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The dead nun says to Dean, “They killed us for love. Someday they'll do the same to you.”
She says it like she can see it written on his skin. She says it like she is Nostradamus, prophesying calamity. She says it with dead lips too thin for kissing, now only good for speaking, and when she opens her mouth, Dean sees beyond them a rattling of teeth and a devouring dark.
“I don't know what you're talking about, lady,” Dean replies, gripping his shotgun tight. “You killed yourself.”
She smiles. The thin skin covering her skull stretches nearly to the point of tearing, and Dean has to remind himself that ghosts can't read minds.
Two ghosts; two dead nuns - they haunt a mission in Wyoming, a rundown old place that’s little more than a tourist trap these days. They killed themselves here back in the mid-19th century, after being found together in one of the cells. Coitus interruptus , as they say. They died hand in hand and with arsenic in their mouths. A lovers’ suicide. Now their ghosts linger on as vicious, twisted shadows of the women they once were, their decaying spirits lashing out at any who wander in at night, unaware.
Dean and his dad had put the case together over the course of an afternoon, and they’re pretty sure they’ve got it all worked out. The nuns had been cremated and their ashes were scattered without ceremony, the church having forbidden them burial on consecrated ground. There must be something else still tying them here, something hidden in the mission - a rosary or a bible or something like that, most likely in their old quarters. It’s Dean’s job to go in and find it.
His first solo hunt. A seventeenth birthday present from Dad.
And sure, at first it hadn’t sounded all that bad. He’d almost been excited for it, eager to prove himself, even if it hadn’t exactly been a top ten item on his Christmas list. Lesbian nun ghosts. What could be better than that? Living lesbian nuns, maybe, but, hey. You take the cards life deals you and you don’t complain. That’s a Winchester life lesson for you right there.
But that had been before he’d really gotten to take a look at the history of the mission. The actual records of these nuns and their passing are scant, little more than fragments and swapped gossip, but each printed word drips with vitriol. Their names are nowhere to be found, only their crime - and their punishment.
‘Now they are with the worms that do not die,’ one letter surmises.
“What’s that mean?” Dean had asked. “The worms that do not die?”
“It means they’re in hell,” his dad responded.
And Dean had felt the first stirrings of discomfort in his gut. He’d wisely kept his mouth shut.
Now he stands in a dark chapel, confronted by a spectre, and she is every bit as awful as he had started to suspect. Her habit is in tatters. Her flesh rots from her skeleton, drips from her bones like hot wax, like the votives in their candle holders scattered all around. She is burnt down to little more than wick. And Dean believes at once that she really has been with the worms that do not die, because it looks like they’ve been chewing on her for a long-ass time. She’s a far cry from the sexy pillow fight lesbians on pay-per-view, and not just because she looks like a corpse. It’s the way she’s looking at him. Staring. It’s the way she sees him - sees him and laughs.
“Just you wait,” she tells him with a nasty grin. “Just you wait and see.”
What the hell does she know? What the hell?
Nothing, Dean tells himself. She’s just some dumb, dead monster and he’s -
But his skin crawls as he remembers certain things, unbidden: The way his eyes had slid along the sharp edge of the waiter's jaw last night, not really looking, but not really not looking either. A bare arm belonging to somebody else, weeks or months ago, the muscles in the biceps tensing and tightening as they moved. An anonymous set of shoulders, broad and faceless, seen only from behind. A laugh. A single dimpled cheek.
He remembers fragments of things that he has been trying desperately to ignore, all of them crawling back to the surfaces now, as if summoned to stand and take sacrament. Dean remembers an abruptly met gaze, like a lightning bolt out of the blue, like a gut punch in a crowded bar, and there’s no way to respond without pulling the whole room into chaos, into a brawl. All he can do is tear his eyes away and hope desperately that no one else has seen.
The dead nun has seen.
He unloads a round of rocksalt straight into her face.
She screams and dissipates and Dean turns on his heels and runs.
Focus on the job, he tells himself. WWJD - what would John do? Not stand around letting the bitch take pot-shots at his ego, that’s for sure.
Her lover appears in the hall before him, as equally ragged and decimated as her other half. Her chest is visible through a tear in her robes. Not her breasts - her ribs, drenched in gore. Beneath that is nothing but a vacuous hole.
Dean sends her off with a matching rock salt round - two for the price of one - then scrambles to reload. He fumbles a shell, drops it, and when he scoops it up and straightens again, the first nun is back. She swipes at him and Dean only just manages to dodge away. He cocks the shotgun and fires off another blast.
