Atonement Part 8
When Dean’s done all that he goes back. They’ve got Sammy striped of his shirt and he’s still got streaks of blood on his chest. They’ve got IVs and O2 sensor. They’ve got him on a vent mask. They’ve got his legs slightly higher than the rest of him and a woman in navy scrubs is hanging a blood bag next to a bag of Ringers. Sam moves his head slightly to look at the blood bag so he’s conscious again. That’s good. Dean feels something in his chest unlock.
Dean looks for E. Lewstein but doesn’t see him. The way not to get thrown out of an ER is to not get in the way so Dean finds a chair in another curtained bay-he smiles at the old guy in the hospital gown on the bed in that bay-and pulls it so he’s opposite of the bay where they are working on Sam. They aren’t frantic. Someone says they want to try a little more dopamine because he’s still tachy.
A woman with a clear facemask and blood all over her scrubs and her latex gloves come over to see him. She raises the facemask. “You’re Sam’s brother?” she asks. The insurance card says ‘Sam Watson.’ He didn’t get a chance to tell Sam that. Her badge says L. Kim, MD. “I’m Dr. Kim.” She’s about 5’7” or so, cute, and way out of his league.
“I’m Dean Watson,” he says.
“Your brother is doing well. He’s responsive. We’re giving him IV fluids and blood. We’re prepping him for surgery on the stab wound. You said he was in the zone? That he has amnesia?”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “He was visiting friends. He was one of those people who wandered away without ID. I just found him.” Dean watches them inject something into the IV. The dopamine maybe?
“He gave his name as Sam Winchester,” she says.
Dean looks confused and shrugs. “Beats me,” he says.
She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve had a couple of people from the zone here. I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with some sleepers, too. So you’re an EMT?”
“No,” Dean says.
She raises an eyebrow. “The guys who brought him back thought you were.”
“Must have been confused,” Dean said. “He needs surgery?”
“Yeah, I’m worried about damage to his intestines. We want to see what else might have been punctured and stop any internal bleeding. I thought you might want to come over and say hello before we take him upstairs.”
Dean would. Very much.
“Hey Sammy,” he says.
Sam opens his eyes and smiles full of dimples.
“How you feeling?” Dean asks.
“Morphine,” Sam says. “So awesome.”
Dean laughs, he can’t help it. “You’re always fun on painkillers. They’re gonna take you up to surgery but I’ll be waiting when you get out, okay?”
“Go get some sleep,” Sam says. “I’ll be getting good stuff.” He is clearly floaty and high as a kite. He’s still out of it from the blood loss, too. He puts his hand on the railing of the bed.
“Yeah, I know, but I just found you.” Dean covers Sammy’s hand.
“Okay,” Sam says. Sam looks at Dean’s hand but it doesn’t seem to bother him.
“You remember leviathans yet?”
Sam stops and thinks. It’s clearly foggy in there. Dean looks at his protection tattoo. He glances over and sees Dr. Kim throwing a chest x-ray up and thinks it’s about to get interesting. Enochian symbols all over Sam’s ribs. Well, Sam sure doesn’t know how they got there.
Sam blinks and then his eyes open a bit. “Oh, right, leviathans.”
“That’s what the video was.”
“Not us?” Sam asks.
“Not us,” Dean says. “We’re the good guys. We save people.”
“Um, Mr. Watson,” Dr. Kim says, “Can I talk to you?”
“See you on the other side of anesthesia,” Dean says to Sam. Then he puts on his most innocent expression and turns to Dr. Kim.
# The place where they live is a bunker, kind of the best art deco men’s playhouse ever made. Sam doesn’t remember it at all. His room is pretty nice if empty. It doesn’t tell him anything about himself-which is possibly very telling. He likes the library more. Rooms are places to sleep, the library is the place to live. Dean is interesting. Not what Sam would have expected. Dean is loud, and drinks way too much (but Sam can’t really fault him on that score, he can’t drink until he’s off pain meds but he would like to.) He tells terrible jokes. He talks like a sexist asshole and well, like an asshole in general and everything Sam does is wrong. What he eats, what he reads, what he likes to watch on television. All wrong. It should be off-putting but it isn’t.
