dean | imagine kissing the skull of a saint
IMAGINE KISSING THE SKULL OF A SAINT
dean, doctor cartwright, castiel, sam. spoilers for 5x11, minor drug use. rated pg-13. ~5,290
It's harder when the end of the world actually ends.
(c) title from pluto to persephone by daniel williams
a/n: for here4castiel for help_haiti auction. thanks to thevinegarworks for the hand-holding and beta work. this is based off of a personal theory (or maybe it is a real thing?) that doctor cartwright is actually a manifestation of deans own imagination, not the wraith, which is briefly explained in the fic.
imagine kissing the skull of a saint
Lucifer dies on a Sunday. Dean finds it fitting.
-
Dean's never seen Sam this drunk.
(This place is dark, but in a way that Dean doesn't know, doesn't recognize. Everything is muted red, caught in nothingness, a fascinating compromise, sort of cruel and haunting in the way it avoids all sound and light, leaving them withdrawn, welcoming, a destructive paradox they have come to know too well.)
“Maybe you need to slow down,” Dean chuckles.
Sam throws back a tequila shot and laughs (Dean can see the colour of his skin, weather-worn, the colour of his eyes, an earthly brown-green, the colour of his happiness, and Dean can't name it). He shakes his head, eyes squinted against the light that comes from everywhere, from nowhere, fills all these vacant, blurred spaces, his hand at his mouth. “What for?”
“Because it's your hung over ass that I have to deal with tomorrow,” Dean accuses. He can smell the warm beer, see someone moving in the corner of the room--Bobby, maybe--and the sound of a fire, the sound of ceaseless, simple noise, the sound of things falling, muffled against carpet and paper. He brings the beer bottle to his lips, clinking against his teeth, the headiness of it filling his head--he tastes nothing.
Sam smiles and it's this smile that Dean hasn't seen in month, years; he was scared he would never see it again and the promises of one day, you'll live again, Sammy come rushing back and Dean's going to keep them all, he will.
“It's not like we've got anywhere to go tomorrow.”
And it's true. They don't.
-
He thinks he's waking up to the end of the world. He thinks it's noise that wakes him, the whispers of sharpened, gathering death that he could never outrun, the skeletons in the fields, the infinite run of hostility and dead loss.
It's nothing, not anything, because he greets silence with a hand in front of his face, the other reaching for his knife.
Even a week later, he still can't sleep, never able to sleep long before anyway, never wanted to, because he still thought like he did when he was a kid, I've got people to save, and he thought he had forgotten what it was like to lose it all again. He knows he'll never escape it.
Maybe, even a week later, the world is still ending, caught in the quick-spin motion of hideous ruination, off balance, stuck on the danger of an evil, mutant reality (it's slowing down, not so doomed now that the oceans are rolling back to soothe open wounds, people crawling from the depths of fires and mountains, and they blink into a low, hot sun, wondering what strange place this world is).
But this time, this time is different.
“Hello, Dean.”
He sits up, his knife in his hand.
There's a woman in a long white coat. She's sitting on the end of his bed, looking off towards the door.
“What--” Dean starts.
She looks over her shoulder. Her face seems brighter in the dark.
“You,” Dean says.
“Yes, me.” She stands up. She runs a hand through her hair.
“Dr. Cartwright, is it?” Dean forces himself to laugh. “Well, I must be drunker than I thought.”
“No, Dean,” she says. “This is all you.”
Dean rubs his face with the back of his hand, knife still clutched in his palm. “Why are you here?”
She furrows her eyebrows. “Because you are.” She pauses and lifts her hands, pointing at him. “Because I am you.”
Dean looks up at her. “What? No. That--that was just the--uh--” Dean's head is swimming.
She smiles, a tiny, lazy curl of her lips. She leans forward, eyes restless and scattering in sudden light, and whispers, “The wraith? No. You're just crazy.”
Dean finds himself smiling back. He throws the covers off his legs, turning to the side of the bed. “This is ridiculous,” he says quietly, waving his hand at her.
She leans back, standing up, nodding. “It sure is.” She walks briskly to the other side of the room, grabs the chair sitting by the door and pulls it back to the bed. Dean watches her. She sits down, beside Dean, her legs crossed at the ankles. “So. The end of the world. You won. Only half of the world burned.” She smiles again. “How do you feel?”
Dean doesn't look away from her. “Tired.”
“Cute,” she says. She sounds only a little amused.
Dean pushes himself from the bed, walks around her and moves to the dresser. She turns in her chair, legs squeaking against the floorboards.
“I'm not going anywhere,” she says.
Dean opens the top drawer and starts looking through it. He doesn't know why; he can't see.. He shrugs his shoulders. “Because you're me, right?”
“Right,” she says.
Dean nods and chews on his lip. The only sound is his hand's dull thump against the wood drawers. (He doesn't seem to notice the odd sounds, the odd light, how the world starts to blacken and soften at the edges when he moves too fast, too far.)
“Something is bothering you,” she says after a few minutes. “I wouldn't be here otherwise. It's just you and me. Well,” she smiles, “just you.”
Dean turns to look at her then. She's not facing him anymore, sitting upright in her chair, looking at the bed.
“I won't tell,” she says and her voice is light, dull, illicit. “Promise.”
Dean slams the drawer shut. The picture frames (people without faces he can recognize, but he doesn't know these people even though someone is telling him, in the back of his head, yes, yes you do, look closer) rattle, wood trembling against glass. He stares at her for a few seconds before he walks over to the window sill, picks his bag up from the ground, tearing the zipper open. He sifts through his clothes, muttering in his head, and he doesn't know how, how he hasn't reached the bottom of the bag yet, fingers wrapped in cotton and jeans.
She waits patiently.
Dean throws the bag to the ground. Something clatters inside; he can't find it.
“We didn't really win, did we?” he says and he hates sounding so defeated.
She shrugs, her head moving from side to side, thinking. “No. Not really.” She raises her hand. “But--you killed Lucifer. That has to count for something.”
Dean runs his hand through his hair. He leans against the window sill, looking outside, and it must be too dark, so dark, that he can't see. The light in here, the sudden white light, swallows everything else. “But how many people died in the crossfire?”
She waits. “Maybe you should have said yes to Michael.” She sounds--regretful.
Dean is startled, forgetting for a moment that she really only exists in his head. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “Maybe I should have.”
