SPN FIC: On a Clear Day You Can See for Miles
Title: On a Clear Day You Can See for Miles
Author: radiumgirl
Rating: Strong PG-13, Light R
Warnings: dark!fic, Godstiel, (temporary)character!death, gore, violence, Crowley in an apron, second person narrative, Cas!POV, etc.
Disclaimer: Not my sandbox.
Recipient: princess_schez
Word Count: 6,634
Author’s Note: Words cannot express the mad love I have for tahirire for being an awesome, shiny, beta who has such an amazing eye for detail and caught all of my sentence fragments. Also? Mad love to quickreaver for the amazing, amazing, simply stunning art that accompanies this story.
Prompt: Set after 6.22. Sam’s having a mental breakdown after reuniting with his soul fragments; he doesn’t know what is real and what isn’t anymore. He manages to escape from Dean’s and Bobby’s watch one night and into Crowley’s grasps, who uses Sam’s instability and friendship with Cas as a way to punish him for grabbing all of Purgatory’s souls for himself. He tortures Sam in Alastair fashion (bonus points if you make Crowley make Alastair look like Mother Theresa). In Sam’s broken mind, he doesn’t know if this real or just some horribly vivid nightmare of Hell.
Will Cas put aside their strained relationship and save Sammy? Dean definitely should be in there somewhere. This prompt is something that I’ve been wondering about since that episode.
Summary: Trust in the lord and you will be saved...sort've.
Sometimes, a Prologue and an Epilogue are the Same Thing
You have gaps of missing memory. It’s disconcerting for an angel. Looking back, you think you know what possession feels like and what it means to be sorry for things you don’t remember doing, or did for the wrong reasons or shouldn’t have done at all.
You wonder if that should mean something, but it doesn’t. You broke Sam, but you were going to fix him.
You meant it when you told Dean that you would do it. If you didn’t think you could do it, you wouldn’t have brought the wall down. At least, you don’t think you would have brought it down.
Desperate times and all that.
One way or another, you would mend the wounds in Sam’s psyche. Someone had to. The wall was crumbling. You know now that if you hadn’t brought it down when you did, it would have come down on its own, slowly, painfully, over the coming months. By October, Sam would be plagued with near-constant migraines, random nosebleeds. He would fall to an aneurysm the day after Christmas in Bobby’s kitchen while Dean poured him a mug of coffee. He would stop breathing in the ambulance with Dean’s hand curled around his fingers. The medics would get him back, but he would not come back, would not wake up. Dean would place him in a care facility, salt the window and the door and visit every day on the way to and on the way from work. Honest work, at a gas station. In the spring, a few weeks after Sam’s birthday, which was quiet and lonely and left Dean with a raging hangover; in the spring, an infection would fester in Sam’s kidneys and he would leave quietly while Dean was at work. After the pyre smoldered down to orange embers and dusty gray ash, Dean would throw himself into hunting and whiskey.
It would have ended bloody and sad.
The Purgatory souls showed you all of this, whispering sweet nothings as you absorbed them all.
You can stop it.
They promised.
We can stop it.
Together.
***
ONE
Sam looks at you like you’re some unholy thing as he slides the angel sword between your vertebrae. You only feel it because you think you should and once you realize that you don’t have to, the blade is a mere presence, like an ant meandering up your sleeve, barely worth a glance.
The souls like Sam. They love him for what he did and what he stands for. They want to touch him. They show you the fractures in his soul, like splintered glass grinding against flesh and they want to dig their fingers into the fissures, scrape nails down the inside of those raw wounds and hear him keen in agony.
Love hurts.
It’s a song, you think, Dean played it once on a dusty Wurlitzer at a dive in Kentucky. Sam called it a dive. Dean called it a “cozy fuckin’ place, Sam, don’t be a snob.”
Sometimes, some things are many things, often at the same time.
Being God is alot like...well it’s like being God.
***
You issue your ultimatum and feel the waves of Dean’s rage, Sam’s terror. They both stink of betrayal.
Your betrayal.
Not theirs.
The souls teeming inside you say that it’s all the same.
***
Sam backs away slowly, bumps into the column behind him, sinks to his knees. He doesn’t see you now. He sees something else entirely. You glide toward him. You don’t need the vessel anymore. Your light won’t hurt anyone unless you will it and you would never will it to these two.
These three.
Bobby is a quiet, stunned presence on your periphery.
You don’t need the vessel anymore, but it’s comfortable and you stopped thinking of it in terms of Jimmy’s arm, Jimmy’s hand, Jimmy’s eyes a long time ago.
You kneel before Sam and Dean says, “Don’t you touch him, Cas.” He sidesteps you and kneels next to his brother. He winces at the twinge in his knee. You’ll fix that too.
Dean grasps Sam’s chin and turns his face towards him, “Sammy?”
He nods jerkily, doesn’t look at Dean, “I’m S-Sam.”
“You okay?”
“I r-remember,” He stares at his hands like they aren’t his hands. He giggles and the laughter dissolves into a gulping sob. He curls closer to Dean and says, “Dean, make it stop.”
Dean pats the back of his head awkwardly, shoots you a look. He doesn’t trust you, not even a little. He doesn’t want you to touch his brother, but he’ll give you this opportunity.
This is your chance. The way to Dean is always through Sam. The way to Sam is through Dean. They will understand now. They only ever understand each other, even when they don’t.
They will understand you now.
You brush your fingertips against Sam’s forehead and nothing happens.
TWO
You fix the Impala.
You fix Bobby’s dislocated shoulder and the fussy knee that has plagued him since a botched ghoul hunt in 1989.
You fix Dean’s cracked collarbone and his torn meniscus.
Sam hasn’t noticed it outside of the occasional weird numbness in his palm, but the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome are developing in his right wrist.
You fix that too.
***
Dean and Bobby say the same thing in different ways.
You don’t understand why you can’t make Sam’s soul do what you want it, what you need it to do. You don’t understand why it won’t just mend, like Dean’s bones, Bobby’s ligaments, the springs and things that make up the Impala. You touch it again, let the voices inside you guide you over the fissures and the cracks and the scabbed over sores. Sam moans and tries to burrow his way into Dean’s chest. You push and something pops and suddenly Sam is screaming, screaming, screaming.
Dean says, “Fuck off, Castiel. You’re hurting him.”
Bobby clears his throat and says, “Maybe you should just…give ‘em some space…for a little while.” He reaches out like he wants to take your arm, then catches himself and stops.
Sam says nothing. He claws at his face like it’s wrong, all wrong. Dean grabs his wrists and tugs. Sam lashes out, splits his lip.
You zap them back to Sioux Falls, a refrigerator full of food, and clean sheets on every bed.
You knock Sam out. You fix Dean’s lip as he’s gingerly dabbing at the blood with a washcloth in Bobby’s upstairs bathroom. He catches your gaze in the mirror and says, “Leave us alone.”
***
Of course, there’s a difference between leaving them alone and leaving them alone.
***
Sam wakes up every day and lays in bed trying to determine what kind of day it’s going to be. Some days are better than others. On a good day, he wakes up and he knows where he is, and more importantly, he knows that where he is isn’t Hell.
On a good day, Sam wakes up and if Dean is still snoring, he rouses him with a hand on his shoulder and a smile and that’s how Dean figures out what kind of day it is. Dean never crawls out of bed before Sam, even if he wakes up first. He doesn’t want him to wake up alone on a bad day. It happened, once, in the beginning, before Dean understood how confused Sam got. It was an unpleasant experience.
They eat whatever breakfast Bobby leaves for them. Or rather, Dean eats it and Sam pushes it around with his fork. Once, Dean wouldn’t let Sam leave the table until he ate “at least the eggs, Sammy, c’mon. Please?” and Sam spent the rest of the morning throwing up.
Sam chafes under Dean’s obsessive gaze and sometimes they fight about it. Dean makes coffee, decaf for Sam, which Sam finds insulting on a good day. Dean is overjoyed when Sam complains about the coffee. Sam takes his mug out on the porch and frowns at it though he admits to Bobby that, “It’s not that bad. The decaf.”
He doesn’t know that you perch on his other side, elbows resting on your knees, and put the caffeine back in for him.
Sam mentions getting back on the road at least once a day. He circles possible hunts in the newspaper and leaves computer print-outs of suspicious happenings on the other side of the state sitting in plain view. Dean passes them off to Bobby. Bobby either passes them on to someone else or takes care of them himself.
