(no subject)
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Author: fools_game
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Sam/Dean, Crowley/Aziraphale
Warnings: Implied incest, implied angel/demon sexxin’. Crackfic, I guess.
Summary: Dean is possessed by - an angel? And this angel calls on a very unlikely ally for help…
~
It wasn’t like Aziraphale was doing anything wrong. Strictly speaking. I mean, at the time, Crowley was over in Dover helping little old ladies across the street, doing good deeds, before he’d set up for a night of tempting the just. Crowley promised - a full day of good deeds before any tempting.
So it all balanced out, right? The appropriate amounts of harm and good had to be done, so Aziraphale had to do his bit - or rather, Crowley’s bit - here in Canterbury.
He handled tempting like a squeamish teenager handled a rat dissection in Biology - at arms length, with eyes squinted nearly shut and breathing through his mouth. Car brakes disengaged, and the vehicles rolled to sloping stops against walls or poles three feet away, undamaged. Men whose eyes he drew to the pretty girls walking by turned out to be gay, or more interested in their lunch. One telemarketer rang the same man sixteen times by mistake. Instead of getting annoyed, he asked her out for dinner.
Aziraphale sighed, discouraged. He just wasn’t very good at the whole corrupting thing. He wondered how Crowley was getting on in Dover, then pictured the havoc that a well-meaning demon could wreak, and decided he’d much rather not know.
Just before sundown, he found himself in the more touristy sections of town, and wandered down a back street - of which Canterbury had many - half-heartedly expiring parking meters and moving dog droppings under the feet of unwary pedestrians. Just as the sun sank beneath the horizon, framing the spire of the majestic Cathedral, he stepped off the pavement and was hit by a bus full of tourists.
It was one of his least graceful discorporations ever. And that included that time in the middle ages, with the maypole and the yak.
~
You saw people possessed by demons in this job, more and more often, recently. Animals too, crazed with demons and mad with the lust for blood. Dean even swore up and down that “This time - in British Columbia, Sammy, you shoulda been there, it was awesome!” that he and their dad had dealt with a flock of demonically possessed sheep. Sam wondered what kind of damage a bunch of herbivores could do, bleat you to death? Throw their soft, woolly bodies at you until you suffocated? But he never said anything, because it was a memory that made Dean cackle happily which happened not nearly often enough.
So, possessed people? All the time. Possessed animals? Occasionally, yeah, and entertaining, if reports could be believed. Possessed furniture?
Yeah, not so much.
They stood, arms folded, and looked suspiciously at the antique cabinet. The wood was dark red and the front panels were beautifully carved, with that unmistakable patina of age about the whole thing. The carvings might have been flowers or decorative scrollwork, but there were suggestions of faces among the seemingly random designs, and if you knew were to look, other, more sinister patterns.
The guy who had so eagerly accepted “Simon Deveau’s” credit card was suspiciously keen to be rid of the innocuous-looking cabinet. If Sam hadn’t known that the last four families to own it had all been picked off by some malevolent force, one by one, he would have been surprised and pleased at the bargain price.
Not that Sam was in any way interested in antiques. And he certainly wasn’t mourning the idea of having to destroy such a beautiful piece of work.
He ran his hand over the carvings one last time, grimacing as his fingers came away with a light coating of yellow crystals. Sulphur had been embedded in all the cracks, like a particularly persistent dust.
“Stop fondling the evil cupboard, Sam, and let’s get this over with.” Dean’s voice was clipped and slightly more than irritated. It seemed he felt demonic furniture was somehow beneath him. He glanced impatiently around the vacant back lot they’d chosen to do the exorcism in, as if looking for any witnesses, and back down at the journal, muttering to himself.
Sam gave the wood one last pat and stepped outside the salt ring. “You do it, then, if you’re so keen.”
Dean raised an eyebrow and said something under his breath about antiquing, stepped forward until he was right outside the protective circle and began to chant.
The temperature had dropped after the sun went down, and he wasn’t dressed for the cold. Sam folded his arms around himself and kept an eye out for passers-by. The lot was in a new development, where there was plenty of building going on but very few residents, so the likelihood of witnesses was slim, but Sam’s eyes scanned their surroundings anyway, an automatic deferral to the proximity of houses, streets and cars to their business. It felt wrong do this in the middle of so much mundanity.
