Fic: Touch of Grace (1/2)
Title: Touch of Grace
Author: MissAnnThropic
Spoilers: mini-sequel to my fic “ Saving Grace”. If you haven’t read that one first, this one will be confusing for you.
Summary: Castiel makes good on his promise to Dean in “Saving Grace” to free Sam from the cage. Sam wakes to find the world a slightly different place than the one he remembers from before.
Disclaimer: None of it’s mine. I'm just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching DVDs of her favorite shows :(
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A/N: This is a fic for scarecrowqueen, who asked me to write a fic that followed “Saving Grace”. You guys have no idea how patient she has been with me on this! I really hope you like it, dear!
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Time in Hell has a strange way of twisting the mind, tearing it to shreds just as the soul is ripped to tatters. When Sam is there, he can’t fathom a time when he wasn’t. There are snatches of dreamlike memories of something else, blurred and impossibly far away. Someplace that doesn’t hurt. Someplace where voices are for more than screaming. Where tendons don’t unravel, bones don’t snap, and blood doesn’t glisten in every scrap of light.
In that fantasy world, people exist who don’t live to strip his soul. Somewhere, in another universe, there is a man named Dean. A figure whose only mission in life is to see Sam safe. That gives it away as a dream, because no such creature could ever really exist - existence is too consumed with pain and suffering to harbor such a compassionate being - but it’s an idea that keeps Sam company. It’s real enough that Sam cries out Dean’s name, as if he could be real. As if Sam could be saved.
But those are only dreamlike wisps of consciousness, and they don’t spare his soul the agony of the forever-now of Hell.
All Sam knows is what it is to be the chew toy between two massive beasts: at one end Michael, the other Lucifer. They pull and yank and claw at him, fighting each other for him for eternity until Sam feels like there’s nothing left of him but wiry sinew and clotted blood, but then there’s more for the beasts to tear at, body conjured from nothing for the beasts’ delight, and Sam begins to come apart all over again. Tug, pull, tear, yank, shake, shred. Over and over. Never-ending.
Even the precious imaginary hero, even Dean, can’t carry Sam away from the torment. Sam would wish for it to end already, but he knows no such thing exists. There is no end.
Then suddenly, there is brilliant white light, wind, a cavalcade of grace.
And it ends.
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Somehow, reality jumped the tracks, because Sam seemed to be stuck in the dream world. The snatches of delusion, the fleeting reprieve from the nightmare that lasted only seconds, became one long held breath. Sam felt mad with the waiting. Waiting for things to rubber-band back to normal: misery, agony, terror, and eternity.
But the endless dreamland didn’t shatter. It held. Its hold grew stronger. For a moment, Hell and Elysium stood together side by side, each just as real as the other. That moment was the worst, because Sam didn’t know which direction he’d fall. He knew where he wanted to land, but it had been millennia, it seemed, since he’d had the power to affect his own fate.
Slowly but surely, Hell began to creep back, retreating behind the line pushed forth by the dream. Only then did Sam breathe.
“That’s it… that’s it! Breathe, Sammy!”
That voice… Sam knew it. It was the voice of the figure that belonged in this world of dreams. It was Dean’s voice. For a breaking second, the sound of it was too much to bear. Sam had mindlessly cried out to Dean so many times since the beginning of time that actually hearing him answer back brought Sam to his metaphorical knees. There was finding himself lodged in the dreamland, and then there was too good to be true.
Then another reality began to steal Sam away. This one Sam went to willingly. It was a place of darkness and rest.
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Hell danced in the corners of Sam’s mind as he roused. But this time it was only his mind that went to the pit. His soul, his sensate-flesh, remained unflayed, unscorched, and free of pain.
Sam peeled open his eyes. His eyelids were heavy from eons since they’d last been lifted. At first, all he could distinguish were blurs of color. But they were wondrous, oceanic colors. Blue, grey. Nowhere in sight was there any ghastly crimson or charred ebony. He didn’t know his eyes could still discern any other colors until they did.
He would have been content to drift in that hazy sea for a decade at least, but movement in his field of vision made him snap to a heightened state of awareness. Fear swept through him. Maybe it was one of the beasts coming to reclaim him.
The figure stilled. Then it rushed at Sam.
Sam sucked in a breath. He let the cool air, unsinged by fire, crash into his lungs in glorious waves as the beast reached out for him.
The beast grabbed him. Sam’s nervous system locked in anticipation of agony.
But nothing dug into his skin and tore. There were no claws. The beast didn’t hurl him back into the flames for the next bout of tug-of-war between rival siblings. The touch was firm but had no intention to hurt. That alone made Sam cry out… it was so unknown, so foreign, and it scared him just as much as the beasts with angel names had.
“Hey, hey… easy, Sammy…”
Everything in Sam closed up in panicked disbelief, then it broke open and spilled out, and Sam just melted into the mattress beneath him. He felt something he hadn’t felt in so long that it felt like the first time.
Safe.
Saved.
Sam focused on the figure looming over him, and he knew that face. He knew those hands. He knew that man.
The ocean was in his eyes as Sam spoke the first word in ages that wasn’t torn from him in a scream.
“Dean."
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Consciousness was hard to hold on to. For the most part, Sam didn’t fight to keep it. It had been so very, very long since he’d had rest; every time he dropped back into that blackness, it was with a sigh.
He might have stayed there forever, but a glimpse of Dean during one of his conscious moments snared him as surely as the beasts Michael and Lucifer ever had. Dean was hovering over Sam when he woke more often than not, and in one particularly lucid moment Sam saw more than just the familiarity of his features.
He saw Dean, but also the state of Dean.
Dean’s skin was ghastly pale. His eyes were sunken and shadowed; the vibrant light Sam knew should have been there was missing. A face that should have been as strong and unshakable as the Rock of Gibraltar looked ready to crumble.
Dean looked gaunt, thinner than Sam’s last memories of him, but there was no telling how old those memories were. Sam’s sense of time was screwed up; he didn’t know how long that never-ending nightmare of Hell had lasted.
Dean did look older, but how much of that was years and how much was mileage? Sam couldn’t begin to know what Dean had been through while Sam was below.
But there were memories that predated even eternity, and they gave Sam excruciating knowledge about Dean. Enough to understand what he saw when he gazed up at his brother’s face.
It was Dean when he was sick. It was Dean ashen and drawn with pain.
It was distressing, and it shook Sam from his stupor. For the first time, Sam shoved away his own troubles to worry about another.
