Nine
Brooke was, once again, stuck, wandering around the bunker for days, afraid to leave the warded safety of the place, lest Naomi or some other unsavory angel was tracking her, hoping to use her to find Castiel. At least now that Naomi's influence over her mind was gone, her nightmares had lessened. They were still there—they would never go away completely—but they were back to their usual fare. Monsters chasing her through dark forests. That sort of thing. No longer was she plagued with a strange, robotic Castiel stalking her through Purgatory and stabbing her in the eye with his angel blade.
She slept about as well as any Hunter did, in short bursts, lightly, waking halfway at any sound before drifting off again. It was better than not sleeping at all.
Of course, now Meg haunted her dreams, picking up where Castiel had left off. And she had no one to talk to about it. Sam and Dean simply couldn't understand the fact that Brooke had fallen in love with a demon. A demon. Honestly, Brooke didn't understand it half the time, either. Not that it mattered now. Meg was dead.
Brooke often fantasized about all the ways she would slowly kill Crowley. But such thoughts were probably not healthy.
Sam wasn't doing too well. The second trial had been completed—the one needed to close the gates of Hell forever. But completing it had fucked him up worse than the last time, and last time, he'd coughed up blood for days. Was still coughing up blood. Now, on top of that, he looked like death and wasn't sleeping. Could barely keep anything down. Brooke knew that Dean was worried about him, but he wouldn't talk to her about it. Not that she was offended by his lack of speech; she'd gotten used to his gruff nature at this point.
And he was being nicer to her—they both were. She guessed that trying so hard to save Dean from a mind-controlled Castiel had put her firmly in the Family category for the Winchesters. It felt nice to finally be truly included. Castiel had been included long ago, and Sam and Dean had always sort of tolerated Brooke because she came with the angel. But, since Purgatory, and especially in the past week, Sam and Dean had treated her less like an acquaintance and more like a… little sister, or something.
In return, Brooke hovered over the stove most days, cooking up large pots of soup for Sam. He wasn't sick in the traditional sense, but her hope was that home-cooked food would make him feel better the way it made every sick person feel better, even if it didn't heal him. Besides, it gave her something to do with her hands and her body, restless as she was. She worried all day, about Cass, about Sam, about what the hell Crowley was up to, about whether Naomi would catch up to Castiel… Cooking food for a convalescent gave her a sense of purpose, since she couldn't go out Hunting.
As Sam came down one morning (nearer to noon), she came over and handed him a thermos full of chicken soup. She'd avoided anything acidic, like tomato, worried about what the acid might do to his throat, since he was still hacking up a storm. He thanked her, but seemed out of it, otherwise, and she glanced worriedly at the hand holding the thermos—how terribly it shook.
"Is there more of that?" Dean asked, sitting at the table behind her.
"Plenty more," Brooke replied, finally tearing her eyes away from Sam's shaking hand. She smirked at Dean. "But if you ask me to go back into the kitchen to get some for you, I'm gonna kick you in the nuts. You're not sick, so you can get it yourself."
Dean folded his arms over his chest. "So, what? You do everything for Cass, and Sam if he's sick, but nothin' for me?"
She laughed. "I'm pretty sure I'm the only reason you're still breathing after Naomi mind-controlled Cass, so I've done enough for you."
Dean said nothing, but his eyes twinkled in amusement.
"What time did I lay down?" Sam asked, shuffling closer to the table.
Dean checked his watch. "You took a siesta around noon… yesterday." Smiling, he grabbed a bottle of beer from the six-pack next to him and tossed it to Sam.
Sam didn't even seem to notice the beer. It went flying through the air and shattered on the floor ten feet away.
Brooke shook with silent laughter, but was simultaneously annoyed. "First of all," she said, holding up a finger and snorting with more laughter, "I don't think Sam needs beer right now. Secondly," she held up another finger. "you're cleaning that up." She pointed at Dean.
Sam stared at the two of them, then turned to stare at the broken bottle on the ground. "I'm sorry," he mumbled. "Uhh…"
"That's why we don't have nice things, Sam," Dean said.
"Shut up, Dean," Brooke admonished. She turned to Sam. "Don't worry about it."
Sam stumbled forward, holding his head, and placed the thermos of soup on the table. He asked about Kevin.
"I've hacked into every security camera around—Garth's houseboat, Kevin's hometown, where Mrs. Tran lived…"
"And?" Sam asked.
"Well, nothin' so far."
"Dean, we have to find him."
"I know," said Dean. "I know. Look, Garth is out lookin' for him, we've got a Hunter APB out on Kevin. We will do what we can from here, while you get better."
"I'm fine," Sam insisted.
Brooke scoffed, crossing her arms over her chest.
