Survivor
TITLE: Survivor
RATING: PG
WORD COUNT: 4450
FANDOM: Supernatural
CHARACTERS: Castiel, OCs, Dean, Sam, Gloria ("Houses of the Holy"). This isn't actually Dean/Castiel, but it's preeeetty slashy.
SUMMARY: He wants to believe in angels and God. Or, the obligatory Cas-comes-back fic.
WARNINGS: Nothing, really. A few mentions of unpleasant stuff?
NOTES: This entire fic is based on spoilers (specifically this one, provided it's a spoiler and not Misha being Misha) and speculation for 7.17, "The Born-Again Identity." Other than that, there are general spoilers for S7 and tiny spoilers for 2.13, "Houses of the Holy." This fic takes place in the same town as that episode. I apologize if there are inaccuracies in the depiction of the mental health profession. Many more notes at the end of this fic.
DISCLAIMER: Supernatural and its characters are not mine.
“It was an angel,” the woman breathes out. Her skin is sallow, and her hair falls straight down, dull with a few days’ grease and too many years in here. And yet her eyes shine, as if lit from something within. “It was God’s will, Chris.”
Chris nods at her, sagely. He’s been told his features carry a mixture of seriousness and openness at once, and whether true or not, it does work. People talk to him.
“I believe you, Gloria.” He wants to believe, is more accurate, but he won’t say that.
Gloria tells him this every time he comes in to see her, even if it’s just to deliver food and medication. He’s seen some of the other nurses leading Gloria to clean herself, and she’s still murmuring softly about angels and God and His will. Chris does his best to smile back at the other orderlies; this job is not easy.
Not easy, and it doesn’t pay well, and his hours are either tedious or a little too interesting when they start involving anyone’s hallucinations. Most of his co-workers are volunteers, psychology majors or graduate students from one of the nearby colleges. They’ll be here for a week, gone the next, back the one after that. Still, eating flavorless cafeteria dinners - or maybe breakfast or lunch, they all meld together - with one other orderly on either side of him, or reading their notecards aloud to prepare them for upcoming tests, they become his best friends. He’s not sure he ever had a friend before.
“You keep weird hours,” one of them, Mara, told him once. He reads people poorly, but he’s fairly certain she likes his company. The two of them were in an otherwise empty rec room, as it was 2:30 AM and most of the hospital’s occupants were asleep. Some were knocked out. “I mean here. I sleep through, like, Wednesday, literally, but I go to class in the day and come here at night, and you’re always here.”
She pauses to bump her toe against Chris’, and continues. “Sometimes I wonder if this is gonna turn out to be a Choke thing with you.”
“Pardon?” Chris knows he comes off as slightly askew to the college kids. Mara finds him endearing, though, as opposed to merely strange.
“Choke. You ever read that book? By Chuck, uh, whatshisname - I can never pronounce it. The one who wrote Fight Club.”
Chris can’t remember sitting down to read that book. He can’t remember reading much of anything other than psychopathology textbooks when the students leave them behind. But he has its words absorbed somehow; he must’ve read it a long time ago. “Yes.”
“I just mean that one of these days it’s gonna turn out you never leave because you’re a patient, or something,” she responds, with a good-natured little laugh. Chris doesn’t say anything in return, because he’s not sure what he can say, and her laughter falls silent. “Geez, I’m sorry.” She toes at his foot again. “Wasn’t real appropriate.”
“Well, you’re tired. You don’t sleep except on Wednesdays.” Chris is pretty sure he’s teasing, because it earns him a smile, but there’s something off about him.
That may be an understatement. Most people don’t wake up soaking wet on the shore of a lake, staring at their hands and not remembering anything. He somehow knew everything, like the way the plot of Choke rolled pleasantly to the front of his mind, but he remembered nothing.
Well, he remembered very little. What he could remember was a flash of light, then dark gurgling over it, and the knowledge that he’d done something horribly wrong. A dirty, metallic sting filled his nose, and he felt like he should cry but his eyes refused to tear up. Instead, he sat, thankful his pants were dark because otherwise the damp grass would have left stains.
He gave himself a few hours, before he got up to move. Those dark pants contained a wallet stuffed with money and credit cards - all with different names - and he came ingrained with the knowledge of how these things worked, somehow. It was unpleasant to shop in his stiff, dried clothes, picking jeans and heavy flannel plaids off the shelves because they appealed to him, but he slipped his new clothes on afterward and sighed in happiness for the first time. They were warm and comfortable, even in this New England winter.
It seems like a whirlwind struck ground, picking him up one day and placing him in another weeks later. Chris Till, he decided his name was, because it was non-descript and something about it appealed to him. He found a motel that didn’t need ID and more or less squatted there for a week, until he found this job at the institution. Chris could return to the motel for some time off, but he never feels the need. Something about him likes it here, with Gloria and Mike, who’d dropped out of the college most of the interns attend because he’d been stressed out and started snorting Ritalin, and the other patients. He likes the easily-forgettable chatter with Mara and her friends.
He knows why he’s there. He still can’t remember what he did, like the murky black thing that lurches to the forefront of his mind stays there purposefully to block it out, but he knows it’s bad, and he knows he’ll have to make up for it some day. Until then, he’ll do what he can to help anyone else.
They don’t pay enough if he wanted to live comfortably, but his life remains in the squat shape of the institution. He can’t find the words to tell Mara he works nights because he can’t sleep. It’s not insomnia; he merely has no use for it. He eats the cafeteria food, but it’s to follow everyone else. Hunger and thirst are foreign feelings to him.
“I wonder if I’m like that, too,” Chris admits. Mara just nods.
“Get some rest,” she tells him.
He doesn’t. Really, he never sleeps.
The next day they have to let Kyle go because he finds Mike, who he knew back in school, and in the words of Elise, the supervisor, starts giving him shit. Chris has cleaned that off the wall here, once; he doesn’t understand why Kyle would’ve given Mike more of it. At night, Chris ends up playing chess with Rob, who has PTSD and takes a long time to make any move because his hands never stop shaking, until the sunlight spills pinkly through the window.
