The reek of impending death permeated the air of the entire loft, reaching down into the elevator well and up into the highest recesses of the grimy ceiling. It drove away any residual euphoria from the interlude with Dean, and Sam had to fight back the urge to pull the hem of his shirt up to cover his nose and mouth. All other available air seemed to have fled the loft; it had lost its stifling caul of warmth and the foul smell hung in at atmosphere so cool it brought gooseflesh to Sam's arms.
Again, Dean seemed unconcerned. The soles of his heavy boots slapping a tattoo as uneven as his face, he headed into the office while Sam lingered behind.
A drift of debris by the foot of the fender-helix passed unnoticed until it moved. There sat Castiel in his coat, in a Gethsemane of auto parts. He leveled his imperturbable gaze at Sam as though he had only been waiting to be noticed.
"Hello, Sam."
"Hey, Cas..tiel."
The first smile Sam had seen from the man appeared. "You may call me Cas. If you like."
"Okay," Sam said, able to relax a little. "Whatcha up to, Cas?"
"I am thinking about leaving. Not this company, but this place. At least for a little while."
"You and me both," Sam said, additional relief allowing him to unclench his hands and breathe a little deeper through his mouth.
"And," Cas said, appearing somewhat ashamed, "I could use a nap."
Sam had been hoping to find Meg, but he hadn't seen her since she drove away after Rufus's accident. Even strange company was better than none. "Wanna take a drive?" he asked.
Back in the Lincoln, Sam still found it difficult to get used to Cas's silent presence, his proximity. Unlike Dean, the man felt no need to comment on the scenery, the cars that passed, his grandiose, but vague, artistic aims. Weighing the stark contrast, Sam had to marvel at just how comfortable he had become with Dean's stream of manic babble.
"Thank you," Cas said, apropos of nothing.
"I needed to get out of there, too," Sam told him.
"I find…" He paused. "I find I am not altogether comfortable with the idea of death."
Before he could stop himself, Sam laughed. Seeing Cas's uncomprehending stare, he added, "Sorry. I was just thinking about what Dean would say."
"What would Dean say?"
"That you're already dead. That we all are."
"That is something he would say," Cas said, then resumed watching the road.
They drove until the sun slipped below the horizon. With the day's last glow fading, Sam felt such an insistent weariness in his limbs that he could barely shift or steer. He yawned.
"We could find a hotel room," Cas said, still looking ahead through the windshield at the vanishing sunset. "To sleep. Though we can have sex if you like."
Sam was half-amused and half-appalled at Cas's deadpan candor. "Sleep sounds good," he said.
They drove until the freeway terminated and split into a pair of local roads. Sam veered left toward the business route-trucker's paths were lined with any number of no-account motels. Certain that Cas would provide no input, he chose the first one he found and pulled into the dusty parking lot of the Desert Star Inn.
The woman behind the counter wore a flowered smock the likes of which Sam had last seen on an elementary school art teacher, but her mouth was etched with deep nasolabial lines and pulled into a permanent frown.
"You two want the queen bed?" she asked, holding up an old-fashioned key attached to an outsize plastic tag.
"If you prefer-" Cas began.
"That's fine," said Sam, taking the key.
"Fifty up front," the woman told him.
Sam was struck by a sudden and vivid memory of Spark. He was about to reach for his wallet when he realized he had neither wallet nor cash. There had been no need to worry about food or lodging. Known as a bit of a health nut at Stanford-outside the secret wine binges-Sam realized that when he ate now, if he ate, he grazed on the crappy fast food items that Dean laid around the office like offerings in their cradles of waxed paper.
Cas was handing over three twenties, a slight tremble in his fingers the only crack in his eerie calm.
"Thanks," Sam said.
"Have fun," the dour woman at the desk called after them.
"Let's sleep," said Sam.
"Like the dead men we are," Cas said.
Sam had to laugh.
The light switch near the door illuminated only half the room; quite the feat because it was so small. Worn carpet, the lingering smell of bleach from stiff bed linens. Still, it exuded comfort like the loft could not. Not right now. And yet, Sam found himself half-wishing it was Dean with him instead of Cas.
