Chapter Text
After the crypt, after Meg, after Cas, Sam and Dean drive back to the bunker. Dean keeps the radio off. Sam doesn't try to make him talk. They get out of the car and stand there in the night air. Road noise is so distant as to be almost imperceptible, but they can hear the dry grass rustling in the wind. "You know what," Dean says. "I'm going to need a minute." Sam nods. And Dean gets back in his car, and he drives.
*
"Hey, brother," Dean hears. Dean's outside some shithole gas station in the middle of nowhere, sitting on Baby's hood, watching the moths flitter and swarm the lights above the pumps. The hood holds no residual heat from the engine block. The phone pressed tightly to his ear is warm.
"Hey," Dean says. His voice comes out wrong, low and rough and thick. Distantly, part of his brain is surprised that the words don't taste like copper, that the working of his jaw and tongue come out without physical pain. He doesn't realize until the hurt doesn't materialize that his body was waiting for the words to pull at the split of his lip.
"Hey yourself," Benny's rumble comes, something like relief in his tone.
Dean's not sure how long he's been sitting here. There's a blank space in his head.
"Where you at?" Benny asks, and Dean, pressing his other hand absently, gently, to his cheekbone, his orbital, realizes he doesn't know. "Dean, you still there?"
"Yeah," Dean says. "Just a sec." The gas station is generic, hum of the overhead fluorescents is the same as it's ever been. The highway runs dark towards a distant city glow in one direction, fades into the blank nothingness of night on the other. The air smells like gasoline. He turns on his GPS. "I'm half an hour out of Tulsa."
"Okay," Benny says. "That's good. Can I get you to do something for me? I'd take it as a real personal favor."
"Sure," Dean says, and "okay," as Benny talks.
Dean moves the Impala a bit down the road, so that he loses the lights of the station. He lies down on the hood, staring up at the roof of stars overhead and tonguing the inside of his lip, checking, until Benny gets there.
*
Dean wakes with a start, hand automatically jerking towards his pillow and the knife under it. The hotel room is grey in the early dawn light, color sucked out of everything. There's a moment, two, where the mattress beneath him is hard as rock and the walls fade out into nothingness and there's blood and smoke in the air, and he tenses automatically, listening for the rustling of leaves in the wind or the footsteps underneath. Then he sees Benny, standing with his back to him, staring out the slats of the blinds. Dean exhales, slow, lets his hand unclench from the hilt of his knife, and he sees Benny's shoulders relax almost infinitesimally in response.
"Morning, sunshine," Benny says, turning his head over his shoulder, towards Dean. Pale strips of light from the blinds play across his face, light up his eyes and leave shadows beneath them. "Bag's in the bathroom if you want to shower, get changed."
"Yeah," Dean says. Sits up and scrubs his hands across his face gingerly at first, then harder. He can still smell purgatory. Showering helps. The bathroom is small, worn but well-cleaned, and the water runs hot and the pressure is good. He closes his eyes, braces his arms against the cool tiles, lets the water beat stinging pinpricks against his skin, and doesn't think of anything until he gets out of the shower. In addition to Cas knitting back together the bones of his face and arm, Dean's lost some of his scars again. He wipes steam from the mirror and looks at his arms, his chest, his shoulders, and can't figure out rhyme or reason for what's been left behind. "Okay," he tells the backwards version of himself in the mirror, and dresses quickly from the bugout bag Benny grabbed out of his trunk. It's not until Dean goes to fold the clothes he slept in that he realizes they're still covered in blood. The shirt's a loss, he thinks, even though he's gotten pretty damn good at getting monster crud and blood out of things over the years, then he thinks - Oh, shit, Benny. -
The jacket's salvageable, the jeans mostly untouched, but he shoves them into a plastic bag first, ties off the bag in the garbage can around the abandoned t-shirt. Carefully washes the flakes of blood from his skin.
As far as Dean can tell, Benny hasn't moved, except to turn his face back to the window. The light is starting to cast everything in gold.
"Hey," Dean says, and "thanks," standing awkwardly, then "sorry," because it's not like he's afraid Benny's going to lunge for his throat, not really, but it's rude, that's what it is, for him to walk around covered in blood. It's like dangling a bottle of water in front of a man in a desert, except the desert is made up of bottles of water - and, okay, that metaphor doesn't make sense. It's like taking an alcoholic out to a bar and then slowly swirling a tumbler of Glenfiddich under their nose. And because Benny's turned to face him now: "thanks," Dean says again, making a gesture that he hopes encompasses the entire situation, the hotel that he doesn't remember finding or paying for, the fact that he's a goddamn mess, everything.