The cabinet was making squawking noises now, its doors banging open and shut so hard pieces were starting to break off. Dean’s voice carried clear and calm above the cacophony, the Latin phrases slipping effortlessly off his tongue. For someone who didn’t believe in God, the old prayers certainly came naturally to him. Sam watched him, caught between sheer aesthetic admiration of the drama in the scene and the desire to properly display his appreciation of Dean’s fine, fine speaking voice. He was so authoritative. Sam had tingles.
The wind was howling now, ripping through Sam’s thin sweater. With a sound rather disappointingly like a cat coughing up a hairball, the cabinet disgorged a thick cloud of oily black smoke. It briefly formed itself into a nearly human avatar, long enough to wheeze out a rude phrase in Dean’s general direction and make a gesture that might have been equivalent to sticking out it’s deformed, demonic tongue.
“Bite me,” Dean suggested, and spat the last few Latin phrases.
Grumbling, the demon went, and the night was still.
Dean kicked the battered cabinet. “Think we should burn it?”
“To be safe,” Sam agreed, and grabbed his ass. “You’re very hot when you speak Latin, you know that?” He bent his head to mouth at Dean’s neck.
“I’m very hot when I’m doing anything, Sammy. You know that.” Dean dug around in the bag for the lighter fluid, his Zippo already in hand. He batted away Sam’s attempts to grope him. “Molest me later, antique boy. We need to - huh.” He paused, wearing an expression that suggested he had just swallowed a bug.
“What?”
“Did you feel that?” Dean tilted his head to the side, looking like he was listening intently.
Sam looked around cautiously. Now that the ritual was over, the wind had dropped away to nothing, and the night was clear and still and silent. The probably-now-harmless cabinet lay on its side, unthreatening.
“Um, no? Feel what, Dean? Are you okay?” Dean was shaking his head like he was trying to dislodge water from his ears.
“Yeah, I just I beg your pardon, could you possibly tell me where I am?”
Dean shut his mouth. Sam stared. “What?”
Dean opened his mouth. “I said Look, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but what the hell was that?” His eyes were wide, frightened.
Sam clamped down on the panic rising up in his own chest. “Who’s there?” He resisted the urge to grab Dean and shake him.
Dean looked cagey, and then his mouth seemed to open of its own accord. “America, then? Oh, dear. So sorry, I’ll just be off now. Sammy, make it stop.”
Jolted into movement, Sam ducked down and grabbed for the journal, grateful it was still out. He never took his eyes off Dean, standing frozen into immobility, as if terrified of what his mouth was going to do next. “Okay. In nomine patri, et filie,”
Dean’s faced assumed an expression of cherubic benevolence. He even gave a little condescending chuckle. “Oh, no, dear boy, you have to wrong idea entirely. I’m not a demon at all.”
Sam seized him by the shirtfront. “What are you? Get the hell out of my brother!”
“I’m trying. Er, there seems to be a bit of a problem. This is most embarrassing…”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sam demanded.
Dean, or the thing that inhabited him, sighed. It was an expressive sigh, conveying a great deal of emotion. Sam thought, a bit meanly, that it sounded sissy.
“I’m not a demon,” Dean’s mouth said, in the oddly inflected accent Sam was beginning to recognise as the intruder. “Quite the opposite, actually. I mean you no harm. What do you mean, just the opposite?” Dean’s voice - cutting off the other’s quite effectively - came out slightly panicked-sounding. “ My dear boy, I’m not your dear anything. And you can’t expect us to believe that you’re some kind of - angel.” There was a pause. Sam watched his brother warily. Dean was going cross-eyed in an apparent attempt to look himself sternly in the eye, his expression flipping between scowling cynicism and long-suffering patience. “You believe in demons readily enough,” the intruder pointed out. Dean scowled. “Not the same thing.”
Sam intervened. “Okay, enough. You - look, do you have a name?”
Dean blinked. “Er, Aziraphale.”
Sam nodded. “And you’re an angel.” He waved away Dean’s protest and sighed. “Say we do take that at face value. What the hell are you doing in my brother and why won’t you leave?”
Dean - Aziraphale - looked distraught. If he’d had control of Dean’s hands, Sam was sure he would have wrung them. “I don’t know! I got hit by a bus, and then - well, I was here! And now I’m stuck! A likely story. It’s true!”
“I thought angels were immortal,” Sam pointed out, shifting from foot to foot in the cold air.
