[fic] Supernatural - There's Only One Sure Thing That I Know [1/4]
May 2nd (0 Days)
Dean, like an idiot, never bothered to get a new cell phone when he stopped hunting. The one in his pocket still has the same number, the same annoying ring, the same cracked screen and missing buttons that it did when he drove from Lawrence to Cicero six months ago. Now though, when it rings, it's almost always Ben asking for a ride or Lisa asking him to pick up something from the store. It's been a long time since Dean's gotten a call from Bobby or some sick fuck monster pretending to be Dad.
The phone starts making its God-awful little chirp while he's crammed under the Impala checking the brake line, and he picks it up on the first ring without looking. "Hey, kiddo," he says, "you done with practice?"
Dean's expecting to hear Ben asking him they can stop off for pizza and not tell Lisa just this once (again). Instead he hears a familiar voice on the other end saying, "No, Dean. I have not been practicing, nor do I appreciate being called... kiddo."
Dean feels like he's been punched in the stomach.
"Holy shit, Cas," he says, slightly breathless. "Where the hell have you been?"
Unsurprisingly, Castiel ignores the question Dean actually did ask and answers one he didn't, saying, "I am currently in Pennsylvania. I require assistance."
"What the fuck is going on that you need my assistance?" Dean asks. "I thought you finally got your wings, Clarence."
"I do not understand that reference," Castiel says, and Dean can totally hear his confused scowl over the phone. The mental picture makes Dean laugh, which he knows is just making Castiel scowl more.
It turns out that what's going on are some demonic omens, the kind that used to happen when the Judeo-Christian apocalypse was still on the menu, but have been conspicuously absent since. According to Castiel, it looks like Pittsburgh is about to be attacked by a real, live plague of locusts.
"What do you want me to do about it?" Dean asks, voice flat.
He expects Castiel to say something about God, something about obligation, something about a divine plan or some other celestial bullshit. Dean has an answer all lined up for that. What Dean doesn't expect is the quiet, slightly defeated way that Castiel says, "Please come."
"Fuck," Dean mutters under his breath.
"I'll be there in six hours," he says.
The most useful thing that Dean keeps in the Impala isn't a shotgun or holy water, it's a leather-bound U.S. atlas that lives wedged underneath the passenger seat. Within 5 minutes of hanging up on Castiel, Dean has it spread open on the hood, a route from Indiana to Pennsylvania already half formed in his mind.
The sun is just starting to set when Lisa finds him standing in the driveway, staring at a cut-out of Pittsburgh.
"That look never means anything good," she says, and hands him a glass of iced tea.
Lisa knows about most of Dean's past, though he's left out a lot of the details about Hell. He had thought that with everything that almost happened to Ben, with how scared she'd been then, that she wouldn't want to hear anything about his old life. But she'd asked and kept asking until he'd finally lashed out at her with the worst thing he could think of, a particularly blood-soaked horror story about being in the pit.
After he'd finished, she'd said, "Look. I don't pretend like I understand what's happened to you, what you've done, what's been done to you. But I want you to know that when I hear it, it's just a story. A story that ends with you saving the world and living happily ever after in Indiana. I don't want you to feel like you have to hold back with me if you want to say something." And when he'd finished processing all that she'd said, "Now do the damn dishes."
He hadn't shied away from telling her anything after that.
"Castiel needs my help," Dean says.
Lisa knows enough now that he doesn't have to explain to her who Castiel is, what Castiel is. Instead, she asks, "Do you want sandwiches for the road? We've got roast beef." It makes Dean feel overwhelmingly grateful, and for a second he can't quite make himself look her in the eye.
"Thanks," he grits out eventually, and takes a long sip of the iced tea, which is way too sweet, but he'll go to his grave again without ever telling her that.
"Right back," she says, kisses him on the cheek, and darts into the house.
For a second Dean thinks about slipping behind the wheel and peeling out without saying goodbye, without telling her where he's going. It's a familiar urge, one he fights down two, three times a week. Every time, it's Sam's voice in his head telling him to have barbecues and go to football games that stops him.