*
“That’s awesome,” Mara tells him on Thursday night, leaning over his shoulder. A few of the other volunteers are in the rec room tonight, at least, though Chris suspects they find him all very odd. They’re not wrong. “You ever in art school or something?”
Chris has a pencil - never pen unless it’s in one of the neat cups at the reception desk, pen leaves marks on walls that are too difficult to get out - and he’s sketching something that clings to the back of his mind. It’s a funny-pointed star, enclosed inside a circle, surrounded with even funnier-looking symbols. A scorpion twists its way through the middle.
“No,” he responds. “I just have an odd imagination.” As if to prove it, he draws out the shape of a ribcage next to the circle, his fingers and wrists working together to move almost of their own volition. Across the bones, he draws symbols that look like omegas and backward Cs. “Enochian,” he explains, the word coming to mind unbidden.
Stephanie walks over. “I know we met already, but do I recognize you?” she asks Chris, her nose scrunched up. She’s attractive, but it’s not a very pleasing expression. “Like - were you ever on TV?”
“You didn’t tell me you were an actor,” Mara interrupts, a wide grin across her face. The corners of her eyes crinkle, and something lurches inside Chris’ gut. He wonders if this is hunger.
“Definitely not,” he tells Mara, rather primly. To Stephanie, he merely shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I have never been on television that I know of.”
Mara and Stephanie exchange glances. They’re both smiling, lightly. “What?” he asks, more out of curiosity than anything else.
“I told Steph you were a great guy,” Mara responds, after a bit. She’s not looking at him; she’s staring down at the paper in his hand. He wrote out the entire Enochian alphabet, and he hadn’t even thought about it. “You’re just kind of an alien sometimes.”
“And you are very blunt.” That earns him a laugh, and a smile creeps over his face.
The three of them, and a few other students Stephanie knows, end up going out to a diner for breakfast. The colors are so bright inside the restaurant, and none of the food appeals to him. If he was truly hungry before, it has passed. Still, he purchases a wrap with eggs and peppers inside, and licks grease off his fingers when he takes two of Mara’s hash browns. She mock-whacks away his hands.
He’ll never really feel that way, but it’s as close to normal as he’s gotten.
*
He has lemonade for Gloria, and chicken in some brown sauce along with limp broccoli and carrots.
“It was an angel. I know I stabbed that man through the heart, but it was God’s will, Chris.”
He nods. Truthfully, he aches for her to be right. He wants there to be angels, and God, because they’ll tell him what to do, other than pad through the linoleum floors giving the patients their medicine and watching videos on YouTube with the other volunteers. They’ll tell him what he did wrong that keeps him inside these walls, only different from the patients because he doesn’t have an official diagnosis. He wants a murderer, a woman who’s been saying the same thing over and over again for five years, to be right.
Stephanie’s playing Solitaire at the front desk, chin cradled in her palm. “Tsk, tsk,” Chris clucks at her. It’s at least partially serious, because he doesn’t truly understand teasing.
“Hey, I deserve it after dealing with the new guy,” she sighs. Chris dislikes gossip and griping among the other volunteers, and Stephanie does the former a little too often for his liking, but not the latter. This sounds suspiciously like both, so Chris just grunts in response. “Tender.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the screen. “The new guy. Sam Tender. Just - yeah, he’s a doozy.”
As these things turn out, Paul calls him in from the rec room to check on Sam that night. Chris tries his best to keep his mind clear of any preconceptions about the patients, only Paul looks grim when he’s ushering Chris toward Sam’s room. “We don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Paul tells him, voice low. “His brother checked him in and seemed pretty shaken up himself. We’re thinking it’s schizophrenia, maybe.”
Sam’s quite calmly sitting in a chair when Chris comes to his room, watching television. He’s a few years younger than Chris, maybe, but older than the interns, and very tall, even when scrunched into a chair. Chris notes, with some amusement, that he’s turned the television to Kourtney and Kim Take New York.
“Dinner,” Chris tells him.
Sam glances at Chris, and something in his eyes goes wide. “Very funny,” he hisses to the air. “Y-you said you wouldn’t bother me if I just let you watch TV -”
“I’m not trying to bother -” but Chris falls silent, because it’s clear Sam isn’t talking to him.
His voice is half-snarl, half-whisper, and there’s so much strength and so many nerves trembling in his shoulders. Something about Sam is fascinating. “Who’s next, Jess? Bobby? Mom, dad, Adam? Throw it on me. Better than the cage. Go ahead.”
“I’m Chris.” He’s holding his hands up so his palms are exposed. “I’m here to help you.”
“That’s hilarious, Cas.” He turns back to the television, whole body trembling. “Not even Cas, Cas could help…” His shoulders hunch toward the screen. Scott whines to Kourtney about a piano, but Sam is silent again.
Chris makes sure to write a small report, listing the names Sam spat out and noting he mentioned a cage. That single word set nervous alarms off in his head. Too much abuse got stuffed into the bodies in this ward, and it all makes Chris despair, that bodies as small as Gloria’s and as large as Sam’s could shudder under it alike.
Mara’s in the rec room that night. Every so often, there are shouts from the nearby rooms. “Tell Stephanie Sam wasn’t so bad,” Chris tells her, and he’s not sure if he’s telling the truth or not.
*
Elise goes out to get the interns Chinese food, which puts everyone on the ward in a disproportionately good mood. Chris will end up stealing dumplings from Mara and Stephanie, and maybe some of their friends too if they’re around tonight.
Everyone on staff knows you don’t mess with Elise. It’s not only the hard South Boston accent; she’s been here longer than anyone, and she works harder than anyone else, too. That’s why it’s such a shock when she comes back, and Chris hears what can be best described as hollering coming from the station in the front of the hospital. “Probably Ryan or one of the guys in this wing pissed they didn’t order their food in time,” Stephanie sighs, adjusting her knees so she can read her Chemistry textbook more easily.
“Ryan is rude. He’s not insane.” You don’t mess with Elise, seriously. “I want to see this.”
