Entertaining Angels (20/21)
Dec. 22nd, 2008 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maychorianTitle: Entertaining Angels
Author: Maychorian
Characters: Dean, Sam, Castiel
Category: Gen, Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: K+/PG
Spoilers: Through 4.10
Summary: A strange boy shows up at Dean and Sam's motel room. Maybe he needs help, or maybe he's there to help them—they can't quite tell.
Word Count: 2264
Disclaimer: Angels belong to God. The Winchesters belong to Kripke. It's a sad, sad world we live in.
Author's Note: Fanart and soundtrack, and now a vid!
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19
20
Later, when Castiel was sleeping more or less peacefully, Sam and Bobby filled Dean in on the particulars of the enemy at the door. By the look on his face, it was clear that Christmas had come early for Dean Winchester.
“You’re shitting me! A dragon? There’s a real live dragon out on the lawn? We get to fight a dragon? You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Just as suddenly, though, his face clouded over, rage furrowing his forehead, darkening his eyes, thinning his lips. It was like watching a tornado touch down in an Iowa field—all pretty waving corn one moment, utter destruction and chaos in the next. “Wait a second. Alastair sent a dragon after Cas? An honest-to-God damsel-eating, town-destroying, fire-breathing dragon? Holy hell. I really, really want to hit him in the face with a crowbar. Again.”
Bobby handed him the stone ring, and Dean went outside and looked for awhile, then came back in, muttering, “Son of a bitch,” and “Holy freaking shit,” and several other phrases that it was just as well Castiel couldn’t hear.
It looked like Sam had been right—Dean both loved this and was really, really, really pissed.
X
Castiel wasn’t getting better. By the end of the second day at Bobby’s, this was abundantly clear. He needed a hospital. He needed a diagnosis, and the right kind of antibiotics, and oxygen, and sterility, and people who knew what the hell they were doing with a desperately ill eight-year-old child. Bobby and the Winchesters kept having to use cold packs to keep his fever below a dangerous level, and every time, every single freaking time, it hurt a little bit more. They still held off on the drastic measure of an ice bath, though, afraid that the shock would be too much for the young, weakened body.
It came to the point that Dean regretted instructing the boy to tell him when it hurt. He regretted it with all his heart. Because he hadn’t known, he hadn’t realized, what it would be like to hear that small, aching voice, breathless and broken, telling him that he hurt, he hurt, and to not be able to do a thing to make it better. Sometimes it was the only word that Cas could say for hours at a time, and that only with several minutes of panting and weak, unproductive coughing in between. Every time, Dean thought that surely this would be it, this one little syllable would finally be too much, would just kill him where he stood, and every time, it didn’t.
If he could have taken the boy’s place, he would have done it in a heartbeat.
He thought that maybe now he finally, finally understood exactly what his dad had been thinking in that hospital room, watching Dean die.
X
The lore on dragons was spotty and pretty much useless. It wasn’t that it was hard to find—this was the opposite problem. Too much information, mostly contradictory. Bobby even had a whole book full of dragon-fighting tactics, badly translated from Middle English, including sections on how to fight them on the ground, in the air, over rough terrain, through a mountain pass. But that was assuming that the dragon was just a beast, like a bear or a cougar, smart and tough but still made of muscle and bone. Their particular problem had been sent straight from Hell. Sam was pretty sure he could still smell the sulfur even when he was in the house, separated from the thing by a hundred yards and two closed doors.
He and Bobby spent hours outside, studying the thing through the circle stone, looking for clues. They noticed that it left gouges in the dirt, moved plants and objects as it lumbered around (a junked concrete mixer groaned metallically as the dragon leaned against it, scratching its scaly back), so it was at least partially corporeal. It ate birds from the air, so it needed sustenance, or at least was not incompatible with it. The wards were affecting it, though it constantly worked at digging up the iron and salt and applied spiritual pressure to the invisible barriers, so it wasn’t immune to human tools and materials.
Sam finally decided that they should just go classic and see what happened. Unfortunately, Bobby’s arsenal, while massive and eclectic, did not include an iron-tipped lance, nor any kind of spear, nor even a decent, non-decorative halberd.
Bobby just snorted when he complained. “You’re telling me that you need something long and sharp and metal to kill this monster with? Really, that’s what you’re telling me?” His voice was dry as dust, twice as spare. “Have you happened to notice that you’re in the middle of a junkyard, kid?”
Across the room, Dean gave his first real laugh in what felt like months. Sam grinned, and started sketching a design.
