As Clean as the Slate Gets
K Hanna Korossy
Dean was rubbing his leg again.
Sam doubted he even noticed he was doing it, but Sam did. It still worried him a little that his brother had had to ditch his cast early just because some monsters were after them. Okay, so the Leviathan were so far an unstoppable threat, eating people, shapeshifting, burning down Bobby's house and sending both Winchesters to the hospital. But still.
A dark, hooded figure appeared in the window, looming menacingly. Its eyes glowed with fire.
And then there were Sam's own hallucinations. He ignored the window and filched one of Dean's fries to distract both of them.
It worked. Dean shifted on the diner's squeaky bench and frowned at him, pulling his food a little closer. "Dude, get your own," he grumbled. The pinched look didn't quite leave his face, though.
Sam returned to his bland chili. "We could check the Campbell library, see if it has anything on Leviathan," he continued their brainstorming session. They'd ransacked the Campbell hunting compound, abandoned after Samuel's death, and those books had become part of the now-traveling Singer library. Bobby would know in which hidey-hole he'd stashed the collection.
"Yeah, maybe," Dean answered without much enthusiasm. He caught their waitress's eye and motioned for more fries. At least his appetite wasn't damaged. "I checked the Bible, but it doesn't say a lot about the Big Mouths. Nothing we can use, anyway."
The fries were delivered, and Dean shoved them over to Sam.
Sam huffed but gave his brother an appreciative smile.
Dean pretended not to notice. Sam knew better.
"Wouldn't be so bad if we could see 'em coming," Dean mused, looking out the diner window. He didn't seem to see that while the hooded figure was gone, the whole landscape was a burning apocalypse. "Cas would probably know at a glance…" He stopped, jaw clenching.
Yeah, then there was that. Sam felt the loss of their friend; of course he did. But he'd been too occupied with first a serious concussion, and then the constant parade of tricks his supposedly healed brain was playing on him to really process the loss. For Dean, however, the angel's demise was terrible, compounded by what had gone before: the betrayal and Cas's homicidal delusions of godhood. And probably the fact that Dean now had to deal with Bobby's homelessness and Sam's crazy on his own. Dean's grief was visibly deep.
"Son of a bitch!" Dean unexpectedly burst out, turning more than a few heads in the diner.
Sam blinked. Okay, Dean's pain often came out as anger, but he hadn't been expecting that.
"You remember Famine's little drive-by?" Dean hissed out of nowhere. Lunch abandoned, he leaned over the table to stare at Sam.
Sam took a second to switch gears. "Uh. Yeah?" A few years and a lot of mileage ago.
"Cas could tell the coroner dude still had his soul just by touching him, right?"
Sam hadn't actually been there, just heard about it after from Dean. But souls were hardly the same as Leviathan. He half-nodded, half-shrugged, not following. "So?"
"So, Cas didn't need to torture you by sticking half his arm into your chest." Thankfully, Dean had lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. "He could've just touched you to figure out you weren't, you know, a real boy."
Ah. This was Memory Lane, not something that would help them now. But the realization had clearly hit Dean hard. "Uh. You'd already beat the crap out of me, remember?" Sam said delicately. And tied him up and hauled him to Bobby's for interrogation. Not that Sam blamed him, from what he could remember about his soulless self.
Dean still looked guilty. Ashamed. Yet still a little defiant when he said, "Well, you had it coming for lying to my face. But Cas, he had no excuse. Hell, he was the one who brought you back like that." From Hell.
Sam stole another French fry, shorthand for forgiveness he knew would be understood, if maybe not accepted. "I wasn't exactly myself. Cas was fighting a war. And you had to be all Sensitive Guy while I was missing a filter. It was a weird time. Clean slate, all right? What's past is past."
Dean twitched, but he looked at least a little mollified. Enough to snitch a few of Sam's fries in return.
Good. They had enough going on without Dean dredging up old pain.
Now, if Sam could just forgive himself.
The End