SPN: Tell Me I'm a Screwed-Up Mess [Dean, Leviathan, Sam]
Title: “Tell Me I’m a Screwed-Up Mess”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG-13 [some disturbing suggestions, major angst, f-words]
Timeline: post-Episode 7x01, “Meet the New Boss”
Summary: The Leviathan is having an existential crisis. (a.k.a. What if SPN was written by Joss Whedon.)
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to Eric Kripke and the CW. Title from ‘Tell Me a Lie’ by Kelly Clarkson.
A/N: My way of coping with the tragedies of the season premiere. Also, my mind is so Jossed it’s scary. I keep seeing the Fred/Illyria parallels in the Castiel/Leviathan story. O_o This started out as crack, but I’m physically incapable of writing non-angst for SPN.
TELL ME I’M A SCREWED-UP MESS
“You’re special, Dean,” the Leviathan tells him. It’s been forty-eight hours since the Purgatory beast started wearing Castiel’s face, and Dean’s coping mechanisms are seizing up. “We are going to stick around.”
“Don’t you have an elsewhere to be?” Dean asks without much hope. “Like maybe go kill things now?”
The Leviathan stares at him like Dean has just offered him a plateful of hot, delicious pie, but appears to reconsider. Whatever it is that he - they? - sees in Dean, it is obviously much more appealing.
“We find it enjoyable,” the monster admits. “But we are content to spend a few hours a day on it, no more. The world has changed in our absence. We would like you to educate us.”
Dean infinitely prefers Cas playing God at the moment, but telling an ancient monster predating history to go fuck itself is probably not a good idea. At least not off the top of his head.
Which is why Dean does what he must. That is, he ignores the monster, goes back to the laptop and continues to watch Asian cartoon porn. A few moments later the Leviathan joins him and giggles throughout the entire movie, while Dean spends an hour fantasizing about numerous colourful ways of murdering the bastard, which he knows will not work in real life. When the movie is over, the Leviathan teaches himself to work the computer and instantly finds another video. It is about tentacles and it grosses even Dean out. The Leviathan, however, puts on that manic grin of his and chirps:
“Look! Our species are compatible.”
This will require much more beer than Bobby has in the house.
* * *
Levi (if they are going to be study buddies or whatnot, the guy needs a shorter name) makes good on his word. He spends at least half of the day away, either swimming in the ocean for old times’ sake or killing people he doesn’t like (or people he likes too much; Dean hasn’t completely figured him out yet). He doesn’t kill humans exclusively. Sometimes he brings Dean corpses of things like vampires or skinwalkers or even a Jefferson Starship, much like a boastful cat would bring its master a dead mouse. He knows Dean wouldn’t appreciate the gift, but maybe that’s exactly why he persists.
“We remember this planet differently,” he says. “We liked it better as it was. Now it’s… infected.”
“Is it your idea of fun then?” Dean snaps. “Hanging out with bacteria?”
“Uh-huh,” the Leviathan says, unperturbed.
He is making a sandwich, and doing it wrong. The sandwich is all askew and it’s leaking ketchup all over Bobby’s research books, not to mention there are peanut butter, whipped cream and sprinkles over a huge lump of meat. Dean hopes he’ll choke on it.
Halfway through gobbling it down, the Leviathan offers to make Dean one. That’s so morbidly nice of him that Dean wants to grab him by the collar of his shirt and start shaking him until he gets the hell out of Cas. If that fails, he would be satisfied with sticking an axe into his skull. Instead, he shakes his head silently. He is capable of making his own sandwiches.
“Can anybody tell me why the hell we have this in my fridge?” says Bobby as he steps in, holding a chopped-off Jefferson Starship head.
Dean does his utmost best not to splatter beer all over the laptop. The Leviathan simply grins, his teeth red. That must not be ketchup after all.
* * *
Sam is standing still, apparently mesmerized by clusters of spider-web in the corner of the ceiling. He has been still ever since Cas smashed the damned wall, except when he’s been running around, cued in by the nightmares in his head, and lately he is less One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and more Silent Hill. Levi could probably fix Sam’s goddamn wall, but the we-find-Sam-entertaining attitude he displays probably won’t allow it.
