Fic: And We Laughed Until We Cried
Title: And We Laughed Until We Cried
Author: tawg
Word count: ~2,700
Rating: M
Pairings/characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Castiel, Gabriel.
Notes: Non-specific, season 6 AU fic.
Summary: Dean is trying to juggle a family and the family business, Sam isn't exactly back to normal, and it looks like the angels have found a new way to keep busy now that the apocalypse is canceled.
There are months when Dean has no one. And then Sam is back, and it’s not so bad. But it takes more time, weeks and weeks and months until they see any sign of Castiel again.
He looks tired.
“The Horn of Gabriel has been recovered,” he tells them. “Order in heaven shall be restored.”
He drops by on occasion, enough time to give them a push in the right direction, or to save their asses. Dean feels a little pissed about it, sure, but Cas always looks so tired, like he’s been rebuilding heaven brick by brick with his own hands.
“So,” he asks when the two of them are standing outside, and Castiel is looking up at the stars. “Is heaven back to normal yet?”
The look Castiel gives Dean is so broken that it makes something in Dean’s chest ache.
“Heaven will never be returned to the way it was,” Cas replies when his eyes are safely returned to the stars.
“Well, that’s good,” Dean says, even though he knows that the wrong words for the moment are coming out of his mouth. “The old heaven kind of sucked.”
Castiel doesn’t look at him again, just keeps staring out at something past Dean’s field of vision. “Try not to do anything stupid,” he says, and Dean is left standing alone.
*
If there is one thing that Dean excels at, it’s doing stupid. There are people going missing and bones turning up and all the signs of bad mojo going down, so what can Dean do but go and put himself and Sammy right in the thick of it?
They come out of a forest shaking pine and dirt off their clothes, shovels over their shoulders and the smell of rot slick on their skin. Castiel is standing next to the Impala, looking back down the road. The town is hidden by the rise of a hill, and Dean can smell smoke on the air.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Cas says without looking at them.
“You checking up on us?” Dean asks.
“I am here on business,” Cas replies. He’s gone between Dean opening the trunk and slamming it shut again. Sam has walked to the crest of the hill, and is staring back at the town.
“Dude, you had better not be admiring the view,” Dean bitches as he stalks up the hill to stand beside his brother.
Sam isn’t. There’s no view to be had. The entire town has been razed to the ground, nothing but a smear of ash and cracked cement. A whole town, and everyone in it, smote out of existence.
Dean can’t find the words to express the sick rage inside him, but Sam comes pretty close when he murmurs, “Son of a bitch.”
*
They find a pattern. Places where things have been a little too base for a little too long. Places where a town stands one day and a field of salt and ash lies the next. Sam tries to work out a system of figuring out where will be hit next, but he hasn’t been himself since he came back, and there are just too many places where normal people do fucked up things.
So Dean decides to cut through the crap and call Castiel. Not with a voice mail or a text. The old fashioned way, with blood, and chanting, and the angel’s name.
Castiel looks exhausted, rough and worn and his patience is worn thin, but he still comes.
“Sorry to pull you away from your ‘work’,” Dean says, his voice hard and his lip curling.
Castiel looks at Dean for a long time. It’s a closed expression that Dean remembers from their first meetings, all that time ago. “Is there a reason you have brought me here?”
“Yeah there’s a freaking reason,” Dean snaps. “What the hell, Cas? Flattening towns, burning people up, salting the earth? What the hell do you think you are doing?”
“I am doing the work of heaven,” Castiel tells Dean with that same closed look and his rough, level voice.
“And what, heaven wants you to kill off the world town by town? Is that the apocalypse plan B?”
“The world can be a sick place. You know this, Dean. It has been decided that these places of sickness need to be purged.”
“So, what, you flap down here and you kill off thousands of people a pop?”
“I watch,” Castiel replies, and there is a low softness to his voice, so that Dean nearly misses his words. “Order in heaven is being restored, and so on earth it is to be as it is in heaven,” Castiel says, as if he has learned the line by rote. “And I am the witness to the restoration.”
Castiel’s face is no longer impassive, his eyes are wide and blue, and his eyebrows are pressing a lost looking furrow in the skin between them. He’s worried.
“And who’s in charge now?” Dean asks. “Who thinks they can come down after being freaking gone for thousands of years and fuck with my planet?”
Castiel gives Dean a long look, like he’s trying to carve some important message into Dean’s skin with his eyes. “Don’t get in his way,” he says, and then he is gone.
