A/N: This is the next story in a mild AU/canon divergence series called The Other Guardian 'verse. There's a detailed note about it on my profile page, but in brief: after Dean is raised from Hell by Castiel, an entire year passes before the Lilith rises and the seals start to break. During that time, Castiel is assigned to watch over the Winchesters, and finds himself growing closer and closer to Sam.
This story follows "A Change in the Weather," but it's not necessary to read that story first.
Special Note: One challenge of adding a "gap year" between Dean being raised from Hell and most of the events of Season 4 was getting in a few important canon events in a new way. This story surrounds/follows Dean finding out about Sam exorcising demons with his mind while he was in Hell, but since in this 'verse it isn't Castiel but Uriel who tells Dean what Sam was doing with Ruby, we needed a different story to explore that. This story is much darker than the last couple, with equal focus on Sam and Dean and Sam and Castiel.
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Blood and Broken Glass
The March night was colder than Sam had expected. He could feel the chill of it even through his heavy brown coat, and his teeth ached as he sucked in a breath and jogged up the rotting steps of the old farmhouse, the soft wind hissing in his ears. He struggled to turn the tarnished brass knob with just two fingers, and then nudged the door open with his knee, the low creak echoing out into the dark, empty fields at his back. Dust swirled up into the air as the bottom of the door caught on a tattered piece of cloth, leaving a long swath of clean wood on the otherwise grimy floor.
The abandoned farmhouse was on the far edges of a small town, smaller now that the only major factory had gone out of business. It was so small that the rumors of bodies turning up in vacant houses had only been a blip in the newspaper. On the drive into town, Sam had peered up at the hulking silhouettes of dark warehouses and silos and then over at his brother as they drove past the glowing sign of the first motel, and the second, and the third. They hadn't stopped to get a room yet when Dean dropped him off on the outskirts and headed for the other side of town, the winking brake lights his only goodbye. Sam tried not to wonder if his brother would pick him up when they were done or if he'd be walking back.
His cell phone sagged against his jacket's breast pocket as he ducked the low doorframe and stepped inside, the entryway glittering with broken bottles and cigarette butts and other footprints in the dust, though they looked old. He usually kept his cell phone in his pants pocket, or the deep pocket of his coat, jammed in among fast-food napkins and hotel pens and loose change and all the other meaningless, everyday things. But now he was on edge, worried about missing a call.
It was stupid, because the ringer was up all the way and he'd turned the vibrate on, too, so that he would probably give himself a coronary if it did ring and the first few bars of "Bad to the Bone" shattered the silence of the house. And he wasn't supposed to be thinking about his phone at all—he was supposed to be thinking about the fistful of salt in one hand, and the tire iron in the other, and the ghost that was his best guess for what had been hanging slashed bodies out the windows of empty houses. They were lucky to even have a guess, with how little research they'd put into this. Dean had looked up directions to the town on his smartphone yesterday, and that was basically it. Sam's hand fidgeted as he fought down the urge to pull out the phone again. The route map was the closest he had to a message, and his missed call list hadn't changed in two days.
There was only ever one name on that list—Dean, 2:25; Dean, 6:47; Dean, 11:17. It seemed like they couldn't be apart for an hour without him missing a call from his brother. It was the technological equivalent of Dean leaving the bathroom door open while he showered.
Two days ago, the calls had stopped. A lot of things seemed to have stopped two days ago. Sam felt like part of him was still frozen in that moment, staring into fuming green eyes.
Do you even know how far off the reservation you are? How far from normal? From human? Sam moved into the kitchen and used his toe to nudge a broken stool, the only stick of furniture left in the ransacked house. It wasn't fair, because he hadn't done anything, not since the day Dean crawled out of Hell and threw his arms around Sam again—hadn't done anything at all except try to pretend it had never happened, that the person he'd stared back at in the mirror for four months had never existed, or at least to bury him six feet down. But Dean had found out anyway, and then he'd been pissed, just as Sam had known he'd be—just as everyone was. A sheet of clear plastic nailed over the insulation on the wall flapped and crackled as he passed, like angry wings.
If it's so terrific, why did an angel tell me to stop you? Sam halted at the edge of the ragged linoleum, steadying himself against the counter as he felt the shiver go through him again—the icy fist that had clenched around his lungs for one moment as he couldn't stop himself from wondering whether it was blue eyes and soft, warm hands that had condemned him to his brother's wrath, before Dean was speaking again. The angels were watching you, Sam. Uriel was watching you—and somehow Sam could imagine that, could imagine Uriel standing over him as he retched into the filthy trash can of a filthier motel, as a beer bottle smashed at his feet, the last of the cheap alcohol still rancid on his tongue, as he dug his fingers into a bare mattress and prayed for something, anything, to make it go away. He could imagine Uriel watching him suffer. He wondered where Castiel had been.
Saving his brother, maybe.