Besides, Levi has really been off his game in the past few days. He comes in dripping wet from swimming in Castiel’s clothes (Dean couldn’t say when exactly they stopped being Jimmy Novak’s clothes and started to belong to Cas), with no traces of blood or gore on his body, and spends most of the time literally watching Dean’s every move. Dean executes his tiny revenge by moving as little as possible. Perhaps the monster will die of boredom.
“We used to be so great,” he laments. “We were His first, we came into the water before there was sand, before these clods of dirt that you inhabit were formed. We hungered and we killed and we grew and-.”
“Dude.” Dean rolls his eyes. “Oversharing.”
“Now we are stuck here,” the Leviathan sighs. “We keep the company of two constantly drunk humans and one pitiful thing that is half-out of its mind. We cannot digest the grace of one petty angel. We suffocate in this dryness. We have tried to flood this planet with blood so that we could breathe, but the more we kill, the more emerge! How many of you are there!?”
“He’s having an existential crisis,” Sam says. Dean starts because it’s the first time in ages that Sam has given voice. The idea itself is pretty stupid (the dude is really a big snake-like fish or a fish-like snake from what he understands; he’s not supposed to feel depressed, much less doubt the foundations of his existence), but the problem has a get-out-of-Cas type of solution, so Dean latches on to it happily.
Needless to say, Levi isn’t on board with this, especially when Dean, feeling benevolent, offers to dig up one of the non-dismembered Starships they have buried in Bobby’s scrapyard and give it to Levi as a meat suit.
“You think if we don’t look like your angel you would succeed in killing us,” the monster says. “You are mistaken. We may have diminished, but we still possess powers beyond your comprehension. You, on the other hand, are fragile. Your feelings speak volumes. So did his, by the way. He could have kept the souls and fought against us, but he chose to give them up because he believed we would leave too and he would earn your forgiveness.”
“Enough pep talk,” Dean says darkly.
“We have his memory of you, you see. We don’t like it. It saddens us, and we don’t wish to be sad.”
“Lucifer tells me you don’t exist,” Sam interjects. Before Dean can proceed with a shocked “Wait, what? Who!?”, the Leviathan wanders over to Sam and gives him a clip on the back of the head. “Ow!” Sam grumbles, and believes him. For now.
“Now I have Sam’s memory of you, too,” Levi mutters in dismay.
* * *
This hunt is definitely a call-Castiel case, except Castiel doesn’t exist anymore, which is why Dean feels really stupid looking up at the sky where the Leviathan has undoubtedly already massacred everyone. You don’t pray to monsters. But there have to be some bonuses of keeping a pet Purgatory beastie around.
“Leviathan,” Dean begins, feeling the weight of the sky on him. The bastard will have a laughing fit when he hears this prayer thing. “Erm… hi there! How’s it going?” Sam gives his brother The LookTM. Dean clears his throat and goes on. “We’re in a bit of a situation here, and we were wondering if maybe you’d like to help us out. You get to kill things, and we won’t give you crap about it. It’s very educational.”
When there is no answer, Dean loses his patience.
“Drag your sorry ass here, you primordial tadpole!” he hollers. “You killed our freaking angel, so come on and help us in his place!”
“No need to shout, Dean,” the Leviathan’s voice comes, followed by the beast itself. His arms are oddly clean, cleaner than the rest of him, but there is ash on his shoes. “We were dissecting an angel,” he explains. “We wanted to see how it works. We found it primitive and less appealing than earthly things because it had no colour.”
Dean cringes visibly. Not many things in the world are still able to do that to him, but Levi has become a pro at unnerving him.
“We can help you now,” Levi says with a calm smile, and marches off in the general direction of the nasties that require smiting.
Sam is impressed. “Next thing you know, you’ll have him dividing by zero,” he chuckles. “Also, not a frog.”
“What are you on about?”
“Frogs come from tadpoles. Snakes come from eggs.”
Dean gnashes his teeth with such force that they might start popping out soon. It’s probably a good thing that Sam is being his usual smartass self, but what kind of an insult would “you primordial egg” make?