Chris arrives at the front desk and Elise is there, snowflakes clumped on her hair. She’s set the bags of food down, and looks weary and furious at once at the source of the noise, a man about Chris’ age who’d be good-looking if he wasn’t snarling. “I want to see my brother.”
“Sam’s here to get the best care he can,” Elise snaps back, her voice significantly lower than the other man’s. It wouldn’t be smart to wake up any sleeping patients. “You’d only disturb him.” A furrow appears between her brows, and this guy is doomed. “Probably already have with your yelling at this hour.”
“You don’t underst -” Sam’s brother starts, and then he looks over at Chris.
Chris isn’t normally that aware of other people. It works for the patients; he sees terrible things each day, but he is not their therapist for a reason, and it gives him the ability to come back the day after. He’s comfortable as a blank slate, even wearing the appropriate white hospital scrubs most of the time. Yes, he’s come to care for Mara and Stephanie and he knows Elise is awesome and Kyle and Ryan are jerks, in the words of the other interns. But he could brush by most people.
He’s fairly sure he couldn’t do that with the yelling man in the entranceway, now that they’ve looked at each other. Sam was fascinating, but it couldn’t compare to his brother, the way the dullness on his eyes rolls over to brightness and his face goes slack. Chris has never seen someone’s jaw actually drop, and it makes him uncomfortable even as his gaze sweeps over his body. “Cas?”
Elise looks between them, and so does the receptionist, one of the college girls Chris doesn’t know very well. They both make a point of looking away.
“It’s Chris,” the receptionist speaks up.
“N-no, you’re - how the hell did you get out? I thought you exploded, or something -” He’s ignoring her to look right at Chris.
“How do you know him, Chris?” the receptionist asks, continuing to poke into the conversation. She’s got her arms folded, and a smile poking at the corner of her mouth.
Chris opens his mouth to say I don’t, but the other man speaks for him. He’s very loud. Brash comes to mind. “We, uh. We fought together, once.”
“You were in the army and you didn’t mention it when you checked your brother in earlier?” Chris can hear the tight inhale at the end of Elise’s question. “Was Sam in the army, too?”
The stranger seemed single-minded before, like Elise and the receptionist were a door he had to batter down. Now, his eyes flick back and forth wildly, and his jaw twitches. He’s unfocused, so much so that Chris worries about him flying apart right here. “Uh, no,” he gets out, at last, swallowing. “I - shit. I - I’ll be back later. During visiting hours.”
Chris knows he shouldn’t say anything. He does anyway. “I’ll be here.”
He doesn’t realize he doesn’t know the other man’s name until he’s out the door.
“Goddamn moron,” Elise snaps. That man doesn’t know how lucky he is that he’s not a giant bloody smear on the carpet. “Crazier than anyone in here. Food probably went cold while he was hollering.” She hikes up the bags again, and leaves to go hand it out.
The receptionist - Amanda, her nameplate reads - smiles up at him conspiratorially when Elise is gone. “Damn, Chris,” she says, and unless he is mistaken she is somewhat impressed. “That guy’s hot.”
“I don’t know him,” Chris sighs, truthfully.
“Oh, honey.” Amanda pouts. “That way of dealing with it never works.” Quickly, she digs through the small tray of candy in front of her desk, and comes up with a neat little rectangle of Hershey’s dark chocolate. “Chocolate always helps, seriously! And I’m here if you need to talk.”
Chris could not remember Amanda’s name until two minutes ago, and there is nothing she could help him with at the current time other than letting him know when he has to bring food and medication to the patients tomorrow. Still, he accepts the chocolate and lets it dissolve against his tongue. It’s distracting.
He absolutely does not jump when he walks by what he believes is Sam Tender’s room and hears a thump, even through the thick walls.
*
“Amanda gave me the deets,” Mara greets him the next day, with a wry grin. Chris doesn’t know what deets are, or why anything Amanda gave Mara is relevant to this conversation. Unless it was more chocolate, because he did enjoy that. “I didn’t know you liked guys like that. Frankly, I didn’t know you liked people like that.”
Chris startles at that, a bit. Again, he isn’t that aware of other people. He finds Stephanie’s features more pleasing to his eyes than Mara’s, but it’s just another fact he mentally files away about them, along with their friendliness or their tastes in music. Their appearances exist, but they are not more important than anything else about them.
“Um,” Mara says, after a long silence. “Sorry if that was - I’m really rude sometimes.”
“You need to sleep on days other than Wednesday.” Chris’ voice is grave, but he smiles.
The institution is nice, Chris believes, not that he has much to compare it to. But the hallways are somewhat too thin, if only to make room for bigger individual rooms. Still, the hallways seem even more cramped when the stormcloud that is the man from last night stomps down them, stopping in the rec room. This time, his mouth actually hangs open a bit when he catches sight of Chris.
“Can I help you?” Mara asks, quickly putting her laptop aside. She’s gotten in trouble before for being unprofessional, Chris knows.
The man gives her an odd expression. “Probably not,” he snaps. “Can I talk to you, Chris?”
“Certainly.”
There’s a pause. “Oh my God, you’re the friggin’ same.” His voice sounds relived and hysterical at once. “Alone.”
Mara can’t bite back her grin. “You work your butt off, Chris, and like everyone else is in today too. I’ll go yell at Derrek to actually do something. Take an hour or two if you need it.” He understands the lectures she gets about her professionalism, or lack thereof.
Chris nods, slowly. He’s unsure what he’s accepting, but something about him is unsettled and any resolution would be helpful.
The other man strides too quickly down the hallway, his gait heavy and rapid at once. Chris finds himself nearly running to keep up. “Did you see your brother? I hope he’s alright.”
“Yeah. He’s as okay as he’s going to get right now.” Chris is slightly embarrassed he didn’t get a chance to change into his hospital whites yet, but it’s not until the other man eyes him that he realizes they’re wearing very similar clothing, down to the boots. Chris’ clothes are almost new; he’s familiar with Halloween, even if he can’t remember experiencing it himself, and he may as well have been dressing up as this stranger for that holiday.
