Part Three
--Death Valley, December 2012
It must have been the eyes. Somehow, Sam didn’t really have a problem dealing with the piercings, the hair, the fucking Matrix-esque wardrobe and space-bending power surges. All those things, bizarre and so un-Dean like made it easier to keep his focus, to fight with the sword Castiel had made for him and not with his mind, but when the dust cleared and there was no one left standing but himself and the fallen angel in the Dean Winchester suit, they faced each other, one on one for the first time, and those were Dean’s eyes.
Maybe he promised Castiel. Maybe he promised Bobby. Hell, maybe he even promised Dean, couldn’t remember, couldn’t ever remember. And how unfair was it that Castiel could hear Sam’s conversations with Dean and Sam couldn’t? Maybe he and Dean hadn’t really been apart for three and half years already, had met nightly on some spiritual plane, but when he looked into Lucifer’s face and Dean looked out at him, something in Sam collapsed, left him weak and finished, spirit posed like the End of the Trail statue. The sword clattered to the ground, heavy, and behind him Bobby pleaded, gasping through the pain of a broken leg that kept him from standing. Castiel wasn’t there to talk him through the surge that sparked up from his toes, prickled at his fingertips, the angel struck down by a bolt of lightning before the battle even began.
Sam didn’t understand the expression on Lucifer’s face when he raised his hands and let the power loose. He shouldn’t have looked that pleased to make it to the brink and be defeated. Unless what he wanted was to...
Sam tried to stop, pulled back before the final gasp and flicker, but he didn’t have Lucifer anymore. Lucifer had him, and he wouldn’t let go, the truth that couldn’t be unlearned.
The key to immortality is procreation.
Sam didn’t have time to wonder how he’d forgotten that before the darkness closed around him.
--December 2013-Woods
Sam was used to waking up to some ruckus or other. Usually it was loud music that only made sense as the soundtrack to whatever he'd been dreaming and made for all kinds of awkward once he was awake. He said 'dreaming' because it didn't seem possible for him to have nightmares. Wasn't he supposed to be the scariest thing that went bump in the night? Anyway, he didn't usually remember them, just figured from the accompaniment that they weren't exactly bedtime stories.
There was no music this time, but it was raucous all the same. Growling, snapping, snarling, and the tent shook like a stampede was going on around it. Sam wasn't doing that. He was still only half awake when he reached over for one of Dean's shoes to throw at the wall, but not too sleepy to notice Dean wasn't beside him anymore.
"Shit..."
His long body coiled and uncoiled like a viper in his dive for the open tent flap, no sooner cleared the opening and stood to full height when something barreled into his shins and nearly knocked him over. The animal, still just a flash of thick grey fur and beady eyes, recoiled with a yelp, and the entire camp fell silent.
Around him a dozen or more pairs of eyes tracked his every movement -- wolves, coyotes, foxes in close, and farther out, a mountain lion, bobcats, and bear -- all lay down at his feet with a collective whimper, just the glint of moonlight off their teeth and the ragged panting of breath.
No sign of Dean.
Sam looked each of the animals in the eye, all of which woofed once and laid head upon paws in submission, taking it one step further and rolling over if Sam persisted.
"Dean!"
No answer, but the mismatched pack all jerked their heads up in response to something else stirring in the distance. From the tree line behind them, branches crashed together, the brittle frozen ends snapping and raining down like the debris from an explosion. A swathe cut through the forest, bearing down on them, and Sam watched it come, unafraid.
Suddenly, a jack rabbit zigged out of the undergrowth at full speed, too focused on the peril from above to notice what it was running into. A horned owl swooped into the clearing, talons outstretched at the exact moment one of the wolves pounced on the rabbit, sending the owl veering sharply upward. A squeal and sharp crack, and the rabbit went limp in the wolf's mouth.
Long stringers of reddened saliva dangled from the canine's loose jowls as it breathed around the carcass, eyes locked with Sam's. As if reaching a decision, the wolf slunk up to him, back concave behind its shoulder blades, belly practically dragging on the ground, and laid the rabbit down at Sam's feet. An offering.
"Suffer the little children to come unto me," Sam chided, "just what I always wanted."
Without breaking eye contact with the wolf, Sam called out, "Dean!"
