#uinlh

[enochianribs]

UINLH | ‘souri and pam’s weird little psychic house and cas’ feather wind chimes he decorates the cabin with (they’re his actual feathers, tho)

[enochianribs]

until it no longer hurts. (cabin/wing fic). read it here, or under the cut.

(accompanying playlist / aesthetic board (thanks @disableddean)

CHAPTER 3. (formatting is lost via tumblr text post fyi)

ch.1 / ch.2

As he lays there, unconscious to the world, and all those things that go bump in the night, his life sorts itself cleanly into two: before and after—   not for the first time.

In fact, there were several times before this. There was before the fire, before the loss of his mother, before John started hunting, before Jess died, before Sammy went to rehab, before Dean picked up that knife. 

Before before before.  

The question has hung in front of him for quite some time now.

What happens after? 

What happens to him, when all is said and done?

The bed is warm and soft and he sinks into it. A hand presses against his chest, pins him down and muscle memory tells him to go for the knife, fingers flexing outward and then curling in, his nails catching on the sheet. 

This is safe. 

Here in this moment, no one can touch him. The tiny flowers on the sheets molt before his eyes, little petals rising out of the fabric and blooming. They're feather light against his bare skin, and the weight of his body is crushing them. He makes a noise of upset, and a hand comes down to press a finger to his mouth, hushing him gently. 

<It's okay.> 

Slowly, he wakes. The warmth from the finger still lingers against his lips, but the bed is hard where his face presses against it, eyelashes fluttering, his eyes open just a crack. The wood of the table greets him, and the sunlight is just now poking through the blinds once again, casting the same lines across the pine knots, along the curves of his outstretched forearm and across where his head faces towards the sun. 

"It's okay." He murmurs, and for an incredibly brief moment he is perplexed by why the words slip from between his lips, until one of his knuckles grazes bare skin. 

His evening comes back. 

Before. 

Before Wings. 

Slowly, Dean sits upright, suddenly entirely aware of the being lying on his table, and his heart beats in his mouth and his fingers catch on something, pulling him even further from the comfort and haze of his dream. He ducks his head in, looking down at where his hand is stuck. His fingers are still woven between Wings', his own a shade lighter.

Dean sits very still.  

He’s afraid to make a sound and wake him up, so he stays there for a moment, assessing the situation he’s willingly walked himself into.

The stranger’s chest rises and lowers every few seconds, almost imperceptibly so.  The gauze is brown from oxidized blood, but it doesn't appear to have been soaked through in the night, proving Dean's improvised medic work satisfactory. The stitches held. 

Huh, Dean thinks. He should be thankful for the live or die experiences thrust upon him by his father's recklessness. 

Half the time, Dean's afraid he took pages out of John's book.

And that would be okay. Well, it wouldn’t—  but he—  he could cope with that. He could work through it. He’s beginning to understand that even as the world ended, it would still spin, and day would come and the night would consume and he’d be okay. 

It’s unspeakably comforting, the feeling of fingers tucked between his own, the way Dean’s calloused palm presses against another, like a bond is forming quietly between a man waking from his dream and another still ensnared. 

“It’s okay.” Dean says one more time, the words an impulse.

Wings stirs, his upper lip twitching a hairsbreadth, and Dean braces for the cry of pain that always comes with waking, even if it’s not aloud. Anticipating the event horizon of his world ending with Wings consciousness, Dean grabs a glass of water, and the bottle of alcohol, and a rag before coming to stand next to his head, his thighs pressed against the edge of the table. 

He stares down at him, and his head feels clearer than it did last night. The stranger’s hair is unruly, unkempt, and Dean can’t tell how long it’s been like that—  how long this winged man has been living in the forest. The locks are nearly as dark as his wings, but the sunlight exposes their truthful deep brown color. It’s tangled here and there, and Dean has to try and restrain himself from carding his fingers through it to work out the knots. A residual caretaking instinct he has had yet no luck fighting.

When they were kids, Sammy always refused to brush his hair, and it was never really a problem when it was just him and Sam. But school begged a shred of presentability from the two, lest child services were called, so he kept up Sam’s appearance for him. Dean kept them fed, schooled, he took care of them both, though Sam always came first. 

Should have always come first. 

