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Dean is sixteen years old, sitting in a gritty motel bathroom. The tap drips, the fan drones, and the cockroaches skitter unseen in shadows across the tiled floor. He’s fairly sure that his little brother is asleep, and he has a few moments to himself to contemplate his, well, problem. Thing is, he thinks he may be losing his marbles. Not that he finds that very surprising, just, how is he supposed to fix this?
About two weeks ago Dean started hearing voices. Or, well, one voice. He didn’t tell Dad, didn’t even tell Sammy, because he knows what Dad would do if he found out. There’d be no amount of convincing he or even Sammy could do that would change John’s mind once he’d decided his oldest son was possessed, or at the very least being influenced by a demon. As useful as a soldier is, he’s no good if he’s a spy for the other side, even unwillingly. So, Dean figures he’s worm food walking at the moment.
It’s for that reason he’s sitting here, on the yellowed toilet lid, staring at his reflection in the dirty mirror. Too-baggy clothes reveal the status of his weight, what that doctor back in Pontiac had referred to as “underweight for your height.” Freckles dot his face, and even after a long hunt, he can’t shower off grit that sits skin-deep. His dirty blonde hair and muddy green eyes only lend to that assessment. Yep buddy, he thinks at that pitiful image, you're royally fucked this time. He tightens his arms around his legs where they’re pulled up against his chest. His bony knees dig uncomfortably into his collarbones, and he rests his chin upon them, sighing shakily.
Whatever, it doesn’t matter. All that matters, all that has ever mattered in Dean’s life, is keeping Sam safe. Whether he’s a soot-covered four-year-old clutching at a bundled-up one-year-old as he watches his life burn down, blinding in his wide teary eyes, or a seventeen-year-old who’s slowly losing it, he’ll take care of Sammy. That’s his kid, and there’s no way he’s making that little nerd face hunger and an alcoholic father on his own. Dean’s done things for money that he never even wants Sammy knowing about, let alone having to do those things himself.
So, yeah, there’ll be no “getting help”, no matter what every school counselor he’s been within spitting distance of says. Stewing in that very uplifting thought, he hears the soft rap of knuckles against the flimsy faux wooden door. “Dean!” Sam is yelling, “I gotta pee!” “Alright, alright, no need to get your panties in a twist,” Dean snarks gruffly as he pushes past the door and his stupidly tall thirteen-year-old brother.
BE NOT AFRAID
The voice that’s been haunting his steps suddenly blares, making him clutch at his head in desperation for it to stop. He allows himself to face plant into the lumpy mattress closest to the motel door. There goes his only reprieve, no way is he going to be able to sleep now with the migraine he feels coming on. “Be not a dick,” he murmurs angrily into the stained comforter, spread eagle, and face down on the bed. Because really, if he is insane, why can’t his brain at least think of something a little more original?
DEAN WINCHESTER, I, CASTIEL, SERAPHIM OF THE FIRST CHOIR OF THE HOLY HOST, REQUIRE YOU AS MY VESSEL
“Well then, how about you politely fuck off, ‘cause I’m not about to be possessed,” he muttered to himself, and it was himself he was talking to, no questions asked, because every hunter knows angels aren’t real. Sure, there’s lore enough for it to be true, but no hunter’s ever seen one and in this business, you can only really believe in what you have solid proof of. He has no proof of angels, but what he sure as hell does have proof of is a life drenched and drowning in psychological and physical trauma.
He doesn’t like to think of it that way, or really, think of it at all, but it’s true. There was a time not long ago when he would have defended his dad’s actions to the ends of the earth. Whatever pain he’d been put through, he knew that it was to try and toughen him up, get him ready for an unforgiving world. But there were some things even John Winchester’s own blunt instrument couldn’t forgive.
John had made him a weapon, yes, but he’d also made Dean into a father, a mother, and anything else Sammy ever needed him to be. So, when he’d sat Dean down one cold night about a month ago, and told him that a day may soon come when Sam is the monster Dean needs to put down? That’d been the end of the sick loyalty and hero worship he’d held for his absent, hollow, father. It had clung to him all throughout his childhood, the broken shards of what had been a healthy father-son relationship cutting jaggedly into his flesh and holding on. Not now, though. The pieces fell loose with the fly of his fist into John’s face, a right hook that promised a real shiner after a couple of hours.
Really, John should have known. But he didn’t, and that just goes to show even more how wrong it was to ever try to find his redemption, searching fruitlessly in the pieces of empty amber bottles he left behind. So, not only is he one hundred percent sure he’s co co for cocoa puffs, he’s even more certain an angel would never want him as a vessel. Not unless they wanted to find out what hunger pains are like, just, y’know, for fun. Though he isn’t even really hungry right now, not even his appetite could survive the thoughts swirling around his head.
