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'Bring Out Your Dead' - SPN - an unolass production - Dean & Cas - PG13 - 1/2
Uno and I would like to blame ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sharp_teeth, for existing, and also ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
maychorian for the prompt, but I guess in the end, if we end up writing 17k words of apocalyptic road trip fic, it is no one's fault but ours. Thanks also to everyone who gave us words of encouragement along the way. Ya'll rock! <3
This is another example of what happens when commentfic gets out of hand.
Title: Bring Out Your Dead
Authors:lassiterfics & unoshot
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 16,886 (Part 1: 8,946 words)
Warnings: violence, gore
Spoilers: through 5x13
Authors' Note: A continuation of The Future As B-Movie, which was based on the following prompt: "There are still a few vampires out there, despite the rampant Apocalypse, and they're still doing their thing. And yeah, angel blood--or former angel blood? Turns out it's way tastier than regular ol' human blood, especially with so many humans jacked up by this weird new virus. (The End 'verse, maybe not all the way to 2014 yet, maybe Sam's still around.)" It helps to read it, but really you just need this: "In the middle of the croatpocalypse, the vampires multiply and zero in on Cas."
Summary: This future isn't much better than that other one. / Surviving the Monsterpocalypse 101 / Worst road trip ever.
As it happens, the whole thing is taken out of Dean's hands. The infirmary is running out of space when the latest raiding party comes back in shreds, and he goes to get Cas but the bed is already filled with some other guy ('Brian,' his mind supplies) screaming and bleeding everywhere.
"Crap," says Dean. "Beck --"
"Sam," she answers, curtly, shouldering Dean out of the way. "Help or go."
Becky's lost some of that chipper attitude, Dean thinks, since the world ended.
Cas isn't in his cabin, and half of Cas's wardrobe is spread crumpled and haphazard across the bed, and Dean feels sick.
He finds them in the supply cabin, the lock undone and the door hanging slightly open. "We can't spare much," Sam is saying, "but you should take some of these cans, and hell, a roll of --"
"It doesn't matter, Sam," interrupts Cas, tiredly.
Sam might be a tough guy these days, but there's still a pause before he answers, "You don't know that."
"Fuck you both," says Dean, from the doorway, and they turn their heads -- Sam, crouched by a low shelf with his hand in Cas's bag, and Cas leaning against the wall, dazed and winter pale. Cas's eyes are too dark, pupils blown and flesh bruised; Sam is the one who flinches.
Dean glares at them both, equal opportunity. "No."
Neither of them respond. After a moment, Sam reaches for a can of beans and adds it to the sad little bag.
"Fuck," says Dean, and then he shakes his head. "Fuck. Fine. Sam, you're gonna have to be in charge for a while."
"Dean." Cas is weary, but there is something in the gravel of his voice. It is low and forbidding. It reminds Dean, on a small, shivering level, that under all that fragile humanity, even with most of his mojo gone, Cas is still a badass.
"No." Sam looks up at him from the floor, all gangly and brown eyes gone wide. (And Sam is a badass also, but Sam is always and forever Dean's little brother, and fuck that, too.)
"You're not going alone," says Dean, evenly.
"Dean," says Cas again, and Dean replies, "Shut the fuck up," and Sam grates, "Then I'm coming."
The statement hangs there in silence. They stare at each other and Dean shakes his head, but he almost relents -- yes, just the three of them, yes, leave all this shit behind -- but then Chuck's hammering at the door, all, "Guys, they're gonna riot in the mess hall, I really really need one of you in there," and Sam is the first to look away.
"Your cue, Sammy. Meet us at the gate in an hour. And Cas, just fucking sit down."
He knows who he's supposed to be in this time and place, when Cas is stoned and lightly swaying, but Dean swallows it back, because this future is supposed to be different. Better.
He's not sure how the vampires are better. But he's gotta have something.
An hour later, Sam wants them to take one of the trucks, but trucks are valuable and if Dean's gonna go out there, he's gonna do it right. So he reaches into his pocket for the keys that are always -- even now -- there, and he flashes his best grin. He thinks it's only a little ill at the edges.
Sam's about to blubber out some speech or something, too, which is why Dean says, "We'll send you a postcard." Then he claps his brother on the shoulder, and -- all right, there's maybe a hug. A manly hug. "Take care," Dean mutters, and Sam says, "You too."
That's how Dean ends up driving out of Camp Chitaqua in the Impala, on a cool and cloudy day, with an ex-angel drowsing against his shoulder and his brother, ginormous shoulders hunched, getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. Just before Dean rounds the dusty curve, Sam waves, and Dean lifts a hand out the window in return.
His baby's steering wheel is smooth and comforting beneath his palms, and the metal-tainted breeze is almost -- almost -- fresh. So he has that, at least.
Dean sets his gaze on the road, and drives.
+
Being in the Impala, Dean almost forgets why he's in the Impala, and he's rummaging around for his old tapes blabbing to Cas about Guns n' Roses when Cas blanches and says, "The vampires."
The what?
Oh, right.
Yup, there they are, breaking through the treeline, blood-crazed and feral, but no way will Dean let them lay a finger on his girl: he floors the gas. Come on, baby, I know it's been a while, he pleads, and the Impala revs like a dream, roars like a lioness around them, and the vampires have nothing to eat but the dust the Impala kicks up in their faces.
"Baby, you never let me down," Dean grins. All the times Sam gave him shit for continuing to tinker with the Impala in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Eat crow, little brother. It kept him sane, and now it will keep him alive. It will keep Cas and him alive.
Dean takes care of his baby, and his baby takes care of him. That's just how it goes.
"They'll follow us," Cas says, tight-voiced. "They'll follow me."
"We'll find a skunk and get it to spray you, see those vamps try and find you then."
“A skunk won’t do much good,” Cas replies, and Dean forgives him because Cas has always sucked at jokes, anyway.
"A-ha!"
Cas looks over. "What?"
Dean reaches between the seat and pulls something out with a triumphant flourish. "Appetite for Destruction!"
Cas frowns.
Dean pops it in, and suddenly Axl Rose is singing his heart out about a paradise city like mullets are back in style.
"I love this song," Dean says, and Cas rides the rest of the way to the highway with a gun on his lap.
+
Siphoning gas, breaking into motels, staying up all night when they think they can hear the monsters closing in. Yeah. Lying prone and chugging whiskey in a supermarket aisle as Cas stitches up his shoulder, Dean thinks of dead scholars who wrote things like hell is the absence of god and hell is other people, wondering which one Cas relates to. Hell is zombies and vampires trying to eat you alive. Maybe that one.
The first order of business is to teach Cas a few things. "Look," Dean says, and points with his knife at the croat they just killed. "If you stab someone here, here, here, or here, they're dead. You cut them here, or here, they're seriously fucked. Got it?"
Cas nods.
Dean makes him stab the corpse a few times, for practice.
This is a gun. This is the safety, this is the trigger. Here is how you replace a clip. This is how you take a gun apart, this is how you put it back together. Cas furrows his brow in concentration as he cleans his Glock, and it dawns on Dean: it's like being thirteen all over again, teaching Sam about guns and salt and holy water. It's like being eleven and telling Sammy about monsters, but don't worry, we can kill them, we always do. When Dean was sixteen, Sam almost got mauled to death by a ghoul, and Dean ripped his own shirt apart to make a bandage, and he held his little brother and talked nonsense at him until Dad showed up; it's like that.
Cas cleans his gun with the same meticulous care Sam does, and it makes Dean's heart ache.
He wonders sometimes, about these second chances that keep falling into his lap. Dean dies, and his father pulls him back out. He dies again, and it's Castiel this time. He sees his parents again, and sees them doom themselves to the same fate that will always, always take them from him. Dean sees the future and he changes it, but maybe not enough, because what the fuck is this shit seriously, and now here he is, with another second chance that came back wrong.
"Dean?"
"Huh?"
Cas cants his head to the left.
"I'm fine," Dean says.
Cas looks skeptical, but also concerned, and Dean knows that expression. It's the expression that means the next thing out of Cas's mouth is going to make Dean feel incapable and volatile, despite the good intentions. So he falls back on the time-tested Winchester method of dealing.
Dean asks, "You wanna shoot some things?"
+
Cas is like a fucking magnet. They stop to plunder an abandoned gas station, Dean seeing if he can get anything from the dead pump and Cas checking the brutalized store for anything useful. It's daylight, but that doesn't really stop a determined vamp. It's a cloudy daylight anyway, which is why the next thing Dean knows he's firing a horde of useless bullets and Cas is booting it for the car with a bag of Cheetos and a pack of lighters under his arm and the vampires are wailing because they are so hungry.
It isn't just Cas they're after, either, because Dean thinks between the zombies and the body count, the bloodsuckers are probably running out of food.
Cas may be filet mignon, but Dean is a hamburger unto himself.
Dean slams his door shut, wrenching the key in the ignition -- sorry baby -- and Cas hurls himself into the passenger seat, and the Impala takes off before Cas's door is closed, leaving Cas's fingers wrapped hard around Dean's elbow as Cas's boots kick at something slavering and shrill that was once a guy in a good suit. Cas tries not to slide out of the car as the Impala peels to the right.
Dean has to run down a vampire to get out, and the guy bounces off the Impala's hood and cracks -- cracks -- the windshield.
The undead peel away behind, and Cas gets settled, and Dean stares at that spiderweb line bisecting the glass just above the dashboard.
It's okay, he tells himself. It's okay. Even in a post-apocalyptic world, he just -- junkyards. Windshields. He can fix it.
He finds himself plotting the best route to Bobby's place, before he remembers with a cold twist that Bobby's not there anymore.
"Sorry about the car," says Cas.
"Shut up. I can -- shut up." Dean glances to the side, and that's when he sees Cas is bleeding on the seat, hand pressed hard to the side of his unshaven throat.
"Goddamnit," adds Dean, and Cas agrees, tiredly, "Yes."
+
Dean doesn't stop until they're on the highway and two exits down, blabbering at Cas to keep pressure on it, to hang on, to calm down.
"You should calm down," Cas breathes harshly, and okay he has a point. The shirt he's balled up and pressing against his neck is no longer blue, but a dull sepia color. They need to stop somewhere, and Dean skids into the next parking lot. Bamboo Garden, the sign informs them. Fine Asian Cuisine est. 1981.
Dean grabs the first-aid kit from the backseat and goes around to grab Cas around the waist. "You're okay," Dean says as they hobble inside, "you're okay.”
They're only there for, what, twenty minutes? Just long enough for Dean to finish the final stitch, when Cas suddenly tenses and jerks around towards the door.
"I said stay still!" Dean snaps.
"Vampires," says Cas.
"How many?" Dean presses the bandage over the stitches, and Cas winces.
"Several."
"How far?" He rips the medical tape with his teeth and sticks on one, two, three, okay the bandage is staying on. Okay, four for good measure. It's not the best patch-up job Dean's ever done, but under the circumstances--
"Not far," Cas replies.
"Let's go."
