chuck/castiel (dean/castiel) | You're the dark room he'll always remember
YOU'RE THE DARK ROOM HE'LL ALWAYS REMEMBER
chuck/castiel, implied dean/castiel. pg-13. spoilers for 5.04, the end; drug abuse, character death. ~4,570.
(c) title from you have a face carved of stone by cesare pavese
a/n: for thevinegarworks on the most glorious occassion of celebrating her birth, which was well over two months ago, but hey! i did it :) *gropes* love you long time, darling ♥
You're the dark room he'll always remember
1.
It's the box of bomb parts under his bed, uncovered, hidden in a way that he thought it would never be looked for. Triggers, components, red and blue wires. Black ash on ends that he rubs with his thumbs, pressing the exposed copper fillings in his palm, everything turning grey against his white skin.
Chuck'll find them and he won't tell because he's not supposed to know. Finds them in Dean's cabin, corner sticking out from under the unmade sheets, Chuck not supposed to be knowing, never knowing. First time he finds them the most he remembers is whiskey breath, slated light, a low grey moon and the familiar warm, the uncomfortable certainty, the taste of dirt and chemicals in the trees, the smell of precision damage, a little like gun powder.
He'll go back, has gone, found new parts that someone's added, new little black boxes with smooth uneven edges, new detonators and new spools of silver-metal wire. Delicate and gleaming, turns them over and over in his hands. Something to admire, to want, to distract and need.
Bomb parts like body parts. Veins for wires, triggers for arms, detonators for hearts. Chuck comes back and back and back again, lays them out, builds someone, a new person, up, leaves out skin and bones and blood, no one needs them, they're just getting in the way. It's seamless, tied together, those little red wires, those green and blue ones, too, twirled up and around triggers, all twisted into so many detonator hearts.
Chuck is coming back and back, again and again, waiting to finish, always rebuilding this person, this someone, in different shapes and it always looks the same, but he never finds a fuse, nothing to sizzle the coloured rubber, to break apart plastic shells, the ring and scream in his ears. Never going to find the fuse among the bomb parts because that's someone else and they'll never be the fire and end of such a thing, no matter how much Dean asks, begs, wants.
Castiel is triumphant in becoming, not the being. This is where he'll stay, Chuck knows this, until Dean burns first.
2.
They cradle their violence, let's protect it, make it white shadows. Not that they ever wanted it that way; someone told them to, not with their words, tangling their language, but in the cruel idleness of a leader, the forgiveness they gave that was never theirs, never his, in the trip-slip-fall of absolution, lessened, sharpened. Chuck's watching from the side, fascinated and apart, blinded in cracks and fissures that hide away beneath all their skin.
They're going to forget the rest, they're built of all this destruction they want to make, going to take it like they wanted it. Fire with fire, they're not becoming it, they're taking it, control. Rise to it, rise above it, defeat it, abandon it, burn it kick it abuse it into the ground until it gives, a great shift and heave (heightened power-play, someone jokes in the stilled after-silence of an explosion), don't be afraid of murder, of blood on your hands, it's on all your hands. Control it, use it. Forget the rest. Make yourself. (They're strange creatures now, god-awful and tipping with reckless abandonment; would say former ghosts, but it's a trigger pulled too soon and no one believes in ghosts like they used to anymore, not threatening enough when they're too busy killing the living. Yes, such strange creatures they've become.)
It's all about control. This is what Chuck learns. This is what he tells himself he knows.
“Give him something.”
All that naked, wasted grace, the absolute perfect tragedy of it. Sometimes, Chuck stills feels it (sure he feels it, too, caught standing on the stone well, arms lifted to his sides, could've been raining, no one remembers, but he was yelling, language all his own, and everyone came to watch; not stunned or afraid, just curious. No one really knows, can't remember, maybe he fell and survived, maybe someone pulled him back. Curiosity, control). Like ripples, like water, reconfigured into motions, tiny little compartments where things make sense: he feels it, that absence, because he is it.
Give him something.
Then--after, all that hard sacrifice of wishing pulled to the edges, in the light he'll take, in the endless dark he'll bring. Chuck's always wondered, if it's how everything will really come undone, that Dean could be a monster, violent and deliberate, calculated actions, forgetting why this was, why his anger was him, but using it all the same. Dean never asked, never rationalized, had a faith in the unbelief, had a faith in humanity, in the vile and restless and unquestionable golden nature, like no other: let him face death, let him conquer it as he might, let it tremble before him, fearing his name. This is what Dean thinks, this is what Dean believes: this is what he tells himself he knows.
Chuck sees it.
Dean throws him forward, fingers slipping across skin, catching on the back of the sleeve, pause, wait, bring him back: Chuck waits, watches, has seen this before, like a play, he knows all the moves. It's not visions, it's practice. Dean shoves. Castiel stumbles over his feet, to his knees, fingers stretched across the floorboards when he lands. Breathe heavy, then stop (Chuck knows this). Dean stands in the doorway, hands on the frame and he's going to block out the sun.
Chuck can't look at him. Turns his eyes to the window, bars across this one, distracted, moving down to the lock, never touched, rusted and blue-grey metal.
“Fix it,” Dean says, snap of tongue, crash of teeth, nothing ever stops breaking.
Control it, control this, this fast and beating dying, the cracked hands, the blueblack cold, a hate they have, for themselves, for each other, for what they couldn't stop and for what they brought, so strong that they're left wandering, ghosts in their own right. How ironic it sounds, it looks, in his head, Castiel still waiting, the rattle-hum of a losing it, control.
Control it, control everything. Fix it, he says.
Fix it, Chuck thinks. Knows.
3.
It was hanging for a moment, just a moment, all that truly blessed silence. Then, the sweeping of light and the swell of burning flesh. Barrelling roar of life--no, sounds, something painfully familiar, something he's sure he could recognize if he wanted to find it to remind him badly enough. Blinding blue, city sounds, cold air.
He wakes up, Castiel's hands on his chest, blank-blue eyes looking over his head and he knows what this is: it's got to be the end.