Bobby had a metal shop on the property, too, and luckily it was also inside the wards. He was perfectly willing to show Sam how to use it.
X
The dragon took out the phone and power lines. Bobby had a generator of course, bless him, but there was no more internet, and cell phone reception was always a little iffy out here. It didn’t really matter, of course, since they’d already been planning to kill it, but it was still annoying. And the fuel for the generator was not unlimited.
Before long they had a sort of routine going, trading off jobs—tending Castiel, watching the dragon, working on Sam’s metal lance with the lathe in the workshop. Sometimes there was sleep and a meal in there, too. They didn’t talk about it, but they all knew which job was the hardest. Listening to little Cas trying to breathe through his crowded, infected lungs tore at all three of them.
The lance was taking shape. It wasn’t pretty, welded from several different junked parts, none of the metals exactly matching in color or tone, stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. It was functional, though, and long, and lethal, and very, very sharp. It wasn’t pretty, but in its own way, it was beautiful.
The time was coming.
X
Dean woke from another dream of a vaguely threatening, vaguely pleading voice. Help me find my brother. He is in danger. He was half-sitting, half-laying on the couch, Castiel propped against his chest, hot little face pressed against his sternum. Still breathing. Still alive.
He was still for a time, trying to remember the dream. It seemed like he had it every time he went to sleep, always with slight variations, always ending with that demanding voice growing angry, petulant, and then fading away. It was weird and unsettling, but at least he wasn’t dreaming about Hell.
Castiel spasmed weakly against him, his body once again struggling to cough, to expel the junk that clogged his breathing, and once again failing. It was time to try steaming up the bathroom again, try to help loosen it up. Hadn’t worked so well last time, but they couldn’t quit trying.
Dean laid his hand over the boy’s chest, feeling the rapid, shallow rise and fall. “Cas? You awake?”
The kid lay still for a moment, gathering strength, then nodded into his chest.
“Think you can drink something? We need to get some water in you.”
He didn’t respond, just let out a breath that would have been a sigh if there’d been any strength behind it. Dean reached over to the coffee table and snagged the bottle of electrolyte solution Sam kept refilling, then held it to the boy’s lips. Castiel took tiny sips until he couldn’t anymore, then sputtered and coughed, water spilling down his chin. Dean put the bottle back on the table and snugged the kid against his chest, murmuring dishonest comfort. “It’s okay, it’s okay. It’s okay, kiddo. You’re gonna be okay.”
Dean had never been a praying man. Even now, with the existence of God pretty much irrefutable, he wasn’t sure he actually believed that praying did any good, that the Guy in the Sky really gave a damn about anything happening on this crappy planet. But for this small, helpless child, it seemed that he was willing to change all kinds of behaviors, break all kinds of habits, including this one.
Don’t You dare abandon this kid. If You exist, You’d better not leave him like this, You giant asshole. He’s one of Yours, through and through. If You can’t do anything for him, You’re worse than useless. Don’t You dare let him die.
Okay, so Dean wasn’t that great at praying. He was trying. He was doing his best.
X
The lance had a three-prong tip, blood channels down both sides, spring-loaded spikes that could be extended with a push on the end of the staff. Sam had based it on drawings of historical weapons, with a few slight changes of his own. He had read the descriptions, the accounts. He knew what was needed to cut, to flay, to murder flesh and spill blood in lethal spurts.
The tip at the end was thin, flat, rapidly widening and thickening down the blade to the two extensions. It was designed to slip in a crack, any crack, between massive armored scales, and it was perfectly engineered for the following thrust deep into the vulnerable flesh beneath. He’d been watching the dragon very carefully—he’d seen the hairline point of vulnerability where the chest plates merged into the smaller scales on the front of its throat. Such a small chance, but it was a chance. What Dean could find in a single flurried, hot-blooded glance, Sam could see, too, given enough time to study and prepare.
Bobby had found an incantation that claimed to be able to weaken any denizen of Hell, but the recitation had to be constant and unbroken, or it would have no effect. That would be his task, while Sam went in with the lance. Dean and the demon-slaying knife would be distraction, and potentially backup. Desperate, last-chance backup. Going against a dragon with a close-range weapon like that was pretty much the worst idea ever, and even Dean admitted it, though reluctantly.
Sam had half-expected there to be an argument about who used the lance. If anyone in the family was going to be a dragonslayer, it seemed that the task should naturally fall to Dean. But he had only shrugged and said, “It’s your weapon, Sammy. You made it. You get to use it.”
