The Monster, for rainylemons
Title: The Monster
Recipient: rainylemons
Characters: Dean (POV), Sam, mentions of Castiel; Team Free Will
Rating: thematic R
Word Count: ~9700
Warnings: [Spoiler (click to open)]fratricide, geographystiel, suicidal ideation, sublimated self-loathing, character deaths (but what does that word mean in SPN, really)
Summary: Dean believes in justice, even when he's on its sharp end. Sam believes in soulmates.
Notes: For rainylemons, who asked for post-canon demon!Dean, glasses-wearing!Sam, comfort for old hurt, Heavenly decay, the sensate aesthetic of terror, and white noise behind the stars.
It's humid in Pontiac, like a womb--all placental steam and rivers of blood. Dean's body slides wetly in its leather jacket, but he doesn't do shit about it. It's only going to get hotter, and it's better if you don't run away. If you always weather the worst, then at least you'll have the memory of vaguely better to fall back on, right?
That's what this preacher tells him, anyway. His name is Dave, and him and his have been floating around the camps, contagious and unavoidable like the pollution clogging all the rivers. The water hasn't killed anyone yet, but it goes in red and comes out redder. But that's not Dean's problem. The preachers haven't killed anyone either, or at least this one hasn't; if he had it might have been Dean's problem, though the jury's out on even that.
In the absence of murder, Dave confesses that he's new to the Church, he wants to preach for the times so as to reach the skeptics as well as the believers, but the times are making it difficult to reach much of anyone, really.
Dave has nice eyes and a big wide mouth. Dave's pretty vanilla.
So Dean commiserates, with a one-liner that shocks Dave's eyes and sours his smile. And Dean grins, because the sunset's dressing everyone in a fiery red, and the heat is pressing into the wood facade of the bar Dean's playing sentry to, and evening's teasing out the smell of smoke sure as busted clockwork, everything grinding to a squealing, steaming halt. Gears crack their teeth as heat and pressure swallow them whole. If this is Heaven, who let me in?
"I'm just playing with you, man," Dean says, because Dave goes rigid as a tin soldier, like his heart's stopped too. It's the kind of reaction you elicit when someone's expecting a friend and they come face to face with a stranger, or a monster instead of a man. "All your prayin's not gonna change me, though. You got plenty of better chances out there."
Dean gestures outward. This had at one point been a dusty highway few had reason to ever see. Now you couldn't get around without having to look into someone's dusty eyes.
There are tents for miles.
They dim at the murky horizon, the tents, but you know they don't end. All the eyes are clouded by war and pestilence. All the eyes have bodies, Dean presumes, but it's their eyes he remembers. Full of dust and terror.
Of course, it's not all bad; there's music, too, brassy porch bands and thrumming gospel choirs. Some wailing a monk assured Dean was Tibetan and every so often, a few ragged guitar solos that are only halfway out of tune. But mostly it's a hum of people, doing peoplely things Dean's spent his whole life either navigating surreptitiously or running from. They're all trying to keep their mind off fear. Maybe Dave will find a lost soul out there.
"Go to them," Dean tells Dave. And even though he's not sure he does, he says, "I got someone else."
&
He does got someone else--sort of. Dean feels the cold of the beer behind him before he turns to meet it.
"You look good, Dean," says Sam, drinks in hand. No hello; no long time, no see. Just a 'you look good.' There's a number of reasons this shouldn't make sense--is, at the very least, kind of fucked up--but Sam opens his mouth, Sam is standing in front of him, he is with Sam, and Dean is nervous as hell.
Sam looks different. It startles Dean at first, like he can't immediately place what's changed. But it's been a long time. Sam's probably changed more than Dean could ever know.
"It'll do that," Dean replies belatedly. He's still thinking about Dave, the ghost of him hanging in the dead air like smoke in a vacuum. 'It'll do that'? Dean thinks. What the fuck are you talking about, 'It'll do that'--
"Have you been waiting long?" Sam asks.
Sam's thinner. (Than Dave, but also thinner than Sam.) The heat's not doing his hair any favors, but it looks fine. He has lines Dean doesn't remember and scars Dean does. The glasses are new, dainty wire frames that all the hot librarians wear. Sammy, you sly little fucker.
It's nice, to imagine that. Calming; pleasant; playful. Towards the end, Sam had just been fault lines to him, and he'd been a guilty earthquake. He might still be an earthquake.
But Sam looks good. Dean hopes Sam feels good.
Dean feels okay.
"Have you been waiting long?" Sam repeats. He pushes the beer into Dean's hands. It's slippery with condensation but as promised, it's cool.
"Wasn't," Dean says.
Sam takes the bottle opener Dean offers and pries his cap open. "Well, sorry I'm late."
"Nah."
They don't hug. Maybe it's the heat, but probably not. There's something so off about this, even though they're both pretending otherwise. They're talking, but not quite to each other, and maybe it's how fast Dean's thoughts are racing relative to how nowhere all that talk is going. Dean doesn't like it.
"Wanna come in?" Sam asks. He's rocking their conversation in its cradle. Shh, shh it's gonna be okay. You're weak, but you're gonna grow up big and strong, sweet little whining conversation o' mine.
(where do we go?
where do we go now?
where do we go?)
"There's a game going. Easy money."
"Not really looking for company." It comes out more strained than he has any right to feel, on a wet, languorous day like this. Muscles slip and wilt on evenings like this, and Dean should too. The only hard things out right now are the knives in the camps (music and murder, that's how it always goes) and the cicadas fucking.
Relax.
"I hate this bar," Dean says, because Sam hasn't taken 'no' for an answer.
"You love this bar."
Dean's pretty sure it hadn't been in Pontiac, last he'd been here. But things change. Though it still plays too much REO Speedwagon (there are no candles in the window, and no cold, no darkness, no winter).
"Nothing good on tap," Dean objects, regarding the deep, wide mug in his hands. "And what the hell are you drinking?"
"Mexican coke--vintage," Sam says. "What? I'm not drinking anything that's been near that water. And 2005 was a good year."
"Wussy."
"I didn't come all this way just to get giardia. Are there going to be fireworks?"
"Not while the sun's still out, dumbass."
But the sun's not out anymore, Dean realizes. The blood and fire vanish from the sky and it's black, pock-marked starry. Dean doesn't recognize any of the constellations, but they look weird for some reason.
And on cue, there are the fireworks. Somewhere far off, there are fireworks. It doesn't look like much from where they're standing, but it's gotta be making someone else's fucking night. Otherwise, what's the point?
"How'd you know? That there'd be fireworks, I mean," asks Dean.
"There were last time. Heaven's like Disneyland, right? Always an opening show?"
Jeez. Sam seems so calm about that. Like, oh, Heaven again. And it's not like Dean hadn't had his suspicions, but the question remains: Who the fuck let him in? Though Heaven's past its heyday; it seems like less of a Disneyland, more of a sideshow.
Maybe he's a circus act. Maybe there will be a bear-baiting.
(There are so many tents. So many tents filled with people with no place to go. Surely they need an example of how this could be worse. People are like that.)
Sam's still talking about fireworks.
It must've been '96 or something, he says. And do you remember-- the field, do you remember we--
"No," says Dean. Of course he remembers. But he doesn't want to know Sam had, too. It's a little late for that. Notably, these are not their fireworks. Not anymore, and not tonight.
If that's their memory out there, they've been locked out of it, and they can't reach it. They can't even talk to each other right. When Sam steps off the porch to get a better look, it feels desperately like he's slipping away. It's like Sam, and everything else, is slipping away.
Then there's a rush of air, and a monster comes for Dean. It shreds the atmosphere, like the humidity's been cleaved off in neat, gelatinous chunks, until it's a dry different sky all around him. And the thing, it tears him apart, hits his chest first but saves his heart for last. He's snipped into florets of adipose tissue. He becomes fine webs of circulation, bright strontium red. His brains string out magnesium white, and his guilt is aluminum, his hatred and his anger and his hopelessness incandescent iron, charcoal. There's a copper taste at the back of his mouth but it's not blood; it explodes out of him turquoise blue. The people, they're still singing, they're still eating, Sam's still drinking his beer, and preacher Dave's gotten into a knife fight with a brash twelve-year old off in the distance, Dean can see. No one notices the monster. It's just Dean's.
Sam turns around. "Hey, you good?"
Dean stumbles against one of the porch supports. The monster abates. From afar Dean has the appearance of wholeness. But he's matte, it's like he doesn't have depth anymore. He holds out a shaking hand, and it doesn't look real. His beer isn't cold. He's lost a dimension. Pain fumbles through him--a jacob's ladder.
"I'm fine," Dean manages.
He takes a gulp of his beer he doesn't like. Just get past it, Winchester. Be a professional, and just get past it.
"Hey, if this is Heaven, then where's Cas? He's gotta be playing bossman again up here by now, right?" Dean croaks.
(just get past it)
"You can't feel it?"
"Feel what?"
"Oh," says Sam. Just oh. Oh right. Oh right, what? "Come on, I need to show you something."
Dean feels forlorn, and chafes against the old, familiar ridges of betrayal. Apparently there's some kind of cosmic secret he hasn't been let in on. Sure, most of that shit's better off Don't Ask, Don't Tell, but this is Cas they're talking about. This is Sam.
"Muggy, right?" Sam says, as he walks and Dean follows, Dean follows because he cannot, cannot bear the thought of Sam leaving, and him being alone. He'll follow Sam anywhere tonight.
"It's Illinois," says Dean. Of course it's muggy. Though, he supposes, they're in Heaven, not Pontiac. And also, the rivers run bloody. All bets are off.
"This is what it feels like inside an angel. When they're on the outside, and there's an angel between you and your body. This is that feeling, Dean."
Oh, Dean thinks. Just oh. He has a feeling he knows by whose grace he's come and gone to Heaven.
"Why is there giardia in Heaven, anyway?" Sam asks, oblivious to the spike in Dean's heart rate.
Dean tries his best to be oblivious, too. "Cas liked bugs," he says.
"I dunno," he says. "He's a weird dude."
&
Cas is less of a weird dude and more of a weird place, these days. Dean's wondered once or twice where God was, where the fuck God had been during all of this. Now he knows. And wouldn't you fucking know, he does work in mysterious ways. Because Heaven doesn't need a leader; it needs scaffolding. It needs a blueprint. It needs a home. And so like God before him, Castiel has become firmament--the role or martyrs before there were martyrs.
Dean doesn't even want to know how this came about; apparently he'd missed it. He'd been away, or dead, or he'd been around but too far gone to give a shit, he thinks. But now that Dean's been charmed into looking, there are pieces of Cas everywhere.
There is no gas in Heaven, but there is a Gas N' Sip, and its employees wear that same, starched, bold little uniform Castiel had been so proud of for all of that month and a half. And the Roadhouse is apparently in Pontiac, Illinois now--a Winchester transplant into the city that had once belonged to Jimmy Novak and his family. As he follows Sam through the camps--refugees, lost souls still recovering from an old war--Dean catches families clutching pamphlets for national parks, fathers fixing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their daughters and strangers sharing tin cans of beans. There's a little girl fiddling with a radio and an old man playing a board game with a sort of gothy nurse. Someone hands Dean a map of Heaven, which apparently now boasts a giant ball of twine of its own, and a Grand Canyon, and a lake, a lake with a fishing dock. Dean looks up from the map to make sure Sam's still in front of him and catches sight of preacher Dave. He's gouging the shit out of a melon-sized grapefruit with the knife from his knife fight; he's with six or seven women who are all, fucking inexplicably, eating grapefruit too. That's a reference Dean doesn't get.
It's weird, to feel Cas all around him but not be able to look him in the face. It reminds Dean too much of grief, even though this is the opposite--this should be the opposite--of that. But if Dean does not understand possession, or Heaven, or Heaven made out of repurposed angel or whatever, he does know loss. And he knows that it's possible to find grief in just about anything, if you let yourself get too curious.
