Fic: The Propensities of Good Men, 13/15
Don't hate me for spamming lately, bbs. I'll be caught up with RL and exams for the next few days and won't be able to post again until ~Thursday (it is the magic day, after all), so in parting I leave you with this. I'm sorry it's not a terribly eventful chapter in terms of action, but hey, with the character development and all that, etc., etc. You get the picture.
Also, new layout is hearts'n'stars'n'rainbows! Maybe not candy red balloons, though, I'm still shady about those guys.
Title: The Propensities of Good Men, 13/15 (Changed back to a question mark because pt 16 may get cut down to 15. Ambivalence is forever my bane, so we are thus relegated back to ye olde question mark.)
Characters: Bobby, Castiel, Dean, Sam
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: ...R?
Word Count: 9,099
Disclaimer: Pffft, I wish.
Warnings: Massive whump, and I do mean massive. Angst, angst, and more angst. And Dean and Cas are just not getting along right now, tsk tsk. Things get much shinier and prettier in the next chapter, though, I promise. Don't run for the hills yet.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
~ ~ ~
The call comes when Dean is in Nebraska, tracking a wily clan of vampires that have been making their mark all across the Midwest. They haven’t been inconspicuous at all - leaving corpses in the streets, attacking in plain sight - which tells Dean they must be young. They’ve had a good run through Oklahoma and Kansas, racking up an impressive body count as they went, but Dean has the fuckers cornered in a farmhouse outside Bridgeport now. Their nest, a ruddy shack stuffed deep into the back woods off Highway 92. Just one building, thankfully. It would be easy to burn to the ground. He’s more than a little wary of taking on the whole clan by himself, but Bobby was tied up with a shapeshifter in Barstow and he wasn’t about to drag Sam into a hunt. The kid could barely walk down the hall without tripping over something. Dean hadn’t even felt comfortable leaving him alone to go hunting, but Sam insisted he would be fine. And he didn’t really have a solid argument against going, so he left.
It’s been almost three months, and Dean hates to admit it but he hasn’t seen any signs of Sam adjusting to his blindness. In all actuality, he seems to have gotten worse. He’s angrier than he ever was before, and he doesn’t talk much. In all fairness, though, that could have something to do with Dean not knowing what the hell to say to him these days. Every word felt forced and bitter; he practically had to roll everything around in his mouth for a full minute before he ever built up the courage to choke it out. And most of the time, Sam only responded with either complete silence or - more frequently - an acidic backlash.
There’s only so much of that a guy can take before he starts getting really fucking antsy, so when the chance came for a hunt, Dean was all over it.
He shifts uncomfortably in the creaking leather, readjusting the rearview mirror with a sigh. When he steals a quick glance at his reflection, he instantly wishes he hadn’t. Beneath his eyes is marked with dark smudges, purplish bruises of exhaustion, just as much mental as it is physical. He’s fucking wiped these days.
Sam isn’t Sam anymore. Years back, when he had first come to terms with leading the life of a hunter, that all his friends and credentials and normality were shot to shit, he had become resentful for a time. When he had been possessed and killed Steve Wandell, it had almost destroyed him. Dean had never seen his little brother retreat so far into thought so often. Never seen him stare off into space with the vacant expression of a man resigned to his own fate, one that he hated more than anything, but after relentless goading and a couple of cringing Hallmark moments, eventually Sam moved on. Dean watched as he grew used to living quick and dirty - scamming credit cards and hustling pool and keeping a sharp eye out for the quickest way to make an under-the-table buck. Hell, he might have even started to like it. And when he reached that point, that’s when Dean had been able to take a step back and view his brother as more of an equal, rather than a clumsy kid who needed his back watched at all times. Sam wasn’t that kid anymore - he was scheming and calculating, just as much if not more than Dean ever had been. Because with Sam, it wasn’t always obvious that he was manipulating the girl in his lap or the scotch-buzzed businessman, or even the four hundred-pound leather-vested Hell’s Angel. Dean was the only one who could see it - the new edge to Sam’s smile when he knew he had his claws in someone, that the plan was immaculate and he would come out shining on the other end of this one. When they played perfectly oblivious into his plan. Dean still couldn’t say what it was exactly - his grin or a new, feline sway of his body. Something dark and collected stirring behind his eyes when he slid a glance in Dean’s direction to signal that things were all systems go. Regardless, though, the underhanded connoisseur he had trained so well over the years wasn’t one of his proudest achievements, and when Dean really thinks about it, sometimes he almost feels guilty. The tricky hustler who wasn’t afraid to wrestle anybody out of a hard-earned dollar was not his little brother as he remembered him. Wasn’t the quiet bookworm who would rather analyze Coleridge than nab a poltergeist, the one who waited on the couch for Dean and Dad to get home, who quietly patched their wounds, fluttered wide gentle hands across their skin until they were safely bandaged up.
It felt wrong, corruptive. Sammy shouldn’t be the one muddying his conscience and getting his hands dirty. Shouldn’t be living in the gray areas. That was Dean’s job.
Now, though, the world apparently worked on a sliding scale and things were irrevocably fucked up. Now Sam was just downright scary, and if Dean could pick between the calculating con artist he felt guilty of creating and what his brother had become since being blinded, he’d pick the sleazy bar fly any day of the week.
He misses his little brother, and as bad as it aches he can’t shake the question of when - if - he’s ever going to see his goofy, smirking ass again.
The ring of his phone just about jolts him clean out of his fucking skin. He sighs through flared nostrils when he sees it’s Bobby’s number and flips it open with a languid blink. Nothing stirs in the barn ahead of him. “Madame Fook-yu’s Palace, happy ending free with purchase,” he chimes unenthusiastically.
“You better get here,” Bobby says gruffly.
Dean blinks. “I thought you were in Barstow?”
“Got back early.”
“Huh.” He ducks down when he sees a flash of movement ahead. A radio roars up, death metal pealing into the country silence. An engine revs almost immediately afterward, before headlights flare through the barn door’s slats. Dean rushes out his words when he says, “I can’t talk now, Bobby, ‘bout to take down these freaks’ nest. Call you back.” He flips his phone shut and pockets it, sneaks out of the car into the line of bushes near the clearing where the barn crouches.
Two vampires emerge - a blonde chick and a curly-headed brunette who looks like he stepped straight out of a Ralph Lauren catalog; Dean recognizes both of them from the local dive bar’s parking lot - to drag the barn doors open for the convertible Mustang that pulls out. Cherry red, white decals, pristine rims. No license plates, Dean notices. Surely it’s stolen, but no telling from whom. Probably some poor bloodless bastard chilling in the city morgue or rotting in a ditch somewhere. These fuckers didn’t seem to have much regard for their meals once they had their fill. Not that any vampires did, but this clan in particular was worse. They were ravenous. And, lucky for Dean, also careless.
The vibration of his phone makes him jump again. He silences it quickly and bares his teeth in a sneer when he sees it’s Bobby again. “Bobby, seriously,” he hisses quickly. The same two vampires shut the barn doors and hop into the back of the Mustang. The engine grumbles artfully and a dust cloud tears up from the ground as they peel out down the dirt road, music blaring, liquor sloshing, party screams high-pitched and wild. “I’m a little busy right -”
“It’s Sam,” Bobby interrupts.
Taken aback, Dean crinkles his eyebrows in confusion. “What?”
“Get your ass back here, idget,” Bobby growls. “Your brother needs you.”
“What happened, is he okay?” Dean asks, suddenly unconcerned about the rise of his voice and that it might open him up to an attack at any second. Fuck it - Sam. His pulse speeds up and his eyes go dry. A thick clammy sweat builds on his palm against the phone’s plastic.
Bobby hesitates, then with a sigh he says, “Just get here,” and hangs up.
~ ~ ~
Four hours shift past in a blur before Dean is swiping a hand back to slam the Impala’s door, his boots scraping loud and dirty against the gravel of the driveway. He takes the stairs two at a time, and when he slips quickly through the front door it claps shut right behind him with a ratcheting clatter. “Sam!”
But the house is quiet. No response meets his voice - not Sam, not Bobby. The pre-dawn stillness rails a shiver along his spine.
“Sam?” He takes a careful step into the living room; checks the kitchen; the den. All empty. “Bobby?”
The subtle thud of movement behind him stiffens his shoulders, spins him in a complete 180. His pistol is in his hand quicker than a lightning split, poised in a perfect straight line at eye-level with the silhouette behind him. “Don’t move unless you wanna catch a bullet with your teeth,” he spits as he turns.
“Jesus, boy,” Bobby jeers. He swats the barrel of Dean’s pistol away from his face easily.
“Bobby - sorry,” Dean offers, exhaling the breath he didn’t notice he’d been holding. With a shrug, he tucks his gun into his belt and flips his shirt over it. “Don’t sneak up on me like that, dude, I almost turned your brains into a Jackson Pollack.”
Bobby watches with narrowed eyes as Dean braces his hands on his knees, bending at the waist to steady his fluttering pulse. “You couldn’t even if you tried,” he teases, but without any real joviality.
“Where’s Sammy?” Dean asks through a ragged breath. He quirks an eyebrow as Bobby scratches at his beard and his forehead wrinkles in hesitation. “Bobby, where is he?”
“He’s upstairs,” Bobby replies with a shrug. Dean keeps his eyes on the hunter as he brushes past, falling lazily into the chair behind his desk, nearly disappearing behind an impressive mountain of dusty books and file folders. He rubs over his face with a sigh that Dean can’t read - exasperated, anxious, irritated, maybe even remorseful. He peeks quickly up the stairs, but second-guesses it and instead walks closer to Bobby.
“What happened?”
The shrug of Bobby’s hand is a slow, careless flip through the air. “Hell if I know,” he gripes. “I got back ‘bout five hours ago, he’d already flipped a shit.”
Dean’s weight shifts. “Like how?”
Bobby gives a disgruntled sigh as he leans back, arms crossing slowly over his chest. Dean can’t help the slight discomfort he feels at the motion; he knows what it means. That’s how Bobby gets when he’s got a much bigger bone to pick than just what’s initially going on. He knows there’s a splinter under the surface, and that it’s been scratching at Dean for months now. His eyebrows raise disapprovingly as Dean instinctively swallows.
“Dean, I ain’t an idiot,” Bobby says quietly. “I know your brother’s been through a lot, and I know it’s hard for you to see him like this.”
Dean’s gaze falls to the floor, because he doesn’t know where else to put it.
“But there’s somethin’ else goin’ on here,” Bobby continues, his tone sharp. “And I think I should know about it, since you’re crashin’ my gate and all. You ain’t talkin’ to Sam for some reason, and it ain’t ‘cause he’s blind.”
A pause; Dean sniffs awkwardly, shuffles his feet around in perfect Charlie Brown fashion. Feel like a total fucking douche because the only thing he can come up with to say is, “What do you mean?”
Bobby doesn’t move, doesn’t even shift his penetrating stare. “You’re nervous ‘bout somethin’, I can smell it. Least I can guess, it has somethin’ to do with Sam.”
And Dean doesn’t even respond, because there’s really nothing he can say. A tense silence settles across the room - Bobby waiting for an answer and Dean swimming through every excuse not to give him one - until finally he manages, “It’s kind of private.”
Bobby’s eyes grow wide, incredulous. “Oh, a secret?”
“Kind of,” Dean answers with a nervous shrug. Nervous, tense, scared, fuck, all of the above. Bobby was fucking intimidating when he wanted to be, goddamn.
“And who the hell am I gonna tell?” Bobby challenges; Dean bites his cheek. “What, you afraid I’m gonna blab to the other kids on the playground? Start a cootie rumor?” He paws a hand through the air and finishes, “Come on, Dean. You know better’n that.”
