Episode 10: In the Midnight Hour (Part 3)

[redemptionmod]

Previous Part



Dean stands outside the motel room door long after the sound of the engine has puttered into the distance, taking the familiar creaks of the vehicle with it and around the bend.

It's the same as any door he has ever encountered. He remembers the first motel, because it was the one after the fire, and the memory shoots out of nowhere, like a falling star, slicing through him with pain and fire. And it's been three decades since that night. But here he is, still no taller than that moment.

As a child, he feared the emptiness, that antiseptic environment of the motel and the hotel chains, watching Sammy sleep while he constructed fantastical Lego creations on a filthy bedspread. But the motel is filled now, filled with an angry angel who Dean knows damn well is stalking back and forth behind the motel room curtains because he can make out the dark form of him, slight and wiry when he turns to the side, filling out his shadow when he turns to pace once more.

Dean hesitates. He opens his hand to touch the knob, to slide the key in but then he remembers that this key is to his and Sam's room. Castiel wanted to be alone. His key trembles in his hand, and Dean closes it up in his fingers, thrusts it back into his pocket. And while Castiel paces inside, Dean counts his own steps across the broken sidewalk. A roadside weed grows up through one of the cracks, and Dean steps around it.

From time to time, he notices that Castiel's shadow pauses, observes him from within like a falcon paused in midflight, hanging on a warm updraught. The sensation is just as unnerving as being sighted by a predator on open ground, exposed, vulnerable, and at his mercy. Then Castiel's pace picks up again, the dark shadow counting out the ground from wall to wall, measuring it with his footsteps.

Dean paces outside, but while he does so, he constructs arguments, excuses, accusations. He replays their last conversation in the car, and he counts to ten under his breath, but the recitation of numbers does nothing to calm him. Instead, his frustration grows, increasing until it becomes a steady pound of pressure inside his chest, raking at the inside of his ribs like a knifepoint, up and down, side to side.

The sun is setting across Crystal Beach, and Dean hears gulls crying out in the distance. He looks up and sees them, pinheads of black against the fading gold of the sun.

Doesn't Castiel know? Dean thinks. It takes nothing. Nothing at all, to wink out like a light, to be there one second and gone the next. People do it all the time. Their hearts stop beating in their chests, and they fall down dead, even little kids at soccer practice. Even young girls crooning over a crib, pinioned and cut open and burning on a ceiling. Even half-angels who do idiot things like launch themselves into the path of danger to save someone else.

Dean is thinking about the fragility of these human matters, when he hears the motel room door crash open. He stops in his tracks, boot heels heavy as cement. Dean leans back before the breeze of the entrance as Castiel appears in the doorway, still in the tired, rumpled button-down that's been caressed by demons and wrinkled by gestures of selfless altruism, his hair pointing like a compass in every direction, the skin on the side of his neck raw where has been scratching at the stubble he misses when he shaves. His shirt is torn at the chest and the blood is like a dark reminder of everything they are.

Castiel steps out from the room in his bare feet, naked toes on the cement, and he wastes no time. Dean doesn't think Castiel's feet even touch the ground, that he just achieves lift-off with the sheer force of his building anger, because he's at the threshold one second and suddenly in Dean's face the next, leaning into him so Dean is forced to lean back. Castiel's teeth are bared as his lips peel back and he bellows, the narrow cage of his chest expanding and contracting beneath the fabric.

Dean blinks.

"Hit me!" Castiel yells.

The words don't register, and Dean blinks again, mouth parting.

"You heard me!" Castiel yells again, and Dean stumbles back a step, unable to fathom a possible response before the half-angel's unmitigated fury. "Go ahead! Take a shot! Let's find out how breakable I am, Dean. Why wait when we can find out right here, right now, how useless I can be, let's spare your tender sensibilities-"

Dean feels the heat as his face flushes red, and he can't say what exactly it is that fills him from the bottom of his spine and rushes up his skin, crawling all the way to the hairs on the top of his head. He feels electric as he takes in Castiel's temper, and how the suggestion of wings flare out behind him, just a faint edge like scratchings on worn stone, that grant the enticing suggestion of a hidden message just for him, because this is for his eyes alone.

Dean swallows. He can feel the heat of Castiel's breath raise the hairs on the back of his neck, the water-stained dotting of blood through Castiel's shirt where the wound is still fresh, untreated. How his Adam's apple bobs beneath the slide of stubbled flesh as he yells and yells and yells and what the fuck is he even yelling about anymore?

Dean leans back and slaps him.

Castiel's words stop the second Dean's fingers make the connection with his cheek, leaving bright ruby trails across his pale skin in their wake. It moves his face a fraction of an inch before he swivels back to stare levelly at Dean.

"Shouldn't have asked me to, Cas," Dean whispers, but the words come from faraway, down a tunnel where he sees from outside of himself, both of them face to face. And his voice is distant and breaks on the final note, leaving him devastated by how adolescent he sounds, how young and terrified by the specter of his inexperience. "I was Alastair's student. I know exactly what it would take to break you."

And Dean rushes him, he uses his body, all motion in the hips as he thrusts forward. He catches Castiel before he can turn, before he can resist with reason, and logic, and more passive-aggressive bullshit, and he doesn't care, doesn't fucking care anymore, and Cas wants to be broken? Dear God, he'll break him a thousand times over with his tongue, and his teeth, and his thrusting hands as he floods a hot breath into Castiel's mouth. Castiel's lips part, willing, too willing as they crash backward, flattening the roadside weed which is actually a purple flower, whose petals go spilling to the ground beneath their tread.