The lies were his own, and that meant the fallout was, too. Nothing he'd said seemed to matter to Dean—and maybe that was because even though he'd apologized, Dean could tell that deep down inside he wasn't really sorry, though he wanted to be, very badly. Sam wasn't sure why wrong and right always seemed twisted around in his head and could only imagine that it was the poison inside him, rotting him from the inside out. And then Dean had found the clip about the corpses in the newspaper, and the next two days had been nothing but driving, the odometer pushing eighty and Dean's knuckles turning white around the steering wheel, and Sam wondering what his brother really wanted to crush.
If I didn't know you, I would want to hunt you.
A creaking sound somewhere deeper in the house jerked Sam back from his thoughts, and he tightened his fist around the tire iron, admonishing himself to focus. He hadn't seen any sign of the ghost yet, or found any cold spots, and there was no electricity to be on the fritz, but that didn't mean he should let his guard down. He stepped out of the kitchen into what might once have been a living room, a wide, empty space with walls of bare two-by-fours and carpet nails sticking up from the floor, gleaming in the light from two large windows. They were both broken now.
There was something huddled into the corner by the windows, and Sam's stomach turned as he recognized the sickly curl of emaciated feet and the twisted heap that only corpses became. He crossed the room and prodded the body through the worn blanket, and then reluctantly took hold of one corner, pulling back the moth-eaten fabric to expose the pallid face.
Wild black eyes snapped open. Sam only had a glimpse of blown pupils and sagging cheeks before the figure was surging up at him, bonelike fingers tearing into his arm as a gurgling shriek bubbled up from his shredded lips. The tire iron slipped from Sam's fingers, hitting the floor with a clang, and his other hand came up instinctively, flinging the handful of salt at the ghost. Except it wasn't a ghost, and Sam should have known that—because ghosts never slept on matted beds of blankets, because the bloodshot eyes staring into his were frantic with a different kind of madness, not the grief and malice of a spirit, but a person lost somewhere in their own mind, either to drugs or the chemicals of a damaged brain—and mostly, because in all the hunts Sam had ever been on, it was always the ghosts surprising the hunters, not the other way around.
The tweaker reared his head back, choking and screaming as the salt flew into his mouth and eyes, and Sam had one crazy, disoriented moment of wondering when his life had gotten so screwed up, of thinking what an insane story this would make when he told it to Dean, if Dean ever talked to him again, if Dean ever found it in himself to hit speed dial one and change the call log on Sam's phone, 11:17 no longer the moment the world ended—and realized too late that he shouldn't have been thinking about the phone, because the tweaker had a knife clenched in his contorted fingers, a long steak knife with rust gnawing at its serrated edge. The man wheezed as he heaved toward Sam, and the hunter stumbled backward, deflecting the blade away from his heart.
It should have been such a simple thing—he was so much taller, so much stronger than a skeletal tweaker shaking around a knife he wielded like a corkscrew—but whatever personal demons tormented him, the man gave a howl the second Sam's hand touched his skin, lurching unexpectedly downward. The knife drove deep into the flesh of his thigh, and for one moment Sam swore he could feel the icy metal against his bone—then everything was fire and Sam's elbow smashed into the window and the tweaker was screaming, staggering back, leaving the knife handle jutting out of Sam's leg as he took off, vanishing into the dark. The windowpane shattered into a hundred jagged pieces on the floor, and Sam was one of them, sliding down against the wall as the front door banged closed, him and everything else in the house shaking with the impact.
Sam took a ragged breath, staring down at the quivering wooden handle embedded in his thigh, a red stain blooming around the rip in his jeans. The throbbing felt so far away he couldn't tell if it was pain or just his heartbeat pulsing in his ears. There was something so gruesome about the knife sticking out of his leg, pinning him to the stripped boards, and Sam knew better, so much better, meant to be reaching for his phone—but somehow his fingers wrapped around the handle instead, and he yanked the blade out, feeling the drag of serrated teeth carving through his flesh. He flung the knife away and it clattered on the floorboards, glinting red as it caught the moonlight through what remained of the gritty glass. Sam's head fell backward against the sill.
God, it was bad. The blood was flowing freely now, faster than he'd expected, darker than he'd expected, leaving him at the center of a widening stain. Sam felt a strange buzzing at the back of his skull, wondered in a distant way if he was bleeding out, because the most vital blood was always the darkest, almost black. Maybe especially in his case. He needed to stop the blood, or slow it down at least; make a compress, make his hands stop shaking. He needed to call Dean. His thumb left a bloody smear on the touchscreen.
The phone rang five times before Dean picked up.
"What, Sam?" his brother's voice barked through the speaker. His tone was sharp and annoyed and the picture in Sam's head was suddenly narrowed green eyes, a jaw that had stayed clenched for two hundred miles, hurt melting into anger that left Sam frozen, shivering against the wall. Or maybe that was the blood loss.
"Dean," Sam rasped. The name tasted cold and metallic, like the barrel of a gun, and he choked on it, realizing only as the drops hit his shirt that it was blood he tasted, that he had bitten through his lip. Somehow that blood was completely black, too.
