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When the first surge of the undead lunges, Dean’s brain shuts off. His world narrows to yellowed teeth and snarling mouths, to the groaning complaints of his bad shoulder, to the flashes of Cas’s flickering Grace.
Dean wonders, wildly, if they’ve faded to commercial yet.
“No!” he hears Cas shout.
Dean’s stomach lurches as he whirls around, expecting to see Sammy on the ground, punishment for taking that final, desperate step. To his relief, his brother is still on his feet, favoring his gunshot side but still moving fluidly.
Another anguished noise from Cas redirects Dean’s attention back to him. He’s headed for Jack’s body--and so are a handful of ghouls.
“No!” Cas shouts again.
He rips the first ghoul off of Jack’s chest and hurls it as far as he can go.
“Sammy!” Dean orders. “Get to the car!”
His brother nods, once, and starts to wade back towards the Impala, knocking all kinds of zombies out of his way. Dean takes off toward Cas.
“We’ve gotta go!”
He grabs Cas by the shoulder and hauls him around to face him, but Cas’s eyes won’t focus on his face. He’s somewhere very far away.
“Cas!”
Cas shrugs him off. The slight blue glow in his eye is all the warning Dean gets before a shivery blast of Cas’s Grace sends the last two ghouls trying to get at Jack blasting backwards.
“I’m not leaving him!”
Dean swears. “All right. I’ve got your back.”
Instinct takes over. It’s disturbingly like Purgatory--him and Cas, fighting off a horde. Just another thing to thank Chuck for later.
Cas scoops Jack’s body off the groud, gentle even as he blasts another renvant away with an icy rush of power.
“Car!”
They slog their way over to the Impala just in time to see Sam go down only a few feet away from his goal, his head smacking against a tombstone hard enough for Dean to hear it.
He thinks of Chuck’s annoyed face, of Nick and the rock, of how Sam’s always been Abel.
“I’ve got him.”
Cas places Jack into Dean’s arms, careful and smooth even as he rushes. Dean throws open the backseat and all but tosses Jack’s body inside. One of the zombies gets a hand inside, and Dean takes care of it by slamming the door shut as hard as he can.
He’s just managed to clamber into the Impala when Cas arrives with one of Sam’s long arms slung around his shoulders. There isn’t time to force the passenger side door open, so Cas squeezes both himself and Sam into the back.
As soon as the door shuts, Dean takes off.
An hour later, he finally deems it safe enough to pull over long enough for Cas to clamber into the front seat. Sam stays in the back, eyes worryingly glassy, one of Jack’s hands clutched in his.
When they get back to the bunker, it takes quite a lot of coaxing to get him to let go.
“Easy there, Sammy,”
One quick nod sends Cas scrambling off towards the little emergency room that Dean’s set up in the back of the bunker. With the way Cas’s hands had been shaking in the car, Dean knows that there’s little chance he’ll be able to do anything for Sam’s concussion tonight.
Speaking of which.
“Eyes open.”
Obediently, Sam fixes him with a wide-eyed stare, stretched wide enough for Dean to determine that he’ll probably have a headache to rival his biggest hangover, but he’ll live. Well. As long as the ugly black bullet hole in his shoulder doesn’t kill him, anyway. He wouldn’t put it past Chuck.
“All right. Come on.”
He slings one of Sam’s arms over his shoulder and half drags, half guides his brother towards his room. With Cas getting the kit--Sammy has a nasty looking bite on his left elbow--there’s no point putting him anywhere else.
As Dean is settling him into bed, Sam blinks slowly at him.
“It’s all a rat race.”
Dean shoves the edge of the comforter under Sam’s mattress. It’ll make it harder for his concussion-addled brain to clamber out in the middle of the night. Not that Dean will be leaving him alone tonight.
“Yeah, okay, whatever you say, Ponyboy.”
Sam shakes his head. “That’s not a Ponyboy quote. Did you even read that book?”
Dean narrows his eyes at him. “When you were in middle school. You had one of those migraines you used to get when you were a kid--the kind where the words would get all wobbly, remember? There was a book report due the next day, so you made me read you the whole thing. And then I handwrote the sucker for you while you dictated.”
But that’s not the point.
“What’s a rat race, Sam?”
Sam’s eyes grow a little distant, and Dean can’t tell if it’s the concussion or the thought itself. He’s not sure which is worse, because he thinks he knows where Sam is going with this one, and he has no idea how to answer.
“Our lives,” Sam says with a vague motion of his arm that quite nearly smacks Dean in the face as he leans over to check out Sam’s elbow again. “He was just timing us, the whole time. How fast can they save the world this go-around?”
Dean opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. “We made choices.”
Sam makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat. “The rat makes choices, too. Except there’s still only one exit. Everything else is just wrong turns.”
He flops back to stare at the ceiling. Dean lowers himself to sit on the edge of his brother’s bed, giving Sam a nudge to move over just enough for him to fit.
“I’ve taken a lot of wrong turns.”
Dean is not allowing self-deprecation. Not when they’ve just learned that Chuck has been yanking on the strings all this time.
“You made the best choices you could,” he says staunchly, “and that’s that. Rest up. I’m gonna get you some soup.”
But as Dean hurries out of the room, he can’t shake the thought from his head. Typical Sammy. Of course he would tangle Dean up in the dumb philosophy of this stupid, shitty situation.
He runs into Cas in the hallway, and before the angel can maneuver around him to tend to Sam, Dean catches him by the sleeve.
“Not too deep,” he says of the bite, tugging Cas along with him to the kitchen. “He’ll live for a few more minutes.”
Cas takes a seat at the counter as Dean bustles around looking for the Campbells. He could have sworn that Mom--was that part of Chuck’s plan, too?--had bought some a week or so ago. He finally finds it tucks away in the corner where he usually puts the oil. Of course she hadn’t known where to put it.
“Something is on your mind.”
Dean snorts. “Yeah. Something. ”
Somehow, it doesn’t feel like that word cuts it.
Cas sits quietly as he explains the metaphor, which includes a brief explanation of what the hell The Outsiders is, because Cas still doesn’t quite get pop culture. Turns out that knowing the plots of hundreds of movies doesn’t do you much good when it comes to references.
“So it’s like Sammy said,” he finishes. “We’re taking all these turns, but what does it matter if he controls the exit? ”
He pours the heated soup out into a bowl and gives it a few good stirs so that it’s not unevenly heated. When Sam is concussed, that’s exactly the sort of thing he bitches about.
“Only if you’re thinking like a rat.”
“What?”
Cas scoops up the antiseptic and the bandages and follows Dean down the hall back to Sam’s room.
“The rat chooses left or right. But you’re not a rat. You can climb out of the maze entirely. Go backwards. Decide not to run the race at all.” He smiles at that, the gummy kind that Dean doesn’t see all that often and certainly didn’t expect to see tonight. “He may give us options, Dean, but that doesn’t mean we have to take them.”
Dean raises his eyebrows at that. “You think?”
“I do,” Cas says. Then, the smile fading somewhat, “I have to.”
Yeah, well.
Dean has to, too.