Fic: Wings
Title: Wings
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: R for language, violence and sex, more romantic than graphic
Pairing: Dean/Cas
Characters: Dean, Cas, Sam, Michael, Anna, Bobby, various hunters, one OC
Genre: Romance, angst, wing!kink, wing!fic, humor, action/adventure, h/c
Warnings: Death, violence, dom/sub
Word Count: 23,300
Summary: Dean and Sam closed the gates to heaven and hell to prevent the apocalypse, stranding Castiel in the world. The best thing to come out of that was the epic love that blossomed between Dean and Castiel. Now the gate to heaven is open again, the apocalypse is back on, and Dean is willing to do anything--anything--to save Cas from destruction at the hand of his brother Michael.
"He knew if he had it all to do over again, he’d just do the same thing, because he was Dean Winchester, and he couldn’t make another choice, for the same old reasons: love, and loyalty, and family."
Notes:
-I love all the hunters, so they're alive in this version.
-I'm a big fan of canon, so besides the hunters all being alive, I adhere to canon as much as I can in this series while still telling the tale. The characters are all their same old selves. Plus, even where I diverged from canon, I like to make it come back around as much as possible.
-This is part 5 in a series, quite possibly the final part, though I've said that before and I really love Dean and Cas's relationship in this series, so who knows. I've carefully written every story in the series so that it could stand on its own. With this story, I think I managed to include all the facts (which is getting harder after five stories' worth of growth and events), but the one thing I can't communicate by "throwing in an explainer" is why and how much they love each other. Thus, you might like to read at least one of the other installments in the series first:
Feathers
Human
Union
One
-Take deep breaths.
Dean sat at the kitchen table, watching Cas with open lust as he made breakfast. He observed Cas’s ingenuous expression as he tried in vain to open the package of bacon and finally, with a guilty little glance around to see if he was being watched by anyone besides Dean, cheated and used his angel powers to get it started. Innocent expression--as if he was innocent. Bacon! He was making bacon?! He knew what that would do to Dean!--just like he knew what his ingenuous expression would do to him, and the fact that he was making them breakfast, and his big, pretty wings, and everything else about him. Cas caught his eye, caught him looking at him, and smiled shyly. Gah! Look at that tease!
Cas wasn’t the only one who noticed Dean staring--when Dean finally looked away, afraid he’d leap up and rip Cas’s clothes off in another couple of seconds if he didn’t, Sam arched a sardonic eyebrow at him. They had the silent conversation only people like the Winchester brothers who knew each other so well could. Dean nodded his head insistently toward Cas. Sam shrugged, very slightly. Virginia, Sam’s girlfriend, now-wife, hadn’t even noticed their exchange of expressions, so she was startled when Dean burst out, “Come on! Like you can’t see it.”
Sam glanced over at Cas, looked back at Dean, and shook his head. “Looks like a guy making breakfast to me.”
“Looks like an angel making breakfast to me,” said Virginia, who knew everything about them and their hunter past, angels and monsters and demons and all the rest of it. Sam had made the mistake of not telling the woman he loved about it once before. He would never make that mistake again.
“As if!” Dean hissed, and leaned closer so maybe Cas wouldn’t overhear them. Cas was sensitive and might take what Dean was saying as a complaint, but as mercilessly as Cas teased him, Dean wouldn’t change a thing. Dean and Sam turned their faces to Cas, and Virginia poked hers above theirs, also watching. “Look at ’im there, stirring the eggs all temptingly, and humming that classic rock he KNOWS I love, consulting that recipe with those wide, innocent eyes. He’s deliberately doing all the things he knows make me go crazy!” Sam and Virginia looked at each other. Virginia giggled. “What!” Dean growled.
“Next you’re going to tell us he digs at the dirt in his garden like a siren, and puts on sweats like a stripper (only in reverse), and generally does everything in the whole wide world as sensually as a nymph,” said Sam with an irrepressible smirk.
“Exactly!” said Dean, satisfied. “You finally get it.”
Sam and Virginia gave each other a look and gave up the argument, amused. Dean was too turned on to be irritated. He looked back at Cas, just now fumbling with the breakfast sausages, narrowly avoiding flinging them all over the kitchen. It was indecent! Didn’t the guy have any boundaries, or did he enjoy tormenting Dean with desire while he did stuff that prevented Dean from being able to have his way with him? It must be the latter.
“Virginia and I are going to a barbecue at her parents’ house today, so we’ll be leaving right after breakfast,” Sam announced, then murmured, “in the nick of time, too, sounds like.”
“Yes!” Dean pumped his fist in the air. Cas had a little shack out on the land where he had his garden, which was the place he’d been living when Dean first met him. It hadn’t had a bed or a fridge or a bathroom when Dean met him, but Dean had been making improvements, since it was the only place they could get any privacy. Dean liked living with his brother and his wife, the four of them all together here in Sam and Dean’s house, but sometimes a guy needed a place he could go with his angel where they could get as loud and wild as they needed to, you know? So Dean had worked on the shack while Cas tended his garden, making it stronger and weather-proof, and he’d dragged a bed in there. Still, it wasn’t his first choice, so having the house to themselves today was great news. “I’ll give that fuckin’ tease what he’s begging for.”
Sam kind of shook his head at Dean disapprovingly, although Virginia looked even more amused than before. “How exactly is he a tease when he says yes every time you ask him? Oh--has it been a while again?” she asked sympathetically. She knew how hard it sometimes was to get Cas in the mood for sex, once upon a time.
“We did it last night,” Dean said, and saw the sympathy vacate her face, then added quickly, “But yeah! Yeah. It’s been like ten hours!”
Sam rolled his eyes, also rudely unsympathetic. Virginia put her arm through Sam’s. “I’m so glad I ended up with the brother I did,” she whispered, but Dean heard it anyway.
“Well, Cas is happy he ended up with this brother!” he insisted defensively. He hadn’t just ended up with him--Cas believed it was an insufferable arrogance for an angel to marry--but Dean had managed to talk him into marrying him, anyway. Dean had the ring and the certificate to prove it. “He thinks I’m the better one!”
Cas delivered two plates to the table. “I like you both. Actually, I like all three of you.” He smiled that ridiculously adorable smile at the gathering of people he often referred to as his little family.
Dean leaped out of his chair. “Cas, what the fuck?! Why are you trying to seduce these guys, too? No, no, no, I am not doing it with my BROTHER AND HIS WIFE. Knock it off, man! You can tempt me all you want, but not Sam and Virginia! I know angels are all free love and whatever, but you’re all mine, got it??”
Cas got that irresistable look of bewilderment on his face as Virginia cracked up and Sam looked tired. “Just ignore him, Cas,” Virginia said. “Something’s gotten into him. You could do dishes and laundry and he’d think you were a foul tempter.”
“Laundry?!” Dean cried. “Holy--Virginia, why’d you have to bring up Cas doing laundry?! All bending over .... God!” He clutched his hair.
Virginia looked at Sam, baffled. “Is this an angel thing, or a Dean thing?”
Sam looked equally confused. “I think it’s an angel-plus-Dean thing.”
“I thought the passion was supposed to start fading after marriage,” said Virginia scientifically.
Sam looked troubled at the thought. “Hope not.”
“For humans, maybe,” Dean groaned, sitting back down, “but with Cas, it’s only gotten worse.”
As Cas went back to retrieve the sausages, now cooked, Virginia lowered her voice and asked Sam, “Do you think it’s possible Cas is really using his angel powers on Dean and ... doing something to him?” They were beginning to look kind of worried.
