A Thousand Lights in Space: December 9
First rule. Don’t panic.
—Day 128—
“Okay, there’s something we need to talk about,” Vera said, pointing him toward her bed when he arrived at her cabin that evening. Surveying the stripped bed, Castiel found himself in the novel position of hoping that wasn’t an invitation and sat down carefully, relieved to see her take a chair, turning it to face him and sitting down. “It’s about Dean.”
Alison’s warning—sent via Leah when she delivered reports before wisely fleeing Chitaqua less than an hour after her arrival—that ten children in the toddler room had come down with severe colds gave Castiel exactly ten hours before Dean stalked out of his room two hours after dawn wearing two layers of flannel and a blanket over a long-sleeve t-shirt, sweatpants, and a pair unmatched socks with a hole in one heel, face pale, nose red, carrying a handful of toilet paper, and punctuating each dragging step with a chorus of sneezes, none of which are in tune.
In that time, Castiel: called an emergency meeting of the available team leaders and various heads of camp functions (Dean went to sleep almost immediately after his shower, a terrible sign of things to come); explained they couldn’t resign, be assigned to Ichabod temporarily, or run away or he would hunt them down and bring them back dead or alive (some inquired if they could request ‘dead’; the answer was ‘no’); sent James on an emergency trip to every abandoned town up to and including Kansas City in a search for tissue (infused with lotion, per Sarah’s recommendation); ordered Brenda to turn numerous chickens into chicken broth and a great deal of soup (noodles are apparently recommended); helped Alicia frantically check their medication inventory for anything to assist with colds; and once completed, added all of these things to their pantry, refrigerator, and/or bathroom and resigned himself to dealing with this without killing either Dean or himself.
(Optional: possibly the camp as well, who voted that he who lives with and has sex with Dean must care for Dean in sickness and in health, which he thought only applied to the institute of marriage but apparently can also be subject to the vagaries of direct democracy. He hates democracy. The alternative, however, was a promise (threat?) that he would have to hunt all of them down in the wilds of Kansas, and he taught them how to hide very well. He hates them, too.)
Castiel finishes his (fourth) cup of coffee, forces himself to his feet, and tries not to look worried when he sees the hectic flush spreading over Dean’s forehead and cheeks.
“There is tissue, soup, fruit juice, water, tea, coffee, extra blankets, and various analgesics and decongestants on the kitchen table,” he says in one breath, but Dean doesn’t vary his course. With determination—and two sneezes—he shoves Castiel over, drops on the couch with another sneeze and inefficient use of tissue paper, and looks up at him with huge, red-rimmed eyes, the very picture of resignation in the face of tragic suffering. Followed by a sniffle.
Castiel thinks: I know better than this.
“Would you like me to get them for you?” he inexplicably hears himself say, and Dean nods, wiping his nose with a tiny, pathetic cough before looking up at him again. “Give me a minute.”
“Actually,” Vera said, leaning forward intently, “this is about you.”
Castiel blinked at her. “About me? Why?”
Here’s what Castiel learns over the course of the first seven hours:
Dean recovering from a serious illness is desperately eager to do all he can on his own, and is regularly cranky and not a little hostile (or perhaps a lot).
Dean with a cold refuses to so much as move from his spot on the couch unless it’s a miserable, solitary trek to the bathroom, and his emotional range comprises of ‘sniffling misery,’ ‘resigned suffering (with coughing)’ and ‘pathetic hope’ (sometimes, he sighs as well, setting off a round of carefully suppressed coughing and assuring Castiel does anything he says to avoid its continuance).
Dean is always too hot or too cold, there are too many blankets or not enough, some are too rough and some too soft, the coffee is too strong but the tea is too weak, toast shouldn’t have crusts, the wet washcloth for his headache drips, is too dry, isn’t in the right place, isn’t helping, he’s bored with this book, the print’s too small in that one, he hates this author, aren’t there any others, but he doesn’t want to be a bother (a. bother.), but it’s okay, he’ll be fine. Followed by sniffles.