The stairs from the chapel to the dormitory are up ahead. He leaps up them as quickly as he can. Dean and his dad had narrowed down the right room to one of two. The first is up ahead on the left. Dean darts into it and slams the door shut, hoping against hope that he’s gotten lucky and found the right one on his first try.
If not, he’s in trouble - his hand is shaking as he draws the salt line along the floor in front of the door. He spills too much. By the time he’s finished with the window, there’s barely any left in the container. Definitely not enough to salt another room.
Sloppy. His dad will be pissed, if he makes this out alive. If he doesn’t, well, at least he won’t have to face his dad’s dressing-down.
Dean curses under his breath, then jumps about a mile in the air as the ghosts slam themselves against the door.
“They killed us!” one of them screams.
“They deserve to die!” the other joins in.
They scream and rage and weep, fists banging at the wood, making an unholy racket, a harmony of damnation. Together, they shake the timbers of the roof. Their beating rattles the door in its frame - the whole room vibrates around Dean. Dust rains down from the ceiling. Small pebbles fall on his head. He begins to worry that they will tear the whole mission down to its foundations just to get at him.
Frantically, he begins to search.
“They did this to us!” the nuns chorus. “They did this!”
The room is painfully bare. The floor is made of stone tiles and the walls are plain brick. A rickety cot and a small nightstand are set up in one corner, but they’re only there for tours, not as a genuine artifact. Dean has thought about this, though. He cased the place during daylight hours already, before it had emptied of employees and guests for the day. If there’s something here, it’s been well hidden.
He runs his hands along the walls, searching for any imperfections - a loose brick that might work free. He finds nothing. After a few minutes of fruitless examination, his heart sinks. The room is empty. He’ll have to brave the ghosts once more, try to get past them to the next room.
Dean turns to face the shaking door. Still, it quakes on its hinges from attacks from the outside. The wood bangs and creaks. He does not want to open it. He does not want to confront those faces. He does not want to be seen.
He has to, though. He can’t stay here until dawn, not with his dad waiting for him expectantly. Dean tries to imagine telling him that he stayed cowering in a closet all night, afraid of a couple of dead, gay nuns, and finds he would rather eat a rocksalt round this very second. It’s this thought that makes him step forward, toward the door.
As he moves, something catches his eye - there, in the corner, on the floor. One of the stone tiles is oddly discolored. It catches the light differently than the others - the pale moonlight that spills through the room’s small window. The tile is slightly raised, and broken at one corner.
Dean falls to his knees and pries at it with his fingers. The tile is stiff from over a hundred years of gathered dust and dirt and damp, but he can feel it start to wiggle in its place. He picks up the shotgun and raises the butt of it into the air, then slams it down. The tile cracks. A few more slams and it breaks open, revealing a small crevice squeezed between the floor and the wall.
There, in the crevice, is a book.
It’s nearly falling apart from age, and it’s small enough to fit in one of Dean’s hands. In the dim light and obscuring cloud of dust that’s raised by pulling it free, he first thinks it’s a bible, just as his dad had suspected. But it’s too small for that, too thin. A book of psalms? He runs his thumb over the fading hand painted letters on the water-stained cover: A Selection of Love Poems . When he moves to look inside, the book falls open to a page somewhere in the middle, marked by a lock of hair.
Not just a lock of hair, but two of them - one black, the other brown. They’ve been twisted together into a braid.
“Yahtzee,” Dean says, and pulls the remains out.
He shakes a healthy dose of salt over the hair, then flicks his lighter and lets it burn. He watches dispassionately as the fire crawls up each strand toward his fingers, twisting into another braid, this time of acrid smelling smoke. Soon there is nothing left but ash that clings to the memory of what it once was. Dean lets it fall limply to the floor.
The pounding on the cell door ceases. He listens for a moment, just to be sure. A minute passes, then another. Not a sound can be heard out in the hall.
The spirits are gone.
Just to be on the safe side, he should probably burn the book, too. He turns to it, then pauses. He stares down at the page the braid has marked. There is a poem printed there: The Canonization by John Donne.
It’s the first line that grabs him - ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love’ - and then he finds himself slowly muddling through the rest of it, stumbling here and there over the stilted, outdated language. It’s the sort of thing that Sam would have no problem understanding. It leaves Dean feeling a little baffled, and then annoyed by his own bafflement.
What the hell does ‘the phoenix riddle hath more wit by us; we two being one, are it’ mean?