Sam looked at Dean, knowing he’d heard the question. “No,” Dean said sullenly, shoving a bite of insanely delicious eggs in his mouth. “It’s just me being me. You really ... you really don’t see what I’m seeing?” They shook their heads sympathetically. “I just can’t get enough of him,” Dean admitted, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and then studiously keeping his eyes off Cas as he finally sat down and joined them for breakfast. That didn’t block out his maddeningly sexy low monotone voice with its warm tones that played Dean like a flute, or his magical words, every word given to someone else making Dean that much more jealous. He’d thought marrying Cas would ease his desire somewhat, but as he’d just told Sam and Virginia, knowing Cas was really his had only inflamed it.
Maybe it was that there always seemed to be new horizons for them. When Cas first became Dean’s friend, Dean had thought that would be it, but then he turned into a better friend than any Dean had ever had in his life, better than he’d ever believed a friend could be. Dean thought that was as good as it would get, but then Cas had become his lover, which was alien and wonderful and more beautiful and satisfying than any romantic relationship Dean had ever had. Dean thought that they’d surely reached the limits of what a romantic relationship could yield, but sex seemed new and exciting every time they did it, especially once Cas threw what they’d dubbed “angel sex” into the mix, which involved Cas touching his soul and merging their being, which was, if possible, even more fulfilling than regular sex. But that couldn’t be it; it wasn’t the sex, really, it was just Cas. Everything good and sweet and whole and healing came from him. Dean wanted to possess him completely, consume him, make them so close they were practically the same person, and the only thing he’d ever come up with to attempt that was sex--which made sense, kind of. It was the only time he had Cas’s full attention, and had him all to himself, and they were sharing everything each of them was. He didn’t even really care what they did, so long as they were there together, talking and being real, and Cas was happy. Somehow his brain (okay, maybe just his downstairs brain) had interpreted that to mean he was desperate for Cas every second of every day. Not that he minded. He WAS desperate for him every second of every day--any and every part of him, mind, body, and soul. Especially now that Cas had learned to kiss right, all he had to do was press his lips to Dean’s and Dean would abruptly be hard as a two by four.
As Sam and Virginia left, Sam pulled Dean aside to say, “Maybe you should ... you know, take a break for a little while. He’s an angel, but you’re only human, Dean. I don’t want you to ... overdo it.”
Dean snorted. “What could happen?!”
“I’m not sure, but ... I don’t want you to be the one to find out. I’m frankly a little worried for your health.”
“Thanks. Just what I always wanted: my brother worrying about my penis.”
“Trust me, Dean, it’s not exactly a dream come true for me, either, but as your brother and the only other human man in this house, I felt obligated. But if you want to wear it out, go right ahead.”
“Thanks, bro. You always were right there, trying to get between me and sex.”
Sam looked exasperated, but amused. “Fuck you, Winchester.”
“Bitch.”
“Jerk.”
Dean eagerly walked them to the door and saw them off, then turned back to face an oddly concerned Cas, standing right behind him. Dean was thrown off by the expression on his face. “What?”
“Your brother is concerned for your health because of ... me?”
“You were eavesdropping again?”
“I saw it in his eyes as he left.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Great.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Well, ya know, poor Sam, he was a virgin until he was twenty-five, and he’s always been kind of scared of sex, so ....”
Cas regarded him quizzically. Finally, he said, “I know for a fact that in no way resembles the truth. Why are you--?”
“Fine, fine!” Dean interrupted. “Such a stickler for accuracy. Sam’s just thinking too much about my sex life again.”
“What does he fear?”
Dean shrugged. “I dunno. That it’ll fall off if we do it too much.”
Cas considered the possibility. “Highly unlikely. However, it is true that as an angel I can handle a good deal more of many things than a human can without suffering any ill effect. That is, what is painful to a human is not especially painful to an angel, and sometimes vice versa. Thus, if your brother thinks we should, er, hold back ....”
Dean took Cas by the back of the head and kissed him deeply. Cas used to be a terrible kisser. He just didn’t get the point. Only fondling his wings used to get him going at all. However, now that he had figured it out, all it took to make him melt was a really heartfelt, passionate kiss, just like this. When Dean looked in his eyes again, he saw that Cas was putty in his hands. “What does Sam know about our sex life, really, Cas?”
“Very little, hopefully ...,” Cas responded softly, melting further as Dean snuck his hand up under his t-shirt and got a good feel of his perfect chest.
“What does Sam know about anything?” Dean murmured, removing Cas’s shirt.
“Well, quite a lot, on a great many subjects--”
“I was being a jerk,” Dean said, his lips brushing against Cas’s as he spoke, pressing their torsos together tightly. “It was a joke. Sam may know a lot about a lot, but he doesn’t know shit about us. Is that safe to say?”
Cas was already falling into the sensual altered state he was usually in when they made love. Suggestible, acquiescent, willing, vulnerable ... Dean could talk him into anything when he was like this, which made this conversation easier. Though he was beginning to look like he’d lost track of the conversation, Cas nodded slightly.
“Good,” Dean breathed, stroking Cas’s cheek softly to make him lose himself further. “That’s my sweet little angel. So ... what say we get to it?”
He started fumbling with the tie on Cas’s sweatpants, but after leaning helplessly against Dean for a few seconds, Cas roused himself enough to say, “We should go to our room.”
“Why? Sam and Virginia’ll be gone all day.”
“You tend to lose track of time. Also, regardless, it is generally considered unseemly to make love on ... public surfaces, or so I am beginning to understand.”
Dean growled, and clutched Cas roughly to him in his frustration. All the way across the hall, up a whole flight of stairs, then all the way down the upstairs hall to their room?! How long was Cas going to keep putting him off?! “Why are you torturing me like this?! Don’t think I didn’t notice your flirtatious cooking and suggestive sausage and how fucking sexy you were there in my old sweats! I know what’s going on, and I’m gonna give you what you’ve been asking for,” Dean said dangerously.
Cas stared at him blankly for a long moment, then he blinked and an obscenely adorable smile alit on his lips. “A ... new trowel?”
Holding himself up by Cas’s shoulders, Dean hung his head low, trying to take in slow breaths. “Cas.”
“Yes, Dean?”
“You are making me insane.”
Cas looked baffled. “No trowel?”
“Get up the stairs before I throw you down on them and fuck you ’til you can’t walk.”
Cas glanced anxiously toward the stairs. “Um ... I’m pretty sure stairs count as a public surface ....”
“GET UP THERE!”
Instead of heading obediently for the steps as Dean expected, Cas disappeared. Dean was seized by the terror that Cas had abruptly decided he’d rather check on his garden or something and gone off to do that, as used to happen all the time when Dean was trying to get him in the mood for sex. Dean raced up the stairs and down the hall to their room, where he was supremely relieved to see Cas lying docilely in bed, waiting for him. Dean held his heart, catching his breath. “You could have at least brought me with you, saved me the trip,” Dean complained.
“But you hate angel travel,” Cas said, confused. “And it was only up a single flight of stairs.”
Dean growled low in his throat, but softened as he realized what was really bothering him. “You scared me, Cas.”
“Why?” Cas asked innocently.
“I was afraid you’d run off to do something else. Don’t go anywhere, okay? I’m going to be getting you back ALL day long for all the tempting and teasing you did to me this morning.”
