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— Day 155, continued —
The infirmary—now two and half buildings—was put together fast and dirty, but he has to admit, they did one hell of a job. The faded murals of a stylized beach on the walls of the waiting room-slash-triage really work for it, and the wrought-iron cage of the non-functional elevator in the admin section—repurposed into a good size drug cabinet—is goddamn inspired for using what you got.
Dolores leaves them in the tiny break room in the admin section with a significant amount of pointing toward the attached bathroom. Stripping down in the small, dimly-lit room holding a bench, a toilet, two deep sinks, and a shower, Dean barely gets the water going before Amanda abruptly joins him under the lukewarm spray of the tiniest stall in the world.
For an entire second, Dean freezes, remembering what Cas said about anyone seeing him without a shirt, but right now, he just doesn’t give a shit. Of all people in the camp (other than Vera and Ana), she’s probably the least likely to have seen or wanted to see Dean naked enough times to take notes, much less care.
“Really?” he asks through an unexpected mouthful of soap.
“Please,” she sniffs, reaching for the homemade soap over his shoulder to rub vigorously on a threadbare washcloth and starting to scrub down. “One naked guy’s pretty much like any other. Not impressed.”
“That’s the problem,” he protests half-heartedly as she edges by him into the spray, taking the offered soap and getting down to business. There’s nothing that says more about his life that he’s naked in a shower with a drop-dead gorgeous hunter—seriously, how has Vera not jumped her just on principle?—and he just wants to get the goddamn Croat out of his hair. As she turns her back to him, he sighs, getting a handful of wet hair and pulling it out of the way. “I’ll get your back if you get mine.”
He hears the smile in her voice when she says, “Deal.”
Freshly dressed in clothes that arrived mysteriously from HQ via Haruhi—he assumes wizardry was involved in that kind of speed—Amanda takes an entire second to dry swallow a couple of painkillers before retrieving Carol’s chart where Dolores left it for them, scanning it with a tightening of her lips before handing it to Dean to skim for relevant details, putting it together with what Lena said about her arrival and what Dolores told him she got from Carol and her companions. Tracking a Hellhound in the snow, really impressive, but it does make you wonder why the fuck she felt the need to track it since it was obviously trying to get away.
Dolores must have been waiting in the hall outside the break room or something; the minute they’re dressed, she comes inside, expression pleasant and unbending as shit. “Can I talk to you, Dean?”
Amanda and Cas look at him, but he’s definitely getting the impression they’re okay with missing this. “Wait for me in the hall,” he says, and Dolores keeps her smile until the door shuts behind them. “Dolores—”
“We have at most a day—maybe two—to convince her to let us amputate,” Dolores tells him. “Then it’s a matter of time before gangrene kills her. Vera gives it five days, a week at best—”
“I know—”
“Have you ever seen someone die like that?” Dolores interrupts. “I have, more than once, and experience doesn’t help. Right now, she’s stable, but you keep this in mind; you won’t be in the infirmary watching gangrene spread through her, you won’t be administering painkillers until they stop working, you won’t be listening to her screaming, and you won’t be the one giving her mercy in the end.”
“If she’s the reason those people died at the ward line—”
“I don’t care if she single-handedly wiped out half the goddamn state,” Dolores says evenly. “It’s my job not to care about anything but her health and life. Under protest, I’m allowing you to interview her without my presence, but you try to take her from my infirmary, you’ll need your militia to drag me away from the door.”
Dean hesitates, taking her in; the brown hair streaked in grey in a messy bun and clear, cool eyes, and he remembers Grant like a slap to the face. “Got it.”
“Good,” she says with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “You have an hour, but she’s in a lot of pain, and I don’t know how long she’s going to be able to talk to you.” Putting back on her pleasant look, she nods at him and turns toward the door, leaving Dean feel like he’s just been punched in the belly: painless, but the breath knocked out of him.
Cas and Amanda don’t ask him what happened in the room, which he assumes is because they listened at the door like normal people. “Manuel’s waiting for us at the back stairs,” Cas says neutrally as he falls into step beside him. “He’ll be outside the door of Carol’s room during the interview.”
Fair enough: Dolores doesn’t mess around, that’s for sure. “Let’s get this over with.”
Using the hallway from admin to the back stairs, they go up two flights to the second floor isolation and recovery rooms, and down the hall, marking the handwritten numbers beside each door. Finding the right one, Dean doesn’t bother knocking when they reach the right door, just goes in.
Inside, a pale woman, the bright red hair knotted behind her head making her look even paler, lies on one of the few hospital beds they have, one leg wrapped in heavy bandages and surrounded by a plethora of vaguely-familiar monitors looks up groggily before her eyes widen in unmistakable recognition. Cas and Amanda follow him in, Manuel shutting the door behind them and waiting outside out of listening range because unlike Dolores, he trusts Dean not to do anything he shouldn’t. Which just tells him Dolores is a better judge of character than he thought.
Eyes narrowing, the beginning of her angry protest cut off with the click of the safety on his gun. “What’s going on?” she asks hoarsely.
“Check her,” Dean says quietly, watching her go still as Amanda passes him to get to the bed. She might have just gotten out of surgery, but she’s a hunter and he’s not taking any goddamn chances. “Keep your hands where I can see them; do anything I don’t like and this ends now. This range, there’s no way I’ll miss.”
He’ll give her this much; she stares at him with a simmering anger almost stronger than the fear as Amanda searches first her, then the bed, tossing out two guns, a knife, and tugging a goddamn stiletto from where it’s settled almost invisibly in the loose knot of her hair (Jesus Christ).
“Anything else?” Dean asks Amanda, and she shakes her head. “Now we talk.”
“What’s this about?” Carol asks angrily. “You don’t run Ichabod, Dean—”
“Alison just watched some of her people slaughtered by Croats on the ward line,” Dean tells her conversationally, grabbing the one visitor’s chair in the room and pulling it to the bed and holstering his gun. “Just so some Hellhounds—minus a member—could get inside Ichabod. You wanna do this with Manuel, he’s waiting outside, but I’m telling you now, one of those volunteers was a friend of his and he watched while they were ripped apart. Ichabod’s open to all, but the penalty for breaking the rules is exile, and it’s carried out immediately.”
It’s barely a flicker, but that’s exactly what Dean’s watching for. “I don’t know—”
“The missing member of that Hellhound pack,” he says. “Why’d you kill it?”
“It attacked me out of nowhere!”
“You were sleeping in the back of the truck when it showed up,” Dean interrupts. “Next thing, you were burying your knife in empty air and jumping out of the truck after it, with your knife telling you exactly where it was. Tell me which part of this story sounds like a random attack of a rogue Hellhound, when one, Hellhounds hunt in packs, two, they don’t have rogues, and three, even if they did, this one wasn’t, since the rest of the pack is here.” She doesn’t answer, mouth a tight, thin line. “It wasn’t random and it wasn’t an attack. Not until you made it one.”
“It was a Hellhound!” she answers hotly. “Was I supposed to let it get away?”
“Hellhounds don’t run away, not unless they have somewhere else they’re supposed to be,” he answers flatly. “This one did. It didn’t attack you, not until you didn’t give it a choice, because killing you wasn’t in its orders. That’s what woke you up; that close, it should have killed you, but it didn’t. Why?”
She licks her lips. “I don’t—”
“They hunt in packs,” Dean interrupts. “They think in packs; what that one found, they all knew the minute it did. They’re after someone here, and I think you know who. All you did was almost get yourself killed for someone whose contract just came due. They’re not getting away, Carol; the pack’s outside Ichabod.”
“Croats were sent after us to get that salt line broken so the Hellhounds could get inside,” Amanda says quietly. “You remember Andy, right? Andy was out there with us, and he’s infected.”
Carol’s hands clench in the blankets, knuckles yellow-white under the strain.
“He walked with you to the gate the night you left,” Amanda continues. “He’s on the clock now, and the faster we get this done, the faster we can get back and be with him. Now help us out here.”
“Micah.” Dean watches her face, not sure what he’s looking for, but he figures he’ll know it when he sees it.
Carol’s expression doesn’t change. “What about him?”
Alicia’s voice drifts through his head: And yet, in all the world, in all of time, in all this migration from Hell, Carol shows up at the same time as Micah and the subdicks two. “When did you two split up? On your way here? Why?”
She’s good but not that good. “What—”
“Ran away while the Hellhound went after you?” he asks with syrupy sympathy, and she flushes; there we go. “His performance as a Person Who Runs Away from Danger could win awards; saw it myself outside the walls today—”
“I told him to get away!” she bursts out before she can stop herself, and hey, that was easy. Slumping back, she stares at him hatefully. “I told him it would be—we should come separately.”