“But you did everything you could. You gave up so much, suffered more than enough.” She's starting to sound sad and Dean needs her to shut up, to leave, he can't do this, not now, not ever. He promised, promised himself a long time ago, that he was going to stop thinking about this, that he was going to make himself remember, because it will kill him, he knows it will.
“Obviously not,” Dean bites back. Then (and this sounds so much more like her, with the sad, ruthless tone): “I should have been able to save them all.”
She turns in her chair again. Dean can't see her eyes, the glare of the light, her face caught in a flare, stretching it across a dark grey back wall, distorted and shaken. He can't see her eyes, but they might look like his. “When did the world become your responsibility?”
For a moment, Dean doesn't have an answer. “When I made it mine,” he answers.
She leans her head to the side, smiling. “Atoning for sins, Dean?” She waits, licks her lips and her eyes widen (because his do). “Do you believe you're going to Heaven?”
Dean bristles. Turns away from her. “I'm just doing my job,” he says, because he is, he always is and it doesn't matter what he gets in the end because he makes sure it doesn't matter. He pushes his hand against the glass, hears the bump of his knuckles against the window pane, feels the warmth of a far-away sun, twisted into the glass he can hardly see.
She pauses. She shifts in her seat, the chair creaking. “Your angel friend.”
“Cas,” Dean says, quickly. He rubs his eyes.
“He's gone?” she asks.
Dean shrugs. “I don't know.”
“You don't care,” she replies.
“I care,” Dean says, but it's a little too quiet, not violent enough. He doesn't know.
“Then why don't you know?”
“I have other things to worry about,” he says, because he does, he always does. He turns back to the bed, avoids looking at her at all, looks down at his feet instead, his bare feet soaking up the dark floorboards. “I'm tired,” he says.
“Stop deflecting, Dean,” she says, her voice sharp, clipped. “Sit down. What about Sam?”
Dean stops by the end of the bed. He doesn't sit down. “He's good. Fine.”
She tilts her head, looking to the corner of the room. “Okay. Have you talked to him?”
Dean chuckles. “Of course I have. I've talked to him everyday for the last six months.”
“Have you really talked to him?” she asks. “About more than Lucifer and the job and the apocalypse and whatever else you talk about so you don't have to talk.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, a little unsure of himself.
“He almost said yes to Lucifer,” she says. He almost doesn't hear her. “Three months ago. You almost lost him.”
“But he didn't,” Dean says. “I didn't.”
“Almost,” she replies and she's demanding, close-mouthed and sly, but it's him, it's him, she's in his head, so he has to know that he's saying these things.
No, he's not, he can't, he wouldn't say these things, never has. No one talks to themselves; he's not insane. He can't be. He won't be.
“I've learned to put a lot more stock into what people actually do, not what they almost do,” Dean says. He walks around her and sits down on the bed. He's almost shocked that he can see her face perfectly, used to stretched features, wide white eyes and dull grins.
“That's good,” she says, nodding. “But you still hate him.”
(It's coming from somewhere, some place inside his head, and he shouldn't have to explain it, and yeah, yeah, he's going insane.) “I don't. I never did.”
“Just a little bit,” she insists.
“No!” Dean screams, slamming his hand down on the bed.
“Dean,” she whispers.
Dean drops his head into his hands, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes. Little blue and red dots carve into his eyelids. “What?”
“You're hiding.”
Dean stands up again. His skin is electric-heat and on fire. “I don't hate Sam.” He paces beside the bed. “I never could. Yeah, he made mistakes. I did, too. But I had stuff to deal with and I couldn't--I wasn't strong enough to let myself forgive him. I still had Hell in my head and--I felt betrayed.” He looks at her. She's looking at her hands. “And he made such stupid decisions and I hated that he went down that road.” He stops, his hands over his eyes. “But I never, never hated him.”
He's uneven, feels out of line, hysterical, lost in his own head, lost in the disaster of absent colour, the piercing cry that's ringing so far back in his mind, the cracks that are swelling through him. He's breathing and it doesn't seem to be enough and he won't look at her because he doesn't want to know. Should never have known, he was just trying to do what his dad wanted him to, he never asked for any of this, anything at all, just wanted to be left to the road, to his guns and his car, left to die bloody and alone and tired because it was all he could ever know.
“At least I got you talking,” she murmurs.
Dean opens his eyes. The room is dark again and everything crashes into silence. He sits back down. She looks at him.
“You really define yourself by other people.”
“I thought we went through this already,” Dean states.
She leans forward, elbows on her knees, her palms up towards him. “Maybe it's time to move on, Dean. Who are you going to be when everyone else does and you're left behind? It's time to be someone besides the leftover pieces of the people in your life.”
Dean laughs. He runs his hand over his mouth and shakes his head. “I am someone, okay?”
“Right.” She bobs her head back and forth, her fingers tapping on her legs. “You're a son, a brother, a vessel, hunted by Heaven and Hell, a friend, a martyr.” She looks up at the ceiling, her hands folded on her stomach. “Sounds like, to me, that you're always someone else's.”
“Whatever,” Dean mutters. “I don't have time for this.”
(Shut up, he tells himself. Shut up, I don't need this. I know already, I know.)
She looks back at him. “Who are you?”
“I am all those people,” Dean says and it's the best answer, the only answer, he has and, of course, it's not enough. “That's who I am.”
“You're okay with that?”
Dean shrugs. “Yeah. I don't know anything else.” He gets up then. Walks over to the dresser again. Opens the top drawer again. He knows she's watching him. He's uncomfortable.
“Do you still think about Hell, Dean?” she asks.
“We talked,” Dean bites out. “You can leave.”
“I won't leave until you're ready.”
“I'm ready,” Dean says, words clipped, looking to be too bold, too assertive, when he's only here, in his head.
She looks down at her lap. After a few seconds, she looks back up, grinning. “Obviously not.”
Dean's found the containers, the little pretty pills that Sam swiped from a pharmacy in Texas a few weeks ago, the ones that made Dean say, god dammit, Sam, you don't need these and took them for himself, hid them in his pockets, in drawers, in little holes in the Impala that only he knew and Sam never found them. He knows Sam wants them, had that steady, angry look in his eyes and he fought with Dean over nothing, like they always do, but Dean kept them because he couldn't see Sam vulnerable again. But he kept them because, one night, he couldn't sleep. But he kept them because he needs them to stop thinking. He kept them because they're his.