Really, since Dean found him he doesn’t know how he feels. They aren’t serial killers. They’re hunters.
Sam spends a fair bit of time sleeping which was what he was doing when he finds himself sitting up unable to think or move, filled with fear. The King of Hell told him that the angels are going to let them out. He has been dreaming of that, dreaming of the Morningstar. They are going to let them out. It’s the middle of the night. His hand hurts and he wants to yank it away from the pain but it’s held, by Dean, who has dug his fingernails into the palm and is saying, “Sam. Sammy. Look at me. Look at me. Stone one, little brother.”
He can’t talk. He can feel that he’s been sitting with his mouth open because it’s dry. His mind is filled with the Morningstar. The hugeness. The awfulness. Awful. Full of awe. Intimacy and pain. He feels the sense of being shattered and not allowed to die.
He knows he woke up awhile ago. He doesn’t know how long ago. He is locked. But the pain in his hand. The voice. Insistent.
He manages to look at Dean. He can’t see his face clearly, only his silhouette against the bright light square of the open door.
Things hurt besides his palm. He is panting. He is trying to say something and for the longest time he can’t until finally he unlocks and says, “They’re going to let them out,” he says.
“Is it a vision?” Dean asks.
“A dream. The King of Hell.”
“Crowley?” Dean is no longer pressing his blunt nails into Sam’s palm. Instead he’s rubbing with his thumb, soothing.
“Who’s Crowley?” Sam is hoarse.
“King of Hell. Sounds British. Wears a black suit. Sarcastic.”
Sam nods.
“Can I turn on the light?” Dean asks. When he does Sam can see that Dean looks exhausted. Sam has just come home that day and his incision hurts. His insides hurt. “You need a pain pill?” Dean doesn’t wait for an answer.
Sam wants to say, ‘Wait,’ but Dean is already gone, padding away bare foot on the cold floors. Sam wipes his face. He’s sweating from the pain but he’s cold. But he’s himself.
Dean comes back with a glass of water. The pain pills are by Sam’s bed and Dean spills two into his palm. “Here big guy. Was it just a dream?”
Sam shakes his head. The water is good. “I don’t think so. He’s come in dreams before. He says they’re going to let them out. To fight The Darkness. Him and the angels because the angels aren’t strong enough.”
“Let who out?” Dean asks.
Sam can’t say it for a minute.
“Who, Sam? Let who out?”
Sam grabs Dean’s hands. “I dream about them. The Morningstar and the other one with him.”
Dean clenches Sam’s hands.
“I can’t,” Sam whispers and bends over Deans hands. “I can’t I can’t.”
While Sam is recuperating, he is reading the books that Dean says tell the story of their lives. It seems highly unlikely that a bunch of mass market paperbacks with really terrible covers would be remotely true. Particularly given the covers. He’s up to the fifth one which is called Skin and is about a Skinwalker and some people he apparently went to Stanford with. The problem is that when he looks up the crimes described on the internet, he finds out that there really were crimes and that ‘Dean Winchester’ who really does look like Dean was reported as dead. And there’s the journal. Some of the handwriting is apparently their father’s. Some of it is clearly his. Maybe they were all engaged in a shared psychosis.
Except, of course, those demons.
Dean is pissed. Pissed as in angry and pissed as in drunk. He is sitting across from Sam at one of the tables in the library with his feet up. Sam can only sit in one of these chairs for an hour or two.
“Where the fuck is Cas,” Dean says.
Sam doesn’t know and since he has only met Castiel in his dreams, at least as best he can remember, he doesn’t bother to answer. He’s only been home two days and he has two modes. Mode one is pain pills and mode two is asleep until the pain from having four inches of his small intestine resected wakes him up because he needs another pain pill.
“You never used to like pain pills,” Dean says.
Sam nods. “That’s sad,” he says. He’s pretty sincere about that. He feels like most of life is about six feet removed from him and that’s nice.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dean says and pauses.
Sam looks at him, attentive. It’s only polite.
