SPN FIC - From a Little Boy's Heart
I have no idea where that year went… but it's Christmastime again! Which means it's time for Christmas fic. Set more-or-less now, series-wise.
Enjoy, you guys. And have a very merry and Darkness-free Christmas!
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Castiel
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3591 words
DISCLAIMER: It's just fanfic. No money involved!
From a Little Boy's Heart
By Carol Davis
Years, Dean thinks.
No; decades. It's gonna take decades to clean this place up after what the frickin' Steins did - and the thing is, they don't have decades.
He's never been what you could call a clean freak, although he does keep his room tidy more often than not. And he certainly understands the value of cleaning up the kitchen so they don't have to deal with an invasion of rodents, or bugs. Sam's the one who likes to wander around shifting things a little to the left or the right, moving a book that somebody's shelved in the wrong place, stuff like that.
It's a nervous habit, Dean's pretty sure. Like taking up smoking because you don't know what else to do with your hands.
But godDAMN it.
This was supposed to be their place: his and Sam's. Warded up to the eyeballs against evil, a place they could finally relax a little bit. Then the frigging Steins showed up, threw everything in a heap in the middle of the floor, and started dousing it with gasoline.
They were going to BURN HIS STUFF.
"Dean?" Sam says from behind him.
There's nothing heaped in the middle of the floor any more, but he can still see it. His old LPs, his pictures, thrown in among the books and notes and mystical stuff.
"Dean."
He doesn't turn. Can't bring himself to turn. Instead, he jams his eyes shut and clenches his fists. Why is it, he thinks with a particular kind of rage, that things don't ever get better - they just shift to some different plateau of terrible?
"Never gonna get this place cleaned up," he mutters.
It doesn't come out sounding like actual words, because his jaw is clenched too tight. So tight, in fact, that the hinges start to hurt. In fact, everything kind of starts to hurt. He expects Sam to ask him what he's talking about, to point out that everything looks fine: the books are back on the shelves, they've cleaned the stains off the floor, and the artifacts and gadgets and whatevers are back where the Men of Letters originally placed them.
Instead, Sam rests a hand on Dean's shoulder. It lays there for a minute, then Sam gives him a little pat.
"I keep finding things," Dean complains.
"Things?"
"Stuff that's in the wrong place. Pieces of broken stuff."
Bloodstains.
"We could go out," Sam suggests. "Go somewhere? See a movie or something. Get some dinner?"
"It's Christmas Eve."
His implication is that everything's going to be closed, but they've gone through enough Christmas Eves on the road that they both know exactly what's likely to be open and what isn't. It used to be that most places would close mid-afternoon if they were open at all, but the world's different now. It's all about the money. They'd be able to drive around at nine or ten o'clock at night and still find places open, even out in this part of Kansas, which isn't exactly the entertainment Mecca of the world.
"Dinner?" Sam suggests again.
The little voice in the back of his head tells him to step away. To be badass. Christmas? So what. Nothing's any different than it would be on any other day. Not for them. Not with the Darkness out there.
Another part of him wants to hug his brother, the way he did when they were little. When Sam was a little potbellied kid who grinned a lot and mimicked everything Dean did because he thought Dean was spectacular.
A twinge of pain digs through Dean's left hand. His fist is wrapped around something he picked up from alongside a bookcase, something that was hidden in the middle of a dust bunny. He has no idea what it was part of; now it's just a little broken chunk with sharp edges, one of which has sliced through his skin and drawn a little bit of blood.
"Gonna maybe go to bed," he mutters.
"It's, like, six thirty."
"Tired," Dean says.
How long ago was it, he wonders, that he was something other than tired, and discouraged, and scared?
Jesus, he wants to hug his brother, like when they were little.
"Where's Cas?" he asks.
Sam blinks at that. Cas has been in the same place for a while now: camped in front of TV, binge-watching shit on Netflix. He does venture out once in a while - each time looking a little bit better - but for the most part he seems content with being King of the Couch Potatoes. Minus the couch. He's taken over Sam's bed, which means Sam's had to bunk down in another one of the couple dozen bedrooms, maybe for the duration.
Maybe for the decades they don't have.
"Stuff's broken," Dean growls, opening his hand to display for Sam the shard of whatever-it-was that's cut his palm open.
"Dude," Sam says with a little bit of distress.
"I'm gonna go to bed," Dean replies.
