Chapter Text
“Right,” Dean says, when Naomi and Crowley are both gone, when the blue-white glow of Bobby’s soul has faded from the canopy of the trees swaying above him and Sam. “Let’s go,” he says, turning his back on the clearing and heading back to the car.
“What about the spell?” Sam asks, loping along beside him. “We need to finish the trial.” He’s tensing and releasing his right fist. Reaches into his pocket to pull out the parchment with the rest of the spell on it.
Dean snags it out of Sam’s hand and keeps walking.
“Hey!” Sam yells, tripping on a root before righting himself.
The car —Benny’s body—is about an hour’s hike away, and there’s moonglow now so Dean’s moving quickly. “I’ve got the parchment with the incantation on it. But we’ve seen that weird-ass glow your arms do when you recite it. We’re getting Benny out of you first.”
Sam’s suddenly in front of him. “Dean,” he says, urgently, blocking his way. “What if there’s a time limit?” he asks. “What, then we have to go through this again, but this time Crowley knows we’re coming?”
Dean starts to push past him, and Sam reaches out to grab his shoulders. There’s dark blood dripping down Sam’s left forearm from where he released Bobby’s soul. There’s a faint, roiling glow visible through the rolled-down plaid covering Sam’s right arm. Dean, staring at it, feels his stomach roil in turn. “Then we’d better get going,” he says.
Sam, silent and judgmental, follows him.
*
“If it was Bobby’s soul we were worried about frying, you wouldn’t think twice,” Dean says.
*
“I’m doing this for you, really,” Dean says. “Who knows what the hell having an extra soul in you when doing the spell would do, anyway.”
*
Sam flexes the arm with Benny’s soul in it as they walk. Dean’s arm smarts with what he at first thinks is sympathy. It’s the span of only a couple of breaths before he realizes it for what it is—the muscle memory of the swing of his machete, coming in to kiss the column of Benny’s neck.
*
The Impala comes into view. Dean, exhausted, breaks into a loping run. Sam follows behind him, more slowly. Dean has the trunk lid propped up by the time Sam gets there. Sam, who had been sullenly silent since they started walking, makes a soft, startled sort of exhale when he sees the carefully wrapped shape in the trunk, the collar of blood. He doesn’t say anything, but he leans into the trunk after Dean, grabbing Benny—grabbing Benny’s body, Benny’s corpse—beneath the knees. Dean slides his arms under Benny’s shoulders, carefully supporting the loose weight of his head through the winding sheets. He’s gentle when he settles Benny to the ground. Stays there for a moment, kneeling on the ground with his hand resting soft on the side of Benny’s face, through the fabric.
Dean breathes. The air smells like Purgatory—moss and trees and blood and death. The grass beneath his knees is softer than anything that grew there. “I killed one of my best friends to save you,” Dean says. He can feel Sam standing behind him, but he’s looking at the arc of Benny’s nose against the sheet. “One of my only friends. I cut off his head. To save you. Does either of us really, seriously think I’ll be able to let you die, slow and violent and painful, for these stupid-ass trials?”
Sam clears his throat. “He - he wasn’t planning on coming back,” Sam says.
Dean closes his eyes and his fist. Opens his hand to rest across Benny’s neck. The space between his neck and body is so small Dean can’t feel it through the sheet.
“He wanted me to tell you he said goodbye. I told him that he could tell you himself,” Sam says.
Dean’s chin drops to his chest before he inhales again, weight on chest, Purgatory in his lungs, and pushes to his feet. “Thank you,” he says and hugs his brother. Hands him a knife. Stands with his back turned and hands stuffed deep in his pockets. Watches the trees as Sam begins to chant and a flashing red arc casts Dean’s shadow across the grass. Dean stays that way, facing the trees and breathing shallowly until he hears a neck crack and footsteps close behind him.
When Dean turns, Benny’s close enough to him that Dean barely has a chance to look at his face before he’s wrapping him up in a tight hug. “You made it,” Dean says.
Benny’s arms tighten around him. “Ain’t nothing in Purgatory that’s been able to stop me yet,” he says. Dean’s head is tucked close enough into his that Dean can see there’s no blood left on his neck, no sign of the decapitation. Dean’s hand tightens in the collar of Benny’s heavy coat, checking. Benny’s arms tighten again, just a fraction. He doesn’t smell like death, just like wool and skin and faintly of the gunpowder-herb-motor oil smell of the Impala’s trunk, and Dean gives himself a couple of breaths to get his face under control before he steps back. It feels like Benny lets go a little reluctantly, but Dean’s not sure if he’s projecting.
Sam has apparently been digging around in the Impala instead of just standing around awkwardly, and he’s found the cooler than Dean grabbed out of Benny’s truck. “Here,” Sam says, holding a blood bag out to Benny like an apology.
Benny takes it, serious, and nods. “Thank you,” he says.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Dean says.
(There’s another universe out there, where Crowley gets to Kevin before they do. One where Sam came back with only a single soul burning under his skin. There, Sam is weak and shaking after the trial, and it takes twice as long for Dean to haul him back to the Impala as it does for them both to walk. With Sam sleeping restlessly in the front seat, Dean has to bury Benny’s body alone. Dean watches shovelful after shovelful of dirt spread across the winding sheets and obscure the muffled lines of Benny’s face and body. Dean buries Benny in that forest, deep enough that the animals won’t get him, marks the grave well so that if—when—they pull Benny’s soul out of Purgatory again, he’s right there and easy to find. Dean takes a minute, or an hour, when the last shovelful of dirt is in place, to stand there and breathe in the dirt-moss-death smell of Purgatory. Eventually, he follows the sound of water until he reaches a creek. He washes his hands in the water, dark soil running into the current. Sam’s still sleeping when Dean gets back to the car. Dean sits there, hands on the wheel. In the moonlight, the dirt left beneath his nails looks like blood. Dean? Sam asks eventually, sleepily, and Dean carefully puts his face back together and starts the car.)
*
It’s well into the next day before they hit the bunker. The kind of long, broad sunrise you only get in the prairies is starting to paint the Kansas sky in vivid relief. In the rearview mirror, Dean can see Benny watching it hungrily out the window. Kevin is watching it too, but Dean’s eyes have been drifting back to Benny for most of the drive. There’s not enough sun to give Benny any problems yet, and he’s watching the purples and oranges like a man who thought he might never see anything other than gray and black again. Dean’s foot drops on the accelerator and the Impala surges through the early morning light.
The garage is cool and silent as the ticking of the motor tapers off. It’s a moment of peace before everyone starts moving. It feels like there are far more than four people milling around the car. Dean, exhausted, stares into the trunk, at his bag in the corner and the machete he used to take Benny’s head off. He seriously considers just crawling back into the Impala and sleeping there. It wouldn’t be the first time or the last.
“Come on,” Sam says. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow.” He moves Dean’s hands and lets the trunk slam closed. Kevin, tweaking, jumps and spins at the sound. Sam sighs. “I’ll take care of that for now.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, and “okay,” as Sam leads Kevin off. When Dean turns around, Benny is standing there awkwardly. Dean’s not sure if he’s ever seen Benny look awkward. He always occupies the space he stands in, even if he’s uncertain. “Come on,” Dean says and trusts Benny will follow him. He can hear Benny trailing behind him, through the long hallways, through the library and the kitchen. Dean, who’s been up for almost three days, who’s never really had a home to bring someone back to, absently wonders what Benny sees when he looks around. Now that the adrenaline is draining out of him, now that he’s out of Baby, every step takes him further into a fog. He’s been at this stage of exhaustion too many times before, and his limbs are about to stop obeying him.
“Pick a room,” Dean says, finally, gesturing up and down the hall. “This one’s mine. Sam and Kevin are around the corner. Cas is a couple of doors down. You’re going to have to deal with it as-is tonight. If I try to make up a fresh bed for you, I will 100% fall asleep partway through. The joy of fresh sheets will not make up for the presence of a snoring hunter in your bed.”
Benny’s face goes through a complicated series of expressions that Dean’s far too tired to parse. “Wherever you want me is fine,” Benny says, finally, slowly. “I’ll be out of your hair in the morning.”
Dean, partway through his door, whips back around. “No,” he says. Points clumsily. “You’re gum,” he says. As predicted, his traitor body is starting to betray him to sleep.
Benny looks at him in confusion. “I need to be scraped off the bottom of your shoe?” he asks, slowly. “I need to be chewed up and spat out?”
“No,” Dean says. The door frame is supporting most of his weight. “Hair. Gum in your hair. What happens if you get gum in your hair? It stays.”
Benny laughs. “Okay, brother,” he says. “You going to be okay to make it the ten or so feet to your bed?”
“I’m fine,” Dean says, with as much dignity as he can muster. It slurs a little coming out, so it’s not much dignity.
“I believe you,” Benny says, slipping under Dean’s arm to stabilize him as he makes his way to his bed. “It’s been a long day for all of us,” Benny says, like Dean’s done anything other than swing a machete and drive a car and stroll through a forest and not die. He works Dean’s boots off of his feet, pulling off his coat and overshirt and looking strangely at the blood on the cuffs of his plaid.
“Uh-huh,” Dean says, as his face hits the pillow. It smells like home. It’s weird to him that home has a smell. “Hey,” he says, reaching out blindly to catch at one of the hands pulling a blanket over him. “Hey,” he says again, pinky tangled with one of Benny’s, “you’re going to be here when I wake up?”
Benny sighs. “I promise, cher,” he says, making no move to detangle his hand from Dean’s before Dean drifts off to sleep.
*
Dean wakes up, warm and comfortable and alone. There’s an extra blanket on top of him, and when he reaches out in the dark he finds a bottle of water and a piece of paper. He’s disoriented in the way he only ever is after a long, deep, motionless sleep. He fumbles the light on. Still here, the note says in unfamiliar, ornate cursive. Dean sits on the edge of the bed and scrubs his hands over his face. There’s a fine trace of blood across his t-shirt. Half-awake, he wonders for a moment where it could have come from, before reality comes crashing down.
Still here, the note reminds him.
Robe belted, Dean wanders out into the hall and follows the sound of distant voices and the smell of food into the kitchen. Everyone else is gathered there. Kevin’s fully dressed. Sam’s wearing his pajamas and nursing a beer. Benny’s making omelets. Dean exhales, then realizes he has no idea what time it is. The clock says 9, but he can’t tell if it’s morning or night.
“Hey,” Benny says, low and easy. Dean fights the urge to poke him just to make sure he’s real. Dean sits down at the table instead, glaring suspiciously at Sam and Kevin. Sam raises his hands placatingly. Kevin already has a plate in front of him, and Benny reaches past Dean to hand one to Sam.
“Thanks,” Sam says, almost formally polite.
Dean rolls his eyes. Benny moves back to the counter and starts chopping something.
“Hey! You going to ask how I want mine?” Dean calls out.
“No,” Benny says, and starts throwing vegetables into the pan. “Because I don’t want your heart attack on my conscience.”
“No rabbit food,” Dean grumbles but takes the omelet Benny puts in front of him despite the non-meat colors folded inside it. He focuses on the food and tries very hard not to think about how fucked up it is that he killed Benny yesterday—or probably yesterday, he should really figure out how long he was asleep—and now Benny’s feeding him.
Benny drops down into a chair beside Dean, same thing on his plate he’s feeding Dean. He tucks in. He might not need food, but he appreciates the taste. For a while, the only noise is the background hum of the bunker and the clink of silverware on plates.
“So, you’re a vampire?” Kevin asks. “This is really good, by the way.”
Dean freezes a bit. Sam looks like he can’t figure out how he wants to feel about the question or the answer.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Dean asks, wary.
Kevin shrugs. “You going to bite me?” he asks Benny directly.
Benny laughs, low and deep. “Stringy little thing like you, all full of caffeine and amphetamines? Nah. I’m on the wagon, don’t worry.”
“Okay,” Kevin says. “Cool.”
Sam flails a bit. “Wait,” he says. “That’s it?”
