Held Against Your Bones [1/3]
Reveals for this fic exchange went up a week ago--am only now getting around to archive this at my own LJ, lol. This just about makes up the bulk of my writing in 2010, this dreadful plot bunny, you. Grrrr.
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Title: Held Against Your Bones
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating/Pairings: R (language, violence, very brief nudity). Dean/Castiel subtext.
Word Count: ~28200
Summary: After Stull Cemetery, Dean finds himself with an angel in his head for unsolicited company. It’s a time to tie up loose ends and run into acquaintances old and new, but Dean isn’t finished with Hell just yet, and Castiel’s trapped without a body of his own. (And someone’s got a wild card left to play.)
Notes: Written for devilsduplicity in the deancastiel Secret Angels IV fic exchange (originally posted here); prompts used were (3) Dean has always been blind. Cas is the only person he's able to see, and (4) Dean wakes up one day handcuffed to Cas. The handcuffs are magical-neither of them can break free. Dean wants to continue hunting. Cas wants to search for God. Title is from Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods; AU from the end of 5x22, no spoilers for S6. SPN is not mine. Many, many thanks to kalliel for looking over this!
He’s rolled the window halfway down so the wind whips at his face without restraint, but he keeps his eyes open against the onslaught. At the next turn in the road, the afternoon sunlight angles again through the windshield, bright fingers sliding here and there with the curving motion of the car. It chases out shadows in crevices, pools upon the dashboard, flashes along the sideview mirrors. Under its touch the Impala gleams brightly, shiny dark like a cockroach shell.
“Gonna be coming into Pontiac soon,” he says; doesn’t turn his head to look at the shotgun seat. “Make a stop there, get some food. Before, you know.”
The emptiness sits beside him and agrees, as much as any expected silence can. Dean drives onward, and blinks; the wind has dried out his eyes.
*
That night Dean drove back to Sioux Falls. The weight of the Horsemen’s linked rings rested light and insubstantial in his pocket; in the rearview mirror, he could see Bobby in the back seat, getting stiffer and colder by the hour. On Bobby’s stomach rested the license plate of his truck, which had carried him to the cemetery and to his death and which even now languished plateless and hidden.
His left eye had swollen up and he had trouble staying on the right side of the yellow line, the one road law he remembered to follow. The blood on his face had dried and crusted over but he didn’t bother wasting holy water to wash it off. As for the stop signs, the lights, and the turns of his driving-he carried the memories like water in his hands but they fell through the cracks and seeped away, except for Sam, and Sam alone, next to him. His face was brighter than any road signal glaring out of the dark.
(I tried to help where I could, Cas told him much later, otherwise you might have crashed; and Dean snapped back, So what? If it happens, who cares? and then he woke up to the empty room and scowled and said out loud, “Oh fuck you.”)
At sunrise he took Bobby some ways from the salvage yard and sent him off. The body burned well, for he had spent plenty of time learning how to work with fire and flesh and the illusions of such in Hell, in the proper fashion, and then some with remains of the ghostly dead on earth, and so did not flinch at the smell. Instead he slid his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans and slouched forward and watched Bobby go up in flames; thought of Bobby walking up and down the stairs all that one long night in another lifetime, each deliberate step, pressing down hard on the creaking wood to sense the pressure shift from heel to ball of foot, the wondering look on his face.
It had been a long night.
Back in the house, he found beer lined up in the fridge and drank it all, though it tasted like shit in his mouth, and then like blood after he bit down hard on his tongue; fell asleep on the floor of the living room, hunched up against the couch and wearing one of Sam’s old hoodies he’d found under the backseat of the Impala. The threadbare fabric was soft against his skin, the familiar scent still lingering where he buried his nose.
He dreamed of Sam, before the growth spurt had made him so tall. Like trees rooted deep in the loamy earth they stood, side by side, and shot at cans on barrels, which tumbled down to the ground in muffled clinks. They never ran out of bullets and their targets returned to sit on the barrels no matter how many times their shots hit home, so they kept hunting the cans, and more cans, and saw no end. Grass stains decorated Sam’s jeans; dirt also, on his left cheek. And so they stood there and the sunlight drew around them like a shroud.
Sam yawned and stretched, raising his hands up as if his palms could act as his eyes and see the world from the heights he would attain, reaching for the sky; his hair flopped into his scrunched up face, so Dean bent down and shoved his little brother’s bangs back. “Aw, Sammy,” he said. “Oughta cut your hair. At this rate your hair’s gonna be long enough for pigtails.”
Sam scowled and carefully wrapped his fingers around Dean’s wrist. “Dean, you promised,” he said, his voice plaintive and firm. “You promised.”
“I know I did,” Dean told him. “I’m gonna go to Lisa’s, I promise. But you and Adam, and Bobby and Cas-” He didn’t bother to spend energy to continue, focusing on his brother’s jawline, his eyes, his ears peeking out under too-long hair. Dean didn’t know how many pictures of Sam he had. Not enough.
Sam’s smile flickered, gutted out, as if a puppeteer was tweaking his facial muscles for shits and giggles, and a growing whine pressed down on them, high-pitched shrieking like a chorus of crickets all at once. Dean, they chattered at him. Dean.
He flinched. Then he sagged and snorted and kept his eyes on Sam, whose features had softened, his edges blurring. Sam didn’t look so much like Sam anymore, and didn’t even try. Lucifer repeated, “You promised,” through the roar of Dean, listen to me, Dean and his lips shaped the words earnestly.
“If I ever go to Heaven again there’s no way I’m sticking around to hear your goddamn angel choirs, Cas,” he said to the air, turning his eyes away from Lucifer-and then he was sitting in the cemetery again. Sam was not there. Was still not there. Somewhere behind him, he knew, lay Bobby with his neck at too unnatural an angle to be living, and even farther off was Castiel, splattered as a careless design of blood on the ground, a burst star. He pressed his knuckles to his eyelids and dragged them down his face, digging in deeply as if to knock against his bones. Tap tap, and a hollow echo answered back. “No,” he said. “You’re all gone, okay, right?” He breathed in sharply, a dull pain in his chest where his ribs still carried Enochian script like a red badge, but of courage or of shame he did not know.
“Dean,” and now it was Cas’s voice, entwined with the low purr of the Impala’s engine revving up at his back-an inexplicable occurrence, as were many things in dreams. “I’m sorry you were left behind. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“Shut up,” Dean said.
“Unfortunately I-I can’t speak to you directly, it would harm you-”
“Does it look like it makes a difference?” Dean said. “You’re not a proper angel, not anymore, so fuck off. Can’t even sleep without going crazy. Why do I have you talking to me anyway?”
There was a sullen silence. Finally, dream Impala Cas said: “I am here.”
Dean replied flippantly, “Yeah, hijacking my baby, I hear you. Good ride, isn’t she?” His car, the only constant now. He turned to the side, bumping his shoulder against a front tire-the raised handprint on his skin rippled and seethed, shit, it felt like acid was eating away, and oh god-the maggots wriggled into his skin, burrowing through muscle and sinew to the bone and he looked up and focused through the bile rising in his throat; heard, oh Dean, who’s that a-comin’, and, Dean Winchester is saved-
Only him. Only Dean. This is Hell.
-and woke to sunlight in his eyes, high noon slinging heat through Bobby’s house with childlike relish. He shuddered and rubbed his hands over his face; they came away smeared in tears and hours-old blood.
He stared up at the ceiling; repeated to himself the words, I am here.
The smell of beer still hung in the air, but he was stone-cold sober-not even the slightest hint of a hangover. He said, cautiously: “Cas?”
The walls seemed to bear down upon him, eyed him with bemusement. “Figures,” he muttered, and got up and thought, Yeah, should wash my face. Blood all over.
He’d seen the blood; and yet his muddled thought at the explosion had been, Not dead, not yet. He’ll-he’ll come back. As he had after Raphael, and as he had after the banishing sigil, like a worn-out boomerang, chipped along the edges but unfailing in its return. (Harder to come back from Hell, though. Hell in Lucifer’s cage. So Sammy wasn’t-)
Surely-
The sound of static. The TV crackled to life, its screen awash with innumerable flickering points, a sea of black white gray.
*
“Dude,” Dean says, “what’s gotten into you?”
He doesn’t really need to ask something to which he knows the answer. The words rasp in his throat uncomfortably, the silence unnerving. He’d become too used to a Cas in his dreams in the days after Stull-one who spoke to him with the ring of true conviction in his voice. It was easier when he thought this Cas was just a visitor.
Dean curls his lip. Bleach in the brain, he really needs bleach to scrub it all out.
Don’t presume to ask. Castiel speaks curtly; he rarely intends to be kind. The Cas Dean visualizes is a Cas who does not often smile. Just do what we came here for.
Bad temper much, Dean decides, resentment lining his thoughts; he thins his mouth in a flat line, and cuts the engine. The Impala rumbles into silence on a residential street near an intersection. The houses are all sedate, painted with a limited palette of neutral colors, bracketed in the front by neatly trimmed lawns and clean porches, about as nice as Lisa’s place. This is a shrine to the normal.
He gets out of the car and walks up to one of the houses. His jacket traps heat against his body under the bright August sun, but he only draws it tighter around himself. At the door, on a whim, he stoops down and turns over the doormat to check the back: a devil’s trap, one pentacle overlaid upon another to form the all-too-familiar heptagram, drawn with painstaking care. The characters along the edges have been retouched with Sharpie marker several times over.
