Chapter Text
Dean doesn’t consider what it’s going to do to Castiel until the ritual’s all but done, and by then it’s too late. He and Sam are both bleeding out—they’ll be dead within minutes unless they finish this, and maybe even if they do.
“Dean,” Sam pants weakly.
Sam’s skin is slick with blood—it’s dripping from his hair, from the tip of his nose—and Dean isn’t doing any better. The handprint on his shoulder burns like a mother, the tiny (and not so tiny) gashes in his skin sting, reddened sweat is dripping in his eyes, and his head’s spinning from all the blood loss.
And he isn’t going to get a chance to say so long to Cas, who may be an angel, yeah, but he’s still Dean’s friend, and he had their backs through this clusterfuck—kept him and Sam off the radar while they searched for a way out, saved Dean’s ass more than once—
“Dean,” Sam says again, softer but more urgently.
Right.
“Sehrus,” Dean mumbles, and feels the ritual lash through his body again. This time it’s his wrist that splits open, although there’s no spurt of blood. Not enough left for his heart to expel more than a weak trickle.
“Gegrahi,” Sam offers, resting his hand on the center of the charcoal design they spent the last twenty-four hours laying out before getting down to business. “Frehar ch-chalil.”
“Frehar chalil,” Dean echoes, making a supreme effort and getting his own hand on top of his brother’s.
He can feel their blood mingling as the ritual opens his throat—ancient power, something tasting of black space and stillness: a power from the time before good and evil even existed—and it hurts more than the rack ever did. It feels like his soul is being torn apart all over again, this time all at once, instant and merciless. His shoulder seems to have been dipped in molten lava.
Sam’s hand is twitching beneath his—Sam’s throat making the same, pained gurgle Dean knows is coming from his own mouth as energy builds and crackles around them—and somehow Dean manages to make his muscles work well enough to lace their fingers together. He doesn’t know if Sam wants the reassurance right now—he can’t read Sam anymore, maybe never could—but Dean doesn’t care because he needs it, damn it. If this is going to be his last moment, he needs to go out knowing that he isn’t alone. Even if it feels like he is.
There’s a brush of air over his face—open window, Dean thinks, only he’s sure Sam closed everything up tight when they began—and then a shocked gasp.
“Dean,” someone says above him. That voice is far too strong to belong to Sam, and anyway Sam’s on the floor with Dean—Sam’s blood is puddling on the floor and mixing with his (demonic-taint with angelic, just what the ritual called for) and the whole hot, coppery mess is getting in Dean’s mouth. Dean’s heart falters as the ritual builds inside his body, stronger than his heartbeat ever was, and his mind starts to float away on a sea of agonizing red.
“Dean,” the voice says again. “What have you done?”
With the lucidity that covers the edges of death like a film, Dean recognizes the hoarse tones this time. Cas, he thinks as the angel’s hands fumble frantically at his skin. Sorry.
His breath eases out—his last breath, echoing Sam’s beside him—and the ritual snaps to completion.
When the world explodes in a heatless, formless flare of red light, he isn’t awake to see it.
Dean wakes again to his brother dragging him across the floor of the room, and he lets out a groan of protest. His entire body aches, leaden and weary. He feels feverish; weak as a newborn kitten. He doesn’t know how the fuck Sam’s even vertical, when he can’t even stand being moved like this right now.
“Sorry,” Sam mutters, but he doesn’t sound all that sorry to Dean. “Can’t lift you.”
So leave me here, Dean wants to say. After all, that’s what Sam’s good at. Except then he glances down at himself—blood congealing on his body, more on the floor—and fuck did all that come out of them? He guesses that he gets why Sam wants to get them both out of this place: looks like a slaughterhouse. Reeks like one too.
“Can you talk?” Sam checks as he starts hauling on Dean again, sweat pouring off him and raining reddened drops onto the floor.
Dean doesn’t know, and he isn’t feeling all that chatty at the moment anyway, so he closes his eyes and drifts off again.
For almost a full week, Dean drifts in and out of consciousness. Sometimes Sam is sitting next to him, sometimes Dean can hear his brother putzing around elsewhere in the house where they’re squatting. Most often, there’s only dark silence around him, broken occasionally by the habitual noises of an unfamiliar place, and then Dean is sure that Sam is dead or gone, has left him yet again.
His feverish mind mixes up the timing, and he thinks first that Sam’s at Stanford: that he’s waiting for Dad to come back and pour some cough syrup down his throat. Cough syrup because he’s sick, he knows that much. If he were injured it’d be whiskey, or gin, or whatever hard alcohol is at hand to souse him up so that he won’t squirm too much when Dad cleans the wound and sticks the needle in him.
Only then he remembers it’s later than that, remembers Dad is missing, and thinks he just left Sam standing in the middle of the road on his way back to California.
No, Dean thinks, cracking his eyes open wide enough to look at the faintly glowing stars some kid (dead or good as now, probably, like most of the world) glued there. His mind clarifies for a moment, the present chaining him down, and he opens his mouth to rasp, “Dad’s dead.”
Then time flick-flicks on him, skidding forward a notch before falling back again and leaving him completely disoriented. He’s lying in bed alone in a strange place, sick with fever and an aching, useless body, and Sam is Gone. There’s no surprise in his chest at that: nothing but a faint, bitter pulse.
Back with Ruby again, he thinks, and then loses interest with the whole mess and drifts off.
As little as Dean is capable of piecing together a timeline in this state, he always expects Sam to stay gone—expects to wake to continued silence and an increasing sense of isolation as his body gives out on him—but Sam keeps coming back. He even brings candlelight once, illuminating the room in flickering, warm tones.
The light is a nice change after so long in the dark, and Dean means to say something but then he remembers that he’s pissed at Sam for running across the street without waiting for him, and Sam is only six and way too young to be pulling that kind of crap, and Dean’s not talking to him. He shuts his eyes and goes back to sleep instead.