“Less suspicious,” he agrees, adding another mark to Alicia’s kind of unsettling record of being right. “Let’s start at the beginning; when did you two crazy kids hook up?”
She looks like she isn’t going to answer, which is a problem, since it’s not like he can make her. Unless he was a monster, of course, and hey, there’s a thought. “He showed up a couple of months ago,” she answers finally. “No idea how he found me. He said you were killed in Kansas City.” Dean can almost feel Cas’s attention sharpen along with his own. “He knew why I left, and he said he wanted to warn me, because Cas took over and things were going to get worse fast.”
“How?”
“On a guess, vengeance was supposed to be high on the list. And something about…” She makes a face. “Opening Purgatory, something like that.”
Dean shuts his mouth hard enough to nearly bite his tongue and sees Amanda’s mouth drop open. Words would be good here; too bad there aren’t any.
Cas says, “You’re kidding.” Okay, there’s that. “He told you I was planning to open Purgatory and conquer the world?”
Carol stiffens defensively. “That’s what he heard. Why?” Then, “How’d you know about the ‘conquer the world’ thing?”
Dean looks at Amanda helplessly. “Uh—” Something goes there, but what?
“Why else would one open Purgatory?” Cas asks with just the right amount of ‘everyone else knows that so how is it you don’t, and no, I am not being subtle implying you’re stupid,’ which just proves Cas has a tone for everything. And it works: Carol shuts her mouth, looking uncertain. “Did Micah happen to mention who told him something so—” They all wait for it. “—specifically ridiculous?”
“He didn’t say,” she answers. “He asked me if I wanted to try to get out of the state before it happened. Both of us know how to get past the border.”
“You didn’t want to.”
“I told him it was bullshit,” she says, adding contemptuously. “That would take time from Cas getting stoned and fucking anything that moved.”
Okay, then. “Why’d you stay, anyway?”
“I’m a hunter,” she says, meeting his eyes without flinching. “It’s my job to protect people, and I didn’t have to be in Chitaqua to do it. Look, Micah was paranoid, okay? Not that I blame him,” she adds with a venomous edge in her voice. “Considering why he left.”
Dean cocks his head. “What did he tell you?”
“His crazy bitch of an ex was trying to kill him,” Carol answers in disgust, and it’s only when Amanda stiffens that he realizes she’s talking about Alicia. “What, you missed her attempted murder of Micah because he got tired of her shit? Surprise.”
“And you believed him?” Dean asks, stiffening at the slice of pain up his arm from the clenched fingers of his right hand. Making an effort, he relaxes his hand, which just barely helps.
“I believe my eyes,” she retorts, crossing her arms with a wince that almost but not quite makes him feel shitty for questioning someone who’s obviously in pain. “I saw the scar, just missed the femoral artery. Guess he moved too fast for her.”
Dean remembers the scars decorating Alicia’s hands and wrists, the flash of metal in Alicia’s left hand outside the walls, and just stops himself from telling her that Alicia didn’t miss.
“I got her measure a long time ago,” Carol continues, stabbing him with a glare. “That helpless act never fooled me.” Dean keeps his mouth firmly shut; it’s like listening to someone describe an alternative universe version of Alicia or something. “No surprise she was one of Erica’s favorites; after Micah left, Alicia was biggest slut in the camp, and I seriously doubt that changed.”
Dean looks Amanda back against the wall before she gets any farther than a step, turning his attention back to Carol. On a guess, this is what Alicia meant when she said Carol was judgy; he half-wishes he could have gone to parties she was at and just to see how much he could get her to judge him for in under an hour. He’d make up all new things just for her to judge; it’d be epic. “You and Micah bonded, huh?”
Carol’s eyes narrow defensively, and Dean revises that to ‘selectively judgy.’ “We talked, yeah—”
“So he told you all about how he’s under contract?” Dean interrupts, ignoring Amanda stiffening and focusing on Carol’s utter lack of reaction; yeah, that’s what he thought. “When did you find out?”
“How is that your business?”
“Twenty-six volunteers, Andy, and fuck knows how many Croats that Erica made just to get him,” Dean answers, and wonder of wonders, Carol stiffens, looking away. “I’m asking you again: when did you find out?”
“The night before we left to come here,” she says reluctantly. “Micah—he drank sometimes, can’t blame him,” of course she can’t, “and that night…” She trails off, wan cheeks flushing dully, obviously aware intimate knowledge of Micah’s drinking habits may just be a clue. Then again, this does explain why the Hellhound was sniffing her up. “Anyway, he—he started talking about—he didn’t want to tell me because he thought I’d…”
“Judge him for making a deal with the devil?” Carol jerks her gaze back to him, and boy, some people get pissed when people judge their shitty SO’s. “Sorry, should be more open-minded, am I right? What was he going for—money, power over the infected zone?”
“They made him!” Carol snaps, straightening and immediately crumpling forward with a gasp when it shifts her left leg on the bed. “Fuck off,” she hisses when Amanda—who officially has more compassion than Dean does—starts toward her with a worried look. Taking a deep breath, she focuses on Dean again with outright hate. “You have no fucking right to judge, Dean. You know who I’m talking about.”
He just might, yeah. “Pretend I don’t.”
“Your team leaders,” she spits out. “Erica took him to the Crossroads herself and put a gun to his head: make contract or die, what the hell was he supposed to do?”
He can almost hear Joe’s voice, asking him what he’d do about the people who had a gun to their head. What do you do when someone puts a gun to your head: you say yes. You hide the bodies, keep your mouth shut, and you sign on the metaphorical dotted fucking line. What do you do when an ex-angel starts noticing what’s going on: you bury him fast and dirty, because it’s not just bodies you’re hiding, it’s souls you’re stealing, ad maiorem Dean gloriam, fucked up be his mission and his name. “What were the terms?”
Carol licks her lips, not meeting his eyes. “Micah wasn’t clear. Erica told him it was the only way to win, they’d all—become better hunters, faster, stronger, all that. Swore he never missed a shot after that.”
“That’s why,” Amanda says suddenly, and Dean sees her and Cas looking at each other.
“What?”
“They were good,” she answers, still looking at Cas. “I mean, when I got to Chitaqua and saw them, it was unreal. First time I put one of them on the ground, it was a surprise, trust me.”
“It wasn’t a surprise,” Cas disagrees, and they share a long look before he turns his attention back to Dean. “If Micah was accurate—which is something of a stretch, admittedly—and the terms included ‘hunter,’ that would only apply to supernatural enemies, not other humans.”
Dean can’t ask outright if they were unnaturally good in the field; that, he’s gonna guess, is something he should know. Chuck said that they were sure they could take out Cas, never thought they’d fail, and this just might be why.
“If that’s all—” Carol starts.
“It’s not,” Dean says, looking at her unforgiving face. “No matter how hard you try to piss us off, we need answers, and until we find Micah, you’re it. You knew he was under contract, you were fucking attacked by a Hellhound on the way here, so you knew it was due. Why—”
“I didn’t know, and neither did he! It shouldn’t even be after him yet!” Carol answers hotly. “The contract’s not done. You’re sitting right here!”
Through the rush of blood in his ears, Dean hears Cas ask, “What?”
“The terms were ten years or Dean’s death,” she answers. “Unless Lucifer was defeated. Dean’s alive and it’s only been two years; it can’t be due yet.”
Dean looks up at Cas, but it’s Amanda that asks the thousand dollar question: “Contracts can do that?”
“Contracts can do anything,” Cas answers, eyes distant. “They’re contract; the question is what would a demon allow in the terms, and a reversion clause isn’t among them. At least, not in memory.” He looks down at Dean, and yeah, demons really are doing new things these days.
“Whatever Micah told you,” Dean says, surprised his voice sounds so steady, “you knew when that Hellhound came after you that he was wrong, it was happening now. So why the fuck didn’t you at least tell Alison, warn her what was in the cards?”
“So you could get him thrown out?” she demands.
“Alison’s call, not mine—”
“Bullshit,” she scoffs. “I lived in Chitaqua, come on! Women fall all over themselves to get in your bed. Why the hell else would you be here if you weren’t fucking her? I doubt it’s altruistic, come the hell on. Micah would be thrown out before we could explain and he needed protection.”
Dean’s about to say something really stupid when he accidentally catches Amanda’s eye, and her bit lip makes him pause. Cas’s murmured, “Promise me I can be present when you tell Alison that,” does the rest. He nods, fighting down the urge to laugh: Alison’s face.