Sam gets antsy toward evening. He doesn’t like the way the setting sun stretches the shadows of the dead cars out in the yard and he doesn’t like being inside, where the rooms feel too small. Sometimes Dean finds him in the backseat of the car, staring at nothing, fingertips rubbing absently over the little green army man crammed in the ashtray. Dean slides into the set next to him and gently squeezes his knee. If any tears start to run silently down Sam’s face, Dean wipes them away with the pads of his thumbs and he doesn’t even make a smartass comment about them.
***
Other days, Dean wakes up first and instantly knows.
Sam sits on his own bed, wrapped in the blanket with his knees drawn up, rocking gently back and forth.
He stares at a wet spot on the bed. You can feel Dean’s heart sink like a stone.
Sam hums Enter Sandman.
Dean moves slowly, carefully, across the chasm between their beds. You want to dry the sheets and Sam’s damp sweats, but it would be too obvious so you lurk in the corner. The voices mock Sam and you demand that they shut up. You say you love him and they say, “we do too,” buzzing like gnats in your brain, black flies in the otherwise pristine glow of your grace.
You don’t understand the souls you carry and you wish, sometimes, you wish that they would shut up.
Sometimes they wish you would shut up.
Dean carefully guides Sam off the soiled bed, gets him out of the damp sweatpants, and throws the blanket back around his shoulders. It’s a slow shuffle to the bathroom. Sam runs a hand along the wall. He doesn’t always remember how to use a body, doesn’t always know who Dean is, doesn’t always want to cooperate.
Dean eases him down on the toilet seat while he runs the bath, then turns and kneels and wraps his arms around Sam’s trembling form. He does this more now, especially on the bad days. He buries his face in Sam’s neck because he doesn’t want Sam to see the sadness painted on his face.
Dean asks, quietly, “What’s my name?”
“Dean.”
Dean nods, “Good. And what’s yours?”
The hesitation shatters Dean, but he won’t show it.
“S-Sam? Sammy.”
It’s already a better day. Dean smiles into the crook of Sam’s neck, runs a hand up the knobby ridges of Sam’s spine, “That’s good. And you’re my…”
Dean is looking for “brother.” What he gets instead is Sam frantically pushing himself away. He falls, uncoordinated, scrambles until he’s wedged between the wall and the toilet. He shakes his head violently, “You shouldn’t b-be here. You c-can’t.”
Dean will try to convince Sam that it isn’t a matter of him being there so much as it’s a matter of Sam being here.
“Is this real?” Sam’s gaze roves over the small bathroom, the yellowed ceiling, the mismatched towels, the toothbrushes on the sink, one blue and one red.
Dean nods, “It’s real, Sammy.”
“You’re here?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“With m-me?”
“Yeah, Sam. I’m here with you.”
Dean never understands why that answer makes Sam crumble and weep, but you do, and the other souls…they do too.
THREE
Sam gets worse. He has fewer lucid days. Dean has to tie him down a few times, listen as he screams himself hoarse but it’s either that or let Sam rip himself wide open. Bobby mentions the panic room and Dean says no, doesn’t even consider it. Somewhere in the haze of his shattered psyche, Sam is grateful for this.
***
You blow your cover on a Saturday morning. Sam wakes up lost. He’s quiet because sometimes when he was quiet, really quiet, they didn’t notice him and he could go a long, long time without a burn or a bruise.
He runs his hand across the nubby bedspread, slowly savoring the feel of it. Lucifer has an eye for detail. Sam shudders and his gaze shoots across the space between the beds to the lump tangled in the sheets.
Sam lets himself want for a moment.
Lucifer has an eye for detail.
Sam eyes an empty beer bottle on the floor next to Dean’s hand. He could break it, rake it across the devil’s chest.
He’ll suffer for it later but sometimes it feels good to fight back, even when the fight is meaningless.
Sam picks the bottle up and slams it against the dresser. Dean starts awake but he’s disoriented and there isn’t time and you reach, instinctively, grabbing Sam’s wrist with a, “No, Sam, stop!”
Sam drops the bottle, drops to the floor, drops his head into his hands and starts screaming.
Dean is aware now, pleading with Sam to be quiet, screaming at you to get away from him. He crawls across the floor on his knees, mindless of the shattered glass. There’s a cut on Sam’s hand, smearing blood across his cheeks, but he jerks when Dean’s fingers brush against his arm, stops wailing. He blinks like a newborn, taking in his brother and you and the mess on the floor. He knows what happened. He knows that this is why they don’t hunt, why they don’t leave, why they’re just sad, lonely moons circling one another in a tight orbit, in a tiny bottle universe.
“I’m sorry.” He whispers, reaching for Dean with his undamaged hand, “I didn’t…I thought.”
“It’s okay, Sam.”
He shakes his head, draws back and cradles his hand. One of the tendons is severed. He can’t bend it. You silently will the flesh and muscle to knit itself back together. Sam watches with something like a half-horrified expression on his face. He looks at you and says, “You’ve always been here,” because sometimes he would catch you, out of the corner of his eye, standing in the corner of the room, sitting on the porch swing in the morning, and he always chalked it up to a hallucination.
Dean shoots you a dark look.
You say, “I’m everywhere.”
“Cut the existential shit, Castiel.” Dean growls, “I told you to leave us alone.”
“I did.”
“No. You didn’t. And look what happened.”
The souls are insulted. They swell inside you, stretching your grace like a rubber band. “This was not my doing.”
“The hell it wasn’t. If you hadn’t-“
Snap. Grace is a lot like a rubber band. Yours in particular is susceptible to it, especially now, covered in the filth from Purgatory. You can feel it rotting within you, weakening.
You tell Dean about what the souls showed you. Before. About how the wall would have broken anyway. It would have been sad anyway. Sometimes cruelty and kindness are the same thing and you see that now. They showed you that, the souls. You can show the Winchesters too. You are profoundly sorry that you can’t fix Sam’s soul. You know that this situation is not ideal, but--
“You are alive. You are together.” You say.
Dean’s frown goes deeper. His arms go tighter around Sam and it takes all of Sam’s willpower not to scream and claw his way out of the bonds.
“Don’t you dare try to spin this so you’re the hero, Cas. Whatever happened to all that free will bullshit, huh? What gave you the right to-“
“I am your Lord. I am your benevolent Lord. Even though you have shown me no respect, I have continued to guard and protect you.” The souls are teeming, whispering, crawling, and slithering inside you, urging you on, basking in your pride, your holiness, your inherent rightness.
They feel so good.
You feel so good.
We feel so good.
“You are my favorites and I love you.”
Sam cringes and curls against Dean, “Too bright.” He mutters, shakes his head, “S’oo bright.”
Dean shakes his head too, “This isn’t love, Cas. This is madness.”
You know, deep inside, that you can’t have one without the other.
The thing is...Dean knows it too. He just refuses to admit it.
***
Because you love Dean, and you love Sam, and you want them to love you in return, you vow to do things their way. For now. The souls are so proud of you, for being so gracious.
You leave.
And when Sam is begging for salvation, when Dean is praying to “anyone but Castiel,” when Bobby is quiet and drunk and seriously considering whether it would be kinder to put a hole in the back of Sam Winchester’s head…you turn your back.
It’s what they wanted.
You always tried to give them what they wanted.
FOUR
You won’t know the whole story until later: Sam gets away from Dean one night. Bobby is in South Carolina tracking a talypo. Dean leaves Sam at the kitchen table, idly picking through the week’s worth of newspapers that he missed out on due to his latest vacation from reality. He’s lost enough weight to wear the old t-shirts shoved in the back of the Impala’s trunk: a faded gray and red Stanford t-shirt, gray sweats with frayed cuffs. He’s picking at a plate of warm, buttery toast and Dean is upstairs digging for a deck of cards. Sam doesn’t really feel up to a round of poker, but he wants to show Dean that he’s not completely helpless, that he can still function.
Sam’s eyes catch on a tear in the wallpaper along the far wall: the faded blue flowers are ripped and beneath them are red strawberries on a yellowed background. It looks like a wound. It looks like a tear straight down into the fat layers of the house.
He reminds himself that houses don’t have fat layers, but then he’s slipping on the ice and swallowing the oily water. He slides off the chair as the world tilts, hits the floor hard and Dean yells from upstairs, “You okay, Sammy?” A floorboard creaks above his head as Dean bounds down the hallway, but Sam only hears the high-pitched shriek that Adam makes when they fillet him and he’s out the door, down the porch steps, across the moonlit yard. The pebbles digging into his bare feet barely register and when he blacks out, wakes up cold on a rack, Crowley leering in front of him like an evil car salesman…he isn’t surprised.
He isn’t surprised at all.
