[Chapter] You can't fix what has been broken (10/22)
Title: You can't fix what has been broken
Author:
youaregonecas
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Castiel/Dean + Jess/Sam [Mentioned]
Tags: High School AU, Death, Depression, hunter!dean, Triggers, Suicide, Slow Build, Minor Character Death, Fluff, Baby Ben, Thoughts of Suicide, Happy Ending, Attempted suicide
Wordcount: 3.418 words
Summary: Castiel Novak has just lost his mother, his father is an absent douche bag and his sister may well be the only one that copes with all of it just fine. When the Winchesters come into town, it doesn't mean anything good, but he doesn't know it yet. He's completely blind to the world of monsters. When his mother rings the bell at five am one morning, Cas has the worst scare he has had in years. Somebody made a contract at the crossroads, and he isn't the one with a countdown.
[Chapter ten: I'm sorry]By the time that Cas got out of the shower, his bedroom was cleaned up and Dean had been thrown out of the house. He was pretty sure that Dean would have escaped the first route that he saw, after their awkward encounter of both last night and his morning. He couldn't blame him for it, the situation was more than a mess.
The empty bottle of whiskey lay on his bed, accompanied with the spare one that they hadn't opened the previous day. He didn't even know how his mother had found the bottles, they were hidden behind a few classics that he kept stashed in his nightstand drawer, just in case. He didn't know if he had ever even touched the classics, even though they looked worn. Maybe, in a distant past, he cared about it, about reading books and getting into the story, the world. Now, he didn't really care for it anymore. The words weren't appealing to him anymore. Sometimes, he felt kind of guilty for being like that, for abandoning everything that he seemed to have cared about at some point.
His mother had put clean blankets on his bed and allowed the room to air out a little. The smell of whiskey still clung to the room. Even after the shower, it still hung to his skin and in his hair for some reason. Next to his bed there was a big stain from where the bottle had fallen over somewhere during the night. He remembered it falling over, Dean reaching forward to catch it before everything spilled. He remembered looking at the muscled back and smiling, wanting to run his fingers down his spine, even if it was just to see the way that Dean reacted to his touch.
"We need to talk, Castiel," Amelia said from his bed. "Not about the thing with Dean, I could see that it was, well, complicated. It's about something that he told me." She padded the fabric next to her. "Come sit down and we'll talk." His mother looked almost nervous. Her hands were shaking and the look in her eyes told him that something was up, something serious.
Cas made his way down to the bed hesitantly, hair still dripping. "What is it mom?" What had Dean talked to her about?
"Dean told me that you have been scratching your scars again, Castiel and that you told him that you do not know where they come from. I know that me and your father have always told you that we do not know where they came from either, but I guess that we do. We wanted to protect you." She shook her head. "Dean told me that you were furious with me because you didn't know why I made the deal. Your scars and the deal are related, so let me tell you about what happened. Maybe you won't be as mad with me as you are now." There was a slight smile that covered her lips, before she spoke again. "Look, I know that this isn't exactly my business, but don't think that Dean doesn't care about you, son. I think that he does care, he just doesn't know how to handle the feelings. It was clear in the way that he spoke that he was conflicted. Give him some time, he'll come around.
"You're not going to give me relationship adivce mom, are you?" His eyebrows perched up. His mother just shook her head and smiled, the way that only a mother could. He could only stare at his mother for a little while, his hand on the scars again. He absentmindedly let his hands stroke them as his mother began to tell him what happened.
"You were seven years old," she started, staring at some point in the distance. "You and your father were driving back home from a birthday party that you had been invited to. I can't remember whose it was, but I think a hunter kid. That was why I didn't want you to go in the first place, but Jimmy, your father, he told me that I couldn't outrun my past forever and that just hanging out with hunter kids wasn't going to get you hurt. It was Joanne's, Ellen's daughter. You know, the one who owns the Roadhouse? I remember that Jimmy said that you had loved it there, but that you sneaked out a hunter's knife. I think I still have that thing somewhere.
"The road was calm that night, or so your father told me. These are the parts of the story that I am not sure about, because I wasn't actually there when all of this happened. There were few cars on the road, though that was probably because it was raining. Your father was driving on the Interstate when a truck started to slip on the water on the road. He noticed it too late and they crashed. Your side of the car was hit the hardest." Cas could see that his mother found it difficult to tell him, that there were tears in her eyes. "The car came out of the accident as wreck. The right side, you know, the passenger seat side? It was completely compressed.
"I was at home with your sister, she was two back then, when we got the call from the hospital to say that there had been an accident and you and your father had been hurt in it. We got there first thing. I remember walking around in the Intensive Care Unit with Claire in a stroller because she was vast asleep. They wouldn't allow me to see you at first, because you were in for surgery. Your dad was luckier. Because your side of the car was hit first, you were the one to get the hit. He managed to get out with a broken leg and arm. You have no idea how long he beat himself up over it, over not being able to protect his son, his only son.