When he opens his eyes again, he knows when he is (interesting change of pace) and there’s the familiar scent of cooking meat in the background. There’s a hand between Dean’s shoulder blades, lifting him up off the bed. Dean rolls his eyes to the side and it’s Sam. Sam easing in between Dean and the headboard and resting Dean’s body against his own.
Dean’s too tired to process so much body-to-body contact, so he settles for watching the way the candlelight catches in Sam’s hair and eyes. The way it makes Sam’s eyes shift back and forth between black and gold.
“I know you’re sick, but you’ve gotta eat,” black-eyed Sam says, and then gold-eyed Sam presses something hot and spongy against Dean’s lips. Hot dog, Dean thinks from the taste. It’s just a small piece, already cut up, but Dean’s pretty sure he isn’t interested. Not that he can stop Sam from pushing the hot dog past his teeth—Sam’s fingers inside his mouth, touching his tongue.
Then Sam’s fingers are gone, leaving the chunk of processed meat behind. Dean rolls the weight of it around and tries to remember what to do with it.
“Come on, man,” Sam says from somewhere beyond the universe of Dean’s mouth. “Don’t do this. Don’t leave me.”
Dean’s not so out of it to recognize that that’s a fucking laugh, coming from Sam, but the fever is dragging him under again. The grin he starts to crack turns into a gape and the chunk of hot dog tumbles out of his mouth and onto his chest.
“Dean,” Sam says from behind him, sounding frantic and needy in a way he hasn’t in years. A hand paws at Dean’s face—at his cheek—and he’s back in the warehouse again, hanging from his hands with a needle in his neck. There’s a djinn around here somewhere, gonna try and hurt Sammy; Dean needs to get free.
Something dry and soft brushes Dean’s lips—another mouth that shouldn’t be there, that wasn’t there anywhere in Dean’s memories, and it’s even more disorienting. His mind reels back, startled and confused.
“Don’t you fucking leave me, you hear?” someone pleads. “God damn it, Dean. Fight this.”
But the voice is getting to be too distant to hear, and anyway Dean’s more concerned with outrunning the hellhounds trying to drag him down. It didn’t happen like this, out in the woods with rocks and branches to trip him up, but then again maybe it did. Maybe it’s happening right now, forty blood-soaked years nipping at his heels and echoing snarls through the skeletal trees.
So Dean runs.
There’s no gradual release. One moment he’s in a dazed fever-delusion (something about clowns and Ruby and Sam with black eyes and vampire fangs) and then he opens his eyes and he’s in some kid’s room. Plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling; Yankees pennant on the grey wall. Dean is in a twin bed, drenched and shivering a little. The room is lit by thin slivers of sunlight coming through the boarded-up windows on the opposite wall.
He feels like he just got hit by a truck.
“Sammy?” he tries. There’s no response, but it didn’t come out as more than a whisper, so he gathers himself and calls again, louder, “Sam.”
The room is dim around him, and empty, and no one answers.
Way down deep, Dean feels a pulse of panic that he quickly smothers. Sam wouldn’t have dragged him out of that bloody room just to abandon him here. And there are fragmented memories of Sam caring for him—Sam pouring chicken broth and plastic-tasting water down his throat, Sam rolling him back and forth on the bed while he changed the soiled sheets out for clean ones. Sam wouldn’t have done that if he were just gonna up and leave without at least saying goodbye.
Dean’s sure of it.
Mostly.
It’s dark out before the door to the room swings open, and Dean is dozing—lightly enough that he comes awake at the faint squeal of hinges. He opens his eyes to see his brother’s form in the flickering light of a candle. He’s pretty sure it’s Sam, anyway. Suddenly, he’s remembering blurry images of Sam looking down at him with unpleasant colors in his eyes.
“Sammy?” he breathes.
Sam stiffens for a heartbeat before hurrying forward, one hand cupped protectively around the wick of the candle. The flickering flame is casting wobbly shadows everywhere, and when Sam leans over, Dean sees that his eyes aren’t the right color after all. It’s just reflected light, though—nothing sinister—and in his new, lucid state, Dean gets that. He relaxes minutely back into the bed.
“Dean,” Sam says, keeping his voice soft. “Hey, man. How’re you feeling?”
Dean takes a moment to lick chapped lips and then answers, “Like crap.”
Nodding, Sam sets the candle down on the nightstand and sits on the edge of the bed. “I felt like shit for a few days myself,” he says.
And he reaches out and slides his fingers up under Dean’s jaw to feel for his pulse.
It’s weird, having Sam touch him so intimately and casually after having spent the last few years dancing in painful, widening circles, and Dean flinches away a little without thinking about it. Sam blinks and takes his hand back.
“Sorry,” he apologizes, dropping his eyes. He lowers his head slightly with the motion, the fringe of his hair falling in the way and obscuring his expression. Not that Dean would have been able to read it anyway. “I—you’ve been out of it for a while, and I—I forgot.” He gets up off the bed, giving Dean that space back, but doesn’t step any further away.
Dean can’t tell whether he feels reassured by that or not.
“How come I got hit so hard?” he asks, setting his feelings on Sam’s proximity aside as irrelevant.
“I don’t think it was the ritual,” Sam admits, lifting his head again. “I’ve been outside, and there are a lot of people down with something. A lot of them are dying.” He pauses and then adds, “Firstborns.”
A weak shiver rushes through Dean’s skin at the announcement—at the knowledge of how close they cut it. “Death’s party favor,” he breathes, and Sam nods, confirming the guess.
“Whatever ritual he used, he didn’t get to finish it, though,” Sam says. “Some of them are getting better.”
You’re getting better.
Sam doesn’t say it, but Dean knows that he’s thinking it. Hell, Dean’s thinking it himself. He remembers how his chest twisted when they cornered Death a couple of months back, a pale man in a dapper red suit. You can’t kill Death, of course, but he and Sam gave it their futile best.