"Any time, brother," Benny says. He leans in to clasp Dean's arm, but stops when Dean tenses, just a little. (Dean's not thinking of Cas's iron grip on his shattered arm, the way his radius and ulna rubbed together.) Benny leans back the couple of inches to the wall instead, crossing his arms easily across his chest. "Any time."
This close, Dean can see that the shadows beneath Benny's eyes weren't just tricks of the light. The heavy stubble Benny usually carries is starting to move into beard territory. The hairs pick up the golden glow of the warming sun, but his skin is sallow. Dean swallows, steps back. "How're you doing?" he asks, guilt twisting at his gut, because he remembers the last time they talked, the strain in Benny's voice, his low rumble that he was in a bad way.
"Oh, you know," Benny says, tilting his head back. "Getting by."
"Yeah," Dean says. "Same."
*
They're almost a mirror image, leaning back against the sides of their vehicles, facing each other, drinking from paper cups. Dean's is full of coffee. Benny's isn't. Benny has to be getting flakes of rust and paint all up the back of his dark coat from his piece of shit camper. Dean has a million places he needs to be and a million things he needs to be doing, but he's drinking coffee as the morning fog burns off and pretending not to notice that there's hazelnut creamer in his cup, making the bitter scorch just that much more palatable.
Dean's almost forgotten what it's like to just be able to be quiet with someone. Sam always want to talk about his feelings and shit or there's a case, and Cas (Cas was so silent in the crypt, face so still) Cas is full of questions and wisdom and lacks a filter and when Dean stops talking or snarking they fill in the spaces, and even when they don't there's just so much weight there. He and Bobby - he and Bobby could sit there, quiet, working their way through a bottle of Jameson's, watching the glitter of light through glass and the way the whiskey changed colors as it dwindled down. Lisa - Lisa chattered as she moved around the house, used to fill the silence with light small talk because she could tell that's what he wanted then, something to fill in the spaces inside him, white noise to fill the spaces in his head. (God. He never deserved Lisa. He hopes she's happy.)
"I should go," Dean says. His only movement is to tighten his fingers around the warmth of his cup.
Benny hums in agreement. The sun's starting to get high enough that even in his coat and hat, it's going to be a problem for him. Every sip from his cup, he's careful to make sure no tell-tale residue stays behind, tongue flicking out to catch any stray drops of red.
Dean turns away. Swallows the rest of his coffee with a burning throat, chucks the cup at a nearby trash can. He's half into his car, one leg inside and the other arm on the door when he stops, straightens. Crosses his arms along the top of the door. "Oklahoma City," he says, and Benny nods like that means anything to him other than a two hour drive. "There's this museum in Oklahoma City," Dean says. "National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum."
Benny's eyes crinkle. "I've got no other plans."
*
Dean tries to figure out if it's weird, that this is the first time he's been in a museum. At least, during the hours the museum is actually open, and not just because he was casing the place for a later break-in or searching for something cursed. No Fed suit. Paid admission. He has a handout with a map of the museum and everything. It's weird.
It's a weekday morning and there aren't any school tours, so people are just a low hum around them. He has a brief flash of what it might be like, the wave and press of kids in cowboy hats hollering "look!", parents yelling "slow down," bored teenagers supervising younger siblings, and he winces. Dean and Benny's steps echo, just a little, in the main hall. The air is cool and they look less out of place than they did outside, each five or six layers deep into their clothing.
The Weitzenhoffer Fine Firearms Gallery is everything Dean's ever dreamed it would be, and Dean's fingers itch to drift across some of the more ornate engraving. "You don't belong behind glass," he definitely doesn't tell one particularly beautiful rifle, its wood stock carved in intricate lines, gold inlaid with delicate scrollwork that spirals out from a buck with proud antlers. If he does, Benny definitely doesn't laugh gently.
"I like this one, here," Benny says, standing in front of a pearl-handled revolver with intricate filigree crawling down its silver barrel.
"Mine's nicer," Dean says with a sideways grin. Their eyes meet in reflection. Maybe this gun, behind glass, is prettier and objectively in better shape despite its age. Dean picked his gun out of the selection in the trunk of some skeezeball's car for his sixteenth birthday, and his father huffed. It has a lot of wear on it - and Dean suddenly wonders just how many bullets he's unloaded down its barrel - but he's taken care of it like he's taken care of his Baby, and he knows it as well as he knows the back of his hand.
Benny turns his head to him, raises an eyebrow. Dean realizes that Benny's seen him with a machete, a purgatory blade, a knife, but never with a gun. "I'll show you later," he says, feeling weirdly proud. The Colt 1911 is tucked at the small of his back, and Oklahoma's an open carry state, but this is - this is a nice day so far, and he doesn't want to risk drawing attention by pulling his gun out in the middle of a museum.