"When we got back to you," she continued, the tears now clear in her eyes, "they told us to expect to see something that we wouldn't like. You had to undergo surgery to stop severe bleeding in your abdomen, you had a slight cause of brain edema - your brains were swollen - your right lung had collapsed, there was a risk that your left lung would collapse too and you had broken quite a few bones, including your ribs." There was a sad smile on her lips. "That is why you break them easily now, because they have been broken before. You were in a coma they told us, and it wasn't one that they had decided to put you in to get better, or to help your body get better. You had slipped into it on your own account." She was crying now, though Cas couldn't do anything but just stare at her. "They said that you still had to go in for a scan to see if you had any brain activity. If there was none, they said that there was a fair chance that we would have to say goodbye to you. If you woke up, you would have to learn to do everything again. No matter how things turned out, we wouldn't like it. When we first got to see you, I ran out of the room. You were hooked up to a thousand different machines, every few seconds something beeped, something made a sound. It was just nerve racking.
"You were in that coma for a year while your body healed. After a while, you had to have a trach to make the breathing easier. Your lungs were really beat up because you wouldn't breathe on your own. They tried to wean you off of the machine for a while, but you kept getting beat up because of it. Your lungs started to swell and get infected. That is where you got your scar in your neck from, the weird one. The trach was this tube that they put in to breathe for you. You have no idea how broken and torn up I was about it." She played with a picture in her hands. "This is a picture that your father took of you, three months after the accident. He said that he wanted to have a last recent picture of you, just in case, just in case you would die."
Cas stared at the picture. It was weird, looking at a picture and knowing that it was you, but not recognizing yourself. His skin was ashy, there were indeed more machines around him than he could imagine.
"That was until the day marking the year after the accident. I remember it clearly, because a representative of the hospital came in to tell me that this was a good moment to reconsider saying goodbye to you and allow you to go off the machines. You weren't showing signs of getting out of the coma and were pronounced brain dead, had been for quite a while at that point. They told us that they couldn't do anything anymore had had to consider moving you out into a private facility if we wanted to keep you there for much longer.
"That was why I made the deal. I got ten years and you got to live a happy and healthy boy. The crossroads demon, Crowley, he told me that he would take away all of the memories of being in the hospital and your recovery after. That you would be able to grow up without any memories of what happened to you. In that way, I was very lucky. If I had come across somebody else, they might have just gotten you out of the coma and done nothing else.
"The doctors were very surprised when you came out of your coma. There were many things that you had to relearn, eating, drinking, talking, walking. After another six months, you went back to school and caught up with all of your stuff like a champion." She smiled at the memory. "Your physical therapist told us that you were a very clever, lucky little boy. That was too the time that you smiled again. Normally, you would have to do say goodbye to all of your classmates because they were a class ahead of you, but because you got caught up with all the stuff that you needed to learn and the stuff of their year, you were allowed to go to the next class with them that year. Me and your father were very proud of you, alongside your teachers. We had to tell your teachers that you suffered from severe memory loss and didn't remember a thing from getting better or having the accident. It was a silent agreement that nobody mentioned any of it while you were in hearing range." She looked up at him with an expectant look in her eyes. "So that is why I made the deal, where you scars come from, the whole truth."
"Why didn't you ever tell me, mom?" Cas was almost angry with her, even though he still had to process it all in his head. The pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit, the gapes in his memory seemed to be explained.
"We were scared, we wanted to protect you. Not even your sister knows about any of it," Amelia said, a sad look in her eyes. Cas could see how broken she was because of it. "Look, we know that it is wrong -"
"And what did you think that I would say now? Thanks mom? Thank you for keeping the biggest thing in my history secret from me?" He snapped, cutting her short of whatever she was about to say. Her words couldn't make anything better. If they only could stop the rage that flew through his veins. "What if I had to go in and something happened? What if I was in an accident and I had to fill in a questionnaire and they would ask whether or not I have ever been through surgery before? I would be providing them with false information and I wouldn't even know it!" Cas could feel the rage pulse through his veins, could feel the need to punch someone or even better, something almost explode. "I'm going for a walk, alone. Don't you dare follow me."
The cold outside helped, helped a lot, but still he couldn't lose the anger completely. He ran for miles before he finally stopped, barely able to catch his breath. His lungs burned, his ribs felt like they couldn't expand anymore, but his headache was mostly gone. All pain seemed to overthrow whatever it was that he thought he felt. It didn't give him the chance to think everything through and for that, he was grateful. Sweat ran down his body, completely making his shower that morning wasted. If only the shower had worked completely. It would have been so much better than the anger that still ran through his veins. The need to punch somebody was still there, though very faintly.
That was when his phone buzzed. Cas cursed as he pulled the cell phone to read whoever it was that needed him. When it appeared to be Dean though, he was surprised. He had thought that Dean wouldn't want to talk to him for another twelve years and that for sure.
Roadhouse, 7PM? Need to talk. D.
