After the End
Title: After the End
Prompt/Summary: Written for the ohsam Sam-focused h/c fic challenge, from a prompt by the lovely and talented rainylemons, which went thus: 5x04 AU, Sam, Castiel, Gen.
Castiel knew Dean was sending him to die, knew he was being used as bait, but he was tired, watching Dean be so cold and tired and broken left Castiel feeling just so tired and he didn't care. He was pretty sure he welcomed death by then. He didn't expect to walk out of there, but he did. Limping, maybe, bleeding certainly, but he did. He also didn't expect to live long enough to see God return to Earth and deal with his wayward child, to see Lucifer finally defeated and for peace to return to the Earth. But, yeah, he did and Castiel finds himself there for the event and for the aftermath when Sam Winchester, once his friend, wakes up from his long, sleeping nightmare, addicted to demon blood and begging for Cas to tell him that Dean isn't dead, even if he's sure he remembers seeing him die while he watched, helpless, from behind his eyes. Castiel doesn't want the burden of caring for Sam, of watching over him while he comes down and withdraws from demon blood and screams and cries, but he has it. And maybe sometimes he just yells at Sam because how can this not be his fault and how can he have not found the strength to have stopped Lucifer from killing Dean and maybe he just wants to walk out while Sam is feverish and sweating in the little burned out wreck that they've made their home.
But Sam is still his friend and Castiel has never had that many good, true friends.
Characters: Sam/Cas, a couple of random OCs.
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 4,840
Disclaimer: Oh, so very much not mine! Alas.
Warnings: Spoilers up to and including 5.04 “The End.” Swearing. Angst. Lots and lots of angst. Also a wee bit of schmoop, but only a wee bit.
Neurotic Author's Note #1: Um. I’m not quite sure what happened here. This was supposed to be a straightforward fic mostly about Sam detoxing and wallowing in guilt, and instead it… became this. It’s as much about Cas as it is about Sam, and that feels really weird, but I guess I’m posting it anyway. There’s plenty of Sam-focused h/c, so I’m not too worried about that.
Neurotic Author's Note #2: So, uh, I wrote more slash, and it’s Sam/Cas. IDEK, okay? It’s not quite as explicit as my H50 fic, but it’s up there. There is more angsty sex-that’s-not-about-the-sex, and I’m pretty sure that both Sam and Cas hate me right about now.
Neurotic Author's Note #3: This ended up being unbeta’d, so all mistakes are my own and I apologize in advance.
Neurotic Author's Note #4: For the record, there is not much attention paid to realism in this particular story. Much, much hand-waving happens.
The world stops ending overnight.
When Cas opens his eyes, he is staring at a bright patch of grass sprouting up between two paving stones. There's a sturdy little dandelion pushing its way toward the sky, determinedly cheerful, and he reaches out tentatively with his left hand to trace a forefinger across the soft petals, like down, and leaves them streaked with crimson. They have chickens at Camp Chitaqua, and Cas likes to hold the chicks in the palm of his hands, even though Dean tells him constantly that he shouldn’t play with the goddamned food. This feels the same, only more fragrant.
Sunlight is streaming into the front courtyard of the Jackson County Sanatorium, and everything is glowing. The ground is littered with corpses, but some of the bodies are beginning to move. He feels oddly lethargic, as though he's taken a handful of downers, but he went into this last fight sober, knowing what it was. It felt wrong to be high while going to his death, even if it meant he had the shakes. All the better to die quickly, he had thought, except that he's not dead now.
A pair of feet in rotting boots appear between him and the dandelion. “Hey, you alive?”
He can taste copper on his tongue, and there's something tacky trickling slowly along his hairline, every breath scrapes a little along his ribs. He raises his head. “I think so,” he croaks, and wishes he'd thought to bring his flask. He didn't, though, because dead men don't drink.
Hands grab onto his arm and haul him to his feet, and he stifles a groan, wrapping his free arm around his stomach. Cas straightens up a little, and finds himself staring at the dirt-streaked face of a man who, not so long ago, was trying to rip his face off with his teeth.
“You're a...” he stops short of saying 'Croat.' “You're one of the infected.”
The man shrugs, but his expression is shell-shocked. “I don't remember. I feel okay. You're that guy, right?”
“What guy?” Cas tries to take a step, grunts with discomfort.
“There were posters. The fucking Devil wanted you. I remember that much. Everyone was after you. Is it true you used to be an angel?”
Cas snorts. “It hardly matters now. I... I need to see what happened.”
“Trust me, you don't want to go back there.”
Cas allows himself a brittle smile. “No offense, but you can't know what I want.”
“I guess. Lean on me, then. I'll get you where you want to go.”
There's a single rose still blooming amidst the desolation. The tiny garden is empty, save for a figure crumpled by the roots of a dying bush. He doesn't need to see the fading green of the surplus jacket or the thin silver band on the third finger of his right hand to know who it is. They all knew going in that they were going to die. It just seems terribly unfair that he's the only one to have come out of a suicide mission alive, when he was the one who most deserved to die.
~*~
He and Chuck bury Dean two days later, in the same garden where they found him, and then Chuck leaves for good. “I think I might try writing again,” he says, giving Cas a pat on the shoulder. “You know what you want to do, Castiel?”
He shrugs. “No one calls me that anymore, Chuck.” No one but Chuck, anyway. He doesn't know why the washed-up prophet insists on calling him by his old name. He hasn't thought of himself as Castiel in well over three years. He's just been 'Cas' this whole time. “It hasn't been my name in a really long time.”
Chuck gives him a look that's surprising in its compassion. “You can't just leave that part of you behind. It's still who you are, even if you don't think it is, trust me on this. And you never answered my question.”