After, when Sam was unconscious and Dean was panting on the floor with two cracked ribs and a spinning head, Death crouched down next to him and announced, ‘I’m gonna do firstborns for my parlor trick. You should enjoy that one, Dean: it’s a classic.’
Son of a bitch must have been in the middle of putting his piece of the endgame in motion when their own ritual cut him short—had just enough finished to carry some off, but not all. Dean guesses he’ll feel grateful for that once he doesn’t feel so much like he just had a Buick dropped on him.
“War? Famine?” he checks. He doesn’t bother asking about Pestilence’s ‘parlor trick’: the disease people have taken to calling Doomsday had already carried off about half the world’s population before he and Sam found the ritual. It seems to be winding down now, though: probably so that the other Horsemen can take their own potshots at everyone still standing.
But Sam just shakes his head. “I don’t know. There’re still Croats running around, but no one I talked to knows if they’re still infectious. And I haven’t heard anything that sounds like Famine.”
Dean nods and closes his eyes. If they haven’t heard anything yet, then they probably won’t. Dean hopes they won’t anyway. Fuck, he’s tired of all this Apocalypse and Four Horsemen crap.
“Can you eat something now?” Sam says. “It’s been almost a week. I managed to get you to keep a little down, but ...”
Something about Sam’s words makes Dean’s chest tighten uncomfortably—something attached to a fragmented, feverish delusion of fingers in his mouth—but he shoves the feeling away and opens his eyes again, laboriously pushing himself up into a sitting position against the headboard. “Yeah. What’ve we got?”
“Franks and beans?”
Dean’s stomach rumbles at the prospect of solid nourishment, but he’s distracted by the return of that flutter. Some light, tentative pressure against his lips. Maybe that memory of fingers in his mouth—a memory associated with the taste of hot dog—wasn’t a delusion after all.
“That all you know how to cook?” he asks, checking.
“It’s what we have.” Sam’s voice is a little sharper than Dean thinks it should be—defensive. Although that could be Dean’s fault. Fuck knows he wasn’t keeping a close watch on his own tone when he asked the question.
Another wave of weariness washes over him as Sam walks away from the bed. He’s so goddamned fed up with all the bickering and pot shots, but at the same time he can’t figure out how to stop. Hell, the last thing he said to Sam before they started the ritual was ‘Just try not to get distracted by all the blood. Last fucking thing we need is for you to fall off the wagon halfway through.’
Sam didn’t respond to that, Dean remembers now, and he wonders if it’s too late to apologize.
“There’s no power,” Sam continues as he steps over a sleeping bag—has he been sleeping in here the whole time?—and crouches down in front of a battery-operated hotplate set up on the floor. “And I don’t know if we can trust the water—guy I talked to said the Croats infected a whole town in Connecticut by bleeding into the reservoir. There’s some bottled, but I figured we’d better save that for drinking.”
Dean magnanimously doesn’t mention that it wouldn’t matter if they held Sam down and poured buckets of infected blood into his mouth. Anyway, things might be different now that the ritual’s done: kid might not be immune anymore.
“So,” he says instead as Sam opens up a can of Campbell’s Beans ‘N Franks. “Did it work?”
Over by the hotplate, Sam stills. After a pause too long to be anything but awkward, he finally answers, “I don’t know.”
“You haven’t seen any, though, right?” Dean pushes. “No demons, no—Cas? You haven’t seen Cas?”
The silence actually deepens. Sam is still enough now that Dean isn’t even sure his brother is breathing, although the flickering shadows cast by the candle present at least the illusion of motion. Dean gives the moment as long as he can, waiting, but eventually he can’t pretend any longer that Sam’s going to answer.
“Sam?” he prods. “You seen Cas?”
“No,” Sam says finally, simply. And just like that, he’s moving again, grabbing a saucepan and dumping the contents of the can into it.
“Then it worked.”
“Maybe,” Sam hedges, as cautious as ever when it comes to truths rooted deep inside Dean’s soul.
And isn’t that the problem at the center of the void between them? Isn’t the sharpest thorn Sam’s inability to accept Dean’s word as good enough: to trust him to know anything on his own—to do anything but follow orders? Isn’t this about the way Sam decided caution was a thing to be applied to Dean’s judgment rather than his own? Isn’t it about the way he kept plunging full speed ahead when Dean was screaming at him to put on some fucking brakes and think about things for one goddamned minute?
Or maybe it’s just the fact that Sam threw Dean and everything Dean thought they had over for a cheap, black-eyed whore in a human-suit.
Sam apologized for that, and Dean accepted—what the fuck else was he supposed to do, throw Sam’s apology back in his face? Dean’s been trying to believe he meant it, too, really he has. It’s just pretty damn impossible to forget how it felt when Sam walked out on him for a demon. Harder still when Sam’s been pulling this ‘Sammy knows best’ crap over and over again, questioning Dean’s intelligence and intuition at every motherfucking turn.
Questioning whether he’s strong enough, or smart enough, or capable enough to lead. Like Dean doesn’t do enough of that already on his own.
Can’t you just fucking trust me for once? Dean thinks, staring at his brother’s back as Sam heats up the pot. But he doesn’t say anything.
Talking never solves shit.
Dean spends two weeks recovering from Death’s parlor trick, but as soon as he can manage to move on his own, he drags himself down to the Impala (through a living room with more pictures on the wall than he wants to look at—doesn’t want to fucking know about the people who used to live here) and crawls inside. Passenger side, and fuck whether or not that makes Sam feel validated. Dean’s too damn exhausted from the walk out here to give a shit.
“Where to?” Sam asks as he buckles in and slides the key into the ignition.
Dean starts to shake his head as the faces of the dead flash before his eyes—Ellen and Jo gone in that suicidal attempt to take out Lucifer, Bobby taken by Pestilence’s plague, Cas ... Dean’s not entirely sure they didn’t just kill Cas. The ritual wasn’t all that specific on that front, and Dean was desperate enough at the time not to register much more than the phrase “forever cast from the earth”.
