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vail_kagamiFandom: Supernatural
Beta:
minviendhaCharacters (overall): Dean, Castiel, Sam, plus a number of angels and demons
Rating (overall): NC-17
Warnings (overall): violence, torture, drug use, insanity, mentions of rape
Spoilers: Going AU during episode 5.18: Point of No Return. No spoilers for after season five.
Words (this chapter): 7,429
Summary: A man wakes up in a ruined wasteland, without memories, without a name, without knowing the strange guy who claims he used to be an angel, or that he once had a little brother. All he knows is that the world is dying, everyone is lying to him and that somehow, somewhere, something went terribly wrong. Because someone said Yes when they should have said No, and someone else paid the price.
Masterpost
It’s snowing when they make their way down the dried river bed, and this time the snow doesn’t melt the moment it touches the ground. Dean thinks with dread about the future. If it gets much colder, Lucifer won’t have to put any effort into finding them. He’ll just have to wait patiently until Sam’s soul comes to him when he freezes to death.
Or starves. Jena has been bringing food, but most of it was canned of inexplicable origin. Little fresh meat. Dean hopes that this is because she thought it would be nice to have a change in their diet rather than because they are running out of animals to kill.
Although the issue with Sam and starvation, admittedly, lies somewhere else.
The snow makes the natural path slippery and Dean falls onto his ass more than once on the steeper parts. He’s hardly setting a good example for his little brother who follows more slowly, depending on him and Cas to help him down the more difficult parts. Jena, as always, is entirely useless. When they make it down, she’s sitting on the carriage, eating an apple and watching them struggle to keep their balance.
Awesome mom his ass.
The horses look exactly the same as they did when their little group arrived at the cave a few days ago. Dean hasn’t seen them since that day and was half-convinced that they had been eaten by something in the meantime. Possibly by him and Cas. There had been that little bit of fresh meat, after all.
Sam, of course, has eaten nothing. Dean likes to tell himself that he’s doing better, overall, but the fact that he can close his hand completely around his once strong brother’s upper arms makes it hard to feel optimistic.
Just the few minutes’ walk down the rocks exhausted Sam completely. Hardly able to stand in the first place, he’s trembling by the time they make it to flat ground. Yet, Dean’s brother stubbornly refuses to let anyone carry him. Dean wants to scream at him, tell him he’s a moron and that he should save every little bit of strength he has, but he understands about control and why Sam needs to feel like he has even a little of it.
That doesn’t mean he has to like the way his brother is panting for air when they reach the carriage, or the fact that he can’t make it up there without quite a lot of help.
“We won’t have any long breaks, so if you’re tired, you crash with Sammy,” Jena says from up on her horse as Dean and Cas climb onto the bench of the wagon. Her hand is tugging the animal’s mane and it shakes its head unwillingly as Dean glares at her, unhappy about her use of the nickname that is reserved only for him. He looks down at Sam, but Sam doesn’t seem to care. He’s leaning heavily against their bags and staring at nothing, his face pale. Every now and then he twitches, his eyes darting back and forth as if following something only he can see. He probably has other problems than someone not Dean calling him by his childhood name.
In the end, when they start moving, Dean is almost glad to be leaving. Anything that puts distance between them and their pursuers is good.
-
Their departure may take them away from any traces they left for Lucifer, Michael and whoever else to find, but it doesn’t do so very quickly. As before, they make their way along the line of mountains at a pretty relaxed pace, and more than once Dean wants to grab the reins and make the horses go faster. He knows, of course, that it’s due to the carriage and the uneven ground that they can’t go faster, but that doesn’t help with the feeling that at any moment he’s going to see the shadow of giant wings on the cover of clouds above them.
The snow doesn’t help. It keeps falling – not strongly, but steadily, and Dean already sees them get stuck and having to make their way on foot over to whatever mountain exactly it is Jena thinks it would be a good idea to cross.
They left early in the morning, and around midday they stop near a small river to let the horses drink and rest and refill their own bottles. At least the river isn’t frozen yet. It’s moving too fast to be affected by temperatures higher than Seriously Below Freezing, but Dean begins to worry about the water in their bottles.
Sam doesn’t move much. He stays huddled against the bags and furs, knees drawn to this chest, his eyes bloodshot and glassy. Little clouds of condensed breath are dancing in front of his face. Dean climbs up to make him drink a little, then huddles beside him and closes his eyes. He’s not all that tired, but his body melts into the soft furs and against his brother’s unhealthy warmth and before he realizes it, he’s drifted off.
