Fic: To Bring the Balance Back (Dean/Castiel)
Title: To Bring the Balance Back
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Dean/Cas (+ Sam)
Rating: Um. R/NC-17
Word Count: 4,285
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Summary/Notes: In which there are a load of very insistent ravens who will not explain themselves; Sam despairs at the fact that zombie apocalypses (apocalypsoi?) are somehow normal for Winchesters; and Dean and Cas scar him for life and then fail to provide brain bleach. Jerks.
Spoilers: General for S4.
He stood between a red dirt road and a turbulence of ravens, the sky grey-blue and sombre with the dusk. The birds wheeled above him in a torque like the turn of a screw, the black-beaten sound of their wings tunnelling the air.
"Damn ravens," Dean said, glumly. "Man, I hate ravens."
For days now, it seemed, the flock had tailed them. Up through the dry red rock of the southwest; north through the grassplains and the hours, the damn things had followed, cawing, thrumming like some great machine in need of oil. Somewhere in Washington, Dean had finally tired of it; pulled the Impala off-road with a curse and leapt up out of the front seat.
"What?" he demanded, reeling back with his arms spread wide to the sky. "What, bitches? You want something, you got to fucking tell us what it is!"
The ravens, unimpressed with this behaviour, had dissipated and fled.
"Nice," Sam commented, the tone of his voice dry in the wet northern air.
"Well, they're gone," Dean pointed out, and pretended not to hear Sam sighing as he resumed his seat.
Now it was late, and the ravens were unquestionably back. Dean stood on the red dirt road in the growing mauve of evening, scowling at them with a face like summer thunder.
"Maybe it isn't us," Sam said, hauling his bag out of the trunk. "It could be that we're all tracking the same thing."
"Damn ravens," Dean said again, leaning over to extricate his own necessary luggage. "What could this thing possibly be that they'd be interested in?"
"Beasts of battle, Dean," Sam shrugged, stepping out towards the door of the motel. "Could be anything. Ravens feature in all kinds of lore."
"Fuck lore," Dean said, shouldering his bag as they walked. "If I have to listen to one more damn raven cawing tonight, I'm gonna have a frickin' breakdown. This place better have decent pay-per-view."
“Well, as long as the wi-fi connection’s steady - “
“True that!” Dean brightened visibly, throwing Sam a grin and rubbing his hands together. “Busty Asian Beauties dot com, here I come.”
“Um, I was gonna say as long as the wi-fi connection’s steady enough for me to get some research done - “ Sam raised his voice over the beginnings of an interruption from Dean, and set down his bag in front of the counter - “I don’t really care what their pay-per-view is like. No more porn on my computer.”
Dean looked as if he was rallying internal forces for an attack, for which Sam was pretty much as far as possible from being in the mood. He fumbled around for the bell, cutting Dean off between “Dude” and whatever his protest would have been as the receptionist, face a little sleep-bruised, hove bulkily into view.
“You want a king?” she asked disinterestedly, around a mouthful of gum, “Or two queens?”
Dean glanced at Sam. Then, very deliberately, he leaned forward over the counter and fixed the receptionist with his most intent expression. “How’s the porn?”
*
“This,” said Sam, throwing his bag down on the bed - singular, and apparently collapsed in the centre - “Is entirely your fault.” He snorted. “No change there.”
“Dude!” Dean’s upturned hands plead his innocence. “What did I do?”
“You asked that mothbitten old hag about the porn, Dean; I don’t think she appreciated it.”
“Now, now, Sammy.” Dean’s hand came down hard and firm on Sam’s shoulder. “What kind of a way is that to talk about a lady?”
“Fuck you,” Sam muttered curtly.
“You wish. You’re on the couch, Sam.”
“What?” Sam’s voice cracked a little, incredulous. “Uh, I think you’ll find you’re on the couch. Even apart from this whole thing being, as we’ve just established, entirely your fault, I won’t fit.”
Dean shrugged. “Shouldn’t have gotten so tall, huh?”
“Dean.”
“I’m claiming Older Dibs.”
“Oh, you are not - you’re - get off the bed, Dean, goddammit.”
Dean laughed under his breath and spread his arms and legs starfish-wide, raising his eyebrows. “You gonna make me?”
“The bed could quite easily accommodate two people.”
It said much, Sam thought, that while he himself still couldn’t contain a little six-inch leap into the air at the sound of that voice of reason, Dean’s only reaction was a broadening of his smile as he turned his head toward its source. “Yeah, well, Sasquatch here kicks.” Dean drew his legs together and tucked one hand up casually behind his head. “What’s up, Cas? You bored or something?”
Cas regarded Dean soberly. “I don’t get bored, Dean.”
“Course you don’t.” Dean was still smiling. “So why’re you here? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not delighted to see you, but we’ve only got one bed as it is, and - “ He waved a hand expansively. Cas’s eyes followed it down to the breadth of the bed.
“While I’m sure that we could, if circumstances demanded it, all fit onto that mattress,” he returned dryly, “I would remind you that I don’t sleep.”
“Oh, right,” Dean said, in the tone of a man receiving revelation. “You don’t sleep. Hear that, Sam? He doesn’t sleep.”
