Make Thick My Blood (2/5)
“I will tell you,” Cas says, gazing with extreme solemnity at Sam. “But please, remember my objections.”
“Yeah, yeah,” says Dean, impatient. Sam’s face by contrast is serious, set, his eyes directed somewhere around Cas’s knees.
“I think it likely,” Cas says slowly, “that there are traces of Lucifer’s grace still left in Sam.”
“Say what?” says Dean.
There’s a heavy silence before Sam speaks. When he does, it’s like Dean’s not there. “You don’t think it likely,” he says in a small, tight voice. “You know.”
He lifts his head, and his face is white; nostrils flaring, lip trembling just the tiniest bit. “You must. I mean. When… Gadreel. You saw what he’d left in me. You must have seen… the other thing, too.”
Cas looks shifty.
“It didn’t seem helpful to share that information,” he says.
Sam closes his eyes, swallows. “Right,” he says. “My mistake, I guess.”
Aggravated, excluded, Dean speaks up. “Back up a second, would you?” he says. “I’m missing something here.”
Sam looks up at him, looks away, the set of his shoulders tense. Dean watches Sam’s fingers curl over the edge of the table, watches the muscles in his forearms flex as his fingers tighten, notices the vulnerable bulge of his brother’s veins.
Eventually, Cas speaks. “When an angel takes a vessel,” he says deliberately, “they suffuse it” - Sam coughs - “they suffuse him, with their grace. It’s the life force that bends the vessel to the angel’s will.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says. “I know all this.”
“Well,” says Cas. “Depending on the length and the intensity of the possession, traces of that grace can remain after the angel departs.”
Dean has heard this before, or something like it, something raised and rapidly dismissed by Sam after that godawful mess with Gadreel. Hearing it now in this new context, the shock of what Cas is saying hits him like a slap. All these years that Sam’s been back and been sitting beside him, he’s had the thin scum of the devil lining his veins.
“Jesus, Sammy,” he says. “Use a condom next time, would you?”
It’s a reflex, more than anything: this is how Dean deals, make a lewd joke about the horror and move on. It’s only when Castiel - Castiel - looks at him with a horrified frown that Dean thinks, maybe that wasn’t cool. He sneaks a glance at Sam; but his brother’s hair is falling over his face so that Dean can’t see his expression at all.
For a long moment, Sam doesn’t speak. His chest rises, falls. Dean thinks idly about puncturing Sam’s lungs, letting the air wheeze out of them, flat balloons.
Eventually, Sam stands up. “Excuse me for a moment,” he says. His mouth is careful around the words.
Dean watches as Sam walks, very cautious and deliberate, away from the table. His steps speed up when he gets to the doorway and he makes it as far as the sink in the war room before he hurls. Sam vomits in loud, choking coughs, long back hunched over, hands gripping the porcelain.
Dean knows that he ought to go and comfort his brother right now. He should smooth his hands over Sam’s shoulders and down the ridge of his spine; talk to him in soothing words, rub circles at the base of his back. He wants to do all these things. He also wants to stalk over on purposeful feet, take Sam by the scruff of his neck and slam Sam’s forehead into the mirror in front of him. The image is vivid: cracks hurrying across the glass, blood running into Sam’s eyes.
Dean sits tight.
Sam finishes, spluttering down into silence. He turns on the tap; bends down further to drink. He keeps the water running after he stands, and Dean pictures it, chunks of Sam’s stomach lining circling the drain. He feels kinda queasy himself.
Sam straightens up. He doesn’t look into the mirror. Instead, he tosses his head, rubs his hand over his mouth. He walks back into the library.
“OK,” he says.
“Sam -” says Dean; but Sam ignores him, looking only at Cas.
“How do we do this?” he says. “What - back into the archives for the king-sized syringe?”
“Not in this instance,” says Castiel. “We can’t use that procedure this time. It’s not suitable.”
Sam’s eyebrows lift in surprise; and his mouth drops open, just a little. The expression turns him suddenly childish, draining off the weight of the years and the worry that can make Sam, glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, look like a hunched old man.
“What? Why not?” he says.
Cas’s eyes trail over to Dean with some anxiety before they return to fix on Sam’s face. “You remember, back then,” he says. “We could not recover enough of Gadreel’s grace to be useful.”
Sam nods, small.