Something was wrong with Dean.
But Sam was already slipping away into the darkness again, and he didn’t fight it. He’d let it take him. For now.
But Sam was filled with a newborn determination to lurch fully into that world beyond the respite of nothing. He had to wrest control of himself and really, truly wake up.
Because he had to find out what was wrong with Dean.
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The next time Sam woke, it wasn’t due to his dogged determination to rise up and help his brother. It wasn’t an act of will that was a credit to Sam’s unfailing love for his brother in need. Sam wished it had been, but it wasn’t. He heard Dean’s voice, low with a gravelly scratch of bone-weary, and he followed it.
Sam opened his eyes and expected to see Dean standing over him, coaxing him gently into this new reality. But Dean wasn’t there. His voice was, but it was coming from somewhere off to the side. Sam laid still and listened, feeling the anguish and exhaustion in Dean’s voice like the grip of one of the beasts.
“He’s getting better. You did it, just like you promised you would.” Dean stopped. Sam could feel the threadbare, frayed end of Dean’s will in the silence. “But this was never supposed to be Sam for you. I can’t live without Sam, but I need you, too. So you gotta wake up… you have to. Please.”
Sam could count on one hand the times he’d heard Dean plead so earnestly. And it had always been a plea aimed at himself or their father. And since Dean wasn’t talking to him, Sam had to wonder just who the hell had Dean so wrung.
Sam rolled his head on the pillow to look in the direction of Dean’s voice.
He didn’t understand at first what he was seeing. Dean was sitting on the edge of another bed in their blue-gray motel room. He presented a tragic pose. Dean’s shoulders were slumped and his back bowed. His whole body screamed exhaustion to the breaking point.
Dean wasn’t alone. Someone was lying in the bed, motionless. Sam squinted and looked closer. It was a man. For a fleeting second, Sam thought maybe his brain was scrambled and it was their father. Maybe those distant memories of John dying were just delusions brought on by Hell. But no, the person in the bed where Dean was holding vigil was too slight of build for John Winchester. The chest in the plain white t-shirt was too narrow and small. Everything about him was too fine for the bearish Winchester patriarch. Plus the hair was too dark. But still, Sam could swear he knew him. If only his shattered and taped-back-together mind would give him a name to go with the face.
It did.
Sam’s eyes widened when he realized the unconscious form in the bed was Castiel. The angel.
Sam had a flash-fire memory of light swallowing him, sweeping him up and away from misery.
He almost opened his mouth to speak, but just before he could, Dean moved. Believing himself unwatched, Dean reached out and curled his fingers around the exposed column of Castiel’s throat. A deeply conditioned part of Sam expected Dean to squeeze and snap, because that’s what throats were for. Instead, Dean just let his hand linger, gentle and soft against Castiel’s neck. Then Dean’s hand trailed down to Castiel’s chest. It flattened there, riding the faint rise and fall as the angel breathed. With his other hand, Dean touched his own chest. Sam could see the ache that took hold of Dean, it was etched on his face.
‘Dean had a bad heart once,’ Sam thought, because the gesture made Sam remember another hell he’d known.
“Come on, Cas,” Dean whispered hoarsely.
Sam wondered how far gone Castiel must be, because surely no one could hear Dean beg like that and not respond. Sam had, and Dean hadn’t even been talking to him.
Castiel just lay there motionless, looking too frail and too pale for a warrior of god.
What happened next made Sam question his sanity… and this reality.
Dean Winchester, tough guy extraordinaire, folded. Turning his back to Sam, he curled up on the bed with the angel, lying alongside his still form. Dean sidled closer to Castiel, gathered him up carefully in his arms, and lay holding the guy like he was a living body pillow. Castiel showed no sign of waking, not even when Dean shifted and rested his head atop Castiel’s chest.
Sam had to be dreaming. His brother would not snuggle up to anyone like that, much less a man, and certainly not the angel.
“Don’t you do this to me, Cas,” Dean muttered. He muttered that and more, and he didn’t stop. He kept up a constant litany, beseeching Castiel to come back.
Confusion kept Sam from trying to get his brother’s attention. Then sleep was casting for him again, and Sam went for the hook.
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The next time Sam opened his eyes, Dean was perched on the edge of his bed. His frame was bent, back a tired parabola, elbows on his knees, and face in his hands. Sam recalled the imagery of a dream, Dean holding Cas. This picture of his brother, while so much harder to bear, was at least normal… expected.
Sam cleared his throat thinly, “Dean?”
Dean’s head snapped up and his eyes went immediately to Sam. For a split-second, there was naked honesty in Dean’s expression… the truth before Dean had a chance to master his features to tell whatever story he wanted to tell. He looked even more ragged than the last time Sam had seen him, and that was worrying. Concern for Dean became foremost on Sam’s mind in the span of a heartbeat.
Then Dean’s face lit up, despite the sick-and-tired pale to it, and he crowded closer. “Sammy!”
“One and only.” Sam offered what he hoped was a passable smile.
Dean grinned, but it looked brittle. Dean looked on the brink of flying apart. But still, he smiled for his little brother, and damn did Sam appreciate that. The only teeth he’d seen in ages were the ones that tore into him, biting to the bone.
“Damn, it’s good to hear your voice,” Dean said. “You had me worried.”
“Sorry.”
Dean laughed. Even that was rough. “You actually are.” Dean looked inordinately delighted that Sam was sorry, which was perplexing to say the least. “Man, it’s good to have you back.” Dean reached out to touch Sam’s face, probably under the pretense of checking for fever, but Sam had caught on to that move when he was twelve. As usual, Sam let him think he was being sly and relented to the touch.
But it wasn’t Dean being touchy that Sam noticed this time. He frowned when a tremble translated into his cheek through Dean’s fingers.
“Dean… you’re shaking.”
Dean snatched back his hand and averted his eyes. “Been a rough few weeks.”
Sam made an ‘if you say so’ noise and reached for his brother with his near hand. He found Dean’s wrist, and the jolt of taking hold of it and touching, being the one to reach out and not fearing retaliation at the contact, sent a shot through Sam that did more to wake him than anything ever had. Dean was still trembling, Sam could feel it in the bracelet made by his fingers, but Dean looked too damn happy to have Sam there to pull away from him just to try and hide the tremor.
That said a hell of a lot, because Dean put ‘keeping up the façade’ insanely high on his list of priorities.
“You okay?” Sam croaked. “You look like shit.”
