Entertaining Angels (19/?)
Title: Entertaining Angels
Author: Maychorian
Characters: Dean, Sam, Castiel
Category: Gen, Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: K+/PG
Spoilers: Through 4.10
Summary: A strange boy shows up at Dean and Sam's motel room. Maybe he needs help, or maybe he's there to help them-they can't quite tell.
Word Count: 2010
Disclaimer: Angels belong to God. The Winchesters belong to Kripke. It's a sad, sad world we live in.
Author's Note: Fanart and soundtrack, and now a vid! Guys, I am so close to done on this story that I can almost TASTE it. I know the holidays are a bad time for posting fics, because you’re all off being familial or whatever, but I CAN’T STOP. It’ll be waiting when you come back.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
19
Dean had always been the one with the hunter’s instinct. Even Dad, for all his driven power and obsession with destroying every evil he could hunt down, had relied more on ruthless training and thorough research to find and annihilate the things that haunted the night. Sam was self-aware enough to know that he was the same way. Dean, though, seemed born to this life. Saving people, hunting things was for him not a duty, a thankless dirty job that someone had to do, but a passion, a calling, a mission. And he was terrifyingly good at it.
Yet here was Sam, studying monsters in three different books and feeling the sharp, needling sting of something like intuition. None of these were right. He just knew it.
“How’s it going?” Bobby leaned against the desk on both hands, peering over at Sam’s research. “You find what you were looking for?”
Sam glanced up at him, scratching a hand through his hair, feeling it slide greasily through his fingers. He needed a shower. And some decent sleep. They could wait.
“Yeah, these match the images we saw in Castiel’s mind.” Sam turned the books slightly so Bobby could get a good look at them.
The older man’s eyes narrowed slightly-he had been very quietly weirded out by Sam’s explanations of what had gone down in the previous two days, but especially by the idea of Dean and Sam and Missouri all taking a spirit-walk in the memories of an angel-turned-child. He said nothing, though, just looked over the three illustrations with professional appraisal. “A cerberus and a couple of different chimera, huh?”
“That’s right. These monsters attacked Castiel, nearly killed him. Along with several dozen various and sundry demons, of course.”
“So one of these is outside my house, trying to break in.” Sam could see Bobby ticking things off his mind, mentally preparing, reminding himself of where he had stashed the silver bullets, the iron blades, the ritual herbs.
Sam sighed gustily and leaned back in the desk chair. “That’s what I’m not sure of.”
His eyes slipped to the next room, where he could see Dean sitting in a straight-backed chair next to the couch, quietly reading a book to the sick little boy. Castiel lay limp, unmoving, reclining on a mound of pillows, Missouri’s blanket pulled up under his chin, his face turned toward Dean as he listened. His eyes were half-open, still glazed with fever. Sam would lay good money that he was only hearing one word in three of whatever story Dean happened to be reading at the time, but he did his best to pay attention, even so.
“What are you thinking, Sam?”
Sam looked back to Bobby. “I’m thinking that we need to actually see what this thing is. We need a way to lift that invisibility or cloak or whatever it has, a way to see its true form. We can’t just go stabbing in the dark.”
Bobby’s face went still in thought, then he snapped his fingers and stepped around the desk. He opened a drawer and started rooting around, then muttered irritably, shut it, and opened a different one. Sam stood up and backed away, giving him space.
After a minute or so, there was a distinctly triumphant “Ah ha!” sound, and Bobby emerged from the desk with a grin and a round, palm-sized object in his hand. “Knew I had it somewhere. Never throw out anything that might prove useful in the future. Waste not, want not, all that jazz.”
Sam couldn’t quite suppress a grin. This smiling, pleased-with-himself Bobby was completely disarming. “What is it?”
In answer, Bobby reached out and dropped the object in Sam’s hand. “Don’t tell me you can’t figure it out.”
Sam turned the thing over in his hand. It was smooth, heavy, cool. It would have been the perfect skipping rock-just the thing to throw sidearm over a still lake to watch it stutter and fly all the way out to the middle-if it wasn’t for the wide, irregular hole bored through the middle.
Sam’s eyes widened. “Natural?” The question was reverent, almost a breath.
Bobby nodded, still wearing that shit-eating grin. “It was under a ledge where spray off a waterfall dripped on it just right for, oh, I dunno. Long time. Got passed to me by another hunter. Lucky thing, though most people don’t think of it.”
