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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): 8,154
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
Sam’s fever climbs steadily as the day moves on. He never stirs. At some point, Dean falls asleep and when he wakes up, he believes for one long, terrible moment that his brother has died, before his shaking finger find the weak, erratic pulse under the thin, hot skin of Sam’s neck.
He goes to search for Jena then and finds her in the next room where she’s sitting in an old armchair with her eyes closed. For a second Dean is convinced she must have fallen asleep, but her eyes open the moment he enters the room.
A nod towards the narrow bed on which Castiel is sleeping tells Dean to keep quiet. The girl who is actually an angel and used to wear a male body the first several times Dean met her follows him out of the room and into Sam’s without a word.
She checks Dean’s brother over quickly but in the end shakes her head. “Nothing I can do right now. It’s down to the traditional methods.”
“I see.” Dean looks around. “We don’t happen to have a bathroom in here?”
“Third door to the right.”
Dean doesn’t even ask if there’s running water – there’s electricity as well, after all. He finds towels and a jug which he fills with cold water from the tab and carries it back to the room, where he sits down to gently cool the heated skin of Sam’s face and neck.
“Why didn’t you heal Cas?” he asks, his eyes never leaving his brother’s face. “His wounds are no personal love bites from Satan, are they?”
“No. I could heal him. But as long as we’re in here not only am I protected from detection, I’m also effectively cut off from the powers of Heaven,” Jena explains. “What power I have I need to keep up the shielding and keep Sam alive. Castiel’s wounds aren’t serious, mostly he’s just exhausted. He’d probably bitch if I wasted energy on him.”
She says it matter-of-factly, without any hidden fondness or remorse, and Dean is reminded that in the big family of Heaven, these two hardly even know what the other looks like. Or at least Gabriel, the almighty archangel turned Trickster, certainly didn’t know Castiel, the heavenly henchman before he turned traitor. There is no deep, brotherly bond between them. It reminds him that Jena is here just for her own interests, but he’s too tired and distracted to try and figure out what those interests might be.
She leaves before the nightmares start. Dean is almost glad for them because a Sam who tosses around, however weakly, is better than a Sam who might just as well be dead for all he moves. Then Sam starts whimpering and crying out which breaks Dean’s heart and makes him try to wake his brother, sooth him, do anything to make it stop. He’s never been able to watch him cry.
Then Sam starts calling for Dean in this thin, broken voice that’s barely there and Dean’s heart does something in his chest that can’t be put into words.
Through it all, he does his best to bring Sam’s fever down, to make him drink and keep him as comfortable as possible. The first time he pulls off the blankets to wrap cool, wet towels around Sam’s legs, he nearly starts crying himself.
Sam’s legs are both splinted. What Dean can see of his flesh through gaps in the bandages is swollen and discoloured in some places, black and purple in others. He needs to ask Jena how bad it is later. Right now he just… can’t.
They don’t even have anything to give Sam for the pain. Dean can only hope Jena’s able to do something about that, even if she can’t heal him.
Sam whimpers again when Dean pulls the covers back up, and Dean can just barely make out his own name. “Shh,” he makes, leaning closer to his brother and stroking his hair. “It’s okay. I’m here. You know that, right? Sammy?”
Sam doesn’t answer. His head falls to the side, away from Dean, as he sinks back into a deeper unconsciousness where nothing can reach him.
-
Dean reaches his first low at some point in what he calls night because of the quietness that surrounds him with Sam deeply unconscious and neither of the others anywhere to be seen. There’s no light falling in through the windows. They might as well be in another dimension and Dean won’t rule out that they are. It adds an air of unreality to the place that seems to crush down on him and makes his thoughts constantly circle the one thing he does not want to think about.
He remembers everything. He remembers his mom and how losing her felt. Remembers putting all his faith into his father and all his responsibility into watching Sammy. He remembers hunting, and Sam leaving, Dad disappearing, Dad’s death, and Sammy’s. He remembers thinking nothing worse could ever happen when Mom died, being proven wrong when Dad died and then the terrible mix of denial and growing horror inside him when Sam slumped lifelessly in his arms.
Deep down inside he had known that very moment what he was going to do. His first instinct was finding a way to fix this. He never even tried to deal with the loss because he couldn’t face it.
And as much as it pained him to admit it later, everything would have been better if he had. Better for the world. But most importantly, better for Sam.
The thought leads to another one, and another, until everything has run through Dean’s head and left him a crying, trembling mess.
The only thing that keeps him from losing it completely is the fact that while he has all those memories in his mind, he knows that not all of those memories are real. Michael must have messed with them, like he did before Lucifer found them. Because there are things there Dean knows he wouldn’t have done. Even if it makes so much sense in his memories, he knows it can’t be true.
