Episode 4: Lead Us Not
Title: Lead Us Not
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info, warnings, and disclaimer)
Authors: electricskeptic and zatnikatel
Characters/Pairing: pre-Dean/Castiel, Sam, Bobby
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~14,000
Warnings: language, memories of Hell, an element that could be perceived as dub-con in nature (non-explicit)
Beta: nyoka
Art: Chapter banner by geckoholic; digital painting by artmetica which you can also find here (contains spoilers for the episode).
Summary: The Lord giveth… And the Lord taketh away.
The new God beholds the Righteous Man, and yearns to make him most honorable over all His creation. And if the Righteous Man will cast away all his transgressions and fall down and worship his Lord, then, for the sake of His love, the new God shall grant the Righteous Man the Word.
The Word is life-giving.
I will give you all the kingdoms of the world, declares the new God, and the souls chitter and screech their agreement in concert with their whispered unease, because the Righteous Man scorns His intentions, and violates His law, and profanes His holy things. And it is written that the Righteous Man can be their undoing and their destruction from without, for he is Michael, who is like God, and who shall rise at the time of the end. Michael, who weighs the deeds of souls and judges them, and if they have been wicked, he shall damn them and banish them, the unchained souls of Purgatory, back into the waste land; Michael, who shall bind together the false prophet and the beast, and hurl them for all eternity into the lake of fire.
I will give you the Word, declares the new God, for His mercy and forbearance are eternal, and He is patient. False prophet, cries the one who redeemed the Righteous Man from deep within, for he will not give up even while his grace withers and dies.
I will give you the Word, declares the new God, and the Word is life-giving.
Death? What is death?
Carthage, Missouri
November 2009
The radio is playing, Springsteen, and he's on fire, a guitar and a throaty voice mumbling the lyrics out between bursts of crackle and static.
He doesn't remember the radio playing.
There's so much blood, too much blood, and he can see she's getting grayer with every moment that passes. He has his hand on her thigh, kneading the muscle, and the denim of her jeans is saturated, cold seeping up through it to his palm. Her chest is heaving, tiny, shallow pants that whistle out between blue lips. Her teeth are chattering, and he can hear their rhythmic clickety-click. She's staring up at him, blinking slowly.
Her eyes are brown. Her eyes are sad, and wise, because she knows.
Dean feels hollow and ill, because he just had his hand inside her belly. A cursory squirt of hand sanitizer, no time to scrub and no point anyway, because she won't last the hour, and then he was scooping up entrails, forcing them back in through the gaping hole they slithered and spilled out of like a litter of energetic snakes birthed by cesarean. They felt rubbery, warm, wet, and slippery. They felt familiar, because look, he used to trill in the Pit, as he grasped and pulled and twisted and squeezed while they screamed, your intestines have become your out-testines. Alastair never taught him that, he remembers abstractedly, it was John. Dean, pay attention, this is how you field dress a rabbit for the pot, cut open the abdomen, reach inside and remove all the internal organs, and then-
She makes a sound when his hand is dipped in her as far as the knob of his wrist, and he never wants to hear a sound like that again. You're playing our song, he used to croon to them, when they sobbed and screamed at him like that, when they begged him to stop. I can name that tune in six notes!
He never thought he would ever make something create beautiful music like that again.
And…this isn't right, he's thinking.
The towels are nothing more than blotting paper, soaked scarlet within the first few minutes, but he packs them in, presses down hard. Her jeans are unzipped and he grips the tab, forces it up the teeth as far as he can, but it's sticky with bodily fluids, and it jams a third of the way up. He feeds the towel down inside, prodding and pushing at it with fingers gone stiff and clumsy.
She's wearing a belt.
"I'm sorry," he mutters, as he feeds the end of it through the buckle, pulls, and cinches it as tight as he can to hold the makeshift padding in place. She whimpers at the pressure, and he ignores her. "More towels," he says harshly, and there they are in his peripheral vision, already folded, incongruously neat. "Bandages."
He leans in so his lips are on her cheek as he winds the strips around her, several passes, followed by a tight knot to secure them over the top of the bulky fabric.
Movement, and he swivels his head towards it.
A curtain of brown hair, a woman's small, capable hand reaching up to cup her daughter's cheek. "It'll be okay, honey." Voice warm and throaty, the barest tremor revealing the strain, and then she fixes Dean with a devastated stare. "Dammit, Dean, where's Cas?"
Ellen's hands are stained red, and so are his.
"I don't know," he fumbles out confusedly, and he's still thinking, this isn't right. He says it out loud, "This isn't right," hears his own distress and disbelief making his voice reedy and pathetic as he pulls back and glances over his shoulder.
Hardware store, dimly-lit, moonlight trickling in through the windows. The doors chained shut, the crunch of his brother's boots on rock salt. Sam has his back to him, and he's peering out through the blinds, his gun cocked and ready.
Dean finds he's biting his knuckle, and the copper of her blood is rank on his tongue.
There behind him, arranged on the floor, metal buckets full of nails, blades, screws, and salt he poured in them himself, interspersed with stumpy propane cans joined with looping wire, a daisy-chain of destruction waiting to ignite behind them as they leave.
I'll see you on the other side, he said, and her lips tasted of death.
And Ellen, her face crumpled and ugly-beautiful in its grief, her make-up smearing down her cheeks and leaving black tear streaks in its wake, said, Get going now, boys.
The noise, the crash-boom of it resounding out into the dark, and sounds are louder at night. He saw the night sky flare brilliantly as it detonated, the flames a lurid orange flower bursting into bloom as debris scattered.
He says it again, his voice small and puzzled, "But this isn't right. We did this." He stares at Ellen, disoriented, because none of this is right.
"Dean."
He hasn't looked at his brother's face until now. Sam is pale and tense, but fuck, his eyes are clear and alert like Dean hasn't seen them in weeks, and his shoulders are squared and confident as he squats down opposite. He hasn't been there yet, Dean thinks, but how would he know that?
"Dean, Cas still isn't answering his cell. I told him where Ellen and Jo are, so-"
"Oh, thank God," Ellen yelps, and her hands are flying up to her face. "Oh, thank God...you can help her, say you'll help her."
And there he is, filling the space to Dean's left that was empty air before, and the relief is like an explosion of sheer comfort that shockwaves right through Dean. "It's fuckin' good to see you, Cas," he says, as he looks up, and his voice fractures on the odd feeling that he never expected to see Castiel alive again, the feeling that this might be a reprieve that goes beyond Jo Harvelle, that it somehow means even more.
The angel kneels down, reaches out a neat hand, long, gentle fingers tipping Jo's face up carefully. His eyes are liquid with compassion as he shakes his head. "I'm cut off from Heaven, healing is beyond me…" He sucks in his top lip, looks straight at Dean, the blue so familiar and direct. "A hospital…we passed one on the road."
Dean's mouth is dry, his voice like kindling when he replies. "McCune Brooks, it's on seventy-one…I've been in the ER there."
