tawdry affair, huh?” Meg said without looking up. She was reading one of the Hustler magazines that she’d lifted from Dean’s duffel. He’d yelled at her the first three times, and then resigned himself to the fact that it was kinda hot seeing a chick flipping through those pages. Even if she was a demon chick that he’d sooner gank than touch.
“I know you know. You’re always lurking around. Like a cockroach.”
“That hurts, Dean,” Meg drawled. “I thought we’d gotten past all the distrust.”
“Look, we’re in this together now, whether I like it or not. Whatever asinine plan they’re working affects you, too.”
“Don’t count on it,” Meg snorted. “First sign of trouble and I’m out of here, revenge or not.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Dean said with his sweetest smile. “You’re Cas’s bitch now. You think there’s somewhere you can run where he can’t find you?”
Meg lifted her eyes from the pages to subject Dean to a withering stare. “If you two yodels don’t manage to get the stone, I’m going back to hell anyway, and not even Castiel can pull me out of there.”
Dean peevishly snatched the magazine from her hands and stomped away, ignoring her exclamation of protest.
“Fucking demons,” Dean muttered, shoving the magazine back into his duffel.
“Ask Sam about the book,” Meg said from behind him. “That’s your answer.”
*****“You’re not gonna like it,” Sam said frankly.
Dean held up the tome impatiently. “What. The hell. Is this?”
Sam looked at Cas. Cas sighed and pressed his hand against the embossed cover. The nonsensical symbols wavered and cleared, and then Dean was looking at bold English letters, stenciled in a straight line across the cover.
Blood Magic.
Dean looked up. “What the hell, Sam?”
Sam sighed. “Page three-forty-seven.”
Dean flipped through the newly legible pages. He passed diagrams of graphic human sacrifice, sharply drawn sigils, numbered lists for poisons and rituals.
“We don’t do this,” Dean said tightly. “This is witch crap. This is what we hunt.” He could almost feel his father’s wrath from Heaven or Hell or nowhere land or wherever the hell he had ended up.
“Yeah, well playing by the rules hasn’t exactly worked for us, has it? We don’t have the advantage here, Dean. We have to use what we can get.”
Dean scanned the page Sam had pointed out to him, trying to make sense of it. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You want to make a bridge?”
“Not exactly,” Sam said. “More like…an anchor. There’s a ritual - it temporarily bonds us together. Keeps your soul from going nuclear. You stay alive, Purgatory stays intact.”
Dean didn’t want to feel it, but he couldn’t help it. Hope, tiny and stubborn, poked its way into his brain.
“What’s the catch?”
Cas opened his mouth, but Sam surged on. “No catch. We have everything we need here - my blood, your blood, something you own, some symbols and some Latin chanting and we’re good to go.”
“What’s this?” Dean frowned. “Blood of the ‘maker’? What’s the maker?”
“Well,” Sam glanced uneasily at Cas. “Okay, so we’re still working out that one tiny little thing. But we have time. And we have everything else.”
Castiel was strangely silent, and Dean glanced at him. “Cas? What is it?”
Dean watched the dance. Sam’s eyes to Cas’s - a sharp warning. Cas’s eyes to Dean’s and then away - stubborn silence.
“What is it?” Dean bit out. “There’s always a price.”
Neither of them answered for a long moment. Then Castiel sighed heavily. “It could fail,” he said. “And then not only do you die, but the wall still comes down. Purgatory opens up.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “That’s a setback. “
“And even if you do succeed, if the ritual works…”
Dean prompted him with an expectant look.
Sam cleared his throat. “The strain of the ritual could…maybe…shatter my soul into a few million pieces.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “I think we’re done here.”
“Dean - ”
“It’s simple math, Sam,” Dean cut him off. “I’m not going to risk some sketchy ritual that could take us both down and bring on another apocalypse as a side dish. It’s not worth it.”
“But - ”
Dean pulled his lighter from his pocket, flicked it open, and lit the corner of the book on fire. It went up remarkably fast for such a solid thing, and he dropped it to the ground before it could burn his fingers.
