Fic: 'Til Morning (Supernatural)
Nov. 25th, 2014 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: 'Til Morning
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Dean/Cas(ish), Sam.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers through 10.05.
Summary: It’s the look in the kid’s eyes. The one who’s gotten up like Cas, with the munchkin-sized trenchcoat and the ridiculous painted-on stubble and the fluffy white wings from a kid’s Halloween costume. Dean leaves Marie and rounds the corner of the stage, and there she is. Standing with her face upturned to the light and singing like—well, yeah, like an angel. If you shut your eyes and just listened you could probably forget about the wobbly sets and the costumes that don’t fit and the fucking robot and all the rest of it.
Dean’s got a scarecrow to kill and no time for any of that crap, so he tears his eyes away and makes himself forget about it. But it comes back to him, later. The look in her eyes.
Author's Notes: Thanks toamberdreams for the beta! ♥
It’s the look in the kid’s eyes. The one who’s gotten up like Cas, with the munchkin-sized trenchcoat and the ridiculous painted-on stubble and the fluffy white wings from a kid’s Halloween costume. Dean leaves Marie and rounds the corner of the stage, and there she is. Standing with her face upturned to the light and singing like—well, yeah, like an angel. If you shut your eyes and just listened you could probably forget about the wobbly sets and the costumes that don’t fit and the fucking robot and all the rest of it.
Dean’s got a scarecrow to kill and no time for any of that crap, so he tears his eyes away and makes himself forget about it. But it comes back to him, later. The look in her eyes.
Same way she looked at her girlfriend, earlier, in the auditorium. Dean had glanced over and made a dig at what looked like some schoolkid fantasy, and then wound up feeling like he’d stumbled in on something uncomfortably private. (Or something uncomfortable, but not because it was private, which he’s been failing at not thinking about ever since.) Then he’d gotten a glimpse of the kid’s face, and yeah, no way that was play-acting. The bright eyes, the rapture there, the—well, call it what it was. Faith.
The kind Dean hasn’t seen in years, maybe decades; the kind that none of them has anymore, at least not in God or cosmic justice or humanity, or any of the other things people cling to because they can’t believe that mom and dad and their kindergarten teacher lied to them.
It’s misplaced. Always. Okay, Dean was never in one high school long enough to think he’d found the love of his life there, but he knows how these things end. They go to separate colleges, and eventually one of them meets somebody else and breaks the other one’s heart. Somebody’s parents insist on saying, “Your roommate” all through Christmas break, and she doesn’t have the nerve to fight them on it and leaves with a headful of doubt. One of them gets a full ride and the other ends up waiting tables, and their lives just tug in different directions. Or one of them gets hit by a bus or eaten by a werewolf or shot by a mugger while she’s walking down the street, because that shit just happens to nice, normal people going about their nice, normal lives.
Dean knows all of that, but he can’t get it out of his head, anyway. Can’t keep from imagining that look on Cas’s face. Real Cas, with his old tax-accountant outfit and his old way of not lining up right with the world, just standing there on the side of some darkened highway.
He doesn’t know what he used to think Cas did with whatever downtime he had. Turned into a swirl of cosmic dust and rolled around up there among the stars? Communed with the universe on some frequency humans couldn’t hear? He never thought about it in much detail; just assumed Cas had better things to do than wait around for him.
That was a dumb thing to assume. The realization startles Dean at the same time as he thinks he should’ve figured it out at least a couple of disasters ago.
“You wanna pull over, let me take a shift?” Sam’s voice on his right. Gentle, but not too-gentle like it sometimes is now. “We’ve been on the road for hours.”
Dean surprises himself by saying, “Sure thing.”
He’s tired. His eyes ache and his bones ache and his forearm itches. But there’s a peace in his tiredness, for all that. An absence of imminently-catastrophic crap hanging over his head; an absence of distrust. There’s work, there are monsters, there’s the damn Mark, but the world isn’t about to go down in flames, and for once it feels like they’re all on the same page. Dean and everybody he loves.
Which—yeah. That shit never lasts. It makes him more uneasy the further they get from those kids and their innocence. (Relative innocence, anyway. Not like Dean’s completely forgotten being seventeen.) It’s the knowing that that’s the worst part; the waiting for it all to come crumbling down around his ears.
They switch places and Sam reaches up to adjust the rearview mirror. His fingers brush over the fake amulet and he smiles, small and soft, before he starts the engine.
Dean scratches at his arm again. Sam turns his head, a barely-there movement that Dean sees out the corner of his eye.
He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see Sam’s expression change, and tries to stop waiting for the other shoe.
----
He can’t. But he doesn’t have to wait long. Small mercies, right?
Sam finds them the job. It’s a family of ghouls working out of a hospital ER, taking on the forms of recently-dead patients and going home with their families. Of course, the dead people’s nearest and dearest are too overwhelmed by the ‘miracle’ to worry too much about any shady behaviour, so when the ghoul decides it’s time to off them and chow down, they’re taken by surprise.
Dean looks at the family photos on the windowsill while Sam talks to the victim who got away, the brother of one of the stiffs. It’s early evening, darkness coming in fast. Dean lifts up the pictures in their frames one by one, cradling them carefully in both his hands to keep them busy. The Mark itches under his shirt.
“I know this is tough,” Sam says. “But just—try to remember what happened. What made you think she wasn’t your sister anymore?”
The guy makes a pained face. “This is gonna sound really shitty,” he says.
“I promise, we’ve heard worse.”
