Held Against Your Bones [2/3]
*
“Sandwiches, huh?” he says into the phone. “That sounds good. Yeah, just checked into the motel. How’s everything?”
“Nothing much happening besides the usual. Ben’s a brat about you being away, but don’t worry, I told him you have your own business to take care of and he’s not allowed to whine about it, else no TV on Saturday mornings.” Lisa’s voice comes through like a bell, bright and ringing. Dean misses her and her straightforwardness and her common sense; she dragged him out of bed over and over on the days when he didn’t have the will to get up himself, which in retrospect is a freakishly monumental accomplishment considering all things Dean. “Thanks for calling. It’s good to hear you’re okay. I know I’ve asked you this a million times, but are you sure you can do this by yourself? You were just going to drive to Illinois for an overnight trip-and now you’re in Nebraska?”
“I know, I know.” He can’t see her, but he’s guessing she’s got that skeptical smirk on her face, going, Really, Dean, do you know, do you? She knows he cracks easily under that look. “I got some information about weird stuff going on, and-I just. I just gotta do it.”
“Don’t be defensive now, not like I can do anything about it so far away,” Lisa laughs. “That means I get to eat more of my own muffins since no one’s stealing platefuls of them. But seriously, don’t drop off the radar, okay?”
“Yeah, I promise,” Dean says. “I promised I’d call you if I can wing it.”
“I appreciate that,” Lisa replies. “I just want to know you’re not getting yourself into trouble.”
He flops out on the motel bed. “So maybe I get myself into trouble all the time, but I’m great at getting out of it.”
“Yeah, well.” There’s shuffling on the other end, a bit of clanking-probably putting away plates, Dean thinks; Lisa did say she’d just finished a late lunch. “Just making sure that you keep getting out, that’s all.” Her voice softens.
So maybe he had looked a terrible sight that first night, showing up on her doorstep. His eye hadn’t recovered from the swelling yet. And more, but Dean doesn’t think about it.
He grunts. “Thanks,” he says. “Say hi to Ben for me.”
“I’ll do that. Stay safe. I’ve got my salt, you keep track of yours,” Lisa says, and Dean nods and replies will do and bye, I’ll talk to you later. He slides his phone back into his bag. “All right, Cas,” he says. “Ready to kick some ghostly ass?”
I don’t understand, Cas mutters. There are other hunters out there. We could-
“Look, I have no idea where to start about this whole-thing.” Dean flaps his hands near his head, even though Cas wouldn’t see it. It’s easier to pretend he can.
He flips open a notebook. Powder blue cover with a bluebird design, something he wouldn’t be caught dead in public with, but the first twenty pages or so are filled in with neat, loopy handwriting and pasted cut-outs of articles. “There’s no way I’m leaving my mom by herself,” Claire had said, letting him out of the house. Behind her, in the living room, Amelia Novak continued to look at family photos; she bore the silence like a bloody cross. “But I try to keep track of things. It’s sort of-hard not to ignore them. So if this is helpful…” She pressed the notebook into his hands and tapped the front. “I printed off some news reports from the Internet, if you’re interested. I don’t know if you still do what you do.”
He’d looked at Claire, thought of Lisa and Ben and how he’d nearly set the grill on fire with a jug of ill-placed lighter fluid, how he’d sit at the kitchen table and listen to Ben’s school escapades while stories of the supernatural kept running through his head. If no other hunter went after this-“Yeah, I do,” and he’d squared his shoulders. “Thanks.”
“What’s your number?”
“... you’re sorta young to be asking that, aren’t you?” He hadn’t been able to resist the jibe.
Claire had only rolled her eyes. “I’m not that desperate to hit on guys twice my age. No, for when I find anything else.”
What she found, Dean thinks now, is pretty damn thorough. The ghost of young Fred Edgerton is bitter as fuck and ready to dump on others; the police would definitely agree, if they knew anything about spirits. Three officers have met untimely, outrageously horrific deaths over the past five years-if there’s one thing Edgerton has, it’s a cold, hard knowledge of methods to hurt and kill.
Dean isn’t surprised by any of the ways they went out. He’d been pretty creative, himself. Wonders how creative Lucifer might get down there. Well, Dean allows, pretty fucking much so. Bitch.
I don’t see why you couldn’t have contacted someone else-
“I’m not in the loop with hunters, okay?” Dean grumbles. “Bobby didn’t label people in his phone book, so who knows who I’ll be calling, a police contact or the damn plumber. Rufus is all the way over in Vermont, and I’m closer. Plus some of them were gunning for us in the first place. You’re stir-crazy and keep talking about finding God, and ‘course we can’t do that at Lisa’s. And you’re complaining now? You have any ideas where we should go? No, you fucking well don’t. Hunt’s here.”
Then you should know more people. You’re not the only hunter out there, but you’re the only one who can help me, Castiel tells him fervently, and with every word Dean hears the thump in his chest like a drum, beating forever onward, one and one heart only.
He shakes it away, breathes in deeply, kicks off his shoes. Sometimes he thinks Cas has got the hang of things, sort of, and then he says embarrassing shit like this that just hangs over his head and won’t go away. “Since you’re stuck with me, I gotta say I don’t find that an honor at all.”
Neither do I. My apologies for neglecting to give you a medal.
“At least tell me I scored gold,” Dean smirks, taps a finger against his forehead-and here, Sam would say something like yeah, in the lame hardass category, but Castiel isn’t like Sam and doesn’t leap at the opportunity, maybe doesn’t even notice in the first place. His smirk falters. “But we break this up and it’s all good. Doesn’t mean I can’t deal with hunts on the side. For hanging around Heaven and earth so long, you could wait some more. I don’t like this any more than you do, but hunters ain’t popping out of the ground ready to take care of things.” It’s better than saying that neither of them have a clue to fix this.
He presses a button on the TV remote and the screen blinks on. Some namby-pamby church service comes up-click, a pair of sharks circle each other, before one turns tail and swims away-click, “And the weather for today is sunny, with a high of eighty-two”-click, and a floppy-haired boy looks to the side and says earnestly, like a promise, “I’m not gonna go away, I’ll always be here-“
Dean switches the channel back to sharks, but the afterimage of the boy lingers behind his eyes. “Godawful,” he says, and blinks the memory away. You know, he tells himself, that was some fucking horrible hair, floppy hair. His eyes are dry. “Soap operas are totally messed up.”
