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Afterward, in the shocked stillness when Sam lifts Ben’s body from the floor (supporting his broken head with one hand, like it matters anymore) and carries him away, Dean waits for the anger to come. It doesn’t. There’s only horror and guilt and grief and, worst of all, a subdued kind of relief.
His last secret is out, Ben is gone, and it wasn’t… it wasn’t as bad as Dean thought it would be. In a way, Sam really did Ben a favor, taking him out of this fucked up ruin of a world before something worse could happen to him—before Sam could happen. It’s only Dean who’s going to suffer the lack. It’s Dean’s life that’s emptier now, and bruised, and just that much darker.
But Dean deserves the knife-edged grief lodged beneath his breastbone. After all, Sam warned him what would happen. And Dean knew his brother was capable of following through.
Dean’s the one who broke the rules.
When Sam comes back empty-handed an hour later, Dean’s cheeks are still wet. He looks for traces of sorrow on his brother’s face—something to tell him that Sam’s tears weren’t just a hallucination. Sam does look tired, but there’s no sign of regret in his expression as his eyes land on Dean. He doesn’t hesitate before moving over behind the couch where Dean is sitting and settling a hand on Dean’s shoulder.
For a sliver of a second, Dean’s entire body aches for Sam to hold him and kiss him and murmur assurances and make this okay. Then Dean’s eyes catch on the fresh bloodstain on the rug and revulsion shudders through him—not for Sam, but for himself.
What the fuck kind of person keeps turning back to a monster again and again and again? What sort of weak son of a bitch lets himself succumb to such a screwed up compulsion?
Ben’s blood isn’t even dry yet, for fuck’s sake! How the hell can Dean even consider letting Sam touch him with that copper stench in the room? How can he long so desperately to feel the comfort of his brother’s arms around him?
With a hot lump of self-loathing in his throat, Dean hunches forward and jerks his shoulder out from under Sam’s hand. Then, before Sam can try touching him again, he pushes to his feet and steps forward, taking the long way around the coffee table in order to avoid the red stain on the rug.
“Dean,” Sam says, voice heavy with warning.
“Don’t. Don’t touch me.”
It isn’t meant as repudiation. It’s just that Dean’s skin is tightly stretched over his ugly insides, which are tender and throbbing with anguish and remorse, and he can’t… he can’t be touched right now. Not just by Sam (although a tiny, rational corner of his mind knows that the jittery self-loathing still ricocheting through him is stronger because it was Sam), but by anyone.
He expects Sam to explode, to call for another victim or wrap Dean up in threads of power and throw him onto the bed, but Sam just stands on the other side of the couch with his hand still outstretched. After a few moments, he blinks and lowers it back to his side, then walks past Dean—keeping far enough away that Dean doesn’t feel so much as a tremor of alarm—and goes to stand on the balcony.
He doesn’t so much as look at Dean for the rest of the day.
For the first time in what feels like years, Dean’s allowed to put himself to bed. He lies still and wakeful on his side, watching Sam where he has taken up position on the balcony again. Sam’s head is lowered, although Dean can’t tell whether or not he’s watching anything in particular. His hands are wrapped on the balcony railing. His hair blows gently in the wind.
Dean isn’t aware of falling asleep, but he must, because one moment his brother is silhouetted against a dark sky of stars and the next it’s morning and he’s alone.
He spends the day packing Ben’s things up in the wooden crates he finds in Ben’s room. His head aches and his vision swims, but he takes his time handling each t-shirt and toy. He forces himself to remember, refuses to take refuge in the numb cloud that keeps threatening around the edges of the deep-seated, stabbing pain in his chest.
When he’s done, he goes back into the other room and sits docilely on the edge of the bed to wait for Sam.
Twilight has already crept in through the sliding doors and left mottled red and purple shadows on the walls before Dean is really aware of the passage of time. He blinks over at the bruised sky, then looks dumbly back at the closed door to the suite. He allows himself to consciously think about the tattoo on his back and finds it dead and devoid of warmth, like the damp coals of a doused hearth fire.
Sam isn’t coming back.
The thought laces Dean with panic, and then relief, and then he thinks about an eternity alone in this mausoleum with Ben’s things in their crates and the herald of darkness turning everything heavy and red sunset after sunset and the panic returns. Sam can’t just leave him here. After all the effort he went through to find Dean again, after everything he did—to himself, to the world—to keep Dean safe … Sam wouldn’t just vanish.
Reassured, Dean lies down on his side to wait.
Dean wakes to an empty room again with the sunrise. He stirs enough to relieve the unbearable weight on his bladder (did he piss at all yesterday? he can’t quite remember) and then returns to his former position on the edge of the bed, not quite looking toward the door or the stain on the other side of the couch, but quietly considering both.
He rests his hands in his lap and remembers Ben. His smile. His habit of delivering full-bodied hugs to Dean’s legs. The surprised look on his face the first time Sam gave him a Coke and the carbonation made him burp.
The sound of his short, aborted scream when Sam crushed his skull like it was nothing more substantial than an eggshell.
