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He can feel Crowley’s touch on his Blade. It scrapes against his bones and pricks at his nerves. He’s actually trying to use it. He dares to touch what belongs to Dean. He’ll pay for it. Not now, maybe, but soon, or eventually. Dean is finding that time doesn’t really matter to him anymore. Intellectually he knows how long it’s been since he woke on that bed, since he started howling at the moon. Realistically it doesn’t matter. It could have been a day, it could have been a millennia. Time holds no constraints for him now, and so it holds no real meaning.
As much as he abhors Crowley’s vicarious touch, he knows it’s futile. Without Dean, his Blade is just a club. A crude, somewhat disagreeable club. It’s not that his Blade is intelligent in itself; it’s just that it has a way of resisting people who don’t have the mark. A blow might go askew of where it’s aimed, or maybe somewhere between the thrust and the meeting of flesh it might decide to soften, or adopt the consistency of the dust it would have long been turned to, had it been a normal hunk of bone.
There are times when Dean’s Blade retains its sharpness in the wrong hands. Soon Crowley will have the wounds to show for it. Because Dean’s Blade craves the taste of flesh, and any flesh that isn’t Dean’s, that Dean hasn’t forbidden it from rending, well, it’s fair game. His Blade likes to wound, but not in a casual way. It won’t nick at Crowley’s arms, scrape at his flesh. It’ll be patient. It’ll wait until he rests it against his knee, or taps it on the inside of his arm. Stows it in a jacket, within reach of his heart. And then it’ll gouge, it’ll hobble, it’ll kill, perhaps, if it gets the chance.
*
Sam looks back at Dean. He looks unusually calm. Serene in a way that his brother is usually not. Dean always has some emotion twitching faintly across his face. Is always thinking about something, good or bad, although lately it’s been bad more often that good. This blankness, this emptiness, it’s not Dean. Sam has to keep reminding himself. This thing sits in Dean’s car and it looks like Dean and sometimes it even sounds like Dean, but it isn’t. He has to draw that dividing line, has to remind himself to look at the placid smoothness of that face and remember. He has to stop automatically relaxing his guard because his brother is in the back of the car.
It’s a thin line Sam treads. Not Dean, don’t relax, don’t let down your guard. Still Dean, don’t gank him, don’t hurt him in ways he can’t recover from.
Sam knows from his experience with Crowley that every evil thing Dean did will come back to him i-when he’s healed. He doesn’t know what kind of man Crowley was before his demonization. He knows what kind of man Dean was. A man who blamed himself for everything. He’ll have a few more whips to scourge himself with now, when they get him back.
*
The further away from his Blade Dean gets, the harder it is to think. His Blade and the mark seem to operate in some kind of loop, bloody, vengeful energy cycling down his arm into the bone and back again into his flesh. Now that energy hisses and sputters through his flesh, sparking wildly in places it shouldn’t as it searches for an exit.
He’s never had this before, even when he’s shed his Blade to sleep with waitresses, waiters, triplets, any willing body. Maybe it’s a distance thing. Maybe it’s these damn cuffs. He feels a vicious buzzing around his eyes and blinks rapidly. He can feel them shuttering from green to black, green to black, green to black as the static fizzles in his eyeballs and tries to find a weakness, a point of escape. He focuses, corrals the sparks, converges them in the thin skin of his wrists, just under the cuffs. A sharp tang and a wisp of smoke stop him. Sam is going to notice if the car mysteriously fills up with smoke and he’s already suspicious. Experiments can wait until Dean’s tied up all alone in the dungeon.
*
Castiel just wants to sleep. He has never experienced weariness like this before. Just like he’d never experienced weariness like he felt an hour ago, or two hours before that. Every minute brings new, previously unplumbed depths of tiredness. It’s the reason he spent so long in bed, before Hannah came to call on him. He knows there are two main components that make up his exhaustion. Can’t tell which parts are grief and which parts are poisonous, rotting grace. He figures it’s probably around equal. Figures they’re feeding on each other. An endless feedback loop of you’re fucked.
