A Thousand Lights in Space: December 16

Just one person is all it would take

—Day 135—

Dean comes to furious, unfortunately very lucid consciousness three hours past midnight, still lingering at stage two and immersed in a bathtub of cool—but not ice-filled—water. A part of him was looking forward to his conversation with imaginary sheep: it was like spending time with Kellie, but with fewer crystals showing up in inconvenient places and finding very strangely shaped bruises the next day.

“What—” he gasps, pushing Castiel’s hand away and flailing briefly. One hundred and two, excellent: it’s dropping again. Leaning tiredly against the cool porcelain of the tub, Castiel sees absolutely no need to elucidate while Dean orients himself, looking around the bathroom with a confused expression, sweat and water-damp hair clinging to his forehead.

“I’m in the bathroom,” he says slowly, trying to focus on Castiel long enough to glare and achieving a credible if vague squint.

“Yes,” he agrees, leaning an elbow on the lip of the tub. “Three hours into a new day, in case that was your next question. Is there anything else?”

There is, of course. With Dean, there always is.

“What happened?” Leaning back in the tub, he frowns, oblivious to the cool of the water and his own goosebumps. “Ichabod. There was an attack.”

“That was hours ago. Technically, yesterday.” Resting his chin on one hand, he resigns himself to what will happen next. The green eyes widen in memory, and jerking his right arm up, Dean ignores the knotted scar of his death-defying run in with a colony of brownies to focus on the scabbing bite in incredulous horror despite the fact it’s covered by a layer of bandages and plastic wrap and he can’t actually see it.

“Oh God. I was—”

“Between eleven and fourteen hours ago, approximately,” he interrupts, fighting back a yawn. “Don’t be alarmed, but you’re currently in stage two. It’s possible that you’re contagious, but on the other hand, you remain uninterested in consuming human flesh. The door is locked, and while I’m not visibly armed, it’s only because you’re unsettlingly good at acquiring other people’s weapons and I can’t risk you getting mine. How are you feeling?”

Dean jerks upright with a splash of water he can’t bring himself to care enough to avoid. “I’m—”

“In stage two and feverish, though it’s dropping again.” Closing his eyes, he feels for his bottle and shakes it to verify the contents before taking out two pills and dropping it back on the floor. “If it helps, I’m not shooting up this time. That won’t continue past the forty-eight hour mark, in case that provides motivation for you. I doubt it will take that long, however.”

“What’s going on?” Before he can answer, Dean becomes aware he’s immersed in cold water, and to Castiel’s amusement, that his teeth are chattering and have been through most of this conversation. Wrapping his arms around his wet t-shirt clad body—a distractingly good look for him, because Castiel is very tired but not close to dead—he draws up his knees before he unleashes his most effective glare, only marginally lessened by the continued chattering of his teeth. “Jesus, can I get out—wait, why am I in the bathtub?”

“Your home improvement efforts fixing the grout means it now leaks water much, much more slowly, and I don’t know where the tub Vera acquired is.” That seems to silence Dean, temporarily at least, which gives him enough time to reach over and feel Dean’s flushed forehead, pleased to note it’s entered the lowest three digit range. “Your temperature’s dropping. You can get out now.”

Standing up, he dry swallows both pills on his way to the door and picks up two towels from the pile he prudently remembered to bring in here after stealing all he could find in the communal laundry room after everyone left for Ichabod. There were a surprising number in the dryers, which tells him he’s not the only one who hates doing laundry; perhaps this could be considered some kind of life lesson should anyone ask why they were taken. Surely there’s a life lesson that applies: he’ll ask Alicia when she gets back, unless they’re her towels, of course. They should definitely acquire more towels soon, in any case.

