sam winchester (neversurrender) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2014-09-13 21:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, castiel (end-verse), sam winchester |
Who: Sam & Cas
What: making amends!
When: Friday, September 12
Where: the Winchester cabin
Warnings: discussions of all their problems (demons, demon blood, violence, injury, etc) but it's all pretty vague.
Everything was almost ready. Dean had been cuffed, one warded silver circle around each ankle and wrist, and the church was ready and waiting for them. There was just one more thing remaining-- well, actually, there was a laundry list of things that remained to do, but only one that needed to happen before the cure. In one of the rooms here in the cabin, Cas was injured and locked up, all because he’d been loyal to Dean, even when Dean was cruel and manipulative, here and in his own timeline.
Sam didn’t want to leave him like that. It had taken a good twenty minutes of musing about it over his coffee before he’d come up with a plan. When Caroline had said she’d needed to leave, he’d given her the Impala to drive back to the city. Then, right before he left with the others that were going to the church, Sam took the first aid kit and headed for the room where they had restrained Cas.
He opened the door, and stepped inside. “Hey,” he said, in the flippant tone he’d learned to use almost solely in Cas’s presence. “Don’t worry, I’m not here to hurt you. Or fix you,” he added, blithely. Looking Cas over, he frowned, genuinely bothered by the sight of him bruised and bloodied. “Though you could use a bit of patching up.”
He wasn’t doing so well himself, but by comparison he was a paragon of health. If he’d been capable of fighting at the time, Sam would have dealt some of those bruises himself, but he didn’t feel any better about it for not being personally responsible. If anything, he felt worse.
--
Cas looked like hell, but then again, so did the rest of the cabin. He and Dean had attempted to fight their way out, only to be met with considerable opposition from Sam's army of interdimensional companions. They'd come out on the losing side, and somewhere along the line Cas had been restrained with a length of cord and left there to sit and think about what he'd done.
He tensed when Sam entered, pressing himself up against the wall he was leaning against and lifting his head like he was bracing to be hurt despite the fact that Sam said that hurting wasn't an option here. He looked Sam over.
"Where's Dean?"
--
Seeing fear, or anything akin to it, in the eyes of someone that was looking at him was one of the things that got under Sam’s skin the most. Especially when it was someone he cared about. His jaw tensed, but otherwise, he covered it up.
“He’s coming with me,” Sam said. “You’re not.” He set down the first aid kit in the corner of the room, near the doorway, but almost as far from Cas as it could be. On top of it, he set a small knife and pointed at it. “When I leave, you can use that to cut the cord and then clean yourself up. There’s food and water in the kitchen, and beds and couches for a nap. The Impala’s gone, and there are no other cars within ten miles of here at least, but… if you want to try walking back to the city, it’s less far than following us.”
He put his hands in his pockets and stayed where he was, his back to the door. “Dean and I will be back once he’s cured. Or I will, at least, but I think he’ll probably need a place to rest and recover from… everything. I really don’t want to have to track you down on top of everything else, so I’d appreciate it if you stayed put.”
--
Cas's eyes flickered to the first aid kit and the knife, then back up at Sam. His expression was difficult to read: anger and bitterness about defeat, fear of making a wrong move, and the faintest hint of a smile. "Why would I leave when the digs are so nice and the hospitality's so good?" he said gruffly, shifting a little in an attempt to get comfortable. His entire body ached, and there was a sharp pain in his side. "I really, really loved meeting your friends, Sam, that was fantastic. I think we should all get together again some time and have another go."
Part of him felt like he was going to die. He'd spent five years trying to avoid his own death while seeing everyone around him die, and it was difficult to believe that Sam's intentions were actually good. It was difficult to see Sam and not see Lucifer. His fears were misplaced, his feelings wildly misguided, but he was beaten and alone, defeated and without Dean. He didn't know what to think anymore.
His smile faded and he swallowed hard, averting his eyes. "If you're going to leave me here to die I'd appreciate it if you just did it quick."
--
Sam ignored the jabs about his friends and his hospitality. He didn’t point out that Cas had broken in, and they’d only been defending themselves, because he knew what this looked like. Even with all of Cas’s talk about how this was about his ‘reputation’, Sam was pretty sure it had more to do with the lingering instincts and opinions from what had happened in his timeline.
