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Dean was floating, warm and weightless, in a fuzzy blanket of comfort he never wanted to leave. Nothing but the steady pulsing of his heartbeat kept him company, like a metronome.
A sharp buzzing shook him from his bliss. He groaned and moved to cover his head with his pillow, but rolled onto a flat, hard surface instead.
“01011520!” a man’s voice barked.
What the hell?
When Dean didn’t answer right away, the voice came closer. “Hey! Fresh paste, get a move on!” he yelled, this time followed by a harsh kick to his side.
Dean grunted, his eyes snapping open.
The sterile walls of a shoebox-sized room surrounded him. A uniformed guard gave him an unimpressed look as Dean sat up and promptly bonked his head on an overhead bunk.
“01011520, you are to get dressed and report to the warden for work assignment within five minutes. For every minute you are late, you will be awarded with the addition of an extra day to your sentence.”
Dean scowled at the Lunar Alliance Corrections Service patch on the guard’s chest as he rubbed his forehead. He stood with the air of someone who was used to running a tight ship, so Dean quickly exchanged jumpsuits, folding the orange scrubs he’d been in at the end of his cot.
The shoebox opened to a catwalk which was lined with other cells. As Dean followed the guard, they passed level upon level of catwalks and brightly lit pods, all devoid of any signs of personality.
His stomach grumbled.
“Hey, any chance the tour comes with breakfast?” Dean tried joking.
“You were late, 01011520. Maybe next time you’ll wake up when you should,” the guard snapped.
“I was sedated!” Dean argued.
Flying, back when it had just meant circling the globe in an airplane, was bad enough—forget about shooting him into goddamn outer space.
Despite Sam’s pleading with him to cooperate and rushed promises about early parole and being right there when he got back, Dean had thrown an absolute shitfit when it came time to be hauled onboard the transport shuttle.
He’d managed to knock two of the guards out cold before another came up behind him, and with a sharp pinch in his neck, he was sent to oblivion where he had floated in bliss until he was so rudely woken up in his cell.
“Are you taking an insubordinate tone with me?” the guard stopped and turned.
“What? No—”
“That’s grounds for an extra twenty-four hours to be added to your sentence.”
Dean zipped his lips, his heart sinking. Sheesh. Hadn’t even been here a day and already, the possibility of leaving early for good behavior seemed to be slipping away.
Thankfully, they made it to the warden’s office in time to avoid adding even more to his sentence.
“Director Mikhael, I have the new inmate ready for you,” the guard presented.
“Thank you, Zachariah,” an authoritative voice called from behind the door. “Send him in. You may leave.”
Zachariah faltered, giving Dean a hard glare like it was his fault for not getting facetime with the director.
Dean went in curiously. Usually, for things like this, prisoners were kept in cuffs. As he sat down in a chair, Dean could see about ten different ways to fight Director Mikhael if he wanted to, all in line of sight.
But Director Mikhael didn’t even pay him a passing glance, and instead slowly flipped through a thick file.
Idly, Dean wondered how exactly the prison worked; if there was some sort of artificial gravity generator or if everything ran on super strong magnets or something. He should’ve paid more attention in history and science class in school, but he’d always had more pressing things on his mind, such as when Dad was coming back and how he was going to make the little food they had last for when he inevitably didn’t.
“01011520,” Mikhael began in a thick accent.
Great, he was getting the Jean Valjean treatment. No more names, just numbers.
The real rub of it all is that his life of crime really did begin with stealing a loaf of bread.
“You have quite the history,” Mikhael said as he set the file down with a thwack!
“Breaking and entering, theft, impersonation, credit card fraud, escape from prison, evasion of arrest. Throughout your life, you’ve been to a boy’s home, to juvenile detention, and you’ve bounced around from several prisons. Agent Henrikson nearly lost his head trying to track you down after you escaped prison and evaded arrest.” He sighed, finally looking Dean in the eye. “What say you?”
Dean lifted his chin and shrugged a shoulder. “Same thing I said at my trial. I do what I have to to get by.”
Every time Dad left, it was up to Dean to scrape together enough so he and Sam could survive. Even after Sam left for college, ever since Dad died, he’d had a hard time, but he’d managed to put together an identity and make it as a mechanic. But a bad storm and a greedy landlord meant he’d struggled to pay for the damages and his rent and for groceries lately.
And apparently, credit fraud was one crime too many for the earth’s tolerance anymore.
