Cowboys and Angels

24. Brother's Keeper

(Season 10 The Road So Far recap; one of my favorites of all time.)

A laptop was open, showing the email from Charlie to Sam. '911 -- see attached!!!!' The message body said, 'Sam, can't talk now. DL this file!" 'FORDEAN.doc'. Underneath the file name it showed 'symbol translator' and 'instant download'.

On the table, were photos of the Winchesters. One was a black and white photo of Dean as a young boy with Mary. The other photo, slightly obscured, showed Dean and a younger Mary.

A bullet was being held in a vice of some sort. A hand was holding a syringe over the top of the bullet and injecting liquid into it.

Castiel was holding the bullet. "Anything?"

Sam was at the table with several bullets on a rack, the vice and the syringe sitting in a bottle of blue liquid.

"12 voicemails to him," Sam said. "LoJack on the Impala has clearly been disabled. So a big scoop of nothing. We need Rowena to hold up her end of the bargain -- now."

Sam took a hammer to the top of the bullet. Castiel rolled her eyes, turned away, and sighed frustratingly.

"What?" Sam asked.

"Nothing. It's -- it's just if she removed the Mark using The Book of the Damned... What of the consequences?" Castiel questioned.

"Which are what?"

"Dean said-"

"Dean guessed!" Sam yelled. He took a breath and let out with a huff. "Cas, what are we supposed to do? Just sit on our asses and do nothing?"

"No. We find Dean." She raised her voice.

"And then what?!" Sam cried. "The only thing that stopped Cain was death. Do you want to kill Dean? Because I don't. And the only way I know how to save my brother is to cure the Mark. And, yes, I know there will be consequences, but not you, not Dean, not anybody can tell us what those consequences are. So we're not gonna let my brother, d-destroy himself on a guess. We save Dean."

---

Dean was lying on a carpeted floor, looking ragged. A truck horn blared, and he startled and lifted his head off the rug. As he started to rise, his phone chimed. He got up, stumbled to sit on the motel room beds, and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. The screen showed '12 Messages from Sam'. Dean dropped his head, sighed, and took a sip of a beer that were on the nightstand. He took a bigger sip and beer spilled down his chin. He breathed heavily as he rubbed a hand down his face.

"Ahh. I'm good. I'm good," Dean lied to himself.

---

A hand with bruised knuckles flexed open and closed. There was a girl in a short denim skirt a floral tank lying dead on the ground. There was blood on her neck. Dean looked down at the girl from the top of the ditch.

The sheriff came up alongside him. "Rose McKinley. Raised up about three miles from here. Nice parents, God-fearin' folk."

"Well, they let her leave the house looking like a whore," Dean said.

"Whoa. Why don't you tell me what you really think, Agent?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Sheriff. My bad."

"Let me tell you how we work out here, son. That right there could be the Whore of Babylon -- wouldn't make no difference at all. 'Cause all I see is somebody's little girl."

"And I feel like a real jerk suggesting otherwise, Sheriff. My apologies." He didn't sound apologetic and the sheriff started walking away. "Good luck crackin' the case with your eyes shut."