Still, he keeps reading. An uncomfortable feeling has been knocked loose in his chest, and it’s the same stirring fear that had whined like a wounded animal in response to the dead nun’s prophecy. The same thing, or its ugly kin. Dragged suddenly into view, it begins to unfurl.
Dean pauses over one set of lines, then reads them over again.
‘We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse…’
Dean thinks of two nuns, nameless and exiled from church and history, dead for having loved one another. They marked this poem with their hair, bound together. They read it again and again, one whispering it to the other. They read it so many times that the book’s spine broke and the pages wore away to little more than yellow dust.
“They killed us for love,” the nun had said to Dean. “Someday they’ll do the same to you.”
He swallows.
It’s the same thing, he sees now, that the two of them had predicted for themselves. And they’d been right. They had loved each other, and the world had hated them for it. It had driven them to their deaths.
Come to think of it, if it was Dean, he’d probably be a little mad, too.
But it’s not Dean. Dean is not that. He is not a shambling, loathsome corpse, destroyed and destroying. He is not some persecuted nun, hiding shamefully in the dark, groping desperately with another woman, afraid, ugly, dead. He is not -
Dean reaches out, picks the book up off the floor, and snaps it shut.
He should burn it, he knows. It’s what his dad would do. When it comes to violent hauntings, you can never be too careful. A mistake can lead to people getting hurt later on down the road, and Dean has already had that lesson drilled into his head a thousand times. Just look at what happened in Fort Douglas, what nearly happened to Sam. All because of Dean.
He can’t afford to make any more mistakes. Especially not today, on the day he’s meant to be proving himself to his dad. Proving that he’s ready. That he’s a man.
He flicks the lighter open again. Then he stops.
For some reason, more than anything he’s ever killed, more than any body he’s ever burned, this feels like desecration.
The book had said:
‘And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for Love.’
Love - in defiance of God.
Look what it had gotten them, he thinks sharply at himself: Arsenic and an eternity as monsters, stuck in the very halls where they had been poisoned to death, slowly, slowly, and then all at once. Then sent to the worms that never die.
Dean steels himself and tosses the book back down onto the stone floor. So used to being bent into one familiar shape, it falls open again, to that very same page. Dean pours salt across the words, struggles momentarily with the lighter, and then stands and watches the poem burn away.
The fire crackles hot and loud. The paper blackens, slowly creeping inward, until the ink is swallowed up and the words all disappear. There is nothing left but smoke and memory and ash.
Dean turns and leaves the mission and resolutely does not look back.
His dad is waiting for him out on a nearby ridge with Sam, both with drinks in hand - beer for Dad; root beer for Sam. They’ve been eating pizza while they wait. Dean scoops up a slice as he joins them and finds that it’s gone a little cold.
He must look shaken, because his dad asks, “Everything go okay?”
“Cut it a little close, that’s all,” Dean lies. “But I got the job done, no sweat.”
His dad eyes him critically for a moment, then seems to decide that ‘a little close’ is an acceptable outcome for a first hunt. He nods and lets it go.
“You can give me the full rundown later,” he says.
“Yes, sir,” Dean says. Then he hesitates, and asks, “Ghosts can’t see the future, can they?”
“None that I’ve ever met,” his dad says. His eyes narrow in sudden suspicion. “Why? Did one of them say something to you?”
Dean forces an easy grin and tells him, “Just that the Red Sox are gonna win the World Series.”
His dad huffs out a laugh and shakes his head.
“That’ll be the day,” he says. He reaches out to place a hand on Dean’s shoulder, the closest they ever get to an embrace. He says, “Happy birthday, son. You did good out there.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Dean says.
“Go put your gear away,” his dad instructs.
Dean obeys.
Later, he tells his dad that the lock of hair was tucked into a bible. It’s a dumb thing to lie about. Lying to his dad for any reason whatsoever is dumb, even if there’s no chance of getting caught. But Dean can’t help it. He’s not sure why. Even the memory of that book feels incriminating. Because he burned it. Because he didn’t want to burn it. Because the words are still burned into his mind - both the poem and the nun’s prediction.
He imagines the look on his dad’s face if Dean opened his mouth to say, “There was this book of love poems…”
Worse yet if Dean had the balls to admit: “I felt bad for them. They told me I was just like them. I believed it. I am.”
Winchesters do not feel bad for monsters. Not ever. And they certainly don’t relate to them. Dead or alive.
Dean forces the poem from his mind. He forces himself not to think about the nuns. Not ever again. He forgets they ever existed. He forgets that one of them spoke to him. He forgets everything she said.