“That's because I don't know.”
Chuck nods, lips pressed together in an expression of sympathy. “I expect you'll find it soon enough. I'll try to keep in touch. Look for me on the bookshelves,” he smiles ruefully, and then he's gone.
Cas kicks at the wooden marker above Dean's grave. It's just a slab of wood, and he didn't even bother trying to write Dean's name on it. It feels kind of pointless, now. No one apart from him and less than a handful of others know who Dean is. No one even knows why the world didn't end. Dean is dead, which means the Colt didn't work, and yet Lucifer is gone, and the world is crawling out of its psychosis like a butterfly from a chrysalis, dazed and still crumpled, trembling in the breeze. The wooden marker lists sadly to the side, and abruptly he drops to the ground, cross-legged in a mockery of the lotus pose that he adopted in a surge of irony so many years ago.
“You fucker,” he tells the marker, surprised by how dispassionate his voice sounds, even to his own ears. “You dragged me all the way here, pointed me at the canons, and you didn't have the fucking decency to take me with you when you went down.”
Footsteps crunch on the gravel behind him, and a young woman's voice that he doesn't recognize speaks. “Are... are you Cas?”
“I can't help you,” he says, not bothering to turn around. “Haven't been an angel in a very long time. Go find someone else.”
Feet shuffle in the loose stones. “No... there's someone else who needs you. Please come?”
He sighs, rolls his eyes, but he's never, ever once been able to say no to something like this. As he moves away, he imagines he can hear Dean laughing at him.
The girl is another of the infected. The Croats are gone, replaced by frightened, bewildered, sometimes mutilated people. At least they don't remember any of what they did before, Cas thinks, watching her as she leads him through the sanatorium. None of them would be sane anymore.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Just to the back. We recognized your name when he was screaming, and it's the only thing he's said that made sense to us,” she says, which doesn't explain a damned thing.
Their footsteps echo in the empty corridors. There's a faint scent of antiseptic still hanging in the air, as though even after all this time the place remembers its original purpose in life. He wonders if he still has any lingering traces of grace still clinging to his clothes like that, tiny molecules of light and nothingness to remind him of everything that he sacrificed. Far away, he can hear screaming -a high-pitched keening that sounds more like an animal in torment than a human being.
He stops, because he knows the voice. “I can't go there.”
The girl rolls her eyes. “Sure you can. Just put one foot in front of the other, and go. He won't stop screaming,” she adds, as though he's somehow supposed to do something about it. He doesn’t even know her name. “We can’t do anything for him, but you might.”
~*~
Sam has fallen silent by the time the girl opens the door to the tiny room in which they’ve locked him up. Cas isn’t sure he would have recognized him, if it wasn’t for the voice and his eyes, which are bloodshot and crazed, opened wide and rolling in his head like those of a spooked horse. He’s wedged in one corner of the room, dressed in a filthy t-shirt that’s at least one size too small, and torn BDU pants that are several inches too short. He’s barefoot, his arms and legs covered in bloody scratches which are, judging by the state of his hands and fingernails, self-inflicted. There are a few bloody gouges on his face, crusted over but still oozing blood in places. For now his hands are limp by his sides, fingers curled up loosely toward the ceiling, knuckles resting on the floor.
Cas pauses in the doorway, looks back, but the girl is long gone, leaving him alone with the man who almost single-handedly brought the earth to ruin. He’s amazed no one simply put a bullet through Sam’s head: it might even be a mercy, judging by the state of him. He walks forward carefully, one foot in front of the other, just like he’s been told, and squats in front of Sam.
“Sam.”
Sam jerks as though Cas has just jabbed him with a red-hot poker. “Dean...”
“Dean is dead.” Dean is dead and it’s your fault, is what he really wants to say. Dean is dead because you killed him. Dean is dead because you broke his neck like it was nothing. Like he was nothing.
Sam’s eyes are tracking something invisible in the room. “I saw him. I saw him do it, and I tried to stop him... Cas?” His gaze comes to land on Cas’ face.
“Yes, Sam.”
Sam pulls in a shuddering breath. “I tried... I tried so hard... it was all lies.”
It’s the one truth in all of this. Sam has been surrounded by lies his entire life. Lied to by his father and his brother, lied to by everyone who pretended to be his friend. Lied to by demons and angels alike. Is it any wonder, Cas thinks, that he finally accepted the one being who promised never to lie to him, no matter what?
Tears are spilling down Sam’s cheeks. Cas is sure he’s never seen Sam cry before, not once, although Dean was fond of saying that his brother cried at the drop of a hat. It was like having a brother and a sister, Dean used to say, before Sam said ‘yes.’
“I saw him die. I tried to stop him, but it was too late,” Sam’s voice is giving out, raw from screaming. “I couldn’t save him. Couldn’t save any of them, not ever. Not even fucking God let me save them...”
Cas leans in toward him, suddenly chilled to his core. “Sam... did you see God?”
“I figured it out,” Sam is choking. “I did, and I won and I still couldn’t...”
He stiffens, suddenly, bare heels scraping against the floor, the tendons standing out on his neck, and Cas can see his jaw clenching with the effort of not screaming or swallowing his tongue, maybe. It’s the demon blood, he realizes, still working its way through Sam’s system. Sam shudders, but he has some strength in him yet, it seems, because a moment later his eyes open and he stares at Cas.
“Are you gonna leave me?”
He wants to, but Sam deserves more than that. He fought the Devil himself for three years, and won, even if it was too late for himself and for Cas, too. Cas thinks that maybe the front lines in the war aren’t mean to live to see the end. It goes agains the natural order of things.
“No.”