Lisa comes back from the house with a bag of food and a thermos of too-sweet tea. She kisses him and brushes his hair back off his forehead and says, "I'll think of something to tell Ben." Dean waits until she's back inside the house to get in the car and start the engine.
Dean says, "I'm sorry, Sam," and drives away from his normal, apple-pie life towards the unknown.
He's headed towards Pennsylvania on I-70, just passed the turn-off where state highway 35 splits off South towards Eaton, when Castiel calls and says, "I seem to be incapable of leaving Ohio."
Dean jerks the car onto the next exit ramp, barrels across the overpass at breakneck speed, and swerves back onto 70 headed West. He guns it the 10 miles it takes him to reach the border and the "Welcome To Indiana: Crossroads Of America" sign, only to find himself inexplicably back where he started, just past the exit to Eaton, Ohio.
"Fuck," Dean says, hitting the steering wheel with the palms of both hands.
"Yes," Castiel says from the passenger seat.
"Fuck!" Dean yells and nearly swerves off the highway. "I thought we didn't do that anymore!"
Castiel turns his head away from the windshield to look at Dean oddly. "We made no such agreement. Turn off here."
Dean takes the next exit, which happens to be the same God damn exit he took the first time. Castiel directs him back towards the border on a different road, pulling off into a parking lot that crosses the state line.
Dean says, "Fuck this noise, I'll go on foot." He gets out of the car.
Castiel doesn't come with him, just watches from the passenger seat of the Impala.
The farther Dean walks West, the harder it becomes for him to think clearly and the more he has to fight the urge to turn around. He doesn't seem to be winning that fight, though, and five times in a row he finds himself headed East without any clear memory as to how he got there.
In the end, he gives up, grabs a bottle of whiskey out of the trunk, and heaves himself up onto the hood to watch the passing traffic. Castiel eventually joins him, the car only settling down slightly on its wheels when he sits down.
"Hey," Dean says, "You're bleeding." Dean points with the hand that's not clutching the whiskey at a small, unhealed cut on Castiel's face.
Castiel touches his fingers lightly to the cut, his fingertips coming away bloodied. "So I am," he says. His hand passes over the cut and it disappears, leaving Castiel's face as unlined, unmarked, and unshaven as it usually is.
"What the hell is going on, Cas?" Dean asks, after watching what has to be the 50th set of tail lights in a row successfully exiting Ohio.
"I do not know," Castiel says, "I have never encountered a spell such as this, before. I am not even certain this is a spell, though that seems most likely."
"Good to know," Dean says, "I assume you tried the trick with the border already?"
"I was flying at the time. The impact was," Castiel pauses, "Painful."
"Sucks to be you," Dean says, and hands Castiel the bottle, which he takes and finishes in one inordinately long pull. Dean forgets, sometimes, that Castiel doesn't actually have to breathe.
"I am incapable of leaving the state of Ohio. Which means that I am physically bound to this realm for the time being," Castiel says, which is news to Dean. Guess Heaven will be sans Sherriff for the time being; hope Castiel appointed a deputy. "As you also seem to be similarly affected, I had thought that we should stick together."
Dean nods. "What the hell happened in Pennsylvania?" he asks.
"I determined that what I believed were biblical omens in Pennsylvania were in fact a diversion meant to lure you to Ohio." Castiel says, "I came to this place with the hope of discovering what the trap was before your arrival, but I was too late. Obviously."
"Sucks to be me," Dean says.
Castiel nods, "Yes."
Dean takes the bottle from Castiel's hand, stands up and throws it as hard as he can towards the edge of the parking lot. The sound of it shattering echoes back from Indiana.
"Well," Dean says, "No use standing around here with our thumbs up our asses." Castiel looks slightly confused at that one, but he nods, and effortlessly slides off the hood.
"Where would you like to go?" Castiel asks.
