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One
It’s a few days after Jess’ death and Sam needs a shower. Hell, he needs a shower and a shave, he decides. Dean is out hustling pool, trying to scrounge up enough money to keep them in motel rooms and out of the impala; they’re both too old and too tall to comfortably sleep while parked at a rest stop anymore. His apartment had burned down with his razor still in it, so he digs through Dean’s duffle bag to steal borrow his. Before he can find the familiar leather toiletry bag Dean stole from a goodwill in Tucson, Arizona in 1996, his fingers close around a firm cylindrical object. Curiously, he pulls it out, hoping he hasn’t just found his brother’s secret sex toy.
When he pulls it out, he blinks in surprise.
It’s a folding cane.
It’s not a surprise to him that his brother needs a cane- shit, he’s probably needed one for years, but it is surprising that Dean is actually using one. He’s not pretending he’s fine when he’s clearly in pain or brushing off a dislocated kneecap as nothing more than a twist.
It scares him. Suddenly, Sam is ten and he’s watching as his brother throws up from the pain of a dislocated rib. He’s twelve and watching in horror as Dean dislocates his hip simply by rolling over too quickly in bed. He’s six and sees his brother bleed through towel after towel from what should have been merely a scratch from where he brushed against the windowsill wrong.
Suddenly, Sam is less afraid of the demon that killed his mother and much more afraid of the monster she passed down to Dean through faulty DNA.
Two
The day after their wendigo hunt, Sam understands the catalyst for the cane. He and his brother had been on the move for days, and Sam had felt confused when he watched as Dean ran and hiked and generally seemed okay. To an outsider, he looked the picture of health, so long as you believed Dean when he said a fall was because of a stray rock and not because of an abused hip buckling beneath him. Once the balloon of adrenaline popped, though, it was clear Dean could not have managed even the simplest of task without an aid.
Sam watches as his brother tries to get out of bed and fails before resigning himself to drag his body up by using the bedside table as leverage. Once he’s up, Dean leans on a chair, then the bedpost, then the wall, struggling to keep a grip on the slick paint. “Here.” Sam says softly, holding out his brother’s cane.
Dean blinks and takes it wordlessly. There’s not so much as a grunt of gratitude from him, but Sam’s fine with that. Dean wants to take this in true Winchester fashion and not talk about it, and for once, Sam obliges without a fight.
Three
They’re at Bobby’s and their dad is dead and Sam still can’t help but still be a little mad at their father.
“I wish Dad was a better haggler.” He tells Bobby as they sit inside, drinking beer until it hits noon and they can rationalize breaking into the bourbon.
Dean’s outside, rebuilding the Impala and pretending he’s using the ice in the cooler next to him to keep his beer cold and not to plunge his swollen fingers into periodically when the pain gets to be too much.
“What makes you say that?” Bobby asks, as if he hasn’t the faintest idea.
The careful way Bobby had rounded the corners of all the furniture of Sam and Dean’s room when they were young was more than enough for Sam to know Bobby was being rhetorical. “It’s getting worse.” Sam replies.
Bobby looks thoughtfully out the window. “I got a few doctor friends.” He muses. “Maybe they could get him on painkillers or something.”
Sam exhales. “He’d need an opioid to even make a dent in it.” He sips his beer slowly. “He gets foggy on them; he’d probably argue he’s too young to be addicted to something.”
They snort halfheartedly; it’s half-past ten and Dean’s two thirds deep into a six-pack already. “Foggy’s gotta be a hell of a lot better than whatever he is now.” Bobby replies.
“I just don’t get why he always has to be the unlucky one.” Sam says, quietly. At least if he were the broken half, he could quietly retire from hunting and go to the cardiologists and physiotherapists his brother would never even consider. If it were him who had the messed-up genes, his brother could be hunting nonstop.
At least if he were the unlucky one, he wouldn’t have to go through the pain of seeing his brother destroyed by the one monster they couldn’t kill.
“Sam, your whole family is the unlucky one.” Bobby retorts, breaking him out of his reverie.
They pour the first round of bourbon early that day.
Four
The Dean that comes back from hell is not the same Dean that Sam buried in a pine coffin.
Somewhere between being eaten by hellhounds and shedding his wooden onesie, Dean has irrevocably changed.