There were a number of cushions on the couch at Sam’s side. Sam selected one with matter-of-fact precision, and lobbed it in the direction of his brother’s head. “Leave him alone, Dean.” He looked at Cas, mouth twitching into a smile. “Seriously. Do you need us for something?”
Cas deliberated for a moment, pulling at his lower lip with a clean edge of teeth. On the bed, Dean was still smiling, but his expression had dimmed a little; gained an edge of attentiveness - although Sam couldn’t be entirely sure that he wasn’t just watching the way Cas toyed with the fleshy part of his lip, which was disturbing, to say the least. Dean’s attentions to Cas had started to get like that, lately. It was weird.
“The ravens,” Cas said, at length. Sam waited patiently for the rest of the sentence. Cas simply stood there, intent blue gaze turned on Dean.
“Okay,” Sam ventured, after thirty seconds of real time had elapsed, “That? Was a fragment. Fragments aren’t helpful, Cas. Just ask Bill Gates.”
“I am not acquainted with Bill Gates,” Cas said, frowning. Sam sighed.
“Never mind. What about the ravens?”
“You may have noticed them circling. You thought they were following you.”
“They were following us,” Dean corrected, pulling himself up into a sitting position. “Bastards followed us all the way from fucking New Mexico. Hell, I even tried interrogating them about it on the off chance that they were, I don’t know, supernatural ravens, but not one fucking nevermore did they quoth.”
“Well,” Cas said, fairly, “It isn’t the practice of the raven to speak to man, outside of repeating meaningless phrases. I suppose they felt they were being clear enough.”
“Clear enough?” Dean spread his arms wide, helplessly. “Clear about what? Come on, Cas. Throw me a bone, here.”
“Dean,” Cas said, voice deepening with the edge of his frustration, “they weren’t following the two of you; they were leading you. Chasing you toward a point. Did nobody ever tell you that ravens were messengers of the heavens?”
“Wait a minute,” Sam interjected, frowning. “Ravens were messengers of pagan gods - Odin, say, or Bran in Celtic mythology. I’ve never heard of them having any connection to your God.”
“All mythologies,” Cas said, impatiently, and with what Sam felt was kind of a disapproving emphasis, “derive from a common point. Ravens are celestial messengers. They were sent to guide you. As you, apparently, are incapable of taking their guidance, I am here to point it out to you.”
“So you’re saying the fucking ravens are just yet another way for you guys to manipulate us?” Dean demanded, brows creasing. “You guys are the reason the inside of my head still feels like it’s cawing?”
“They are a way for us to help you, Dean,” Cas said, quietly. “Another seal is about to be broken. The ravens are leading you to the place where it will break, so that you can save the town from destruction.”
**
It turned out to be the fifth seal. Sam looked it up in Revelation in the little Gideon Bible while Cas perched awkwardly on the end of the bed, stiffly patient.
“"When He opened the fifth seal,” Sam read, “I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, 'How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?'” He paused, brow furrowing, and looked up at Dean. Dean shrugged.
“I got nothing,” he confessed. “Cas? A little help here?”
“There is a church,” Cas said wearily, “in this town. It is called the Church of the Martyrs. Under the altar are buried a number of missionaries, men who tried and failed to convert the native population of the area when it was first settled. John’s revelation there - “ he indicated the book in Sam’s hand “ - is a little blurry, but to be fair, I think he was under the influence of toxins other than the spirit of God at the time.”
(Dean grinned at this with all the inappropriate glee of a twelve year old. Sam ignored him.
Cas appeared not to notice.)
“You cannot stop the seal itself from breaking. That process has already been set in motion. You’re here to deal with the consequences.”
Dean frowned. “Consequences? Do I wanna hear this?”
“They’re gonna rise up,” Sam said, quietly. Cas inclined his head in acknowledgement.
“As it is written - mostly - those who were slain for the word of God will rise up and call for vengeance upon the unrighteous.”
“You’re telling me we’re expected to deal with wasting a load of motherfucking Zombies For Christ?” Dean flopped back down heavily onto the bed. “I didn’t wanna hear that.”
“It is not God’s work they do, Dean,” Cas pointed out, calmly. “The devil’s hand is upon them.”
“Them and half the other nutjobs who think God’s gagging for them to go waste a bunch of PFLAG moms, or whatever,” Dean grumbled. “So, mini zombie apocalypse, huh? Sure. Okay. Sign me up. Can we waste ‘em like usual?”
Not for the first time, it occurred to Sam that there was something not quite right about having a usual way to kill a load of zombies. Their lives? Were weird.
**
Later, as he crouched in the darkened church, shotgun in hand, Sam found himself praying for two things. One: that his knees wouldn’t give out before the zombies showed. Hey, it was hard to be tall. And two: that Cas knew what he was talking about in re these special edition Fifth Seal zombies. Something told him that if they were all hell-bent on taking out the unrighteous, he’d be first on the hit-list. Which was totally unfair, really, since everyone knew he was a nice guy who’d never hurt anything that wasn’t at least a little bit demonic, and -
“Hey.” Dean’s voice cut jagged through the heavy air of the church, a serrated blade of sound. “On the left. That’s moving, right?”
“It’s moving,” Cas confirmed, grimly. Crouched on Dean’s other side, Sam noted, even in the dark, that he was pressed against his brother hip to hip, and suppressed a smile. Cas never had gotten the hang of personal space.