So here he was, despite Sam and Bobby’s attempts at getting him out.
“Why didn’t you ask for help, boy? I’d have gotten you fixed up,” Bobby had asked during visitation, while he was awaiting arraignment.
Dean couldn’t look him in the eye. Couldn’t explain the invisible but insurmountable weight of responsibility on his shoulders.
“You think this is what you’re worth? ” Bobby had cried.
The truth was Dean didn’t think he was worth much of anything, and the world at large seemed to agree. It had a new policy, post-Cold War. A policy to keep the most un-rehabilitable members of society away from the general population, while still making sure they were productive cogs in the machine.
“Your old behavior pattern, this constant evasion and escape, it comes to an end today. The old prison system may have failed you, but here, you will do as you are told. Resistance is futile.”
The last stop off Earth. Nowhere else to go after this but the great big empty out beyond the facility walls.
Still, Dean couldn’t help himself.
“Did you just quote Star Trek?”
“Talking back is grounds for an extra shift added to your allotted sentence,” Mikhael said, standing up and marching over to the door.
When it slid open, Mikhael gestured to someone in a prisoner’s uniform who had been busy cleaning the hallways. “05101223,” he said.
Footsteps, followed by a British accent. “Sir?”
“This is 01011520, you will be showing him to his workstation. Engineering bay. Report back in ten minutes or face consequences.”
“Yes sir,” the British man said as he peeked into the office, eyeing Dean with interest.
“You have work to do,” Mikhael said, dismissing them. The door slammed shut behind him.
The man, whose string of numbers Dean hadn’t had a hope of remembering, scrutinized him for a few moments.
“Name’s Crowley,” he said, sticking out a hand. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”
Dean shook it. “Dean,” he said warily.
Crowley started walking off. “Well, you just going to stand there? Don’t have much time if I’m going to give you the grand tour and get you to your station.”
Dean jogged behind as Crowley began spouting off facts about the prison, demonstrating the impenetrable alloys in the walls, the dual artificial gravity generator at the center of the building, and the magnetized floors which were capable of being electrified at the push of a button. Dean did a fist pump when he found out he was right in both his guesses, then did a doubletake when he realized what Crowley said.
They passed the hallways where men were meant to strip and line up for ten-second steam showers at the end of each shift—at least he didn’t have to worry about dropping the soap here, he guessed—and Crowley pointed out all the facilities on each wing.
”We recycle waste here,” he said, making Dean shudder at the implications.
A large window overlooked the mess hall, where finally, Dean could confront up close and personal just how far he was from home.
His heart stopped in his chest, dread sinking in his bones as he saw the pale blue dot of Earth in the distance. The moon’s surface was vast, stretching far beyond any desert he’d ever seen. Shadows covered most of the surface he could see from view.
Just below the window, there were hundreds of tent-like structures, where he could see prisoners in helmets, working on what looked like a farm as they were connected by tethers, like a chain gang. Dean watched as they worked, tilling the soil and moving rocks around under the panels outside.
He saw one prisoner not working at all, standing at the edge of his tether, floating slightly on his heels, swaying as his helmet reflected the Earth. It wasn’t until a guard bounced along, prodding him with something, that he turned and started hauling bags.
“Hydroponic farms,” Crowley explained. “Waste from the facilities along with imported chemicals makes for nutrient-rich soil, watered using the moon’s own ice crystals, plus,” he pointed to the panels of light, “artificial UV rays to compensate for when there’s a lack of direct sunlight. Not too bad for crops.”
Dean raised a brow. “There’s fresh food here?”
Crowley snorted. “Don’t get too excited. The lion’s share gets exported back to Earth. Some people pay an exorbitant amount for ‘moon-grown’ produce, it’s all the rage. We just get the scraps—you’ll see at lunch.”
Dean rubbed his stomach. “By the way, when is that?”
Crowley led him a few flights down to below the surface into an engineering bay, ignoring his question. “You must have experience working with your hands, not a lot of inmates are assigned to engineering on their first day.”
They stopped in front of a guard posted at the door.
“05101223, presenting 01011520 for duty,” Crowley said, raising his brows at him in goodbye.
“0801504,” the guard shouted, and a burly man from a center work table ran over. “Your replacement, 01011520. You have him for three thousand, six hundred and fifty-one shifts,” he said, smirking at the added ‘one’, courtesy of Zachariah.