Cas seemed confused, but not afraid. “Why would I tempt you, when you know I am always yours to do with as you please?” Dean let out a deep groan, ran across the room and attacked him. Cas always somehow said exactly the thing that most got him going. “You know I would never do anything I knew made you unhappy,” Cas murmured softly as Dean gave him a passionate hickey.
Dean clutched Cas’s hair, waiting out the tears that suddenly sprang to his eyes at his words. How could he help falling more in love with Cas every single day they were together? “Yeah,” Dean finally managed to come up with something that sounded cool and in control. “You’re not a dick like other angels, are you?”
Cas’s wings--the most expressive part of him--suddenly stopped moving. Fuck. “I’m sorry, Cas,” Dean murmured, stroking Cas’s head. “Sorry. I know. You can say whatever you want about your own family, but someone else says it .... Anyone who says a word against Sammy gets a fast punch to the junk. I shouldn’t have said it. I just remember Michael and Zachariah and all those junkless pricks, and I can’t believe you came from the same family as them.”
“Michael was my favorite brother.”
Dean drew back, stunned. Cas’s expression was as impassive as ever, but somehow said so much nevertheless. “You never told me that.”
“You prefer not to talk about him.”
“Still, though--you know you can say anything to me.” Dean shook his head, still reeling from the information. “Seriously? He’s not just a dick with wings?”
“Michael ....” Cas tilted his head, remembering. “Michael was pure goodness. Whenever I was confused about what the right thing was, I went to him, and he explained things so I could understand. I never once doubted a word he said, until ... until I first touched your soul when you were in hell and I was able to see another perspective.”
“But he wasn’t nice, was he?!”
“Very nice. One of the kindest of my brothers. An archangel, never considering himself above helping one of his lowliest brothers? He was the older brother humans long for.”
“What happened?” Dean could not help asking sardonically.
“He is no different now, but obedience to our father is paramount to him; he will suffer no disobedience, as we saw with Lucifer.”
“Yeah, talk about a dick ...,” said Dean, figuring they could at least agree on that scumbag.
“He was my second favorite brother,” Cas said flatly as Dean goggled. “Until ... until he was cast away to hell.”
“What is there to like about him?!” Dean burst out, disbelieving. He and Sam had encountered him a few times in another vessel. He was terrifying and, obviously, evil.
“He was fun-loving, inventive, unusual. Our father made all of us different, you see--rather like a prototype for humanity. Apparently our father made him a little too unique, a little too willing to question what he’d been taught, but he still loved him too much to destroy him, so he simply ... made another place for him.”
“You still love him!” Dean exclaimed, unable to believe it, but he could hear it in his voice.
“He is my brother.”
Dean looked down. Even when Sam was turning into a demon-blood-guzzling monster, Dean still loved him. He would never stop loving him, no matter what. “You miss them. You miss your family.”
“Only sometimes,” Cas said, turning to Dean with an attempt at a reassuring smile, but Dean could still see underneath it the vast unknowable loneliness only Cas would ever know, the only angel left in the world after Dean, Sam, and their hunter buddies closed the gates of heaven, hell and purgatory in order to avert the apocalypse. Already having fought on the human side, Cas believed he would surely be killed if he returned to heaven when the gates closed, so he remained on Earth, where he met Dean and they fell in love. Dean, of course, would be forever grateful Cas stayed behind. Cas too said he didn’t regret it, but sometimes he got melancholy. He never talked about it, but Dean had always known that was what was behind his melancholy, so it was kind of a relief to hear him finally talk about it now.
“If you could talk to them, if you could see them now ... what would you say to them?”
“Nothing.” Cas’s smile turned bittersweet. “There is nothing to say. I disobeyed. Lucifer only refused to serve humans; I actively fought with them against my brothers and sisters. I would be eradicated, without doubt.”
“But you were doing what you thought was right!” Dean exclaimed. “And God made humans, too. Couldn’t you explain what you thought and why--?”
“No,” Cas interrupted him. “We are soldiers. I mean, we call each other brothers and sisters, but really we are my father’s army. When we were created, the word ‘coworker’ didn’t exist yet, or we might have gone with that one instead. We aren’t brothers like you and Sam, related in any way. We were each created individually. The sort of love that exists between you and your brother is beyond my ‘family’s’ comprehension. My superiors brook no disobedience. They already tried to ... reprogram me, but the effort failed. Besides, now, since remaining on Earth, I have broken countless other rules, marriage chief among them, also fornicating with a human, influencing and participating in human lives when there was no order to do so .... The list goes on and on, but my crimes were already more than sufficient to condemn me.”
Dean scowled. “With a family like that, who needs demons? People who treat you like that don’t count as a family. You deserve to be treated right. You deserve to be treated better than anyone in the world.” Dean hugged him close. No wonder Cas was so humble and fearful. He was an angel, so it looked different on him, but Dean had finally come to see Cas’s self-doubt as a form of low self-esteem. Having a family like that sure could do that to you. Dean would have thought that kind of thing only happened to humans, but apparently not. “You have a new family now,” Dean murmured, nuzzling him protectively, though soon enough it turned more sensual. “You’re with us now, Cas, and I promise, baby, I will always take good care of you.”
“By ... taking me to task for my imagined attempts to seduce you?” Cas said, smirking. He was kind of almost getting the hang of a joke.
“You love it when I ‘take you to task,’” Dean growled, and then he couldn’t hold back anymore, not like Cas wanted him to hold back. As desperate for him as he had been for hours now, Dean didn’t last long, but it didn’t matter; he could keep Cas going for hours upon hours, stroking his wings, and then, once he’d had a rest, Dean would be ready for another go.
Still, no matter what they did, somehow Dean could never get enough. He refused to see it as a problem, but the fact was that there was an unbridgable divide between humans and angels. Dean supposed in his heart of hearts that what he so craved was to know Cas, inside and out, the way Cas knew him. He loved listening to Cas wax on about whatever his heart desired, and he did sometimes for hours--usually about gardening tips; but occasionally about history--human, animal, or geological; mythology; linguistics; or religion. Dean could sometimes barely follow him, marveling at Cas’s vast supercomputer mind that could contain and process in one minute more information than a human mind could in a lifetime. Didn’t Dean seem like a puny little bug compared to the wonders Cas had known in all the eons he’d existed? Cas had lived to see Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, and Einstein. He’d seen every war, every civilization that rose and fell, every country born. He’d seen humanity evolve from sea creatures or whatever they evolved from. For that matter, Earth events probably didn’t even seem like much to him compared to whatever happened in other realms.
So how could he have ended up here, in Dean’s arms, his own precious, beloved angel, letting him do to him all the delicious, unspeakable things he wanted to his heart’s content, pledging to be with him until Dean died of old age? How could Dean possibly have gotten so lucky? What went on in that amazing angel mind? What thought process had led to the glorious miracle of his deciding to belong to Dean? What exactly was Cas, anyway? Dean, a simple human, was surely no mystery to Cas, but Cas was so vast and deep he was utterly unfathomable to Dean, and that left Dean with an emptiness he could never fill ... but one thing was sure: he would never stop trying, in the simple human ways he knew how to. Right now, that meant pouring as much love into Cas--physical and emotional--as he possibly could.
