Work Text:
Dean sat bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding as he scrambled to hold on to the rapidly dissolving wisps of some weird-ass dream he’d been having. Only Dean Winchester could conjure up an entire imaginary hunt he had to research and then fight to stay in the nightmare rather than be glad he was awake again. The library had been pretty swanky though, compared to most of the places he got stuck doing research. If his entire life was gonna be filled with waking nightmares, he might as well at least get to enjoy the simple pleasures where he could find them.
But something had pulled him out of that dream into waking reality, and that had to take top priority. At least his dad had drilled his training in so hard that despite feeling completely disoriented and off balance from whatever recycled horror his own mind had served up to him in his sleep, he still managed to pull the gun from under his pillow and hold it steady as he scanned the room for whatever had dragged him back to consciousness. There had to be something, after all. It had been a long damn time since he’d let some stupid nightmare stand in the way of his four hours.
As he meticulously sorted through all the room’s unfamiliar shadows lurking in the corners and behind curtains in the gloaming and forced his breathing to steady, the strange, clingy residue of the dream slid away completely. As suddenly as if he’d had a blindfold pulled away, he remembered where and when he was. The motel in some nowhere town in Illinois where their dad had left them three days ago. It was a random Wednesday— no, wait. He shook his head, glancing over at the old-fashioned alarm clock on the nightstand that informed him it was already after midnight, so it was technically a random Thursday in September now, and Sam was really starting to get pissy about not being able to go to school. It wasn't like Dean could actually do anything about it. He was just following John's orders. So he mostly just let Sam rant at him, blame him, all while he himself grew more and more worried with each passing day about their dad, and whatever might have prevented him from returning.
Dean’s nightmares really did have more than enough material from his own waking life to work with.
They were only supposed to have been there for one night, but Dean knew better than to take John’s word on shit like that anymore. Like always, he just sucked it up and tried to do what he could to keep Sam happy, and hopefully too distracted and preoccupied to be constantly pissed off in Dean’s direction. In this case, it meant getting up early so Sam could spend an hour in the local library before they had to pretend they were leaving to go to a school they weren’t even registered to attend. It was either that or risk getting hauled in for truancy. No matter what else happened to them while John was off hunting the things that go bump in the night, rule number one was always don’t let yourselves get put into the system. It was the one place John wouldn’t be able to protect them, and possibly worse, the one place Dean wouldn’t be able to protect Sam.
He’d learned from personal experience that it was also the one place that might just be a little too tempting to let himself fall back into again. He’d given it up, walked away from people who had offered to stand up for him, and back into the life so that there’d be someone looking out for Sam. Dean didn’t really regret it, not completely, but some days it was harder to convince himself of that than others.
Dean slowly let the hand holding his gun drop to his lap. Of course there was no one else in the room besides Sam, softly sawing logs in the other bed like he didn’t have a care in the world. For a brief, bitter moment, Dean wished he’d had as few problems at twelve as Sam did. Despite all his complaining, Dean wasn’t sure if Sam actually understood just how easy he had it, with Dean maintaining as much of a wall as he could between Sam and all the shit John routinely tried to bring home to them.
He sighed, figuring he wasn’t likely to get back to sleep any time soon, and climbed out of bed as quietly as he could. Might as well take advantage of the fact that their motel room, for once, had a decently illuminated chair and table on the sidewalk just outside the door, like a proper little front porch. The previous morning, Dean had snagged a paperback at random from a big bin of old books the library was just giving away for free as they hurried out through lobby. Once he got his boots on— because despite trying to reassure himself that they were safe and everything was fine, Dean couldn’t remember a time in his life when he actually believed that was true— he tucked his gun into his waistband, checked on his brother one more time, and then took the mystery book he hadn’t yet given a second glance outside to hopefully kill an hour or two wrapped up in a story.
Dean left the door to the room cracked open just enough so that he'd hear if Sam woke up and be able to rush back inside if he had to. He scanned the mostly deserted parking lot for any sign of danger. Reassured that the only car in the lot was the old beater he’d seen the night clerk napping in before his shift started, he finally let himself inspect the book he’d grabbed. All he’d registered up to that point was that the cover had a picture of a deserted highway stretching off into the desert, and it felt like the book had been enticing him personally to find out where that highway would take him.
