Le Chant Des Oiseaux: Chapter 3
The summer Sam was twelve, an arid heat wave rolled across the country. Most of the country was seared dry and desolate during those months. Monsters, demons, beings who craved human blood or carnage were as rare as the prayed for rain.
The Impala served as a torturous oven. It multiplied the humidity within as the sun blazed through untempered glass. Heat radiated up through the leather seats. The open windows were a desperate attempt to create a cross-breeze to evaporate the sweat from their salt-streaked bodies. It only served to increase the furnace blast of heat fruitlessly flowing from one stifling hot corner to the next.
John barely spoke that summer. It was as if the effort to speak sapped too much energy. Dean struggled to occupy his thoughts with mindless tasks and memorization tests. Anything, no matter how brief, was better than thinking about the constant need for water that strummed through his veins.
Sam seemed impervious to it all. True, he pleaded for an extra day in the chilled air of run-down motel rooms as often as Dean. But once he was tucked back into the Impala’s back seat, he fell silent, lost in a world of written birds.
One weekend, John splurged for three days in the motel. An entire weekend spent at a motel on the outskirts of a former steel town afforded them uninterrupted hours of cool respite from the blinding heat waiting outside. John slept, Dean flipped through skin mags, and Sam read about owls, blue jays, macaws, and swallows.
“Sam,” Dean asked the second night, “What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?” Sixteen year old Dean smiled smugly, sure Sam would be flummoxed by the question.
“African or European?” Sam retorted without ever lifting his eyes from his book.
“Either.”
“Twenty-four miles an hour.”
“And a laden swallow?”
Sam lazily flipped the page of the dog-eared Audubon book in front of him. “A five ounce bird can’t carry a one pound coconut, Dean.”
Dean threw a pillow at him. “You’re such a little shit, Sammy.”
“I know. Anyway, shut up, you love me.”
Smiling, Dean nodded. It was true. It would always be true. “You shut up.”
That night, Dean sat on the cool concrete of the breezeway outside their room. Funny how he almost missed the oppressive heat after forty-eight inside a refrigerated room. Just a taste, he told himself, so he could appreciate the cool air in the room behind him.
A gust of wind sent a myriad of plastic bags, cigarette butts, and food wrappers skittering past Dean. A feather drifted amongst the detritus, catching on one of the Impala’s tires. Dean snagged it out of the tire well, twirled it between his fingers. It was frayed, several barbs missing and bent. It smelled decidedly of motor oil, as if it had spent the day in a pool of it beneath another, long-gone car. He couldn’t tell if had been multi-colored once, or if had always been black, regardless of the motor oil. But it was small enough to fit into his pocket, so Dean stuffed it inside. He’d give it to Sam in the morning.
Morning came with John sounding reveille early. He spoke gruffly, choked out a brief, “Gotta get moving,” to wake Dean and Sam. They dressed as quickly as they shoveled breakfast into their mouths, and were on the road with the rising sun. Another monotonous day stretched before them. The rescued feather sat newly forgotten in Dean’s back pocket.
Weeks later, when Dean asked Sam about his summer spent reading all things avian, and Sam had spoken of freedom, he remembered the discarded, oily feather. Digging through various pairs of jeans in search of it, Dean figured it had simply given up the ghost, disintegrated from wear and tear and a hundred washes. But there, in the back pocket of his favorite jeans, was the feather.
There was enough left that Dean could still twirl it between his fingers. He dropped it in Sam’s lap, saying, “Found this. Thought you might like it.”
Sam scrunched his face at it before carefully inspecting the feather. It was tattered and cracked, but still held its own. Looking up at Dean, Sam flashed him a lop-sided smile.
“I do. Thanks, Dean.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
Dean plopped onto the couch next to Sam. He channel surfed for something besides the Hee-Haw reruns the local station seemed to play every night. Sam returned to his homework, and John came back a week late past his promised return.
The morning after Sam flew away to Stanford, Dean found an envelope on his pillow. When Dean unfolded Sam’s note, the feather was inside, taped next to the words, I’ll always look back.