It’s strange; even knowing he’s being ruthlessly manipulated for Dean’s sadistic amusement, it doesn’t actually change anything. He finds a space heater to station by the couch and turns it on and off when desired, gets more blankets/different blankets/blankets from other cabins because they don’t deserve them, makes a new pot of coffee with less coffee grains and leaves the teabag in the cup for a full three minutes, de-crusts all the toast, has four washcloths on standby for switching between at a moment’s notice, and tells James to take two jeeps to denude the nearest public library of its entire fiction section in under five hours or he’ll pray for demon possession before Castiel is done with him.
(Then immediately apologizes and tells him he’s doing an excellent job in his studies on how roads are made. It says a great deal that James simply nods with an expression of pity and promises to keep him updated on the pothole situation. For a horrifying moment, he’s in great danger of being patted on the back. It’s very lowering.)
Dean takes a long nap after the abrupt spike in his temperature lowers again with the application of ibuprofen, and Castiel loses some amount of time that afternoon watching him sleep.
“First rule. Don’t panic.”
Castiel said, “What?”
“You heard me,” Vera answered, staring into his eyes as if trying to force the meaning of the words into his brain by sheer will. “Don’t. Panic.”
Standing at the stove that evening, Castiel prepares grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner (cheese delivered from the mess because he assumed dairy would be unwelcome due to congestion and was very wrong indeed) (the bread has no crust) while heating up the chicken noodle soup that Brenda swore several times would make Dean feel better.
Putting the grilled cheese (cut in precise triangular quarters, not squares) onto a plate, he carefully measures out the soup for the correct proportion of broth to chicken to vegetables into a bowl, adds both to the tray with a glass of (not too cold) water, a napkin and silverware, before returning to the living room where he catches Dean reading Firestarter by Stephen King, a power that Castiel would very likely sell his soul right now to acquire.
“Dinner’s ready,” he says, and watches as Dean composes himself into pathetic gratitude—how does he do that?—and blows his nose, following it up with a messy wipe before discarding the tissue in the general location of the wastebasket that was acquired specifically for the purposes of tissue-handling.
For a long moment, Castiel contemplates the existential horror of being attracted to someone with a swollen red nose that’s begun to peel and excretes immense quantities of mucus, but then Dean looks up from a blue cotton-wool blend blanket-formed cowl, green eyes shimmering with excess water, and he immediately loses his train of thought. Uneasy, he sets the tray on the coffee table, unable to ignore the warmth that suffuses him when Dean smiles.
“Thanks,” Dean tells him thickly before carefully shifting his blanket cocoon enough to reach for a quarter of crustless grilled cheese (evenly browned on both sides) and take a bite, chewing with the determination of someone using the last of their energy to acquire nutrition to combat mortal disease (a cold qualifies, apparently). Then he frowns, looking up at him again. “You gonna have anything?”
Castiel thinks: a long, cold shower and dimebag on the porch after you finally go to bed, yes. “I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten all day.” Dean’s frown intensifies, and reaching for a new tissue, he sneezes twice before continuing. “Get something to eat. I’ll wait.”
Experience suggests compliance is his only sane course of action, so he resigns himself, getting a bowl of soup and returns, seating himself grimly beside Dean at his sniffling head-jerk, and applies himself to eating.
And stops, startled. Lowering his spoon, he suspiciously examines the rich golden broth, in which is scattered a plethora of creamy-white pasta and generous chunks of off-white meat.
“What?” Dean asks, pausing in his own half-hearted efforts toward sufficient nutrition consumption. “Don’t like it?”
“This is chicken,” he answers, dividing one of the pieces of meat with the side of his spoon and tasting it warily before looking at Dean. “This is what it’s supposed to taste like?”
Dean blinks wetly before taking a bite, nose wrinkling. “Not that I can taste anything right now, but yeah, I guess. You’ve had it before.”