Then he remembers a glint of green eyes; rabbity twitch of hands; nervous quirk of a mouth. The one guy who’s been in their corner who they haven’t managed to kill yet.
“We should try to find Chuck,” he says. “Let him know he doesn’t have archangels on his shoulders anymore.”
“That he might not have an archangel on his shoulder,” Sam amends.
“Dude, would you chill with the maybes already? Cas totally would’ve popped up by now if he could’ve.” Dean’s guilt over possibly offing the angel—his friend, if he wants to be honest—makes his voice sharper than he means it to be, although he supposes he’s grateful for the edge. It masks most of his regret—the mournful ache that has been set off in his chest at the memory of all the good people lost in this war.
Most of the time, the loss is too staggering to grasp, but every once in a while Dean accidentally focuses on a manageable portion and teeters on the edge of meltdown.
It’s like that body dump they drove past in Oakland at the height of the Doomsday Plague, only on a larger scale. Dean glanced at the mounds of the dead—some in garbage bags or other wraps, most exposed to the sky—and noted the size of the dump in the back of his head. It was too much to process, though, and he kept driving without a twitch.
His own flicker of comprehension came two weeks later by Bobby’s bedside, with the man’s cold, skeletal hand clutched in his own and Sam missing from the moment as usual. By the time his brother got back from hunting down some food, Dean had Bobby sewn up in a shroud of clean linen and waiting on the pyre he and Sam built in silence some days before in preparation of the inevitable. No body dump for Bobby, although the sight of the one in Oakland had been foremost in Dean’s mind as he lit the gasoline-drenched wood.
Sam hadn’t cried even then, the heartless bastard.
He seems as emotionless as always now, staring out through the front windshield at the eerily empty street. Dean would think his brother isn’t paying attention at all—that he’s checked out from the conversation—but then he catches the slight, stubborn twitch of Sam’s jaw. It’s one of the few expressions Dean recognizes these days, and he always mixes it up with the way Sam looked in the motel room, cold and haughty and distant, while Dean lay gasping for breath on the floor.
‘You walk out that door, don’t you ever come back,’ Dean panted, straining to claw through that mask to the brother he was sure, even then—even after all of the betrayals and the lies and the obvious disdain—lay beneath.
Except Sam turned and walked away.
“Yeah, fine,” he says now, glancing out the window to his right. “Go ahead and keep on waiting for Gunga Din, then.”
“Godot,” Sam corrects, putting his hand on the gearshift.
Whatever, Dean thinks as he leans his head against the window, eyes scanning the vacant street littered with roving newspapers. Four months old now, Dean guesses: it’s been at least that long since there was enough of a society left to care about things as mundane as the daily news.
There are towels hanging from most of the mailboxes—light colored—signs of sickness within, asking the authorities for help that never came. The shades in the windows are down, all the curtains pulled, and Dean imagines the uncollected bodies lying still and peaceful in the darkness within. He wonders if there were any bodies in the house Sam picked out for them, or whether Sam found the place mercifully abandoned, and then decides he doesn’t want to know.
But he can’t stop thinking about all of the dead as Sam gets them moving. Bodies stiff like chunks of wood, and cold, and decaying in silence. Summer’s on the way, and then autumn will come, bringing rain, and new diseases will breed in the dead flesh, paving the way for fresh bouts of sickness and death—ghosts aplenty too, because the world’s just that fucked.
The ritual worked—Dean’s knows it did, no matter what Sam says—only he thinks now that maybe it was already too late. Maybe it was long past time to save anything at all.
This is the way the world ends, Dean thinks, and closes his eyes.
Chuck is right where they left him, huddled in his house behind boarded up windows and a reinforced, padlocked door. It takes almost half an hour of pounding on the door and shouting the guy’s name before there’s a timid, “Dean?” from inside the house.
“Yeah,” Dean answers, rubbing the sore side of his hand. “Open up already and let us in.”
“How do I know you’re you and not one of them?”
Croats he means, which indicates that there are some in the neighborhood. It’s a reasonable question, but something about the whole situation strikes Dean as ludicrously cliché—like he somehow wandered into a bad horror flick—and he glances over at Sam, ready to roll his eyes.
Sam has his back turned, though, hands shoved into his jacket pockets as he scans the street for signs of trouble. Used to be, he would’ve known Dean wanted to share a moment before Dean did. Used to be, Dean only ever had to glance to his right and Sam was there, looking back at him.
Used to be a lot of things.
“You don’t,” Dean calls, giving himself a shake and turning back to the door. “But if you don’t open up right fucking now, Sam and I are breaking down the door and shoving the pieces so far up your ass you’ll be shitting splinters for a month.”
There’s a brief pause and then, almost too hushed for Dean to catch, a muttered, “Yeah, it’s them all right.”
He can feel Sam’s eyes on him this time—Sam questing for a companionable glance. But Sam wasn’t there for him a minute ago, and damned if Dean’s going to give him the satisfaction. This is a two-way fucking street; he isn’t here to play Sam’s wingman.
Dean turns his face the other way, pretending to watch for any approaching Croats. After a couple of seconds, he feels Sam give up on him and knows that it’s safe enough to turn his attention back to the door without the risk of catching his brother’s eye. The disconnect between them isn’t any more comfortable when Chuck finally lets them in a couple of minutes later, opening the door wide enough for them to slip through past the bulky blockade of an old bureau.
He shuts the door again as soon as they’re clear, and starts resetting the seven deadbolts and chains he had installed before things went to shit.
“Man, am I glad to see you guys,” he says as he works, casting a quick glance over his shoulder. “I thought you were dead for sure.”
“How’s that?” Dean asks.
“Last thing I saw, you both looked like you’d been put through a cheese grater,” Chuck answers, hurrying around to the other side of the bureau. “Gimme a hand?”