Sure, I’ll be there. You okay?
Yeah, just need to talk.
Walking in the roadhouse felt weird to Cas. He had gone back home to quickly take a shower, again, before fleeing again the first chance that he saw. The roadhouse was practically abandoned at 7PM. He should have been home too, but he had called his mother to say that he needed to think things through, that he would be back at some point, but just not right now. He needed to space to breathe for a little while and not get any angrier about all of it. If he had been forced to stay home, he probably would have lashed out anyway. He didn't want to leave a path of destruction in his wake.
Why did people always think that keeping things a secret from the people you love could help them out? How did people think that it would be when the secrets popped up? He didn't know why his mother hadn't expected this.
The worst of it all were the memories that started to come back in flashes. Starting during the run, things had started to come back to him. Sitting in the car with his father. The impact, waking up in the hospital, it came back once in a while. No full memories, just flashes of them.
Dean was already sitting in their usual booth, two bottles of beer in front of him. He looked up when Cas stopped in front of the booth, throwing him a almost nervous smile, pushing forth his second beer.
"Hi," he said before taking another swig from his beer himself, "thanks for coming."
"Sure," Cas said, shrugging before sliding into the booth. "I needed to get out of the house anyway."
"They giving you trouble for what happened?" he asked, sounding as worried as he could get.
"No," Cas said, putting the bottle to his mouth and taking a sip, "they probably will though. It's something else. None of your concern. I'll tell you later" He shook his head. "Really. What did you want to talk to me about?"
"Dad called," he said, "we're about to leave the city again. We leave tomorrow. I'll keep my eyes open to possibilities for breaking your sister's deal if I can." Cas didn't know what happened after that. He knew that something happened, but he couldn't exactly see through the haze that the anger provided. "I can't help you the way I want to anymore. I'm really sorry, Cas." Dean took him in cautiously, seeing what Cas would do.
"Great," he snapped, setting the bottle down on the table. He was sure that the whole bar could hear the bottle crack, but he didn't care. He stormed out in a haze of fury, not caring who he passed in his wake.
"Cas!" His fist connected with the bricks outside of the Roadhouse, sending pain shoot through him. He didn't care about the pain, couldn't care about it anymore. "Calm down Cas!" He heard him cuss, but couldn't understand what it was exactly. His fingers were still on his hands, he could still move them, so they weren't broken. That was the most important thing.
He felt somebody wrap his arms around him, pulling his arms to his sides. "Calm, down." Cas could see the worry in Dean's eyes, but he didn't care anymore. He was beyond caring.
"You know, I gave up a lot? You bloody idiot, I could have gotten information about the deal from the demon! But you know, I didn't because I wanted you to be safe. I sacrificed so much of my time in looking for information about deals with you, I skipped schooldays, I got drunk, I did everything." He had to bite his lips to stop the tears from coming in. "I went on this crazy road trip with you to make sure that you and your father would be okay. I only asked you one thing. You can't even do that! Now, you just stroll in and say well, I can't help you anymore." Blood burst through the shallow cuts on his knuckles. "Look, I get this can be awkward between you and me right, but I need your help Dean." He shook his head. "But of course, you can't help, and you won't either!"
Cas didn't even know why he threw the first punch. Maybe it was a build up from all that had been happening the past couple of days, weeks. All he knew was that he hit Dean in the face, hard. The crunch of his nose almost felt good to Cas, for some twisted reason. Blood trickled down to Dean's lip, ran in his mouth as he stood there, frozen.
"I trusted you," Cas whispered as he raised his hand again. His fist connected with Dean's nose, again. He could feel the bones under his fist and best or worst, whatever you want to call it, the way they have way. Cas was too far gone too care about it. "What are you standing there for? Just hit me already." He didn't know where his bravery came from, or why he was taunting a full fletched hunter. "Just freaking hit me already!"
His cheek burned with the touch of Dean's fist against his jaw. Blood pooled up in his mouth. It tasted bitter, almost like iron. When he smiled up at Dean, he was sure that his teeth were red, because he backed off a little bit.
"I don't want to have to do this, Cas. Can't we talk about it, please?"
"No." He spat the words at him. "No we freaking can't."
He wished that he could say that he stopped throwing punches at some point because he felt sorry for Dean, but knew that he was lying. As the two boys got into a fight, it wasn’t just the anger for Dean leaving him. Suddenly, it was everything, the anger that he felt because Dean said that it was nothing but being drunk the other night, for saying that his kisses were nothing, for getting him fucked up, for everything that had ever happened to him.
When he was forced to back off, both him and Dean were bloody and bruised. Cas could barely walk straight after a few kicks in the rib from Dean. Each breath he took hurt like hell as he crawled away from Dean, ashamed about what he had done, ashamed about how scared he was. That was when he blacked out.
After that, all he remembered was being helped by somebody whose voice didn't sound familiar at all, being put into the ambulance and driving off to the hospital, hanging on for dear life.