“No, I haven’t.” He takes another bite, concentrating on the rich, salt-laden burst of flavor. “This is nothing like that square substance swimming in colored water—”
“Salt,” Dean interrupts grimly. “I told you, the military was palming you off with sodium free or fat free shit or something all this time, which is what normal people call flavor. People who can taste, that is,” he adds darkly, taking another grim bite.
Ignoring him, Castiel eats with somewhat less reluctance than usual, thinking of the last few meals he prepared and trying to mark out the difference. Salt definitely helps: he wonders now if Dean was right about hamburgers combined with marijuana use.
After they’ve both finished and he’s taken the dishes back to the kitchen, he pauses at the doorway. Unobserved, Dean’s movements are slower, more clumsy, and he reaches up to rub his temples irritably before his head drops onto the back of the couch as if he can’t find the energy to hold it up any longer before he begins to cough again. The faint flush from activity doesn’t seem to be fading; on the contrary, it’s starting to spread.
“I’m not going to—”
“Are you listening to me? Say it with me, Cas.”
“Don’t panic,” he ground out, resenting Vera’s encouraging smile with all his being. “I’ll also continue to breathe in and out while you’re away; my understanding is regular respiration is somewhat necessary for living. I don’t panic.”
“Funny story,” Vera said, sitting back in satisfaction. “Anyone else, they’d agree. But you’re talking to one of the only two people on earth who know you do and exactly what it looks like in action. Ask me who the other one is.”
He shut his mouth on the obvious reply; he doesn’t panic.
“He can read you like a book, Cas,” Vera said. “Don’t believe me? You’ll find out exactly what I mean the first time he gets the sniffles. Now say it with me…”
“I. Don’t. Panic.”
Going to the pantry, he retrieves ibuprofen and a decongestant, then adds the hydrocodone-laced cough syrup Alicia promised him would help Dean to rest, before refilling the glass and returning to the living room. Pushing the coffee table back, he sits down, setting water and medication aside, and fights the urge to check his temperature again; he’s very flushed.
“I have your medication,” he starts and freezes at how familiar those words are on his tongue. Lifting his head, Dean opens his eyes, and the expression on his face tells him he recognizes it as well. “If you would—”
“So how long until ice baths become a feature, anyway?” Dean demands roughly.
“It shouldn’t be a feature. This is merely a cold—”
“Most colds start with a high fever?” He snorts, which unfortunately sets off a fit of coughing. “Cas, you think I don’t know what it feels like? What is it now?”
He hesitates, but finally reaches out, fingers skimming the hot, dry skin of Dean’s forehead. “One hundred point one three eight and climbing, yes, but I have ibuprofen—”
“Like that helped last time?”
“It did this afternoon,” he tells Dean. “Vera didn’t think your immune system was permanently compromised, as I’m sure she told you more than once, but I did warn you that your body is adapting and that may take time.”
“So I’ll pick up the first cold I see?” Dean asks, rolling his eyes and pausing for an exceedingly bitter sneeze. “Wish I had that kind of luck with women.”
“No, you picked up the same cold that every adult and adolescent who worked in the toddler room also acquired.” Dean’s never not been lucky with women, up to and including angels who choose to Fall by their own choice, are born into humanity with their own (female) body, and upon reaching adulthood have only to meet him before they’re being willingly seduced in the back of the Impala. Not that he particularly cares. “And several parents, including Tony.”
“Is he okay?” Dean asks worriedly, straightening. “I mean, he’s sixty—”
“Walter and Dennis both live with him and his daughters, and I’m sure are seeing to his care,” he interrupts. “When Leah brings the next report, she’ll have an update on everyone’s status, but Leah gave me Alison’s message verbatim and she didn’t seem worried.”
Dean searches his face for a moment before slumping into the cushions again.
