Disclaimer:Don't own
Summary:Written as a Christmas present for a friend on lj.
Misery
Blood sits in drying beads on Dean Winchester's skin, trembling and threatening movement when he quivers, muscles tensed as one long, thin dribble of red leaks from between his ribs, sliding slowly down the path created by one of his intercostal muscles as it stretches tight across Dean's ribs while he inhales. The blood drips and stains the beige motel comforter red in splotches, perfect circles where it sinks into the cloth and begins to dry; a brilliant burgundy amid the expanse of faded brown.
"Dude, hold still." Sam wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, needle and thread resting delicately against Dean's skin, bloody black thread and crimson smeared metal.
"The crazy bitch shot me." Dean mumbles, eyes half open, fixed on the myriad of cracks in the ceiling. The flexing of his fingers each time Sam spears the needle through his flesh is the closest he comes to indicating pain. Castiel remembers Dean before, before hell and Alastair and the rack, and the noticeable differences make the sympathetic part of his soul ache. The Dean before would scream or yelp, swear and kick a foot half-heartedly in Sam's direction. This Dean just lies back, accepting, and it is strangely beautiful, a soft vulnerability only captured in the most perfect prose of the finest poetry, woven into beauty through the eloquence of the written word.
"You broke through her front door." Sam hisses and sets the needle down on top of Dean's half sewn shut wound. "I think I have glass in my hand. Castiel, can you finish this?" A clear shard protrudes from Sam's middle knuckle, the skin around it pink and irritated.
"Did they teach you sewing 101 up in heaven Cas?" Dean skin is warm when he presses down, guides the needle through inch by inch, leaving a line of black thread behind it; a map of pain over Dean's flesh.
"A past vessel of mine was a tailor." Dean's chest rumbles with forced, half delirious laugher beneath his fingertips.
"You can fix the tear in my jeans then?" Dean's teeth grind together and Castiel can hear the squeak of enamel on enamel, an almost inaudible sound of something giving way. Fresh blood rises from the graze, bubbling past the stitches, hot against the base of Castiel's palm as he finds a towel and wipes it up, fascinated as Dean's toes uncurl inside his socks; a modicum of relaxation flowing through Dean's soul. He finds himself delighted at the way Dean goes motionless, lips parted in a sigh, humming low under his breath, patient and trusting like Castiel has rarely seen him be. It is reminiscent of his time mending Dean's decrepit corpse, bringing the skin to life piece by piece, warming it into the land of the living while Dean's soul lay nestled in the space between his wings, sheltered beneath the feathers stretching towards the heavens. "Who thought it was a good idea to let kids play with guns? Fucking constitution." His thumbs dance along the edges of Dean's wound, touching the crust of old blood and drying stitches.
Dean twitches once and wraps his sweat slick fingers around Castiel's wrist.
"Whoa, you've gone a little too far south there cowboy." He glances down to where he has intertwined black thread with Dean's unbroken skin, six extra stitches down his side.
He corrects his mistake and presses his hand to feel as Dean shivers, the minute shuddering of Dean's trust and fragility.
"I can't breathe through my nose." Dean sniffles, his voice clogged and nasally, cheeks flushed a too bright pink.
"Shut up." Sam tosses a pillow weakly at his brother's face. "Ugh, my nose is running." Sam blows his nose violently, as if he is expelling demons from it. "I need more NyQuil."
"Meh." Dean coughs into his hand and Castiel listens to his chest rattle, the bones creak and tissue spasm. Inside Dean sounds like he's drowning.
"Castiel, can you go to the pharmacy? I think there's one downtown." He's never been to visit an apothecary, but the Winchesters appear to be desperately in need of one. "Get NyQuil, and some Tylenol and uh, cough drops."
"Cherry cough drops." Dean coughs again and his entire body heaves with the force of it before he slumps over, wrapping himself in blankets, burrowed in a cocoon of lime colored sheets. Things inside Dean crackle angrily.
The supermarket is a fascinating place. There is an entire section devoted to medicinal needs, bottle of medication after medication, syrups and pills and suppositories. The dark, sickly green bottle of goopey fluid is NyQuil; the red and yellow bottle stocked with pills Tylenol; and cough drops are small, rounded circles that smell bitterly sweet in their individual wrappers. He finds a strange sense of pride in taking care of Dean, a ribbon of warmth blooming in his solar plexus.
"Oh thank God you're back." Sam has a roll of toilet paper in his hand and only one sock on his feet as he shuffles from the bathroom back to his bed, snatching the bag from Castiel's hand as he passes him. Castiel opted to pay an extra two dollars for a re-usable bag. The clerk told him it was environmentally friendly and he was helping to save the world. "Dean, wake up." Sam shakes Dean's blanket covered shoulder. "We have drugs."
"G'way." Dean rasps, sweating from every pore in his forehead, his collar soaked through and wet. "Bitch."
"I'm too tired for this. Roofie him Cas." Sam sets the two white elliptical pills onto the nightstand beside the alarm clock. Sam is a solid weight on his bed, snoring within minutes, mouth open wide so he can breathe.