A leaden sigh fights out of Dean’s throat as his head falls back. Bobby had this way about him that could squeeze the last drop of information from a black-ops KGB agent if he wanted to. Telling him about the dreams, the blood, Sam’s lingering animosity toward Castiel ever since he’d learned of the angel’s bond with Dean, though - that was a lot to throw out in the open at once. Dean decides the best thing to do is just ignore it. He stilts his hand on his hips and looks Bobby straight in the face. “I swear I’ll catch you up later, okay, just - tell me what happened. How’d he flip out?”
“Well,” Bobby begins with a groan as he climbs to his feet. His voice echoes behind him, baiting Dean to follow, as he shuffles to the kitchen. “He owes me a new set a’deck chairs, I can tell you that. And a front window. And don’t think I’m just gonna forget about you tellin’ me what’s goin’ on in that airhead of yours, either.”
Dean hikes an eyebrow and sits down uneasily at the dining table. He watches absently as Bobby shifts and clatters things around in his sleep-hazed search to make coffee. “He went WWF on your furniture?”
Bobby nods; Dean simply purses his lips, angles his jaw in thought. “Did he say why?”
Reluctantly, Bobby braces his hands on the cabinet and stares hard at Dean, who practically fucking shivers under the pressure of the gaze. “And then some.”
For a long time, silence draws out. Then Dean blinks expectantly, asks, “So?”, and Bobby withdraws a silver flask from the pocket of his bathrobe and flips it at Dean. He barely catches it.
“He kept sayin’, I’m out, I’m out, and when I asked him what in tarnation he was yappin’ about, he threw that at my chest and told me to butt out. In some choice words that I’d rather not repeat,” he finishes bitterly.
Warily, Dean eyes the flask. He opens it and takes a whiff, but there’s nothing telling inside - no scent, no colors, no clues as to what the hell Sam could be so upset about running out of, except -…
A deep, squirming pit of apprehension builds in the floor of his belly. It would make sense, but surely Sam wasn’t that far gone. Flasks of demon blood? What the fuck, no way, that’s fucking ridiculous. Just the thought that Sam would even consider something so demented drills a pertinent shudder through every one of Dean’s muscles. But as he really considers it, his mind reeling with all the countless possibilities, the more sense it makes, and the more painful, the more black, the pit grows.
Ah, fuck.
He tucks the flask neatly into his pocket and clears his throat, rising from the table with as innocent of a shrug as he can muster. “Beats the hell outta me,” he chokes, and he hopes that the shake of his knees isn’t obvious, or the quiver in his voice or the sheen of sweat breaking out of every pore on his body. He makes a quick exit by saying he’s going to check on Sam, maybe grab a few hours of zees, but Bobby stops him on the stairs. Dean glances back over his shoulder, and even as he tries he can’t hide the mask of concern etched all into his features.
“He’s knocked out cold,” Bobby admits. Dean turns to face him more. “It was the only way I could get him to stop rantin’ and ravin’.”
“Wait, you just bopped him on the head and threw him upstairs?”
“Yeah,” Bobby says casually, with a shrug, as if it was the most natural conclusion to be drawn. Dean grounds his jaw and glances up the dark incline where the stairs build stacks of gradually darkening shades of gray. “Dean…”
He looks back down, eyebrows knotted in some tangled collision of fear, confusion, anticipation, concern. Anger. Bobby raises a hand and shakes his head.
“Somethin’ big’s goin’ on with your brother. You best find out what it is, ‘fore he goes completely off the deep end.” He hesitates, softens his eyes a shade when he sees the worry that must be burned into Dean’s. “Scary as it is, I think he’s already gettin’ pretty damn close.”
Dean just nods, because what the fuck else is he supposed to do?
When he finally builds up the courage to crack the door open, after three full minutes, Sam is still unconscious, breathing easily as Dean watches the subtle inflation-deflation cadence of his chest. One of his hands lies across his stomach, long tapered fingers relaxed and at ease. Dean grimaces when he sees the raw scrapes of Sam’s knuckles and how long spears of wood have scratched into his skin in places, probably from going batshit on the deck chairs. He smirks when he remembers the impassive blink of Sam’s eyes when he’d told Dean once before that it wasn’t fair to dissipate rage on inanimate objects because they couldn’t fight back; swallows back a wave of nausea when his eyes catch on the thick scars mangling the flesh where his brother’s should be.
For a long time Dean just watches him - the rhythm of his breathing, his startling lack of expression. It’s rare, not seeing combative annoyance or sorrow or wrath or even the deep furrows of thought built into his features. Dean knows he can’t be dreaming anything good - since when had the Winchesters ever been the type for fucking rainbows and Candyland dreams? - but at least he seems peaceful.
He strips off his mud-streaked clothes and curls into the sheets, inhaling the musty scents of pine and cotton, wades through all the nostalgic flashbacks of cedar trees and hunting cabins in the middle of uncharted woods, Dad teaching him how to shoot tin cans off a log from fifty yards away - he bulls-eyed every one of those sons of bitches - and just when he’s about to fold into the soft haze of slumber, the thought flickers across his mind that maybe he should be sleeping downstairs just in case Sam wakes up in a rage. He instantly stuffs the thought into the back of his mind, and kicks himself into a restless sleep for even thinking that kind of shit, for being afraid of, his little brother.
~ ~ ~
Sam wakes up in a rage.
The first thing that draws Dean out of sleep into instant alertness is the rattling slam of the door. He sits up quick, buck knife in hand sooner than his eyes open. “Sam?”
He doesn’t seem shocked to hear Dean’s voice. He’s sitting on his bed, fingers curled tightly into the blankets, and when Dean narrows his eyes he notices that Sam looks sick. Very, very sick.
“Dude, what’s goin’ on with you?” Dean asks. He tosses the covers back and clumsily pulls on the same clothes he wore the day before. “Huh? You don’t look too hot.”
“I am crawling,” Sam begins, and pushes up from the bed to pace restlessly. His voice rises inexplicably when he finishes, “Out of my fucking skin.”
Confusedly, Dean blinks. “Sammy, man - what the hell?”
“Give it back,” Sam slices venomously. He extends a palm, and Dean tightens his jaw at the gesture.
“What?”
“You know what, now give it fucking back.”
“Sammy, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man,” Dean lies through his best false laugh. He finds his entire body withdrawing sharply as the sweep of Sam’s arm overtakes the end table, cleanly swiping every lamp and alarm clock and beer bottle off onto the floor in a clattering crash.
“I’m not kidding, Dean!” yells Sam, his voice thunderous and loud, and more than a little threatening. Dean’s eyes widen at the sudden flare.
Strained silence spins out as he stares at Sam and Sam simply holds out an open palm. Dean weighs the options in his head, then with a long draw of breath he digs the empty flask from his jacket pocket on the floor. Fuck it. He huffs out a sigh and slaps it in Sam’s hand. “It’s empty.”
“I know.”
“So what’s the big deal, why d’you want it back so bad?”
Sam doesn’t answer. He twists the flask in his grip for a few seconds, then spins and extends an uneasy hand to feel his way back to his bed. When he sits down, his lips part in a shaky sigh and he seems to have collapsed in on himself. It almost breaks Dean’s heart clean in fucking two, seeing him so fractured, so weak and paralyzed. He searches Sam’s entire body, from the careless slick of his hair to the swell of scar tissue replacing his eyes, the waxy yellow pallor of his skin, dampened with sweat. How he holds onto the flask so tightly, as if it’s his lifeline, vine-like blue veins spiking out of his skin and crawling steadily up his forearms. Something lessens in Dean’s chest and he swings his legs out of bed and steadies them on the floor. “Sam,” he begins cautiously, rubbing at the triangle of muscle in his shoulder that rips with fiery tension.
Barely, Sam’s head cocks in acknowledgment.
Dean breathes out a furious sigh, shrugging his hands through the air. “Elephant in the room, okay.” He clears his throat. “You don’t expect me to believe that was J&B you’ve been slurpin’ outta that thing ever since Reno, do you?”
Sam’s jaw tightens, but he says nothing.
“Sam.”
“What?” he hisses, his tone acidic. “What, Dean? What the hell am I supposed to do, huh?”
“Well, let’s see,” Dean begins, and suddenly he’s angry, irrationally angry, so fucking pissed off he feels like crushing something, all the tension and the fear and the ugliness and monstrosity of the last two months flaring bright and lethal in his blood. He rises to his feet, and his voice rises along with his body. “You’re not a friggin’ vampire, so sucking blood shouldn’t even be an option.”
“I’m doing it to get stronger,” Sam counters, but Dean talks over him easily.
“Don’t make excuses, Sam! Excuses don’t work anymore, not when you’ve gone this far off the crazy farm.” He shifts, scratching at his eyebrows in confusion, maybe disgust. Shit, okay, definitely disgust. “What in the hell did you think was gonna happen, huh? You just thought hey, I’ll ‘roid out on some demon blood, kick Lilith’s ass, and then everything’ll go back to peachy keen?”
“Dean -”
“It doesn’t work that way, Sammy. You’re drinking demon blood, for fuck’s sake!”
Sam jolts from the bed and he’s inches from Dean’s face within a second. “Keep your fucking voice down,” he warns.
Dean shakes his head with a bitter laugh. “Now you wanna keep it a secret, huh? You wanna just shrug it all off, pretend like you goin’ balls-out crazy on Bobby yesterday was just a - a bad mood? You were just man-PMSing, right?”
Sam’s jaw sets. His lips twitch in that frustrated, defiant way of his. “Shut your mouth,” he says, low, measured, and Dean’s eyes narrow.
“Why do you do it?”
Sam shakes his head, just barely. He stilts his hands on his hips, fists working; Dean recognizes the signs. He knows Sam is struggling to contain himself, trying hard not to let his temper take over and allow him to crack one across Dean’s jaw. Regardless, he continues.
“When the hell did this happen to you, huh? While I was in Hell? You just got bored one day and started suckin’ Hell-bitch juice?” Dean shakes his head, bitter, and all at once it hits him like an earthquake beneath the flesh that he’s just about at the end of his rope. His chest is hurting and his vision is clouding and he’s got a headache building in the front of his skull that could drive a lesser person crazy, words like monster and fucking Ruby and sick spooling through his head, and he knows he’s just about broken by the words stumbling out of his mouth. It’s everything that’s been coiling up inside of his mind for months now, everything he wishes he could have forgotten, shoved to the background, buried beneath layers and layers of fresh new emotion, hidden behind a new hunt. But instead of concern, like he should have been feeling for his brother since Reno, instead of empathy or worry or compassion for Sam, what he’d really been feeling was revulsion.
Revulsion and fear.
He shakes his head, and he’s not surprised when he thinks he feels a tear carve a glistening streak down his face. He pushes a hand roughly against his brother’s shoulder when he doesn’t offer a response. “Why do you do it, Sam? I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Sam mumbles, as if he is containing some impossibly large and dangerous monster within his body.
“Why?” Another knock, and Sam’s breath rakes in quickly. “My little brother wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t reduce himself to some - blood-sucking freak.”
Sam winces and his shoulders raise in a fractured breath, but he doesn’t respond, and that fact alone wrenches Dean’s voice out louder this time.
“Who the hell are you, huh?!”
“I don’t know!” Sam shouts, his voice enormous and his hands stone-hard and strong when they come up to crush against Dean’s chest, knocking him straight back onto the floor.
Dean blinks, climbing easily to his knees, and when Sam continues it’s not sharp and angry like it was before. It’s not hurtful, or rough, or spiteful. Not monstrous.
It’s desperate.
“I don’t know, Dean,” he breathes. “I don’t know who I am anymore, because I can’t remember anything from before!”
