Chapter Text
In the end, saving the world doesn’t cost much.
Just a couple pints of blood, some sea-salt infused chalk, a few dozen candles, and a match.
It’s the subsonic explosion of light following Lucifer’s second Fall that turns out to be so expensive.
The death toll in the first few weeks after the Flare is staggering.
Dean’s not supposed to know—he can tell from how low Sam is keeping the TV, and the way he and Bobby always step outside to talk about the world governments’ disaster response efforts. He hears everything anyways, the newscaster’s voice booming like a snare drum in his head. It hurts—even whispers hurt these days, make his head pound and ache and his stomach lurch violently—but Dean doesn’t shy away from the noise. He strains his ears for more, shifting his head and feeling the gauze wrapping around his eyes snag briefly on the cotton pillowcase.
Beneath the gauze, his skin feels dry, and Dean thinks that the dressing has become unnecessary, but Sam doesn’t show any signs of wanting to take it off. He doesn’t want to look at what their last-minute Hail Mary play did to Dean.
Dean doesn’t want to look at it, either, but that isn’t exactly going to be a problem for him.
Mary Carlson, 26, was weeding in her garden when it happened.
When the sky started to turn, she dropped her sheers and stood, mouth agape and hand shading her eyes.
She never saw the car swerving off the road and speeding straight for her petunias.
Ben Reynolds, the 48 year-old insurance salesman from Detroit behind the wheel, never saw Mary Carlson either.
Sam looked at the Flare.
So did Bobby.
They all stood together and watched as the sun seemed to expand, as it burned from yellow to red. In every direction, the sky was exploding in bands of color—crimsons and violets and oranges with a single, sinking stream of black cutting through the fiery madness.
Lucifer, the light-bearer, gone dark and silent on his second descent into Hell.
Dean’s last sunset.
He’d blame God for being a vindictive son of a bitch about the Michael thing, but just around half of the world’s population plunged into the darkness with him, so he guesses it’s just God being a raging asshole.
Fucking figures.
“Dean.”
Dean grunts, rolling over onto his other side to get away from his brother’s nagging hands. It works for all of a second.
“Dean, come on, man.”
“Fuck off. ‘M sleeping.”
“One of those UN medical response teams is in Sioux City,” Sam says instead. “They’re trying to figure out if there’s a cure for the ...” He trails off and then continues, more brusquely, “I got you an appointment.”
No, Dean wants to say, I’m not gonna let them fucking poke and prod me like some kind of goddamned freak.
But he’s not a freak anymore; he’s just one statistic among many. Anyway, Sam’s practically oozing hope, hovering close enough that Dean can feel his brother’s body heat on his upturned arm. This visit is just going to be a humiliating waste of time—Dean can sense it in the way the cold, heavy weight in his stomach hasn’t so much as shifted—but he already knows he’s going to go. Has to go.
After a brief hesitation, he sits up. Sam’s hands close on him instantly, gripping his bicep and shoulder with steadying firmness—like Dean’s eyes have anything to do with his balance. It’s insulting, but worse is the momentary flicker of memory that hits Dean, turning that grip harsher with possessive greed.
Like Sam’s ever going to touch him like that again.
Scowling, Dean shakes the considerate, careful touch away.
Sam doesn’t say anything as Dean gets up and feels his way around the room for some clothes, but the image of his brother’s face pulling down into a hurt, wounded expression rises vividly in Dean’s head anyway. His shoulders tense, facial muscles stiffening in an expression of his own—something he thinks might resemble a dog’s snarl.
“Enjoying the show?” he snaps, not even trying to locate his brother in the room’s small space.
“Here,” Sam answers, his own voice soft and gentle.
Fabric brushes Dean’s forearm—rough denim, soft flannel—and he jerks away, almost falling over the chair he wasn’t expecting to find on his other side. Sam catches Dean’s arm, starts to right him, and Dean pulls free again. This time there’s no stopping his fall, and he crashes over onto the floor with his legs tangled up in what sounds and feels like a broken chair.
“Jesus, Dean, are you oka—”
“Don’t fucking touch me.”
There’s a beat of near silence, where all Dean can hear is his own breath coming quick and harsh. The constant drone of the television out in the living room, where Bobby’s likely keeping tabs on the Flare Incident. Birds outside in the salvage yard—gulls, which means it’s mid-morning at the earliest. He can hear the goddamned house settling around him, for fuck’s sake.
Sam, though. Sam might as well have evaporated into the air.
Panic—lost Sammy, lost him again, where the fuck is he—has started to choke Dean’s windpipe when Sam finally bites out, “Fine.”
The word brings Sam back, places him solidly at Dean’s feet, and Dean hates how strong the swell of relief that fills him is. He flinches imperceptibly as the clothes hit his back, and then Sam’s footsteps storm over to the door, which slams behind him.
It’s the best conversation they’ve had since Dean’s eyes started leaking blood.
As soon as they walk (Sam walks, Dean shuffles) into the room, the doctor asks if there’s been any recent bleeding. It’s the gauze around his eyes, Dean guesses, that prompts the inquiry. Stuff’s pretty damned pointless otherwise.
There’s a beat where Sam waits for Dean to answer—fat fucking chance; Dean came, that’s enough participation on his part—and then Sam clears his throat and says, “Not since the first week.”
Dean waits for the inevitable follow-up question about the reason for the gauze wrapping, but it doesn’t come. Looks like Sam’s not the only one who’s been clinging to the hope that hiding what happened behind a layer of cloth is somehow going to make everything better.
There are other questions after that—what was Dean doing at the time of the Flare (jogging, apparently, which is news to Dean), does he still get the headaches (Sam’s gonna give him hell for that one when they get home, since Dean never got around to letting his brother know there were headaches), how many sighted people in the household (two), any other Flare victims (no)—and finally cool, unfamiliar hands brush the sides of Dean’s face. He jerks away, heart racing in his chest and sweat breaking out across his skin.
“Sorry,” the doctor apologizes. “But I need to take the wrapping off if I’m going to examine you.”
Of course he does.
But when Sam finally herds Dean back out to the car half an hour later—minus the gauze wrapping—Dean’s pulse is still unsteady and the hairs on the back of his neck are standing up.
He understood on day one how fucking useless this makes him, but it wasn’t until the doctor touched him that he realized how vulnerable he is.
Can’t see, can’t fight back.
Sitting duck.
He'd be better off dead.
David Yarrow, 34, was sitting at his desk.
He was running late on a deadline, and when Jill from Records called out for everyone to come look at the sky, he just hunched lower and kept wading through his calculations.
When the lights went off for David Yarrow ten minutes later, he thought it was just a power outage.
Then the pain started.
Things are better when they get back to Bobby’s—familiar smells, familiar sounds, terrain Dean can sort of picture in his head from his memories of Before. He speeds his steps, keeping his hands out in front of him to keep from running into anything.
The doctor gave them a cane when they left, but he also said it would take Dean a while to get the hang of using it, and he’s not lurching around like a dumbass in front of Sam.
“Dean,” Sam says from behind him. “Can we talk about this?”
Talk about how the doctor told them both, gently but emphatically, that the condition doesn’t appear to be temporary, is what Sam means.
Dean silently feels his way down the hallway to his room and then, in case his brother missed that message, slams the door behind him.
“Dean? Hey, man, you awake in there?”
Dean rolls over, turning his back on the door, and doesn’t say anything.
After a beat of silence, Sam calls, “There’s an information session at the town hall for that government-funded orientation program—you remember, we talked about it at dinner?”
