March-Stalkers Mighty: 12/22
Passus VI: Pes sinister.
Castiel’s fingers curled around Dean’s shoulders, too hard, and his eyes were bright as the water.
“I have never wanted to be greedy before, Dean. So tell me, who is the siren?”
A confused noise among the servants now drew all eyes towards the door; the impatient Captain hastened to open it, and then, clapping his hands, called out, “’Fore George, ‘tis the same person I took for your relation!” And then, to the utter astonishment of every body but himself, he hauled into the room a monkey! fully dressed, and extravagantly à-la-mode!
...
“Come, now,” continued the regardless Captain, “just for fun’s sake, doff your coat and your waistcoat, and swop with Monsieur Grinagain here, and I’ll warrant you’ll not know yourself which is which.”
“Not know myself from a monkey? - I assure you, Sir, I’m not to be used in this manner, and I won’t bear it, - curse me if I will!”
Evelina, Frances Burney, 1778. (Vol III, Letter XXI.)
The thing was, though. Dean couldn’t afford to make any mistakes just now. The least whiff of anything unnatural about him and he’d be locked up properly, or more. The way things were going, he couldn’t afford to let anyone see in, or to let anyone get hurt on his account. He’d done enough already.
And he didn’t have Sam. And Bobby was broken. Not even shaped like a human anymore. Stuck in a chair like that. A monster, by his own years-old definition, spoken to a child to make the world look simple. Except it had already been a mess by then, and Bobby hadn’t even known.
... If any angel had turned Dean’s head, it hadn’t been Gabriel.
It had all been so quick, that farewell outside the ravine. And Dean had been exhausted, and strung-out, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember all the little steps along the way that had let to that decision, that one big decision.
Sam.
How the hell had he decided that? to let go of Sam and leave him with angels? without family?
Incubi.
It was the touch of their mouth that gave them real power. And surely it couldn’t be coincidence that Cas had, just before Dean had... and the tingle in his lips, and the unfamiliar burn in his belly. Only, not entirely unfamiliar. Different and hotter and more shaky, but it was basically... well, it was arousal. In part. Now that he thought about it. And now that he thought about that, it surely couldn’t be normal, even among angels, for brothers to kiss like that. For men to kiss like that.
Suddenly, inescapably, Dean found himself rethinking every look and word, revisiting every sideways gleam from under dark lashes, and... had that been heat in there? Lust, even? Or longing? Or just fondness? Or calculation?
Dean had no answers, only an empty house and no one to cook for.
He hit his thumb with the hammer, for the fourth time in as many minutes.
It jerked back, quite of its own accord, and he cursed and stuck it in his mouth, dirty and swollen as it was. At the sudden movement, Andy, who was hammering the other end of the board for Missouri’s broken window, and who’d been chattering away happily like he was perfectly comfortable with Dean, flinched and faltered, and looked for a moment like he might have to do the discretion-is-the-better-part thing.
Fuck. What the hell was wrong with Dean?
He dreamed, predictably, that something was pressing down on him in his sleep, hovering over the bed with its fangs sliding into his throat. It rocked against him, hot and heavy, one long smothering weight from his toes to his neck, working its inexorable way in to press between his legs. Dean thought about fighting it, but his body didn’t really want to move.
Then he was down by the river, and folding little paper boats for Sammy, only it was night time and Sammy wasn’t there, and Dean knew with a creeping inevitability that there was a tiny evil thing nestled inside his own chest, just waiting to come clawing out when nobody around him expected it. There wasn’t really anything he could do, though, so he kept on folding the paper, one crisp white line at a time.
Castiel was murmuring something in his ear, though he wasn’t there either. Dean batted at the air irritably, because it was like the buzzing of a fly right where he couldn’t get rid of it, but Castiel didn’t go away.
... hear me, Dean? ... hold this for long. Gabriel ...
“Hey, no. I’m not having that dick in my dreams too,” he muttered at the distant voice, because enough was enough.
The voice paused, then spoke again, clearer and quicker. Dean, we’re coming back. Gabriel and Sam found a solution for Sam - not a cure, I’m afraid. Sam believes that it will anger you, and that you will try to blame Ga...
Dean frowned at the water, which was making a lot of noise and drowning out Castiel’s voice when he was trying to talk about important things like Sam.
... skinwalker, Dean, but you mus... concerned about him, he is well and entirely himself... were right, he is very tall.
Although of course, if Castiel was lying on top of him and snatching the blood from his throat and the breath from his mouth, that could be why Dean wasn’t hearing properly.
“Cas, man,” he grumbled. “You trying to steal my breath?”
He could taste Castiel’s confusion on the wind. And why was his brain insisting on calling him by his full name just now?
Dean. Try to focus, and now his dream angel just sounded pissed. Look for us within two weeks. We have... that Sam calculates ... negotiate a truce ...
The water rippled as Dean placed the last paper boat in the water; rippled, and swallowed the boat. In its place were two vividly blue eyes, dark-rimmed and frowning.
Castiel shouldn’t be frowning.
... fight together against the demons. If we had only known from the beginning, many lives on both sides...
“Cas, man.” Dean reached out to run his fingers over the ripples of the water. It made a rough noise like a stick against a fence. “You gotta try harder. You keep fading into nothing. Everything you are, it’s all broken up.”
... That was profound, somehow. Dean was being profound. He got distracted by it, and stared at the sky and at the evil thing inside his belly, and it took the grasp of Castiel’s impatient hand on his shoulder to call him out of it.
“Dean,” Castiel said, and there was a sort of awkward exasperation in the way he looked at Dean that wasn’t like the way he normally looked at Dean in dreams, so Dean smirked at him and leaned his cheek against Castiel’s fingers. “Will you remember anything that I have said when you wake?”
Dean had a sudden weird desire to kiss Castiel’s thumb where it brushed the side of his chin; and he was sleeping, so he did it.
Castiel’s face did something weird, like he knew he was dreaming and was going to have to wake up. Which was kind of stupid, all things considered, because who was the one dreaming here?
“I apologise,” Castiel said carefully, and his eyebrows did that little half-crinkle thing they did sometimes when he was worried. “I have never tried this with a human before. And even with Gabriel’s help, the physical distance is a serious obstacle.”
