Episode 24: Redemption (Part I)
Title: Redemption (Part I)
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info,
warnings, and disclaimer)
Authors: swordofmymouth and zatnikatel
Characters/Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam, OC and canon characters
Rating: R (this part)
Wordcount: ~20,500
Warnings: language, violence, sexuality
Betas: dotfic and murron
Art: Chapter banners by zatnikatel; digital paintings by quantum_witch, Mobius-9, and Rinienne, which you can also find here, here and here; graphic by catstiella (NB: art contains major spoilers for the chapter)
Summary: "Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows…"
Lawrence, Kansas
1978
Michael.
Michael, and his brother's presence sears through Castiel's senses like electricity, corrodes his waning grace like acid, disorients him with a mix of joy and sheer terror as he lurches up off of…a bed he doesn't recall being placed on.
His vessel's heart is beating a rapid tattoo in his chest, and the moonlight flooding in through the windows of the room he is in casts his face an eerie, icy, washed-out blue as he stares up, wide-eyed with his own confusion, at his reflection in a large mirror positioned above the bed.
Michael, and his magnetic pull tugs at every elementary particle of Castiel's being with its rightness and its promise of succor, even while its wrongness appalls him, because Michael shouldn't be here. And if he is…the notion fills Castiel with a complicated, hectic desperation he doesn't quite understand, has him choking out Dean's name as he claws at his equilibrium and heaves it back to steady himself.
There is no reply to his cry; the room is quiet, uninhabited but for him. He filters through his grace tentatively, searches for some sign of Dean here, and not for the first time he regrets that the sigils he inscribed on his friend's ribs cloak him so thoroughly. He fumbles in his pocket for the cell phone Dean gave him, snaps it open. There is nothing, no signal, and he shakes it, mutters a curse under his breath at the lack of response. But still there is his brother's low, sibilant, wrathful murmur, I'll see you soon, Dean, cutting through the insistent clamor of six billion human souls, and it's enough, gives Castiel a point in time and space, a location.
For one fraction of a second he considers the fact his brother already knows he's here, and that their kinship won't stop Michael from meting out judgment and justice for Castiel's treachery. And then, Dean, he thinks, and with that thought he beats his wings and he's there, staring through the wreckage of a solid wall into the eyes of the man he last saw gasping his way back to life in Mary Winchester's arms, and seeing his brother gaze back at him.
"So it's true." Michael tilts his head, regards Castiel thoughtfully, and he sounds almost reasonable in his distaste at Castiel's perfidy as he continues. "I didn't want to believe Zachariah."
Castiel tamps down his discomfort and his own anguish, spares a moment to scan their surroundings. As he slants his eyes back, Michael curls John Winchester's lips up into a subtle smile.
"He is safe. As is his brother. I sent them back."
Michael is standing next to Mary Winchester, where her curled body forms a golden-haired comma on the floor, and he inclines his head and contemplates her. "She won't remember this," he says quietly. "She will birth both of her sons."
Castiel feels a surge of despair. "This isn't right," he tries, but he can hear the way his own hopelessness makes his voice hollow. "Please." He puts a hand out, palm up, and he implores. "Please let her be. Let Dean be. This can't be what our Father really wants."
Michael looks up, focuses on Castiel slowly. His stare is grave, it doesn't waver, and Castiel already knows this particular battle is lost.
"Whether this is what our Father wants or intended is not of import, Castiel, not any more," Michael offers. "It's too late to turn back. Lucifer walks, and he must be stopped for the sake of all souls."
Even though his brother's tone is firm with what Castiel knows is both logic and Michael's belief that this is right, it is underpinned with what Castiel thinks might be kindness as he goes on.
"There is no other option, despite your new-found appreciation for free will. All roads lead to the same destination." Michael pauses a beat then, and all the while Castiel can feel the tendrils of his brother's grace vibrating through him, weaving their way into his superconsciousness, tapping his every unspoken thought and feeling. "And that one…your Dean. He is the Righteous Man, the one who began it, and you know the prophecy. The one who began it must end it, or it will never end."
Michael sinks to his knees then, reaches out a slow, considerate hand, places it on Mary Winchester's lower belly. "I can feel him inside her," he murmurs, almost dreamily. "Can you feel him, Castiel? Can you already feel the pull of him?" He looks up, and his eyes gleam critically as he examines Castiel. "He is my vessel. He is me. This is why you serve him, Castiel, why you cleave to him. This is why you love him."
There is a sudden, somber clarity that comes from Michael's conclusion, a simple resolve that springs up inside Castiel in place of the confusion that has always clouded any analysis of the motives that drive him where Dean Winchester is concerned. It positions itself like a barrier between him and his brother, between their shared past, millennia of fealty, respect, and fraternal devotion. Castiel knows that Michael senses it, can feel his brother's flash of outrage and dismay as he pushes up fluidly and draws closer.
Castiel shuffles backwards as Michael approaches, but he will say this even if he knows he won't survive the admission. "I do love him. But that isn't why."
He comes up against a solid surface, allows himself a swift glance behind him to see he has backed into the Impala, swivels back to see Michael so close now that Jimmy Novak's face is reflected in John Winchester's eyes. If there is an instant when Castiel knows he can still run from this, it's gone even before he completes the thought, as he feels his grace tethered and confined here by the archangel.
"Do you think I won't do what has to be done, Castiel?" his brother asks, on a faint sigh that exudes sorrow. "Do you think I won't end you for your duplicity? Even if I don't want to?"
Castiel swallows. "I know you better than that," he answers softly, and he can feel it starting already, can feel himself being dispersed, the strands of him being unlaced and unknitted, pulled apart, as Michael exorcises him; can feel himself weakening, crumpling onto the hood of the car as his brother looms closer and ponders him though the methane glow that seeps out through his vessel’s pores.
"Or I could make you forget your human," Michael says, not unkindly. "I could send you back to him with no memory of what you feel for him."
Through the fire of his own immolation, Castiel can feel the metal skin of the Impala start to bubble and boil under his fingertips as he scrabbles at it, this last piece of Dean. He clings to it as it runs liquid under him and fuses with his vessel's melting flesh and his own dying grace. "Since you can't change who Dean is, you can't change what I feel for him," he gasps. "I am for him…the road I travel will always lead me to him, no matter how many obstacles you lay in my path, and I will always protect him."
He gives up then, gives himself up to the hazy agony and ecstasy of his own termination, but through it he catches Michael's last, faint words, then perhaps you can best keep him safe for me, brother-
-Castiel's arrival is abrupt and sickening, sends him reeling, until he is grasped and steadied, one hand pressed on his chest to stop his collapse, and voices he never expected to hear again saying his name.
"You sonofabitch," Dean is declaring, part relief and part triumph, and his eyes are bright and intense as he stares at Castiel. "You made it."
Castiel blinks slowly at his friend, hears himself croak out, "I did?" He can taste the copper of blood in his mouth, and he holds up his hand and studies it, tries to collect his thoughts past the disquieting suspicion that something important he can't recall just happened. "I'm very surprised," he concedes, and then it goes dark.
Southern Pacific Ocean
Present day
Meg can taste something on the tip of her tongue, something strong and sour, something that makes her lips pucker involuntarily. But she can't focus for long enough to work out what it is because the ocean is roaring beside her as it ebbs and flows, and fuck anyone who ever thought the sound of it was restful, because its constant crash-slosh at the periphery of her mind is mind-numbingly repetitive.
Beneath the steady rhythm of the endless tide, she hears another sound that keeps time with it; ragged exhales as someone nearby wheezes out a strangled, hopeless cry, catches their breath, and does it again, over and over. Meg listens to the sound for what might be a long time before it occurs to her to backtrack her brain and figure out why she's here, but the memory of her fall into the abyss after Sam and Castiel is little more than windswept screaming as she plunged endlessly, from what seemed like the top of the universe to the bottom, until she hit the freezing-cold shock of water and everything went black.
She opens her eyes a crack, and everything is scorching daylight after the eternal midnight of the cavern. Sam is a few feet away, the long, dark bulk of his body laid out across the beach in a way that looks almost relaxed. And there is that sound of water again, and Meg becomes aware that her legs feel cold, that the water is lapping at her feet and seeping up her jeans as far as her thighs. Seawater, because where there is beach there is sea, and there is that confirmation of surf swooshing across sand again.
Meg finds herself musing hazily that there was a time - hundreds of years long - when she couldn't even touch the ocean. Too pure, and in the instant she thinks it she recalls another fall, and with it comes the realization that she is sucking in air she actually needs to live now, and the taste in her mouth is salt. Sand crusts her eyes, and every blink is an irritating sweep of lids over grit. Everything hurts too, and an incredible arc and throb of pain dominates where her splinted leg is immersed in brine; but the physical pain is lost in the revelation of a deeper ache, and she can't hold back her soft gasp of grief at the knowledge she is an empty husk, that the comforting, velvet-soft blackness that pulsated at her center is gone, that she is cleansed, sanitized. Weak and vulnerable too, and without the gift of demon-power at her disposal she becomes part of the catastrophe, part of the disaster. Now she shares the misfortune with them all, and she does it bitterly as she heaves herself up out of the sand and onto her elbows at the same time as Sam stirs, rousing himself to consciousness with a groan bitten off between his teeth.
Meg twists, scans the horizon. Along the tide line is the broken wreckage of their ill-fated expedition; assorted bags, pieces of the Duck, firearms washed ashore. When she turns back to look in the other direction, Sam is lurching to his feet on a choked cry and digging footprints into the sand. Beyond him is a huddled figure, and for a moment Meg thinks she sees the shape of massive sails extending out behind it, but they aren't sails, they're…
Oh, she thinks, with breathless surprise, and in the next second they're gone and from here on in she'll pretend she didn't just totally fangirl over Castiel's wings. She pulls herself together, ignores the fact that she has never run into a set of them before now, even while she mentally fistbumps herself for finally catching a glimpse after she turned mortal, because to witness grace is to burn. It's what they do, the function they serve - to burn the lower demonic orders out from every molecule.
But the wings are gone now, tucked back into invisibility, and in their absence Meg's eyes widen and she takes in the whole of the scene and the extent of the disaster. A body further on up the beach lies just above the seaweed line, where someone - where Castiel - has dragged it out of the reach of the greedy water. Castiel sits cross-legged with Dean's head in his lap, bent over his lover with his arms cradling him. He rocks back and forth, and the sound Meg heard comes from him; a breathless, featureless animal scream, as he shakes and pours out his heart into the salty air.
Meg listens to him for a moment and thinks there ought to be something profound in the revelation that the sound an angel makes in grief is no different from the infinite victims she has tortured. It's one thing to be trapped in a human body, she considers, but to feel it, to truly inhabit that ephemeral humanity - oh, that's the punishment, that's the hurt, and she marvels that something so powerful and above it all can be grounded and forced to feel so much without relief. As Castiel does now.
Another wave laps at her feet and she hauls herself further away from the water. Her fingers scrape on shells and tangle in seaweed until they trip over a long piece of driftwood, jagged and brittle. She thrusts it into the ground, bites into her tongue until blood wells to the surface and fills her mouth, as she uses it to lever herself up onto her knee, and then her one good foot, her broken leg dragging useless behind her.