Sam finds himself hoping, for a few moments as he hugs his brother, that Dean just might be undead, rather than alive. Maybe, just maybe, they’ve had a lucky break and Dean no longer has to deal with the more unpleasant side effects of being alive. It’s a stupid thought, not only because when have they ever had anything lucky happen, but also because being undead tends to come with a lot of equally unpleasant side effects like an insatiable urge for human blood. It’s a nice thought, nonetheless.
The second Sam sees the damage the broken mirror did to his brother, the gouges painting him red, he knows better.
Later, Dean talks of the angel he met skeptically. For Sam, this is just the piece of hope he needed. Later that night, Dean dreams of hell and wakes up thrashing and screaming. As Sam reduces his brother’s dislocated should with nary a comment, he understands Deans hesitation to trust Castiel.
Afterall, why bring Dean back to life just to leave him with the parasite of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome still attached?
Five
There are wheelchair tracks crisscrossing Bobby’s carpet and they’re not made by Dean.
How fucked up, Sam thinks one night after he’s had more than his standard issue of liquor, that he would have thought he’d see his own brother in a wheelchair long before he saw Bobby in one.
Dean has gone to bed after drinking himself into a stupor, and Bobby sits in the corner, searching for a way to power up Castiel. The angel himself is idly drinking a cup of black coffee, murmuring about what the molecules tell him about weather patterns in Sumatra. “Why is healing so difficult for angels?” Sam finally asks, slamming down another useless book. He might not be drunk yet, but he’s slowly approaching tipsy and the liquor burns like courage in his veins. “Shouldn’t that be like, your default?”
“I am a soldier above all else.” Castiel says wearily. “And grace is not an infinite resource. Generally speaking, in terms of miracles though, healing is one of the easier arts.” He sips his coffee, tasting the rain that fell on the forty-third day of the bean’s growing. “That’s why there are so many biblical tales of the reversal of illness and only one of being turned to salt.”
Sam finishes his beer and pauses before asking the question that’s been burning within for a year’s time. “Is that why you didn’t cure Dean when you pulled him out of hell?”
Castiel places his mug down gently. “DNA is a difficult thing.” He responds carefully. “A little bit of grace in the wrong place can cause a person to mutate into something more closely resembling a snail than a human. I was born to fight. Someone like Raphael, an angel born to heal, might be able to carefully remove the abnormalities causing your brothers defective collagen but even then, it would be risky.”
“So you’re telling me my brother is more likely to be cured by CRISPR than angels?” Sam snorts, picking up another book that probably should have been thrown out in the Victorian years. “Sounds like a load of horse shit.”
“The lord works…” Castiel starts.
Sam cuts him off. “Don’t you dare say mysterious ways.”
Castiel doesn’t. Instead, he picks a book from the stack on the table and begins to read.
Sam huffs at the text in front of him. He’s gonna need another beer.
Plus One
Sam makes Dean promise he’ll go find Lisa and live the life he deserves. Makes him promise to be the father Ben needs and that the most excitement in his life needs to be college football. And Dean does. It’s a few days before he says yes to Lucifer and instead of saying his goodbyes or getting drunk Sam finds himself at the library printing off pages of documents on pain management and preventative cardiac care. He highlights the important parts and brings it back to the motel room.
“So,” he tells his brother. “this is how we’re going to keep you as healthy as possible. I don’t want you just to survive when I’m gone. I want you to live.”
And if the last thing Sam thinks as he jumps into the pit is how glad he is Dean finally gets a shot at normalcy, well, no one is none the wiser.
Plus Two
Somehow, after leaving the strip club, Dean ends up kissing Castiel. They’re in an alleyway and Dean is getting desperate for air when the angel pulls away. “Let’s go somewhere a bit more private.” Cas says huskily, grasping Dean’s shoulders firmly.
In an instance, they’re in a dimly lit room with nary a window. The walls are such a deep blue they look almost black, and the only furniture in the room is a California king bed. “Wow.” Dean jokes. “Didn’t peg you as the kinky type, Mr. Forty-Year-Old Virgin.”
“I assure you.” Castiel responds. “I am much older than forty.”
