Make Thick My Blood (Sam/Dean, M, ch 1/5)
Title: Make Thick My Blood
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: M (for violence, not for smut)
Wordcount: 20669
Artist: stormbrite
Beta: agelade
Warnings: discussion of past noncon, possession, vomiting, seizures, self-harm
AO3 link
Summary: S10 AU (after 10x14). Cas has an idea for curing the Mark of Cain; but if they go through with it, Sam will have to pay a terrible price.
Author's note: This was written for the sammybigbang 2016 so it has beautiful accompanying art (find the masterpost here). It also started out waaaay back in Feb 2015 with a prompt over at OhSam's five year anniversary meme (spoilery, but you can find it here). So sorry, chomaisky, that I took SUCH A LONG TIME to fill your prompt, but hopefully the enormous length of this story will go some way to make up for it!
Dean is going to kill his brother.
The bunker; late at night. Dean is pacing down the corridor, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. His blood is singing. He rolls his shoulders, feels the muscles shift under his skin; and looks down at the weapon he’s carrying, its worn wooden handle clasped tight in his hand. It’s a hammer: a big one, heavy. He shifts it so the clawed end is outward, and keeps on walking. He starts to whistle under his breath.
Somewhere in the warren of corridors, Sam is scared. He’s running. But he won’t get far.
Dean pictures his brother, the hummingbird pulse at his throat. “Sammy…” he calls, sing-song.
Up ahead, something - a hand, a shirttail, a heel - whisks out of sight around the corner of the wall.
Dean smiles.
He doubles back, silent now, feet soft and springy beneath him, and crosses through the shooting range to cut off Sam’s path.
As he turns into the space where Sam is hiding, Dean pauses to take in the view. Sam’s backed up close against the wall, looking in entirely the wrong direction. His chest is heaving, his shirt is sweaty, and there’s a tremor running right through his body. He’s an open target.
Dean’s veins flood hot with satisfaction. It’s the same buzz he gets when he sees a woman in a bar, watches her pupils dilate and her mouth drop open, and thinks,
I can have you. And I don’t even have to try.
He can take Sam, just like this; can destroy his brother completely.
It’s only three steps, half-dancing, over to where Sam stands. Dean raises the hammer.
Sam swings round, a moment too late. His eyes pan huge and his skin drains white and he lifts his arm, just a little way, before Dean brings the claw end of the hammer down hard in his skull. It sinks with a satisfying crunch, splitting bone. Blood spurts bright out of the fracture, soaking into Sam’s hair.
Sam’s eyes roll back in his head. His chest issues a weird, groaning gasp of a sound. Something gurgles in his throat.
Dean brings the hammer back up, brings it down, does it again. He doesn’t stop until Sam is sprawled on the floor, limbs squashed out like a spider in all directions and his head an unrecognisable oozing mess.
Dean grinds the heel of his boot into the space where his brother’s face used to be. He spits a wet plug of liquid down onto Sam’s chest, triumph coursing sweet through every pathway of his body. It’s better than anything: better than sex, better than driving Baby at a hundred miles an hour down an open road. The feeling of it sends Dean dizzy, giddy with glee. Looking down at his brother’s broken corpse, he begins to laugh.
~~~
It’s his own laughter that wakes him, jerking him to consciousness panting and terrified, his dick trapped hot and hard against his thigh and his limbs tangled up in his sheets. He’s in his room, in the bunker; in the dark, although that means nothing down in these windowless bowels of the building.
He lies there for a moment suspended in the shreds of his dream, catching his breath, waiting for the tightness at his crotch to subside. He refuses to touch himself. Every time he closes his eyes, a hundred different images of Sam’s smashed-up body appear behind his eyelids. Dean might be pretty far gone, but there’s absolutely no way, no way he’s jacking off to that.
Instead, he finds his left hand creeping over his belly, settling over the Mark just below his right elbow. Tiny pinpricks of heat run over its surface, tingling at the tips of his fingers. He grips tight; and the movement sets the nerves in his shoulder spasming, slip-starting a chain reaction that jangles up his neck and down to the ends of his toes. This is more than just the regular ache of a nightmare. Something happened before he went to sleep.
Ignoring his protesting muscles, Dean hauls himself upright, digging his fingers into the bed. He swings his legs over the edge of the mattress; rests his feet on cold linoleum. He drops his head into his hands.
The Mark’s having a funny effect on him, of late. Not funny ha-ha. Funny freakish, horrible, disturbing. Every morning after… after the thing has acted up, Dean finds himself foggy and dizzy, groping ineffectually for memories of the previous day. So while it’s just about possible that the ache at the back of his head is simply a result of too many whiskies, that’s almost certainly wishful thinking. It’s been several years since Dean last got a hangover that way.
Dean rubs his fingers through the short hair at the back of his head and strains to remember what he did last night.