“Lucifer says you’re a nimrod,” Sam adds. “His words, not mine.”
There goes hoping that Levi’s clip has knocked at least part of the wall back into its place.
* * *
There are many things Dean can forgive. He forgave Sam when he ran off to Stanford. He forgave Sam after he jumpstarted the Apocalypse. He even somewhat forgave Cas his little soul-high killing spree. But seeing a bloodthirsty Purgatory monster with split personalities poking under the hood of his car does not merit forgiveness. Not in the slightest.
Dean shuts the hood so quickly that it probably hits Levi’s fingers, but in all honesty, Dean doesn’t give a shit.
“Baby,” he coos. “What did the big otherworldly creep do to you?”
“We have the car’s memory of you,” Levi says, a tad incredulously. “We are surprised a car has memories.”
“If you touch my car again, you’ll have your own memory of me,” Dean hisses. “The memory of my fist bashing your teeth in.”
“You already tried,” the Leviathan reminds him, “when we suggested your brother was too old to play with imaginary friends.”
Dean still has teeth marks on his knuckles. Not a very pleasant feeling.
* * *
On one of those rare nights when Sam doesn’t talk to himself (or Lucifer), Dean falls asleep early and on the couch as opposed to sliding gradually over the course of the night under the table in a drunken stupour. There are no dreams as such, but there is remorse gnawing at his insides. He couldn’t save Cas, he cannot help Sam; what’s the point of him at all?
He awakes with a start to see someone sitting by his side. His initial thought is: Cas! but it can’t be Cas, of course not. Nevertheless, Dean mutters grouchily: “Personal bubble!” because Cas and this creature seem to have that in common.
“We were looking inside your head,” the Leviathan says, voice crackling with hysterical humour. The usual. “We wanted to carve those nightmares out and set them free. They would be fun to keep as pets. We could give one to Sam.”
“I’m pretty sure Sam has his deal of nightmares every day.”
Dean feels sick, sweaty being the runner-up. He runs his hands across his face, and at the moment he’s just a little too tired of being hollow.
“You know what, freako,” he says, eyes narrow and hairs sticking up at the back of his neck. “I won’t say it again. Get - the fuck - out - of my friend!”
The Leviathan blinks. With the manic grin gone for a second and the scary black veins dormant under his skin, he looks almost like Castiel.
He shrugs. “Fine.”
“Fine?”
“You won’t say it again. We’re fine with that. We are a little annoyed every time we hear this pointless request.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Dean spits. “You haven’t even seen me try to exorcise you yet.”
“You couldn’t if you tried. Not even God can, and He created us. Trust us, Dean, our Father had no qualms about getting rid of us, much like He allowed humanity to perish in Sodom and Gomorrah or the Great Flood. He simply couldn’t. He didn’t know how. So he locked us up in our very own special prison. So what are you going to do, Dean? Push us in?”
“If I have to.”
The Leviathan leans closer to him, too close in point of fact, so that his breath ghosts over Dean’s face. It should smell of blood and death and decay and all things nasty, but it doesn’t. Whatever the Leviathan does during his ominous walkabouts, it doesn’t cling to him. It doesn’t cling to Cas.
“Just how long are you willing to wait for the next lunar eclipse?” he whispers.
And then Dean is pissed. He swings his arm and punches the Leviathan hard in the face. It takes him by surprise. The monster swings back, and Dean is on top of him in an instant, showering him with punches and screaming his lungs out:
“Get out of my friend! Get out of my friend! Get the fuck out of my friend!”
The Leviathan laughs. It’s a full-throated sound, chilling to the bone, but it’s not enough to stop Dean. Starbursts flare before his eyes, and he hits harder and harder, wanting to smash that face like he smashed the Impala when he couldn’t deal with his father’s stupid death. He wants to shut the laughing thing up, he wants Castiel back if only for a minute, he wants Sam to stop talking to the walls, he wants himself to stop.
“Is it helping?” the Leviathan asks curiously.
“You know what would really help? If you got out of Cas right now!”
He can’t bear another second of this thundering laughter.
