SPN FIC: 11 Days
I wrote 7.17 reaction fic! Yes, I hate the ending that much. For now. I reserve the right to change my opinion on that matter if Show gives me a reason to in the future.
Anyway, thank yous are needed for 4422shiniemmram for their encouragement and general awesomeness. emmram has written her own coda which is absolutely delightful and which mine doesn't even compare to and if you haven't read it yet, you should check it out.
Summary: AU coda to The Born Again Identity. Cas is awesome. Dean is angry. Sam is...in bad shape.
Warnings: SPOILERS for 7.17.
Disclaimer: Not my sandbox.
11 Days
Sam was awake for five days before the accident.
It takes Dean another three, almost four, to track down Emanuel and reboot Castiel-there and back again and Castiel remembers how to work his mojo like magic after that. He’s in and out in a literal flash, ominously Sam-less with a grimmer face than Dean thinks should be possible for someone who just remembered that he was last seen on TV as a super villain.
“Where’s Sam?”
Castiel doesn’t say anything. He places his fingers on Dean’s forehead and then they’re in Sam’s room and Sam isn’t better. Sam isn’t digging his jeans out of the tiny closet, rubbing irritably at the stubble on his chin, bitching about how badly he wants to shave now, Dean, ugh. No, Sam is sprawled on the bed and he looks fucking terrible, fucking worse than when Dean left just a few days earlier.
Dean doesn’t understand.
That’s the story of Dean’s life and isn’t it poetic? That Dean doesn’t understand his own story?
“Sammy?” Dean crosses the room in a few quick strides. Sam’s tracking something across the ceiling and flinches when Dean leans across his field of vision, “Sam?”
“You’re n-not real.”
“It’s me, Sam. It’s Dean. I’m here now.” Dean bites his lip as Sam weakly shakes his head. His lips are gnawed raw and the bags beneath his eyes are heavy with exhaustion. His breathing is harsh, labored. Castiel hovers in the corner like a ghost.
He says, “I tried, Dean. I am sorry.”
“What do you mean you ‘tried’?”
“I cannot heal Sam. There is nothing left to heal. His soul is crushed beneath whatever is happening in his mind.”
Sam’s heart fumbles beneath Dean’s fingers. Dean holds his breath until it all evens out and Sam’s head rolls on the pillow, eyes trained on the ceiling again. Dean wants to scream, to grab Castiel by the blood-stained lapels and shake him relentlessly. He tamps his anger down and asks with a calm that trembles under the strain of its forcedness, “Ok. Ok, Cas. Just fix this then. He looks fucking terrible. Just buy us some time and I’ll figure it out. Just do that, ok?”
It occurs to Dean that if Castiel could have done that, he would have done it already, but he clings to the tattered remnants of his faith as though it were the fluttering pieces of Sam’s soul, shapeless and aimless and slipping through his fingers like air.
“I cannot heal him, Dean. I am…I am very sorry.”
Dean’s eyes burn and Sam takes a particularly harsh breath, turns his head and coughs and it sounds wet. Dean smooths his hair back and winces as long strands of hair stick to his palms like dandelion seeds. He can’t bring himself to wipe them away and stares at his hand, the strands of Sam unraveling like a cheap blanket, “So this is it then? He’s just gonna be like this until his candle burns out?”
“This isn’t a problem that I can make disappear.”
“You’re the one who created the fucking problem, Cas!”
“Dean, if I could take back-“
“That’s what I’m asking you to do!”
Castiel shrinks a little at that, nods, “I can’t. I am so sorry. To both of you. I will go.”
Dean wraps his fingers around an emaciated wrist to take Sam’s pulse. He notes the missing fingernails and the blue tinge in the beds of those that remain. He frowns, “No. You stay. You see this through you son of a bitch.”
“I will do that for you, Dean.”
Dean’s lips twist. It’s an ugly shape. “You stay for him.” Dean says, “He hasn’t slept in a week. His hair’s falling out.” Dean’s voice cracks, “His fucking hair.”
Castiel cocks his head to the side, “His lungs are weak and his kidneys are failing. It will not be long.”