When he starts to see it, it’s in flashes; and it doesn’t take too many of those to make him regret that he tried. Black eyes in a startled face. The crunch of bone under his fist. A cloud of smoke - the damp warm wash of blood across the back of his hand - Sam trembling and determined, fingers around his wrist. Yeah, Dean remembers now, more than enough. A fight, and Sam had had to step in, to throw himself bodily between Dean and the guy he was beating. Sam’s mouth had been moving and he had been speaking but it had all been subsumed under the dull roar of the Mark in Dean’s ears. Dean’s not certain, but he’s pretty sure that he did his brother some serious damage before the thought of Cain’s warning had finally, somehow, clawed its way up to the surface of his brain.
So. Great.
Dean drags his hands heavily forward, sliding them up the back of his aching shoulders, down over his collarbone and onto his chest. It doesn’t ease the pain; but he sits like that for a little while anyway, fingers notched at the base of his neck, left palm resting over his anti-possession tattoo. What a joke that turned out to be. Small good to put your body on lockdown, in a world where you can cook up a demon from your own insides.
Dean doesn’t want to move. He’s putting off the moment where he has to get up, walk back down the hallway into the library and see Sam’s face. He’s not ready, yet, to deal with the way that his brother flinches every time that Dean moves too fast: or worse, how Sam overcompensates for it by arranging himself self-consciously, conspicuously close at Dean’s side. It drives Dean crazy: Sam with his jaw and his shoulders set rigid in the front of the car, holding himself stubbornly still as Dean leans over into his personal space. As an attempt at deception, it’s pathetic. Even with the Mark’s constant pounding clouding his head, it’s easy for Dean to see the little red crescents that Sam’s fingernails dig into his palms.
“I know what you’re doing,” Dean wants to say; wants to lean right up in Sam’s face and gnash his teeth, just to see his brother’s pupils dilate in fear. At the same time he wants to ruffle Sam’s hair, knock him on the shoulder, watch him smile. “I’m just your brother,” he wants to tell him. In fact, the Mark has tainted even that, loading the word with the iron-tang threat of Abel’s blood on the blade.
Fuck this, Dean thinks. He puts his hands on his knees and stands, pulling his boots straight onto his bare feet and shrugging a T-shirt over his head. He’s still wearing his jeans, which probably means he ought to change them; but it doesn’t seem worth it when all he wants to do is spend some time with the punching bag in the Bunker’s worn-out gym. Of course, it might be that even that counts as feeding the Mark: that he ought instead to be unrolling his yoga mat and following Sam into Downward Dog. But right now Dean wants to hit something pretty fucking hard, and the punch bag seems like a safer option than anything else.
He creaks open the door, half-expecting to find Sam’s sleeping body in the passage outside. It’s happened before; Sam unfolding his long limbs in startled guilt as the opening door woke him with a knock to the spine. Dean hadn’t been sure if Sam was acting as protector, or prison guard. Prodded for an answer, Sam had denied both; and Dean had found himself turning snappy and hostile, irritated by his brother’s oppressive, humiliating concern.
Tonight, the corridor is empty. But it isn’t quiet. There are voices echoing, bouncing off the tiles. Down in the library, Sam and Castiel are having a fight.
For an unexpected second, Dean finds himself thrown back to childhood, to his mother and father’s irregular fallings-out. This gives him the same odd feeling of the ground shifting beneath him. Despite the ‘profound bond’ he and Cas apparently share, the two of them just can’t seem to stop butting heads. Dean hasn’t got the patience for Castiel’s endless, stupid mistakes; for his bumbling and usually ineffectual goodwill. But it’s almost unheard of for Sam and Cas to argue like this. Lately, especially, they’ve been best buddies; texting surreptitiously behind Dean’s back, gathering to whisper their concerns where they think he can’t hear.
It’s been this way ever since last year, when Gadreel commandeered Sam’s body and Dean took on the Mark. Something that neither Sam nor Cas will discuss went down during those two weeks when Dean was away, before he and Sam crashed back into each other’s orbit on the hunt for Garth. Neither of them has told him what it was, and Dean hasn’t asked. He feels a certain amount of unfair jealousy that Sam turned to Cas after Dean walked out; when really, what else could the kid have done? And what else would Dean have wanted? Sam’s always needed somebody to hold his hand; if not Dean then Jessica, Ruby, Amelia. Lately, that person seems to be Cas.
So, to hear them shouting like this? It shocks Dean, but it fascinates him, too. He slips off his boots and sidles barefoot down the corridor to listen in.
As he nears the library, it rapidly becomes clear that he’s behaving more cautiously than is really required. He must have been out for a while: long enough for the pair of them to have forgotten to worry about waking him up. They’re full-on yelling at this point, Sam’s voice in particular raised and angry, in a way Dean hasn’t heard it since… well, he can’t even think of when. There was a time when Sam was essentially a solid wall of muscle and rage. Neither’s true now. His brother’s thinned down and the anger seems to have thinned out, too, become pointed and (Dean’s gotta say) petty where it used to be blunt and big. Half the time, it feels like Sam is too tired to be angry at all.