For a second, silence hung ominous over them like so much clouded animal breath curling over his shins. Then, a low collective growl erupted from the pack followed by another rainstorm of tree debris from overhead. "A tree?" Sam chided, still trying to focus on which one Dean was hiding in. "You really climbed a tree instead of just getting back in the tent?"
"You told me not to smoke inside," Dean snapped, followed by a mumbled, "and the zipper was stuck." Sam finally made out the shape of his brother perched in the top of a leaning birch tree directly above him.
"You can come down. They won't hurt you."
Dean thudded to the ground, landed on his knees, and then staggered to an upright position.
"Get in the fucking tent."
Dean didn't argue, but his footsteps faltered after only a few strides. By then, Sam could hear his teeth chattering, the pained hiss of his breath. Turning his back on the wolf and the rest of the menagerie, Sam had only a second to react. Dean teetered and fell forward.
His hair and skin glistened with frost, and he was so cold Sam was surprised he didn't shatter. Some of his hair did, maybe an eyelash or two as his head fell against Sam's chest, but Sam caught him, and nothing else touched the ground until they were both inside once more.
--
If the last time he woke up, it was to whispered voices that sent a thrill of hope through him, this time was, at least, a bitter disappointment, and at most horrifying. Lucky for Dean he'd lost perspective on the horrific just as surely as if those nerves had been cut and never regenerated. He wasn't nearly as disturbed about waking up in the middle of a dogpile as he should have been, considering the dogs were wolves, and their low growling rumbled through his sinuses like badly adjusted bass. It was its own kind of thrill but not hope.
"If I get fleas..."
"You'll what? Because you might want to take a little inventory before you decide to get in a pissing contest. Stay out in the cold long enough... things start to fall off." Sam was growling a little himself, and in his half conscious state, Dean wasn't sure whether it was a snarl or just the scrape of words through a sadistic grin.
He sat up abuptly, his upper body dragged stock straight by the sudden movement of his arm. The rush of relief at finding out he still had all his... extremities was short-lived. The mass of fur around him scattered and then closed in, a mammoth jaw locking around his throat with a strength that cut off his breath in the span of time between one and the next.
Dean's hands clawed into the neck of the offending wolf, his thumbs in the soft spot between jaw bone and up into the sensitive tissue under its tongue. His feet kicked, everything below his rib cage twisting, and everything above stock still. It was as much instinct as every bit of advice Dad ever gave him-- Better to go still when bitten. Pulling away only rips the wound-- but as his lungs burned with asphyxiation, his resolved ebbed away.
"Drop it!"
A long, cold snarl, tongue lapping against his skin, and the vice broke.
Dean rolled onto his side, coughing, one hand propping him up and the other massaging at the bruised flesh of his throat. He peered up under half-open eyelids, still squinting through tear-eyes, and glared at Sam. "It?" he grumbled, his own voice now the only growl.
"Why mince words? I'm pretty sure he doesn't speak English?"
"The wolf's a 'he' and I'm just an it?"
"I'm sorry. I don't deal with animals much. But all those trainers on Animal Planet say, 'leave it,' when they want a dog to let go. I guess it just popped out."
Dean glowered into the tent floor, too exhausted to argue further.
"Hey," Sam offered, "Could've been worse. I could've said, 'that'll do, Pig.'"
Dean was not amused. "What the hell are they even doing in here?"
"You were freezing. I figured the fur and the body heat..."
"So, what? You played Timmy to their Lassie? How's that even possible? Your psychic mojo works on animals, too?"
Sam shrugged, holding out a mug of steaming coffee from the thermos at his side. "Pretty much works that way with everything. Whatever Sammy wants, Sammy gets."
Dean detected something like remorse in his voice but didn't believe it was genuine. "Not if I can help it."
Sam huffed and looked down. His fingers twined in the ruff of the wolf's neck, massaging the animal down flat on the ground from its wary head-up stance.
"That's kind of the point, Dean."
Maybe nearly freezing to death and then almost having his throat ripped out by a large carnivore made him slow on the uptake, but after a few more sips of coffee, Dean looked up again, eyes darting between Sam and the floor. "You're not controlling me..." His voice went flat at the end, not sure if he was asking or stating a fact. He didn't feel controlled, but maybe that was part of the 'charm'.