When a rough shove against his leg wakes him, not more than ten minutes can have passed. Dean is disoriented for a few seconds, but surprisingly well rested. A life consisting of night-time hunts and research marathons has taught him the value of short nabs.
It’s Cas who woke him. “We’re leaving,” he says, and when Dean looks around, he sees Jena wrap something inside a cloth that’s probably leftovers of the food they ate without him. He hurries over, snatches the bundle and keeps it with him when climbs back onto the bench. Jena smirks but doesn’t say anything as Dean inspects the contents and finds dried fruit, dried meat and what’s left of the potatoes Cas dug up two days ago, cooked over the fire for better edibility. Though Dean isn’t entirely sure it’s really potatoes, what with them being available in winter and all. But then, he doesn’t even know what month it is. Might be August.
He’d love to feed one of the soft things to his brother, but Sam looks like he’s going to puke even without him contributing to it.
So he just waits for Cas to come join him and take the reins, but Cas never shows. Instead the wagon creaks with movement in the back and Dean turns around to see his old friend crawl up to Sam. He’s holding a rolled up fur in his hands, stripes hanging off the corners. Dean can imagine what it’s for, but he’s never seen it before, so Cas probably created it while he was nabbing.
When he notices Dean looking, Cas tilts his head in something that’s maybe supposed to look apologetic. “I’m tired,” he informs Dean. “Take over for a while.”
He does look tired, as Dean notices now he’s actually paying attention. In fact, Cas looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Probably hasn’t, too – Cas doesn’t need quite as much sleep as the average human, and while he lay down with them most nights, he was always already awake when Sam woke Dean with his trashing nightmares, so maybe he only snuggled up to them to keep Sam as warm as possible between them.
Sam’s so fragile now that Dean, not exactly honing his football player muscles anymore either, is always a little scared that he’ll crush him in his sleep. (Like when he was a baby, this tiny little thing that mom left behind for Dean to watch over when she left them.)
In the light of that, it would probably better if Sammy stayed curled up and sitting upright, making himself as compact as possible, but it has to be hell on his joints. So Dean wishes he would stretch, even if that means losing warmth, because seriously, Sammy, there are enough blankets to cover half the planet with.
And yet, Dean feels irrationally pissed off when Cas coaxes his brother into a lying position with soft words and gentle but firm touches. And just in a second he’s going to stretch out beside him, Dean just knows. Which makes sense because of warmth and the lack of any other space to lie down, but it still pisses Dean off.
Worst is how easily Sam leans into those touches and lets himself be guided.
When Sam’s lying flat, Cas ties the fur to the edges of the carriage, creating a small roof to protect them from the snow that’s been steadily getting worse. About time, really, but Dean still wants to stop him when he pulls it down, covering both Cas and Sam from sight. Damn, why couldn’t Gabriel have pulled a damn plane wagon out of his ass?
There’s movement beneath the cover and then the part of the blankets still visible fills out as Cas stretches his legs out alongside Sam’s. Dean glares at the bulge as if he could somehow make it disappear until Jena rides over to him and punches his arm. “We were supposed to be going somewhere, hero,” she reminds him. “The two of them will still be there if you turn around and concentrate on getting this horse to move it’s impressive ass. And they’re still be cuddling.”
That’s exactly what worries Dean, and judging by her malicious grin she’s well aware of it. “Sure you’re not just jealous? Sorry, dude, but I’m not going to warm those feet of yours.”
Jena, despite the snow, is still barefoot. By all rights her feet should be blue and bleeding from countless cuts. Naturally, they’re not. She just grins more.
“Dean, dear, I am a Norse God as a second career. The Vikings called me Loki. I basically invented the cold, just to have an excuse to show them how to keep warm.”
Dean really doesn’t want to think about that. “Loki, huh? That makes me worry what you might have been thinking when you complimented this horse’s ass.” He pulls the reins a little and the horse moves even though Dean doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Maybe it’s trying to get away from Jena’s lecherous grin.
For the first time he’s really, really glad Gabriel doesn’t have a dick in this incarnation.
“One does have a reputation to upkeep,” the angel just says. Dean shudders.
So does the horse.
-
Surprisingly enough, they make it to their next stop without Jena trying to hump anything. Although, didn’t Dean read something once about how riding is basically a form of sexual stimulation for girls? There must be a reason why she’s opted to ride the horse instead of the wagon all this time.