Benny likes art, it turns out. Dean shifts a little. "I don't know anything about it, really." The Art of the American West Gallery - sunsets and wagon trains and cowboys caught mid lasso - is really more his speed than the Prix de West Gallery, where Benny lingers.
"I don't know much about art, either," Benny says. Every painting in this room won some sort of major award, so Dean knows that in the opinions of people who think they know about art, they're all good. Benny turns away from the one he's been looking at (a single, tall ship with layered sails, reaching into the wind and towering over two smaller boats that trail dark clouds of smoke from their smokestacks). Benny looks at him intently, just like he was looking at the painting. "I just know what I like."
*
Benny huffs a little, sometimes, at some of the exhibits. Soft, amused sounds. At the clothes in the Museum of the Frontier. At some of the full-sized buildings they move through in Prosperity Junction.
"Of course he's about to get thrown from that horse," Benny says. Points at how the man in the photograph is grasping the horse with his thighs. Uses his hands to sketch out how the rider should have the reins wrapped across his palm, around his wrist.
Dean's mouth is dry. "How old are you, anyway?" Dean asks. "I know you bit it just before the sixties really started to swing."
"Now that," Benny says. "Is a complicated question." Dean, who is either in his early thirties or a septuagenarian, understands. "I was born in 1862. We counting to when I was turned, to when I died, to today, or we starting from when I crawled back out of my grave?"
The picture in front of them was taken in 1915, and the man - boy - about to fall off the horse can't be more than 25. Dean's standing next to a man who died before this photograph was even taken. "You know how to ride a horse, then," Dean says. "Not very pirate-y of you."
Benny smiles, slow. "Oh, I know how to ride," he says. Dean definitely doesn't blush.
Pop Quiz, Dean thinks, only a little wildly. What's the weirdest thing about this situation? The hunter standing peaceably next to a vampire; the fact that the person - the man - next to him was born before the man in this faded, sepia photograph; or that Dean Winchester is in a museum, no hunt involved?
*
Benny's sitting in the shade of the back of his camper. Dean has his hands in his pockets and his face to the sun. He feels like he should be saying see you later. Heading back to the bunker. Sam's there. His room is there.
(Sam will want to talk about it. Kevin will have been working on the tablet, and will have news about the trials. Sam will want to do the next trial. In Dean's room, he can stare at the ceiling and listen to the hum of whatever magic power system keeps the bunker lit.)
"I could do with some food," Dean says instead. (Things he didn't say, because he has some situational awareness, take THAT, Sam: You hungry? I could use a bite.)
"I could eat," Benny says.
It's what he says the next day, too.
And the one after that.
And the one after that.
*
They drive. Nowhere in particular. Benny is no more willing to ditch his shitty-ass camper than Dean is to part with the Impala, so they make a bizarre caravan, the sleek, low purr of a muscle car and uneven hitching of an engine on its last legs.
"You should let me look at it for you, sometime," Dean says. He knows that what he should be offering is to show Benny how to fix it himself. They're somewhere in Texas, sitting on the back of the Impala, eating pulled-pork sandwiches wrapped in foil from a roadside diner. The sandwich takes both hands, and Dean has an open bottle of beer wedged between his thigh and the back bumper. It's cold through the denim. He has a flask tucked into the inside of his jacket, coming up to body temperature.
"We're ever somewhere with the time and tools, you go right ahead," Benny replies. Somewhere. Benny's always known more about boats than cars, and a thing or two has changed in the last half century.
Dean thinks about it, a bit. Being somewhere. He was in the bunker for what, three months? He's been on the road with Benny for a week. He feels untethered, unmoored. He's crisscrossed the country more times than he could count, spent near his entire life doing it, but he always had a target. Always had a goal. (He shouldn't be here, he thinks. He shouldn't be running away from - )
"Easy, brother," Benny says. His hand is hovering near enough to his shoulder to touch, like he's waiting for permission to touch, and that's bullshit, Dean thinks. When did Benny ever need permission to clasp his shoulder? Dean's not some skittish -
"Thanks," Dean says, to drown out whatever was about to come tumbling out of his brain. Leans into Benny's hand.
*
They've somehow fallen into a bizarre travel schedule. Dean sleeps better at night but Benny has a hard time traveling during the middle of the day. Nothing else calling, they either split the day with a siesta in the middle, or leave sometime in early afternoon and drive into the evening. They should just switch to travel at night, Dean thinks, because it's not like he hasn't spent his entire life snatching winks of sleep where he can find them. At least that way it works for one of them instead of half-assed for both, but every time he tries to shift their schedule it somehow ends up rolling back. He doesn't think he's ever seen so many sunsets and sunrises.
