me, myself (2.5k, 14.02 episode coda)
Sam sees Cas shift gears the moment he catches sight of Dean, still drooping and exhausted in Michael’s wool and cashmere, as no one, not even Mary, had thought this mission would go well enough to warrant packing a change of clothes for Dean. One moment Cas is frowning, giving not-Bobby a cursory once-over to make sure he hasn’t injured himself beyond repair, and the next moment he’s still, intent, staring as Dean trundles tiredly down the staircase and says, almost shyly, “Hey, Cas.”
“Dean,” Cas says reverently. Everything about him has oriented towards Dean, like a flower seeking the sun. Sam’s grin feels tired and sloppy from worry and also how long it’s been stretched across his face, but he manages to drag out a little mouth-quirk at this. “Dean—is it really—”
“As far as I can tell, it’s just me knocking around up here, yeah.” He’s stepped over holy fire, endured a banishing sigil and Kevin’s how-to-speak-to-a-possessed-host seal, and every other angel-test they could think of. It’s really Dean. God, it’s really Dean.
Cas crosses the war-room-floor in two long steps and flings his arms around Dean in one of their standard oh-God-you’re-not-dead-after-all hugs. Sam, drenched in vampire gore only alleviated by baby wipes because Dean, wrung-out as he is, still managed to bitch him out when he tried to get in the car without at least making a token effort to clean himself up, edges around them and sets his machete down on the map table. So he almost misses it when Cas lets go and Dean—doesn’t.
“Dean?” Cas says, which is Sam’s only warning for how the rest of the night is going to go.
“Cas, I—” Dean swallows. Then he hauls Cas into an awkward kiss, all teeth clacking together and noses mashing. Sam drops his duffel.
Dean lets him go. He’s breathing hard, his cheeks wine-red, and he shuffles backward, quite unable to look Cas in the eye. “I just…” he breathes. “I didn’t want to wait anymore.”
“Neither do I,” Cas whispers.
They’re staring into each other’s eyes, which is not unusual for them but has suddenly become a lot more awkward for everyone else in the room. Dean’s hand is resting possessively under Cas’s shoulderblade. Sam says, “Welltimeforbed,” and dashes off, hooking one arm in Mary’s—who’s grinning like a fiend—and one in not-Bobby’s and carrying them away with the sheer force of his bulk. If anyone deserves privacy at a time like this, it’s Dean, who’s been sharing headspace with a megalomaniac for the last month. Still, because Sam is a gossip and snoop, he casts one look over his shoulder and sees Dean lean in and press his forehead gently to Cas’s, saying something he can’t quite catch from his position halfway across the library. They look happy.
Sam will remember that moment later, when it all goes to hell.
He finds Dean in the kitchen the next morning, comfortably wrapped in that disgusting gray robe and wearing an even more disgusting look of bone-melting contentment on his face. He’s weirdly bashful about it, won’t meet Sam’s eye at first and doesn’t rub his face in the fact that he clearly had a very good night’s sleep like he usually does, but Sam makes a joke about Cas snoring and Dean settles. There’s still an awful weariness to him, something about the eyes that Sam has no trouble recognizing. He sees it in Nick. In Cas, sometimes. In the mirror. “So,” Sam says over cornflakes. “Cas.”
Dean smiles. It makes him look less bone-tired. “Yeah.”
“What finally made you get your head out of your ass, man?” Sam asks, genuinely curious.
Dean’s smile fades a bit. A touch of that awful, washed-out look returns to his eyes. He says, “There was a moment… with Michael, you know… actually, there were a lot of moments where I thought, this is it. I’m going to die. Do you—do you remember Jimmy? Novak,” he adds, as though they’re overrun with Jimmies. (One of the guys from Apocalypse World is actually named Jimmy Sandero, but Sam always knows what Dean is talking about.)
“Yeah,” Sam says quietly. “And I know—’chained to a comet’ is an understatement.”
“You remember. It’s like—every thing that makes you you is burning. And there was this moment, or a series of moments, or, hell, an eternity, when I was just sure that I was never going to see you again. You, or Mom, or Jack, or Cas. And I thought—before I said yes—there was this moment—” Dean looks away. He does all his best communicating staring stonily at breakfast foods. “I shoulda told him then. I remember thinking that I shoulda told him. And that I’d never get the chance to, now.”
“You did,” Sam says gently.
“Yeah,” Dean says at his bacon. Slowly, slowly, the smile comes back out again. “Yeah, I did.”