Sam sighs, the last of the tension draining from his body. “Thank you,” he whispers, and then his eyes roll back into his head.
~*~
It’s not over by a long shot, though it may as well be. Cas drags Sam back with him to Camp Chitaqua, only to find that everyone who was left has abandoned it in favour of trying to return home. He’s had to fold Sam awkwardly into the back seat of the jeep in which he and Dean drove to Jackson County, where he’s still curled up, muttering under his breath. It’s been a hellish drive back, or at least that would be the word Cas would have used if he didn’t know exactly what Hell was really like. Sam has seized twice, and thrown up so many times that Cas has lost count. He’s filthy and shivering and wretched, but at least he doesn’t talk. Cas thinks that would make all of it all the more unbearable. The mumbling is unintelligible, and he hopes it’ll stay like that.
Sam gasps and moans when Cas tries to pull him from the vehicle, and Cas just shakes him a little, impatient in spite of himself. Cas has been sober for three days, and he finds that it doesn’t agree with him at all. He wonders if his stash of pharmaceuticals was raided and cleaned out before everyone left, or whether his hiding place really was as clever as he imagined it was while he was high.
“Come on, I can’t carry you. Human now, which is basically a synonym for ‘useless.’ You’re too goddamned big to lift. Get up!”
Sam groans again, but he uncurls enough to slide out of the jeep and get his feet under him, leaning heavily against the vehicle. He’s still barefoot, still wearing nothing but the clothes Cas found him in. It hasn’t occurred to either one of them that he should change his clothes. “What is this place?”
“Nowhere important. Just a place to stay.”
“This is where you lived before.”
He just nods once, briefly, and shoves Sam none too gently toward his cabin. He’s not going to do them both the disservice of having either of them stay in Dean’s old cabin. Sam stumbles, almost goes to his knees before Cas catches him around the waist and hoists him back up, still shoving him forward. He’s not sure how they make it all the way to the cabin without either of them taking a header, but Sam ends up curled on one of the uncomfortable cots inside, feet hanging off the end, his face pressed into the scratchy grey blanket, his laboured breathing the only indication he’s alive at all.
Cas pries up the loose floorboard at the far end of the cabin, and finds that no one has touched his stash after all. He pulls out one of the small bottles, one with no label, and pops a couple of little white pills into his mouth. If he’s lucky, they’ll turn out to be oxy of some kind, and he won’t have to feel anything for a very long time. He dry-swallows them, and looks back at where Sam has started trembling almost convulsively on the bed. He’ll probably have another seizure soon, Cas thinks, eyeing him critically, and is soon proven right. He doesn’t move from where he is as Sam’s body goes rigid and begins to jerk in tight, uncomfortable movements, saliva bubbling at the corners of his mouth, eyelids fluttering enough to reveal white semi-circles beneath them.
Cas digs around in his stash until he comes up with a bottle labeled “Depakote,” and hopes that the pills inside are still what it says they are. He thinks it’s meant for this sort of thing. His brain can’t encompass all the knowledge he had before, but he still knows a damned sight more than all of humanity combined. He shuffles over to Sam’s side, and when the seizure has passed and Sam is lax, jaw slack and eyes staring fixedly at the far wall, he props him up and pushes a pill into his mouth as far as it will go, the way he imagines someone might do for a sick pet, and forces him to swallow.
Then he leans back against the bed, his head brushing against Sam’s thigh, and closes his eyes.
~*~
It’s easier to keep Sam drugged than to listen to him talk. When Sam opens his mouth, all that comes out is questions about Dean, about what happened while Lucifer was still walking the earth. All of Sam’s memories are of a blinding white light that dissipated only long enough for him to realize that Dean was dead -he has no idea what the Devil did while he was wearing him like a cheap suit. So Cas just does for Sam what he did for himself, and finds as many meds as he can and feeds them to him regularly whenever Sam opens his mouth, whether it’s to scream or talk. Both options are too awful to tolerate for long.
Eventually, Sam goes silent.
The sun starts shining more. Cas doesn’t remember the last time there were two sunny days in a row. Before the sky was constantly overcast, as though the world had stopped turning on some hazy November day and had never bothered to move forward again. When the worst of the detox has passed, Sam spends most of those early sunny days asleep, dead to the world on his cot, head pillowed in the crook of his arm. Cas finds some leftover acid and some Thorazine, and the sun wobbles brightly in the sky and the clouds shiver and stretch and dance, and eventually he falls asleep as well.
When he wakes up Sam is gone, and the thought that he’s failed Dean even in this one small task hits him hard in the solar plexus. He thinks he might throw up, except that he doesn’t remember the last time he had anything to eat, and there’s nothing in his stomach to throw up. He scrambles to his feet, clumsy and uncoordinated, light-headed from lack of food, staggers toward the door.
Sam is outside, sitting on the rickety wooden stairs outside his cabin and staring up at the afternoon sky. When Cas approaches, he sees the sun glinting off something in the palm of Sam’s hand. He recognizes it immediately, and the surge of relief he’d felt at finding Sam turns into a clenching pain in his chest.
“Where did you get that?”
Sam is staring at the tiny bronze amulet, weighing it in his fingers. “You kept your trench coat. It was in the pocket.” He’s forced to whisper
Cas hasn’t worn his trench coat in four years. “He never asked for it back. I think he was convinced I would find God, even when I stopped looking.”
“I guess he was right.” Sam toys with the amulet. “We should bring this back to him. You never told me what you did with -with him.”
“We buried him near where he died.”
“The rose garden?”
“Yes.”
Sam swallows. “We’ll have to go back, make sure he’s given a proper hunter’s funeral.”
“Not today.”
“No, I guess not.”