In Purgatory, the sun never really ever rose or set, just hovered, a distant presence that sometimes shifted unpredictably in intensity or angle but never waxed or waned. Sunsets and sunrises were never really Dean's thing but he thinks, maybe, if you were used to watching the sun rise and set over the open ocean, you might miss them after a half century without.
Dean's driving and watching the sun set when he turns his phone back on and calls Sam.
"Hey," Dean says. He thinks he can hear the grinding of his brother's teeth and the way he inhales through his clenched jaw. Dean's had his phone off but he's been using credit cards he knows Sam can trace.
Sam inhales once, loudly, lets it out. "Kevin's here," he says. His voice sounds stronger than Dean remembered. "When you bugged out, I went and grabbed him." Laughs a little. "Literally threw him across my shoulder and dragged him back to the bunker. If you couldn't -" Sam stops. Pauses. Sam sighs. "How could we expect him to handle this on his own?"
Dean watches the sun set ahead of him, watches Benny's camper in his rearview. 'I could handle it,' he doesn't say. Instead: "He asked us to-"
"Yeah, but he's not exactly in his right mind at the moment."
Dean shrugs, like 'none of us ever are.' Sam can't see him down the line, but in the silence Dean can hear that he understands.
Sam doesn't ask how Dean's doing. Sam - Sam might not have known what happened after Flagstaff, but he'd been there in Boise after Dean had been too slow to stop one of the vamps from getting at Sam. Sam'd been there, afterward, scrunched down helpless in the back seat of the Impala, one hand pressed to his bandaged neck and the other to the window of the Impala while John had Dean up against the brick wall of the alley. Sometimes, Dean thinks that the look on Sam's face was the worst part of it.
"I'll leave my phone on," Dean says.
He calls Cas. Cas doesn't answer.
*
The thing about Benny – one of the things about Benny – is that they're square. Dean's not a fuck-up brother and replacement father-mother figure. He's not a righteous man with a glittering soul, born to lead armies; he's not the best-worst example of free will out there. He's not an FBI agent or a looming savior with a knife and a gun and the blood of monsters on his face. He's not one of the (in)famous Winchesters with a kill list as long as the Mississippi.
And yeah, maybe, Benny rode him out of Purgatory but Dean wouldn't have known there was a way out – wouldn't have gotten there, through every being, every creature – without him. Benny looks at him and all he sees is Dean.
*
Benny doesn't need food, but he enjoys it. Dean knows he likes to cook. Likes the act of creation. The job at the diner wasn't just because of Elizabeth. He favors Cajun food in part because of his childhood, in part because of the heavy spices, the depth of flavors. With his amplified sense of smell, the scent of herbs, of fresh fruits and vegetables cooking elevates itself to an art form. More than once Benny's turned them around just inside a restaurant's door because he can smell something that's gone off.
Benny takes to food like a smoker gone cold-turkey takes to gum. Food's changed a lot in the last half century, and Benny wants to try it all. Sometimes, Dean laughs to himself and wonders what Sam would think if he could see him, crammed into a too-small booth in a hole in the wall, slurping noodles Benny finagled them off a menu devoid of English.
Dean wants a burger most days, fries, but that's all in the taste, the grease, the salt. Not a lot of heady aroma. He's willing to compromise, sometimes. He's willing to set aside a craving now and then, when Benny's doing it every day.
*
The country crawls by in a never-ending sprawl of diners and roadside attractions and museum brochures and ticket stubs. At a Biggerson's in New Mexico, for a split second, Dean thinks he sees Cas. Dean and Benny kill monsters where they find them, when they're hurting people. Dean starts picking up battered paperbacks at second-hand book stores and leaving them in whatever motel room or park he finishes them in. He chooses books by author, by cover, by a vague sense of familiarity with the title. Sometimes he just grabs the one with the most battered spine or the one languishing at the bottom of the pile.
Benny reads every newspaper he can get his hands on, front to back, building context for a world moved on.
*
Somewhere around Des Moines, Dean realizes he likes Japanese woodblock prints. He's seen them before without really paying too much attention. Bobby had a bunch of them for research, depictions of monster and folklore and fairytales. (Bobby also had a book of pornographic ones that Dean found in a closet when he was twelve, a mix of confusing and arousing and not at all helping the fact that by bouncing between schools Dean'd managed to miss sex ed entirely.)
