title: what fun it all would be (7/7)
summary: "You asked for this, Dean," he said. "You fucking asked that goddamn angel for this, so you don't get to-"
pairing: Dean/Castiel
warnings:language, violence, gore, suggestive situations, eventual character death
a/n: this is the last chapter, so I really can't tell you how much I would appreciate hearing what you thought of the story. Pretty please?
epilogue
"All right, what is the number one rule about this weekend?"
"No sex," replies Emma dutifully, rolling her eyes. "Seriously, Mom, do we have to have this conversation in front of Dad?"
"Yeah, I'd sort of rather not hear the sex talk either." Dad heaves Mom's suitcase intro the back of the SUV. "J.B., if you're not down here in the next sixty seconds me and Mom are leaving without you!"
"Dude, you can't leave without me! You're going to my tournament," J.B. shouts from the porch, clattering down the steps with his cleats bouncing around his neck. He ducks into the car, shouting, "Bye, Emma, have fun sucking face at prom!"
Dad rolls his eyes upward and shuts the back of the SUV, cutting off J.B.'s cackling. "Those are your genes," he tells Mom, who flicks him in the arm.
"Yeah, because 'have fun sucking face' doesn't sound at all like something your brother would say," she says sardonically. "C'mere, Em, give me a hug before we go." She wraps her arms around Emma, says in her ear, "Now, if you do violate Rule Number One, I expect to be told about it, okay?"
Emma laughs and shoves Mom off, noting that Dad looks stricken. "I don't think you're doing your job right if Mom is that desperate to live vicariously through me, Dad."
"Ha ha," Dad says dryly and clasps her in a one-armed hug. "Get in the car, we'll drop you off at school on our way out of town."
- o -
"Have you decided what color you're going with yet?" Julie asks as she pulls out of the student parking lot that afternoon. I was thinking purple for my fingers and gold for my toes, to bring out the stitching on the hem, you know?"
Emma's rustling around in the duffel bag she's brought since she's spending the night at Julie's after they go to get mani-pedi's for tomorrow night. "Yeah, I think that-aw, crap!"
"What?"
"I forgot my wallet at home." Emma puts on her best Pitiful Best Friend face. "Think you could swing by my house so I can get it?"
"You are like the most high-maintenance friend ever," Julie complains, but she's grinning, so Emma starts to say, "whatever, you think I'm adorable," but her phone starts buzzing in her pocket.
She sees Dad's icon on the screen, rolls her eyes at Julie, mouthing Dad, and picks up. "Miss me already, Dad?"
"Heh," he says, that exhale-laugh he does that always makes the phone crackle. "You know it, Em. Hey, uh..."
Emma's immediately suspicious. "What?"
"It's just, uh. Your uncle's in town."
"What? Why? I have plans for the weekend, Dad, I can't sit at home babysitting Uncle Dean-"
"Emma," he says, a little sternly now. "I may have mentioned to him that it was your prom weekend. I think maybe he just wanted to be here for it."
"Yeah, and that's not creepy at all," Emma says under her breath.
He hears her anyway. She can tell from the edge his voice gets, the one it always gets when she gets bitchy about his brother. Sorry, she can't help it if the guy's a druggie and a hick and seriously, Dad?
"He's your family, Emma."
"Your family," Emma retorts. "Sorry, Dad, but I see him like twice a year, I don't think that's enough to qualify someone as family. I even see, like, Sheriff Mills more often than that."
"Emma," Dad says, and now his voice is this mixture of angry and sad that makes her feel rebellious and ashamed all at once. "Can't you just-"
"We're here," Emma says, because Julie's pulling into their driveway, and sure enough, there's Uncle Dean's ancient black car parked in the road. "I'll go talk to him, but I'm not cancelling my plans with Julie to sit around and be awkward with him."
She hangs up without saying goodbye. Takes a deep breath and looks over at Julie, who's giving her a sympathetic look.
Emma rolls her eyes in response and grabs her keys and clarinet case. "I'll be right back."