Cas, it turns out, lost Nick. Sam is never letting him babysit anything larger than a guinea pig again.
Dean cheers Cas up with all the stories of how he almost lost Sam when he was the designated caretaker of the Winchester family, which Sam does not exactly find amusing as much as retroactively horrifying, painting his mostly-boring pre-hunting childhood in a much more precarious light. They hunt for Michael, which is easy given the swath he’s cutting through the known monster populations of North America, but frustrating in that he’s always gone by the time they arrive and they have no idea what he looks like. Dean says, grimly, that he doesn’t remember much, but he knows that Michael is trying to make a perfect monster. “Like him,” he says, a haunted distance in his eyes. “He wants to make something just like him.”
Cas moves in with Dean, which means he moves his two belongings—his trenchcoat and a mix tape Dean apparently made for him (a mix tape, Jesus, Sam is going to cry, how have they not been screwing this entire time)—into Dean’s room. Sometimes Sam comes across them playing footsie or sipping coffee or just smiling sappily at each other and he thinks he might combust from how happy he is for them, really, ten years of living with the sexual tension is nothing to scoff at, and how utterly embarrassing he finds them. It’s like watching your dad make eyes at your fifth grade teacher, a feeling Sam is uncomfortably familiar with.
Sam shaves. It feels good.
They hunt, with Mary and Bobby and the rest of the Apocalypse Crew and without, and Sam keeps a careful eye on Dean. He’s—skittish, back in the saddle. He lets Sam take the lead with a wraith preying on, of all things, truckers and chemo patients. On the hunt he’s his usual brash, bawdy self, but in a fight he’s by turns aggressive and weirdly tentative. Sam wonders if watching him lead the Apocalypse Crew really had that much of an effect on him. Sure, Sam’s always deferred to his big brother’s judgment, but he hasn’t needed him for a long time, and maybe finally Dean is coming to terms with that. Or maybe it’s a Michael thing. Sam definitely saw his own hands move in ways he’d prefer to forget when he was under Lucifer’s thrall.
In October, Dean forgets what was happening on Game of Thrones. In November, he fumbles a silver knife when a Vetala goes for his throat.
This is the moment Cas realizes something is very, very wrong:
They’re lying in bed together, making out turned to light petting turned to just breathing in each other, Cas’s nose tucked into Dean’s hair, Dean’s lashes fluttering against his chin. Cas runs worshipful fingers over Dean’s arm, studying the fine golden hairs, the tiny bumps that rally to his touch, the taste of sweat on his skin. Dean is telling him a story about the car and Sam and their father and Cas isn’t really following, he has his eyes closed and his ears hooked onto the cadence of Dean’s voice, when Dean says—
“And I can still hear it now, Sam crying and trying to sing along at the same time, so it was like, ‘boo hoo, my Shangri-La beneath the boo-hoo moon, I will return again…’”
He trails off. Cas feels the fretful flicker of him blinking, mouth still moving, like he can call up the lyrics to “Kashmir” by willing them into being.
“’Sure as the dust that floats high as June,’” Cas warbles, completing the lyric, “’when moving through Kashmir.’”
Dean snaps his fingers. Cas feels the percussion move through him, but a chill has settled over his shoulders, a bitter wind rattles through the remains of his grace. That was on Dean’s Top 13 Zepp Traxx. He’d heard Dean shout-sing along to that song many times from the back seat, many more times when Dean hadn’t been aware that he’d been following him, back in the bad old days of the Apocalypse and after. “Right,” Dean sighs, “that.”
Cas strokes Dean’s arms and doesn’t think about it, but he shivers as though someone has just let in the cold.
In the end, it’s Dean who figures it out first.
They’re in Framingham on the outskirts of Boston, running through another derelict church, this one colonial-old and filled with winding staircases and dead-ends where renovations have turned hallways into walls. Michael’s slashing his way through a colony of skinwalkers. Cas is deciphering the blood-sigils scrawled over the stone walls, trying to figure out exactly what manner of monster Michael is trying to transform his captives into; Sam is freeing the chained skinwalkers barking and hissing and sobbing from the floor in their animal forms.
Dean is holding the archangel blade.
