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Dean watched as Sam grabbed a stack of files off of his table and plopped them down on a table only a few feet away. On some level it bothered him that the kid was sitting at his own table, like he was too good to sit with Dean. Well, that was no big shock. The kid had been too good for his family since he’d been all of what, five? Six? Old enough to go to school and figure out that other kids stayed in one place for more than a few weeks at a time and hardly ever lived out of their cars. Killing evil sons of bitches had never been good enough for Mr. Normal, had it? No, he’d always wanted more than Dad or Dean could provide. More food, newer clothes, can’t we stay in this town longer I don’t care that people are dying - and when Dad had finally put his foot down he hadn’t cared enough about his family to stick around. He never had. His family meant nothing to Sam, never had and never would.
He shook his head. That wasn’t true. Sam had loved him once. Sam had let him be Stone Number One. Sam had been willing to grovel for his approval after Dean had taken him back, when he’d gone into Zachariah’s little zombie games there. Sam had been desperate to find a way to save him from his deal, had rescued him from the ghouls and from Alistair and from the Benders and from Osiris and from the hellhound. Sam had shown so much faith in him that he brought him right to Michael when Dean was ready to annihilate himself by saying Yes. Sam had undertaken the Trials because yet again he couldn’t stand to see Dean destroy himself. Sam had loved him.
And Sam had needed him, too. That was the kicker. Sam had needed him when he’d gotten those crazy visions. If Dean hadn’t sold his soul Sam would be dead – he’d probably be a demon by now. He’d needed him through all that crap happening when Gordon had hunted him and right up until the hounds showed up to take him away. He’d tried to pretend he didn’t need him when Dean came back from Hell, tried to pretend like he could do the heavy lifting for a while, but everyone had seen how that turned out. No, he’d needed Dean and he still needed Dean. He just wouldn’t admit to that. If it weren’t for Dean he’d still be in Lucifer’s Cage, because someone (probably Dean) would have shot that shell with his face and all that would be left was the soul and no one would have ever been the wiser. If it weren’t for Dean he’d have just died from the effects of the hallucinations, all of that catching up with his bunk buddy. If it weren’t for Dean he’d have died sealing up Hell. If it weren’t for Dean he’d have died after backing off sealing up Hell. Would it kill the guy to show a little gratitude?
He felt the red haze coming up again and struggled to force it down. That was wrong. He didn’t get what Sam was being such a little bitch about – the kid was alive and that was what counted – but Dean had known that Sam wouldn’t be happy about the possession when he’d decided to go ahead with it. He didn’t care how Sam felt about it frankly, because he was alive to sit beside him and be bitchy about it. Well, that was his rationale at the time. Now he just… didn’t care. And that was wrong.
He knew it was wrong. It terrified him, or it would have terrified him if he felt anything beyond rage these days. Rage and bloodlust. He knew something was wrong with him. He might not be Advanced Placement like Kevin but he wasn’t as stupid as people thought. Something was wrong, deeply wrong.
He’d been all heartbroken about Kevin and then Crowley had come along offering him something to do – some way to do something that would allow him to get results he could see. It wasn’t Gadreel, but let’s face it there was only so far he was likely to get against the guy anyway. And Abaddon was gunning for him specifically – he wasn’t going to be able to avenge Kevin if he was dead now was he? And then he’d heard Cain’s sob story and taken the Mark and now here he was. Numb. Apathetic. Apathetic, that was, when he wasn’t thirsty.
He’d been perfectly willing to kill Garth just to get a few answers and it had been Sam – Sam! – who’d saved the guy. Sam saving anyone – who’d have thought? Never mind Sam saving Garth, Sam didn’t even like Garth. He’d had a hard time not ripping through all of those werewolves and that wasn’t like him. He’d learned to see the difference between evil “monsters” and perfectly innocent supernatural creatures. Hell, angels were technically monsters. Well, most of ‘em were pretty evil. But Cas – Cas was good. He hadn’t always been, but he was now. And Benny was a vampire but he was the best of the bunch.
Funny – losing Benny had broken his heart at the time. Right now, though, he could think of Benny without much of a twitch.