Dean snorted. “You want shitty, let me get you a mirror.”
“Dean…”
Dean sobered, but it only made him look sicker without the mask of humor to disguise it. He must have known his look was telling, because he looked away as he grumped, “I… later, Sam.”
It might have been lifetimes, but Sam knew better than to try and out-mule that tone. While Dean’s glance was averted, Sam’s gaze was pulled over to the right.
Castiel lay as he had in Sam’s dream, still as death but for the slight up and down of his chest as he breathed. The identical appearance of Castiel in life and Castiel in his dream made Sam fidget. Sam reasoned he must have woken up at some point and seen Castiel - it must have given his imagination the grist it needed for that weirdly cozy dream.
His gut told him it was more than that, though.
“What’s wrong with Castiel?”
Dean looked abruptly at Sam, startled agony in his face. He obviously hadn’t expected Sam to ask that. Sam was taken aback by the intensity of Dean’s reaction. The last that Sam’s memory served him, Dean and the angel were weirdly up in each other’s business, but not to the point where Castiel being in trouble would hit Dean so hard. But fact was that Dean looked like Sam had punched him in the gut.
“What do you remember?” Dean asked grimly.
For the first time, Sam tried… he’d honestly been avoiding examining any of it too closely. “I… I remember Detroit. The devil. Fighting.” Falling. Tightness clutched at his chest, making it hard to say more. “It’s kind of jumbled up.” The beasts at head and foot. Sam sucked in a breath and stiffened. “I remember the cage, Michael and Lucifer.”
Dean’s free hand clamped down over Sam’s fingers where they clutched at Dean’s wrist. He squeezed, and it was actually enough to hurt, but for once it was a good kind of hurt.
“I’m sorry you were down there so long, Sam.”
Sam shook his head. “I told you not to save me.”
“Yeah, well, when have I ever listened to you?”
Sam chuckled… a chuckle that turned into a cough. Dean was up and gone in an instant, soon back with a glass of water. He helped Sam take a few swallows, and the feel of cold water rushing into his stomach almost bowled Sam over. It was incredible. He’d been parched and boiling for so long. He started to gulp with gusto.
“Easy, Sam…”
When he was finished, Sam eased back against his pillow and said, “You saved me.”
Dean blanched and his jaw tightened as he put the empty glass on the nightstand. “No… Cas saved you.”
“Cas?”
“Yeah…” Dean tried to smile, but he failed pretty miserably. “He has this pesky habit of rescuing Winchesters from Hell. I’ve told him it’s bad for his health, but he listens about as well as you do.”
Sam remembered the light.
“Is he going to be okay?”
Dean looked stricken at the question. If Sam was expecting hollow reassurances in answer, he didn’t get them. Dean just didn’t have the energy for it. “I don’t know.” Dean lifted his hand and scrubbed at his face. He hadn’t shaven in several days, and the dark stubble of his pseudo-beard only accentuated how starkly pale his skin was. When Dean’s hand left his face, it migrated down to his chest. Dean massaged his sternum, like he’d taken a kick square in the chest from something.
By the look of him, Sam would guess Dean had been off his feed for days, if not weeks. Like a dog, if Dean wasn’t eating, Sam knew something was really wrong.
“Dean… what’s going on?”
“Not now, Sam… you just rest.”
It sounded like something for Sam’s benefit, put it off until Sam was stronger, but Sam could swear that the delay was actually for Dean. That was the only reason Sam let it go… for the time being.
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The next time Sam woke up, it was completely on his own. It was disorienting not to hear or see Dean right away… Dean’s presence in one way or another had been so reliable that Sam had come to expect it. His brother’s absence was surprisingly distressing, and it compelled Sam up out of bed for the first time.
Struggling with muscles that last remembered being pulled apart, Sam sat up in bed. His head swam at the change in position, and he clutched at the edge of the mattress briefly while stars exploded in his vision. When it cleared, he found himself facing the second bed in the room.
He froze and stared. Apparently his weird dream hadn’t been a dream after all. Because Dean was there again, his body lying flush against the comatose angel. His head was pillowed on Castiel’s shoulder and his right hand rested solidly atop Castiel’s chest. Dean’s left hand was pinned between their bodies, trapped in a position where it was curled loosely against Dean’s own chest. Dean was on the opposite side of Castiel this time, so Sam could clearly see Dean’s face. He would have thought sleep would dispel some of the deathly pallor from Dean’s face. It didn’t. Even sleeping, he looked just as sick and wounded as he had awake.
Normally, Sam would be at his brother’s side in a second trying to tend to him, despite his protestations. But the intimate pose of man and angel stopped him. Sam frowned. He was missing something. The Dean he knew wouldn’t do more than share long looks with the angel… now here he was, sharing a bed with him.
It was like Sam had woken in the wrong reality. Suddenly, he had no idea where or if he belonged.
Sam levered himself out of bed. He took care not to wake Dean. He shuffled over to the bathroom and gently shut the door to use the facilities. When he came out, he turned to the sink and rested his hands on the counter while he looked at himself in the mirror. He recognized his face, but somehow it seemed half stranger to him. Not so unlike Dean. Sam reached up and touched his cheek. He traced a finger over the line on his brow when he scowled. The skin felt whole, but Sam remembered being skinned.
If duration determined one’s place, then did that mean the cage (where he’d spent centuries) was where he belonged now? Was that the only way this feeling of being out of place would end?
He couldn’t stand going back there. So where did that mean he belonged now?
Sam put a stop to his ruminations when he heard Dean getting up out of bed. It wasn’t long before he was strolling up behind Sam. Their eyes met in the mirror… Sam’s lost and Dean’s wrecked.
“You okay, Sam?”
“Honestly? I have no idea.”
With an all-too-understanding nod, Dean came up and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. The touch felt good, but so alien for not being bent on the destruction of his soul.
Dean put his other hand on the counter next to Sam and let it take some of his weight. He let loose a breath, as if the walk from bed to bathroom had been taxing.
“What’s the matter?” Sam asked.
“Told you… rough few weeks.”
Giving no hint he meant to do it (because that would have given Dean time to retreat), Sam reached up and cupped Dean’s cheek with one hand. Dean grumbled and pulled out of the touch, but not before Sam got what he was after. He was checking for fever, but Dean wasn’t hot. He was cool to the touch. Sam was sure it wasn’t just his whacked sense of temperature, either. Dean felt clammy. Entirely too corpse-like for Sam’s liking. Fear, like an old friend, returned to Sam full-force.
