Chapter Text
'He promised Dean that he'd take him as vessel only for the fight against Lucifer. Fundamentally, Michael broke an oath. For an angel that's almost unthinkable' Cas said carefully. Neither he nor Sam had forgotten that Cas himself had once double-crossed Crowley and the rest of the bunch weren't exactly trustworthy. Sam had wondered before, and now wondered again, if that had only happened because Crowley didn't expect it from an angel back then. Times had changed now.
'For an archangel it's without precedent. They- we- may deceive in other ways but to break a deal…' Cas trailed off. 'I believe we may be able to use that to make him leave Dean as a vessel.'
'There are spells to punish oathbreakers. No shortage of those, in fact' Rowena said. 'But to enforce the completion of an oath is something different.'
'But it's possible, you think?' Sam looked up from the parchment he'd been looking over.
'Possible, my bairn, but dangerous.'
'More or less dangerous than having Michael swanning around in his perfect vessel?'
'Perhaps a wee smidge less dangerous than that' Rowena smiled. Sam didn't.
'We'd still have to find him' Cas grunted.
'Not necessarily. A good many of the spells used to punish a broken promise were intended for unfaithful and absent lovers. In most cases an item of clothing or a personal belonging would suffice. Even a drop of blood shed while Michael was in control of Dean's body might be enough.'
Cas stood up. 'I'll check the church. There might be some scrap left over from the battle.'
By the time Cas returned an hour later with three short, sandy hairs, they were ready.
+++++ Nine days later +++++
'Hey Sam.' Charlie held her phone to her ear with one hand and stabbed a fry with the fork in the other. 'Any news on Dean, or Michael?'
'Nothing at all. Cas says Dean hasn't turned up in Heaven and our sources say he's not in Hell. Did you get anything new from the hospital admissions searches?'
'Couple dozen hits so far matching his description but none without a tick in the Contacted Next of Kin box with the right blood type. I ran a scan on recent arrests just in case but those all have photos and none of them are more than very approximately Dean-shaped.'
'Great. So he's either not in this country, being held somewhere warded to Hell by a pissed off archangel, or worse.'
'Worse?' asked Charlie and immediately wished she hadn't.
'Worse like Michael left him to die in a ditch in Siberia worse. Worse like he's sleeping on the street somewhere with brain damage or memory loss worse.'
'Yeah, ok, those count as worse.'
There was an awkward pause.
'I'm sorry Sam. I'll keep trying.'
'Yeah. Of course. Thanks Charlie.'
Sam hung up, tired and defeated. Charlie munched the last of her fries thoughtfully and opened her laptop. There was nothing new on the hospital or arrest searches. She briefly considered trying to expand both worldwide, but that represented a massive chunk of work and wouldn't happen quickly. It was something to think about once all other avenues had failed.
She brought up social media and search engine trend reports for the date Michael should have been ripped out of Dean. Nothing useful. There were no spikes on the usual supernatural and conspiracy nut forums that looked out of the ordinary.
Out of reflex, she brought up her own socials- or rather the one that had belonged to the other Charlie Bradbury. She wasn't sure why and knew it wasn't healthy, but she'd taken to lurking, just watching Charlie's feeds.
It seemed like the longest of long shots, but she scrolled down Charlie's Tumblr, a mix of Moondoor, fandom, radical politics and science geekery. Her finger stopped dead. A few hours after the time of the spell, one of her- or not her- mutuals had posted an image of an unusually bright, unusually blue shooting star seen over Mark Twain State Forest in Missouri. The timestamp on the photo was exactly right.
In another window, Charlie Googled a few facts and ran some numbers. Shooting stars were common but this one seemed wasn't part of a known meteor shower. Still, the timing could easily be chance.
A new tab brought up methods for tracking the path of meteors and their likely landing points. It didn't look difficult, though the vast majority burned up in the atmosphere and never hit the ground. And Charlie had much better access to radar, seismic data and satellite feeds than the average amateur astronomer.
Getting an approximate impact location wasn't hard, and her best estimate wasn't even far from a road. Although if it were out by even a mile the chances of finding anything were slim in dense forest even if there were anything to find. Still, she didn't have anywhere else to be.
By early afternoon the next day she was driving through the woods looking for the closest drivable point to the target, It was a good ten miles from the nearest town of any size- definitely well out of Charlie's comfort zone- and there looked to be nothing but unbroken forest on all sides, so much so that she found herself staring at an incongruous broken-down wooden stand by the side of the tarmac. She braked, and nosed the car into a pull-off behind it. There wasn't much to see except a sign fallen off into the shrubbery that said 'Honey'.