Dean pushes down his immediate response, which is out of fucking Ohio, and says instead, "I have no God damn clue." Dean has mixed good and bad memories of Athens, and universally shitty ones of Toledo, Milan, Springfield and Elizabethville. "Somewhere I haven't been before."
Castiel nods, solemn, like Dean is being profound instead of being a whiny bitch.
Dean is hit by a sudden, disorienting memory of Heaven. "And definitely not Cleveland," he says.
They take 75 South into Dayton, pulling off at a motel when Dean's eyes start to lose their ability to focus. Dean checks in while Castiel waits in the car, getting a double out of habit before remembering that Castiel doesn't sleep.
The room looks like it hasn't been remodeled since 1973, complete with good ole fashioned shag carpeting and avocado-colored appliances.
"No place like home," Dean says, and tosses his duffle bag on the bed closest to the door. He half expects Castiel to say something like, This is not your home, or I do not understand human disregard for cleanliness, but instead he only nods and locks the door behind him.
Dean takes a shower, eats a roast beef sandwich, and after watching five minutes of a painfully unfunny Leno monologue, mans up and calls Bobby.
Dean doesn't even get halfway through explaining before Bobby starts laughing. When he lets himself think about it for more than five seconds, Dean can almost see Bobby's point: he's faced down demons, witches, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, angels, and Satan himself and now he's been defeated by the God damn Midwest.
"Hey," Bobby says, "It could be worse."
"How in God's name could it be worse?" Dean asks.
Bobby growls, "You could be in North Dakota," and hangs up. Dean tries not to feel insulted.
May 5th (3 Days)
Dean is starting to wish they'd never introduced Castiel to the internet.
They've been camped out in the motel room for two solid days, there's nothing on the TV except for infomercials (and not even the kind with the hot women in spandex), and Castiel is hogging the laptop.
"So," Dean says, knowing as he does that he sounds bored and petulant, "Why Ohio?"
Castiel doesn't look up from where he's scowling at the screen and typing at something like 60 words an hour. Dean fishes a bag of pistachios out of his duffle and starts throwing them, one at a time, at the back of Castiel's head.
"Stop that," Castiel says, turning around and glaring. "I do not know. What I have determined from the internet is that there is nothing that makes Ohio particularly interesting."
Dean snorts. "I could have told you that."
"I have also found no evidence of recent major supernatural activity," Castiel says, crankiness creeping in under his usual calm. "Nor have there been reports of anyone other than ourselves being unable to leave the state."
"Hallelujah for them," Dean says.
Castiel sighs, says, "I thought we had talked about the blasphemy."
Dean throws another nut. "You thought wrong."
Castiel catches the pistachio out of the air before it lands, looks thoughtfully at it and then at Dean. "I do not know many spells of confinement that would work on humans." He says. "Nor do I know of any that would contain someone within a political boundary."
"So it's not the trapped thing that's bothering you, is it?" Dean asks. "It's totally the Ohio thing."
Castiel sort of half nods. From where Dean's sitting, it's as good as a hell yes.
"The majority of spells work by physical proximity, or by delimiting a space using a material, such as holy oil. State borders, as drawn on maps, are mostly arbitrary and hold little to no magical power." Castiel turns around the laptop to show Dean the four or five different maps of Ohio he's pulled off various websites. Magnified to about 1000% the way they are, it's easy to see that there's a least a mile on either side of the border where no one can decide if it's owned by Ohio or Indiana. Dean's been over that ground more than once, and he figures if they haven't decided yet, it's because no one really wants it.
"So you're saying that it's stupid, arbitrary, and no one knows how it's being done? If I didn't know for a fact that little shit was dead, I'd say this has the Trickster all over it." Dean says.
"It is not a good sign when our one and only suspect has been deceased for eight months," Castiel says, the corner of his lip quirking up into something near a smile. It's nice to know that even with as long as he's being hanging out with the dicks upstairs, he hasn't lost what little sense of humor he had.
