Chapter Thirty-Five: In Which a Bad Plan Is Poorly Executed
There was only one thing that could bring Castiel back and Mary knew it.
"Come on, Dean. Please."
His jaw remained tight.
"We need him. This is our only chance."
Everything was in place. The ritual, the sigil on the wall, everything except for Cas. Mary reached out and gripped his arm gently. Dean took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Mary couldn't make out what he was saying under his breath, but she figured things were better that way.
"Dean."
Cas suddenly stood in front of them, face drawn tight with pain, angry red gouges and peeling skin decorating it. Just as the thought crossed Mary's mind that he looked as if he were going to collapse, he did. Dean grabbed him firmly by the shoulders and yanked him back to his feet, hands lingering to make sure he stayed there.
"We need to fix this."
Mary and Bobby pretended to busy themselves with checking over the sigil and Sam drew back to sit with Ellen and Jody. Ellen had told her about what had happened last night with Sam. Mary had decided to take things one disaster at a time, but it was still good to know the two other women were looking after him.
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah, well, sorry doesn't really cut it. Not this time."
Bobby leaned forward, increasingly interested in the flaking tile, but Mary listened in, no longer caring if they realized what she was doing.
"You broke down the wall, Cas. Sam's not okay. And now he might never be."
Cas winced. "If I had enough energy, I'd fix him."
"Means a lot," Dean snapped.
Bobby must have decided it was a good time to step in. "All right, Cas, here we go."
He squinted down at the ritual and began to read, never stumbling once over the Latin. Mary joined Ellen and Jody in standing near Sam, leaving only Dean to hold Cas in place in front of the portal.
It opened flawlessly, bits and pieces of the dirty plaster from the wall being sucked in as if a tornado were on the other side. The portal to Hell had been the same way. Mary shook off that particular memory, choosing instead to focus on Cas lighting up like a Christmas tree with the weight of all the souls pouring in.
A bad plan well executed, it seemed.
Just as Bobby finished, the light died away and the portal closed. Cas collapsed, only Dean keeping him from hitting his head off the floor.
Almost well executed.
Mary hurried over. Dean had dropped to his knees beside him, cradling his head. Mary didn't need to check his pulse or breath to know what Dean already did. He was gone. She laid a hand on her son's shoulder.
And then, just like Sam had once done in an abandoned house, Cas took breath when he never should have again. Dean leaped back as if he'd been burned, quick to let his head drop now that he knew he was all right.
"That was unpleasant," he noted, sitting up.
Mary and Dean helped him to his feet. Mary dusted off the front of his trench coat (not that it really mattered when the whole thing was covered in blood) and Dean kept a steadying hand on his shoulder.
"I'm not dead."
"Well, that's good," Ellen said drily. "Anybody feel like getting out of here?"
Mary couldn't agree more, but Cas stopped in his tracks.
"I'll find some way to redeem myself to you," he told Dean.
She had a feeling that all he'd had to do in order to do that was come back from the dead like he just had, but Cas had no way of knowing that.
"All right. Fine. Let's just go."
Cas tore himself free of Dean's grip, wrenching back a few steps, arms wrapping around himself like he was protecting himself from the world. Or the world from him. Mary put a hand in front of Sam, just in case.
"They're too strong! I can't hold them back!"
"Hold what back?" Dean shouted. "Cas?"
"Leviathan!"
A strange light entered his eyes, something inhuman, but a different kind of inhuman than Cas's usual detached manner. It seemed almost fevered. Any creature Death found amusing was not one Mary wanted to be near.
"Go, go, go!" she ordered, shoving Sam towards the exit.
Understanding her perfectly, both Ellen and Jody grabbed one of his arms and started pulling him out of the room. Bobby followed quickly behind, leaving Mary and Dean to stare at what had once been Jimmy Novak—had once been Cas.
"Cas?"
"CaS iS dEaD. We RuN tHe ShOw nOw."
/
He'd lost one of the most important people in his life, and all he had to show for it was a ruined trench coat, still dripping wet and bloodstained. If that wasn't a metaphor for Dean's life, he didn't know what was.
"Hey."
Mom sat down next to him, both looking out on the lake Cas had walked into only about an hour before. Sam and the others had retreated to the Mystery Machine to plan out their next move—not that they had one—but Dean had been unable to take his eyes off the water.