“Does it work?”
“Well, I saw the seelie folk in Europe and a mermaid off the coast of Florida while looking through it. So yeah. I think it works.”
Sam barely paused to throw on his jacket before barreling out into the cold, porch door swinging noisily shut behind him. He crunched through the snow, making his way through the wrecks toward the edge of the circle of iron and salt Bobby had buried after the last time ghosts had attacked this place. The ward would be broken eventually, of course-they all were-but for now it was holding, and they always had the panic room to fall back on.
He climbed up on the hood of a derelict truck for a better vantage point, holding the stone ring to his eye. “Show yourself!” he called, fearless, no longer desperate with anger and newly awakened protectiveness. He was confident, now. All he had to do was see it. If he knew what it was, he could kill it.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are! I’m not afraid of you!”
He did a slow pan, right to left, looking around the circle stone, thorough and exacting. The world through the lens of truth looked little different than the world without-a bit sharper and clearer, lit on the edges with light that wasn’t usually visible, both sharp and opaque. He was going to find the monster, uncover its secrets. He didn’t care how long it took.
The first part of the beast that Sam saw was a curl of smoke sweeping along in the brisk wind, several yards off the ground. He followed that to a red snout, teeth like long, curved knives, dirty ivory, curled in a laughing reptilian mouth. His breath quickening, he swept across the rest of the creature, a sinuous tail, leathery black wings shifting over a powerfully muscled back, eyes like yellow gemstones peering with unblinking malice.
Sam stumbled back and jumped backward off the truck. Too close-he couldn’t see the entire creature up so close, seeming only bare inches away from where he stood. He jogged a few yards toward the house, turned around and looked again, already knowing what it was, his breath jumping in his chest, cold air cutting his lungs.
A dragon. It was a dragon.
It stood at the edge of the ward’s border, not attempting to move around, to make it more difficult for Sam to find it. The skeletal wings, folded over its back like some kind of hellish origami, rode gently up and down with its massive breaths, the movement of the enormous chest seeming somehow impossible, unholy, obscene. It was too big to be real. Sheer physics declared that such a thing should be collapsing under its own weight, not sitting on its haunches and laughing silently at the human who dared to taunt it, sulfurous breath snorting out of its fist-sized nostrils in chimney smoke-puffs.
“I’m going to kill you,” Sam told it calmly. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to kill you.”
The dragon from Hell just kept laughing.
Sam jumped slightly when Bobby grabbed his shoulder, coming up behind him. “Let me see, son.” The command was quiet, calm.
Sam handed over the circle stone, his breath still coming in erratic pulls, adrenaline surging through his body. Strangely, he still felt no fear. A dragon. It was a dragon.
Dean was either going to love this, or be really, really pissed.
Bobby stood there looking through the stone for awhile, still as a man scoping out the enemy laying siege to his home could be. Sam saw no increase in the older hunter’s breathing, no tension in his shoulders. From Bobby’s reaction, it might appear that he saw nothing at all.
“Huh.” Bobby lowered the stone and looked to Sam, jaw working thoughtfully. “It’s a dragon.”
Sam nodded. “You know how to kill a dragon?”
“Guess we’ll find out.”
They returned to the house to find Dean kneeling by the couch, once again wiping Castiel’s forehead and cheeks with a wet washcloth, murmuring soothing nonsense, his voice a calm veneer over a well of anxiety. The boy’s eyes were closed, his breathing harsh and irregular, rasping in his throat. It was so loud.
The book lay abandoned on the floor, open facedown, pages bent and in danger of creasing. Sam rescued the book, for lack of anything better to do. He could hear Bobby in the kitchen, fetching the lavender oil, the antibiotics, more tea, something.
Dean looked up at Sam, his face carefully still, almost expressionless. “He’s too hot. He’s too hot, Sam. I think he’s getting worse.”
Bobby came back with cold packs, ice in Ziploc bags, prepared last night and placed in the freezer, now wrapped in hand towels and ready for use. They had all hoped that they wouldn’t need them. Dean moved aside to let him work, watching without blinking as Bobby placed cold compresses on the boy’s forehead, chest, groin. Castiel whimpered breathlessly at the icy touch, and Sam’s fingernails bit into his palms.