He started as he always liked to, stroking Cas’s wings. For whatever reason, he was the only one who could see or touch Cas’s wings; they passed right through everything and everyone else most of the time. Cas had an explanation that had to do with something about the intensity of their connection vibrating on compatible frequencies, but Dean usually thought of it as something happened simply because he loved Cas so freakin’ much. Sam and Virginia loved Cas, too--lots of people did--but not like this, not enough to see this most divine, magical part of him. Dean had always found Cas’s wings awe-inspiring and magnificent, especially once he discovered what it did to Cas for him to fondle them. He loved the way it made Cas kind of collapse, no matter what he was doing, like he was an instrument and Dean knew how to play him just right. He loved the instant erotic groans it drew out of him. He loved the way it turned Cas into his plaything. Cas would submit to anything he wanted to do to him after a couple of minutes of wing-stroking. Cas often wasn’t in the mood for sex, but just a little of this and he was ready for anything.
He got even louder when Dean started touching his body, too--wilder, writhing and bucking, but at the same time, even more Dean’s to do with as he pleased. It had taken Dean all the time they had been together, but he’d finally figured out if he moved his hands over Cas’s wings really slowly and softly, it got him going even more than if he did it fast or powerfully, although sometimes Cas did shove his wing hard against Dean when he wanted it like that. It would always be a mystery to Dean why it worked and what it made Cas feel; all Dean could do was to try to figure out from Cas’s reactions what really did it for him.
“Yeah, you like that?” Dean purred as Cas made strangled gasping sounds. Dean was, oh-so-slowly, stroking his hand all the way down his wing, then returning to the base of it to stroke down a line below where he’d been before, methodically touching every last feather he had. It was making Cas get downright out of control, nearly thrashing off the bed, and Dean grinned. God, he loved life.
He kept Cas going like this, utterly mercilessly, for well over an hour, before finally making love to him again--or trying; instead, Cas frenziedly pushed him down, held him in place with his wings, and produced a bottle of lube out of thin air. Dean was gonna go ahead and assume that meant Cas wanted to be on top, which was just peachy by Dean. It was all peachy by Dean, especially as Cas started stroking him with those soft feathers in all the right places.
During a lull, Dean remarked on how touching all of Cas’s feathers had an even more extreme effect than Dean’s usual haphazard stroking did.
“Of course,” Cas murmured robotically, the power of normal-sounding speech drained out of him well before.
“Yeah?” prompted Dean, sliding up Cas’s body to kiss his mouth, careful not to touch his wings and thus bring the conversation to a premature end.
“Yeah,” Cas repeated. “Each feather is attuned to a slightly different frequency of the universe, so each feather feels ... different from every other.”
“SERIOUSLY?? Holy crap; that would be like having thousands of different erogenous zones on your body!” Dean grinned, imagining it.
“Millions,” Cas corrected, all the strength sucked out of his voice by their lovemaking.
Dean groaned, vicariously turned on by the idea, and started pitilessly fondling handfulls of feathers all over his wings, as Cas gradually lost the power even to move. “So ... your wings are like ... giant satellite dishes,” Dean said thoughtfully, “and each feather is like a little one.” Cas had talked before about being able to hear the host, back when the gate to heaven was still open. Maybe this was how he did it.
Okay, he guessed Cas was right when he said Dean tended to lose track of time, because Dean was most irritated when he heard Sam’s car pull up in the driveway. “What the hell?!” Dean squealed, just gearing up for another round. “He said he was gonna be gone all day!”
“It’s evening,” Cas murmured, sounding sensual and spent. These were some of Dean’s favorite times, lying in bed with the golden late-day sun gently lighting Cas’s face, naked together, touching each other whenever and however they felt like. Cas’s wings slowly opened and closed, like a butterfly intent upon a flower, and Dean knew it was one of Cas’s expressions of greatest contentment and happiness. Dean touched one of his wings, eliciting a soft, involuntary moan from Cas, and he withdrew his hand, not wanting to make Cas noisy now that Sam was home. Instead, he simply marveled at those gorgeous wings.
“Baby, you have the prettiest wings in the whole wide world.”
“I have the only wings in the whole wide world ... at least, on a human form.”
“Still, I’m sure they’re the prettiest wings ever on an angel.”
Cas hesitated. He’d once said angels were not vain about their wings, but Dean had begun to suspect he meant they weren’t allowed to be vain about their wings, and now, in the shelter of the safety of his new life with Dean, he finally felt free to talk about them, at least a little: “I never thought so; I thought of them as scraggly and sparse. It was Michael who had the most magnificent wings of us all.”
Dean reached for one very carefully, just touching a fingertip to one of the soft, vibrant feathers, and still, even at this little touch, Cas couldn’t help but sigh. He pressed his forehead against Dean’s cheek. “Well, whatever you say, I still think no other wings could be awesomer than yours,” Dean said. Dean was the only human who could see them, and even he couldn’t see them very well, since they appeared transparent. Only in certain kinds of light--like right now--could he make out the individual feathers, their vivid blackness and shininess. He was used to Cas and his oddities by now, even all the amazing things that he could do, but getting a good gander at his wings was the one thing that still sometimes filled him with awe. “What’s it like,” he could not help but ask, “having wings?”
“I do not know what it’s like not to have wings,” Cas replied. “To be honest, I’ve always felt a bit sorry for humans, that they don’t have them. I suppose it’s only because flight is so fundamental to angels, but to have no choice but to move laboriously to one’s destination along the ground or in an airplane ... I mean, I enjoy it, when I get to travel with you, but otherwise, it would be dreadful and terribly boring.”
Dean grinned. “Not when you’ve got wheels like mine. Then it rocks.” Still, he could get what Cas was saying. For Cas to be pinned down would be to take away that sense of peace and freedom he had like the butterfly on the flower; it would be to make Cas no longer Cas. “Yeah, that’s part of you: you can always fly away. Just always come back to me, ’kay, baby?” he said, kissing him, feeling Cas melt into the kiss. “Forever, right? You’re mine forever.”
Cas’s smile was bittersweet again. “I am more yours forever than you are mine forever,” he said wistfully, stroking Dean’s jaw, gazing at his face. “I’ll be with you your whole life long, but you ... when at last you die and your soul goes to heaven, I’ll be unable to follow.”
“Aw, come on!” Dean said. He couldn’t stand the idea. “You can--can’t you--well ... we’ll spend the next fifty years figuring out a way to fix that, ’cos I ain’t spending eternity away from you, that’s for sure.” It was unthinkable, for Cas to be stuck here on Earth, alone, away from Dean in heaven, Cas’s home to which he could never return ... all because Dean got him stranded here in the first place. “Anyway,” he said, thinking of other times he’d been to heaven, “you know as soon as I got there, those dicks’d just put me back in my body so they could start the apocalypse again. I’d be back here in no time,” he blustered, but Cas, never fooled, only smiled faintly and gazed at Dean like he was imprinting his face and this moment upon his mind for those days when they were finally, eternally parted. Dean’s entire life would scarcely register as a blip on the eons Cas had been alive. Did their days together that seemed so wonderfully endless to Dean pass in a flash for Cas?
What would Cas do here, alone? Jimmy once said Cas would have faded away like smoke on the wind if he hadn’t had Dean’s love to sustain him. Now that Cas could no longer connect to heaven’s power, he had to eat and sleep like any person, and Dean’s love was somehow part of what kept him going. Would he slowly fade and disappear without Dean here? “We’ll open the gate,” Dean said suddenly. “When I die, or right before I die or whatever, we’ll open the gate again, so you get your fix of heaven juice to keep you going. Maybe you can even sneak in there with me,” Dean said with a grin, knowing Cas would unceremoniously shoot down that idea and not caring; they had a lifetime to come up with something better.