“We are required to take human form,” Aziraphale said, a bit snippily. “It has its benefits, but also its drawbacks.” There was a pause. Dean was scowling, an expression of intent concentration on his face. “Doesn’t explain why you’re in my head. Also, why you won’t leave! I’m not sure about the second, but when I’m discorporated, I tend to gravitate towards - open minds. People praying, calling on the Almighty, that sort of thing.” There was another pause. “Not one word, Sammy.”
“Not a one,” Sam promised.
“Anyway,” continued the angel, “I’m not really in your head. I’m just riding along. I can’t read your thoughts, you know.”
Sam smothered the relieved expression trying to unfold on his face. There were things he really didn’t want any kind of angelic being spotting inside Dean’s head. “Okay, so what usually happens when you get - what was it?”
“Discorporated. Well, normally I just go and ask upstairs for a new body. Upstairs? You gotta be kidding me. I assure you, I am perfectly I was being sarcastic. You don’t need to answer. Sammy, Well, perhaps you should learn to guard your tongue. Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, you know. You mind not hijacking my mouth while I’m using it? Oh, I do beg your pardon. Whatever.”
“Well, why don’t you do that, then? I mean, ask for a new body?” said Sam, torn between amusement, frustration and fear.
Dean face went blank and there was a long pause. “I am currently - stuck - inside your brother,” said Aziraphale, and it seemed to Sam that he was speaking very carefully. He wondered if angels could lie.
“So what the hell are we supposed to do?” he asked aloud.
~
The drive back to the motel was a chore. Sam drove, because he didn’t trust the thing in Dean’s head, and Dean was eerily, stubbornly silent that whole way back. Sam considered trying to make conversation, but the fear of what - or rather, who - might be answering his questions, rather put him off the idea. He snuck furtive glances instead, watched Dean slouched in his seat, lips pinned tightly shut, his arms folded and tense.
He pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine. “Okay,” he said, for want of anything else. He looked at Dean again, and Dean looked back helplessly, but when he spoke, it was with the slightly nasal inflection and British accent of the intruder.
“I really am terribly sorry. This isn’t ideal for me either.”
Sam sighed, and resisted the urge to bash his head on the steering wheel. “Dean, you okay?”
His brother nodded. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he can’t take control of my body or anything. I can’t. And gosh, I’d sure appreciate if he stopped mouthing off when I’m talking.” A pause, no reply from the angel. “I think it’s okay.”
Sam nodded tightly and didn’t look at his brother, because if he did, he’d have to crawl over and curl up in Dean’s lap, or grab him by the ears and plant a wet one on him, or reach out and touch his face gently to reassure himself. None of which were possible with something riding shotgun behind his brother’s eyes. “Okay,” he said again, and got out of the car.
Dean followed more slowly, and once they got into the motel room, he seemed jumpy, skittish. His eyes darted around, looking at the mess they’d left it in that morning, the papers scattered over the table, clothes hung over the backs of chairs or dropped where they were. He shot Sam a desperate look, and his eyes flicked briefly over the beds, one still made and piled high with crap, the other obviously slept in, rumpled and stained. Sam nodded slightly.
“I’m going to go shower,” Dean announced and took himself off to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. It had been a long time since he’d bothered shutting Sam out while he bathed, preferring to subtly encourage the whole getting-clean task as a team sport, but Aziraphale might get the wrong idea.
Sam rubbed his forehead as he started to clean the junk off the spare bed. This whole thing was getting more complicated by the second. Even if the thing in Dean’s head was exactly who he said he was - something Sam still had his doubts over - there were certain aspects of their lives that would probably cause their celestial visitor to get the vapours, if he ever found out. Until Aziraphale was gone, they were going to have to be very, very careful.
Glancing around, he snatched the lube and condoms off the nightstand and stuck them in his duffle, then smoothed the sheets on the used bed just as Dean came out of the bathroom.
He wondered if there was a special circle of hell reserved for incestuous sodomites.
Dean was red faced and looked irritated. “Something wrong?” asked Sam.
Dean scowled. “It does not send you blind,” he said grumpily. “It’s a perfectly healthy dangerously narcissistic outlet for tension.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. With an angel in your head? Dude.”
“Shut up,” said Dean. “Frickin’ kinky angel. How dare you.”
~
Sleep proved impossible, so Sam lay on his side and watched Dean instead, restless without his brother’s comforting presence. Dean lay on his front, sprawled out, facing away from Sam and didn’t move, though Sam knew he was awake.
