Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Before.

It goes like this. 

Dean Winchester keeps her knives clean and close, polished. She tucks them into the sleeves of her jackets, next to her ankle and the leather of her boots, nested in her shoelaces. She dedicates 27 minutes in the morning to them, sandpaper ducked-taped to the linoleum counter, sharpening with precision and care. She calls them the things that they have killed, first names only, Rennee and Jackie and Randy. These are the only things she’s gentle with other than her sister, and she’s carved herself a niche with them, blood and glory and viscera. 

Dean Winchester spends money on everything and nothing, wastes money gambling in Reno. She keeps stashes of cash in the trunk, stuffed into the crack between the floor and the driver's seat, dollar bills and coins rattling in the lining of her coats. She sews patches onto the knees of her jeans, buys pairs skinny and ripped for her by the factory that makes them, shoplifts drugstore candy and tips the waitress's well. 

Dean Winchester reads tarot in the backseat of the Impala, bottom row of teeth and nose crooked. She walks a fine line, and she laughs when the cards she keeps flipping announce her upcoming death. When girls call her pretty in dusty and poorly lit rooms, hungry and tired and desperate, Dean pushes herself off of them, because she’s not, not really, made of long limbs and sharp lines, scars shaped like stars and comets, puckered and raised. 

Dean Winchester doesn’t pray. She learned the meaning of holy from her stint in Catholic school, skirts hiked up past her thighs, learned it from the mouth of her father when describing something that her sister wasn’t. She learned it from hungry voices that she hears more often than not, Our Father who art in heaven , Sammy’s copy of the bible hidden inside a hollow in the mattress. She does not think being holy is the truth, the light. 

Dean Winchester is the opposite of her sister, racy and witty and quick and good , where Sam is modest and dull and halted and evil . She raises her sister anyway, from the ground up, teaches Sam to stitch her up in the backseat, to roll a joint, to defy their father in every way that doesn’t matter. When Sam threatens to leave, eyes smudged with eyeliner and regret, plastic plates rattling in their shelves, Dean smirks because she knows that it’s the truth. 

Dean Winchester stays up at night indulging the voices that clatter through her head. They all call her by her full name, 3 syllables and too few letters, and Dean does not know the answer. They call her righteous and one of their own. She does not know when she learned the language that they speak, and sometimes she worries if she is more similar to Sammy than she thought. She does not make the plates rattle. She does not push things through the air lazily, nose bloody and eyes black, but there is something inside of her, boiling and hot, and sometimes she can feel it emit from her irises and weep from her wounds. 

Dean Winchester is Jamie and Paula and Rachel and Minnie. She pushes herself into roles to fill, adjusts her posture to become someone else. She grows out her hair to her waist when Sam is gone, brushes it before bed. The night before she reaches Palo Alto she cuts it again, tucks it behind her ears, straight and thin, chin-length and tawny. The girl in the bar that she flirts with tells her that she’s cute, which has always been better than pretty , so Dean lets her fuck her slow and hard and like it ought to be more meaningful. She is Jamie that night. 

Sam looks like she’s seen a ghost when Dean shows up in her apartment, unchanged and bathed in neon and grit. Her smile is stretched wide and her teeth gleam, painfully aware of how grown her sister looks. There is a boy in the doorway who looks like he belongs to Sam, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, America’s favorite type of normal. Dean takes a step forward, remembers not to stumble. Her smile is starting to waver. 

“Heya, Sammy.” 

This is how it goes. 

During. 

It goes like this. 

Samantha Winchester wears a cross around her neck and reads her bible before bed each night. When Dean can be bothered to stop, Sam kneels in churches across America, hands clasped in front of her, mouth parted and chapped and sorry. She asks God for guidance, forgiveness, freedom, but He never gives because she is made of something wrong, black and tarnished and broken. 