“Never know what to make of you, man,” Dean confessed to the dream image that towered over him like risen dough. “I mean, come on. Nightmares? Stealing my little brother’s shoes? Ellen thinks I’m broken. Did you do some incubus mojo on me when we were kids? This can’t be right. Hell, I don’t know what to make of me.”
Castiel... went very still. Had Dean said something wrong? Or did nightmares not like it when you called them on being nightmares?
Dean turned, caught Castiel’s nice warm hand, which was all long and tempting, and pressed his forehead into it. “What’s going on, Cas?” he pleaded.
“I don’t know how you understand me and mine,” vibrated through Castiel’s hand against Dean’s bones. “You have never told me.” Hey. That was accusation. Why was Cas getting snarky at him now? Nightmares didn’t get to do snark. That was what Dean did. And it was all Dean’s head.
“Is there a monster inside me, Cas?” Dean considered. “Are you a siren?”
“Dean,” Castiel said, and now he sounded kind of pissed and growly, but his hands came up to cradle the sides of Dean’s neck. “You tempt me every day. You make me think of... things. Impossible things.” He made a small huff, like he was fed up with his own voice and how it never made sense. “A... house, a home,” he threw out like gruff inadequate nothings. “Arguing in the morning over fried eggs or poached. I look at you and I think of... caring and being cared for, in all the perplexing little everyday ways that I never learned because we have been too busy fighting and dying grandly for each other.”
Awkward words, like tools that Castiel had only ever seen used and had never handled for himself.
Dean blinked at him, because the Castiel of his dreams didn’t usually bother with words at all.
“I can’t abandon my people or they will fall apart behind me, but you make me wish I could have that and have all of you.” Castiel’s fingers curled around Dean’s shoulders, too hard, and his eyes were bright as the water. “I have never wanted to be greedy before, Dean. So tell me, who is the siren?”
... Yes, that was definitely a monster inside Dean’s chest. He even did nasty things to angels.
“Sorry, man,” he mumbled, because Castiel sounded kind of frustrated and lost and Dean didn’t know why, except that it was because of Dean.
Castiel stared at Dean hard for another moment, then sighed, and leaned forward to press a kiss to his forehead. “Your sleeping mind is a strange and disorganised place,” he said, stern like that was Dean’s fault, but he didn’t sound like he minded. “Rest. Wait for us.”
Dean woke and sat up, gasping, and the absence of weight where Sam’s amulet should have been felt heavy against his chest.
Dean wasn’t running away. Just, sometimes the people on the outer farms needed a hand too. And there were a lot of people kind of wrapped up in their own problems just now, not being as helpful as they usually would this time of year, and Dean didn’t have anything better to do, so.
Which was all very fine and logical. He still wasn’t sure how he ended up helping Charlie, whom he’d barely changed fifty words with in his life, tie hessian rags around the trunks in her apple orchard in some mad new scheme of hers to trap codlin grubs. He also wasn’t sure how she managed to keep up a running commentary on everything she did for over two hours, without any contribution from him, or why she kept doing things like narrowing her eyes at recalcitrant bits of hessian and saying “It’s just you and me now!”, all grim and dramatic like she was challenging it to a duel.
“Do you ever stop?” he asked at last, somewhere between irritated and bewildered into amusement.
“Not much!” she replied cheerfully, not seeming to notice that he’d actually been kind of rude. “You wouldn’t believe what you can get away with when it’s just you in the house all day every day. My kitchen table knows secrets that you couldn’t burn out of me. I serenade my cookie jar.”
There were a few long strands of chestnut hair caught up on her lower lip. Dean wasn’t used to women who wore their hair down while they worked. Didn’t it get in her way?
“Well, whatever works for you,” Dean responded, sort of lamely.
He watched her more closely after that, because he was in the habit of watching people just now, and he didn’t really know Charlie at all. Her hands looked kind of delicate, like the bones were too heavy for the pale, paper-fine skin, but her fingers flew over her work almost too fast for Dean’s eyes to follow. (He took over the job of ripping up the hessian, because that needed calloused hands and some muscle behind it, and maybe just a bit because his efforts at arranging and fastening the coarse material looked so slow and clumsy next to her deft weaving.) Kind of skinny - spindly, almost - probably wouldn’t even be able to hold anything but a handgun properly, let alone absorb the kick of it. There was a little wrinkle at the bridge of her nose that kept showing itself whenever she frowned or laughed, and her mouth just wouldn’t stay still.
And she talked, of course. She talked almost too fast for Dean to follow, and about things he wasn’t used to having conversations about, and she used long technical terms all the time instead of easy practical nicknames, and she never mentioned monsters or angels or demons once. It left Dean feeling sort of slow and bemused, and like nothing he knew or was good at was really relevant. Which was okay, honestly. It was sort of a relief not to have to think about all that for a bit.
The thing was... okay, so, here was a woman, young, around his age, not married or attached or anything, and one Dean didn’t know well enough to have considered much before. And he just couldn’t help watching her and prodding at all those little thoughts that Ellen had spun into motion. She was... sweet? And yes, cute, if that was the sort of thing you liked. Pretty enough, definitely. He didn’t really get her at all, but he thought he might have been able to like her, if he hadn’t been feeling kind of numb.
But she didn’t make him want. There was nothing potent there, nothing possessive and sweet like when he looked at Cas.
Only surely there shouldn’t be? Not the same as for Cas, anyway. He hardly knew Charlie, and Cas was his.
What was he meantto feel?
“Charlie,” he broke in abruptly on a vehement reflection on the resonances produced by different kinds of metals when struck. “Are you - you’re not, you know... in the market?”
She made a quizzical little “huh?” sound, and looked up from the string she was tying. Her hair got caught in the knot again. And honestly, yes, Dean was pretty sure she was exactly the kind of pretty that plenty of guys would go for, so why hadn’t anyone yet?
“You know, for...” Dean made a vague explanatory gesture. “Getting married?”
All that pale skin apparently showed emotions really easily, like they were shining through from underneath and it wasn’t thick enough to cover them. Her eyes flickered through surprise, dismay, disappointment, and impatience, then settled on a cagey “shit now I’ve got to be tactful.” Dean, busy trying to work out exactly how he could capture all of those with a pencil, took a moment to cotton on, and she’d already twisted her mouth into a grimace and opened it to reply when it clicked.
Shit.
