66 Seals of Doom on the Wall, Chapter 2
Dean could feel his whole world spinning out of control. He searched the room for the one person that had always been his center of sanity.
Sam was sound asleep in the bed nearest to the bathroom, like usual, leaving the one by the window to his older brother. The faint streetlights, outside the shady place that they had chosen to spend the night, cast a pale yellow glow on the back of Sam’s head, making the dark brown look lighter than it actually was.
Reposted after going under the magic fingers of my awsome beta, Jackfan2!
~Chapter two~
When he finally made his way in to the motel room, Dean had managed to get his breathing mostly under control.
The journey from the bar to this place had been one of the longest in Dean’s life. He actually had no idea how he’d been able to make it without crashing his baby in to something heavy and unforgiving. Come to think of it, he would have to check the Impala for any dents in the morning.
Dean had no recollection of the past fifteen minutes. Everything was one big blur of denial and anger, of feeling strange and like a foreigner in his own skin.
He felt like a freak. He’d been turned into a damn freak!
Dean just wished that Castiel would show his angelic face right now, so that he could smash his angelic nose right in.
How dare he? What gave him the right? Were those God’s specific orders? ‘Go thee and screw Dean Winchester’s life in My name?’
Dean could feel his whole world spinning out of control. He searched the room for the one person that had always been his center of sanity.
Sam was sound asleep in the bed nearest to the bathroom, like usual, leaving the one by the window to his older brother. The faint streetlights, outside the shady place that they had chosen to spend the night, cast a pale yellow glow on the back of Sam’s head, making the dark brown look lighter than it actually was.
For a fleeting moment, Dean wanted nothing more than to wake his brother up and just talk. Talk about everything that had happen, talk about what he’d been through, find out what was going on with Sam… God help him, Dean even wanted to talk about his feelings because right now… right now he felt like he might explode if he didn’t do SOMETHING.
But he couldn’t. Talking would make it all real, permanent. Unchangeable.
Dean closed his eyes and leaned against the closed door. If he stood still for long enough, would he be able to hear his brother’s thoughts too? Or maybe if he walked slowly outside, would he be able to hear what other people were doing in the privacy of their rooms?
Except for the dog barking and the two cars that drove by on the freeway outside, Dean couldn’t hear a thing.
He wanted to believe that the ‘episode’ in the bar had been the fruit of over-tiredness, major freakiness and just normal reaction to one hell of a night. Dean wanted to believe that everything would be normal with his brother and that he hadn’t turned in to some sort of psycho in his absence.
If he woke Sam now, he would probably end up punching him in the face.
Because despite everything else, the one thing that had surprised him the most, the one thing that was weighing his heart down and making it hard to breathe, was knowing that Sam had betrayed him with such ease, with so little regard for his wishes and promises.
Sam had stood there, looking Dean straight in the eyes just hours after their reunion, and LIED. He hadn’t even blinked, didn’t even paused to gather his thoughts and decide if he wanted to deceive the brother that had just came back from Hell or not. He’d just stood there and assured Dean that he’d respected his whishes because they’d been his dying ones.
Bullshit.
Dean yanked his buttoned-down shirt off and pulled his pants down, intent on sleeping over the matter and figure out what he would do in the morning. It was nearing dawn and he was sure that any decision taken at such an ungodly hour could only be a bad one.
Out of habit, he pulled the cheap covers down, only to change his mind and throw them back up and lay on top of the mostly made bed. Being cold helped him sleep better, and Dean needed to sleep tonight. He needed a clean slate and a fresh start in the morning, when everything looked less fucked up.
He managed to stay quiet for a grand total of fifteen minutes. Every time he closed his eyes Dean was presented with the after images of his mother’s eyes, slowly filling with tears as she realized that she had lost everything but John in the same night. As she realized that something horrible would happen in ten years just so she could have that brief time of happiness with the man she loved. The same sad eyes that, in their old house in Kansas, had looked at a grown-up Sam and apologized.
Despite Castiel’s reassurances, Dean couldn’t shake the feeling that he should be the one saying ‘I’m sorry.’
And if Dean managed to force his mother’s image out of his mind, Sam’s face, their expressions so similar, would replace her just as fast. Speeding images of Sam emptying a clip in Jake’s face; of Sam killing first and asking questions later; of Sam ready to sacrifice one life for the sake of a couple of others; of Sam ready to embrace his powers, in the odd chance that he would be able to save Dean from Hell.
And through it all, Castiel’s face; laughing maniacally at him, enjoying the show.
Dean punched his pillow and turned to the other side. There was a red neon sign somewhere outside that pulsed like throbbing blood, turning his vision blood-filled even when he closed his eyes.
Sam’s laptop was resting on top of the wooden table beneath the window, the only thing that served as piece of decoration in the dingy place. Next to the laptop, stashed carelessly beneath a paper bag filled with something greasy, was Sam’s journal, the one that Dean wasn’t even aware existed until Sam had whipped it out the other day to take some notes.
All pretence of going to sleep forgotten, Dean slowly got up, glad that the bed wasn’t a squeaker. His bare feet made no sound as he crossed the carpeted floor, grabbed the laptop and the journal and made his way to take a seat on the floor, as far away from Sam’s bed as possible.
Making sure that the light from the computer screen wouldn’t disturb Sam, Dean opened it and started the search engine.