She hobbles along in Sam's wake as he walks unevenly to Castiel, and she can hear the sounds of the angel's inarticulate breathing. Alongside the sounds of Castiel's labored gasping and the slumped shape of Sam, silhouetted against the burning sun, is the silent presence of the corpse between them. Meg is close enough to see Dean's body in more detail now, and she finds that she's recalling him in the way someone who never paid much attention to him might; a caricature of the youth he was, not the reality of the man he became. His name evokes a series of images, of false machismo and half-assed bravado, cheap food at roadside diners, bad music; but beneath it all, an untamable spirit with a liking for band shirts and denim, and his father's leather jacket. A healthy if emotionally stunted youth.
What Meg sees now is a shadow of the man that was. Whatever happened to him after he slid the gun over to her in the Duck and walked away has burned his skin to raw and blistered, melted through to gleaming bone along his arms and down his torso. There are gaping rips in his flesh, and the rack of his ribs protrudes through his open chest like the keys of a piano, blood seeping languidly all around them. Dark hollows have gone purple beneath his eyes, but for all that, his face is oddly serene, the thick fringe of lashes on his cheeks peaceful. Meg muses that from the neck up, he looks as if he crashed out to sleep off his hangover after one hell of a party, that he might wake up again at any moment.
He never will.
Castiel knows it. He sways and shivers, but when he hears their approach he snaps to attention, pulling his gaze away from the body in his arms and looking up as Sam's shadow falls across him. His face has all the contour and shape of a crumpled sheet of paper, but his eyes blaze electric blue in the morning light. "Help me, Sam," he whispers, parched and desperate. "You have to help me. We'll start from the beginning, and-"
"What is that, Cas?" Sam says, strained but gentle.
"The spell…if we just do it again, if we go back to the beginning and fix it, and-"
"Cas."
"-remember, Sam, Sumerian phonetics can be difficult to the untrained speaker but I can help you through the difficult passages…there must have been a word we tripped up on-"
"Cas."
"-but when we get it right this time, and we will get it right, I know we will…then we can do it-"
"No, Cas."
"-together, we'll do it together. And if it doesn't work there's always Enochian, there are so many rituals, so we should start while it's early and then-"
"Cas!"
Sam's switch from gentle to sharp breaks through the trance, and Meg steels herself for the result.
"My name is not part of the spell, Sam," Castiel finally acknowledges him, terse. He doesn't pause for breath, begins to recite the spell himself instead, and even from a couple of yards away Meg feels an uneasy twinge in her split flesh, in the atmosphere, and in the sand underfoot. The spell has the power to shake the world, even in broad daylight, and she winces, waiting to see what will happen next.
"Stop that," Sam snaps.
Castiel does not stop that. He keeps going, racing through the words in the ancient language, and Meg hears herself moan deep in her throat. "Make it stop," she hisses, and she isn't sure if it's the scorching heat of Castiel's grief that she is begging to have relief from or the power of the spell itself, but it seems that Sam can't bear it either because he leans down and slaps Castiel across the face.
Almost before the sound of the blow dies away, there is an explosion of movement as Castiel bolts upright from his seated position, leaving Dean unguarded on the sand. Meg finds her gaze pulled to the body again, studying the way Dean's head tilts up to the sky, his mouth canting open, his lips cracked from the salt. Dean's worries are over, she thinks. Dean has bitten the dust, bought the farm, gone to the big room downstairs, and he's not coming back this time because she has a gut feeling that not all of the angels and all of the spells can put this Winchester back together again.
Sam doesn't move an inch as Castiel rises to meet him and there is the faint suggestion of the slap on the angel's cheek, the red tingling through his pale skin. His eyes have gone from grieving to feral.
"You should have let me go with him," he says, his voice reverberating from his throat in a deep, bone-shaking growl. "If you're not going to help me, you should have let me die with him. I thought you were his brother, Sam."
If there was a single pressure point Castiel could hit on to make Sam explode, this is it, Meg knows, and she assesses Sam's face, the clench of his jaw as he leans further over Castiel, a charge that threatens violence building between them.
Meg can stitch together countless moments when her life intersected with the Winchesters, and during all of them she didn't fully appreciate the effect Dean's presence had, whether it was on John or Sam, and now on the angel. Without the general apathy of her demonhood blinding her, she observes, with insight and sudden, unexpected sadness, everything that Dean had been, the various roles he had filled. He was a keystone, a linchpin, the point upon which a fulcrum turns, the central hub without which things disintegrate and fall apart, and it can't be more clear than in the tableau that plays out as she watches.
She limps closer, curious to see what happens despite herself, the foot of her crippled leg furrowing a snaking trail in the sand.
"For Dean's sake, I'll pretend I didn't hear that," Sam says, icy cold.
"For Dean's sake you should have tried harder to reach him," Castiel yells.
And that's it - there is a flurry of motion so rapid that Meg's brain has to sprint to catch up with it; the sudden fast pull of punches as both men lurch into each other with flying fists and bared teeth, their eyes gone dark with anger and hurt, wolves howling on the empty stretch of beach with Dean's body a mute testament between them.
Knuckles trade off against their faces, and where they shuffle in their tight boxing ring, their feet dance dangerously close to the corpse. Meg sinks to her knees, swallowing a screech of pain as she reaches for Dean's body, and she can't say what impulse causes her to lean forward to pull it to safety. This man was squirting holy water in her face not that long ago, and taking no small delight in the burning of her skin.
"Soldiers deserve better," she mutters, as she threads her hands under his arms and pulls him up and away from the fray, and she tells herself that is the whole of it. They shared the same rack once upon a time, in another land, and this man looked down at her with something like understanding and pity as he unstrapped her from Crowley's torture table after the demon inside Christian Campbell smoked and died. They might have been on different sides of a war, but when life has passed, the boundaries of enemy and friend are no longer so clearly defined. They seem small and trivial when she stares down at the empty vessel that was once meant for Michael.
Above her are the thud of impact and the sound of thick grunts as Sam breaks Castiel's nose and gore comes flooding down the angel's face; the answering gasp and cry from Castiel as he sends several punches into Sam's kidneys so that Sam buckles over, heaving in air. He erupts back up, clamping his fingers to Castiel's arm and swinging him around violently, into a chokehold that binds them to each other. Both of them are breathing hard, like cattle in a stampede.
"My brother is dead and you broke my fucking wall, and you think I'm going to deal with this all by myself?" Sam hollers, his face creased ugly with fury. "You fucker! You selfish fucking bastard! It's real easy to die and leave the mess for the living, but you aren't doing this the easy way, Cas. You're doing this with me. We're doing this together."
Sam lets him go and Castiel stumbles a few feet away, to where the sand is splotched with blood from a split on Sam's cheek, and from Castiel's own broken nose. He reaches up and fingers the break with a hiss, before he shifts the bone back into place with an audible crack. The two men breathe hard and fast in tandem as they regard each other with an awkward, nervous silence, the tension too thick to break with words alone until Castiel finally does, leaning with his hands on his knees and spitting blood into the ground.
"I should be thanking you. You saved me from Hell," he croaks, in what Meg assumes is the closest he can manage to an apology.
Sam exhales a long, steadying breath, but his reply is dull and exhausted. "Yeah. I guess I did, in a way."
"But you left my soul behind, Sam."
For the first time in a long time, Castiel's voice regresses back into his angelic monotone and the contrast highlights just how far his journey has taken him to all levels of human and angel and back again. He turns and looks down at Meg, where she has dragged Dean a few yards from their altercation. His stare is empty and desolate as he rests it on Dean and hunkers down opposite, his hair wild and messy, and clogged with sand, blood oozing from his nose and from a split in his eyebrow. Meg studies him in silence until he lifts his gaze to her, his lips pressed into a thin, angry line.
"Thank you," he whispers.
His gratitude makes her uncomfortable, and she looks away and down at the dead body between them both.
"There's some magic left, you know," Castiel adds dryly.
He reaches across the corpse that divides them and before Meg can react, his fingers are pressed to the sore and bruised calf of her broken leg. His touch sends fireworks through her nerves and she can't look at what he is doing, opens her mouth to scream - but then the agony shuts off abruptly, as if it was never there, as if all her nerve endings were silenced at once. She opens her eyes and the swollen, deformed limb is recognizable again; the rent in the skin where the broken bone pushed through healed over and the pain gone with it. She replays the angel's last words, and her eyes narrow as she looks from her leg to Dean Winchester's lax, dead features and ravaged body, and then back to Castiel once more.
"Magic enough to fix him, to-"
"No," Castiel cuts her off, biting the word out as if it hurts. "Not enough to do what matters most. His soul is gone where I can no longer follow, and without his soul he would not be fixed. It would not be him, and I…" His voice dies for a second before he swallows. "I would not do that to him. Or his brother."
Meg thinks she sees something in his eyes as he speaks, a flash of something that might be guilt, but she isn't sure. Movement from above is a distraction as Sam kneels down beside them, cutting a dark shadow over his brother, and by the time she looks back to Castiel he has collapsed in on himself, shoulders brushing Sam's. He doesn't seem to care or mind, regardless of the fight from seconds ago. All the animosity is forgotten, and Sam sets a hand on Dean's shoulder, withdrawing into his own private thoughts for a few moments before he swipes a hand across his eyes and speaks.
"You have any mojo left to take us back, Cas?" he asks. "I thought you were-"
"Running on empty?" the angel says with a weary bitterness. "I know. It cost me to fix her leg, but if we wait long enough, I can take us home."
"What the hell went wrong anyway?" Meg asks Sam, after brief silence has passed, but Sam's eyes are vacant, and he doesn't answer her.
Castiel stays with Dean.
Several times Sam attempts to get him to leave the body, and Meg grows tired of the pleading and Castiel's mute obstinacy, and wanders down to the tideline, where she finds several unopened water bottles and a pack of sodden bagels washed up on the shore. She lines them up in a row, wades into the lapping surf to fish out what looks like a fabric bag so she can carry the provisions more easily. Her hand closes around something solid concealed within it, and she picks at the coarse material, peers inside it to see the dull luster of old metal. She barks out a dry, mirthless laugh as she drops the water bottles and food in beside it, and makes her way back to their makeshift camp.
Sam is sitting with his back against a large rock, his legs sprawled out carelessly. He's staring at the sea, and he doesn't acknowledge Meg's return. She sits down a foot or so away, reaches inside the bag and retrieves the bagels and the water bottles one by one, before leaning over to drop the cloth bundle on Sam's lap. "Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes," she remarks, and when he drifts red-rimmed eyes over to focus on her, she nods down at her salvage. "The mighty sword of truth and justice. No sign of the holy grail though."
Sam casts his eyes down to examine the bag but he doesn't open it up, just shoves it off his thighs, then stretches across to scoop up one of the bottles of water. He stares over at Castiel for a moment before pushing up and ambling over, almost leisurely, to place the bottle beside the angel. He mutters words too low for Meg to hear, but Castiel shakes his head and he will not speak, not yet.
Once Sam has slumped back down in his spot, Meg unscrews the cap on one of the bottles and sets it down next to him. Ahead of them, the golden ball of the sun is sinking fast as the night closes in. The prospect of darkness is forbidding with the trees behind them whispering threats as they rustle in the breeze, and Meg finds her gaze drawn to Castiel, his head bowed and Dean Winchester still cradled in his arms. "We should burn the body," she hisses. "Leaving it intact is an invitation to trouble." She jerks a thumb back into the jungle that borders the beach. "There's no telling what could be in there still."