But Cas didn’t shoot it down, he only smiled his sad little smile at Dean and said nothing. Dean had to change the subject. “I tell ya why I’d want wings--one and only reason: so you could get me as hot and crazy, touching them, as I do you. Know what I’m sayin’?”
A smile scattered the dark clouds over his expression from before, considering this. “I would really enjoy that. I could ‘take you to task’ for your pitiless stimulation of mine.”
Dean chuckled, but what remained unresolved from their conversation before seized him and he could not help but say, “But if you did disappear--Cas, if you died, your soul or essence or whatever would go to heaven, right? So we could find each other there again someday?”
Cas seemed surprised Dean could not know the answer to this question. Anticipating Dean’s reaction to the answer, his voice was uncharacteristically gentle as he said, “No, Dean. Heaven is our home, the place we come from. Just as a human doesn’t go to Earth when they die, angels don’t go to heaven when they die. When an angel kills another angel, it is with the understanding that they are ending the existence of that angel, forever.”
Dean couldn’t help gripping Cas’s upper arms very tightly, couldn’t help the intense tone of his voice as he asked, “But--but then what happens to you guys??”
Cas quirked his head, considering. “I’ve always imagined our energy dissipates throughout the universe to become parts of other things, as your bodies decay in the soil and get used for sustaining the life cycle of this planet. But no one knows for certain. I like that human bodies are recyclable. I only hope that I, too, will be ... recycled when I come to my end.”
Dean felt his expression twitching. He couldn’t control it. All this was unthinkable. Cas would live longer than Dean would, for sure, but Dean had promised to take care of him now that he had to live as a human, so Dean had to start thinking hard about ways to make sure Cas was taken care of after he was gone ... only it seemed so huge and impossible, so far beyond his puny human powers. He only ended up freaking out for part of a minute before managing to get himself back under tight control. Whatever; he’d done the impossible before. Whatever it took, however difficult a task it might be, he would just have to work at it until he’d found a way. There simply was no other option.
“You keep saying my love is what keeps you going here on Earth, but could you be a little more specific? You’re really not being too helpful, Cas,” Dean said, hauling a bale of straw from the trunk of the Impala so Cas could spruce up his backyard year-round nativity scene.
“Perhaps it would help if you explained to me why you keep asking me this,” Cas said, lugging cleaning supplies, since the holy family was fairly dirt-covered by now after a rainy summer, and two of the wise men under the tree collected a lot of bird droppings.
“I told you: I’ve got to find a way to keep you going here, you know, after I’m gone.”
“And I told you: It is something over which you have no influence.”
“You don’t know that. Everyone said we couldn’t close the gates, but we did it. The Winchesters always have a few tricks up their sleeves.” Dean threw down the bale of straw next to the nativity scene and sat on it while Cas got to work. It had never occurred to Dean how ironic it was that Cas doted so fondly over symbols of a family who not only treated him like shit but who actually would kill him given half a chance, but that was Cas: devoted and forgiving to the end, no matter what someone had done to him.
Cas set down his cleaning supplies and sat next to Dean on the strawbale with a sigh. “Angels are love, Dean. Because God is love. Love is our essence. Your love for me feeds my essence. That you let me love and serve you in return allows me to continue to be an angel, in some respect, since that is an angel’s function.”
Dean was relieved. “So all I’ve gotta do is find someone else to love you before I die, and we’re golden!” he said, getting excited. “But not until I’m practically dead!” he said then gruffly. “I’ll be so fuckin’ jealous. But still! Still, it’ll be worth it. Just ... not until I’m already almost dead, okay, Cas?”
Cas gave him that wise, knowing smile. “You say it like it’s so easy.”
“Falling in love with you is the easiest thing in the world,” Dean said simply. “I’ll be beating ’em all off with a stick.”
“There has been no one to beat off,” Cas said seriously, while Dean chortled at his phrasing. “Many humans look their whole lives for love and never find it. In any case, our connection is in large part a result of my touching your soul and repairing it when you were in hell, which will never be repeated with another person. It is all right, Dean,” Cas said, one of his strange smiles dawning on his face. “I’m content to live only as long as you do and fade away thereafter. It is so much more than I ever hoped for, so much more than my family believes I deserve.”
“No!” Dean snapped, getting up to pace, upset. “So, what, my soul lives in paradise forever and you just--cease to exist?! Fuck, no! As long as you’re still kicking, there’s a chance we could be together again!”
Cas considered. “That is true, I suppose. But, Dean, every moment we spend together is impressed into the fabric of time. It’s remembered by the universe forever, so even if--even were I to disappear and cease to exist, I would never really die. I would go on existing in your heart forever ... right?”
“That’s not good enough,” Dean growled. “I need you here, the real you, right here, with me, forever. Period. Okay? Okay. So: we just need to find someone to love you--later on--MUCH later on--and then you need to mess with their soul or something so you have that connection thing, and that’s that. I’m sure we’ll fine-tune the plan over the years, but at least now we have something to go on. And then you keep trying on this end, and I’ll keep trying in heaven, to find a way to get back to each other. You cool with that?”
Cas seemed thrown off, but his eagerness to make Dean feel better about all this won out. “Y--yes, Dean,” he stuttered.
“Okay, good. Now, you need help with this thing, or can I mow the lawn?”
Dean mowed while he fondly watched Cas putter around his beloved nativity scene. It really was a monstrosity, dolls of all different sizes in various states of disrepair representing the different characters. A neighbor dog had gotten at the Jesus doll, which now had teeth marks in its head and right arm. Cas even had an AT-AT walker in there, since he couldn’t find enough sheep. Also, barns are dirty places, and Cas was all about realism, so it lacked any of the romantic sheen of most nativity scenes, focusing instead on the humble and the ordinary. Still, it made Dean smile every time he looked at it, because it reminded him of Cas. Sam and Virginia found it downright creepy, but it made Cas so happy, Dean couldn’t help but love it a little, himself.
Cas was still at it when he finished mowing, so he got a beer, sat in the shade and watched Cas clean, unable to help thinking it over and honing their plan. Cas glanced up at him, into his eyes, which he did whenever he wanted to know what Dean was thinking about; angels could read your mind just by looking in your eyes. When he saw what it was, he smiled, moving on to clean G.I. Joseph. “Love is the most powerful force in the universe, Dean,” he murmured. “Why do you think angels are more powerful than demons? Demons embody hate and fear. Angels are love. Love can do anything. Love can reach across time and space. It can heal, it can renew, it can create. It can overcome any obstacle. It’s the fabric and the origin of the universe. Never forget it.”
He said it because he could tell Dean was still fretting. “Cool,” Dean said absently. “Just gimme a love gun and I’ll blast through everything that gets in my way.”
Cas chuckled softly, though he looked a bit disappointed, like he could tell Dean didn’t really get it. “Oh, Dean. You think only in terms of guns.”
“Or knives. Knives are good. Fists are fine, in a pinch. I’ve even been known to use a taser.”
Cas was silent for a while, cleaning and spreading clean straw around the nativity scene. At last, he said quietly, “Some things, you can’t fight.”
Dean knew what he was trying to say. Cas didn’t believe they could be together again after Dean died, didn’t believe Dean would find a way to save Cas. Dean planned to spend their lives finding a way; Cas probably planned to spend it helping Dean come to terms with failure, but that just wasn’t how Dean rolled. “I’ve spent my whole life fighting, Cas,” he said at last, taking a long swig. “I don’t know any other way.”