“Dean… what’s wrong?”
“I should be asking you that, genius. You’re the one just sprung from the cage.” Dean turned a look on his brother. “Want to talk about it?”
Maybe it was Dean’s intention all along when Sam pulled back. “No… not really. I mean, what would be the point? You know.” The only human on earth who could. Only now did Sam really understand what Dean felt like when he was freed from Hell (and by the very same angel that had rescued Sam, no less).
Dean dropped his gaze. “Yeah… sucks ass.”
“Pretty much. Where are we?”
“Lawrence.”
It made sense, but it still made Sam’s body jolt.
“Cas figured… thought the easiest way to get into the cage to bust you out was the same spot where you went in. Something about scar tissue on this plane of existence or something, weak points… I don’t really know the gnat’s ass details.”
Nor was Sam really up for angel physics. “Another silly question… what day is it?”
Dean’s expression went carefully neutral. Sam was braced even before Dean answered. “Sam… this is going to kick your ass, but… you were down there over a year.”
The revelation didn’t stun him like Dean must have thought it would. “Huh… seemed like longer.”
“Yeah, I know.” And Dean did. The Winchester luck left a lot to be desired.
The atmosphere was getting too thick, almost suffocating, so Sam moved away from it. He stepped out of his brother’s touch and meandered back toward his bed. He needed to sit down anyway. “So… what, you were up here over a year trying to break me out? You and Cas?” It was a subtle way of trying to get back to sorting out what this new closeness between Dean and Castiel was about that made Sam squirm.
“Well… not exactly. You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?” A cold knot formed in his stomach.
Dean came to the bed and sat down next to Sam. “While your soul was in lockdown with the dick brothers, you were here.”
Sam gave Dean a puzzled look.
“I mean, not you you. There was a walking, talking Sam Winchester living your life… but it was just your hard candy shell.”
Understanding finally hit him. Sam’s stomach bottomed out. It was a good thing he was already sitting, because the world spun underneath him. Dean just sat there watching him, and his miserable and wary expression said a lot about what that husk-Sam, Sam without his soul inside, had been like.
“I think you better fill me in,” Sam said lowly, a chord of threat to his tone. Dean had better tell him… Sam had a right to know. He would not stand for being protected against this ‘for his own good’.
Dean hesitated briefly as if to fight, then he just sagged and gave a weary nod. “Okay, Sam.”
While he prepared himself to learn about his soulless double, he wondered at this new level playing field between him and his brother. Maybe sharing the horror of Hell at last put them on even ground. Dean was going to talk to him man to man, not older brother to little brother. Seemed like Sam had wanted nothing more for a large chunk of his life than to be treated as more than just the baby brother that needed to be cared for and coddled.
But right then, Sam would give anything not to have deserved the honor.
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As Sam sat there quietly, listening to Dean tell him about this alter-ego Sam Winchester, he supposed he should feel guilty about what the other Sam had done. But the truth was, all he could really feel for that soulless, callous copy of himself was jealousy. After all, that Sam was here, up top, while the real Sam was being torn to pieces over and over by two brothers with the greatest of all sibling rivalries. It was hard to feel bad about the guy who’d been wearing his face being a dick when, at the time, Sam was downstairs doing his chew toy impression.
It wasn’t long before Sam stopped listening. His resentment toward the other Sam just grew the more he heard, so he just stopping hearing it. Instead of focusing on what he heard, he zeroed in one what he saw.
And that was Dean looking like three kinds of shit on a hot sidewalk. More than once, the impulse rose up in Sam to reach out and support his brother, because Dean looked like he was fit to topple over any second. Or throw up. More than once, Sam’s eyes skittered to the trashcan near the door.
Sam’s eyes went to Castiel a lot, too… but that was because Dean’s did, and Sam just followed them. That struck Sam as so significant, if only he could figure out why. And sure, Dean and Cas had always been leashed by gazes - tethered by glances like Sam had never seen before in anyone else - but somehow this was different. Like Dean was hanging on every shallow breath from Castiel.
Then Sam’s gaze took in the dimensions of the room they were in. He gauged the distances to walls, the lowness of the ceiling, the solidity of the floor. He tried to guess the measurements. Twenty by twenty. No. Fifteen by fifteen. Fifteen by twelve. It was hard to tell. The furniture crammed into it made it seem smaller than it was. Or maybe it really was just that small. But surely the contracting sensation was imaginary. But then, it had been so long since Sam’s reality had static boundaries. He was used to the walls of his cage squeezing, like a heart muscle crushing him in pulses. Or those old west stories of Indians wrapping cowboys up tight in wet leather and leaving them out in the sun to be slowly crushed to death. No… ten by ten. Much closer to ten by ten.
He realized Dean had stopped talking. He glanced up and Dean was frowning at him. “Sammy?”
“I need to get out of here.”
That wasn’t the response Dean had been expecting, obviously. His eyebrows rose.
Sam was antsy. “You know, what all you just said. Lot to take in.” His voice dropped with no conscious intention for it to happen. “I’m sick of being caged up in here.”
Dean blinked, taken aback. And fuck if the next thing that went through his expression wasn’t understanding. The look that said Dean totally got it. That was so monumentally fucked up and so quintessentially Winchester.
“Don’t go far, okay?” Dean simply asked.
“Aren’t you going to…” Sam started to ask, because he’d fully expected his very own big brother escort/shadow on his first excursion outside after the pit. That was just over-protective Dean all over. Sam wasn’t even going to fight it, because there were some things not worth fighting. The tide. Hurricanes. Dean Winchester in mother-hen mode.
But not this time. Instead, Dean’s eyes cut over to Cas. Sam could tell Dean was torn. He wanted to go with his brother, but something even more powerful kept him locked within eyesight of Castiel.
“I shouldn’t leave Cas. He needs… he needs to be looked after.”
That was certainly not what Dean started out to say. He was going to say who Castiel needed, not what. Sam would bet whatever money left to his name on that. Something was definitely going on here.
Dean passed over the room key card and a cell phone Sam didn’t recognize. Sam took them, stood, and edged toward the door. He kept expecting Dean to change his mind and go out with him. But Dean just went over to Castiel’s bed and sat on the edge. If he could see them, Sam imagined the paleness of Dean’s face would match the whiteness of Castiel’s wings.
Visions of blinding white fingers/feathers/streaks of light hit Sam like a sledgehammer. He hurried out the door before Dean could see his brother having some kind of episode.
