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Dean is dreaming.
They’ve been taking the watch in turn for weeks now. It took some time to get there, longer still for Dean to actually roll over and fall asleep instead of watching Benny through slitted eyes like he’s just waiting for him to make a move for the jugular. What Dean did before Benny came along, he doesn’t know. Maybe he didn’t sleep at all.
Purgatory is funny like that — the rules aren’t quite the same. Hunger and exhaustion exist, just like on Earth, and going days on end without food or sleep runs you ragged, turns you sharp-edged and jangling with desperate energy. Doesn’t kill you, though. If there’s no food to be had, you’ll just ride that knife’s edge forever, far as Benny can tell. He should know; he hasn’t eaten in fifty years.
There are nights when he watches Dean sleep and thinks he’s right to be wary. That beat of human blood under his skin — Benny can hear it, smell it, practically taste it. He’s thought more than once of asking Dean for just a taste, just a taste, just when he’s bleeding already from a fight, just when he wouldn’t miss it. Dean might even let him.
‘Course, they’d both know the real reason. A test. And Benny would fail it, wouldn’t be able to stop once he starts, and Dean would kill him, and all this would be for nothing.
There’s no doubt in his mind who’d win that fight. He’s seen Dean kill vamps he’d never tangle with, not in a thousand years. Some of them have been here for a thousand years. Others sent by Dean himself — and now he’s sent them on to the next thing, another layer of Purgatory or sheer oblivion, Benny wouldn’t know. For years now, Benny’s been hearing the whispers, the name Winchester. He’s never cared much for rumors, though, didn’t really give them a second thought until Dean showed up in the flesh — God, is he in the flesh, for a moment the hunger nearly swamps Benny, his whole body aches with the effort of choking it down — and started cutting a swath through the hordes of nasties who want a taste of him more than they’ve ever wanted anything in the world.
Benny can relate. Enough that he almost came after Dean himself; enough that he almost stayed the hell away. But he watches the pulse jump under Dean’s skin and reminds himself, again and again, that there’s something he wants even more than the blood meal sprawled on the hard ground next to him. He wants revenge.
---
Dean is dreaming, and there’s a smile on his face.
It makes him look different, younger. It’s not the feral grin he wears in the thick of a fight but something softer. Then he turns his head and his lips move soundlessly, speaking to someone only he can see.
A pause. The smile fades. “I don’t know,” says Dean, and sits up straight.
His eyes are open and alert, no sign of the disorientation of sleep. He turns his head to see Benny watching him. He doesn’t blink.
“All right, brother?” Benny asks, burying his unease in a thick drawl.
“I’m not your brother,” Dean says automatically, like he always does, and doesn’t look away.
“Bad dream?” Benny knows it wasn’t. He’s seen Dean’s bad dreams, knows the way his body tightens, the tension around his eyes, the way his hands twitch and grasp and he never wakes up, never makes a sound.
Dean doesn’t answer for a minute. His voice when he does is a little sleep-rough, as if he’s let the hyperawareness of waking ebb. “I dreamed my dad was alive,” he says.
“Here?”
“No,” says Dean, “topside. He asked me —”
He stops there, looks away. “Your turn,” he says, and Benny doesn’t argue, just settles himself down for his own few hours of sleep.
---
Truth be told, it took Benny longer than Dean to sleep without fear, even though he was the one who proposed the split watches.
There’s no logic to it. Dean’s not battling the hunger of half a century, the round-the-clock barrage of temptation; Dean doesn’t belong here, needs Benny to get out.
He can tell himself all those things. He’s not sure he believes them. There are days when Benny thinks Dean belongs here more than he himself ever has; days when Dean tortures and kills with searing pleasure, with single-minded devotion. And Dean doesn’t need Benny to get out, not really — just needs the knowledge in his head, which he gleaned from others, which exists outside of him. And Benny’s watched Dean pull intel from sobbing monsters, knowing just where to slice and carve, just how to not-quite-kill.
He’s watched Dean look coolly down at a vamp with his sternum split in two, with his chest cavity gaping open and flies already buzzing to it, a vamp who’s clinging grimly to his secrets and his life. Benny’s watched Dean calmly slice his own hand, let a single drop of blood fall to the vamp’s gasping lips.
You’ll get another, Dean says in the memory, if you tell me what you know about the angel.
One more drop before you die, he doesn’t say, but the vamp hears it anyway.
I’ve heard he’s west of here, he breathes. Two days’ journey. Could be gone by now.
And Dean looks down on him, calmly considering. Thank you, he says. The vamp watches blood drip from his fist to the ground below, fanatical acceptance written across his face. Dean bends down, tears a strip from the vamp’s shirt, and ties it methodically around his palm.
Please, the vamp gasps. You promised. Please. Dean says nothing. Takes his head in a single blow.
That’s the scene that would haunt Benny’s nightmares, if he still knew how to dream.
---
He can’t do it.
It happens in the middle of one of Dean’s nightmares. Soundless as always, but worse than usual, one that’s got Dean tossing and turning and sweating, heart beating fast, fast, and the smell of his blood just swamps Benny’s senses, warm and intoxicating. He tries to stop them, but his fangs slide out and he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s catching Dean’s wrist in both hands and bends low, savoring the anticipation, ready for the bite.
Dean’s eyes open and lock with his. With an icy rush of fear, Benny thinks, I’m dead.
“Easy, brother,” says Dean. He doesn’t break Benny’s gaze. He doesn’t pull away. “Easy now.”
Benny hovers there, transfixed. The blood is so close, so close, but so are Dean’s eyes, and they’re clear, they’re calm.