When Sam and Virginia returned from shopping that afternoon, they suggested all four of them go out to dinner. The fact was that Cas did way more than his fair share of the cooking, which made everybody feel guilty, but nobody else was in the mood to cook tonight, so going out to dinner was a good solution. Anyway, Cas was always entertaining in a restaurant, asking the waittress about the most obvious things, taking forever to decide and then ordering something weird, marveling over the most commonplace items on the menu. He was usually over the moon with whatever he ordered, although Dean didn’t think he’d ever been happier than he was with the green bean casserole he once ended up with, singing its praises nonstop for a good twenty minutes, attracting the notice of all the nearby patrons. Having Cas around guaranteed that things would always stay fun.
Virginia picked a seafood restaurant, which treated them all to a detailed lecture about the different species of sea animal and the order in which they evolved. Apparently Cas really dug sea life; Dean had never seen him this excited while talking about evolution. He scarcely paused to give his order (trying to order sea slugs, then electric eel--not having consulted the menu--before Virginia and Sam quickly recommended shrimp and he accepted their suggestion, eager to get back to the discussion), before returning to a detailed timeline of the evolution of the mollusks.
When the food arrived, Cas seemed baffled at the appearance of his shrimp, and then of everyone else’s orders, remarking that they seemed unrecognizable, as if he’d expected a pile of raw shrimp on his plate with no seasoning or vegetables or anything else. “You each got a different kind of fish,” he noted then, looked at his companions’ plates each in turn. “Don’t all the fishes taste more or less alike? I always thought sea cucumbers looked delicious,” he said avidly. He began to say something else, when his entire expression changed, and he sat up much straighter. Dean saw his wings rise high above his head, almost as in triumph. They looked different--much ... blacker. In fact, if Dean didn’t know better, he’d say that for the first time ever, they appeared opaque. “I ... I feel wonderful!” Cas exclaimed, then looked at his plate of shrimp, as if it was the cause.
Then Dean noticed Sam and Virginia staring, open-mouthed, at Cas’s wings, too, and he realized that, for some reason, suddenly he wasn’t the only one who could see them--which meant everyone else in the restaurant could see them, too. They were in a booth with three walls, but surely it wouldn’t be long before they attracted some serious stares. “Cas!” Dean hissed urgently. “Your wings! They’re visible! Put ’em away!”
Cas looked at him for a moment, flummoxed, then seemed to see what Dean meant more in his eyes than in his words. His wings abruptly disappeared. His eyes were darting around, as if ... as if perceiving things none of the rest of them could. Dean saw Sam and Virginia glance at each other in alarm out of the corner of his eye. Dean was staring intently at Cas. “The gate,” Cas said in monotone. “It’s open. I must go.”
“Cas!” Dean yelled, grabbing at the space where he was a split second before, but he was gone.
Cas had been gone for hours. The only missive from him was a cryptic text to Dean’s phone, which read, “They found a way through. Headed for the other gates. Will stop.” He never really had gotten the hang of texting.
They’d taken turns praying, asking for Cas at least to stop by to let them know what the hell was going on, but still no Cas. “Fuck this,” Dean finally growled. “I know how to make him come home.” He drove out to Cas’s property where there were no neighbors to hear him yell and threaten, and threw his arms up to the dark sky. “Castiel! You better get your ass home right now! You once told me you HAD to answer my heart’s true wish, and I wish more than anything in the world for you to get here now! NOW, Cas, you hear me??” It was what he wished for more than anything, not least because he was getting worried. ‘The gate,’ he’d said. He couldn’t really mean the gate to heaven, could he? Dean hoped he meant one of the other gates, because demons and monsters were way easier to handle than vengeful angels who wanted to make you into their skin suits, but his wings appearing, his saying he felt wonderful ... not to mention the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that Dean couldn’t seem to get rid of, all pointed in one direction.
Dean prayed again, getting louder and cursing more and more, at last crying and begging. “CAS!” he finally screamed. “COME HOME!” His voice echoed out over the flat, empty land, the wind blew through the weeds, the stars twinkled silently back at him, and Dean had never felt more alone.
He drove home, still praying, and slammed through the door to the house, where Sam and Virginia were waiting up. Sam was on his feet as soon as he saw Dean. “Call the other hunters,” Dean said, trying his very best to sound impassive, but he, at least, heard the quaver in his own voice. “Something’s wrong. We’ve gotta get to the gate to heaven and close that motherfucker up again--and do it right this time!”
“You’re sure it’s the gate to heaven?” Sam asked anxiously. “Cas told you?”
“No. Cas never came. That’s why I’m sure.”
On to Part 2!
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: R for language, violence and sex, more romantic than graphic
Pairing: Dean/Cas
Characters: Dean, Cas, Sam, Michael, Anna, Bobby, various hunters, one OC
Genre: Romance, angst, wing!kink, wing!fic, humor, action/adventure, h/c
Warnings: Death, violence, dom/sub
Word Count: 23,300
Summary: Dean and Sam closed the gates to heaven and hell to prevent the apocalypse, stranding Castiel in the world. The best thing to come out of that was the epic love that blossomed between Dean and Castiel. Now the gate to heaven is open again, the apocalypse is back on, and Dean is willing to do anything--anything--to save Cas from destruction at the hand of his brother Michael.
"He knew if he had it all to do over again, he’d just do the same thing, because he was Dean Winchester, and he couldn’t make another choice, for the same old reasons: love, and loyalty, and family."
Notes:
-I love all the hunters, so they're alive in this version.
-I'm a big fan of canon, so besides the hunters all being alive, I adhere to canon as much as I can in this series while still telling the tale. The characters are all their same old selves. Plus, even where I diverged from canon, I like to make it come back around as much as possible.
-This is part 5 in a series, quite possibly the final part, though I've said that before and I really love Dean and Cas's relationship in this series, so who knows. I've carefully written every story in the series so that it could stand on its own. With this story, I think I managed to include all the facts (which is getting harder after five stories' worth of growth and events), but the one thing I can't communicate by "throwing in an explainer" is why and how much they love each other. Thus, you might like to read at least one of the other installments in the series first:
Feathers
Human
Union
One
-Take deep breaths.
Dean sat at the kitchen table, watching Cas with open lust as he made breakfast. He observed Cas’s ingenuous expression as he tried in vain to open the package of bacon and finally, with a guilty little glance around to see if he was being watched by anyone besides Dean, cheated and used his angel powers to get it started. Innocent expression--as if he was innocent. Bacon! He was making bacon?! He knew what that would do to Dean!--just like he knew what his ingenuous expression would do to him, and the fact that he was making them breakfast, and his big, pretty wings, and everything else about him. Cas caught his eye, caught him looking at him, and smiled shyly. Gah! Look at that tease!
Cas wasn’t the only one who noticed Dean staring--when Dean finally looked away, afraid he’d leap up and rip Cas’s clothes off in another couple of seconds if he didn’t, Sam arched a sardonic eyebrow at him. They had the silent conversation only people like the Winchester brothers who knew each other so well could. Dean nodded his head insistently toward Cas. Sam shrugged, very slightly. Virginia, Sam’s girlfriend, now-wife, hadn’t even noticed their exchange of expressions, so she was startled when Dean burst out, “Come on! Like you can’t see it.”
Sam glanced over at Cas, looked back at Dean, and shook his head. “Looks like a guy making breakfast to me.”
