Chapter Text
MAY, 2010: WHEREVER I MAY ROAM
Where I lay my head is home
And the Earth becomes my throne
Two weeks after the world doesn’t end, and Dean’s in the kitchen. Sam’s standing on the air conditioning grate of the 1920s bungalow Dean claimed theirs a week ago in his socks. In the other bedroom, Castiel is breathing, door open. Sleeping. Sam can hear it. Shedding the last few drops of grace like snakeskin.
Sam’s hands are shaking. The devil’s back in the box.
He’s been trying his hardest to shuck the weight of Stull off his back. It’s been digging, painfully, into the back of Sam’s neck, dripping blood; sometimes he wakes from fitful sleep swearing there’s sticky red smeared over the pillow case. Guilt.
But he’s breathing, even if just barely.
They’ve returned, impossibly, painfully, to Lawrence. The city’s hollowed out, gotten quiet; it’s a news story, now, the greatest worst thing to come from Kansas since the Dust Bowl. Two weeks isn’t nearly enough time, but the half that stayed after Stull are thinking of selling t-shirts. Shot glasses. Monogrammed shotguns, sure.
Dean, across from Sam, putting the meager groceries away, May sun slanting in through the blinds, looks old. Sam blinks, and his brother is the bigger-than-life teenager he was growing up, flash of that manic adolescent hunger. Blinks, and his brother is an unknown, is a foreign creature, exhaustion weighing on his hulking shoulders the same way it hung on Dad’s. He is barely 30. Sam’s about to turn 27, and his skin still feels loose around his child bones, still feels ill fitting and too big. And he doesn’t recognize himself, either, the planes of his own face a bizarre collection of features in the mirror as he brushes his teeth, washes his face. A jumble of spare parts. Four years, and the job has turned him and Dean into black and white copies, color leached out.
“Coffee?” Dean murmurs, glancing back at where Sam is standing. His voice is gravel, late night deep. His fingers are already hovering over the pot, broad and scarred, already pouring them both a cup. He knows the answer.
The door swings open. Cas is wearing one of Dean’s ratty wife beaters and a pair of sweatpants from Goodwill. He looks small. Dean passes a mug to Sam, then turns back to the cabinets to reach for another for Cas.
“How you feeling?” Dean says, then winces.
“Human.”
And it’s true that here, in the dying light of twilight, barefoot on the tile floor, Castiel looks like less. Sam can see it in the lines of his face, the tension in his jaw, the way he moves. He doesn’t smell like an energy you can taste on the back of the throat. He smells like sweat. He smells like the laundry detergent they’ve been pilfering from whatever poor fuckers used to occupy the house.
Two weeks ago, the world didn’t end. Sam didn’t launch himself into Hell. Castiel, no longer holy, speaks with the cadence of something separate. Dean, older and stranger and quieter, still brews a perfect pot of coffee with ease.
MID SEPTEMBER, 2010
Fall’s trickling in, stick of summer fading fast. Sam’s on the hood of the Impala with a beer. Dean’s inside, fiddling with the radio. Night is descending upon them.
Sam’s worrying. Dean’s chain smoking. They’re river watching, Kansas water flooding by, just drunk enough to get undone.
“Do you still think about Bryce Harmon?” Sam asks Dean, voice low. Sam still gets caught on 1996, that first summer. That first original crack.
Dean laughs. It’s a sloppy sound. He’s got a bottle of Jack in his left hand, knuckles white on the glass, and Mom’s wedding ring has found a home around his thumb. After Stanford, Sam had wondered when his brother had taken up drinking again. If he ever stopped. He’s well practiced, wrapped around the lip, tipping back.
“I dream about him, sometimes.”
Sam hasn’t dreamt since Stull. Hasn’t really slept. Dean puts himself to bed every night just to wake, inevitably heaving, from Hell-shaped nightmares at four.
“You never really talked about it.”
Dean shrugs.
“I dream about his girlfriend giving me ketamine, after.” He takes another pull from the bottle, wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, passes it to Sam. “I don’t remember most of that year, anyway.”