“Sorry, baby,” Dean murmured, cupping a hot cheek in his palm, wrapping his other arm around the boy’s abdomen to hold him still. “I know it hurts. Just for a little while, okay? We have to get your fever down.”
The boy tried to toss his head back and forth, trying to displace the pack there, and Dean let out a breath of pain and held him still. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” It was a bare whisper now, an audible wince.
Sam turned away, back to the desk, the books. He had a dragon to kill.
“I should have stopped.”
Bobby sighed. “Kid, you can’t…”
“I noticed when he stopped coughing but I thought… We even passed a couple of hospitals but I didn’t… I should have realized. I shouldn’t have made him run back at the park. I should have…”
“What, Dean? What?”
“Something.”
Sam stepped back. This was something he could do. Even if it was only an echo, far less powerful than the original. “Dean. Anger not.”
Dean looked up at him, his eyes too large, too bright. Of course, Dean couldn’t cry for himself, but for others, especially when he thought he was at fault for their pain…
“Anger not,” Sam said again, nudging Dean’s leg with his foot. “C’mon, man. You want Cas to get mad at you? He totally will. He’s told you so many times now, and you still don’t get it. Sad okay. Anger not.”
A short laugh tore out of Dean, sounding entirely involuntary, watery and choked. “Yeah, okay. I get you. Anger not. I’ll try, I promise. Wouldn’t want Cas to get mad at me.”
Sam shook his head seriously. “It’s pretty dangerous to get Castiel angry. He’ll, you know…cry on you. Get you all wet. It will be very uncomfortable.”
Bobby humphed at them. “If you ask me, you’re both all wet already.”
Dean laughed again, slightly more genuine this time. He looked back to Castiel, who had fallen still and quiet, no longer struggling. Maybe it was just Sam’s imagination, but he thought that maybe the fever flush was starting to recede.
Bobby pushed himself up off the floor, groaning as his knees popped. “All right, all right, enough of this fool talk. Ten more minutes, then take off the cold packs.” Dean nodded gravely, and the older man looked at Sam. “Let’s get cracking on those books.”
Sam turned to the desk again, this time not in helplessness but in fierce determination. They had a dragon to kill.
Part 20
Author: Maychorian
Characters: Dean, Sam, Castiel
Category: Gen, Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: K+/PG
Spoilers: Through 4.10
Summary: A strange boy shows up at Dean and Sam's motel room. Maybe he needs help, or maybe he's there to help them-they can't quite tell.
Word Count: 2010
Disclaimer: Angels belong to God. The Winchesters belong to Kripke. It's a sad, sad world we live in.
Author's Note: Fanart and soundtrack, and now a vid! Guys, I am so close to done on this story that I can almost TASTE it. I know the holidays are a bad time for posting fics, because you’re all off being familial or whatever, but I CAN’T STOP. It’ll be waiting when you come back.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
19
Dean had always been the one with the hunter’s instinct. Even Dad, for all his driven power and obsession with destroying every evil he could hunt down, had relied more on ruthless training and thorough research to find and annihilate the things that haunted the night. Sam was self-aware enough to know that he was the same way. Dean, though, seemed born to this life. Saving people, hunting things was for him not a duty, a thankless dirty job that someone had to do, but a passion, a calling, a mission. And he was terrifyingly good at it.
Yet here was Sam, studying monsters in three different books and feeling the sharp, needling sting of something like intuition. None of these were right. He just knew it.
“How’s it going?” Bobby leaned against the desk on both hands, peering over at Sam’s research. “You find what you were looking for?”
Sam glanced up at him, scratching a hand through his hair, feeling it slide greasily through his fingers. He needed a shower. And some decent sleep. They could wait.
“Yeah, these match the images we saw in Castiel’s mind.” Sam turned the books slightly so Bobby could get a good look at them.
The older man’s eyes narrowed slightly-he had been very quietly weirded out by Sam’s explanations of what had gone down in the previous two days, but especially by the idea of Dean and Sam and Missouri all taking a spirit-walk in the memories of an angel-turned-child. He said nothing, though, just looked over the three illustrations with professional appraisal. “A cerberus and a couple of different chimera, huh?”
“That’s right. These monsters attacked Castiel, nearly killed him. Along with several dozen various and sundry demons, of course.”