“Fucker,” Dean spat, as a hand groped its way out from under the altar, and Sam returned his full attention to the issue at - dammit. The issue demanding their attention. He glanced at Dean.
“We waiting till it gets all the way out?”
“Shouldn’t be long,” Dean said, nodding.
The thing about zombies was that, while they moved with the slow ungainliness of Lurch from the Addams Family (the black and white one, not the shitty 90s movies), they had a way of getting places pretty quick once they were topside. The first one - in a remarkable state of preservation, given the supposed age of the corpse - was a couple of feet from the altar within a second of pulling its legs free, such that when Dean shot its head off, the body stumbled and fell a good eight feet from the tomb.
That was good. Made it easier when the zombies didn’t have to climb over a pile of the recently re-deceased before you could see them properly.
They came out more quickly after that, the way toothpaste glides out easier after you’ve squeezed off the gross little plug of hardened paste that forms when someone can’t seem to replace the cap after use. Cas wasn’t much of a hand with a shotgun - Dean had given him one to hold, once, and he had simply blinked at it in confusion. But Dean and Sam had more than enough practice with this kind of shit, fucked up though that was, and the zombies went down without any more of a fight than usual, their headless corpses mostly bloodless and the fight, bizarrely, surprisingly clean as a result. It did occur to Sam to wonder, as they stood panting before the pile of bodies, what Cas was actually doing here, but it seemed rude to ask. Maybe Cas had intended to step in and use his super angel powers if things looked like getting out of hand, or something. He probably wanted to let Dean know he had his back. And - possibly thought that standing so closely behind him that you couldn’t get light between them was the best way to go about this.
“Is that it?”
“Huh?” Sam blinked; tore his eyes away from the line of Dean’s back and returned them to his face. “Is that what?”
“Is that all, dope.” Dean scanned the heap of corpses on the floor, counting. Sam could tell he was counting because his lips moved slightly as his eyes wandered, which always happened when Dean had to deal with numbers in any way at all. “Nine here.” He scanned the stones above the altar. “And nine guys buried, so unless there’s gonna be some kind of grand finale...”
“Nothing can emerge from the ground but what was put there,” Cas said. “That’s all.”
“But the seal was broken anyway, right?”
“The seal was broken,” Cas conceded, eyes wide and serious on Sam’s, “but the people of this town were not. So.” He lifted his shoulders in a little half-shrug. It struck Sam that he had never seen Cas do that before, move his body beyond the absolutely obvious. Maybe Cas was finally getting used to his vessel, to what it could do.
Sam wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Dean stood still another long minute, surveying the heap of blasted corpses on the church floor. Then he said, “Okay. Well, I don’t know about you, but I need a cheeseburger.”
For a second, Sam could only blink. Sure, hunting could be hungry work, but this was pretty quick off the mark, even for Dean ‘if it casts a shadow, I’ll put it in my mouth’ Winchester.
“You have avenging zombie in your hair,” Sam pointed out.
Dean shrugged dispassionately. “It’ll brush out,” he said.
*
In the end, what happened was that Dean swung by the motel to drop Sam off, and then went off with Cas in search of a burger joint. This was fine by Sam. He wasn’t actually all that hungry, not really being the type to develop a growling stomach at the sight of a load of centuries’-old guts splattered across a church floor, and there was beef jerky and stuff in his duffel if he changed his mind. And it was always easier to do research with Dean out of the way. Hell, he could probably make some decent headway on things without Dean heckling from the other side of the room.
So saying, he dug out his laptop, ensconced himself comfortably on the bed with it, and promptly fell asleep.
When he woke up, he thought for a moment that the laptop had actually burned a hole right through his jeans. Possibly through his flesh. When he managed to shove it off his lap, he did seem to be intact, but it felt like it must have been a close thing. That was the fucking anti-virus software, making it overheat like that; but you couldn’t have Dean around and not have anti-virus. Not after the last time.
Sam presumed it was the heat that had woken him up. After all, he wasn’t all that fond of being seared like a steak. He was just contemplating going to the bathroom when something reverberated loudly off the wall behind his head, smack. smack. SMACK.
Something like a - like a headboard.
Oh, awesome. Sam rolled his eyes and sighed. Fine, possibly the people next door trying to fuck the bed through the wall had had something to do with him jolting awake at - he squinted at the bedside clock - 2.37 a.m. Still, it wasn’t like it was the first time. He’d spent far too many nights lying awkwardly awake, listening to that from next door and Dean sniggering in the other bed and -
and where the fuck was Dean, anyway?
Next door, the smacking of wood on plaster was becoming more vigorous. Sam took a moment to hope and pray that the wall was more durable than it looked, and then resumed his train of thought. It wasn’t that he was worried about Dean, exactly - it had been pretty late when Sam had gotten back, so it wasn’t like he’d been out all that long; besides which, Sam didn’t think anything too terrible could have happened to him when he was with
“Oh, fuck, Cas!”
Sam’s train of thought promptly derailed itself. Off the nearest mental cliff.
