Fic: Common Calamity
Title: Common Calamity
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~4,200
Spoilers: Through season five-ish, but it's AU, so nothing major.
Warnings: Mental illness, colorful language, some bloody imagery and some not-so-hot parenting.
Summary: Castiel comes for Dean, Sam intercepts, and Dean falls through the cracks. OR: the continuing adventures of schizophrenic!Dean, who first showed up in part III of " Variations on a Theme."
Neurotic author's notes: I...actually kind of like this one, which might mean I've just lost my mind for good and it's terrible. Blargh. The title comes from Baptista Mantuanus: "It is a common calamity; at some one point we have all been mad." Cut text is from Ray Bradbury. Oh, and here is John's lighter, for the curious. It is actually, apparently, a Mr. Gene Ramsey's.
Some days, it’s very easy to pretend that nothing’s wrong. Some days the alarm goes off, Sam lets out a low grumble and gropes for it blindly while Jess roles over and presses her nose into his shoulder, groaning, and there are no messages on either of their phones, there’s no one in the apartment but them. Some days Sam makes coffee and Jess makes eggs and they call each other babe, don’t talk much for sleepiness as they fumble to tug their clothes on. Some days they both walk to class, hand in hand like possessive high schoolers, and their phones remain blessedly silent all day long. Some days Sam makes dinner, squinting at the four-decade-old index card on which Jess’s grandmother once printed some family recipe in portions big enough to feel a family of six, sometimes Dean even joins them and sits at the table and talks animatedly and makes Sam snort and blush and roll his eyes, often makes Jess throw her head back and laugh.
Some days the two of them pile onto the bed and watch “The West Wing” or an old movie, drop off to sleep with ease.
These good days, they’re wonderful, but they also make it too easy to pretend things are always that easy, and for this reason Jess is beginning to suspect they’re sort of dangerous.
:::
It’s in the morning, on a weekend, before the sun is up, and there’s a rustle like a bird in a cage and it wakes Dean from a dream about long car rides.
“Don’t be afraid,” says the man at the foot of his bed, and his voice is thick and curiously stilted. Dean isn’t afraid. This man is not very intimidating. He’s dressed like an accountant in a trench coat, with his hair sticking up at odd angles, like he’s arrived in a hurry. He’s staring at Dean like he’s a revelation.
“I’m not afraid,” says Dean belatedly, to fill the silence.
“I didn’t think you would be,” replies the funny man. He tilts his head to the side a bit, and Dean is reminded of a curious bird. “I am Castiel. I’m an angel of the Lord,” he adds, and Dean sees the shadows of wings splashed across his closet doors. That can’t be right, he thinks, staring, astonished. His stomach feels bottomless and full of air. The wings twitch, a little bit.
“I don’t think you’re real,” Dean breathes, and something changes in Castiel’s face, and it twists, unpracticed but sincere, into a wry, affectionate grin.
“Oh ye of little faith,” he replies.
:::
Very bad days, when they come, usually begin at night. Sometime past two Sam’s phone will ring and ring until Sam either gives in and answers or Dean gives up and calls Jess-and she always answers. Usually on the second ring. She can feel Sam’s eyes on her as she sits up, crosses her legs beneath her, cradles the phone with both hands, repeats Dean’s name until he stops hyperventilating and listens.
“There’s nobody there, Dean. Nobody but you. You’re okay. Sam’s okay. I’m okay. No, you don’t have to do any of that, Dean, stay in bed. Dean. Listen to me, stay in bed. It’s okay. I’m not mad you called, okay, I’m glad. It’s alright, you were right to call. Everything’s okay. There’s nobody there. Nobody but you.”
Later, as she gathers the sheets back around her shoulders, Sam will huff, “It’s-you’re indulging him, Jess. You can’t do that.”
“He’s just scared, Sam. Isn’t it better he calm down than panic all night long?” She waits for an answer and receives only a cough that sounds a lot like codependent in reply. She sucks her teeth, turns to Sam, knows this argument by heart and wants to make herself clear anyways. “I’m not trying to impose on the family dynamic, Sam,” she says, and this earns her a second derisive cough. “I’m just saying, he needs-you.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Sam mutters darkly, and goes back to sleep.
:::
Sam was not built to be a hardass, though he was finely trained in the art by his father. Some part of Sam, something young and helpless, is desperate to reach out to Dean and hold him steady, hold him together, protect him from the monsters of his own making. The way Dean used to protect him.
But it doesn’t work that way. Sam has to be firm, has to draw the line, can’t get sucked back into this. Dean will go back to the hospital, or disappear again, just fall off the grid for months the way he did when Sam first left for school, and then things will be even worse than they were before.
When Sam was in high school this was his life, holding Dean’s forearms or shoulders or the back of his neck, reciting a litany of Dean listen Dean stop it Dean that’s not real. At the time he’d been hateful about it, loathed his brother for being so fucked up, his father for not stepping up and handling it himself. Now he’s older and looks back in his memory, sees the scene with adult clarity, sees himself in high school, growing and gangly and all hormones, crouched impatiently over a brother who would have indulged him anything. When Dean was sixteen he was working, cooking, maintaining a complex string of lies to keep the landlord and Sam’s teachers and ER nurses and CPS all satisfied, and if Sam had started whimpering about demons in the pipes Dean would have probably gone out to fight them bare-knuckled. Dean, now as ever, would do just about anything stupid and brave for Sam.