Two weeks since that torturous doctor’s appointment, and all Sam has achieved is a shift in his fixation—from healing Dean to adapting him. Never stopped to ask whether Dean wants to fucking adapt.
“Or, uh, I talked about it and you sulked like a moody bitch,” Sam continues, his voice stilted with false levity. “Anyway, I’m gonna head down there. I thought you might want to come. We could stop for ice cream on the way back?”
Dean waits, jaw clenched, and resists the urge to throw something at the door.
“Well, uh. I thought I’d check. Bobby’ll be here if you need anything.”
Bending the pillow in half, Dean holds it tightly against his ears.
“Guess I’ll see you later.”
See him later. Right.
It isn’t until the dry ache registers ten minutes after Sam has gone that Dean realizes his eyes are open.
“Boy, I’ve had it up about to here with this bullshit.”
Ignoring his pounding heart, Dean smirks vaguely into the air and says, “Up to where, Bobby? You wanna point that out to me again? I didn’t quite see it the first time.”
The careless response is supposed to nettle and, from the anger straining Bobby’s voice when he speaks again, it does.
“I mean it, Dean. You been moping around here going on two months now, and maybe Sam doesn’t mind playing punching bag for you, but he doesn’t deserve the crap you’ve been giving him. So you’re blind, so what? Half the fucking world’s in the same goddamned spot. Grow a pair and deal with it.”
“Bobby.”
Dean tenses at the unexpected sound of his brother’s voice. He didn’t hear Sam come in. Thought he was at one of his stupid rehabilitation meetings—the ones he keeps on going to in Dean’s place.
“Someone’s got to say it, Sam,” Bobby maintains.
“No, they don’t.”
Dean’s stomach twists uncomfortably and he hunches lower on the couch. Thinks about getting out from the middle of the brewing argument, but of course with his luck he’d probably walk right into the coffee table instead of out the door the way he means to.
“Damn it, Sam, you can’t keep babying him—”
Bobby’s gearing himself up to an actual shout, and the volume of his voice drowns out everything else. When a hand clamps down on Dean’s bicep, therefore, it takes him by surprise and his heart surges up into his throat. He flails out in an uncoordinated, violent thrash, but instead of letting go the way it’s supposed to, the hand tightens. Before he can grope for his attacker’s (demon, fucking demon, what took them so long) wrist, Dean finds himself hauled to his feet only to fetch up against a wall of unyielding muscle.
Sam, he recognizes from the breadth and firmness of the chest, and a fraction of a second later his brother’s scent registers as well. Instead of calming Dean, though, the recognition sends a jolt of adrenaline shooting through him and he fights harder.
Usually jerking his body in the direction Sam isn’t makes his brother let go, but today Sam’s grip tightens further as he gives Dean a teeth-rattling shake.
“Don’t,” he growls, mouth close to Dean’s ear.
The warm thrill the pitch of Sam’s voice sends through Dean’s gut kicks his heartbeat up a notch and he twists in his brother’s arms, sending a fist hurtling in the direction of Sam’s voice. Sam ducks out of the way easily, of course, because Dean couldn’t win a fight with the broad side of a barn like this. Chest tightening with something that borders on panic, he gears up for another try.
Sam shakes him again before he can manage it, like Dean’s some sort of misbehaving dog. “I’m not letting go, so stop it, Dean.”
Fuck you, Dean wants to say, but he can’t get the words past the bile burning in his throat. His eyes aren’t stinging, at least—tear glands burnt out by the Flare along with his sight. It’s the only silver lining in this particular storm.
Then Sam starts dragging him sideways.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Bobby asks, and Dean would like to know the same thing.
“We appreciate you letting us stay here so long,” Sam answers, getting a firmer grip on Dean as he trips over the edge of the carpet and almost goes down. “But I can’t let Dean stay anywhere someone’s going to talk to him like that.”
Dean’s stomach pulls so tight it aches.
“Fuck you,” he bites out, the words coming easily now that he has a clearer target for his anger. “I can take care of myself.”
Sam lets go of him so suddenly that he’s on the floor before he realizes he’s falling. His left knee pulses painfully from the impact; left elbow and cheek too. He didn’t even have time to try to catch himself on his hands, which is probably a good thing. Just a little over six weeks since the Flare, and he’s already lost count of the times he’s sliced his palms open, or bent his fingers back, or jammed his thumb.
It’s dead quiet in the room as Dean slowly pushes himself up to his knees with a grimace, favoring his left side. He’s going to have a motherfucking spectacular bruise there tomorrow, but right now the throb isn’t as bad as the embarrassed, shamed pit in his stomach. He can feel eyes on him—judging, pitying—and his skin heats.
There’s a clatter of something—the stupid fucking cane, has to be—hitting the floor by his hands, and then Sam says, “Go ahead. Show me how well you can take care of yourself. All you’ve gotta do is get up and walk over to the kitchen.”
Dean’s hands curl into fists against the floor. His face is so hot it hurts, his muscles thrumming with hostile tension. He doesn’t move.
After an agonizingly long moment, Sam huffs out a breath. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
This time, when he grabs Dean underneath the armpits and hauls him up, Dean doesn’t struggle. He hangs limply in Sam’s grasp, head down and eyes focused who the fuck knows where. He doesn’t offer any goodbyes or apologies as Sam turns them both and heads them for the door, but then again Bobby doesn’t either, so what the fuck ever.
Somewhere between the front porch and the car, Sam’s hold changes from restricting to supportive. One of his arms loops around Dean’s lower back. His other hand forms a steadying focal point where it rests on the center of Dean’s chest.
It’s the most contact they’ve had since those first few days after the Flare, when Dean finally realized the scope of what had happened—to him, to the world—and started shoving his brother away.
Almost as distracting as Sam’s proximity is the sudden fresh air on Dean’s skin. He hasn’t been outside since Sam dragged him to the doctor, and suddenly he can feel the sun all around him—beating warmth on his face despite the breeze. It feels funny against his eyes so he shuts them, then tilts his head down as though he can somehow escape the physical reminder of light.
At the evasive movement, Sam starts rubbing his thumb back and forth where his hand is closed around Dean’s waist. There’s nothing but reassurance in the gesture—nothing of the heated memories it’s stirring up—but Dean uneasily starts to pull away with a defensive snarl on his lips. His brother disengages before he has a chance to, wrapping one oversized hand around each of Dean’s wrists and placing Dean’s hands on the warm roof of the car in front of him.
Dean instinctively shuffles forward, fingers spanning the metal—the Impala, he’d know his baby anywhere—in a restless caress. He waits there for Sam to open the door and baby him into the passenger seat (shotgun, backseat, doesn’t fucking matter anymore).
Instead, Sam steps close behind him, one hand resting low on Dean’s back.
“I know you can take care of yourself, Dean,” Sam murmurs, voice low as though he’s sharing a secret. “You just won’t.”
The place Sam finds for them is hours away—how many hours, Dean can’t tell. It’s hard to count minutes or miles when the only marker he has to work with is his brother’s breathing and a series of disorienting, stomach-turning loops as Sam turns the car right or left. It’s dark by the time they stop—no sensation of sun on his skin, a chill in the air—but Dean didn’t know what time it was when they left Bobby’s, so he can’t use that to judge either.
And he sure as shit isn’t going to ask Sam. Not when he’s fucking pissed at Sam for overreacting like this.
Sam’s quiet as he leads Dean across what feels like a gravel driveway and up onto a porch that squeaks with every step. Inside, the place smells funny—smells like someone else’s home, thick and cloying enough that Dean wants to throw up.
