It's the Stars That Lie: October 15

Short version: still not dead.

—Day 73—

Dean appreciates that his recovery is gonna be slow and not every day will be filled with exciting progress reports. He gets this, he does, but the last time he had problems with solid food, he had the flu. Sam, being a giant fucking girl, fed him vegetable broth and grass (sprouts? Whatever) even though he could have done it himself if Sam didn’t maliciously given him a spoon that weighed a fucking ton. It was hugely embarrassing, and Sam enjoyed every goddamn minute of it.

It’s not the quality of solid food (bread, shredded meat untyped, chopped vegetables untyped, soup in all its terrifying incarnations), or how tiring it is to sit up to open and close his mouth on command, or even the sheer embarrassment of having to be fed two meals of three.

It’s that it’s difficult, because he’s never hungry now: it’s hard, because he forgets about meals until one’s in front of him: it’s an effort, every damn time, because he doesn’t want to eat. He recognizes the schedule that Cas adheres to like a goddamn message from God; it’s the one he started and made Cas follow to get some goddamn normalcy living here and he follows it to the goddamn second; he has to, because if he doesn’t, Dean wouldn’t remember to eat.

The only thing that makes this less utterly humiliating is the sheer weirdness of Cas’s grim determination to apparently master the complicated art of being a nurse without any actual people skills or even a working idea of what those are or how to implement them. He can’t say in all honesty he’s helping Cas out with his Interacting With People 101 either, and not just because it’s kind of hilarious.

Cas was good at being a junkie and good at being a dick and good at making sure everyone knew those things; it was a script that was easy and simple, almost effortless in a life that was anything but, and Dean gets that, he does, but he figures it’s time for a change. Historically, Cas has been fine with going off-script given motivation, and, historically, Dean’s been pretty good at supplying it. One way or another, Cas is gonna start actually dealing with having a personality of his very own and letting other people see it live and not whatever he thought up that might be useful in alienating people as much as humanly (post-angelically?) possible.

As Cas impatiently holds out the last spoonful of canned cream of chicken, swimming with may or may not be bits of actual meat, Dean’s pretty sure he’s about a second away from getting it shoved straight through his throat; so fine, he’s also motivated by being fucking sick of being this goddamn sick.

“I don’t need—” Dean tries and then it’s all shitty metal-flavored cream of and teeth hitting metal and Jesus, they should have let him die. Swallowing frantically, he wipes his mouth and glares at Cas. “God dammit, Cas!”

With a sigh of insulting relief, Cas sets the empty bowl aside and glares back at Dean as if he deliberately contracted a fever just to fuck with his life. “Even if currency were a valid method of exchange for goods and services here,” he says bitterly, “I still couldn’t pay anyone to deal with this no matter how much I offered them.”

That’s his surly ex-angel working impromptu. “Do your federal warrants include crimes against humanity? Because I think I’m seeing why.” Rolling his eyes, he sighs noisily when Cas touches his forehead, blue eyes distant. At some point, he stopped finding it creepy, which yeah, could be fever-related brain damage, but at this point, he really can’t find it in himself to care. “How am I doing?”

“Your temperature is approximately ninety-nine point six two eight three degrees Fahrenheit. As it hasn’t risen to a critical level in over two weeks, you continue to respond appropriately to the antibiotics, and you’re now able to consume a minimal amount of nutrition at every meal, I think we can safely say the nightmare is almost over.”

Short version: still not dead.

“Thanks, Cas. It’s been great for me, too.” He crosses his arms, careful of the IV line, feeling annoyed with his own exhaustion just from sitting up and swallowing on command. “I can’t believe a brownie bite does this.”

Vera’s started hiding her charts since he started spending more time awake, and she’s good, but he’s better at pretending to be asleep and catching her reading them—charts, during the Apocalypse, he’s not sure why that’s funny, but it is—with a bewildered expression.

They went through a lot of treatments, that much he was told, but it wasn’t until she left the clipboard on his bed that he understood what that really meant. He pulled out the bottom ten pages before she came back to get it—considering the number, barely noticeable—and read through them during his designated nap times (read: whenever either Cas or Vera decided he looked tired and they were only mostly right) trying to figure out what the hell happened to him. It’s not that Cas wouldn’t tell him if he asked; it’s that whatever happened, he’s not sure Cas is ready to talk about all of it. The two times his heart stopped are worrying, but not nearly as much as why the last one has a lot of cross-outs, entire areas of potential prognosis scratched out entirely.