“Get up,” Castiel whispers.
The car door handles were slick with mud. Chuck rubbed it off on the seats. Dean asked, What happened; Chuck never gave an answer. He was sleeping, passed out, dreaming maybe, but he doesn't know. Useless, Dean says, tongue-clicking, Castiel nodding curtly, suddenly; Chuck knows.
Four hundred miles from air laced with acid, the furl of snow-grey ash, a taste stuck on his tongue, Dean drags him out of the back seat. Hands him an empty duffel, handgun, tucks a buckknife in his jacket pocket.
“We need medical supplies,” he had said, steering Chuck towards the pharmacy, windows black in an empty bright-coloured town, shelves pushed against the glass, red half-price and sale signs handwritten, slanted and uneven. “We're going to get food.”
Castiel had looked at him, a scattering, hollowed look, something Chuck likes to think about later, trying to figure out what it meant. Sometimes, Chuck's sure it was a plea, something like save me, please. Other times, it's the unknown losing (control, already), the close-mouthed disaster, finely wound so that it's hard to see. Prettied up in pills, in philosophy and all the same books he reads, in the languages no one knows, only him, just him.
So many different shades of dark in that place, Chuck finally understand what darkness could really mean. He didn't read the labels. Grabbed blindly, a strange compulsion in his head, the clatter of plastic against cardboard echoing back at him. Couldn't zip up the bag properly; sat out on the curb, bag between his feet, watching, waiting.
They came like birds, running fast, choking up air, laughing so that Chuck could hear. For a moment, they're blurred, fingers twined, slipping apart when Chuck can see their faces. They stop and Chuck stands, duffel clutched in his hands. Castiel is leaning over, hands on his knees, head turned to the side, looking at Dean. Smirk, lips tilted. Dean smiles, too, head tilted up, watching the clear white sky. Chuck watches. The sound of air rips past them, tearing into pieces, elastic shards turning around them, the heat of the fire felt on the other side of the town.
“You blew up the grocery store?” Chuck asks and Dean just laughs.
(Not enough medical tape or gauze, Dean said in the car, sifting through the bag, throwing. Enough, more than enough, pills in white boxes and bottles, innocence and naivety in the lack of understanding of things like Dolophine and Buprenex, but the names meaning nothing, can't read them anyway.
“You're looking after that,” Dean had said. “Inventory and stock. Sort of.” Chewing on his thumb, fingers moving over the stereo, music louder, rumbling under their feet.
Chuck was turning a bottle of Vicodin over in his hands. “Where are we going?”
It was Castiel's eyes Chuck caught in the rearview mirror when he glanced up.)
4.
He's a coffin builder, too, a hobby he wanted when his words were diminished to the names of prescriptions and canned soup, vocabulary taken over by the fantastic proportion of codes and numbers and locks and keys; it comes around when days are left without true need of what they've come to live, without the steady tremor and sinking in the bones of this is how it will all end, carrying tarps and nails and warped lumber, siding off barns and houses and sheds that Dean brings back in the back of trucks, never saying where he was, but Chuck can smell blood, that sticky iron weight. They're always coming back with cream-skinned bodies, pale and warm; sometimes Chuck recognizes them, knows their names.
Croats got 'em, Dean will say. No one questions him. No one ever really knows.
Castiel comes with, brings the shovel, leads Chuck through the trees with all that absent grace that eases into abrupt finality; he's the one to dig the shallow graves in the woods behind the camp. He tears off nearby branches while Chuck lines up the boards with a hammer and nails, strips the bark and leaves, ties them into a cross with twine wrapped around his wrists, marking the graves.
(“Are you gonna pray?” Chuck asked, once, when it started, when he thought that he was right about some of this.
Castiel had stood up, regarding the graves with a tired suffering; raises his hands to peer in the half-dark, surprised at the dirt etched into his skin, stretched and raw and fingernails bleeding. “No,” he answered.)
When the blood dries on their hands, they stand together by the river, soaking their clothes in the muddy water, sitting on rock, scrubbing their hands clean. Chuck will glance sideways, Castiel's slender red fingers skimming across the waters surface and maybe grace never left him at all, the suspended and tortured ease of his body, so much more than a part of it, bending and turning into swift smooth lines, arrogance and old-earth fear burnt into all the sinews. Laughter caught on his lips, something hidden (a secret, a truth only known to only one, only meant for one) that Chuck wants, only rewarded with the thin circle of unearthly blue eyes when he looks up and catches Chuck watching.
(Miss the colour of his eyes and know what it means. Control it.)
But--it's stained all the same in the end and Chuck wakes up every morning, sure that his fingers are dripping with it.
Sometimes, every thing's blood-dimmed and too blunt in it's reality and they say fuck it, it's over, really, we're done, leaving the bodies on the bank, tired of their hollow eyes and stitched lips. They're usually washed away by morning, when Chuck goes back to check. Castiel never asks, Castiel never cares.
5.
Thieves of religion, is what they are. Someone's been praying at night, a Bible left on the front steps of Dean's cabin. He's gone for days after that and Castiel's in Chuck's cabin all those nights, talking in that language no one knows and Chuck wants to ask who he's talking to (fuse and detonators, he knows, fuck he knows).
He comes back and Castiel's gone again and Chuck is back to sheets of paper with numbers, sleeping pills that don't work, rationing need and want into separate piles, different categories, he can't think. Castiel's gone again and he doesn't think he knows what it means, but he does, oh he does.
Their little red cabins: smashed out windows, plywood bunk beds and grey faded graffiti (dates and names carved into studs, Bible verses about God's power and God's love and God's presence, but they all forgot Revelations and what would happen to all that love in the end), flower-pattern sheets over windows, blankets over doors, bare mattresses, no need to sleep. Croats circling the camp, maybe demons, they're building fences and setting up salt lines and devil's trap, and it never ends. Their little red cabins, where they hide, and Chuck's scared, but no one else is. They can't be.
