title: what fun it all would be (1/4)

summary: Nothing dies in Purgatory, but they are forever finding corpses.

pairing: Dean/Castiel

warnings: language, violence, gore, suggestive situations

a/n: A thoroughly jossed Purgatory fic. Nothing in "Slice Girls" indicated that Amazons eat the flesh of their human fathers to become full-fledged Amazons/survive, but I tweaked that a little here because I'm gross like that. Also, I pretty much dispensed with even an attempt at plot or SPN-accurate vampirism. Please adjust your expectations accordingly.

Title from a Led Zeppelin song.

i.

It's a Tuesday, which means it's Dad's turn to pick Emma up from Kid Care. He comes in a few minutes after Keisha's mom picks her up, looking up and going "oof!" as Emma barrels into him.

"C'mon, c'mon, Dad, let's go!" She yanks at his hand, bouncing from foot to foot as he signs her out in the big binder on the lunchroom table. He takes forever to write his name; it shouldn't take him that long, Emma knows, because she can write her name faster than this and she has the same number of letters in her name as he does, E-M-M-A W-I-N-C-H-E-S-T-ER, and come on, Dad, can't he see she's got news?

"See ya, Jen," Dad gives a wave to Miss Jenny and then finally lets Emma drag him out the doors. "What's the rush, kiddo? You late for a hot date?"

"Da-a-a-a-d," because that doesn't even deserve a response, really, and she tosses her lunchbox into the backseat and clambers into the front, because even if she's really impatient she's never going to stop trying to make Dad let her ride in the front seat of the Impala. When he pushes on his sunglasses and gives her an uh-uh look, she huffs loudly and slithers between the front seats to the back.

"I guess if I can't sit in front I can't share my Doritos with you," she informs Dad as she buckles her seatbelt and pulls out her lunchbox. Dad always makes fun of her for saving part of her lunch to eat on the ride home, but he usually eats some of it, too.

"I guess you don't have any Doritos to share, you little troll," Dad retorts. "Cuz I saw Papa pack your lunch this morning and the only chips I saw in there were made of shriveled-up bananas."

Emma glowers into her lunchbox, which is indeed devoid of Doritos. The banana chips Papa packed for her still sit there in their snack-sized Ziploc bag, all pale and hard and gross. Papa hasn't let them buy Doritos in forever, ever since he saw that dumb thing on the news about eating healthy, and he keeps buying weird crunchy granola and stuff instead, and it's like being at Uncle Sam and Aunt Amelia's house all the time, and "Daaaad, can't you make Papa let us buy Doritos?"

She hears a rummaging sound in the front seat. Then Dad's handing her something over his shoulder, a bag-of Doritos! And not even the plain cheesy ones, the cool ranch ones like she likes. "Dad!" she shouts in delight.

"Yeah, yeah. Just make sure you lick your fingers clean before we get home," Dad says, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. "And no cheese on the seats!"

What with the surprise Doritos, Emma completely forgets about her news, until they got home and Papa's sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper with a cup of tea next to his hand.

"Don't even think about it, Emma," Dad begins, but Emma's already taking off, getting a running start through the living and leaping into Papa's lap, right on top of his newspaper.

"Oof!" goes Papa.

Emma smacks a Hi Papa kiss on his cheek, aiming high near his eye, since she doesn't like his pricklies. "Papa, guess what!"

"Emma, what've I told you?" Dad stomps into the kitchen holding Emma's lunchbox. "You are too bony to go jumping on people. And Cas-" He points accusingly at Papa, "you're too bony to let her. One of these days, you two are going to impale each other. God, my kid's a monkey."

Emma and Papa ignore him; they're used to Dad yelling when he's not really angry. "Hello, Emma," Papa says solemnly, keeping her balanced on his knee with one hand and tugging the newspaper free with the other. He pauses, and looks at her. "Is what you want me to guess that your father gave you Doritos?"

Emma goes open-mouthed. How did he know?

Behind Papa, Dad grins, then, then Papa turns around to look at him, changes it to an appalled look (the kind that means he's so going to throw her under the bus, as Uncle Sam says). "Emma! You've been eating Doritos? You know Dad #2 doesn't like you eating junk food."

"You gave them to me!" Emma protests, but there are more pressing matters here. She looks at Papa. "How did you know?"

Dad makes a snorting noise like he's trying not to laugh. Papa looks back at her, shifts her slightly on his lap, away from him. He says delicately, "You smell like them. Perhaps Dad should give you some gum to chew, next time." He looks at Dad, who's grinning sneakily as he comes to stand by Papa's chair.