Castiel's arms are suddenly in the way, frustrating and arresting Dean as Castiel plucks at his wrists, stopping their forward momentum, gasping for breath as he jerks his head away, and Dean glares. He feels like a satellite rocketing back toward earth, and the reason he is out of orbit and out of sync is because of Castiel. On the descent now, he realizes he's hard as marble, and it's one more thing he doesn't care about, only the pain of it shivers down his calves with anticipation.

"What?" Dean snaps, as Castiel continues to look at him, expressionless, with Dean's wrists clamped firmly in his hands.

Castiel lets go and slaps him in return. Dean hears the rasp of his own stubble on Castiel's palm and it stings.

"What was that for?!" he shouts.

Castiel doesn't answer, he locks his hands on either side of Dean's face and drags him in for another kiss, everything raw and sandpaper, the flesh virgin-eager while housing a millennia of experience. A thousand years of desire, pent-up inside human skin, and what is that like, Dean wonders abstractly, through the taste of Castiel's insistent tongue. Castiel pulses like a sword point into him, and all the while Dean fights through the stupor of their swelling lips, and hears the distant sounds of saliva against flesh as Castiel finds the underside of Dean's jaw.

Dean pushes him back, back against the door of the motel room, and jars Castiel's body against the maroon painted steel.

Castiel groans, a small sound he swallows back, but Dean stops, pulls back, assessing Castiel like a man just awakening from a dream. His senses are ricocheting off every touch and scent, but the brief admission of agony recalls Dean to himself. He breathes hard, discovering his hands are fisted into the fabric of Castiel's bloody shirt. The cotton's bunched in his hands, drawing the shirt tight over his friend's torso.

"Cas," Dean whispers. What the fuck did we just do?

He clears his throat as he lets go, and Castiel leans back away from the door, suddenly looking guilty, sneaking glances up and down the parking lot where the sunlight is fading over vehicles parked in their stations.

Dean swallows, glancing down at himself. He has blood on his shirt now.

"It's just from the fight, earlier," Castiel explains, making a meaningless gesture with one hand to include all of his wounds.

"You should have said something," Dean mutters darkly, and then he grabs a fistful of Castiel's collar so he can kick open the door and drag Castiel through as though he were no more than a puppy, letting him go when they are safely past the door trim. The door slams shut behind them, and they are ensconced in the empty, musty room, where the air conditioner blows up flurries of dust bunnies in an attempt to give relief from the Gulf humidity.

"Sit," Dean orders, snagging the duffel bag from the floor and opening it up.

Hindsight being what it is, in retrospect Dean knows he shouldn't have left Cas to deal with his injuries on his own, since not even he can claim to have done a particularly good job stitching up sucking chest wounds in the past.

He pulls out the first aid kit with military efficiency, and he knows he looks calm, looks functional. But he can still feel his lips buzzing with the weight of Castiel's mouth, and even in this Southern heat he feels cold without the angel's lips still there.

Castiel sits atop the counter in the motel kitchenette, his body awkward and uncertain. His face is impassive, a mask as he looks up, down, away from Dean, anywhere but at Dean, and Dean thinks there is so much more than humidity thickening the air; it churns the atmosphere between them like a storm cell.

Castiel eventually turns to him, and Dean meets his eyes, feeling bold. "Ready?"

"I don't need your help," Castiel answers, peevish as ever, and Dean barely resists rolling his eyes.

"Normally I'd tell you to go fuck yourself, but right now I'm inclined to save it until after I'm sure you aren't going to bleed out on the floor." He gestures again with his open palm for his friend to stop being a stubborn bitch and just let him, stares at him until Castiel eventually sighs and nods.

"Take off your shirt," Dean says.

"Take off-"

"You heard me."

Dean flips open the first-aid kit and fishes out the economy-sized bottle of hydrogen peroxide he keeps in the duffle, spinning off the cap. He's surprised it doesn't catch on the ledge of his swollen cock. It feels huge and greedy, and he knows that if he doesn't start thinking about something else, anything else, it's going to start commanding its own gravity soon. He lets out a whistle from between his teeth as he closes his eyes, counts to ten.

He's no less hard when he finishes, but he thinks that maybe Sam's counting exercises might be good for something because he feels centered, less desperate to go tearing off Castiel's clothes so he can dry hump him into the bare, dirty motel room carpet or up against the wooden dresser with the mirror just so or the bedspread with the paisley coverlet-

"Dean?"

Dean clears his throat and turns to Castiel. His dark hair is even messier than it was earlier, but his lips are a delicious, deep pink they've never been before, revived with blood flow from insistent presses.

Goddammit, Dean thinks. What the fuck were they doing?

But Dean knows what they were doing, and staring at Castiel's bruised lips all he can think is, I did that. He takes in a sharp breath and shuffles close, approaching from an angle that he hopes doesn't suggest he's about to lose all sense of dignity and beg for it. He considers it. Just get down on his knees and beg Cas for anything, because the pain and the fury that unites at his groin feels like Mt. Saint Helen's right before eruption.

Calm the fuck down, he tells himself. If not for you, then for Cas.