He thought they were all gone. They still rattle in the bottle when he shakes them. “No,” Dean says. “I don't think about Hell.”
“It's hard to forget,” she says.
“Yeah, well.” He pops open three pill containers. Shakes them out on the top of the dresser, pushing them into piles: baby blue, baby pink, baby yellow. “I have.”
“Those pills won't make me go away,” she says loudly, like Dean can't hear her, even when she's in his head. “What are you taking?”
“Advil,” he says. “Valium. Cyanide. I don't know.”
She clicks her tongue, disapproving. He thinks he's being funny.
Dean grabs the bottle of whiskey from the corner of the dresser. He wants to say, it's harder when the end of the world actually ends, just so she knows, just so she (he) can stop asking, but he knows she already knows that.
“Dean, Hell's a scary place.”
“I know,” Dean says and he doesn't mean to sound arrogant, but he always has, always will. Most of the time, he likes himself like this. “I've been.”
“You can't deal with this by not dealing with it at all,” she chides.
He picks up three pills, one from each pile: baby blue, baby pink, baby yellow. He doesn't know what they do, but he likes them just the same. He swallows them with a mouthful of warm whiskey. “It seems to work well for me.”
“You're breaking apart,” she says. “You're empty. Everyone says you're empty.”
Dean takes another pill, the little baby yellow one, and swallows it dry.
“Women, sex, food. Ugly, ugly vices, Dean.” She sounds so protective, so concerned, like she (he) could actually care.
“I'm fine,” Dean says and his words leave scars, bruises, even in him.
“You're always fine,” she says, callous and loud. Quickly: “Your angel friend.”
“Cas,” Dean snaps. “His name is Cas.”
“I know.” (Yeah, she does.) “Where is he?”
Dean thinks. “Sleeping.”
“Angels don't sleep.”
Dean's stopped breathing. Maybe it's the whiskey, the white blur behind his eyes. “He's not an angel anymore,” he says. He's quiet now, hollow and golden.
“He hasn't been for a long time,” she says and pauses. Dean thinks of broken machines, used parts, things that never work. “He bleeds easy.”
“You're sick,” Dean says and doesn't really mean it.
“I'm you.” She leans back, her chair tipping on its hind legs. “And Sam?”
“He's fine,” Dean says. “God, I already said it--we're fine!” He swings his arm out and the whiskey spills out over his hand.
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “No. You've never been okay. You just like to think you are.”
He takes two more pills, baby blue, likes the taste and the colour and the way they make him think about nothing; swallows these dry, too, and sets the open whiskey bottle down on the floor. He says, “I'm going back to bed.”
“I'll be here when you wake up,” she says, her voice so soft and winding.
“No, you won't.” Dean sits on the edge of the bed. He doesn't move to get under the covers.
“Oh, Dean,” she says and she thinks it's funny because she's laughing. “Yes I will. I always will.”
She flickers, short, premonition-like, phantoms and ghosts that shudder at the sound of shot guns. “That thing you hate, that monster you see, every time you look in the mirror? That's me.”
And she's right, she's right.
“What's wrong with you?” And Dean remembers sounding this ruined years ago when he thought, yeah, hey, the world isn't mine to save.
She stands up and shrugs. “Whatever is wrong with you, I guess.”
-
He wakes up to the sound of muffled footsteps, the smell of cooking bacon and the world not falling apart. It all seems so wrong.
-
“Morning,” Sam says brightly when Dean appears in the stairwell. He raises his cup of coffee. “Feels good to actually say that.”
Dean breathes deeply. “Yeah,” he mutters, rubbing the back of his head.
“Hungry?” Sam looks back at the table where there are plates of toast and scrambled eggs and bacon.
Dean waves his hand in front of his face. Sam shrugs. He grabs a book off the table and moves towards the living room.
“Sam, hey--” Dean stops.
Sam looks over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“You're good?” Dean asks. “You know--with everything.”
Sam's smile moves through his face like waves. “Yeah, Dean. I'm good. We're alive. Lucifer's dead. I'm good.”
“Okay. Good.”
Sam steps back, back towards Dean. He sets down his book, his cup. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Dean says quickly. “I'm great. Just--I'm glad we're both okay. That we have time, you know? Time to make things right.”
Sam's smile falters, caught, and he looks at his hands. Dean wants to know what this is. “Yeah, Dean, me too.”
When Dean looks at the walls, he recognizes colour. Baby blue, baby pink, baby yellow. Sam, dressed in baby blue, the walls in baby pink, the table and chairs in baby yellow.
(We're going to try this again, he hears and he's fighting, now.)
“Uh--” Dean looks at his own hands and his colourless. “Where's Cas?”
For a moment, Sam looks torn, broken. Then his face softens. “He's sleeping. You'd think he'd never slept before.”
-
Castiel is sitting up in his bed, reading. The sun is baby yellow and paints everything in the room in soft reds and oranges and browns. Something is slipping, even now, and Dean's holding on because he has to, because it means so much more than she'll ever know, and he feels her here, now, waiting on him, watching him, and even in this room with the unfocused borders, colours like brushfire and strange, autumn leaves.
“Dean.” Castiel sounds surprised. He's in soft reds, his eyes white, his skin pale.
“Hey.” Dean stays in the doorway. “How are you feeling?”
Castiel closes his book. “Fine. How are you?”
“Living,” Dean says. Castiel looks at him fondly. “So. Uh--you're probably leaving soon, right?”
Castiel frowns. “Leaving--where?”
“Well, you must have done enough to buy your golden ticket back into Heaven, right? God must be giving you some sort of second chance.”
(But it doesn't matter because none of this, none of Sam or Castiel, here and now, is true.)
Castiel looks amused, so amused. “It doesn't work that way, Dean.”
“Why not?” Though he probably already knows, because he's got something echoing in his head, something he heard months and months ago: it's gone, Dean, I'm gone. He's sure he heard it, even if he's making it up, because none of this is real.
“I lost my grace. I cannot get it back.”
“Anna got hers back.”
“It was only hidden. Lost.” Castiel runs his finger down the spine of the book. He looks terrible and lost and kind, like angels should. “Mine has been taken.”
Dean doesn't want to give this time to sink in.
“So, there's nothing you can do?”
Castiel shrugs and his sad, sad eyes aren't so sad anymore. “I'm afraid not.”
