Fic: In Country, Chapter I
Jul. 22nd, 2010 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oselleTitle: In Country, Chapter 1 of 5
Genre: SPN slash, AU based upon Episode 5:04, "The End"
Pairings: Dean/Castiel
Principals: Future!Dean, Future!Castiel
Rating: NC-17 for Chapter I
Warnings: Sex, language, angst, violence, dubcon, implied noncon (ratings and warnings will change for each chapter)
Spoilers: For SPN Episode 5:04
Word Count: 8,400 for Chapter I
Disclaimer: The Winchesters and all canon characters are the intellectual property of their creators. All original characters are mine. No money was made or sought in the writing of this story.
Summary: It's 2015 and the world's gone to hell in the Croatoan apocalypse and Dean and Castiel are going to Detroit to put a lid on this mess one way or the other.
Author's Note: This is a sequel to my story, Feast Of All Saints. So I guess this isn't the "All Saints Trilogy" anymore. I'll make like Twilight and call it the "All Saints Saga!" Special thanks go to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
baylorsr for her crash course on the neighborhoods and landmarks of Detroit.
I: Cairo
It had once been a drive of eight hours from eastern Kentucky to Detroit, more than four hundred miles of it on Interstate 75 north through Cincinnati and Dayton and Toledo and all the cities of that old rustbelt corridor. That way was closed to them and closed to everyone and two days out from eastern Kentucky they came to an impassable pileup on an Ohio county route. They double-backed to the next road and found the same thing and on the next one too. The pileups had a deliberate look to them and they knew they would not be driving into Michigan. That night it rained and they holed up in the garage bay of an abandoned gas station and Dean took first watch while Cass fell asleep with his back against Dean's leg and Dean's hand heavy on his arm.
A cold drizzle shrouded them all the next day and it was still raining when they found the house in the afternoon. It was small and white and the front door was closed and all the curtains on the first floor windows were down. The two of them stood in the road and stared at it through the misting rain.
"We should dry off," Cass said.
"For what? We're just gonna get wet again."
"We should eat something."
"You think it's empty?"
"We haven't seen any sign of people since around Columbus," Cass said. He shook his head. "This close to Detroit...no one's left around here."
Dean looked at Cass and he looked at the house and then he said, "Just long enough to eat. It's only two o'clock, we can't waste the daylight."
They tramped across the road and up the steps. The front door was unlocked and they went in and closed the door behind them. The entry let onto a small living room and dining room with a kitchen visible behind these and a flight of carpeted stairs to the second floor. It was just light enough to see that the house had not been ransacked, that there were books on the shelves and a knit blanket on the sofa and around the dining table all of the chairs still stood in silent and orderly assembly. In the corner of his eye Cass saw Dean wipe his boots on the doormat and he did the same.
The kitchen was as neat as the rest of the place although the pantry was almost empty. Powdered sugar. A bottle of dishwasher detergent. Parsley flakes. The refrigerator was also empty except for a box of baking soda, hard as a brick.
"Looks like whoever lived here got out while the getting was good," Dean said.
Cass went upstairs. There was a dripping sound up here and a sagging spot in the ceiling with long plaster stalactites pending from it and a puddle in the carpet beneath. It was the only sign that the house had been empty for a long time. He skirted the drip and passed a small bedroom and a green bathroom and next to that another bedroom, larger than the first. The windows here had only lace curtains over them and the room was pale gray and cool. He held aside the curtain and looked out over a leaflittered yard and the roof of a carport and bare trees. Someone had applied insulation plastic over this window and a corner of it had come loose and now rattled in the draft it had been put up to stop and Cass pressed it back onto the old tape and it was quiet.
He turned around and slid his rifle off his shoulder and propped it up against the nightstand. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed. He put his hands down on either side of his knees and they looked very dirty against the white bedspread but the cotton felt clean and dry under his hands so he left them there. He closed his eyes and moved his hands over the bedspread and the weave whispered against his palms. He heard Dean coming up the stairs and when Cass opened his eyes Dean was standing in the doorway. His hair and the shoulders of his jacket were all wet. Cass took a deep breath and held it and let it out almost in a sigh.
After a moment Dean said, "No."
"There's nothing after here but Detroit."
"We need the light."
"We won't have another chance like this."
"Cass..."
"We won't."
Dean stood there and looked at him. He glanced at the window. Then he put down his bag and his shotgun and turned away and took off his wet jacket and hung it on the doorknob.
Unbuttoning his shirt, he said, "No sleeping."
"No sleeping," Cass repeated and stood up and began to undress. When they lay down the bed was cold but soft with washworn sheets and they were naked and warm and while they made love the plastic came loose at the window and rattled and the curtain drifted and the scent of rain and autumn filled the room.
* * *
Afterward Dean lay next to Cass and Cass stroked his forearm from elbow to wrist and back. He turned his face into Dean's hair and said, "No sleeping."
Dean murmured, "Fuck it," against Cass's shoulder. "It's raining."
"I'll take watch," Cass said and he started to sit up and Dean pulled him back without even opening his eyes.
"Fuck that too. There's no one around here."
Cass smiled and settled down onto the bed. He lay there and listened to the rain on the roof and felt the steady rise and fall of Dean breathing against him. He closed his eyes and when he opened them the light had dimmed and the wind must have shifted because the plastic at the window was still and so except for the sound of rain and the drip of the decayed ceiling in the hallway the house was silent.
In the quiet, Cass said, "There's no news out of Detroit." To himself or so he thought.
After a moment Dean answered, "He's there."
The rain in the hallway dripped once, twice, four times.
"We don't know that."
"An entire city doesn't go dark for no reason. Not even these days."
"What if he's not there?"
Dean shifted and opened his eyes. "Cut it out, Cass."
Cass moved to touch Dean's face and Dean reached up and took his hand and put it away.
"I told you this didn't change anything."
"I know it doesn't."
"Then don't talk about Detroit as if we could just turn around and go back. We can't."
"What do we do when we get there? We don't even know how to find him."
"I think he'll find us."
"That'll be even worse."
Dean raised up and looked at Cass. "You said three miracles, Cass."
"I know I did."
"Well two down, one to go."
Cass looked up at him and then turned his face away and closed his eyes and didn't say anything. After a while Dean rolled forward and pressed the whole naked length of himself against Cass and he was so warm that Cass turned back to him and his arms came up around him.
"I don't want to talk about this stuff," Dean said and kissed his neck. "Not here." He kissed him again. "Not now."
They rocked against each other and kissed and Dean turned over face-down onto the faded sheets. They made love again and then curled up together so close that Cass could press his insteps against the soles of Dean's feet and the daylight dimmed and Dean fell asleep and Cass lay awake for a while and then fell asleep himself.
* * *
When Cass woke up it was dusk and Dean was still sleeping. He rolled over and slipped out of bed and put his bare feet down on the cold floor and stood up. He felt around for his clothes and picked them up and dressed in only his jeans and shirt.
"What's wrong?" Dean said and Cass turned to look at him. He was propped up on his elbow, already pushing back the covers.
"Nothing, I have to take a leak."
"Take the gun."
"Yeah," Cass said. He slung the riflestrap over his shoulder and went downstairs. The house was cold and on the first floor it was very dark. He let himself out onto the backporch and leaned the rifle up against the rail and unzipped and pissed into the yard and fastened back up.
"What's it like?"
He grabbed the rifle and spun around. She was sitting in one of the aluminum chairs with her legs tucked up beneath her and she was so small that anyone would have taken her for a girl but she wasn't.
"Do you know who I am?"
"I know what you are," Cass said. He lowered the gun, but only halfway. "I thought all of you were gone."
"Where would we go? We can't fly off to heaven like you angels. Present company excepted."
"I haven't seen a trickster in years."
"I hate that name. Don't call me that."
"What should I call you?"
"You can call me Ainsel. And you can answer my question."
"What question?"
"What's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"Being in love...now that you're one of them. Is it nice?"
Cass put his head down. He planted the stock of the rifle on the floorboards and looked up. "You didn't come out of nowhere just to ask me that. Why are you here?"
"I want to help you," she said. "But first you have to tell me about this being in love. Do you like it?"
"Yes. Yes I do."
"Why?"
Cass sighed. She leaned forward and sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. "You smell like you need a bath. I'll bet he does too. Doesn't that bother you?"
"No, I like the way he smells."
"Is it all about the sex? Because I've had sex, I've just never had sex good enough to die for."
"I wouldn't die for the sex, I'd die for him."
"Is that love?"
"Yes, that's love."
"It sounds awful."
"Sometimes it is."
"Then why do you keep on doing it?"
"Because I don't have any choice," he said. He thought about it for a few seconds. "I never had any choice in the first place. I don't think anyone does."
She cocked her head and studied him.
"Does he love you too?"
"In his own way."
"Does he love you more than his brother?"
"His brother is dead."
"When he sees him again will he remember that he loves you...in his own way?"
Cass smiled. "Trickster. What are you doing?"
"A, I said don't call me that and B, I wanted to know if love will be enough to get the job done, but you don't seem to have anything useful to say about it." She grinned. "Although you are awful pretty in bed."
Cass shook his head. "You're all the same," he said. "Whatever you call yourselves, all you want to do is play games. Now it's your turn to answer my question. Tell me why you're here."
"That's an easy one. I'm here to help you get to Lucifer."
"Really. Why would you do that? You have no stake in any of this."
"If we don't do something the whole world will be nothing but a playground for demons and one fallen angel with a big bug up his ass."
"Well, we could've used your help about...five years ago."
"None of us thought it would get this bad. We've watched these people push themselves to the brink of disaster for thousands of years and always pull themselves back, but this time something has to be done."
"How do I know you're not working for him?"
"Who, Lucifer?" she laughed. "If he wanted to find you he wouldn't need my help. He's not looking for you Castiel, either one of you." She stood up and came over to him and Cass set his hand on the porchrail and took a step back. The evening had grown dark but she was bright and small and eldritch. "He knows you've got nothing. And I know that all you have is some stupid faith that it's meant to be the two of you. That's very romantic but it's not a plan. You don't know anything or anyone in Detroit...I do. Someone who can help you."
"Who?"
"He calls himself Asher. He's set up in the Cairo Apartments on Matthew Street."
