weary_head | (no subject)

Dean sat where Angua had deposited him, staring after Angua's back as she went to rummage for pie ingredients. Sam was still at the bar, still hunched over his glass, shoulders tight and too long hair falling over his ears and into his eyes.

It made him look younger than he was, younger then the new lines around his eyes and mouth betrayed, and Dean's heart twisted a little tighter in his chest.

Sam would be okay here. Somehow, Dean could make that happen, and if not Dean than Jess or Dad or Twerp or any combination of people left on the island that loved him. The only person in the way of that was Sam himself, but Dean would find a way around that, too.

He just had to find a way around whatever it was that stood between them, first.

Sam had arrived on the island spitting words like apocalypse and Lucifer from his mouth, and those scared Dean, but not nearly as much as the look in Sam's eyes when he said them.

Dean sighed, tucking himself further into the booth, watching with an anxiousness barely contained while those around Sam came and went. Occasionally he looked away, out into the jungle beyond the Winchester, to his hands and the small but growing marks on his palms his own fingernails had left behind, but always Dean's focus shifted back to Sam at the bar.

"Fuck," he murmured, twitching helplessly as the long line of uncertain questions restarted themselves in his head. What the hell happened to us?

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Castiel almost laughed. Of course Sam didn't.

"There's an expression, isn't there. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." He smiled around the mouth of the bottle and drank from it again, waiting for his tongue to grow accustomed to the taste.

He was trying to hide the anger, the bitterness from Dean. Wondered if Dean could see it, he just felt so gutted, surely his thoughts were written all over him.

He felt like he ought to clap or something, the way Cas was chugging the whiskey down, but instead it unsettled Dean as much as anything else had that night, and that was saying quite a lot.

"Go easy," he said, reaching for the bottle. Guilt clutched hard and sudden at his insides at the look on the angel's face. He'd sent Dean, he said, sent him in a last ditch effort to help Sam, and it hadn't worked. It hadn't worked and the goddamn Devil was free.

"Hey, I'm sorry. I know it didn't go down like you wanted it to."

"Maybe if Sam had listened to us this wouldn't have happened," Castiel snapped, sliding the bottle away from Dean's hand. Not out of reach, but enough to send a message that he wasn't done yet. The alcohol was already making his head swim, felt like it had burned a trail down his throat.

"Stubborn, hard-headed, both of you."

"Yeah, well, you try having an easy goddamn temperament in this life," Dean muttered back, hand reaching for and finding the bottle this time.

He took a long swig that burned all the way down, seeping hot and uncomfortable in a slow spread throughout his middle. "What do you mean, listened to you?"

Castiel closed his eyes and his head spun a little before he opened them again.

"Nothing, Dean," he said, not wanting to complicate things. Dean did not deserve to feel worse, he would have to watch himself.

"There is a way to stop Lucifer yet," Castiel added, the words feeling like bile as they came out, "if you survived. And I'm sure you did, somehow."

"How the hell do you stop the devil, Cas?" Dean grunted, voice as doubtful as his eyes were curious and hopeful. There could be a way out of it for them back home, for Sam, and Castiel knew what it was.

"I mean, how's it get any worse than Lucifer?"

"He is an angel. Powerful, yes, but he has his limits," Castiel said, taking the bottle back for another drink, to hide the waver in his voice more than anything at that moment. His hands felt shaky.

"Do not worry about the hows, there is nothing we can do from here," he finally said, when he knew he could keep his tone level. "It is not your burden to carry, and that is a good thing."

"Huh uh," Dean replied, "don't bench me, man. Maybe I'm not home to deal with it, but I need to know what's going on. What me and Sam are up against." He looked back at his brother, shoulders still curled as tight as he'd ever seen them. "He knows, and I can't help him unless I do, too."

"There's nothing that needs help here, and I've been told if we leave this place we don't return there, anyway. Just..." He paused, glaring at the bottle since the youngest Winchester was out of his line of vision. "You and Sam were at odds. You should know that."