That wasn’t strictly true. They had all taken turns working on the lance. But Sam had designed it and instructed the other two in its making, and he was the one who had first blooded it, accidentally cutting his thumb on the razor-thin edge the first time he sharpened it. By ancient tradition and by Winchester understanding, that made it his.
X
Nighttime again, but Dean was barely aware of the cycle of light and darkness anymore. The only cycle that meant anything to him right now was Castiel waking and sleeping, coughing and panting breathlessly, taking nourishment and fluids, lucid and delirious, listening wearily and staring away. In the morning they were going to slay the dragon, and that didn’t even sound cool to him anymore, because all he cared about was that Cas kept breathing until they killed it.
He told him so, too, in halting broken words, while those glassy dark blue eyes held to his face, like his old unearthly stare, but so tired now, so hurt, so half-there. “You just gotta hold on for a little while longer, okay? You can’t go away yet because…because you just can’t, all right? Are you hearing me? I know you like it here. You showed us so in a hundred ways, in just a day. And I l…I like having you here, too. So you can’t go. You can’t go.”
Sam, lying on the floor on the other side of the room, his eyes still closed, but his voice clear and strong: “God, Dean, just say it. You giant pussy. It’s not like any of us don’t already know.”
So Dean leaned his forehead against Castiel’s and whispered the words. “You remember what you told me in that gross, stinky bathroom? Same goes for you. Love you. Want you to be okay.”
Castiel closed his eyes, but he kept breathing.
X
The morning of the fourth day, a resounding boom woke them, roused them stumbling to their feet in the bitter line of dawn.
“That was the outer ward,” Bobby said grimly. “It’s gone.”
Sam looked at the lance, propped in the corner.
Dean didn’t say anything. The most recent dream was clear and sharp in his head, unfaded. He’d been woken before he could piss Uriel off enough to make the cranky angel storm away and take the memory of their meeting with him.
He’d been wondering where God was, why He wasn’t answering Dean’s prayers, as stupid and impious as they were. Now he realized, in a staggering rush of clarity, that the answer had been coming to him every night.
Uriel had found Castiel’s grace, what the demons had ripped away and spread across the universe. Every night, there it was, gleaming in his hands. He’d gathered it all together, patiently hunting down every last shred, collecting it, sheltering it, bringing it back to heal his wounded brother.
Dean knew what he had to do. But he didn’t want to do it.
He didn’t want to do it one tiny bit.
Part 21
Author: Maychorian
Characters: Dean, Sam, Castiel
Category: Gen, Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: K+/PG
Spoilers: Through 4.10
Summary: A strange boy shows up at Dean and Sam's motel room. Maybe he needs help, or maybe he's there to help them—they can't quite tell.
Word Count: 2264
Disclaimer: Angels belong to God. The Winchesters belong to Kripke. It's a sad, sad world we live in.
Author's Note: Fanart and soundtrack, and now a vid!
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19
20Later, when Castiel was sleeping more or less peacefully, Sam and Bobby filled Dean in on the particulars of the enemy at the door. By the look on his face, it was clear that Christmas had come early for Dean Winchester.
“You’re shitting me! A dragon? There’s a real live dragon out on the lawn? We get to fight a dragon? You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Just as suddenly, though, his face clouded over, rage furrowing his forehead, darkening his eyes, thinning his lips. It was like watching a tornado touch down in an Iowa field—all pretty waving corn one moment, utter destruction and chaos in the next. “Wait a second. Alastair sent a dragon after Cas? An honest-to-God damsel-eating, town-destroying, fire-breathing dragon? Holy hell. I really, really want to hit him in the face with a crowbar. Again.”
Bobby handed him the stone ring, and Dean went outside and looked for awhile, then came back in, muttering, “Son of a bitch,” and “Holy freaking shit,” and several other phrases that it was just as well Castiel couldn’t hear.
It looked like Sam had been right—Dean both loved this and was really, really, really pissed.
X
Castiel wasn’t getting better. By the end of the second day at Bobby’s, this was abundantly clear. He needed a hospital. He needed a diagnosis, and the right kind of antibiotics, and oxygen, and sterility, and people who knew what the hell they were doing with a desperately ill eight-year-old child. Bobby and the Winchesters kept having to use cold packs to keep his fever below a dangerous level, and every time, every single freaking time, it hurt a little bit more. They still held off on the drastic measure of an ice bath, though, afraid that the shock would be too much for the young, weakened body.