“He would want you to keep it. There is no point in burning it.”
Sam nods. After that, there seems to be nothing else to say.
~*~
Sam finds the mouldering vegetable garden that some of the residents of the camp had tried to maintain with little success, before. He rummages around until he finds a trowel and a hoe, and sets about weeding the little patch of dirt with more energy than Cas has seen him put into anything. Then he spreads a bunch of beaten-up tarps over it, weighing them down with rocks.
“Can’t plant anything now,” he tells Cas. His voice is permanently hoarse now, although the fact that he wakes up screaming from nightmares every night can’t help. “It’ll snow soon. We’re well past the first frost, anyway.”
Cas shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”
It’s a lie, but he can’t bring himself to think about planting. Not now. He’s not going to deny Sam this, though, not if it means saving the precarious balance of Sam’s mind. It wouldn’t take much for either or both of them to lose the tenuous hold they have on sanity these days. When Sam isn’t sleeping or trying to tend the garden he sits in a corner of the room and simply stares at nothing, which would be unnerving if Cas wasn’t already an old hand at ignoring other people’s pain.
Christmas rolls by, and Cas secures a small bottle full of pills and swallows all of them, complete with half a bottle of some unspeakably disgusting moonshine to wash them down. Sam won’t mind, he thinks, sitting on his bed and resting his head against the wall. There’s not much left for him here, anyway. It’s nice, this feeling of floating away. He’s been a little more careful, lately, of how much he takes at once, making sure he would have enough, once he made up his mind, and it’s liberating not to have to pay attention anymore. He’s missed this feeling, he realizes, having made himself responsible for Sam in the intervening months. It was all so much easier when all he had to do was follow where Dean led.
“Cas!” Someone shakes him so roughly that fireworks spark behind his eyelids. “Cas, you stupid fuck, what did you do?”
The floating feeling shifts and changes, and he realizes he’s being carried, half-dragged, really, and suddenly the quality of the air changes. Something collides hard with his elbows and knees, and he realizes it’s the ground, the smell of dirt pungent in his nostrils. Someone grabs his hair and yanks until there are tears in his eyes from the pain, and fingers pry open his mouth, force themselves past his tongue until he gags and coughs. The next thing he knows he’s emptying the contents of his stomach onto the ground while Sam holds him up, retching and coughing, tears coursing down his cheeks and mixing with the dirt and vomit and half-digested pills. He manages to draw in a shuddering breath, and Sam pulls him backward into his lap and wraps his arms around him so tightly Cas thinks he might choke him.
“You can’t leave me here,” Sam tells him, in that same wrecked voice he uses for everything else. “You can’t fucking leave me, Cas.”
Cas shifts in his arms, lets himself sob into Sam’s shoulder, and Sam lets him because Sam has always been his friend, and Cas has never had so many that he’s found he could spare them.
~*~
He never notices the winter pass them by. On the night of Christmas Day Sam slips quietly into Cas’ bed and pulls him close again, locking one leg around both of his, and Cas settles comfortably there as though they’ve been doing this all along. Sam has lost weight over the months, but so has Cas, and they fit together even on the narrow mattress that Cas keeps on the floor. It’s wider than the army cots, and this way he never had to worry about falling whenever he’d taken too much.
It’s Sam who gets into bed with him first, but it’s Cas who initiates the first kiss, almost two weeks later, turning to face Sam in the bed under the cover of darkness. There’s no surprise in the gesture. He thinks maybe they’ve been doing this all along as well, as Sam’s tongue moves against his, gentle and a little curious, and Cas can taste the faint curl of tainted grace that still lingers there, so similar to his own and yet almost forgotten. After that, the rest falls into place just as naturally.
Sam doesn’t talk much anymore. He says everything he needs to say with lips and tongue and teeth, with hands and fingers. He maps out Cas’ body slowly, exploring inch by inch until Cas is shuddering and gasping quietly, writhing under him while Sam holds his hips still with strong hands. For reasons he can’t explain to himself he shoves a hand in his mouth when he feels Sam’s lips on his cock, bites down on the delicate web of skin between his thumb and forefinger to keep himself from crying out when Sam’s tongue swipes up his length and lazily circles the crown. He smothers a moan as Sam keeps going, clenching a fistful of sheets in his other hand, eyes rolling back in his head at the sensation of hot and wet and Sam.
Tears prick at his eyes when he comes, bucking hard in spite of himself, and he swallows the sob that wells up in his chest. Sam pulls off gently, moves up to kiss him, and he chases his own taste in Sam’s mouth, puts both hands on Sam’s ass to draw him as close as possible. Sam’s still soft when Cas lets one hand drift between his legs, but that doesn’t come as a surprise anymore. Not after all this time, and it hardly seems to matter. Sam strokes his hair, nuzzles at his jawline, teeth scraping against the stubble that’s beginning to form there, and Cas pulls harder until they’re lying entangled together so that he hardly knows where he ends and Sam begins, until sleep pulls them both under again.
When he awakens again, sunlight is streaming in through the window, dust motes dancing in the pale beam, and Sam is standing above him, fully clothed, holding something in hands carefully cupped one over the other. Cas sits up, rubbing the remnants of sleep from his eyes, and when Sam holds out his hands with an expectant air, Cas obediently holds out his own, palms up a bit like a supplicant. Very gently Sam opens his hands, and deposits a chick in Cas’ outstretched hands.
“I didn’t even know we had chickens,” he says, ducking his head with a smile. “It must have hatched a couple of days ago.”
Cas looks down at the tiny ball of yellow fuzz, and can’t help but wonder what Dean would think of this. “Shouldn’t play with the goddamned food.”
He grins, then, and Sam throws back his head and laughs.
