Angel Dust
K Hanna Korossy
He was too busy lunging to catch his crumpling brother to do anything about the angel that had felled him.
"Sam!" Dean grabbed the kid around the waist, controlled his fall down. "Sam, hey." The dead weight told him what his mind knew and his heart feared. "Hey, hey." Sam's lanky legs puddled on the ground beside them, his upper body slumped against Dean's chest, the mop-top lolling. "Sam. Sammy." He lifted Sam's chin, flinched despite himself at the closed eyes and lax face under the hair.
"Balls," Bobby declared succinctly above him. "He breathing?"
Dean was already checking. One hand wrapped around Sam's shoulders, the other fretted around to rest on his chest, press under his jaw, flatten against his forehead. "Yeah, I… Yeah, he's just out. He's okay."
Bobby didn't call him on the lie.
Dean's eyes finally darted up to the alley, belatedly securing the scene. It was empty apart from the three of them, and the doc's body. Absently, he thought it looked like the alley where Sam had chugged demon blood in preparation for facing down Lucifer. Before he'd taken the swan dive into…
Dean pressed the limp body closer, rocking a little in desperation. He swallowed. "Cas! Castiel! You get your feathered ass down here, you son of a bitch, and fix Sam!"
A truck horn blared from the nearby street, but otherwise there was silence.
Dean swore under his breath, softened his tone. "Cas, please. We'll talk, okay? It doesn't… It doesn't have to be like this."
More silence. Dean bowed his head, pressing his chin into Sam's ridiculously soft hair.
"Dean…" Bobby carefully prompted.
"Yeah." Dean cleared his throat, letting himself keep his eyes shut and pretend for one second longer that everything wasn't seriously screwed. "Yeah, okay." He shifted Sam forward just enough to be able to reach into his own jacket pocket and tossed the keys without looking, confident of Bobby's reflexes. "Bring the car in."
He registered the momentary hesitation in Bobby's response, as if letting someone else drive his car meant crap when Sam was unconscious and tucked against him like when he'd been small. Dean pressed his eyes shut again as Bobby's footsteps moved off.
"It's gonna be all right, kiddo. You can do this—you can fight this." Like Sam had helped him fight the pull of Hell. "Don't let the bastards win, Sammy. We'll show 'em—you're strong enough to survive this." Even if Dean had barely survived so much less. He jutted his chin out. "Not gonna let this beat you, right?"
He was still waiting for an answer when the Impala pulled up.
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He could tell Sam had been working up to something, that ginormous brain always thinking way too much. Dean had braced himself for another round of, "We'll find another way than you being Michael's bitch," or possibly the newer refrain of, "Maybe I could beat Lucifer." He was fully prepared to wade into the emo again if Sam needed it, or to kick him in the rear, as appropriate.
What he hadn't been ready for was Sam's deceptively casual question one day in the car, "What was Hell like?" Or the terror he couldn't hide in his eyes when Dean finally pried out of him that he was trying to prepare himself for the experience.
Dean had yelled at him. Then refused to talk to him for the rest of the trip.
Sam didn't ask again.
It was only later, when Dean walked in on his ashen, puking brother, that he realized he hadn't warned Cas to not answer the question, either.
He didn't know whether to be proud or horrified when his brother insisted on still going forward with his kamikaze plan.
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They hadn't needed to discuss that they were going back to Bobby's. It wasn't as if a hospital would be able to help Sam now. His brother had effectively suffered a massive head injury, but the brain and skull were just fine. It was his mind that had been tossed in the blender, and no white coat was going to help with that.
"His heart's racing," Dean noted as he laid Sam's arm back on his stomach. The long body was folded almost in half to fit in the back seat with Dean, but he wasn't leaving Sam alone, not when he was afraid that any minute the seemingly lifeless body would give shut down for real.
"Yeah, well, whatever's going on inside his head, it probably ain't a walk in the park," Bobby said from the driver's seat.
Dean blew out a frustrated breath, unable to argue that. How many people had warned him what would happen if Sam's wall fell? Including Cas and Robo-Sam himself. Dean still struggled with his seeming decades in Hell; how could Sam possibly process over a century?
"You've always been stronger than me," Dean admitted in a whisper to the slack face squashed against his jeans. "If you could stand up to Dad and make your own life, or survive what that yellow-eyed bastard did to you, or keep going with a raw-hamburger soul, you can do this. You made it through all that time in the Cage, Sammy—you can't give up now, you hear me? You keep fighting."
"We got anybody else we can call on this?" Bobby asked. "Balthazar? Death?"
"Maybe," Dean said hopelessly. One of them was on Cas's side, and the other had made it quite clear he was done helping. Still, Dean would ask. Maybe even Crowley would be worth approaching, even if the thought made Dean's skin crawl.
Sam's eyes fluttered, but the momentary leap of Dean's heart quickly sank back down. Sam wasn't rousing; he was dreaming, or reliving. Whatever it was, Dean was sure it wasn't good.
He pressed a hand against his brother's chest, feeling the caged-bird flutter of his heart. The last time he'd held his limp brother in the back of the Impala, Sam had been dead. This had to be an improvement, right? "They're just memories, Sammy—it's over. Not gonna let some crap in the past take you down now, are you?"
He felt like the blackest pot ever.
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He hadn't immediately understood what Cas had meant. "I can erase it" wasn't the angel's most confusing opening line, but it was up there.
