Chapter One: Patching Back Together
It seemed like the roiling black cloud went on forever. But finally it dissipated, leaving the Impala sitting in a muddy track next to an abandoned cantina, underneath a sky the color of winter storms and tornado seasons.
Ten minutes after that, Dean managed to unclench his hands from the steering wheel. Sam managed to raise his head from where he'd ducked on reflex. Dean turned to regard his brother. "So much for nothing happening, Sammy."
"Yeah, I guess." Sam grimaced. Then he looked his brother in the eyes. "Hey, you'd leave the gates of Hell open and pick up the Mark of Cain. Apparently I'd unleash the forces of Darkness. Call it even."
Dean snorted a choked off laugh. "Yeah, well I ganked Death for you, so you owe me, bitch." He shook his head. "Gank Death and release the Darkness. I swear, sounds like a bad horror movie." His nerves were singing with adrenaline and the stress of the past hour, and he felt dangerously giddy.
Sam laughed, a shaky weak laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. "Jerk." he sighed, mirth vanishing as quickly as it had come. "I'm thinking, something like this...our best bet is probably to head back to the warehouse we were working out of. If nothing else, Cas should be there. He might have some ideas. Or at least information. And maybe the Book of the Damned has some clues?"
"Maybe. It had a spell to take out the Mark of Cain." Dean sighed. "Don't get me wrong Sam, I get it, but still..."
"Don't even start again with all that Mark of Cain, and your destiny and all that crap. Or I will seriously hit you." Sam glared at his brother. "We both know how this works Dean. One brother gets in trouble, the other one screws the fucking world to save him. It's basically our modus operandi by now, so...maybe this time we can skip the melodramatic 'you shouldn't have' and all that crap? I mean...all jokes aside, we're pretty even on the scoreboard for this one, and we're gonna need to stick together if we wanna have even a prayer of dealing with this, especially if it's as bad as Death told you it was."
Dean sat still for a moment, then nodded. "Yep. You're right. One thing though..." He looked at his brother. Sorrow filled his eyes. "I'm sorry I beat you up so bad Sammy. I really am. And...those pictures..."
"Yeah, yeah. I stole them from your room. And I kinda deserved it for lying to you." Sam prodded a swollen point on his jaw and winced. "I think it's died down for a while, so let's get the Impala out of that pothole and go pick up Cas."
Dean glanced at the darkened sky, then shoved his door open. "Sure."
It took fifteen minutes of shoving to get the Impala out of the muddy pothole and back to firm ground. Sam took another two minutes to dig through the trunk until he found the medical kit, then settled himself into the passenger seat to start tending to the wounds on his face. Dean settled in behind the wheel, taking a moment to run his hands over smooth leather and metal.
He'd left the car behind for Sam when he went to summon Death, and he hadn't thought he'd ever see her again.
After a moment he gunned the engine and turned the car around. "Okay, where to?"
Sam gave him the name of the town, two states over, then went back to gingerly putting anti-septic on his face. Dean watched him for a moment. "You finish with that, you get some shut-eye. You look like shit."
Sam snorted. "Not much worse than you."
"Yeah. But I'm driving. Plus, I had super-powers working for me. And I'm not the one who got beat all to crap in there. You've been running on adrenaline and cheap nasty food I bet." Dean shot his brother a look. "I'll wake you when I need to pull off, but I'm good."
"You sure?"
"Yeah. I'm sure." Dean turned his attention to the road, fired up the car, and started for the nearest highway.
Sam waited for a few minutes until the Impala went from rutted dirt road to a smoother paved one, then returned to attending to the bruises on his cheek. After a few minutes, he shut the kit, threw it back into the back seat, and leaned back with his eyes closed. A few minutes later, his breathing had evened out into the steady rhythm of sleep.
Dean watched him out of the corner of his eye. The bruises on Sam's face were purpling fast, and he was willing to bet his brother would have a bad time moving his jaw when he woke up. He was lucky Sam knew how to roll with the punches, or he'd have shattered his jaw and cheekbone.
Exactly like Cas.
Dean swallowed hard. He remembered in vivid, horrible detail, the beating he'd given the angel. The feel of Cas's wrist snapping in his hand as he wrenched the angel's arm around and out of it's socket. The brutal elbow to the face. The way he'd sucker-punched him, kneed him in the gut hard enough to crack ribs, then thrown Cas into the pile of books without a second thought.
The way he'd slammed him face first into the oak table over and over again, then thrown him to the floor, wrenched his angel blade away, and nearly stabbed him.
The way Cas hadn't fought him, except to try and hold him, or to defend himself from those merciless blows.
Cas's broken plea for him to stop, weak fingers on his wrist, his voice a hoarse whisper around the blood bubbling in his throat and from his nose and lips. The way he'd left the angel lying there, his parting words a threat that next time he really would kill him.