“Cas,” continued the voice from next door, “Cas. Jesus Christ, don’t fucking stop, don’t -”
The weeping core of Sam’s brain cried out feebly for bleach, even while the rest of it continued to boggle, pulling the shreds of its disbelief protectively, defiantly around itself. No way that was Dean’s voice, that deep rasp, scratchy with exertion, that Sam would have known anywhere. No way that was Dean, babbling and pleading the way Jess used to do when Sam was inside her and
“THERE! Fuck, there, there, you bastard, harder, for - Christ - “
A sharp sound, then, as the last word gave way to a desperately unmanly squeak, and then a low rumbling that sounded far too much like Cas for Sam’s liking. Like Cas, gasping platitudes into the sweaty hollow of Dean’s throat; like Cas, breathing assurances as his fingers tightened on Dean’s hips. The tone of Dean’s voice had been strident, insistent; demanding enough for him to have been on top, but desperate enough for him to be underneath, and the weight and speed of the bed-to-wall smacks suggested that, too; Cas above, thrusting fierce and deep, Dean’s legs curling up to cradle his hips as he threw back his head and keened - like that - like -
“BRAIN BLEACH,” Sam yelled, pressing his knuckles into his eyes hard enough that they blurred.
Next door, the keening erupted into a series of short little cries that made Sam want to stab himself in the face with just how fucking obviously they were the sound of Dean coming. After that came a low sound like thunder; a final smack of the headboard to the wall, and then nothing.
And Sam had just heard all that. And there was no brain bleach. His life sucked.
Still. If there was anything good in the fact that those orgasms (ohfuckno) had been loud enough to be heard pitch-perfect through the fucking wall, there was at least the fact that they’d both sounded pretty preoccupied. So - hopefully tomorrow Sam could just pretend to have slept through the whole thing (despite the fact that it could have raised Jesus), under the assumption that they were both too busy to have heard him yelling in agony.
Because, sure, part of him wanted to know when the hell this had happened, and if Dean had actually been planning on telling him at any point, and if it wasn’t some kind of mortal sin to let an angel of the lord fuck you, or if it maybe just meant you got filled full of grace on a regular basis instead. But a way, way bigger part of him wanted to just file it away in the back of his mind with all the other healthily repressed memories, and maybe in a month or two he’d send them a card congratulating them on their relationship or something. Because knowing your brother was in a relationship with his angel was one thing, and a pretty massive thing all on its own. But knowing that your brother knew that you heard him having his brains screwed out by said angel was - well -
Sam was just glad he didn’t have to deal with that. Next door, everything still seemed pretty quiet. Maybe they were falling asleep. Sam closed the laptop carefully and set it on the floor to, hopefully, cool down. Then he wriggled down onto his back and, for safety’s sake, pulled a pillow over his head.
Next thing he knew was a sharp knock on the door. He pushed the pillow off again, stood up, and took a moment to savour the sensation of his stomach dropping into the space where his boots would have gone if he hadn’t been barefoot. Then he approached the door and jerked it open like a popgun.
Dean. Naked, except for his boxer-briefs, sex-flushed and bedheaded and grinning like someone who just had it really fucking good. Sam blinked. Dean held up the paper bag in his hand like an offering. “Got you some fries. I would have brought them over earlier, but I thought you were asleep.” He rustled the bag enticingly. “You want ‘em or not?”
“I hate you,” said Sam, and closed the door.
“More for me,” said Dean brightly, as he walked away. The walls were so fucking thin that Sam might as well not have bothered closing anything. Of course.
**
The next morning, Cas had apparently disappeared. Sam discovered this when he got out to the car and found Dean alone in the front seat, cataloguing the contents of his wallet.
“So,” he said, as he slid into the passenger seat. “You got another room.”
“Only one bed in ours,” Dean said, casually. “Not enough space.”
Sam snorted. “I thought Cas didn’t sleep?”
“He doesn’t,” said Dean. Sam glanced at him. Dean waited a moment, and then grinned slowly. Sam, to his own annoyance, found himself reluctantly grinning back.
“What happened to teaching him the value of personal space?” he demanded, stuffing his duffel under the seat and arranging his legs, which was always a monumental task in itself. Dean shrugged.
“Tried. Failed. Turned out there were benefits to failing.” He slid the keys into the ignition and fired up the engine. “And before you ask: about a month, his idea, and no, I don’t need to talk about my feelings.”
And yeah, Sam thought, as they pulled out of the parking lot, that was Dean. That was Dean right there.
“I’m scarred for life, you realise,” Sam said, matter-of-fact and calm. “I’m thinking of filing a complaint.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean said, pausing to honk his horn irritably at some idiot in a BMX who seemed to want to die. “Tell it to the judge. And I’ll tell him how damaged I was when I heard my kid brother was screwing a demon.”
“You never had to hear that,” Sam pointed out, as they pulled out onto the freeway.
“And let’s keep it that way, shall we?” Dean smiled at him sidelong, and reached a long arm for the glove compartment. There was a packet of Kettle chips in there, and Dean did not buy Kettle chips for himself. He tossed them into Sam’s lap, like a peace-offering. “Breakfast.”
“Jerk,” Sam said, companionably, as he shoved the compartment shut and accepted the chips for what they were.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Dean again, and turned up the Zeppelin. It was better than brain bleach, Sam decided; more tuneful, and less burny. It would be okay.
A little outside of town, Dean picked up the tune halfway through Ramble On; nodded to Sam like he wanted some company in singing. Sam was happy to oblige. The sun was shining, the road was clear, and the apocalypse shit suddenly seemed like a distant prospect. God was on their side. Things would be okay.