"We need to talk."
"If you give me the same speech that you did when I broke up with Cassie Robinson—"
Not that he was comparing Cas walking into a lake and literally vanishing after trying to become God to a breakup when he was twenty or anything. Or that this was like a breakup. Which it wasn't. At all.
"That's not what this is about."
She took a deep breath. For a moment, Dean could see the kid who'd just lost both her parents to a demon, the young woman that he'd warned to stay out of the nursery on November 2nd.
"It's been a pretty crappy year. For both of us."
"No offense, but I think Sam wins the crappy year contest."
Now that he could remember it, Sam definitely won the crappy year contest.
Mom shook her head. "You're right. But I can't fix that right now, so I'm fixing this instead."
She leaned forward and brushed his hair out of his face, the way she'd used to do it on the first day of school and picture day.
"I didn't want to raise you like I'd been raised and I thought…well, when Sam got into Stanford and you got that teaching gig, I thought I'd actually done it. Let you be normal. But I failed you in the end anyway. I shouldn't have let you go after Azazel with me. I knew that there wasn't any going back and I let you come anyway."
She cracked a wry smile.
"Guess I never learn. After—after Sam died, you wanted out and I wouldn't let you. I should've just given you the apartment and gotten back on the road. But instead, I dragged you right back in. I dumped way too much on you this year and then I ran off anyway." Her hands convulsed in her lap. "I'm sorry."
He hadn't expected that. Dean pulled her into a hug, tucking his face in her shoulder and breathing in just like he had when he was a kid. Unlike when he was a kid, it didn't make the scary thing go away. Mom was good, but she wasn't that good.
"Together?" he asked, pulling back.
She smiled. "One thing at a time."
/
"When was the last time you changed your fire alarm batteries?" Ellen shouted. "There's a protocol, you know!"
Bobby was pretty sure they were breaking every rule known to man when it came to how to react when you knew your house was on fire, but he was not about to let this library go with it.
"Get Sam out!"
Thankfully, Ellen decided to listen to him for once, grabbing Sam by the arm and dragging him out the front door. The poor kid had been utterly transfixed by the smell of smoke. Bobby shook his head and stuffed a few more books into his knapsack. He'd long since stopped grabbing important volumes and had instead decided to grab everything he could.
"You need to get out of here. Come on!"
He thought of Karen's quilting in the trunk in his bedroom, the photo albums Mary and the boys had made him over the years, one of Rufus's hats that he'd stolen still squirreled away in the closet somewhere.
"Bobby Singer, this is not a negotiation!"
Before he could really register what was happening, Ellen had snatched him by the front of his jacket and gotten him outside, knapsack still in hand. Sam stood about twenty yards away from the house, arms wrapped tightly around himself. Ellen tapped nine-one-one into her phone.
"Is he—?"
"The fire set him off," Ellen said tiredly. "I couldn't calm him down. Give it a shot, will you?"
She relayed his address to the operator. Bobby determinedly ignored the fact that the house he'd bought with his wife so long ago was going up in smoke and went to try his hand with Sam.
He jumped violently when Bobby got close. He'd been skittish over the last few days, but never quite this bad before.
"It's just me, Sam."
Sam visibly slumped in relief. "Right. Sorry."
Bobby scrutinized him carefully. Dark circles under his eyes told of long sleepless nights where even simply resting wasn't an option. The poor kid had been through a lot, a lot that Bobby couldn't even imagine. But if Bobby Singer knew one thing, it was broken.
"Shut up."
He glanced up. "I didn't even say anything."
Sam shook his head. "No. Not—not you. It's—never mind."
Ellen had mentioned the hallucination, but Bobby had been hoping against hope that it was a one-time deal. No such luck.
"It'll be all right, kid. Mary and Dean'll get back soon and everything'll be all right."
If only he could know that he was telling the truth.
/
"No, no, no!"
Most people when spotting smoke rising from their house would decide to call the fire department, but Jody's mind had temporarily gone offline. She flung open the front door and raced inside. Her wedding album, Sean's things, pictures of Owen and all of his toys. The memories of a home she was never going to have again and they were all going to go up in flames.