I believe it’s common custom to knock on the door when you want to speak to someone, Castiel says. So knock.
Dean replaces the doormat in its proper place. “Yeah, well, I guess you’re finally catching up on our human customs,” he replies, and certainly two years ago the shattered glass and the high-pitched whistling hadn’t been half as pleasant a greeting; adds, in a moment of spite, “You wanna try it yourself?” before he rings the doorbell, and does not knock, and thinks to himself, Shut your goddamn mouth, man-no hands, ma, Jimmy Novak’s gone and there’s no hands for knocking; but he can’t take the words back, and isn’t sure he wants to, and he considers, maybe there’s a reason that no one answers. But where’s your god now, huh? Where’s your god?
He peeks through the glass while he waits and tries to ignore Cas, whose presence has grown heavy and cold, like a slug dragging its trail of chilly slime over his collarbone. Nowadays Cas rides roughshod over his consciousness as he tries to collect his strength-vertigo strikes Dean’s dreams when asleep, ticklish sensations crawl between his shoulder blades when driving. Out of some warped sense of propriety, Dean hasn’t jerked off in a week since he finally realized that Cas had been in his mind all along, weak and pissed to Hell-and making Dean increasingly pissed as well. Not a visitor after all, but a fucking tenant. No rent, no by-the-way or by-your-leave, but Dean can’t kick Cas out anyway, not like he thought he could before-dumb of me, Dean thinks, goddamn dumb to think it was him-and he wouldn’t do it, anyway. The way it is, at least he knows Cas is alive. That this is Castiel. He’d rather not know where Cas would go.
(He touches his necklace. Four fingers, none of them his thumb.)
Occasionally Castiel will mutter rapid phrases of Enochian to himself, a litany of syllables chiming like bells interspersed with the harsh snap of curses. “What are you doing?” Dean asks and Cas answers, Trying to remember.
Dean never asks what. Cas returns the favor and never asks Dean what, either.
Now Cas stops murmuring incomprehensibly and says, They aren’t here. And it’s true. Three, five, six minutes, and no one has come to open the door and let in the man who broke the first seal, the gloriously damned guest of honor.
“Fine,” Dean says. “I guess we can come again later. You wanna double back to the diner, grab pie?” He runs his tongue over dry, cracked lips, thinks, Maybe a drink too.
You think I can taste it in this form?
“You can taste my taste of it. Or imagine it, or something.”
Cas says flatly, I have no taste buds. I wouldn’t taste you, either.
“What the fuck?” Dean almost turns his head, remembers at the last moment that nobody’s looking at him, that it’s all in his head. Doesn’t that sound almost like he ought to be in an asylum, instead of bumming at Lisa’s place. He steps off the porch and heads back toward the Impala. “Missing out, but hate to inform you, Cas, I don’t do guys.”
I’m not a guy. Cas sounds offended. Angels aren’t restricted to categories like that.
“You looked like some poor son of a bitch to me.”
No, that was Jimmy. You’ve never looked at me. Unless you want to be blinded?
Cas has learned sarcasm well during his time walking the earth-unless he’s being serious. It’s harder to tell the difference than Dean would’ve thought.
“Cas,” Dean finally says, “you look so fucking bright and fine that unicorns are breeding outta your ass, okay? I’m not going to turn my dirty eyes on that pure shit.”
You’re incorrect-there are no unicorns in Heaven, only pegasi.
“I’m sorry.” Dean slides back into the front seat and passes his hands over the familiar curve of the wheel, fingers curling one by one. “Your sense of humor sucks.”
Really. Pegasi have the wings.
“Fuck it all,” Dean says. “Cut it out already.”
Fine, Cas snaps. You believe what you want.
Dean twists his mouth down savagely and starts up the Impala; thinks, Sam would’ve said yes to pie.
(And he said yes to Lucifer. And you, Dean, you too, almost would’ve said yes too-)
He thinks, Sam would’ve bust a gut mooning over unicorns.
(And Dean Winchester, the righteous man: he doesn’t.)
-
At the diner, he ends up ordering fried chicken. The place does a brisk business: off in the corner some girls are sharing pizza at their table, all wearing t-shirts with number and last name emblazoned on the back, and athletic shorts and all; a kid keeps crying in the booth behind Dean’s seat about his broken crayons while his parents confer furiously over the menu; the waitress who took his order stops at a vacated table to clean up, pressing a hand to her temple, and he sees the drawn, hard look in her eyes, the rigid angles of her body. Muscles lean and curving under freckled skin-Dean could easily follow her lines with the keen edge of a knife, grow some fresh blood blossoms for a prize-winning garden. Her face is a blurred mirror image of his own.
Is the table so fascinating? Cas asks. Dean flicks his eyes up and away from the glossy formica. Are you so bored you have to bother me? he mutters. I’m surprised you’re going to all this trouble in the first place.
Just the basics; you already know that. It’s an obligation at the very least.
A terrible courtesy as well, thinks Dean; then again, angels aren’t ones to consider much beyond their duty and obligations. Cas is no longer one hundred percent angel, that’s true, but now that any acknowledgment of his existence is restricted to the space between Dean’s ears, Cas is only more determined to find his absent God and to cling to the remnants of his past nature. He had been almost human for a while, but what’s a few months to a few millennia? Lucifer razed me to pieces and tried to undo my grace, yet I survived, he had told Dean, who snorted and said, “Next time we see Lucifer, that son of a bitch is-“ Curled his hands into fists. Next time, there’d be a next time when he’d yank Sam out, there would be-
And Cas had not spoken of Lucifer, and continued, That counts for something. God must still be out there.
Dean wants to say, And where’s he in this world? And when you find him, you think he’s gonna snap his fingers and fix everything? When he didn’t before?
But he doesn’t direct these words at Cas. Castiel never met his God throughout all the time he was an angel in Heaven; calls him his Father, but not like any father Dean would ever imagine. Perhaps it is easier to love in one’s absence. Perhaps it is easier to hate.
Dean doesn’t want to burst Cas’s bubble, not yet-is, in his own way, strangely envious of Cas’s desperate faith in God all over again. He is being kind, or cruel, or both.
I appreciate you taking me here at my request, Cas suddenly says. I know that you hate my forced presence-
Can’t be helped. Yeah, and he hates it even more when Cas starts talking about the situation again. It was easier when Dean only had to deal with this in dreams, but then at that time-a wave of nausea suddenly surges in his throat; he winces, swallows it down until his stomach settles again. Dude, seriously, not now when other people are around. Maybe it’s no difference to you, but I want to hear myself speak when I talk to people, if possible.
How very self-absorbed of you, Cas observes.
Hey, I gotta talk to someone like they actually exist outside my head, Dean retorts. And who doesn’t have to be so bitchy, he adds as an afterthought.
Times like these, he’s grateful Cas only hears what Dean wants him to hear.
I hope you don’t think you’re insane to speak with voices in your head. I prefer to think I could exist like that.
Well, Dean says, you know what they say about delusions of grandeur-and then the waitress comes with the plate of fried chicken, a side of mashed potatoes, a beer, and he breaks off to give her a nod and a wink. “You’re gorgeous, you know that?” he says to her. “Bringing a man food when he needs it.”
“Or when he’s a customer ordering,” she replies wryly, but the corners of her lips twitch. Her face smoothes out, forehead losing the creases of concentration-through-headache, and the lines around her eyes crinkle up rather than down. She shifts the plates and drink onto the table, her movements deft and swift. “Betcha say that to every waitress you ever see?”
“You’d win, hands down,” he says, but keeps right on smiling. “I do. But that ain’t saying I don’t mean every word of it.”
“‘S only right that you see the truth of my awesome looks,” she shoots back. “Enjoy the food, handsome. You better like it.”
He raises the beer. “Expect I will,” Dean says to the waitress, who finally smiles outright, turns, and sails off to the next table.
(Dean, says Sam, stop flirting all the time, oh my god, don’t you give me that smirk. Okay, so, look at this article here, there was a suicide in-)
Dean, says Cas, if you’re that hungry you should just eat and not talk.
You’re kinda missing the whole point. Dean tries the potatoes. Smooth, well-mashed, a hint of cream and salt and garlic, and the last one’s a pleasant surprise, since Lisa doesn’t like garlic in her potatoes. He knows the taste of Yukon Gold sliding along his tongue almost immediately, the kind his mother always used. That he can still remember bits and pieces of a life before hunting-this surprises him at times. Thirty-one years old, yet feeling four decades older. He wonders: or maybe he is, depending on how you count the years.
I forget, he says. Did you ever get to try fried chicken?
No. Castiel makes a sighing noise, and the aches clear out of Dean’s skull, a feather-light brush like wings sliding against his temples before they vanish. Dean nearly turns his cheek into the touch-
And he catches himself mid-movement sharply, edging toward empty air. Fuck, he thinks, at least I had someone to look at before.
Cas goes on, The burgers though, I remember those.
Not really something you’d forget easily. Because yeah, the sight had been damn nauseating. Dean crunches the food in his mouth. The meat’s done just right, not too dry but not too oily either. He drags the crisp skin across his teeth, scraping over his gums. It tastes nothing like human skin.