Oh, well. Rufus would only be a distraction for a little while longer. And when he was gone, Sam knew with a precise, icy certainty that it was his arms, not Cas's, that Dean would run to.
When Cas shrugged off the battered trench coat, it was the first time Sam had ever seen him without it. He looked somehow smaller, shrunken inside a white tee with a crinkled pattern of yellow staining at the armpits. This he took off as well, letting it slip down on the far side of the bed, looking away from Sam toward the bathroom.
"Oh, my god."
"Hardly," said Cas. Wide expanses of mutilated tissue cascaded from points on his shoulders and dipped below his belt line. The scar reached out ragged fingers along his upper arms and flanks-the teasing hints of which Sam had seen on the afternoon of the demolition derby. For all its ragged edges, each side of the burn seemed to mirror the other, folded across the axis of Cas's spine like a Rorschach blot. Like…wings.
"What happened?" Sam asked.
"From what I'm told," Cas said, "A Ford Pinto happened."
"From what you're told?"
"I don't remember anything before the accident. Not even the accident itself. When I was able to wake up, I was told that I had been lucky that the fire was contained to the back half of the car, but that the vinyl of the seat had melted into my skin by the time I was pulled out," Cas said.
The matter-of-fact narration made it seem like Cas was talking about someone else entirely, but, in truth, he may as well have been.
"So… 'able to wake up?'" Sam asked. "Were you in a coma?"
"Yes." The half-turn of his upper body toward Sam pushed some of the scar out of view. "On my own, at first. And then medically induced. I hear doctors often do so with burn victims because if they were awake, the agony would drive them mad."
The contrast between the untouched skin and the ragged claws of twisted tissue made Sam's fingertips itch with the need to touch it-the shift in texture an indulgence. Again he thought of Dean. "How long-?"
"There is no way to know. I do know that I have had sixteen surgeries and eight grafts."
Sam's heart galloped, his palms were damp. "But it doesn't hurt anymore?"
"It does," Cas said. "On and off. They call it neuralgia. It only occurs around the edges of the burn, where the tissue damage was not as severe." He gave a little laugh. "Don't you find it strange that the worse it is, the less painful it becomes? I have always found that strange."
"I think that's true for a lot of things," Sam said. "Maybe only in Dean's world."
Cas tilted his chin, eyes bright and puzzled. "Is there another world?"
Sam chuckled, hands in his pockets, scuffing his feet on the carpet.
"I feel I need to apologize for my stinginess with my salve when you first joined us, Sam," Cas said, frowning. "It is hard to come across, and I do find it helps." Cas shucked his jeans and stood in plain white boxers.
"You don't have to apologize," Sam told him. He wanted to explain, to justify further, but he couldn't find the words.
Cas sat on the edge of the bed, hands splayed on the scratchy spread and head half-turned like a virgin bride. Sam couldn't tell if his aim was coquettish or clueless, but the effect was the same. Desire boiled in his gut and made the room, with its limping air conditioner, seem even warmer.
"Could I ask you to help me apply some?" Cas asked. "You can find it in my left coat pocket."
Hesitation a thing for another life-long gone-Sam agreed.
Cas lowered himself with extreme care on the bed, face down, as though the burns were still fresh.
The scent of the balm, rather than calling up memories of Rufus and the stench of his living rot crawling into every corner of the loft, sent Sam into a haze reminiscent of his own lazy descent into the unconsciousness brought on by Dean's narcotic brew.
Sam knelt on the bed and swung his leg over to straddle Cas's hips. The scars rippled as they slid across his field of vision, the flicker of a zoetrope. Salve warm on his fingers, Sam traced the ragged border between the destroyed and the untouched skin-the full perimeter, memorizing. Cas tensed then relaxed, both wanting and avoiding the touch. The play of muscles below the scar, now so much closer to the skin's surface, made Sam giddy. He was terrified if he let his hands linger he might come without even unbuttoning his jeans.