Dean does, feeling Sam set his own strength to the push as well (their shoulders brush with the effort, casual contact Dean’s startlingly aware of these days), and the bureau slides back into place effortlessly. Dean rests his hand on top of the wood as he straightens, turning to Chuck.
“The ritual?” he checks. “That’s the last vision you got?”
“I—I dunno. Is that what that was? You guys were in a room, and there was this black design on the floor, and there was all this blood—”
Dean nods. “Yeah, you don’t have to describe it. We were there.” Actually, Dean would prefer if Chuck didn’t describe it. His memories of the ritual and what followed are pretty hazy, but he remembers enough for body and soul to give a pained, aching pulse at the reminder.
“How’d you guys get out of that?” Chuck asks, glancing between them. “You don’t—you don’t look hurt at all.”
“Fringe benefit of finishing the ritual,” Sam says.
“And you knew that going in?” Chuck’s peering up at them like he doesn’t quite believe it, which just goes to show how sharp the guy can be sometimes. Dean just looks back at him steadily until he drops his eyes; senses Sam watching Chuck with his own inscrutable expression to Dean’s left. Chuck shakes his head and turns away, wandering deeper into the house. “Christ, you two are nuts. What were you trying to do, anyway?”
He grabs a bottle of alcohol off the top of the dust-covered TV, takes a swig, and then turns around and holds it out in offer.
Dean takes the bottle, giving Sam a chance to answer and redeem himself slightly—Chuck’s visions stopping with the ritual is just another pretty irrefutable chunk of evidence in the ‘It Worked’ column—but Sam just stands there quietly while Dean drinks. Stubborn bitch.
Annoyed, Dean hands the bottle back to Chuck without offering it to his brother and says, “We pulled in the welcome mat—to both sides. You don’t have to worry about peeping toms in the shower anymore.”
“The angels?” Chuck says, sounding just as confused and bewildered as always—although that might just be because he senses how askew things are between them, because the concerned, questioning look Chuck’s giving Dean while he hands the bottle over to Sam has nothing to do with the End of Days.
“The ritual was supposed to close the world off to both Heaven and Hell,” Sam says. “So no more angels or demons should be able to get in, and any that were here should have been forced out.”
“Really?” Chuck says, brightening. “And it worked? No more Lucifer-Michael death match?”
“I dunno, Sammy,” Dean says, glancing sideways at his brother. “You want to weigh in on this one?”
Sam’s staring down at the bottle, little tension lines around his mouth and eyes, but after a moment he gives a tiny shrug and says, “It worked.”
Dean bites his tongue, because he’s awesome like that.
Chuck just stares for a moment, like he didn’t quite understand what Sam said, and then smiles, wide and relieved. “Well shit! That calls for a real celebration. Let me break out the good stuff.”
The ‘good stuff’ turns out to be 40-year-old, single malt Glenlivit, which is mighty fine indeed, and it doesn’t take long before Dean’s sitting with his head lolling back against the couch and nursing a pleasant buzz. Chuck’s in a ratty armchair, curled up and snoring with his head against the arm, and Dean guesses he isn’t surprised the guy went under so quickly. Chuck never struck him as the well-rested type—not that Dean blames him, the dreams he’s been forced to put up with.
He wonders for what has to be the hundredth time whether the man got a ringside seat to Dean’s time in Hell, or if the angels let him skip that bit.
Sam pads back into the room, swaying a little, and tosses a bag into Dean’s lap before collapsing down on the couch next to him. Dean looks down at the bag—Cheetos—with a slight frown before remembering that he demanded sustenance a couple minutes ago. He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular at the time, and he doesn’t remember Sam saying anything in response, but ...
“Thanks,” he says, opening the bag and digging in. The Cheetos don’t really taste like much of anything—maybe because they’re stale, or maybe just because the Glenlivit has burned off all his taste buds—but he keeps eating them anyway. Sam got them for him, after all, which is enough to count as a Gesture these days. Besides, he needs to do something to distract himself from the way Sam is unabashedly staring at him.
“I’m sorry,” Sam says now—slurs really. Dean’s pretty sure the kid drank more than he did, and Sammy’s always been a lightweight, despite his size.
He shrugs, plunging his hand into the bag again. “No biggie. The important thing is that neither of us has to worry about getting all dolled up for the Prom anymore.”
“I used to have nightmares about it,” Sam says in a soft, confessional voice. “I dreamed about coming back to the motel room to find you—you were sitting on the bed, waiting for me, only you weren’t—you were Him instead. Michael.”
“Yeah, well, at least you never actually had to see it for real,” Dean can’t help muttering. His not-brother’s face, at once so familiar and so strange, flickers in his memory and he scrunches his eyes shut and tosses an arm over the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know what was worse—fact that you actually caved for that son of a bitch or seeing you in that fucking suit. Wearing loafers.” He gives his head a tiny shake, which makes the couch spin beneath him. He may possibly be drunker than he thought. “I dunno how the fuck you ever could’ve said yes.”
Sam’s silent for a couple of minutes and then he says, “I do.”
Dean glances over, surprised, and Sam’s closer than he has been in a long time. Closer than Dean was expecting or is comfortable with, really. Sam’s eyes are unfocused, all of his haughty walls melted with drink, and Dean’s chest gives a flutter at the expression he finds on his brother’s face—nothing he recognizes, which is par for the course, but there’s something in this look that almost feels familiar. Like he’d understand it if he were a little less drunk—or maybe just a little less terrified of what it might mean.
Look away, he tells himself, but of course he can’t. Instead, he opens his mouth and says, “Yeah? Why’s that?”
