FIC: Pulling Out The Nails, Chapter 18: Stay [19/20]
Back to 17. Unbound, or go to the Masterpost.
Dean had never felt his mortality more keenly than when he was no longer, technically speaking, mortal. At least, he definitely didn't feel mortal.
All that rage-all that powerlessness-burst forth from the dam that had stopped it all up inside him, because he didn't need to hide it anymore, because he wasn't powerless anymore. Thanks to Castiel, he was free. For the first time in his life, he could do something more than scrape their best shot together and pray.
He was their best shot now, and he wasn't just the last available option; he was a good choice. He could see this through.
Castiel transformed beside him, a sudden, lithe panther, and took off through the chaos, drawing the attention of the assembled spirits away from Dean. He picked his first target and fired; the resulting Detonation was powerful enough to send the entire hallway rippling backward. The spirit nearest him gaped through its host, and he flung out a hand, trying to focus on a single intent, recalling the basic attacks most spirits used-and the magician and its rider went up in a sudden torrent of flame. From the other end of the hallway, he heard Castiel yell in encouragement.
He hardly felt drained, though he knew the magic was more powerful than a standard attack for a djinni. Sweeping his arms forward, he summoned a wind strong enough to force them all backward again, closer to the open door of the summoning chamber. All of the spirits in this hallway were djinn, he could see that clearly now-a formidable foe, had he still been human, especially in a pack like this.
He sensed, though, that Lilith and her fellow marids would be the only ones to offer him much of a challenge.
"There are more," Castiel called out, quickly shutting the door that the spirits had been forced through. Dean, as soon as it had occurred to him to move, was at Castiel's side, bringing down the silver gate that locked over the exit to the summoning chamber. It stung, but just barely; the iron still jangling in his pockets hadn't registered at all, though he wasn't touching that with his bare skin.
"Is Lilith still inside?" Dean asked, turning toward the next hallway. They ran, side by side, Castiel's trench coat flapping out behind him; he was Jimmy again, wearing fresh bruises beneath his five o'clock shadow.
"I didn't see her," Castiel said, and took off again, wading through a swarm of spirits engaged with lower-level magicians, who were valiantly fighting back. Dean picked his targets more carefully this time, eliminating individual spirits one by one to avoid frying the magicians who were fighting on their side. Henriksen was among them, sweating profusely; he had long since traded his pistols for a shotgun. Jody, too, was firing at will, Garth only a few paces from her.
"Dean?!" he shouted, astonished, as Dean cut through the crowd, weakening the magicians casting through their spirit companions with a hearty array of Fluxes; from there, a few rounds from a pistol or shotgun would ground them.
"Don't ask!" Dean yelled back, catching one of the more potent spirits in the hallway with a Hurricane. Garth whooped with glee, the sound ragged with disbelief. The magician it was riding screamed in terror as it spiraled up toward the ceiling, trapped in the forceful gale.
"Where are the others?" Dean asked, holstering his power for the moment; the hallway was still, and Castiel was back at his side.
"In the other three hallways, leading out of the summoning chamber," Jody answered, swiftly reloading her shotgun. "Trying to contain them. There's a switch-"
"I know, I know, I'm getting there," Dean said.
"What the hell happened to you?" Henriksen asked, eyeing Dean's smoking palm with suspicion. Garth appeared more interested in the new lines on his face; Dean hadn't yet managed to look in a mirror, but he thought the change was probably significant.
"I went to the Other Place," he said shortly, "and got juiced up. Jimmy Novak did some research in the 1980s. Just had to put it to practice." At Henriksen's look of discomfort, Dean pressed, "Look, I'll explain it all later, we don't have time, the others-"
"This way," Garth urged, and they took off for the next corridor.
Bobby was here, hurling elemental spheres with uninterrupted rhythm to keep the spirits and their magicians as close to the summoning chamber as possible. A small band of lower-level magicians-all mere clerks, by the scrawny, underfed look of them-were huddled up behind him, casting cloaking and distraction spells.
It was the best they could do, but Dean could do better. He raised a Hurricane and sent it off; it carried the majority of the spirits, stammering in protest, back into the summoning chamber. He only hoped that they remained disoriented enough on the other side to not go streaming back out the two doors that were still open.
There were two spirits left in the hallway-a djinni and an afrit, controlling their respective magicians: a slight woman with fierce red hair, and a hulking man in a crisp business suit.
"Anna," Castiel said bleakly. "This-this isn't the answer-"
She darted forward to attack, and Dean planted an Inferno in her way. She reeled back, her magician's skin bubbling horribly, the woman trapped inside shrieking distantly; she sounded like a mere echo.
"What is this?" the man demanded; his voice was two octaves too low to hear comfortably. "What are you?"
"Dean," he said, raising his palm. "Nice to meet you."