And you’re saying this because? Cas sounds rather taken aback.
“They don’t understand anything about what’s going on.” Dean grimaces. “They’re always lying to each other too. ‘Oh no, you just chucked away that scrap of paper! Not important at all, but I’m gonna blow up at you anyway. You piece of shit!’ Then you find out the paper was a diagnosis for fucking cancer and the guy dies, and then his surprise twin comes outta nowhere.”
The answering silence is long, and mildly incredulous. Then Cas says, neutrally, You seem to be very familiar with certain elements of soap operas.
Dean bristles. “Dude,” he says. “I’ve lived in motels most of my life. I don’t always find good TV programs everywhere.”
Well, mutters Cas. If you want to see it that way.
He shrugs, and sits back to wait for the cover of night. The sharks on the television thrash about in a feeding frenzy, and blood clouds the water like a roiling storm. “This is so fucked up,” he says to himself.
-
And twelve hours later, he’s screaming the same thing all over again. I don’t think the ghost likes you very much-Cas remarks, dry as toast, and Dean just keeps running, rolling behind a gravestone. “Stop laughing, this ain’t goddamn funny!” he grits out, and cocks his gun. He doesn’t know where his shovel’s gone-when he showed up to the cemetery early-bird-style, Edgerton was already lying in wait. Blurriness seeps into the edges of his vision, and Dean’s not even drunk yet.
A few feet over, the ghost hovers like a vulture. A poor, twitchy boy, accidentally shot by police while holding up a store for money to fund his runaway-and though now dead, dealing out a particular brand of nasty that Dean can’t help but feel sorry for both the kid and the three police officers who happened to be on the scene and suffered the consequences. Each time a different MO-one burned and branded on the kitchen stove, another whipped to death with a garden hose, the last suffocating on ammonia fumes-but Dean looks at the pitiful little stone with the dead boy’s name, remembers reading the clippings on his surviving family members (a drunk abusive father, a sick absent mother) and thinks that, yes, this is how Hell works, all pains which are suffered you visit upon those whom you choose to suffer. Terribly human, or almost so.
I can try to distract him, Cas offers.
“How would you do that?” Dean gasps, rubbing at his temples; as if Cas unconsciously senses his pain, cold sinks into his scalp, a sudden blast that shocks the ache out. He pokes his head around the gravestone, cocks the gun ready, and pulls the trigger. The salt shell blast rips through Fred and he dissipates rapidly, his shriek like a piece of chalk squeaking down a blackboard. Dean winces at the ringing in his ears, says, “He’s not gonna be gone for long.” And where’s the damn shovel?
I think I could. Castiel’s voice drops low and gravelly. It’s inadvisable for you to suffer a concussion, and after-last time-I’m sure I can survive grappling with a mere spirit. He says it with deadly certainty.
It’s true, Dean thinks. Castiel had kept himself together, even as buried as he was, all that time. All that time, and Dean hadn’t tried to consider his own suspicions-
-so he only replies, “Whatever you say.” He’s got the shovel in hand now, and drives the tip down hard into the ground before levering up dirt; keeps seesawing up and down, in and out, but just a few loads in he feels the hair on his back stand up again-
He’s coming back, Cas says, and suddenly Dean feels him receding, washing away and out of notice like the tides, without fanfare. You keep digging. Be quick.
“I’ve been hunting long before you hauled your ass to earth, don’t tell me what to do.” Dean’s grip is tight on the handle, knuckles standing out white. Dirt flies past his face, caught up in the momentum of his shoveling.
A flare of warmth kindles in his left shoulder, fleetingly, a curl of bare fingers upon scarred skin that echoes in the pit of his stomach, and then he hears Castiel breathe out, his voice soft and inexorable: Forgive me. Behind him, Fred Edgerton starts screaming-holy fuck, he sounds closer than he oughta be, Dean thinks hurriedly, and digs faster.
“No,” Fred sobs, “please, I didn’t mean to break it, I’ll fix it-it doesn’t smell right, I wanna get out, Daddy, let me out-“ He cuts off, choking, gasping. It’s a moment before Dean realizes it sounds like hyperventilation, if ghosts had lungs.
“Cas!” he shouts. “What the hell are you doing?”
Don’t look!
Dean can see his shadow in the hole he’s digging, unnaturally white light streaming over his shoulders and pooling upon the ground, deep in the ground. It stretches out large and smoky and amorphous, a demon in its truest form; he sees nothing of himself in it.
“Cas!”
The void opens up sharply in his mind, an abrupt absence. Having his head space to himself-now, Dean’s totally fine with that-but Cas, where’s Cas? He turns just as the light begins to fade-sees it sucked down, dimming in the ghost’s chest till Fred Edgerton’s shaking on the ground, knees bent awkwardly, pale ribs glowing bright as phosphorus, and Cas says, almost babbles, I couldn’t hold him, Dean, move-
Fred snaps his head up, face twisted with rage-the shovel wrenches itself out of Dean’s hands and swivels around to plant the flat of the blade firmly in his stomach.
“Shit!”
He’s knocked right into the hole he was digging, the impact rattling his bones like a marionette’s limbs. No time to grab his gun and salt shells. Dean, Cas is broadcasting like crazy and he certainly doesn’t seem to realize that his words are rocketing around in Dean’s head like someone’s shouting over a loudspeaker-Dean, you can’t let him trap you here!
“Stop telling me what the fuck to do!” Dean shouted back, trying to ignore the headache, his fingers scrabbling for purchase in the dirt, grabbing at the edges of the hole as the ground crumbles underneath his grip, and-
He gags and lets go, dirt in his face, dirt down his mouth and it just keeps going down, and now Fred is right in his face. “You can’t keep me down!” His silvery eyes are wide with anger and barely concealed fear; Dean can see a thin scar running along his cheek. “I’m not going down! I’m gonna be good enough and you-can’t-do this to me!” And the ghost keeps trying to shove the entire fucking ground into Dean’s face. Dean is not cut out to eat this shit.
He screws his eyes shut and braces his body against the bottom of the hole; spits blindly at the front and in one quick movement hauls himself back out. He hadn’t been digging very long, though he’d been efficient, and he knows he hasn’t hit the coffin yet. Doesn’t know how much more he needs to dig, and all the while the ghost is still shrieking, kicking up dirt around him and-a jerky tug at his leg, and Dean can’t open his mouth again unless he wants a late night snack of dirt, but there’s no way he’s going to let himself get dragged back down, not now, not again, and he twists sideways, and Cas with him, away and away-
“Allow me,” the night says.