“The grace that Lucifer left in you,” Cas says. “It will have… it’s lodged deeper. So it would be harder to extract.”
“Right,” Sam says.
“I don’t think we could do it without killing you,” Castiel says, suddenly honest. “It was unpleasant enough last time.”
Sam’s tongue flicks out pink to moisten his lips. “Yeah,” he says. He looks exhausted. “What, then?”
Last time? It’s a revelation, a peek into the secret weeks that Dean’s been mulling over for months. And yeah, Dean should be - he kind of is - retrospectively concerned for what might have been. But he’s also furious with his brother for keeping this quiet, for hiding the fact that he almost died after Dean compromised so much to save him. How could Sam do that? Yeah. Dean’s straight-up mad with him for lying. And somewhere mixed in with that familiar feeling is a darker resentment, at the fact that Sam might just have walked out on the world when Dean wasn’t there to see.
“I’m not altogether certain, yet,” says Cas. “I think it might be -” he pauses, looks apologetic - “I think it might be necessary to channel Lucifer’s power through a vessel. A human vessel. Through you.”
It’s like watching Sam get beat down by a ghost: the shock and absorption of a series of invisible blows, striking him in the solar plexus, brutally, one by one. You’d think he must have seen this particular punch coming, but the impact of it still manages to elicit a physical flinch. Sam reels; and Dean suddenly can’t stand to see any more, feels sweaty with disgust at the whole situation. He told Cas to say this, sure. But he doesn't have to like it.
“Gee,” he says. “A lot of good that does. Tell Sam he has to fuckin’ spread ‘em for Lucifer and go light on the rest of the details? What are we actually supposed to do?”
“The answers most probably lie within your library,” Cas tells him, calm. “When Sam and I were seeking Gadreel, we found the Men of Letters to be impressively well informed. It’s just that I have been restricted until now, because I was hoping to prevent Sam from following my investigations. But it ought to be possible to find the necessary information here.”
Dean looks at his brother. Sam is nodding.
“Fine,” Sam says. “I’m in. But Cas. I want to make sure that we get it right first time. So please, please, make sure that the research is solid. I don’t want to be doing this twice.”
Cas inclines his head.
“I’ll help you look,” Sam says. “Later. But I think,” and with the words he seems to slough off the final remnants of the front that he’s been carefully clinging to all this while, shedding them like a worn-out skin to show his insides exposed and raw, “I think that right now I need to go to bed.” He looks at Dean through red-rimmed eyes. “I’ve been up for, like, thirty hours.”
“Thirty-two,” says Castiel.
“Right,” Sam says. “Whatever. I’m just… I’m no good when I’m this tired.”
“It’s OK, Sam,” Dean says. “I can do it. I can help him out.”
Sam closes his eyes, nods again, then turns and shuffles out of the door. Dean watches him, the defeated line of his shoulders. Come on, Sam, he thinks. At least put up a fight.
~~~
Of course, Sam knows more and better than Dean about the Bunker’s stores. He’s the one who’s spent half his life in libraries; who understands about archival systems and classifications, who gets a kick out of using the ancient card catalogue and who dug up a typewriter from some long-abandoned office in order to add his own notes in kind. But Dean’s not stupid, and more importantly, he knows how Sam works. He’s picked up more than enough to help Castiel out on his quest.
So the two of them walk down together to the archive, a great suite of rooms on the second basement level, underneath the regular parts of the Bunker where they actually live. Dean’s been down here several times since he took on the Mark, poking around the Men of Letters’ records on curses and scars. For a while, though, now, he’s put the search on hold; so the mouldering coffee cups he finds slotted randomly into the shelves must be evidence of Sam’s continued, isolated labours.
Dean looks at the one closest to his eyeline, a bright green thing with a chip in the rim and the faded logo of a Florida waterpark on the side. For a second he considers hooking a finger into the handle and flicking the mug onto the floor just to watch it smash. But he catches Castiel’s blue gaze from the corner of his eye, and restrains his hand.
“Right, then,” Dean says. “Angels.” And they both dive in.
As they search, leafing through books and portfolios, reaching down dusty archive boxes and poking through what’s within, Dean keeps thinking about what he’s just heard.
“Cas,” he says. “This thing with the syringe and Gadreel’s grace.”
Cas puts down the folder in his hand and gives Dean his full attention.