Part Two
Author: MissAnnThropic
Spoilers: mini-sequel to my fic “ Saving Grace”. If you haven’t read that one first, this one will be confusing for you.
Summary: Castiel makes good on his promise to Dean in “Saving Grace” to free Sam from the cage. Sam wakes to find the world a slightly different place than the one he remembers from before.
Disclaimer: None of it’s mine. I'm just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching DVDs of her favorite shows :(
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A/N: This is a fic for scarecrowqueen, who asked me to write a fic that followed “Saving Grace”. You guys have no idea how patient she has been with me on this! I really hope you like it, dear!
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Time in Hell has a strange way of twisting the mind, tearing it to shreds just as the soul is ripped to tatters. When Sam is there, he can’t fathom a time when he wasn’t. There are snatches of dreamlike memories of something else, blurred and impossibly far away. Someplace that doesn’t hurt. Someplace where voices are for more than screaming. Where tendons don’t unravel, bones don’t snap, and blood doesn’t glisten in every scrap of light.
In that fantasy world, people exist who don’t live to strip his soul. Somewhere, in another universe, there is a man named Dean. A figure whose only mission in life is to see Sam safe. That gives it away as a dream, because no such creature could ever really exist - existence is too consumed with pain and suffering to harbor such a compassionate being - but it’s an idea that keeps Sam company. It’s real enough that Sam cries out Dean’s name, as if he could be real. As if Sam could be saved.
But those are only dreamlike wisps of consciousness, and they don’t spare his soul the agony of the forever-now of Hell.
All Sam knows is what it is to be the chew toy between two massive beasts: at one end Michael, the other Lucifer. They pull and yank and claw at him, fighting each other for him for eternity until Sam feels like there’s nothing left of him but wiry sinew and clotted blood, but then there’s more for the beasts to tear at, body conjured from nothing for the beasts’ delight, and Sam begins to come apart all over again. Tug, pull, tear, yank, shake, shred. Over and over. Never-ending.
Even the precious imaginary hero, even Dean, can’t carry Sam away from the torment. Sam would wish for it to end already, but he knows no such thing exists. There is no end.
Then suddenly, there is brilliant white light, wind, a cavalcade of grace.
And it ends.
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Somehow, reality jumped the tracks, because Sam seemed to be stuck in the dream world. The snatches of delusion, the fleeting reprieve from the nightmare that lasted only seconds, became one long held breath. Sam felt mad with the waiting. Waiting for things to rubber-band back to normal: misery, agony, terror, and eternity.
But the endless dreamland didn’t shatter. It held. Its hold grew stronger. For a moment, Hell and Elysium stood together side by side, each just as real as the other. That moment was the worst, because Sam didn’t know which direction he’d fall. He knew where he wanted to land, but it had been millennia, it seemed, since he’d had the power to affect his own fate.
Slowly but surely, Hell began to creep back, retreating behind the line pushed forth by the dream. Only then did Sam breathe.
“That’s it… that’s it! Breathe, Sammy!”
That voice… Sam knew it. It was the voice of the figure that belonged in this world of dreams. It was Dean’s voice. For a breaking second, the sound of it was too much to bear. Sam had mindlessly cried out to Dean so many times since the beginning of time that actually hearing him answer back brought Sam to his metaphorical knees. There was finding himself lodged in the dreamland, and then there was too good to be true.
Then another reality began to steal Sam away. This one Sam went to willingly. It was a place of darkness and rest.
**********************
Hell danced in the corners of Sam’s mind as he roused. But this time it was only his mind that went to the pit. His soul, his sensate-flesh, remained unflayed, unscorched, and free of pain.
Sam peeled open his eyes. His eyelids were heavy from eons since they’d last been lifted. At first, all he could distinguish were blurs of color. But they were wondrous, oceanic colors. Blue, grey. Nowhere in sight was there any ghastly crimson or charred ebony. He didn’t know his eyes could still discern any other colors until they did.
He would have been content to drift in that hazy sea for a decade at least, but movement in his field of vision made him snap to a heightened state of awareness. Fear swept through him. Maybe it was one of the beasts coming to reclaim him.
The figure stilled. Then it rushed at Sam.
Sam sucked in a breath. He let the cool air, unsinged by fire, crash into his lungs in glorious waves as the beast reached out for him.
The beast grabbed him. Sam’s nervous system locked in anticipation of agony.
But nothing dug into his skin and tore. There were no claws. The beast didn’t hurl him back into the flames for the next bout of tug-of-war between rival siblings. The touch was firm but had no intention to hurt. That alone made Sam cry out… it was so unknown, so foreign, and it scared him just as much as the beasts with angel names had.
“Hey, hey… easy, Sammy…”
Everything in Sam closed up in panicked disbelief, then it broke open and spilled out, and Sam just melted into the mattress beneath him. He felt something he hadn’t felt in so long that it felt like the first time.
Safe.
Saved.
Sam focused on the figure looming over him, and he knew that face. He knew those hands. He knew that man.
The ocean was in his eyes as Sam spoke the first word in ages that wasn’t torn from him in a scream.
“Dean."
**********************
Consciousness was hard to hold on to. For the most part, Sam didn’t fight to keep it. It had been so very, very long since he’d had rest; every time he dropped back into that blackness, it was with a sigh.
He might have stayed there forever, but a glimpse of Dean during one of his conscious moments snared him as surely as the beasts Michael and Lucifer ever had. Dean was hovering over Sam when he woke more often than not, and in one particularly lucid moment Sam saw more than just the familiarity of his features.
He saw Dean, but also the state of Dean.
Dean’s skin was ghastly pale. His eyes were sunken and shadowed; the vibrant light Sam knew should have been there was missing. A face that should have been as strong and unshakable as the Rock of Gibraltar looked ready to crumble.
Dean looked gaunt, thinner than Sam’s last memories of him, but there was no telling how old those memories were. Sam’s sense of time was screwed up; he didn’t know how long that never-ending nightmare of Hell had lasted.
Dean did look older, but how much of that was years and how much was mileage? Sam couldn’t begin to know what Dean had been through while Sam was below.
But there were memories that predated even eternity, and they gave Sam excruciating knowledge about Dean. Enough to understand what he saw when he gazed up at his brother’s face.
It was Dean when he was sick. It was Dean ashen and drawn with pain.
It was distressing, and it shook Sam from his stupor. For the first time, Sam shoved away his own troubles to worry about another.
Something was wrong with Dean.
