"Do you know why your father is digging up those graves?" Asks Castiel.
Dean hesitates.
"Yes."
"Can you tell u-," the Angel pauses, rewords, "Can you tell me?"
Dean feels the instinctive, "no," rise to his lips, the snarky, "you wouldn't understand."
But this is his Angel talking. If anyone in the world could understand, it would have to be him.
"The bodies are dangerous," says Dean, "He's making them safe."
It's such an unexpected answer that everyone just sits and stares at him for a whole minute, each at a total loss. Except for Sammy, who's started playing with his shirt-sleeve, almost bored.
"The bodies are... dangerous?" It's Karen's partner, the old guy, who speaks up.
"We're not supposed to talk about it," says Sammy.
Dean fights the urge to shush him again.
Karen and the old guy look skeptical, confused, but not the Angel. Dean meets Castiel's eyes and finds the man giving Dean his absolute attention, hanging on his every word.
"Dangerous how?" He says.
"Something to do with the drugs. I don't know really."
"Dean," says Sammy, sounding worried, "We're not supposed to-"
Dean does shush him this time. He keeps staring at his Angel.
"It does weird shit," says Dean, talking directly to Castiel, "The drugs they sell. They're messed up."
Castiel nods, understanding flitting across his face. Dean is relieved. He knew his Angel would understand.
"Weird shit" hardly covers it. The sheer amount of reports Cas and his bosses have been getting off the street about the drugs Lilith and her gang are putting out should have been enough to turn heads. But the wild impracticality of their content had everyone writing it off as merely hallucinogenic. There have been reports ranging from psychic visions to telekinesis all the way to people claiming the drug made others obedient to their will. The information was insane to the highest degree, so beyond the realm of normal, that no one even considered taking any of it seriously.
Except Castiel.
At first, Cas thought the reports of death-touches and premonitions as bonkers as everyone else. But when a group of teenagers came in reporting super strength, it caught his attention.
The report had been run up the ladder from local police, as they all were. Anna had him documenting everything, no matter how ridiculous, insisting the nature of the delusions and hallucinations the drugs were causing could prove significant down the road. The boys were insisting that, after ingesting the new designer drug known colloquially as "Demon Blood" they'd been cursed with the ability to lift cars with one hand and crush solid metal into dust.
It was the word "cursed" that made Cas pause. They young men weren't claiming to be blessed with superpowers, but rather cursed with a burden that made them terrified to touch the people they loved or even go out in public. The stories were so familiar they'd sent raging chills down Castiel's spine.
"It's like everything I touch, breaks."
Cas knew what that felt like. All too well.
Cas has never been a big fan of superhero movies. On the rare occasion he does watch TV, he has a preference for children's cartoons. Something about the simplicity of their plots is a source of comfort in his painfully complicated life and the colorful antics provide a relief from the stress and darkness often present in his job. But there are moments, late at night, when he's flicking through the channels, unable to sleep, where he'll stumble across the cartoon or live-action version of a superhero comic, brought to life on the tiny screen.
They all seem to follow a similar pattern. A seemingly normal individual goes through some sort of trauma and wakes up with miraculous new gifts that elevate them beyond the rest of humanity. They recognize the responsibility that goes with these gifts and decide to dress up in costume and use them for the good of humanity. It's a nice notion, if a bit silly. And Cas has certainly fantasized, as surely everyone has at one point or another, about possessing such gifts and how much easier his life would be if he could, for example, run faster than light or read people's minds. How useful such abilities might be to his work. How enjoyable to be able to rise above the mundane and bush with the spectacular.
But never, of course, has he considered such possibilities beyond the realm of a passing whim. Cas is, and always has been, a realist. Rooted in facts and undeniable truths. He has faith in people because he honestly believes they deserve it. Not because he believes in magic and radioactive spiders.
And yet, here he stands, with his bed in one hand and the dresser in the other, each a good three feet off the ground, without even breaking a sweat.
Ever since he pulled those boys out of the fire with one arm, he's been testing himself. At first, Cas thought it was an adrenaline rush. From what he's read online, they are fairly common in times of stress or when heroic measures are called for. But that same night when he got home, his front door had gotten stuck...again. And when he tried to pull it open, he'd yanked the damn thing clear off its hinges.
A week later, he was pursuing a suspect down a back alley, running much faster than his partner and not the least bit winded. He caught up with the guy easily and grabbed ahold of him. He'd planned to tackle him to the ground, but instead had sent the man flying a good twenty feet before he crashed into the brick wall, breaking his nose and cracking two ribs.
That was when Castiel really started taking notice. He's had to be careful. Treating everything and everyone like they could break… which they very well might if he doesn't find a way to keep this… thing, whatever it is, in check. He has to find out the rules.
Cas puts down the furniture and stares at his own hands for the thousandth time in total shock. What is happening to him? Why is it happening? He has no answers. He doesn't even know where to start looking.
He's pretty sure it started the night of the fire. He can't know for sure, but at the very least he can't recall anything like this happening to him before that night. But where does that get him? Dozens of people were present that night and as far as his very awkward prodding has gotten him, no else noticed anything strange outside the obvious.
No one can tell how the fire was started and they still have no leads on the mysterious individual who had invaded the family's home. There were even those who doubted such an individual even existed and that either John, himself, had started the fire as a cover for killing his wife, or the man had simply gone mad upon seeing her burn to death. One overzealous attorney even planned to prosecute John on suspicion of murder, but the man and his sons had all mysteriously disappeared just nights after the incident.