Christ, Dean’s chest hurts. He’s cracked ribs and breathing wasn’t this painful then, like butcher-knife-sized shards have pierced his sternum and are branching out to slice into his pectorals, his lungs, his heart.
At one point—couple points, maybe—he cries. There’s no sensation of release after the tears dry up. No lessening of the pain or the weight of grief.
There’s only Dean, and this room, and the waiting.
He thinks about Ben and waits for his brother until it’s too dark to see and then crawls back under the covers.
Tomorrow, he tells himself. He’ll be back tomorrow.
Dean isn’t feeling very hungry when he wakes up on the third day—wakes up in Ben’s bed with no clear memory of how he got here, how weird is that? He isn’t hungry, but for no particular reason at all as he lies on his side and stares at the ceiling, he thinks about how important it is to Sam that he keeps himself healthy. He can’t remember eating or drinking anything yesterday, and he’s pretty sure there wasn’t any food on the first day of his isolation either. His body could probably use a little pick-me-up.
Dean rolls onto his side and stares at the bulky shapes of the crates he packed. The sun is shining in the other room, but there are no windows in Ben’s room and the lights are off, so it’s dim in here. Dim and quiet. Dean focuses on the quality of the silence, which hangs in the air like a thin, insubstantial nimbus.
Strange how empty silences sound so different from inhabited ones.
The thought of food, when it comes again some time later, remains completely unappetizing. Dean seriously considers just letting the whole concept of eating drop off his radar again. After all, it isn’t like Sam is here to see. Maybe he’ll just… wait until he’s hungry again. His body will let him know when it needs something.
Food or not, though, he shouldn’t lie here all day. The awareness of Ben’s loss is already becoming suffocating—Christ, Dean can almost smell him on the pillow under his head. He doesn’t think that the pain in his chest can get any sharper, but he doesn’t want to find out.
He’ll get up in just a few minutes. When his vision isn’t blurred and he can breathe right.
Turning his face further into the pillow, Dean shuts his eyes and lets himself shake. He doesn’t know where his body is getting the moisture for yet another round of tears, but it seems to be managing just fine. They taste a little different, maybe: more bitter than salty on his lips. But that’s just the bite of failure and despair, spicing the sharp ache of grief lodged in his throat.
It’s an endless span of minutes later that Dean finally feels ready to move back into his own bed. He sits up, then stands, and the room whirls unexpectedly around him. He winds up lying on the floor with his head turned toward the bed. Glassy, lifeless eyes stare back at him.
Looks like he missed a stuffed animal on packing day—the thick-furred bear that Ben slept with until Sam took him to the zoo and gave him that damned lion he loved so much.
What the fuck did you do? the bear’s accusing stare demands. How could you let this happen to our boy?
Dean has no answer—it’s an inanimate object, for Christ sakes, he doesn’t owe it anything anyway—but he can’t bring himself to look away. Thing is, he can remember putting that bear in Ben’s arms for the first time, Sam’s hand a heavy weight on his shoulder and Sam’s power a warning, tight tingle against his skin. Ben, oblivious, beamed up at him and snuggled the bear tightly to his chest. Wide-eyed. Trusting.
He should have known better than to put his faith in something like Dean.
After a while, Dean turns his head away and pushes back to his feet. He moves more carefully, taking his time as the weakness in his body registers. He isn’t in trouble really, not yet, but Sam wouldn’t be happy if he saw him like this.
Fuck Sam, Dean thinks, but the words lack any heat, and he doesn’t really mean it.
He spares a few moments to put the stuffed bear into the crates with the rest of Ben’s things (carefully keeping the bears eyes pointed away from himself as he does) and then goes to see whether or not the dumbwaiter is still working.
By the end of the fourth day, with his only contact with anyone the ritual rise and fall of the dumbwaiter sending him meals and taking away the dishes again, Dean’s shock has mostly worn off. He’s about ready to start throwing things off the balcony to get a little attention. Not himself, he’s learned that lesson, but he’s pretty sure he could move the couch over there, tip it up on its end and…
And he doesn’t. There’s too great a chance he’ll accidentally drop it on an innocent’s head. Dean can feed himself all the bullshit he wants about Ben being in a better place, but he doesn’t buy into it enough to be so careless with life, even the life of one of Sam’s slaves.
There’s been enough killing in this world.
Dean refuses to add to the toll any more than he already has.
He spends the fifth day with his skin crawling from the stress of the unending silence. The accusing stain on the rug keeps catching his eye when he least expects it. He can’t stop wandering over to the doorway to Ben’s room and staring at the packed crates—constant, sore reminders of the life that used to be there.
Reminders of what Dean had, and lost.
Reminders that he failed. Again.
Not that he needs the crates for that. Ben is all over the suite, everywhere Dean turns. He keeps catching ghostly movement out of the corner of his eyes, only to turn and find himself face to face with a memory—Sam crawling on his hands and knees across the floor with Ben on his back, Ben wearing an oversized glove and doing his best to catch the balls Dean tossed to him, Ben sprawled out on his stomach on the bathroom floor playing with a set of Matchbox Cars.