Castiel leans in, threads his hands under Jo, and pushes up effortlessly. Her head flops on his shoulder and her arm hangs limp. He holds her carefully, like he might a child, as Ellen fusses with handfuls of towels, tucking more of them in to stem the bloodflow. He doesn't break Dean's gaze.
"Be careful, Dean," he says quietly. "Please."
And then Dean is looking at thin air again.
Roughly twenty minutes after that, he shoots the devil in the head, smack-bang between the eyes, a magic bullet delivered straight into the frontal lobe. It's the textbook kill shot even without Samuel Colt's enchanted cartridges in the equation, but he stares down at the prone body and he doesn't celebrate. It's too good to be true, he thinks. He can't shake off the feeling that he knows it's too good to be true.
When Lucifer snaps awake, stands, gives him an irritated look and swings at him, some sixth sense tells Dean to duck. He dodges the blow as swiftly as he has ever taken evasive action, hollers at his brother to run, and crashes off into the trees. He lays low for ten minutes, but there aren't any sounds of pursuit. He hoots a couple of times, hears the standard reply, and his brother appears stealthily at his side.
"What the hell took you?" Dean hisses.
Sam gazes at him through eyes that pop wide with astonishment, and he ignores the question. "Fuck, Dean, it didn't work," he says faintly. "He said there are only five things in all of creation the Colt can't kill, and he's one of them."
Dean swipes a shaky hand across his brow. "You waited around to chat to him?" he snaps, and he shakes his head. Of course he did. "Of course you did. Jesus fuckin' Christ." An icy finger of suspicion trails its way up his spine then, its sharp fingernail scraping across the vertebrae. "What else did he say to you?" he asks, and he somehow knows the answer is there already, in his long-term memory, but misfiled somewhere so he can't find it. It spooks him again, the odd feeling that he knows this.
His brother's face goes crestfallen. "Uh," he mumbles, with something almost like guilt. "You know. The usual…evil monologue."
Even though the whole deal niggles like a bad tooth, there isn't time for this. "We need to get to the hospital," Dean diverts tightly. He roots in his pocket, pulls out his compass. "Car's that way."
This isn't right, he thinks again a half-hour later, as his baby vacuums up the white lines. "Does anything about this seem off to you?" he blurts out into the tense silence.
Sam doesn't reply, and Dean sneaks a quick glance to his right, sees that his brother is drifting miles away, gazing into the middle distance, his arm slung casually along the window frame. He looks like he's meditating but Dean knows better, can see the tight line of Sam's clenched jaw, and how his fingers twitch restlessly.
"Sam," he announces sharply, and he boffs his brother on the shoulder so that Sam jumps. He swivels his head too slowly and his eyes don't really focus on Dean. It ramps Dean's anxiety up even higher, and he doesn't really know why, but he flaps a hand in his brother's line of sight. "Hey," he barks, with an urgency that surprises him. "Are you seeing stuff? Are you about to seize?"
He has no clue why he says it, and it seems Sam doesn't either because he blinks at Dean and his brow creases. "Seize?" he queries, bewildered. "Seize what? What does that even mean?"
And Sam is back, seems normal, but nothing seems normal, and Dean is floundering, feels like he's navigating hostile territory without a map, barefoot and armed only with a plastic spork. "Does anything about this, any of it, seem off to you?" he asks again.
His brother's reply is despondent. "You mean as well as the fact the only hope we had of ending this is firing blanks?"
Dean grits his teeth. "Yeah, as well as that."
He gets a weary headshake for his effort. "Isn't that enough?" Sam blows out resignedly. "Damn Crowley. What the fuck will we do? How are we supposed to-"
"We'll find another way," Dean cuts in. "Do you hear me?" And they will, he has a gut feeling they will, even if that intuition is grim and hopeless, and underpinned with the same crawling sense of unease as everything else is right now.
He doesn't know if Sam registers what he said or not because the bright lights of the hospital are looming, and he's peeling smoothly into the parking lot.
"This place looks familiar," Sam offers as they trudge towards the building.
"We were here about three years ago. After the rugaru." Dean floats a hand up to his temple reflexively, and he can still feel the silvery raised scar from the cut, remember his brother's disproportionate panic when he blacked out in the car.
Sam snorts at him. "Dean, that was last October."
It hits Dean again, a feeling of cognitive dissonance he can't quite get a handle on. "It's…" he starts, and he stops, has to really think about it. November 2009, he recalls.
When Ellen and Jo died.
Only it isn't, that memory must be some weird whiskey-soused head trip, because Ellen is up on the third floor, alive albeit that she isn't even in the ballpark of well. She's sitting on a couch in the relatives' room, bolt upright and rigid with tension.
Castiel is standing next to her like he's on guard duty, a hand resting on her shoulder, and seeing him there gives Dean the same jolt of surprise and pleasure, the same odd feeling of sheer contentment as before. He doesn't dwell on it though, he just cuts right to the chase. "The Colt didn't work. What's the deal with Jo?"
Castiel is damned good, his gaze stays rock-steady, and there isn't even a flicker of disappointment in his expression. "The doctors haven't really said much to us. They're operating on her. Someone is supposed to come and tell us if she di-" He brakes, glances down at Ellen. "Someone is supposed to come and tell us what happens," he continues stiltedly, and his composure cracks, just barely, into a frown. "I'm not sure what to do."
Sam clears his throat, leans in and speaks confidentially. "Have they asked how she was hurt? Do they seem suspicious? Have you seen any cops?" He raises a meaningful eyebrow at Dean. "We can't be here if the five-O show up, Dean."
Ellen's voice is faint and tired when she cuts in. "Dogs. I said it was dogs. Pitbulls."
It's fuckin' appropriate, Dean thinks, and he has to suppress the shudder, school his features hard so they don't give away the memory of their weight on him, and how they fought each other for him, how the fangs tore into his skin and muscles and shattered his bones, how he slithered and flopped about like a beached fish in scarlet puddles of his own blood, hearing his own garbled pain and distress and gulping down their stinking breath so desperately in his dying gasps.
Music is playing somewhere in the distance, outside the room. It doesn't fit, and what's wrong with this picture? he's thinking. He blinks hard for a moment, pinches the bridge of his nose. When he opens his eyes, Castiel is looking at him, impassive.
"Does anything about this seem off to you?" he croaks at the angel as he pulls his cellphone out of his pocket and speed-dials Bobby.
Castiel cants his head fractionally. "I think it's a miracle she's alive at all, Dean," he replies.
It's detached, glacial. It's poised, waiting expectantly for Dean to join the dots and figure out the answer.
It's not Cas.
The world is abruptly sluggish, slowing down around Dean as if the planet is creaking to a labored halt on its axis, in preparation for changing course and spinning the opposite way.
The radio is playing, Springsteen, and he's on fire, a guitar and a throaty voice mumbling the lyrics out between bursts of crackle and static.
It's not Cas.