He thinks of sharks. When Dean was in the third grade in Ohio, or maybe Pennsylvania, they learned about the ocean, about how one drop of blood in the water can call in sharks from miles around. Dean remembers staying up late with Sammy watching documentaries about the Amazon, those piranhas that turn a goat into a skeleton in minutes. The call of the fucking wild.
Cas, Dean thinks, is only so much chum.
"There," Cas blurts out, staring north. Dean shoves him in the car. He can't see the vamps yet, but he can hear them, their yowls of exulted desperation.
Dean gets in the driver's side and grins manically at Cas. "Better hold on tight," he winks, and floors it.
+
They can't stop anywhere for very long, not with chum in the passenger seat. They drive for mile after endless mile, pausing only for gas and food and bathroom breaks. They sleep in the car.
Dean grows to hate the days following new wounds, because that's when life's on fast-forward, running on empty, everything a blur of exhaustion and panic and monsters at his heels. He thinks he can hear them but he knows he actually can't. He just remembers how they sound, the looks on their faces when they're holding him down, the mindless lust when they hurl themselves at Cas.
He and Cas, they have nowhere to go. They are trapped on the open road, keeping on keeping it on, Cas fading next to him and Dean's eyes feeling heavy, so heavy, oh god, he just wants to sleep.
The next time they stop for gas, a couple of croats appear, which they pick off no problem. Vampires eventually show up though, so they hightail it out of there, Cas's eyes glued to the sideview mirror as Dean stares at the road ahead.
"I wonder how Sammy's doing," Dean declares.
"Me too," Cas says, after a beat.
"I bet he's got Chitaqua running in tip-top shape."
"Yes."
"I should send him that postcard I promised. He'll think I'm not a man of my word."
Cas smiles a little, maybe, and Dean continues rambling about Sam until they can't hear the vampires anymore.
+
Dean dreams of Alastair, whose teeth are rows of knives that bite into him, tearing into the soft flesh under his ribs as Dean screams and screams, cursing everything he knows, even Sam, cursing Sam for not being here, for never being here. Dean dreams of Alastair saying, "Be mine, Dean. Be one of mine and you can wield the knife instead of being cut by it. Be mine, and I will set you free." The yes burbles at the back of Dean's throat, but before it can escape his lips, he wakes up gasping.
The world is dark and smells of the Impala. He's got that crick in his neck that he gets when he sleeps in the car. The jackhammering in his ears, Dean realizes it's his heartbeat. His breaths are too loud, without rhythm, and he has to remind himself who's really dead and who's alive.
"Dean," a murmur cuts through his panic, and Dean feels a light touch at his temple. He turns towards it and it's Cas, who else can it be. He remembers this too, waking up from memories to a sound like leaves rustling, and the whisper of black wings smoothing out his mind, better than any lullaby, softer than a sigh.
But Cas is still mostly asleep, and that's when Dean remembers yeah, the dude's not an angel anymore. He can't mojo the nightmares out of Dean, but Cas seems to have forgotten this, acting on instinct or habit, Dean isn't sure. "You should sleep," Cas whispers, like he used to, and curls his fingers against Dean's cheek, stroking lightly as his hand falls away again.
Dean is not afraid of his nightmares. He is not afraid of sleep, but he stays awake for some time, wondering if saying yes to Michael would have been anything like saying yes to Alastair. Self-loathing first, sure, and relief, but then acclimatization, and a certain pride in craft. What does it matter, if the world is going to shit around him anyway?
He's glad Cas can't see his thoughts anymore.
+
The church is burned and broken, but it was made of stone and seems sound enough to poke around in. Dean goes in the back, gun in hand, and he rifles through shattered cupboards, taking a scorched silver cross and a miraculously -- yeah, he thought it -- undisturbed bag of communion wafers.
It looks like a mouse was chewing through one edge of the bag, but fuck it, he'll take what he can get.
"Cas," he says, heading back into the main church, "can you tell if these are, uh, holy? Or whatever?" Dean has learned that these things make a difference -- that sometimes stale bread is just stale bread and then he is well and truly fucked.
The roof is half gone, and there's a hint of sunlight in the sky today. It filters down through the ash and filth, touches Cas's shoulders where he stands by the altar.
The once-an-angel has been rearranging things. He's found an almost-white cloth somewhere, and spread it across the altar's cracked surface. When Dean enters, Cas is positioning a half-melted cross at the centre, just where the sun hits it. The twisted gold flickers, gleams in and out beneath his shadow as he moves.
"Keep your damn gun out," says Dean, and then he's brought up short because Cas turns at that and his eyes are fierce and hard.
"Don't swear here."
They are silent, then, both of them, and there is more than an edge of familiarity to the way they stare at each other -- Dean's irritated confusion, Cas's sharply obfuscated desperation.
An edge of glass, stained red, falls glittering from one of the broken windows and shatters against a scorched stone sill. Dean jerks his attention over, finger tightening on gun trigger, then the moment passes and Cas says, dully, "Yes. They're consecrated."
That's lucky, anyway.
Cas rubs a hand across the bridge of his nose, and fades back to what he is: unshaven, wounded, stinking in wrinkled clothes four days old. "Let's go," he says. "There's nothing here."
"Yeah." Dean looks at the ruined altar, at the sadly tilting cross on its thin cotton perch. He offers, "You can drive."
+
They finally find a safehouse that's actually still safe -- or relatively so. It’s a last remnant of Bobby's network: the bunker is undisturbed, the big metal door still on its hinges, the electrified alarm system still hooked up to the generator. Dean drops his pack on a ragged cot and pronounces himself satisfied.
The important thing, though – the really important thing – is how the generator also powers the radio transmitter, and how the transmitter seems to still be working. Cas crashes on a cot with his eyes closed, not asleep but not really awake, either, and Dean plays with the radio tuner and fights patiently with bursts of static and finally, at long last, gets through to Chuck.
And yeah, Chuck, he’s doing fine, Cas is fine (yeah), everything’s great, could Chuck maybe go get Sam?
When he hears his brother’s voice crackle, something loosens in Dean’s chest like his ribs just unknotted, hearing Sam say, “Dean?”
“Dude,” he says, into the transmitter. “Hey. We’re okay. Cas says hi.” Cas doesn’t, in the most technical sense, but he does lift two fingers from the cot in agreement, and Dean figures that’s close enough. “You get that Apocalypse thing fixed yet?”
His brother’s staticky snort is the best thing Dean’s heard in days. “Oh yeah,” says Sam. “Soon as you left.”
“I fucking knew Cas was getting in the way.”
Cas, inert, drops one of his fingers, leaving the middle clearly extended.
“Seriously,” says Sam, “You guys all right?” He doesn’t ask where they are, and Dean doesn’t offer, because everyone knows better than that.
So yeah, they’re all fine (Dean is getting tired of the word), and Sam’s okay and Chuck and Becky and – Sam hesitates, telling Dean about Risa, and Dean closes his eyes, holding the handset white-knuckled as he bows his head.
Cas sits up, on his cot, and rubs his hands over his face.
It’s a moment of silence, anyway, and it’s the best they can give, because Dean should sign off and Sam doesn’t want him to but Sam has to go anyway. Sam has shit to do and a camp to run, and – there’s nothing to say, because all of their talk is in the quiet between.
Dean wants to know whether the vamps have stopped attacking so close, though, and Sam admits – half-reluctantly – that they have.
Cas just looks tired.
“’Night, bitch,” says Dean then, amiably, and Sam says, “Later, jerk – ‘bye, Cas,” and then that’s it, the static’s gone and the bunker is filled with the massed volume of its absence. Dean keeps the handset in his palm significantly longer than he has to, before he finally puts it down and rubs his hand on his jeans.
“Don’t,” says Dean, when Cas looks like he’s going to speak. “Relax. We’re as safe here as it’s gonna get for a while.”
They use the little stove. They heat up a can of beans, and the heat itself tastes like heaven.
(At least, Dean thinks it might, although he isn't the one with first-hand experience and he doesn't actually ask.)
Dean sets his back to the concrete wall, and watches with a critical eye as Cas organizes the weapons bag.
He doesn't need to say much, though. Cas is a quick learner, long fingers clever and capable, knives flicking and sharpened and re-sheathed.
"We're running low on ammunition," says Cas, and Dean grunts.
"Try for a mall tomorrow," he replies. "See if we can find anything."
Most of the malls are looted and burned, but Cas knows that Dean knows and Cas has also learned that sometimes it's better not to point things out.
Except: "You don't have to do this, Dea --"
"Shut up."
So Cas puts the weapons away, and goes to sit by the camp lantern that is lighting the darkness of their little bunker. He pulls a tattered book out from his bag, opens it, and peers at it in the dimness.
"Please tell me that isn't the Bible," mutters Dean, but Cas only shakes his head. He flips pages, and then adjusts to sit cross-legged; a moment later, he's reading out loud.
Cas says, quietly, "It begins, as most things begin, with a song. In the beginning, after all, were the words, and they came with a tune."
"The hell is that?"
Cas ignores Dean. "That was how the world was made, how the void was divided, how the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the animals, how all of them came into the world." His voice is low and rough -- not the bass it used to be, when it had heaven behind it, but there's something of Castiel left in Jimmy Novak's larynx.
Dean tries not to think about that too often.
Cas keeps reading. One of Sam's books, probably, Dean realizes, and he lets his head drop back; no, he will not think about Sam, either. He closes his eyes, and listens to the calm flow of words. Eventually the words stop making sense, but that’s okay too.
Much later, Dean wakes to pitch blackness lit only by the tiny, reassuring red light of the security system.
A confused beat after that, he realizes that it is far too quiet, and he is -- yes, of course, fucking of course -- alone.
+
Dean has a gun, and a knife, and matches and a crossbow with bolts soaked in a dead man's blood (the soaking from a week before, and dead blood hardly in short supply). He also has a shitload of attitude.
Cas left him everything -- the weapons, the food, the car -- everything but one old knife, and that tells Dean all he needs to know about exactly how far Cas expected to get, and why.
It doesn’t take long to pack. They travel light because they have to travel fast on minimal gas, and he and Cas have arguments about that all the time, being well-prepared versus being fast. Dean keeps his swearing inside his head and the headlights of the Impala turned off as he eases down the ruin of the road. He has the window rolled down, to hear. His hands are tight on the steering wheel, and his pulse is beating staccato in his throat.
He spots a figure staggering at the side of the road, and his heart leaps and his stomach drops and he thinks it might be -- but no, it isn't. It's a croat zombie, a lone straggler that turns and lurches toward the car with its yellowed teeth pale in the night.
Dean puts a bullet in its head and drives on in the dark. He doesn't look at that sodden, shadowed heap, retreating in the mirror. He's got other things to watch for.
Cas can't have gotten much farther, he thinks, and he realizes he’s assuming that he’s picked the right direction, or that Cas hasn’t just gone offroad, but he figures Cas isn’t much good for hiking at the moment so he’s maybe got a fifty-fifty shot. That’s just around the time he hears the laughter.
Dean stops the car. He debates, briefly, leaving the keys in the Impala, then he pulls them silently from the ignition and folds them carefully into his pocket. Only then does he open the door, setting booted feet on cracked pavement.