"I try not to."
"Why?"
For a second, the bangs fell out of Sam's eyes, and it was Sam looking back at him, something both pensive and bitterly ironic in the crease of his forehead and squint of his eyes. "What would be the fun in that?" When Dean didn't reply, Sam said, "If I wanted a slave, I could have anyone."
Dean squinted across the short distance between them, his eyes only daring go as far up as Sam's chin. "So, what do you want? Revenge? For not having your back?"
Sam didn't answer.
"For leaving you alone?"
"What do you want, Dean? I mean, this situation is less than ideal, but I would think you'd be happy here. Isn't this what you always wanted? Just you and me, together? Forever?"
Dean set his coffee down hard enough it would have sloshed if there'd been more than a sip or two left. "First, nothing's meant to stay the same forever. Second, you're not you and I'm not me. Us being here..." he paused, swallowing against something bitter but colder than coffee. "It goes against everything we worked for, everything I wanted. It's wrong, Sam."
Sam stood, hunched over under the dome of the tent, opened the flap, and gestured the wolves out. He hesitated at the opening, shoulders slouched. Maybe Dean only saw a tiny puff of white from Sam’s lips because he wanted to. "Funny, you say you're not you, and I'm not me, but that's exactly what Dean would say."
He stalked out into the morning, and Dean watched him go. Shaking his head and reaching for his coffee, he jerked his hand back when a cold nose pressed into it, followed by a warm tongue.
"What the..."
A half-grown wolf cub slunk out from behind him, probably last spring's get, all big ears and paws, not quite proportionate and clumsy in its movements. "What, didn't you hear that?" Dean nodded toward the open flap. "What Sammy wants, Sammy gets." The cub woofed and plopped down behind Dean. It's tail thumped as he shot questioning glances upward. "Nah, never mind," Dean smirked. "I wouldn't go out there either. Fucking freezing." Besides, he’d have never made it into that tree the night before if the critter hadn’t mostly pulled and then pushed him to it. He patted the cub as it curled up into a ball to sleep. "Way to stick to your guns. You're a better man than I, my friend."
And he meant it.
--
When Sam slunk back in, what was left of the rabbit from the previous night roasted and shredded into two stainless steel bowls, he wasn't willing to call it a peace offering. He'd said it himself, what would be the fun in that? Brothers bicker. They pick and tease, call each other's bluff. He preferred Dean calling him Sasquatch and trading insults over any eager-to-please minion. He didn't bother to consider the paradox in that. If he wanted contrary and got contrary by forfeit, well, that was just convenient, not backdoor mind control. It wasn't his fault the universe seemed to revolve around him.
It became difficult to maintain that perspective when he went back inside and found Dean asleep with his head on one scraggly looking wolf cub that should have made it's exeunt along with the rest. Dean was invited to disobey. Nothing else was allowed.
The wolf whined and sat up when Sam entered, jarring Dean from his sleep. Dean stirred and looked up, bleary-eyed. "What's'a matter, Cas?" Catching a glimpse of Sam, he said, "Oh, don't let the boogey man scare you. He's all bark and no bite."
"Why would I be afraid of...?"
"I was talking to the wolf," Dean mumbled, reaching for the bowl of meat. He took one look inside it, pushed the meal around a little with his fingers and then set it down on the ground. "Here you go, boy. Sam made you dinner. I told you he wasn't all bad."
"You've gotta be kidding me."
"Isn't that what you want? Entertainment?"
Sam bit back something uglier than he intended to admit to. With a sigh, he said, "Cas? You named it after an angel?"
"He's got the same eyes. Tell me that's a coincidence."
"It's a coincidence."
"And you're jealous."
"Am not."
"Are so."
Sam opened the tent flap, intending to gesture the... CAS out, but Dean put his arm over the animal's back. "I'm keeping him."
"You can't keep him."
"Why not?"
"Because it's a wild animal."
"Technically so are you. Anyway, you have a pet. I want one, too."
"A pet? You don't mean...? Right. Doc." Sam sighs, and slumps back on the floor. "Fine, then you two eat up. It's a long walk back to the cabin. I'm calling the hunting trip off."