“That supposed to make me fucking feel better?”
“He will not suffer much longer.”
“He’s been suffering for months.”
“I-“
“D-Dean?”
“Sam?”
Sam is looking at him. His eyes flicker to the side, to the empty chair, then back to Dean. He smiles carefully, “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
“Who you talking to?” He eyes the empty chair again, the smile falters.
“Cas is here. I found him shacked up with some chick in Colorado.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Looked less like holy tax accountant and more like holy high school math teacher.”
Sam laughs at that and it comes out a wheeze. Dean wonders if he should get the doctor. Sam interrupts his thoughts, trying to push himself up on trembling arms. He doesn’t begrudge Dean sliding his arm behind his back and Dean pretends that he can’t feel the ridge of Sam’s spine through the thin t-shirt. Give and take. Sam flinches when Castiel steps into his sightline, comes back to himself, at least, as close to himself as he can get, and grins, “It’s good to see you.”
“I cannot heal you, Sam.”
The only indication of Sam’s disappointment is that his smile falters, shrinking a barely discernable degree. Castiel sees it because of his heightened senses. Dean sees it because he has had decades to catalogue the minor tells that give his brother away. The only times that Sam has won against him in poker involved flowing booze and distracting women. Sam is a terrible liar. Sometimes Dean is amazed by how they’ve managed to bluff their way onto so many crime scenes.
“It’s ok, Cas.”
“It’s not ok.” Dean says.
“It is.” Sam nods jerkily and wheezes into his chest.
“Don’t argue with me.” Dean squeezes his shoulder and Sam flinches.
“Don’t argue with me. I’m the one who’s dying.”
“You’re not dying.” Dean carefully guides Sam back down to the bed. Sam’s eyes immediately shoot to the empty chair. He tilts his head like he’s listening to something, then tiredly rolls his eyes before forcing them to find Dean again.
“Pretty sure…this is what dying looks like.”
A little bit after midnight on the ninth day, Sam seizes. Dean sent Castiel on a coffee run. Sam grew insensible when the sun went down. Dean turned on every light in the bare little room, but it didn’t help, so he turned them off again because they gave him a headache.
It isn’t a long fit, not like the seeming endlessness of those that the wall caused. Sam turns his head to the side and spews yellow bile. Castiel pops back in with an extra large foam cup and Dean tells him to get help while he pulls Sam out of the mess and wipes his cheek with his sleeve. Holding Sam is like holding a well-preserved body. They’re like that sometimes, in the desert, where the dry heat wraps the skin around the bones like tissue paper.
Then the nurse is there, shining her penlight in Sam’s eyes. He flinches, turns his face into Dean’s shoulder, and the nurse is quick with the stethoscope, quick to take Sam’s temperature with a thermometer in his ear when he doesn’t turn at her request to open his mouth. Even the small intrusion clearly agitates him and Dean thinks that he should just take him somewhere that isn’t here.
But where else do they have to go?
“I’m going to get his doctor, ok?” The nurse, Judy, Dean remembers, Judy who wouldn’t let him in that first time. He thought she was a bitch with her indignant face and now she looks grim and speaks to him softly and Dean doesn’t like it at all.
By the time the sun slips yellow- gold rays between the gaps in the blinds, the tests come back with their expected bad news and Sam is on oxygen in the ICU. Dean has a bucket of ice chips in his lap. Something is rattling in Sam’s chest with every breath and his doctor says there’s fluid in his lungs, fluid causing his ankles to swell because his kidneys aren’t working right.
“It won’t be long.” The doctor says, echoing Castiel the night before, “We’ll keep him medicated. He won’t suffer.”
Dean waits for the doctor to leave and turns to Castiel, “Does he see Lucifer right now?”
“Yes.”
Sam’s eyes are open to mere slits, dull with drugs and exhaustion, fixated on something at the foot of his bed. Dean scoots his chair as close to the bed as he can and leans forward, ignoring the smell of sweat and hospital and sick that comes off of Sam like sour cologne. He palms his scratchy cheek, “Sammy, look at me. Hey.” He smiles when Sam’s eyes land on his face, despite the accompanying flinch, “Hey, bro, hey, Sammy, you with me?”