“So one of these is outside my house, trying to break in.” Sam could see Bobby ticking things off his mind, mentally preparing, reminding himself of where he had stashed the silver bullets, the iron blades, the ritual herbs.
Sam sighed gustily and leaned back in the desk chair. “That’s what I’m not sure of.”
His eyes slipped to the next room, where he could see Dean sitting in a straight-backed chair next to the couch, quietly reading a book to the sick little boy. Castiel lay limp, unmoving, reclining on a mound of pillows, Missouri’s blanket pulled up under his chin, his face turned toward Dean as he listened. His eyes were half-open, still glazed with fever. Sam would lay good money that he was only hearing one word in three of whatever story Dean happened to be reading at the time, but he did his best to pay attention, even so.
“What are you thinking, Sam?”
Sam looked back to Bobby. “I’m thinking that we need to actually see what this thing is. We need a way to lift that invisibility or cloak or whatever it has, a way to see its true form. We can’t just go stabbing in the dark.”
Bobby’s face went still in thought, then he snapped his fingers and stepped around the desk. He opened a drawer and started rooting around, then muttered irritably, shut it, and opened a different one. Sam stood up and backed away, giving him space.
After a minute or so, there was a distinctly triumphant “Ah ha!” sound, and Bobby emerged from the desk with a grin and a round, palm-sized object in his hand. “Knew I had it somewhere. Never throw out anything that might prove useful in the future. Waste not, want not, all that jazz.”
Sam couldn’t quite suppress a grin. This smiling, pleased-with-himself Bobby was completely disarming. “What is it?”
In answer, Bobby reached out and dropped the object in Sam’s hand. “Don’t tell me you can’t figure it out.”
Sam turned the thing over in his hand. It was smooth, heavy, cool. It would have been the perfect skipping rock-just the thing to throw sidearm over a still lake to watch it stutter and fly all the way out to the middle-if it wasn’t for the wide, irregular hole bored through the middle.
Sam’s eyes widened. “Natural?” The question was reverent, almost a breath.
Bobby nodded, still wearing that shit-eating grin. “It was under a ledge where spray off a waterfall dripped on it just right for, oh, I dunno. Long time. Got passed to me by another hunter. Lucky thing, though most people don’t think of it.”
“Does it work?”
“Well, I saw the seelie folk in Europe and a mermaid off the coast of Florida while looking through it. So yeah. I think it works.”
Sam barely paused to throw on his jacket before barreling out into the cold, porch door swinging noisily shut behind him. He crunched through the snow, making his way through the wrecks toward the edge of the circle of iron and salt Bobby had buried after the last time ghosts had attacked this place. The ward would be broken eventually, of course-they all were-but for now it was holding, and they always had the panic room to fall back on.
He climbed up on the hood of a derelict truck for a better vantage point, holding the stone ring to his eye. “Show yourself!” he called, fearless, no longer desperate with anger and newly awakened protectiveness. He was confident, now. All he had to do was see it. If he knew what it was, he could kill it.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are! I’m not afraid of you!”
He did a slow pan, right to left, looking around the circle stone, thorough and exacting. The world through the lens of truth looked little different than the world without-a bit sharper and clearer, lit on the edges with light that wasn’t usually visible, both sharp and opaque. He was going to find the monster, uncover its secrets. He didn’t care how long it took.
The first part of the beast that Sam saw was a curl of smoke sweeping along in the brisk wind, several yards off the ground. He followed that to a red snout, teeth like long, curved knives, dirty ivory, curled in a laughing reptilian mouth. His breath quickening, he swept across the rest of the creature, a sinuous tail, leathery black wings shifting over a powerfully muscled back, eyes like yellow gemstones peering with unblinking malice.
Sam stumbled back and jumped backward off the truck. Too close-he couldn’t see the entire creature up so close, seeming only bare inches away from where he stood. He jogged a few yards toward the house, turned around and looked again, already knowing what it was, his breath jumping in his chest, cold air cutting his lungs.
A dragon. It was a dragon.
It stood at the edge of the ward’s border, not attempting to move around, to make it more difficult for Sam to find it. The skeletal wings, folded over its back like some kind of hellish origami, rode gently up and down with its massive breaths, the movement of the enormous chest seeming somehow impossible, unholy, obscene. It was too big to be real. Sheer physics declared that such a thing should be collapsing under its own weight, not sitting on its haunches and laughing silently at the human who dared to taunt it, sulfurous breath snorting out of its fist-sized nostrils in chimney smoke-puffs.
