Part Two
--August, 2009-- San Dimas, California.
It all went down at the Circle K. Or it would’ve if that particular Circle K hadn’t been bought out by Exxon. And the guy cowering in the phone booth was no Rufus come to mentor his Bill and Ted, just some poor schmuck who got a front row seat to the demise of an Angel of God at the hands of Sam and Castiel. The feat didn’t involve any criss-crossing jumps through the space time continuum, but it might as well have for all Sam could believe it. He felt a lot less like a Wyld Stallyn and lot more like an Urkel when he stumbled to his knees and croaked, "Did I... Did I do that?"
"You did." Castiel was either at a loss for words or just, well... Cas. Sam couldn’t tell. If the angel’s expression changed at all as he stood in the blackened shadow on the pavement where Zachariah met his demise, Sam couldn’t see it, his own vision still clouded and prickling at the edges.
"But..."
"I thought only an angel could kill an angel," Bobby finished, offering a hand to heave Sam off the blacktop.
"Or a man with angel in his blood."
"Angel?" Sam choked on the word, or maybe he choked on something else and the word just scraped its way past.
Castiel turned away from the scarred ground and gazed beyond them. Power lines snapped and sparked in a widening arc with Sam the compass point in the center as the city went dark around them.
"Azazel was only a demon after he fell, Sam. Hell changed him at a base level, as it does everything that enters, but the demon is only a taint, a poison, not a complete reconstruction. His blood was both angel and demon, and therefore, so are you."
"But you..." Sam stuttered, unsure if cleansed or purified were the appropriate words. "You pulled it out. The blood. I thought..."
"I undid what you did to pollute yourself. I did not change what you are. Only God can remake you in his image... if that is His will."
As the darkness closed in around them, Sam’s eyes fell to his hands, his fingertips still glowing and twitching with the latent energy of whatever power had surged through him just minutes ago. "So that was... angel power?" Still agape and more than a little unsteady on his feet. "When you taught me the meditation, did you know that’s what I was tapping?"
"I..." Castiel’s chin dropped into his chest. "I hoped."
"You hoped?!" Bobby seethed, shoving his Jacques seed cap down tighter over his brow after making a half-hearted gesture to throw the thing at Castiel and thinking better of it. "You taught the kid some cockamamie Harry Potter hocus pocus, dragged us halfway across the country because he talked in his sleep, and then got us into a showdown with one of Lucifer’s Generals because you... had a hunch?"
"In a manner of speaking," Castiel conceded.
Bobby spat in the dirt, saliva and blood, because none of them escaped unscathed, well, except the dude in the phone booth, and hitched up his jeans. "Yeah, well, just so we’re clear."
"Clear?" Sam was still watching static charges jump from fingertip to fingertip when he realized Bobby and Castiel were already making their way back to the truck without him. He swatted his hands against his jeans like he was knocking off so much angelic dust and scrambled to catch up. "We are most definitely not clear. I talked in my sleep? That’s how we ended up in San Dimas? What did I say?"
"Zachariah’s in San Dimas." Castiel’s frustrating brevity was going to get him a punch in the face one of these days. Especially now that Sam knew he might actually be able to make it hurt.
"Fine, then, who told me that?"
"Dean."
Sam missed the door handle and cracked his forehead against the window. Instead of pressing his hand to the knot that caused, he rubbed the back of his head, the only real hurt being that no one actually cuffed him there. "Dean. Of course." He hadn’t actually forgotten that Dean didn’t have his back on this one. There might even have been a moment when his fingers started sparking and that power surged through him, cannon ball through a bubble wand, when he was glad Dean wasn’t there to see. Somehow tapping into something bigger than Heaven or Hell made him feel like a preschooler hiding wet bed sheets in the bottom of the hamper. No way could he shake the feeling of cold and clammy that meant Dean wasn’t there while he stumbled through the dark. "Does Dean know he told me that?"
"No. You only spoke with his subconscious."
"Great," Sam grumbled. "Spent the last four years trying to get Dean to talk to me, and when he does, neither one of us thinks to turn on the video camera." He slid into the cab, long legs banging the bottom of the glove compartment, because it was Bobby’s truck, and Bobby’s bench seat, and Bobby’s shorter legs trying to reach the pedals. "I don’t suppose Dean’s subconscious told my subconscious where Lucifer is."
"What would you do if you knew?"
Sam bumped shoulders with Castiel harder than he could dismiss as accidental. It wasn’t like he didn’t know exactly how much room he had on the seat with Castiel straddling the stick shift, but he still wasn’t quite perturbed enough to hit the angel with intent. He was also still shaky enough to have no real strength other than his own weight. "What do you think I’d do? I’d go after him."
Castiel folded the tails of his coat against his knees so the shifter was more accessible as Bobby slid in beside him. "Then, no. He did not say."
Bobby didn’t pretend his flask was full of holy water when he kicked back a swig and tossed it to Sam. Castiel didn’t flinch as the flask narrowly missed his head, the metal reflecting the red and blue flashers of approaching emergency vehicles before they roared from the scene.
Sam was more than a little disappointed Castiel’s head didn’t hit the back window due to the sudden acceleration, and he swallowed the disappointment with the rest of Bobby’s whiskey.
When the walls started crawling in the middle of the night, he chalked it up to good whiskey and bad housekeeping, because cockroaches couldn’t dance. And once he stuffed cotton balls in his ears, they couldn’t sing either.
--November, 2013-Cabin
He awoke, but his eyes remained closed.