Ben with Sam’s hand folded around the back of his skull, first sobbing, then screaming, and finally hanging silent.
Dean has never been less inclined to reach for a box of rock salt and a match. He deserves to be haunted, if that’s what this is. He deserves the constant, agonizing pain.
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to him, actually, just how wretched he is—not just because of his culpability in Ben’s death, but because of the growing swell of a second emotion beneath his never-ending grief and guilt. It takes Dean a while to pin down what that second, lesser hurt is, but when he figures it out, it takes all of his self-control not to claw at himself in the hopes of digging the emotion from his chest with his bare fingers.
God help him, he actually misses Sam.
On the sixth day, he’s desperate enough to walk down the hall and bang on the elevator doors while shouting for his brother. He calls Sam all sorts of names—coward, murderer, bastard. He means all of them, and none of them, and after a while it gets a little fuzzy just whom he’s yelling at.
When Dean finally drags himself back to the room, his entire body aches. His knuckles are bloodied. He goes into the bathroom and washes them off, then stands stupidly in front of the sink looking down at the deepening bruises along the sides of his hands. He examines the swollen, split skin of his knuckles.
This sort of damage merits punishment and Dean knows it, but the thought brings no panic. Dean feels no rush of anger at his own stupidity.
It isn’t recklessness leaving him calm, or exhaustion. It isn’t faith that Sam wouldn’t do anything else to him right now—not so soon after Ben.
Dean just doesn’t have anything left to lose.
On the seventh day, Sam finally comes back.
With a puppy.
Dean takes one look at the squirming, panting ball of fur and fat in his brother’s arms and runs to the bathroom to throw up.
The puppy lasts almost three days, which is how long it takes for Sam’s soft, repentant tenderness (he kissed Dean’s hands when he saw them, no words of censure or blame, no retribution over the damage) to jolt over into snarling rage. It’s Dean’s fault again, for still not being able to handle Sam’s hands on his skin without helplessly shaking and thrashing to get away. The puppy is followed by a kitten, a bird, a goddamned ferret and finally, incredibly, a monkey.
That last death, at least, isn’t Dean’s fault. Apparently, Sam just isn’t a fan of loudly chattering animals hanging off the curtains.
As Sam tosses the monkey’s broken body off the balcony with a coil of power, his face is tight and frustrated. Dean can practically see him wracking his brain for other options.
Over the past few weeks, Dean has been ridden by so many emotions in such sharp, successive turns that it has gotten difficult to keep track of his current state. The only constant is the stabbing loss and sickened guilt, neither of them at all faded, despite Sam’s continual promises that it’ll get better. There’s no misidentifying the absurd hysteria bubbling up inside of him now, though.
Jesus Christ, what’s Sam going to try next, a pony?
“Sam,” he says without knowing he means to speak.
Sam turns, looking more startled than Dean expected. He doesn’t approach, stays by the edge of the balcony with awkward hesitation and desperate hope flickering back and forth over his face. Belatedly, Dean thinks about it and realizes that he hasn’t actually said anything since Sam tried to touch him with the bloodstain still fresh on the rug.
Dean’s head swims a little with the understanding, but he clears his throat and continues, “Dude, stop. It’s not—you can’t just replace him.”
“I just want you to be happy,” Sam answers as he takes a tentative step forward.
When Dean doesn’t shy back, Sam crosses the rest of the space between them and draws to a gentle stop. Watching Dean carefully, he lifts his hand and brushes Dean’s cheek with his knuckles.
It’s the same hand, Dean notes, that his brother used to kill Ben.
He waits for the nausea to come, but it doesn’t. There’s only that deep, stabbing pain in his heart and the lingering ache of exhaustion.
“Then let me go,” he says finally. “If you really—Jesus, Sam, if you really want that, then you have to stop what you’re doing, and you have to let me go. You have to let me try to put things right.”
For a moment, Dean thinks Sam is wavering. He’s almost positive Sam is considering it.
Then Sam’s eyes harden.
“And where exactly do you think you’d go, Dean?” he asks. “Without my protection, you’d be ripped to shreds the second you stepped off that elevator.”
“Nice to see you think so much of my ability to handle myself,” Dean says, and then shuts up again when Sam’s hand moves suddenly to grip his throat in a tight, uncompromising hold. Sam is being careful not to bruise the skin, but he’s coming close.
“Besides,” Sam continues in a deceptively reasonable voice. “You belong here. You belong to me. And my mark on your back says that you know it.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
It’s the wrong thing to say, because Sam smiles—slowly—and then spends the next few hours reminding Dean that he does, in fact, have to like it. He has to like it if Sam’s hands, and his power, and his mouth say so. He has to like it to the tune of not just one, or even two, but three gut-wrenching, unstoppable orgasms.
That night, when Sam climbs into bed beside him again, Dean’s heart sinks even lower, but he can’t say he’s actually surprised.
After that, Dean stops keeping track of pretty much everything.