The burly man nodded, quickly bringing Dean over to his table. “You know how to use a drill?”
Dean scoffed. “You kidding?”
“Good.”
And for eight hours, it was all Dean did.
***
When he sat down for his first meal of the day, he was sorely disappointed to be greeted with a trayful of gray slop and a packet of water.
“The hell is this?” he asked his shift manager, whose name he found out was Benny.
Benny chuckled humorlessly as he led him to sit at a spare table where only one other person was sitting. Outside, the fields were empty.
“It’s soy paste, enhanced with vitamins and minerals.”
The nickname ‘fresh paste’ that Zachariah spat at him earlier made more sense—there was no such thing as ‘fresh meat’ on the moon.
“How’s the new inmate’s first day?” Crowley asked as he sat down, joining them along with another man in Dean’s work pod, Ash.
Dean dipped his spork in it, letting a plop fall back to the tray. “Adjusting. This looks like the stuff from The Matrix,” he complained.
“No playing with your food,” a passing guard barked.
“Just close your eyes and imagine it’s your favorite food, you’ll get used to it after a while,” Benny suggested. “I pretend mine is gumbo. Or pecan pie, depending on the day.”
Despite stretching his imagination to its limits, the paste stubbornly refused to taste like pie. Still, Dean was no stranger to making do when hungry, so it wasn’t too much of a struggle to choke it down.
“Who’s the helmet hair?” Dean asked, nodding slightly to the man with the bottom half of his spacesuit still on, sitting off by himself at the end of the table. He stared into the distance as he ate. Visible on his jumpsuit were the numbers 04011518.
Ash leaned forward. “Castiel Krushnik. He’s been here before any of us, he’s kind of a recluse.”
“People say he’s everything from an ex-cosmonaut, leftover from the war, while others say he has connections with the bratva,” Crowley said conversationally.
“The Russian mob?” Dean whispered.
“The very one. But it’s all speculation. Kinda hard to get information from someone who doesn’t talk to you. There are a thousand different rumors about the guy, but the only one that’s half true is that he lives up to his nickname.”
“Which is?”
“Some call him the angel of death, others the angel of mercy.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause he kills prisoners who ask him to.”
“Why the hell would anyone ask for that?”
“Look, we’re not on Earth anymore, right? Which means we’re not subject to Earth rules and regulations for prisons. They get to put us in inhumane conditions, feed us space paste, overwork us, and do all kinds of crap,” Ash pointed out.
“And the only way off the planet before your sentence is up is in a body bag,” Benny muttered. “It’s how my last worker disappeared—how your cell gained a vacancy.”
“Jesus,” Dean said. “How long have you all been here?”
“Over ten years,” Crowley said.
“Eight,” Benny replied.
Ash raised two fingers. “Got three left.”
Suddenly, ten years sounded like forever.
***
To make matters worse, Dean found out that no one’s sentence ever truly ended, if his cellmate was to be believed.
After another grueling half shift, more unappetizing paste for dinner, and a too-brief steam shower, he rushed to find his cell before lights out.
“I call top bunk,” his cellmate, another British man with a patch emblazoned with the number 12011503, said as Dean stepped inside, narrowly avoiding either an extra day’s sentence or the activation of the electrified floor that prevented prisoners from leaving their cells at night.
“Okay,” Dean said, not wanting to fight.
“Arthur Ketch,” he introduced himself.
“Dean Winchester.”
“Keep your hands to yourself and we won’t have any trouble.”
“Likewise,” Dean grumbled as he got settled into the hard bed. Part of him wished for the warmth of the sedative he’d woken up from.
He stared up at the plain white plastic, watching as it shuttered into darkness as the lights to their floor were cut out.
So this was corrections on the moon. 238,855 miles from home. Little chance of early parole, no visits from a lawyer, no visits from friends or family, and certainly no conjugal visits. Not even a phone call home. Grueling shifts and gross paste.
Just 3,650 days to go.
All Dean had to do was survive them.
Apparently, he’d said it aloud, because Ketch responded to him.
“I admire your hope. But the truth is, no one ever leaves. I’ve served my sentence, twice over now. I’m on my third round of ‘five years’. It doesn’t matter how good you are, they’ll find a way to add to your sentence and keep you here forever. The only way they ever get new people is if someone kills themselves. But you’re lucky—we happen to be right next door to an angel of death.”
***
Days, weeks, months passed.
