Under Covenant of Working Grace
Title: Under Covenant of Working Grace
Rated: PG-13 (Gen)
Pairing(s): Subtext, pre-slash (Sam/Castiel)
Characters: Sam, Castiel, Chuck, Dean, Bobby
Warnings: character death (haunting), language, mentions of violence
Word Count: 5,963
Disclaimer: Characters and such are not mine, only the words.
Authors Notes: Another fic inspired by a passage in I Wrote This For You. Beta edited for me by cerberus_sky. Minor spoilers for S5.
Under Covenant of Working Grace
There's still a door here shaped like you. Boarded up, covered in chains and nails. Paper stuffed in the locks.
Sam’s alone a lot now, but he’s never lonely. He has tried a few times to explain how this works to Bobby when Bobby comes by on Friday, but he doesn’t understand. He almost does and Sam can tell he wants to, but he doesn’t. The sad part about that really is that Sam doesn’t mind and he forgives Bobby for not getting it, but Bobby thinks he should get it. Bobby’s been alone a long time so there isn’t a lot about it he doesn’t get.
But he’ll never get this, no matter how Sam tries to explain it. Unless Sam comes right out and plainly says, Bobby, it’s Dean. He’s haunting me. He still lives in his old bedroom, he still makes his own bed with creases so sharp you could cut yourself on them and he still listens to Def Leppard late at night on that radio station coming in all the way from Aberdeen. Bobby would understand that for sure and he’d go home worried about Sam, convinced beyond any doubt that he’s deranged. But Sam would never do that.
Sam can leave Dean’s stuff in his room and go in there sometimes to open the windows, telling Bobby he’s airing it out and when Bobby asks for who, he’ll say for Dean. That’s okay. Just like the paper in the locks is okay. It just is. But, that, that’s going too far.
That’s in-your-face honest and Sam’s finding it harder and harder to speak in anything but riddles these days. He’s grateful not to be speaking in tongues, but other people aren’t quite so logical; they don’t see it that way.
Sam gets up in the morning and goes into the kitchen to make coffee and pour himself a bowl of cereal, which he eats standing up with his butt against the countertop. He turns on the TV to listen to the news from the other room while he rinses out his bowl then goes into the bathroom to shower and brush his teeth. He gets dressed same as he does every day and he goes room by room through his apartment, checking each lock to make sure the rolled up paper notes he jammed into the keyholes haven’t come out.
Everything’s perfectly normal except he’s always watching in his peripheral vision for Dean. Sometimes he even sees him there, but not for long and not clearly. He’s a blur, a shadow; a dancing mote of dust or a spark of light in the air. He’s a half-imagined movement of nothing, a displacement of air that for a second leaves a shadow that lingers, but it’s him and Sam knows it.
The paper keeps the demons out, that’s what Sam tells Bobby. Bobby just nods, but he knows he understands because he doesn’t make Sam take it out and he’s always very careful not to knock the curls of parchment loose. If he does, he carefully rolls it back up and slips it back inside, gives Sam a little smile and tells him it’s alright. It is, too, so long as Bobby puts it back.
Bobby thinks the paper notes are spells, but he never asks and Sam’s never caught him trying to read them. He would have, too; Sam’s very watchful.
He doesn’t tell Bobby what they really are. They’re letters to Dean on one side of the door and letters from Dean on the other. Bobby would get that worried look again and might not come back to see him the next Friday.
Sam takes one of the pieces of paper out of the lock where it’s been stuffed into the keyhole on the inside of the door from the bathroom into the hallway and unrolls it to read. It says, Good morning, Sammy.
He smiles. “Good morning, Dean,” he says. He rolls the paper back up and works it back into the keyhole. It’ll keep the demons out like that. That’s the only way it works.
What he doesn’t say-what he’d never tell anyone-is that he sometimes thinks the paper keeps Dean in, too. But that’s just crazy.
After he’s dressed and done checking all the paper in the locks throughout the apartment, Sam leaves and takes the stairs down to the street, walks three blocks east and catches a bus that will take him as close to where he wants to go as can be expected. He walks the barren, cracked, desolate streets of Sioux Falls, where once there used to be a city-albeit a small, rather ordinary one. He follows a familiar path made up of markers and signs that he’s kept meticulously in his head and goes back to “Ground Zero”.
That’s what Sam calls it because that’s what Dean calls it. He doesn’t say it in front of Bobby though. Bobby might scowl at him for being morbid or disrespectful. Sam’s not sure what Bobby calls the place; he’s never asked. It’s the place where the angels and demons were at long last finally put face to face to fight their own battle for themselves. It’s a scorched stretch of earth five miles long and two and a quarter miles wide that no one on earth will set foot on except for Sam who goes there every day. Most importantly, it’s where everything changed and it’s where Dean died.
Sam knows the building Dean was in-Catkin’s Bar-and precisely where it was located. He pulls his jacket tight around himself, zips it up as a cool wind chills through his shirt, and walks that way.
What a lot of people don’t know is that Dean hadn’t even been there at the final showdown. He got in an argument with Michael-or the meat suit the angel was walking around in; they were a little hard to tell apart sometimes-and went over to the bar across the street to have a drink and brood about it. He thought-they all thought-there was still time for that sort of thing. Then the world lit on fire and there or not, Dean was caught in the crossfire and Sam was left to mourn and sift through the rubble for his bones.
When Sam gets there, he has to run off a few wild mongrel dogs that are digging through the trash. He knows they’re more likely than not just after some old rotted, scorched garbage, but he can’t take the chance that one of them will find a bone and run off with it. He throws rocks at them and shouts and they leave with their tails tucked between their legs and their eyes gleaming.
Once they’re gone and he knows he’s alone, Sam takes his jacket off and sets it aside, then starts picking through the ashes for bones. He takes them all; human, bird, alley cat, even a few sparkling shards of angel bone. He gathers each piece, no matter how small, and piles them up on his jacket. He’ll put them in his pockets later and carry them home to burn them and he tries to imagine a day in the near future when he won’t come here, kneel just where he is and sink his hands into the dust of old buildings and the ashes of fallen angels.
Sam feels a hand rest on his shoulder and gently squeeze and he pauses with his hands full of pebbles and soft white ashes. “What do you want?” he asks. He doesn’t turn his head; he knows that hand on his shoulder quite well.
“To stand exactly where I am and watch the very thing that I am watching,” Castiel murmurs, frank as always and a little puzzled by the question.
“Alright,” Sam says. “Except maybe quit touching me, alright?”
Castiel shrugs-a gesture he picked up from Dean, Sam can tell. Every time the angel does it, Dean’s manner and way of moving glance back at him. “Certainly,” Castiel says and drops his hand.
Sam turns in his crouch to keep Castiel in his line of sight and goes back to digging through the rubble. He finds three small shards and one larger piece of a bone that’s definitely human and reaches over to drop them onto his jacket.
Castiel crouches down in front of him and Sam casts him a cautious glance and picks up a small hardened glob of melted green glass. He blows the dust off of it, turns it in his fingers, and shifts to slip it into his hip pocket. “You just gonna watch me? You can help,” Sam says.
“Why do you do this?” Castiel asks. He cocks his head to one side and looks up into Sam’s downturned face.