The sore, wounded edges around the dead place left in his heart by Ben’s death don’t heal up the way he thinks they should, the way Sam keeps promising they will. Instead, numb bleakness seeps through him. It’s a form of anesthesia that hobbles Dean’s mind and makes his thoughts slow. Emotions, if they come to him, are distantly glimpsed or only half-acknowledged. They’re unimportant. Dull.
Ben’s loss is the only thing kept shining and new, and Dean wonders sometimes if that’s his own doing, if he’s clinging to the pain in some misguided attempt to keep Ben’s memory near him.
Ben’s things have been moved away, but the room is still there. It’s empty now, which is surprising. Maybe that isn’t deliberate, maybe Sam just hasn’t thought up a use for it. Or maybe he’s actually taking Dean at his word and has stopped trying to fill the void. If that’s the case, Dean doesn’t know whether to be grateful or not.
Sam has filled the entertainment center housing the TV with new films—all of Dean’s old favorites, some he’d always meant to see but never got around to. There’s a small library of books as well—mystery novels, westerns, anything by any author Dean has ever expressed the mildest interest in. He might as well not have bothered, though, because Dean spends most of his time when Sam is gone inside Ben’s room. He inevitably finds his way inside within half an hour after his brother’s departure and leaves only to eat lunch and greet Sam near the door at his return like the good, faithful pet he is.
There’s no furniture in Ben’s room anymore, not since Sam had the bed moved out, so Dean spends his days sitting cross-legged on the floor. He looks at the barren walls while the muffling fog of detachment sinks deeper into his body. He immerses himself in the ripping pain of bereavement, hugging Ben’s ghost close—holding onto it even as it lacerates his chest and shreds the muscle beneath.
When Sam is home, he vacillates between treating Dean like he’s made of fragile, precious glass and clutching at him with greedy hands. There’s no way of predicting which version Dean will get on any given day, but the way Sam touches him in those first few moments after waking is usually a good indicator of how things are going to go.
Not that Dean alters his behavior one way or the other. The present just doesn’t seem to matter enough to be anything other than passively pliant. Nothing matters anymore; as far as Dean is concerned, Sam can do whatever he wants as long as he doesn’t expect Dean to actively participate.
The only time Dean’s calm trembles on the edge of shattering is one very bad afternoon, when Dean reads a piss poor day on the Front in Sam’s fuming heat when he bursts through the door. Sam throws Dean against the nearest wall in a careless, almost violent toss and then blankets him with his own body. He bites down on the side of Dean’s throat, and ruts against him without even bothering to remove any of their clothing.
After Sam has rubbed himself off against Dean’s hip, after the scent of Sam’s climax rises up to fill the room, Dean thinks that it’s over. He thinks it’s over until Sam strips him down and hauls him across the room toward the couch. Dean wakes up enough to resist a little when he realizes where they’re headed, but Sam’s grip tightens and a moment later Dean has been shoved down onto the floor. He catches himself on his hands, staring down at the bloodstain in front of him, and then Sam’s hand is on the back of his head.
Sam shoves Dean’s face down, forcing him lower until his breath is panting out over the stain, until his entire field of vision is filled with it. Sam continues to hold him there while power crackles through the tattoo and the cuffs, dragging Dean helplessly into arousal. He holds him there while he fondles Dean’s balls and jerks Dean’s cock until Dean finally spills with a harsh, broken sob.
Then it’s over.
Mostly, though, things aren’t bad. They aren’t good either, of course, but Dean settles into some weird, grey, blank space that he guesses is some sort of depression. He’d think he’s lost the capacity to feel anything at all, except that the pain is still with him, ever-present and digging into him with every breath. Even that isn’t so bad, though; he’s grown accustomed to the pain. It’s an old friend now. A welcome reminder of things that were and will never be again.
Dean is still engaged enough to watch autumn curl the leaves on the new trees in the park. But when he feels the bite of approaching winter in the air, he turns his back on the balcony without remorse, allowing his world to shrink down to the four walls of the suite. He doesn’t miss looking outside. Nothing much ever changed there anyway.
The days pass and Dean lets Sam touch him, he doesn’t resist. He doesn’t make a fuss. And when Sam asks how he’s doing, he always gives his brother an honest answer.
He’s just fine.
“When are you going to stop punishing yourself?”
They’re in bed, Dean rolled on his side with Sam scooted up close behind him. The connection is open wide between them, forcing Dean to feel things he doesn’t want any part in. Contentment, and love, and concern. Softer, warmer emotions that make him ache fiercely in the first few moments after Sam inevitably pulls away and leaves Dean alone in himself.
Dean’s heart is still racing because Sam’s is. There’s slickness between his thighs, on his lower back—his come and Sam’s, and only marginally more uncomfortable than the dampness sticking to him pretty much everywhere. Sleeping with Sam is like bedding a furnace sometimes, and Dean’s skin has gone slick with sweat.
Sam cradles Dean closer in his arms and gently strokes Dean’s stomach with his fingertips.
Dean doesn’t answer the question. He doesn’t know what the answer to that particular question is.
