Fading Away, Chapter 1
Fading Away, Chapter 1
A Supernatural story by Axy @Aaaahhhxy
Texts in the middle of the night are never good omens.
Sam’s phone vibrated twice on the nightstand before it woke him up. He grabbed it without being really aware of his movements. A reflex. As if he permanently lived on a strange, unsafe edge, waiting for Dean to call him at any time of the day or night.
It led to a few disappointments, though, when all Sam had received over the past few days were, at best, possible sightings of his brother coming in from hunters around the country, and at worst, yet another one of those weird, random messages from cable companies asking whether he wanted to subscribe to HBO. If only they knew that the bunker’s outdated system was, actually, innovative enough to allow them to get about every channel on the planet free of charge…
This time, though, the text sent at 3:04 left little to no doubt about its nature.
“Coordinates,” Sam whispered to himself.
His mind drifted away during the brief time needed for his phone to identify the location, unable to hold on to any expectation in order to protect himself from the icy bite of another cold trail.
And yet... When a little red dot in the middle of the state popped out on his map application, a wild, vibrant hope fired all of his nerves at once.
“Dean.”
***
As the only living creature not to sleep in the bunker -- besides Arthur’s occasional drunken ramblings that could go on for a long time and usually ended up with the angel applying his fingers on Arthur’s forehead to solve the problem, albeit too temporarily for the angel’s taste -- Castiel was immediately concerned when he heard Sam looking for him in the middle of the night.
The younger Winchester found him in the library, his usual spot to kill the night when he decided to stay in the bunker, which happened more and more often. Wandering aimlessly in the streets, with the ill-concealed objective of randomly bumping into Dean as a sign that, maybe, Chuck knew and cared, was causing more pain than hope after all. If Chuck cared, none of them had any proof of it whatsoever.
“Cas, I think I have something.”
As far as the angel was concerned, his hope for happier days was fading a little more each day, and would end with yet another look at the empty seat at their table. But somehow, there was something different in Sam’s voice. A fever. Not one caused by the flu, but rather, caused by a possibility. A chance. An odd in their favor, for once.
“I just got this…”
Sam handed his phone, as Cas quickly read the series of numbers, at first confused. His eyes looked at the wall behind Sam, trying to gather whatever that feeling holding him so tight was about. And then it hit him.
“Dean,” he sighed.
“Dean,” Sam smiled.
“Where do the coordinates point to?”
“A small town, a couple of hours from here. There isn’t much, beside a couple hundred inhabitants, two bars closed at this hour, and get this...One motel.”
Hope. It was hope that was making Cas’ body more alert than it had been in a while, and it was hope that sent a shiver down his angelic spine. He forgot a while ago what it truly felt like, and how intoxicating it could be.
There was a light in Sam’s eyes that Cas hadn’t seen in a long time, and this only caused the angel to be reasonably cautious. He could take disappointments and false alarms -- his emotions didn’t matter -- but he wanted to keep his closest family shielded from the pain as much as he could.
“Sam … We don’t know.”
“Don’t you get it? It’s him, Cas. I know it’s him.”
Castiel tried to shake off how contagious Sam’s newly rebuilt optimism was already. None of them could afford another disenchantment. Dean’s absence was built as a scale, an endless ladder of pain and emptiness, and each time they failed to bring him back, they pushed their own threshold a little higher.
Even when they thought they were at the utmost of missing him, it always, eventually, grew bigger, swallowing them whole into hollowness. Lately, Cas’ expression was always somewhere a few steps away from utter despair. Tonight wasn’t any different. He was fighting off Sam’s sudden light, while Sam persisted in explaining the validity of his instinct.
“Back in the day, this is how our dad used to send us on a trail. This is something only Dean would do.”
“Or Michael.”
Sam was getting frustrated at Castiel’s rebuttal.
“It’s him, Cas. Trust me. It is.”
