Author Note: Obviously I didn't have to work today. I'm not usually quite this quick with the tags. Lots of thoughts to be had after last night's ep. Lots of things to try to touch on. Lots of heart eyes for my partner in crime, who puts up with me spamming her with no less than three story drafts in the span of two hours.
Sisu
Finnish; Extraordinary determination in the face of adversity.
Rowena braces a hand against the wall and struggles to pull herself to her feet. She doesn't make it completely there, sinks back down onto the steps and draws her bloody hands into her lap, looking uncharacteristically shell-shocked.
Sam tracks her movements with wide eyes. He's feeling a bit off-balance himself, still trying to catch his breath for multiple reasons. "Rowena? You okay?"
Michael burned hard and fast within her, and no one could possibly expect her to recover this quickly. But she squares her shoulders and smiles tightly, lifts her chin. "Fine, Samuel." She doesn't maintain eye contact for long, dropping her hooded gaze to the bodies sprawled on the floor.
He follows her lead and takes in the state of the room, deflating at the tracks and smears of blood on the floor and walls, the fallen hunters. "Ah, dammit."
At his side, Dean takes a step closer to the carnage and immediately wavers, his knees buckling as they refuse to carry his weight for another moment.
"Hey, hey, hey." Sam catches his brother around the arm, steadying the man as he narrows his gaze appraisingly. Dean's face is chalk-white, the ghostly pallor making the gash in his forehead and bruises around his eye look that much more gruesome, and he presses his lips together in a tight line as he fights to stay upright.
Sam's a bit disoriented himself in the wake of those sightless, oxygen-deprived moments courtesy of Michael, with phantom aches singing out from his nerve endings. But he doesn't have the added bonus of a nasty concussion, and a very recent stretch of concerning unconsciousness. He attempts to steer Dean toward the nearest chair but his brother stubbornly locks his knees, planting himself where he stands.
"Cas?" Sam implores, raising his eyebrows.
The angel moves forward and Dean immediately shrugs Sam away, bracing himself against the tabletop with his right hand as he raises his left to keep Cas at bay. "Don't." He takes a few deep breaths and forces himself to stand straighter. "I'm fine," he grits, despite the fact he's somehow managed to turn a shade whiter.
Sam clenches his jaw, nostrils flaring in frustration. He's so goddamned sick of everyone being fine all the time. Before he can voice his irritation, Cas beats him to it.
"Dean, you're not fine."
His brother smirks, tired eyes roaming the thrashed room. "Yeah, well, this place is full of bodies because of me, so it's the least I – "
"Dammit, Dean," Sam seethes, rounding on his brother. "Do not stand there and say you deserve this." Dean rolls his eyes, but he won't be deterred. "Michael tricked you. He used you. He hurt you." He gestures vaguely to the bodies in the room, swallows roughly as his gaze lands on Maggie. "All of this is on him. Not you."
Dean shrugs. "I let my guard down, Sam."
"Well, it was bound to happen eventually." His tone is understanding, not accusing, but his brother still won't accept it.
"It didn't have to."
"Then blame me," Sam shoots back hotly, thumping his hands against his chest. "If you need to blame someone, blame me. Because you're right, Dean. I'm the one who wouldn't let you go into the Mal'ak box." That damn coffin you built for yourself. "Don't blame yourself for this. Michael has been pounding on that door in your mind nonstop for weeks." He takes a breath, shifts his weight. "I mean, you've barely been sleeping. You said so yourself."
Dean shoots Cas a betrayed look, and Sam shakes his head.
"Don't look at him like he sold you out, man. You have no idea what it was like, driving all the way back here with you like…" He purses his lips. "You wouldn't wake up, Dean. Not for anything. Like, full lights out, completely unresponsive." In a heart-stopping, utterly terrifying way that Sam would really like not to revisit, ever again. "We didn't know if you were going to wake up, if you would even be you when you did. And that…that was more than Michael."
His brother doesn't verbally argue that point, but looks at each of them in turn. Sam knows he's got everyone on his side on this one, even Rowena, folded in on herself on the steps, looking vulnerable and violated. He also knows that if push comes to literal shove, he can easily hold the stubborn son of a bitch down for the five seconds it will take Cas to heal the wound on his head.
Dean knows it, too. He sighs, bobs his head in surrender and leans on his palms on the table. "Okay, Sammy."
Sam nods curtly, and steps to the side as Cas closes the distance between them. It's a simple matter of two fingertips pressed to Dean's bloody temple, which seems sort of anticlimactic given the day they've had.
Dean closes his eyes and rocks back a step as the ragged, bloody wound seals and disappears. After Cas drops his hand away, he reaches up reflexively to the unbroken skin of his forehead, picks away the bit of bandaging stuck there and tosses it to the tabletop.
Sam nods, satisfied, and turns to Jack, finally allowing his shoulders to slump in relief. "Jack, are you really – "
This time Cas is the one to catch Dean under the arm as he unexpectedly starts to go down again. Sam's head spins as he rushes to take control of his exhausted, unsteady brother, dismayed to see how little his color has improved despite the fact his head injury has been healed. He thinks back on the way Dean had seized up in the infirmary, the violent, disoriented outburst upon finally waking, and knows Dean's barely been holding it together, for far too long. He's been putting every ounce of his energy and willpower into keeping Michael at bay, and was overdue to crack. The thought doesn't make it any easier to deal with the losses they've just been dealt, but this could have ended much, much worse.
Or it could have been contained to one single, overwhelming loss, if he'd let Dean have his way. But that's the one thought he can't allow.