When Dean has run out of all the throat clearing, chin scratching, and nervous habits he can muster, he takes a look at Castiel, seeing how the flat panes of his chest construct and build him up. Worse yet, he glances down and notices the tight ridge of a hipbone, which he swears wasn't there a month ago. And-

Oh.

There's a distinct tightening at Castiel's waistline, a bulge that knocks at his belt buckle and no sooner do Dean's eyes flick away than Castiel's cheeks turn pink, starting there and then traversing down into his neck. But there the delicate color stops and gives way to a more brutal palette; mottled bruises that hammer out the shape of his bones all across his back and up and over his shoulders where he hit the wall in his face off with Meg, the shallow wound that seeps blood above his right pec, nicks and scratches taken in battle all across his chest.

"You need to learn to do this," Dean says, hearing his voice come out surprisingly soft after everything. Everything. "If you're losing mojo, you could pick up some infection from this kind of wound."

Castiel nods, and Dean is glad he's not fighting him on this. Dean leans closer, and from this side he has a much better view of the ugly gash bisecting the right side of Castiel's chest, just narrowly missing the lines of his tattoo; perhaps it's not as severe as Dean first thought, but it still makes him wince at the thought it must be causing even Cas no small amount of pain. Batting the angel's hands away from the first-aid kit, Dean fishes around for peroxide, antiseptic wipes, and fresh gauze and turns his gaze upwards to where Castiel is staring at him.

Dean arranges himself in front of Castiel and the counter, studying how the angel's muscles flex through to his forearm, an elegant line. "This will sting."

Castiel rolls his eyes and puffs breath from his mouth. It catches at the edges of his hair and lifts the strands in the resulting breeze. Dean pours from the bottle and the peroxide froths at the wounds, whiting out the angry red slash as it burns.

Cas doesn't make a sound or a motion; he forms a fist and then releases it, staring at the wall.

Wound cleaned, Dean starts in on the stitches.

"So what you do is this." Years ago, John showed him a shortcut that Dean never quite got the hang of - it involved folding the thread between thumb and forefinger and somehow disappearing it through the eye of the needle, a sleight of hand Dean always failed to catch no matter how many times it was repeated. Castiel doesn't need to know that, though. "Are you watching?"

"Yes."

"Good. You take your needle, and you take your thread, and then-" Face impassive, Dean reaches around Cas into the little sewing pouch he keeps stashed in with the first-aid supplies. It's not a real sewing kit, at least not for fabric, but his fingers quickly snag the small metal needle-threader he keeps around for just this type of emergency. Sam mocks him for it sometimes, but the upshot is that Dean doesn't have to waste much time threading things when he could be stitching people up instead. Two seconds, and the deed is done. "Capiche?" Dean presents the threaded needle for Castiel's inspection.

Unsurprisingly, Castiel simply rolls his eyes. As Dean sees it, he can do as much of that as he likes while they go about seeing to his injuries. Aiming for gentle, he pushes Castiel further back on the kitchenette counter. "I still don't need your help," Castiel insists suddenly, voice strained. "This is something I can do myself."

Dean snorts. "Yeah, when were you planning on doing that? After you bled out?"

Castiel says nothing in turn, and somehow Dean's mind manages to stay carefully blank as he goes about closing the gash up with the needle and thread, pinching the lips of the wound together so each stitch is neat and as small as possible. Cas is mostly silent during the process, for which he's thankful, but a quick glance at his face shows an expression waxy and tight with discomfort. This is so different from when he tattooed the sigils underneath Castiel's collarbones, Dean thinks, though the angel is no less close, his skin no less warm beneath Dean's fingers. As before, he can feel Castiel's breaths ghosting across his cheek while he works.

"Almost there," Dean tells him as he's nearing the end, though he's counted no less than twenty-eight stitches in his head. If Cas were human it'd leave an impressive scar, not that he hasn't got one already. He can't resist asking, "Does it hurt more 'cause you're low on juice?"

"Yes," is the thin reply. "But I've had worse."

"And it could have been worse, it could have been much worse," Dean observes somberly. He finishes the last couple stitches - nothing like an even thirty - and ties off the thread before setting the needle down. "This is why you should take better care of yourself, why-"

"Sometimes I think you pick arguments with me because you think it's the only way to get close to me."

Dean drops the roll of thread. He mutters a distinct curse as it gets caught in the cheap carpeting. He bends to pick up it up, dumping it back in the first-aid kit before he looks up to see Castiel staring at him, blue eyes narrowed in on Dean. It's like looking down the muzzle of a Desert Eagle .50. One that shoots flame from the end.

Castiel leans forward, and Dean falls still as his friend's hand closes in that tender space between neck and shoulder, works his fingers beneath the rough fabric of his shirt collar so they settle against Dean's pulse. It beats faster. And Dean can do nothing to stop it as he swallows and wonders what the fuck he's doing, both to himself and Castiel, if he can ever repair it or make it right, or if it was ever broken to begin with.

"I love to fight with you," Castiel whispers, and his grasp tightens, draws Dean closer, and Dean feels it; the slack of his muscles as he gives up, the last of his resistance fleeing before the force of Castiel's heated words. "But you don't have to fight with me to be close with me."

Dean feels like he's falling.

