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Dean's been at it for weeks. Baby's never looked so good, honestly. Probably his best work to date. Too bad the reason why harshens the sun-glare off her windshield so much it hurts, tries to blind him. He's gotta turn away.
Seems every time Baby gets beat to hell it's Hell itself that's been the cause: Demons T-boned her with a semi. Demons tossed her about like a leaf in a storm - and Cas may not have done the deed but he sure as hell was complicit in the crime.
Not that there's any sense moanin' about it now; that Cas is gone. Million monsters ate him up from the inside out so Dean can't even chew him out for it. Can't show him how good Baby looks right now either, despite everything that happened to her, everything Cas did.
Can't fix what Cas broke between 'em just as easy, but any chance at that is gone now, too.
And without the Impala to work on what's he 'spose to do? Can't kill God, so-called. And not-Cas said he'd leave 'em alone if they did the same, so.. Hunting seems the thing to do, right? Get back on that horse and wrangle some bad guys.
Except.. there's nothing to hunt.
Godstiel - or whatever the hell they're calling that thing wearing Jimmy's face these days - snapped 'em all straight to Purgatory. Or they're in hiding, and ain't that a pip: Monsters of all kinds all over the States just as afraid as Sam and Dean and Bobby are of the mutant monster-mash claiming the vacancy of God for itself (themselves?). Now they've got nothin' to distract 'em while the new Big Boss makes its way through the continents one madcap miracle at a time.
But Dean's not one for being idle, so there's still one thing left to do.
He'll start with the classics, obviously. Figure out which old girls could make the most of the parts already in the lot. Settle on a few models to switch between while he figures out what else needs to be tracked down, ordered and delivered.
Maybe this is what he'll do now. Not just today, or next week, but for the foreseeable future (however not-so-far-off that shifty horizon may be).
He'll do the work he can do. He'll fix cars, because cars can take new parts and borrowed parts, and they can be salvaged from the scrap heap. Put the time and skill into it and they can be restored to their former glory, or maybe something even better.
Dean can't fix everything that's broke, everything of his that's been damaged or everything he's had a hand in screwin' up somewhere along the line.
But this he can do.
So, until something else comes along - a case or a clue or a Cas-shaped confrontation - this is exactly what he's gonna do.
* * *
He's fine.
Well, that might be stretching it. Sam's alive, at the very least.
He's sleeping pretty well, which seems like nothing short of a miracle. Although, miracles are in strange supply these days. There are no dreams, no nightmares, no nothing - and he'll gladly take a dreamless sleep over one edged in Hellfire. Whatever Dean and Bobby did, whatever old or new magic they managed to cobble together for a cure, it seems to be doing the trick.
First it was only an hour or so, here and there, staggered and tiring in its own right. Now it's six hours at least, every night like normal. Or some familiar concept of normal. Then again, maybe everything they consider 'normal' is due for re-evaluation, for God walks the earth.
His memories from Hell aren't.. gone, exactly, but they're no longer eclipsing the rest of his mind. He can still feel them, nestled in his subconsciousness, but they're dormant. Inactive. A snapshot of a subreality filed away for review (not likely to happen any time soon) but which no longer draw power from his soul or torment his psyche - which is what had happened: fear and pain transmuting into a second power feed, which in turn strengthened the nature of the hallucinations, seizing control of Sam's reality.
But, no more. Like he said, he's.. fine.
It's not without conditions, understandably, because it's not so much a 'cure' as an ongoing treatment. The heady decoction - and he hesitates to call it a 'potion', though that does seem to be the most appropriate term - helping him along needs to be freshly brewed every seven days and drank on an empty stomach (a personal preference, considering what comes after - though sleep swiftly follows, which seems a small but notable blessing, or..). The ingredients don't seem anything special, so the magic ingredient must be in the.. well, in the magic. The incantation and the precise brewing process.
As for everything else he's relieved there's nothing to hunt, for right now. He's not sure he could handle it physically. Generally speaking he feels queasy and light-headed much of the time - although that, too, has been easing. A little over a month and he can feel his body regaining strength as his mind regains control. It's slow-going, but it is going.
There's one other notable change: his senses.
They fluctuate between intensified and impaired. Everything from vision and olfactory to balance and pain reception - easy to imagine the affects that has on simple daily tasks.