They were okay.
*****
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Dean/Cas (+ Sam)
Rating: Um. R/NC-17
Word Count: 4,285
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Summary/Notes: In which there are a load of very insistent ravens who will not explain themselves; Sam despairs at the fact that zombie apocalypses (apocalypsoi?) are somehow normal for Winchesters; and Dean and Cas scar him for life and then fail to provide brain bleach. Jerks.
Spoilers: General for S4.
He stood between a red dirt road and a turbulence of ravens, the sky grey-blue and sombre with the dusk. The birds wheeled above him in a torque like the turn of a screw, the black-beaten sound of their wings tunnelling the air.
"Damn ravens," Dean said, glumly. "Man, I hate ravens."
For days now, it seemed, the flock had tailed them. Up through the dry red rock of the southwest; north through the grassplains and the hours, the damn things had followed, cawing, thrumming like some great machine in need of oil. Somewhere in Washington, Dean had finally tired of it; pulled the Impala off-road with a curse and leapt up out of the front seat.
"What?" he demanded, reeling back with his arms spread wide to the sky. "What, bitches? You want something, you got to fucking tell us what it is!"
The ravens, unimpressed with this behaviour, had dissipated and fled.
"Nice," Sam commented, the tone of his voice dry in the wet northern air.
"Well, they're gone," Dean pointed out, and pretended not to hear Sam sighing as he resumed his seat.
Now it was late, and the ravens were unquestionably back. Dean stood on the red dirt road in the growing mauve of evening, scowling at them with a face like summer thunder.
"Maybe it isn't us," Sam said, hauling his bag out of the trunk. "It could be that we're all tracking the same thing."
"Damn ravens," Dean said again, leaning over to extricate his own necessary luggage. "What could this thing possibly be that they'd be interested in?"
"Beasts of battle, Dean," Sam shrugged, stepping out towards the door of the motel. "Could be anything. Ravens feature in all kinds of lore."
"Fuck lore," Dean said, shouldering his bag as they walked. "If I have to listen to one more damn raven cawing tonight, I'm gonna have a frickin' breakdown. This place better have decent pay-per-view."
“Well, as long as the wi-fi connection’s steady - “
“True that!” Dean brightened visibly, throwing Sam a grin and rubbing his hands together. “Busty Asian Beauties dot com, here I come.”
“Um, I was gonna say as long as the wi-fi connection’s steady enough for me to get some research done - “ Sam raised his voice over the beginnings of an interruption from Dean, and set down his bag in front of the counter - “I don’t really care what their pay-per-view is like. No more porn on my computer.”
Dean looked as if he was rallying internal forces for an attack, for which Sam was pretty much as far as possible from being in the mood. He fumbled around for the bell, cutting Dean off between “Dude” and whatever his protest would have been as the receptionist, face a little sleep-bruised, hove bulkily into view.
“You want a king?” she asked disinterestedly, around a mouthful of gum, “Or two queens?”
Dean glanced at Sam. Then, very deliberately, he leaned forward over the counter and fixed the receptionist with his most intent expression. “How’s the porn?”
*
“This,” said Sam, throwing his bag down on the bed - singular, and apparently collapsed in the centre - “Is entirely your fault.” He snorted. “No change there.”
“Dude!” Dean’s upturned hands plead his innocence. “What did I do?”
“You asked that mothbitten old hag about the porn, Dean; I don’t think she appreciated it.”
“Now, now, Sammy.” Dean’s hand came down hard and firm on Sam’s shoulder. “What kind of a way is that to talk about a lady?”
“Fuck you,” Sam muttered curtly.
“You wish. You’re on the couch, Sam.”
“What?” Sam’s voice cracked a little, incredulous. “Uh, I think you’ll find you’re on the couch. Even apart from this whole thing being, as we’ve just established, entirely your fault, I won’t fit.”
Dean shrugged. “Shouldn’t have gotten so tall, huh?”
“Dean.”
“I’m claiming Older Dibs.”
“Oh, you are not - you’re - get off the bed, Dean, goddammit.”
Dean laughed under his breath and spread his arms and legs starfish-wide, raising his eyebrows. “You gonna make me?”
“The bed could quite easily accommodate two people.”
It said much, Sam thought, that while he himself still couldn’t contain a little six-inch leap into the air at the sound of that voice of reason, Dean’s only reaction was a broadening of his smile as he turned his head toward its source. “Yeah, well, Sasquatch here kicks.” Dean drew his legs together and tucked one hand up casually behind his head. “What’s up, Cas? You bored or something?”
Cas regarded Dean soberly. “I don’t get bored, Dean.”
“Course you don’t.” Dean was still smiling. “So why’re you here? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not delighted to see you, but we’ve only got one bed as it is, and - “ He waved a hand expansively. Cas’s eyes followed it down to the breadth of the bed.
“While I’m sure that we could, if circumstances demanded it, all fit onto that mattress,” he returned dryly, “I would remind you that I don’t sleep.”
“Oh, right,” Dean said, in the tone of a man receiving revelation. “You don’t sleep. Hear that, Sam? He doesn’t sleep.”
There were a number of cushions on the couch at Sam’s side. Sam selected one with matter-of-fact precision, and lobbed it in the direction of his brother’s head. “Leave him alone, Dean.” He looked at Cas, mouth twitching into a smile. “Seriously. Do you need us for something?”