For a split second, sitting there in the stillness of the night and finally giving himself a moment to really get paranoid about it, he wondered if it hadn’t been some sort of trap, a magical artifact planted where he, specifically, would pick it up and carry it away. Dean flipped through the pages to assure himself that no, it was just a well-worn and otherwise entirely normal paperback. It didn’t have any more power to bewitch him than any other story did— which is to say it had the potential to let him forget the horrors of his own life for a few hours, which was a pretty damn incredible kind of magic on its own, Dean figured.
As he flipped past the title page and all the blah blah small print of publishing information, the story contained between those worn out covers came flooding back to him. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It had been a while, almost completely forgotten and buried under a year or two of newer memories pushing it down, but it was still in there. It was hard to forget a story where one of the main characters shared your own name and spent most of the novel on a long road trip. And Dean admitted to himself now, a couple years down the line, he had a lot more in common with Dean Moriarty than he’d been willing to admit way back when. So it was with a genuine anticipation to let himself enjoy the story unfolding in that new light— and without a teacher forcing him to write essays about it and a class full of bored and uninterested kids sucking all the enjoyment out of it— that he dove back into the fictional world he held in his hands.
He hadn’t been sitting out there long before he was deeply engrossed in the story. He'd fallen right in and raced along through the opening scenes, so Dean was entirely unprepared for the book itself to throw a traffic jam into his road trip story. After zooming through a few dozen pages, he flipped to the next and his reading screeched to a halt with a shuddering jolt. Some previous reader had defiled the book. In bright blue ink, right across the entire top margin of the page, someone had written DEAN in big bold blue letters. If someone had rung a bell right behind his head, he couldn’t have been more startled. He stared down at the offending letters until that feeling of alarm had subsided, and then shook his head to clear away the last of his uneasiness.
Obviously someone had gotten bored while reading, or maybe just liked the character or even just the name. Dean couldn’t really blame them. He agreed, it was a pretty damn good name. It could have been someone who had a destructive streak paired with a lack of creativity, or someone who needed to fidget to keep their focus and ran out of scrap paper, and just idly scribbled out the character’s name on the page while they read. There had to be a mundane explanation for it, because again, Dean was positive that it was just an innocent old beat up library book, long past its prime and destined for the trash if he hadn’t picked it out of that bin, and not a cursed object attempting to speak to him directly. That would just be silly.
Just to be sure, he got up and peeked in on Sam. His brother was still sound asleep as far as he could tell, so Dean pulled the door almost closed again. He took the opportunity while he was still standing up to pace the length of the sidewalk. Nothing was out there waiting for him. It was just a regular dark night outside a regular run down roadside motel in a regular middle of nowhere place. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something— maybe not something right outside his field of vision, lurking in the shadows and waiting for him to drop his guard, but something, somewhere watching and waiting for him.
That sense of alertness bordering on paranoia had probably been ingrained as a low level permanent state of his being by the time he’d hit double digits. Dean wasn’t sure if he should blame his father for it, or thank him. That degree of constant awareness definitely served him well on hunts, but it had some down sides. Like whatever had startled him awake and kept him from being able to just go back to sleep like a normal person.
Dean shook his head, then glanced down at the book in his hand. He pointed at it like he was warning it to behave, or else. The book had no immediate response to his threat, so he reluctantly returned to his makeshift porch.
For a moment as he settled back into his chair and prepared to crack open his book again, Dean had the absurd notion that whoever— or whatever— was lurking out there beyond his small, dim pool of light, wasn’t out there waiting to get him, but desperately trying to save him. For a fraction of an instant, Dean’s heart clenched in his chest and he was plowed over by a surge of disorienting visions and sounds. The only thing he could make out in it before the feeling faded was that it sounded like someone begging him to wake up.