Dean eats; Castiel doesn’t speak. The kid has stopped his crayon-crying fit and is cheerily telling his parents about art class yesterday in school-“and the teacher said she really liked my snake! She said it was really cool it had so many heads and called it a hydra.”
“Like the one Hercules fought, right?” his mother says.
“Uh huh, and every time you chop one off more grow back!”
Overhead, the ceiling fans hum steadily. The girls in the corner have finished their pizza and get up to leave, traipsing past him in a flurry of blue shirts and athletic bags. They’re all quick in their movements, sharp, young, and he hears one of them laugh unreservedly at some joke. He imagines that in their eyes the world must open like an oyster before them, soft and gleaming and brilliant.
Shit, Dean thinks. When I was their age-well. Seen a lot even back then.
He wipes his hands on a napkin and rolls his knuckles over his brow, then snags another piece of chicken and watches them go out through the door. Their last names proclaiming their presence: Morris, Przezinski, Latimer, Yi, and-
-he stiffens. Cas says, Oh. Somehow, even as powerless as he is, that one syllable slices down like a glass shard, leaving behind the regret and the pain.
The last girl must have sensed Dean’s gaze, for she turns and catches sight of him, her face very still with creeping recognition. She says something inaudible to her friends, waves as they head outside; then she comes back, back to the place where Dean sits unmoving, and nods. Smiles, but the line of her mouth is half-hearted and wary.
What Dean had seen first: the letters on the back of her t-shirt.
And Claire Novak says, “I told them you’re an old college friend of my dad’s who visited way back after hearing about his disappearance. I thought it’d be good to catch up, though obviously you were going to come see us anyway.” She pauses, then continues: “Can-May I join you?”
Even now, proper grammar. Dean marvels. How humans cling to the things they know. A small miracle all its own. “Um,” he says. Of course this is the kind of luck a Winchester has. “Yeah, sure, sit down.”
Castiel is silent.
She takes the seat across from him. Her hair is tied up high in a ponytail, swinging back and forth like a dying metronome. She settles her duffel in her lap; splays one hand on the table, examines her nails, and rubs off a little grease. Then she folds her arms and slumps down and watches Dean who watches her, for a long while.
“So,” she finally says, voice low and quiet beneath the buzz of nearby conversation. She flicks a crumb off the table, and continues, “Good to see you again,” as if she’s merely exchanging pleasantries with him like any other. “What’s happening?”
“I went to your house,” he tells her. “But you weren’t there.”
“Just soccer with friends,” she explains. “Mom’s working overtime. To pay the bills, you know. She’ll get home later tonight. Where’s Dad?”
And there’s the question. Just like an arrow homing in on the bullseye.
He puts his piece of half-eaten chicken on the plate; he’s terrible at this sort of talk, wishes Sam were there to say this instead. Sammy, whaddya say, to sugarcoat or not? “So. It’s all over. Your dad’s gone,” he says.
Everything remains much the same, except the shadowed ripple across Claire’s face, her cheeks sunken and her eyes burning with a terrible light-in that split-second she does not look at all like the girl who had just laughed with friends, with the world. The sharp lines of her face are sanded down by stress and the agony of known ignorance; for a moment, it reminds Dean oddly of Castiel, that frozen snapshot. She has seen that which the world has already offered her: the tearing apart of hearts, and the difficulty in sewing them back together.
“All right.” Claire ducks her head and looks away from Dean. “We sort of thought.” She pauses. “Daddy’s been gone for a long time,” she adds slowly. “And what Castiel said…”
Dean barely hears the hitch in her voice, but it’s there. I said it wrong, he realizes. Not just gone.
“No, not that way. I mean,” Dean stops. “Your dad’s dead. Shit. I’m sorry.” Dropping a bomb like that-and a round of applause for you, great job, Dean-o.
Cas should be talking to the Novaks, tying up loose ends, but instead the angel’s a disembodied, intangible mess hanging with Dean like a limpet. Or maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that Cas isn’t standing in Jimmy’s body for the visual shock. Either way, Jimmy’s still dead.
“My daddy.”
“I never talked to him again,” he blurts out. “I think it was quick.”
When Raphael tore me apart, Cas had said, I don’t know where I went, much less Jimmy. I was beyond oblivion-there he had broken off, and nothing more. It’s just about the most Dean’s ever heard from Cas on his destruction. Chuck’s room, decorated in bloody smithereens, before Cas’s first return-this he hasn’t forgotten.
“My daddy,” Claire says again, the words like a prayer. She slides her hands up her face till the tips of her fingers meet at the bridge of her nose, the skin under her eyes. Her hands point straight up to the sky. Our father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. “He’s not with Castiel anymore?”
“No,” replies Dean.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, okay,” and she picks up a napkin, methodically wiping her hands, then her face, turning her head to the window to block herself from the sight of other customers. “That’s all I needed to know.” She folds the napkin in half, in quarters, in eighths; then snatches up a second one, trembling in her grip. “Sorry,” she says. “Can we go now?”
“Yeah,” Dean mumbles. “Sure.” He gets up and throws down some bills-should more than cover the check, and tip for the waitress too, he guesses, hopes she smiles some more. Someone needs to.
Claire draws herself up as if she was never crying, face gone blank and deceptively calm, and they go outside, past the harsh light of the diner’s sign. The evening swallows them up in its dusky gullet, red streaked purple streaked gray in the sky, punctured only by the pale chalky smudge of the moon.
“I’ll drive you home,” he says abruptly. “I, uh, it’s better for me to talk to your mom. Wouldn’t want you to do it.”
Claire laughs, more like a sob, and swings her duffel in time with the rhythm of her legs. “I wouldn’t want to do it either.” She turns her face up to look at him. “What about Castiel?”
“Cas?” Dean keeps walking, no telltale break in his rhythm, but he slows. “Cas can’t really do much of anything right now. He’s, ah... outta commission.”
“So he’s gone, too.” Claire’s eyes slide past him, focusing on a tree branch, a sliver of sky. “I wanted to ask Castiel about stuff, you know. Like, what was special about our blood. What it was like for Daddy, like how it was for me. But I guess it doesn’t really matter. He’s not stuck anymore.” She’s smiling like she means it, even as the tears slip down her cheeks, for in her eyes there’s nothing but naked relief and quiet sorrow, aging like fine wine. “He’s gotten out of it.”
Cas, says Dean, staring at Castiel’s former vessel. You and the Novaks-
He said yes, Cas replies.
So what? Dean watches Claire; just the two of them in the parking lot, a man and a girl, saying nothing that could be humanly heard. You still got some of your angel mojo, enough to be here. What’s keeping you from just nagging her so we don’t have to be stuck like this? Afraid she’s gonna say no forever?
Dean, Cas says reproachfully. I don’t have the power. And of course I keep my promises.
And if you could-what, the promise is the only thing stopping you?
The breeze brought in by the falling twilight is surprisingly chilly, nipping at the backs of their necks. He waits for a while, then grins bitterly at the quiet.
“Car’s over here,” he says, and Claire hiccups once, replies, “I know, I recognize it.”
“My baby’s one of a kind,” he adds, because it’s easier to talk about his car.
“Yeah. I’d remember your Impala. I rode in it,” she says shortly. And: “It was nice.”
“One thing I can keep that way,” he tells her and gets in, back too straight against his seat. Cas, he grumbles, cat got your tongue?
Claire’s still standing. “You can hop in, you know,” he says.
“I’ll-just sit here, then,” she says, and her eyes move haltingly over the entire car before she looks back to Dean. She opens her mouth again, as if to say, And your brother, where is he-
She doesn’t ask, and opens the door to ride shotgun.
No, says Cas, I understand better, now.
*
He said to the sheriff over the phone, Yeah, if you could just make sure people didn’t snag anything from his place-much appreciated. Thanks. I’ll figure out what to do with his stuff, sometime. I don’t know. Something like that. Forward whoever calls his phones to me. The words clattered around in Dean’s head, like a tower of blocks falling, each knocking against another on the way down.
Jody Mills listened, and hmmed, and said, finally, “All right. Keep it together, Winchester,” and hung up. She hadn’t asked about anything other than Bobby’s cremation, had heard the news with a loud release of breath and refrained from questioning why Dean had left Sioux Falls without talking to her then, why he was calling her from Indiana of all places. Easier over the phone than in person, he figured, and it seemed like Sheriff Mills recognized that as well.
Dean put the phone back on the hook and massaged his temples. A pain to deal with-storing the books on obscure superstitions and legends and the numerous FBI-police-CIA-and-so-forth-labeled phones, going through Bobby’s contacts, finding someone who would be able to take on the resources and wasn’t retired for the most part, like Rufus. The Winchesters had been known among the hunters, but had not known many hunters themselves; Dean regretted it now, the utter disconnection from anyone else who shared the hunting life. Maybe one of them got to meet Mom before, he wondered fleetingly. When she was young. If there was one old enough. Longevity wasn’t so common among the hunters he knew-or at least, among people the Winchesters knew, which also included themselves.
He thought of the books he’d taken from Bobby’s place and stowed away in the back of the Impala. So far, no sign of anything promising, but there had to be a way. It had to exist; or Dean would figure it out, somehow.
“You feeling okay?” Lisa appeared in the doorway. She carried a wrench in one hand and a rag in the other. “Aspirin?”