Returning to the tub, he ignores Dean’s continuing glare and helps him out onto the rug (also stolen, and quite nice; they may not get that back), briskly rubbing him with the smaller towel until he’s simply very damp before wrapping the larger one around him and easing him onto the floor. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Dean snaps, huddling in the corner made by the wall and tub as he makes an attempt to bury himself in several feet of faded ochre terrycloth. Castiel watches his maneuvering in fascination before it occurs to him that multiple towels and the blanket might be of assistance and goes to acquire them, turning on the space heater as well; it is rather cold in here. Dean jerks them out of his hands immediately, and by the time he’s seated himself again, Dean’s achieved something like a very bad interpretation of a multi-colored cocoon, much like he does with blankets, but somehow, impossibly, even funnier. “Like I’m gonna be eating people soon, so—” He breaks off, staring at him from the depths of a frayed mustard-yellow cowl, and Castiel quite literally can’t look away. “It’s been eleven hours?”

“Between eleven and thirteen. It’s not definitive,” he admits, briefly distracted by the sight of his own bare foot sliding over the wet tile floor. “Except for the part where you’re not progressing toward cannibalism, which I assure you is very new. I’m not despairing, worried, drunk, or high, if that helps. Unless you count on life, of course.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“You said you trusted me,” he interrupts. “Was that just words so I’d feel better about performing an immediate execution on you or did you mean it?”

Dean peers out at him from the depths of his terrycloth hood, and Castiel files this memory away for later enjoyment. “What’re you doing, Cas?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“You still have a knife at your back. Saw it when you were picking up the towels,” Dean points out. “You got your answer. Now tell me what you’re doing.”

Reaching back, he locates the hilt and tugs it out, skidding it across the floor toward the doorway and ignoring Dean’s indignant protest. “No one dies from a brownie bite.”

“Yeah, I heard. What the fuck does that have to do with—”

“No one dies from it. Most people never even know they’re infected, it’s that minor. It was too different for your body to recognize immediately, because this world was too different, which being you, required a dramatic response.” Dean’s swollen, red-rimmed eyes try to narrow, which makes him look extremely funny. “Not too much for you to adapt of course, but enough so that it took time for you to do it. Human bodies do this, given sufficient time. They’re made to do it. You’re made to do that, to adapt. It’s your—purpose, if you had one other than to exist, multiply, and be fruitful.”

Dean’s teeth seem to finally decide to stop chattering. “Get to the point.”

“Croatoan is one hundred percent infectious, it affects every single human being on this planet in exactly the same way, in the same general time period with an eight hour threshold, with the exact sequence of stages of infection and with the exact same result, without exception. There’s no variation except in compensation for the mass of the victim infected, and that’s predictable as well.”

“Right, that’s…” He pauses, licking his lips. “Interesting, what?”

“That,” he announces, “isn’t natural.”

“You think?” Dean bursts out incredulously. “Not natural, demon virus, really—”

“It’s not even alive, not by any definition of the word, because what is living, what is of Creation, is subject to the same rules of existence: to be alive, there must be change. It’s a construct of theoretically-organic material, a parody of life, but it’s not and cannot be alive. It’s—a set of instructions given form and power, but that’s all it is. Microsoft could have written it, and in this case, could have actually done a better job of it than Lucifer.”

“Cas?”

Taking a deep breath at the wary note in Dean’s voice, he slumps back against the tub, making himself focus.

“Lucifer did understand this much about Creation—about humanity,” he continues, aware of Dean’s strict attention. “The human genome is in a constant state of change—you have no idea how much, you won’t for centuries, and new mutations are occurring all the time, some discrete and some that can be passed on to your offspring. He couldn’t afford a single mistake in making this; he had to cover the fullest potential of human mutation as it was, as it is, and as it will be, and you may not be aware of this, but that information among angels is common knowledge.”

“Of course it is,” Dean agrees glumly. “Best way to kill us, really popular topic.”

“Your entire genetic range—all you were, are, and will be—had to be in Croatoan before it was released, because once it began to spread among the population, all it would need to be stopped was one resistant human body.” Dean frowns, terrycloth falling in loose folds around his shoulders. “Just one person is all it would take, a human body with the correct genetic makeup to create the exact antibodies needed to destroy it. Scientists could then have a blueprint for a vaccine, and unlike those associated with a true virus, one hundred percent immunity would be achieved and there would be no possibility of mutation in the interim. Not just to Croatoan; it’s probable that immunity would extend to any constructed virus he devised afterward. Unlike my Father, unlike you, angels can’t create, only mimic what is already done. He had one chance to get this right, because it wouldn’t work again.”