"It hurts," said Cas.
Until that point, Sam had not realized he was grinding into the "v" on Cas's lower back where the periphery of the burn broke in a smear over unmarred flesh.
"Don't stop," Cas said, more softly.
Half out of pity and half seeking relief, Sam stood, balancing on the edge of the sagging mattress and slid off his jeans and boxers. Cas writhed when he felt the weight of Sam's cock on his back. Sam lowered his full weight, knees bent under him, and the twining scars on his legs stretched with the dry ache of winter-blasted skin.
Without concern for reserving the precious balm, Sam dipped out nearly a handful of the stuff and began warming it between his palms. Cas gasped when Sam placed his hands over his scapulae, the twin blades of bone rising and wrinkling the skin between them into a canyon of erratic geography. His hands were broad, but the scars broader still, enveloping them from heel to fingertip. Sam drew in a sharp breath and closed his eyes to dampen the surge of arousal.
He bent, placed a kiss at the nape of Cas's neck, where feathers of dark hair trailed down to brush the upper limits of the scar. With a long exhale, Sam moved up toward the head of the bed and tucked his knees under Cas's arms. Wherever his skin touched the scar, it slid along the corrugated flesh on a thick layer of salve, very nearly begging the shallow thrusts that Sam could not help but make.
Cas tensed again, shoulderblades rising and pulling in toward one another.
"Stay there," Sam said. "Don't move. Please."
He slid his cock into the slick fissure of flesh at Cas's spine, and pressed his palm over it, creating a tunnel of scalding warmth. Sam let his head fall back and desire take over, pushing long thrusts into the orifice he had created. Each press of his hips forced the air from Cas's lungs; he breathed a growing wet stain onto the pillowcase.
But he did not complain, did not ask to stop.
"Sam," he whispered, mouth red and wet.
Sam ground his teeth and came, washing over Cas's nape and anointing his shoulders. He slipped away, tumbling onto the far side of the bed with a tremor that whipped through the matrix of bedsprings.
"Cas," he said, struggling to find breath, scratching pale skin with ragged nails in the fumbling rush to push the boxers away. "Come here."
Sam hauled on the man's biceps, fingers pressing new agony into the stippled skin there. Cas bared his teeth and let his head roll forward. Sam brought him upright to straddle his waist; he opened his eyes slowly, vivid blue and staring at the space above the headboard.
"Touch yourself," said Sam. In his head, he heard Dean speak the words.
Rather than watching Cas's hand, his motions, Sam watched his face-now crushed with concentration, now open in bald ecstasy. When Cas bit his lip, Sam felt the warm rush of fluid over his sternum, reaching cooling fingers into the hollow of his throat.
Cas fell forward, a slow arc, fitting himself into Sam's wide embrace.
The smell of him that rose through the scent of the ointment was strange. In the back of his mind, Sam gave a moment of absent thought to the fact that he hadn't had a proper shower in what was probably weeks. But the weight of Cas pressed him into the bed, unfamiliar scents filling his nostrils.
His thumbs alongside the lettuce-edge of Cas's scars, stroking, his mind drifted, reclaiming its haze. Through it broke one thing, and one thing only-a razor recognition.
Dean.
Dean.
Though he woke with full sun slicing through the curtains, Sam couldn't pin down the time if he tried. They could have slept for hours or days. A warm finger of light bisected the sleeping body next to him, stopping just short of touching Sam's skin. He lay and stared for a moment at the washing glow that flowed like a sheet up to Cas's chin, leaving his face in relative shadow. As if he felt Sam's gaze, Cas shifted into the light, eyes still closed, bringing the circular scars studding his forehead into relief.
Ignoring the unwashed reek that rose from the sheets as he shifted and the flaking remnants of the night's activities, Sam bent to press cracked lips to each scar. His was a removed tenderness, almost paternal. If anyone made it out of the maelstrom that was Dean's grand design, he hoped it was Cas. Dean was right-he was an innocent. Not ensnared as the rest of them were, but falling, turning end over end. A hapless Alice tilted into a rabbit hole he could never comprehend. If he were as delicate as he seemed, his landing would be harshest of them all.