Dean really doesn’t like the course his thoughts are taking. (Well, he could always distract himself by thinking about Cas and Sam under that cover behind him…)
“You look like someone who needs to get laid.” Jena’s definitely enjoying this far too much. She must get bored, stuck without being allowed to use her powers much and riding a horse to substitute for sex, so she torments the human a bit. Yeah, Dean gets it, thank you very much.
“Please, don’t,” he groans. “You’re really not my type.” She actually isn’t, and wouldn’t be even if she wasn’t Gabriel. Even though she’s the only female being Dean’s seen in ages and there’s been moments when he thought that getting laid would be really nice, Jena doesn’t even register on his radar. There’s the fact that she looks too young for his tastes, is too skinny, and that he used to know her when she was a guy and liked to kill him a lot.
“Too bad. You’re mine.”
“Since when are you into men?” Might be a stupid question, but Dean imagines that if he grew a pair of boobs he’d become an out and proud lesbian rather than show any interest in dick.
Jena rolls her eyes, “Since I don’t discriminate, dumbass. Which I never did. I would have taken you when I wore the janitor. Sammy too. Nice pair of asses, the two of you. One does learn to appreciate art.”
It’s the perfect way to void all the improvement of Dean’s mood the mindless babbling might have brought. The words, along his brother’s nickname, nearly make him jump over to tear her off her horse and punch her into the ground. Jena seems to notice that mentioning Sam in the context of sex has been a mistake and hurries to change the topic. To a certain extent of change. “I’ve had sex in ways your stuck up boundaries won’t ever be able to imagine. Now the Romans, they knew how to make love. Because I taught them.”
“I hear one of your sons was a wolf,” Dean snaps, still feeling aggressive and suddenly scared that Sam might have woken up just in time to hear an archangel talk about wanting to fuck him.
Jena is completely unfazed. “And another was a giant snake. You should have seen their moms.”
By now, Dean is pretty damn convinced Gabriel is pulling his leg. He just growls in response, sliding off the bench when the wagon finally comes to a stop. His ass is hurting from all the sitting on the hard wood and in context that’s really not something he appreciates. He considers making a pillow to sit on out of his folded shirt or the blanket he has wrapped around his shoulders, but it’s cold and he’s not getting an awful lot of movement up there, so he’d rather not lose any of his covers.
His fingers are numb with cold and his face feels kind of frozen. Maybe he should ask Cas to make him one of those silly hats with ears the next time he kills something.
But then, after this break it’ll be Cas’ turn to freeze his ass off up there while Dean will curl up with this furnace that is his little brother and sleep the wariness out of his body. He walks around the carriage, looks under the covers and can just about make out the two of them, curled up facing each other. Damn, their legs are probably entwined beneath the blankets. Dean pulls a grimace and turns back to Jena. “We’re gonna stay here for a few hours?” They’re near a river again, no surprise there, but they’re also on their way through a small forest on a road that is still mostly intact. The leaves are sheltering them from the snow, the soft wind and the prying eyes of anything looking for them.
Of course, they also keep their tracks from being covered by fresh snow, because the earth isn’t frozen through yet, is still preserving the imprint of the wheels and the hooves. And the state of the road worries Dean. For it to not be completely overgrown, someone has to maintain it, and that means people living here, and that means people who can find them and rattle them out to the angels.
“Just until the sun comes up.” Dean can tell from Jena’s expression that she would prefer not to stop at all, but they’ve already travelled well into the night and between the trees, there is no weak glow of the snow reflecting the meager glimmer that always lingers between the ground and the clouds. It’s simply too dark to move on, even though he suspects her night vision to be better than his.
The sun’s not coming up for another three or four hours. Despite the weather, the days have been notably getting longer since they left their shelter in the non-existent house. Two hundred years ago, they would be moving towards summer.
So no potato season yet. At least that’s settled, then.
Dean shivers. He busies himself freeing the horse of the belts and ropes keeping it before the carriage and lets it wander off to look for grass between the trees, nibble on a few leaves with its friend and then hopefully lie down so Dean can lean against it and suck in some warmth.
He and Jena share a quiet dinner that is spared any kind of sex talk, thank God. Eventually, Dean asks, “How cold do you think it’s going to get?”
