Western Rising 15/?
A/N: And we're back! Only a few more parts to come, we're all going for the climax now. :)
Warning: Minor character deaths.
Cas had resumed that still, birdlike posture, reminding Dean of an eagle or owl preparing itself to swoop. The crossroads had been deserted for three hours now, and he was desperate to get going, but until they could steal a vehicle they were effectively grounded. He had left Chuck and Becky in charge, gathering supplies and rallying the troops - if one could call them that. Dean still didn’t know if there was any wisdom in taking them - but he supposed, more hands, more eyes, more guns and -
“We can at least provide a measure of shielding,” Castiel said gravely.
Dean jumped. That was not where he was going. Not at all.
“You sure you’re not bioengineered?” he asked suspiciously. “You seem to be reading my mind a lot dude.”
“I am sure. You have an expressive face.”
Which Cas spent a lot of time reading, apparently.
“You know…” Dean blew out his breath. This was probably the last pause they’d get before it was full-on action, so he had to say this: “You know me and Sam are…”
“Together. Yes.”
“I’m just saying, dude, don’t go falling in love with me.” Forced jocularity a little too much. A little too mocking.
Castiel just gave him the tragic eyes.
‘Fuck my life,’ thought Dean. He had come to care about Cas intensely in just the short time he’d known him, and undeniably, the man possessed an offbeat sort of beauty. In another life - say, when Dean was single and Cas was sane and unicorns shat rainbows - he would no doubt have been up for a whole different sort of bonding. For lack of anything more appropriate, he patted Cas on the shoulder.
The growling of an engine alerted them both at once. It was too loud and lumbering to be anything but a Ghost’s, as the state of the truck that came into view shortly afterwards confirmed.
“Let’s do this without bloodshed if we can,” Dean said. Castiel shrugged. They got up and stood in the road with their guns aimed at the truck’s windscreen. The driver’s eyes visibly widened. He braked.
“Hands up and get out of there,” Dean ordered. The Ghost slowly raised his hands and got out of the cab, looking terrified.
“I got nothing of value in there,” he said.
“We need your truck,” explained Dean. “You can hang out at our base while we borrow it, and if we can, we’ll get it back to you when we’re done.”
“Please, I - what?” the Ghost was clearly expecting to be shot, and was taken aback at this.
“We require your vehicle urgently,” Cas said.
“We got no beef with you,” Dean said, but he didn’t lower his gun. “Hop on into the back now.”
Shaking, the Ghost complied, and Dean took the wheel whilst Cas kept a gun trained on their hostage. Dean swallowed adrenalin. Stage one down without a hitch. Of course, that was the easy part.
At the base, Becky, Chuck, Rosemary and Hamid were waiting already armed.
“Got these working.” Hamid produced a pair of communicators - limited range, so they couldn’t leave one for Charlie, but definitely an advantage if and when the group needed to split up. Dean and Cas took one each. Their other boon was a single grenade.
“Charlie’s working on accessing the cameras,” Becky said, “But she says we need to co-ordinate watches and agree on a time to infiltrate. If she turns them off too soon, someone will notice before we get there. Here are the co-ordinates, and ours,” she handed Dean a piece of paper with some scribbled numbers.
“Given the state of the vehicle we will need approximately 20 hours to reach that base,” said Cas.
“That is barring any untoward interruption.”
“Tell Charlie 0200 tomorrow,” Dean said to Becky, who went to dispatch the message. “Is there any way we can keep in contact with her?” He was looking at Chuck, who shook his head:
“Sam’s the only other person I’ve ever had any kind of communication with, and I’m assuming that’s because he’s-“
“Alright, get anything else you need,” Dean said. “We leave in twenty minutes.”
* * *
“You look like rat shit,” said Crowley to Sam, leaning casually in the doorway. Sam had been moved to a more secure cell with a gun at the back of his head - the bars between him and Crowley were electrified. Once Lilith had judged that the serum had worn off, she had tried to force Sam to display his power by using the taser. When he refused, she got frustrated, and tried a knife - holding herself back from real damage, she couldn’t afford that, but she knew to the last nerve how best to inflict pain without debilitating her prisoner. She’d learned from the best, he assumed. After the knife, she’d called on a couple of meathead guards who seemed ready to do her bidding - or just glad for the chance to rough somebody up a bit, the old-fashioned way.
“You know what this place reminds me of?” Sam said.
“Can’t imagine,” Crowley patted his dog’s head.