His Detonation didn't have as much of an effect on the afrit, though he still leapt back, hissing. Bobby took up again with the elemental spheres, keeping the spirits distracted while Dean hurriedly planted attacks-a Flux, another Inferno, until the air was full of fire and thick black smoke, and the spirits were breaking free of their human vessels, no longer able to stay contained in something so damaged. Their disorientation was great enough that Dean's quick Hurricane swept them back into the summoning chamber, and he slammed the door after them, locking the silver in place.
"What have you gotten yourself into, boy?" Bobby barked.
"Later," Dean said. "We've got to get to the others, there are two more hallways-"
"I know," Bobby grumbled. "One of them's already shut off. The one we first came through-one of those spheres of Crowley's buried the whole damn area. No one's getting out through there."
"So it's just one left," Dean said. "Where's Rufus?"
Bobby shook his head. "Buried. Too close to the explosion. Don't know if he's still alive in there, but we didn't have time to check. Annie too."
"Dammit," Dean muttered. A whoop came from the next hallway over; he recognized Jo's voice, ringing out in a taunt undoubtedly directed at a nearby spirit. Castiel close at his side, he took off, following the sound of Jo's continued cursing.
She and Charlie were backed up to the end of the hallway, running out of ground to hold. Lilith fought with her lieutenants, shaking off the spray of silver rounds and the pop of elemental spheres with only moderate difficulty. She and Azazel moved seamlessly, deflecting, dodging; Dean could see them wearing down, but not nearly enough, and two more spirits, both riding women with dark hair-one short and slight, the other tall and curvy-were still battling beside her.
"Go find it!" Dean shouted to Castiel. "I'll see you in there!"
His voice got Lilith's attention; while she was distracted by his sudden, bizarre reappearance, Castiel skirted around her and fled to the summoning chamber. A resounding cry from the spirits trapped within went up, and Dean knew he had to make it fast, or Castiel would be torn to shreds.
Lifting a hand, Dean stared down the hallway at Lilith. "Miss me?"
"Dean," they growled back, and it wasn't Lilith but Azazel. "I should have known better than to-"
Dean set off the Inferno. Lilith and her host leapt back, narrowly avoiding the blaze. Dean hefted an unbroken orb from the ground nearby and tossed it into the fray; it shattered, booming with impressive force and volume when it made contact with the flames, spraying the whole hallway with shards of silver. The pungent scent of rosemary filled up the room from floor to ceiling, and Dean didn't think he would ever be able to eat anything like that again, because it turned his stomach in a surprisingly forceful fashion.
Lilith recovered quickly, but he was ready; ducking the Compression flung out by the shorter woman, he sent out enough sparks to confuse an already bright and smoky fray, and ran past while Azazel was still coughing. "Come on!" he roared, passing through the doorway. "I'm right here, come and get me-!"
Through the door, where the smoke cleared, he spotted Castiel, hovering near a panel in the far wall. The chambers echoed with the jabber of dozens of imprisoned spirits, and when Dean turned back toward the threshold, Lilith had crossed over in pursuit, her two lieutenants in tow. That was it, as good as he was going to get, so he threw up a harsh wind and slammed the door behind him, letting the silver jar into place on the other side. He heard his people shout from the other side, demanding to be let in, but he didn't have time-he had to make this happen, and make it fast.
"Now!" he shouted, and Castiel threw the switch. The entire building groaned, the lights flickered, and slowly, surely, a pinprick of darkness grew in the center of the room.
"You little cockroach," Azazel snarled behind him, "you'll take the entire damn city down with you-"
Dean didn't dodge the Detonation in time; it singed the length of his arm when it exploded, making his exposed flesh bubble. The pain was distant, as though his connection to his body was superfluous now, but it hurt somewhere deeper, somewhere sharper, than a flesh wound-whatever part of him that had transformed to essence rather than matter was feeling it, and it was draining him.
He ran, dancing out of their reach, making his way to Castiel and giving the growing vortex at the middle of the room a wide berth. It tugged, peripherally, on his limbs, but he was more man than essence, he thought, and as long as he stayed outside the boundaries of the thing-there was a painted, enormous pentacle, marking out the edges of the room-he would be fine. But the portal needed the words to open wide enough to drag them all back to the Other Place-
He chanted, the incantation he had memorized the moment that Henriksen had sent it out of Washington, like the rest of the reports that had spelled out in no uncertain terms how doomed they all were; and while he shouted, he ran for Castiel. The djinni's teeth were gritted, his manifested form beginning to warp at the edges, his wings straining to hold him back from the tear and to keep the switch thrown-
"Go!" Dean shouted, finishing the first repetition as he skidded to a halt beside Cas. "You have to get further back, it'll take you through!" He placed his hands over the djinni's on the switch, and Castiel, reluctantly, nodded; he stepped back, slipping his fingers from beneath Dean's, to a dozen feet from the enormous pentacle's boundaries, safely out of harm's way, as close to the first door they'd closed as he could get.