"Don't kill him! Don't kill him, don't you fucking -- oh he is delicious, oh I want this again and again."
"I'm hungry now."
"I'm telling you --" There is a sudden, violent motion in the shadows beyond the trees. Dean hears gurgling, a wet and meaty sound, and then that first voice giggles. "Oh, that'll teach him. Now," and the voice darkens, "try that on me..."
Dean hears a thud, and then a hoarse whisper he would recognize even in pitch black. "Pater noster," breathes Cas, "qui es in coelis," and then something garbled, something in not-quite-random syllables that Dean has heard before.
Then Dean is through the trees, and he’s got the crossbow firing, and the bolts slam into the back of the vamp who’s sucking on Cas even as Cas murmurs the Enochian that Dean hasn’t heard in years and – there’s Cas, tracing sigils on the vampire with his own damn blood, even as the vamp rips him apart, too hungry to care, and – then the vamp rears back, eyes gone dark and horrible, and before Dean can slam the knife into his throat, the corpse goes to dust, just like that.
Not like the body that’s still squirming on the ground, head half off, gashed throat struggling to heal and black dead blood leaking all over the place. Dean fires a crossbow bolt into that one’s face, then stares at the space where that other vampire used to be. The space just in front of Cas.
“The hell did you do?” he asks, and Cas says, distant and chiding, “I was an angel once.”
Followed by, “They’re coming, Dean,” just before the knife falls loose from Cas’s hand. Cas himself takes a graceless dive for the ground, which causes Dean no end of cursing as he gets an armful of bleeding Cas and tries to reload the damn crossbow for five seconds, before he gives the whole thing up as a bad plan and just drags Cas bodily toward the car.
“Let me go,” Cas hisses. “What are you doing?”
“I'm fucking gripping you tight and raising you from goddamn perdition.”
In the distance, Dean can hear the vampires howling.
“You don’t get to die,” he grunts, throwing Cas in the passenger seat, and all his fury just simmers in the back of his throat. “You don’t get to die before I get to yell, and I am really going to yell.”
And like Pringles, once he pops, he can't stop. It's all coming out of Dean as they're speeding toward the interstate again, issuing from him like the roar of wounded beasts because you are so selfish, Cas, you think you can do whatever the hell you want, you think I left my brother alone so I can watch you die? You're a coward who doesn't think of anyone else.
“Dean--”
“Think of me, okay, fucking think of me, because you can't do this, because I can't do this. You can't do this because I can't do this.”
“Do what?” Cas asks, his breath coming in harsh gasps as he staunches the bleeding.
“You can't die,” Dean explains, “because I won't let you.”
“You’re being stupid.” Cas’s shirt is soaked with crimson, and they are running low on laundry. More importantly, Dean is running out of any kind of cleaners and if the car starts smelling like blood they are just beyond fucked.
“I was thinking of you,” continues Cas, teeth gritted, “and Sam--” and Dean wrenches his hands on the steering wheel, turns a left too hard and sends Cas into the passenger-side door. Cas says a word Dean didn’t think he knew – then again, Dean is a shit influence.
The windshield is still cracked, and there are shapes flickering in the woods, leaping and dashing.
Cas presses his hand to his shoulder and leans forward, wet shirt peeling from the seat as he lowers his head to his knees. Neither of them look to the forest; Dean keeps his eyes on the road, with occasional quick sidelong glances toward Cas.
“Dean,” says Cas, light-headed and furious at the same time, “I’m not worth this.”
Dean says tightly, “I’m not that guy, okay. I’m never going to be that guy.”
He revs the Impala, drowns out the distant laughter outside, and floors it, leaving the gibbering behind. Dean reaches a hand to the side, resting his palm on Cas’s sticky hot shoulder, and neither of them says anything until Cas sits up again.
“Wait.” Cas turns to look out the back window, winces at the wound. He looks around them, looks at Dean. “This isn't the way back to the bunker.”
“We're not going back to the bunker.”
“Why not?”
“Because, asshole, you fucked that one up. If we go back, every vampire within whateverthefuck radius will zero in on you and lay siege to the place. We'll be surrounded. Trapped.”
Cas looks stricken, guilty. Annoyed. Good, Dean thinks.
“You shouldn't have come after me,” Cas retorts.
“You shouldn't have left. Shut the fuck up. Do you need stitches?”
Cas stares ahead, tight-lipped, pale.
“Cas. Do you need stitches.”
“Yes,” he answers, small and flat.
“Okay. Okay, just hang on. Put pressure on it.”
“I know,” Cas snaps.
Yeah, he knows, Dean knows, they know how this goes. This is all routine for them now. This is life.
And here we go, he thinks detachedly. Life speeds up, along with his heart rate, and they're running out of gas, running out of food, running out of blood, running, running.
+
“I miss demons.”
Dean frowns as he cuts the sutures. “What?”
“At least they don't try to eat me,” Cas mutters.
They're pulled up on the side on the highway, stitching Cas up in the car. It's hard to see and they have to bend themselves at awkward angles, but at least they have a quick escape if anything comes after them.
“Not your fault you're so scrumptious, huh?” Dean says, unrolling some bandages.
“How many of them do you think were only recently turned?”
“I don't know. As many people as were scared shitless.”
Cas raises his eyebrows, smiling grimly. “And we're not?”
“There's a difference between being scared and being a coward.”
“What's the difference?”
“Here, hold this.”
Cas does, and Dean measures out the medical tape.
“Dean?”
“Okay.” Red blossoms rapidly across the bandage, but it seems to be sticking in place. “You're good. We're good.” Dean grabs a Gatorade from the backseat and shoves it into Cas's hands. “Drink this. Let's go.”
+
Cas is sleeping on the passenger seat when the thought occurs to Dean: maybe the difference is hope.
Vampires are strong; they have natural weapons. What those people cling to when they decide to vamp themselves out is the hope that they can kill before they are killed, that they will live.
He envies them their delusion.
Dean is so busy thinking about how fucked up it is to envy fucking vampires that he almost doesn’t register the car parked at the other side of the road, or the arms that are trying to wave him down. He’s so blankly exhausted that he almost doesn’t stop, because there’s nothing out here but vampires and croats and why the hell is a zombie waving at him.
Oh, he thinks then, and Dean pulls the Impala to a rolling stop, checking the gun in the waistband of his jeans. “Hey,” he says. “Wake up, Buttercup.”
He has to shake Cas, none too gently, before Cas stirs and can tell Dean that no, there aren’t any vampires around, and Dean doesn’t like the blur in Cas’s voice but he leaves the Impala running anyway and says, “Move over here and stay alert. We might have to take off.”
Then he’s out of the car, before Cas can ask anything stupid like ‘why’ or ‘what are you doing,’ and he stops to get that bag of communion wafers from the trunk. He keeps his gun in hand as he walks, carefully, back down to where that car is waiting.
It’s a police car, but the man and woman waiting for Dean are just people, civilians, worn thin like Dean is – they all have the same haggard look. They take communion together and the wafers are stale and dry.
They are Greg and Alice.
“We don’t have any spare gas,” says Dean, straight up, because it sucks but that’s just the way things are.
Greg shakes his head, runs a hand through rough salt-and-pepper hair. “We were hoping – medical supplies, or – our daughter. It’s – we’ve been looking for a doctor.”
Dean gets a sinking feeling, a sudden drop in his gut, but it doesn’t rise to bile until Alice leads him to the police car, where a little girl is locked in the back seat, behind that metal cop grill. “This is Annie,” whispers Alice, and her smile is tremulous and empty, and Annie shrieks and moans, thudding her small bleeding skull against the window again and again and again.
Dean’s hand tightens on his gun. Greg shifts his own shotgun in his hands, and they all stare at each other for one hopeless moment before Dean shakes his head. “Sorry,” is all he says, but he doesn’t lift the gun and Greg doesn’t shoot him, and they are all very civilized.
Dean gives them some of the communion wafers, and Alice presses a bottle of water into his hands, and then they all nod. “Don’t go north,” says Dean. “Shitload of vampires coming that way.”
When he walks back to the Impala, he can hear the little girl’s groans and thuds, matching his footsteps like a drum beat. Alice whispers, hums the beginning of a broken lullaby.
Dean pushes Cas back into the passenger seat and hands over the bottle of water when he gets in the car.
He remembers, once, a very long time ago, Sam tried to rescue a wounded bird. Made a little nest of kleenex and an old shirt, put it in a box, cut up worms into tiny pieces. And Dean saw the way that bird’s wing tore, he saw its twisted neck and panting little breaths, but he couldn’t take Sammy’s big eyes and he let Sam try and it was so much fucking worse in the end after Sam had named the thing, after it was a pet.
“Shit,” he says, pulling away.
Cas doesn’t look over; he is unwinding a crusted bandage from his left wrist, mechanical and disinterested, barely awake as he reaches into the dwindling first aid kit that rests in the center of the front seat.
“Shit,” Dean repeats. “Should’ve just –“
He lets the thought go unfinished.
+
Dean never thought the Impala’s sanctuary would feel like a prison; never thought he’d spend his life eyeing that damn needle, watching it creep toward ‘E’. “How many?”
“A lot.”
“You said that four hours ago.”
“And there are still a lot.” Cas rubs a hand across his forehead, slumped in the corner of the passenger seat, and the third ruined town in a day crawls by outside the car.
“More than the last place?”
“I don’t know.”
“What the hell good –“
“I’m not a radar,” snaps Cas. “Croats, mostly. Some vampires. There’s demon taint to the east.”
“Damnit,” says Dean. “We’ve got a quarter tank of gas and half a box of cereal. We have to stop somewhere.”
“Then stop.” Cas jerks his chin toward the shattered windows of a grocery store up ahead. There are cars left haphazardly in the parking lot.
Cas checks his Glock, metal sliding in his hand; Dean eyes the cars, calculates the time to siphon, notes the hint of motion on the steps of what was probably city hall. Bodies, seething, ripping.
“We’ll try the next one,” he decides, grimly, and it’s probably stupid to keep his voice so low but he does it anyway, watching the zombies as they lift their heads, turn toward the car. He adds, “Keep your gun out.”
+
Dean wakes up in increments, starting with the sunlight pricking at his vision, then the constant sound of murmurs that he realizes is the susurrus of waves.
He opens his eyes.
When he realizes that the Impala’s not moving, he curses, yells "Cas!" and stumbles out of the car. The air smells salty and he whirls around, yelling for Cas again. Goddammit. They're supposed to keep moving. They take turns driving so they can keep moving.
Dean's name on Cas's voice is carried over on the sea breeze and Dean turns towards the sound, and there he is. There's the little fucker, standing by the shoreline with his pants rolled up to his knees like it's Cape Cod vacation time and Dean is so sick of wanting to strangle the bastard, is so relieved he's still alive.
“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Dean yells, running to him. “Get back in the fucking car, let's get the hell out of here.”
“There have been no vampires or croats or demons for the past hundred miles,” Cas says. “We can rest here.”
“Yeah, let's see how restful you are when they're ripping your throat out, you stupid bastard.”
Cas narrows his eyes. “Dean. You need to rest.”
“I need to live.”