Dean burned them both.
~*~
“Sam?”
Sam legs sprawl over the empty corpse of Raphael, of the vampire, of dead Mark Falls. There’s a sickening thud as the head drops back off the body. Sam’s no longer smiling. He twirls the angel feather gently. Sam offers the feather to Dean.
“To remember, so we never have to look back.” Then he promptly passes out, sliding to the floor in a heap.
Dean wobbles on his knees, lurches forward onto his hands. It’s an unsteady position, his right hand higher than his left, his left knee lower than his right, as he crawls across upended floorboards.
He takes a few deep breathes, tries to will his nausea away. It doesn’t go. Instead, he vomits watery bile. Dry heaves rack his body. Adrenaline drains away, replaced by the ache of tense and exhausted muscles. Moments pass, and his body gives in. Dean rolls onto his back, narrowly avoiding the puddle of his own sick, There are cracks in the ceiling. He follows one across until his eyes roll back in his head. The stench of death and blood and vomit and sweat fill his nose. Three decades spent here, twice that long spent below, and he’s still not used to the smell. His stomach clenches, but there’s nothing left to expel.
He wonders if it would be best for him, for Sam, for the whole miserable line of Winchesters if he simply closed his eyes and let go. Castiel, surely, can wipe his memory from Sam’s mind. Leave Sam’s mind blank, let him spend his life sharing bird facts with anyone willing to listen. It seems less cruel than leaving Sam’s mind the chaotic painful place it is now, thanks to Dean.
C’mon, get up, got things to do. John’s voice echoes through Dean’s head, and so he does. He pushes himself up, crawls over to Sam. Sam is still unconscious, lying partially across Mark Falls’ dead body, Dean pushes and pulls Sam off the corpse. He runs a hand across Sam’s warm face, down to the pulse point on his neck, feels the steady thump-thump of life beneath his fingertips.
“Cas?” Dean calls. The question is more of a reflex than an actual desire to talk to the angel. After three years, it’s a hard habit to break; he doesn’t really expect an answer. Castiel spent the last awful year ignoring Dean’s pleas for help, there’s no reason he should change his ways now.
“Think you’ll be okay for a minute, Sammy?” Sam still holds the dark feather. It flutters in the breeze blowing in through the empty windows. “Yeah, I think you’ll be all right for a minute.”
With a sigh, Dean hoists himself upright, shuts his eyes against a brief bout of vertigo. Carefully, he picks his way through the wreckage to the stairs. The steps are twisted and gnarled, spiraling first to the left, then to the right. By the time he reaches the landing, he’s breathless. He’d call himself out of shape if it weren’t for the fresh anxiety driving him forward. The hallway leading to Sam’s bedroom, the place Sam promised Lisa and Ben would be safe, looks just as distorted and fractured as the rooms below.
Dean hurries down the hall to the bedroom door. The frame is bent and bowed, but the door is straight and solid. Dean grabs the doorknob and pulls. The door opens smoothly, despite the ruined hallway; the interior of the room is undamaged. Dean stares. There are no blown out panes of glass littering broken floor boards, no bowed walls that crack the ceiling.
And Lisa and Ben are right where Dean left them. Their backs to the bed, bare feet and hands pressed to the floor, eyes staring determinedly through the intact window to the world outside. They’re alive and safe; Sam kept his promise.
“Dean?” Lisa asks. “That you?”
“Yeah,” he whispers in return, “it’s me.”
Dean walks over, stands in front of them. Neither avert their eyes from the window, even though Dean is blocking their view. “It’s okay, you can stop looking, now.”
Ben blinks, first. He raises his eyes to Dean, keeps his gaze on Dean’s face as he squats to their eye level. Lisa holds out a moment longer, and then another, and one more before she takes a trembling breath and looks at Dean.
“Sam?”
Dean nods. “Fine. Passed out, but,” Dean exhales, “fine.”
Lisa nods too, wraps a shaking arm around Ben. “Okay, then. Okay.”