Tentatively, Dean slides a knee forward, braces a hand on his bed. His pulse is thrashing in his temples, bleeding all the anger and the humiliation and the heartbreak out of his brain and replacing it with a distinct sense of urgency, of what the fuck happens now, the piercing unfamiliarity of being completely out of his depth. “Of course you can remember,” he says, though he’s not sure if he’s trying more to convince Sam or himself.
“No,” Sam chokes. He shifts his weight, shrugs a hand through the air. Twists the other in his belt loop. “I don’t remember anything, it’s all gone. It’s like it’s just a - blank slate.”
And then he’s on his knees right in front of Dean, with his hands pressing hard against the mess where his eyes should be, and by the shattered breaths dragging in and out of his throat Dean thinks there should be tears, but there’s not. As he watches the shake of his brother’s shoulders and the bones spearing out in his hands with the tension builds up in them, the sweat on his forehead and the erratic twists of his hair and the whipping tendons in his neck when he struggles to fight in each breath, he wonders if Sam even can cry anymore.
“Okay,” Dean offers, uneasily. He takes a calculated step toward Sam, but when he extends a hand it instantly gets swatted away. Which, for some reason, sets something off inside of Dean and suddenly he’s not spiteful or angry or confused anymore. He’s just - fuck, he’s sad, and desperate, and determined to get his brother back. He’s dizzy and reeling and he can’t really think anything besides no no no and wrong wrong so fucking wrong, but he elbows through the forefront and fishes around until he locks on a good memory, one that he knows Sam will remember. “Okay, just - just think about Arizona, huh? Yeah.” He inches closer again, and surprisingly Sam doesn’t react. He keeps his hands to himself this time, though.
“Yeah, think about Arizona when we got stranded out in the desert with that haunted cemetery.” Dean runs his tongue quickly along his lips and keeps going, and fuck, at this point he doesn’t know if it’s to reaffirm Sam’s identity, Sam’s memories, or his own. “Think about how it was hot, it was so friggin’ hot, and clear, and when we got to top of those hills we could see for miles. Just these angry red mesas, sprawled out across the whole world, like that’s all that existed. Remember? We could see for miles, like it was just infinite, like it went on forever to the ends of the friggin’ universe.”
“No!” Sam’s voice is loud, breaking desperate and rough across the short distance between them. “No, Dean! I don’t remember, I don’t remember Arizona, I don’t remember what the desert looks like because I can’t see anything anymore!”
Somewhere in the distance, Dean can hear Bobby moving around downstairs, and the fact makes him strangely grateful. No one else but him should ever have to see Sam this way. This broken down and degraded and weathered. The words churn in his stomach but they come out in an unstoppable storm, stuttering and nonsensical and even if they’re pathetically weak it doesn’t even bother him.
“But - you can remember, Sammy, just - just think about it as hard as you can.” Again he reaches forward to get his hands around Sam’s wrists, but Sam sneers and whips his arms straight out of his grip. Dean anxiously licks his lips, shakes his head. Drags his knees along the cruel roughness of the floor until he can feel splinters jabbing into his flesh, but even the pain of it doesn’t stop him. “The sky was red, remember, just as red as it could be, and then it went purple, like this crazy neon violet color, while we sat on the hood of the Impala and - Gentleman Jack.” A wide clumsy smile breaks all across Dean’s lips and he bends, trying to look Sam straight in the face. His chest goes cold and arrhythmic when Sam won’t - or, fuck, can’t - look at him, or even face him directly. “We were drinkin’ Gentleman Jack straight outta the bottle, remember? And then we started driving, just - driving, no idea where we were headed, through wild desert, not a damn thing out there for miles in any direction. Remember, we were goin’ ninety miles and hour on unpaved road and listening to the Stones, the fucking Stones, and shit just got unbelievably beautiful?”
“I don’t fucking remember, Dean!”
Dean jolts back at the words, his chest tightening.
“I can’t see it anymore, alright?” Sam chokes, his voice breaking in a retching sob, raw, scratched straight down to the bone. It reaches deep into Dean’s chest and claws its way clumsily around every corner of his body, making him ache, wringing electric pulses of pure fucking agony through every cell and fiber and thought. Sam presses his hands to the scarred caverns of his eye sockets, rocks forward until his elbows are almost touching the floor. “I lost it already,” he says, quieter, “Just like I’ll lose everything else, and just like I’ll lose you.”
“Sammy,” Dean says, because he doesn’t have anything else fucking left to say.
“I can feel it already,” Sam answers. He sniffs sharply, his shoulders curling in on themselves with the action. One of his palms shifts to his forehead and rests there. Dean swallows back a swell of nausea as he watches wild copper strands of hair sneak through Sam’s fingers to ghost against his wristbones; his hair’s too long. He needs a haircut, but who the fuck cares about that right now? Sam takes a mighty gulp of air and says, weakly, “I can feel you fading already.”
With a sigh, deep enough that it squeezes every shade of oxygen from his lungs until he damn near feels asphyxiated, Dean twists his body so that he’s sitting close enough to knock an elbow against Sam’s side. “Hey,” he says, quiet; Sam doesn’t move. “I’m not goin’ anywhere, okay? I’m not fading. Alright? Ever. I don’t care if you forget - what color my eyes are or what my stupid hair looks like.”
Sam’s lips part and he grinds his teeth, jaw jutting out defiantly. He sits up with a slowly-leaked sigh, head dropping back. Despite his eyes catching on a thin line of blood leaking along Sam’s temple where he must have scratched one of the scars open, Dean quirks a grin. “Hey. Least you can’t bitch at me for wearin’ black shoes with a brown belt anymore.”
Barely, Sam exhales a laugh through his nose. “That’s not funny.”
“Yeah it is,” Dean says flippantly. “You know I’m hilarious.”
Minutes pass while the silence irons out - Dean collecting himself, Sam sitting there spent and breathing. When Dean climbs back to his feet, he bumps a hand against Sam’s shoulder, leaving it extended there so Sam can feel it. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go get a beer.”
Sam snarks, but pulls against his hand anyway, standing slowly. “Not really big on the social scene, Dean.”
“What, are you kiddin’ me?” Dean asks incredulously. “You know how much ass you could get, being the blind guy? Chicks eat that stuff up.”
Sam breathes out a hushed snicker, dusting his palms over his thighs. “Okay - using my handicap to bag chicks? That’s low even for you.”
Dean paws a dismissive hand through the air. “Nah, I’ve done much worse.” He flips his jacket from the foot of the bed, absently rubbing the ache building low on his hip where he hit the floor, and somehow manages to sound almost genuinely cheery when he says, “Anyway, pull up your bootstraps. Let’s go, huh?”
He summons his best winning grin, fuck if Sam can’t see it, when he says, “We’ll even get you some sexy Ray-bans if it makes you feel better.” And that must sell Sam, because a skewed smirk hooks one side of his lips and he asks Dean to help him find his jacket.
Dean tries to keep up his façade of easy charm, the careless one, the strong one, but even as he’s getting ready it takes him four tries to tie his shoelaces right, and fifteen minutes of searching before he remembers that his keys are already in his pocket. He can let it slide off his back easily enough, but only on the outside. He can’t let Sam know how scared he is, or how much it terrified him and shattered him at once, seeing his little brother lose everything like that. Some of the things he said… Fuck. Dean doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to wash that stain out of his mind.
He sucks down beers fast, even if it pisses Bobby off that he’s driving drunk as a skunk. Because as the night winds down and he’s leaning his elbows on the bar, regaling carefully-fabricated big fish stories with the local drunks around him and his little brother at his side, the telltale ring of his laugh spiking through the crowd in errant places, the world tilts. And even though on the inside he’s more wrecked and mauled than he ever has been, in this moment he’s suddenly more balanced than he has been in three long months.
~ ~ ~
By the time Dean makes it into bed, he’s had about a keg’s worth of Heineken and half a bottle of Crown, and he manages somehow to get his completely wasted brother into bed without any help whatsoever from Sam himself, and he can’t decide if he’d rather puke or sleep, so he drags a trash can across the room and collapses onto his bed, and he’s passed out cold within the first three minutes of lying there.
At half past four in the morning, he wakes up.
There’s a distinct absence of sound - just Sam’s light breathing from across the room and the consistent background drone of crickets - and a warm pressure coiled against the length of his back that doesn’t quite feel right. He doesn’t open his eyes, but he inhales deep and strong, and when recognition snaps in his head he doesn’t know if he should be more angry or overjoyed or comforted or ambivalent, so instead he just squeezes his eyes, draws a methodical breath, and asks, “Am I dreaming?”
“No,” comes the low drawl of Castiel’s voice. Dean’s entire body rushes with pins and needles at the familiar sound.
“So you’re really here?”
“Yes.”
Dean sighs, but he doesn’t move. Castiel’s hand rests on his back, a subtle warm pressure in the center of his spine. Just that touch alone washes away almost all of the animosity that’s built up behind Dean’s tongue over three months.
Holy shit. Three months.
He hasn’t seen or heard from Castiel in three months, and now suddenly here he is.
Dean shifts to exhale a quivering breath into the open air, unobstructed by the pillow he’d been lying against before. “God, Cas… I didn’t -”
“Shhh,” Castiel hushes in a careful whisper as his hand smoothes around Dean’s shoulder; he brings one finger up to rest against his lips. Silence settles, pulls out into a long rhythmic beat as Dean’s pulse quickens just enough to feel it in the crooks of his elbows, the pads of his fingers. Castiel’s palm flattens against his throat, smoothly sneaks down the line of his chest, over the faint ridges of his ribs, finally coming to rest on the subtle bend of his waist. “Keep your voice down,” he says, his words pouring directly into Dean’s ear from not even an inch away. Dean shivers, pulls a breath in through his teeth.
For a long time, he just waits. Eyes shut, focusing on the weight of Castiel’s hand just above his stomach. After a stretch of strained minutes, the lines of their bodies flushed together, Castiel’s hand shifts another inch down, methodical and graceful as a tarantula. His voice is smoky, sweet, when he says, “Don’t wake your brother.”
Dean’s eyes open, and he’s surprised at how easy it is to see despite the darkness. He turns, just barely, and peers over his shoulder. Castiel’s face is impassive, but serene, as he leans on the straight angle of his elbow. He’s not wearing his coats, which for some reason Dean finds comforting; the darkness bleeds into the sharp whiteness of his shirt, stains it a dusty periwinkle. He doesn’t move when Dean looks at him; simply returns the stare, an indistinct gloss hazed across his features.
“Is it finished?” he asks after a pause. “Everything with Belial, I mean. Is he gone for good?”
Castiel nods briefly.
“What happened?” Dean asks, genuinely curious.
“Sam exposed the demon, and in our true forms I was able to overpower him. He’s been destroyed.”
Dean nods, letting easy silence take the reins for a while. Finally, he risks it. “He’s not good, Cas,” he says with a jerk of his head in Sam’s direction. He stays quiet, keeping his voice below a whisper so that Castiel is the only one who could possibly hear it.
Castiel’s gaze falls to rest on what Dean thinks is his lips. “I know,” he says.
Dean swallows, twists barely, but the noise of it seems like a deafening rip in the stark silence of the room so he stills almost instantly. “He’s a - shell, man,” he whispers. “He’s not Sammy anymore.”
Castiel’s lips purse slightly into a frown as he resituates against his fist. Dean brings his eyes up and they stick momentarily on the prominent bones of Castiel’s wrist, how thin and fragile they seem, and he remembers holding onto them above his head, his fingers wrapping easily around them. The blaring strength of his hands despite the slenderness of the bones within, and how remarkably soft they were, fluttering and shifting deftly along every part of his body. “What would you have me do?”
“Will you do it, if I ask?”