“Because I have to,” Sam says simply. He picks up another bone shard, blows it off and drops it onto his coat with the rest. “How do you always know where I am but you can’t find him? Huh?”
“You know why,” Castiel says. “The mark I put on you both prevents it. You… I just follow you.”
“Stalker,” Sam says.
“I’ve been called that before,” Castiel says, his lips twitching in a brief smile.
Sam doesn’t have to ask by whom. “I have to do this for him, you know,” he says.
“Perhaps you only believe that,” Castiel says. “Perhaps it’s time you moved on.”
“That’s not the way it is,” Sam says. He shovels ash out of his way with a chunk of two-by-four and blows his hair out of his eyes to glare up at Castiel. “You make it sound like it’s in my fucking head and I know it’s not. You know it, too, so don’t lie to me.”
Castiel sighs and it‘s another one of those learned human mannerisms that makes Sam‘s heart ache. “I believe it would be best for you and that you’re clinging to him… his memory,” Castiel says. He stands up and brushes off his long coat with his equally grimy hands, sending up little puffs of dust. “I believe you are the real reason that your brother can’t truly rest, not these bones.”
Sam laughs softly and shakes his head. “Maybe so,” he says.
He sees a glint of gold in the ashes and reaches his hand into them to pull out another blob of glass, this one brown. “I wonder what this was,” he says and he’s speaking so low that he’s almost whispering.
Castiel looks at what he’s holding and cocks his head curiously. It’s a far more natural expression than the shrug or the sigh and it makes Sam smile to see it.
“It was probably a bottle,” Sam says, rubbing dust off of it with his thumb. “A beer bottle. Budweiser. Maybe it was even one of Dean’s. Lined up on the top of the bar like soldiers with peeled labels. Maybe…” He trails off and lifts the piece of glass to his cheek, watching Castiel with mad, tired eyes. “Maybe he put it to his lips and drank it down empty and now here it is in my hand. Not a bottle anymore. Good only for catching light in.”
Castiel gives Sam one of those sad, patient what am I going to do with you? looks-something Sam is sure the angel learned from Bobby, not Dean-and crouches back down on his heels with him to look at the piece of glass. He sifts his fingers through the dirt and dust and finds a small flat bit of pale blue glass which he holds up for Sam’s inspection. “What about this one?”
Sam looks at it and frowns thoughtfully. “Gin bottle, probably,” he says. “Dean would never have drunk that. Isn’t it pretty, though?”
Castiel looks down at the chunk of glass resting in the hollow of his palm, rolls it around to catch the light and smiles a little. The glass is slightly oval shaped and about the size of a silver dollar. Castile dances it over his fingers once and Sam watches him do it with a childlike kind of fascination.
“Yes, it is,” Castiel says.
Sam puts his hands over Castiel’s and pushes them toward him insistently. “Keep it,” he says.
“Alright,” Castiel says. He stands up again and slips the bit of glass into his pocket.
Sam tenses for a moment when he feels Castiel rest his hand on his shoulder again. When he feels Castiel’s fingers slide up the side of his neck and pet into his hair, he relaxes and tilts his head back to look up at him. Castiel leans down and presses a brief kiss to his forehead. Then he takes his hand away and steps back and Sam sits there with a little frown scrunching up his eyebrows.
“Angel kisses,” Sam muses. “They don’t mean anything.”
Castiel smiles gently and casts his eyes over the ruins of the city with a calm expression. “This angel’s kisses do,” he says.
Sam shrugs and goes back to digging for bones. Castiel leaves silently, but Sam knows when he’s gone. Like Dean, he has a very loud presence.
~~*~~
After he drops the little pieces of bones he gathered into the incinerator, Sam goes up to his apartment and takes a long shower. He’s darkly tanned from all the time he spends digging through the remains down at Ground Zero, but he still sometimes burns and often gets sick from the heat if the sun is high. A cool shower makes him feel better and a sandwich washed down with a beer takes the nausea away.
He’s sitting on his raggedy sofa finishing his second beer and watching NCIS on the TV while he picks idly at a tear in the arm when he hears a knocking sound. He tilts his head back and looks toward Dean’s room, which is where it’s coming from and listens.
For a while, there’s nothing, then a light tap, tap, tap on the inside of the door and a softly whispered, beckoning, “Sammy?”
Sam gets up and goes down the hall to Dean’s room. He stops outside of the door and leans down to press his ear to it and listen. “Dean?”
“Hi, Sammy.”
Sam smiles and sits down on the floor outside the room, sliding down the door to sit with his back to it. “Hi.”
“Do you miss me, Sammy?”
Sam smiles. It’s a little tired and lot sad, but it’s real. “Yes,” he says. He turns a little to the side to rest his cheek against the door and put his hand flat to it. He thinks of Dean sitting there on the other side, his mouth close to the keyhole as he speaks in a little whisper that is as loud as Dean can scream anymore. “Yes, I do.”
“You have to find me, Sammy. Burn me. You know that.”
“I know,” Sam says and it comes out snappish because it’s so frustrating.
“You’re not looking,” Dean says.
Sam scowls at the door. “I look every day.”
“You wander around picking up colored glass with angels.”
Sam cocks his head curiously at the door and frowns, wondering how Dean could know about that. “Only the one,” he says. He sits there frowning for a minute, then says, “You’re jealous.”
“No,” Dean says.
“Yes, you are,” Sam says.
Dean doesn’t say anything, but Sam gets the impression that he’s annoyed with him. It’s just like him and it makes Sam smile. “I am looking, Dean,” he says. “But there are so many bones. They’re everywhere and there’s so much to dig through.”
“Maybe Castiel will help you,” Dean says and it’s so bitchy that Sam actually laughs.
“Maybe so,” Sam says serenely. He gets up from the floor and goes back into the kitchen for another beer, wondering if Dean will follow him.
He doesn’t and when Sam goes back to sit by the door and talk to him, he won’t answer. Sam knows he’s there and listening though. He’s just pouting and giving him the silent treatment.
Sam thinks about going into the room with him, and if Dean weren’t a ghost, that’s exactly what he would do, but Dean is a ghost and that’s the problem. Sam’s done it before and he knows what happens. He knows that if he walks through that door the room will be empty and cold. It will smell like stale air and dust with just a hint of what Dean’s skin might smell like if it were peeled off his body and stretched to dry for parchment. There will be nothing, not even a flicker of a shadow to comfort him.
Sam can’t go through that anymore. His mind is as fragile as tissue paper already and he just can’t take it.
Unable to stand Dean’s brooding silence and the way the air in the apartment rests heavy on his shoulders even the beer isn’t helping, Sam leaves. He takes his coat and his wallet then goes down the stairs instead of using the elevator because elevators are dangerous and not to be trusted.
He plays Dean’s breathy soft words back in his mind, over and over, picking at them, wondering why he’d be jealous of Castiel of all things and why it should matter. He walks to the bus stop with his right hand in his hip pocket, fingering the little smooth piece of brown bottle glass from the bar, feeling exhausted and lonely.
~~*~~
Sam goes to see Chuck and finds his front door open and sheets of paper all over the yard. He goes over to the neighbors’ fence and peels one of them away from the wire to look at it. He’s not that surprised to find his name and Dean’s there on the page.
