Fic: Away With Us (Supernatural)
Jun. 11th, 2014 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: Away With Us
Characters/pairing: Dean, Sam, Cas, Gilda, Cain
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/contains: None
Word count: 5900
Summary: Post-S9 AU. Dean is still marked by the fae as their own, and, with the Mark of Cain gone, they begin to take an interest again. This time, he finds it harder to resist.
Notes: Incredibly belated (because that's just how me and comment memes work, apparently) response to a prompt on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
biketest’s Dean-centric comment meme. I wrote most of this before 9.23 aired, so it's pretty thoroughly Jossed.
Many thanks toseptembers_coda for the beta! Any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own.
Dean doesn’t feel anything.
That’s the part he wasn’t expecting.
Or wouldn’t have expected, if he’d really thought about it, which—yeah. Thinking things through has never exactly been his strong suit, and he’s in no shape to start, not lately. He’s felt like shit long enough that it’s the status quo; that the brief, blank seconds that follow his diminishing hours of sleep, or that happen when Sam calls his name and distracts him from the dark knot of his thoughts, are sweet relief. The rest of the time, it’s this. The inside of his head feverish and disjointed, an inferno behind his eyes, a tremor of need running through him and only one thing that can make it stop.
Cain gives him the nod, and it’s an effort to hold back long enough to get through the necessaries, say what needs to be said. Dean swallows and his throat is dry. He’s parched.
“Your bones,” he says. “Burn or bury?”
Cain shrugs, self-contained and expansive both at once. “I doubt you’ll need to worry about that.” Then, “You have a promise to keep.”
Expression neutral, face impassive. Like this isn’t the last thing he’s ever gonna say.
“Hey, I’m a man of my word.”
It’s supposed to be light, cheerily inappropriate, his best attempt at playing human. This is just Dean Winchester, ganking a demon. Nothing to see here; business as usual. But his voice comes out strained, his smile an involuntary twitch, and there’s something burning up behind his eyes and his head feels like it’s about to explode. The Mark throbs like a bee sting on his arm. Worse than ever, he thinks. Like maybe it’s reacting to Cain’s presence.
“The Mark,” Dean gets out, past the roar of it in his ears. “What happens to it? When you die?”
And Cain actually looks interested, for the first time since—well, for the first time Dean has ever seen. His voice is mild, though. “I don’t know.”
He looks back at Dean, then, and Dean’s hand moves like it has a mind of its own. It’s the only part of him that’s steady, the Blade finding its target and guiding itself home. An easy thing to give himself up to. (Like he has a choice.)
Cain goes down heavy, and his body should hit the floor like a ton of bricks but it doesn’t. He disintegrates before he gets there, the big guy turning to a desiccated husk and then breaking apart. Millennia of dust settle on the wooden floorboards without a sound.
The Mark flares bright, curls and dissolves in a shudder of sparks, like burning paper. A sharp surge of pain accompanies it, disappears just as quick. Dean drops the Blade, doesn’t realise he has until he hears it clatter to the floor. For the first time in—hell, months—letting go of it isn’t like pulling teeth. He registers the fact with a dull kind of surprise. His bones don’t ache with its absence, and he can’t hear it anymore. It’s been whispering to him so long, I know what you want, I know what you need, I know what you are, swirling dark and intimate inside his skull. And now there’s—nothing. The silence feels strange, a universe of it expanding inside his head.
It’s like the center has dropped out of him. And all the other things that have been crowded out until now, lost under the burn of the Mark and the need for the fight and the blood pounding in his ears—they should come pouring back on in to fill the void.
They don’t.
There’s no guilt. No shame. He remembers the dull thud of the Blade hacking into living flesh, warm blood on his face, screams—and the relief that accompanied them, a close enough cousin to what he felt in the Pit all those years ago that he’d be a liar to pretend the difference matters. The rush of nausea that ought to follow hard on the heels of remembering doesn’t come, though. There’s no confusion, no fear, no doubt. Not even relief that it’s over.
Dean can feel the space where all of that should be, and it stays empty. He’s battered, sure, but he doesn’t ache with it. Just feels emptied out and numb, like the shell of a piñata.
Running footsteps in the hallway outside, and then Sam bursts into the room, the door bouncing off the wall hard enough to leave a mark and swinging on its hinges. Sam is breathing hard, concern on his face.
“Dean!” he yells. Comes to a halt three strides into the room and stares, taking in the pile of dust that was Cain, the Blade on the floor. “Dean?” Softer, this time.
Dean blinks at him, slow.
Sam moves towards him and it seems to take an age. Dean feels like the moment’s being played back to him on tape at half speed. It’s not really happening to him. He’s struck with a crazy conviction that if he reached his hand out to Sam right now, he wouldn’t be able to touch him.
“Don’t,” he manages to croak out. It’s barely audible, but Sam stops right away; raises his hands, placating. The kind of gesture he’d use for dealing with a monster or a gun-toting crazy, not his unarmed brother.
Dean should tell him there’s no need for any of that. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody anymore.
He doesn’t want anything. He’s just—empty. Still.
“Dean,” Sam says, again. “Are you—”
“‘M fine, Sammy,” he insists, and means it, and can’t understand why Sam keeps on looking at him like he’s supposed to say something else.
----
They head for the bunker. Dean lets Sam drive, dozes with the side of his head pressed against the window. Cas comes with them, sitting hunched forward in the backseat. Dean can hear him and Sam talking intermittently, over the rumble of the road and the soft swoosh of passing cars. No radio, but that figures. Dean’s always been the one who isn’t good with silence.
Sometimes their voices turn hushed, and he figures that means they’re talking about him. Somehow, though, he can’t muster up the energy to give a crap. He’s floating in white noise, their words passing unheard above his head.
----
Dean makes his excuses and crashes out as soon as they get home. There are conversations he should be avoiding, probably, but mostly he just can’t see any good reason to stay awake.
In the morning he climbs out of bed on autopilot, brews coffee and finds that his stomach is actually growling. First time he’s felt hungry in weeks, after fuck-knows-how-many mornings of waking up with a sore head and a sour whiskey aftertaste in the back of his mouth.
He rummages in the fridge without too much hope—he hasn’t done a real supply run in ages, and Sam’s usual breakfast choices are way over on the ‘depressingly healthy’ end of the scale—but they have bacon, and pancake batter mix, and there’s maple syrup in the cupboard beside the stove. Dean knows he didn’t buy them. It surprises him, that Sam did.
He ought to be more than surprised, he thinks.
He tries to be. He even makes a crack about Sammy having finally seen the light and escaped the Cult of Wholewheat, by way of thanks, when Sam emerges from his bedroom. Sam blinks back at him, tries on a couple different expressions before settling on a smile, like he doesn’t know what to feel.
Dean watches him and doesn’t feel, and thinks that maybe that’s best, for now.
----
The other shoe has to drop sometime. Always does. Dean did a hell of a lot of crap under the influence of the Mark, and he actually remembers most of it, which is what ought to bother him. His brain should be hard at work repressing all that stuff, right? Or at least it should be spilling out of him in nightmares, in disgust at his own face in the bathroom mirror. He should be feeling it like Hell; not this quiet, dispassionate kind of remembering, all forensic detail and no horror clawing its way up from his gut.