“I can’t stay here,” he says, trying to backpedal.
Sam grips his shoulder and marches him forward—black space rushing past him at a terrifying speed, could be anything there, anything at all, and with every fumbling step Dean winces at the anticipated impact. When it comes, it’s against his shins and not his nose (something padded and soft, doesn’t hurt at all) and then Sam turns him around—whirl of disorientation—and sits him down on what turns out to be a couch.
“Damn it, Sam,” Dean chokes, grasping after his brother as Sam starts to step back. “I said I can’t fucking stay here. It smells like—”
“We’ll open the windows and air it out,” Sam says, detaching himself from Dean’s grip with ease and moving out into the void where Dean can’t follow.
“I’m gonna strangle you in your sleep,” Dean threatens, fists opening and closing futilely at his side.
There’s a beat where he thinks he might have gotten through—and if that’s the case, his first demand is going to be that Sam take him back to Bobby’s—but when his brother’s voice comes, it’s pitiless and hard.
“If you can find my room, you’re welcome to try.”
Max Sidorov, a 28 year-old rafter and trail guide, was taking a family of five down the Yellowstone River when the sky above them exploded in a bloody flare of color. The burning pain in his eye sockets took him by surprise ten minutes after the display started, just as they were shooting into the third set of rapids.
Somehow, amidst the shrill screams coming from one of the kids and the hoarser shouts of O’Connor Sr., Max managed to keep the raft upright and talk Mrs. O’Connor into guiding them in for an emergency landing downstream. There wasn’t any question of rafting out, of course—not with the only experienced rafter (not to mention O’Connor Sr. and 12 year-old Cassidy) inexplicably blind—but Max was able to rig up some trail packs from their supplies and organize a blind-man’s train with Mrs. O’Connor (call me Shelly) up in front and Henry and Kelly bringing up the rear.
They lost O’Connor Sr. when they stopped for the night. Near as Max could figure, the man woke up in the early morning hours needing to take a piss and wandered off without telling anyone. He went over the side of the cliff with no more notice than a choked-off scream. After that, Max made sure everyone stayed roped together at all times—no use in some misplaced sense of shyness getting anyone else killed.
It was difficult going, not being able to see where he was putting his feet, and worse still when the headaches started, but four days after the Incident happened, they finally reached the launch site. Reached safety and salvation.
To Max Sidorov, a 28 year-old rafter, trail guide and survivor, the news that the blindness wasn’t exactly a localized phenomenon came as an unpleasant confirmation, but not much of a shock.
Those first few weeks, Dean gets turned around all the time.
On their third night in the house (still smells funky, no matter what Sam claims), he gets up in the early morning to take a piss and winds up in the kitchen, only figuring it out when he feels around for the toilet and knocks the coffee pot off the counter and onto the floor instead.
Sam finds Dean cursing under his breath as he tries to pick the shards up and takes him by shoulder without a word. He guides Dean through what feels like miles of blank space and relocates him in front of the bathroom sink, where he patiently and methodically rinses Dean’s bloodied fingertips clean and bandages the worst of the cuts.
Only then is Dean allowed to relieve himself—after Sam helps him aim. Even so, he can tell from the sound that he missed a little, and he should be used to it by now, but he isn’t. He’s never gonna get used to the humiliation of this—can’t even take a piss without someone cleaning up after him. At least Sam lets him shake on his own, and put his dick back in his sweats where it belongs.
The most embarrassing part of the entire incident, though, comes when Sam walks him back to his bed like a kid, counting off the steps the entire way in this really loud, overly clear voice that makes Dean want to punch him.
Sam counts all the time after that—fucking annoying habit, is what it is, and Dean’s even more annoyed when he realizes that his brother has him doing it too. The first day Dean counts his way across the living room and into the kitchen without running into anything—the first day he realizes how much this strange, unseen place has filled in with vague, blocky shadows—he hurls a beer bottle at his brother’s superior, nagging voice.
Sam ducks, of course—or Dean assumes he does, since the sound of the bottle breaking is a little too distant for a direct hit—and then says evenly, “You can punish yourself all you want, but you’re learning how to get around inside here. I’m sorry, Dean, but I can’t spend all day worrying about you when I go out.”
Dean’s mouth works—Sam’s full of crap, doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about—but he finally swallows the retort and blunders in the direction his brother isn’t. He deliberately doesn’t count, winds up smacking his head against a cabinet, and ignores the hot, vindictive rush of relief that accompanies the spill of blood down the side of his face.
He doesn’t feel the least bit guilty at the way Sam’s hands tremble as he stitches the cut closed.
Listening to movies, Dean discovers, isn’t so much entertaining as it is torturous.
If he hasn’t watched the film before, he only gets confused by all the different sound effects, and then frustrated by the knowledge that what he’s seeing in his head doesn’t—can’t—match whatever’s being projected on the TV screen.
If he has watched the film before, then the memory just focuses him on what it was like to be able to see, on how much he took it for granted, on what he used to be like before the Flare shut down his sight—shut him out of the world.
But Sam leaves a pile of DVDs in the living room every time he goes out—a job, Dean assumes, although he doesn’t bother asking—and Dean can’t seem to stop himself from putting them on.
He’s not punishing himself, though.
It just gets really fucking boring, trapped alone in the dark.
Sam finally loses his patience. There doesn’t seem to be anything in particular that sets him off. One moment Dean’s grunting his customary, disinterested response to his brother’s, “Aren’t you going to ask about my day?” and the next there’s an unexpected crash as Sam’s plate (presumably still filled with the pasta Sam made for dinner) smashes against the wall.
Dean tenses momentarily and then, grinning, tries to bluster through the tense moment. “It doesn’t taste that bad.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Sam replies with an eerie calmness. “I thought I could wait you out, but I can’t.”
He’s leaving, Dean realizes, and is a little shocked when the understanding doesn’t bring the expected panic. Instead, a knot in Dean’s chest loosens.
Relief.
Then Sam says, “You have to stop punishing yourself.”
Now comes the panic, buried underneath a hot flare of anger. Dean bottles both up, keeping his smile steady as he says, “Dude, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, but—”
“Cut the crap, Dean!” Sam yells, hitting the tabletop with his fist and making Dean flinch. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? You think I don’t feel just as fucking guilty as you do about what happened? But we didn’t know. That text didn’t say one damned thing about the ritual having this kind of side effect.”
Dean’s stunned into silence.
After all these months of not talking about it, he thought he’d lucked out. Thought he’d made it clear to Sam that they weren’t going to talk about it. That this particular topic of conversation is off limits.
Looks like Sam didn’t get the memo after all.
“And you know what?” Sam adds belligerently. “If I had known? I would’ve done it anyway. So fuck you for shitting all over what we did. Fuck you for being the only person dumb enough to turn saving the world into something you should be crucified for.”
The chair squeals against the floor as he gets up, and a moment later a door slams and Dean’s alone.
Frank Garris, 69, had seen a good deal of action flying A-1 Skyraiders in ‘Nam. He’d seen more action than he would have liked, actually, but he survived, which was more than he could say for most of the guys who went through basic with him. These days, when he flew, it was in a smaller bird—little Cessna Skyhawk with a McCauley propeller and a 180 horsepower engine—and she purred just like a kitty cat instead of rattling his bones like the Flying Dumptruck used to. These days, flying wasn’t so much about testosterone and solid brass balls, as it was about cutting himself free from the earth.
It was about feeling like he had the whole world spread out in front of him, instead of a few short years.