He swears now. He notices it creep in. All that junk Metatron stuffed into his head. It has an impact. He now recognises that some of his patterns of speaking are strange, some of his behaviours not normal. He tries to stop them from fading though. He’s starting to understand a bit more about human identity. These mistakes and oddities are a part of what makes him Cas, friend of Dean and Sam. Not Castiel, reprogrammable angel of the lord.
Hannah is driving and she thinks he’s asleep. He should be, but as much as he wants sleep, he’s also terrified of it. It is nothing. And that is what he is to be shortly. Angels don’t have souls. Angels don’t go to heaven, or at least, not when they die. They simply cease to exist. Sleeping feels like practice. Sleeping feels like he might not wake up again. He deserves that. He will accept that. Doesn’t mean he wants that.
He wants to see Sam and give him a hug and tell him he’s sorry. He wants to see Dean, the real Dean, not some twisted up consequence of trying to do the right thing and failing to predict the aftermath. He wants to make him laugh; he wants to be made to smile. It’s not a monumental dying wish. It’s not asking the world. It’s just something small, something for him. He knows he won’t get it.
He knows what awaits him, where Dean and Sam are. He even knows what it’s called now. He knows what it felt like, to all these thousands of characters whose lives were recently delivered into his memory. He even suspects he knows what heartbreak feels like himself.
He tried to harden his heart, but he doesn’t have the strength. He can’t even stop the tears as they come. But at least they come silently. He thanks his absent Father for small miracles. He’s used up all his big ones, this small one even is probably more than he deserves.
*
Dean is stuck, but he won’t be for long. The devil’s trap might have the power to enclose him, but it doesn’t have the power to do much else. The cuffs that Sam left on him do, unfortunately. Little brother is being more cautious than Dean hoped, less cautious than he expected. He was expecting the full chains and manacles shebang. All he gets is a trap and some handcuffs.
The static in Dean’s veins has been building, crackling pops ricocheting through his blood. He wants to wait though, wants to make sure there’s enough spark, so he’s patient. Well, as patient as demon’s get. It’s part of their make up to just take something when they want it, do something when they have the urge. Caution and patience are not stitched into their psyche.
Dean waits until the waiting itself becomes unbearable and then he corrals the static into his wrists, condenses it there, waits to see what happens. There’s no explosion, no obvious destructive force. There’s just an acrid smell, something he is used to by now, and a dribble of smoke. It doesn’t stay a dribble, it graduates to a stream, a gush, and finally a cascade. And then there’s a metallic click as the cuffs fall to the floor.
He examines the cuffs- see’s that the devil’s trap has not been melted off as he expected. It’s still there, but it’s different. Not in look maybe, but in intent. It’s like the anti-possession tattoo on his chest. It’s corrupted. It’s an invitation.
He stows the cuffs in his pocket, a vague idea forming somewhere in the back of his mind. He leaves it to his subconscious to ferment into something solid, and he turns his attentions to the task at hand.
His eyes slick over black and he examines the trap through demon eyes. He’s found that devil’s traps glow, different sections of them shining different colours. Bright white where they’re strongest, fading down to greys and blacks where they’re weaker. He doesn’t think that other demons have this skill. He’s subtly tested the waters with Crowley, watched him walk into a trap that was hidden under a carpet but glowed so bright he thought he was going to go blind. This skill is all Dean. Maybe it comes from his familiarity with the things in life. Maybe all demons get a special power based on their mortal exploits, maybe he’s just special.
There are a few spots of light grey in this devil’s trap- a line that’s a little thinner than it could be, a symbol that’s almost misshapen, but he doesn’t see any glaringly usable flaws. The Men of Letters did their job well. It doesn’t matter though, because he has other methods. He brings his foot down on the weakest point and when he lifts it there’s a tiny fracture in the concrete. It’s small, but it’s a start, the area around it turning a few shades darker. He stomps again and again until there’s a dark grey patch in the shape of his boot print. The next time his foot meets the floor it breaks through the concrete and the bright white lines of the trap fizzle out and fade to black, their power broken.
Dean saunters out of the trap, looking around the room for something to use as a weapon. He spots an axe. He hefts it up, swinging it around in a few wide circles and he grins. He’s going to have so much fun.