“Oh, hey, no! No, I wasn’t -” he blurted hastily, and honestly, what was it with him and women lately? “I wasn’t asking, I was just. Asking.” Smooth, Dean. He coughed, and turned on the friendly-but-not-too smile he used on mothers when they were eyeing him off for chatting with their daughters. “In general.”
She peered at him suspiciously, drumming both sets of fingers at once where they were resting on her knees. “Um. Okay. So then, I’m not interested. In general,” she added quickly, and went back to tying the hessian.
“Okay,” Dean echoed. “Good. Fine.”
And that, that thing right there? That was why it was so much easier to stick to hunting, and hanging around with guys, and only talking to women who were used to that sort of thing.
Only... really? Not interested?
He listened to her singing for a bit, breathy and a bit shaky, put his finger on the string when she told him, ripped up a few more hessian sacks into the right shapes for the next few trees. The cuffs of her sleeves rode up on her long bony wrists, all the layers of her shirts, blue and pink and then another blue. Also there was a daisy in her hair, though it kept trying to slip out and being pushed back, and who seriously wore flowers in their hair after the age of six?
“IthinkI’mnoteither,” he said after a minute, in a strong manly tone that for some reason came out as a half-articulate mumble.
But manly or not, it felt like a big thing to say, like just the admission of it loosened something around his chest that he hadn’t even known was there. To confess aloud, even just to one person he didn’t really know, that he didn’t want to settle down and become normal, make a house and home and have a woman around who’d be a partner in everything, who’d be the other part of him in facing down the world. That he didn’t think he’d ever be the person who could do that, and love it. Love that shadowy unknown her.
He didn’t want that. Just. Maybe he wished he could want it.
He said it, and felt the relief; then he glared at the string he was holding, and waited for her judgement.
“Okay.” Her voice rose at the end uncertainly, as if she wasn’t sure whether there was more there.
He said nothing. She covered the silence with humming.
Dean left it.
Or he meant to. Apparently his mouth had other ideas.
“No, but seriously, you’re - what, eight months younger than me? Are you dead set against marriage, or something?”
Charlie bit off another length of string, eyeing him over it like she wasn’t sure that wasn’t just another line. “Oh, I’ve thought about it. Just... urgh. But, hey!” Her mouth curved into something broader and brighter. “I’m not really normal. I get that.”
She seemed ready to drop it, all casual like it wasn’t important, but Dean couldn’t help feeling they weren’t really done here. “How do you mean, not normal?”
“Don’t really want what other people want.” She shrugged tiny bony shoulders that Dean’s hands could have engulfed and crushed, then amended, “Just. I don’t really like men. No offence,” she added hastily.
Dean gave that due, bemused consideration. Because it was obviously not true, not literally true. She didn’t dislike Dean, for one, because she’d been happily wrapping trees with him for two hours, and you didn’t do that with someone you couldn’t stand. But there was something in there that made sense, something that spoke to him, only he couldn’t quite work out what.
He prodded at it.
“How can you not like men?”
Her nose crinkled up again as she tried to punch and fold the hessian to the contours of a particularly misshapen tree. “Hey, big gun. What’s with the third degree?”
Uh. Yeah, okay.
Dean backed off, cheeks hot, and reached for his pile of hessian sacks. It was empty of hessian sacks, and therefore failed dismally at being a pile.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
Not like it could make a difference anyway. He went to get more sacks.
He got back just in time to see her pump her fist, crow “Everything’s coming up me!” and do a little victory dance without getting up off her knees.
“Catchy,” he commented, and peered at the intricate little web of string and strategic sticks pressing the hessian into every crevice. “Guess you defeated the evil tree.”
“I might have masterminded its downfall a little,” she conceded cheerfully, like everything was forgiven and there’d been nothing to forgive in the first place.
Huh. Dean had sort of missed ‘playful’. It seemed like a very long time since he and Cas had been flicking cogs and washers at each other on the grass.
He looked down at the loose ruddy slide of hair over her cheek and neck, the twinkle in her eyes, and the sharp point of her chin. She looked soft around the edges, and happy, not like Jo, or Ellen, or Gwen, or any of the other women Dean knew, married or not. Like she was part of another world.
“You’re a tree-defeating genius,” he said dryly, and she flashed him a smug grin.
“I know. It’s a problem.”
Three trees later, she volunteered, easy as anything, “Just can’t imagine any man in my home, thinking he gets to tell me what to do with my own things and my own time, you know?” like she thought there was a good chance that he might. Then she shrugged and laughed at herself a bit. “But, then, I’m a freak. That’s fine.”
Dean didn’t laugh.
“But doesn’t it get...” He trailed off uncertainly, and scratched the back of his neck, and tried not to think of a house without Sam’s loud free laughter filling the kitchen, or a house with the soft rustle of feathers brushing against the walls, and the soft sweet smell of sleepy angel in the sheets, and fried or poached eggs in the morning.
“I don’t know, kind of... quiet?” he finished awkwardly, though that didn’t really cover it. “At night, or when you’re feeling like crap? Or, hell, when something’s funny and there’s no one there to laugh with?”
“It’d be nice, I guess.” She flicked a large centipede out of a fold in the hessian, and whacked it with the handle of her knife. “Just not sure it’d be worth having a man shoving his way into my home. Or, you know...” The crushed centipede had a sudden encounter with the tip of the blade, and turned into two halves of a crushed centipede. “My bedroom.”
“Yeah,” Dean muttered feelingly, and held the edges of the hessian in place on the trunk for her. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” And then, to even the ground and because her eyes were occupied with positioning the string, he confessed, “Aren’t exactly any girls I especially want in our - in my house all day either.”
The corner of her mouth quirked behind her hair. “Any man?”
It was said teasingly, but there was something quivering under there that was... a touch too close to thoughts Dean wasn’t sure how to touch.
“Just my brother,” he answered, a bit shortly, because he couldn’t think of any way to brush that off with a joke.
“Kids would be nice someday, though,” she threw out off-handishly, and prodded his fingers down a few centimetres on the rough fabric. “Maybe I could put up with a man just for that.”
Dean laughed, and it sounded tired. “Charlie, if things keep on like this? Just give it a couple of years and there’ll be more orphans about than you’ll know what to do with.”
She pulled a face at him and laughed, but there was that uncertain little rise at the end again. “Oh. Well, thanks. That’s comforting.”