Sam looked at her, annoyed. "Guys, I can still go out there. I can still Hunt."
"Really?" Dean said, raising his eyebrows at his brother.
And they went off to the shooting range in the bunker to test this insistence that Sam was "fine."
Brooke did not go with them, allowing them some brotherly time without her, but when Dean came back, he shook his head at her. Sam had failed whatever test Dean had made up for him in the shooting range, and a Hunter who couldn't shoot was no Hunter at all. Sam was not ready yet.
###
Meeting Charlie Bradbury was definitely an experience for Brooke, who had heard stories from Sam and Dean, and had hyped the woman up in her head. Happily, the hype was real; Charlie Bradbury was awesome.
Brooke did not drive out with the boys to meet her, preferring to stay inside the safety of the bunker. Naomi could, of course, appear the boys just as easily she could appear to Brooke… but the boys did not have a mental connection to Castiel that Naomi could, possibly, hijack to help her find him.
Should've cut off the mental connection, Brooke said to herself, even though the thought of doing it caused phantom pain in her head.
The sound of the bunker's heavy door opening and closing above her head broke her out of her thoughts. She went over to the bottom of the stairs, smiling upward. There were Sam and Dean… and there was that fire-haired nerdy chick, Charlie.
Charlie ran down the rest of the steps when she saw Brooke. "You must be Brooke," she said, and hugged her. "Whats up, bitch?"
Brooke laughed. "I've heard a lot about you."
"Yeah? Did they tell you how awesome I am?"
"Of course they did."
Charlie laughed. "So, I hear you've got a whole… Vulcan mind-meld thing goin' on with an angel. How's that?"
Brooke smiled, though her smile was soft and a little sad. "Mostly? It's awesome. Right now… not so much."
Charlie gave her a sympathetic arm pat. "Yeah, I heard about Castiel disappearing…"
Subconsciously, Brooke spun her wedding band around on her finger with her thumb, and the tattoo of his name on her arm seemed to itch.
They all sat down around a table and began to talk about the case that Charlie had brought them. A man had been found dead, his insides liquified. Gross. The police had tried to bury the case, so as not to cause panic, but Charlie had hacked into the police records (as you do) and dug up any information she could find out about it.
Dean stood up from the table after Charlie gave him as many details as she could. The boys seemed impressed at her sudden aptitude toward all things monstrous, and she admitted that she could be… "a wee bit obsessive… if a wee bit meant completely."
"I also found this series of books by Carver Edlund," Charlie broke in.
Sam, Dean, and Brooke all glanced at each other over the table.
"Did those books really happen?" Charlie asked, though she almost sounded scared to know the answer.
No one answered her, but their silence was answer enough.
"Wow," she said. "That is some meta-madness." She looked at Dean, saw the awkward look on his face. "Thanks for saving the world, and stuff." Then she looked at Sam. "Sorry you have zero luck with the ladies."
Brooke snorted, which seemed to draw Charlie's attention to her.
"You… were mentioned, briefly, but… Nothing much was written about you. Uh… sorry, I guess?"
Brooke shook her head, smiling. "I'm… not important, in the grand scheme of things, I guess. Most… non-human beings—angels, demons—tend to see me as, simply, an extension of Castiel, if anything. So, I guess Chuck didn't… feel the need to really… add me."
Brooke remembered, as she spoke, about the day that Castiel had come to her in her motel room, very upset, and told her that he had gone to look for a version of her in other universes, other dimensions. And she had been… nowhere. Nowhere but here. Being unique, in this instance, didn't make her special. It meant that God had only bothered to create one of her, because He didn't care much about her… or something. Perhaps she really did only exist to… be an extension of Castiel. Being raised as a badass Hunter, Brooke wasn't sure how she felt about the idea that her existence was tied so completely to a man. Well, Castiel technically didn't have a gender, but he resided in a male body and that made him male enough.
Brooke stared at the wood grain in the table, then glanced at her left arm, where she had tattooed Castiel's Enochian name. She shook her head at herself. No. She would not be ashamed of her relationship with Castiel. There had been a time, early on, where he had treated her with less respect than she had deserved, but he had treated all humans that way. And she and Dean had given it right back to him. He had learned. And he was good to her, as crazy as their lives sometimes were. She knew he respected her, and loved her, and would do anything for her. And the fact that she would do the same did not make her lesser than him. It made them equals. She smiled, tilting her hand so that the lamplight caught on her gold ring and made it shine.
Angel Whore, she thought to herself. That's right. And the only one who was allowed to call her that was herself… and her husband… in the bedroom.
It was a name they all used, all the ones who wished to disparage her. But she had taken it back, and thus, had taken their power from them.