“I’m sorry,” Chris begins, as they push open the doors together. Snow dusts the ground, and they both walk carefully. “What’s your name?”
Chris can’t describe the look that passes over the stranger’s face. He works in a mental institution, and he’s never seen hurt so plain. “It’s Dean.” The expected handshake never comes. “You really don’t remember, shit.”
“You know me,” Chris gets out, eventually, after too long watching his breath condense into fog in the air. It’s partially a question, but mostly a statement. Chris knows nothing of Dean other than his loudness and his brother, but if Dean knows him, maybe he’s a clue. Maybe Dean will let him exhale the one deep breath that’s been caught inside his lungs since he woke up. “How?”
Dean laughs at that, but there’s no humor behind it. “I guess it started when you pulled me out of Hell,” he spits, pulling a flask out of his pocket and taking a long swig. Chris seriously has to talk to Elise about cornering Dean about his own state of mind the next time he comes to visit his brother. “What’s - humor me, Cas.”
“It’s Chris.” There is little conviction behind that sentence.
“Bullshit. I could tell when it was just someone who looked like you, like Jimmy or that Misha guy, and this is you.” Chris wants to talk to him about how grief is an incredibly powerful emotion, but lecturing Dean, however gently, doesn’t seem right. “What’s the first thing you remember?”
Chris likes to think that Mara is his friend, but she’s never asked him about his family, or where he’s from, or what he did before he came to the institution. Funnily enough, that’s a large part of why he’s friendly with her; he has no answers to give, so he appreciates her lack of questions. “I woke up beside a lake,” he answers, truthfully. “It was only a few months ago. I remember nothing before that.”
Dean just looks. Chris - and no, whoever Dean is, he’s right, Cas was the name he’d been searching for all along - has never had anyone look at him like that, and yet he’s not uncomfortable. “Something mind-whammied you, huh,” he concludes. “And it made sure to take me out.”
“I don’t think it was you,” Cas responds. It should be strange to think of himself as a different name, but he hadn’t had the old one for very long. “I just - I know I did something awful.” He takes a step closer to Dean. “That’s why I work here. I know I have to help somehow.” It’s completely unprofessional, and he doesn’t know why he does it, but he slots his hand over one of Dean’s shoulders.
Dean looks at the hand on him, and then at Cas’ face, alarm and - Cas cannot deny it - hot intent alike in his gaze. “Can I say something to you that… man, if you’re telling the truth, it’s not going to make any sense.”
Cas listens to the legally insane every day, but nothing they say scares him in the way Dean Tender’s ice green gaze sparks every nerve ending he has, or makes all his organs slosh. “Okay,” he murmurs. “Tell me what you want.” His hand hasn’t moved.
“I wanted to forget you,” Dean sighs out, at last. “Just Eternal Sunshine you away. It was easier than getting pissed at myself for… for not getting pissed at you. I should wanna wring your neck because of everything, but I just -” His voice trails off into choked laughter. “I’m just so fucking glad there’s someone I can talk to now. I’m glad I didn’t lose everything just yet.”
“You can talk to me,” Cas repeats, shock and hurt and confusion and under it all, relief darting through his thoughts, and then he’s gathered up very roughly against Dean’s chest. He smells like cheap Old Spice and metal, but he’s somehow comforted. “My job is to help your brother,” he’s saying, and he doesn’t even mind that his lips are right against Dean’s neck, “But I hope I can help you too.” He pulls out of the hug, but stays close. Their hands stay on each other’s shoulders, a strange little cage formation with too much held inside. “I am sorry if that is too unprofessional.”
Dean nearly chokes laughing. The situation should be rather embarrassing, half-embracing on the sidewalk among all this gray slush. A few people who pass by give them odd looks, and Cas is sure Mara, Amanda, and perhaps even Elise, frighteningly enough, are clumped together back in the hospital, watching them and giggling. Normally, Cas would avoid unnecessary attention; here, with Dean, he does not care.
Cas should be insulted by the way Dean barges right into his tiny but neat life, altering his very name and telling Cas that he wants to be furious at him. He isn’t. It’s normal, like spearing one of Mara’s dumplings with a chopstick, and gut-churning at once. It’s exciting is what it is, and Cas hasn’t ever felt that before.
Cas wants to believe in angels, like Gloria does. He wants to believe in God. He aches to know that there’s something out there to believe in, and that can free the burden from his shoulders. Cas wants to let in the white light he remembers from the side of the lake, and wipe away the dark, curdling thing that couldn’t quite overwhelm it. Dean isn’t an angel, and he’s certainly not God. But Cas looks at his face, too open, not fully smiling but not quite wrecked right now, and it’s someone he can help and have faith in at once.
He nods at Dean, and together, they walk back into the hospital.
A/N: Since we got the spoilers about amnesia and Sam in a mental institution, combined with Misha's picture, almost every fic I've read of Castiel's return has him as a patient in the same mental institution as Sam. I adore that trope, but I wanted to try something different. I rewatched "Houses of the Holy" the day Misha posted that possible spoiler picture, and what he's wearing matches Sam's outfit from when he's pretending to be a nurse in order to get information from Gloria. The idea of Castiel working in a mental institution stuck with me. I'm also fascinated with the idea of Castiel being amnesia'd up, but knowing he did something very, very wrong, and trying to help in any way he can. It also amuses me to think of Cas leading the most normal life he could, only to have Dean find him.
This fic started out as an outsider POV of Mara talking to her freshman roommate about how the kind yet totally alien guy who worked with her at her internship was acting even weirder than usual lately but oh lawd it was way too much telling and no showing. The most interesting part of it was a fairly extended discussion of Cheez-Whiz and Wal-Mart, and I am not kidding. That said, now that I've written the actual fic I wanted to write, more or less, maybe I'll write ~remixes~ if I'm inspired enough before 7.17 actually airs. After all, to me Cas is totally still at least partially an angel even if he isn't aware of it, and Dean still needs to give him that coat back.........
The title is from Palahniuk's Survivor, and the name Tender is from the main character in that book.
Finally, you know Lucifer totally loves him some E!.