Dean knows loss.
With every step, he and Sam filter through a different shade of Cas, past rogue landmarks and overdetermined objects, things thrust into a state of such ardent, desperate importance they begin to tessellate. (How many gas stations does one road really need?) Walking through him feels so aimless, so adrift. But maybe that's just what Heaven is.
There are so many people here, waiting and homeless and lost and confused.
He wants to ask Sam where they're going, but he's not sure if he could stand an answer. Dean doesn't want to be going anywhere; truth be told, he doesn't mind the forever wandering. He doesn't want any road to end. He's died and, damningly, persisted enough times to know that no end is any end you want. There's no such thing as a good ending.
Dean concentrates on the slight hunch to Sam's back before him, the fact that he's wearing a shirt Dean doesn't recognize, the distressed white of Sam's wallet and his knife in the back pockets of jeans Dean does. How long has it been? How long has it been since they saw each other last? He can see all that time built up in Sam, added entropy (or something), but Dean does not have it, cannot account for it.
There's a screech.
It's this bright, keening whisper, and it cracks through the air, it's sound so powerful you feel it. It doesn't sound like the Cas Dean knows, but it twins something deep inside him, a screaming Dean heard long ago in Hell, the scream of something pulling him back. (He'd come back with too much time then, and not enough now. Dean's not sure if that's a clue or just equilibrium.)
It's a sound he's almost forgotten. It's a sad sound. Then Dean hears pop music. Late 90s, sexy schoolgirl outfit, lots of blondes. Well, buddy, Dean thinks. You're going to be a very different god.
Dean wishes he could clap him on the shoulder but he can't, Cas has no shoulders, so Dean snaps his fingers instead. Crack.
"What?" says Sam.
"Nothing."
&
They come to a forest. It's gray, desaturated the way the real world looks after a night terror. Sketchy, like the final details haven't been added yet, and the systemic complexity (water, soil, growth, old growth, undergrowth, decomp) hasn't been sorted out yet. The fog rolls in thick, a marine layer meandering off an ocean that hasn't been written yet. There should be monsters here, but none come. (Yet.)
"This isn't Purgatory," Dean says, more to assure himself than anything else.
"That would be a neat trick," says Sam. "But yeah, this doesn't seem... Well, I mean. You'd know better than anyone, right?"
Dean's eyes narrow. "Why would Cas put Purgatory in his Disneyland? He realizes that if he starts advertising this kind of shit on his postcards, Hell's gonna have a waiting list, right?"
Sam touches one of the trees, as if to sample its reality. He observes it with and without his glasses. The bark comes away with his hand, ruddy and soft. Even if it's not quite right, it's real enough.
"Obviously it reminds him of something he loves," Sam says.
Dean squirms. Castiel's list of things he'd loved in Purgatory is a lot shorter than Dean's was.
where are the monsters where are
&
the monsters where are they
"It got pretty bad down there, you know. Before we figured out how to jerry-rig the lock on Heaven, the pressure of all those ghosts in the air basically qualified as a barometric apocalypse."
Dean laughs. "Barometric-- that's weak, man. What's next, attack of the bagels?"
Sam doesn't join him. And he'd been so good-natured up until this point--quiet, but not restive or accusatory, which is how Dean remembers him. But at least now Dean knows he's real. In Dean's Heavenly hopes and dreams, Sam is always happy.
Dean knows what's soured Sam; he remembers some of that too, from before. Less than he should, maybe, but he'd been occupied with different things. Like white noise, Dean remembers the electrical storms, the heaviness of everything. People dropping dead of spontaneous heart attacks. Tides washing away cities. Freak magnetic fields wiping minds and computers both. There'd just been so many fucking ghosts; the planet couldn't take it any more. It's like when you touch a wall and the whole house comes down, because really, it was all just termites.
"That's the last time we were in a forest like this, huh. Waiting up for Candi," Dean says, because Sam's stopped talking, and he wants to hear Sam's voice again.
"Together, you mean?" says Sam. "Yeah, I guess. Fucking cold."
"Really fucking cold." Dean wonders how many forests Sam's trekked through without him. "You think she ever made it out of the veil? Or Kevin--"
"Kevin's safe." The two words shoot from him, double-tap. But he doesn't elaborate.
"Sam, I--"
"I think it was the worst for you, you know," Sam bulldozes. His voice is different than Dean remembers, rougher, but his panic sounds the same as ever. It hurts.
"After the ghosts hit capacity, all the other demons just kind of... melted back into Hell, I guess. But you-- you didn't have anywhere to go, or at least you didn't know how, or--something..."
"Sam, you're making me sound pathetic."
Judging by the look on Sam's face, it had probably been pathetic, no assistance required. Dean doesn't remember that part either way.
That had been his favorite thing about his tenure as a demon. He hadn't been Crowley, or Alistair, or Lilith, or even Meg; he'd been too willing to forget, to be nothing, to make no plans and harbor no ambitions. Too willing to be shit, living from one moment to the next as just a hungry, ruthless thing. Yeah, he'd been one of those guys, signed on full-willing and everything. He'd boiled down to fluid dynamics--no memory, no thought. It's as close to true death as Dean's ever been, and honestly, he misses it. Because now that he's up here, in Castiel's shitty, war-torn, people-populated Heaven, he misses Sam. He misses Cas and he misses Sam and they're both right here with him and it doesn't feel like that at all, and for a moment he fucking hates Sam for dragging him back to this. He'd been fine with oblivion. He'd felt good and right and deserving of oblivion.
Dean's a realist. He knows what he's spent several lifetimes destroying, and Heaven can go screw itself. Even Castiel's, and even Sam's.
(you can find loss in anything; what a talent, a prodigy!)
"Wait here for a sec."
Dean's stomach drops because they're not just walking, they're not just traveling. There's a destination in here somewhere. Dean wishes again for reckless pointlessness, but Sam jogs that last fifty yards to a cabin.
The cabin is familiar, and as misplaced in Purgatoryland as the Roadhouse had been in fake Pontiac--Rufus's old place. The screen door slams against the wall when Sam springs it open, and Dean catches the glitter of the Devil's trap they'd painted onto the screen. Black on black. Surreptitious.
He's not sure why they always paint their traps in red. It's a decent way to say "don't even try," but demons are fucking stupid. They'll always try.
Then Dean is jumped from behind. It's the monster again, with saber teeth that plunge deep into his gray matter. Its claws pulverize his ribs and his lungs collapse, he can't breathe, but as always it saves his heart for last. There's a whistling, he thinks. Maybe it's forest wind whistling through his chest, the efficient pop of his viscera reorganizing as his kidneys are pirated, his liver is feasted upon. They've left all the people behind, out in the dust, but someone is whistling a song. "The Hall of the Mountain King," Dean thinks; it's that song, but someone's fucked with it, thrown it into a major key. And it's not whistling, but singing--thin, high and off-key. Every other lyric is "Candi."
There's radio disturbance in his alveoli. A crackling--the sound is somewhere between a pneumonic warning and a ghost attempting to whisper. Dean spits out undergrowth (when had he fallen? when his heart, stopped, probably) and rolls onto his back. But his lungs dispense themselves like parachutes, lay themselves to rest on the soup that is what's left of him.
Dean stares up at the stars, which have been caught and hoarded by the trees. They're too orderly, that's what's wrong with them. They're set up in rows like on the American flag, he realizes. He can't believe Castiel lived for millenia and never once looked up (looked down?) at the real goddamn sky. And now his Heaven's stuck with this.
The stars buzz, the bleary fluorescence of every hospital and record-room in the country echoing through them.
He should have taken Cas star-gazing, fuck. He does not belong here. He does not deserve to belong here.
The screen door slams again--Sam coming back.
Dean's monster buries itself.
Sam looks sad, though; or maybe just distressed. Maybe he's noticed the carnage.
But Dean doesn't even feel wet. There's no dirt, no blood to be wiped away. He's not hurt (though he swears-- he swears...) It's all an invisible pain and madness.
But the gray forest is an odd tinge of red, and Dean knows what Sam must see. So that's why they paint in red.
And Dean wonders for a moment if it had ever been sunset in Heaven, if the rivers truly ran with blood, or if it had been his eyes at fault, and not the scenery. Maybe Castiel's refugees were in better spirits than he thought; and all the dusty, haunted eyes he'd seen had been his fault. what are you doing here, what have you done to deserve, why must we share this with you?
Because Dean sees red, and from the white-knuckle grip Sam has on the box in his arms, Sam must see black. (Let's go take a howl at that moon. Shall we?)
Sam comes to him anyway. He drops the box at Dean's feet indelicately, and they sit apart from one another on the trunk of a felled tree. Coastal redwood; it's rotting from the inside out.
Sam gets right to the point. Sort of.
"Sorry. I didn't mean to stare. I just, I thought maybe--" he confesses, "I mean, I'd hoped-- Since we're in Heaven and I--
"But no, that makes sense."
Dean's glad something does. But Sam just goes south from there, from incoherent to disconsolate.
"At the Roadhouse, when you wouldn't come inside." Sam covers his eyes with his hand. It's an easy, well-practiced swoop under the bridge of his glasses. He pops them off and dangles them in his free hand. And Dean wonders how many years of this he missed. How much practice you needed before the mechanics of crying became that goddamn smooth. (Dean's been told he cries pretty.)
"You can't. It's warded and you can't," Sam mumbles.
Dean sighs. That's part of the reason. But warding is an excuse the same way becoming a demon was a consequence, and not an act. Dean's act was everything that came before that. And his reason, well. At least as far as the Roadhouse is concerned, he really hadn't been looking for company. He wouldn't have survived that much guilt.
"Oh, you knew, Sam," he says, after Sam has taken a deep breath. If he hadn't at least suspected, he wouldn't have had Dean wait outside. They'd be in Rufus's cabin now, instead outside in the fog, listening to the world rot around them. "You just didn't want to know."
"Do you remember how you died?" Sam asks suddenly. "It's important."
It's not that important.
"As a demon," Dean answers.
"As my brother."
As a demon, Dean amends, but he doesn't want to argue with Sam anymore. "I hope this doesn't mean Cas has been handing out freebies to any-goddamn-thing. He always was a huddled masses kind of guy, but this is just ridiculous."
"Why are you talking about him in the past tense?" Sam asks. He puts his glasses back on.
There's an untold story there, Dean thinks. Some span of years Dean will never know and Sam will never recover. They're in Heaven, which he guesses means they're done now.
"Because everything feels past tense," he says.
&
Sam, of course, does his best to prove Dean wrong. He brought toys and everything. Because the box from the cabin is the kind that comes with library archives, filled with old, vaguely important, mostly illegible shit you're only allowed to touch with gloves on. And the dew point in Purgatory is not the dew point of an archive room; already, everything is floppy and rippled. As far as recklessly pointless goes, this is pretty ideal. Because it's a case, and if that doesn't light a fire in Dean's heart he would have pretended it had. Dean doesn't care what the case is--monster, check; perplexing, largely unrelated amounts of research, check; unsolved mystery, double check. It's a case and it's theirs and they're going to fucking work it.
Leave it to his geek brother to bring work with him to the afterlife.
Dean's smiling about that until he remembers that this is he afterlife, and his brother is dead.
"Falling down on the job, Sammy," Dean says, because it's too quiet to think about that kind of thing. "This shit isn't organized at all. What were you doing?"
"It is organized," Sam insists. "Or it was; I don't know what the hell you're doing with it. You're just not using it right."
"Well, your system sucks."
"It's the Library of Congress!"
Dean buries his distress. They're supposed to work together seamlessly, always have (well...). But this box, these materials; Dean doesn't understand any of it. Sam's working in ways that Dean does not understand and he feels so separate Dean can't even grab him back, guide him back, make him come back home. Sam's archive was not made for Dean, and he is so, so lost. "For fuck's sake," he mutters. "The 'Library of Congress' doesn't have a code for"--he squints at Sam's tight, neat print down the side of the folder. "Dumb Hell Shit."