The first thing Lisa says when he calls her is, "What do you mean stuck?" The second is, "I'm coming to get you."
"Jesus Christ," Dean says. "No." He doesn't think about how bad that sounds until he hears her shocked inhalation of breath.
She says, "What? Dean you can't mean that. I can't leave you there alone!"
Dean says, "I'm not alone," before thinking it through. "Castiel is here with me. Well, not right now, he's getting food." Not that he actually knows if Castiel's sticking around. He'd left earlier, saying that he needed to talk to someone, and Dean had shouted get burgers on your way back at him before he'd vanished. He'd thought he'd seen Castiel nod.
Lisa sounds frustrated when she says, "Well, I just don't know what to do. If I stay here, I'm going to feel so useless. I can't help but think that if I could just come out there and see you, then we could figure this all out."
"You can't come here." Dean says, "I can't risk you getting trapped here, too. Who would take care of Ben if that happened? And I still don't know what's going on here, it could be dangerous."
"But it's just Ohio," she says. "I can handle Ohio."
Dean laughs, "Oh I know you can." He can tell she's smiling, he can almost hear it, that oh Dean smile she saves for when he's trying to be charming. Beyond that, he can hear the buzz of the radio in the kitchen, the chirp of cicadas in the back yard, the boring, forgettable sounds of suburban Indiana.
The door to the motel room opens, and Castiel walks in holding a brown, grease-stained bag.
"I have to go," Dean says. "I'll call you tomorrow night."
May 12th (10 Days)
They've been doing nothing but wasting time on some exceptionally vague leads, doing some pretty half-assed internet searches, and eating increasingly terrible take out for about a week before Dean decides he's had enough.
Castiel is talking to Bobby on the phone about the fake demonic omens he saw in Pittsburgh when Dean hijacks his cell phone to say, "Find me something I can kill, Bobby. A ghost, a demon, a fucking shape shifter, I don't care as long as it's in Ohio."
Dean can hear Bobby muttering, "Idjit," as Castiel glares at him and jerks the phone back, but Bobby calls two hours later about a string of weird disappearances in a small suburb just South of Youngstown.
Dean walks out to the parking lot to take inventory: he counts his stash of rock salt rounds, checks the barrel of his sawed-off, and is about to close the trunk when Castiel stops him with a hand on his arm.
"Why are you doing this?" He asks, voice flat in a way Dean hasn't heard in a long time.
Dean shrugs, feeling Castiel's hand slip down his arm with the movement. "In case you haven't noticed, Ohio is pretty damn boring," he says.
Castiel says, "An unknown force is keeping you here against your will for a purpose we still have not determined. And yet you insist on running toward yet another unknown danger, because you are bored? This is not what Sam wanted. He asked me to take care of you."
"I'm not good at waiting around for the bad guys to kill me, Cas." Dean says, shaking off Castiel's hand and slamming the trunk shut. "I like it a lot better when I'm the one killing them."
Dean gets in the Impala and locks the doors as Castiel reaches for the handle. He drives out of the parking lot heading North, Castiel getting smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror. Dean drives West for half an hour in a righteous fury, cranking up the volume on AC/DC and flooring it. The tape runs out around when Dean's resolve starts to waver, and he drives on for a few minutes in silence, feeling like a douche. He half-forms the thought, I should go back, when he feels a rush of air against his face.
"You forgot to lock the door to the motel room," Castiel says, and Dean nearly swerves into oncoming traffic.
"Ok," Dean shouts, "New rule! We are not doing that anymore!"
"I have agreed to no such thing," Castiel says. "You are not leaving without me."
"That's it," Dean mutters to himself, "I'm getting you a bell."
The string of strange disappearances turns out to be a string of violent, ugly murders as perpetrated by the vengeful spirit of Randolph Jessup, grudge holding former Boardman Senior High School vice principal. It's clear within four hours of arrival that it's a salt-and-burn kind of job, but since nothing can ever be that easy, the guy's buried under the football field.