It complicated things, having an angel around. For the first time in a long time, Sam felt a tendril of shame curl in his chest at the thought of touching Dean. He longed for it, wanted to be wrapped around his brother so bad it hurt, but the idea of having an angel watching, and knowing, and judging, made him want to crawl into a hole and die.
Because it had to be unholy, what was between him and Dean, despite the fact that it was the only comfort and love and security they had. He wondered, if he had to choose, what his choice would be. If the angel found out and said in his horrible, irritating way “You can’t do this, you’ll be damned,” Sam wondered if he would be strong enough to choose redemption over Dean. He wondered if that was even the right choice.
He slept a little, just before dawn, and rose to find Dean’s bed empty, and neatly made. A note on the table said Gone to get breakfast. If not back by 8, check local psych ward. D.
Sam showered to pass the time, picturing Dean conversing with himself - and answering - at the drive-through of the local McDonalds. Then he jerked off over the fantasy of what he was going to do to Dean when they got him un-angelised, because if he was going to be struck down by a bolt of lightning for thinking bad things about his brother, he’d be McSparky the Lightning Boy by now.
Dean was back when he got out, arguing with Aziraphale over the appropriate way to serve scrambled eggs and unable to find a compromise on beverages. “Hey, Sammy Good morning. Did you sleep well? Do you mind? Sorry,” they greeted him.
“Morning,” said Sam, snagging a muffin. “I slept fine, thanks. No nightmares.” He took a bite and sat down, his feet connecting with Dean’s under the table. He left them there, ankles entwined. “What’s on the agenda today?”
“Find a crowbar to get this thing out of my head?” suggested Dean sweetly. “Well, really. As it happens, I do have a useful suggestion for a way to end this - unfortunate arrangement.”
They both stared. Or rather, Sam stared, and Dean went a little cross-eyed and shook his head. “Why didn’t you say something before?” Sam demanded.
“I only thought of it last night, as you two slept.” Sam nearly strained a muscle rolling his eyes, and Aziraphale huffed. “Look, do you want to hear my idea or not? Yes, okay, fine. Sam, stop poking the angel in my head. I’ve already told you, I’m not really in your head. Are you going to tell us your brilliant idea or not?”
Sam rubbed his temples. Dean’s back-and-forth with himself confused him.
“I have a counterpart in England. We’ll have to fly out and see him. He can get me out of you, and he can help me build a new body. Wait, I thought you had to get a new body from, um, upstairs?”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “And what kind of counterpart?”
“An old friend,” said the angel, “I’ve known him since the beginning. He’s helped me out before. Okay, but the whole building a body thing?” Dean - or properly, Aziraphale - seemed to blush a little. “It’s complicated. Also not something we talk about.”
Sam had his suspicions on that score, but kept quiet, since there was no way to talk to Dean without Aziraphale hanging around, and he might just be being paranoid.
“I have a problem with this plan,” volunteered Dean, with a handwave. “Apart from the obvious point where I’m totally not going to let some guy I don’t even know who may or may not be good, based on the word of some maybe-evil thing that’s taken up residence inside my skull I told you I’m not really shut UP Aziraphale - dig around in my head - what was I saying? You have a problem with my cunning plan. It’s not really cunning. I wouldn’t say cunning. Angels really shouldn’t be cunning, are you sure you’re an angel? Of course I’m an angel. Are you saying you don’t believe the word of one of the heavenly host? I’m supposed to take your word as an angel that you are really, actually, an angel? Hmm. Put that way, it does seem silly. I really am an angel, though. Oh, yeah? Do you have wings? Sometimes. I had a flaming sword once, but I, ah, lost it. A flaming sword? Like a real sword, on fire? Oh, yes, it was quite a mighty weapon.”
…said Dean.
“Oh, God,” said Sam, and covered his eyes. “Stop, please.”
There was blessed silence from the other side of the table. Sam peeked. Dean - or maybe Aziraphale - looked sheepish. “Sorry, Sammy.”
“Aziraphale? Dean doesn’t like flying. Any plan that involves Dean on a plane is a bad plan.”
The face across from him - and he couldn’t tell anymore who was controlling it, which rather annoyed him - seemed to fall a little, then perk up. “Ah, well. I shall have to phone him. He’ll laugh himself discorporated, of course, but I know he’ll come.”