It came to the point that Dean regretted instructing the boy to tell him when it hurt. He regretted it with all his heart. Because he hadn’t known, he hadn’t realized, what it would be like to hear that small, aching voice, breathless and broken, telling him that he hurt, he hurt, and to not be able to do a thing to make it better. Sometimes it was the only word that Cas could say for hours at a time, and that only with several minutes of panting and weak, unproductive coughing in between. Every time, Dean thought that surely this would be it, this one little syllable would finally be too much, would just kill him where he stood, and every time, it didn’t.
If he could have taken the boy’s place, he would have done it in a heartbeat.
He thought that maybe now he finally, finally understood exactly what his dad had been thinking in that hospital room, watching Dean die.
X
The lore on dragons was spotty and pretty much useless. It wasn’t that it was hard to find—this was the opposite problem. Too much information, mostly contradictory. Bobby even had a whole book full of dragon-fighting tactics, badly translated from Middle English, including sections on how to fight them on the ground, in the air, over rough terrain, through a mountain pass. But that was assuming that the dragon was just a beast, like a bear or a cougar, smart and tough but still made of muscle and bone. Their particular problem had been sent straight from Hell. Sam was pretty sure he could still smell the sulfur even when he was in the house, separated from the thing by a hundred yards and two closed doors.
He and Bobby spent hours outside, studying the thing through the circle stone, looking for clues. They noticed that it left gouges in the dirt, moved plants and objects as it lumbered around (a junked concrete mixer groaned metallically as the dragon leaned against it, scratching its scaly back), so it was at least partially corporeal. It ate birds from the air, so it needed sustenance, or at least was not incompatible with it. The wards were affecting it, though it constantly worked at digging up the iron and salt and applied spiritual pressure to the invisible barriers, so it wasn’t immune to human tools and materials.
Sam finally decided that they should just go classic and see what happened. Unfortunately, Bobby’s arsenal, while massive and eclectic, did not include an iron-tipped lance, nor any kind of spear, nor even a decent, non-decorative halberd.
Bobby just snorted when he complained. “You’re telling me that you need something long and sharp and metal to kill this monster with? Really, that’s what you’re telling me?” His voice was dry as dust, twice as spare. “Have you happened to notice that you’re in the middle of a junkyard, kid?”
Across the room, Dean gave his first real laugh in what felt like months. Sam grinned, and started sketching a design.
Bobby had a metal shop on the property, too, and luckily it was also inside the wards. He was perfectly willing to show Sam how to use it.
X
The dragon took out the phone and power lines. Bobby had a generator of course, bless him, but there was no more internet, and cell phone reception was always a little iffy out here. It didn’t really matter, of course, since they’d already been planning to kill it, but it was still annoying. And the fuel for the generator was not unlimited.
Before long they had a sort of routine going, trading off jobs—tending Castiel, watching the dragon, working on Sam’s metal lance with the lathe in the workshop. Sometimes there was sleep and a meal in there, too. They didn’t talk about it, but they all knew which job was the hardest. Listening to little Cas trying to breathe through his crowded, infected lungs tore at all three of them.
The lance was taking shape. It wasn’t pretty, welded from several different junked parts, none of the metals exactly matching in color or tone, stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. It was functional, though, and long, and lethal, and very, very sharp. It wasn’t pretty, but in its own way, it was beautiful.
The time was coming.
X
Dean woke from another dream of a vaguely threatening, vaguely pleading voice. Help me find my brother. He is in danger. He was half-sitting, half-laying on the couch, Castiel propped against his chest, hot little face pressed against his sternum. Still breathing. Still alive.
He was still for a time, trying to remember the dream. It seemed like he had it every time he went to sleep, always with slight variations, always ending with that demanding voice growing angry, petulant, and then fading away. It was weird and unsettling, but at least he wasn’t dreaming about Hell.
Castiel spasmed weakly against him, his body once again struggling to cough, to expel the junk that clogged his breathing, and once again failing. It was time to try steaming up the bathroom again, try to help loosen it up. Hadn’t worked so well last time, but they couldn’t quit trying.
Dean laid his hand over the boy’s chest, feeling the rapid, shallow rise and fall. “Cas? You awake?”
The kid lay still for a moment, gathering strength, then nodded into his chest.
“Think you can drink something? We need to get some water in you.”
He didn’t respond, just let out a breath that would have been a sigh if there’d been any strength behind it. Dean reached over to the coffee table and snagged the bottle of electrolyte solution Sam kept refilling, then held it to the boy’s lips. Castiel took tiny sips until he couldn’t anymore, then sputtered and coughed, water spilling down his chin. Dean put the bottle back on the table and snugged the kid against his chest, murmuring dishonest comfort. “It’s okay, it’s okay. It’s okay, kiddo. You’re gonna be okay.”