Sam was looking at him in disbelief. “You burned my book.”
“Yeah, well words obviously weren’t getting through,” Dean said, stomping at the smoldering pages to keep the fire contained.
“Why can’t you just - ”
“Sam!” Dean snapped. “This is a waste of time. If you want to research something, research the damn stone. Because if we don’t find it here, we’re going to have to start all over again.”
Sam was shaking his head, not looking at him. He had that lock-jawed expression that meant mutiny, but he pursed his lips and said. “Fine.”
*****When they were teenagers, they used to race, back and forth down whatever stretch of deserted highway they were parked at that month. Most kids raced for the sheer fun of it, but there were always conditions attached for the Winchester boys.
“Almost a second slower than last night,” John had said appraisingly. “What did you eat today?”
And Dean had been forced to admit that he ate three bowls of cereal and nothing else, although he kept the sour gummi worms a secret. In truth, he had been slow that night because he’d been thinking of Chelsey Hart and her flared, plaid skirt, but he kept that a secret, too.
“One second,” John had said. “That’s the swipe of a knife. In a fight, that could get you dead.”
“Yes sir,” Dean had said, staring at the ground and thinking about Chelsey’s white hands playing with her hair.
Sam joined him when he was old enough. Dean used to fret. How could Sammy possibly run from ghosts when he couldn’t even keep up with Dean?
“That’s what we’re here for,” his father had. “So he doesn’t have to. Right?”
And then Sam grew, and by the time Dean was eighteen, Sam was eating up the gravel beside him, long legs carrying him farther and faster than Dean could keep up with. He remembered Sam pulling ahead, sprinting past him to the designated telephone pole, tossing a triumphant grin over his shoulder while Dean yelled, “Cheater!”
“How can you cheat at a race? It’s just running.”
“Says the freak with ten-foot legs.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Gigantic or not, I can still kick your ass.”
Dean remembered the feeling of watching Sam pull away, relief and panic tearing at him in equal measure. Sam could out-run ghosts, which meant Sam would be safe. But if Sam was safe all on his own, then what good was Dean?
In Purgatory, Dean had run, faster and farther than he ever thought he’d have to, but he never stopped. He should probably be grateful to his father for that. Or something.
Sam laid out his sleeping roll too close to Dean. When he stretched out on it, Dean could feel him radiating heat, broad and solid.
“If the stone is it,” Sam said quietly, “then we should stop wasting time.”
“Mm.”
“We only have a week and a half left. I don’t think we’re going to come up with any better plan than the one we have right now.”
“Mm.”
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Sam asked.
Because he had a headache, and Sam’s scrutiny was distracting, all sharp shadows and soft eyes in the darkness.
“I’m tired,” he said. “Burning your stupid book wore me out.”
Sam’s eyebrows looked amused. “Not my fault you’re a drama queen.”
“Shut up,” Dean said, muffled into his pillow.
Tomorrow, they’d go hunting. He didn’t know how they’d come to that agreement, but they somehow, silently, had.
“Aren’t you nervous? It’s basically a suicide mission.”
“No. I’m trying to block out this annoying voice that won’t let me sleep.”
Sam pressed closer to him. Meg and Cas were across the room and were probably watching like the supernatural little voyeurs they were, but Dean didn’t much care.
“You’re not fooling me,” he heard Sam say.
Dean pretended to sleep, and when Sam hooked their ankles together, Dean let him.
Chapter 7
Author: sowell
Genre: Angst, action, slash
Characters/Pairing: Sam/Dean, secondary Dean/Cas, and Meg/Cas if you squint
Rating: NC-17, eventually
Word count: This part 3,767
Warnings: Language, Wincest, see spoiler warnings
Spoilers: Assumes knowledge of all aired episodes. Very general S8 spoilers:
[here there be spoilers]
Dean gets himself out of Purgatory and Sam has gotten out of the hunting game
Disclaimer: Sooooo not mine
Summary: Dean comes back from Purgatory, but there are consequences attached to his return. Sam and Dean try to reconnect to keep each other safe.