Day after day after day of cramped hands and endless whirring. Dean began to forget the sound of music, the sound of Sammy’s voice, the feel or taste or sight of anything that wasn’t the sterile environment of the penal colony.
Dean still scratched off days in his sentence on the wall using a spare screw, but no matter how much time passed, it made no dent. Any perceived infraction only added to his sentence.
Look at a guard wrong? An extra day. A second late to work duty? An extra day. Talk during the shift? An extra day. Realize it was futile and refuse to work at all? An extra day—and a trip to Alastair, the sadistic guard who enjoyed shocking people back into compliance and letting lines that sounded like they belonged in an eighties horror flick curdle in his mouth:
“In space, no one can hear you scream.”
“Oh, blow me,” Dean had complained, just to feel something. It earned him another jolt from the cattle prod and—yep, you guessed it—another day added to his sentence.
Dean was a hamster on a wheel, and there was no getting off. He was going to go insane at this rate.
The angel of death’s unspoken offer of mercy looked more tempting by the day.
***
“I’d kill for a cigarette,” Ash said at lunch during Dean’s 127th shift. His face was stained black from grease from wherever they’d had him working.
“I’d kill for some booze—or a burger,” Dean groaned, his mouth watering with the memory.
“How American,” the angel of death muttered, surprising Dean. He always sat a little ways away from them, apart from everyone else, and had never said anything to them. All the other prisoners gave him a wide berth, and it seemed as if their table was the only one that was indifferent to his presence.
“Maybe I’d just kill you for a burger,” Dean snarked back, flexing his fists. He’d do about anything just to feel skin contact with another human being again, even if it meant getting pummeled.
“I’d kill just to kill,” Crowley interrupted casually, sitting down and swirling his metal canteen as his gaze clouded, looking wistful. “But, alas. Here,” he said, offering him his canteen.
“I got my own, I don’t need your germs.”
Crowley rolled his eyes. “Take it before I change my mind,” he gritted, pointedly handing it to him.
Dean took a hesitant sip—and looked at him in surprise when the warmth of whiskey washed down his throat. “Where the hell did you get this?”
“Perks of not being afraid to get down in the muck. People owe me—I know how to get things in and out.”
“Even people?” Dean whispered hopefully.
“Save for that. Or a cheeseburger, unfortunately. But less perishable things–things the guards request that can then conveniently go missing— that I can do.”
Dean leaned in. “If I find a way to write a letter, can you make sure it finds its way to someone on Earth?”
Crowley shrugged. “Quid pro quo. I can do that for you, but you’ll owe me a favor.”
“Anything.”
“I need you to smuggle eight screws out of engineering bay and get them to me.”
“What for?”
Crowley glared. “Don’t ask questions, it’s not your strong suit. Just do.”
“Whatever, Yoda.”
That evening during his shift, Dean periodically hid a screw in his hand and pretended to cough, carefully hiding them under his tongue and praying to whoever the fuck was listening that he didn’t accidentally choke on them.
“Well?” Crowley asked him during dinner as he sat down with his plate of grey paste. “I’ve got the pen and paper, they’re hidden behind a panel in the bathroom on the south wing. Write it, then leave it there and I’ll send someone to collect it as they’re loading up the next shuttle for export.”
Dean looked around to make sure the coast was clear, then emptied his cheeks like a goddamn rodent.
Crowley laughed. “You might prove useful yet, you little squirrel!”
From across the table, Krushnik’s blue eyes glinted with something like amusement.
It was the first spark of anything other than the passive gaze he’d seen.
***
Thirty days later, Dean got a letter back from Sam, slipped to him inside his laundered uniform.
Dean’s heart pounded as he opened it, but it was miraculously, undoubtedly in Sam’s handwriting. Unbidden tears hit the page as he read.
De,
It’s so good to hear from you. I’ve been digging into the Lunar Corrections Service since you left, and the more I talked to families of other inmates, the more hopeless I started to feel.
I’ve been working with a group with connections to the UN that has been trying to reform the prison system, so I’m saving your letters as evidence. If you can get more testimonies from other prisoners, it’ll be a big help toward building a case.
Stay safe and hang in there, jerk.
He took a deep breath, then shredded and ate the paper to hide the evidence. Better safe than sorry—if he were ever caught, he didn’t want to get Sam in trouble, too. As a human rights lawyer, Sam had a lot to lose if he was sent up here.