*
Dean just got Sam back again. He kind of has a life now, and he doesn’t want to lose any of it. It’s the first time he’s honestly been tempted to stay home from a hunt. He dreams about family holidays, and Sam laughing, and working with his hands. He falls asleep and dreams about fixing leaking taps, building new cupboards, and wakes with an odd feeling of peace and pride.
But Dean’s lived inside his own head for a long time.
And he knows they’re not his dreams.
“Stay the fuck out of my head,” he says to the ceiling. And the nightmares he has that night are both an admission of guilt and a return to the status quo.
Sam and Dean head out the next morning, another job to do.
*
There is simply too much going on in the world to find a real pattern. They can find instances of the heavenly equivalent of a salt and burn, but they’re scattered across the globe, sometimes several happening at once, sometimes weeks between one and the next.
“So you can’t track it,” Bobby sums up for them.
“Can’t track it, can’t stop it. Hell, we don’t even know exactly what it is, aside from Cas and his douchebag friends messing around.”
Sam looks at Dean and raises his eyebrow. “Can we track Cas?”
It turns out that they can. Dean takes the angel’s mobile next time he turns up, under the premise of keying Bobby’s number in. He slips a scrap of paper with a binding enchantment under the plastic case, and hands it back. Sam had warned Dean that Cas would probably notice the magic, but he takes his phone back without comment.
“You should try getting some sleep,” Dean says before Cas can flutter off.
“As should you,” Castiel counters. It’s a worn and frayed sign of their old familiarity, but it sticks deep under Dean’s skin, reminding him that Cas isn’t the enemy.
*
“Maybe he’s just trying to get back into heaven’s good books,” Sam suggests. “He goes and picks humanity - and not just any humans, he picks us - over everyone else. He gets locked out on the wrong side of the pearly gates. He starts to fall. He’s got a lot of ground to cover if he’s going to earn anyone’s trust back up there.”
Dean turns the idea over in his mind. “It makes sense,” he agrees. “But this is some fucked up shit for a bunch of trust exercises.”
*
The next time they see Cas he pulls them out of a fight they’re losing and into Bobby’s living room. There’s blood on his face, and it takes the drip drip of it onto the collar of his trench coat for Dean to realise that it’s his own.
“What happened?” he asked, handing Cas some wadded gauze. “You hit on the wrong pair of wings at single’s night?”
Castiel stares at the gauze in his hand like it’s something foreign, and the bleeding slowly stops of its own accord. “Not exactly.”
“So, is this more heaven drama happening? You guys back to fighting amongst yourselves.”
“There is... resistance,” Castiel says carefully.
“I hope you’re not trying to win them over with your charming personality.”
Castiel looks at Dean for a long, hard moment. “I will come to you,” he says. “And Sam. And I will ask for a favour. Will you grant it to me?”
Dean is a little thrown by the shape of Castiel’s expression, worried and concerned and a little bit pleading.
“Sure,” he replies, and then backpedals. “Depending on what it is.”
Cas nods, as if that is an acceptable compromise. “Try to stay out of trouble,” he says, and then he is gone.
Dean stares at the little drips of blood left on the carpet until they dry and turn stiff and brown.
*
It takes them days to get back to the site of the fight they didn’t quite lose, because Cas had left the Impala neatly parked just where Dean had left it. It’s the only thing there, an eerie silhouette against a backdrop of scorched earth.
They drive away without a word.
*
It’s Sam who suggests that they just pick a den of iniquity and stake it out. But they’re both surprised when Dean agrees. Lisa doesn’t like him moving around. Dean doesn’t even like it, now that he has a home to worry about. So they bicker back and forth, what would heaven hate more? The town with the gay mayor, or the state of Nevada with its legalised gambling?
“Bestiality is legal in Brazil,” Dean offers.
“You just want to go hang out with some Brazilian babes,” Sam shoots back. “I still think Utah.”
“Maybe,” Dean says. “I know God hated getting kicked out of bed by Mormon doorknockers.” He frowns, and slumps back in his seat, staring at the map spread across the table. “I don’t know. All the places they’ve hit, there’s been a lot of bad shit going down there. It’s not just one immoral thing, it’s when a whole population loses its way.”
“So, what, we just need to find a place where everyone’s a dick?”
They both stare at the map, and then look up.
“New York,” Sam says.
“LA,” Dean counters.
“New York has way more dicks than LA.”
“Well you would know, being Queen of the Dicks.”
“Yeah, real mature, Dean.”
Dean makes Sam close his eyes, and pick a place at random on the map.