Dean clasped a handful of blanket with his right hand, clenching and releasing against the matt fuzziness of shabby wool, dank from condensation and sweat.
A cascading trickle of light seeped through the window, caused him to shield his eyes. He blinked away the watery blur, felt the saline spill over his cheek and dissolve into the pillow.
The pads of his finger tips tingled, with the flat of his hand he brushed over the bedding, feeling the kinetic warmth seep into his skin. Being... whatever he was-- undead, immortal, a monster of unknown composition-- felt oddly familiar. He was reminded of months, years locked away in his own mind, in the dark, starved for any kind of input with only the walls and floor to touch, only his breath in his ears, straining, straining to distinguish what sound was heartbeats and what was footsteps, how a slip of tissue paper under the door snapped and crackled like staticky sheets out of a hot dryer. Everything looked sharper, brighter, clearer, and felt hotter, colder... emptier, like the world had turned to liquid, and he was swimming instead of standing, going down the drain.
He was surprised to find his legs met the floor with a solid thunk and then bore his weight, half expected something of a moon landing effect. He stood, stayed standing, and eventually the room stopped spinning, but the air stayed heavy and eddied over his skin like water. Looking down to his fingertips took three distinct movements of his head, everything herky-jerky and disconnected. Despite the tingling and general sensation of melting and oozing, nothing dripped from his fingertips, and no amount of staring at them, perplexed, could dull the sensation that there was.
His breath came out in clouds, white that picked up flecks of light from the barely glowing coals in the fireplace. Without reason, he followed it to the window, one breath at a time, and when he reached the glass, the edges of frost between the muttons curled back away from him like the edges of a page on a fire. It shimmered. Frost did that. Frost with a full moon back drop had always done that. But now it was different. The occasional sparkle of silver became a glow, became a rolling arc of blue-white current. Mesmerized, he leaned closer, lips nearly brushing the glass, and chased back the frost one huffing breath at a time, trembling fingertips following in its wake, until he’d cleared a whole square of glass and bumped against a mutton. Dean butted up against the metal, and jerked back, the difference between the glass and the divider so different, it pulsed through is arm like a feedback whine through a telephone.
Fingers drawn up to eye level, he expected to find them charred or bleeding. Instead, melted frost slid between the whorls, then down his wrist and over the pulse point, all the way to the crook of his elbow. That’s when he realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt. And he was cold.
The curtains on the window were some sort of linen, and up-close, Dean could see tar stains and discolorations, maybe from the fireplace, or maybe the owner was a smoker. He fisted a handful of the fabric, ignoring the way it felt like sandpaper against his skin, and pulled. The entire thing came down along with the rod and half of the hangers, which pinged to the floor and skated away into the darkness. He drew it up over his head and let it slide down to his shoulders, fought with it briefly as it caught in his ponytail. At that point, he caught his reflection in the exposed glass. The opaque whites of his eyes and the silver piercings were like a broken constellation against black. Exhaling slowly, he backed away a step so the breath was cold by the time it hit the glass and curled into new tendrils of frost, new sparkles of reflected moonlight that gratefully occluded the reflection of what he’d become.
With a jerk, the curtain slid down to rest upon his shoulders, taking out the ponytail holder so the hair fell over his eyes. He didn’t brush it away. Securing the drape around his neck, he reached inside, out of habit, to pull the amulet out and lay it on top.
Only it wasn’t there.
Suddenly, he wasn’t swimming anymore. He was drowning, stumbling through the cabin, into walls and chairs, the curtain dragging behind him like a fishing net, and no matter how hard he listened, all he heard was huffing breath, thudding footsteps, pounding heartbeat, not... NOT what he needed to hear. He didn’t plan to go out into the snow, but when he reached the door (Do not open the door, Dean) he opened it.
--
Run away like a prodigal...
Sam's eyes snapped open, then promptly rolled in their sockets. The Unheavenly Host was serenading him again. He hadn’t quite found the word for it-- avatar, maybe? Or effigy? Familiar? He just knew he’d sleep a lot better if he made good on his promise to kill the damned thing, but what would be the point? It always came back. He hummed a line from the "The Cat Came Back," if for no other reason than to avoid having to hear it come over the speakers, and he rolled over on his cot to find Smelly Cat glaring up at him, yellow eyes half-squinted, tail question marking one way and then the other. "Always with the impeccable timing." Who needed an alarm clock when he had immortality and nothing at all to do with the time of day? If he was still mostly warm-blooded, he probably would've noticed the chill in the air, but he actually needed to see the front door standing wide open before he got the message.
He rolled out of bed and jumped over the loft railing to the floor, not because he was in a hurry, just because he could, landed hard enough to shake a picture frame off the wall behind him. He stood on the front porch with his arms folded across his chest. The sunrise was really quite spectacular, and he usually didn't bother getting up early enough to see it. He figured he might as well take the opportunity while he could. Dean would keep.
Sam just hoped he wouldn't be frozen when he found him, though admittedly, a stiff body was much easier to maneuver than a limp one. He knew from experience. Thinking on it a moment longer, he decided to start the fire and get a cup of coffee before he went out. He shut the door and went back inside, scratching the back of his head and tapping on his bluetooth.
"When did he leave?"
"About two hours ago."
"I don’t suppose he left a note."
"How the hell would I know?" Doc was always such a charmer in the morning.
"Just making conversation," Sam said, grimacing at the bitter reheated coffee as he removed it from the microwave and forced a swallow down. "How far do you think he can get?"
"I’d take the snowmobile," Doc suggested.