The guy shifts in his seat. “Stefanie suffered from anxiety,” he says. “She kept it under control, most of the time, but—she had to work at it. It wasn’t ever easy for her. Our mom used to say she just cared too much.” He sighs. “When she came out of the hospital—at first I thought, Jesus, maybe nearly dying had actually helped her. Given her a new outlook or something. But then I realized—she just didn’t seem to care anymore. About anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam tells him, all puppy-eyed sincerity. He gives the guy a moment to sniffle before he moves on to the necessaries. “Do you have any idea where—”
Of course, that’s when the back door slams open and the Addams Family decide to make their entrance.
The one who still looks like the guy’s sister makes for Dean.
He gets off a headshot before she touches him. Blood and brain matter splatter on the drapes, the wallpaper, the family photos. There’s a jolt that goes right through him when the bullet finds its mark. Heat and energy, a fizz like a soda can popping, a burn in his veins, and the Mark at the center of it all, burrowing its tendrils down into the bones of him. A crawling darkness.
It sends him reeling. He grabs at the windowsill to steady himself as he catches his breath. Blinks and it’s like lightbulbs bursting before his eyes.
First hit’s free, he thinks, in some hysterical recess of his brain. More fireworks. Moments pass.
The burning recedes. Dean blinks until the flashing lights fade; until he can see what’s happening in the room, in front of his eyes.
Sam’s on the floor, groping half-consciously for his gun, the shattered remnants of a lamp on the floor around his head. The other ghoul advances on witness-guy. It’s wearing a heavy-set middle-aged woman, all pearls and pink lipstick, the wrong body for its predator prowl. What was her name? Constance something?
The guy just stands there and quakes, doesn’t even back up. Dean shoots Constance in the back of the head.
He’s expecting it—whatever it is—this time. He drops the gun and grits his teeth and breathes through the surge of heat and darkness and the lights exploding in his head until he’s about eighty percent sure he isn’t gonna pass out. Then he crouches, peering into Sam’s face.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey, Sam, you with me?” His voice comes out sounding like he’s inhaled smoke, raw in the back of his throat.
Sam blinks a couple times and then levers himself into a sitting position. He looks around blearily, but his eyes narrow when they find Dean’s face. “I’m fine,” he says. “Are you?”
Dean gets to his feet, tucking his gun back into his waistband.
“I’m awesome,” he says. “C’mon. We got Mommy and daughter, which mean’s Dad’s still out there somewhere. We ain’t done here.”
Sam casts an apologetic glance at traumatized-witness-guy, and follows Dean out the door.
By the time they track down the final ghoul and Sam takes him out, though, Dean’s feeling like steamrollered crap. His throat is sore, the Mark a constant, painful throb, and every time he turns a corner on the drive back to witness-guy’s place, his stomach lurches. He lets Sam handle the heavy lifting, just douses the bodies in gas and lights them up once they’ve found a suitably middle-of-nowhere spot for the pyre.
He can feel Sam watching him in the firelight.
Dean’s got his mouth open, working up to a don’t-worry-about-me-I-can-handle-it that neither of them will believe, when Sam says, “That was the first time you’ve killed anything.”
Dean doesn’t reply.
“Since—”
“Since I damn well know, okay, Sam?”
There’s a pause, and for a moment, Dean thinks he’s been spared.
“Cas warned me, you know,” Sam says, then.
Dean turns to look at him.
“After the cure. He told me this was gonna happen. Or he told me something was gonna happen, anyway. That we needed to fix this. The Mark. And I said we should wait.” Sam shrugs. “I guess I just—wanted things to be okay for a little while. You know?”
Dean goes back to watching the fire. The flames curl like clutching fingers. “I know,” he says.
----
Dean’s half-asleep at the wheel when they get back to their motel, unconscious as soon as his head hits the pillow.
He wakes sometime in the small hours, to a feeling like something crawling under his skin.
Sam’s sprawled out on the other bed, dead to the world. It wasn’t him that woke Dean up.
Great, he thinks, slumping back against the pillows. Hello insomnia, my old friend. He glances over at the window, the faint light from the motel sign creeping through under the curtains. Something brighter arrests his eyes: his cellphone lighting up with a text.
It’s from Cas.
sam told me what happened, it reads.
Yeah, of course he did.
i’ll be with you asap.
Something in Dean’s chest clenches uncomfortably at that. This isn’t 2009. He knows damn well that Cas has more important things to do than hang around worrying about his sorry ass. His mission with that stick-up-her-ass angel whose name Dean resolutely refuses to remember. His fading grace. But he’s about to drop everything and run to Dean’s side like none of that shit matters?
Dean hits Call before he even knows what he’s gonna say. He thinks about hanging up right away, his thumb hovering over the red button, but Cas picks up while he’s still frozen there in indecision.
“Dean,” he says. His voice is solemn, but it’s warm. Dean finds himself picturing the little smile that appears on his face when they meet, however crappy everything happening around them is.
Cas never used to do that. It’s probably a weakness.
“Hey,” Dean says. “Look, man, you don’t gotta do this. You got your own crap to worry about, I get it. I’m not expecting—”
“Dean,” Cas says again, cutting him off. “You never—”
He pauses, then. Probably doing that face he does when he’s trying to figure out something unfamiliar, squinting like there’s a light shining in his eyes.
“I know I don’t have to,” Cas says, finally. “I choose to do this. You need help. The mission can wait.”
Dean lets out a breath. “I’m sorry,” he finds himself saying. “Shit.”
A beat. “For what?”
Dean scrubs at his eyes; tries not to picture that kid standing under the spotlight with her eyes full of love. Or Cas standing at the side of the road in the dark. (Cas drugged out of his head in that future that never happened; Cas slipping out of his grasp and back into Purgatory; Cas manning the counter at a Gas ‘n’ Sip; Cas standing before an army of angels about to turn their backs on him. Cas checking in on him, gentle and concerned, a couple hours after Dean had been all black eyes and murder.)