This is apparently another thing that pisses Dean off. “See, that’s exactly the kind of opening you would have jumped on.” He swings his feet off the table and stands up but once he’s standing he doesn’t seem to have any idea where he should go.
Sam raises an eyebrow, as if to say, in what way?
“Before you would have jumped all over that. Said, ‘don’t strain yourself,’ or ‘isn’t that above your pay grade,’ or something.”
“I thought I smelled something burning,” Sam obliges.
“Bite me,” Dean mutters.
Sam shrugs. He knows when he’s around Dean he doesn’t feel that deadening loneliness. But other than that, Dean is a stranger. He remembers the man in his dream, the King of Hell, being amused that when he dreamed of Dean he dreamed that Dean was pissed at him. Dean seems pissed at him a lot.
“I’m sorry,” Sam says and he doesn’t know where that came from.
“Goddamn, don’t’ start that again,” Dean says and he is truly furious. “We CANNOT start blaming and apologizing. You hear me Sam? This isn’t your fault!” He leans his hands on the library table until his face is only inches from Sam’s face and he repeats it. “This. Isn’t. Your. Fault.” Sam can smell whisky.
Which makes it pretty clear that it probably is and Sam feels like a stormfront is coming in. “What isn’t my fault?” he asks, trying to keep his voice detached.
“The Darkness,” Dean says and the moment it is out of his mouth Sam can see that Dean wishes he could take it back.
“Okay,” Sam says. It seems utterly reasonable that just one guy couldn’t cause a worldwide phenomena that does impossible shit and yet he knows without question that it is utterly his fault. It’s like he had finally put this heavy weight down when Dean told him they weren’t serial killers. Now he picks it up again and it feels like a dull ache.
“Sam-” Dean says, and stops.
“You want to tell me about it?” Sam says. He tries to keep his face pleasant, like he doesn’t feel tired and suddenly sad. He doesn’t really want to hear but he can’t not. Go forward.
“No,” Dean says.
Sam looks at him. Looks at his face. He feels such a strange mixture of emotions when he lets himself think about that face. Dean usually calls Castiel by saying he is ‘praying’ but by mostly just addressing the air the way he would make a phone call. Sam folds his hands and closes his eyes. “Castiel,” he says, not even sure why he is doing it. “Castiel, if you can hear me, if you can come to the bunker.”
There is a flutter, like wings. Then the man in the trenchcoat, the man with the incredibly blue eyes, the man who doesn’t blink, is there. “Sam,” he says.
“Where the fuck have you been,” Dean says.
“I have been fighting the Darkness,” Castiel says. “Sam, how are you? What happened?”
“I was fighting a demon,” Sam says. “Dean tracked me down. I was injured but I had surgery and I’ll be all right. Thank you for answering.” Castiel is like he was in Sam’s dreams except even weirder. Like Dean, he clearly knows Sam and like Dean, Sam has no sense of familiarity with him. But he is an angel and he answered Sam’s prayer.
Castiel reaches for Sam’s forehead with two fingers in kind of boy scout salute and Deans says, “Wait!” Castiel stops. Sam doesn’t know what is going on. “Maybe he doesn’t need his memories back,” Dean says.
Castiel says to Sam, “Do you want your memory back?”
“Of course,” Sam says. It’s one way to find out how he managed to cause a world wide catastrophe.
“NO!” Dean says. “Fuck. Would you just wait? Cas, think about it. Think about all the shit. The Cage.”
Castiel looks at Sam. “It is true. Many of your memories are bad.”
“How bad?” Sam asks. The stuff in the books sounds grim. Lousy childhood, fiancé dying but it was years ago.
Dean said, “Really bad. Psychotically bad.”
“Dean,” the angel says.
“Yeah, I know. You took care of that and I’m grateful but if you hadn’t taken down the wall you wouldn’t have had to.” Dean’s look is stony. Sam is kind of glad not to be on the receiving end.
“Took care of what? Just what are you talking about?” Sam asks. “What is the cage?”
“The place you dream about. You went to Hell,” Dean says.