Searching for the 66 seals proved pointless. It was a reference too obscure for the usual sites and apart from certain libraries and Bobby’s private stash, Dean doubted that he would find much.
Briefly, he entertained the idea of surfing a little porn, seeing what was new after his four months away, but to be honest with himself, he wasn’t in the mood. The magazine he had robbed from the store near his gra… near the crossroads had remained untouched inside the bag and eventually forgotten at Bobby’s place.
He looked at his brother’s journal again. Dean knew that his curiosity over what Sam had been up to all this time would eventually get the better of him. That was, after all, why he’d grabbed the book in the first place. But now that all that stood between curiosity and spying was a closed cover, Dean wasn’t so sure he wanted to break Sam’s trust.
Telling himself that, if Sam had anything to hide, he wouldn’t have kept his journal in plain sight, Dean opened the dog-eared book. Taking advantage of the light coming from the computer screen, Dean flipped through the pages that described his brother’s life throughout the four months that he’d been alone.
It read like a hit man’s list.
For almost every town that his brother had been to, Dean could find at least two killings, sometimes three at the same time. Sam’s journal registered everyone of them as a different demon, naming the list of clues that had led Sam to it, small notations of visual links and intensities made on the side, followed by a serious of numbers that Dean couldn’t quite figure. The numbers were always matched by series of two, the first one always smaller than ten, the second one always ten. It looked like some kind of score points.
Dean looked at his brother, too long hair spread all over a too flat pillow, nose buried in to the once white fabric, right hand clenching the edge of his sheets, the other lost beneath the covers.
A bright white flash exploded behind Dean’s eyes and he gasped in surprise. For a moment, instead of the dark room with peeling green paint, he could see another one, with an equally bad paint job, only in yellow.
Closing the journal and quickly getting up, Dean blinked hard and took a deep breath. Sam hadn’t seemed to notice either the light or Dean’s reaction, just sighing in contentment and turning to his other side.
A second flash and Dean had to grab the wall behind him to stop himself from taking a nosedive. There was a portrait of an old Mexican couple above the bed and the picture seemed to enlarge and shrink in time with the rocking motion beneath his knees.
Only it wasn’t his knees, or his hands that he could see caressing some girl’s breasts.
Dean could feel bile rising up in his throat and he raced to the bathroom, closing the door and keeping the lights out.
A third flash brightened the dark place, but instead of a bathtub and toilet, he could see the owner of the previous breasts, a brunette, rocking in tempo with him, wild hair and ecstasy closed eyes, teeth biting her lips to keep her from screaming. “Sam,” she whimpered.
When she opened her eyes, all he could see was black.
With no time and no trust in his ability to find the toilet in the windowless dark room, Dean threw up in the general direction of the sink. He figured that with dinner being a non-event and lunch such a distant event, the damaged couldn’t be that big.
What the hell had that been about?
He recognized the brunette, but not like THAT. He’d seen her with Sam when he’d first returned and tonight again, playing chauffeur to his brother’s nightly activities.
Ruby.
If he’d been asleep, he would’ve just assumed that this had been some kind of perverse, wet nightmare. He had never been attracted to demons and the fact that the bodies they used weren’t even theirs, only added insult to a very large injury.
But he couldn’t ignore the fact that he was wide-awake and that it hadn’t been his name escaping the demon’s mouth, it had been his brother’s.
Dean palmed around, searching for the faucet and opened what he hoped to be the cold-water tap. The sound of running water and the wet feeling washing through his fingers came seconds after.
Wet handed, the hunter ran his fingers through his hair. If these images weren’t part of his memories and were certainly not part of his fantasies, were they Sam’s?
The answer was almost certainly yes. The real question now being if what was happening in them was just a hormone-induced fantasy or Sam’s memory of a real event. The thought brought a new surge of bile to Dean’s mouth.
“What are you doing here in the dark?” Sam’s voice sounded at the same time that the whole bathroom exploded in to light. “Are you ok?”
Dean flinched back from the light, his eyes not prepared for such a drastic change.
He blinked at his brother, black dots of residual shock dancing around Sam’s figure. His mouth was all of a sudden really dry.
This was it.
A question as simple as ‘Are you ok?’ and depending on his answer, Dean knew that their lives could take two completely different roads.
If he told Sam the real reason for him losing his lunch all over the sink it would be: one- embarrassing as hell; and two- force him to confess that he was now a freak that could spy on other people’s thoughts. This would undoubtedly lead to telling Sam what Castiel had done to him and in turn everything else, like the fact that, on account of him being one of the 66 locks on damn Lucifer, an angel of the Lord had offered - threatened - to actually smite Sam, if Dean didn’t step up to the plate.
For a guy that actually had some faith in the Man upstairs, that couldn’t be nice for Sam to hear.
Or Dean could lie.
It wasn’t as if Sam hadn’t lied right back at him. Dean could bide his time, see for himself what Sam had been getting himself in to, cross-check some facts, hunt that bitch Ruby down and end her existence once and for all, get some straight answers out of Castiel.
“Dean?” Sam asked, concerned filling his face as he reach a hand out to grab his brother’ shoulder.
Dean managed to hide the pain from his face as his brother’s fingers brushed over Castiel’s handprint. “I’m fine, Sam,” he whispered. “It was just a bad dream.”
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