Castiel is coming on his own, to the cabin, soon enough. Dean doesn't stand in the doorway much anymore, giving Castiel to him, telling him, give him something, sounding like fix it, and Chuck thinks he can't, really knows he can't.
No one asks, no one says. Castiel knows what he wants. Chuck doesn't, no, not yet, not anymore.
6.
(He lies every time he speaks, such tricky little words, sounding like thunder and so holy, each one lost before you can hear it, words coming next right after, faster faster, and it's contrived and silly because it can't make sense. It's worse off because it does and they tell themselves, yes, yes I do understand, I know, you're right. Lures them in, lets them have belief, religion, he knows what he wants, with all those tricky little words. There is much more of nothing now and this, this is much more.)
“He was beautiful.”
Chuck won't listen. Castiel is standing by the window, wearing Dean's clothes, wearing his misery, too, that sharp contrasted beast, all Dean's own, too, so recognizable. He's wearing everything of Dean's because he wants to, sure he has to. Chuck is weary of sacrifices. (Fingers dancing across the window panes; when Chuck does look, he's sure Castiel is smiling, the tilt of lips.)
“I'm sure he loved me once.”
They're on the river bank. Castiel's knee-deep in the water, green-black, cold and it could be spring. Chuck is sitting on the left over tarp, blood-fingers bending against the shift of the earth. (Castiel's standing with his arms out again, shoulders moving, he wants to fly; he told Chuck, said he can still remember it, almost, that this is the closest he can feel that it could have been.)
“I think I still do.”
Castiel is sitting on the end of Chuck's bed. Chuck doesn't have to ask him anymore. He's counting out the pills, Castiel's hands open on the blanket. He's humming a song Chuck knows. (What now, what now, Chuck doesn't know, something comes apart, a sweet danger that pulls Chuck back in, should move back, move back, but oh--the touch of his hands on his cheek, Chuck won't leave this, can't.)
“You do,” Chuck says.
Castiel smiles and it's never looked right.
7.
Chuck hears Castiel cry out first. He puts in the gun shot, the snap of bones, skin on asphalt, after.
Give him something, fix it.
Castiel's on the side of the road, his gun at his side. He's panting, sitting, leaning back on his arms, staring at Chuck.
“Get up,” Chuck whispers, begs, glancing over his shoulder, no one come, no one. “Cas, get up.”
“I can't--” Castiel leans forward, arms out. Chuck reaches out, pulls him up. Castiel stands, falls back down, eyes tight-shut, lips twisted. “I can't walk.”
“Try!” Chuck says.
Castiel shakes his head, no no no, falls back onto the road, his hands over his eyes; Chuck is shocked by the defeat, by the quiet give up and let go. “Fuck, I can't.”
So, this is the end and this is what it looks like. So many different shades of darkness, Chuck forgot. It was starting to look the same, the same fire, the same desperation, the same weakness and wandering.
Give him something, fix it.
Chuck does (plans it in four-step rhythm, the story he'll tell himself because of it, he needs to hear it like it's all make-believe: you, he tells himself, you carry him back to the truck, tell him shut up shut up I'm driving, he's crying out again; carry him up the hill, carry him up the wet grass, carry him up the stairs, to the bed; no one's come back, no one knows, they will; pull down the bottles, whatever comes down into your open hands first, it'll work, and feed it to him quick, wait for his eyes to roll, to lay down, hands resting on the back of your neck; lock him in his own room, leave him, back against the wall, slide down, head in your hands, you can't think).
He tries, he tries.
8.
Outside a mess hall they never use. No one goes in but Dean, sometimes Castiel. No one wonders what they do, what they could possibly be saying. Chuck sits underneath the windows and never hears.
Dean's standing on the steps. Chuck's kicking shattered pieces of pavement through the grass.
“Any visions I should know about?” Dean calls out, asks.
They stare at each other like they're kids, like they have a secret too big for the world, something only the both of them understand and no one else ever will. They're going to wrap it up in stolen blankets and tape shut a shoebox, dig a hole in the sand at the beach and bury it, hope the tide washes it away. It'll mean something. They're kids. It all means something.
Sure, it all means something. It's just not what he thinks it should be.
Chuck hasn't. So, he shrugs, stops and looks at his feet. “No, none.”
Footsteps, a thunder and crash down the steps. Chuck's against the wall, head snapped back, Dean's elbow under this throat. “You're lying!” Dean yells. “Something, anything--anything about Sam--”
(He forgot. Right--make yourself. Control, Dean had said. What a great leader. Let us forget.)
Chuck is trying to push him off, fingertips and chewed nails nothing against memory and the brutal tragedy, the right honesty of it. “I haven't!” Chuck yells back, but Dean won't hear.
“You've had to seen something--”
“Dean.”
Dean's hands drop, too fast. Pulled back on strings, maybe, puppet-like. Marionette dancing, strange knowing smiles and unblinking eyes, asking and never answering. This could be them, all of them. Dean steps back and Chuck's hands go to his own throat. He looks up, to his right: Castiel is standing on the front landing. Castiel is looking at Dean. Of course.
“We had a meeting,” Castiel says (easy grin), that spin of words, the tricky ones that are packaged with the most horrendous and exquisite of lies, the lilt of meaning, the vain and sweet and warped. Chuck likes the sound of that.
Dean rubs his hands together, skips the steps two at a time and lets the door fall shut behind him. Chuck crawls along the side, sits and waits under the windows. He hears nothing, not even footsteps, the entire time he stays there.
Castiel doesn't come to the cabin that night. Chuck should know better, but he never knows.
9.
He's stolen those bomb parts again, taken them back to his cabin, hiding them in his own box, under his own bed, his own. He almost has enough, three hearts, too many veins, waiting for a fuse, that fire and kerosene. He has one, knows one, but it won't fit. The parts don't ever fit.
For now, he's waiting, won't wait, wandering those narrow hallways in black dreams, white shapes, grey shapes, shapes like people he should know.