Not tonight.
“Just when I think you’ve got a basic grasp on humanity, this happens,” Sam says, loud and solid and mad. “And it makes me realise that you’re such a fucking angel after all.” Whatever Dean’s suspicions, this isn’t a term of endearment; not the way that Sam’s saying it now.
“You’re wrong, Sam,” Castiel says: growly, low. It’s his Big Serious Angel Voice, the one he uses when he’s trying to puff himself up beyond the trenchcoat and the wrinkled tie. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, and whose fault is that?”
“This is for your own good.”
As Cas says it, Dean winces. Sam’s not wrong. Cas is still way off in his human relations if he thinks for a moment that he can shut Dean’s brother down with a phrase like that.
There’s a tense, furious silence. Dean pictures Sam, mouth pinched tight, colour rising on his cheeks. He edges a little closer to the library door.
Soon enough, Sam breaks the tension: breathless, outraged. “How dare you, Castiel? How dare you try and tell me what is for my own good? Don’t you think I’ve had enough of other people trying to make choices for me? Don’t you think that maybe, for once, it might be nice to let me take a fully informed decision?”
“No,” Cas says, flat. “I know you, Sam. You will do what you think is necessary, regardless of the implications. And this? This is not a good idea.”
“That’s it?” Sam asks. There is a dangerous softness to his voice.
“That’s it.”
A beat. Dean is anything but surprised to hear the clatter of an overturning chair. There are a couple of dry slaps, skin on skin; the heavy bump of Sam’s boot against wood. The table scrapes along the floor.
“Nnnngh,” says Sam. Another chair falls over.
Silence descends.
Dean cranes his neck towards the door. He can see light through the long crack between the hinges; but the angle’s wrong to figure out what’s happening inside. He peels his bare foot off the tiles, steps nearer; wonders if they’re sufficiently absorbed in one another to allow for him to take a quick peep around the door.
As he’s weighing the options: “Come in, Dean,” says Cas.
A hot prickle of embarrassment inches its way up Dean’s spine. He thinks, for a moment, about walking away; sprinting down the corridor into the gym, and denying that he ever was here. But Cas's celestial Spidey sense probably precludes that as an option. Better to brazen it out.
He slaps on a smirk, and swaggers in.
Cas has Sam pinned backward over a library table, straddling his hips with a hand around his throat and another trapping Sam’s arms together against the polished wood surface. Sam’s long legs are awkwardly folded beneath him, the table digging into his back. The whole position looks disconcertingly intimate.
“Uh,” Dean says, articulately. Sam’s eyes flick toward him. There’s a deep pink-purple bruise on his brother’s cheek, blossoming over the cheekbone under his left eye. It’s too ripe for Cas to have inflicted it in the moment’s scuffle: and the Mark twitches with interest when Dean looks at it, leaving him with the sick, certain feeling that the thing is his fault. There are more bruises - smaller, finger-sized - on the white wrists exposed where Cas has Sam pinned.
Swallowing the gut-punch, Dean tries again. “Don’t let me interrupt you lovebirds.” He’s aiming for a casual tone. “Just… you know. Keep the domestics to a minimum, if you want the kids to stay in bed.”
Cas frowns. (When doesn’t Cas frown?) He looks down at Sam.
“Will you stop attacking me?” he asks.
Sam nods, as much as he’s able with Cas’s hand at his neck; and Cas lets go, shifts backward to stand on his feet. Sam crumples at the knees, slumps onto the floor. He clutches at his throat and wheezes.
Dean strides towards his brother, offers a hand. Hesitating a microsecond too long, Sam takes it, letting Dean haul him up onto his feet.
“Thanks, man,” he says, backing away.
With his fingers still warm from Sam’s, Dean glances at Castiel’s implacable expression. The Mark is blazing on his arm and he has to tighten his muscles fast and close to avoid pounding hard into Cas’s face. How dare he twist Sam up like that? Doesn’t he know about the kid’s bad back? Can’t he see the goddamn bruising all over him? Nobody gets to hurt Sam. (Nobody but Dean.)
“Dean?” says Sam, low - and Dean realises that he’s been looming, curling his fingers into a fist as he frowns. He deflates a little, relaxes his hand and tries to smile; although he’s not sure how many of his features are on board with the movement. Judging by Sam’s reaction, the overall effect is less than soothing.
Dean pushes through it. “Tell me, Sammy, what’s up?”
He figures the odds of his getting a truthful reply at somewhere around forty thousand to one. Sure, Sam might be feeling frustrated at his inability to get a straight answer out of Cas. But it’s been a long, long time since Dean’s brother felt able to let him in on his most secret plans: Sam’s too well conditioned, too hedged around by guilt, to ‘fess up about something that is obviously sketchy as fuck. So Dean watches without many expectations, as Sam sucks at the inside of his cheek and looks down at his hands.