Sam tries to think about what Dean means by that. Dean and Castiel are looking at him a bit expectantly, like he should have some reaction. He doesn’t like what effect this conversation is having on his pleasant, pain pill haze. He went to Hell. Given that Castiel is an angel even if he looks like an insurance agent that probably means exactly what it sounds like and there is the dreams. “So I’m not a good guy.” Sam says. No surprise there.
Dean laughs. “Fuck no, you volunteered to go to Hell to save the world. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’ve done some fucked up things. But martyrdom is kind of your specialty.” He sounds very bitter. “If there’s one thing you live for, it’s the moral high ground.”
Maybe he doesn’t want his memories back because he sounds like a righteous prick. No wonder he has no friends.
Castiel says, “You went to Hell to lock Lucifer in The Cage and stop the Apocalypse. Your soul spent almost two centuries locked with Lucifer and the Archangel Michael there.”
The dreams. The King of Hell. “The Morningstar. Lucifer means morning star.” He looks at Castiel. “You’re going to let them out.” In the back of his mind he’s thinking about the two centuries thing. Does that mean he and Dean were born in the 1800’s? Is that any weirder than angels or demons? But mostly he’s thinking about the Morningstar and the idea that they will let him out.
Castiel says nothing.
“Tell me you don’t think this is a good idea,” Dean says.
“The Bible is correct when it says that my Father separated the Light from the Darkness. But it doesn’t describe it as a battle. It took my Father and a host of angels. Now we’re reduced in numbers and my Father is missing.”
God is missing? He should be more surprised at that then he is.
“There is no way you’re going to let those fuckers out of The Cage,” Dean says.
“I need a pain pill,” Sam mutters. He really does. Castiel leans forward and touches Sam’s forehead and everything is infused with this feeling, this energy, the world is light, and there’s a feeling of goodness and health. Sam blinks and the pain is gone.
Which means, sadly, no more pain pills.
“You didn’t,” Dean says.
“I did not return his memories,” Castiel says. “I merely healed his injuries.”
“Did you put back that four inches they took of his small intestine?” Dean asks. “Because that’s just creepy.”
There is a moment of awkward silence.
“Sam,” Castiel says, “Do you want your memories back or do you want to wait?”
“Wait a little while,” Dean says. “A couple of days.” Dean seems…desperate. Not that it’s obvious.
Why not? “Okay,” he says.
“You’re the genius at research,” Dean says.
Sam looks around at the books. Also the tables and the beautiful reading lamps. He has no idea where to even start looking for something. Although he likes the idea of all the books. Books, it turns out, make him happy. “Spells?” he says. “Like magic spells?”
Dean shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. A location spell. To find Rowena.”
The news is full of a new cloud of Darkness. This one stretches across the Texas panhandle into parts of Arizona and New Mexico. Castiel is gone. Dean says that with this new cloud it’s going to be impossible to get Cas.
“Rowena is…”
“Crowley’s mother,” Dean says. “She’s a witch. She has the most powerful book of spells ever made. It’s called The Book of the Damned and it was made by a deranged nun who wrote it in a special code on pages made from her own skin in ink made of her own blood.”
Sam is pretty sure Dean is making this shit up to see how much he’ll believe.
“I’m not making this shit up,” Dean says. Which is kind of creepy.
“Why do we care about Rowena?” Sam asks.
“Because the book is like, you know, Excalibur or the Holy Grail, except evil, and it might have the equivalent of the atomic bomb for The Darkness.”
“Right,” Sam says. “Because that sounds like such a good idea.”
“Sarcasm isn’t really your style, Sam. I’m not saying we use it,” Dean says. “I’m saying we should have the book instead of Rowena or Crowley because nothing about those two makes me think ‘with great power comes great responsibility.”
“Didn’t you say I caused this?”
Dean shoves him against a bookcase and suddenly Dean’s nose is about three inches below Sam’s. “No,” Dean hisses, “I did not say you caused this. This. Is. Not. Your. Fault. I got the Mark. The Stynes lost the book. I blamed you for…” Dean stops himself and blows air through his teeth. “Cas helped you. Rowena was part of it. No one knew what the result would be. You were just trying to save me.”