Vera’s a very good nurse and a hell of a working doctor. She didn’t do that because she thought she made a mistake in treating him or did something wrong—she was the only one who would be reading it, or understand it for that matter, or so she probably thought. She still tests him every morning and evening, and while the quality is less intense, more routine, there’s a reason she’s still doing it and still making notes on his progress (chart shows: almost insanely good, awesome). The only thing he can guess is that something changed between when she got his heart going the last time, her initial observations (likely at that point, the potential damage) and coming back later and removing it because apparently, she thought they were wrong.

Then Cas says, “It doesn’t.”

He hesitates, glancing back at the closed door, then at Dean, blue eyes searching. Whatever he’s looking for, he seems to find; to Dean’s surprise, he gets up and locks the door before settling himself cross-legged on the bed. “At least, I don’t think it wasn’t entirely the brownie bite.”

He nods slowly. “Okay.”

“Actually, I’m sure it wasn’t, but I was trying to be considerate of your continued weakness and causing you undue stress during your recovery.”

The sad part is, Cas probably thinks he’s being nice; for him, it probably is. “Thanks,” he says between his teeth, remembering that he’s got to be sensitive and shit to Cas’s feelings here, since he’s got to try and model non-dick behavior on the off-chance Cas picks it up. Stranger things have happened, like almost dying from a brownie bite. “You wanna explain?”

“No, I don’t, but it seems I’ll have to anyway.” Cas rubs his eyes tiredly, and Dean feels a faint twinge of guilt before he can suppress it. “You contracted a very mild infection from the bites, one that under normal circumstances you wouldn’t have even been aware you had. However, it’s not uncommon for it to spread without sufficient treatment, which is why I insisted on treating you when you returned from patrol. Why the team leaders didn’t insist on doing so immediately is still a mystery.”

Dean doesn’t ask what Cas did about that; three quarters of Chitaqua is mowed, after all.

“Instead of simply becoming somewhat ill after a day or two and lasting a week at most, within ten hours, it escalated in a pattern similar to someone suffering from an autoimmune disorder.” Before he can start to wonder if this is panic-worthy, Cas adds rigidly, “Or someone who had been thrust into an entirely new environment and therefore, had no resistance to any of the bacteria present.”

He wishes he couldn’t follow that. “Dorothy, we’re still in Kansas, not Oz.”

“You were displaced in spacetime,” Cas answers quietly. “It only looks like the same world; it’s not.”

“Like War of the Worlds, death by goddamn cold? Is that what—”

“Something like that, except no, not at all, so stop interrupting me so I can try to find a way to explain this.” Cas looks like he’s visibly bracing himself. “In general, moving humans in spacetime is discouraged, though there’s no way you could know that, since it seems to happen to you with alarming frequency.” There’s a general impression Cas feels Dean just didn’t try hard enough to avoid it.

“I’m special like that.” He almost wishes he hadn’t asked. “What does that mean? Is this going to happen every time I get injured?”

“It’s complicated,” Cas says, avoiding Dean’s eyes. “However—”

“You don’t know.”

“A corporeal body can’t survive the process of being moved through space and time without protection, obviously.” Dean nods impatiently; that’s so not fucking obvious. “What is less obvious is that just being in the wrong time is equally dangerous, though for different reasons.”

Dean stills. “Wait, if you knew this could happen, why the hell didn’t you tell me when I got here?”

“It shouldn’t have happened.” Cas slumps, visibly bringing himself under control before he continues. “It’s—insert the word ‘impossible’ here, I don’t have a better one, though you’re a living example of just that.”

He nods carefully, trying to decide how to approach this. “Why?”

“The same reason that the manipulation of time is almost exclusively limited to those that exist outside of time,” Castiel answers tightly, and the way he’s staring at the bedspread scares Dean like nothing he’s actually said. “In a manner of speaking, existing outside of time means that when living within linear time, it is always as a visitor, so that protection is inherent to their very being. Moving someone else in time automatically extends that protection to them by the law of contamination. There’s no way to separate one from the other and no possible way to voluntarily withdraw it; in essence, for the purposes of this conversation, you’re part of them. When I took you to see your mother, whether or not I was visible, I was there; you couldn’t have stayed in that time if I wasn’t.”

“And there’s no way around that?”