Sam is scratching and plucking convulsively at his chest through the fabric of his t-shirt, but he freezes, looks at her for a long moment, and Meg can almost hear the gears in his head grind as he registers what she said. He winces, his face creasing with distaste for a few seconds, distaste that might be aimed whatever could be watching from the woods, or might be a reaction to her suggestion.
Meg's eyes slant, unbidden, to the cloth-wrapped blade Sam could use to end her for once and for all, at his other hand, curled on his thigh and perilously close to the weapon. But she remembers the way he fought inside her when she wore him, the way he protested her crimes when she used his hands to maim and murder, the way he screamed in rage and horror when she drove his fist into his brother's dazed face. Even if she knows his integrity is his strength and could be her death sentence, she also knows it is his weakness, and that it can save her. "For all we know, the body of the Righteous Man could be like a homing beacon to that thing's drones, and how can you and I fight them?" she adds quickly. "We're defenseless human beings, Sam…you and me both."
He frowns and Meg thinks she can see in his eyes that he has taken the bait, thinks she can sense his tension easing by tiny increments. "We'd have to gather a heck of a lot of wood for the pyre," she continues cautiously, and she can see Sam's jaw twitching like he's chewing the inside of his mouth.
"We'd have to distract Cas," he murmurs absently, because he's going over the logistics and Meg can finally relax at his acquiescence. "Separate him from the body. Restrain him so he doesn't put out the fire."
Meg continues in this odd, uneasy truce that seems to have been reached between them in the temporary insanity of his grief. "Could he put us out of commission? He isn't fully charged…if we piss him off and he uses up any more of his juice, we could be stuck here for days." As she speaks, it suddenly occurs to her that being marooned on this godforsaken beach after burning Dean's body would be fully dependent on them surviving the inevitable distress that would follow, and it's like Sam read her mind.
"If we piss him off, being stuck here would be the least of our worries," he says. "And if he didn't kill us for it, he might not help get us home afterwards. Look at him…"
Meg slants her eyes over to the hunched figure. Castiel is gazing up at the stars now, with Dean's head in his lap. He's rocking slightly, and his fingers are stroking Dean's cheek as the song of the waves plays out beyond them. If there is a time for arguing over how to dispose of Dean, it's going to have to happen on home turf. Castiel is too raw to deal with it.
Meg gathers a small pile of driftwood and sticks from the treeline anyway, and uses it to make a bonfire, cursing as she manages to burn her fingers on a set of waxed matches she finds in one of the bags.
"What, not a girl scout, Meg?" Sam pokes acidly. "Always prepared?"
Uneasy truce is right, but Meg is diplomatic, bites her tongue and doesn't respond as she steps back from the growing blaze. They take a moment to admire the licking flames and enjoy their different perspectives on Hell that the fire reminds them of. After a moment, Meg hears the slosh of liquid and glances beside her to see Sam lifting a stainless steel flask to his lips. "Since when did you have that?" she asks.
He points dark, resigned eyes at her. "It was Dean's. I found it in the surf. It belonged to John, went with him to 'Nam."
Meg licks her lips, ventures, "Can a friend be persuaded to share?"
Sam's gaze doesn't waver. "Sure."
He passes her the flask. She spins the cap and takes a moment to quietly toast Dean Winchester before she knocks back a swig, and, "Fuck," she curses, spluttering brackish water.
"You didn't really think we kept alcohol in there, did you?" Sam smirks. "Holy water for the family Winchester."
Meg considers saying something snide, but rolls her eyes instead. They fall into silence then, and she sees Sam darting sharp, speculative glances Castiel's way, as if he hopes the angel will nod off in the darkness for long enough for him to pull Dean out of his grasp and set him ablaze.
But Meg knows instinctively that none of them will sleep tonight, and that Dean won't burn.
She must sleep after all, because she comes round to the glow of sunrise and Sam looming over her, neurotic and babbling, hands out towards Castiel where he stands beside Dean's body.
"Let me just - I don't want Bobby to see him like this. He needs something on him, covering him."
As Meg pushes up to stand, Sam fumbles to pull his t-shirt over his head, and she's taking a moment to admire the ripple of toned muscle when something catches a glint of light in the sun. It reflects off Sam's chest and under his chin, a golden spot, and Castiel frowns and steps closer, his hand flying up to hook a finger under the amulet that hangs on a cord around Sam's neck. As he stares at its strange horns and stylized face, Sam curses, and that can't be good. Meg sighs and moves a few feet away again.
"You knew?" Castiel whispers, and his eyes go glassy with tears. "You knew he planned this?"
Sam shakes his head rapidly, fumbles out words. "No, Cas, wait a minute, there was no plan, it-"
"Don't lie to me, Sam," Castiel chokes out. "It was planned. He used the sigil against me so I wouldn't stop him. And now this…you didn't have time to take that off him, and I haven't left his body. The only reason you'd have it is if he gave it to you before he did it." He lets the amulet fall from his fingers, backs away unsteadily. "I thought he tricked you too," he mutters dully. "But you knew he was leaving me to walk into the fire. You kept saying the words. You let him do it. You knew."
Meg watches as Castiel turns toward the ocean with his hands at his head and his hair tufted between his fingers, seemingly unable to process the multitude of betrayals that descend upon him, one upon the other. Meg wonders if he's contemplating not taking them back at all; if he's considering just walking into the sea to drown himself in the dark and the deep, but finally he turns back, his eyes red and watery.
Sam colors, and he doesn't meet the angel's agonized look. He sinks down to his knees and gently lifts his brother up into the crook of his arm, slipping his t-shirt over Dean's head as it lolls against his thigh. The body is still oddly floppy, the primary flaccidity that follows death not having worn off for whatever reason, and Meg drops to her haunches and sticks out a supportive hand herself when it threatens to slump back onto the sand.
Sam lays his brother back down, picks up the cloth-wrapped sword, and stands. When Castiel makes an inarticulate sound and lurches towards them, there is an instant when Meg wonders if he might intend casting them into the ocean to drown. But he squats and hefts Dean into his arms, eyes flashing.
In the next second, Meg feels freezing cold air blast her face.
First there is the high-altitude oxygen-suck and turbulence of flight, and then there is the sudden impact of terra firma, and there never has been any warning of when to brace for landing, when to bend at the knees so the aftershock of boots smack-banging on solid ground doesn't jar its way up the spine in an uncomfortable grate and shimmy of vertebrae.
Then there is bitter cold against Sam's naked back, the vapor of warm breath in freezing air, and dogs, a mad, frenzied howling and baying, discordant noise that has Sam thinking, hellhounds. He swings his head around frantically to see them streaking towards him in the pinkish haze of dawn, a pack of ten or fifteen mutts of various sizes, and over their din he can hear shouting coming from the house.
"Shit," he yelps, and he backs away as Meg dodges around him adroitly and clatters up the porch steps to hammer at the door. Castiel doesn't react, seems rooted to the spot next to Sam, staring into the distance, Dean cradled limp in his arms. Sam crowds into him, pushes him closer to the porch, hisses, "Get up the steps," but he isn't sure if Castiel can really hear him at this point, blockaded behind his grief as he is.
The first of the dogs is nearing the steps now, while Meg still batters her fists on the wood and hollers for entry. It skids to a stop a couple of feet away, panting and snarling, and then it stops, cocks its head in what appears to be a more measured threat assessment, and whines.
"Cheney?" Sam gapes. It is, he's sure of it, but the dog is as skinny as a junkyard cur, its flanks hollow and its ribs visible. The rest of the pack is milling about in the lot, yipping and barking in excitement, but Cheney pads up to Sam and sidles past him, nudges its nose on Castiel's thigh, whines again, and licks Dean's hand where it hangs suspended in mid-air.
Sam tears his eyes away from that, strides the few feet it takes him to get to the door, throwing the sword onto the porch swing so he can thunder both fists on the wood. "Bobby, open up," he says hoarsely, and when he listens he can hear a soft rumble of conversation inside.
"You ain't fooling me."
The response is muffled but it's low and harsh, ramps up to controlled anger as it continues. "Whatever the fuck you are, revenant, tulpa - get off my land. House is warded and we're armed."
Beside Sam, Meg rolls her eyes. "Some welcome party."
But Sam ignores her, because none of this makes sense. He steps back, catches sight of a metallic shine on the inside of the window overlooking the porch. Corrugated aluminum, as far as he can make out in the gloom, and it looks like there are hurricane shutters secured to the inside of the frame. As Sam swings his gaze back out to scope the lot, the feeling of wrongness magnifies in the length of time it takes him to take in the frigid air, the naked trees, the patches of snow and the ice crystals gleaming on the Impala, sitting where Dean left her before they headed out of here just over three weeks ago, when it had been summer.
He turns back to Castiel, asks, "Did you bring us to the right reality?" but the angel stares through him.
Sam drops his gaze to where his brother's head is resting on Castiel's shoulder. Dean's eyelids have slipped open and his stare is fixed and unseeing, and twelve hours, Sam finds himself thinking. His brother has been dead for twelve hours, give or take, and even if Dean's body is still lax and floppy where it reclines in Castiel's arms, rigor mortis will set in sooner or later.
Like it had the first time he buried his brother.
And Sam has had enough, and he brings his hands up to his face, covers his eyes and thinks he might just sink down to his ass and sit on the ground until he freezes to death out here.
Or he can handle it, like Dean wanted him to.
He exhales, once, twice. "Come on," he says shortly, and he snags a handful of Castiel's t-shirt at the scruff of his neck, shepherds him down the steps much as he'd guided him up them. The dogs growl, but it seems like Cheney is the boss of them and they follow at a respectful distance as Sam steers Castiel around and onto the path that leads to the back of the property, to the autoshop and the yard full of wrecks. He's thinking logically, he tells himself, as he runs through it all in his mind. Burning his brother would be best, he knows, but he'd have to travel miles to find somewhere he can get a decent pyre going without the local fire department turning up, and-
"Uh-huh."
He wheels around at the crunch of boots on ice behind him. Meg, following along a few feet behind them, and she's eyeing him curiously and nodding.
Thinking out loud, then. Sam clears his throat. "On the other hand, burning him here is out of the question."
She quirks an eyebrow but doesn't comment.
"Well look around you," he says defensively, and he waves his hand haphazardly in the direction they came. "A lot of these junkers are probably still soused in oil and gasoline, and I don't want to burn Bobby's house down." He pauses, thinks darkly that the old bastard might at least show his face if a stray cinder set the roof alight.
Burial then, he thinks, and he ignores the way his heart is flopping painfully in his chest, ignores his breathlessness. "We bury him," he declares. "With a shit-ton of wards to make sure he stays put and nothing can get to him, because fuck knows I don't want anything using his meatsuit to terrorize me if I can help it."
They're coming up to the hangar that houses Bobby's auto shop, and Sam slows Castiel to a halt. "Stay there," he orders, and Castiel dutifully obeys as Sam ponders the canoe Bobby has propped up against the siding. The craft is a two-man job, a twelve-foot long Trapper, and Sam remembers how Dean would slide it in the back of Bobby's truck and drive them to Lake Oahe to camp and fish. He thinks it'll-
"-fight you, Sammy…it'll fight you. Don't use the reel to pull it in, you need to pump and lift the rod. Keep it tight."