Everything blurs together after that, as they rush into sex, clinging to the animalistic sensation as one clutches a rock to avoid drowning. It’s Castiel’s last night on earth, and he’s not going to waste what little time he has left with foreplay. Afterwards, Castiel teleports them back to the ramshackle house that’s acting as a temporary home for them. There’s a litany of bruises on Dean’s hips from where Castiel held him, and Dean rubs them idly. It’s a dull pain, a different sort of ache from the agony that grips his joints on a daily basis, and he relishes in the break of monotony they bring. Suddenly, his hands are covered by another’s.
There’s a faint crackling sensation across Dean’s skin, not painful or even uncomfortable, just a tingle akin to touching the static on a television screen. Castiel’s hand glows and the bruises are healed. “My apologies.” The angel murmurs. “I did not mean to cause you any unneeded pain.”
Dean feels tears forming unexpectedly. “You say that like my normal pain is needed.”
Castiel pulls him close to his chest in a gentle embrace, their bare skin meeting as he holds him. “I wish I could say it was God given to inspire empathy and set you on the path to become the righteous man.” His fingers trace down Dean’s spine idly. “But there is no rhyme or reason for it. You are innately in possession of the kindness and compassion to make you the most holy human to currently walk the earth. Your defects do not change that. Your illness may not be a blessing from my father but you must know that it is not a punishment from him, either.”
Dean felt a tear run down his cheek, his head drooping to lay on Castiel’s shoulder. “Why is it always me?” He asks. “Why do I always need to be superhuman?”
“Because God has a plan for you.” Cas says simply.
And the angel Castiel held the righteous man as he wept.
Plus Three
“That clacking is going to drive me insane.” Not- quite Sam scolds.
Dean looks up, aghast. He wants to tell his soulless shell of a brother that this isn’t something they acknowledge, much less talk about. “Sorry.” He grumbles instead. “I’ll try and think of your auditory comfort before I sprain my knee next time.”
Not-quite Sam looks at him quizzically, clearly thinking of telling Dean point blank that he dislocated his knee, not sprained it. “It was a quick hunt.” Almost- Sam says instead. “Surely you don’t really need those.”
Dean wants to get angry, to yell at the husk of a brother beside him that he’s not sure he could make it to the shitter unaided, much less meander through the sporting goods store they’re at while trying to gauge how many shotgun shells they can buy at once without raising suspicions. But then the thing turns to look at him, and the eyes are Sammy’s, so he softens. “You have a point.” He replies amicably. “I’ll leave them in the car when we buy groceries.”
“I’d prefer the dumpster.” Sam complains.
Annoyance seems to be as close to emotion as Sam gets nowadays, and Dean finds himself grinning. “Well, you can’t always get what you want.”
“No.” Soulless Sam responds. “I suppose you can’t.”
Plus Four
Dean makes it three days with Benny before his knees start to buckle every half mile.
“You sure you’re okay, brother?” The vampire asks again.
Dean shakes his head. “I’m fine, stepped on a slippery patch of moss.” If there’s one thing he’s learned from being in purgatory so far, it’s that weakness has no place.
Benny stops to scan the area. “Cave in another two miles.” He drawls. “I’ll find you something to eat when we get there, maybe you just need something more than dandelions.”
Dean put a supporting hand against a tree. “It’s isn’t hunger.” He says. “This place isn’t meant for humans, it’s like it’s trying to light my joints on fire. I’ll get used to it.”
The vamp gives him a side-eye. He knows it’s a lie, but it seems like the closest thing to an explanation he’s going to get. “I’ll find you a branch to lean on.”
Dean nods. He’s going to need it to find Cas.
Plus Five
Acquiring the bunker is somehow simultaneously one of the best and worst things that happen to Dean. On one hand, there’s the escape from the cramped impala, a gorgeous memory foam mattress that cradles his aching body, and a consistent supply of hot water to cascade from a rain head shower.
But those fucking stairs.
It’s been fine, so far. Dean has an endless number of white lies to delay hunts and errands with when the steps seem to be Mt. Everest instead of an architectural feature, and Sam, Kevin, and Cas know better than to prod when he uses one. Now, though, as he drives his semi-conscious brother back from delivering Bobby’s soul to heaven, a lump of dread fills his stomach. Sam is lying in the backseat, either passed out or damn close to it, so when he gets off the exit for Lawrence, he prays.