“We need to rest. My wounds have closed up; I'm not bleeding at all. We'll be safe here.”
It's a battle of wills, meted out through a staring contest, a familiar routine that they have not indulged in for a while. Cas's eyes are the same blue as the Atlantic behind him, and it's almost like he's got holes in his head, like Dean is seeing through him to the ocean and the rise and fall of waves.
“One night,” Dean concedes.
“Two.”
“One.”
The gulls call and twitter overhead, and the sound, the smell of sea salt, recalls splashing around in the sea with Sammy when they were kids and their dad was off hunting... something, somewhere. Where was that, Myrtle Beach? He'd race Sam in the water and he'd win because Sam was just learning to swim back then, but Sam never held it against him because later Dean'd buy him an extra hot dog. Mustard and ketchup, no relish.
“So where are we shacking up?” Dean sighs.
Cas looks to the south. There are beach houses along the shore, squat and picturesque like something out of postcards.
“Wish I’d brought my fishing gear,” Dean quips, and Cas smiles.
+
There is a one-story house with garish pink walls and a wide deck overlooking the ocean that Cas decides he likes the looks of. Dean doesn't know about the pink, but it has few windows and it's on elevated ground, with a driveway that slopes up from Sandy Cove Lane and stairs that lead from the deck to the beach, so Dean thinks what the hell. He brings the Impala round, and totes their stuff inside.
“Cas?”
The house is as cute on the inside as it is on the outside, all patterned wallpaper and wicker furniture. There's a rocking chair in one corner, a rabbit-eared television in the other, and a vase of dead flowers on the coffee table. There's a bookcase stuffed with a dusty collection of beach reading – old Sweet Valley novels and Maeve Binchy crap and outdated atlases that still say the USSR. Dean checks the pantry: nothing. Oh well.
“Cas?” he calls again, and notices one of the bedroom doors is ajar. He pushes it open and it creaks like it's in pain, revealing Cas curled up on top of the covers, gilded by the sunset through the window and fast asleep.
What a goober, Dean thinks.
He stands there for a few seconds, snagged by the peace on Cas's face. Sleep makes him look young and vulnerable, blissfully ignorant. Cas is sleeping like the Apocalypse isn't happening, and Dean wonders why, why, why is it that the people he loves are always the locus of some great disaster. Sam, Dad, Mom, now Cas, staring into the abyss until it bites them back, immune to good intentions.
He wants to sleep, even after his nap in the car; he wants to close his eyes and let go because they never get enough sleep these days anyway. Watching Cas conked out makes Dean tired and heartsick, and there's nothing he wants more than to collapse on the mattress next to him and sleep like children sleep, content with bedtime stories and a rock-a-bye song. But there are doors and windows to salt, devil's traps to draw, and he's kind of hungry. There's a can of tuna to spare for dinner, and he wants to go through the house looking for useful things.
It's good to keep busy.
He leaves Cas's door open and sets his bag down on the living room armchair, takes out salt and spray paint and gets to work.
+
Dean wakes up with an ache in his back and the taste of dust in his mouth. That's what he gets for sleeping on shitty collapsed couches, but hey, it's better than sleeping in the Impala, much as he loves his baby.
He tried to sleep in the other bedroom last night, but it made him nervous not having Cas in his line of sight, so Dean dragged blankets and pillows to the couch and camped out there, one eye on the unmoving lump in the next room. He slept, and dreamed of Sam.
The details of the dream are fading now, and Dean doesn't bother trying to hold on to them. He doesn't really remember the whats and wherefores, only the sensation of a warm and helpless devotion that made him ache.
Cas is awake.
Dean can hear him puttering around the kitchen and making domestic sounds, which is weird because there's nothing to be domestic with. He rubs his face and shuffles into the kitchen, wincing at the sunlight, then stares at the spread on the table. “Is that coffee?” There’s a tin kettle set up above a camp stove on the counter.
“Instant coffee,” Cas shrugs. “I took it from the house next door.”
“Next door?” Dean feels a twinge of annoyance – Cas is not supposed to just wander around like that! – then forces himself to calm down. Cas is a grown-ass man... angel, thing, even if an increasingly anemic one, and hey, at least he's not dead. (Sammy, aged thirteen, shoving Dean away and blazing, “I can take care of myself!”)
Plus, now there is coffee. Awesome.
“Are those Sno Balls?” Dean asks.
“Yes. There are also Twinkies and Funyuns, if you prefer.”
“Also from next door?”
“Yes.”
“Holy shit. Maybe we picked the wrong house to stay in.”
“Breakfast... of champions...?” Cas hazards.
Dean hears the question mark ghosting the end of the sentence and chuckles in sympathy. Cas will sacrifice himself to vampires without hesitation, but make him do open mic and pop culture references and he'll shit himself.
“Yeah,” Dean confirms, grinning. “Definitely. We're champions, and this is our motherfucking breakfast.” He raises his mug. “To champions.”
“Champions,” Cas agrees, and clink mugs.
It's the best damn Sno Ball Dean's ever eaten in his life.
+
To Dean's dismay, today is laundry day.
It's been a long time coming, but the instinct to dread it is habitual, and he complains all the way to the shoreline, dragging the bag of clothes behind him. Cas weathers his whining with amusement, carrying an assortment of soaps and detergent. Dean can almost hear Sam in his head scolding him for putting chemicals in the sea, but whatever: once they get rid of all the croats and vampires and demons in the world, Dean will be the first to sign Sam's 'save our oceans' petition. In the meantime, he will wash his clothes wherever he damn well wants.
I'm having fake arguments in my head with my brother who isn't here, Dean realizes.
It's the end of the world and everyone's a little cracked.
“My clothes are gonna smell like fish,” Dean says, but at least it's better than blood.
Out here where the water sweeps into the land, it really does feel like the end of the world. Not in the Armageddon kind of way, but like in the old stories that warned sailors not to sail too close to the horizon. The place where two worlds meet feels like the edge of everything. Behind them, the land is ravaged and blistered, swallowed by the chaos of hell and the apathy of heaven. In front of them, the ocean is unending and free. It captures the sunlight and throws it back up at the sky, glittering. It speaks in whispers as the waves lap at the jetty where they wash, and Dean can't understand it but maybe Cas can. Between scrubs, Cas raises his eyes to the sea, and the air around him seems to slow, weighed down by ancient sorrows. Dean can't tell if Cas is looking for something, listening for something, lost in thought, or just lost. Sometimes Dean flicks a wet shirt at him, laughing at the surprise on Cas's face. After the third time Dean does this, Cas starts flicking back.
It doesn't actually take that long to wash their clothes. They don't have a lot of clothes. They don't get all the blood out but that's only to be expected; the stains have been in there for far too long. Cas finishes before Dean does and shucks off his shirt, washing it too, and the network of scars on Cas's skin is a startling sight in the gentle light of the late morning sun.
Cas is gaining quite the collection, healing teeth marks running rough and bright and new down his neck, across his shoulders, inside his elbows. Dean knows each mark intimately; he is the one who changes the bandages, pours precious alcohol, stitches up the worst.
Dean knows, and that is why he looks away.
+
“It's like,” Dean says wonderingly, “it's like someone said hey, good job washing your clothes and foraging for food. Your reward is booze. Level up!”
Five houses down from their cute pink monstrosity, there is a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Dean reaches for the Johnnie Walker at the same time Cas reaches for the Patrón.
Carthage flashes through Dean's mind, Cas and the Harvelles playing drinking games in the next room the night before one of the worst days of Dean's life. There was a lot of giggling from Jo, and Ellen sounding snide, and the first time Dean popped his head in, the three were practically BFFs. He wondered what transpired in the car ride over, what Ellen's gruff affection and Jo's youthful cynicism had been able to coax out of a fallen angel with little left to lose.
“You want the Bacardi?” Cas asks as they collect their favorite bottles into their separate bags.
Dean makes a face. “Nah, it's that Limon shit.”
So Cas collects it for himself, because Cas is a pansy who drinks pansy booze, but Dean's not going to hold that against him.
Lunch is Funyuns and instant coffee on the deck, with Twinkies for dessert. (Dean can just see Sam's bitchface of dismay.) After their meal, Cas grabs the tequila from his bag and starts making his way down the stairs to the beach. Dean, in the middle of some tirade about where the hell is he gonna get a new windshield, follows him without pause.
“Drives me nuts,” Dean is going on, trotting down the steps. “It's like when I'm behind the wheel, the world cracks in half.”
Cas shrugs. “I get used to it.”
Cas plops himself down on the sand and opens the Patrón, and Dean sits next to him, saying, “I almost wanna pop the windshield altogether.”
The first shot is for Sam. Dean lets Cas call the second shot, and Cas says this next shot is for you, and Dean accuses him of being unimaginative. This next slug is for Jo, this next one is for Ellen, and then it becomes a recitation of the dead: this next swallow is for Dad, this one's for Mom, this one's for Pamela, this one's for Andy, and Adam, this one's for Risa, and yes, even Anna gets a shot, because in the end she was just trying to save the world like the rest of them.
"Okay stop," Dean slurs. "If we drink to everyone who's dead, we're gonna get alcohol poisoning," and his heart will break and he'll just wanna crawl into a hole and never come out again.
"We'll drink to the living," Cas decides.
"No, that's just as depressing."
"What will we drink to?"
"Where did you go, Cas," Dean asks, "when you were looking for your dad?"
There's no answer for a while. Could be that Cas is drunk, but could be that Cas doesn't want to talk about it. After all, Dean doesn't like to talk about his dad much either, so he's about to change the subject when Cas says:
"Everywhere," in a small crackly voice, and Dean isn't sure that he's exaggerating.
"Tell me."
Cas pauses for too long again and Dean sighs and is about to talk about the Impala again or whatever, some safe topic, when Cas says, "Once, in Montpellier, I thought I found Him."
"Yeah? Montpelier, Vermont?"
"Montpellier, France."
"Oh. I was gonna say, we ganked a werewolf there once."
"Your amulet burned and I thought finally..." Cas murmurs, and continues talking, loosened by alcohol. How he cut across the square, practically shoving tourists out of the way, excited and hopeful, how the amulet burned into his skin leaving a scar where his grace would be, "and I thought about all the things I'd say, all the things I wanted to apologize for and everything I wanted to know," but when he got there, when he reached the cafe and touched the shoulder of the man seated under the awning and said "Father?" it was not his Father at all.
"Who was it?" Dean asks.
"It was Vishnu. He invited me to sit with him and He bought me madeleines. He didn’t know where my Father was."
"What was Vishnu doing in France?"
"Eating a crepe."
"...Oh," Dean says. Of course. Why not.
Sometime a couple of shots ago, Dean had collapsed onto his back, shifting in the sand so Cas blocked out the sun. With every swallow of tequila, the world becomes fuzzier, and Dean is lulled by Cas's voice wafting over him, the gentle rise and fall of it, telling him about the sticky heat of Islamabad and the crisp cold of Boston, the dense jungles of Sulawesi and the vastness of the Mongolian plains: all these places created by the will of his Father, a hundred glittering watches in the desert, and nary a watchmaker in sight.