Except, sometimes, he does remember.
A man will sit down on the stool next to him at the bar. Their arms will accidentally or not-so-accidentally brush. Dean will feel a shock of electricity dancing under his skin. Then, from the corner of his eye, he’ll see a hovering specter. She has a hideous, rotten face. She wears a nun’s habit. As he watches, her mouth begins to move, and Dean doesn’t need to hear her voice to know the words she’s saying.
What’s that superstition people have for when they feel a sudden chill?
It’s like someone just walked over his grave.
So Dean pulls his arm back. He gets up from the bar and walks away.
He spends years doing that - he spends years playing chicken with that ghost, and he loses every time.
The poem, however, he forgets entirely.
More than twenty years pass. There are many things in between. Many, many things. Enough that forgetting is no longer just a blessing but an inevitability. The Dean of seventeen feels so far away, he doubts he would recognize him if they passed each other on the street. That boy is a ghost, just as his father is now, and if they haunt Dean, they do it with company, and their voices are lost in the same chorus that drowns the poem out.
It’s Castiel that causes him to suddenly remember. Castiel, and Lily Sunder.
Dean and Castiel are sitting in the bunker together, nursing another round of beers. Sam has gone to bed, but Dean has yet to follow suit. He doesn’t want to leave Castiel alone like this. There is something jagged to the way he sits, blood still crusted to the side of his face from his fight with Ishim.
They talk, then fall into silence, then talk again. It’s easy to do that with Castiel.
“It is ironic,” Castiel says, returning to the day’s events. “Among angels, falling in love with a human is considered one of the most shameful acts possible.”
“It’s a load of B.S. is what it is,” Dean says.
Castiel hums.
“Once, I felt differently,” he says. “Today I find myself shamed not by Akobel’s actions, but by Ishim’s. I wonder what I would have done if I had known the truth back then.”
“You would have done the right thing, Cas,” Dean says. “And you’ll do the right thing now. Whatever that is.”
Castiel laughs slightly and takes another drink.
“I’m not certain I share your faith.”
He looks down at the beer bottle in his hands. Then he raises it, as if in toast. It’s a strangely human gesture. Dean is still getting used to that.
“Lily Sunder,” Castiel says. Then he quotes, “‘You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage.’”
Dean draws up short, his hand frozen with his own beer half raised toward Castiel’s. The quotation has sparked to life a sudden memory. It stokes a long-burning ember back into a hot coal. He’s startled to discover that he recognizes the phrase’s source.
“What?” he says, taken aback.
Castiel blinks and lowers his beer.
“It’s...from a poem,” he says.
“Yeah, I know,” Dean says. “Since when do you know poetry?”
“Since Metatron...nevermind,” Castiel says. He looks away, clearly embarrassed. “Forget I said anything.”
Dean examines the side of his face for a long moment, then looks away, too. He hasn’t thought about that in a long time. His first hunt. The poem. The nuns.
They had died because of the church’s condemnation. Now, of course, Dean knows it was a condemnation based not on the real wrath of heaven, but instead on the baseless bigotry of humankind. God never despised them, just as He never despised Akobel or Lily’s daughter. Still, all of them had died.
No, none of them are hated by God. None of them are with the worms that do not die. In fact, Lily’s daughter is probably in heaven right now. So, too, are the nuns.
The realization washes abruptly over Dean, startling and profound.
The nuns. They’re probably in heaven. After all that. Almost certainly.
Together. At peace.
He wonders what heaven looks like for them. He wonders if it’s a small mission cell, with only a single dwindling candle by which to read, a book spread out across their thighs.
Their fingers trace old, yellowing pages. Their lips, full of life, full from kissing, move in harmony as they form words their owners know by heart. They hardly need the light at all. They could say it together in the dark.
‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love...’
Then again, maybe their heaven is another place, far from the stifling confines of that holy prison. Maybe it’s a cottage in the woods where they can be alone. Maybe their heaven is a shore to walk along, or a field where they lay together in the sun, or a little village in the mountains where they are greeted on the street with a smile.
Maybe for them, heaven isn’t a ‘where’ but a ‘whom.’
Whatever it is, they are there.
Dean is a little staggered at the relief he feels at this sudden unburdening. The thought of heaven so rarely sets him at ease. But there it is.
For them, at least.
For himself, he’s not yet convinced.
His gut churns.
“A ghost once told me I’d be killed for love, you know,” Dean tells Castiel, and isn’t really sure why.
“Then it was right,” Castiel says at once, with conviction.