~*~
The three of them stand in the crumbled remains of the house. Lisa holds Ben close, Dean stands next to Sam. Dean was sure Lisa would have said something about the state of the house by now. But she’d merely pursed her lips into a straight line and held Ben tighter. Even Ben’s awed, “Damn,” had earned no rebuke. Whatever her current thoughts might be, she keeps them under wraps. It’s possible Lisa simply has nothing to say in the face of her destroyed home, the dead vampire spread-eagled on the floor, or the sight of Sam unconscious and clutching a feather. Dean certainly has no words. His throat is tight and he can’t catch his breath. He is utterly exhausted.
But still he pushes on.
Dean scrounges up a pillow and blanket for Sam, moves his brother into the most comfortable looking position possible. Sam’s heartbeat and breathing are still strong. Except for the dried blood on Sam’s hand and pants leg, it looks like he simply decided to curl up on the floor to take a midday nap.
Dean gingerly knocks Mark’s head into a garbage bag, ties it off, and begins dragging his body by the feet across the floor. It’s slow going and laborious, but keeps his mind occupied and off Sam, angels, the state of Lisa’s house, and a thousand, million directions his thoughts try to skitter off to. By the time he reaches the shattered mudroom doorway, his mind is no longer racing, but his heart is. It’s just from the exertion. Not because he now knows Sam is living in hell.
Dean grunts as he pulls Mark’s body down the steps, and finally, Lisa reacts. She gives Ben a gentle push toward Dean.
“Go, help him,” she says.
Ben does so without question or pause. Together, the two of them haul Mark’s body back to his grave.
Dean collapses at the edge of the hole he’d dug, that Raphael had crawled out of in a borrowed, decomposing long-gone human body. He sits cross-legged, staring at the shovel he left in the grass. Ben stands awkwardly next to him, periodically glancing around the yard. Dean can’t tell if he’s checking out the damage to the house or simply serving as a look-out. Eventually, Ben sits down beside him and plucks at a blade of grass.
Above them, a flock of southerly migrating geese flap their wings lazily, honking.
The last, brittle threads of strength forcing Dean to put one foot in front of the other, despite loss and grief, hell and betrayal finally break. He puts his head in his hands and cries.
~*~
The stars have long replaced the sun when Dean wakes. He’s curled on his side, cocooned inside a wool blanket; Lisa or Ben had taken a moment to cover him before trying to find peace themselves in the tattered remains of their house. It is quiet, but not supernaturally so. This is the muted quiet of night, when people retire to their houses and animals go quiet. He expects to find himself alone, but hunter’s instinct tells him he’s not. There’s someone nearby.
Chancing a glimpse, Dean cracks one eyelid. Castiel stands before him. Dean opens his mouth to grit out, Go away, but his voice gives out somewhere around the A. He closes his eyes, again. He feels a strange sense of movement, and then, nothing.
~*~
Dean blinks awake to brilliant sunlight. His muscles are so sore he’s sure they’ll cramp the minute he moves. Slowly he catalogues his surroundings: lying on a bed, dust motes floating in fresh air. The scent of death is gone. There’s a figure before him. Lisa sits ramrod straight in a wingback chair, her hands tucked beneath her legs. He chokes back a hysterical laugh at the thought he’s a child again and his long-gone mother replaced by some bizarre facsimile of a stern Harriet Nelson.
Aloud, he asks, “Sam?”
“Awake. Sitting outside in the Impala.”
The answer startles him. Dean moves to sit up, and the world spins. He lowers his head between his knees to stave off the nausea.
“I’m glad you’re awake, Dean.” Then acidly, she adds: “I’m fine. Ben, too, thanks.”
“Good, good, that’s --” Dean reaches blindly for her, exhaling, “that’s good.”
“Yeah, okay.” Lisa takes his hand, helps him to his feet. She guides him down the hallway, down the stairs, through the house, across the yard, towards Sam and the Impala. Always.