***
Crowley sends you an invitation that you promptly ignore, the souls inside you sniggering as you burn the heavy onyx paper, like they know something that you don’t. You feel guilty sometimes. You wonder what the outcome might have been if you had just acquiesced to Crowley’s invitation the first time around.
Your father used to say that sometimes, things just have to happen a certain way.
***
Dean prays fervently and fiercely. He hasn’t seen Sam in days. He knows he’s been taken by…something.
Someone.
“Castiel. Cas. Please. He’s not here. No one in town has seen him. He was in pajamas, man. He didn’t take his wallet or his phone or keys or anything.”
Dean is using you. You’re a tool in the hunt for Sam. It’s not that you are jealous of Sam. It’s not that you want to replace him. It’s not even that you want to be his equal.
You just want to rank higher than a shotgun.
The souls reaffirm what you knew on your own all along. They say that you are right to be angry.
They Winchesters did not want your help.
The Winchesters do not get to take it back.
***
Crowley sends you another invitation. This one arrives in a larger envelope. There are pictures, artful studies in deep, dark crimson. There’s a lump of ice in your gut and it’s not the Purgatory souls and it’s not your stomach and it’s not the flickering remnants of your grace.
The pictures burn in your hands, the ash still clinging to your palms as you go get Dean.
***
You go to the basement in that chateau in Bootback, Kansas, where you smeared an archangel on the wall like a rodent only a few months earlier. Dean lingers behind you, his apprehension undulating like waves.
You are just another weapon in the Impala's trunk, a unique piece, like Sam’s curved knife, a present from John on his sixteenth birthday.
You aren’t sure why you’re even doing this, except that the lump of ice in your stomach makes it hard to swallow, hard to think, hard to be the God you are meant to be.
Crowley is wearing a well-tailored suit in the usual classic black. He’s protecting it with a yellow apron trimmed in delicate lace. Bright red blood spatters across the dainty polka-dotted material.
Crowley smiles and spreads his arms, “Castiel! I was worried that you weren’t getting my invitations!”
“Release Sam.”
“No.”
Dean growls and attacks. Crowley doesn’t bother looking away from you as he flicks his wrist. Then Dean is flying and crunching and limp at the base of the far wall. Crowley narrows his eyes and says, “Bad doggie.”
You spare Dean a look. There is a thin stream of blood running down his forehead, but the damage is minimal. He will be fine. Perhaps this will go smoother without him.
“You should probably keep your pets on a leash, Castiel. They’re a bit unstable, don’t you think? Especially that big, dumb mutt I picked up wandering around the junk yard a few nights back.” Crowley’s tone is light and conversational.
“He is ill.”
“The things that come out of that boy’s mouth, out of his mind. I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.”
That cold feeling in your gut that is neither souls nor grace nor indigestion simmers when you see Sam. Crowley is a smirking figure to your left, presenting his exhibit with a flourish, proud of his handiwork. “Trained by Alastair himself” he gloats. “They don’t just give you a sales position on your first day in the pit, you know. You have to earn it.”
There are bubbles beneath your skin, the souls feeding on the sweltering heat of your rage. Sam is only clothed by the blood streaming down his arms, his legs, and his face. His breaths rattle, heavy and heaving and wet and he looks eviscerated. You see tissue and bone, tendons and nerves never meant for exposure like this.
“What did you do?” You breathe, gliding towards Sam. He’d be on the floor if it wasn’t for the barbed wire holding him to the rack. You recognize the rack as something old and ornate, a relic from the old age, when angels and demons fought one another directly.
Crowley smirks, "I’ve never actually used one for its intended purpose. Thought I’d improvise here, send a message.”
“What message?” Sam’s head is limp on his neck, and you reach out to tilt it up. His eyes flutter but don’t open.
“You didn’t think you could break a deal with me and walk away, did you Castiel?”
You spare a glance away from Sam to glare and Crowley is standing with his palms spread in a mockery of innocence. “This is your rack, Cas. I would have gladly cut your liver out if you had one, but you’re a mite untouchable these days. And by proxy, at least for a little while, so were your pets.”
Crowley yanks on an invisible leash. Sam’s head jerks out of your touch. There’s a ring of purple bruises around his throat. Dean moans and slowly pushes himself up.
“But then you just left them, like a pissy little child or a scorned lover. Unprotected.”
Crowley steps forward and his hands are tangled in Sam’s hair and he’s pulling pulling pulling.
“STOP IT.” You growl, grasping inside for every single soul, every single ounce of power you possess. Your vision whites out for a moment and you forget where you are, what you are. Someone so powerful should not feel so helpless.
You are a vengeful God.
You are rage.
You are burning burning burning.
Crowley is trying to leave. You grab the strands of his pitiful power and strangle him with it. You blink and he is a smear on the wall beside Raphael. The wire binding Sam to the rack crumbles to dust. He starts to fall and you catch him, cradle him, deposit him in Dean’s beseeching arms like a prize.
You performed admirably. You served them well.
You don’t wait for Dean to banish you back to the trunk. You walk away yourself.
FIVE
The souls are whispering and soothing, smoothing over the sparks still crackling inside you. On the seventh day God rested and it’s been longer than that since you’ve taken up the mantle. You hover in the air like a ghost because it is easier and you’re tired.
“Sammy?” A voice cracks.
Below you, beside you, and then there is Dean on the floor, next to the old angel rack, Sam draped in his arms like a wilted plant. The flannel Dean was wearing is flush with Sam’s abdomen and Sam’s fingers twitch at his side like he wants to push it away.
His wet gasps are shorter, harsher; his head bobbing with the incredible effort. His eyes are open now, barely, and Dean presses harder against his abs every time they roll up into his head, wincing with guilt when Sam makes those hurt noises, breathy gasps between sticky breaths.
“Stay with me, okay?”
“Dean?"
“Yeah, Sam, don’t talk okay?”
In his head, Dean is screaming for you, frantic, like you are his last hope.
His savior, at last.
The souls rejoice. You are warm and comfortable and calm.
Sam is calm too. He appreciates the downtime, when he isn’t being carved or burned and broken. He used to wonder why the devil did this, gave him these moments. It’s a good imitation. Lucifer has an eye for detail. He even got the smell right. All things considered, this is a good death. They’re always good when Dean is there.
Sam hates dying alone.
***
You used to wonder how your father could turn his back on his creations, but really, it’s very easy: one part pride and one part exhaustion and one part guilt. Mix it all together, and God walks out the door.
The smiting was always better than the healing.
Your father ran out to find himself and got lost.
***
The souls open another window; show you what will happen if you heal Sam now: Dean takes him back to Sioux Falls. Sam continues to deteriorate. Within two years, he is confined to the panic room. Dean won’t have him committed because he is afraid of other demons, other monsters, taking advantage of Sam’s condition. He and Bobby line the walls of the panic room with old mattresses, cover the floor with soft foam, take the bed off the frame. Dean sleeps outside the door on a crappy futon and it kills his back like it kills his heart to listen to Sam plead and cry, or rage and scream.
There are no more lucid days.
November has never been kind to the Winchesters, and this is no exception.
Starting on the 2nd, Sam weeps for six days. He won’t touch his food. He won’t let Dean touch him. He claws at his face, his arms, deep gouges from elbow to wrist. He paints obscure sigils on the floor. Dean will sit outside and drinks or sits just inside the door and drinks, good and numb when Sam finally crawls across the padded floor to collapse in his lap. Sam mutters softly, brokenly in Enochian. It hasn’t been anything Dean understands in months and Dean reaches up unsteadily to smooth his greasy hair back. He knocks the almost-empty bottle of Red Label over and watches the amber liquid soak into the floor next to one of Sam’s sigils, rust-colored ink rubbed into the foam. His sigh is a shudder and Sam doesn’t even notice. He hasn’t noticed Dean in ages.
Sam’s stomach rumbles loudly and Dean can’t think of the last time Sam ate. They’ll have to tie him down, run the IV until he starts eating again…if he starts eating again.
Dean doesn’t think he has it in him to restrain Sam. Again.
He presses a chaste kiss to Sam’s forehead and reaches behind himself, pawing at the waistband of his jeans.
Bobby hears the two shots out in the yard and runs, even though he knows he’s going to be too late.
“What if I do not save him?” You ask.
The souls murmur inside you, their voices tingling along the inside of your skin. They show you a clear picture, as bright as the first day your father crafted…and you know what has to be done.
The souls don’t like it.
No one likes it.
***
“Cas! Cas, dammit, c’mon!”
You stand in the corner and try not to listen to Dean’s mind screaming.
Sam is fading fast and Dean knows it. He moves his hand from the bloody compress to Sam’s colorless cheek, wipes at the blood in the creases of his lips and does little more than smear it around.