“It’s not even Cas we’re talking about!” the Leviathan bellows, and pushes Dean off with such force that Dean is flung across the room. He smashes into a bookcase, and books come tumbling down on him. “It’s just some human corpse that Cas borrowed. We live here now. Deal with it.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Dean asks wearily. “Go fuck up heaven or something. Just get the hell away from me.”
“Why? You’re so much fun to be around.”
Dean crosses the room and attempts to hit him again.
“You’re wearing the face of my dead friend. I don’t want you here.”
The Leviathan catches him by the wrist before Dean’s fist connects with his face. The grip is strong, but not enough to break the bones.
“What friend?” he asks, laughter gurgling in his throat. “You wanted to kill him. You even bound Death to do your dirty job. It’s not something you can ever wash yourself clean from, Dean. I may not know much about what a friend is, but that isn’t friendship.”
“The fuck you kno-!” Dean starts saying, but breath catches in his throat. He must have misheard. “What did you say?”
The Leviathan stares at him with crazed eyes and a little grin frozen on Cas’s face. This is as fucked up as can be, and it seems Dean should have got used to it by now.
“You said “I”,” Dean prods.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did! Twice.” Dean pushes him against the wall. It’s easy when the monster doesn’t kick back. He looks ticked. “What are you? Who am I talking to?”
“We are many,” the voice comes. The black veins are back, but the voice isn’t frightening, nor is it buffoonish anymore. “We are one. We are incomplete.”
Dean takes a step back. “Identity crisis then?”
“You are funny, Dean Winchester. We would keep you as a pet, but you bite.”
There is an ominous touch of finality to this scene. Whatever it is, this momentary change of personal pronoun bodes ill for one of them.
“I just have this one question for you,” the monster says.
Dean glares at him, running his favourite therapeutic modality in his mind: images of himself killing the bastard over and over and over again. The Leviathan cannot be entirely oblivious to it, but he merely cocks his head and asks with a light smile:
“Did you name me after the jeans?”
* * *
Sam is asleep in the panic room. He seems to favour it, especially when his fits worsen, even though the sigils have no power against hallucinations. Fear used to be so easy to stand up to.
Dean sits at the bedside, quiet and uncertain. Somewhere along the race something inside him broke. He doesn’t know how to fix it and he doesn’t know how to fix Sam. He places his hand on Sam’s forehead, the skin beneath his palm dry and warm. Dean used to do that when they were kids and Sam would have a fever. Last night Sam nearly flooded the house as he tried to put out a non-existent fire.
“What-?” Sam whispers hoarsely. He’s awake, tense and trembling slightly.
“Just me,” Dean says reassuringly.
The tremour subsides. Sam takes a deep breath and relaxes in his cot.
“Levi?”
“Gone… I think. He seems to have figured something out. But I’m pretty sure he’ll be back. He doesn’t like it here, but he gets off on pestering us.”
“Lucky us,” Sam murmurs. He sounds sleepy, but it’s for Dean’s sake. He has been having trouble sleeping as much as Dean, but he doesn’t want his big brother to worry.
“Sammy, I’m sorry,” Dean says. “I’m so very sorry.”
Sam touches his elbow briskly. “If you’re getting started on the whole I-should-have-I-shouldn’t-have guilt trip, I’d rather sleep through it. We’re cool, Dean, honestly. You didn’t do this to me. And really, we should just stop apologizing completely, what with all the shit we’ve ever done to each other.”
Dean looks at his brother’s face, which is upside down and sickly pale but calm at the same time, and nods. There is an I-forgive-you buried in there somewhere, and Dean accepts it. He’s not sure he has the right to, but he needs it too much. He sits still, his hand on Sam’s forehead, and counts down to tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Some time along the way a memory flashes in his mind, a fragment of a conversation held what now seems like ages ago.
We cannot digest the grace of one petty angel.
Dean jumps to his feet, the stool dropping loudly behind him.
“Holy shit!” he exclaims, stunned. “Cas is alive. It’s not just a body. He’s still in there!”
Sam opens one eye lazily and murmurs: “Well, duh,” and leaves Dean with a mission and an acute awareness of having just woken up from an exhausting dream.