“It depends,” is the vague reply. “This might be it, at least for the next fifty years. But I wouldn’t count on it. It could soon be very, very cold.”
“But the weather barely ever changes at all. It should take years for the temperatures to drop like this.”
“Exactly. This has been happening a little too fast for my taste. But I’m not sure. It could still be natural.”
Suddenly, Dean understands. His insides turn to ice. “You think this is Lucifer’s doing? He’s trying to kill Sam by making everyone freeze to death?”
“Michael, more likely. But yeah, it could be. I don’t know, but I certainly wouldn’t put it beyond him. It would be the sensible thing to do, from his point of view. I’m just not sure the planet would tolerate such a change anymore. We are, in the end, bound to it in a way. There are limits.”
Dean doesn’t reply to that in any way. For the first time he really becomes aware of just how hopeless their battle is against beings that have the whole damn planet on their side.
Suddenly without appetite, Dean packs his dinner away, thinks about trying to feed the leftovers to Sam and is overcome by another wave of hopelessness. Be it hunger, withdrawal or cold, Sam is going to die, and they won’t be able to get him back another time.
“You’re a fucking archangel,” he says, his voice full of anger.
Jena raises an eyebrow. “I can’t make it summer, if that’s what you’re after.”
“I didn’t think you could. After all, there’s a pretty impressive list of things you can’t do.” Including keeping Sam alive.
Jena glares at him, then, unexpectedly, she laughs. It sounds only slightly fake. “I can kill you, for instance.”
“Part of the point,” Dean says entirely unimpressed. “You can kill basically anyone. Of all of us you have the best chances for survival. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you have excellent chances for survival, given your natural drive to stay alive.”
“And yet here I am,” Jena reminds him, but she seems mildly interested. “You sound like you’re going somewhere with this.”
“You could kill Sam.”
“Dean, sweetheart, a toothless rabbit could kill Sam.”
“That’s kind of the point. It’s nearly hopeless to keep him alive so we need to,” Dean swallows, “need to consider how to keep him safe anyway.”
“Ah.” Jena nods slowly. “I can see where this is going.”
“You can do what Cas did,” Dean confirms. “Take Sam’s soul and protect it from your psychopathic brothers.”
“Not the worst idea ever,” Jena agrees. “Unfortunately, it’s impossible.”
“What? How so?”
“Well, Lucy’s an overcautious son of a bitch. He didn’t think anyone else would ever again lay hands on his dear Sammy, and yet first thing after he took him from Cas, he marked the soul in a way that makes it impossible to ever carry it like that again.”
Dean feels hopelessness crash down on him. “How can you be so sure? He told you?”
“No, we checked as soon as we made it out of Lucy’s hiding place, when it looked like Sam would die right under our hands any second.”
Once again Dean thinks he might be sick. “’We’?”
“Cas and I, of course. We knew we couldn’t take this way out even before you woke up.”
“Wait. Does that mean you wanted to kill my brother while I was asleep?”
“Well, obviously.” Jena says it as if it was, indeed, obvious. “We could hardly wait until you felt up to joining us, could we? Besides, you would have been overly dramatic about it.”
“Dramatic!” Dean jumps us, his hands balled to fists, but Jena remains unimpressed, even though she seems to sober up a little bit.
“Think about it, Dean. For Sam it would have been for the best – or why else did you suggest it just now?”
But Dean’s not thinking about that, he’s thinking about waking up with his memories intact and finding only his brother’s dead body waiting for him. No chance to talk to him ever again, or to apologize (since he’s made such a great job of that so far).
A creaking sound behind him makes him jump and turn around. Something moves under the covers on the wagon and he becomes acutely aware that they are having this conversation within earshot of his brother.
Jena raises her eyebrows at him, silently urging Dean to go on, but he doesn’t actually have anything more to say about this, because he knows she’s right and he hates himself for knowing it.
If they had waited for him to wake up and killed Sam afterwards, what good would that have done in the end? It might have satisfied Dean’s selfish desire to hold his brother’s warm body one more time and says he’s sorry, but Sam still wouldn’t even have known his brother was back with them.
Jena and Cas are the wrong people to direct his anger at. Intellectually he knows that. But somewhere deep inside him the less fucked-up boy still exists, the boy who is convinced that no-one is allowed to make any decisions about his little brother’s life but him.
Not even Sam. Which perhaps is a summarization of all Dean has done wrong.