~END~
Prompt/Summary: Written for the ohsam Sam-focused h/c fic challenge, from a prompt by the lovely and talented rainylemons, which went thus: 5x04 AU, Sam, Castiel, Gen.
Castiel knew Dean was sending him to die, knew he was being used as bait, but he was tired, watching Dean be so cold and tired and broken left Castiel feeling just so tired and he didn't care. He was pretty sure he welcomed death by then. He didn't expect to walk out of there, but he did. Limping, maybe, bleeding certainly, but he did. He also didn't expect to live long enough to see God return to Earth and deal with his wayward child, to see Lucifer finally defeated and for peace to return to the Earth. But, yeah, he did and Castiel finds himself there for the event and for the aftermath when Sam Winchester, once his friend, wakes up from his long, sleeping nightmare, addicted to demon blood and begging for Cas to tell him that Dean isn't dead, even if he's sure he remembers seeing him die while he watched, helpless, from behind his eyes. Castiel doesn't want the burden of caring for Sam, of watching over him while he comes down and withdraws from demon blood and screams and cries, but he has it. And maybe sometimes he just yells at Sam because how can this not be his fault and how can he have not found the strength to have stopped Lucifer from killing Dean and maybe he just wants to walk out while Sam is feverish and sweating in the little burned out wreck that they've made their home.
But Sam is still his friend and Castiel has never had that many good, true friends.
Characters: Sam/Cas, a couple of random OCs.
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 4,840
Disclaimer: Oh, so very much not mine! Alas.
Warnings: Spoilers up to and including 5.04 “The End.” Swearing. Angst. Lots and lots of angst. Also a wee bit of schmoop, but only a wee bit.
Neurotic Author's Note #1: Um. I’m not quite sure what happened here. This was supposed to be a straightforward fic mostly about Sam detoxing and wallowing in guilt, and instead it… became this. It’s as much about Cas as it is about Sam, and that feels really weird, but I guess I’m posting it anyway. There’s plenty of Sam-focused h/c, so I’m not too worried about that.
Neurotic Author's Note #2: So, uh, I wrote more slash, and it’s Sam/Cas. IDEK, okay? It’s not quite as explicit as my H50 fic, but it’s up there. There is more angsty sex-that’s-not-about-the-sex, and I’m pretty sure that both Sam and Cas hate me right about now.
Neurotic Author's Note #3: This ended up being unbeta’d, so all mistakes are my own and I apologize in advance.
Neurotic Author's Note #4: For the record, there is not much attention paid to realism in this particular story. Much, much hand-waving happens.
The world stops ending overnight.
When Cas opens his eyes, he is staring at a bright patch of grass sprouting up between two paving stones. There's a sturdy little dandelion pushing its way toward the sky, determinedly cheerful, and he reaches out tentatively with his left hand to trace a forefinger across the soft petals, like down, and leaves them streaked with crimson. They have chickens at Camp Chitaqua, and Cas likes to hold the chicks in the palm of his hands, even though Dean tells him constantly that he shouldn’t play with the goddamned food. This feels the same, only more fragrant.
Sunlight is streaming into the front courtyard of the Jackson County Sanatorium, and everything is glowing. The ground is littered with corpses, but some of the bodies are beginning to move. He feels oddly lethargic, as though he's taken a handful of downers, but he went into this last fight sober, knowing what it was. It felt wrong to be high while going to his death, even if it meant he had the shakes. All the better to die quickly, he had thought, except that he's not dead now.
A pair of feet in rotting boots appear between him and the dandelion. “Hey, you alive?”
He can taste copper on his tongue, and there's something tacky trickling slowly along his hairline, every breath scrapes a little along his ribs. He raises his head. “I think so,” he croaks, and wishes he'd thought to bring his flask. He didn't, though, because dead men don't drink.
Hands grab onto his arm and haul him to his feet, and he stifles a groan, wrapping his free arm around his stomach. Cas straightens up a little, and finds himself staring at the dirt-streaked face of a man who, not so long ago, was trying to rip his face off with his teeth.
“You're a...” he stops short of saying 'Croat.' “You're one of the infected.”
The man shrugs, but his expression is shell-shocked. “I don't remember. I feel okay. You're that guy, right?”
“What guy?” Cas tries to take a step, grunts with discomfort.
“There were posters. The fucking Devil wanted you. I remember that much. Everyone was after you. Is it true you used to be an angel?”
Cas snorts. “It hardly matters now. I... I need to see what happened.”
“Trust me, you don't want to go back there.”
Cas allows himself a brittle smile. “No offense, but you can't know what I want.”
“I guess. Lean on me, then. I'll get you where you want to go.”
There's a single rose still blooming amidst the desolation. The tiny garden is empty, save for a figure crumpled by the roots of a dying bush. He doesn't need to see the fading green of the surplus jacket or the thin silver band on the third finger of his right hand to know who it is. They all knew going in that they were going to die. It just seems terribly unfair that he's the only one to have come out of a suicide mission alive, when he was the one who most deserved to die.
~*~
He and Chuck bury Dean two days later, in the same garden where they found him, and then Chuck leaves for good. “I think I might try writing again,” he says, giving Cas a pat on the shoulder. “You know what you want to do, Castiel?”
He shrugs. “No one calls me that anymore, Chuck.” No one but Chuck, anyway. He doesn't know why the washed-up prophet insists on calling him by his old name. He hasn't thought of himself as Castiel in well over three years. He's just been 'Cas' this whole time. “It hasn't been my name in a really long time.”
Chuck gives him a look that's surprising in its compassion. “You can't just leave that part of you behind. It's still who you are, even if you don't think it is, trust me on this. And you never answered my question.”
