Archive of Our Own

The first floor

Dean stood in front of a haunted house, feet an inch into the mud, and he was petrified.

It was dark. He wasn’t afraid of the dark.

The house might as well have been haunted; he was not afraid of ghosts.

What awaited him behind the haunted house door was paralyzing in a way no supernatural being could ever compare to.

Social interaction.

More specifically, social interaction involving his ex-best-friend whom he'd been consistently avoiding for the past six months.

An ex-best-friend who now stood at the end of the line formed by Garth, Kevin, Charlie, Hannah, Gabriel, Anna, Ruby and Dean, and said,

"Are you coming?"

Dean stared at Cas and hoped the earth would open up and swallow him.

See, for the past six months, Cas has been trying to catch him alone at any chance he got – to talk; to get an explanation for Dean’s aloofness; maybe even to apologize for the things he’d said. And thanks to Dean’s incredible evasion abilities, the number of chances Cas had gotten to talk to him alone were a round zero.

Until their friends took one look at the haunted house and decided it was getting late and they should get back home.

Until Dean hesitated, glancing back at the house.

Until Cas said, "Are you coming?"

“Um.”

Cas raised an eyebrow. Some of their friends turned to watch the exchange with halfhearted interest. “Scared?”

Yes. “Yep.” Not for the reasons you think. “This place looks creepy as hell.”

“We’ll stick together, then,” Cas insisted. If anyone thought it was odd that the two of them were having this long a conversation, they were only showing it by raising their eyebrows and unsuccessfully trying to catch Dean’s or Cas’ eyes. Cas’ eyes were planted on Dean. Dean was trying to skillfully assess the diameter of a nearby tree. It was at least four centimeters. That was, like, ten inches, right?

 “Sure.” It came out weaker than he’d intended. He was making a conscious effort not to look up, because if he looked, he knew he would be lost in whatever he would find in Cas’ eyes. Sneaky bastard. Dean hated that he wasn’t even trying to fight the soft feeling that bubbled in his chest at the thought of a door being closed with the rest of the world on one side and them on the other.

The rest of their friends said goodbye, going off looking like a strange, disjointed combination of the avengers in the middle of a zombie attack. Dean dragged his Grim Reaper’s scythe and followed Cas onto the front lawn, his black cloak dragging through the mud behind him.

On the outside, the house was impressive. Dean counted four floors and an attic. The windows were coated in dust and spiderwebs and the wood of the walls seemed to be so old it was rotting. The inside was a proper haunted house, with skeletons dressed in different hats on the sofas, gutted pumpkins alight with candles, and the crackling recorded laughter of a witch coming from one of the rooms. It was warm inside. This house felt lived-in. Or, for the very least, partied-in. The floor was littered with empty plastic cups and soda stains.

But the moment the door shut behind Cas and him, all of this blinked out like it had just been a trick of the light, and the decorations flickered out in a second. Now it was cold. Bare. And dead silent.

“Creepy,” Dean commented. The word was little more than a breath, but still felt loud in this space.

“Creepy,” Cas agreed.

There were no bulbs on the ceiling, and the only light was a faint glow coming through the windows from the streetlamps outside. On every level, Dean’s costume befitted this house; it was dark and stuffy, and emanated a deathly stink.

Well – it wasn’t the stink part that befitted him. It was the death part. Because he was Grim Reaper. It was – was it obvious? He wasn’t stinky. And if he was, it was because October really wasn’t cold enough to justify a full-body cloak.

“Listen,” Cas said in that tone, the I’ve been wanting to tone.

Dean secured the hold on his scythe (it was longer than him, and as sharp as an actual blade. It was somewhat disconcerting that he’d managed to buy a deadly weapon on the internet for 22.99 bucks, but otherwise thoroughly awesome). “Let’s do this,” he said and marched into the house.

“I wish we would,” Cas muttered behind him, but Dean wouldn’t – he just wouldn’t – talk to him. Not about this. The reason why they’d stopped talking. The reason why they were here.

Not if he could keep on being an insistent asshole about it instead.

So he ignored Cas, and peeked into the kitchen. “What is this place?” It looked abandoned.

No, that wasn’t it. It looked… expectant.

Dean touched the wooden railing that led to the second floor. He placed a foot on the first step.

“Hello.”

He spun sharply, eyes crossing with Cas’. It was a woman’s clear voice, with a strange, almost metallic tone to it, but there was no one around.

