Chapter 4

Books tower in stacks on the ends of the table. There's a lamp between them, and the journal Dean was reading in the motel sits open beneath it. Dean jabs his finger at the passage he was reading only moments before he flailed out of Sam's bed and landed on the floor. "The Holy Grail," he says, voice pleading, almost hoarse. "It says right here, 'The Cup of Life', and the Men of Letters found it. You can't just blow that off."

"All it says is that they discovered the location, Dean. There's like, one sentence, and it doesn't even say where that is." Sam sighs, runs his fingers through his hair. "I want this to end just as much as you do. More, I swear to god. But we can't get our hopes up about this. People have been searching for the Holy Grail for hundreds of years. It's never been found."

"That you know of," Dean says. "It's never been found as far as you know. Come on, Sammy. There's a lot of stuff we never knew about until we found out about the Men of Letters. We just got to go through these books, find out where it is, and go pick it up."

"Hang on, Dean," Sam says. "If they found it, wouldn't they have brought it here? Something like that in the wrong hands could be disastrous. They'd bring it here, to keep it safe, I'm sure of it."

Dean pulls a face. "Urgh," he says. "Yeah. You're right. Or people would go around resurrecting Hitler and stuff."

Sam lifts an eyebrow, then glances down at the book. "That was written in the 1930's, Dean."

Dean shrugs. "What? Like they didn't go back and dig it up after the war just to make sure." He shoves out away from the table, chair legs screeching across the floor, then stands. "Come on, Sammy. We've got some storerooms to check out."

---

When they moved in, while they explored, half the time they'd get a door open, figure out it was full of books or objects or jars of weird stuff on dusty shelves, and just shut it up again. There's always something going on more important than digging through piles of crap that may or may not be useful.

So in the first room they enter, there's not even a trail of footprints in the dust on the floor to prove they've even entered before. Sam doesn't seem to notice, wanders right in, drags his big feet through thick dust, and walks right up to a wall of shelves. "Come on," he says. "This one's all vessels of some kind or another." He waves his hand across the shelf at eye level. "It doesn't have to be a cup, you know."

"Yeah," Dean says. He takes a step forward, or tries to, at least. He can't move over the threshold. "What the hell—?"

Sam looks up. He puts the wooden bowl he's holding back on the shelf, and tips his head to the side as he walks back toward the door. "What's wrong?"

Dean lifts his foot, tries to move into the room again. Something pushes back, something invisible, like the doorway is a magnet and Dean is the opposite pole. "There's something keeping me out, Sammy." He can't keep the panic out of his voice, even though it's illogical. It's just one room, nothing inside but a bunch of dusty old artifacts, and it's not like Sam couldn't bring everything out if necessary.

Sam walks back to the doorway, drops into a crouch. He brushes his fingers over the floor at the base of the open doorway, sweeps away decades of dust. It reveals a strip of what looks like glass along the threshold, some kind of narrow glass case set into the floor. "There's salt in it," Sam says. "It's full of rock salt."

"Jesus." Dean turns away from the room, slides down to the floor with his back to the wall outside. "It's got to be here. There's salt embedded in the floor—they're trying to keep something out, demons, monsters. There's good stuff in this room, Sammy."

"Have you been in any of these rooms since—" Sam trails off. "They might all be protected."

"I don't know." Dean shakes his head. "Not the ones with the books, that's for sure. Just look, Sam. It's somewhere in the bunker, I can feel it."

"Okay." Sam heads back into the room, and for a few moments there's just the sound of dust shifting on ancient wood, on the shelves, on the floor beneath Sam's feet. Then: "Uh, Dean?"

"Yeah, Sammy?" There's hope in his voice, futile, perhaps, but it's there. "What've you got?"

"I don't think the salt is meant to keep things out of this room," Sam says.

Dean turns, crawls to the threshold of the door, feels the push of the barrier once again. He looks up at Sam, and there's a jar in Sam's hands, transparent glass covered in dust, but where the dust has been swept away by Sam's fingers, Dean can see that within, there is a swirling, glitching mist.

Dean scrambles to his feet, staring across the space. "There's a ghost in that jar," he says. "It's a ghost."

"Yup." Sam turns back to the shelves, places the jar carefully there, reaches for an ornate metal flask. It looks like it's made of silver, but it's black with decades worth of tarnish. There's a paper label around the neck of it, and he lifts it to read. "Demon extracted from one 'Timothy White', age 5 years."

"They kept demons and ghosts," Dean says. "That's sick."

"I don't know," Sam says. "Maybe it's like cryogenics, all those people who had their heads frozen in the eighties, believing that one day technology would be able to bring them back to life. Maybe they thought that one day, they'd be able to help them. Like, curing the demons. Like you."

"They bound a ghost to a jar instead of a meat suit?" Dean eyes the jar, the contents swirling and flashing inside. "Maybe you should have done that." He looks up at Sam and tries to grin. "You could have carried me around in your pocket."