"He's one like you?"
"He's a demon."
"Oh," Cass said. He looked up and coughed out a laugh. "A demon will tell us how to get to Lucifer.
What's his real name? His old name?"
"Depends who you ask. Ashmadaevi, Asmodeus, Saturn. All one in the same."
"No," Cass said. He shook his head. "No. I know who he is."
"Do you?"
"He's as ancient a servant of hell as Azazel was and he's a vulgar piece of filth on top of it. If he's in Detroit he's at Lucifer's right hand."
"See, that's the fault with angels...with men, too. You think everything can be divided right down the middle. Asher doesn't serve Lucifer, he serves himself. He was on earth before Lucifer even existed and until now he's always come and gone as he pleased. He wants things to go back to the way they were."
"Then why doesn't he take Lucifer out himself?"
"Asher's in Detroit at Lucifer's will and he can't leave and things will stay that way as long as Lucifer is unbound. Asher has no power over him. He's waiting for you."
"Waiting for us to kill Lucifer."
"Not to kill him, he can't be killed. To bind him and send him back where he was."
"And Asher knows how to do that?"
"He knows a lot of things." She leaned forward and put her hot and tiny hand on his arm. "You're helpless, Castiel. Without someone on the inside, you and Dean are helpless."
Cass looked down at her. Then he looked out into the darkened yard. He bit his lip, a habit he had picked up from Dean, unconsciously, and held onto, consciously. He smelled rotting leaves and heard rain dripping off the bare trees. If the weather cleared and they hit no setbacks they could reach Detroit city limits by tomorrow.
"You trust him?"
"In this I do."
"If you're wrong and things go bad with him will you get us out?"
"Detroit is fixed, I can't do anything there. But things won't go bad. Asher needs you as much as you need him."
"The Cairo Apartments?"
She nodded. "That's right. 1016 Matthew Street, you can't miss it. Tell him Ainsel sent you," she said and then she was gone. The slight tingle of her hand on his arm faded like a candlewick just blown out. Then Cass just stood there.
He thought about Dean upstairs. He thought about them sleeping together for the first time not even two weeks ago and before that all the years he had loved Dean. Stretching back to hell itself. He wrapped one hand around the riflebarrel and the other around the porchrail and gripped both until his fingers ached and splinters slid into his palm.
He talked about miracles yet the closer they came to Detroit the less possible any miracle seemed for God's ways were a mystery to men and angels alike and it might very well serve God for both of them to die or come to something worse than death. He would have thwarted God's will and turned Dean away from Detroit if he could have but he couldn't and so he had kindled a hope that the only miracle would be to find Detroit empty and abandoned as every other place. To find neither Lucifer nor any agent of his so that they would leave that place together and if they never found Lucifer and he burned the whole earth to a cinder then so be it and now this little spirit from a forgotten race had come and taken away even that sorry hope.
Don't tell him.
The idea was so sudden and horrifying in its selfishness and thrilling in its simplicity that it dizzied him and he leaned against the porch and shut his eyes. Lucifer wasn't looking for them and wouldn't look for them and if they never went to Asher he would go on not looking for them and Cass stood on the porch for a little while longer and then he picked up the rifle and turned and went into the house.
* * *
He met Dean coming down the stairs, dressed and armed.
"What the hell happened to you, that was the longest fucking piss anyone ever took."
Don't tell him. Don't.
"We should eat," Cass said. "It's still raining we should...we should eat and spend the night."
"Yeah...okay," Dean said. "I thought that's what we were gonna do anyway. It's not like we can go anywhere now."
"No."
Dean searched his face in the dark.
"What's up with you?"
"Nothing."
"You sure?"
"Yeah," he said and then more convincingly, "Yes."
"Okay," Dean said and passed him on the stairs. "Think this fireplace works or you think there's a pack of squirrels living in it?"
Cass watched from the stairs for a moment and then he went down to the living room and helped Dean build up the fire. The wood stacked beside the fireplace kindled quickly and began to fill the room with ashy smoke and Dean shoved at the flue handle until it was fully open and fanned the flames and the flue caught the smoke and drew it up the chimney and the fire blazed. They fed newspapers and magazines into it and Dean paused and spread one of the papers on his lap and looked at it.
"I should've at least taken you to the movies, Cass," he said. "We should've done something fun before it all went to shit." He shook his head and smiled and Cass stared at him for a second and then leaned forward and kissed him. He held Dean's face in his hands and kissed him and Dean dropped the newspaper and wrapped his arms around Cass and they kissed and went on kissing and they would have undressed and had each other right there on the floor but Cass drew back and pressed his forehead against Dean's and sat there with his eyes closed.
"What?" Dean said half out of breath.
"I have to tell you something," Cass said. He could barely make the words come out of his mouth and had to say them through clenched teeth.
"All right," Dean said. He took Cass's hands and held him by the wrists and ducked his head to look into his face. "Jesus Christ, Cass, what is it?"
He slipped out of Dean's grasp and pushed himself back and stared into the fire and told Dean everything. When he was done he looked at Dean and neither of them spoke.
Then Dean said, "You believe her?"
Cass nodded. "Yes."
"Well this is good. We have a lead, we have an in. Shit..." he said. "It's more than we had before."
"Yeah," Cass said. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes and stood up and dusted black ash from his palms and the splinters from the porchrail stung. "It's good."
* * *
They ate canned soup and the last of the bread that Amy had packed up for them. It was very warm in front of the fire and they sat there and watched the flames lick at the wood and the fire whispered and the coals shifted in the grate. Cass sat with his arms around his knees and he turned his head to look at Dean and after a moment Dean met his gaze. Neither of them said anything. When he'd been an angel Cass had thought that out of all their failings men were most culpable because they judged everything within the confines of their own short lives, indifferent to eternity, infinity, even God and now he understood how those things could mean so little compared to one flickering moment of joy. One life made infinitely and eternally holy by its very transience.
Dean said, "You didn't want to tell me about that trickster, did you?"
After a moment, Cass said, "No."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't want to find Lucifer. I don't want you to find Lucifer."
"I'm not exactly counting the minutes myself."
"Will you promise me something?"
"Depends what it is."
"Promise me you'll stay alive."
Dean looked away. "Come on, Cass..."
"No. Promise me you'll do everything you can to stay alive."
Dean looked back at him and then smiled and shook his head. "You know what, Cass? You already died for me once and you said you'd do it again. You're the one who didn't get out with Frank and the others when you had the chance. You went out into that shithole of Knoxville to save my ass when I was shot and you signed on to this goddamn Detroit job with me. So if anyone should be making promises like that...maybe it shouldn't be me."
Cass put his forehead down on his knees and Dean went on, "This is a suicide mission and we both know it. We go in, we get the job done. If we can do that and make it out alive, great, if we don't...we don't."
"Then we don't," Cass said. He looked at Dean. "Whatever happens in Detroit, it's you and me. At least promise me that."
After a moment Dean said, "All right, I promise. Do you?"
"Yes."
"Good," Dean said and then he smiled. "You want to seal this deal or what?"
"Down here or upstairs?"
"It's a lot warmer down here."
For the third time that day they made love and if Ainsel or Asmodeus or God himself were watching Cass thought, let them watch. When they were done he clasped his hands around Dean's back and his knees around Dean's hips and held onto him. After a while he rolled Dean over so that he could cover him with his whole body and that was better. He closed his eyes and laid his forehead against Dean's shoulder and could have wept for the fragility of life and joy and love and the whole fleeting world.
* * *
Detroit had been dying for a long time, longer than the release of Lucifer or the virus and now at last it was dead. Other cities were still ringed by National Guard troops and sectors of them were cordoned off by Quarantine Control but no such effort had been made for Detroit. At some point concrete barriers had been set across the highways to the south but it was unclear whether this had been to keep people out or keep them in. There were great pileups of abandoned vehicles on the city side of the barriers. On the other side a few military vehicles, some lying on their side, charred and skeletal. Corpses among the trucks. A great press of silence.
They came into the city at dusk and they stood on Route 85 near the derelict bus depot and looked out over the rubbled streets. Behind them loomed the bridge that had been destroyed the year before to keep the virus from crossing the river. One tower still stood on the Canadian side with its suspension cables snapped and hanging slack over the water like the tentacles of some dead creature and the virus had crossed over anyway. They could see little fires burning in the city and they could smell the burning. Trash and wood, rubber and oil. The smell came off the river too, thick and toxic, and it began to snow. The snowflakes were flat and papery and gray as ash. By the last of the daylight Dean looked at the map folded over in his hands.
"Matthew Street?" His voice fell flat in the silence.
"Yeah. 1016 Matthew."
Dean traced a line on the map with his finger and then looked up into the snow. "It's that way."
Cass felt as if they were being watched and they probably were. The windows of the buildings and houses were all blank and yet did not seem empty. Dirt gritted under their feet and papers blew around them and once he thought he heard someone running behind them and Dean heard it too and they both wheeled around but the sound receded off among the empty lots and was gone.
Now it was snowing and now it was not and now it was again. When they turned the corner onto Matthew they saw a century-old hulk of yellow brick in a style somewhere between moorish and gothic as if the builder had thought this incongruous mix of exotic elements suited the name of the place, carved across the stone lintel in silent-movie script. In front of the entrance stood a garden court that housed a single dead and twisted tree as black as burned iron. There were two lamps mounted on either side of the entrance and a bulb burned in the left one, the first electric light they had seen since Knoxville.
The original doors of the place had long ago been looted and replaced with steel security doors the color of putty and each set with a square of wired glass. The door beside the working lamp was propped open and a man in lowslung chino pants and a tank top was lounging up against it smoking a cigarette. He had a black rag or scarf wrapped around his head with the tails hanging down to his shoulder and he blew smoke out into the cold air and stared at them.
"Is that him?" Dean asked.
"I don't know what he would look like."
The man called out, "You gonna stand there or you gonna come on up?"
"Are you Asher?" Cass said.
The man laughed. He turned his head and spat onto the stone stairs. "I'm just the concierge, baby. Asher's waiting for you upstairs. Come on up now, don't be shy. All kinds of good things waiting for you at The Cairo."
Cass and Dean looked at each other and Dean reached around to his back where the Colt was hidden.