He sketches stories into the frame of the house, carving letters that form words that form syntax. He hates the way it looks, scratches it out with his nails. No one asks about the gouges in the wall. He can't write, won't write, nothing to write because he'd be lying and it would never, never be this. Tangle your language, it'll never be enough.
Castiel's learning to count his own pills, singing out the numbers, let them be confused with rhymes and quiet. Castiel's learning to hide the pills in his cheeks, takes more than he should, Dean said to stop it, that's enough, and Chuck's been trying to say no. But Castiel's learning, he's fast, he knows what he wants.
Chuck doesn't. He's learning to watch Castiel hide pills underneath his tongue and not say anything.
10.
Flood lights.
Someone's got out. Someone, something's, got in.
Trip wires in the bushes, they should know better.
Out of bed, out the door, looking out the window, blurred jagged people running past. Chuck walks down the steps, one, two, sits. Hands in his hair, he's waiting. No one says anything.
Minutes pass, no gunshots, no smell of burning. They'll never be able to tell by screams; they haven't heard fear in what seems years. Those blurred jagged people coming back, whichway glances of bright white eyes.
Someone's got out.
Flood lights snap off and they're thrown in and out now, reflected by the lights from windows. Theses lights start going out, voices echoing in the trees, rolling through the dry grass.
“Chuck.”
It's later. All the lights are off. Chuck looks up, unfolds his arms, hugs his knees to his chest. Dean pulls Castiel into the light; yellow-pale, blood on his lips, red cheek, red eye.
Chuck stands. “What happened?”
Dean shoves Castiel forward. Castiel grabs onto the banister, fingers curling around the wood. It creaks under his weight.
“Watch him,” Dean says and walks away.
The things he should have overheard but never did. The things he could have known, what he could have seen. The same red cabins, scattered, row by row, doors used for coffins, shut you up and lock you out. The things he could have heard Dean say, heard Castiel plead.
Slide down the wall, legs spread out, head down. Chuck kneels in front of him. Someone got out, Castiel got out, even if it were only for a minute. He's shaking, the melancholy wind-up that Chuck's seen so many times before, a gentle come-down after, second chances all over again. Maybe he was flying.
“Where were you going?”
Castiel laughs, never right. “I don't know,” he whispers.
11.
(Dean's packing up the truck: mission, gotta say it like there's hope for it, should put faith in it, faith like God and saviours and things they all knew, know, using the words taught to them, not realizing they come round back on them. There'll be blood on his hands when he comes back, a coffin to build, a grave to dig, a cross of branches and twine, no prayers.
Chuck hands Dean his list, inventory, food, low supplies, he can't remember much anymore besides numbers and words without real thought.
“Get him off the pain meds,” Dean says, shoving the list into his pocket.
“What?”
“Cas.” Dean's pulling the canvas across the guns and boxes, tugging the rope down, looping it in knots. “I need him off the pain meds and focused. I can't have him fucking up again.”
“Yeah, okay.” Chuck steps back. “Sure.”)
They don't tell Dean.
Chuck fills the empty bottles, hides them in his own box under his bed, waits for Castiel to sit against the wall, hands open, eyes shut.
“Don't tell Dean,” Castiel whispers. Runs his fingers through Chuck's hair, resting on the back of his neck, pulls him close. Lips against his and for a moment, Chuck forgets. “Please, don't tell.”
Chuck won't.
They are (and their everything is) carted in boxes, stuffed between sheets, blood in their mouth like ribbons and bows, grinning pink teeth. (Try again, try better.) Stretch it out, rips the seams, let it spill, all the ugly and the unwanted and the riot: it's Castiel laughing. It's never sounded right. Some of the time, Chuck likes the sound. He can pretend it's always meaning what it's meant to.
12.
It was never about whether he could have it or not, because he couldn't, knew it always. Fuses and detonators, Chuck has to find his own. Thought he had. Their wires don't match, the fuse won't fit, and all these black plastic bones tremble for nothing. Chuck's tried, he's tried enough, but Dean is a different shade of red, different shade of blue and green, that Castiel always wants, always comes back and back and back to.
It was never about what he could have had because nothing was ever going to be his. It was never about being something more, trying to be something else, because it was never needed and Chuck thinks he's the better one, knowing that. It was never about stopping it, trying to hold them back, trying to save someone, anyone, just that one.
It's gotta be someone else, not Castiel, to destroy him. And Chuck, yeah, he wants to be destroyed, too.
13.
Someone Chuck barely knows, a young grey-eyed kid they found holed away in an empty apartment block right in the middle of a hot zone, dirty and angry and distrusting then, comes back, alone, letting the truck skid to a stop in the driveway. He leaves the gate open, doesn't reset the traps, pushes past Chuck as he comes running down the path. He's crying and he won't say anything when Chuck asks, but Chuck should know, he should already know.
“I'm sorry, I couldn't, I'm sorry.” He's pressed himself against the wall of the cabin, slamming his hands against the side, over over over. He won't look at Chuck, won't open his eyes. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”
To his knees in the mud. Push himself back up, how did he get there, maybe there are sirens sounding and he'll be dead soon. Didn't reset the traps, the alarms, the salt lines, the wire gate. He can't remember how he got here: it's all in his head, sure it is, the stories and the writing and the words he thought were all his own. It's in the edge of a knife, the blood under his nails, the gunpowder in his bones, ignite and let it burn.
Control, they said once.
Fuck control, Chuck thinks, just this once.
The boy is still screaming and Chuck remembers, fuses and wires. He opens the end gate, blood trickles onto his feet.
So, this is how the end looks. Such a different shade of darkness from the rest of all the other endings.
14.
He's building coffins, too, burying those bomb parts, all the black plastic bones and detonator hearts. Something triggered, something burned, set fire for one glorious moment, before they made themselves into silence and Chuck's alone, like it was meant for him, building coffins, carrying a shovel and making crosses from branches and twine.
He would pray if he knew the language, the one that only he could say, the disarming overture, startled tenor, slip-shift of words, taking it all off, shut you up, close you down, all those words he thought he understood.