Part 2
A/N: The lines Cas reads are swiped from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.
sharp_teeth, for existing, and also maychorian for the prompt, but I guess in the end, if we end up writing 17k words of apocalyptic road trip fic, it is no one's fault but ours. Thanks also to everyone who gave us words of encouragement along the way. Ya'll rock! <3This is another example of what happens when commentfic gets out of hand.
Title: Bring Out Your Dead
Authors:
lassiterfics & unoshotRating: PG13
Word Count: 16,886 (Part 1: 8,946 words)
Warnings: violence, gore
Spoilers: through 5x13
Authors' Note: A continuation of The Future As B-Movie, which was based on the following prompt: "There are still a few vampires out there, despite the rampant Apocalypse, and they're still doing their thing. And yeah, angel blood--or former angel blood? Turns out it's way tastier than regular ol' human blood, especially with so many humans jacked up by this weird new virus. (The End 'verse, maybe not all the way to 2014 yet, maybe Sam's still around.)" It helps to read it, but really you just need this: "In the middle of the croatpocalypse, the vampires multiply and zero in on Cas."
Summary: This future isn't much better than that other one. / Surviving the Monsterpocalypse 101 / Worst road trip ever.
As it happens, the whole thing is taken out of Dean's hands. The infirmary is running out of space when the latest raiding party comes back in shreds, and he goes to get Cas but the bed is already filled with some other guy ('Brian,' his mind supplies) screaming and bleeding everywhere.
"Crap," says Dean. "Beck --"
"Sam," she answers, curtly, shouldering Dean out of the way. "Help or go."
Becky's lost some of that chipper attitude, Dean thinks, since the world ended.
Cas isn't in his cabin, and half of Cas's wardrobe is spread crumpled and haphazard across the bed, and Dean feels sick.
He finds them in the supply cabin, the lock undone and the door hanging slightly open. "We can't spare much," Sam is saying, "but you should take some of these cans, and hell, a roll of --"
"It doesn't matter, Sam," interrupts Cas, tiredly.
Sam might be a tough guy these days, but there's still a pause before he answers, "You don't know that."
"Fuck you both," says Dean, from the doorway, and they turn their heads -- Sam, crouched by a low shelf with his hand in Cas's bag, and Cas leaning against the wall, dazed and winter pale. Cas's eyes are too dark, pupils blown and flesh bruised; Sam is the one who flinches.
Dean glares at them both, equal opportunity. "No."
Neither of them respond. After a moment, Sam reaches for a can of beans and adds it to the sad little bag.
"Fuck," says Dean, and then he shakes his head. "Fuck. Fine. Sam, you're gonna have to be in charge for a while."
"Dean." Cas is weary, but there is something in the gravel of his voice. It is low and forbidding. It reminds Dean, on a small, shivering level, that under all that fragile humanity, even with most of his mojo gone, Cas is still a badass.
"No." Sam looks up at him from the floor, all gangly and brown eyes gone wide. (And Sam is a badass also, but Sam is always and forever Dean's little brother, and fuck that, too.)
"You're not going alone," says Dean, evenly.
"Dean," says Cas again, and Dean replies, "Shut the fuck up," and Sam grates, "Then I'm coming."
The statement hangs there in silence. They stare at each other and Dean shakes his head, but he almost relents -- yes, just the three of them, yes, leave all this shit behind -- but then Chuck's hammering at the door, all, "Guys, they're gonna riot in the mess hall, I really really need one of you in there," and Sam is the first to look away.
"Your cue, Sammy. Meet us at the gate in an hour. And Cas, just fucking sit down."
He knows who he's supposed to be in this time and place, when Cas is stoned and lightly swaying, but Dean swallows it back, because this future is supposed to be different. Better.
He's not sure how the vampires are better. But he's gotta have something.
An hour later, Sam wants them to take one of the trucks, but trucks are valuable and if Dean's gonna go out there, he's gonna do it right. So he reaches into his pocket for the keys that are always -- even now -- there, and he flashes his best grin. He thinks it's only a little ill at the edges.
Sam's about to blubber out some speech or something, too, which is why Dean says, "We'll send you a postcard." Then he claps his brother on the shoulder, and -- all right, there's maybe a hug. A manly hug. "Take care," Dean mutters, and Sam says, "You too."
That's how Dean ends up driving out of Camp Chitaqua in the Impala, on a cool and cloudy day, with an ex-angel drowsing against his shoulder and his brother, ginormous shoulders hunched, getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. Just before Dean rounds the dusty curve, Sam waves, and Dean lifts a hand out the window in return.
His baby's steering wheel is smooth and comforting beneath his palms, and the metal-tainted breeze is almost -- almost -- fresh. So he has that, at least.
Dean sets his gaze on the road, and drives.
+
Being in the Impala, Dean almost forgets why he's in the Impala, and he's rummaging around for his old tapes blabbing to Cas about Guns n' Roses when Cas blanches and says, "The vampires."
The what?
Oh, right.
Yup, there they are, breaking through the treeline, blood-crazed and feral, but no way will Dean let them lay a finger on his girl: he floors the gas. Come on, baby, I know it's been a while, he pleads, and the Impala revs like a dream, roars like a lioness around them, and the vampires have nothing to eat but the dust the Impala kicks up in their faces.
"Baby, you never let me down," Dean grins. All the times Sam gave him shit for continuing to tinker with the Impala in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Eat crow, little brother. It kept him sane, and now it will keep him alive. It will keep Cas and him alive.
Dean takes care of his baby, and his baby takes care of him. That's just how it goes.
"They'll follow us," Cas says, tight-voiced. "They'll follow me."
"We'll find a skunk and get it to spray you, see those vamps try and find you then."
“A skunk won’t do much good,” Cas replies, and Dean forgives him because Cas has always sucked at jokes, anyway.
"A-ha!"
Cas looks over. "What?"
Dean reaches between the seat and pulls something out with a triumphant flourish. "Appetite for Destruction!"
Cas frowns.
Dean pops it in, and suddenly Axl Rose is singing his heart out about a paradise city like mullets are back in style.
"I love this song," Dean says, and Cas rides the rest of the way to the highway with a gun on his lap.
+
Siphoning gas, breaking into motels, staying up all night when they think they can hear the monsters closing in. Yeah. Lying prone and chugging whiskey in a supermarket aisle as Cas stitches up his shoulder, Dean thinks of dead scholars who wrote things like hell is the absence of god and hell is other people, wondering which one Cas relates to. Hell is zombies and vampires trying to eat you alive. Maybe that one.
The first order of business is to teach Cas a few things. "Look," Dean says, and points with his knife at the croat they just killed. "If you stab someone here, here, here, or here, they're dead. You cut them here, or here, they're seriously fucked. Got it?"
Cas nods.
Dean makes him stab the corpse a few times, for practice.
This is a gun. This is the safety, this is the trigger. Here is how you replace a clip. This is how you take a gun apart, this is how you put it back together. Cas furrows his brow in concentration as he cleans his Glock, and it dawns on Dean: it's like being thirteen all over again, teaching Sam about guns and salt and holy water. It's like being eleven and telling Sammy about monsters, but don't worry, we can kill them, we always do. When Dean was sixteen, Sam almost got mauled to death by a ghoul, and Dean ripped his own shirt apart to make a bandage, and he held his little brother and talked nonsense at him until Dad showed up; it's like that.
Cas cleans his gun with the same meticulous care Sam does, and it makes Dean's heart ache.
He wonders sometimes, about these second chances that keep falling into his lap. Dean dies, and his father pulls him back out. He dies again, and it's Castiel this time. He sees his parents again, and sees them doom themselves to the same fate that will always, always take them from him. Dean sees the future and he changes it, but maybe not enough, because what the fuck is this shit seriously, and now here he is, with another second chance that came back wrong.
"Dean?"
"Huh?"
Cas cants his head to the left.
"I'm fine," Dean says.
Cas looks skeptical, but also concerned, and Dean knows that expression. It's the expression that means the next thing out of Cas's mouth is going to make Dean feel incapable and volatile, despite the good intentions. So he falls back on the time-tested Winchester method of dealing.
Dean asks, "You wanna shoot some things?"
+
Cas is like a fucking magnet. They stop to plunder an abandoned gas station, Dean seeing if he can get anything from the dead pump and Cas checking the brutalized store for anything useful. It's daylight, but that doesn't really stop a determined vamp. It's a cloudy daylight anyway, which is why the next thing Dean knows he's firing a horde of useless bullets and Cas is booting it for the car with a bag of Cheetos and a pack of lighters under his arm and the vampires are wailing because they are so hungry.
It isn't just Cas they're after, either, because Dean thinks between the zombies and the body count, the bloodsuckers are probably running out of food.
Cas may be filet mignon, but Dean is a hamburger unto himself.
Dean slams his door shut, wrenching the key in the ignition -- sorry baby -- and Cas hurls himself into the passenger seat, and the Impala takes off before Cas's door is closed, leaving Cas's fingers wrapped hard around Dean's elbow as Cas's boots kick at something slavering and shrill that was once a guy in a good suit. Cas tries not to slide out of the car as the Impala peels to the right.
Dean has to run down a vampire to get out, and the guy bounces off the Impala's hood and cracks -- cracks -- the windshield.
The undead peel away behind, and Cas gets settled, and Dean stares at that spiderweb line bisecting the glass just above the dashboard.
It's okay, he tells himself. It's okay. Even in a post-apocalyptic world, he just -- junkyards. Windshields. He can fix it.
He finds himself plotting the best route to Bobby's place, before he remembers with a cold twist that Bobby's not there anymore.
"Sorry about the car," says Cas.
"Shut up. I can -- shut up." Dean glances to the side, and that's when he sees Cas is bleeding on the seat, hand pressed hard to the side of his unshaven throat.
"Goddamnit," adds Dean, and Cas agrees, tiredly, "Yes."
+
Dean doesn't stop until they're on the highway and two exits down, blabbering at Cas to keep pressure on it, to hang on, to calm down.
"You should calm down," Cas breathes harshly, and okay he has a point. The shirt he's balled up and pressing against his neck is no longer blue, but a dull sepia color. They need to stop somewhere, and Dean skids into the next parking lot. Bamboo Garden, the sign informs them. Fine Asian Cuisine est. 1981.
Dean grabs the first-aid kit from the backseat and goes around to grab Cas around the waist. "You're okay," Dean says as they hobble inside, "you're okay.”
They're only there for, what, twenty minutes? Just long enough for Dean to finish the final stitch, when Cas suddenly tenses and jerks around towards the door.
"I said stay still!" Dean snaps.
"Vampires," says Cas.
"How many?" Dean presses the bandage over the stitches, and Cas winces.
"Several."
"How far?" He rips the medical tape with his teeth and sticks on one, two, three, okay the bandage is staying on. Okay, four for good measure. It's not the best patch-up job Dean's ever done, but under the circumstances--
"Not far," Cas replies.
"Let's go."
He thinks of sharks. When Dean was in the third grade in Ohio, or maybe Pennsylvania, they learned about the ocean, about how one drop of blood in the water can call in sharks from miles around. Dean remembers staying up late with Sammy watching documentaries about the Amazon, those piranhas that turn a goat into a skeleton in minutes. The call of the fucking wild.