A/N: 1) Unbeta’d - all mistakes are my own. 2) Watson, AR is a real place, but I’ve never been there and thus all details are one hundred percent made up. 3) Beware some nonsensical appropriation of biblical mythology. 4) Comments and concrit are always welcome.
Masterpost
Chapter 6
Friday
Dean woke gasping. The vision was a horrific echo in his brain, pressing in.
“Dean?” Sam asked sleepily.
“I’m fine,” Dean said. “Go back to sleep.”
He waited until Sam’s breathing settled into soft snores again, and then he pulled himself to his feet and made his way silently out of the cabin.
Cas was standing by the parked Impala behind the cabin, hands in the pockets of his coat. He stared at Dean’s approach like some eerie sentinel.
“Yo,” Dean said, and Castiel nodded.
Dean opened the door and reach in the driver’s side compartment to pull out a fifth of Jim Beam. He twisted open the plastic cap and seated himself on the hood while Castiel watched. He held out the bottle in what he considered a pretty damn generous offer. It was the middle of the night, and there was still someone else’s blood sloshing around inside his head, and he didn’t share his booze very freely on the best of days.
“I don’t see the point,” Castiel said sincerely. Dean shrugged and kept drinking.
“You had another vision.” It wasn’t a question.
“Give the guy a prize,” Dean said around the burn in his throat.
“They’re getting worse.” Also not a question. Dean had spent eighteen months living back-to-back with Cas in Purgtory; he’d get to the point when he was ready.
“What do you see?” Castiel asked, cocking his head, and Dean chuckled darkly.
“Same thing I saw when I was there. A bunch of freaks of nature tearing each other apart. Only now…”
“Now what?”
“I feel it,” Dean said. “Some vamp gets decapitated, I get decapitated. A shifter sheds his skin, I shed my skin. I know what they think. I’m not just in Purgatory, I’m in them.”
“That’s…upsetting,” Castiel said, eyes narrowed, and Dean toasted him with the open bottle. The alcohol was making its way through his blood, turning his muscles loose and numb.
“You know,” Dean said. “At first I saw you.”
That got Cas’s attention. He frowned. “Me?”
“Yup. Well. I was you. Talk about creepy.”
“You felt what I felt,” Castiel said, like it bothered him. Dean wasn’t sure why. Castiel had never hesitated to vent exactly what was in his mind over the last year and a half. Especially when it concerned Dean and Dean’s shitty choices.
“Do you still…?”
“Nope. Purgatory-only deal. Once you got out, my brain moved on.”
Castiel sat down next to him on the car, very carefully. It was unnerving to see him make such a casual movement. Castiel crouched when he needed to spring, sat if he was drained, flickered from one place to another for attack or escape. When he wasn’t moving, he stood and stared. There was no reason for him to slide next to Dean, to put himself close enough that Dean could almost feel the whisper of his wings. It was something new, and uncomfortably human.
“You should tell your brother that it’s getting worse.”
“Why, so he can furrow his eyebrows at me all day? Forget it.” Dean discarded the idea immediately and thoroughly, ignoring the little spark of panic that idea started in him.
“He has a right to know what will happen…if you fail.”
“Nothing will happen,” Dean said, final and flat. “If I fail, I go back. End of story.”
“The risk - ”
“There’s no risk, Cas.” His voice had risen, he realized. He forcefully unclenched his shoulders and took another drink. Castiel was looking at him, always staring, except this time he looked pitying.
“Look,” Dean said, controlling his voice with effort. “I’m not gonna do anything stupid. Neither will Sam, as long as you keep your trap shut.”
Cas didn’t look away, and it was like a shiver on Dean’s skin. “All right,” he said finally.
The bottle was nearly a quarter empty, and Dean had been sober for too long for that amount of whiskey to leave him untouched. It washed over him in increments, shaking his nerves loose. This had been his father at forty, Dean realized. Too many secrets and mistakes, too much grief not to hit the bottle when he could.