Dean’s reaction to this declaration - shocked dismay - must be written plainly on his face, because Castiel explains bitterly, “Sacrificing yourself for the people you love is what you do, Dean. As you would put it, it’s your ‘M.O.’ That’s the whole problem. That’s the whole -” He scowls. “I wish you would stop.”
Dean sets his beer carefully down on the table.
“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
But he can’t promise that he’ll stop like Castiel wants him to. He knows himself better than that. The look Castiel gives him is as knowing as it is displeased.
“That’s not what the ghost meant, anway,” Dean says, if only to change the subject. “She meant that other people would be so disgusted by it that it would kill me.”
That does the trick of distracting Castiel at least - it gives him pause.
“Why would she say that?” he asks, head tilted, brows pinched.
Dean only shrugs.
Even after all these years, even to Castiel, he finds himself unable to confess the whole truth. The nun had meant, they will kill you for having loved. Their hate will be poison in your ears until it is poison in your mouth. They will do it to you because you are a man who loves other men.
In Dean’s own head, the words are sour and soaked in filth. They flicker weakly into his thoughts, slipping through the safety net he carefully maintains, and he works quickly to squash them back down into silence. It’s too late. The damage is already done. He feels sick with his admission.
Dean stares down at one hand, half expecting to see it holding a lighter. A braid of hair. A pile of ash.
“I cannot imagine,” Castiel says, drawing his attention once more, “a version of your love that would disgust me, Dean. Your love improves the universe, illuminates it, makes it into something more beautiful than what it was. Anyone who would condemn you for it isn’t worthy of living in the world that it has saved.”
Castiel’s face is furious. He is filled with righteous anger on Dean’s behalf.
“Is that so?” Dean asks distantly.
He is remembering, all of a sudden, many fragments of many things. A mosaic of times Dean looked, then looked away.
“Yes.” Castiel is vehement.
“But what if I was an angel?” Dean ventures. “You just said that they find love between angels and humans shameful.”
“Angels are often wrong,” Castiel says wryly. “Besides, you aren’t an angel.”
“No,” Dean agrees. He keeps his eyes on the floor. “But you are.”
“I am,” Castiel agrees - slowly, drawing out the sounds, still thinking as he says it. “However…”
He trails off.
Dean dares to look at him. Castiel is looking back. Their eyes meet - like a lightning bolt out of the blue. Like a punch straight to the gut.
Dean licks his lips.
“However?” he prompts.
“I’ve already broken many of heaven’s decrees,” Castiel says. “For you.”
“So?” Dean asks, voice low.
“So,” Castiel continues. He stops. Then he concludes: “So what’s one more?”
And then Dean is suddenly kissing Castiel.
He does it before his brain can catch up to his heart and tell him that it’s a bad idea. He’s kissing Castiel before his lips can even remember what kissing is. He’s kissing Castiel almost before his body has even moved. Dean is kissing Castiel years ago, a thousand times, in a thousand different places, under a thousand different skies.
And Castiel is kissing him back.
Dean has kissed plenty of people before - countless women, a few forcefully forgotten men. It’s never quite been like this. This is both a memory and a revelation. It is familiar. It is brand new. It feels like coming home, and Dean hardly even knows what that means, even now. He spent thirty years without one. Now here it is: He comes home. He comes home and Castiel is there to greet him.
If ever there has been real divinity on earth, it is in this. It must be.
When they break apart again, Dean feels breathless, like they’ve been kissing for eons instead of just a few tender seconds.
A part of him, he finds, is bracing for retaliation. For retreat. But Castiel remains right there in front of him, looking both steady and torn open at the seams. He shows the soft part of himself and refuses to look away, as if daring Dean to strike. As if daring Dean to do the same.
Dean holds his gaze.
He knows now that there will be no more ghosts. They have all been put to rest. And anyway, they are not welcome here. This is hallowed ground.
Still, he can’t help it. The thought recurs:
“Someday someone might kill us for this,” Dean says. “The same as Akobel and Lily.”
“Someday someone will kill us anyway,” Castiel replies. “They’ll probably have better cause.”
Dean laughs.
“Well don’t sugarcoat it, Cas.”
“It’s the truth,” Castiel insists.
It is, Dean thinks.
Someday he will die. He will go down bloody. He will go down hard. Someday, someone will burn his body and throw his ashes to the wind, regardless of who or how or why. It’s practically written in the sand.
Better to do it having loved, he decides. Better to do it having been loved by Castiel.
“What the hell,” he says, leaning in a second time. “Heaven can just try and keep us out.”