“Looks like an angel making breakfast to me,” said Virginia, who knew everything about them and their hunter past, angels and monsters and demons and all the rest of it. Sam had made the mistake of not telling the woman he loved about it once before. He would never make that mistake again.
“As if!” Dean hissed, and leaned closer so maybe Cas wouldn’t overhear them. Cas was sensitive and might take what Dean was saying as a complaint, but as mercilessly as Cas teased him, Dean wouldn’t change a thing. Dean and Sam turned their faces to Cas, and Virginia poked hers above theirs, also watching. “Look at ’im there, stirring the eggs all temptingly, and humming that classic rock he KNOWS I love, consulting that recipe with those wide, innocent eyes. He’s deliberately doing all the things he knows make me go crazy!” Sam and Virginia looked at each other. Virginia giggled. “What!” Dean growled.
“Next you’re going to tell us he digs at the dirt in his garden like a siren, and puts on sweats like a stripper (only in reverse), and generally does everything in the whole wide world as sensually as a nymph,” said Sam with an irrepressible smirk.
“Exactly!” said Dean, satisfied. “You finally get it.”
Sam and Virginia gave each other a look and gave up the argument, amused. Dean was too turned on to be irritated. He looked back at Cas, just now fumbling with the breakfast sausages, narrowly avoiding flinging them all over the kitchen. It was indecent! Didn’t the guy have any boundaries, or did he enjoy tormenting Dean with desire while he did stuff that prevented Dean from being able to have his way with him? It must be the latter.
“Virginia and I are going to a barbecue at her parents’ house today, so we’ll be leaving right after breakfast,” Sam announced, then murmured, “in the nick of time, too, sounds like.”
“Yes!” Dean pumped his fist in the air. Cas had a little shack out on the land where he had his garden, which was the place he’d been living when Dean first met him. It hadn’t had a bed or a fridge or a bathroom when Dean met him, but Dean had been making improvements, since it was the only place they could get any privacy. Dean liked living with his brother and his wife, the four of them all together here in Sam and Dean’s house, but sometimes a guy needed a place he could go with his angel where they could get as loud and wild as they needed to, you know? So Dean had worked on the shack while Cas tended his garden, making it stronger and weather-proof, and he’d dragged a bed in there. Still, it wasn’t his first choice, so having the house to themselves today was great news. “I’ll give that fuckin’ tease what he’s begging for.”
Sam kind of shook his head at Dean disapprovingly, although Virginia looked even more amused than before. “How exactly is he a tease when he says yes every time you ask him? Oh--has it been a while again?” she asked sympathetically. She knew how hard it sometimes was to get Cas in the mood for sex, once upon a time.
“We did it last night,” Dean said, and saw the sympathy vacate her face, then added quickly, “But yeah! Yeah. It’s been like ten hours!”
Sam rolled his eyes, also rudely unsympathetic. Virginia put her arm through Sam’s. “I’m so glad I ended up with the brother I did,” she whispered, but Dean heard it anyway.
“Well, Cas is happy he ended up with this brother!” he insisted defensively. He hadn’t just ended up with him--Cas believed it was an insufferable arrogance for an angel to marry--but Dean had managed to talk him into marrying him, anyway. Dean had the ring and the certificate to prove it. “He thinks I’m the better one!”
Cas delivered two plates to the table. “I like you both. Actually, I like all three of you.” He smiled that ridiculously adorable smile at the gathering of people he often referred to as his little family.
Dean leaped out of his chair. “Cas, what the fuck?! Why are you trying to seduce these guys, too? No, no, no, I am not doing it with my BROTHER AND HIS WIFE. Knock it off, man! You can tempt me all you want, but not Sam and Virginia! I know angels are all free love and whatever, but you’re all mine, got it??”
Cas got that irresistable look of bewilderment on his face as Virginia cracked up and Sam looked tired. “Just ignore him, Cas,” Virginia said. “Something’s gotten into him. You could do dishes and laundry and he’d think you were a foul tempter.”
“Laundry?!” Dean cried. “Holy--Virginia, why’d you have to bring up Cas doing laundry?! All bending over .... God!” He clutched his hair.
Virginia looked at Sam, baffled. “Is this an angel thing, or a Dean thing?”
Sam looked equally confused. “I think it’s an angel-plus-Dean thing.”
“I thought the passion was supposed to start fading after marriage,” said Virginia scientifically.
Sam looked troubled at the thought. “Hope not.”
“For humans, maybe,” Dean groaned, sitting back down, “but with Cas, it’s only gotten worse.”
As Cas went back to retrieve the sausages, now cooked, Virginia lowered her voice and asked Sam, “Do you think it’s possible Cas is really using his angel powers on Dean and ... doing something to him?” They were beginning to look kind of worried.
Sam looked at Dean, knowing he’d heard the question. “No,” Dean said sullenly, shoving a bite of insanely delicious eggs in his mouth. “It’s just me being me. You really ... you really don’t see what I’m seeing?” They shook their heads sympathetically. “I just can’t get enough of him,” Dean admitted, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and then studiously keeping his eyes off Cas as he finally sat down and joined them for breakfast. That didn’t block out his maddeningly sexy low monotone voice with its warm tones that played Dean like a flute, or his magical words, every word given to someone else making Dean that much more jealous. He’d thought marrying Cas would ease his desire somewhat, but as he’d just told Sam and Virginia, knowing Cas was really his had only inflamed it.
Maybe it was that there always seemed to be new horizons for them. When Cas first became Dean’s friend, Dean had thought that would be it, but then he turned into a better friend than any Dean had ever had in his life, better than he’d ever believed a friend could be. Dean thought that was as good as it would get, but then Cas had become his lover, which was alien and wonderful and more beautiful and satisfying than any romantic relationship Dean had ever had. Dean thought that they’d surely reached the limits of what a romantic relationship could yield, but sex seemed new and exciting every time they did it, especially once Cas threw what they’d dubbed “angel sex” into the mix, which involved Cas touching his soul and merging their being, which was, if possible, even more fulfilling than regular sex. But that couldn’t be it; it wasn’t the sex, really, it was just Cas. Everything good and sweet and whole and healing came from him. Dean wanted to possess him completely, consume him, make them so close they were practically the same person, and the only thing he’d ever come up with to attempt that was sex--which made sense, kind of. It was the only time he had Cas’s full attention, and had him all to himself, and they were sharing everything each of them was. He didn’t even really care what they did, so long as they were there together, talking and being real, and Cas was happy. Somehow his brain (okay, maybe just his downstairs brain) had interpreted that to mean he was desperate for Cas every second of every day. Not that he minded. He WAS desperate for him every second of every day--any and every part of him, mind, body, and soul. Especially now that Cas had learned to kiss right, all he had to do was press his lips to Dean’s and Dean would abruptly be hard as a two by four.
As Sam and Virginia left, Sam pulled Dean aside to say, “Maybe you should ... you know, take a break for a little while. He’s an angel, but you’re only human, Dean. I don’t want you to ... overdo it.”
Dean snorted. “What could happen?!”
“I’m not sure, but ... I don’t want you to be the one to find out. I’m frankly a little worried for your health.”
“Thanks. Just what I always wanted: my brother worrying about my penis.”
“Trust me, Dean, it’s not exactly a dream come true for me, either, but as your brother and the only other human man in this house, I felt obligated. But if you want to wear it out, go right ahead.”
“Thanks, bro. You always were right there, trying to get between me and sex.”