Eventually, though, something hardens around his jaw; and he looks up, looks Dean in the eye.
“It’s Lucifer,” he says.
Five years ago, when Sam called Dean up from the other side of the country and told him that Lucifer was planning to ride him over the backs of the world, Dean had been too beat-down and worn-out to care. Sam, the Sam he’d loved and coddled and protected, was gone; and the new strange man who’d greeted him after he got back from Hell had sold out everything Dean went down for to chase after some demon bitch and feed himself sick on her blood. Screw the apocalypse. That fight in a North Dakota honeymoon suite had already felt like the end of all things. Sam’s departure, weeks later, had been only the belated flick of a switch, the pulling of a merciful plug on a patient who had long been dead; and when Dean got that call, he hadn’t wanted to revive the corpse. “Pick a hemisphere,” he’d told his brother; and hung up the phone.
Zachariah’s trip to the future might have prompted them back together, but Dean’s not sure that they ever really fixed what broke back then. So, this time, when Sam says ‘Lucifer’, he’s certainly not short on emotion. But he bites down the instinctive, angry response: there’s no sense scaring Sam into silence before he’s even spilled.
Instead, he keeps it clinical. “What do you mean?” he says.
Sam twists his index finger so hard that Dean thinks it might break. He takes a deep breath.
“Metatron said. I mean. You remember what Metatron said about finding the source?”
“Yes,” Dean says. This is it? “We found the source, Sam, you might remember. And I killed him.” If Sam’s forgotten it, Dean certainly hasn’t: a dark night in a dark barn that left Dean feeling like the last remnants of hope had been squeezed from his soul.
But his brother’s shaking his head. “Not Cain. Cain got the Mark from Lucifer. You remember?”
Dean nods.
“So, we, uh… we saw Metatron again, a little while ago” - and when the fuck did that happen, Sam? - “and he said that he’d made up the thing about the source. But he also… he mentioned Lucifer, too. It was Lucifer who created the Mark, Dean. If anybody can take it off…”
Dean bites down, hard, on his own lip. He tastes copper. “And this is what Cas won’t tell you?”
Sam spreads his hands, desperate, appealing. “He has an idea. I saw him have it, he found something and he won’t tell me and… I just want to know. I just want to understand what our options are.”
No, Dean thinks, and he’s not exactly sure where it came from. It feels like it’s him; but there’s a tension, also, somewhere in the back of his brain. Before he can analyse the thought, his mouth is open and he’s pushing Sam back with the same half-responses he’s been using now for months.
“How many times do we gotta have this conversation, Sam?” he says. “I’ve told you to drop it like a thousand times by now. We don’t have options. This isn’t something you can solve. It’s something I have to handle. My problem. My choice. And what I’ve chosen to do is to deal with this for as long as I can. I thought you were on board with that.”
“No,” Sam says. It’s unusual enough to make Dean double take. “No. You’re not dealing with it at all. You’re just waiting around for… for I don’t know what, because it won’t be death, not with that thing on your arm. It has to go, Dean. And this could be the answer, something real.”
Somewhere very deep down inside himself, Dean begins to feel a tiny, germinating sprout of belief. It’s dangerous. Hope is what gets you hurt. But looking at Sam’s pleading expression, the forehead and the big damp eyes, and remembering somewhere through the fog of the Mark that they have, haven’t they? They’ve always managed to do it before… He finds something, just enough of a thread to be worth holding onto for a little while longer.
“OK,” he says. “OK.” And he wheels around to face Castiel, who has been looking at them all this while with an expression of profound consternation. “Sammy’s right. Let’s hear it, Cas.”
Cas shakes his head. “As I have told Sam,” he says, “I don’t think that this is a suitable solution.”
“Not really your call, Cas,” Dean says; and he knows, as he says it, that Castiel will be persuaded: that he’s never been able, in the end, to refuse Dean anything that he really wants. But Cas is trying to be adamant, shaking his head; and Dean doesn’t have the patience for a drawn-out battle. Instead he thinks,
OK. I can do this. I can do this for Sam.
And he lets it go, just for a moment, takes off the reins and lets the black nastiness that’s been nipping at the edges of his mind surge suddenly to the fore. It’s easy to do, easy to sink down into it; a helluva lot harder to get out.
When he resurfaces, maybe sixty seconds later, it seems like not much has changed. Cas’s shirt is rumpled (more rumpled than usual), and he’s breathing heavily, and Dean’s knuckles are stinging. But the real shock is in Sam. He hasn’t moved. But his eyes have the wild look of a horse about to bolt, and his limbs are taut with a painful, quivering suspense.
“It’s OK,” Sam says to Cas. His mouth shapes the words, but the sound isn’t there.
Cas looks at Dean’s brother. “Enough,” he says. “Enough. I will tell you what I know.”