RATING: PG
WORD COUNT: 4450
FANDOM: Supernatural
CHARACTERS: Castiel, OCs, Dean, Sam, Gloria ("Houses of the Holy"). This isn't actually Dean/Castiel, but it's preeeetty slashy.
SUMMARY: He wants to believe in angels and God. Or, the obligatory Cas-comes-back fic.
WARNINGS: Nothing, really. A few mentions of unpleasant stuff?
NOTES: This entire fic is based on spoilers (specifically this one, provided it's a spoiler and not Misha being Misha) and speculation for 7.17, "The Born-Again Identity." Other than that, there are general spoilers for S7 and tiny spoilers for 2.13, "Houses of the Holy." This fic takes place in the same town as that episode. I apologize if there are inaccuracies in the depiction of the mental health profession. Many more notes at the end of this fic.
DISCLAIMER: Supernatural and its characters are not mine.
“It was an angel,” the woman breathes out. Her skin is sallow, and her hair falls straight down, dull with a few days’ grease and too many years in here. And yet her eyes shine, as if lit from something within. “It was God’s will, Chris.”
Chris nods at her, sagely. He’s been told his features carry a mixture of seriousness and openness at once, and whether true or not, it does work. People talk to him.
“I believe you, Gloria.” He wants to believe, is more accurate, but he won’t say that.
Gloria tells him this every time he comes in to see her, even if it’s just to deliver food and medication. He’s seen some of the other nurses leading Gloria to clean herself, and she’s still murmuring softly about angels and God and His will. Chris does his best to smile back at the other orderlies; this job is not easy.
Not easy, and it doesn’t pay well, and his hours are either tedious or a little too interesting when they start involving anyone’s hallucinations. Most of his co-workers are volunteers, psychology majors or graduate students from one of the nearby colleges. They’ll be here for a week, gone the next, back the one after that. Still, eating flavorless cafeteria dinners - or maybe breakfast or lunch, they all meld together - with one other orderly on either side of him, or reading their notecards aloud to prepare them for upcoming tests, they become his best friends. He’s not sure he ever had a friend before.
“You keep weird hours,” one of them, Mara, told him once. He reads people poorly, but he’s fairly certain she likes his company. The two of them were in an otherwise empty rec room, as it was 2:30 AM and most of the hospital’s occupants were asleep. Some were knocked out. “I mean here. I sleep through, like, Wednesday, literally, but I go to class in the day and come here at night, and you’re always here.”
She pauses to bump her toe against Chris’, and continues. “Sometimes I wonder if this is gonna turn out to be a Choke thing with you.”
“Pardon?” Chris knows he comes off as slightly askew to the college kids. Mara finds him endearing, though, as opposed to merely strange.
“Choke. You ever read that book? By Chuck, uh, whatshisname - I can never pronounce it. The one who wrote Fight Club.”
Chris can’t remember sitting down to read that book. He can’t remember reading much of anything other than psychopathology textbooks when the students leave them behind. But he has its words absorbed somehow; he must’ve read it a long time ago. “Yes.”
“I just mean that one of these days it’s gonna turn out you never leave because you’re a patient, or something,” she responds, with a good-natured little laugh. Chris doesn’t say anything in return, because he’s not sure what he can say, and her laughter falls silent. “Geez, I’m sorry.” She toes at his foot again. “Wasn’t real appropriate.”
“Well, you’re tired. You don’t sleep except on Wednesdays.” Chris is pretty sure he’s teasing, because it earns him a smile, but there’s something off about him.
That may be an understatement. Most people don’t wake up soaking wet on the shore of a lake, staring at their hands and not remembering anything. He somehow knew everything, like the way the plot of Choke rolled pleasantly to the front of his mind, but he remembered nothing.
Well, he remembered very little. What he could remember was a flash of light, then dark gurgling over it, and the knowledge that he’d done something horribly wrong. A dirty, metallic sting filled his nose, and he felt like he should cry but his eyes refused to tear up. Instead, he sat, thankful his pants were dark because otherwise the damp grass would have left stains.
He gave himself a few hours, before he got up to move. Those dark pants contained a wallet stuffed with money and credit cards - all with different names - and he came ingrained with the knowledge of how these things worked, somehow. It was unpleasant to shop in his stiff, dried clothes, picking jeans and heavy flannel plaids off the shelves because they appealed to him, but he slipped his new clothes on afterward and sighed in happiness for the first time. They were warm and comfortable, even in this New England winter.
It seems like a whirlwind struck ground, picking him up one day and placing him in another weeks later. Chris Till, he decided his name was, because it was non-descript and something about it appealed to him. He found a motel that didn’t need ID and more or less squatted there for a week, until he found this job at the institution. Chris could return to the motel for some time off, but he never feels the need. Something about him likes it here, with Gloria and Mike, who’d dropped out of the college most of the interns attend because he’d been stressed out and started snorting Ritalin, and the other patients. He likes the easily-forgettable chatter with Mara and her friends.
He knows why he’s there. He still can’t remember what he did, like the murky black thing that lurches to the forefront of his mind stays there purposefully to block it out, but he knows it’s bad, and he knows he’ll have to make up for it some day. Until then, he’ll do what he can to help anyone else.
They don’t pay enough if he wanted to live comfortably, but his life remains in the squat shape of the institution. He can’t find the words to tell Mara he works nights because he can’t sleep. It’s not insomnia; he merely has no use for it. He eats the cafeteria food, but it’s to follow everyone else. Hunger and thirst are foreign feelings to him.
“I wonder if I’m like that, too,” Chris admits. Mara just nods.
“Get some rest,” she tells him.
He doesn’t. Really, he never sleeps.
The next day they have to let Kyle go because he finds Mike, who he knew back in school, and in the words of Elise, the supervisor, starts giving him shit. Chris has cleaned that off the wall here, once; he doesn’t understand why Kyle would’ve given Mike more of it. At night, Chris ends up playing chess with Rob, who has PTSD and takes a long time to make any move because his hands never stop shaking, until the sunlight spills pinkly through the window.