Sam’s lips remind Dean of a fish that time Bobby took him fishing on a pond way way out on his property. They were all small, inconsequential fish, too small to take back to the house and fry. Bobby showed him how to unhook them without damaging them too badly, toss them back in the murky water, but Dean was small and inconsequential himself and sometimes he dropped them in the dirt. It never sat right with him how they flopped around waiting for someone to save them.
Sam is colorless, except for where he isn’t, except for where he’s purple and blue. Dean rubs one of the ice cubes against Sam’s lips and Sam instinctively licks at the moisture. Dean asks Castiel, “What’s gonna happen to him?” and Castiel says, “Heaven’s grace shall render his soul whole again.”
Dean runs his fingers along the nasal cannula snaking behind Sam’s ears, carefully brushes his hair back, pleased when none of it clings to his fingers, “You hear that, little brother? You’re gonna be fine.”
On the tenth day, Sam is unconscious. In the afternoon, the doctor examines him and says he won’t survive the night. He’d intubate him if it wasn’t a lost cause.
Oh, he doesn’t use the term ‘lost cause.’ He’s a professional, the doctor, but so is Dean, and he’s made a career out of reading between the lines.
So Dean sits and Castiel hovers and they don’t acknowledge one another as Sam fights for air. Dean doesn’t know what to say anymore, so he doesn’t say anything. He knows that it’s selfish to beg Sam to stay with him, but he would still very much like Sam to stay. He refuses to tell Sam that it’s ok. It’s not ok. He wraps his hand around Sam’s and runs his fingertips over the raised skin on his palm, studies his face for any twitch, any sign of recognition, but Sam isn’t home anymore.
Dean thinks about Sam’s year without a soul, without that essential Samness that made Sam his Sam. He wonders if he’s just holding vigil over a stubborn body at this point.
Castiel slides into the chair beside him. Dean wishes he was Bobby and Castiel looks at him sadly, like he knows what Dean just thought.
“Dean-“
“Don’t talk.”
Castiel looks at his hands and sighs, “Dean-“
“Do I have to say it in Enochian?”
Castiel looks up, “There is…something we can try. Something that would buy Sam time, get him back on his feet.”
“And you decided to wait until he’s half brain dead to mention this? Good job.”
“I wanted to be certain that it would work.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
Dean glances at Sam’s monitors and swallows, “Well, it won’t much matter in a few hours. What’ve you got?”
“You and Sam are soul mates.”
Dean rolls his eyes, but Castiel continues, unperturbed, “Not all soul mates are romantic in nature, Dean. It isn’t a terribly uncommon phenomenon in siblings-“
“Your point, Cas. Get to it.”
“Soul mates are not the byproduct of an immense bond, Dean. But rather, that bond is the byproduct of a soul mate. The overlapping Heavens, the misery when you are apart-your souls are complimentary, compatible.”
“Interchangeable.”
“Not interchangeable. They are still different. That is why you are Dean and Sam is Sam.”
“What are you getting at?” On the bed, Sam takes a sharp breath and doesn’t take another one for what feels like a small eon. The long fingers wrapped in Dean’s hand are ice cold and unresponsive when Dean squeezes.
“Sam’s soul is shattered. It is without form. It is broken.”
“Old news.”
“You are soul mates, Dean. Therefore, your souls know one another intimately.”
“Sounds kinky. What’s it mean?”
“Perhaps it would be possible to attach a piece of your soul to what remains of Sam’s.”
Dean blinks, “Come again?”
“I cannot promise that it would work, Dean. I have never heard of it being done. Then again, I have never heard of there being a need for such a procedure.”
Dean runs his free hand over the stubble on his own cheeks, shakes his head, laughs bitterly, “A soul transplant. Are you fucking serious?”
“Only a small piece of your soul, Dean. Your soul is strong. It can withstand it. And it would still be your soul. It would be returned to you upon your death, reunited in Heaven. Sam’s soul would still be his own as well, still fractured, unfortunately, but held together by part of you.”