"Why? Because I got a little hypothermia? I'm fine. I can still hunt."
"I'm sure you can, but I doubt we'll get within shooting distance of anything worth eating now that everything smells like wolf."
"I have news for you. You already smelled bad. I wasn't going to say anything, but the cigarette smoke was the only thing making this place tolerable."
"Fuck you," Sam said, but he couldn't force enough animosity into it to squelch the smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"In your dreams."
"Wouldn't you like to know." Dean took a second to register the comment and then faltered in his constant scratching of Cas's neck, lips pulling together abruptly.
"Dude, that’s sick."
--
Dean woke the next morning to whispers again, a subtle reminder that, despite spending the night shoulder-to-shoulder with Sam, talking and trading insults into the wee hours, they were not brothers on a camping trip, partaking of some rite of passage into manhood. The passage was an endless tunnel with no light at the end, and there was no going back. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, but his skin tingled, flared red with growing intensity around the growing collection of runes he’d carved into it. "I’m going as fast as I can," he whispered back, but the answer was head-to-toe spasm that curled him over his stomach, sent his hand scrabbling for the can opener and the can of beans Sam had put out for breakfast.
When Sam woke up, he had cold beans in a bowl waiting for him at his pillow, and Dean had a fresh track of runes up his left shin bone. Dean pretended not to notice when Sam gave the beans to Cas.
--
Dean was ready when the ache settled in this time, only this time they were halfway back to camp, still knee deep in snow and making slow progress. When his hands started to shake and burn, he shoved them deep into the snow, flinging a clump out to Cas who snapped it out of the air. It was a good game to pass the time and kept Sam from noticing anything out of the ordinary. Also kept him from shuddering through the realization that this fucked up existence had found its own level of ordinary, and he was allowing it.
He should've known better than to leave Sam out of the loop. The thing about having the world revolve around him? He didn't take well to be lefting out.
The first snowball hit Dean between the shoulder blades as he reached down to grab another mittful between his burning fingers. At least, he assumed it hit between the shoulder blades. It was hard to tell from the way the pain radiated outward, his entire back spasming with such force as to knock the wind out of him. The snowball he threw in retaliation was intended to have much more heat behind it than it did. Way to add insult to injury.
Sam must've taken Dean's panting as laughter, because he cackled something like, "You giant pussy!" and followed it up with a second snowball, this time to the shoulder.
Dean seethed, figuratively and literally, white hot flaring down his arm and through his chest. He fired back, teeth set firmly against each other. His shot went wide, and he hissed, "Knock it off."
"Make me," Sam laughed, the air white around him as he knocked into low-hanging branches, diving for the cover of the nearest tree trunk before throwing back.
This one hit Dean on the side of the head, and the pain drove him over the edge, half-mad as he staggered forward, lobbing snowball after snowball, most of which weren't packed and disintegrated within a few feet of leaving his hand. Sam continued to laugh as Dean bore down on him, arms thrown up over his face so just his mouth was visible. By the time Dean got close enough to put some real sting behind the attack, the whispers in his hears scraped over the inside of his skull like white water over a dam.
Laughing, Sam shouted, "Stop!"
"Make me," Dean grit out, a challenge. Make me stop. Make it all. Just. Stop.
The next barrage of hits pelted Sam's face in rapid succession, first silencing him with its intensity and then forcing him to close his mouth. "I said, make me!"
Sam did. He kicked out, the flat of his foot impacting Dean's thigh hard enough that the whole leg spasmed and Dean fell backward into the snow.
Cas pounced, licking at Dean's face, and to his embarrassment, Dean yelped. His entire body shook, back arching up off the ground as the last of his breath whooshed out.
He fought to draw it back in, but his chest locked down. Everything burned with such intensity he wondered why he couldn't smell it or hear the crackling, couldn't even scream against the grasp his own body held him in.
"Geez," Sam huffed. He stalked over, shaking the snow from his hair and out of the front of his coat. "You're a dick, you know that?"
Beside him, Cas growled.
"Dean?" A second later, "Dean!" Sam knelt in the snow, trying and failing to press Dean flat to the ground with his hand on Dean's sternum. "What's...?"