Pills are small and dry and chalky things. They taste acerbic on the tip of his tongue when he licks one, a distinctly metallic, sugar coated flavor.
"Open your mouth Dean."
"Kinky son of a bitch, I don't swing that way." Dean laughs a messy, half coherent laugh, delirious with fever. "Ha, now you're actually giving me roofies. I better not wake up with hickeys."
"Swallow." The pills drop from his palm into Dean's throat.
"Just this once." Dean giggles to himself, amused by a joke beyond Castiel's comprehension. "Never thought I'd swallow." Dean hacks up something damp and green. "Gross."
"You have mucous in your lungs." The fluid is visible through the slits of Dean's ribs, standing out against the symbols carved into his bones.
"I'll take a shower in the morning." He seats himself on the side of Dean's bed, mattress flexing and bending beneath him, one lone metal spring poking into the underside of his thigh.
That night, Dean tosses with fever, coughs his throat sore, and Castiel has never felt more useful than when he rests the back of his hand against Dean's burning skin.
Dean dreams in blood. Dean dreams in his own blood. Dean's blood splattered wide and wet and red across the floor, dripping from the sharpened ends of gleaming steel tools, pooled at demons feet. Some nights the demon is Azazel, sometimes Meg, sometimes faceless, nameless creatures, twisted and terrible, memories from his decades of endless torment. Usually, however, at least three nights of the week, the demon is Alastair, or the demon is Dean himself. Alastair and demon Dean team up on occasion, slice Dean up until he is nothing, scattered pieces that resemble flesh. Castiel would stop the dreams if he could, but there are more pressing matters in the world than the activities of Dean's subconscious. He allows the nightmares to persist until they become too much for him to permit Dean to bear.
"'Bout time you got here." Dean spits blood and the fragments of his remaining tooth. The pack of demons, wild, black things, darker than the night and hell itself don't look up from where they continue to ravage Dean's body, pulling him apart with bare, greedy hands and gnarled, pointed fingers. One begins to pull out the length of Dean's trachea and he banishes it back, sends it to the corners of Dean's mind where it originated; the rest of them follow. On the ground Dean gurgles, mangled hands trying to hold his intestines in. "Cas."
"Shh." In Dean's dreams he's powerless, is only as strong as Dean wants him to be, and here Dean is only a solid, weak thing. He touches where Dean's skin has been ripped away, his fingertips gliding over blood slick bone, splintered white and yellow. "I'll take care of you." There are no bandages in the desolate place that is Dean's mind, and he patches Dean's wounds with scraps of his clothing, Dean's t-shirt and jeans tied around spurting arteries and exposed muscle. Dean's amulet functions as a makeshift tourniquet for his half severed arm, the blood flow trickling to a marginally safer ooze. He gathers Dean in his arms, this Dean who is battered and broken, who soaks up his affection like a sponge rather than push it away. Dean is docile and affable, someone to be cherished openly and eternally, someone who rests his cheek against the side of Castiel's neck and breathes into his skin, close and unrestricted.
In his deepest moments of self-loathing, he hates himself for liking broken Dean better.
He can smell Dean's blood on the wind. It hangs in salt and iron scented molecules, so thoroughly drenched the air is almost red.
There are three long cuts down Dean's torso, completely superficial, barely past the first two layers of skin. The cuts do bleed though, and from where he stands, shrouded from sight, he sees the fine ribbons of red rushing steadily downwards. The wendigo tying Dean to the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse licks the blood from his chest, its slick, gray-pink tongue lapping up the droplets. The cement is stained purple and black with dried blood and bile, sour of rotten flesh and half chewed bones. Wendigo lairs are messy and fetid with death, picked clean skeletons hanging from the ceiling by their ankles, strung up at their bony, crumbling wrists. This wendigo picks its victims clean, leaves marrow and bone behind, accustomed to the innumerable victims it brings back. Wendigos are supposed to hibernate for decades at a time yet this is no ordinary creature, this is a demon living beneath a wendigos skin, a black eyed wendigo six times more deadly.
"I knew you'd fall for it." The demon bursts out of the wendigo's mouth in a coil of smoke. The wendigo falls dead to the ground, killed from within by the demonic heat and sulfur. The demon steps from the darkness in a new body, a blade worthy of Alastair's praise held in his hand. "A wendigo in Chicago? Ridiculous."
"Technically you were a wendigo, so, we were right about that." Dean fails to gain leverage in his upside down position and swings slowly back and forth. "Wearing a wendigo, that is pretty fucking impressive, very creative of you."
"I try." The demon grins, that shiny, immaculate knife clutched in his fingers. "Alastair used to tell us stories about you Dean; I want to see if the man lives up to the legend. The vessel of an angel" The demon smiles, straight white teeth flecked red with blood. "Lucifer is going to be so proud." Castiel's protective nature rears its head, urges for him to protect, but he finds himself thinking of a bandaged, injured Dean, sitting beside Dean in bed, peeling blood crusted gauze from his wounds with such tenderness Dean will be able to feel it, the love radiating from his soul. He wants to be the hero, armor clad knight, scooping Dean up to carry him away to safety, to a future together.
The demon sinks in his knife, and Castiel waits.