The world slams back into gear, accelerates, zero-to-sixty in five seconds. It pitches and yaws around Dean like a fairground ride while the thought screams through his brain, it's not Cas, and his eyes blur with the speed at which the illusion is ripped away, his healthy brother, Ellen, Castiel, all gone, subsumed into corrugated metal, shelves lining the walls, benches laden with tools and equipment.
His boots are planted firmly on the concrete floor of Bobby's autoshop, his hands grimy with oil and gripping the bottom lip of his baby's wide-open mouth as he stares down at her innards.
The radio is playing, Springsteen, and he's on fire, a guitar and a throaty voice mumbling the lyrics out between bursts of crackle and static.
His cellphone is in his hand, and it's grinding out music at him.
"Take the call, Dean."
He yelps, jumps like a scalded cat as Castiel continues, his voice easy and unconcerned even if Dean can sense a hum of something malevolent, of power, emanating from him.
"You'll want to take this one."
Dean checks who's incoming, licks lips gone dry and parched. He puts the phone up to his ear, listens to the bittersweet minutiae of a hunt down south in Troy, Alabama, bittersweet because it's something that isn't, something that can't be. She barely draws breath as she tells him how the humidity is driving her crazy and frizzing her hair, and how Rufus Rufus too? keeps acting like he's her dad or something, and her mom told her to tell Dean to call and let her know how Sam is holding up, and Hey Dean, you're real quiet, cat got your tongue?
"No. No… I'm good," he fumbles out. "Sam's good, he's - managing. We’re just back from a hunt, a pack of hodags about five miles outside of Rhinelander. He did okay, only flipped out the once or twice. He's getting there."
Dean stops, stares into steely blue as she commiserates and then, Oh, it's Rufus, I'll call you back.
And she's gone.
He swallows thickly, scrolls down through his contacts. Ellen. Jo. Rufus. All present and accounted for.
"It can be this way, Dean," Castiel tells him calmly. "They can be a part of this new future. I can give you this. It's up to you." His eyes drift beyond Dean, and he takes a few slow steps that bring him closer to the side of the Impala. He frowns, examines her scars thoughtfully, trails a listless finger along her bruised skin.
"If I cooperate?" Dean spits out. "What is this, my payoff?"
Castiel slants his eyes up, gazes at Dean from under thick black lashes. He raps his knuckles lightly on the car. "I see you rejected my gift, Dean," he observes flatly. "Will you reject this new gift?"
It numbs Dean to the marrow at the same time it fills him with a sort of incredulous horror because he suddenly knows what's at stake in this choice. He hears his breath quicken, feels himself start to shake with the buzz of adrenaline, feels sweat prickle on his spine, and thinks he might even hear it trickle down his skin in the silence.
"What, you grease my palms by bringing my friends back so they can die of cancer, or walk under a bus?" Dean eventually dares. "Have you followed up on anything? Your miracles go wrong, pal. They all go wrong." He blows out a sharp, appalled breath before he continues. "Jesus. If you had fixed my brother, he'd probably have dropped dead of a fuckin' heart attack or something." As that dawns on him, it's all he needs to know that there really is no choice. "No deal."
Castiel reacts then, with what sounds like an affronted hiss, before his voice rumbles out low and lethally controlled. "You will do what you're supposed to do, Dean. I told you this already. It is written."
The atmosphere turns incendiary and vibrant, like one wrong word might set it off. Dean thinks he might try and figure out what that wrong word might be. "You are fuckin' cracked," he grates out deliberately. "And you can take your sermon on the mount crap, and shove it up your ass sideways and dry. I know my friend is in there. I know. And I think you know I know…I think you saw me in the dream." Dean bites his lower lip so hard he thinks he might even draw blood as he remembers his friend's fear, remembers how this monster raised a hand and took Castiel from him like he has every time the angel has tried to reach out to him. There's nowhere Castiel can run that the souls can't hunt him down, and it fills Dean with a pristine, almost tranquil kind of fury. "Get out of him," he breathes. "You can have me if you get out of him."
The ghost of a smile plays across Castiel's lips. "It doesn't happen that way, Dean," he replies, oddly placid now. "It can't happen that way."
Dean thinks of Castiel's, his Castiel's sorrow and despair, the hesitant way he reached out for help, the way his voice broke when he confided in Dean while Dean was asleep and unaware, his panic when the new God appeared. "If you think I would leave him to you…" He trails off, sets his jaw and shakes his head.
"So be it," Castiel says quietly.
Nothing changes that Dean can see and he cocks his head, momentarily puzzled because he isn't really sure if anything happened at all. But then suddenly he knows.
He's gripping his cellphone still, his fingers clamped tight around it, his knuckles sharp and bloodless. He scrolls through his contacts again, and the same sadness he felt back then tightens his chest.
"She ran out of minutes, Dean," Castiel says. "They all did."
The fact he can't hear any clanging noises or curses as he approaches the autoshop sets Bobby's nerves on edge. He knows damn well the silence likely signals brooding, or drinking, or both. Truth be told, he doesn't really blame Dean, and he muses that he's been hitting it harder than usual himself.
Bobby can't see Dean anywhere, just the hood of the Impala wide open, still dented and streaked with silvery scars. It's dead quiet, the only sound the steady plink-plink of the dripping faucet he's been planning to fix since he can't remember when, because Sam keeps raising a judgmental eyebrow and telling him every fifteen-thousand drips is a gallon of water wasted. A drip a minute is eighty-six thousand a day, give or take a few hundred, Bobby, he'd said, with an ego that could only be gained at some highfalutin' ivy league. That's more than two thousand gallons a year, and that's… Bobby can remember him squinting as he ran the numbers in his head. Forty-one baths! Fuckin' mathletes.
"You plan on just standing there?" the voice drifts out.
It sounds resigned, which is about par for the course these days, and when Bobby peers around the top end of the car he sees that Dean is sitting on the floor, legs sprawled out ahead of him and a whiskey bottle cradled loosely on his thigh. His eyes are watery and bloodshot, and his face is smudged with oil.
Bobby holds up the bundle he's toting, says, "I brought you some vittals." Since you'll be drinking out here most of the day on an empty gut if I don't goes unsaid. He drops the paper bag down between Dean's legs, glances over towards the car. "Need any help?"
Dean purses his lips. "Sam by himself in the house?" he says, his tone mildly accusing.
"Nope. Sheriff Mills is up there with him." Bobby steps over Dean's out-flung legs, lowers himself down onto his own backside, hearing his knees pop loudly as he does. "Thought she might be able to help him."
Dean fixes him with a skeptical look. "Sheriff Mills?"
Bobby nods. "She's got some kind of psychology degree, volunteers as a counselor at one of the local churches. She kept going on about cognitive behavioral therapy." He shrugs. "Something like that. Thought it might help him to talk to her about it. She's been through some stuff. As we know. After all, her and Sam-"
"Had that incredible bonding moment ganking her zombie kid after he chowed down on his dad?" Dean cuts in acidly.