“Sam…There is nothing I want more. But what if it isn’t? What if it’s Michael sending us on a wild goose chase, or worse? Maybe it’s a trap. He knows we’re coming for him. He knows we won’t ever let go. He knows we'll stop at nothing to bring Dean back.”
Castiel hated to be the one to shatter Sam’s dreams, but he had no other choice. Still, he felt like a monster himself when Sam resorted to begging, tears progressively forming in his eyes.
“Cas…My brother is being used as a puppet by a psychopath, a liar, a thief, hellbent on something that could be another apocalypse. If there is so much as half a chance to help him, I’m taking it.”
“You could be killed.”
“Cas…”
“Again.”
Something darker showed up in Sam’s eyes, and for a split second, it disarmed Castiel.
“I don’t care.”
Castiel’s eyes grew larger, as a way to show his angry disapproval. “Well, I do care.”
Sam sat down next to him, his back hunched under the current, doubled-down weight he carried now that his brother was gone.
“I’m tired, man. I can’t do it without my big brother. I don’t want to, I never wanted to, and I just…I can’t, Cas. It’s beyond my strength. I try, every day I try, as hard as I can, but I’m wearing thin, thinner each day.”
Fresh off the death of Lucifer, Sam hadn’t really shown any sign of weakness for the first few days after Dean’s disappearance. Even if Castiel was questioning whether it was a facade, he didn’t really think that the cracks were getting so big Sam couldn’t handle them.
This was answering a question he’d been asking himself for a long, long time, in ways he couldn’t fathom or accept: How far could either of them go, deprived from the other one? They both tried, and it got them nowhere.
Deep down, Cas kept the sick certitude that there was only so much the brothers could bear on their own, and that they’d eventually throw themselves on a suicide mission. What if Sam had already passed that point? All he was seeing, right now, was a little boy pleading for something he desperately needed.
Cas knew that he’d go anyway, even if he used a million and one arguments to prove the idea was dangerous at best. And under that curtain of reason and care, the angel knew he needed to see for himself whether this one, unexpected, insane hope was the one they’d been waiting for.
Castiel sighed, as the light chased once again the dark clouds in Sam’s eyes.
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
Sam chuckled. “‘Star Wars’ is rubbing off on you, Cas.”
The angel frowned, trying to figure out whether that was a good or a bad thing.
Upon noticing his confusion, Sam explained what he meant, and Cas simply tilted his head in agreement.
Jack’s obsession with lightsabers and Jedis took on a brand new amplitude now that he found a comfort in the movies he had a hard time finding in his reality. The strange mood in the bunker was getting to him, and so was the feeling of uselessness after having fought angel bombings for weeks.
Sam and Cas let him accompany them on their occasional hunts, but as his powers’ return was unsure, they were both too concerned about him getting hurt to really let him take any initiative.
As helpless as Jack felt, it was frustrating. His current predicament made him feel close to Luke and Rey. Thankfully, he still considered Anakin too reckless for his taste.
Castiel shrugged, edging close to denial of how much he enjoyed watching movies with Jack, even the same ones over and over again, but he couldn't fool Sam.
Sam knew how much fatherhood on this side of the realms had grown on Cas. Turns out, Castiel made a pretty badass dad.
At times, it reminded Sam of his brother. The way he protected him, the way he sugarcoated the harshest of truths. The way he absorbed the pain of big, sad, cold realities. The way he went above and beyond to meet all of his needs, even if it meant depriving himself.
There was a lot of Dean in the way Castiel handled this new thing that no one had taught him about, and Sam was immensely proud of the way the angel cared for Jack. He wished Kelly could have seen it. She would have left this world peacefully if she had.
***
“Cas, I need to get a few books and my laptop. Do you mind telling Bobby or mom that we’re leaving?”
At first, Cas looked pissed. He remained as socially awkward as ever, and waking people up in the middle of the night was dangerously outside of his comfort zone. But Sam didn't really give him the option of opting out, as he rushed back to his room to pack the things he needed, leaving the angel in the middle of the corridor.