“I dunno, man. I guess I just—I know I can be an asshole sometimes. I get it. And I’m sorry.”
He kind of expects Cas to be mystified. Instead, he just says, “I should probably say the same to you,” very quietly. And then, “It’s four AM, Dean. You should sleep.”
“Guess so,” Dean says.
He doesn’t. He lies awake with the Mark burning on his arm, and waits for morning.
----
They comb through endless volumes of lore in the bunker’s library. Sam went through most of it at least once back before Dean’s demonic sabbatical, and it didn’t look like the Men of Letters knew anything, but he insists that they look again. They might have missed something, he says. There has to be a clue out there somewhere.
His eyes are tired as he says it, and when Dean reaches for the whiskey bottle because he needs something to dull the burn of the Mark, Sam just says, “Pour me one of those too, would you?”
The burn fades, mostly, after a few days. Dean can keep it down with booze and Advil, and he feels almost-normal most of the time, except that there’s a lump in his throat that throbs along with his pulse when he reads about bloody murder.
Cas texts him a couple more times, mostly just with wherever he is at the moment. Once it’s, traffic queues are frustrating, and once, i saw a fox with a smiley emoticon. Dean shakes his head and almost smiles back at that, and then he catches himself and frowns at the book he’s supposed to be reading.
He keeps his replies short, light. But when Cas finally pulls up in the Continental—alone, so maybe God is still out there somewhere—Dean doesn’t miss the careful way Cas looks into his face. Cas’s fingers graze the fabric of his shirtsleeve where it’s pulled down over his forearm before Cas pulls him in for a hug.
Dean goes with it. Doesn’t even roll his eyes. He’s glad that Cas can’t see his face, and he tries not to think about why.
When he pulls away, Sam’s watching them. There’s a faint, amused quirk to his mouth, but it fades as soon as it came.
----
Cas figures that if anybody knows anything about the Mark, it’ll be the guys who’ve been hanging around on the planet since Cain and Abel were a twinkle in Adam’s eye. He talks to Hannah—whose name gets mentioned often enough that eventually Dean can’t forget it, hoo-fucking-ray—on the phone a lot, relaying questions for the other angels up in Heaven.
There’s the whole weird angelic mind-meld thing, too, but apparently Cas can’t manage it like he used to. He can get through to the others, but it’s faint, like a faulty connection, and it makes him grimace like he’s got a raging migraine. When he’s done he actually takes the bottle of whiskey Dean waves in his direction and tips a good couple inches down his throat.
The Mark isn’t burning anymore, but the brief peace Dean felt after that job with the freaky-ass musical is long gone.
He’s restless now, all the time, jiggling his leg as he sits in the library and reads, his hands trembling as he cleans guns or makes coffee. His stomach’s in knots; it’s always Sam who remembers when it’s time to eat.
He isn’t sleeping, either. The night after Cas shows, Dean gives up on trying to catch any shut-eye and gets out of bed, pulls on a t-shirt and sweats and flops down in front of the TV.
A moment later, he feels the other end of the couch dip as Cas sits beside him.
“Dean—” he begins.
Dean cuts him off. “Don’t,” he bites out. “I already know, okay? I don’t need it. So just, don’t.”
Cas falls silent. On the TV, a grinning infomercial woman wearing too much jewellery holds up a gold watch and says, Give the gift of time this Christmas! Dean flips through channels. News, shopping, porn, more shopping, more porn. Some excruciatingly high-pitched Japanese cartoon. Something with swirling silver shoals of fish and a somber British narrator. He groans and sets down the remote.
Cas’s hand finds his shoulder, then. There’s a faint, cool tingle to his touch. Kind of anaesthetic.
“I mean for you to be okay,” he says. “That’s all. I—” He wavers, and he looks like he’s about to say, I miss you, or something like that anyway.
Dean can’t handle that. He doesn’t care how big of a coward it makes him.
“Not now, man,” he says. “I just—I’m not saying—” He swallows. “Just. Not now.”
“I understand,” Cas says, and Dean wonders if he really means it or if it’s another of those dishonest human survival tactics he’s picked up.
Cas settles both his hands back in his lap. The watery light from the TV flickers over his face.
----
When the breakthrough comes, it isn’t good news.
Well, no shit.
Cas has been sitting there in a kind of trance—which is pretty much the only way he can hear the other angels these days—for a couple minutes, a bead of sweat trickling down the side of his face. He comes out of it with dark, worried eyes and a grim set to his mouth.
“What?” Dean says, when he doesn’t spill right away. “What is it?”
“It’s—as I feared,” Cas says. “The only way the Mark can be removed is if someone else agrees to accept it.” He sounds tired.
Dean doesn’t even have the vocabulary to express how fucked he is. He lets his head drop, suddenly too heavy for his shoulders.
But when he lifts it again, Cas is looking in his eyes. The creases in his forehead have deepened. Not puzzlement: determination.
“Our best option,” he says, “is to find Cain and persuade him to take it back.”
----
Dean was expecting a fight. Or a flat-out refusal, or that Cain would’ve just up and vanished off the face of the planet. Or something.
Not… this, anyway. A measured, assessing look; the way Cain’s eyes flick between him and Cas as though in recognition. Cas is tense at his side. Not crackling with suppressed power and ready with an angel blade, the way he would’ve been, once. It’s a breathing, material kind of tension. Hackles raised, like a cat with its fur standing on end.
“You have faith,” Cain says, and it takes Dean a second to realise he’s talking to Cas.
Cas frowns. “Yes,” he says. It’s a little bit defiant, like he’s not sure he understands the question but he’s sure of the answer anyway.