“I’m going to pick New York, just to spite you.”
He doesn’t. He picks Tehachapi, Kern County, California. It’s as good a place to start as any.
*
Dean’s pretty sure they’re onto something, because he starts having dreams. Dreams about Ben calling for him, dreams about his dad taking Lisa’s hand and smiling at Dean the way he never had while he was alive. Dreaming ordinary things, like driving Ben to softball, stopping in at the grocery store with his phone to his ear and Lisa telling him which bread he needs to buy.
“Fuck you,” he says to his ceiling, after a second day of waking up feeling homesick.
“Bnnugh?” Sam groans from the other bed.
“Wasn’t talking to you,” Dean replies, and gets up to take the first shower.
*
They sit in a small park with grass that’s green and still wet from the morning sprinklers, and Dean is quietly enjoying himself, the wide expanse of green filled with people. Just people. Sam tapping on his laptop, and Dean can almost convince himself that it’s just him and his geek-boy brother, shooting the breeze between hunts.
And then Sam says, “Huh.”
“Huh, what?” Dean asks.
“Cas is here,” Sam replies.
And Dean is halfway through scanning the surrounding shallow landscape of grass before he gets the urge to say, “Yeah, no shit.”
It should be hilarious. That’s all Dean can think as he watches Castiel run. It should be the funniest thing to see that scrawny body run full pelt and that trench coat flare out behind him. But it isn’t. Cas moves so fast and his sword is bright in his hands, and for the first time Dean notices how empty the park is. And then there’s a flapping in the air that isn’t the sound of tan material trailing in the breeze, it’s the sound of dark shapes unfolding and unfurling and filling the sky.
Dean has often wondered if maybe he just imagined the wings, if maybe his brain had added them in after for effect.
He knows now that he didn’t.
Castiel skids to a stop in front of them, on one knee with his other foot angled out in front, tearing a furrow through the grass. His sword slams into the ground with a force that Dean can feel, and the wings, the fucking wings curl around and it’s the oddest feeling of being trapped in a bubble of shadow, the world outside darkened and indistinct.
Dean looks over at Sam, hoping for a moment to see a return of that fanboy delight his brother had held for angels not so long ago. But Sam is staring up at the sky, at the twisting shapes of the clouds, and one slow bolt of lightning that arcs gracefully down to the earth.
There’s a man standing at the point where its tip scorched the ground. And Dean immediately wants to chastise himself, because no, of course that’s not a man. It’s the body of one, in a black suit with brown hair that looks oddly long given the angelic predilection for business wear.
And then wings unfurl, though Dean has learned by now not to expect feathers. Not after Castiel’s shadows and Raphael’s lightning.
Wings made of smoke, shot through with embers. Wing that fill the sky and keep unfolding, more pairs than Dean can count.
A hand raises to the angel’s shoulder, unsheathing a sword as if from a scabbard slung across its back, pulling the blade into existence.
Dean is amazed that angels have such small weapons.
And then the blade cuts through the air, once, twice, and on the third arc it turns to fire, and is plunged into the earth with such force that the grass ripples with the shockwave, that Dean has to clutch at Castiel’s shoulder to keep his place. He notices that his angel has his face scrunched tight in concentration, his brow damp with sweat.
When he looks up, Tehachapi is blowing away. Every tree, every building. The people, twisting and writhing but somehow not moving. Everything. Turned to grey and turned to dust, and holding for one long moment as sick and bitter sand sculptures, before a whirl of wind hits them and everything is blown away, a snowstorm of ash and smoke and embers.
Everything but Sam and Dean, and the bench they’re sitting on, and the little tuft of green protected by the circle of Castiel’s wings.
And then Castiel’s wings are folding back into that neverwhere they come from. He doesn’t move, stays kneeling awkwardly on the ground with his forehead pressed to the hilt of his sword, his eyes closed. Dean wonders if they’re all going to die. What it would feel like to be turned to ash without burning first, molecule by molecule.
Dean looks up at the angel standing in the middle of the devastation, at the crackling power and idle disregard. He doesn’t feel angry, not yet. He stares as brown hair is ruffled in the breeze, as grey ash settles on the shoulders of that immaculate suit. He watches as the body turns, shoulder, then hip, then finally the head, as if just noticing that something didn’t go entirely to plan.
Dean sees the face, and then the anger hits.
“Gabriel.” Dean stares into that familiar face, but he sees no trace of a smirk, no laughter at the corner of those lion eyes.
“Not as you knew him,” Castiel replies, his voice a low, exhausted rumble.