He sucks in a shaky breath and forces himself out of Castiel's grip, out of his line of sight. He ignores the pointed comment, the idea of being close, something that every cell in his body is craving. "You've got another cut on your cheek," he says instead, because it's easier than addressing anything else. This time Castiel doesn't bother to argue or point out that it'll heal on its own eventually.

Dean slides firmly into the vee between Castiel's legs. Carefully keeping his thoughts at bay is significantly harder when he's right up in Castiel's personal space and dabbing rubbing alcohol along the neat arch of his friend's cheekbone. It's significantly harder when Dean knows damn well there's no way Castiel isn't thinking of the same stuff as he is, about that kiss, about being closer.

Castiel's eyes, of course, are set firmly upon his face and watching every move, lips parted slightly with the hiss of pain that comes from the antiseptic's sting. Castiel's knees close in on either side of Dean's hips, and Dean feels their jeans rub together as he drifts even closer. He catches the way Castiel's throat moves, as though he's about to say something, but instead the angel's eyes drift closed, and he lets Dean work. All that emerges is a quiet sound from his throat, a murmur that turns up at the end like a question, then his tongue creeping out to swipe at his lips. If Cas were anyone else, Dean would think the angel was doing it on purpose.

The movement stalls Dean's hand, and he sucks in another breath, finally allowing himself to reach for the thread of conversation from earlier, because he suddenly finds he can't not.

"Close with you?" he whispers.

"Close with me," Castiel growls.

And Dean falls.

He can't tell who moves next, how fast they reach for each other in the sterile light of the motel room, where faint smells of ammonia and hydrogen peroxide fill the air, and there is Castiel's smooth skin, interrupted by scratches and cuts beneath his fingers, the uptilt of his head as Dean closes over the gap of his mouth with his own. A sigh, and a moan, and then they pull apart, breathing hard, eyes locked.



Castiel says nothing, just reaches up to close his hand around Dean's where it rests against his face, squeezes his fingers in a way that has become shorthand between them for so much, for everything. Dean falls silent, and Castiel holds him there with his eyes, his eyes, Jesus. Castiel's knees tighten about Dean's hips just slightly, and he positions Dean's other hand against his thigh so they're holding on to each other, and maybe they always have been. There is the brush of Castiel's hair against Dean's forehead and the bump of noses together. Then it becomes impossible to see how there's anything easier than letting their mouths find their way back together again and again, and feeling such a surge of incredible rightness that Dean's whole chest feels tight with joy.

Castiel kisses with the kind of purpose Dean's always wanted to feel, unflinching and unwavering, giving over everything of himself until all Dean knows is the slick of his lips and the glide of his tongue, the way Castiel opens and draws him in and in and in. Dean tumbles gratefully down and loses himself in that greedy warm mouth, those steady hands that seem to keep Dean fixed right where he belongs, where he needs to be. His fingers clutch at the solidness of Castiel's thigh and tangle in his hair; stubble rasps against his palm and the sides of his mouth. They fit so naturally like this it's hard to remember how it could have ever been otherwise, the way their cracks seem to match up and fill the empty spaces between them, the way Dean has always felt they're so much stronger together than apart.

Dean, it feels-

Shhh, Cas. I know.

-and then there are no more words. And Dean never finishes fixing Castiel's battle wounds because there is no more pain; and the fragility of human skin is only outmatched by the vulnerability of an inhuman heart.



It's delicious. He could live off these kisses, like oxygen, like food, but the moment is short lived. Dean is thinking about flesh in new ways, in new perspectives, because there were times before but never like this, nothing like this. Nothing like Castiel.

But no sooner does Dean have Castiel flat on his back on the bed, bare-chested and illuminated in thin light, their hips meeting in the middle, straining through cloth, muscle to muscle, than Castiel looks up at the ceiling and goes rigid, his eyes flaring bright, a brief trip of light through the iris.

"Dean, did you hear that?"

"What, what is it, Cas?"

"Sam. Sam is calling for us. I think he's in trouble, Dean."



Sam leaves Dean standing out in front of the motel, looking haggard and withdrawn, as though he grows a year older for each foot of space that Sam puts between them as he hits the gas and leaves Dean's figure, growing smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror of the Impala.

The main drag in Crystal Beach branches off to the docks, and Sam takes it down with the Gulf, expansive and sultry and bathed in golden light to the side of the road. The shoulder fades to the bulkhead and the railing, but further down where Sam follows the road the shoulder opens up into a proper beach of white sand, and he passes a faded sign: Miller's Landing.

He doesn't mean to stop there. He's still wearing the suit he used to question old man Conway, and he could swear it smells of Conway's tears. Spots of blood on his cuff, maybe his, maybe not.

His hand drifts down to stroke the spine of the paperback in his pocket: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: How to Survive the Aftermath in a Destroyed Psyche. The car slows and the tires eat into soft sand over concrete as he pulls into a parking area. Beyond, he sees a park bench seated in a dune where dune grass pokes up from the drift.

For a while, he's content to watch the sun fade, and there is only a lone fisherman in the distance, whipping his line into the surf with a floppy hat decorated with lures and pins. But Sam feels the persistence itch of his anxiety, anxiety without focus or understanding.

Give it time, Sam.