He would pray if.
end.
chuck/castiel, implied dean/castiel. pg-13. spoilers for 5.04, the end; drug abuse, character death. ~4,570.
(c) title from you have a face carved of stone by cesare pavese
a/n: for thevinegarworks on the most glorious occassion of celebrating her birth, which was well over two months ago, but hey! i did it :) *gropes* love you long time, darling ♥
You're the dark room he'll always remember
1.
It's the box of bomb parts under his bed, uncovered, hidden in a way that he thought it would never be looked for. Triggers, components, red and blue wires. Black ash on ends that he rubs with his thumbs, pressing the exposed copper fillings in his palm, everything turning grey against his white skin.
Chuck'll find them and he won't tell because he's not supposed to know. Finds them in Dean's cabin, corner sticking out from under the unmade sheets, Chuck not supposed to be knowing, never knowing. First time he finds them the most he remembers is whiskey breath, slated light, a low grey moon and the familiar warm, the uncomfortable certainty, the taste of dirt and chemicals in the trees, the smell of precision damage, a little like gun powder.
He'll go back, has gone, found new parts that someone's added, new little black boxes with smooth uneven edges, new detonators and new spools of silver-metal wire. Delicate and gleaming, turns them over and over in his hands. Something to admire, to want, to distract and need.
Bomb parts like body parts. Veins for wires, triggers for arms, detonators for hearts. Chuck comes back and back and back again, lays them out, builds someone, a new person, up, leaves out skin and bones and blood, no one needs them, they're just getting in the way. It's seamless, tied together, those little red wires, those green and blue ones, too, twirled up and around triggers, all twisted into so many detonator hearts.
Chuck is coming back and back, again and again, waiting to finish, always rebuilding this person, this someone, in different shapes and it always looks the same, but he never finds a fuse, nothing to sizzle the coloured rubber, to break apart plastic shells, the ring and scream in his ears. Never going to find the fuse among the bomb parts because that's someone else and they'll never be the fire and end of such a thing, no matter how much Dean asks, begs, wants.
Castiel is triumphant in becoming, not the being. This is where he'll stay, Chuck knows this, until Dean burns first.
2.
They cradle their violence, let's protect it, make it white shadows. Not that they ever wanted it that way; someone told them to, not with their words, tangling their language, but in the cruel idleness of a leader, the forgiveness they gave that was never theirs, never his, in the trip-slip-fall of absolution, lessened, sharpened. Chuck's watching from the side, fascinated and apart, blinded in cracks and fissures that hide away beneath all their skin.
They're going to forget the rest, they're built of all this destruction they want to make, going to take it like they wanted it. Fire with fire, they're not becoming it, they're taking it, control. Rise to it, rise above it, defeat it, abandon it, burn it kick it abuse it into the ground until it gives, a great shift and heave (heightened power-play, someone jokes in the stilled after-silence of an explosion), don't be afraid of murder, of blood on your hands, it's on all your hands. Control it, use it. Forget the rest. Make yourself. (They're strange creatures now, god-awful and tipping with reckless abandonment; would say former ghosts, but it's a trigger pulled too soon and no one believes in ghosts like they used to anymore, not threatening enough when they're too busy killing the living. Yes, such strange creatures they've become.)
It's all about control. This is what Chuck learns. This is what he tells himself he knows.
“Give him something.”
All that naked, wasted grace, the absolute perfect tragedy of it. Sometimes, Chuck stills feels it (sure he feels it, too, caught standing on the stone well, arms lifted to his sides, could've been raining, no one remembers, but he was yelling, language all his own, and everyone came to watch; not stunned or afraid, just curious. No one really knows, can't remember, maybe he fell and survived, maybe someone pulled him back. Curiosity, control). Like ripples, like water, reconfigured into motions, tiny little compartments where things make sense: he feels it, that absence, because he is it.
Give him something.
Then--after, all that hard sacrifice of wishing pulled to the edges, in the light he'll take, in the endless dark he'll bring. Chuck's always wondered, if it's how everything will really come undone, that Dean could be a monster, violent and deliberate, calculated actions, forgetting why this was, why his anger was him, but using it all the same. Dean never asked, never rationalized, had a faith in the unbelief, had a faith in humanity, in the vile and restless and unquestionable golden nature, like no other: let him face death, let him conquer it as he might, let it tremble before him, fearing his name. This is what Dean thinks, this is what Dean believes: this is what he tells himself he knows.
Chuck sees it.
Dean throws him forward, fingers slipping across skin, catching on the back of the sleeve, pause, wait, bring him back: Chuck waits, watches, has seen this before, like a play, he knows all the moves. It's not visions, it's practice. Dean shoves. Castiel stumbles over his feet, to his knees, fingers stretched across the floorboards when he lands. Breathe heavy, then stop (Chuck knows this). Dean stands in the doorway, hands on the frame and he's going to block out the sun.
Chuck can't look at him. Turns his eyes to the window, bars across this one, distracted, moving down to the lock, never touched, rusted and blue-grey metal.
“Fix it,” Dean says, snap of tongue, crash of teeth, nothing ever stops breaking.
Control it, control this, this fast and beating dying, the cracked hands, the blueblack cold, a hate they have, for themselves, for each other, for what they couldn't stop and for what they brought, so strong that they're left wandering, ghosts in their own right. How ironic it sounds, it looks, in his head, Castiel still waiting, the rattle-hum of a losing it, control.
Control it, control everything. Fix it, he says.
Fix it, Chuck thinks. Knows.
3.
It was hanging for a moment, just a moment, all that truly blessed silence. Then, the sweeping of light and the swell of burning flesh. Barrelling roar of life--no, sounds, something painfully familiar, something he's sure he could recognize if he wanted to find it to remind him badly enough. Blinding blue, city sounds, cold air.
He wakes up, Castiel's hands on his chest, blank-blue eyes looking over his head and he knows what this is: it's got to be the end.
“Get up,” Castiel whispers.