He sleeps deeply but restlessly, feeling like he's riding the swells of a horrific storm, like he's George Clooney in The Perfect Storm and nothing's going to come of it but his being sucked down to the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen again. He wakes fully a couple of times feeling like his body's going to burst into its component atoms; like, come morning, there's going to be smears and stains of what used to be Dean Winchester all over the walls of his room. All over his stuff: his records and pictures, his clothes, his duffel bags, his guns.
Finally, he wakes again and the clock tells him it's morning, a little after seven. He can smell coffee somewhere off in the distance. Coffee won't help what his head feels like (like some giant bell, he thinks, that some son of a bitch keeps hammering on), but if you're a Winchester, morning = coffee, so he struggles out of the death grip of his tangled covers and shuffles to the bathroom, pees for what feels like half an hour, then throws some cold water onto his face and hands.
He's mildly surprised when he finds Cas in the kitchen, not Sam.
Cas has the slightly glazed look of someone who's been watching TV virtually nonstop for nineteen days. He's cheerful, though.
"I made coffee," he announces.
Dean sniffs through the nostril that's not plugged up. It's some fancy blend, he guesses, like the stuff Bobby used to hoard, though where Cas got hold of something like that, he can't imagine. There certainly wasn't any here in the kitchen. He buys the kind Dad always used to buy, which is maybe a step or two above drain cleaner. Sam's taken to drinking tea.
He got all that from Jessica, Dean thinks sometimes. The tea and the salads. Nobody ever drank tea or ate a salad when they were on the road with Dad.
He doesn't object when Cas guides him into a chair and sets a big mug of coffee in front of him. He's not sure whether he really wants to pick it up, let alone drink it; his stomach's unhappy and coffee might make it unhappier.
"Would you like breakfast?"
"Nah."
Cas has kind of a sweet, benign smile on his face, which prompts Dean to wonder whether he's actually awake or whether this is a dream. It looks and smells and feels real enough, but who knows. Or maybe Cas has been binge-ing some old black-and-white show from the 1950s where everybody was pleasant and helpful and there weren't any problems that couldn't be solved in 25 minutes.
He tests that theory by suggesting, quietly, "Pancakes?"
"All right," says the Angel of the Lord.
In what seems like a realistic amount of time Dean's got a plate of fluffy-looking silver dollar pancakes in front of him, along with some scrambled eggs, home fries and bacon. There's fresh-squeezed OJ, too, and Cas has freshened up his mug of coffee.
Each time he turns his head, he expects to find Cas wearing a ruffled apron and pearls.
He goes as far as resting his hand on the fork that's sitting alongside his plate. The food will taste good, he tells himself. He'll feel better if he eats something. He can eat it slowly and it'll go down all right.
Instead, he asks his friend, "What's this for?"
Something slides across Cas's face and is instantly gone… mostly. "It's Christmas, Dean."
"Yeah, I know that."
"I thought you might enjoy a good breakfast."
"And since when do you cook?"
"It's not difficult."
No, Dean thinks in a detached way, as if he's observing someone else's thoughts. It never was difficult, if he could afford the right ingredients and had access to a stove that worked like it was supposed to. Everything that's sitting here in front of him is simple to make, if you've got the right tools and you give half a damn.
"Thanks," he whispers.
The food is good, as good as anything he's ever tasted, despite - or maybe because of - the simplicity of it. It's not lost on him that having a friend who cares enough to do this is one of the best parts of the giant shitstorm that is his life, and he does his best to smile at Cas as gently and beatifically as Cas is still smiling.
"Sam up?" he asks. There's been no sign of his brother, no sound, although Sam is generally up early.
Cas cocks his head, somewhat like a dog. "Yes," he says.
"Friggin' angels," Dean murmurs.
It's not a complaint, really, although he wouldn't mind having ears like that. On the other hand, most of the time he can hear more than enough.
"Dean?"
Sam.
He's behind Dean, in the doorway. Dean can feel him there, looming, filling up the space. He's torqued about something; Dean can sense that without turning, as if he's got a little bit of Cas's angel mojo. It's never been hard to sense what kind of mood Sam is in - without seeing him, or even being in the same room. It tends to roll off of him in waves.
"I've made breakfast," Cas offers, gesturing like a spokesmodel.
"Good," Sam says a little dismissively. After a pause he says, "That's great. Thank you."
There's a "but" tacked onto the end of that, an unvoiced one but there all the same. Not an angry one, Dean thinks, or a scared one. More like… puzzled.