When the sky exploded around him at 3,000 feet and climbing, Frank Garris thought—for a single, heart pounding second—that he was back in the jungle. His next thought, even as he started to tilt the Skyhawk’s nose groundward again, banking around to the left to come back toward the private runway his Wall Street hours had garnered him, was that it had finally happened. Some trigger happy, suicidal, extremist asshole had blown up the eastern seaboard.
But there weren’t any mushroom clouds in view—just a streak of black, way off in the distance—and Frank guessed he was going to be in for a bit of a story once he was back on the ground and could find out what in the devil had just happened to his sky.
The stabbing pain hit him mere moments before the darkness.
Thirty seconds after that, it was the ground’s turn.
It takes Dean a while to track Sam down.
The house isn’t huge, but it’s big enough and empty enough (Sam’s doing, he took out all but the essential furniture, pushed what was left against the walls) that loud sounds echo, which means that Dean can’t track his brother by the sound of the door Sam slammed. Finally, though, once he’s ruled everywhere else out, he finds his way onto the back porch.
It’s less any noise that Sam makes and more the absence of animal calls from the dark waste surrounding the house that tells him he isn’t alone out here. He pauses, one hand on the doorjamb, and turns his head one way and then the other. Waits for Sam to say something—to call out.
When nothing happens, Dean clears his throat and tries, “Sammy? You out here?”
The sigh that greets him comes from closer than he expects—less than two feet in front of him, and down around knee height—and Dean jumps. Then Sam says, tiredly, “Can we just ... Can we not tonight? I can’t argue with you right now, I—”
“You’re right.”
Sam’s silent for a moment and then, warily, he says, “I’m right?”
“About me. You mind if I join you?”
There’s another, longer pause where Dean thinks the answer is going to be no, and then the porch creaks as Sam gets up. Dean holds out his hand, waiting, and Sam ignores the show of trust to grasp Dean’s forearm and waist instead.
Dean stiffens momentarily and then, as Sam hesitates, forces himself to relax. Sam is still careful as he leads Dean forward, talking him through where to put his feet, wrapping his hand around one of the rungs in the stair railing to let him support himself as he sinks down onto the top step.
It’s the first time Dean’s been outside since Sam brought him here, and his heart is beating quickly despite his brother’s reassuring presence. Anything could be out there, watching him, and Dean wouldn’t know. He doesn’t even know what sort of terrain surrounds the house—forest, grassland, mountain, farm country, desert. The world has always felt like a big place to him—all those miles of highway—but nowadays it stretches out exponentially. Endless. Forever expanding and hostile.
Dean doesn’t think his fear shows on his face, but it must because Sam sits down close enough that their sides are touching and says, “It’s safe. I put up wards and protection lines before I brought you here.”
Dean turns his head at that, looking a question in Sam’s direction.
“I bought it a couple of weeks after the Flare,” Sam answers in a confessional tone. “When I figured out what was going on with you. I knew Bobby wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t ever going to get that you needed to—you weren’t feeling sorry for yourself. You just feel like you deserved it. Like you don’t deserve to get any better.”
Dean wants to let it go—mostly because Sam still sounds so goddamned weary—but now that he’s gone and sort of admitted it out loud, he can’t seem to shut up.
“I do deserve this, Sam,” he says. “We both do. You think I didn’t hear those reports? You think I don’t know how many people died because of what we did? How many more have to live like this?”
“At least they’re alive,” Sam argues with a little more energy in his voice. “That’s more than they would’ve gotten if the angels had their way. Or do you think Lucifer and Michael would have left anything behind but a pile of rubble?”
Dean lifts one shoulder to show what he thinks about that, knowing that his brother will feel the movement even if he isn’t looking at Dean.
“What about me?” Sam tries after a couple seconds. “Do you think I deserve to be blind?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Sam presses, sounding far more confident than he should that Dean’s been cornered. “I performed that ritual too. I’m just as culpable as you are, man.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t deserve to be punished. Just said you shouldn’t be blind.”
There’s a beat of silence and then Dean feels his brother’s body go stiff as Sam gets it.
When Sam speaks, his voice is flat. “Looking after you isn’t a punishment, Dean.”
“Sure seems like one from where I’m sitting.”
Sam laughs, dry and humorless. “Yeah, cause you’re being an asshole,” he agrees. Then he relaxes slightly, turning his body toward Dean, and Dean tenses as he feels his brother’s regard, heavy and suffocating.
“It doesn’t have to be a punishment,” Sam says, his voice lower and warmer than it has been since the Flare. His hand cups Dean’s cheek, fingers light and caressing across Dean’s hairline. His thumb brushes meaningfully over Dean’s lips.
Dean turns his face away. “Yeah, Sam. It does.”
The next day, Sam comes home early. Like, a lot early.
Dean frowns when he hears the car, and starts feeling around on the couch next to him for the remote. By the time he has the TV off, he’s schooled his expression into something more neutral, although Sam’s getting his goddamned head bitten off as soon as they’re alone.
Fucker brought someone with him.
Make that several someones. Goddamned kids.
The clamor of voices swells as Sam opens the door and Dean, pressing his lips tightly together to keep from swearing at his brother right now and impressionable ears be damned, turns his head toward the sound.
“Here he is!” Sam announces, his voice bright with false cheer. “Told you guys I wasn’t making him up.”
Dean has about three seconds to prepare himself as what sounds like a small herd of rhinoceros stampede toward him, and then there are kids hanging off of his arms and climbing into his lap. He grunts as one of them knees him in the balls—thank God the little shit’s light—and then forgets all about that minor pain as a small finger pokes his shoulder.
Should’ve put a fucking shirt on this morning.
“What’s that?” a young, male voice asks.
Dean grits his teeth—Sam’s a dead man—and then grunts, “Burned myself.”
“How come it looks like a hand?” the same voice prods.
Another finger pokes the scar. “Cool!” the voice that presumably belongs to the second finger says. “Did you get it hunting monsters?”
Sam told them. What a motherfucking moron.
“Sam?” Dean says, turning his head in an attempt to locate his brother. There’s enough warning in his voice to tell Sam that this is unacceptable, whatever it’s meant to illustrate, but all he gets for his trouble is another weight plopped into his lap and a pair of chubby arms flung around his neck.
“This here’s Mandy,” Sam says. “And the hooligans are Matt, Chris, Greg and Todd.”
Only five, then. Dean would’ve sworn there were about fifty of the suckers.
“Are you blinded?” That has to be Mandy asking—voice is coming from right in front of Dean’s face, and it’s higher than the boys’.
Dean’s about to tell her to mind her own goddamned business—fuck being nice; Sam never should’ve brought kids here in the first place—when one of the arms unhooks from his neck and clumsy fingers feel their way across his face.
Feel their way blindly across his face.
Dean’s breath catches.
“Your face is scratchy,” Mandy announces. “Can’t you shave without looking? My daddy can.”
“He can not,” one of the boys puts in. “I seen mommy helping him.”
It isn’t said maliciously—just as a statement of fact—but Dean’s insides twist anyway (fuck Sam for this, fuck him right to Hell) and he says, “I can shave. Just didn’t know I was going to have company.”
“We’re a prize!” Mandy declares, bouncing a little and kneeing Dean’s stomach in the process.
“That’s surprize, brainiac,” one of the boys announces.
“Are you gonna tell us a story?” another asks. “Sam said you know lots of stories from when you were a superhero.”
Dean snorts at that, bitterly, and Sam hastily corrects, “Hunter, Matt. We used to be hunters.”
“You killed monsters and saved people, right?”
“Well ...” Sam hedges.