But Sam was already slipping away into the darkness again, and he didn’t fight it. He’d let it take him. For now.
But Sam was filled with a newborn determination to lurch fully into that world beyond the respite of nothing. He had to wrest control of himself and really, truly wake up.
Because he had to find out what was wrong with Dean.
**********************
The next time Sam woke, it wasn’t due to his dogged determination to rise up and help his brother. It wasn’t an act of will that was a credit to Sam’s unfailing love for his brother in need. Sam wished it had been, but it wasn’t. He heard Dean’s voice, low with a gravelly scratch of bone-weary, and he followed it.
Sam opened his eyes and expected to see Dean standing over him, coaxing him gently into this new reality. But Dean wasn’t there. His voice was, but it was coming from somewhere off to the side. Sam laid still and listened, feeling the anguish and exhaustion in Dean’s voice like the grip of one of the beasts.
“He’s getting better. You did it, just like you promised you would.” Dean stopped. Sam could feel the threadbare, frayed end of Dean’s will in the silence. “But this was never supposed to be Sam for you. I can’t live without Sam, but I need you, too. So you gotta wake up… you have to. Please.”
Sam could count on one hand the times he’d heard Dean plead so earnestly. And it had always been a plea aimed at himself or their father. And since Dean wasn’t talking to him, Sam had to wonder just who the hell had Dean so wrung.
Sam rolled his head on the pillow to look in the direction of Dean’s voice.
He didn’t understand at first what he was seeing. Dean was sitting on the edge of another bed in their blue-gray motel room. He presented a tragic pose. Dean’s shoulders were slumped and his back bowed. His whole body screamed exhaustion to the breaking point.
Dean wasn’t alone. Someone was lying in the bed, motionless. Sam squinted and looked closer. It was a man. For a fleeting second, Sam thought maybe his brain was scrambled and it was their father. Maybe those distant memories of John dying were just delusions brought on by Hell. But no, the person in the bed where Dean was holding vigil was too slight of build for John Winchester. The chest in the plain white t-shirt was too narrow and small. Everything about him was too fine for the bearish Winchester patriarch. Plus the hair was too dark. But still, Sam could swear he knew him. If only his shattered and taped-back-together mind would give him a name to go with the face.
It did.
Sam’s eyes widened when he realized the unconscious form in the bed was Castiel. The angel.
Sam had a flash-fire memory of light swallowing him, sweeping him up and away from misery.
He almost opened his mouth to speak, but just before he could, Dean moved. Believing himself unwatched, Dean reached out and curled his fingers around the exposed column of Castiel’s throat. A deeply conditioned part of Sam expected Dean to squeeze and snap, because that’s what throats were for. Instead, Dean just let his hand linger, gentle and soft against Castiel’s neck. Then Dean’s hand trailed down to Castiel’s chest. It flattened there, riding the faint rise and fall as the angel breathed. With his other hand, Dean touched his own chest. Sam could see the ache that took hold of Dean, it was etched on his face.
‘Dean had a bad heart once,’ Sam thought, because the gesture made Sam remember another hell he’d known.
“Come on, Cas,” Dean whispered hoarsely.
Sam wondered how far gone Castiel must be, because surely no one could hear Dean beg like that and not respond. Sam had, and Dean hadn’t even been talking to him.
Castiel just lay there motionless, looking too frail and too pale for a warrior of god.
What happened next made Sam question his sanity… and this reality.
Dean Winchester, tough guy extraordinaire, folded. Turning his back to Sam, he curled up on the bed with the angel, lying alongside his still form. Dean sidled closer to Castiel, gathered him up carefully in his arms, and lay holding the guy like he was a living body pillow. Castiel showed no sign of waking, not even when Dean shifted and rested his head atop Castiel’s chest.
Sam had to be dreaming. His brother would not snuggle up to anyone like that, much less a man, and certainly not the angel.
“Don’t you do this to me, Cas,” Dean muttered. He muttered that and more, and he didn’t stop. He kept up a constant litany, beseeching Castiel to come back.
Confusion kept Sam from trying to get his brother’s attention. Then sleep was casting for him again, and Sam went for the hook.
**********************
The next time Sam opened his eyes, Dean was perched on the edge of his bed. His frame was bent, back a tired parabola, elbows on his knees, and face in his hands. Sam recalled the imagery of a dream, Dean holding Cas. This picture of his brother, while so much harder to bear, was at least normal… expected.
Sam cleared his throat thinly, “Dean?”
Dean’s head snapped up and his eyes went immediately to Sam. For a split-second, there was naked honesty in Dean’s expression… the truth before Dean had a chance to master his features to tell whatever story he wanted to tell. He looked even more ragged than the last time Sam had seen him, and that was worrying. Concern for Dean became foremost on Sam’s mind in the span of a heartbeat.
Then Dean’s face lit up, despite the sick-and-tired pale to it, and he crowded closer. “Sammy!”
“One and only.” Sam offered what he hoped was a passable smile.
Dean grinned, but it looked brittle. Dean looked on the brink of flying apart. But still, he smiled for his little brother, and damn did Sam appreciate that. The only teeth he’d seen in ages were the ones that tore into him, biting to the bone.
“Damn, it’s good to hear your voice,” Dean said. “You had me worried.”
“Sorry.”
Dean laughed. Even that was rough. “You actually are.” Dean looked inordinately delighted that Sam was sorry, which was perplexing to say the least. “Man, it’s good to have you back.” Dean reached out to touch Sam’s face, probably under the pretense of checking for fever, but Sam had caught on to that move when he was twelve. As usual, Sam let him think he was being sly and relented to the touch.
But it wasn’t Dean being touchy that Sam noticed this time. He frowned when a tremble translated into his cheek through Dean’s fingers.
“Dean… you’re shaking.”
Dean snatched back his hand and averted his eyes. “Been a rough few weeks.”
Sam made an ‘if you say so’ noise and reached for his brother with his near hand. He found Dean’s wrist, and the jolt of taking hold of it and touching, being the one to reach out and not fearing retaliation at the contact, sent a shot through Sam that did more to wake him than anything ever had. Dean was still trembling, Sam could feel it in the bracelet made by his fingers, but Dean looked too damn happy to have Sam there to pull away from him just to try and hide the tremor.
That said a hell of a lot, because Dean put ‘keeping up the façade’ insanely high on his list of priorities.
“You okay?” Sam croaked. “You look like shit.”
Dean snorted. “You want shitty, let me get you a mirror.”