“I’m not going to leave you to die,” he said firmly. “I don’t want to leave you tied up, either, and I don’t want to leave anyone to guard you. You’re not my prisoner. You’re my friend. So, you get to be free, relatively speaking. I just can’t let you pull the same stunt twice.”
There was genuine sympathy on his face. “I know you don’t believe me, but I’m doing the right thing for Dean. When he doesn’t know what the right thing is anymore, that’s when he needs his pain in the ass little brother to fix things for him. And it’s my own fault that I wasn’t around in your world for you to understand that-- and that I didn’t do enough to help you understand what was happening here-- so I’m not going to hold any of this against you.”
Taking a deep breath, he said simply, “I’m sorry, Cas.”
--
Cas was quiet for a while, watching his feet. Maybe it would have been easier if Sam was angry, or violent, or intended on killing him. Right now, he was getting the feeling that maybe he was wrong in all of this. Maybe, just maybe, Sam really could cure Dean and it really was what Dean needed. Cas had been around a different version of Dean for so long that the demonic version of him didn't seem so far off. Dean was certainly more affectionate with him, seemed to care more.
When he spoke again, he looked up at Sam and the anger was gone. "Do you really think you can cure him?" he asked. "And it's the right thing?" It was just sad at at this point, Cas didn't even know what was right in this situation. Dean was stronger than human, better, but his soul was twisted and dark. But he treated Cas well -- or, Cas thought so. Cas had bought into every act of manipulation because Dean preyed on Cas's need for someone to follow.
--
“Yes,” Sam said simply. He looked down, too, at the floor. Because he already knew what Cas was beginning to grasp, which was that he’d been played. They’d been played, but Cas far more than Sam, because Sam had been questioning it the entire way, and as a result his wake-up call had come sooner. Or maybe it wasn’t to Sam’s credit it at all, it was just the way Dean had played his hand. Maybe if he’d chosen Sam to be nice and brotherly to, he’d have fallen for it too. He nearly had. “The cure works. And Dean would want to be cured, if he were still him. He wouldn’t want to be a demon.”
He wanted to trust Cas. He wanted to show him that he, Sam, could be trusted. But bringing him along was dangerous, wasn’t it? Sam was tired of treating Cas as a liability, and everyone would be on their guard if he came along. But then again-- leaving him here alone wasn’t exactly treating him well, either.
Sam hesitated for a moment, and then remembered, out of nowhere, one of the lessons that he’d learned from watching his own life on television. That it wasn’t stupid to have absolute faith in people, not always; that sometimes, that kind of faith was the thing that saved the day, or at least it saved his relationship to them. It opened him up to all kinds of ways to be hurt, too, but the risk was worth it.
Bending down, he picked the knife back up again and put it in his pocket. Then he moved forward and knelt in front of Cas. There was no hesitation in his movements, as if he simply expected there to be no resistance or attempts to hurt him. He reached out, and started untying the cord that bound his friend. “The cure takes eight hours,” he said, almost conversationally, as if he were talking about the weather. “I have to confess to purify my blood, and then I give him an injection of it, once every hour, on the hour. Then there’s an incantation, and I cut my hand and put it over his mouth, and then… he’ll be himself again. And there’s someone here-- a knight mage-- who has magic that works against demons, that can take away the Mark. All I have to do is make a deal.”
He finished untying Cas’s bonds, and then straightened up. Finally, he looked Cas in the eye. “Do you want to come with us?”
--
Cas rubbed at his wrists once he was free. He'd been having a difficult couple of weeks to begin with, but Sam's kindness seemed to throw him off more than anything else. The more Sam spoke, the more color drained from his face, and the more aware he became that unless Sam was truly gifted in lying, he'd put his faith in the wrong person.
Dean had led him to his death once before and used him as a distraction; Cas should have backed off then. He didn't know what to believe if he couldn't believe Dean. It was like the floor fell out from underneath him and it was occurring to him that he'd just attempted to use deadly force on all of Sam's friends, who were possibly perfectly decent people.
There were tears in his eyes when Sam asked. As an angel, Castiel never cried, and as a mortal, he could only recall a couple of times. It wasn't natural to him. Now, the tears never fell, but he looked completely and utterly devastated.
"I've done enough," was all he said.