“Only the one,” Sam told him. He sat there frowning quietly for a minute, not sure if he should say what he was thinking. “You’re jealous,” he told Dean at last.
“No,” Dean said, but it was obvious that he was.
“Yes, you are,” Sam said.
Dean got all quiet then and though he didn’t say anything, Sam had got the feeling he was annoyed, which was just like him. This thought made him smile.
“I am looking, Dean. But there are so many bones. They’re-
Sam drops his hand and pinches the bridge of his nose. He shakes his head once and crumples the paper up. There are more of them blowing across the grass and stuck against the fence, but he just leaves it and goes inside the house to find Chuck.
He finds him just inside the door, passed out on his back with his head propped up on a pile of manuscript pages. There’s a puddle of whiskey from the bottle clutched in his hand soaking into the carpet and paper strewn all over the floor, all over the couch, all over every surface in the living room it looks like.
Sam picks up another sheet of paper and reads:
“You know why,” Castiel said. “The mark I put on you both prevents it. You… I just follow you.”
“Stalker,” Sam said, but he wasn‘t really angry.
“I’ve been called that before,” Castiel said. He smiled a little and Sam knew he meant by Dean once upon a time.
“I have to do this for him, you know,” he said.
“Perhaps you only believe that,” Castiel said. “Perhaps it’s time you moved on.”
“That’s not the way it is,” Sam said. He scooped ash out of his way with a piece of wood and blew his hair out of his eyes. He glared up at Castiel through it. “You make it sound like it’s in my fucking head and I know it’s not. You know it, too, so don’t-
“Christ,” Sam says. He wads up the paper and throws it then stands there looking down at Chuck. He gently nudges his leg with the toe of his boot. “Hey, man, wake up.
Chuck snorts turns his head away with a grimace and opens his eyes. “Oh no,” he mutters. He pushes himself up and brings his bottle up to drink before he realizes it’s empty and he’s sitting in the stuff. Cussing under his breath, he uses the chair next to him to drag himself up from the floor. “What do you want?”
“World peace and a box of chocolates,” Sam says without thinking.
Chuck snorts laughter and shakes his head, then lurches toward his kitchen, almost falling as he slips on some slick computer paper. “I got it,” he says, waving Sam off when he puts out a hand to catch him.
Sam lets him go, but when he starts to fall again, he grabs the arm of his worn, plaid terrycloth robe and hauls him back up then keeps hold of him while Chuck makes his unsteady way to the kitchen. He lets him go when they reach the kitchen and Chuck has a good hold on the refrigerator door.
“What are you doing writing this again?” Sam asks. He picks up another page of his life from the kitchen island, looks at it, sees his name and some of the things he said to Bobby last Friday stuck between the quotation marks of dialog then throws it aside. “I thought your doctor gave you pills for this shit.”
Chuck snags two beers from his refrigerator and hands one to Sam. “Yeah, well…” He slams the refrigerator door and leans back against it for support. “They don’t work anymore.”
Sam blinks at him and stares. There’s a coffee stain on the white undershirt Chuck’s wearing and Sam thinks it looks a little like Jesus. Which would be funny if he weren’t quietly freaking out. “Fuck,” he says.
“Yeah, man, tell me about it,” Chuck says. He twists the top off his beer and takes a long drink. “You two are gonna fucking kill me with this shit. Especially you.”
Sam doesn’t know which two he means, but it doesn’t really matter. It has to either be Dean or Castiel, but what he really cares about is the shit on the paper and the shit in Chuck’s head. It’s always felt a lot like a cross between spying and mind rape to him and God, he doesn’t need this right now. He knows Chuck doesn’t do it on purpose and would stop it if he could, that’s the only reason Sam doesn’t resent the hell out of the guy. Now he’s back to having no secrets though and it really scares the shit out of him.
“Did you… maybe they can give you something else,” Sam says.
“Tried it,” Chuck says. He taps his left temple with the side of his beer bottle and gives Sam a sympathetic look. “Short of a fucking lobotomy, it ain’t going away, dude. It’s here to stay.”
Sam stares down at the floor between his feet and chews his bottom lip.
“I’m sorry, man,” Chuck says.
Sam shrugs. He twists off the top of his beer and drinks, thinking that this is how they’re supposed to deal with the aftermath of a war, like this? It fucking sucks. It really does. “Not your fault,” he says.
“Damn right it’s not,” Chuck says, gesturing with his beer bottle. He finishes it then opens the refrigerator and gets another one. “You think I want to be thinking your thoughts all day long? Your brain ain’t exactly a walk in the clouds these days, my friend. I want to think some of my own goddamn thoughts for a change, but oh no, that is not to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam says and he is. Really, excruciatingly sorry.
Chuck shrugs and drinks his beer. “Not up to you,” he says. “Don’t think I don’t know that. You don’t want me fishing around in your head while you’re angsting over your brother and your angel stalker any more than I want to be thinking your sad thoughts while I’m trying to jerk off. I just want to be able to watch one fucking movie beginning to end without feeling like I gotta run for a pen and paper worse than I’ve ever had to piss in my life. It’s fucked up.”
“Is it happening now?” Sam asks.
“What?” Chuck says.
Sam gestures with his beer bottle then drinks the last of it and puts it down to go get another one. “I don’t know, are you… reading my mind right now?”
Chuck stands there quietly watching him as Sam stands back up and closes the refrigerator door. He leans against the counter, watching Chuck as he twists the top off his beer.
“No,” Chuck finally says. “It’s kinda… quiet up there right now.”
“Awesome, let’s pack this beer in the living room and watch a movie then,” Sam says.
“I am not watching porn with you,” Chuck says, eyebrows shooting up.
Sam pauses as he’s opening the refrigerator to get the beer. “Well, no,” he says. “Um… don’t you have anything else?”
“Got HBO and Showtime,” Chuck says.
“Okay then,” Sam says, relieved. “We’ll just watch Dexter or something.”
Chuck sighs and leans back against the counter, scratching his jaw with a morose expression. “Shit,” he mutters.
“Dude, I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna watch that shit with you,” Sam says.
“And I don’t want you to,” Chuck says. “I’ve got my modesty or whatever, too, okay? I just really miss it.”
Sam snickers and hefts the case of beer out of the refrigerator. “Prophecy for porn, dude. Not a fair trade, but there you go,” Sam says. “Come on.”
Chuck follows him, a little more steady on his feet than when he got up off the floor and plops down on the couch in the middle of a pile of paper, which he shoves off on the floor. “That’s alright, you’ve got to get laid sometime, Winchester,” Chuck says.
~~*~~
At a little after two in the morning, Sam leaves Chuck sleeping on the couch with an open bag of nacho cheese Doritos on his chest and a beer by his left hand on the end table and walks home. The buses don’t run anywhere so early in the morning, but it’s not that long of a walk. A little under six miles. After all, Chuck had moved out to Sioux Falls in the heat of war to be closer to Sam, Dean and Bobby for the sake of safety.
Not a bad idea, Sam guesses, but then maybe what he should have done was move as far away from them as possible. That would have been safer.