“Sam, you with me?”
A low moan against Dean’s shoulder and, “S’this….real?”
“Yeah, Sam, I’m here. For real.”
Sam’s breath hitches and you know it isn’t the blood.
“No. You c-can’t.”
“Sammy, you aren’t there anymore. Please. You aren’t…”
You are sick of Dean repeatedly getting it wrong. You carefully slide the tumblers into place, wait for the click. It’s on Dean’s face, the way his mouth thins and his eyes squeeze shut. He understands now.
“Shhhh. Sammy, I take it back. I was wrong. You’re gonna wake up soon, okay?” He rubs his thumb over the tears tracks on Sam’s cheek and Sam doesn’t feel it, doesn’t feel much of anything. That’s you too.
"S’this…"
“It’s not real, Sammy. You’re just freaking out.”
“M’jus…”
“Freaking out. Defense mechanism, you know?”
Sam’s relief is like a balm over the rawness of Dean’s hurt. He smiles, all blood smeared teeth and unfocused eyes, “S’good. S’good you’re not here"
“I know, Sam. It’s okay. You’re gonna wake up again real soon.”
Sam nods and his lungs spasm uselessly. Dean tightens his hold while Sam loosens his. Dean rests his head on Sam’s and asks, once more, “Please, Castiel, don’t do this.”
SIX
You do do this and then you wait until the Winchesters’ reaper appears. Sam is cradled in Dean’s arms and Sam is a flickering shape in the corner, hunched over and shaking his head “no” while Tessa implores, “Sam, sweetheart, it’s time to go.”
He’s heavenbound but it won’t fix a thing.
You approach and Tessa looks up, her expression hard, “What do you want?”
“Sam, come with me.” You say, reaching a palm out.
“You can’t do that!”
Sam flinches at her harsh tone. His soul is scarred. It looks like it’s been through a thresher, thick ridges of burned skin on his face, the collar of his jacket frayed, a gaping wound above his heart soaking the plaid red. He flickers out for a minute, then appears again, a dim light. He squints at Tessa, “You're something different."
Tessa’s expression softens, “It’s over, Sam. No one will hurt you again.”
Sam focuses on her, something between sadness and amusement on his face, and he begins chuckling, a rough sound wretched from his cracked lips.
Across the room, Dean sobs brokenly, the other half of this cacophonic symphony.
The souls inside you are a shrieking, screaming, unwilling audience. They show you a dozen views through a dozen cracked windows, grasping at any inkling of truth, anything to stop you from wrapping your hand around the wrist of Sam’s soul and tugging.
The reaper is, to use a Dean-ism, totally sick of this shit. “You can’t do this, Castiel, what gives you the right to-“
Tessa’s voice is lost in the din. Sam is burning burning burning and the souls are white hot and hungry for more rage, more pride, more...anything but this. They can’t thrive on this.
Another voice joins in their crying, deeper, warmer, more familiar. The screams are, for a brilliant moment, overpowering.
And then there is only one voice left.
***
You come back to yourself, floating in the ether, like the hum in the ozone after a storm. Everything aches and you don’t know where you left your vessel and the very idea of inhabiting one seems overwhelming at the moment anyway.
“It’s okay, Cas. I got ‘em.”
***
Dean calls Bobby and waits on the drafty floor in Bootback until he gets there. By then, he is stiff and Sam is stiff and his clothes are stiff and that smell, that bloody metallic tang hangs in the air like a shroud. He wants to take Sam back to Sioux Falls. Bobby helps him clean Sam up.
When Sam died in Cold Oak, Dean wouldn’t let Bobby help. He stumbled to the Impala with Sam’s dead weight straining his arms, crawled into the backseat and held on. It was his idea to pull over to the abandoned house. He knew that when they got back to Bobby’s place, they’d build a pyre and that would be that. It would be the end, and he couldn’t bring himself to admit that.
This time, Dean rides back to Sioux Falls in the front seat. He isn’t okay. They stop for gas outside of Topeka and Dean, still sporting rusty stains beneath his nails, walks across the street to the Liquor-Mart. Bobby grumbles, “We have a dead body in the backseat and you’re gonna crawl into a bottle of rotgut while I’m drivin’.”
“So stick to backroads.” There is no life in Dean’s voice. There is no life in Dean’s eyes. The life in Dean’s veins is a mere formality.
When Dean passes out near Omaha, Bobby throws the whole bottle out the window. There isn’t much amber liquid left in the bottom, but the sound of the glass shattering against the asphalt is comforting in an indefinable way. Sam is finally quiet, like he hasn’t been in months and the silence is relief and that relief, is a deep, throbbing guilt for Bobby Singer.
They reach Sioux Falls in the wee hours of morning. Bobby lets Dean sleep curled in the front seat, leaves Sam stretched in the back and tries not to think about how often they probably slept like that before. He goes to his herbal stores, pulls aster and rosemary, poppy and asphodel. Karen planted a garden out back the first year they were married and Bobby hasn’t tended it in over twenty years, but there’s a lot of stuff growing wild around the rotting fence and broken bench. Sometimes he wonders if she even knew what she was planting. He picks up oak leaf, snips white lilac and long vines of gold and white honeysuckle. When the boys were small, Dean tried to show Sam how to get the honey out of the delicate blossoms. Sam was maybe two or three and shoved the whole flower in his mouth, frowning chubby cheeks around the bitter taste. He spat the half-chewed mush of mutilated petals back into his hand, wiped the mess on the back of Dean’s t-shirt while John sat on the bench, not broken yet, and laughed.
Bobby’s garden is full of ghosts.
Dean wakes up with a headache and it’s just as well. He helps build the pyre in the back woods, carefully lays Sam out. He helps Bobby arrange the herbs and blossoms, messages for the dead, stiffens when the lid on the tin of lighter fluid pops off in Bobby’s hands.
Dean says you looked like some rabid dog, flashing into the clearing with an audible crack and staggering towards Sam’s pyre. You kept muttering to yourself, clawing at your chest like something was trying to escape.
The lighter is in Dean’s hands.
You practically collapse against the neatly stacked wood, claw at the shroud, say, “He needs to breathe.”
Dean pulls you away, rough, and any other time you wouldn’t have fallen, but you feel like you are barely in control of yourself. There’s too much heat and light inside you and it’s not trying to burn you, but it just does and it needs to be out out out and there’s only one place to put it.
“Don’t touch him.” Dean growls, jerks you away from the pyre.
“He needs…I need…we need….” There are too many thoughts and not all of them are yours.
Dean’s hands are gripping your shoulders, pushing you back back back, “Castiel, you need-“
“Air! He needs-“ You claw at your tie, your collar, your coat. You can’t breathe. You don’t need to breathe.
You do.
He does. He’s talking. Or are you talking?
“He doesn’t.” Dean shakes his head, incredulous. “He’s dead, Castiel. And I’m not entirely convinced that you didn’t have a hand in it. So get out of here and don’t come back. Just don’t. Come. Back.”
Dean’s hands tighten on your lapel and you say, “Trust me.”
Dean practically throws you into the unlit pyre and you feel like you’re about to burst and scatter across the universe. Dean’s fists clench and he says, “I did trust you. Sammy trusted you.” You’re practically numb, can’t feel the cloth between your fingers as you pull the shroud down, reveal Sam’s face, discolored by bruising and a day of decay. You press you palm flat against his head and expect pain.
You’re pleasantly surprised when it feels like a release, steam from a valve or the tug of a ripcord. You look down at your hand and see a streak of pure white energy, like grace, but more.
You wake up on Bobby’s sofa. Next to you, on the cot brought up from the panic room, Sam is curled beneath a blanket with good color and an unfurrowed brow. There is a plate on the floor with a half-eaten turkey sandwich. Bobby is snoring in the recliner, but Dean is awake, seated on the floor between the cot and the sofa. He gently smooths Sam’s hair away from his face, looks at you with red-rimmed eyes and says, “He woke up.”
The room is spinning and you instinctively check your grace. It’s intact. Battered, but intact. If these were better times, Dean would have said “You just got your feathers ruffled, man.”
You nod, can’t tear your gaze away from Sam’s somnolent face. Something flutters in your chest, neither grace, nor souls, nor indigestion, and it feels good. Feels right.
“He woke up and he knew who we were and where he was.” Dean bites him lip and twirls a strand of Sam’s hair around his index finger. “Cas, you did it. You fixed him.”
You clear your throat and say, “He fixed himself.”
Dean nods, says, “I think you had a hand in it.”
You search for the souls that teemed inside you like maggots and find that they’re gone.