--
Standing up had been the wrong move; it just made Cas seem even smaller and more pathetic sitting there on the floor. Sam’s heart ached for him, but his mind was unable to even imagine exactly what he was going through. He could only guess at it, and he had a feeling he was barely scraping the surface.
“There’s still time to help me do the right thing for him,” he said. “If you want to.” He wouldn’t have blamed Cas at all if, after this, he never wanted to do anything for Dean ever again. Not after Dean had gotten him killed, not after he had played him like this. “Or just… see what happens to him. You don’t have to do anything at all.”
He moved away briefly, back over to the first aid kit, and brought it back over to Cas. “You really should patch yourself up a little, at the very least.”
--
Cas looked down at the first aid kit, but he didn't seem to take a lot of interest in using it. "Why are you even here?" he asked after a moment. As difficult as it was sometimes to watch Cas when he was high, it was even harder now to look at him sober. There were reasons why he was an addict, why he tried to regulate his moods and escape in a haze.
It was difficult for him to accept that Sam cared what happened to him; he knew from experience that Sam treated him like a friend, but Dean had tried to convince him otherwise and mostly succeeded. Without Dean, Cas didn't really know what to think.
"People are waiting for you, aren't they?" All of Sam's stalwart friends. Cas, who was used to abandonment and loss, was achingly jealous.
--
There were a lot of different answers Sam could have given. In truth, he wasn’t entirely sure himself why he was here-- why he was here right now, and not dealing with this after he’d taken care of Dean. “Because,” he said finally, “You raised my brother from hell. You helped him escape the other angels to try to stop me from raising Lucifer.” He paused there, to make sure he had the timeline right, that he didn’t accidentally include anything that the other Cas had done-- because although it counted for something in his mind, just as his actions in Cas’s timeline meant something about him, he knew it wouldn’t be taken the way he meant it. “And when I fucked up and lost to the devil, you still tried to take care of Dean and you tried to take me out. You’ve done the right thing, in general and for me and Dean, multiple times over. Just because you got it wrong this once doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on you.”
He gave the former angel a wry smile. “And if anyone knows how much it sucks to be played, to trust the wrong person, to lose your trust in your own instincts because of it… well. It’d be me, wouldn’t it? I guess I…” he trailed off. “I think I’m here, right now, because this isn’t over yet and I wanted to give you the chance to make a different choice. At least… to understand what I’m doing, rather than letting you sit here worrying about what I’m doing. I want… it’s important to me that you understand. You’re important to me. That’s why I’m here.”
--
Cas listened, watching Sam warily. Not a lot of people would have taken time out of their mission to give Cas some kind of a pep talk, especially after what he'd done. Dean wouldn't have -- at least, the Dean he knew wouldn't have bothered. He would have trusted that he'd get over it, and then they'd fight about things later and bicker passive aggressively for a week. He wasn't used to things like kindness or mercy, even from his friends and certainly not from people he'd harmed. To say that he'd genuinely expected death, even from Sam, was an understatement.
Angels weren't prone to killing each other as punishment, but they were far less sympathetic to humans and didn't care much about destroying an entire village to rid the Earth of one witch. The last five years had seen Cas and Dean killing loved ones to spare them madness and death, over and over again. People just didn't survive in the losing war against the Devil.
At the very least, he would have expected Sam to be more angry.
It was seriously fucking with his worldview, and Cas was trying to piece it together. He had the option to patch himself up and go with Sam, to face his companions and be there for Dean in this ridiculous attempt to rescue him from himself. On the other hand …
"Save him, then." He looked down at his hands and started picking dirt and blood out from under his thumbnail. "He means everything to me." A pause, and then: "I'm not stupid. I know I don't mean the same to him, but I'll follow him to the end. That's just how it works, me and Dean." Losing Sam had broken Dean, and he'd fostered a codependent relationship with an angel who had nothing else to live for. "I just thought…"
He chuckled to himself and shuddered, leaning back and letting his head hit the wall with a little thud. "He doesn't want me there, Sam. He wants you. That's all he's ever really wanted."