Jody's eyes darted over the scene. She wasn't stupid. Jody had spent enough years on the force to know the difference between an accidental fire and an arson. And a house that had been empty for several weeks while its occupant tried to stop an angel from ending the world was not a good candidate for an accidental fire. She spotted several wet patches on her carpet, staining it darker than the rest.
Gasoline.
Crap.
The smoke rose higher. Jody snatched the picture of the three of them off of her table and shoved it into her jacket, but she didn't have enough time left. Giving the house one last glance, she raced back out into the street.
Fumbling with her phone, tears gathering in her eyes without permission, she pulled out her phone and called Bobby's.
/
"No."
Mary's heart practically threw itself against her ribcage. Singer Salvage Yard was in ruins, smoke still rising in halfhearted curls from the roof. She launched herself out of the car, the ankle she'd broken years ago when they'd met Alastair buckling.
"Mom!" Dean shouted, but she ignored him.
There'd been a case with a swim team that had been massacred inside their own locker room. Thinking there might be a possibility of Leviathan involvement, she and Dean had gone, leaving Ellen and Bobby to look after Sam and Jody to make sure everything was all right at her house. They hadn't even been gone twenty-four hours.
"Sam? Sammy!"
It had been ages since she'd last used the childhood nickname—she'd always been more respectful of his desire to be called Sam than Dean—but it slipped out without her noticing.
Bobby and Ellen wouldn't have just left him there. The horrid images of him struggling to breathe trapped in a room filling with smoke got worse with the addition of Ellen and Bobby trying to get them all out. She'd never, even in her worst nightmares, imagined him dying like John.
Someone's hands grabbed her by the shoulders. Mary whirled around to face her attacker only to find Dean staring back at her, equally shaky but holding it together one heck of a lot better than she was.
"Right. Sorry."
He released his hold on her. "He's not in there. They're not in there. They can't be."
Avoiding the house, afraid of what they'd see, the two walked in the graveyard of cars. They didn't split up and Mary didn't suggest it. For one thing, she didn't want to let him out of her sight. For another, the burnt out shells of cars was a little creepy.
"Oh, now it's personal."
It had been sitting in the back of Bobby's lot for several years now, only used a few times, but Mary could still recognize her '93 Villager within a second of seeing it. Even when most of it had been burnt to a crisp.
She'd driven Sam to debate camp in that car, stuck balloons on it for Dean's graduation, stitched up hunting wounds in the backseat. And now, someone had set it on fire to what, send a message? Well, message received and ignored. If they thought a car was going to make her back off, they should have tried the Impala.
Had the situation been different, she was sure Dean would have made a crack about how the world would be better without it. Instead, both of their searches got a more worried tone. Mary tried to imagine a world without them, and she failed miserably.
"Oh, thank Pete," Mary said, finally spotting a figure standing on the top of a small crest. "Dean, I foun—"
That wasn't one of them.
"Winchesters, yes?" he asked, observing them the way Mary imagined a lion might a gazelle. "Apparently you're a big enough threat to bother eliminating. Congratulations."
Nothing good ever happened when someone knew their name. Mary raised John's handgun and fired twice—two perfect shots that should have killed them. Instead, both bullets bounced back onto the ground, skittering away. Along with them came plenty of black goo.
"Oookay."
Silver bullets were a no go. Mary fumbled around in her purse, fingers ghosting over all the things she'd stowed away, searching for the holy oil she knew she had in there somewhere.
Dean, thinking along the same lines, threw the contents of his small flask of holy water at the monster. He didn't even flinch. Mary finally got the top off of her own flask and just chucked the whole thing at him. No effect.
"Iron?" Mary asked, backing up a few steps.
"Don't think so."
The man wiped his face of both the water and the oil. There wasn't any telltale steam.
"Cute," he drawled.
"Well, I am adorable," they said at the same time.
She'd taught him well.
The monster—Leviathan, her brain supplied and wasn't that just great—advanced.
"Now!" Mary shouted.
The Leviathan grabbed Dean by the collar and threw him. He landed with an audible crunch. Mary winced sympathetically, but she didn't even have time to ask him if he was all right. The Leviathan grabbed her by the arm next.
Mary tried to wrench back, but even throwing all her weight against him did nothing. He threw her, hard, into the wrecked shell of the Villager. The irony was not lost on her.
She clung to consciousness just long enough to see a car literally fall from the sky and squish the Leviathan flat.