Maybe Sam, too, thinks he's dreamed himself into a 1950s rerun.
Slowly, Dean shifts in his chair, bringing Sam into his peripheral vision. Yeah, he looks puzzled, like something just doesn't compute - and it's not the food. Sam's head keeps twitching to the left, like he's sort of but not really looking over his shoulder. He lifts a hand and shoves his fingers through hair that's already sticking out every which way, some of it standing straight up as if he's gelled it.
"When did you go out?" Sam asks.
"Didn't," Dean says.
So Sam looks at Cas.
"I have not been out," Cas replies.
"Somebody went out," Sam says firmly. "Or somebody did a… an angel thing. Because there's no way."
Before anyone can disagree with that - or question it - Sam leaves the doorway.
Although he would really rather not, Dean leaves his chair and his breakfast and follows his brother down a couple of the bunker's many, many hallways with Cas a couple of steps behind. They end up in the library, a room that generally doesn't change very much. Books, tables, chairs, those old lamps. Sometimes there are books and papers strewn across the tables; right now there's a few, along with Dean's laptop.
And there's… well, that.
Sam turns and looks at Dean with one eyebrow hiked. It makes him look a lot like he did when they were kids, when Dean left something on the countertop and the result was eighty billion ants. The result of that was Sam complaining that there were ants swarming around in his bed. Dean never had any particular objection to ants - live and let live, he always figured - but he did object to Sam keeping him up all night because he thought there were things crawling on him.
God, he was a prissy kid.
"You can say," Sam announces. "I mean - are we gonna do the 'Dad was here while you were sleeping' thing again? Only this time it's -"
He cuts himself off midstream and his face falls a little.
No, a lot.
Dad's not out there driving around. Neither is Bobby, or Ellen and Jo, or Charlie, or anybody else who might by some stretch of the imagination have done this: set up a ten-foot Christmas tree in a corner of the library, all decorated and lit, smelling of fresh-cut pine and casting a glow of soft colors across a room in which all the other lights are turned off. It's surrounded by neatly and festively wrapped packages of all sizes, dozens of them.
"You can say," Sam mutters.
"So can you," Dean replies.
"I didn't do this."
"Don't play this frigging game, Sam. It's not funny. It's not heartwarming."
Breakfast is getting cold.
"I didn't -" Sam says, and hiccups. "I thought you did it."
They turn, at the same instant, their movements almost identical, and peer at Castiel, who shakes his head.
"I made breakfast," he says.
Then WHO? There's nobody else here. Nobody trussed up in what they've come to think of as the dungeon. The door's locked. Of course, it's been locked before and people (and things) got in, but nobody'd come in here to do this. They'd come in looking to kill, or steal, or trash the place up… like those goddamn Steins.
The best Dean can come up with is Santa Claus.
That enormous, glowing thing holds him transfixed for a minute, even though he does his best to fight it, to pretend it's not there. There ought to be nothing in here but books. Tables. A bunch of old lamps.
It's a trick.
Gotta be a trick of some sort.
Crowley. Or Rowena. They did this.
Nobody says anything, or moves, for a while. Then Cas strolls across the room, frowning a little. He stretches out a hand toward the tree, head cocked like a dog again. His fingertips brush one of the ornaments and Dean's breath catches a little in his throat. It'll explode, he thinks. Or suck them all into some alternate dimension. Or the Darkness will come roiling out of it.
He needs a gun. They all need guns.
Cas is holding a spatula. In the hand that's not touching the tree.
"Cas?" Sam says. "Can you -"
Cas's head twitches a little. "It appears to be… normal. I don't sense the presence of anything unnatural." He crouches down and picks up one of the packages, a small one. He examines it a little, then holds it out to Sam. "It's addressed to you."
Sam stands there looking at it, barefoot, hair sticking out all over the place.
Then he takes the package and quickly strips the wrapping off of it. He lets the paper and the bow drop to the floor; Dean watches it fall, feeling like it's happening in slow motion even though he knows it's not.
"Sunglasses," Sam says, and tips the open box for Dean to see.
A nice pair, too. Not top of the line, but not dollar-store quality, either. Something pokes at Dean's memory.
Sunglasses…?
"I lost mine," Sam says. "I needed a new pair."
He folds his gigantor self down alongside the heap of packages and begins to sort them out. Apparently there are a bunch addressed to him, and he rips into those one at a time, tossing the wrapping aside like he used to. There's some shirts, underwear, socks. Useful stuff. Some books. A warm jacket. Boxes of fancy tea. Within a couple of minutes he's surrounded with swag and crumpled wrapping paper and ribbons and bows - but there are a lot more packages.