“I'm sorry, Cas.”
Castiel raises his hand, bowing his head. “Please, Dean, do not apologize. This was my choice.”
“Dammit, Cas, I still feel guilty,” Dean says. He takes a step past the doorway. Castiel looks at him, his eyes wide, afraid. Dean steps back. “I--I practically brow-beat you into going rogue.”
“I know you do, Dean,” Castiel says, quickly. “I wouldn't be here, now, if I didn't have the utmost faith in your unfailing humanity.”
Dean shuffles his feet, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I do not regret this, Dean. I will--adjust.”
“You shouldn't have to,” Dean says and he means it, he means every word.
“I did what I think I was destined to do.” Castiel smiles, but it's not right, not the same as every other smile. It's more of a dismissal, a laying down of arms, acceptance for what should have never come. “God has a plan for every one of us. I believe I was meant to follow you, to trust you, to fall, to end up here. We did what was right, Dean. We must have faith in that.”
The room spins then, shifts and Dean falls to his knees, the taste of whiskey and pretty little pills in his mouth.
(Your angel friend bleeds easy. He's even wearing red.)
-
He's on the porch. He looks out and everything is grey, charred and burned, except for the baby yellow sun. There's no sound, no heat. He looks to his right and she's sitting on a wicker chair, backed into the corner.
“Why are you back here?” Dean waves his hand at her, like she will actually, really go away and it's kind of foolish, he knows. “I fixed everything.”
She looks at him, her eyes kind and motherly, head tipped down. “Think, Dean.”
He feels the earth shift, ever so slightly, beneath his feet. He looks back to the house and it's not the same. “I'm still sleeping.”
“You've been sleeping for awhile,” she says. She rubs her hands together. “But, of course, you knew that as soon as you stepped into that kitchen and talked to Sam.”
“I was trying not to--” He stops. He doesn't know what he's saying. He walks to the steps, wanting to run, but he doesn't step down. He leans against the support. “They're--”
“Not dead,” she says. “Well, almost.”
He smells iron in the air and the baby yellow sun turns blood-red. “Sam's hurt.”
“War has its casualties,” she says, distracted, far away. “But he'll live.”
Dean looks at her. He's cold. “That's what you say.”
“It's what you believe, Dean.”
Dean shrugs, feels something inside him ignite, something inside him burn, distrusting and vast, but he can't move. He won't move. He finds, yeah, he doesn't want to.
“You're wondering about your angel friend.” She waits. He says nothing because she knows. So does he. “He's not here.”
Dean nods, scuffing his foot against the wood. “He made it back to Heaven.”
“He did.” She sounds happy. He's happy, maybe, too. “You still feel guilty because you never did apologize. Now, you'll never get the chance.”
“Why can't you just leave me alone?” He doesn't want her to go, not now, not really, but he needs to say something, always say something, so this doesn't have to make sense.
She's standing beside him. She reaches out, touching the side of Dean's face and her hands are warm and her eyes are such a beautiful green. “I think it's time for you to wake up now, Dean.”
He does.
-
Colour settles, light moves to one corner of the room and it's hard to see.
In the distance, an alarm is blaring.
Dean scrambles from his bed, feet tangled in the sheets. He falls forward, hands out, catching on the bed opposite his. His fingers hit something cold, sticky. He looks up, met with Sam's half-closed eyes, weak smile, hands folded over his side.
“Hey,” Sam says. “Welcome back.”
“Oh God,” Dean says, pulling himself onto the bed, prying Sam's hands away: brown-black stain decorated with new wet spots of blood.
“I--I tried patching myself up.” Sam hisses between his teeth when Dean lifts his shirt to see the wound. “I stopped--stopped most of the bleeding.”
“Jesus.” Dean feels his voice catch in his throat. The cut is deep, white and pink, bleeding from between the haphazard stitches. “Why didn't you wake me up?”
“You wouldn't,” Sam says and, now, he's starting to sound scared and when Dean looks up, Sam's got those far-away eyes, shimmering and shallow in the lack of light. “I thought you were dead. Dean, I thought you were dead.”
(He only wishes he was.)
“I'm not,” Dean mutters, running a hand over Sam's head. “Okay? I'm not.”
Sam nods, face twisting when Dean pushes him into a sitting position, pointing towards the door when Dean asks for the medical supplies. There's a mirror hanging by the door--he looks at his hands, his feet, tripping in the grey-dark room,
Dean's threading a needle, pulling out a bottle of vodka, handing Sam towels and sheets, when he asks, “Where's Cas?”
And Sam looks broken, torn. Then his face softens and it screams back to a face Dean thought he knew. “Dean, he's gone.”
Dean should have known that angels don't sleep.
-
(Dean sees her again, five hundred and thirty miles later. He glances in the rear view in the middle of the day as they head towards South Dakota in hopes of life in a junkyard.
She smiles at him, endearing and kind and warm, something he missed the first time. And she has those brilliant green eyes, earning his attention, and he misses when monsters were just monsters, not in his heart and in his head.
He won't think about it because no one has ever asked him to before, no one has ever told him to. He will be as he always has and he will listen for the sounds of numb hesitation and the numbing of unlocking and he will run, as he always has.
Because no one's ever asked him to stay and listen and he never will.)
-
They're in South Dakota on Sunday and Dean sees a spray-painted sign that says Someone took paradise from us. He glances over at his brother, giant and sleeping, filling up the the space of windows and the warm seats beneath them. He won't let himself think of the elsewhere, the blood staining Sam's lips, the mute change of something cruel and devouring that he can't fix, can't take back and, God, he wants to take it back. He hears music and the soft, restful shame that breaks him, quietly, quietly, and he'll move faster, faster than Sam, than this, than the world and it all. He won't be in that alluring, loathsome place with Sam alone, not again.
Dean feels the crippling riot of mutant emptiness, something missing and it brings a hideous suffering that he's known for years. There's the sweet, angry taste of disappointment that screams with the world around him. It's more like bad faith, more like you're leaving, you're leaving without telling me, more and more like victories losing meaning where they never had any merit at all. He's having trouble remembering the sounds of wings and he's not missing it, not yet.
He's distracted, distracting, moving towards thunder and grey-blue skies where he can hear another end calling for him; and he leaves the rest where it belongs--behind.
He finds it fitting.
-
end.