... Great. Now Dean felt like a dick.
Ten minutes later, she sat back, took a swig from her flask of water, then offered it to him. “You know Sir Yvain?”
Dean blinked, and took a biggish swig to play for time. Just what he needed. Someone else throwing random storybook references at him and expecting him to remember the difference between all those interchangeable adventures. “Um. Rode around on a cart?”
“No, that was Lancelot, and he only hitched a ride once.” She waved the irrelevancy away with a flick of pale fingers, happy as Sam in geek mode. “Yvain was the one who made friends with a lion and ran around in the forest insane and naked for a year.”
Of course. As those guys did.
Dean cast his memory back to when Sam had been a demanding little bastard and still couldn’t read to himself. “There was something about a giant and a bell, yeah?”
“Sort of,” she said, in that diplomatic way that meant ‘not really at all.’ “The giant cowherd told Yvain where the bell was, except it was more of a basin full of water than a bell. And if you spilled the water from the basin there was this enormous storm that would ruin the land and the crops all around, so whichever knight married the woman who owned the land had to spend all his time fighting off other knights who were doing that as a challenge, so Yvain fought her husband and killed him and then married the woman.”
That... well, rang a bell. “She hated him, right?”
“Sure, at first, because he’d killed her husband. Then she married him. Then he stayed away for too long, so she banished him, and that was when the whole running around mad in the forest thing happened. Then her maid fixed everything.”
Dean raised his eyebrows and handed the flask back. “Well, that makes sense.” In a senseless way.
She nodded happily, then jabbed the flask at him like it would help make her point. “However. Laudine needed Yvain, right? She had to marry him so there’d be a knight to see off other knights who decided to try their luck. But that was it, you see? That was all she needed from him. He could have stood out there all day and night to guard the basin, and she would have been fine. She already had everything else she needed right there.”
Dean was falling behind again. “Right where?”
“Lunete! Her maid, remember? The one who organises everything and is generally awesome? Friendship, help around the home, a good punch in the head when she needed it? Those girls were kick-ass together.” She rolled her eyes, like she was inviting him to marvel with her at the stupidity of the author, and continued with the vehemence of a familiar rant on a favourite topic, “Plus, she and Yvain had, like, zero in common. I mean, what were they going to talk about in the evenings? The weather? Well, if there’s been anyone down by the basin that day that’s going to be pretty stupidly predictable, isn’t it?”
“... I think I understood about a quarter of what you just said there,” Dean admitted, a bit cautiously.
“The only reason Laudine married Yvain is because everyone else thought she needed a man in the house. Which she didn’t, except to beat off all the other guys who thought she needed a man in the house,” Charlie explained, prompt and reasonable. “And then he wouldn’t stick around anyway, because he preferred being out there getting himself beaten up in tournaments with Gawain. So she cut him off.”
Dean considered this. Then he considered the little shudder that had flickered over Charlie’s face at the thought of a man in her bedroom. He wasn’t quite sure where this was going, but... “So you’re saying that Yvain and Laudine were never going to make it because she was already kinda married to her maid?”
Charlie blinked up at him, startled. Then she pursed her mouth consideringly, and said, a little wistfully, “I never really thought about it exactly like that. I guess so. All the important bits of marriage, anyway.”
Dean had no idea what to make of that, but it probably won the prize for the weirdest conversation of the year.
He dreamed of a safe family home with something hidden and deadly inside the walls, and a marriage ceremony with two brides, both with daisies in their hair. He dreamed of whispers and sideways glances, and something dark moving under his skin, and bloodied black feathers underfoot.
He dreamed of cool, elegant fingers tracing the lines of his belly, in ways he’d barely even thought of being touched. They went whispering down his ribs to the jut of his hip, resting soft and promising in the hollow of it, then skittering like a tease over the soft part of his thigh. There was skin under his hands, firm and hot over flesh, and he ran his hands up through the catch of fine hairs to slide over slim shoulders and corded muscle, until he felt the soft press of feathers against the back of his hands. A mouth opened against his neck, all hot inside and red, and when it moved across to nestle damp lips in the corner of his throat he arched up into it, seeking, because it felt like safety and happiness. Then it was gone.
Infatuation, he heard, and sometimes, whispered where he shouldn’t have heard, incubus.
Which wasn’t true. And when he was awake, he knew that.
Except. Monsters came in families, right? Werewolves, shapeshifters, and so on, all one type of thing - strongest around the full moon, susceptible to silver, and so on. Holwe hathels and barrow wights and other spooks that rattled and moaned in the night, they were another group. Will-o’-the-wisps were close enough to the relatively harmless marshlights that you could mistake one for the other if you weren’t watching (and look how well that had turned out), and they were both distant cousins to the things that called and whispered to you in the woods, promising you riches and comfort and peace if you would only step this way. Then there were vampires, incubi, succubi, all things like that, things that came in the night and drained you, of your life or your spirit or your blood or your semen until you were hollowed into nothing.
Angels?
Angels, they’d never managed to classify. Demons either.
No reason to think that they weren’t part of the last group. After all, all of those could fly too.
And if his thoughts ever reached that point Dean would stop, and cut them off, and remember the warmth of Cas’ throat, the uncertainty trembling in his lips, the hunger in his eyes - hungry for touch, for love, for reciprocation, for acknowledgement, for Dean, he told himself - promising and safe and home-like and intoxicatingly, blossomingly beautiful. Nothing poisonous there at all.
... But still, but still. Wouldn’t that be what an incubus would make him think?
Or maybe - because Dean could have sworn that Cas had never done that before, never promised that to anyone before - what if that was how incubi began? Persuasion, and sincerity, and the heady adoring mead of their presence?
Two days after that, there was an attack on the Gates. The same shadow, the same cloak of smothering darkness in the air, that the other hunters had seen that day they’d been hunting Rachel. But there were no angels here, or none that they saw. Instead, under the shelter of impenetrable shadows that drove panic straight into the lungs, demons attacked. Three more people died before they were driven off.
Demons had never done that before, attacking the village outright, working together. Using that spell, or whatever it was, that Dean was pretty sure Cas had said he’d come up with.
Not this kind of compromise, Dean.
Things were changing, and there were fewer than five hundred people left alive. Only twenty-two fully trained hunters now.
Not this kind.
They were under siege. And they needed information.