~
Part 2
Author: fools_game
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Sam/Dean, Crowley/Aziraphale
Warnings: Implied incest, implied angel/demon sexxin’. Crackfic, I guess.
Summary: Dean is possessed by - an angel? And this angel calls on a very unlikely ally for help…
~
It wasn’t like Aziraphale was doing anything wrong. Strictly speaking. I mean, at the time, Crowley was over in Dover helping little old ladies across the street, doing good deeds, before he’d set up for a night of tempting the just. Crowley promised - a full day of good deeds before any tempting.
So it all balanced out, right? The appropriate amounts of harm and good had to be done, so Aziraphale had to do his bit - or rather, Crowley’s bit - here in Canterbury.
He handled tempting like a squeamish teenager handled a rat dissection in Biology - at arms length, with eyes squinted nearly shut and breathing through his mouth. Car brakes disengaged, and the vehicles rolled to sloping stops against walls or poles three feet away, undamaged. Men whose eyes he drew to the pretty girls walking by turned out to be gay, or more interested in their lunch. One telemarketer rang the same man sixteen times by mistake. Instead of getting annoyed, he asked her out for dinner.
Aziraphale sighed, discouraged. He just wasn’t very good at the whole corrupting thing. He wondered how Crowley was getting on in Dover, then pictured the havoc that a well-meaning demon could wreak, and decided he’d much rather not know.
Just before sundown, he found himself in the more touristy sections of town, and wandered down a back street - of which Canterbury had many - half-heartedly expiring parking meters and moving dog droppings under the feet of unwary pedestrians. Just as the sun sank beneath the horizon, framing the spire of the majestic Cathedral, he stepped off the pavement and was hit by a bus full of tourists.
It was one of his least graceful discorporations ever. And that included that time in the middle ages, with the maypole and the yak.
~
You saw people possessed by demons in this job, more and more often, recently. Animals too, crazed with demons and mad with the lust for blood. Dean even swore up and down that “This time - in British Columbia, Sammy, you shoulda been there, it was awesome!” that he and their dad had dealt with a flock of demonically possessed sheep. Sam wondered what kind of damage a bunch of herbivores could do, bleat you to death? Throw their soft, woolly bodies at you until you suffocated? But he never said anything, because it was a memory that made Dean cackle happily which happened not nearly often enough.
So, possessed people? All the time. Possessed animals? Occasionally, yeah, and entertaining, if reports could be believed. Possessed furniture?
Yeah, not so much.
They stood, arms folded, and looked suspiciously at the antique cabinet. The wood was dark red and the front panels were beautifully carved, with that unmistakable patina of age about the whole thing. The carvings might have been flowers or decorative scrollwork, but there were suggestions of faces among the seemingly random designs, and if you knew were to look, other, more sinister patterns.
The guy who had so eagerly accepted “Simon Deveau’s” credit card was suspiciously keen to be rid of the innocuous-looking cabinet. If Sam hadn’t known that the last four families to own it had all been picked off by some malevolent force, one by one, he would have been surprised and pleased at the bargain price.
Not that Sam was in any way interested in antiques. And he certainly wasn’t mourning the idea of having to destroy such a beautiful piece of work.
He ran his hand over the carvings one last time, grimacing as his fingers came away with a light coating of yellow crystals. Sulphur had been embedded in all the cracks, like a particularly persistent dust.
“Stop fondling the evil cupboard, Sam, and let’s get this over with.” Dean’s voice was clipped and slightly more than irritated. It seemed he felt demonic furniture was somehow beneath him. He glanced impatiently around the vacant back lot they’d chosen to do the exorcism in, as if looking for any witnesses, and back down at the journal, muttering to himself.
Sam gave the wood one last pat and stepped outside the salt ring. “You do it, then, if you’re so keen.”
Dean raised an eyebrow and said something under his breath about antiquing, stepped forward until he was right outside the protective circle and began to chant.
The temperature had dropped after the sun went down, and he wasn’t dressed for the cold. Sam folded his arms around himself and kept an eye out for passers-by. The lot was in a new development, where there was plenty of building going on but very few residents, so the likelihood of witnesses was slim, but Sam’s eyes scanned their surroundings anyway, an automatic deferral to the proximity of houses, streets and cars to their business. It felt wrong do this in the middle of so much mundanity.