It wasn't the kisses but Sam's fingertips pressed to the purplish marks that woke Cas. Where Sam had expected confusion in the blue eyes, there was only recognition. It served to undermine his theories about Cas's aimless trajectory.
"They call it a halo," Cas said.
The statement startled a laugh out of Sam. "Dean does?"
"No. Real doctors do. The device that made these marks. For injuries to the cervical spine. Pins are screwed directly into the skull."
"They still use those?" Sam asked.
"Perhaps only on me," Cas said, with a sliver of smile. He flicked with one fingernail at a patch of dried semen clinging to the plane of Sam's left pectoral.
The twinge of discomfort roused Sam from the swift-coming dream state attending a warm bed and warm company. Cas's next comment split the mood altogether, and the sudden invasion of stuffy closeness made the smell of their unwashed bodies billow into the room.
"Rufus is dead," he said.
There was no point in disagreeing, so Sam only nodded. If it was not fact, it would be soon enough.
"He got in the way," Cas said, with unusual enmity. "He was unpredictable."
"And Dean isn't?" Sam asked.
This brought a genuine laugh. "No. Dean is a simple man of simple expectations. And in that way he is pure. There is no 'before' or 'after.' Only the moment in which he lives."
"Like you."
"Not exactly. My memory begins with my fall," Cas said. "Dean does not fall. He hovers."
Sam could sense the truth of it, even couched in the convoluted metaphors.
"It makes him easier to see," Cas said. "To examine. You...I have never seen."
"What do you mean?"
"I…" he paused. "Here I see your body. But unlike the rest of us, you are not only your scars."
The comment pushed an inexplicable barb of hurt into Sam, and he bit his lip to keep a neutral expression.
"I believe you are kinetic," said Cas, staring at the ceiling. "And Dean does. It is no wonder he wants to hold on."
"To me?"
"He is the axle, we are the spokes," said Cas, using a comparison Sam felt could have been plucked nearly word-for-word from his head. "But you are the motion."
Sam frowned. Could he be outside even among outsiders? The worst of it was not being able to tell whether he was more upset by the idea that Dean couldn't hold onto him or that he was what held the two of them together.
"It disturbs you," said Cas, mimicking Sam's expression. "I have never been good with words."
"No," Sam said. "You're fine." A lie. He shook his head, inviting the fog back in rather than trying to clear it. "I'm going to take a shower."
Both of them clean and shirtless, as t-shirts washed under the shower dangled from the Lincoln's seatbelt stays, Sam and Cas drove back until the skyline swallowed the mountains once again. Everything was city-dry and hot and harsh within the shroud of dust-thickened air.
Meg was standing outside the loft, dressed in a black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, and jean shorts cut off just below the swell of her ass. With her wild bleach-blonde hair spiked upward and eyes hidden behind huge sunglasses, she struck Sam both as a comforting presence and as one entirely unknown-familiar skin sculpted into dangerous terrain as if she were slated to fill the spot abandoned by Rufus.
She gave a knowing but guarded smile when Sam and Cas unfolded their clean, broad expanses of skin from within the car.
"Where's Dean?" Sam asked.
"At the salvage yard," said Meg. "Getting my car."
"Your car?"
"The Lexus, yes."
"It's not driveable," Sam said. "Is it?"
"Dean took chains and a hitch. He thinks it'll make the perfect ship for Rufus's send-off."
"A piece of art," Sam said. "An installation."
Meg nodded. "I'm glad to be rid of it. The thing was ridiculous. Padded like a prison, fitted out with stupid devices in the name of safety. We both know how well those worked. It's no use trying to cut off contact. The car will find the road, and the road will find you."
Where she might have rolled her eyes at Dean's pronouncements before the derby, she was beginning to sound just like him now. Sam wanted to grab her, crush her flesh to bruising below his fingertips, fuck the words out of her throat.