"She said there's techniques you can use to distract yourself from psychological trauma," Bobby continues with a shrug. "Reframing stuff, so it looks less bad and you can deal with it. That’s what she said."
Dean shakes his head. "Don't tell me," he huffs out witheringly. "She's telling him how he can see the bright side of Hell. Well, good luck with that." He raises the liquor bottle in a mock toast, takes a pull at it. "Lisa sicced some shrink on me down in Cicero," he says after he gulps down his mouthful. "I was screaming myself awake most nights." He sniffs. "Considering my trunk full of guns, I think she was afraid I was heading for a clocktower moment."
It reminds Bobby of the hurt and betrayal on Dean's face when he found out Bobby had been in the loop on his brother being topside for a whole year, and he shifts uncomfortably at the memory. "Did it help?" he sidetracks clumsily.
Dean doesn't look at him. "The shrink? Not one bit." He doesn't elaborate any further, just nudges Bobby and offers him the bottle. It feels light, more than three-quarters of a fifth of booze gone already.
Bobby clears his throat uneasily. "Maybe you shouldn't be pickling your liver, boy," he observes. "Not with things how they are right now."
Dean huffs like he's amused. "You mean now Cas can't fix me? Newsflash: the new, improved Cas is offering to do a lot more than fix me."
That pulls Bobby up. "He was here again?"
Dean nods. "Looks like all those new wards are about as effective as a fart in the wind." He pauses, takes another slug of whiskey, and hisses at its burn before he wipes his mouth. "Remember how Zachariah fast-forwarded me five years down the road? Well, our new God took me back. To Carthage. And then he beamed down in the nick of time and e-vacced Jo and Ellen to the nearest hospital."
Bobby gets a sour taste in his mouth, a twisting feeling of queasiness in his stomach. He puts one hand there to rub it away, hooks the whiskey bottle off Dean's leg, and has another swig of the booze himself. He remembers how damned useless he felt, chairbound and pep-talking Dean from hundreds of miles away, across a weak radio connection. He still regrets burning the photograph. "Dammit," he says, because Ellen Harvelle and her kid are collateral damage he'll regret until his last breath, and ever since Dean told him about the fake-marriage Balthazar inadvertently landed him in, some part of Bobby has regretted their loss even more.
Dean brings a hand up to rub at his brow. "He said it could be real. If I wanted it to be. He airlifted me back here, and she called me up on the phone." His voice cracks. "Jo. She was with Rufus, hunting."
It's another lightning bolt, and Bobby gapes. "Rufus?"
Dean nods at his look. "Yeah, Rufus. And I spoke to her, and it was here and now." He sighs, and it's defeated and weary. "He gave me the same line as before, pretty much. This is meant to be, it is written. So sign the pledge and get with the program or…" He trails off, waves a hand in the air.
"Or it all goes back to how it really is," Bobby finishes, and he doesn't need to ask to know that's exactly what happened - it's all there in Dean's slumped desolation and guilt-shadowed eyes.
They sit there in silence for a few moments. "Look, son," Bobby starts then. He waits a beat, isn't really sure what he's going to say, but then the words just pop up in his throat. "Killing my wife was bad enough the first time." He sees Dean slant his eyes across, sees a muscle twitch in Dean's cheek. "I’d never come up against anything supernatural, never even believed it existed before it got Karen," he goes on. "I panicked when she went for me. Self-defense." He swallows. "You saw her, in the dream. She got cut up pretty bad in the fray. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know a damn thing about exorcisms or demonology back then. All I knew was that something nasty, something evil, had gotten a hold of my wife. And when it left her, it was too late." He rubs a hand across his jaw as he casts his mind back. "And then there she was again, right out of the blue, in the kitchen baking pies." He chuckles fondly. "I still got some of those damn pies in the freezer."
Dean casts his eyes down. "Bobby, I-"
"What I'm saying is that I had to make a choice," Bobby interrupts gruffly. "I wanted it to turn out different. But I had to make a choice. The right choice, like you boys told me back then. Because God knows, we've seen what happens when you mess with the natural order."
Dean glances up at him again. "But what if he makes me an offer I can't refuse, Bobby?" he answers, and the strain is even more evident in his voice. "What then?"
Bobby blows out ruefully. "I don't know." He thinks on it for a minute, because there's still something in all of this he doesn't get. "He wants you playing on his team, but why?" he asks finally. "I mean - we haven't really worked that out. He can do anything he wants, why does he need you to do it for him? No offense…"
Dean snorts. "None taken." He shakes his head. "I have no damn idea, Bobby. I can't figure out if it's maybe some part of Cas that's still… you know." He colors.
"Intensely connected to you?" Bobby suggests tartly.
The flush on Dean's cheeks deepens. "Something like that," he concedes. "Cas - the old Cas - said we had this profound bond thing going on. I don't really know what that means...but maybe it's why."
Bobby can see Dean's fingers tighten around the bottle, see the fingers of the other hand start picking agitatedly at the fabric of his jeans. "You miss him," Bobby ventures.
"I don't want to do this," is the grim response, but Bobby sees Dean's face go dazed and dejected for a split second, before he glowers and cants his head away, his fingers dancing faster.
It occurs to Bobby then that he hasn't really broached Dean's loss in any of this, that he's been shooting first with both barrels and no questions asked. But even if he's had damn good reason to, it doesn't mean the kid isn't grieving for his friend, isn't torn up inside by the same dull ache Bobby still feels for the Harvelles, for Pamela Barnes, for Rufus Turner, for his wife and everyone else sacrificed in the fight. "I'm real sorry about what happened to Cas, son," he says quietly. "I do get what he meant to you. And this whole plan B deal was only ever me be-"
"Being realistic," Dean interrupts, and his tone is flat and despondent. "I know that."
Bobby plows on regardless. "He was - a good guy. A grumpy little fucker at the best of times, but a good guy. Just walked the wrong path. Made piss-poor choices." He ponders that briefly. "Maybe he was a Winchester after all that," he throws out wryly.
Dean makes a small, harsh noise Bobby can't quite decode, followed by a brittle laugh, but he doesn't comment.
"You dreaming about him still?" Bobby asks then, because he knows that now they're getting to what he suspects is a deeper attachment than Dean has ever let on or maybe even admitted to himself, he'll default to repression and denial any second. "Only if you are, then maybe the next time he dreamstalks you, you need to pin him down and ask him what the hell the souls want with you."
Dean's expression darkens even more. "It isn't that easy," he mutters. "I've been trying, but it's like they keep tabs on him or something. He's there one moment, gone the next. They're aware of him in there…it's like they snatch him away when we're close to getting anywhere."
Bobby sucks his tooth for a few seconds. "So, it is written is still about all we have to go on," he ponders. "Still sounds like some kind of prophecy to me, but I'm damned if I can find anything."
They sit there in another moment of silent contemplation before Bobby reaches over to snag the paper bag and dangles it in front of Dean's face. "Eat your sandwich," he orders. "Then we work the books again. Maybe something'll jump out at you."