That’s the story of Dean’s life and isn’t it poetic? That Dean holds his life together with magic glue and angelic favors?
“Do it.” Dean says.
“It could kill you.”
“I don’t care.”
“It could kill Sam.”
“He’s already dying. Just do it, Castiel.”
Cas nods and stands, begins to roll his sleeves. Dean shrugs out of his over shirt, shivers as the chilly hospital air hits his bare arms. “Stay seated,” Cas instructs, “Relax. Be calm, though this will be excruciating.”
“Wait.” Dean fumbles with his belt, slides it through the hoops in his jeans, folds it and clamps it between his teeth. Castiel pauses and Dean muffles something that sounds like, “Just do it.”
“If this doesn’t work, I want you to know that I regret my actions and I’m very sorry that I hurt you. That I hurt Sam.” He plunges his hand into Dean’s chest and Dean thinks he’s going to explode. He’s everywhere and nowhere and he’s tearing tearing tearing apart into tiny stars. He thinks he’s screaming, but he isn’t sure, and then everything goes white.
On the morning of the eleventh day, Dean wakes up with a yelp and Castiel shushes him, sitting primly on a vinyl chair between the two beds. He cleaned the trench coat back at the hospital when the nurses gave him odd looks, but the rest of the ensemble is back, the blue tie, the dark slacks. Castiel is clean-shaven and neatly groomed. Dean rubs the sleep from his eyes and pushes himself up on his elbows, frowning, vaguely nauseous.
Castiel hands him a Styrofoam cup of coffee, “It will help.”
“Sam?”
“He is resting. I must insist that you speak softly and do not disturb him.”
Dean nods absently, sips the coffee carefully and sputters on the excessive sugar content.
“It will help.” Castiel says.
“Is he…?”
“He has been sleeping since last night. I thought it best to relocate both of you since the medical professionals were very interested in Sam’s miraculous recovery. He woke briefly and seemed lucid.”
“He’s not sick?”
“I healed his physical ailments. He is merely tired. I cannot heal that.”
“Understood.” Dean resists the urge to crawl across the space between their beds, palm Sam’s hair and see his miraculous recovery for himself, “Thanks, Cas.”
Castiel nods.
“No, really. Thank you.”
Dean didn’t think that it was possible for angels to blush, but it makes sense, with their human vessels and all. He falls back in bed, balances his coffee on his chest and watches Sam’s chest rise and fall with careless ease.
“You said when I die that that piece of my soul will go to heaven with me?”
“Yes.”
“What’s that mean for Sam?”
“It means that we are back to where we started. His soul is still damaged, Dean. Even right now. Nothing on Earth can fix that. That piece of your soul is merely holding it together for him.”
“That’s unacceptable.”
“I’m sorry, Dean-“
“What happens if he dies before me?”
“The piece of your soul will be returned to you and he will be healed by admittance to Heaven.”
“Ok.” Dean places his foam cup on the nightstand and sits up, steadier, the caffeine and the sugar working together to recharge his depleted batteries, “Cas, I need you to promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“We go together.”
Castiel is silent, his face impassive.
“If we’re out in the woods and I bite it because of some Wendigo, you get Sam out of there. Some poltergeist runs a fireplace poker through my chest, you come for Sam. Shit, if we live long enough to get stuck in some home eating mashed carrots every night for supper and I keel over from a fucking normal-ass stroke, you take Sam’s geriatric ass to Heaven. You got that?”
Castiel is infuriatingly quiet. He looks at his hands. He looks at Sam and Sam sighs contentedly in his sleep. Dean marvels at the thick, shiny hair and the bronze, sun-kissed skin. He’s still too skinny but they can work with that. They’ll hit every greasy burger joint between here and Las Vegas and Sam will bitch and eat a salad and bitch about how gross and wilted the lettuce is and eat it anyway while Dean admonishes him for daring to order rabbit food at a diner advertising the best burgers on Route 66 anyway.
“Well?”
“I will do that, Dean. You have my word.”