September 25-26, 2011
Or read at AO3.
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG-13 [some disturbing suggestions, major angst, f-words]
Timeline: post-Episode 7x01, “Meet the New Boss”
Summary: The Leviathan is having an existential crisis. (a.k.a. What if SPN was written by Joss Whedon.)
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to Eric Kripke and the CW. Title from ‘Tell Me a Lie’ by Kelly Clarkson.
A/N: My way of coping with the tragedies of the season premiere. Also, my mind is so Jossed it’s scary. I keep seeing the Fred/Illyria parallels in the Castiel/Leviathan story. O_o This started out as crack, but I’m physically incapable of writing non-angst for SPN.
TELL ME I’M A SCREWED-UP MESS
“You’re special, Dean,” the Leviathan tells him. It’s been forty-eight hours since the Purgatory beast started wearing Castiel’s face, and Dean’s coping mechanisms are seizing up. “We are going to stick around.”
“Don’t you have an elsewhere to be?” Dean asks without much hope. “Like maybe go kill things now?”
The Leviathan stares at him like Dean has just offered him a plateful of hot, delicious pie, but appears to reconsider. Whatever it is that he - they? - sees in Dean, it is obviously much more appealing.
“We find it enjoyable,” the monster admits. “But we are content to spend a few hours a day on it, no more. The world has changed in our absence. We would like you to educate us.”
Dean infinitely prefers Cas playing God at the moment, but telling an ancient monster predating history to go fuck itself is probably not a good idea. At least not off the top of his head.
Which is why Dean does what he must. That is, he ignores the monster, goes back to the laptop and continues to watch Asian cartoon porn. A few moments later the Leviathan joins him and giggles throughout the entire movie, while Dean spends an hour fantasizing about numerous colourful ways of murdering the bastard, which he knows will not work in real life. When the movie is over, the Leviathan teaches himself to work the computer and instantly finds another video. It is about tentacles and it grosses even Dean out. The Leviathan, however, puts on that manic grin of his and chirps:
“Look! Our species are compatible.”
This will require much more beer than Bobby has in the house.
* * *
Levi (if they are going to be study buddies or whatnot, the guy needs a shorter name) makes good on his word. He spends at least half of the day away, either swimming in the ocean for old times’ sake or killing people he doesn’t like (or people he likes too much; Dean hasn’t completely figured him out yet). He doesn’t kill humans exclusively. Sometimes he brings Dean corpses of things like vampires or skinwalkers or even a Jefferson Starship, much like a boastful cat would bring its master a dead mouse. He knows Dean wouldn’t appreciate the gift, but maybe that’s exactly why he persists.
“We remember this planet differently,” he says. “We liked it better as it was. Now it’s… infected.”
“Is it your idea of fun then?” Dean snaps. “Hanging out with bacteria?”
“Uh-huh,” the Leviathan says, unperturbed.
He is making a sandwich, and doing it wrong. The sandwich is all askew and it’s leaking ketchup all over Bobby’s research books, not to mention there are peanut butter, whipped cream and sprinkles over a huge lump of meat. Dean hopes he’ll choke on it.
Halfway through gobbling it down, the Leviathan offers to make Dean one. That’s so morbidly nice of him that Dean wants to grab him by the collar of his shirt and start shaking him until he gets the hell out of Cas. If that fails, he would be satisfied with sticking an axe into his skull. Instead, he shakes his head silently. He is capable of making his own sandwiches.
“Can anybody tell me why the hell we have this in my fridge?” says Bobby as he steps in, holding a chopped-off Jefferson Starship head.
Dean does his utmost best not to splatter beer all over the laptop. The Leviathan simply grins, his teeth red. That must not be ketchup after all.
* * *
Sam is standing still, apparently mesmerized by clusters of spider-web in the corner of the ceiling. He has been still ever since Cas smashed the damned wall, except when he’s been running around, cued in by the nightmares in his head, and lately he is less One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and more Silent Hill. Levi could probably fix Sam’s goddamn wall, but the we-find-Sam-entertaining attitude he displays probably won’t allow it.