The woodblocks are landscapes and slices of life, but there are geisha and samurai, monsters and demons and gods. Dean likes the cleanness of the lines, the vividness of the colors, the cleverness of the technique itself. Ukiyo-e, the museum plaque calls it. Pictures of the floating world.
There's a face in one that strikes him as familiar. It makes Dean think of cool shadows. He closes his eyes and smells damp wood and grass gone to seed. Bobby's place again, Dean realizes. He'd been climbing in the open rafters of Bobby's porch when he found a long tube tucked up against the eaves of the house. Legs kicking into empty space on either side of the beam, he'd pried the tube open and unrolled the print inside, careful of the age of the paper. That face had been the one staring up at him, heavy mustache supporting his bulbous nose, eyes crossed under dark, overhanging brows. The hell are you doing up there, boy? Bobby had yelled, and Dean had shoved the print back in and jammed the lid on quick before he swung sheepishly down to the porch, careful to take the weight on his good ankle.
"That's Shōki the Demon Queller," the docent tells him when he asks. "Families with male children used to hang images of him outside their homes to ward off evil spirits. Some still do."
"Would it mean anything if it were done in red?"
"That would make it an aka-e as well," she says. "Used to ward off disease and illness, primarily smallpox."
The Leviathans left some of the walls of Bobby's house standing. Dean wonders if there's any chance the print is still there, tucked up safe, like it was meant to help keep them.
*
There's a werewolf in Odessa, a rawhide ranging around Salton Sea, vampires at the world's largest outdoor bookstore in Ojai. Benny whistles when he fights and hums when he's happy or he's not paying attention, Dean's not sure which. He doesn't ask. Doesn't want to draw attention to it. It makes falling asleep easier, sometimes.
Dean keeps thinking that maybe they should talk about it. They should talk about a lot of things. He knows this can't last.
He thinks maybe, just maybe, he's happy.
He wonders how he'd know.
*
They're outside of Canyonlands National Park when Cas drops out of the night sky.
*
Dean is out of his car before Benny's even come to a stop. Cas is bleeding and Dean freezes, uncertain, for a second, two seconds, until Cas growls "help me." Dean starts forward, but Benny pushes past him. Backlit by the Impala's headlights, Dean casts a long shadow across them. Benny picks Cas up like he weighs almost nothing. Dean's on the phone with Sam by the time Cas is settled into the Impala's back seat. Benny hangs back while Dean looks after Cas's wounds as best he can, considering he doesn't know what to do about wounds on an angel that close slow.
Benny's leaning against the front of his truck. He's shut it off so that the headlights didn't blind them, and he's cast red by the brake lights of the Impala.
"Twelve hours to Lebanon," Benny says. "Nine, the way you drive. You going to be okay?"
"Yeah," Dean says. "I'm fine." Dean has known this moment is coming from the second he saw Cas's trench coat, the blue of his eyes. (He's known it was coming for longer than that.) No matter how Dean tries, he can't see a place for Benny in the bunker, not like he can Cas. It's not just that Sam (and Cas) hate him. (Neither of them are going to be Benny's favorite people, either, because Benny and Cas never had much in common but Dean, and Sam's the reason for Martin, for the look on Elizabeth's face, for Benny's backslide. And look - Dean was a vampire for all of five minutes, really, but he can still remember the thirst.) The entire bunker would be a reminder of what Benny is. And look, Benny knows what he is. It's not like he ever forgets that he's a vampire, not really. He's perfectly aware what he's capable of. What he's done in the past. But you can't ask someone to live surrounded by reminders that people set up entire huge secret societies dedicated to hunting things like you, built lairs to hold and torture and experiment.
Dean realizes that Benny's holding out his arm for Dean to clasp and Dean does so, steps in close and uses it to pull Benny into a hug. "Look after yourself," Dean says, pulling him in tighter.
"Same to you, mon oisillon," Benny says. Dean can feel the cool rush of his breath on his neck. The hand on his back drifts lower before they release each other. "Drive safe," Benny says. He stays, leaning against his bumper, arms crossed against the night air he can't feel, watching as Dean gets in Baby. Without the backlight of headlights, he falls away quickly into the dark. In the mirror, Dean can see Cas, propped up against the door in the back, close his eyes.
*
When Dean has installed Cas into a room in the bunker, when he's seen to his wounds again and carefully washed his hands, he finds Sam in the war room. Dean's afraid Sam's going to try to make him talk about it, talk about everything, but he just folds him into a tight hug. Dean half-breaks it eventually, holding Sam at arm's length so he can take a good look at him. Sam looks - not good, exactly, not healthy, but better.
Dean nods.
"Let's get to work," Sam says.