"Sorry, Dorito Breath," he tells her, leaning down to give Papa a kiss.

Papa wrinkles his nose as Dad pulls away. "You have Dorito breath too, Dean."

Dad looks at Emma, who looks back, and then, in unison, they exhale gustily in Papa's direction.

Papa blinks at both of them long-sufferingly. "How delightful," he sighs, and promptly gets up, sending Emma sliding off his lap with a yelp. "For that, you can prepare the beans for dinner."

"What?" Emma and Dad whine in unison, but Papa's already back from the kitchen with a pot and a bag of green beans, putting them on the table. "The two of you can snap them while Emma tells us her exciting news."

This cheers Emma up slightly. She climbs onto the chair across from Cas and opens her backpack. "Look!"

The letter's stapled in her agenda; Ms. Monaghan stapled it in everyone's agendas today during reading time. She shoves it across the table to Papa, who's already taking a pen from his pocket to sign off on today's date for her. He holds the pen cap between his teeth as he begins to read the letter (even though he's always telling Dad not to do that because pens have germs on them, to which Dad always says, "You think germs are gonna be what finally kills me, Cas?" To which Papa says, "No, I think they will make you ill and cause you to whine to the rest of us about how ill you feel so that we feel bad for you and agree to go buy you a cheeseburger that will only make you feel worse than before." "That was one time, Cas-" "Twice, Dean. It was twice").

Dad's leaning around the table, trying to read the letter with Papa. Papa starts to read it aloud instead, as Emma bounces in excitement on the other side of the table. "Dear parents-slash-guardians. We are excited to inform you that the third grade classes will be attending Elementary Biztown on Tuesday, September 18. This is a day-long workshop held for elementary schoolers in which they are assigned jobs and learn how to act as entrepreneurs, government officials and citizens in a simulated town facility."

Papa stops. "I'm afraid I don't understand. They're already making the children choose their vocations?" He sounds concerned.

"No, it's like a pretend thing," Dad replies. "The kids all get pretend jobs with fake pay and stuff, and they get to go buy stuff with their fake money to teach them how to budget and write checks and stuff." He elbows Papa. "You would've benefited from something like this, actually."

"It does sound as if it would have been helpful," Papa says. "This sounds very educational, Emma. Would you like one of us to chaperone?"

Emma nearly dies of horror. "No! The whole point is to be grown up, I don't want you guys there treating me like a baby!"

"Hey, I don't treat you like a baby." Dad looks offended for a minute, then goes back to looking at the brochure that came with the letter, grinning. "Dude, I remember Sam doing one of these when he was in grade school. He got assigned to be a custodian, he was so mad."

"Why?" Papa asks. "Custodians are invaluable to the function of any workplace."

Dad snorts again and ruffles Papa's hair. "Only you, Cas," he says affectionately, and looks over at Emma. "I think exciting news like this calls for pizza. Do you think it calls for pizza?"

Emma's response is to give Papa the biggest, saddest, Uncle Sammiest puppy dog eyes she can manage.

Papa puts a hand to his face, shakes his head. "Fine," he relents, and when Emma whoops, "But it has to have wheat crust."

"Whoah, hey, I didn't sign up for that," Emma hears Dad say as she tromps upstairs to put her backpack away.

- o -

Nothing dies in Purgatory, but they are forever finding corpses. Dean doesn't think he'll ever forget the first time he trips over his own dead body, falling hard in the wet carpet of leaves and catching himself on a hand thrown heavily into something soft that gives under his weight. He looks down and sees blank eyes staring past him up at the tree cover. Familiar blank eyes, his own, protruding from a rotting mess of face.

There are no flies in purgatory to eat the soft parts of the dead, the eyes and the tongue and the other parts that usually go first. It looks like they just start to liquefy instead.

"Holy shit," he says, voice shaking more than he'll ever admit. He looks at Cas, instead of his own fucking corpse. "Is that...?"

He's only been alive again for a few days. He'd bled out after a fucking vetala, of all things, got the drop on while he was trying to find Cas. Imagine his surprise at watching everything go black and then waking, some indeterminable amount of time later, to Cas's face floating extra-clearly above him, like the knock to the head had made everything go high-definition, and blood or marks at all on the chest that had been mangled the last time he checked.

"You?" Cas says. He looks grave, but then what else is new. He looks tired, which would have been new once but hadn't been in a long time. "Yes."

"Like...shifter me?" It's been over 40 years since then, in Dean-time, but Dean will probably never forget what it felt to barge into that chick's house and see himself strangling Sammy. "He ended up here, right?"