“With the exception of literal divine intervention in the laws of Creation themselves—that would be my Father, in case this needs clarification—there shouldn’t be, but as you’re here…..” Cas makes a face; yeah, he gets it. “It’s not just that. The power required to do this—to move you from your own timeline into another one entirely—is tremendous, far more than simple time travel, and the knowledge and skill to do it are even more rare. At this point, I’ve eliminated all the potential candidates, including those that I made up to entertain myself when reality failed me.”

“Right.” Swallowing, Dean makes himself ask. “So how long until—how long do I have?”

Cas frowns. “What do you mean?”

“What do—” Dean stares at him. “Until I die! Until being here kills me! What the fuck do you think I’m talking about?”

Cas’s expression flickers briefly, too fast for Dean to follow. “While this doesn’t shorten the list of ways you can die here in any meaningful sense—this being you—we can eliminate ‘existing here at all’ from consideration.”

“You just said—”

“If you stop interrupting me, I would have already finished this explanation.” Cas looks at him meaningfully, which he ignores. “In the future, any injuries or infections should follow the same course as they would have in your own world, though the process is uncertain, this being new—”

“Cut to the chase.”

“You’re adapting to this world.” Cas lets out a breath. “Humans do this quite often. That’s how you survive your environment; you adapt to it. In this case—Vera could explain better, but it’s not uncommon to attempt several different treatments before finding the one that works for a given illness. The challenge was keeping you alive long enough for a treatment to be found that would slow the spread of the infection enough for your immune system to begin to respond.”

Dean licks his lips. “You could tell what was happening to me.”

“I didn’t know I could until—I felt it,” Cas says, looking away. “I knew all we had to do was keep you alive long enough for you to adapt; once you did, you would recover.”

“You just needed time.”

Cas nods. “From Vera’s observations, I think the reason why your condition degraded so rapidly is that in your world, you were never bitten by a brownie. They’re non-terrestrial in origin, which gives the human body a limited immunity to the bacteria they carry, but to compensate for that, the infection rate is very high. You, however, had no existing exposure from a previous infection in your world, which might have been enough for your body to note the points of similarity.”

“And it won’t happen again?”

“There’s a small possibility of a slight increase in severity should you contract a virus or another infection for some time—which is inevitable, I know—but this infection acted as a catalyst, giving your body the blueprint. Rather like a very drawn out and hideously slow vaccine or—” Cas brightens, looking pleased with himself, “—learning a new language. It’s fluency is still in question, but it’s only a matter of time.”

Like learning a new language: that almost makes sense.

“So that’s it? Just bad luck? “It can’t be that easy. His life isn’t that easy.

“Good luck in one way.” Cas hesitates, mouth thinning. “Your body may have adapted faster if it were measles, due to your body having those exact antibodies—one world to the left, that is—and if your vaccinations were up to date, which I doubt considering this is you, but in theory. On the other hand—brownie infections are normally very mild; anything more serious might have killed you before your body could adapt. For that matter, if it was anything that Vera wasn’t familiar with or that we didn’t have the means to treat, it might have been different.”

“And how long are we at plague level precautions here?” Dean asks.

“While your recovery might seem slow, it’s actually progressing very rapidly; the problem is the strain your body was under during the fever. We’re in a camp, not a hospital, and right now, you’re vulnerable to any infection, however mild, which could then result in a relapse, which you don’t have the reserves to deal with. This cabin and this room are currently as close as Vera and I could get to something resembling the conditions you would have at a hospital, but now that you’re relatively cognizant, a great deal will be up to you and how well you follow Vera’s strictures.”

Dean nods slowly. “And if I do? Letter and spirit.”

“According to Vera, there was no damage to any of your major organs, which—she tries not to use the word ‘miracle’ but even I can’t think of a better word—so if you adhere to Vera’s schedule and avoid any further infections during your recovery, she thinks—and I know—that you should be fine.” Cas smiles faintly at his dubious expression. “There are certain advantages associated with having an angel resurrect you after your body had already almost entirely decomposed; I’m very intimately acquainted with your specific genetic makeup and its exact parameters. While I won’t go into detail, suffice to say, I now better understand why my Father chose to create Eve from Adam’s still-living rib; it saved Him a great deal of time and bother. While building an entire human body from DNA fragments is of course far less difficult than starting with bare dirt and an active imagination, I would have done a great deal for just one well-preserved—” He glances at Dean’s expression and stops short, fighting back a smirk. “Too much detail?”