*
It's a big bunker but Dean sometimes feels like he's suffocating. For some reason, they've all decided to congregate into one little corner of it, when they haven't even explored the extent of its expanse.
Kevin is yelling about going to the desert. Sam wants to either take off to Colorado after Metatron or hurl himself back into hell, looking for an innocent soul. Cas is somehow still bleeding and appears to want to cause the same in someone else. And Dean, to be honest, would rather be either killing something or in a tiny-ass restaurant in Buttfuck, Idaho, while he and Benny bump knees under the table. The four of them are trying to fly off in at least seven different directions. Dean's sitting in the library with a hand pressed to his forehead to try to contain the throbbing pain centered there while Sam looms over Cas and Kevin pulls book after book off of the shelves, looking for something, and the next time a heavy tome hits the desk, Dean just snaps.
"That's it! No one is going anywhere," Dean snarls. It takes him a second to realize that the reason everyone's silent and looking at him is that he smacked a book to the table so hard the noise is still echoing. "No one. Not right now. No wandering off. No taking off to find ourselves or run secret missions or make any damn deals. No one is going anywhere until we get our shit together. Everyone's going to find an empty corner of the building and take a deep breath and I'm going to chew a handful of Advil and cook us all supper." Sam starts to say something, but Dean holds up one finger. "And yes, I'm a hypocrite. New rules, starting now."
And because Cas isn't human and is shit at body language, he stops forward into the silence. "Dean," he says, "You know that I don't need to --"
"EVERYONE," Dean snarls, and stomps out of the room.
*
In heaven, Dean watched a full-grown version of his brother have Thanksgiving with his 13-year old girlfriend.
In Minnesota, Dean was on the menu for a bunch of inbred cannibals.
More than once, when Dean was hunting with his dad, the most expedient way to save lives was to use Dean as sex bait for whatever they were after.
When they were looking for Anna's grace, Sam, Dean, Ruby, and Anna ended up crammed into the last, too-small booth in a greasy diner that didn't even have the courtesy to serve booze.
This is still the most awkward family dinner Dean's ever been involved in.
*
"I'm still a vegan," Kevin finally complains one day.
Sam pauses. Looks at the salad Kevin has made himself out of burger fixing. "Did – did you think we were bringing you vegan tacos on the houseboat?"
Kevin gasps. "You weren't?" His eyes are wide. Sam looks a little frustrated and a little distressed.
"Gelato isn't vegan?" Dean asks, before he can stop himself.
"Milk and eggs, bitch!" Kevin crows.
Dean and Kevin snort with laughter. Sam looks just as confused as Cas does.
Things get easier, sometimes.
*
Another week in, and Sam corners Dean in an artifact room.
"You need to know," Sam says, "you need to remember, that no matter what happens, I don't want to die. I'll accept it, if I have to. But it's nothing I'm looking for."
Dean, who has been facing the wall, forces his shoulders to relax. "Good," he says, and as long as he doesn't turn around he can pretend that his voice isn't rough.
It's not like Dean doesn't know it's fucked up, the lengths they'll go to for each other. Or at least the lengths he'll go to for Sam. The Purgatory thing – if there had been any sign that Dean was dead, he'd understand. A body, or a smear that used to be a body or an atomic shadow, or Cas's wings burned into the ground.
It's not like Dean doesn't get it, on some level. Their dad sold his soul so Dean could live and Dean carried that heavy. Sam had to watch that whole year. Had to deal with the aftermath when Dean came back. When Dean broke the first seal. Sam's got to be getting tired of carrying the weight of his fucked-up brother's mistakes.
"You know what the most messed up thing is?" Dean asks, later. He's in his room, sitting at the foot of his bed, talking low into his phone. It's not the most messed up thing, but it's not exactly great, either. "I think, probably, that Lisa was when I had my head the most together. I mean, I was –" he grasps for words.
"Shell-shocked, half-mad with grief and guilt," Benny says, like he knows. Because he knows.
"Yeah," Dean says. He had screaming nightmares, days he saw monsters around every corner. But the press of guilt drowned out the constant mantra of look after Sammy running through his head. The Look after Sammy. Look after Sammy. LookafterSammy. Lookaftersammylookaftersammy that bounces around in his brain sometimes, broken only by his father's voice whispering if you can't save him, you'll have to kill him. "But I was clearer about a lot of things."
Dean's not dumb. He's not a genius like Sam or Kevin or Charlie, but he can see patterns. He knows that every time he and Sam are apart for any length of time, things get a little more clear. He thinks of the case in Waterville with Cas, how he hadn't laughed that hard or that freely in years.