Like Dean knew what the hell was going on. It wasn't like he had any experience being a science experiment. He did know that Sam wasn't helping. Just weight of his hand sent lightning bolts crackling through Dean's bones, the white noise in his head flaring to deafening proportions. "Nnnnggghhh!"
It was the most scream he could manage with his mouth clamped shut.
Sam fumbled with Dean's collar, unzipping his coat and pulling it back, each click of the zipper pinging in his head like pea gravel against his temples. He had no control over himself, felt the rush of warmth a second before the stench of urine assaulted his nasal passages. His vision blurred, either from oxygen deprivation or tears, and he didn't consider where his hand was going before he felt it clasp over the hilt of his knife. Makeitstop, makeitstop, makeitstop...
Sam's lips were moving, but Dean couldn't make out what he was saying, nothing he said up until the final, desperate, "NOOOO!" as the knife flashed through the air.
It plunged into his chest, and if Dean had been thinking clearly, he'd have known that was a mistake before he made it. Too many contracting muscles, too much bone. Gut would've been the wiser move. As it was, the knife only went in a couple of inches before Dean lost his grip on it.
"Make it stop, make it stop, make it stopstopstopstopstop." Dean didn't know if he was speaking aloud or only in his head, but when he finally found the knife again, Sam's hand was already on it. The world slowed to a crawl, the fork in the road suddenly obvious as Sam's hand trembled over the hilt, each vibration another wave of agony Dean couldn't breathe through. God, if Sam pulled out the knife... The prospect of going on another second, of being poked and prodded down the mountain... "Please... pleasepleaseplease." Pulling out whatever last bit of free will he still had, Dean locked his hand over Sam's and forced his eyes to stay open and fixed. "Please. Fix me."
Sam's chin quivered a second before the knife plunged beneath their hands and into Dean's heart. It pulsed only once or twice before it went still. Dean's eyesight was the last thing to go, but not before he saw Sam turn and vomit into the snow. Not before he saw the curl of steam rise up from it.
--December 2013, Cabin-The Next Day
"What do you mean, I'm affecting him? I'm purposely trying not to affect him."
"You affect everything just by being. You're like a giant tuning fork vibrating into the ether. You set the key and the tone of whatever's around you." For a sick, evil, bastard, Doc had a knack for being right.
"So how am I causing these spells?"
"Your blood's in him, and it's tuned in to you. His whole body's like one continuous exposed nerve while his new nervous system's still being constructed. Imagine his blood boiling over a raw nail bed. He might as well have acid in his veins."
"So... a transfusion, then. Re-perfuse with a lower concentration of my blood."
"With what? Have you got another donor lying around here?"
Hindsight being twenty-twenty, he suddenly understood exactly why he left old man Carson parked in that snow bank behind the shed. "Yeah... yeah, I do."
"The popsicle?"
"Dean always did like the red ones."
--
The next time Dean opened his eyes, Sam was leaning over him, a scalpel in hand, retracing the line of scars up Dean's forearm. Still groggy, either from the seizure, the death and resurrection, or loss of blood, he could do nothing but watch the dark, near-black stream eek out his vein and into the bucket on the floor.
"Hey," Sam said, his mouth pulled into a straight line as he concentrated on the task. "Doc thinks my blood's causing the seizures. Lucky for you, I've been keeping some one ice."
Dean's stomach lurched, the only part of him that seemed capable of movement as his head lolled to the side. It stopped lurching and cramped into a full-on retch when Dean spied old Carson dangling from the ceiling on a meat hook through his lower legs. The old guy's neck gaped open, blood pinging into a stainless steel tub. Smelly Cat was poised over the bowl eyeing his own reflection with a Cheshire grin.
Sam tipped Dean's head to the side as he spit up nothing but yellow foam, wiped away the mess with a corner of a dish towel. "Yeah, I know it's pretty gross. But the blood wouldn't pump out with no heartbeat. Once he thawed, I had to kinda... well, squeeze it out." A chuckle, mirthless and cold. "I imagine it's a little like stretching cat gut into tennis racquet strings. But it'll be worth it if we stop the seizures, and Doc says we can introduce my blood gradually once your nervous system calms down again."