"This looks like a fuckin shitshow, Cass."
Cass shook his head. "We don't have to do this."
"You got any other ideas?"
"He don't have no ideas," the man called from the doorway. "There ain't no idea but this one. All your days on this earth have brought you right to The Cairo. Where you gonna go if it ain't here?"
"Man's got a point," Dean said.
"The second something looks wrong, we're out."
Dean glanced at the place and back at Cass with half a smile. "You think anything's gonna look right in there?"
They went up the walk and climbed the three steps and the man pitched his cigarette out into the dark and then stood back against the door to let them pass. The lobby was lit by one dusky bulb in a yellow utility cage. The floor was some intricate mosaic rendered indecipherable by missing tiles. On the right wall the old mailboxes had no doors and were stuffed with trash and cigarette butts. One slot somehow held a solitary piece of mail. Beneath the mailboxes two men were playing dice on a purple blanket and they glanced up at Cass and Dean and then went back to their business. The hall smelled like cigarettes, garbage, vermin, piss. The elevator doors stood open on nothing but a black shaft and a dank wind blew out of it and the cables inside made a low electric buzz and above the elevator the arched panel blinked the number three over and over behind milky yellow glass. From somewhere beneath the floor came a deep mechanical thrum like some engine turning in the guts of the building. Maybe the generator that kept this place lit up. Maybe the stalled elevator works. God only knew. The dice clicked.
"Sixth floor," the man said. He lit another cigarette. "Take the stairs."
The banisters had been plundered and the iron posts were still sunk in the marble to the right and left. In some places they had to climb over mounds of garbage and debris. Here and there a light burned on the wall, sometimes an incandescent bulb spotted with age, sometimes a fluorescent bar buzzing like a fly. They could hear footsteps on the floors above them and doors slamming and laughter and shrieks but they saw no one at all. Beneath these sounds the engine beneath them turned and turned with a heavy rolling sound like some great iron wheel or wheels churning over and over. They could feel the vibration of it beneath their feet. At each landing shadows seemed to run away from them into the greasy dark.
The air up here was hot and stagnant. It stank even worse than it had downstairs. It smelled like shit and vomit. Like unwashed cunt and ass and like come dried stiff onto filthy sheets.
"Dean. We should go."
Dean didn't look at Cass. He kept climbing. "We can't."
On the sixth floor they stopped and stood at the top of the stairs and looked down the hallway to the right and the left. Every door was closed. Above them two bulbs flickered in a crumbling plaster fixture.
"Now what?" Dean said. "We just start knocking?"
Something was walking towards them. Someone was walking towards them. A bony girl resolved out of the brown shadows as if she were emerging from smoke. At first Cass thought she had a horrible limp and then he saw that one foot was bare while the other was strapped into three inches of gold platform sandal. Other than this she was wearing only a string bikini bottom and cropped t-shirt. The jagged bones of her hips ground away beneath the bikini bows.
"You're the guys who're here to see Asher?"
"Yeah," Dean said.
"Okay," she said and turned around and walked off the way she'd come. She had a raw and swollen tattoo above the slack triangle of fabric that barely covered her rear and Cass stared at it until he realized it was a crude drawing of a naked woman on her hands and knees with her breasts dangling and her ass up in the air. Above her was inked an unfurled banner that read OPEN FOR BUSINESS.
"That thing on your back looks infected," Dean said.
The girl barked out a laugh and kept walking. "That ain't the only thing infected on me."
They moved through pockets of light and dark. The girl's one shoe clomped and clomped. The engine below turned and turned.
"Why don't you take off that shoe?" Dean said. "You'd be better off barefoot."
Cass looked at him. They were in a dark place and Cass couldn't see him. The girl stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall and she pushed it open and leaned against it.
"Go on," she said. "This is Asher's place."
Cass went in first and behind him the girl said, "Asher gave me this shoe. I earned it."
Dean said, "How?"
Cass turned to Dean and said his name but Dean was looking at the girl.
"I learned how to stick my tongue up his ass the way he likes it. I'll get the other shoe when I learn some new tricks." She looked Dean up and down. "You wanna teach me some?"
Cass said Dean's name again, sharply, and Dean looked at him. "Stop talking to her." To the girl he said, "Where's Asher?"
She smiled. "He's coming."
"Then get out of here."
She pulled some face that was neither a pout nor a smirk but some ugly combination of both and then pivoted on her one mountainous shoe and stepped out and pulled the door shut behind her.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Dean said. He stood there by the door with his bag over his shoulder and his shotgun in his hand. "What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing," he said. He felt dazed but whether from the noise or the heat or the stench he couldn't tell. His pulse throbbed in time with the sound from the basement. He turned and looked at the apartment. It was one bleak room and an efficiency kitchen. A bare bulb hung from a wire in the kitchen ceiling. In the living room, a shattered television and a recliner with the stuffing boiling out of the seat. A stained and springshot mattress on the floor. Paint had fallen from the walls in curdled sheets and there were two naked windows in the far wall and a light was coming in through them, some spotlight that flared in and crawled up the walls and up across the ceiling and went back out and then did it all over again in a steady creep that seemed tied to the throbbing of the engine below. Now louder than ever. Cass had never seen this place before and yet felt as if he had in some nightmare. Some dark well of imagination as potent as memory.
I've never been here, he thought and on the heels of that, I have been here. He whispered "What the fuck is this?"
From behind him Dean said, "I know what it is."
Cass stood there or thought he stood there for a long time and he was afraid to turn around though he couldn't have said why, only that there was a dread on him like a weight of chains. Then he was looking at Dean but Dean was not looking at him and his own tongue was locked inside his mouth and Dean took two steps into the apartment and put the duffel on the floor and reached behind himself and pulled out the Colt and bent over and set that down on top of the bag. Then he straightened up and just let the shotgun fall to the floor and he looked at Cass without seeming to see him.
"I know what happens here."
The light came in. Crept across the apartment like a living thing. It lit up Dean's face and Dean tracked it up the ceiling and watched it go out. Then he started taking off his clothes.
"What are you doing?" Cass said but he knew. He thought, Stop this and get him out of here, and if he'd still been an angel he would have been able to do that but he wasn't. His groin flooded with heat unbidden as if something had burst inside him. Dean pulled off his boots. He shucked off his jeans and stood there naked. The light crawled up him.
"Where you want it? On the mattress? Just you or you bringing some friends?"
He swallowed. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt thick inside his jaws.
"What's the matter?" Dean laughed. "You guys getting a limp dick on me all of a sudden?"
A reel of pornographic depravity unspooled in his head of things the angels had told him before he'd gone down to hell for Dean and things he'd seen in Dean's own nightmares and memories when he'd still had that sight. And one thought that came as if whispered in his ear from the black belly of this place, that he had waited a long time for Dean, pined away for him for a long goddamn time and given up everything for him and all that after every ratfuck demon in hell had gotten a free piece for forty fucking years and now it was time to make up for that shit.
Fuck, his dick was rock-hard and aching up into his belly.
He opened his mouth and heard himself say, "Don't put up much of a fight, do you?"
"What the fuck for?" Dean said. "To get you off?"
The light came in again and lit Dean up all naked he was standing there and it went up the ceiling and out. The engine turned. The room throbbed. The light came back, up, over, out.
"Get on the fucking mattress," he said and Dean smirked and went to it and lay down on his stomach and spread his legs.
He stalked over in a stilted gait because his cock was so fucking hard. It felt like a goddamn club between his legs. He knelt on the mattress between Dean's legs and grabbed Dean's hips and jerked him up so that Dean was on his knees and forearms. Open for business, just like the sign said. He unzipped his fly and even with the sound from below Dean heard that and said, "That's it, motherfucker."
"Yeah, that's it," he said. "You better believe it." He pulled out his dick and it was heavy and huge in his hand and already wet at the head. "You fuckin love it," he said and pushed in with no prelude and no slick except his own leaking juice and Dean caught his breath and locked up and he said, "Open wide," and shoved himself in up to the hilt and stopped there with his dick throbbing away inside Dean and then he started fucking him.
He fucked him and now he heard all around him through the walls other people fucking, screaming and cursing and grunting like beasts. The whole place was fucking the walls were bleating beating bleeding with it and all of it in time with that pulsing noise like hell's machinery hot and dirty and endless churning up fire and filth from the guts of the earth. Light glared up the wall up the ceiling out. Dean was almost bent double beneath him and sucking air between clenched teeth and when he saw Dean try to get himself up on one hand and brace the other against the wall he put his palm flat on Dean's back and shoved him down until the crown of his head was on the mattress.
"You stay down there. Stay down there and take it how you like it."
He clamped his hands around Dean's hipblades and threw his head back and pumped into him. He was running with sweat and his dick felt bigger with every thrust.
"I'm gonna go for hours," he said in a voice that was barely his own. "Gonna bust you open all night and you'll still beg for it. Won't you? Yeah." He spewed out a litany of obscene plans and imputations.
Dean didn't say anything. Dean wasn't making a sound. The light came in. He saw his own shadow against the wall, distorted and hunched and humping like a bedlamite, a monster, a devil. Now it was quiet. Now it was very quiet. He heard himself grunting. The squeal of rusted springs in the mattress. His own dick sucking in and out. He looked down panting. The light moved up the ceiling, reflected down onto Dean's face. He was lying with his neck twisted to the right and his cheek against the mattress and his eyes half open and blank and Cass suddenly cried out and pushed Dean away from him and fell backwards onto the floor.
His guts, loins, genitals were on fire, engorged, excruciating. He rolled over and grabbed himself in both hands and after a few hard jerks he began to come onto the floor in thick burning spurts that wouldn't stop. He didn't know how long he lay there and pulled at himself until he was empty. When he finally sat up he was still half erect and aching and there was a viscous splatter of come sprayed across the floor that reminded him of a drunk's runny vomit. He stuffed himself into his open fly and zipped up, his hands trembling.
He said, "Dean?" He turned onto his hands and knees and crawled to the mattress. Dean was lying on his side where Cass had thrown him. His hands were over his face and his whole body shook. "Dean?" he repeated and came up on the mattress and touched Dean's shoulder and Dean rolled onto his back and took his hands from his face and burst out laughing.
"Can't finish the job?"