Episode 4: Lead Us Not (Continued)
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info, warnings, and disclaimer)
Authors: electricskeptic and zatnikatel
Characters/Pairing: pre-Dean/Castiel, Sam, Bobby
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~14,000
Warnings: language, memories of Hell, an element that could be perceived as dub-con in nature (non-explicit)
Beta: nyoka
Art: Chapter banner by geckoholic; digital painting by artmetica which you can also find here (contains spoilers for the episode).
Summary: The Lord giveth… And the Lord taketh away.
The new God beholds the Righteous Man, and yearns to make him most honorable over all His creation. And if the Righteous Man will cast away all his transgressions and fall down and worship his Lord, then, for the sake of His love, the new God shall grant the Righteous Man the Word.
The Word is life-giving.
I will give you all the kingdoms of the world, declares the new God, and the souls chitter and screech their agreement in concert with their whispered unease, because the Righteous Man scorns His intentions, and violates His law, and profanes His holy things. And it is written that the Righteous Man can be their undoing and their destruction from without, for he is Michael, who is like God, and who shall rise at the time of the end. Michael, who weighs the deeds of souls and judges them, and if they have been wicked, he shall damn them and banish them, the unchained souls of Purgatory, back into the waste land; Michael, who shall bind together the false prophet and the beast, and hurl them for all eternity into the lake of fire.
I will give you the Word, declares the new God, for His mercy and forbearance are eternal, and He is patient. False prophet, cries the one who redeemed the Righteous Man from deep within, for he will not give up even while his grace withers and dies.
I will give you the Word, declares the new God, and the Word is life-giving.
Death? What is death?
Carthage, Missouri
November 2009
The radio is playing, Springsteen, and he's on fire, a guitar and a throaty voice mumbling the lyrics out between bursts of crackle and static.
He doesn't remember the radio playing.
There's so much blood, too much blood, and he can see she's getting grayer with every moment that passes. He has his hand on her thigh, kneading the muscle, and the denim of her jeans is saturated, cold seeping up through it to his palm. Her chest is heaving, tiny, shallow pants that whistle out between blue lips. Her teeth are chattering, and he can hear their rhythmic clickety-click. She's staring up at him, blinking slowly.
Her eyes are brown. Her eyes are sad, and wise, because she knows.
Dean feels hollow and ill, because he just had his hand inside her belly. A cursory squirt of hand sanitizer, no time to scrub and no point anyway, because she won't last the hour, and then he was scooping up entrails, forcing them back in through the gaping hole they slithered and spilled out of like a litter of energetic snakes birthed by cesarean. They felt rubbery, warm, wet, and slippery. They felt familiar, because look, he used to trill in the Pit, as he grasped and pulled and twisted and squeezed while they screamed, your intestines have become your out-testines. Alastair never taught him that, he remembers abstractedly, it was John. Dean, pay attention, this is how you field dress a rabbit for the pot, cut open the abdomen, reach inside and remove all the internal organs, and then-
She makes a sound when his hand is dipped in her as far as the knob of his wrist, and he never wants to hear a sound like that again. You're playing our song, he used to croon to them, when they sobbed and screamed at him like that, when they begged him to stop. I can name that tune in six notes!
He never thought he would ever make something create beautiful music like that again.
And…this isn't right, he's thinking.
The towels are nothing more than blotting paper, soaked scarlet within the first few minutes, but he packs them in, presses down hard. Her jeans are unzipped and he grips the tab, forces it up the teeth as far as he can, but it's sticky with bodily fluids, and it jams a third of the way up. He feeds the towel down inside, prodding and pushing at it with fingers gone stiff and clumsy.
She's wearing a belt.
"I'm sorry," he mutters, as he feeds the end of it through the buckle, pulls, and cinches it as tight as he can to hold the makeshift padding in place. She whimpers at the pressure, and he ignores her. "More towels," he says harshly, and there they are in his peripheral vision, already folded, incongruously neat. "Bandages."
He leans in so his lips are on her cheek as he winds the strips around her, several passes, followed by a tight knot to secure them over the top of the bulky fabric.
Movement, and he swivels his head towards it.
A curtain of brown hair, a woman's small, capable hand reaching up to cup her daughter's cheek. "It'll be okay, honey." Voice warm and throaty, the barest tremor revealing the strain, and then she fixes Dean with a devastated stare. "Dammit, Dean, where's Cas?"
Ellen's hands are stained red, and so are his.
"I don't know," he fumbles out confusedly, and he's still thinking, this isn't right. He says it out loud, "This isn't right," hears his own distress and disbelief making his voice reedy and pathetic as he pulls back and glances over his shoulder.
Hardware store, dimly-lit, moonlight trickling in through the windows. The doors chained shut, the crunch of his brother's boots on rock salt. Sam has his back to him, and he's peering out through the blinds, his gun cocked and ready.
Dean finds he's biting his knuckle, and the copper of her blood is rank on his tongue.
There behind him, arranged on the floor, metal buckets full of nails, blades, screws, and salt he poured in them himself, interspersed with stumpy propane cans joined with looping wire, a daisy-chain of destruction waiting to ignite behind them as they leave.
I'll see you on the other side, he said, and her lips tasted of death.
And Ellen, her face crumpled and ugly-beautiful in its grief, her make-up smearing down her cheeks and leaving black tear streaks in its wake, said, Get going now, boys.
The noise, the crash-boom of it resounding out into the dark, and sounds are louder at night. He saw the night sky flare brilliantly as it detonated, the flames a lurid orange flower bursting into bloom as debris scattered.
He says it again, his voice small and puzzled, "But this isn't right. We did this." He stares at Ellen, disoriented, because none of this is right.
"Dean."
He hasn't looked at his brother's face until now. Sam is pale and tense, but fuck, his eyes are clear and alert like Dean hasn't seen them in weeks, and his shoulders are squared and confident as he squats down opposite. He hasn't been there yet, Dean thinks, but how would he know that?
"Dean, Cas still isn't answering his cell. I told him where Ellen and Jo are, so-"
"Oh, thank God," Ellen yelps, and her hands are flying up to her face. "Oh, thank God...you can help her, say you'll help her."
And there he is, filling the space to Dean's left that was empty air before, and the relief is like an explosion of sheer comfort that shockwaves right through Dean. "It's fuckin' good to see you, Cas," he says, as he looks up, and his voice fractures on the odd feeling that he never expected to see Castiel alive again, the feeling that this might be a reprieve that goes beyond Jo Harvelle, that it somehow means even more.
The angel kneels down, reaches out a neat hand, long, gentle fingers tipping Jo's face up carefully. His eyes are liquid with compassion as he shakes his head. "I'm cut off from Heaven, healing is beyond me…" He sucks in his top lip, looks straight at Dean, the blue so familiar and direct. "A hospital…we passed one on the road."
Dean's mouth is dry, his voice like kindling when he replies. "McCune Brooks, it's on seventy-one…I've been in the ER there."