Of a morning toothpaste is overwhelming, only to have Dean's three-alarm chilli be tasteless by nightfall. Bobby's staircase is a life-or-death hazard at breakfast, but the towers of books that line the halls and walls and interrupt every floorspace are all too-easy to navigate with his eyes closed by sundown. Proximity to the radiator could result in second-degree burns if he's not visually careful, caused by either reduced thermoception or nocioception. And time spent out in the elements can burn him all the same, with summer's UV rays having ten times the impact on his oversensitised skin, not to mention the sun practically blinding him on photophobic days.
And Sam's never been one to sleep in the nude but the rough fibres of all of his clothes are unbearable on allodynic nights (not that lying naked on those old flannel sheets is any better, but at least the material is only on one side of his body).
Dean had noticed something was out of sorts a couple days after brewing the first batch of potion; that Sam's stumbling over familiar lumps in the carpeting, loss of balance from the kitchen to the couch, newfound aversion to dental care, sudden inability to read antique lettering, and his intermittent lack of working tastebuds and the contrasting hypergeusia, were all signs pointing towards a problem.
Sam would've said something first, but Dean beat him to it (apparently it was the four spoons of sugar in his coffee that cemented it - sugar which turned out to be salt; not that he could taste either one at the time).
Two hours and a pair of maxed-out old credit cards later, they were geared up: a range of prescription and precision-tinted eyewear, triple-protective UVA, UVB and UVC sunglasses, Mongolian cashmere blankets and sweaters (he'd managed to talk Dean out of the onesie recommended on Amazon, just barely), organic bamboo lyocell bedding, an excessive amount of Tiger Balm, fragrance-free soaps, flavourless toothpaste, industrial quality earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones - just to name a few.
All with expedited shipping.
The headphones Dean had questioned the necessity of, what with the earplugs and Sam's regular old earbuds, but Sam insisted - not citing the full truth as to why he needed them, merely hoping his emphatic base reasoning would be persuasive enough: What if the foam of the earplugs doesn't conform to my ear canal, Dean? You know how they are. What if they fit but it's not enough to block out the ambient noise of the world? Sleep-deprivation isn't conducive to mental stability. Numerous studies have shown.. - at which point Dean conceded, if only to spare himself a scientific rhetoric, adding the Bose to their cart while surreptitiously sliding Sam's coffee mug out of reach.
Of all the items in their online haul, Sam was looking forward to those headphones in particular. He was especially relieved when they arrived two days later - mere hours before an onset of hyperacusis, which happened to coincide with Dean taking some power tools to a beat-up old Mustang.
Sam loves his brother. And as far as coping mechanisms go, rebuilding something sure beats destroying it. But when he can hear a bolt drop from a hundred yards away it's only been thanks to some ingenious padding and a couple of sleeping pills that he was previously able to drown out the noise of Dean working out his frustrations on the Impala.
He didn't tell Dean he could hear every sound as if it were right outside his door, for obvious reasons. With everything that happened with Cas, everything that's still happening, the last thing Dean needs is to turn to the bottle or the nearest bar. That's the last thing Sam wants for his brother.
Fortunately, 'sensitive ear days', as Dean calls them, are few and far between compared to the rest - however unpredictable their onset may still be. Even so, despite everything, it's a comfort to know he'll be able to sleep past sunrise without a cacophony of sound parading through his ear canals from the other end of the scrapyard.
It's late, and Sam's exhausted.
Today was the first day without a hint of nausea from the potion, and the headaches accompanying his sensory fluctuations finally ceased completely after having eased off two weeks back. His energy reserves are sitting at around seventy five percent, which is a huge improvement from the less than twenty percent he had when he first woke up after.. well, before his first dose of the potion, before it really started to work its magic. In any case, all the sensory yo-yo-ing takes its toll, so it's no wonder he needs no help falling asleep come nightfall.
After a hyposmic morning and a mostly bearable hyperosmic day, there finally comes that everynight lull in the sensory rollercoaster as he gets ready for bed. The new bedding, sleep clothes - oh, and a memory foam mattress as well - are all precautionary measures; he still doesn't know what senses will go wild when, so he prepares for all eventualities: Tiger Balm and odour-filter mask sit alongside his charged pair of wireless Bose, all waiting to be called into action from the bedside table. Blackout curtains are fitted to all the windows in Bobby's house, and incandescent lightbulbs fitted in every room - on a dimmer, thanks to Dean's own handiwork.
Not knowing if his eyes or ears will want to murder his phone for waking him he foregoes the alarm and simply drinks the two glasses of water required to wake him naturally, a reasonable hour after sunrise.