No, he thinks. Not the Trickster at all.
Author: tawg
Word count: ~2,700
Rating: M
Pairings/characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Castiel, Gabriel.
Notes: Non-specific, season 6 AU fic.
Summary: Dean is trying to juggle a family and the family business, Sam isn't exactly back to normal, and it looks like the angels have found a new way to keep busy now that the apocalypse is canceled.
There are months when Dean has no one. And then Sam is back, and it’s not so bad. But it takes more time, weeks and weeks and months until they see any sign of Castiel again.
He looks tired.
“The Horn of Gabriel has been recovered,” he tells them. “Order in heaven shall be restored.”
He drops by on occasion, enough time to give them a push in the right direction, or to save their asses. Dean feels a little pissed about it, sure, but Cas always looks so tired, like he’s been rebuilding heaven brick by brick with his own hands.
“So,” he asks when the two of them are standing outside, and Castiel is looking up at the stars. “Is heaven back to normal yet?”
The look Castiel gives Dean is so broken that it makes something in Dean’s chest ache.
“Heaven will never be returned to the way it was,” Cas replies when his eyes are safely returned to the stars.
“Well, that’s good,” Dean says, even though he knows that the wrong words for the moment are coming out of his mouth. “The old heaven kind of sucked.”
Castiel doesn’t look at him again, just keeps staring out at something past Dean’s field of vision. “Try not to do anything stupid,” he says, and Dean is left standing alone.
*
If there is one thing that Dean excels at, it’s doing stupid. There are people going missing and bones turning up and all the signs of bad mojo going down, so what can Dean do but go and put himself and Sammy right in the thick of it?
They come out of a forest shaking pine and dirt off their clothes, shovels over their shoulders and the smell of rot slick on their skin. Castiel is standing next to the Impala, looking back down the road. The town is hidden by the rise of a hill, and Dean can smell smoke on the air.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Cas says without looking at them.
“You checking up on us?” Dean asks.
“I am here on business,” Cas replies. He’s gone between Dean opening the trunk and slamming it shut again. Sam has walked to the crest of the hill, and is staring back at the town.
“Dude, you had better not be admiring the view,” Dean bitches as he stalks up the hill to stand beside his brother.
Sam isn’t. There’s no view to be had. The entire town has been razed to the ground, nothing but a smear of ash and cracked cement. A whole town, and everyone in it, smote out of existence.
Dean can’t find the words to express the sick rage inside him, but Sam comes pretty close when he murmurs, “Son of a bitch.”
*
They find a pattern. Places where things have been a little too base for a little too long. Places where a town stands one day and a field of salt and ash lies the next. Sam tries to work out a system of figuring out where will be hit next, but he hasn’t been himself since he came back, and there are just too many places where normal people do fucked up things.
So Dean decides to cut through the crap and call Castiel. Not with a voice mail or a text. The old fashioned way, with blood, and chanting, and the angel’s name.
Castiel looks exhausted, rough and worn and his patience is worn thin, but he still comes.
“Sorry to pull you away from your ‘work’,” Dean says, his voice hard and his lip curling.
Castiel looks at Dean for a long time. It’s a closed expression that Dean remembers from their first meetings, all that time ago. “Is there a reason you have brought me here?”
“Yeah there’s a freaking reason,” Dean snaps. “What the hell, Cas? Flattening towns, burning people up, salting the earth? What the hell do you think you are doing?”
“I am doing the work of heaven,” Castiel tells Dean with that same closed look and his rough, level voice.
“And what, heaven wants you to kill off the world town by town? Is that the apocalypse plan B?”
“The world can be a sick place. You know this, Dean. It has been decided that these places of sickness need to be purged.”
“So, what, you flap down here and you kill off thousands of people a pop?”
“I watch,” Castiel replies, and there is a low softness to his voice, so that Dean nearly misses his words. “Order in heaven is being restored, and so on earth it is to be as it is in heaven,” Castiel says, as if he has learned the line by rote. “And I am the witness to the restoration.”
Castiel’s face is no longer impassive, his eyes are wide and blue, and his eyebrows are pressing a lost looking furrow in the skin between them. He’s worried.
“And who’s in charge now?” Dean asks. “Who thinks they can come down after being freaking gone for thousands of years and fuck with my planet?”
Castiel gives Dean a long look, like he’s trying to carve some important message into Dean’s skin with his eyes. “Don’t get in his way,” he says, and then he is gone.