“Good. Thank you.” Dean pauses and snorts, shakes his head like he doesn’t believe his own words. He looks Castiel straight in his unworldly blue eyes and says, “I trust you.”
Anyway, thank yous are needed for 4422shiniemmram for their encouragement and general awesomeness. emmram has written her own coda which is absolutely delightful and which mine doesn't even compare to and if you haven't read it yet, you should check it out.
Summary: AU coda to The Born Again Identity. Cas is awesome. Dean is angry. Sam is...in bad shape.
Warnings: SPOILERS for 7.17.
Disclaimer: Not my sandbox.
11 Days
Sam was awake for five days before the accident.
It takes Dean another three, almost four, to track down Emanuel and reboot Castiel-there and back again and Castiel remembers how to work his mojo like magic after that. He’s in and out in a literal flash, ominously Sam-less with a grimmer face than Dean thinks should be possible for someone who just remembered that he was last seen on TV as a super villain.
“Where’s Sam?”
Castiel doesn’t say anything. He places his fingers on Dean’s forehead and then they’re in Sam’s room and Sam isn’t better. Sam isn’t digging his jeans out of the tiny closet, rubbing irritably at the stubble on his chin, bitching about how badly he wants to shave now, Dean, ugh. No, Sam is sprawled on the bed and he looks fucking terrible, fucking worse than when Dean left just a few days earlier.
Dean doesn’t understand.
That’s the story of Dean’s life and isn’t it poetic? That Dean doesn’t understand his own story?
“Sammy?” Dean crosses the room in a few quick strides. Sam’s tracking something across the ceiling and flinches when Dean leans across his field of vision, “Sam?”
“You’re n-not real.”
“It’s me, Sam. It’s Dean. I’m here now.” Dean bites his lip as Sam weakly shakes his head. His lips are gnawed raw and the bags beneath his eyes are heavy with exhaustion. His breathing is harsh, labored. Castiel hovers in the corner like a ghost.
He says, “I tried, Dean. I am sorry.”
“What do you mean you ‘tried’?”
“I cannot heal Sam. There is nothing left to heal. His soul is crushed beneath whatever is happening in his mind.”
Sam’s heart fumbles beneath Dean’s fingers. Dean holds his breath until it all evens out and Sam’s head rolls on the pillow, eyes trained on the ceiling again. Dean wants to scream, to grab Castiel by the blood-stained lapels and shake him relentlessly. He tamps his anger down and asks with a calm that trembles under the strain of its forcedness, “Ok. Ok, Cas. Just fix this then. He looks fucking terrible. Just buy us some time and I’ll figure it out. Just do that, ok?”
It occurs to Dean that if Castiel could have done that, he would have done it already, but he clings to the tattered remnants of his faith as though it were the fluttering pieces of Sam’s soul, shapeless and aimless and slipping through his fingers like air.
“I cannot heal him, Dean. I am…I am very sorry.”
Dean’s eyes burn and Sam takes a particularly harsh breath, turns his head and coughs and it sounds wet. Dean smooths his hair back and winces as long strands of hair stick to his palms like dandelion seeds. He can’t bring himself to wipe them away and stares at his hand, the strands of Sam unraveling like a cheap blanket, “So this is it then? He’s just gonna be like this until his candle burns out?”
“This isn’t a problem that I can make disappear.”
“You’re the one who created the fucking problem, Cas!”
“Dean, if I could take back-“
“That’s what I’m asking you to do!”
Castiel shrinks a little at that, nods, “I can’t. I am so sorry. To both of you. I will go.”
Dean wraps his fingers around an emaciated wrist to take Sam’s pulse. He notes the missing fingernails and the blue tinge in the beds of those that remain. He frowns, “No. You stay. You see this through you son of a bitch.”
“I will do that for you, Dean.”
Dean’s lips twist. It’s an ugly shape. “You stay for him.” Dean says, “He hasn’t slept in a week. His hair’s falling out.” Dean’s voice cracks, “His fucking hair.”
Castiel cocks his head to the side, “His lungs are weak and his kidneys are failing. It will not be long.”
“That supposed to make me fucking feel better?”
“He will not suffer much longer.”