"They're yours," Sam says.
He doesn't say aloud, but it's there on his face: Open them.
Dean's fists are clenched. The palm of his left hand burns a little where he cut it. It stopped bleeding last night, but the wound is still there, red and raw. Something rises inside him as he digs his fingertips into it, letting the pain keep him grounded. This isn't real, he tells the part of him that wants to follow Sam's instructions, the part that wants to forget everything that's happened these last few months - everything that's happened since, like, ever - and pretend this is some normal, everyday Christmas, that he can open packages and drink eggnog and listen to old Christmas classics on the radio.
His head swims a little.
Sleep, he thinks. It would be good to go back to sleep.
Then Cas is up close and personal - too damn close, invading his personal space. Taking hold of his hand and peeling his fingers back.
"This," Cas says.
Dean snatches his hand back and steps away, scowling.
"You broke one of the artifacts?" Cas says. "Something with an enchantment on it?"
"I didn't break anything," Dean barks. "I was cleaning up. All I ever do is clean up. It was those fucking Steins."
All at once, he feels himself break.
He wants to run - part of him can feel himself running - but his feet won't cooperate. All he can do is stand there, clenching his fists until they burn. He'd like to cry, but the tears won't come. All he can do is break. For Charlie. For Kevin. For Bobby and Ellen and Jo and Mom and Dad, the ones who should be here, the ones he should be able to turn to on Christmas. Open gifts with. Drink eggnog with. And the music…
Mom always played Christmas music on the radio.
She made breakfast. Pancakes with cinnamon and whipped cream. And hot chocolate.
Distantly, he can hear Cas talking to him. Or maybe he's talking to Sam. It all seems far away, on the other side of something.
"Is that possible?" Sam asks.
"It drew blood," Cas says. "Yes. I've heard of spells that can extract the target's deepest desires. They're usually meant to cause harm. Compel the target to unleash what's hidden." He looks at Dean, then turns back to Sam. "But that had already happened. The Mark caused Dean to set free the darkest part of himself. All that's left hidden is -"
From that distant place, Dean watches his brother climb up off the floor and come to him.
Horror floods through him. This is a bad dream, he thinks - one in which Sam and Cas are going to go completely emo on him and turn this into something that belongs on the Hallmark Channel. Something where (somewhat like Scrooge, he thinks, cured by the spirits of things that were and are and will be) he sees the light and turns into some pancake-eating guy next store. Some guy who runs a garage and comes home at night to the wife and kids.
But all Sam does is gesture toward the packages that haven't been unwrapped.
"That's -" Dean mutters.
"Go with it, man," Sam urges. "Come on. All that other stuff's got your name on it. You really needed some new socks."
No, he thinks.
He can't. All he can ever do is try to clean up… and the messes just keep getting worse.
Sometimes they draw blood.
"You remember what I told you?" Sam says quietly. "When we were there with Death, and you had the scythe in your hands? I told you I wanted you to remember what it was like to love. And there's some part of you that wants to." Lightly, he rests a hand on Dean's shoulder, the way he did last night, when there was nothing in here but tables and chairs and rows and rows of books. "We're still here," he says. "Me and Cas."
From far away, Dean hears himself crowing, "Look at this! We made a killing!"
He can't move.
But Cas does. Spatula in hand, he circles around to the far side of the tree, where there's a gigantic box with a huge red ribbon on it. The wrapping paper - miles and miles of it - is covered with cheerful Santa Claus faces.
"It's a television," he says with a great deal of awe.
Like a child, he tears the paper away in a frenzy. When the box beneath it has been fully uncovered, he turns back to Dean and Sam, looking like the thing from that old story, a thing Dean is pretty glad he's never actually seen: the dog with eyes as big as windmills. He's a freaking Angel of the Lord, Dean thinks.
And some part of Dean's psyche gifted him with a 70-inch SONY TV.
"It's all gonna go poof," he mutters. "Can't be real. I cut my hand, and somehow all this stuff shows up here?"
"Maybe," Sam allows.
Then he nods toward the packages still sitting underneath the tree. He doesn't look quite so much like a little kid any more, or, thank heaven, like a big-eyed dog. He looks like Dean's brother, his grown-up gigantor brother.
The one who's still here.
Sam smiles, and once more tips his head toward all the stuff sitting under the tree.