Castiel doesn’t even blink. “Anything you want.”
“Gimme back my brother,” Dean says after a beat. “Heal him, Cas.” At the words, Castiel looks to the side beneath a blink, and when Dean sees the calculations working behind them he adds on, “Please.”
“Dean…”
He waits, then nods. His lips give a bitter twist and he recognizes what Castiel’s silence means. “You can’t,” he says, not a question, and suddenly all the maddening wrath and drilling sadness and sour futility comes back to him in an unnatural rush. “Why not? Tell me, I wanna know.”
Castiel says nothing. He draws a breath, exhales it through slightly flared nostrils.
“I’m tired of bein’ jerked around, Cas,” Dean says in an acidic whisper. “Now you don’t have to sugarcoat it, just - tell me the truth. Come on, I can handle it, whatever it is. Why can’t you cure my brother?”
“Understand,” Castiel begins, then pauses. “Understand that I do have the power, Dean. But I can’t interfere.”
“Yeah?” Dean challenges. “I think you interfered enough when you scorched his eyes outta their goddamn sockets.”
Castiel’s gaze flickers to his hand, which lingers as a solid weight on Dean’s chest where he smoothes the fabric of the sheets between his fingers. “There would be consequences.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing that would make any of our lives any easier.”
“Really?” The volume of Dean’s voice rises just slightly, into a regular whisper. He twists further onto his back, a frown burying deeply in his brow. “’Cause I don’t know if you noticed or not, but Sam is blind, Cas. His life’s not exactly easy. And when his life’s not easy, my life’s not easy.”
“Accidents happen, Dean.”
The coldness of the response whips through Dean’s chest with a phantom weight, which he recognizes reluctantly as harsh honesty. Still, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t fucking hurt. “I know that, but you can take it back. You can undo it. Hop in your time machine or whatever. Please, man, I’m - begging here.” A misplaced laugh, one that dives deep into itself and disappears right after emerging. “I miss my little brother, Cas. I can’t take it, him bein’ like this.”
“I’m sorry,” is the only thing Castiel says in response.
Dean’s lips twist bitterly as he exhales a quiet snark. “Boy,” he says, shaking his head. “You are one spineless sonofabitch, you know that? You’re just gonna bail out? That’s your way of dealing with this?”
“No.”
“You can help him, Cas! I know you can!” Dean steels his jaw; shakes his head adamantly. “Screw your ethics code, dude, this is Sammy we’re talkin’ about here.”
“It’s not my place to -”
“If you say intervene, so help me God, I will knock your goddamn teeth to the back of your throat so fast.”
Castiel hesitates, either stung by the vehemence in Dean’s voice or agitated at his impatience; he remains, as always, completely fucking unreadable. The lock of their eyes is steady, and neither one of them wants to break it first, but eventually Castiel breathes out a tight sigh as his gaze falls once against to an indiscriminate point on Dean’s chest. “If I could help, I would.”
“I don’t believe you,” Dean instantly snaps.
“You should.” Castiel doesn’t miss a beat.
“Why.”
“Because it’s the truth.”
Dean’s lips curl into a slight snarl, his blood flaring hot with the exchange. “We talkin’ truth truth, or shady angel truth with ulterior motives?”
“It’s whatever kind of truth you want it to be.”
And just - fuck that.
Dean turns away quickly, rustling the sheets over his shoulders. The room is a vague blur of shadow, all the texture of the lumber sucked away by the gloss of darkness. “Then I wanna talk to Zach.”
“Dean, if you think going over my head is going to accomplish something, you’re wrong.”
“Well I can still try.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
Dean flips back over on instinct. “You threatening me, Cas?”
Castiel swallows thickly, and even with as pissed off as he is at the moment Dean can’t maintain it when Castiel exhales long and low and his eyes soften in that distinct way that somehow absorbs all the moonlight in the room at once. His tone diminishes, lowering again to a whisper where it had previously risen to nearly full-volume. “Zachariah is the one who issued the order.”
“What?”
“Zachariah issued the standing order that no one interfere with Sam’s situation.” Castiel darts his tongue out to wet his lips, the gesture strangely human, Dean thinks, before he goes on. “Listen.”
When Dean turns his head again, a cynical snark rolling out of his throat, Castiel splays a hand on his jaw and pulls him directly back into his line of sight. “Listen.” His gaze settles above Dean’s eyes, where he moves his hand up to lightly skim a finger along his temple.
Dean blinks. Swallows. Listens. Castiel drags his fingers along the crest of his cheekbone and traces his jaw in a steady, cool pressure until he reaches his neck, settling there, directly below the curve of Dean’s jaw where his pulse is strongest.
Dean tries not to close his eyes against the gentle touch. He’s still supposed to be pissed here, goddammit, and he is, he’s royally fucking pissed actually, but it’s hard to stay that way when Castiel is pushing his hair back with fingers that feel like they’ve been charged up with spark plugs, magnetic and electric and harboring that weird secret energy he always has, touching him like licking a battery almost. Dean’s breath shakes out in a wavering curtain. Sam, he tells himself over and over, Sam, Sam is blind, he’s blind and fucked and Castiel did it, it’s his. Fucking. Fault. And Dean hates him for it.
Or at least he’s supposed to. Fuck.
“There are much larger things happening with this turn of events than you know,” Castiel says as he pets at Dean’s throat.
“Cas -”
“But rest assured,” Castiel speaks easily over his protests, “That if there were a way - any way - for me to help you and your brother, I would.” The slide of his palm along Dean’s throat, mapping out the line of his collarbone, sends shudders all along Dean’s body. “Zachariah gave a direct order; if I went against it, I think we all know what would happen.”
Dean mulls it over. “Disobedience.”
Barely, Castiel nods. “It is punishable by death, and there are other - larger things at work that I can’t just abandon.”
A pause. “You need to be able to stay, so that you can help us stop Lilith. Stop the seals from breaking.” And Dean hates the heavy darkness settling in his chest, blotting out all the outrage and desperation from before. He doesn’t like it, and he definitely doesn’t agree with it, but - fuck. He understands where Castiel is coming from. He actually understands his angle, even if he shouldn’t, and it makes his stomach wrest and his fists clench.
The next time he breathes out, it’s not only air that leaves his body. A measure of something deeper, a piece of his core or soul or whatever the fuck you want to call it dissipates right along with it, floating disembodied and transparent into the atmosphere, light as ash. Castiel can’t heal Sam, because at the cost of disobedience he would fall. And he can’t fall, because then he couldn’t help Dean, and the Seals would break and Lucifer would rise. It would be the end of everything and everyone, pandemonium on the streets, dogs and cats living together, the whole fucking piñata.
And he’s kicking himself because he shouldn’t even consider anything else besides getting Sam better, because the destruction of the world and the bloody battles of Armageddon shouldn’t even matter when compared to getting his little brother back, but he closes his eyes against the sting of it because he knows, deep down, that Castiel is right. Goddammit, he’s right, with all his infuriating logic and bigger-picture bullshit, he’s actually fucking right.
That doesn’t mean Dean has to agree with it though, because Sam.
Castiel curls his fingers along Dean’s neck and in one movement he shifts and presses his lips against Dean’s forehead, cool and soft, a subtle shimmering current melting into Dean’s skin with the touch. He brings a hand up to rest against Castiel’s wrist, and when Castiel pulls away it’s too soon. Dean’s eyes open and he looks straight at him, and Castiel looks straight back with all the unnatural grace and tenderness of something that can only be from Heaven. “This is the Apocalypse, Dean. We all need to be prepared to make sacrifices.”
Dean tenses his jaw so hard that his teeth ache with a sudden, stabbing pain. He drags his hand back onto his chest.
Fuck right and wrong.
He wants Sam back.
Even if it means the world will burn, even if it means Lilith will win and Lucifer will rise and all the battles of Heaven and Hell will rain down on six billion oblivious lives, he’d be okay with that if it meant that when things really ended, he would have Sam at his side in the final battle.
And Castiel can help, and he refuses to.
Quickly, Dean’s tongue darts out to wet his lips, a habitual nervous tick he almost regrets doing as soon as it happens. He knows Castiel can see his weakness with the gesture. He pulls in a breath; sighs it out heavy and raw. “Fuck your bigger picture, Cas.”
Castiel blinks; his head tilts at a quizzical angle as the weight of his hand becomes suddenly much more apparent against Dean’s chest.
“I’d just like to say that,” Dean continues. “Because you know what, if I’m the only one who can stop it, like you mooks keep saying? I need Sam by my side. I can’t do it without him. And if he’s blind as a bat, he can’t do that. So how the hell’s this supposed to help anybody by leaving him like this?”
“It’s helping Sam,” Castiel growls, obviously in no mood for Dean’s typical six-and-one, devil’s advocate antics.
But Dean doesn’t really give a shit what he’s in the mood for right now, unless it’s healing Sam. And since it’s quite obviously not, then, well. Fuck him. “Really. How’s that?”
Something springs into Castiel’s eyes when he turns his head slightly, narrowing his gaze at the darkness of the room. He seems to be listening intently to something, though Dean can’t hear a sound. “I’ve risked enough telling you this much,” he says quickly. “I can’t say any more. I can only hope that someday you realize what I’m doing for you and your brother.”
“So you’re not healing him.”
Castiel doesn’t even venture a response. The draw of his face is blank, the grim line of his lips in a frown. He is unchangeable and inhuman and made of stone, and it fills Dean to the brim with the worst kind of resentment. God fucking dammit, he can’t believe he ever actually thought -…
“Go fuck yourself, Cas,” he sneers. “Seriously. I’m sick of this pansy bullshit, toeing the line between black and white all the time. I’m done, Cas. We’re done.” A sickened laugh bubbles out of his chest. “And I thought you wanted to help me.”
Dean hears something creak around him, but he doesn’t look away from Castiel’s eyes, all cold and silver and fuming with unearthly fury. Even with all of his ridiculous rage Dean shudders at the inherent power in them, and the only word in his head as the thoughts bleach out in his struggle to begin hating the one person - fuck, creature - besides Sam who ever did him a damn bit of good, the one who believed in him and saved him and maybe even loved him, is terrifying.
Any other time it would have intimidated Dean, but at this moment it doesn’t. The walls are pulling together, toward themselves, threatening to collapse in zero gravity, but even that doesn’t stop his words.
“You’re selfish. Spineless. You are physically incapable of going against your precious orders, aren’t you? I bet if Zachariah told you to bump me off, you wouldn’t even second-guess it. You’d pull the gloves off and go to town, wouldn’t you?”
All of the danger and strained tension in Castiel’s countenance melts away, hardens into an impenetrable wall of opacity. “I’m not going to argue with you, Dean,” he says in an unnervingly calm tone. “You either accept this or you don’t, but either way this is how things have to happen.”
“Well then no, I don’t accept it.”
“Well then I’m sorry for your naiveté.”
And Dean really can’t think of anything to do but watch the impassive glimmer of Castiel’s eyes for a few seconds before he grounds his jaw and turns over with a mighty hrumph. His pulse is ratcheting at hazardous speeds, every inch of his body flooded with adrenaline and heat. Yet even as angry as he is, as much as he wants to turn around and slam his fists against the unbreakable wall of Castiel’s chest, claw out his eyes, rip apart that fucking body he knows so well limb from limb, he doesn’t fight against it when he feels the soft, tentative press of a kiss to the back of his shoulder, cool lips meeting flushed naked skin.
His eyes roll shut and he thinks about forgetting it all, twisting back and crushing his mouth to Castiel’s not just to shut him up, but because he missed him so goddamn much and that’s the only way he could ever think to express it… But then he feels a breeze, hears a slight familiar fluttering, and suddenly he’s alone again, with goosebumps on his skin and the hushed sounds of Sam breathing through sleep on the other side of the room.