Behind him, Sam sighs. “I don’t like seeing you like this.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have killed him, then.” He can’t say the name. He can’t desecrate Ben like that.
“It’d be easier if you could blame me, wouldn’t it?” Sam asks, shifting the arm trapped beneath Dean’s body up higher so that he can free his hand to tease Dean’s hair. A second, heavier jostling of the bed follows and then Sam is nuzzling at the side of Dean’s throat, nosing the underside of his jaw. “You can, if you want,” he whispers as his other hand slides down over Dean’s upturned hip to fondle Dean’s spent cock.
There isn’t a scrap of temptation in the offer.
“It was my fault.”
Fond pride warms Dean’s chest—Sam’s pride in him, reverberating down the connection between them—and for an instant he tastes nothing but bitter metal in his mouth. How obedient he is, how well he’s learned his lesson, how goddamned satisfied the monster behind him is when he—when he—
The embers of anger fizzle out, leaving Dean even more exhausted than before. Even with Sam’s emotions coursing through him, he can sense his own grey around the edges of his consciousness, waiting to reclaim him.
Please God let Sam be done with this conversation soon.
Sam doesn’t seem inclined to do any more talking, but he shows no signs of letting go anytime soon either. In fact, he seems to be working himself up for another round, nipping and licking at the corner of Dean’s jaw and the exposed side of his throat while his hand toys gently with Dean’s cock and balls.
Then Sam lifts his mouth long enough to say, “I’m going to have to do something about this if you can’t pull yourself out of it soon.”
Dean struggles against the sudden, fierce sting in his eyes and can’t quite keep the tears in. As wretched as this endless, bleak existence is, Sam’s threat to wrench Dean out of it is worse. Much as Dean would like to believe that Sam can’t do that, that he can’t possibly take Ben’s loss away, can’t take the weight of Ben’s death (and so many others, so many deaths laid at Dean’s doorstep, and he thought he understood before, but he didn’t, he didn’t, oh God) from Dean’s chest, he knows better.
There are ways to wrench him from this murky rut he’s sunken into, and none of them are going to be pleasant.
“Don’t,” he whispers as his body starts to shake with helpless, violent tremors. “Don’t, Sam, you can’t—you can’t do that to me. Don’t, please.”
“Shh,” Sam soothes.
Shifting his hand from Dean’s cock up to his stomach, he rocks him gently. Power weaves through Dean, spreading a low-grade hum of pleasure and calm over his insides and he quiets. He quiets like Sam wants, but his attention is focused longingly on the numb blanket waiting to settle back over him once Sam is done.
“Shh, baby,” Sam breathes, placing a light kiss on the nape of Dean’s neck. “I’ll take care of you.”
When Dean finally slips into an uneasy sleep hours later, he doesn’t dream of Ben, or Sam, or the ruined, wasted world.
He doesn’t dream of anything at all.
On the same day that Sam calls Dean over to the window and makes him watch disinterestedly as the first fat flakes of snow rain down from a slate-colored sky (like ash, Dean thinks, and wonders what’s burning this time), Sam comes back in the afternoon leading along a visitor on a heavy chain. Dean freezes at the sight—not because of the broken, useless fingers on Sam’s captive or the lurching, dragging way he walks, as though simply holding himself upright hurts. It’s the blue eyes that catch him, familiar and kind and somehow still apologetic.
The grey bleakness trembles.
Sam leads the angel further into the room, smiling softly at Dean and keeping his movements slow and easy. He’s moving the way, Dean realizes, someone might approach a spooked horse. Dean’s shield of detachment trembles again, more violently, and he backs up a step, muscles trembling with the inexplicable urge to run.
“Easy,” Sam says, coming to a stop and tugging the angel up beside him with the heavy clink of metal. “There’s nowhere for you to go.”
“What—” Dean says, and then has to stop and martial his words. The months he spent cultivating an attitude of numb apathy have left his awareness blunted and dulled, which makes it difficult to think. He’s lost the knack of asking questions.
Finally, he comes up with, “What’s going on?”
Sam’s pleasant, everything-is-going-to-be-fine expression slips slightly, revealing a mix of worry and annoyance. “We talked about this, Dean.”
Dean’s mind flicks backwards through conversations he only half paid attention to and, for some reason, gets stuck instead on another pair of kind, apologetic blue eyes—eyes belonging to a woman, the woman who hauled him back from comforting darkness before he could escape.
This time, the grey fog encasing him doesn’t just tremble but roils, shot through with jagged bursts of panic.
“No,” Dean breathes, backing up until he runs into the cold glass of the sliding doors.
“I gave you plenty of time to manage this on your own, Dean,” Sam chides. “Now we do it my way.” Regarding Dean with a cautious, assessing gaze, he tilts his head. “Are you going to be good and hold still, or do you need help behaving?”
Dean hesitates as disorder wells up and muddies his already turbulent numbness, and then breaks to the right. He has no real plan of escape—there’s nowhere to go, just like Sam said—but he can’t just stand there and let Sam rip Ben’s loss away from him.