Castiel leans in, threads his hands under Jo, and pushes up effortlessly. Her head flops on his shoulder and her arm hangs limp. He holds her carefully, like he might a child, as Ellen fusses with handfuls of towels, tucking more of them in to stem the bloodflow. He doesn't break Dean's gaze.
"Be careful, Dean," he says quietly. "Please."
And then Dean is looking at thin air again.
Roughly twenty minutes after that, he shoots the devil in the head, smack-bang between the eyes, a magic bullet delivered straight into the frontal lobe. It's the textbook kill shot even without Samuel Colt's enchanted cartridges in the equation, but he stares down at the prone body and he doesn't celebrate. It's too good to be true, he thinks. He can't shake off the feeling that he knows it's too good to be true.
When Lucifer snaps awake, stands, gives him an irritated look and swings at him, some sixth sense tells Dean to duck. He dodges the blow as swiftly as he has ever taken evasive action, hollers at his brother to run, and crashes off into the trees. He lays low for ten minutes, but there aren't any sounds of pursuit. He hoots a couple of times, hears the standard reply, and his brother appears stealthily at his side.
"What the hell took you?" Dean hisses.
Sam gazes at him through eyes that pop wide with astonishment, and he ignores the question. "Fuck, Dean, it didn't work," he says faintly. "He said there are only five things in all of creation the Colt can't kill, and he's one of them."
Dean swipes a shaky hand across his brow. "You waited around to chat to him?" he snaps, and he shakes his head. Of course he did. "Of course you did. Jesus fuckin' Christ." An icy finger of suspicion trails its way up his spine then, its sharp fingernail scraping across the vertebrae. "What else did he say to you?" he asks, and he somehow knows the answer is there already, in his long-term memory, but misfiled somewhere so he can't find it. It spooks him again, the odd feeling that he knows this.
His brother's face goes crestfallen. "Uh," he mumbles, with something almost like guilt. "You know. The usual…evil monologue."
Even though the whole deal niggles like a bad tooth, there isn't time for this. "We need to get to the hospital," Dean diverts tightly. He roots in his pocket, pulls out his compass. "Car's that way."
This isn't right, he thinks again a half-hour later, as his baby vacuums up the white lines. "Does anything about this seem off to you?" he blurts out into the tense silence.
Sam doesn't reply, and Dean sneaks a quick glance to his right, sees that his brother is drifting miles away, gazing into the middle distance, his arm slung casually along the window frame. He looks like he's meditating but Dean knows better, can see the tight line of Sam's clenched jaw, and how his fingers twitch restlessly.
"Sam," he announces sharply, and he boffs his brother on the shoulder so that Sam jumps. He swivels his head too slowly and his eyes don't really focus on Dean. It ramps Dean's anxiety up even higher, and he doesn't really know why, but he flaps a hand in his brother's line of sight. "Hey," he barks, with an urgency that surprises him. "Are you seeing stuff? Are you about to seize?"
He has no clue why he says it, and it seems Sam doesn't either because he blinks at Dean and his brow creases. "Seize?" he queries, bewildered. "Seize what? What does that even mean?"
And Sam is back, seems normal, but nothing seems normal, and Dean is floundering, feels like he's navigating hostile territory without a map, barefoot and armed only with a plastic spork. "Does anything about this, any of it, seem off to you?" he asks again.
His brother's reply is despondent. "You mean as well as the fact the only hope we had of ending this is firing blanks?"
Dean grits his teeth. "Yeah, as well as that."
He gets a weary headshake for his effort. "Isn't that enough?" Sam blows out resignedly. "Damn Crowley. What the fuck will we do? How are we supposed to-"
"We'll find another way," Dean cuts in. "Do you hear me?" And they will, he has a gut feeling they will, even if that intuition is grim and hopeless, and underpinned with the same crawling sense of unease as everything else is right now.
He doesn't know if Sam registers what he said or not because the bright lights of the hospital are looming, and he's peeling smoothly into the parking lot.
"This place looks familiar," Sam offers as they trudge towards the building.
"We were here about three years ago. After the rugaru." Dean floats a hand up to his temple reflexively, and he can still feel the silvery raised scar from the cut, remember his brother's disproportionate panic when he blacked out in the car.
Sam snorts at him. "Dean, that was last October."
It hits Dean again, a feeling of cognitive dissonance he can't quite get a handle on. "It's…" he starts, and he stops, has to really think about it. November 2009, he recalls.
When Ellen and Jo died.
Only it isn't, that memory must be some weird whiskey-soused head trip, because Ellen is up on the third floor, alive albeit that she isn't even in the ballpark of well. She's sitting on a couch in the relatives' room, bolt upright and rigid with tension.
Castiel is standing next to her like he's on guard duty, a hand resting on her shoulder, and seeing him there gives Dean the same jolt of surprise and pleasure, the same odd feeling of sheer contentment as before. He doesn't dwell on it though, he just cuts right to the chase. "The Colt didn't work. What's the deal with Jo?"
Castiel is damned good, his gaze stays rock-steady, and there isn't even a flicker of disappointment in his expression. "The doctors haven't really said much to us. They're operating on her. Someone is supposed to come and tell us if she di-" He brakes, glances down at Ellen. "Someone is supposed to come and tell us what happens," he continues stiltedly, and his composure cracks, just barely, into a frown. "I'm not sure what to do."
Sam clears his throat, leans in and speaks confidentially. "Have they asked how she was hurt? Do they seem suspicious? Have you seen any cops?" He raises a meaningful eyebrow at Dean. "We can't be here if the five-O show up, Dean."
Ellen's voice is faint and tired when she cuts in. "Dogs. I said it was dogs. Pitbulls."
It's fuckin' appropriate, Dean thinks, and he has to suppress the shudder, school his features hard so they don't give away the memory of their weight on him, and how they fought each other for him, how the fangs tore into his skin and muscles and shattered his bones, how he slithered and flopped about like a beached fish in scarlet puddles of his own blood, hearing his own garbled pain and distress and gulping down their stinking breath so desperately in his dying gasps.
Music is playing somewhere in the distance, outside the room. It doesn't fit, and what's wrong with this picture? he's thinking. He blinks hard for a moment, pinches the bridge of his nose. When he opens his eyes, Castiel is looking at him, impassive.
"Does anything about this seem off to you?" he croaks at the angel as he pulls his cellphone out of his pocket and speed-dials Bobby.
Castiel cants his head fractionally. "I think it's a miracle she's alive at all, Dean," he replies.
It's detached, glacial. It's poised, waiting expectantly for Dean to join the dots and figure out the answer.
It's not Cas.
The world is abruptly sluggish, slowing down around Dean as if the planet is creaking to a labored halt on its axis, in preparation for changing course and spinning the opposite way.
The radio is playing, Springsteen, and he's on fire, a guitar and a throaty voice mumbling the lyrics out between bursts of crackle and static.
It's not Cas.