When there's nothing left to burn, you must set yourself on fire
(Anonymous)
dean, doctor cartwright, castiel, sam. spoilers for 5x11, minor drug use. rated pg-13. ~5,290
It's harder when the end of the world actually ends.
(c) title from pluto to persephone by daniel williams
a/n: for here4castiel for help_haiti auction. thanks to thevinegarworks for the hand-holding and beta work. this is based off of a personal theory (or maybe it is a real thing?) that doctor cartwright is actually a manifestation of deans own imagination, not the wraith, which is briefly explained in the fic.
imagine kissing the skull of a saint
Lucifer dies on a Sunday. Dean finds it fitting.
-
Dean's never seen Sam this drunk.
(This place is dark, but in a way that Dean doesn't know, doesn't recognize. Everything is muted red, caught in nothingness, a fascinating compromise, sort of cruel and haunting in the way it avoids all sound and light, leaving them withdrawn, welcoming, a destructive paradox they have come to know too well.)
“Maybe you need to slow down,” Dean chuckles.
Sam throws back a tequila shot and laughs (Dean can see the colour of his skin, weather-worn, the colour of his eyes, an earthly brown-green, the colour of his happiness, and Dean can't name it). He shakes his head, eyes squinted against the light that comes from everywhere, from nowhere, fills all these vacant, blurred spaces, his hand at his mouth. “What for?”
“Because it's your hung over ass that I have to deal with tomorrow,” Dean accuses. He can smell the warm beer, see someone moving in the corner of the room--Bobby, maybe--and the sound of a fire, the sound of ceaseless, simple noise, the sound of things falling, muffled against carpet and paper. He brings the beer bottle to his lips, clinking against his teeth, the headiness of it filling his head--he tastes nothing.
Sam smiles and it's this smile that Dean hasn't seen in month, years; he was scared he would never see it again and the promises of one day, you'll live again, Sammy come rushing back and Dean's going to keep them all, he will.
“It's not like we've got anywhere to go tomorrow.”
And it's true. They don't.
-
He thinks he's waking up to the end of the world. He thinks it's noise that wakes him, the whispers of sharpened, gathering death that he could never outrun, the skeletons in the fields, the infinite run of hostility and dead loss.
It's nothing, not anything, because he greets silence with a hand in front of his face, the other reaching for his knife.
Even a week later, he still can't sleep, never able to sleep long before anyway, never wanted to, because he still thought like he did when he was a kid, I've got people to save, and he thought he had forgotten what it was like to lose it all again. He knows he'll never escape it.
Maybe, even a week later, the world is still ending, caught in the quick-spin motion of hideous ruination, off balance, stuck on the danger of an evil, mutant reality (it's slowing down, not so doomed now that the oceans are rolling back to soothe open wounds, people crawling from the depths of fires and mountains, and they blink into a low, hot sun, wondering what strange place this world is).
But this time, this time is different.
“Hello, Dean.”
He sits up, his knife in his hand.
There's a woman in a long white coat. She's sitting on the end of his bed, looking off towards the door.
“What--” Dean starts.
She looks over her shoulder. Her face seems brighter in the dark.
“You,” Dean says.
“Yes, me.” She stands up. She runs a hand through her hair.
“Dr. Cartwright, is it?” Dean forces himself to laugh. “Well, I must be drunker than I thought.”
“No, Dean,” she says. “This is all you.”
Dean rubs his face with the back of his hand, knife still clutched in his palm. “Why are you here?”
She furrows her eyebrows. “Because you are.” She pauses and lifts her hands, pointing at him. “Because I am you.”
Dean looks up at her. “What? No. That--that was just the--uh--” Dean's head is swimming.
She smiles, a tiny, lazy curl of her lips. She leans forward, eyes restless and scattering in sudden light, and whispers, “The wraith? No. You're just crazy.”
Dean finds himself smiling back. He throws the covers off his legs, turning to the side of the bed. “This is ridiculous,” he says quietly, waving his hand at her.
She leans back, standing up, nodding. “It sure is.” She walks briskly to the other side of the room, grabs the chair sitting by the door and pulls it back to the bed. Dean watches her. She sits down, beside Dean, her legs crossed at the ankles. “So. The end of the world. You won. Only half of the world burned.” She smiles again. “How do you feel?”
Dean doesn't look away from her. “Tired.”
“Cute,” she says. She sounds only a little amused.
Dean pushes himself from the bed, walks around her and moves to the dresser. She turns in her chair, legs squeaking against the floorboards.
“I'm not going anywhere,” she says.
Dean opens the top drawer and starts looking through it. He doesn't know why; he can't see.. He shrugs his shoulders. “Because you're me, right?”
“Right,” she says.
Dean nods and chews on his lip. The only sound is his hand's dull thump against the wood drawers. (He doesn't seem to notice the odd sounds, the odd light, how the world starts to blacken and soften at the edges when he moves too fast, too far.)
“Something is bothering you,” she says after a few minutes. “I wouldn't be here otherwise. It's just you and me. Well,” she smiles, “just you.”
Dean turns to look at her then. She's not facing him anymore, sitting upright in her chair, looking at the bed.
“I won't tell,” she says and her voice is light, dull, illicit. “Promise.”
Dean slams the drawer shut. The picture frames (people without faces he can recognize, but he doesn't know these people even though someone is telling him, in the back of his head, yes, yes you do, look closer) rattle, wood trembling against glass. He stares at her for a few seconds before he walks over to the window sill, picks his bag up from the ground, tearing the zipper open. He sifts through his clothes, muttering in his head, and he doesn't know how, how he hasn't reached the bottom of the bag yet, fingers wrapped in cotton and jeans.
She waits patiently.
Dean throws the bag to the ground. Something clatters inside; he can't find it.
“We didn't really win, did we?” he says and he hates sounding so defeated.
She shrugs, her head moving from side to side, thinking. “No. Not really.” She raises her hand. “But--you killed Lucifer. That has to count for something.”
Dean runs his hand through his hair. He leans against the window sill, looking outside, and it must be too dark, so dark, that he can't see. The light in here, the sudden white light, swallows everything else. “But how many people died in the crossfire?”
She waits. “Maybe you should have said yes to Michael.” She sounds--regretful.
Dean is startled, forgetting for a moment that she really only exists in his head. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “Maybe I should have.”