Sam’s power catches him up before he’s gone more than a few steps. Dean grunts as he’s jerked to a halt, then swears as he’s lifted and carried through the air toward the chained and collared angel. Sam lowers him again when he’s close enough, although not quite far enough for his feet to touch the floor. Dean’s left with just the tips of his toes brushing the rug, which doesn’t give him anything to push off—as though it matters, with Sam’s power encasing Dean’s limbs like lead and keeping him still.
Desperate, Dean scrambles at the wall in his mind for the first time since Sam reforged it—scrambles after the yellow-eyed demon’s power, locked on the other side—and is slapped away.
“Stop that,” Sam scolds, and then offers Dean a smile and reaches up to touch his cheek. “You’ll feel better in a few minutes, baby; just wait.”
Dean doesn’t want to feel better, though. Sam can’t take this from him, he can’t wipe away the stains on Dean’s heart, he can’t blunt the knives that Dean has been living with since he fucked up and Ben paid the price.
Those are Dean’s. They don’t belong to Sam. He can’t fucking have them.
There isn’t much of his detached bleakness left by now, but the last few shreds flake away as Dean thrashes and snarls from within the confines of his own mind. He struggles harder, now that the unhealed wound of Ben’s death has been unshrouded. Raw agony rips through his chest, tears burn his eyes, and then power flickers out over Dean’s mind, hobbling his thoughts. He can still feel the pain, but he can’t do anything about it, and the rest of the world recedes a little in response.
“So,” Sam’s voice echoes distantly into Dean’s ears. “What’s the verdict, angel?”
With a supreme effort, Dean is able to focus his eyes in time to see the angel’s broken hands lift up toward his chest. Sam’s hand immediately shoots out and closes around one of the angel’s wrists with an audible sound of grating bone, but the angel doesn’t so much as flinch. His eyes, locked on Dean’s, are unwavering.
“Who said you could touch him?” Soft menace purrs through the question, spills into Dean through the connection that Sam’s bonds of power are holding open between them.
“I have to touch him if you want me to heal him,” the angel says in a hoarse voice. “And not just his body. I can’t do it any other way. None of my kind can.”
When Dean’s fettered mind digests that, he feels a brief, muted flicker of hope. If that’s the case, then this isn’t going to happen. Sam would never allow anyone else to touch him—especially not in some deeper, more intimate way like this angel is implying would be necessary.
Sam’s jaw does work with frustration. His anger crackles through Dean’s insides in a scorching wind before being wrestled back down. With what is clearly a supreme act of willpower, Sam’s hand opens and falls back to his side.
“Do it.”
Dean has time to make one more effort to throw off Sam’s restraints—feels the numbing weight press down more heavily on his mind in response—and then the angel’s broken hands are resting on his chest. One heartbeat, two, and pain explodes through Dean’s body. Searing, violated pain.
Gold light flashes and suddenly Dean is lying on the floor. Sam stands over him, stands between him and the angel. Those dark, insubstantial wings are back, high and unfurled, and flames lick around Sam’s brow. Lightning twines up and down each arm. He’s a creature of fire and shadow and power, filling the air around him with violence and fury.
The angel, sprawled on the ground before Sam in a similar position to Dean’s, looks up into Sam’s face with steady calm.
“I thought you wanted him healed.”
“You hurt him,” Sam snarls. He takes a step forward, wings snapping brutally behind him.
“You didn’t think this was going to be painless, did you?” the angel replies with a trace of unbroken heat in his voice. “A man’s soul is intimately connected to his being. It’s the center of his heart—of everything that he is, was, or ever will be. As such, souls are highly sensitized to outside interference, even from an angel. I will help Dean—not for you, Samuel, not for your purpose, but for God’s. But if you want him healed, then I’m going to have to hurt him to do it. Otherwise, you can just send me back to Alistair now.”
“So eager to crawl back to your handler,” Sam sneers as Dean cautiously pushes himself up into a sitting position. He’s trying not to draw too much attention to himself, but he can sense Sam’s awareness of him sharpen at the slight shift. Sam steps a handful of inches to the side, wings curling downward in something Dean recognizes as an attempt to shade him from view.
“Do you think I want to be in here with that?” the angel replies.
Dean flinches as he catches sight of the angel beneath the curve of one great wing and realizes that the angel is pointing at him. That he’s the reason for the thick, undisguised disgust and revulsion in the angel’s voice.
“It sickens me,” the angel continues. “It’s an abomination in the eyes of the Lord.”
The connection isn’t open between them any longer, but Dean can feel Sam’s anger flare even higher anyway. It washes out over the entire room in a wave of savage heat. “Don’t think your conversation is so fascinating that I won’t have your tongue removed again... and again… and again. I’m told Alistair appreciates the taste. He’s been begging for a second try at yours.”
Dean’s stomach turns over at his brother’s words, with the thoughts of what the angel has been enduring at the hands of this ‘Alistair’, whoever that is. Dean’s fault, all of it. He’s the one who begged that the angel be spared, as if that were a kindness. It would have been kinder if he’d let Sam kill the angel when he clearly wanted to.