Eye of the storm, Dean thinks, and he waits. And waits and waits.
He gets up in the mornings. Showers, eats breakfast. Scans the newspapers for jobs out of habit, and he and Sam work a couple routine salt-and-burns, the kind they could get through blindfolded with one hand tied behind their backs, every action a reflex.
The second job is just far enough out from Lebanon that Sam insists they get a room for the night instead of driving back, and Dean doesn’t have it in him to argue.
The whole thing goes off easy, and afterwards Dean thinks he should be ready for a few beers and maybe some female company for the night—but he feels sluggish, barely awake. When they pull up in the motel parking lot, Sam heaves a sigh and shoots a concerned frown in his direction.
“You look kind of out of it,” he says. “Everything alright?”
Dean scowls at him. “The hell you talking about?” he says, because that’s what he always does, that’s the script.
And everything is okay. He’s getting used to this heavy feeling—like there’s something blanketing him, insulating his brain from the world—but that’s it. Not like his brain is much of a loss to anybody anyway. The more separating the world from that shitshow, the better, probably.
It could be worse. It could be so much fucking worse.
Sam doesn’t exactly look convinced, but he says, “Okay,” and then, “Think I’ll do a beer run, you want some?”
Dean shrugs. “Sure,” he says, because that’s in the script, too.
He lets himself into the dark room as Sam pulls away in the Impala, throws his keys on the table, goes to shut the blinds.
And that’s when he sees them.
Across the parking lot, just standing there. Three of them. Their faces are pointed and silvery-pale, their dark eyes fathomless. Even at this distance, they draw his gaze like black holes. It’s a weird, vertiginous feeling, like dropping a penny down a well and not hearing it hit bottom.
They’re staring at him. Nothing else. Just staring and standing still. Looking at their faces, Dean gets this weird feeling—like other things are watching him, too. Like maybe he’d be able to see them if he just turned his head quick enough. Shaggy things with pointed muzzles. Small crawling shadowy things. Things with feathers sharp as shards of glass.
It’s creepy as hell. It should probably worry him, at least a little. Dean gets that, the same way he gets that he should be relieved that the Mark is gone, or concerned that they haven’t heard from Cas in a couple weeks. Fear’s the best survival mechanism he has, most of the time. But all he feels is a vague sense of, great, what now? He remembers to grab his gun before he heads for the door, but mostly because just thinking about the lecture he’ll get if Sam catches him chasing around after these things unarmed makes him tired.
Naturally, when he opens the door, there’s nothing there.
Dean makes a circuit of the motel, checks the clump of trees on the other side of the parking lot. Just once, he thinks he hears a sound. Not quite a voice, not quite a hum, crystalline and distant with the ghost of something low and inhuman humming along beneath it.
He doesn’t see anything when he turns around, and the sound fades away as fast as it came.
Otherwise, it’s just a whole lot of nothing.
----
Sam pulls up in the parking lot just as Dean is letting himself back into the room.
“What’s going on?” he says, frowning.
Dean should tell him, probably. Who knows what those things were? What they wanted? If they’re gonna come back? Sam should be forewarned.
Only, something tells Dean it wasn’t Sammy they were after, and he just doesn’t have the energy to freak out about much of anything else. He isn’t curious enough to go chasing after them. Hell, maybe they were just a figment of his imagination. He’s due a spell in the nuthouse, probably; maybe his time has finally come. He can’t imagine it really mattering, whether he’s sane or not, anyway.
Mostly, he just wants to sleep.
Dean shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “Just a cat. C’mon, throw me one of those beers.”
Sam does. He lingers at the door, peering out, for a long moment after Dean lets himself into the motel room and settles in front of the TV, but eventually he gives up and closes it behind him.
----
A couple nights later, Dean’s lying in bed on top of the covers, eyes shut, headphones on. The last mournful note of “Bring It on Home” fades out, leaving behind a heavy silence, but he’s too nearly asleep to get up and change the album.
That’s when he hears the sound again.
At first he thinks maybe there’s something wrong with his stereo—or another ghost, that’d be just peachy, some dead Man of Letters hanging around the place—but when he pulls off his headphones, kills the power to his sound system at the mains, it’s still there. The same noise he heard outside the motel, when he was snooping around after those things he’d maybe-imagined. A tickle just outside normal hearing range, so he can’t tell what it is. Almost words, almost music, not quite either. The suggestion of an inhuman, animal sound somewhere beneath it.
But he gets this weird sense that—well, it’s hard to know for sure. That it’s calling to him, maybe. Dean lies there for a moment on top of the covers, not completely dredged up into wakefulness. Wonders if he can manage to sleep through it.
He tries not to hear it. He knows it’s there now, though. Just quiet enough he has to strain to catch it, but not so quiet he can ignore it. It’s just there
Dean groans, swings his legs over the side of the bed, and levers himself upright.
He follows the sound down the hallway, into the library, up the stairs and out the door, into the trees behind the bunker. It seems closer out here. They’re a couple miles from the light pollution of the town, and normally the darkness here feels like a tangible thing, like Dean should be able to reach out and touch it.
But there’s cool, gentle light under the trees. They’re standing there, waiting. Watching him with their soft, depthless eyes, reaching out to him with their pale hands.
Dean peers out of the dark at them. Realises that he knows who they are.
They don’t look much like the ones who took him before, that time in Indiana. There are a fuckton of different kinds of them, though—the lore is a mess, and no wonder. The others were more memorable, on the surface of it: the tiny glowing naked lady, the fucking brownies, like something out of a storybook for kids. These guys, though—they were there, hanging around on the other side, calm and watchful. They didn’t do much, far as he remembers, but then he doesn’t remember much. Just that he didn’t stay with them; he couldn’t. He had other things to worry about—Sam, mostly. But maybe, somewhere in the back of his mind, he kind of wanted to.
He didn’t feel anything, there. He was so damn sick of feeling things.
They’re smiling at him. Eyes dead as space and soft as velvet. He’s never seen the dark look so welcoming.
Dean, he hears, then. It isn’t a sound at all, really, more like a feeling inside his head. Come with us. Come away. Come.
He looks back at them, not moving forward, not running away either.
There are a dozen things he could say, most of them variations on, Get the fuck out of here and leave me alone, but the only one that comes out is, “Why now?”
A beat; a space between breaths.
The taint. Before. So much darkness. Couldn’t let it into our home. None of that, where we are. Just peace. The woods and the wild and nothing else.
Come with us. Come away. Come.
The Mark. He doesn’t get why that’s such a big deal to them, really. Not like it was ever the only stain on his soul. Gone now, though.
And Dean thinks: if he wanted, he could go. He could go.
----
He wakes hours later in the grass, shoeless and shivering, his t-shirt and sweats soaked with dew. Sam’s hand is on his shoulder. Sam’s voice in his ear, vibrating with concern.
“Dean,” he’s saying. “Dean, what the hell?”
(For once, Hell has nothing to do with it.)
He shrugs Sam’s hand off, pulls himself upright. The cold has sunk in deep, made itself at home in his bones. They protest when he forces himself to make for the bunker.