Sam knows this, he does, but it doesn’t actually change anything. Dean isn’t scared of the things that used to scare Sam, not bullies or men on corners who shout about his faggy hair to get a rise out of him, not sirens and shouting next door or their father, drunk past reason and lurching and lost, and there’s nothing for Sam to fight.
When he was a child and scared of monsters under the bed, his father had grinned crookedly up at him from his slumped position at the kitchen table, looked down at the KA-BAR knife he was sheathing and unsheathing shakily, then with a leer held it out to Sam. Sam had taken it delicately in both hands, turned it over, looked at the faded JW picked into the leather just below the USMC logo.
“Give you a gun if I had one,” Dad had said, grinning like he was telling some filthy joke Sam didn’t understand, but Sam had closed his fingers around the knife handle. Dean had Dad’s lighter from ’Nam, after all. It said Girl if you want to fuck smile when you give this lighter back.
Later Dean had found him and tugged the knife roughly out of his hands, hauled him to bed and promised to fight back the monsters, when they came.
When, not if. Even then.
One of these days Sam is going to go out into the road and just start screaming.
:::
“What does an angel want with me?”
It’s still early, and Castiel is watching as Dean fumbles with the coffee maker. The Haldol makes him clumsy, especially in the morning. Castiel frowns at Dean’s ineffective, slightly shaky hands, then at the pill bottles lined up neatly on the counter.
“We have work for you,” says Castiel matter-of-factly, watching dispassionately as Dean squints nervously at the coffee machine, shifting from foot to foot. He hates feeling skittish. It’s the antipsychotic. It is, it says it on the side effects list, on the page that comes all folded up with the pills. Jessica has a copy. So does Dean.
“Be not afraid,” says the angel, and Dean turns to look at him. Maybe the stupid Haldol’s making him fidgety, but he is not afraid. But when he looks at Castiel, there’s an open warmth-an edge of need-in his face that reminds Dean-all in a rush-of Sammy, when he was little and wanted Dean to play soldiers, to make a leaf pile, to read him a story.
“I’m not,” says Dean, his mouth a little dry, and Castiel tilts his head again. He doesn’t say anything and Dean hates silence, so he adds, “Just don’t know what an angel’s doing in my kitchen.”
Castiel stares for another long moment, then comprehension dawns on his face and he says, “You don’t think you deserve to be saved.”
Dean considers this.
Considers the hospital, the nurses with their hard-scrubbed exhausted faces and the dark shapes he saw in the doctor’s eyes, the way he’d recited his dull litany of sanity for days until they let him leave. Considers the girls he’s fucked, whose names he lost, considers Jessica, who he doesn’t deserve the way Sam does, who lets him call in the night even though she has school in the morning and a whole world Dean can’t even really imagine, much less inhabit. Considers holding cells and ERs. Considers the people, in bars and alleys and once or twice churches, who he’s tackled, crashed to the ground, screamed at, bashing their faces and throats until they’re silent and still and he can’t hear anything whispering through them about hell. He’s a good fighter, he knows, considers this too-his dad taught him to fight, out in the yard on Saturday late-afternoons, bleary, Hit me, son, hard as you can, again, again, again, and in the night sometimes, you little pussy hit me, on and on until he’d do it and then there’d be hell to pay.
Dean considers his father, who left, and not because Dean didn’t spar with him, because he did. Considers Sam, who looks at him now like he’s something disgusting and pitiful and infectious. Sam, who even when he loves him does it wearily, like he knows he’s supposed to but wishes he doesn’t.
Castiel is still watching him intently, as if he might actually hold some piece of salvation. He. Dean Winchester, who is always left behind, always one second out of sync with everybody else. Dean, whose father wanted nothing to do with him even after he gave everything they had. Whose brother loves him like it’s sore.
He doesn’t have an answer for Castiel, so he offers him coffee instead and is politely refused.
:::
Sam’s in the shower and Jess is reading when the phone chirps and it’s Dean. He hasn’t called in a few days, which is good news, probably, but she’s still quick to snatch the phone up. “Dean,” she says, then realizes how she sounds and swallows. “Hi.”
“Hey-a, Jess,” he says, his voice taking on that shifty quality it gets when he knows what he’s about to say won’t make her happy. Or Sam happy, really. “Listen, I-uh-I have a-there’s someone here, and I’m-I mean…”
He trails off helplessly, and Jess sends a quick glance in the direction of the bathroom. The shower’s still running. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Dean,” she says, “is anybody else there with you?”
“I don’t know,” says Dean, his voice suddenly very thin, and Jess thinks for one second she might throw up. For most of her life, the right thing has been fairly apparent, but the Winchesters don’t deal in certainties.
“Quit looking at me like that!” Dean says, now sounding less afraid, more exasperated. After a moment he huffs an almost-laugh and mutters something about a baby in a trench coat.
“Dean,” says Jess, firmly, as the shower cuts out in the next room. “Dean,” she repeats, and he gives a little “huh?” noise.