The books are pressing unevenly into Sam’s back. Dean is clearly working hard to convince himself that this is not Sam’s fault. “Okay,” Sam says.
They have stirred up a lot of dust.
“Dean,” Sam says. “If you don’t let me loose I’m going to sneeze in your face.”
Part Seven | Part Nine
Dean looks for E. Lewstein but doesn’t see him. The way not to get thrown out of an ER is to not get in the way so Dean finds a chair in another curtained bay-he smiles at the old guy in the hospital gown on the bed in that bay-and pulls it so he’s opposite of the bay where they are working on Sam. They aren’t frantic. Someone says they want to try a little more dopamine because he’s still tachy.
A woman with a clear facemask and blood all over her scrubs and her latex gloves come over to see him. She raises the facemask. “You’re Sam’s brother?” she asks. The insurance card says ‘Sam Watson.’ He didn’t get a chance to tell Sam that. Her badge says L. Kim, MD. “I’m Dr. Kim.” She’s about 5’7” or so, cute, and way out of his league.
“I’m Dean Watson,” he says.
“Your brother is doing well. He’s responsive. We’re giving him IV fluids and blood. We’re prepping him for surgery on the stab wound. You said he was in the zone? That he has amnesia?”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “He was visiting friends. He was one of those people who wandered away without ID. I just found him.” Dean watches them inject something into the IV. The dopamine maybe?
“He gave his name as Sam Winchester,” she says.
Dean looks confused and shrugs. “Beats me,” he says.
She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve had a couple of people from the zone here. I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with some sleepers, too. So you’re an EMT?”
“No,” Dean says.
She raises an eyebrow. “The guys who brought him back thought you were.”
“Must have been confused,” Dean said. “He needs surgery?”
“Yeah, I’m worried about damage to his intestines. We want to see what else might have been punctured and stop any internal bleeding. I thought you might want to come over and say hello before we take him upstairs.”
Dean would. Very much.
“Hey Sammy,” he says.
Sam opens his eyes and smiles full of dimples.
“How you feeling?” Dean asks.
“Morphine,” Sam says. “So awesome.”
Dean laughs, he can’t help it. “You’re always fun on painkillers. They’re gonna take you up to surgery but I’ll be waiting when you get out, okay?”
“Go get some sleep,” Sam says. “I’ll be getting good stuff.” He is clearly floaty and high as a kite. He’s still out of it from the blood loss, too. He puts his hand on the railing of the bed.
“Yeah, I know, but I just found you.” Dean covers Sammy’s hand.
“Okay,” Sam says. Sam looks at Dean’s hand but it doesn’t seem to bother him.
“You remember leviathans yet?”
Sam stops and thinks. It’s clearly foggy in there. Dean looks at his protection tattoo. He glances over and sees Dr. Kim throwing a chest x-ray up and thinks it’s about to get interesting. Enochian symbols all over Sam’s ribs. Well, Sam sure doesn’t know how they got there.
Sam blinks and then his eyes open a bit. “Oh, right, leviathans.”
“That’s what the video was.”
“Not us?” Sam asks.
“Not us,” Dean says. “We’re the good guys. We save people.”
“Um, Mr. Watson,” Dr. Kim says, “Can I talk to you?”
“See you on the other side of anesthesia,” Dean says to Sam. Then he puts on his most innocent expression and turns to Dr. Kim.
# The place where they live is a bunker, kind of the best art deco men’s playhouse ever made. Sam doesn’t remember it at all. His room is pretty nice if empty. It doesn’t tell him anything about himself-which is possibly very telling. He likes the library more. Rooms are places to sleep, the library is the place to live. Dean is interesting. Not what Sam would have expected. Dean is loud, and drinks way too much (but Sam can’t really fault him on that score, he can’t drink until he’s off pain meds but he would like to.) He tells terrible jokes. He talks like a sexist asshole and well, like an asshole in general and everything Sam does is wrong. What he eats, what he reads, what he likes to watch on television. All wrong. It should be off-putting but it isn’t.
Really, since Dean found him he doesn’t know how he feels. They aren’t serial killers. They’re hunters.