“Oh yeah,” he tells Carol seriously, but he can’t stop the grin and doesn’t want to; it seems to piss her off even more. “Sex and paneer curry for guarding Ichabod: Alison makes really good deals, am I right?” Carol opens her mouth, but Dean keeps going. “It’s great, no lie, but we’re talking about you, who thinks sex makes it okay to put a hundred thousand people at risk.” Carol stills. “Give or take a hundred thousand, or didn’t you notice on your way here the fucking traffic jam of people trying to get here?”
Carol’s lips tighten. “Every life’s worth saving. That’s what Cas said in training, and yeah, I should have figured it was bullshit if he said it, but we’re hunters. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Save people?”
Dean just stops himself from commenting on how fast Micah (a hunter) ran away from danger (and saving people that might have survived if he’d just stood his ground), but that’s not, actually, her fault.
“He wouldn’t have been thrown out.” Carol snorts, saw that coming. “But he sure as fuck wouldn’t have been allowed outside the walls right on the ward line, especially with a whole bunch of civilians who had no idea of the risk—”
“I only have your word he was there,” Carol interrupts, raising her voice like maybe volume will drown out the entire fact thing. “Dean, whatever happened is on you; if they couldn’t cut it, they shouldn’t have been out there. Where the hell was Chitaqua, anyway?”
“At the checkpoints, on the wall, running escort for those coming in, helping Ichabod house everyone, and sleeping when they weren’t doing that. Along with Ichabod’s patrol, those from other towns, and anyone who volunteered who could hold a gun,” he answers, keeping his voice even with an effort, and to his surprise, Carol looks uncomfortable. “They were out there because they were trying to help save people’s lives, and yeah, they knew the risks, but only the ones we knew about. You’re a hunter, you said you were helping defend that town; you tell me how okay you’d be with someone coming there and not telling you they were an active—as in, gonna happen—danger to themselves and everyone around them?” He waits a beat; what happened may not be her fault, but he doesn’t care. “This isn’t your town, though. How altruistic of you.”
“Fuck you.” She swallows, bracing herself before meeting her eyes. “So you got enough or should I expect a visit from your fucking team leaders next?”
Dean looks at Cas, then Amanda, who shrugs, eyes on Carol. “Funny story: she kept telling Dolores to throw Vera out of the room. Until she needed surgery, of course; then it was okay. Guess it slipped her mind.” Carol looks between them warily. “They’re dead.”
Carol stills, hands frozen in their twist of the blankets. “What?”
“The team leaders are dead,” Amanda says clearly, and Dean reminds himself to find out what the hell Carol said to Vera to make her sound like that. “Five months ago in Kansas City.”
“Micah didn’t tell you?” Dean asks rhetorically. “So I’m alive, Cas isn’t opening Purgatory—at least, hasn’t said anything to me, Cas, we should talk later—and the team leaders are dead; you gotta wonder where he was getting his information when all of it’s wrong, you know?”
Carol looks at Amanda. “You saw their bodies?”
“I helped wrap them for the fire,” she says softly, and Dean remembers the way she watched the bonfire that night in what he’d thought was grief. “And watched ‘em burn.”
Carol’s lips part, then she closes her eyes, slumping back into the pillow in helpless relief, and Dean remembers how many weapons Amanda found in her bed. “You were waiting for them.”
Carol covers her face, she lets out a half-laugh, half-sob. “Only the last two years. Stuck in this goddamn bed, all I could think… if they came for me now, I was going to take one of them out with me.”
Dean gets up, sitting on the edge of the bed near the foot, feeling her instinctive flinch like a slap. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly, nauseated at the distrust on her face. “I swear to you, what happened—it won’t happen again. I won’t let it.”
Carol snorts. “Tell me another one.”
“He didn’t know about any of it,” Amanda says, nodding when Carol looks at her disbelievingly. “Look, they’re dead and everything’s different now. If you let Vera talk to you, she would have told you—”
“Why should I believe her?” Carol demands. “Or any of you, for that matter? For all I know, you decided to join the holy fucking crusade—”
“They tried to kill Vera,” Amanda says incredulously.
“You could have left, like I did,” Carol answers flatly. “You didn’t, which makes you just as guilty as they were. Poison fruit—”
“Good can never come from evil,” Cas interrupts solemnly. “Nor can evil be expiated with sincere atonement. Change is a myth, forgiveness a lie propagated by irresponsible clergymen, association alone determines virtue, and if you wish to debate theology with me after you lost so humiliatingly the last time, this time I’m actually sober.”
“Even the devil can quote scripture for his own purposes,” she answers, cheeks flushing dully.
“True.” Dean doesn’t need to turn around to see Cas smile. “But it’s not nearly as amusing as when you do it.”
She deliberately turns her attention back to Dean. “Is there anything else?”
Getting to his feet, Dean tries to think but his eyes are drawn to her leg again.
“Fuck you,” she spits out, hands tightening in the blankets. “I don’t need your pity.”
Dean doesn’t bother mincing words here. “You get you’re going to die if you don’t let them take it, right?”
“Without it, what’s the point?” she retorts, a flicker of pain crossing her face. “I’ll take my chances.”
“Bobby took on a werewolf from his wheelchair,” Cas tells her quietly.
“I believe his words were ‘watch and learn, idgit.’ I watched and learned that was both impressive and extremely stressful to observe.”
“I don’t need your advice, either,” she retorts. “You got what you came for.” That’s clear enough, and Dean starts to turn when she says grudgingly, “Wait.”
He’s tempted to keep walking, but something in her voice makes him turn back around. “What?”
For a moment, Carol doesn’t respond, then her expression cracks. “Can I—” She takes a breath. “Can I see Andy? Dean, I left, but that… I want to see him.”
“Does he want to see you?” She flinches, and yeah, that was a low blow; he’s pretty sure he’ll feel shitty about that someday. “If Andy does, you’ll have to clear it with Dolores, but Amanda can take you over.” Feeling a reluctant surge of sympathy at the stark look on her face, he reminds himself (again) she isn’t actually responsible for most of this.
She nods shortly, and Dean does something that’s not a retreat to the hallway, waiting for Cas to close the door behind himself and Amanda. Manuel tilts his head in question, and Dean shakes his head, watching them hit the stairs before motioning them away from the door. “For someone working that hard to piss us off,” he says, because he wants to believe no one is that hostile on baseline, “she was really helpful if we just asked the right questions. Or the wrong ones. Or even ones we didn’t know to ask. Anyone but me?”
“Carol’s not subtle,” Amanda answers. “She wasn’t lying, though.”
He glances her. “But?”
She makes a face. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have left the ‘but’ unspoken.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Look, I got a couple of things to do, shouldn’t take long,” he tells her. “If Dolores clears it, make sure Carol has anything she needs, okay?” Amanda nods. “Tell Andy—tell him I’ll be there.”
“He’ll wait,” she says, squeezing his shoulder, and Dean waits until she’s down the stairs before he and Cas follow more slowly.
“Well?” he prompts.
“Not just you.”
Okay, thanks. “She didn’t want us to ask if she knew where he was.”
“No, she very much wanted us to ask,” Cas corrects him. “She was telling the truth in all else so that when we asked, we would also believe the lie. Though I don’t know why she thinks someone who allowed her to be mauled by a Hellhound while he ran away would be frank and open regarding his hiding place.”
“There’s that.” As they start toward the stairs again, Dean thinks he has to at least try. “You get Micah could have lied to her about everything, right? I mean…” Something goes there, like ‘unbelievable bullshit,’ but the hell of it, it’s not; the kind of people that Dean recruited were fanatics, they hated Lucifer, and their souls were probably a cheap price to pay if that’s what it took.
(Erica’s entire family was murdered in their own home by her Luciferite boyfriend in that fucker’s name. The rack might have been a goddamn relief after that: something, anything, that could—even for a second—drive out watching them die, three days under the body of her dead boyfriend surrounded by their bodies. Anything would be better than that.)
“You don’t need to try and be reassuring,” Cas says, and from his voice, Dean figures Cas is thinking the same thing. “We’ll know more when we find Micah. Especially how on earth a hunter seems to be on such intimate terms with a demon that they exchange gossip.”
“Does Jeffrey do anything but talk?” Dean asks in disgust. “I’d like to how the fuck he’s still alive to do it.” He doesn’t want to say Hell’s (or Crowley’s) standards are slipping (actually, he would like to say that), but there’s no excuse for Jeffrey. “Look, until we know more, let’s keep the specifics on Micah under wraps. Vera, Joe, Kamal, no one else.” Which means he needs to talk to Amanda and tell her—like Dean’s inexplicable immunity to Croat—that she’s got another kind of big secret to keep under wraps.