“Castiel makes out with a demon sometimes,” Kevin says. “I thought this was just how we roll.”
*
Dean makes up the bed. (It’s more complicated than the weight carried in those five words, of course. He runs sheets through the ancient washer and dryer, peers at the distribution of dust in the bedrooms down the hall before swallowing hard and considering the possibility that Benny either didn’t sleep or spent the night sitting beside him. He grabs Benny’s beat to-shit duffel bag, the one he’d liberated from Benny’s beat to-shit truck, out of the trunk of the Impala.)
Dean makes up the bed. He feels the weight of eyes on the back of his head as he wrestles the last corner of the fitted sheet in place. “What?” he asks, letting the mattress thump back down to the bed frame. Inhales fabric softener and softens his tone. “What’s up, Sammy?”
Sam’s looking around the room with an expression that Dean can’t read. Sam hasn’t said anything about the trials since they got back almost two days ago. Dean had slept for fifteen hours, almost twice what he can remember ever getting in one go, and now finds himself by turns achingly clear-headed and disoriented in an overslept-fog.
Sam’s eyes stop sweeping the room, settle on Dean, standing by the bed with its fitted sheet. “Where’s Benny?” he asks, and his tone is mild, but Dean still feels his hackles rise.
“Getting some fresh air,” Dean says, trying to figure out which way the top sheet goes.
“He staying?” Sam asks.
Dean, tucking in the sheet, doesn’t answer.
“Right,” Sam says. “Better question. How long is he staying?”
Dean huffs and tries to get the sheet to lie flat. “Long as he wants,” he says. It’s not that Dean is bad at changing sheets, but he hasn’t had much call to learn. He’s spent most of his life out of hotels and abandoned houses and the backseat of his car. He and Lisa used to do it together, a small ritual, light streaming in through the windows and sheets ballooning up between them meaning something to him that he could never manage to articulate. Dean puts one blanket on the bed and then another because fuck if he knows how many blankets a vampire needs. Does the lower body temperature mean he needs more or less? “Look. I know you don’t get it,” Dean says. Sits down on the mattress and starts shoving pillows into pillowcases.
“You’re right,” Sam says. “I don’t get it. Look—he’s not what I thought.”
Dean thinks about making the bed with Lisa. He thinks about making the bed with Lisa while Sam was dead. While he thought that Sam was dead. I told Benny I was going to do better by him, Dean wants to say.
“But he still—he killed Martin.”
Dean exhales. “Maybe Martin needed killing,” he says. Fights the urge to rub at his wrists. Martin kidnapped and terrorized Elizabeth; Martin held a blade to her throat and made her bleed. Benny took out a vamp who needed killing; Benny walked away from the blood on Elizabeth, on Dean, with little more than a steadying breath. Dean’s been a vampire. He knows how hard that is.
Sam, still standing in the doorway, crosses his arms when Dean doesn’t say anything further. “Even if we assume that’s true—Dean, he’s still a vampire. He can’t stay here.”
Dean inhales. Puts the pillow down on the bed. “He saved your life,” Dean reminds him. His fingers tighten and release in the blankets. If I’d known Benny wasn’t planning on coming back, I don’t know what I would have done, Dean thinks with sudden clarity. (He’s not sure if this is a lie, but he knows that at the very least, he would have made Benny promise he was coming back.) “He saved your life,” Dean repeats. “He saved Bobby’s soul from hell.”
“Lot of people have saved my life,” Sam says. “Don’t remember inviting all of them to move in with me.”
“Maybe we should,” Dean says.
“Dean,” Sam says, frustration clear in his voice. He has this look on his face, one that always sets Dean on edge, like Sam is the reasonable one about to speak truths Dean’s too dense to see. “Dean, I live here too. I get a say in whether or not I want a vampire living with me.”
Dean exhales. “He didn’t actually ask to be turned,” Dean says. “It’s not like he had a say in the matter.” And then, because Dean isn’t above a low blow, and because Dean can still feel the handle of the machete cool against his palm and see Benny’s head separate from his body: “Believe me, I know what it feels like to get your neck ripped open, have someone else’s blood dripped down your throat. But you know what that last part feels like, don’t you, Sam? Someone else’s blood in your teeth and running warm down your throat? You jealous?”
The room is absolutely, completely quiet. Neither of them even breathe.
“Jesus, Dean,” Sam says, eventually. He looks worse than he ever has when Dean’s punched him. “That’s low.”
Dean shrugs. “Yeah, well, so is knocking me out and handcuffing me to a radiator.”
Sam doesn’t say anything. Just turns and walks away.
Dean sits there on the bed, heart jackhammering, for how long he can’t say. Eventually, he scrubs his hands over his face and stands, grabbing Benny’s duffle from the foot of the bed. He unpacks the bag mechanically, carefully laying the mended and neatly folded clothes into a drawer that dwarfs them.
*
Dean finds Benny outside. He’s standing stock still and staring at the moon and stars. Wild grass sways in the breeze, brushing against his thighs. Dean wonders if Benny can hear each individual blade and stalk and head as it bends and sways, gliding and rasping against its neighbor. He wonders if Benny can hear the way Dean’s heart thumped unsteadily until Dean saw him, the way his breathing evened out when he saw Benny standing, hale and whole.
“Hey,” Dean says, picking his way carefully through the uneven ground.
“Hey yourself,” Benny says, leaving Dean waiting for—he’s not sure. Benny to call him chief, or brother, or—Dean’s not sure, so he stands there next to Benny, staring up at the sky.
“How many more stars can you see?” Dean asks. “With that vamp eyesight of yours.”
Benny huffs a quiet laugh. “Not as many as you’d think. Not as many as I used to see when I was a child. Light pollution. Everything’s got a side effect.”
Benny looks so at home there, silent in the moonlight and undulating waves of grass that it takes Dean utterly by surprise how lost his eyes are. Dean thinks that if he were Sam there’d probably be something he could say or do to make Benny feel found. Instead, he shrugs and clasps a hand to Benny’s shoulder. “Progress isn’t all bad. I’ll trade a few stars for indoor plumbing and 24/7 access to internet porn.”
Benny laughs, loud and sudden, like he didn’t expect to feel it bubbling out of him. It vibrates up Dean’s arm. “You got me there, chief.”
“Come on,” Dean says. He thinks about how close he came to never feeling the rumble of Benny’s laugh again. His hand on Benny’s shoulder curls involuntarily, fabric free of blood twisting beneath his fingers, knuckles curling to brush against the nape of Benny’s neck. Dean slides his hand on Benny’s shoulder across his back and uses it to pull him back towards the bunker. “Got a room set up for you. Experience the best modern amenities an abandoned dead-guy bunker has to offer.”
Benny stiffens a bit, but Dean keeps pulling him along. “How’s Sam feel about this?” Benny asks.
Dean huffs. “Sam will learn to deal.” (Sam’s being a bitch about it, but he’ll learn to deal.)
“He’s your brother,” Benny says. “I’m not —”
Dean keeps walking. “You saved his life. You say you’re not worth it, and I’m going to kick your ass.”
Benny stops, abruptly. Dean loses contact. Benny stands there, woodenly. “Let’s be realistic here,” Benny says.
Dean crosses his arms. “You just piggybacked your soul out of freaking Purgatory in my brother’s arm. We crossed realistic a long time ago.”
Benny looks lost again. “Dean—”
“No.” Dean’s gaze hardens and he steps up to Benny again. Pokes him in the chest. Benny looks surprised. Dean’s smile shows teeth. “Look. I told you I was going to do better by you, and this is the best I know how to do, so you’re just going to have to deal with it. Okay?”
Benny looks—not quite confused, but something, and at least it’s not lost. “Anyone else get any say in any of this?”
“No,” Dean says, and Benny looks—a lot of expressions flash across his face, but in the end, he smiles. “Okay,” he says.
Dean can feel Benny following him back inside, but the part of his brain that lives in lore is afraid to look back. His spine unwinds when he hears Benny’s steps behind him on the concrete floors.
*
The thing about Purgatory—one of the things about Purgatory, about it being pure, was just how it stripped everything down, stripped everything away.
Hunt.
Everything else was secondary, even killing. You kill because that’s how the hunt ends.
Integrating back into the world after Purgatory was—is—was an entirely different thing than coming back after Hell. It’s not—Dean wouldn’t say it’s harder, because it’s not. Purgatory was calm, almost, after Hell. Meditative, almost, like his life but with all the bullshit, all the pretense, everything about people stripped away. Monsters fell on him as easy as breathing, and he didn’t have to check if they were good or bad or human before taking them out. Everything in Purgatory was a monster, including him.
(You took hunt and decided to make it about saving the angel, a voice that sounds like Benny’s says. How many of the monsters there were like Benny? a voice that sounds too much like Dean’s own asks.)
Coming back from Hell was literally coming back from Hell. Coming back from Purgatory was like walking from one version of his life into another. In Purgatory, he wasn’t—he wasn’t in someone’s hands, someone’s web. Purgatory stripped away every need other than the hunt, same way it stripped away bloodthirst and the need for human hearts, or it would have just been a dimension of monsters slowly starving to death. It pared him back to the bone.
Yeah, being back on Earth means there are more colors, at least in the day. But he’s still hunting. He forgets, sometimes, that he has to eat now. That he has to sleep. Dean trained himself young to ignore the hollowed-out feel of not having eaten for days, when Dad was on a hunting trip and they were out of money and Sammy needed food. His body has rarely felt hunger properly since then, permanently caught somewhere between ignoring the gaping, growling hole in the center of him and never quite being able to fill it.
Sleep’s a little the same. You sleep too deep, and you might not hear something scratching at the motel room door, looking for your little brother. You never stay anywhere long enough for your brain to work out which noises are normal and what’s a monster, and there’s always a monster coming after you.
Sleep after Hell was harder, with the things he’d found out he’s capable of, the things he’s done and had done to him scratching at the back of his eyes. Pushing himself until his body took him down so deep he had no choice. It’s different yet after Purgatory, his brain knowing it still needs sleep but his body remembering that he can live without it for months, years.
Of the things he misses about Purgatory, not having to sleep is right up there.
*
Dean hates Djinn.
*
“I think I actually prefer these bastard off-shoot Djinns,” Dean tells Charlie.
“Really?” Charlie asks. Staring out the window of the Impala at the hospital in front of them. “You prefer a nightmare to a dream? That’s—I mean, it’s telling.”
Dean drums his hands on the steering “Hear me out—yeah, getting stuck in a nightmare loop of facing your worst fears sucks, but nightmares are supposed to suck, right? A normal Djinn gives you everything you ever wanted and then shows you how shitty and useless you’d be at it.”
Charlie wrinkles her nose at him. “I don’t think you understand how good dreams work.”
Dean shrugs. “I understand how Djinn work.”
“Okay,” Charlie says. Takes a deep breath. Looks at the hospital where her mother is lying dreamless. “Time to wake up.”
Dean gets out of the car when she does. Hugs her—lets her hug him for as long as she seems to need.
“I love you,” she tells his shoulder.
“I know,” he says, and she laughs, wetly.
“Okay,” she says again, finally. Smooths her hair as she steps back. Takes a deep breath. “Later, gator.”
Dean leans against Baby’s front hood and watches Charlie walk into the hospital. Her back is straight but her steps are small. Dean exhales and looks up at the sunny sky above him. It’s not really fair that it’s that nice of a day, he thinks. That the air is so clear and there are birds singing. It should be gray and dreary, threatening rain. He stands there, feeling the warmth of the sun on the hood through his jeans. Instead of getting in his car and burning rubber back to Lebanon, he pulls out his phone. Calls Sam. “Just wrapping up here,” he says. “Everything okay?”
Sam huffs. “Everyone still has their heads.”
Dean exhales through his nose. “Kevin’s not still tweaking? You still hacking?”
Sam’s response is slower this time. “Yeah,” he says. He sounds tired. “Kevin’s getting better. I’m doing okay. Benny’s keeping to himself.”