~ ~ ~
{to be continued...}
ONTO PART FOURTEEN
Also, new layout is hearts'n'stars'n'rainbows! Maybe not candy red balloons, though, I'm still shady about those guys.
Title: The Propensities of Good Men, 13/15 (Changed back to a question mark because pt 16 may get cut down to 15. Ambivalence is forever my bane, so we are thus relegated back to ye olde question mark.)
Characters: Bobby, Castiel, Dean, Sam
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: ...R?
Word Count: 9,099
Disclaimer: Pffft, I wish.
Warnings: Massive whump, and I do mean massive. Angst, angst, and more angst. And Dean and Cas are just not getting along right now, tsk tsk. Things get much shinier and prettier in the next chapter, though, I promise. Don't run for the hills yet.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
~ ~ ~
The call comes when Dean is in Nebraska, tracking a wily clan of vampires that have been making their mark all across the Midwest. They haven’t been inconspicuous at all - leaving corpses in the streets, attacking in plain sight - which tells Dean they must be young. They’ve had a good run through Oklahoma and Kansas, racking up an impressive body count as they went, but Dean has the fuckers cornered in a farmhouse outside Bridgeport now. Their nest, a ruddy shack stuffed deep into the back woods off Highway 92. Just one building, thankfully. It would be easy to burn to the ground. He’s more than a little wary of taking on the whole clan by himself, but Bobby was tied up with a shapeshifter in Barstow and he wasn’t about to drag Sam into a hunt. The kid could barely walk down the hall without tripping over something. Dean hadn’t even felt comfortable leaving him alone to go hunting, but Sam insisted he would be fine. And he didn’t really have a solid argument against going, so he left.
It’s been almost three months, and Dean hates to admit it but he hasn’t seen any signs of Sam adjusting to his blindness. In all actuality, he seems to have gotten worse. He’s angrier than he ever was before, and he doesn’t talk much. In all fairness, though, that could have something to do with Dean not knowing what the hell to say to him these days. Every word felt forced and bitter; he practically had to roll everything around in his mouth for a full minute before he ever built up the courage to choke it out. And most of the time, Sam only responded with either complete silence or - more frequently - an acidic backlash.
There’s only so much of that a guy can take before he starts getting really fucking antsy, so when the chance came for a hunt, Dean was all over it.
He shifts uncomfortably in the creaking leather, readjusting the rearview mirror with a sigh. When he steals a quick glance at his reflection, he instantly wishes he hadn’t. Beneath his eyes is marked with dark smudges, purplish bruises of exhaustion, just as much mental as it is physical. He’s fucking wiped these days.
Sam isn’t Sam anymore. Years back, when he had first come to terms with leading the life of a hunter, that all his friends and credentials and normality were shot to shit, he had become resentful for a time. When he had been possessed and killed Steve Wandell, it had almost destroyed him. Dean had never seen his little brother retreat so far into thought so often. Never seen him stare off into space with the vacant expression of a man resigned to his own fate, one that he hated more than anything, but after relentless goading and a couple of cringing Hallmark moments, eventually Sam moved on. Dean watched as he grew used to living quick and dirty - scamming credit cards and hustling pool and keeping a sharp eye out for the quickest way to make an under-the-table buck. Hell, he might have even started to like it. And when he reached that point, that’s when Dean had been able to take a step back and view his brother as more of an equal, rather than a clumsy kid who needed his back watched at all times. Sam wasn’t that kid anymore - he was scheming and calculating, just as much if not more than Dean ever had been. Because with Sam, it wasn’t always obvious that he was manipulating the girl in his lap or the scotch-buzzed businessman, or even the four hundred-pound leather-vested Hell’s Angel. Dean was the only one who could see it - the new edge to Sam’s smile when he knew he had his claws in someone, that the plan was immaculate and he would come out shining on the other end of this one. When they played perfectly oblivious into his plan. Dean still couldn’t say what it was exactly - his grin or a new, feline sway of his body. Something dark and collected stirring behind his eyes when he slid a glance in Dean’s direction to signal that things were all systems go. Regardless, though, the underhanded connoisseur he had trained so well over the years wasn’t one of his proudest achievements, and when Dean really thinks about it, sometimes he almost feels guilty. The tricky hustler who wasn’t afraid to wrestle anybody out of a hard-earned dollar was not his little brother as he remembered him. Wasn’t the quiet bookworm who would rather analyze Coleridge than nab a poltergeist, the one who waited on the couch for Dean and Dad to get home, who quietly patched their wounds, fluttered wide gentle hands across their skin until they were safely bandaged up.
It felt wrong, corruptive. Sammy shouldn’t be the one muddying his conscience and getting his hands dirty. Shouldn’t be living in the gray areas. That was Dean’s job.
Now, though, the world apparently worked on a sliding scale and things were irrevocably fucked up. Now Sam was just downright scary, and if Dean could pick between the calculating con artist he felt guilty of creating and what his brother had become since being blinded, he’d pick the sleazy bar fly any day of the week.
He misses his little brother, and as bad as it aches he can’t shake the question of when - if - he’s ever going to see his goofy, smirking ass again.
The ring of his phone just about jolts him clean out of his fucking skin. He sighs through flared nostrils when he sees it’s Bobby’s number and flips it open with a languid blink. Nothing stirs in the barn ahead of him. “Madame Fook-yu’s Palace, happy ending free with purchase,” he chimes unenthusiastically.
“You better get here,” Bobby says gruffly.
Dean blinks. “I thought you were in Barstow?”
“Got back early.”
“Huh.” He ducks down when he sees a flash of movement ahead. A radio roars up, death metal pealing into the country silence. An engine revs almost immediately afterward, before headlights flare through the barn door’s slats. Dean rushes out his words when he says, “I can’t talk now, Bobby, ‘bout to take down these freaks’ nest. Call you back.” He flips his phone shut and pockets it, sneaks out of the car into the line of bushes near the clearing where the barn crouches.
Two vampires emerge - a blonde chick and a curly-headed brunette who looks like he stepped straight out of a Ralph Lauren catalog; Dean recognizes both of them from the local dive bar’s parking lot - to drag the barn doors open for the convertible Mustang that pulls out. Cherry red, white decals, pristine rims. No license plates, Dean notices. Surely it’s stolen, but no telling from whom. Probably some poor bloodless bastard chilling in the city morgue or rotting in a ditch somewhere. These fuckers didn’t seem to have much regard for their meals once they had their fill. Not that any vampires did, but this clan in particular was worse. They were ravenous. And, lucky for Dean, also careless.
The vibration of his phone makes him jump again. He silences it quickly and bares his teeth in a sneer when he sees it’s Bobby again. “Bobby, seriously,” he hisses quickly. The same two vampires shut the barn doors and hop into the back of the Mustang. The engine grumbles artfully and a dust cloud tears up from the ground as they peel out down the dirt road, music blaring, liquor sloshing, party screams high-pitched and wild. “I’m a little busy right -”
“It’s Sam,” Bobby interrupts.
Taken aback, Dean crinkles his eyebrows in confusion. “What?”
“Get your ass back here, idget,” Bobby growls. “Your brother needs you.”
“What happened, is he okay?” Dean asks, suddenly unconcerned about the rise of his voice and that it might open him up to an attack at any second. Fuck it - Sam. His pulse speeds up and his eyes go dry. A thick clammy sweat builds on his palm against the phone’s plastic.
Bobby hesitates, then with a sigh he says, “Just get here,” and hangs up.
~ ~ ~
Four hours shift past in a blur before Dean is swiping a hand back to slam the Impala’s door, his boots scraping loud and dirty against the gravel of the driveway. He takes the stairs two at a time, and when he slips quickly through the front door it claps shut right behind him with a ratcheting clatter. “Sam!”
But the house is quiet. No response meets his voice - not Sam, not Bobby. The pre-dawn stillness rails a shiver along his spine.
“Sam?” He takes a careful step into the living room; checks the kitchen; the den. All empty. “Bobby?”
The subtle thud of movement behind him stiffens his shoulders, spins him in a complete 180. His pistol is in his hand quicker than a lightning split, poised in a perfect straight line at eye-level with the silhouette behind him. “Don’t move unless you wanna catch a bullet with your teeth,” he spits as he turns.
“Jesus, boy,” Bobby jeers. He swats the barrel of Dean’s pistol away from his face easily.
“Bobby - sorry,” Dean offers, exhaling the breath he didn’t notice he’d been holding. With a shrug, he tucks his gun into his belt and flips his shirt over it. “Don’t sneak up on me like that, dude, I almost turned your brains into a Jackson Pollack.”
Bobby watches with narrowed eyes as Dean braces his hands on his knees, bending at the waist to steady his fluttering pulse. “You couldn’t even if you tried,” he teases, but without any real joviality.
“Where’s Sammy?” Dean asks through a ragged breath. He quirks an eyebrow as Bobby scratches at his beard and his forehead wrinkles in hesitation. “Bobby, where is he?”
“He’s upstairs,” Bobby replies with a shrug. Dean keeps his eyes on the hunter as he brushes past, falling lazily into the chair behind his desk, nearly disappearing behind an impressive mountain of dusty books and file folders. He rubs over his face with a sigh that Dean can’t read - exasperated, anxious, irritated, maybe even remorseful. He peeks quickly up the stairs, but second-guesses it and instead walks closer to Bobby.
“What happened?”
The shrug of Bobby’s hand is a slow, careless flip through the air. “Hell if I know,” he gripes. “I got back ‘bout five hours ago, he’d already flipped a shit.”
Dean’s weight shifts. “Like how?”
Bobby gives a disgruntled sigh as he leans back, arms crossing slowly over his chest. Dean can’t help the slight discomfort he feels at the motion; he knows what it means. That’s how Bobby gets when he’s got a much bigger bone to pick than just what’s initially going on. He knows there’s a splinter under the surface, and that it’s been scratching at Dean for months now. His eyebrows raise disapprovingly as Dean instinctively swallows.
“Dean, I ain’t an idiot,” Bobby says quietly. “I know your brother’s been through a lot, and I know it’s hard for you to see him like this.”
Dean’s gaze falls to the floor, because he doesn’t know where else to put it.
“But there’s somethin’ else goin’ on here,” Bobby continues, his tone sharp. “And I think I should know about it, since you’re crashin’ my gate and all. You ain’t talkin’ to Sam for some reason, and it ain’t ‘cause he’s blind.”
A pause; Dean sniffs awkwardly, shuffles his feet around in perfect Charlie Brown fashion. Feel like a total fucking douche because the only thing he can come up with to say is, “What do you mean?”
Bobby doesn’t move, doesn’t even shift his penetrating stare. “You’re nervous ‘bout somethin’, I can smell it. Least I can guess, it has somethin’ to do with Sam.”
And Dean doesn’t even respond, because there’s really nothing he can say. A tense silence settles across the room - Bobby waiting for an answer and Dean swimming through every excuse not to give him one - until finally he manages, “It’s kind of private.”
Bobby’s eyes grow wide, incredulous. “Oh, a secret?”
“Kind of,” Dean answers with a nervous shrug. Nervous, tense, scared, fuck, all of the above. Bobby was fucking intimidating when he wanted to be, goddamn.
“And who the hell am I gonna tell?” Bobby challenges; Dean bites his cheek. “What, you afraid I’m gonna blab to the other kids on the playground? Start a cootie rumor?” He paws a hand through the air and finishes, “Come on, Dean. You know better’n that.”