Sam was typing. Dean tried not to stare. The Mark itched. Was it reacting to Dean’s anger? Because Dean was nothing if not angry. Not brothers anymore, wouldn’t save Dean. Didn’t even have Dean in his Heaven, for crying out loud, not that the kid had any business in Heaven. Hadn’t looked for him in Purgatory. Lost his soul. Left for Stanford. Maybe it was reacting to the demon blood in Sam, the stain he’d never be able to scrub out. Maybe Dean should just do it for him –
No. Wrong. He bit down on the inside of his cheek. Those weren’t his thoughts. Well, the anger was. Not the bloodlust though – not toward Sam. And that – that was the problem, really.
At the other table Sam gave a huff. “Something funny about the Knights of Hell there Chuckles?” Dean snarled, recognizing the sound for his brother’s equivalent of laughter these days. It was important to keep Sam on task. He remembered Dad saying that once, years ago. Decades, really, when Sam had decided that schoolwork and friends were more important than avenging the woman who gave them both life.
Sam didn’t jump. He turned those eyes of his on Dean, though. He didn’t try the puppy dog eyes, not that they’d work on Dean these days. No, these were those piercing, almost inhuman eyes, the ones that seemed to cut right through you. He made a mental note to hit his brother with a splash of holy water one of these days. There was nothing natural about those eyes. “Not even remotely. Any clues in your pile?”
“You just worry about your own pile of crap,” Dean spat. “I’ll deal with mine.” What was Sam trying to imply here? Just because Dean hadn’t made much progress on the paperwork didn’t mean he wasn’t working. Sam had no idea – none at all – what Dean was dealing with. The elder Winchester felt his pulse starting to rise. Grimly he gritted his teeth and forced it down.
Sam hesitated for a moment. Then he closed his laptop and gathered his materials. “You know what? I’m kind of beat. That demon threw me around pretty good. I’m going to go work from bed.”
His brother snorted. “Whatever.” What demon? Had Sam fought a demon? Or had he screwed it? That was his preferred partner, right? Dean fought the intrusive thoughts back. No, Sam had repented. He’d stayed away from demons, unless he was fighting them. And he had bruises around his neck. He’d been fighting. Once that would have been the first thing he’d have noticed, and he’d have been furious. Of course, once he wouldn’t have let his little brother work a case by himself and he sure as hell wouldn’t have ignored him when he asked for help with the case. Now he just… didn’t care. What the Hell was wrong with him that he just didn’t care?
Sam grabbed another stack of work from Dean’s table and added it to the pile before heading back to his room. Well, that was fine. Sam had always been into research. Dean would double check everything because there was no way he was going to trust the little double-crossing bastard. Kid was part-demon anyway – He reached down into his bag and pulled out a nice, new bottle of whiskey.
Yeah, he knew he was hitting the bottle with a vengeance. So what? It worked. It did the job. He had a problem, all right. Crowley didn’t know what he was talking about, though. Dean wasn’t a drunk. Well, okay. Sure he was. But he wasn’t drinking because he was some trembling little man-child, terrified of the unknown. He wanted… well, he knew what he wanted. He wanted to go out, get into a fight and knock some heads in. He wanted to find some demons and stab them with Ruby’s knife until all the flashing lights stopped and everything stopped moving around him. (Stupid Sam got to take out a demon alone… ) He wanted to go find a nest of vampires and take them all out, one by one. He wanted…
He wanted blood. Right now, though, there was only him and Sam.
He drank from the bottle again. He was angry at Sam. He had good reason to be angry at Sam. He’d given up so much for Sam, the least the kid could do was stick by him, look up to him. Be his little brother. But he knew that when he was rational, when he was himself, he didn’t want to kill Sam. He didn’t want to hurt Sam. Unfortunately, moments when he was himself and completely sober seemed to be fewer and farther between – especially after he’d gotten his hands on the First Blade.
And God how he wanted it back. He could feel it calling out to him even from wherever Crowley had stashed it away. He’d beheaded Sinclair without even a thought and the jolt that had gone through him at that point had been unlike anything he’d ever felt before. The nearest experience would have to be orgasm but to liken it to sex would have been to liken a top-ranked vintage Rioja with Ripple. He needed it. He needed to take that bone and slice through more bodies. He needed it more than he needed air.
His hand shook as he brought the bottle back to his lips. He could fight this. He was stronger than some goddamn donkey jaw. For now.
He could numb the feeling with booze. It was, after all, the only way to kill Abaddon. Crowley had told them so. The guy was the King of Hell, right? He was supposed to know these things. And he’d never steered them wrong before.