The angel seems cowed by the threat, losing his defiance and speaking in a softer voice as he tells Sam, “You can bring another of my brothers or sisters to see to him if you want, but the pain will be just as bad. And I’m telling you honestly that none of them know his soul as I do.”
Sam doesn’t tell the angel to go to hell. He doesn’t set the room on fire, or crack the ceiling, or do anything but stand there with great, black wings of smoke leaking from his back and fire wreathing his body. Then, grudgingly, the wings retract. The fire wanes and goes out.
Silently, Sam looks down over his shoulder at Dean.
“No,” Dean whispers, pushing backwards with an uncoordinated flail of arms and legs. He runs into something soft and bulky—the couch—and isn’t thinking well enough to detour around it. He tries to stand and can’t get his legs underneath him.
It isn’t about keeping the shrine to Ben that he’s set in his heart anymore. Not now that he’s had a taste of the cure. Christ, just the memory of that pain is enough to lock his lungs and muscles in panic.
Not again. He can’t go through that again.
Sam doesn’t say anything, but the way he steps aside, leaving the angel an unobscured path to Dean is permission enough. As the angel gets to his feet and walks toward him, Dean frantically tries to catch his brother’s eyes.
“Sam. Sammy, please. I can—I’ll try harder. I’ll, I can—”
“This is for your own good, Dean,” Sam says, riding over his pleas smoothly. “It’s only going to hurt for a few moments, and then you’ll be back with me. I’ll order us a treat for after, all right? Couple of rib eyes and some tequila. You’ll like that.”
Dean would like the tequila now, actually, on the off chance that it will have any numbing effects at all. He’d like a time out, too—not long, just enough so that he can knock himself unconscious for this, although the pain was bad enough that he’s sure it would follow him into the black as well. He doesn’t really want to look into the blue eyes that used to be so kind and face new revulsion there, but as the angel crouches beside him, he’s desperate enough to try it.
“Don’t do this,” he begs.
But the angel doesn’t appear to even notice that Dean has spoken, reaching for him without hesitation and pushing his broken hands through Dean’s chest and into his soul.
Pain flares through Dean, searing and crippling, and this time it isn’t cut short by Sam’s intercession. Instead, the pain builds (more, how the fuck can it hurt more?), a scourging fire moving through his insides. Strands of barbed wire and knife-tipped whips accompany the fire and they lash at him, they lash into him. Red, it’s red, everything is (Dean) red, boiling agony, and Dean is drowning in it, he’s (Dean) being ripped apart, he—
Dean.
The pain doesn’t so much cease as mute. Suddenly, there’s a barrier standing between it and Dean, high and white and shining. The aura of pain that’s baking him through the barrier like heat seeping from an oven tells him that it’s just a temporary measure at best, though, and he can’t keep in a whimper at the thought of all that agony crashing down on him again.
Something is in here with him: something vast and cool and blue. The Something is in charge, Dean senses—that barrier belongs to it, is fed by its power. He clings desperately to his savior.
Don’t put me back in there. Please.
I’m sorry, the Something tells him, and it actually does sound regretful, which is surprising.
It’s surprising because now that Dean’s initial shock has worn away, he realizes what the thing wrapped around and through him is, what it must be. He knows where all the blue light is coming from, where he’s seen that particular shade before, but there isn’t any revulsion here.
Or rather, there is, but it isn’t precisely directed at him.
I’m sorry I wasn’t there to stop him, the angel continues while the pain rages unabated on the other side of the barrier. The continuing sound and feel of it strikes Dean like the rumble of an approaching nuclear blast, sweeping inexorably toward him across an arid plain.
He’s going to have to go back into that.
This is going to hurt, and I’m sorry for that too, but I have to try. I’ll shield you as best as I’m able.
That’s all the warning Dean is given before an arc of pain thrusts through the barrier. It snarls into him where he hangs in the midst of the angel’s peaceful blue mind and he screams, thrashing, as hooks dig into him. They part him, holding him open for the knives that follow, cutting deeper and leaving bloodied runnels in his thoughts, in his soul, and the pain crescendos to a blistering, glistening edge so agonizing he can’t scream, he can only shake and beg.
pleasestopdon’tgodstopstopitno
There’s a slow, deep yank then, and he can feel a red, tenderized chunk of himself being drawn up, pulling more of him with it, tearing him, more pain, more
PLEASEDONTSTOPFUCKOHFUCKSTOPIT
The terrible pulling stops. Dean snaps back together with a suddenness that sends shockwaves through him and then, blessedly, he’s huddled in the blue light and the pain is back on the other side of the barrier where it belongs. The aftertaste of agony lingers, though, vibrating through whatever he has that passes for a body in this place.
Sorrow pulses over him from all sides. An invisible, insubstantial hand strokes across him, soothing.
I’m sorry, Dean. It’s beyond my power to undo what your brother has done. It should never have been possible for him in the first pl—
I don’t give a fuck, Dean spits, trying to push the invisible presence away. It’s difficult to fight when he doesn’t technically have any arms. Just get out. Get the fuck out and leave me alone.