A leaden sigh fights out of Dean’s throat as his head falls back. Bobby had this way about him that could squeeze the last drop of information from a black-ops KGB agent if he wanted to. Telling him about the dreams, the blood, Sam’s lingering animosity toward Castiel ever since he’d learned of the angel’s bond with Dean, though - that was a lot to throw out in the open at once. Dean decides the best thing to do is just ignore it. He stilts his hand on his hips and looks Bobby straight in the face. “I swear I’ll catch you up later, okay, just - tell me what happened. How’d he flip out?”
“Well,” Bobby begins with a groan as he climbs to his feet. His voice echoes behind him, baiting Dean to follow, as he shuffles to the kitchen. “He owes me a new set a’deck chairs, I can tell you that. And a front window. And don’t think I’m just gonna forget about you tellin’ me what’s goin’ on in that airhead of yours, either.”
Dean hikes an eyebrow and sits down uneasily at the dining table. He watches absently as Bobby shifts and clatters things around in his sleep-hazed search to make coffee. “He went WWF on your furniture?”
Bobby nods; Dean simply purses his lips, angles his jaw in thought. “Did he say why?”
Reluctantly, Bobby braces his hands on the cabinet and stares hard at Dean, who practically fucking shivers under the pressure of the gaze. “And then some.”
For a long time, silence draws out. Then Dean blinks expectantly, asks, “So?”, and Bobby withdraws a silver flask from the pocket of his bathrobe and flips it at Dean. He barely catches it.
“He kept sayin’, I’m out, I’m out, and when I asked him what in tarnation he was yappin’ about, he threw that at my chest and told me to butt out. In some choice words that I’d rather not repeat,” he finishes bitterly.
Warily, Dean eyes the flask. He opens it and takes a whiff, but there’s nothing telling inside - no scent, no colors, no clues as to what the hell Sam could be so upset about running out of, except -…
A deep, squirming pit of apprehension builds in the floor of his belly. It would make sense, but surely Sam wasn’t that far gone. Flasks of demon blood? What the fuck, no way, that’s fucking ridiculous. Just the thought that Sam would even consider something so demented drills a pertinent shudder through every one of Dean’s muscles. But as he really considers it, his mind reeling with all the countless possibilities, the more sense it makes, and the more painful, the more black, the pit grows.
Ah, fuck.
He tucks the flask neatly into his pocket and clears his throat, rising from the table with as innocent of a shrug as he can muster. “Beats the hell outta me,” he chokes, and he hopes that the shake of his knees isn’t obvious, or the quiver in his voice or the sheen of sweat breaking out of every pore on his body. He makes a quick exit by saying he’s going to check on Sam, maybe grab a few hours of zees, but Bobby stops him on the stairs. Dean glances back over his shoulder, and even as he tries he can’t hide the mask of concern etched all into his features.
“He’s knocked out cold,” Bobby admits. Dean turns to face him more. “It was the only way I could get him to stop rantin’ and ravin’.”
“Wait, you just bopped him on the head and threw him upstairs?”
“Yeah,” Bobby says casually, with a shrug, as if it was the most natural conclusion to be drawn. Dean grounds his jaw and glances up the dark incline where the stairs build stacks of gradually darkening shades of gray. “Dean…”
He looks back down, eyebrows knotted in some tangled collision of fear, confusion, anticipation, concern. Anger. Bobby raises a hand and shakes his head.
“Somethin’ big’s goin’ on with your brother. You best find out what it is, ‘fore he goes completely off the deep end.” He hesitates, softens his eyes a shade when he sees the worry that must be burned into Dean’s. “Scary as it is, I think he’s already gettin’ pretty damn close.”
Dean just nods, because what the fuck else is he supposed to do?
When he finally builds up the courage to crack the door open, after three full minutes, Sam is still unconscious, breathing easily as Dean watches the subtle inflation-deflation cadence of his chest. One of his hands lies across his stomach, long tapered fingers relaxed and at ease. Dean grimaces when he sees the raw scrapes of Sam’s knuckles and how long spears of wood have scratched into his skin in places, probably from going batshit on the deck chairs. He smirks when he remembers the impassive blink of Sam’s eyes when he’d told Dean once before that it wasn’t fair to dissipate rage on inanimate objects because they couldn’t fight back; swallows back a wave of nausea when his eyes catch on the thick scars mangling the flesh where his brother’s should be.
For a long time Dean just watches him - the rhythm of his breathing, his startling lack of expression. It’s rare, not seeing combative annoyance or sorrow or wrath or even the deep furrows of thought built into his features. Dean knows he can’t be dreaming anything good - since when had the Winchesters ever been the type for fucking rainbows and Candyland dreams? - but at least he seems peaceful.
He strips off his mud-streaked clothes and curls into the sheets, inhaling the musty scents of pine and cotton, wades through all the nostalgic flashbacks of cedar trees and hunting cabins in the middle of uncharted woods, Dad teaching him how to shoot tin cans off a log from fifty yards away - he bulls-eyed every one of those sons of bitches - and just when he’s about to fold into the soft haze of slumber, the thought flickers across his mind that maybe he should be sleeping downstairs just in case Sam wakes up in a rage. He instantly stuffs the thought into the back of his mind, and kicks himself into a restless sleep for even thinking that kind of shit, for being afraid of, his little brother.
~ ~ ~
Sam wakes up in a rage.
The first thing that draws Dean out of sleep into instant alertness is the rattling slam of the door. He sits up quick, buck knife in hand sooner than his eyes open. “Sam?”
He doesn’t seem shocked to hear Dean’s voice. He’s sitting on his bed, fingers curled tightly into the blankets, and when Dean narrows his eyes he notices that Sam looks sick. Very, very sick.
“Dude, what’s goin’ on with you?” Dean asks. He tosses the covers back and clumsily pulls on the same clothes he wore the day before. “Huh? You don’t look too hot.”
“I am crawling,” Sam begins, and pushes up from the bed to pace restlessly. His voice rises inexplicably when he finishes, “Out of my fucking skin.”
Confusedly, Dean blinks. “Sammy, man - what the hell?”
“Give it back,” Sam slices venomously. He extends a palm, and Dean tightens his jaw at the gesture.
“What?”
“You know what, now give it fucking back.”
“Sammy, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man,” Dean lies through his best false laugh. He finds his entire body withdrawing sharply as the sweep of Sam’s arm overtakes the end table, cleanly swiping every lamp and alarm clock and beer bottle off onto the floor in a clattering crash.
“I’m not kidding, Dean!” yells Sam, his voice thunderous and loud, and more than a little threatening. Dean’s eyes widen at the sudden flare.
Strained silence spins out as he stares at Sam and Sam simply holds out an open palm. Dean weighs the options in his head, then with a long draw of breath he digs the empty flask from his jacket pocket on the floor. Fuck it. He huffs out a sigh and slaps it in Sam’s hand. “It’s empty.”
“I know.”
“So what’s the big deal, why d’you want it back so bad?”
Sam doesn’t answer. He twists the flask in his grip for a few seconds, then spins and extends an uneasy hand to feel his way back to his bed. When he sits down, his lips part in a shaky sigh and he seems to have collapsed in on himself. It almost breaks Dean’s heart clean in fucking two, seeing him so fractured, so weak and paralyzed. He searches Sam’s entire body, from the careless slick of his hair to the swell of scar tissue replacing his eyes, the waxy yellow pallor of his skin, dampened with sweat. How he holds onto the flask so tightly, as if it’s his lifeline, vine-like blue veins spiking out of his skin and crawling steadily up his forearms. Something lessens in Dean’s chest and he swings his legs out of bed and steadies them on the floor. “Sam,” he begins cautiously, rubbing at the triangle of muscle in his shoulder that rips with fiery tension.
Barely, Sam’s head cocks in acknowledgment.
Dean breathes out a furious sigh, shrugging his hands through the air. “Elephant in the room, okay.” He clears his throat. “You don’t expect me to believe that was J&B you’ve been slurpin’ outta that thing ever since Reno, do you?”
Sam’s jaw tightens, but he says nothing.
“Sam.”
“What?” he hisses, his tone acidic. “What, Dean? What the hell am I supposed to do, huh?”
“Well, let’s see,” Dean begins, and suddenly he’s angry, irrationally angry, so fucking pissed off he feels like crushing something, all the tension and the fear and the ugliness and monstrosity of the last two months flaring bright and lethal in his blood. He rises to his feet, and his voice rises along with his body. “You’re not a friggin’ vampire, so sucking blood shouldn’t even be an option.”
“I’m doing it to get stronger,” Sam counters, but Dean talks over him easily.
“Don’t make excuses, Sam! Excuses don’t work anymore, not when you’ve gone this far off the crazy farm.” He shifts, scratching at his eyebrows in confusion, maybe disgust. Shit, okay, definitely disgust. “What in the hell did you think was gonna happen, huh? You just thought hey, I’ll ‘roid out on some demon blood, kick Lilith’s ass, and then everything’ll go back to peachy keen?”
“Dean -”
“It doesn’t work that way, Sammy. You’re drinking demon blood, for fuck’s sake!”
Sam jolts from the bed and he’s inches from Dean’s face within a second. “Keep your fucking voice down,” he warns.
Dean shakes his head with a bitter laugh. “Now you wanna keep it a secret, huh? You wanna just shrug it all off, pretend like you goin’ balls-out crazy on Bobby yesterday was just a - a bad mood? You were just man-PMSing, right?”
Sam’s jaw sets. His lips twitch in that frustrated, defiant way of his. “Shut your mouth,” he says, low, measured, and Dean’s eyes narrow.
“Why do you do it?”
Sam shakes his head, just barely. He stilts his hands on his hips, fists working; Dean recognizes the signs. He knows Sam is struggling to contain himself, trying hard not to let his temper take over and allow him to crack one across Dean’s jaw. Regardless, he continues.
“When the hell did this happen to you, huh? While I was in Hell? You just got bored one day and started suckin’ Hell-bitch juice?” Dean shakes his head, bitter, and all at once it hits him like an earthquake beneath the flesh that he’s just about at the end of his rope. His chest is hurting and his vision is clouding and he’s got a headache building in the front of his skull that could drive a lesser person crazy, words like monster and fucking Ruby and sick spooling through his head, and he knows he’s just about broken by the words stumbling out of his mouth. It’s everything that’s been coiling up inside of his mind for months now, everything he wishes he could have forgotten, shoved to the background, buried beneath layers and layers of fresh new emotion, hidden behind a new hunt. But instead of concern, like he should have been feeling for his brother since Reno, instead of empathy or worry or compassion for Sam, what he’d really been feeling was revulsion.
Revulsion and fear.
He shakes his head, and he’s not surprised when he thinks he feels a tear carve a glistening streak down his face. He pushes a hand roughly against his brother’s shoulder when he doesn’t offer a response. “Why do you do it, Sam? I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Sam mumbles, as if he is containing some impossibly large and dangerous monster within his body.
“Why?” Another knock, and Sam’s breath rakes in quickly. “My little brother wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t reduce himself to some - blood-sucking freak.”
Sam winces and his shoulders raise in a fractured breath, but he doesn’t respond, and that fact alone wrenches Dean’s voice out louder this time.
“Who the hell are you, huh?!”
“I don’t know!” Sam shouts, his voice enormous and his hands stone-hard and strong when they come up to crush against Dean’s chest, knocking him straight back onto the floor.
Dean blinks, climbing easily to his knees, and when Sam continues it’s not sharp and angry like it was before. It’s not hurtful, or rough, or spiteful. Not monstrous.
It’s desperate.
“I don’t know, Dean,” he breathes. “I don’t know who I am anymore, because I can’t remember anything from before!”