That was wrong too. He had steered them wrong. Steered him wrong. But who hadn’t? Benny. Dad. And even Dad had only cared about Sam. Dean was just Daddy’s little blunt instrument. Never important. Never special. Never worthwhile. He was important to Crowley, though. Crowley needed him, because he had the blade. And Dean liked to be needed.
He forced himself to drink again. Those were intrusive thoughts. He knew it. He knew that they weren’t… they weren’t right. He did like to be needed – he needed to be needed. It was the only reason people kept him around. But not like this.
He was in over his head with the Mark. He knew it, he knew he should have thought further ahead before taking on the stupid Mark. But it was the only way to get rid of Abaddon. Before Sam’s big reveal he’d been on the verge of considering tapping out on this one, trying to find a way of getting rid of the Mark because he knew that he was turning into something he wasn’t. But now that he knew what Abaddon was doing – there was no way. He couldn’t let other souls suffer just because of him, right? Once, a long time ago, he’d have gone to Sam and asked for help. But the kid had said he wouldn’t save him. And frankly Sam… well, Sam wasn’t safe around him. Not anymore, not with those intrusive thoughts getting louder and louder in his head. He’d been right to let Sam go off on his own, right to ignore Sam’s request for backup. Better to risk Sam getting hurt by some punk-ass demon than to risk Dean being the one to do it himself. He needed to keep Sam away as much as possible. So Dean sat at his table, numbing out the bloodlust the only way he could.
***
Sam sat down at the table across the aisle from Dean’s. He wasn’t an idiot, whatever Dean might think of his powers of deduction. The six files on top of the upper-left-hand corner pile were the same six files that had been on top of the same pile when Sam had left. The research materials in the other piles, for all their artful state of disarray, hadn’t changed either. The only change in the library was the smell, which had gone from “old books” to “abandoned distillery” in a matter of days. For all of Dean’s preaching and thinly-veiled accusations of shirking and distractibility – “what you call obsession I call doing my job” – he hadn’t actually done much but drink the entire time Sam had been gone. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d expected. He’d seen Dean drink before, he’d seen Dean on a bender before. Dean had always found solace in booze, ever since he’d been a little kid. Back then it had helped him to feel bigger than he was, more potent against the things their father insisted on throwing them against. Now – well, maybe it was still something like that. John had encouraged him, too. Sam shook his head against the memory of the way they’d celebrated the new millennium and the hangover that followed. After he’d gotten back from Hell Dean’s drinking had increased to John Winchester levels and yeah, that was all because of Sam. After Bobby died, though, Dean had made John look like a teetotaler.
Sam hadn’t appreciated much of what Purgatory had done to his brother, but getting him sober was the exception. All of that hard work seemed to have gone out the window, though. Part of Sam wanted to rage against it, to smash things or maybe throw a lamp or shout for a while. He didn’t do any of those things, of course. He barely even acknowledged the urges existed, tightening the seals on those emotions as a matter of reflex. A guy like him couldn’t afford them. Besides, they weren’t productive, they wouldn’t get him anywhere. He needed to be logical and focused. Yeah, Dean had been drinking a lot. He’d been drinking more since he’d taken the Mark of Cain. Sam would have to have been blind not to have noticed all of the times he’d found Dean sulking in the kitchen over a bottle. And then there had been what he’d been doing since he’d gotten his hands on the First Blade, however briefly.
He opened up a document on his laptop and started a list. The First Blade had side effects. Of course it had side effects. Nothing came without side effects. Giving demon blood to a baby gave it abilities of one kind or another when it grew to maturity. It also made it a part-demon freak and damned it to Hell. You could put a mutilated soul back into a soulless abomination’s body, but you’d have to put up a wall to keep it from going insane. You could kill the head of the Leviathan, but by the way you’d get sucked into Purgatory when you did the deed.
He stared at the screen for a moment. Dean wasn’t likely to be terribly forthcoming about his symptoms. That was okay. Sam had been observing his behavior for a while. He started a list, with bullet points. He liked bullet points. They always looked so neat. “Increased alcohol consumption,” he noted. “Consumption increased exponentially after contact with the First Blade, accompanied by compulsive lying and secrecy.” He leaned back in his seat and sighed. Maybe he was overreacting. Maybe Dean was just a garden-variety alcoholic. It wasn’t as though it wasn’t something Winchesters weren’t prone to. He’d gone off on his own extended benders in the past; it wasn’t like he was in a position to go off on a high horse. He’d thought Ruby had saved him from this.