But it put his house in walking distance and Sam is home before four. Bone tired and a little drunk, he takes a shower, brushes his teeth and goes to say goodnight to Dean. The door is open and he stops in the hall outside the room, just looking in at the empty bed and the empty walls, trying to feel Dean’s presence but not feeling much of anything except the certain knowledge of a hangover in his near future.
He reaches out and closes the door.
“I can’t keep doing this,” Sam whispers, thinking of Castiel and that sad what am I going to do with you? look he wears so much. He remembers that look on his face and what he said and even if Dean isn’t a figment of his imagination-and Sam would still swear to that-what good is this constant mourning doing for him? It’s breaking his mind a little at a time and he doesn’t need anyone else to say it, he knows.
“I have to stop,” he says, and he thinks he’s saying it for Dean, but maybe he’s saying it for himself, too. “I’m never going to find it all. I’m never going to burn it all. I’m never… I’m tired, Dean. I’m sorry, but I’m so tired. You don’t need me to burn your bones to move on. You just need… to go. That’s not why you’re here, I am. But I… I need you to go now. Need you to want to. You’re not helping me, man. You gotta move on so I can move on, alright?”
Sam rubs at his forehead and lets out a deep breath. There’s a pain like a ball of weight in his belly and pressure against the back of his eyes because he’s going to cry soon if he keeps on like he is, but he’s not done yet.
“Please leave, Dean,” Sam whispers. He laces his fingers together like a child at prayer and bends his head down to rest his forehead on the door. “I love you, man, but you’re dead and I’m not, so let me go.”
There’s no response at all and Sam takes a deep breath, lets it out, and rubs at his eyes. His hands come away wet and he frowns down at his palms like he’s been betrayed.
“I’m going to bed,” he finally says.
“Goodnight, Sammy,” Dean whispers, his voice like a creeping thing sliding under the door and through the keyhole.
“Yeah, you, too,” Sam murmurs. He goes into his own room and closes the door.
He lies down and he’s so tired, but he doesn’t sleep. He can’t. He watches shadow pixies cavort across the ceiling and that painful weight in his stomach just keeps expanding until he feels like he’s swelling with it. He’s crying and he knows it, but it doesn’t matter. There’s no one to see and Sam’s pretty sure he’s entitled to a good fucking cry right about now anyway.
Sam has one arm thrown over his face, tears sliding down his cheeks, getting in his mouth and nose and making his head hurt when he feels the mattress beside him give under the weight of someone sitting down. He jumps and scrambles to sit up. Then he sees Castiel sitting there and he relaxes a little.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam demands. “How the fuck did you get in here?”
“Your note fell out of the front door lock,” Castiel says, watching him as Sam gradually slumps back down on the bed. “Don’t worry, I put it back.”
“Good, now you can get the fuck out,” Sam says.
“You’re only upset because I startled you,” Castiel says, staying right where he is. “I apologize.”
Sam sits there with his back propped up against the headboard and studies him thoughtfully. “What do you want?”
“You’re always asking me that like one day the answer is going to change,” Castiel says, returning his gaze with frank amusement.
“Okay, I’ll rephrase… Why are you here?” Sam asks.
“Because I want to be,” Castiel says. “You were crying.”
“So what, you’re here to comfort me?” Sam says incredulously.
“No, not exactly,” Castiel says. “You don’t find me very comforting.”
“I find you fucking disturbing,” Sam says. “Especially at… five thirty in the morning. Dude, go home.”
“And where would that be?” Castiel says.
Sam rakes a hand through his hair and makes a sound of frustration in his throat. “Fine, stay. But you’re sleeping on the couch.”
“I don’t sleep,” Castiel says.
“Maybe you should try it,” Sam says. “You might like it.”
Castiel just shakes his head.
Sam watches him and Castiel watches him back and he’s sure there should be something to say, but there isn’t. The silence between them should be the uncomfortable silence of near strangers, but it’s not. Sam shifts against the pillows, pulling one up higher on the headboard to rest against and studies the angel with a frown. He’s the same angel. The same Castiel, but with a lighter shade of grace than when they first met. Same stupid clothes that look like he sleeps in them, except by his own admission, he doesn’t sleep. Same coat that’s seen far better days. Same unshaved look to his face and a healing little nick on his jaw from the last time he bothered.
He looks nothing like an angel, which is funny in a way because he’s the best of them that Sam’s ever known.
“Why don’t you ever change your clothes?” Sam asks him.
Castiel raises an eyebrow and looks down at himself. “I don’t know,” he says. “Why would I?”
“Don’t those get dirty?” Sam asks.
“No,” Castiel says.
“Oh. Okay, well don’t you get tired of them?” Sam says.
“I never thought about it,” Castiel says.
They’re quiet for a few minutes and Sam goes back to watching the shadows dance on the walls, feeling Castiel’s eyes on him like a touch. He suddenly feels very tired, as tired as he told Dean he was and sleepy on top of it.
Sam yawns and sinks down in the bed a little.
“Would you like me to get different clothes?” Castiel asks him.
“Yes,” Sam says.
“Alright,” Castiel says.
Sam arches a brow at him. “Just like that? Alright?”
“It bothers you so, yes, alright,” Castiel says.
“It does not bother me,” Sam mutters, shifting down into the covers more. “Why do you follow me?” he asks. “Why don’t you go home?”
Castiel sighs and looks down at the floor between his feet. He folds his fingers together loosely between his legs and frowns. “My place is here now,” he says. “And because you are you.”
Sam doesn’t really know what that means, but he doesn’t ask. He’s sick of angelic rhetoric at the moment and glad to find himself sleepy enough to probably drift off. “I’m gonna try to sleep now,” he says.
Castiel nods and starts to get up, but Sam grabs his coat sleeve and stops him. “Lay down,” he says. He doesn’t even really know why he’s asking. It might be that he thinks the angel will sleep if he’s beside him instead of hovering around in the divine ether spying on him, or it may just be that Sam doesn’t want to be alone.
Whatever it is, Castiel gives him a strange look, but he walks around the bed and sits down on it, takes his coat and his shoes off, and stretches out beside Sam. He lays there for a long time staring at the ceiling and Sam’s almost asleep when he says, “We… I didn’t know until it was too late. There… was no warning. I am sorry that I failed him. And you.”
“You…” Sam turns his head on his pillow and blinks at Castiel in confusion. “Well if I weren’t still here, he would have moved on by now. I should have died there with him.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Castiel says.
“It’s survivor’s guilt, of course it is,” Sam says. “I forgive you. Just go to sleep.”
“Thank you,” Castiel whispers.
“Shh… close your eyes, that’s the first thing you have to do,” Sam says, thinking he’ll damn well teach the angel how to sleep if he has to. “Now make your breathing even and try to clear your mind.”
Castiel does what he says, listening to Sam’s voice as he talks him into sleep. Then he’s drifting and it’s strange because he’s not going anywhere, but then he does sleep.
Sam watches it happen with a little smile on his lips, then snuggles down into his blankets and throws half of the covers over Castiel. He’s thinking how strange everything has become since everything was supposed to have ended and then didn’t. They didn’t die and this is how they deal with what’s left over-however they can-and sometimes it sucks, but sometimes, like now, it’s not so bad.
He drifts off to sleep himself, content for a little while, hoping like hell that sleeping angels don’t snore.