"When did Rufus die?" Cas asked.
Meg didn't answer.
"What about the other car?" Sam asked. "Lucifer."
"Ask Dean yourself," Meg said.
The belching growl of Baby's engine was doubled in intensity as it fought with all its horses behind it to drag the wreck of the Lexus. The rear wheels were serviceable, and Dean had hoisted the annihilated front end high enough with a length of chain wrapped around Baby's rear fender to drag it back to the loft.
Sam could see the fender buckling, pinched inward where the chain bit down, but for once Dean didn't seem to care at all. Whatever Rufus had meant to him Sam wasn't privileged to know, and it rankled.
Dean's face was haggard in the sunlight, his eyes bloodshot and puffy. The damaged eyelid drooped, making a slit of his eye as though it had been sealed shut with a hard right hook.
"We have to carry him out," he said, voice thick with phlegm.
Meg, Cas, and Sam followed silently into the loft. Most of the sick-smell had dissipated. Sam imagined it thinning bit by bit as Rufus's organs shut down one at a time. But as the elevator rose, he saw that some of the windows had been broken, fresh air whistling past the glass teeth even in the morning's relative stillness.
The helix of fenders lay on its side, and bits of chrome from the skeletal Chevy were snapped apart and tossed all over the concrete floor. Sam's discomfort burrowed bone-deep in an instant. This vandalism, even more than Rufus's death, was a telltale for ruin, for rot from within. Regardless of circumstance, Sam felt responsible for it. The light wind skimmed his naked skin, making him shiver.
The office was still clotted with stench; even Dean made no pretense at hiding disgust.
The bandage-covered form that had been Rufus lay in a boneless heap on a mattress speckled with stains turning black. If his humanity was nearly erased by the blood-soaked dressings, death had finished the job.
"Take the whole mattress," Dean said. "It'll burn better."
A burning "ship." That was Dean, theatrical to a fault. Rufus would have a Viking funeral, however bastardized.
Each of them grabbed a corner of the mattress, sodden and sagging with dead weight, and wrestled it across the loft and into the elevator. Inside the garage, they folded the mattress over on itself with the body inside and secured it with ropes. The bed springs moaned.
The four of them loaded the bundle through the ruined rear window of the Lexus, secured it to the crushed frame and covered the whole thing with a dirty blue tarp.
Dean patted the end of the mattress beneath its plastic overwrap. "I'll take you, buddy." He did not look up. "Sam, grab the gas can in the garage. It's time to sail."
Dragging the Lexus, Dean led the procession of cars-Sam and Cas in the Lincoln and Meg bringing up the rear in the Mercedes-with proper funerary slowness. It was hard to tell whether the weight of the car he pulled or the weight of the loss dragged Dean to a crawl on the long drive to the desert. The roads grew progressively smaller and more poorly maintained the further outside city limits they drove. The sun hung low and gold over the city, and Sam knew then that Dean hoped to lose the fire in the last blaze of sunset. An offering to a greater purpose.
When Dean popped the straining padlock on the chain supporting the Lexus, it dropped at once and settled with a sigh onto a destroyed front tire.
Sam didn't need a cue to fetch the gas can from the trunk of his car and begin dousing the mattress and the car's interior. It was clear Dean was there to stand at watch. Sam poured a trickling path leading away from the car, and Meg offered her lighter.
The two of them staggered back as the fire slapped the oxygen out of the surrounding air. Cas and Dean stood steady, owing to their kinship with flame, Sam guessed. So much for camouflage in the red of sundown; the car sent a column of black smoke straight up into the unmoving desert air.
It must have smelled the same when Jess's body burned in the car, but Sam couldn't remember. The reek of broiling flesh and sizzling blood mixed with the chemical horror of the burning interior made tears spill over and cut trails through the ash on their faces.
Had Dean turned around, it would have looked like mourning. But he stared only at the fire. As the roof caved in on bending steel, sinking the remains of the mattress and body almost out of view, Dean snapped out of his stupor and jogged to his car. The howl of tires rose over the sounds of the dying fire, and twin plumes of dust blew over it, a few specks igniting in tiny pyrotechnic bursts.