"Dean, listen to me..."
"Maybe if you stuck it down my throat."
"We have to get out of here."
"Come on you sonofabitch," Dean said. He grabbed for Cass's crotch. "Let me suck you off."
His dick was swelling. He closed his eyes and took Dean by the wrists.
"Dean..."
"I knew none of you had any fucking sack," Dean said and then he tipped his head back on the filthy mattress and shouted, "What do I have to do to suck some cock around here?" and from outside that apartment the whole building came to life with whoops and howls and a pounding of feet on the stairs and fists against the walls.
"Shhh, Dean, shhh..." The noise from the halls was hideous.
"I wanna suck some fuckin dick!" Dean bellowed. "Jesus fuckin Christ!" He started to laugh so hard he was screaming.
"Stop it!" he pleaded and straddled Dean and put a hand over his mouth and for a second Dean arched up taut as if he would buck Cass off and then he just went still and stared up at him.
"We have to go, Dean, please. Do you understand me?"
Dean blinked. He nodded slowly.
"Do you know who I am?"
Dean nodded again.
"Okay," Cass said. He slid his hand from Dean's mouth and cupped his face. "Okay, let's go."
Dean looked at him for a second and then turned his head and took Cass's thumb in his mouth and wrapped his tongue around it and made a guttural noise in his throat. Cass felt it up the whole length of his arm. He felt it all the way down to his dick. He closed his eyes and worked his thumb down into the wet heat at the back of Dean's throat and Dean moaned and Cass put his hand on the bulge between his legs and his fingers were on his zipper and then he opened his eyes and yanked his hand out of Dean's mouth and hit him hard across the face. Dean's head snapped to the side and his eyelids dipped and fluttered and he looked up at Cass half stunned.
"I'm sorry," Cass breathed. His arm hung in the air.
Dean grinned wolfishly. There was blood on his teeth.
"That's how you want it?"
Cass hesitated and then he drew back his fist and hit him again and Dean's eyes rolled up and he was out. Cass knelt there for a second and then he swung his leg over Dean and got up off the mattress. The only light now was from the naked bulb in the kitchen and in its feeble gray illumination he gathered Dean's clothes up from the floor. When he brought them back to the mattress Dean was coming around and he turned his head to Cass.
"Cass?"
"Yeah," Cass said. He dropped the clothes on the mattress and knelt down beside Dean and got his hands under Dean's arms. "You have to get dressed."
"What..." he said. He raised up on his elbows. "Why the fuck am I undressed?"
"Because we have to get out of here."
Dean lay there in a daze. He ran his tongue out to the corner of his mouth where he was bloody and touched his jaw. "Did you hit me?"
He pulled Dean's t-shirt over his head and Dean slid his arms into it and sat up and winced. "Did you fuck me?"
"Yes," Cass said. He handed Dean his jeans and Dean took them and sat there staring at him. His eyes moved past Cass and took in the whole squalid room.
"Ahh fuck," he said wearily. He looked back at Cass. "Tell me it was just you."
"It was just me."
"You okay?"
Cass nodded and Dean said, "All right. I don't..." He shook his head. "I don't want to know anything else." He got to his feet and stumbled off the mattress and Cass caught him by the arm. When he was steady Dean nodded and Cass let go of him and he pulled on the rest of his clothes and Cass brought him his boots and he took them and knelt down to put them on.
"Asher never showed up, did he?"
"No," Cass said. He handed Dean the Colt and Dean hunched over and shoved it back in his belt and looked up at him.
"It was all a trick, wasn't it?"
"I think so," Cass said. He helped Dean to his feet and Dean put on his jacket and he gave Cass such a bleak look that Cass's heart ached and yet for one wildly hopeful moment he thought, We can go now. From The Cairo, Detroit, the whole damned place.
He put his hand on Dean's arm and turned to the door and the man was sitting beside the door in the shredded recliner and Cass had never laid eyes on him before but knew who he was all the same.
Asher said, "Not a trick, a test."
They stood there and stared at him and he sat in the shadows and none of them said anything. He was bald except for a crescent of white hair above his ears and the white hair that came up through his open shirtcollar and he was thickset as an old prizefighter with a bulldog head on a slab of neck. His hands on the arms of the recliner were almost square, the fingers so blunt they seemed all of the same length. Beneath the cuffs of his black trousers his feet were bare and calloused and set with long nails. Cass could smell him, sulfur and sweat and the back-closet mothy funk of his suit jacket.
Castiel said, "Asmodeus," and he answered, "Castiel," and then to Dean he said, "And Dean. I've missed you Dean. Things were never the same after this one bailed you out."
Cass could hear Dean breathing hard behind him and he turned to him and in one motion Dean pulled out the Colt and leveled it at Asher and Cass held up his hands but Dean wasn't looking at him.
"I remember you too, you cocksucker."
"If I recall, you were the one sucking cock."
"If I'd known it was you I'd have..."
"What? Gone wandering around Detroit until you stumbled into Lucifer?"
Dean drew in a deep breath. His jaw was clenched and shaking and Cass whispered his name and Dean glanced at him and then back at Asher.
"Come on, Dean," Asher said. "Water under the bridge, isn't it?"
Dean looked at Cass and blinked and lowered the gun.
"That's better," Asher said. "I didn't ask you here expecting to get shot."
"And we didn't come here expecting to be part of your goddamn freakshow. Can you get us to Lucifer or not?"
"Oh yes. Better than that, I can show you how to put him back where he belongs. For good."
"How?"
Asher stood up. "That is a long story and I'd like to tell it somewhere else." He looked at the puddle of come on the floor and glanced at Cass and winked. "This place is nasty." He turned to the door and Dean put the Colt back in his belt and Cass said, "Dean, I didn't...I should have known."
Without looking up Dean said, "It's all right, Cass."
"Are you?"
Dean repeated, "It's all right," and shouldered past Cass and picked up the bag and shotgun and walked out of the apartment.
In the hall the bony girl was leaning up against the far wall with her bare and dirty foot perched on the sandaled one. She stood up when they came out and balanced on her platform like a gymnast and picked at her fingernails.
Asher said, "Someone shot their load all over the goddamn floor. Get in there and clean it up."
She stood there with her face slack. Shredding her cuticles. When Cass passed her he said, "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
He shook his head and then turned away from her and Dean who had been right ahead of him was not there and Asher was not there and the long hallway was intersticed as before with dim light and black shadow and empty of anyone save himself and the girl.
He called out, "Dean?" and got no response.
He broke into a run to the stairs but they were also empty and he launched himself down them shouting Dean's name and from the landing above him the girl said, "They're gone," and he stopped and looked up at her.
"Where? Which way did they go?"
She shrugged.
"That's how it is around here. People're just there one second gone the next. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't."
"Did you see them go?"
She shook her head. "You get used to it after a while. Asher always comes back."
He stared at her for a second and then turned and ran, half falling down the stairs in the stinking dark, and she shouted, "I'm telling you they're gone!" but she was receding and his feet pounded on the stairs and his voice echoed off the walls and no one answered. On the third floor someone grabbed his arm and spun him onto the landing and threw him up against the wall and Asher was standing there with his eyes gone dead white in his thuggish face.
"Lights out," he said and shoved the flat of his hand against Cass's forehead and Cass felt his knees buckle and himself slide down the wall and Asher's frozen hand on his head and then the lights did indeed go out.
Continued in Chapter II: Michigan Central
Genre: SPN slash, AU based upon Episode 5:04, "The End"
Pairings: Dean/Castiel
Principals: Future!Dean, Future!Castiel
Rating: NC-17 for Chapter I
Warnings: Sex, language, angst, violence, dubcon, implied noncon (ratings and warnings will change for each chapter)
Spoilers: For SPN Episode 5:04
Word Count: 8,400 for Chapter I
Disclaimer: The Winchesters and all canon characters are the intellectual property of their creators. All original characters are mine. No money was made or sought in the writing of this story.
Summary: It's 2015 and the world's gone to hell in the Croatoan apocalypse and Dean and Castiel are going to Detroit to put a lid on this mess one way or the other.
Author's Note: This is a sequel to my story, Feast Of All Saints. So I guess this isn't the "All Saints Trilogy" anymore. I'll make like Twilight and call it the "All Saints Saga!" Special thanks go to
baylorsr for her crash course on the neighborhoods and landmarks of Detroit.I: Cairo
It had once been a drive of eight hours from eastern Kentucky to Detroit, more than four hundred miles of it on Interstate 75 north through Cincinnati and Dayton and Toledo and all the cities of that old rustbelt corridor. That way was closed to them and closed to everyone and two days out from eastern Kentucky they came to an impassable pileup on an Ohio county route. They double-backed to the next road and found the same thing and on the next one too. The pileups had a deliberate look to them and they knew they would not be driving into Michigan. That night it rained and they holed up in the garage bay of an abandoned gas station and Dean took first watch while Cass fell asleep with his back against Dean's leg and Dean's hand heavy on his arm.
A cold drizzle shrouded them all the next day and it was still raining when they found the house in the afternoon. It was small and white and the front door was closed and all the curtains on the first floor windows were down. The two of them stood in the road and stared at it through the misting rain.
"We should dry off," Cass said.
"For what? We're just gonna get wet again."
"We should eat something."
"You think it's empty?"
"We haven't seen any sign of people since around Columbus," Cass said. He shook his head. "This close to Detroit...no one's left around here."
Dean looked at Cass and he looked at the house and then he said, "Just long enough to eat. It's only two o'clock, we can't waste the daylight."
They tramped across the road and up the steps. The front door was unlocked and they went in and closed the door behind them. The entry let onto a small living room and dining room with a kitchen visible behind these and a flight of carpeted stairs to the second floor. It was just light enough to see that the house had not been ransacked, that there were books on the shelves and a knit blanket on the sofa and around the dining table all of the chairs still stood in silent and orderly assembly. In the corner of his eye Cass saw Dean wipe his boots on the doormat and he did the same.
The kitchen was as neat as the rest of the place although the pantry was almost empty. Powdered sugar. A bottle of dishwasher detergent. Parsley flakes. The refrigerator was also empty except for a box of baking soda, hard as a brick.
"Looks like whoever lived here got out while the getting was good," Dean said.