At the same time, all these new memories hand him the final proof that the memory Michael tried to leave in his brain about raping Sam couldn’t have been true – because Dean’s memory ends the moment he says Yes, and even if the events leading up to that moment can’t be entirely genuine, he knows Castiel was right when he said Michael kept Dean’s consciousness so far under that he never had the slightest awareness of what was going on.
There’s nothing. Nothing at all. And if there had been something, anything at all that indicated Dean was in the least okay with what Michael was doing, the manipulative bastard would have let Dean remember it.
What this leaves him with is confusion, uncertainty and in result an inability to finally fully face his guilt and remorse over what he has done and how horribly wrong it all went. Everything inside him is a disconnected mess, as if those memories belonged to someone else; another Dean this one barely knows. It’s not so much that he can’t pick out the bits that are wrong as that he can’t decide what’s right, because everything feels wrong to him. Alien.
It makes Dean feel sick, and wanting to scream, and yet it is all still held back, leaving him unable to let go.
Sam is ill, hurt, maybe dying. Sammy’s gone through Hell, suffered more than Dean could imagine even with his own memories of Hell intact, and that is all Dean’s fault. Of this, at least, there is no doubt.
And yet Sam keeps whimpering Dean’s name in his sleep and the fact that Sam must have seen him before he passed out is, ironically, the reason why Dean knows he’ll keep fighting.
The whole situation is wearing him down, yet he can’t sleep. His own thoughts won’t let him, which goes against every instinct he has: there’s nothing to do, no reason to stay awake. He needs sleep and should get it while he can so he’ll be rested when he needs to be. But knowing that doesn’t help in the least.
When he finally drifts off into a half-awake haze, his thoughts get away from him and leave him with confused and terrible dreams.
He’s woken after what feels like minutes for all the rest he got and days for the horror that accumulated in his mind. What wakes him is Castiel opening the door and entering with a basket hanging off his arm. Like a fucking flower-girl in a meadow.
“You should eat,” he says without preamble, putting the basket on the desk beside Sam’s bed. It’s too high for Dean to look into from his position, but he suspects the basket contains food.
His stomach seems to think that food would be great, but the thought of eating makes him feel sick.
“Not hungry,” he says. His stomach growls in protest, but Cas only shrugs; he probably couldn’t care less if Dean starves or not.
The fallen angel has changed his clothes into something Dean hasn’t seen before, so he guesses Jena provided for it the same way she provided for whatever’s in that basket. Cas is still pale and looks like he could use more sleep, but he also doesn’t give the impression of planning to get some anytime soon.
Which is stupid because there can’t be any more to do for him than for Dean.
Then he comes over and sits on the edge of the bed, opposite Dean. He places a hand on Sam’s forehead to take his temperature and then two fingers on the side of his neck to measure his pulse, and Dean is reminded that he did this for decades, that he took care of Sam longer than Dean has even known his brother.
The realisation is followed by the irrational urge to shove Cas off that bed and tell him to fuck off. He doesn’t, because it’s not the right reaction to show to the guy who kept his baby brother more of less alive in his stead, but the jealousy remains where it is, gnawing painfully away on Dean’s insides.
But he pulls himself together and only says, “He hasn’t woken up yet.”
“I didn’t think he would.”
Dean doesn’t like the way Cas says that – it doesn’t sound like he didn’t think Sam would have woken up yet, but like he doesn’t think Sam will wake up at all. Once again, Dean wants to kick him, but before he can snap a reply, Cas says, “You have to eat something. We might be stuck here for a while.”
Dean knows that. The moment they leave the protection of this place, Lucifer will be able to track them down, so they can only get out when Sam is up to being constantly on the run. Even without the illness and the internal injuries, that will take weeks. Sam’s legs, broken in several places, make sure of that.
“No doubt about it,” he agrees. “Sammy won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.”
Castiel hesitates with his reply, so long Dean starts to glare at him. “Spit it out.”
“Sam might not wake up. Not as himself. If he dies, Lucifer won’t let him go before he said Yes, so the moment he he’s gone, we have no choice but to abandon him. You should sleep and feed yourself, so you will be up to it should we have to run.”
“Don’t be an idiot! Sam’s not going to die. You heard Jena – his wounds aren’t lethal anymore.”
“They’re not longer inevitably going to kill him. He’s still heavily injured, and very ill,” Cas reminds him, calmly and mercilessly. “There is no guarantee he’ll make it. You’ve witnessed the nightmares he has. He might simply give up.”
“He won’t!” Dean’s fingers close around Sam’s limp hand – carefully despite the agitation he feels. “This is Sam we’re talking about. I didn’t give him enough credit back then, but you’ve been with him all this time and you should know that he’ll keep fighting. He’s been trying to get me back for decades.” And it hurts to think of that, guilt crushing Dean like a collapsing building. “Do you really think he’ll give up now I’m finally here?”