You don’t miss them.
Author: radiumgirl
Rating: Strong PG-13, Light R
Warnings: dark!fic, Godstiel, (temporary)character!death, gore, violence, Crowley in an apron, second person narrative, Cas!POV, etc.
Disclaimer: Not my sandbox.
Recipient: princess_schez
Word Count: 6,634
Author’s Note: Words cannot express the mad love I have for tahirire for being an awesome, shiny, beta who has such an amazing eye for detail and caught all of my sentence fragments. Also? Mad love to quickreaver for the amazing, amazing, simply stunning art that accompanies this story.
Prompt: Set after 6.22. Sam’s having a mental breakdown after reuniting with his soul fragments; he doesn’t know what is real and what isn’t anymore. He manages to escape from Dean’s and Bobby’s watch one night and into Crowley’s grasps, who uses Sam’s instability and friendship with Cas as a way to punish him for grabbing all of Purgatory’s souls for himself. He tortures Sam in Alastair fashion (bonus points if you make Crowley make Alastair look like Mother Theresa). In Sam’s broken mind, he doesn’t know if this real or just some horribly vivid nightmare of Hell.
Will Cas put aside their strained relationship and save Sammy? Dean definitely should be in there somewhere. This prompt is something that I’ve been wondering about since that episode.
Summary: Trust in the lord and you will be saved...sort've.
Sometimes, a Prologue and an Epilogue are the Same Thing
You have gaps of missing memory. It’s disconcerting for an angel. Looking back, you think you know what possession feels like and what it means to be sorry for things you don’t remember doing, or did for the wrong reasons or shouldn’t have done at all.
You wonder if that should mean something, but it doesn’t. You broke Sam, but you were going to fix him.
You meant it when you told Dean that you would do it. If you didn’t think you could do it, you wouldn’t have brought the wall down. At least, you don’t think you would have brought it down.
Desperate times and all that.
One way or another, you would mend the wounds in Sam’s psyche. Someone had to. The wall was crumbling. You know now that if you hadn’t brought it down when you did, it would have come down on its own, slowly, painfully, over the coming months. By October, Sam would be plagued with near-constant migraines, random nosebleeds. He would fall to an aneurysm the day after Christmas in Bobby’s kitchen while Dean poured him a mug of coffee. He would stop breathing in the ambulance with Dean’s hand curled around his fingers. The medics would get him back, but he would not come back, would not wake up. Dean would place him in a care facility, salt the window and the door and visit every day on the way to and on the way from work. Honest work, at a gas station. In the spring, a few weeks after Sam’s birthday, which was quiet and lonely and left Dean with a raging hangover; in the spring, an infection would fester in Sam’s kidneys and he would leave quietly while Dean was at work. After the pyre smoldered down to orange embers and dusty gray ash, Dean would throw himself into hunting and whiskey.
It would have ended bloody and sad.
The Purgatory souls showed you all of this, whispering sweet nothings as you absorbed them all.
You can stop it.
They promised.
We can stop it.
Together.
***
ONE
Sam looks at you like you’re some unholy thing as he slides the angel sword between your vertebrae. You only feel it because you think you should and once you realize that you don’t have to, the blade is a mere presence, like an ant meandering up your sleeve, barely worth a glance.
The souls like Sam. They love him for what he did and what he stands for. They want to touch him. They show you the fractures in his soul, like splintered glass grinding against flesh and they want to dig their fingers into the fissures, scrape nails down the inside of those raw wounds and hear him keen in agony.
Love hurts.
It’s a song, you think, Dean played it once on a dusty Wurlitzer at a dive in Kentucky. Sam called it a dive. Dean called it a “cozy fuckin’ place, Sam, don’t be a snob.”
Sometimes, some things are many things, often at the same time.
Being God is alot like...well it’s like being God.
***
You issue your ultimatum and feel the waves of Dean’s rage, Sam’s terror. They both stink of betrayal.
Your betrayal.
Not theirs.
The souls teeming inside you say that it’s all the same.
***
Sam backs away slowly, bumps into the column behind him, sinks to his knees. He doesn’t see you now. He sees something else entirely. You glide toward him. You don’t need the vessel anymore. Your light won’t hurt anyone unless you will it and you would never will it to these two.
These three.
Bobby is a quiet, stunned presence on your periphery.
You don’t need the vessel anymore, but it’s comfortable and you stopped thinking of it in terms of Jimmy’s arm, Jimmy’s hand, Jimmy’s eyes a long time ago.
You kneel before Sam and Dean says, “Don’t you touch him, Cas.” He sidesteps you and kneels next to his brother. He winces at the twinge in his knee. You’ll fix that too.
Dean grasps Sam’s chin and turns his face towards him, “Sammy?”
He nods jerkily, doesn’t look at Dean, “I’m S-Sam.”
“You okay?”
“I r-remember,” He stares at his hands like they aren’t his hands. He giggles and the laughter dissolves into a gulping sob. He curls closer to Dean and says, “Dean, make it stop.”
Dean pats the back of his head awkwardly, shoots you a look. He doesn’t trust you, not even a little. He doesn’t want you to touch his brother, but he’ll give you this opportunity.
This is your chance. The way to Dean is always through Sam. The way to Sam is through Dean. They will understand now. They only ever understand each other, even when they don’t.
They will understand you now.
You brush your fingertips against Sam’s forehead and nothing happens.
TWO
You fix the Impala.
You fix Bobby’s dislocated shoulder and the fussy knee that has plagued him since a botched ghoul hunt in 1989.
You fix Dean’s cracked collarbone and his torn meniscus.
Sam hasn’t noticed it outside of the occasional weird numbness in his palm, but the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome are developing in his right wrist.
You fix that too.
***
Dean and Bobby say the same thing in different ways.
You don’t understand why you can’t make Sam’s soul do what you want it, what you need it to do. You don’t understand why it won’t just mend, like Dean’s bones, Bobby’s ligaments, the springs and things that make up the Impala. You touch it again, let the voices inside you guide you over the fissures and the cracks and the scabbed over sores. Sam moans and tries to burrow his way into Dean’s chest. You push and something pops and suddenly Sam is screaming, screaming, screaming.
Dean says, “Fuck off, Castiel. You’re hurting him.”
Bobby clears his throat and says, “Maybe you should just…give ‘em some space…for a little while.” He reaches out like he wants to take your arm, then catches himself and stops.
Sam says nothing. He claws at his face like it’s wrong, all wrong. Dean grabs his wrists and tugs. Sam lashes out, splits his lip.
You zap them back to Sioux Falls, a refrigerator full of food, and clean sheets on every bed.
You knock Sam out. You fix Dean’s lip as he’s gingerly dabbing at the blood with a washcloth in Bobby’s upstairs bathroom. He catches your gaze in the mirror and says, “Leave us alone.”
***
Of course, there’s a difference between leaving them alone and leaving them alone.
***
Sam wakes up every day and lays in bed trying to determine what kind of day it’s going to be. Some days are better than others. On a good day, he wakes up and he knows where he is, and more importantly, he knows that where he is isn’t Hell.
On a good day, Sam wakes up and if Dean is still snoring, he rouses him with a hand on his shoulder and a smile and that’s how Dean figures out what kind of day it is. Dean never crawls out of bed before Sam, even if he wakes up first. He doesn’t want him to wake up alone on a bad day. It happened, once, in the beginning, before Dean understood how confused Sam got. It was an unpleasant experience.
They eat whatever breakfast Bobby leaves for them. Or rather, Dean eats it and Sam pushes it around with his fork. Once, Dean wouldn’t let Sam leave the table until he ate “at least the eggs, Sammy, c’mon. Please?” and Sam spent the rest of the morning throwing up.
Sam chafes under Dean’s obsessive gaze and sometimes they fight about it. Dean makes coffee, decaf for Sam, which Sam finds insulting on a good day. Dean is overjoyed when Sam complains about the coffee. Sam takes his mug out on the porch and frowns at it though he admits to Bobby that, “It’s not that bad. The decaf.”
He doesn’t know that you perch on his other side, elbows resting on your knees, and put the caffeine back in for him.
Sam mentions getting back on the road at least once a day. He circles possible hunts in the newspaper and leaves computer print-outs of suspicious happenings on the other side of the state sitting in plain view. Dean passes them off to Bobby. Bobby either passes them on to someone else or takes care of them himself.