Cas, Dean thinks, is only so much chum.
"There," Cas blurts out, staring north. Dean shoves him in the car. He can't see the vamps yet, but he can hear them, their yowls of exulted desperation.
Dean gets in the driver's side and grins manically at Cas. "Better hold on tight," he winks, and floors it.
+
They can't stop anywhere for very long, not with chum in the passenger seat. They drive for mile after endless mile, pausing only for gas and food and bathroom breaks. They sleep in the car.
Dean grows to hate the days following new wounds, because that's when life's on fast-forward, running on empty, everything a blur of exhaustion and panic and monsters at his heels. He thinks he can hear them but he knows he actually can't. He just remembers how they sound, the looks on their faces when they're holding him down, the mindless lust when they hurl themselves at Cas.
He and Cas, they have nowhere to go. They are trapped on the open road, keeping on keeping it on, Cas fading next to him and Dean's eyes feeling heavy, so heavy, oh god, he just wants to sleep.
The next time they stop for gas, a couple of croats appear, which they pick off no problem. Vampires eventually show up though, so they hightail it out of there, Cas's eyes glued to the sideview mirror as Dean stares at the road ahead.
"I wonder how Sammy's doing," Dean declares.
"Me too," Cas says, after a beat.
"I bet he's got Chitaqua running in tip-top shape."
"Yes."
"I should send him that postcard I promised. He'll think I'm not a man of my word."
Cas smiles a little, maybe, and Dean continues rambling about Sam until they can't hear the vampires anymore.
+
Dean dreams of Alastair, whose teeth are rows of knives that bite into him, tearing into the soft flesh under his ribs as Dean screams and screams, cursing everything he knows, even Sam, cursing Sam for not being here, for never being here. Dean dreams of Alastair saying, "Be mine, Dean. Be one of mine and you can wield the knife instead of being cut by it. Be mine, and I will set you free." The yes burbles at the back of Dean's throat, but before it can escape his lips, he wakes up gasping.
The world is dark and smells of the Impala. He's got that crick in his neck that he gets when he sleeps in the car. The jackhammering in his ears, Dean realizes it's his heartbeat. His breaths are too loud, without rhythm, and he has to remind himself who's really dead and who's alive.
"Dean," a murmur cuts through his panic, and Dean feels a light touch at his temple. He turns towards it and it's Cas, who else can it be. He remembers this too, waking up from memories to a sound like leaves rustling, and the whisper of black wings smoothing out his mind, better than any lullaby, softer than a sigh.
But Cas is still mostly asleep, and that's when Dean remembers yeah, the dude's not an angel anymore. He can't mojo the nightmares out of Dean, but Cas seems to have forgotten this, acting on instinct or habit, Dean isn't sure. "You should sleep," Cas whispers, like he used to, and curls his fingers against Dean's cheek, stroking lightly as his hand falls away again.
Dean is not afraid of his nightmares. He is not afraid of sleep, but he stays awake for some time, wondering if saying yes to Michael would have been anything like saying yes to Alastair. Self-loathing first, sure, and relief, but then acclimatization, and a certain pride in craft. What does it matter, if the world is going to shit around him anyway?
He's glad Cas can't see his thoughts anymore.
+
The church is burned and broken, but it was made of stone and seems sound enough to poke around in. Dean goes in the back, gun in hand, and he rifles through shattered cupboards, taking a scorched silver cross and a miraculously -- yeah, he thought it -- undisturbed bag of communion wafers.
It looks like a mouse was chewing through one edge of the bag, but fuck it, he'll take what he can get.
"Cas," he says, heading back into the main church, "can you tell if these are, uh, holy? Or whatever?" Dean has learned that these things make a difference -- that sometimes stale bread is just stale bread and then he is well and truly fucked.
The roof is half gone, and there's a hint of sunlight in the sky today. It filters down through the ash and filth, touches Cas's shoulders where he stands by the altar.
The once-an-angel has been rearranging things. He's found an almost-white cloth somewhere, and spread it across the altar's cracked surface. When Dean enters, Cas is positioning a half-melted cross at the centre, just where the sun hits it. The twisted gold flickers, gleams in and out beneath his shadow as he moves.
"Keep your damn gun out," says Dean, and then he's brought up short because Cas turns at that and his eyes are fierce and hard.
"Don't swear here."
They are silent, then, both of them, and there is more than an edge of familiarity to the way they stare at each other -- Dean's irritated confusion, Cas's sharply obfuscated desperation.
An edge of glass, stained red, falls glittering from one of the broken windows and shatters against a scorched stone sill. Dean jerks his attention over, finger tightening on gun trigger, then the moment passes and Cas says, dully, "Yes. They're consecrated."
That's lucky, anyway.
Cas rubs a hand across the bridge of his nose, and fades back to what he is: unshaven, wounded, stinking in wrinkled clothes four days old. "Let's go," he says. "There's nothing here."
"Yeah." Dean looks at the ruined altar, at the sadly tilting cross on its thin cotton perch. He offers, "You can drive."
+
They finally find a safehouse that's actually still safe -- or relatively so. It’s a last remnant of Bobby's network: the bunker is undisturbed, the big metal door still on its hinges, the electrified alarm system still hooked up to the generator. Dean drops his pack on a ragged cot and pronounces himself satisfied.
The important thing, though – the really important thing – is how the generator also powers the radio transmitter, and how the transmitter seems to still be working. Cas crashes on a cot with his eyes closed, not asleep but not really awake, either, and Dean plays with the radio tuner and fights patiently with bursts of static and finally, at long last, gets through to Chuck.
And yeah, Chuck, he’s doing fine, Cas is fine (yeah), everything’s great, could Chuck maybe go get Sam?
When he hears his brother’s voice crackle, something loosens in Dean’s chest like his ribs just unknotted, hearing Sam say, “Dean?”
“Dude,” he says, into the transmitter. “Hey. We’re okay. Cas says hi.” Cas doesn’t, in the most technical sense, but he does lift two fingers from the cot in agreement, and Dean figures that’s close enough. “You get that Apocalypse thing fixed yet?”
His brother’s staticky snort is the best thing Dean’s heard in days. “Oh yeah,” says Sam. “Soon as you left.”
“I fucking knew Cas was getting in the way.”
Cas, inert, drops one of his fingers, leaving the middle clearly extended.
“Seriously,” says Sam, “You guys all right?” He doesn’t ask where they are, and Dean doesn’t offer, because everyone knows better than that.
So yeah, they’re all fine (Dean is getting tired of the word), and Sam’s okay and Chuck and Becky and – Sam hesitates, telling Dean about Risa, and Dean closes his eyes, holding the handset white-knuckled as he bows his head.
Cas sits up, on his cot, and rubs his hands over his face.
It’s a moment of silence, anyway, and it’s the best they can give, because Dean should sign off and Sam doesn’t want him to but Sam has to go anyway. Sam has shit to do and a camp to run, and – there’s nothing to say, because all of their talk is in the quiet between.
Dean wants to know whether the vamps have stopped attacking so close, though, and Sam admits – half-reluctantly – that they have.
Cas just looks tired.
“’Night, bitch,” says Dean then, amiably, and Sam says, “Later, jerk – ‘bye, Cas,” and then that’s it, the static’s gone and the bunker is filled with the massed volume of its absence. Dean keeps the handset in his palm significantly longer than he has to, before he finally puts it down and rubs his hand on his jeans.
“Don’t,” says Dean, when Cas looks like he’s going to speak. “Relax. We’re as safe here as it’s gonna get for a while.”
They use the little stove. They heat up a can of beans, and the heat itself tastes like heaven.
(At least, Dean thinks it might, although he isn't the one with first-hand experience and he doesn't actually ask.)
Dean sets his back to the concrete wall, and watches with a critical eye as Cas organizes the weapons bag.
He doesn't need to say much, though. Cas is a quick learner, long fingers clever and capable, knives flicking and sharpened and re-sheathed.
"We're running low on ammunition," says Cas, and Dean grunts.
"Try for a mall tomorrow," he replies. "See if we can find anything."
Most of the malls are looted and burned, but Cas knows that Dean knows and Cas has also learned that sometimes it's better not to point things out.
Except: "You don't have to do this, Dea --"
"Shut up."
So Cas puts the weapons away, and goes to sit by the camp lantern that is lighting the darkness of their little bunker. He pulls a tattered book out from his bag, opens it, and peers at it in the dimness.
"Please tell me that isn't the Bible," mutters Dean, but Cas only shakes his head. He flips pages, and then adjusts to sit cross-legged; a moment later, he's reading out loud.
Cas says, quietly, "It begins, as most things begin, with a song. In the beginning, after all, were the words, and they came with a tune."
"The hell is that?"
Cas ignores Dean. "That was how the world was made, how the void was divided, how the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the animals, how all of them came into the world." His voice is low and rough -- not the bass it used to be, when it had heaven behind it, but there's something of Castiel left in Jimmy Novak's larynx.
Dean tries not to think about that too often.
Cas keeps reading. One of Sam's books, probably, Dean realizes, and he lets his head drop back; no, he will not think about Sam, either. He closes his eyes, and listens to the calm flow of words. Eventually the words stop making sense, but that’s okay too.
Much later, Dean wakes to pitch blackness lit only by the tiny, reassuring red light of the security system.
A confused beat after that, he realizes that it is far too quiet, and he is -- yes, of course, fucking of course -- alone.
+
Dean has a gun, and a knife, and matches and a crossbow with bolts soaked in a dead man's blood (the soaking from a week before, and dead blood hardly in short supply). He also has a shitload of attitude.
Cas left him everything -- the weapons, the food, the car -- everything but one old knife, and that tells Dean all he needs to know about exactly how far Cas expected to get, and why.
It doesn’t take long to pack. They travel light because they have to travel fast on minimal gas, and he and Cas have arguments about that all the time, being well-prepared versus being fast. Dean keeps his swearing inside his head and the headlights of the Impala turned off as he eases down the ruin of the road. He has the window rolled down, to hear. His hands are tight on the steering wheel, and his pulse is beating staccato in his throat.
He spots a figure staggering at the side of the road, and his heart leaps and his stomach drops and he thinks it might be -- but no, it isn't. It's a croat zombie, a lone straggler that turns and lurches toward the car with its yellowed teeth pale in the night.
Dean puts a bullet in its head and drives on in the dark. He doesn't look at that sodden, shadowed heap, retreating in the mirror. He's got other things to watch for.
Cas can't have gotten much farther, he thinks, and he realizes he’s assuming that he’s picked the right direction, or that Cas hasn’t just gone offroad, but he figures Cas isn’t much good for hiking at the moment so he’s maybe got a fifty-fifty shot. That’s just around the time he hears the laughter.
Dean stops the car. He debates, briefly, leaving the keys in the Impala, then he pulls them silently from the ignition and folds them carefully into his pocket. Only then does he open the door, setting booted feet on cracked pavement.
"Don't kill him! Don't kill him, don't you fucking -- oh he is delicious, oh I want this again and again."