Dean looks at him sideways. “Cas—” he starts to say, because you shouldn’t say yes when demons ask you cryptic shit, and dammit, Cas is old enough to know that.
He doesn’t get to finish, though, because then Cain gets out of his chair, and takes a step forward and then another, and clasps Dean’s hand.
They just stand there for a moment. And then he’s on fire, he can feel it, it’s raging in his veins, and something’s uprooting itself from the core of him, pulling up his foundations and scattering the stones. He’s on fire—
The last thing he sees before he blacks out is Cas’s face bathed in light.
----
It’s dark when Dean wakes.
He aches all over. His head feels like there’s a miniature army trying to fight its way out of his frontal lobe, complete with miniature AK-47s. He swallows, dry and sandpapery.
“Hey.” It’s Sam, relief in his voice.
The bedside lamp flicks on and Dean narrows his eyes as they adjust to the light.
It’s enough to show him that they’re in some shitty motel that looks like all the other shitty motels they’ve ever stayed in. Sandwich wrappers and paper cups litter the coffee table, so he’s been out long enough for Sam to get hungry more than once. The other bed is pristine, unslept-in.
Cas is nowhere to be seen.
“What happened?” Dean asks. His voice is a croak, and Sam pushes a glass of water at him. But he’s smiling, and that’s what lets Dean risk a glance down at his forearm.
There’s a scar there. An ugly mess of raised tissue, like an old burn mark, ridged beneath his fingertips. That’s all he feels when he touches it. He waits for the burn to zap through him, for the tingle in his veins, but it doesn’t come.
“It worked,” Sam says. “Far as we can tell, anyway. Cas says he can’t sense anything from it anymore.”
Dean nods and swallows water so he doesn’t have to talk.
He doesn’t know what to say to this. How to acknowledge it. Or he’s afraid to—to let that wave of relief crash over him. Can’t quite believe it won’t carry him away and deposit him right back up shit creek and wash away his boat along with the paddle.
“Cas?” he says, instead. “Where is he?”
“Just went out to grab us some coffee.”
Cas is drinking coffee. Cas is tired. Cas is running out of time.
(But not faith. But not faith?)
Sam looks at him. “So, you wanna tell me what that was about back there?”
Dean scowls at him. “Fuck you.”
Sam pats his shoulder. “Good to see you’re on the mend.”
----
Sam makes his excuses and lets himself out the room about two minutes after Cas shows up, which makes Dean feel uncomfortably like something’s expected of him.
He’s not sure he has it in him to live up to—well, anything, really. Not yet anyway.
Cas just hovers there, watching his face with searching eyes but not saying anything, breathing in the steam from his Styrofoam coffee mug. After a moment, Dean sighs, and pats the side of the bed with his hand.
“Cas,” he says. “Dude. Quit standing there, I’m not gonna explode.”
Cas half-smiles. “I know,” he says. He casts an uncertain glance at the chair Sam just vacated, but then he parks his ass on the end of the bed, next to Dean’s feet. His coat bunches up around him. He doesn’t move to straighten it.
“So,” Dean says. “We got me all fixed up. You’re next in line, right?”
Cas looks down into his coffee, frowning.
“I spoke with Metatron,” he says, after a moment, and Dean blinks. “Before Crowley killed Adina and gave me her grace. Not through choice,” he adds, hastily. “Hannah—well. It’s a long story.” He looks up again, meets Dean’s eyes. “He said there was a possibility some of my original grace remained. He could have been lying, but…” He trails off.
Dean feels sick, in a way that has nothing to do with the Mark. “You’re gonna make a deal with him?”
Cas worries at his lower lip. “Not exactly.”
Dean gets caught there watching Cas’s mouth, that gesture so human it scares the shit out of him. He takes a moment to catch on. “You’re gonna double-cross him?” he says. “Seriously? The dude’s a fucking snake.”
It’s not that he doesn’t believe Cas can pull it off. It isn’t. It’s just—
He scrubs at his eyes and refuses to finish the thought.
Cas sighs. His shoulders sag, and it’s like he shrinks a little. “It’s either that or—” He breaks off; pauses. “It seems to be the only option.”
“Or what?” Dean frowns up at him. “Cas. C’mon. It’s me.” He tries for a smile. “All me. For once.”
Cas is quiet for what feels like a short lifetime. Dean starts to think he isn’t getting an answer.
But then, “I could fall,” Cas tells him. “I could do what Anna did. If I tore out this grace before it faded completely—it would make me human again. I’d be weakened. It would be difficult.”
“Weakened? ‘S better than dead,” Dean says. “I mean, I get it, I do. Being human sucks balls. But—”
“It might not be so bad,” Cas finishes for him. “Not this time. Not if I—belonged somewhere.”
“Hey, we’ve got, like, a zillion spare rooms.”
Cas’s eyes are very tired. “Dean,” he says. Just that, like, come on, you know what I mean.
And Dean’s heart is beating double-time and there’s an empty space expanding inside his head and his chest, and yeah, he knows what Cas means, he’s hearing that stupid song from the stupid play and fuck, what if this is it, the moment when Cas’s patience finally runs dry and it can’t be, it’s too soon, it’s too soon—
“I’m not dying yet,” Cas says, then.
Dean swallows, takes a breath. “Yeah?” he says.
His voice shakes traitorously. It wants to give away everything he isn’t saying.
Wait for me. You can do that. You’re good at that. Just wait for me a little longer.
Cas leans down to set his coffee cup on the floor. He reaches out and his fingers find Dean’s arm, stroke the knot of scar tissue there. They trail down to his wrist, his palm, and hover there, barely touching.