“Did Sam really nearly die?”
“Oh, yes,” says Castiel. “He was quite determined. I believe that he felt it would compensate for Kevin’s death at his hands.”
Dean feels an odd, proprietary outrage. “What the fuck?” he says. “Kevin’s death was on me.”
Castiel regards him, level. “Nonetheless. Sam felt considerable guilt about what happened. He seemed to believe that finding and killing Gadreel would offer some measure of redemption. But I advised him otherwise.”
“You advised him,” Dean says.
“I told him,” says Castiel, “that I understand what it is to make mistakes. But that however many mistakes he might have made, death was not the right or suitable solution.”
Something about this doesn’t quite sit right. Kevin’s death is Dean’s problem: Dean’s mistake. Dean knows that, because that guilt is his justification for this whole, messy business with the Mark of Cain. He had to take the damn thing on to kill Abaddon - no, to kill Gadreel. Or something. To do something good, at any rate, that would make up for his terrible error. So what exactly did Sam think he was doing, trying to sacrifice himself instead?
He looks at Castiel’s complacent face, full of pride at his achievement in persuading Sam that suicide would simply be another sin on the list; and he feels so terribly tired at the prospect of untangling that particular cat’s cradle that he just doesn’t bother.
“OK,” he says. “Well, thanks.”
Cas nods, and gets back to his documents; and Dean wanders off to the other corner of the room, starts to go through the older boxes from even longer ago. As he looks through the folders, he thinks: what if Cas had done it? What if he’d pushed on through and pulled the stuff out and let Sam be damned in the process? Dean had already taken on the Mark by then; probably picked it up around the same time that Sam and Castiel were arguing over Sam’s life. Without his little brother beside him, where would he be right now? The answer feels painfully obvious: slumped next to Crowley on their ongoing demon bender; or worse, snug-tight in the bastard’s throne, the newest ruler of Hell. Both are possible. It’s felt many times this past year like Sam’s deceptively steely grip is the only thing holding him back from the abyss. Trouble is, sometimes Dean actively wants to jump into it. The fall would hurt, but it feels like it might be simpler than this constant, nerve-wracking teetering on the edge.
He’s done; so done, and yet he’s somehow been persuaded, by the power of Sam’s stupid kicked-animal eyes, into making a last dragging venture towards salvation. So, he supposes, the least he can do is to give it a go. He sighs, deep in his chest, and starts scanning the files.
~~~
Dean’s never been the most enthusiastic researcher; but he’s usually at least efficient by necessity, sorting things through quick and thorough so he doesn’t have to look at them twice. Today, though, he’s not on his game. Every page he turns seems to lead him astray, so that he finds himself staring for twenty minutes at a tedious treatise on archangel genealogy, words running meaningless in his mind, before he snaps awake. Jesus. His brain just won’t do what he wants it to; there’s some hovering force at the back of it, tugging his thoughts off track. It’s like every page that he’s reading is written in Latin: he can make his way through it, but the task is arduous, slow.
He puts his hand to his forearm without thinking, but when he realises where it’s settled, he knows that his answer’s there too. Of course. The thing doesn’t want to be removed. This is just another obstacle in his way.
The recognition nudges at Dean’s more obstinate instincts, prompting him into a renewed burst of activity; and, maybe five or six books later, he finds himself holding exactly the text that he’s sought. Harnessing an angel’s residual energy, reads the heading: Necessary preparations for the vessel, body and mind. Dean reads on. The book is old and sturdy, backed in leather with the imprint of the Men of Letters stamped onto the front; and it’s written in a stiff kind of formal English that Dean suspects is as much the product of deliberate archaism as it is a function of the time that the book first appeared. This is the work of a learned society self-conscious of its own, authenticating tradition.
Whatever, Dean scoffs. What matters is what it says. Pompous old dudes and their fusty phrasing be damned; he’s got his hands at long-fucking-last on the key to his own release.
But as his eyes pan down the page, he begins to realise with a sinking feeling that Castiel was right. No. No way. Whatever Sam might feel about the way that Dean’s been behaving, whatever crazy ideas he’s got in his head about what might happen next, there’s not a chance in Hell that Dean can ask his brother to do this; that he can ask Sam to do this to himself, for him. No. No. It’s not going to happen.
Over at the other side of the room, Castiel calls out to him, “Dean? How’s it going?”