XXX
Rated: PG-13 (Gen)
Pairing(s): Subtext, pre-slash (Sam/Castiel)
Characters: Sam, Castiel, Chuck, Dean, Bobby
Warnings: character death (haunting), language, mentions of violence
Word Count: 5,963
Disclaimer: Characters and such are not mine, only the words.
Authors Notes: Another fic inspired by a passage in I Wrote This For You. Beta edited for me by cerberus_sky. Minor spoilers for S5.
Under Covenant of Working Grace
There's still a door here shaped like you. Boarded up, covered in chains and nails. Paper stuffed in the locks.
Sam’s alone a lot now, but he’s never lonely. He has tried a few times to explain how this works to Bobby when Bobby comes by on Friday, but he doesn’t understand. He almost does and Sam can tell he wants to, but he doesn’t. The sad part about that really is that Sam doesn’t mind and he forgives Bobby for not getting it, but Bobby thinks he should get it. Bobby’s been alone a long time so there isn’t a lot about it he doesn’t get.
But he’ll never get this, no matter how Sam tries to explain it. Unless Sam comes right out and plainly says, Bobby, it’s Dean. He’s haunting me. He still lives in his old bedroom, he still makes his own bed with creases so sharp you could cut yourself on them and he still listens to Def Leppard late at night on that radio station coming in all the way from Aberdeen. Bobby would understand that for sure and he’d go home worried about Sam, convinced beyond any doubt that he’s deranged. But Sam would never do that.
Sam can leave Dean’s stuff in his room and go in there sometimes to open the windows, telling Bobby he’s airing it out and when Bobby asks for who, he’ll say for Dean. That’s okay. Just like the paper in the locks is okay. It just is. But, that, that’s going too far.
That’s in-your-face honest and Sam’s finding it harder and harder to speak in anything but riddles these days. He’s grateful not to be speaking in tongues, but other people aren’t quite so logical; they don’t see it that way.
Sam gets up in the morning and goes into the kitchen to make coffee and pour himself a bowl of cereal, which he eats standing up with his butt against the countertop. He turns on the TV to listen to the news from the other room while he rinses out his bowl then goes into the bathroom to shower and brush his teeth. He gets dressed same as he does every day and he goes room by room through his apartment, checking each lock to make sure the rolled up paper notes he jammed into the keyholes haven’t come out.
Everything’s perfectly normal except he’s always watching in his peripheral vision for Dean. Sometimes he even sees him there, but not for long and not clearly. He’s a blur, a shadow; a dancing mote of dust or a spark of light in the air. He’s a half-imagined movement of nothing, a displacement of air that for a second leaves a shadow that lingers, but it’s him and Sam knows it.
The paper keeps the demons out, that’s what Sam tells Bobby. Bobby just nods, but he knows he understands because he doesn’t make Sam take it out and he’s always very careful not to knock the curls of parchment loose. If he does, he carefully rolls it back up and slips it back inside, gives Sam a little smile and tells him it’s alright. It is, too, so long as Bobby puts it back.
Bobby thinks the paper notes are spells, but he never asks and Sam’s never caught him trying to read them. He would have, too; Sam’s very watchful.
He doesn’t tell Bobby what they really are. They’re letters to Dean on one side of the door and letters from Dean on the other. Bobby would get that worried look again and might not come back to see him the next Friday.
Sam takes one of the pieces of paper out of the lock where it’s been stuffed into the keyhole on the inside of the door from the bathroom into the hallway and unrolls it to read. It says, Good morning, Sammy.
He smiles. “Good morning, Dean,” he says. He rolls the paper back up and works it back into the keyhole. It’ll keep the demons out like that. That’s the only way it works.
What he doesn’t say-what he’d never tell anyone-is that he sometimes thinks the paper keeps Dean in, too. But that’s just crazy.
After he’s dressed and done checking all the paper in the locks throughout the apartment, Sam leaves and takes the stairs down to the street, walks three blocks east and catches a bus that will take him as close to where he wants to go as can be expected. He walks the barren, cracked, desolate streets of Sioux Falls, where once there used to be a city-albeit a small, rather ordinary one. He follows a familiar path made up of markers and signs that he’s kept meticulously in his head and goes back to “Ground Zero”.
That’s what Sam calls it because that’s what Dean calls it. He doesn’t say it in front of Bobby though. Bobby might scowl at him for being morbid or disrespectful. Sam’s not sure what Bobby calls the place; he’s never asked. It’s the place where the angels and demons were at long last finally put face to face to fight their own battle for themselves. It’s a scorched stretch of earth five miles long and two and a quarter miles wide that no one on earth will set foot on except for Sam who goes there every day. Most importantly, it’s where everything changed and it’s where Dean died.
Sam knows the building Dean was in-Catkin’s Bar-and precisely where it was located. He pulls his jacket tight around himself, zips it up as a cool wind chills through his shirt, and walks that way.
What a lot of people don’t know is that Dean hadn’t even been there at the final showdown. He got in an argument with Michael-or the meat suit the angel was walking around in; they were a little hard to tell apart sometimes-and went over to the bar across the street to have a drink and brood about it. He thought-they all thought-there was still time for that sort of thing. Then the world lit on fire and there or not, Dean was caught in the crossfire and Sam was left to mourn and sift through the rubble for his bones.
When Sam gets there, he has to run off a few wild mongrel dogs that are digging through the trash. He knows they’re more likely than not just after some old rotted, scorched garbage, but he can’t take the chance that one of them will find a bone and run off with it. He throws rocks at them and shouts and they leave with their tails tucked between their legs and their eyes gleaming.
Once they’re gone and he knows he’s alone, Sam takes his jacket off and sets it aside, then starts picking through the ashes for bones. He takes them all; human, bird, alley cat, even a few sparkling shards of angel bone. He gathers each piece, no matter how small, and piles them up on his jacket. He’ll put them in his pockets later and carry them home to burn them and he tries to imagine a day in the near future when he won’t come here, kneel just where he is and sink his hands into the dust of old buildings and the ashes of fallen angels.
Sam feels a hand rest on his shoulder and gently squeeze and he pauses with his hands full of pebbles and soft white ashes. “What do you want?” he asks. He doesn’t turn his head; he knows that hand on his shoulder quite well.
“To stand exactly where I am and watch the very thing that I am watching,” Castiel murmurs, frank as always and a little puzzled by the question.
“Alright,” Sam says. “Except maybe quit touching me, alright?”
Castiel shrugs-a gesture he picked up from Dean, Sam can tell. Every time the angel does it, Dean’s manner and way of moving glance back at him. “Certainly,” Castiel says and drops his hand.
Sam turns in his crouch to keep Castiel in his line of sight and goes back to digging through the rubble. He finds three small shards and one larger piece of a bone that’s definitely human and reaches over to drop them onto his jacket.
Castiel crouches down in front of him and Sam casts him a cautious glance and picks up a small hardened glob of melted green glass. He blows the dust off of it, turns it in his fingers, and shifts to slip it into his hip pocket. “You just gonna watch me? You can help,” Sam says.
“Why do you do this?” Castiel asks. He cocks his head to one side and looks up into Sam’s downturned face.