He hears the bathroom door swing open, right before something hard and rectangular is pressed into the small of his back. He huffs softly, “whaddya want Sammy?” “I stole it from Circle K,” he mumbles, “and I told you to stop calling me that. I go by Sam now. Everybody at school calls me Sam, even the teachers.” “Well, I ain’t your teacher, Sammy,” he says resolutely, sitting up on the bed and feeling the little rectangle, whatever it is, slide down his back to land on the comforter. He reaches behind himself a bit, before feeling the smooth wrapper and pulling the breakfast bar up to eye level. He stares at it for a moment, uncomprehending, then glances over to stare inquisitively at his baby brother.
Sam blushes and shuffles his feet a bit in clear embarrassment. “You heard what that doctor said, Dean!” He suddenly blurts out. “You need to eat more, you’re too skinny, and don’t even try to make the excuse that you have muscles, so, of course, you’re healthy. You’re just wiry with no meat on your bones! They taught us all about weight distribution and proper nourishment in health.” Sam finishes his rant, hands clenched into fists at his sides, a defiant look in his eyes. He expects Dean to put up a fight, no doubt. Expects relentless empty assurances that his big brother is great, in perfect health, but with everything going on he just can’t bring himself to lie to Sam.
Now, he isn’t about to give him all the gory details of his long ongoing malnourishment, the blame for which Sam would no doubt place on his own too-compassionate shoulders, but he’ll at least accept the bar and shut his trap about it. Sam is smart enough to understand a surrender when he sees one, and with the way they’ve been in each other's back pockets their whole lives, he knows Sam understands him now. He allows his lips to twitch up into a ghost of his normal cocky smirk. “Thanks, Sammy,” he says, tucking the bar into his hoodie pocket for later.
Sam sighs, the fight draining out of him all out once, his shoulders slouching a bit. “Yeah,” he says, blatantly shelving gratitude he doesn’t believe he deserves and spinning on his heel to stalk over to the other bed. Dean takes the dismissal for what it is and lays back on his own bed, staring up at the off-white popcorn ceiling. He’s already dressed for bed, clothed just in a pair of boxers and his dark blue hoodie. He reluctantly pulls the comforter out from under himself and up to his chest. He isn’t going to sleep, he’s just getting marginally comfortable for the very long night ahead of him, hand worming its way under the pillow to get a grip on the gun hiding beneath.
He lasts ‘til about three in the morning, whispers of,
LET ME IN
And,
I CAN HELP
Sliding past his ears and into the murky semi-darkness of the motel room. It may not have been so impressive if this hadn't already been going on almost non-stop since the voice had first sounded two weeks ago. It played seemingly on a loop, be not afraid, then introductions, and finally the bargaining and begging. He might not have called it that, but he got the sense that that’s exactly what it was. Begging, because for whatever reason the voice had, it needed to be let in, and quickly. Usually, he sticks it out, bags drooping lower each long- suffered night.
It would probably sound stupid to anyone living the normal, apple-pie life, but he hasn’t yet tried to appease his looney mind by just acquiescing to the voice’s demands. He’s sure it’s just him, but really, in this line of work, you never know. So he hasn’t tried it. But tonight three am rolls around and he’d give anything to sleep, even if just for half an hour. His apprehensions are about the farthest thing from his addled mind when he finally whispers his consent into the stale air of the early morning. He expects quiet, maybe, the sweet quell of that deep droning voice. Instead, what he gets is feeling like he’s been dipped in fire, so hot it’s cold. He muffles a yelp into his pillow as it intensifies, his vision whiting out in absolute brightness. Delirious, he thinks to himself that a bird must’ve gotten in, because all he can hear is a cacophony of ruffling feathers and quick flaps. That is his last coherent thought before he blacks out completely.
༺☆༻
He cracks his eyes open blearily, shuffling into an upright position. Once his brain’s had a few minutes to boot up he drags himself to the bathroom to wash the taste of metal out of his mouth. He takes a cursory glance at the mirror, before reaching down to grab his toothbrush and toothpaste. His head whips back up so fast he swears he feels a muscle begging to pull, before relaxing back down. What he sees in the mirror stuns him so bad he freezes in place, hand still around what he’d meant to retrieve. His grip goes white-knuckled, the toothpaste bulging in its plastic tube.
His face and arms are more filled out, a trend he can only assume follows through throughout his whole body. He might have chalked it up to an optical illusion, but he felt a little bit different this morning, slightly off from how he usually would. Not in a bad way, just, different. In fact, he felt great, better than he had in months. There’s nothing else he could possibly attribute that feeling to other than his spontaneous weight gain. Crazy what proper nutrition can do for a guy’s mood.