“That's because I don't know.”
Chuck nods, lips pressed together in an expression of sympathy. “I expect you'll find it soon enough. I'll try to keep in touch. Look for me on the bookshelves,” he smiles ruefully, and then he's gone.
Cas kicks at the wooden marker above Dean's grave. It's just a slab of wood, and he didn't even bother trying to write Dean's name on it. It feels kind of pointless, now. No one apart from him and less than a handful of others know who Dean is. No one even knows why the world didn't end. Dean is dead, which means the Colt didn't work, and yet Lucifer is gone, and the world is crawling out of its psychosis like a butterfly from a chrysalis, dazed and still crumpled, trembling in the breeze. The wooden marker lists sadly to the side, and abruptly he drops to the ground, cross-legged in a mockery of the lotus pose that he adopted in a surge of irony so many years ago.
“You fucker,” he tells the marker, surprised by how dispassionate his voice sounds, even to his own ears. “You dragged me all the way here, pointed me at the canons, and you didn't have the fucking decency to take me with you when you went down.”
Footsteps crunch on the gravel behind him, and a young woman's voice that he doesn't recognize speaks. “Are... are you Cas?”
“I can't help you,” he says, not bothering to turn around. “Haven't been an angel in a very long time. Go find someone else.”
Feet shuffle in the loose stones. “No... there's someone else who needs you. Please come?”
He sighs, rolls his eyes, but he's never, ever once been able to say no to something like this. As he moves away, he imagines he can hear Dean laughing at him.
The girl is another of the infected. The Croats are gone, replaced by frightened, bewildered, sometimes mutilated people. At least they don't remember any of what they did before, Cas thinks, watching her as she leads him through the sanatorium. None of them would be sane anymore.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Just to the back. We recognized your name when he was screaming, and it's the only thing he's said that made sense to us,” she says, which doesn't explain a damned thing.
Their footsteps echo in the empty corridors. There's a faint scent of antiseptic still hanging in the air, as though even after all this time the place remembers its original purpose in life. He wonders if he still has any lingering traces of grace still clinging to his clothes like that, tiny molecules of light and nothingness to remind him of everything that he sacrificed. Far away, he can hear screaming -a high-pitched keening that sounds more like an animal in torment than a human being.
He stops, because he knows the voice. “I can't go there.”
The girl rolls her eyes. “Sure you can. Just put one foot in front of the other, and go. He won't stop screaming,” she adds, as though he's somehow supposed to do something about it. He doesn’t even know her name. “We can’t do anything for him, but you might.”
~*~
Sam has fallen silent by the time the girl opens the door to the tiny room in which they’ve locked him up. Cas isn’t sure he would have recognized him, if it wasn’t for the voice and his eyes, which are bloodshot and crazed, opened wide and rolling in his head like those of a spooked horse. He’s wedged in one corner of the room, dressed in a filthy t-shirt that’s at least one size too small, and torn BDU pants that are several inches too short. He’s barefoot, his arms and legs covered in bloody scratches which are, judging by the state of his hands and fingernails, self-inflicted. There are a few bloody gouges on his face, crusted over but still oozing blood in places. For now his hands are limp by his sides, fingers curled up loosely toward the ceiling, knuckles resting on the floor.
Cas pauses in the doorway, looks back, but the girl is long gone, leaving him alone with the man who almost single-handedly brought the earth to ruin. He’s amazed no one simply put a bullet through Sam’s head: it might even be a mercy, judging by the state of him. He walks forward carefully, one foot in front of the other, just like he’s been told, and squats in front of Sam.
“Sam.”
Sam jerks as though Cas has just jabbed him with a red-hot poker. “Dean...”
“Dean is dead.” Dean is dead and it’s your fault, is what he really wants to say. Dean is dead because you killed him. Dean is dead because you broke his neck like it was nothing. Like he was nothing.
Sam’s eyes are tracking something invisible in the room. “I saw him. I saw him do it, and I tried to stop him... Cas?” His gaze comes to land on Cas’ face.
“Yes, Sam.”
Sam pulls in a shuddering breath. “I tried... I tried so hard... it was all lies.”
It’s the one truth in all of this. Sam has been surrounded by lies his entire life. Lied to by his father and his brother, lied to by everyone who pretended to be his friend. Lied to by demons and angels alike. Is it any wonder, Cas thinks, that he finally accepted the one being who promised never to lie to him, no matter what?
Tears are spilling down Sam’s cheeks. Cas is sure he’s never seen Sam cry before, not once, although Dean was fond of saying that his brother cried at the drop of a hat. It was like having a brother and a sister, Dean used to say, before Sam said ‘yes.’
“I saw him die. I tried to stop him, but it was too late,” Sam’s voice is giving out, raw from screaming. “I couldn’t save him. Couldn’t save any of them, not ever. Not even fucking God let me save them...”
Cas leans in toward him, suddenly chilled to his core. “Sam... did you see God?”
“I figured it out,” Sam is choking. “I did, and I won and I still couldn’t...”
He stiffens, suddenly, bare heels scraping against the floor, the tendons standing out on his neck, and Cas can see his jaw clenching with the effort of not screaming or swallowing his tongue, maybe. It’s the demon blood, he realizes, still working its way through Sam’s system. Sam shudders, but he has some strength in him yet, it seems, because a moment later his eyes open and he stares at Cas.
“Are you gonna leave me?”
He wants to, but Sam deserves more than that. He fought the Devil himself for three years, and won, even if it was too late for himself and for Cas, too. Cas thinks that maybe the front lines in the war aren’t mean to live to see the end. It goes agains the natural order of things.
“No.”