"Well, they should. Here, I typed up a finding aid. Jeez."
Dean doesn't use the finding aid. It'd be like asking for help, and even God knows Dean can't do that. Not anymore.
Fifteen minutes later, Sam is trying to salvage his organizational system and Dean is staring at a photograph.
"Same date," Dean says.
Sam looks up. Dean wonders how long it had taken him to perfect the tousled, sexy librarian look. "Hm?" he says.
"This picture was taken on the same day as one of those other ones. Goddamn it, Sam, why'd you put everything away?"
"Because that's how organization works, dude. Look, if you describe the picture you want, I can find it for you. We can work this, you know, together."
Dean does, and Sam searches, pointedly and dramatically. Like, fucking watch this, I am fucking magic.
Whatever.
He looks at the picture in his hands. Same time, same place as one of the other albums Sam had collected. It means whoever took them, they were all gathered in one place. If he can cross-reference the two albums, maybe he can piece together the scene. If the photographers have pictures of each other snapping scenes, even better.
Sam hands him the other photograph.
He wants a thank you, but Dean just says, "How do you even do that?"
Sam's picture is from a sock hop; there are hundreds of photographs from the cutting room floor of some local rag--all that made it into the print edition was a blurry, cropped thumbnail. The photo in Dean's hands is a picture of the sky above the sock hop--the billowy precursor to a major electrical storm. But it's the same park, and all the ancillary figures twin themselves in the photos. Two perspectives on one event. Dean crows. "Jackpot."
"How do you even do that?" Sam asks.
"Same date," Dean repeats. "It stuck out."
"Sure, Dean. Whatever you say."
The date is September 18th. Six years to the day.
&
It's been hours since the last breakthrough, though it's difficult to tell if time has passed in Purgatoryland, and Dean's not sure if time passes in Heaven at all. All he knows is that the sock hop hadn't exactly given them the traction he'd hoped. But he holds to it--it was a breakthrough, goddamn it; it'll fall into place eventually. He's never been so defensive of a sock hop.
"What about you, then?" Dean asks, after more time does and does not pass, and very little falls into place.
"What got you? 'Cause if this is what you look like at a hundred and nine, I hate you."
Sam huffs. "I was forty five, thanks."
If Sam were an obituary, he'd be one of the sad ones. No dying in peacefully in his sleep, after a long life well lived. Fucking forty five? Seriously? "That's not old enough," Dean says. He's not sure who he's blaming.
"It's a lot older than you."
"Not really."
"It felt like a lot."
And who is Dean to say Sam hadn't lived a long life well, really. But forty five. Dean could name a dozen bands who'd been playing together longer than that. The Super Bowl's been around longer than that. There's so much he's certain Sam could have done with longer than that.
"What happened?" he asks. The question is reckless and pointless and Dean regrets it almost instantly.
Sam chokes, and blushes. He dips his head so fast his glasses slide down his nose. The spiral of Sam's part catches the gleam of the moon--some of his roots had been growing in silver. But not enough of them. Sam had not died old enough. Sam had not died nearly old enough. And it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair.
"Uhhh, funny story," says Sam, once he's recovered himself.
But Dean does not recover. "No, it's not funny."
"Oh come on, it's kinda funny."
He hates it when Sam turns his own old words back on him like that. Sam gets that triumphant, overhappy smile; and it ruins the homage because to Dean that smile forever belongs to a bratty teenager who no longer exists. Who is dead now; like, really, actually, no takebacks, this-is-not-a-nightmare, this-is-not-a-metaphor dead. Sam is dead.
"Come on. You already know how it ends," Sam goads. "Dramatic irony is supposed to be funny."
"I don't wanna think about you dying any more." Dean swipes a new file from the box and abruptly dedicates himself to its contents.
Sam refuses to follow the cue. "Seriously, even now?"
Dean's throat is tight and he feels like he's going to choke on the words. Like the monster's come crawling back and gone and wrapped itself around his neck. But Sam doesn't say anything, doesn't point anything out, so it can't have. "Don't tell me," he hisses.
"Some demon you are."
The file in Dean's hands degrades at his touch. He pulls the paper out to mulchy webbing, carbon fractals not unlike his favorite parts of the human body. They combust, and the file and all its photographs and articles and saving graces go up in wet, dark smoky flames. He blows the plume towards Sam. Because Sam should know exactly what kind of demon he is. "Fuck you," he says. "Fuck death, and fuck you."
"Fuck you, too," Sam says, without heat. But he repeats it, fuck you too, Dean, and Dean doesn't know how to respond so he sits back down and wipes the soot from his hands and wishes he hadn't burned that file. Some demon, he thinks. But it's hard to want to do anything else. He's tired of hurting Sam, and Sam seems mostly tired of him. Purgatoryland is empty and absent the rush and stimulus of the real thing, and the feel of Castiel here on the fringes isn't as welcoming as it was in the camps. It's terse here, stressed. Fraying, a bit. And Dean does not belong here. Really really, this time. He does not belong here.
"I'm sorry," Dean says.
"Some of the photos were from personal collections," Sam replies. "But they sold them off piecemeal to the newspaper, or some obscure university, or put them on Flickr, or whatever. So it's hard to know the provenances of all the partial collections. I could use your help."
If you're done with all that bullshit, I could use your help.
Dean chuffs. Provenances. After all these years word's still funny. Good old Sarah Blake--they'd been so close to saving her. But he supposes all they'd really done is give the world greater, deeper opportunity to mourn her. They'd ruined a marriage and ripped a mother from her child. That's what they'd done.
"Your 'funny story,'" Dean says. "Did it break anyone's heart?"
Sam's calm falters. He snaps the newspaper he'd been looking at. Then he says, "Nah."
He says, "She'll get through it."
He says, "She has six older brothers."
The thought re-centers him. Dean watches Sam's shoulders relax. Whoever she is, she has six brothers.
"--and also like seven hundred nieces and nephews," Sam amends quickly. "I'm not complimenting you, asshole."
For a moment, Dean feels kind of proud anyway. But six brothers and a girl means seven mourners, and Dean has no idea how Sam can even handle that. How he can handle the thought of making that many people that fucking sad. Because death is letting someone down. Either you didn't save someone, or you didn't save yourself, and no matter what, you really fucking disappointed someone.
Dean's had plenty of opportunities to work this out, and no matter what, that's what it always comes down to. Death means you fucked up, and you failed someone. Of course, if you're extra precocious (and Dean is a fucking prodigy), you can do this before your lights go out. At which point, it's best to die alone.
Dean doesn't remember how he died, but he knows how he planned to.
&
Morning in Purgatoryland is nothing like morning in Purgatory, which did not exist. In Purgatoryland, the fog burns off and where the copse of trees thins out, sunlight punches through so strong you can see motes and gnats hanging in the quiet air. Everything smells like dust, and maybe smoke. Old smoke not quite cleared, from the night before. Dean wonders how many nights Cas had spent huddling in Purgatory's dark alone, wishing that would happen. Pining for a little daylight, some hope. Dean should have been there for him, and he should have fucking dragged him out. Fuck Cas.
"I'm sorry for not helping you," Sam says suddenly, when the sun twists high enough overhead to be useful. He's wiping his lenses with his flannel, holding them up to the light to inspect their cleanliness. Dean can't tell anymore whether he looks less familiar with them or without.
"You did," says Dean.
"I'm sorry it wasn't enough, then. Or soon enough."
Dean shrugs. "You lose some."
"I wanted to win that one."
Dean, you have no idea how much I wanted to win that one.
&
They go back to camp for breakfast. It's Heaven, but Cas's is crafted in Earth's image instead of the other way around. We might as well, Sam figures. Sam brings him an inexplicable grapefruit they both know Dean's not going to eat.
It's ostensibly morning, but Heaven is as red and rundown as it ever was. The rivers run bloody and the moment they leave the trees in Purgatoryland the humidity boils over again. Dean surveys the world, stranded as it is in a perpetual sunset. (Or is that you? Is it just your eyes, your heart, that cripple it?)
He doesn't want to ask how Pontiac looks to Sam, or how it feels. "Like an angel" had not been helpful. The thought of Sam inside and angel and angels inside of Sam makes the reds redder and the blacks their blackest. He doesn't need anything else to remind him how much he does not belong here.
"You're in those photographs, you know," says Sam, who picks at his grapefruit. A citrus tang springs from beneath Sam's fingernails. "Did you notice?"
He hadn't. He picks out Dave playing hacky sack (god, Cas, why) with the grapefruit girls sixteen tents away, he can hear the 10am smack of a pool cue from inside the Roadhouse, and now he can close his eyes and tell you exactly the way Sam's changed since they'd seen each other last, but he did not notice himself.
"What, at the sock hop?" he says, incredulous. Because one, it's a sock hop.
Sam chuckles. "You were there for the storm. Or you were the storm. I never really figured out which."
It's too hot to keep pacing. And staring at Dave playing his dumb game is only making him feel sweatier. Dean sits his ass down on the Roadhouse porch, next to Sam's. This is as close as they've been in a long time, but Sam doesn't move away. Dean feels a weight on his knee--not Sam's hand, but his grapefruit, gouged out and sickeningly pulpy. Dean samples a nibble. When Sam shifts his weight Dean feels it creak through the old dry wood beneath them both and Sam feels more real than he's been all night.
"Dean, do you remember how you died?"
And even though he's in Heaven, and even though in no acceptable world does Sam ever die before him (or ever), Dean asks, "Did I?"
He wasn't sure he could. He's not sure he can.
"September 18th, 2014."
If he doesn't look down he can imagine it's Sam's hand on his thigh, and not his breakfast. If he wants hard enough maybe the sunset will vanish and the star-spangled stars will come out and there will be fireworks again. If he feels Sam beside him intensely enough maybe there will be fireworks again.
Their knees knock. The grapefruit tumbles into the dust like a severed head. September 18th, 2014.
"At a sock hop?"
"It was an electrical storm," Sam insists.
"Yeah, a storm... at a sock hop. What, did I get struck by lightning or something? Divine intervention?"
(because how do you beat the Mark of Cain?
how do you damn the damned?)
Sam takes a deep breath. "Well, there's Cain and Abel. And then there's, um. Abel and Cain, I guess."
"Wow. That clarifies everything, Sam."
"We're soulmates," says Sam. He means, I killed you.
This might give better beings pause, but to Dean, it's a perfect translation. Love has a lot of stupid, stupid synonyms, and Dean's begged all of them. So 'We're soulmates I killed you' seems simple and direct. Try this: We're brothers I saved you I let the world burn I lit the match I slit its throat and it bled kerosene I was the firestarter I saved you and I saved you and saved you and I didn't let myself see that we were burning, burning we all were burning all we were was burning we are still just burning.
Sam's 'we're soulmates I killed you' is chump change by comparison, as far as Dean's concerned. But Sam still says, "I'm so sorry."
Dean thinks about the box in the woods, the 'case' that had really just boiled down to two (or three, translations differ. we're soulmates / I killed you) damn words. All that time they'd spent, working together and solving the case and sitting along in the woods. It hadn't meant anything at all, then. Except for the part where Dean wouldn't give it up for anything now, it hadn't meant a damn thing, if Sam knew those photographs, those reports, those archives all ended.
"Why didn't you just say that? It would have saved a lot of fucking time," Dean asks, though time--finally--is something they have. They have too much time.
"I still haven't," Sam points out. "I can't."
"It's three words, Sam."
But Sam can't, and he used a box and a case and the job to do it for him. Dean's familiar with the strategy. He could have told Sam it was a losing one years ago.
"We can't talk to each other that way, man," says Sam. "We don't-- we didn't work like that anymore, and hell, maybe we never did. It just doesn't work that way, and that doesn't change up here. We don't know how to talk to each other."
