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Dean’s to-do list for today consists of exactly one thing: get Lucifer out of Cas, by any means necessary. If that includes throwing his arms around Chuck’s knees and begging—well. He’s not gonna be happy about it, but there will be groveling.
The only problem is, he’s not exactly sure how much Chuck even likes him. Actually, if the last eleven-odd years of his life are any indication, Chuck downright despises him. And okay, maybe he hasn’t been very forthcoming with the ‘hail mary’s or whatever, but honestly, who can blame him? Dean’s relationship with faith began and ended with a woman who’d been turned into a free-for-all demon barbeque, so he thinks he deserves a pass.
Still, it’s probably a good idea to take Sam along for the ride, just in case. Hopefully a lifetime of faith to his lifetime of…whatever will be enough to balance the scales a little bit. So, once he’s fairly certain that his war/living room isn’t going to be turned into charred pile of smoking family drama and Lucifer’s teenaged angst, he heads off to find Sam.
Usually, Sam leaves his door a little ajar, if not fully open (Dean thinks, in a way, he sort of misses the camaraderie of sharing a room all those years), so the first prickle of foreboding starts with it being shut.
“Sam?” He raps on the door a few times with his knuckles. “Sammy?”
A scoff. “Good luck getting in there.”
Dean freezes. It’s Cas’s voice, but not Cas’s voice, just like it’s Cas’s face, but not Cas’s face, just like it’s Cas’s eyes, but not Cas’s eyes. Just like Dad taught him, he shakes the leadenness out of his limbs and turns around, totally casual.
Oh, hey, Satan. Good to know that you and your dad aren’t going to blow up my house. Would you mind getting out of my best friend? Like he said. Casual. Just another Wednesday.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sure, he sounds a little bit like a teenaged girl in those chick flicks he claims to hate, but it’s all he can do not to melt into a pathetic puddle of goo and just ask for Cas back.
Lucifer simply raises his eyebrows and glides past him like he owns the place. When this is all over, Dean is going to scrub each and every inch of the bunker that he—and his dad—touched.
“Sammy!”
The door opens. To his credit, Sam forces a smile, though it looks more like somebody had grabbed him by the corners of his mouth and tried to yank him in the air.
“Hey. Need something?”
Dean doesn’t miss the fact that Sam all but drags him into the room. Nor does he miss the new chair standing in the corner that he suspects Sam was using to jam the door shut. The bundle of blankets on his bed looks like the nest he used to make as a kid whenever he was upset.
“Yeah, I was just—dude, you were sitting here in the dark?”
He flicks on the light switch. One of the bulbs flickers weakly for a few moments before resigning itself to another hour or so of service. Dean makes a mental note to get more bulbs when they get out to restock.
Which, when you’re living with God and his lunatic kid, seems a little ridiculous, but there is no way in hell Dean is asking this guy for a lightbulb.
“Helps me think.”
It takes Dean a moment to realize why his little brother is sitting in a dark room, curled up in his bed, at three o’clock in the afternoon, and when he finally susses it out, he feels like an idiot.
“You know this is only for a little while.”
Sam snorts. “Like that helps.”
He’s seen Sam try to shrink before. It’s usually when they’re facing a witness or a vic and he doesn’t want to look intimidating. He draws his shoulders in and ducks his head and generally tries to give off a calm persona. This is totally different.
Dean’s scared of Lucifer. Of course he is. It’s a little something he likes to call common sense. But it’s the same fear he feels when standing in the same room as Chuck, like there’s electricity dancing across his skin, and if he steps out of line, it’ll strike. He doesn’t feel the same fear Sam does—fear born of years and years of going under a knife, of someone buried in the corners of his mind, of retribution.
He imagines someone sitting him down at a table across from Alastair and saying, go get ‘em, team!
“Come on.”
He knows it’s only because Sam doesn’t want to look weak that he allows Dean to steer him out of his room and towards the garage. Dean prays—ha—that they don’t run into anyone. Whether it’s Chuck being omniscient or just plain good luck, they get all the way down there without incident.
“Dean, we’re not gonna be able to take the Impala. It’s kinda—well—Chuck sort of…magicked it to the bunker and completely missed.”
A beat.
“So what you’re telling me is that God can’t parallel park?”
Usually, his reaction would have been much angrier than that, but the genuine smile that flashes across Sam’s face makes holding his tongue worth it.
They grab one of the other cars from the bunker instead. Dean shoves the fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview in the glove compartment with a scowl, silently cursing the Men of Letters who’d thought he was some kind of jokster.