Now Dean’s here with someone else’s blood under his fingernails, and there’s a hunter on the loose who probably has it out for them both. And he’s not even a real hunter. He's just some guy with a gun and a penchant for killing things.

    Dean’s officially in over his head. 

Dark smudges look like they’ve been pressed underneath his eyes with two uncaring thumbs, and a distinct line of his cheekbones drags in a swoop across either side of his face. His lips are full but chapped and Dean wonders why he cares, but the urge to dab a spot of lotion against them nearly overpowers him. 

He’s trying hard to ignore the wings. 

There’s finding a human man and then there is finding a man with wings, real wings, with muscle and tendons and quivering feathers, and yep there it is, that edge of panic. 

The word hangs over his head but Dean refuses to use it. His mother’s bedtime stories aren’t real.

Demons are. He knows that now, though they are few and far between. But the a-- no. 

Dean shakes his head.

There's never been any proof. 

He rocks his weight from foot to foot, debating his best course of action. Minutes pass, but the man doesn’t stir again, so finally Dean sucks it up and takes his hand and pats it against his cheek, gently. His skin feels rough against the surprising softness, even the barest hint of stubble is nearly feather soft.  

He comes to sit on the edge of the table.

“Hey.” He murmurs, uselessly.  “Wake up?”

Please wake up.

Wings’ head moves, only slightly, pressing against his hand. Dean freezes like a deer in headlights, caught touching when he should have only been looking. Heat crawls up his cheeks and his stomach flips. 

“Fucking hell, Dean.” He mutters, pulling his hand away and he cocks his head, unsure if he really heard a quiet, sad noise leave the man still lying seemingly unconscious on his table. 

A warm, steady hand snakes out and grabs his wrist. Dean swallows his own quiet noise. It takes everything to look up again, scared of what he’s going to see.

When they lock eyes that fear melts.  

Wings flexing underneath his back, extending as far as they can go until the longest feathers graze the floor and the farthest tip brushes the wall near the dining table, the stranger looks up at him with clear eyes. His lips move rapidly, as he soundlessly repeats something over and over. One side of his face clenches up in pain as he tries to sit up.

Dust particles drift from the rafters like nothing is amiss, little bokehs proving that what Dean sees is real. He still doesn’t believe it.  

“Hey, hey, hey,” he keeps his voice low, holding his breath and extending his hands, palms out, as a friendly act. “I’m not—  I’m not gonna hurt you, just, you gotta let me get—” 

    Before Dean’s fingers even lift the bandaging to inspect the damage, there’s a forearm against his throat, and he’s pinned against the table by strong arms and they form an iron cage to hold him there. Two strong legs straddle him. Whatever he was going to say dies in his throat. 

    “Wings—” 

    The stranger barks something out, the syllables harsh and completely foreign, staring down at Dean with a combustion-prone concoction of fear, confusion and leftover adrenaline mixing behind the blue. 

    “Please I—” 

The arm presses against his windpipe even harder, and Dean meets the icy stare. Wings tilts his head, and his eyes narrow, his lips hanging open slightly, like he wants to say something. 

“I’m trying to help you.” 

    The pressure lessens a fraction, and Dean takes the opportunity to whip his arm up, hand sliding between him and Wings’ own, and he pushes him away and back a short inch, but it’s enough to throw the smaller man. Finally free, his throat drags in a breath but he doesn’t plan on giving wings another opening, so he brings his knee up from under the other man, using it as a brace to prevent him from overpowering him again. 

    He says the first thing that flies through his pea-brain. “Who are you?” Lord help him, he may just be the stupidest man alive. “What do I call you?” Asking him to introduce himself seems like the dumbest possible direction for the scene playing out. 

    With the quilt long gone, the stranger is fully indecent again, and Dean’s trying very hard to ignore it, because it’s the icing on the unreal cake. Fire creeps up his cheeks regardless and Dean squirms. 

A black arm brings itself up and around Wing’s body curling as though it was a protective stance. It reminds him of a knight with a shield. Everything else about his posture screams prey animal, and Dean can tell when the ghost of a fight is reverberating through someone’s muscle memory.

What the fuck did Campbell do to him? 

To top it all off, Dean realizes he did a terrible job of cleaning the blood away from his mouth. The blue takes over his eyes as his pupil’s become pinpricks of something primal and it doubles with the dried blood smeared down the hollow of his throat. 