Dean snorted, shook his head, and tried to pretend that it hadn’t shaken him as he cracked open his book and found his place. Out loud, he muttered to himself, like his spoken words would be enough to fend off imaginary monsters in the darkness.
“I’m already awake, nightmare. Congrats, you won that round. Now fuck off and let me read in peace.”
His outward bravado clearly had won round two against his own mind’s demented idea of late night entertainment. Dean hoped there wouldn’t be a round three, especially now that the mystery margin doodler had lost the power to trigger his paranoia. Every page from that one on could’ve been decorated like a lovesick teenager scribbling a crush’s name surrounded by little hearts in the margins of school notebooks, and it wouldn’t have had the power to shake him like that again. With at least that much confidence, he let himself fall back into the fictional road trip, where hopefully for a little while Dean would be able to forget the darker details of his own life on the road.
To anyone who might have passed by on that lonely stretch of highway and spotted him sitting there, Dean was certain he would’ve appeared so calm and relaxed that he would hardly have registered as a blip on anyone’s radar. Even completely engrossed in the story once again, there was still a tiny part of his attention that stood sentry now that he’d been spooked once already. It killed a little bit of his enjoyment of reading, not allowing himself to entirely fall back into the imaginary world conjured by the words, but it did help him relax enough to enjoy it. Normal people probably would have thought it sounded insane that he could find comfort in that, but they hadn’t seen the things that he had, either. When you knew the monsters were real and really out to get you, not letting yourself forget it was a hell of a lot more comforting than setting yourself up to get blindsided by the fact over and over again.
So slowly that he almost hadn’t realized it was happening, that same odd notion that something just outside of his field of vision was battling its way toward him through the darkness had crept back up on him again. It hadn’t set off his internal alarm bells because it didn’t feel threatening. As unfamiliar as Dean may have been with the feeling of safety and security, he couldn’t shake the notion that there was something so deeply familiar about this particular variety of it. It was just curious enough that even subconsciously while his eyes continued to scan the words on the page in his lap, he allowed himself to passively wonder where he knew that feeling from. Like hearing a clip of a song he couldn’t quite remember the name of, or catching a fleeting burst of a flavor or a scent he couldn’t quite place, it also felt like something that would come back to him if only he didn’t think too hard about it.
Almost automatically, he flipped through the pages as he read while the kernel of warm comfort continued to grow steadily in his chest. Until he encountered another defiled page. The blue ink seemed even brighter and more intense this time, scrawled across not only the top margin, but also the top few lines of printed text. He’d been about to grumble out a complaint about the blank space being fine to doodle in, but overwriting the author’s words for doodles was taking it too far, until the scrawled words registered.
WAKE UP, DEAN.
His complaint died in his throat. He wasn’t spooked this time. The words hadn’t exactly surprised him, but they did seem to activate the growing sense of comfort, warmth, and safety he’d been trying not to let himself become overwhelmed by. He couldn’t just brush it off this time, even though he tried to anyway.
“Already awake, still,” he muttered without really registering that he’d said the words aloud. “Thanks, though.”
It occurred to him that he probably should have tried to shake off the strange, unfamiliar and yet inexplicably familiar feeling, but it had just felt too good to shut down and shove away. As he continued to allow it to settle into his chest, he turned his attention back to the story. He wasn’t sure if he was really absorbing all the words anymore, though, and his eyes repeatedly darted back to the handwritten command until he eventually reached the end of the page.
Dean reluctantly flipped to the next page, and for a split second, the blue ink seemed to sparkle, like it had been written in glass, or glitter. Again, he didn’t allow himself to flip back and make sure his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on him. He was still trying not to think too hard about what any of it meant, hoping that the unsettling and growing feeling of deja vu would eventually resolve into the tangible memory he somehow knew was just outside his grasp that would surely clarify all of this for him. After a few more pages, Dean had become absolutely certain that it would. That feeling spurred him on— both to continue reading and to indulge the warmth now blooming in his chest. So he was entirely unsurprised when he was confronted by another handwritten note, this time taking up most of a page.
DEAN, COME BACK TO ME.