“He’s been suffering for months.”
“I-“
“D-Dean?”
“Sam?”
Sam is looking at him. His eyes flicker to the side, to the empty chair, then back to Dean. He smiles carefully, “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
“Who you talking to?” He eyes the empty chair again, the smile falters.
“Cas is here. I found him shacked up with some chick in Colorado.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Looked less like holy tax accountant and more like holy high school math teacher.”
Sam laughs at that and it comes out a wheeze. Dean wonders if he should get the doctor. Sam interrupts his thoughts, trying to push himself up on trembling arms. He doesn’t begrudge Dean sliding his arm behind his back and Dean pretends that he can’t feel the ridge of Sam’s spine through the thin t-shirt. Give and take. Sam flinches when Castiel steps into his sightline, comes back to himself, at least, as close to himself as he can get, and grins, “It’s good to see you.”
“I cannot heal you, Sam.”
The only indication of Sam’s disappointment is that his smile falters, shrinking a barely discernable degree. Castiel sees it because of his heightened senses. Dean sees it because he has had decades to catalogue the minor tells that give his brother away. The only times that Sam has won against him in poker involved flowing booze and distracting women. Sam is a terrible liar. Sometimes Dean is amazed by how they’ve managed to bluff their way onto so many crime scenes.
“It’s ok, Cas.”
“It’s not ok.” Dean says.
“It is.” Sam nods jerkily and wheezes into his chest.
“Don’t argue with me.” Dean squeezes his shoulder and Sam flinches.
“Don’t argue with me. I’m the one who’s dying.”
“You’re not dying.” Dean carefully guides Sam back down to the bed. Sam’s eyes immediately shoot to the empty chair. He tilts his head like he’s listening to something, then tiredly rolls his eyes before forcing them to find Dean again.
“Pretty sure…this is what dying looks like.”
A little bit after midnight on the ninth day, Sam seizes. Dean sent Castiel on a coffee run. Sam grew insensible when the sun went down. Dean turned on every light in the bare little room, but it didn’t help, so he turned them off again because they gave him a headache.
It isn’t a long fit, not like the seeming endlessness of those that the wall caused. Sam turns his head to the side and spews yellow bile. Castiel pops back in with an extra large foam cup and Dean tells him to get help while he pulls Sam out of the mess and wipes his cheek with his sleeve. Holding Sam is like holding a well-preserved body. They’re like that sometimes, in the desert, where the dry heat wraps the skin around the bones like tissue paper.
Then the nurse is there, shining her penlight in Sam’s eyes. He flinches, turns his face into Dean’s shoulder, and the nurse is quick with the stethoscope, quick to take Sam’s temperature with a thermometer in his ear when he doesn’t turn at her request to open his mouth. Even the small intrusion clearly agitates him and Dean thinks that he should just take him somewhere that isn’t here.
But where else do they have to go?
“I’m going to get his doctor, ok?” The nurse, Judy, Dean remembers, Judy who wouldn’t let him in that first time. He thought she was a bitch with her indignant face and now she looks grim and speaks to him softly and Dean doesn’t like it at all.
By the time the sun slips yellow- gold rays between the gaps in the blinds, the tests come back with their expected bad news and Sam is on oxygen in the ICU. Dean has a bucket of ice chips in his lap. Something is rattling in Sam’s chest with every breath and his doctor says there’s fluid in his lungs, fluid causing his ankles to swell because his kidneys aren’t working right.
“It won’t be long.” The doctor says, echoing Castiel the night before, “We’ll keep him medicated. He won’t suffer.”
Dean waits for the doctor to leave and turns to Castiel, “Does he see Lucifer right now?”
“Yes.”
Sam’s eyes are open to mere slits, dull with drugs and exhaustion, fixated on something at the foot of his bed. Dean scoots his chair as close to the bed as he can and leans forward, ignoring the smell of sweat and hospital and sick that comes off of Sam like sour cologne. He palms his scratchy cheek, “Sammy, look at me. Hey.” He smiles when Sam’s eyes land on his face, despite the accompanying flinch, “Hey, bro, hey, Sammy, you with me?”