"Little like Purgatory itself," Benny says.
Dean hums in affirmation. Because, yeah, sucks in a lot of ways, painful as anything, hell on the nerves, but pure. "How's your bucket of bolts handing together?" he asks. Drops to his back on his bed to stare up at the ceiling. He's been trying to picture where Benny is, how he's doing. How much color there is in his skin. How many days deep his stubble is. If he's somewhere warm enough that he has to carefully fold back the bottom few inches of his sleeves so as not to appear out of place.
"Still packing on the miles," Benny says. Doesn't offer anything about where he is, but the light conversation and clink of glass that was in the background when Dean called has long since been replaced by the distant rumble of cars and the occasional call of night birds. The bunker is full of a constant, low electric hum, the occasional rattle of old pumps, the sigh of recirculated air.
"Tell me a story," Dean says, and falls asleep listening to Benny's voice rise and fall like the waves.
*
Sam and Dean are neck-deep in research – literally, in Sam's case, because to one side he has a stack of books that reaches past his chin – when Sam gets a look on his face that Dean's learned to hate over the years. It's Sam's 'let's talk about our feelings' face. Dean feels his eyelid twitch. Dean tries frantically to think of something to say to ward it off, but Sam's already talking.
"Dean," Sam says, as he carefully marks his place in the book. "I just. I'm glad you're here. I don't like the thought of you out there alone, with everything happening. I know you're an adult – you're a hunter, one of the best out there – and you can take care of yourself, but - "
"I wasn't alone," Dean interrupts. The muscles in his thighs tense, and his jaw clicks.
Sam's face gets tight. "Who –"
Dean relaxes his hands. Flips a page. "Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to, Sammy."
*
"Hello, Dean," Missouri says when she picks up the phone. "And yes, you should bother with the small talk," she continues, which Dean was just wondering about. "I haven't heard from you boys in years, and I don't know everything. I ain't gonna ask you how you're doing, but a little bit of consideration wouldn't hurt. A few minutes out of your life right now aren't going to make any difference at all."
Dean laughs, shaky. "Okay," he says, and does his best to make casual conversation. He knows how to put someone at ease, how to lead a conversation. He learned how to carefully pass for almost normal for when he slipped and a teacher or social worker got suspicious. He knows lore. When he has to, he can talk about the big things, about life and death. It's not that he's rusty. It's that he's never really learned the in-between. He didn't have a friend - just friend, no romantic interest or parental substitute - until well into adulthood, long past the time he was supposed to learn these types of things. It's like learning a second language late in life, when the plasticity of the brain has long since been lost. They talk for a bit about Sam, about Lawrence, about Missouri's kids and grandkids. She tells him that he should tell Benny that when he thinks of home, he thinks of docks on the water and porches facing out into the green. Tells him that he should call Charlie, because both of them could use a friend.
"We should come see you sometime," Dean finally says, because they only live a few hours away now. (He lives somewhere, he thinks.) "Or you could come see the bunker, if you want."
"I'd like that, Dean," Missouri says, and he can hear her smile. There's silence then, and Missouri sighs. "No matter what you do, this ends the same. There are variations, of course. You don't usually think to call me. But no matter what, neither of those tablets gets used, not right now, not during this story. And I'm sorry, but the longer you fight it, the bloodier it ends. For everyone."
*
Dean thinks about that painting in Oklahoma City, sometimes. The graceful, tall arc of the sailing ship, the mountains, played against the squat lines of the steamships. There was an art that's been lost, he thinks, in playing to the sea. To tacking into the wind. Traded for convenience and motors and soot and the ability to chart your own course. To draw a straight line.
What the fuck does he know, though.
*
"Nash Equilibrium!" Sam yells. It's been an unusually quiet day, and Dean sees Kevin startle. It's evening, maybe. It's hard to tell when you're so completely cut off from the cycle of the sun and moon. Their sleep schedules have started to desynchronize from each other's and from the clock.
"The Nash Equilibrium!" Sam yells again. His eyes are a little feverish.
"You keep saying that," Dean says. "But you repeating 'Nash Equilibrium' doesn't actually tell us anything we didn't already know."
"There are two tablets in play," Sam says. "Opposing tablets. So –"
"It's game theory," Cas says. "Each side – each side is making the best decision they can, given the decisions made by their opponent. As long as your opponent's position doesn't change, neither can yours. It's reciprocal."
"So, stalemate?" Kevin asks.
Dean feels a grin start to tug at his lips. "Mutually assured destruction."