“But you did everything you could. You gave up so much, suffered more than enough.” She's starting to sound sad and Dean needs her to shut up, to leave, he can't do this, not now, not ever. He promised, promised himself a long time ago, that he was going to stop thinking about this, that he was going to make himself remember, because it will kill him, he knows it will.
“Obviously not,” Dean bites back. Then (and this sounds so much more like her, with the sad, ruthless tone): “I should have been able to save them all.”
She turns in her chair again. Dean can't see her eyes, the glare of the light, her face caught in a flare, stretching it across a dark grey back wall, distorted and shaken. He can't see her eyes, but they might look like his. “When did the world become your responsibility?”
For a moment, Dean doesn't have an answer. “When I made it mine,” he answers.
She leans her head to the side, smiling. “Atoning for sins, Dean?” She waits, licks her lips and her eyes widen (because his do). “Do you believe you're going to Heaven?”
Dean bristles. Turns away from her. “I'm just doing my job,” he says, because he is, he always is and it doesn't matter what he gets in the end because he makes sure it doesn't matter. He pushes his hand against the glass, hears the bump of his knuckles against the window pane, feels the warmth of a far-away sun, twisted into the glass he can hardly see.
She pauses. She shifts in her seat, the chair creaking. “Your angel friend.”
“Cas,” Dean says, quickly. He rubs his eyes.
“He's gone?” she asks.
Dean shrugs. “I don't know.”
“You don't care,” she replies.
“I care,” Dean says, but it's a little too quiet, not violent enough. He doesn't know.
“Then why don't you know?”
“I have other things to worry about,” he says, because he does, he always does. He turns back to the bed, avoids looking at her at all, looks down at his feet instead, his bare feet soaking up the dark floorboards. “I'm tired,” he says.
“Stop deflecting, Dean,” she says, her voice sharp, clipped. “Sit down. What about Sam?”
Dean stops by the end of the bed. He doesn't sit down. “He's good. Fine.”
She tilts her head, looking to the corner of the room. “Okay. Have you talked to him?”
Dean chuckles. “Of course I have. I've talked to him everyday for the last six months.”
“Have you really talked to him?” she asks. “About more than Lucifer and the job and the apocalypse and whatever else you talk about so you don't have to talk.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, a little unsure of himself.
“He almost said yes to Lucifer,” she says. He almost doesn't hear her. “Three months ago. You almost lost him.”
“But he didn't,” Dean says. “I didn't.”
“Almost,” she replies and she's demanding, close-mouthed and sly, but it's him, it's him, she's in his head, so he has to know that he's saying these things.
No, he's not, he can't, he wouldn't say these things, never has. No one talks to themselves; he's not insane. He can't be. He won't be.
“I've learned to put a lot more stock into what people actually do, not what they almost do,” Dean says. He walks around her and sits down on the bed. He's almost shocked that he can see her face perfectly, used to stretched features, wide white eyes and dull grins.
“That's good,” she says, nodding. “But you still hate him.”
(It's coming from somewhere, some place inside his head, and he shouldn't have to explain it, and yeah, yeah, he's going insane.) “I don't. I never did.”
“Just a little bit,” she insists.
“No!” Dean screams, slamming his hand down on the bed.
“Dean,” she whispers.
Dean drops his head into his hands, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes. Little blue and red dots carve into his eyelids. “What?”
“You're hiding.”
Dean stands up again. His skin is electric-heat and on fire. “I don't hate Sam.” He paces beside the bed. “I never could. Yeah, he made mistakes. I did, too. But I had stuff to deal with and I couldn't--I wasn't strong enough to let myself forgive him. I still had Hell in my head and--I felt betrayed.” He looks at her. She's looking at her hands. “And he made such stupid decisions and I hated that he went down that road.” He stops, his hands over his eyes. “But I never, never hated him.”
He's uneven, feels out of line, hysterical, lost in his own head, lost in the disaster of absent colour, the piercing cry that's ringing so far back in his mind, the cracks that are swelling through him. He's breathing and it doesn't seem to be enough and he won't look at her because he doesn't want to know. Should never have known, he was just trying to do what his dad wanted him to, he never asked for any of this, anything at all, just wanted to be left to the road, to his guns and his car, left to die bloody and alone and tired because it was all he could ever know.
“At least I got you talking,” she murmurs.
Dean opens his eyes. The room is dark again and everything crashes into silence. He sits back down. She looks at him.
“You really define yourself by other people.”
“I thought we went through this already,” Dean states.
She leans forward, elbows on her knees, her palms up towards him. “Maybe it's time to move on, Dean. Who are you going to be when everyone else does and you're left behind? It's time to be someone besides the leftover pieces of the people in your life.”
Dean laughs. He runs his hand over his mouth and shakes his head. “I am someone, okay?”
“Right.” She bobs her head back and forth, her fingers tapping on her legs. “You're a son, a brother, a vessel, hunted by Heaven and Hell, a friend, a martyr.” She looks up at the ceiling, her hands folded on her stomach. “Sounds like, to me, that you're always someone else's.”
“Whatever,” Dean mutters. “I don't have time for this.”
(Shut up, he tells himself. Shut up, I don't need this. I know already, I know.)
She looks back at him. “Who are you?”
“I am all those people,” Dean says and it's the best answer, the only answer, he has and, of course, it's not enough. “That's who I am.”
“You're okay with that?”
Dean shrugs. “Yeah. I don't know anything else.” He gets up then. Walks over to the dresser again. Opens the top drawer again. He knows she's watching him. He's uncomfortable.
“Do you still think about Hell, Dean?” she asks.
“We talked,” Dean bites out. “You can leave.”
“I won't leave until you're ready.”
“I'm ready,” Dean says, words clipped, looking to be too bold, too assertive, when he's only here, in his head.
She looks down at her lap. After a few seconds, she looks back up, grinning. “Obviously not.”
Dean's found the containers, the little pretty pills that Sam swiped from a pharmacy in Texas a few weeks ago, the ones that made Dean say, god dammit, Sam, you don't need these and took them for himself, hid them in his pockets, in drawers, in little holes in the Impala that only he knew and Sam never found them. He knows Sam wants them, had that steady, angry look in his eyes and he fought with Dean over nothing, like they always do, but Dean kept them because he couldn't see Sam vulnerable again. But he kept them because, one night, he couldn't sleep. But he kept them because he needs them to stop thinking. He kept them because they're his.