“He might not even know that, Dean,” Cas says softly. “I think he passed out before he understood what was going on. For all Sam knows, I’m dead, you’re Michael, and there’s no hope. He’s all alone, Dean. With Lucifer.”
“No.” Dean shakes his head in denial. “Sammy knows I’m here. He’s been calling my name.”
But Cas doesn’t look convinced. He just sighs and for the first time looks at Dean with something like pity in his eyes. “He always called your name, Dean.”
It should make Dean feel better, should tell him that no matter what, Sam still counted on him on some level. But it only makes him want to cry.
He has to look away and when he looks up again, Cas is gone.
-
Jena makes herself scarce. She can’t leave any more than the others without giving away their position so Dean has no idea what she’s doing all the time, but he doesn’t really care either. It’s not like he went looking for her. In the end, he only leaves Sam’s room to go to the bathroom.
Without light from the outside it’s impossible to tell how much time has passed. After a while the walls begin to drive Dean crazy. He feels irritated and restless, yet too worn out to do anything about it.
He does eat, eventually – not because he thinks that Cas is right and Sam will die on him, but because he needs his strength to take care of his little brother. Like he’s always done. Like he was always supposed to do, anyway.
Dean has no illusion that re-dressing Sam’s wounds, putting cool cloths on his forehead and changing his sheets is going to make up for his fundamental failure, but it’s something he can do, so he does it.
Sam doesn’t wake up. He never opens his eyes. Days pass, maybe a week or even two and Sam only moves when he’s tossing in his nightmares. Dean manages to feed him some fluids at least but he needs food and it’s not as if they have an IV in here. Apparently Jena’s powers reach their limit there, which is a pity; a respirator would have been nice as well, since Sam’s breathing sounds laboured at best, ratting and wheezing on the worse days.
His fever doesn’t go down notably, but it doesn’t seem to climb any further either, which is something, at least. Dean sits and holds his hand whenever he can, talking to him all the time. Letting him know he’s here, waiting for Sammy to come back to him.
Hoping he can reach him, somehow.
Whenever Jena comes in, she sits beside Sam for a while, holding his hand and feeling his forehead, but if she’s actively helping him or simply monitoring his state, Dean can’t tell. He only knows that Sam doesn’t wake up.
The memories Michael left him with make him sick. There are some he can identify easily as fake simply by knowing he would never actually do what he remembers doing, but even those feel deceptively real and Dean doesn’t know where the line runs. He’s had some fucked up thoughts on the way to Michael, that much is certain. The only question is how fucked up.
He asks Cas about it, eventually, after a long time of thinking on little food and less sleep. That day he’s sitting on the bed with Sam in his arms, having lifted his brother’s head and shoulders ever so carefully off the mattress so he can better hold on to him. Dean does that for himself as much as for Sam. After so many years of separation they both need the closeness.
“Hey Cas,” he says. “Tell me everything you know about me. Everything that happened in the time we were friends.”
Cas looks confused. He hasn’t lost that particular expression, and Dean finds that strangely comforting. “I thought you remembered.”
“I do. But some of it is wrong. I think Michael messed with my memory and now…” Dean stops and laughs a little, though there is no humour in it. “Now I’m not even sure which of the bullshit I remember I actually need to feel guilty about.”
“Try everything,” Cas says dryly. “You can’t go wrong with that.” But then he meets Dean’s eyes and takes pity. “Very well. Why do you think Michael manipulated your recollection of events?”
“Because he did it before. When I met him just before Lucifer found us.” New guilt washes over Dean at that, though in all fairness no one can blame him for accidentally letting Michael know something he didn’t even know himself. Fairness plays no part here, though, because he can always blame himself, and should. “He tried to convince me that I… did something he did by making me remember doing it.”
“Do what?”
Damn, couldn’t Cas just let that go? “He made me remember raping Sammy, okay?” Dean snaps. “He made me remember…” His voice breaks and he has to look away. His arms tighten their hold around his brother as if they could somehow shield him from all the terrible things that already happened to him. Cas, mercifully, doesn’t comment on it.
“I knew that wasn’t true the moment he did it, though,” Dean says as soon as he trusts his voice enough to speak. “And now I remember other things that can’t be true either. But it all feels so disconnected. I can’t grasp it as long as I don’t know which parts are wrong, and how it really happened.”
“Why would Michael put fake memories into your mind?”
“To make me feel awful about myself and more likely to believe things the way he presents them, I guess.” Dean shrugs. “At least, that’s what he tried before. He thinks he can make me see things a certain way if he makes me believe I thought so before.”
“And he made you believe you raped Sam?”
“No!” Dean hisses angrily. “He tried to. But I know I didn’t because I know I’d never do anything like that, least of all to Sam. Just like I know I wouldn’t throw myself at Michael for the promise of him getting rid of my brother for good!”