Lawrence haunts Sam. It’s recognizable, in the flat sprawl of strip mall Americana, highway lanes. Last week, he ran into Mrs. Morris, his 11th grade Spanish teacher, at the grocery store. The past years haven’t been kind to her, there’s a purse to her lips that reads as overtired, overworked; her hair has gone completely white. She asked him about Stanford. She gave him the number to her landline— she runs a coffee hour in her living room every Thursday for those who stuck around. For those who didn’t leave.
Lawrence is foreign in the decay of their old house, firmly isolated on the other side of town. In their parents' graves, Cas’s constant presence.
“What are we doing here, man?” Sam whispers.
“Living,” Dean says, like it’s the easy, best thing.
Sam’s drunk. Lawrence is swirling in front of his eyes, stars smearing into meteors, into fallen divinity.
He puts his elbows on his knees and begins to sob into his hands.
DECEMBER, 2010: POT KETTLE BLACK
Lazy locomotives
Wherever you may roll
I think you have no motive
I know you have no home
In Fort Bragg, Sam swims in the ocean. He walks, shivering and still soaked, to Jess’ grave. His phone’s ringing; Dean won’t stop calling, even with the voicemail full.
It’s fading, the angle of her smile. The pitch of her laugh, the rhythm of her voice, sleepy and satiated in the bed they used to share. But he remembers the ring he bought her. Remembers the shampoo she used to use, her favorite brand of salad dressing, the curl of her hair. The birthmark on her hip. Her fingers, graceful, wrapped around a pencil, drawing him. Her messy handwriting. Her pajama shirt. The laces of her shoes, never double-knotted, always coming undone.
He rests his back against her headstone, and like this, his breath is almost hers, his pulse thudding against the marble is almost human. Maybe she would hate him, if she lived. Maybe she’d wake up, roll from her grave, crawl herself into living, just to find Sam a stranger, a weary, wary creature. Maybe she’d be horrified. Maybe she’d cover her face with shame. Maybe, worst of all, she’d still love him, cry over him, wish he moved on.
Sam stands. He watches the waves crash, break open, split in the horizon. He swallows, works through the lump in his throat.
“I hope you would be proud of me,” he breathes, and feels guilty for speaking it at all. There is a rivulet of water from his wet hair snaking its way down his spine.
It’s a constant, this missing, this ache. He sees her at gas stations, pumping gas in her sandals. He sees her in grocery stores, buying orange juice, head tilted over a notebook in the public library, sees her in the line of the highway, the slant of the winter sun. She was beautiful, and she was his. Sam was hers. It’s been four years, and still she’s gone. Still she’s dead.
He presses his lips against the cool granite of the headstone, then goes, embarrassed, to call his brother back.
LATE DECEMBER, 2010
Sam’s not coming home for Christmas, but Dean’s still got a turkey in the oven. Is still laying the lattice for the apple pie, keeping an eye on the cranberry sauce. He’ll get started on the potatoes later. It’s only 9am.
Sam’s still hunting. Apparently, according to his calls, he’s “finding himself” in between salt and burns, possessions in Oregon, black dogs and shifters and ghouls. Finding himself in the after, in the road, that repetitive beat of asphalt-rubber, coasting over state lines like it’s something that’s still novel, like it’s something bent, sharp and shiny and new.
Home has relocated with Sam gone. Lawrence is waking up– the ones who left are trickling back in 6 months after the fact, so they’d been forced into renting the new apartment, really. It’s smaller than the house, but there’s a room for Cas and a room for Dean and a pull out couch for Sam’s inevitable return, so it’s good enough. They have a lease and an address and neighbors and their own little mail slot down in the lobby, and it’s something permanent, something continuous that Dean occupies. He folds his laundry and places it into the drawers of the dresser him and Cas hauled from the side of the road, he washes the three plates and three bowls and three mugs Cas bought for them at Goodwill in constant revolution. He has a job as a bartender, now, something steady for the first time since his 20s. On the weekends, early morning Sunday swarm, Dean drives Cas through suburbia searching for yard sales, things to populate their sparse apartment– junker couches, russian nesting dolls, paint-by-numbers.