Cas sniffed at the bucket of blood beside him and whimpered before backing away. He licked Dean's face once and laid down in the corner. Luckily, Dean passed out before the transfusion began.
--
Dean had his second attack two weeks later, exactly one day after he stopped leaking over-heparinized blood from all his orifices and tear ducts. It was just long enough after the first to convince himself and Sam that it wasn't going to happen again. Long enough for Sam to stop watching him out of the corners of his eyes and moving to the far end of the room whenever Dean dragged himself in, Cas skulking at his heels. Long enough for Sam to yank out the wiring along the walls and ceiling to stop the speakers blaring melancholic ballads at all odd hours of the day and night. No way he was thinking anything along the lines of Toto’s "I Will Remember." Had to have been Dean.
This time, it went on for nearly half an hour as Sam pulled at his hair and paced the room, unwilling to touch Dean and make it worse, unable to watch him suffer unaided.
Finally Sam cut Dean's throat, whether to let out the tainted blood or just to stop him screaming, it was hard to tell.
--
"Your blood is a living thing. It's taken root in his marrow." Sam really wished he’d spent more time on the voice synthesizer. He hadn’t ever realized how far the sound of an actual human voice went to making him feel... well, human, and not alone.
"So... a transfusion won't work. The taint will just come back."
"So it would seem."
"If I can't make him stop reacting to me, then maybe I can... I dunno... remove myself from the equation." He paced, fully aware Doc’s peripheral vision wasn’t good enough to follow him from one end of he porch to the other but still amused in a distracting way to know the eyes would try to follow anyway. Simple pleasure was all he had when all his complex plans continued to fall through. "The... darkness... evil... whatever it is... it follows me. So, if I keep Dean away from me..."
"How do you intend to do that? He’s like an infant. He can’t take care of himself, and you can’t set him loose on the world."
Sam shrugged then glared at the crackle of speakers from inside. The damned things insisted on working despite not being connected to any source of power.
This is a test of the emergency broadcast system... this is only a test...
He grinned and paused, square in the refrigerator door for the first time since he stepped onto the porch. "Ya hear that? Tornado coming."
Doc protested with a roll of his eyes. "It’s not tornado seas..." The refrigerator door slammed.
"Dean! Storm’s comin’!" He refrained from saying, "I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too," but the sound system was already streaming "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" before he kicked the cat and silenced it.
--December 2013--A Week Before Christmas
So, I look to my Eskimo friend...
Once upon an Apocalypse, Lucifer rose. That should've been the end, but it was only another beginning.
In the beginning there were two brothers--one bound by fate, the other by destiny, and both intending to stop the Apocalypse at all cost. No price too high. No sacrifice they wouldn’t make.
Good intentions make for great stories, and this one? Well, it got messy, and it stayed that way all the way to Hell. No surprise there. Everyone knows the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
I look to my Eskimo friend...
But what paves the road out? Blood? Sweat? Tears? Sacrifice? An angel in wolf’s clothing? My Eskimo friend?
"..."
"Fuck. I’m gonna kill that cat."
"Saaaam! Let me out!" Dean wasn't above begging. It was pretty much all he had left. He couldn't even pound on the door for effect, not with the mattress fastened onto it. He gave up rapping on the rafters with a broom handle when Sam turned off the lights to stop Dean from carving on himself. Joke was on Sam, though. The friggin’ runes glowed in the dark. At least, they did when Sam was within a hundred yards, which was most of the time. Antichrist or not, he still hovered like a mother hen.
Dean had been passing the time, and distracting himself from the pain of his growing collection of skin hieroglyphics, by changing his life story into fairy tales in his mind. In his defense, it was a lot better fit to fairy tales than to gospels ala Chuck the Prophet. Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm Brothers were creepy mother fuckers who, as far as Dean could tell, didn’t actually think there was a moral to the story. Defeatist bastards who traumatized little kids. (So, he was still bitter from having read "The Little Matchstick Girl" in the first grade.) That made sense to him, more than the idea of future generations using him as the needle on some moral compass. (He still hadn’t decided which direction he was pointing.)
But he’d been stuck in the same place for at least an hour now, that fucking Damien Rice song on repeat outside the door, and no matter how hard he tried to make sense of his own life and predicament, he kept coming back to "What the fuck is up with the Eskimo?"