Cass went upstairs. There was a dripping sound up here and a sagging spot in the ceiling with long plaster stalactites pending from it and a puddle in the carpet beneath. It was the only sign that the house had been empty for a long time. He skirted the drip and passed a small bedroom and a green bathroom and next to that another bedroom, larger than the first. The windows here had only lace curtains over them and the room was pale gray and cool. He held aside the curtain and looked out over a leaflittered yard and the roof of a carport and bare trees. Someone had applied insulation plastic over this window and a corner of it had come loose and now rattled in the draft it had been put up to stop and Cass pressed it back onto the old tape and it was quiet.
He turned around and slid his rifle off his shoulder and propped it up against the nightstand. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed. He put his hands down on either side of his knees and they looked very dirty against the white bedspread but the cotton felt clean and dry under his hands so he left them there. He closed his eyes and moved his hands over the bedspread and the weave whispered against his palms. He heard Dean coming up the stairs and when Cass opened his eyes Dean was standing in the doorway. His hair and the shoulders of his jacket were all wet. Cass took a deep breath and held it and let it out almost in a sigh.
After a moment Dean said, "No."
"There's nothing after here but Detroit."
"We need the light."
"We won't have another chance like this."
"Cass..."
"We won't."
Dean stood there and looked at him. He glanced at the window. Then he put down his bag and his shotgun and turned away and took off his wet jacket and hung it on the doorknob.
Unbuttoning his shirt, he said, "No sleeping."
"No sleeping," Cass repeated and stood up and began to undress. When they lay down the bed was cold but soft with washworn sheets and they were naked and warm and while they made love the plastic came loose at the window and rattled and the curtain drifted and the scent of rain and autumn filled the room.
* * *
Afterward Dean lay next to Cass and Cass stroked his forearm from elbow to wrist and back. He turned his face into Dean's hair and said, "No sleeping."
Dean murmured, "Fuck it," against Cass's shoulder. "It's raining."
"I'll take watch," Cass said and he started to sit up and Dean pulled him back without even opening his eyes.
"Fuck that too. There's no one around here."
Cass smiled and settled down onto the bed. He lay there and listened to the rain on the roof and felt the steady rise and fall of Dean breathing against him. He closed his eyes and when he opened them the light had dimmed and the wind must have shifted because the plastic at the window was still and so except for the sound of rain and the drip of the decayed ceiling in the hallway the house was silent.
In the quiet, Cass said, "There's no news out of Detroit." To himself or so he thought.
After a moment Dean answered, "He's there."
The rain in the hallway dripped once, twice, four times.
"We don't know that."
"An entire city doesn't go dark for no reason. Not even these days."
"What if he's not there?"
Dean shifted and opened his eyes. "Cut it out, Cass."
Cass moved to touch Dean's face and Dean reached up and took his hand and put it away.
"I told you this didn't change anything."
"I know it doesn't."
"Then don't talk about Detroit as if we could just turn around and go back. We can't."
"What do we do when we get there? We don't even know how to find him."
"I think he'll find us."
"That'll be even worse."
Dean raised up and looked at Cass. "You said three miracles, Cass."
"I know I did."
"Well two down, one to go."
Cass looked up at him and then turned his face away and closed his eyes and didn't say anything. After a while Dean rolled forward and pressed the whole naked length of himself against Cass and he was so warm that Cass turned back to him and his arms came up around him.
"I don't want to talk about this stuff," Dean said and kissed his neck. "Not here." He kissed him again. "Not now."
They rocked against each other and kissed and Dean turned over face-down onto the faded sheets. They made love again and then curled up together so close that Cass could press his insteps against the soles of Dean's feet and the daylight dimmed and Dean fell asleep and Cass lay awake for a while and then fell asleep himself.
* * *
When Cass woke up it was dusk and Dean was still sleeping. He rolled over and slipped out of bed and put his bare feet down on the cold floor and stood up. He felt around for his clothes and picked them up and dressed in only his jeans and shirt.
"What's wrong?" Dean said and Cass turned to look at him. He was propped up on his elbow, already pushing back the covers.
"Nothing, I have to take a leak."
"Take the gun."
"Yeah," Cass said. He slung the riflestrap over his shoulder and went downstairs. The house was cold and on the first floor it was very dark. He let himself out onto the backporch and leaned the rifle up against the rail and unzipped and pissed into the yard and fastened back up.
"What's it like?"
He grabbed the rifle and spun around. She was sitting in one of the aluminum chairs with her legs tucked up beneath her and she was so small that anyone would have taken her for a girl but she wasn't.
"Do you know who I am?"
"I know what you are," Cass said. He lowered the gun, but only halfway. "I thought all of you were gone."
"Where would we go? We can't fly off to heaven like you angels. Present company excepted."
"I haven't seen a trickster in years."
"I hate that name. Don't call me that."
"What should I call you?"
"You can call me Ainsel. And you can answer my question."
"What question?"
"What's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"Being in love...now that you're one of them. Is it nice?"
Cass put his head down. He planted the stock of the rifle on the floorboards and looked up. "You didn't come out of nowhere just to ask me that. Why are you here?"
"I want to help you," she said. "But first you have to tell me about this being in love. Do you like it?"
"Yes. Yes I do."
"Why?"
Cass sighed. She leaned forward and sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. "You smell like you need a bath. I'll bet he does too. Doesn't that bother you?"
"No, I like the way he smells."
"Is it all about the sex? Because I've had sex, I've just never had sex good enough to die for."
"I wouldn't die for the sex, I'd die for him."
"Is that love?"
"Yes, that's love."
"It sounds awful."
"Sometimes it is."
"Then why do you keep on doing it?"
"Because I don't have any choice," he said. He thought about it for a few seconds. "I never had any choice in the first place. I don't think anyone does."
She cocked her head and studied him.
"Does he love you too?"
"In his own way."
"Does he love you more than his brother?"
"His brother is dead."
"When he sees him again will he remember that he loves you...in his own way?"
Cass smiled. "Trickster. What are you doing?"
"A, I said don't call me that and B, I wanted to know if love will be enough to get the job done, but you don't seem to have anything useful to say about it." She grinned. "Although you are awful pretty in bed."
Cass shook his head. "You're all the same," he said. "Whatever you call yourselves, all you want to do is play games. Now it's your turn to answer my question. Tell me why you're here."
"That's an easy one. I'm here to help you get to Lucifer."
"Really. Why would you do that? You have no stake in any of this."
"If we don't do something the whole world will be nothing but a playground for demons and one fallen angel with a big bug up his ass."
"Well, we could've used your help about...five years ago."
"None of us thought it would get this bad. We've watched these people push themselves to the brink of disaster for thousands of years and always pull themselves back, but this time something has to be done."
"How do I know you're not working for him?"
"Who, Lucifer?" she laughed. "If he wanted to find you he wouldn't need my help. He's not looking for you Castiel, either one of you." She stood up and came over to him and Cass set his hand on the porchrail and took a step back. The evening had grown dark but she was bright and small and eldritch. "He knows you've got nothing. And I know that all you have is some stupid faith that it's meant to be the two of you. That's very romantic but it's not a plan. You don't know anything or anyone in Detroit...I do. Someone who can help you."
"Who?"
"He calls himself Asher. He's set up in the Cairo Apartments on Matthew Street."
"He's one like you?"
"He's a demon."
"Oh," Cass said. He looked up and coughed out a laugh. "A demon will tell us how to get to Lucifer.
What's his real name? His old name?"
"Depends who you ask. Ashmadaevi, Asmodeus, Saturn. All one in the same."
"No," Cass said. He shook his head. "No. I know who he is."
"Do you?"
"He's as ancient a servant of hell as Azazel was and he's a vulgar piece of filth on top of it. If he's in Detroit he's at Lucifer's right hand."
"See, that's the fault with angels...with men, too. You think everything can be divided right down the middle. Asher doesn't serve Lucifer, he serves himself. He was on earth before Lucifer even existed and until now he's always come and gone as he pleased. He wants things to go back to the way they were."
"Then why doesn't he take Lucifer out himself?"
"Asher's in Detroit at Lucifer's will and he can't leave and things will stay that way as long as Lucifer is unbound. Asher has no power over him. He's waiting for you."
"Waiting for us to kill Lucifer."
"Not to kill him, he can't be killed. To bind him and send him back where he was."
"And Asher knows how to do that?"
"He knows a lot of things." She leaned forward and put her hot and tiny hand on his arm. "You're helpless, Castiel. Without someone on the inside, you and Dean are helpless."
Cass looked down at her. Then he looked out into the darkened yard. He bit his lip, a habit he had picked up from Dean, unconsciously, and held onto, consciously. He smelled rotting leaves and heard rain dripping off the bare trees. If the weather cleared and they hit no setbacks they could reach Detroit city limits by tomorrow.
"You trust him?"
"In this I do."
"If you're wrong and things go bad with him will you get us out?"
"Detroit is fixed, I can't do anything there. But things won't go bad. Asher needs you as much as you need him."
"The Cairo Apartments?"
She nodded. "That's right. 1016 Matthew Street, you can't miss it. Tell him Ainsel sent you," she said and then she was gone. The slight tingle of her hand on his arm faded like a candlewick just blown out. Then Cass just stood there.
He thought about Dean upstairs. He thought about them sleeping together for the first time not even two weeks ago and before that all the years he had loved Dean. Stretching back to hell itself. He wrapped one hand around the riflebarrel and the other around the porchrail and gripped both until his fingers ached and splinters slid into his palm.
He talked about miracles yet the closer they came to Detroit the less possible any miracle seemed for God's ways were a mystery to men and angels alike and it might very well serve God for both of them to die or come to something worse than death. He would have thwarted God's will and turned Dean away from Detroit if he could have but he couldn't and so he had kindled a hope that the only miracle would be to find Detroit empty and abandoned as every other place. To find neither Lucifer nor any agent of his so that they would leave that place together and if they never found Lucifer and he burned the whole earth to a cinder then so be it and now this little spirit from a forgotten race had come and taken away even that sorry hope.
Don't tell him.