"Can’t. I dumped out all the gas," Sam shrugged. "Besides, looks like a beautiful day for a hike. I’ve been dying to try out these snowshoes."
"You’re an ass."
"And you have a foul mouth." Sam smirked. "Just for that, I might bring you inside to cat-sit while I’m gone."
"You wouldn’t."
"Oh, I would."
Morning routine out of the way, fire crackling under the hearth, the sun was over the tree line when Sam finally left the cabin.
--
He wasn't even winded when Dean came into sight, plodding along at a slow, steady pace, deceptively determined considering the trail of footsteps zigzagged and loopty-looped thither and yon like the tracks of a fox tracking a mouse under the snow. He expected Dean to acknowledge his presence, maybe run away, but he neither sped up nor picked a direction that could accurately be described as ‘away.’ Sam got the distinct feeling that if he were to run ahead and wait, Dean would walk right into him rather than try to evade. Instead he sped up just enough to fall into step behind. From there he could hear Dean talking to himself but not what he was saying, a constant stream of words slurred together and muted by the rattling saw of breath. He sounded like a man in the throes of an asthma attack or an anaphylactic reaction, yet his words seemed unconcerned, without inflection even when they started to come in bursts of only one or two as his breath grew shorter. He couldn't tell if Dean was ignoring him, or if this was the new Dean Winchester version of blind panic.
"Y’know," Sam said, "I can appreciate you wanting to get your sea legs back and all, but since you don’t really seem to have a destination in mind, I’m gonna have to suggest you meander your way back the way you came."
Dean came to a stumbling halt, straightening enough so that he wasn’t tipped into the wind but not enough to expose the front of his body to the cold. That curtain couldn’t have been providing much warmth. His head tipped almost comically toward the sound of Sam’s voice, then wobbled around on a spindly neck. He managed to croak out, "Why?" before the wobble transferred down his spine to his knees and he sat down hard, all the grace of a pinwheel with bent spokes.
Sam stopped beside him, his knees at Dean’s shoulder height. His hands in the pockets of his coat, he shrugged, flapping the coattails around his calves, considered saying something on the order of, ‘because I said so,’ but decided the truth couldn’t hurt. He trained an assessing eye on the reddened scratch marks clawed into the Dean’s collar bone and down his chest where his fingers still scraped and dug, already having ripped off the top two buttons. "Pestilence."
To Sam’s chagrin, Dean only glanced up at him, barely a twitch of an eyebrow before he went back to scratching and heaving, lips moving but not enough air to make words.
"I got the powers of all four horsemen," he explained, "but that's one of my favorites. I mean, how awesome is it that I can say 'a pox on you,' and have it actually happen?"
Dean tipped forward, turned his head at the last second so as not to end up with a mouthful of snow, and sprawled flat out, his gasps coming farther and farther apart.
"It's all in the blood, you know." Sam stooped beside his prone brother and snaked a hand around his neck, felt out the thready, erratic pulse. Looked like he’d be carrying Dean back up the mountain. Made him wish he hadn’t trashed the Mule’s engine when he parked it in the shed. "Mine’s like gumbo, every kind of disease boiled down into the rue." He clapped a hand on Dean's shoulder, left his arm draped around his back. "Thing is, I can control what I want to get out and when." He paused for dramatic effect, because even if Dean didn't get the joke, the art of comedy was still in the timing, and no punch line should be delivered before it's time. "You got any latent psychic ability I don't know about? 'Cause you got a whole lot of my super unleaded flowing through your veins. I wouldn’t recommend you expose anyone to yourself unless you actually want to see someone’s face melt off."
Dean worked a hand out from under himself and took his last breath while staring at his waggling fingers.
Sam stood from his crouched position and gazed up the long trail back to the cabin. With a sigh and a roll of his eyes, he said, "You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille," and heaved Dean over his shoulder.
He couldn’t even blame the cat for that one, but he was still gonna kill it one of these days.
--
A week later, Dean still hadn’t found his ‘sea legs’ or his amulet. He hadn’t really asked about either one. Sam was more than happy to monologue and proselytize about Dean’s purpose, his progress, what the next stage of the experiment would entail. From his count, he’d died about four times already, and true to Sam’s promise, he always came back, along with the tingling, hypersensitivity, and crawling skin awareness that things weren’t quite working out like he’d planned.
Not that he’d ever had a solid plan. Everything was a hunch, but one thing he’d learned in his years of isolation was to trust his instincts. If that translated to "Have faith in yourself, Dean," then he had to hand it to Castiel, because he never had that before, only going with his gut when there was no other choice. Now, that was pretty much the only choice. He was fine with that. He was. This wasn’t really about him, anyway. It hadn’t been since he opened the door.
-- January, 2013-- Three and a half years in solitary
The walls had been coming down for what seemed like hours. It started with just a vibration in the floor, escalated to floorboards jumping out of their grooves and rattling together like old bones, and that was before his notes started coming loose of the walls and fluttering down, disappearing between the widening cracks. Dean didn’t stop to think how imaginary corkboard and plaster could generate the same sound as a blackboard with fingernails scritching over the surface, just clapped his hands over his ears and slid backwards against the door. The one glance through the portal he managed before the peephole closed revealed nothing but desert and a legion rising out of it, shimmering mirages through a wall of heat, that could either have been real or just imagined like puddles of water on pavement, but he had a feeling it was real. Hard to say, just then, whether the rush of adrenaline through him was hope or fear, some of both, but when the walls started to come down, leaving just him and the door in a swirling cloud of darkness, he stopped trying to wait for the smoke to clear.