Fred Edgerton’s grave goes up like a bonfire, shooting beyond the gravestone till the entire cemetery is lit up by the impromptu pyre, in a single moment of wild ecstasy-tendrils of flame barely lick at Dean’s jeans, holy shit is it close, he tries to rub them out against the ground-then the blazing red and orange blinks out, like a snuffed candle.
Under the skin, Dean can hear his heart beating, rabbit-quick.
What the fuck. He says weakly, “Cas, what did you do?”
I tried to connect to him on another plane of existence. Then I showed him his worst memories, to keep him incapacitated as long as I could, but he fought through it and forced me away. He was very determined. Cas sounds almost admiring. He adds warily, I didn’t set anything on fire though.
“Oh,” says Dean, squinting into the darkness. His worst memories-and he guesses it makes sense, because if Heaven can cherry-pick your happiest memories it can certainly pick out the worst ones. What a bastard to do it, Castiel, though it got the job done. Maybe in Heaven Fred Edgerton can get away, and won’t go down.
The fire, though.
He sees first the bare feet, then the colorfully patterned cloth of skirt and blouse. Kali melts out of nothingness, the lines of her movements as etchings of shadows made real, accompanied by the smell of smoke. She lowers her left hand, and smiles.
Dean turns on his back; turns on his charm, a flick of the switch, even through the dirt lining the inside of his cheeks and the underside of his tongue. He is so tired, of this life and of this hunt and of these beings who see humanity not as it sees itself. My luck to get all this in one night, he thinks.
“Nice seeing you again, how ya doing?” He keeps his facial muscles rigid, grinning. Last time he’d seen her-roaring away from the Elysian Fields Motel, the three of them sitting in strained silence-ten minutes out, she’d finally stirred from the Impala’s backseat, said coldly, “I will remember you two,” and vanished.
(Shit, Sam had said, pulling a disgruntled look at him. You shouldn’t have hit on her.
Bitch, at least I had the balls to do it.
That was before you knew she could eat you alive, jerk.
If I’m alive by the time she gets around to it, Dean had thought, and the surprising thing about that was that the notion wasn’t even surprising.)
He figures that yeah, she wasn’t gonna forget them so easily. He’s banking on the hope that she remembers them with more indifference than anger. Besides, he wonders, what is she doing here anyway?
Kalikamata, Castiel says. His voice is subdued. Kalaratri. Hail, adi Mahavidya. He goes on, but in no words that Dean can recognize. Castiel speaks like he’s singing a war song, drumming out a dance. Blood pumps through Dean’s veins, a strangely pleasant dizziness in his head, of adrenaline and fear and the scathingly free existence of the hunt; here he lives, wind on his face, dirt in his mouth, at the feet of gods, and so he exists with the rhythm of Castiel’s words in his mind, fierce and unyielding and neverending-
Kali bobs her head and taps her feet, and then Cas suddenly stops, stricken.
A shudder runs through Dean’s body, though he doesn’t know why-
-or, maybe, he does. The hazy stupor down under, for there he did not live, carvings on his soul, entrails in his hands, at the feet of torturer and teacher, and so he existed with Alastair’s praise like a drug, lifting him high and giddy.
(But he doesn’t dwell on it.)
What was that? he asks Cas. He sits up, gingerly, his eyes fixed on Kali and his mouth fixed in a smile.
Castiel says, I cannot go on anymore than that. I-his voice cracks briefly, but he goes on as steadily as he can-I lack the capacity, nowadays.
“No need to exert yourself on my behalf, young messenger,” Kali says carelessly. “I know that you are forgetting words you once knew. I grant you some slack.”
“You can hear Cas?” Dean blurts out automatically, because he’s been the only one for so long-but obviously she had, if she was talking to Cas in the first place, so the question’s damn stupid-and tries not to shrink under her glare.
“Just because we appear to you in the guise of humans doesn’t mean we’re restricted as you are,” Kali comments. She shrugs and runs her hands through her hair, which cascades to her shoulders, thick, dark, unbound, and messy; then she bends down, scoops up dirt, and flicks her tongue along her palms. “It isn’t as disgusting as you think it is,” she murmurs, her eyes watching his mouth. “You have strange conceptions of the world, Dean Winchester.”
“Uh,” Dean says. “Sure, I do.” He shoots a glance behind him, then scrambles to his feet. “Thanks for… helping with the ghost.” He scrapes his tongue over his teeth, spits onto the ground. Maybe his world is strange, but he hasn’t started eating dirt yet. And what Kali wants in return, Dean can’t even begin to guess.
You’ve met her before? Cas asks.
Not now, Dean says hastily. Later.
“The cremation,” says Kali. “These grounds are favored places of mine.” She steps lightly over to the burnt hole and kicks at the ground-when Dean next blinks, the grave’s completely filled in.
“That’s cool,” Dean mutters carefully. “I-haven’t seen you at a salt ‘n burn before.”
“You did not even think to believe in me before,” Kali returns without resentment, merely stating bald fact, her voice crackling like embers. Her face is nearly akin to the night, barely distinguishable-what shines are her eyes large and bottomless and aflame with unrefined, barely contained explosive glee, and her lips bright red as if painted with pomegranate juice. It’s hard to tell under the washed-out moonlight and the fading starlight. Blood, possibly. “And I don’t always care to come. But I did say I’d remember you, and your brother.”
“My-my brother. Sam.” Dean cuts in sharply, the muscles in his neck taut with apprehension. He’d carried the hope with him for so long, before it had crashed and burned with the reveal of Cas’s true presence, and since then he hasn’t dared, has barely let himself think of his failure, and near-failure once more-yeah, Dean, why don’t you almost screw the world over again, let the devil out again-but right now, here in front of him, a deity who scorned Lucifer the fallen and despised the apocalypse games, who has power-
He looks at Kali, knowing his failure to conceal anything, his want, and oh how desperately he does want. Let me be as selfish as I want to be, for once, he pleads, to an absent God; and says, to Kali, “Do you know how I-“
Dean, says Cas, don’t. He sounds pained.