The world slams back into gear, accelerates, zero-to-sixty in five seconds. It pitches and yaws around Dean like a fairground ride while the thought screams through his brain, it's not Cas, and his eyes blur with the speed at which the illusion is ripped away, his healthy brother, Ellen, Castiel, all gone, subsumed into corrugated metal, shelves lining the walls, benches laden with tools and equipment.
His boots are planted firmly on the concrete floor of Bobby's autoshop, his hands grimy with oil and gripping the bottom lip of his baby's wide-open mouth as he stares down at her innards.
The radio is playing, Springsteen, and he's on fire, a guitar and a throaty voice mumbling the lyrics out between bursts of crackle and static.
His cellphone is in his hand, and it's grinding out music at him.
"Take the call, Dean."
He yelps, jumps like a scalded cat as Castiel continues, his voice easy and unconcerned even if Dean can sense a hum of something malevolent, of power, emanating from him.
"You'll want to take this one."
Dean checks who's incoming, licks lips gone dry and parched. He puts the phone up to his ear, listens to the bittersweet minutiae of a hunt down south in Troy, Alabama, bittersweet because it's something that isn't, something that can't be. She barely draws breath as she tells him how the humidity is driving her crazy and frizzing her hair, and how Rufus Rufus too? keeps acting like he's her dad or something, and her mom told her to tell Dean to call and let her know how Sam is holding up, and Hey Dean, you're real quiet, cat got your tongue?
"No. No… I'm good," he fumbles out. "Sam's good, he's - managing. We’re just back from a hunt, a pack of hodags about five miles outside of Rhinelander. He did okay, only flipped out the once or twice. He's getting there."
Dean stops, stares into steely blue as she commiserates and then, Oh, it's Rufus, I'll call you back.
And she's gone.
He swallows thickly, scrolls down through his contacts. Ellen. Jo. Rufus. All present and accounted for.
"It can be this way, Dean," Castiel tells him calmly. "They can be a part of this new future. I can give you this. It's up to you." His eyes drift beyond Dean, and he takes a few slow steps that bring him closer to the side of the Impala. He frowns, examines her scars thoughtfully, trails a listless finger along her bruised skin.
"If I cooperate?" Dean spits out. "What is this, my payoff?"
Castiel slants his eyes up, gazes at Dean from under thick black lashes. He raps his knuckles lightly on the car. "I see you rejected my gift, Dean," he observes flatly. "Will you reject this new gift?"
It numbs Dean to the marrow at the same time it fills him with a sort of incredulous horror because he suddenly knows what's at stake in this choice. He hears his breath quicken, feels himself start to shake with the buzz of adrenaline, feels sweat prickle on his spine, and thinks he might even hear it trickle down his skin in the silence.
"What, you grease my palms by bringing my friends back so they can die of cancer, or walk under a bus?" Dean eventually dares. "Have you followed up on anything? Your miracles go wrong, pal. They all go wrong." He blows out a sharp, appalled breath before he continues. "Jesus. If you had fixed my brother, he'd probably have dropped dead of a fuckin' heart attack or something." As that dawns on him, it's all he needs to know that there really is no choice. "No deal."
Castiel reacts then, with what sounds like an affronted hiss, before his voice rumbles out low and lethally controlled. "You will do what you're supposed to do, Dean. I told you this already. It is written."
The atmosphere turns incendiary and vibrant, like one wrong word might set it off. Dean thinks he might try and figure out what that wrong word might be. "You are fuckin' cracked," he grates out deliberately. "And you can take your sermon on the mount crap, and shove it up your ass sideways and dry. I know my friend is in there. I know. And I think you know I know…I think you saw me in the dream." Dean bites his lower lip so hard he thinks he might even draw blood as he remembers his friend's fear, remembers how this monster raised a hand and took Castiel from him like he has every time the angel has tried to reach out to him. There's nowhere Castiel can run that the souls can't hunt him down, and it fills Dean with a pristine, almost tranquil kind of fury. "Get out of him," he breathes. "You can have me if you get out of him."
The ghost of a smile plays across Castiel's lips. "It doesn't happen that way, Dean," he replies, oddly placid now. "It can't happen that way."
Dean thinks of Castiel's, his Castiel's sorrow and despair, the hesitant way he reached out for help, the way his voice broke when he confided in Dean while Dean was asleep and unaware, his panic when the new God appeared. "If you think I would leave him to you…" He trails off, sets his jaw and shakes his head.
"So be it," Castiel says quietly.
Nothing changes that Dean can see and he cocks his head, momentarily puzzled because he isn't really sure if anything happened at all. But then suddenly he knows.
He's gripping his cellphone still, his fingers clamped tight around it, his knuckles sharp and bloodless. He scrolls through his contacts again, and the same sadness he felt back then tightens his chest.
"She ran out of minutes, Dean," Castiel says. "They all did."
The fact he can't hear any clanging noises or curses as he approaches the autoshop sets Bobby's nerves on edge. He knows damn well the silence likely signals brooding, or drinking, or both. Truth be told, he doesn't really blame Dean, and he muses that he's been hitting it harder than usual himself.
Bobby can't see Dean anywhere, just the hood of the Impala wide open, still dented and streaked with silvery scars. It's dead quiet, the only sound the steady plink-plink of the dripping faucet he's been planning to fix since he can't remember when, because Sam keeps raising a judgmental eyebrow and telling him every fifteen-thousand drips is a gallon of water wasted. A drip a minute is eighty-six thousand a day, give or take a few hundred, Bobby, he'd said, with an ego that could only be gained at some highfalutin' ivy league. That's more than two thousand gallons a year, and that's… Bobby can remember him squinting as he ran the numbers in his head. Forty-one baths! Fuckin' mathletes.
"You plan on just standing there?" the voice drifts out.
It sounds resigned, which is about par for the course these days, and when Bobby peers around the top end of the car he sees that Dean is sitting on the floor, legs sprawled out ahead of him and a whiskey bottle cradled loosely on his thigh. His eyes are watery and bloodshot, and his face is smudged with oil.
Bobby holds up the bundle he's toting, says, "I brought you some vittals." Since you'll be drinking out here most of the day on an empty gut if I don't goes unsaid. He drops the paper bag down between Dean's legs, glances over towards the car. "Need any help?"
Dean purses his lips. "Sam by himself in the house?" he says, his tone mildly accusing.
"Nope. Sheriff Mills is up there with him." Bobby steps over Dean's out-flung legs, lowers himself down onto his own backside, hearing his knees pop loudly as he does. "Thought she might be able to help him."
Dean fixes him with a skeptical look. "Sheriff Mills?"
Bobby nods. "She's got some kind of psychology degree, volunteers as a counselor at one of the local churches. She kept going on about cognitive behavioral therapy." He shrugs. "Something like that. Thought it might help him to talk to her about it. She's been through some stuff. As we know. After all, her and Sam-"
"Had that incredible bonding moment ganking her zombie kid after he chowed down on his dad?" Dean cuts in acidly.
"She said there's techniques you can use to distract yourself from psychological trauma," Bobby continues with a shrug. "Reframing stuff, so it looks less bad and you can deal with it. That’s what she said."