Castiel seems to freeze in his movements. “What?” he asks.
Dean runs a hand over his face, feeling drained. He doesn’t like revisiting his memories, fake or not, because they make him feel like there are ants in his brain eating away little chunks of him – but at the same time he has to talk about it before he explodes. And he needs certainty.
“According to my memory,” he says, “I went to Michael and told him he could have me if he promised in return that he would kill Sammy. For good. And then he did – he made me watch so I’d know he kept his promise and it was…” His voice breaks but he doesn’t care if he’s sounding pathetic. The memory plays out in his mind once again, down to the horror and relief he felt simultaneously as Sam died before his eyes, screaming and convulsing as blood poured from his eyes and ears and eventually his mouth, choking him. “It was horrible, but Michael said it had to be, to make sure Lucifer couldn’t bring him back. It’s the last thing I remember before waking up in the middle of nowhere.”
Cas is silent for a long time. Long enough for Dean to worry. So long, in fact, that when he speaks his words don’t really come as a shock anymore. “That is what happened,” he said. “You thought Sam saying Yes was inevitable, so you asked Michael to make sure he couldn’t be brought back.”
Dean closes his eyes and instinctively holds his brother even closer. “How can you know that?” he whispers. “You weren’t even there.”
“Sam told me. Later.”
Dean barely hears him. His mind is full of terrible pictures, all the more painful now he can no longer deny they are true. He remembers Sam’s agony and his body going up in flames before he even stopped moving. Remembers that his last thought was that now, at least, it was over for both of them. He could let go and leave the world to Michael.
“You…” Cas is clearing his throat in that awkward way he copied from humans not knowing what to say but feeling they have to say something. Dean wishes he just wouldn’t. “You meant well,” Cas tried. “You thought you were keeping Sam safe.”
“I watched him get burned alive,” Dean chokes. “Just so I could run away.”
Cas doesn’t say anything to that. He must have had his own thoughts about what happened and Dean is very sure that they weren’t as favourable as he pretends right now. All he does say, when he stands up and turns to leave the brothers alone, is, “Sam understood.”
It doesn’t make anything better. Dean buries his face in Sam’s hair and screams.
-
The worst about everything is that Sam was there. He was present when Dean said Yes, looking at him like a kicked puppy because he had been so sure that Dean wouldn’t in the end. He had had so much faith, in fact, that he gambled all the world on it and Dean will never again forget the look on his face the moment Dean let him down.
He’d nearly taken it back, then. Sam’s faith in him had very nearly been enough to replace the faith Dean didn’t have in either of them. But in the end he looked away so he didn’t have to meet his brother’s eyes when he said, “There’s one condition.”
And the last words Sam ever heard him say were Dean demanding of an angel to kill his brother and make sure he could never come back. Because Dean would rather see him die horribly than trust he wouldn’t destroy the world.
What terrifies Dean is how much sense it all made at the time and how absurd it seems now. Maybe things would have been different if Michael had kept his promise. Sam would have gone to Heaven and eventually Dean would have joined him, and all that would have been left of his betrayal would be the fact that he spared his brother further suffering and saved half the world.
But Michael didn’t keep his promise, he merely kept Dean’s consciousness in blissful oblivion so he would never learn that he himself revived Sam the moment Dean was gone. Looking back it is unbelievable that he would trust an asshole of an archangel more than Sam, who’d made mistakes but always meant well.
In the end, Dean can’t even pretend his anger at and mistrust in Sam had been anything more than a convenient excuse to give up and blame someone else.
He spends the next hours, days or weeks in a haze. It feels like weeks, but Sam hasn’t starved yet and neither has Dean, so it must have been hours. His brain doesn’t work right, though, and his emotions are a mess. “Your way of dealing is not exactly natural,” Jena says at some point, and the moment she speaks is the only moment he realises she’s in the room. “There was no ongoing development that led you to a point of revelation. It’s all jumbled in there, with giant gaps in your emotional progress. It’s hardly surprising you can’t deal, I get that. However, as long as you don’t, you’re useless. So how about you just pretend it was someone else who fucked up and get moving again so we don’t have two coma patients to take care of?”
Her concern is touching and her advice bullshit. Dean quickly forgets she exists as he tries to come to terms with how apathetic he was to his own fate, and Sam’s.
Holding his brother’s limp hand, it does feel like another person, another life. But it wasn’t.
Regardless, Dean gives in and starts eating again; not much but enough to keep him going so he can take care of his brother. Sinking into guilt and depression isn’t going to help anyone, but it takes effort not to do it. It’s so, so hard – but Dean has a lot to make up for and for once he’s going to actively work on that instead of just feeling bad about himself and leaving everyone else to deal with the mess he caused.
He’s going to do what Sam did.
And he can only hope that Sam will ever know.