Brooke pulled herself out of her thoughts to hear Sam say, "We need to find every single copy of those books and burn them."
"Well, they're online, now," Charlie muttered, "so, good luck with that."
Brooke looked up with an amused smile.
Dean tapped his foot on the ground for a moment, annoyed, and said, "You three crazy kids deal with that. I will go see if there's anything to this case of yours." He motioned vaguely at Charlie.
"I'm coming with you," Sam insisted, standing up. Immediately, his knees buckled and he grabbed onto the table for support.
"Whoa!" Charlie said, reaching out and grabbing his shoulder. "Are you okay?"
"Yes," said Sam.
"No," said Brooke and Dean, at the same time.
"You're taking a knee as long as you're off your game," Dean told his little brother.
"I'll go with you," Charlie piped up, suddenly.
Brooke raised an eyebrow at her, but did not voice any protest. Honestly, she wouldn't be surprised if the nerdy redhead ended up being more badass than all three of them.
Not as badass as Cass, though. Nobody was more badass than Castiel.
Brooke was probably a little biased, though.
"Look, no disrespect, okay," Dean said to Charlie, "but there's a big difference between reading about Hunting and actually Hunting."
Charlie stared at him. "I'm coming… with."
Brooke continued saying nothing, but she smiled at the exchange.
In the end, Charlie left with Dean. Brooke was not at all surprised.
###
"Sam, no," Brooke said, a few hours later.
"You can't make me stay here," he growled at her, trying to get around her and up the stairs to the outside world.
"Oh, can't I?" she countered. "I could shoot you in the leg. That would stop you."
"Oh, yeah. And Dean would come back and kick your ass for it."
"Yeah? I'd shoot him, too." Brooke put a hand on Sam's shoulder and shoved him back. "Sit the fuck down, Winchester."
Sam sighed, glaring at her. "You treat Cass like this?"
Brooke raised an eyebrow at him. "If he deserves it, yes. If I think he's gonna kill himself doing something stupid, yes."
"You let him open Purgatory," Sam shot at her.
Brooke closed her eyes for a moment. "Yes, I did. And if I could do it all over again, I would stop him."
Silence reigned for a few awkward moments.
"I just…" Sam began, but stopped.
Brooke waited.
"I just feel… useless."
Brooke sighed quietly. "You think I don't feel useless? I can't leave here, in case Naomi decides to shove a drill into my brain to figure out where Cass is."
Sam tossed his hands into the air. "So… we're both a mess… So…"
"So what?"
"So…" Sam repeated, slowly, drawing the word out. "Maybe we should both go. I'm in no shape to drive and… if you start acting weird without realizing it, I can tell you, and we can go back to the bunker."
Brooke stared at him. She wanted to say no, that it was too dangerous, that Dean would kill them both if she let Sam go anywhere. She took a breath. "I assume that if I leave these steps, you're gonna disappear without me, right?"
Sam pursed his lips. "Yeah."
She sighed heavily, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. "All right. Fine. But if you die, I will drag your ass back to Earth so I can punch you in the face."
Sam smiled at her, and whacked her on the shoulder playfully. "Sounds good."
###
They stole Charlie's car, since Brooke had left her car behind (again) the night Castiel had attacked Dean. In the escape from Crowley, Dean had shoved her into the back of Impala. Her car was probably still sitting in front of the old crypt.
Brooke worried about Sam the whole drive to where the case was, but she never said a word, knowing that if she did, Sam would only get defensive. He fell asleep on the drive, which was probably a good thing. She left the radio off and kept driving. In the silence, the urge to pray to Castiel was strong, but she fought it off, afraid that any kind of contact with any angel might trigger Naomi, somehow. Now that she was outside the protection of the bunker, she was jumpy.
And she kept wondering… why the hell had Naomi even rescued her from Purgatory in the first place? Wouldn't it have just been easier to leave Brooke there, away from Castiel? It was something she planned on asking him about… whenever she saw him again…
###
Dean wasn't happy to see them, later that night. He glared at Sam, and then turned his wrath on her. "You were supposed to keep him in the bunker."
She opened her mouth. "I—
"I wouldn't let her," Sam interrupted. "Don't yell at her. She tried to stop me, Dean, but I told her that the second she turned her back on me I was just gonna sneak out, anyways. So she went with me, to keep an eye on me."
Dean went back to glaring at Sam. Without taking his eyes off his brother, he said, to Brooke, "Why don't you and Charlie go talk to the witnesses."
"But I don't wanna miss the bro-ment," Charlie whined.
Brooke rolled her eyes and dragged Charlie away to go talk to the two teenage kids playing video games in the corner. They were covered in… blood splatter. That was never a good sign.