The idea was so sudden and horrifying in its selfishness and thrilling in its simplicity that it dizzied him and he leaned against the porch and shut his eyes. Lucifer wasn't looking for them and wouldn't look for them and if they never went to Asher he would go on not looking for them and Cass stood on the porch for a little while longer and then he picked up the rifle and turned and went into the house.
* * *
He met Dean coming down the stairs, dressed and armed.
"What the hell happened to you, that was the longest fucking piss anyone ever took."
Don't tell him. Don't.
"We should eat," Cass said. "It's still raining we should...we should eat and spend the night."
"Yeah...okay," Dean said. "I thought that's what we were gonna do anyway. It's not like we can go anywhere now."
"No."
Dean searched his face in the dark.
"What's up with you?"
"Nothing."
"You sure?"
"Yeah," he said and then more convincingly, "Yes."
"Okay," Dean said and passed him on the stairs. "Think this fireplace works or you think there's a pack of squirrels living in it?"
Cass watched from the stairs for a moment and then he went down to the living room and helped Dean build up the fire. The wood stacked beside the fireplace kindled quickly and began to fill the room with ashy smoke and Dean shoved at the flue handle until it was fully open and fanned the flames and the flue caught the smoke and drew it up the chimney and the fire blazed. They fed newspapers and magazines into it and Dean paused and spread one of the papers on his lap and looked at it.
"I should've at least taken you to the movies, Cass," he said. "We should've done something fun before it all went to shit." He shook his head and smiled and Cass stared at him for a second and then leaned forward and kissed him. He held Dean's face in his hands and kissed him and Dean dropped the newspaper and wrapped his arms around Cass and they kissed and went on kissing and they would have undressed and had each other right there on the floor but Cass drew back and pressed his forehead against Dean's and sat there with his eyes closed.
"What?" Dean said half out of breath.
"I have to tell you something," Cass said. He could barely make the words come out of his mouth and had to say them through clenched teeth.
"All right," Dean said. He took Cass's hands and held him by the wrists and ducked his head to look into his face. "Jesus Christ, Cass, what is it?"
He slipped out of Dean's grasp and pushed himself back and stared into the fire and told Dean everything. When he was done he looked at Dean and neither of them spoke.
Then Dean said, "You believe her?"
Cass nodded. "Yes."
"Well this is good. We have a lead, we have an in. Shit..." he said. "It's more than we had before."
"Yeah," Cass said. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes and stood up and dusted black ash from his palms and the splinters from the porchrail stung. "It's good."
* * *
They ate canned soup and the last of the bread that Amy had packed up for them. It was very warm in front of the fire and they sat there and watched the flames lick at the wood and the fire whispered and the coals shifted in the grate. Cass sat with his arms around his knees and he turned his head to look at Dean and after a moment Dean met his gaze. Neither of them said anything. When he'd been an angel Cass had thought that out of all their failings men were most culpable because they judged everything within the confines of their own short lives, indifferent to eternity, infinity, even God and now he understood how those things could mean so little compared to one flickering moment of joy. One life made infinitely and eternally holy by its very transience.
Dean said, "You didn't want to tell me about that trickster, did you?"
After a moment, Cass said, "No."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't want to find Lucifer. I don't want you to find Lucifer."
"I'm not exactly counting the minutes myself."
"Will you promise me something?"
"Depends what it is."
"Promise me you'll stay alive."
Dean looked away. "Come on, Cass..."
"No. Promise me you'll do everything you can to stay alive."
Dean looked back at him and then smiled and shook his head. "You know what, Cass? You already died for me once and you said you'd do it again. You're the one who didn't get out with Frank and the others when you had the chance. You went out into that shithole of Knoxville to save my ass when I was shot and you signed on to this goddamn Detroit job with me. So if anyone should be making promises like that...maybe it shouldn't be me."
Cass put his forehead down on his knees and Dean went on, "This is a suicide mission and we both know it. We go in, we get the job done. If we can do that and make it out alive, great, if we don't...we don't."
"Then we don't," Cass said. He looked at Dean. "Whatever happens in Detroit, it's you and me. At least promise me that."
After a moment Dean said, "All right, I promise. Do you?"
"Yes."
"Good," Dean said and then he smiled. "You want to seal this deal or what?"
"Down here or upstairs?"
"It's a lot warmer down here."
For the third time that day they made love and if Ainsel or Asmodeus or God himself were watching Cass thought, let them watch. When they were done he clasped his hands around Dean's back and his knees around Dean's hips and held onto him. After a while he rolled Dean over so that he could cover him with his whole body and that was better. He closed his eyes and laid his forehead against Dean's shoulder and could have wept for the fragility of life and joy and love and the whole fleeting world.
* * *
Detroit had been dying for a long time, longer than the release of Lucifer or the virus and now at last it was dead. Other cities were still ringed by National Guard troops and sectors of them were cordoned off by Quarantine Control but no such effort had been made for Detroit. At some point concrete barriers had been set across the highways to the south but it was unclear whether this had been to keep people out or keep them in. There were great pileups of abandoned vehicles on the city side of the barriers. On the other side a few military vehicles, some lying on their side, charred and skeletal. Corpses among the trucks. A great press of silence.
They came into the city at dusk and they stood on Route 85 near the derelict bus depot and looked out over the rubbled streets. Behind them loomed the bridge that had been destroyed the year before to keep the virus from crossing the river. One tower still stood on the Canadian side with its suspension cables snapped and hanging slack over the water like the tentacles of some dead creature and the virus had crossed over anyway. They could see little fires burning in the city and they could smell the burning. Trash and wood, rubber and oil. The smell came off the river too, thick and toxic, and it began to snow. The snowflakes were flat and papery and gray as ash. By the last of the daylight Dean looked at the map folded over in his hands.
"Matthew Street?" His voice fell flat in the silence.
"Yeah. 1016 Matthew."
Dean traced a line on the map with his finger and then looked up into the snow. "It's that way."
Cass felt as if they were being watched and they probably were. The windows of the buildings and houses were all blank and yet did not seem empty. Dirt gritted under their feet and papers blew around them and once he thought he heard someone running behind them and Dean heard it too and they both wheeled around but the sound receded off among the empty lots and was gone.
Now it was snowing and now it was not and now it was again. When they turned the corner onto Matthew they saw a century-old hulk of yellow brick in a style somewhere between moorish and gothic as if the builder had thought this incongruous mix of exotic elements suited the name of the place, carved across the stone lintel in silent-movie script. In front of the entrance stood a garden court that housed a single dead and twisted tree as black as burned iron. There were two lamps mounted on either side of the entrance and a bulb burned in the left one, the first electric light they had seen since Knoxville.
The original doors of the place had long ago been looted and replaced with steel security doors the color of putty and each set with a square of wired glass. The door beside the working lamp was propped open and a man in lowslung chino pants and a tank top was lounging up against it smoking a cigarette. He had a black rag or scarf wrapped around his head with the tails hanging down to his shoulder and he blew smoke out into the cold air and stared at them.
"Is that him?" Dean asked.
"I don't know what he would look like."
The man called out, "You gonna stand there or you gonna come on up?"
"Are you Asher?" Cass said.
The man laughed. He turned his head and spat onto the stone stairs. "I'm just the concierge, baby. Asher's waiting for you upstairs. Come on up now, don't be shy. All kinds of good things waiting for you at The Cairo."
Cass and Dean looked at each other and Dean reached around to his back where the Colt was hidden.
"This looks like a fuckin shitshow, Cass."
Cass shook his head. "We don't have to do this."
"You got any other ideas?"
"He don't have no ideas," the man called from the doorway. "There ain't no idea but this one. All your days on this earth have brought you right to The Cairo. Where you gonna go if it ain't here?"
"Man's got a point," Dean said.
"The second something looks wrong, we're out."
Dean glanced at the place and back at Cass with half a smile. "You think anything's gonna look right in there?"
They went up the walk and climbed the three steps and the man pitched his cigarette out into the dark and then stood back against the door to let them pass. The lobby was lit by one dusky bulb in a yellow utility cage. The floor was some intricate mosaic rendered indecipherable by missing tiles. On the right wall the old mailboxes had no doors and were stuffed with trash and cigarette butts. One slot somehow held a solitary piece of mail. Beneath the mailboxes two men were playing dice on a purple blanket and they glanced up at Cass and Dean and then went back to their business. The hall smelled like cigarettes, garbage, vermin, piss. The elevator doors stood open on nothing but a black shaft and a dank wind blew out of it and the cables inside made a low electric buzz and above the elevator the arched panel blinked the number three over and over behind milky yellow glass. From somewhere beneath the floor came a deep mechanical thrum like some engine turning in the guts of the building. Maybe the generator that kept this place lit up. Maybe the stalled elevator works. God only knew. The dice clicked.
"Sixth floor," the man said. He lit another cigarette. "Take the stairs."
The banisters had been plundered and the iron posts were still sunk in the marble to the right and left. In some places they had to climb over mounds of garbage and debris. Here and there a light burned on the wall, sometimes an incandescent bulb spotted with age, sometimes a fluorescent bar buzzing like a fly. They could hear footsteps on the floors above them and doors slamming and laughter and shrieks but they saw no one at all. Beneath these sounds the engine beneath them turned and turned with a heavy rolling sound like some great iron wheel or wheels churning over and over. They could feel the vibration of it beneath their feet. At each landing shadows seemed to run away from them into the greasy dark.
The air up here was hot and stagnant. It stank even worse than it had downstairs. It smelled like shit and vomit. Like unwashed cunt and ass and like come dried stiff onto filthy sheets.
"Dean. We should go."
Dean didn't look at Cass. He kept climbing. "We can't."
On the sixth floor they stopped and stood at the top of the stairs and looked down the hallway to the right and the left. Every door was closed. Above them two bulbs flickered in a crumbling plaster fixture.
"Now what?" Dean said. "We just start knocking?"
Something was walking towards them. Someone was walking towards them. A bony girl resolved out of the brown shadows as if she were emerging from smoke. At first Cass thought she had a horrible limp and then he saw that one foot was bare while the other was strapped into three inches of gold platform sandal. Other than this she was wearing only a string bikini bottom and cropped t-shirt. The jagged bones of her hips ground away beneath the bikini bows.
"You're the guys who're here to see Asher?"
"Yeah," Dean said.