Dean and Castiel kill the hours between 8:30 at night and ass o'clock in the morning playing I Never in the high school parking lot.
"I've never flown," Dean says. Castiel downs an entire Corona.
"I've never given a blowjob." Castiel says, completely straight faced. This is one of those moments where Dean is really pissed off that he can read minds.
"Oh, fuck you," Dean says, and downs half the bottle he's holding, making sure to lick around the rim on his way down.
Eventually, the sky darkens enough to hide them almost completely.
"Alright," Dean says, clapping his hands together. "Let's dig up some bodies!"
"There," Castiel says, pointing halfway up the 15 yard line.
Dean turns, looks, doesn't see a single blade of grass out of place. "If you say so," he says.
"Hey, you want-" Dean starts, cut off by the weird flapping noise that means that Castiel has left the God damn building. "Great."
Dean's shovel is just hitting pine when he hears a sound like the whirr of a mechanical pencil sharpener and looks up just in time to see Vice Principal Jessup reaching for him.
It's not the first time Dean's been hauled out of a grave by a vengeful spirit, but it's the first time in at least six months. He'd forgotten how much it frickin' hurts.
"I am very disappointed by your behavior." Jessup says, "I expect all my students to live up to our five pillars of citizenship. I'm afraid it's detention for you, young man."
"Christ," Dean wheezes, "Who writes your dialog? Stephanie Meyer?"
"I'm a firm believer in discipline," Jessup says, and shoves his hand through Dean's chest. If Dean's shouts of pain are louder than usual, it's just because he's out of practice.
And then, like a, damn, like an avenging angel, Castiel appears behind Jessup. He lays a hand on Jessup's shoulder, and burns him out of existence in about half a second.
Dean falls back into the half-exhumed grave with a heavy thud.
"Where the fuck have you been?" He pants, crawling to his feet. "I don't have a get out of dead free card anymore."
"A man was attempting to assault a woman in the parking lot, I could hear her praying for help," Castiel says. "I stopped him." There's an oddly intense look in Castiel's eyes, and Dean decides against asking how, exactly, the man was stopped.
"And here I thought you were my guardian angel," Dean says. Castiel shakes his head.
"Do you understand now my reluctance to let you do this on your own?" Castiel asks, casting Dean a significant look. Dean wouldn't have believed it, but Castiel's righteous fury is even scarier from six feet under.
"Sure," Dean coughs, lungs full of dust.
Dean grabs his shovel and clears the last of the dirt off the wooden coffin, uses the sharp point of the shovel to break open the top. Castiel hauls him easily out of the grave. Unfortunately, his angel-mojo doesn't cover actually salting and burning the bones, but hell, that's the fun part anyway.
After they stumble back to the car, the warm, trapped air in the Impala smells like graveyard dirt and smoke. For a while they just sit silently, staring out the windshield, no fucking clue what to do next. Dean turns the key in the ignition just to have something to do with his hands, no clear destination in mind.
He drives East on for a couple of miles, changing lanes and passing cars on auto-pilot. Around mile marker 131, Castiel turns to him and says, "I had thought, when you chose to heed Sam's wishes and go to Indiana, that you had outgrown your childish desire to hurt yourself and those around you. I see now that I was wrong."
Dean glances over at the passenger seat, only to find it empty.
Four hours later he pulls into the parking lot of the Royal Motel and Cocktail Lounge, picturing what's waiting for him inside: two empty beds, a pathetic excuse for a kitchenette, a bathroom that hasn't been cleaned since the Reagan administration, and a TV that's lost its grip on the color yellow. His shoulder twinges when he opens the car door, and his left knee almost gives out when he tries to put his weight on it. This is no way to live, he thinks, even though it's how he's spent nearly his entire adult life.
"Jesus," Dean says, "I need to grow the fuck up."
When Dean walks into the motel room, he finds Castiel perched in his usual spot, staring intently at the laptop. If he heard Dean through the door, he doesn't show it.
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4