-
Eventually, Dean falls asleep. It takes days, or so it seems, and when it happens he crashes hard, sleeps so deeply not even a nuclear explosion or an angry archangel would be able to wake him.
He wakes up filled with horror and a vague memory of pain. The feeling is instantly familiar – he recognizes it as the wake of a dream about Hell, one of the merciful ones he doesn’t fully remember. For a moment, while he waits for his rapidly beating heart to slow down, he longs back for the days when he couldn’t remember anything and these dreams had no meaning.
A second later he feels guilty about that.
Dean’s limbs feel almost too heavy to move and despite the terrors of his dreams he has a hard time pulling himself back to wakefulness. What makes him jerk fully awake, in the end, is the realisation how deep his sleep was, and worry about all the things that might have happened without his notice.
His back screams in protest when he moves, but Dean ignores it until he assessed his surroundings. Unsurprisingly, he finds himself in Sam’s room, half lying on the bed, half on the floor. Sam is lying before him and with every breath Dean can hear a soft rasp he can’t make himself pretend is just snoring.
The air is stale, smells of sweat and long illness. It tells Dean that they have been alone for a long time because somehow the air always gets better when Jena was there. The girl is like a freaking air freshener, which is the least she can do in his opinion, after forbidding them to ever open the windows.
“No.”
The whispered word comes so unexpected that Dean flinches and his heart leaps. He quickly grabs Sam’s hand, but his brother’s eyes are still closed. He’s covered in sweat and trembling, shows no sign of waking.
It’s not the first time Sam’s been speaking in his sleep, but it’s the first time he’s said anything other than “Dean.”
He’s having a nightmare, that much is clear. Not the first one, and all Dean can do is shake his brother ever so gently and hope to reach him somehow.
“No,” Sam whimpers again, and “Please,” and “Don’t.”
For the first time Dean is glad he doesn’t say his name between all of that.
“It’s okay, Sammy,” he mumbles, stroking his brother’s hair. They need to wash it, he thinks absentmindedly. Sam’s always hated having his girly hair be dirty. He’ll feel terrible when he wakes up like this.
At the same time he wonders what horrible memory Sammy is reliving in his dreams, and if Lucifer would know and come if he said Yes in his sleep.
He’ll have to ask Jena – she’ll know.
Dean still doesn’t know what to make of her. She’s never done anything to help him or his brother back in the day, when she ran around in a male vessel and pretended to be a trickster god who liked to kill people. And later she stood by and watched everything bad that happened happen without ever trying to interfere. The fact that now, all of a sudden, she discovered her good heart and wants to support them is suspicious, but so far Dean has seen nothing that indicates betrayal.
She’s the only reason they are still alive and Sam is still himself, and it doesn’t sit well with Dean that he’s dependant on and indebted to someone whose agenda he doesn’t know.
He should ask her, but he knows her replies will be pointless. He should ask her if she can do something about Sam’s nightmares, but Dean’s brother has already calmed down again and he doesn’t want to leave him to someone else. Especially someone he doesn’t trust.
Castiel Dean does trust. Now his memories are back much of the information the fallen angel kept from him makes sense, even though Dean still doesn’t like how things went down. It’s hard to keep a grudge against anyone but himself at the moment, though, so Dean just drops the whole thing. He doesn’t want to have discussions of any kind right now, anyway.
And no matter how he looks at it, there can’t be any doubt that Cas really cares for Sam and would never do anything to harm him. Not recently. Something between them changed in the time Dean was absent, and he still has enough sense to get that his absence had everything to do with it.
He’s still not over feeling a little resentment. When Cas comes in and feels Sam’s pulse and temperature, pulls away the covers to gently wash his sweat-covered body with a damp cloth and just tells Dean to “Go take a shower. You smell,” Dean wants to push him away and tell him that yes, Dean fucked up and he doesn’t deserve Sam’s love anymore, but he’s the one who raised the kid and stuck with him through the pile of horseshit that was their life, while Cas was the one who judged him for having been fed demon blood as a baby and smashed Sam’s faith in Heaven upon their first meeting.
He doesn’t. He goes and takes a shower instead.
The water is cool but not cold. It feels awesome on Dean’s skin and reminds him that this is the first shower he’s taken in two hundred years.
He can’t really enjoy it, when everything that feels remotely good makes him want to cry.
Cas is still there and sitting with Sam when he returns. Dean can’t even complain – it’s not like the angel has been particularly obnoxious these past few days. Mostly, he’s left the brothers alone and kept to the other end of the building, only showing up to bring food or to accompany Jena and hear her latest assessment of Sam’s condition.
So Dean owes him for one more thing, and bitching about his presence isn’t the way to go.
“How are you doing?” he therefore asks instead of what he feels like saying when he slips back into his clothes. “You look better.”