Dean's face is all lit up there next to Sam, and he's leaning in now, so the canoe bobs a little bit from side to side. "Is he running?"
Sam nods, can feel the fish swimming away with the line, and Dean's hand is steady on his, his brother's fingers nimble on the drag setting.
"You want about four pounds on there. If he runs again just let him go, he'll get tired soon enough." A smile splits Dean's face, and it's pleasure, pride. "We'll be frying up bass for dinner, kiddo…and it'll-
-do, and Sam smiles, thinks Dean would probably appreciate being buried like a Viking in his longship, as he heaves the canoe down.
"Viking burial. Hell, yes." But the seats will get in the way, he realizes. "Chainsaw," he tells Castiel, and he knows Bobby has one hanging up in the shop so he pushes open the door, scrabbles for the light switch. It clicks impotently, and it's still dark in there. "Change the damn light bulb, old man," Sam shouts back towards the house, and he shakes his head. "There's a fucking service pit in there," he spits at Meg, and she looks bemused. "Anyone could fall into it if there are no lights," he elaborates, and she nods slowly.
"Oh. Okay."
It's lucky he knows where the saw is, and Sam picks his way over to it and back carefully. "Last time I used this was when that tree came down, remember?" he reminisces to Castiel, and he chuckles. "Round about the time you learned to bake pie. Maybe you can bake us one after we get this done, because I'm working up a hell of an appetite."
Castiel is mute, but Meg snorts in a disbelieving way.
"What?" Sam demands, and she lifts up her hands in surrender.
"This is clearly your way of dealing, Sam," she says neutrally. "I'm saying nothing."
"You're damn right I'm dealing," he snaps. "Someone has to. I'm handling this. Is anyone else? Well?" After a moment's silence he feels vindicated. "No one is handling this like me."
Meg stares him out, and her scrutiny is measured. "No they aren't," she concedes.
"You're damn right," Sam says again. The adrenaline is buzzing in him now, so that Meg's judgmental expression doesn't really bother him. He feels almost satisfied, triumphant, feels like he's achieving something here. He's handling it, even if cold sweat is trickling its clammy way down his spine and he's shivering, and he pulls the starter cord with a hand that he abstractedly notices is shaking. The machine revs throatily, and the canoe seats are no match for the blade, splintering in seconds. Sam sets the chainsaw down and studies the result critically. "You think he'll fit in there, Cas?"
The angel's stare is as blank as it has been since the beach, still as blank as Dean's is, and Sam sighs out his frustration. "One fucking crisis too many and he crumples." He swivels to look at the woman again. "But not me. I'm handling this. Do you think he'll fit in there?"
She nods, very slowly. "And then some."
"But we need some sort of cover, else we might as well just throw the body in the hole as is." Sam rubs at his jaw. "Wood, I need some wood…" Lumber, from when Bobby had him and Dean fix the fence at the back of the lot the summer before last, and it's right where he remembers them stacking it, in the shed.
"I found the shovel and pick ax as well," he celebrates as he emerges with the tools and an armload of the pine planks, and he gestures at the canoe. "Can you haul that along? Just grab the mooring line."
Meg nods, even if it's a little doubtful. She bends to snag the rope, tries the load on for size, and the canoe skids along the frost and ice easily.
"Now we're talking," Sam crows, and he splays his hand out on Castiel's back, pushes the angel into motion. "We'll put him near your Christmas tree," he soothes as Castiel stumbles placidly along just ahead of him. "We dug up the ground there already, so it'll be easier to turn over now. That sound reasonable?"
Still more silence, and it's getting damned annoying. "I'm handling this," Sam chides his friend. "I'm the only one who seems to be fucking handling it. Jesus."
From a few feet further back, over the grind of the boat along the ground, Meg calls Sam's name softly and then slants her eyes back towards the house. "Movement up there."
Sam's head is throbbing, his throat is sore, and swallowing past the dryness and constriction there is getting less and less easy. There is a void in him and he wants a drink, not just beer but something that will burn and corrode his belly, and blur the sharp edges of all this before blasting him to insensibility and dreamless sleep. And he will find it, after he handles it, and he forces his exhaustion away. "I'm handling this first," he barks out again decisively, and his voice sounds rough and raw.
The tree is just ahead and Sam doesn't pause as he circles around Castiel, throws the pick ax down, and sets the blade of the shovel against the ground, just like he did when he and his-
-brother have been digging for a half-hour now, and Sam is as unconvinced of the success of this as he ever was, finds himself casting dubious looks at the tree even while Dean throws up clods of earth enthusiastically.
"Dean, you know that when we plant this thing it'll either die or topple over, don't you? It's the wrong time of year to do this."
Dean's eyes are bright, his face somehow younger and less drawn than Sam has seen it in weeks, and he's swinging the pick ax with gusto, putting his back into it and grunting with satisfaction as it spears the icy ground. "It'll work," he says cheerfully. "It's my lucky tree. I want to keep it, so does Cas." He pauses for a moment, straightens up and arches backwards with a groan, rubbing at the small of his back. He glances at his wristwatch, looks over towards the house. "Come on," he urges. "He'll be waking up soon, I want him to see it when he looks out the window."
His expression is secretive and pleased when he looks at Sam again, and it reminds Sam that he hovered in the doorway to Bobby's study on his way up to bed Christmas night and caught them, Castiel slumped on Dean's chest as he slept and Dean gazing at him with gentle awe, as if he was sacred. The way Castiel always stares at Dean, Sam realizes, and it hits him that it's because something happened while they were away on their Christmas tree hunt, something that has eased his brother's stress and made him laugh again, made him happy. And that is a good thing. So Sam smiles, settles the blade of the shovel against the earth and-
-pushes at it, putting his whole weight on it, but the ground is rock-hard permafrost because somehow it turned into winter in the last week, and Sam still hasn't puzzled his way through that riddle.
"Pick ax might be better," he decides, and he throws the shovel down, reaches for the other tool. He ignores the figures that are ranging closer, guns raised, ignores the way Meg stands there with her hand out to catch the flask Bobby throws her, ignores the old man's scathing have a drink on me, as he hefts the pick ax and slams it down into the soil. It penetrates the top few inches before it bounces back up, and, "See?" Sam cheers, "now we're getting somewhere."
He brings it up and around and down again, again, again, and he pays no mind to the fact that it's Mira standing alongside Bobby, pays no mind to Meg rolling up her sleeve and cutting into her arm with a blade Sam knows is consecrated silver as Mira takes her through the standard tick-list of precautionary tests. He pays no mind to the way Bobby is walking towards Castiel on slow, stiff, unwilling legs, pays no mind to the old man's choked-out denials, pays no mind to the great big, fat tears streaming down Bobby's cheeks as he reaches his hand out to lay it on Dean's face.
Sam pays no mind to any of this because he's handling it, burying his brother, but-
-there is no time for stitching wounds, and the sheet is stained with rusty brown patches of dried-in blood. The air inside the car is thick with the rank piss-shit odor of violent death, combined with the smell of Sam's own vomit, spattered down his shirt, and with the eye-watering stench of his brother's decomposing flesh, because it's hot and even with the windows open the stink of putrefaction lingers.
Bobby hasn't said a word since he fell to his knees beside Sam in the lake of blood Dean made as he bled out. They loaded their burden into the car in dead silence and now they sit there, staring dead ahead, mute but somehow expectant, as if they think Dean will break the hush of their loss by sitting up with a grin and telling them it was a joke.
It isn't a joke. Sam really did see his brother torn apart, and he's clamping his hand to his nose at the smell, the smell. And maybe he said it out loud, because Bobby takes the next exit, drives them out into the sticks. They do it there, hammering together strips of the pine they stopped off at Home Depot for before Dean started to rot, and forcing his body down into the box because it is already rigid with cadaveric spasm.
Just before Bobby nails down the lid, Sam reaches for the amulet, and then they dig, and the soil is summer soft and breaks easily under the spike of-
-the pick ax isn't really doing it if Sam is honest, and he throws it down with a curse, twists around and runs a shaking hand through his hair.
"Backhoe," he snaps out at Bobby as the old man shakes his head, but Bobby doesn't seem to notice him. He's talking to Castiel now, his hand on the angel's cheek instead of Dean's, and Castiel is finally focusing on Bobby, and his eyes aren't empty any more: they're aching with hurt, and shock, and disbelief, and he's weeping.
"Backhoe," Sam says again, and he smacks his fist into his opposite palm for emphasis, wonders why he never thought of it earlier. And what do you know, Bobby's mini-Terramite is parked conveniently close, complete with auger and excavator shovel, and Sam trots over there, maneuvers himself into the seat. The keys are right where Bobby always leaves them, and Sam cranks the engine, shakes his head at the labored, unproductive grind that results. The fuel gauge is on zero, and "Fucking typical," he grates out as he slides out of the machine and stalks back over to where Bobby is taking a few steps in his direction.
"Does no one maintain this fucking place any more now Dean is dead?" Sam yells as Bobby comes to a halt, and he stabs viciously back towards the auto shop. "There's no light bulb in there, and it could cause an accident. The place is crawling with wild fucking dogs, and I need to use the fucking backhoe so I can bury my brother, and the fucking needle is on empty."
Bobby's voice is calm and gentle, understanding. "We can find some gas somewhere, Sam, but why don't you let us handle this-"
"No," Sam cuts him off, in a way he knows is damned aggressive, because he sees Bobby flinch and flick his eyes over to Mira as she comes closer. "I'm handling it," he insists, even though he knows he isn't sucking in enough breath to give his voice the force it needs, even though he can feel something inside him start to give way and rip apart. "I'm handling it," he claims, even though he feels weak at the knees and everything is pressing in around him. "I'm handling it," he lies, because it has been a lie all along and he's falling forward into Bobby's arms, and Bobby is collapsing to the ground with him.
"I want to sleep," Sam hears himself choke out. "I don't want to bury my brother. I want to sleep. I want something that'll help me sleep."
Bobby's answer is gruff in Sam's ear, and his words hang suspended in the air like doom. "I'll handle this, son."
There is a shriek, far off and muffled, sobbed-out anguish that penetrates the thick, soft blanket of drugged slumber, and Sam blinks blearily. It's dark, inside and out if the moonlight seeping in through the curtains is anything to go by.
The cry sounds again, different from nightmares, and there is such sorrow and hopelessness in it that Sam can feel tears spring. Castiel, and Dean isn't there for the angel now. Sam sighs, starts to shift in the bed and throw off the covers, but there is a warm body stretched up behind him, an arm snaking in to wrap around him and hold him in place, keeping him safe.
"Bobby is taking care of him," Mira whispers. "Now sleep."
She kisses the back of Sam's neck and he remembers that she is the one, and there is a sort of peace in this feeling of security. He turns himself around, pulls her into him, tangles his fingers in her hair. "You're the one," he breathes against her mouth. "You're the one, and that's the last thing I said to my brother. He was happy about it. And I'll be alright."
She kisses him, a brief press of lips. "Sleep, love," she repeats. "We're safe here."
The distant lament lulls Sam back to unconsciousness.