Cas deliberated for a moment, pulling at his lower lip with a clean edge of teeth. On the bed, Dean was still smiling, but his expression had dimmed a little; gained an edge of attentiveness - although Sam couldn’t be entirely sure that he wasn’t just watching the way Cas toyed with the fleshy part of his lip, which was disturbing, to say the least. Dean’s attentions to Cas had started to get like that, lately. It was weird.
“The ravens,” Cas said, at length. Sam waited patiently for the rest of the sentence. Cas simply stood there, intent blue gaze turned on Dean.
“Okay,” Sam ventured, after thirty seconds of real time had elapsed, “That? Was a fragment. Fragments aren’t helpful, Cas. Just ask Bill Gates.”
“I am not acquainted with Bill Gates,” Cas said, frowning. Sam sighed.
“Never mind. What about the ravens?”
“You may have noticed them circling. You thought they were following you.”
“They were following us,” Dean corrected, pulling himself up into a sitting position. “Bastards followed us all the way from fucking New Mexico. Hell, I even tried interrogating them about it on the off chance that they were, I don’t know, supernatural ravens, but not one fucking nevermore did they quoth.”
“Well,” Cas said, fairly, “It isn’t the practice of the raven to speak to man, outside of repeating meaningless phrases. I suppose they felt they were being clear enough.”
“Clear enough?” Dean spread his arms wide, helplessly. “Clear about what? Come on, Cas. Throw me a bone, here.”
“Dean,” Cas said, voice deepening with the edge of his frustration, “they weren’t following the two of you; they were leading you. Chasing you toward a point. Did nobody ever tell you that ravens were messengers of the heavens?”
“Wait a minute,” Sam interjected, frowning. “Ravens were messengers of pagan gods - Odin, say, or Bran in Celtic mythology. I’ve never heard of them having any connection to your God.”
“All mythologies,” Cas said, impatiently, and with what Sam felt was kind of a disapproving emphasis, “derive from a common point. Ravens are celestial messengers. They were sent to guide you. As you, apparently, are incapable of taking their guidance, I am here to point it out to you.”
“So you’re saying the fucking ravens are just yet another way for you guys to manipulate us?” Dean demanded, brows creasing. “You guys are the reason the inside of my head still feels like it’s cawing?”
“They are a way for us to help you, Dean,” Cas said, quietly. “Another seal is about to be broken. The ravens are leading you to the place where it will break, so that you can save the town from destruction.”
**
It turned out to be the fifth seal. Sam looked it up in Revelation in the little Gideon Bible while Cas perched awkwardly on the end of the bed, stiffly patient.
“"When He opened the fifth seal,” Sam read, “I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, 'How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?'” He paused, brow furrowing, and looked up at Dean. Dean shrugged.
“I got nothing,” he confessed. “Cas? A little help here?”
“There is a church,” Cas said wearily, “in this town. It is called the Church of the Martyrs. Under the altar are buried a number of missionaries, men who tried and failed to convert the native population of the area when it was first settled. John’s revelation there - “ he indicated the book in Sam’s hand “ - is a little blurry, but to be fair, I think he was under the influence of toxins other than the spirit of God at the time.”
(Dean grinned at this with all the inappropriate glee of a twelve year old. Sam ignored him.
Cas appeared not to notice.)
“You cannot stop the seal itself from breaking. That process has already been set in motion. You’re here to deal with the consequences.”
Dean frowned. “Consequences? Do I wanna hear this?”
“They’re gonna rise up,” Sam said, quietly. Cas inclined his head in acknowledgement.
“As it is written - mostly - those who were slain for the word of God will rise up and call for vengeance upon the unrighteous.”
“You’re telling me we’re expected to deal with wasting a load of motherfucking Zombies For Christ?” Dean flopped back down heavily onto the bed. “I didn’t wanna hear that.”
“It is not God’s work they do, Dean,” Cas pointed out, calmly. “The devil’s hand is upon them.”
“Them and half the other nutjobs who think God’s gagging for them to go waste a bunch of PFLAG moms, or whatever,” Dean grumbled. “So, mini zombie apocalypse, huh? Sure. Okay. Sign me up. Can we waste ‘em like usual?”
Not for the first time, it occurred to Sam that there was something not quite right about having a usual way to kill a load of zombies. Their lives? Were weird.
**
Later, as he crouched in the darkened church, shotgun in hand, Sam found himself praying for two things. One: that his knees wouldn’t give out before the zombies showed. Hey, it was hard to be tall. And two: that Cas knew what he was talking about in re these special edition Fifth Seal zombies. Something told him that if they were all hell-bent on taking out the unrighteous, he’d be first on the hit-list. Which was totally unfair, really, since everyone knew he was a nice guy who’d never hurt anything that wasn’t at least a little bit demonic, and -
“Hey.” Dean’s voice cut jagged through the heavy air of the church, a serrated blade of sound. “On the left. That’s moving, right?”
“It’s moving,” Cas confirmed, grimly. Crouched on Dean’s other side, Sam noted, even in the dark, that he was pressed against his brother hip to hip, and suppressed a smile. Cas never had gotten the hang of personal space.