“Superhero.” It’s said so decisively that there’s clearly no arguing with the kid.
“If you’re a superhero, can I be your sidekick?” Mandy wants to know, snuggling close to Dean’s chest.
If Dean makes it through today without ripping his brother a new asshole, it’ll be a miracle.
Over the next few hours, Dean learns way more than he wants to about the Booker family, which turns out to be more of a clan than anything else. The kids belong to three sets of parents—two brothers, a sister, and their respective spouses. Only two of the adults are sighted, but Mandy’s the only blind child on a block that houses sixteen.
“Apparently,” Sam says as the boys play tag in the backyard and Mandy sleeps curled up against Dean’s side. “The Flare mostly hit adults.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Dean demands. His voice is rough with how much he hates being here, how much he hates having his nose shoved in what he did.
“Doesn’t it?” Sam replies.
Dean clenches his jaw and doesn’t answer.
Billy Cunningham, age 4, was playing outside in the yard. He preferred playing outside these days, because it got him away from the scary darkness inside the house. Mommy never liked the lights on anymore—she yelled and screamed and cried all the time, demanding that Billy turn those fucking lights off. She screamed about it even when there weren’t any lights on.
Even though the dark was scary, though, Billy liked the lights off better too, cause then he didn’t have to look at the blood leaking out of Mommy’s eyes with her tears, or the deep grooves she tore in her own face when she clawed herself.
Billy’s stomach rumbled as he drove his red fire truck around in a circle. He and Mommy had eaten the last of the food in the house a few days ago, and Mommy refused to go out to the store. She refused to go outside at all, cause she was scared that it was still on fire.
Billy had told her it wasn’t, but she wouldn’t believe him.
As his stomach rumbled again, Billy got up, leaving his fire truck where it was, and wandered over to the corner of the yard. He’d noticed a clump of funny looking mushrooms springing up by the fence when he was outside playing yesterday. They were still there today, bigger than ever, and he glanced back at the dark house before looking down at the mushrooms again. After a few more moments of hesitation—Mommy told him not to eat anything growing outside, and these didn’t look quite like the small, white things Mommy used to put in his salad—he plopped down on the grass and started in on them.
While he watched the clouds drift by overhead, Billy scarfed down half the patch of destroying angels and then collected the rest and took them inside to his mommy. Because Billy was hungry, but he knew Mommy had to be hungry too, and good boys shared.
Neither of them would know for another seventeen hours, but the Cunninghams’ days of living in darkness were over.
That night, when Sam gets home from bringing the kids back to wherever they came from, Dean waits for his brother to get close enough and then puts everything he’s got in a right hook. He just manages to graze Sam’s nose before Sam catches him and manhandles him up against the nearest wall and pins him there.
“You son of a bitch,” Dean spits, struggling.
Sam leans forward, forcing Dean still with the weight of his body. “I’m not giving up, Dean. Not on you, not on myself, and not on us. Anything we might deserve for what happened, we already got.”
“Get off me,” Dean snarls. He heaves backward—an immense effort after what has to be months of inactivity—and gets a few inches of breathing room before Sam’s weight crashes right back down on top of him.
“Mom, Jess, Dad,” Sam lists relentlessly. “Jo, Ellen, Pam. Our childhoods. You went to Hell, Dean. For forty fucking years, you went to Hell and they left you there. We paid. We already paid.”
And maybe Sam’s right on his own score—maybe Sam doesn’t deserve the crap Dean’s making him wade through. But Dean’s not done paying. Dean was still making installments on what he did those last ten years in Hell when the Flare hit. Now he’s buried beneath so much debt, he could pay and pay and pay until he’s a hundred and he won’t even have made a dent.
Sam can’t declare bankruptcy for him.
Not on this.
“I love you,” Sam breathes, dropping his forehead against the back of Dean’s skull and breathing down his neck. “I love you, damn it—isn’t that enough?”
Dean stares sightlessly down the length of whatever wall Sam has him up against and offers the only answer he can.
“No.”
Castiel comes the next day, while Sam’s out.
Dean’s first notice of the angel’s presence is the subtle rustling of fabric in the corner of the room and he almost pisses himself before Castiel makes this dry, hrmming noise in the back of his throat that Dean remembers from one too many unpleasant conversations.
“Cas,” he breathes, letting all the air in his lungs out on the word as though he’s been punched. His body flushes hot and then cold again, caught up in the aftershocks of an aborted adrenaline rush.
“Dean,” Castiel replies, sounding as unruffled as ever. Fifty-fifty odds as to whether or not he’s even noticed how badly he just freaked Dean out. “You’re looking well.”
Dean laughs unevenly, putting one hand up to his face and rubbing his stubbled cheeks. “Guess you finally learned how to lie.”
“I had a good teacher.”
Dean doesn’t like the depth of fondness he hears in the angel’s voice. Dropping his hand back to his side, he bluntly asks, “What do you want, Cas?”
“The world owes you a great debt of gratit—”
“Jesus Christ,” Dean moans, interrupting the spiel. His legs twitch, restless with the urge to get up from the couch and pace. “Did Sam send you? He did, didn’t he?”
The sound of footsteps announces Castiel’s approach. “I’m not here for Sam, Dean,” the angel says earnestly. “I’ve been meaning to make this trip. I’m just sorry it took so long. Things have been ... interesting ... in Heaven since Lucifer’s Fall.”
“Really?” Dean says caustically. “Been boring as hell down here.”
There’s a pause and then Castiel notes, “You’re angry with me.”
“Damn straight I’m angry!” The roar doesn’t come out as strong as Dean means it to, not sitting stiffly on the couch and unable to pin Castiel in place with his eyes the way he wants.
This time, the pause is longer.
“I’m not sure why.”
“Did you know all those people would go blind if we did the ritual?” Dean asks bluntly, speaking on the heels of the angel’s admission. There’s no point in beating around the bush, after all. Not when they’re going to end up heading down this road in the end regardless.
“No,” Castiel answers. There’s no delay, which means he’s telling the truth. “If it would help to have someone to blame, though, I would not have stopped you if I had.”
Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t help at all. It doesn’t let Dean off the hook.
His anger leaves him in a rush, though, taking what little strength he still has with it, and he slumps back against the couch.
“What do you want, Cas?” he repeats dully. He doesn’t actually care why the angel is here anymore, not now that his question has been answered. He just wants him to get whatever it is over with and then flap back to Heaven where he belongs.
Then Castiel says, “I came to restore your sight.”
Dean’s spine snaps straight. Panic curls in his throat. “What?”
“You don’t deserve to suffer for fulfilling God’s plan.” Castiel says it like it’s that simple—like he can just lift away Dean’s guilt on his own say-so—and through the icy panic stiffening his muscles, Dean feels his anger returning.
“Who the fuck are you to decide what I do or don’t deserve?” The low tension in his voice should be enough of a warning for Castiel, who has heard him use this same tone a thousand times before raining down hell on some demonic son of a bitch’s ass.
“I’m an angel of the Lord. And in this instance, I speak for Him.”
Looks like that tone is a little less impressive coming from a dude who can’t take more than a couple steps without tripping on something.
“God told you to come down here and forgive me,” Dean says slowly.
“You don’t need to be Forgiven, but yes.”
“What, you talk to Him now? You guys hang out, drink a few beers, play some poker?”
“Our conversations occur on more of a metaphysical level than that required to perform those activities, but you’re essentially correct. I am the Voice of God.”
Even as pissed off as Dean feels right now, that declaration comes out funny enough that he has to take a second to deal with just how huge the stick up Cas’ ass is. Then he moves on, anger solidifying in his chest and turning his voice hard.