A few paces after, an overgrown gravel side track disappeared into the trees. Charlie consulted her road maps, which didn't include that track, and the satellite imagery, which did. There was a house shown at the end, along with what looked like a cleared garden space around it. The whole thing wasn't quite on Charlie's target square but it was close.
Although nobody was around to see, Charlie shrugged and pulled the car off the road closer to the old honey stand. She put a gun in one jacket pocket and her phone and printouts in the other and set off on foot. There was no way her car would make it down that track, which had decent sized saplings growing up through it. Her boots crunched on loose stones. It didn't look like anyone had been this way recently but gravel didn't hold footprints.
The track opened out in front of a house and surrounded by a tall stone wall festooned with vines. It had clearly been abandoned but not for more than a few years- the gate was intact, though rusty. Grass was growing up through the path but the windows and roof looked complete. Behind the gate, out of reach of browsing deer, flowers were still poking up through the weeds out the front of the house.
The door wasn't locked. Charlie paused before entering, seeing symbols of an unknown kind on the threshold. They didn't have any effect as she stepped through. Inside, the house was surprisingly clean. There were a few cobwebs but it didn't look like mice or birds had found their way in and the air didn't smell stale.
'Hello? Anyone home?'
No answer. Charlie moved through the house, gun in hand. She tried flicking a light and found it came on. In the kitchen, the tap worked and the water ran clean. There was a single clean bowl and spoon on the draining board with no trace of dust. Someone had filled up a basket of apples and left it on the counter, and another of some kind of big nuts, still in their shells.
On the table, there was a neat pile of papers. Charlie frowned. A heavy fold of handwritten text seemed to be instructions and advice for keeping bees, and then there were pages of recipes for apple cake and smoked venison and canned peaches. There were the legal deeds for the house and surrounding land, bank statements with a few scribbled notes, and a careful and detailed map of the garden with every tree and bed labeled in the same ornate hand.
At the bottom of the stack was the envelope they must have come out of. It was addressed with just one word: Dean.
'Dean?' Charlie called. There was no answer. Quickly and carefully, she searched the rest of the house. Nobody was there but there were signs of recent occupation. A massive old wooden bed was made up, though the comforter was stained with what looked like ash, and there were broad smears of the same black stuff on the wall by the stairs and in a few other places. There was a towel in the bathroom stained with it. It was still slightly damp.
Charlie moved around to the back window and looked out. It was a little grimy but looked out over a bigger garden. Weeds and tall grass had grown up but square raised vegetable beds were still visible and there was a clear path down the middle. Careful to be quiet, she opened the back door- also not locked- and stepped out into the cool fall air.
'Dean? Hello?' Again, there was no answer. Charlie looked around the garden, following recent tracks though the overgrown grass. There was nobody there but one of the garden beds had been recently dug into and a small pile of potatoes was stacked neatly beside the disturbed soil. Heroes in books always had a sense that they were being watched in situations like this, but Charlie just felt uneasy.
Sometimes you had to do the sensible thing rather than follow the narrative. She sighed and pulled out her phone to find Sam's number.
'Don't.' A voice croaked. Charlie spun around but nobody was visible. The voice had come from a tangle of shrubs.
'Dean?'
'Just don't, ok. Don't call Sam. Don't call anyone. Or if you do, tell them all you didn't find anything and nobody's been here in years.'
'Dean- are you hurt?'
'Some. It doesn't matter. You need to go.'
There was an awkward silence. Charlie wasn't sure what to do. The sensible thing would be to walk away call Sam and let him deal with whatever this was. Dean wasn't her friend and she didn't owe him her trust. She hadn't met him more than a few times and didn't want to. He was everything she was wary of- big, brutish, dangerous.
'You need to go' Dean said again. His voice was rasping as if it hadn't been used in a long time.
'Is Michael-'
'Michael's dead. Burned up. Tell them that. Tell them I'm ashes.'
It occurred to Charlie that Dean might not be 100% sane. Brain damage or memory loss, Sam had said.
'They know you're not dead. Not in heaven, not in hell. Which is good. I mean, they're worried but they're looking for you.'
'Tell them to stop looking. It's better this way. Now go.'
It occurred to Charlie that there was only one way Dean could be sure she wouldn't tell anyone where he was. It wasn't a pretty thought.
Then she remembered the photos. There was a folder on the dead Charlie's laptop called /best/ that held nothing but photos- a few digitized copies of old photos of her mom and dad before the accident, a few that were obviously taken at comic cons and Moondoor events, and some of Charlie and Dean. Dumb selfies. Charlie with popcorn in her hair on a sofa in what looked like the Bunker. Dean and Charlie together, sweaty and looking a little drunk in a club somewhere. Sam and Dean leaning on swords in full LARP costume. Dean and Charlie in matching Star Wars t-shirts, Sam looking exasperated in the background.