"Okay," Sam says firmly, and probably too loudly, fingers tightening around Dean's upper arm. "You're done."
His brother frowns up at him, concerningly pale and glassy-eyed. "What are you – "
"Enough is enough, Dean. You've done enough. You've given enough. There are some things even Cas can't heal. You need rest."
Dean grits his teeth and wrenches his arm free of his brother's grip. He gestures to the murdered men slumped over the table. "Dammit, Sam. I can't just take a knee when I'm the reason they're all dead. They deserve a proper hunter's funeral. I owe them that much."
"We can handle that." Sam narrows his eyes as Cas and Jack nod in agreement. "Dean, man, you're barely standing. I will drag you to your room if you make me."
His brother blinks. "You're serious?"
Sam folds his arms over his chest and raises his eyebrows.
"Okay," Dean says, posture slumping in resignation.
He nods. "Okay. I'll meet you there."
"Whatever you say, Sam," his brother mutters. He turns and weaves a slightly unsteady line toward the adjoining hallway.
Sam runs a hand down his face, gaze drifting over Rowena slumped numbly on the steps and Jack standing tall, looking brighter and healthier and stronger than he has in months, before he locks eyes with Cas. They have a long night ahead of them, but first he has to make sure that Dean is finally, deservedly taken care of. "I'll be right back."
He stops off in the infirmary, sidestepping the mess left in Dean's wake and digs through their considerable stash in the cabinet until he locates the Temazepam. He knocks a pair of tablets into his palm, then after a brief deliberation decides to bring the rest of the bottle along with him. It's not as though the man will just easily drift off into the sort of deep, long sleep that he's in desperately need of after the past several weeks.
By the time Sam makes it to Dean's room – finding the door ajar and the lights off – his brother has kicked off his boots and left his jacket in a tangled heap at the foot of his bed. He's stretched across his mattress at an angle, arm flung over his eyes. He doesn't look as though he could pull himself back to his feet if the room was on fire. Once he finally goes down, Dean goes down hard.
Sam sighs, nudges his elbow. "Here."
Dean cracks open an eye, squints suspiciously at the pills in his outstretched hand. "What's that?"
"Encouragement."
He shakes his head. "Sam – "
"Shut up." Sam pulls his brother's arm away from his face and forces the pills into his palm. "Seriously, man, you're off the clock. For as long as possible. Jack's back and Michael's dead. I'm gonna put this one in the win column." He stares pointedly.
Dean rolls his eyes, but tosses the pills into his mouth and dry-swallows them, then rolls his head until it lands atop his pillow. "They're all dead out there, Sam," he says softly. "Because I couldn't keep the damn door locked. How the hell is that a win?"
It just is. Sam knows he can't put it into words that his brother will understand, but he needs Dean to see it this way, can't allow him to take on and carry the weight of those lying dead in the war room and library. Sam is the one who refused the plan that would have saved them, and everyone else. That would have rid the world of the threat of Michael while damning only Dean. He'll gladly shoulder that blame, because at the end of the day, he still has his brother.
Dean adjusts in the bed, wincing a bit as he gets himself situated in a more comfortable position. Once he finds it, he exhales heavily, as though wringing months' worth of stress from his body with a single breath. "Michael killed a lot of people, Sam. Because I had to save you."
The irony of his brother's words isn't lost on Sam. "You did save me," he says. "And Jack. You also killed Lucifer, Dean. Don't ever forget that." He looks around the room, drags over the chair from the desk and lowers his sore, tired body into it. "And Michael versus Lucifer…we always knew there'd be casualties."
"Yeah, well, I should have been one of them. I was supposed to be one of them. But he didn't kill me."
Sam leans forward, forearms resting on his thighs. "What?"
"Michael. Billie said this only ended one way." Dean's words are already slurring. "But he didn't kill me."
He's right. Sam sits back in the chair, scrubs at his face with both hands. Because he didn't have to, he realizes with a start. Michael didn't break out of Dean's mind, he slipped out.
With Dean bloody and limp and unresponsive in the backseat, Cas had told them about the conversation they'd had, but it had really just been confirmation of what Sam had already known. They haven't been in the same room every night, but enough that he'd seen for himself the way his brother's been sleeping lately, in broken snatches of brief, fitful slumber that can't really be called rest. He'd laid off the whiskey of late – comparably, at least – and had taken on a pinched and pale look Sam had worried would become permanent. But he'd never dropped his guard, not once. Never given Michael the opportunity to escape until now.
The gorgon probably saved Dean's life, bashing his head against the wall like that.
"I'm glad she was wrong," Sam says after a long, silent moment. He hopes it's as easy as all that. Doubts it, but hopes.
"Hmm," Dean grunts noncommittally. His gaze is faraway, growing heavy-lidded as the Temazepam takes hold.
Sam leans forward again, pats his brother's shoulder. "Just get some rest, man," he says softly, but Dean's way ahead of him, already loosing his first soft snore.
In the war room, Rowena hasn't moved from her stiff perch on the steps, but Cas and Jack have already moved Mark and David from the table, leaving behind congealing pools of blood on the lighted map. The bodies of the slain hunters are laid in a reverent line along the wall.
They all look up as he enters the room, even Rowena, as though emerging from a trance.
"How is he?" Cas asks, a folded sheet in his arms.
Sam lifts a shoulder, exhales heavily as he rubs the back of his neck. "He's, uh…"
Stubborn.
Resilient.
Strong.
He smiles wearily, and gives the answer they'll all understand, and appreciate, in individual ways. "He's Dean."