He has a system and it works. With Dean and Bobby helping him through each day and with the potion slowly taking that need away as he regains his psychological and physical strength, if things keep advancing as well as they have been, the end is in sight.
He's half-beneath the covers when he decides it might be best to put the earplugs in now; they'll save him from a potentially unpleasant wake-up call in the middle of the night, from any number of worldly noises—when a high-pitch tone deafens him out of nowhere, ears popping with the sound, room spinning.
Palms pressed tight to his ears and suddenly horizontal, he reaches for the Bose―when the tone cuts out as abruptly as it had cut in. The room stills. Just that one brief moment of chaos before everything settles and is.. fine, apparently?
His hearing isn't so quick to follow. The background noise of the world comes to him garbled and muted, like he's underwater. Maybe his eardrums have burst? Before he can think to panic about a possible non-temporary loss of hearing, the watered distortion thins and the sounds dry out.
A cupboard door opening; softly closing. A sniffle, a swallow, a shift of clothing against the kitchen counter - a piece of cloth catching on that chip in the counter edge near the coffee-maker; a sigh.. Crap. He knows that sound, that sigh. Knows it so well his stomach drops down into the puddle of potion still working its way through his digestive tract.
That's Dean. He can hear Dean - from two hallways down and away through the sound-proofed door of his room. Those are definitely Dean's Timberlands on the linoleum downstairs, except.. it doesn't hurt to hear it, which is new and intriguing and raising questions his tired body doesn't want to ask right now. He continues laying still, listening instead.
Dean's moving quietly - the kind of soft-stepping of someone who either doesn't want to disturb or doesn't want to be heard, but the sounds are crisp and obvious to Sam's heightened ears: out the back door, over the gravel, gnats throwing themselves against the zapper, Impala door barely whispering a creak as it opens (the rear left door, and maybe his chest swells with a small wave of pride at recognizing that) but he hears it loud and clear anyway.
His hyperacusis has never been like this before. His sensory changes up till now have been an extreme nuisance, not an improvement. But somehow this feels.. manageable.
He doesn't need to block the input in any way; it's not painful or overwhelming. Sound is.. amplified, but not all-encompassing. And while he can hear the slow drip of the bathroom faucet in the upstairs bathroom and what his ear knows is Bobby shuffling around in his slippers, he finds he can narrow the focus of his ear just by trying, like an aural squint.
The distinct impact of water droplets on porcelain fades along with the rubber soles of Bobby's well-worn slippers against the floorboards down the hall.
Sam hones his ear: downstairs, outside, in the carport adjoining the north wall of the house, he hears his brother's voice - in recorded form - along with the shift of leather in the Impala's back seat, and the tilt and swim of a liquid in an angular bottle.
There are definitely things about his brother's life Sam doesn't want to know and definitely never wants to hear (again, in some cases). Some of it's actually scarring and best averted (because he has enough scars as it is), but some of it's simply too personal.
It's not about keeping secrets. It's about respecting privacy. Dean wouldn't want him - or anyone - to know certain things about him, to eavesdrop on his private thoughts, essentially. Because from the aural evidence, Sam knows (or at least, he can make an educated guess) one thing his brother is thinking (or feeling) is that he misses Cas.
* * *
It's stupid. Dean doesn't know why he kept it, but he did. And.. maybe he's glad. Because Cas is long-fuckin'-gone no matter what Sam and Bobby say - but he's still right here. And Dean can't help watchin', can't help hearin', can't help but loop the damn thing 'til his half bottle of jack is good n' drained and he can't see straight enough to make out Cas' face - but he knows it, can see it clear on the inside of his lids. And Cas' damn voice is one he'll never forget, even for trying. Because no human could possibly sound like that. None could even come close.
"What are you doing?"
"Makin' a movie." If the thought of Sam piping up with some nerd-alert comment or even freakin' looking at Dean with any hint of a joke right now hits him where it hurts, well. No-one's the wiser if he just shoves that feeling away - even if Cas is staring right at him. "Just stand there n' look pretty." The phone pans to Cas' right, capturing the levelled gas station beyond the police barricade.
Cas had already explained what happened here, sure. But it can't hurt to have a little Angel A-bomb-aftermath on tape for the future. Never know when this sorta thing might come in handy. Best to keep it under the radar, too, just in case Raphael's got eyes nearby.