Sam spends a fair bit of time sleeping which was what he was doing when he finds himself sitting up unable to think or move, filled with fear. The King of Hell told him that the angels are going to let them out. He has been dreaming of that, dreaming of the Morningstar. They are going to let them out. It’s the middle of the night. His hand hurts and he wants to yank it away from the pain but it’s held, by Dean, who has dug his fingernails into the palm and is saying, “Sam. Sammy. Look at me. Look at me. Stone one, little brother.”
He can’t talk. He can feel that he’s been sitting with his mouth open because it’s dry. His mind is filled with the Morningstar. The hugeness. The awfulness. Awful. Full of awe. Intimacy and pain. He feels the sense of being shattered and not allowed to die.
He knows he woke up awhile ago. He doesn’t know how long ago. He is locked. But the pain in his hand. The voice. Insistent.
He manages to look at Dean. He can’t see his face clearly, only his silhouette against the bright light square of the open door.
Things hurt besides his palm. He is panting. He is trying to say something and for the longest time he can’t until finally he unlocks and says, “They’re going to let them out,” he says.
“Is it a vision?” Dean asks.
“A dream. The King of Hell.”
“Crowley?” Dean is no longer pressing his blunt nails into Sam’s palm. Instead he’s rubbing with his thumb, soothing.
“Who’s Crowley?” Sam is hoarse.
“King of Hell. Sounds British. Wears a black suit. Sarcastic.”
Sam nods.
“Can I turn on the light?” Dean asks. When he does Sam can see that Dean looks exhausted. Sam has just come home that day and his incision hurts. His insides hurt. “You need a pain pill?” Dean doesn’t wait for an answer.
Sam wants to say, ‘Wait,’ but Dean is already gone, padding away bare foot on the cold floors. Sam wipes his face. He’s sweating from the pain but he’s cold. But he’s himself.
Dean comes back with a glass of water. The pain pills are by Sam’s bed and Dean spills two into his palm. “Here big guy. Was it just a dream?”
Sam shakes his head. The water is good. “I don’t think so. He’s come in dreams before. He says they’re going to let them out. To fight The Darkness. Him and the angels because the angels aren’t strong enough.”
“Let who out?” Dean asks.
Sam can’t say it for a minute.
“Who, Sam? Let who out?”
Sam grabs Dean’s hands. “I dream about them. The Morningstar and the other one with him.”
Dean clenches Sam’s hands.
“I can’t,” Sam whispers and bends over Deans hands. “I can’t I can’t.”
While Sam is recuperating, he is reading the books that Dean says tell the story of their lives. It seems highly unlikely that a bunch of mass market paperbacks with really terrible covers would be remotely true. Particularly given the covers. He’s up to the fifth one which is called Skin and is about a Skinwalker and some people he apparently went to Stanford with. The problem is that when he looks up the crimes described on the internet, he finds out that there really were crimes and that ‘Dean Winchester’ who really does look like Dean was reported as dead. And there’s the journal. Some of the handwriting is apparently their father’s. Some of it is clearly his. Maybe they were all engaged in a shared psychosis.
Except, of course, those demons.
Dean is pissed. Pissed as in angry and pissed as in drunk. He is sitting across from Sam at one of the tables in the library with his feet up. Sam can only sit in one of these chairs for an hour or two.
“Where the fuck is Cas,” Dean says.
Sam doesn’t know and since he has only met Castiel in his dreams, at least as best he can remember, he doesn’t bother to answer. He’s only been home two days and he has two modes. Mode one is pain pills and mode two is asleep until the pain from having four inches of his small intestine resected wakes him up because he needs another pain pill.
“You never used to like pain pills,” Dean says.
Sam nods. “That’s sad,” he says. He’s pretty sincere about that. He feels like most of life is about six feet removed from him and that’s nice.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dean says and pauses.
Sam looks at him, attentive. It’s only polite.
This is apparently another thing that pisses Dean off. “See, that’s exactly the kind of opening you would have jumped on.” He swings his feet off the table and stands up but once he’s standing he doesn’t seem to have any idea where he should go.
Sam raises an eyebrow, as if to say, in what way?