He thought they were all gone. They still rattle in the bottle when he shakes them. “No,” Dean says. “I don't think about Hell.”
“It's hard to forget,” she says.
“Yeah, well.” He pops open three pill containers. Shakes them out on the top of the dresser, pushing them into piles: baby blue, baby pink, baby yellow. “I have.”
“Those pills won't make me go away,” she says loudly, like Dean can't hear her, even when she's in his head. “What are you taking?”
“Advil,” he says. “Valium. Cyanide. I don't know.”
She clicks her tongue, disapproving. He thinks he's being funny.
Dean grabs the bottle of whiskey from the corner of the dresser. He wants to say, it's harder when the end of the world actually ends, just so she knows, just so she (he) can stop asking, but he knows she already knows that.
“Dean, Hell's a scary place.”
“I know,” Dean says and he doesn't mean to sound arrogant, but he always has, always will. Most of the time, he likes himself like this. “I've been.”
“You can't deal with this by not dealing with it at all,” she chides.
He picks up three pills, one from each pile: baby blue, baby pink, baby yellow. He doesn't know what they do, but he likes them just the same. He swallows them with a mouthful of warm whiskey. “It seems to work well for me.”
“You're breaking apart,” she says. “You're empty. Everyone says you're empty.”
Dean takes another pill, the little baby yellow one, and swallows it dry.
“Women, sex, food. Ugly, ugly vices, Dean.” She sounds so protective, so concerned, like she (he) could actually care.
“I'm fine,” Dean says and his words leave scars, bruises, even in him.
“You're always fine,” she says, callous and loud. Quickly: “Your angel friend.”
“Cas,” Dean snaps. “His name is Cas.”
“I know.” (Yeah, she does.) “Where is he?”
Dean thinks. “Sleeping.”
“Angels don't sleep.”
Dean's stopped breathing. Maybe it's the whiskey, the white blur behind his eyes. “He's not an angel anymore,” he says. He's quiet now, hollow and golden.
“He hasn't been for a long time,” she says and pauses. Dean thinks of broken machines, used parts, things that never work. “He bleeds easy.”
“You're sick,” Dean says and doesn't really mean it.
“I'm you.” She leans back, her chair tipping on its hind legs. “And Sam?”
“He's fine,” Dean says. “God, I already said it--we're fine!” He swings his arm out and the whiskey spills out over his hand.
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “No. You've never been okay. You just like to think you are.”
He takes two more pills, baby blue, likes the taste and the colour and the way they make him think about nothing; swallows these dry, too, and sets the open whiskey bottle down on the floor. He says, “I'm going back to bed.”
“I'll be here when you wake up,” she says, her voice so soft and winding.
“No, you won't.” Dean sits on the edge of the bed. He doesn't move to get under the covers.
“Oh, Dean,” she says and she thinks it's funny because she's laughing. “Yes I will. I always will.”
She flickers, short, premonition-like, phantoms and ghosts that shudder at the sound of shot guns. “That thing you hate, that monster you see, every time you look in the mirror? That's me.”
And she's right, she's right.
“What's wrong with you?” And Dean remembers sounding this ruined years ago when he thought, yeah, hey, the world isn't mine to save.
She stands up and shrugs. “Whatever is wrong with you, I guess.”
-
He wakes up to the sound of muffled footsteps, the smell of cooking bacon and the world not falling apart. It all seems so wrong.
-
“Morning,” Sam says brightly when Dean appears in the stairwell. He raises his cup of coffee. “Feels good to actually say that.”
Dean breathes deeply. “Yeah,” he mutters, rubbing the back of his head.
“Hungry?” Sam looks back at the table where there are plates of toast and scrambled eggs and bacon.
Dean waves his hand in front of his face. Sam shrugs. He grabs a book off the table and moves towards the living room.
“Sam, hey--” Dean stops.
Sam looks over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“You're good?” Dean asks. “You know--with everything.”
Sam's smile moves through his face like waves. “Yeah, Dean. I'm good. We're alive. Lucifer's dead. I'm good.”
“Okay. Good.”
Sam steps back, back towards Dean. He sets down his book, his cup. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Dean says quickly. “I'm great. Just--I'm glad we're both okay. That we have time, you know? Time to make things right.”
Sam's smile falters, caught, and he looks at his hands. Dean wants to know what this is. “Yeah, Dean, me too.”
When Dean looks at the walls, he recognizes colour. Baby blue, baby pink, baby yellow. Sam, dressed in baby blue, the walls in baby pink, the table and chairs in baby yellow.
(We're going to try this again, he hears and he's fighting, now.)
“Uh--” Dean looks at his own hands and his colourless. “Where's Cas?”
For a moment, Sam looks torn, broken. Then his face softens. “He's sleeping. You'd think he'd never slept before.”
-
Castiel is sitting up in his bed, reading. The sun is baby yellow and paints everything in the room in soft reds and oranges and browns. Something is slipping, even now, and Dean's holding on because he has to, because it means so much more than she'll ever know, and he feels her here, now, waiting on him, watching him, and even in this room with the unfocused borders, colours like brushfire and strange, autumn leaves.
“Dean.” Castiel sounds surprised. He's in soft reds, his eyes white, his skin pale.
“Hey.” Dean stays in the doorway. “How are you feeling?”
Castiel closes his book. “Fine. How are you?”
“Living,” Dean says. Castiel looks at him fondly. “So. Uh--you're probably leaving soon, right?”
Castiel frowns. “Leaving--where?”
“Well, you must have done enough to buy your golden ticket back into Heaven, right? God must be giving you some sort of second chance.”
(But it doesn't matter because none of this, none of Sam or Castiel, here and now, is true.)
Castiel looks amused, so amused. “It doesn't work that way, Dean.”
“Why not?” Though he probably already knows, because he's got something echoing in his head, something he heard months and months ago: it's gone, Dean, I'm gone. He's sure he heard it, even if he's making it up, because none of this is real.
“I lost my grace. I cannot get it back.”
“Anna got hers back.”
“It was only hidden. Lost.” Castiel runs his finger down the spine of the book. He looks terrible and lost and kind, like angels should. “Mine has been taken.”
Dean doesn't want to give this time to sink in.
“So, there's nothing you can do?”
Castiel shrugs and his sad, sad eyes aren't so sad anymore. “I'm afraid not.”
“I'm sorry, Cas.”