Sam sighs, the last of the tension draining from his body. “Thank you,” he whispers, and then his eyes roll back into his head.
~*~
It’s not over by a long shot, though it may as well be. Cas drags Sam back with him to Camp Chitaqua, only to find that everyone who was left has abandoned it in favour of trying to return home. He’s had to fold Sam awkwardly into the back seat of the jeep in which he and Dean drove to Jackson County, where he’s still curled up, muttering under his breath. It’s been a hellish drive back, or at least that would be the word Cas would have used if he didn’t know exactly what Hell was really like. Sam has seized twice, and thrown up so many times that Cas has lost count. He’s filthy and shivering and wretched, but at least he doesn’t talk. Cas thinks that would make all of it all the more unbearable. The mumbling is unintelligible, and he hopes it’ll stay like that.
Sam gasps and moans when Cas tries to pull him from the vehicle, and Cas just shakes him a little, impatient in spite of himself. Cas has been sober for three days, and he finds that it doesn’t agree with him at all. He wonders if his stash of pharmaceuticals was raided and cleaned out before everyone left, or whether his hiding place really was as clever as he imagined it was while he was high.
“Come on, I can’t carry you. Human now, which is basically a synonym for ‘useless.’ You’re too goddamned big to lift. Get up!”
Sam groans again, but he uncurls enough to slide out of the jeep and get his feet under him, leaning heavily against the vehicle. He’s still barefoot, still wearing nothing but the clothes Cas found him in. It hasn’t occurred to either one of them that he should change his clothes. “What is this place?”
“Nowhere important. Just a place to stay.”
“This is where you lived before.”
He just nods once, briefly, and shoves Sam none too gently toward his cabin. He’s not going to do them both the disservice of having either of them stay in Dean’s old cabin. Sam stumbles, almost goes to his knees before Cas catches him around the waist and hoists him back up, still shoving him forward. He’s not sure how they make it all the way to the cabin without either of them taking a header, but Sam ends up curled on one of the uncomfortable cots inside, feet hanging off the end, his face pressed into the scratchy grey blanket, his laboured breathing the only indication he’s alive at all.
Cas pries up the loose floorboard at the far end of the cabin, and finds that no one has touched his stash after all. He pulls out one of the small bottles, one with no label, and pops a couple of little white pills into his mouth. If he’s lucky, they’ll turn out to be oxy of some kind, and he won’t have to feel anything for a very long time. He dry-swallows them, and looks back at where Sam has started trembling almost convulsively on the bed. He’ll probably have another seizure soon, Cas thinks, eyeing him critically, and is soon proven right. He doesn’t move from where he is as Sam’s body goes rigid and begins to jerk in tight, uncomfortable movements, saliva bubbling at the corners of his mouth, eyelids fluttering enough to reveal white semi-circles beneath them.
Cas digs around in his stash until he comes up with a bottle labeled “Depakote,” and hopes that the pills inside are still what it says they are. He thinks it’s meant for this sort of thing. His brain can’t encompass all the knowledge he had before, but he still knows a damned sight more than all of humanity combined. He shuffles over to Sam’s side, and when the seizure has passed and Sam is lax, jaw slack and eyes staring fixedly at the far wall, he props him up and pushes a pill into his mouth as far as it will go, the way he imagines someone might do for a sick pet, and forces him to swallow.
Then he leans back against the bed, his head brushing against Sam’s thigh, and closes his eyes.
~*~
It’s easier to keep Sam drugged than to listen to him talk. When Sam opens his mouth, all that comes out is questions about Dean, about what happened while Lucifer was still walking the earth. All of Sam’s memories are of a blinding white light that dissipated only long enough for him to realize that Dean was dead -he has no idea what the Devil did while he was wearing him like a cheap suit. So Cas just does for Sam what he did for himself, and finds as many meds as he can and feeds them to him regularly whenever Sam opens his mouth, whether it’s to scream or talk. Both options are too awful to tolerate for long.
Eventually, Sam goes silent.
The sun starts shining more. Cas doesn’t remember the last time there were two sunny days in a row. Before the sky was constantly overcast, as though the world had stopped turning on some hazy November day and had never bothered to move forward again. When the worst of the detox has passed, Sam spends most of those early sunny days asleep, dead to the world on his cot, head pillowed in the crook of his arm. Cas finds some leftover acid and some Thorazine, and the sun wobbles brightly in the sky and the clouds shiver and stretch and dance, and eventually he falls asleep as well.
When he wakes up Sam is gone, and the thought that he’s failed Dean even in this one small task hits him hard in the solar plexus. He thinks he might throw up, except that he doesn’t remember the last time he had anything to eat, and there’s nothing in his stomach to throw up. He scrambles to his feet, clumsy and uncoordinated, light-headed from lack of food, staggers toward the door.
Sam is outside, sitting on the rickety wooden stairs outside his cabin and staring up at the afternoon sky. When Cas approaches, he sees the sun glinting off something in the palm of Sam’s hand. He recognizes it immediately, and the surge of relief he’d felt at finding Sam turns into a clenching pain in his chest.
“Where did you get that?”
Sam is staring at the tiny bronze amulet, weighing it in his fingers. “You kept your trench coat. It was in the pocket.” He’s forced to whisper
Cas hasn’t worn his trench coat in four years. “He never asked for it back. I think he was convinced I would find God, even when I stopped looking.”
“I guess he was right.” Sam toys with the amulet. “We should bring this back to him. You never told me what you did with -with him.”
“We buried him near where he died.”
“The rose garden?”
“Yes.”
Sam swallows. “We’ll have to go back, make sure he’s given a proper hunter’s funeral.”
“Not today.”
“No, I guess not.”
“He would want you to keep it. There is no point in burning it.”