"Okay," Dean whispers. "Yeah. Okay."
* * * * *
Enjoy, you guys. And have a very merry and Darkness-free Christmas!
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Castiel
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3591 words
DISCLAIMER: It's just fanfic. No money involved!
From a Little Boy's Heart
By Carol Davis
Years, Dean thinks.
No; decades. It's gonna take decades to clean this place up after what the frickin' Steins did - and the thing is, they don't have decades.
He's never been what you could call a clean freak, although he does keep his room tidy more often than not. And he certainly understands the value of cleaning up the kitchen so they don't have to deal with an invasion of rodents, or bugs. Sam's the one who likes to wander around shifting things a little to the left or the right, moving a book that somebody's shelved in the wrong place, stuff like that.
It's a nervous habit, Dean's pretty sure. Like taking up smoking because you don't know what else to do with your hands.
But godDAMN it.
This was supposed to be their place: his and Sam's. Warded up to the eyeballs against evil, a place they could finally relax a little bit. Then the frigging Steins showed up, threw everything in a heap in the middle of the floor, and started dousing it with gasoline.
They were going to BURN HIS STUFF.
"Dean?" Sam says from behind him.
There's nothing heaped in the middle of the floor any more, but he can still see it. His old LPs, his pictures, thrown in among the books and notes and mystical stuff.
"Dean."
He doesn't turn. Can't bring himself to turn. Instead, he jams his eyes shut and clenches his fists. Why is it, he thinks with a particular kind of rage, that things don't ever get better - they just shift to some different plateau of terrible?
"Never gonna get this place cleaned up," he mutters.
It doesn't come out sounding like actual words, because his jaw is clenched too tight. So tight, in fact, that the hinges start to hurt. In fact, everything kind of starts to hurt. He expects Sam to ask him what he's talking about, to point out that everything looks fine: the books are back on the shelves, they've cleaned the stains off the floor, and the artifacts and gadgets and whatevers are back where the Men of Letters originally placed them.
Instead, Sam rests a hand on Dean's shoulder. It lays there for a minute, then Sam gives him a little pat.
"I keep finding things," Dean complains.
"Things?"
"Stuff that's in the wrong place. Pieces of broken stuff."
Bloodstains.
"We could go out," Sam suggests. "Go somewhere? See a movie or something. Get some dinner?"
"It's Christmas Eve."
His implication is that everything's going to be closed, but they've gone through enough Christmas Eves on the road that they both know exactly what's likely to be open and what isn't. It used to be that most places would close mid-afternoon if they were open at all, but the world's different now. It's all about the money. They'd be able to drive around at nine or ten o'clock at night and still find places open, even out in this part of Kansas, which isn't exactly the entertainment Mecca of the world.
"Dinner?" Sam suggests again.
The little voice in the back of his head tells him to step away. To be badass. Christmas? So what. Nothing's any different than it would be on any other day. Not for them. Not with the Darkness out there.
Another part of him wants to hug his brother, the way he did when they were little. When Sam was a little potbellied kid who grinned a lot and mimicked everything Dean did because he thought Dean was spectacular.
A twinge of pain digs through Dean's left hand. His fist is wrapped around something he picked up from alongside a bookcase, something that was hidden in the middle of a dust bunny. He has no idea what it was part of; now it's just a little broken chunk with sharp edges, one of which has sliced through his skin and drawn a little bit of blood.
"Gonna maybe go to bed," he mutters.
"It's, like, six thirty."
"Tired," Dean says.
How long ago was it, he wonders, that he was something other than tired, and discouraged, and scared?
Jesus, he wants to hug his brother, like when they were little.
"Where's Cas?" he asks.
Sam blinks at that. Cas has been in the same place for a while now: camped in front of TV, binge-watching shit on Netflix. He does venture out once in a while - each time looking a little bit better - but for the most part he seems content with being King of the Couch Potatoes. Minus the couch. He's taken over Sam's bed, which means Sam's had to bunk down in another one of the couple dozen bedrooms, maybe for the duration.
Maybe for the decades they don't have.
"Stuff's broken," Dean growls, opening his hand to display for Sam the shard of whatever-it-was that's cut his palm open.
"Dude," Sam says with a little bit of distress.
"I'm gonna go to bed," Dean replies.