Dean showers and changes into dry clothes and necks a couple shots of whiskey sitting at the table in the library. None of it does anything to warm the chill at the center of him. Sam watches him, unsuccessfully trying to hide a frown behind his laptop. Dean gets the impression he’s supposed to say something—make a crack about how Sammy can come over here and cuddle him if he’s that worried, or growl out a protest that he’s fine and Jesus, Sam, I’m not a goddamn invalid, drop it. He can’t find the stomach for it, though, somehow.
He’s still shivering.
Cold. That’s all he feels.
----
Sam looks worried when he thinks Dean can’t see him. The rest of the time, he avoids Dean’s eyes, keeps quiet, buries his head in books. He shuts himself in his room a lot. Once, Dean thinks, he woulda made something of that. Come out with some joke about Sam taking advantage of finally having separate rooms to jerk off in.
He keeps his mouth shut.
Jokes are a defense mechanism. They cover up other things, and Dean has no other things in his head to worry about anymore, and nothing else he wants to say. The silence between them grows unbridgeable.
It seems like things have been this way forever. Dean thinks he’s definitely supposed to feel something about that—guilty or pissed off or regretful, or some flavour of crappy, anyhow—but he doesn’t. Just breathing weighs heavy enough on him, sometimes. In a vague kind of way, he’s glad the other stuff leaves him alone.
----
The sound wakes Dean up again a couple nights later. He sees them again, hears them calling. Wonders if this time, he’ll go.
Wakes up lying in the grass out back, near the trees, and isn’t sure why he stayed.
----
The second time Sam finds him passed out on the ground at asshole o’clock in the morning, he can’t stop shivering.
Sam shakes his head, says, “You keep doing this, you’re gonna get sick,” and offers his hand to help Dean up.
Dean gets to his feet under his own steam, ducks out from under the steadying hand Sam places on his shoulder when he wobbles. He manages to get up a half-assed protest about being babied (it’s in the script), but then a sneeze that probably registers somewhere on the Richter scale bursts out of him, and when Sam steers him to the couch and vanishes to look for blankets and aspirin, he finds that doesn’t have the energy to fight about it.
He doesn’t have the energy to fight about much of anything, these days.
He doesn’t even want to, not really. He doesn’t know what he wants, if anything.
Sam sits down at his laptop, and Dean shuts his eyes again, drifts off to sleep to the rhythmic clacking of keys.
When Dean wakes up, his head feels thick and weird, the way it sometimes does after a really vivid dream or a nightmare. Well, usually a nightmare, no use pussyfooting around that one. He isn’t sure, right away, what’s real. His ears ring with echoes, and the afterimages of lights dance behind his eyes, and for a moment he feels a real, sharp pang of loss.
He rubs his eyes, takes in the familiar furniture, the sound of utensils clattering in the kitchen, Sam’s empty mug and his laptop still open on the desk. The pang fades as reality comes back into focus, and after a moment Dean can’t even remember what it was he missed, except maybe some vague, dumb-as-shit idea that everything was gonna be okay.
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Dean snorts.
He grabs Sam’s laptop off the desk, mostly for something to do with his hands.
Sam has two tabs open. One of the folklore databases he sometimes uses for research—that’s the one that’s up in the browser window. Some depression support group crap in the other one. Dean rolls his eyes, closes out of it. Figures he probably ought to give Sam a hard time about that, going looking for crazy when for once their lives are—well, maybe eighty percent bugfuck free?
Probably ought to, but he knows he won’t.
Dean hesitates over the other page, the folklore database. Runs through a mental checklist of the reasons not to bother. They already dealt with the fairy crap; it was done and dusted, and it doesn’t actually seem like they mean him any harm right now. He’s not even sure he has any fucks left to give if they do. And then there’s kicker: why the hell would they want him, anyway?
That one gives him pause a moment longer. Then he types in, fairies.
----
Figures, there’d be a rupture in the wall between realities somewhere around here. An entrance to fairyland, if you wanna get traditional about it. All the signs point to it, according to Sam’s handy online repository of information about supernatural pains in the ass.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons the Men of Letters decided to build their top-secret HQ here. Or maybe it’s just that creepy sticks to Dean and Sam like flies on shit. Not that it bothers Dean a whole lot. Which is weird, considering the creepy seems to be stalking him, and he should maybe worry about that.
He doesn’t. He just turns the thought over and over in his head. Imagines a door. Imagines stepping through it.
He’s imagining it right now, while Cas tells him all about the stolen grace he’s leaking like a ruptured gas tank, about how contact with Heaven is the only thing keeping him going, about how if he doesn’t find a way to fix it, then soon he’ll have to stay there permanently, won’t even be able to zap back down here for these hour-long visits.
Dean remembers having a conversation a little like this one once before. How it felt like dying inside, but he grinned and made some dumb E.T. reference like it could cover over the pit of despair that the thought of Cas being gone opened up in the pit of his stomach.
Now, he slaps Cas on the shoulder, says, “So, being around us is literally your Kryptonite, huh?”
He tries to remember how it felt, before—to really remember it, to feel the hollow of it in his gut again. He can’t get there.
It doesn’t feel like dying, not this time. You have to be at least halfway alive in the first place for that, right?
Cas’s face works through a complicated series of expressions, finally lands on one that Dean can’t make sense of for a moment. Then he realises it’s just plain sad.
“I don’t think that analogy makes sense,” Cas says.
Dean molds his face into a smile. It doesn’t feel right. He can’t tell if it’s convincing. (He used to be able to fake it easy, didn’t he?) “So,” he says, “you got time for a beer before you turn into a pumpkin?”
The look Cas turns on him is uneasy, but he nods.
Cas is leaving them, Cas is leaving him, and Dean can barely feel it because Dean is already gone.
He’s already gone. Dean thinks it again, and realizes his decision is made.
----
He goes alone.
He knows he should’ve told Sammy the plan, but he goes alone. Unarmed, too, which is probably the dumbest idea he’s had in a while, but he just feels like—like he knows it’d be pointless. There’s nothing out there he wants to fight.
He doesn’t know what the hell he is planning to do, or even why he’s going, really. Unless it’s just how peaceful everything seemed. Like he could just lay down in it and close his eyes. How he wanted that, and how it was the closest thing to a real feeling he’d had in forever.
At first, he can’t see them. Thinks, dully, that he’s left it too late. The one night he makes his damn mind up, and there’s nobody here. He stands very still, breathing slow in the night air, the long wet grass around his ankles soaking his jeans. Nothing.
It’s silent, no light in the trees, and Dean shrugs his shoulders numbly, expecting it, not even really disappointed. He half-turns, ready to head back inside.
And then.
That sound, that almost-music, and when Dean looks back he sees a way into somewhere—else.
A forest hung with stars. The light has this fuzzy, phosphorescent underwater quality. Like those glow-in-the-dark deep-sea fish they sometimes show on nature documentaries, luring in prey by giving it something to swim for in the depths. It’s all hazy and soft. And the light and the softness and the calm are all there is.
No demons, no monsters, no decisions. No losses, no fear, no pain.
He’ll never have to worry about feeling those things ever again.