“Before you would have jumped all over that. Said, ‘don’t strain yourself,’ or ‘isn’t that above your pay grade,’ or something.”
“I thought I smelled something burning,” Sam obliges.
“Bite me,” Dean mutters.
Sam shrugs. He knows when he’s around Dean he doesn’t feel that deadening loneliness. But other than that, Dean is a stranger. He remembers the man in his dream, the King of Hell, being amused that when he dreamed of Dean he dreamed that Dean was pissed at him. Dean seems pissed at him a lot.
“I’m sorry,” Sam says and he doesn’t know where that came from.
“Goddamn, don’t’ start that again,” Dean says and he is truly furious. “We CANNOT start blaming and apologizing. You hear me Sam? This isn’t your fault!” He leans his hands on the library table until his face is only inches from Sam’s face and he repeats it. “This. Isn’t. Your. Fault.” Sam can smell whisky.
Which makes it pretty clear that it probably is and Sam feels like a stormfront is coming in. “What isn’t my fault?” he asks, trying to keep his voice detached.
“The Darkness,” Dean says and the moment it is out of his mouth Sam can see that Dean wishes he could take it back.
“Okay,” Sam says. It seems utterly reasonable that just one guy couldn’t cause a worldwide phenomena that does impossible shit and yet he knows without question that it is utterly his fault. It’s like he had finally put this heavy weight down when Dean told him they weren’t serial killers. Now he picks it up again and it feels like a dull ache.
“Sam-” Dean says, and stops.
“You want to tell me about it?” Sam says. He tries to keep his face pleasant, like he doesn’t feel tired and suddenly sad. He doesn’t really want to hear but he can’t not. Go forward.
“No,” Dean says.
Sam looks at him. Looks at his face. He feels such a strange mixture of emotions when he lets himself think about that face. Dean usually calls Castiel by saying he is ‘praying’ but by mostly just addressing the air the way he would make a phone call. Sam folds his hands and closes his eyes. “Castiel,” he says, not even sure why he is doing it. “Castiel, if you can hear me, if you can come to the bunker.”
There is a flutter, like wings. Then the man in the trenchcoat, the man with the incredibly blue eyes, the man who doesn’t blink, is there. “Sam,” he says.
“Where the fuck have you been,” Dean says.
“I have been fighting the Darkness,” Castiel says. “Sam, how are you? What happened?”
“I was fighting a demon,” Sam says. “Dean tracked me down. I was injured but I had surgery and I’ll be all right. Thank you for answering.” Castiel is like he was in Sam’s dreams except even weirder. Like Dean, he clearly knows Sam and like Dean, Sam has no sense of familiarity with him. But he is an angel and he answered Sam’s prayer.
Castiel reaches for Sam’s forehead with two fingers in kind of boy scout salute and Deans says, “Wait!” Castiel stops. Sam doesn’t know what is going on. “Maybe he doesn’t need his memories back,” Dean says.
Castiel says to Sam, “Do you want your memory back?”
“Of course,” Sam says. It’s one way to find out how he managed to cause a world wide catastrophe.
“NO!” Dean says. “Fuck. Would you just wait? Cas, think about it. Think about all the shit. The Cage.”
Castiel looks at Sam. “It is true. Many of your memories are bad.”
“How bad?” Sam asks. The stuff in the books sounds grim. Lousy childhood, fiancé dying but it was years ago.
Dean said, “Really bad. Psychotically bad.”
“Dean,” the angel says.
“Yeah, I know. You took care of that and I’m grateful but if you hadn’t taken down the wall you wouldn’t have had to.” Dean’s look is stony. Sam is kind of glad not to be on the receiving end.
“Took care of what? Just what are you talking about?” Sam asks. “What is the cage?”
“The place you dream about. You went to Hell,” Dean says.
Sam tries to think about what Dean means by that. Dean and Castiel are looking at him a bit expectantly, like he should have some reaction. He doesn’t like what effect this conversation is having on his pleasant, pain pill haze. He went to Hell. Given that Castiel is an angel even if he looks like an insurance agent that probably means exactly what it sounds like and there is the dreams. “So I’m not a good guy.” Sam says. No surprise there.