Castiel looked away eventually, tipping his face up to the starry sky, and Dean followed the white line of his throat. He had put his mouth there just weeks ago, pressed dents into Cas’s side to see if he could bruise an angel. Cas remained always pristine, steady and untouched, no matter what Dean did.
“You’re happy to be with Sam again,” Castiel said. Another not-question that Dean wasn’t going to bother with. The whiskey was playing havoc with his hormones. He’d blown his payload into Sam’s throat hours ago, but he couldn’t stop remembering Castiel pinned under him on the hard-packed ground, the flicker in his blue eyes at every new sensation. Dean had never been good at celibacy, and thank god he’d taken one of the pretty angels with him to Purgatory. He thought he might have gone insane if Cas hadn’t been there.
“I never said thank you,” Dean said gruffly, shaking himself out of it. “I probably would have died in there without you. So…thanks.”
“You don’t have to thank me for anything,” Castiel said. “I wouldn’t thank me, if I were you.”
Dean knew he was remembering blood on his own hands, innocents slaughtered. Dean had been there often enough to recognize the look. Cas’s betrayal had been sharp and unexpected, surprisingly painful. Now, though…
It was an old wound. It ached, but it was just a shadow of the anger that had once been. Cas was forgiven, and Dean wondered if he’d ever be able to say that out loud, if Castiel would even believe him.
He offered what he could, instead. “The visions are changing,” he said. “It’s like…they’re multiplying. Two things happening at once, sometimes more.”
“That’s the side effect of the deal you made. It will keep getting worse. You might die before your month is up.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it or anything,” Dean said dryly.
“What would you have me say?” Castiel asked, the barest edge of annoyance in his voice, and this at least was familiar territory.
“Yeah, I know,” Dean said. “You told me so.”
The moon was gone, the sky still pitch, and almost a quarter of the bottle had disappeared.
“I need sleep,” Dean said. “Watch my baby. Don’t let the vampires get her.”
He left Cas on the hood of the car, hands lost in the folds of his trenchcoat, staring at the night sky.
*****Sam figured it out, just like he eventually figured out everything Dean had ever tried to hide from him, ever.
Dean started to vibrate with impatience as the hours passed. He was a caged animal, pacing his way around their confined space in way that drove Sam insane. Sam gave him tasks: go re-fill the water bottles, sharpen the machetes, wash his damn socks before they all died of the stink. A twitchy Dean worked best with direct instruction.
Sometimes Sam sent Meg with him, just so Dean could take his ADHD out on someone else for a few hours.
“Plan B,” he said to Castiel, while Dean and Meg were re-organizing the weapons cache for the twelfth time. “What is it?”
Cas looked at him blankly. “I don’t understand.”
“Back-up,” Sam said impatiently. “This can’t be it. Cas - we’re going up against a whole nest. Even if the stone is there - which is a big if - they’ll probably squash us before we even get close. We need another option. In case.”
“You should ask Dean,” Cas said, not meeting his eyes.
“I’m asking you.”
“I don’t have an answer for you.” Castiel was never a very good liar. Sam guessed it came with being a servant of God, and all.
Sam watched him calmly. Not threatening. Not yet. “What do you know?”
“I don’t know what you’re - ”
“Don’t screw with me, Cas. Not about this.”
Castiel finally lifted blue eyes to his. Caught. Guilty.
“There’s no Plan B,” Castiel said. “The stone is your only option. And Dean knows that.”
*****Sam lost it when he confronted Dean. Dean in turn lost it with Cas, and Meg laughed at them all.
Only it wasn’t really funny.
“He fails to send himself back, and the two parts of his soul separate,” Castiel had said.
“What does that mean?” Sam asked wildly.
“It means he dies,” Cas said. “And in the process, tears open a hole between the two worlds.”
“Opens the gate for whatever wants out of there and into here,” Sam said numbly.
“Possibly,” Castiel said calmly. “Or possibly the whole wall comes down. No Purgatory, no Earth, just one big dimension full of every monster God and Eve ever brought forth.”