They’re waiting. Still smiling. They hold out their hands to him. Come with us. Come away. Come.
Dean goes.
----
It isn’t just pretty here. It’s like a five-star hotel room dressed up as a forest clearing, with the mossy ground as comfortable as any bed Dean’s ever slept in, and some kind of weirdo magic booze that’s probably made of unicorn tears and stardust flowing freely. Everything’s in warm, deep colours, like an old illustration in a book of kids’ fairytales. You know: the edited version, where in the end the heroes come out on top and the wicked witch ends up dumped in the well, and the bad guys might wear disguises but the mirror is one place they never hide.
Everyone here is smiling. All of them are beautiful. Not just hot—though, yeah, looking around, nobody Dean wouldn’t hit on sober. But in the soft light, they look fucking angelic, all shining eyes and bright, genuine laughter, never faltering, never looking down.
Somebody hands Dean a cup of something syrupy-sweet and a hell of a lot stronger than whiskey. It makes his head spin, but not in a bad way. It doesn’t feel like he’s about to puke or start pouring out his life-story on a stranger’s shoulder or anything like that.
It feels like the world is rocking him to sleep. He couldn’t tell his life story because it’s not even there anymore; the dead weight of it inside his chest is gone, like it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing left to anchor him to his grief and his guilt and all the shitty choices he’s made in a lifetime of having nothing but shitty choices. He’s empty and clean.
Dean finds a quiet space on the edge of the clearing. Leans his back against the trunk of a huge tree, feels the scrape of bark through his shirt. He tips his head back.
He can’t see the stars. He doesn’t know what time it is, how long he’s been here.
He doesn’t mind.
----
An indefinite time later, he catches sight of a face he sort-of recognizes, somewhere on the other side of the laughing, drinking throng.
She has long shiny hair, and her face is cute but kinda vacant. It’s the absence of expression that makes him struggle to place her for a moment.
Eventually, though, he figures it out. That fairy chick Charlie almost hooked up with. Gilda, that was her name. She’d looked pretty seriously into Charlie at the time—Dean always figured that maybe she occasionally hopped back over the border for a booty call. And she’d been seriously pissed with the guy who was controlling her, righteous rage vibrating beneath her gentle surface. He remembers being more than happy to step back and let her take care of business.
Right now, though, her face is serene; her smile perfectly empty.
Dean remembers her saying something about a tribunal, which seemed to make sense at the time. But looking around him, he can’t imagine these people having anything like a court of law. Can’t imagine them angry. He can’t imagine feeling angry ever again. Not here.
The sight of a familiar face does stir something uncomfortable in him, though, and he makes his way over there without any real idea of what he’s gonna say to her. Just some vague idea of putting the memory to rest, he guesses. It makes him uneasy, remembering that he has another life and he maybe shouldn’t be here, and Dean doesn’t want to deal with that. He doesn’t want to feel that.
“Hey,” he says, when he finally catches Gilda’s eye. His voice feels kind of rusty, and Dean realises he hasn’t done much talking since he got here.
He hasn’t done much talking in a while, come to think of it.
Gilda looks at him without recognition; shakes her head, still smiling. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”
“Uh, Dean. Winchester.” Nothing. “Friend of Charlie’s.”
Her face stays blank for a moment, and then her expression clears. “Charlie,” she says, smile brightening a notch. “Yes. She was pleasant to look at.”
And that’s it. No, Have you seen her, no, How is she?, no, Tell her I said ‘hi’. No nothing. Just the mask of serenity slotting neatly back into place.
Dean watches her, frowning. Feels an unexpected pang of sadness.
Feels it.
Christ, even if it was just a one-time thing—forgetting somebody like that? Somebody who saved your ass, and more than that, your freedom? Not even forgetting, really, just… not caring about them anymore?
There’s a fuckton of lore about fairies, half of it contradictory, most of it probably at least a little true. One thing that shows up again and again. They were human once. Now they’re not.
That’s what this place does to you.
Dean notices, then—really notices—that he isn’t looking at some hot chick his friend hooked up with once. He’s looking at a creature, an inhuman blank.
And it’s just like seeing a monster in the mirror.
He thinks about Sam, running into Cain’s house, yelling for him. Sam trying to help him up out of the cold, soaking grass outside the bunker, Sam fetching him medicine and blankets when he got sick from it. Sam watching him quietly, not pushing him and not giving up.
How long has Sam been trying to save his ass? How long has Dean not been noticing it?
Suddenly, all at once, he can’t think of anything worse.
He feels sick. He feels dizzy, as the dam breaks and it all rushes in on him. He feels anger and fear and guilt and loss, and he wants Sam and he wants Cas and he’s not supposed to be here, he doesn’t want to be here, no, fuck, please.
Gilda looks up at him again. Tilts her head, curious.
Dean’s frozen where he stands. He can imagine the horror on his own face, can see it in the way other people are turning to look at him now. Like they’re just now noticing he doesn’t fit.
Gilda takes his hand. “You can’t stay,” she tells him, and her voice is kind, without even a hint of sadness.
“Yeah,” he gets out. “Yeah, I got that.”
It’s fading already, the whole scene. Fading before his eyes. Something moves beneath it.
Dean doesn’t stay to watch. He turns, and he runs for home.
----
He doesn’t hear anybody follow him. It’s just his own footsteps crashing through the undergrowth, his own breath rasping in his ears.
And the music. It’s weird, high and insidious, and he starts to hear all the other sounds in it, the weird animal noises, the alien harmonies. It digs tendrils into his brain and makes him feel woozy, anchoring him momentarily to the spot. He can’t remember which direction he came from. He can’t find the path. He turns and turns and roots trip him, branches seem to catch at his clothes.
Dean turns again, thinks he sees light and plunges through the space between two trees and isn’t sure if the forest he comes out in is the same one or not. He gets the sense of a bunch of different realities pressing in on him. Like he could walk through a gap in the trees and find himself in another state, another country, another century.
He has no line to hold on to. He doesn’t know the way home.
He steadies himself with his hand against a tree trunk, dizzy. Tries to find something to focus on. Not something here. Something real.
Sam’s hand on his shoulder. He remembers it. Solid, if he’d only been able to feel it. An anchor for him, if he’d only been able to see what Sam was offering.
Sam. He closes his eyes and pictures Sam. His steady hands. His stupid fussing with blankets and aspirin. His face, scrunched up with concern, washed out in the light from his laptop screen. There. Patient. Waiting.
Dean keeps his eyes closed, and he walks forward.
----
He crashes out into sheeting, horizontal rain.
He doesn’t know where the hell he is. He has no gun and he has no fucking shoes. Hell, he doesn’t even have a quarter for a payphone. But a little ways down the road he finds a diner, and he apparently looks pathetic—or crazy—enough that the little old lady behind the counter lets him use the phone for free.
Sam picks up on the second ring. His voice when he answers is tight, nervous.
“It’s me,” Dean says without prelude, and hears Sam let out a shuddering breath.
Sam doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Three weeks, Dean. Three fucking weeks. Where were you?”
“Don’t know,” Dean admits, and Sam makes this strangled noise that’s almost a laugh.