“The State prisons.”
Crowley snorted.
“Oh they were cleaner,” Sam went on, shifting awkwardly against the stone wall as his bruised ribs protested. They weren’t broken, but a sudden sharp jolt of pain made him wonder if one or two were cracked. “Better technology. But they wanted to test me too. They tortured me. Trying to get me to manifest my powers.”
“Oh, the moral irony,” Crowley deadpanned. “So…” he pushed himself off the doorframe. “Bent any spoons yet?”
Now Sam snorted.
“Can you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Generalized curiosity. I am a man of varied pursuits, including intellectual.”
“I would have to be pretty stupid to tell you anything.”
“Yeah well no offense, kid, but you ain’t won any prizes for brains in the short time I’ve known you.”
Crowley chuckled the rough low laugh of a long-term smoker.
“I trusted you,” Sam admitted. “That was stupid. Or - I didn’t think to doubt you.”
“Even now,” Crowley narrowed his eyes, a hint of a smile still playing at the corners of his mouth,
“After everything you know about the State and its alternatives, you take people at face value. You
don’t think to doubt them. that is stupid.”
Sam swallowed. “I feel sorry for you.”
Crowley gestured to his dog and turned to leave: “The feeling’s mutual.”
* * *
There was something vaguely farcical about it - the creaky old truck struggling across the badlands with its burden of antiheroes - but everyone from Cas to Becky remained serious and stoic-faced. Dean felt like laughing - hysterically - or perhaps praying, but that was hardly an option these days.
He wondered if Cas ever prayed.
They made surprisingly good time, and actually stopped driving an hour before the appointed shut down of the cameras. A slow realization had come over Dean as the miles passed, and with it, something treacherously close to hope they could actually succeed here: he knew where they were going. He’d been to this base before, a covert op back in early Guard days, when his unit commander was tasked with the assassination of a Resistance commander. To the shock and shame of the unit, they’d failed - Resistance had somehow gotten word of their movements, the target was long gone, and an ambush was waiting for them. one hand unconsciously dropped to the deepest scar on his body, the messy one across his abdomen. His first Guard commander had died that day, along with most of their unit.
Well.
The plus was, he knew the terrain. There were trees on the east side and a depression on the North, which meant they should split up and approach the base from different angles. More chance of some of them dying and the rest getting in under cover of the distraction. He conferred with Cas briefly, and they decided that Cas would take Becky and Hamid and go North, Dean would take Rosemary and Chuck and approach from the East. Dean’s team would attempt to get Sam out, Cas’s company provide the distraction: to which end, they took the grenade. Whoever got out would rendezvous at the truck. T-minus 30 minutes: they split up. Dean led his half of the contingent along the treeline, stopping and holding a hand out when the lights of the base glinted through the trees. Chuck nearly stumbled over his arm, gulping. His eyes were huge.
“You gonna be alright?” Dean asked him sharply.
Chuck nodded frantically.
“I can’t shield you once we get in there.”
“I can do it,” Chuck said. “It’s just - wow - I haven’t seen one since - you know….”
Dean nodded.
T-minus 18 minutes. Rosemary stared silently through the trees, the odd lights of the base casting her features with a strange glow. Her gun looked large and heavy in her hands. Dean realized how little he knew about her.
T-minus 10 minutes. The communicator in Dean’s hand crackled to life.
“ ---- in ---sition,” came Cas’s voice through static.
“Alright,” said Dean quietly. “I’ll signal you as we move out.”
T-minus 4 minutes. Dean cleared his throat and said quietly, “Thanks for this, guys.”
Pause. Rosemary said,
“I don’t know if I believe Becky. I want to. Sometimes I think I do. But if it wasn’t for you guys I’d be dead anyway, so…” she shrugged.
T-minus 1 minute.
Dean watched the seconds tick down on his watch.
And… “We’re going in,” he said into the com unit.
“Copy that, --ving ---t,” said Cas.
Nothing changed. There were no sirens, no lights glaring at the base. He had no way of knowing, really, if Charlie had come through for them, but they moved out at his gesture anyway, hoping Cas and the others hadn’t been sighted and shot already. As they approached, no searchlights pinned them or alarms screamed.
“She did it,” Chuck said hopefully.
There were guards either side of the gate in the barbed wire fence. Slipping past it, they turned the corner and clipped a small hole in the fence. They were in.
“Cas, we’re in, what’s happening?” Dean said into the com unit.