Screw it. Dean needed information. He needed to understand.
Castiel’s fingers curled around Dean’s shoulders, too hard, and his eyes were bright as the water.
“I have never wanted to be greedy before, Dean. So tell me, who is the siren?”
A confused noise among the servants now drew all eyes towards the door; the impatient Captain hastened to open it, and then, clapping his hands, called out, “’Fore George, ‘tis the same person I took for your relation!” And then, to the utter astonishment of every body but himself, he hauled into the room a monkey! fully dressed, and extravagantly à-la-mode!
...
“Come, now,” continued the regardless Captain, “just for fun’s sake, doff your coat and your waistcoat, and swop with Monsieur Grinagain here, and I’ll warrant you’ll not know yourself which is which.”
“Not know myself from a monkey? - I assure you, Sir, I’m not to be used in this manner, and I won’t bear it, - curse me if I will!”
Evelina, Frances Burney, 1778. (Vol III, Letter XXI.)
The thing was, though. Dean couldn’t afford to make any mistakes just now. The least whiff of anything unnatural about him and he’d be locked up properly, or more. The way things were going, he couldn’t afford to let anyone see in, or to let anyone get hurt on his account. He’d done enough already.
And he didn’t have Sam. And Bobby was broken. Not even shaped like a human anymore. Stuck in a chair like that. A monster, by his own years-old definition, spoken to a child to make the world look simple. Except it had already been a mess by then, and Bobby hadn’t even known.
... If any angel had turned Dean’s head, it hadn’t been Gabriel.
It had all been so quick, that farewell outside the ravine. And Dean had been exhausted, and strung-out, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember all the little steps along the way that had let to that decision, that one big decision.
Sam.
How the hell had he decided that? to let go of Sam and leave him with angels? without family?
Incubi.
It was the touch of their mouth that gave them real power. And surely it couldn’t be coincidence that Cas had, just before Dean had... and the tingle in his lips, and the unfamiliar burn in his belly. Only, not entirely unfamiliar. Different and hotter and more shaky, but it was basically... well, it was arousal. In part. Now that he thought about it. And now that he thought about that, it surely couldn’t be normal, even among angels, for brothers to kiss like that. For men to kiss like that.
Suddenly, inescapably, Dean found himself rethinking every look and word, revisiting every sideways gleam from under dark lashes, and... had that been heat in there? Lust, even? Or longing? Or just fondness? Or calculation?
Dean had no answers, only an empty house and no one to cook for.
He hit his thumb with the hammer, for the fourth time in as many minutes.
It jerked back, quite of its own accord, and he cursed and stuck it in his mouth, dirty and swollen as it was. At the sudden movement, Andy, who was hammering the other end of the board for Missouri’s broken window, and who’d been chattering away happily like he was perfectly comfortable with Dean, flinched and faltered, and looked for a moment like he might have to do the discretion-is-the-better-part thing.
Fuck. What the hell was wrong with Dean?
He dreamed, predictably, that something was pressing down on him in his sleep, hovering over the bed with its fangs sliding into his throat. It rocked against him, hot and heavy, one long smothering weight from his toes to his neck, working its inexorable way in to press between his legs. Dean thought about fighting it, but his body didn’t really want to move.
Then he was down by the river, and folding little paper boats for Sammy, only it was night time and Sammy wasn’t there, and Dean knew with a creeping inevitability that there was a tiny evil thing nestled inside his own chest, just waiting to come clawing out when nobody around him expected it. There wasn’t really anything he could do, though, so he kept on folding the paper, one crisp white line at a time.
Castiel was murmuring something in his ear, though he wasn’t there either. Dean batted at the air irritably, because it was like the buzzing of a fly right where he couldn’t get rid of it, but Castiel didn’t go away.
... hear me, Dean? ... hold this for long. Gabriel ...
“Hey, no. I’m not having that dick in my dreams too,” he muttered at the distant voice, because enough was enough.
The voice paused, then spoke again, clearer and quicker. Dean, we’re coming back. Gabriel and Sam found a solution for Sam - not a cure, I’m afraid. Sam believes that it will anger you, and that you will try to blame Ga...
Dean frowned at the water, which was making a lot of noise and drowning out Castiel’s voice when he was trying to talk about important things like Sam.
... skinwalker, Dean, but you mus... concerned about him, he is well and entirely himself... were right, he is very tall.
Although of course, if Castiel was lying on top of him and snatching the blood from his throat and the breath from his mouth, that could be why Dean wasn’t hearing properly.
“Cas, man,” he grumbled. “You trying to steal my breath?”
He could taste Castiel’s confusion on the wind. And why was his brain insisting on calling him by his full name just now?
Dean. Try to focus, and now his dream angel just sounded pissed. Look for us within two weeks. We have... that Sam calculates ... negotiate a truce ...
The water rippled as Dean placed the last paper boat in the water; rippled, and swallowed the boat. In its place were two vividly blue eyes, dark-rimmed and frowning.
Castiel shouldn’t be frowning.
... fight together against the demons. If we had only known from the beginning, many lives on both sides...
“Cas, man.” Dean reached out to run his fingers over the ripples of the water. It made a rough noise like a stick against a fence. “You gotta try harder. You keep fading into nothing. Everything you are, it’s all broken up.”
... That was profound, somehow. Dean was being profound. He got distracted by it, and stared at the sky and at the evil thing inside his belly, and it took the grasp of Castiel’s impatient hand on his shoulder to call him out of it.
“Dean,” Castiel said, and there was a sort of awkward exasperation in the way he looked at Dean that wasn’t like the way he normally looked at Dean in dreams, so Dean smirked at him and leaned his cheek against Castiel’s fingers. “Will you remember anything that I have said when you wake?”
Dean had a sudden weird desire to kiss Castiel’s thumb where it brushed the side of his chin; and he was sleeping, so he did it.
Castiel’s face did something weird, like he knew he was dreaming and was going to have to wake up. Which was kind of stupid, all things considered, because who was the one dreaming here?
“I apologise,” Castiel said carefully, and his eyebrows did that little half-crinkle thing they did sometimes when he was worried. “I have never tried this with a human before. And even with Gabriel’s help, the physical distance is a serious obstacle.”