He sleeps deeply but restlessly, feeling like he's riding the swells of a horrific storm, like he's George Clooney in The Perfect Storm and nothing's going to come of it but his being sucked down to the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen again. He wakes fully a couple of times feeling like his body's going to burst into its component atoms; like, come morning, there's going to be smears and stains of what used to be Dean Winchester all over the walls of his room. All over his stuff: his records and pictures, his clothes, his duffel bags, his guns.
Finally, he wakes again and the clock tells him it's morning, a little after seven. He can smell coffee somewhere off in the distance. Coffee won't help what his head feels like (like some giant bell, he thinks, that some son of a bitch keeps hammering on), but if you're a Winchester, morning = coffee, so he struggles out of the death grip of his tangled covers and shuffles to the bathroom, pees for what feels like half an hour, then throws some cold water onto his face and hands.
He's mildly surprised when he finds Cas in the kitchen, not Sam.
Cas has the slightly glazed look of someone who's been watching TV virtually nonstop for nineteen days. He's cheerful, though.
"I made coffee," he announces.
Dean sniffs through the nostril that's not plugged up. It's some fancy blend, he guesses, like the stuff Bobby used to hoard, though where Cas got hold of something like that, he can't imagine. There certainly wasn't any here in the kitchen. He buys the kind Dad always used to buy, which is maybe a step or two above drain cleaner. Sam's taken to drinking tea.
He got all that from Jessica, Dean thinks sometimes. The tea and the salads. Nobody ever drank tea or ate a salad when they were on the road with Dad.
He doesn't object when Cas guides him into a chair and sets a big mug of coffee in front of him. He's not sure whether he really wants to pick it up, let alone drink it; his stomach's unhappy and coffee might make it unhappier.
"Would you like breakfast?"
"Nah."
Cas has kind of a sweet, benign smile on his face, which prompts Dean to wonder whether he's actually awake or whether this is a dream. It looks and smells and feels real enough, but who knows. Or maybe Cas has been binge-ing some old black-and-white show from the 1950s where everybody was pleasant and helpful and there weren't any problems that couldn't be solved in 25 minutes.
He tests that theory by suggesting, quietly, "Pancakes?"
"All right," says the Angel of the Lord.
In what seems like a realistic amount of time Dean's got a plate of fluffy-looking silver dollar pancakes in front of him, along with some scrambled eggs, home fries and bacon. There's fresh-squeezed OJ, too, and Cas has freshened up his mug of coffee.
Each time he turns his head, he expects to find Cas wearing a ruffled apron and pearls.
He goes as far as resting his hand on the fork that's sitting alongside his plate. The food will taste good, he tells himself. He'll feel better if he eats something. He can eat it slowly and it'll go down all right.
Instead, he asks his friend, "What's this for?"
Something slides across Cas's face and is instantly gone… mostly. "It's Christmas, Dean."
"Yeah, I know that."
"I thought you might enjoy a good breakfast."
"And since when do you cook?"
"It's not difficult."
No, Dean thinks in a detached way, as if he's observing someone else's thoughts. It never was difficult, if he could afford the right ingredients and had access to a stove that worked like it was supposed to. Everything that's sitting here in front of him is simple to make, if you've got the right tools and you give half a damn.
"Thanks," he whispers.
The food is good, as good as anything he's ever tasted, despite - or maybe because of - the simplicity of it. It's not lost on him that having a friend who cares enough to do this is one of the best parts of the giant shitstorm that is his life, and he does his best to smile at Cas as gently and beatifically as Cas is still smiling.
"Sam up?" he asks. There's been no sign of his brother, no sound, although Sam is generally up early.
Cas cocks his head, somewhat like a dog. "Yes," he says.
"Friggin' angels," Dean murmurs.
It's not a complaint, really, although he wouldn't mind having ears like that. On the other hand, most of the time he can hear more than enough.
"Dean?"
Sam.
He's behind Dean, in the doorway. Dean can feel him there, looming, filling up the space. He's torqued about something; Dean can sense that without turning, as if he's got a little bit of Cas's angel mojo. It's never been hard to sense what kind of mood Sam is in - without seeing him, or even being in the same room. It tends to roll off of him in waves.
"I've made breakfast," Cas offers, gesturing like a spokesmodel.
"Good," Sam says a little dismissively. After a pause he says, "That's great. Thank you."
There's a "but" tacked onto the end of that, an unvoiced one but there all the same. Not an angry one, Dean thinks, or a scared one. More like… puzzled.
Maybe Sam, too, thinks he's dreamed himself into a 1950s rerun.