The nearest café is approximately fourteen miles away, in another little town called Smith Center. He and Sam stumbled on it by sheer luck while looking for a Wal-Mart to stock up on some cleaning supplies.
They both order a frou-frou coffee he normally would have teased Sam for. To Dean’s surprise, Sam is actually the first to speak up.
“I guess it’s just—Cas didn’t mean to, but—” Sam’s hands convulse around his drink. Dean doesn’t press. “After the whole wall thing, when I was dealing with the hallucinations, I coped. You know, the scar, building from stone one. But I also thought—what if I didn’t?”
Dean leans forward, cupping his hands around his coffee.
“You remember what it was like. You pick one thing, and you cope. I just kept thinking, well, at least I did something. I locked him up. I saved the world.”
He sucks in a deep breath and doesn’t speak for a few moments. Dean can see he’s struggling—there’s that crease in between his eyebrows, and he bites down on the inside of his cheek.
“And now he’s out. Free.” Sam visibly sags. “And it was all for nothing. It’s just like last time.”
Dean shakes his head. “No. No it’s not. We’ve got God on our side, Sammy. Chuck’ll keep him in chuck.”
Far from looking heartened, Sam retreats into his coffee and doesn’t say another word until they get back to the bunker. Thankfully, they make it back to Sam’s room again without running into anybody.
“You know what,” Dean says with a sudden burst of inspiration. “Here.”
He scoops up the knife from Sam’s bedside table (and the fact that this is a normal sentence says a lot about their life) and makes a cut into his palm. Sam watches as he replicates the symbol from the submarine on the door.
“You saw him bounce off the sub, right?”
Maybe reminding him of that particular experience isn’t the best idea. Sam grits his teeth and nods.
“Sam.” He grabs his brother’s shoulder and steadies him. “He’s not getting in. It’s okay.”
Sam nods, but Dean can tell he hasn’t really helped matters much. He leaves Sam behind in his (now safely warded) room and adds another tick to his list of complaints for Chuck.
Dean finds him sitting in the war room, eating Dean’s rocky road ice cream straight of the carton, watching Orange is the New Black on his laptop.
“Okay, it’s time we had a chat.”
Chuck looks up, and promptly spills rocky road on his t-shirt. Dean rolls his eyes, realizes this guy could turn him into a pillar of salt or a pile of ash, and doesn’t regret a thing.
“A, that is mine.” He snaps the laptop shut and picks it up. “Two, keep your kid away from mine, capisce? And C—”
“You said A then two,” Chuck interrupts.
Not for the first time, Dean fantasizes about simply decking him with his laptop.
“Cas.”
He thinks he sees Chuck’s features shift for a split second before they harden again into that expression that he wants to compare to the ocean right before a storm—placid but still tempestuous beneath the surface, not that Dean’s ever really seen the ocean properly anyway.
“You’ve remade his vessel before, haven’t you? So do it again. Kick Lucifer out, give him a vessel all his own and we can go at this together.”
Chuck shakes his head minutely. “He made his decision. I gave you all free will for a reason, Dean.”
Dean’s not usually a frustrated crier, but he can feel the last few days building up in a prickling in his eyes. Sam’s hiding from the devil in his bedroom with a freaking chair wedged beneath the door. Their newest prophet is an atheist currently suffering a crisis of not-faith. Amara wants to, what, consume him. And Cas? Cas is buried deep in a screwed-up angel’s psyche, and Dean doesn’t want to see what they’re going to find when they dig him up.
“I know this is hard for you—”
“Cut the crap, Chuck.” Dean barrels on before he has a chance to realize that he just told God to cut the crap. “You don’t have a clue what it’s like in the trenches down here. Sure, you’ve taken a couple of joyrides in a couple of meatsuits. So what? That doesn’t mean a damn thing and you know it.”
Chuck’s eyes narrow, and Dean thinks that he’s officially pushed his limits.
“We don’t have time for your little soap opera,” Chuck growls out. “I can feel every little ounce of that longing you’re pinging his way, but right now, we need Lucifer on our side, and kicking him out of a vessel that he’s made his home in isn’t going to help.”
Dean’s ears burn. “Longing?”
Chuck fixes him with a look that would almost be sad if he was human. “Go take a break, Dean. You need it.”
“But—”
“Go.”
Dean has to shoulder past Lucifer standing smirking in the doorway on his way out, the lump in his throat getting even bigger.