(Chapter 2)
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: M (for violence, not for smut)
Wordcount: 20669
Artist: stormbrite
Beta: agelade
Warnings: discussion of past noncon, possession, vomiting, seizures, self-harm
AO3 link
Summary: S10 AU (after 10x14). Cas has an idea for curing the Mark of Cain; but if they go through with it, Sam will have to pay a terrible price.
Author's note: This was written for the sammybigbang 2016 so it has beautiful accompanying art (find the masterpost here). It also started out waaaay back in Feb 2015 with a prompt over at OhSam's five year anniversary meme (spoilery, but you can find it here). So sorry, chomaisky, that I took SUCH A LONG TIME to fill your prompt, but hopefully the enormous length of this story will go some way to make up for it!
Dean is going to kill his brother.
The bunker; late at night. Dean is pacing down the corridor, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. His blood is singing. He rolls his shoulders, feels the muscles shift under his skin; and looks down at the weapon he’s carrying, its worn wooden handle clasped tight in his hand. It’s a hammer: a big one, heavy. He shifts it so the clawed end is outward, and keeps on walking. He starts to whistle under his breath.
Somewhere in the warren of corridors, Sam is scared. He’s running. But he won’t get far.
Dean pictures his brother, the hummingbird pulse at his throat. “Sammy…” he calls, sing-song.
Up ahead, something - a hand, a shirttail, a heel - whisks out of sight around the corner of the wall.
Dean smiles.
He doubles back, silent now, feet soft and springy beneath him, and crosses through the shooting range to cut off Sam’s path.
As he turns into the space where Sam is hiding, Dean pauses to take in the view. Sam’s backed up close against the wall, looking in entirely the wrong direction. His chest is heaving, his shirt is sweaty, and there’s a tremor running right through his body. He’s an open target.
Dean’s veins flood hot with satisfaction. It’s the same buzz he gets when he sees a woman in a bar, watches her pupils dilate and her mouth drop open, and thinks,
I can have you. And I don’t even have to try.
He can take Sam, just like this; can destroy his brother completely.
It’s only three steps, half-dancing, over to where Sam stands. Dean raises the hammer.
Sam swings round, a moment too late. His eyes pan huge and his skin drains white and he lifts his arm, just a little way, before Dean brings the claw end of the hammer down hard in his skull. It sinks with a satisfying crunch, splitting bone. Blood spurts bright out of the fracture, soaking into Sam’s hair.
Sam’s eyes roll back in his head. His chest issues a weird, groaning gasp of a sound. Something gurgles in his throat.
Dean brings the hammer back up, brings it down, does it again. He doesn’t stop until Sam is sprawled on the floor, limbs squashed out like a spider in all directions and his head an unrecognisable oozing mess.
Dean grinds the heel of his boot into the space where his brother’s face used to be. He spits a wet plug of liquid down onto Sam’s chest, triumph coursing sweet through every pathway of his body. It’s better than anything: better than sex, better than driving Baby at a hundred miles an hour down an open road. The feeling of it sends Dean dizzy, giddy with glee. Looking down at his brother’s broken corpse, he begins to laugh.
~~~
It’s his own laughter that wakes him, jerking him to consciousness panting and terrified, his dick trapped hot and hard against his thigh and his limbs tangled up in his sheets. He’s in his room, in the bunker; in the dark, although that means nothing down in these windowless bowels of the building.
He lies there for a moment suspended in the shreds of his dream, catching his breath, waiting for the tightness at his crotch to subside. He refuses to touch himself. Every time he closes his eyes, a hundred different images of Sam’s smashed-up body appear behind his eyelids. Dean might be pretty far gone, but there’s absolutely no way, no way he’s jacking off to that.
Instead, he finds his left hand creeping over his belly, settling over the Mark just below his right elbow. Tiny pinpricks of heat run over its surface, tingling at the tips of his fingers. He grips tight; and the movement sets the nerves in his shoulder spasming, slip-starting a chain reaction that jangles up his neck and down to the ends of his toes. This is more than just the regular ache of a nightmare. Something happened before he went to sleep.
Ignoring his protesting muscles, Dean hauls himself upright, digging his fingers into the bed. He swings his legs over the edge of the mattress; rests his feet on cold linoleum. He drops his head into his hands.
The Mark’s having a funny effect on him, of late. Not funny ha-ha. Funny freakish, horrible, disturbing. Every morning after… after the thing has acted up, Dean finds himself foggy and dizzy, groping ineffectually for memories of the previous day. So while it’s just about possible that the ache at the back of his head is simply a result of too many whiskies, that’s almost certainly wishful thinking. It’s been several years since Dean last got a hangover that way.
Dean rubs his fingers through the short hair at the back of his head and strains to remember what he did last night.