It occurs to him that if he’d done his goddamn job and defended the alcove himself instead of hanging out at the door like a goddamn civilian, he could have gotten between Andy and that fucking Croat. He got bit, the worst he’d be dealing with right now was anticipating an ice bath in a Jacuzzi tub. Possibly with Cas: relationships are about sharing, and if he’s gonna freeze his balls off, his significant other is going to join in for relationship building purposes.
He pauses at the top of the stairs; it should have been him, defending the alcove, protecting his people, getting between Andy and that goddamn Croat. Instead, he was the one slowing them down, the one they were protecting, the one—the one who didn’t step in front of a bullet to protect someone else, but who stepped behind someone else so they could take it for him. Like in Kansas City and the confrontation with Lucifer, when Dean goddamn Winchester the former needed to buy some time.
“Dean?” Cas asks, and he remembers watching Cas in that goddamn green jacket walking away to die with the team leaders. To buy Dean time.
For the first time, he wonders why he let Cas walk away on Dean’s order like that, why the fuck he didn’t stop him himself. He knew—he had to have known—what Dean was doing before he told him, but he still didn’t stop him.
“Joe and Kamal should be at Admin by now,” he says roughly, starting down the stairs. “Come on.”
Joe and Kamal are there, briefing Alison (thank God), but that just means that Dean got no excuse not to be the one who calls the checkpoints to tell Lee, Damiel, and James and their teams about Andy. Alison silently gives them the unit to take to Andy, which Dean immediately gives to Joe.
“Check in with him before you go,” Dean tells Joe and Kamal. “I’ll be right there.”
“I need to discuss something with them before they go. I’ll meet you downstairs,” Cas says abruptly, which Dean assumes means ‘all the shit Carol told them,’ which is great, but only until he realizes he’s alone with Alison and she looks dangerously close to saying something sympathetic.
And the door’s closed. “So—”
“Sit,” she says, coming out from behind her desk and shoving one of the chairs toward him. Dean wonders suddenly when she last slept; there are grey circles around her eyes, and he can’t be sure with the baggy sweaters and cargo pants that belonged to a seven foot construction worker or something, but it looks like she’s lost weight that she couldn’t afford to lose. The dark brown hair is barely holding up even secured with two pencils, though one he suspects she just forgot was there and will probably find out when she stabs herself with it later. Taking the other chair, she slumps back to squint at him through her glasses. “Want to talk about it?”
“No,” he says firmly. “Nothing to talk about.”
She nods in relief and braces her feet on the desk with a sigh.
Okay then. “Should I—” he asks, starting to get up.
“Plant it,” she answers, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s back in his seat and wondering uneasily if she just used some special mayor-voice on him. “Ten, fifteen minutes, then Cas will think we talked about it.”
Dammit, he didn’t think of that. “Nothing to talk about.”
“I hear you,” she agrees sympathetically, tipping her head back against the chair and closing her eyes. “Tony does this to me every time. ‘Alison,’ he tells me, ‘you gotta talk to someone and I’m the only one you’re not scaring right now except Teresa, and she’s not speaking to you.’” She snorts. “Every goddamn time. Eight and a half minutes, let’s at least try and make it plausible?”
There’s no clock, which means Dean’s got no idea of the passage of time other than the very real possibility it may not be. Alison shifts once, like she’s settling in for a nap, and abruptly, Dean remembers she also lost people out there today. He may have killed them himself. Math says he probably did, actually: how many people did he kill today, anyway?
“I gotta go,” he says abruptly, getting up before that thought gets too far, but Alison just opens an eye to regard him thoughtfully. “I need to—”
“I know.” Getting to her feet, she looks at him for a long moment. “One thing before you go.”
He has the doorknob in his hand. “Yeah?”
“You gave the order to close the gate,” she answers. “I gave the order that it stayed closed. I could have overruled you, and I didn’t.”
He nods blindly. “Yeah—”
“I couldn’t risk it while any of them were still alive,” she interrupts, and Dean braces a hand on the frame, trying to remember how to breathe normally. “Before I was mayor, I took shifts on patrol like everyone else, and I still do shifts in isolation. A needle isn’t the same as a gun, I know; I’ve done it with both.”
He nods blindly. “I get it.”
“Okay,” she says mildly. “Time’s up. Talk to you later.”
“Sure,” he agrees, jerking the door open. “See you.”
Stepping into headquarters is like walking into a lucid dream. The lobby seems huge, echoingly empty except for Evelyn, elbows resting on the desk and head bent, straight black hair falling out of a messy ponytail. Looking up, he sees people on the second floor, and jerks his gaze back down, wondering how the fuck it can be so quiet.
“Dean,” Evelyn says, voice unnaturally loud, and Dean just manages not to jump, aware of the attention from those on the second floor like something scraping across his nerves. Wiping her eyes, she gets clumsily to her feet, grabbing the log book and clutching it against her chest. “Everyone’s checked in,” she says quickly, voice cracking on the last word. “He’s—uh, okay.”
Dean accepts the terrible lie with a nod. “Who’s with him?”
“His team, Sarah’s, Mel’s, Carol, Vera, and Amanda,” she answers, voice not quite shaking. “That’s all—all he wanted. Everyone else checked in, and the teams at the checkpoints talked to him over the unit Joe brought.”
Dean doesn’t look at the stairs. “Good.”
“Teresa and Tony came by for Ichabod, some others from…” She looks down at the notebook and starts to open it, ruffling through the pages frantically. “Give me a minute, I wrote it down.”
“It’s okay,” Dean tells her hastily; her hands are shaking so badly she almost drops it. “Did Dolores come by yet?”
“When they brought Carol. She talked to Andy and explained how it works here.” Evelyn looks away, mouth working soundlessly. “Alicia—she said she’d handle it, she did it, uh—last time, and Vera said she’ll do the final check.” She finally meets his eyes, red-rimmed eyes bright with unshed tears. “He’s ready, Dean. He’s just waiting for you.”
Yeah. “Where…”
“Top of the stairs, right hall, first door—uh, in your—the room you had before.”
He barely stops himself from asking why there. It’s not like any room would be better or—stop it.
“Thank you,” he hears Cas say, and then—he’s not sure how—
he’s at the stairs and on the second floor before he even remembers
how to move, passing those waiting on the balcony and in the hall who don’t feel any more real than shadows. Haruhi and Derek, sitting on either side of the door, start to their feet when they see him.
“Dean,” Haruhi says blankly. Shifting nervously from foot to foot, she knocks into the door and immediately winces. “Hi.”
“Did all your fellow students have the opportunity to check in?” Cas asks her. Why the hell they would; they didn’t even know Andy. A lot like him, actually, but at least they have an excuse.
“Yes,” she answers, nodding quickly. “Rosario and Vicky are organizing the relay; they’re waiting for our word. We’ll inform them when—so they can tell everyone on duty.” Looking between them, she starts to look worried, then almost sighs in relief as the door opens and Vera comes out.
“Thanks. Go wait downstairs,” Vera tells Haruhi and Derek with a smile. “Evelyn could use the help.”
He nods when Haruhi looks at him and she jerks her head at Derek before heading down the hall with him on her heels. Dean watches as long as he can before plausible deniability ends and he has to face Vera.
And realizes Vera’s waiting for… something.
“You need to disarm,” Cas tells him quietly. He’s not sure what’s worse, that it should have been obvious or Vera’s sympathetic expression. As quickly as he can, he removes his gun and knife from his belt, crouching to get the one in his boot. Straightening with everything in his hands, he doesn’t have any time to feel more like an idiot; Brenda shows up like an apparition, taking them and murmuring something—what, who the fuck knows—before vanishing again.
“How is he?” Cas asks because Dean’s tongue isn’t working; neither is his brain, but that’s not new.
“Fine,” she says, and Dean wonders how the hell she puts on professional like that so easily, wonders if he’ll ever be able to pull it off. “Kat’s team is with her, Sarah thinks she’s in shock, so…”
Cas nods, and now they’re both looking at him.
“Dean,” Cas starts and right, this part he knows.
“Yeah.” He watches his own hand reach for the doorknob, and opening it, he steps inside.
The first thing he notices is that everyone’s in a surprisingly good mood for a wake where the guest of honor’s still breathing.