"I'm hungry now."
"I'm telling you --" There is a sudden, violent motion in the shadows beyond the trees. Dean hears gurgling, a wet and meaty sound, and then that first voice giggles. "Oh, that'll teach him. Now," and the voice darkens, "try that on me..."
Dean hears a thud, and then a hoarse whisper he would recognize even in pitch black. "Pater noster," breathes Cas, "qui es in coelis," and then something garbled, something in not-quite-random syllables that Dean has heard before.
Then Dean is through the trees, and he’s got the crossbow firing, and the bolts slam into the back of the vamp who’s sucking on Cas even as Cas murmurs the Enochian that Dean hasn’t heard in years and – there’s Cas, tracing sigils on the vampire with his own damn blood, even as the vamp rips him apart, too hungry to care, and – then the vamp rears back, eyes gone dark and horrible, and before Dean can slam the knife into his throat, the corpse goes to dust, just like that.
Not like the body that’s still squirming on the ground, head half off, gashed throat struggling to heal and black dead blood leaking all over the place. Dean fires a crossbow bolt into that one’s face, then stares at the space where that other vampire used to be. The space just in front of Cas.
“The hell did you do?” he asks, and Cas says, distant and chiding, “I was an angel once.”
Followed by, “They’re coming, Dean,” just before the knife falls loose from Cas’s hand. Cas himself takes a graceless dive for the ground, which causes Dean no end of cursing as he gets an armful of bleeding Cas and tries to reload the damn crossbow for five seconds, before he gives the whole thing up as a bad plan and just drags Cas bodily toward the car.
“Let me go,” Cas hisses. “What are you doing?”
“I'm fucking gripping you tight and raising you from goddamn perdition.”
In the distance, Dean can hear the vampires howling.
“You don’t get to die,” he grunts, throwing Cas in the passenger seat, and all his fury just simmers in the back of his throat. “You don’t get to die before I get to yell, and I am really going to yell.”
And like Pringles, once he pops, he can't stop. It's all coming out of Dean as they're speeding toward the interstate again, issuing from him like the roar of wounded beasts because you are so selfish, Cas, you think you can do whatever the hell you want, you think I left my brother alone so I can watch you die? You're a coward who doesn't think of anyone else.
“Dean--”
“Think of me, okay, fucking think of me, because you can't do this, because I can't do this. You can't do this because I can't do this.”
“Do what?” Cas asks, his breath coming in harsh gasps as he staunches the bleeding.
“You can't die,” Dean explains, “because I won't let you.”
“You’re being stupid.” Cas’s shirt is soaked with crimson, and they are running low on laundry. More importantly, Dean is running out of any kind of cleaners and if the car starts smelling like blood they are just beyond fucked.
“I was thinking of you,” continues Cas, teeth gritted, “and Sam--” and Dean wrenches his hands on the steering wheel, turns a left too hard and sends Cas into the passenger-side door. Cas says a word Dean didn’t think he knew – then again, Dean is a shit influence.
The windshield is still cracked, and there are shapes flickering in the woods, leaping and dashing.
Cas presses his hand to his shoulder and leans forward, wet shirt peeling from the seat as he lowers his head to his knees. Neither of them look to the forest; Dean keeps his eyes on the road, with occasional quick sidelong glances toward Cas.
“Dean,” says Cas, light-headed and furious at the same time, “I’m not worth this.”
Dean says tightly, “I’m not that guy, okay. I’m never going to be that guy.”
He revs the Impala, drowns out the distant laughter outside, and floors it, leaving the gibbering behind. Dean reaches a hand to the side, resting his palm on Cas’s sticky hot shoulder, and neither of them says anything until Cas sits up again.
“Wait.” Cas turns to look out the back window, winces at the wound. He looks around them, looks at Dean. “This isn't the way back to the bunker.”
“We're not going back to the bunker.”
“Why not?”
“Because, asshole, you fucked that one up. If we go back, every vampire within whateverthefuck radius will zero in on you and lay siege to the place. We'll be surrounded. Trapped.”
Cas looks stricken, guilty. Annoyed. Good, Dean thinks.
“You shouldn't have come after me,” Cas retorts.
“You shouldn't have left. Shut the fuck up. Do you need stitches?”
Cas stares ahead, tight-lipped, pale.
“Cas. Do you need stitches.”
“Yes,” he answers, small and flat.
“Okay. Okay, just hang on. Put pressure on it.”
“I know,” Cas snaps.
Yeah, he knows, Dean knows, they know how this goes. This is all routine for them now. This is life.
And here we go, he thinks detachedly. Life speeds up, along with his heart rate, and they're running out of gas, running out of food, running out of blood, running, running.
+
“I miss demons.”
Dean frowns as he cuts the sutures. “What?”
“At least they don't try to eat me,” Cas mutters.
They're pulled up on the side on the highway, stitching Cas up in the car. It's hard to see and they have to bend themselves at awkward angles, but at least they have a quick escape if anything comes after them.
“Not your fault you're so scrumptious, huh?” Dean says, unrolling some bandages.
“How many of them do you think were only recently turned?”
“I don't know. As many people as were scared shitless.”
Cas raises his eyebrows, smiling grimly. “And we're not?”
“There's a difference between being scared and being a coward.”
“What's the difference?”
“Here, hold this.”
Cas does, and Dean measures out the medical tape.
“Dean?”
“Okay.” Red blossoms rapidly across the bandage, but it seems to be sticking in place. “You're good. We're good.” Dean grabs a Gatorade from the backseat and shoves it into Cas's hands. “Drink this. Let's go.”
+
Cas is sleeping on the passenger seat when the thought occurs to Dean: maybe the difference is hope.
Vampires are strong; they have natural weapons. What those people cling to when they decide to vamp themselves out is the hope that they can kill before they are killed, that they will live.
He envies them their delusion.
Dean is so busy thinking about how fucked up it is to envy fucking vampires that he almost doesn’t register the car parked at the other side of the road, or the arms that are trying to wave him down. He’s so blankly exhausted that he almost doesn’t stop, because there’s nothing out here but vampires and croats and why the hell is a zombie waving at him.
Oh, he thinks then, and Dean pulls the Impala to a rolling stop, checking the gun in the waistband of his jeans. “Hey,” he says. “Wake up, Buttercup.”
He has to shake Cas, none too gently, before Cas stirs and can tell Dean that no, there aren’t any vampires around, and Dean doesn’t like the blur in Cas’s voice but he leaves the Impala running anyway and says, “Move over here and stay alert. We might have to take off.”
Then he’s out of the car, before Cas can ask anything stupid like ‘why’ or ‘what are you doing,’ and he stops to get that bag of communion wafers from the trunk. He keeps his gun in hand as he walks, carefully, back down to where that car is waiting.
It’s a police car, but the man and woman waiting for Dean are just people, civilians, worn thin like Dean is – they all have the same haggard look. They take communion together and the wafers are stale and dry.
They are Greg and Alice.
“We don’t have any spare gas,” says Dean, straight up, because it sucks but that’s just the way things are.
Greg shakes his head, runs a hand through rough salt-and-pepper hair. “We were hoping – medical supplies, or – our daughter. It’s – we’ve been looking for a doctor.”
Dean gets a sinking feeling, a sudden drop in his gut, but it doesn’t rise to bile until Alice leads him to the police car, where a little girl is locked in the back seat, behind that metal cop grill. “This is Annie,” whispers Alice, and her smile is tremulous and empty, and Annie shrieks and moans, thudding her small bleeding skull against the window again and again and again.
Dean’s hand tightens on his gun. Greg shifts his own shotgun in his hands, and they all stare at each other for one hopeless moment before Dean shakes his head. “Sorry,” is all he says, but he doesn’t lift the gun and Greg doesn’t shoot him, and they are all very civilized.
Dean gives them some of the communion wafers, and Alice presses a bottle of water into his hands, and then they all nod. “Don’t go north,” says Dean. “Shitload of vampires coming that way.”
When he walks back to the Impala, he can hear the little girl’s groans and thuds, matching his footsteps like a drum beat. Alice whispers, hums the beginning of a broken lullaby.
Dean pushes Cas back into the passenger seat and hands over the bottle of water when he gets in the car.
He remembers, once, a very long time ago, Sam tried to rescue a wounded bird. Made a little nest of kleenex and an old shirt, put it in a box, cut up worms into tiny pieces. And Dean saw the way that bird’s wing tore, he saw its twisted neck and panting little breaths, but he couldn’t take Sammy’s big eyes and he let Sam try and it was so much fucking worse in the end after Sam had named the thing, after it was a pet.
“Shit,” he says, pulling away.
Cas doesn’t look over; he is unwinding a crusted bandage from his left wrist, mechanical and disinterested, barely awake as he reaches into the dwindling first aid kit that rests in the center of the front seat.
“Shit,” Dean repeats. “Should’ve just –“
He lets the thought go unfinished.
+
Dean never thought the Impala’s sanctuary would feel like a prison; never thought he’d spend his life eyeing that damn needle, watching it creep toward ‘E’. “How many?”
“A lot.”
“You said that four hours ago.”
“And there are still a lot.” Cas rubs a hand across his forehead, slumped in the corner of the passenger seat, and the third ruined town in a day crawls by outside the car.
“More than the last place?”
“I don’t know.”
“What the hell good –“
“I’m not a radar,” snaps Cas. “Croats, mostly. Some vampires. There’s demon taint to the east.”
“Damnit,” says Dean. “We’ve got a quarter tank of gas and half a box of cereal. We have to stop somewhere.”
“Then stop.” Cas jerks his chin toward the shattered windows of a grocery store up ahead. There are cars left haphazardly in the parking lot.
Cas checks his Glock, metal sliding in his hand; Dean eyes the cars, calculates the time to siphon, notes the hint of motion on the steps of what was probably city hall. Bodies, seething, ripping.
“We’ll try the next one,” he decides, grimly, and it’s probably stupid to keep his voice so low but he does it anyway, watching the zombies as they lift their heads, turn toward the car. He adds, “Keep your gun out.”
+
Dean wakes up in increments, starting with the sunlight pricking at his vision, then the constant sound of murmurs that he realizes is the susurrus of waves.
He opens his eyes.
When he realizes that the Impala’s not moving, he curses, yells "Cas!" and stumbles out of the car. The air smells salty and he whirls around, yelling for Cas again. Goddammit. They're supposed to keep moving. They take turns driving so they can keep moving.
Dean's name on Cas's voice is carried over on the sea breeze and Dean turns towards the sound, and there he is. There's the little fucker, standing by the shoreline with his pants rolled up to his knees like it's Cape Cod vacation time and Dean is so sick of wanting to strangle the bastard, is so relieved he's still alive.
“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Dean yells, running to him. “Get back in the fucking car, let's get the hell out of here.”
“There have been no vampires or croats or demons for the past hundred miles,” Cas says. “We can rest here.”
“Yeah, let's see how restful you are when they're ripping your throat out, you stupid bastard.”
Cas narrows his eyes. “Dean. You need to rest.”
“I need to live.”
“We need to rest. My wounds have closed up; I'm not bleeding at all. We'll be safe here.”