Sam sways closer—close enough for Dean to smell the alcohol on his brother’s breath—and Dean leans back automatically. It isn’t about Sam, really—a little about the flicker of similar memories from Hell; even more about the fact that having their foreheads crack together would really hurt—but even as drunk as he is, Dean doesn’t miss the flash of hurt in his brother’s eyes. He considers apologizing and then doesn’t say anything. His chest is still all light and shuddery; his stomach uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to encourage Sam to keep on doing ... whatever he was doing.
He watches as his brother struggles to his feet while wiping a hand over his face.
“Fuck, ‘m drunk,” Sam announces.
“So go sleep it off,” Dean suggests, pulling out another handful of Cheetos to mask just how naked he suddenly feels. How off balance.
He wishes Chuck was awake.
But Chuck isn’t awake and Sam is just standing there, swaying almost imperceptibly while he stares down at Dean. After a few, agonizing minutes, he steps forward, unheedful of Dean’s feet. Dean moves them out of the way before Sam can step on them, the big oaf, but Sam doesn’t seem to notice as he moves between Dean’s spread legs and tips forward. He catches himself on the couch back and the arm to Dean’s right—just in time to avoid crashing into Dean’s lap—and wow, this is making Dean appreciate his personal bubble way more than he ever has before. Funny how you never notice that invisible ring of space until someone’s crowding you up and making it difficult to breathe right.
“Little close,” Dean offers, keeping his voice light.
Sam ignores him. “What would it’ve taken for you?” he demands instead. “To say yes to Michael?”
“I wouldn’t’ve,” Dean answers.
“Never?”
Dean snorts, turning his face away since he doesn’t dare try pushing Sam up—kid’d probably lose his balance and wind up in Dean’s lap instead. “Fuck no. You think I was just gonna bend over and spread for those dicks?”
He can feel Sam’s eyes on him—Sam’s breath warm and moist as it ghosts over his cheek. It makes his stomach squirm, and he shifts against the couch, tightening his hands on the Cheetos with a rustle.
The moment stretches out, Sam’s regard steady and burning. Sam’s body closer than it has been in years: huge and hot and eating away at the resentful, hurt knot in Dean’s chest.
Then Sam says, “I would’ve done it for you. He came to me as Jess, but if he’d—” He stops abruptly—just fucking stops—and Dean doesn’t know whether he wants Sam to finish or just shut the fuck up and go away so that they can both pretend this never happened. He glances up—means it to be a glance, anyway, but he gets caught in Sam’s eyes and can’t look away again.
And he’s sure, suddenly, that whatever this is, it’s going to change things between them forever.
Then Sam’s eyes widen, confused and slightly pained. “I think I’m gonna hurl,” he announces.
The prospect of getting covered in his brother’s puke snaps Dean out of his daze and he scrambles to his feet, shoving Sam back and then catching him before he can go down.
Dean just hopes the ceramic bowl he finds for Sam to toss his cookies in wasn’t a family heirloom.
Dean wakes in the morning to the sound of breaking glass. He jerks upright at the noise, dislodging Sam’s arm from around his waist and making the mattress creak alarmingly. Dean doesn’t know how they ended up sharing a bed—has only faint memories of polishing off the rest of Chuck’s booze—but even more unsettling is the way that Sam grabs at him as he starts to get up.
“Dean,” Sam slurs. He still sounds drunk—probably is: he took a break for a while after the ceramic bowl incident, but Dean seems to recall Sam matching him swig for swig at the end.
“Dude,” Dean mutters, left off-balance and distracted by the way Sam is gripping his side with one, oversized mitt. Fingers pushing up under his shirt, and Dean’s really fucking ticklish there, thanks.
“Dude,” Dean repeats, louder and more vehemently, and illustrates his point by shoving Sam’s hand away.
“Mmph?” Sam’s head comes up at that, and he blinks at Dean owlishly, like he expected someone else. Not that Dean is surprised, what with the way Sam’s acting. “Dean?”
“No, it’s the Queen of England. Get off me, bitch.”
And Sam is definitely still drunk, because instead of obeying he makes a confused, frowning face and reaches again.
“Sam!” Dean warns. He realizes his heart is pounding. His mouth is dry. His own hand is curled into a fist, and he’s pretty sure he’s one wrong touch away from doing his best to dislocate his little brother’s jaw.
And how the fuck did they wind up here? Since when has punching Sam been anything close to a default response?
Downstairs, a male voice rises in a guttural scream.
Dean rolls off his side of the bed without pausing to think, already sprinting for the door. He’s unarmed, but Chuck’s place is crammed with enough crap that there’s always a weapon at hand, and he grabs a convenient baseball bat (signed by someone who’s probably dead) off the wall on his way down the stairs.
There are two voices now—one still filling the early morning with that mindless, raging scream and the other (Chuck’s) shrieking Dean’s name. Behind him, Dean can hear Sam stumbling along and feels a momentary, uneasy twinge in his chest. Not six months ago, that twinge would have resulted in a barked order for Sam to wait upstairs, or at least to stay behind Dean, damn it, but today adrenaline brushes it aside without a second thought, and then Dean is down in the living room with Sam hot on his heels.
The living room is empty, but from here Dean can see the blurred motion of a fight in the kitchen, and anyway he can pinpoint the disturbance from the sound of things being knocked every which way as a burly, bloodied man slams Chuck from one counter to the next. Dean’s pulse kicks his heart up into his throat where it gets in the way of his breathing—a Croat inside the house, leaking infection all over the place (and Sam is right behind Dean, too fucking close)—and then Dean is in the kitchen and swinging the bat in a short, brutal arc. The arc terminates in a sickening, wet crack as the bat connects with the Croat’s skull and sends a splash of blood and bone fragments and brain against Chuck’s kitchen cabinets.
The enraged screaming cuts off as the Croat drops immediately—dead weight. Chuck is still yelling, though, his eyes wide and glassy, and shit, the dude’s covered in blood. There’s too much of it for Dean to be able to tell if Chuck’s cut—if there’s any danger of infection, assuming that’s still a possibility anymore. Chuck doesn’t seem capable of answering that question for Dean right now, not as panicked as he is, so Dean follows his instincts and grabs the guy by the arm and hauls him in the direction of the downstairs bathroom.