Cas sighed and took a deep breath before knocking on the door to Mary’s room. He loved Bobby, but he always found that Mary was easy to talk to. She was pretty straightforward and easy to figure out.
She exhibited none of Dean’s exhausting efforts to detour from painful realities, and none of Sam’s emotions that could be overwhelming for him to decipher, at times. Just plain old truth, as brutal as it was. It was easy for him to navigate communicating with the boys’ mom.
He knocked a couple of times, rehearsing in his head the way the discussion would most likely go, and, as it proved inefficient, decided on a change of strategy.
“Mary?”
It took Mary a few more minutes to fully emerge, and to grab the nearest piece of clothing available to cover herself, as she opened the door just enough to worm her way out of the room and close it behind her.
“Castiel? What’s going on?”
“Sam and I have received information on Dean’s potential whereabouts.”
She placed a lock of hair behind her ear, and smiled shyly.
“That’s amazing. Are you sure?”
“No, but Sam needs to check it anyway, and I can't let him do it on his own.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
Castiel could tell that she wasn't really offering, and that she sincerely hoped they wouldn't want it. It seemed strange, even to him.
“No, Mary. You need to stay and take care of Jack. He’ll probably be distressed that we’re both gone.”
“OK. How long do you think you’ll be?”
That was something Cas hadn’t considered.
“A day, maybe two,” he guessed.
“OK. Castiel, please be careful. Nobody knows what Michael is planning.”
Castiel nodded silently. Something was off about Mary, but he couldn't quite guess what, until he noticed the pattern of the shirt she was wearing.
“Is that … Bobby’s shirt?”
Mary blushed instantly, as Cas suddenly understood.
“Is Bobby sleeping with you?”
She simply nodded. “Don't tell Sam,” she said. “He has too much on his plate right now for me to bother him with us.”
Mary kissed Cas on the cheek and went back to bed, and the angel stayed a little while in the middle of the corridor, battling the discomfort of being the guardian of a secret he never wanted in the first place.
He wasn’t really surprised, though. As visible proof that his grasp of humanity was getting stronger and possibly more accurate than ever, he knew something was off with those two for a while. The light in Bobby’s eyes when he talked with Mary, the shy smile on the brothers’ mom’s lips when she and Bobby ended up spending time together…
There was something satisfying for Cas to realize that he was getting better at this relationship thing. The lines were always so blurry, and the unsaid as important as what was said. It was the most confusing thing for him.
He never really forgot that his sole attempt a while ago, when he experienced humanity upfront, ended up with him being killed by a reaper. It was safe to assume that romance wasn’t his forte.
Still. How dare Mary make him the keeper of such a bombshell? He was practically certain that Sam would be happy for her anyway. Bobby -- their Bobby at least -- had always been a father figure for the boys, and it made a lot of sense that the two of them had ended up together.
Cas was so lost in his own confused thoughts about what makes a viable relationship between two people, he didn’t hear Sam calling him from the other side of the bunker, and almost hit a wall when he noticed.
Secrets. Bad for angels. Duly noted.
***
“Your mother is sleeping with Bobby.”
Sam abruptly braked, narrowly escaping causing an accident with the only other car on the road at this unholy hour. As he was getting copiously insulted by the raging driver, he looked at Cas, just as if he threw a live grenade at him.
“What the…Wow, how do you know?”
“Because she was wearing one of his shirts, and she confirmed it to me. Also, she asked me to keep this from you, so, please, do you mind looking surprised when she tells you? I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of Mary Winchester.”
Sam was visibly having a hard time grasping the angel’s revelation.
“My mother is sleeping with Bobby?”
Castiel sighed. “You always did have a talent for stating the obvious, or at least repeating it. Yes.”
Sam frowned, his eyes lost in the horizon. “Man, this is a weird night.”
“Tell me about it.”
Actually, the time he spent in the garage taking care of Baby was among the nicest things he found himself doing lately. Ultimately, he did it for Dean. Working actively on his brother’s car was the best proof to convince himself that he’d be back, and soon.
Sam knew that the day had finally come.