"It wouldn't have been the same. I need you Dean. I need you talking, I need you here." Sam shakes his head. "I wouldn't put you in a bottle." Sam frowns, looks back at the shelves. "I bet there are Djinn here. It's got to be where the whole genie in a lamp myth came from, the practice of storing monsters in jars and stuff."

"Thinking you might make a wish?"

Sam grins and shakes his head. "Hell no."

---

Sam crouches at the threshold of the next room, sweeps away the dust from the floor. "No salt," he says, as he exposes bare floor boards.

"Sweet," Dean says, and walks into the room before Sam is back up on his feet.

Something hits him as he passes under the door frame. He shudders, all the breath knocked out of him, and he gasps, freezes, stares forward for a moment. Then he sucks in a breath.

He feels different. He's not cold anymore. He feels lighter, almost as if he might drift away.

"Dean," Sam says, and with all they've seen, Sam's voice doesn't sound like that often. Like horror, like disbelief.

Dean turns on the ball of one foot. "Oh, holy shit." He blinks, stares, because while he's inside the room, he's also in Sam's arms on the other side of the doorway.

"Dean," Sam says.

Dean looks down at his own hands. They look solid, seem solid, feel, solid. But there's color in them, they're not white like they have been since he woke up dead. His outfit doesn't match the clothes he put on this morning, and there's no bandage on his thigh. "Whoa," he says, then looks back up at Sam, Dean's dead body in his arms. "I'm a ghost," he says. "Like, just a ghost. Non-corporeal spook." He takes a step back. "What do I do, Sam? Sammy? What do I do?"

"Um," Sam says, eyes wide, staring up at Dean and then down at the body in his arms. "Um." He looks back up. "Come back out. You were... I bound you to your body. There's got to be something in the door—" He looks up at the door frame, reaches out to touch it. Dust comes away under his fingertips, exposing arcane symbols carved into the wood. "Must be some kind of dispossession. It's not an exorcism, but it's probably meant for demons. It'd probably work on angels as well, but, um, ghost possession too, apparently." He looks up. "Come back out, Dean."

Dean looks down at his hands again. He clenches his fists, watches as the simulation of blood moves beneath his skin. The cold doesn't reach him, and the stiffness of his joints doesn't exist anymore.

"Dean," Sam says. "I bound you before a reaper could come. I don't know what will happen if you stay like that, if you don't come back."

This isn't real. This is what Dean is now, but staying here, remaining outside his body would be like giving up, like accepting that he's just going to move on and leave Sam alone, and Dean's not ready for that.

He looks up, looks into Sam's eyes. "Yeah," he says. "Okay." He takes a step forward. "I'm coming out."

One step at a time, Dean approaches the doorway. His body still lies limp in Sam's arms, neck bent, head back against Sam's shoulder. His eyes are still open, staring at the ceiling, blank and dead. There are dark circles beneath his eyes, and he looks... Dean looks dead.

"Look at me, Sammy," Dean says. "Look at me now. Remember what I look like now." He nods at the body in Sam's arms. "In case that's all I ever am. Remember me now."

Sam nods. "I will," he says, voice breaking as he sucks in air between the words. "I already do, Dean."

Dean takes a breath, and then he steps through the door.

As soon as his body passes the threshold, something grabs him in the chest, and jerks him forward. When he stepped into the room, it was like a release, this time, it's a violent pull. The corridor blurs around him, and then he's cold, and stiff, but wrapped in warmth. He takes a breath and blinks at the ceiling, and he goes heavy in Sam's arms.

Sam sinks to the floor with Dean in his arms, and Dean just goes with him. He doesn't feel right in his skin, not yet, it's like waking up all over again. He doesn't have the strength to move yet.

"Dean?" Sam says, and his breath washes, warm, over Dean's cheek. "Dean, are you okay?"

"I'm good, Sammy," Dean says, and he gets one arm moving, reaches up and covers Sam's arm with his own. "I'm back."

They stay like that for long minutes. Dean breathes, and absorbs Sam's warmth, and stares back into the room that pulled him out of his meat suit.

---

"I'm not going in there," Dean says, as he leans carefully on the outside of the door frame of yet another storage room. "Not in the mood to get kicked out of my meat suit again."

Sam turns from his examination of the wood framing. His face is pained. "Can you stop calling it that? It's your own body, you haven't stolen it from anyone, it's not a vessel. It's where you're supposed to be."

Dean gives Sam a wry smile. "No. It's where you wanted me. I should be in heaven, or in hell, or in the veil." He sighs, because he's inviting Sam to start talking about that second bullet again. "Never mind. Just, see if the grail is in here so we can move on."

Sam purses his lips and returns to his examination of the doorway. "There's nothing. No salt, no symbols. I think you're safe."

Dean narrows his eyes. "What if I explode this time?"

Sam shakes his head. "I'm 99% sure you won't."

Dean crosses his arms over his chest and lifts his chin. "I'm going with the safe 1%, little brother."

Sam tips his head in a shrug and crosses the threshold. He approaches a shelf and blows dust off the artifacts there. "Dean," he says, as his eyes move over them. "There are cups here."