*
“That’s awesome,” Mara tells him on Thursday night, leaning over his shoulder. A few of the other volunteers are in the rec room tonight, at least, though Chris suspects they find him all very odd. They’re not wrong. “You ever in art school or something?”
Chris has a pencil - never pen unless it’s in one of the neat cups at the reception desk, pen leaves marks on walls that are too difficult to get out - and he’s sketching something that clings to the back of his mind. It’s a funny-pointed star, enclosed inside a circle, surrounded with even funnier-looking symbols. A scorpion twists its way through the middle.
“No,” he responds. “I just have an odd imagination.” As if to prove it, he draws out the shape of a ribcage next to the circle, his fingers and wrists working together to move almost of their own volition. Across the bones, he draws symbols that look like omegas and backward Cs. “Enochian,” he explains, the word coming to mind unbidden.
Stephanie walks over. “I know we met already, but do I recognize you?” she asks Chris, her nose scrunched up. She’s attractive, but it’s not a very pleasing expression. “Like - were you ever on TV?”
“You didn’t tell me you were an actor,” Mara interrupts, a wide grin across her face. The corners of her eyes crinkle, and something lurches inside Chris’ gut. He wonders if this is hunger.
“Definitely not,” he tells Mara, rather primly. To Stephanie, he merely shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I have never been on television that I know of.”
Mara and Stephanie exchange glances. They’re both smiling, lightly. “What?” he asks, more out of curiosity than anything else.
“I told Steph you were a great guy,” Mara responds, after a bit. She’s not looking at him; she’s staring down at the paper in his hand. He wrote out the entire Enochian alphabet, and he hadn’t even thought about it. “You’re just kind of an alien sometimes.”
“And you are very blunt.” That earns him a laugh, and a smile creeps over his face.
The three of them, and a few other students Stephanie knows, end up going out to a diner for breakfast. The colors are so bright inside the restaurant, and none of the food appeals to him. If he was truly hungry before, it has passed. Still, he purchases a wrap with eggs and peppers inside, and licks grease off his fingers when he takes two of Mara’s hash browns. She mock-whacks away his hands.
He’ll never really feel that way, but it’s as close to normal as he’s gotten.
*
He has lemonade for Gloria, and chicken in some brown sauce along with limp broccoli and carrots.
“It was an angel. I know I stabbed that man through the heart, but it was God’s will, Chris.”
He nods. Truthfully, he aches for her to be right. He wants there to be angels, and God, because they’ll tell him what to do, other than pad through the linoleum floors giving the patients their medicine and watching videos on YouTube with the other volunteers. They’ll tell him what he did wrong that keeps him inside these walls, only different from the patients because he doesn’t have an official diagnosis. He wants a murderer, a woman who’s been saying the same thing over and over again for five years, to be right.
Stephanie’s playing Solitaire at the front desk, chin cradled in her palm. “Tsk, tsk,” Chris clucks at her. It’s at least partially serious, because he doesn’t truly understand teasing.
“Hey, I deserve it after dealing with the new guy,” she sighs. Chris dislikes gossip and griping among the other volunteers, and Stephanie does the former a little too often for his liking, but not the latter. This sounds suspiciously like both, so Chris just grunts in response. “Tender.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the screen. “The new guy. Sam Tender. Just - yeah, he’s a doozy.”
As these things turn out, Paul calls him in from the rec room to check on Sam that night. Chris tries his best to keep his mind clear of any preconceptions about the patients, only Paul looks grim when he’s ushering Chris toward Sam’s room. “We don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Paul tells him, voice low. “His brother checked him in and seemed pretty shaken up himself. We’re thinking it’s schizophrenia, maybe.”
Sam’s quite calmly sitting in a chair when Chris comes to his room, watching television. He’s a few years younger than Chris, maybe, but older than the interns, and very tall, even when scrunched into a chair. Chris notes, with some amusement, that he’s turned the television to Kourtney and Kim Take New York.
“Dinner,” Chris tells him.
Sam glances at Chris, and something in his eyes goes wide. “Very funny,” he hisses to the air. “Y-you said you wouldn’t bother me if I just let you watch TV -”
“I’m not trying to bother -” but Chris falls silent, because it’s clear Sam isn’t talking to him.
His voice is half-snarl, half-whisper, and there’s so much strength and so many nerves trembling in his shoulders. Something about Sam is fascinating. “Who’s next, Jess? Bobby? Mom, dad, Adam? Throw it on me. Better than the cage. Go ahead.”
“I’m Chris.” He’s holding his hands up so his palms are exposed. “I’m here to help you.”
“That’s hilarious, Cas.” He turns back to the television, whole body trembling. “Not even Cas, Cas could help…” His shoulders hunch toward the screen. Scott whines to Kourtney about a piano, but Sam is silent again.
Chris makes sure to write a small report, listing the names Sam spat out and noting he mentioned a cage. That single word set nervous alarms off in his head. Too much abuse got stuffed into the bodies in this ward, and it all makes Chris despair, that bodies as small as Gloria’s and as large as Sam’s could shudder under it alike.
Mara’s in the rec room that night. Every so often, there are shouts from the nearby rooms. “Tell Stephanie Sam wasn’t so bad,” Chris tells her, and he’s not sure if he’s telling the truth or not.
*
Elise goes out to get the interns Chinese food, which puts everyone on the ward in a disproportionately good mood. Chris will end up stealing dumplings from Mara and Stephanie, and maybe some of their friends too if they’re around tonight.
Everyone on staff knows you don’t mess with Elise. It’s not only the hard South Boston accent; she’s been here longer than anyone, and she works harder than anyone else, too. That’s why it’s such a shock when she comes back, and Chris hears what can be best described as hollering coming from the station in the front of the hospital. “Probably Ryan or one of the guys in this wing pissed they didn’t order their food in time,” Stephanie sighs, adjusting her knees so she can read her Chemistry textbook more easily.
“Ryan is rude. He’s not insane.” You don’t mess with Elise, seriously. “I want to see this.”