I did, he thinks, as he slams the car door behind him. His shoes sink into forgiving sand, and the wind buffets against his forehead, sweeping the hair from his face. Everything is quiet but for the non-stop roar of the ocean, the screech of a seagull in the distance. He walks out onto the beach, feeling the pages of the book rasp against his sleeve as he goes, thinking of the words printed there, what they mean, and what they're for, and what the fuck is time anyway? What the fuck is he supposed to do with time, what is he supposed to wait for, for this fucking pain to end, for this frustration to just dissolve like salt in water?

He toes off his shoes and casts them into the sand, his pitching arm violent, and they flop over like dead fish. He feels a glow of satisfaction accompany the action, a relief to that never-ending panic that sits in his belly, trying to digest a millennium in Hell, and coming up short. He reaches for one sock and then the other, leaves them where they fall. Next, he tears at the buttons of his clean shirt, casting them into the sand with a flick of his wrist, as though he could skip them along the ground like stones on a river. He tears at the jacket and throws it into the sand along with his shoes, leaving just the filthy t-shirt he has been wearing for days without washing, and why should he?

What was the point, anyway? All these rituals of human life seem so desolate and trivial, who cares about shirts, and soap, and showers, and fucking time, always the fucking time, when he still can't get through a day without counting to ten?

And there it is; like a nuclear reactor that opens up a chamber in his heart, glowing bright with fission, with too much light and energy to contain - a mire of endless rage without relief. His brother is at a motel dancing around an angel and he can't help him, he can't help Cas, he can't help Conway emerge from that blackness that dogs them all.

His eyes fall on the book. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: How to Survive the Aftermath in a Destroyed Psyche. It's poking out of the pocket of his jacket where he threw it on the sand, white particles scattered over the black fabric, and Sam stoops to pick it up, opens it. The pages catch on the wind, flicking through random selections of text, and he skims through the words as he walks away from his deflated clothes, leaving them sad and abandoned. The surf pounds, beckons him beyond as he continues, barefoot.

"There's nothing in here," Sam says aloud, turning the pages faster. "There's nothing! Nothing!"

His voice rises to a shout, words breaking through the relentless pound of the surf, but there is no other place for the words to go, and if he keeps them in they will shake through his bones, burst his lungs, pulverize his ribs. And they follow, faster, one after the other, as he grips the book in his hands and begins to tear the pages, jaw clenched, teeth gritted and ready to crush diamonds between them with the pressure.

"There's no blueprint for Hell. You don't get over it, ever, ever, ever."

Give it time, Sam.

He rips through the spine of the book, and it gives with a tearing sound, like a scream, like the laughter of the seagulls, but it has the aftertaste of Lucifer's laugh, or worse yet, Michael's, and Sam drops the ripped pages into the sand as his feet cross the tide line. He feels seaweed between his toes and his thoughts are distracted, ragged things, like scuttling claws along the bottom of the sea, and he thinks he's heard that before in a T.S. Eliot poem. The lone fisherman is gone, he notices, terrified away by the crazed six-foot five-inch lunatic hollering at the sea and smashing footprints down into the wet sand. And Sam doesn't care.

He gives a cry and kneels into the wet surge of the ocean, just a shallow push of saltwater at his ankles. He smells his own sweat, bitter and rank, as he kneels down, hands clutching at his head and thrust up through his ragged hair so he can feel his scalp through his fingertips, draw out his brain through his fingernails and cast it away from him, to pull out what rots inside. He can't. He's stuck with himself.

There's no blueprint for the Cage. There's no road map out of this. There's no one who can tell him what to do or how to recover, because there's no one else who's walked down this exact path. Dean's Hell was different, no less worse, but different. This version of Hell is Sam's and Sam's alone. And all this bullshit of breathing deep and counting to ten, and these convenient self-help books - they're no fucking help at all.

"Fuck," Sam whispers. His breath wheezes out of him as he exhales. "Fuck everything."

And as bad as it all is - this empty, hollowed shell he calls his heart, this sore and aching feeling of wounds all over, within and without, this numbness that dogs him no matter how deep he sleeps - it's the best he's felt all year.

After a while, he gets up and starts to pick up the pages.

He couldn't say why. He's done with the book. He doesn't need it anymore. And now that he knows that this book can't help him, or any of the others, or even Jodie Mills, with her warm-hearted intentions and gentle, reassuring presses of hand to shoulder, he doesn't need any of it, any more. He doesn't need time, either, he thinks ruefully. Because I have all the time in the world to remember this hurt.

Sighing, he plucks a sandy-wet page from below the tide line, just as the Gulf comes skittering up the shore to meet his fingers.

There's an inky black line running across the text and staining everything from the middle down. Sam holds it up to the dying light of the golden sunset, layered in yellows and coppers, burnishing everything it touches. He puzzles over that single page, blackened as char, until his attention is caught by the strengthening wave washing over his ankles, sucking his feet deeper into the wet sand. Small things move and burrow in the shifting substrate beneath him, and he's mesmerized by it, the words swallowed up in the black.

Kill the blackness, boy. But you watch out for the things inside it.

And when the next wave comes, the tide sluices around his calves, soaks his pants and covers them in sand, until he feels the stretch of slime along his muscles, twining up his leg. When he looks down, it's not seaweed at all.

It's a hand. A hand reaching out of the black.



All Sam has time to think is that the hand looks human. Even with the faint impression of waxy blue-tinted skin, and the suggestion of scaling where the knuckles form and the nails top the fingertips, it looks humanoid from where it rises out of the salty Gulf water.