“Right,” Dean says, and: “couple of loose ends to wrap up here,” because it sounds like he can spare a minute. “I’ll let you know when I’m heading out.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, and “okay,” and “see you when you get back.”
“See you soon,” Dean says, biting back everyone better still be alive when I get home, and hangs up. He stares at Benny’s number in his phone and tries to figure out if Sam will take him calling Benny the wrong (or right) way. “Fuck it,” Dean finally says, staring at the hospital, and hits call.
Benny picks up on the first ring because he missed the point in society that trained people out of seeming too eager to hear from someone.
“Hey,” Dean says, drumming the fingers of his free hand on the hood.
“Hey there, yourself, Dean,” Benny replies.
“Hey,” Dean says again, staring at the hospital and feeling the warmth from the long, broad way Benny says his name. “Charlie’s got a thing,” he says. “I just want to stay and make sure she’s okay. You gonna be—"
“I’ll be all right,” Benny says. There’s a soft pause, and Dean hears a radio playing in the background. “You look after your friend.”
I’m trying to do better at that, Dean thinks. “You need me to grab you anything?” he offers. “I’m at a hospital anyway.”
“Nah, your brother already took care of that. Very pointedly installed a minifridge in my room.” Benny laughs. “Didn’t know anyone could put that much meaning into plugging in a cord.”
“Sorry about that,” Dean says.
“Can’t say as I blame him,” Benny says.
Dean scoffs. “You haven’t seen some of the potion concoctions Kevin’s stored in the fridge.”
“It’s fine, Dean,” Benny says, and “I’m fine.”
“Right,” Dean says. Feels the sun on his face and the slow warmth in his throat. Looks at the hospital and sighs.
“You look after your friend, now,” Benny says.
Dean nods. “I’ll see you soon,” he says, and hangs up.
Dean settles onto a long bench in the hospital hallway. It’s padded, if barely, which puts it head and tails above the standard hard plastic chairs. It’s not that Dean doesn’t get it, needing furniture that’s easy to clean and can stand up to fits of rage and innumerable anxious family members, but he’s spent enough time in hospitals to know that the physical discomfort of waiting areas adds another level of shittiness to the entire experience.
Look at what a princess he’s turned into, Dean thinks absently. At home he’s got the most comfortable mattress he’s ever slept on, and it’s his, and it’s still hard for him to fall asleep.
The hospital hallway he’s sitting in is long-term care, so it lacks the hustle and bustle of emergency, of other wings. It’s quiet, voices carrying down the tiles of two nurses talking in hushed tones at the end of the hall. He crosses his arms and his legs and settles lower on the bench, counting ceiling tiles and different colors of floor tiles and sending out the occasional prayer to Cas, same as he’s been doing for weeks. Hey buddy, not doing the trials thing anymore, come home.
Dean’s starting to get Pavlovian cravings for hospital-terrible coffee by the time Charlie and a woman in a doctor’s coat step out of a room down the hall. Their voices are low enough that Dean can’t hear them. Charlie wearily drops her coat and bags to the floor. Her back is to him so he can’t see her face, but he knows what it will look like from his own reflection in the mirror, after John. Dean knows how this conversation goes, and he leans his elbows on his thighs and rubs his hands together in sympathy. The doctor and Charlie talk for a few more minutes before she touches Charlie on the arm, gently. Dean gets up and heads toward them.
“Is there anyone you can call to take you home?” the doctor is asking.
“I’m fine,” Charlie says.
“I’ve got her,” Dean says.
Charlie turns to look at him, face heavy and eyes dry and red, and he can see that it takes her a second to place him. “Dean?” she asks, surprised.
“Let’s get you home,” Dean says, the doctor waiting until Charlie nods at her that everything is as okay as it can be.
Dean opens his arms and raises an eyebrow because he’s honestly not sure what she wants right now. She picks up her stuff, cradling it to her stomach, and lets Dean put his arm over her shoulders as they walk.
She’s silent the entire way back to her motel. Dean pulls into the parking lot and they sit there, quietly. Charlie pulled a copy of The Hobbit out of her bag at some point during the drive, and she’s running her fingers along the spine absently. Her shoulders are hunched but steady. “You going to try to make me talk?” she asks, finally.
“Me?” Dean asks. “God, no.”
“Right,” Charlie says. Huffs a little. Turns the book over and over and over in her hands. “What was I thinking?”
“I’m here if you want to, though,” Dean says. “You’ve read the books so you know—my relationship with my parents was complicated in an entirely different way than yours was, but—” he releases his white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, runs his hand across the dashboard. “I took Baby to pieces after Dad died. If Bobby and Sam hadn’t been there—”
Charlie shakes her head. “I need to do this alone.”
“Okay,” Dean says. “But I have a question for you. Do you? Do you have to do it alone, or do you just think that you have to?”
Charlie exhales wetly. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been on my own for so long.”
“I wouldn’t know what that’s like,” Dean says, “but—”
“Yeah, you know,” Charlie says.
Dean shrugs. “You attached to this motel room?” he asks.
“It’s a motel room,” Charlie sniffs.
“Look,” Dean says. “I had this whole thing I was going to say about how we could use help with wifi in the bunker, and how we had all these lore and magic resources, but the truth is—yeah, we have books, but you’ve got your head on straight; and for whatever reason, the wifi works. But Charlie—you don’t have to be alone.”
Charlie half laughs, half cries. “Not exactly great company at the moment,” she says.
“You don’t have to be,” Dean says. “It’s a big bunker. Plenty of space if you just want to get lost somewhere and be alone. Have your space. But you don’t have to be by yourself. I’m not—I’m not saying that you have to uproot your life and move in with us forever. But you don’t have to be alone if you don’t want to.”
Charlie’s hands flex and relax along the spine of the book. She tilts her head back to look at the roof. There’s a tear slowly making its way from the corner of her eye and she blinks furiously. Dean reaches out for her and stops, pulls back, giving her space and time. She fights to keep her breathing steady. “Don’t want to cramp your style,” she says.
Dean laughs. “Bold of you to assume we have style to cramp,” he says. Pauses. “I’ve never really had a home, before,” Dean tells her. “But you—you read the books, so you know that.” He stops. Tries to figure out something to tell her that the books wouldn’t have. Chuck glossed over a lot of things. Glossed over a lot of John Winchester. “I spent three months at a group home when I was a teenager, and honestly, that was the best time I ever had growing up. So I—I don’t know what it was like for you, to lose your home. And I’m not trying to replace it. I just want you to know,” Dean says. “That you could have a place to come back to. If you wanted.”
Charlie scrubs her hands over her face. Wipes the sleeve of her hoodie across her eyes. “Okay,” she says.
“Yeah?” Dean asks.
“For now,” Charlie says, voice firm, eyes red, poking him in the chest. “For now.”
“One day at a time,” Dean says, and then, in a long exhale, “thank god. You have no idea how much I’ve been wanting a buffer between Sam and Benny.”
Charlie punches him in the arm. “Knew you just wanted to take advantage of my sparkling wit and conversational acumen.”
“Definitely,” Dean says, and follows her across the parking lot.
“Just for that, you’re carrying all my stuff,” she calls back across her shoulder.
*
“Objectively,” Charlie says, sitting on her unmade bed and looking at the passports in her hands, “Objectively, I know that she’s been gone for—that she’s been gone for years. She hasn’t been my mother for—”
Dean, folding sweaters and tucking them into a backpack with the kind of muscle memory that only a life lived on the road gives you, nods.
“Objectively,” Charlie says, “I know that I didn’t kill my mother.”
When Dean is finished with the sweaters, there’s still plenty of room left on the top, so he starts throwing in books as Charlie nods yes or no to them. “Objectively doesn’t mean shit,” Dean says. “I know all kinds of things I don’t believe.”
“One day at a time, huh,” Charlie says.
Dean closes the backpack over the last of the books Charlie nodded yes at. He fiddles with the zipper pull. Swallows around something in his throat. “I killed Benny the other week,” he says. “Cut off his head. Objectively, I know it turned out. I know he’s alive again now, for values of ‘alive’ that include undead. Objectively —”
“Yeah,” Charlie says, and, softer, “yeah,” pulling at Dean’s wrist until he sits down beside her on the rumpled sheets and she can drop her head to his shoulder.
*
“Okay,” Charlie says. “That looks like it’s everything.”
Dean looks around and nods. Charlie’d tried to renege on making him carry all her stuff, but honestly, there hadn’t been much of it.
“You’re probably tired,” Dean says.
Charlie nods. “I don’t want to be rude, but—”
“Long few days,” Dean says. Wraps her up in a hug, and kisses her forehead and waits for her to let go. “I’m down the hall if you need anything,” he says.
It’d taken a couple of days to get everything wrapped up, and the bunker was empty when they got back. Sam and Kevin were on a ghost thing, and Benny was—was somewhere, and Dean fought the lurch in his stomach.
Dean stops outside his room and turns across the hall to Benny’s. He pushes the door open, just a bit, just double checking that Benny’s stuff is still there. Small things have appeared in Benny’s room in the weeks since—since he helped get Sam out of Purgatory. An old fashioned radio, a coat rack. An ever-growing stack of history books piled up against the mini-fridge. Dean stands at the door to Benny’s room and feels a little hollow at how few pieces of clothing he’d carefully tucked away into the drawers. He realizes suddenly that Benny’d have no idea how to run credit card scams, had no ID, no way to pass a background check. Benny probably hasn’t spent much time learning how to run a con—he was law-abiding before he’d turned, then lived with a nest that took what they wanted, and Andrea was an heiress. Dean, who grew up learning how to spot a mark, how to bat his eyes or wobble just right, had never considered that it was a skill set not everyone had.
Dean thinks about not having had a home. About how after resurrecting, Benny had returned to the two places he’d lived in life. That there must have been a pull there for him.
A warm body leans against him. “Turns out I don’t want to be alone right now,” Charlie says. “Turns out I want to be distracted.”
Dean nods. “Okay.”
*
Charlie had grabbed The Fellowship of the Ring from the box of DVDs Dean pulled out from underneath his bed, so they’re sprawled on their stomachs across Dean’s mattress, eating popcorn in the flickering light of the tv.
“I can’t wait to give each other mani-pedis,” Dean says. “Maybe then we can have a pillow fight and practice kissing?”
Charlie snorts. “You do realize that’s not actually how sleepovers work, right?” she asks. “If I’m going to be trusting you about what kind of creatures are real and which are fairy tales, I need to know that you realize that hypothetical situation is about as likely to occur as you and I making out.”
“That’s too bad,” Dean says. “The sleepover thing. Not—"
Charlie wrinkles her nose. “Eww,” she says. Then she sighs. “Yeah, the sleepover thing would have been nice.”
Dean’s hands, almost instinctively, follow the swing of Aragorn’s sword on Weathertop. “I’m not used to having friends,” Dean admits to Charlie.
“No doy,” Charlie replies. “I love you anyway, you giant, closeted nerd.”
Dean snorts and bounces popcorn off her cheek. “Who am I going to come out to, anyway?”
One of Charlie’s eyebrows sneaks up but she bumps her shoulder against his, snags the popcorn off the bedspread, and pops it in her mouth. “I meant that you literally keep your nerd movies where most people keep their porn, but thank you for telling me.”
“Porn’s in the dresser,” Dean says. “I’ve got hunter’s knees. Way easier to get at. There’s a stack of magazines from the Men of Letters’ stash you might want to go through yourself, actually.” They watch the movie for a bit. “I’m just saying,” Dean says. “That there are things I’m good at, and this, having friends, isn’t one of them. If you need something—you gotta tell me, okay?”
“Okay,” Charlie says, and leans her shoulder against his.
A shadow falls across the hallway. It always throws Dean a little how quietly Benny moves.
Charlie holds the popcorn bowl over her and Dean’s heads in Benny’s general direction. “Do vampires eat popcorn?” she asks.
“Not if it has margarine on it,” Benny says.