“Nah,” he said. “You sure you don’t want-“
“No,” she told him firmly. “I can take care of this leaky faucet on my own. You just got here yesterday evening, I’m not going to have you run around doing work.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to sit around, Lisa. I need to do something.” His hands shook. Oh hell. He added up the days, then multiplied, then checked. Three on earth. So that’s how long it’s been down there already. Oh hell. He couldn’t do this, to sit and live a life like this. Telling me to make happy with apple pie-Sammy, you are shit at knowing what I’d do. Fuck the pie. When I was gone, you couldn’t have forgotten what it was like for you, what you did-
“What you can do is rest. I don’t know what you’ve been through, and I’m not going to make you tell me, though I wish you would, but-“
Surely, surely he was just being delusional. The TV had been acting up, that was all. The static, though, even the way the electronics had gone haywire on his first night out of the grave-I am here, he had heard, laying against Bobby’s couch, and even though there were such things as lies, he wondered if maybe something was there after all.
“Actually,” he interrupted. “Do you have any sleeping pills?”
Lisa blanched, the expression flashing so quickly over her face that he barely caught it. “And what do you want with them?” she demanded. She kept her eyes fixed on him, her gaze pinning Dean like an ant under a magnifying glass. At a certain angle, he’d start burning, though he couldn’t guess at which body part would go first, like he’d used to back under. Getting rusty in his old age, he really was, and he could do better than this. Alastair would’ve been so fucking disappointed in him.
“Dean, you can’t ask for things like that to use so casually.”
“I know,” he mumbled, unsure if her fear was of him or for him. He’d shown up without any warning, muttering detached one-word answers to her careful queries, till she’d taken him to Ben’s room, absent the kid at a weekend sleepover, and said to him, “Sleep, Dean,” her voice impossibly alien in its simple, unreserved kindness, and hazy through his exhaustion. Or maybe he had already been asleep-but either way, he had heard the words softly dropping into his head: Sleep, Dean. He couldn’t remember what it had sounded like, only something low and gentle and smooth before he’d slipped away and sunk into slumber, as into water deep and cool as the night; and had not dreamed, and there but for his silent breathing had lain like the dead.
“I’m just-tired.”
“Tired,” Lisa repeated. “It’s far too early, only two in the afternoon-“
“I want to sleep.” His voice wavered. “Lisa, I’m so fucking tired. And if I just lie down I’ll keep thinking and won’t get away-“
Lisa’s eyes were watchful. “You won’t tell me anything,” she said. “Dean, you were so out of it last night it wasn’t even remotely funny. And for god’s sake, where’s your brother?”
And even after all the past few days, the question still struck him as utterly absurd for a moment. Then he thought, Of course. She noticed. Of course. He opened his mouth, because he could say it, he knew he could, but the words withered to dust in his throat.
Lisa took a long look at his face, unshaven and shattered and sunken-eyed; her gaze shifted, became stricken itself. She murmured, “Never mind. You don’t need to say anything. I’ll get some for you.” And was back within the minute. She grasped his hand and turned it over, her fingers pressing upon his wrist with a firm, solid pressure, upon the fluttering pulse of a vein; hadn’t brought the whole bottle to give to him (and Dean didn’t think about what that was supposed to mean, not at all). Instead, she dropped one little pill into his palm. “Just for now,” she said. “Just this once.”
He looked into Lisa’s face and managed to form his mouth into a smile, grateful but mirthless. “Thanks. You’re just plain awesome,” he told her, and meant it. “You get that faucet fixed soon, yeah?”
She smiled half-heartedly, said, “Do you doubt my skills?” and raised her eyebrows, and led him to the living room couch. “Here you go.”
He swallowed it down without water. Before he closed his eyes, he saw in his blurred vision Lisa leaning down to tuck a thin blanket around him, and the creased lines of worry on her forehead-
-and then he did not open his eyes for a long time. But his eyes saw.
“You heard me,” said Castiel. “So you did believe after all. Your faith isn’t completely lost.”
“Oh fuck,” Dean breathed out, “you really are here. I-I thought-” Then he stopped and couldn’t continue, thinking of the bloody spray of pieces Cas had become.
The smile on Cas’s face was faint in the slow, mocking curl of his mouth. “This,” he gestured at himself, “is just for convenience. I can’t say I really have a body anymore. That’s been taken care of.” He had on the pristine white dress shirt, the loose tie, the trench coat-unwrinkled in appearance, though slightly worn and faded in color as if drenched in wispy shadows. “You were aiming for sleeping pills the entire time, then. Just to talk to me.”
Dean rolled his shoulders, left, right, both down. “Had to see if you were alive,” he said. “So I wasn’t the only one who made it out. Shit, Cas, where have you been this whole time? It’s not like I haven’t been sleeping, you could’ve talked to me properly earlier.”
The angel’s face wiped itself blank. “Trying to survive. I was taken apart and each cell of my body was ravaged to atoms-“
Goddamn, Dean thought, you cheery bastard.
“-but I was still there. I presume,” he added lightly, “I’ve retained something. There’s angel left in me.” He looked around curiously. “Is this the place you want to be?”
In his dream the trees grew thick and dark like weeds around them. Dean leaned against the porch railing of the small, sturdy cabin at the center of a clearing and shoved his hands into his pockets; he watched Cas hungrily, wondering at the sheer audacity of someone else who was also alive, like him, someone who knew of the almost end of the world, the meaning of despair. He wanted to clap his hand to Cas’s shoulder and feel the solidity of his presence, but if he started forward to do so then he might find this was all a dream within a dream, and so he stayed put, lingering at an awkward distance. Cas sat on the steps of the cabin and gazed back levelly, kicking carelessly at pebbles on the ground. They knocked against his shoe but the impacts went noiseless and unheard. Cas didn’t pay any attention to them.
“Not really,” Dean finally said. “It’s empty. We’re the only ones here.”
Cas dipped his head. Tufts of his hair stood up in clumps, ruffled by wind. “Bobby’s in Heaven, you know,” he said. “He had a long life.”
Dean bared his teeth. “That supposed to make me feel better?” he snapped. “It’s no way to go out, getting killed by the devil-and why would you want to go to Heaven anyway.” It wasn’t a question. Dean had been there, done that. Should burn the place down and free the spirits of the dead from their endlessly looping, deceptive existence. At least in Hell you knew where you were. Fucking God, sticking humans between a rock and a hard place, and destiny chasing after the Winchesters even in life. Dean’s eyes burned and tingled at the corners; he said to himself, Gonna be like this till the end of our days, huh, and thought of Lucifer’s cage. No, not this way.
“My thoughts exactly,” Cas said.
Dean blinked and focused on Cas’s face. “What?” he said, surprised. No change that he could see, but Cas had spoken, calm, implacable, like he’d thought about this for ages and ages and knew himself inside and out. None of the wishy-washy God-resenting, God-loving, angel-human melange of confusion Cas had carried around like a ton of bricks. The purity of belief in his words-now that, Dean thought, was something as angelic as could be.
He frowned. Dean, listen to me, Dean, the small voice dying like a footfall, a dissipated sigh.
Cas’s face was shadowed, darkness softening the lines of his jaw. “What?” he said, repeating Dean’s question as his own. “I was forsaken by Heaven, as were you. There’s little left there for either of us.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Dean,” said Cas. “I know what Hell is like.” He turned toward Dean, but his eyes did not look at him, only through him. Dean wondered at what Cas saw: when blazing a path through the dominion of the damned to raise Dean up, how that terrible landscape must have appeared to Castiel the angel he could not even begin to imagine. Hell shaped itself to its inhabitants’ preconceived ideas, so Dean had hung on the rack like a flayed carcass amid his own ideas of his body, his human belief. But what was Hell for angels? What did they feel, or see? Angels without vessels did not have eyes.
Castiel had eyes now. Glazed blue, like marbles studded in plaster. Castiel said, “And you; you know too.”
“Yeah, I do,” Dean snapped. “So what’s your point? How’s knowing that making anyone feel better? ‘Cause-“
“Because Sam is beyond us, for now,” Cas interrupted. Dean stopped short, pain flaring at the base of his neck as if there the words had been etched in flesh. In Hell, not here, is here, is-“Hell’s beyond this plane, just as Heaven is. Time is not the same, and Lucifer’s cage is like none other. It’s stifling. A bath of bitterness and despair. You might have had your free will, but you can’t exert it over anything. You can’t even begin to hope.”
Dean stared at him. Castiel added, simply, “That’s what I learned from Heaven.”
“Why,” said Dean, “can’t you just shut the fuck up sometimes?”
“I only speak the truth.”
“Liar.”
Cas shrugged. “I have no control over what you choose to believe,” he said. “But I know that at the very least, you would never give up on Sam.”
“If I could’ve-“ Dean snarled, clenching his teeth tight and feeling his blood pulse at juncture of jaw and neck-but Cas suddenly stood and strode toward Dean, scuffing the dirt with his shoes; came up silently and rested one hand on Dean’s shoulder, pressing down on the handprint where the skin went chillingly numb under Cas’s touch. The warmth of Cas’s breath fluttered across his cheek, and Dean jerked away. “Dude,” he grumbled. “You should really know about the personal space issue by now.”
Cas didn’t apologize, and looked, instead, politely bemused. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. He reached out his other hand, down to the side-before Dean could fully register the action, he withdrew his hand from the pocket of Dean’s jacket, something dangling, twinkling from his fingers.