He didn’t know anyone was on the other side of the door until he tried to turn the knob and it turned the other way, sliding through the sweaty grip of his palm to rattle in the latch. It was pointless to ask who was there, could only be one of two people so far as he could tell, and he wouldn’t hear the answer anyway. Hand fumbling for the knob, he knew there was as much chance the whole thing was a ploy to flush him out and force him into the open, but after three and a half years, the emptiness of the room was almost more stifling than the cloying fear of what lay beyond. If anything, were this an attempt to flush him out, it was definitely overkill on the part of whoever set it up.
As the knob turned three quarters of the way to open, the entire door tilted back on him, so that he was bent at the knee, thighs pressed against his calves and forehead to the wood when it finally sprang open. The second the latch released, all the coiled tension in his body went with it and thrust him through the opening like a jack in the box on the last note of "Pop, Goes the Weasel." He wound up draped over the bottom of the door frame, fingers scrabbling for whatever purchase they could find on the other side.
What they found was a hand, and then two small fingers, curled around his own and keeping him from sliding backward. With a kick and heave, he lurched out, wound up atop two feet clad in black Dickies work boots, a size he hadn’t worn in fifteen years, at least.
"Dean! Hurry! Lucifer’s coming!"
The voice... familiar, but impossible. "Sss-sam?"
He rolled, partially on purpose and partially due to the floor bucking beneath him, wound up staring up into the face of his nine-year-old brother.
Sam must’ve noticed the confusion on his face or anticipated his reaction. "What?" he asked. "You really thought I left you here all alone?"
Standing slowly, Dean grasped Sam’s shoulders and stared into his eyes, looking for any flicker of something that would indicate it was not Sam at all, but he could find nothing, found his fingers curling tightly into the soft hoodie. "How long? When? I thought?"
"I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you it was me," Sam answered, and when he did, he used Dean’s voice, the same sickening sweet Dean’s voice Dean had been hearing through the door for years. "If I had, you would have opened the door."
"But, if it’s you, then how...?" So many questions, so many things that didn’t add up.
"You say, ‘you’ as though we were ever really two separate people." Sam smiled, then-- tired and a little sad-- before he said, "Now, go!"
Confused, Dean shook himself to an upright position, suddenly reminded that the world was closing in around them, a cloud of black so dark even he couldn’t see through it with eyes that’d grown accustomed to the lack of light. It swirled overhead, faster and faster, flinging loose one long tendril and then another. He realized in horror that each one had a hold of Sam, was wrapped around his legs and ankles, his neck, climbing higher, drawing tighter.
"No! I’m not leaving you."
Sam laughed, or at least his face laughed, lungs squeezed too tight to follow through. "You couldn’t..." He gasped. "... if you wanted to." With his one free hand, he reached into the pocket of his hoodie and drew out a key, a bone key exactly like the one Dean had shattered in the lock all those months ago. "Where you go, I go." He pressed the key into Dean’s hand. "Now, run away, and don’t forget... to lock the door behind you."
"Sam..."
"Just do it!" With that, Sam jerked free of the vines and dove through the open doorway. The whoosh of movement as the cloud moved to follow slammed the door shut behind him, and no matter how Dean tried to push through it, he couldn’t reach more than the keyhole.
The cloud buzzed in his ears like a swarm of bees, made it impossible to think. He shut his eyes, fighting for composure, the key zinging in his hand, when a voice echoed behind his ears. "Where you go, I go." The last reverberation twanged like a tuning fork, the pitch gradually rising until it overwhelmed his senses, sound into light, and he saw it, a spark in the darkness, zinging over the backdrop of his eyelids in a pattern he not only recognized but knew by heart. "The door swings both ways."
When he opened his eyes, the keyhole was the only thing still visible, glowing like a beacon.
He broke that key, too.
And then he ran.
--January, 2013-Death Valley, California
Dean only realized he was on his knees when the world pulled back suddenly, serpent slither on the very edges of his vision, and he tipped the opposite way. The slip and slide jerked to an abrupt halt with the closing of a fist in the collar of his jacket. When he opened his eyes… brown loafers. One even still had the penny showing, a little green around the edges, but still there, United States of America, In God We Trust, and all that jazz. There was still a good ol’ US of A, and its pennies were still worthless. They won. Didn’t they? That deserved a moment of silence, even a forfeit one. And how could the world be a hollow victory?
"Cas..." Fuck, his throat hurt, every bit as dry and raw as it had been the last time he woke up with Castiel at his side.
Only Castiel.
Whether he couldn’t--or wouldn’t--speak, silence was a good enough cover for the chaos that accompanied waking from a years-long nightmare. Dean clutched his throat, massaging at it with fingers too bony to be his own, like some puppet hand or prosthesis had attached itself to the stump of what used to be Dean Winchester, and Castiel tipped him from nearly face-planted in the dirt to squinting up into the noonday sun. Still that sickening sensation of something swirling and swimming on the periphery, most likely the ghost mirage of heat off the baked sand. Fucking Death Valley. He sure knew how to pick a place to make a last stand, out of the frying pan and into the fire. Oh yeah, Dean was home. At least, as close to it as he’d ever been. Bring on the peace and rest, baby, because he was tired, and his whole body ached and throbbed, radiating from the inside like a tanning lamp set too high and working the wrong side of his skin.
Understandable. Still sucked, though. Last time, the burn was leftover from a vent tube. What came out this time was a whole lot bigger, and Dean didn’t have to remember to know it (only it, because He was too much credit, too personal for something with no right to be so) went kicking and screaming. But at least it went.