Alicia’s laughing, seated on the floor with one leg stretched out in front of her, a new ankle brace visible just below the hem of her jeans, and Matt and Jody sitting on either side of her. Kat is kneeling just a few feet away, her expression set in something almost like a smile if he didn’t know what a smile should look like, Sarah beside her with Drew and Phil behind them. To Jody’s left, Carol’s in a wheelchair with Amanda kneeling beside her, and they’re both flushed with what he assumes is recent laughter.
It’s almost enough to ignore Mel and her team to the left of the bed, watching the scene alertly, and as Vera joins them, David subtly shifts enough so he’s between her and the room while Mel takes a casual step forward, Liz at her shoulder. Frowning, Dean looks at the room again and sees the wide swathe of space between everyone and that bed, and his mind automatically pulls up a dozen scenarios and how Mel standing right there can easily stop every one of them. Unlike everyone else in the room but Cas, he realizes belatedly, her team is armed.
Taking a deep breath, Dean makes himself look directly at the bed.
It’s the one from the infirmary, pushed against the wall opposite the door, bedding stripped to a bare mattress. Andy, dressed in clean, faded sweatpants and a bleach-stained green t-shirt, brown hair still damp from a shower, is seated cross-legged in the middle, arm freshly bandaged and laughing helplessly. He barely looks like he should be out of high school, flushed and smiling, he looks fine, like maybe—maybe…
“He’s in the second stage,” Cas murmurs, and Dean didn’t even realize how much hope he was still carrying around until it dies, just like that. “He’s now contagious.”
Like he heard Cas, Andy looks at them, wet brown eyes meeting Dean’s like a punch to the gut. “Hey, Dean, Cas. You want to—” He looks around the room exaggeratedly. “Not a lot of chairs, sorry.”
“Lots of floor,” Alicia offers, smiling up at them, eyes dry and clear. Dean makes his way to the space beside Matt, dropping gracelessly onto the rug. “I was reminding Andy of our first mission after we got off local—Cas sent us on salvage to Wichita.”
Dean feels his mouth stretching out into what he hopes to God is a smile. “What were you getting?”
“Pillows,” Andy says, rolling his eyes as delighted laughter ripples through the room. “Pillows, blankets, lumber—if we could find any—pipes, and a book on plumbing. And roof repair, so we split the difference with a lot of home improvement magazines, half a shelf of engineering books from the first library we saw, and anything with a house on the cover. Could barely fit in the jeep with all that.”
“Kyle’s team went to Kansas City, same assignment,” Alicia tells Dean. “Here’s the thing; everyone knew better than to do anything but nod and just go with it back then. You were still out of it most of the time, and Cas was pretty stressed, so just common sense, right? But Kyle…” She starts to laugh again, bent half over her knees.
“Kyle actually said…” Matt shakes his head, grinning. “He actually told Cas that he was a hunter, not a plumber.”
Dean looks at Cas, who seems to be really fascinated by the ground, then at Andy. “You know, I never did ask how home improvement month went. What happened then?”
“Cas dismissed everyone, and Kyle sulked, as he does,” Andy answers, eyes dancing. “Anyway, two days later, everyone gets back to camp, and Cas calls a camp-wide meeting, and everyone—except Kyle, because he’s like that—showed up early for good seats. Alicia dragged me out of the shower so we’d be right up front. We were all gathered at your porch, and Cas comes out and reminds everyone to turn in their reports by dawn and then—” He pauses for breathless chuckle. “He asks how many people would be interested in becoming plumbers as well as hunters.”
Dean glances at Cas again, but that floor is really interesting. “And?”
“I sprained something raising my hand,” Alicia says gloatingly. “First, by the way. That voice, it doesn’t matter what he’s asking; answer’s yes, please.”
“And dragged mine up when I didn’t move fast enough,” Matt adds wryly, leaning back on one arm and giving Alicia a fond look. “Jody kicked Andy until got with the program.”
“Mark’s and Vera’s teams were right behind us,” Alicia says, looping an arm around her upraised knee. “Vera was actually watching from the doorway and excused herself for important Dean business before Cas caught her laughing.”
“Dean needed something,” Vera objects. “I had a sense.”
“Of humor,” Amanda says tauntingly. “I looked through the window, Vera; you fell off that goddamn armchair you were laughing so hard.”
“Lies.”
Despite himself, Dean feels himself grinning. “I remember that,” he says, and Vera sighs, mouth twitching. “Off the chair and onto the floor. You said it was the fever fucking with my head.”
“And you,” she says smugly, “believed me.”
“And Cas said,” Andy says, grinning hard enough to hurt, “that everyone who volunteered should stay for a few minutes, and right then, Joe shows up and says he found more lawnmowers in Kansas City and they were ready to go.”
He can actually see this. “How many?”
“Kyle’s team—I felt bad for them, they didn’t deserve suffering for Kyle’s dumb ass—and…” Alicia squints, lips moving soundlessly. “Fifteen in all. Weirdly,” leaning forward, she looks at Cas, “exactly as many people as lawnmowers.”
“I didn’t tell Joe to find fifteen,” Cas objects, entering the conversation for the first time and giving Alicia a narrow look. “I simply told him that double digits would probably be necessary, and greater than ten preferred.”
Dean looks around the room. “How long—”
“While those who volunteered got three days off duty to learn to be plumbers, the rest would take care of the flora problem,” Andy laughs. “Cas didn’t even have to ask about roof repair; once the plumbing was done, everyone was a junior carpenter in training. Idle hands are the lawnmower’s playthings and everything.”
“We were getting kind of nervous when we got to the last roof, but by then, you were staying awake longer and kept him entertained,” Amanda picks up, smirking in Cas’s direction. “And both us and Vera’s medical texts were safe from Cas needing something to do with his time.”
“No, you were safe,” Andy tells her. “The rest of us were sentenced to training under your iron fist because we were out of practice.” Andy looks at Dean. “Or more mowing. Something about manual labor being good for you.”
“It builds character,” Cas says solemnly. “It also creates a pleasant living environment, encourages a work ethic, avoids the potential for uncontrolled fires, and far more importantly, removes you from my immediate vicinity before you begin to annoy me.”
“It’s almost like he likes us,” Alicia remarks, her eyes are on Andy, whose expression turns wistful, and like that, Dean forgets how to breathe. “Andy? You with us, kiddo?”
“I’m good,” he answers, smiling at her and then looking at Vera. “Got some sheep to count.”
Kat makes a choked sound, but Alicia’s smile doesn’t change as she gets to her feet in a single motion, and watching Vera bend over and pick up a case, Dean realizes what’s about to happen. “Sheep?” he asks, wondering where he heard that before. “What about sheep?”
“You never heard?” Andy asks as he eases himself down, raising his arms to grab the edge of the mattress. As Vera kneels beside the bed, Dan and Lyz casually circle to the other side of the bed and Mel and David move unobtrusively closer, close enough to—do something, he thinks hazily. “It’s a thing, it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” Alicia argues, kneeling beside Vera as she opens the bag. “Don’t knock it or you’re gonna feel stupid when you see her.”
Dean keeps his smile; right now, he’s not sure he can stop. “Who?”
“The girl with the sheep,” Matt tells him, eyes fixed on Alicia and carefully moving closer, and in his peripheral vision, he sees Sarah doing the same thing behind Kat, who looks frozen, staring at Andy with wide, blank eyes. “Kellie—she who thought it would be a good idea to teach Cas about healing crystals—”
“Oh God,” Amanda moans. “I almost forgot about that, thanks, Matt. The cabin was a death zone for your feet for weeks.”
“Kellie was very pleasant,” Cas says, a vague hint of defensiveness in his voice. “And very well studied regarding her subject.”
“God knows you were a good student,” Amanda tells him mockingly. “Crystals all over the cabin, trying not to wonder what the hell you two were doing with them…”
“Yes, thank you for the reminder,” Cas says, not quite interrupting. “What about Kellie, other than her fondness for quartz?”
Amanda snorts, but her expression darkens. “After that ambush near Emporia, when Ray was killed,” she answers, reaching up to touch her shoulder when Carol stiffens.
“I remember.” Something in Cas’s voice makes Dean wonder what exactly happened on that mission. “Ray had already bled out by the time they were located in one of the dormitories at the university.”
“Kellie was pretty out of it when we found her,” Amanda says, licking her lips before forcing a smile. “Two days alone with a concussion will do that to you. Probably should have been seeing Elvis or aliens, but this is Kellie we’re talking about. She sees… sheep.”
“She didn’t say she saw sheep,” Alicia counters, watching Andy. “Well, maybe a sheep, fine, but it was mostly about the girl.”
Dean sees Vera take out a bottle, eyes narrowing as she reads the label. “She saw a girl with sheep?”