*
Crowley, with one and half tablets, no prophet, and taste for some of the finer whiskeys made only on Earth, offers a trade. He's surprisingly easy to capture really, in the end. Naomi appears with little fanfare when they call, seems entirely unsurprised when they light up the lines of holy oil that encircle the devil's trap.
"Welcome to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Tablets, bitches," Kevin says.
It goes better than can be expected, which means that everyone yells and brings up shit from before humans were walking upright, but no feathered or black-eyed dicks pop up to try to gank everyone and disrupt the proceedings.
Naomi and Crowley appear to agree that a formal cessation of hostilities is probably for the best. "Neither one of us wants to get trapped at home with the kids for all of eternity," Crowley explains.
The big hang-up appears to be figuring out what to do with the tablets so that no one gets an advantage. "They should be with me," Naomi insists. "I have no interest in preventing tarnished souls from spending the rest of eternity in Hell."
Dean snorts. Presses a hand absently to his cheekbone. Can see the blank look on Cas's face as he stood above him. "Yeah, because you're Miss Trustworthy."
Naomi seems angry then, humanly angry, in a way he's never really seen an angel get. "As the only being in this room who has not started an apocalypse, let Lucifer loose from his cage, or unleashed ancient primordial evils upon the world, my judgment deserves a little more weight."
Kevin's currently getting a snack, so this is, unfortunately, true.
"The hell with this," Dean says. "We'll smash the tablets."
*
Kevin has a sledgehammer suspiciously close at hand.
They let him do the honors.
*
"Come home," Naomi tells Cas, when tablets have been reduced to dust, when the line of the devil's trap has been broken, when the holy oil has been extinguished. "Metatron has heard, somehow, that the archangels are dead. He wants nothing more than to cast every angel out of heaven. Fight with us."
"I'll consider it," Cas says, and disappears to spread the dust of the tablets across the solar system. Kevin is passed out in the Impala. Sam and Crowley are off tying up loose ends, which apparently includes the fact that Crowley stole Bobby's soul from heaven, what the actual fuck.
It's just Dean and Naomi then, in an echoing warehouse, lingering wafts of holy smoke still on the air.
"You were around for the whole apocalypse thing, from what I gather," Dean says. There's literally blood on his hands, from a nick earlier that day. "You don't get to pretend like your hands are clean. That's without even getting into your little torture chamber and mind rape gig."
Naomi's face goes through a range of emotions. It's fluid in a way Dean hasn't even seen from Cas. "I'm a Seraph," she says. "Do you honestly think I had any control over the archangels?"
"Probably not," Dean says, tracing patterns in the grime on the wall. "But something tells me you didn't exactly kick up a fuss."
"What would you do, to stop the end of the human race?" She asks. "What have you done?"
"Yeah, well," Dean says. "You know what they say about the road to hell."
"I don't think you understand," Naomi says. "We're an endangered species. Only God himself can make more of us. I wish that I could say that Castiel decimated heaven," Naomi tells him. "I wish that we had only lost ten percent of the angels. He's known you for less than the blink of an eye."
She flies away before Dean's hand can hit the banishing sigil.
"I really do not like that woman," Dean snarls.
"She's not actually a woman," Cas says, close behind him. "But yes, I agree. Unfortunately, I can think of no better options."
"Yeah," Dean says, heavy. Clasps his hand to Cas's shoulder. "Yeah, buddy, I know."
*
Here's one version of how the rest of their lives could go: Sam and Dean live together, they hunt together. They live out of each other's pockets and they sleep down the hall from each other in an isolated compound for however long the rest of their lives are, and they hunt things until they die and they hope that the ratio of the disasters they stop and the disasters they start remains tipped in their favor. Dean and Cas eventually get their shit together, or they don't. They all die bloody together, or they die one at a time and mourn each other's passing when death finally takes them. It's not a bad life, all things considered. It's comfortable, familiar, and a damn sight better than any life Dean ever really believed he'd get.
Here's another: They learn how to live apart from each other. Not like the only way they've been able to in the past, which is cold turkey, no contact. They try to figure out how people who aren't hunters or in cults relate to each other. Dean goes somewhere he can feel the night air and hear birdsong. Sam goes back to law school or he starts a new Men of Letters. Maybe one or the other of them becomes the new Bobby, now that Garth's missing. Cas teaches angels about free will or he and Naomi end up in another civil war. They never leave the life, not really, not entirely. They all die bloody together, or they die one at a time and mourn each other's passing when death finally takes. It scares the shit out of Dean, and he has nothing to measure it against.
*
Dean gets in his car, and he drives.
*
"You going to invite me in, or what?" Dean asks.
Benny, standing in the doorway with golden light spilling out onto the porch, jazz playing low in the background, opens the door and smiles.