'Dude, I don't have time for the drama, ok?' Charlie stepped around the bushes, and there was Dean on the ground on his knees.
He was dirty and shirtless and there was a trickle of fresh blood down his side and dark stains on his jeans, but none of that mattered. On Dean's back there were now huge, monstrous black… Somethings. Two of them erupting like the legs of a gigantic insect emerging from his shoulders down to the ribs, the biggest longer than she was tall. They were burned and blackened, blistered in places.
When she was fourteen Charlie had read Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis in a book of short stories. The image of Gregor waking to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach, wriggling upside down in his own bed, had given her nightmares for weeks afterwards. She turned and ran.
She scrambled back up the porch steps and into the house. The door banged behind her, but Charlie skidded to a stop. She took in a huge, sobbing breath. This world was supposed to be better. It was supposed to be less horrible. If it wasn't, there wasn't anywhere to run to.
Slowly, Charlie made her way back down the garden path to where Dean was still kneeling in the grass. He head drooped as though he was asleep sitting up. A couple of flies had settled on the cuts on his back, which were long and deep and filthy.
'Hey. Wake up.'
Dean's eyes opened but he didn't say anything. Charlie tried not to look at the obscene, inhuman things that erupted from his back. They were deeply disturbing, like a dislocated limb but so much worse.
'Dean what are those?'
'It's ok. It's ok.' Dean's eyes closed. He slumped forward again, under the weight of them. Up lose they were charred as if burned.
'Don't fall asleep.'
'Doesn't matter. I've got a headache.'
'Dean. Let me rephrase my question: what in the actual fucking fuck are those?'
'Little parting gift from Michael. You should go.'
'So not leaving. Obviously.'
'Did you actually roll your eyes at me?' Dean raised a half smile.
'Shut up.'
'You're tough, kiddo, I'll give you that. Well done for not puking. Hell, I did.'
'It's the smell. You stink of burned hair.'
'Feathers.'
'What?'
'Burned feathers. Not burned hair. Look closer. I double-dare you.'
Charlie looked, and he was right. They weren't giant legs. They were the remains of wings, burned and ruined. The stubble of black feathers clung to them but there were patches of reddened and blistered skin. The lower section of one was twisted as if the bone underneath was broken.
'What happened to you?'
'Aside from the archangelic possession thing? I fell out of the sky. We were flying and then I could feel Michael screaming. Being torn apart. We were burning. Then I was burning and I was alone and falling and I wanted to be alone and safe and a long way from anyone and I thought of here. Then I hit the ground.'
'Sam and Cas and Rowena cast a spell to force the completion of the deal you and Michael made- he promised to get out of you after you killed Lucifer together. To make him hold up his end of the bargain.'
There was a long pause. Dean was breathing hard, as if he was in pain. His wings lifted and fell as his ribs moved. Then he started to laugh.
Charlie moved back a little, in case what was laughing wasn't Dean.
'You wanna hear a funny story?' When Charlie didn't reply, Dean continued. 'This is what happens when your brother forces an archangel to keep up his end of the agreement but there's a kicker. There's a punchline. The archangel had been torturing you for weeks, fucking waterboarding you to try and get you to lay down and accept the inevitable or maybe just for fun, and because you're an asshole and dumb as shit, you say "No, man, your wings can stay 'cause they're awesome but the rest of you is a dickbag and has to go". So when your family do the spell to force him out, it rips his wings off and tears the son of a bitch apart.'
'So you got cursed with burned up wings because you… Sassed an archangel?' Charlie asked, incredulous.
'Welcome to my world. Hilarious. Laugh a minute.' Dean, bloody and on his knees, gave a thumbs-up sign.
'That is actually pretty funny.' Charlie giggled, and wondered if they were both hysterical, or if she was dreaming.
'Yeah. Fuck my fucking life.' Dean laughed again, harder and harder until it dissolved into gasps for air.
'Hey. Hey now. Come on. You're bleeding.'
'Yeah. Tried to cut them off. Another great idea from me.' Dean giggled, but helped Charlie pull him to his feet. He held the twisted wing still as best he could. Charlie inserted herself under his other arm and together they staggered towards the house.
'Guh. Do you have to be so big?'
'Just be glad I'm not Sam.'
Only later, when Charlie had improvised the best splint for broken bone that she could and dressed the open wounds and blisters as best she could, using almost the entire contents of the hunter first aid kit in her trunk, did she think to go back into the garden and get her phone from the grass. It was almost dark and Dean was either asleep or passed out from exhaustion and pain, face down on the bed.
She checked her phone. No messages, no calls. She thought about texting or calling Sam but decided to wait til morning. Instead, she went back up to the room where Dean was sleeping and picked up the copy of The Light Fantastic she'd seen on the bedside table. Charlie started to read.