“Yes,” Cas says. He leans forward into the lamplight, and his eyes are shining.
Author:
anactoriaCharacters/pairing: Dean/Cas(ish), Sam.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers through 10.05.
Summary: It’s the look in the kid’s eyes. The one who’s gotten up like Cas, with the munchkin-sized trenchcoat and the ridiculous painted-on stubble and the fluffy white wings from a kid’s Halloween costume. Dean leaves Marie and rounds the corner of the stage, and there she is. Standing with her face upturned to the light and singing like—well, yeah, like an angel. If you shut your eyes and just listened you could probably forget about the wobbly sets and the costumes that don’t fit and the fucking robot and all the rest of it.
Dean’s got a scarecrow to kill and no time for any of that crap, so he tears his eyes away and makes himself forget about it. But it comes back to him, later. The look in her eyes.
Author's Notes: Thanks to
amberdreams for the beta! ♥It’s the look in the kid’s eyes. The one who’s gotten up like Cas, with the munchkin-sized trenchcoat and the ridiculous painted-on stubble and the fluffy white wings from a kid’s Halloween costume. Dean leaves Marie and rounds the corner of the stage, and there she is. Standing with her face upturned to the light and singing like—well, yeah, like an angel. If you shut your eyes and just listened you could probably forget about the wobbly sets and the costumes that don’t fit and the fucking robot and all the rest of it.
Dean’s got a scarecrow to kill and no time for any of that crap, so he tears his eyes away and makes himself forget about it. But it comes back to him, later. The look in her eyes.
Same way she looked at her girlfriend, earlier, in the auditorium. Dean had glanced over and made a dig at what looked like some schoolkid fantasy, and then wound up feeling like he’d stumbled in on something uncomfortably private. (Or something uncomfortable, but not because it was private, which he’s been failing at not thinking about ever since.) Then he’d gotten a glimpse of the kid’s face, and yeah, no way that was play-acting. The bright eyes, the rapture there, the—well, call it what it was. Faith.
The kind Dean hasn’t seen in years, maybe decades; the kind that none of them has anymore, at least not in God or cosmic justice or humanity, or any of the other things people cling to because they can’t believe that mom and dad and their kindergarten teacher lied to them.
It’s misplaced. Always. Okay, Dean was never in one high school long enough to think he’d found the love of his life there, but he knows how these things end. They go to separate colleges, and eventually one of them meets somebody else and breaks the other one’s heart. Somebody’s parents insist on saying, “Your roommate” all through Christmas break, and she doesn’t have the nerve to fight them on it and leaves with a headful of doubt. One of them gets a full ride and the other ends up waiting tables, and their lives just tug in different directions. Or one of them gets hit by a bus or eaten by a werewolf or shot by a mugger while she’s walking down the street, because that shit just happens to nice, normal people going about their nice, normal lives.
Dean knows all of that, but he can’t get it out of his head, anyway. Can’t keep from imagining that look on Cas’s face. Real Cas, with his old tax-accountant outfit and his old way of not lining up right with the world, just standing there on the side of some darkened highway.
He doesn’t know what he used to think Cas did with whatever downtime he had. Turned into a swirl of cosmic dust and rolled around up there among the stars? Communed with the universe on some frequency humans couldn’t hear? He never thought about it in much detail; just assumed Cas had better things to do than wait around for him.
That was a dumb thing to assume. The realization startles Dean at the same time as he thinks he should’ve figured it out at least a couple of disasters ago.
“You wanna pull over, let me take a shift?” Sam’s voice on his right. Gentle, but not too-gentle like it sometimes is now. “We’ve been on the road for hours.”
Dean surprises himself by saying, “Sure thing.”
He’s tired. His eyes ache and his bones ache and his forearm itches. But there’s a peace in his tiredness, for all that. An absence of imminently-catastrophic crap hanging over his head; an absence of distrust. There’s work, there are monsters, there’s the damn Mark, but the world isn’t about to go down in flames, and for once it feels like they’re all on the same page. Dean and everybody he loves.
Which—yeah. That shit never lasts. It makes him more uneasy the further they get from those kids and their innocence. (Relative innocence, anyway. Not like Dean’s completely forgotten being seventeen.) It’s the knowing that that’s the worst part; the waiting for it all to come crumbling down around his ears.
They switch places and Sam reaches up to adjust the rearview mirror. His fingers brush over the fake amulet and he smiles, small and soft, before he starts the engine.
Dean scratches at his arm again. Sam turns his head, a barely-there movement that Dean sees out the corner of his eye.
He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see Sam’s expression change, and tries to stop waiting for the other shoe.
He can’t. But he doesn’t have to wait long. Small mercies, right?
Sam finds them the job. It’s a family of ghouls working out of a hospital ER, taking on the forms of recently-dead patients and going home with their families. Of course, the dead people’s nearest and dearest are too overwhelmed by the ‘miracle’ to worry too much about any shady behaviour, so when the ghoul decides it’s time to off them and chow down, they’re taken by surprise.
Dean looks at the family photos on the windowsill while Sam talks to the victim who got away, the brother of one of the stiffs. It’s early evening, darkness coming in fast. Dean lifts up the pictures in their frames one by one, cradling them carefully in both his hands to keep them busy. The Mark itches under his shirt.
“I know this is tough,” Sam says. “But just—try to remember what happened. What made you think she wasn’t your sister anymore?”
The guy makes a pained face. “This is gonna sound really shitty,” he says.
“I promise, we’ve heard worse.”