“Because I have to,” Sam says simply. He picks up another bone shard, blows it off and drops it onto his coat with the rest. “How do you always know where I am but you can’t find him? Huh?”
“You know why,” Castiel says. “The mark I put on you both prevents it. You… I just follow you.”
“Stalker,” Sam says.
“I’ve been called that before,” Castiel says, his lips twitching in a brief smile.
Sam doesn’t have to ask by whom. “I have to do this for him, you know,” he says.
“Perhaps you only believe that,” Castiel says. “Perhaps it’s time you moved on.”
“That’s not the way it is,” Sam says. He shovels ash out of his way with a chunk of two-by-four and blows his hair out of his eyes to glare up at Castiel. “You make it sound like it’s in my fucking head and I know it’s not. You know it, too, so don’t lie to me.”
Castiel sighs and it‘s another one of those learned human mannerisms that makes Sam‘s heart ache. “I believe it would be best for you and that you’re clinging to him… his memory,” Castiel says. He stands up and brushes off his long coat with his equally grimy hands, sending up little puffs of dust. “I believe you are the real reason that your brother can’t truly rest, not these bones.”
Sam laughs softly and shakes his head. “Maybe so,” he says.
He sees a glint of gold in the ashes and reaches his hand into them to pull out another blob of glass, this one brown. “I wonder what this was,” he says and he’s speaking so low that he’s almost whispering.
Castiel looks at what he’s holding and cocks his head curiously. It’s a far more natural expression than the shrug or the sigh and it makes Sam smile to see it.
“It was probably a bottle,” Sam says, rubbing dust off of it with his thumb. “A beer bottle. Budweiser. Maybe it was even one of Dean’s. Lined up on the top of the bar like soldiers with peeled labels. Maybe…” He trails off and lifts the piece of glass to his cheek, watching Castiel with mad, tired eyes. “Maybe he put it to his lips and drank it down empty and now here it is in my hand. Not a bottle anymore. Good only for catching light in.”
Castiel gives Sam one of those sad, patient what am I going to do with you? looks-something Sam is sure the angel learned from Bobby, not Dean-and crouches back down on his heels with him to look at the piece of glass. He sifts his fingers through the dirt and dust and finds a small flat bit of pale blue glass which he holds up for Sam’s inspection. “What about this one?”
Sam looks at it and frowns thoughtfully. “Gin bottle, probably,” he says. “Dean would never have drunk that. Isn’t it pretty, though?”
Castiel looks down at the chunk of glass resting in the hollow of his palm, rolls it around to catch the light and smiles a little. The glass is slightly oval shaped and about the size of a silver dollar. Castile dances it over his fingers once and Sam watches him do it with a childlike kind of fascination.
“Yes, it is,” Castiel says.
Sam puts his hands over Castiel’s and pushes them toward him insistently. “Keep it,” he says.
“Alright,” Castiel says. He stands up again and slips the bit of glass into his pocket.
Sam tenses for a moment when he feels Castiel rest his hand on his shoulder again. When he feels Castiel’s fingers slide up the side of his neck and pet into his hair, he relaxes and tilts his head back to look up at him. Castiel leans down and presses a brief kiss to his forehead. Then he takes his hand away and steps back and Sam sits there with a little frown scrunching up his eyebrows.
“Angel kisses,” Sam muses. “They don’t mean anything.”
Castiel smiles gently and casts his eyes over the ruins of the city with a calm expression. “This angel’s kisses do,” he says.
Sam shrugs and goes back to digging for bones. Castiel leaves silently, but Sam knows when he’s gone. Like Dean, he has a very loud presence.
~~*~~
After he drops the little pieces of bones he gathered into the incinerator, Sam goes up to his apartment and takes a long shower. He’s darkly tanned from all the time he spends digging through the remains down at Ground Zero, but he still sometimes burns and often gets sick from the heat if the sun is high. A cool shower makes him feel better and a sandwich washed down with a beer takes the nausea away.
He’s sitting on his raggedy sofa finishing his second beer and watching NCIS on the TV while he picks idly at a tear in the arm when he hears a knocking sound. He tilts his head back and looks toward Dean’s room, which is where it’s coming from and listens.
For a while, there’s nothing, then a light tap, tap, tap on the inside of the door and a softly whispered, beckoning, “Sammy?”
Sam gets up and goes down the hall to Dean’s room. He stops outside of the door and leans down to press his ear to it and listen. “Dean?”
“Hi, Sammy.”
Sam smiles and sits down on the floor outside the room, sliding down the door to sit with his back to it. “Hi.”
“Do you miss me, Sammy?”
Sam smiles. It’s a little tired and lot sad, but it’s real. “Yes,” he says. He turns a little to the side to rest his cheek against the door and put his hand flat to it. He thinks of Dean sitting there on the other side, his mouth close to the keyhole as he speaks in a little whisper that is as loud as Dean can scream anymore. “Yes, I do.”
“You have to find me, Sammy. Burn me. You know that.”
“I know,” Sam says and it comes out snappish because it’s so frustrating.
“You’re not looking,” Dean says.
Sam scowls at the door. “I look every day.”
“You wander around picking up colored glass with angels.”
Sam cocks his head curiously at the door and frowns, wondering how Dean could know about that. “Only the one,” he says. He sits there frowning for a minute, then says, “You’re jealous.”
“No,” Dean says.
“Yes, you are,” Sam says.
Dean doesn’t say anything, but Sam gets the impression that he’s annoyed with him. It’s just like him and it makes Sam smile. “I am looking, Dean,” he says. “But there are so many bones. They’re everywhere and there’s so much to dig through.”
“Maybe Castiel will help you,” Dean says and it’s so bitchy that Sam actually laughs.
“Maybe so,” Sam says serenely. He gets up from the floor and goes back into the kitchen for another beer, wondering if Dean will follow him.
He doesn’t and when Sam goes back to sit by the door and talk to him, he won’t answer. Sam knows he’s there and listening though. He’s just pouting and giving him the silent treatment.
Sam thinks about going into the room with him, and if Dean weren’t a ghost, that’s exactly what he would do, but Dean is a ghost and that’s the problem. Sam’s done it before and he knows what happens. He knows that if he walks through that door the room will be empty and cold. It will smell like stale air and dust with just a hint of what Dean’s skin might smell like if it were peeled off his body and stretched to dry for parchment. There will be nothing, not even a flicker of a shadow to comfort him.
Sam can’t go through that anymore. His mind is as fragile as tissue paper already and he just can’t take it.
Unable to stand Dean’s brooding silence and the way the air in the apartment rests heavy on his shoulders even the beer isn’t helping, Sam leaves. He takes his coat and his wallet then goes down the stairs instead of using the elevator because elevators are dangerous and not to be trusted.
He plays Dean’s breathy soft words back in his mind, over and over, picking at them, wondering why he’d be jealous of Castiel of all things and why it should matter. He walks to the bus stop with his right hand in his hip pocket, fingering the little smooth piece of brown bottle glass from the bar, feeling exhausted and lonely.
~~*~~
Sam goes to see Chuck and finds his front door open and sheets of paper all over the yard. He goes over to the neighbors’ fence and peels one of them away from the wire to look at it. He’s not that surprised to find his name and Dean’s there on the page.