“Never know what to make of you, man,” Dean confessed to the dream image that towered over him like risen dough. “I mean, come on. Nightmares? Stealing my little brother’s shoes? Ellen thinks I’m broken. Did you do some incubus mojo on me when we were kids? This can’t be right. Hell, I don’t know what to make of me.”
Castiel... went very still. Had Dean said something wrong? Or did nightmares not like it when you called them on being nightmares?
Dean turned, caught Castiel’s nice warm hand, which was all long and tempting, and pressed his forehead into it. “What’s going on, Cas?” he pleaded.
“I don’t know how you understand me and mine,” vibrated through Castiel’s hand against Dean’s bones. “You have never told me.” Hey. That was accusation. Why was Cas getting snarky at him now? Nightmares didn’t get to do snark. That was what Dean did. And it was all Dean’s head.
“Is there a monster inside me, Cas?” Dean considered. “Are you a siren?”
“Dean,” Castiel said, and now he sounded kind of pissed and growly, but his hands came up to cradle the sides of Dean’s neck. “You tempt me every day. You make me think of... things. Impossible things.” He made a small huff, like he was fed up with his own voice and how it never made sense. “A... house, a home,” he threw out like gruff inadequate nothings. “Arguing in the morning over fried eggs or poached. I look at you and I think of... caring and being cared for, in all the perplexing little everyday ways that I never learned because we have been too busy fighting and dying grandly for each other.”
Awkward words, like tools that Castiel had only ever seen used and had never handled for himself.
Dean blinked at him, because the Castiel of his dreams didn’t usually bother with words at all.
“I can’t abandon my people or they will fall apart behind me, but you make me wish I could have that and have all of you.” Castiel’s fingers curled around Dean’s shoulders, too hard, and his eyes were bright as the water. “I have never wanted to be greedy before, Dean. So tell me, who is the siren?”
... Yes, that was definitely a monster inside Dean’s chest. He even did nasty things to angels.
“Sorry, man,” he mumbled, because Castiel sounded kind of frustrated and lost and Dean didn’t know why, except that it was because of Dean.
Castiel stared at Dean hard for another moment, then sighed, and leaned forward to press a kiss to his forehead. “Your sleeping mind is a strange and disorganised place,” he said, stern like that was Dean’s fault, but he didn’t sound like he minded. “Rest. Wait for us.”
Dean woke and sat up, gasping, and the absence of weight where Sam’s amulet should have been felt heavy against his chest.
Dean wasn’t running away. Just, sometimes the people on the outer farms needed a hand too. And there were a lot of people kind of wrapped up in their own problems just now, not being as helpful as they usually would this time of year, and Dean didn’t have anything better to do, so.
Which was all very fine and logical. He still wasn’t sure how he ended up helping Charlie, whom he’d barely changed fifty words with in his life, tie hessian rags around the trunks in her apple orchard in some mad new scheme of hers to trap codlin grubs. He also wasn’t sure how she managed to keep up a running commentary on everything she did for over two hours, without any contribution from him, or why she kept doing things like narrowing her eyes at recalcitrant bits of hessian and saying “It’s just you and me now!”, all grim and dramatic like she was challenging it to a duel.
“Do you ever stop?” he asked at last, somewhere between irritated and bewildered into amusement.
“Not much!” she replied cheerfully, not seeming to notice that he’d actually been kind of rude. “You wouldn’t believe what you can get away with when it’s just you in the house all day every day. My kitchen table knows secrets that you couldn’t burn out of me. I serenade my cookie jar.”
There were a few long strands of chestnut hair caught up on her lower lip. Dean wasn’t used to women who wore their hair down while they worked. Didn’t it get in her way?
“Well, whatever works for you,” Dean responded, sort of lamely.
He watched her more closely after that, because he was in the habit of watching people just now, and he didn’t really know Charlie at all. Her hands looked kind of delicate, like the bones were too heavy for the pale, paper-fine skin, but her fingers flew over her work almost too fast for Dean’s eyes to follow. (He took over the job of ripping up the hessian, because that needed calloused hands and some muscle behind it, and maybe just a bit because his efforts at arranging and fastening the coarse material looked so slow and clumsy next to her deft weaving.) Kind of skinny - spindly, almost - probably wouldn’t even be able to hold anything but a handgun properly, let alone absorb the kick of it. There was a little wrinkle at the bridge of her nose that kept showing itself whenever she frowned or laughed, and her mouth just wouldn’t stay still.
And she talked, of course. She talked almost too fast for Dean to follow, and about things he wasn’t used to having conversations about, and she used long technical terms all the time instead of easy practical nicknames, and she never mentioned monsters or angels or demons once. It left Dean feeling sort of slow and bemused, and like nothing he knew or was good at was really relevant. Which was okay, honestly. It was sort of a relief not to have to think about all that for a bit.
The thing was... okay, so, here was a woman, young, around his age, not married or attached or anything, and one Dean didn’t know well enough to have considered much before. And he just couldn’t help watching her and prodding at all those little thoughts that Ellen had spun into motion. She was... sweet? And yes, cute, if that was the sort of thing you liked. Pretty enough, definitely. He didn’t really get her at all, but he thought he might have been able to like her, if he hadn’t been feeling kind of numb.
But she didn’t make him want. There was nothing potent there, nothing possessive and sweet like when he looked at Cas.
Only surely there shouldn’t be? Not the same as for Cas, anyway. He hardly knew Charlie, and Cas was his.
What was he meantto feel?
“Charlie,” he broke in abruptly on a vehement reflection on the resonances produced by different kinds of metals when struck. “Are you - you’re not, you know... in the market?”
She made a quizzical little “huh?” sound, and looked up from the string she was tying. Her hair got caught in the knot again. And honestly, yes, Dean was pretty sure she was exactly the kind of pretty that plenty of guys would go for, so why hadn’t anyone yet?
“You know, for...” Dean made a vague explanatory gesture. “Getting married?”
All that pale skin apparently showed emotions really easily, like they were shining through from underneath and it wasn’t thick enough to cover them. Her eyes flickered through surprise, dismay, disappointment, and impatience, then settled on a cagey “shit now I’ve got to be tactful.” Dean, busy trying to work out exactly how he could capture all of those with a pencil, took a moment to cotton on, and she’d already twisted her mouth into a grimace and opened it to reply when it clicked.
Shit.