Dean had never been a praying man. Even now, with the existence of God pretty much irrefutable, he wasn’t sure he actually believed that praying did any good, that the Guy in the Sky really gave a damn about anything happening on this crappy planet. But for this small, helpless child, it seemed that he was willing to change all kinds of behaviors, break all kinds of habits, including this one.
Don’t You dare abandon this kid. If You exist, You’d better not leave him like this, You giant asshole. He’s one of Yours, through and through. If You can’t do anything for him, You’re worse than useless. Don’t You dare let him die.
Okay, so Dean wasn’t that great at praying. He was trying. He was doing his best.
X
The lance had a three-prong tip, blood channels down both sides, spring-loaded spikes that could be extended with a push on the end of the staff. Sam had based it on drawings of historical weapons, with a few slight changes of his own. He had read the descriptions, the accounts. He knew what was needed to cut, to flay, to murder flesh and spill blood in lethal spurts.
The tip at the end was thin, flat, rapidly widening and thickening down the blade to the two extensions. It was designed to slip in a crack, any crack, between massive armored scales, and it was perfectly engineered for the following thrust deep into the vulnerable flesh beneath. He’d been watching the dragon very carefully—he’d seen the hairline point of vulnerability where the chest plates merged into the smaller scales on the front of its throat. Such a small chance, but it was a chance. What Dean could find in a single flurried, hot-blooded glance, Sam could see, too, given enough time to study and prepare.
Bobby had found an incantation that claimed to be able to weaken any denizen of Hell, but the recitation had to be constant and unbroken, or it would have no effect. That would be his task, while Sam went in with the lance. Dean and the demon-slaying knife would be distraction, and potentially backup. Desperate, last-chance backup. Going against a dragon with a close-range weapon like that was pretty much the worst idea ever, and even Dean admitted it, though reluctantly.
Sam had half-expected there to be an argument about who used the lance. If anyone in the family was going to be a dragonslayer, it seemed that the task should naturally fall to Dean. But he had only shrugged and said, “It’s your weapon, Sammy. You made it. You get to use it.”
That wasn’t strictly true. They had all taken turns working on the lance. But Sam had designed it and instructed the other two in its making, and he was the one who had first blooded it, accidentally cutting his thumb on the razor-thin edge the first time he sharpened it. By ancient tradition and by Winchester understanding, that made it his.
X
Nighttime again, but Dean was barely aware of the cycle of light and darkness anymore. The only cycle that meant anything to him right now was Castiel waking and sleeping, coughing and panting breathlessly, taking nourishment and fluids, lucid and delirious, listening wearily and staring away. In the morning they were going to slay the dragon, and that didn’t even sound cool to him anymore, because all he cared about was that Cas kept breathing until they killed it.
He told him so, too, in halting broken words, while those glassy dark blue eyes held to his face, like his old unearthly stare, but so tired now, so hurt, so half-there. “You just gotta hold on for a little while longer, okay? You can’t go away yet because…because you just can’t, all right? Are you hearing me? I know you like it here. You showed us so in a hundred ways, in just a day. And I l…I like having you here, too. So you can’t go. You can’t go.”
Sam, lying on the floor on the other side of the room, his eyes still closed, but his voice clear and strong: “God, Dean, just say it. You giant pussy. It’s not like any of us don’t already know.”
So Dean leaned his forehead against Castiel’s and whispered the words. “You remember what you told me in that gross, stinky bathroom? Same goes for you. Love you. Want you to be okay.”
Castiel closed his eyes, but he kept breathing.
X
The morning of the fourth day, a resounding boom woke them, roused them stumbling to their feet in the bitter line of dawn.
“That was the outer ward,” Bobby said grimly. “It’s gone.”
Sam looked at the lance, propped in the corner.
Dean didn’t say anything. The most recent dream was clear and sharp in his head, unfaded. He’d been woken before he could piss Uriel off enough to make the cranky angel storm away and take the memory of their meeting with him.
He’d been wondering where God was, why He wasn’t answering Dean’s prayers, as stupid and impious as they were. Now he realized, in a staggering rush of clarity, that the answer had been coming to him every night.
Uriel had found Castiel’s grace, what the demons had ripped away and spread across the universe. Every night, there it was, gleaming in his hands. He’d gathered it all together, patiently hunting down every last shred, collecting it, sheltering it, bringing it back to heal his wounded brother.
Dean knew what he had to do. But he didn’t want to do it.
He didn’t want to do it one tiny bit.
Part 21