“I think I was wrong,” he says, in the determinedly even voice he uses when he’s reassuring Sam. I know that’s not real. I took the meds. I know it didn’t happen that way. I know, Sammy. “I-uh-yeah, I was wrong. I’ll see you, Jess. I’ll come for dinner. Maybe. It’s Thursday. Huh. Maybe Saturday.”
And then he’s gone, and Sam is in the doorway in his pajama bottoms and no shirt, towel still in his hand, hair sticking to his sweet open face, and he’s looking at her inquiringly. There’s none of the edge that she knows will come back the minute she explains what just happened, and Jess, for one wild second, desperately wants out.
:::
Dean had done a lot of things on account of monsters. Beat strangers half-unconscious. Covered the house in neat little lines of salt. Slept with Dad’s KA-BAR knife under his pillow. Been arrested for digging up graves. Lit things on fire.
When they were small, he used to let Sam sleep in his bed, to starve off the dark. To calm him down when Dad scared him, when he wanted his mom. Shortly before Sam left for college Dean had taken to sneaking into Sam’s room, sometimes clambering on top of him and pressing his hand over Sam’s mouth and breathing “Don’t worry Sammy you just gotta be quiet it’s okay he’s not gonna get you, not gonna touch you, ever, you hear me, that son of a bitch isn’t getting his blood anywhere near you.” Sometimes he’d just stay, keep watch, and Sam would awaken to find Dean blinking blearily from the desk chair, having held vigil all night.
The night Sam decided to leave for good is one of the few he can’t force himself to reimagine with fresh eyes. He cannot reconcile. They’d been living in Flagstaff, and things had been squarely okay. He’d come home early, found the house empty. Trudged to bed and fallen asleep in his jeans and woken up at four in the morning to Dean barreling into the room and launching himself onto the bed, holding Sam down with his legs, clutching his arm to his side.
“I fixed it, Sam, this is gonna fix it do you hear me Sammy I’m sorry but I fixed it now,” he gasped, in one breath, and before Sam-seventeen and hungry and terrified-could do anything he’d dipped low and pressed his forearm to Sam’s mouth, and Sam, thrashing, became belatedly aware that there was something warm and coppery-tasting smearing over his face and leaking into his mouth-and-
“JESUS, Dean!” He kicked wildly and sent Dean crashing to the floor. Dean tried to get back up, but Sam kicked him, once, in the ribs, just a spastic, panicked little kick before he was bolting out the door and into the cluttered little kitchen where his father was splayed out over the kitchen table, mostly-empty bottle of Jack still resting in his uncurling fingers, and wasn’t that just perfect, the picture-perfect alcoholic father, and there on the table next to Dad was the fucking KA-BAR knife, slick with Dean’s blood and sticking to the table, the lighter next to it. Another empty bottle was tipped on its side in the center of the table, completing the scene.
Sam could hear his brother fumbling around upstairs, yelling his name. His heart was going like a jackhammer, his ears rushing with blood. He nodded to himself, once, grabbed his backpack, seized the landline, and dialed 911.
Dean hadn’t cut himself enough to die soon, he swore to himself, then left the phone hanging by the chord in the kitchen and sprinted out the door.
:::
“Demons are the least of your problems, Dean,” says Cas, apropos of nothing. Dean looks up at him, tries to swallow. His throat feels swollen all of a sudden.
“Demons aren’t real,” says Dean, evenly.
“Demons killed your mother,” counters Castiel, without malice. “They took your father. They tried to-”
“My mom died in a fire,” Dean grinds out, mechanically, “and my dad is just-was just-he-”
“-infect your brother with their filthy blood, Dean, and you let-”
“No,” says Dean, hot around the collar now, fine tremors running up and down his arms. He feels jumpy and cornered. “I tried to, to, I tried but it didn’t-”
“-you said you would keep him safe, Dean, and now you’re going to abandon him when he needs you the most-”
“He doesn’t, he’s with Jess, and she-I’m never gonna abandon Sammy, I won’t, I won't-!”
“-and they’re going to kill your brother, Dean.”
“Then how are they the least of my problems?” Dean demands, heart thundering in his ears.
“Well,” says Cas, pleasantly, “angels are worse.”
:::
Sam is awoken from an uneasy sleep by the sound of someone pounding on the door and hollering “SAM!” for all he’s worth. It doesn’t take him long to work out who it might be, and maybe it’s learned behavior, maybe it’s anger, maybe it’s the lingering impression of a strange, dark dream wherein he beat his brother senseless on top of their father’s old car, but something has Sam rocketing out of bed before Jess’s even awake, barreling for the door and slamming it open to find his brother standing with his legs planted, breathing heaving, his arm extended as if he’d been mid-knock, hand curled in a fist as blood comes in spurts from the ragged, uneven cut that runs from the base of his thumb almost up to the edge of his pinky.
And for some mad reason, even though they’d taken it from Dean years ago, for a full moment all Sam can think is, Fuck that stupid fucking KA-BAR knife.