Dean nods slowly. “So it had to have everything he knew about humanity in there from the start. Missing anything and it might not work.”

“He was also trying to make a terrible philosophical point, which is never a good basis for your method of conquest: perfection and unchanged versus the imperfect in constant flux. Which is why he turned this into an all or nothing without knowing it; he couldn’t imagine the possibility of losing. How could he, when all of human evolution was known to him and placed within that virus?”

Dean’s eyes narrow suspiciously. “You’re enjoying this.”

“His lack of a work ethic offends my sensibilities,” he agrees. “He almost did it, too. You almost can’t blame him for missing it; even prophecy didn’t have a contingency plan to deal with a human appearing from an entire different world.” Dean’s mouth falls open in belated understanding. “Someone whose immune system was surprised unto near death by an infected brownie bite. Someone with a single difference on the genetic level caused by temporal displacement.” Castiel smiles at him. “Something new.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“I’m not a virologist,” he starts, grinning helplessly at the return of Dean’s glare, “nor am I conversant with Lucifer’s truly abysmal grasp of the scientific method, but while you’re close, it wasn’t programmed for close, because close—”

“—isn’t perfect.” Dean drops his head back against the wall with an audible thump.

“The brownie infection that lingers in your immune system reacts to stress; it wouldn’t have had anything to react to unless, unlike every other human being on earth, yours detected Croatoan. It can’t hide from you, you’re killing it faster than it can replicate and spread, and it can’t fight back, because it doesn’t know how.” He smiles into Dean’s eyes. “He never thought he’d have to fight to win. You weren’t supposed to even step on the field.”

Dean takes a breath, eyes naked. “You’re sure—you’re sure that’s what’s happening now?”

“I know it is.” Dean looks away, shoulders slumping slightly as the tension melts away. He hadn’t expected that; at best, he hoped for a suspension of disbelief, a willingness to wait; at worst, the unpleasant necessity of restraints until his supposition was proven correct. “You believe me.”

Dean frowns. “What?”

“You believe me,” he repeats.

“You get I understood maybe ten, twenty words of that, right?” Castiel nods, still bewildered. “But you’re saying—correct me here if I’m wrong—I’m going to survive this and not as a—”

“Living representation of the sum of all humanity’s fears.”

“Yeah, that.” His eyes narrow suspiciously. “That’s where you were going with this, right?”

Belatedly, he nods. “Yes. You’ll survive and not as a mindless monster that devours human flesh for pleasure.”

“Then yeah, I believe you.” Leaning back against the wall, Dean closes his eyes, the boneless slump beginning to be in danger of becoming a slow slide. “You asked me if I trusted you. You didn’t have to knock me out until you had proof. You saying it is proof enough for me.” Sighing, his eyes slit open. “Can I get some sleep or—”

“Yes, of course.” Dean nods tiredly, looking content to fall asleep sitting up, which can only lead to an unpleasant semi-concussed awakening when he makes painful contact with the floor. Before he can consider the consequences of acting on impulse, Castiel reaches over, tugging him unresistingly from his corner. Dean’s eyes open long enough to convey irritation before half-turning and letting himself slump bonelessly into Castiel’s lap, sighing heavily as he shuts his eyes.

“Rest,” he murmurs, touching Dean’s forehead, skin pleasantly cool against his fingers. “You have between an hour and an hour in a half until it begins again if the pattern I’ve observed so far is any indication.”

“So two weeks of this and I might survive?” Dean yawns tiredly, tugging the towels around him before rolling onto his side, breath puffing against the damp material of Castiel’s t-shirt, and he wishes he’d thought to bring in another blanket. As Dean curls closer, he firmly reminds himself not to take it personally; he’s probably a vast improvement on the floor. Not as cold, not as hard, and far, far less wet. “Sounds great.”

“It’s a construct, so replication isn’t based on biological rules, but math, and Croatoan isn’t nearly as complicated as a true virus. Between eleven and thirteen hours before you’re no longer contagious, and thirty-six until the virus is eradicated entirely. And you’ll survive, of course.”

Dean nods in satisfaction, closing his eyes with a contented sigh. “Wake me for the next ice bath.”