The car door handles were slick with mud. Chuck rubbed it off on the seats. Dean asked, What happened; Chuck never gave an answer. He was sleeping, passed out, dreaming maybe, but he doesn't know. Useless, Dean says, tongue-clicking, Castiel nodding curtly, suddenly; Chuck knows.
Four hundred miles from air laced with acid, the furl of snow-grey ash, a taste stuck on his tongue, Dean drags him out of the back seat. Hands him an empty duffel, handgun, tucks a buckknife in his jacket pocket.
“We need medical supplies,” he had said, steering Chuck towards the pharmacy, windows black in an empty bright-coloured town, shelves pushed against the glass, red half-price and sale signs handwritten, slanted and uneven. “We're going to get food.”
Castiel had looked at him, a scattering, hollowed look, something Chuck likes to think about later, trying to figure out what it meant. Sometimes, Chuck's sure it was a plea, something like save me, please. Other times, it's the unknown losing (control, already), the close-mouthed disaster, finely wound so that it's hard to see. Prettied up in pills, in philosophy and all the same books he reads, in the languages no one knows, only him, just him.
So many different shades of dark in that place, Chuck finally understand what darkness could really mean. He didn't read the labels. Grabbed blindly, a strange compulsion in his head, the clatter of plastic against cardboard echoing back at him. Couldn't zip up the bag properly; sat out on the curb, bag between his feet, watching, waiting.
They came like birds, running fast, choking up air, laughing so that Chuck could hear. For a moment, they're blurred, fingers twined, slipping apart when Chuck can see their faces. They stop and Chuck stands, duffel clutched in his hands. Castiel is leaning over, hands on his knees, head turned to the side, looking at Dean. Smirk, lips tilted. Dean smiles, too, head tilted up, watching the clear white sky. Chuck watches. The sound of air rips past them, tearing into pieces, elastic shards turning around them, the heat of the fire felt on the other side of the town.
“You blew up the grocery store?” Chuck asks and Dean just laughs.
(Not enough medical tape or gauze, Dean said in the car, sifting through the bag, throwing. Enough, more than enough, pills in white boxes and bottles, innocence and naivety in the lack of understanding of things like Dolophine and Buprenex, but the names meaning nothing, can't read them anyway.
“You're looking after that,” Dean had said. “Inventory and stock. Sort of.” Chewing on his thumb, fingers moving over the stereo, music louder, rumbling under their feet.
Chuck was turning a bottle of Vicodin over in his hands. “Where are we going?”
It was Castiel's eyes Chuck caught in the rearview mirror when he glanced up.)
4.
He's a coffin builder, too, a hobby he wanted when his words were diminished to the names of prescriptions and canned soup, vocabulary taken over by the fantastic proportion of codes and numbers and locks and keys; it comes around when days are left without true need of what they've come to live, without the steady tremor and sinking in the bones of this is how it will all end, carrying tarps and nails and warped lumber, siding off barns and houses and sheds that Dean brings back in the back of trucks, never saying where he was, but Chuck can smell blood, that sticky iron weight. They're always coming back with cream-skinned bodies, pale and warm; sometimes Chuck recognizes them, knows their names.
Croats got 'em, Dean will say. No one questions him. No one ever really knows.
Castiel comes with, brings the shovel, leads Chuck through the trees with all that absent grace that eases into abrupt finality; he's the one to dig the shallow graves in the woods behind the camp. He tears off nearby branches while Chuck lines up the boards with a hammer and nails, strips the bark and leaves, ties them into a cross with twine wrapped around his wrists, marking the graves.
(“Are you gonna pray?” Chuck asked, once, when it started, when he thought that he was right about some of this.
Castiel had stood up, regarding the graves with a tired suffering; raises his hands to peer in the half-dark, surprised at the dirt etched into his skin, stretched and raw and fingernails bleeding. “No,” he answered.)
When the blood dries on their hands, they stand together by the river, soaking their clothes in the muddy water, sitting on rock, scrubbing their hands clean. Chuck will glance sideways, Castiel's slender red fingers skimming across the waters surface and maybe grace never left him at all, the suspended and tortured ease of his body, so much more than a part of it, bending and turning into swift smooth lines, arrogance and old-earth fear burnt into all the sinews. Laughter caught on his lips, something hidden (a secret, a truth only known to only one, only meant for one) that Chuck wants, only rewarded with the thin circle of unearthly blue eyes when he looks up and catches Chuck watching.
(Miss the colour of his eyes and know what it means. Control it.)
But--it's stained all the same in the end and Chuck wakes up every morning, sure that his fingers are dripping with it.
Sometimes, every thing's blood-dimmed and too blunt in it's reality and they say fuck it, it's over, really, we're done, leaving the bodies on the bank, tired of their hollow eyes and stitched lips. They're usually washed away by morning, when Chuck goes back to check. Castiel never asks, Castiel never cares.
5.
Thieves of religion, is what they are. Someone's been praying at night, a Bible left on the front steps of Dean's cabin. He's gone for days after that and Castiel's in Chuck's cabin all those nights, talking in that language no one knows and Chuck wants to ask who he's talking to (fuse and detonators, he knows, fuck he knows).
He comes back and Castiel's gone again and Chuck is back to sheets of paper with numbers, sleeping pills that don't work, rationing need and want into separate piles, different categories, he can't think. Castiel's gone again and he doesn't think he knows what it means, but he does, oh he does.
Their little red cabins: smashed out windows, plywood bunk beds and grey faded graffiti (dates and names carved into studs, Bible verses about God's power and God's love and God's presence, but they all forgot Revelations and what would happen to all that love in the end), flower-pattern sheets over windows, blankets over doors, bare mattresses, no need to sleep. Croats circling the camp, maybe demons, they're building fences and setting up salt lines and devil's trap, and it never ends. Their little red cabins, where they hide, and Chuck's scared, but no one else is. They can't be.