When she lets herself in the house, the living room's empty. She sees what looks like light spilling from the kitchen doorway, and for a moment, she considers tip-toeing upstairs to her bedroom and tip-toeing back outside without going to let Uncle Dean know she's come in. But Dad's disappointed face wriggles into her brain and makes her sigh, and head for where the light's spilling out of the doorway.
He's standing at the sink in his usual battered coat and jeans, holding something close to his face. When she knocks on the doorjamb and says, "Hey," he jumps, stuffs whatever it is in his pocket as he spins around.
"Emma!" His smile's forced the way it always is, and she can see his pupils are dilated, even under the bright kitchen light. God, she really wishes she hadn't come in. "Hey! How's it going, kiddo?"
She shrugs. "Okay. You?"
His eyes light on the case in her arms; it's like he didn't even hear her. "That your clarinet? How's band going, you gunning for All-State again? Those judges aren't gonna know what hit 'em, Sammy sent me a tape of your last solo-"
"Uh, maybe," Emma says. "Look, I was just, uh." She motions over her shoulder, "Popping in for a second to grab something. I've actually got plans tonight-"
"Yeah? Is it prom tonight? I thought it was tomorrow, I told Sammy I'd take pictures for him and your. Uh. Your mom."
"No, I'm just-you know, going out with Julie. She's waiting, so..." Emma backs toward the stairs.
"Does she want to go for dinner? I could take you guys for something, my treat-"
"No, we, uh-her mom has plans to take us out." Emma inches up the stairs. "So. Help yourself to anything in the fridge, though. Dad made really good lasagna last night."
She hurries up the stairs before he can say anything else. Uncle Dean makes her uneasy, always has, even before the summer when she was twelve and he came to their house wanting to take her on a road trip for the summer. Dad never raises his voice, ever, but he'd raised his voice then, she'd heard it through the door of his office where he'd asked Dean to step in with him for a second so they could talk. "You asked for this, Dean," she'd heard him shout. "You fucked asked that goddamned angel for this, so you don't get to-" And Mom had found her after that, pulled her away from the door and taken her and J.B. out for ice cream, and when they came back, Uncle Dean's car was gone.
She drops her clarinet on her bed, grabs her wallet from her desk. Heads back down the stairs, and when she reaches the living room, her uncle's there, looking out the window.
"Uh," Emma says, opening the front door. "See you later, I guess."
"Later," he echoes.
Emma hurries down the front walk, lets herself into Julie's car. She's not quite sure, but she thinks she can make out her uncle's silhouette through the semi-sheer curtains in the living room window. Watching them.
"He's kind of a creeper, isn't he?" Julie says, backing out of the driveway. "Your uncle."
"The creepiest," Emma says, and flicks on the radio as they drive away.
- o -
A few years back, one of the hunters in Garth's network found a new use for the djinn toxin antidote the Campbells found. Mix it with some linseed oil, put it in a syringe, and bam! Supernatural opiate. You get all the effects of a djinn without being bled to death while you shroom.
Dean scoffed when Garth first told him about it. But the scrawny little son of a bitch snuck a syringe into his shaving kit while he wasn't looking, "just in case you need it," his tinny voice had insisted over the phone, and when Dean found it, he looked at it for a minute, standing alone in the motel room with the single bed and not thinking about how if he ever ran into a djinn again he didn't think he'd bother trying to escape it.
A few weeks after that it was a Thursday night not far from Christmas, and Emma had her first clarinet solo since she'd made first chair. Sam had sent him the fancy Winter Concert invitation with its fancy-ass barely readable font, and Dean was wondering why the hell he hadn't just gone like Sam had told him to, uncles could go to their nieces' band concerts, couldn't they, no one would think it was weird, and as he sat there wrestling with himself he glanced up from his half-eaten plate of fries and seen a khaki trenchcoat, and for just a second he thought-
But it wasn't. Of course it wasn't. And Dean was so damn tired all of a sudden, and there was a bottle of Jack waiting in his duffel at the motel but eventually it ran out, and then he was too sloshed to get even the two blocks to the bar he'd seen in the way into town, and that syringe was sitting in his shaving bag, capped and gleaming and-
He'd used it.