At the time, all he'd felt was that cold, merciless anger, the deep rooted violence that drove him. Now...
Cas had been right. The Mark had changed him. Now that it was gone, he could feel how deep the taint had been. The warping of his perspective. Cas was right. Before the Mark, he wouldn't have shot the kid. He wouldn't have beaten the angel. He wouldn't have threatened to kill Sam. He wouldn't have even considered trying to kill Sam.
He'd been so angry after the incident with the angel tablet, angry at the way Cas had run, the way he'd vanished. So cold to the angel, so cutting, vicious with his words when he wasn't ignoring him all together. But if what he felt now was how Cas had felt after that crypt fight, then he couldn't blame the angel for running.
He wanted to run away too. He half hoped Cas would forgive him as Sam had, half hoped the angel would beat the hell out of him in payback. He wondered if Cas had told Sam about the fight. Sam hadn't given him any indication.
He clenched his hands on the wheel, and forced himself to focus on the road.
***AGM***
Dean drove for three hours, until the gas gauge was on empty and his stomach was growling, then pulled into the first gas station he saw. Sam woke up as he cut the engine. "Dean?"
"Pit stop Sammy." He frowned. "You got a card or anything? I kinda burned up all my cash earlier." He'd spent the last of it getting the supplies to cook for Death. He hadn't figured he'd need it any more after that.
Sam nodded and fished into a pocket. "Yeah. Just got two new ones." He held up a card. "You wanna fill the car or pick up the food?"
The idea of going in there, of being near people, made his stomach flip uncomfortably. "I'll pump the gas. Get whatever looks good." Sam nodded and ducked out of the car.
Half an hour later, they were back on the road, cold sodas and cheap gas station food in hand. Sam had even gotten him a cheeseburger from the small attached restaurant. It was a pretty pathetic cheeseburger, with a thin patty, single slice of cheese and nowhere near enough onions, but he hadn't eaten one in forever, and it was just about the best damn thing he'd ever tasted. The Mark and his time as a demon had dulled his sense of taste, among other things. He enjoyed every bite, and every swallow of the soda Sam gave him.
Sam watched him eat, took his trash, then set the bag carefully to one side. "So...you wanna talk about it?"
Dean winced. "Talk about it? About what, Sam?"
"About anything. How you feel now, anything that happened under the Mark's influence, the weather...anything." Sam gestured.
Dean didn't even want to think about it. Still, he needed to know. To know if Sam knew what all he'd done. "You heard about the Stynes?"
"You slaughtered them. All of them. Cas mentioned it, yeah."
Dean swallowed. "Last of them was just a kid. He didn't even want to be there. He was just some geeky little nerd, looked like he would have been more at home cataloging our library, instead of burning it." He swallowed again, hands clenched on the steering wheel and eyes on the road because he couldn't look at his brother. "I shot him right between the eyes, while he was begging for his life."
"It was the Mark. And you were upset about Charlie's death. Cas told me." Sam sighed, shifted in his seat. "Look, I'm not going to pretend it's not bad. I'm not going to pretend it won't haunt you, probably for a long time. But if you're expecting me to get all huffy and disgusted and demand that you pull over so I can get out, or if you're expecting me to throw you out of the bunker when we get back...not happening Dean." Sam shrugged. "I've done as bad. I've done worse. I'm not in the mood for playing 'who's the monster' right now."
Dean let himself absorb that for a minute. Then he spoke again. "Did Cas tell you what happened when he tried to stop me from leaving?"
Sam shifted. "Only that he didn't succeed."
"Did you see him?"
"I saw him when I got there. Didn't look any different than he usually does." Sam turned to look at him. "Why?"
"Cause the last time I saw Cas, he looked worse than you do now." Dean clenched his jaw. "I damn near shoved his own angel blade into his throat, Sam. And he didn't fight back." His jaw clenched tighter. "He didn't want to hurt me."
"Sounds like Cas." Sam's voice was quiet. His brother sat for a minute, then shrugged again. "You'll have to take your issues on that up with Cas, Dean. I can't say anything."
"I guess so." Dean sighed, and let silence fall over the Impala.
They drove through the night, switching off and fueling up as needed. Neither of them felt like stopping. The urgency the Darkness cast over both of them was only magnified when Sam called Cas and received no answer. Finally, in the murky light of a storm-tossed dawn, they pulled up at the warehouse.
Sam got out first, knocked on the door. "Cas? Cas, you in there?" No answer.
The two brothers shared a look, then pulled their pistols free of their belts. Sam nudged the door open, and the two of them descended the stairs.