Castiel raises his hand, bowing his head. “Please, Dean, do not apologize. This was my choice.”
“Dammit, Cas, I still feel guilty,” Dean says. He takes a step past the doorway. Castiel looks at him, his eyes wide, afraid. Dean steps back. “I--I practically brow-beat you into going rogue.”
“I know you do, Dean,” Castiel says, quickly. “I wouldn't be here, now, if I didn't have the utmost faith in your unfailing humanity.”
Dean shuffles his feet, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I do not regret this, Dean. I will--adjust.”
“You shouldn't have to,” Dean says and he means it, he means every word.
“I did what I think I was destined to do.” Castiel smiles, but it's not right, not the same as every other smile. It's more of a dismissal, a laying down of arms, acceptance for what should have never come. “God has a plan for every one of us. I believe I was meant to follow you, to trust you, to fall, to end up here. We did what was right, Dean. We must have faith in that.”
The room spins then, shifts and Dean falls to his knees, the taste of whiskey and pretty little pills in his mouth.
(Your angel friend bleeds easy. He's even wearing red.)
-
He's on the porch. He looks out and everything is grey, charred and burned, except for the baby yellow sun. There's no sound, no heat. He looks to his right and she's sitting on a wicker chair, backed into the corner.
“Why are you back here?” Dean waves his hand at her, like she will actually, really go away and it's kind of foolish, he knows. “I fixed everything.”
She looks at him, her eyes kind and motherly, head tipped down. “Think, Dean.”
He feels the earth shift, ever so slightly, beneath his feet. He looks back to the house and it's not the same. “I'm still sleeping.”
“You've been sleeping for awhile,” she says. She rubs her hands together. “But, of course, you knew that as soon as you stepped into that kitchen and talked to Sam.”
“I was trying not to--” He stops. He doesn't know what he's saying. He walks to the steps, wanting to run, but he doesn't step down. He leans against the support. “They're--”
“Not dead,” she says. “Well, almost.”
He smells iron in the air and the baby yellow sun turns blood-red. “Sam's hurt.”
“War has its casualties,” she says, distracted, far away. “But he'll live.”
Dean looks at her. He's cold. “That's what you say.”
“It's what you believe, Dean.”
Dean shrugs, feels something inside him ignite, something inside him burn, distrusting and vast, but he can't move. He won't move. He finds, yeah, he doesn't want to.
“You're wondering about your angel friend.” She waits. He says nothing because she knows. So does he. “He's not here.”
Dean nods, scuffing his foot against the wood. “He made it back to Heaven.”
“He did.” She sounds happy. He's happy, maybe, too. “You still feel guilty because you never did apologize. Now, you'll never get the chance.”
“Why can't you just leave me alone?” He doesn't want her to go, not now, not really, but he needs to say something, always say something, so this doesn't have to make sense.
She's standing beside him. She reaches out, touching the side of Dean's face and her hands are warm and her eyes are such a beautiful green. “I think it's time for you to wake up now, Dean.”
He does.
-
Colour settles, light moves to one corner of the room and it's hard to see.
In the distance, an alarm is blaring.
Dean scrambles from his bed, feet tangled in the sheets. He falls forward, hands out, catching on the bed opposite his. His fingers hit something cold, sticky. He looks up, met with Sam's half-closed eyes, weak smile, hands folded over his side.
“Hey,” Sam says. “Welcome back.”
“Oh God,” Dean says, pulling himself onto the bed, prying Sam's hands away: brown-black stain decorated with new wet spots of blood.
“I--I tried patching myself up.” Sam hisses between his teeth when Dean lifts his shirt to see the wound. “I stopped--stopped most of the bleeding.”
“Jesus.” Dean feels his voice catch in his throat. The cut is deep, white and pink, bleeding from between the haphazard stitches. “Why didn't you wake me up?”
“You wouldn't,” Sam says and, now, he's starting to sound scared and when Dean looks up, Sam's got those far-away eyes, shimmering and shallow in the lack of light. “I thought you were dead. Dean, I thought you were dead.”
(He only wishes he was.)
“I'm not,” Dean mutters, running a hand over Sam's head. “Okay? I'm not.”
Sam nods, face twisting when Dean pushes him into a sitting position, pointing towards the door when Dean asks for the medical supplies. There's a mirror hanging by the door--he looks at his hands, his feet, tripping in the grey-dark room,
Dean's threading a needle, pulling out a bottle of vodka, handing Sam towels and sheets, when he asks, “Where's Cas?”
And Sam looks broken, torn. Then his face softens and it screams back to a face Dean thought he knew. “Dean, he's gone.”
Dean should have known that angels don't sleep.
-
(Dean sees her again, five hundred and thirty miles later. He glances in the rear view in the middle of the day as they head towards South Dakota in hopes of life in a junkyard.
She smiles at him, endearing and kind and warm, something he missed the first time. And she has those brilliant green eyes, earning his attention, and he misses when monsters were just monsters, not in his heart and in his head.
He won't think about it because no one has ever asked him to before, no one has ever told him to. He will be as he always has and he will listen for the sounds of numb hesitation and the numbing of unlocking and he will run, as he always has.
Because no one's ever asked him to stay and listen and he never will.)
-
They're in South Dakota on Sunday and Dean sees a spray-painted sign that says Someone took paradise from us. He glances over at his brother, giant and sleeping, filling up the the space of windows and the warm seats beneath them. He won't let himself think of the elsewhere, the blood staining Sam's lips, the mute change of something cruel and devouring that he can't fix, can't take back and, God, he wants to take it back. He hears music and the soft, restful shame that breaks him, quietly, quietly, and he'll move faster, faster than Sam, than this, than the world and it all. He won't be in that alluring, loathsome place with Sam alone, not again.
Dean feels the crippling riot of mutant emptiness, something missing and it brings a hideous suffering that he's known for years. There's the sweet, angry taste of disappointment that screams with the world around him. It's more like bad faith, more like you're leaving, you're leaving without telling me, more and more like victories losing meaning where they never had any merit at all. He's having trouble remembering the sounds of wings and he's not missing it, not yet.
He's distracted, distracting, moving towards thunder and grey-blue skies where he can hear another end calling for him; and he leaves the rest where it belongs--behind.
He finds it fitting.
-
end.
When there's nothing left to burn, you must set yourself on fire
(Anonymous)