“Um,” Dean said into the empty space. “Alexa?”

“No,” said the voice, and he and Cas turned in different directions trying to locate its source. “I am…” There was a pause which, if the voice hadn’t been so monotonous, might have come off contemplative. “House.”

They locked eyes again.

“The house is alive,” Cas whispered. He tipped his head in the direction of the front door, and Dean nodded. There wasn’t awkward laughter, or hesitation, or confusion. The understanding between them was clear: fun’s over. Now we get the fuck out of here. They moved silently towards the door.

Cas placed his hand on the doorknob, cautious, as if the house was an animal he was trying to calm.

Nothing happened.

He turned the knob.

Locked.

He shot Dean a look that was something close to panic as the woman’s static voice filled the air around them.

“You have activated Instant Death mode.”

“We’ve what?”

The last thing Dean saw was some tentacle-like thing shooting towards Cas from the wall, and the last thing he felt was something grabbing him from the opposite direction and pulling his limbs apart, and then there was pain like he had never felt in his life, and then there was nothing.

The second floor

Dean woke up – could you call it woke up? He didn’t open his eyes or shake unconsciousness off, he just… returned to exist – on cold wooden boards, Cas lying beside him.

“What the hell?” His voice came out raspy.

“We just died,” Cas breathed. “How-“ They’d just died. Dean’s limbs were sore from it, from being torn away from his body. “How are we alive?”

They got to their feet with stiff motions and looked around. “This is a different place than before.”

“You’ve reached the second floor.” Dean jolted at the house’s voice. “When you reach level three, you get eaten.” Its tone took on a cheerful turn towards the end.

“It ate us?” said Cas.

“What the hell is this place?”

“I am House.”

Dean’s skin prickled. His stomach dropped the way it only did when he was genuinely afraid. He wanted to hold onto Cas, the only familiar presence in what was turning out to be a strange, twisted nightmare, but he didn’t.

This floor was a long hallway, patched with locked doors, a stairway on one end and a single large window on the other. It was dark in here, too, and Dean worked to get accustomed to this color of the air, the faint echoes of light coming from outside lampposts and muffled by the window glass. It was an extremely unsettling shade of the night, but he had a feeling it was going to be this way until they found a way out of this place. He had to get himself together if he was gonna get out of here without clinging to Cas like a child that had gotten lost in the supermarket.

Cas was walking around, his steps measured and steady, and examined their options. Dean pulled a piece of candy out of his cloak pocket and tried not to watch the way the dim light played with Cas’ hair.

“There’s the window,” Cas said quietly, as if the house was only gonna hear them if they spoke loud. “And the stairs.” He tried to open the window. No luck. He tried harder. “And, I mean, these doors.”

Dean had to force down the shiver that ran up his spine at the thought of trying to force one of the hallway doors open. He popped a couple more candies into his mouth and offered Cas one. He took it with furrowed eyebrows.

“How many of these have you got?”

Dean patted the side of his cloak. “These pockets are deep.”

They took another stroll around the dark floor. The line of Cas’ back was straight and confident. Dean walked behind him and tried to hold onto that and ate a piece of candy whenever his mind wandered towards his feelings or his and Cas’ history or their imminent death by Haunted House tentacles.

They stopped by the stairs. Cas considered them for a moment.

“Think we’ll get killed if we try the steps?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t Dean’s voice. It was the house’s.

“Okay.” Dean turned away from the stairs. Cas picked a clean spot of floor and sat down, leaning his back against the wall.

Dean propped his scythe against the wall and walked up and down the hallway. This was ridiculous. There wasn’t such a thing as murderous houses. Up and down. This had to be some kind of illusion. Something in the air that made them hallucinate or – up and down – fall asleep and dream all this, or-

The fourth time he skipped over Cas’ legs on his route, Cas spoke.

“Why did we stop being friends?”

Dean stilled and looked at him. “Really? You think now’s the time for this?”

“Then when?” Cas wasn’t prone to snapping, but this was getting close. “When are we going to talk about it? In front of all our friends? Or when you’re ignoring me and not answering my texts?”

Dean went back to pacing. For a while, his boots against the floorboards were the only thing making sound. Cas didn’t move.

“You know why,” he said finally, unwillingly. His fingers tapped nervously against the side of his leg, and Cas’ eyes tracked the movement.