Episode 24: Redemption (part I continued)
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info,
warnings, and disclaimer)
Authors: swordofmymouth and zatnikatel
Characters/Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam, OC and canon characters
Rating: R (this part)
Wordcount: ~20,500
Warnings: language, violence, sexuality
Betas: dotfic and murron
Art: Chapter banners by zatnikatel; digital paintings by quantum_witch, Mobius-9, and Rinienne, which you can also find here, here and here; graphic by catstiella (NB: art contains major spoilers for the chapter)
Summary: "Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows…"
Lawrence, Kansas
1978
Michael.
Michael, and his brother's presence sears through Castiel's senses like electricity, corrodes his waning grace like acid, disorients him with a mix of joy and sheer terror as he lurches up off of…a bed he doesn't recall being placed on.
His vessel's heart is beating a rapid tattoo in his chest, and the moonlight flooding in through the windows of the room he is in casts his face an eerie, icy, washed-out blue as he stares up, wide-eyed with his own confusion, at his reflection in a large mirror positioned above the bed.
Michael, and his magnetic pull tugs at every elementary particle of Castiel's being with its rightness and its promise of succor, even while its wrongness appalls him, because Michael shouldn't be here. And if he is…the notion fills Castiel with a complicated, hectic desperation he doesn't quite understand, has him choking out Dean's name as he claws at his equilibrium and heaves it back to steady himself.
There is no reply to his cry; the room is quiet, uninhabited but for him. He filters through his grace tentatively, searches for some sign of Dean here, and not for the first time he regrets that the sigils he inscribed on his friend's ribs cloak him so thoroughly. He fumbles in his pocket for the cell phone Dean gave him, snaps it open. There is nothing, no signal, and he shakes it, mutters a curse under his breath at the lack of response. But still there is his brother's low, sibilant, wrathful murmur, I'll see you soon, Dean, cutting through the insistent clamor of six billion human souls, and it's enough, gives Castiel a point in time and space, a location.
For one fraction of a second he considers the fact his brother already knows he's here, and that their kinship won't stop Michael from meting out judgment and justice for Castiel's treachery. And then, Dean, he thinks, and with that thought he beats his wings and he's there, staring through the wreckage of a solid wall into the eyes of the man he last saw gasping his way back to life in Mary Winchester's arms, and seeing his brother gaze back at him.
"So it's true." Michael tilts his head, regards Castiel thoughtfully, and he sounds almost reasonable in his distaste at Castiel's perfidy as he continues. "I didn't want to believe Zachariah."
Castiel tamps down his discomfort and his own anguish, spares a moment to scan their surroundings. As he slants his eyes back, Michael curls John Winchester's lips up into a subtle smile.
"He is safe. As is his brother. I sent them back."
Michael is standing next to Mary Winchester, where her curled body forms a golden-haired comma on the floor, and he inclines his head and contemplates her. "She won't remember this," he says quietly. "She will birth both of her sons."
Castiel feels a surge of despair. "This isn't right," he tries, but he can hear the way his own hopelessness makes his voice hollow. "Please." He puts a hand out, palm up, and he implores. "Please let her be. Let Dean be. This can't be what our Father really wants."
Michael looks up, focuses on Castiel slowly. His stare is grave, it doesn't waver, and Castiel already knows this particular battle is lost.
"Whether this is what our Father wants or intended is not of import, Castiel, not any more," Michael offers. "It's too late to turn back. Lucifer walks, and he must be stopped for the sake of all souls."
Even though his brother's tone is firm with what Castiel knows is both logic and Michael's belief that this is right, it is underpinned with what Castiel thinks might be kindness as he goes on.
"There is no other option, despite your new-found appreciation for free will. All roads lead to the same destination." Michael pauses a beat then, and all the while Castiel can feel the tendrils of his brother's grace vibrating through him, weaving their way into his superconsciousness, tapping his every unspoken thought and feeling. "And that one…your Dean. He is the Righteous Man, the one who began it, and you know the prophecy. The one who began it must end it, or it will never end."
Michael sinks to his knees then, reaches out a slow, considerate hand, places it on Mary Winchester's lower belly. "I can feel him inside her," he murmurs, almost dreamily. "Can you feel him, Castiel? Can you already feel the pull of him?" He looks up, and his eyes gleam critically as he examines Castiel. "He is my vessel. He is me. This is why you serve him, Castiel, why you cleave to him. This is why you love him."
There is a sudden, somber clarity that comes from Michael's conclusion, a simple resolve that springs up inside Castiel in place of the confusion that has always clouded any analysis of the motives that drive him where Dean Winchester is concerned. It positions itself like a barrier between him and his brother, between their shared past, millennia of fealty, respect, and fraternal devotion. Castiel knows that Michael senses it, can feel his brother's flash of outrage and dismay as he pushes up fluidly and draws closer.
Castiel shuffles backwards as Michael approaches, but he will say this even if he knows he won't survive the admission. "I do love him. But that isn't why."
He comes up against a solid surface, allows himself a swift glance behind him to see he has backed into the Impala, swivels back to see Michael so close now that Jimmy Novak's face is reflected in John Winchester's eyes. If there is an instant when Castiel knows he can still run from this, it's gone even before he completes the thought, as he feels his grace tethered and confined here by the archangel.
"Do you think I won't do what has to be done, Castiel?" his brother asks, on a faint sigh that exudes sorrow. "Do you think I won't end you for your duplicity? Even if I don't want to?"
Castiel swallows. "I know you better than that," he answers softly, and he can feel it starting already, can feel himself being dispersed, the strands of him being unlaced and unknitted, pulled apart, as Michael exorcises him; can feel himself weakening, crumpling onto the hood of the car as his brother looms closer and ponders him though the methane glow that seeps out through his vessel’s pores.
"Or I could make you forget your human," Michael says, not unkindly. "I could send you back to him with no memory of what you feel for him."
Through the fire of his own immolation, Castiel can feel the metal skin of the Impala start to bubble and boil under his fingertips as he scrabbles at it, this last piece of Dean. He clings to it as it runs liquid under him and fuses with his vessel's melting flesh and his own dying grace. "Since you can't change who Dean is, you can't change what I feel for him," he gasps. "I am for him…the road I travel will always lead me to him, no matter how many obstacles you lay in my path, and I will always protect him."
He gives up then, gives himself up to the hazy agony and ecstasy of his own termination, but through it he catches Michael's last, faint words, then perhaps you can best keep him safe for me, brother-
-Castiel's arrival is abrupt and sickening, sends him reeling, until he is grasped and steadied, one hand pressed on his chest to stop his collapse, and voices he never expected to hear again saying his name.
"You sonofabitch," Dean is declaring, part relief and part triumph, and his eyes are bright and intense as he stares at Castiel. "You made it."
Castiel blinks slowly at his friend, hears himself croak out, "I did?" He can taste the copper of blood in his mouth, and he holds up his hand and studies it, tries to collect his thoughts past the disquieting suspicion that something important he can't recall just happened. "I'm very surprised," he concedes, and then it goes dark.
Southern Pacific Ocean
Present day
Meg can taste something on the tip of her tongue, something strong and sour, something that makes her lips pucker involuntarily. But she can't focus for long enough to work out what it is because the ocean is roaring beside her as it ebbs and flows, and fuck anyone who ever thought the sound of it was restful, because its constant crash-slosh at the periphery of her mind is mind-numbingly repetitive.
Beneath the steady rhythm of the endless tide, she hears another sound that keeps time with it; ragged exhales as someone nearby wheezes out a strangled, hopeless cry, catches their breath, and does it again, over and over. Meg listens to the sound for what might be a long time before it occurs to her to backtrack her brain and figure out why she's here, but the memory of her fall into the abyss after Sam and Castiel is little more than windswept screaming as she plunged endlessly, from what seemed like the top of the universe to the bottom, until she hit the freezing-cold shock of water and everything went black.
She opens her eyes a crack, and everything is scorching daylight after the eternal midnight of the cavern. Sam is a few feet away, the long, dark bulk of his body laid out across the beach in a way that looks almost relaxed. And there is that sound of water again, and Meg becomes aware that her legs feel cold, that the water is lapping at her feet and seeping up her jeans as far as her thighs. Seawater, because where there is beach there is sea, and there is that confirmation of surf swooshing across sand again.
Meg finds herself musing hazily that there was a time - hundreds of years long - when she couldn't even touch the ocean. Too pure, and in the instant she thinks it she recalls another fall, and with it comes the realization that she is sucking in air she actually needs to live now, and the taste in her mouth is salt. Sand crusts her eyes, and every blink is an irritating sweep of lids over grit. Everything hurts too, and an incredible arc and throb of pain dominates where her splinted leg is immersed in brine; but the physical pain is lost in the revelation of a deeper ache, and she can't hold back her soft gasp of grief at the knowledge she is an empty husk, that the comforting, velvet-soft blackness that pulsated at her center is gone, that she is cleansed, sanitized. Weak and vulnerable too, and without the gift of demon-power at her disposal she becomes part of the catastrophe, part of the disaster. Now she shares the misfortune with them all, and she does it bitterly as she heaves herself up out of the sand and onto her elbows at the same time as Sam stirs, rousing himself to consciousness with a groan bitten off between his teeth.
Meg twists, scans the horizon. Along the tide line is the broken wreckage of their ill-fated expedition; assorted bags, pieces of the Duck, firearms washed ashore. When she turns back to look in the other direction, Sam is lurching to his feet on a choked cry and digging footprints into the sand. Beyond him is a huddled figure, and for a moment Meg thinks she sees the shape of massive sails extending out behind it, but they aren't sails, they're…
Oh, she thinks, with breathless surprise, and in the next second they're gone and from here on in she'll pretend she didn't just totally fangirl over Castiel's wings. She pulls herself together, ignores the fact that she has never run into a set of them before now, even while she mentally fistbumps herself for finally catching a glimpse after she turned mortal, because to witness grace is to burn. It's what they do, the function they serve - to burn the lower demonic orders out from every molecule.
But the wings are gone now, tucked back into invisibility, and in their absence Meg's eyes widen and she takes in the whole of the scene and the extent of the disaster. A body further on up the beach lies just above the seaweed line, where someone - where Castiel - has dragged it out of the reach of the greedy water. Castiel sits cross-legged with Dean's head in his lap, bent over his lover with his arms cradling him. He rocks back and forth, and the sound Meg heard comes from him; a breathless, featureless animal scream, as he shakes and pours out his heart into the salty air.
Meg listens to him for a moment and thinks there ought to be something profound in the revelation that the sound an angel makes in grief is no different from the infinite victims she has tortured. It's one thing to be trapped in a human body, she considers, but to feel it, to truly inhabit that ephemeral humanity - oh, that's the punishment, that's the hurt, and she marvels that something so powerful and above it all can be grounded and forced to feel so much without relief. As Castiel does now.
Another wave laps at her feet and she hauls herself further away from the water. Her fingers scrape on shells and tangle in seaweed until they trip over a long piece of driftwood, jagged and brittle. She thrusts it into the ground, bites into her tongue until blood wells to the surface and fills her mouth, as she uses it to lever herself up onto her knee, and then her one good foot, her broken leg dragging useless behind her.