The cabinet was making squawking noises now, its doors banging open and shut so hard pieces were starting to break off. Dean’s voice carried clear and calm above the cacophony, the Latin phrases slipping effortlessly off his tongue. For someone who didn’t believe in God, the old prayers certainly came naturally to him. Sam watched him, caught between sheer aesthetic admiration of the drama in the scene and the desire to properly display his appreciation of Dean’s fine, fine speaking voice. He was so authoritative. Sam had tingles.
The wind was howling now, ripping through Sam’s thin sweater. With a sound rather disappointingly like a cat coughing up a hairball, the cabinet disgorged a thick cloud of oily black smoke. It briefly formed itself into a nearly human avatar, long enough to wheeze out a rude phrase in Dean’s general direction and make a gesture that might have been equivalent to sticking out it’s deformed, demonic tongue.
“Bite me,” Dean suggested, and spat the last few Latin phrases.
Grumbling, the demon went, and the night was still.
Dean kicked the battered cabinet. “Think we should burn it?”
“To be safe,” Sam agreed, and grabbed his ass. “You’re very hot when you speak Latin, you know that?” He bent his head to mouth at Dean’s neck.
“I’m very hot when I’m doing anything, Sammy. You know that.” Dean dug around in the bag for the lighter fluid, his Zippo already in hand. He batted away Sam’s attempts to grope him. “Molest me later, antique boy. We need to - huh.” He paused, wearing an expression that suggested he had just swallowed a bug.
“What?”
“Did you feel that?” Dean tilted his head to the side, looking like he was listening intently.
Sam looked around cautiously. Now that the ritual was over, the wind had dropped away to nothing, and the night was clear and still and silent. The probably-now-harmless cabinet lay on its side, unthreatening.
“Um, no? Feel what, Dean? Are you okay?” Dean was shaking his head like he was trying to dislodge water from his ears.
“Yeah, I just I beg your pardon, could you possibly tell me where I am?”
Dean shut his mouth. Sam stared. “What?”
Dean opened his mouth. “I said Look, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but what the hell was that?” His eyes were wide, frightened.
Sam clamped down on the panic rising up in his own chest. “Who’s there?” He resisted the urge to grab Dean and shake him.
Dean looked cagey, and then his mouth seemed to open of its own accord. “America, then? Oh, dear. So sorry, I’ll just be off now. Sammy, make it stop.”
Jolted into movement, Sam ducked down and grabbed for the journal, grateful it was still out. He never took his eyes off Dean, standing frozen into immobility, as if terrified of what his mouth was going to do next. “Okay. In nomine patri, et filie,”
Dean’s faced assumed an expression of cherubic benevolence. He even gave a little condescending chuckle. “Oh, no, dear boy, you have to wrong idea entirely. I’m not a demon at all.”
Sam seized him by the shirtfront. “What are you? Get the hell out of my brother!”
“I’m trying. Er, there seems to be a bit of a problem. This is most embarrassing…”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sam demanded.
Dean, or the thing that inhabited him, sighed. It was an expressive sigh, conveying a great deal of emotion. Sam thought, a bit meanly, that it sounded sissy.
“I’m not a demon,” Dean’s mouth said, in the oddly inflected accent Sam was beginning to recognise as the intruder. “Quite the opposite, actually. I mean you no harm. What do you mean, just the opposite?” Dean’s voice - cutting off the other’s quite effectively - came out slightly panicked-sounding. “ My dear boy, I’m not your dear anything. And you can’t expect us to believe that you’re some kind of - angel.” There was a pause. Sam watched his brother warily. Dean was going cross-eyed in an apparent attempt to look himself sternly in the eye, his expression flipping between scowling cynicism and long-suffering patience. “You believe in demons readily enough,” the intruder pointed out. Dean scowled. “Not the same thing.”
Sam intervened. “Okay, enough. You - look, do you have a name?”
Dean blinked. “Er, Aziraphale.”
Sam nodded. “And you’re an angel.” He waved away Dean’s protest and sighed. “Say we do take that at face value. What the hell are you doing in my brother and why won’t you leave?”
Dean - Aziraphale - looked distraught. If he’d had control of Dean’s hands, Sam was sure he would have wrung them. “I don’t know! I got hit by a bus, and then - well, I was here! And now I’m stuck! A likely story. It’s true!”
“I thought angels were immortal,” Sam pointed out, shifting from foot to foot in the cold air.