“No, I don’t. I don’t understand. You just disappeared like you couldn’t care less whether I existed or not.”

“I cared too much, is the problem,” Dean snapped. He halted a couple of feet away from Cas, and it might’ve been this conversation he’d been desperately trying to avoid for so long or the fact that they were trapped in an abandoned house that was trying to eat them or, most likely, the sugar from the twenty pieces of candy he’d had in the past fifteen minutes, but he couldn’t keep still. His foot tapped against the floor, or his knee jerked impatiently, or his eyes jumped everywhere on Cas’ face and around it. “I cared too much, and I knew you didn’t feel the same way about me, so I fucked off.”

“Oh, you knew that.”

“Yeah,” Dean muttered. His fingers twitched at his sides.

“You knew that.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because you said it!”

And there it was. The blessed silence that indicated Cas understanding, remembering, and not wanting to do a damned thing to change the way things were.

Interlude

Half a year ago, they’d gone to a party. Dean didn’t remember which party anymore. It didn’t really matter. They’d spent half of it squeezing in between bodies, making small talk with the rest of their friends – this was back when they were used to sticking together, being more of a single entity socially than two different ones – and only partly successfully trying to avoid having other people’s drinks spilled on them. The other half they’d spent on a questionably clean couch, watching other people make small talk and spill drinks on one another.

When Cas had rolled his head on the backrest of the couch to face him and asked, “If you could be with anyone in this room, who would you choose?”, Dean was a little bit drunk, a little bit brave from the noise and the music and the people making out around the room. The word had slipped from his lips like it was the most natural, most reasonable thing to say, and not the exact opposite.

“You.”

For a while after that, they’d stared at each other like there was nothing better in the world to look at. Then Dean forced the same word out of his mouth again, different intonation this time.

“You?”

Cas’ eyes clung to his face for a moment longer. Then he looked slackly around the room, and his gaze fixated on someone on the other side of it.

“That guy taking shots out of a meerkat figurine.”

Back at the creepy house

They fell into an oppressive kind of silence. Dean went back to pacing. Rapping his knuckles on the walls absently. Tapping his foot against the floor.

"You've had too much sugar," Cas noted.

"Yeah," Dean muttered. "Well, you've had too much... Asshole juice." The fact that he was painfully in love with the person this was aimed at and thought he could do very little wrong took most of the bite out of it.

He banged his palms on the wall. "Let us out!"

"No," said the house pleasantly.

"Why?" Cas demanded from the floor.

"Humans contain a variety of nutrients that help House stay happy, healthy and alive," the lady's voice provided. It really did eerily resemble Alexa.

"Well, you've just traumatized us for life," Cas muttered at the floor. He had one foot folded beneath his body and another stretched in front of him. He looked deflated, like all the fight had drained out of him, and Dean didn't know whether it was because of the house or their argument or both or something else entirely. It hit him that he knew nothing about the current state of Cas' life, not whether he was getting along with his siblings, not whether he was doing alright at school or at home or at work or what kind of week he was having and whether he was happy or upset or about to have a breakdown, all the things Dean used to know, used to take for granted that he knew.

“Alexa?” he called into the space. There was a pause.

“Did you mean me?” The house replied eventually.

“Yes.”

There was no answer.

“Did we really die back there? On the first floor.”

“Yes.”

“So this is what you do?” Cas asked. “You masquerade as a haunted house, then trap people, kill them and then regenerate them so you can eat them again and again?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you just kill us now and get it over with?”

“My systems are not done digesting the corpses of the previous you.” Her voice was disturbingly gracious. “I need to make room.”

Cas pulled himself to his feet. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Find a way out of here,” Cas replied, shoulders squared, the set of his jaw confident.

“You heard the house,” said Dean. “We're dead if we take the stairs.”

“So we won't take the stairs.” Cas rolled up his sleeves. “Get your weapon.”

Dean grabbed his scythe, and they turned to the window and got to work. But no matter whether they tried to crack, shatter, unlock, break, or jam it open, it wouldn’t budge. The blade cut a piece of Dean’s sleeve and a lock of hair off Cas’ head in the process, but it didn’t leave a scratch on the glass.

Finally, having given up on the window, they turned slowly to look at the stairs.

“We’ve got no choice, do we?” asked Cas. Dean spread an arm in the general direction.