Besides, Levi has really been off his game in the past few days. He comes in dripping wet from swimming in Castiel’s clothes (Dean couldn’t say when exactly they stopped being Jimmy Novak’s clothes and started to belong to Cas), with no traces of blood or gore on his body, and spends most of the time literally watching Dean’s every move. Dean executes his tiny revenge by moving as little as possible. Perhaps the monster will die of boredom.
“We used to be so great,” he laments. “We were His first, we came into the water before there was sand, before these clods of dirt that you inhabit were formed. We hungered and we killed and we grew and-.”
“Dude.” Dean rolls his eyes. “Oversharing.”
“Now we are stuck here,” the Leviathan sighs. “We keep the company of two constantly drunk humans and one pitiful thing that is half-out of its mind. We cannot digest the grace of one petty angel. We suffocate in this dryness. We have tried to flood this planet with blood so that we could breathe, but the more we kill, the more emerge! How many of you are there!?”
“He’s having an existential crisis,” Sam says. Dean starts because it’s the first time in ages that Sam has given voice. The idea itself is pretty stupid (the dude is really a big snake-like fish or a fish-like snake from what he understands; he’s not supposed to feel depressed, much less doubt the foundations of his existence), but the problem has a get-out-of-Cas type of solution, so Dean latches on to it happily.
Needless to say, Levi isn’t on board with this, especially when Dean, feeling benevolent, offers to dig up one of the non-dismembered Starships they have buried in Bobby’s scrapyard and give it to Levi as a meat suit.
“You think if we don’t look like your angel you would succeed in killing us,” the monster says. “You are mistaken. We may have diminished, but we still possess powers beyond your comprehension. You, on the other hand, are fragile. Your feelings speak volumes. So did his, by the way. He could have kept the souls and fought against us, but he chose to give them up because he believed we would leave too and he would earn your forgiveness.”
“Enough pep talk,” Dean says darkly.
“We have his memory of you, you see. We don’t like it. It saddens us, and we don’t wish to be sad.”
“Lucifer tells me you don’t exist,” Sam interjects. Before Dean can proceed with a shocked “Wait, what? Who!?”, the Leviathan wanders over to Sam and gives him a clip on the back of the head. “Ow!” Sam grumbles, and believes him. For now.
“Now I have Sam’s memory of you, too,” Levi mutters in dismay.
* * *
This hunt is definitely a call-Castiel case, except Castiel doesn’t exist anymore, which is why Dean feels really stupid looking up at the sky where the Leviathan has undoubtedly already massacred everyone. You don’t pray to monsters. But there have to be some bonuses of keeping a pet Purgatory beastie around.
“Leviathan,” Dean begins, feeling the weight of the sky on him. The bastard will have a laughing fit when he hears this prayer thing. “Erm… hi there! How’s it going?” Sam gives his brother The LookTM. Dean clears his throat and goes on. “We’re in a bit of a situation here, and we were wondering if maybe you’d like to help us out. You get to kill things, and we won’t give you crap about it. It’s very educational.”
When there is no answer, Dean loses his patience.
“Drag your sorry ass here, you primordial tadpole!” he hollers. “You killed our freaking angel, so come on and help us in his place!”
“No need to shout, Dean,” the Leviathan’s voice comes, followed by the beast itself. His arms are oddly clean, cleaner than the rest of him, but there is ash on his shoes. “We were dissecting an angel,” he explains. “We wanted to see how it works. We found it primitive and less appealing than earthly things because it had no colour.”
Dean cringes visibly. Not many things in the world are still able to do that to him, but Levi has become a pro at unnerving him.
“We can help you now,” Levi says with a calm smile, and marches off in the general direction of the nasties that require smiting.
Sam is impressed. “Next thing you know, you’ll have him dividing by zero,” he chuckles. “Also, not a frog.”
“What are you on about?”
“Frogs come from tadpoles. Snakes come from eggs.”
Dean gnashes his teeth with such force that they might start popping out soon. It’s probably a good thing that Sam is being his usual smartass self, but what kind of an insult would “you primordial egg” make?