“We are required to take human form,” Aziraphale said, a bit snippily. “It has its benefits, but also its drawbacks.” There was a pause. Dean was scowling, an expression of intent concentration on his face. “Doesn’t explain why you’re in my head. Also, why you won’t leave! I’m not sure about the second, but when I’m discorporated, I tend to gravitate towards - open minds. People praying, calling on the Almighty, that sort of thing.” There was another pause. “Not one word, Sammy.”
“Not a one,” Sam promised.
“Anyway,” continued the angel, “I’m not really in your head. I’m just riding along. I can’t read your thoughts, you know.”
Sam smothered the relieved expression trying to unfold on his face. There were things he really didn’t want any kind of angelic being spotting inside Dean’s head. “Okay, so what usually happens when you get - what was it?”
“Discorporated. Well, normally I just go and ask upstairs for a new body. Upstairs? You gotta be kidding me. I assure you, I am perfectly I was being sarcastic. You don’t need to answer. Sammy, Well, perhaps you should learn to guard your tongue. Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, you know. You mind not hijacking my mouth while I’m using it? Oh, I do beg your pardon. Whatever.”
“Well, why don’t you do that, then? I mean, ask for a new body?” said Sam, torn between amusement, frustration and fear.
Dean face went blank and there was a long pause. “I am currently - stuck - inside your brother,” said Aziraphale, and it seemed to Sam that he was speaking very carefully. He wondered if angels could lie.
“So what the hell are we supposed to do?” he asked aloud.
~
The drive back to the motel was a chore. Sam drove, because he didn’t trust the thing in Dean’s head, and Dean was eerily, stubbornly silent that whole way back. Sam considered trying to make conversation, but the fear of what - or rather, who - might be answering his questions, rather put him off the idea. He snuck furtive glances instead, watched Dean slouched in his seat, lips pinned tightly shut, his arms folded and tense.
He pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine. “Okay,” he said, for want of anything else. He looked at Dean again, and Dean looked back helplessly, but when he spoke, it was with the slightly nasal inflection and British accent of the intruder.
“I really am terribly sorry. This isn’t ideal for me either.”
Sam sighed, and resisted the urge to bash his head on the steering wheel. “Dean, you okay?”
His brother nodded. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he can’t take control of my body or anything. I can’t. And gosh, I’d sure appreciate if he stopped mouthing off when I’m talking.” A pause, no reply from the angel. “I think it’s okay.”
Sam nodded tightly and didn’t look at his brother, because if he did, he’d have to crawl over and curl up in Dean’s lap, or grab him by the ears and plant a wet one on him, or reach out and touch his face gently to reassure himself. None of which were possible with something riding shotgun behind his brother’s eyes. “Okay,” he said again, and got out of the car.
Dean followed more slowly, and once they got into the motel room, he seemed jumpy, skittish. His eyes darted around, looking at the mess they’d left it in that morning, the papers scattered over the table, clothes hung over the backs of chairs or dropped where they were. He shot Sam a desperate look, and his eyes flicked briefly over the beds, one still made and piled high with crap, the other obviously slept in, rumpled and stained. Sam nodded slightly.
“I’m going to go shower,” Dean announced and took himself off to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. It had been a long time since he’d bothered shutting Sam out while he bathed, preferring to subtly encourage the whole getting-clean task as a team sport, but Aziraphale might get the wrong idea.
Sam rubbed his forehead as he started to clean the junk off the spare bed. This whole thing was getting more complicated by the second. Even if the thing in Dean’s head was exactly who he said he was - something Sam still had his doubts over - there were certain aspects of their lives that would probably cause their celestial visitor to get the vapours, if he ever found out. Until Aziraphale was gone, they were going to have to be very, very careful.
Glancing around, he snatched the lube and condoms off the nightstand and stuck them in his duffle, then smoothed the sheets on the used bed just as Dean came out of the bathroom.
He wondered if there was a special circle of hell reserved for incestuous sodomites.
Dean was red faced and looked irritated. “Something wrong?” asked Sam.
Dean scowled. “It does not send you blind,” he said grumpily. “It’s a perfectly healthy dangerously narcissistic outlet for tension.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. With an angel in your head? Dude.”
“Shut up,” said Dean. “Frickin’ kinky angel. How dare you.”
~
Sleep proved impossible, so Sam lay on his side and watched Dean instead, restless without his brother’s comforting presence. Dean lay on his front, sprawled out, facing away from Sam and didn’t move, though Sam knew he was awake.