When he starts to see it, it’s in flashes; and it doesn’t take too many of those to make him regret that he tried. Black eyes in a startled face. The crunch of bone under his fist. A cloud of smoke - the damp warm wash of blood across the back of his hand - Sam trembling and determined, fingers around his wrist. Yeah, Dean remembers now, more than enough. A fight, and Sam had had to step in, to throw himself bodily between Dean and the guy he was beating. Sam’s mouth had been moving and he had been speaking but it had all been subsumed under the dull roar of the Mark in Dean’s ears. Dean’s not certain, but he’s pretty sure that he did his brother some serious damage before the thought of Cain’s warning had finally, somehow, clawed its way up to the surface of his brain.
So. Great.
Dean drags his hands heavily forward, sliding them up the back of his aching shoulders, down over his collarbone and onto his chest. It doesn’t ease the pain; but he sits like that for a little while anyway, fingers notched at the base of his neck, left palm resting over his anti-possession tattoo. What a joke that turned out to be. Small good to put your body on lockdown, in a world where you can cook up a demon from your own insides.
Dean doesn’t want to move. He’s putting off the moment where he has to get up, walk back down the hallway into the library and see Sam’s face. He’s not ready, yet, to deal with the way that his brother flinches every time that Dean moves too fast: or worse, how Sam overcompensates for it by arranging himself self-consciously, conspicuously close at Dean’s side. It drives Dean crazy: Sam with his jaw and his shoulders set rigid in the front of the car, holding himself stubbornly still as Dean leans over into his personal space. As an attempt at deception, it’s pathetic. Even with the Mark’s constant pounding clouding his head, it’s easy for Dean to see the little red crescents that Sam’s fingernails dig into his palms.
“I know what you’re doing,” Dean wants to say; wants to lean right up in Sam’s face and gnash his teeth, just to see his brother’s pupils dilate in fear. At the same time he wants to ruffle Sam’s hair, knock him on the shoulder, watch him smile. “I’m just your brother,” he wants to tell him. In fact, the Mark has tainted even that, loading the word with the iron-tang threat of Abel’s blood on the blade.
Fuck this, Dean thinks. He puts his hands on his knees and stands, pulling his boots straight onto his bare feet and shrugging a T-shirt over his head. He’s still wearing his jeans, which probably means he ought to change them; but it doesn’t seem worth it when all he wants to do is spend some time with the punching bag in the Bunker’s worn-out gym. Of course, it might be that even that counts as feeding the Mark: that he ought instead to be unrolling his yoga mat and following Sam into Downward Dog. But right now Dean wants to hit something pretty fucking hard, and the punch bag seems like a safer option than anything else.
He creaks open the door, half-expecting to find Sam’s sleeping body in the passage outside. It’s happened before; Sam unfolding his long limbs in startled guilt as the opening door woke him with a knock to the spine. Dean hadn’t been sure if Sam was acting as protector, or prison guard. Prodded for an answer, Sam had denied both; and Dean had found himself turning snappy and hostile, irritated by his brother’s oppressive, humiliating concern.
Tonight, the corridor is empty. But it isn’t quiet. There are voices echoing, bouncing off the tiles. Down in the library, Sam and Castiel are having a fight.
For an unexpected second, Dean finds himself thrown back to childhood, to his mother and father’s irregular fallings-out. This gives him the same odd feeling of the ground shifting beneath him. Despite the ‘profound bond’ he and Cas apparently share, the two of them just can’t seem to stop butting heads. Dean hasn’t got the patience for Castiel’s endless, stupid mistakes; for his bumbling and usually ineffectual goodwill. But it’s almost unheard of for Sam and Cas to argue like this. Lately, especially, they’ve been best buddies; texting surreptitiously behind Dean’s back, gathering to whisper their concerns where they think he can’t hear.
It’s been this way ever since last year, when Gadreel commandeered Sam’s body and Dean took on the Mark. Something that neither Sam nor Cas will discuss went down during those two weeks when Dean was away, before he and Sam crashed back into each other’s orbit on the hunt for Garth. Neither of them has told him what it was, and Dean hasn’t asked. He feels a certain amount of unfair jealousy that Sam turned to Cas after Dean walked out; when really, what else could the kid have done? And what else would Dean have wanted? Sam’s always needed somebody to hold his hand; if not Dean then Jessica, Ruby, Amelia. Lately, that person seems to be Cas.
So, to hear them shouting like this? It shocks Dean, but it fascinates him, too. He slips off his boots and sidles barefoot down the corridor to listen in.
As he nears the library, it rapidly becomes clear that he’s behaving more cautiously than is really required. He must have been out for a while: long enough for the pair of them to have forgotten to worry about waking him up. They’re full-on yelling at this point, Sam’s voice in particular raised and angry, in a way Dean hasn’t heard it since… well, he can’t even think of when. There was a time when Sam was essentially a solid wall of muscle and rage. Neither’s true now. His brother’s thinned down and the anger seems to have thinned out, too, become pointed and (Dean’s gotta say) petty where it used to be blunt and big. Half the time, it feels like Sam is too tired to be angry at all.