Dean snorts. “Real butter only, baby.”
Benny hovers at the door until Charlie shakes the bowl of popcorn at him and Dean waves his hand lazily. “Get in here,” Dean says.
Dean’s bed (and that’s never going to get old, is it? His bed.) is big, but it’s definitely not going to fit all three of them easily. Benny takes the bowl of popcorn from Charlie while she and Dean shift around, moving so that Benny can settle with his back against the headboard and feet on the floor. Charlie’s short enough that she’s got room, but Dean’s legs are long enough that Benny rests a light hand on his ankle, indicating Dean can rest his feet against his hip. It should be awkward as fuck, but Charlie’s already settled in, and it’s—kind of nice.
Dean has always been very, very good at making excuses.
“Funny how everything old is new again,” Benny says. “Reminds me of a book I was reading before I—you know.” He pauses. “Wait, is this—did Tolkien write a sequel to The Hobbit?”
“What,” Charlie says, flat. Flails around for the remote and hits pause. “A SEQUEL. To THE HOBBIT. How do you not know anything about Lord of the Rings? The hat said hipster, but even hipsters can’t pretend to be unaware of the massive influence of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on modern literature and cinema.” Benny is laughing, and that only seems to fuel her rage. “Where were you?” she asks, throwing the pillow she’s been curled up around at Benny and hitting him in the face.
“Dead, Charlie,” Dean says. “He was dead.” Dean has a moment where he thinks of the flat way in which he said Benny was dead. That he’d told her he’d killed Benny AGAIN the other week. Wonders if he’s rubbing it in.
“Oh,” Charlie says. She doesn’t look at all like she’s going to break. Takes back her pillow as Benny hands it to her. “Well,” she says, with as much dignity as she can muster in fuzzy slippers and a giant lock of hair hanging between her eyes. “Well, good. That’s the only reason I’ll accept.” She smooths her hair back and reaches for the remote. “We’re starting from the beginning, then.” Cate Blanchett's voiceover cuts through the room. “I’ll lend you the books,” she says.
“I take it this movie is a big deal, then,” Benny says, amused.
“Movies,” Charlie corrects, “and books,” and “Shhh, I’ll make you a list of must-watch and must-read pop culture to catch up on later.”
“All right,” Benny says, and Dean nudges him with his foot in thanks.
Charlie falls asleep in the silver-blue light of Lothlórien and Dean not long after. He’s woken hours later by Charlie whimpering in her sleep. They’re still curled together, wrong way around on his bed, but they’re alone and covered with a heavy blanket. “Shhhh,” Dean says, and falls asleep again as Charlie’s forehead smooths out.
*
Sam’s car pulls into the garage as Dean’s unloading the Impala. Or rather, Dean assumes it’s Sam’s car based on the engine growl and location, but the stack of bags he’s carrying obscures his vision somewhat.
“Whoa, hey,” he hears Kevin say, and then the paper towels and toilet paper he’d been balancing atop the other bags disappear.
“They have a warehouse sale, or are you stocking up for the apocalypse?” Sam asks, grabbing the last few bags from the trunk and slamming it closed. He stops. “Please tell me there’s not another apocalypse already.”
“I know I’m new at this,” Kevin says, “but I feel like there’s always an apocalypse.”
Dean shrugs, heads towards the kitchen to start unpacking. “Five mouths,” he says, putting the groceries down. “Five mouths, Sam, which means five butts.”
Sam, stacking cans onto the shelves, pauses briefly with peas above his head before he keeps moving. “Five, huh,” he says with a frown.
“I’m going to assume that this cooler is for Benny,” Kevin says. “I’m going to go and take it to him and it’s just a coincidence that it’s getting me out of this room at this exact moment.”
“Yeah, that’s Benny’s,” Dean says, but Kevin is already out the kitchen door. Dean keeps putting groceries away, letting the silence in the room grow heavier. “You’re the one with a problem,” he eventually tells the crisper. “You’re going to have to be the one to say something.”
Dean hears Sam huff. “Said everything I have to say, and you’re obviously not hearing it.”
“I heard it,” Dean says. “But I’ve decided it’s all stupid as fuck, so I have in turn decided to ignore it.”
“Dean,” Sam says, and he’s obviously working up a head of steam when he looks down and realizes he’s holding a box of tampons. “What,” he says.
Dean blinks at him. “They’re for Charlie,” he says, slowly, “unless you have something to share with the class, Samantha.”
“No, I figured that out,” Sam says. “I’m just surprised you—"
“I lived with Lisa for a year,” Dean says. “You think I was too good to pick shit up for her? You think she wouldn’t have kicked my ass?” Like Dean would ever get involved with anyone who couldn’t kick his ass.
Sam shakes his head. “That’s not what I —” He sighs. “I can’t get anything right with you, can I?” he asks. Sits down heavily at the table.
“I don’t know,” Dean says. They’ve never been GOOD at talking to each, not exactly, and god, there are so many examples of that. They were better before, though, before Purgatory. Dean thinks it’s probably something to do with the fact that in Purgatory, he forgot how to be a person. That when Sam was with Amelia in his soft-focus life, he forgot how to deal with someone who isn’t a person. He reaches back into the fridge and grabs two beers and drops down across from his brother. Pops both tops with his ring and pushes one across the table. He’s always been—Dean thinks he’s always been a little less of a human being than Sam. Daddy’s blunt little instrument, he thinks bitterly.
“I was going to die,” Sam says. “I was ready for that. I was going to die, and the trials were going to kill me, and now—now none of that is happening, and everything is changing so fast.”
“Okay,” Dean says. “You’re benched,” he says, thinking of Benny’s closed eyes as Dean swung his arm, thinking it was supposed to be me who did the trials.
“No,” Sam says. “Dean, that’s not how this works. You don’t just get to—"
Dean rolls his beer between his hands. “That’s not what—” he says. “If you’re walking out the door still thinking—still thinking, anywhere in your head, that it’s your time to die.” Dean takes a pull of his beer. He keeps his eyes on the wood grain of the tabletop because he knows that if he closes them he’ll see the moment the blade hit Benny’s neck. “You telling me that you don’t have some boring dusty book you’re dying to translate?”
Sam shrugs. “I mean, I do, but—”
“We’ve got the manpower,” Dean says. Tries to smile. “Charlie is dying to try out her new crossbow.”
“Yeah,” Sam says and drinks. “Okay,” he says finally. “But only—ONLY—if it’s a simple hunt. Anything complicated…”
“Anything complicated and we’ll let you ride to our rescue,” Dean promises. “Or run, anyway. Don’t think they make horses big enough to be ridden by a moose.”
“You’ve seen a real horse,” Sam asks. “Like, in person. I know you have, I was there,” and like that they’re off, the familiar back and forth of banter and barbs that circle deliberately around everything they don’t say.
*
The next hunt that comes up looks like a simple salt and burn in Tulsa. Charlie sulks until Dean finally rolls his eyes and lets her load her crossbow into Baby with the rest of their supplies.
“If you shoot me in the ass with that thing, we are going to have words,” he tells her.
“Yay!” she says and starts looking for the perfect place for it under the Impala’s false trunk bottom.
Sam calls before they even hit Wichita. “Heya, Sammy,” Dean says, chucking his phone on the dashboard on speaker. Charlie has her laptop out in the passenger seat next to him, feet drawn up and legs contorted to support it in a way that makes Dean’s hips ache just to look at.
“I was doing some more reading,” Sam says. “You might want to check out the McDaniel family as well. Some of the older reports in the archives say they have a feud with the Kidds that goes back to the 1850s.”
“The McDaniels also cremate their deceased,” Charlie cuts in. “They’re on the list, but I was thinking we’d check out the Innis family first. Looks like there was some bad blood in the 1940s between them over a piece of land that’s being developed now.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line. Sam coughs. Dean reaches over to offer a hand to Charlie and she high-fives it.
“Right,” Sam says. “Sounds like you’ve got a handle on it. I just had a bit of free time, and —”
“Uh-huh,” Dean says. “How’s that translation going, by the way?”
Sam coughs. “Just about to get started,” he says.
“Right,” Dean says. “Look, as touching as this concern is, we’ll be fine.”
“I know that,” Sam says. “I just —”
“Yeah, I get it,” Dean says.
“Okay,” Sam says. “I’ll—”
“Benny speaks decent Latin,” Dean says, casually. “And French.” Like he hasn’t been trying to figure out how to drop it into conversation. “You know. If that dusty old book is part of the international Men of Letter collection—"
“Yeah,” Sam says, abruptly. Then, “Sure. Thanks.” More normally: “Call me if you run into any problems.”
“Will do,” Dean says, and hangs up.
Charlie makes it through two and a half Led Zeppelin tracks before she closes the lid of her laptop and unwinds her legs. “So,” she says, in what she has to know isn’t passing for a casual voice, “Sam and Benny. They seem to not like each other.”
Dean snorts. “You noticed.”
“I mean, yeah,” Charlie says. “Can we—why is that? Don’t take this the wrong way, but between you and Sam, if one of you was going to befriend a vampire, from the books, I would have thought—”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Dean says. “Sam’s always been the one wanting to let monsters go. Carry on their lives. With far less proof of good intentions than we have from Benny.”
Charlie swings her hands wide. “Wasn’t there even a thing,” she asks, “with another set of vampires?”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “And I’d say it’s the difference between knowing something’s out there and being okay with it sleeping down the hall, but he was like this when Benny was STATES away as well. Got a hunter to follow him around at all times and everything.”
“Yikes,” Charlie says. Barren fields and sparse trees roll by along the highway.
“I don’t get it,” Dean says. “I don’t—Benny was there for me when Sam wasn’t. When Cas wasn’t. He’s the only one who hasn’t let me down and the entire reason I’m alive. He’s the only reason I got out of purgatory. He’s the only reason Sam got out of Purgatory.”
“Ooooh,” Charlie says, like that make everything make more sense instead of less.
“No ‘ooooh,’” Dean says. “That doesn’t—Sam should be—he should be fucking grateful for Benny, to Benny.”
“Yeah,” Charlie says. “Probably.”
Dean leans over and turns off Physical Grafitti. “Talk,” he says.
“Look,” Charlie says. “I don’t know Sam as well as I know you, but. I wonder. Do you think there’s a chance that Benny makes Sam feel guilty?”
Dean snorts. “Doubt it. Whole time I was in Purgatory, dragging Benny up every cliff and through every thicket to find Cas’s ass, Sam wasn’t even looking for me. And Benny—despite everything Sam did, he went back into Purgatory to save his ass.”
“Yeah,” Charlie says, “exactly,” and turns the music back on.
“But,” Dean says, later, as Wichita comes into sight, “what, you think Sam needs to believe that Benny can’t be trusted? That doesn’t—”
“I don’t know,” Charlie says. “But I wouldn’t exactly call any of us ‘emotionally well adjusted.’”
Dean takes the 15 out of Wichita. Kansas Turnpike’s faster but he doesn’t feel like paying the toll and there’s an itch behind his eyes that’s only ever really satisfied when he’s watching blacktop roll out in front of him.
Charlie pulls her laptop back out, twists herself up again, and works quietly for the next couple of hours.
“It’s not just Sam,” Dean says, eventually, watching the yellow lines play out, sweeping the ditches and fields for flashing eyes, playing the accelerator out so that they flow smoothly just above the speed of traffic. “Benny and Cas can’t stand each other either.”
“Benny the one you broke up with?” she asks eventually, not pushing him to make eye contact, just tapping away at her keyboard. Dean can hear her asking the same thing back in that Moondoor tent.
“Yeah,” Dean says this time, and then “but we weren’t—we weren’t actually—"
Charlie’s hand creeps out to near his shoulder, then retreats. “But did you want to?” she asks, and that’s the right question, the question that no one has ever bothered to actually ask him before.
“Maybe,” Dean says, looking at the road, but leaning into her touch, just a little. His voice is low and rough. “It’s complicated.”