“Only the one,” Sam told him. He sat there frowning quietly for a minute, not sure if he should say what he was thinking. “You’re jealous,” he told Dean at last.
“No,” Dean said, but it was obvious that he was.
“Yes, you are,” Sam said.
Dean got all quiet then and though he didn’t say anything, Sam had got the feeling he was annoyed, which was just like him. This thought made him smile.
“I am looking, Dean. But there are so many bones. They’re-
Sam drops his hand and pinches the bridge of his nose. He shakes his head once and crumples the paper up. There are more of them blowing across the grass and stuck against the fence, but he just leaves it and goes inside the house to find Chuck.
He finds him just inside the door, passed out on his back with his head propped up on a pile of manuscript pages. There’s a puddle of whiskey from the bottle clutched in his hand soaking into the carpet and paper strewn all over the floor, all over the couch, all over every surface in the living room it looks like.
Sam picks up another sheet of paper and reads:
“You know why,” Castiel said. “The mark I put on you both prevents it. You… I just follow you.”
“Stalker,” Sam said, but he wasn‘t really angry.
“I’ve been called that before,” Castiel said. He smiled a little and Sam knew he meant by Dean once upon a time.
“I have to do this for him, you know,” he said.
“Perhaps you only believe that,” Castiel said. “Perhaps it’s time you moved on.”
“That’s not the way it is,” Sam said. He scooped ash out of his way with a piece of wood and blew his hair out of his eyes. He glared up at Castiel through it. “You make it sound like it’s in my fucking head and I know it’s not. You know it, too, so don’t-
“Christ,” Sam says. He wads up the paper and throws it then stands there looking down at Chuck. He gently nudges his leg with the toe of his boot. “Hey, man, wake up.
Chuck snorts turns his head away with a grimace and opens his eyes. “Oh no,” he mutters. He pushes himself up and brings his bottle up to drink before he realizes it’s empty and he’s sitting in the stuff. Cussing under his breath, he uses the chair next to him to drag himself up from the floor. “What do you want?”
“World peace and a box of chocolates,” Sam says without thinking.
Chuck snorts laughter and shakes his head, then lurches toward his kitchen, almost falling as he slips on some slick computer paper. “I got it,” he says, waving Sam off when he puts out a hand to catch him.
Sam lets him go, but when he starts to fall again, he grabs the arm of his worn, plaid terrycloth robe and hauls him back up then keeps hold of him while Chuck makes his unsteady way to the kitchen. He lets him go when they reach the kitchen and Chuck has a good hold on the refrigerator door.
“What are you doing writing this again?” Sam asks. He picks up another page of his life from the kitchen island, looks at it, sees his name and some of the things he said to Bobby last Friday stuck between the quotation marks of dialog then throws it aside. “I thought your doctor gave you pills for this shit.”
Chuck snags two beers from his refrigerator and hands one to Sam. “Yeah, well…” He slams the refrigerator door and leans back against it for support. “They don’t work anymore.”
Sam blinks at him and stares. There’s a coffee stain on the white undershirt Chuck’s wearing and Sam thinks it looks a little like Jesus. Which would be funny if he weren’t quietly freaking out. “Fuck,” he says.
“Yeah, man, tell me about it,” Chuck says. He twists the top off his beer and takes a long drink. “You two are gonna fucking kill me with this shit. Especially you.”
Sam doesn’t know which two he means, but it doesn’t really matter. It has to either be Dean or Castiel, but what he really cares about is the shit on the paper and the shit in Chuck’s head. It’s always felt a lot like a cross between spying and mind rape to him and God, he doesn’t need this right now. He knows Chuck doesn’t do it on purpose and would stop it if he could, that’s the only reason Sam doesn’t resent the hell out of the guy. Now he’s back to having no secrets though and it really scares the shit out of him.
“Did you… maybe they can give you something else,” Sam says.
“Tried it,” Chuck says. He taps his left temple with the side of his beer bottle and gives Sam a sympathetic look. “Short of a fucking lobotomy, it ain’t going away, dude. It’s here to stay.”
Sam stares down at the floor between his feet and chews his bottom lip.
“I’m sorry, man,” Chuck says.
Sam shrugs. He twists off the top of his beer and drinks, thinking that this is how they’re supposed to deal with the aftermath of a war, like this? It fucking sucks. It really does. “Not your fault,” he says.
“Damn right it’s not,” Chuck says, gesturing with his beer bottle. He finishes it then opens the refrigerator and gets another one. “You think I want to be thinking your thoughts all day long? Your brain ain’t exactly a walk in the clouds these days, my friend. I want to think some of my own goddamn thoughts for a change, but oh no, that is not to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam says and he is. Really, excruciatingly sorry.
Chuck shrugs and drinks his beer. “Not up to you,” he says. “Don’t think I don’t know that. You don’t want me fishing around in your head while you’re angsting over your brother and your angel stalker any more than I want to be thinking your sad thoughts while I’m trying to jerk off. I just want to be able to watch one fucking movie beginning to end without feeling like I gotta run for a pen and paper worse than I’ve ever had to piss in my life. It’s fucked up.”
“Is it happening now?” Sam asks.
“What?” Chuck says.
Sam gestures with his beer bottle then drinks the last of it and puts it down to go get another one. “I don’t know, are you… reading my mind right now?”
Chuck stands there quietly watching him as Sam stands back up and closes the refrigerator door. He leans against the counter, watching Chuck as he twists the top off his beer.
“No,” Chuck finally says. “It’s kinda… quiet up there right now.”
“Awesome, let’s pack this beer in the living room and watch a movie then,” Sam says.
“I am not watching porn with you,” Chuck says, eyebrows shooting up.
Sam pauses as he’s opening the refrigerator to get the beer. “Well, no,” he says. “Um… don’t you have anything else?”
“Got HBO and Showtime,” Chuck says.
“Okay then,” Sam says, relieved. “We’ll just watch Dexter or something.”
Chuck sighs and leans back against the counter, scratching his jaw with a morose expression. “Shit,” he mutters.
“Dude, I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna watch that shit with you,” Sam says.
“And I don’t want you to,” Chuck says. “I’ve got my modesty or whatever, too, okay? I just really miss it.”
Sam snickers and hefts the case of beer out of the refrigerator. “Prophecy for porn, dude. Not a fair trade, but there you go,” Sam says. “Come on.”
Chuck follows him, a little more steady on his feet than when he got up off the floor and plops down on the couch in the middle of a pile of paper, which he shoves off on the floor. “That’s alright, you’ve got to get laid sometime, Winchester,” Chuck says.
~~*~~
At a little after two in the morning, Sam leaves Chuck sleeping on the couch with an open bag of nacho cheese Doritos on his chest and a beer by his left hand on the end table and walks home. The buses don’t run anywhere so early in the morning, but it’s not that long of a walk. A little under six miles. After all, Chuck had moved out to Sioux Falls in the heat of war to be closer to Sam, Dean and Bobby for the sake of safety.
Not a bad idea, Sam guesses, but then maybe what he should have done was move as far away from them as possible. That would have been safer.