“Then you give Him this message from me. Tell Him He can take His forgiveness and shove it.”
There’s a creak of the floorboards as Castiel shifts. Somehow, Dean’s bitterness—or maybe it’s his crassness—surprised him. Makes Dean wonder if the angel was paying any attention at all the last few years.
“You want me to tell the Father to ‘shove it’,” Castiel repeats, speaking slowly and with a greater amount of confusion than Dean remembers. Probably God rubbing the human mannerisms back off his new Number One Bitch.
The anger throbbing in Dean’s throat intensifies, and what Dean wants to say is ‘damn straight’. Cas used to be a friend, though, and shouldn’t have to pay just because he’s basically a slave to the biggest dick that ever lived.
Even knowing it’s not Cas’ fault he’s been picked to play errand boy, it still takes Dean a couple tries before he can throw the angel a bone by offering, “You can add ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ if it’ll make you feel better.”
“Dean, I know you’re hurting, but you have to—”
“I don’t have to do anything, Cas—and you touch me, Host of Heaven or not—friend or not—I swear to God I will dust your feathery ass.”
The prickling across Dean’s skin—warning of an impending touch—eases off again at the depth of hostility in Dean’s threat. It’s the absence of Cas’ claim to innocence more than anything else, though, that tells Dean his suspicion was right.
The angel was about to do some laying on of hands and screw what Dean wants.
That son of a bitch.
“If you won’t accept this gift, then what? Name it and it’s yours.” It’s the most human Castiel has ever sounded, his voice thick with an emotion that Dean’s all too familiar with.
Dean’s just pissed enough at the near betrayal to turn that familiarity into a weapon.
“Let me fill you in on a secret,” he says pitilessly. “That nagging pit just here?” —lifting one hand just to just beneath his heart, he taps his chest— “Maybe feels sorta like a bad case of indigestion? That’s guilt.”
“You’re right,” Castiel agrees. The words are halting, his voice rough. “I consider you a friend, Dean, and fate has not been kind to you. Also, there are things I have done, for the greater good, that have hurt you. I know they were necessary, but I—I confess I find myself wishing that I had not—”
“Forget it,” Dean interrupts. He’s bone weary suddenly and more than a little disgusted with himself. Getting that admission out of Cas was less satisfying than it was supposed to be. Whatever past crimes are bothering the angel, he was only doing his job. Just like he’s only trying to do his job now.
Tipping his head back against the couch and staring sightlessly up at the ceiling, Dean asks, “Anything I want, right? That’s what you said? My very own heavenly severance package?”
“Yes.” Castiel’s voice is eager now, almost pathetically desperate to please.
Dean has a feeling the angel will be less excited when Dean gives him his marching orders—and Sam’s gonna have kittens when he finds out—but he’s too exhausted to care.
“Okay, then. I know just what I want.”
True to Dean’s expectations, Sam practically kicks the door off its hinges when he gets home that night. He doesn’t bother shutting it again, either; just charges across the room and jerks Dean up from the couch.
“You asshole!” he spits. “You self-martyring son of a bitch.”
Dean feels his mouth stretch in a wide, shit-eating grin as he stands calmly with the back of his calves anchoring him against the couch and his brother’s anger burning hot against his front. “What’s wrong, Sammy?”
“Don’t!” Sam yells, giving him a shake. “Don’t lie to me! I saw Mandy and I know what you did.”
Yeah, okay. Looks like they’re going to do this. Might as well get it over with.
“She’s got eighty good years in front of her. I’ve got forty, maybe fifty if I’m lucky. It’s simple math.”
“Do I look like I give a shit about math?”
“I dunno,” Dean answers as innocently as possible. “Do you?”
Sam drops him then, with a muffled, hurt noise like he’s been burned, and all but runs into his room.
Dean can still hear his brother crying through the walls.
Later, when Sam reemerges, Dean is still sitting on the couch. He hears his brother go over to the front door and close it. Then Sam’s footsteps approach and the cushion sinks as Sam sits down beside him.
“You know the first thing I felt when I saw her?” Sam says after a moment. “Hate. That sweet, five-year-old little girl, and I hated her for taking something that should have been yours.”
“She didn’t take anything from me, Sam.”
“Oh, so Cas didn’t show up here offering to heal you.” Dean doesn’t say anything to that, and after a few moments, Sam exhales heavily. The couch cushion dips a little more as he moves—leaning forward, Dean guesses. He imagines Sam propping his elbows on his knees and holding his head in his hands.
“I thought you were a little less masochistic than this,” Sam says finally.
The urge to apologize is an almost physical surge moving from Dean’s stomach up through his chest and into his throat, but it gets caught there. He’s not used to bending, or maybe the problem is that he’s too used to taking pot shots at all of Sam’s weak points.
“Guess you thought wrong.” There’s no trace of remorse in his voice. No hint of the tension in his chest.
Used to be, that sort of flippancy would’ve stirred Sam to a fight. Now Sam just asks softly, “What’s it going to take, Dean? What do I have to do to get you to stop doing this to yourself?”
“How about you start by convincing me that blinding a couple billion people was the best way to go about the whole stopping-the-apocalypse thing?”
Sam doesn’t answer him, and after a few minutes of sitting in stilted silence, he gets up without another word and walks away.
Sam leaves Dean alone after that. For twelve glorious, pressure-free days.
Then, on the thirteenth day, Dean is woken from a deep, dreamless sleep by his brother’s hand on his shoulder.
“Get up,” Sam says shortly. “We’re going on a trip.”
Taylor Bridgeman, 40 years and one day old, woke up blind and hungover.
His house was quiet and empty after last night’s party, the floor strewn with beer bottles and paper plates and napkins.
The bottle that killed him was a Blue Ribbon, and Mandy White, Taylor’s best friend’s wife, drank it less than an hour before she went down on Taylor in the bathroom. He was the birthday boy, after all, and in the middle of a rough divorce, and she felt sorry for him.
Taylor was actually trying to remember just whom the mouth and throat belonged to when he stepped on the bottle and lost his balance. His head slammed into the bathroom doorframe on his way down and he was dead before he hit the floor.
“Damn, boy. It’s good to see you.”
Caught off guard by the unexpected voice, Dean starts to step backwards toward the car. Bobby catches him before he can make good on the retreat, pulling him into a hug and filling his nose with the familiar scents of gun oil and hot metal. Dean’s customary ‘wish I could say the same’ is caught on the tip of his tongue, stuck there amidst the ache running through his insides.
He didn’t realize how much he missed Bobby until now.
“Yeah,” he says haltingly, getting one hand up to pat the man on the back. “You too, Bobby.”
Bobby holds on for a few more seconds before letting Dean go and then moves back a step. He’s still holding onto Dean’s shoulder, though, and he squeezes it in a wordless attempt at communication. Whatever message he’s trying to convey gets lost, of course; Dean’s days of reading whole conversations in other people’s eyes and faces are over.
As the moment draws out and Dean doesn’t offer any sort of response, Bobby’s hand falls away and he coughs awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” he says aloud. “About what I said last time you were here. I was running my mouth about something I didn’t understand. Should’ve known you’d gone and twisted everything round in that thick skull of yours.”
An apology is the last thing Dean expected to hear, and now that it’s out there he’s left squirming inside with how uncomfortable it makes him. He’s never been great at handling this sort of thing, but it’s even worse when he knows that Bobby’s got nothing to apologize for.