His eyes rolled around in their gritty sockets, the scrape barely enough to spring tears to the corners when there was likely no moisture to spare in the rest of his body. He wasn’t looking for anything, turned inside out and backward, but something found him, piercing eyes and cowlick of sun-bleached hair over parched lips. Castiel laid him down, held him there with a hand flat over his chest, then proceeded to try and drown him with water trickled from a flask he produced from a pocket. Not exactly a miracle or anything befitting an angel of the Lord, but appreciated nonetheless. When in Rome, you know? Dean spluttered and choked but tipped his head up and opened his mouth for more, Castiel’s voice a cicada drone in his ears.
"You stopped it."
"Good… I guess." So, why did he feel like it stopped him?
--November, 2013--Cabin, One Week Later
"Your endurance is shot to hell."
Dean didn’t answer, knew he wasn’t really expected to. When Sam was like this, hovering and poking, that little puzzling line between his eyebrows, he was either talking to himself or having conversations with who or whatever spoke to him through that headset. Use of the pronoun ‘you’ was just a formality, shorter than ‘the subject’ since Sam refused to call him by name when he was on the table. Dean actually found that to be a good thing. It would be a hell of a lot harder to convince himself Sam was still in there if Sam ever acknowledged the meat suit petri dish on the table was actually his brother. Dean’s Sam wasn’t a monster... yet. There was still some Sammy in there, or maybe, in here.
Not that it mattered. He couldn’t open the door without the key.
Dean caught Sam’s wrist, his grip not strong, but placed in such a way as to make Sam almost drop the scalpel, blade still slicked with blood. "I want my necklace back," he said.
Sam met his eyes, and for a second the yellow flickered to something deeper, almost green, and the lines at the corners of his lashes almost smoothed out... almost. Dean knew he was pressing his luck. Catching Sam off guard like that had produced mixed results so far. While Dean found it promising, that little crack in the monster mask, Sam didn’t seem to appreciate the slip. Like milking the venom from a snake bite. Out with the bad and in with the good... he hoped. This time, the moment lingered, their gazes locked until the scalpel finally dropped from Sam’s fingers and pinged to the floor. Then his jaw set, angry huff of breath through flared nostrils, and Dean wasn’t really surprised when he picked the scalpel off the floor and went right back to cutting. Through the haze of pain, and right before he passed out, he heard Sam hiss, "The good Lord giveth, and He taketh away."
His eyes rolled back in his head, and stayed there, focused on the runes emblazoned in his memory on tiny squares of toilet paper. He still couldn’t read them, after three and a half years, but he was willing to bet ‘Door Number Two’ was a fair enough interpretation. Body convulsing one last time, he tumbled into darkness.
--
I’m the invisible man. I’m the invisible man.
"He came back wrong." Sam scowled against the window pane, watched as Dean lit his third cigarette on the cherry of the second before grinding the butt into the porch with his heel. Dean must've felt the weight of his glance, judging by the way he kept glancing back over his shoulder to where Sam stood in the window. Sam really wished he'd stop doing that. He had no desire to see the fresh black tattooed around Dean's lips or the deep cut in the lower one Sam had put there when he saw the new ink. Pretty soon it wouldn't even look like Dean anymore.
"Hypersensitivity is a known complication," Doc chimed in his ear. The electronic voice was all wrong, too high, too feminine, too chipper, and spaced out too precisely like someone trying to force logic where there was none. Or maybe it just seemed that way in context. "The serum is a neurotoxin. It kills the old nervous system while slowly building a new, more efficient one. It allows primary functions to continue after traumatic injury or... organ loss. His central nervous system is practically its own entity. Once the old nerves stop resisting and allow themselves to be reabsorbed, the pain will stop and most likely, the self-mutilation will as well."
As if Dean's behavior was nothing more than adolescent angst and growing pains. Cutting like a teenage girl in a bad relationship. Except Dean wasn’t just slashing himself. His cuts were deliberate, patterns and symbols that looked like runes, but nothing Sam recognized, nothing Dean should recognize to the best of Sam’s knowledge. Half of him suspected Dean was only doing it to piss him off. The other half hadn’t failed to notice the strange thrum and twang that went through him sometimes when he touched Dean without gloves or a blade. It wasn’t just the necklace, then, since Dean hadn’t had his hands on it for weeks. It was Dean, or something Dean was doing.
I'm the invisible man. I'm the invisible man
And Sam wouldn’t mind, really. Whatever tripped Dean’s trigger, so long as he stayed, but he was just so... relentless, like he could think of nothing else except carving and tattooing himself into an archaic totem of some sort. He kinda reminded Sam of Sam, back in the days when he was studying for the SATs, deadset on landing a scholarship and getting out on his own. He hadn’t cared, then, if it was like he wasn’t even there anymore. Figured Dean and Dad needed to learn to deal without him anyway, because he wasn’t staying. Now, he couldn’t help but resent that Dean didn’t seem to have any time for him, when Sam was the only reason Dean was still even around. Seemed all they did was bicker.
He’d expected a mourning period, some pouting, maybe some flailing, bitching and moaning. Instead, he got Dean the little princess, working tirelessly to weave vests out of nettle even as she rolled to her execution.
Incredible how you can, see right through me.
It was maddening, which would mean a lot more if Sam wasn’t already convinced he was insane.
Smoke curled out of Dean's nose and the corners of his lips while he peeled at something on his thumb that seemed to be bothering him. Probably skin. He said it crawled. Said it the way he said the sky was blue or the ground was hard. When the last tendril wafted away, Dean took another long drag, the cherry smoldering bright red, then let the cigarette dangle lax in his mouth while the breath leaked out of him. Their eyes locked for a second when he glanced over his shoulder for the dozenth time.