Four rings, tarnished in patches here and there, but the dim sunlight of his dreams flashed across metal like the most ephemeral of shooting stars. And Cas said, “You still have this.”
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
-
Title: Held Against Your Bones
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating/Pairings: R (language, violence, very brief nudity). Dean/Castiel subtext.
Word Count: ~28200
Summary: After Stull Cemetery, Dean finds himself with an angel in his head for unsolicited company. It’s a time to tie up loose ends and run into acquaintances old and new, but Dean isn’t finished with Hell just yet, and Castiel’s trapped without a body of his own. (And someone’s got a wild card left to play.)
Notes: Written for devilsduplicity in the deancastiel Secret Angels IV fic exchange (originally posted here); prompts used were (3) Dean has always been blind. Cas is the only person he's able to see, and (4) Dean wakes up one day handcuffed to Cas. The handcuffs are magical-neither of them can break free. Dean wants to continue hunting. Cas wants to search for God. Title is from Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods; AU from the end of 5x22, no spoilers for S6. SPN is not mine. Many, many thanks to kalliel for looking over this!
He’s rolled the window halfway down so the wind whips at his face without restraint, but he keeps his eyes open against the onslaught. At the next turn in the road, the afternoon sunlight angles again through the windshield, bright fingers sliding here and there with the curving motion of the car. It chases out shadows in crevices, pools upon the dashboard, flashes along the sideview mirrors. Under its touch the Impala gleams brightly, shiny dark like a cockroach shell.
“Gonna be coming into Pontiac soon,” he says; doesn’t turn his head to look at the shotgun seat. “Make a stop there, get some food. Before, you know.”
The emptiness sits beside him and agrees, as much as any expected silence can. Dean drives onward, and blinks; the wind has dried out his eyes.
*
That night Dean drove back to Sioux Falls. The weight of the Horsemen’s linked rings rested light and insubstantial in his pocket; in the rearview mirror, he could see Bobby in the back seat, getting stiffer and colder by the hour. On Bobby’s stomach rested the license plate of his truck, which had carried him to the cemetery and to his death and which even now languished plateless and hidden.
His left eye had swollen up and he had trouble staying on the right side of the yellow line, the one road law he remembered to follow. The blood on his face had dried and crusted over but he didn’t bother wasting holy water to wash it off. As for the stop signs, the lights, and the turns of his driving-he carried the memories like water in his hands but they fell through the cracks and seeped away, except for Sam, and Sam alone, next to him. His face was brighter than any road signal glaring out of the dark.
(I tried to help where I could, Cas told him much later, otherwise you might have crashed; and Dean snapped back, So what? If it happens, who cares? and then he woke up to the empty room and scowled and said out loud, “Oh fuck you.”)
At sunrise he took Bobby some ways from the salvage yard and sent him off. The body burned well, for he had spent plenty of time learning how to work with fire and flesh and the illusions of such in Hell, in the proper fashion, and then some with remains of the ghostly dead on earth, and so did not flinch at the smell. Instead he slid his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans and slouched forward and watched Bobby go up in flames; thought of Bobby walking up and down the stairs all that one long night in another lifetime, each deliberate step, pressing down hard on the creaking wood to sense the pressure shift from heel to ball of foot, the wondering look on his face.
It had been a long night.
Back in the house, he found beer lined up in the fridge and drank it all, though it tasted like shit in his mouth, and then like blood after he bit down hard on his tongue; fell asleep on the floor of the living room, hunched up against the couch and wearing one of Sam’s old hoodies he’d found under the backseat of the Impala. The threadbare fabric was soft against his skin, the familiar scent still lingering where he buried his nose.
He dreamed of Sam, before the growth spurt had made him so tall. Like trees rooted deep in the loamy earth they stood, side by side, and shot at cans on barrels, which tumbled down to the ground in muffled clinks. They never ran out of bullets and their targets returned to sit on the barrels no matter how many times their shots hit home, so they kept hunting the cans, and more cans, and saw no end. Grass stains decorated Sam’s jeans; dirt also, on his left cheek. And so they stood there and the sunlight drew around them like a shroud.
Sam yawned and stretched, raising his hands up as if his palms could act as his eyes and see the world from the heights he would attain, reaching for the sky; his hair flopped into his scrunched up face, so Dean bent down and shoved his little brother’s bangs back. “Aw, Sammy,” he said. “Oughta cut your hair. At this rate your hair’s gonna be long enough for pigtails.”
Sam scowled and carefully wrapped his fingers around Dean’s wrist. “Dean, you promised,” he said, his voice plaintive and firm. “You promised.”
“I know I did,” Dean told him. “I’m gonna go to Lisa’s, I promise. But you and Adam, and Bobby and Cas-” He didn’t bother to spend energy to continue, focusing on his brother’s jawline, his eyes, his ears peeking out under too-long hair. Dean didn’t know how many pictures of Sam he had. Not enough.
Sam’s smile flickered, gutted out, as if a puppeteer was tweaking his facial muscles for shits and giggles, and a growing whine pressed down on them, high-pitched shrieking like a chorus of crickets all at once. Dean, they chattered at him. Dean.
He flinched. Then he sagged and snorted and kept his eyes on Sam, whose features had softened, his edges blurring. Sam didn’t look so much like Sam anymore, and didn’t even try. Lucifer repeated, “You promised,” through the roar of Dean, listen to me, Dean and his lips shaped the words earnestly.
“If I ever go to Heaven again there’s no way I’m sticking around to hear your goddamn angel choirs, Cas,” he said to the air, turning his eyes away from Lucifer-and then he was sitting in the cemetery again. Sam was not there. Was still not there. Somewhere behind him, he knew, lay Bobby with his neck at too unnatural an angle to be living, and even farther off was Castiel, splattered as a careless design of blood on the ground, a burst star. He pressed his knuckles to his eyelids and dragged them down his face, digging in deeply as if to knock against his bones. Tap tap, and a hollow echo answered back. “No,” he said. “You’re all gone, okay, right?” He breathed in sharply, a dull pain in his chest where his ribs still carried Enochian script like a red badge, but of courage or of shame he did not know.
“Dean,” and now it was Cas’s voice, entwined with the low purr of the Impala’s engine revving up at his back-an inexplicable occurrence, as were many things in dreams. “I’m sorry you were left behind. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“Shut up,” Dean said.
“Unfortunately I-I can’t speak to you directly, it would harm you-”
“Does it look like it makes a difference?” Dean said. “You’re not a proper angel, not anymore, so fuck off. Can’t even sleep without going crazy. Why do I have you talking to me anyway?”
There was a sullen silence. Finally, dream Impala Cas said: “I am here.”
Dean replied flippantly, “Yeah, hijacking my baby, I hear you. Good ride, isn’t she?” His car, the only constant now. He turned to the side, bumping his shoulder against a front tire-the raised handprint on his skin rippled and seethed, shit, it felt like acid was eating away, and oh god-the maggots wriggled into his skin, burrowing through muscle and sinew to the bone and he looked up and focused through the bile rising in his throat; heard, oh Dean, who’s that a-comin’, and, Dean Winchester is saved-
Only him. Only Dean. This is Hell.
-and woke to sunlight in his eyes, high noon slinging heat through Bobby’s house with childlike relish. He shuddered and rubbed his hands over his face; they came away smeared in tears and hours-old blood.
He stared up at the ceiling; repeated to himself the words, I am here.
The smell of beer still hung in the air, but he was stone-cold sober-not even the slightest hint of a hangover. He said, cautiously: “Cas?”
The walls seemed to bear down upon him, eyed him with bemusement. “Figures,” he muttered, and got up and thought, Yeah, should wash my face. Blood all over.
He’d seen the blood; and yet his muddled thought at the explosion had been, Not dead, not yet. He’ll-he’ll come back. As he had after Raphael, and as he had after the banishing sigil, like a worn-out boomerang, chipped along the edges but unfailing in its return. (Harder to come back from Hell, though. Hell in Lucifer’s cage. So Sammy wasn’t-)
Surely-
The sound of static. The TV crackled to life, its screen awash with innumerable flickering points, a sea of black white gray.
*
“Dude,” Dean says, “what’s gotten into you?”
He doesn’t really need to ask something to which he knows the answer. The words rasp in his throat uncomfortably, the silence unnerving. He’d become too used to a Cas in his dreams in the days after Stull-one who spoke to him with the ring of true conviction in his voice. It was easier when he thought this Cas was just a visitor.
Dean curls his lip. Bleach in the brain, he really needs bleach to scrub it all out.
Don’t presume to ask. Castiel speaks curtly; he rarely intends to be kind. The Cas Dean visualizes is a Cas who does not often smile. Just do what we came here for.
Bad temper much, Dean decides, resentment lining his thoughts; he thins his mouth in a flat line, and cuts the engine. The Impala rumbles into silence on a residential street near an intersection. The houses are all sedate, painted with a limited palette of neutral colors, bracketed in the front by neatly trimmed lawns and clean porches, about as nice as Lisa’s place. This is a shrine to the normal.
He gets out of the car and walks up to one of the houses. His jacket traps heat against his body under the bright August sun, but he only draws it tighter around himself. At the door, on a whim, he stoops down and turns over the doormat to check the back: a devil’s trap, one pentacle overlaid upon another to form the all-too-familiar heptagram, drawn with painstaking care. The characters along the edges have been retouched with Sharpie marker several times over.