Dean opens his mouth to continue, to say, I’m sorry for everything, or where’s Cas, we gotta help him, or, what are we gonna do?, but what comes out is, “I want to come home.”
Characters/pairing: Dean, Sam, Cas, Gilda, Cain
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/contains: None
Word count: 5900
Summary: Post-S9 AU. Dean is still marked by the fae as their own, and, with the Mark of Cain gone, they begin to take an interest again. This time, he finds it harder to resist.
Notes: Incredibly belated (because that's just how me and comment memes work, apparently) response to a prompt on
biketest’s Dean-centric comment meme. I wrote most of this before 9.23 aired, so it's pretty thoroughly Jossed.Many thanks to
septembers_coda for the beta! Any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own.Dean doesn’t feel anything.
That’s the part he wasn’t expecting.
Or wouldn’t have expected, if he’d really thought about it, which—yeah. Thinking things through has never exactly been his strong suit, and he’s in no shape to start, not lately. He’s felt like shit long enough that it’s the status quo; that the brief, blank seconds that follow his diminishing hours of sleep, or that happen when Sam calls his name and distracts him from the dark knot of his thoughts, are sweet relief. The rest of the time, it’s this. The inside of his head feverish and disjointed, an inferno behind his eyes, a tremor of need running through him and only one thing that can make it stop.
Cain gives him the nod, and it’s an effort to hold back long enough to get through the necessaries, say what needs to be said. Dean swallows and his throat is dry. He’s parched.
“Your bones,” he says. “Burn or bury?”
Cain shrugs, self-contained and expansive both at once. “I doubt you’ll need to worry about that.” Then, “You have a promise to keep.”
Expression neutral, face impassive. Like this isn’t the last thing he’s ever gonna say.
“Hey, I’m a man of my word.”
It’s supposed to be light, cheerily inappropriate, his best attempt at playing human. This is just Dean Winchester, ganking a demon. Nothing to see here; business as usual. But his voice comes out strained, his smile an involuntary twitch, and there’s something burning up behind his eyes and his head feels like it’s about to explode. The Mark throbs like a bee sting on his arm. Worse than ever, he thinks. Like maybe it’s reacting to Cain’s presence.
“The Mark,” Dean gets out, past the roar of it in his ears. “What happens to it? When you die?”
And Cain actually looks interested, for the first time since—well, for the first time Dean has ever seen. His voice is mild, though. “I don’t know.”
He looks back at Dean, then, and Dean’s hand moves like it has a mind of its own. It’s the only part of him that’s steady, the Blade finding its target and guiding itself home. An easy thing to give himself up to. (Like he has a choice.)
Cain goes down heavy, and his body should hit the floor like a ton of bricks but it doesn’t. He disintegrates before he gets there, the big guy turning to a desiccated husk and then breaking apart. Millennia of dust settle on the wooden floorboards without a sound.
The Mark flares bright, curls and dissolves in a shudder of sparks, like burning paper. A sharp surge of pain accompanies it, disappears just as quick. Dean drops the Blade, doesn’t realise he has until he hears it clatter to the floor. For the first time in—hell, months—letting go of it isn’t like pulling teeth. He registers the fact with a dull kind of surprise. His bones don’t ache with its absence, and he can’t hear it anymore. It’s been whispering to him so long, I know what you want, I know what you need, I know what you are, swirling dark and intimate inside his skull. And now there’s—nothing. The silence feels strange, a universe of it expanding inside his head.
It’s like the center has dropped out of him. And all the other things that have been crowded out until now, lost under the burn of the Mark and the need for the fight and the blood pounding in his ears—they should come pouring back on in to fill the void.
They don’t.
There’s no guilt. No shame. He remembers the dull thud of the Blade hacking into living flesh, warm blood on his face, screams—and the relief that accompanied them, a close enough cousin to what he felt in the Pit all those years ago that he’d be a liar to pretend the difference matters. The rush of nausea that ought to follow hard on the heels of remembering doesn’t come, though. There’s no confusion, no fear, no doubt. Not even relief that it’s over.
Dean can feel the space where all of that should be, and it stays empty. He’s battered, sure, but he doesn’t ache with it. Just feels emptied out and numb, like the shell of a piñata.
Running footsteps in the hallway outside, and then Sam bursts into the room, the door bouncing off the wall hard enough to leave a mark and swinging on its hinges. Sam is breathing hard, concern on his face.
“Dean!” he yells. Comes to a halt three strides into the room and stares, taking in the pile of dust that was Cain, the Blade on the floor. “Dean?” Softer, this time.
Dean blinks at him, slow.
Sam moves towards him and it seems to take an age. Dean feels like the moment’s being played back to him on tape at half speed. It’s not really happening to him. He’s struck with a crazy conviction that if he reached his hand out to Sam right now, he wouldn’t be able to touch him.
“Don’t,” he manages to croak out. It’s barely audible, but Sam stops right away; raises his hands, placating. The kind of gesture he’d use for dealing with a monster or a gun-toting crazy, not his unarmed brother.
Dean should tell him there’s no need for any of that. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody anymore.
He doesn’t want anything. He’s just—empty. Still.
“Dean,” Sam says, again. “Are you—”
“‘M fine, Sammy,” he insists, and means it, and can’t understand why Sam keeps on looking at him like he’s supposed to say something else.
They head for the bunker. Dean lets Sam drive, dozes with the side of his head pressed against the window. Cas comes with them, sitting hunched forward in the backseat. Dean can hear him and Sam talking intermittently, over the rumble of the road and the soft swoosh of passing cars. No radio, but that figures. Dean’s always been the one who isn’t good with silence.
Sometimes their voices turn hushed, and he figures that means they’re talking about him. Somehow, though, he can’t muster up the energy to give a crap. He’s floating in white noise, their words passing unheard above his head.
Dean makes his excuses and crashes out as soon as they get home. There are conversations he should be avoiding, probably, but mostly he just can’t see any good reason to stay awake.
In the morning he climbs out of bed on autopilot, brews coffee and finds that his stomach is actually growling. First time he’s felt hungry in weeks, after fuck-knows-how-many mornings of waking up with a sore head and a sour whiskey aftertaste in the back of his mouth.
He rummages in the fridge without too much hope—he hasn’t done a real supply run in ages, and Sam’s usual breakfast choices are way over on the ‘depressingly healthy’ end of the scale—but they have bacon, and pancake batter mix, and there’s maple syrup in the cupboard beside the stove. Dean knows he didn’t buy them. It surprises him, that Sam did.
He ought to be more than surprised, he thinks.
He tries to be. He even makes a crack about Sammy having finally seen the light and escaped the Cult of Wholewheat, by way of thanks, when Sam emerges from his bedroom. Sam blinks back at him, tries on a couple different expressions before settling on a smile, like he doesn’t know what to feel.
Dean watches him and doesn’t feel, and thinks that maybe that’s best, for now.
The other shoe has to drop sometime. Always does. Dean did a hell of a lot of crap under the influence of the Mark, and he actually remembers most of it, which is what ought to bother him. His brain should be hard at work repressing all that stuff, right? Or at least it should be spilling out of him in nightmares, in disgust at his own face in the bathroom mirror. He should be feeling it like Hell; not this quiet, dispassionate kind of remembering, all forensic detail and no horror clawing its way up from his gut.