"It's for your own good." So, Sam was still listening. Dean had begun to wonder if maybe he was the pet rabbit ol’ Trashcan Man had kept as a pet and starved to death in its cage before Captain Tripps made him go all Finger of God on Randal Flagg’s ass.
"It's cold down here. There's frost on the walls."
"Which would you prefer, Dean, a little cold or another seizure?" Whichever brought death first. He didn’t say it out loud, but it was on the tip of his tongue.
"I'd prefer you to live in the basement."
"My house. My rules."
"It's not your house. You stole it."
"Like I said, my rules make it my house. Are you hungry?"
Dean let his head fall back against the wall, the backs of his legs aching where they hung over the metal frame of the foldaway cot. His hands trembled once, and the radio slid from his grasp. He heard it clamber to the concrete floor, hated the way his heart pounded the whole while he scrambled around for it in the dark.
"Dean? Hungry?" The radio crackled, helping him zero in on it. The frame of the cot wasn't made for someone his size to crawl under, and he bruised his ribs trying to reach just that one inch closer to the crackling static. Backing out of the tight space with a curse, he latched onto the cot and jerked it away from the wall with a deafening scrape.
"Going once, going twice..."
He found the radio and pressed the talk button, ashamed of the way his breath panted in and out of his chest. "No. Not hungry. Just... I'm about out of smokes." He was out of just about everything he had in him.
"I told you to ration them out."
"Sam..." he huffed into the damp shroud of air around him, too aware of the way it sucked the warmth from his breath and left it stale and used up. "Please..." Dean was many things but a quitter? Not even part of his vocabulary. Dean was many things but a quitter? Not even part of his vocabulary.
"I'll send 'em down the vent. You know you've gone through most of Carson's stash. You're going to have to give them up eventually."
"Yeah, story of my life. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, or jump off, whichever works." The vent scraped above him, followed a second later by the scrape of cellophane down the shaft. It plunked into his lap with a satisfying thud, and he had one out between his lips before he realized he'd dropped his lighter somewhere. "Figures."
Panic welled up inside him, manifesting as a deep-seated itch under his skin. His fingers twisted into claws, the tracks of which were already carved into his forearms and the tops of his thighs. "Fuck!" He hefted the radio overhead, set to chuck it against the wall, (It was the third one to date,) then thought better of it. "You better be feeding my fucking dog!"
Sam was halfway through arguing that Cas wasn't a dog when the radio smashed, bits of plastic and circuitry raining down and scattering across the floor for him to crunch over later. Ah, well, at least it would cover the sound of dead cockroaches underfoot. By the time that image branded itself on his frontal lobe, Dean found his lighter and didn't give a rat's ass.
In the darkness conceded defeat was bright as day.
--
Something was up with Dean's... Cas. The critter had absolutely no Sam sensitivity whatsoever. At first, he'd surmised the cub's resistance was out of some strange attachment to Dean, but that wasn't only it. The other wolves knew something was up with him, too. They didn't welcome Cas into their fold, though he most likely had come with them. Instead they growled and snapped, kept him pushed off to the side, made him eat last. Not that much had wandered through the dooryard lately for them to eat.
Maybe it was jealousy. The rest of the pack fawned at Sam's feet and cowered before him when he went out for wood or supplies from the shed, but he didn't pay them any attention. Cas spent his days curled up at the cellar door, closer to Sam by default than any of the others.
Or maybe he was just your typical juvenile delinquent. Sam snickered to himself at the thought, imagined the low growls of the leaders to translate into something like the sendoff Dad gave him when he left for school.
At any rate, he'd been eating more of Dean's food than Dean. And Sam never had to wonder where Dean was in the cellar below, because Cas tracked his movement through the floor, nose to the ground, big ears lopped forward at the tips.
Sam made sure to stay on the opposite side of the house. Sam didn't like that the cub had no regard for him at all, but he respected it. He had a spot in his heart for the loners and freaks of the world.
Besides, he was more fun to talk to than Doc, especially when Dean decided to hold a grudge and cut off radio communications. Though he'd prefer Dean to a pet. Cas mostly ignored him. Dean was more fun, just the right side of infuriatingly contrary to keep things interesting. If only he wasn't such a sensitive SOB.