“I’m going to kill you,” Sam told it calmly. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to kill you.”
The dragon from Hell just kept laughing.
Sam jumped slightly when Bobby grabbed his shoulder, coming up behind him. “Let me see, son.” The command was quiet, calm.
Sam handed over the circle stone, his breath still coming in erratic pulls, adrenaline surging through his body. Strangely, he still felt no fear. A dragon. It was a dragon.
Dean was either going to love this, or be really, really pissed.
Bobby stood there looking through the stone for awhile, still as a man scoping out the enemy laying siege to his home could be. Sam saw no increase in the older hunter’s breathing, no tension in his shoulders. From Bobby’s reaction, it might appear that he saw nothing at all.
“Huh.” Bobby lowered the stone and looked to Sam, jaw working thoughtfully. “It’s a dragon.”
Sam nodded. “You know how to kill a dragon?”
“Guess we’ll find out.”
They returned to the house to find Dean kneeling by the couch, once again wiping Castiel’s forehead and cheeks with a wet washcloth, murmuring soothing nonsense, his voice a calm veneer over a well of anxiety. The boy’s eyes were closed, his breathing harsh and irregular, rasping in his throat. It was so loud.
The book lay abandoned on the floor, open facedown, pages bent and in danger of creasing. Sam rescued the book, for lack of anything better to do. He could hear Bobby in the kitchen, fetching the lavender oil, the antibiotics, more tea, something.
Dean looked up at Sam, his face carefully still, almost expressionless. “He’s too hot. He’s too hot, Sam. I think he’s getting worse.”
Bobby came back with cold packs, ice in Ziploc bags, prepared last night and placed in the freezer, now wrapped in hand towels and ready for use. They had all hoped that they wouldn’t need them. Dean moved aside to let him work, watching without blinking as Bobby placed cold compresses on the boy’s forehead, chest, groin. Castiel whimpered breathlessly at the icy touch, and Sam’s fingernails bit into his palms.
“Sorry, baby,” Dean murmured, cupping a hot cheek in his palm, wrapping his other arm around the boy’s abdomen to hold him still. “I know it hurts. Just for a little while, okay? We have to get your fever down.”
The boy tried to toss his head back and forth, trying to displace the pack there, and Dean let out a breath of pain and held him still. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” It was a bare whisper now, an audible wince.
Sam turned away, back to the desk, the books. He had a dragon to kill.
“I should have stopped.”
Bobby sighed. “Kid, you can’t…”
“I noticed when he stopped coughing but I thought… We even passed a couple of hospitals but I didn’t… I should have realized. I shouldn’t have made him run back at the park. I should have…”
“What, Dean? What?”
“Something.”
Sam stepped back. This was something he could do. Even if it was only an echo, far less powerful than the original. “Dean. Anger not.”
Dean looked up at him, his eyes too large, too bright. Of course, Dean couldn’t cry for himself, but for others, especially when he thought he was at fault for their pain…
“Anger not,” Sam said again, nudging Dean’s leg with his foot. “C’mon, man. You want Cas to get mad at you? He totally will. He’s told you so many times now, and you still don’t get it. Sad okay. Anger not.”
A short laugh tore out of Dean, sounding entirely involuntary, watery and choked. “Yeah, okay. I get you. Anger not. I’ll try, I promise. Wouldn’t want Cas to get mad at me.”
Sam shook his head seriously. “It’s pretty dangerous to get Castiel angry. He’ll, you know…cry on you. Get you all wet. It will be very uncomfortable.”
Bobby humphed at them. “If you ask me, you’re both all wet already.”
Dean laughed again, slightly more genuine this time. He looked back to Castiel, who had fallen still and quiet, no longer struggling. Maybe it was just Sam’s imagination, but he thought that maybe the fever flush was starting to recede.
Bobby pushed himself up off the floor, groaning as his knees popped. “All right, all right, enough of this fool talk. Ten more minutes, then take off the cold packs.” Dean nodded gravely, and the older man looked at Sam. “Let’s get cracking on those books.”
Sam turned to the desk again, this time not in helplessness but in fierce determination. They had a dragon to kill.
Part 20