Sam nods. After that, there seems to be nothing else to say.
~*~
Sam finds the mouldering vegetable garden that some of the residents of the camp had tried to maintain with little success, before. He rummages around until he finds a trowel and a hoe, and sets about weeding the little patch of dirt with more energy than Cas has seen him put into anything. Then he spreads a bunch of beaten-up tarps over it, weighing them down with rocks.
“Can’t plant anything now,” he tells Cas. His voice is permanently hoarse now, although the fact that he wakes up screaming from nightmares every night can’t help. “It’ll snow soon. We’re well past the first frost, anyway.”
Cas shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”
It’s a lie, but he can’t bring himself to think about planting. Not now. He’s not going to deny Sam this, though, not if it means saving the precarious balance of Sam’s mind. It wouldn’t take much for either or both of them to lose the tenuous hold they have on sanity these days. When Sam isn’t sleeping or trying to tend the garden he sits in a corner of the room and simply stares at nothing, which would be unnerving if Cas wasn’t already an old hand at ignoring other people’s pain.
Christmas rolls by, and Cas secures a small bottle full of pills and swallows all of them, complete with half a bottle of some unspeakably disgusting moonshine to wash them down. Sam won’t mind, he thinks, sitting on his bed and resting his head against the wall. There’s not much left for him here, anyway. It’s nice, this feeling of floating away. He’s been a little more careful, lately, of how much he takes at once, making sure he would have enough, once he made up his mind, and it’s liberating not to have to pay attention anymore. He’s missed this feeling, he realizes, having made himself responsible for Sam in the intervening months. It was all so much easier when all he had to do was follow where Dean led.
“Cas!” Someone shakes him so roughly that fireworks spark behind his eyelids. “Cas, you stupid fuck, what did you do?”
The floating feeling shifts and changes, and he realizes he’s being carried, half-dragged, really, and suddenly the quality of the air changes. Something collides hard with his elbows and knees, and he realizes it’s the ground, the smell of dirt pungent in his nostrils. Someone grabs his hair and yanks until there are tears in his eyes from the pain, and fingers pry open his mouth, force themselves past his tongue until he gags and coughs. The next thing he knows he’s emptying the contents of his stomach onto the ground while Sam holds him up, retching and coughing, tears coursing down his cheeks and mixing with the dirt and vomit and half-digested pills. He manages to draw in a shuddering breath, and Sam pulls him backward into his lap and wraps his arms around him so tightly Cas thinks he might choke him.
“You can’t leave me here,” Sam tells him, in that same wrecked voice he uses for everything else. “You can’t fucking leave me, Cas.”
Cas shifts in his arms, lets himself sob into Sam’s shoulder, and Sam lets him because Sam has always been his friend, and Cas has never had so many that he’s found he could spare them.
~*~
He never notices the winter pass them by. On the night of Christmas Day Sam slips quietly into Cas’ bed and pulls him close again, locking one leg around both of his, and Cas settles comfortably there as though they’ve been doing this all along. Sam has lost weight over the months, but so has Cas, and they fit together even on the narrow mattress that Cas keeps on the floor. It’s wider than the army cots, and this way he never had to worry about falling whenever he’d taken too much.
It’s Sam who gets into bed with him first, but it’s Cas who initiates the first kiss, almost two weeks later, turning to face Sam in the bed under the cover of darkness. There’s no surprise in the gesture. He thinks maybe they’ve been doing this all along as well, as Sam’s tongue moves against his, gentle and a little curious, and Cas can taste the faint curl of tainted grace that still lingers there, so similar to his own and yet almost forgotten. After that, the rest falls into place just as naturally.
Sam doesn’t talk much anymore. He says everything he needs to say with lips and tongue and teeth, with hands and fingers. He maps out Cas’ body slowly, exploring inch by inch until Cas is shuddering and gasping quietly, writhing under him while Sam holds his hips still with strong hands. For reasons he can’t explain to himself he shoves a hand in his mouth when he feels Sam’s lips on his cock, bites down on the delicate web of skin between his thumb and forefinger to keep himself from crying out when Sam’s tongue swipes up his length and lazily circles the crown. He smothers a moan as Sam keeps going, clenching a fistful of sheets in his other hand, eyes rolling back in his head at the sensation of hot and wet and Sam.
Tears prick at his eyes when he comes, bucking hard in spite of himself, and he swallows the sob that wells up in his chest. Sam pulls off gently, moves up to kiss him, and he chases his own taste in Sam’s mouth, puts both hands on Sam’s ass to draw him as close as possible. Sam’s still soft when Cas lets one hand drift between his legs, but that doesn’t come as a surprise anymore. Not after all this time, and it hardly seems to matter. Sam strokes his hair, nuzzles at his jawline, teeth scraping against the stubble that’s beginning to form there, and Cas pulls harder until they’re lying entangled together so that he hardly knows where he ends and Sam begins, until sleep pulls them both under again.
When he awakens again, sunlight is streaming in through the window, dust motes dancing in the pale beam, and Sam is standing above him, fully clothed, holding something in hands carefully cupped one over the other. Cas sits up, rubbing the remnants of sleep from his eyes, and when Sam holds out his hands with an expectant air, Cas obediently holds out his own, palms up a bit like a supplicant. Very gently Sam opens his hands, and deposits a chick in Cas’ outstretched hands.
“I didn’t even know we had chickens,” he says, ducking his head with a smile. “It must have hatched a couple of days ago.”
Cas looks down at the tiny ball of yellow fuzz, and can’t help but wonder what Dean would think of this. “Shouldn’t play with the goddamned food.”
He grins, then, and Sam throws back his head and laughs.
~END~