~*~
The garage is well-lit. Far more so than the night Dean sat here (just a year ago), desperate for respite from his all- consuming grief. Now Sam sits in the passenger seat, waiting. The car door is open, his legs sprawled out onto the garage floor. In his hand, the angel plucked feather twirls between his fingers. Dean breaks free of Lisa’s support, hurries to Sam’s side. Leaning against the car, he knocks Sam’s gigantic feet.
“Hey, you okay?”
Before he even looks up, Sam grins. “Yeah, yeah.”
“He woke before you did, insisted on coming out here.”
Castiel’s voice rumbles against the aluminum walls and concrete floor. Dean hadn’t even noticed his presence.
Chose not to acknowledge it.
Dean turns to Lisa. He needs to ask her, but he has no idea where to start.
Lisa glances from Castiel to Dean. She, finally, Dean realizes, looks him square in the eyes for the first time that day. Dean knows what she’s going to say before she opens her mouth.
“Yeah. Listen, I know what I said before. But I can’t.” Her voice cracks and she visibly pulls herself together before continuing. “I can’t figure this out with you. Not anymore. You boys --” she flutters her hands around the garage, “-- figure this out. I’m, we’re, done.”
“Lisa -“
“No, it’s not. It’s not because of what happened.” A brittle laugh. “It is, actually.” She crosses her arms, hugging them to her chest. “It’s because. My debt, it’s paid, Dean. You -“
“No, Lisa, you didn’t have any debt -“
“Stop. Just shut up. I did. To you, to Sam, for Ben, for that out there.” she lifts her chin, indicating the world beyond the garage walls. “I didn’t mind, it wasn’t a burden. But whatever debt you two have yet to pay, I can’t be a part of it. It’s not mine to repay. Or make right. Or wrong. I’m out, I’m all paid up.”
“Lisa -“
Sam grabs his leg, gives a tight shake of his head.
“Just, um, just say good-bye before.” Lisa pulls herself taller, offers Dean a sad smile, juts out her chin before continuing, “You come say good-bye before you leave, got it?”
She spins on her heel and leaves before Dean has a chance to reply.
Dean backs away from Sam’s grip, leans against the work bench. He glances at Sam, then Castiel. Neither of them look guilty for the secrets they’ve kept for the past year. There’s no hint of anything at all on their faces. That’s to be expected from Castiel. But not Sam. Not Sam who bitch-faced his way through Dean’s entire life. Sam whose lack of emotion as he sat in a darkened room communing with wood for fuck’s sake had torn Dean’s heart to shreds. Sam whose vicious decapitation of vampires and violent rebuke of Raphael had scared him shitless. And that’s not even counting the whole feather stealing weirdness. But now Sam’s face is placid, calm, like he doesn’t have a care in the world. It’s like he doesn’t have a thought in his head, which seems pretty fucking convenient. Dean calls bullshit.
He explodes at them both. “What the fuck?” Dean. “What the fuck was all that about? And I don’t just mean the last two days. I mean the whole fucking enchilada, you assholes.”
Dean’s anger rises up, boils over. He stalks from one end of the garage to the other.
“You.” He points at Castiel, “You show up one night with Sam out of his mind, and babble on about how he made some choice.” Dean rounds on Sam. “Then you babble about fucking birds or whatever,” he yells, furious, “and break Lisa’s house with your voice. You tell an angel to go fuck itself, and oh by the way, didn’t I tell you I actually had it pretty good down there with Lucifer, thanks for asking,. And let’s not forget you stole one of Raphael’s goddamn feathers, passed the fuck out, and left me to pick up the pieces.”
Dean pauses, out of breath. One of them better say something pretty fucking fast or he’s going to continue the verbal beat down. He’s got plenty left to say. Castiel and Sam exchange a look, but that’s it. Okay, fine.
Dean shoves everything off the workbench. Tools, nails, screws cascade to the floor in a clattering heap. For one long moment, the only sound is the reverberating echo of metal on concrete.
“One of you, for the love of --,” Dean catches himself. “For fuck’s sake, one of you needs to start talking. Now.”