The hand tugs, fingers digging into the muscle and immobilizing it, stretched tight and straining at his Achilles tendon. The horizon swaps places as his heels pull up from the sand and go out from under him. He lands on his back with a sharp gasp of air and a splash, and he struggles to sit upright without dunking his head beneath a fresh wave of water that overlaps him.

The scaly hand is drowned out of sight below him, the fingers dug firm in his muscle. Sam slaps at his waist, a desperate pull and grab for the Colt at his belt, but there's nothing; just empty skin and his dirty shirt, and he remembers that he left the gun in the glove box. He curses. Stupid! He kicks out with his foot and feels the pain of the fist clench tighter.

"Bullshit," he hisses, and punches into the water. The tide roils around him, resisting the force of his fist as he brings it down onto the hand that grasps him. He feels the buckle and recoil of the hand, the shift of tendons as bones crunch beneath the blow-

And still, the hand doesn't let go.

The next wave crests and douses him afresh, spilling salt into his mouth, spluttering acrid brine all down his shirt front, as the hand drags him closer to the edge of the Gulf, where the waves swell with greater intensity, regurgitating shells, jellyfish, and driftwood beneath their force. And then Sam learns, with a new-found discovery that borders on delight, that there's a benefit to post-traumatic stress disorder that Sheriff Mills never mentioned, that the books didn't include in their bullet points, and that time did not give him.

You get really, really, pissed off.

He hauls up out of the water until he can feel the burn of the effort in the muscles of his abdomen, and there's no fear, no panic. The anxiety that has eaten every day at the pit of his stomach and added that deep purple tint to the hollow of his eyes is gone. There is no thousand-yard stare. He sees the ocean, feels its elemental suck. He is fully present and alive in the moment, and he imagines that for an instant he feels an approving nod from Lucifer in the Cage, fathoms and fathoms deep in Hell, as one ancient soldier regards another with level respect.

Give it time, Sam.

"I'll give you some fucking time," Sam growls, and he feels it - the slip and loosen of the hand around his calf as he reaches into the blackness of the seawater beneath the foam with brutal velocity, all decision and action, made and executed in nanoseconds. He feels the scrabble of fingertips at his leg, and then the thing beneath the water loses purchase, skittering away into the liquid dark.

"No you don't!"

Sam plunges in after it, ruthless, relentless, and as he dips his hands back into the next crashing wave, he feels the slide of scaled skin beneath his fingers. He makes a fist, catches the slippery fish-skin on his nails, raking them until he imagines blood frothing to the surface.

And then his tenuous hold is shaken loose and the thing is gone.

He gasps and stumbles backward from the water, falling once and then rising up again to get free of the surging tide.

"You better be ready for next time," he spits, turning back to face the shore, the ocean at his back.

And comes to a stop, pressing footprints into the wet mud of the sand.

There are five silhouettes paced out before him. And he recognizes the one in the center with a jarring shock as it steps forward through the sand, recognizes it from the dot-matrixed newsprint, the portrait of a boy smiling into a camera. Conway's son. Jack Conway.

But the thing leading the other silhouettes isn't Jack Conway anymore. His healthy head of blond hair has gone thin and all that remains are tattered wisps, and his eyes bulge from their sockets, putting Sam in mind of bullfrogs he and Dean used to catch at lakesides when they should have been gathering wood or setting up camp. The scales ripple up Jack Conway's neck, where the faint impression of gills formed, mottling the point of his jaw into something less than human.

Jack Conway is not in the blackness. He is become the blackness.



Sam falls into a crouch, and still there is no fear. He studies them with a strategic eye, looking for openings, weaknesses in the loose semi-circle they stitch around him as they enclose him and herd him backward into the pounding surf. He feels the sand up through his heels, gritty and raw.

As the sun dips down below the horizon, his eyes adjust and he can see them clearer. Jack Conway is the most humanoid; his eyes still glitter with dimming intelligence, while his fingers clamp and loosen on nothing but air. His friends around him all wear the tattered garb of fisherman, shirts hanging over their brittle bones and their misshapen forms. Jack Conway stands tall but the others are hunched over in various heights, their spines dictating a new form that their bodies are helpless to follow. Between their sets of gills is faint pink skin, hungry and raw. Their eyes are losing their human coloration, becoming wider and wider, like perfect circles seeking to set themselves into the farthest sides of their faces, in imitation of a flounder. Their mouths open in steady pulls of lips and tongue, like babies searching for nourishment. They close on empty air and the smell drifts from them, a mixture of corpse-flesh and stale water.

Sam has smelled worse.

It's the rows of teeth behind their lips that give him pause.

He tries to make a break for it by turning back to the ocean and pounding through the wave, but he underestimates the force of the tide, and he has to struggle to ensure he doesn't lose his balance and get swept away by the tide. The water slows him down, and the few feet he gains with which to break through their encroaching line is gone, swallowed up by the ocean.

Shit, he thinks. Dean doesn't know I'm out here.

"Castiel!" Sam thrusts the word into the air, but he's calm, bordering on euphoric. The sweep and lull of the tide as it rises to his waist is comforting. He's not afraid. And even as he says his friend's name, he knows the angel can't hear him. With the dimming of Castiel's grace, Sam's call is lost in an ocean of people's thoughts and feelings; Castiel can't filter them all.