Cas loves it. In his jeans borrowed from Dean, waistband sagging and shirt ratty at the neck and sleeves, he is softer, he is something separate; digging through the 1 dollar bin of jewelry in a stranger’s garage, he is humanity defined. On the car rides back to their apartment, trunk filled with boxes of various junk, Dean plays music for Cas, Zeppelin and Bowie and Patti Smith, Sabbath, Seger, Skynard. Part of his education, and Cas is hungry for it, craving, insatiable. In the mornings, he drinks coffee. He forgets to comb his hair. He doesn’t understand the need for socks or shoes, he prefers deep greens and rusty oranges, 100% cotton, blue raspberry artificial flavoring, shitty art, romance novels, glam rock and pop’s top 40.
“Look,” Cas says, in garages, sloping yards, digging through the homegoods section of the Salvation Army, holding glassware, old tapes, strands of pearls. Winter has been bruising his ears, fingers, tip-of-nose cherry red.
“Isn’t this wonderful?”
It’s not like Dean doesn’t miss it, that slip, the burn of the barrel, that sick twist of satisfaction, the gratitude, the thanks, the pulse of the highway spilling into his, the weight of blood, of terrors, that dead-to-the-world sleep after a job well done.
It’s been months, and Dean is exhausted. He jumps at nothing, now. He falls asleep and never doesn’t dream. He’s been on borrowed time since 16, and to make it to 30 feels impossible. Feels weighty and horrific.
Finding joy. Dean’s never been that fast a learner.
In the meantime, he cooks Christmas dinner for him and Cas to eat alone.
FEBRUARY, 2011: THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.
Sam’s spilling blood in Dean’s bed. It’s pooling on the sheets, slick and terrible, deep, smearing crimson. He’s writhing with the pain of it, jaw locked and quivering, hands fisting Dean’s thin thrift store blanket.
It’s the first time Dean’s seen Sam in months.
This is what Dean was afraid of. His brother, gone. His brother, returning, torn into pieces, made a figment, an echo. His brother, gangling and heavy in Dean’s arms, leaving life despite it all. His brother, small and tall and separate still, who left Kansas for California twice over, who stood at Stull, who knelt at the edge of the world, who tried to jump in. Who Dean hauled from the brink. Who Dean saved from the fire. His brother, his brother, who Dean missed like nothing else. In the cabinet in the kitchen, there is a Goodwill mug for him, a set of cutlery, a plate.
He does it how Mary taught him, dental floss and a fifth of Jack, hands shaking. He sews Sam back together. Quilting his brother back to whole, and he’s sorry enough for it to ache.
After, Sam’s face relaxed into sedated sleep, Dean washes the blood from underneath his fingernails. He packs the med kit away. He sheds his clothes like skin, steps into the shower. The water going down the drain is red.
The bathroom light slots through the dusk of the apartment like a beacon. Dean pulls his sweatpants over his hips. He stands in the doorway of his bedroom and watches Sam sleep, that steady rise and fall, and listens to his own pulse, thready, shaky, in his ears. And he’s tired, but sleep means dreams, means waking up with the vestiges of Hell still on his skin, means visions and ghosts of Alistair, of Lucifer, of Mary and John. Sleep means Sam’s breathing will slip into the rattle of near death, that he’ll die at only 26 on Dean’s memory foam mattress topper. Outside the window, twilight shudders into sunset, into the blue shadows of night.
“Dean?”
He turns, and it’s Cas in his boxers, blinking. He’s barefoot.
Dean could say 100 hundred things. A thousand. He’s worried Sam will suffocate on the pillow. He’s sorry he pulled them both in at all, Sam and Cas, sorry Cas shed his grace for something as boring and selfish as Dean, sorry he left Sam to hunt alone, worried Sam will split his stitches and bleed out on the bathroom floor, trip and hurt himself in the shower, worried he’ll wake up alone and upset with Dean, sorry his parents are dead, sorry he started this, sorry he’s here, watching Sam sleep, still only in sweatpants and socks and sorry it’s been hours of watching, of worrying the spot in between his thumb and pointer until it’s rubbed raw worried Sam’ll stop breathing worried that Sam’s embarrassed of him like he’s a kid again worried sorry—
There are a thousand things Dean could say, but he can’t get his tongue to work.