“Lead the way.” It wasn’t a genuine fear of going first as much as a genuine attempt to get on Cas’ nerves. And a little bit of fear of going first.

Cas raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” said Dean. “Maybe you should've thought twice before you said meerkat figurine."

“Are we still on that?”

“Could've been less descriptive, man.”

“Okay.” Cas let out a deep sigh. Then he crossed the hall towards the stairs. Dean followed. But when they got to the stairs, he touched Cas’ wrist to make him stop.

“We should split,” he said. “Go in different directions. Raise our chances.”

Cas nodded.

“I’ll go up, you go down.”

Cas nodded again, and swallowed, and kept looking at him. The corners of his mouth were pulled down. He was upset, but Dean couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Finally, he nodded again, and they fell into motion. This time, when the tentacles tore through the wall and into Dean’s skin, there were two of them, and he felt himself being torn in half. The sound alone would have made him vomit his guts out, if he’d had any left in his body.

The third floor

He woke up next to Cas, and felt a wave of relief washing over him just at the fact that they were together. Now it occurred to him that, by heading to different levels of the house, they should have considered the option of getting separated.

His body was in one piece and his limbs were all intact. Still, the ghost of a nausea lingered in his stomach at the memory of the sight and the sound and the cutting, all-consuming pain of being torn apart. He felt the urge to grab Cas and hug him – as if that could somehow keep either of them safe – but settled for dragging his hand across the cold, dusty floorboards and squeezing his hand. Cas’ hand squeezed back.

“You okay?” Dean asked as he sat up. He found it within himself to be relieved that he’d already been dead by the time the eating presumably started.

“There are things I can never unsee,” Cas said flatly, rubbing at his forehead.

“Headache?” Dean guessed. Cas grumbled something.

Dean shoved a hand into his pocket, and huffed with delighted surprise as he pulled a handful of candy out of it. “My candy regenerated.”

Cas’ eyes fixed on the small pile in his hand and widened. “No. You are not having any more sugar.”

“Party pooper,” Dean muttered and shoved it back into his pocket. Somewhere above them, the house spoke.

“You’ve reached the third floor. When you reach level four, you get eaten.”

His eyes locked with Cas’.

“Come on.”

They got to their feet and examined this floor. It was pretty much identical to the last one, except there were no doors lining the hallway.

“What’s the point of a whole floor that has no rooms?” Cas wondered, fingers trailing the walls as he walked.

“What’s the point of a house if it tries to murder you?” Dean retorted.

“And succeeds,” the house’s crisp voice intervened helpfully.

He felt crabby. Irritable. He thought to blame it on the sugar drop, but if his body and the candy both regenerated separately, that probably meant all that candy had never been in this version of his body at all. So, there went his excuse.

He glanced at Cas. He didn’t know what to do from here. Here was a guy who valued their friendship enough not to get fazed by Dean’s love confession, to try to talk to him about it again and again even as months of heavy silence ran between them, to take Dean into a creepy abandoned house none of their friends agreed to go into, just for the chance to make things better, for the chance to understand. And here was Dean, rejecting all of that just because he was afraid. No – terrified. Terrified of something that had already happened months ago.

They circled the hallway in silence for a few minutes. Cas seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. He tapped the glass of the window sometimes, or kicked a wall, not with Dean’s irritability but with deliberate motions and an assessing crease to his forehead. And finally, he gave up. He put his back to a wall and slid down until he was sitting on the floor, elbows on knees, fingers drumming on the front of his shin. Dean went ahead and replaced his kicking and tapping with jittery motions.

The silence had been running so deep that Dean had forgotten conversation was an option when Cas leaned his head against the wall and looked up at him.

"Why did you have to leave?” he asked, quiet and unhappy. “Why couldn't we just be friends?"

Dean kicked a nearby wall, but his heart wasn’t in it. He kicked harder.

There was no escaping this conversation. He hated that.

“You knew how I felt,” he said simply. He sat down against the wall opposite Cas’, the soles of their shoes almost touching. Cas’ eyes tracked his every movement. Dean fixed his stare on a convenient spot on the floor. “It was only going to get more awkward. I just couldn’t stand the thought of that. I thought it was better to rip the band aid than to watch it die slow.”

“So it was either being a couple or nothing for you?”