“That’s right,” says Dean, and Benny feels his fangs receding back into his gums. He eases back a fraction, loosens his grip on Dean’s arm, and still, Dean doesn’t pull away. “You’re all right,” he murmurs instead, and he’s sitting up, moving slowly, fluidly, as if he’s trying not to spook a skittish animal. His wrist pivots in the loose circle of Benny’s fingers, and then he’s clasping Benny’s arm, grip tight, as if this was what Benny was seeking all along. His other hand slides through the short hair at the back of Benny’s head, strong and sure, cradling it, drawing him in until their foreheads rest together, noses almost brushing, breathing in harsh gasps of each other’s air.
“You’re all right,” Dean says again, and somehow, that makes it true.
---
“That dream,” says Dean, “about my dad.”
It’s a few nights later, a secluded enough spot that they’ve chanced a fire, and they’re sitting on either side of it now, watching it burn low. There’s something about the death of a fire, Benny thinks, that makes men honest with each other. He waits.
“He asked me how Sammy was. My brother.”
He doesn’t say anything else for a long time, just stirs the coals idly with a long stick. The stubble on his jaw gleams in the firelight. His eyes are in shadow.
“That when you woke up?” Benny asks eventually, remembering that I don’t know. The blank force of it, like a vital truth dredged up from the depths of Dean’s soul.
Across the fire, Dean nods. “He —” he starts, then stops. “I went to hell for him once,” he says. “To save his life. Got back, and he’d nearly killed himself trying to get me out, then gone and got himself addicted to demon blood.”
Understanding slides through Benny’s ribs. Dean’s eyes locked on his, Benny’s mouth mere inches from his wrist. Easy, brother. Easy now.
“I never could help him,” Dean admits now, quietly. “I never could. And things got worse and worse between us, and I just keep hanging on, keep telling myself that sometimes they get better. Through everything. All this shit he’s been through, all this shit I couldn’t stop.”
Silence stretches out between them, broken only by the fire’s occasional sharp pop . Dean’s got his head held low, face mostly hidden in shadow, and he looks young, a little wild, afraid. It makes Benny dizzy for a moment, that this is the cold-blooded killer he runs with, the guy who still scares him shitless more days than he doesn’t.
Then he sees that Dean’s crying.
It’s just the single tear that catches his eye, tracking down the right side of Dean’s nose, but it spears him with a sudden, blinding need to act. He’s on his feet and drawing Dean to his, pulling him in, wrapping strong arms around him. And Dean is sliding his jaw against Benny’s, tilting his head, and then they’re kissing, slick and open-mouthed, messy, desperate.
“I don’t want to go back,” Dean gasps into his mouth. “I don’t want to go back.”
Benny doesn’t answer that, can’t answer that, but he slides his hands under Dean’s shirt — it’s filthy, they’re both filthy, sweat and mud and dried blood caked to every inch of them — thumbs over his hips, his ribs, and Dean’s gasp this time is a different kind, the kind that Benny can work with, the kind that doesn’t mean impossible choices and fresh nightmares no matter where you turn. And he’s Dean again, Dean in a new and electrifying and freshly terrifying way, twisting Benny over his hip and onto the ground, and following him down, down, clever hands and hot mouth and flashing teeth, and Benny gives himself up to the ride.
---
Afterward, they lie there naked, a fresh sheen of sweat drying on them both. Benny’s wiped out, about as sated and exhausted as he thinks he’s ever felt, but Dean’s still got this restless, prowling energy. He presses kisses to Benny’s chest, his stomach; skates slow hands down his thighs, exploring, learning the geography passed over in their hasty clash.
“Winchester,” Benny groans, feeling the faint, helpless stirrings of fresh desire, “you’re going to kill me one day.” He means it, he thinks, in a hundred different ways.
Dean raises his head, and there’s a hard look in his eyes, a battle look. “Not ‘til I get you out of here,” he says, and his voice is bloody, a promise.
“You don’t have to,” Benny manages, choking back a gasp as Dean nuzzles his inner thigh. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“Shut up,” says Dean, and Benny does.
---
The fire is well and truly out by the time they’re dressed again and resuming their normal routines: Dean’s got first watch, and Benny’s certainly tired enough for a couple good hours of sleep. He rolls onto his back, watching Dean’s profile out of the corner of his eye. A few stars are visible through the branches overhead. Somehow, in fifty years, Benny’s never thought to check and see if the constellations are the same.
“I do have to,” Dean murmurs, some time later. Benny’s not even sure he’s awake, except that he knows he doesn’t dream. The moon is up now, just a crescent, just enough light to see Dean’s shape through the gloom.
“It’s Sam,” says Dean, softly. “He’s mine. My responsibility. And he’s probably doing something stupid right now, trying to get me out, and I can’t — I can’t let him, Benny. I gotta get myself out first. I gotta get you out. I gotta get Cas.”
He says it like a mantra, like he’s stacking the foundation stones of Dean Winchester, building and rebuilding the path that points him on. Because there is this, under it all.
In time, Benny thinks, Dean Winchester might be a legend. Half man, half god, an angel of death, the nightmare stalking every monster’s deepest shadows and darkest fears. Forged by hellfire, quenched in the heart of Purgatory, a weapon like none of them has ever seen. But there is this, under it all.
Benny reaches for him, groping in the dark. What he finds is an ankle. He circles it in his fingers, asks them to say what he can’t: I see you. I know you. You will kill me one day, Dean Winchester. I forgive you, Dean Winchester.
“You don’t gotta do it alone,” he says. Above them, Orion wheels his slow way home.