Or, whatever. Any excuse to get Castiel - badass Angel of the Lord - looking very much out of his element (which is kinda perfect) as he holds the pose Dean helped him strike: one hand up, fingers paired with space between. If anyone sees them they'll just think they're a couple of conspiracy nutjobs.
It's freakin' ridiculous. But sometimes in the middle of do-or-die it's this kinda stupid crap that's necessary just to keep folks sane. It's putting a smile on Dean's dial, anyway.
He zooms in on the blast shadow for a moment before lowering his phone with a signal to Cas. "Alright Nimoy, that's a wrap."
"I.. don't understand that reference."
And if a certain someone were here right now Dean wouldn't've even made the reference. Hell, he wouldn't've chosen Spock in the first place. There're just some things you don't want your little brother knowing about you because those things have the potential to wind up as ammo for future battles in a time-honoured prank war.
But.. he's not here, so.. there's no use hiding.
"Tell ya what. When all this is over we're gonna have ourselves a little Star Trek marathon." They begin the short walk back to Baby, Cas falling into step beside him. "We'll start with the original, o' course. And I know you don't need to sleep, but probably still a good idea to make a week of it, spread 'em out a bit."
"What exactly is, Star Trek?"
Coming to a stop at Baby's passenger side Dean takes a breath, considering. He faces Cas head-on, "It's one of the greatest television shows ever made―" and raises his finger in warning, "―and if you ever tell anyone I said that, I will deny it." 'Nuf said.
Whatever Cas was gonna say next reroutes when something between them catches his eye, steals his attention. "Is that red light a warning of some kind?"
Following his gaze down, Dean finds it fixed on the phone in his hand - which is still recording. "Sonuva―"
The clip cuts out―only to cut right back in a half second later as it plays again from the beginning.
Head tipped back, eyes loose on the Impala's dark ceiling, he can see Cas standing in that dead patch of grass, squinting against the sun.
What was with that damn squint, anyway? Not like he needed to do it..
As interrogations go, it's not the first thing Dean'd ask if he got the chance. And if things were different, if things weren't so screwed to hell and they had another shot, maybe he'd extend that invite again, set aside a few days to educate a millenia-old celestial being on the genius of one Gene Roddenberry.
Still not top priority though.
The only question Dean needs answered is why that stubborn ass of an Angel didn't come to him for help, why he joined forces with the damn King of Hell, why he chose a freakin' demon over a friend - friends don't pull that kinda crap!
In the end, the Apple Pie Life wasn't worth the trade. Fuck.. Dean knew that from the jump. It was hard enough knowing Sam was sulfer-side all that time, and then to come out of it learning he was actually topside and fuckin' soulless - but that ain't Sam's fault. Fact is, Cas had every opportunity to talk to Dean, to ask for help - and Dean would've, in a heartbeat.
It's not like he told Cas never to stop by. The guy took off before he could tell him it wasn't outta the question. And the whole lack-of-prayin' thing was only Dean's choice since he didn't need Cas, didn't wanna bother him.
But finding out Cas needed him, and never said..
The empty bottle drops into the footwell, recorded voices rambling, a tight fist pressing the warmed case of the phone to his forehead hard enough to leave marks.
Cas made a choice. It was the wrong damn one, but it was his to make. Dean couldn't've known. This is on Cas.
So why does he feel like he failed him?
It was one damn thing after another: Cas steered clear of Dean, chose the darkest path to wander down. A sheep heading for slaughter thinkin' it's freedom. Dean could've helped steer him straight.
First Dean, then Sam, followed by a wayward Angel on the highway to Hell.
Bad decisions are catching.
"... When all this is over …"
It is over.
It's done. Cas brought his own hide to the Devil's market and monsters took their fill. Now they all gotta live with the consequences, gotta live 'em without Cas, and Dean's gotta live with knowing he could've saved him. If only he'd been given the chance.
But this life ain't about giving. It takes, and it breaks, and sometimes it even dares you to care - more than you wanted to, more than you ever thought possible. It shows you things you want that you know you can't have. Doesn't mean you want 'em any less.
Helluva prank. But as any Hunter worth their salt knows, this is a cruel world.
There's no comin' back from this, from what Cas did to himself. Maybe they can take down this mutant-God—maybe. They gotta try, at least, because that's what they do: find a way, somehow, no matter what, right? Pull a miracle outta their ass in the final play. That's what they do best.
But for right now Dean's got no idea how they'll manage this one. Sam's on the mend, sure, but they're still down a man.
Things are different now. Things are never gonna be the same again.