Sam Winchester does not know why. While her sister has embraced this, using the things unknown like they’re hers, Sam wallows in them, searches and wishes and wants. She belongs to the unknown. When she was 16, wallpaper ripped off of motel walls and tile yanked from the wall by an invisible force, John Winchester had tied her up in the closet, salt shoved down her throat and exorcism on his lips. She had screamed, and when Dean had come home with the groceries, they had all gone spilling across the floor, curses traded and punches thrown, Sam stuffed into the back of Dean’s car, wrists raw from rope burn. They returned after a week, and Dean apologized to their father like it was her fault. John Winchester examined her closer after that, but he did not try again. 

Sam Winchester is filled with demon blood. Jesse used to tell her she was a good girl, just like the one who lived next door, cardigans and hair pushed back by a tiny blue headband. He also used to call her Samantha, and she liked the way it sounded in his mouth, lazy and plain. She lets him believe it because she is convinced too, lied enough to trust this new version of herself that she had created. She does not tell Jesse what the scars or nightmares are from, just lets him love her, fake and normal and new. 

Sam Winchester is not good. She is used to it by now, Azazael whispering in her ear, knife in her gut, Girl King of Hell, one part of a whole, a demon's favorite. There is something bad inside of her, and when she gets angry things begin to quake, lift, crack. Dean is always in the middle of it, face blank and slack, fear hidden behind a mask carved to fit each wrinkle and curve. Sammy, Dean says, watches the paint flake off the walls, the wood splinter up off of the floor. Her hair is longer than Sam’s ever seen it now, resting just above her collar bones. Sam imagines what it would be like if Dean had killed her, then and now. Wonders if John would have killed her, tied up in the closet, drowned in a bathtub filled with holy water. Wonders if this evil inside of her is something that can be cut out like a tumor, if eating healthy and knowing what is moral and right can soothe anything except her. 

Sam Winchester is not good. She smokes weed in the passenger seat of the Impala, liberates the bills shoved into the cracks to pay for it. She hides and sneaks and lies because she cannot erase this part of herself, the demon in her, the black eyes and flinching at the name of God. It is a hopeless endeavor, a pathetic attempt. 

Sam Winchester kisses boys with blond hair and blue eyes that remind her too much of Jesse. She beats them at pool, pulls them in, fishing line and split lips. They don’t tell her that she’s good any longer, because she tosses liquor back fast, watches Dean fight her way through bars with practiced indifference, does not pull her sister off the man she has beat half to death. She watches. 

Sam Winchester meets Ruby, whose eyes flick black, who feeds Sam french fries and horror stories, smirking. I can save her , she says, and it’s all Sam wants, really. The guilt is a stone in her stomach, Dean devoured by hellfire. It should be her. When Ruby kisses her, rough and sloppy, Sam questions it for only a second. She wonders, suddenly, if the idea of losing Dean has turned Sam into her, reckless and angry, kissing girls on the mouth like someone is going to rip them apart. She forgets her doubts. When Sam dives into research as the clock ticks down, Ruby sits beside her, hair blonde and eyes blue, and Sam thinks it fits with the rest of her sins. 

Sam Winchester has time. Her older sister does not, and so she watches her get ripped apart. She is scared that it might be her doing it instead of the hellhounds, that something has suddenly burst and bubbled over. Everything is so confusing, but time is up, wasted, and Dean is laying in a pile of her own blood, eyes so green against the carnage. 

When Sam drags Dean's body to the car, she can feel her arm get torn from the socket. She is sick in the grass next to the sprinkler, but she piles her sister into the trunk to not get blood on the upholstery. 

This is how it goes.

Chapter Text

After. 

It goes like this. 

Castiel is a cog in the machine, a soldier, angel blade in her sleeve. Her wings here are black like an oil slick, washed in static, and when she pulls Deanna Winchester from the hellfire, it is in pieces. Heart first, all the important parts. Lungs, limbs, entrails and fingernails and teeth. God needs her whole and human and Michael needs a vessel, Castiel a purpose and Hell a motive. 

Castiel does not have doubts, not yet. She doesn't know better, does not look longer at His absence, at the disarray. And here, half-mortal and half something else, Castiel does not have hands, tools for reconstruction. She is made of lightning, dizzying and impossible, lacks the shotgun shells and gasoline of Deanna’s moments spent living. She does not carve away things like Alistair, muscles made wood and skin peeled off like cambium. She builds, reforms, and she is good at it. She holds Deanna, the most righteous, and then restarts her heart like it is as simple as flicking a lightswitch. 