“Dean…”
Dean sobered, but it only made him look sicker without the mask of humor to disguise it. He must have known his look was telling, because he looked away as he grumped, “I… later, Sam.”
It might have been lifetimes, but Sam knew better than to try and out-mule that tone. While Dean’s glance was averted, Sam’s gaze was pulled over to the right.
Castiel lay as he had in Sam’s dream, still as death but for the slight up and down of his chest as he breathed. The identical appearance of Castiel in life and Castiel in his dream made Sam fidget. Sam reasoned he must have woken up at some point and seen Castiel - it must have given his imagination the grist it needed for that weirdly cozy dream.
His gut told him it was more than that, though.
“What’s wrong with Castiel?”
Dean looked abruptly at Sam, startled agony in his face. He obviously hadn’t expected Sam to ask that. Sam was taken aback by the intensity of Dean’s reaction. The last that Sam’s memory served him, Dean and the angel were weirdly up in each other’s business, but not to the point where Castiel being in trouble would hit Dean so hard. But fact was that Dean looked like Sam had punched him in the gut.
“What do you remember?” Dean asked grimly.
For the first time, Sam tried… he’d honestly been avoiding examining any of it too closely. “I… I remember Detroit. The devil. Fighting.” Falling. Tightness clutched at his chest, making it hard to say more. “It’s kind of jumbled up.” The beasts at head and foot. Sam sucked in a breath and stiffened. “I remember the cage, Michael and Lucifer.”
Dean’s free hand clamped down over Sam’s fingers where they clutched at Dean’s wrist. He squeezed, and it was actually enough to hurt, but for once it was a good kind of hurt.
“I’m sorry you were down there so long, Sam.”
Sam shook his head. “I told you not to save me.”
“Yeah, well, when have I ever listened to you?”
Sam chuckled… a chuckle that turned into a cough. Dean was up and gone in an instant, soon back with a glass of water. He helped Sam take a few swallows, and the feel of cold water rushing into his stomach almost bowled Sam over. It was incredible. He’d been parched and boiling for so long. He started to gulp with gusto.
“Easy, Sam…”
When he was finished, Sam eased back against his pillow and said, “You saved me.”
Dean blanched and his jaw tightened as he put the empty glass on the nightstand. “No… Cas saved you.”
“Cas?”
“Yeah…” Dean tried to smile, but he failed pretty miserably. “He has this pesky habit of rescuing Winchesters from Hell. I’ve told him it’s bad for his health, but he listens about as well as you do.”
Sam remembered the light.
“Is he going to be okay?”
Dean looked stricken at the question. If Sam was expecting hollow reassurances in answer, he didn’t get them. Dean just didn’t have the energy for it. “I don’t know.” Dean lifted his hand and scrubbed at his face. He hadn’t shaven in several days, and the dark stubble of his pseudo-beard only accentuated how starkly pale his skin was. When Dean’s hand left his face, it migrated down to his chest. Dean massaged his sternum, like he’d taken a kick square in the chest from something.
By the look of him, Sam would guess Dean had been off his feed for days, if not weeks. Like a dog, if Dean wasn’t eating, Sam knew something was really wrong.
“Dean… what’s going on?”
“Not now, Sam… you just rest.”
It sounded like something for Sam’s benefit, put it off until Sam was stronger, but Sam could swear that the delay was actually for Dean. That was the only reason Sam let it go… for the time being.
**********************
The next time Sam woke up, it was completely on his own. It was disorienting not to hear or see Dean right away… Dean’s presence in one way or another had been so reliable that Sam had come to expect it. His brother’s absence was surprisingly distressing, and it compelled Sam up out of bed for the first time.
Struggling with muscles that last remembered being pulled apart, Sam sat up in bed. His head swam at the change in position, and he clutched at the edge of the mattress briefly while stars exploded in his vision. When it cleared, he found himself facing the second bed in the room.
He froze and stared. Apparently his weird dream hadn’t been a dream after all. Because Dean was there again, his body lying flush against the comatose angel. His head was pillowed on Castiel’s shoulder and his right hand rested solidly atop Castiel’s chest. Dean’s left hand was pinned between their bodies, trapped in a position where it was curled loosely against Dean’s own chest. Dean was on the opposite side of Castiel this time, so Sam could clearly see Dean’s face. He would have thought sleep would dispel some of the deathly pallor from Dean’s face. It didn’t. Even sleeping, he looked just as sick and wounded as he had awake.
Normally, Sam would be at his brother’s side in a second trying to tend to him, despite his protestations. But the intimate pose of man and angel stopped him. Sam frowned. He was missing something. The Dean he knew wouldn’t do more than share long looks with the angel… now here he was, sharing a bed with him.
It was like Sam had woken in the wrong reality. Suddenly, he had no idea where or if he belonged.
Sam levered himself out of bed. He took care not to wake Dean. He shuffled over to the bathroom and gently shut the door to use the facilities. When he came out, he turned to the sink and rested his hands on the counter while he looked at himself in the mirror. He recognized his face, but somehow it seemed half stranger to him. Not so unlike Dean. Sam reached up and touched his cheek. He traced a finger over the line on his brow when he scowled. The skin felt whole, but Sam remembered being skinned.
If duration determined one’s place, then did that mean the cage (where he’d spent centuries) was where he belonged now? Was that the only way this feeling of being out of place would end?
He couldn’t stand going back there. So where did that mean he belonged now?
Sam put a stop to his ruminations when he heard Dean getting up out of bed. It wasn’t long before he was strolling up behind Sam. Their eyes met in the mirror… Sam’s lost and Dean’s wrecked.
“You okay, Sam?”
“Honestly? I have no idea.”
With an all-too-understanding nod, Dean came up and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. The touch felt good, but so alien for not being bent on the destruction of his soul.
Dean put his other hand on the counter next to Sam and let it take some of his weight. He let loose a breath, as if the walk from bed to bathroom had been taxing.
“What’s the matter?” Sam asked.
“Told you… rough few weeks.”
Giving no hint he meant to do it (because that would have given Dean time to retreat), Sam reached up and cupped Dean’s cheek with one hand. Dean grumbled and pulled out of the touch, but not before Sam got what he was after. He was checking for fever, but Dean wasn’t hot. He was cool to the touch. Sam was sure it wasn’t just his whacked sense of temperature, either. Dean felt clammy. Entirely too corpse-like for Sam’s liking. Fear, like an old friend, returned to Sam full-force.