“Yeah,” Charlie says. “It usually is.”
*
The salt-and-burn goes about as smoothly as it ever does, which is to say not smoothly at all. They make it out the other side with nothing much more than bumps and bruises and some follicular casualties, which is to say that Charlie gets a bit enthusiastic with the lighter fluid but the ghost goes up in flames.
“Might have been a bit of overkill,” Charlie says when the spirit has stopped screaming and finally dissipated.
“Just the right amount of kill,” Dean says, taking her proffered hand and letting her help pull him upright. “Should have seen Sam and me after our first solo ghost hunt. Any one you walk away from.”
“Yeah,” Charlie says. Walks with him back to the Impala, parked behind some bushes so they can make a getaway before someone calls the cops on account of the fire and screaming. “I’ve kind of been wanting to get a bob, anyway.”
“Sure,” Dean says, starting the car as he hears the first, distant call of sirens. “Maybe look for somewhere in Wichita, though,” he suggests, because she has a list of salons open on her phone.
“Way ahead of you,” she says, and they spray gravel as they peel out.
*
“Very Marion Davies,” Benny says when he sees them, giving a friendly tug to one of Charlie’s curls. “Picture didn’t do it justice.”
“It’s cute, right?” she asks. “You waited for us to get back to do Return of the King, right?”
Benny raises an eyebrow. “I did promise.”
“Wait, since when do the two of you text each other?” Dean asks.
“Is that a problem?” Charlie asks, and she looks—sharp.
“Nah,” Dean says, placating for some reason he doesn’t understand. “Can’t be playing telephone between the two of you forever.”
Charlie looks satisfied at that. Links one arm with Dean and one with Benny. “For Gondor!” she yells, hauling them behind her.
“Nice hair, Charlie,” Kevin yells from the kitchen as they pass by.
“Wait,” Sam calls into the hallway behind him. “Dean, are you missing an eyebrow?”
*
Dean thinks about the sharpness with which Charlie had asked him if it was okay if she texted Benny. He thinks about it a lot, over the next couple of days. Thinks about how Benny’s barely left the bunker, other than long, aimless walks at night from which he returns smelling of night air and dry grass.
He walks up to Benny’s door two times, three times, before he steels himself and knocks.
“Come on in,” Benny says. He’s sitting at his desk, reading. Looks up from his book and is good enough to pretend like he couldn’t hear the doppler of Dean’s heartbeat approach and fall away from his door.
“Hey,” Dean says. Sits down at the foot of Benny’s bed, awkwardly. “Look,” he says. Pauses. “I was thinking.” Tries to figure out what to say. “If you ever want to leave—"
“I understand if you want me gone,” Benny says. His face is—he looks unsurprised, like he’s been waiting for—
“No,” Dean says. “That’s not what I—” He takes a deep breath. “Look, give me a minute.”
“All right,” Benny says. Carefully closes his book and stacks it with the others on his desk.
Dean untwists his hands. Runs his fingertips across the soft afghan folded at the foot of Benny’s bed. “You’re allowed to leave if you want,” Dean says. “I want you here. You’re welcome for as long as you want. But you’re not a prisoner. You don’t need a day pass for good behavior or anything. If you want—if you want to go to the mall, or you want to go get books that Charlie or I didn’t pick out for you, or you want—I don’t know, sushi or new suspenders or some shit, you’re free to leave, for as long as you want. Get a job, or—Or if you want to take off for good—"
Benny nods. “Okay,” he says.
Dean feels the bottom drop out of his stomach. “Right,” he says.
Benny laughs, gentle. “Not that last one, Chief,” he says. He gets up and settles next to Dean on the bed, and Dean’s throat goes a little dry as Benny’s firm thigh presses against his. “Believe me, if I was going to take off for good, I’d let you know.”
Would you, Dean thinks, thinking about how Sam’d told him Benny was going to stay behind in Purgatory.
Benny must sense the change in Dean’s heart rate or something because he leans his shoulder against Dean’s for a long, comforting moment. “Promise,” Benny says.
“Okay,” Dean says, and sits there, thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder, and tries to take him at his word.
*
Sam and Benny appear to have worked out some kind of uneasy truce while Dean and Charlie were gone.
Dean still bristles if they stand too close together or if Sam’s voice rises a little too sharply when he’s talking to Benny, but he feels less like he’s riding a constant knife’s edge. He wants to know what the terms they’ve come to are, if Benny bared his neck, if Sam opened his hand or his arm because he couldn’t make himself take Dean’s word on Benny’s self-control.
He wants to know, because he closes his eyes and sees Sam, bleeding and hand ready on a machete, sees Benny with his eyes and jaw tight and chin tilted back.
He wants to know, but everyone’s heads are still attached and he doesn’t want to throw off whatever delicate balance has been struck.
*
“What if I was thinking I’d like to try hunting some time,” Benny says. He’s gamely cutting a piece off of his pancake.
“Don’t eat that,” Dean says, chewing mechanically. “These taste terrible. I can’t imagine how much worse they’d be for you.”
“They’re not that bad,” Sam sulks, cutting into his own pancake. “Mmmm,” he says around a mouthful.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” Kevin says. “But these really are that bad.”
“You tried,” Charlie says, patting Sam on the shoulder as he tries to subtly spit his pancake back into his napkin.
“Yeah,” Sam says, finally. “They are that bad. No one eat them.”
“Thank the lord,” Benny says, putting his fork down heavily.
“Hunting?” Sam asks.
“Yeah,” Benny says. “I’m not bad with a blade.”
Kevin snorts. “I bet being able to rip people apart with your bare hands doesn’t hurt, either.”
Benny inclines his head in acknowledgment and deliberately lets his fangs drop.
“Oh my god, stop eating those,” Sam tells Dean, and pulls his plate away from him.
“Isss fine,” Dean says around a mouth full of awful, vaguely pancake-shaped food. Sam’s trying, he really is. And Dean - well, Dean’s eaten worse.
“No,” Sam says, batting at Dean’s hand as Dean covers his plate.
“I’ll never get over how cool that is,” Kevin says, looking at Benny’s teeth.
“You sure?” Dean asks Benny as he puts his teeth away.
“Might as well start pulling my weight around here,” Benny says.
Dean stiffens a little at that, because it’s one thing if Benny’s looking for something to do, but - “Hey!” Dean says as Sam uses his distraction to get the plate of terrible, terrible pancakes away from him.
“Oooh,” Charlie says. “That means you’re going to need a Fed suit.”
“I’m heading into Manhattan next week to pick up some herbs and metals we can’t get here,” Sam says. “I could take you.”
Charlie waves her hand. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. She winds an arm through Dean’s, and pokes him none-too-subtly with her elbow. “Dean and I will take you,” she tells Benny. “I need to pick up Riders of Rohan and a glave anyway.”
*
There’s a soft knock at Dean’s door, barely a ghost of a noise, not nearly enough to wake him if the light spilling out from around the doorframe was a lie and he was actually asleep. When he opens it, Charlie’s standing there, half turned away.
“You’re up,” she says, then, “of course you are, this would be a weird thing for me to be hallucinating about.”
“Yeah,” he says, taking in the dark smudges beneath her eyes and the way she seems to be vibrating a little. “Monster movies or terrible romcoms?” he asks, stepping aside to let her into his room, letting his face perform a complicated and exaggerated dance of disgust at the last option.
She snorts. “Spare me the pantomime of heteronormative pretense.”
Dean shrugs. “You want me to —” he trails off, gesturing down the hall.
“Yeah,” she says, pulling out the box of movies from beneath his bed. “Duh.”
Dean waits outside Benny’s room for a heartbeat or two before the other man opens it. Dean tilts his head across the hall, to where Charlie is visible through the open door, pushing the box back under Dean’s bed. Benny nods wordlessly and they crowd back into Dean’s room. Charlie has pulled a copy of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms from the Harryhausen box set Dean picked up at some point after this became a thing. Kind of a thing. When it moved from ‘educating Benny on some of the pop culture he’d missed out on,’ Benny talking about a string of favorite b-movies he saw in first-run theatres in the 1950s, Charlie yelling about Game of Thrones, and neither Benny or Charlie having seen a single All Saints’ Day movie or even having heard of Hatchet Man.
Neither Charlie nor Dean sleeps too well, sometimes. Benny doesn’t need much. Dean thinks, sometimes, that maybe he should go out and get a big TV and a couch and set up a recreation room, or something. That would make sense. But he worries, a little, that if he points out how often they do it, that Charlie and Benny will decide they have better things to do. And even if not—yeah, they haul an extra chair or two around sometimes, depending, but there’s this delicate balance they’ve found of how close they can sit and how many people fit on a bed, depending on injuries, and Dean—honestly, Dean finds he kind of likes it, the casual touch. And if he’s had one of those days where he can feel the nightmares nipping at his heels, he can just—if he grumbles and throws on a movie and one or the other joins him, sometimes he can fall asleep before the bad dreams catch him.
*
“You decent?” Dean asks, rapping at the change room door with one knuckle. The big band music cuts out and Dean can see that Charlie has abandoned her post in the waiting area to flirt with a woman who has been trying on slim-cut men’s blazers deliberately in her line of sight.
“Never,” Benny drawls from the other side of the door. The air is filled with the standard off-brand classical music now that Charlie’s been distracted from her shopping montage. “But I’m dressed enough for your delicate sensibilities.”
Dean snorts and pushes his way into the change room when he hears the flimsy lock open. “Look, man, I’m just saying pants are common courtesy,” like they didn’t spend a year together in Purgatory with one set of clothes each.
The door closes behind him, and it’s not exactly a small change room, but it leaves them close enough that limbs brush. Close enough that Dean can smell the soft sandalwood of Benny’s soap over the almost-sharp scent of him.
“Uh-huh,” Benny says, examining himself critically in the mirror.
“Common courtesy,” Dean says, eyes stuck on Benny’s broad hands, Benny’s fingers, as he carefully, practicedly, does up the buttons on the crisp dress shirt. Benny’s wearing dark gray slacks and there’s a thread of blue through the white of the dress shirt, the shirt finally one broad enough for his chest without drooping elsewhere, and Dean’s mouth is dry as the hollow of Benny’s throat disappears beneath the buttons. He wonders if Benny can smell it, the sharp punch of desire that cuts from the back of Dean’s throat down his spine, pools low in his torso and the soles of his feet, the curl of his toes.
“Charlie work up the nerve to talk to that girl out there?” Benny asks, draping a tie loose around his neck. His nostrils don’t flare out at Dean or anything, so Dean thinks he’s probably safe.
“Oh, yeah,” Dean says, words coming out surprisingly normal. He saw far more of Benny’s body when they were in Purgatory, but the same gray flatness that wiped away so many needs—food, sleep, water, blood—compressed desire in the same way. “Figured we should give her a couple minutes,” he says, like what he actually came in here to say wasn’t what he says next, which is, “Look, I just—I wanted to make sure that you want to do this.”
Benny’s hands still on his tie and Dean automatically reaches out to take the ends.
“I was enjoying the musical montage, actually,” Benny says. Tilts his head up towards Dean as Dean crosses one end of the tie over the other. The fabric catches slightly where Dean’s hands are rough.
“The hunting,” Dean says, hands working. “I know you took out your nest, and that punk back in Carencro,” he says, setting the knot. “But you had your reasons then,” he says, looping the wide end of the tie through the knot. “You don’t actually have to earn your keep or anything. You don’t—you don’t owe me anything, okay.”
“Hey,” Benny says. His hands come up to rest on Dean’s as Dean carefully tightens the knot to the hollow of Benny’s throat. “I’m sure,” Benny says. Dean’s knuckles rest against the solid sweep of his collarbone. Beny’s skin is enough above room temperature that it wouldn’t completely freak out a civilian, but low enough that someone like Sam or Dean who accepts the existence of vampires will know.
