Chapter Text
Dean doesn’t come out, that Roman can see, for three days. Sure, there’s food missing, and he’s pretty sure if he checked the camera he’s got installed all over the house, he’d see something moving, here and there, in the middle of the day when anything decent with demon blood in it should be asleep. But he’s not entirely sure what Seth is, whether he’s got more secrets than those silver-tipped claws that left him knitting his skin together for almost eight hours, bleeding sluggishly on sheets with a thread count higher than the number of floors in Hell, alone and cold and hating himself for not putting the fucking creature down like the rabid dog he so clearly was. His soft heart may have won him Dean, once, but he has no clue why he decided that this feral, fell beast was something he should bring home and try to tame. He let Dean bite the hand that fed him, because it amused him, and Dean was unlikely to actually kill him, no matter how fun he felt it was to suggest it. Seth, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity, and Roman half wants to pin him down and slice under his ribcage, just to see what secrets come slithering out of something so clearly lab-made when they were still learning how to make things semi-stable.
Roman’s not stupid, for all that he can toss his hair with the arrogance of a supermodel, for all that he’s sharing his house with two cast-offs of programmes designed to create perfect killers, programmes which were decommissioned because they were too difficult to control, difficult to predict. He knows that he, too, will one day have a team sent for his dispatch, when the next generation of living weapons has some more kinks ironed out. Possibly in the literal sense, because tying arousal to violence is something they’ve never quite been able to shift out of the demon blood, no matter how hard they try.
At first, there were the ones like Dean. Dean has never said how old he is, and Roman has never asked, but the early ones, the ones who tore their way through human flesh because the demon blood was so strong within them, that goes back nearly a thousand years, to a time when human and demon mixed freely, because the consequences were unknown. Once someone figured out they could weaponise the children, they decided that losing valuable hosts each time was a waste, and it was easier to breed the children in vats, lab-grown, with each generation stronger, faster, less volatile in ways the agency didn’t like, less likely to bleed each other for fun. When Roman looks at Dean, he can see hundreds of years of freedom, and he wonders what Dean sees in his. Three hundred years of refining bloodlines and checking chemicals, maybe, and Roman still has to go to the clinic every six months for injections and blood tests, just to check he’s not quietly going insane while they’re not watching him.
The bedroom is dark when he wakes, trying to work out what sent him from peacefully asleep to on high alert in seconds. He smells Seth before he sees him, something like brimstone and blood and a trace of metal, and then he seems to melt out of the darkness, standing by the bed. There’s something wrong with the air behind him, and it takes Roman a moment to work out that those are wings, there’s wings sprouting from Seth’s shoulder blades, leathery and black, and dripping with ichor.
“What did you do to Dean?” he asks, voice croaky with being awoken, and fear. He knows Dean can take care of himself, but if Seth has wings and silver-tipped claws, what else might he have to take down Dean? There are stories of poisoned breath, of sleep spells, of all the ways a monster can hurt a man, and most days, Dean is more monster than anyone Roman knows – but here, with Seth in front of him, he worries. There are three sets of knives within easy reach, one silver, one iron, one plain steel, but… Roman realises the air in the room is cold, the sheets chilly against his bare skin, which means someone’s changed the heat settings. Dean is lucky, he can work in most temperatures, but Roman’s improved stability came with a susceptibility to cold, and he feels sluggish, slow. He doesn’t know if he’ll beat Seth to the knives.
“Dean?” Roman calls, hoping that his lover will hear him from wherever he is in the house, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Seth, listening to the noise of the ichor dripping onto the carpet, and the low growling noise Seth is making in the back of his throat. “Your friend is loose.”
Seth draws a ragged breath that sounds like air through gravel, and takes another step towards the bed, until he’s close enough that Roman can see the flesh hanging off his ribs, just how skinny he is, the way his chest rises and falls with what looks like obvious effort. He needs antibiotics, a bath, and a good meal. All things Roman would be happy to provide if he just knew where Dean was, and if he’s alright.
“Seth, I need you to tell me where Dean is,” Roman says, a last-ditch attempt to get some sense out of the fucking feral creature he brought home and who is ruining his life.
“All dead.” Seth says, in a voice which speaks of pits and flames, something no one could ever mistake for fully human. “All dead. All gone. I made it happen.”
Roman is off the bed, a silver knife in each hand, burning into his palms, before Seth can react at all, but he staggers back when Roman shoves both of them down to the hilt in his chest, looking down as if stunned by the pain and the pressure. Roman doesn’t give him a chance to recover, just sprints down the hall, fumbling for the key around his neck, with his dog tags, the key to Dean’s safe room.
He doesn’t need it, the door is already ajar, and Dean’s lying on the floor, twitching slightly. There’s no blood, no injury Roman can see when he crouches down next to him, and presses a hand to his skin. It’s still warm, he’s not dead yet. There’s a sound from the doorway behind him, and Roman whirls around to see Seth, chest wounds already healed, holding both knives as they drip blood. He doesn’t seem to flinch away from the silver at all, and Roman wonders if this is how he dies, if this is what the end of the world looks like, crouched over Dean’s body as something genetically created to murder does its job.
“He fell,” Seth says, and his voice is still fire, and the pit, and the shrieks of the dead, but this time, Roman can hear it for what it is. Worry. Dean’s had these falls before, when the heat breaks, or when he’s stressed, these twitching little fits that come from being a product of biology and not the lab.
“Dean, can you hear me?” Roman asks, and Dean opens those true blue eyes, and stares up at him.
“Ro?” Dean says, sounding lost, and far away. “Why is Seth bleeding?”
Roman doesn’t have a good answer, so he just kisses Dean, and hopes that, eventually, he’ll be forgiven.