Those first uneasy weeks, when Dean was freshly aware of the magnitude of his crime and the guilt sat new and sharp on his shoulders, needling Sam was less of a pastime and more of a survival tactic. Any energy he wasted cutting through Sam’s flimsy defenses was energy not spent tearing himself to pieces. Bobby was less of a casualty of Dean’s messy emotions—there wasn’t anything like hurting the one person he loved best to distract Dean from the fact that he accidentally fucked over the entire world—but the man caught enough shit to understand what it was doing to Sam.
Dean would’ve been pissed on his brother’s behalf if Bobby hadn’t said something.
“Don’t sweat it,” Dean says now.
It’s a little too belated for Bobby to take his words at face value, although he really should, but there’s no awkwardness in the way the man steps close and throws an arm over Dean’s shoulders. Dean imagines that he can feel Sam’s eyes on him—maybe watching him over the roof of the car, maybe standing in front of her with one hand resting on the hood. The Sam in Dean’s head is waiting for him to jerk away, or go stiff, or do any one of the hundred asshole things he always does when someone tries to lead him around the way Bobby’s doing.
But the guidance doesn’t feel as threatening as it does when it’s Sam’s hands on him—maybe because Sam always seems to be offering more than Dean’s willing to take. With Bobby, a hand into the house is just that. No strings attached.
“Come on in,” Bobby says as they go, Dean doing his best not to show how nervous he is about stepping into a dip in the drive and taking them both down. “I got some beers in the fridge, coupla steaks on the grill. Thought maybe we could make a night of it. Have some chow, listen to the game.”
The depth of the longing that idea stirs in Dean’s chest warns him that this is a bad idea. The cozy, domestic scene Bobby’s painting for him isn’t going to lift the darkness. It isn’t going to bring back all those people lost during the first few weeks after the Flare.
“Thanks, Bobby,” Dean says, finally dragging his steps and trying to duck out from under the man’s arm, “but we’ve got a ways to drive back, and—”
“We’re staying.” Sam’s hand closes on Dean’s arm at the same time as his voice registers. Then he moves in closer, blocking Dean’s line of escape (like he could run anyway) and pinning Dean against Bobby’s body. “Unless you think you can drive yourself home.”
The slight cheerfulness that snuck into Dean at the unexpected reunion is stripped away by the blunt reminder of his own helplessness and he feels his expression go flat and stiff. His chest aches with sudden freshness, as though the wound is recent instead of months distant.
Dean can already tell that this is gonna be a fantastic visit.
Dinner is as awkward of an affair as Dean can make it, which means there’s a lot of free-flowing beer to keep everyone distracted from the huge, blind elephant in the room. His tongue is sharp enough that he even cuts himself a few times by accident, but he’s willing to accept the pain if it’ll get Sam and Bobby off his back. Only problem is that Sam and Bobby are unflaggingly patient, and polite, and Sam even seems to be in a good mood for a change.
It doesn’t make any goddamn sense, not unless Sam’s become a better liar with his voice than he used to be. Fuck, what Dean wouldn’t give to be able to see his brother’s expression right now so that he could figure out what’s going on.
“So,” Bobby says in a casual tone of voice as Dean pushes pieces of steak around on (and occasionally off of) his plate. “Sam gave me a call a couple weeks ago. Asked me to do a little more research into that ritual of yours.”
“Bit late for that,” Dean comments, although there’s a cold pit of dread in his stomach that tells him the man isn’t going to be pushed off topic that easily. This is, after all, why Sam brought him here. It has to be.
It’s a motherfucking trap.
“There was a lot of mumbo jumbo about destined paths and turned fates that I had to wade through,” Bobby continues levelly, “But I found it. Can’t figure how your brother knew it was there.”
“I didn’t,” Sam puts in from his own side of the table. “But there had to be something, because Dean sure as hell can’t hear anything I’ve been saying.”
There’s a trickle of sweat running down the back of Dean’s neck and his stomach is tying itself in knots, but he plays it cool and, grinning, says, “Dude, I’m blind, not deaf.”
“You ever wonder why you’re blind?” Bobby asks.
Dean’s grin falters.
“Why you and not Sam? Or me?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“It’s got nothing to do with luck, boy, and it’s time you know it.” From the sharpness of Bobby’s reply, the man doesn’t care at all for Dean’s sarcastic tone.
“Whatever,” Dean mumbles. He’s really sweating now—everywhere, not just down the back of his neck, and his mouth has gone dry. When he reaches for his beer, he misjudges where he left it and his knuckles collide solidly with the bottle instead. There’s a dull thunk as it falls over, and then a fizzing noise of the alcohol rushing out onto the table, and Dean swears, fumbling for his napkin.
He’s managed to knock a few more pieces of steak off his plate and his fork onto the floor before a hand—Sam’s, Dean’d know that oversized paw anywhere—lands on his and stills it. Dean expects his brother to tell him to relax, that he’s got this, but Sam doesn’t mention the beer at all.
Instead, in a soft, serious voice Sam says, “You would’ve been dead, Dean. You ... Mandy ... everyone who went blind after the Flare. If we hadn’t performed the ritual, if we hadn’t stopped Lucifer the way we did instead of the way the angels wanted us to, you all would have died.”
Dean’s head pulses—feels about two sizes too small, along with his chest. There’s spilled beer seeping around his fingers (isn’t anyone gonna clean that up?), but that isn’t what makes him jerk his hand out from underneath his brother’s. He can’t—he can’t have Sam touching him right now.
“Did you hear me, Dean?” Sam says, and both the creak of his chair and the sound of his voice tell Dean he’s leaning closer. “People died after the Flare, lots of them—I’m not denying that. But if we hadn’t done that ritual, it would have been a lot worse.”
Mandy’s face flashes through Dean’s head—not what she actually looks like, of course, but Dean’s never going to know any better, and he had to put some kind of image to the name. So he’s looking at some generic, little girl face in his head—a little girl with Mandy’s name who’s filled with guileless questions and has a high, open laugh—and in his head the little girl’s face is covered with blood. Her eyes are open, sightlessly staring.
Of course, minus the blood, they’d still be doing that if Dean hadn’t taken Cas up on God’s bribe.
“Better dead than this,” Dean spits. He means to push to his feet now—gonna fall on his face before he makes it out of the kitchen, probably, and that’ll be plenty humiliating, but he can’t sit here any longer.
Then Bobby says, “The rest of us woulda been meatsuits.”
The ripple of cold that goes through Dean’s body is painful in its intensity.
“No survivors,” Bobby continues. “Just the dead and the disposable party suits, and I don’t wanna hear any bullshit about us having been better off, cause I’ve had one of those bastards inside me and it ain’t a picnic.”
On Dean’s other side, there’s the scrape of chair against linoleum and then Sam’s hand lands on the back of Dean’s neck, kneading.
“Breathe,” Sam says. “C’mon, man. Breathe.”
Dean tries to protest that he is breathing, fuck Sam very much, but when he goes to speak he realizes that Sam’s right; there’s no air getting into his lungs. He gropes for the edge of the table as his head swims, hears a clatter as his knife joins his fork on the floor.
He’s making a mess. He should get that. He should—
“Oh, Christ,” Bobby gripes.
Dean almost falls out of his chair as it’s pulled backwards, and then Sam’s hand on his neck presses forward, urging him to bend over and getting his head between his legs. Sam crouches next to him, close enough for the shaggy fringe of his hair to brush across Dean’s cheek, and murmurs, “You’re okay. You’re okay, Dean, I’m right here, I’ve got you. Just let go.”