Castiel is coming on his own, to the cabin, soon enough. Dean doesn't stand in the doorway much anymore, giving Castiel to him, telling him, give him something, sounding like fix it, and Chuck thinks he can't, really knows he can't.
No one asks, no one says. Castiel knows what he wants. Chuck doesn't, no, not yet, not anymore.
6.
(He lies every time he speaks, such tricky little words, sounding like thunder and so holy, each one lost before you can hear it, words coming next right after, faster faster, and it's contrived and silly because it can't make sense. It's worse off because it does and they tell themselves, yes, yes I do understand, I know, you're right. Lures them in, lets them have belief, religion, he knows what he wants, with all those tricky little words. There is much more of nothing now and this, this is much more.)
“He was beautiful.”
Chuck won't listen. Castiel is standing by the window, wearing Dean's clothes, wearing his misery, too, that sharp contrasted beast, all Dean's own, too, so recognizable. He's wearing everything of Dean's because he wants to, sure he has to. Chuck is weary of sacrifices. (Fingers dancing across the window panes; when Chuck does look, he's sure Castiel is smiling, the tilt of lips.)
“I'm sure he loved me once.”
They're on the river bank. Castiel's knee-deep in the water, green-black, cold and it could be spring. Chuck is sitting on the left over tarp, blood-fingers bending against the shift of the earth. (Castiel's standing with his arms out again, shoulders moving, he wants to fly; he told Chuck, said he can still remember it, almost, that this is the closest he can feel that it could have been.)
“I think I still do.”
Castiel is sitting on the end of Chuck's bed. Chuck doesn't have to ask him anymore. He's counting out the pills, Castiel's hands open on the blanket. He's humming a song Chuck knows. (What now, what now, Chuck doesn't know, something comes apart, a sweet danger that pulls Chuck back in, should move back, move back, but oh--the touch of his hands on his cheek, Chuck won't leave this, can't.)
“You do,” Chuck says.
Castiel smiles and it's never looked right.
7.
Chuck hears Castiel cry out first. He puts in the gun shot, the snap of bones, skin on asphalt, after.
Give him something, fix it.
Castiel's on the side of the road, his gun at his side. He's panting, sitting, leaning back on his arms, staring at Chuck.
“Get up,” Chuck whispers, begs, glancing over his shoulder, no one come, no one. “Cas, get up.”
“I can't--” Castiel leans forward, arms out. Chuck reaches out, pulls him up. Castiel stands, falls back down, eyes tight-shut, lips twisted. “I can't walk.”
“Try!” Chuck says.
Castiel shakes his head, no no no, falls back onto the road, his hands over his eyes; Chuck is shocked by the defeat, by the quiet give up and let go. “Fuck, I can't.”
So, this is the end and this is what it looks like. So many different shades of darkness, Chuck forgot. It was starting to look the same, the same fire, the same desperation, the same weakness and wandering.
Give him something, fix it.
Chuck does (plans it in four-step rhythm, the story he'll tell himself because of it, he needs to hear it like it's all make-believe: you, he tells himself, you carry him back to the truck, tell him shut up shut up I'm driving, he's crying out again; carry him up the hill, carry him up the wet grass, carry him up the stairs, to the bed; no one's come back, no one knows, they will; pull down the bottles, whatever comes down into your open hands first, it'll work, and feed it to him quick, wait for his eyes to roll, to lay down, hands resting on the back of your neck; lock him in his own room, leave him, back against the wall, slide down, head in your hands, you can't think).
He tries, he tries.
8.
Outside a mess hall they never use. No one goes in but Dean, sometimes Castiel. No one wonders what they do, what they could possibly be saying. Chuck sits underneath the windows and never hears.
Dean's standing on the steps. Chuck's kicking shattered pieces of pavement through the grass.
“Any visions I should know about?” Dean calls out, asks.
They stare at each other like they're kids, like they have a secret too big for the world, something only the both of them understand and no one else ever will. They're going to wrap it up in stolen blankets and tape shut a shoebox, dig a hole in the sand at the beach and bury it, hope the tide washes it away. It'll mean something. They're kids. It all means something.
Sure, it all means something. It's just not what he thinks it should be.
Chuck hasn't. So, he shrugs, stops and looks at his feet. “No, none.”
Footsteps, a thunder and crash down the steps. Chuck's against the wall, head snapped back, Dean's elbow under this throat. “You're lying!” Dean yells. “Something, anything--anything about Sam--”
(He forgot. Right--make yourself. Control, Dean had said. What a great leader. Let us forget.)
Chuck is trying to push him off, fingertips and chewed nails nothing against memory and the brutal tragedy, the right honesty of it. “I haven't!” Chuck yells back, but Dean won't hear.
“You've had to seen something--”
“Dean.”
Dean's hands drop, too fast. Pulled back on strings, maybe, puppet-like. Marionette dancing, strange knowing smiles and unblinking eyes, asking and never answering. This could be them, all of them. Dean steps back and Chuck's hands go to his own throat. He looks up, to his right: Castiel is standing on the front landing. Castiel is looking at Dean. Of course.
“We had a meeting,” Castiel says (easy grin), that spin of words, the tricky ones that are packaged with the most horrendous and exquisite of lies, the lilt of meaning, the vain and sweet and warped. Chuck likes the sound of that.
Dean rubs his hands together, skips the steps two at a time and lets the door fall shut behind him. Chuck crawls along the side, sits and waits under the windows. He hears nothing, not even footsteps, the entire time he stays there.
Castiel doesn't come to the cabin that night. Chuck should know better, but he never knows.
9.
He's stolen those bomb parts again, taken them back to his cabin, hiding them in his own box, under his own bed, his own. He almost has enough, three hearts, too many veins, waiting for a fuse, that fire and kerosene. He has one, knows one, but it won't fit. The parts don't ever fit.
For now, he's waiting, won't wait, wandering those narrow hallways in black dreams, white shapes, grey shapes, shapes like people he should know.