Slowly, Dean shifts in his chair, bringing Sam into his peripheral vision. Yeah, he looks puzzled, like something just doesn't compute - and it's not the food. Sam's head keeps twitching to the left, like he's sort of but not really looking over his shoulder. He lifts a hand and shoves his fingers through hair that's already sticking out every which way, some of it standing straight up as if he's gelled it.
"When did you go out?" Sam asks.
"Didn't," Dean says.
So Sam looks at Cas.
"I have not been out," Cas replies.
"Somebody went out," Sam says firmly. "Or somebody did a… an angel thing. Because there's no way."
Before anyone can disagree with that - or question it - Sam leaves the doorway.
Although he would really rather not, Dean leaves his chair and his breakfast and follows his brother down a couple of the bunker's many, many hallways with Cas a couple of steps behind. They end up in the library, a room that generally doesn't change very much. Books, tables, chairs, those old lamps. Sometimes there are books and papers strewn across the tables; right now there's a few, along with Dean's laptop.
And there's… well, that.
Sam turns and looks at Dean with one eyebrow hiked. It makes him look a lot like he did when they were kids, when Dean left something on the countertop and the result was eighty billion ants. The result of that was Sam complaining that there were ants swarming around in his bed. Dean never had any particular objection to ants - live and let live, he always figured - but he did object to Sam keeping him up all night because he thought there were things crawling on him.
God, he was a prissy kid.
"You can say," Sam announces. "I mean - are we gonna do the 'Dad was here while you were sleeping' thing again? Only this time it's -"
He cuts himself off midstream and his face falls a little.
No, a lot.
Dad's not out there driving around. Neither is Bobby, or Ellen and Jo, or Charlie, or anybody else who might by some stretch of the imagination have done this: set up a ten-foot Christmas tree in a corner of the library, all decorated and lit, smelling of fresh-cut pine and casting a glow of soft colors across a room in which all the other lights are turned off. It's surrounded by neatly and festively wrapped packages of all sizes, dozens of them.
"You can say," Sam mutters.
"So can you," Dean replies.
"I didn't do this."
"Don't play this frigging game, Sam. It's not funny. It's not heartwarming."
Breakfast is getting cold.
"I didn't -" Sam says, and hiccups. "I thought you did it."
They turn, at the same instant, their movements almost identical, and peer at Castiel, who shakes his head.
"I made breakfast," he says.
Then WHO? There's nobody else here. Nobody trussed up in what they've come to think of as the dungeon. The door's locked. Of course, it's been locked before and people (and things) got in, but nobody'd come in here to do this. They'd come in looking to kill, or steal, or trash the place up… like those goddamn Steins.
The best Dean can come up with is Santa Claus.
That enormous, glowing thing holds him transfixed for a minute, even though he does his best to fight it, to pretend it's not there. There ought to be nothing in here but books. Tables. A bunch of old lamps.
It's a trick.
Gotta be a trick of some sort.
Crowley. Or Rowena. They did this.
Nobody says anything, or moves, for a while. Then Cas strolls across the room, frowning a little. He stretches out a hand toward the tree, head cocked like a dog again. His fingertips brush one of the ornaments and Dean's breath catches a little in his throat. It'll explode, he thinks. Or suck them all into some alternate dimension. Or the Darkness will come roiling out of it.
He needs a gun. They all need guns.
Cas is holding a spatula. In the hand that's not touching the tree.
"Cas?" Sam says. "Can you -"
Cas's head twitches a little. "It appears to be… normal. I don't sense the presence of anything unnatural." He crouches down and picks up one of the packages, a small one. He examines it a little, then holds it out to Sam. "It's addressed to you."
Sam stands there looking at it, barefoot, hair sticking out all over the place.
Then he takes the package and quickly strips the wrapping off of it. He lets the paper and the bow drop to the floor; Dean watches it fall, feeling like it's happening in slow motion even though he knows it's not.
"Sunglasses," Sam says, and tips the open box for Dean to see.
A nice pair, too. Not top of the line, but not dollar-store quality, either. Something pokes at Dean's memory.
Sunglasses…?
"I lost mine," Sam says. "I needed a new pair."
He folds his gigantor self down alongside the heap of packages and begins to sort them out. Apparently there are a bunch addressed to him, and he rips into those one at a time, tossing the wrapping aside like he used to. There's some shirts, underwear, socks. Useful stuff. Some books. A warm jacket. Boxes of fancy tea. Within a couple of minutes he's surrounded with swag and crumpled wrapping paper and ribbons and bows - but there are a lot more packages.