"Sam!" Dean repeated. "Sam, are you still there?"
He sounded even angrier, if that were possible, but there was an edge of something else there, too, maybe panic, fear—Sam couldn't shake the feeling that six months ago he would have known. The phone was crackling against his ear, Dean's voice fuzzing in and out. Sam tried to answer but it was hard with his teeth chattering, hard to dredge up any words that didn't just come out broken. His brother was practically screaming now, and he could hear the sound of splintering wood, screeching tires, some kind of destruction echoing in his ragged voice as he demanded answers: where was Sam, was he hurt, did he find the fucking ghost—talk to me, Sam! But Sam wasn't sure what to say.
The day they burned Dean's body in New Harmony, Indiana, Sam stood stiff inside the gruff circle of Bobby's arms and then got in the car and peeled out, not daring to look back in case he caught a glimpse of smoke in the rearview mirror. He drove until his eyes were blurring, until the glowing E glaring at him from the dashboard was just a haze of red light, a pinprick of hellfire. He vomited on the side of the road and Dean's ashes came up with his bile. He drove without direction but somehow he always ended up in the same place—a bare bunk in a motel so bad he and Dean wouldn't have touched it, alcohol and ache equally heavy in his stomach. Bobby's number filled up the missed call log.
Sometimes at night he lay in the half-dark of broken blinds with his phone hovering over his face and called Dean's cell phone, speed dial one, over and over, and listened to it ringing in the duffel bag at the foot of his bed. Took it out and stared at his own name until the screen went black. The first night he went looking for something stronger than liquor, ended up on his knees in an alley, throwing up into the spaces between battered red bricks until he was shaking, crying, his whole body hollow, like all he'd ever been were the streams of spit and bile sliding down his chin, like he was going to throw his heart up next.
There was a pistol in his pocket and the only thing that stopped Sam from putting it to his head was the knowledge that suicides went to Hell, and he couldn't bring himself to do it, to stare back at Dean through the flames and show him how worthless his sacrifice had been. He reached into his other pocket instead, dug out the phone, hit speed dial one until he could breathe again, his lungs shuddering open, closed in time to the ringing line. The next day he looked at his phone and felt his chest cave in at the notice on the screen, eight missed calls from Dean—but as he listened to the messages, heavy breathing, ugly sobs, someone choking on vomit and brick dust, he realized he had just grabbed the wrong phone the day before, had been calling himself over and over in a dark alley at the end of a very dark road, gravel and broken glass digging into his palms and the sound of black wings—yes, he thought he could remember them now—beating at his back, angels watching over him. Watching him surrender everything that he was to the gutter while the phone rang on and on with no one on the other side to answer it.
There was glass under him now, too—the reflection of the moon on the surface of a hundred fractured shards, bright as silver against the spread of black. Sam wondered suddenly if this was what he'd always been, blood and broken glass—if he was really that dark on the inside. He shuddered and his head snapped back against the windowsill, and the phone fell from his numb fingers, red droplets splattering across the glowing screen as it hit the floor—the black timer counting the minutes of the call he should have made two days ago, while he could still hear Dean, while there was some chance his brother would hear him. Before that alley caught up to him and the phone line was empty again, ringing for no one.
Sam's eyes wanted to slip closed, but he kept them open, fixed on the ragged hole the knife had torn through his jeans, the deep laceration underneath that cut right into the depths of him. He ground the heel of his palm into the wound, pressed down as hard as he could, the blood running hot over his fingers. The phone counter passed another minute, the little numbers ticking incessantly as Sam stared at his life slipping through his hands, every dark decision pouring out of him, every heartbeat one more pump of tainted blood leaving his veins. Maybe he'd been on the right track, in that alley all those months ago, vomiting onto the bricks—maybe the only way he'd ever be clean was to be hollow, a shriveled husk, everything that had made him wrong and twisted all his life leached, at last, from his bones. Maybe Heaven would still take him if he bled out right here on the floor, if he wasn't the boy with the demon blood anymore.
If I didn't know you, I would want to hunt you.
He would die, though—the thought was inside of Sam somewhere, and it made him press harder, try to hold onto his warped existence for a while longer, if only for the phone that was still on, still counting, still had somebody on the other end. For one moment the image of Castiel flashed through Sam's mind, but he couldn't hold onto it—couldn't picture soft hands and brilliant blue eyes when he was stained with deep, visceral black. Couldn't imagine an angel in this rotting house sick with demon blood. Couldn't see anything anymore except the numbers rolling over and over, counting out six minutes, nine…
Dean's voice was still screaming through the phone, and Sam thought maybe he heard something else, the distant sound of a door crashing in, glass shattering under heavy shoes. But his vision was fading, and he didn't think there was anything that could save him from the darkness anymore. Maybe there never had been. Then his eyes fell shut, and all he could hear was the rasp of his breaths and a ringing in his ears, someone missing his very last call.