“It’s not like that.” He sounded defensive. He didn’t want to. But he couldn’t help it. “Look, I fucked up, okay? I shouldn't've told you. But once I did, it was never gonna be the same. You would’ve felt sorry for me.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” Cas’ eyebrows were furrowed, but he was looking away.

“You would have,” Dean pressed. “You would have tried to make me not feel weird about it, and I would’ve taken it as pity, and then things would have gotten weird.” He looked at Cas’ face, waiting for Cas to look at him, and bumped his boot with Cas’ when he didn’t.

“Maybe I should regret cutting out,” he said when Cas finally looked him in the eye. “But I don’t. I really believe that if I hadn’t done this, it would’ve been a nightmare for us to hang out. We would’ve ended up hating being around each other just because of all the tiptoeing it meant we had to do. That’s not the ending I would choose for us.”

Cas looked away again. Dean tried to convince himself his silence didn’t hurt. He pulled himself up and shed his cloak onto the floor. His heart was pounding in his chest and he was nervous-sweating.

“We could’ve made it work,” Cas mumbled to the floor.

“Right.”

“You didn’t really give that a chance.”

“Nope.”

“Just feels like you should have.”

“Feels like you should take the stairs and see what happens,” Dean muttered. Cas closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall with a thump.

“House?” he called. “Tell me anything.”

Silence.

“I’m begging you. Anything to make me forget this guy is here.”

“That's real mature,” Dean grumbled. “You're the one who dragged me here to talk about our feelings, you know.”

“I will walk to the stairs and let you rip my arm off if you change the subject right now,” Cas called into the space of the hallway. The house chimed in immediately this time.

“I don’t like the bones,” it said cheerfully. “They jam up my systems. Would you like to know what I do with them?”

“No, lady, we would hate to know,” Dean shrieked before it could elaborate. But something Cas had said did make him think…

They’d asked the house why it wouldn’t just kill them, and it had replied that it had to wait a certain amount of time until it could re-digest them, but that didn’t explain why it wasn’t attacking them right now. They must have spent over twenty minutes on this floor by now. What if they needed to be close enough to the outer walls for the tentacles to be able to reach them? Or if it had some kind of trigger? What if they could turn that off? He grabbed his scythe – a useless attempt at self defense which hadn’t helped him on the last two floors – and inched closer to the staircase.

Behind him, he could hear Cas rise up and follow him until a hand was on his elbow. He turned around.

“I don't want you to think it was you.” There was urgency in Cas’ voice. “I don't know if we’re going to get out of here, and if we don't, it doesn't really matter, but if we do, I don't want you to go on with your life thinking I wouldn't have chosen you.”

“But you didn't,” Dean said flatly.

He sighed. “I… we were in the middle of a party. There were people around. It just felt weird. And then things really escalated.”

Dean shrugged passive-aggressively. Yes, that was a thing, apparently, and he nailed it. “There weren’t any people around half an hour ago on the second floor.”

Cas pulled his shoulders helplessly. “It wasn’t…” he trailed off.

"You know,” Dean’s jaw tightened. “I can survive a rejection, but I just can't take the excuses.” He turned away and had every intention to walk down the stairs out of spite, get torn to shreds just to be a dick, but Cas’ voice stopped him.

“It wouldn’t have worked.”

He turned around. “What?”

“It’s simple statistics. It wouldn’t have ended well if we’d have gotten together. That’s just how relationships work.” There was enough pain in his voice, enough exhaustion in his eyes to convince Dean this was something he’d been sitting on for a while.

“What,” Dean scoffed. “Did you google it or something?” But his throat dried.

“What I said at the party...” Cas held his eye. “That was me choosing you. If the choice was between having a relationship that would have most likely failed or getting to keep you as my best friend, I would choose keeping you every time. I did choose keeping you. I would've done anything to be with you knowing it wouldn't go wrong, but I couldn't know that.”

 Dean shuffled his feet. “Well, it went wrong anyway, so. Your strategy wasn't idiot proof.”

“Which of us is the idiot in this scenario?”

“Me,” said Dean. “I'm obviously the idiot.” He gestured vaguely with his hands. “Look, it’s whatever now.” And he turned away, just to be looking at anything else, but Cas tried to grab his arm, which made the scythe slide out of his hand and hit the floor, slicing Cas’ palm on the way down.

“Shit.” Dean stared at the blood that started to pool around the cut. “Sorry.”