But it put his house in walking distance and Sam is home before four. Bone tired and a little drunk, he takes a shower, brushes his teeth and goes to say goodnight to Dean. The door is open and he stops in the hall outside the room, just looking in at the empty bed and the empty walls, trying to feel Dean’s presence but not feeling much of anything except the certain knowledge of a hangover in his near future.
He reaches out and closes the door.
“I can’t keep doing this,” Sam whispers, thinking of Castiel and that sad what am I going to do with you? look he wears so much. He remembers that look on his face and what he said and even if Dean isn’t a figment of his imagination-and Sam would still swear to that-what good is this constant mourning doing for him? It’s breaking his mind a little at a time and he doesn’t need anyone else to say it, he knows.
“I have to stop,” he says, and he thinks he’s saying it for Dean, but maybe he’s saying it for himself, too. “I’m never going to find it all. I’m never going to burn it all. I’m never… I’m tired, Dean. I’m sorry, but I’m so tired. You don’t need me to burn your bones to move on. You just need… to go. That’s not why you’re here, I am. But I… I need you to go now. Need you to want to. You’re not helping me, man. You gotta move on so I can move on, alright?”
Sam rubs at his forehead and lets out a deep breath. There’s a pain like a ball of weight in his belly and pressure against the back of his eyes because he’s going to cry soon if he keeps on like he is, but he’s not done yet.
“Please leave, Dean,” Sam whispers. He laces his fingers together like a child at prayer and bends his head down to rest his forehead on the door. “I love you, man, but you’re dead and I’m not, so let me go.”
There’s no response at all and Sam takes a deep breath, lets it out, and rubs at his eyes. His hands come away wet and he frowns down at his palms like he’s been betrayed.
“I’m going to bed,” he finally says.
“Goodnight, Sammy,” Dean whispers, his voice like a creeping thing sliding under the door and through the keyhole.
“Yeah, you, too,” Sam murmurs. He goes into his own room and closes the door.
He lies down and he’s so tired, but he doesn’t sleep. He can’t. He watches shadow pixies cavort across the ceiling and that painful weight in his stomach just keeps expanding until he feels like he’s swelling with it. He’s crying and he knows it, but it doesn’t matter. There’s no one to see and Sam’s pretty sure he’s entitled to a good fucking cry right about now anyway.
Sam has one arm thrown over his face, tears sliding down his cheeks, getting in his mouth and nose and making his head hurt when he feels the mattress beside him give under the weight of someone sitting down. He jumps and scrambles to sit up. Then he sees Castiel sitting there and he relaxes a little.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam demands. “How the fuck did you get in here?”
“Your note fell out of the front door lock,” Castiel says, watching him as Sam gradually slumps back down on the bed. “Don’t worry, I put it back.”
“Good, now you can get the fuck out,” Sam says.
“You’re only upset because I startled you,” Castiel says, staying right where he is. “I apologize.”
Sam sits there with his back propped up against the headboard and studies him thoughtfully. “What do you want?”
“You’re always asking me that like one day the answer is going to change,” Castiel says, returning his gaze with frank amusement.
“Okay, I’ll rephrase… Why are you here?” Sam asks.
“Because I want to be,” Castiel says. “You were crying.”
“So what, you’re here to comfort me?” Sam says incredulously.
“No, not exactly,” Castiel says. “You don’t find me very comforting.”
“I find you fucking disturbing,” Sam says. “Especially at… five thirty in the morning. Dude, go home.”
“And where would that be?” Castiel says.
Sam rakes a hand through his hair and makes a sound of frustration in his throat. “Fine, stay. But you’re sleeping on the couch.”
“I don’t sleep,” Castiel says.
“Maybe you should try it,” Sam says. “You might like it.”
Castiel just shakes his head.
Sam watches him and Castiel watches him back and he’s sure there should be something to say, but there isn’t. The silence between them should be the uncomfortable silence of near strangers, but it’s not. Sam shifts against the pillows, pulling one up higher on the headboard to rest against and studies the angel with a frown. He’s the same angel. The same Castiel, but with a lighter shade of grace than when they first met. Same stupid clothes that look like he sleeps in them, except by his own admission, he doesn’t sleep. Same coat that’s seen far better days. Same unshaved look to his face and a healing little nick on his jaw from the last time he bothered.
He looks nothing like an angel, which is funny in a way because he’s the best of them that Sam’s ever known.
“Why don’t you ever change your clothes?” Sam asks him.
Castiel raises an eyebrow and looks down at himself. “I don’t know,” he says. “Why would I?”
“Don’t those get dirty?” Sam asks.
“No,” Castiel says.
“Oh. Okay, well don’t you get tired of them?” Sam says.
“I never thought about it,” Castiel says.
They’re quiet for a few minutes and Sam goes back to watching the shadows dance on the walls, feeling Castiel’s eyes on him like a touch. He suddenly feels very tired, as tired as he told Dean he was and sleepy on top of it.
Sam yawns and sinks down in the bed a little.
“Would you like me to get different clothes?” Castiel asks him.
“Yes,” Sam says.
“Alright,” Castiel says.
Sam arches a brow at him. “Just like that? Alright?”
“It bothers you so, yes, alright,” Castiel says.
“It does not bother me,” Sam mutters, shifting down into the covers more. “Why do you follow me?” he asks. “Why don’t you go home?”
Castiel sighs and looks down at the floor between his feet. He folds his fingers together loosely between his legs and frowns. “My place is here now,” he says. “And because you are you.”
Sam doesn’t really know what that means, but he doesn’t ask. He’s sick of angelic rhetoric at the moment and glad to find himself sleepy enough to probably drift off. “I’m gonna try to sleep now,” he says.
Castiel nods and starts to get up, but Sam grabs his coat sleeve and stops him. “Lay down,” he says. He doesn’t even really know why he’s asking. It might be that he thinks the angel will sleep if he’s beside him instead of hovering around in the divine ether spying on him, or it may just be that Sam doesn’t want to be alone.
Whatever it is, Castiel gives him a strange look, but he walks around the bed and sits down on it, takes his coat and his shoes off, and stretches out beside Sam. He lays there for a long time staring at the ceiling and Sam’s almost asleep when he says, “We… I didn’t know until it was too late. There… was no warning. I am sorry that I failed him. And you.”
“You…” Sam turns his head on his pillow and blinks at Castiel in confusion. “Well if I weren’t still here, he would have moved on by now. I should have died there with him.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Castiel says.
“It’s survivor’s guilt, of course it is,” Sam says. “I forgive you. Just go to sleep.”
“Thank you,” Castiel whispers.
“Shh… close your eyes, that’s the first thing you have to do,” Sam says, thinking he’ll damn well teach the angel how to sleep if he has to. “Now make your breathing even and try to clear your mind.”
Castiel does what he says, listening to Sam’s voice as he talks him into sleep. Then he’s drifting and it’s strange because he’s not going anywhere, but then he does sleep.
Sam watches it happen with a little smile on his lips, then snuggles down into his blankets and throws half of the covers over Castiel. He’s thinking how strange everything has become since everything was supposed to have ended and then didn’t. They didn’t die and this is how they deal with what’s left over-however they can-and sometimes it sucks, but sometimes, like now, it’s not so bad.
He drifts off to sleep himself, content for a little while, hoping like hell that sleeping angels don’t snore.
XXX