Unable and unwilling to continue the conversation, he makes his way over to the horses that have settled on the ground by now and leans against on one of the warm backs, preferring the company of the dozing animals over anything that could talk back at him.
-
When the sky starts to brighten, Jena starts to get busy. She collects their stuff, whistles once and the horses actually jump up and wander over to her. Dean has to jump out of the way and glares at her, even as he starts preparing the animals for the next part of the road. He dozed a little himself, unwillingly but unable to stay awake any longer. It did nothing but freeze his joints from the lack of movement.
His fingers are num; the only thing not cold in him is the anger he still feels at himself and everyone else.
They are nearly done when Cas shows signs of life. He must have slept for more than ten hours and he looks much better for it as he pulls away the fur stretched over him and Sam. Instead of grabbing a bite to eat and getting his ass onto the bench taking the reins, he pulls out a water bottle he apparently kept under the covers with them to keep it from becoming too cold and gently shakes Sam halfway to wakefulness to prop him up and make him drink a little, being all fucking careful and soft, like treating to a baby. Then he settles Sam back onto the blankets and comes crawling down, stretching his limps like they had all the fucking time in the world.
He’s also standing in the way. Dean shoves him aside none too gently and with a glare but without a word, earning a confused frown in response he would love to punch out of Cas’ stupid face.
His old friend is, of course, used to Dean not being entirely happy with him, but obviously he has no idea what he did wrong this time. Looks like he really did sleep all through the conversation.
Dean doesn’t offer an explanation. He carefully crawls up the wagon, pulls over the roof even though they don’t need it at the moment and snuggles against his brother under the cover. He imagines his icy body cooling Sam’s fever as Sam’s heat drives the cold out of Dean’s bones. Like something that belongs.
He imagines waking up with the memories of all the ways he wronged his brother in his mind and only a cold dead body to reunite with.
Sam turns towards him in his sleeps and breathes against his chest.
-
Even though Dean is tired beyond belief, it takes a long time before the rough movements of the wagon on the uneven ground lulls him to sleep. When he opens his eyes it’s to Sam stirring softly against him and still tired, the exhaustion sitting deep in his bones and trying to drag him back under.
Washed out daylight greets him when he blinks his eyes open, the dirty orange of the sky reflected by the snow and making the whole world look like a cloud of chemical gas.
There are voices. Cas and Jena talking, but not to each other. Jena says something and is answered by a voice Dean doesn’t know.
“Pretty close, actually,” the voice says.
“How many?” Cas asks.
“Oh, there’s room for some more, if that’s what you want to know. It’s just the two of you?”
Sam moves, quite awake, and his fingers scrape along the underside of the fur above them, as if desperate to see what’s going on out there, so Dean shoves the roof aside before his brother can panic. Sam at once sits up, pulling himself upright on the side of the wagon and Dean helps here, too, even as he begins to understand that it might be a better idea to keep his brother’s presence hidden.
The sour look Jena throws them when they emerge tells Dean that she thought along the same lines. “It was going to be,” she says drily. “But then we got company.”
Beside Dean, Sam blinks in the weak light, an expression on his face Dean can’t read. Disbelieving astonishment might come close; for a moment he thinks Sam recognizes the three strangers standing beside Jena’s horse, but then he remembers that anyone Sam might have known is long since gone.
At least it doesn’t seem to be a “Oh shit, these are demons” expression, but then, Dean doesn’t even know if those instincts still work with the blood (mostly) out of Sam’s system.
He kind of assumes that Jena would know, though, even if Cas didn’t.
The three random strangers, two men and a woman, look normal enough to Dean. They are wearing clothes made of animal skins and fur, which probably means there’s no department store around that offered enough clothes to be raided for generations, which doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. Despite the cold, their faces are sweaty, as if they’ve been doing hard labor. After a moment Dean sees a small wagon full of wood they’ve apparently been dragging behind them, and if Dean’s not mistaken, at least one of them eyes theirs horses with obvious greed. Instinctively, he tightens his hold around Sam’s shoulders to pull him aside should these be the kind of people capable of Spontaneous Murder for Horses.
Though he’d like to see them try to get past the angels.
The men are wearing quite impressive beards that obscure half their faces, but their eyes look young, not older than Sam. The woman can’t be much older than Gabriel’s vessel has been by the time the archangel took over, however long ago that might have been.
All of them are staring at Dean and Sam as they peek over the side of the wagon, probably all ruffled (Sam certainly is) and looking like little kids disturbed during a nap. More precisely, they are staring at Sam, and that gets all of Dean’s big brother instincts in uproar.