“He’ll be okay,” Cas says. His shoulder brushes against Dean’s, warm. “He’s survived worse.”
Dean forces his throat into compliance, swallows instinctually twice over.
“Yeah.” He’s faking nonchalance. He’s walking away from the door and to the couch, the weight of Cas’ eyes heavy on his back.
“Dean,” Cas says. “You’ll hurt your back sleeping there.”
And it is, explicitly, always constant, anger that bubbles up, slides through the cracks. It is easier than this deadening grief, easier than sorrow.
“You’re the one who begged me to buy it,” Dean snaps. Then breathes. And next, the guilt. “Sorry.”
“My bed is big enough for the two of us,” Cas says. There’s something building in the back of Dean’s throat, choking and horrific, and he nods, let’s himself be led.
Cas lays him down. He tucks the sheets and blankets and various pillows around Dean, haloed, he turns off the light. He climbs into bed. His breath is hot and sticky in the night, and Dean can feel it whispering against the back of his neck.
His chest is heaving. His eyes hurt. He sits to scrub desperately at his face with his hands. He is 30 years old. He is 29 and 26 and 16 and 4.
“He bled all over my mattress topper,” he says. It is such a stupid thing to cry about, but he does it anyway. “I’m sorry I’m such a mess.”
“It’s okay,” Cas responds, voice sleep rasped and low. “I don’t mind.”
Cas’ hands are warm on his shoulders. He is rubbing patterns into his skin. His bed smells like earth and Dean’s aftershave, which Dean never had the heart to tell him to stop using. His breath is steady.
Dean sleeps.
In the dream, Hell is the wine-dark of the apartment. Hell is Sam, bloody, bent over Dean’s chest cavity.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” Sam asks, shuffling through the contents, fingernails digging into the meat behind Dean’s ribcage. “Isn’t this just what we needed?”
In the dream, Hell is Cas, Hell is salvation, Hell is the handprint and the rescue and light hot enough to burn redemption, to brand it.
Dean sleeps. He dreams, drifts. And when he wakes, Cas is still there, holy and human and snoring, hand pressed flush with Dean’s bicep.
JULY, 2011
In July, Dean bakes a peach pie in the oven of the new house, and the smell of it leaks from the corners, windows, curtains, vanilla and summer heavy on the nose, lips, tongue. The house doesn’t have air conditioning yet. There are studs in the living room left exposed. Upstairs, in Dean and Cas’ bedroom, there are exposed wires like snakes coming from the ceiling, and none of the outlets work.
Cas comes in from the yard, the back of his t-shirt plastered to skin. His face is flushed, red low on his cheeks, and his hair is pushed away from his face, out of his eyes. When his arms wrap around Dean, he smells like the compost. Mouth opens, and he tastes like dog days, like summer.
Dean is baking a peach pie in the oven of the new house. Sam’s in Cedar Rapids, planning on staying there; back in school, in work. It’s only a 5 hour drive. Sometimes, if Dean isn’t busy, distracted, if Sam isn’t in class, they’ll call twice a week. Dean’s learning domesticity. Dean’s learning to step back. Dean’s learning love, stepping into it, forgetting quick draw, rough as sandpaper, constantly remembering.
Here it is. Cas slides from Dean and towards the bathroom for a shower. On his way, he fixes those broad hands on a peach from the bowl, and when he bites into it, juice goes sluicing down his palm, tracing lines.
Here it is. Tomorrow they’ll go to the hardware store for paint in eggshell white for the bedroom, wallpaper for the hall. Tomorrow they’ll buy groceries. There’s a yard sale down the street that their neighbors promise is worth it.
Summer’s leaking from the soil, bubbling up from the ground.
Tomorrow, they’ll have peach pie for breakfast, and Dean’ll watch Cas swallow every perfect, impossible bite.