It complicated things, having an angel around. For the first time in a long time, Sam felt a tendril of shame curl in his chest at the thought of touching Dean. He longed for it, wanted to be wrapped around his brother so bad it hurt, but the idea of having an angel watching, and knowing, and judging, made him want to crawl into a hole and die.
Because it had to be unholy, what was between him and Dean, despite the fact that it was the only comfort and love and security they had. He wondered, if he had to choose, what his choice would be. If the angel found out and said in his horrible, irritating way “You can’t do this, you’ll be damned,” Sam wondered if he would be strong enough to choose redemption over Dean. He wondered if that was even the right choice.
He slept a little, just before dawn, and rose to find Dean’s bed empty, and neatly made. A note on the table said Gone to get breakfast. If not back by 8, check local psych ward. D.
Sam showered to pass the time, picturing Dean conversing with himself - and answering - at the drive-through of the local McDonalds. Then he jerked off over the fantasy of what he was going to do to Dean when they got him un-angelised, because if he was going to be struck down by a bolt of lightning for thinking bad things about his brother, he’d be McSparky the Lightning Boy by now.
Dean was back when he got out, arguing with Aziraphale over the appropriate way to serve scrambled eggs and unable to find a compromise on beverages. “Hey, Sammy Good morning. Did you sleep well? Do you mind? Sorry,” they greeted him.
“Morning,” said Sam, snagging a muffin. “I slept fine, thanks. No nightmares.” He took a bite and sat down, his feet connecting with Dean’s under the table. He left them there, ankles entwined. “What’s on the agenda today?”
“Find a crowbar to get this thing out of my head?” suggested Dean sweetly. “Well, really. As it happens, I do have a useful suggestion for a way to end this - unfortunate arrangement.”
They both stared. Or rather, Sam stared, and Dean went a little cross-eyed and shook his head. “Why didn’t you say something before?” Sam demanded.
“I only thought of it last night, as you two slept.” Sam nearly strained a muscle rolling his eyes, and Aziraphale huffed. “Look, do you want to hear my idea or not? Yes, okay, fine. Sam, stop poking the angel in my head. I’ve already told you, I’m not really in your head. Are you going to tell us your brilliant idea or not?”
Sam rubbed his temples. Dean’s back-and-forth with himself confused him.
“I have a counterpart in England. We’ll have to fly out and see him. He can get me out of you, and he can help me build a new body. Wait, I thought you had to get a new body from, um, upstairs?”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “And what kind of counterpart?”
“An old friend,” said the angel, “I’ve known him since the beginning. He’s helped me out before. Okay, but the whole building a body thing?” Dean - or properly, Aziraphale - seemed to blush a little. “It’s complicated. Also not something we talk about.”
Sam had his suspicions on that score, but kept quiet, since there was no way to talk to Dean without Aziraphale hanging around, and he might just be being paranoid.
“I have a problem with this plan,” volunteered Dean, with a handwave. “Apart from the obvious point where I’m totally not going to let some guy I don’t even know who may or may not be good, based on the word of some maybe-evil thing that’s taken up residence inside my skull I told you I’m not really shut UP Aziraphale - dig around in my head - what was I saying? You have a problem with my cunning plan. It’s not really cunning. I wouldn’t say cunning. Angels really shouldn’t be cunning, are you sure you’re an angel? Of course I’m an angel. Are you saying you don’t believe the word of one of the heavenly host? I’m supposed to take your word as an angel that you are really, actually, an angel? Hmm. Put that way, it does seem silly. I really am an angel, though. Oh, yeah? Do you have wings? Sometimes. I had a flaming sword once, but I, ah, lost it. A flaming sword? Like a real sword, on fire? Oh, yes, it was quite a mighty weapon.”
…said Dean.
“Oh, God,” said Sam, and covered his eyes. “Stop, please.”
There was blessed silence from the other side of the table. Sam peeked. Dean - or maybe Aziraphale - looked sheepish. “Sorry, Sammy.”
“Aziraphale? Dean doesn’t like flying. Any plan that involves Dean on a plane is a bad plan.”
The face across from him - and he couldn’t tell anymore who was controlling it, which rather annoyed him - seemed to fall a little, then perk up. “Ah, well. I shall have to phone him. He’ll laugh himself discorporated, of course, but I know he’ll come.”
~
Part 2