He’s not an idiot, sure he can be a little oblivious at times, something Sam likes to take full advantage of, but even he can see the connection between this and last night. He’d kind of thought that that whole thing had just been a really weird dream. Some manifestation of all his fears and anxieties around the situation come true. Seems like even that was too much to hope for. Not that he’s really complaining about the outcome but, for all intents and purposes it seems like he’s probably possessed now. “Goddamit all to hell,” he curses angrily.
“Please do not take my father’s name in vain,” the voice murmurs. Dean jumps a little, startled by how close the voice now sounds, compared to before. “And why the hell shouldn’t I, huh? Seems I’ve found myself in a pretty shit situation at his hand,” he says heatedly. Honestly, how dare this thing even scrounge up the audacity to admonish him, it’s the one trying to wear him to the prom. “Actually, my father had very little to do with my current occupation of your vessel,” it corrects gently, “and my name is Castiel, I am an angel of the lord, not a “thing.” “As if that excuses it,” he scoffs, not at all liking the fact that it can apparently read his thoughts while it's possessing him.
“And what do you mean he had “little to do with it”?" I thought angels were supposed to get all their orders from the big guy,” Dean asks, thoroughly confused by how this whole situation came about. “Well, yes, but you see, I am fallen and therefore may no longer receive divine instruction. My brothers would wish me harm because of this, so I am in hiding. Had you not accepted last night, I would have been forcefully exiled to the reformatory.” The words ring out with a grim certainty in his head, and he’s left wondering how something with such innocent connotations can sound so ominous. “Well, uh,” he stutters, “what’s their idea of reform?” “We are strapped down and stripped of most of our grace until we are small and helpless. Then, they ruthlessly drill into us the need to follow, to be good, and fall back into god’s favor. The process is very painful,” Castiel states, a wince in his voice that says more than he’s likely willing to. Dean can easily see that Castiel is speaking from personal experience.
“Alright,” he huffs, “you can lay low in my meat suit for a while, but once you’re in the clear you better get the fuck out.” He has no way to enforce his threats, a fact the angel no doubt knows, but when you’re backed into a wall you bluff ‘til you’re blue in the face. Though there's no reply from Cas, he can feel a general sense of gratitude from wherever the entity is holed up in his brain. It’s creepy as all hell, but at least he knows he can get a sense of what Cas is feeling in case he tries to pull something in the future.
From then on he zips his lips shut tight. No reason to get Sam all worried by talking to himself loud and clear when the kid’s within earshot. He guesses he could always attempt to communicate more with Castiel in his head, but that’s just going too far too fast for him. It’s weird enough having something in his head, let alone being able to talk to it, what, telepathically? Anyways, he needs to be making breakfast, not worrying about some rogue angel.
He quickly finishes his previously derailed morning routine, before striding the few steps across the motel room it takes to reach the tiny kitchenette. He pops the last two Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches into the old microwave and watches them revolve in that sickly orange light. When the shrill ding sounds he hears a sleepy groan from Sam’s direction. Smirking, he creeps up to his little brother's bed. He leans down close to Sammy’s ear and suddenly yells, “Rise and shine, Gigantor!” He rips the covers off of Sam’s freakishly tall body, chuckling as he hears an annoyed whine of “Dean!”
Sam blinks open eyes still crusty from sleep. He sits up slowly, bringing his fisted hands up to rub at them before glancing over at Dean, who is of course standing just to the side with a wide shit-eating grin on his face. Sam pouts fiercely in return, before apparently deciding that food is a more pressing matter than chiding Dean for his immature behavior. He stands and walks past Dean to the kitchenette, where a breakfast sandwich is waiting for him on a flimsy paper plate. Sam shoves the sandwich into his mouth, coming away with a bite much too large. He winces a bit as he swallows after far too little time spent chewing, “Thanks Dean,” he says easily, and all is forgotten. In their family, food is definitely the way to someone's heart, or at least the fastest way to be forgiven for asinine behavior, in Dean’s case.
As he picks up his own sandwich, Sam remarks that he looks much better this morning. Dean just brushes it off, saying that he slept really well last night. Sam seems to accept this answer, going to the bathroom to get ready for school. Dean just goes back to his bed, having dropped out early this year. Some people may have been able to pull off juggling taking care of a kid and getting an education, but he wasn’t one of them. Sammy’s always been the academic one, seemingly having taken all the book smart genes John and Mary had to give. He’s not upset though, he has other things he’s good at, like hitting targets or handling knives.
He stopped actually trying to get better at school around fourth grade when the counselor pulled him out of class and made him take a short assessment. The results were glaringly obvious, Dean had dyslexia. Once he knew that he was going to have to work twice as hard as anyone else to get on their level, he just quit and put all his focus into raising Sam and hunting. Even though you technically need to be seventeen to drop out, his birthday wasn’t far off, and he hadn’t even bothered enrolling himself in a new school the last time Dad uprooted them. It wasn’t like CPS was going to care anyway, one of the few perks, if you could call it that, of getting dragged halfway across the country at a call’s notice.