“I heal quickly,” Cas explains without much emphasis in his voice. “My injuries were not serious.” After a long, awkward pause he asks, “How are your hands?”
They ache, but until now Dean hasn’t paid attention to them. Sometimes, when holding Sammy, he noticed the red and blistered skin on his fingers but the sight never truly registered in his brain. Dean got rid of the bandages ages ago because they were in the way.
Now he looks at his burned hands, for the first time really seeing them. They look better than he thought. The skin is still burned, still overly sensitive, but it’s healing. There’ll probably be scars that could have been avoided with some antiseptic cream and attention, but Dean doesn’t give a fuck.
The red, tender skin reminds Dean, suddenly, of the handprint burned into his shoulder and what it meant. He and Cas had something, once – some bond that went beyond friendship, beyond the mere gratitude for having been saved, and Dean mourns its loss.
“I’m sorry,” he says. It hardly covers what he wants to say, but neither would anything else.
Cas nods and doesn’t say anything.
After a minute, Dean moves to open the door to the corridor, letting in some air that’s old and dusty but still better than the air in the room. He wishes he could open a window.
He wishes Sam would know he’s been saved. That Dean is back and sorry, and so fucking proud of him.
The thought that his brother might die and be lost returns with unexpected force. It makes Dean leave the room, and since he can’t get out and run until he vomits his lungs onto the dirty ground, he goes to look for Jena who could make the air a little more breathable for his brother, if nothing else.
The place is still small, and Dean doesn’t quite know why he expected it to have miraculously gotten bigger. Perhaps because the time he spent alone with Sam felt so long that he thought Cas and Jena must have been somewhere, done something. But there’s only the one corridor and six doors leading from it: Sam’s room, the room Dean first woke up in and the room Jena put Cas in after he collapsed. Then there’s the bath right beside Sam’s room, a small storage chamber stuffed with rubbish and a large kitchen that Dean has looked into but never entered. Jena is in none of these rooms and Dean can’t explain where she’s gone. She might be hiding from him. Stranger things have happened.
The lights in the corridor are always on. They’re bright enough to almost resemble daylight and keep Dean from going completely crazy. Cas’ room, on the other hand, is mostly drowning in shadows, with only a small, dim light bulb providing some illumination. Like the light in the corridor it doesn’t have a switch to turn it off. Only the light in Sam’s room and in the kitchen can be turned on and off. The room they placed Dean in when he was unconscious and the bathroom are always well lit.
The arrangement seems random. Dean is pretty sure that this whole place isn’t, strictly speaking, real, but he can’t for the life of him figure out why Jena would have chosen this design if she made the house up out of nothing.
Or where she fucked off to.
He’ll have to ask Cas, then. Dean returns to the room at the end of the corridor and stops in the doorway. Cas is sitting on the bed, having pulled Sam up to his chest and stroking his hair ever so softly. Dean can tell he isn’t holding him like this for the first time and his chest aches at the sight.
Sometimes he wonders if it wouldn’t be better for everyone if he just went away and left them to themselves.
Perhaps it is good that he can’t leave without Lucifer finding them, because no matter how much he feels they don’t need and want him, in the end it would just be another form of running away.
Besides, Sam wants to get him back, for whatever unfathomable reason. It would be cruel to keep that from him after he fought for it for so very long.
Cas looks at him and Dean wants to leave again. He is about to do so when Sam stirs.
Sam stirred every so often in the past few days, but this is different. This isn’t a toss of the head or a listless movement of his fingers. This time, Sam lifts his less injured hand as if to reach for something and groans.
Then he opens his eyes.
The room is much darker than the corridor. Dean knows he should come closer, should stop being just a silhouette in the doorway, but he can’t move.
Sam will think he’s Michael, he suddenly realises. He’ll think that Lucifer’s big brother came to join in the fun.
Again.
Sam looks directly at him. Dean can tell even in the shadows that fill the room. He’s waiting for panic, and sure enough Sam’s eyes fill with tears.
“Dean,” he whispers, breathes the word entirely without voice.
Dean is with him a heartbeat later and he knows he shouldn’t – Sam can’t know this is him, he’s just calling out his name. Dean is going to scare him. But he can’t help himself. His hands reach out for Sam against his will and he pulls him out of Castiel’s arms – carefully, carefully – and into his own. Waits for the screaming, the struggling.
Sam sobs into his shoulder and lets his thin, broken body sink against his brother’s. “Dean,” he breathes again. “Be real.”
“Yes, Sammy, I’m here, it’s me, really me this time,” Dean babbles. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Got you now, Sammy. Gonna stay, just hang on. So sorry…”
Sam’s far too weak to hold on to Dean with his one good arm but Dean can feel him shift and try anyway because this is Sam and this is what he does. He holds on to his brother, no matter how hard it is.
All Dean can do is hold him closer so Sam doesn’t have to.