Castiel isn't coming. Dean isn't coming.

No one can help him now.

This is it, isn't it? Sam thinks, and with the thought is a weight lifted; a sensation of liberation. He wishes his brother the best, in one final, heartfelt surge of love, and with it that Castiel should take care of him. This is where his story ends. After all this time, after Hell and everything in between, he's here in the warm seawater and he's not upset. He's not sad. He likes the ocean. He always has.

The dead fisherman in their strange, distorted humanoid forms draw closer, drive him further into the water. His shirt sticks to his chest and he reaches down for the hem, lifts it over his head and discards it into the water. It floats emptily at the surface beside a stick of driftwood.

Beyond him, further out in the water, are black shapes and shadows beneath the murk.

And he has time to think, before he feels the scaly touch of a hand on his wrist, that there are worse ways to die, and he has all the time in the world.



There's a moment when Sam feels the pressure building in his lungs, the slow mix of carbon dioxide outweighing the oxygen and burning through his center. Open up, his lungs demand. Open up to empty us and fill us with life again.

Sam opens up and fills them with seawater instead.



He sees death underwater. A Reaper.

Not the man in charge with his raven black hair; not that Death. But he knows this is a Reaper, senses it to the core of his body. Her blond hair lifts like a mermaid's through the fluid, suspended in the water with him, where he floats just beneath the scum of the ocean. The underside of the sea is like a rippling mirror. Pages from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: How to Survive the Aftermath in a Destroyed Psyche float beside him like abandoned feathers, and the Reaper shakes her head with an expression of disdain, as though this is exactly what she expects of a Winchester. She wears a pencil skirt that ends just above her knee, over the smooth rise of pantyhose with her fingers splayed out across her hip like a fan. Her modest heels dig into the underwater sand of the ocean bottom. A minnow flits by, arrowing beneath her cloak, and then stops as though it swam head first into an invisible pane of glass. It floats to the top of the water, dead and empty-eyed.

Sam waits to be taken. This is it, the moment his soul will be in a Reaper's hands once more, ferried from one distant shore to another.

But the Reaper only stands there, still in the water beside Sam's floating body. He has heard that drowning men see visions, that the experience is pleasant in one's confused dizziness. Maybe if it were something he'd like to see. He's not above a few guilty pleasures, like maybe a girl's volleyball team. That would be nice. But it's only the Reaper, who patiently withdraws a pocket watch on a chain, as though she is expecting the arrival of someone important, and they're testing her patience by making her wait.

And Sam cannot, for the life of him, or what little he has left, figure out who would be important enough, bold enough, to keep a Reaper waiting.

The Reaper glances up from the watch, where the chain floats in the water beside her, and sees Sam as though for the first time. She reaches out a hand to touch his forehead-



Sam's eyes open.

He's weightless and drifting with the rhythm of the tides. Here and now, he knows a peace he has never known since the womb, when he was warm and safe inside his mother's skin, knees tucked to his chest and filled with the heartbeat of his mother. This is what it must be like, he thinks, in the dark hour before birth.

Rise, Sam. Rise. I call you forth.

The words thrum through the water like whale song, more vibration than sound, and suddenly Sam recalls every event up until now in a rush, the strange monsters that drove him from the shore and into the water, Jack Conway, with his bulging eyes and his scaled skin. Sand between his toes.

Shit. He died.

Sam opens his mouth in blind panic, and lets loose a stream of desperate air bubbles that show him the way to the surface, and he looks up, stunned to still be underwater. His heart lurches into motion as though for the first time, and it waxes strong with each beat, steadying out his pulse and pushing lightning through his veins. He feels revived. He feels ten years younger, he feels oxygen burning through his blood and he pushes for the surface, where he can see the waves break above him.

He bursts from the ocean, into the light.

Dawn is breaking over Crystal Beach. Sam screams in a breath, half-exultation and half-astonishment, and bobs back into the water, pushing the hair back from his eyes. The horizon stretches out in every direction, sporting pink clouds above the ocean, the beach glorious and sun-bleached, and within reach. He thinks that by now Dean will have been worried, Castiel climbing the walls with him.

He takes long strokes back to land, until he can set his feet down on the broken shells that line the bottom, and he stands, ocean water streaming down the hard lines of his chest where they snake sinuously beneath the waistband of the sodden dress pants. He scratches at his tattoo through the salt water, disoriented and confused. He feels good. Vibrant. He rises out of the saltwater, and when he has finally outpaced the hungry churning of the ocean behind him, he stands, bewildered, at the tide line, where he studies the single set of footprints.

Rise, Sam. Rise. I call you forth.

He sets his own foot beside the print, studying it, to know its shape as though he could sense the owner of it. But there is nothing of what called him forth but these shapes in the sand, and he has no other choice but to abandon them.

He finds his suit jacket and button-down shirt further up the beach, and he snatches them up, shaking sand out of his sleeves as he shrugs on his destroyed clothes. The shirt's no good anymore without buttons but he feels like a porn-star with his nipples hard in the Texas wind. The shirt adds a layer of modesty without him feeling like a dirty pizza man about to make good on a delivery.

He trudges up the dunes, back to the car, and when he comes around the side and draws near, wincing as his naked feet hit the rough concrete he sees that someone has left the car door open. He tilts his head, studying the vehicle for signs and clues, but he needs no prompting to figure that whoever raised him from the ocean and snatched him from death has been sitting in the driver's side.