Sam emerges from the bathroom approximately twenty minutes later, freshly showered and ready to go. “Grab your bag, I’ll go start the car,” Dean calls over his shoulder as he makes his way to the door. The keys to what’s been the only consistent home present in their lives hang on a hook next to it. He thinks about the dive over to the middle school, wondering if it’ll rain today and if he should make sure Sam brings his jacket. As these idle thoughts pass through his head he pushes the door open, eyes cast down at the floor. He doesn’t notice the man looming over him until it’s too late and collides none too gently with him. The man lets out a grunt but otherwise doesn’t budge.
The acrid smell of whiskey surrounds him, and his armpits sting with the sudden nervous sweat that familiar scent brings on. “Move boy,” John slurs out, surly and demanding, shoving up hard against Dean, causing him to stumble back. Now that there’s some distance between them he can clearly see John’s rumpled and filthy appearance. He looks like he’s spent the last week drowning in a bottle without ever coming up for air. Dean stays resolutely in the doorway, feeling an odd twinge in his head, that he guesses means Cas has been roused by his distress. He ignores it for now, keeping himself between John and the inside of the room where Sam is.
“No,” Dean says, feeling just a little proud when his voice doesn’t wobble the way it wants to. John’s face turns ruddy, a vein in his forehead bulging at the rebellion being shown by his oldest son. He steps forward into Dean’s space and without warning pushes him down hard onto the floor, which is just a thin layer of carpeting covering concrete. His head smacks down with a sickening thud, and black spots dance in his vision. He brings a hand up to his pounding head, and it comes away sticky and dripping blood. He hears Sam’s strangled gasp and cry of “Dean!” from somewhere behind him. “It’s okay Sammy,” he slurs out, finding morbid amusement in the fact that he must also sound hammered now. “Get in the bathroom and lock the door,” he orders, sitting up shakily.
“But Dean,” Sam says tearily. “Just do it!” He snaps, as John starts forward on him again. “Why’re you helping that abomination?” He shouts, “It’s evil, got demon blood flowing through its veins, It needs to be put down!” Spittle flies as he screams in Dean’s face. “I can help, if you’d let me,” Cas says softly in his head, a siren’s call. But Castiel is practically a stranger, and a foreign creature at that, who knew what he’d do to John if Dean accepted. Sure, Dean thinks about as lowly of John as he’s able to, but surely he still loves the man a bit, even against his better judgment? He searches around for that scrap of anything, maybe nostalgia for better times, but he comes up empty. He looks up into John’s dead, glassy eyes and feels empty.
“If anyone needs to be put down, it’s you,” He yells into John’s face, lips pulled back into a fierce snarl. John growls like a rabid dog, his fist a harsh reality against the side of Dean’s face. He winces a bit as he licks the blood from his newly busted lip, and it tastes like metal. It tastes like freedom. “Will you let me help you?” Cas asks once more, concern bleeding into the words. “I won’t interfere without your approval.” Dean chuckles darkly into his father’s furious face and says, “go ahead, angel.” John’s outraged look fades into one of indignant confusion at Dean's words. Dean feels new strength suffuse his limbs, and the pain from his injuries fades. He gets to his feet without ever moving to do so and leans back into the control he can feel taking over his limbs, using his legs to stride confidently towards John and place one hand on his forehead.
John tries to get away, tries to remove the hand seemingly pinning him to the floor, but cannot. His expression slowly fades to one of horror, and as the thing that is not his son’s eyes glow with a fierce blue light, he cries out, “what are you?!” The answer itself comes far too late for John to comprehend, as a white light burns the scum of his soul out of existence. “MY NAME IS CASTIEL, AND I AM AN ANGEL OF THE LORD.” As black takes over his vision, he feels triumph. He can rest now that the threat to his little brother is gone.
༺☆༻
He wakes to his brother's bright smile shining mere inches from his face, and a heavy weight on his chest. He pushes Sam off of him and to the side, anxiety spiking when he sees John sitting calmly in a chair at the other end of the room. Too calmly, really, to even be John. The expression he wears now is one of serenity and it’s not one Dean’s ever seen John’s features stretch into before. Sam follows his gaze to where John is sitting and quickly turns back to his big brother to reassure him. “Don’t worry Dean,” he smiles brightly, “Dad’s gone, that’s Castiel now. Why didn’t you tell me about him? He knows so many interesting things about history! I’ll never get a B in that class again.” Sam is practically bouncing with excitement, and Dean looks from Sam to what is now apparently Cas.
There’s a small smile on his face as he watches Sam gush about nerdy history facts before shifting his gaze to Dean.
“I’ll take care of things from now on,” he says, and Dean feels relief for the first time since he was about four years old.
The End