“A sheep, maybe,” Alicia answers, voice beginning to sound strained. “She said she was trying to stop the bleeding, and then a girl came up beside them, and she told Ray—”
“To get up,” Matt says when Alicia’s voice cuts off with a ragged swallow. “Because he had sheep to count, and he’d be surprised how many were waiting for him.”
“Kellie was a flake,” Carol says disparagingly, wiping her eyes discreetly.
“A flake,” Amanda agrees lightly. “Who beat two ghouls to death with the butt of her rifle when she ran out of bullets while rocking three broken fingers, a broken arm, a second degree concussion, and a dead teammate.” Carol shuts her mouth. “Christ, that room… blood everywhere, five dead ghouls, and there’s Kellie, sitting against the wall with her twenty-two in her good hand and Ray in her lap, grinning at us like—very Kellie.” Amanda giggles, eyes too bright. “She kept asking us where the girl went. Wanted to thank her for keeping her awake until—until we found her. Our sheep girl was a Scheherazade, apparently, told her stories of all the ways you could kill a demon with a crook, it was weird.” Amanda’s voice changes, and he sees her frown as she looks at Vera. “And useful, now that I think about it.”
“Gotta admit,” Vera says wryly, but Dean sees her eyes flicker from Amanda to Cas with an unreadable expression, “wouldn’t mind my near-death hallucinations being that helpful.”
Amanda nods, wiping her eyes quickly. “So say us all.”
“Told you,” Andy says to Dean, mouth beginning to tremble. “It’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not,” Dean hears someone say, and realizes from the sudden attention of the room that it was him.
Feeling not quite there, he gets to his feet and crosses to the head of the bed, hip checking a startled Mel and David out of his way. Over Vera’s shoulder, he sees Alicia putting on a pair of surgical gloves before taking the bottle and needle from her. As he watches, she pulls the plunger, clear liquid beginning to fill the reservoir, hands rock-steady, then he looks down at Andy, who’s watching the same thing.
“Andy, look at me,” he says softly, and Andy jerks his gaze up to him. This close, he can see the fear he can’t quite hide, not anyone. “The girl with the sheep? When you see her—”
“It’s just a story,” Andy whispers, knuckles yellow-white around the edge of the mattress, and God, he barely looks older than Jeremy, how old is he anyway? Another thing about Andy he doesn’t know, like he doesn’t know about Andy’s family, if he has any, if something happened to them, if that’s why he came to Chitaqua, if that’s why he stayed. Christ, Andy’s dying for him and he doesn’t even know his fucking last name.
“That’s what you think now. Just get up when she says to,” Dean says, dropping into a crouch to look into Andy’s surprised eyes. “Dude, no lie, that fucking crook stings. Got it right in the ass.”
Vera frowns, glancing at him and then up as Cas joins them, but he can’t look away from Andy’s pale face.
“You saw her?” Andy whispers, eyes wide with a vague hope it hurts to see.
“Almost died during the fever, remember?” Reaching out, he pulls Andy’s left hand free of the mattress and squeezes it, aware of Vera’s gasp. Cas murmurs something he can’t quite hear, but the ripple of command in his voice sends Mel and David a reluctant step back. “When you turn around, you’ll see a lot of sheep—you have no idea, they’re fucking everywhere.”
“You’re fucking with me.” Andy squeezes his hand, tongue darting out to lick his lips as Vera ties off the tourniquet and Alicia moves closer; quickly, he focuses on Andy’s face again. “You really—”
“When you came to Chitaqua—when you became a hunter—you said yes,” Dean tells him, dimly aware his fingers are going numb from the grip of Andy’s fingers. “To saving people’s lives, just because you could. I’m telling you that, and Ami’s going to show you what your yes meant; they’re not sheep, not one of them. Remember that, and when she tells you to stand up, you do it. It’ll be easy; you never knelt in your life.”
Andy nods, licking his lips. “Okay.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Dean whispers, squeezing Andy’s hand as hard as he can. “You’re not alone.”
“We’re here,” Alicia says as Vera strips off the tourniquet and takes the needle from Alicia’s shaking hand. Reaching out, Alicia touches his cheek, smiling at Andy as he nods, eyelids starting to droop; belatedly, he realizes that Kat’s beside her, one hand resting on his hip, mouth trembling. “You have a lot of sheep, Andy: better get going.”
“I love you,” Kat whispers, squeezing his hip and holding onto her smile with everything in her. “Okay?”
Andy smiles at her before he nods sleepily, eyes starting to close before they fix on a point in the distance with a brief, startled look, mouth opening as if he wants to say something before his eyes slowly fall shut. Dean feels the grip of Andy’s hand loosen, pressure vanishing entirely between one breath and the one that doesn’t follow, but he can’t make himself move, not yet. Cas’s voice abruptly cuts off, a murmur he didn’t even realize he was listening to until it’s gone, and somehow, that’s when he realizes it’s over.
Kat’s smile wobbles, hand clamping down on his hip. “Andy?”
Vera leans over Andy and then says quietly, “Amanda, get the time for me.”
“Andy?” Kat says again, staring at his face like maybe if she just looks hard enough, he’ll open his eyes. “Did you hear me? Andy?”
“Kat—” Alicia whispers.
“He was going to say something. Andy?” Dean forces himself to fold Andy’s hand against his chest, staring down at the slack face, lips still parted. From the corner of his eye, he catches Matt bent over beneath Jody’s arm, but then Kat makes a horrible sound, springing forward, and Alicia just catches her before she lands on Andy’s body.
It’s like watching a slow-motion movie or something; unreal, everything takes forever, and he can’t remember how to move.
“Kat,” Alicia starts, and twisting, Kat twists around, arm drawing back for a punch that takes hours, Alicia slowly dodging back, but he can almost hear it connect with solid bone in what will probably be one hell of a bruise. Kat’s left drop to her hip, and finding nothing but an empty holster, she goes for Alicia’s throat with a sobbing cry.
Over Cas’s shoulder—when did he move?—Dean sees Alicia drop back onto the floor, too controlled to be anything but reflex. Wrapping an arm around Kat’s waist, she rolls them over, coming up to straddle her hips, one hand on her chest. Sarah appears like magic, pinning Kat’s wrists above her head, Drew drops flat on her legs, and Dean sees fresh blood on Kat’s fingers and beneath her fingernails.
“Kat,” Sarah says calmly, but Kat screams something and tries to buck Alicia off, face red as tears leak from wild brown eyes. Sarah’s knuckles go white before she shifts, kneeling directly on Kat’s wrists and shoving Kat’s shoulder’s back to the floor with both hands. “Kat, listen to me—” Her voice is drowned out by another scream.
Dean belatedly starts toward them and finds out Cas can still be an unmoving wall when he wants to be, hand on his hip like a goddamn clamp. “Don’t move,” he says in the same voice he used on Mel earlier, and Dean doesn’t.
Looking around the room, Dean realizes no one’s surprised. Dan and Jody are in front of the door, David standing in front of Vera, one hand reaching back to rest against her hip, Mel and Liz between the bed and the rest of the room, Phil and Amanda protecting Carol in her wheelchair, and Matt hovering close enough to drag Alicia away if Sarah loses her hold on Kat’s arms. He didn’t even see them move.
They weren’t just not surprised; they were ready. Cas getting Vera’s gun when Debra died wasn’t just about being fast; he’d known it might happen, because it must have happened before.
“Alicia?” Vera asks from behind David.
“Hold on. Sarah?” Alicia asks breathlessly, and when she lifts her head, he sees bloody scratches on her neck and the beginnings of a spectacular bruise high on one cheek. At Sarah’s nod, Alicia says, “We got her. Come on.”
“Matt,” Vera says as she approaches Kat, David pacing her, “I’m going to need your help.”
“He wanted to tell me something! It was too soon, he wasn’t ready!” Kat sobs up at Alicia as Matt kneels by Kat’s shoulder, pinning her upper arm before dragging up her sleeve. “He wasn’t ready, there’s still hours—!”
“He was ready,” Alicia tells her, soothing voice at odds with the obvious strain of holding Kat down, bringing down her full weight on Kat when she tries to buck again. “Deep breath, Kat, you know how this goes—”
“You were his leader!” Kat screams as Vera lowers herself down between Matt and Sarah, and Dean can see the words hit Alicia like a punch. “You were supposed to protect him!”