Not tonight.
“Just when I think you’ve got a basic grasp on humanity, this happens,” Sam says, loud and solid and mad. “And it makes me realise that you’re such a fucking angel after all.” Whatever Dean’s suspicions, this isn’t a term of endearment; not the way that Sam’s saying it now.
“You’re wrong, Sam,” Castiel says: growly, low. It’s his Big Serious Angel Voice, the one he uses when he’s trying to puff himself up beyond the trenchcoat and the wrinkled tie. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, and whose fault is that?”
“This is for your own good.”
As Cas says it, Dean winces. Sam’s not wrong. Cas is still way off in his human relations if he thinks for a moment that he can shut Dean’s brother down with a phrase like that.
There’s a tense, furious silence. Dean pictures Sam, mouth pinched tight, colour rising on his cheeks. He edges a little closer to the library door.
Soon enough, Sam breaks the tension: breathless, outraged. “How dare you, Castiel? How dare you try and tell me what is for my own good? Don’t you think I’ve had enough of other people trying to make choices for me? Don’t you think that maybe, for once, it might be nice to let me take a fully informed decision?”
“No,” Cas says, flat. “I know you, Sam. You will do what you think is necessary, regardless of the implications. And this? This is not a good idea.”
“That’s it?” Sam asks. There is a dangerous softness to his voice.
“That’s it.”
A beat. Dean is anything but surprised to hear the clatter of an overturning chair. There are a couple of dry slaps, skin on skin; the heavy bump of Sam’s boot against wood. The table scrapes along the floor.
“Nnnngh,” says Sam. Another chair falls over.
Silence descends.
Dean cranes his neck towards the door. He can see light through the long crack between the hinges; but the angle’s wrong to figure out what’s happening inside. He peels his bare foot off the tiles, steps nearer; wonders if they’re sufficiently absorbed in one another to allow for him to take a quick peep around the door.
As he’s weighing the options: “Come in, Dean,” says Cas.
A hot prickle of embarrassment inches its way up Dean’s spine. He thinks, for a moment, about walking away; sprinting down the corridor into the gym, and denying that he ever was here. But Cas's celestial Spidey sense probably precludes that as an option. Better to brazen it out.
He slaps on a smirk, and swaggers in.
Cas has Sam pinned backward over a library table, straddling his hips with a hand around his throat and another trapping Sam’s arms together against the polished wood surface. Sam’s long legs are awkwardly folded beneath him, the table digging into his back. The whole position looks disconcertingly intimate.
“Uh,” Dean says, articulately. Sam’s eyes flick toward him. There’s a deep pink-purple bruise on his brother’s cheek, blossoming over the cheekbone under his left eye. It’s too ripe for Cas to have inflicted it in the moment’s scuffle: and the Mark twitches with interest when Dean looks at it, leaving him with the sick, certain feeling that the thing is his fault. There are more bruises - smaller, finger-sized - on the white wrists exposed where Cas has Sam pinned.
Swallowing the gut-punch, Dean tries again. “Don’t let me interrupt you lovebirds.” He’s aiming for a casual tone. “Just… you know. Keep the domestics to a minimum, if you want the kids to stay in bed.”
Cas frowns. (When doesn’t Cas frown?) He looks down at Sam.
“Will you stop attacking me?” he asks.
Sam nods, as much as he’s able with Cas’s hand at his neck; and Cas lets go, shifts backward to stand on his feet. Sam crumples at the knees, slumps onto the floor. He clutches at his throat and wheezes.
Dean strides towards his brother, offers a hand. Hesitating a microsecond too long, Sam takes it, letting Dean haul him up onto his feet.
“Thanks, man,” he says, backing away.
With his fingers still warm from Sam’s, Dean glances at Castiel’s implacable expression. The Mark is blazing on his arm and he has to tighten his muscles fast and close to avoid pounding hard into Cas’s face. How dare he twist Sam up like that? Doesn’t he know about the kid’s bad back? Can’t he see the goddamn bruising all over him? Nobody gets to hurt Sam. (Nobody but Dean.)
“Dean?” says Sam, low - and Dean realises that he’s been looming, curling his fingers into a fist as he frowns. He deflates a little, relaxes his hand and tries to smile; although he’s not sure how many of his features are on board with the movement. Judging by Sam’s reaction, the overall effect is less than soothing.
Dean pushes through it. “Tell me, Sammy, what’s up?”
He figures the odds of his getting a truthful reply at somewhere around forty thousand to one. Sure, Sam might be feeling frustrated at his inability to get a straight answer out of Cas. But it’s been a long, long time since Dean’s brother felt able to let him in on his most secret plans: Sam’s too well conditioned, too hedged around by guilt, to ‘fess up about something that is obviously sketchy as fuck. So Dean watches without many expectations, as Sam sucks at the inside of his cheek and looks down at his hands.