It’s Castiel who speaks first. “I didn’t ignore, you, Dean. I heard you every time you asked for help. But I couldn’t. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“Well that makes perfect sense, Cas. You sure as shit didn’t have any problem showing up last night.”
“He couldn’t enter the house before, Dean,” Sam interrupts. “The house was warded against angels. Warded against --” A mirthless laugh punches out of him, “pretty much everything. Nothing in or out. Until -- ”
Dean grips the workbench, his knuckles white with the force of it. “Until I let those bloodsuckers in?”
“Yeah. But.”
Sam extricates himself from the Impala, walks to Dean. He’s still got the damned feather clutched in one fist. He rests his free hand on Dean’s arm. It’s a steady hold, and it grounds him.
“But I heard it,” Sam admits. “And I broke the wards. I let everything in.”
“What does that mean, Sam? I don’t know what that means.” Dean shrugs, shakes his head. “What any of this means.”
“It means I’m here, now.” Sam raises his other hand, twirls the feather in Dean’s face. “And this means Freedom. For both of us.”
“Sam.”
“Dean, when I was….below. With Lucifer and Michael and Adam. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever known. It wasn’t pain or misery or anything. It just was. But all around us, me, was blood and agony. And every day, I watched it. Couldn’t understand why I wasn’t a part of that. I didn’t even know where the others where, mostly. All I heard were nonsense words and distant whispers.”
“Michael came to me, told me that I didn’t belong. That I wasn’t worthy of peace or love or,” Sam pauses. Dean watches Sam’s eyes grow distant as he remembers. “That my place was out there, beyond the bars of Lucifer’s cage. Out where souls are twisted and spun and broken until there’s nothing left but hollow darkness.” Sam’s eyes re-focus, shift back to Dean. “Like what they tried to do to you ”
Images of his own time in Hell flicker through Dean’s mind. He can still feel the oily slickness slither over the remains of his soul.
Sam shakes Dean slightly, his face breaking into a smirk. “I told him to go fuck himself. That he was a lying sack of shit. I didn’t belong out there, and neither did you. And you.” Sam shakes Dean again. “You aren’t any of that.”
“Then Adam came to me. He said he was happy. He…went somewhere, I don’t know where. But I didn’t see him, again. Worse, I guess, I didn’t hear him again.”
Sam breathes deeply through his nose, continues, “Next, Lucifer came to me. He didn’t say anything at first. Just stood there, watching me. He held out two closed fists, told me to pick one.”
Dean can feel Sam’s hand trembling, see his whole body begin to shake with emotion. Sam drops his head, speaks softly, “I didn’t choose either for days and days. I don’t know, probably longer, I guess. I didn’t want to. Every time I made a choice in my life, it was the wrong one. But -“ he chokes out a sob, works to control himself, “I never really had a choice, did I? Lucifer showed me that. Azazel made sure of it. Fucking cherubs forcing mom and dad together. Brady, Meg, Ruby, Michael.”
Dean whispers, “I know.”
“And that’s when it hit me, Dean.” Sam looks up, tears shining in his eyes, but his voice strong, “Lucifer didn’t care, anymore. I was useless to him. He couldn’t get out with Lilith, gone. He couldn’t walk topside with me below. All he had, all he ever had, was that cage. And now he had Michael to play with. I was less than useless to him, I was pointless.”
“But a discarded angel is still an angel. So I chose. For the first time in my whole fucking life, I got a choice, and I chose. Peace or Freedom.”
Dean’s mind tumbles and turns as he re-plays the last year of their lives together. How clueless he’d been to Sam’s suffering. He’d watched his brother scream and cry and flay his skin to the muscle. But Dean had never realized Sam did those things because he was here. Why hadn’t he spared himself the pain? It was stupid. So goddamn stupid. Dean wasn’t worth that. Dean is stupidly, selfishly grateful for Sam in his life, right now, even after everything he knows. But he’s not worth it.
“You should have chosen Peace, Sammy.”