Then his brain catches up with what’s happening as Dean steps forward and returns his attention to the door, when Sam can see he’s drawing something with the blood from shredded hand. Sam moves clumsily, automatically, seizes Dean’s wrist and drags him away from the door, takes a few seconds to panic about what the fuck the neighbors-the landlord-are going to say as he shuts it, pulls Dean into the kitchen.
“Sammy,” Dean says, glancing over his shoulder, “I wasn’t finished, Sammy, they can still-”
“There are no fucking demons,” Sam grinds out, wrenching Dean forward and sticking his hand under the faucet, swallows convulsively. “There aren’t. Stop talking about them.”
“I know, Sammy,” says Dean, and he starts to laugh a little, trying to pull his arm away from Sam’s firm grip. Jess has made her way to the doorway and watches silently, hand to her mouth. “I know,” says Dean again, “and so do you, you smart son of a bitch, of course. It’s not demons. Small fucking potatoes, Sam, it’s not the demons. It’s-angels, Sam, they’re mad, they’re so mad, they wanna wear us to prom, dude. Rip the fucking world in two, make us do the dirty work.”
“Dean, Jesus,” says Sam, but not like he’s mad. “Stop it. What’s-have you-you’re taking your meds?”
Dean’s face hardened and he renewed his efforts to free himself from Sam’s grasp. “Yes,” he snaps, “yes and that means this is real so if you’d just listen-”
“Dean, it isn’t,” says Sam, a little thickly, and his thumb finds itself to the back of Dean’s hand, moving in an abortive little attempt at comfort.
“It is. It is, Sam, they’re gonna-you have to-I have to-it’s real, Sammy, it’s-CAS!” Dean wrenches himself free of Sam’s surprise-slacken grasp and whirls around, eyes roving the kitchen frantically before focusing on one of the kitchen chairs. “Cas, show them, please, Sam can’t, they’re going to-”
Sam and Jess are watching Dean, glancing at one another occasionally, carrying out a frantic and entirely silent do we call 911 conversation as Dean pleads with empty space, growing desperate and agitated before Sam realizes with a jolt that he’s digging his fingers into the freshly-cleaned wound on his right hand, that there’s an identical one, just beginning to scab on his left.
Sam jumps forward and grabs Dean’s wrists again. Just as Jess is debating going to the bedroom for the phone, the decision is made for her as Dean lets out a roar of frustration and head-butts Sam so hard they break apart violently, before Dean, still bleeding sluggishly, launches himself at Sam, pinning him to the wall and begging him to listen.
“Sam, I’m trying to fix it, okay, Sammy,” he’s yelling, pleading, “they’re gonna take you and they won’t give you back and I can’t, Sammy, I can’t, I can’t, I keep losing you I won’t this time, okay, not you too, not again, so please, Sam, I won’t let them take you, alright, I won’t-”
Sam is writhing and Dean is shaking him, and Jess, returning from the bedroom, drops and phone and seizes the back of Dean’s shirt. Dean lets Sam go immediately, whirls around, hollers for Cas like he’s desperate. The cuts on both hands are bleeding again now, thinly, and Sam can see that they go further up the arm on the arm on at least one side, jagged and messy. Of course. Sharp objects kept to a minimum. Dean got creative. For fuck’s sake. Sam thinks of the bloody shape on his door-on his fucking door-and wonders distantly how many of those are smeared around Dean’s apartment.
“Jesus Christ,” Jess breathes, and Sam thinks that about covers it. Dean is arguing, near-tearfully, with with some invisible angel in the corner of the kitchen. Jess ducks for the phone on the table, slips into the hallway to call 911.
Dean says something about the end of the world and angels being dicks, bitter and raw-throated, and Sam remembers a scene from what feels like someone else’s life, Dean sitting on the edge of his bed and pulling the covers up fussily around his shoulders, saying, “Night-night, Sammy. Sleep well. Angels are watching over you.”
“Daddy says there’s no such thing as angels,” Sam had said, and Dean had wrinkled his nose, then reached out and run a finger over Sam’s cheek, affectionate and awkward and strange and exceedingly gentle.
“Well, Mom said they were. And she’s one now, too, Sammy. She’s got our back. Sleep tight, now.”
Dean finally got his angel, and an apocalypse with it. Just figures.
:::
Hours later, after Dean has been admitted and Sam has talked to doctors and seen his brother sedated and filled out some forms and promised his barely-conscious brother he’d visit soon, long after they’ve dragged themselves home and Sam has gotten the blood off the door while Jess scrubbed the kitchen clean, after they’ve staggered to bed around 8 am, Sam wakes up with a strangled sob that might have been a scream if he’d had the energy.
He dreamed he was back in the Ramos Way apartment, where he’d lived with Jess their last year at Stanford, dreamed Dean was dragging him bodily out of the bedroom while Jess-Jess had been pinned the ceiling, bleeding from her stomach, split in two, and the room had been on fire-
Sam swallowed down the urge to vomit and rolled over, curled himself around Jess. She gave a sleepy sigh but didn’t wake up. It was afternoon by now, the sun high in the sky. Dean had only shown up that morning.
Sam pressed his nose into the crook between Jess’s shoulder and her neck, tried to force himself to stop trembling. It was just a dream, he snapped at himself, just something he’d imagined, something his overworked, paranoid brain had pulled from the dark, and there was nothing to fear in that.