***
During lunch, as he hungrily sucked down his meager portion of soy paste and wished for something with actual substance, like some of the potatoes he’d seen being picked and loaded up on the transport shuttle, he noticed Castiel wasn’t eating. Instead, he breathed out slowly as he did some odd head and neck maneuvers.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
Cas mumbled. “Mmmhmm. Just a headache, it will pass. Used to it.”
“It happen a lot?”
Cas grunted.
“Why hasn’t Med Bay done anything?”
“Because it is not of import to them. It’s a common side effect of working the fields. Inner ear disorientation caused by the constant switch from the lack of gravity outside and the forced gravity inside, the changes in air pressure,” he explained. “The human body was not meant for this, long term.”
“That sucks,” Dean said, thinking back to Sam’s letter about needing more testimonies about the conditions.
Cas put his head down on the table, ignoring the guards’ warnings about punishment.
Screw the testimony—he wanted to help now .
He’d been smuggling other items for Crowley as needed, hiding them around the facility in every nook and cranny he could think of. It had earned him a reputation among the prisoners, as Crowley’s nickname had taken off.
A few shifts ago he’d helped squirrel away several meds out of a shipment to Med Bay following a staged work accident, per Crowley’s request.
He’d been saving the aspirin for personal emergencies, but as he looked at Cas, he decided this qualified.
After dinner, he retrieved the bottle and waited until lights out.
“Hey,” Dean called, edging toward the cell entrance, careful of the floor’s electrified surface and any roving guards. The one on their level was thankfully asleep at his post, knocked out thanks to the nightcap Crowley slipped him.
No answer.
“Cas!” Dean hissed.
“What?” Castiel’s annoyed voice said.
He reached around, holding the bottle out to him. “Here. For your headaches.”
There was a pause, then rough fingers brushed over his as the bottle was taken.
“Thank you, Belka, ” Cas said softly.
“The name’s Dean,” he said.
A rattle as Cas popped the pills. “Goodnight, Belka .”
Dean huffed.
***
The following evening as they returned to their cells, Cas wordlessly slipped him a handful of peanuts from their latest crop.
After hiding the skins and shells, Dean fell asleep with a full stomach for once, and a grin on his face.
***
The reprieve from their interaction didn’t last long.
Dean swore their shifts were getting longer, while their sleep time and meal times were getting shorter. Engineering was working them harder, pushing them to meet demanding quotas for the parts they were working on—parts Dean, even in his extensive knowledge of anything vehicular, had never seen in his life—so much so that even their most hale and hearty inmates were getting beat.
Benny passed out one day and was sent to Med Bay where he was allowed rest—for a double penalty.
“Congratulations, 01011520, you’ve been promoted,” the guard overlooking the shift said. “You’re now in charge of your team. If any one of them fails to meet their quota, you’ll both be punished.”
Dean swallowed hard as he looked out at the rest of his team.
“Well then, men, we’ve got work to do,” he said, laughing nervously, sweat rolling down his neck as he struggled to pick up the pace.
***
“Benny, you okay?” Dean asked during dinner.
Benny looked tired but slightly better than he had before he’d been carted away. He nodded. “Anemia—lack of sunlight can do that to you, it seems.”
“They going to give you time outside?”
Benny swirled his paste. “Got a transfusion in the meantime, but they want to transfer me to working the farms.”
Cas’ head snapped up. “Refuse.”
“What? He needs the sunlight,” Dean protested.
“You will not fare better out there than in engineering, trust me. No one makes it working farms more than a few months,” he said vehemently.
“You’re still here,” Dean pointed out. “You’ve been working there for the whole time I’ve been here.”
Cas shifted. “I am special case,” he said, his accent growing thick. “But you,” he said to Benny. “Not fit. You won’t get the sunlight you need out there, regardless.”
“I thought the artificial light would be enough?” Benny asked.
“They’re just telling you that so you’ll go without a fuss.”
“Meaning?”
“Why do you think they put us on the dark side?” Cas hissed, eyes narrowing. “Out of sight, out of mind. Like all the other undesirables. All of us noncompliant people—the people once with free will and free minds. They feared our freedom so they took it away, locking us away in a little world they could control.”
“We’re not fucking free,” Dean scoffed.
“No, not anymore. Not in a way that can cause damage.”
“What does that even mean, what’s your point?”
“Forget it,” Cas snapped, muttering in Russian. “Always buzzing in my ear, asking questions. Pchelka,” he said to Dean. He turned to Benny. “If you know what’s good for you, stay in engineering.”