“Hey,” Dean’s voice is low and shaking and he feels just like he did when he spent all those years helpless, just a child yanked around. “Stay with me. C’mon.” 

The wing lowers, and as it does so it catches the light, and the entire wing is made up of feathers that look just like the ones sitting on his mantle, an oil slick in sunshine. Without thinking, Dean brings his hand to his thigh and squeezes it, thumb digging into the meat of it. The touch is meant to be grounding, though he’s not sure who for.

“You know me.” He hums, in a futile effort to comfort him. 

A flip must switch in the stranger’s mind, because he nods suddenly, pulling his weight off of Dean and settling down on his own legs, his wings larger than life, spread out in the room.

“Dean.” He says, and it sounds reverent, his voice rough, the syllable catching in his throat. He doesn’t seem to notice, but fresh scarlet blooms across the bandage. “Dean.”

Dean stays as still as a statue and he can’t recall ever saying his name, though that’s usually how it goes for most anything. Words pour out of his mouth ceaselessly, and he’s always embarrassing himself, dumping his scattered thoughts on poor unsuspecting souls: hey, did you know that Led Zeppelin were tolkien fans? Simply because he’d seen someone had walked past wearing a Tree of Gondor shirt. 

But Dean doesn’t remember saying his own name. His fathers harsh words rattle around inside his mind: kill first, figure out what it is later.

This thought has to wait, though, because the bullet wound seems to have caught up to him, and Wings slumps forward, his entire body going limp in Dean’s arms, his wings thumping down against the table. Dean drags his hands up his back, until his fingers are buried in the downy feathers that molt into his shoulder blades. Dean can’t be certain, but he feels warmer than last night, like he’d been sleeping next to a fire. 

Fuck, fuck fuck.

Dean has no idea how to treat an infection, not really. He can try and prevent one from happening, sure—  he’s done that what feels like hundreds of times. But if the infection takes hold it’s out of his hands and he’s going to be left with a dead winged man on his table, or a possibly alive winged man forced into the spotlight. 

Dean presses his fist to his mouth, and his body feels like a bow-string pulled too taut, threatening to snap. There’s no one who can help, and there’s no one he trusts.

    Dean sits there for nearly thirty minutes, ignoring where his friend’s blood has stained his shirt. The cabin smells like iron, and like feathers, which he hadn’t realized was a distinct scent until it filled up the room. His phone sits in his hands. 

    The texture of the rug on the floor blurs with the sound of the ragged breathing next to him. 

    His phone rings.

    His fingertips burn where they touched his warm, soon to be cold thigh.

    It rings again.

    “Hey.” Dean expects Sam’s voice on the other end, and blinks, confused when he’s greeted with a familiar short drawl that he can’t immediately place.  

    “Missouri says he’s gonna be fine, kid.”

    The voice belongs to Pamela. 

    “Who?” Dean stands up abruptly. Is she outside?

    “Your birdman.”

    Dean doesn’t acknowledge the remark. “Who?”

    Once again, Dean is privy to a conversation happening away from the phone. It sounds like another woman talking, and she sounds annoyed. 

    “Oh. Missouri. The ol’ wife.”

    “Wife?” He runs a quick calculation in his head and then raises his eyebrows. That tracks. 

    “Dean Winchester, are you listening to me.”

    Uh, no? 

“Yeah, yeah okay. I heard you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

    Whatever she thinks she knows, she better not.

    Something that sounds, in a honey sweet and dainty voice, like ‘Give it here’ comes from the other end and then she’s speaking to him directly. 

    “Dean Winchester?” She asks.

    “Speaking.”

    “Mmkay, good. You better listen up, sweetheart because he’s gonna be fine, but I’m still sending Pam your way. She was a nurse before she retired early, so whatever is wrong with the wound, she should be able to help.”

    For once, Dean is rendered speechless, and utterly, utterly confused. 

    “You still there?”

    “Yeah.” Dean croaks. “Yeah, I’m still here.” He looks over at where Wings is laying. His skin should look sunkissed, but instead beads of sweat form along his tendons, and they’re pulled tight, his body tense even if he’s out cold. “How do you know about him?”

    “Pamela and I… we share some unique gifts. But that shouldn’t concern you right now. You’ve got a fallen angel dying in your living room. She’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, alright?” She doesn’t wait for his response. “Go dig up some of Rufus’ old stash. The good stuff.”