She hobbles along in Sam's wake as he walks unevenly to Castiel, and she can hear the sounds of the angel's inarticulate breathing. Alongside the sounds of Castiel's labored gasping and the slumped shape of Sam, silhouetted against the burning sun, is the silent presence of the corpse between them. Meg is close enough to see Dean's body in more detail now, and she finds that she's recalling him in the way someone who never paid much attention to him might; a caricature of the youth he was, not the reality of the man he became. His name evokes a series of images, of false machismo and half-assed bravado, cheap food at roadside diners, bad music; but beneath it all, an untamable spirit with a liking for band shirts and denim, and his father's leather jacket. A healthy if emotionally stunted youth.
What Meg sees now is a shadow of the man that was. Whatever happened to him after he slid the gun over to her in the Duck and walked away has burned his skin to raw and blistered, melted through to gleaming bone along his arms and down his torso. There are gaping rips in his flesh, and the rack of his ribs protrudes through his open chest like the keys of a piano, blood seeping languidly all around them. Dark hollows have gone purple beneath his eyes, but for all that, his face is oddly serene, the thick fringe of lashes on his cheeks peaceful. Meg muses that from the neck up, he looks as if he crashed out to sleep off his hangover after one hell of a party, that he might wake up again at any moment.
He never will.
Castiel knows it. He sways and shivers, but when he hears their approach he snaps to attention, pulling his gaze away from the body in his arms and looking up as Sam's shadow falls across him. His face has all the contour and shape of a crumpled sheet of paper, but his eyes blaze electric blue in the morning light. "Help me, Sam," he whispers, parched and desperate. "You have to help me. We'll start from the beginning, and-"
"What is that, Cas?" Sam says, strained but gentle.
"The spell…if we just do it again, if we go back to the beginning and fix it, and-"
"Cas."
"-remember, Sam, Sumerian phonetics can be difficult to the untrained speaker but I can help you through the difficult passages…there must have been a word we tripped up on-"
"Cas."
"-but when we get it right this time, and we will get it right, I know we will…then we can do it-"
"No, Cas."
"-together, we'll do it together. And if it doesn't work there's always Enochian, there are so many rituals, so we should start while it's early and then-"
"Cas!"
Sam's switch from gentle to sharp breaks through the trance, and Meg steels herself for the result.
"My name is not part of the spell, Sam," Castiel finally acknowledges him, terse. He doesn't pause for breath, begins to recite the spell himself instead, and even from a couple of yards away Meg feels an uneasy twinge in her split flesh, in the atmosphere, and in the sand underfoot. The spell has the power to shake the world, even in broad daylight, and she winces, waiting to see what will happen next.
"Stop that," Sam snaps.
Castiel does not stop that. He keeps going, racing through the words in the ancient language, and Meg hears herself moan deep in her throat. "Make it stop," she hisses, and she isn't sure if it's the scorching heat of Castiel's grief that she is begging to have relief from or the power of the spell itself, but it seems that Sam can't bear it either because he leans down and slaps Castiel across the face.
Almost before the sound of the blow dies away, there is an explosion of movement as Castiel bolts upright from his seated position, leaving Dean unguarded on the sand. Meg finds her gaze pulled to the body again, studying the way Dean's head tilts up to the sky, his mouth canting open, his lips cracked from the salt. Dean's worries are over, she thinks. Dean has bitten the dust, bought the farm, gone to the big room downstairs, and he's not coming back this time because she has a gut feeling that not all of the angels and all of the spells can put this Winchester back together again.
Sam doesn't move an inch as Castiel rises to meet him and there is the faint suggestion of the slap on the angel's cheek, the red tingling through his pale skin. His eyes have gone from grieving to feral.
"You should have let me go with him," he says, his voice reverberating from his throat in a deep, bone-shaking growl. "If you're not going to help me, you should have let me die with him. I thought you were his brother, Sam."
If there was a single pressure point Castiel could hit on to make Sam explode, this is it, Meg knows, and she assesses Sam's face, the clench of his jaw as he leans further over Castiel, a charge that threatens violence building between them.
Meg can stitch together countless moments when her life intersected with the Winchesters, and during all of them she didn't fully appreciate the effect Dean's presence had, whether it was on John or Sam, and now on the angel. Without the general apathy of her demonhood blinding her, she observes, with insight and sudden, unexpected sadness, everything that Dean had been, the various roles he had filled. He was a keystone, a linchpin, the point upon which a fulcrum turns, the central hub without which things disintegrate and fall apart, and it can't be more clear than in the tableau that plays out as she watches.
She limps closer, curious to see what happens despite herself, the foot of her crippled leg furrowing a snaking trail in the sand.
"For Dean's sake, I'll pretend I didn't hear that," Sam says, icy cold.
"For Dean's sake you should have tried harder to reach him," Castiel yells.
And that's it - there is a flurry of motion so rapid that Meg's brain has to sprint to catch up with it; the sudden fast pull of punches as both men lurch into each other with flying fists and bared teeth, their eyes gone dark with anger and hurt, wolves howling on the empty stretch of beach with Dean's body a mute testament between them.
Knuckles trade off against their faces, and where they shuffle in their tight boxing ring, their feet dance dangerously close to the corpse. Meg sinks to her knees, swallowing a screech of pain as she reaches for Dean's body, and she can't say what impulse causes her to lean forward to pull it to safety. This man was squirting holy water in her face not that long ago, and taking no small delight in the burning of her skin.
"Soldiers deserve better," she mutters, as she threads her hands under his arms and pulls him up and away from the fray, and she tells herself that is the whole of it. They shared the same rack once upon a time, in another land, and this man looked down at her with something like understanding and pity as he unstrapped her from Crowley's torture table after the demon inside Christian Campbell smoked and died. They might have been on different sides of a war, but when life has passed, the boundaries of enemy and friend are no longer so clearly defined. They seem small and trivial when she stares down at the empty vessel that was once meant for Michael.
Above her are the thud of impact and the sound of thick grunts as Sam breaks Castiel's nose and gore comes flooding down the angel's face; the answering gasp and cry from Castiel as he sends several punches into Sam's kidneys so that Sam buckles over, heaving in air. He erupts back up, clamping his fingers to Castiel's arm and swinging him around violently, into a chokehold that binds them to each other. Both of them are breathing hard, like cattle in a stampede.
"My brother is dead and you broke my fucking wall, and you think I'm going to deal with this all by myself?" Sam hollers, his face creased ugly with fury. "You fucker! You selfish fucking bastard! It's real easy to die and leave the mess for the living, but you aren't doing this the easy way, Cas. You're doing this with me. We're doing this together."
Sam lets him go and Castiel stumbles a few feet away, to where the sand is splotched with blood from a split on Sam's cheek, and from Castiel's own broken nose. He reaches up and fingers the break with a hiss, before he shifts the bone back into place with an audible crack. The two men breathe hard and fast in tandem as they regard each other with an awkward, nervous silence, the tension too thick to break with words alone until Castiel finally does, leaning with his hands on his knees and spitting blood into the ground.
"I should be thanking you. You saved me from Hell," he croaks, in what Meg assumes is the closest he can manage to an apology.
Sam exhales a long, steadying breath, but his reply is dull and exhausted. "Yeah. I guess I did, in a way."
"But you left my soul behind, Sam."
For the first time in a long time, Castiel's voice regresses back into his angelic monotone and the contrast highlights just how far his journey has taken him to all levels of human and angel and back again. He turns and looks down at Meg, where she has dragged Dean a few yards from their altercation. His stare is empty and desolate as he rests it on Dean and hunkers down opposite, his hair wild and messy, and clogged with sand, blood oozing from his nose and from a split in his eyebrow. Meg studies him in silence until he lifts his gaze to her, his lips pressed into a thin, angry line.
"Thank you," he whispers.
His gratitude makes her uncomfortable, and she looks away and down at the dead body between them both.
"There's some magic left, you know," Castiel adds dryly.
He reaches across the corpse that divides them and before Meg can react, his fingers are pressed to the sore and bruised calf of her broken leg. His touch sends fireworks through her nerves and she can't look at what he is doing, opens her mouth to scream - but then the agony shuts off abruptly, as if it was never there, as if all her nerve endings were silenced at once. She opens her eyes and the swollen, deformed limb is recognizable again; the rent in the skin where the broken bone pushed through healed over and the pain gone with it. She replays the angel's last words, and her eyes narrow as she looks from her leg to Dean Winchester's lax, dead features and ravaged body, and then back to Castiel once more.
"Magic enough to fix him, to-"
"No," Castiel cuts her off, biting the word out as if it hurts. "Not enough to do what matters most. His soul is gone where I can no longer follow, and without his soul he would not be fixed. It would not be him, and I…" His voice dies for a second before he swallows. "I would not do that to him. Or his brother."
Meg thinks she sees something in his eyes as he speaks, a flash of something that might be guilt, but she isn't sure. Movement from above is a distraction as Sam kneels down beside them, cutting a dark shadow over his brother, and by the time she looks back to Castiel he has collapsed in on himself, shoulders brushing Sam's. He doesn't seem to care or mind, regardless of the fight from seconds ago. All the animosity is forgotten, and Sam sets a hand on Dean's shoulder, withdrawing into his own private thoughts for a few moments before he swipes a hand across his eyes and speaks.
"You have any mojo left to take us back, Cas?" he asks. "I thought you were-"
"Running on empty?" the angel says with a weary bitterness. "I know. It cost me to fix her leg, but if we wait long enough, I can take us home."
"What the hell went wrong anyway?" Meg asks Sam, after brief silence has passed, but Sam's eyes are vacant, and he doesn't answer her.
Castiel stays with Dean.
Several times Sam attempts to get him to leave the body, and Meg grows tired of the pleading and Castiel's mute obstinacy, and wanders down to the tideline, where she finds several unopened water bottles and a pack of sodden bagels washed up on the shore. She lines them up in a row, wades into the lapping surf to fish out what looks like a fabric bag so she can carry the provisions more easily. Her hand closes around something solid concealed within it, and she picks at the coarse material, peers inside it to see the dull luster of old metal. She barks out a dry, mirthless laugh as she drops the water bottles and food in beside it, and makes her way back to their makeshift camp.
Sam is sitting with his back against a large rock, his legs sprawled out carelessly. He's staring at the sea, and he doesn't acknowledge Meg's return. She sits down a foot or so away, reaches inside the bag and retrieves the bagels and the water bottles one by one, before leaning over to drop the cloth bundle on Sam's lap. "Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes," she remarks, and when he drifts red-rimmed eyes over to focus on her, she nods down at her salvage. "The mighty sword of truth and justice. No sign of the holy grail though."
Sam casts his eyes down to examine the bag but he doesn't open it up, just shoves it off his thighs, then stretches across to scoop up one of the bottles of water. He stares over at Castiel for a moment before pushing up and ambling over, almost leisurely, to place the bottle beside the angel. He mutters words too low for Meg to hear, but Castiel shakes his head and he will not speak, not yet.
Once Sam has slumped back down in his spot, Meg unscrews the cap on one of the bottles and sets it down next to him. Ahead of them, the golden ball of the sun is sinking fast as the night closes in. The prospect of darkness is forbidding with the trees behind them whispering threats as they rustle in the breeze, and Meg finds her gaze drawn to Castiel, his head bowed and Dean Winchester still cradled in his arms. "We should burn the body," she hisses. "Leaving it intact is an invitation to trouble." She jerks a thumb back into the jungle that borders the beach. "There's no telling what could be in there still."