The guy shifts in his seat. “Stefanie suffered from anxiety,” he says. “She kept it under control, most of the time, but—she had to work at it. It wasn’t ever easy for her. Our mom used to say she just cared too much.” He sighs. “When she came out of the hospital—at first I thought, Jesus, maybe nearly dying had actually helped her. Given her a new outlook or something. But then I realized—she just didn’t seem to care anymore. About anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam tells him, all puppy-eyed sincerity. He gives the guy a moment to sniffle before he moves on to the necessaries. “Do you have any idea where—”
Of course, that’s when the back door slams open and the Addams Family decide to make their entrance.
The one who still looks like the guy’s sister makes for Dean.
He gets off a headshot before she touches him. Blood and brain matter splatter on the drapes, the wallpaper, the family photos. There’s a jolt that goes right through him when the bullet finds its mark. Heat and energy, a fizz like a soda can popping, a burn in his veins, and the Mark at the center of it all, burrowing its tendrils down into the bones of him. A crawling darkness.
It sends him reeling. He grabs at the windowsill to steady himself as he catches his breath. Blinks and it’s like lightbulbs bursting before his eyes.
First hit’s free, he thinks, in some hysterical recess of his brain. More fireworks. Moments pass.
The burning recedes. Dean blinks until the flashing lights fade; until he can see what’s happening in the room, in front of his eyes.
Sam’s on the floor, groping half-consciously for his gun, the shattered remnants of a lamp on the floor around his head. The other ghoul advances on witness-guy. It’s wearing a heavy-set middle-aged woman, all pearls and pink lipstick, the wrong body for its predator prowl. What was her name? Constance something?
The guy just stands there and quakes, doesn’t even back up. Dean shoots Constance in the back of the head.
He’s expecting it—whatever it is—this time. He drops the gun and grits his teeth and breathes through the surge of heat and darkness and the lights exploding in his head until he’s about eighty percent sure he isn’t gonna pass out. Then he crouches, peering into Sam’s face.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey, Sam, you with me?” His voice comes out sounding like he’s inhaled smoke, raw in the back of his throat.
Sam blinks a couple times and then levers himself into a sitting position. He looks around blearily, but his eyes narrow when they find Dean’s face. “I’m fine,” he says. “Are you?”
Dean gets to his feet, tucking his gun back into his waistband.
“I’m awesome,” he says. “C’mon. We got Mommy and daughter, which mean’s Dad’s still out there somewhere. We ain’t done here.”
Sam casts an apologetic glance at traumatized-witness-guy, and follows Dean out the door.
By the time they track down the final ghoul and Sam takes him out, though, Dean’s feeling like steamrollered crap. His throat is sore, the Mark a constant, painful throb, and every time he turns a corner on the drive back to witness-guy’s place, his stomach lurches. He lets Sam handle the heavy lifting, just douses the bodies in gas and lights them up once they’ve found a suitably middle-of-nowhere spot for the pyre.
He can feel Sam watching him in the firelight.
Dean’s got his mouth open, working up to a don’t-worry-about-me-I-can-handle-it that neither of them will believe, when Sam says, “That was the first time you’ve killed anything.”
Dean doesn’t reply.
“Since—”
“Since I damn well know, okay, Sam?”
There’s a pause, and for a moment, Dean thinks he’s been spared.
“Cas warned me, you know,” Sam says, then.
Dean turns to look at him.
“After the cure. He told me this was gonna happen. Or he told me something was gonna happen, anyway. That we needed to fix this. The Mark. And I said we should wait.” Sam shrugs. “I guess I just—wanted things to be okay for a little while. You know?”
Dean goes back to watching the fire. The flames curl like clutching fingers. “I know,” he says.
Dean’s half-asleep at the wheel when they get back to their motel, unconscious as soon as his head hits the pillow.
He wakes sometime in the small hours, to a feeling like something crawling under his skin.
Sam’s sprawled out on the other bed, dead to the world. It wasn’t him that woke Dean up.
Great, he thinks, slumping back against the pillows. Hello insomnia, my old friend. He glances over at the window, the faint light from the motel sign creeping through under the curtains. Something brighter arrests his eyes: his cellphone lighting up with a text.
It’s from Cas.
sam told me what happened, it reads.
Yeah, of course he did.
i’ll be with you asap.
Something in Dean’s chest clenches uncomfortably at that. This isn’t 2009. He knows damn well that Cas has more important things to do than hang around worrying about his sorry ass. His mission with that stick-up-her-ass angel whose name Dean resolutely refuses to remember. His fading grace. But he’s about to drop everything and run to Dean’s side like none of that shit matters?
Dean hits Call before he even knows what he’s gonna say. He thinks about hanging up right away, his thumb hovering over the red button, but Cas picks up while he’s still frozen there in indecision.
“Dean,” he says. His voice is solemn, but it’s warm. Dean finds himself picturing the little smile that appears on his face when they meet, however crappy everything happening around them is.
Cas never used to do that. It’s probably a weakness.
“Hey,” Dean says. “Look, man, you don’t gotta do this. You got your own crap to worry about, I get it. I’m not expecting—”
“Dean,” Cas says again, cutting him off. “You never—”
He pauses, then. Probably doing that face he does when he’s trying to figure out something unfamiliar, squinting like there’s a light shining in his eyes.
“I know I don’t have to,” Cas says, finally. “I choose to do this. You need help. The mission can wait.”
Dean lets out a breath. “I’m sorry,” he finds himself saying. “Shit.”
A beat. “For what?”
Dean scrubs at his eyes; tries not to picture that kid standing under the spotlight with her eyes full of love. Or Cas standing at the side of the road in the dark. (Cas drugged out of his head in that future that never happened; Cas slipping out of his grasp and back into Purgatory; Cas manning the counter at a Gas ‘n’ Sip; Cas standing before an army of angels about to turn their backs on him. Cas checking in on him, gentle and concerned, a couple hours after Dean had been all black eyes and murder.)