“I would tell you to listen to the messenger, if you’ll have it.” Kali looks like she feels a little sorry for him, but not sorry enough. She runs her tongue along her mouth-licks her lips, not seductively but clinically, as if to inspect taste. “I am hardly familiar enough with your Hell, and care not to bother with your God. If your God wants his creations to learn responsibility, he must begin with himself. And where is he?” She shows her teeth this time when she smiles, bitter and radiant as a star.
Dean isn’t smiling anymore, fake or otherwise.
That’s what I’m trying to learn, Castiel replies. If I have survived this long, in the face of all that has occurred, I can’t claim that God has abandoned us entirely.
“In the face of all that has occurred?” Kali repeats gently, mockingly. The corners of her mouth are still turned up.
So it is.
“Ah,” and Kali sighs. “Your faith, now that is admirable. Your lack,” she continues, addressing Dean, “is also.”
She makes a gesture with her right hand, a swift swivel of the wrist, flicking it at some distant point. “There’s an acquaintance of mine, who last I heard is in California,” she says lightly. “If you’re looking for someone who knows a bit about creation, and separation, and might help you. Unfortunately, I don’t have the angel’s blood, and so-“ She holds out both hands now, palms facing up. “If you’re interested.”
“What do you mean?” Dean demands; has given up on bothering to soften his tone, and speaks to her bluntly, bulling straight ahead.
“You can’t possibly want the young one as a hangers-on for the rest of your life, do you?” Kali tosses her head back and laughs. “And you, you can’t want to be stuck, barred from your greatness, forever and ever?”
Castiel says, slow and sure, I want to be able to find my God, and be of help, and to go where I wish to go. That is all.
Dean clenches his teeth, and feels inexplicably, strangely bereft.
Kali comes to them. She places her hands on the sides of Dean’s face, and the press of her fingers upon skin is rough, gritty, but surprisingly cool. Dean thinks of Kali’s hands, arms raised in attack-thinks of fire pouring forth in the inferno, licking at his neck. “Ask for Papa at Haloa, in Los Angeles. Maybe.” Her breath slides over him, hot but not scalding. Dean hasn’t been burned yet. “Perhaps you’ll find a way.”
“Haloa?”
She lets go and twirls away, back to the grave. “Consider it a boon,” she calls back. “You dared to confront me once before. And at least you agreed to fight against Lucifer, who had such pride to dictate to us all. To me. I am beholden to no one.” She curls her lip. At once she seems older, more stark, more disheveled, but carries herself without regard.
The rank air presses down upon Dean. Kali’s voice is laced with acid, cold disdain. “If he came to the land of my rise, he would not hold his head like a brat. Ganesh laughed so hard! Cutting off his head does nothing, he’s so accustomed to it by now. Did Lucifer presume himself to be so high and mighty that we would commit all of ourselves to our avatars? We make our own bodies, we do not take.” She flings out her left hand, slicing through the air so quickly Dean can hear the pitched whine and swish.
And he can’t have been concussed from the fight, but his eyes must be tricking him, a mirror image trembling in his vision, a ghost, a doppelganger demon: two left arms, two left hands, dark and blood-stained. Except one carries a sword, and the other does not, and there’s the smell of sweat and days-old blood, and the decay of flesh. He knows the scent, imbued in his own skin: Hell’s most popular perfume.
Kali says, the curve of her mouth like a bare sliver of the moon: “He never saw me dance.”
Dean shivers. “So?” he replies. He cocks his head back and looks her straight in the eye, unflinching. “You dance pretty fucking well.”
Cas says sharply, sober and wary, Very. And he says, I saw it once. Gabriel was there too. I think that’s why he sought you out, Kali. You would never turn away from nothing.
“So he wanted that which he lacked in himself,” Kali says dismissively.
“Sure,” Dean mumbles, then raises his voice. Now they’re back on ground he knows. Gabriel had been a twisted bastard, but-“But hey, he ended up against Lucifer in the end, you know. That count?”
Kali’s face smoothes out and closes in, like doors shutting in shadow. Her expression is utterly unaffected, cool and blank, but though she looks at Dean she seems to see another face before her. “Perhaps,” she says, her words lilting. “But he gave up too early, before everything. He had no heart to kill his brother.”
From this distance, Dean can barely make Kali out at all, but her eyes gleam bright in the dark, like blazing comets, like sunlight flashing off the cold biting metal of blades. She takes a swinging side-step, shaking out her hair, and-
-there is only empty space.
Dean stares into the night, listening to the thrum of his pulse. Thinks about the worlds out there of which he knows nothing. Fire has charred Fred Edgerton’s gravestone along the sides; he runs a finger down his jaw and feels the stickiness of blood, a thin cut. Then he picks up the shovel; retrieves his gun; turns away from the place where Kali left the sphere of mortal sight, and says, “Cas?”
Cas mutters, haltingly, Kali isn’t you, Dean. You would not-ever. But it doesn’t mean that you-we haven’t given up.
It doesn’t matter. Not like Crowley has the mojo to help him pull off a raid anyway, even if the demon bothered. Another idea that’s withered and died; Dean’s stopped counting.
“I think we’ve got somewhere we need to be, before someone comes to see about Kali’s crazy flash bomb,” he says instead. “Sunny days in California, Cas, just think. You up for it?”
If Cas had a face, Dean thinks he might nearly look relieved. Yes, Castiel says. Yes, I am.
*
“So how come you didn’t die again?” He sat on the far corner of the dock-not even on a chair, just cross-legged on the wooden planks, and he felt the smooth grains running parallel against the side of his foot. Somehow, magically, a fishing pole was secured in front of him, though he wasn’t really sure about what it was attached to, and the line trailed in the waters, testing the murky depths. Dean thought, Hope there’s good bait on this thing, and then figured that this was a dream by the almighty fucking Dean Winchester and good bait was an automatic given.
“I’ve already told you before,” said Cas placidly.
“Yeah, I’m not dumb.” Dean tugged at his sleeve.
He heard Cas shift behind him and sigh. The trench coat rustled. “I guess that Lucifer wasn’t thorough enough,” Cas said, “since he had other things which distracted him.” A soft snort, bitter and darkly amused in its tone. “As for me-I didn’t want to die. And the closest thing that grounded me-it was easier to tag onto you, since you’ve known my grace before. It’ll only be for a while, I need time to regain my strength.”