Dean tore his gaze away from the cemetery, the empty space where there had been a hole minutes before, where he'd last seen Sam. "What?" he croaked.
Castiel crouched beside him. Even his trench coat was pristine again, pretty amazing for a guy who'd recently exploded like a meat grenade. "Your memories of Sam." Dean tried to focus on his face, his words. "I can try to erase them."
He frowned, thoughts sludgy, slow. "What, like…make me forget him?" Surely that wasn't what Cas meant.
The angel's lips thinned. "I am not certain if it's even possible—Sam is…extremely woven into the essence of who you are. But I can try. At least it might…ease your loss."
"Ease my loss," Dean repeatedly numbly. He knew he should probably be mad, or outraged, or…something. But all that seemed to bubble up in him was a laugh that made the angel recoil. "You can't take Sam out of me, Cas. Without him, there's nothing left."
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"I can get his feet." Bobby had opened the back door and was peering in at them.
Dean was already shaking his head. "Just help me get him out," he countered.
Bobby did so, easing those stilt legs to the ground as Dean shoved and manhandled out the stupidly brawny torso. Soulless-Sam had apparently bench-pressed all night instead of slept, and even struggling, guilt-ridden regular Sam hadn't lost all that muscle mass since.
Once out, though, Dean stubbornly took the burden all on himself, finding his footing with Sam slung over one shoulder, then determinedly heading inside.
"Panic room?" Bobby asked as he opened the front door.
Probably a good idea was what Dean would've said if he'd had the breath, but instead he just gave a terse nod.
He took the steps one at a time, feeling Bobby hovering behind him in case he stumbled. Dean tried not to think of the last time he'd hauled Sam down there, after he'd knocked out his soulless brother just before Sam was able to sacrifice Bobby. He'd been just as unsure then that Sam would wake up from what was about to happen to him, but he had. The kid had left him plenty of times, but he always came back.
Bobby hurried around him to spin open the panic room's lock and open the door for Dean. He stood, a silent honor guard, as Dean brought Sam inside and eased him down on the cot.
"We could run an IV," Bobby offered quietly after a minute.
"He's not gonna be here long enough," Dean shot back.
Bobby sighed. "I'm gonna start looking for wherever Cas and Crowley are throwing their coming-out party. Holler if you need anything."
"I'll be here," Dean said tightly, checking pulse and respiration and temp again.
"No kidding," he heard Bobby mutter as the older man went out the door.
Dean glanced idly around the panic room, eyes lingering on the angel-warding sigils, then back to his brother. With a long sigh, he washed a hand down his face, then sank into the chair next to the cot.
"So. Déjà vu all over again, huh?" He huffed a laugh. "Yeah, I could've done without tripping on memory lane again, too." He leaned forward, forearms resting on thighs, hands dangling, helpless. "It's funny, huh? Here I've been giving you all this grief about don't scratch the wall, Sam, don't try to remember! And Cas, our friggin' friend, brings it down." Dean paused, shook his head mournfully. "Sorry, Sammy. I know you saw it a lot earlier than I did, but I didn't think… I mean, it's Cas, dude."
Dean raised his hands to steeple over his nose, rub his gritty eyes. He'd call up to Bobby for some coffee soon, just… He couldn't move yet.
"C'mon, man," he said quietly. "You survived the Cage; you made it, you're topside. You can't let it get you after all that. I mean, PTSD is practically Winchester SOP, right? You came back from it once—you can do it again."
That was when Sam started seizing.
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"I would not have believed it."
Dean sat up, on high alert at those simple words. "What? The Kahn worm's still—"
"No, the effects of Eve's…worm are completely gone, in all of you."
They'd thought it prudent to check with Cas even though they'd seen the sucker fry, just in case. Bobby and Dean were still cleaning black goo out of their ears, and considering Slimy had made Dean gank a member of his family, he was taking no chances. Sam hadn't even been infected—as far as they knew—but Dean had asked Cas to check him just as a precaution.
"Then what…?"
Castiel sat on the bed beside Dean, looking perplexed. Then again, the angel usually looked perplexed, so that didn't tell him much. "It's Sam's soul."
Dean went cold at the words. "What about his soul?"
Cas tilted his head, finally met Dean's eyes. "It is much improved from when it was returned."
That…actually sounded good. "Okay, so? Sam's getting better—that's what we were hoping for, right?"
"I was not." Cas was the soul of tact, as usual. "Dean, souls don't heal themselves. They can be healed, by powers greater than mine, or they can continue in suffering until they are corrupted beyond repair. They don't usually just…'get better.'"
Dean digested that. "So…you're saying that…"
"Unless God Himself has intervened again, the only explanation I can see is that you have helped Sam heal."
Dean blinked at him. Opened his mouth, closed it. Utterly nonplussed, at last he weakly joked, "Love conquers all, huh?"
"Exactly," Cas said, his eyes burning into Dean. "You are still made in the Father's image, after all."
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The next time he saw Sam, his brother was driving an angel knife through Cas's chest.
It was too late. Castiel was too powerful; the damage was done. But even as some part of Dean mourned the loss of Cas, the bigger part was fixed on Sam: alive, on his feet, there.
Perhaps he'd lost his brother-in-arms that day, and that was a loss he had yet to fully grasp. But Dean still had his brother.
And at the end of the day, that was all he asked for or needed.
The End