Tentatively, Dean slides a knee forward, braces a hand on his bed. His pulse is thrashing in his temples, bleeding all the anger and the humiliation and the heartbreak out of his brain and replacing it with a distinct sense of urgency, of what the fuck happens now, the piercing unfamiliarity of being completely out of his depth. “Of course you can remember,” he says, though he’s not sure if he’s trying more to convince Sam or himself.
“No,” Sam chokes. He shifts his weight, shrugs a hand through the air. Twists the other in his belt loop. “I don’t remember anything, it’s all gone. It’s like it’s just a - blank slate.”
And then he’s on his knees right in front of Dean, with his hands pressing hard against the mess where his eyes should be, and by the shattered breaths dragging in and out of his throat Dean thinks there should be tears, but there’s not. As he watches the shake of his brother’s shoulders and the bones spearing out in his hands with the tension builds up in them, the sweat on his forehead and the erratic twists of his hair and the whipping tendons in his neck when he struggles to fight in each breath, he wonders if Sam even can cry anymore.
“Okay,” Dean offers, uneasily. He takes a calculated step toward Sam, but when he extends a hand it instantly gets swatted away. Which, for some reason, sets something off inside of Dean and suddenly he’s not spiteful or angry or confused anymore. He’s just - fuck, he’s sad, and desperate, and determined to get his brother back. He’s dizzy and reeling and he can’t really think anything besides no no no and wrong wrong so fucking wrong, but he elbows through the forefront and fishes around until he locks on a good memory, one that he knows Sam will remember. “Okay, just - just think about Arizona, huh? Yeah.” He inches closer again, and surprisingly Sam doesn’t react. He keeps his hands to himself this time, though.
“Yeah, think about Arizona when we got stranded out in the desert with that haunted cemetery.” Dean runs his tongue quickly along his lips and keeps going, and fuck, at this point he doesn’t know if it’s to reaffirm Sam’s identity, Sam’s memories, or his own. “Think about how it was hot, it was so friggin’ hot, and clear, and when we got to top of those hills we could see for miles. Just these angry red mesas, sprawled out across the whole world, like that’s all that existed. Remember? We could see for miles, like it was just infinite, like it went on forever to the ends of the friggin’ universe.”
“No!” Sam’s voice is loud, breaking desperate and rough across the short distance between them. “No, Dean! I don’t remember, I don’t remember Arizona, I don’t remember what the desert looks like because I can’t see anything anymore!”
Somewhere in the distance, Dean can hear Bobby moving around downstairs, and the fact makes him strangely grateful. No one else but him should ever have to see Sam this way. This broken down and degraded and weathered. The words churn in his stomach but they come out in an unstoppable storm, stuttering and nonsensical and even if they’re pathetically weak it doesn’t even bother him.
“But - you can remember, Sammy, just - just think about it as hard as you can.” Again he reaches forward to get his hands around Sam’s wrists, but Sam sneers and whips his arms straight out of his grip. Dean anxiously licks his lips, shakes his head. Drags his knees along the cruel roughness of the floor until he can feel splinters jabbing into his flesh, but even the pain of it doesn’t stop him. “The sky was red, remember, just as red as it could be, and then it went purple, like this crazy neon violet color, while we sat on the hood of the Impala and - Gentleman Jack.” A wide clumsy smile breaks all across Dean’s lips and he bends, trying to look Sam straight in the face. His chest goes cold and arrhythmic when Sam won’t - or, fuck, can’t - look at him, or even face him directly. “We were drinkin’ Gentleman Jack straight outta the bottle, remember? And then we started driving, just - driving, no idea where we were headed, through wild desert, not a damn thing out there for miles in any direction. Remember, we were goin’ ninety miles and hour on unpaved road and listening to the Stones, the fucking Stones, and shit just got unbelievably beautiful?”
“I don’t fucking remember, Dean!”
Dean jolts back at the words, his chest tightening.
“I can’t see it anymore, alright?” Sam chokes, his voice breaking in a retching sob, raw, scratched straight down to the bone. It reaches deep into Dean’s chest and claws its way clumsily around every corner of his body, making him ache, wringing electric pulses of pure fucking agony through every cell and fiber and thought. Sam presses his hands to the scarred caverns of his eye sockets, rocks forward until his elbows are almost touching the floor. “I lost it already,” he says, quieter, “Just like I’ll lose everything else, and just like I’ll lose you.”
“Sammy,” Dean says, because he doesn’t have anything else fucking left to say.
“I can feel it already,” Sam answers. He sniffs sharply, his shoulders curling in on themselves with the action. One of his palms shifts to his forehead and rests there. Dean swallows back a swell of nausea as he watches wild copper strands of hair sneak through Sam’s fingers to ghost against his wristbones; his hair’s too long. He needs a haircut, but who the fuck cares about that right now? Sam takes a mighty gulp of air and says, weakly, “I can feel you fading already.”
With a sigh, deep enough that it squeezes every shade of oxygen from his lungs until he damn near feels asphyxiated, Dean twists his body so that he’s sitting close enough to knock an elbow against Sam’s side. “Hey,” he says, quiet; Sam doesn’t move. “I’m not goin’ anywhere, okay? I’m not fading. Alright? Ever. I don’t care if you forget - what color my eyes are or what my stupid hair looks like.”
Sam’s lips part and he grinds his teeth, jaw jutting out defiantly. He sits up with a slowly-leaked sigh, head dropping back. Despite his eyes catching on a thin line of blood leaking along Sam’s temple where he must have scratched one of the scars open, Dean quirks a grin. “Hey. Least you can’t bitch at me for wearin’ black shoes with a brown belt anymore.”
Barely, Sam exhales a laugh through his nose. “That’s not funny.”
“Yeah it is,” Dean says flippantly. “You know I’m hilarious.”
Minutes pass while the silence irons out - Dean collecting himself, Sam sitting there spent and breathing. When Dean climbs back to his feet, he bumps a hand against Sam’s shoulder, leaving it extended there so Sam can feel it. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go get a beer.”
Sam snarks, but pulls against his hand anyway, standing slowly. “Not really big on the social scene, Dean.”
“What, are you kiddin’ me?” Dean asks incredulously. “You know how much ass you could get, being the blind guy? Chicks eat that stuff up.”
Sam breathes out a hushed snicker, dusting his palms over his thighs. “Okay - using my handicap to bag chicks? That’s low even for you.”
Dean paws a dismissive hand through the air. “Nah, I’ve done much worse.” He flips his jacket from the foot of the bed, absently rubbing the ache building low on his hip where he hit the floor, and somehow manages to sound almost genuinely cheery when he says, “Anyway, pull up your bootstraps. Let’s go, huh?”
He summons his best winning grin, fuck if Sam can’t see it, when he says, “We’ll even get you some sexy Ray-bans if it makes you feel better.” And that must sell Sam, because a skewed smirk hooks one side of his lips and he asks Dean to help him find his jacket.
Dean tries to keep up his façade of easy charm, the careless one, the strong one, but even as he’s getting ready it takes him four tries to tie his shoelaces right, and fifteen minutes of searching before he remembers that his keys are already in his pocket. He can let it slide off his back easily enough, but only on the outside. He can’t let Sam know how scared he is, or how much it terrified him and shattered him at once, seeing his little brother lose everything like that. Some of the things he said… Fuck. Dean doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to wash that stain out of his mind.
He sucks down beers fast, even if it pisses Bobby off that he’s driving drunk as a skunk. Because as the night winds down and he’s leaning his elbows on the bar, regaling carefully-fabricated big fish stories with the local drunks around him and his little brother at his side, the telltale ring of his laugh spiking through the crowd in errant places, the world tilts. And even though on the inside he’s more wrecked and mauled than he ever has been, in this moment he’s suddenly more balanced than he has been in three long months.
~ ~ ~
By the time Dean makes it into bed, he’s had about a keg’s worth of Heineken and half a bottle of Crown, and he manages somehow to get his completely wasted brother into bed without any help whatsoever from Sam himself, and he can’t decide if he’d rather puke or sleep, so he drags a trash can across the room and collapses onto his bed, and he’s passed out cold within the first three minutes of lying there.
At half past four in the morning, he wakes up.
There’s a distinct absence of sound - just Sam’s light breathing from across the room and the consistent background drone of crickets - and a warm pressure coiled against the length of his back that doesn’t quite feel right. He doesn’t open his eyes, but he inhales deep and strong, and when recognition snaps in his head he doesn’t know if he should be more angry or overjoyed or comforted or ambivalent, so instead he just squeezes his eyes, draws a methodical breath, and asks, “Am I dreaming?”
“No,” comes the low drawl of Castiel’s voice. Dean’s entire body rushes with pins and needles at the familiar sound.
“So you’re really here?”
“Yes.”
Dean sighs, but he doesn’t move. Castiel’s hand rests on his back, a subtle warm pressure in the center of his spine. Just that touch alone washes away almost all of the animosity that’s built up behind Dean’s tongue over three months.
Holy shit. Three months.
He hasn’t seen or heard from Castiel in three months, and now suddenly here he is.
Dean shifts to exhale a quivering breath into the open air, unobstructed by the pillow he’d been lying against before. “God, Cas… I didn’t -”
“Shhh,” Castiel hushes in a careful whisper as his hand smoothes around Dean’s shoulder; he brings one finger up to rest against his lips. Silence settles, pulls out into a long rhythmic beat as Dean’s pulse quickens just enough to feel it in the crooks of his elbows, the pads of his fingers. Castiel’s palm flattens against his throat, smoothly sneaks down the line of his chest, over the faint ridges of his ribs, finally coming to rest on the subtle bend of his waist. “Keep your voice down,” he says, his words pouring directly into Dean’s ear from not even an inch away. Dean shivers, pulls a breath in through his teeth.
For a long time, he just waits. Eyes shut, focusing on the weight of Castiel’s hand just above his stomach. After a stretch of strained minutes, the lines of their bodies flushed together, Castiel’s hand shifts another inch down, methodical and graceful as a tarantula. His voice is smoky, sweet, when he says, “Don’t wake your brother.”
Dean’s eyes open, and he’s surprised at how easy it is to see despite the darkness. He turns, just barely, and peers over his shoulder. Castiel’s face is impassive, but serene, as he leans on the straight angle of his elbow. He’s not wearing his coats, which for some reason Dean finds comforting; the darkness bleeds into the sharp whiteness of his shirt, stains it a dusty periwinkle. He doesn’t move when Dean looks at him; simply returns the stare, an indistinct gloss hazed across his features.
“Is it finished?” he asks after a pause. “Everything with Belial, I mean. Is he gone for good?”
Castiel nods briefly.
“What happened?” Dean asks, genuinely curious.
“Sam exposed the demon, and in our true forms I was able to overpower him. He’s been destroyed.”
Dean nods, letting easy silence take the reins for a while. Finally, he risks it. “He’s not good, Cas,” he says with a jerk of his head in Sam’s direction. He stays quiet, keeping his voice below a whisper so that Castiel is the only one who could possibly hear it.
Castiel’s gaze falls to rest on what Dean thinks is his lips. “I know,” he says.
Dean swallows, twists barely, but the noise of it seems like a deafening rip in the stark silence of the room so he stills almost instantly. “He’s a - shell, man,” he whispers. “He’s not Sammy anymore.”
Castiel’s lips purse slightly into a frown as he resituates against his fist. Dean brings his eyes up and they stick momentarily on the prominent bones of Castiel’s wrist, how thin and fragile they seem, and he remembers holding onto them above his head, his fingers wrapping easily around them. The blaring strength of his hands despite the slenderness of the bones within, and how remarkably soft they were, fluttering and shifting deftly along every part of his body. “What would you have me do?”
“Will you do it, if I ask?”
Castiel doesn’t even blink. “Anything you want.”
“Gimme back my brother,” Dean says after a beat. “Heal him, Cas.” At the words, Castiel looks to the side beneath a blink, and when Dean sees the calculations working behind them he adds on, “Please.”