Dean slipped a hand over his left shoulder automatically, but couldn’t feel the raised ridges of the scar through his jacket. Under all the layers of clothing he was unnaturally cold. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s that.” Cas’s words told him nothing new, but there had to be something more he wasn’t saying. Dean couldn’t help but wonder how long Cas would last; every night Cas looked a bit more drained of energy, more pinched around the mouth-sometimes he stayed for only a few minutes before taking his leave. Even his lips looked paler, tinged with blue.
I just need time to regain my strength. But angels could lie.
He turned his head and looked up. In his eyes the sunlight flared out around Cas’s head, a dazzling blurred ring, a camera flash gone too long. The prolonged exposure warped his vision; the angel’s face was muted, cast in shadow. “Hey,” he added, and lightly jabbed his elbow into Cas’s shin. “You’ve even got a halo now. First step in angel recovery, you know?”
“I try not to let people be stunned too much by its brilliance.” Cas’s voice was bland as he crouched down, so his face was level with Dean’s. His hand darted out, like a snake lunging for the strike, and the pads of his fingers pressed deeply into the hollow between Dean’s collarbones.
“Fuck!” Dean startled and jerked away from Cas, the pressure vanishing as quickly as it’d come. “Give a guy some warning, would ya? I’m not a goddamn voodoo doll.”
“My apologies,” said Cas. “No pins in the future.” He nodded at Dean, his eyes fixed on Dean’s chest. “So what do you think of it?”
“I think you’re crazy,” Dean replied, but there was no heat in his words-more consideration than condemnation. He snagged the chain he wore around his neck, and four rings clicked against each other. War, Famine, Pestilence, Death. “We can’t just open it all up so demons can get out-“
Cas shook his head. “These are for Lucifer’s cage,” he said. “Not a Hell’s gate to demons. I need the initial set-up of these four linked together-then I can search and point you where to go. In a physical sense, it’s finding a weakness in the cage-when Sam used the rings, that was cracking the cage wide open.”
“How the fuck would you know where-“ Even Azazel hadn’t known the location.
“I got a lock on Lucifer beforehand,” Cas interrupted, chilly and business-like. “I can trace his grace well enough-“
“How’d you do that?” Dean tore his eyes away from Cas and looked down the length of the dock. “And how’d you think of it in the first place?”
The fishing pole trembled, the water rippled. The wind brushed along Dean’s head, tickling like a handful of cattails dragged over his hair, and he heard his name repeated in a mantra, whispery and strained. Dean, Dean, Dean listen to me.
Cas sighed. “I couldn’t expect that you would succeed,” he said. “Sam-Sam is strong, but Lucifer is Lucifer. And it’s practical to have a failsafe. If necessary, I would’ve tracked him to deal with the damage he would wreak.”
“Wow, thanks for your confidence,” Dean muttered. At the other end of the dock he could barely make out the grass, yellow-brown with drought.
“It turned out to our advantage in the end. Sam doesn’t deserve to be there. I have faith that you can do it.” And here was the miracle: that Cas sounded like he actually meant it.
Faith that he’d break his promise. Faith that he was weak. Cas didn’t mean for it to come out that way, Dean was sure-and he was weak, he wasn’t denying it, but he couldn’t afford to care. Not now. In with the devil, jack in the box, slurred voice settling lithe and easy upon his ears, and black smoke curled up like a comma mark, a Cheshire grin, and aren’t you Christmas come early?
The echo of Alastair’s smile along the line of his mouth, and oh, the pride.
Good boy.
He heard Cas stepping away from him now, the snap of his heels against wood. “Sure,” Dean said stiffly; thought of Cas saying, I don’t have the same faith in you that Sam does. But they’d succeeded in the end, hadn’t they? The hollow victory lodged in his chest like a carved-out shell, but Lucifer was caged and Sam had jumped, he’d chosen to jump. Just like Cas had chosen to turn against the schemes of Heaven. And Dean had chosen…
The air shimmered, the glazed heat of summer in a dream where Dean felt the cold sink through marrow in a way that the warmth of a savage sun could not even hope to conquer. Along the banks of the lake the weeds tangled fiercely with each other-rundown, like a future land he’d once seen, and he imagined Lucifer walking over the ground, shoes squeaky clean upon snapped necks and the buried dead, dressed all in cleanly pressed white like a wraith. The Devil wore his brother’s face, and smiled.
His eyes were terrible in their sincerity. Dean shuddered.
Castiel’s shadow stretched past him and onward, long and distorted like a wicker man burning. If he squinted, he could almost imagine it looked like Sam, more Sam than Jimmy Novak. The shadow turned, a quick shot of Sam’s profile, but its arms began to elongate and stretched toward the edges of the dock, the darkness gathering up and overflowing into the water. Now this was new-hallucinating in a dream, just awesome, Dean thought, and curled his mouth up.
“Dean,” Cas said. “Do you have faith in yourself?”
“Faith’s got nothing to do with it.” Dean snorted. He looked away from the shadow to the shadow maker, and saw that Cas was watching him, blue eyes sharp as an eagle’s, pinning Dean down like prey. Standing there innocuously, drawing himself into his coat.
“I’m just gonna do it,” Dean said. “That’s all.”
The skin at the corners of Cas’s eyes tightened, a touch of crow’s feet. “As you wish.”
The end of Dean’s fishing pole twitched once, twice, before the entire pole started shaking. “Oh shit,” Dean said, and made a swipe for it-“Caught something!”
“We have to act soon.” Cas was fading out-the dock too, and as Dean got to his feet the sunlight glanced off the water again and again, flashing like a strobe light, a whited out police siren. He reached for the fishing pole but it sidled away from his hands-right there, right in front of him, but he still couldn’t grab it properly. “It’ll be easier for me.”
“When?” And what’s gonna happen to you?
“It’s up to you, Dean. You choose.”
Don’t listen, Dean, not-
The water fractured into a thousand brilliant pieces, blinding bursts pulsing around him like heartbeats all in unison-hey Sammy, so how about the fireworks, and Sam said, You promised, Dean, you promised, and then he felt the stutter of breath in his throat, the pressure of a hand upon his shoulder, the sear of a branding iron-and here’s the question, who gripped you tight and raised you from-
“Holy crap!” Ben’s voice snapped out of oblivion, a side hit ramming into his head.
He came awake with a gasp and his heart racing like he’d run a marathon. In that first second of wakefulness Dean stared up at the ceiling but with eyes unseeing.