“A little, yeah.” Dean cocks his head. “Even without Grace you can still tell?”

“Grace only provided the most convenient means to accomplish your resurrection,” Cas says slowly. “It was a tool, nothing more. You were an act of Creation, and what I create I will always know.”

Mouth dry, Dean can’t make himself look away; when Cas finally does, he’s not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. “So—that’s it?”

“As soon as Vera clears you and you’re stronger, I’ve suggested performing a series of vaccinations for whatever we can get through the border.” Dean makes a face, but he kind of likes living, so. “She agreed, since the ones you would have had in childhood would have expired in any case and being a nurse, she knows the importance of that in this world for anyone. The entire camp will be participating as well, if that makes you feel better.”

“And that won’t—set this off again?”

“I lied,” Cas answers flatly, and Dean’s stomach drops. “I know you weren’t up to date; the last time was when Bobby took you and Sam when you were ten after Sam almost got lockjaw from stepping on a nail. Unfortunately, your father was far too concerned with—”

“Cas.”

“—avenging his dead wife to take the simplest measures possible to prevent the unnecessary death of his youngest son and refused to leave you with Bobby permanently for reasons I have yet to understand, considering he was willing to give up hunting until you both came of age.” The look on Cas’s face warns him not to push, but mostly, he’s too surprised by what Cas said about Bobby to try; he never knew that. “I ordered Joseph to begin negotiations at the next scheduled meeting with the border to get everything he could from Vera’s list. What happened to you here has never happened in all of time, and this will hopefully lower the risk to your life. At least in this.”

They need a new subject now. “So what was that about selling my soul, anyway?”

Cas abruptly goes still, eyes darting to Dean and away, but not fast enough for him to miss something disturbingly like panic before he tries for casual. “Hallucinations are not uncommon during fevers. Don’t let it trouble you; for the most part, you were incomprehensible as well as belligerent.”

“Which means there were times I wasn’t.” Dean sighs in resignation. “What’d I say, Cas? Crossroad, Lucifer, Crowley, who?”

“It wasn’t always clear,” he answers evasively, “but that could be that during your more vocal periods, I tried not to listen too closely. It was unsettling.”

“You’re doing a shitty job avoiding the question.”

“I can’t think of a plausible reason to escape the room without risking you’ll drag yourself out of bed to try and follow me and thereby precipitating a relapse,” Cas explains depressingly. “Pretend I’m doing a better job and take it as a given that one day, you would’ve eventually found it very, very funny.”

“Okay,” Dean says, officially unnerved; he’s pretty sure he’s watching Cas freaking the fuck out. “Would you eventually find it funny, though?”

Cas looks conflicted. “I suppose that might depend on the quality of your aim and my ability to avoid you.”

“Twenty questions is over,” he says, giving up. “Just tell me. Not like I haven’t sold my soul before; there’s nothing new here.”

“Why do you—” Cas looks away, mouth tight. “I don’t think I truly understood what my counterpart had done to you, despite what you told me.”

…and he was wrong. This is definitely something he hasn’t done. “Oh.”

“As it turns out, even while drunk, you were surprisingly careful on what details you chose to share.” Cas looks into the middle distance with a closed expression. “You thought—you thought he took your brother and you—” He shakes his head. “They were estranged for so long before Sam became Lucifer’s vessel, I forgot how much you meant to each other.”

Dean wonders if it would be better or worse if he remembered what happened; it’s not like he can’t guess. “I told him…Christ.” He stares at Cas in horror. “I thought you were him once, didn’t I?”

Cas doesn’t look at him. “It—wasn’t just once.”

To Dean, Cas had once been someone else entirely; unknown enemy to reluctant ally, who became friend and then family, whose betrayal and death had gutted him alive and left scars that he didn’t even realize have begun to heal. It’s distant now, like years have passed since that day at the reservoir, a lifetime, another life entirely. He’s always thought of them as different people, but Dean’s not sure when how he thought of them changed, when this Cas became simply Cas. He doesn’t know how to explain that, not now, not and be believed.

“Eventually,” Cas continues with grim determination, not quite twisting the bedspread into bare threads, “I understand that we will find this funny. Assuming we survive long enough for it to become a charming anecdote that we unfortunately will be unable to ever share, seeing as it requires knowing you’re not from here. And that my counterpart became a god with very poor ethics and a decided strain of rampant megalomania.”

“Technically,” Dean tries, “it was more pre-god, I think—”

“That doesn’t help.”