The blue handwritten letters seemed oddly familiar now. Like he should know the person who had written them. He longed to do exactly what the note had asked of him. Dean was certain in that moment that he wanted nothing more than to return to whoever was clearly crying out for him. The comforting glow in his chest flared into an almost painfully bright ball of yearning. He felt a tear roll down his cheek, and instinctively wiped it away with the back of his hand, more alarmed by the unbidden show of emotion than by the fact it felt so shockingly familiar to him. He surely couldn’t remember ever having met someone who could make him feel that strongly about anything. And yet, he was also positive that he had, and that it was beginning to feel like a matter of life and death that he figure out who, and where, and when.
Dean did the only thing he could, and kept reading. Only now, the story had become the low level background noise as the previously silent sentry steadily took over. The comforting feeling of security and safety rapidly took on overtones of desperation and borderline panic, a rapidly growing sense of urgency that he remember. His eyes barely touched on the printed words now as he raced through the pages. When he finally landed on another handwritten note, it was almost with a sense of relief.
I LOVE YOU, DEAN. I NEED YOU TO WAKE UP.
His breath caught in his throat, and Dean stared down at the words. He ran his fingertips over them, inexplicably absolutely certain he knew their author, and that they were written specifically for him. The urgency screamed through loud and clear, an alarm bell clanging in his chest and rattling the darkness beyond his bubble of light, like reality itself was collapsing around him. Even his makeshift porch had crumbled away, and he rubbed his fingers together as the book in his hands dissolved into dust. The only thing that remained had been the sparkling blue words unspooling before him like a lifeline he could cling to while everything else disintegrated around him.
He had only one brief moment to wonder if he’d done the right thing, giving in to the seductive lure and letting himself be dragged into that comforting embrace. It was too late to go back now for a do-over. If he was ever going to lay down and give up so easily and completely, he should’ve known it would have been exactly like this. He wasn’t giving in to fear, or hopelessness, or despair. The thing that convinced him to surrender was pure, unconditional love. And he recognized it completely, like it had been pulled directly from the depths of his own soul. He pulled himself along the thread of those words eagerly, holding on for dear life while they pried him free from a drowning pool of anguish and loss.
“I’m here, Cas,” he found himself muttering as he slowly felt himself truly waking up and remembering where he’d been all along. “I’m here. You got me.”
Cas sighed with relief and held him tighter. “I thought I’d lost you, Dean. You were sitting there flipping through the pages of that book, until you suddenly froze.”
Dean tried to sit up, and Cas rushed to support him as he did. The last thing he remembered, he’d been sitting in the chair that now lay toppled over beside them where he was sprawled out on the library floor, half under the table. The book he’d been flipping through while trying to figure out what exactly they had been hunting for the last few days now lay a few feet away in a sticky puddle of what looked like ectoplasm.
“Well, that’s not alarming at all,” he muttered, trying to shake off the vague headache his experience with the clearly and obviously cursed book had left him with. He sighed with relief, though. Cas had saved his ass yet again.
Dean wasn’t quite yet ready to move more than he already had to get his bearings, and let himself continue to lay there, mostly bonelessly, in Cas’s arms. Cas fussed over him the way he always did when Dean’s life was endangered— or even just minorly inconvenienced. That’s just how Cas was with him, especially now that Dean eagerly encouraged it in him. Only now Cas looked far more frustrated than he used to about the fact he wasn’t able to simply give Dean’s soul the once over with angel-ray vision anymore, and had to go about examining him in the regular human way. Cas poked and prodded him until Dean finally pulled himself up just enough to look Cas in the eye. It made him feel better than anything else probably could have, when just a few minutes earlier he hadn’t even been able to remember that Cas existed, let alone loved him this much. That fact alone brought a smile back to his face as he watched that unwavering love and concern in Cas’s eyes.
“Is the curse still affecting you, Dean? Do we need to destroy the book?”
Dean sighed, one hand on the back of Cas’s neck as he closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against Cas’s. “No, I’m good, Cas. Thanks to you.” He opened his eyes and leaned back just enough to smile at Cas, and then nodded back over his shoulder to the gooey book behind him. “I vote we should burn that thing anyway.”