Chris arrives at the front desk and Elise is there, snowflakes clumped on her hair. She’s set the bags of food down, and looks weary and furious at once at the source of the noise, a man about Chris’ age who’d be good-looking if he wasn’t snarling. “I want to see my brother.”
“Sam’s here to get the best care he can,” Elise snaps back, her voice significantly lower than the other man’s. It wouldn’t be smart to wake up any sleeping patients. “You’d only disturb him.” A furrow appears between her brows, and this guy is doomed. “Probably already have with your yelling at this hour.”
“You don’t underst -” Sam’s brother starts, and then he looks over at Chris.
Chris isn’t normally that aware of other people. It works for the patients; he sees terrible things each day, but he is not their therapist for a reason, and it gives him the ability to come back the day after. He’s comfortable as a blank slate, even wearing the appropriate white hospital scrubs most of the time. Yes, he’s come to care for Mara and Stephanie and he knows Elise is awesome and Kyle and Ryan are jerks, in the words of the other interns. But he could brush by most people.
He’s fairly sure he couldn’t do that with the yelling man in the entranceway, now that they’ve looked at each other. Sam was fascinating, but it couldn’t compare to his brother, the way the dullness on his eyes rolls over to brightness and his face goes slack. Chris has never seen someone’s jaw actually drop, and it makes him uncomfortable even as his gaze sweeps over his body. “Cas?”
Elise looks between them, and so does the receptionist, one of the college girls Chris doesn’t know very well. They both make a point of looking away.
“It’s Chris,” the receptionist speaks up.
“N-no, you’re - how the hell did you get out? I thought you exploded, or something -” He’s ignoring her to look right at Chris.
“How do you know him, Chris?” the receptionist asks, continuing to poke into the conversation. She’s got her arms folded, and a smile poking at the corner of her mouth.
Chris opens his mouth to say I don’t, but the other man speaks for him. He’s very loud. Brash comes to mind. “We, uh. We fought together, once.”
“You were in the army and you didn’t mention it when you checked your brother in earlier?” Chris can hear the tight inhale at the end of Elise’s question. “Was Sam in the army, too?”
The stranger seemed single-minded before, like Elise and the receptionist were a door he had to batter down. Now, his eyes flick back and forth wildly, and his jaw twitches. He’s unfocused, so much so that Chris worries about him flying apart right here. “Uh, no,” he gets out, at last, swallowing. “I - shit. I - I’ll be back later. During visiting hours.”
Chris knows he shouldn’t say anything. He does anyway. “I’ll be here.”
He doesn’t realize he doesn’t know the other man’s name until he’s out the door.
“Goddamn moron,” Elise snaps. That man doesn’t know how lucky he is that he’s not a giant bloody smear on the carpet. “Crazier than anyone in here. Food probably went cold while he was hollering.” She hikes up the bags again, and leaves to go hand it out.
The receptionist - Amanda, her nameplate reads - smiles up at him conspiratorially when Elise is gone. “Damn, Chris,” she says, and unless he is mistaken she is somewhat impressed. “That guy’s hot.”
“I don’t know him,” Chris sighs, truthfully.
“Oh, honey.” Amanda pouts. “That way of dealing with it never works.” Quickly, she digs through the small tray of candy in front of her desk, and comes up with a neat little rectangle of Hershey’s dark chocolate. “Chocolate always helps, seriously! And I’m here if you need to talk.”
Chris could not remember Amanda’s name until two minutes ago, and there is nothing she could help him with at the current time other than letting him know when he has to bring food and medication to the patients tomorrow. Still, he accepts the chocolate and lets it dissolve against his tongue. It’s distracting.
He absolutely does not jump when he walks by what he believes is Sam Tender’s room and hears a thump, even through the thick walls.
*
“Amanda gave me the deets,” Mara greets him the next day, with a wry grin. Chris doesn’t know what deets are, or why anything Amanda gave Mara is relevant to this conversation. Unless it was more chocolate, because he did enjoy that. “I didn’t know you liked guys like that. Frankly, I didn’t know you liked people like that.”
Chris startles at that, a bit. Again, he isn’t that aware of other people. He finds Stephanie’s features more pleasing to his eyes than Mara’s, but it’s just another fact he mentally files away about them, along with their friendliness or their tastes in music. Their appearances exist, but they are not more important than anything else about them.
“Um,” Mara says, after a long silence. “Sorry if that was - I’m really rude sometimes.”
“You need to sleep on days other than Wednesday.” Chris’ voice is grave, but he smiles.
The institution is nice, Chris believes, not that he has much to compare it to. But the hallways are somewhat too thin, if only to make room for bigger individual rooms. Still, the hallways seem even more cramped when the stormcloud that is the man from last night stomps down them, stopping in the rec room. This time, his mouth actually hangs open a bit when he catches sight of Chris.
“Can I help you?” Mara asks, quickly putting her laptop aside. She’s gotten in trouble before for being unprofessional, Chris knows.
The man gives her an odd expression. “Probably not,” he snaps. “Can I talk to you, Chris?”
“Certainly.”
There’s a pause. “Oh my God, you’re the friggin’ same.” His voice sounds relived and hysterical at once. “Alone.”
Mara can’t bite back her grin. “You work your butt off, Chris, and like everyone else is in today too. I’ll go yell at Derrek to actually do something. Take an hour or two if you need it.” He understands the lectures she gets about her professionalism, or lack thereof.
Chris nods, slowly. He’s unsure what he’s accepting, but something about him is unsettled and any resolution would be helpful.
The other man strides too quickly down the hallway, his gait heavy and rapid at once. Chris finds himself nearly running to keep up. “Did you see your brother? I hope he’s alright.”
“Yeah. He’s as okay as he’s going to get right now.” Chris is slightly embarrassed he didn’t get a chance to change into his hospital whites yet, but it’s not until the other man eyes him that he realizes they’re wearing very similar clothing, down to the boots. Chris’ clothes are almost new; he’s familiar with Halloween, even if he can’t remember experiencing it himself, and he may as well have been dressing up as this stranger for that holiday.