Yeah, he didn’t think so. “You’re nothing like him. I know the difference.”

Cas snorts softly. “I know You were feverish. I don’t think—”

“Vino veritas, right? It’s a lie. The only truth in liquor is what you’re still willing to lie about. So whatever I told you—”

“Worship is not all that he wanted from you.”

“Worship was kind of de facto.” Dean blows out a breath. “Look, Cas, so I thought you were him. What, did I—”

“What do you think?”

This could be worse, but he can’t imagine how. “Cas—”

“I accepted it,” Cas says, looking at nothing. “Your offer of worship. And then I made you promise not to die.”

“Oh.” He may not remember this, but it’s surprisingly easy to imagine. “Just—let me get this straight. I offered, what, worship, love, and loyalty—”

“And obedience,” Cas interrupts, looking pained. “You threw that in unexpectedly near the end.”

“Right, and obedience.” Right there, Dean thinks the contract would have failed, possibly accompanied by hysterical disembodied laughter. “And the only thing you asked for—ordered—was for me to not die? Anything else?”

Cas’s eyes narrow. “I can think of several things now I should have requested.”

“Yeah, hindsight’s a bitch.” He tilts his head back, thinking. “And I lived. Not bad for a Fallen angel, though kind of shitty for a god.”

“Dean, it wasn’t a real contract.” Cas looks away. “I can’t actually—I didn’t save you.”

“Pretty sure the ice baths and drugs and IV thing helped, though,” Dean observes. “More manual labor, less snapping, I get it, but hey, this is how humans have been pulling it off for a while. You’re doing okay for a newbie.”

Cas blinks at him for a moment, tilting his head; humanity is so strange, it suggests. I really don’t know what to do with you at all.

“Anything else I should know?” Dean asks; if there’s anything else that’s gonna traumatize them, might as well get it over with. This time, Cas’s mouth twitches, just a little, but it’s enough. This is gonna be okay.

“I suppose you might want to apologize to Vera eventually.”

Oh God, did he hit on her? In front of Cas? “Why?” Then, relieved, he remembers. “The demon thing? Yeah, that was—”

“Oh, she got used to that,” Cas says, a hint of malice in his voice. “At some point, despite the care both of us took to disarm ourselves when in your presence due your surprisingly improved reflexes, Vera forgot her boot knife. After pinning her to the bed and disarming her, you accused her of being someone named ‘Meg’ and attempted to exorcise her.” Cas frowns faintly. “I thought Meg had been absent from earth for several years now. Did she return?”

Dean closes his eyes and wonders how the fuck this is his life. Meg. Jesus Christ. “Weird. So—”

“Which is when we decided restraints would be advisable, as you continued to address her as Meg until your fever broke, often combined with telling me not to trust her.” He has no idea what his expression is telling Cas, but the blue eyes narrow suspiciously. “Dean—”

“Yeah, that fever, Jesus, no idea.” Dean raises an eyebrow. “Nice work with the restraints, by the way.”

“Thank you.” Cas smiles back, blue eyes lightening. “Your safe word was not ‘thirsty’.”

“Fuck you.” Dean hears the rattle of beads that means that Vera’s back from her break time on the porch, and glances hopefully at the spiral on his bedside table as Cas returns from unlocking the door. “You have a few minutes for another installment of hippo porn?”

“Good, made it just in time,” Vera says as she comes in the room, checking Dean over with laudable speed before nudging him over with a hip and sitting down. Cas looks between them. “Well?”

Opening the spiral, Cas opens it to where they left off yesterday. “My translations from this point are rather questionable.” It’s said more in hope than any actual doubt of the accuracy of the translation, which after the last installment Dean understands.

“No problem,” Dean assures him, settling his pillows again as Vera leans against his upraised knees hopefully. “We’re at how the bare curves of the hippos’ backs—how did he say it?—’emerged slick and gleaming from the recesses of the swamp’.”

Vera frowns at him. “Wait, there were ‘shadowy crevices’ in there somewhere.”

“’From the murky depths they emerged slick and gleaming in the spill of moonlight, deepening shadows like crevices between each mound of delicately rounded flesh, as if arching into a willing hand.’” Cas stops, closing his eyes with a shudder that Dean and Vera share. “It’s a metaphor.”

“Still hoping for Tawaret?” It’s so not a metaphor.

Cas gives him a flat look. “You have no idea how much.”