“Okay,” Dean says, and uncurls his hand against Benny’s collarbone, fingers flat on the trapezius muscles sweeping up his neck, heel of his palm nestled into the shadow of intercostal space. A short, high laugh cuts through the tinkly cocoon of classical music, and Dean’s lungs expand wide as the world comes crashing back in.
“Okay,” Benny repeats, and his hands tighten once around Dean’s before releasing.
“Okay,” Dean says again. “This is the one, by the way.”
Benny tilts his head and cocks an eyebrow.
“The suit,” Dean says, heat in his face. “I’ll see if they can find you a matching jacket.”
The salesman raises a half-knowing, half-judgmental eyebrow at Dean when Dean makes his way back out, but Dean’s still put together everywhere but for the color in his cheeks.
“I’ll see if they can find you a matching jacket,” Dean parrots back to himself under his breath and he drops back into the chair outside the changing room and stares blankly at the ceiling.
Shit.
*
Later, Dean looks over to see Charlie gesturing at him significantly. The woman who was flirting with her is ringing something up at the till, and Charlie is shooting Dean a complicated and exaggerated set of pantomimes. Dean fights to keep the corner of his mouth from twisting in amusement, loses the battle when she pulls out her phone and starts texting him. His phone buzzes in his pocket, and Charlie looks up from her phone to find him flashing her an exaggerated wink and a thumbs-up. She flips him off as she follows the woman out of the store.
Good for her, Dean thinks, standing to wave out the store window at her. One of them should be getting somewhere with someone.
“We lose Charlie?” Benny’s voice comes, a low rumble close enough to Dean’s shoulder that he should probably worry about the fact he didn’t notice Benny appear.
Dean watches as the other woman hands Charlie a helmet for a motorcycle. “Just for a bit,” Dean says. “She’s just going to-” He pulls out his phone to text her nice, sees the message she sent. “She’s going to a ‘butterfly garden,’” Dean says.
“That newfangled slang or something?” Benny asks.
Dean snorts. “Honestly, I’d give it even odds.”
They stand there silently. Benny has the new suit slung over one arm. He’s back in his dark coat and white shirt, top button undone, and Dean’s fingers twitch a little at the memory of the tie sliding through his fingers, the wing of Benny’s collarbone against his palm.
“You hungry?” Benny asks.
Dean’s stomach growls, saving him from having to try to figure out what way to answer the question.
*
“You want us to steal you a car while we’re in town?” Dean asks, absently licking a rivulet of vanilla ice cream where it’s making its way down the back of his hand. It’s a hot day out, and they’re sitting deep enough under some trees that the shade brings some temperature relief to Dean, and light relief to Benny. Dean’s down to his t-shirt, sitting in the grass and leaning back against the trunk of a tree with an ice cream cone in hand. He hadn’t even realized he was hungry until Benny suggested it.
“Sorry?” Benny asks, and he’s barely touched his milkshake, which is funny because he’s the one who wanted ice cream in the first place. There’s this look on his face like he’s half somewhere else, and Dean wonders if they’re far enough out of the sun for him.
“Car,” Dean repeats. “You want us to steal you one of your own while we’re in town?”
Benny shakes his head. “Nah, brother,” he says, and takes a long drink from his straw.
“You sure?” Dean asks. “No way we’re going to be able to get that piece of shit camper of yours back at this point.” You should have a way to leave, when you want to, Dean doesn’t know how to say.
“Don’t want to leave some poor family out their vehicle, not unless I have to,” Benny says.
A terrible thought occurs to Dean. “You didn’t pay money for that piece of junk you were driving, did you?” he asks.
“I strike you as someone who knows how to reprogram one of these fancified computer cars?” Benny asks, which is exactly the same as admitting that yes, he did pay money for it and shouldn’t be left unsupervised. “It was a hayburner, but it was good to have someplace to call my own.”
Dean, who learned to drive as soon as his feet could reach the pedals, who learned to hotwire a car not a month after that, blinks. “Huh,” he says, and “we’ll have to work on that.” There are some cars in the garage he’s been meaning to get up and running anyway. Or, he could always steal a car and pretend he hustled the money to get it on the cheap and sketchy, but he’s not sure if Benny’d be able to smell how recently someone else had owned it. The piece-of-shit truck Benny’d been driving was more than old enough that computers wouldn’t have been any kind of issue, which means paying actual money for it was either lack of know-how or some kind of personal code. “We’ll figure something out,” Dean says, leaning in to lick up a rivulet of ice cream that’s made its way across the back of his hand and to the turn of his wrist.
Benny chokes on his milkshake.
“You okay?” Dean asks. “They didn’t bless that milkshake or anything?”
Benny’s cough turns into a laugh in a way it couldn’t if breathing weren’t more a camouflage than a necessity for him.
Dean’s phone vibrates with a text from Charlie. It’s a pickup location and a close-up photo of a butterfly on some kind of yellow flower, because apparently “butterfly garden” wasn’t actually code for anything more fun.
These are the people Dean’s chosen to hang out with. Whom he’s chosen for friends. Who pay money for shitty, falling-apart trucks and take off with strangers to look at bugs.
Charlie spends most of the trip back to the Bunker texting and smiling out the window, eyes bright and crinkled, and Benny shares his milkshake as Dean drives.
*
“Hello, Dean,” Cas says, and Dean just about jumps out of his skin.
“We’ve talked about this,” Dean snarls, and his body pulls Cas into a hug even as it remembers the last time he saw Cas, the broken bones in Dean’s face and arm knitting back together, the taste of his own blood in his mouth.
Dean’s not sure what his heart is doing but it must be all over the place, because when he lets go of Cas, Benny is looking at him in concern. Concern shifts to suspicion as Benny and Cas regard each other carefully. Benny’s jaw clenches like he’s trying to keep his teeth back.
“Cas,” Sam says and pushes forward to try to hug Cas.
“So you’re an angel?” Charlie asks, “I have a literal list of questions for you,” she says, as Cas keeps staring impassively at Benny over Sam’s shoulder.
“Oh my god, not this again,” Dean whispers as Kevin says “What happened? Where’s the tablet?” because Kevin is apparently the only fucking adult they know.
“The tablet is—the tablets are out of play,” Cas says. “A deal has been struck.”
Sam makes a face. “No offense, Cas, but we’re going to need more details than that.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t responded to any of your prayers,” Cas tells Dean, like Dean is totally cool with everyone knowing he’s been praying to Cas. “The situation has become even more complicated. There is a being called Metatron, and he—”
“Wait, Metatron is real?” Sam asks. Pauses. “I’m not sure why I keep being surprised by these things.”
“Nor am I,” Cas says. “The arbitrary boundaries of your skepticism are a constant point of confusion to me.”
“Tablets,” Kevin says.
“Yes,” Cas says. “Being that you have decided against using them, and that Heaven and Hell are currently embroiled in a multifaceted civil war that includes a battalion of prisoners that Metatron has released from the prisons of both Heaven and Hell, the decision was made to throw the tablets that we were in possession of into several suns.”
“Bullshit,” Dean says.
“You really think we’re going to take your word on that?” Sam says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I still don’t know what went down in that crypt, but Dean was —”
“Dean was fine,” Dean says. Cas looks stricken. Benny shifts. “Dean is always fine,” Dean says. “Christ.”
“I—” Cas says. “I know that currently, I have not done much to regain your trust, but—”
“Was it last week?” Kevin breaks in.
“Yes,” Cas says, warily.
“Okay,” Kevin says. “Okay, I believe him.”
Dean blinks. Cas looks more surprised than any of them.
“I have questions,” Sam says.
“I felt something,” Kevin says. “Last week.”
Cas nods. “As a prophet, you are linked to the tablets. It makes sense that you might have registered it somehow.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Sam asks.
Kevin winces. “Honestly, at the time I thought it was from the pancakes.”
“They weren’t that—" Sam takes a deep breath. “Okay. Maybe they were that bad. But I still don’t—”
“I’m with Sam,” Dean says, crossing his arms. “I don’t—Cas, how do we know you’re not still mind-whammied? That makes more sense than Crowley and Naomi deciding to destroy the most powerful weapon they could get their hands on.”
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Castiel says. “There was a weapon of mass destruction—one that had the potential to destroy the entire universe in our struggle for it. I’m not saying that the choice was without its detractors, but ultimately an executive decision was made to remove it from play before it destroyed the entirety of creation. It was logical. I don’t understand why that decision is so hard to comprehend.”
“Because we’re human,” Benny says. At some point, he’d put himself right in Dean’s space, and Dean didn’t consciously notice. Benny clears his throat. “Or, we were born that way, anyway. I remember when they dropped the bombs on Hiroshima. I remember the first pictures that came out, the inverse shadows on the walls. You know what it was like to come back to a world with this many nuclear weapons?”
“Ah,” Cas says, “yes.”
Kevin and Charlie—who are too young to remember the Cold War—and Sam and Dean—who had a childhood in which John Winchester and monsters and a yellow-eyed demon loomed much closer than the threat of nuclear war—shrug.
“Believe me, or don’t,” Cas says. “But if you lock the portion of the tablet you hold away, if you ward it and bury it in stone and keep it somewhere only you know, no one will be able to find it, and you will have it in case of future need.”
“So we’re holding onto the last atom bomb, just in case?” Charlie clarifies. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Later, when Kevin has pored over the Enochian notes Cas provided to check their providence, when they’ve found the last of the ingredients in the farthest of the Men of Letters storerooms, Dean finds Cas standing in the hallway outside his room, looking at the closed door.
“It’s all still there,” Dean says. “Your stuff. You didn’t have much shit, but it’s all still there. It’s still your room.”
“Yes,” Cas says, looking at the closed door. “Dean,” he says. “I—”
“You’re not staying,” Dean says. He can taste the dust-dank-still air of the crypt on his tongue. Can taste his own blood in his mouth.
“No,” Cas says. He takes a step towards Dean. Reaches—starts to reach for Dean’s arm, and Dean’s heart goes a little wild and Cas falls back. “Dean, I’m —”
“We’re not talking about that,” Dean says. Tries not to hear the snap of his radius and ulna. He closes his eyes for a second, can see Cas standing over him, Dean’s blood glittering on Cas’s fist as it arcs back toward him. Feel his zygomatic cave. “Wasn’t you.”
“It was,” Cas says.
“That why’re you leaving?” Dean asks. “Because if so, you’re also the one who stopped. Who healed me up.”
Cas closes his eyes. Dean wonders what he’s seeing, in the long moment before they open again. “It’s not that simple,” he says.
Leaving is what you’re good at, Dean wants to say. Wants to know if that would hurt. Thinks about landing in Purgatory and turning around to find Cas gone. Thinks of Cas disappearing wordlessly, leaving Dean alone in the dust-mildew-blood scent of the crypt. Of the water closing around Cas as he walked into that lake to explode.
Dean—Dean knows that he’s being shitty. That every situation was complicated and he’s done his fair share of shit. That by the sounds of it, they’re this close to a battle between Heaven, Hell, and freaking Metatron spilling over onto Earth and becoming something else he and Sam are going to have to clean up after, like they always do. That it’s not about him. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay. It never is, is it?” he asks, deliberately reaching out to clasp Cas’s shoulder.
“It’s not—I’m not saying I’ll never be back,” Cas says. “I wish—” He Inhales. Dean can feel the movement of his shoulder as his lungs expand.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, buddy, I know.”
*
Dean lies awake when Cas is gone. Leave your shit, he’d told Cas. It’ll always be your room. You can always — he’d said, trailing off, because Cas was looking at him in that way that Dean figured out years ago meant that Cas was looking right past him and into his soul. Dean’s been lying in the dark for what feels like—and what the red glowing numbers beside his bed confirm to be—hours.
Dean stares up at the ceiling and rubs at a phantom ache in his arm, and he’s not sure what he’s feeling. If it’s the memory of Benny’s soul curled under his skin, Cas knitting his bones back together, or the strain in his muscles from taking Benny’s head off.