"But it's still him, right?" Sam asked.
"I've been rebuilt at least ten times. I'm still me as far as I know."
"He's not how I remember him." The Dean he knew shrugged off concussion, impalement, dislocation, and internal bleeding, but cussed like a sailor for the duration of his one and only tattooing session. He was complicated and contradictory, churning below the surface but cocksure and steady on top. This one was just... absorbed. Otherwise occupied. Not at home.
I'm the invisible man. I'm the invisible man.
"That's an unfair expectation, isn't it?"
"Why? I went to all this trouble, months of planning, so I could have my brother. If I wanted just anyone I could stand in the road and put out my thumb."
"Your brother?"
"And that's not him."
"What you mean is, he's not behaving like you planned."
"I guess."
"Why should he give you what you want?"
"I'm his brother. That's what family is for."
"You've been standing in the window for fifteen minutes and you haven't even fogged up the glass. The way he sees it, you're the one who came back wrong."
It's criminal how you can, see right through me.
"I can't change what I am."
"Then change his mind."
Sam snorted, marring the glass by bumping it with his forehead. Change Dean's mind. Antichrist or not, Sam wasn't sure the power to do that even existed. The Apocalypse was a shorter order.
--
"What? Does that hurt?" Sam gripped Dean's wrist hard enough to feel the bones shift and scrape against each other. If Dean would just suck it up and hold still, but no, he kept jerking away, and Sam was forced to find a ragged rhythm. Grip, twist, jab, and jerk, the last two steps in rapid succession if he wanted to make a clean stitch and not just end up tearing the skin with the needle. "You can't be wussing out over some stitches. You're getting soft, big brother." Grip, twist, jab, and jerk. He cussed as Dean's sweat-slick arm slipped his grasp, tearing yet another stitch.
"Fuck!" Sam tossed the arm away, the gaping cut along the front still only half stitched. Sam should just let the bastard bleed out. It wouldn’t be the first time, but he was making a mess, and Sam knew from experience, he wasn’t going to clean it up. Sam might be the Antichrist, but cleanliness was still next to godliness. Apparently that old saying wasn’t God specific.
He stood abruptly and leaned in, because there was no point in being the top of the food chain if he couldn't fucking loom over the rest of it. "You know what you need?" When Dean didn't look up, Sam yanked his head back, waited until the white eyes squinted and slid in his general direction. "Visual aids." Releasing his grip, he cuffed Dean on the back of the head and strolled out onto the porch, taking care to make sure each footfall vibrated through the floor boards hard enough to jangle the glassware on the other side of the cabin.
He came back a few minutes later dangling Doc from one hand like something out of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, minus the cape and horse. Smelly Cat stayed close on his heels, Sylvester eyeing Tweety in the overhead cage, twined between Sam’s legs, and nearly tripping him three times before he gave up and just stomped on its tail. The cat gave a hiss and smacked him hard on the knee with his paw, then scuttled under the table, now with a noticeable kink in his trailing appendage.
Don’t lose our head! Don’t lose your head!
"Doc, Dean, Dean, Doc," he introduced, "I believe you've met." He dropped the head on the table and propped it up between two ceramic salt and pepper shakers so Doc ended up glaring over Dean's head to the ceiling fan and had to look down his own nose to see anything else.
Nodding decisively, Sam settled back into the chair across from Dean and held out his hand. "Now, you can suck it up and let me stitch this up, or you can end up like Doc here. Y'know, he didn't even whimper when I sawed off the rest of his body." He wiped his shirt sleeve across his upper lip. "Of course, he was probably glad to be rid of it. Sucker was rank. Nothing like smell of putrefied flesh in the morning."
Dean spared the corpse head one or two fleeting glances, then ducked his eyes away and held out his arm. Sam chuckled. "I knew you'd see it my way. You just gotta ask yourself, how pretty do you want to be a thousand years from now?
Seeing that Sam was preoccupied, Smelly Cat took advantage of the situation and jumped up on the table, circling ‘round and ‘round Doc Benton like the leg of his favorite human. With each pass the crooked tail somehow ended up under Doc’s nose, and Sam had to laugh at the genius of that move. Tried to imagine having cat hairs lodged in his sinuses and no lungs to sneeze them out with. Sometimes, old Smelly Cat was a cat after Sam’s own heart.
Don’t drink and drive your car. Don’t get breathalyzed. Don’t lose your hea-aad.
And sometimes he was just a pain in the ass. Sam tore the newly inserted stitch himself this time, jerking his elbow to shove the cat away from the table. When Doc tipped over and wound up flat on his left cheek, Sam turned off his headset. A hundred year old head shouldn’t even know some of those words.
Grab, twist, jab, jerk, Sam finished up the rest of the stitches on that arm and then the other, silence punctuated only by an occasional grunt and hiss. When it was over, he patted everything dry with a clean towel. He held onto Dean's left arm, admiring his work, tiny, neat stitches perfectly spaced. "Let's not have any more stunts like that, okay? You're not doing anyone any favors. Doc doesn't even have blood or lungs, and he's still alive. You've got his serum and my blood to spice things up. You're stuck here."
"I wasn’t trying to..." Dean started and then stopped, already scratching at the wound, a nervous tick Sam knew would progress to pressing his thumbnail into the skin hard enough to leave a red, raised line, which he’d then cut and tattoo on later, when Sam wasn’t looking.