“Dean… what’s wrong?”
“I should be asking you that, genius. You’re the one just sprung from the cage.” Dean turned a look on his brother. “Want to talk about it?”
Maybe it was Dean’s intention all along when Sam pulled back. “No… not really. I mean, what would be the point? You know.” The only human on earth who could. Only now did Sam really understand what Dean felt like when he was freed from Hell (and by the very same angel that had rescued Sam, no less).
Dean dropped his gaze. “Yeah… sucks ass.”
“Pretty much. Where are we?”
“Lawrence.”
It made sense, but it still made Sam’s body jolt.
“Cas figured… thought the easiest way to get into the cage to bust you out was the same spot where you went in. Something about scar tissue on this plane of existence or something, weak points… I don’t really know the gnat’s ass details.”
Nor was Sam really up for angel physics. “Another silly question… what day is it?”
Dean’s expression went carefully neutral. Sam was braced even before Dean answered. “Sam… this is going to kick your ass, but… you were down there over a year.”
The revelation didn’t stun him like Dean must have thought it would. “Huh… seemed like longer.”
“Yeah, I know.” And Dean did. The Winchester luck left a lot to be desired.
The atmosphere was getting too thick, almost suffocating, so Sam moved away from it. He stepped out of his brother’s touch and meandered back toward his bed. He needed to sit down anyway. “So… what, you were up here over a year trying to break me out? You and Cas?” It was a subtle way of trying to get back to sorting out what this new closeness between Dean and Castiel was about that made Sam squirm.
“Well… not exactly. You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?” A cold knot formed in his stomach.
Dean came to the bed and sat down next to Sam. “While your soul was in lockdown with the dick brothers, you were here.”
Sam gave Dean a puzzled look.
“I mean, not you you. There was a walking, talking Sam Winchester living your life… but it was just your hard candy shell.”
Understanding finally hit him. Sam’s stomach bottomed out. It was a good thing he was already sitting, because the world spun underneath him. Dean just sat there watching him, and his miserable and wary expression said a lot about what that husk-Sam, Sam without his soul inside, had been like.
“I think you better fill me in,” Sam said lowly, a chord of threat to his tone. Dean had better tell him… Sam had a right to know. He would not stand for being protected against this ‘for his own good’.
Dean hesitated briefly as if to fight, then he just sagged and gave a weary nod. “Okay, Sam.”
While he prepared himself to learn about his soulless double, he wondered at this new level playing field between him and his brother. Maybe sharing the horror of Hell at last put them on even ground. Dean was going to talk to him man to man, not older brother to little brother. Seemed like Sam had wanted nothing more for a large chunk of his life than to be treated as more than just the baby brother that needed to be cared for and coddled.
But right then, Sam would give anything not to have deserved the honor.
**********************
As Sam sat there quietly, listening to Dean tell him about this alter-ego Sam Winchester, he supposed he should feel guilty about what the other Sam had done. But the truth was, all he could really feel for that soulless, callous copy of himself was jealousy. After all, that Sam was here, up top, while the real Sam was being torn to pieces over and over by two brothers with the greatest of all sibling rivalries. It was hard to feel bad about the guy who’d been wearing his face being a dick when, at the time, Sam was downstairs doing his chew toy impression.
It wasn’t long before Sam stopped listening. His resentment toward the other Sam just grew the more he heard, so he just stopping hearing it. Instead of focusing on what he heard, he zeroed in one what he saw.
And that was Dean looking like three kinds of shit on a hot sidewalk. More than once, the impulse rose up in Sam to reach out and support his brother, because Dean looked like he was fit to topple over any second. Or throw up. More than once, Sam’s eyes skittered to the trashcan near the door.
Sam’s eyes went to Castiel a lot, too… but that was because Dean’s did, and Sam just followed them. That struck Sam as so significant, if only he could figure out why. And sure, Dean and Cas had always been leashed by gazes - tethered by glances like Sam had never seen before in anyone else - but somehow this was different. Like Dean was hanging on every shallow breath from Castiel.
Then Sam’s gaze took in the dimensions of the room they were in. He gauged the distances to walls, the lowness of the ceiling, the solidity of the floor. He tried to guess the measurements. Twenty by twenty. No. Fifteen by fifteen. Fifteen by twelve. It was hard to tell. The furniture crammed into it made it seem smaller than it was. Or maybe it really was just that small. But surely the contracting sensation was imaginary. But then, it had been so long since Sam’s reality had static boundaries. He was used to the walls of his cage squeezing, like a heart muscle crushing him in pulses. Or those old west stories of Indians wrapping cowboys up tight in wet leather and leaving them out in the sun to be slowly crushed to death. No… ten by ten. Much closer to ten by ten.
He realized Dean had stopped talking. He glanced up and Dean was frowning at him. “Sammy?”
“I need to get out of here.”
That wasn’t the response Dean had been expecting, obviously. His eyebrows rose.
Sam was antsy. “You know, what all you just said. Lot to take in.” His voice dropped with no conscious intention for it to happen. “I’m sick of being caged up in here.”
Dean blinked, taken aback. And fuck if the next thing that went through his expression wasn’t understanding. The look that said Dean totally got it. That was so monumentally fucked up and so quintessentially Winchester.
“Don’t go far, okay?” Dean simply asked.
“Aren’t you going to…” Sam started to ask, because he’d fully expected his very own big brother escort/shadow on his first excursion outside after the pit. That was just over-protective Dean all over. Sam wasn’t even going to fight it, because there were some things not worth fighting. The tide. Hurricanes. Dean Winchester in mother-hen mode.
But not this time. Instead, Dean’s eyes cut over to Cas. Sam could tell Dean was torn. He wanted to go with his brother, but something even more powerful kept him locked within eyesight of Castiel.
“I shouldn’t leave Cas. He needs… he needs to be looked after.”
That was certainly not what Dean started out to say. He was going to say who Castiel needed, not what. Sam would bet whatever money left to his name on that. Something was definitely going on here.
Dean passed over the room key card and a cell phone Sam didn’t recognize. Sam took them, stood, and edged toward the door. He kept expecting Dean to change his mind and go out with him. But Dean just went over to Castiel’s bed and sat on the edge. If he could see them, Sam imagined the paleness of Dean’s face would match the whiteness of Castiel’s wings.
Visions of blinding white fingers/feathers/streaks of light hit Sam like a sledgehammer. He hurried out the door before Dean could see his brother having some kind of episode.
Part Two