“No.” Sam leans his forehead against Dean’s, whispers, “The only peace I will ever know is with you. You’re my brother, Dean. And I’ll keep saying this until you get it through your head: There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”
“You traded one cage, for another.”
“Not anymore.” Sam pulls back, shows the feather to Dean again. “When I broke the wards, I knew Raphael would come.” Sam jerks his head toward the silent Castiel, “Don’t blame him. He’s the one who talked me out of my original plan.”
“You had a plan?”
“Yeah, to kill Raphael for --” Sam twirls the feather “-- this. Castiel’s the one who told me I only had to pluck it.”
“The point being?”
“The point being that whoever has the feather of an angel cannot be harmed. By Heaven. By angels. Even fallen, discarded angels.”
Dean pushes Sam away. His anger returns, flares into a rage. “If it was that simple, if that’s all we had to all this time, all these years, then why didn’t Castiel offer one up?”
Dean rounds on Castiel, his words venomous. “You raised me out of Hell, let Michael possess Adam. You brought Sam here under one of your wings for fuck’s sake, and kept me from helping Sam fight that dick, Raphael! And all of it could have been prevented by a single fucking feather? Why didn’t you help?”
“I did, Dean.”
Castiel’s calm, almost patronizing tone is nearly more than Dean can bear. He holds himself very still. “You insufferable bastard.”
“Sam had to fight that battle on his own, I couldn’t help him,” Castiel explains. It would be….unseemly for me to outwardly aid in the defeat of an angel. And I have no desire to fight my brother.”
Castiel steps close to Dean, almost touching. “I saved you by surrounding you with Noah’s Dove Blood.” Castiel nods towards Sam, “Just like he saved Lisa and Ben by encircling them in the blood.”
Castiel’s eyes turn cold as he continues, “And I gave you a feather, once. The summer you had nothing to hunt. But you threw it away. I couldn’t give you another. So you should be more grateful.“
Dean is stunned. He remembers that stifling hot summer. He remembers his father’s near silence, Sam’s obsession with books on birds. And he remembers the feather. Finding it. Losing it. Giving it to Sam. And when Sam gave it back, Dean had burned it. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known.
Dean manages to murmur, “Shit,” before his knees give way. He staggers over to the wall for support. “Isn’t this just fucking perfect.”
“It is.”
Dean raises weary eyes to Sam, wonders if Sam’s gone back ‘round the bend.
“What the fuck?”
Sam rummages through the mess of tools Dean dumped on the floor. “I loved that summer, Dean. People weren’t dying, Dad and I weren’t fighting, you and me, we did pretty good. I spent years trying to find that feeling again. Thought I could find it at college.” Sam sweeps aside nuts and bolts, his voice nearly lost in the sound of scraping metal. “But I wasn’t ever going to. Because,“ Sam pauses, slides his gaze to Dean, “you weren’t there. So when Lucifer cast me back up here, and I was…I was kinda lost there for a while, it’s what brought me home, back to you.”
Sam stops rummaging, smiles triumphantly, and reveals a frayed piece of twine. Dean watches incredulously as Sam methodically ties the twine to the feather and hangs it from the Impala’s rearview mirror. “I remembered that summer, and, I don’t know, things started to hurt less.” Sam drops his hands, looks around the Impala. “It still hurts. But now,” he extends a finger, brushes Raphael’s stolen feather, turns back to Dean. “We have this,” he says simply.
“I don’t -“
“We won, Dean. Freedom from Hell and Heaven.”
When Dean throws his hands in the air, Sam replies “We still got the family business. You know,” Sam smirks, “saving people, hunting things.”
Dean looks from Sam to Castiel, and back. He’s looking for some sign that there’s another shoe to drop. There’s always another shoe to drop. Nothing in their lives is this easy.
Off Dean’s look of disbelief, Sam crouches in front of him. “C’mon, Dean. We got work to do.”
“This what you really want, Sammy?”
“I chose, Dean.”
~*~
Master Post || Epilogue; Notes & Thanks