“Hey Cas.” He says softly. “I know you’re busy, but I’ll be needing a hand in a minute.” He glances at the pale face of his brother in the rearview mirror. “Don’t know if I’ll be able to carry sasquatch by myself.” He admits.
It’s only a few seconds before he hears the rustling of wings and Castiel is sitting next to him. The angel glances at Sam with concern. “How is he?” He asks quietly.
“Not sure.” Dean admits as he slows to a leisurely 60 whilst passing a school. “We’ll have to wait and see until after he’s gotten some rest.”
Castiel nods somberly. “And you?” He questions.
“I’m not the one who just went through hell, heaven, and purgatory.” The hunter defends.
“It doesn’t mean I can’t worry about you.” Castiel replies.
Dean sighs, deflating a bit. “Tired.” He admits. His body has been precarious ever since returning from purgatory, and the constant stress over the past few days has taken its toll.
The rest of the drive is silent, aside from Sam’s soft snores from the backseat. When they arrive, Dean opens the impala’s back doors, intending to rouse his brother, but Castiel scoops the sleeping form of Sam up and put him in a fireman’s carry. “I will put him to bed.” Cas insists, walking towards the bunker’s entrance. “Wait here.”
Not one for orders, Dean waits less than a minute before crossing through the bunker door. He’d called Cas to help him, not replace him. Bracing himself against the handrail, he places his left foot on the first step down before slowly easing his weight down onto the leg. He grits his teeth as shooting pain attacks his hips, while he feels the bones of his knee grind together. Picking up the right foot carefully, he puts it beside his other. One down, twenty-one to go. He thinks. His wrist trembles from leaning on it but he makes it down two more stairs before he stops to sit, the agony making him too dizzy to continue. As he rests his head between his knees, he hears the quiet footsteps of Castiel approaching.
Cas sits next to him, and Dean pretends not to envy the way his knees don’t quake. The angel reaches out to touch him, but he pushes his hand away. “Don’t waste your mojo.” He instructs. “I’m fine, just needed to sit for a moment.”
Their shoulders touch and Dean tries to match his breathing to Cas’. “I wish I could take this burden from you.” Castiel says softly. “I wish I could place it onto myself so I wouldn’t have to see you suffer.”
Dean thinks he should be agitated. He doesn’t want to be coddled, or even worse, pitied. Somehow, the tone and Castiel’s voice let him know that’s not what going on now. Can isn’t sad for him, per say, he’s sad with him. With a deep breath, he lifts his head and the room is no longer spinning. “Help me up?” He asks.
Cas hauls him to his feet carefully and rests Dean’s right arm around his shoulder, holding onto him while letting the hunter use the other hand to grab onto the railing. “Ready?” He asks, waiting for Dean’s nod before starting down the stairs. When they’re on flat ground, Dean removes his arm from behind Cas’ neck, but the angel makes no move to let him go. “You should lie down.” Castiel whispers, feeling no need to be louder with their heads next to each other’s.
Dean shakes his head. “I need to go sit by Sam.”
Cas knows better than to argue with either brother when it comes to matters of the heart, so he silently guides Dean to the chair in Sam’s room. “I fear I need to return to Meg.” He apologizes. “Would you like your cane or crutches?”
Dean is already tucking the blanket tighter around his brother’s body. “Neither.” He insists. “Sammy will probably get feverish soon, I’ll need my hands free to get ice.
Castiel turns to examine the doorway, frowning when he realizes it’s too wide to accommodate a wheelchair. “I’ll be right back.” He says, returning almost immediately with a bucket of ice water, towels, acetaminophen, and a wheeled walker. He set the items in the basket of the rollator before putting the padded seat down overtop it. “Call me should you need my assistance.”
Dean smiles softly. “Thanks, Cas.”
Castiel strode over to the man. “I mean it, Dean.” He insists, pressing a gentle kiss to the hunter’s lips. Pulling back, the sounds of wings moving fills the air and the angel is gone once again.
Dean pulls himself out of the chair with the help of the walker and prays as he dabs a cool cloth across Sam’s forehead.
I love you too, Cas.