There weren’t enough hunters in the world, Sam thought. Humans would be gone within a week.
He yelled at Dean (Why didn’t you tell me?) and Dean yelled at Castiel (How could you tell him?), and when they were both screamed out, staring each other down, red-faced and hostile, Sam said, “How do we stop it?”
“That,” Dean said darkly. “That right there is why I didn’t tell you. We don’t stop it, Sam. We get the stone. End of story.”
*****Sam researched. He sat in the Impala, because he was too angry to look his brother in the face, and he scoured every supernatural site he could find for something, anything that might help.
His phone rang steadily - Becca, the bar, the college - and he ignored it.
After the sun had set, Dean slid into the passenger side of the Impala. It was disorienting to see Dean in the shotgun seat. It only happened when he was bleeding or asleep, and he was neither at the moment.
“Stop it,” he said. “Sammy, stop. You’re gonna drive yourself crazy.”
Sam ignored him like he ignored his phone. One impatient look, and then he tuned it out.
“There’s no way around it. You don’t think I looked?”
Sam brought up a spectacularly graphic message board about blood bonds and didn’t answer. Dean reached over and hit the power button, wiping the screen blank.
“If you think turning the computer off will make me stop looking, then you’re a complete fuckwit,” Sam said, staring straight ahead.
“They know, Sam,” Dean said, hand rubbing his face. “They know who you are, who we are. The Nephilim - this is why he offered this deal to me. He knew you’d go off half-cocked. He’s counting on it.”
“Is that what Cas said?” Sam asked, low and clipped. He was still angry. He was more than angry. He was fucking terrified, even more than when this had begun. He realized that in the back of his mind, he’d always been counting on some fallback plan. Some miraculous last minute ass-pull that would save Dean. Even if they failed with the nest, he’d believed Dean would be all right, just like always.
Now, the stone was it. Full stop.
“Yeah,” Dean said, resigned. “Cas said it. A lot. Loudly. But he didn’t have to. I knew anyway. I knew when I took this deal that there was only one way out.”
“I don’t believe that,” Sam said stubbornly, and Dean reached over and put a hand on his thigh.
“Don’t try to distract me,” Sam warned, and Dean huffed a laugh. He leaned into Sam, hunched over the gearshift, knees bumping into the side of Sam’s thigh. Sam put a hand in his hair and clutched, because he couldn’t help it.
He thought Dean might slide into his lap, lower the seat and press them both down. Instead, he pushed up Sam’s shirt and put his mouth on Sam’s stomach, sucking hotly. Sam held him there with two hands, let his tongue work over ridged skin until Sam felt like he might pop out of his jeans.
He was painfully hard, laptop abandoned on the dashboard.
“I hate you so much,” Sam mumbled, even as Dean was moving up, tongue over his nipple, hands pressed to the window and the leather seat to hold himself up.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean said, vibrating against his skin. “Keep talking.”
*****John Winchester had taught both his boys to lie with a fluency and frequency that would have shocked any other parent. Dean had never questioned it when he was growing up. He could easily swallow his father’s explanations - for Sammy’s safety, for everyone’s protection. Besides, they were Winchesters. They were different. School room morality didn’t apply to ghost-battling, gun-wielding, monster-fighting superheroes.
They had practiced their cover stories with their father over and over until he was satisfied with their performance, and they had watched him lie to the people around him more than he ever told the truth. He charmed their teachers, talked his way around Social Services, and hustled more pool than Dean could keep track of.
They had both learned from a master, and maybe that was why they could never lie to each other.
Sam thought he was being sneaky, keeping his laptop turned just away from Dean’s view, surreptitiously following Cas into the back bedroom, sliding a sheet of paper to cover the title of some clunky book he’d been lugging around. Dean snuck a peek at the title when Sam’s back was turned, but it was in some weird language Dean couldn’t read, so he wasn’t sure why Sam had bothered.