--
"C'mon, Dean, it's not that hard. Just take your turn. Go ahead, "I spy with my little eye..." Sam paused and waited, but Dean didn't fill in the blanks, so he continued, "something in the color..."
"Black, Sam. Black. It's dark down here."
"I turned the power back on ages ago."
"Fine, so besides the space heater and the dehumidifier light, which I'm pretty sure means the tank is full, by the way, it's dark down here."
"Fine, then I'll go... I spy with my little eye, something in the color... brown."
"Oh, that's so much better than black."
"I call it like I see it."
"Let me guess. Is it the wood floor?"
"No."
"Wooden walls?"
"No."
"Rafters, doors, table chairs, cupboards, spoons, ceiling...?"
"No, and you're not playing right."
"I don't want to play 'I Spy' Sam."
"I was just trying to pass the time."
"When am I getting out of here?"
He almost said, "I don't know," but changed it to, "When I say so," instead. The first might sound too much like, 'I miss you.' Because Dean was a sap and would hear that, not because Sam actually did.
But hell, if he was any good at being alone, they wouldn't have been in that mess.
--
Dean didn't know exactly what Sam was trying to accomplish by locking him down in the hole, but he had a clue it wasn't working.
The whispers were fainter down here, swallowed by the dark or the humidity, or just the distance, but they'd been there the whole time, gradually getting louder. Some nights he slept with the radio keyed under his pillow so the static drowned them out.
The downhill slide was slower, but there was no doubt where things were heading. His hands had been shaking for days, and even Sam's voice sliced through his head like a blow torch. His sheets stayed soaked with sweat, his body trembling with cold.
But hey, what Sam didn't know wouldn't hurt him.
Of course, it was starting to hurt Dean a whole lot. He gave up trying to sleep altogether, because he had a door to build before he bit, and at least fifty more glyphs to transfer from his memory to his flesh.
--
Dean smashed their last radio on a Tuesday. Sam was already at wit's end. That damned wolf had been whining and scratching at the floor all day, and nothing Sam did, short of wringing his scraggly neck made him stop.
"Dammit, Dean! That was the last one," he shouted. "Don’t make me come down there."
That's when the screaming started, followed by the howling. Cas ran to the cellar door and began digging at the frame frantically, a low howl eeking from his throat.
Sam tossed Cas aside roughly enough to make the animal yelp as it collided with the wall behind him. He opened the door to find it pitch dark on the other side and flipped on the switch. The act was followed immediately by a high-keening moan.
Dean was at the bottom of the stairs, pale and slippery, lips bruised from biting them, some of the bruises yellow and old. The runes that’d been confined to his limbs had made their way up his neck and over his jaw, and Sam didn’t have time to wonder how Dean managed that in the dark. "Dean!"
When Dean looked up at him, his eyes were ringed red, the only other color in his face the circles around his nostrils where he'd smashed his nose against the floor.
"Do it!" Dean was past begging.
"No!" Sam stooped to the floor and heaved Dean over his shoulder, ignoring the way his touch made Dean flinch away. "No, this is..." Sam searched for something to say, "it's like a bad tooth. It always hurts the worst before it dies." He dropped Dean onto the cot, wincing at the smell, not even a rustle from the heavy, sodden sheets. "We're gonna wait it out." Truth was, he’d been wondering whether his blood changed any other properties of the serum. Was it really an immortality serum still, or would Dean run out of lives like a cat?
For all his uncontrolled thrashing, Dean's grip was strong when it wrapped in Sam's shirt collar and held tight, his breath fetid in Sam's face. "We?"
"Yeah, yeah," Sam pried Dean's hands away, resisted the urge to tie them down, but only because he had nothing to tie them with. "We'll wait it out together. Just like old times, right?"
But it wasn't like old times. Back then, Dean cared more about keeping up appearances and not scaring Sam than about letting on how bad things actually were. So not the case anymore.
It took him about an hour to cave and go back upstairs. He listened for another thirty minutes, felt his own throat scraped raw and closing shut from screaming.
It only took him two minutes once he made up his mind, to find the gun and end it. Forty-five seconds of that was spent fighting off Cas.
Part Four