He left, leaving Dean and Benny to stare at each other in confusion.
***
That evening, while Ketch was trying to jack off in their ensuite toilet (Dean was too exhausted to even think about sex most of the time, though occasionally he woke up hard from dreams about pouty lips and blue eyes and rough hands touching him), Dean wondered aloud why there wasn’t a women’s block.
“Most prisons are segregated by sex, but surely ‘non-rehabitable,’ 'noncompliant' women exist, too,” he theorized, thinking of some badass women he had run into back on Earth. “Where do they go?”
“Who cares,” Ketch groaned, giving up on trying to achieve release, and he pressed a button for a quick burst of cleansing steam on his hands. He rolled onto his bunk. “Even if there was a women’s block here, I doubt they’d allow for interactions. They crack down on the time men spend with each other here as it is,” he pointed out.
True.
“Hey, Ketch?”
“Hmm,” he mumbled.
“You’ve been here longer than I have. You said on my first day, even offered ‘the angel of mercy’ next door as a way out. Why do you choose to stay here, even knowing there’s no way out for you?”
There was a rustle as Ketch shrugged. “That’s the human condition, isn’t it? To fight. To survive against all odds—to rage against the dying of the light. I can’t say I haven’t thought about it, but… something always stops me. If the choice is to live or die, I want the option to keep making that choice. Can’t make choices for myself if I’m gone. Such is the nature of free will.”
As he went to sleep, a more probing question popped into Dean’s head.
Who built the prison, and had they known what they were building?
***
There was a hushed hubbub in the mess hall as the morning shift workers realized that the farmers were being transferred onto a shuttle.
“I thought no one ever left?” Dean said to Crowley, watching the tethered, helmeted prisoners shuffle onto one of the bigger transport ships.
“I don’t think they are—not back home, anyway. Look, it’s heading in the opposite direction of the export and import shuttles,” Crowley said.
Dean couldn’t help but feel a pang of worry as he saw the last prisoner enter. From the way they lingered to stare at the Earth, he had a feeling it had been Cas, the same as he had done on Dean’s first day, what felt like years ago now.
“Do you think Cas knew they were leaving, and that’s why he told you to stay behind?” he asked Benny.
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
Not for the first time, Dean wondered what else Cas was hiding.
***
After a few months of working double shifts in engineering and farms, the ship that all the original farmers had left on finally returned.
Cas was the only one to step off.
He looked like hell, but Dean was secretly glad to see him again.
“Cas?” he asked in the mess hall.
Cas turned to him.
Screw it.
Dean pulled him in for a tight hug. Cas’ arms hung limply at his sides, and it took him a while to reciprocate.
“Hello, Dean.”
“What happened? Where did you all go—where are the others?”
The lights flickered for a few seconds.
Cas sat down next to him, whispering, “They’re building a new prison, on Mars. If it works, it’ll just keep spreading. More food and goods for Earth, more Hell for the people sent here.”
“What?”
“Haven’t you wondered what it is you’ve been putting together all this time? It’s not just goods for Earth, it’s parts and panels for a new prison.”
Dean wanted to puke.
Crowley looked uncomfortable. “Why are you the only one left?”
“Told Pchelka. I’m a special case.”
He didn’t elaborate on what he meant.
“Hey,” Dean pushed. “You knew you were leaving, didn’t you? That’s why you told Benny to stay in engineering before you left.”
“I put the pieces together,” he admitted.
The lights flickered again.
“Has it been doing that for long?” Cas asked.
“Yeah,” Dean said. “Since you all left, randomly, only for a few seconds at a time. Do you know anything about it?”
He sighed. “Most of the solar energy harvested here is routed to the panels outside; the products take priority. The rest of the electricity indoors is work-generated.”
“So that’s why the lights have been weird since you guys left—not as many workers here,” Benny realized.
“They’ll be looking to fill the gap, soon,” Cas agreed. “And one person alone can’t build a prison. I think that’s why they brought me back here. To wait.”
“How do you know all this, about how the prison is run?” Crowley prodded.
Cas just shook his head.
“Let him rest,” Dean said, patting him on the back.
***
Slowly, true to Cas’ prediction, new inmates began being shuttled in. On each inbound and outbound ship, Dean traded letters with Sam, letting him know about the new prison plans for Mars and the number of deaths.