“What’s wrong with him?” the woman asks, taking in Sam’s pale, thin face and bloodshot eyes. “Is he sick?” She sounds nervous, and the guys look nervous, and Dean understands.
“He’s had an accident,” he hurries to say. “Bad infection. He’s recovering, though.”
His words put them at ease some but he can see that they remain tenser than they have been before the brothers made their appearance. “So, why are you out here all on your own?” one of the men wants to know. “You’re not from the area, I’d know you.” Besides that, he can probably hear it from the way they speak. All of the strangers talk in a drawl that sounds vaguely Georgian to Dean, though he’s pretty sure that this is not, in fact, Georgia.
“Our village had to be given up when the temperature dropped. There wasn’t enough food, so some of us left, hoping to find a better place in the south. But most of us didn’t make it over the mountains.” Cas speaks smoothly, as if he didn’t realize that these people were scared they’d been chased out of their village because Sam had a catching illness, or that the epidemic had simply wiped out everyone else.
They calm down even more after that, though they stay on their guard, as everyone has learned to do who survived this long in a world this generally evil. They relax enough, however, to revel that their village isn’t far from here, that there used to be more villages around but most have died out in recent decades and that they wouldn’t be devastated if these four travelers decided to settled down and bring some fresh blood. Or at least stay a while and leave one of their horses in gratitude for the villagers’ hospitality.
Like that’s going to happen, but then, once they reach the mountains, they can’t keep the horses anyway. The idea of taking a few nights in a proper house and maybe some fresh food for the road from these people and in return allow one or two of them to accompany them to the mountains and take the horses back with them when Dean and the others have no longer need them comes suddenly and is very tempting. He doesn’t like the thought of just leaving the animals to fend for themselves anyway, after they served them so patiently.
And then there’s Sammy, who looks at these people as if they were the best things that ever happened to this planet.
“We could really do with a place to rest,” Jena answers to their invitation just that moment, and Dean is surprised. He thought she would want to avoid closer contact with others as much as possible, and almost wants to protest the decision just for that.
“How much further to your village?” Cas wants to know, and one of them gestures in the direction of a hill where Dean can only just make out the tops of a couple of bare trees. “Over there. If not for the hill, you could see it.”
“Awesome.” Jena gives them a happy grin that would fool Dean if he didn’t know her; but he does, and so it looks mostly creepy to him. Not even evil, as she tends to be, just creepy. “Lead the way! If you want, you can leave that wagon with us – my horse can pull it faster than you.”
The idea obviously excites them, no surprise there. What surprises Dean is Jena jumping off her horse and pulling some of their spare ropes out of her bag. “Just leave it to me,” she says and they stand back a little, watch her, watch Dean and Cas and especially Sam and then they go a few steps aside to a have a little discussion, too far away for Dean to make out much except that apparently one of them is convinced the town guard will shoot the newcomers on sight and that they can’t agree who will go and announce their coming. And how to politely take away all of their weapons, naturally. Well, they can try.
“Hey Sammy.” He gently punches his brother in the rips, so carefully Sam probably hardly even feels it. “How do you feel about getting a real bed again? I bet they have excellent straw for us to sleep on.”
Sam turns to look at him with something like a smile and tears in his eyes that are more than a little confusing. “Hey, what’s wrong?” Dean asks, concerned but not too concerned, understanding that Sam is sick and emotional and has every right to be. “I know they are a little dirty, but I didn’t think they look terrible enough to make babies cry.”
Sam shakes his head and ignored the lame joke. “I just wasn’t sure there was anyone left.”
And Dean finally gets it. Since Sam came back, they have been running through empty wastelands without seeing a single human being. Sure, they mentioned the other people they met on their travels to him, but is it really surprising if Sam thought that in his absence everyone else died? That his struggles for all those years have been in vain?
Now he thinks about it, Sam was with Lucifer and his angels for a good while before Dean and the others pulled him out. Who knew what the bastards told him?
“Aw, Sammy,” he signs and gently ruffles his brother’s hair. “The world is full of people. Granted, most of them are assholes, but what else is new?”
It gets a weak smile out of his brother, who then turns his attention back to the three strangers who keep sneaking glances at him as if to make sure he doesn’t develop black bumps all over his body while they’re still deciding what to do.