Dean started the incantation again. The spirits nearest the center were already being drained into the tear, crying out as they went; this wasn't the Gate, not the traditional buffer between worlds, but something worse, something sinister, something that could rip them apart as they fell through, and certainly killed their hosts on impact.
Lilith and her lieutenants, despite their best efforts, were being dragged to the torn edge of reality, too; Azazel's yellow eyes were fixed defiantly on Dean, blood vessels erupting in the whites, Lilith's voice screaming on his lips. His fingernails tore off as he clawed at the hardwood floor. The man who had been so composed, so deliberate when he announced the death of Dean's father, was apoplectic with rage now, decomposed with his indignation at his impending death.
"Do not pass Go," Dean muttered, and started on the final repetition. He had finally started to sweat.
*
Dean was fading.
He was powerful, but not that powerful, and his strength was new, easily sapped; Castiel heard him gritting his teeth through the final words, saw the sweat soaking through his thin t-shirt, the flickering brilliance of his green eyes, and knew he was almost out of energy. He hovered as close as he dared, kept back by Dean's warning hand, ready to spring to his aid if it was possible for him to do so. That Dean was hardly compelled by the growing tear in reality spoke to his remaining human identity; no spirit inside that pentacle could have resisted the pull of that deep, terrible darkness.
Lilith was swallowed up, Azazel dragged with her, before Dean sagged and let go; the singularity collapsed on itself, and Dean fell to his knees.
The silence was deafening, until Dean gasped.
Castiel ran forward, ducking under Dean's arm before he could get all the way to the floor. "Hey, Cas," he greeted sleepily, his green eyes half-open.
"Don't go to sleep," Castiel ordered, his voice shaking. The tear had pulled so horribly at his essence, and Dean's weight was too much for him, but he couldn't let him fall. "If you go to sleep-"
"Right," Dean agreed, trying to get his feet back beneath him. Castiel helped, pulling Dean's weight upward, but when he was there, Dean still had to lean heavily on him for support. "Think I'm out of juice," he slurred.
At that moment, the last door that Dean had slammed shut banged open; the surviving members of the Resistance poured through, weapons at the ready, arms full of glowing spheres. Jo caught sight of Dean first; her sigh of relief was loud enough to reach Castiel, a hundred yards away.
"I can't," Dean croaked. "Cas, I've gotta sit, I'm so busted…"
"Told you," Castiel said, a little petulant, and slowly lowered his weight to the floor. Dean stretched his legs out with a groan, holding his blackened, dead arm away from his body. Castiel kept him sitting half upright, an arm supporting Dean's shoulders. They trembled minutely against him.
"Dean," Charlie called out, her voice reedy with shock. The group was approaching fast. "Dean, what happened?"
"They're gone," Dean reassured, though he didn't speak loud enough for them to hear yet. "They're gone, right, Cas?"
"They're gone," Castiel confirmed, tightening his hold on Dean's shoulders.
"Where?" Jody asked, shotgun still ready in her hands; they all stopped about two feet back from Dean, giving him space. Jo dropped down to one knee. Castiel saw Dean try to smile at her, though it seemed more like a cringe. She let out a hoarse laugh of disbelief, but her eyes stared at his damaged limb.
"The failsafe," Dean rasped. "It worked. Sucked them all in. Probably got torn up en route to the Other Place, if we're lucky. Look, I need to rest for a few minutes, okay? But Bobby-Jo-Jody-please, go check the rubble in the first hallway. We need to find Rufus and Annie, whether they're alive, or…"
Dean trailed off; the idea that they could have died obviously pained him. He coughed. Jo rose fluidly to her feet, nodding, and took off with Bobby and Jody at her side. Jody slipped her hand through the crook of Bobby's elbow, rested her cheek against his shoulder, and draped her free arm around Jo's shoulders. They all slumped a little, relief weighing them down.
"We should check the building," Charlie said. There were tears glittering on her face, but she didn't seem to have noticed them; she made no move to wipe them away. "Make sure that-if anyone's hiding out, or if there's any more that got past us-"
"You and Garth," Dean agreed, coughing again. "And Henriksen." The magician nodded, swinging his shotgun to his shoulder. "But be careful. Check every floor above this one-they would have tried to get out to the street. The survivors can wait. If there's still a threat, we've gotta contain it."
Charlie nodded jerkily, climbing to her feet too. She, Henriksen, and Garth left, heading for the hallway closest to the stairs, and the summoning chamber was quiet again. As soon as they were out of sight, Dean sagged back into Castiel's support, no longer trying to hold himself up.
"You're fine," Castiel reassured, even as Dean made a low, wounded noise in his throat. "We'll get out of here, and you'll be fine."