“It’s not bad,” Cas mumbled. Dean reached for his hand. Then he felt like his spine was being ripped through his stomach, and he saw something spear-shaped burst through his stomach and reach for Cas, whose blood, by the time Dean looked up, covered much more surface than just his palm. Dean felt himself about to vomit, but it was hard to vomit when your bowels were no longer a part of your body.

The fourth floor

“You’ve reached the fourth floor.”

Dean’s vision was blurry.

“When you reach level five, you get a pony!”

He sent his hand out to find the wall. It found Cas. They pulled each other up into sitting.

“I’m just messing with you,” the house was saying cheerily. “You get eaten.”

“Are you okay?” he heard Cas say somewhere near him. His head was spinning.

“I think all this dying gave me brain damage.” He groaned. Then he remembered seeing his insides separating from his body, and his empty stomach lurched.

“Come on.” Cas pulled him up carefully.

He was starting to feel better, and the fact that he had a stash of candy in each pocket which Cas was too distracted to comment about was an improvement. This floor was different, the hallway wider, only one wall lined with doors, and a square attic door on the ceiling. He let Cas explore for a few minutes, leaning against a wall, chewing on candy and watching him, enjoying the quiet. Then he pushed himself upright.

“Listen…”

Cas spared him a glance, but he seemed distracted.

“You were right,” Dean said, rubbing his hands against his sides. He didn’t like saying that. Cas turned and gave him a proper look this time. “It was stupid of me to throw away our friendship over this. I mean, of course what we have is stronger than whatever I imagined we maybe could have.”

“Right,” Cas said, but his eyes were already drifting away, upward, following some invisible line of thought.

“We can be friends,” Dean said with as much confidence as he had in him. He wished Cas would look at him. “I’ve missed being friends.”

Cas opened his mouth… and said, “Rope.”

Dean squinted. “Excuse me?”

Cas pointed at the attic door. “I think I saw rope when I was inside the walls.”

“While you were being eaten alive?” Dean asked. It wasn’t meant to come out skeptical.

“Yes.” Cas turned to look at him. “What if we manage to get some? We could try to pull this door open.”

“There might be a way out through there.”

“It’s worth the try.”

“But we don’t have a way to reach the rope,” Dean said. “Unless we die.”

Cas eyes Dean’s scythe. “Or almost die.”

They set everything up with quick and quiet motions, full of newfound purpose. Cas insisted he should be the one to go into the walls because he remembered roughly where he’d seen the rope. Dean didn’t argue, partly because he trusted him, and partly because he was still a little nauseated.

“If I don’t come back…” Cas said, “I guess you’ll have that creepy lady’s voice to keep you company.”

They were standing at the point in the room that was farthest away from the outside walls. Dean tried to take a deep breath, but it came out too shallow. He was starting to panic.

“Are you sure about this?”

“What do we have to lose? We’ve died and un-died three times so far.”

Dean didn’t like the way he said so far.

“Yeah, well, death is really nauseating.”

Cas opened his mouth, then stopped.

“We good?” said Dean. He nodded.

Dean handed him the scythe. “Okay, then. Slice me open.”

Cas took the blade and brought it to Dean’s palm. He paused.

“Try to stay away from the outer walls.”

“Yeah, I’ll just stick to watching you get torn to shreds.”

“It’ll lose most of its interest in me once it realizes I’m not the source of the blood,” Cas repeated impatiently. “But you’ll be out of reach. Right?”

“It’s okay.” Dean’s mouth twisted into a tired smile. “I can say I told you so when we regenerate.”

Cas closed his eyes and let out a sigh.

“I’ll be out of reach,” Dean recited. “Whatever. Let’s do this.”

Cas pressed the blade into his palm. A red line sliced open along it, and a few seconds later blood trickled onto the floor. Dean braced himself for the tentacles.

Nothing.

“what’s happening?”

The blood soaked slowly into the floorboards.

“You’ve unlocked Thirst mode,” the house provided.

“Then why aren’t you killing us?”

“Digestion will end in – thirty seven seconds.”

Cas’ eyes found his, and there was something intensely desperate in them.

“We have thirty seven seconds.”

“Thirty three,” the house corrected.

Cas took Dean’s uninjured hand and started speaking so fast Dean could barely follow.

"I had this idea that us getting together would end bad and it wasn't even worth the try. But I've just been sawed in half by a murderous house ten minutes ago. So screw the future."