Get as much evidence as you can. The more we have, the better. We’re prepping to offer asylum to prisoners who escape and can testify to the inhumane conditions on the lunar penal colony, and prevent future inmates from being transferred there again.
The lights flickered again as Dean ate the letter to hide the evidence, which began to give him an idea.
“We need to find a way to escape before they replace all the prisoners that left,” Dean said to the table that morning.
“You think no one has tried before? What is it with Americans and the insistence that they can do anything?” Cas asked. “That kind of hubris landed man on the moon in the first place.”
“At least my country didn’t shoot dogs into space and leave ‘em to die,” Dean grumped. He missed Sam’s dog back home, and all Sam’s letter did was remind him of everything he was missing.
Cas tilted his head, squinting. “No, no you Americans just did the same with monkeys,” he growled.
“And look at where all that combined innovation both of your countries landed us: we’re all fucking here. Ain’t no point in arguing.” Benny pointed out, his tone fed up.
“Why even stay loyal to a country you’ll never return to?” Crowley pointed out. “Nationalism means nothing out here, and we mean nothing to them.”
The truth sapped the fight out of them; Dean felt his shoulders sink, mirroring Cas’. They were marooned here; neither country cared about them. Only their loved ones did, but there was shit all they could do on Earth to get them home.
All any of them had left until they died or the end of time—whichever came first—was each other.
So they either had to try to make the most of it, or make a break for it.
***
“I miss music,” Dean said conversationally to Cas that night as they worked. Since Cas had left, Dean had been pulling alternating shifts in engineering and on the farm.
Cas didn’t respond for a long while, but then he began humming what sounded like a lullaby in his native tongue.
Dean couldn’t help but smile. “What are you, my personal radio? Forget angel of death—you’re my angel radio,” he said when the lullaby ended. He bit his lip, hoping Cas wasn’t still pissed off or worn out from earlier.
“I miss the feel of the sun on my face,” Cas admitted quietly, the helmet muffling his voice.
“Don’t you want the chance to feel it again?” Dean offered, quietly.
“I gave up on that a long time ago.”
“You don’t have to. Something tells me you don’t want to give up.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“You offer an out to everyone but yourself. Why stick around, just to do that? At this rate, you’ll see everyone else die before you, but you’ll still be stuck here.”
“Because I feel responsible,” Castiel said lowly. He looked toward the facility. “Because I built this prison.”
Dean was taken aback. “What?”
Cas sighed. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was caught being… involved with another man, It’s a crime in my country. So, with my history of the bratva, they decided I was the perfect test subject for a new pilot program, for the ‘unredeemable.’ I got sent here. I worked, and watched every one of my comrades die over time. I watched what we made become a hell for others, so I feel it is my duty to offer relief where I can.”
“You built the prison? Dude, don’t you think maybe that information would’ve been helpful to us before?” he spits out.
“You did not ask.”
“Okay, well how much do you know about this prison, about the one they’re building? How many levels are there, what’s the prisoners-to-guard ratio, how often do they get switched out, how many shipments come in and out on schedule?”
Cas stared at him. “You don’t care that I had a hand in your suffering?”
“You didn’t send me here. You don’t force me to work—you… as much as we fight, you being here makes it better, Cas,” Dean said honestly. “I need you, man.”
Cas was quiet for another few moments, and Dean was afraid he lost him.
“Okay, Krasavka,” Cas agreed, and began giving him details.
“There’s more of us than there are of them, why can’t we take control?”
“Everyone’s afraid—of being abandoned, even more than we already are.”
“Then let’s give them an out,” Dean said, a determined set to his jaw.
***
If enough of them collectively decided to stop working, they could turn the facility’s energy off for long enough to overtake the prison guards and gain control for themselves long enough to escape.
But they’d have to convince the prisoners to stop working, to ignore their fear of punishment.
And as Cas so aptly put it one evening while tilling the fields, teaching complacent people to disobey was like trying to teach poetry to fish.
“If we’re doomed to work forever anyway, we may as well take the production into our own hands.”
Cas smiled wryly at him. “You want to seize the means of production, American?”
“It’s our only way out.”
“We are running out of time,” Cas conceded. “Soon they’ll ship us off… I won’t let what happened to the others happen to you, Krasavka .”
“Hey, if you’re going to help overthrow a prison with me, can you at least call me by my name?”
“No,” Cas, the little shit, grinned at him.