:::
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~4,200
Spoilers: Through season five-ish, but it's AU, so nothing major.
Warnings: Mental illness, colorful language, some bloody imagery and some not-so-hot parenting.
Summary: Castiel comes for Dean, Sam intercepts, and Dean falls through the cracks. OR: the continuing adventures of schizophrenic!Dean, who first showed up in part III of " Variations on a Theme."
Neurotic author's notes: I...actually kind of like this one, which might mean I've just lost my mind for good and it's terrible. Blargh. The title comes from Baptista Mantuanus: "It is a common calamity; at some one point we have all been mad." Cut text is from Ray Bradbury. Oh, and here is John's lighter, for the curious. It is actually, apparently, a Mr. Gene Ramsey's.
Some days, it’s very easy to pretend that nothing’s wrong. Some days the alarm goes off, Sam lets out a low grumble and gropes for it blindly while Jess roles over and presses her nose into his shoulder, groaning, and there are no messages on either of their phones, there’s no one in the apartment but them. Some days Sam makes coffee and Jess makes eggs and they call each other babe, don’t talk much for sleepiness as they fumble to tug their clothes on. Some days they both walk to class, hand in hand like possessive high schoolers, and their phones remain blessedly silent all day long. Some days Sam makes dinner, squinting at the four-decade-old index card on which Jess’s grandmother once printed some family recipe in portions big enough to feel a family of six, sometimes Dean even joins them and sits at the table and talks animatedly and makes Sam snort and blush and roll his eyes, often makes Jess throw her head back and laugh.
Some days the two of them pile onto the bed and watch “The West Wing” or an old movie, drop off to sleep with ease.
These good days, they’re wonderful, but they also make it too easy to pretend things are always that easy, and for this reason Jess is beginning to suspect they’re sort of dangerous.
:::
It’s in the morning, on a weekend, before the sun is up, and there’s a rustle like a bird in a cage and it wakes Dean from a dream about long car rides.
“Don’t be afraid,” says the man at the foot of his bed, and his voice is thick and curiously stilted. Dean isn’t afraid. This man is not very intimidating. He’s dressed like an accountant in a trench coat, with his hair sticking up at odd angles, like he’s arrived in a hurry. He’s staring at Dean like he’s a revelation.
“I’m not afraid,” says Dean belatedly, to fill the silence.
“I didn’t think you would be,” replies the funny man. He tilts his head to the side a bit, and Dean is reminded of a curious bird. “I am Castiel. I’m an angel of the Lord,” he adds, and Dean sees the shadows of wings splashed across his closet doors. That can’t be right, he thinks, staring, astonished. His stomach feels bottomless and full of air. The wings twitch, a little bit.
“I don’t think you’re real,” Dean breathes, and something changes in Castiel’s face, and it twists, unpracticed but sincere, into a wry, affectionate grin.
“Oh ye of little faith,” he replies.
:::
Very bad days, when they come, usually begin at night. Sometime past two Sam’s phone will ring and ring until Sam either gives in and answers or Dean gives up and calls Jess-and she always answers. Usually on the second ring. She can feel Sam’s eyes on her as she sits up, crosses her legs beneath her, cradles the phone with both hands, repeats Dean’s name until he stops hyperventilating and listens.
“There’s nobody there, Dean. Nobody but you. You’re okay. Sam’s okay. I’m okay. No, you don’t have to do any of that, Dean, stay in bed. Dean. Listen to me, stay in bed. It’s okay. I’m not mad you called, okay, I’m glad. It’s alright, you were right to call. Everything’s okay. There’s nobody there. Nobody but you.”
Later, as she gathers the sheets back around her shoulders, Sam will huff, “It’s-you’re indulging him, Jess. You can’t do that.”
“He’s just scared, Sam. Isn’t it better he calm down than panic all night long?” She waits for an answer and receives only a cough that sounds a lot like codependent in reply. She sucks her teeth, turns to Sam, knows this argument by heart and wants to make herself clear anyways. “I’m not trying to impose on the family dynamic, Sam,” she says, and this earns her a second derisive cough. “I’m just saying, he needs-you.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Sam mutters darkly, and goes back to sleep.
:::
Sam was not built to be a hardass, though he was finely trained in the art by his father. Some part of Sam, something young and helpless, is desperate to reach out to Dean and hold him steady, hold him together, protect him from the monsters of his own making. The way Dean used to protect him.
But it doesn’t work that way. Sam has to be firm, has to draw the line, can’t get sucked back into this. Dean will go back to the hospital, or disappear again, just fall off the grid for months the way he did when Sam first left for school, and then things will be even worse than they were before.
When Sam was in high school this was his life, holding Dean’s forearms or shoulders or the back of his neck, reciting a litany of Dean listen Dean stop it Dean that’s not real. At the time he’d been hateful about it, loathed his brother for being so fucked up, his father for not stepping up and handling it himself. Now he’s older and looks back in his memory, sees the scene with adult clarity, sees himself in high school, growing and gangly and all hormones, crouched impatiently over a brother who would have indulged him anything. When Dean was sixteen he was working, cooking, maintaining a complex string of lies to keep the landlord and Sam’s teachers and ER nurses and CPS all satisfied, and if Sam had started whimpering about demons in the pipes Dean would have probably gone out to fight them bare-knuckled. Dean, now as ever, would do just about anything stupid and brave for Sam.