He sketches stories into the frame of the house, carving letters that form words that form syntax. He hates the way it looks, scratches it out with his nails. No one asks about the gouges in the wall. He can't write, won't write, nothing to write because he'd be lying and it would never, never be this. Tangle your language, it'll never be enough.
Castiel's learning to count his own pills, singing out the numbers, let them be confused with rhymes and quiet. Castiel's learning to hide the pills in his cheeks, takes more than he should, Dean said to stop it, that's enough, and Chuck's been trying to say no. But Castiel's learning, he's fast, he knows what he wants.
Chuck doesn't. He's learning to watch Castiel hide pills underneath his tongue and not say anything.
10.
Flood lights.
Someone's got out. Someone, something's, got in.
Trip wires in the bushes, they should know better.
Out of bed, out the door, looking out the window, blurred jagged people running past. Chuck walks down the steps, one, two, sits. Hands in his hair, he's waiting. No one says anything.
Minutes pass, no gunshots, no smell of burning. They'll never be able to tell by screams; they haven't heard fear in what seems years. Those blurred jagged people coming back, whichway glances of bright white eyes.
Someone's got out.
Flood lights snap off and they're thrown in and out now, reflected by the lights from windows. Theses lights start going out, voices echoing in the trees, rolling through the dry grass.
“Chuck.”
It's later. All the lights are off. Chuck looks up, unfolds his arms, hugs his knees to his chest. Dean pulls Castiel into the light; yellow-pale, blood on his lips, red cheek, red eye.
Chuck stands. “What happened?”
Dean shoves Castiel forward. Castiel grabs onto the banister, fingers curling around the wood. It creaks under his weight.
“Watch him,” Dean says and walks away.
The things he should have overheard but never did. The things he could have known, what he could have seen. The same red cabins, scattered, row by row, doors used for coffins, shut you up and lock you out. The things he could have heard Dean say, heard Castiel plead.
Slide down the wall, legs spread out, head down. Chuck kneels in front of him. Someone got out, Castiel got out, even if it were only for a minute. He's shaking, the melancholy wind-up that Chuck's seen so many times before, a gentle come-down after, second chances all over again. Maybe he was flying.
“Where were you going?”
Castiel laughs, never right. “I don't know,” he whispers.
11.
(Dean's packing up the truck: mission, gotta say it like there's hope for it, should put faith in it, faith like God and saviours and things they all knew, know, using the words taught to them, not realizing they come round back on them. There'll be blood on his hands when he comes back, a coffin to build, a grave to dig, a cross of branches and twine, no prayers.
Chuck hands Dean his list, inventory, food, low supplies, he can't remember much anymore besides numbers and words without real thought.
“Get him off the pain meds,” Dean says, shoving the list into his pocket.
“What?”
“Cas.” Dean's pulling the canvas across the guns and boxes, tugging the rope down, looping it in knots. “I need him off the pain meds and focused. I can't have him fucking up again.”
“Yeah, okay.” Chuck steps back. “Sure.”)
They don't tell Dean.
Chuck fills the empty bottles, hides them in his own box under his bed, waits for Castiel to sit against the wall, hands open, eyes shut.
“Don't tell Dean,” Castiel whispers. Runs his fingers through Chuck's hair, resting on the back of his neck, pulls him close. Lips against his and for a moment, Chuck forgets. “Please, don't tell.”
Chuck won't.
They are (and their everything is) carted in boxes, stuffed between sheets, blood in their mouth like ribbons and bows, grinning pink teeth. (Try again, try better.) Stretch it out, rips the seams, let it spill, all the ugly and the unwanted and the riot: it's Castiel laughing. It's never sounded right. Some of the time, Chuck likes the sound. He can pretend it's always meaning what it's meant to.
12.
It was never about whether he could have it or not, because he couldn't, knew it always. Fuses and detonators, Chuck has to find his own. Thought he had. Their wires don't match, the fuse won't fit, and all these black plastic bones tremble for nothing. Chuck's tried, he's tried enough, but Dean is a different shade of red, different shade of blue and green, that Castiel always wants, always comes back and back and back to.
It was never about what he could have had because nothing was ever going to be his. It was never about being something more, trying to be something else, because it was never needed and Chuck thinks he's the better one, knowing that. It was never about stopping it, trying to hold them back, trying to save someone, anyone, just that one.
It's gotta be someone else, not Castiel, to destroy him. And Chuck, yeah, he wants to be destroyed, too.
13.
Someone Chuck barely knows, a young grey-eyed kid they found holed away in an empty apartment block right in the middle of a hot zone, dirty and angry and distrusting then, comes back, alone, letting the truck skid to a stop in the driveway. He leaves the gate open, doesn't reset the traps, pushes past Chuck as he comes running down the path. He's crying and he won't say anything when Chuck asks, but Chuck should know, he should already know.
“I'm sorry, I couldn't, I'm sorry.” He's pressed himself against the wall of the cabin, slamming his hands against the side, over over over. He won't look at Chuck, won't open his eyes. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”
To his knees in the mud. Push himself back up, how did he get there, maybe there are sirens sounding and he'll be dead soon. Didn't reset the traps, the alarms, the salt lines, the wire gate. He can't remember how he got here: it's all in his head, sure it is, the stories and the writing and the words he thought were all his own. It's in the edge of a knife, the blood under his nails, the gunpowder in his bones, ignite and let it burn.
Control, they said once.
Fuck control, Chuck thinks, just this once.
The boy is still screaming and Chuck remembers, fuses and wires. He opens the end gate, blood trickles onto his feet.
So, this is how the end looks. Such a different shade of darkness from the rest of all the other endings.
14.
He's building coffins, too, burying those bomb parts, all the black plastic bones and detonator hearts. Something triggered, something burned, set fire for one glorious moment, before they made themselves into silence and Chuck's alone, like it was meant for him, building coffins, carrying a shovel and making crosses from branches and twine.
He would pray if he knew the language, the one that only he could say, the disarming overture, startled tenor, slip-shift of words, taking it all off, shut you up, close you down, all those words he thought he understood.
He would pray if.
end.