“--- place to enter….guards patrolling this side.”
“Alright, check in when you’re through the fence. Cameras seem to be down.”
They moved silently along the side of the building, approaching a metal door. It opened abruptly in front of them, and Dean reacted, knifing the soldier swiftly under the ribs on the left side. His eyes widened in surprise, and his strangled sound was choked off with thick arterial blood. The body fell heavily at their feet, and Dean quickly took his machine gun: a faster and more precise model than what he was carrying. He passed his own gun to Rosemary. He peered around the doorway and saw two more soldiers heading down the corridor, backs to the door.
A burst of gunfire split the air suddenly on the other side of the compound.
“ - sighted-” came through the com-line.
“Shit,” Dean said. In a flurry of activity the guards ran from the corridor, heading towards the fire. Dean shot them both in the back. A siren started up, and the base was moving. They ran down the corridor and Rosemary said,
“This way!” sighting a sign that said read, ‘cells’, then yelped as a bullet clipped her shoulder. Her assailant went down under a hail of bullets from Chuck’s gun. Dean sprinted down the corridor, came to a screeching halt by a door labelled holding cell and blew the lock out. The door swung open to reveal a corridor, bars of electricity cutting off cells, most of which were empty. He glanced wildly around for the source of the power, dimly aware that Chuck and Rosemary were no longer behind him. His eyes fell on a circuit-board, which he shot to pieces. It fizzled and snapped, sparks from above, and he ducked, momentarily, covering his head.
“Dean!” shouted Sam, and despite everything, Dean felt a grin break out his face. The sparks lessened, and he raised his head to see Sam pressed against the now-deactived bars of a small cell, bruised and bloody and with one hand clamped against his ribs, but very much alive. Dean unlocked the cell easily with the flip of a latch, grabbed Sam and kissed him. Sam returned the kiss frantically, but then Dean pulled back:
“We have to go, can you walk?”
Sam nodded: “Maybe not run,” he added with a self-depreciating grin. Dean grabbed his arm and propelled him towards the doorway and back down the corridor:
“Oh - shit,” three bodies slumped in close proximity. Two guards -
- And Chuck.
“Oh - shit,” Sam said again, pressing his free hand to his mouth.
At that moment, the ceiling caved. A deep boom shook the building, a crack, followed by the roar of flame and groan of collapsing structures. Cas had used the grenade. The com-unit crackled to life suddenly.
“Dean, report,” Cas said.
“I’ve got Sam. Chuck’s dead. Rosemary’s missing.”
“Hamid is dead also. We have inflicted severe casualties on their numbers.”
“Get out, and get Becky out,” Dean said.
“You brought them?” Sam said incredulously.
“They volunteered,” Dean bit off.
Sam blinked.
“We have to get out of here, now.”
* * *
Dean had hoped, vainly, that Rosemary would be waiting at the truck. She wasn’t. Cas held one arm awkwardly, and Becky’s cheek was torn, blood drying on her face and down her collarbone. They were both filthy and covered in ash. No-one spoke. Becky reached over and squeezed Sam’s hand, but her eyes were dull.
Becky took the wheel. Dean sat close enough to Sam to feel the warmth of his body, hands surreptitiously interlinked, heart beating fast, feeling real.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment to Becky.
She raised her chin and shrugged.
Cas looked sideways at Sam.
“Hi,” Sam said eagerly, leaning forward to shake Cas’s good hand. “I’m sorry, we haven’t met-…?”
Castiel cocked his head. “We met several minutes ago.”
“Sam, this is Castiel,” Dean said. “We kind of, uh, found him. At the Base.”
“You rebelled against the State? That’s great - us too. Thank you so much. For volunteering for this. I mean, I guess you’re a soldier so…” Sam trailed off. Cas was staring at him in that way he had.
“Your survival was extremely important to Dean,” he said gravely.
“Uh, yeah….” Sam said. “Right.”
Silence.
“I killed five of them,” Becky said after a moment.
“Cool,” Dean said absently.
“I never saw Crowley though.”
“Lilith?” Sam asked.
“We did not see her either,” Cas said. “She may have been killed in the explosion.”
“Those people shouldn’t have died for me,” Sam blurted.
No-one really had any answer. He was right. Why did they have to come?, Dean wondered. Would the mission have succeeded without them? They were cannon fodder. But he knew, deep down, didn’t feel the deaths like he ought to, with Sam and - yes, Cas - alive. He never claimed to be a good guy.