Sam is scratching and plucking convulsively at his chest through the fabric of his t-shirt, but he freezes, looks at her for a long moment, and Meg can almost hear the gears in his head grind as he registers what she said. He winces, his face creasing with distaste for a few seconds, distaste that might be aimed whatever could be watching from the woods, or might be a reaction to her suggestion.
Meg's eyes slant, unbidden, to the cloth-wrapped blade Sam could use to end her for once and for all, at his other hand, curled on his thigh and perilously close to the weapon. But she remembers the way he fought inside her when she wore him, the way he protested her crimes when she used his hands to maim and murder, the way he screamed in rage and horror when she drove his fist into his brother's dazed face. Even if she knows his integrity is his strength and could be her death sentence, she also knows it is his weakness, and that it can save her. "For all we know, the body of the Righteous Man could be like a homing beacon to that thing's drones, and how can you and I fight them?" she adds quickly. "We're defenseless human beings, Sam…you and me both."
He frowns and Meg thinks she can see in his eyes that he has taken the bait, thinks she can sense his tension easing by tiny increments. "We'd have to gather a heck of a lot of wood for the pyre," she continues cautiously, and she can see Sam's jaw twitching like he's chewing the inside of his mouth.
"We'd have to distract Cas," he murmurs absently, because he's going over the logistics and Meg can finally relax at his acquiescence. "Separate him from the body. Restrain him so he doesn't put out the fire."
Meg continues in this odd, uneasy truce that seems to have been reached between them in the temporary insanity of his grief. "Could he put us out of commission? He isn't fully charged…if we piss him off and he uses up any more of his juice, we could be stuck here for days." As she speaks, it suddenly occurs to her that being marooned on this godforsaken beach after burning Dean's body would be fully dependent on them surviving the inevitable distress that would follow, and it's like Sam read her mind.
"If we piss him off, being stuck here would be the least of our worries," he says. "And if he didn't kill us for it, he might not help get us home afterwards. Look at him…"
Meg slants her eyes over to the hunched figure. Castiel is gazing up at the stars now, with Dean's head in his lap. He's rocking slightly, and his fingers are stroking Dean's cheek as the song of the waves plays out beyond them. If there is a time for arguing over how to dispose of Dean, it's going to have to happen on home turf. Castiel is too raw to deal with it.
Meg gathers a small pile of driftwood and sticks from the treeline anyway, and uses it to make a bonfire, cursing as she manages to burn her fingers on a set of waxed matches she finds in one of the bags.
"What, not a girl scout, Meg?" Sam pokes acidly. "Always prepared?"
Uneasy truce is right, but Meg is diplomatic, bites her tongue and doesn't respond as she steps back from the growing blaze. They take a moment to admire the licking flames and enjoy their different perspectives on Hell that the fire reminds them of. After a moment, Meg hears the slosh of liquid and glances beside her to see Sam lifting a stainless steel flask to his lips. "Since when did you have that?" she asks.
He points dark, resigned eyes at her. "It was Dean's. I found it in the surf. It belonged to John, went with him to 'Nam."
Meg licks her lips, ventures, "Can a friend be persuaded to share?"
Sam's gaze doesn't waver. "Sure."
He passes her the flask. She spins the cap and takes a moment to quietly toast Dean Winchester before she knocks back a swig, and, "Fuck," she curses, spluttering brackish water.
"You didn't really think we kept alcohol in there, did you?" Sam smirks. "Holy water for the family Winchester."
Meg considers saying something snide, but rolls her eyes instead. They fall into silence then, and she sees Sam darting sharp, speculative glances Castiel's way, as if he hopes the angel will nod off in the darkness for long enough for him to pull Dean out of his grasp and set him ablaze.
But Meg knows instinctively that none of them will sleep tonight, and that Dean won't burn.
She must sleep after all, because she comes round to the glow of sunrise and Sam looming over her, neurotic and babbling, hands out towards Castiel where he stands beside Dean's body.
"Let me just - I don't want Bobby to see him like this. He needs something on him, covering him."
As Meg pushes up to stand, Sam fumbles to pull his t-shirt over his head, and she's taking a moment to admire the ripple of toned muscle when something catches a glint of light in the sun. It reflects off Sam's chest and under his chin, a golden spot, and Castiel frowns and steps closer, his hand flying up to hook a finger under the amulet that hangs on a cord around Sam's neck. As he stares at its strange horns and stylized face, Sam curses, and that can't be good. Meg sighs and moves a few feet away again.
"You knew?" Castiel whispers, and his eyes go glassy with tears. "You knew he planned this?"
Sam shakes his head rapidly, fumbles out words. "No, Cas, wait a minute, there was no plan, it-"
"Don't lie to me, Sam," Castiel chokes out. "It was planned. He used the sigil against me so I wouldn't stop him. And now this…you didn't have time to take that off him, and I haven't left his body. The only reason you'd have it is if he gave it to you before he did it." He lets the amulet fall from his fingers, backs away unsteadily. "I thought he tricked you too," he mutters dully. "But you knew he was leaving me to walk into the fire. You kept saying the words. You let him do it. You knew."
Meg watches as Castiel turns toward the ocean with his hands at his head and his hair tufted between his fingers, seemingly unable to process the multitude of betrayals that descend upon him, one upon the other. Meg wonders if he's contemplating not taking them back at all; if he's considering just walking into the sea to drown himself in the dark and the deep, but finally he turns back, his eyes red and watery.
Sam colors, and he doesn't meet the angel's agonized look. He sinks down to his knees and gently lifts his brother up into the crook of his arm, slipping his t-shirt over Dean's head as it lolls against his thigh. The body is still oddly floppy, the primary flaccidity that follows death not having worn off for whatever reason, and Meg drops to her haunches and sticks out a supportive hand herself when it threatens to slump back onto the sand.
Sam lays his brother back down, picks up the cloth-wrapped sword, and stands. When Castiel makes an inarticulate sound and lurches towards them, there is an instant when Meg wonders if he might intend casting them into the ocean to drown. But he squats and hefts Dean into his arms, eyes flashing.
In the next second, Meg feels freezing cold air blast her face.
First there is the high-altitude oxygen-suck and turbulence of flight, and then there is the sudden impact of terra firma, and there never has been any warning of when to brace for landing, when to bend at the knees so the aftershock of boots smack-banging on solid ground doesn't jar its way up the spine in an uncomfortable grate and shimmy of vertebrae.
Then there is bitter cold against Sam's naked back, the vapor of warm breath in freezing air, and dogs, a mad, frenzied howling and baying, discordant noise that has Sam thinking, hellhounds. He swings his head around frantically to see them streaking towards him in the pinkish haze of dawn, a pack of ten or fifteen mutts of various sizes, and over their din he can hear shouting coming from the house.
"Shit," he yelps, and he backs away as Meg dodges around him adroitly and clatters up the porch steps to hammer at the door. Castiel doesn't react, seems rooted to the spot next to Sam, staring into the distance, Dean cradled limp in his arms. Sam crowds into him, pushes him closer to the porch, hisses, "Get up the steps," but he isn't sure if Castiel can really hear him at this point, blockaded behind his grief as he is.
The first of the dogs is nearing the steps now, while Meg still batters her fists on the wood and hollers for entry. It skids to a stop a couple of feet away, panting and snarling, and then it stops, cocks its head in what appears to be a more measured threat assessment, and whines.
"Cheney?" Sam gapes. It is, he's sure of it, but the dog is as skinny as a junkyard cur, its flanks hollow and its ribs visible. The rest of the pack is milling about in the lot, yipping and barking in excitement, but Cheney pads up to Sam and sidles past him, nudges its nose on Castiel's thigh, whines again, and licks Dean's hand where it hangs suspended in mid-air.
Sam tears his eyes away from that, strides the few feet it takes him to get to the door, throwing the sword onto the porch swing so he can thunder both fists on the wood. "Bobby, open up," he says hoarsely, and when he listens he can hear a soft rumble of conversation inside.
"You ain't fooling me."
The response is muffled but it's low and harsh, ramps up to controlled anger as it continues. "Whatever the fuck you are, revenant, tulpa - get off my land. House is warded and we're armed."
Beside Sam, Meg rolls her eyes. "Some welcome party."
But Sam ignores her, because none of this makes sense. He steps back, catches sight of a metallic shine on the inside of the window overlooking the porch. Corrugated aluminum, as far as he can make out in the gloom, and it looks like there are hurricane shutters secured to the inside of the frame. As Sam swings his gaze back out to scope the lot, the feeling of wrongness magnifies in the length of time it takes him to take in the frigid air, the naked trees, the patches of snow and the ice crystals gleaming on the Impala, sitting where Dean left her before they headed out of here just over three weeks ago, when it had been summer.
He turns back to Castiel, asks, "Did you bring us to the right reality?" but the angel stares through him.
Sam drops his gaze to where his brother's head is resting on Castiel's shoulder. Dean's eyelids have slipped open and his stare is fixed and unseeing, and twelve hours, Sam finds himself thinking. His brother has been dead for twelve hours, give or take, and even if Dean's body is still lax and floppy where it reclines in Castiel's arms, rigor mortis will set in sooner or later.
Like it had the first time he buried his brother.
And Sam has had enough, and he brings his hands up to his face, covers his eyes and thinks he might just sink down to his ass and sit on the ground until he freezes to death out here.
Or he can handle it, like Dean wanted him to.
He exhales, once, twice. "Come on," he says shortly, and he snags a handful of Castiel's t-shirt at the scruff of his neck, shepherds him down the steps much as he'd guided him up them. The dogs growl, but it seems like Cheney is the boss of them and they follow at a respectful distance as Sam steers Castiel around and onto the path that leads to the back of the property, to the autoshop and the yard full of wrecks. He's thinking logically, he tells himself, as he runs through it all in his mind. Burning his brother would be best, he knows, but he'd have to travel miles to find somewhere he can get a decent pyre going without the local fire department turning up, and-
"Uh-huh."
He wheels around at the crunch of boots on ice behind him. Meg, following along a few feet behind them, and she's eyeing him curiously and nodding.
Thinking out loud, then. Sam clears his throat. "On the other hand, burning him here is out of the question."
She quirks an eyebrow but doesn't comment.
"Well look around you," he says defensively, and he waves his hand haphazardly in the direction they came. "A lot of these junkers are probably still soused in oil and gasoline, and I don't want to burn Bobby's house down." He pauses, thinks darkly that the old bastard might at least show his face if a stray cinder set the roof alight.
Burial then, he thinks, and he ignores the way his heart is flopping painfully in his chest, ignores his breathlessness. "We bury him," he declares. "With a shit-ton of wards to make sure he stays put and nothing can get to him, because fuck knows I don't want anything using his meatsuit to terrorize me if I can help it."
They're coming up to the hangar that houses Bobby's auto shop, and Sam slows Castiel to a halt. "Stay there," he orders, and Castiel dutifully obeys as Sam ponders the canoe Bobby has propped up against the siding. The craft is a two-man job, a twelve-foot long Trapper, and Sam remembers how Dean would slide it in the back of Bobby's truck and drive them to Lake Oahe to camp and fish. He thinks it'll-
"-fight you, Sammy…it'll fight you. Don't use the reel to pull it in, you need to pump and lift the rod. Keep it tight."