Dean laughs. “Fuck no, you volunteered to go to Hell to save the world. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’ve done some fucked up things. But martyrdom is kind of your specialty.” He sounds very bitter. “If there’s one thing you live for, it’s the moral high ground.”
Maybe he doesn’t want his memories back because he sounds like a righteous prick. No wonder he has no friends.
Castiel says, “You went to Hell to lock Lucifer in The Cage and stop the Apocalypse. Your soul spent almost two centuries locked with Lucifer and the Archangel Michael there.”
The dreams. The King of Hell. “The Morningstar. Lucifer means morning star.” He looks at Castiel. “You’re going to let them out.” In the back of his mind he’s thinking about the two centuries thing. Does that mean he and Dean were born in the 1800’s? Is that any weirder than angels or demons? But mostly he’s thinking about the Morningstar and the idea that they will let him out.
Castiel says nothing.
“Tell me you don’t think this is a good idea,” Dean says.
“The Bible is correct when it says that my Father separated the Light from the Darkness. But it doesn’t describe it as a battle. It took my Father and a host of angels. Now we’re reduced in numbers and my Father is missing.”
God is missing? He should be more surprised at that then he is.
“There is no way you’re going to let those fuckers out of The Cage,” Dean says.
“I need a pain pill,” Sam mutters. He really does. Castiel leans forward and touches Sam’s forehead and everything is infused with this feeling, this energy, the world is light, and there’s a feeling of goodness and health. Sam blinks and the pain is gone.
Which means, sadly, no more pain pills.
“You didn’t,” Dean says.
“I did not return his memories,” Castiel says. “I merely healed his injuries.”
“Did you put back that four inches they took of his small intestine?” Dean asks. “Because that’s just creepy.”
There is a moment of awkward silence.
“Sam,” Castiel says, “Do you want your memories back or do you want to wait?”
“Wait a little while,” Dean says. “A couple of days.” Dean seems…desperate. Not that it’s obvious.
Why not? “Okay,” he says.
“You’re the genius at research,” Dean says.
Sam looks around at the books. Also the tables and the beautiful reading lamps. He has no idea where to even start looking for something. Although he likes the idea of all the books. Books, it turns out, make him happy. “Spells?” he says. “Like magic spells?”
Dean shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. A location spell. To find Rowena.”
The news is full of a new cloud of Darkness. This one stretches across the Texas panhandle into parts of Arizona and New Mexico. Castiel is gone. Dean says that with this new cloud it’s going to be impossible to get Cas.
“Rowena is…”
“Crowley’s mother,” Dean says. “She’s a witch. She has the most powerful book of spells ever made. It’s called The Book of the Damned and it was made by a deranged nun who wrote it in a special code on pages made from her own skin in ink made of her own blood.”
Sam is pretty sure Dean is making this shit up to see how much he’ll believe.
“I’m not making this shit up,” Dean says. Which is kind of creepy.
“Why do we care about Rowena?” Sam asks.
“Because the book is like, you know, Excalibur or the Holy Grail, except evil, and it might have the equivalent of the atomic bomb for The Darkness.”
“Right,” Sam says. “Because that sounds like such a good idea.”
“Sarcasm isn’t really your style, Sam. I’m not saying we use it,” Dean says. “I’m saying we should have the book instead of Rowena or Crowley because nothing about those two makes me think ‘with great power comes great responsibility.”
“Didn’t you say I caused this?”
Dean shoves him against a bookcase and suddenly Dean’s nose is about three inches below Sam’s. “No,” Dean hisses, “I did not say you caused this. This. Is. Not. Your. Fault. I got the Mark. The Stynes lost the book. I blamed you for…” Dean stops himself and blows air through his teeth. “Cas helped you. Rowena was part of it. No one knew what the result would be. You were just trying to save me.”
The books are pressing unevenly into Sam’s back. Dean is clearly working hard to convince himself that this is not Sam’s fault. “Okay,” Sam says.
They have stirred up a lot of dust.
“Dean,” Sam says. “If you don’t let me loose I’m going to sneeze in your face.”
Part Seven | Part Nine