Dean draws a shuddering breath. And suddenly, immediately, he's angry at Cas. He is fucking furious at Cas, even though it's not his fault, none of this is anyone else's fault, it's just. Well, it's justice, probably. And Dean is at its sharp end. "Is that the best Heaven can do?"
"Apparently!" Sam snaps. Then his voice softens. And this tone, Dean remembers well. "I'm sorry. Look. Look at me, Dean."
Dean looks. He can see himself in the reflection off Sam's glasses and his eyes are black and his face is drawn and there's a monster with its hand on his shoulder.
"I thought, if I died, it wouldn't matter where you'd gone, or what you were. I could bring you with me. I had to believe that. I had to; you have no idea how bad I wanted--want that. So I'm sorry, I guess." The apology is a bitter appendage. "I just wanted you to be okay. I just wanted you to be okay. I did everything I could so you would be okay."
Sam is his soulmate, and when he rose to Heaven, he dragged Dean up too--his plus one. And Cas let him.
There's probably a double standard in all of this, though Dean's not sure if it's his, or Sam's, or Cas's, or everyone's. He smells wood and the smoke in the wood and the fires that haven't burned yet, and dust, and fear in handfuls of it, and he kicks the grapefruit away and he asks, "But were you happy?"
Because Dean imagines Sam surrounded by strangers (no, family; they'd be Sam's family by then). There's meat on the grill, maybe those kebabs Sam likes so much, with the peppers and onions and grilled peaches. Cousin-in-laws plucking out riffs on some old guitar, trying to remember tabs someone taught them ages ago; that one uncle who spent a summer in Thailand and was now convinced he was a monk. Nephews manning swing sets and nieces burning ants with a magnifying glass. The rivers here are clear and it's humid, but like being in bed with a loved one, and not at all like an angel. People wear flip flops because they don't have anything to run from. Sam's glasses fog up when he bends over the wok to check the potstickers and he's not worried that something's going to slice him open if he doesn't rectify this problem, stat. It seems like a good time.
But groomed lawns and loud barbecues don't buy happiness; this is a fact Dean knows. You can smile for a picture without it going any deeper and you can act like a professional, do your job, and do it well, without ever having any clue what you're doing. You can live without living.
"Were you happy?"
"I was alive," Sam answers, sort of. "I wasn't gonna waste that. Price per pound, I wasn't gonna waste that."
All Dean can think about is everything he's wasted. Everything he's taken away from someone else. From Sam. If Sam knew how big these mountains were, he wouldn't be sitting next to him like this, Dean's sure.
"It's okay, Dean."
"It's really not."
"Dean," Sam says. Just his name, just like that. Just Dean. "I've already lived a life without you. Don't make me do that here, too."
Dean's monster squeezes his shoulder. But for their knees, Sam doesn't touch him. Dean can't take this. "There are so many things I--"
I don't deserve this.
"Yeah, well Cas wasn't into perfect." Sam slaps at a mosquito and mutters something about bugs. "And, you know. We're brothers, and soulmates and stuff, so I'm biased."
"Don't do the math," Sam adds, because he knows Dean is. "Because you suck at it, you know that? Not everything is subtraction."
Sam's trying to be funny, or cute, but Sam's not that funny. Maybe if he were a chick he'd be cute, but without the librarian glasses even that's a no-go. He's trying to be nice, he's trying so hard to be right. To be Sam, his brother who saved him. And then Cas, or Castiel's Heaven, who's sheltering them both, working so hard to fix everything, to give all these dumb, lost souls a home, when all Dean's done is draw rivers of blood where maybe there weren't any, convince him that Purgatoryland was worth Heaven's crusty edges, terrify hacky sack kids and preachers named Dave and pre-teens name Candi with his black, black eyes; all he's done is disappoint Cas and disappoint Sam and hurt them in ways he cannot imagine--and there is no one in the world who's better at imagining torture and pain than him. Dean has nothing, nothing to give them anymore. He is an emptiness, and he is a poison, and what good he has is nothing they need.
Dean smells wildfire. Then hellfire, then house fires. Singed spiderweb and chemical smoke, old wallpaper curling back from its coving. His monster lights a match and drops it at his feet, and the whole Roadhouse goes up in a span of seconds. Sam doesn't seem to notice. He doesn't even flinch. But it occurs to Dean to wonder where the match had come from, what the monster had struck it against, how this fire started. It's not a difficult puzzle, in the end. Because Dean takes what in that moment feels like might be his last look at Sam (and how can Sam not notice?), and his heart reaches his eyes, his mouth--he smiles--and he opens his heart and he thinks, he loves Sam so fucking much, and he opens his heart and the air rushes in and Dean explodes, his insides explode. The rest of him goes up in the backdraft. Light a match on Dean's heart and it'll burn until there's nothing left. It will swallow you whole.
At the back of Dean's mind, a nice voice whispers from a wide mouth, Come on, let's say goodnight to your brother.
His monster smiles wide.
"You know what I want from you?" Sam asks, over the blaze he doesn't see. But maybe he can feel the heat of it, because when he leaves Dean shivers and he feels Sam's absence keenly. He's leaving, he's leaving. Sam's leaving.
He's picking up the grapefruit and tossing it in the trash can.
"Dean, I just want you to come home."
(But home is burning.)
"Come with me, Dean. Just let it go, and come with me."
Sam says things like that like it's so easy. Like it's Dean's choice to be the way he is, and if he could just let it go and get over it, life would be so easy. And maybe it is Dean's choice, maybe a part of this--a huge part of this--has always been Dean's choice. But what if you need to choose a way to lose, or you'll just have everything ripped from you? What if that's the best you can do, the best you can give, the best you can hope for? What if that's all you have? Because this is all Dean has. This is all Dean is, and he has no more to give. No more to be.
"I know," says Sam, even though Dean hasn't said anything and his only thoughts are vague, and vaguely pointless. But Sam's not looking at Dean.
He's looking at the monster behind him, which for all Dean's fuzzy panic is sharp-edged and gleaming, well-tended. It's all polished guilt and genuine leather trauma. Chrome self-loathing. Personalized terror. It's beautiful, and terrible, the object of so much of Dean's attention and two tons of everything Dean is. Dean's not sure how it got that way. It's not because he's a demon that he doesn't deserve Heaven, or Cas, or Sam, or whatever. He's a demon now because he already did not deserve those things. This is what he deserves. Or this is what he has, in any case. And Dean believes in justice.
Dean believes in justice.
"Yeah, well, I don't," says Sam. "Not like that."
Of course he doesn't. He's in Heaven. Sam's in Heaven and he believes everyone should be in Heaven, because if he can be there, anyone can. But he's not the one in Heaven because someone dragged him there. He's not the one who exists--as ever--just because of Sam. Because of Cas.
"I'm sorry," says Dean. But you don't just let that go. You don't get past it.
"Yes you can, Dean. I mean, no one's saying it's easy, but--"
"Look, man. You've had like fifteen years to process, or find yourself, or whatever. You lived your life. I didn't."
(I didn't get to, I refused to, I did not deserve to)
"And I just, I need some time." And oblivion, but Dean keeps that to himself. "I need time."
"I can give you that," Sam says quickly.
It's weird. The relief Dean feels is huge. It's not the response he expected, though he's not sure why. It's not that Sam isn't patient, or giving. Maybe it's just that Sam has always been too brief. Sam grows up too fast and learns too much and leaps away in starts and fits too quickly. But mostly Sam, gray sexy glasses strange shirt fifteen-years-without-him Sam, dies too soon. Sam expires. Sam ends. But this is Heaven; what they do have, finally, is time.
And Sam says, "I dunno if you've noticed, but Heaven is kind of a clusterfuck. And like, it's not like Cas is giving anyone special treatment, so ours are all fucked up and scattered, too. It'll take a while to find the pieces."
Obviously, Cas isn't giving anyone special treatment. Obviously, says Sam.
"Or he's just made it in Earth's image, you know? Like you gotta find your happiness up here just like you did down there," Sam continues, and Dean thinks, exactly. That's exactly it. Fucking Cas.
"I want to find it," says Sam. "Which will take time, because I want to find it all."
Dean nods. That sounds good.
"And Dean, not all of my heaven is you."
"Good," Dean says, too forcefully. And he does his best to mean it. He does mean it. As best he can, he does mean it. "Good."
This is time. This is just Sam giving him some time. It's good, it's healthy and it's good. Dean can be okay with this. Still, he feels dimensionless again, and matte again, and he yearns for that pain again, or fire again, but mostly all he feels is hungry and vacated.
"You asked if I was happy, earlier," Sam says, sensing the tension and seeking to ease it. "And yeah, I was. Her name is Stella, in case you were wondering. She was a hunter, too."
"You married a hunter?"
"We married civilians."
"Kids?"
Sam laughs. "No. That was always your thing, Dean. Not mine."
Dean thinks of Sam, wiry and mop-headed, so young and so small and so happy, that one time. Just a kid for one goddamn night. He'd been, so beautifully, a kid. "You wanna light some fireworks?" Dean asks.
But Sam shakes his head. He has so much more Heaven yet to see. He is so much more.
"I'll come back, I promise. I'll be back, I want to come back," Sam babbles. It's like he's eighteen again (but growing up so fast). Knowing how this story ends, Dean might actually believe him this time; but maybe not. Don't ask him.
"I'm coming back, okay? I just--I have more Heaven to find, you know? And so do you. So do you, Dean. And I'm coming back, I promise. I want to come back. Just--"
(don't do anything stupid, don't disappear, don't run, do not become a storm, an earthquake, a monster, a thing that is anything less than my soulmate, my brother)
"--don't get lost. Okay?"
&
Heaven is a big place to be alone in. The unfinished looks especially unfinished, and the seams show, and it's hard to ignore the parts where road drifts sloppily into gravel, no rhyme and no reason. Like someone had just thrown them together because they'd been too busy to really think purposively about why these things deserved to be together. But maybe that's just Dean.
He takes the gravel path to a grassy one, and that to rocks again, though this time they're smooth, riverrun. The water is clear, untouched by pestilence. He follows the stream to a lake and the edge of the lake to a dock. Then he gets up on the dock and walks to the edge, and tries to imagine the lake's unfathomable depth.
Nah, it's probably not that deep. It's a murky green-blue, but he thinks he can see mossy branches clawing up from the bottom. And he can see the whole of it just standing here; so really, it's more of a glorified pond. But it'd only need to be six feet down.
If you die in a dream, you wake up. If you die in Heaven, well.
"I'll tell you a funny story," he says to his reflection, and then says nothing.
He sits at the edge of the dock and feels the sun warm in the wood beneath his hands, and the water cool against his legs, and heavy in his boots. It could drag him under. If he wasn't careful, it could drag him under. There are plenty of things, out of all the tooth and fang and memory he's brought to Heaven with him, that would not mind holding him under. If that was what he wanted.
"Sock hop." Dean snorts. "Gets funnier every time I hear it."
He lies back on the dock and knows that the only reason this exists in Cas, in Heaven, is because of a lame dream Dean had once. Cas had loved him then, and loves him now. Dean had dreamed the dream because Sam loved fishing, once. He loved Dean then, and now. Fireworks or no fireworks, monsters or no monsters, finding aids or none at all. Dean looks up at the sky--full sun, no sunset--and he can still see the star-spangled stars behind the brightness of the sun. He can still hear them buzzing, waiting for night, ridiculously fake but ridiculously bright. Their white noise belongs to some cosmic, untuned radio, he imagines. And one of these days, some giant hand will remember to turn the dial at there will be music. He shades his eyes and blots out the sun with his hand. The whole sun can fit in that hand.
On that dock, alone, Dean takes bets with himself. He tries to decide what song it will be, once that dial turns. His monster wades and is present but quiet. Dean drifts off, humming music.
And he finds peace, which is no memory at all.
