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The skin on Sam’s hands stretches, red and angry, but finally clean of blood, as he clenches and unclenches his fist. It’s shaking a little bit, and he can’t quite tell if it’s from the effort of moving the bodies or from shock.
He gathers together the bloodied washcloths in a pile. He doesn’t have the energy to dig around for hydrogen peroxide right now. Maybe Dean will do it later--he always cleans obsessively when he’s upset, a tornado with a Swiffer.
Sam scrubs a freshly clean hand across his face as he picks up a handful of unused washcloths with the other. Then, he dampens them under the spray of the sink before leaving the bathroom behind and making his way down the hall.
Truth is, he still doesn’t fully understand this thing with Rowena. Isn’t really sure that it’s a thing at all, really. But he’ll be damned if he lets her just keep sitting in the library, staring at nothing.
“I brought a washcloth.”
Sam lowers himself gingerly into a seat across from Rowena. She doesn’t so much as blink; it’s like she can’t even see him. Sam knows the feeling. After possession, nothing quite feels real. He waits patiently until she focuses in on his face.
“Samuel.”
She tries to put some of that old teasing back in her voice, the back-and-forth that has characterized virtually every conversation that they’ve had the last few years but doesn’t quite succeed.
“Here. May I?”
Rowena nods, barely perceptible. Sam leans across the table and starts dabbing at the worst of the blood on her cheek. None of it is Rowena’s, so it comes off easily. She holds herself stiff, staring blankly past his head.
“How can you even look at me?”
Sam lowers the washcloth, surprised that she’d spoken at all.
“Rowena--”
Her hands clench around the edge of the table at the sound of her name, so Sam falls silent, giving her a chance to keep talking. He focuses intently on the streak of blood on her forehead, which seems to want to stick a little more than the others.
“I thought that you’d kill me,” Rowena whispered. “Death said there was only one way things end for me. I thought that archangel blade I know you’ve got on you would do the trick.”
Sam swallows. He can’t bring himself to admit that he’d been thinking just that. Sure, an archangel blade is only useful for an archangel, but Sam has been carrying it all the same, ever since they’d gotten it.
“I don’t want to kill you, Rowena.”
He’s been thinking that ever since Billie told them their fates. But then, Billie had also told them that Dean’s life would end with Michael destroying the world, and that doesn’t seem very likely anymore.
“Well,” Rowena says after a moment. “That’s reassuring.”
She finally pushes Sam’s hand aside. He lets it fall but nudges the other few washcloths towards her anyway. She doesn’t move to take them.
“You need to change and get the blood off,” Sam says. “It’ll help. Seperate you a little.”
After Gadreel, he’d actually burned the clothes the angel had worn, after standing for something like an hour under the spray of the shower, trying to scorch the crawling feeling off of his skin.
Rowena’s eyes flash, but it’s not with the amusement that he’s gotten used to these last few months. There’s a sharp edge to them that Sam hasn’t seen in a long time.
“I’ve killed people before, Samuel. This is hardly new.”
She’s trying to push past this, but Sam knows firsthand that she won’t be able to. Not like this, anyway.
“That’s not you anymore.”
Or, at least, that’s what he’s hoping. There’s a part of Sam that likes Rowena far more than he cares to admit. He doesn’t want to believe that this experience will set her back, make her the way she used to be.
She narrows her eyes. “I don’t need you to baby me, Samuel.”
Sam doesn’t bother to point out that she could have fled the bunker the moment Michael was dead. Instead, she’d chosen to stay.
“I tried to close the gates of Hell,” Sam says abruptly.
That gets Rowena’s attention. She finally looks him in the eye instead of staring past his face. Sam takes a breath, but he’s already in too deep to stop now.
“I didn’t manage it, and it almost killed me. I woke up in the hospital a few days later.”
Rowena’s brow knits, and despite herself, she leans forward. Sam looks down at the bloodied washcloth to prod himself to keep going.
“Miraculous recovery.” In hindsight, he can’t quite believe that he fell for it. Those kind of wand-wave solutions have never been simple for him. “Turns out, Dean let an angel possess me, called Gadreel.”
His voice still sticks on the last sentence, even all after these years. Time has softened his anger towards Dean--he understands the desperation--but he still can’t quite believe that his brother had gone so far.
“Gadreel killed our friend, Kevin.” Sam closes his eyes, trying to banish the mental image of Kevin’s burnt-out eyes. How similar they’d looked to Maggie’s. “Right in the bunker, actually.”