He barely notices Castiel leaving the room.
-
Sam doesn’t stay conscious for long, and less than an hour after he first sobbed his brother’s name, Dean already doesn’t know anymore if it really happened or if he dreamt the whole thing after exhaustion finally knocked him down without him noticing. Sam is lying still and limp in his arms, filling this silence in the room with the rattling sound of his breathing. His skin is still dry and hot and Dean doesn’t know. Maybe it never happened.
He isn’t yet desperate enough to ask Cas, but he might.
Jena comes in eventually and checks Sam over. He’s doing better, she says, but the frown on her face doesn’t sit well with Dean.
What feels like hours later, the nightmares start again. Sam starts tossing and struggling against Dean’s hold, and Dean tries to keep him still because Sam’s hurting himself but his well-meant attempts only makes his brother struggle harder. Then he starts screaming for Dean, over and over, in a desperate, broken voice, and Dean pulls him close and says, “I’m here, I’m here.”
Sam jerks and opens his eyes. He’s staring right at Dean but his eyes are wide and scared, full of confusion. When he tries to move away, Dean’s heart breaks but he let him go.
Sam’s breathing hard and he looks like he might start to cry any moment. He looks so lost and hurt that Dean wants nothing more than pull him close again. It takes all his will not to and his hands are balled to tight, tight fists.
“It’s me, Sammy, it’s really me. Michael let me go.” He feels tears prickling his eyes and doesn’t care. “God, if there’d just be a way to prove it to you…”
Sam’s breathing speeds up – Dean fears he’ll start hyperventilating soon. He doesn’t know how awake his brother even is. Sam just woke up from days of unconsciousness in a haze of fever to a place he doesn’t know and something he probably didn’t really expect to ever see again. He must think this is a dream, or a trick of Lucifer or Michael, or Hell…
“It’s okay, Sam,” Dean says roughly. “I’ll give you some space. Take deep breaths, okay? Calm down, I won’t hurt you. No one’s gonna hurt you ever again.” He turns to the door that is inconveniently closed and calls for Cas, accepting that the angel is the more comforting sight right now – no matter how much it hurts.
Stepping back is the least he can do for Sam.
Cas appears within seconds. Maybe he heard Sam scream despite his lack of voice, or he’s been waiting behind the door like a creepy stalker. Dean doesn’t care, being able to focus only on the way Sam flinches when the door opens, and the way his eyes widen even more when he recognizes his friend.
“You are safe now, Sam,” Cas says gently, sitting down beside him, and there’s no satisfaction for Dean in seeing Sam flinch away from him, too. He aches for his brother, and he can’t help him.
Castiel doesn’t seem bothered by the reaction at all. Dean wonders if he’s used to it. For the first time he thinks about what state Sam might have been in every time he returned from Hell.
Sam struggles to sit up, weak as he is, with broken legs and only one arm that’s remotely useful. He shouldn’t, Dean thinks; not with internal injuries and so many fractures. He shouldn’t because he’s too weak and in too much pain, but Cas reaches out to help him, and Dean quickly places a few pillows behind his brother’s back so he can lean against them.
“Don’t worry,” Cas says calmly when Sam makes a sound disturbingly like a whimper. “We’ll just help you sit. That’s all.” True to his word he withdraws his hands as soon as Sam is settled and moves out of his personal space.
Sam’s eyes travel from one to the other, not trusting them, or not trusting his own perception. His good hand clenches around the covers and he’s covered in sweat. Dean can see his panic growing as he is overwhelmed by things his confused mind can’t take in. First Cas killed him, and then he was being tortured by Lucifer and his lackeys, and now he’s with Cas again and Dean is sitting right before him.
It would probably be easier on him if only Cas was around, because that’s something he is used to, at least. The logical conclusion is easily made but difficult to accept.
Castiel, obviously, comes to the same conclusion. “Dean,” he says quietly, throwing him a look.
Dean clenches his teeth and wordlessly leaves the room.
-
When Dean returns to Sam’s room an hour later, his brother is asleep again and Cas is sitting vigil at his bedside. Sam looks a little better, though: his face not quite as pale, his sleep not quite as restless. There are tear tracks on his face but he looks a little more peaceful than before.
This is what Cas has been able to do just by being there. All Dean managed to accomplish was giving his brother a panic attack.
“Did you say anything?” Dean asks in a low voice, sitting in the chair before the desk. “Does he know what’s going on?”
Cas hesitates with the answer. “I’m not sure,” he admits. “Sam is exhausted and sick. I don’t know how much he understood of what I told him, but he seemed calmer when he drifted off.” He, too, is keeping his voice low, so Dean assumes that Sam is indeed asleep rather than unconscious this time.