He couldn’t think where he was, couldn’t remember where his arms were, then realized that he was tangled up in his blanket, about to fall off the bed onto the floor. His skin was slick with nervous sweat. But this was normal, a normal bed, in a normal room, and through the open door wafted the smell of Lisa’s special beef casserole. His arms and legs remained intact, neither dislocated nor dismembered entirely, and Sam and Adam and Bobby were gone and Cas was going and all was well. Fuck.
Ben hovered nervously several feet away, his hands held up apologetically. “Shit, Dean, sorry. But it’s past noon. I thought I’d wake you up, though guess you didn’t need my help after all.”
There were no cracks in the ceiling. But cracks in a cage, just one and that’ll be enough, Dean thought. Just one shot.
He threw back the blanket and sat up; shot Ben a smile, crooked and loose. His mouth ached. So he’d promised, but-Sam, and Adam too, both stewing in the cage-he couldn’t let that go. “Hey man,” he said. “Better not let your mom hear that.”
Ben crossed his arms. “I hear Mom saying stuff all the time,” he said, and winked. His attempt to look cool looked more like he’d got something in his eye.
What a kid, Dean thought tiredly, fondly. What a kid. He himself hadn’t felt much like one, after the fire. Nor Sam, worrying about stitches instead of toys.
“For real? I gotta be the one cleaning your mouth out?” He reached out and mussed up Ben’s hair, fingers scoring gentle lines across the scalp, before slicking it back. “There you go, you regular Elvis.”
Ben scowled but he hadn’t tried to duck away from the impromptu hair styling, so Dean figured he was all right in the kid’s books. “Mom says lunch time. And she says if you keep hogging the shower so much she’s gonna start feeding you salad-like, plain lettuce. No dressing or anything. Though,” he added, leaning closer as if drawing Dean into his conspiracy, “I don’t really care much myself.”
“C’mon, you’re just sayin’ that because you want all the real food to yourself,” Dean said. He couldn’t explain it to Lisa, couldn’t imagine how on earth he would say, So I was in Hell for a while, I can still feel it sometimes on my skin, at least before it got ripped off-so instead he kept his mouth closed and would stay under the spray of hot water for half hours at a time. So long underground, it was a wonder he hadn’t smelled worse after being pulled out of Hell, crawling out of the earth like a bewildered newborn. Considerate of Cas to clean him up, really, back when Cas only knew him as the righteous man, and not so much as Dean. The righteous man sounded like someone who was supposed to have everything worked out, kept together. Dean, though-now that only meant Dean, and nothing else. An alien guest in this apple-pie-life home, the first one to break, the only one saved by an angel under the orders of Heaven. Brother without a brother, and o where art thou, who art not in Heaven and all that shit.
He smacked Ben gently in the stomach. “Looks like you’re growing sideways instead of up, Ben,” he said. “No problemo, someone’s gotta help pick up the food slack. I’ll be there in five.”
(Problema, Sam had muttered over the phone. Dude, your Spanish sucks.
Are you seriously gonna whine about my grammar right now? Everyone knows what the hell a problemo is, it’s a goddamn problem! The werewolf’s-
I’m coming! Promise. I’ll be there.)
*
He orders coffee at the Starbucks closest to the university-picks the blackest choice they have, no milk and no sugar, and then he buys another one, a frappuccino with caramel and whipped cream on top. He shoots a quick, rakish grin at the barista, a pretty girl with curly dark hair tied back who looks more startled than flattered. “Thanks,” he says, and turns away from the surprised wariness on her face, a cup in each hand.
He’s a grimy, rough-hewn blur in the mass of sleep-deprived, party-happy, class-ridden, homework-hounded college students. Colorado State’s fucking enormous, and he can’t imagine living in a place with so many people milling and bustling around, minding their own business. Wonders how long it took for Sam to get used to it. Maybe I really can’t do normal after all, he says, if even a random barista’s gonna be giving me the evil eye. You think?
I wouldn’t. Cas adds, You aren’t as strange as you could be.
Yeah, but you’re an angel, and you’re disembodied. So that doesn’t mean much, coming from you.
You told me I looked like a tax accountant. That’s normal, isn’t it?
Sure, a tax accountant working for the IRS. Are you kidding me? That automatically makes you a weirdo.
And what is so damning about the IRS?
Dean pauses, mulling over the choices that spring to mind. Come on, it’s the International Rollerderby Sect, what’s not wrong about that, he finally tells Castiel. Really small religious faction, but any group’s gotta have someone to lord over the finances, you know.
Cas replies, I see. Or so you claim.
Cas has gotten better at knowing when Dean’s pulling his nonexistent leg. Dean rolls his eyes, even if it is at empty air; it’s the meaning of the action that matters, he figures. If he tells that to himself enough times it doesn’t sting so much.
He picks the corner seat so his back’s to the wall. It’s as good a place as any to keep an eye over the place, over the sidewalk through the window, unless a hellhound’s about to tear through the café. And those dogs, he’d hear a mile off-would know the deep-throated, wailing cry singing down his bones like it was his own, those grotesque symphonies in Hell, scritch-scratch and knife slices and sputtered gasps. The music of the spheres, and for ten years it had been weirdly, horribly beautiful and he would sing along, off-key, Hey Jude.
The black coffee snakes a burning trail down his throat. He sighs and sets down the cup, then shakes open the newspaper to skim the headlines. Nothing noteworthy, nothing that hints at a possible hunt that could make up for the fact he went off on the wrong route and ended up in Fort Collins when he could be farther south.
Shit, I really wasted some gas, he grumbles. Just kept right on 80 till it changed to 76, and didn’t even notice. Should’ve turned down sooner, for LA.
He’d gone back to the motel, thrown his stuff together, and checked out in the early hours of the morning, driving on the highway drunk with adrenaline and sheer willpower. Seven hours later, his eyes are probably bloodshot; he didn’t shower, so there’s still dirt rubbed into his skin here and there, and also the disinfected scrape at his chin, which stopped bleeding after the first hour. He doesn’t remember why he felt like he had to start for California, then and there. Kali breathed something into him, a raging fire blazing through his body, and now it’s finally died out into a pile of ashes.
Coffee’s tasteless in his mouth.
It doesn’t matter, says Cas, sober and quiet. It’s only a few hours lost, and the destination will still be there in the end. Thank you.
Kali’s the one who tipped us off. And holy fuck, he’ll be glad if he never sees her again. You think I want you to be stuck with me as long as I’m around?