I believe it’s common custom to knock on the door when you want to speak to someone, Castiel says. So knock.
Dean replaces the doormat in its proper place. “Yeah, well, I guess you’re finally catching up on our human customs,” he replies, and certainly two years ago the shattered glass and the high-pitched whistling hadn’t been half as pleasant a greeting; adds, in a moment of spite, “You wanna try it yourself?” before he rings the doorbell, and does not knock, and thinks to himself, Shut your goddamn mouth, man-no hands, ma, Jimmy Novak’s gone and there’s no hands for knocking; but he can’t take the words back, and isn’t sure he wants to, and he considers, maybe there’s a reason that no one answers. But where’s your god now, huh? Where’s your god?
He peeks through the glass while he waits and tries to ignore Cas, whose presence has grown heavy and cold, like a slug dragging its trail of chilly slime over his collarbone. Nowadays Cas rides roughshod over his consciousness as he tries to collect his strength-vertigo strikes Dean’s dreams when asleep, ticklish sensations crawl between his shoulder blades when driving. Out of some warped sense of propriety, Dean hasn’t jerked off in a week since he finally realized that Cas had been in his mind all along, weak and pissed to Hell-and making Dean increasingly pissed as well. Not a visitor after all, but a fucking tenant. No rent, no by-the-way or by-your-leave, but Dean can’t kick Cas out anyway, not like he thought he could before-dumb of me, Dean thinks, goddamn dumb to think it was him-and he wouldn’t do it, anyway. The way it is, at least he knows Cas is alive. That this is Castiel. He’d rather not know where Cas would go.
(He touches his necklace. Four fingers, none of them his thumb.)
Occasionally Castiel will mutter rapid phrases of Enochian to himself, a litany of syllables chiming like bells interspersed with the harsh snap of curses. “What are you doing?” Dean asks and Cas answers, Trying to remember.
Dean never asks what. Cas returns the favor and never asks Dean what, either.
Now Cas stops murmuring incomprehensibly and says, They aren’t here. And it’s true. Three, five, six minutes, and no one has come to open the door and let in the man who broke the first seal, the gloriously damned guest of honor.
“Fine,” Dean says. “I guess we can come again later. You wanna double back to the diner, grab pie?” He runs his tongue over dry, cracked lips, thinks, Maybe a drink too.
You think I can taste it in this form?
“You can taste my taste of it. Or imagine it, or something.”
Cas says flatly, I have no taste buds. I wouldn’t taste you, either.
“What the fuck?” Dean almost turns his head, remembers at the last moment that nobody’s looking at him, that it’s all in his head. Doesn’t that sound almost like he ought to be in an asylum, instead of bumming at Lisa’s place. He steps off the porch and heads back toward the Impala. “Missing out, but hate to inform you, Cas, I don’t do guys.”
I’m not a guy. Cas sounds offended. Angels aren’t restricted to categories like that.
“You looked like some poor son of a bitch to me.”
No, that was Jimmy. You’ve never looked at me. Unless you want to be blinded?
Cas has learned sarcasm well during his time walking the earth-unless he’s being serious. It’s harder to tell the difference than Dean would’ve thought.
“Cas,” Dean finally says, “you look so fucking bright and fine that unicorns are breeding outta your ass, okay? I’m not going to turn my dirty eyes on that pure shit.”
You’re incorrect-there are no unicorns in Heaven, only pegasi.
“I’m sorry.” Dean slides back into the front seat and passes his hands over the familiar curve of the wheel, fingers curling one by one. “Your sense of humor sucks.”
Really. Pegasi have the wings.
“Fuck it all,” Dean says. “Cut it out already.”
Fine, Cas snaps. You believe what you want.
Dean twists his mouth down savagely and starts up the Impala; thinks, Sam would’ve said yes to pie.
(And he said yes to Lucifer. And you, Dean, you too, almost would’ve said yes too-)
He thinks, Sam would’ve bust a gut mooning over unicorns.
(And Dean Winchester, the righteous man: he doesn’t.)
-
At the diner, he ends up ordering fried chicken. The place does a brisk business: off in the corner some girls are sharing pizza at their table, all wearing t-shirts with number and last name emblazoned on the back, and athletic shorts and all; a kid keeps crying in the booth behind Dean’s seat about his broken crayons while his parents confer furiously over the menu; the waitress who took his order stops at a vacated table to clean up, pressing a hand to her temple, and he sees the drawn, hard look in her eyes, the rigid angles of her body. Muscles lean and curving under freckled skin-Dean could easily follow her lines with the keen edge of a knife, grow some fresh blood blossoms for a prize-winning garden. Her face is a blurred mirror image of his own.
Is the table so fascinating? Cas asks. Dean flicks his eyes up and away from the glossy formica. Are you so bored you have to bother me? he mutters. I’m surprised you’re going to all this trouble in the first place.
Just the basics; you already know that. It’s an obligation at the very least.
A terrible courtesy as well, thinks Dean; then again, angels aren’t ones to consider much beyond their duty and obligations. Cas is no longer one hundred percent angel, that’s true, but now that any acknowledgment of his existence is restricted to the space between Dean’s ears, Cas is only more determined to find his absent God and to cling to the remnants of his past nature. He had been almost human for a while, but what’s a few months to a few millennia? Lucifer razed me to pieces and tried to undo my grace, yet I survived, he had told Dean, who snorted and said, “Next time we see Lucifer, that son of a bitch is-“ Curled his hands into fists. Next time, there’d be a next time when he’d yank Sam out, there would be-
And Cas had not spoken of Lucifer, and continued, That counts for something. God must still be out there.
Dean wants to say, And where’s he in this world? And when you find him, you think he’s gonna snap his fingers and fix everything? When he didn’t before?
But he doesn’t direct these words at Cas. Castiel never met his God throughout all the time he was an angel in Heaven; calls him his Father, but not like any father Dean would ever imagine. Perhaps it is easier to love in one’s absence. Perhaps it is easier to hate.
Dean doesn’t want to burst Cas’s bubble, not yet-is, in his own way, strangely envious of Cas’s desperate faith in God all over again. He is being kind, or cruel, or both.
I appreciate you taking me here at my request, Cas suddenly says. I know that you hate my forced presence-
Can’t be helped. Yeah, and he hates it even more when Cas starts talking about the situation again. It was easier when Dean only had to deal with this in dreams, but then at that time-a wave of nausea suddenly surges in his throat; he winces, swallows it down until his stomach settles again. Dude, seriously, not now when other people are around. Maybe it’s no difference to you, but I want to hear myself speak when I talk to people, if possible.
How very self-absorbed of you, Cas observes.
Hey, I gotta talk to someone like they actually exist outside my head, Dean retorts. And who doesn’t have to be so bitchy, he adds as an afterthought.
Times like these, he’s grateful Cas only hears what Dean wants him to hear.
I hope you don’t think you’re insane to speak with voices in your head. I prefer to think I could exist like that.
Well, Dean says, you know what they say about delusions of grandeur-and then the waitress comes with the plate of fried chicken, a side of mashed potatoes, a beer, and he breaks off to give her a nod and a wink. “You’re gorgeous, you know that?” he says to her. “Bringing a man food when he needs it.”
“Or when he’s a customer ordering,” she replies wryly, but the corners of her lips twitch. Her face smoothes out, forehead losing the creases of concentration-through-headache, and the lines around her eyes crinkle up rather than down. She shifts the plates and drink onto the table, her movements deft and swift. “Betcha say that to every waitress you ever see?”
“You’d win, hands down,” he says, but keeps right on smiling. “I do. But that ain’t saying I don’t mean every word of it.”
“‘S only right that you see the truth of my awesome looks,” she shoots back. “Enjoy the food, handsome. You better like it.”
He raises the beer. “Expect I will,” Dean says to the waitress, who finally smiles outright, turns, and sails off to the next table.
(Dean, says Sam, stop flirting all the time, oh my god, don’t you give me that smirk. Okay, so, look at this article here, there was a suicide in-)
Dean, says Cas, if you’re that hungry you should just eat and not talk.
You’re kinda missing the whole point. Dean tries the potatoes. Smooth, well-mashed, a hint of cream and salt and garlic, and the last one’s a pleasant surprise, since Lisa doesn’t like garlic in her potatoes. He knows the taste of Yukon Gold sliding along his tongue almost immediately, the kind his mother always used. That he can still remember bits and pieces of a life before hunting-this surprises him at times. Thirty-one years old, yet feeling four decades older. He wonders: or maybe he is, depending on how you count the years.
I forget, he says. Did you ever get to try fried chicken?
No. Castiel makes a sighing noise, and the aches clear out of Dean’s skull, a feather-light brush like wings sliding against his temples before they vanish. Dean nearly turns his cheek into the touch-
And he catches himself mid-movement sharply, edging toward empty air. Fuck, he thinks, at least I had someone to look at before.
Cas goes on, The burgers though, I remember those.
Not really something you’d forget easily. Because yeah, the sight had been damn nauseating. Dean crunches the food in his mouth. The meat’s done just right, not too dry but not too oily either. He drags the crisp skin across his teeth, scraping over his gums. It tastes nothing like human skin.
Dean eats; Castiel doesn’t speak. The kid has stopped his crayon-crying fit and is cheerily telling his parents about art class yesterday in school-“and the teacher said she really liked my snake! She said it was really cool it had so many heads and called it a hydra.”