Sam knows this, he does, but it doesn’t actually change anything. Dean isn’t scared of the things that used to scare Sam, not bullies or men on corners who shout about his faggy hair to get a rise out of him, not sirens and shouting next door or their father, drunk past reason and lurching and lost, and there’s nothing for Sam to fight.
When he was a child and scared of monsters under the bed, his father had grinned crookedly up at him from his slumped position at the kitchen table, looked down at the KA-BAR knife he was sheathing and unsheathing shakily, then with a leer held it out to Sam. Sam had taken it delicately in both hands, turned it over, looked at the faded JW picked into the leather just below the USMC logo.
“Give you a gun if I had one,” Dad had said, grinning like he was telling some filthy joke Sam didn’t understand, but Sam had closed his fingers around the knife handle. Dean had Dad’s lighter from ’Nam, after all. It said Girl if you want to fuck smile when you give this lighter back.
Later Dean had found him and tugged the knife roughly out of his hands, hauled him to bed and promised to fight back the monsters, when they came.
When, not if. Even then.
One of these days Sam is going to go out into the road and just start screaming.
:::
“What does an angel want with me?”
It’s still early, and Castiel is watching as Dean fumbles with the coffee maker. The Haldol makes him clumsy, especially in the morning. Castiel frowns at Dean’s ineffective, slightly shaky hands, then at the pill bottles lined up neatly on the counter.
“We have work for you,” says Castiel matter-of-factly, watching dispassionately as Dean squints nervously at the coffee machine, shifting from foot to foot. He hates feeling skittish. It’s the antipsychotic. It is, it says it on the side effects list, on the page that comes all folded up with the pills. Jessica has a copy. So does Dean.
“Be not afraid,” says the angel, and Dean turns to look at him. Maybe the stupid Haldol’s making him fidgety, but he is not afraid. But when he looks at Castiel, there’s an open warmth-an edge of need-in his face that reminds Dean-all in a rush-of Sammy, when he was little and wanted Dean to play soldiers, to make a leaf pile, to read him a story.
“I’m not,” says Dean, his mouth a little dry, and Castiel tilts his head again. He doesn’t say anything and Dean hates silence, so he adds, “Just don’t know what an angel’s doing in my kitchen.”
Castiel stares for another long moment, then comprehension dawns on his face and he says, “You don’t think you deserve to be saved.”
Dean considers this.
Considers the hospital, the nurses with their hard-scrubbed exhausted faces and the dark shapes he saw in the doctor’s eyes, the way he’d recited his dull litany of sanity for days until they let him leave. Considers the girls he’s fucked, whose names he lost, considers Jessica, who he doesn’t deserve the way Sam does, who lets him call in the night even though she has school in the morning and a whole world Dean can’t even really imagine, much less inhabit. Considers holding cells and ERs. Considers the people, in bars and alleys and once or twice churches, who he’s tackled, crashed to the ground, screamed at, bashing their faces and throats until they’re silent and still and he can’t hear anything whispering through them about hell. He’s a good fighter, he knows, considers this too-his dad taught him to fight, out in the yard on Saturday late-afternoons, bleary, Hit me, son, hard as you can, again, again, again, and in the night sometimes, you little pussy hit me, on and on until he’d do it and then there’d be hell to pay.
Dean considers his father, who left, and not because Dean didn’t spar with him, because he did. Considers Sam, who looks at him now like he’s something disgusting and pitiful and infectious. Sam, who even when he loves him does it wearily, like he knows he’s supposed to but wishes he doesn’t.
Castiel is still watching him intently, as if he might actually hold some piece of salvation. He. Dean Winchester, who is always left behind, always one second out of sync with everybody else. Dean, whose father wanted nothing to do with him even after he gave everything they had. Whose brother loves him like it’s sore.
He doesn’t have an answer for Castiel, so he offers him coffee instead and is politely refused.
:::
Sam’s in the shower and Jess is reading when the phone chirps and it’s Dean. He hasn’t called in a few days, which is good news, probably, but she’s still quick to snatch the phone up. “Dean,” she says, then realizes how she sounds and swallows. “Hi.”
“Hey-a, Jess,” he says, his voice taking on that shifty quality it gets when he knows what he’s about to say won’t make her happy. Or Sam happy, really. “Listen, I-uh-I have a-there’s someone here, and I’m-I mean…”
He trails off helplessly, and Jess sends a quick glance in the direction of the bathroom. The shower’s still running. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Dean,” she says, “is anybody else there with you?”
“I don’t know,” says Dean, his voice suddenly very thin, and Jess thinks for one second she might throw up. For most of her life, the right thing has been fairly apparent, but the Winchesters don’t deal in certainties.
“Quit looking at me like that!” Dean says, now sounding less afraid, more exasperated. After a moment he huffs an almost-laugh and mutters something about a baby in a trench coat.
“Dean,” says Jess, firmly, as the shower cuts out in the next room. “Dean,” she repeats, and he gives a little “huh?” noise.