--
The thing was, the extra time spent now could make the entire plan go smoother. It would leave them less to work out once Dean was actually human again. And yes, that was Sam's primary objective, but he wasn't like Dean-- the Dean that Cas had known, at least. He was asking his friends to take risks but he would never plan for them to die. And there was something else, a luxury that he could afford right now, which was to also make the plan work in a way that didn't leave the people involved all angry at each other and torn apart. It never worked that way at home, but he had managed it multiple times to make it work here and he was going to do it again.
The way they felt about things mattered. The times when they disregarded that tended to be the times that their plans went the worst for them, so it wasn't as if he were prioritizing feelings over the plan itself. His friends had managed to keep Dean contained even after Cas had broken him out, they could manage a few more minutes while Sam sorted this out. Curing Dean was important, but making things right with Cas was important, too.
He had a flashback to the vague future memory of how he and Cas had worked together to fix Dean. He couldn't remember all the details, but he remembered that it had been important that they stuck together. Maybe when it really came down to it, he was here because it just didn't feel right going through with this if they weren't in it together.
"This is not a competition," he said quietly, but firmly. "He has both of us, and he needs to treat both of us better, but that's not going to happen until we fix what's wrong with him. This is about what we want. No matter how crappy things get with him, we don't want him dead or twisted and demonic. We should have been on the same side of this all along. We haven't managed that so far, but we can finish off that way. We can fix that part of it, and we can fix him, too."
He held out a hand to help the former angel to his feet. "Come with me, Cas. There's not much for you to do, but you can just as easily wait for the cure and the deal to be done at the church as you can here. And if you're there, you can watch our backs, even though we hopefully won't need it." He paused, and then added, "I want you there, even if he doesn't."
Hopefully, that meant something. He had mattered to Cas before this happened, and Cas was listening to him now; surely some of that was left. This was how they could start to regain the ground they were losing because of the contention over Dean; this was how Cas could make up for the mistake of breaking in, fighting, almost overturning the whole plan. By coming with them and being a part of it.
Sam was pretty sure some of his friends, those who had fought against Cas before, would be a little uncomfortable with that. But it was better to deal with that now, and show them that Cas had come around before the plan was over. Even if that didn't matter to Cas, it mattered to Sam.
--
Cas hissed in pain when he stood, but he tried to hide it with a chuckle. "I don't know, Sam, it seems like you've got some friends to might object to my showing up." He didn't mean it meanly, but he knew that he hadn't made any friends today, and he really hadn't been lying when he told Sam (however rudely) that he felt like he and Dean were embarrassments for Sam's clean new life. He'd been snide whenever he mentioned it to Sam, but he had an awareness that, first, he wasn't the Castiel that some of his friends knew of, and second, he was definitely something of a disreputable sort.
He was a flirt, which bothered people, he was an addict, which bothered people more, and people seemed to take him alarmingly seriously when he discussed orgies and casual sex -- like it was either a bad thing or something wildly distasteful because they were all so chaste and monogamous that they had to mention it constantly. He had a certain level of awareness that what was largely seen as acceptable behavior in his own community was not acceptable here, so even if he hadn't attacked most of Sam's friends, he still would have felt … unwelcome.
He didn't fit in, and he knew it. What happened today just made it worse.
"But…" He huffed, looking down at his feet and curling his toes within his shoes. "You did take my car."
--
“They’re putting up with my brother being a demon, and with me being on demon blood,” Sam pointed out. He gave a slight smile. “I think they can deal with it. And if they don’t want to, they can leave.”
What Cas didn’t seem to understand was that Sam didn’t care much about what might make a person be considered unsavory. His friendship was offered based on who a person was, at heart. Cas was damaged and eccentric, but what person amongst his current crew wasn’t? They were vampires and hunters or slayers and dark wizards and demon sorcerers. Those were his kind of people. And the past few days had proved beyond a doubt that they had his back even under dangerous, uncomfortable circumstances. He wasn't concerned about their opinion of cas; concerned that they would treat him with wariness after having had to fight him, probably, but Sam was now one hundred percent confident that Cas would help rather than hinder, or at least stay out of their way. So he would come with them, and prove it to himself and everyone else that he really had been on their side in sentiment all along.
“We’re not taking the car,” he said simply. “And if those are the best excuses you can come up with, then you’re coming. Come on.” He had let go of Cas’s hand but took hold of his upper arm-- gently, aware that he was hurt, but firmly-- and led him towards the door. “Let’s get this done.”