“Okay, now hold her still,” Vera says, waiting until Matt reaches over, his other hand closing on Kat’s forearm so her entire arm is stretched flat against the floor. Expertly, Vera ties off her arm and sets a finger against her elbow, expression intent, then holds out a hand for David, who hands her a needle. In one motion, she slides it in below her finger and pushes the plunger. “Got it,” he hears her say between Kat’s hysterical sobs, taping gauze into place and getting up and letting David nudge her back. “Thirty seconds, count starts now.”
“Drew, Phil, get ready,” Sarah says, not looking away from Kat. “Sorry, Alicia, she moved too fast for me.”
“Like a cat, that’s our Kat,” Alicia agrees, watching Kat’s face as well. “Deep breath, Kat, come on. It’s gonna be okay.” Kat glares up at her, face red and twisted in grief and hate, but slowly—it feels like forever—Kat’s movements become more sluggish, less coordinated. “Vera?”
Vera’s lips move silently as Kat begins to still, sobs fading as her eyes fall half-closed. “Go ahead.”
“Kat, your team’s gonna get you somewhere more comfortable, okay?” Alicia says as Matt climbs to his feet and extends a hand to her. Phil goes to crouch at Kat’s side as Drew gets up to take his place on her other side. “It’ll be okay.”
Dean sees Kat’s glazed eyes focus on Alicia, but it happens too fast to even warn her; as soon as she’s free of Alicia’s weight, she twists, jerking her knee toward her chest and in a final burst of energy, kicks Alicia in the abdomen hard enough to throw her back against Mel with a breathless grunt, face drained of all color. For a horrifying second, Mel looks in danger of overbalancing and both of them falling onto Andy’s body, but Lyz steadies them.
“I’m gonna… kill you,” Kat slurs, trying to spit before collapsing back against the floor, eyes already swelling as Drew belatedly pins her legs down again.
“Fuck, Drew, keep her down or I’ll knock her out myself!” Matt snaps, dodging past them to help Mel lower Alicia to the floor. “Alicia—”
“Fine,” Alicia gasps, shaking off Matt’s hands, but when she tries to sit up, she can’t quite swallow the gasp.
“Don’t move,” Vera orders, kneeling across from Matt and helping him get Alicia flat. “Hold still or you get a dose of what Kat got,” she snaps when Alicia tries to sit up again, and with a sigh, Alicia lies back again. Tugging up Alicia’s flannel and t-shirt before unbuttoning her jeans, Vera says, “Sarah, get Kat out of here, restrain her if you have to. I’ll be over in a few minutes to check her, okay?”
Belatedly, Dean realizes Sarah’s looking at him. “Yeah, go.”
“We’re on 209,” Sarah tells Vera, then motions for Phil and Drew, supporting a semi-conscious Kat between them, to precede her to the door and following them out.
From here, Dean can’t see what Vera’s doing, but spending weeks under her iron medical fist and then most of a night with her watching Cas means he can tell by the set of her shoulders that she’s worried but not worried. She murmurs questions to Alicia, which Alicia answers with a shake of the head, teeth gritted together, but the last one ends with a strangled gasp she can’t stop.
“That’s what I thought,” Vera says finally, sitting back on her heels. “Infirmary, now.”
“I’m. Fine,” Alicia grits out and it’s only Matt’s hands on her shoulders that keep her down, though on a guess, sitting up would send her right back down. “It’s nothing.”
“Just some x-rays to make sure,” Vera answers. “You were one of the few and proud who got Darryl clean and sober for almost a day to put you back together. It may be the only decent thing he ever did at Chitaqua, so let’s not fuck up his record, okay?”
“I’ll go with her,” Matt says, frowning down at Alicia when she starts to protest. “Due to the—physical… condition of my leader, this is a coup—”
“Oh God,” Alicia mutters, squeezing her eyes shut.
“—and as conqueror—usurper,” he says with a trembling grin as Alicia opens her eyes again to glare at him, “of our team, my orders are, uh, you go to the infirmary.”
“No,” Alicia says stubbornly. “I gotta stay here, it’s fine.”
“Alicia,” Cas says, “if I have to make it an order—”
“I can’t,” she says between her teeth, “go, okay? Just gonna go to my room, it’ll be okay”
It’s only when she flickers a glance at him and then away that Dean remembers what she told him earlier, but it’s as unreal as everything else today. He stares at her, trying to make it work, then gives up: later. Or at least not now.
“You’re going,” he says shortly. “That’s an order. Matt, Jody, stay with her.” He looks around the room almost frantically; Cas still blocking him (why?); Mel and Lyz still by Andy’s body on the bed; Amanda talking to a quietly sobbing Carol; Matt and Alicia and Jody and Vera on the floor; Andy’s body on the bed. A liability, Amanda said, and now Andy’s dead. Andy died for him, Andy is dead, and he doesn’t even know how old he is. Was.
A flare of white-hot pain shoots up his right wrist to the elbow when he tries to unclench his right hand, muscles too cramped to respond and spasming every time he tries. Even through that, he can still feel the impression of an invisible hilt against his palm.
“Dean?” he hears and thinks that may not be the first time. “Are you—”
“Fine.” He needs to get out of here now. “I’m gonna go talk to Manuel about the search,” he adds and is already out the door before anyone can answer.
The topography of grief is too new to not feel its echoes: the memory of Dean’s death, of Bobby’s death recalled in stunning detail, as fresh as the moment he looked upon their bodies, layered with the more immediate loss today. Looking around the stricken room, Amanda and Vera and Carol, Alicia and Matt and Jody, Melanie’s team uncertain, he stops his instinctive step toward the door to follow Dean; in Dean’s absence, his responsibilities lie here. Whatever they are.
Gaze lingering on the still figure on the bed, he tries to think what happens next; this part he’s never known in more than the broadest outlines.
“Melanie,” he says. “Haruhi and Derek are downstairs with Evelyn. Tell them to spread the word to the others and report to Alison and Claudia personally.”
At Chitaqua, the burnings have always been done at dusk, bodies taken to the cabin at the edge of the camp, prepared by—someone, he’s not sure, but apparently Amanda was among them the last time. How does he not know this? Amanda’s observations of the aftermath of that first attack on Ichabod linger in his memory; the ritual of burning he knows in both theory and practice, but there are other things, before and after, that Alison did, Claudia did, that if they didn’t—couldn’t—ease the horror of grief, eased the lives of those confined within it.
“Also, request from Ichabod we—that we request their assistance with Andy’s remains,” he adds. “I think Callisto is the one who oversees those who care for the dead; her help would be appreciated.”
“Got it.” Nodding at her team, they leave, reducing the number of people he needs to see to.
Going to Alicia, he speaks to her quietly before stepping back to allow her team to see to her and approving very much of Matt ignoring her attempts to rise on her own and simply picking her up while Jody scowls Alicia’s protests quiet. She is perhaps the only person who’s ever managed to do that, he reflects as they leave.
Turning his attention to those remaining, he swallows: Carol’s silent, helpless grief, Amanda’s attempts to offer comfort in her own grief and guilt, Vera attempting to help both with limited success. Catching her eye, he crosses the room, crouching, aware that Amanda and Carol both are oblivious to his presence.
“There’s a break room just down the hall,” Vera whispers, voice thick. “Some old couches in there, enough room for anyone who wants to…you know. When they get off-duty, whatever.”
That part, at least, isn’t unfamiliar. “Excellent idea, thank you; please see that everyone knows. Also, could you take Carol in your charge while she’s here; I don’t know how long Dolores gave permission for her to be here.”
“I’ll find out.” Wiping her eyes, she murmurs something to Amanda before rising to her feet, practiced composure fully in place, and he watches her expertly maneuver her tiny group toward the door. Castiel follows them out, shutting the door firmly and instructing Alonzo, one of those waiting in the hall with his team, not to open the door to anyone without his permission.
What next: he can’t afford uncertainty with Alonzo—with anyone—watching, and so finds himself going down the hall, locating the room Sarah’s team appropriated and knocking perfunctorily before entering. He’s greeted with the startlingly sight of Sarah sitting cross-legged at the head of a sleeping bag, dark blonde ponytail immaculate as always, face expressionless but with Kat’s head in her lap, one hand stroking soothingly through the mess of light brown hair spread across her thigh.
“She’s out,” Sarah says quietly, eyes flickering toward the other two members of her team sitting on a sleeping bag nearby and the pile of weapons in the far corner, blocked by two backpacks and both their bodies. The lessons learned from Millie, from Trey, are not ones they can forget, not when so many of them have lost so much that even a single loss more can be too much: certainly not when they’re also soldiers and don’t need weapons to be dangerous. Approvingly, he marks the easy distance between Drew and Kat, the position of Sarah’s body allowing her to easily restrain Kat for the few brief seconds of potential hysterical strength before Drew can be at her side.
