Each day was the same: Wake up, eat something, check on Cas, report for duty with Sam. He had been used to the same old routine for about a year now. His life had started to blur together into one long string of days where one day never differed from the next. It was getting to the point where he couldn't tell the days apart from each other. He couldn't remember if they had eaten chicken for dinner last week or a month ago.
Before his life had turned into the wild and crazy mess that it was, he could remember nearly every detail of every day. He remembered the cases him, his dad, and his brother had taken on when he was young. He remembered the day his brother went to college, and the day he came back. He could remember his dad dying. He remembered his brother dying, he remembered going through literal hell to bring him back. He remembered going on hunts for Bobby with Sam. He remembered going to the roadhouse and seeing Ellen and Jo.
He remembered how Sam used to smile and research cases on his laptop. He remembered picking on him for eating salads all the time. He remembered giving people Bobby's phone number, and having Bobby pretend to be some big bad FBI agent. He clearly remembered the apocalypse, and the reason that he was in this situation in the first place. But most of all, he remembered Cas.
He remembered Cas because while everything had changed, Castiel had changed the most. Sam was still his brother; he was still the same guy, just a little more focused, a little more cold. Bobby was still Bobby, the go-to guy, the one who told you where to go, what to do, and how to be. Ellen was still taking care of everyone, sort of acting like a mother hen. She'd taught herself how to be a make shift nurse for the doctor they'd been lucky enough to find. And Jo, she was still following Sam and Dean around, acting like the little sister they never wanted but are grateful to have. But Castiel...
Castiel was a shell of his former self. He had taken to drugs, sex and his newly acquired skills of sarcasm and lying to make his way through. Hell, Dean didn't even know if he was an angel anymore, he showed no signs of having any mojo. He was given jobs to do, but he'd refuse, forcing Dean to do his dirty work for him. Well, he didn't force Dean, but Dean felt the need to cover for Cas. Surely Bobby knew this was happening, but he turned the other way.
No one wanted to admit that the angel had fallen.
So Dean chose to focus on the angel he used to know. The one who never understood references, who was scared of female contact, who was hands down the biggest badass anyone could ever know. If Dean admitted to himself that that angel was gone, he'd have to kill whatever replaced him.
"We're runnin' low on food so I'm gonna send out five of you to get somethin' from one of the towns nearby. It should be a grab-n-go so it'll be a great time to get some of you trainees out there for the first time." Bobby explained to the group.
Since the Croatoan virus started to spread, they had started up a safe haven open to anyone willing to fight. Initially it was just Sam, Dean, Bobby, Cas, and a few others they had picked up on the street but it had expanded substantially since Ellen and Jo arrived with more people. Eventually they sent out recruitment teams to go and find other survivors to join them. There is always strength in numbers.
"I'll go," Dean volunteered, as per usual.
Sam raised his hand, "Me too,"
"No, Sam, you need to sit this one out. It'll be easy, let your brother handle it," Ellen said, shaking her head.
Sam raised an eyebrow, but decided to keep his mouth shut. Dean on the other hand was not so quiet about it, he didn't like to be away from Sam, "Ellen, that's ridiculous, there's no reason he shouldn't go out there. Its easy, he's not hurt and-"
"Trust me Dean." Ellen interrupted him, crossing her arms. Dean let it go.
"I'll go then," Jo raised her hand.
After a few seconds of hesitation, Ellen nodded, "Alright, three more?"
"How 'bout me?" Castiel asked, his voice had a playful tone in it, almost like he knew he would get turned down.
"Are you clean?" Bobby questioned.
Cas scoffed, "No,"
"Then no, anyone else?" He looked around, "Joseph? Allison? How 'bout you two?" They agreed quickly, "Alright, good and, let's see... Derek? You've shown some potential, you think you're ready for the real deal?"
Derek smiled, "Hell yeah,"
Ellen clapped her hands together, "Great, now that that's settled, this meeting is dismissed. Those of ya'll going out, start getting together and devising a plan. Get moving people." As people started to file out she called out, "I need Sam, Dean, Chuck, and Mark to come talk to me,"
Chuck was always real good with the people in the settlement. He had a way with words no one else seemed to posses. It made since, he was a writer and a prophet of the Lord after all. Words were kind of his thing.