Dean finds peace.
Recipient: rainylemons
Characters: Dean (POV), Sam, mentions of Castiel; Team Free Will
Rating: thematic R
Word Count: ~9700
Warnings: [Spoiler (click to open)]fratricide, geographystiel, suicidal ideation, sublimated self-loathing, character deaths (but what does that word mean in SPN, really)
Summary: Dean believes in justice, even when he's on its sharp end. Sam believes in soulmates.
Notes: For rainylemons, who asked for post-canon demon!Dean, glasses-wearing!Sam, comfort for old hurt, Heavenly decay, the sensate aesthetic of terror, and white noise behind the stars.
It's humid in Pontiac, like a womb--all placental steam and rivers of blood. Dean's body slides wetly in its leather jacket, but he doesn't do shit about it. It's only going to get hotter, and it's better if you don't run away. If you always weather the worst, then at least you'll have the memory of vaguely better to fall back on, right?
That's what this preacher tells him, anyway. His name is Dave, and him and his have been floating around the camps, contagious and unavoidable like the pollution clogging all the rivers. The water hasn't killed anyone yet, but it goes in red and comes out redder. But that's not Dean's problem. The preachers haven't killed anyone either, or at least this one hasn't; if he had it might have been Dean's problem, though the jury's out on even that.
In the absence of murder, Dave confesses that he's new to the Church, he wants to preach for the times so as to reach the skeptics as well as the believers, but the times are making it difficult to reach much of anyone, really.
Dave has nice eyes and a big wide mouth. Dave's pretty vanilla.
So Dean commiserates, with a one-liner that shocks Dave's eyes and sours his smile. And Dean grins, because the sunset's dressing everyone in a fiery red, and the heat is pressing into the wood facade of the bar Dean's playing sentry to, and evening's teasing out the smell of smoke sure as busted clockwork, everything grinding to a squealing, steaming halt. Gears crack their teeth as heat and pressure swallow them whole. If this is Heaven, who let me in?
"I'm just playing with you, man," Dean says, because Dave goes rigid as a tin soldier, like his heart's stopped too. It's the kind of reaction you elicit when someone's expecting a friend and they come face to face with a stranger, or a monster instead of a man. "All your prayin's not gonna change me, though. You got plenty of better chances out there."
Dean gestures outward. This had at one point been a dusty highway few had reason to ever see. Now you couldn't get around without having to look into someone's dusty eyes.
There are tents for miles.
They dim at the murky horizon, the tents, but you know they don't end. All the eyes are clouded by war and pestilence. All the eyes have bodies, Dean presumes, but it's their eyes he remembers. Full of dust and terror.
Of course, it's not all bad; there's music, too, brassy porch bands and thrumming gospel choirs. Some wailing a monk assured Dean was Tibetan and every so often, a few ragged guitar solos that are only halfway out of tune. But mostly it's a hum of people, doing peoplely things Dean's spent his whole life either navigating surreptitiously or running from. They're all trying to keep their mind off fear. Maybe Dave will find a lost soul out there.
"Go to them," Dean tells Dave. And even though he's not sure he does, he says, "I got someone else."
&
He does got someone else--sort of. Dean feels the cold of the beer behind him before he turns to meet it.
"You look good, Dean," says Sam, drinks in hand. No hello; no long time, no see. Just a 'you look good.' There's a number of reasons this shouldn't make sense--is, at the very least, kind of fucked up--but Sam opens his mouth, Sam is standing in front of him, he is with Sam, and Dean is nervous as hell.
Sam looks different. It startles Dean at first, like he can't immediately place what's changed. But it's been a long time. Sam's probably changed more than Dean could ever know.
"It'll do that," Dean replies belatedly. He's still thinking about Dave, the ghost of him hanging in the dead air like smoke in a vacuum. 'It'll do that'? Dean thinks. What the fuck are you talking about, 'It'll do that'--
"Have you been waiting long?" Sam asks.
Sam's thinner. (Than Dave, but also thinner than Sam.) The heat's not doing his hair any favors, but it looks fine. He has lines Dean doesn't remember and scars Dean does. The glasses are new, dainty wire frames that all the hot librarians wear. Sammy, you sly little fucker.
It's nice, to imagine that. Calming; pleasant; playful. Towards the end, Sam had just been fault lines to him, and he'd been a guilty earthquake. He might still be an earthquake.
But Sam looks good. Dean hopes Sam feels good.
Dean feels okay.
"Have you been waiting long?" Sam repeats. He pushes the beer into Dean's hands. It's slippery with condensation but as promised, it's cool.
"Wasn't," Dean says.
Sam takes the bottle opener Dean offers and pries his cap open. "Well, sorry I'm late."
"Nah."
They don't hug. Maybe it's the heat, but probably not. There's something so off about this, even though they're both pretending otherwise. They're talking, but not quite to each other, and maybe it's how fast Dean's thoughts are racing relative to how nowhere all that talk is going. Dean doesn't like it.
"Wanna come in?" Sam asks. He's rocking their conversation in its cradle. Shh, shh it's gonna be okay. You're weak, but you're gonna grow up big and strong, sweet little whining conversation o' mine.
(where do we go?
where do we go now?
where do we go?)
"There's a game going. Easy money."
"Not really looking for company." It comes out more strained than he has any right to feel, on a wet, languorous day like this. Muscles slip and wilt on evenings like this, and Dean should too. The only hard things out right now are the knives in the camps (music and murder, that's how it always goes) and the cicadas fucking.
Relax.
"I hate this bar," Dean says, because Sam hasn't taken 'no' for an answer.
"You love this bar."
Dean's pretty sure it hadn't been in Pontiac, last he'd been here. But things change. Though it still plays too much REO Speedwagon (there are no candles in the window, and no cold, no darkness, no winter).
"Nothing good on tap," Dean objects, regarding the deep, wide mug in his hands. "And what the hell are you drinking?"
"Mexican coke--vintage," Sam says. "What? I'm not drinking anything that's been near that water. And 2005 was a good year."
"Wussy."
"I didn't come all this way just to get giardia. Are there going to be fireworks?"
"Not while the sun's still out, dumbass."
But the sun's not out anymore, Dean realizes. The blood and fire vanish from the sky and it's black, pock-marked starry. Dean doesn't recognize any of the constellations, but they look weird for some reason.
And on cue, there are the fireworks. Somewhere far off, there are fireworks. It doesn't look like much from where they're standing, but it's gotta be making someone else's fucking night. Otherwise, what's the point?
"How'd you know? That there'd be fireworks, I mean," asks Dean.
"There were last time. Heaven's like Disneyland, right? Always an opening show?"
Jeez. Sam seems so calm about that. Like, oh, Heaven again. And it's not like Dean hadn't had his suspicions, but the question remains: Who the fuck let him in? Though Heaven's past its heyday; it seems like less of a Disneyland, more of a sideshow.
Maybe he's a circus act. Maybe there will be a bear-baiting.
(There are so many tents. So many tents filled with people with no place to go. Surely they need an example of how this could be worse. People are like that.)
Sam's still talking about fireworks.
It must've been '96 or something, he says. And do you remember-- the field, do you remember we--
"No," says Dean. Of course he remembers. But he doesn't want to know Sam had, too. It's a little late for that. Notably, these are not their fireworks. Not anymore, and not tonight.
If that's their memory out there, they've been locked out of it, and they can't reach it. They can't even talk to each other right. When Sam steps off the porch to get a better look, it feels desperately like he's slipping away. It's like Sam, and everything else, is slipping away.
Then there's a rush of air, and a monster comes for Dean. It shreds the atmosphere, like the humidity's been cleaved off in neat, gelatinous chunks, until it's a dry different sky all around him. And the thing, it tears him apart, hits his chest first but saves his heart for last. He's snipped into florets of adipose tissue. He becomes fine webs of circulation, bright strontium red. His brains string out magnesium white, and his guilt is aluminum, his hatred and his anger and his hopelessness incandescent iron, charcoal. There's a copper taste at the back of his mouth but it's not blood; it explodes out of him turquoise blue. The people, they're still singing, they're still eating, Sam's still drinking his beer, and preacher Dave's gotten into a knife fight with a brash twelve-year old off in the distance, Dean can see. No one notices the monster. It's just Dean's.
Sam turns around. "Hey, you good?"
Dean stumbles against one of the porch supports. The monster abates. From afar Dean has the appearance of wholeness. But he's matte, it's like he doesn't have depth anymore. He holds out a shaking hand, and it doesn't look real. His beer isn't cold. He's lost a dimension. Pain fumbles through him--a jacob's ladder.
"I'm fine," Dean manages.
He takes a gulp of his beer he doesn't like. Just get past it, Winchester. Be a professional, and just get past it.
"Hey, if this is Heaven, then where's Cas? He's gotta be playing bossman again up here by now, right?" Dean croaks.
(just get past it)
"You can't feel it?"
"Feel what?"
"Oh," says Sam. Just oh. Oh right. Oh right, what? "Come on, I need to show you something."
Dean feels forlorn, and chafes against the old, familiar ridges of betrayal. Apparently there's some kind of cosmic secret he hasn't been let in on. Sure, most of that shit's better off Don't Ask, Don't Tell, but this is Cas they're talking about. This is Sam.
"Muggy, right?" Sam says, as he walks and Dean follows, Dean follows because he cannot, cannot bear the thought of Sam leaving, and him being alone. He'll follow Sam anywhere tonight.
"It's Illinois," says Dean. Of course it's muggy. Though, he supposes, they're in Heaven, not Pontiac. And also, the rivers run bloody. All bets are off.
"This is what it feels like inside an angel. When they're on the outside, and there's an angel between you and your body. This is that feeling, Dean."
Oh, Dean thinks. Just oh. He has a feeling he knows by whose grace he's come and gone to Heaven.
"Why is there giardia in Heaven, anyway?" Sam asks, oblivious to the spike in Dean's heart rate.
Dean tries his best to be oblivious, too. "Cas liked bugs," he says.
"I dunno," he says. "He's a weird dude."
&
Cas is less of a weird dude and more of a weird place, these days. Dean's wondered once or twice where God was, where the fuck God had been during all of this. Now he knows. And wouldn't you fucking know, he does work in mysterious ways. Because Heaven doesn't need a leader; it needs scaffolding. It needs a blueprint. It needs a home. And so like God before him, Castiel has become firmament--the role or martyrs before there were martyrs.
Dean doesn't even want to know how this came about; apparently he'd missed it. He'd been away, or dead, or he'd been around but too far gone to give a shit, he thinks. But now that Dean's been charmed into looking, there are pieces of Cas everywhere.
There is no gas in Heaven, but there is a Gas N' Sip, and its employees wear that same, starched, bold little uniform Castiel had been so proud of for all of that month and a half. And the Roadhouse is apparently in Pontiac, Illinois now--a Winchester transplant into the city that had once belonged to Jimmy Novak and his family. As he follows Sam through the camps--refugees, lost souls still recovering from an old war--Dean catches families clutching pamphlets for national parks, fathers fixing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their daughters and strangers sharing tin cans of beans. There's a little girl fiddling with a radio and an old man playing a board game with a sort of gothy nurse. Someone hands Dean a map of Heaven, which apparently now boasts a giant ball of twine of its own, and a Grand Canyon, and a lake, a lake with a fishing dock. Dean looks up from the map to make sure Sam's still in front of him and catches sight of preacher Dave. He's gouging the shit out of a melon-sized grapefruit with the knife from his knife fight; he's with six or seven women who are all, fucking inexplicably, eating grapefruit too. That's a reference Dean doesn't get.
It's weird, to feel Cas all around him but not be able to look him in the face. It reminds Dean too much of grief, even though this is the opposite--this should be the opposite--of that. But if Dean does not understand possession, or Heaven, or Heaven made out of repurposed angel or whatever, he does know loss. And he knows that it's possible to find grief in just about anything, if you let yourself get too curious.