Sam gets antsy toward evening. He doesn’t like the way the setting sun stretches the shadows of the dead cars out in the yard and he doesn’t like being inside, where the rooms feel too small. Sometimes Dean finds him in the backseat of the car, staring at nothing, fingertips rubbing absently over the little green army man crammed in the ashtray. Dean slides into the set next to him and gently squeezes his knee. If any tears start to run silently down Sam’s face, Dean wipes them away with the pads of his thumbs and he doesn’t even make a smartass comment about them.
***
Other days, Dean wakes up first and instantly knows.
Sam sits on his own bed, wrapped in the blanket with his knees drawn up, rocking gently back and forth.
He stares at a wet spot on the bed. You can feel Dean’s heart sink like a stone.
Sam hums Enter Sandman.
Dean moves slowly, carefully, across the chasm between their beds. You want to dry the sheets and Sam’s damp sweats, but it would be too obvious so you lurk in the corner. The voices mock Sam and you demand that they shut up. You say you love him and they say, “we do too,” buzzing like gnats in your brain, black flies in the otherwise pristine glow of your grace.
You don’t understand the souls you carry and you wish, sometimes, you wish that they would shut up.
Sometimes they wish you would shut up.
Dean carefully guides Sam off the soiled bed, gets him out of the damp sweatpants, and throws the blanket back around his shoulders. It’s a slow shuffle to the bathroom. Sam runs a hand along the wall. He doesn’t always remember how to use a body, doesn’t always know who Dean is, doesn’t always want to cooperate.
Dean eases him down on the toilet seat while he runs the bath, then turns and kneels and wraps his arms around Sam’s trembling form. He does this more now, especially on the bad days. He buries his face in Sam’s neck because he doesn’t want Sam to see the sadness painted on his face.
Dean asks, quietly, “What’s my name?”
“Dean.”
Dean nods, “Good. And what’s yours?”
The hesitation shatters Dean, but he won’t show it.
“S-Sam? Sammy.”
It’s already a better day. Dean smiles into the crook of Sam’s neck, runs a hand up the knobby ridges of Sam’s spine, “That’s good. And you’re my…”
Dean is looking for “brother.” What he gets instead is Sam frantically pushing himself away. He falls, uncoordinated, scrambles until he’s wedged between the wall and the toilet. He shakes his head violently, “You shouldn’t b-be here. You c-can’t.”
Dean will try to convince Sam that it isn’t a matter of him being there so much as it’s a matter of Sam being here.
“Is this real?” Sam’s gaze roves over the small bathroom, the yellowed ceiling, the mismatched towels, the toothbrushes on the sink, one blue and one red.
Dean nods, “It’s real, Sammy.”
“You’re here?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“With m-me?”
“Yeah, Sam. I’m here with you.”
Dean never understands why that answer makes Sam crumble and weep, but you do, and the other souls…they do too.
THREE
Sam gets worse. He has fewer lucid days. Dean has to tie him down a few times, listen as he screams himself hoarse but it’s either that or let Sam rip himself wide open. Bobby mentions the panic room and Dean says no, doesn’t even consider it. Somewhere in the haze of his shattered psyche, Sam is grateful for this.
***
You blow your cover on a Saturday morning. Sam wakes up lost. He’s quiet because sometimes when he was quiet, really quiet, they didn’t notice him and he could go a long, long time without a burn or a bruise.
He runs his hand across the nubby bedspread, slowly savoring the feel of it. Lucifer has an eye for detail. Sam shudders and his gaze shoots across the space between the beds to the lump tangled in the sheets.
Sam lets himself want for a moment.
Lucifer has an eye for detail.
Sam eyes an empty beer bottle on the floor next to Dean’s hand. He could break it, rake it across the devil’s chest.
He’ll suffer for it later but sometimes it feels good to fight back, even when the fight is meaningless.
Sam picks the bottle up and slams it against the dresser. Dean starts awake but he’s disoriented and there isn’t time and you reach, instinctively, grabbing Sam’s wrist with a, “No, Sam, stop!”
Sam drops the bottle, drops to the floor, drops his head into his hands and starts screaming.
Dean is aware now, pleading with Sam to be quiet, screaming at you to get away from him. He crawls across the floor on his knees, mindless of the shattered glass. There’s a cut on Sam’s hand, smearing blood across his cheeks, but he jerks when Dean’s fingers brush against his arm, stops wailing. He blinks like a newborn, taking in his brother and you and the mess on the floor. He knows what happened. He knows that this is why they don’t hunt, why they don’t leave, why they’re just sad, lonely moons circling one another in a tight orbit, in a tiny bottle universe.
“I’m sorry.” He whispers, reaching for Dean with his undamaged hand, “I didn’t…I thought.”
“It’s okay, Sam.”
He shakes his head, draws back and cradles his hand. One of the tendons is severed. He can’t bend it. You silently will the flesh and muscle to knit itself back together. Sam watches with something like a half-horrified expression on his face. He looks at you and says, “You’ve always been here,” because sometimes he would catch you, out of the corner of his eye, standing in the corner of the room, sitting on the porch swing in the morning, and he always chalked it up to a hallucination.
Dean shoots you a dark look.
You say, “I’m everywhere.”
“Cut the existential shit, Castiel.” Dean growls, “I told you to leave us alone.”
“I did.”
“No. You didn’t. And look what happened.”
The souls are insulted. They swell inside you, stretching your grace like a rubber band. “This was not my doing.”
“The hell it wasn’t. If you hadn’t-“
Snap. Grace is a lot like a rubber band. Yours in particular is susceptible to it, especially now, covered in the filth from Purgatory. You can feel it rotting within you, weakening.
You tell Dean about what the souls showed you. Before. About how the wall would have broken anyway. It would have been sad anyway. Sometimes cruelty and kindness are the same thing and you see that now. They showed you that, the souls. You can show the Winchesters too. You are profoundly sorry that you can’t fix Sam’s soul. You know that this situation is not ideal, but--
“You are alive. You are together.” You say.
Dean’s frown goes deeper. His arms go tighter around Sam and it takes all of Sam’s willpower not to scream and claw his way out of the bonds.
“Don’t you dare try to spin this so you’re the hero, Cas. Whatever happened to all that free will bullshit, huh? What gave you the right to-“
“I am your Lord. I am your benevolent Lord. Even though you have shown me no respect, I have continued to guard and protect you.” The souls are teeming, whispering, crawling, and slithering inside you, urging you on, basking in your pride, your holiness, your inherent rightness.
They feel so good.
You feel so good.
We feel so good.
“You are my favorites and I love you.”
Sam cringes and curls against Dean, “Too bright.” He mutters, shakes his head, “S’oo bright.”
Dean shakes his head too, “This isn’t love, Cas. This is madness.”
You know, deep inside, that you can’t have one without the other.
The thing is...Dean knows it too. He just refuses to admit it.
***
Because you love Dean, and you love Sam, and you want them to love you in return, you vow to do things their way. For now. The souls are so proud of you, for being so gracious.
You leave.
And when Sam is begging for salvation, when Dean is praying to “anyone but Castiel,” when Bobby is quiet and drunk and seriously considering whether it would be kinder to put a hole in the back of Sam Winchester’s head…you turn your back.
It’s what they wanted.
You always tried to give them what they wanted.
FOUR
You won’t know the whole story until later: Sam gets away from Dean one night. Bobby is in South Carolina tracking a talypo. Dean leaves Sam at the kitchen table, idly picking through the week’s worth of newspapers that he missed out on due to his latest vacation from reality. He’s lost enough weight to wear the old t-shirts shoved in the back of the Impala’s trunk: a faded gray and red Stanford t-shirt, gray sweats with frayed cuffs. He’s picking at a plate of warm, buttery toast and Dean is upstairs digging for a deck of cards. Sam doesn’t really feel up to a round of poker, but he wants to show Dean that he’s not completely helpless, that he can still function.
Sam’s eyes catch on a tear in the wallpaper along the far wall: the faded blue flowers are ripped and beneath them are red strawberries on a yellowed background. It looks like a wound. It looks like a tear straight down into the fat layers of the house.
He reminds himself that houses don’t have fat layers, but then he’s slipping on the ice and swallowing the oily water. He slides off the chair as the world tilts, hits the floor hard and Dean yells from upstairs, “You okay, Sammy?” A floorboard creaks above his head as Dean bounds down the hallway, but Sam only hears the high-pitched shriek that Adam makes when they fillet him and he’s out the door, down the porch steps, across the moonlit yard. The pebbles digging into his bare feet barely register and when he blacks out, wakes up cold on a rack, Crowley leering in front of him like an evil car salesman…he isn’t surprised.
He isn’t surprised at all.