“It is only a cold,” he repeats. “Though it’s somewhat complicated by the residual infection from the brownie bite, yes, which…” Before Dean does more than stiffen, he quickly adds, “This isn’t a relapse, simply the predictable result of your immune system being stressed.”
“That’s all.” Dean stares at him. “So if I get sick—every time I get sick, it’ll keep coming back? Vera said she thought that might happen, and this is proof, right? A goddamn cold and now I’m gonna be exorcising people or talking about sheep…”
“You actually were talking to them,” he corrects Dean, but understandably, he doesn’t appreciate the distinction. “Dean, you’re in no danger of—”
“You don’t know that!” he snaps, setting off another round of coughing. Castiel retrieves the tissue box and mutely extends it, waiting for it to taper off. “So don’t fuck with me!”
“I do know that, just like I knew when I saw you emerge from your room that day you were already in danger, just as I knew the moment you began to respond to treatment,” he answers, keeping his voice far calmer than he feels. “Do you see a blood circle in this room? I’m not going through that again, and this time, I have volunteers for the sacrifice. All I have to do is tell them they have to care for you during your illness, and they’ll happily—”
“Cas.”
“—sacrifice themselves. If you think I didn’t read everything Vera recorded about the progress of that fever or I don’t remember helping her to treat it or that I didn’t ask her what I should watch for before she left, one of us is hallucinating right now and I hope it’s me!”
Dean stares at his upraised knees, mouth tight, and Castiel closes his eyes; surely there is bread somewhere in this camp that needs the crusts removed. He’s finished with all that they have in the cabin.
“If it’s not serious, why do you look…” Dean’s mouth works briefly. “Look like it is.”
Somewhere south of Atlanta, Georgia, Castiel knows that Vera just started to laugh and—this being his life, of course—has doubtless intuited from the very ether exactly why.
He hates her, too.
“What is the word for when you associate something with a fairly traumatic event in your life and it has nothing to do with food but instead your best friend almost dying before your eyes from a brownie bite?”
Dean frowns, wiping his nose. “PTSD?”
“Vera told me that the most important thing I could do for you is not to—overreact if you became ill,” he says, fixing his gaze on one corner of the blanket. “She told me that no matter what she told you and what you knew for yourself, you wouldn’t believe it unless I did. So my behavior now should match what it was when you were still very ill; otherwise, any doubts you might have would be confirmed.” He frowns at the blanket. “I told her I had no idea why she’d think I’d need such ridiculously obvious advice.”
Dean makes a face, followed almost immediately by another fit of coughing. Annoyed with himself, Castiel reaches for the cough syrup, pouring out a measured amount into the tiny measuring cup and handing it to Dean when it finally abates, followed by the ibuprofen and decongestant.
Handing back the empty glass, Dean is still flushed and irritable, but somewhat less hostile. “It’s just a cold.”
“It’s just a cold,” he confirms. “Aggravated by the residual traces of the infection from the brownie bite, which isn’t anything to be worried about but will probably magnify your symptoms, and don’t panic. Me, not you.”
Dean hesitates before nodding grudgingly. “I was okay until you actually cut the crust off of the toast.”
“I thought I was perfectly fine until you started to run a temperature after lunch,” he offers. “However, before that, I was removing the crusts because it was very funny to see your expression each time I did it.”
Dean’s head snaps up, outraged, before he abruptly bursts into laughter, inevitably leading to another fit of coughing. One out-thrust hand stops Castiel from moving, and eventually, it tapers off as Dean gropes for more tissues, wiping his nose and snickering hoarsely between two rapid sneezes. Straightening, he relaxes back into the couch—flushed, red (and now somewhat damp) nose, watery green eyes, and still ridiculously attractive. It’s surreal; how does he do that?
“People in Ichabod think you’re charming.”
“Huh?” Dean blows his nose messily before dropping the tissue into the wastebasket—a first, his aim is improving—and acquiring a fresh one. “They do?”