"They're yours," Sam says.
He doesn't say aloud, but it's there on his face: Open them.
Dean's fists are clenched. The palm of his left hand burns a little where he cut it. It stopped bleeding last night, but the wound is still there, red and raw. Something rises inside him as he digs his fingertips into it, letting the pain keep him grounded. This isn't real, he tells the part of him that wants to follow Sam's instructions, the part that wants to forget everything that's happened these last few months - everything that's happened since, like, ever - and pretend this is some normal, everyday Christmas, that he can open packages and drink eggnog and listen to old Christmas classics on the radio.
His head swims a little.
Sleep, he thinks. It would be good to go back to sleep.
Then Cas is up close and personal - too damn close, invading his personal space. Taking hold of his hand and peeling his fingers back.
"This," Cas says.
Dean snatches his hand back and steps away, scowling.
"You broke one of the artifacts?" Cas says. "Something with an enchantment on it?"
"I didn't break anything," Dean barks. "I was cleaning up. All I ever do is clean up. It was those fucking Steins."
All at once, he feels himself break.
He wants to run - part of him can feel himself running - but his feet won't cooperate. All he can do is stand there, clenching his fists until they burn. He'd like to cry, but the tears won't come. All he can do is break. For Charlie. For Kevin. For Bobby and Ellen and Jo and Mom and Dad, the ones who should be here, the ones he should be able to turn to on Christmas. Open gifts with. Drink eggnog with. And the music…
Mom always played Christmas music on the radio.
She made breakfast. Pancakes with cinnamon and whipped cream. And hot chocolate.
Distantly, he can hear Cas talking to him. Or maybe he's talking to Sam. It all seems far away, on the other side of something.
"Is that possible?" Sam asks.
"It drew blood," Cas says. "Yes. I've heard of spells that can extract the target's deepest desires. They're usually meant to cause harm. Compel the target to unleash what's hidden." He looks at Dean, then turns back to Sam. "But that had already happened. The Mark caused Dean to set free the darkest part of himself. All that's left hidden is -"
From that distant place, Dean watches his brother climb up off the floor and come to him.
Horror floods through him. This is a bad dream, he thinks - one in which Sam and Cas are going to go completely emo on him and turn this into something that belongs on the Hallmark Channel. Something where (somewhat like Scrooge, he thinks, cured by the spirits of things that were and are and will be) he sees the light and turns into some pancake-eating guy next store. Some guy who runs a garage and comes home at night to the wife and kids.
But all Sam does is gesture toward the packages that haven't been unwrapped.
"That's -" Dean mutters.
"Go with it, man," Sam urges. "Come on. All that other stuff's got your name on it. You really needed some new socks."
No, he thinks.
He can't. All he can ever do is try to clean up… and the messes just keep getting worse.
Sometimes they draw blood.
"You remember what I told you?" Sam says quietly. "When we were there with Death, and you had the scythe in your hands? I told you I wanted you to remember what it was like to love. And there's some part of you that wants to." Lightly, he rests a hand on Dean's shoulder, the way he did last night, when there was nothing in here but tables and chairs and rows and rows of books. "We're still here," he says. "Me and Cas."
From far away, Dean hears himself crowing, "Look at this! We made a killing!"
He can't move.
But Cas does. Spatula in hand, he circles around to the far side of the tree, where there's a gigantic box with a huge red ribbon on it. The wrapping paper - miles and miles of it - is covered with cheerful Santa Claus faces.
"It's a television," he says with a great deal of awe.
Like a child, he tears the paper away in a frenzy. When the box beneath it has been fully uncovered, he turns back to Dean and Sam, looking like the thing from that old story, a thing Dean is pretty glad he's never actually seen: the dog with eyes as big as windmills. He's a freaking Angel of the Lord, Dean thinks.
And some part of Dean's psyche gifted him with a 70-inch SONY TV.
"It's all gonna go poof," he mutters. "Can't be real. I cut my hand, and somehow all this stuff shows up here?"
"Maybe," Sam allows.
Then he nods toward the packages still sitting underneath the tree. He doesn't look quite so much like a little kid any more, or, thank heaven, like a big-eyed dog. He looks like Dean's brother, his grown-up gigantor brother.
The one who's still here.
Sam smiles, and once more tips his head toward all the stuff sitting under the tree.
"Okay," Dean whispers. "Yeah. Okay."
* * * * *