“Do you require anything?” he asks, pitching his voice to avoid disturbing Kat.
“Ask Vera to bring a sedative when she checks in. We’ll clear the room of weapons before she wakes up.”
He looks at Kat’s pale, tear-stained face; she looks small and infinitely fragile, which means absolutely nothing, not with any of them. “I will.”
“Kat’s never been calm about anything in her entire life,” Sarah says, a faint flicker of—something—in her voice. “When it really hits, it’s going to be difficult.”
He licks his lips, controlling the fresh spurt of grief with an effort; those long weeks after Dean’s death were forever, the memories still too raw to touch with impunity. “Who else is Kat close to who would be appropriate to relieve you?” A faint line appears on her forehead which he’s come to interpret as Sarah in the throes of disagreement. “There’s no reason to exhaust yourselves unnecessarily when there are others available to assist you.”
Sarah considers that before nodding. “Amanda, Melanie, Sheila, Dane, and Kyle,” she answers immediately, and he just stops himself from raising his eyebrows at the last name. “Their relationship is amicable now, and he’s very good at being sympathetic.”
That much is true, he supposes sourly; Kyle is uncomfortably skilled at making himself very agreeable to those in distress when he makes an effort to do so. “Kyle’s currently assisting in the search, but I’ll speak to the others immediately. Is there anything else?”
“No, thank you,” Sarah answers coolly, but the easy rhythm never falters, slipping down to stroke with infinite gentleness down Kat’s back.
“Vera suggested the second floor break room as a meeting place,” he adds, not sure what else to say or if there is anything. “I’ve requested assistance from Ichabod, they have certain customs after a Croatoan death that may be of benefit.” Frustrated with his own helplessness, he looks at the limp body stretched out on the cot. “Please keep me informed of anything she might need, and I’ll see that she gets it.”
Very faintly, Sarah nods. “We will. Thank you.”
In retrospect, it’s almost embarrassing that after five years on earth—over two of them mortal—it only took two weeks helping Dean in his first, initial attempts to lead Chitaqua that he realized something that should have been self-evident: he needs work. Not simply something with which to occupy himself as a way to fill the endless hours and mark the progression of time, but work, necessary work that must be done and must be done by him.
Dean, however, didn’t need to teach him the requirements of duty; that, he always knew, from the moment of his creation.
Leaving Sarah and her team to their vigil at Kat’s side and their own grief, Castiel sets aside everything but the requirements of his position in Dean’s absence, the list of things that must be done, letting them scroll through his mind like the checklists he used to create for Dean.
He checks on Amanda and Carol in the second floor breakroom, sending members of the militia drifting in the hallways to acquire more comfortable furnishings before returning to the lobby to assist Evelyn at the front desk, verifying who’s checked in and who is still on duty. Melanie returns with both Callisto’s condolences as well as her assurance that she and her team will arrive to care for Andy’s remains as soon as they’ve finished preparations.
Haruhi and her team arrive almost as soon as he’s dismissed Melanie to the second floor, Britney’s team in tow. He directs Leon to usher a shaky Evelyn from the desk and to the second floor while Mads takes her place with a determined expression. Britney and George—whose nephew Finn was killed in the earlier attack on Ichabod and took his place in Amanda’s class—he sends to the mess to see what is available for consumption that isn’t alcohol, though he doubts anyone will be much interested in anything else.
When he’s done, Haruhi approaches, her team giving the impression that nothing in this world is as important as standing very still and looking alert.
“On behalf of Ichabod, Alison and Claudia send their sympathy and support,” Haruhi recites soberly. “And on behalf of themselves, of course.”
“Of course,” he agrees, startled by the impulse to smile when Haruhi (and her team) relax, formalities complete.
“She also said to tell you all Chitaqua members are to consider themselves off duty until dawn once their current shift is done,” she continues, adding before he can argue, “That’s standard; all the families of those who lost people are off tonight. No worries about coverage: we have more than enough people for wall duty, since pretty much everyone wants an excuse to hang out on the wall.” She smiles faintly. “Can’t blame them: it’s an awesome wall.”
He nods his thanks (and agreement; it is). “Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” she says immediately. “Don’t worry about Dean; Joe sent word to Alison to tell you that he has him at the YMCA and wouldn’t let him look at any of the street maps until he ate a sandwich while he was watching and he did.”
Joseph is to be commended for his perspicacity. “Excellent.” After a moment, he realizes she’s waiting for something and wonders what. “Good job.”
“Thanks,” she answers, biting her lip. “So…” He waits, curious, as she shifts her weight from foot to foot before finally asking, “Anything you need us to do?”
Actually, yes. “How well do you know Microsoft Excel?”
He introduces Victoria (she used to do something called ‘project management,’ though the project in question wasn’t entirely clear) to the patrol spreadsheets, which she seems to intuitively understand (unlike some people he could name). After he’s certain that she understands how to use it (and after making a backup copy, of course), he leaves her to adjust the schedule appropriately: remove those teams at the checkpoints as well as Alicia’s pending Vera’s decision, make note of the possibility of removing Sarah’s team as well, and adjust the remaining teams to fill the gaps both actual and potential. Derek is charged with organizing the reports, currently in a disgraceful state, into the clearly marked boxes by team and date while Haruhi and Rosario are sent to the YMCA for any potential updates on the search (and unspoken: Dean, of course).
Jeremy arrives soon after he returns to the lobby to check on Mads, eyes red-rimmed and face blotchy. “Is he—”
“Yes,” Castiel says quietly, and isn’t sure what startles him more; his own reach for Jeremy when his face crumples, or Jeremy leaning into him. After Jeremy spoke to Andy, Vera sent him to complete his shift at Volunteer Services. While Castiel didn’t ask for her reasons, he can easily speculate, as they probably match his own. If Jeremy stayed here to wait, he would have insisted on being in the room, and a person infected with Croat is always a danger to others. As Kat proved, those grieving can also be just as dangerous.
“It was peaceful,” he murmurs against the dark blonde hair, tightening his hold at Jeremy’s shudder; at Chitaqua, he’s witnessed what happens when they’re not, another reason to exclude him: that isn’t what his last memories of Andy should contain. “Amanda’s in the second floor break room with some of the others; would you like to join them?”
Jeremy nods against his shoulder before taking a deep breath, composing himself, and Castiel escorts him upstairs and into Amanda’s care, lingering long enough to assure nothing is needed before returning downstairs.
And sees Joelle rise from one of the chairs, holding a large container and looking at him as if he should know what to do with it.
“Food,” she says, correctly interpreting his blank expression. “Where should I put it?”
“The mess,” he says automatically, leading her to the kitchen where Britney and George take it without surprise, adding it to the table on which they’ve assembled a surprising amount of consumables (and he notes, alcohol has a table of its own). The tradition of offering food to the bereaved is one he knows—though for obvious reasons has never experienced—but he’s also aware of how much Ichabod’s residents have donated to the general messes; this may very well represent the last of their own private stores.
“We can’t take this,” he says abruptly as Britney unwraps a massive pan of spicy lemon rice mixed with fall vegetables. Britney freezes, looking at him worriedly, but Joelle—doubtless due to Jeremy’s influence—seems unbothered.
“You can,” Joelle tells him confidently. “And will. Better a dinner of herbs with friends than a fatted calf in solitude.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“I can’t remember the quote, sorry,” she admits, tossing the multitude of thin braids back over her shoulder, beads clinking softly. “I got the spirit. Also, trust me, we have a lot of rice; the world may end, but the rice will not.”
“Joelle—” he starts.
“Some sacrifices,” she interrupts, expression suddenly far older than her chronological age, “are really gifts—to those making them, I mean. Bread on the water: sometimes, that’s how it’s returned, just knowing you made someone else’s life easier. Everyone who contributed will sleep well tonight knowing they’ve helped in the only way they can right now.”
That makes sense. “It would be an insult to refuse as well.”
“Hurt their feelings,” Joelle agrees, nodding.
“Thank you,” he says quietly. “We appreciate it and will return the favor at the first opportunity.”
“Anytime.” She stretches her shoulders. “That was my last casserole delivery today, so—”
“I think we have enough people for front desk duty,” he says, biting his lip at her disappointment. “However, if you wish, Jeremy is upstairs in the second floor break room where everyone is congregating. I think he would appreciate your company. Pending your mother’s approval, of course.”
“I asked before I started deliveries, just in case,” she answers in relief. “Where on the second floor now?”
He tilts his head toward the lobby. “I’ll walk you up.”