“Yes, Alison told me about what happened at the council meeting, as well as at those introductory dinners she hosted for you,” he explains. “She said she was immune, of course—”
“She’s not,” Dean interrupts smugly. Castiel doesn’t agree, but only because Alison begged him not to ever tell Dean it worked, as Teresa mocked her for it enough.
“—but she did ask me if that was why I was attracted to you,” he continues. “I had to profess myself utterly ignorant of what she was talking about, as I’d never seen any evidence that you knew the meaning of the word.”
Dean’s amusement slowly changes into something he doesn’t recognize, but there’s no mistaking the dangerous light filling the green eyes. “That right?” he says huskily. Wiping his nose, he starts to add something to that and frowns, forehead creasing, and Castiel can see him just stop himself from reaching up: that would be the headache, yes.
“Lie down,” he says, inexplicably relieved as he reaches for the empty glass. “It may be only a cold, but I’m assured that while not life-threatening and of short duration, they’re utterly miserable while they last.”
“They are,” Dean agrees far too easily, reaching for one of the pillows Castiel brought from the bed and tucking it against the arm of the couch before curling up with a sigh. A soft thump catches Castiel’s attention, and reaching down, he picks up the book Dean was reading. “You’re not going to watch me sleep, are you?”
“Yes, I am. Especially if your grilled cheese has to be cut into triangles and without crust. I think I’m owed this.”
Dean begins to grin, and one foot abruptly snakes out from the blankets to kick the couch cushion in a way that seems to be significant. “Read to me.”
“What?”
Another kick, harder this time. “My head hurts and I’m bored. Sit down on the couch like a normal person and read to me. You can watch me sleep, I can pretend you’re just reading until I actually am, and everyone wins.”
He almost argues the point but realizes no, he can’t go cabin to cabin to acquire more bread to cut, and even if he could, he doesn’t want Dean out of his line of sight, and the camp is distressingly well-organized at this moment (as well as notable in their absence). Short of continuing research on the feasibility of building a small nuclear reactor in one of the less desirable cabins—Joseph was appalled, Alicia enthusiastic—he’s not actually sure he has anything else to do, and his concentration at this moment is not compatible with primitive nuclear physics.
If only they’d invented cold fusion already, he thinks wistfully, and at Dean’s third—and much more determined—kick, he sighs and picks up the book.
“Not that,” Dean says. “Hippo porn. I know you have more done, come on.”
Castiel thinks of where he stopped translating. “I do, but—”
“Get it,” Dean demands snottily (quite literally, even), and with another sigh, he retreats to the utility closet under Dean’s eagle eye, finding where he’d hidden the evidence—behind the inexplicably depleted supply of Eldritch Horror—and comes back to see Dean’s helpfully left the end of the couch ready for him. Almost as soon as he’s seated, Dean promptly decides he must stretch out, long legs abruptly draped across his lap followed by a heartfelt sigh of satisfaction.
Stupidly, Castiel looks at him and gets in return a mischievous grin. “Well? Anytime you’re ready.”
Castiel thinks: I do know better than this and I don’t care.
Carefully setting the original text on the arm of the sofa—burning it would probably contaminate the fire—and his pens on the coffee table in easy reach, he removes the green one as he skims through the notebook, warily relieved to realize there’s probably still a great deal of text before…that part.
“Where did we stop?” he asks as the blanket is flung downward, just short of Dean’s feet, and he absently reaches down to straighten it over them and tuck in the ends securely.
“South of Memphis, on the road to Thebes, just spent time staring at hippo ass in the swamp while having a lot of feelings.”