"Weren’t what? Trying to kill yourself?" Sam dropped his utensils into the wash bin like so much silverware, glaring sidelong. "No, I get that. You want me to do it for you? You think I will?" He couldn’t take Dean’s distraction and pinged him between the eyes until he looked up. "You think it’s not suicide if you get me to do it for you?"
Standing less deliberately this time, he grasped Doc by the hook and dragged him off the table instead of making a clean lift, just because he could. "I don't know where suicides go, but I know there's no place in Heaven for what we are, natural death or not. So you might as well enjoy the scenery while you’re here, because it’s gonna be a long, long time." A beat. "But look at the bright side. At least you're not alone."
He was out the door when he added, "And neither am I."
He wasn't surprised at all when he came back in from the porch to find Dean with his gun leveled on him. He couldn't die either, but it still hurt like a bitch when the bullet tore through his chest. He laughed a little before sitting down at the table to stitch himself up. "There now. Glad we got that out of our system. Soon as I'm done here, I'll cook us some dinner. Mac and cheese?"
Dean stared at him blankly.
"Yeah, sounds good to me, too."
--July, 2012--Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
"Sam, you can’t keep using your powers." Castiel pressed a cloth to the cut on Sam’s head.
"What do my powers have to do with anything? I just tripped on my way to the bathroom." No way Castiel knew he’d brained himself on the corner of the table while trying to catch a rat that wouldn’t stop singing the theme from "The Mickey Mouse Club." That was only in Sam’s head. Sure, stuff like that was happening all the time now-- every night, worse on nights after a battle, but Sam thought he was doing a pretty good job of hiding the after-effects. And as far as he knew, Castiel wasn’t getting much in the way of phone calls from home to tip him off.
Castiel ignored his denial. "If you continue to use your powers to kill, then we will lose our connection to Dean."
Sam snapped to attention. Fucking angel always knew more than he was letting on and always knew just which cat to let out of the bag in a given situation. "I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re taking out Lucifer’s Generals. Isn’t that why we need the connection to Dean in the first place? Why find out who they are if we’re not supposed to kill them?"
Castiel took Sam’s hand and placed it over the cloth so that Sam was holding it in place himself. "You are right. They need to die. But you cannot always be the one to deliver the final blow."
"I..." Sam choked a little. "Lucifer’s got my brother, Cas! He took him from right beside me, and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it." He dropped the cloth, hands going to his hair which had gotten longer than usual, but still not as long as Dean’s was when they caught that glimpse of him in Phoenix. "I couldn’t do anything then, but I can do this, now. I have to..."
"No. You do not." Castiel didn’t raise his voice, but his gaze didn’t falter, eyes hard and set so that Sam had to look away.
"Why not? They’re angel powers, now, right? Not demon. I’m using them for good. I don’t see the problem."
"The problem is that while you are part angel you are also part human." Castiel looked down, searching for words, then spoke more to the lapels of his coat than to Sam. "Something cold and dark has tainted my brothers. Eons of hatred and betrayal. Where do you think that goes when you kill one of them? Just evaporates into the ether?" He took one step forward and then crouched at the side of Sam’s bed, looked up into Sam’s face like he was begging to be heard. "It does not. It stays. And you... you draw it like a magnet. A human... the very thing they loathe, and an angel." He ducked down further when Sam tried to dodge his eyes away. "I cannot remove that taint from you the way I did the demon. If you do not stop, you will be no better than they are. You will be lost."
"What about the taint that’s already in me?" Barely a whisper. Sam almost didn’t believe he was admitting as much, but if Castiel knew, could tell him he wasn’t going insane...
"I am working to find a way to destroy it. But if there is a way, it is more ancient than I. I do not know that it can be removed." Sam felt himself sag a little, breath suddenly not holding up his chest wall. "So, you need to stop." A hand closed over Sam’s knee and squeezed. "We will get Dean back. And when he comes back, he will need his brother. Stop." Castiel asked again. "For him."
And he did, until he met Lucifer.
--December, 2013--Cabin
Opened, opened, opened up the window.
A hunting trip probably wasn't Sam's best or most original idea.
"We're going hunting for a few days. Running low on meat in the freezer."
A change of scenery was in order. Some fresh air, the great outdoors, a couple days away from the bubble, bubble toil and trouble chemistry set and speakers that had a gone from randomly blaring out anything to playing the theme from "Silver Spoons" on an endless loop. Smelly Cat knew it pissed him off and stayed out of sight for the most part, only occasionally wending his way between Sam’s feet when he stood in the doorway and watched the exodus move through the yard.
Loaded, loaded, loaded up the rifle.
Dean barely looked up from what he was doing-- carving little spider web patterns into the tips of his fingers. (He swore the scar tissue didn't tingle as much as the bare skin. Of course, wearing gloves was a stupid idea, because it was Sam's.) "Then stand in the yard and wait for something to come by. This place is like Mecca for all the wild and woolies lately. It's like they're on a freaking pilgrimage."
He was half right. It was more like an exodus. Every predator on the mountain was making the pilgrimage, and everything else was being flushed out ahead of them. Running away. No lions lying with lambs around here. Sam wasn't entirely sure what brought them around, whether they saw him as a leader or a threat. Maybe the stampede of rabbits and deer was some kind offering. At any rate, Dean was right. A hunting trip was a pretty piss poor excuse, and a thinly veiled one at that.
"C'mon. You're like T-Rex. You don't want to be fed. You want to hunt. It's in your blood."
"Really? I didn’t know I had any of my blood left."
