corrode (Day 17)
The bunker's light flickers once.
Dean pops his head up from his laptop, staring at the lamp over their heads. "You saw that?"
Sam looks up from his book too. "Yeah."
"Okay good, thought it was my eyes or something." Dean stares at the light for a bit longer. But it doesn't happen again.
"Just one flicker, it can be nothing, right?" Sam says hopefully, going back to his book.
Dean hums, turning his attention back to his laptop too.
And the light flickers again.
"Okay, definitely something now." Dean closes the laptop, taking out his EMF.
"You think it's ghosts haunting the bunker?" Sam narrows his eyes.
Dean shrugs slightly. "Famous for affecting electricity, might as well start from there. And don't tell me the bunker is the safest place and can't be haunted or anything. Remember when Kevin was around and tried to talk through a freaking coffee machine?"
Sam murmurs, "I remember."
But the EMF gives nothing. Which is good. Scratch the ghost.
"Any chance it's just some random electricity surge, making it unstable?" Dean tucks the EMF back into his pocket, squinting at the light. "You know, these lamps are old, and we never figure out how the bunker gets all the electricity and water. Maybe just due for a half-century-overdue maintenance or something?"
"You really believe that? With our luck?" Sam raises his eyebrows.
Dean sighs. "Yeah, no, I got it. What about I go grab Cas? See what he can find out? Talking about electricity influencers -- the angels, dudes, don't let me start."
Sam chuckles. "And honestly, I don't really want to know why some days I get up and find out some bulbs blow up. Don't tell me."
Dean wiggles his eyebrows deliberately, suddenly in a really good mood. "As you wish."
The light flickers again as he walks out of the library. Dean picks up his pace, heading to his room.
Cas yawns as he comes to the library. His hairs are completely ruffled, and he's in Dean's nightgown -- which is to say, it's a dead guy's robe that Dean commandeered, and now clearly changes the owner again.
They start turning on all the lights around the area. And notices it doesn't only happen to the library. The hallway and storage rooms too.
"Okay, I'm starting to get real freaking worried. Is the bunker in danger or anything?" Dean raises his voice, reaching for his hidden pistol under the table, just in case.
There is just no pattern in the flickering, as Sam initially suspected, which means it totally wouldn't -- and shouldn't -- be an encoded message of some hidden spirit.
"I can't sense anything supernatural." Cas wanders along the hallway, examining the lights. His palms hover over the light, doing his angel things, while Dean just follows him around, watches him with open amusement and hope in his eyes, which is practically saying without him actually saying the words, "I don't know what you're doing but I think you're doing something that looks pretty freaking cool."
"You sure about that?" Dean asks half-heartedly, watching as Cas finishes examining the last room.
Cas rolls his eyes. "Yes, I'm an angel, I'm sure there is nothing supernatural about those unstable lights or electricity. Perhaps we should consider the 'natural' causes." He does the air quotes around "natural."
Dean curves one side of his lips. "I said the exact same thing! But Sammy didn't believe we'd have this kind of luck. When was the last time we had something weird happening to us and turned out to be 'natural' cause? Never."
"Maybe with Chuck gone, our luck would have changed?" Cas answers solemnly.
Dean gives Sam a look, tilting his head toward Cas. "What he said."
"So what? Call an electrician to take a look at the bunker's power grid? I don't know if we trust anyone enough to invite them over, I mean, anyone who's not in this side of the world, civilians." Sam shifts uneasily.
"Good point," Dean bites his lower lip, thinking. "How long do you think it would take for us to be electricians ourselves? I mean, I worked on cars' cables and all that, how different would the houses be, right?"
"You'd think," Sam wrinkles his nose, opening his laptop and pulling out enough electrician tutorial videos for all of them to kill the rest of the day and the day after.
It's not that they become professionals after two days. It's that they lose patience with watching anymore.
"Basically like follow the lines and figure out which is which and what to do with them." Dean summarizes. "And we'll probably end up digging through walls and floors and ceilings, hopefully not tearing the whole place down."
"And there are like a million different diagrams and configurations you can run into." Sam's eyes are still on the screen.