Doing what, exactly?

When Sam can detect nothing more from staring at the car, he slides in, and he can smell something exotic and spicy clinging to the interior. Clove? Cinnamon? It's difficult to pin down, but he finds it enticing, until he forces himself to open his eyes and snap to attention. He could eat the air if it always smelled that good. A woman's perfume? He recalls the voice, rise, its sultry, smoky notes; yes, it was female. A woman.

He reaches over and pops open the glove box. The Colt is safe, nestled in a pile of papers. He frowns and slams it shut. After a moment, he starts the car, the keys exactly where he left them, sitting in the ignition, and turns back onto the boulevard.



When he pulls into the motel lot, the headlights flash against the window in the early morning dawn, and the door bursts open, slamming against the opposite wall. Dean frames the doorway before Sam can even stop the engine, and he hears his brother's voice over the stuttering exhaust of the Impala.

"-the fuck were you! Cas said he thought he heard something-"

Sam opens his mouth, and for a moment a torrent of words threatens to break through Dean something brought me back, and it wasn't Cas, and it wasn't you, and it wasn't Death, and I don't know what the fuck it is this time, when he notices something that forces his mouth to slam shut over his teeth, breathless and surprised.

On Castiel's jaw, Sam makes out the clear imprint of stubble-burn. And Sam supposes it could be his overworked imagination, but he thinks there is something in the way Castiel purposefully steps away from Dean, as though no one will know that his feet itch to take the space beside him, how Castiel must make a fist to prevent himself from setting a hand on his brother in an expression of comfort, of love.

Something happened with them last night, Sam realizes. While Dean is spluttering and punching Sam in the arm, he sees that Castiel stands straighter, looks stronger, as though his grace is expansive and filling him throughout in the light of Dean's regard. And Dean…

…For once stops yelling, and is suddenly hugging Sam so hard he takes a gulp of air as his brother presses the breath out of his lungs. Sam attempts to remember the last time Dean hugged him, instead of just continuing to yell at him, and knows that this, this is what happens when you love someone, and sense that love returned. It opens up a space in you that calms the nervous heart, opens your arms instead of closing them. The proof of it is here, in this brother of his who never embraces, not like this.

Sam halts, traps his tongue between his teeth as Dean steps away.

"Well?" Dean asks. "What did happen to you last night?"

"Oh," Sam says, and he shifts his gaze, uncomfortable. And he tries again, thinks of how to form the words to describe it; and all he can think is that he will shatter this tenuous thing with the blackness that lives in the ocean, with the panic and terror of Sam dying beneath the water while Dean and Castiel fell in love in a comfortable motel room miles away.

And Sam cannot say the words. He cannot snatch this newfound light from his brother and the errant angel when they've only just found it.

So he swallows the words, and charms them with the truth. His words come out, lilting in time with his smile.

"Oh, you know, the usual - Death and back. Found those mutant fish men, though."

Dean stares at Sam. Castiel leans back against the door, a startling maroon against the faded gray color of one of Dean's band shirts. It hangs from his shoulders, and Castiel's face is dark, assessing, the lines of his forehead in vertical slashes.

Then Dean's face breaks out into an exuberant smile.

"You got some last night."

A beat of silence elapses, and then, for Dean's sake, Sam looks away, sliding his gaze to Castiel, who lifts his head into the clean, ocean wind. In his dark blue eyes, there is no suspicion of midnight romps with the opposite sex; but if he suspects anything, or tastes the honeyed spices that cling to Sam like a perfume, he says nothing, only looks away.

They all trundle into the motel, Dean already laughing and speculating on Sam's phantom lady lover, because when one is drunk and heady on those first delicious explorations of new flesh, new love, you see love everywhere you look. Sam meets Castiel's eyes and the stare holds, as though Castiel suspects far more than he will ever say, and Sam waits to be found out, to be exposed.

Castiel turns back to the interior, leaving Sam standing alone in the open door, without a word. The atmosphere of the moment isn't icy, or cruel, or condemning - it's the feeling of trust that Castiel extends to him, trust that whatever secret Sam is keeping to himself, he does it for a reason, and he'll share it when he is ready, not a second before.

Sam smiles then; his senses are sharp and on fire with the nervousness of his shellshock, that endless stress that never goes to sleep, but remains ever vigilant inside him. It can't be calmed; it will never breathe out and count to ten, or take the advice of doctors, counselors, or self-help gurus. But he came from the water with something more than hurt and wounds, left the endless rage behind him in the Gulf, with the blackness. The scars are sealed. And in their place is new tissue, a new chance, new life, something burning brightly inside him where there was nothing before.

He hesitates in the doorway, glancing over his shoulder. He will go inside to the laughter of his brother and Castiel's soft-spoken observations, but for now, he soaks in the coming day, as if for the first time.

Across the parking lot, beside the main boulevard, he sees, for an instant, a woman in a veil, black lace drawn over the curve of dark skin. He catches the enticing mixture of clove and cinnamon, and when he blinks, the woman in black is gone. All that remains is a deep tremor of her sadness, and he stays there, his breath stopped, waiting for her to come back. She does not.

Rise, Sam. Rise. I call you forth.

Sam answers.

"I'm here."



Next: The Magic Faraway Tree