“I’m sorry,” Chris begins, as they push open the doors together. Snow dusts the ground, and they both walk carefully. “What’s your name?”
Chris can’t describe the look that passes over the stranger’s face. He works in a mental institution, and he’s never seen hurt so plain. “It’s Dean.” The expected handshake never comes. “You really don’t remember, shit.”
“You know me,” Chris gets out, eventually, after too long watching his breath condense into fog in the air. It’s partially a question, but mostly a statement. Chris knows nothing of Dean other than his loudness and his brother, but if Dean knows him, maybe he’s a clue. Maybe Dean will let him exhale the one deep breath that’s been caught inside his lungs since he woke up. “How?”
Dean laughs at that, but there’s no humor behind it. “I guess it started when you pulled me out of Hell,” he spits, pulling a flask out of his pocket and taking a long swig. Chris seriously has to talk to Elise about cornering Dean about his own state of mind the next time he comes to visit his brother. “What’s - humor me, Cas.”
“It’s Chris.” There is little conviction behind that sentence.
“Bullshit. I could tell when it was just someone who looked like you, like Jimmy or that Misha guy, and this is you.” Chris wants to talk to him about how grief is an incredibly powerful emotion, but lecturing Dean, however gently, doesn’t seem right. “What’s the first thing you remember?”
Chris likes to think that Mara is his friend, but she’s never asked him about his family, or where he’s from, or what he did before he came to the institution. Funnily enough, that’s a large part of why he’s friendly with her; he has no answers to give, so he appreciates her lack of questions. “I woke up beside a lake,” he answers, truthfully. “It was only a few months ago. I remember nothing before that.”
Dean just looks. Chris - and no, whoever Dean is, he’s right, Cas was the name he’d been searching for all along - has never had anyone look at him like that, and yet he’s not uncomfortable. “Something mind-whammied you, huh,” he concludes. “And it made sure to take me out.”
“I don’t think it was you,” Cas responds. It should be strange to think of himself as a different name, but he hadn’t had the old one for very long. “I just - I know I did something awful.” He takes a step closer to Dean. “That’s why I work here. I know I have to help somehow.” It’s completely unprofessional, and he doesn’t know why he does it, but he slots his hand over one of Dean’s shoulders.
Dean looks at the hand on him, and then at Cas’ face, alarm and - Cas cannot deny it - hot intent alike in his gaze. “Can I say something to you that… man, if you’re telling the truth, it’s not going to make any sense.”
Cas listens to the legally insane every day, but nothing they say scares him in the way Dean Tender’s ice green gaze sparks every nerve ending he has, or makes all his organs slosh. “Okay,” he murmurs. “Tell me what you want.” His hand hasn’t moved.
“I wanted to forget you,” Dean sighs out, at last. “Just Eternal Sunshine you away. It was easier than getting pissed at myself for… for not getting pissed at you. I should wanna wring your neck because of everything, but I just -” His voice trails off into choked laughter. “I’m just so fucking glad there’s someone I can talk to now. I’m glad I didn’t lose everything just yet.”
“You can talk to me,” Cas repeats, shock and hurt and confusion and under it all, relief darting through his thoughts, and then he’s gathered up very roughly against Dean’s chest. He smells like cheap Old Spice and metal, but he’s somehow comforted. “My job is to help your brother,” he’s saying, and he doesn’t even mind that his lips are right against Dean’s neck, “But I hope I can help you too.” He pulls out of the hug, but stays close. Their hands stay on each other’s shoulders, a strange little cage formation with too much held inside. “I am sorry if that is too unprofessional.”
Dean nearly chokes laughing. The situation should be rather embarrassing, half-embracing on the sidewalk among all this gray slush. A few people who pass by give them odd looks, and Cas is sure Mara, Amanda, and perhaps even Elise, frighteningly enough, are clumped together back in the hospital, watching them and giggling. Normally, Cas would avoid unnecessary attention; here, with Dean, he does not care.
Cas should be insulted by the way Dean barges right into his tiny but neat life, altering his very name and telling Cas that he wants to be furious at him. He isn’t. It’s normal, like spearing one of Mara’s dumplings with a chopstick, and gut-churning at once. It’s exciting is what it is, and Cas hasn’t ever felt that before.
Cas wants to believe in angels, like Gloria does. He wants to believe in God. He aches to know that there’s something out there to believe in, and that can free the burden from his shoulders. Cas wants to let in the white light he remembers from the side of the lake, and wipe away the dark, curdling thing that couldn’t quite overwhelm it. Dean isn’t an angel, and he’s certainly not God. But Cas looks at his face, too open, not fully smiling but not quite wrecked right now, and it’s someone he can help and have faith in at once.
He nods at Dean, and together, they walk back into the hospital.
A/N: Since we got the spoilers about amnesia and Sam in a mental institution, combined with Misha's picture, almost every fic I've read of Castiel's return has him as a patient in the same mental institution as Sam. I adore that trope, but I wanted to try something different. I rewatched "Houses of the Holy" the day Misha posted that possible spoiler picture, and what he's wearing matches Sam's outfit from when he's pretending to be a nurse in order to get information from Gloria. The idea of Castiel working in a mental institution stuck with me. I'm also fascinated with the idea of Castiel being amnesia'd up, but knowing he did something very, very wrong, and trying to help in any way he can. It also amuses me to think of Cas leading the most normal life he could, only to have Dean find him.
This fic started out as an outsider POV of Mara talking to her freshman roommate about how the kind yet totally alien guy who worked with her at her internship was acting even weirder than usual lately but oh lawd it was way too much telling and no showing. The most interesting part of it was a fairly extended discussion of Cheez-Whiz and Wal-Mart, and I am not kidding. That said, now that I've written the actual fic I wanted to write, more or less, maybe I'll write ~remixes~ if I'm inspired enough before 7.17 actually airs. After all, to me Cas is totally still at least partially an angel even if he isn't aware of it, and Dean still needs to give him that coat back.........
The title is from Palahniuk's Survivor, and the name Tender is from the main character in that book.
Finally, you know Lucifer totally loves him some E!.