Dean trips over the threshold before he can think better of it. Then he turns, looks back, but he's still in one piece. "If I'm stuck in here for all eternity, Sammy, I'm blaming you."

"Cups and bowls and all kinds of things, Dean," Sam says. He scratches at the label on a shelf as Dean comes up behind him. The plates are tarnished and crusted with grime. "These have been here a while, Dean."

If his heart could beat, it would probably damn near explode. Dean reaches out for the first cup he sees, a wide, shallow vessel on a foot, lifts it off the shelf. It's got weight behind it, but it's too coated in dust and grime to know what it's made of, to make out the designs that bump the outer surface. He holds it in his hands and looks inside.

Sam scrubs at the label on the edge of the shelf where it sat. "Whoa," he says.

"What?" Dean turns the cup in his hands, instinctively pulls it toward his chest. "Is this it? Is this the one, Sammy? Tell me it's the one."

Sam stands up and licks his lips, bites the lower one as he tries to hide a smile. "Dean, if you drink from that, you'll probably get pregnant."

Dean blinks, almost loses his grip on the cup. "What?"

Sam runs his finger along the edge of the shelf, then turns to the shelves on the back wall and blows dust off the artifacts stored there. "These are all fertility relics."

Dean shoves the cup at Sam, turns his attention to the back wall. "Huh," he says, and reaches for the largest of the relics there. He holds it up in front of him, grins at Sam. "Mine's bigger than yours," he says.

Sam blushes and looks from the large marble phallus in Dean's hands, then down at the vessel he holds in his own. He quickly shoves the bowl back onto the shelf behind him. "Dean, god." He grabs the phallus from Dean's hands and then puts it back on the shelf. "Don't mess with the mystical artifacts," he says. "If the Men of Letters hid them away here, they did it for a reason. This stuff could be dangerous."

The words are barely out of Sam's mouth before Dean feels a tingle way down. He lifts an eyebrow, and looks down. Slowly, his dick fills, eventually starts straining against the fly of his jeans. "Huh," he says. "I didn't even think that would work considering my current condition." He looks up. "That thing is mystical viagra."

Sam looks profoundly uncomfortable, and turns away, hands fisted on his thighs. He clears his throat. "Uh. Yeah. Dammit."

Dean laughs. "You touched it too. Awesome." His jeans are too tight now, and he steps around his dick as he makes for the door.

"Where are you going?" Sam says, panic in his voice.

"I'm going to jerk off," Dean says. "I'd figured that was a pleasure no longer within my grasp, due to my entire lack of blood, so I'm making the most of this." He looks back over his shoulder. "Don't lock the room up. I might be back." He winks, and then heads for the shower.

"Dean, we've got work to do," Sam calls after him.

"Twenty minutes, Sammy."

---

It's only been a few days, but for Dean, it's a long time to go without getting off. And he had figured it was all over for him as far as sex was concerned. For one thing, he looks like what he is—a goddamn corpse. No one's going to want to hit that. But the days when he would wander into a bar and find a woman for a night just to get off are long past.

Lately, he just started the day with a shower and an orgasm, but he figured his dick didn't work anymore. You need blood for that, right?

Yet, Dean lies on his own bed—the bed he hasn't slept in since the night before he died—and looks down at the chub poking out of his unzipped fly, and it's hard. "So cool," he says to himself, and then trails his finger up the underside from the base to the leaking tip. "So goddamn cool." He hasn't been this excited about an erection since he was twelve years old.

The skin is still pale, so it must be mystical. When he wraps his hand around it, the pulsing heat he's accustomed to isn't there, either. Still, it feels good, small shivers of pleasure tightening his balls, twisting in his belly.

There are shivers of cold, too. Lying here like this, immobile but for the shifting of his hand over his cock, he feels it more than when he's moving around. He should probably jump in the shower, get off surrounded in warm water, but right now he's just going to do this. He's in no hurry, and wants to make it last, because he's probably said goodbye to the spontaneous arousal he was so used to experiencing before he died.

His mind keeps flicking back to warmth, though. To being heated right to the core, and unfortunately, the shower doesn't do it like being wrapped up in Sam's bed does.

Sparks shoot up Dean's spine and he doubles over with the intensity of his arousal. He pulls his hand off his dick and slams both palms down on the bed beside his hips. "Awkward," he says, staring at his feet and gasping for breath. "Nope. No. I'm not going to think about that." He closes his eyes, takes a breath in, and consciously shifts his mind to thoughts of the warmth and sound of hot water beating down on his skin. It works, imagines the high pressure shower heads in the bunker—not the wimpy pressure of most motel showers—on his nipples, and then he returns his hand to his dick.

He's almost there, lost in the so-close, not-quite, need of his impending orgasm, and then the shower is gone and there's warm flesh pressed against him, a large warm hand on his belly, but it's too late to pull back, to stop.

He cries out, makes a strangled sound that is half pleasure, half horror, as he starts to come, something cold and sticky spilling out over his fingers and streaking up his belly.

Dean opens his eyes and looks down. "Oh, shit," he says.