Sam’s lips remind Dean of a fish that time Bobby took him fishing on a pond way way out on his property. They were all small, inconsequential fish, too small to take back to the house and fry. Bobby showed him how to unhook them without damaging them too badly, toss them back in the murky water, but Dean was small and inconsequential himself and sometimes he dropped them in the dirt. It never sat right with him how they flopped around waiting for someone to save them.
Sam is colorless, except for where he isn’t, except for where he’s purple and blue. Dean rubs one of the ice cubes against Sam’s lips and Sam instinctively licks at the moisture. Dean asks Castiel, “What’s gonna happen to him?” and Castiel says, “Heaven’s grace shall render his soul whole again.”
Dean runs his fingers along the nasal cannula snaking behind Sam’s ears, carefully brushes his hair back, pleased when none of it clings to his fingers, “You hear that, little brother? You’re gonna be fine.”
On the tenth day, Sam is unconscious. In the afternoon, the doctor examines him and says he won’t survive the night. He’d intubate him if it wasn’t a lost cause.
Oh, he doesn’t use the term ‘lost cause.’ He’s a professional, the doctor, but so is Dean, and he’s made a career out of reading between the lines.
So Dean sits and Castiel hovers and they don’t acknowledge one another as Sam fights for air. Dean doesn’t know what to say anymore, so he doesn’t say anything. He knows that it’s selfish to beg Sam to stay with him, but he would still very much like Sam to stay. He refuses to tell Sam that it’s ok. It’s not ok. He wraps his hand around Sam’s and runs his fingertips over the raised skin on his palm, studies his face for any twitch, any sign of recognition, but Sam isn’t home anymore.
Dean thinks about Sam’s year without a soul, without that essential Samness that made Sam his Sam. He wonders if he’s just holding vigil over a stubborn body at this point.
Castiel slides into the chair beside him. Dean wishes he was Bobby and Castiel looks at him sadly, like he knows what Dean just thought.
“Dean-“
“Don’t talk.”
Castiel looks at his hands and sighs, “Dean-“
“Do I have to say it in Enochian?”
Castiel looks up, “There is…something we can try. Something that would buy Sam time, get him back on his feet.”
“And you decided to wait until he’s half brain dead to mention this? Good job.”
“I wanted to be certain that it would work.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
Dean glances at Sam’s monitors and swallows, “Well, it won’t much matter in a few hours. What’ve you got?”
“You and Sam are soul mates.”
Dean rolls his eyes, but Castiel continues, unperturbed, “Not all soul mates are romantic in nature, Dean. It isn’t a terribly uncommon phenomenon in siblings-“
“Your point, Cas. Get to it.”
“Soul mates are not the byproduct of an immense bond, Dean. But rather, that bond is the byproduct of a soul mate. The overlapping Heavens, the misery when you are apart-your souls are complimentary, compatible.”
“Interchangeable.”
“Not interchangeable. They are still different. That is why you are Dean and Sam is Sam.”
“What are you getting at?” On the bed, Sam takes a sharp breath and doesn’t take another one for what feels like a small eon. The long fingers wrapped in Dean’s hand are ice cold and unresponsive when Dean squeezes.
“Sam’s soul is shattered. It is without form. It is broken.”
“Old news.”
“You are soul mates, Dean. Therefore, your souls know one another intimately.”
“Sounds kinky. What’s it mean?”
“Perhaps it would be possible to attach a piece of your soul to what remains of Sam’s.”
Dean blinks, “Come again?”
“I cannot promise that it would work, Dean. I have never heard of it being done. Then again, I have never heard of there being a need for such a procedure.”
Dean runs his free hand over the stubble on his own cheeks, shakes his head, laughs bitterly, “A soul transplant. Are you fucking serious?”
“Only a small piece of your soul, Dean. Your soul is strong. It can withstand it. And it would still be your soul. It would be returned to you upon your death, reunited in Heaven. Sam’s soul would still be his own as well, still fractured, unfortunately, but held together by part of you.”
That’s the story of Dean’s life and isn’t it poetic? That Dean holds his life together with magic glue and angelic favors?