***
Crowley sends you an invitation that you promptly ignore, the souls inside you sniggering as you burn the heavy onyx paper, like they know something that you don’t. You feel guilty sometimes. You wonder what the outcome might have been if you had just acquiesced to Crowley’s invitation the first time around.
Your father used to say that sometimes, things just have to happen a certain way.
***
Dean prays fervently and fiercely. He hasn’t seen Sam in days. He knows he’s been taken by…something.
Someone.
“Castiel. Cas. Please. He’s not here. No one in town has seen him. He was in pajamas, man. He didn’t take his wallet or his phone or keys or anything.”
Dean is using you. You’re a tool in the hunt for Sam. It’s not that you are jealous of Sam. It’s not that you want to replace him. It’s not even that you want to be his equal.
You just want to rank higher than a shotgun.
The souls reaffirm what you knew on your own all along. They say that you are right to be angry.
They Winchesters did not want your help.
The Winchesters do not get to take it back.
***
Crowley sends you another invitation. This one arrives in a larger envelope. There are pictures, artful studies in deep, dark crimson. There’s a lump of ice in your gut and it’s not the Purgatory souls and it’s not your stomach and it’s not the flickering remnants of your grace.
The pictures burn in your hands, the ash still clinging to your palms as you go get Dean.
***
You go to the basement in that chateau in Bootback, Kansas, where you smeared an archangel on the wall like a rodent only a few months earlier. Dean lingers behind you, his apprehension undulating like waves.
You are just another weapon in the Impala's trunk, a unique piece, like Sam’s curved knife, a present from John on his sixteenth birthday.
You aren’t sure why you’re even doing this, except that the lump of ice in your stomach makes it hard to swallow, hard to think, hard to be the God you are meant to be.
Crowley is wearing a well-tailored suit in the usual classic black. He’s protecting it with a yellow apron trimmed in delicate lace. Bright red blood spatters across the dainty polka-dotted material.
Crowley smiles and spreads his arms, “Castiel! I was worried that you weren’t getting my invitations!”
“Release Sam.”
“No.”
Dean growls and attacks. Crowley doesn’t bother looking away from you as he flicks his wrist. Then Dean is flying and crunching and limp at the base of the far wall. Crowley narrows his eyes and says, “Bad doggie.”
You spare Dean a look. There is a thin stream of blood running down his forehead, but the damage is minimal. He will be fine. Perhaps this will go smoother without him.
“You should probably keep your pets on a leash, Castiel. They’re a bit unstable, don’t you think? Especially that big, dumb mutt I picked up wandering around the junk yard a few nights back.” Crowley’s tone is light and conversational.
“He is ill.”
“The things that come out of that boy’s mouth, out of his mind. I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.”
That cold feeling in your gut that is neither souls nor grace nor indigestion simmers when you see Sam. Crowley is a smirking figure to your left, presenting his exhibit with a flourish, proud of his handiwork. “Trained by Alastair himself” he gloats. “They don’t just give you a sales position on your first day in the pit, you know. You have to earn it.”
There are bubbles beneath your skin, the souls feeding on the sweltering heat of your rage. Sam is only clothed by the blood streaming down his arms, his legs, and his face. His breaths rattle, heavy and heaving and wet and he looks eviscerated. You see tissue and bone, tendons and nerves never meant for exposure like this.
“What did you do?” You breathe, gliding towards Sam. He’d be on the floor if it wasn’t for the barbed wire holding him to the rack. You recognize the rack as something old and ornate, a relic from the old age, when angels and demons fought one another directly.
Crowley smirks, "I’ve never actually used one for its intended purpose. Thought I’d improvise here, send a message.”
“What message?” Sam’s head is limp on his neck, and you reach out to tilt it up. His eyes flutter but don’t open.
“You didn’t think you could break a deal with me and walk away, did you Castiel?”
You spare a glance away from Sam to glare and Crowley is standing with his palms spread in a mockery of innocence. “This is your rack, Cas. I would have gladly cut your liver out if you had one, but you’re a mite untouchable these days. And by proxy, at least for a little while, so were your pets.”
Crowley yanks on an invisible leash. Sam’s head jerks out of your touch. There’s a ring of purple bruises around his throat. Dean moans and slowly pushes himself up.
“But then you just left them, like a pissy little child or a scorned lover. Unprotected.”
Crowley steps forward and his hands are tangled in Sam’s hair and he’s pulling pulling pulling.
“STOP IT.” You growl, grasping inside for every single soul, every single ounce of power you possess. Your vision whites out for a moment and you forget where you are, what you are. Someone so powerful should not feel so helpless.
You are a vengeful God.
You are rage.
You are burning burning burning.
Crowley is trying to leave. You grab the strands of his pitiful power and strangle him with it. You blink and he is a smear on the wall beside Raphael. The wire binding Sam to the rack crumbles to dust. He starts to fall and you catch him, cradle him, deposit him in Dean’s beseeching arms like a prize.
You performed admirably. You served them well.
You don’t wait for Dean to banish you back to the trunk. You walk away yourself.
FIVE
The souls are whispering and soothing, smoothing over the sparks still crackling inside you. On the seventh day God rested and it’s been longer than that since you’ve taken up the mantle. You hover in the air like a ghost because it is easier and you’re tired.
“Sammy?” A voice cracks.
Below you, beside you, and then there is Dean on the floor, next to the old angel rack, Sam draped in his arms like a wilted plant. The flannel Dean was wearing is flush with Sam’s abdomen and Sam’s fingers twitch at his side like he wants to push it away.
His wet gasps are shorter, harsher; his head bobbing with the incredible effort. His eyes are open now, barely, and Dean presses harder against his abs every time they roll up into his head, wincing with guilt when Sam makes those hurt noises, breathy gasps between sticky breaths.
“Stay with me, okay?”
“Dean?"
“Yeah, Sam, don’t talk okay?”
In his head, Dean is screaming for you, frantic, like you are his last hope.
His savior, at last.
The souls rejoice. You are warm and comfortable and calm.
Sam is calm too. He appreciates the downtime, when he isn’t being carved or burned and broken. He used to wonder why the devil did this, gave him these moments. It’s a good imitation. Lucifer has an eye for detail. He even got the smell right. All things considered, this is a good death. They’re always good when Dean is there.
Sam hates dying alone.
***
You used to wonder how your father could turn his back on his creations, but really, it’s very easy: one part pride and one part exhaustion and one part guilt. Mix it all together, and God walks out the door.
The smiting was always better than the healing.
Your father ran out to find himself and got lost.
***
The souls open another window; show you what will happen if you heal Sam now: Dean takes him back to Sioux Falls. Sam continues to deteriorate. Within two years, he is confined to the panic room. Dean won’t have him committed because he is afraid of other demons, other monsters, taking advantage of Sam’s condition. He and Bobby line the walls of the panic room with old mattresses, cover the floor with soft foam, take the bed off the frame. Dean sleeps outside the door on a crappy futon and it kills his back like it kills his heart to listen to Sam plead and cry, or rage and scream.
There are no more lucid days.
November has never been kind to the Winchesters, and this is no exception.
Starting on the 2nd, Sam weeps for six days. He won’t touch his food. He won’t let Dean touch him. He claws at his face, his arms, deep gouges from elbow to wrist. He paints obscure sigils on the floor. Dean will sit outside and drinks or sits just inside the door and drinks, good and numb when Sam finally crawls across the padded floor to collapse in his lap. Sam mutters softly, brokenly in Enochian. It hasn’t been anything Dean understands in months and Dean reaches up unsteadily to smooth his greasy hair back. He knocks the almost-empty bottle of Red Label over and watches the amber liquid soak into the floor next to one of Sam’s sigils, rust-colored ink rubbed into the foam. His sigh is a shudder and Sam doesn’t even notice. He hasn’t noticed Dean in ages.
Sam’s stomach rumbles loudly and Dean can’t think of the last time Sam ate. They’ll have to tie him down, run the IV until he starts eating again…if he starts eating again.
Dean doesn’t think he has it in him to restrain Sam. Again.
He presses a chaste kiss to Sam’s forehead and reaches behind himself, pawing at the waistband of his jeans.
Bobby hears the two shots out in the yard and runs, even though he knows he’s going to be too late.
“What if I do not save him?” You ask.
The souls murmur inside you, their voices tingling along the inside of your skin. They show you a clear picture, as bright as the first day your father crafted…and you know what has to be done.
The souls don’t like it.
No one likes it.
***
“Cas! Cas, dammit, c’mon!”
You stand in the corner and try not to listen to Dean’s mind screaming.
Sam is fading fast and Dean knows it. He moves his hand from the bloody compress to Sam’s colorless cheek, wipes at the blood in the creases of his lips and does little more than smear it around.