*
Dean just got Sam back again. He kind of has a life now, and he doesn’t want to lose any of it. It’s the first time he’s honestly been tempted to stay home from a hunt. He dreams about family holidays, and Sam laughing, and working with his hands. He falls asleep and dreams about fixing leaking taps, building new cupboards, and wakes with an odd feeling of peace and pride.
But Dean’s lived inside his own head for a long time.
And he knows they’re not his dreams.
“Stay the fuck out of my head,” he says to the ceiling. And the nightmares he has that night are both an admission of guilt and a return to the status quo.
Sam and Dean head out the next morning, another job to do.
*
There is simply too much going on in the world to find a real pattern. They can find instances of the heavenly equivalent of a salt and burn, but they’re scattered across the globe, sometimes several happening at once, sometimes weeks between one and the next.
“So you can’t track it,” Bobby sums up for them.
“Can’t track it, can’t stop it. Hell, we don’t even know exactly what it is, aside from Cas and his douchebag friends messing around.”
Sam looks at Dean and raises his eyebrow. “Can we track Cas?”
It turns out that they can. Dean takes the angel’s mobile next time he turns up, under the premise of keying Bobby’s number in. He slips a scrap of paper with a binding enchantment under the plastic case, and hands it back. Sam had warned Dean that Cas would probably notice the magic, but he takes his phone back without comment.
“You should try getting some sleep,” Dean says before Cas can flutter off.
“As should you,” Castiel counters. It’s a worn and frayed sign of their old familiarity, but it sticks deep under Dean’s skin, reminding him that Cas isn’t the enemy.
*
“Maybe he’s just trying to get back into heaven’s good books,” Sam suggests. “He goes and picks humanity - and not just any humans, he picks us - over everyone else. He gets locked out on the wrong side of the pearly gates. He starts to fall. He’s got a lot of ground to cover if he’s going to earn anyone’s trust back up there.”
Dean turns the idea over in his mind. “It makes sense,” he agrees. “But this is some fucked up shit for a bunch of trust exercises.”
*
The next time they see Cas he pulls them out of a fight they’re losing and into Bobby’s living room. There’s blood on his face, and it takes the drip drip of it onto the collar of his trench coat for Dean to realise that it’s his own.
“What happened?” he asked, handing Cas some wadded gauze. “You hit on the wrong pair of wings at single’s night?”
Castiel stares at the gauze in his hand like it’s something foreign, and the bleeding slowly stops of its own accord. “Not exactly.”
“So, is this more heaven drama happening? You guys back to fighting amongst yourselves.”
“There is... resistance,” Castiel says carefully.
“I hope you’re not trying to win them over with your charming personality.”
Castiel looks at Dean for a long, hard moment. “I will come to you,” he says. “And Sam. And I will ask for a favour. Will you grant it to me?”
Dean is a little thrown by the shape of Castiel’s expression, worried and concerned and a little bit pleading.
“Sure,” he replies, and then backpedals. “Depending on what it is.”
Cas nods, as if that is an acceptable compromise. “Try to stay out of trouble,” he says, and then he is gone.
Dean stares at the little drips of blood left on the carpet until they dry and turn stiff and brown.
*
It takes them days to get back to the site of the fight they didn’t quite lose, because Cas had left the Impala neatly parked just where Dean had left it. It’s the only thing there, an eerie silhouette against a backdrop of scorched earth.
They drive away without a word.
*
It’s Sam who suggests that they just pick a den of iniquity and stake it out. But they’re both surprised when Dean agrees. Lisa doesn’t like him moving around. Dean doesn’t even like it, now that he has a home to worry about. So they bicker back and forth, what would heaven hate more? The town with the gay mayor, or the state of Nevada with its legalised gambling?
“Bestiality is legal in Brazil,” Dean offers.
“You just want to go hang out with some Brazilian babes,” Sam shoots back. “I still think Utah.”
“Maybe,” Dean says. “I know God hated getting kicked out of bed by Mormon doorknockers.” He frowns, and slumps back in his seat, staring at the map spread across the table. “I don’t know. All the places they’ve hit, there’s been a lot of bad shit going down there. It’s not just one immoral thing, it’s when a whole population loses its way.”
“So, what, we just need to find a place where everyone’s a dick?”
They both stare at the map, and then look up.
“New York,” Sam says.
“LA,” Dean counters.
“New York has way more dicks than LA.”
“Well you would know, being Queen of the Dicks.”
“Yeah, real mature, Dean.”
Dean makes Sam close his eyes, and pick a place at random on the map.
“I’m going to pick New York, just to spite you.”