“Fucker,” Dean spat, as a hand groped its way out from under the altar, and Sam returned his full attention to the issue at - dammit. The issue demanding their attention. He glanced at Dean.
“We waiting till it gets all the way out?”
“Shouldn’t be long,” Dean said, nodding.
The thing about zombies was that, while they moved with the slow ungainliness of Lurch from the Addams Family (the black and white one, not the shitty 90s movies), they had a way of getting places pretty quick once they were topside. The first one - in a remarkable state of preservation, given the supposed age of the corpse - was a couple of feet from the altar within a second of pulling its legs free, such that when Dean shot its head off, the body stumbled and fell a good eight feet from the tomb.
That was good. Made it easier when the zombies didn’t have to climb over a pile of the recently re-deceased before you could see them properly.
They came out more quickly after that, the way toothpaste glides out easier after you’ve squeezed off the gross little plug of hardened paste that forms when someone can’t seem to replace the cap after use. Cas wasn’t much of a hand with a shotgun - Dean had given him one to hold, once, and he had simply blinked at it in confusion. But Dean and Sam had more than enough practice with this kind of shit, fucked up though that was, and the zombies went down without any more of a fight than usual, their headless corpses mostly bloodless and the fight, bizarrely, surprisingly clean as a result. It did occur to Sam to wonder, as they stood panting before the pile of bodies, what Cas was actually doing here, but it seemed rude to ask. Maybe Cas had intended to step in and use his super angel powers if things looked like getting out of hand, or something. He probably wanted to let Dean know he had his back. And - possibly thought that standing so closely behind him that you couldn’t get light between them was the best way to go about this.
“Is that it?”
“Huh?” Sam blinked; tore his eyes away from the line of Dean’s back and returned them to his face. “Is that what?”
“Is that all, dope.” Dean scanned the heap of corpses on the floor, counting. Sam could tell he was counting because his lips moved slightly as his eyes wandered, which always happened when Dean had to deal with numbers in any way at all. “Nine here.” He scanned the stones above the altar. “And nine guys buried, so unless there’s gonna be some kind of grand finale...”
“Nothing can emerge from the ground but what was put there,” Cas said. “That’s all.”
“But the seal was broken anyway, right?”
“The seal was broken,” Cas conceded, eyes wide and serious on Sam’s, “but the people of this town were not. So.” He lifted his shoulders in a little half-shrug. It struck Sam that he had never seen Cas do that before, move his body beyond the absolutely obvious. Maybe Cas was finally getting used to his vessel, to what it could do.
Sam wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Dean stood still another long minute, surveying the heap of blasted corpses on the church floor. Then he said, “Okay. Well, I don’t know about you, but I need a cheeseburger.”
For a second, Sam could only blink. Sure, hunting could be hungry work, but this was pretty quick off the mark, even for Dean ‘if it casts a shadow, I’ll put it in my mouth’ Winchester.
“You have avenging zombie in your hair,” Sam pointed out.
Dean shrugged dispassionately. “It’ll brush out,” he said.
*
In the end, what happened was that Dean swung by the motel to drop Sam off, and then went off with Cas in search of a burger joint. This was fine by Sam. He wasn’t actually all that hungry, not really being the type to develop a growling stomach at the sight of a load of centuries’-old guts splattered across a church floor, and there was beef jerky and stuff in his duffel if he changed his mind. And it was always easier to do research with Dean out of the way. Hell, he could probably make some decent headway on things without Dean heckling from the other side of the room.
So saying, he dug out his laptop, ensconced himself comfortably on the bed with it, and promptly fell asleep.
When he woke up, he thought for a moment that the laptop had actually burned a hole right through his jeans. Possibly through his flesh. When he managed to shove it off his lap, he did seem to be intact, but it felt like it must have been a close thing. That was the fucking anti-virus software, making it overheat like that; but you couldn’t have Dean around and not have anti-virus. Not after the last time.
Sam presumed it was the heat that had woken him up. After all, he wasn’t all that fond of being seared like a steak. He was just contemplating going to the bathroom when something reverberated loudly off the wall behind his head, smack. smack. SMACK.
Something like a - like a headboard.
Oh, awesome. Sam rolled his eyes and sighed. Fine, possibly the people next door trying to fuck the bed through the wall had had something to do with him jolting awake at - he squinted at the bedside clock - 2.37 a.m. Still, it wasn’t like it was the first time. He’d spent far too many nights lying awkwardly awake, listening to that from next door and Dean sniggering in the other bed and -
and where the fuck was Dean, anyway?
Next door, the smacking of wood on plaster was becoming more vigorous. Sam took a moment to hope and pray that the wall was more durable than it looked, and then resumed his train of thought. It wasn’t that he was worried about Dean, exactly - it had been pretty late when Sam had gotten back, so it wasn’t like he’d been out all that long; besides which, Sam didn’t think anything too terrible could have happened to him when he was with
“Oh, fuck, Cas!”
Sam’s train of thought promptly derailed itself. Off the nearest mental cliff.