Dean doesn’t reply. He’s only just beginning to understand the multitude of problems he is facing now Sam is conscious again. He wants to have a proper talk, with Sam awake and listening. He needs to apologize, explain himself, ask for forgiveness – but at the same time he dreads that conversation like nothing else.
Maybe Sam won’t forgive him. Dean certainly doesn’t deserve forgiveness, and when he thinks how little effort he had made to forgive Sam after he freed Lucifer for much less selfish reasons, he can’t imagine Sam feeling anything but disgust with him.
The fact that his brother fought so hard to get him back has nothing to do with it. Back in the day, before he said Yes, Dean also needed to know Sam was safe and felt responsible for him, even though he didn’t want him around.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that now, not wanting Sammy; not needing to have him nearby and shelter him from forces that had used him from the beginning and weren’t done with him yet.
Cas pulls him out of his thoughts eventually, with a quiet, “You need to eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.” It’s true – the mere thought of eating makes Dean’s stomach revolt.
“Regardless of your emotional state, your body needs sustenance,” Cas insists. “Sam is going to need you healthy – that is, if you intend to take care of him.”
There’s no venom in his voice, but Dean can hear it anyway. He doesn’t deserve any better, really. Last time it mattered, his idea of taking care of his brother was to ask someone else to kill him.
He has the chance to do better now, though, and in reply to Cas’ unvoiced question he leaves the room and heads for the kitchen, where he finds a plate with sandwiches inexplicably waiting for him. He grabs a few and an equally inexplicable bottle of soda and moves back to Sam’s room, where he takes one sandwich and hands another to Castiel.
The angel takes it without comment.
They sit in silence for a while, but eventually Cas leaves again. It’s then that Sam wakes up and Dean isn’t sure if it’s curse or blessing, if he finally gets to connect with his brother or if he’ll have to call for someone else again because his presence makes Sammy flip out.
But Sammy only looks at him, and okay, his eyes are brimming with tears, but they’re not wild and wide and Dean supposes that a little crying can be excused every now and then.
“Hi,” he says.
“I thought it was a dream,” Sam whispers. “It wasn’t, right?” He sounds so doubtful that Dean’s heart breaks and makes him instinctively reach out for his brother’s hand. Sam doesn’t flinch away but returns the pressure with a desperation that overcomes his physical weakness.
“No, Sammy, it wasn’t. I’m here now. I’m so sorry.” His voice breaks. Sam lets out a strangled sob and Dean just wants to pull him into his arms, but that would hurt him so he can’t.
He can only watch and eventually begin to panic when Sam’s sobbing turns into a cough that doesn’t seem to stop.
-
When Dean finds Jena in the kitchen and tells about the cough so she’ll check Sam over again, she just rolls her eyes. “No point,” she says. “The disease is deeply settled and won’t go away. There’s nothing I can do.”
“He nearly vomited his lungs out there,” Dean protests. “What, we’re just going to wait until it gets better on its own? Or until it kills him? Did you forget that the magical healing finger of death won’t do him any good if Lucifer won’t let him go before he said yes?”
“What part of ‘I can’t heal him’ didn’t you understand?” Jena sounds irritated and not concerned about Sam at all. “I’m not refusing just to annoy you, moron.”
“Even death wouldn’t heal him,” Castiel suddenly says. He doesn’t seem interested in elaborating, though.
Dean doesn’t like it at all. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Sam has been sick for a long time. I don’t know if Lucifer can’t heal his illness or if he simply doesn’t want to, but so far it never disappeared and I don’t think it will."
This doesn’t get better. “But it’s just like a chronic cough, right? It’s not like it’s going to kill him. You said he’s had it for years…”
Neither Cas nor Jena answer for a long minute. Dean is ready to murder someone when finally Cas says, “It has killed him before, when he was already weak due to other causes. There’s a risk it will happen now as well.”
Sam is weak. Dean gets that. Centuries of being dead and a day of being tortured on top of being pretty banged up to begin with will do that to a guy. “But the circumstances are different,” he observes. “He’s not sleeping in a cave this time. It’s warm here, there’s food and water and we’re taking care of him.” There’s food Sam can’t eat and it’s not like Cas didn’t take care of him before, but Dean refuses to believe that the house and Jena’s help are all for nothing.
“You’re right,” Cas says to his incredible relief. “Sam seems to be recovering and we won’t have to put the stress of moving on him before he’s ready. He has better chances than ever before.”
It’s what Dean wants to hear right now. It’s time to leave and go back to Sammy, he decides, before he has a chance to worry about the look Cas shares with Jena and what it might be they’re not telling him.
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Date: 2012-02-03 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 10:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-04 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 10:18 am (UTC)It's not quite easy to go full-on happy from this, I admit.
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Date: 2012-02-04 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 10:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-05 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-12 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-12 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-11 01:34 am (UTC)Amazed at the wonderful pictures your words pain even with them being painful right now.