I can’t do that, the voice answers. Samuel brought me here to serve his own purposes, but there are greater destinies at play, and I cannot allow you to continue as you are. You have to resist him, Dean. You must be whole.
There isn’t really anything Dean can say to that except, Fuck you. Fuck you, you son of a bitch, and fuck your God.
The angel, hurt, flinches at that, and despite the pain and the sensation of having been horribly violated—despite what he knows the angel still plans on doing to him, Dean feels a tiny surge of guilt.
You don’t mean that, the angel says a moment later.
Dean doesn’t, but that doesn’t make him any more willing. I’m done fighting, he answers. Get another sucker for whatever holy mission you’re on; I’m tapping out.
There’s a pause and then the angel’s voice returns. Somehow, he manages to sound regretful and implacable all at once.
No, you aren’t.
Dean feels himself being pushed back toward the barrier—the angel preparing to throw him back into the pain, preparing to do Sam’s dirty work—and Dean digs in, resisting.
Wait! Wait, just—fucking wait a sec!
Amazingly, the angel hesitates.
I want a name, Dean tells him. I think it’s only fair you give me that much before you finish raping me.
The angel recoils, shocked, and Dean gains a few more painless moments until he recovers enough to protest, That isn’t my intent. I’m healing you, Dean.
Funny how the fact that you don’t have my consent makes that feel like rape.
Your soul has been desecrated beyond imagining, the angel responds, sounding steadier despite Dean’s obstinacy. I may not be able to purify it, but I can mend some of the greater tears. You’re my charge. It’s my duty to do this.
And he starts pushing Dean toward the barrier again.
A name! Dean demands, resisting as best as he’s able. I want a goddamned name!
Castiel, the angel says, and then Dean is forced out through the barrier and back into the maelstrom.
It doesn’t seem to hurt as much this time around. Oh, the sensation of the angel—Castiel—knitting up and cauterizing bits of his soul is beyond agonizing, but it doesn’t hold a candle to whatever he tried before, when they were both on the other side of the barrier and, presumably, out of sight of Sam. And pain Dean knows what to deal with. He knows how to cope.
It’s the sensation of being violated that he can’t take. His very core is being felt up and penetrated, and he knows damn well that this Castiel son of a bitch doesn’t belong there. Dean didn’t fucking give him permission to be there.
Dean knows he’s just prolonging things, making this harder on himself, but he keeps instinctively clenching up and trying to force the angel out. He gets a mental nudge of rebuke for every attempt, and then the angel shoves him back down and spreads him open again.
Finally, the angel wraps Dean tightly and holds him down and immobile. Dean resorts to screaming—a silent roar inside his head which Castiel almost immediately muffles with something like a hand pressed over the mouth Dean knows he doesn’t really have in this place. The angel covers him; it fills him with a heavy, blue weight. When Dean tries to thrust the invasion away, Castiel’s touch grows more forceful, driven by a relentless insistence that makes Dean’s soul crawl. Castiel handles every piece of Dean within reach, running cool, assessing hands over Dean’s most intimate places and then focusing in on any gashes he finds. Spurring Dean on to new levels of agony and violation.
There’s no slow sense of withdrawal. One moment, Dean is restrained and open and filled. The next, the burning red is gone. The suite snaps back into place around him just in time for him to watch Castiel’s fingertips slide out of his chest.
Dean promptly curls over onto his side and pukes, his body shaking as he brings up the burger and fries he ate for lunch, and then follows that with the mostly liquefied remnants of this morning’s omelet and toast. His stomach’s empty of everything but bile and his throat and stomach are still seizing, still bringing up thin, stinging strands of fluid.
And he’s crying.
Crying because the grey vagueness has been ripped away from him and the knives in his chest are gone. There’s a dull ache in their place, not so deep or severe, and when he thinks about Ben the sorrow feels old and worn. The guilt that he wants to rise and swallow him—the guilt he knows he deserves to feel—doesn’t come.
“Goddamn it,” he chokes between cramping heaves.
“I’m sorry, Dean,” the angel—Castiel, that bastard, that heartless son of a bitch—apologizes. “I hope that one day you can forgive me.”
“I’m sure he will.”
That’s Sam’s voice, and a moment later the clink of a chain tells Dean that Sam is pulling his pet angel to heel, pulling him away from Dean, and then out the door and down the hall. His awareness of Sam’s presence doesn’t fade any further than that, though, so Sam must be sending the angel down the elevator on his own.
The worst of Dean’s nausea has finally calmed, although his throat muscles keep giving little reflexive twitches and his stomach aches, but he doesn’t bother looking up when Sam returns. He stays hunched over, one arm wrapped protectively around his stomach while shudders wrack his body. He’s shamed and raw, with fading sparks of light rocketing through his insides like part of the angel is still there, still touching him.
Sam’s hand on his arm is a welcome distraction.
“Come on, baby,” Sam says, his cheerful voice a comforting point of familiarity. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”