“Like the one Hercules fought, right?” his mother says.
“Uh huh, and every time you chop one off more grow back!”
Overhead, the ceiling fans hum steadily. The girls in the corner have finished their pizza and get up to leave, traipsing past him in a flurry of blue shirts and athletic bags. They’re all quick in their movements, sharp, young, and he hears one of them laugh unreservedly at some joke. He imagines that in their eyes the world must open like an oyster before them, soft and gleaming and brilliant.
Shit, Dean thinks. When I was their age-well. Seen a lot even back then.
He wipes his hands on a napkin and rolls his knuckles over his brow, then snags another piece of chicken and watches them go out through the door. Their last names proclaiming their presence: Morris, Przezinski, Latimer, Yi, and-
-he stiffens. Cas says, Oh. Somehow, even as powerless as he is, that one syllable slices down like a glass shard, leaving behind the regret and the pain.
The last girl must have sensed Dean’s gaze, for she turns and catches sight of him, her face very still with creeping recognition. She says something inaudible to her friends, waves as they head outside; then she comes back, back to the place where Dean sits unmoving, and nods. Smiles, but the line of her mouth is half-hearted and wary.
What Dean had seen first: the letters on the back of her t-shirt.
And Claire Novak says, “I told them you’re an old college friend of my dad’s who visited way back after hearing about his disappearance. I thought it’d be good to catch up, though obviously you were going to come see us anyway.” She pauses, then continues: “Can-May I join you?”
Even now, proper grammar. Dean marvels. How humans cling to the things they know. A small miracle all its own. “Um,” he says. Of course this is the kind of luck a Winchester has. “Yeah, sure, sit down.”
Castiel is silent.
She takes the seat across from him. Her hair is tied up high in a ponytail, swinging back and forth like a dying metronome. She settles her duffel in her lap; splays one hand on the table, examines her nails, and rubs off a little grease. Then she folds her arms and slumps down and watches Dean who watches her, for a long while.
“So,” she finally says, voice low and quiet beneath the buzz of nearby conversation. She flicks a crumb off the table, and continues, “Good to see you again,” as if she’s merely exchanging pleasantries with him like any other. “What’s happening?”
“I went to your house,” he tells her. “But you weren’t there.”
“Just soccer with friends,” she explains. “Mom’s working overtime. To pay the bills, you know. She’ll get home later tonight. Where’s Dad?”
And there’s the question. Just like an arrow homing in on the bullseye.
He puts his piece of half-eaten chicken on the plate; he’s terrible at this sort of talk, wishes Sam were there to say this instead. Sammy, whaddya say, to sugarcoat or not? “So. It’s all over. Your dad’s gone,” he says.
Everything remains much the same, except the shadowed ripple across Claire’s face, her cheeks sunken and her eyes burning with a terrible light-in that split-second she does not look at all like the girl who had just laughed with friends, with the world. The sharp lines of her face are sanded down by stress and the agony of known ignorance; for a moment, it reminds Dean oddly of Castiel, that frozen snapshot. She has seen that which the world has already offered her: the tearing apart of hearts, and the difficulty in sewing them back together.
“All right.” Claire ducks her head and looks away from Dean. “We sort of thought.” She pauses. “Daddy’s been gone for a long time,” she adds slowly. “And what Castiel said…”
Dean barely hears the hitch in her voice, but it’s there. I said it wrong, he realizes. Not just gone.
“No, not that way. I mean,” Dean stops. “Your dad’s dead. Shit. I’m sorry.” Dropping a bomb like that-and a round of applause for you, great job, Dean-o.
Cas should be talking to the Novaks, tying up loose ends, but instead the angel’s a disembodied, intangible mess hanging with Dean like a limpet. Or maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that Cas isn’t standing in Jimmy’s body for the visual shock. Either way, Jimmy’s still dead.
“My daddy.”
“I never talked to him again,” he blurts out. “I think it was quick.”
When Raphael tore me apart, Cas had said, I don’t know where I went, much less Jimmy. I was beyond oblivion-there he had broken off, and nothing more. It’s just about the most Dean’s ever heard from Cas on his destruction. Chuck’s room, decorated in bloody smithereens, before Cas’s first return-this he hasn’t forgotten.
“My daddy,” Claire says again, the words like a prayer. She slides her hands up her face till the tips of her fingers meet at the bridge of her nose, the skin under her eyes. Her hands point straight up to the sky. Our father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. “He’s not with Castiel anymore?”
“No,” replies Dean.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, okay,” and she picks up a napkin, methodically wiping her hands, then her face, turning her head to the window to block herself from the sight of other customers. “That’s all I needed to know.” She folds the napkin in half, in quarters, in eighths; then snatches up a second one, trembling in her grip. “Sorry,” she says. “Can we go now?”
“Yeah,” Dean mumbles. “Sure.” He gets up and throws down some bills-should more than cover the check, and tip for the waitress too, he guesses, hopes she smiles some more. Someone needs to.
Claire draws herself up as if she was never crying, face gone blank and deceptively calm, and they go outside, past the harsh light of the diner’s sign. The evening swallows them up in its dusky gullet, red streaked purple streaked gray in the sky, punctured only by the pale chalky smudge of the moon.
“I’ll drive you home,” he says abruptly. “I, uh, it’s better for me to talk to your mom. Wouldn’t want you to do it.”
Claire laughs, more like a sob, and swings her duffel in time with the rhythm of her legs. “I wouldn’t want to do it either.” She turns her face up to look at him. “What about Castiel?”
“Cas?” Dean keeps walking, no telltale break in his rhythm, but he slows. “Cas can’t really do much of anything right now. He’s, ah... outta commission.”
“So he’s gone, too.” Claire’s eyes slide past him, focusing on a tree branch, a sliver of sky. “I wanted to ask Castiel about stuff, you know. Like, what was special about our blood. What it was like for Daddy, like how it was for me. But I guess it doesn’t really matter. He’s not stuck anymore.” She’s smiling like she means it, even as the tears slip down her cheeks, for in her eyes there’s nothing but naked relief and quiet sorrow, aging like fine wine. “He’s gotten out of it.”
Cas, says Dean, staring at Castiel’s former vessel. You and the Novaks-
He said yes, Cas replies.
So what? Dean watches Claire; just the two of them in the parking lot, a man and a girl, saying nothing that could be humanly heard. You still got some of your angel mojo, enough to be here. What’s keeping you from just nagging her so we don’t have to be stuck like this? Afraid she’s gonna say no forever?
Dean, Cas says reproachfully. I don’t have the power. And of course I keep my promises.
And if you could-what, the promise is the only thing stopping you?
The breeze brought in by the falling twilight is surprisingly chilly, nipping at the backs of their necks. He waits for a while, then grins bitterly at the quiet.
“Car’s over here,” he says, and Claire hiccups once, replies, “I know, I recognize it.”
“My baby’s one of a kind,” he adds, because it’s easier to talk about his car.
“Yeah. I’d remember your Impala. I rode in it,” she says shortly. And: “It was nice.”
“One thing I can keep that way,” he tells her and gets in, back too straight against his seat. Cas, he grumbles, cat got your tongue?
Claire’s still standing. “You can hop in, you know,” he says.
“I’ll-just sit here, then,” she says, and her eyes move haltingly over the entire car before she looks back to Dean. She opens her mouth again, as if to say, And your brother, where is he-
She doesn’t ask, and opens the door to ride shotgun.
No, says Cas, I understand better, now.
*
He said to the sheriff over the phone, Yeah, if you could just make sure people didn’t snag anything from his place-much appreciated. Thanks. I’ll figure out what to do with his stuff, sometime. I don’t know. Something like that. Forward whoever calls his phones to me. The words clattered around in Dean’s head, like a tower of blocks falling, each knocking against another on the way down.
Jody Mills listened, and hmmed, and said, finally, “All right. Keep it together, Winchester,” and hung up. She hadn’t asked about anything other than Bobby’s cremation, had heard the news with a loud release of breath and refrained from questioning why Dean had left Sioux Falls without talking to her then, why he was calling her from Indiana of all places. Easier over the phone than in person, he figured, and it seemed like Sheriff Mills recognized that as well.
Dean put the phone back on the hook and massaged his temples. A pain to deal with-storing the books on obscure superstitions and legends and the numerous FBI-police-CIA-and-so-forth-labeled phones, going through Bobby’s contacts, finding someone who would be able to take on the resources and wasn’t retired for the most part, like Rufus. The Winchesters had been known among the hunters, but had not known many hunters themselves; Dean regretted it now, the utter disconnection from anyone else who shared the hunting life. Maybe one of them got to meet Mom before, he wondered fleetingly. When she was young. If there was one old enough. Longevity wasn’t so common among the hunters he knew-or at least, among people the Winchesters knew, which also included themselves.
He thought of the books he’d taken from Bobby’s place and stowed away in the back of the Impala. So far, no sign of anything promising, but there had to be a way. It had to exist; or Dean would figure it out, somehow.
“You feeling okay?” Lisa appeared in the doorway. She carried a wrench in one hand and a rag in the other. “Aspirin?”