"Okay," she said and turned around and walked off the way she'd come. She had a raw and swollen tattoo above the slack triangle of fabric that barely covered her rear and Cass stared at it until he realized it was a crude drawing of a naked woman on her hands and knees with her breasts dangling and her ass up in the air. Above her was inked an unfurled banner that read OPEN FOR BUSINESS.
"That thing on your back looks infected," Dean said.
The girl barked out a laugh and kept walking. "That ain't the only thing infected on me."
They moved through pockets of light and dark. The girl's one shoe clomped and clomped. The engine below turned and turned.
"Why don't you take off that shoe?" Dean said. "You'd be better off barefoot."
Cass looked at him. They were in a dark place and Cass couldn't see him. The girl stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall and she pushed it open and leaned against it.
"Go on," she said. "This is Asher's place."
Cass went in first and behind him the girl said, "Asher gave me this shoe. I earned it."
Dean said, "How?"
Cass turned to Dean and said his name but Dean was looking at the girl.
"I learned how to stick my tongue up his ass the way he likes it. I'll get the other shoe when I learn some new tricks." She looked Dean up and down. "You wanna teach me some?"
Cass said Dean's name again, sharply, and Dean looked at him. "Stop talking to her." To the girl he said, "Where's Asher?"
She smiled. "He's coming."
"Then get out of here."
She pulled some face that was neither a pout nor a smirk but some ugly combination of both and then pivoted on her one mountainous shoe and stepped out and pulled the door shut behind her.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Dean said. He stood there by the door with his bag over his shoulder and his shotgun in his hand. "What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing," he said. He felt dazed but whether from the noise or the heat or the stench he couldn't tell. His pulse throbbed in time with the sound from the basement. He turned and looked at the apartment. It was one bleak room and an efficiency kitchen. A bare bulb hung from a wire in the kitchen ceiling. In the living room, a shattered television and a recliner with the stuffing boiling out of the seat. A stained and springshot mattress on the floor. Paint had fallen from the walls in curdled sheets and there were two naked windows in the far wall and a light was coming in through them, some spotlight that flared in and crawled up the walls and up across the ceiling and went back out and then did it all over again in a steady creep that seemed tied to the throbbing of the engine below. Now louder than ever. Cass had never seen this place before and yet felt as if he had in some nightmare. Some dark well of imagination as potent as memory.
I've never been here, he thought and on the heels of that, I have been here. He whispered "What the fuck is this?"
From behind him Dean said, "I know what it is."
Cass stood there or thought he stood there for a long time and he was afraid to turn around though he couldn't have said why, only that there was a dread on him like a weight of chains. Then he was looking at Dean but Dean was not looking at him and his own tongue was locked inside his mouth and Dean took two steps into the apartment and put the duffel on the floor and reached behind himself and pulled out the Colt and bent over and set that down on top of the bag. Then he straightened up and just let the shotgun fall to the floor and he looked at Cass without seeming to see him.
"I know what happens here."
The light came in. Crept across the apartment like a living thing. It lit up Dean's face and Dean tracked it up the ceiling and watched it go out. Then he started taking off his clothes.
"What are you doing?" Cass said but he knew. He thought, Stop this and get him out of here, and if he'd still been an angel he would have been able to do that but he wasn't. His groin flooded with heat unbidden as if something had burst inside him. Dean pulled off his boots. He shucked off his jeans and stood there naked. The light crawled up him.
"Where you want it? On the mattress? Just you or you bringing some friends?"
He swallowed. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt thick inside his jaws.
"What's the matter?" Dean laughed. "You guys getting a limp dick on me all of a sudden?"
A reel of pornographic depravity unspooled in his head of things the angels had told him before he'd gone down to hell for Dean and things he'd seen in Dean's own nightmares and memories when he'd still had that sight. And one thought that came as if whispered in his ear from the black belly of this place, that he had waited a long time for Dean, pined away for him for a long goddamn time and given up everything for him and all that after every ratfuck demon in hell had gotten a free piece for forty fucking years and now it was time to make up for that shit.
Fuck, his dick was rock-hard and aching up into his belly.
He opened his mouth and heard himself say, "Don't put up much of a fight, do you?"
"What the fuck for?" Dean said. "To get you off?"
The light came in again and lit Dean up all naked he was standing there and it went up the ceiling and out. The engine turned. The room throbbed. The light came back, up, over, out.
"Get on the fucking mattress," he said and Dean smirked and went to it and lay down on his stomach and spread his legs.
He stalked over in a stilted gait because his cock was so fucking hard. It felt like a goddamn club between his legs. He knelt on the mattress between Dean's legs and grabbed Dean's hips and jerked him up so that Dean was on his knees and forearms. Open for business, just like the sign said. He unzipped his fly and even with the sound from below Dean heard that and said, "That's it, motherfucker."
"Yeah, that's it," he said. "You better believe it." He pulled out his dick and it was heavy and huge in his hand and already wet at the head. "You fuckin love it," he said and pushed in with no prelude and no slick except his own leaking juice and Dean caught his breath and locked up and he said, "Open wide," and shoved himself in up to the hilt and stopped there with his dick throbbing away inside Dean and then he started fucking him.
He fucked him and now he heard all around him through the walls other people fucking, screaming and cursing and grunting like beasts. The whole place was fucking the walls were bleating beating bleeding with it and all of it in time with that pulsing noise like hell's machinery hot and dirty and endless churning up fire and filth from the guts of the earth. Light glared up the wall up the ceiling out. Dean was almost bent double beneath him and sucking air between clenched teeth and when he saw Dean try to get himself up on one hand and brace the other against the wall he put his palm flat on Dean's back and shoved him down until the crown of his head was on the mattress.
"You stay down there. Stay down there and take it how you like it."
He clamped his hands around Dean's hipblades and threw his head back and pumped into him. He was running with sweat and his dick felt bigger with every thrust.
"I'm gonna go for hours," he said in a voice that was barely his own. "Gonna bust you open all night and you'll still beg for it. Won't you? Yeah." He spewed out a litany of obscene plans and imputations.
Dean didn't say anything. Dean wasn't making a sound. The light came in. He saw his own shadow against the wall, distorted and hunched and humping like a bedlamite, a monster, a devil. Now it was quiet. Now it was very quiet. He heard himself grunting. The squeal of rusted springs in the mattress. His own dick sucking in and out. He looked down panting. The light moved up the ceiling, reflected down onto Dean's face. He was lying with his neck twisted to the right and his cheek against the mattress and his eyes half open and blank and Cass suddenly cried out and pushed Dean away from him and fell backwards onto the floor.
His guts, loins, genitals were on fire, engorged, excruciating. He rolled over and grabbed himself in both hands and after a few hard jerks he began to come onto the floor in thick burning spurts that wouldn't stop. He didn't know how long he lay there and pulled at himself until he was empty. When he finally sat up he was still half erect and aching and there was a viscous splatter of come sprayed across the floor that reminded him of a drunk's runny vomit. He stuffed himself into his open fly and zipped up, his hands trembling.
He said, "Dean?" He turned onto his hands and knees and crawled to the mattress. Dean was lying on his side where Cass had thrown him. His hands were over his face and his whole body shook. "Dean?" he repeated and came up on the mattress and touched Dean's shoulder and Dean rolled onto his back and took his hands from his face and burst out laughing.
"Can't finish the job?"
"Dean, listen to me..."
"Maybe if you stuck it down my throat."
"We have to get out of here."
"Come on you sonofabitch," Dean said. He grabbed for Cass's crotch. "Let me suck you off."
His dick was swelling. He closed his eyes and took Dean by the wrists.
"Dean..."
"I knew none of you had any fucking sack," Dean said and then he tipped his head back on the filthy mattress and shouted, "What do I have to do to suck some cock around here?" and from outside that apartment the whole building came to life with whoops and howls and a pounding of feet on the stairs and fists against the walls.
"Shhh, Dean, shhh..." The noise from the halls was hideous.
"I wanna suck some fuckin dick!" Dean bellowed. "Jesus fuckin Christ!" He started to laugh so hard he was screaming.
"Stop it!" he pleaded and straddled Dean and put a hand over his mouth and for a second Dean arched up taut as if he would buck Cass off and then he just went still and stared up at him.
"We have to go, Dean, please. Do you understand me?"
Dean blinked. He nodded slowly.
"Do you know who I am?"
Dean nodded again.
"Okay," Cass said. He slid his hand from Dean's mouth and cupped his face. "Okay, let's go."
Dean looked at him for a second and then turned his head and took Cass's thumb in his mouth and wrapped his tongue around it and made a guttural noise in his throat. Cass felt it up the whole length of his arm. He felt it all the way down to his dick. He closed his eyes and worked his thumb down into the wet heat at the back of Dean's throat and Dean moaned and Cass put his hand on the bulge between his legs and his fingers were on his zipper and then he opened his eyes and yanked his hand out of Dean's mouth and hit him hard across the face. Dean's head snapped to the side and his eyelids dipped and fluttered and he looked up at Cass half stunned.
"I'm sorry," Cass breathed. His arm hung in the air.
Dean grinned wolfishly. There was blood on his teeth.
"That's how you want it?"
Cass hesitated and then he drew back his fist and hit him again and Dean's eyes rolled up and he was out. Cass knelt there for a second and then he swung his leg over Dean and got up off the mattress. The only light now was from the naked bulb in the kitchen and in its feeble gray illumination he gathered Dean's clothes up from the floor. When he brought them back to the mattress Dean was coming around and he turned his head to Cass.
"Cass?"
"Yeah," Cass said. He dropped the clothes on the mattress and knelt down beside Dean and got his hands under Dean's arms. "You have to get dressed."
"What..." he said. He raised up on his elbows. "Why the fuck am I undressed?"
"Because we have to get out of here."
Dean lay there in a daze. He ran his tongue out to the corner of his mouth where he was bloody and touched his jaw. "Did you hit me?"
He pulled Dean's t-shirt over his head and Dean slid his arms into it and sat up and winced. "Did you fuck me?"
"Yes," Cass said. He handed Dean his jeans and Dean took them and sat there staring at him. His eyes moved past Cass and took in the whole squalid room.
"Ahh fuck," he said wearily. He looked back at Cass. "Tell me it was just you."
"It was just me."
"You okay?"