“Oh, hey, no! No, I wasn’t -” he blurted hastily, and honestly, what was it with him and women lately? “I wasn’t asking, I was just. Asking.” Smooth, Dean. He coughed, and turned on the friendly-but-not-too smile he used on mothers when they were eyeing him off for chatting with their daughters. “In general.”
She peered at him suspiciously, drumming both sets of fingers at once where they were resting on her knees. “Um. Okay. So then, I’m not interested. In general,” she added quickly, and went back to tying the hessian.
“Okay,” Dean echoed. “Good. Fine.”
And that, that thing right there? That was why it was so much easier to stick to hunting, and hanging around with guys, and only talking to women who were used to that sort of thing.
Only... really? Not interested?
He listened to her singing for a bit, breathy and a bit shaky, put his finger on the string when she told him, ripped up a few more hessian sacks into the right shapes for the next few trees. The cuffs of her sleeves rode up on her long bony wrists, all the layers of her shirts, blue and pink and then another blue. Also there was a daisy in her hair, though it kept trying to slip out and being pushed back, and who seriously wore flowers in their hair after the age of six?
“IthinkI’mnoteither,” he said after a minute, in a strong manly tone that for some reason came out as a half-articulate mumble.
But manly or not, it felt like a big thing to say, like just the admission of it loosened something around his chest that he hadn’t even known was there. To confess aloud, even just to one person he didn’t really know, that he didn’t want to settle down and become normal, make a house and home and have a woman around who’d be a partner in everything, who’d be the other part of him in facing down the world. That he didn’t think he’d ever be the person who could do that, and love it. Love that shadowy unknown her.
He didn’t want that. Just. Maybe he wished he could want it.
He said it, and felt the relief; then he glared at the string he was holding, and waited for her judgement.
“Okay.” Her voice rose at the end uncertainly, as if she wasn’t sure whether there was more there.
He said nothing. She covered the silence with humming.
Dean left it.
Or he meant to. Apparently his mouth had other ideas.
“No, but seriously, you’re - what, eight months younger than me? Are you dead set against marriage, or something?”
Charlie bit off another length of string, eyeing him over it like she wasn’t sure that wasn’t just another line. “Oh, I’ve thought about it. Just... urgh. But, hey!” Her mouth curved into something broader and brighter. “I’m not really normal. I get that.”
She seemed ready to drop it, all casual like it wasn’t important, but Dean couldn’t help feeling they weren’t really done here. “How do you mean, not normal?”
“Don’t really want what other people want.” She shrugged tiny bony shoulders that Dean’s hands could have engulfed and crushed, then amended, “Just. I don’t really like men. No offence,” she added hastily.
Dean gave that due, bemused consideration. Because it was obviously not true, not literally true. She didn’t dislike Dean, for one, because she’d been happily wrapping trees with him for two hours, and you didn’t do that with someone you couldn’t stand. But there was something in there that made sense, something that spoke to him, only he couldn’t quite work out what.
He prodded at it.
“How can you not like men?”
Her nose crinkled up again as she tried to punch and fold the hessian to the contours of a particularly misshapen tree. “Hey, big gun. What’s with the third degree?”
Uh. Yeah, okay.
Dean backed off, cheeks hot, and reached for his pile of hessian sacks. It was empty of hessian sacks, and therefore failed dismally at being a pile.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
Not like it could make a difference anyway. He went to get more sacks.
He got back just in time to see her pump her fist, crow “Everything’s coming up me!” and do a little victory dance without getting up off her knees.
“Catchy,” he commented, and peered at the intricate little web of string and strategic sticks pressing the hessian into every crevice. “Guess you defeated the evil tree.”
“I might have masterminded its downfall a little,” she conceded cheerfully, like everything was forgiven and there’d been nothing to forgive in the first place.
Huh. Dean had sort of missed ‘playful’. It seemed like a very long time since he and Cas had been flicking cogs and washers at each other on the grass.
He looked down at the loose ruddy slide of hair over her cheek and neck, the twinkle in her eyes, and the sharp point of her chin. She looked soft around the edges, and happy, not like Jo, or Ellen, or Gwen, or any of the other women Dean knew, married or not. Like she was part of another world.
“You’re a tree-defeating genius,” he said dryly, and she flashed him a smug grin.
“I know. It’s a problem.”
Three trees later, she volunteered, easy as anything, “Just can’t imagine any man in my home, thinking he gets to tell me what to do with my own things and my own time, you know?” like she thought there was a good chance that he might. Then she shrugged and laughed at herself a bit. “But, then, I’m a freak. That’s fine.”
Dean didn’t laugh.
“But doesn’t it get...” He trailed off uncertainly, and scratched the back of his neck, and tried not to think of a house without Sam’s loud free laughter filling the kitchen, or a house with the soft rustle of feathers brushing against the walls, and the soft sweet smell of sleepy angel in the sheets, and fried or poached eggs in the morning.
“I don’t know, kind of... quiet?” he finished awkwardly, though that didn’t really cover it. “At night, or when you’re feeling like crap? Or, hell, when something’s funny and there’s no one there to laugh with?”
“It’d be nice, I guess.” She flicked a large centipede out of a fold in the hessian, and whacked it with the handle of her knife. “Just not sure it’d be worth having a man shoving his way into my home. Or, you know...” The crushed centipede had a sudden encounter with the tip of the blade, and turned into two halves of a crushed centipede. “My bedroom.”
“Yeah,” Dean muttered feelingly, and held the edges of the hessian in place on the trunk for her. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” And then, to even the ground and because her eyes were occupied with positioning the string, he confessed, “Aren’t exactly any girls I especially want in our - in my house all day either.”
The corner of her mouth quirked behind her hair. “Any man?”
It was said teasingly, but there was something quivering under there that was... a touch too close to thoughts Dean wasn’t sure how to touch.
“Just my brother,” he answered, a bit shortly, because he couldn’t think of any way to brush that off with a joke.
“Kids would be nice someday, though,” she threw out off-handishly, and prodded his fingers down a few centimetres on the rough fabric. “Maybe I could put up with a man just for that.”
Dean laughed, and it sounded tired. “Charlie, if things keep on like this? Just give it a couple of years and there’ll be more orphans about than you’ll know what to do with.”
She pulled a face at him and laughed, but there was that uncertain little rise at the end again. “Oh. Well, thanks. That’s comforting.”
... Great. Now Dean felt like a dick.