Dean's teeth chattered; a fine tremble went through him as his body succumbed to shock. Castiel lowered himself to a sitting position, cross-legged, and gently braced Dean's shoulders against his thigh, letting his head rest back on the muscle. Despite his obviously limited faculties, Dean's fingers clung tight into Castiel's arm as the djinni lowered him gently down, letting the tile floor take the whole of his weight.
"Can't go yet," Dean muttered. "I've gotta rest. Five minutes. Please."
"Maybe ten," Castiel hedged. "I'm worried about the stability of the building after what you did."
Dean smiled at that. "What we did. We've got time. They wouldn't have built the thing if the building couldn't stand it." He took a deep breath; the way the air shuddered out of him told how hard he was trying not to cough again. "I can't tell if I'm dying or just about to pass out. Don't make me move. I think I might throw up."
"No, you won't." Castiel, at a loss for anything else to do, stroked Dean's hair back from his dusty, newly-lined forehead. Dean closed his eyes at the touch, breathing shallowly; his chest rose and fell, the rhythm of it disjointed. He turned his head so that his cheek pressed into Castiel's thigh.
"Am I dying," he asked into the dusty fabric of Castiel's trench coat. "Do you think I'm dying?"
"No," Castiel repeated. His voice was shaking. "You just used too much energy at once. You'll be fine."
Dean slit one eye open to look up at Castiel, just briefly. Castiel's fingers stilled, but when Dean didn't protest the touch, he went on separating the dust from the sandy-brown-now streaked with silver-strands.
"How do you know?" Dean's muffled voice demanded.
"You're too stubborn to die," Castiel retorted, "despite all your claims otherwise."
Dean hacked out a laugh; the sound must have torn his throat on the way up. "I feel terrible."
"A dramatic overstatement."
Dean chuckled again, clearer this time, and lifted a hand to bunch his fingers into Castiel's trench coat. It was his undamaged arm; the other hung limply at his side, pressed carefully between Castiel and his own body.
"You can call it dramatic when one of your limbs is fried extra crispy," Dean muttered. "This body's actually mine, you know."
"We'll fix it," Castiel said, trying to sound dismissive.
Dean smiled, tipping his chin to look up at him. "Hate to break it to you, Cas, but I'm better at breaking things than putting them back together."
"You won," Castiel pointed out.
Dean snorted. "You sure I'm not imagining the whole thing?"
"It would be a narcissistic delusion of grandeur if you were-"
But Dean was looking at him, his eyes bright with that unnamed emotion again. "Hey," he said huskily, and it had nothing to do at all with the smoke of the debris or the pain radiating through them both. "Cas."
Automatically, instinctively, Castiel fitted his free hand against Dean's cheek, trying to soothe him. The lines around Dean's mouth deepened as he smiled; his hand crawled from Castiel's trench coat to cup a palm around the back of Castiel's neck, his fingers sliding up into Castiel's hair.
"Supposing I don't die," Dean said quietly.
"Supposing," Castiel allowed, his borrowed heart beating, beating, beating. Dean's echoed faintly, a whisper away, a thud-thud-thud that was still too fast.
"And you get back to the Other Place long enough to heal," Dean continued, his eyes straying briefly to Castiel's lips.
"You'll have to come with me," Castiel said firmly. "I doubt there's another way to replenish your energy enough to fix that burn."
Dean nodded, and from him the gesture made it seem like he was impatiently waving all this off. "Will you stay?" he asked.
"Stay where?" Castiel said blankly, frowning.
Dean swallowed. Castiel watched his throat bob, fascinated. "With me," he clarified. "You know, freedom and all that-visits to the Other Place, traveling the world, but-would you come back?"
And Dean, as he'd done since the beginning, dragged Castiel down, palm clasped around the back of his neck; or maybe Castiel was dragging Dean up-did it matter?
Because Dean, with his remaining strength, was kissing him, and it was like the Other Place flowing in an electric current through Castiel's veins. He made a muffled noise of surprise and Dean's fingers pressed hard on the back of his neck; Dean answered him with a broken moan, a thing of pain and trembling exhaustion but also the deepest, purest relief.
Dean was familiar, as though Castiel had known him all along: Dean was a grimace, and the wet warmth of moving lips, and an enthusiasm that Castiel would have thought-just seconds ago-was beyond him. And when Castiel touched back, when he carded fingers through Dean's hair, when his mouth clumsily matched Dean's eagerness, Dean hauled him impossibly closer until there seemed to be no space between them at all.
Dean made a little choked gasp deep in his throat and then, as soon as it had begun, it was over, and Dean was falling back with bright eyes and a laugh of hoarse delight on his bruised lips.
Castiel couldn't imagine where else he would possibly go.
Forward to Epilogue.
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