On top of that, Castiel informed his bosses about the odd yellow liquid he'd spotted when pulling the boys from danger. But no one performing the investigation after the fact could find any trace of any unusual substances in the house.
All that was weird, but still offered him nothing in way of explanation for his inexplicable new strength. In fact, it all seemed quite stubbornly designed to do just opposite, screaming, "Move along! Nothing to see here!"
It left Cas stumped. His right hand, the one he'd first stuck in the strange goo and then grabbed the little boy's arm with, was burned badly, but that could just as easily have been caused by the burning metal of the doorknob he'd touched only moments before. Which leaves him with nothing. Nothing at all except maybe something the little boy had seen or experienced that could shed some light on his bizarre new situation. But the odds of seeing him again are even more ridiculous than the odds of getting superpowers from a house fire to begin with. Coincidences like that don't happen in real life. Hell, it even pisses him off when they happen in the movies. Life is never supposed to be that neat.
"Why is it your dad's job to make the bodies safe?" Karen is asking, when Cas drifts back to the meeting at hand.
"Well, no one else is going to do it," says Dean with a fire in his eyes. He turns to Castiel, "Are you?"
The next day Dean asks for his phone back.
Karen feels so guilty about being forced to leave him and his brother in the sheriff's station overnight she pulls some strings and gets it for him. But not before the lead detectives and Agents Novak and Milton have gone through it, and Sam's, extensively.
There's a peculiar text in the older boy's inbox from a blocked number:
~Nearby Are Yellow Eyes~
No one knows what to make of it, so Karen resolves to ask Dean about it once she gives the phone back to him. (She has to be very firm on that point.)
The first thing Dean does when she hands it to him is check his inbox. No new messages, Karen knows. He checks his texts, and his face goes pale.
"What is it?" She asks, going for concerned but afraid she comes off as more curious than anything else.
"Nothing."
Karen's not surprised. She feels silly for expecting a different answer.
"Is everything alright?"
Sammy tugs on his older brother's sleeve but Dean just shakes his head, putting the phone away in his pocket.
"Everything's fine," he promises. He's lying.
She knows he's lying but there's nothing she can do about it. The others are tracing the number, she knows, maybe they can give her some answers.
Everything is happening fast. Nine different states are competing over the extradition of John Winchester, Karen Giles is pushing to put his sons into proper care, and the journal they've discovered among John Winchester's effects is sending them off in twenty different directions, each more bizarre than the last.
If there were any remaining doubt about John Winchester's psychological state, this serial-killer's type manifest would have silenced them. Most of it is an incomprehensible jumble of demonic-looking symbols and random collections of letters and numbers. But the stuff they can make out is even more disturbing.
Diana flips through the pages, eyebrows growing higher with every leaf. In between the drawings and margin scrawls are pages and pages of crazed rantings about psychics and superhumans. There are long lists of meticulously organized numbers and names and diary-like entries about "putting down" monsters. It so stuffed with possible leads, Diana hardly knows where to start. How much of this true? How much is simply the delusional rantings of a sick man? It's like she hit the evidence-jackpot only peek in and discover the pot itself is chock-full of counterfeit needles, a pile worse than any haystack could have ever been. How will they ever sort out the truth from this mess?
Pete, on the hand, seems thrilled by the journal and everything in it. According to him, it confirms everything he's been saying since the beginning: John Winchester is a nutjob and all the suspicious death that seems to follow him around will fall directly on his head.
Diana's not so sure. But she has nothing to offer in place of his theory and, if Pete's gut says Winchester is the man they're looking for, who is she to argue?
Cas is sifting through files on the Demon Blood's effects, old and new, when the news comes in.
He's at home, on his computer, scrolling through the incident reports, looking at them with a brand new eye. When the account about super-strength had caught his attention, he'd started to wonder at the credibility of the other...effects. But now, knowing he's not the only one who's taken notice, even if Winchester is a madman, he's got an entirely new perspective to work with.
Dangerous, Dean had called them. And not just the users themselves, but their very bodies, even dead, seemed to carry some horrible risk in the eyes of the boy's father.
John Winchester looks at this list, or whatever variation he has at his disposal, and sees very real, very prominent threats. Dangerous individuals with an even more dangerous substance in their veins and in their pockets, spreading their afflictions like a disease. He sees monsters, demons, with infected blood,poisoning the masses with an addition to something no one could possibly understand. An epidemic.
And he's on a one-man mission to contain it.
Cas closes his eyes. Getting so deep into the mind of someone like John Winchester is making his head ache. It frightens him a little to realize how deep down this rabbit hole one might fall if they weren't careful. If they really, truly believed in it.
Those poor boys.
What twisted scenarios must their father be filling their heads with? What crazed, paralyzing fears must they have when they go to sleep at night? When they step out into this world of theirs, crawling with monsters of the very worst sort. They must be terrified.
The thing is, Cas isn't entirely certain they don't have a right to be. He knows for sure at least one of the reported effects is not only possible but has happened. And as for the rest of them...something about it feels...true. Not everything. Certainly not to the letter. But the idea behind the panic... something about it seems frightening plausible to him. The tingling beneath his skin refuses to die when he looks at the list, it pushes at him, nudging his conscious mind, whispering look harder. Look deeper.
Cas's phone buzzes on the table beside him.
He opens his tired eyes and stares at the screen, not comprehending what he's seeing. He shakes his head to clear the fuzzniess of exhaustion and looks again. It's from Anna.
~Winchester escaped. Sheriff's station. Now.~