Eventually, though, something hardens around his jaw; and he looks up, looks Dean in the eye.
“It’s Lucifer,” he says.
Five years ago, when Sam called Dean up from the other side of the country and told him that Lucifer was planning to ride him over the backs of the world, Dean had been too beat-down and worn-out to care. Sam, the Sam he’d loved and coddled and protected, was gone; and the new strange man who’d greeted him after he got back from Hell had sold out everything Dean went down for to chase after some demon bitch and feed himself sick on her blood. Screw the apocalypse. That fight in a North Dakota honeymoon suite had already felt like the end of all things. Sam’s departure, weeks later, had been only the belated flick of a switch, the pulling of a merciful plug on a patient who had long been dead; and when Dean got that call, he hadn’t wanted to revive the corpse. “Pick a hemisphere,” he’d told his brother; and hung up the phone.
Zachariah’s trip to the future might have prompted them back together, but Dean’s not sure that they ever really fixed what broke back then. So, this time, when Sam says ‘Lucifer’, he’s certainly not short on emotion. But he bites down the instinctive, angry response: there’s no sense scaring Sam into silence before he’s even spilled.
Instead, he keeps it clinical. “What do you mean?” he says.
Sam twists his index finger so hard that Dean thinks it might break. He takes a deep breath.
“Metatron said. I mean. You remember what Metatron said about finding the source?”
“Yes,” Dean says. This is it? “We found the source, Sam, you might remember. And I killed him.” If Sam’s forgotten it, Dean certainly hasn’t: a dark night in a dark barn that left Dean feeling like the last remnants of hope had been squeezed from his soul.
But his brother’s shaking his head. “Not Cain. Cain got the Mark from Lucifer. You remember?”
Dean nods.
“So, we, uh… we saw Metatron again, a little while ago” - and when the fuck did that happen, Sam? - “and he said that he’d made up the thing about the source. But he also… he mentioned Lucifer, too. It was Lucifer who created the Mark, Dean. If anybody can take it off…”
Dean bites down, hard, on his own lip. He tastes copper. “And this is what Cas won’t tell you?”
Sam spreads his hands, desperate, appealing. “He has an idea. I saw him have it, he found something and he won’t tell me and… I just want to know. I just want to understand what our options are.”
No, Dean thinks, and he’s not exactly sure where it came from. It feels like it’s him; but there’s a tension, also, somewhere in the back of his brain. Before he can analyse the thought, his mouth is open and he’s pushing Sam back with the same half-responses he’s been using now for months.
“How many times do we gotta have this conversation, Sam?” he says. “I’ve told you to drop it like a thousand times by now. We don’t have options. This isn’t something you can solve. It’s something I have to handle. My problem. My choice. And what I’ve chosen to do is to deal with this for as long as I can. I thought you were on board with that.”
“No,” Sam says. It’s unusual enough to make Dean double take. “No. You’re not dealing with it at all. You’re just waiting around for… for I don’t know what, because it won’t be death, not with that thing on your arm. It has to go, Dean. And this could be the answer, something real.”
Somewhere very deep down inside himself, Dean begins to feel a tiny, germinating sprout of belief. It’s dangerous. Hope is what gets you hurt. But looking at Sam’s pleading expression, the forehead and the big damp eyes, and remembering somewhere through the fog of the Mark that they have, haven’t they? They’ve always managed to do it before… He finds something, just enough of a thread to be worth holding onto for a little while longer.
“OK,” he says. “OK.” And he wheels around to face Castiel, who has been looking at them all this while with an expression of profound consternation. “Sammy’s right. Let’s hear it, Cas.”
Cas shakes his head. “As I have told Sam,” he says, “I don’t think that this is a suitable solution.”
“Not really your call, Cas,” Dean says; and he knows, as he says it, that Castiel will be persuaded: that he’s never been able, in the end, to refuse Dean anything that he really wants. But Cas is trying to be adamant, shaking his head; and Dean doesn’t have the patience for a drawn-out battle. Instead he thinks,
OK. I can do this. I can do this for Sam.
And he lets it go, just for a moment, takes off the reins and lets the black nastiness that’s been nipping at the edges of his mind surge suddenly to the fore. It’s easy to do, easy to sink down into it; a helluva lot harder to get out.
When he resurfaces, maybe sixty seconds later, it seems like not much has changed. Cas’s shirt is rumpled (more rumpled than usual), and he’s breathing heavily, and Dean’s knuckles are stinging. But the real shock is in Sam. He hasn’t moved. But his eyes have the wild look of a horse about to bolt, and his limbs are taut with a painful, quivering suspense.
“It’s OK,” Sam says to Cas. His mouth shapes the words, but the sound isn’t there.
Cas looks at Dean’s brother. “Enough,” he says. “Enough. I will tell you what I know.”
(Chapter 2)