Sometime, when he walked into the room, Sam and Castiel stopped talking and jerked their eyes away from each other so quickly that they might as well have waved a neon flag in Dean’s face that read, “We’re hiding something! Ask us what!”
Cas was usually an easy mark, but the way he kept his eyes averted told Dean he’d better find an alternate source of truth. Luckily, they’d brought along one irritatingly long-lived demon with a hard-on for Winchester drama. She’d have to do.
“Okay,” Dean said, cornering her while Cas and Sam were having a supposedly covert powwow by the Impala. “What’s going on? Why are Cas and Sam sneaking around like Bill and Monica?”
“Tawdry affair, huh?” Meg said without looking up. She was reading one of the Hustler magazines that she’d lifted from Dean’s duffel. He’d yelled at her the first three times, and then resigned himself to the fact that it was kinda hot seeing a chick flipping through those pages. Even if she was a demon chick that he’d sooner gank than touch.
“I know you know. You’re always lurking around. Like a cockroach.”
“That hurts, Dean,” Meg drawled. “I thought we’d gotten past all the distrust.”
“Look, we’re in this together now, whether I like it or not. Whatever asinine plan they’re working affects you, too.”
“Don’t count on it,” Meg snorted. “First sign of trouble and I’m out of here, revenge or not.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Dean said with his sweetest smile. “You’re Cas’s bitch now. You think there’s somewhere you can run where he can’t find you?”
Meg lifted her eyes from the pages to subject Dean to a withering stare. “If you two yodels don’t manage to get the stone, I’m going back to hell anyway, and not even Castiel can pull me out of there.”
Dean peevishly snatched the magazine from her hands and stomped away, ignoring her exclamation of protest.
“Fucking demons,” Dean muttered, shoving the magazine back into his duffel.
“Ask Sam about the book,” Meg said from behind him. “That’s your answer.”
*****“You’re not gonna like it,” Sam said frankly.
Dean held up the tome impatiently. “What. The hell. Is this?”
Sam looked at Cas. Cas sighed and pressed his hand against the embossed cover. The nonsensical symbols wavered and cleared, and then Dean was looking at bold English letters, stenciled in a straight line across the cover.
Blood Magic.
Dean looked up. “What the hell, Sam?”
Sam sighed. “Page three-forty-seven.”
Dean flipped through the newly legible pages. He passed diagrams of graphic human sacrifice, sharply drawn sigils, numbered lists for poisons and rituals.
“We don’t do this,” Dean said tightly. “This is witch crap. This is what we hunt.” He could almost feel his father’s wrath from Heaven or Hell or nowhere land or wherever the hell he had ended up.
“Yeah, well playing by the rules hasn’t exactly worked for us, has it? We don’t have the advantage here, Dean. We have to use what we can get.”
Dean scanned the page Sam had pointed out to him, trying to make sense of it. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You want to make a bridge?”
“Not exactly,” Sam said. “More like…an anchor. There’s a ritual - it temporarily bonds us together. Keeps your soul from going nuclear. You stay alive, Purgatory stays intact.”
Dean didn’t want to feel it, but he couldn’t help it. Hope, tiny and stubborn, poked its way into his brain.
“What’s the catch?”
Cas opened his mouth, but Sam surged on. “No catch. We have everything we need here - my blood, your blood, something you own, some symbols and some Latin chanting and we’re good to go.”
“What’s this?” Dean frowned. “Blood of the ‘maker’? What’s the maker?”
“Well,” Sam glanced uneasily at Cas. “Okay, so we’re still working out that one tiny little thing. But we have time. And we have everything else.”
Castiel was strangely silent, and Dean glanced at him. “Cas? What is it?”
Dean watched the dance. Sam’s eyes to Cas’s - a sharp warning. Cas’s eyes to Dean’s and then away - stubborn silence.
“What is it?” Dean bit out. “There’s always a price.”
Neither of them answered for a long moment. Then Castiel sighed heavily. “It could fail,” he said. “And then not only do you die, but the wall still comes down. Purgatory opens up.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “That’s a setback. “
“And even if you do succeed, if the ritual works…”
Dean prompted him with an expectant look.