“Dean…”
He waits, then nods. His lips give a bitter twist and he recognizes what Castiel’s silence means. “You can’t,” he says, not a question, and suddenly all the maddening wrath and drilling sadness and sour futility comes back to him in an unnatural rush. “Why not? Tell me, I wanna know.”
Castiel says nothing. He draws a breath, exhales it through slightly flared nostrils.
“I’m tired of bein’ jerked around, Cas,” Dean says in an acidic whisper. “Now you don’t have to sugarcoat it, just - tell me the truth. Come on, I can handle it, whatever it is. Why can’t you cure my brother?”
“Understand,” Castiel begins, then pauses. “Understand that I do have the power, Dean. But I can’t interfere.”
“Yeah?” Dean challenges. “I think you interfered enough when you scorched his eyes outta their goddamn sockets.”
Castiel’s gaze flickers to his hand, which lingers as a solid weight on Dean’s chest where he smoothes the fabric of the sheets between his fingers. “There would be consequences.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing that would make any of our lives any easier.”
“Really?” The volume of Dean’s voice rises just slightly, into a regular whisper. He twists further onto his back, a frown burying deeply in his brow. “’Cause I don’t know if you noticed or not, but Sam is blind, Cas. His life’s not exactly easy. And when his life’s not easy, my life’s not easy.”
“Accidents happen, Dean.”
The coldness of the response whips through Dean’s chest with a phantom weight, which he recognizes reluctantly as harsh honesty. Still, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t fucking hurt. “I know that, but you can take it back. You can undo it. Hop in your time machine or whatever. Please, man, I’m - begging here.” A misplaced laugh, one that dives deep into itself and disappears right after emerging. “I miss my little brother, Cas. I can’t take it, him bein’ like this.”
“I’m sorry,” is the only thing Castiel says in response.
Dean’s lips twist bitterly as he exhales a quiet snark. “Boy,” he says, shaking his head. “You are one spineless sonofabitch, you know that? You’re just gonna bail out? That’s your way of dealing with this?”
“No.”
“You can help him, Cas! I know you can!” Dean steels his jaw; shakes his head adamantly. “Screw your ethics code, dude, this is Sammy we’re talkin’ about here.”
“It’s not my place to -”
“If you say intervene, so help me God, I will knock your goddamn teeth to the back of your throat so fast.”
Castiel hesitates, either stung by the vehemence in Dean’s voice or agitated at his impatience; he remains, as always, completely fucking unreadable. The lock of their eyes is steady, and neither one of them wants to break it first, but eventually Castiel breathes out a tight sigh as his gaze falls once against to an indiscriminate point on Dean’s chest. “If I could help, I would.”
“I don’t believe you,” Dean instantly snaps.
“You should.” Castiel doesn’t miss a beat.
“Why.”
“Because it’s the truth.”
Dean’s lips curl into a slight snarl, his blood flaring hot with the exchange. “We talkin’ truth truth, or shady angel truth with ulterior motives?”
“It’s whatever kind of truth you want it to be.”
And just - fuck that.
Dean turns away quickly, rustling the sheets over his shoulders. The room is a vague blur of shadow, all the texture of the lumber sucked away by the gloss of darkness. “Then I wanna talk to Zach.”
“Dean, if you think going over my head is going to accomplish something, you’re wrong.”
“Well I can still try.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
Dean flips back over on instinct. “You threatening me, Cas?”
Castiel swallows thickly, and even with as pissed off as he is at the moment Dean can’t maintain it when Castiel exhales long and low and his eyes soften in that distinct way that somehow absorbs all the moonlight in the room at once. His tone diminishes, lowering again to a whisper where it had previously risen to nearly full-volume. “Zachariah is the one who issued the order.”
“What?”
“Zachariah issued the standing order that no one interfere with Sam’s situation.” Castiel darts his tongue out to wet his lips, the gesture strangely human, Dean thinks, before he goes on. “Listen.”
When Dean turns his head again, a cynical snark rolling out of his throat, Castiel splays a hand on his jaw and pulls him directly back into his line of sight. “Listen.” His gaze settles above Dean’s eyes, where he moves his hand up to lightly skim a finger along his temple.
Dean blinks. Swallows. Listens. Castiel drags his fingers along the crest of his cheekbone and traces his jaw in a steady, cool pressure until he reaches his neck, settling there, directly below the curve of Dean’s jaw where his pulse is strongest.
Dean tries not to close his eyes against the gentle touch. He’s still supposed to be pissed here, goddammit, and he is, he’s royally fucking pissed actually, but it’s hard to stay that way when Castiel is pushing his hair back with fingers that feel like they’ve been charged up with spark plugs, magnetic and electric and harboring that weird secret energy he always has, touching him like licking a battery almost. Dean’s breath shakes out in a wavering curtain. Sam, he tells himself over and over, Sam, Sam is blind, he’s blind and fucked and Castiel did it, it’s his. Fucking. Fault. And Dean hates him for it.
Or at least he’s supposed to. Fuck.
“There are much larger things happening with this turn of events than you know,” Castiel says as he pets at Dean’s throat.
“Cas -”
“But rest assured,” Castiel speaks easily over his protests, “That if there were a way - any way - for me to help you and your brother, I would.” The slide of his palm along Dean’s throat, mapping out the line of his collarbone, sends shudders all along Dean’s body. “Zachariah gave a direct order; if I went against it, I think we all know what would happen.”
Dean mulls it over. “Disobedience.”
Barely, Castiel nods. “It is punishable by death, and there are other - larger things at work that I can’t just abandon.”
A pause. “You need to be able to stay, so that you can help us stop Lilith. Stop the seals from breaking.” And Dean hates the heavy darkness settling in his chest, blotting out all the outrage and desperation from before. He doesn’t like it, and he definitely doesn’t agree with it, but - fuck. He understands where Castiel is coming from. He actually understands his angle, even if he shouldn’t, and it makes his stomach wrest and his fists clench.
The next time he breathes out, it’s not only air that leaves his body. A measure of something deeper, a piece of his core or soul or whatever the fuck you want to call it dissipates right along with it, floating disembodied and transparent into the atmosphere, light as ash. Castiel can’t heal Sam, because at the cost of disobedience he would fall. And he can’t fall, because then he couldn’t help Dean, and the Seals would break and Lucifer would rise. It would be the end of everything and everyone, pandemonium on the streets, dogs and cats living together, the whole fucking piñata.
And he’s kicking himself because he shouldn’t even consider anything else besides getting Sam better, because the destruction of the world and the bloody battles of Armageddon shouldn’t even matter when compared to getting his little brother back, but he closes his eyes against the sting of it because he knows, deep down, that Castiel is right. Goddammit, he’s right, with all his infuriating logic and bigger-picture bullshit, he’s actually fucking right.
That doesn’t mean Dean has to agree with it though, because Sam.
Castiel curls his fingers along Dean’s neck and in one movement he shifts and presses his lips against Dean’s forehead, cool and soft, a subtle shimmering current melting into Dean’s skin with the touch. He brings a hand up to rest against Castiel’s wrist, and when Castiel pulls away it’s too soon. Dean’s eyes open and he looks straight at him, and Castiel looks straight back with all the unnatural grace and tenderness of something that can only be from Heaven. “This is the Apocalypse, Dean. We all need to be prepared to make sacrifices.”
Dean tenses his jaw so hard that his teeth ache with a sudden, stabbing pain. He drags his hand back onto his chest.
Fuck right and wrong.
He wants Sam back.
Even if it means the world will burn, even if it means Lilith will win and Lucifer will rise and all the battles of Heaven and Hell will rain down on six billion oblivious lives, he’d be okay with that if it meant that when things really ended, he would have Sam at his side in the final battle.
And Castiel can help, and he refuses to.
Quickly, Dean’s tongue darts out to wet his lips, a habitual nervous tick he almost regrets doing as soon as it happens. He knows Castiel can see his weakness with the gesture. He pulls in a breath; sighs it out heavy and raw. “Fuck your bigger picture, Cas.”
Castiel blinks; his head tilts at a quizzical angle as the weight of his hand becomes suddenly much more apparent against Dean’s chest.
“I’d just like to say that,” Dean continues. “Because you know what, if I’m the only one who can stop it, like you mooks keep saying? I need Sam by my side. I can’t do it without him. And if he’s blind as a bat, he can’t do that. So how the hell’s this supposed to help anybody by leaving him like this?”
“It’s helping Sam,” Castiel growls, obviously in no mood for Dean’s typical six-and-one, devil’s advocate antics.
But Dean doesn’t really give a shit what he’s in the mood for right now, unless it’s healing Sam. And since it’s quite obviously not, then, well. Fuck him. “Really. How’s that?”
Something springs into Castiel’s eyes when he turns his head slightly, narrowing his gaze at the darkness of the room. He seems to be listening intently to something, though Dean can’t hear a sound. “I’ve risked enough telling you this much,” he says quickly. “I can’t say any more. I can only hope that someday you realize what I’m doing for you and your brother.”
“So you’re not healing him.”
Castiel doesn’t even venture a response. The draw of his face is blank, the grim line of his lips in a frown. He is unchangeable and inhuman and made of stone, and it fills Dean to the brim with the worst kind of resentment. God fucking dammit, he can’t believe he ever actually thought -…
“Go fuck yourself, Cas,” he sneers. “Seriously. I’m sick of this pansy bullshit, toeing the line between black and white all the time. I’m done, Cas. We’re done.” A sickened laugh bubbles out of his chest. “And I thought you wanted to help me.”
Dean hears something creak around him, but he doesn’t look away from Castiel’s eyes, all cold and silver and fuming with unearthly fury. Even with all of his ridiculous rage Dean shudders at the inherent power in them, and the only word in his head as the thoughts bleach out in his struggle to begin hating the one person - fuck, creature - besides Sam who ever did him a damn bit of good, the one who believed in him and saved him and maybe even loved him, is terrifying.
Any other time it would have intimidated Dean, but at this moment it doesn’t. The walls are pulling together, toward themselves, threatening to collapse in zero gravity, but even that doesn’t stop his words.
“You’re selfish. Spineless. You are physically incapable of going against your precious orders, aren’t you? I bet if Zachariah told you to bump me off, you wouldn’t even second-guess it. You’d pull the gloves off and go to town, wouldn’t you?”
All of the danger and strained tension in Castiel’s countenance melts away, hardens into an impenetrable wall of opacity. “I’m not going to argue with you, Dean,” he says in an unnervingly calm tone. “You either accept this or you don’t, but either way this is how things have to happen.”
“Well then no, I don’t accept it.”
“Well then I’m sorry for your naiveté.”
And Dean really can’t think of anything to do but watch the impassive glimmer of Castiel’s eyes for a few seconds before he grounds his jaw and turns over with a mighty hrumph. His pulse is ratcheting at hazardous speeds, every inch of his body flooded with adrenaline and heat. Yet even as angry as he is, as much as he wants to turn around and slam his fists against the unbreakable wall of Castiel’s chest, claw out his eyes, rip apart that fucking body he knows so well limb from limb, he doesn’t fight against it when he feels the soft, tentative press of a kiss to the back of his shoulder, cool lips meeting flushed naked skin.
His eyes roll shut and he thinks about forgetting it all, twisting back and crushing his mouth to Castiel’s not just to shut him up, but because he missed him so goddamn much and that’s the only way he could ever think to express it… But then he feels a breeze, hears a slight familiar fluttering, and suddenly he’s alone again, with goosebumps on his skin and the hushed sounds of Sam breathing through sleep on the other side of the room.
~ ~ ~
{to be continued...}
ONTO PART FOURTEEN