“I dunno, man. I guess I just—I know I can be an asshole sometimes. I get it. And I’m sorry.”
He kind of expects Cas to be mystified. Instead, he just says, “I should probably say the same to you,” very quietly. And then, “It’s four AM, Dean. You should sleep.”
“Guess so,” Dean says.
He doesn’t. He lies awake with the Mark burning on his arm, and waits for morning.
They comb through endless volumes of lore in the bunker’s library. Sam went through most of it at least once back before Dean’s demonic sabbatical, and it didn’t look like the Men of Letters knew anything, but he insists that they look again. They might have missed something, he says. There has to be a clue out there somewhere.
His eyes are tired as he says it, and when Dean reaches for the whiskey bottle because he needs something to dull the burn of the Mark, Sam just says, “Pour me one of those too, would you?”
The burn fades, mostly, after a few days. Dean can keep it down with booze and Advil, and he feels almost-normal most of the time, except that there’s a lump in his throat that throbs along with his pulse when he reads about bloody murder.
Cas texts him a couple more times, mostly just with wherever he is at the moment. Once it’s, traffic queues are frustrating, and once, i saw a fox with a smiley emoticon. Dean shakes his head and almost smiles back at that, and then he catches himself and frowns at the book he’s supposed to be reading.
He keeps his replies short, light. But when Cas finally pulls up in the Continental—alone, so maybe God is still out there somewhere—Dean doesn’t miss the careful way Cas looks into his face. Cas’s fingers graze the fabric of his shirtsleeve where it’s pulled down over his forearm before Cas pulls him in for a hug.
Dean goes with it. Doesn’t even roll his eyes. He’s glad that Cas can’t see his face, and he tries not to think about why.
When he pulls away, Sam’s watching them. There’s a faint, amused quirk to his mouth, but it fades as soon as it came.
Cas figures that if anybody knows anything about the Mark, it’ll be the guys who’ve been hanging around on the planet since Cain and Abel were a twinkle in Adam’s eye. He talks to Hannah—whose name gets mentioned often enough that eventually Dean can’t forget it, hoo-fucking-ray—on the phone a lot, relaying questions for the other angels up in Heaven.
There’s the whole weird angelic mind-meld thing, too, but apparently Cas can’t manage it like he used to. He can get through to the others, but it’s faint, like a faulty connection, and it makes him grimace like he’s got a raging migraine. When he’s done he actually takes the bottle of whiskey Dean waves in his direction and tips a good couple inches down his throat.
The Mark isn’t burning anymore, but the brief peace Dean felt after that job with the freaky-ass musical is long gone.
He’s restless now, all the time, jiggling his leg as he sits in the library and reads, his hands trembling as he cleans guns or makes coffee. His stomach’s in knots; it’s always Sam who remembers when it’s time to eat.
He isn’t sleeping, either. The night after Cas shows, Dean gives up on trying to catch any shut-eye and gets out of bed, pulls on a t-shirt and sweats and flops down in front of the TV.
A moment later, he feels the other end of the couch dip as Cas sits beside him.
“Dean—” he begins.
Dean cuts him off. “Don’t,” he bites out. “I already know, okay? I don’t need it. So just, don’t.”
Cas falls silent. On the TV, a grinning infomercial woman wearing too much jewellery holds up a gold watch and says, Give the gift of time this Christmas! Dean flips through channels. News, shopping, porn, more shopping, more porn. Some excruciatingly high-pitched Japanese cartoon. Something with swirling silver shoals of fish and a somber British narrator. He groans and sets down the remote.
Cas’s hand finds his shoulder, then. There’s a faint, cool tingle to his touch. Kind of anaesthetic.
“I mean for you to be okay,” he says. “That’s all. I—” He wavers, and he looks like he’s about to say, I miss you, or something like that anyway.
Dean can’t handle that. He doesn’t care how big of a coward it makes him.
“Not now, man,” he says. “I just—I’m not saying—” He swallows. “Just. Not now.”
“I understand,” Cas says, and Dean wonders if he really means it or if it’s another of those dishonest human survival tactics he’s picked up.
Cas settles both his hands back in his lap. The watery light from the TV flickers over his face.
When the breakthrough comes, it isn’t good news.
Well, no shit.
Cas has been sitting there in a kind of trance—which is pretty much the only way he can hear the other angels these days—for a couple minutes, a bead of sweat trickling down the side of his face. He comes out of it with dark, worried eyes and a grim set to his mouth.
“What?” Dean says, when he doesn’t spill right away. “What is it?”
“It’s—as I feared,” Cas says. “The only way the Mark can be removed is if someone else agrees to accept it.” He sounds tired.
Dean doesn’t even have the vocabulary to express how fucked he is. He lets his head drop, suddenly too heavy for his shoulders.
But when he lifts it again, Cas is looking in his eyes. The creases in his forehead have deepened. Not puzzlement: determination.
“Our best option,” he says, “is to find Cain and persuade him to take it back.”
Dean was expecting a fight. Or a flat-out refusal, or that Cain would’ve just up and vanished off the face of the planet. Or something.
Not… this, anyway. A measured, assessing look; the way Cain’s eyes flick between him and Cas as though in recognition. Cas is tense at his side. Not crackling with suppressed power and ready with an angel blade, the way he would’ve been, once. It’s a breathing, material kind of tension. Hackles raised, like a cat with its fur standing on end.
“You have faith,” Cain says, and it takes Dean a second to realise he’s talking to Cas.
Cas frowns. “Yes,” he says. It’s a little bit defiant, like he’s not sure he understands the question but he’s sure of the answer anyway.