It’s true that I wish I could move of my own volition, Cas says. But your company isn’t so cursed as you think it is.
Dean turns the newspaper page. Family of four saved from fire. A firefighter’s quoted as saying, This is my job, but I don’t do it just because it’s something I know how to do. I do it because I want to help people. ‘Course not. I’m awesome company.
Dean. Do not lie.
Dude. Dean downs another gulp of black coffee. Stop digging around my mind and trying to psychoanalyze me. Freud was full of himself, just saying.
You know I’m not able to intrude with you in that fashion-I can only hear what you tell me. And Freud had a very uncomfortable couch, which was not helpful.
Uhuh. He’s fairly sure that most of the time Cas makes up meetings with past figures just for kicks. One day Cas will say he ran into Marilyn Monroe, or the crazy Byron who slept around like there was no tomorrow, and wouldn’t that be a grand shitshow?
Dean glances over the top of the paper. Maybe the barista was just surprised, and not repulsed, because she keeps shooting him lingering, inquisitive stares every other minute and doesn’t even bother to hide her interest. He can’t imagine she’s not familiar with flirting; she’s cute and has a nice smile, all slow and impish, and something in her face niggles at his mind but he can’t put his finger on it. He doesn’t rise to go back to the counter, though; a possible conversation with her is an idea he finds exhausting-would rather sit here, paper in hand, a travesty to coffee for a drink, and talk to Cas, who sometimes snaps in irritation and sometimes sees too deeply, and sometimes-
He had been a strange ally, to be sure. Stranger still that Cas would be his friend, someone who pulled him out of Hell and threatened to put him back-strung him along, asked him to torture, turned to help him, beat him up-but no matter what, in the end Castiel was still here.
Whatever, he says. Going there-it’s something to do. I can’t-I don’t know what else to do. He props his elbows on the table and rubs his face. I was a fucking idiot, he says, I believed and I thought I could do it, but Sam’s still in there, he’s stuck and they gotta get out, and I don’t know, Cas, I don’t know.
He adds, I wish I could talk to you proper.
I didn’t wish to die, Cas says. I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way.
Angels aren’t the best at apologies, but Cas does try. We never do, Dean replies. He kneads his temples and stares at his coffee, just the bitter gritty dregs left now, but the frappuccino sits next to the empty cup, untouched. The whipped cream’s beginning to deflate.
Yes, Cas says. I know. But I regret-
Look, Dean interrupts. I sort of suck, okay? And I was gonna say yes, and you stopped me from doing that-
I was angry. Cas’s voice is flat, blank, and Dean feels a flush sliding down his neck, the shame of it all. I regret it.
Hey, it’s not like I’m perfect. Don’t sweat it.
I believed that I thought you weren’t, says Cas, almost dreamily, but once I knew myself as an angel of the Lord and I knew you body and soul, and then I could not and so I was wrong. I’m not so proficient at understanding, now.
We’re all only human, says Dean, and the laugh bubbling up in his throat cringes sharply, dying a mirthless death. Body and soul, what a privilege to see him at his worst times. Sorry. That’s a terrible joke.
No. Cas actually sounds amused. Bitter, but amused. It’s not really a joke.
Yeah. Dean suppresses the urge to squirm. He angles his body sideways and stares out the window. The sky’s like any other day, slightly cloudy but mostly sunny, and people move alongside each other, against each other, and somehow coordinate their movements so it works, and occasionally he sees an arm jogged, an awkward left-right avoidance, but then it passes and they go on. They live their lives and go on.
Nothing else has ever seemed harder to Dean.
Instinct is still hardwired into his brain, though, so he snaps his head around when he hears footsteps, locking onto the barista. She stops dead in her tracks like a deer in headlights, a brief hiccup in her stride, but then she draws her shoulders back and comes up to the table.
She says, “I just got off my shift,” and he expects her to add, And I thought I’d just say hi, or possibly, Can I join you, or outrageously, I think you’re really hot and do you want to hang out-outrageous, because he feels like shit and looks it too-but instead what she says is, “And I’m sorry, you must think I’m a total, complete creeper, but you sorta look familiar.”
He blinks and tenses, but he grins through his apprehension. “Really? Never knew there was anyone running around looking like me, I thought I was the one and only.” Fucking shapeshifters. Or the worst luck, she actually remembers his face from the FBI’s Most Wanted, even if he is legally dead and there are no more Winchesters as Henriksen would’ve declared, before Lilith came for them and blew the station sky-high to spare him the trouble.
She still looks embarrassed. “Just-like-I don’t know.” She shrugs. “A guy I met before.”
“Must have been an unusual experience,” he cracks.
Her eyes blank out briefly, and she shivers. “Could say that,” she replies. “It’s just-I heard the news that he died a while back.” Her voice is very small, and she’s wringing her hands. “So I wanted to apologize, you know, for staring, because I know you saw me doing that and must be so weirded out-“
“Nah.” He laces his fingers behind his neck and slouches back. “I’m sorry about your friend,” he says. Death’s ring rests under his shirt, against his skin, a perfect cool circle, and he thinks, I’m sorry he went. I hope he at least met a cool reaper. I hope he’s not a spirit I’m gonna have to put down. “It’s okay, I’m not spooked easily. Worse things to deal with than a pretty girl looking at you.”
“Not really a friend, but-he helped me once, and I never had the chance to repay the favor. I guess I should say thank you for the compliment,” she says, and there’s delight in her smile, sure, but it’s tempered with something almost like sorrow, and inexpressible gratitude. “Anyway, my name’s Haley. If you’re a new student, you should stop by more often.”
He keeps himself from making a face. God, Starbucks. And a student? Bad coffee versus a nice barista, though. “And get to see you?”
She colors, but straightens and says very steadily, “Starbucks always loves to have new customers,” and bobs her head and quickly doubles back before he can say anything else, to the counter where her replacement instantly pounces on her, presumably demanding details.
She wasn’t giving you the evil eye after all, Cas says.
Yeah, she had nice eyes, Dean replies. Curly hair. He frowns.
He picks up the frappuccino and takes one sip, and then sets it down. All right, he says, let’s head out. Because as much as he said it didn’t bother him, it sort of does. The last thing he needs is attention drawn to him, and he’s certainly not the man the girl remembers, is only himself and no one else. Cas says, Yes, let’s, and so Dean stands and throws away his empty cup and the frappuccino which would’ve been Sam’s and nods to the barista as he hurries on his way out, and she smiles back and ignores her friend’s hushed ribbing but her face is subdued and distant, as if she’s seeing something else behind her eyes.