And he didn’t question for one second the fact that it might be too good to be true.
Their win was overdue. Maybe Chuck had listened. Maybe not. Maybe Dean alone had kicked an archangel out of his system. Maybe he had help from resources they couldn’t access. The possibilities were vast and infinite.
And Sam really couldn’t care less about the why or the how. All that mattered to him was the final result. Getting his brother back. The rest of the world could very well go to the dogs today. They were taking a day off. A break.
A Dean day.
The 267 miles they had to go were the longest. Even Baby was unusually capricious, eager to get back to her rightful owner.
Oh, she’d enjoyed being driven by his brother and the angel. And she loved the sweet kid that fell asleep on her back seat within minutes, every time.
But she belonged to one person, and one person only. It was about time she got him back.
***
Talk about a ghost town.
Not a single light along the road leading to the motel. Not one. As for the motel itself, it looked abandoned. If it wasn’t for the 24-hour reception, and the couple of lost souls that had parked their cars in front of two rooms, Cas and Sam both would have thought that it had been deserted by any civilization a long, long time ago.
Although, they had to admit that the place was fairly neat. Just unbelievably old. There were cracks in the walls, but the doors and the windows had been cleaned very recently, and from the outside, the curtains looked OK, too.
The trumping appearances fell apart quickly, though.
It was huge. At first it looked like one unit of a couple of dozen empty rooms, spread across two stories. But there were at least 20 other similar blocks, making it the biggest motel they’d ever seen.
There was something eerie about finding such a property in the middle of nowhere, and as far as Sam could tell, all the other blocks were partially filled. Rooms and cars, as far as he could see.
“Creepy,” he whispered to himself.
“Understatement of the year,” Cas said.
The mystery solved itself as they reached the outer limits of the motel, and noticed that on the other side of the highway there was an entire mall, and the outlines of what seemed to be an exhibition center of massive proportions.
Sam frowned, slightly taken aback by the dual effect of the place. “Weird. I didn’t see anything like that on the app.”
“Maybe you didn’t notice,” Cas said.
It bothered Sam. Usually, as far as research went, he was pretty thorough. It bugged him that something this big could have escaped his knowledge.
Castiel felt the urge to clarify his thought, as Sam looked pretty lost. “Maybe you were too excited to notice anything else.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Sam said.
Still, he thought, it doesn’t add up.
Cas, eyes lost in the ocean of rooms before them, was halfway between pissed and confused. “480.”
Sam stared back at the angel, thoroughly lost. “What?”
“480. Rooms. It’s a rough estimation. The number of rooms. It’s going to take us … a long time.”
Sam smiled, looking for the numbers on the doors around them. “No, it won’t.”
He parked the car along one of the blocks, as a tensed silence fell between the human and the angel. Castiel simply followed Sam, who was looking for a specific number. Was that something between them? A code he wasn’t aware of?
When Sam found the room he was looking for, Castiel smiled. Dean Winchester, man of habits.
“67.”
They both held their breath as Sam prepared to knock at the door, his fist up in the air, less than an inch away from the sturdy material painted in pale green.
He didn’t have to.
The door opened itself.
For Sam, it felt like the weight of the world had been lifted off his shoulders instantly.
For Castiel, it felt different. The relief was so immense, he almost thought his grace had been ripped out and he was able to access all of humanity with one sigh. The emotions were raw and intense and uncontrollable, and it was the best thing he’d experienced in his entire existence.
For Dean, the impulse was beyond uncontrollable. He grabbed both his brother and his best friend and hugged them the tightest he could, all too aware that his wavering life force wouldn’t allow him the privilege much longer.
Neither Sam nor Castiel noticed it, absorbing the happiness of the moment, but Dean was white-knuckling his embrace.
It was the only way to conceal the now painful, nearly unbearable tremors.
Give me a minute. Give them a minute. Right now, they’re convinced everything is right in the world. I can protect them one last time, for just another minute.
You owe it to me, you bastard.
(To be continued)
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