Castiel is good at watching, sets of eyes pried open. She hasn’t had to in years and years and years, not since Mckinley was shot and Queen Victoria died, not since the last time her body was chained to something physical. It comes back to her easy, ice water and sticky heat. When she consumes Jimmi Novak, the one who pleaded for this, the feeling of being human washes over her like an ocean. 

Castiel keeps a collection of earthly things in the pocket of her slacks, cinched tight at the waist. A zippo lighter that glows in the dark, 3 coke bottle caps that jingle when she walks, Jimmi’s old wallet and keys. Sometimes, when she’s sure that she can take her eyes off of Deanna for even a second, she pulls out the photo of Claire and finds it funny that people feel attachment at all. She feels like she is too big for this body she is stuck in, skin tight and thin. Like it might split and crack, Grace leaking out of the edges. Castiel tries twice to talk to Deanna. The first time is a guess, but the second time is something more. A want, a wish. She wonders, Deanna waiting for her in a barn, knife balanced carefully in her hand, if this is what it is supposed to feel like. 

Castiel knows that Dean is terrified and hungry. The smell of it permeates off of her, blade in hand and fingers twitching. She built her from nothing after all, formed eyes and ears and teeth in perfect likeness of the original, scars and crooked bones. She had held Deanna's heart, pulsing and writhing, life of its own. When she stands in front of the Deanna who thinks of her as a stranger, wings a presentation of power and flashing lights turned makeshift lightning, it is like looking into a mirror. She wonders if God ever gets tired of this, of creating. 

Castiel does not lie to herself, so she watches Dean carefully even when it’s not needed. Notes the scars that rake across her body, legs and arms and face and back. Examines the sharp line of her nose, the points of her eye teeth, smudges of purple beneath her eyes. Dean is sunken and hollow, soft lines and hard edges. Dean has 8 tattoos, and none of them are words. When she shows them to Castiel in the fluorescents of the Paradise Inn she smells like metal and bar soap, and their proximity startles her. Castiel is not above this.

Castiel does not sleep, but she goes days or hours or minutes or seconds in some sleep-like stupor when the white noise that rattles through her head gets loud enough to make her vision go black. She is stuck in between, heaven yanking at her hair to drag her back, hell or purgatory or maybe just earth grabbing onto her feet to keep her rooted. Sometimes, when Deanna prays, voice like crushed glass and fireball, Castiel wishes she never had to return at all. Sometimes, when Deanna stands in front of Alistair, hands forced steady, Castiel wants to pull her out of the room herself, concrete cell turned makeshift inferno. For what it’s worth , she tells Deanna, and then goes out to bury another one of her siblings. 

Castiel’s eyes flash blue-white in the glow of the vacancy sign of a motel outside of Cheyenne. Flash blue-white when she heals Deannas’s wounds, brushes salt from the corner of her eyes with too-delicate hands. Castiel is a soldier, a tool made for fixing and carving, blood leaking from wounds. She is supposed to be above this, this doubt . When she sits next to Deanna in the Impala, cherry black and glistening, she watches her swallow like there is something lodged in her throat, cry and heave like she is trying to get it out. Seven of Castiel's siblings are dead, and she wonders if it is even worth it at all. She doesn’t know what to do. 

Castiel kisses Dean first in the impala, lips chapped and hair greasy, a profane thing. She does not feel other here, hand splayed against the upholstery, and when Dean kisses her while they are waiting for the dryer to finish, Castiel does not tell her no. She is supposed to be above this, this humanity, but she is not, and she is scared. They kiss in the aisle of a convenience store, eager but hesitant, and then don’t speak of it for two weeks straight. 

Castiel is wanting and doubtful and terrified. When heaven drags her back, she goes kicking and screaming. When she returns, things have both changed and stayed the same. 

This is how it goes.