Dean looks at him sideways. “Cas—” he starts to say, because you shouldn’t say yes when demons ask you cryptic shit, and dammit, Cas is old enough to know that.
He doesn’t get to finish, though, because then Cain gets out of his chair, and takes a step forward and then another, and clasps Dean’s hand.
They just stand there for a moment. And then he’s on fire, he can feel it, it’s raging in his veins, and something’s uprooting itself from the core of him, pulling up his foundations and scattering the stones. He’s on fire—
The last thing he sees before he blacks out is Cas’s face bathed in light.
It’s dark when Dean wakes.
He aches all over. His head feels like there’s a miniature army trying to fight its way out of his frontal lobe, complete with miniature AK-47s. He swallows, dry and sandpapery.
“Hey.” It’s Sam, relief in his voice.
The bedside lamp flicks on and Dean narrows his eyes as they adjust to the light.
It’s enough to show him that they’re in some shitty motel that looks like all the other shitty motels they’ve ever stayed in. Sandwich wrappers and paper cups litter the coffee table, so he’s been out long enough for Sam to get hungry more than once. The other bed is pristine, unslept-in.
Cas is nowhere to be seen.
“What happened?” Dean asks. His voice is a croak, and Sam pushes a glass of water at him. But he’s smiling, and that’s what lets Dean risk a glance down at his forearm.
There’s a scar there. An ugly mess of raised tissue, like an old burn mark, ridged beneath his fingertips. That’s all he feels when he touches it. He waits for the burn to zap through him, for the tingle in his veins, but it doesn’t come.
“It worked,” Sam says. “Far as we can tell, anyway. Cas says he can’t sense anything from it anymore.”
Dean nods and swallows water so he doesn’t have to talk.
He doesn’t know what to say to this. How to acknowledge it. Or he’s afraid to—to let that wave of relief crash over him. Can’t quite believe it won’t carry him away and deposit him right back up shit creek and wash away his boat along with the paddle.
“Cas?” he says, instead. “Where is he?”
“Just went out to grab us some coffee.”
Cas is drinking coffee. Cas is tired. Cas is running out of time.
(But not faith. But not faith?)
Sam looks at him. “So, you wanna tell me what that was about back there?”
Dean scowls at him. “Fuck you.”
Sam pats his shoulder. “Good to see you’re on the mend.”
Sam makes his excuses and lets himself out the room about two minutes after Cas shows up, which makes Dean feel uncomfortably like something’s expected of him.
He’s not sure he has it in him to live up to—well, anything, really. Not yet anyway.
Cas just hovers there, watching his face with searching eyes but not saying anything, breathing in the steam from his Styrofoam coffee mug. After a moment, Dean sighs, and pats the side of the bed with his hand.
“Cas,” he says. “Dude. Quit standing there, I’m not gonna explode.”
Cas half-smiles. “I know,” he says. He casts an uncertain glance at the chair Sam just vacated, but then he parks his ass on the end of the bed, next to Dean’s feet. His coat bunches up around him. He doesn’t move to straighten it.
“So,” Dean says. “We got me all fixed up. You’re next in line, right?”
Cas looks down into his coffee, frowning.
“I spoke with Metatron,” he says, after a moment, and Dean blinks. “Before Crowley killed Adina and gave me her grace. Not through choice,” he adds, hastily. “Hannah—well. It’s a long story.” He looks up again, meets Dean’s eyes. “He said there was a possibility some of my original grace remained. He could have been lying, but…” He trails off.
Dean feels sick, in a way that has nothing to do with the Mark. “You’re gonna make a deal with him?”
Cas worries at his lower lip. “Not exactly.”
Dean gets caught there watching Cas’s mouth, that gesture so human it scares the shit out of him. He takes a moment to catch on. “You’re gonna double-cross him?” he says. “Seriously? The dude’s a fucking snake.”
It’s not that he doesn’t believe Cas can pull it off. It isn’t. It’s just—
He scrubs at his eyes and refuses to finish the thought.
Cas sighs. His shoulders sag, and it’s like he shrinks a little. “It’s either that or—” He breaks off; pauses. “It seems to be the only option.”
“Or what?” Dean frowns up at him. “Cas. C’mon. It’s me.” He tries for a smile. “All me. For once.”
Cas is quiet for what feels like a short lifetime. Dean starts to think he isn’t getting an answer.
But then, “I could fall,” Cas tells him. “I could do what Anna did. If I tore out this grace before it faded completely—it would make me human again. I’d be weakened. It would be difficult.”
“Weakened? ‘S better than dead,” Dean says. “I mean, I get it, I do. Being human sucks balls. But—”
“It might not be so bad,” Cas finishes for him. “Not this time. Not if I—belonged somewhere.”
“Hey, we’ve got, like, a zillion spare rooms.”
Cas’s eyes are very tired. “Dean,” he says. Just that, like, come on, you know what I mean.
And Dean’s heart is beating double-time and there’s an empty space expanding inside his head and his chest, and yeah, he knows what Cas means, he’s hearing that stupid song from the stupid play and fuck, what if this is it, the moment when Cas’s patience finally runs dry and it can’t be, it’s too soon, it’s too soon—
“I’m not dying yet,” Cas says, then.
Dean swallows, takes a breath. “Yeah?” he says.
His voice shakes traitorously. It wants to give away everything he isn’t saying.
Wait for me. You can do that. You’re good at that. Just wait for me a little longer.
Cas leans down to set his coffee cup on the floor. He reaches out and his fingers find Dean’s arm, stroke the knot of scar tissue there. They trail down to his wrist, his palm, and hover there, barely touching.
“Yes,” Cas says. He leans forward into the lamplight, and his eyes are shining.