Dean's face is all lit up there next to Sam, and he's leaning in now, so the canoe bobs a little bit from side to side. "Is he running?"
Sam nods, can feel the fish swimming away with the line, and Dean's hand is steady on his, his brother's fingers nimble on the drag setting.
"You want about four pounds on there. If he runs again just let him go, he'll get tired soon enough." A smile splits Dean's face, and it's pleasure, pride. "We'll be frying up bass for dinner, kiddo…and it'll-
-do, and Sam smiles, thinks Dean would probably appreciate being buried like a Viking in his longship, as he heaves the canoe down.
"Viking burial. Hell, yes." But the seats will get in the way, he realizes. "Chainsaw," he tells Castiel, and he knows Bobby has one hanging up in the shop so he pushes open the door, scrabbles for the light switch. It clicks impotently, and it's still dark in there. "Change the damn light bulb, old man," Sam shouts back towards the house, and he shakes his head. "There's a fucking service pit in there," he spits at Meg, and she looks bemused. "Anyone could fall into it if there are no lights," he elaborates, and she nods slowly.
"Oh. Okay."
It's lucky he knows where the saw is, and Sam picks his way over to it and back carefully. "Last time I used this was when that tree came down, remember?" he reminisces to Castiel, and he chuckles. "Round about the time you learned to bake pie. Maybe you can bake us one after we get this done, because I'm working up a hell of an appetite."
Castiel is mute, but Meg snorts in a disbelieving way.
"What?" Sam demands, and she lifts up her hands in surrender.
"This is clearly your way of dealing, Sam," she says neutrally. "I'm saying nothing."
"You're damn right I'm dealing," he snaps. "Someone has to. I'm handling this. Is anyone else? Well?" After a moment's silence he feels vindicated. "No one is handling this like me."
Meg stares him out, and her scrutiny is measured. "No they aren't," she concedes.
"You're damn right," Sam says again. The adrenaline is buzzing in him now, so that Meg's judgmental expression doesn't really bother him. He feels almost satisfied, triumphant, feels like he's achieving something here. He's handling it, even if cold sweat is trickling its clammy way down his spine and he's shivering, and he pulls the starter cord with a hand that he abstractedly notices is shaking. The machine revs throatily, and the canoe seats are no match for the blade, splintering in seconds. Sam sets the chainsaw down and studies the result critically. "You think he'll fit in there, Cas?"
The angel's stare is as blank as it has been since the beach, still as blank as Dean's is, and Sam sighs out his frustration. "One fucking crisis too many and he crumples." He swivels to look at the woman again. "But not me. I'm handling this. Do you think he'll fit in there?"
She nods, very slowly. "And then some."
"But we need some sort of cover, else we might as well just throw the body in the hole as is." Sam rubs at his jaw. "Wood, I need some wood…" Lumber, from when Bobby had him and Dean fix the fence at the back of the lot the summer before last, and it's right where he remembers them stacking it, in the shed.
"I found the shovel and pick ax as well," he celebrates as he emerges with the tools and an armload of the pine planks, and he gestures at the canoe. "Can you haul that along? Just grab the mooring line."
Meg nods, even if it's a little doubtful. She bends to snag the rope, tries the load on for size, and the canoe skids along the frost and ice easily.
"Now we're talking," Sam crows, and he splays his hand out on Castiel's back, pushes the angel into motion. "We'll put him near your Christmas tree," he soothes as Castiel stumbles placidly along just ahead of him. "We dug up the ground there already, so it'll be easier to turn over now. That sound reasonable?"
Still more silence, and it's getting damned annoying. "I'm handling this," Sam chides his friend. "I'm the only one who seems to be fucking handling it. Jesus."
From a few feet further back, over the grind of the boat along the ground, Meg calls Sam's name softly and then slants her eyes back towards the house. "Movement up there."
Sam's head is throbbing, his throat is sore, and swallowing past the dryness and constriction there is getting less and less easy. There is a void in him and he wants a drink, not just beer but something that will burn and corrode his belly, and blur the sharp edges of all this before blasting him to insensibility and dreamless sleep. And he will find it, after he handles it, and he forces his exhaustion away. "I'm handling this first," he barks out again decisively, and his voice sounds rough and raw.
The tree is just ahead and Sam doesn't pause as he circles around Castiel, throws the pick ax down, and sets the blade of the shovel against the ground, just like he did when he and his-
-brother have been digging for a half-hour now, and Sam is as unconvinced of the success of this as he ever was, finds himself casting dubious looks at the tree even while Dean throws up clods of earth enthusiastically.
"Dean, you know that when we plant this thing it'll either die or topple over, don't you? It's the wrong time of year to do this."
Dean's eyes are bright, his face somehow younger and less drawn than Sam has seen it in weeks, and he's swinging the pick ax with gusto, putting his back into it and grunting with satisfaction as it spears the icy ground. "It'll work," he says cheerfully. "It's my lucky tree. I want to keep it, so does Cas." He pauses for a moment, straightens up and arches backwards with a groan, rubbing at the small of his back. He glances at his wristwatch, looks over towards the house. "Come on," he urges. "He'll be waking up soon, I want him to see it when he looks out the window."
His expression is secretive and pleased when he looks at Sam again, and it reminds Sam that he hovered in the doorway to Bobby's study on his way up to bed Christmas night and caught them, Castiel slumped on Dean's chest as he slept and Dean gazing at him with gentle awe, as if he was sacred. The way Castiel always stares at Dean, Sam realizes, and it hits him that it's because something happened while they were away on their Christmas tree hunt, something that has eased his brother's stress and made him laugh again, made him happy. And that is a good thing. So Sam smiles, settles the blade of the shovel against the earth and-
-pushes at it, putting his whole weight on it, but the ground is rock-hard permafrost because somehow it turned into winter in the last week, and Sam still hasn't puzzled his way through that riddle.
"Pick ax might be better," he decides, and he throws the shovel down, reaches for the other tool. He ignores the figures that are ranging closer, guns raised, ignores the way Meg stands there with her hand out to catch the flask Bobby throws her, ignores the old man's scathing have a drink on me, as he hefts the pick ax and slams it down into the soil. It penetrates the top few inches before it bounces back up, and, "See?" Sam cheers, "now we're getting somewhere."
He brings it up and around and down again, again, again, and he pays no mind to the fact that it's Mira standing alongside Bobby, pays no mind to Meg rolling up her sleeve and cutting into her arm with a blade Sam knows is consecrated silver as Mira takes her through the standard tick-list of precautionary tests. He pays no mind to the way Bobby is walking towards Castiel on slow, stiff, unwilling legs, pays no mind to the old man's choked-out denials, pays no mind to the great big, fat tears streaming down Bobby's cheeks as he reaches his hand out to lay it on Dean's face.
Sam pays no mind to any of this because he's handling it, burying his brother, but-
-there is no time for stitching wounds, and the sheet is stained with rusty brown patches of dried-in blood. The air inside the car is thick with the rank piss-shit odor of violent death, combined with the smell of Sam's own vomit, spattered down his shirt, and with the eye-watering stench of his brother's decomposing flesh, because it's hot and even with the windows open the stink of putrefaction lingers.
Bobby hasn't said a word since he fell to his knees beside Sam in the lake of blood Dean made as he bled out. They loaded their burden into the car in dead silence and now they sit there, staring dead ahead, mute but somehow expectant, as if they think Dean will break the hush of their loss by sitting up with a grin and telling them it was a joke.
It isn't a joke. Sam really did see his brother torn apart, and he's clamping his hand to his nose at the smell, the smell. And maybe he said it out loud, because Bobby takes the next exit, drives them out into the sticks. They do it there, hammering together strips of the pine they stopped off at Home Depot for before Dean started to rot, and forcing his body down into the box because it is already rigid with cadaveric spasm.
Just before Bobby nails down the lid, Sam reaches for the amulet, and then they dig, and the soil is summer soft and breaks easily under the spike of-
-the pick ax isn't really doing it if Sam is honest, and he throws it down with a curse, twists around and runs a shaking hand through his hair.
"Backhoe," he snaps out at Bobby as the old man shakes his head, but Bobby doesn't seem to notice him. He's talking to Castiel now, his hand on the angel's cheek instead of Dean's, and Castiel is finally focusing on Bobby, and his eyes aren't empty any more: they're aching with hurt, and shock, and disbelief, and he's weeping.
"Backhoe," Sam says again, and he smacks his fist into his opposite palm for emphasis, wonders why he never thought of it earlier. And what do you know, Bobby's mini-Terramite is parked conveniently close, complete with auger and excavator shovel, and Sam trots over there, maneuvers himself into the seat. The keys are right where Bobby always leaves them, and Sam cranks the engine, shakes his head at the labored, unproductive grind that results. The fuel gauge is on zero, and "Fucking typical," he grates out as he slides out of the machine and stalks back over to where Bobby is taking a few steps in his direction.
"Does no one maintain this fucking place any more now Dean is dead?" Sam yells as Bobby comes to a halt, and he stabs viciously back towards the auto shop. "There's no light bulb in there, and it could cause an accident. The place is crawling with wild fucking dogs, and I need to use the fucking backhoe so I can bury my brother, and the fucking needle is on empty."
Bobby's voice is calm and gentle, understanding. "We can find some gas somewhere, Sam, but why don't you let us handle this-"
"No," Sam cuts him off, in a way he knows is damned aggressive, because he sees Bobby flinch and flick his eyes over to Mira as she comes closer. "I'm handling it," he insists, even though he knows he isn't sucking in enough breath to give his voice the force it needs, even though he can feel something inside him start to give way and rip apart. "I'm handling it," he claims, even though he feels weak at the knees and everything is pressing in around him. "I'm handling it," he lies, because it has been a lie all along and he's falling forward into Bobby's arms, and Bobby is collapsing to the ground with him.
"I want to sleep," Sam hears himself choke out. "I don't want to bury my brother. I want to sleep. I want something that'll help me sleep."
Bobby's answer is gruff in Sam's ear, and his words hang suspended in the air like doom. "I'll handle this, son."
There is a shriek, far off and muffled, sobbed-out anguish that penetrates the thick, soft blanket of drugged slumber, and Sam blinks blearily. It's dark, inside and out if the moonlight seeping in through the curtains is anything to go by.
The cry sounds again, different from nightmares, and there is such sorrow and hopelessness in it that Sam can feel tears spring. Castiel, and Dean isn't there for the angel now. Sam sighs, starts to shift in the bed and throw off the covers, but there is a warm body stretched up behind him, an arm snaking in to wrap around him and hold him in place, keeping him safe.
"Bobby is taking care of him," Mira whispers. "Now sleep."
She kisses the back of Sam's neck and he remembers that she is the one, and there is a sort of peace in this feeling of security. He turns himself around, pulls her into him, tangles his fingers in her hair. "You're the one," he breathes against her mouth. "You're the one, and that's the last thing I said to my brother. He was happy about it. And I'll be alright."
She kisses him, a brief press of lips. "Sleep, love," she repeats. "We're safe here."
The distant lament lulls Sam back to unconsciousness.
Episode 24: Redemption (part I continued)