Sam cleared his throat. “The strain of the ritual could…maybe…shatter my soul into a few million pieces.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “I think we’re done here.”
“Dean - ”
“It’s simple math, Sam,” Dean cut him off. “I’m not going to risk some sketchy ritual that could take us both down and bring on another apocalypse as a side dish. It’s not worth it.”
“But - ”
Dean pulled his lighter from his pocket, flicked it open, and lit the corner of the book on fire. It went up remarkably fast for such a solid thing, and he dropped it to the ground before it could burn his fingers.
Sam was looking at him in disbelief. “You burned my book.”
“Yeah, well words obviously weren’t getting through,” Dean said, stomping at the smoldering pages to keep the fire contained.
“Why can’t you just - ”
“Sam!” Dean snapped. “This is a waste of time. If you want to research something, research the damn stone. Because if we don’t find it here, we’re going to have to start all over again.”
Sam was shaking his head, not looking at him. He had that lock-jawed expression that meant mutiny, but he pursed his lips and said. “Fine.”
*****When they were teenagers, they used to race, back and forth down whatever stretch of deserted highway they were parked at that month. Most kids raced for the sheer fun of it, but there were always conditions attached for the Winchester boys.
“Almost a second slower than last night,” John had said appraisingly. “What did you eat today?”
And Dean had been forced to admit that he ate three bowls of cereal and nothing else, although he kept the sour gummi worms a secret. In truth, he had been slow that night because he’d been thinking of Chelsey Hart and her flared, plaid skirt, but he kept that a secret, too.
“One second,” John had said. “That’s the swipe of a knife. In a fight, that could get you dead.”
“Yes sir,” Dean had said, staring at the ground and thinking about Chelsey’s white hands playing with her hair.
Sam joined him when he was old enough. Dean used to fret. How could Sammy possibly run from ghosts when he couldn’t even keep up with Dean?
“That’s what we’re here for,” his father had. “So he doesn’t have to. Right?”
And then Sam grew, and by the time Dean was eighteen, Sam was eating up the gravel beside him, long legs carrying him farther and faster than Dean could keep up with. He remembered Sam pulling ahead, sprinting past him to the designated telephone pole, tossing a triumphant grin over his shoulder while Dean yelled, “Cheater!”
“How can you cheat at a race? It’s just running.”
“Says the freak with ten-foot legs.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Gigantic or not, I can still kick your ass.”
Dean remembered the feeling of watching Sam pull away, relief and panic tearing at him in equal measure. Sam could out-run ghosts, which meant Sam would be safe. But if Sam was safe all on his own, then what good was Dean?
In Purgatory, Dean had run, faster and farther than he ever thought he’d have to, but he never stopped. He should probably be grateful to his father for that. Or something.
Sam laid out his sleeping roll too close to Dean. When he stretched out on it, Dean could feel him radiating heat, broad and solid.
“If the stone is it,” Sam said quietly, “then we should stop wasting time.”
“Mm.”
“We only have a week and a half left. I don’t think we’re going to come up with any better plan than the one we have right now.”
“Mm.”
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Sam asked.
Because he had a headache, and Sam’s scrutiny was distracting, all sharp shadows and soft eyes in the darkness.
“I’m tired,” he said. “Burning your stupid book wore me out.”
Sam’s eyebrows looked amused. “Not my fault you’re a drama queen.”
“Shut up,” Dean said, muffled into his pillow.
Tomorrow, they’d go hunting. He didn’t know how they’d come to that agreement, but they somehow, silently, had.
“Aren’t you nervous? It’s basically a suicide mission.”
“No. I’m trying to block out this annoying voice that won’t let me sleep.”
Sam pressed closer to him. Meg and Cas were across the room and were probably watching like the supernatural little voyeurs they were, but Dean didn’t much care.
“You’re not fooling me,” he heard Sam say.
Dean pretended to sleep, and when Sam hooked their ankles together, Dean let him.
Chapter 7