"Right," Dean says carelessly, waving Cas over. "I think I got it. Cas, give me a hand?"
Cas walks to him, sticking out his hands to Dean. "Here are my hands. What do you need?"
Dean chuckles, pointing at the control table in the corner of the war room. "Why don't we start here? Think you can tear it apart but not break the lines?"
"That will be a very delicate job, but yes," Cas crawls under the table to study its structure and gets to work. Dean bends over him, glancing behind him.
The lines and knobs connected to the control table don't seem to have any issue, so they simply dig them out, follow the lines, digging up more bricks, following them line by line, all the way to a hidden power supply room at the lowest level of the bunker that they never found, even lower than the dungeon.
The room would totally give anyone claustrophobia, with all the lines and cables crawling and stretching in all directions. It's like the biggest freaking spider's nest, the kind that's even worse than Shelob.
"Sometimes I'd forget the bunker was built by men before the fifties." Dean glances at all the electrical lines around them. "And apparently it's not generated by magic."
They can hear a vague sound of water dripping in the room, making a quiet wet sound. There's a leak in the power supply room -- probably the worst nightmare for most (if not all) of the electricians in the world, supernatural or not.
"For some reason, I always thought all those protection sigils out there should also protect these kinds of things." Sam comments, following them into the room.
"There is no such spell, as far as I know," Cas answers seriously.
They find out the leaking spot on the ceiling, and find out the damage too.
"Dammit, look at that," Dean points at the tangled wires that are soaked in the water. They have no idea how long this has been happening, but judging by the growing rust, it doesn't look good. Actually, it looks really really bad.
"These lines are corroded," Cas lowers his body to take a closer look. "The rust has been accumulating, perhaps for five years, I think. And I believe this is the exact reason why this room is kept sealed and secret, to isolate from outside intrusion, especially from water and oxygen to protect the metals. There must be severe changes in the building structure that loosened the wall and ceiling structure, causing the water pipe and the seals to break."
"Building structure -- huh," Sam huffs thoughtfully.
"Son of a bitch, don't tell me it's..." Dean starts at the same time.
"Must be when you used that grenade to blow a hole in the wall, you think?" Sam says.
"When was that? I didn't know." Cas frowns.
Dean lets out a short breath, a little harsh. "Three, four years ago? Freaking Brits wanted to bury us alive in our own bunker, oxygen running out quick, thought we'd die back then, until we used that baby to blow a hole to get out."
Cas's frown deepens. "I'm sorry I never knew. Where was I at that time? Why didn't you pray to me?"
Dean shifts uneasily. "You, uh, were running off with your son -- our son -- before he was almost born. We weren't really on good terms back then, remember? The whole big debate about what to do with him, we didn't know he'd be dorky little Jack and all that, and uh, with everything happened after that, we never got a chance to talk about that, so we sorta just forgot."
He swallows, casting a pained look at Cas, forcing a breath out and a twitch on the lip. He aims for a lighter tone but misses by a thousand miles. "But everything gets figured out in the end, doesn't it?"
"I'm so sorry," Cas says in a low voice, eyes boring right back into Dean's.
"Not your fault," Dean answers quickly, can't move his gaze away.
Sam clears his throat. "Ugh, how are we gonna fix this corrosion? These must be the lines for the lights. We gotta switch the wires or what?"
Dean has to shift his attention back. "Cas? Any idea?"
"I can miracle them away." Cas hovers his palm over the rusted electrical lines. A light golden light pours out from his palm, covering the eroded area. And when he moves his palm away, sure enough, the wires and lines all look as good as new.
"Wow, I didn't know it was possible," Sam exclaims.
"Yet someone said they're not an electrician," Dean beams.
"It's not too different from healing. Both are a type of fixing," Cas explains easily. "Healing a human body is like removing the rusty cells from a body, so healing these wires is curing them of the oxygenized elements -- a disease for metal, you may say -- and so I just reverted them back to their healthy original states."
"You can just say you magicked them perfect and working again," Dean smiles at him. "That's awesome."
Cas smiles back. And he "heals" the leaking ceiling as well, just as they get out of the room.
The bunker light doesn't flicker anymore after that.