"This is you," Cas says. "Look at the coat."

Dean looks. The-him-is wearing his new jacket, the preppy one Sam grabbed for him after Dad's got left behind in that stupid junker. And part of his anti-possession tattoo is visible through the gory mess of mauled shoulder. He hadn't had that yet when the shifter took him.

"So I..." He looks at himself, remembered spirit-walking with that kid when Alastair tried to break the seal with the reapers. "I'm dead? Actually?"

"Dean." Cas is looking at him with the look he always gets when he doesn't understand why Dean's making a big deal out of something. "The vetala killed you."

"Yeah, but-" Dean spreads his arms. "Look at me. Still kicking here, Cas."

Cas is still frowning his troubled Dean-is-being-particularly-human-today frown. "Dean. I told you that this is where things which are not human come to prey upon each other for all eternity."

"...and?"

"How do you think they prey upon each other for all eternity if they stay dead when they are killed?"

"Yeah, because that makes so much sense, Cas," Dean says flippantly. But his guts are twisting. "Thing is, I'm not a monster. I'm not a shifter, or..."

Cas is watching him silently. His you-know-why gaze answers a question Dean has always sort of had, and never wanted to ask, because, you know, he'd been right, he hadn't wanted to know that Cas had known. You knew that soulless son of a bitch let me get turned and you didn't do anything about it. That had been a different Cas, maybe, and it had been a different Sam, too, and now it's a different Dean, thanks to both of them, and he isn't going to think about this now, goddamnit. "Got it. Great. So-get turned into a bloodsucker once, and you're screwed for eternity. Awesome." He grips the knife in his hand more tightly, looks down at old-him's caved-in face without looking at it.

"If we leave this behind it's going to get eaten, isn't it."

Cas is shifting from foot to foot. His gaze has gone to the dark trees behind Dean. "Eventually."

And they don't have anything to set it on fire with, even if they could afford to reveal their location like that. Dean momentarily considers taking the time to bury it, abandons the idea when a howl comes through the trees behind him, still a good distance away but probably not for long.

They run.

- o -

For Biztown, the kids in Emma's class have to wear what Mrs. Mahon calls "mature clothing," which makes Dad snort and spew out his coffee when he reads it in the letter that comes with Emma's permission slip.

"Dean, really," Papa says dryly.

Dad grins, wipes his mouth. "Guess that means you gotta go shopping, huh?" he says to Emma. "I bet Aunt Amelia'll die of happiness to take you shopping for fancy girl stuff."

Emma has other ideas. Auntie A's great, but she always asks Emma, "Are you sure that's what you want?" like she thinks Emma should choose something else instead. But Emma already has an outfit in mind. Luckily, there's one person she can always count on not to argue with her fashion sense. "But I want Papa to take me."

Dad blinks. Papa just takes a last sip of his tea and says, "All right." He stands up and goes to pull on his jacket.

"Hey, Emma," Dad says loudly, eyes twinkling. "Don't let Papa talk you into buying a trench coat, okay?"

Papa comes back into the kitchen with Emma's jacket. "If only you were as funny as you think you are, Dean."

"Whatever, you think I'm adorable," Dad says.

Emma's frowning. "I remember your trench coat." It's a blurry memory, kind of like when she tries to remember being a baby (Andrew Cooper told everyone at lunch the other day that he could remember coming out of his mommy's belly, but Mason said he was lying because babies don't even grow eyeballs until they're a week old, and Mason always gets A's in Science, so Emma believes him), but she's pretty sure she can remember Papa wearing something soft and khaki that had a lot of loose threads that tickled her nose.

Dad and Papa are giving each other Father Looks. "Yeah?" Dad says. "You remember that?"

"I guess a little," she says, wrinkling her nose. "I don't think it smelled very good." She steps into her favorite galoshes, clomps crookedly to the door. "Hey, Papa, if I'm good, can we get Chinese at the mall?"

- o -

It should have been a relief. Right? Coming back to life every time he died. Like an endless get-out-of-jail-free card that he sure as hell needs because there's no downtime in Purgatory, monsters springing from above, below, and every freaking 360 degrees around him.

Of course it isn't that simple.

They never know where Purgatory's going to vomit out his newest body. Sometimes Dean comes to in a tangle of tree roots, sometimes thrashes his way up out of scalding pits of tar and gore, other times crawls up out of dirt, scrabbling for a grip among wet rotting leaves. It's inconvenient, and it's slow, because Cas has to find him again every time, but Dean realizes it's good, in a way, because it means he doesn't have to wake up in a new body next to his old one as it gets its heart gobbled out of its ribcage by the fucking werewolf he's doing to tear apart the next time he catches its fucking scent.