***
With the prisoners Cas had convinced, Crowley’s know-how of the facility, Benny’s brawn, Ash’s technical knowledge, and the makeshift weapons Dean had hidden all over the facility, the date was set.
All they had to do was work together.
When the next shuttle was set to come in, everyone on the lower floors stopped working, ignoring the guards’ threats and cattle prods, waiting for the facility to lose power.
When it did, it was a chaos.
The farming’ tethers and makeshift tethers made from bedsheets and uniforms tied together were the only things that kept the prisoners from staying grounded, while the guards struggled to fight against the shift in gravity.
While prisoners took care of the guards, Crowley broke into Mikhael’s office, taking as many files as he needed to get evidence to Sam, while Ash worked to hack into the systems, rerouting half the energy from the solar panels into the facility, turning off the electrified floors, and patching into a radio channel meant to connect with Sam’s humanitarian group.
“Dean,” Alastair growled behind him from where he stood guard, his cattle prod at the ready.
Dean smirked.
“Why are you so confident?”
“The angel of death is behind you,” he taunted triumphantly and watched Cas' 'angel' work in action as he snapped his neck.
Cas fumed at Alastair’s body as he drifted to the ground.
“It’s time for you to go, Krasavka,” Cas said.
Dean had no time to worry about sedatives; he’d have to face his fear head-on. He grabbed Cas’ hand, feeling, for the first time in a thousand days, sheer happiness building as he bounced toward the exits. He rushed to put on his space suit, slowing down when Cas didn’t join him.
“Cas?”
As terrified as Dean is to fly, he’s more determined to get the hell off the moon.
Cas let go of Dean’s hand. “Go, Dean. Now!”
“I’m not leaving without you!”
Cas’ face was pained. “I can’t go with you. If I go… chances are I’ll die.”
“What? What do you mean, what are you afraid of?”
“I’ve told you, I’m a special case. I’ve been out here too long. Been out there, without the artificial gravity, for too long,” he said, pointing out the window. “My physiology is permanently changed, even more so by the gravity on Mars. If I go back to Earth...” he shook his head sorry.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Dean’s joy drained from him.
“Because I didn’t want you to do something stupid, like not try at all,” he said. “Besides, I deserve to be stuck here anyway.”
Dean looked back, wavering. Benny and Crowley were waiting for him, eagerly waving him on.
“What if I stayed with you?” he decided, looking back at Cas.
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering.”
“I won’t let you.”
Dean bit his lip. He didn’t want to lose Cas forever. He’d had his time on Earth, and if everything went to plan, he could go back later.
“What if we went somewhere else?”
Cas cocked his head.
“With enough work, we could steer a different ship anywhere together, right? Let’s take the next one out. Together. See the stars. The sun. The sights.”
Cas softened, his eyes glimmering with unshed tears. “Dean,” he shook his head. “I—”
“Shut up and let me do this, yeah? Last night on the moon. I’ll get back home eventually, But you and I, we only get right now. Let’s make the most of it. The angel of death—the angel of mercy deserves a little mercy of his own.”
“That could be years. Decades. Time, the body, it all passes differently out here. It’s an unknown.”
“Cool, I’ll be like Kirk. You’re my great unknown,” he waggled his brows. “Just… let me write a quick letter, okay?”
Cas nodded, and Dean rushed to write one last letter to Sam, attaching it to the last of the files from Mikhael’s office, sticking his helmet on and running it out to Crowley.
See you on the dark side of the moon, bitch.
When Dean returned, the radio Ash hacked in the comms room began echoing throughout the facility, and prisoners who had done nothing but work for days on end stepped out of their cells, free of the threat of electrocution, awed to be hearing music for the first time in ages.
“Looks like it’s just you and me, and whatever you want to do.”
“So it is,” Cas said, holding his hand as they looked out the window.
“Hey— all your little nicknames for me, what do they mean?”
Cas sighed. “They are names of Soviet ships, some of the first successful ones…”
Dean laughed. “Your pet names for me are ship names?”
Cas explained; “I’d been here so long I’d lost hope. But you, in your blind optimism… it was like seeing the sun again. Better than that, even. You, like those ships, are hope, to me. Freedom.”
Dean exhaled. “Oh.” He pulled him in for a kiss as the shuttle took off, and their friends headed back home toward safety, and to get help for the remaining prisoners.
As they met, Dean thought Cas’ lips kinda tasted like hope and freedom, too.