The tub’s full—Chuck’s doing before the plumbing went—and Dean knows the guy’s saving it for drinking, but he doesn’t hesitate before lifting Chuck off his feet and dropping him in. Water splashes over the sides of the tub in a pink-tinted flood while Chuck curses, spluttering, and tries to flail his way back out. Dean ignores the feel of Sam’s eyes on his back—Sam standing in the doorway fucking judging him, like he has any better ideas—and gets a hand on Chuck’s head, forcing him back under.
He keeps Chuck in the tub for a while, letting him up to breathe every so often and ignoring Chuck’s increasingly weak protests. The water’s red by now, polluted, and Dean should be letting Chuck out but his knees aren’t ready to support him. Besides, if he stops struggling with Chuck, Sam’s going to notice how badly Dean’s hands are shaking.
When Dean finally chances a glance over his shoulder fifteen minutes later, past ready to stop his futile attempts to salvage the situation, Sam is gone. Dean’s struck by the unpleasant realization that he doesn’t know how long he’s been needlessly dunking Chuck in contaminated water—he didn’t notice Sam leave.
He wonders when things got fucked enough for Sam leaving to be a common enough occurrence to fly under the radar like that, and then decides that he doesn’t really want to know.
Chuck’s cut. He’s cut in a couple of places, actually—from getting knocked into the counters, from stray shards of glass. And there’s a perfect, bloodied imprint of human teeth sunk into his wrist.
“You got me into the water fast enough, right?” Chuck asks, freshly dried and redressed in an oversized, ratty bathrobe. He’s unconsciously hugging himself with his arms and looks about ten years old, scraggly beard notwithstanding.
Dean carefully doesn’t look over at Sam, who is sitting on the arm of the couch to his right. Doesn’t meet Chuck’s eyes either.
“Guys?” Chuck asks, voice cracking.
“It might not be contagious anymore,” Sam offers. “I mean, we sealed everything off, and that includes War. If the Croatoan virus is linked to him, the infection might not be active anymore.”
Dean wants to believe the words as much as Chuck clearly does, but he can’t shake the certainty that it’s the case of locking the barn doors after a rabid fox has gotten inside and bitten most of the horses. It’s death in the dark, now: in the close, suffocating dark with no way for the farmer to get back inside and save the healthy livestock from getting crushed or bitten to death when the rest go insane.
Fuck, maybe Dean should’ve just said yes.
“You know, I feel fine, actually,” Chuck says hopefully. “I mean, I’d feel different, right? If it was in me?”
Dean’s jaw clenches reflexively and he pushes to his feet with a suddenness that makes Chuck flinch. He ignores the claustrophobic, tight feeling in his chest and directs his gaze to the floor midway between his brother and God’s last prophet.
“I’m gonna board up the kitchen,” he announces.
If Sam says anything to excuse his behavior as he leaves, Dean doesn’t hear it.
By lunchtime, Chuck is snappy and churlish. Sweat drips down his cheeks and gets tangled in his beard. Dean doesn’t think the man notices. He hopes he doesn’t, anyway: it’ll be better if Chuck doesn’t see it coming.
They make it through the meal—stale pop tarts and Doritos eaten in the wreckage of the kitchen—and then, as Dean gets a broom from the closet and finally starts sweeping broken glass from floor, Sam comes up behind him. Sam steps close enough that Dean can feel his body heat and then stops, a hulking line of heat. The proximity is doing uncomfortable things to Dean’s stomach. His mind flashes back to this morning, which feels decades distant now, and for an instant he thinks Sam’s going to do it again. He thinks Sam’s going to slip an arm around his waist and pull him close, chest to back. He isn’t sure whether he’d do anything to stop him.
Then Sam says, “Chuck’s infected.”
Dean tightens his grip on the broom handle. It takes all of his willpower not to whirl around on his brother and lay into him—what the fuck does Sam want him to say to that? What does he want Dean to fucking do?
But of course, the answer to that is obvious. Sam wants Dean to do what he’s always done: get his hands dirty.
“I already killed someone today,” Dean bites out, careful to keep his voice soft enough that Chuck won’t hear. “It’s your turn.”
Sam makes a choked, hurt noise that makes Dean’s cheeks heat with a shamed flush. But the guilt only makes him angrier, and before he can think things through all the way he’s swearing and throwing down the broom and turning around and shoving Sam to one side.
Sam yells his name—like he didn’t just push Dean into this, the fucker—but all of Dean’s attention is on Chuck, who’s watching him come with a little bit of fear but already far too much mocking glee. Looks like he’s already more gone than not.
Good, that’ll make this easier.
But they had some good times, and Chuck’s come through for them more than once, so Dean still pauses to offer, “Sorry, Chuck.”
Chuck starts to bare his teeth in something that can’t decide whether to be a smile or a snarl and that’s when Dean brings his hand out from behind his back, pistol cocked and ready, and puts a bullet in his skull.
They burn the house when they leave—granting Chuck and the unnamed Croat at least a semblance of a proper funeral. Dean doesn’t say anything out loud, but as he sits in the Impala and watches flames eat up through the walls and wreathe the ceiling, he wonders—and not for the first time—whether the dead aren’t the lucky ones. He wonders if maybe he should saunter on up the walk and let himself back inside and just sit there until he doesn’t have to feel anything anymore either.
There’s a momentary glimmer of warmth against his shoulder—like a hand hovering with the intent to touch—but when Dean casts a glance his brother’s way, Sam’s hands are on his side of the car where they belong. He is looking at Dean, though, and maybe that’s what Dean felt: that steady, mournful gaze that strips away the last forty-three years and makes Dean’s head swim and his heart ache. He doesn’t know how to fuse that expression with the crumbling, dying world around them. Doesn’t know how to align it with what he and Sam have become.