Part Sixteen
Warning: Minor character deaths.
Cas had resumed that still, birdlike posture, reminding Dean of an eagle or owl preparing itself to swoop. The crossroads had been deserted for three hours now, and he was desperate to get going, but until they could steal a vehicle they were effectively grounded. He had left Chuck and Becky in charge, gathering supplies and rallying the troops - if one could call them that. Dean still didn’t know if there was any wisdom in taking them - but he supposed, more hands, more eyes, more guns and -
“We can at least provide a measure of shielding,” Castiel said gravely.
Dean jumped. That was not where he was going. Not at all.
“You sure you’re not bioengineered?” he asked suspiciously. “You seem to be reading my mind a lot dude.”
“I am sure. You have an expressive face.”
Which Cas spent a lot of time reading, apparently.
“You know…” Dean blew out his breath. This was probably the last pause they’d get before it was full-on action, so he had to say this: “You know me and Sam are…”
“Together. Yes.”
“I’m just saying, dude, don’t go falling in love with me.” Forced jocularity a little too much. A little too mocking.
Castiel just gave him the tragic eyes.
‘Fuck my life,’ thought Dean. He had come to care about Cas intensely in just the short time he’d known him, and undeniably, the man possessed an offbeat sort of beauty. In another life - say, when Dean was single and Cas was sane and unicorns shat rainbows - he would no doubt have been up for a whole different sort of bonding. For lack of anything more appropriate, he patted Cas on the shoulder.
The growling of an engine alerted them both at once. It was too loud and lumbering to be anything but a Ghost’s, as the state of the truck that came into view shortly afterwards confirmed.
“Let’s do this without bloodshed if we can,” Dean said. Castiel shrugged. They got up and stood in the road with their guns aimed at the truck’s windscreen. The driver’s eyes visibly widened. He braked.
“Hands up and get out of there,” Dean ordered. The Ghost slowly raised his hands and got out of the cab, looking terrified.
“I got nothing of value in there,” he said.
“We need your truck,” explained Dean. “You can hang out at our base while we borrow it, and if we can, we’ll get it back to you when we’re done.”
“Please, I - what?” the Ghost was clearly expecting to be shot, and was taken aback at this.
“We require your vehicle urgently,” Cas said.
“We got no beef with you,” Dean said, but he didn’t lower his gun. “Hop on into the back now.”
Shaking, the Ghost complied, and Dean took the wheel whilst Cas kept a gun trained on their hostage. Dean swallowed adrenalin. Stage one down without a hitch. Of course, that was the easy part.
At the base, Becky, Chuck, Rosemary and Hamid were waiting already armed.
“Got these working.” Hamid produced a pair of communicators - limited range, so they couldn’t leave one for Charlie, but definitely an advantage if and when the group needed to split up. Dean and Cas took one each. Their other boon was a single grenade.
“Charlie’s working on accessing the cameras,” Becky said, “But she says we need to co-ordinate watches and agree on a time to infiltrate. If she turns them off too soon, someone will notice before we get there. Here are the co-ordinates, and ours,” she handed Dean a piece of paper with some scribbled numbers.
“Given the state of the vehicle we will need approximately 20 hours to reach that base,” said Cas.
“That is barring any untoward interruption.”
“Tell Charlie 0200 tomorrow,” Dean said to Becky, who went to dispatch the message. “Is there any way we can keep in contact with her?” He was looking at Chuck, who shook his head:
“Sam’s the only other person I’ve ever had any kind of communication with, and I’m assuming that’s because he’s-“
“Alright, get anything else you need,” Dean said. “We leave in twenty minutes.”
* * *
“You look like rat shit,” said Crowley to Sam, leaning casually in the doorway. Sam had been moved to a more secure cell with a gun at the back of his head - the bars between him and Crowley were electrified. Once Lilith had judged that the serum had worn off, she had tried to force Sam to display his power by using the taser. When he refused, she got frustrated, and tried a knife - holding herself back from real damage, she couldn’t afford that, but she knew to the last nerve how best to inflict pain without debilitating her prisoner. She’d learned from the best, he assumed. After the knife, she’d called on a couple of meathead guards who seemed ready to do her bidding - or just glad for the chance to rough somebody up a bit, the old-fashioned way.
“You know what this place reminds me of?” Sam said.
“Can’t imagine,” Crowley patted his dog’s head.
“The State prisons.”
Crowley snorted.