“I think I was wrong,” he says, in the determinedly even voice he uses when he’s reassuring Sam. I know that’s not real. I took the meds. I know it didn’t happen that way. I know, Sammy. “I-uh-yeah, I was wrong. I’ll see you, Jess. I’ll come for dinner. Maybe. It’s Thursday. Huh. Maybe Saturday.”
And then he’s gone, and Sam is in the doorway in his pajama bottoms and no shirt, towel still in his hand, hair sticking to his sweet open face, and he’s looking at her inquiringly. There’s none of the edge that she knows will come back the minute she explains what just happened, and Jess, for one wild second, desperately wants out.
:::
Dean had done a lot of things on account of monsters. Beat strangers half-unconscious. Covered the house in neat little lines of salt. Slept with Dad’s KA-BAR knife under his pillow. Been arrested for digging up graves. Lit things on fire.
When they were small, he used to let Sam sleep in his bed, to starve off the dark. To calm him down when Dad scared him, when he wanted his mom. Shortly before Sam left for college Dean had taken to sneaking into Sam’s room, sometimes clambering on top of him and pressing his hand over Sam’s mouth and breathing “Don’t worry Sammy you just gotta be quiet it’s okay he’s not gonna get you, not gonna touch you, ever, you hear me, that son of a bitch isn’t getting his blood anywhere near you.” Sometimes he’d just stay, keep watch, and Sam would awaken to find Dean blinking blearily from the desk chair, having held vigil all night.
The night Sam decided to leave for good is one of the few he can’t force himself to reimagine with fresh eyes. He cannot reconcile. They’d been living in Flagstaff, and things had been squarely okay. He’d come home early, found the house empty. Trudged to bed and fallen asleep in his jeans and woken up at four in the morning to Dean barreling into the room and launching himself onto the bed, holding Sam down with his legs, clutching his arm to his side.
“I fixed it, Sam, this is gonna fix it do you hear me Sammy I’m sorry but I fixed it now,” he gasped, in one breath, and before Sam-seventeen and hungry and terrified-could do anything he’d dipped low and pressed his forearm to Sam’s mouth, and Sam, thrashing, became belatedly aware that there was something warm and coppery-tasting smearing over his face and leaking into his mouth-and-
“JESUS, Dean!” He kicked wildly and sent Dean crashing to the floor. Dean tried to get back up, but Sam kicked him, once, in the ribs, just a spastic, panicked little kick before he was bolting out the door and into the cluttered little kitchen where his father was splayed out over the kitchen table, mostly-empty bottle of Jack still resting in his uncurling fingers, and wasn’t that just perfect, the picture-perfect alcoholic father, and there on the table next to Dad was the fucking KA-BAR knife, slick with Dean’s blood and sticking to the table, the lighter next to it. Another empty bottle was tipped on its side in the center of the table, completing the scene.
Sam could hear his brother fumbling around upstairs, yelling his name. His heart was going like a jackhammer, his ears rushing with blood. He nodded to himself, once, grabbed his backpack, seized the landline, and dialed 911.
Dean hadn’t cut himself enough to die soon, he swore to himself, then left the phone hanging by the chord in the kitchen and sprinted out the door.
:::
“Demons are the least of your problems, Dean,” says Cas, apropos of nothing. Dean looks up at him, tries to swallow. His throat feels swollen all of a sudden.
“Demons aren’t real,” says Dean, evenly.
“Demons killed your mother,” counters Castiel, without malice. “They took your father. They tried to-”
“My mom died in a fire,” Dean grinds out, mechanically, “and my dad is just-was just-he-”
“-infect your brother with their filthy blood, Dean, and you let-”
“No,” says Dean, hot around the collar now, fine tremors running up and down his arms. He feels jumpy and cornered. “I tried to, to, I tried but it didn’t-”
“-you said you would keep him safe, Dean, and now you’re going to abandon him when he needs you the most-”
“He doesn’t, he’s with Jess, and she-I’m never gonna abandon Sammy, I won’t, I won't-!”
“-and they’re going to kill your brother, Dean.”
“Then how are they the least of my problems?” Dean demands, heart thundering in his ears.
“Well,” says Cas, pleasantly, “angels are worse.”
:::
Sam is awoken from an uneasy sleep by the sound of someone pounding on the door and hollering “SAM!” for all he’s worth. It doesn’t take him long to work out who it might be, and maybe it’s learned behavior, maybe it’s anger, maybe it’s the lingering impression of a strange, dark dream wherein he beat his brother senseless on top of their father’s old car, but something has Sam rocketing out of bed before Jess’s even awake, barreling for the door and slamming it open to find his brother standing with his legs planted, breathing heaving, his arm extended as if he’d been mid-knock, hand curled in a fist as blood comes in spurts from the ragged, uneven cut that runs from the base of his thumb almost up to the edge of his pinky.
And for some mad reason, even though they’d taken it from Dean years ago, for a full moment all Sam can think is, Fuck that stupid fucking KA-BAR knife.
Then his brain catches up with what’s happening as Dean steps forward and returns his attention to the door, when Sam can see he’s drawing something with the blood from shredded hand. Sam moves clumsily, automatically, seizes Dean’s wrist and drags him away from the door, takes a few seconds to panic about what the fuck the neighbors-the landlord-are going to say as he shuts it, pulls Dean into the kitchen.