Flipping to the correct page, Castiel nods. “’Cleft in twain, ripened and honey-glazed—’”
“—’beneath the sun in splendor’ that’s it,” Dean finishes for him, rubbing his nose and abruptly tugging a pillow under his head to look at Castiel through watery eyes. “Hey, what happened to the boyfriend with the blister lips or whatever—”
“’A carbuncle gleaming like a blister swollen with new blood,’ and I’m honestly not sure. He vanished between the Inundation that entered the Cubits of Plenty—as his very presence also controls the Nile’s Inundations, not Pharaoh, who’s only a god on earth, after all—” He stops himself with an effort. “That and Pallas Athena’s weeping lamentations as the water level rose around her supine form, for in her despair she’ll drown herself, though that will take time, since it takes some days for the Nile to rise, but it seems she’s willing to wait.” Flipping back, he verifies the potential lover’s absence since before that obscenely inaccurate rendition of Athena’s—there’s literally nothing not wrong with it. Entirely new things were created wholesale just so he could be wrong about them.
Going back, he proceeds to the next stanza and comes to an abrupt stop.
…yes, that part.
“Cas?” There’s an impression of activity on the other side of the couch, but he needs a moment. “You gonna start?”
It seems as if he’ll have to. “’Kneeling within the swirl of mud as the swamp ascended the banks in crawling tendrils of azure and verdant greens’—for the water of the Nile is like tentacles—’he cried out to the heavens, ‘Lo, for your name I speak and know, Messenger, come to my bidding with these gifts I seek to give’.” The silence from the other side of the couch almost echoes with ominous portents, but perhaps Dean’s fever will abruptly spike and a pleasant sheep-based hallucination will commence. Any moment now. “The grammar is—”
“He summoned,” Dean breathes in something suspiciously like joy, “an angel?”
Castiel grits his teeth. “Technically—”
“Of the Lord?”
“Technically speaking, no,” Castiel says in pedantic misery. “The pantheons of Egypt and Greece had no conceptualization for ‘angel.’ In point of fact, the word itself is only a very loose translation of—”
“’That which you call a rose’,” Dean quotes maliciously. “Or an angel: Shakespeare knew his shit. Was it you?”
Castiel jerks his gaze to Dean in horror.
“Tell me it was you,” Dean says gloatingly. “Tell me he summoned you by name and you’re immortalized in shitty teenage Greek except in Egyptian pre-MySpace epic poetry being turned down by hippofucker. Is this why you made up shitty excuses all this time about still translating it?”
“The translation is somewhat questionable—”
“Qafsiel Kaziel, Cassiel, Messenger, Castiel—”
“’Anina, Namina, Anael, Ana-el’.” He watches in interest as Dean stills, green eyes wide, and abruptly becomes somewhat reconciled to the fact he can’t smite eastern Athens the night of this poet’s misbegotten birth. “I assume you recognize the name.”
Dean’s mouth closes with an audible snap.
“’And so they appeared,’” he reads more enthusiastically, “’draped in silvered moonlight like the most diaphanous of garments, laid bare to only the most private of eyes, rich in flesh and rounded in form’—”
Dean promptly begins to cough.
“—’lush, ripe, honeyed fruit falling into his willing hand’—he did have a problem with repetition, it seems,” he observes. “Maybe he made a copy paste error—”
“Cas,” Dean says in horror. “That’s your sister he’s—talking about being ripe and honeyed!”
“Incest is a mortal sin, not a divine one,” he responds, turning the page. “Among the gods, a relative within the first degree was generally preferred as a mate; in no other way could they consolidate and expand their power. I have no conceptualization of the taboo as such, and if I did, I’ve never known her in that sense.” He looks at Dean in understanding. “That would make one of us.”
Dean swallows. “Uh—”
“’Their steps fall like raindrops as they stretch—,’ he’s an idiot, he meant ‘paces’.” He pauses to make another correction as Dean indulges in a rather drawn-out fit of coughing and raises his voice to compensate. “’Their steps fall like raindrops as they pace the length of the swamp on feet of light’—not a completely inaccurate description of our true form, though technically speaking, we don’t have feet—’and displayed themselves before him in all their glory, red hair surmounting a face of carved ebony and gold’—acceptable, though the fact he’s not being burned alive for the presumption of looking on their true form…”
“You’re telling me Ana’s true form had red hair?” Dean demands, ending his fit of coughing with remarkable rapidity. “Come the fuck on!”