Dean knows loss.
With every step, he and Sam filter through a different shade of Cas, past rogue landmarks and overdetermined objects, things thrust into a state of such ardent, desperate importance they begin to tessellate. (How many gas stations does one road really need?) Walking through him feels so aimless, so adrift. But maybe that's just what Heaven is.
There are so many people here, waiting and homeless and lost and confused.
He wants to ask Sam where they're going, but he's not sure if he could stand an answer. Dean doesn't want to be going anywhere; truth be told, he doesn't mind the forever wandering. He doesn't want any road to end. He's died and, damningly, persisted enough times to know that no end is any end you want. There's no such thing as a good ending.
Dean concentrates on the slight hunch to Sam's back before him, the fact that he's wearing a shirt Dean doesn't recognize, the distressed white of Sam's wallet and his knife in the back pockets of jeans Dean does. How long has it been? How long has it been since they saw each other last? He can see all that time built up in Sam, added entropy (or something), but Dean does not have it, cannot account for it.
There's a screech.
It's this bright, keening whisper, and it cracks through the air, it's sound so powerful you feel it. It doesn't sound like the Cas Dean knows, but it twins something deep inside him, a screaming Dean heard long ago in Hell, the scream of something pulling him back. (He'd come back with too much time then, and not enough now. Dean's not sure if that's a clue or just equilibrium.)
It's a sound he's almost forgotten. It's a sad sound. Then Dean hears pop music. Late 90s, sexy schoolgirl outfit, lots of blondes. Well, buddy, Dean thinks. You're going to be a very different god.
Dean wishes he could clap him on the shoulder but he can't, Cas has no shoulders, so Dean snaps his fingers instead. Crack.
"What?" says Sam.
"Nothing."
&
They come to a forest. It's gray, desaturated the way the real world looks after a night terror. Sketchy, like the final details haven't been added yet, and the systemic complexity (water, soil, growth, old growth, undergrowth, decomp) hasn't been sorted out yet. The fog rolls in thick, a marine layer meandering off an ocean that hasn't been written yet. There should be monsters here, but none come. (Yet.)
"This isn't Purgatory," Dean says, more to assure himself than anything else.
"That would be a neat trick," says Sam. "But yeah, this doesn't seem... Well, I mean. You'd know better than anyone, right?"
Dean's eyes narrow. "Why would Cas put Purgatory in his Disneyland? He realizes that if he starts advertising this kind of shit on his postcards, Hell's gonna have a waiting list, right?"
Sam touches one of the trees, as if to sample its reality. He observes it with and without his glasses. The bark comes away with his hand, ruddy and soft. Even if it's not quite right, it's real enough.
"Obviously it reminds him of something he loves," Sam says.
Dean squirms. Castiel's list of things he'd loved in Purgatory is a lot shorter than Dean's was.
where are the monsters where are
&
the monsters where are they
"It got pretty bad down there, you know. Before we figured out how to jerry-rig the lock on Heaven, the pressure of all those ghosts in the air basically qualified as a barometric apocalypse."
Dean laughs. "Barometric-- that's weak, man. What's next, attack of the bagels?"
Sam doesn't join him. And he'd been so good-natured up until this point--quiet, but not restive or accusatory, which is how Dean remembers him. But at least now Dean knows he's real. In Dean's Heavenly hopes and dreams, Sam is always happy.
Dean knows what's soured Sam; he remembers some of that too, from before. Less than he should, maybe, but he'd been occupied with different things. Like white noise, Dean remembers the electrical storms, the heaviness of everything. People dropping dead of spontaneous heart attacks. Tides washing away cities. Freak magnetic fields wiping minds and computers both. There'd just been so many fucking ghosts; the planet couldn't take it any more. It's like when you touch a wall and the whole house comes down, because really, it was all just termites.
"That's the last time we were in a forest like this, huh. Waiting up for Candi," Dean says, because Sam's stopped talking, and he wants to hear Sam's voice again.
"Together, you mean?" says Sam. "Yeah, I guess. Fucking cold."
"Really fucking cold." Dean wonders how many forests Sam's trekked through without him. "You think she ever made it out of the veil? Or Kevin--"
"Kevin's safe." The two words shoot from him, double-tap. But he doesn't elaborate.
"Sam, I--"
"I think it was the worst for you, you know," Sam bulldozes. His voice is different than Dean remembers, rougher, but his panic sounds the same as ever. It hurts.
"After the ghosts hit capacity, all the other demons just kind of... melted back into Hell, I guess. But you-- you didn't have anywhere to go, or at least you didn't know how, or--something..."
"Sam, you're making me sound pathetic."
Judging by the look on Sam's face, it had probably been pathetic, no assistance required. Dean doesn't remember that part either way.
That had been his favorite thing about his tenure as a demon. He hadn't been Crowley, or Alistair, or Lilith, or even Meg; he'd been too willing to forget, to be nothing, to make no plans and harbor no ambitions. Too willing to be shit, living from one moment to the next as just a hungry, ruthless thing. Yeah, he'd been one of those guys, signed on full-willing and everything. He'd boiled down to fluid dynamics--no memory, no thought. It's as close to true death as Dean's ever been, and honestly, he misses it. Because now that he's up here, in Castiel's shitty, war-torn, people-populated Heaven, he misses Sam. He misses Cas and he misses Sam and they're both right here with him and it doesn't feel like that at all, and for a moment he fucking hates Sam for dragging him back to this. He'd been fine with oblivion. He'd felt good and right and deserving of oblivion.
Dean's a realist. He knows what he's spent several lifetimes destroying, and Heaven can go screw itself. Even Castiel's, and even Sam's.
(you can find loss in anything; what a talent, a prodigy!)
"Wait here for a sec."
Dean's stomach drops because they're not just walking, they're not just traveling. There's a destination in here somewhere. Dean wishes again for reckless pointlessness, but Sam jogs that last fifty yards to a cabin.
The cabin is familiar, and as misplaced in Purgatoryland as the Roadhouse had been in fake Pontiac--Rufus's old place. The screen door slams against the wall when Sam springs it open, and Dean catches the glitter of the Devil's trap they'd painted onto the screen. Black on black. Surreptitious.
He's not sure why they always paint their traps in red. It's a decent way to say "don't even try," but demons are fucking stupid. They'll always try.
Then Dean is jumped from behind. It's the monster again, with saber teeth that plunge deep into his gray matter. Its claws pulverize his ribs and his lungs collapse, he can't breathe, but as always it saves his heart for last. There's a whistling, he thinks. Maybe it's forest wind whistling through his chest, the efficient pop of his viscera reorganizing as his kidneys are pirated, his liver is feasted upon. They've left all the people behind, out in the dust, but someone is whistling a song. "The Hall of the Mountain King," Dean thinks; it's that song, but someone's fucked with it, thrown it into a major key. And it's not whistling, but singing--thin, high and off-key. Every other lyric is "Candi."
There's radio disturbance in his alveoli. A crackling--the sound is somewhere between a pneumonic warning and a ghost attempting to whisper. Dean spits out undergrowth (when had he fallen? when his heart, stopped, probably) and rolls onto his back. But his lungs dispense themselves like parachutes, lay themselves to rest on the soup that is what's left of him.
Dean stares up at the stars, which have been caught and hoarded by the trees. They're too orderly, that's what's wrong with them. They're set up in rows like on the American flag, he realizes. He can't believe Castiel lived for millenia and never once looked up (looked down?) at the real goddamn sky. And now his Heaven's stuck with this.
The stars buzz, the bleary fluorescence of every hospital and record-room in the country echoing through them.
He should have taken Cas star-gazing, fuck. He does not belong here. He does not deserve to belong here.
The screen door slams again--Sam coming back.
Dean's monster buries itself.
Sam looks sad, though; or maybe just distressed. Maybe he's noticed the carnage.
But Dean doesn't even feel wet. There's no dirt, no blood to be wiped away. He's not hurt (though he swears-- he swears...) It's all an invisible pain and madness.
But the gray forest is an odd tinge of red, and Dean knows what Sam must see. So that's why they paint in red.
And Dean wonders for a moment if it had ever been sunset in Heaven, if the rivers truly ran with blood, or if it had been his eyes at fault, and not the scenery. Maybe Castiel's refugees were in better spirits than he thought; and all the dusty, haunted eyes he'd seen had been his fault. what are you doing here, what have you done to deserve, why must we share this with you?
Because Dean sees red, and from the white-knuckle grip Sam has on the box in his arms, Sam must see black. (Let's go take a howl at that moon. Shall we?)
Sam comes to him anyway. He drops the box at Dean's feet indelicately, and they sit apart from one another on the trunk of a felled tree. Coastal redwood; it's rotting from the inside out.
Sam gets right to the point. Sort of.
"Sorry. I didn't mean to stare. I just, I thought maybe--" he confesses, "I mean, I'd hoped-- Since we're in Heaven and I--
"But no, that makes sense."
Dean's glad something does. But Sam just goes south from there, from incoherent to disconsolate.
"At the Roadhouse, when you wouldn't come inside." Sam covers his eyes with his hand. It's an easy, well-practiced swoop under the bridge of his glasses. He pops them off and dangles them in his free hand. And Dean wonders how many years of this he missed. How much practice you needed before the mechanics of crying became that goddamn smooth. (Dean's been told he cries pretty.)
"You can't. It's warded and you can't," Sam mumbles.
Dean sighs. That's part of the reason. But warding is an excuse the same way becoming a demon was a consequence, and not an act. Dean's act was everything that came before that. And his reason, well. At least as far as the Roadhouse is concerned, he really hadn't been looking for company. He wouldn't have survived that much guilt.
"Oh, you knew, Sam," he says, after Sam has taken a deep breath. If he hadn't at least suspected, he wouldn't have had Dean wait outside. They'd be in Rufus's cabin now, instead outside in the fog, listening to the world rot around them. "You just didn't want to know."
"Do you remember how you died?" Sam asks suddenly. "It's important."
It's not that important.
"As a demon," Dean answers.
"As my brother."
As a demon, Dean amends, but he doesn't want to argue with Sam anymore. "I hope this doesn't mean Cas has been handing out freebies to any-goddamn-thing. He always was a huddled masses kind of guy, but this is just ridiculous."
"Why are you talking about him in the past tense?" Sam asks. He puts his glasses back on.
There's an untold story there, Dean thinks. Some span of years Dean will never know and Sam will never recover. They're in Heaven, which he guesses means they're done now.
"Because everything feels past tense," he says.
&
Sam, of course, does his best to prove Dean wrong. He brought toys and everything. Because the box from the cabin is the kind that comes with library archives, filled with old, vaguely important, mostly illegible shit you're only allowed to touch with gloves on. And the dew point in Purgatory is not the dew point of an archive room; already, everything is floppy and rippled. As far as recklessly pointless goes, this is pretty ideal. Because it's a case, and if that doesn't light a fire in Dean's heart he would have pretended it had. Dean doesn't care what the case is--monster, check; perplexing, largely unrelated amounts of research, check; unsolved mystery, double check. It's a case and it's theirs and they're going to fucking work it.
Leave it to his geek brother to bring work with him to the afterlife.
Dean's smiling about that until he remembers that this is he afterlife, and his brother is dead.
"Falling down on the job, Sammy," Dean says, because it's too quiet to think about that kind of thing. "This shit isn't organized at all. What were you doing?"
"It is organized," Sam insists. "Or it was; I don't know what the hell you're doing with it. You're just not using it right."
"Well, your system sucks."
"It's the Library of Congress!"
Dean buries his distress. They're supposed to work together seamlessly, always have (well...). But this box, these materials; Dean doesn't understand any of it. Sam's working in ways that Dean does not understand and he feels so separate Dean can't even grab him back, guide him back, make him come back home. Sam's archive was not made for Dean, and he is so, so lost. "For fuck's sake," he mutters. "The 'Library of Congress' doesn't have a code for"--he squints at Sam's tight, neat print down the side of the folder. "Dumb Hell Shit."