“Do it.” Dean says.
“It could kill you.”
“I don’t care.”
“It could kill Sam.”
“He’s already dying. Just do it, Castiel.”
Cas nods and stands, begins to roll his sleeves. Dean shrugs out of his over shirt, shivers as the chilly hospital air hits his bare arms. “Stay seated,” Cas instructs, “Relax. Be calm, though this will be excruciating.”
“Wait.” Dean fumbles with his belt, slides it through the hoops in his jeans, folds it and clamps it between his teeth. Castiel pauses and Dean muffles something that sounds like, “Just do it.”
“If this doesn’t work, I want you to know that I regret my actions and I’m very sorry that I hurt you. That I hurt Sam.” He plunges his hand into Dean’s chest and Dean thinks he’s going to explode. He’s everywhere and nowhere and he’s tearing tearing tearing apart into tiny stars. He thinks he’s screaming, but he isn’t sure, and then everything goes white.
On the morning of the eleventh day, Dean wakes up with a yelp and Castiel shushes him, sitting primly on a vinyl chair between the two beds. He cleaned the trench coat back at the hospital when the nurses gave him odd looks, but the rest of the ensemble is back, the blue tie, the dark slacks. Castiel is clean-shaven and neatly groomed. Dean rubs the sleep from his eyes and pushes himself up on his elbows, frowning, vaguely nauseous.
Castiel hands him a Styrofoam cup of coffee, “It will help.”
“Sam?”
“He is resting. I must insist that you speak softly and do not disturb him.”
Dean nods absently, sips the coffee carefully and sputters on the excessive sugar content.
“It will help.” Castiel says.
“Is he…?”
“He has been sleeping since last night. I thought it best to relocate both of you since the medical professionals were very interested in Sam’s miraculous recovery. He woke briefly and seemed lucid.”
“He’s not sick?”
“I healed his physical ailments. He is merely tired. I cannot heal that.”
“Understood.” Dean resists the urge to crawl across the space between their beds, palm Sam’s hair and see his miraculous recovery for himself, “Thanks, Cas.”
Castiel nods.
“No, really. Thank you.”
Dean didn’t think that it was possible for angels to blush, but it makes sense, with their human vessels and all. He falls back in bed, balances his coffee on his chest and watches Sam’s chest rise and fall with careless ease.
“You said when I die that that piece of my soul will go to heaven with me?”
“Yes.”
“What’s that mean for Sam?”
“It means that we are back to where we started. His soul is still damaged, Dean. Even right now. Nothing on Earth can fix that. That piece of your soul is merely holding it together for him.”
“That’s unacceptable.”
“I’m sorry, Dean-“
“What happens if he dies before me?”
“The piece of your soul will be returned to you and he will be healed by admittance to Heaven.”
“Ok.” Dean places his foam cup on the nightstand and sits up, steadier, the caffeine and the sugar working together to recharge his depleted batteries, “Cas, I need you to promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“We go together.”
Castiel is silent, his face impassive.
“If we’re out in the woods and I bite it because of some Wendigo, you get Sam out of there. Some poltergeist runs a fireplace poker through my chest, you come for Sam. Shit, if we live long enough to get stuck in some home eating mashed carrots every night for supper and I keel over from a fucking normal-ass stroke, you take Sam’s geriatric ass to Heaven. You got that?”
Castiel is infuriatingly quiet. He looks at his hands. He looks at Sam and Sam sighs contentedly in his sleep. Dean marvels at the thick, shiny hair and the bronze, sun-kissed skin. He’s still too skinny but they can work with that. They’ll hit every greasy burger joint between here and Las Vegas and Sam will bitch and eat a salad and bitch about how gross and wilted the lettuce is and eat it anyway while Dean admonishes him for daring to order rabbit food at a diner advertising the best burgers on Route 66 anyway.
“Well?”
“I will do that, Dean. You have my word.”
“Good. Thank you.” Dean pauses and snorts, shakes his head like he doesn’t believe his own words. He looks Castiel straight in his unworldly blue eyes and says, “I trust you.”