    “Why?” He feels deeply out of the loop. 

    “To calm your nerves. I can feel them from here. Alright now, I’m gonna hang up. Sit tight until she gets there.” 

▵▿▵

Knuckles rap against the door, and Dean nearly jumps out of his skin. From the time it took him to hang up to Pamela showing up at his door it had started to rain again. This time the storm was black, and he had a feeling there would be no sunset, just the dimming of the sky until the charcoal was pitch. He flips the porchlight on as he opens the door. 

Pamela’s black hair is caught under the strap of an army green duffel bag, and the rain drips down her forehead and off her chin, smearing her smokey eye shadow slightly. Standing next to her is a woman Dean hasn’t met yet. She stands tall, and if there is a height difference between her and Pamela, he can’t tell. Her ringlets are just as soaked as her wife's and her dark eyes catch the yellow of the porch light. Inexplicably, they're warm, and Dean lends himself to trusting them. 

“The psychic forgot her umbrella, huh?” Dean asks, stepping aside to let them in. 

Missouri makes  a face. 

“I was gonna say you’re the prettiest thing in these hills but…” Whatever she was going to say, dies as she takes in the sight strewn across the dining table. 

Pamela sets her duffle bag down in one of the seats pulled away from the table and then her arm goes limp as she stands there. Missouri stops by her side, the fingers of her hand trailing her arm until it rests stationary by Pamela’s, their pinkies intertwining. 

“Seeing and believing are truly two different things.” Missouri sounds almost reverent.

“Yeah.” Dean breathes, and, actually, he gets that. “Earlier, on the phone you called him a…” 

“An angel.”

There are a million questions he could ask but he settles on one. “How do you know?”

Pamela tears her gaze away for just a moment, to look over her shoulder at Dean. “That’s a long story for another night. Right now, we have an angel to save. You look terrible, by the way.”

“Mmhm. Dead on your feet. There’s nothing you can do to help right now. We’ll take care of your angel.”

“Have you eaten anything since you found him?” Pam asks. The duffle bag zipper slices through the ambient silence between words, and she rifles through it for a solid minute before she finally produces a pair of tweezers and what looks to be military grade cotton balls with a pleased grin.

His stomach makes a pathetic noise in response, however instead of making a move to eat something, he's standing there staring validly, wondering why these two women who live in the middle of nowhere are completely calm about Mr. Comatose being heaven sent.

It’s fairly obvious from the way their backs are turned to him now, heads leaning in close until they're almost touching so they can whisper in confidence, that he isn’t going to get any answers tonight. 

The exhaustion hits him like a tidal wave, breezing through his muscles, seeping straight into his bones and burrowing in his marrow. Pamela seems to have some left over hospital grade drugs in her nursing kit, and his new friend is completely subdued under the quiet blanket of sleep. 

“Dean.” He tears his gaze away from the middle distance, where it had gotten comfortable to see Pamela watching him, her eyes narrow with concern. “I don’t want to have to take care of you next. Eat something and get some rest. You’ve done enough. We’ll be out of your hair once we’re done.”

Dean shouldn’t trust them. But he does. He doesn’t have any other choice. Shuffling around, he shows Missouri the outlets, where Rufus’s first aid-kit (nearly an end-of-days cold war quantity) stash is shoved into the top three shelves of one of the three storage closets. Missouri promises to lock up and leave the key under the worn-through doormat, and Dean nods sleepily. 

Missouri pats his cheek, and for the briefest of moments, Dean misses home. He misses Sammy. His life had never been simple or easy or even nice, but at least it had been predictable. 

“He’s gonna be okay, sweetheart. I promise.”

▵▿▵

When he wakes, he’s in his bed and sleep-drunk, and there’s an empty space to his side, a starless void that he’d never been able to fill. In his living room lies the moon, and the stars, and the hopeful sliver of himself wonders if even the sun can be found there as well. The cabin is peaceful, a comforting fog of quiet wrapping him up. Sleep drags him under again, and he goes willingly. 

[enochianribs]

I promise to update UINLH today I prommy

[enochianribs]

Ok! UINLH (cabin fic) will update Wednesday. I think it's gonna be another chunky update. I also am going to write a big section of the outlast AU fic.

(Into the thick of it.mp3) for both of these.