"Well, they should. Here, I typed up a finding aid. Jeez."
Dean doesn't use the finding aid. It'd be like asking for help, and even God knows Dean can't do that. Not anymore.
Fifteen minutes later, Sam is trying to salvage his organizational system and Dean is staring at a photograph.
"Same date," Dean says.
Sam looks up. Dean wonders how long it had taken him to perfect the tousled, sexy librarian look. "Hm?" he says.
"This picture was taken on the same day as one of those other ones. Goddamn it, Sam, why'd you put everything away?"
"Because that's how organization works, dude. Look, if you describe the picture you want, I can find it for you. We can work this, you know, together."
Dean does, and Sam searches, pointedly and dramatically. Like, fucking watch this, I am fucking magic.
Whatever.
He looks at the picture in his hands. Same time, same place as one of the other albums Sam had collected. It means whoever took them, they were all gathered in one place. If he can cross-reference the two albums, maybe he can piece together the scene. If the photographers have pictures of each other snapping scenes, even better.
Sam hands him the other photograph.
He wants a thank you, but Dean just says, "How do you even do that?"
Sam's picture is from a sock hop; there are hundreds of photographs from the cutting room floor of some local rag--all that made it into the print edition was a blurry, cropped thumbnail. The photo in Dean's hands is a picture of the sky above the sock hop--the billowy precursor to a major electrical storm. But it's the same park, and all the ancillary figures twin themselves in the photos. Two perspectives on one event. Dean crows. "Jackpot."
"How do you even do that?" Sam asks.
"Same date," Dean repeats. "It stuck out."
"Sure, Dean. Whatever you say."
The date is September 18th. Six years to the day.
&
It's been hours since the last breakthrough, though it's difficult to tell if time has passed in Purgatoryland, and Dean's not sure if time passes in Heaven at all. All he knows is that the sock hop hadn't exactly given them the traction he'd hoped. But he holds to it--it was a breakthrough, goddamn it; it'll fall into place eventually. He's never been so defensive of a sock hop.
"What about you, then?" Dean asks, after more time does and does not pass, and very little falls into place.
"What got you? 'Cause if this is what you look like at a hundred and nine, I hate you."
Sam huffs. "I was forty five, thanks."
If Sam were an obituary, he'd be one of the sad ones. No dying in peacefully in his sleep, after a long life well lived. Fucking forty five? Seriously? "That's not old enough," Dean says. He's not sure who he's blaming.
"It's a lot older than you."
"Not really."
"It felt like a lot."
And who is Dean to say Sam hadn't lived a long life well, really. But forty five. Dean could name a dozen bands who'd been playing together longer than that. The Super Bowl's been around longer than that. There's so much he's certain Sam could have done with longer than that.
"What happened?" he asks. The question is reckless and pointless and Dean regrets it almost instantly.
Sam chokes, and blushes. He dips his head so fast his glasses slide down his nose. The spiral of Sam's part catches the gleam of the moon--some of his roots had been growing in silver. But not enough of them. Sam had not died old enough. Sam had not died nearly old enough. And it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair.
"Uhhh, funny story," says Sam, once he's recovered himself.
But Dean does not recover. "No, it's not funny."
"Oh come on, it's kinda funny."
He hates it when Sam turns his own old words back on him like that. Sam gets that triumphant, overhappy smile; and it ruins the homage because to Dean that smile forever belongs to a bratty teenager who no longer exists. Who is dead now; like, really, actually, no takebacks, this-is-not-a-nightmare, this-is-not-a-metaphor dead. Sam is dead.
"Come on. You already know how it ends," Sam goads. "Dramatic irony is supposed to be funny."
"I don't wanna think about you dying any more." Dean swipes a new file from the box and abruptly dedicates himself to its contents.
Sam refuses to follow the cue. "Seriously, even now?"
Dean's throat is tight and he feels like he's going to choke on the words. Like the monster's come crawling back and gone and wrapped itself around his neck. But Sam doesn't say anything, doesn't point anything out, so it can't have. "Don't tell me," he hisses.
"Some demon you are."
The file in Dean's hands degrades at his touch. He pulls the paper out to mulchy webbing, carbon fractals not unlike his favorite parts of the human body. They combust, and the file and all its photographs and articles and saving graces go up in wet, dark smoky flames. He blows the plume towards Sam. Because Sam should know exactly what kind of demon he is. "Fuck you," he says. "Fuck death, and fuck you."
"Fuck you, too," Sam says, without heat. But he repeats it, fuck you too, Dean, and Dean doesn't know how to respond so he sits back down and wipes the soot from his hands and wishes he hadn't burned that file. Some demon, he thinks. But it's hard to want to do anything else. He's tired of hurting Sam, and Sam seems mostly tired of him. Purgatoryland is empty and absent the rush and stimulus of the real thing, and the feel of Castiel here on the fringes isn't as welcoming as it was in the camps. It's terse here, stressed. Fraying, a bit. And Dean does not belong here. Really really, this time. He does not belong here.
"I'm sorry," Dean says.
"Some of the photos were from personal collections," Sam replies. "But they sold them off piecemeal to the newspaper, or some obscure university, or put them on Flickr, or whatever. So it's hard to know the provenances of all the partial collections. I could use your help."
If you're done with all that bullshit, I could use your help.
Dean chuffs. Provenances. After all these years word's still funny. Good old Sarah Blake--they'd been so close to saving her. But he supposes all they'd really done is give the world greater, deeper opportunity to mourn her. They'd ruined a marriage and ripped a mother from her child. That's what they'd done.
"Your 'funny story,'" Dean says. "Did it break anyone's heart?"
Sam's calm falters. He snaps the newspaper he'd been looking at. Then he says, "Nah."
He says, "She'll get through it."
He says, "She has six older brothers."
The thought re-centers him. Dean watches Sam's shoulders relax. Whoever she is, she has six brothers.
"--and also like seven hundred nieces and nephews," Sam amends quickly. "I'm not complimenting you, asshole."
For a moment, Dean feels kind of proud anyway. But six brothers and a girl means seven mourners, and Dean has no idea how Sam can even handle that. How he can handle the thought of making that many people that fucking sad. Because death is letting someone down. Either you didn't save someone, or you didn't save yourself, and no matter what, you really fucking disappointed someone.
Dean's had plenty of opportunities to work this out, and no matter what, that's what it always comes down to. Death means you fucked up, and you failed someone. Of course, if you're extra precocious (and Dean is a fucking prodigy), you can do this before your lights go out. At which point, it's best to die alone.
Dean doesn't remember how he died, but he knows how he planned to.
&
Morning in Purgatoryland is nothing like morning in Purgatory, which did not exist. In Purgatoryland, the fog burns off and where the copse of trees thins out, sunlight punches through so strong you can see motes and gnats hanging in the quiet air. Everything smells like dust, and maybe smoke. Old smoke not quite cleared, from the night before. Dean wonders how many nights Cas had spent huddling in Purgatory's dark alone, wishing that would happen. Pining for a little daylight, some hope. Dean should have been there for him, and he should have fucking dragged him out. Fuck Cas.
"I'm sorry for not helping you," Sam says suddenly, when the sun twists high enough overhead to be useful. He's wiping his lenses with his flannel, holding them up to the light to inspect their cleanliness. Dean can't tell anymore whether he looks less familiar with them or without.
"You did," says Dean.
"I'm sorry it wasn't enough, then. Or soon enough."
Dean shrugs. "You lose some."
"I wanted to win that one."
Dean, you have no idea how much I wanted to win that one.
&
They go back to camp for breakfast. It's Heaven, but Cas's is crafted in Earth's image instead of the other way around. We might as well, Sam figures. Sam brings him an inexplicable grapefruit they both know Dean's not going to eat.
It's ostensibly morning, but Heaven is as red and rundown as it ever was. The rivers run bloody and the moment they leave the trees in Purgatoryland the humidity boils over again. Dean surveys the world, stranded as it is in a perpetual sunset. (Or is that you? Is it just your eyes, your heart, that cripple it?)
He doesn't want to ask how Pontiac looks to Sam, or how it feels. "Like an angel" had not been helpful. The thought of Sam inside and angel and angels inside of Sam makes the reds redder and the blacks their blackest. He doesn't need anything else to remind him how much he does not belong here.
"You're in those photographs, you know," says Sam, who picks at his grapefruit. A citrus tang springs from beneath Sam's fingernails. "Did you notice?"
He hadn't. He picks out Dave playing hacky sack (god, Cas, why) with the grapefruit girls sixteen tents away, he can hear the 10am smack of a pool cue from inside the Roadhouse, and now he can close his eyes and tell you exactly the way Sam's changed since they'd seen each other last, but he did not notice himself.
"What, at the sock hop?" he says, incredulous. Because one, it's a sock hop.
Sam chuckles. "You were there for the storm. Or you were the storm. I never really figured out which."
It's too hot to keep pacing. And staring at Dave playing his dumb game is only making him feel sweatier. Dean sits his ass down on the Roadhouse porch, next to Sam's. This is as close as they've been in a long time, but Sam doesn't move away. Dean feels a weight on his knee--not Sam's hand, but his grapefruit, gouged out and sickeningly pulpy. Dean samples a nibble. When Sam shifts his weight Dean feels it creak through the old dry wood beneath them both and Sam feels more real than he's been all night.
"Dean, do you remember how you died?"
And even though he's in Heaven, and even though in no acceptable world does Sam ever die before him (or ever), Dean asks, "Did I?"
He wasn't sure he could. He's not sure he can.
"September 18th, 2014."
If he doesn't look down he can imagine it's Sam's hand on his thigh, and not his breakfast. If he wants hard enough maybe the sunset will vanish and the star-spangled stars will come out and there will be fireworks again. If he feels Sam beside him intensely enough maybe there will be fireworks again.
Their knees knock. The grapefruit tumbles into the dust like a severed head. September 18th, 2014.
"At a sock hop?"
"It was an electrical storm," Sam insists.
"Yeah, a storm... at a sock hop. What, did I get struck by lightning or something? Divine intervention?"
(because how do you beat the Mark of Cain?
how do you damn the damned?)
Sam takes a deep breath. "Well, there's Cain and Abel. And then there's, um. Abel and Cain, I guess."
"Wow. That clarifies everything, Sam."
"We're soulmates," says Sam. He means, I killed you.
This might give better beings pause, but to Dean, it's a perfect translation. Love has a lot of stupid, stupid synonyms, and Dean's begged all of them. So 'We're soulmates I killed you' seems simple and direct. Try this: We're brothers I saved you I let the world burn I lit the match I slit its throat and it bled kerosene I was the firestarter I saved you and I saved you and saved you and I didn't let myself see that we were burning, burning we all were burning all we were was burning we are still just burning.
Sam's 'we're soulmates I killed you' is chump change by comparison, as far as Dean's concerned. But Sam still says, "I'm so sorry."
Dean thinks about the box in the woods, the 'case' that had really just boiled down to two (or three, translations differ. we're soulmates / I killed you) damn words. All that time they'd spent, working together and solving the case and sitting along in the woods. It hadn't meant anything at all, then. Except for the part where Dean wouldn't give it up for anything now, it hadn't meant a damn thing, if Sam knew those photographs, those reports, those archives all ended.
"Why didn't you just say that? It would have saved a lot of fucking time," Dean asks, though time--finally--is something they have. They have too much time.
"I still haven't," Sam points out. "I can't."
"It's three words, Sam."
But Sam can't, and he used a box and a case and the job to do it for him. Dean's familiar with the strategy. He could have told Sam it was a losing one years ago.
"We can't talk to each other that way, man," says Sam. "We don't-- we didn't work like that anymore, and hell, maybe we never did. It just doesn't work that way, and that doesn't change up here. We don't know how to talk to each other."