“So,” Sam says after a long moment. “I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”
Dean isn’t sure if that’s an attempt at a peace offering or a thinly-veiled offer of a suicide pact. Either way, it’s as good a direction as any. He turns the car on with a shrug and shifts into reverse.
“Okay, but if you think I’m driving my baby off the side of a cliff, you’re fucking nuts.”
They run out of gas in Iowa.
Dean sees it coming miles away—sees it coming when they keep driving past barren, burnt out husks instead of gas stations; when the stations that haven’t exploded come up dry. He doesn’t yell when it happens. He doesn’t pitch a fit.
He just puts her in park and gets out, going around to the trunk to get his duffle.
“Hey,” Sam says, jogging around to him. “Maybe we can siphon some more gas from that car a couple miles back.”
“What, the one with the ‘Gone to get gas’ sign in the front windshield?” Dean asks. His voice comes out a little sharp, but Sam fucking deserves it for saying something so stupid.
For some reason, though, Dean’s chest clenches at the crestfallen expression his words put on his brother’s face.
Clenching his jaw, he hoists the duffle up onto his shoulder and drops the Impala’s keys carelessly into the dirt. He doesn’t look back as he heads back the way they came—there’s a town close enough to reach by nightfall, they can hole up in one of the abandoned houses.
Sam’s still for a few moments, and then Dean can hear his brother scrambling to gather his own belongings. There’s a jingle of metal as well—sentimental idiot retrieving the keys, like Dean’s ever going to need them again—and then the crunch of footsteps on gravel as Sam jogs to catch up. He falls in step to Dean’s right like he belongs there, and the thought that maybe he doesn’t anymore makes Dean feel twitchy and even more defensive.
“We can find some gas in town somewhere,” Sam says. “There’s bound to be a car with a full tank. We can drive back here and load up.”
Sam’s right, but Dean’s not so stupid he doesn’t get that they’d only be postponing the inevitable. Sooner or later—sooner, everything is sooner these days—there isn’t going to be another car. Isn’t going to be any more gas. Better it happened here, where they’re still relatively close to things, than in the wide open, desolate Midwest.
Dean squints at the blur of civilization on the horizon and gives a slight shrug of his shoulders.
“Naw,” he says. “Think maybe I’ll just walk for a while. Stretch my legs.”
For once, Sam’s smart enough to hold his tongue.
Dean spends the next few weeks stocking up on supplies. There’s no sporting goods store in town, but he manages to find a couple of decent, insulated sleeping bags and a portable grill in someone’s basement. Two corpses upstairs as well, which says that the camping equipment isn’t going to be missed.
He and Sam are going to need it if they’re walking from here on out. Especially if it’s going to be this cold at night.
Dean never thought of summer as chilly before, but he guesses that’s because the electricity kept everything warm. Or maybe the heat was just cast off from a couple of billion people sharing breathing space and rubbing elbows.
It’s perfectly normal to see your breath in the morning in mid June. Perfectly fucking normal to spend half the night biting down on a corner of the blanket to keep your teeth from chattering while your brother probably does the same in his own borrowed room down the hall.
Perfectly normal.
Sam follows him on his scavenging missions. Dean never asks him to come—tries sneaking out early a couple of times, just to get some much-needed distance—but Sam must be the lightest sleeper on the planet because he’s always there, tailing Dean and pretending to be absorbed in a piece of debris whenever Dean turns around. Like Dean’s going to buy that sort of coincidence when it’s just the two of them and a town full of corpses.
Sam’s constant attendance makes Dean feel itchy—like he somehow managed to get grains of sand caught under his skin and can’t get them out. He doesn’t like the way Sam’s attention makes his chest feel, not when this is just Sam running after the only human being in a hundred mile radius. Not when it isn’t about Dean, no matter how much he’d like it to be—and he’s never admitting that little bit of wisdom, not if Sam tries to pry it out of him with a crowbar.
Towards the end of the second week, Dean finds himself vaulting over a fence and sprinting down a back alley and darting inside a nearby house, and takes a moment to wonder what he’s doing. The moment of clarity hits him a few minutes later, when he’s pressed up against a wall listening for signs of pursuit, and he gets that he’s running away from Sam. He’s treating Sam like some kind of hostile tail to be lost, and he’s so fucking desperate to keep going now that he’s managed the trick—to split and keep running until he’s so lost Sam won’t ever be able to find him and sucker him in again—that he can barely breathe past the lump in his throat. He has to get out now, before he forgets why he can’t trust Sam and falls back into old, destructive patterns.
Except it’s already too late for that, because the thought of leaving Sam is enough to send shooting, eye watering pains through Dean’s chest. The most he can manage is a few hours, actually, and then he finds his course meandering back to their house in reluctant, narrowing gyres.
Sam is cross that night—spares a couple of words for Dean at most before disappearing into his room and slamming the door behind him. But the next morning, he’s downstairs again waiting for Dean to leave, and this time he sticks closer. It makes Dean feel trapped and claustrophobic again—Sam can’t do this to him, he can’t make Dean feel like this—and within half an hour, he’s crawls through some dude’s basement and out the far window while Sam stands watch over the house in front.
Sam doesn’t talk to Dean at all when Dean comes back that night. He’s waiting downstairs when Dean gets back, but as soon as Dean shuts the door Sam is up and hurrying toward his room, violence bleeding from the hostile lines of his back. Dean doesn’t bother chasing after him—mostly because he doesn’t have anything to say.
Sam’s waiting for him again the next morning, and this time Dean is determined to be good. He doesn’t want Sam to actually get fed up enough to leave, is the thing. He just ... he wants Sam pissy so that he can keep straight in his head how things are these days. How he and Sam are.
It isn’t until he turns around mid-afternoon to find himself alone—Sam gone, Sam vanished—that he remembers he and Sam aren’t actually anything at all anymore.