Cas gets to watch, instead, and how fucking weird is that, looking at the new blood all over Cas's trench coat and knowing it's his. Only not. And maybe Dean blurts out something to that effect, trying to fill in the silence that stretches taut between them like a carcass bloated full to bursting by its own gas, looking at the blood and the gobs of guts because they're easier to see than the look in Cas's eyes as darkness spreads across Dean's vision again.

Maybe, he thinks as he blinks and floats up toward a filmy green surface, Cas wised up this time. Maybe he left instead of staying to watch Dean's empty body get ripped apart. Maybe he'll be at the surface of whatever this water is, already waiting for Dean-

His head breaks the surface. His throat drags down a mouthful of air and filthy water. He blinks through the water streaming down his face, sees he's in some kind of brackish river ringed with some sort of cypress trees. The water's green and cloudy, too dirty to see anything, and he swims quickly for the bank, new heart pounding, every sense strained for teeth to close around his ankle, his leg, and drag him down. He makes it to the shallows, then the shore itself, slime dripping into every part of him, his eyes, his ears, the crack of his ass. He gnashes in teeth in rage that he's let himself get fucking killed again, and forces himself to his feet, shakes himself out like a dog, trying to get the slime off. Further downstream, there's water is moving a little faster, clearer; he heads toward it to sluice off some of the gunk, moving more stealthily than someone so wet should be able to as he scents the air for any hint of Cas or monsters nearby.

That should have been his hint. The scenting thing. It's not, it's not until he's hissing in displeasure at his blurry reflection in the river water and sees the second row of teeth that he realizes.

- o -

"What did I look like when I was born?"

Dad and Papa exchange glances.

"You didn't open your eyes for a while," Papa says finally. "It...scared us."

Emma tilts her head. "Why? Was I sick?"

"Nah, just lazy," Dean says. "You didn't bother opening your eyes until we finally got some food in you. Better than Sam. You know what he did when it was my turn to hold after he was born?"

Emma has heard this story before. "He farted!"

"Damn right he did!" Dad says, indignant. "Right in my face. And he's been doing it ever since. God, sometimes I feel like that lame dude from Adventure Time."

"My life is like a fart!" Emma exclaims in delight. "Ghost Princess" is one of her favorite Adventure Time episodes. She's pretty sure it's Dad's too. Except he really likes the episodes with Tree Trunks, too, because Tree Trunks is always making apple pie for Finn and Jake.

Papa is shaking his head, smiling into his tea cup. Dad sees him and says, "Dude. There is nothing funny about Sam's gas."

"I am unfortunately aware of that fact," Papa says. "I'm merely amused by your allusion to a show you insisted was-" He crooked his fingers and lowered his voice to sound like Dad's, " 'complete crap.' "

"Eh. Well," Dad says, scratching his head. "Turns out it's actually pretty funny."

"Damn right!" Emma says.

Papa sighs. Dad grins. Then sobers when Papa shoots him a Look. Emma decides it's a good idea to change the subject.

"If I was Auntie A, I think I'd have to divorce Uncle Sam," she decides. "Between him and JB, that is just too much farting."

Papa rolls his eyes heavenward, like Are we really having this conversation?

Dad grins and says, "Maybe Amelia does it too and that's why she doesn't complain."

Emma bursts into laughter.

Papa clears his throat. "It's not very respectful of you two to talk that way about someone who has done so much for you."

"Come oooon, lighten up," Dad says, leaning back and kicking his feet up on the empty chair. "Everyone lets one rip sometimes, it's part of being human."

Emma thinks for a minute as Papa looks at Dad in that way Emma often has to put up with them looking at each other. She has gotten used to interrupting it, which is what she does now: "Hey, Papa, how come you never fart?"

Now it's Dad's turn to guffaw. "Yeah, Cas, how come?" he says.

"We are not having this conversation," Papa says loftily and determinedly ignores them-and the Whoopie cushions they stealthily plant under his spot on the couch-for the rest of the night.

- o -

They find the werewolf. Dean's not sure if he was looking for it. Not sure how he kills it, either. Just comes back to himself, heaving, growling, sweeping sour blood from his teeth with his tongue.

- o -

You're a good man. My mother told me that.

I seriously doubt she said that. And if you knew me, you would seriously doubt it's true.