Dean draws a shuddering breath. And suddenly, immediately, he's angry at Cas. He is fucking furious at Cas, even though it's not his fault, none of this is anyone else's fault, it's just. Well, it's justice, probably. And Dean is at its sharp end. "Is that the best Heaven can do?"
"Apparently!" Sam snaps. Then his voice softens. And this tone, Dean remembers well. "I'm sorry. Look. Look at me, Dean."
Dean looks. He can see himself in the reflection off Sam's glasses and his eyes are black and his face is drawn and there's a monster with its hand on his shoulder.
"I thought, if I died, it wouldn't matter where you'd gone, or what you were. I could bring you with me. I had to believe that. I had to; you have no idea how bad I wanted--want that. So I'm sorry, I guess." The apology is a bitter appendage. "I just wanted you to be okay. I just wanted you to be okay. I did everything I could so you would be okay."
Sam is his soulmate, and when he rose to Heaven, he dragged Dean up too--his plus one. And Cas let him.
There's probably a double standard in all of this, though Dean's not sure if it's his, or Sam's, or Cas's, or everyone's. He smells wood and the smoke in the wood and the fires that haven't burned yet, and dust, and fear in handfuls of it, and he kicks the grapefruit away and he asks, "But were you happy?"
Because Dean imagines Sam surrounded by strangers (no, family; they'd be Sam's family by then). There's meat on the grill, maybe those kebabs Sam likes so much, with the peppers and onions and grilled peaches. Cousin-in-laws plucking out riffs on some old guitar, trying to remember tabs someone taught them ages ago; that one uncle who spent a summer in Thailand and was now convinced he was a monk. Nephews manning swing sets and nieces burning ants with a magnifying glass. The rivers here are clear and it's humid, but like being in bed with a loved one, and not at all like an angel. People wear flip flops because they don't have anything to run from. Sam's glasses fog up when he bends over the wok to check the potstickers and he's not worried that something's going to slice him open if he doesn't rectify this problem, stat. It seems like a good time.
But groomed lawns and loud barbecues don't buy happiness; this is a fact Dean knows. You can smile for a picture without it going any deeper and you can act like a professional, do your job, and do it well, without ever having any clue what you're doing. You can live without living.
"Were you happy?"
"I was alive," Sam answers, sort of. "I wasn't gonna waste that. Price per pound, I wasn't gonna waste that."
All Dean can think about is everything he's wasted. Everything he's taken away from someone else. From Sam. If Sam knew how big these mountains were, he wouldn't be sitting next to him like this, Dean's sure.
"It's okay, Dean."
"It's really not."
"Dean," Sam says. Just his name, just like that. Just Dean. "I've already lived a life without you. Don't make me do that here, too."
Dean's monster squeezes his shoulder. But for their knees, Sam doesn't touch him. Dean can't take this. "There are so many things I--"
I don't deserve this.
"Yeah, well Cas wasn't into perfect." Sam slaps at a mosquito and mutters something about bugs. "And, you know. We're brothers, and soulmates and stuff, so I'm biased."
"Don't do the math," Sam adds, because he knows Dean is. "Because you suck at it, you know that? Not everything is subtraction."
Sam's trying to be funny, or cute, but Sam's not that funny. Maybe if he were a chick he'd be cute, but without the librarian glasses even that's a no-go. He's trying to be nice, he's trying so hard to be right. To be Sam, his brother who saved him. And then Cas, or Castiel's Heaven, who's sheltering them both, working so hard to fix everything, to give all these dumb, lost souls a home, when all Dean's done is draw rivers of blood where maybe there weren't any, convince him that Purgatoryland was worth Heaven's crusty edges, terrify hacky sack kids and preachers named Dave and pre-teens name Candi with his black, black eyes; all he's done is disappoint Cas and disappoint Sam and hurt them in ways he cannot imagine--and there is no one in the world who's better at imagining torture and pain than him. Dean has nothing, nothing to give them anymore. He is an emptiness, and he is a poison, and what good he has is nothing they need.
Dean smells wildfire. Then hellfire, then house fires. Singed spiderweb and chemical smoke, old wallpaper curling back from its coving. His monster lights a match and drops it at his feet, and the whole Roadhouse goes up in a span of seconds. Sam doesn't seem to notice. He doesn't even flinch. But it occurs to Dean to wonder where the match had come from, what the monster had struck it against, how this fire started. It's not a difficult puzzle, in the end. Because Dean takes what in that moment feels like might be his last look at Sam (and how can Sam not notice?), and his heart reaches his eyes, his mouth--he smiles--and he opens his heart and he thinks, he loves Sam so fucking much, and he opens his heart and the air rushes in and Dean explodes, his insides explode. The rest of him goes up in the backdraft. Light a match on Dean's heart and it'll burn until there's nothing left. It will swallow you whole.
At the back of Dean's mind, a nice voice whispers from a wide mouth, Come on, let's say goodnight to your brother.
His monster smiles wide.
"You know what I want from you?" Sam asks, over the blaze he doesn't see. But maybe he can feel the heat of it, because when he leaves Dean shivers and he feels Sam's absence keenly. He's leaving, he's leaving. Sam's leaving.
He's picking up the grapefruit and tossing it in the trash can.
"Dean, I just want you to come home."
(But home is burning.)
"Come with me, Dean. Just let it go, and come with me."
Sam says things like that like it's so easy. Like it's Dean's choice to be the way he is, and if he could just let it go and get over it, life would be so easy. And maybe it is Dean's choice, maybe a part of this--a huge part of this--has always been Dean's choice. But what if you need to choose a way to lose, or you'll just have everything ripped from you? What if that's the best you can do, the best you can give, the best you can hope for? What if that's all you have? Because this is all Dean has. This is all Dean is, and he has no more to give. No more to be.
"I know," says Sam, even though Dean hasn't said anything and his only thoughts are vague, and vaguely pointless. But Sam's not looking at Dean.
He's looking at the monster behind him, which for all Dean's fuzzy panic is sharp-edged and gleaming, well-tended. It's all polished guilt and genuine leather trauma. Chrome self-loathing. Personalized terror. It's beautiful, and terrible, the object of so much of Dean's attention and two tons of everything Dean is. Dean's not sure how it got that way. It's not because he's a demon that he doesn't deserve Heaven, or Cas, or Sam, or whatever. He's a demon now because he already did not deserve those things. This is what he deserves. Or this is what he has, in any case. And Dean believes in justice.
Dean believes in justice.
"Yeah, well, I don't," says Sam. "Not like that."
Of course he doesn't. He's in Heaven. Sam's in Heaven and he believes everyone should be in Heaven, because if he can be there, anyone can. But he's not the one in Heaven because someone dragged him there. He's not the one who exists--as ever--just because of Sam. Because of Cas.
"I'm sorry," says Dean. But you don't just let that go. You don't get past it.
"Yes you can, Dean. I mean, no one's saying it's easy, but--"
"Look, man. You've had like fifteen years to process, or find yourself, or whatever. You lived your life. I didn't."
(I didn't get to, I refused to, I did not deserve to)
"And I just, I need some time." And oblivion, but Dean keeps that to himself. "I need time."
"I can give you that," Sam says quickly.
It's weird. The relief Dean feels is huge. It's not the response he expected, though he's not sure why. It's not that Sam isn't patient, or giving. Maybe it's just that Sam has always been too brief. Sam grows up too fast and learns too much and leaps away in starts and fits too quickly. But mostly Sam, gray sexy glasses strange shirt fifteen-years-without-him Sam, dies too soon. Sam expires. Sam ends. But this is Heaven; what they do have, finally, is time.
And Sam says, "I dunno if you've noticed, but Heaven is kind of a clusterfuck. And like, it's not like Cas is giving anyone special treatment, so ours are all fucked up and scattered, too. It'll take a while to find the pieces."
Obviously, Cas isn't giving anyone special treatment. Obviously, says Sam.
"Or he's just made it in Earth's image, you know? Like you gotta find your happiness up here just like you did down there," Sam continues, and Dean thinks, exactly. That's exactly it. Fucking Cas.
"I want to find it," says Sam. "Which will take time, because I want to find it all."
Dean nods. That sounds good.
"And Dean, not all of my heaven is you."
"Good," Dean says, too forcefully. And he does his best to mean it. He does mean it. As best he can, he does mean it. "Good."
This is time. This is just Sam giving him some time. It's good, it's healthy and it's good. Dean can be okay with this. Still, he feels dimensionless again, and matte again, and he yearns for that pain again, or fire again, but mostly all he feels is hungry and vacated.
"You asked if I was happy, earlier," Sam says, sensing the tension and seeking to ease it. "And yeah, I was. Her name is Stella, in case you were wondering. She was a hunter, too."
"You married a hunter?"
"We married civilians."
"Kids?"
Sam laughs. "No. That was always your thing, Dean. Not mine."
Dean thinks of Sam, wiry and mop-headed, so young and so small and so happy, that one time. Just a kid for one goddamn night. He'd been, so beautifully, a kid. "You wanna light some fireworks?" Dean asks.
But Sam shakes his head. He has so much more Heaven yet to see. He is so much more.
"I'll come back, I promise. I'll be back, I want to come back," Sam babbles. It's like he's eighteen again (but growing up so fast). Knowing how this story ends, Dean might actually believe him this time; but maybe not. Don't ask him.
"I'm coming back, okay? I just--I have more Heaven to find, you know? And so do you. So do you, Dean. And I'm coming back, I promise. I want to come back. Just--"
(don't do anything stupid, don't disappear, don't run, do not become a storm, an earthquake, a monster, a thing that is anything less than my soulmate, my brother)
"--don't get lost. Okay?"
&
Heaven is a big place to be alone in. The unfinished looks especially unfinished, and the seams show, and it's hard to ignore the parts where road drifts sloppily into gravel, no rhyme and no reason. Like someone had just thrown them together because they'd been too busy to really think purposively about why these things deserved to be together. But maybe that's just Dean.
He takes the gravel path to a grassy one, and that to rocks again, though this time they're smooth, riverrun. The water is clear, untouched by pestilence. He follows the stream to a lake and the edge of the lake to a dock. Then he gets up on the dock and walks to the edge, and tries to imagine the lake's unfathomable depth.
Nah, it's probably not that deep. It's a murky green-blue, but he thinks he can see mossy branches clawing up from the bottom. And he can see the whole of it just standing here; so really, it's more of a glorified pond. But it'd only need to be six feet down.
If you die in a dream, you wake up. If you die in Heaven, well.
"I'll tell you a funny story," he says to his reflection, and then says nothing.
He sits at the edge of the dock and feels the sun warm in the wood beneath his hands, and the water cool against his legs, and heavy in his boots. It could drag him under. If he wasn't careful, it could drag him under. There are plenty of things, out of all the tooth and fang and memory he's brought to Heaven with him, that would not mind holding him under. If that was what he wanted.
"Sock hop." Dean snorts. "Gets funnier every time I hear it."
He lies back on the dock and knows that the only reason this exists in Cas, in Heaven, is because of a lame dream Dean had once. Cas had loved him then, and loves him now. Dean had dreamed the dream because Sam loved fishing, once. He loved Dean then, and now. Fireworks or no fireworks, monsters or no monsters, finding aids or none at all. Dean looks up at the sky--full sun, no sunset--and he can still see the star-spangled stars behind the brightness of the sun. He can still hear them buzzing, waiting for night, ridiculously fake but ridiculously bright. Their white noise belongs to some cosmic, untuned radio, he imagines. And one of these days, some giant hand will remember to turn the dial at there will be music. He shades his eyes and blots out the sun with his hand. The whole sun can fit in that hand.
On that dock, alone, Dean takes bets with himself. He tries to decide what song it will be, once that dial turns. His monster wades and is present but quiet. Dean drifts off, humming music.
And he finds peace, which is no memory at all.
Dean finds peace.