“’And there’s nothing to do but kneel before such in abject worship.’” Castiel glances at Dean’s red face—carbuncle-like, even. “Red is often used as an indicator of lust, anger, sexual heat without procreative function: it’s a well-known fact. You’re welcome to check my translations, if you wish.”
“I’m going to,” Dean promises, wiping his nose venomously. “Soon as I find a demotic Egyptian to English dictionary.”
“I look forward to our future conversations in comparative linguistics,” Castiel tells him sincerely before continuing. “’A divine hand fell upon his head, gentle in their touch, warm in their offered benediction, diaphanous robes like mist parting to reveal them swollen, ripe’—he does like the word ‘ripe,’ doesn’t he?—’turgid and dewed with divine seed, sweet in taste when offered for adoration, slick in honey-sticky ropes’—ropes, that certainly is an image I could live without—”
“You—”
“’—thick and heavy, accepting its deserved worship and sending him beyond mortal endurance into both agony and ecstasy indistinguishable. Speared by the heavens before him—”
“Okay, wait, wait,” Dean interrupts. “How much of this is there?”
“Eighteen stanzas.”
“You’re going to read eighteen stanzas of your sister banging hippofucker?” Dean demands, then looks uncertain. “That’s…what they’re doing, right? The spearing thing, that’s…what?”
“I’m honestly not sure,” he mutters, frowning at the page before returning his attention to Dean. “As I said, I don’t—oh, I apologize. Human sexual prudery—”
“Fuck you, I’m not being—that! No prudery here!”
“—is alien to me. Would you be uncomfortable listening to me read eighteen stanzas of your ex-girlfriend in their true form—”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend! It was one time!” Dean bursts out, and earns himself a well-deserved genuine fit of coughing.
“—having what may or may not be anatomically impossible divine and somewhat ambiguous sex in overwrought prose with hippofucker on the banks of the Nile during Inundation?” Dean’s face turns an interesting shade of purple, and he sits back, satisfied. “It’s your decision, of course. I’ll wait.
Dean doesn’t speak for several long moments after he’s finished. Closing the notebook, he stacks it with the text on the coffee table and puts away his pen before sitting back, wondering if he should admit…
“Okay, I give up,” Dean says finally, blowing his nose. “What the hell just happened?”
“I checked this four times,” he replies. “I’m not certain whether my former divinity should be offended by the blasphemy—it being fictional—or his lack of literacy when engaged in fictional blasphemy, but it would help to know if blasphemy actually occurred. Fictionally speaking, that is. I was hoping I simply wasn’t human enough to understand it.” It was a wonderful theory, and he regrets its loss very, very much.
“Yeah, no, that’s just hippofucker being—I don’t even know.” Dean sneezes in resignation. “Okay, let’s get it over with.”
He takes a deep breath. “Are you sure—”
“Look, we gotta figure this out, not like we’re sleeping either way after that—whatever it was. Better to know for sure.” Blowing his nose again, Dean motions to the notebook. “I’m pretty sure he was probably talking about Ana’s holy cock with turgid seed—”
“Divine seed.” At Dean’s incredulous look, he shrugs helplessly. “Perfect memory, and I regret it more than you can imagine right now. You have no idea how much.”
“Sorry,” Dean replies with almost painful sincerity. “Anyway, holy cock, we got that much so far, right? Tell me I’m right, lie if you have to.”
“I don’t think he knows what a cock looks like.” He reads the stanza again, but it doesn’t help. “Even his own.”
“Which might explain where he thought it was—was it moving or is it just me?” Dean shudders before straightening with a determined look. “Heaven’s spearing something, and we’re gonna find out what that is or die trying.”
“No one dies from reading bad poetry, Dean.”
“I said,” Dean states, “that we’re gonna try. Now ‘speared by the heavens’: start there.”