Ten minutes later, she sat back, took a swig from her flask of water, then offered it to him. “You know Sir Yvain?”
Dean blinked, and took a biggish swig to play for time. Just what he needed. Someone else throwing random storybook references at him and expecting him to remember the difference between all those interchangeable adventures. “Um. Rode around on a cart?”
“No, that was Lancelot, and he only hitched a ride once.” She waved the irrelevancy away with a flick of pale fingers, happy as Sam in geek mode. “Yvain was the one who made friends with a lion and ran around in the forest insane and naked for a year.”
Of course. As those guys did.
Dean cast his memory back to when Sam had been a demanding little bastard and still couldn’t read to himself. “There was something about a giant and a bell, yeah?”
“Sort of,” she said, in that diplomatic way that meant ‘not really at all.’ “The giant cowherd told Yvain where the bell was, except it was more of a basin full of water than a bell. And if you spilled the water from the basin there was this enormous storm that would ruin the land and the crops all around, so whichever knight married the woman who owned the land had to spend all his time fighting off other knights who were doing that as a challenge, so Yvain fought her husband and killed him and then married the woman.”
That... well, rang a bell. “She hated him, right?”
“Sure, at first, because he’d killed her husband. Then she married him. Then he stayed away for too long, so she banished him, and that was when the whole running around mad in the forest thing happened. Then her maid fixed everything.”
Dean raised his eyebrows and handed the flask back. “Well, that makes sense.” In a senseless way.
She nodded happily, then jabbed the flask at him like it would help make her point. “However. Laudine needed Yvain, right? She had to marry him so there’d be a knight to see off other knights who decided to try their luck. But that was it, you see? That was all she needed from him. He could have stood out there all day and night to guard the basin, and she would have been fine. She already had everything else she needed right there.”
Dean was falling behind again. “Right where?”
“Lunete! Her maid, remember? The one who organises everything and is generally awesome? Friendship, help around the home, a good punch in the head when she needed it? Those girls were kick-ass together.” She rolled her eyes, like she was inviting him to marvel with her at the stupidity of the author, and continued with the vehemence of a familiar rant on a favourite topic, “Plus, she and Yvain had, like, zero in common. I mean, what were they going to talk about in the evenings? The weather? Well, if there’s been anyone down by the basin that day that’s going to be pretty stupidly predictable, isn’t it?”
“... I think I understood about a quarter of what you just said there,” Dean admitted, a bit cautiously.
“The only reason Laudine married Yvain is because everyone else thought she needed a man in the house. Which she didn’t, except to beat off all the other guys who thought she needed a man in the house,” Charlie explained, prompt and reasonable. “And then he wouldn’t stick around anyway, because he preferred being out there getting himself beaten up in tournaments with Gawain. So she cut him off.”
Dean considered this. Then he considered the little shudder that had flickered over Charlie’s face at the thought of a man in her bedroom. He wasn’t quite sure where this was going, but... “So you’re saying that Yvain and Laudine were never going to make it because she was already kinda married to her maid?”
Charlie blinked up at him, startled. Then she pursed her mouth consideringly, and said, a little wistfully, “I never really thought about it exactly like that. I guess so. All the important bits of marriage, anyway.”
Dean had no idea what to make of that, but it probably won the prize for the weirdest conversation of the year.
He dreamed of a safe family home with something hidden and deadly inside the walls, and a marriage ceremony with two brides, both with daisies in their hair. He dreamed of whispers and sideways glances, and something dark moving under his skin, and bloodied black feathers underfoot.
He dreamed of cool, elegant fingers tracing the lines of his belly, in ways he’d barely even thought of being touched. They went whispering down his ribs to the jut of his hip, resting soft and promising in the hollow of it, then skittering like a tease over the soft part of his thigh. There was skin under his hands, firm and hot over flesh, and he ran his hands up through the catch of fine hairs to slide over slim shoulders and corded muscle, until he felt the soft press of feathers against the back of his hands. A mouth opened against his neck, all hot inside and red, and when it moved across to nestle damp lips in the corner of his throat he arched up into it, seeking, because it felt like safety and happiness. Then it was gone.
Infatuation, he heard, and sometimes, whispered where he shouldn’t have heard, incubus.
Which wasn’t true. And when he was awake, he knew that.
Except. Monsters came in families, right? Werewolves, shapeshifters, and so on, all one type of thing - strongest around the full moon, susceptible to silver, and so on. Holwe hathels and barrow wights and other spooks that rattled and moaned in the night, they were another group. Will-o’-the-wisps were close enough to the relatively harmless marshlights that you could mistake one for the other if you weren’t watching (and look how well that had turned out), and they were both distant cousins to the things that called and whispered to you in the woods, promising you riches and comfort and peace if you would only step this way. Then there were vampires, incubi, succubi, all things like that, things that came in the night and drained you, of your life or your spirit or your blood or your semen until you were hollowed into nothing.
Angels?
Angels, they’d never managed to classify. Demons either.
No reason to think that they weren’t part of the last group. After all, all of those could fly too.
And if his thoughts ever reached that point Dean would stop, and cut them off, and remember the warmth of Cas’ throat, the uncertainty trembling in his lips, the hunger in his eyes - hungry for touch, for love, for reciprocation, for acknowledgement, for Dean, he told himself - promising and safe and home-like and intoxicatingly, blossomingly beautiful. Nothing poisonous there at all.
... But still, but still. Wouldn’t that be what an incubus would make him think?
Or maybe - because Dean could have sworn that Cas had never done that before, never promised that to anyone before - what if that was how incubi began? Persuasion, and sincerity, and the heady adoring mead of their presence?
Two days after that, there was an attack on the Gates. The same shadow, the same cloak of smothering darkness in the air, that the other hunters had seen that day they’d been hunting Rachel. But there were no angels here, or none that they saw. Instead, under the shelter of impenetrable shadows that drove panic straight into the lungs, demons attacked. Three more people died before they were driven off.
Demons had never done that before, attacking the village outright, working together. Using that spell, or whatever it was, that Dean was pretty sure Cas had said he’d come up with.
Not this kind of compromise, Dean.
Things were changing, and there were fewer than five hundred people left alive. Only twenty-two fully trained hunters now.
Not this kind.
They were under siege. And they needed information.
Screw it. Dean needed information. He needed to understand.