It won’t work, not without the force of an archangel’s arm behind it, but their current hope is that Dean has enough archangel grace left in him to jump-start it if he gets the chance to jam it between Michael’s ribs. It’s not a good plan, but it’s a plan. So Dean is careening around corners, blade up, shoulders tense, looking for Michael’s torture chamber and the Flying Dick himself. He shoulders his way into the basement—
“Hello, Dean,” his own face says to him over a butcher’s apron, holding a knife dripping with gore. The image is so arresting, so evocative of so many Hell nightmares, that Dean freezes long enough for Michael to throw him into the wall. The archangel blade clatters to the ground. Michael steps over, careful not to get skinwalker guts on his Armani leather shoes, and retrieves the blade with two fingers.
“Thanks for this,” he says. “I’ve been looking for it.”
Dean’s gaze is still fixed furiously on—his own face. “What—” he gasps. “How—”
Michael smiles. It’s a sleazy kind of smile, or maybe it just looks that way stretched across that mug because Dean has never smiled like that in his life, not even at his drunkest and most lecherous. Michael wipes the knife on his apron. Neither of them look at the neatly-vivisected thing, half human and half animal and half something else, splayed across his dissection table. “The memories are holding, then? Good. I wasn’t sure how long they would last, you know. This being the first attempt of its kind.”
“How,” Dean snarls out, “are you wearing my face?”
Michael laughs. “Your face! That’s a good one. Oh, Dean.” But this time Dean can hear the malice in it, the way Michael’s voice curls so smugly around his name. The quotation marks. “’Dean,’ Dean, Dean. You’ve proved even more interesting than I could’ve imagined. I didn’t think you would last longer than a few weeks. Surely the shift would begin to fail. Surely someone would notice. But it looks like I’ve done a better job than I could’ve imagined.”
“What,” Dean says. His heart is pounding. It feels cold in his chest.
“’Dean,’” Michael says. He steps over Dean’s body. And drops the knife.
Dean catches it on reflex. And screams.
The metal bites into his skin. He drops it like he would a burning brand, raises a shaking hand to eye-level so he can see the terrible chemical burn spreading across his skin— “What the hell did you do—”
Michael says, “It’s only silver.”
Dean stares at the skin peeling away from his hand. At the new, reddish skin underneath. He looks up at Michael—at himself—at Dean—and says, “No. No. I can’t—I’m not—”
“I found a family of shifters. Shifters that I could make better, stronger. I could show them how to absorb the memories of the person they shifted into, not just skim their surface thoughts. And then I realized I was asking the wrong question. What do you get when you have Dean Winchester’s body and Dean Winchester’s memories and every mediocre, misbegotten day of Dean Winchester’s life?” Michael says softly. “Dean Winchester.”
“DEAN,” Sam calls from outside, the heavy sound of his boots racing down the hallway.
“Duty calls,” Michael says, and vanishes in a flash of wings. Leaves not-Dean crumpled on the floor, hand bleeding and burning, a simple silver knife lying innocuously at his feet, for Sam and Cas to burst in on and, in a flush of horror, understand.
Not-Dean supposes he’s not a perfect copy after all. He knows what the real Dean Winchester would do, and they would never have had to leave that run-down, decrepit old abbey. Not-Dean spends the drive home silent, staring at the wound in his hand that feels like a wound in the world. He watches Sam, eyes hollow and withdrawn after not-Dean had convinced him that he hadn’t known, really, hunch over his laptop to hunt endlessly for another clue as to Michael’s whereabouts. To Dean’s whereabouts. He watches Cas hover inert in the doorways, pause outside Mary’s and Jack’s and not-Bobby’s bedrooms and pass them by, save the news for another day. He sits in the library. Sam eventually goes to bed. Cas eventually goes—somewhere. Not to their bed, certainly. That’s all right. That’s all right.
When Cas drifts into the war room later, he finds not-Dean sitting stiffly in one of the heavy wooden chairs. Not where Dean usually sits. That’s a nice touch.
“You should rest,” Cas says softly.
Always the caretaker. Always the guardian angel.
“I wanted to kiss you,” not-Dean says. Cas pulls up short. “I’ve wanted to kiss you for years. Every time you die. Every time you come back I think—he thinks—this time, this time. This time I’ll tell you.”
“Dean,” Cas says, like pulling shrapnel from his throat. He flinches after he says it. Not-Dean doesn’t.
“I—he—he won’t do it. Not after this. Not after… me. So it has to be you, Cas. It has to be you.”
“You gotta be brave, Cas,” not-Dean says, and lifts the silver knife that has been burning into the raw bone of his palm to his throat.
snowghoul
kianamaiart
ellievsbear
gummygunk
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