The main section of the warehouse looked like a supernatural nightmare, or a set for a bad horror movie. The spell-work table/altar was still upright in the middle of the room, the cold ashy bowl, burnt out candles and spell components evidence of the ritual to remove the Mark. Next to the table was the body of a young man, tall with curly blond hair and a mangled hole in his neck, dead eyes wide and surprised and hurt. And nearer to the door, two familiar forms, one in black, one in a tan trench-coat, both liberally blood splattered.
Sam dropped his pistol to rest position and bolted into the room to kneel by Castiel's prone form. "Cas!"
"Stop your yelling Moose. Your homicidal maniac of an angelic puppy is still alive." Crowley shifted, winced visibly, then opened Crossroad-red eyes. He blinked, and the color returned to the dark green that was his human eye color.
Sam turned a heated look on the demon. "What the hell did you do to him? And why are you even here?"
"I'm fine, thanks for asking." Crowley grimaced. He tilted his head back to look at Dean. "Squirrel. Unmarked, I hope."
"Yeah. Now answer his question." He tilted his head at his brother.
Crowley grimaced again. "My dear mother, whom I will take great pleasure in torturing to death as soon as I can get my hands on her, cast the spell to remove the Mark, then used the residual energy to cast another spell. She bound me, then turned Castiel over there into something like a mindless, rabid attack dog and set him on me. She then disappeared with the Book of the Damned."
Dean scowled. "How the hell could a witch cast a spell that would effect an angel, or the King of Hell? Witches don't have that kind of juice."
Crowley scowled. "Book of the Damned aside...my mother is not an ordinary witch. If you two boys had done your homework on the skanky whore, you'd know that she's one of the only witches alive who has natural magic. She doesn't need a rite or a demon deal for her powers, and that is exactly why she's more powerful than any other witch alive."
"Fine. Rowena is extra-powerful. But why are you even here?" Sam didn't budge from Castiel's side.
Crowley snorted. "Because your darling feathered poster boy asked me to assist in gathering the spell components. Apparently the damaged wings make it inconvenient to go hunting for things all around the world. Since he asked nicely, and since one of the requirements was making my mother sacrifice something she actually loved, which I admit I found amusing, I agreed. End of story." He grimaced again, hand going to the torn cloth over his chest. "She took offense to that, hence the spell."
Dean sighed, then holstered his pistol and knelt beside the demon, pulling him roughly into a sitting position. Crowley made a low noise in the back of his throat, but didn't fight him as Dean checked his wounds. There was a lot of dried blood, but the wounds themselves were healed to angry red lines. "At least one of you has some courtesy. And gratitude."
Dean huffed. "Yeah, whatever. I'm just getting a crick staring down at you." He glanced at Castiel. "So, Rowena mojo'd you and set Cas on you. Why are you still here, Crowley?"
"Because it took most of my bloody power to break Mother's spells, and keep myself from being slashed to ribbons and internally barbecued. Not to mention that bloody awful surge of whatever the hell it was." He glanced at the angel. "I can't complain, considering it changed your flightless wonder over there from an attack dog to a puking wretch. But you boys should know, something's come into this world. Something that makes Lucifer look like a bloody Boy Scout." His expression settled into a serious, almost worried expression. "Whatever's been let loose, I'd rather be in Hell as a new soul than one of you lads on the surface."
Cas chose that moment to make a small noise. Sam immediately hoisted the angel into a sitting position, leaning Cas's head against his shoulder. "Cas? Cas, you okay?"
The angel rolled his head, blinked twice, and made a face. "No. My mouth is foul and I hurt." He reached up one hand to rub his head. "Rowena, she did something to me. To me and Crowley." He looked up, frowned when he saw the King of Hell. "You aren't dead."
"No thanks to Mother." Crowley made a face.
Dean nodded. "You're lucky you're a full on angel again. That attack dog spell usually liquefies it's victim's entrails. No surprise you're a little sore."
Castiel's eyes flew to him, still crouched near the demon. His eyes widened, then warmed. "Dean."
"Cas." Dean swallowed. He didn't know what to say to the angel. Finally, he held up his arm. "No Mark."
Cas's eyes warmed further. A smile touched the corner of his mouth. "That's good. I'm glad."
Dean managed a ghost of his usual smirk. "You and me both, Cas."
Crowley watched the exchange. "You two...I tell you that a force of darkness and evil great enough to make me want to vacate the planet has emerged, and you just sit there trading small talk with an angel." His gaze flickered between the two hunters. "You know something. The pair of you know something about what just happened."
Dean sighed. He locked eyes with Sam, exchanging a silent communication with his brother. It felt good. They hadn't been able to communicate like that, to understand each other like that, since before Gadreel. Sam looked uncomfortable, but resigned. Dean nodded.
"We know a few things, yeah. But before we get to that, I got a question for you." He looked at the angel leaning against his brother. "Cas, I need to know everything you know about the Darkness."
Author's Note: Up next, information gathering, and some explanations given to the angel and demon...