The thought got a little half-laugh out of him, which of course got a glower from Dean. “Something funny about the Knights of Hell there Chuckles?” his older brother snarled.
Sam didn’t jump. It was a near thing though. “Not even remotely. Any clues in your pile?”
There might have been. There might not. Dean wouldn’t know. He’d been looking at the same page – the same spot on the same page – since Sam sat down. “You just worry about your own pile of crap,” Dean spat. “I’ll deal with mine.”
Sam hesitated for a moment. Then he closed his laptop and gathered his materials. “You know what? I’m kind of beat. That demon threw me around pretty good. I’m going to go work from bed.”
His brother snorted. “Whatever.” Sam grabbed another stack of work from Dean’s table and added it to the pile before heading back to his room and setting back up.
Maybe it had been a mistake to let this room be “his.” It still didn’t feel like his. There was nothing about it to indicate that he’d ever been here. Still, for now it was the room to which he returned, where his hair occasionally stayed on the pillow when he picked his head up off it. Maybe he’d change rooms at a later date just to get away from anything Gadreel had touched. Of course, maybe that was stupid – it wasn’t like he could change skin.
He looked at the stack of materials. It was important. He hadn’t really cared much about Hell’s little Red Election one way or another, not really. Sure Abaddon had killed Henry and wiped out the Men of Letters. Crowley had killed plenty of people on his own, not to mention enslaving Sam and Dean briefly and waging a steady campaign of murder against the people they’d saved. And, to top it off, he’d killed Sarah Blake. They were equally vile. It didn’t matter who ruled the Pit. It was the Pit. The ruler was supposed to be evil and instability in Hell meant that the contenders would be too busy menacing each other to be much of a problem for the Winchesters. He honestly had no idea why Dean had suddenly turned around from his mission of revenge for Kevin’s death (what had been done to Sam apparently required no revenge or consideration) and decided to dedicate his life and body to Crowley’s war against Abaddon.
This whole thing with the souls, though – that was something else. That had to be stopped as soon as possible. He could still taste the bile in the back of his throat when he remembered seeing all of those jars, when he thought about the moment when he understood Abaddon’s plan. He knew – better than anyone else – what it felt like to walk around without a soul, to have that soul become the plaything of pure evil. If he had the opportunity to spare anyone the agony he’d undergone – the pain he still felt – he had a moral obligation to do so. But what about Dean?
He felt a spike of rage again. Dean had taken on the Mark of Cain and whatever was going on with him he should really be left to deal with it. It wasn’t like the guy wanted help, he certainly didn’t want Sam’s help. Even asking him if he wanted coffee was likely to draw a snarl. Then there was the lying and the drinking –
No. Wrong. It was the wrong way to think. He tightened the hatch on his fury yet again. Dean had taken the Mark of his own free will, sure. He hadn’t thought things through – well, Sam hadn’t been there and he had no idea what had gone down, but he knew Dean well enough to know that he probably hadn’t really considered the consequences of his actions. Dean wasn’t a great long-term thinker, probably because their lives had never had much of the long-term about them. Hell, they’d never even lived in the same place for more than three months and it wasn’t like their profession had a long life expectancy. Sam had seen Dean sign cell phone contracts. There was no way he’d actually thought through the terms and conditions on the Mark of Cain.
He looked at the list again. “Increased impulsivity,” he typed. It seemed to fit. What were some of Dean’s other symptoms? Well, he could think of one right off the bat. “Apathy.” Sam had come in beat to hell and with clear bruises around his neck and Dean could not have given a rat’s ass about it. This from the guy who was willing to rent him out to an angel just to keep him alive a little longer, the one who’d once wanted to rip the lungs out of every schoolyard bully in Tennessee. And – well, things were absolute crap between them, because Dean had actively participated in Sam’s being violated on every level possible and Sam just couldn’t find it in himself to be grateful for it. So maybe that wasn’t a representative case. But the car? When the demons had keyed Baby Dean had been annoyed, but he hadn’t reacted with the intensity that Sam would have expected. And then he’d kind of… let it go. It had been Sam who had carefully buffed out all of the scratches and touched up the paint, Sam who’d handled the clear coat. Dean never even knew about it. He hadn’t batted an eye when Sam had informed him he was taking the Impala to Milton, even though they had a massive garage full of other (beautiful, classic) options. So… apathy. Things that had been previously very important to Dean were no longer particularly important to him.