“Still looking,” Dean calls back. He casts a quick, guilty glance over to the shelves behind which Cas is concealed, then picks up the volume he’s holding and shoves it awkwardly into his shirt. “I’m just gonna go and use the bathroom, alright?”
“Of course,” Cas says. “Your toilet habits are none of my business.”
“Yeah, OK, thanks,” says Dean, already halfway out of the door with the book poking an accusatory corner into his chest. He’s overtaken with the horror of what he’s read and with the absolute dread certainty that nothing will stop Sam now: that even if it means subjecting his fragile mental stability to a final, shattering, sledge-hammer blow, Sam will do it to save Dean’s soul and not think twice about the action. It can’t happen, mustn’t happen. Dean won’t let him even consider it.
Almost without consciously deciding to do it, he’s pounding up the stairs into the bunker’s largest washroom and setting the book down carefully in the middle of the white-tiled floor. It’s as good a place as any, and he gropes with slippery, sweaty fingers in his pockets for a lighter or match. “Come on,” he finds himself chanting under his breath, gasping with relief when he finally settles his hands on the metal of a Zippo. “Come on, come on.”
The room is dry and so is the book but the leather of the cover proves unexpectedly tough. Dean’s thumb goes numb with clicking at the flint before he's finally able to kindle a lasting flame: and even then, it flickers useless against the binding for the longest time. “Fuck,” Dean murmurs, and drops the book open, leafing through to the offending section. This is the only part that he really needs to destroy; and thankfully, this time, the flame catches and a thin black border of burning creeps quickly around the edge of the page.
Dean’s watching it, heart in his mouth, when suddenly he’s propelled sideways across the bathroom, shoulder and hip slamming painfully into the wall. In the centre of the room, Cas snatches up the burning volume, smothering the flames against his coat. He looks at Dean, face set and angry.
“No,” he says.
Disoriented and incredulous, Dean’s not immediately able to articulate his outrage. “What the fuck?” he splutters at last.
“You were trying to destroy it,” says Cas. “The answer. The way to get rid of the Mark.”
“Christ’s sake, Cas,” Dean says. “You don’t understand. Sam can’t - it’s not a good solution.”
Cas watches him, silent.
“You were trying to hide the whole thing from him yourself!”
"I was wrong," Cas says; and is he really stupid enough to think it's that easy? That you can just make a mistake and change your mind and move on? “Sam was right. Things have gone far enough, Dean, and we need to find a way to help you.”
“This isn’t about me, not now,” says Dean. “This is about Sam. You don’t get it, Cas, you don’t know -”
Cas interrupts him. “I’m not stupid, Dean. I know what it says.”
“Well, then,” says Dean, although Castiel’s unshaken assurance has jolted some of his certainty. “You know that Sam’s not strong enough. I don’t know how - I mean. Jesus, Cas, you were the one so down on the whole thing first time round. Called him a fucking abomination, if I remember right.”
“I was wrong then, too,” Castiel says. “Sam is stronger and better than I gave him credit for. And you are wrong now about your own reasons for acting. Think about it, Dean. Why did Cain kill his brother?”
This is something that Cas must have picked up from Sam: the condescending, infuriating ability to be right, to present a point that Dean can’t answer and which frogmarches him by sheer force of logic to some unpleasant philosophical place in which he really doesn’t want to end up. It’s his least fucking favourite of Sam’s behaviours and the fact that Cas has now started in on it is ten times worse. But the son of a bitch is right, and so Dean grits his teeth and grinds it out.
“Cain killed Abel to save him. From Lucifer. He killed him so that Lucifer wouldn’t corrupt him.”
Cas doesn’t need to say anything more. It’s enough that he’s muddied the waters: that he’s clouded Dean’s confident clarity into the same murky self-suspicion that has hindered every step of his action since the end of the summer, since the moment when Sam bound him down in service of that half-assed cure. Because yes, when Cain first explained his actions, standing in the kitchen of his cottage with a rational smile, Dean had understood exactly the impulse that had driven the guy’s desperate slide into damnation: had recognised the absolute imperative to preserve the purity of a little brother with a soul a hundred times more precious than your own. But now. After his most recent face-off with the Father of Murder, Dean’s been somewhat less sure about how things went down. Cain had seemed frighteningly unfazed at the prospect of murdering some innocent kid, just on the off-chance that he might turn bad. Who’s to say that the guy’s first step wasn’t similarly suspect: that it wasn’t him being taken for a fool all along?