“Sam, you with me?”
A low moan against Dean’s shoulder and, “S’this….real?”
“Yeah, Sam, I’m here. For real.”
Sam’s breath hitches and you know it isn’t the blood.
“No. You c-can’t.”
“Sammy, you aren’t there anymore. Please. You aren’t…”
You are sick of Dean repeatedly getting it wrong. You carefully slide the tumblers into place, wait for the click. It’s on Dean’s face, the way his mouth thins and his eyes squeeze shut. He understands now.
“Shhhh. Sammy, I take it back. I was wrong. You’re gonna wake up soon, okay?” He rubs his thumb over the tears tracks on Sam’s cheek and Sam doesn’t feel it, doesn’t feel much of anything. That’s you too.
"S’this…"
“It’s not real, Sammy. You’re just freaking out.”
“M’jus…”
“Freaking out. Defense mechanism, you know?”
Sam’s relief is like a balm over the rawness of Dean’s hurt. He smiles, all blood smeared teeth and unfocused eyes, “S’good. S’good you’re not here"
“I know, Sam. It’s okay. You’re gonna wake up again real soon.”
Sam nods and his lungs spasm uselessly. Dean tightens his hold while Sam loosens his. Dean rests his head on Sam’s and asks, once more, “Please, Castiel, don’t do this.”
SIX
You do do this and then you wait until the Winchesters’ reaper appears. Sam is cradled in Dean’s arms and Sam is a flickering shape in the corner, hunched over and shaking his head “no” while Tessa implores, “Sam, sweetheart, it’s time to go.”
He’s heavenbound but it won’t fix a thing.
You approach and Tessa looks up, her expression hard, “What do you want?”
“Sam, come with me.” You say, reaching a palm out.
“You can’t do that!”
Sam flinches at her harsh tone. His soul is scarred. It looks like it’s been through a thresher, thick ridges of burned skin on his face, the collar of his jacket frayed, a gaping wound above his heart soaking the plaid red. He flickers out for a minute, then appears again, a dim light. He squints at Tessa, “You're something different."
Tessa’s expression softens, “It’s over, Sam. No one will hurt you again.”
Sam focuses on her, something between sadness and amusement on his face, and he begins chuckling, a rough sound wretched from his cracked lips.
Across the room, Dean sobs brokenly, the other half of this cacophonic symphony.
The souls inside you are a shrieking, screaming, unwilling audience. They show you a dozen views through a dozen cracked windows, grasping at any inkling of truth, anything to stop you from wrapping your hand around the wrist of Sam’s soul and tugging.
The reaper is, to use a Dean-ism, totally sick of this shit. “You can’t do this, Castiel, what gives you the right to-“
Tessa’s voice is lost in the din. Sam is burning burning burning and the souls are white hot and hungry for more rage, more pride, more...anything but this. They can’t thrive on this.
Another voice joins in their crying, deeper, warmer, more familiar. The screams are, for a brilliant moment, overpowering.
And then there is only one voice left.
***
You come back to yourself, floating in the ether, like the hum in the ozone after a storm. Everything aches and you don’t know where you left your vessel and the very idea of inhabiting one seems overwhelming at the moment anyway.
“It’s okay, Cas. I got ‘em.”
***
Dean calls Bobby and waits on the drafty floor in Bootback until he gets there. By then, he is stiff and Sam is stiff and his clothes are stiff and that smell, that bloody metallic tang hangs in the air like a shroud. He wants to take Sam back to Sioux Falls. Bobby helps him clean Sam up.
When Sam died in Cold Oak, Dean wouldn’t let Bobby help. He stumbled to the Impala with Sam’s dead weight straining his arms, crawled into the backseat and held on. It was his idea to pull over to the abandoned house. He knew that when they got back to Bobby’s place, they’d build a pyre and that would be that. It would be the end, and he couldn’t bring himself to admit that.
This time, Dean rides back to Sioux Falls in the front seat. He isn’t okay. They stop for gas outside of Topeka and Dean, still sporting rusty stains beneath his nails, walks across the street to the Liquor-Mart. Bobby grumbles, “We have a dead body in the backseat and you’re gonna crawl into a bottle of rotgut while I’m drivin’.”
“So stick to backroads.” There is no life in Dean’s voice. There is no life in Dean’s eyes. The life in Dean’s veins is a mere formality.
When Dean passes out near Omaha, Bobby throws the whole bottle out the window. There isn’t much amber liquid left in the bottom, but the sound of the glass shattering against the asphalt is comforting in an indefinable way. Sam is finally quiet, like he hasn’t been in months and the silence is relief and that relief, is a deep, throbbing guilt for Bobby Singer.
They reach Sioux Falls in the wee hours of morning. Bobby lets Dean sleep curled in the front seat, leaves Sam stretched in the back and tries not to think about how often they probably slept like that before. He goes to his herbal stores, pulls aster and rosemary, poppy and asphodel. Karen planted a garden out back the first year they were married and Bobby hasn’t tended it in over twenty years, but there’s a lot of stuff growing wild around the rotting fence and broken bench. Sometimes he wonders if she even knew what she was planting. He picks up oak leaf, snips white lilac and long vines of gold and white honeysuckle. When the boys were small, Dean tried to show Sam how to get the honey out of the delicate blossoms. Sam was maybe two or three and shoved the whole flower in his mouth, frowning chubby cheeks around the bitter taste. He spat the half-chewed mush of mutilated petals back into his hand, wiped the mess on the back of Dean’s t-shirt while John sat on the bench, not broken yet, and laughed.
Bobby’s garden is full of ghosts.
Dean wakes up with a headache and it’s just as well. He helps build the pyre in the back woods, carefully lays Sam out. He helps Bobby arrange the herbs and blossoms, messages for the dead, stiffens when the lid on the tin of lighter fluid pops off in Bobby’s hands.
Dean says you looked like some rabid dog, flashing into the clearing with an audible crack and staggering towards Sam’s pyre. You kept muttering to yourself, clawing at your chest like something was trying to escape.
The lighter is in Dean’s hands.
You practically collapse against the neatly stacked wood, claw at the shroud, say, “He needs to breathe.”
Dean pulls you away, rough, and any other time you wouldn’t have fallen, but you feel like you are barely in control of yourself. There’s too much heat and light inside you and it’s not trying to burn you, but it just does and it needs to be out out out and there’s only one place to put it.
“Don’t touch him.” Dean growls, jerks you away from the pyre.
“He needs…I need…we need….” There are too many thoughts and not all of them are yours.
Dean’s hands are gripping your shoulders, pushing you back back back, “Castiel, you need-“
“Air! He needs-“ You claw at your tie, your collar, your coat. You can’t breathe. You don’t need to breathe.
You do.
He does. He’s talking. Or are you talking?
“He doesn’t.” Dean shakes his head, incredulous. “He’s dead, Castiel. And I’m not entirely convinced that you didn’t have a hand in it. So get out of here and don’t come back. Just don’t. Come. Back.”
Dean’s hands tighten on your lapel and you say, “Trust me.”
Dean practically throws you into the unlit pyre and you feel like you’re about to burst and scatter across the universe. Dean’s fists clench and he says, “I did trust you. Sammy trusted you.” You’re practically numb, can’t feel the cloth between your fingers as you pull the shroud down, reveal Sam’s face, discolored by bruising and a day of decay. You press you palm flat against his head and expect pain.
You’re pleasantly surprised when it feels like a release, steam from a valve or the tug of a ripcord. You look down at your hand and see a streak of pure white energy, like grace, but more.
You wake up on Bobby’s sofa. Next to you, on the cot brought up from the panic room, Sam is curled beneath a blanket with good color and an unfurrowed brow. There is a plate on the floor with a half-eaten turkey sandwich. Bobby is snoring in the recliner, but Dean is awake, seated on the floor between the cot and the sofa. He gently smooths Sam’s hair away from his face, looks at you with red-rimmed eyes and says, “He woke up.”
The room is spinning and you instinctively check your grace. It’s intact. Battered, but intact. If these were better times, Dean would have said “You just got your feathers ruffled, man.”
You nod, can’t tear your gaze away from Sam’s somnolent face. Something flutters in your chest, neither grace, nor souls, nor indigestion, and it feels good. Feels right.
“He woke up and he knew who we were and where he was.” Dean bites him lip and twirls a strand of Sam’s hair around his index finger. “Cas, you did it. You fixed him.”
You clear your throat and say, “He fixed himself.”
Dean nods, says, “I think you had a hand in it.”
You search for the souls that teemed inside you like maggots and find that they’re gone.
You don’t miss them.