Mark on the other hand, he was all business. He was a doctor who they had found hiding with his family in a shed a few miles out. He was a certified trauma surgeon and had some pretty impressive triage skills under his belt. While he worked quickly and efficiently, his bedside manner wasn't amazing. But in times like this, petty things like bedside manner didn't seem to matter.
"What do you need Ellen?" Chuck asked.
"Mark and I were thinking and we realized that we'd lost more people to the virus than we had anything else," Ellen explained.
Mark nodded, "This is true, we've been keeping records, and most of the fatalities, 78% to be exact, are coming from people who come dead from the outside because they'd been infected."
Dean shook his head, "Thanks for the info Captain Obvious, but that's not surprising anyone. We're in the middle of the friggin' apocalypse in case you didn't notice."
"Here him out Dean," Ellen replied.
"We've decided to try and come up with some sort of vaccine, a way to prevent the virus from happening to any of us. It would make going out of the walls easier," Mark said.
Dean furrowed his eyebrows, "Why the hell are you telling us this? Start working on it,"
"That's the thing. Vaccines are made by introducing an inactivated version of the virus to a person's immune system. The immune system in a way 'sees' the virus and can build up antibodies to protect itself against it. It would be difficult and very dangerous to try to get a person infected with the Croatoan virus into the camp, and even if we could, it would be very difficult to deactivate the virus, so we were thinking-"
"You were thinking," Ellen corrected him.
"Yes, I was thinking, that since Sam is already immune to the virus..." He seemed to be afraid of finishing his sentence.
"You want my blood don't you?" Sam asked.
Dean tensed up immediately, "No, definitely not. You're not taking his blood. He's not a human blood bag."
"It would only be a little bit, just to test the theory out." Mark reasoned.
"You can take some," Sam said rolling up his sleeve.
Dean shook his head, "No! Sammy, no. We don't even know if this is gonna work,"
"Well we've gotta try. Dean I started all of this. I made this happen. If I can try and help stop it, I'm going to." Sam continued to roll his sleeve up.
Chuck butted in, "Okay, let's say you get a vaccine together. How are you going to test it?"
Mark smiled and put his hands on Chuck's shoulders, "That, my friend, is where you come in. I need you to talk this over with everyone else and try and find a volunteer to have it tested out on."
At this point, Dean was livid. Not only was this dick trying to take Sam's blood, but he was going to knowingly put one or more of the settlement's people in danger. These people weren't just strangers, they were his friends. Hell he'd even go as far as calling some of them family. These people were all any of them had. As far as he knew, they were all that was left of the world. Or at least all that was left of his world. Even if there were other people out there somewhere it was likely they would never find them.
Dean looked to Chuck, hoping he'd disagree with the idea.
"I'll get with Carlotta, if I remember correctly, she was a psychologist. If I do get a volunteer I'll have her go over everything with them and have her make sure they're volunteering for the right reasons." Chuck nodded, "If it works, maybe you can work on getting a cure." He said, only half jokingly.
Mark was grinning, "Perfect, alright Dean, you're the only one left. Are you good with what's happening?"
Dean was unsure, "What does Bobby think of all this?"
Ellen shrugged, "He's not the biggest fan, but he can't see a good reason to be against it,"
"I can. We're going to test out an unnecessary vaccine out on a person who'll die if it doesn't work. I think that's a damn good reason to go against it,"
Mark pursed his lips, "If we weren't in the middle of what you call 'the friggin' apocalypse', I'd agree with you, but these are desperate times. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices, even if it doesn't settle well with you,"
Dean nodded. That was the first bit of sensible knowledge to come out of the doctor's mouth, "Fine. But I wanna be there for everything. I wanna be here when you draw the blood, when your making the vaccine, and when you test it out. These are my people Doc, you better not screw this up,"
Okay, so this came to my head. I know there's a lot of these Croatoan AUs, but I got the vaccine idea and I had to write it. Anyway here it is. Cas is pretty screwed up right now, you'll see more of that in future chapters, I tried to include him a bit more at the beginning, but this chapter does focus more on introducing the vaccine thing. I certainly hope nobody has already done this, that would suck.
Anyway, hope you liked it. Plus I'm doing a really shitty job at writing the characters, I know, but I'll try and get a hang of it. I'm hoping that the next chapters will be longer and more interesting.
Well, thanks for reading! Feel free to complement or criticize me in the form of a review! Love you guys! XOXO