“Lucifer says you’re a nimrod,” Sam adds. “His words, not mine.”
There goes hoping that Levi’s clip has knocked at least part of the wall back into its place.
* * *
There are many things Dean can forgive. He forgave Sam when he ran off to Stanford. He forgave Sam after he jumpstarted the Apocalypse. He even somewhat forgave Cas his little soul-high killing spree. But seeing a bloodthirsty Purgatory monster with split personalities poking under the hood of his car does not merit forgiveness. Not in the slightest.
Dean shuts the hood so quickly that it probably hits Levi’s fingers, but in all honesty, Dean doesn’t give a shit.
“Baby,” he coos. “What did the big otherworldly creep do to you?”
“We have the car’s memory of you,” Levi says, a tad incredulously. “We are surprised a car has memories.”
“If you touch my car again, you’ll have your own memory of me,” Dean hisses. “The memory of my fist bashing your teeth in.”
“You already tried,” the Leviathan reminds him, “when we suggested your brother was too old to play with imaginary friends.”
Dean still has teeth marks on his knuckles. Not a very pleasant feeling.
* * *
On one of those rare nights when Sam doesn’t talk to himself (or Lucifer), Dean falls asleep early and on the couch as opposed to sliding gradually over the course of the night under the table in a drunken stupour. There are no dreams as such, but there is remorse gnawing at his insides. He couldn’t save Cas, he cannot help Sam; what’s the point of him at all?
He awakes with a start to see someone sitting by his side. His initial thought is: Cas! but it can’t be Cas, of course not. Nevertheless, Dean mutters grouchily: “Personal bubble!” because Cas and this creature seem to have that in common.
“We were looking inside your head,” the Leviathan says, voice crackling with hysterical humour. The usual. “We wanted to carve those nightmares out and set them free. They would be fun to keep as pets. We could give one to Sam.”
“I’m pretty sure Sam has his deal of nightmares every day.”
Dean feels sick, sweaty being the runner-up. He runs his hands across his face, and at the moment he’s just a little too tired of being hollow.
“You know what, freako,” he says, eyes narrow and hairs sticking up at the back of his neck. “I won’t say it again. Get - the fuck - out - of my friend!”
The Leviathan blinks. With the manic grin gone for a second and the scary black veins dormant under his skin, he looks almost like Castiel.
He shrugs. “Fine.”
“Fine?”
“You won’t say it again. We’re fine with that. We are a little annoyed every time we hear this pointless request.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Dean spits. “You haven’t even seen me try to exorcise you yet.”
“You couldn’t if you tried. Not even God can, and He created us. Trust us, Dean, our Father had no qualms about getting rid of us, much like He allowed humanity to perish in Sodom and Gomorrah or the Great Flood. He simply couldn’t. He didn’t know how. So he locked us up in our very own special prison. So what are you going to do, Dean? Push us in?”
“If I have to.”
The Leviathan leans closer to him, too close in point of fact, so that his breath ghosts over Dean’s face. It should smell of blood and death and decay and all things nasty, but it doesn’t. Whatever the Leviathan does during his ominous walkabouts, it doesn’t cling to him. It doesn’t cling to Cas.
“Just how long are you willing to wait for the next lunar eclipse?” he whispers.
And then Dean is pissed. He swings his arm and punches the Leviathan hard in the face. It takes him by surprise. The monster swings back, and Dean is on top of him in an instant, showering him with punches and screaming his lungs out:
“Get out of my friend! Get out of my friend! Get the fuck out of my friend!”
The Leviathan laughs. It’s a full-throated sound, chilling to the bone, but it’s not enough to stop Dean. Starbursts flare before his eyes, and he hits harder and harder, wanting to smash that face like he smashed the Impala when he couldn’t deal with his father’s stupid death. He wants to shut the laughing thing up, he wants Castiel back if only for a minute, he wants Sam to stop talking to the walls, he wants himself to stop.
“Is it helping?” the Leviathan asks curiously.
“You know what would really help? If you got out of Cas right now!”
He can’t bear another second of this thundering laughter.