Cass nodded and Dean said, "All right. I don't..." He shook his head. "I don't want to know anything else." He got to his feet and stumbled off the mattress and Cass caught him by the arm. When he was steady Dean nodded and Cass let go of him and he pulled on the rest of his clothes and Cass brought him his boots and he took them and knelt down to put them on.
"Asher never showed up, did he?"
"No," Cass said. He handed Dean the Colt and Dean hunched over and shoved it back in his belt and looked up at him.
"It was all a trick, wasn't it?"
"I think so," Cass said. He helped Dean to his feet and Dean put on his jacket and he gave Cass such a bleak look that Cass's heart ached and yet for one wildly hopeful moment he thought, We can go now. From The Cairo, Detroit, the whole damned place.
He put his hand on Dean's arm and turned to the door and the man was sitting beside the door in the shredded recliner and Cass had never laid eyes on him before but knew who he was all the same.
Asher said, "Not a trick, a test."
They stood there and stared at him and he sat in the shadows and none of them said anything. He was bald except for a crescent of white hair above his ears and the white hair that came up through his open shirtcollar and he was thickset as an old prizefighter with a bulldog head on a slab of neck. His hands on the arms of the recliner were almost square, the fingers so blunt they seemed all of the same length. Beneath the cuffs of his black trousers his feet were bare and calloused and set with long nails. Cass could smell him, sulfur and sweat and the back-closet mothy funk of his suit jacket.
Castiel said, "Asmodeus," and he answered, "Castiel," and then to Dean he said, "And Dean. I've missed you Dean. Things were never the same after this one bailed you out."
Cass could hear Dean breathing hard behind him and he turned to him and in one motion Dean pulled out the Colt and leveled it at Asher and Cass held up his hands but Dean wasn't looking at him.
"I remember you too, you cocksucker."
"If I recall, you were the one sucking cock."
"If I'd known it was you I'd have..."
"What? Gone wandering around Detroit until you stumbled into Lucifer?"
Dean drew in a deep breath. His jaw was clenched and shaking and Cass whispered his name and Dean glanced at him and then back at Asher.
"Come on, Dean," Asher said. "Water under the bridge, isn't it?"
Dean looked at Cass and blinked and lowered the gun.
"That's better," Asher said. "I didn't ask you here expecting to get shot."
"And we didn't come here expecting to be part of your goddamn freakshow. Can you get us to Lucifer or not?"
"Oh yes. Better than that, I can show you how to put him back where he belongs. For good."
"How?"
Asher stood up. "That is a long story and I'd like to tell it somewhere else." He looked at the puddle of come on the floor and glanced at Cass and winked. "This place is nasty." He turned to the door and Dean put the Colt back in his belt and Cass said, "Dean, I didn't...I should have known."
Without looking up Dean said, "It's all right, Cass."
"Are you?"
Dean repeated, "It's all right," and shouldered past Cass and picked up the bag and shotgun and walked out of the apartment.
In the hall the bony girl was leaning up against the far wall with her bare and dirty foot perched on the sandaled one. She stood up when they came out and balanced on her platform like a gymnast and picked at her fingernails.
Asher said, "Someone shot their load all over the goddamn floor. Get in there and clean it up."
She stood there with her face slack. Shredding her cuticles. When Cass passed her he said, "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
He shook his head and then turned away from her and Dean who had been right ahead of him was not there and Asher was not there and the long hallway was intersticed as before with dim light and black shadow and empty of anyone save himself and the girl.
He called out, "Dean?" and got no response.
He broke into a run to the stairs but they were also empty and he launched himself down them shouting Dean's name and from the landing above him the girl said, "They're gone," and he stopped and looked up at her.
"Where? Which way did they go?"
She shrugged.
"That's how it is around here. People're just there one second gone the next. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't."
"Did you see them go?"
She shook her head. "You get used to it after a while. Asher always comes back."
He stared at her for a second and then turned and ran, half falling down the stairs in the stinking dark, and she shouted, "I'm telling you they're gone!" but she was receding and his feet pounded on the stairs and his voice echoed off the walls and no one answered. On the third floor someone grabbed his arm and spun him onto the landing and threw him up against the wall and Asher was standing there with his eyes gone dead white in his thuggish face.
"Lights out," he said and shoved the flat of his hand against Cass's forehead and Cass felt his knees buckle and himself slide down the wall and Asher's frozen hand on his head and then the lights did indeed go out.
Continued in Chapter II: Michigan Central
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
omfg
Date: 2010-07-22 11:59 pm (UTC)This makes me...very happy. ♥
ETA: now that I've read it, definitely *not* a very happy-making fic. How could have forgotten how fiercely your writing has the ability to just reach into my chest and twist my heart into a crumpled mess?? Oh, Dean. Oh, Cas. So glad they got their brief interlude of loving each other. I have a feeling they're in for a bumpy ride.
Re: omfg
Date: 2010-07-29 02:17 am (UTC)Stay tuned for more, thanks for reading!
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Date: 2010-07-23 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 03:06 am (UTC)Laurie
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Date: 2010-07-23 05:07 am (UTC)It makes total sense to think that Dean was sexually abused while in Hell, and he fell so fast back under that influence. What is that place, an extrusion of Hell into our world?
So bleak has the world become, but even if/when they die on this hopeless quest, so outmatched as they are, their efforts being a last tragic, desperate attempt to make things right, and that is so essentially the best part of being human and I love them for it.
Laurie
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From:Re: um wow
Date: 2010-07-29 02:15 am (UTC)Thanks for reading!
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Date: 2010-07-23 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 02:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2010-07-23 07:39 am (UTC)Looking forward to reading the rest - oh and I'm very glad your problems haven't stopped you writing (hope you are feeling much better now).
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Date: 2010-07-29 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 10:39 am (UTC)Why so callous, to drag us through that awful scene and leave us there? Why?
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Date: 2010-07-23 12:42 pm (UTC)I sure hope so.
Laurie
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Date: 2010-07-23 01:40 pm (UTC)But wow, you really do know how to paint a visceral picture. So many small, tiny details that project every dirty, smelly, dark aspect of this world straight into my mind. I have to say that I'm really glad Dean and Cass had a short, quiet moment to themselves at the beginning because I have a horrible feeling that it's all downhill from here. Until that third miracle that is... ;o)
I also just want to tell you that I sent baylorsr's podfic of the original trilogy to a friend of mine who watches SPN, but doesn't really participate in fandom or fic, and she absolutely loved it!
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Date: 2010-07-29 02:07 am (UTC)I had to give them something because I know the rest of the story's going to be -- spoiler alert! -- Lucifer's Motor City House of Horrors. LOL, stay tuned!
And thanks for passing along the podfic.
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Date: 2010-07-23 04:37 pm (UTC)You make me so interested in every detail of the worlds you write about. Everything seems important--but not in a ponderous way, just in a very specific way. Like that house--I don't need to know who lived there and how they left, but I can feel that somebody lived there and that they had a story before they left. And that girl with one shoe--jesus, you pack a lot into a character who's showing them up the stairs.
And poor Cass. Dean too, but you really capture Cass's peculiar brand of hope in hopelessness. Like all this has to have meaning because he's given up so much for it. Talk about a crash course in being human. Which again I think is reflected in all the choices of details--some people when they write about stuff that's just, well, gross you feel like they're just trying to be edgy or gritty, but all the gritty details here are right and important, part of being human.
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Date: 2010-07-29 02:04 am (UTC)I was nervous about this scene because exactly what I DIDN'T want was for it to sound like I was just trying to be edgy. It's like when you see someone label their story as "darkfic," you just know it's going to be a lot of gratuitous abuse, sexual or otherwise. So I'm really glad this worked for you!
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Date: 2010-07-23 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 02:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-24 03:10 pm (UTC)And this is why I love you. I can't wait to read more. ♥
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Date: 2010-07-29 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-26 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-27 01:28 am (UTC)SOOO excited to see new fic from you! And this is amazing--especially the descriptions of that house--the staircase alone *shudders*
Looking forward to more!
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Date: 2010-07-29 01:46 am (UTC)LOL, boy, do you get the gold star for that one!
Extra Credit: Why is Asher's residence named The Cairo?
*basks in own cleverness*
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Date: 2010-07-27 02:51 am (UTC)Awesome writing as ever. MORE!!
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Date: 2010-07-29 01:56 am (UTC)If Cass hadn't told Dean about Asher and Dean found out? I think he might have left Cass. Not because he was angry but because he would have felt that he couldn't trust Cass anymore, that Cass was putting their relationship above the mission.
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Date: 2010-08-13 05:27 am (UTC)I love this right at the beginning: He heard Dean coming up the stairs and when Cass opened his eyes Dean was standing in the doorway. His hair and the shoulders of his jacket were all wet. Cass took a deep breath and held it and let it out almost in a sigh.
After a moment Dean said, "No."
The feel is different, the tone is different. Even at the beginning. There's something in the air. Then it becomes raw and bleak, and... I wish this season was an alternate view telling us what would have happened if the boys had stayed apart. Too bad you don't run the show. Heh!
Not really coherent, am I? Anyway, getting into the depths of darkness. Intriguing. Can't wait for the rest! (Can't believe we're already left hanging!)
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Date: 2010-08-27 02:07 am (UTC)If I ran the show? That's exactly what Season 6 would have been all about. It would have been "The End" stretched into one season-long storyarc. I even had this brief moment of crazy hope near the end of Season 5 that they were actually going in that direction but...not so much. Not at all, in fact. Sigh.
But anyway, thanks for reading! Part II is now up! Follow the link at the end of this chapter.
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Date: 2010-10-11 04:37 am (UTC)I'm really loving this whole verse - so beautifully written and heartbreaking. Your Dean and Cas are superbly characterized.
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Date: 2010-10-11 11:05 pm (UTC)Thank you for reading. I hope to get more of this story up soon!
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Date: 2011-04-16 04:51 pm (UTC)http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/in-country-m4a
http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/in-country-audiobook
:-)
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Date: 2011-05-07 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-07 05:49 pm (UTC)The story is phenomenal, by the way. Amazing. I'm enjoying it very, very much.
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Date: 2011-05-07 11:02 pm (UTC)What's the Cairo Codex?
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