Dean shakes his head. "Don't tell me," he huffs out witheringly. "She's telling him how he can see the bright side of Hell. Well, good luck with that." He raises the liquor bottle in a mock toast, takes a pull at it. "Lisa sicced some shrink on me down in Cicero," he says after he gulps down his mouthful. "I was screaming myself awake most nights." He sniffs. "Considering my trunk full of guns, I think she was afraid I was heading for a clocktower moment."
It reminds Bobby of the hurt and betrayal on Dean's face when he found out Bobby had been in the loop on his brother being topside for a whole year, and he shifts uncomfortably at the memory. "Did it help?" he sidetracks clumsily.
Dean doesn't look at him. "The shrink? Not one bit." He doesn't elaborate any further, just nudges Bobby and offers him the bottle. It feels light, more than three-quarters of a fifth of booze gone already.
Bobby clears his throat uneasily. "Maybe you shouldn't be pickling your liver, boy," he observes. "Not with things how they are right now."
Dean huffs like he's amused. "You mean now Cas can't fix me? Newsflash: the new, improved Cas is offering to do a lot more than fix me."
That pulls Bobby up. "He was here again?"
Dean nods. "Looks like all those new wards are about as effective as a fart in the wind." He pauses, takes another slug of whiskey, and hisses at its burn before he wipes his mouth. "Remember how Zachariah fast-forwarded me five years down the road? Well, our new God took me back. To Carthage. And then he beamed down in the nick of time and e-vacced Jo and Ellen to the nearest hospital."
Bobby gets a sour taste in his mouth, a twisting feeling of queasiness in his stomach. He puts one hand there to rub it away, hooks the whiskey bottle off Dean's leg, and has another swig of the booze himself. He remembers how damned useless he felt, chairbound and pep-talking Dean from hundreds of miles away, across a weak radio connection. He still regrets burning the photograph. "Dammit," he says, because Ellen Harvelle and her kid are collateral damage he'll regret until his last breath, and ever since Dean told him about the fake-marriage Balthazar inadvertently landed him in, some part of Bobby has regretted their loss even more.
Dean brings a hand up to rub at his brow. "He said it could be real. If I wanted it to be. He airlifted me back here, and she called me up on the phone." His voice cracks. "Jo. She was with Rufus, hunting."
It's another lightning bolt, and Bobby gapes. "Rufus?"
Dean nods at his look. "Yeah, Rufus. And I spoke to her, and it was here and now." He sighs, and it's defeated and weary. "He gave me the same line as before, pretty much. This is meant to be, it is written. So sign the pledge and get with the program or…" He trails off, waves a hand in the air.
"Or it all goes back to how it really is," Bobby finishes, and he doesn't need to ask to know that's exactly what happened - it's all there in Dean's slumped desolation and guilt-shadowed eyes.
They sit there in silence for a few moments. "Look, son," Bobby starts then. He waits a beat, isn't really sure what he's going to say, but then the words just pop up in his throat. "Killing my wife was bad enough the first time." He sees Dean slant his eyes across, sees a muscle twitch in Dean's cheek. "I’d never come up against anything supernatural, never even believed it existed before it got Karen," he goes on. "I panicked when she went for me. Self-defense." He swallows. "You saw her, in the dream. She got cut up pretty bad in the fray. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know a damn thing about exorcisms or demonology back then. All I knew was that something nasty, something evil, had gotten a hold of my wife. And when it left her, it was too late." He rubs a hand across his jaw as he casts his mind back. "And then there she was again, right out of the blue, in the kitchen baking pies." He chuckles fondly. "I still got some of those damn pies in the freezer."
Dean casts his eyes down. "Bobby, I-"
"What I'm saying is that I had to make a choice," Bobby interrupts gruffly. "I wanted it to turn out different. But I had to make a choice. The right choice, like you boys told me back then. Because God knows, we've seen what happens when you mess with the natural order."
Dean glances up at him again. "But what if he makes me an offer I can't refuse, Bobby?" he answers, and the strain is even more evident in his voice. "What then?"
Bobby blows out ruefully. "I don't know." He thinks on it for a minute, because there's still something in all of this he doesn't get. "He wants you playing on his team, but why?" he asks finally. "I mean - we haven't really worked that out. He can do anything he wants, why does he need you to do it for him? No offense…"
Dean snorts. "None taken." He shakes his head. "I have no damn idea, Bobby. I can't figure out if it's maybe some part of Cas that's still… you know." He colors.
"Intensely connected to you?" Bobby suggests tartly.
The flush on Dean's cheeks deepens. "Something like that," he concedes. "Cas - the old Cas - said we had this profound bond thing going on. I don't really know what that means...but maybe it's why."
Bobby can see Dean's fingers tighten around the bottle, see the fingers of the other hand start picking agitatedly at the fabric of his jeans. "You miss him," Bobby ventures.
"I don't want to do this," is the grim response, but Bobby sees Dean's face go dazed and dejected for a split second, before he glowers and cants his head away, his fingers dancing faster.
It occurs to Bobby then that he hasn't really broached Dean's loss in any of this, that he's been shooting first with both barrels and no questions asked. But even if he's had damn good reason to, it doesn't mean the kid isn't grieving for his friend, isn't torn up inside by the same dull ache Bobby still feels for the Harvelles, for Pamela Barnes, for Rufus Turner, for his wife and everyone else sacrificed in the fight. "I'm real sorry about what happened to Cas, son," he says quietly. "I do get what he meant to you. And this whole plan B deal was only ever me be-"
"Being realistic," Dean interrupts, and his tone is flat and despondent. "I know that."
Bobby plows on regardless. "He was - a good guy. A grumpy little fucker at the best of times, but a good guy. Just walked the wrong path. Made piss-poor choices." He ponders that briefly. "Maybe he was a Winchester after all that," he throws out wryly.
Dean makes a small, harsh noise Bobby can't quite decode, followed by a brittle laugh, but he doesn't comment.
"You dreaming about him still?" Bobby asks then, because he knows that now they're getting to what he suspects is a deeper attachment than Dean has ever let on or maybe even admitted to himself, he'll default to repression and denial any second. "Only if you are, then maybe the next time he dreamstalks you, you need to pin him down and ask him what the hell the souls want with you."
Dean's expression darkens even more. "It isn't that easy," he mutters. "I've been trying, but it's like they keep tabs on him or something. He's there one moment, gone the next. They're aware of him in there…it's like they snatch him away when we're close to getting anywhere."
Bobby sucks his tooth for a few seconds. "So, it is written is still about all we have to go on," he ponders. "Still sounds like some kind of prophecy to me, but I'm damned if I can find anything."
They sit there in another moment of silent contemplation before Bobby reaches over to snag the paper bag and dangles it in front of Dean's face. "Eat your sandwich," he orders. "Then we work the books again. Maybe something'll jump out at you."
Episode 4: Lead Us Not (Continued)