“Nah,” he said. “You sure you don’t want-“
“No,” she told him firmly. “I can take care of this leaky faucet on my own. You just got here yesterday evening, I’m not going to have you run around doing work.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to sit around, Lisa. I need to do something.” His hands shook. Oh hell. He added up the days, then multiplied, then checked. Three on earth. So that’s how long it’s been down there already. Oh hell. He couldn’t do this, to sit and live a life like this. Telling me to make happy with apple pie-Sammy, you are shit at knowing what I’d do. Fuck the pie. When I was gone, you couldn’t have forgotten what it was like for you, what you did-
“What you can do is rest. I don’t know what you’ve been through, and I’m not going to make you tell me, though I wish you would, but-“
Surely, surely he was just being delusional. The TV had been acting up, that was all. The static, though, even the way the electronics had gone haywire on his first night out of the grave-I am here, he had heard, laying against Bobby’s couch, and even though there were such things as lies, he wondered if maybe something was there after all.
“Actually,” he interrupted. “Do you have any sleeping pills?”
Lisa blanched, the expression flashing so quickly over her face that he barely caught it. “And what do you want with them?” she demanded. She kept her eyes fixed on him, her gaze pinning Dean like an ant under a magnifying glass. At a certain angle, he’d start burning, though he couldn’t guess at which body part would go first, like he’d used to back under. Getting rusty in his old age, he really was, and he could do better than this. Alastair would’ve been so fucking disappointed in him.
“Dean, you can’t ask for things like that to use so casually.”
“I know,” he mumbled, unsure if her fear was of him or for him. He’d shown up without any warning, muttering detached one-word answers to her careful queries, till she’d taken him to Ben’s room, absent the kid at a weekend sleepover, and said to him, “Sleep, Dean,” her voice impossibly alien in its simple, unreserved kindness, and hazy through his exhaustion. Or maybe he had already been asleep-but either way, he had heard the words softly dropping into his head: Sleep, Dean. He couldn’t remember what it had sounded like, only something low and gentle and smooth before he’d slipped away and sunk into slumber, as into water deep and cool as the night; and had not dreamed, and there but for his silent breathing had lain like the dead.
“I’m just-tired.”
“Tired,” Lisa repeated. “It’s far too early, only two in the afternoon-“
“I want to sleep.” His voice wavered. “Lisa, I’m so fucking tired. And if I just lie down I’ll keep thinking and won’t get away-“
Lisa’s eyes were watchful. “You won’t tell me anything,” she said. “Dean, you were so out of it last night it wasn’t even remotely funny. And for god’s sake, where’s your brother?”
And even after all the past few days, the question still struck him as utterly absurd for a moment. Then he thought, Of course. She noticed. Of course. He opened his mouth, because he could say it, he knew he could, but the words withered to dust in his throat.
Lisa took a long look at his face, unshaven and shattered and sunken-eyed; her gaze shifted, became stricken itself. She murmured, “Never mind. You don’t need to say anything. I’ll get some for you.” And was back within the minute. She grasped his hand and turned it over, her fingers pressing upon his wrist with a firm, solid pressure, upon the fluttering pulse of a vein; hadn’t brought the whole bottle to give to him (and Dean didn’t think about what that was supposed to mean, not at all). Instead, she dropped one little pill into his palm. “Just for now,” she said. “Just this once.”
He looked into Lisa’s face and managed to form his mouth into a smile, grateful but mirthless. “Thanks. You’re just plain awesome,” he told her, and meant it. “You get that faucet fixed soon, yeah?”
She smiled half-heartedly, said, “Do you doubt my skills?” and raised her eyebrows, and led him to the living room couch. “Here you go.”
He swallowed it down without water. Before he closed his eyes, he saw in his blurred vision Lisa leaning down to tuck a thin blanket around him, and the creased lines of worry on her forehead-
-and then he did not open his eyes for a long time. But his eyes saw.
“You heard me,” said Castiel. “So you did believe after all. Your faith isn’t completely lost.”
“Oh fuck,” Dean breathed out, “you really are here. I-I thought-” Then he stopped and couldn’t continue, thinking of the bloody spray of pieces Cas had become.
The smile on Cas’s face was faint in the slow, mocking curl of his mouth. “This,” he gestured at himself, “is just for convenience. I can’t say I really have a body anymore. That’s been taken care of.” He had on the pristine white dress shirt, the loose tie, the trench coat-unwrinkled in appearance, though slightly worn and faded in color as if drenched in wispy shadows. “You were aiming for sleeping pills the entire time, then. Just to talk to me.”
Dean rolled his shoulders, left, right, both down. “Had to see if you were alive,” he said. “So I wasn’t the only one who made it out. Shit, Cas, where have you been this whole time? It’s not like I haven’t been sleeping, you could’ve talked to me properly earlier.”
The angel’s face wiped itself blank. “Trying to survive. I was taken apart and each cell of my body was ravaged to atoms-“
Goddamn, Dean thought, you cheery bastard.
“-but I was still there. I presume,” he added lightly, “I’ve retained something. There’s angel left in me.” He looked around curiously. “Is this the place you want to be?”
In his dream the trees grew thick and dark like weeds around them. Dean leaned against the porch railing of the small, sturdy cabin at the center of a clearing and shoved his hands into his pockets; he watched Cas hungrily, wondering at the sheer audacity of someone else who was also alive, like him, someone who knew of the almost end of the world, the meaning of despair. He wanted to clap his hand to Cas’s shoulder and feel the solidity of his presence, but if he started forward to do so then he might find this was all a dream within a dream, and so he stayed put, lingering at an awkward distance. Cas sat on the steps of the cabin and gazed back levelly, kicking carelessly at pebbles on the ground. They knocked against his shoe but the impacts went noiseless and unheard. Cas didn’t pay any attention to them.
“Not really,” Dean finally said. “It’s empty. We’re the only ones here.”
Cas dipped his head. Tufts of his hair stood up in clumps, ruffled by wind. “Bobby’s in Heaven, you know,” he said. “He had a long life.”
Dean bared his teeth. “That supposed to make me feel better?” he snapped. “It’s no way to go out, getting killed by the devil-and why would you want to go to Heaven anyway.” It wasn’t a question. Dean had been there, done that. Should burn the place down and free the spirits of the dead from their endlessly looping, deceptive existence. At least in Hell you knew where you were. Fucking God, sticking humans between a rock and a hard place, and destiny chasing after the Winchesters even in life. Dean’s eyes burned and tingled at the corners; he said to himself, Gonna be like this till the end of our days, huh, and thought of Lucifer’s cage. No, not this way.
“My thoughts exactly,” Cas said.
Dean blinked and focused on Cas’s face. “What?” he said, surprised. No change that he could see, but Cas had spoken, calm, implacable, like he’d thought about this for ages and ages and knew himself inside and out. None of the wishy-washy God-resenting, God-loving, angel-human melange of confusion Cas had carried around like a ton of bricks. The purity of belief in his words-now that, Dean thought, was something as angelic as could be.
He frowned. Dean, listen to me, Dean, the small voice dying like a footfall, a dissipated sigh.
Cas’s face was shadowed, darkness softening the lines of his jaw. “What?” he said, repeating Dean’s question as his own. “I was forsaken by Heaven, as were you. There’s little left there for either of us.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Dean,” said Cas. “I know what Hell is like.” He turned toward Dean, but his eyes did not look at him, only through him. Dean wondered at what Cas saw: when blazing a path through the dominion of the damned to raise Dean up, how that terrible landscape must have appeared to Castiel the angel he could not even begin to imagine. Hell shaped itself to its inhabitants’ preconceived ideas, so Dean had hung on the rack like a flayed carcass amid his own ideas of his body, his human belief. But what was Hell for angels? What did they feel, or see? Angels without vessels did not have eyes.
Castiel had eyes now. Glazed blue, like marbles studded in plaster. Castiel said, “And you; you know too.”
“Yeah, I do,” Dean snapped. “So what’s your point? How’s knowing that making anyone feel better? ‘Cause-“
“Because Sam is beyond us, for now,” Cas interrupted. Dean stopped short, pain flaring at the base of his neck as if there the words had been etched in flesh. In Hell, not here, is here, is-“Hell’s beyond this plane, just as Heaven is. Time is not the same, and Lucifer’s cage is like none other. It’s stifling. A bath of bitterness and despair. You might have had your free will, but you can’t exert it over anything. You can’t even begin to hope.”
Dean stared at him. Castiel added, simply, “That’s what I learned from Heaven.”
“Why,” said Dean, “can’t you just shut the fuck up sometimes?”
“I only speak the truth.”
“Liar.”
Cas shrugged. “I have no control over what you choose to believe,” he said. “But I know that at the very least, you would never give up on Sam.”
“If I could’ve-“ Dean snarled, clenching his teeth tight and feeling his blood pulse at juncture of jaw and neck-but Cas suddenly stood and strode toward Dean, scuffing the dirt with his shoes; came up silently and rested one hand on Dean’s shoulder, pressing down on the handprint where the skin went chillingly numb under Cas’s touch. The warmth of Cas’s breath fluttered across his cheek, and Dean jerked away. “Dude,” he grumbled. “You should really know about the personal space issue by now.”
Cas didn’t apologize, and looked, instead, politely bemused. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. He reached out his other hand, down to the side-before Dean could fully register the action, he withdrew his hand from the pocket of Dean’s jacket, something dangling, twinkling from his fingers.
Four rings, tarnished in patches here and there, but the dim sunlight of his dreams flashed across metal like the most ephemeral of shooting stars. And Cas said, “You still have this.”
part 1 | part 2 | part 3