"Well, then let's find out." Sam didn't intend to hit Dean on the head with the cap and gloves he chucked at him or to drop the snow boots on his stocking-clad feet, but he wasn't sorry he did it either. "Get off your ass and let's go."
Shot, he shot, he shot, he shot her in the chest.
Dean might or might not have sighted down the barrel of his gun in Sam's direction before sliding it into his jeans. Sam pretended not to notice and gathered up the rest of their gear.
And then, and then, he went right back to bed.
--
"Dude, take that outside."
"We are outside," Dean huffed.
"No, we're in a tent." Sam kicked the sleeping bag off his legs hard enough for it to slap the wall and shake the whole enclosure as if to prove his point.
"We're in a tent outside." Dean took another long drag, and smoke curled up to the ceiling.
"So, how's that different from being in a cabin that's outside?" Sam shook his head, because Dean was messing with it, and he knew full well that was the whole point. "Never mind. We're in closed quarters then. Common courtesy would be to smoke your cigarettes outside."
"You go outside. You're the one who's not fogging up the mirror anymore. Cold won't bother you."
"But the smoke will still be here when I come back. What's the point of that?"
"You live with a corpseless head on a hook, and you think cigarettes stink?"
"We live with a rotting head, who's really pissed at being left behind, by the way, and we have air fresheners for that."
"Then why didn't you bring some?"
"We're outside! Who needs air fresheners for the great outdoors?"
"I thought you said we were inside."
"You're twisting my words."
"Must be all that high octane Antichrist blood I got in me. Hear that dude's a real politician."
"Yeah, well, he learned everything he knows from his big brother."
Silence followed, so crushing Sam wondered if the tent would collapse on them.
Dean took another drag off his cigarette, and for a moment held it in his chest, choked up high against his throat. Then, he huffed it out hard enough to get it in Sam's face where it would, no doubt, bond to his hair and cling for the rest of the trip. Sam's hands curled into fists as Dean turned his blank eyes up from the floor and fixed them on Sam defiantly.
In one smooth lunge, Dean reached over head and slit a circular opening in the roof of the tent with his knife, blade flashing in the lantern light.
"There, now the smoke's outside." His voice cut as deftly as the knife.
Sam felt it bubble up from his center, something cold, and spiteful, and dark. The nylon walls fluttered as though a storm was blowing up around them. Maybe one was. Dean continued to smoke, unblinking, his left hand clawing up his right arm where he'd already dug a row of grooves and tattooed them on for posterity.
Sam tore the zipper on his way out and didn't come back until Dean was sound asleep.
--
When Dean was little, he used to get ear infections, the kind that no hot water bottle and baby medicine could fix, that made him cry into his pillowcase through the night waiting for the pain to go away so he could sleep. What he remembered most about that was the same thing he remembered about the sleepless nights he spent at eighteen, cutting wisdom teeth that refused to come through. When something hurt that bad, every pulse of his heart made it throb, and there was no sound louder than the sound of his own heart beating in his ears.
He hadn't really been able to hear much of anything since he woke up with Sam, the new Sam, looming over him with his glass of black poison. So, when he woke to whispering, harsh yet silent and scraping over his eardrums only a decibel louder than the throb, throb, throb of blood pounding through his veins, a thrill rushed through him. He wouldn't call it hope. There was no way he had any of that left, but definitely relief.
Anticipation.
Someone was trying to talk to him.
We fought to get to you in time, but we were too late.
Funny. Not long ago, he'd resented having them there, always talking, plotting, waiting for him to answer and tell them what they needed to know about Lucifer's plans, but during the worst of it -- that years playing passenger in his own body -- they were the only reassurance he'd had. Castiel said they'd all gone now, and Dean shouldn't be able to hear or speak with them anymore, but he woke to whispers, and for a second, wanted to believe they'd come back.
But only for a second.
Almost immediately, the whispers crescendoed to a scream, sharp claws over some blackboard in his head, and every muscle in his body clamped down, squeezing breath from him like water from a sponge. He curled into the fetal position, tensed when he felt Sam asleep at his back. With a spasm, he flipped over toward the opposite wall. He jerked away and pulled back the tent flap, his hands tetanic and refusing to cooperate, making it nearly impossible to work the zipper.
The first touch of snow against his palms jolted through him like electricity, still soothing in comparison to the liquid fire inside his skin. All he could manage was to crawl out into the nearest drift, dragging his legs more than using them, before he collapsed face-first into the cold.
The wet on his cheeks was only melted snow. He had nothing to cry about. He wasn't a child, and this wasn't an earache. This was forever, so he might as well suck it up, but it wasn’t about him. Never was. Something was wrong. More wrong than being... whatever it was he was, undead, unliving, fake. He wasn’t stupid. Dean knew he was an experiment. Knew experiments usually failed lots of times before they succeeded. He was never really worried about living forever, because not even Sam with powers was immune to the law of averages. He was never afraid of living forever. Alone or otherwise.
But suddenly, with his body on fire, nerve endings threatening to claw out of his skin, he was afraid of dying. "Not yet. Not yet. Not yet," he whispered, breath hot and scorching over his tongue.
After all, Castiel told him there were no rain checks. Sam said no one would come for him the way he was now. Dean was the only one. He’d already given up Heaven. Wouldn’t lose Sam, too.
"Not yet, not yet, not yet..." Something tugged at his leg, and he whipped around to find a wolf, teeth buried in the cuff of his jeans and pulling for all it was worth. "Dear God..."
God never came to Gethsemane, and he didn't come to Dean either.
But Sam did.
Part Three