Cas nodded solemnly, leaning to the side to glare at the book over Dean’s shoulder, as if he still had the power to incinerate it from across the room.
“We’ll take care of it just as soon as we can be sure that burning it will actually destroy it, and not just make it worse, okay?” Dean said, pulling Cas's attention away from the offending book.
When Cas nodded, Dean sighed, slumping back down against Cas’s chest again. He muttered into Cas’s shirt as he wrapped his arms tightly around his waist. “But first I’m gonna sit here for another minute just like this, if that’s okay with you.”
“This is always okay with me,” Cas replied, clearly still concerned for Dean’s well being, but not entirely sure what else he could do about it other than continuing to hold on to him, too. When Dean didn’t let go after a few minutes, Cas had clearly begun to worry about him again. “Are you really okay, Dean?”
Dean nodded, then tightened his grip on Cas for a moment before letting go and struggling back to his feet. Cas had to steady him, since Dean’s balance hadn’t completely recovered from his disorienting experience. Cas squinted at him critically, not so much attempting to scan him or read his mind, but just because it was the face Dean always made at him now when he was feeling even a tiny bit under the weather and refused Dean’s overbearing attempts at nursing. Dean reassured him immediately that he could stand on his own without toppling over, though, and then proved it by bending over to right the chair he’d toppled over when he’d hit the floor.
“Yeah, I think I’m gonna be fine, eventually,” Dean said, and then dropped into the chair, shaking his head. “That was pretty fucked up, though.”
“I’d say so,” Cas replied. “The book started glowing, and the text appeared to be moving on the page.” He frowned, unsure how to describe what he’d seen, but giving it his best attempt. “The words were forcing themselves into you through your hands, like the book was trying to fill you with the curse.”
Dean looked up at him where Cas still stood by his shoulder, staring down at him and looking a little lost and off peak himself. Dean took his hand, both to remind Cas that it was over, that he was gonna be okay now, and to try to encourage him to sit down too. When he finally did, he gave Dean a relieved smile, and neither of them moved to let go of each other’s hand. After a moment, when he was sure Cas wasn’t gonna swoon on him or anything, Dean did his best to explain what he'd experienced. They did that now, instead of bottling shit up and letting it fester. It was an even bigger relief right then and there than usual, in the immediate aftermath of Dean having been flung back so far into his memories, back to when he wasn’t allowed to express himself like that, even if there was anyone willing to listen who could understand. That had just been how it had to be for the vast majority of his life. But Cas had saved him from that, too.
“If you hadn’t had eyes on me the entire time, I would’ve sworn to you that I’d been zapped back in time,” Dean said, and then frowned.
He’d been time traveling so many times he knew that wasn’t exactly right. He’d always brought all his memories with him when it had happened before. But this time, it was as if he’d actually become that person he’d been all those years ago. He shuddered at the thought, and took in a sharp breath as he shook off the horror of it. Cas sat there, holding his hand and waiting patiently for Dean to find words for it. Dean smiled at him and squeezed his hand to reassure himself that he was really there, that Cas would never leave him again. It gave him the courage to go on, even if it was in barely more than a whisper.
“It was more like time got rolled back, actually. Like nothing after that day had happened yet. No apocalypse, no Hell, and as far as I knew, you didn’t even exist. I was just a dumb teenage kid trying to keep my baby brother alive in some podunk motel room while Dad was off on a hunting trip.”
Cas nodded slowly, like he was afraid that any sudden movements might spook Dean back into cursed catatonia. Dean smiled at him, though. He was pretty sure now exactly how Cas had managed to save him, and Cas absolutely deserved to know.
“It wasn’t all bad,” he said. “I remember the week we actually spent at that motel, because Sam made me take him to the library every damn day. There wasn’t fuck-all else to do within walking distance, so we both spent most of the week holed up reading.”
Cas’s eyebrows scrunched down, like he’d already begun to figure out what had happened, too. “So the curse now was literally forcing you to take in its words by making you relive a memory where you spent a great deal of time reading?”