*
“There’s never a case around when you want one,” Dean bitches. Drops his head face-first into the book he’s reading. Trying to read. He lets his eyes drift closed. He’s been on the same paragraph for the last half bag of chips. It’s been weeks since something cropped up. They’re all gathered in the library because Kevin wanted to use the downtime to do a research binge on vrykolakas.
Sam, pacing back and forth with a book, muttering in Latin under his breath, stops. “Are you seriously complaining about a lack of suspicious murders?”
“Course he is,” Benny says, turning a page without looking up.
“Yes,” Dean says. Expends far too much effort to wedge his eyes back open. “Because there is going to BE a murder if I have to keep reading about the —” he double-checks “medicinal and mystical properties of human urine.”
Kevin looks up. “What? Why are you reading that?”
Dean waves his hand. “It was in the pile of books you shoved at me.”
Sam frowns. “Are you eating chips while handling ancient books? Ancient books on urine?”
“No,” Dean says around a mouth full of barbeque. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Charlie tilt the bag away from him and surreptitiously dust crumbs off on her pants. Benny doesn’t bother to cover his laugh.
“You shouldn’t be reading that,” Kevin says. “It doesn’t—didn’t it seem weird that it didn’t have anything to do with vrykolakas?”
“It’s an undead vampire werewolf,” Dean says. “How am I supposed to know what kind of lore surrounds an undead vampire werewolf? I figured you eggheads had a reason,” Dean says. Kicks his feet up on the table and grins pretty. Posing just a bit. “That’s how this usually works. You smart people find something, point me at it, and I kill it.” Then—“Hey, OW,” as Charlie starts hitting him over the head with her bag of chips.
“Stop it,” she says and smacks him with the chips again. Unfortunately, Dean had thrown himself into a precariously balanced position in order to flex his thighs while he mugged with his feet on the table, and when he goes to block her next swing he over-balances in the chair and crashes down on his back.
“Huh,” Dean says into the silence that follows. “Did you know there’s a rune up there that looks like the Dead Kennedys logo?”
Charlie drops down on her back beside him. “Huh,” she says, looking at the glyphs carved into the roofs and beams. “You know, I’ve never thought about how many mystical symbols look like the logos from anarcho-punk bands, but the one next to it is one swirly thing past Husker Du’s.”
“Is Husker Du really anarchist, though?” Dean asks.
“Husker who?” Sam asks.
“Awww, did the college radio station only play music from screaming girl groups and soft, plaintive guitar from misunderstood boys?” Dean asks.
Sam coughs. “There was also a lot of dead air and slam poetry,” he says.
“You’re all so old,” Kevin says.
Benny looms into Dean’s field of view, offering a hand to both him and Charlie, pulling them effortlessly to their feet. Dean’s heart definitely doesn’t thump a little at the casual show of strength, or the way Benny’s hand seems to linger on his for a moment or two longer than necessary.
“It’s called an iPod,” Charlie tells Kevin. “Please tell me you’ve at least heard of The Pixies.”
“Who even has an iPod anymore?” Kevin asks.
“It’s called vinyl,” Dean insists. “Sound quality is heads and tails above—”
Charlie crosses her arms. “Tell me,” she says. “Do you, personally, own any vinyl?”
“Yes,” Dean says confidently, hoping it’ll carry him through.
“Really?” Charlie asks. “And where do you store it? Because I have seen the contents of both your nerd box and porn drawer—"
Kevin starts laughing.
Sam closes his book and drops down in a chair at the table. “I WISH I still didn’t understand this conversation.”
“—and you have no vinyl of any kind anywhere,” Charlie says, “But if you want to talk sexto—" and falls silent as Dean throws a hand over her mouth. He scowls as threateningly as possible at her, and she raises an entirely unimpressed eyebrow in response. “Sixteen different John Wayne movies,” Charlie finishes when Dean removes his hand.
Kevin is still laughing. Sam is thunking his head on the table. Benny looks a little disgruntled, a little constipated, or something. “What’s the matter?” Dean asks. “You offended by my stash of… westerns?”
“Nah,” Benny says. “Only by your taste in cowboys.”
“I think them are fighting words,” Charlie mock whispers.
Dean crosses his arms. “You got a problem with the Duke?”
“Man knew how to ride, but he clearly hated horses,” Benny says.
“Lies!” Dean says. “Damn, dirty lies.”
Benny shakes his head. “I pre-date cars. I’ve spent enough time on horseback to know when someone’s only riding because he has to.”
“Huh,” Dean says, and does his best impression of someone whose brain hasn’t just imploded.
“Right,” Sam says. “Can we please go back to talking about medicinal uses for human urine?”
*
“Feel like a road trip?” Dean asks, throwing himself down on Charlie’s half-made bed. “Uggh,” he says. “Your mattress is terrible.”
“Yeah,” Charlie says, twisting at her desk to look at him. “I’ve been meaning to complain to the management that the quality of this establishment is really not up to the level I expect for the high, high price I’m paying.”
“Drop the complaint in the suggestion box and we’ll see what we can do.” Dean waves his hand lazily. “Road trip?”
Charlie crosses her arms across the back of her chair. “When?” she asks. “Also, why? Also, where?”
“Why, because I’m going stir-crazy,” Dean says. “Might have a case in Provo, but I’ll be honest, it’s weak. I want action, I want adventure, I want to stare at a different ceiling while I pretend to sleep.”
Charlie wrinkles her nose. “Ugh,” she says. “Utah? No thanks.”
“You’ve got a date with butterfly girl this weekend, huh?” Dean says. Grabs the Rubik’s Cube from her bedside table and starts fiddling with it.
“Yes,” Charlie says. “Yes, I do, and her name is Parisa, but I stand by my ‘ugggh, Utah’ statement. Especially in July. Sam already turned you down?”
“Yeah,” Dean says. Swears when he loses a white row and can’t get it back. “He’s pretty sure it’s just college kids dicking around over the summer, not a wraith.”
“Utah in July, and potential frat bros? Double pass.”
Dean grimaces. “Figured as much,” he says. “Sam’s probably right. Provo, man.” He remembers Bobby once laughing and dismissing a case just because it was in Provo. You live long enough and you learn a few things, boy Bobby’d said. Like that nothing interesting ever happens in Provo.
“Take Benny,” she says, waggling her eyebrows. “Gives you an excuse to put him in the suit.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Dean says, with as much conviction and dignity as he can muster, which is even less than normal while playing with a rainbow twisty cube.
“Uh-huh,” Charlie says, holding out her hands for the Rubik’s cube and catching it when Dean tosses it to her. “Sure,” she says, and, “What the hell did you do to this?” as Dean flushes and darts for the door.
*
Benny’s in his room, opens the door as Dean’s knuckles hit it. “Come on in, brother,” he says.
Dean drops down on Benny’s bed, much like he did with Charlie’s. Because he threw himself on Charlie’s, and his brain is insisting that it’ll be suspicious if he doesn’t do the same here. Benny’s bed is neatly made, sharp corners and well-fluffed pillows, extra blankets folded at the foot. Dean makes a face. “Your mattress is just as bad as Charlie’s,” he says. “Seriously. Does no one else in this bunker care about their spines?”
Benny laughs a little. His eyes on Dean are—not sharp, but intent. “Feels mighty fine to me. ‘Course, I haven’t had a real bed since the 1960s.”
“Right,” Dean says. The blankets smell a little like the laundry detergent they use and a little like Benny. “You might welcome a motel room bed, if this is what you’ve been sleeping on,” Dean offers.
Benny’s face goes a bit distant, and Dean swings himself upright, rests his elbows on his knees. Dean kicks himself, just a bit. “How’d you feel about a bit of a road trip?” he asks. “Stretch your legs, save a life, maybe get to kill something.”
Benny grins, teeth sharp. “Sounds like my kind of a time.”
*
“You care if we take the I-70?” Dean asks, when they’re loading the car. It’s dark out, sun starting to paint the faintest of lights along the horizon. He’d gotten up when he was tired of staring at the ceiling, found Benny making breakfast sandwiches in the kitchen. Dean’s dressed down in plaid and a henley and soft-worn jeans, has his suit lying in the back seat because it’s an all-day drive.
“Driver’s choice,” Benny says, inclining his head.
“Cool,” Dean says.
“80’s faster,” Dean says later, after Denver, after they’ve broken for lunch in the brightest part of the day. “I-80’s faster, but Nebraska is as open a pile of nothing as Kansas,” he says as the Rockies unspool around them. It’s a clear, bright day but it doesn’t seem to bother Benny much between his hat and sunglasses and the Impala’s visor pulled down.
“This is something else,” Benny says, voice soft. He’s staring out the window with almost rapt attention, watching the mountains surge above them as they travel deeper, the clear delineation of cloud shadows as they sweep across the geometric rock faces and proud, straight evergreens and blue-green lakes. “Spent most of my life in the coastal plains and the bayous and at sea.”
“Don’t get to come through here much myself,” Dean says. Tries to play it off like he doesn’t have favorite stretches of highway, because he knows that’s weird. Tries to play it off like it doesn’t mean something to him, that Benny gets the way this stretch of road twists something in Dean’s soul. Dean—Dean hasn’t been through here since Hell, and he’s weirdly glad to find that it means the same thing to him now.
“Do you ever just—stop and enjoy where you’re at?” Benny asks.
Dean shrugs. “Lives at stake,” he says, and “you spend enough time on the road and you just want to be the place you’re going,” he says. Knows that was true for Dad, for Sam. Sometimes Dean thinks he’s spent most of his life in the front seat of this car. When he was little he would sit up here beside his father, Sam in the back reading or doing homework while Dean juggled the sprawl of paper maps, keeping track of exits and interchanges. He got good, young, quickly, at finding the fastest route between two points. Pretty much as soon as Dean looked old enough to legally drive they got another car, because Dad and Sam got along best when they spent as little time together as possible. It was pretty much the same then, Dean up front with the window down, Sammy in the back seat reading or doing homework because Dean was damned if his little brother wasn’t going to get the chance to finish high school. It was easier then, sometimes, to just follow the straight line Dad cut across the country, rather than rifle through the mix of maps on the front passenger seat, risk getting wherever they were going late and finding Dad waiting and angry.
“Seems a shame to go so many places without really seeing them,” Benny says. Rests his elbow on the window and stares, captivated, through the glass. He relaxes a bit when they hit the Eisenhower Tunnel. It’s more than a mile through the mountain in gray concrete and solid fluorescents, and Dean holds his breath a little when they start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It always creeps up on him quicker than he thinks, a sudden burst of sunlight his eyes take a blink to adjust to. It always catches him by surprise, how exiting the tunnel into the thin mountain air feels like you’re flying out the top of the world.
Dean hears Benny’s breath catch, an honest physiological response rooted so deep in human psychology it cuts through things like ‘not actually needing to breathe.’ Dean grins. “Right?” he asks, watching the sky and the road and the way Benny’s hand presses reflexively against the glass at the mountains unwinding before them.
*
The coroner is short and harried, scraped-back hair and no-nonsense eyebrows. “No idea why the Feds are interested in this, but you’re not going to like it,” she says, rapid strides carrying her through the morgue to her desk. It’s pretty standard as far as these things go—piles of papers and a sloping, uneven stack of folders, small tumbles of microtapes from recorders, fifteen-year service plaque. Empty coffee cup and a bottle of hot sauce because, like hunting, it’s a job that makes you so inured to death you can eat anywhere. “Never seen anything like it,” she says as she locates the correct folder, as she flips through the case file.
“Wish I had a nickel for every time I’d heard that,” Dean whispers under his breath. Benny laughs, short and bright, and turns it into a cough as she looks up at them sharply.
“Doctor Isip,” Dean says. “I guarantee you we’ve seen weirder.”
“Perfectly healthy young man,” she says. “Except for the fact that his brain was a dried-out husk.”
“Strange indeed,” Benny says, doing a very poor impression of someone who wasn’t expecting to hear that.
“Uh-huh,” the corner says, narrowing her eyes at them beneath her heavy glasses as she hands over her notes.