-
He pulls the Impala onto the road and follows 70 and drives from Colorado straight on into Utah. Cas tells him, There were forests greater than these when I last visited Arcadia and Latium; and, Coyote is the kind who finds these to his liking, this dust and rock and enough room to run free; and, I would like to try champagne, one day, when the Impala scoots past a billboard for a brewery, high and dry in the arid heat with the sign peeling at the corners.
“Sure,” Dean replies. So long as you don’t become a goddamn alcoholic in the future. “So long as I get all the beer.”
He calls Lisa. “Even farther?” she exclaims. “Why LA?”
“Just felt like it,” he says.
“Really.” Lisa sounds anxious. “I don’t want to get a phone call from some hospital saying Dean Campbell’s on life support, from a hunting accident or-“ She cuts herself off.
Dean isn’t dumb. Lisa had kept a carefully close eye on him the first few days, when he’d done very little more than stay in bed, and eat, and breathe; had tracked his usage of sleeping pills with razor-sharp precision. He isn’t dumb, and he’s thankful.
“I’ll be all right,” he says. “Tell Ben I’ll bring him a souvenir when I get back.”
He stops for half an hour on the side of the road, vehicles whizzing past like flies. The heat sits heavy on his chest and stagnates and smells of sweat, two days’ worth; he falls asleep listening to Cas reciting something incomprehensible, the hard c and v sounds of Enochian, power glory and him that liveth forever, the quiet desperation to hold onto knowledge dying out of reach, like grass bent and shriveled with frost.
He checks in, ten at night. The motel has cactus-patterned wallpaper, the prickly bastards.
I can’t remember, Cas says. He is resigned; since he was freed more than a week ago, he has spent ages sunk deep into himself, trying to ferret out memories, words, what makes up Cas and nothing else. I’m sure I know of Papa but I can’t remember. I can’t.
Just give it time, Dean says, and doesn’t say that maybe he’s forgetting because he’s not all angel, that God isn’t going to prop him up, that there’s no family left for either of them, but he thinks that Cas must know it anyway, the thought festering in a wound deep down.
Cas goes silent after that, voice snapped off sharp and weary.
Dean peels off his clothing, grimacing. Jacket and shirt and pants and all, and he lifts the necklace he wears over his head and sets it down on the bathroom counter, and counts to be sure: one two three four. His joints are stiff, corpse-like, dirt baked hard into skin, and he cracks his neck before stepping into the shower and turning the water all the way up.
Under the rising steam he stands and looks down, water spray beating against the top of his head before angling down his neck. Temperature’s pushed high, almost scalding skin, and he remembers this, he does, and wonders if Sam will remember this too.
Lucifer and Michael in the cage, together. Fuck, what a death match.
Maybe Death could come and take both of them out, he wonders; maybe he could track down Death-he had to return the rings in the end, or destroy them, so might as well ask. After they finished with this Papa in California, though the father of what he doesn’t know-creation and separation, Kali had said. And separation.
Maybe he’ll leave after, he thinks. He’s suffered enough. He’s had enough of me, and enough of earth, and-
He can’t imagine. Thinks of Cas leaving, back to Heaven which stretches across planes and pokes its fingers into everything, deliberate and disregarding, and though he never saw Sam leaving till he did for college either way they both left or would leave, and somehow the first time he had managed and gone on hunting but the next time, the next time-
He presses his forehead against the shower walls and stares down at his feet. Skin’s turning faint pink from the heat, like half-cooked salmon. Sam had tried it first at Stanford, so he’d said, and had added, It tastes good with lemon, sourness upon the tongue. He’d learned so much of the new and the ordinary and taken it in like a drowned man revived, but then Jess had gone up in flames, and so they always returned to hunting and to each other…
That’s who she was, he realizes. The first case after. Curly hair and the peanut M&M’s. Strung up like a sack of meat, him and her brother. And the brothers Winchester together, now legally dead.
He wonders how her brothers are doing. He can bet they’re not in Hell. But he can guess they’re alive, so there’s that much.
He’s really not the man she remembers. Forty years.
He can’t summon up the energy to care.
Dean turns his face into his hands and lets the water trickle between, slick skin pressed up against the water and steam till he thinks he could open up, unpeel himself like an onion. Here’s the rub, that he should recall almost all things about Hell except the ascent, Castiel burning firefly-bright in the vast dark pit, faint pinpricks reflected in his soul. He thinks, Or maybe third time’s the charm. Just one more chance.
He rakes his nails along his arms till the dirt brown shade is scrubbed out. There used to be a scar that lay diagonal across the crook of his left arm, either from the ghost in Santa Fe or from the bullet in Texarkana, and he can’t even remember what it looks like. Twelve-year-old Sam’s messy stitching no longer straggles along an absent cut in his right calf; and the ache in his pinky from the break while scuffling with a black dog-that’s gone too.
He rubs his hips, the slope of his stomach, the front of his thighs, takes himself in hand. Touches his shoulder. There, where the dimensions of the soul bled into the body and raised the mark as he had himself been raised. A press of fingers to the forehead, voice whisper-quiet, the skin at the nape of his neck prickling under Cas’s stare, a fist smashing across his cheek. Wide-eyed and relentless, letting Dean slump to the floor, and you will not say yes.
Under the sparks of exploding lights, the cold, knowing gaze, Castiel murmurs, You don’t think you deserve to be saved.
His breath hitches.
Dean, Cas suddenly breaks in-
Dark spots thread through his sight like tendrils of thick smoke. He braces his heels at the juncture of shower wall and floor, the knobs of his spine rolling in-out against slippery tiling, and shudders, and then again.
-are you listening? Castiel’s voice rumbles on, I know now, I know.
He bows in upon himself and looks at the shower curtain. Hot water sluices down his body and gathers under his feet, the knot of tension in his gut falling away and trembling in his legs. “Uh,” he says blankly. “What?” What was, he thinks. What.
Dean, are you all right? Cas asks. You do not sound well.
“Yeah,” he says, isn’t quite sure what he’s saying yes to. “Just-just a moment.” He squeezes his eyes shut. The backs of his eyelids are blindingly bright.
part 1 | part 2 | part 3