“Oh they were cleaner,” Sam went on, shifting awkwardly against the stone wall as his bruised ribs protested. They weren’t broken, but a sudden sharp jolt of pain made him wonder if one or two were cracked. “Better technology. But they wanted to test me too. They tortured me. Trying to get me to manifest my powers.”
“Oh, the moral irony,” Crowley deadpanned. “So…” he pushed himself off the doorframe. “Bent any spoons yet?”
Now Sam snorted.
“Can you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Generalized curiosity. I am a man of varied pursuits, including intellectual.”
“I would have to be pretty stupid to tell you anything.”
“Yeah well no offense, kid, but you ain’t won any prizes for brains in the short time I’ve known you.”
Crowley chuckled the rough low laugh of a long-term smoker.
“I trusted you,” Sam admitted. “That was stupid. Or - I didn’t think to doubt you.”
“Even now,” Crowley narrowed his eyes, a hint of a smile still playing at the corners of his mouth,
“After everything you know about the State and its alternatives, you take people at face value. You
don’t think to doubt them. that is stupid.”
Sam swallowed. “I feel sorry for you.”
Crowley gestured to his dog and turned to leave: “The feeling’s mutual.”
* * *
There was something vaguely farcical about it - the creaky old truck struggling across the badlands with its burden of antiheroes - but everyone from Cas to Becky remained serious and stoic-faced. Dean felt like laughing - hysterically - or perhaps praying, but that was hardly an option these days.
He wondered if Cas ever prayed.
They made surprisingly good time, and actually stopped driving an hour before the appointed shut down of the cameras. A slow realization had come over Dean as the miles passed, and with it, something treacherously close to hope they could actually succeed here: he knew where they were going. He’d been to this base before, a covert op back in early Guard days, when his unit commander was tasked with the assassination of a Resistance commander. To the shock and shame of the unit, they’d failed - Resistance had somehow gotten word of their movements, the target was long gone, and an ambush was waiting for them. one hand unconsciously dropped to the deepest scar on his body, the messy one across his abdomen. His first Guard commander had died that day, along with most of their unit.
Well.
The plus was, he knew the terrain. There were trees on the east side and a depression on the North, which meant they should split up and approach the base from different angles. More chance of some of them dying and the rest getting in under cover of the distraction. He conferred with Cas briefly, and they decided that Cas would take Becky and Hamid and go North, Dean would take Rosemary and Chuck and approach from the East. Dean’s team would attempt to get Sam out, Cas’s company provide the distraction: to which end, they took the grenade. Whoever got out would rendezvous at the truck. T-minus 30 minutes: they split up. Dean led his half of the contingent along the treeline, stopping and holding a hand out when the lights of the base glinted through the trees. Chuck nearly stumbled over his arm, gulping. His eyes were huge.
“You gonna be alright?” Dean asked him sharply.
Chuck nodded frantically.
“I can’t shield you once we get in there.”
“I can do it,” Chuck said. “It’s just - wow - I haven’t seen one since - you know….”
Dean nodded.
T-minus 18 minutes. Rosemary stared silently through the trees, the odd lights of the base casting her features with a strange glow. Her gun looked large and heavy in her hands. Dean realized how little he knew about her.
T-minus 10 minutes. The communicator in Dean’s hand crackled to life.
“ ---- in ---sition,” came Cas’s voice through static.
“Alright,” said Dean quietly. “I’ll signal you as we move out.”
T-minus 4 minutes. Dean cleared his throat and said quietly, “Thanks for this, guys.”
Pause. Rosemary said,
“I don’t know if I believe Becky. I want to. Sometimes I think I do. But if it wasn’t for you guys I’d be dead anyway, so…” she shrugged.
T-minus 1 minute.
Dean watched the seconds tick down on his watch.
And… “We’re going in,” he said into the com unit.
“Copy that, --ving ---t,” said Cas.
Nothing changed. There were no sirens, no lights glaring at the base. He had no way of knowing, really, if Charlie had come through for them, but they moved out at his gesture anyway, hoping Cas and the others hadn’t been sighted and shot already. As they approached, no searchlights pinned them or alarms screamed.
“She did it,” Chuck said hopefully.
There were guards either side of the gate in the barbed wire fence. Slipping past it, they turned the corner and clipped a small hole in the fence. They were in.
“Cas, we’re in, what’s happening?” Dean said into the com unit.
“--- place to enter….guards patrolling this side.”