*
“Have to say, I was kinda hoping it’d turn out to be a bunch of kids who’d gotten the wrong end of a psychedelic trip,” Benny says.
“Yeah,” Dean says, loosening his tie, flipping through files from the police report spread out on the table. “That’s the dream,” he says, waving the witness statements above his head until Benny takes them. Benny drops down at the table across from him. He’s stripped off the coat and has the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up his forearms. The table’s small, and their knees are close enough together that they bump occasionally. “Does wraith venom work on vampires?” Dean asks after a while.
“Didn’t in Purgatory,” Benny says. “No idea if it works topside.”
“Better hope it doesn’t,” Dean says. “Worst trip I’ve ever had.” He winces a little at the thought of it, the soul-bruised, beaten down feeling he’d rolled out of that asylum with, every fuck-up he’d ever made roiling through his head. “Last one we fought we had to get ourselves thrown in an asylum with Martin. Almost did not end well, thank you very much.” He snorts. “She even had the audacity to criticize my sleep patterns.” It was the hallucination she caused that criticized his sleep patterns, but it’s easier for Dean to chalk all its vicious words up to someone else rather than the monsters living in his own head.
“You don’t sleep enough, brother,” Benny says. His voice is easy but his eyes are tight.
“You know I don’t blame you for that, right?” Dean asks. “Martin. You know that I don’t expect you to just—lay down and die,” he says, hand and forearm tightening automatically.
Benny shrugs. “Course.”
“Do you?” Dean asks. “He was going to kill you. He threatened Elizabeth. She’s your blood, and he put a knife to her throat.”
“I was there for that bit, actually,” Benny observes. He’s trying for mild. “Can’t help but think that it could have ended a different way, if I’d kept my head.”
“You did keep your head,” Dean says. “That was pretty much the only way you were going to stay attached to it. You’d already left once, and he called you back. Forced you back. Anything less, and he was going to follow you to the ends of the earth. Once Martin got it in his head to end you, it was always going to end bloody.” Dean’s hand curls. Tightens. Martin had taken himself out of the game years ago for a reason. Martin had taken Dean down as soon as it became clear Dean wasn’t going to let him play out his little savior fantasy.
“Someone tries to take your head off, you fight back,” Dean says. “Doesn’t matter who it is.” He feels strain in his knuckles. “If it’s some random hunter. If it’s another vamp. If it’s me.”
Benny reaches out and puts his hand on Dean’s, and Dean doesn’t realize until that moment that his fist is clenched so tight it’s white through, that the tension is vibrating up his arm. “Okay,” Benny says, turning Dean’s hand over and encouraging him to relax it. His voice is soft but steady. He sounds tired, watching carefully as Dean unclenches his fist. There are crescent marks scored deep into his palm. Benny rubs his thumbs across Dean’s palm firmly, helping the blood flow back in. “Okay,” Benny says, meeting Dean’s eyes solidly and squeezing Dean’s hand.
“Okay,” Dean says, and “yeah,” and “good,” untangling a moment too late and sitting back in his chair and pretending he can’t still feel Benny’s hand on his.
Ur right, he texts Sam. Frat guys totally dehydrate their entire brains all the time.
*
Another body turns up drained in a wildlife reserve outside the city, staring blind-eyed at the sky while long grass plays across his blue-white skin and open mouth. The victim is one of the other frat guys they interviewed earlier, and Benny snorts a little as he drops down to get a closer look.
“Can’t say I much fault the choice of victim,” Benny says. He’s crouching beside the body, dress pants stretching over solid thighs, framed by the mountains low on the horizon on all sides of him. They’re far enough out the air is full of the overlapping drone and rise and fall of insects instead of city noise. It’s a complicated statement, because the vic is the kind of person society misses—white, young, well-off—but he was also—Dean totally understands why someone might snap and scramble his brains.
Dean doesn’t argue, because he’s been trying to come up with a way to refer to a collective group of douchebags. There’s a pun on the edge of his tongue but he just can’t find it.
*
Dean’s about to knock on the door of victim number two’s upstairs neighbor when Benny reaches out to grab his hand before knuckle hits wood, tilting his ear towards the door. “Shit,” he swears, a second before a crash hits Dean’s hearing. The door is locked, so Dean backs up just enough to drive his heel hard into the door above the lock, wood splintering under the blow. Benny sweeps in behind him. The apartment lights are out and it feels a little like Purgatory, the silver cast of light and knowing so effortlessly where Benny is and that he has his back. Their guns are loaded with silver bullets, because Dean figures that if either head trauma or general stabbing with a silver knife will do the job, a silver bullet between the eyes’ll more than do the trick.
The scene in the living room takes a second to register. The upstairs neighbor is lying on his back on the ground, and it’s only his ugly-ass Hawaiian shirt that tells Dean it’s him, because his face is the melted, rotted visage of a wraith, with what looks like an ornately-handled ceremonial silver knife protruding straight up from his eye socket. Ashy gray smoke drifts from where silver is embedded in skin. There’s a short figure standing over him. It’s a woman. The skin of her right hand is crackled as if burned, and the face reflected in the window, staring back at them with hollowed-out eyes and slip-shod cheeks, is that of another wraith. She holds their gaze in the window, unmoving.
“Hands up, turn around slow,” Dean barks.
She complies, arms slowly rising overhead as she turns to face them, pulled back hair giving way to serious brows and heavy glasses.
“Doctor Isip, I presume,” Benny says, because it’s definitely the coroner from the morgue.
She stands, still and unthreatening and face unreadable, all sagging flesh hidden back behind whatever magic helps them pass. “I’m going to assume you’re not actually Agents Kantner and Slick,” she says. Her voice is steady, but her right hand, overhead, is shaking a bit. The patterns burned into the flesh look to match the ornate handle of the knife in the eye of the other wraith.
“You wanna fill in some blanks here?” Dean asks, gesturing with his gun at the room.
She laughs, short and sharp. “Does it really matter? You’re going to kill me.”
“I’m curious,” Dean says. “Like a cat.” Thinks about the fifteen-year service award on her desk. That he went back through years of records and the only wraith-looking kills he could find were recent. Thinks about how nothing supernatural ever happens in Provo. “Like a cat. Lover’s quarrel? Territorial tiff?”
She snarls a little at the suggestion, but her shoulders settle lower and more-drawn in at her body. “Didn’t curiosity kill the cat?”
“Satisfaction brought it back,” Benny says. “Besides, been there, done that.”
“Tell me a lie,” Dean says, because there’s a theory taking shape behind his eyes. His gun doesn’t waver.
“Why?” she asks.
Dean steps closer, and his gun doesn’t waver. “Humor me.”
“I enjoy you drawing this out,” Isip says. Says, “My favorite workdays are when white men swan into my morgue telling me how to do my job,” and, “That cowboy hat you walked into the morgue with looked completely natural and you pulled it off well.”
“Hey,” Dean says. One hand automatically goes to the cowboy hat he’s not currently wearing. “No need to get personal.”
“If it’s the only hit I’m going to get in, I’m taking it,” she says. Gravity has pulled at the edges of her sleeves, revealing rings of jagged scar tissue, silver in the moonlight.
Dean looks over at Benny. Benny nods, and Dean knows he has enough of a read on her heartbeat to tell when she’s lying.
“Can’t imagine dead man’s brain goo tastes too good,” Dean says.
She shudders visibly. “I wouldn’t know,” she says.
Benny winces in sympathy but his aim doesn’t waver. “You’d be surprised,” Dean says. He thinks about Lenore and her crew, the way their faces had twisted at the thought of cow. Thinks about what you’re willing to eat when there are two mouths and the money ran out a week ago. “You hurting anyone?” he asks.
“You think I’d be living on the curdled aggregation of dead brain tissues and cerebral fluids if I was hurting people?” she asks. “Doesn’t matter what I tell you though, does it? I need to be put down, don’t I?”
There’s a pale band on her ring finger where something used to sit. “You know him?” Dean asks again, gesturing at the corpse on the living room floor. “This a marital dispute?”
“No,” she says, confused and angry-defeated. “No, I have no idea who he was, other than the asshole who’s managed to get me killed.”
Dean looks over at Benny, raises an eyebrow. Benny nods. “She’s telling the truth,” he says, tapping one hand above his heart. He’s—he’s more withdrawn than Dean would have thought, more cautious, less approving.
“We never would have known about you, if you hadn’t come here,” Dean says.
“If I’d known you two were hunters, I’d be out of town already,” she says. “Letting this asshole murder his way through the local population.”
Benny snorts, shakes his head in a way that lets Dean know just how much of a lie it is.
“What are you waiting for?” Isip snarls. “Do it.”
Dean looks at the already-healing ornate burns on her palm, the ceremonial knife, the pale strip of a missing wedding ring that tells him her story is bigger than he knows. Dean thinks about the hot sauce on her desk, about how little supernatural activity he’d found records of here. Of the ‘do not disturb’ sign on his motel room door, the blood bags in the barely-functioning minifridge shoved in the corner under the window. Hears Benny snarling Do it already at him in that alley.
“Yeah,” Dean says, slowly lowering his gun. “Yeah, no. You want to kill yourself, you’ll have to do it yourself.”
Benny’s face is unreadable.
“What?” Isip asks, with the clear-eyed confusion of someone given a reprieve from a known and creeping death.
“Nothing supernatural ever happens in Provo,” Dean says. “Don’t suppose you know anything about that?” Then, because he’s definitely not above taking advantage of a situation: “You got access to the local blood bank?”
*
Later, when the fires of the morgue crematorium are running hot, when they’re sliding the body inside to be reduced to ash and bone, Dean turns away from the radiant heat and looks at Isip. She’s skittish, still, keeps her back to the walls and away from Dean and Benny.
“Here’s the thing,” Dean says. Dean, who can barely remember the last time he felt like a human being. Who closes his eyes sometimes and finds himself reduced to the snarling, bloody thing he was in hell, or how Purgatory stripped everything human away from him and pared him down to nothing but an empty, clawing need to hunt. “We all get to decide what kind of monster we want to be.”
*
“What if she kills someone?” Benny asks. He’s been weirdly silent in the passenger seat.
“You think I haven’t thought about that?” Dean asks. He feels distant, disconnected from his body. “What if we kill her, and something she would have taken out kills someone else?” It feels different than Kate, than Lenore, where he’d just had to let Sam talk him into letting them go. Different than Benny, who he—whom he trusted, implicitly, who had proven himself again and again. He’s always—he’s always been able to let Sam be that voice of reason, be his conscience.
“This ain’t because of me?” Benny asks.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Dean says, but it’s not—he thinks anyone else would probably be surprised that Benny’s more in favor of a permanent death for Isip than he is, but Benny tried to throw himself back into Purgatory because he was worried he’d hurt someone. “She slips up, we’ll catch her.” Sam said you weren’t planning on coming back, he wants to say. Anger flashes through him, unexpected and sudden and—Dean knows—entirely unearned. He grabs it and tries to shove it back into the box where he keeps the things he doesn’t want to think about it, the feelings he has no right to.
They sit there in the car, silently, for a minute or two before Dean turns the ignition over.
“I like you in that cowboy hat just fine,” Benny says.
Dean grins. “Damn straight you do.”
*
Wraith’s dead, Dean texts Sam, because he doesn’t want to talk about it. Doesn’t want Sam to tell him he’s gone soft because of Benny. Doesn’t want to talk about Lenore, who died screaming, or Amy, who Dean ended. He lies on his back on the motel bed, fully dressed, staring up at a suspicious stain on the ceiling.
Benny has the radio on low, soft jazz tinkling through the room as he packs his bag and Dean’s, shifts his newly acquired blood bags into the struggling fridge, puts fresh ice in the cooler. When he’s done he turns out everything but the small corner light, squeezes Dean’s shoulder before he crawls into bed.
What the hell was that, Dean thinks, lying awake and listening to Benny not-breathe the next bed over, drawing constellations in the pock-marked ceiling and wondering what stars Kate is under.