Rowena stares, the same intensity in her eyes as when she’d asked him when the fear of Lucifer would fade. Sam lets out a breath.
“I like the person that you’ve become,” Sam says before he really realizes what he’s saying. “Michael told us why you said yes.”
Her face softens a little bit. “Don’t go getting a big head now, Samuel.”
The corner of his mouth twitches despite himself. “I know better than that.”
She shrugs the purple jacket off her shoulders and kicks it aside. Sam stands up.
“You can stay as long as you need to.”
Rowena glances up at him. “I--thank you, Samuel.”
He knows that he’s just put a band-aid on a bullet hole, but at least he’s done something.
Cas spends about an hour trying to work out if Jack is still--well. If he’s still Jack. If he’s still half human. At the end of it, he determines nothing except that Jack is more preoccupied with his new pet snake than he is with world domination.
For now, that will have to be enough.
He has a feeling that he knows where he’ll find Dean. So he makes his way toward the war room, where Sam has tried to arrange the bodies as thoughtfully as possible. The pouring rain outside has made it impossible to build proper pyres. The entire room feels like a crypt.
Sure enough, Dean stands in the middle of the room, every muscle locked and tension evident even in the way he holds his head. Cas sucks in a breath. It’s not quite unlike the days of the Mark of Cain--Dean in the middle of a sea of bodies. Then, he shakes the feeling off. Dean needs him present.
“Dean.”
Cas approaches him slowly, not unlike how he might approach a startled animal. Dean lifts the bottle of whiskey in his right hand in greeting. Then, he takes another swig, stumbling a little sideways as he does.
Considering how much it takes to get Dean drunk, Cas doesn’t like where this is headed.
“I told you to let me go,” Dean slurs, his eyes not quite leveling on Cas’s. “I always ask, and you never do.”
“You’d prefer that? Eternity in a box with an archangel?”
Dean nods jerkily. Once he starts, it’s like he can’t stop. Cas stops a few yards away from him, observing quietly.
“All these people.” He waves his hand grandly at the corpses around him, as if Cas has been able to ignore them. “Every last one of them would still be breathing.”
The soldier in Cas--long dormant, but still there--wants to point out that all of these hunters had wanted nothing better than to kill Michael for what he had done to their home. Most of them would probably take solace in the knowledge that they’d died in service of that goal, in a way.
“I let Sammy do it.”
Something cold slithers down Cas’s back at those words. He’s had a front seat to the consequences of that choice. He’d taken Sam’s wounds on to himself, once, had lived in the mind of Sam’s torturer.
“Then you should know better.”
Dean snorts, tips the bottle back for another swig.
“Why won’t you just let me go?”
Cas narrows his eyes. “I’m not having this conversation with you while you’re drunk.”
Dean waves his hand again, more messily this time. “Not drunk.”
Cas briefly considers asking him to walk in a straight line but decides that it’s probably not worth the argument.
“That’s not what we do anymore,” he answers instead.
It’s a cop-out, and not even true, technically, but he can’t help himself. They’ve been trying to put an end to this self-sacrificing circle for something like five years now. Dean laughs, and he must really be drunk, because that snort he never admits to creeps into it. “C’mon, Cas. We both know that’s not true.”
For a horrible second, Cas thinks that Dean knows or suspects what he’s done. When Dean doesn’t elaborate, he lets out a small, private sigh of relief.
“You need to get to bed.”
He closes the gap between them and pries the whiskey out of Dean’s unprotesting fingers. Dean sways sideways into his side, head tipped slightly back.
“I get it,” Dean says as they make their slow way back to his room. “I don’t think I could give you up, either.”
Cas waits for the punchline, the denial, the addition of Sam and Jack to the end of the sentence, but they don’t come.
“I’m just afraid of what that’ll do to the world, Cas,” Dean finishes. “Cause I ain’t saving it if it means losing you.”
It’s still not a conversation Cas is willing to have with a very drunk Dean Winchester, and he’s fairly certain that Dean will forget it (or pretend to forget it) by morning.
“Well then,” he says as he deposits Dean on his bed. “We’ll just have to make sure it never comes to that, then.”
Dean stays silent as Cas attempts to get him arranged comfortably. He doesn’t speak again until Cas’s hand is on the light switch.
“I meant it, Cas.”
Cas lowers his head, his chest aching with something he can’t quite describe. “I know.”