It's a battle of wills, meted out through a staring contest, a familiar routine that they have not indulged in for a while. Cas's eyes are the same blue as the Atlantic behind him, and it's almost like he's got holes in his head, like Dean is seeing through him to the ocean and the rise and fall of waves.
“One night,” Dean concedes.
“Two.”
“One.”
The gulls call and twitter overhead, and the sound, the smell of sea salt, recalls splashing around in the sea with Sammy when they were kids and their dad was off hunting... something, somewhere. Where was that, Myrtle Beach? He'd race Sam in the water and he'd win because Sam was just learning to swim back then, but Sam never held it against him because later Dean'd buy him an extra hot dog. Mustard and ketchup, no relish.
“So where are we shacking up?” Dean sighs.
Cas looks to the south. There are beach houses along the shore, squat and picturesque like something out of postcards.
“Wish I’d brought my fishing gear,” Dean quips, and Cas smiles.
+
There is a one-story house with garish pink walls and a wide deck overlooking the ocean that Cas decides he likes the looks of. Dean doesn't know about the pink, but it has few windows and it's on elevated ground, with a driveway that slopes up from Sandy Cove Lane and stairs that lead from the deck to the beach, so Dean thinks what the hell. He brings the Impala round, and totes their stuff inside.
“Cas?”
The house is as cute on the inside as it is on the outside, all patterned wallpaper and wicker furniture. There's a rocking chair in one corner, a rabbit-eared television in the other, and a vase of dead flowers on the coffee table. There's a bookcase stuffed with a dusty collection of beach reading – old Sweet Valley novels and Maeve Binchy crap and outdated atlases that still say the USSR. Dean checks the pantry: nothing. Oh well.
“Cas?” he calls again, and notices one of the bedroom doors is ajar. He pushes it open and it creaks like it's in pain, revealing Cas curled up on top of the covers, gilded by the sunset through the window and fast asleep.
What a goober, Dean thinks.
He stands there for a few seconds, snagged by the peace on Cas's face. Sleep makes him look young and vulnerable, blissfully ignorant. Cas is sleeping like the Apocalypse isn't happening, and Dean wonders why, why, why is it that the people he loves are always the locus of some great disaster. Sam, Dad, Mom, now Cas, staring into the abyss until it bites them back, immune to good intentions.
He wants to sleep, even after his nap in the car; he wants to close his eyes and let go because they never get enough sleep these days anyway. Watching Cas conked out makes Dean tired and heartsick, and there's nothing he wants more than to collapse on the mattress next to him and sleep like children sleep, content with bedtime stories and a rock-a-bye song. But there are doors and windows to salt, devil's traps to draw, and he's kind of hungry. There's a can of tuna to spare for dinner, and he wants to go through the house looking for useful things.
It's good to keep busy.
He leaves Cas's door open and sets his bag down on the living room armchair, takes out salt and spray paint and gets to work.
+
Dean wakes up with an ache in his back and the taste of dust in his mouth. That's what he gets for sleeping on shitty collapsed couches, but hey, it's better than sleeping in the Impala, much as he loves his baby.
He tried to sleep in the other bedroom last night, but it made him nervous not having Cas in his line of sight, so Dean dragged blankets and pillows to the couch and camped out there, one eye on the unmoving lump in the next room. He slept, and dreamed of Sam.
The details of the dream are fading now, and Dean doesn't bother trying to hold on to them. He doesn't really remember the whats and wherefores, only the sensation of a warm and helpless devotion that made him ache.
Cas is awake.
Dean can hear him puttering around the kitchen and making domestic sounds, which is weird because there's nothing to be domestic with. He rubs his face and shuffles into the kitchen, wincing at the sunlight, then stares at the spread on the table. “Is that coffee?” There’s a tin kettle set up above a camp stove on the counter.
“Instant coffee,” Cas shrugs. “I took it from the house next door.”
“Next door?” Dean feels a twinge of annoyance – Cas is not supposed to just wander around like that! – then forces himself to calm down. Cas is a grown-ass man... angel, thing, even if an increasingly anemic one, and hey, at least he's not dead. (Sammy, aged thirteen, shoving Dean away and blazing, “I can take care of myself!”)
Plus, now there is coffee. Awesome.
“Are those Sno Balls?” Dean asks.
“Yes. There are also Twinkies and Funyuns, if you prefer.”
“Also from next door?”
“Yes.”
“Holy shit. Maybe we picked the wrong house to stay in.”
“Breakfast... of champions...?” Cas hazards.
Dean hears the question mark ghosting the end of the sentence and chuckles in sympathy. Cas will sacrifice himself to vampires without hesitation, but make him do open mic and pop culture references and he'll shit himself.
“Yeah,” Dean confirms, grinning. “Definitely. We're champions, and this is our motherfucking breakfast.” He raises his mug. “To champions.”
“Champions,” Cas agrees, and clink mugs.
It's the best damn Sno Ball Dean's ever eaten in his life.
+
To Dean's dismay, today is laundry day.
It's been a long time coming, but the instinct to dread it is habitual, and he complains all the way to the shoreline, dragging the bag of clothes behind him. Cas weathers his whining with amusement, carrying an assortment of soaps and detergent. Dean can almost hear Sam in his head scolding him for putting chemicals in the sea, but whatever: once they get rid of all the croats and vampires and demons in the world, Dean will be the first to sign Sam's 'save our oceans' petition. In the meantime, he will wash his clothes wherever he damn well wants.
I'm having fake arguments in my head with my brother who isn't here, Dean realizes.
It's the end of the world and everyone's a little cracked.
“My clothes are gonna smell like fish,” Dean says, but at least it's better than blood.
Out here where the water sweeps into the land, it really does feel like the end of the world. Not in the Armageddon kind of way, but like in the old stories that warned sailors not to sail too close to the horizon. The place where two worlds meet feels like the edge of everything. Behind them, the land is ravaged and blistered, swallowed by the chaos of hell and the apathy of heaven. In front of them, the ocean is unending and free. It captures the sunlight and throws it back up at the sky, glittering. It speaks in whispers as the waves lap at the jetty where they wash, and Dean can't understand it but maybe Cas can. Between scrubs, Cas raises his eyes to the sea, and the air around him seems to slow, weighed down by ancient sorrows. Dean can't tell if Cas is looking for something, listening for something, lost in thought, or just lost. Sometimes Dean flicks a wet shirt at him, laughing at the surprise on Cas's face. After the third time Dean does this, Cas starts flicking back.
It doesn't actually take that long to wash their clothes. They don't have a lot of clothes. They don't get all the blood out but that's only to be expected; the stains have been in there for far too long. Cas finishes before Dean does and shucks off his shirt, washing it too, and the network of scars on Cas's skin is a startling sight in the gentle light of the late morning sun.
Cas is gaining quite the collection, healing teeth marks running rough and bright and new down his neck, across his shoulders, inside his elbows. Dean knows each mark intimately; he is the one who changes the bandages, pours precious alcohol, stitches up the worst.
Dean knows, and that is why he looks away.
+
“It's like,” Dean says wonderingly, “it's like someone said hey, good job washing your clothes and foraging for food. Your reward is booze. Level up!”
Five houses down from their cute pink monstrosity, there is a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Dean reaches for the Johnnie Walker at the same time Cas reaches for the Patrón.
Carthage flashes through Dean's mind, Cas and the Harvelles playing drinking games in the next room the night before one of the worst days of Dean's life. There was a lot of giggling from Jo, and Ellen sounding snide, and the first time Dean popped his head in, the three were practically BFFs. He wondered what transpired in the car ride over, what Ellen's gruff affection and Jo's youthful cynicism had been able to coax out of a fallen angel with little left to lose.
“You want the Bacardi?” Cas asks as they collect their favorite bottles into their separate bags.
Dean makes a face. “Nah, it's that Limon shit.”
So Cas collects it for himself, because Cas is a pansy who drinks pansy booze, but Dean's not going to hold that against him.
Lunch is Funyuns and instant coffee on the deck, with Twinkies for dessert. (Dean can just see Sam's bitchface of dismay.) After their meal, Cas grabs the tequila from his bag and starts making his way down the stairs to the beach. Dean, in the middle of some tirade about where the hell is he gonna get a new windshield, follows him without pause.
“Drives me nuts,” Dean is going on, trotting down the steps. “It's like when I'm behind the wheel, the world cracks in half.”
Cas shrugs. “I get used to it.”
Cas plops himself down on the sand and opens the Patrón, and Dean sits next to him, saying, “I almost wanna pop the windshield altogether.”
The first shot is for Sam. Dean lets Cas call the second shot, and Cas says this next shot is for you, and Dean accuses him of being unimaginative. This next slug is for Jo, this next one is for Ellen, and then it becomes a recitation of the dead: this next swallow is for Dad, this one's for Mom, this one's for Pamela, this one's for Andy, and Adam, this one's for Risa, and yes, even Anna gets a shot, because in the end she was just trying to save the world like the rest of them.
"Okay stop," Dean slurs. "If we drink to everyone who's dead, we're gonna get alcohol poisoning," and his heart will break and he'll just wanna crawl into a hole and never come out again.
"We'll drink to the living," Cas decides.
"No, that's just as depressing."
"What will we drink to?"
"Where did you go, Cas," Dean asks, "when you were looking for your dad?"
There's no answer for a while. Could be that Cas is drunk, but could be that Cas doesn't want to talk about it. After all, Dean doesn't like to talk about his dad much either, so he's about to change the subject when Cas says:
"Everywhere," in a small crackly voice, and Dean isn't sure that he's exaggerating.
"Tell me."
Cas pauses for too long again and Dean sighs and is about to talk about the Impala again or whatever, some safe topic, when Cas says, "Once, in Montpellier, I thought I found Him."
"Yeah? Montpelier, Vermont?"
"Montpellier, France."
"Oh. I was gonna say, we ganked a werewolf there once."
"Your amulet burned and I thought finally..." Cas murmurs, and continues talking, loosened by alcohol. How he cut across the square, practically shoving tourists out of the way, excited and hopeful, how the amulet burned into his skin leaving a scar where his grace would be, "and I thought about all the things I'd say, all the things I wanted to apologize for and everything I wanted to know," but when he got there, when he reached the cafe and touched the shoulder of the man seated under the awning and said "Father?" it was not his Father at all.
"Who was it?" Dean asks.
"It was Vishnu. He invited me to sit with him and He bought me madeleines. He didn’t know where my Father was."
"What was Vishnu doing in France?"
"Eating a crepe."
"...Oh," Dean says. Of course. Why not.
Sometime a couple of shots ago, Dean had collapsed onto his back, shifting in the sand so Cas blocked out the sun. With every swallow of tequila, the world becomes fuzzier, and Dean is lulled by Cas's voice wafting over him, the gentle rise and fall of it, telling him about the sticky heat of Islamabad and the crisp cold of Boston, the dense jungles of Sulawesi and the vastness of the Mongolian plains: all these places created by the will of his Father, a hundred glittering watches in the desert, and nary a watchmaker in sight.
Part 2
A/N: The lines Cas reads are swiped from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.