Emma's friend's headlights pull out of the driveway. He watches them fade down the street. Steps away from the window and goes to his bag. He's still got a few vials left, hadn't planned on using them while he was at Sam's, but the house is empty and he's alone. No one there to catch him at it.
A few minutes later he's stretched out on the bed. Breathing deep and easy. It's familiar now, like slipping into a pair of his old boots, like letting water close over his head.
He dreams.
- o -
Dad finds her in the bathroom, perched on the sink counter like a monkey and twisted around so she can see her shoulder blade. She's rubbing it roughly with a back scrubber, turning the peeling skin an angry red.
"Hey!" Dad barks.
Emma whips around, eyes wide. Dad seems to realize he scared her; he lowers his voice. "What're you doing, Em?"
She shrinks a little, pulls the scrubber from her shoulder so he can see it. The Enochian sigil Papa drew there for her when they went to the lake is there, barely visible beneath the skin she's rubbed raw. Dad touches it carefully.
"It was going away," she tells him in a small voice.
"That means it's getting better," Dad says. "It's called a sunburn for a reason, sweetheart."
"I don't want it to get better," Emma says.
Dad snorts. "Tough luck, kiddo."
"Can't we get it done again?" she says as he nudges her out of the way to get some Triple-A ointment out of the cabinet. "If we go back to the lake-"
"Not gonna happen," he says. "Sunscreen all over from now on. Sunburns like this aren't good for you."
She squirms as he slathers the cold cream on her shoulder. Juts out her lower lip. "I don't care."
"Well, I care. And I'm your dad, so we're gonna do what's not gonna give you skin cancer twenty years from now, capisce?"
The lower lip doesn't move. "But I want it."
"Well, your papa wanted whole wheat pizza for dinner, and he's not getting what he wants either, so maybe you two can form a club," he says with a chuckle as he swings her off the counter and onto his hip. Emma glowers and suffers herself to be carried downstairs, where Papa is sitting at the table with his phone at his ear, saying, "yes, all that, on whole wheat crust, please."
"What?" Dad sputters, letting Emma down and making a grab for the phone. Papa snatches it out of Dean's reach, shouts "Thank you!" in the general direction of the phone's speaker, and disconnects the call with an audible beep.
"Aw, Caaaas," Dad moans as Emma whines, "Papaaaaa."
And Papa grins. Full-out grins. "I'm doing what's good for you," he tells them both, enunciating carefully. "Because I love you."
Which makes Emma think that Papa somehow overheard their conversation upstairs. Which makes her turn to give Dad a face because this is his fault; if he had just let Emma have her sun-burned sigil back, Papa couldn't have used love as an excuse for making them eat gross pizza.
But he's not looking at her. He's staring at Papa with that look he gets sometimes, his eyes big and shocked, like he's not sure Papa's real. And Papa's grin becomes something a little gentler as he looks back, and he sits up in his chair and lifts his arms, and Dad's taking one step toward him, and another, and bringing his hands carefully to Papa's face and saying, almost like a question, "Cas?" And as Papa holds Dad's head too, cradling it in his hands, bringing him in for a kiss, and Dad mumbles, "Love you, Cas." He sounds a little bit like he's laughing and a little bit like he's crying. "God, I really love you."
- o -
It's daylight when he opens his eyes. The bottle on the nightstand is empty. The syringe, uncapped in its case, is empty. And when he finally drags himself off of the bed and down the stairs to the kitchen where Emma stood just yesterday, that's empty, too.
He sits down at the table, remembers Cas sitting under him, holding his face, catching his kiss. Lips still warm from blackberry tea, calloused fingertips that traced the shell of his ear.
Dean thumbs the tiny dot inside his elbow until it is red and stinging.
Then he grabs his duffel, and his keys, and leaves.
- o -
And if you say to me tomorrow,
oh,what fun it all would be
Then what's to stop us, pretty baby,
but what is and what should never be.