Eye of the storm, Dean thinks, and he waits. And waits and waits.
He gets up in the mornings. Showers, eats breakfast. Scans the newspapers for jobs out of habit, and he and Sam work a couple routine salt-and-burns, the kind they could get through blindfolded with one hand tied behind their backs, every action a reflex.
The second job is just far enough out from Lebanon that Sam insists they get a room for the night instead of driving back, and Dean doesn’t have it in him to argue.
The whole thing goes off easy, and afterwards Dean thinks he should be ready for a few beers and maybe some female company for the night—but he feels sluggish, barely awake. When they pull up in the motel parking lot, Sam heaves a sigh and shoots a concerned frown in his direction.
“You look kind of out of it,” he says. “Everything alright?”
Dean scowls at him. “The hell you talking about?” he says, because that’s what he always does, that’s the script.
And everything is okay. He’s getting used to this heavy feeling—like there’s something blanketing him, insulating his brain from the world—but that’s it. Not like his brain is much of a loss to anybody anyway. The more separating the world from that shitshow, the better, probably.
It could be worse. It could be so much fucking worse.
Sam doesn’t exactly look convinced, but he says, “Okay,” and then, “Think I’ll do a beer run, you want some?”
Dean shrugs. “Sure,” he says, because that’s in the script, too.
He lets himself into the dark room as Sam pulls away in the Impala, throws his keys on the table, goes to shut the blinds.
And that’s when he sees them.
Across the parking lot, just standing there. Three of them. Their faces are pointed and silvery-pale, their dark eyes fathomless. Even at this distance, they draw his gaze like black holes. It’s a weird, vertiginous feeling, like dropping a penny down a well and not hearing it hit bottom.
They’re staring at him. Nothing else. Just staring and standing still. Looking at their faces, Dean gets this weird feeling—like other things are watching him, too. Like maybe he’d be able to see them if he just turned his head quick enough. Shaggy things with pointed muzzles. Small crawling shadowy things. Things with feathers sharp as shards of glass.
It’s creepy as hell. It should probably worry him, at least a little. Dean gets that, the same way he gets that he should be relieved that the Mark is gone, or concerned that they haven’t heard from Cas in a couple weeks. Fear’s the best survival mechanism he has, most of the time. But all he feels is a vague sense of, great, what now? He remembers to grab his gun before he heads for the door, but mostly because just thinking about the lecture he’ll get if Sam catches him chasing around after these things unarmed makes him tired.
Naturally, when he opens the door, there’s nothing there.
Dean makes a circuit of the motel, checks the clump of trees on the other side of the parking lot. Just once, he thinks he hears a sound. Not quite a voice, not quite a hum, crystalline and distant with the ghost of something low and inhuman humming along beneath it.
He doesn’t see anything when he turns around, and the sound fades away as fast as it came.
Otherwise, it’s just a whole lot of nothing.
Sam pulls up in the parking lot just as Dean is letting himself back into the room.
“What’s going on?” he says, frowning.
Dean should tell him, probably. Who knows what those things were? What they wanted? If they’re gonna come back? Sam should be forewarned.
Only, something tells Dean it wasn’t Sammy they were after, and he just doesn’t have the energy to freak out about much of anything else. He isn’t curious enough to go chasing after them. Hell, maybe they were just a figment of his imagination. He’s due a spell in the nuthouse, probably; maybe his time has finally come. He can’t imagine it really mattering, whether he’s sane or not, anyway.
Mostly, he just wants to sleep.
Dean shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “Just a cat. C’mon, throw me one of those beers.”
Sam does. He lingers at the door, peering out, for a long moment after Dean lets himself into the motel room and settles in front of the TV, but eventually he gives up and closes it behind him.
A couple nights later, Dean’s lying in bed on top of the covers, eyes shut, headphones on. The last mournful note of “Bring It on Home” fades out, leaving behind a heavy silence, but he’s too nearly asleep to get up and change the album.
That’s when he hears the sound again.
At first he thinks maybe there’s something wrong with his stereo—or another ghost, that’d be just peachy, some dead Man of Letters hanging around the place—but when he pulls off his headphones, kills the power to his sound system at the mains, it’s still there. The same noise he heard outside the motel, when he was snooping around after those things he’d maybe-imagined. A tickle just outside normal hearing range, so he can’t tell what it is. Almost words, almost music, not quite either. The suggestion of an inhuman, animal sound somewhere beneath it.
But he gets this weird sense that—well, it’s hard to know for sure. That it’s calling to him, maybe. Dean lies there for a moment on top of the covers, not completely dredged up into wakefulness. Wonders if he can manage to sleep through it.
He tries not to hear it. He knows it’s there now, though. Just quiet enough he has to strain to catch it, but not so quiet he can ignore it. It’s just there
Dean groans, swings his legs over the side of the bed, and levers himself upright.
He follows the sound down the hallway, into the library, up the stairs and out the door, into the trees behind the bunker. It seems closer out here. They’re a couple miles from the light pollution of the town, and normally the darkness here feels like a tangible thing, like Dean should be able to reach out and touch it.
But there’s cool, gentle light under the trees. They’re standing there, waiting. Watching him with their soft, depthless eyes, reaching out to him with their pale hands.
Dean peers out of the dark at them. Realises that he knows who they are.
They don’t look much like the ones who took him before, that time in Indiana. There are a fuckton of different kinds of them, though—the lore is a mess, and no wonder. The others were more memorable, on the surface of it: the tiny glowing naked lady, the fucking brownies, like something out of a storybook for kids. These guys, though—they were there, hanging around on the other side, calm and watchful. They didn’t do much, far as he remembers, but then he doesn’t remember much. Just that he didn’t stay with them; he couldn’t. He had other things to worry about—Sam, mostly. But maybe, somewhere in the back of his mind, he kind of wanted to.
He didn’t feel anything, there. He was so damn sick of feeling things.
They’re smiling at him. Eyes dead as space and soft as velvet. He’s never seen the dark look so welcoming.
Dean, he hears, then. It isn’t a sound at all, really, more like a feeling inside his head. Come with us. Come away. Come.
He looks back at them, not moving forward, not running away either.
There are a dozen things he could say, most of them variations on, Get the fuck out of here and leave me alone, but the only one that comes out is, “Why now?”
A beat; a space between breaths.
The taint. Before. So much darkness. Couldn’t let it into our home. None of that, where we are. Just peace. The woods and the wild and nothing else.
Come with us. Come away. Come.
The Mark. He doesn’t get why that’s such a big deal to them, really. Not like it was ever the only stain on his soul. Gone now, though.
And Dean thinks: if he wanted, he could go. He could go.
He wakes hours later in the grass, shoeless and shivering, his t-shirt and sweats soaked with dew. Sam’s hand is on his shoulder. Sam’s voice in his ear, vibrating with concern.
“Dean,” he’s saying. “Dean, what the hell?”
(For once, Hell has nothing to do with it.)
He shrugs Sam’s hand off, pulls himself upright. The cold has sunk in deep, made itself at home in his bones. They protest when he forces himself to make for the bunker.