“It’s not even Cas we’re talking about!” the Leviathan bellows, and pushes Dean off with such force that Dean is flung across the room. He smashes into a bookcase, and books come tumbling down on him. “It’s just some human corpse that Cas borrowed. We live here now. Deal with it.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Dean asks wearily. “Go fuck up heaven or something. Just get the hell away from me.”
“Why? You’re so much fun to be around.”
Dean crosses the room and attempts to hit him again.
“You’re wearing the face of my dead friend. I don’t want you here.”
The Leviathan catches him by the wrist before Dean’s fist connects with his face. The grip is strong, but not enough to break the bones.
“What friend?” he asks, laughter gurgling in his throat. “You wanted to kill him. You even bound Death to do your dirty job. It’s not something you can ever wash yourself clean from, Dean. I may not know much about what a friend is, but that isn’t friendship.”
“The fuck you kno-!” Dean starts saying, but breath catches in his throat. He must have misheard. “What did you say?”
The Leviathan stares at him with crazed eyes and a little grin frozen on Cas’s face. This is as fucked up as can be, and it seems Dean should have got used to it by now.
“You said “I”,” Dean prods.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did! Twice.” Dean pushes him against the wall. It’s easy when the monster doesn’t kick back. He looks ticked. “What are you? Who am I talking to?”
“We are many,” the voice comes. The black veins are back, but the voice isn’t frightening, nor is it buffoonish anymore. “We are one. We are incomplete.”
Dean takes a step back. “Identity crisis then?”
“You are funny, Dean Winchester. We would keep you as a pet, but you bite.”
There is an ominous touch of finality to this scene. Whatever it is, this momentary change of personal pronoun bodes ill for one of them.
“I just have this one question for you,” the monster says.
Dean glares at him, running his favourite therapeutic modality in his mind: images of himself killing the bastard over and over and over again. The Leviathan cannot be entirely oblivious to it, but he merely cocks his head and asks with a light smile:
“Did you name me after the jeans?”
* * *
Sam is asleep in the panic room. He seems to favour it, especially when his fits worsen, even though the sigils have no power against hallucinations. Fear used to be so easy to stand up to.
Dean sits at the bedside, quiet and uncertain. Somewhere along the race something inside him broke. He doesn’t know how to fix it and he doesn’t know how to fix Sam. He places his hand on Sam’s forehead, the skin beneath his palm dry and warm. Dean used to do that when they were kids and Sam would have a fever. Last night Sam nearly flooded the house as he tried to put out a non-existent fire.
“What-?” Sam whispers hoarsely. He’s awake, tense and trembling slightly.
“Just me,” Dean says reassuringly.
The tremour subsides. Sam takes a deep breath and relaxes in his cot.
“Levi?”
“Gone… I think. He seems to have figured something out. But I’m pretty sure he’ll be back. He doesn’t like it here, but he gets off on pestering us.”
“Lucky us,” Sam murmurs. He sounds sleepy, but it’s for Dean’s sake. He has been having trouble sleeping as much as Dean, but he doesn’t want his big brother to worry.
“Sammy, I’m sorry,” Dean says. “I’m so very sorry.”
Sam touches his elbow briskly. “If you’re getting started on the whole I-should-have-I-shouldn’t-have guilt trip, I’d rather sleep through it. We’re cool, Dean, honestly. You didn’t do this to me. And really, we should just stop apologizing completely, what with all the shit we’ve ever done to each other.”
Dean looks at his brother’s face, which is upside down and sickly pale but calm at the same time, and nods. There is an I-forgive-you buried in there somewhere, and Dean accepts it. He’s not sure he has the right to, but he needs it too much. He sits still, his hand on Sam’s forehead, and counts down to tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Some time along the way a memory flashes in his mind, a fragment of a conversation held what now seems like ages ago.
We cannot digest the grace of one petty angel.
Dean jumps to his feet, the stool dropping loudly behind him.
“Holy shit!” he exclaims, stunned. “Cas is alive. It’s not just a body. He’s still in there!”
Sam opens one eye lazily and murmurs: “Well, duh,” and leaves Dean with a mission and an acute awareness of having just woken up from an exhausting dream.
September 25-26, 2011
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