Dean’s shoulders shake once—more of a hitch than anything else—and Sam’s hand tightens on his neck.
“That’s it. C’mon, man. Let it out.”
The second shake is stronger, traveling through his entire torso and making his right leg twitch, and then Sam’s fingers card up through his hair and that’s it. Dean sucks in a breath, the oxygen flooding his lungs so fast it hurts, and then he’s crying with weak, pathetic gasps. Tear glands weren’t burnt out at all, turns out, because his face is getting sloppy and wet as he cries.
Sam eases Dean off the chair and down to the floor. The linoleum is cool against his knuckles as he leans forward, head bowed and back hunched. Now that he’s in a better position to get air, the sobs are wracking him harder—painful in their intensity—and he’s trembling all over.
When Sam lets go of his neck, it’s only to haul him into a tight hug. Dean’s mouth ends up squished against Sam’s collarbone; his forehead rests against the side of his brother’s throat.
Dean struggles a little—it’s reflex, after having spent so long pushing Sam away—and then, desperately, his arms come up and grip Sam back.
Eugena Clarence, a 28 year-old mother of two clocking in at just under 300 lbs, was making her slow, laborious way downstairs when the lights went out. It was the sudden blindness more than the pain that made her lose her balance, sending her down in a tumble.
She didn’t break anything, thank the Lord—thank her lard, her best girl Jade would have said—but once she was down on the bottom, she was shocked to the core to realize that she couldn’t get up.
Huffing, she rocked her body first one way and then the other as something—tears?—leaked out of her burning eyes. She strained to sit up, neck cording and muscles screaming, and moved not at all.
And then, deeper in the house, came the cry all mothers dread. A child’s yell of pain and fear.
Three hours later, after Jade showed up with her current beau and the two of them levered Eugena back to her feet—after Eugena had her crying Mercy in her arms, with Reggie clinging at her knees—she made herself a promise.
Whatever just happened—whether it was the final judgment as Jade claimed, or if it was some sort of terrorist attack—Eugena was done putting off that damned diet.
“Hey, man. You doing okay out here?”
Dean doesn’t startle—Sam made more than enough noise as he came out on the porch. He does shift over to make room: a wordless invitation for his brother to join him on the step.
Sam comes closer, then pauses behind Dean. A warm weight settles over Dean’s shoulders—gradually, Sam still being careful not to startle him—and when Dean reaches up, he grips the collar of what feels like a heavy, woolen coat.
“Thanks,” he says as he puts the coat on. He didn’t notice when he found his slow, unsteady way out here in the aftermath of Sam and Bobby’s ambush, but there’s more than a little chill to the air.
“Hey, don’t thank me,” Sam says as he settles himself in the space Dean made for him. “It’s self-preservation. If you got sick, I’d have to take care of you—and, dude, you suck as a patient.”
Laughing feels strange—the entire universe has a weird, surreal tint to it; side effect of adjusting his worldview—but Dean manages okay. Sam laughs with him—softer, but no less genuine—and it warms him up inside better than the coat ever could.
“What month is it, anyway?” Dean asks as he zips the coat up. “I’m freezing my ass off here.“
“It’s October 21st.”
Dean takes a moment to digest that—the last date he was consciously aware of was May 17th—and then says, “Huh.”
He guesses there are things he’ll have to catch up on now—shit he should know about what happened after Lucifer Fell, what the other hunters are doing, what Sam’s been doing aside from babysitting those kids—but right now he doesn’t feel any particular urge to ask. He’s already processing enough new information.
“So,” Sam says after a few minutes of companionable quiet. “Are you actually going to learn how to use that cane now?”
Dean doesn’t even know where the damned thing is, but it’s a sure bet that Sam does. Sam has probably been keeping it polished in his eternal optimism that the day would come when Dean would run out of excuses not to bother.
“Guess I’m gonna have to try, anyway.”
Sam’s silent, but it isn’t difficult to follow his train of thought. It isn’t difficult to guess that he’s thinking about how maybe Dean wouldn’t have had to learn, if he’d been a little less determined to pay for mistakes he didn’t actually make.
“I don’t regret it, just so we’re clear,” Dean announces, hoping to head off that argument before it starts. “If I’d known, I still would’ve told Cas to heal her instead.”
“I know.” The evenness of Sam’s answer surprises Dean, although he supposes it shouldn’t. Sam has had two weeks to work through Dean’s decision, and there are times—like now—that Dean gets the uncomfortable impression that his brother knows him better than he knows himself.
Sam’s hand is warm when he slides it into Dean’s and twines their fingers together. Dean snorts, trying to pull his hand free, and Sam uses his grip to tug Dean closer.
“Sam,” Dean warns.
Sam noses at his jaw, lips brushing the side of Dean’s neck and sending minute shivers down his back. “God, I missed you.”
This time, it’s less a brush of Sam’s lips and more a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss on the underside of his jaw.
Dean moves his head away with a sharp movement. “Sam, stop.”
“Why?” Sam asks, pursuing him and pressing another kiss to Dean’s earlobe. “Bobby went into town to give us some privacy. He’s not gonna see anything.”
“That’s not the point,” Dean insists as he slips his hand free from his brother’s. Getting his newly freed hand up between them, he uses it to push against Sam’s chest and get some space. “It’s not that easy for me, dude.”
“Why not?” Sam demands, radiating hurt. “Is it—Ruby? Because I thought we were past that.”
“No—I mean, we are.” Christ, Dean hates how much he sounds like a girl right now. Huffing out a breath, he finishes, “It’s complicated.”
There’s a beat of silence where he can practically hear Sam thinking about this and then his brother suggests, “So uncomplicate it.”
“I can’t be what you want.”
“What I want is my brother. I’m pretty sure you fit the bill, Dean.”
The bitch is actually going to make him say it.
“I’m blind, Sam.”
“You can’t possibly think I care about that!”
“No, but I do care. Things are pretty fubar right now, Sammy, and I’m not fucking them up more by throwing sex into the mix.”
“You sound just like you did after Stanford,” Sam accuses sourly.
“Yeah, well, this whole ‘screw the consequences, let’s get horizontal’ attitude of yours ain’t all that unfamiliar either, dude,” Dean shoots back. Almost immediately, he grimaces—having this fight for what feels like the hundredth time isn’t going to do either of them any good—and temporizes, “Look, I’m not saying never. I’m saying give me some time, all right? Let me get my legs under me again before you kick them open.”
“So you’re saying take it slow.”
“I’m saying that you’ve gotta let me deal with the fact that I’m never gonna be able to fucking see anything again,” Dean snaps. “You know what I see in my head whenever I look up? I see that sky. It looked like the whole fucking world was exploding, remember? Lucifer’s grace bleeding all over the place and fucking shit up—that’s the image I get to carry around with me. Last fucking thing I ever saw.”
“Dean, it—it doesn’t look like that anymore.”
“You think I don’t know that? Doesn’t change what I’m stuck with in here.” Turning his head in his brother’s direction, Dean taps his temple. “And that’s just—that part doesn’t even fucking matter as much as the other stuff. I can’t—Dude, I can’t drive. I can’t cook. I can’t even take a piss without making a goddamn mess. No offense, Sammy, but this thing with us is a hassle I don’t need right now.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not you, man, I just ... Wait, what?”
“Okay,” Sam repeats. His hand finds Dean’s again and squeezes. “I can wait. Take as long as you need, man. Just don’t expect me to get tired and find someone else while you’re figuring things out, because that’s never going to happen.”
For the first time—since Hell, since this messy thing started between them, since Sam ditched him for Stanford—Dean believes him.