He doesn’t. He picks Tehachapi, Kern County, California. It’s as good a place to start as any.
*
Dean’s pretty sure they’re onto something, because he starts having dreams. Dreams about Ben calling for him, dreams about his dad taking Lisa’s hand and smiling at Dean the way he never had while he was alive. Dreaming ordinary things, like driving Ben to softball, stopping in at the grocery store with his phone to his ear and Lisa telling him which bread he needs to buy.
“Fuck you,” he says to his ceiling, after a second day of waking up feeling homesick.
“Bnnugh?” Sam groans from the other bed.
“Wasn’t talking to you,” Dean replies, and gets up to take the first shower.
*
They sit in a small park with grass that’s green and still wet from the morning sprinklers, and Dean is quietly enjoying himself, the wide expanse of green filled with people. Just people. Sam tapping on his laptop, and Dean can almost convince himself that it’s just him and his geek-boy brother, shooting the breeze between hunts.
And then Sam says, “Huh.”
“Huh, what?” Dean asks.
“Cas is here,” Sam replies.
And Dean is halfway through scanning the surrounding shallow landscape of grass before he gets the urge to say, “Yeah, no shit.”
It should be hilarious. That’s all Dean can think as he watches Castiel run. It should be the funniest thing to see that scrawny body run full pelt and that trench coat flare out behind him. But it isn’t. Cas moves so fast and his sword is bright in his hands, and for the first time Dean notices how empty the park is. And then there’s a flapping in the air that isn’t the sound of tan material trailing in the breeze, it’s the sound of dark shapes unfolding and unfurling and filling the sky.
Dean has often wondered if maybe he just imagined the wings, if maybe his brain had added them in after for effect.
He knows now that he didn’t.
Castiel skids to a stop in front of them, on one knee with his other foot angled out in front, tearing a furrow through the grass. His sword slams into the ground with a force that Dean can feel, and the wings, the fucking wings curl around and it’s the oddest feeling of being trapped in a bubble of shadow, the world outside darkened and indistinct.
Dean looks over at Sam, hoping for a moment to see a return of that fanboy delight his brother had held for angels not so long ago. But Sam is staring up at the sky, at the twisting shapes of the clouds, and one slow bolt of lightning that arcs gracefully down to the earth.
There’s a man standing at the point where its tip scorched the ground. And Dean immediately wants to chastise himself, because no, of course that’s not a man. It’s the body of one, in a black suit with brown hair that looks oddly long given the angelic predilection for business wear.
And then wings unfurl, though Dean has learned by now not to expect feathers. Not after Castiel’s shadows and Raphael’s lightning.
Wings made of smoke, shot through with embers. Wing that fill the sky and keep unfolding, more pairs than Dean can count.
A hand raises to the angel’s shoulder, unsheathing a sword as if from a scabbard slung across its back, pulling the blade into existence.
Dean is amazed that angels have such small weapons.
And then the blade cuts through the air, once, twice, and on the third arc it turns to fire, and is plunged into the earth with such force that the grass ripples with the shockwave, that Dean has to clutch at Castiel’s shoulder to keep his place. He notices that his angel has his face scrunched tight in concentration, his brow damp with sweat.
When he looks up, Tehachapi is blowing away. Every tree, every building. The people, twisting and writhing but somehow not moving. Everything. Turned to grey and turned to dust, and holding for one long moment as sick and bitter sand sculptures, before a whirl of wind hits them and everything is blown away, a snowstorm of ash and smoke and embers.
Everything but Sam and Dean, and the bench they’re sitting on, and the little tuft of green protected by the circle of Castiel’s wings.
And then Castiel’s wings are folding back into that neverwhere they come from. He doesn’t move, stays kneeling awkwardly on the ground with his forehead pressed to the hilt of his sword, his eyes closed. Dean wonders if they’re all going to die. What it would feel like to be turned to ash without burning first, molecule by molecule.
Dean looks up at the angel standing in the middle of the devastation, at the crackling power and idle disregard. He doesn’t feel angry, not yet. He stares as brown hair is ruffled in the breeze, as grey ash settles on the shoulders of that immaculate suit. He watches as the body turns, shoulder, then hip, then finally the head, as if just noticing that something didn’t go entirely to plan.
Dean sees the face, and then the anger hits.
“Gabriel.” Dean stares into that familiar face, but he sees no trace of a smirk, no laughter at the corner of those lion eyes.
“Not as you knew him,” Castiel replies, his voice a low, exhausted rumble.
No, he thinks. Not the Trickster at all.