The fact that they are willing to take the travelers back to their villages despite their lingering suspicions about Sam’s state tells Dean how badly they need fresh blood. He worries, though – about the reaction of the other villagers to someone so obviously sick. Their stay there is going to be tense, with Dean ready to attack anyone coming too close to his brother, and if the tenseness of Castiel’s shoulders is anything to go by, he’s ready to do the same.
As for Jena, when Dean looks over to her she’s just very calmly pulling the wooden bow from the back of her horse’s saddle, puts in an arrow and aims. Dean’s shocked call comes too late. The first man is hit in the back of the neck and dead before the others even understand what’s going on. Jena’s fingers fly to the next arrow and the woman falls, an arrow embed so deeply in her chest it nearly comes out of her back. Only the last man has a chance to react to the danger, but he barely manages to get his hand around the handle of the knife in his belt when a third arrow pierces his throat, killing him within seconds.
Worse than the gurgling sound that escapes his destroyed throat just before death is the strangled cry Sam makes once it registers what’s happening. Before Dean can even get over his shock, his brother has kicked off the blankets still covering him and crawled off the wagon, only to have his legs give out the moment they touch the ground. Immediately, he tries to get back to his feet and now Dean’s there, helping him up and holding him back as he struggles to get to Jena, tears of rage streaming down his face. His lips move, but words seem to escape him. Dean gets it, he does.
Jena watches him impassively. Cas hasn’t moved at all. He doesn’t even turn to see what they are doing.
“What the fuck have you done?” Dean spits the words his brother can’t form – or has no air for. Sam seems to be struggling for breath now and Dean begins to worry what this must be doing to him. It makes him even angrier with Jena.
“Taken out a potential threat,” Jena says coolly. “I thought you’d appreciate that. Or am I really the only one who saw the danger?”
Sam finally finds something to say, even though he nearly chokes on it. “They were just humans.”
“I know.” Jena shrugs. “So what? They would still have betrayed us. They, or someone from their village, knowingly or not. As soon as the first demon or angel came along, they would have known exactly where we were and were we are going.”
“So you killed them on principle? They didn’t even do anything wrong yet!” Dean still can’t quite believe it. Sam’s legs give out and he nearly falls but suddenly Cas is there, helping to keep him upright and hyperventilating between them.
“And you would have taken the risk? If I needed any more proof how much you need me, this would be it.” Jena’s still holding the bow. She has a Colt, Dean knows, but that would have been too loud, would have alerted the people in the village. Too much attention, even if they would have been gone by the time anyone arrived.
Those people wouldn’t even have recognized the sound of a gunshot for what it is, Dean thinks. “Last time I checked we were trying to save mankind, not wipe it out.”
“Most of all we’re trying to protect Sam, are we not? He’s the one thing everything depends on and we can’t take any risk. Anything that can be done to keep danger away from him has to be done, and I don’t care if that insults your sensibilities. I don’t think you have any idea how fragile your brother is.”
As if to prove her right, Sam doubles over and retches. Weak as he is, this was simply too much for him. Dean wishes he’d just slept through it all.
“As I see it, it’s your actions that didn’t exactly do him any good,” he snaps before helping Cas to lift Sam back onto the wagon once the retching has stopped.
How could things go from awesome downhill so fast?
While they take care of Sam, Jena continues to be unimpressed. She wanders over to the three bodies, pulling out the arrows, then rolling the corpses into bushes where they are less obvious with a few well-placed kicks. In the end she begins to place some of the logs from the small wagon the three were pulling along onto a free spot on their own wagon. “We shouldn’t let this go to waste,” she explains when she notices Dean staring. “It’s cold.”
-
Sam is still sobbing helplessly when they move on. He curls into a ball as much as his stiff and aching body allows him to and clenches his teeth against the angry sobs that try to escape him. Dean’s comforting hand he doesn’t seem to notice.
When Sam’s fever comes back with a vengeance not an hour after they moved on, leaving three corpses half-hidden in the bushes, Dean isn’t surprised. If there’s one thing his brother doesn’t need it’s any more emotional stress. It’s a long time before Sam falls asleep, and when he does, he’s twitchy and restless, shouting incomprehensible words every now and then.
It’s the only words spoken for a long time. They travel in tense silence, their speed still excruciatingly slow but a little faster than before, a little more rushed. It’s still a couple of days to the mountains and Dean is torn; wanting to go as fast a possible, yet wanting to postpone their arrival at their destination and the loss of the wagon to give his brother more time to rest.