“Cas,” continued the voice from next door, “Cas. Jesus Christ, don’t fucking stop, don’t -”
The weeping core of Sam’s brain cried out feebly for bleach, even while the rest of it continued to boggle, pulling the shreds of its disbelief protectively, defiantly around itself. No way that was Dean’s voice, that deep rasp, scratchy with exertion, that Sam would have known anywhere. No way that was Dean, babbling and pleading the way Jess used to do when Sam was inside her and
“THERE! Fuck, there, there, you bastard, harder, for - Christ - “
A sharp sound, then, as the last word gave way to a desperately unmanly squeak, and then a low rumbling that sounded far too much like Cas for Sam’s liking. Like Cas, gasping platitudes into the sweaty hollow of Dean’s throat; like Cas, breathing assurances as his fingers tightened on Dean’s hips. The tone of Dean’s voice had been strident, insistent; demanding enough for him to have been on top, but desperate enough for him to be underneath, and the weight and speed of the bed-to-wall smacks suggested that, too; Cas above, thrusting fierce and deep, Dean’s legs curling up to cradle his hips as he threw back his head and keened - like that - like -
“BRAIN BLEACH,” Sam yelled, pressing his knuckles into his eyes hard enough that they blurred.
Next door, the keening erupted into a series of short little cries that made Sam want to stab himself in the face with just how fucking obviously they were the sound of Dean coming. After that came a low sound like thunder; a final smack of the headboard to the wall, and then nothing.
And Sam had just heard all that. And there was no brain bleach. His life sucked.
Still. If there was anything good in the fact that those orgasms (ohfuckno) had been loud enough to be heard pitch-perfect through the fucking wall, there was at least the fact that they’d both sounded pretty preoccupied. So - hopefully tomorrow Sam could just pretend to have slept through the whole thing (despite the fact that it could have raised Jesus), under the assumption that they were both too busy to have heard him yelling in agony.
Because, sure, part of him wanted to know when the hell this had happened, and if Dean had actually been planning on telling him at any point, and if it wasn’t some kind of mortal sin to let an angel of the lord fuck you, or if it maybe just meant you got filled full of grace on a regular basis instead. But a way, way bigger part of him wanted to just file it away in the back of his mind with all the other healthily repressed memories, and maybe in a month or two he’d send them a card congratulating them on their relationship or something. Because knowing your brother was in a relationship with his angel was one thing, and a pretty massive thing all on its own. But knowing that your brother knew that you heard him having his brains screwed out by said angel was - well -
Sam was just glad he didn’t have to deal with that. Next door, everything still seemed pretty quiet. Maybe they were falling asleep. Sam closed the laptop carefully and set it on the floor to, hopefully, cool down. Then he wriggled down onto his back and, for safety’s sake, pulled a pillow over his head.
Next thing he knew was a sharp knock on the door. He pushed the pillow off again, stood up, and took a moment to savour the sensation of his stomach dropping into the space where his boots would have gone if he hadn’t been barefoot. Then he approached the door and jerked it open like a popgun.
Dean. Naked, except for his boxer-briefs, sex-flushed and bedheaded and grinning like someone who just had it really fucking good. Sam blinked. Dean held up the paper bag in his hand like an offering. “Got you some fries. I would have brought them over earlier, but I thought you were asleep.” He rustled the bag enticingly. “You want ‘em or not?”
“I hate you,” said Sam, and closed the door.
“More for me,” said Dean brightly, as he walked away. The walls were so fucking thin that Sam might as well not have bothered closing anything. Of course.
**
The next morning, Cas had apparently disappeared. Sam discovered this when he got out to the car and found Dean alone in the front seat, cataloguing the contents of his wallet.
“So,” he said, as he slid into the passenger seat. “You got another room.”
“Only one bed in ours,” Dean said, casually. “Not enough space.”
Sam snorted. “I thought Cas didn’t sleep?”
“He doesn’t,” said Dean. Sam glanced at him. Dean waited a moment, and then grinned slowly. Sam, to his own annoyance, found himself reluctantly grinning back.
“What happened to teaching him the value of personal space?” he demanded, stuffing his duffel under the seat and arranging his legs, which was always a monumental task in itself. Dean shrugged.
“Tried. Failed. Turned out there were benefits to failing.” He slid the keys into the ignition and fired up the engine. “And before you ask: about a month, his idea, and no, I don’t need to talk about my feelings.”
And yeah, Sam thought, as they pulled out of the parking lot, that was Dean. That was Dean right there.
“I’m scarred for life, you realise,” Sam said, matter-of-fact and calm. “I’m thinking of filing a complaint.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean said, pausing to honk his horn irritably at some idiot in a BMX who seemed to want to die. “Tell it to the judge. And I’ll tell him how damaged I was when I heard my kid brother was screwing a demon.”
“You never had to hear that,” Sam pointed out, as they pulled out onto the freeway.
“And let’s keep it that way, shall we?” Dean smiled at him sidelong, and reached a long arm for the glove compartment. There was a packet of Kettle chips in there, and Dean did not buy Kettle chips for himself. He tossed them into Sam’s lap, like a peace-offering. “Breakfast.”
“Jerk,” Sam said, companionably, as he shoved the compartment shut and accepted the chips for what they were.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Dean again, and turned up the Zeppelin. It was better than brain bleach, Sam decided; more tuneful, and less burny. It would be okay.
A little outside of town, Dean picked up the tune halfway through Ramble On; nodded to Sam like he wanted some company in singing. Sam was happy to oblige. The sun was shining, the road was clear, and the apocalypse shit suddenly seemed like a distant prospect. God was on their side. Things would be okay.
They were okay.
*****