Dean’s not convinced either way. He certainly hasn’t articulated his suspicions to Castiel, still less to Sam. But he’s just not sure enough that Cain’s fratricide was an act of mercy, rather than a murder that the devil endorsed.
Castiel watches him waver, and tells him, “Go and talk to Sam. And be honest. You owe him that.”
~~~
Dean leaves Sam to sleep for as long as he can bear it; busies himself for a good five or six hours to give the kid some chance to rest. Sam’ll need all the strength he can get to handle what Dean has to tell him. But the waiting is torture. He paces up and down every one of the bunker’s corridors; beats three punching bags until they’re leaking stuffing; makes himself an elaborate, disgustingly healthy breakfast; and even, driven to desperation, goes out on a run. Eventually, when he can’t take any more of it, when the Impala is shining and the kitchen is gleaming and he’s taken every gun he owns to pieces and put them back together, he knocks, ever so gently, at the door of Sam’s room.
“Come in,” says Sam. When Dean does, he sees his brother sitting at the head of his bed, back against the wall, forehead resting on his drawn-up knees. He’s wearing the same clothes that he had on when Dean last saw him. Dean’s pretty sure that he hasn’t even shut his eyes; or if he has, it’s been the kind of shitty, fitful dozing that leaves you worse off than when you first lay down.
Sam must have heard the opening door, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t even stir until Dean’s close up beside him, awkwardly clearing his throat. And when Sam does look up, it isn’t pretty. His face is oatmeal grey, and there are heavy dark circles under his eyes. He looks like shit.
“Come on then,” Sam says. “Let me have it.”
Dean opens his mouth, but there’s something heavy and tight around his chest that stops him from speaking. He’s gone over the sentence dozens of times, pounding out the words with his alternating feet as he powered through the woods outside. But now, now he’s there in the room with his brother, he doesn’t want to say it; and he surprises himself with what happens instead.
“What I said earlier,” he tells Sam. “About. About Lucifer. About what happened in the Cage.”
Sam’s head snaps up. The whites stand out around his eyes. “Dean,” he says, warning.
“This is important,” Dean says. “Did he. Did he. Or. I mean. Sam, I know what can happen in Hell.”
Sam is mute.
“Dude,” Dean says. “What I said. I was making a joke about possession. I wasn’t. Fuck, man. I just didn’t think. I was talking about possession, OK?”
Sam looks at him for the longest time, before at last he closes his eyes and massages his fingers across them. “Come on, Dean. You know as well as I do, it’s the same damn thing.” His voice is explanatory; it’s not unkind. But it coaxes a thick, nasty bile from the back of Dean’s throat.
Time passes. Sam breathes in, deep. Dean explores the black bitter taste in his mouth with his tongue.
At last, Sam opens his eyes and asks, false and bright, “Anyway. Is that all you wanted to say?”
“No,” Dean says, hating it. “No. It’s. Um. I think we found what we need, or most of it. About how to use Lucifer’s grace.”
Sam waits; and Dean, reluctant, miserable, drags his gaze heavily Sam-ward.
“It’s,” he says; and chokes on it. “You’re gonna. Oh, Sammy,” he says.
He really thinks that he’s going to have to say it: but it turns out, Sam’s too fucking smart of a guy to have missed the obvious, and too fucking merciful to let Dean suffer the way he deserves. Instead he gives a horrible, papery laugh and offers Dean the words already, again, on his own account.
“Demon blood,” he says, looking carefully past Dean’s midriff to the blank bare brick of the wall.
“I’m sorry,” says Dean, “so fucking sorry,” and, “please, Sam, don’t do it.”
Sam does look up then, and his face is twisted in something like cruelty, or pain. “Fuck off, Dean,” he says.
“I mean it,” Dean tells him. “It’s not worth it for you.”
Sam smiles, sort of. He lifts a hand to the back of his head, curls his fingers into his hair and tugs at it, hard. “I don’t really understand what you think the alternative is,” he says.
Dean opens his mouth; closes it. He’s coming up dry.
“You’re going to kill me, Dean,” Sam says, eventually
And all Dean can say is, “I think I am.”
( Chapter Three)