Dean showers and changes into dry clothes and necks a couple shots of whiskey sitting at the table in the library. None of it does anything to warm the chill at the center of him. Sam watches him, unsuccessfully trying to hide a frown behind his laptop. Dean gets the impression he’s supposed to say something—make a crack about how Sammy can come over here and cuddle him if he’s that worried, or growl out a protest that he’s fine and Jesus, Sam, I’m not a goddamn invalid, drop it. He can’t find the stomach for it, though, somehow.
He’s still shivering.
Cold. That’s all he feels.
Sam looks worried when he thinks Dean can’t see him. The rest of the time, he avoids Dean’s eyes, keeps quiet, buries his head in books. He shuts himself in his room a lot. Once, Dean thinks, he woulda made something of that. Come out with some joke about Sam taking advantage of finally having separate rooms to jerk off in.
He keeps his mouth shut.
Jokes are a defense mechanism. They cover up other things, and Dean has no other things in his head to worry about anymore, and nothing else he wants to say. The silence between them grows unbridgeable.
It seems like things have been this way forever. Dean thinks he’s definitely supposed to feel something about that—guilty or pissed off or regretful, or some flavour of crappy, anyhow—but he doesn’t. Just breathing weighs heavy enough on him, sometimes. In a vague kind of way, he’s glad the other stuff leaves him alone.
The sound wakes Dean up again a couple nights later. He sees them again, hears them calling. Wonders if this time, he’ll go.
Wakes up lying in the grass out back, near the trees, and isn’t sure why he stayed.
The second time Sam finds him passed out on the ground at asshole o’clock in the morning, he can’t stop shivering.
Sam shakes his head, says, “You keep doing this, you’re gonna get sick,” and offers his hand to help Dean up.
Dean gets to his feet under his own steam, ducks out from under the steadying hand Sam places on his shoulder when he wobbles. He manages to get up a half-assed protest about being babied (it’s in the script), but then a sneeze that probably registers somewhere on the Richter scale bursts out of him, and when Sam steers him to the couch and vanishes to look for blankets and aspirin, he finds that doesn’t have the energy to fight about it.
He doesn’t have the energy to fight about much of anything, these days.
He doesn’t even want to, not really. He doesn’t know what he wants, if anything.
Sam sits down at his laptop, and Dean shuts his eyes again, drifts off to sleep to the rhythmic clacking of keys.
When Dean wakes up, his head feels thick and weird, the way it sometimes does after a really vivid dream or a nightmare. Well, usually a nightmare, no use pussyfooting around that one. He isn’t sure, right away, what’s real. His ears ring with echoes, and the afterimages of lights dance behind his eyes, and for a moment he feels a real, sharp pang of loss.
He rubs his eyes, takes in the familiar furniture, the sound of utensils clattering in the kitchen, Sam’s empty mug and his laptop still open on the desk. The pang fades as reality comes back into focus, and after a moment Dean can’t even remember what it was he missed, except maybe some vague, dumb-as-shit idea that everything was gonna be okay.
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Dean snorts.
He grabs Sam’s laptop off the desk, mostly for something to do with his hands.
Sam has two tabs open. One of the folklore databases he sometimes uses for research—that’s the one that’s up in the browser window. Some depression support group crap in the other one. Dean rolls his eyes, closes out of it. Figures he probably ought to give Sam a hard time about that, going looking for crazy when for once their lives are—well, maybe eighty percent bugfuck free?
Probably ought to, but he knows he won’t.
Dean hesitates over the other page, the folklore database. Runs through a mental checklist of the reasons not to bother. They already dealt with the fairy crap; it was done and dusted, and it doesn’t actually seem like they mean him any harm right now. He’s not even sure he has any fucks left to give if they do. And then there’s kicker: why the hell would they want him, anyway?
That one gives him pause a moment longer. Then he types in, fairies.
Figures, there’d be a rupture in the wall between realities somewhere around here. An entrance to fairyland, if you wanna get traditional about it. All the signs point to it, according to Sam’s handy online repository of information about supernatural pains in the ass.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons the Men of Letters decided to build their top-secret HQ here. Or maybe it’s just that creepy sticks to Dean and Sam like flies on shit. Not that it bothers Dean a whole lot. Which is weird, considering the creepy seems to be stalking him, and he should maybe worry about that.
He doesn’t. He just turns the thought over and over in his head. Imagines a door. Imagines stepping through it.
He’s imagining it right now, while Cas tells him all about the stolen grace he’s leaking like a ruptured gas tank, about how contact with Heaven is the only thing keeping him going, about how if he doesn’t find a way to fix it, then soon he’ll have to stay there permanently, won’t even be able to zap back down here for these hour-long visits.
Dean remembers having a conversation a little like this one once before. How it felt like dying inside, but he grinned and made some dumb E.T. reference like it could cover over the pit of despair that the thought of Cas being gone opened up in the pit of his stomach.
Now, he slaps Cas on the shoulder, says, “So, being around us is literally your Kryptonite, huh?”
He tries to remember how it felt, before—to really remember it, to feel the hollow of it in his gut again. He can’t get there.
It doesn’t feel like dying, not this time. You have to be at least halfway alive in the first place for that, right?
Cas’s face works through a complicated series of expressions, finally lands on one that Dean can’t make sense of for a moment. Then he realises it’s just plain sad.
“I don’t think that analogy makes sense,” Cas says.
Dean molds his face into a smile. It doesn’t feel right. He can’t tell if it’s convincing. (He used to be able to fake it easy, didn’t he?) “So,” he says, “you got time for a beer before you turn into a pumpkin?”
The look Cas turns on him is uneasy, but he nods.
Cas is leaving them, Cas is leaving him, and Dean can barely feel it because Dean is already gone.
He’s already gone. Dean thinks it again, and realizes his decision is made.
He goes alone.
He knows he should’ve told Sammy the plan, but he goes alone. Unarmed, too, which is probably the dumbest idea he’s had in a while, but he just feels like—like he knows it’d be pointless. There’s nothing out there he wants to fight.
He doesn’t know what the hell he is planning to do, or even why he’s going, really. Unless it’s just how peaceful everything seemed. Like he could just lay down in it and close his eyes. How he wanted that, and how it was the closest thing to a real feeling he’d had in forever.
At first, he can’t see them. Thinks, dully, that he’s left it too late. The one night he makes his damn mind up, and there’s nobody here. He stands very still, breathing slow in the night air, the long wet grass around his ankles soaking his jeans. Nothing.
It’s silent, no light in the trees, and Dean shrugs his shoulders numbly, expecting it, not even really disappointed. He half-turns, ready to head back inside.
And then.
That sound, that almost-music, and when Dean looks back he sees a way into somewhere—else.
A forest hung with stars. The light has this fuzzy, phosphorescent underwater quality. Like those glow-in-the-dark deep-sea fish they sometimes show on nature documentaries, luring in prey by giving it something to swim for in the depths. It’s all hazy and soft. And the light and the softness and the calm are all there is.
No demons, no monsters, no decisions. No losses, no fear, no pain.
He’ll never have to worry about feeling those things ever again.
They’re waiting. Still smiling. They hold out their hands to him. Come with us. Come away. Come.
Dean goes.