“Sammy,” Dean says, glancing over his shoulder, “I wasn’t finished, Sammy, they can still-”
“There are no fucking demons,” Sam grinds out, wrenching Dean forward and sticking his hand under the faucet, swallows convulsively. “There aren’t. Stop talking about them.”
“I know, Sammy,” says Dean, and he starts to laugh a little, trying to pull his arm away from Sam’s firm grip. Jess has made her way to the doorway and watches silently, hand to her mouth. “I know,” says Dean again, “and so do you, you smart son of a bitch, of course. It’s not demons. Small fucking potatoes, Sam, it’s not the demons. It’s-angels, Sam, they’re mad, they’re so mad, they wanna wear us to prom, dude. Rip the fucking world in two, make us do the dirty work.”
“Dean, Jesus,” says Sam, but not like he’s mad. “Stop it. What’s-have you-you’re taking your meds?”
Dean’s face hardened and he renewed his efforts to free himself from Sam’s grasp. “Yes,” he snaps, “yes and that means this is real so if you’d just listen-”
“Dean, it isn’t,” says Sam, a little thickly, and his thumb finds itself to the back of Dean’s hand, moving in an abortive little attempt at comfort.
“It is. It is, Sam, they’re gonna-you have to-I have to-it’s real, Sammy, it’s-CAS!” Dean wrenches himself free of Sam’s surprise-slacken grasp and whirls around, eyes roving the kitchen frantically before focusing on one of the kitchen chairs. “Cas, show them, please, Sam can’t, they’re going to-”
Sam and Jess are watching Dean, glancing at one another occasionally, carrying out a frantic and entirely silent do we call 911 conversation as Dean pleads with empty space, growing desperate and agitated before Sam realizes with a jolt that he’s digging his fingers into the freshly-cleaned wound on his right hand, that there’s an identical one, just beginning to scab on his left.
Sam jumps forward and grabs Dean’s wrists again. Just as Jess is debating going to the bedroom for the phone, the decision is made for her as Dean lets out a roar of frustration and head-butts Sam so hard they break apart violently, before Dean, still bleeding sluggishly, launches himself at Sam, pinning him to the wall and begging him to listen.
“Sam, I’m trying to fix it, okay, Sammy,” he’s yelling, pleading, “they’re gonna take you and they won’t give you back and I can’t, Sammy, I can’t, I can’t, I keep losing you I won’t this time, okay, not you too, not again, so please, Sam, I won’t let them take you, alright, I won’t-”
Sam is writhing and Dean is shaking him, and Jess, returning from the bedroom, drops and phone and seizes the back of Dean’s shirt. Dean lets Sam go immediately, whirls around, hollers for Cas like he’s desperate. The cuts on both hands are bleeding again now, thinly, and Sam can see that they go further up the arm on the arm on at least one side, jagged and messy. Of course. Sharp objects kept to a minimum. Dean got creative. For fuck’s sake. Sam thinks of the bloody shape on his door-on his fucking door-and wonders distantly how many of those are smeared around Dean’s apartment.
“Jesus Christ,” Jess breathes, and Sam thinks that about covers it. Dean is arguing, near-tearfully, with with some invisible angel in the corner of the kitchen. Jess ducks for the phone on the table, slips into the hallway to call 911.
Dean says something about the end of the world and angels being dicks, bitter and raw-throated, and Sam remembers a scene from what feels like someone else’s life, Dean sitting on the edge of his bed and pulling the covers up fussily around his shoulders, saying, “Night-night, Sammy. Sleep well. Angels are watching over you.”
“Daddy says there’s no such thing as angels,” Sam had said, and Dean had wrinkled his nose, then reached out and run a finger over Sam’s cheek, affectionate and awkward and strange and exceedingly gentle.
“Well, Mom said they were. And she’s one now, too, Sammy. She’s got our back. Sleep tight, now.”
Dean finally got his angel, and an apocalypse with it. Just figures.
:::
Hours later, after Dean has been admitted and Sam has talked to doctors and seen his brother sedated and filled out some forms and promised his barely-conscious brother he’d visit soon, long after they’ve dragged themselves home and Sam has gotten the blood off the door while Jess scrubbed the kitchen clean, after they’ve staggered to bed around 8 am, Sam wakes up with a strangled sob that might have been a scream if he’d had the energy.
He dreamed he was back in the Ramos Way apartment, where he’d lived with Jess their last year at Stanford, dreamed Dean was dragging him bodily out of the bedroom while Jess-Jess had been pinned the ceiling, bleeding from her stomach, split in two, and the room had been on fire-
Sam swallowed down the urge to vomit and rolled over, curled himself around Jess. She gave a sleepy sigh but didn’t wake up. It was afternoon by now, the sun high in the sky. Dean had only shown up that morning.
Sam pressed his nose into the crook between Jess’s shoulder and her neck, tried to force himself to stop trembling. It was just a dream, he snapped at himself, just something he’d imagined, something his overworked, paranoid brain had pulled from the dark, and there was nothing to fear in that.
:::