That left one more important note. Well, maybe two. “Bloodlust,” Sam typed. What little Sam had managed to find in the archives strongly suggested that the Mark of Cain had a lot to do with bloodlust and Dean’s “condition” certainly seemed to carry a certain amount of “kill-em-all” attitude with it. Of course, the soulless people in Milton had all been pretty damn bloodthirsty too. Sam – well, he was so used to clamping down on everything that no extra aggression would have been apparent to anyone, even anyone who knew him with a soul. But he recognized that feeling, that need, in the people he’d seen. What he saw in Dean wasn’t the same. But it wasn’t all that different either.
Finally there was Dean’s sleep habits. He added“Sleeplessness” to the list. He’d come into the kitchen more than once to find that Dean hadn’t slept, not a bit. He wasn’t even lying about it. He knew that Dean was trying to go to bed, but was he having success? He couldn’t ask. He might get snarled at, he might get punched in the face, but what he would not get would be answers.
So the balance of probability was that the Mark of Cain was having an effect on Dean’s soul. Getting an angel to take a look at the soul would confirm his theory. He made a note of this, followed in a larger font with bold face and underlining, “DO NOT DO THIS.” No one deserved to have an angel invade their body to grope their soul like Cas had done to him. He’d been imprisoned with two angry archangels and he’d still never felt anything more painful.
Maybe Dean’s soul was being destroyed – obliterated, erased, whatever – by the Mark. Maybe – as Sam had initially worried, as had happened with Cain – it was twisting him into something different and demonic. Either way, it was harming Dean. And sure, the First Blade could kill Abaddon. They only had Crowley’s word to go on that it was the only way, though.
Did they have the time to find another way? If Agnes had been truthful – and why would she lie? – there were plenty of other factories where Abaddon could be out “recruiting.” Did Sam have the right to risk however many other souls for the possible chance of this one? Of course, if what he thought was happening to Dean was happening - if either possibility was correct – his brother would become a worse monster than Sam himself had ever been. Than Sam was now.
He sighed. The end result was the same. Abaddon had to be taken down, and Dean had to be liberated from the Mark. There could be no either/or. There was only “and.”
He glanced at the clock. It wasn’t too late. He hadn’t done this yesterday. It was a little thing, a very small thing in the greater scheme of things, but it meant something to him. He’d seen the guilt in the ex-nun’s face, heard it in her voice. Sam was more than a little familiar with guilt. He knew what he’d done yesterday but he didn’t think that she understood what had happened. He was so used to secrecy – maybe it was time to keep people a little less in the dark. He dialed the phone. “Hello?” the woman’s voice came through, suspicious.
“Ms. Wilkinson? This is Sam Winchester. From yesterday.”
“Oh! Yes. How are you? Is everything okay? I thought everything was taken care of!”
“It is. I mean, you should be perfectly okay. I just… I don’t know if I fully explained what we did. What you participated in.”
“I didn’t do anything, Sam,” she told him, and he could just about hear her eyebrows draw together. “I told you about something that happened fifty-six years ago. It’s hardly the stuff of heroes. I’m not exactly a Man of Letters.”
He huffed out a little laugh. “Ms. Wilkinson, I literally could not have broken the case without you. And do you know what the demon was doing? She was stealing people’s souls. Straight from their bodies. And because of what you told me, I could find those souls and free them. Do you understand? Together, Ms. Wilkinson, you and me, we literally saved souls. Visible, tangible souls.” Maybe a different civilian wouldn’t have appreciated it but a woman who had initially chosen a life in the church would probably grasp the enormity of what had happened. “It could not have happened without you. I need… I need for you to understand that. You saved souls yesterday. That was your work, your knowledge and your courage. Okay?”
There was silence on the other end for a few moments. “But… I wasn’t even there.”
“I know. And that’s a good thing. I just… I know you felt bad about keeping silent before. But I understand why you did. I wanted you to know how important it was, what you did now. You saved those people’s souls, and their lives. And the lives of anyone they might have killed without their souls. And now that I know what Abaddon is up to, I can let others know and we can fight her. So… it’s like a ripple effect. Just being willing to talk to me – you’ve done so much good, Ms. Wilkinson. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Sam,” she whispered. “I… thank you.”
Sam hung up the phone. If he could save strangers’ souls, he should be able to save his brother’s. He had his work cut out for him.