It isn’t just pretty here. It’s like a five-star hotel room dressed up as a forest clearing, with the mossy ground as comfortable as any bed Dean’s ever slept in, and some kind of weirdo magic booze that’s probably made of unicorn tears and stardust flowing freely. Everything’s in warm, deep colours, like an old illustration in a book of kids’ fairytales. You know: the edited version, where in the end the heroes come out on top and the wicked witch ends up dumped in the well, and the bad guys might wear disguises but the mirror is one place they never hide.
Everyone here is smiling. All of them are beautiful. Not just hot—though, yeah, looking around, nobody Dean wouldn’t hit on sober. But in the soft light, they look fucking angelic, all shining eyes and bright, genuine laughter, never faltering, never looking down.
Somebody hands Dean a cup of something syrupy-sweet and a hell of a lot stronger than whiskey. It makes his head spin, but not in a bad way. It doesn’t feel like he’s about to puke or start pouring out his life-story on a stranger’s shoulder or anything like that.
It feels like the world is rocking him to sleep. He couldn’t tell his life story because it’s not even there anymore; the dead weight of it inside his chest is gone, like it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing left to anchor him to his grief and his guilt and all the shitty choices he’s made in a lifetime of having nothing but shitty choices. He’s empty and clean.
Dean finds a quiet space on the edge of the clearing. Leans his back against the trunk of a huge tree, feels the scrape of bark through his shirt. He tips his head back.
He can’t see the stars. He doesn’t know what time it is, how long he’s been here.
He doesn’t mind.
An indefinite time later, he catches sight of a face he sort-of recognizes, somewhere on the other side of the laughing, drinking throng.
She has long shiny hair, and her face is cute but kinda vacant. It’s the absence of expression that makes him struggle to place her for a moment.
Eventually, though, he figures it out. That fairy chick Charlie almost hooked up with. Gilda, that was her name. She’d looked pretty seriously into Charlie at the time—Dean always figured that maybe she occasionally hopped back over the border for a booty call. And she’d been seriously pissed with the guy who was controlling her, righteous rage vibrating beneath her gentle surface. He remembers being more than happy to step back and let her take care of business.
Right now, though, her face is serene; her smile perfectly empty.
Dean remembers her saying something about a tribunal, which seemed to make sense at the time. But looking around him, he can’t imagine these people having anything like a court of law. Can’t imagine them angry. He can’t imagine feeling angry ever again. Not here.
The sight of a familiar face does stir something uncomfortable in him, though, and he makes his way over there without any real idea of what he’s gonna say to her. Just some vague idea of putting the memory to rest, he guesses. It makes him uneasy, remembering that he has another life and he maybe shouldn’t be here, and Dean doesn’t want to deal with that. He doesn’t want to feel that.
“Hey,” he says, when he finally catches Gilda’s eye. His voice feels kind of rusty, and Dean realises he hasn’t done much talking since he got here.
He hasn’t done much talking in a while, come to think of it.
Gilda looks at him without recognition; shakes her head, still smiling. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”
“Uh, Dean. Winchester.” Nothing. “Friend of Charlie’s.”
Her face stays blank for a moment, and then her expression clears. “Charlie,” she says, smile brightening a notch. “Yes. She was pleasant to look at.”
And that’s it. No, Have you seen her, no, How is she?, no, Tell her I said ‘hi’. No nothing. Just the mask of serenity slotting neatly back into place.
Dean watches her, frowning. Feels an unexpected pang of sadness.
Feels it.
Christ, even if it was just a one-time thing—forgetting somebody like that? Somebody who saved your ass, and more than that, your freedom? Not even forgetting, really, just… not caring about them anymore?
There’s a fuckton of lore about fairies, half of it contradictory, most of it probably at least a little true. One thing that shows up again and again. They were human once. Now they’re not.
That’s what this place does to you.
Dean notices, then—really notices—that he isn’t looking at some hot chick his friend hooked up with once. He’s looking at a creature, an inhuman blank.
And it’s just like seeing a monster in the mirror.
He thinks about Sam, running into Cain’s house, yelling for him. Sam trying to help him up out of the cold, soaking grass outside the bunker, Sam fetching him medicine and blankets when he got sick from it. Sam watching him quietly, not pushing him and not giving up.
How long has Sam been trying to save his ass? How long has Dean not been noticing it?
Suddenly, all at once, he can’t think of anything worse.
He feels sick. He feels dizzy, as the dam breaks and it all rushes in on him. He feels anger and fear and guilt and loss, and he wants Sam and he wants Cas and he’s not supposed to be here, he doesn’t want to be here, no, fuck, please.
Gilda looks up at him again. Tilts her head, curious.
Dean’s frozen where he stands. He can imagine the horror on his own face, can see it in the way other people are turning to look at him now. Like they’re just now noticing he doesn’t fit.
Gilda takes his hand. “You can’t stay,” she tells him, and her voice is kind, without even a hint of sadness.
“Yeah,” he gets out. “Yeah, I got that.”
It’s fading already, the whole scene. Fading before his eyes. Something moves beneath it.
Dean doesn’t stay to watch. He turns, and he runs for home.
He doesn’t hear anybody follow him. It’s just his own footsteps crashing through the undergrowth, his own breath rasping in his ears.
And the music. It’s weird, high and insidious, and he starts to hear all the other sounds in it, the weird animal noises, the alien harmonies. It digs tendrils into his brain and makes him feel woozy, anchoring him momentarily to the spot. He can’t remember which direction he came from. He can’t find the path. He turns and turns and roots trip him, branches seem to catch at his clothes.
Dean turns again, thinks he sees light and plunges through the space between two trees and isn’t sure if the forest he comes out in is the same one or not. He gets the sense of a bunch of different realities pressing in on him. Like he could walk through a gap in the trees and find himself in another state, another country, another century.
He has no line to hold on to. He doesn’t know the way home.
He steadies himself with his hand against a tree trunk, dizzy. Tries to find something to focus on. Not something here. Something real.
Sam’s hand on his shoulder. He remembers it. Solid, if he’d only been able to feel it. An anchor for him, if he’d only been able to see what Sam was offering.
Sam. He closes his eyes and pictures Sam. His steady hands. His stupid fussing with blankets and aspirin. His face, scrunched up with concern, washed out in the light from his laptop screen. There. Patient. Waiting.
Dean keeps his eyes closed, and he walks forward.
He crashes out into sheeting, horizontal rain.
He doesn’t know where the hell he is. He has no gun and he has no fucking shoes. Hell, he doesn’t even have a quarter for a payphone. But a little ways down the road he finds a diner, and he apparently looks pathetic—or crazy—enough that the little old lady behind the counter lets him use the phone for free.
Sam picks up on the second ring. His voice when he answers is tight, nervous.
“It’s me,” Dean says without prelude, and hears Sam let out a shuddering breath.
Sam doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Three weeks, Dean. Three fucking weeks. Where were you?”
“Don’t know,” Dean admits, and Sam makes this strangled noise that’s almost a laugh.
Dean opens his mouth to continue, to say, I’m sorry for everything, or where’s Cas, we gotta help him, or, what are we gonna do?, but what comes out is, “I want to come home.”