###
"Leviathan?" Sam suggested, much later, when they were all back at the bunker. They'd been researching what kinds of creatures killed their victims and liquified their insides into a slushy-like consistency.
Charlie shook her head, her chin resting in her hand as she stared at some old tome laying open on the table. "They consume their prey."
"Well, maybe the vics were Leviathan."
"No black goo on either scene, according to the reports," Charlie countered.
Brooke sighed, staring down into her own book, scanning the words as quickly as possible while still retaining their meaning.
"Dragons," Sam offered. "They—
"No signs of burns on the vics," Charlie cut in.
"Wait a second," Dean said, speaking for the first time in ten minutes. "Djinn."
Brooke looked up, confused, and opened her mouth—
"Djinn vics don't get liquified," Charlie said.
Brooke nodded, and pointed at her.
"No, no, no," said Dean. "Not regular Djinn. According to this, there is a bastard offshoot." His eyes scanned the page of his father's journal. "Uhh, their eyes light up blue. They pass as humans, all that regular jazz. Except these 'leave their victims with jelly-like insides.' And, supposedly, when they poison their victims, they leave behind a blue handprint." Dean slapped the journal with a hand and looked up in triumph.
Brooke smiled and took the opportunity to rub her eyes, strained from all that reading. Sam, Dean, and Charlie went on to talk about how to kill Djinn (a silver blade dipped in lamb's blood), and everyone seemed to collectively sigh with relief.
"All right, well…" Charlie stood up, holding her stuff. "Breakthrough means snack time to me. And I wanna just, uh, stretch my legs." She turned away from the table, grabbing her backpack. "I will pick us up some grub and, unlike you, Sam, I will not forget the pie."
Sam chuckled, staring after her as she left.
The second she was out of earshot and headed up the steps to the outside world, Dean leaned in toward Sam. "She seem a little off to you?"
"Since the second she got here," Sam replied.
Brooke hadn't noticed anything off about the woman. She'd seemed jumpy, but her entire personality had seemed fueled by a sort of nervous energy, so Brooke hadn't really thought that the jumpiness meant anything. Probably, she would have noticed it if she had met Charlie previously, but since this was the first time, she had no prior meetings to go off of. Sighing, she leaned in toward the Winchesters. "So, what do we do about it?"
Dean glanced at her. "You don't do anything. Now that you're back in the bunker, you gotta stay put. Naomi could latch onto you at any time, and… Look, I don't know what the hell Cass is up to, but I do know that Naomi is bad news."
Brooke closed her eyes for a moment, wondering if she had it in her to argue. She had felt useless up until today, hanging around the bunker, doing nothing. But… if doing nothing was keeping Cass safe, how was she supposed to argue with that. Unlike the brothers, she liked to think she didn't just jump into unnecessary risks out of boredom. This was probably false, but, she could at least pretend she had better judgment than the Winchesters.
"Fine," she said. "More sleep for me." She closed the big, heavy, dusty book on the table, slid it up away from her, and laid her arms down on the table with her head pillowed on them. "Good night."
…
But in the end, when Sam and Dean left, to go find Charlie, Brooke refused to let them go alone.
"We won't be alone," Dean argued, spinning around to face Brooke as made his way to the stairs. "We'll have each other."
"Oh, sure," Brooke said. "You'll have Sam. Who is still coughing up blood, and looks like shit." She glanced at Sam. "No offense."
"Listen to me. You gotta protect Cass."
"Cass is a big boy. He can handle himself, even if Naomi gets to him through me. Finding Charlie is more important right now."
Dean stared at her, angrily. "Then you gotta protect yourself. I don't know what Sam and I could do to save you if Naomi came after you to shove a drill into your brain through your eye."
Brooke stepped closer to Dean, her face inches from his. "If that bitch comes near me, I will stab her in the face with my angel blade. Now, are we gonna save Charlie, or not?"
###
And they did save Charlie, in the end, from the Djinns that had attacked her, a mother and son. And Naomi didn't come to take Brooke away the second she stepped out of the bunker, despite the mental connection she shared with Castiel, which would make it so easy for her to find him. This would have been the second opportunity she had let slip, the first being when Sam had insisted he leave to work the case the day before. They'd been out of the bunker for hours, then, and Naomi had not come for Brooke.
She began to wonder if she was overestimating how important she was in all this, if at all. Or perhaps… Naomi had already found Castiel. But that could not be. Surely Castiel would have haunted her dreams, as he had done the last time he needed help, if he had gotten caught. Surely she would know if something was wrong… But then, if Castiel was still on the run, then why was Naomi so disinterested in Brooke's direct link to the angel she so desperately wanted to find?