He leaned forward and kissed Dean, not desperately, not urgently, but gentle, like they had all the time in the world. About ten seconds in, Dean could feel metal wrapping around Cas, and he knew this wasn’t the plan but he held on, and Cas held on, just to have their faces pressed together for two seconds, three, four, until they were torn apart, and Dean was left alone, bleeding mildly, in the one spot where nothing could reach him.

He braced himself for a long wait, maybe even a rescue mission, but a couple of minutes later there was a loud thumping noise from inside the walls, then Cas was thrown back into the room, his body rolling on the floor until he bumped into Dean’s feet, a stretch of rope in one hand.

“Do I get to say ‘I told you so’?” he shot at Dean between heavy breaths.

“Nope.” Dean reached out a hand and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s get to work.”

They managed to thread the rope into the attic door handle and secured it with several knots. Dean tried to ignore the fact that his face turned a deep red whenever Cas glanced at him and pretended not to notice Cas’ face turning the same shade.

“Is the tentacle not gonna come after us?” he asked.

“I tied it to a pipe.”

“How?”

“Rope.”

He was starting to feel something running in the air between them. A buzz of hope. They had a chance. They actually had a chance.

“Ready?” Cas asked, clutching the end of the rope that dangled from the handle. Dean nodded and gripped the rope right above his hands.

They pulled.

Nothing happened.

They pulled harder.

Nothing happened.

They pulled harder – and the entire attic door came crashing down.

Along with the rest of the ceiling, and a roomful of human skeletons.

“Bones!” the house squealed.

Dean shrieked in surprise and stumbled backwards. He slipped on an end of his cloak and tumbled from the top of the stairs, taking Cas with him and bursting through the outer wall of the house.

They found themselves in a narrow space between two walls. A few inches to their left was a hole filled with metal spikes. Above them was something that resembled a ceiling fan, only its wings were razor-sharp and it was spinning so fast that the blades were barely visible. There was a metal tentacle tied to a pipe. The second they crashed on the ground, Cas’ hand found his and held like his life depended on it, and one second later, forty skeletons rained down on them through the hole they’d just made in the wall.

Dean yelped again and thrust the bones away. When they hit the death machines, they crackled, then slowed them down, then, by the seventeenth or eighteenth skull, the machines finally jammed.

Dean lay on the floor, panting, wiggling to shoo away any bone that rested too close to him.

“We’re not out yet,” Cas breathed.

“I know,” Dean said. But he cherished the moment of quiet. The ceiling fan and the spike hole were ruined. The tentacle slithered against its pipe.

Cas grabbed the scythe as they forced themselves up onto their feet. Were they supposed to hack their way through the wall right now? Dean felt every muscle in his body like it was a slice of meat at a butcher’s shop.

Cas turned around, his hand loose on the scythe, and nicked Dean’s arm.

“Um,” said Dean, watching his arm. He couldn’t see blood through the sleeve, but he felt the cut burn. Cas turned sharply to look at him.

“Oh.”

And then the tentacle burst free of the rope and spiraled their way.

On either instinct or pure adrenaline, Dean yanked the both of them down, and the tentacle blasted through the wall behind them.

And there it was. The dark, freezing, blessed four a.m. outside.

Dean hauled himself up to his feet a last time and pulled Cas outside. They stumbled a few feet away from the house before turning back to look at it. There was a dull voice coming from inside.

“Thank you for your service,” it said. “Please come back soon! Did you know? one in every 999,999 Houses starves every year. Your donation will keep this House energized for an entire 8 hours and 53 minutes. please come back soon!”

The only indication they were ever there was that one hole in the wall.

“So this was fun,” Dean said. His arm was bleeding. The cut on his palm stung. And from the look of it, Cas’ ankle was twisted.

“Thank you for your service. Please come back soon! Did you know? one in every 999,999 Houses starves every year. Your donation will keep this House energized for an entire 8 hours and 51 minutes. please come back soon!”

“Sorry,” Cas said, leaning against him for balance.

“This is what you get for trying to have a talk about our feelings.”

“You tried to warn me,” Cas said drily. His head rested on Dean’s shoulder. Dean bit back a smile. They stumbled into the comforting wash of the streetlights, leaning on each other. Behind them –

“Thank you for your service. Please come back soon! Did you know? one in every nine hundred ninety nine thousand…”