Dean shrugged. “Since you said the words on the page here were shoving themselves into my skin, I’m gonna go with that, yeah.”
Cas looked down at their entwined hands, still clinging to each other, like he was confirming to himself that no trace of those evil words still stained Dean’s skin. Very quietly, he said, “I couldn’t pry the book from your fingers. The spell wouldn’t let me.”
Dean patted their clasped hands with his free hand, like he needed to remind Cas that he was able to do that now, that his hands weren’t still shackled to the book by magic. He took a deep breath and waited until Cas looked up at him again before saying, “Yeah, but then you threw a little wrench in the spell, I’m guessing.”
Dean looked over the table where they’d been working, still stacked with dozens of books. Amid the clutter were their long-abandoned empty coffee cups, and a bowl of pretzels they’d been idly snacking on. There were also a few loose sheets of paper they’d been using to taking notes, and an assortment of pens. Including a bright blue one that Dean knew he’d recognize that precise shade of ink anywhere, now that Cas had essentially shoved a sample of it directly into his soul. Or at least into an obscenely vivid memory. But at least when he turned back to Cas, he was finally smiling again. Cas sighed, and nodded.
“I was out of other ideas, and so I thought if there was any chance at all that any words written into the book might be picked up and carried along by the curse, and make it to you somehow, it was worth a try,” Cas said, and then frowned a little before casting a glancing glare down at the offending book, still oozing itself out on the floor a few feet away. He looked back at Dean, and smirked. “I had to overcome my reticence to deface a valuable old book, but if any book ever earned defacing, I think that one has.”
“Dude, it tried to eat me,” Dean replied, grinning. “It deserves whatever’s coming to it.”
They grinned at one another for another moment, until Cas leaned in, finally seeming like he was feeling himself again.
“So my words did break through the spell?”
Dean shrugged. “At first I thought it was just someone who scribbled in an old library book,” he said, and then smirked. “I’m not actually sure it was just the words on the page on their own that broke the spell.”
Cas looked puzzled for a moment, so Dean took a deep breath and pulled him in for a kiss. He hadn’t been aware of just how much he’d needed that until he leaned back, and the last of the curse disintegrated inside him. He smiled at the soft, goofy look that still came over Cas whenever Dean kissed him out of the blue like that. Dean wasn’t sure he’d ever be over fact that he could still leave Cas filled with wonder with a single kiss, even that long after they’d shared their first one.
“You told me you loved me, and I believed it,” Dean said. “I knew it was true, even when I couldn’t even remember you existed at all. Even when I thought I was just some dumb seventeen year old—”
Cas cut him off, jumping to his feet and looking around frantically until his eyes landed on the clock mounted high up on the wall. He dropped Dean’s hand and raced around the table to where a little magnetic calendar from the local pizza joint was stuck to the side of the mini fridge where they kept their beer. He pulled it off and walked back over to the table, dropping the magnet in front of Dean and pointing down at the date.
“Seventeen,” he said. When Dean didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about, Cas sat back down and clarified. “It’s after midnight now. It’s officially the seventeenth anniversary of our first meeting. We’ve known each other for seventeen years now, Dean.”
Dean’s eyes went wide as an entirely different set of memories now raced through his mind, washing away the last of what that spell had tried to force on him. The loneliness and burden of responsibility was swept away, and the certainty that Cas not only had saved him yet again, but that he’d done it out of love and not just because he’d had orders to do it.
“I guess it’s kinda fitting then,” Dean said. “You gonna save me from hell every year on our anniversary, then?”
Cas laughed. “I’d honestly prefer not to have to, if that’s okay with you. Maybe we could go out to dinner instead.”
“I’d rather not keep getting sent to various assorted hells, so yeah. I can get behind that.”
They sat grinning at one another until Cas leaned forward, taking Dean’s hand again and looking at him intensely, like he wanted to be sure Dean truly understood how serious he was.
“I will always love you, though. I don’t ever want you to forget that again.”
Dean nodded slowly, as dumbstruck now as Cas had been by his kiss. He had to clear his throat a couple times before he could reply. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”