This time, Meg did not drive away. She followed close to the Lincoln all the way back to the loft, where full dark had taken over. A guttering streetlight a block away played over the smashed glass on the building's face.
Meg threaded her fingers through Cas's and pulled him close to whisper, her lips brushing his ear. Cas gave a backward glance toward Sam, but the idea of going up into the loft was still nauseating.
Sam shook his head. Instead he sat on the Lincoln's hood, putting on Cas's shirt and then his own for warmth, watching the two of them disappear into the murk of the garage.
If not for the reflection of the faraway light on jagged glass, Sam would not have seen the figure in brief silhouette on top of the building. Shielding his eyes, he let them grow accustomed to a darkness that was barely interrupted by weak starlight, until he could see the outline once again.
"Hey, Sammy." The greeting floated down through the complete silence of the street.
Sam slid off the hood and walked, listening to the gravel shifting with each step. On the far side of the building was a fire escape. It was intact all the way to the roof level, but shrieked under Sam's boots, splitting the silence. He wondered whether Cas and Meg heard through the office wall, or whether their sad and careful fucking had already gulped down all sound but their breath.
It was a relief when Sam pulled himself up to the tarpaper roof. He followed discarded clothes like trail markers-shoes, a shirt, jeans, boxers-to where Dean crouched, naked, looking out to the city's edge. No traces of smoke were visible in the deep night.
"Dean," Sam said.
He stood. As Sam put a hand on his shoulder, shocked at the coolness of his skin, he saw in the wan light his hair standing on end. Each one, all over Dean's body, except for the burned spots where hair had been blasted away.
Sam wanted to pull off one of the shirts he wore and drape it around Dean's shoulders, but the incredible landscape of his skin beckoned too strongly. He let his other hand drop down onto the graft scars and was hit by a rush of vertigo that pushed him, wavering, against Dean's body. The scars were warm, thermoclines running through cold skin.
Sam caught his breath before he spoke. "I'm sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry about," Dean said. "Of everybody, he was with me the longest. Rufus, then Cas, then Meg. And you. Like there's some kind of order."
"Cas is afraid of dying."
Dean laughed. "Cas will never die. He's immortal. Are you?"
"Immortal?"
"Afraid of dying."
After a pause, Sam said, "I don't think about it."
"I think about it all the time," Dean said. "It feels good. I've died more times than I can count."
Sam laughed, the warm breath of it stirring the hairs at Dean's nape. He put his arms around Dean, gingerly, as if he would shatter himself like one of his statues.
"Check that out," Dean said, tilting his head upward against Sam's shoulder.
Sam nodded into Dean's neck, suddenly desperate to breathe in a lifetime of him in just a few minutes.
"Reminds me of a story I heard," Dean said. "A story from Africa. I think my dad told it to me."
It was the first time Dean had mentioned family outside of the crew he had assembled, and Sam was taken aback.
"This guy in the story, he killed someone he wasn't supposed to," said Dean. "And the gods exiled him. They exiled him to Heaven for a year. Except in this story, Heaven was shitty. Like there was no atmosphere, and he had to walk around in the wind nonstop. The sun burned him, and the moon did, too. And get this: the stars could talk, but all they did was tell him what a fuckup he was."
"That's weird."
"Yeah. When I was a kid, I still used to climb out on the roof and try to listen to the stars."
Sam placed a kiss at the crook of Dean's neck. "What did they say?"
"Nothing," said Dean. "Not a fucking thing."
Sam turned Dean in his arms. He was no longer crying, but his eyes were swollen from the acrid smoke of the fire. Sam traced the perimeter of the graft on Dean's forehead, feeling for the first time its fragility. He followed the scar's path with his forefinger across Dean's face and down to the point that it disappeared just below his ear.
Then he bent and put his lips against Dean's, and felt the tremors of his teeth chattering behind them. Sam held him until the knocking stopped and the night was still again.