“Alright, check in when you’re through the fence. Cameras seem to be down.”
They moved silently along the side of the building, approaching a metal door. It opened abruptly in front of them, and Dean reacted, knifing the soldier swiftly under the ribs on the left side. His eyes widened in surprise, and his strangled sound was choked off with thick arterial blood. The body fell heavily at their feet, and Dean quickly took his machine gun: a faster and more precise model than what he was carrying. He passed his own gun to Rosemary. He peered around the doorway and saw two more soldiers heading down the corridor, backs to the door.
A burst of gunfire split the air suddenly on the other side of the compound.
“ - sighted-” came through the com-line.
“Shit,” Dean said. In a flurry of activity the guards ran from the corridor, heading towards the fire. Dean shot them both in the back. A siren started up, and the base was moving. They ran down the corridor and Rosemary said,
“This way!” sighting a sign that said read, ‘cells’, then yelped as a bullet clipped her shoulder. Her assailant went down under a hail of bullets from Chuck’s gun. Dean sprinted down the corridor, came to a screeching halt by a door labelled holding cell and blew the lock out. The door swung open to reveal a corridor, bars of electricity cutting off cells, most of which were empty. He glanced wildly around for the source of the power, dimly aware that Chuck and Rosemary were no longer behind him. His eyes fell on a circuit-board, which he shot to pieces. It fizzled and snapped, sparks from above, and he ducked, momentarily, covering his head.
“Dean!” shouted Sam, and despite everything, Dean felt a grin break out his face. The sparks lessened, and he raised his head to see Sam pressed against the now-deactived bars of a small cell, bruised and bloody and with one hand clamped against his ribs, but very much alive. Dean unlocked the cell easily with the flip of a latch, grabbed Sam and kissed him. Sam returned the kiss frantically, but then Dean pulled back:
“We have to go, can you walk?”
Sam nodded: “Maybe not run,” he added with a self-depreciating grin. Dean grabbed his arm and propelled him towards the doorway and back down the corridor:
“Oh - shit,” three bodies slumped in close proximity. Two guards -
- And Chuck.
“Oh - shit,” Sam said again, pressing his free hand to his mouth.
At that moment, the ceiling caved. A deep boom shook the building, a crack, followed by the roar of flame and groan of collapsing structures. Cas had used the grenade. The com-unit crackled to life suddenly.
“Dean, report,” Cas said.
“I’ve got Sam. Chuck’s dead. Rosemary’s missing.”
“Hamid is dead also. We have inflicted severe casualties on their numbers.”
“Get out, and get Becky out,” Dean said.
“You brought them?” Sam said incredulously.
“They volunteered,” Dean bit off.
Sam blinked.
“We have to get out of here, now.”
* * *
Dean had hoped, vainly, that Rosemary would be waiting at the truck. She wasn’t. Cas held one arm awkwardly, and Becky’s cheek was torn, blood drying on her face and down her collarbone. They were both filthy and covered in ash. No-one spoke. Becky reached over and squeezed Sam’s hand, but her eyes were dull.
Becky took the wheel. Dean sat close enough to Sam to feel the warmth of his body, hands surreptitiously interlinked, heart beating fast, feeling real.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment to Becky.
She raised her chin and shrugged.
Cas looked sideways at Sam.
“Hi,” Sam said eagerly, leaning forward to shake Cas’s good hand. “I’m sorry, we haven’t met-…?”
Castiel cocked his head. “We met several minutes ago.”
“Sam, this is Castiel,” Dean said. “We kind of, uh, found him. At the Base.”
“You rebelled against the State? That’s great - us too. Thank you so much. For volunteering for this. I mean, I guess you’re a soldier so…” Sam trailed off. Cas was staring at him in that way he had.
“Your survival was extremely important to Dean,” he said gravely.
“Uh, yeah….” Sam said. “Right.”
Silence.
“I killed five of them,” Becky said after a moment.
“Cool,” Dean said absently.
“I never saw Crowley though.”
“Lilith?” Sam asked.
“We did not see her either,” Cas said. “She may have been killed in the explosion.”
“Those people shouldn’t have died for me,” Sam blurted.
No-one really had any answer. He was right. Why did they have to come?, Dean wondered. Would the mission have succeeded without them? They were cannon fodder. But he knew, deep down, didn’t feel the deaths like he ought to, with Sam and - yes, Cas - alive. He never claimed to be a good guy.
Part Sixteen