He continues to travel on the back of the wagon, keeping one hand on Sam’s leg as he sits leaning against the sides. He’s not even cold anymore, feels strangely numb under all the anger. Sometimes he looks up to glare at Jena, but she acts like nothing happened. To her it probably doesn’t matter at all. She used to feed people to crocodiles, after all. This wasn’t even up to her standards.
-
Even though their speed didn’t feel all that much faster to Dean, the horses are trembling with exhaustion when they finally stop at dusk, coming to a halt beside a small lake. The water is covered in ice, but it’s so thin it takes absolutely no effort to break it. The horses drink greedily and Dean wonders if that’s good for them. It probably isn’t. Maybe Jena’s keeping them healthy the same way she’s keeping Sam from starving.
It once again reminds Dean of how fucking much they depend on this changeable, unpredictable asshole.
It falls to Cas to rub the horses dry after their stop, which is probably unfair after he had to drive all day. It’s not like they agreed on it. Dean simply didn’t offer to, and now he simply doesn’t move, just watches the other work, one hand slowly rubbing Sammy’s back. Cas doesn’t complain, doesn’t even glare at him. Maybe he thinks he owes him something.
Well, maybe he damn well does. Dean can’t forget how tense he was all the time while Jena spoke to the strangers. Maybe he knew, or at least suspected what she was about to do and let it happen.
Even though it’s not snowing anymore, Dean pulls the makeshift roof back over Sam’s head after a while to protect him from the cold. There are trees around them, enough for them to dare make a small fire. Dean looks at it from a distance, the warmth it promises tempting but not so much he’d leave Sam for it, or bear the presence of the two angels who are talking quietly in their damn language anyone but Dean seems to understand.
When Cas comes over to bring him a cup of steaming hot water, he accepts, though. The heat feels wonderful against his icy hands as he holds it, and when he smells the stream, it gets even better as Dean realizes that it’s not just hot water but tea, some of the natural stuff Cas sometimes makes. He didn’t think they had any left.
It still tastes strange, like earth and pine cones, but it’s better than nothing, and it warms him from the inside. Dean drinks a few sips, then wakes Sam just enough to make him drink, too. Sam accepts the rest of it, then curls up again and huddles even deeper into his blankets. His near-skeletal frame is wrecked by shivers from the fever and the cold. After a while he starts coughing, harsh and breathless, in a way he hasn’t in a while – not this badly. There goes Dean’s delusion that his lungs might finally be getting better, no matter what Cas and Jena told him about his illness.
He sighs wearily. Unless Sam starts coughing blood, there’s nothing he can do, and if Sam does cough blood, he can’t do anything but wipe it off his face.
Cas doesn’t say anything. He sticks around, though, sits at the end of the carriage with his feet dangling towards the ground, and listens to Dean’s brother chocking on his own lungs.
Eventually, Sam stops, and after a while he’s so still Dean is certain that he’s fallen back asleep. (Or died.)
“There would have been a better way,” he says quietly.
Cas shakes his head, barely perceptible as if he isn’t quite convinced this is the movement he should make. (He shouldn’t.) “None that would have been safe enough. We couldn’t avoid running into those people. Given the circumstances, this was the only possible course of action.”
“So that’s how you kept Sammy alive all those years?” Dean asks bitterly. “By randomly killing people?”
This time, Cas headshake is clearer. “Of course I didn’t. But things were different then. Easier.”
“Easier,” Dean echoes. “Yeah, because what you told me about it sounds just like a walk in the park.”
“Sam’s state was less critical,” Cas elaborates. “He died, but back then, his death was mostly an inconvenience. Now we can’t let it happen under any circumstances. I thought you understood that.”
Dean isn’t sure he wants to have this conversation with a man who calls Sam dying “inconvenient” without blinking. “Do you really believe that or are you just trying to justify murder here? Don’t forget who she is. She probably killed those people because she has a certain quota of murder to commit in order to keep up her ego.”
Cas looks at him blankly and Dean wishes it was easier to read him. “Does it matter?”
“It’ll matter to Sam.”
This time Cas looks away. “Sam is important,” he says regretfully. “His opinions are not.”
NEXT
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Date: 2012-04-16 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-22 12:35 am (UTC)I'm really looking forward to more.
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Date: 2012-04-23 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-23 06:26 pm (UTC)