Sam looked exasperated, but amused. “Fuck you, Winchester.”
“Bitch.”
“Jerk.”
Dean eagerly walked them to the door and saw them off, then turned back to face an oddly concerned Cas, standing right behind him. Dean was thrown off by the expression on his face. “What?”
“Your brother is concerned for your health because of ... me?”
“You were eavesdropping again?”
“I saw it in his eyes as he left.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Great.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Well, ya know, poor Sam, he was a virgin until he was twenty-five, and he’s always been kind of scared of sex, so ....”
Cas regarded him quizzically. Finally, he said, “I know for a fact that in no way resembles the truth. Why are you--?”
“Fine, fine!” Dean interrupted. “Such a stickler for accuracy. Sam’s just thinking too much about my sex life again.”
“What does he fear?”
Dean shrugged. “I dunno. That it’ll fall off if we do it too much.”
Cas considered the possibility. “Highly unlikely. However, it is true that as an angel I can handle a good deal more of many things than a human can without suffering any ill effect. That is, what is painful to a human is not especially painful to an angel, and sometimes vice versa. Thus, if your brother thinks we should, er, hold back ....”
Dean took Cas by the back of the head and kissed him deeply. Cas used to be a terrible kisser. He just didn’t get the point. Only fondling his wings used to get him going at all. However, now that he had figured it out, all it took to make him melt was a really heartfelt, passionate kiss, just like this. When Dean looked in his eyes again, he saw that Cas was putty in his hands. “What does Sam know about our sex life, really, Cas?”
“Very little, hopefully ...,” Cas responded softly, melting further as Dean snuck his hand up under his t-shirt and got a good feel of his perfect chest.
“What does Sam know about anything?” Dean murmured, removing Cas’s shirt.
“Well, quite a lot, on a great many subjects--”
“I was being a jerk,” Dean said, his lips brushing against Cas’s as he spoke, pressing their torsos together tightly. “It was a joke. Sam may know a lot about a lot, but he doesn’t know shit about us. Is that safe to say?”
Cas was already falling into the sensual altered state he was usually in when they made love. Suggestible, acquiescent, willing, vulnerable ... Dean could talk him into anything when he was like this, which made this conversation easier. Though he was beginning to look like he’d lost track of the conversation, Cas nodded slightly.
“Good,” Dean breathed, stroking Cas’s cheek softly to make him lose himself further. “That’s my sweet little angel. So ... what say we get to it?”
He started fumbling with the tie on Cas’s sweatpants, but after leaning helplessly against Dean for a few seconds, Cas roused himself enough to say, “We should go to our room.”
“Why? Sam and Virginia’ll be gone all day.”
“You tend to lose track of time. Also, regardless, it is generally considered unseemly to make love on ... public surfaces, or so I am beginning to understand.”
Dean growled, and clutched Cas roughly to him in his frustration. All the way across the hall, up a whole flight of stairs, then all the way down the upstairs hall to their room?! How long was Cas going to keep putting him off?! “Why are you torturing me like this?! Don’t think I didn’t notice your flirtatious cooking and suggestive sausage and how fucking sexy you were there in my old sweats! I know what’s going on, and I’m gonna give you what you’ve been asking for,” Dean said dangerously.
Cas stared at him blankly for a long moment, then he blinked and an obscenely adorable smile alit on his lips. “A ... new trowel?”
Holding himself up by Cas’s shoulders, Dean hung his head low, trying to take in slow breaths. “Cas.”
“Yes, Dean?”
“You are making me insane.”
Cas looked baffled. “No trowel?”
“Get up the stairs before I throw you down on them and fuck you ’til you can’t walk.”
Cas glanced anxiously toward the stairs. “Um ... I’m pretty sure stairs count as a public surface ....”
“GET UP THERE!”
Instead of heading obediently for the steps as Dean expected, Cas disappeared. Dean was seized by the terror that Cas had abruptly decided he’d rather check on his garden or something and gone off to do that, as used to happen all the time when Dean was trying to get him in the mood for sex. Dean raced up the stairs and down the hall to their room, where he was supremely relieved to see Cas lying docilely in bed, waiting for him. Dean held his heart, catching his breath. “You could have at least brought me with you, saved me the trip,” Dean complained.
“But you hate angel travel,” Cas said, confused. “And it was only up a single flight of stairs.”
Dean growled low in his throat, but softened as he realized what was really bothering him. “You scared me, Cas.”
“Why?” Cas asked innocently.
“I was afraid you’d run off to do something else. Don’t go anywhere, okay? I’m going to be getting you back ALL day long for all the tempting and teasing you did to me this morning.”
Cas seemed confused, but not afraid. “Why would I tempt you, when you know I am always yours to do with as you please?” Dean let out a deep groan, ran across the room and attacked him. Cas always somehow said exactly the thing that most got him going. “You know I would never do anything I knew made you unhappy,” Cas murmured softly as Dean gave him a passionate hickey.
Dean clutched Cas’s hair, waiting out the tears that suddenly sprang to his eyes at his words. How could he help falling more in love with Cas every single day they were together? “Yeah,” Dean finally managed to come up with something that sounded cool and in control. “You’re not a dick like other angels, are you?”
Cas’s wings--the most expressive part of him--suddenly stopped moving. Fuck. “I’m sorry, Cas,” Dean murmured, stroking Cas’s head. “Sorry. I know. You can say whatever you want about your own family, but someone else says it .... Anyone who says a word against Sammy gets a fast punch to the junk. I shouldn’t have said it. I just remember Michael and Zachariah and all those junkless pricks, and I can’t believe you came from the same family as them.”
“Michael was my favorite brother.”
Dean drew back, stunned. Cas’s expression was as impassive as ever, but somehow said so much nevertheless. “You never told me that.”
“You prefer not to talk about him.”
“Still, though--you know you can say anything to me.” Dean shook his head, still reeling from the information. “Seriously? He’s not just a dick with wings?”
“Michael ....” Cas tilted his head, remembering. “Michael was pure goodness. Whenever I was confused about what the right thing was, I went to him, and he explained things so I could understand. I never once doubted a word he said, until ... until I first touched your soul when you were in hell and I was able to see another perspective.”
“But he wasn’t nice, was he?!”
“Very nice. One of the kindest of my brothers. An archangel, never considering himself above helping one of his lowliest brothers? He was the older brother humans long for.”
“What happened?” Dean could not help asking sardonically.
“He is no different now, but obedience to our father is paramount to him; he will suffer no disobedience, as we saw with Lucifer.”
“Yeah, talk about a dick ...,” said Dean, figuring they could at least agree on that scumbag.
“He was my second favorite brother,” Cas said flatly as Dean goggled. “Until ... until he was cast away to hell.”
“What is there to like about him?!” Dean burst out, disbelieving. He and Sam had encountered him a few times in another vessel. He was terrifying and, obviously, evil.
“He was fun-loving, inventive, unusual. Our father made all of us different, you see--rather like a prototype for humanity. Apparently our father made him a little too unique, a little too willing to question what he’d been taught, but he still loved him too much to destroy him, so he simply ... made another place for him.”
“You still love him!” Dean exclaimed, unable to believe it, but he could hear it in his voice.
“He is my brother.”
Dean looked down. Even when Sam was turning into a demon-blood-guzzling monster, Dean still loved him. He would never stop loving him, no matter what. “You miss them. You miss your family.”
“Only sometimes,” Cas said, turning to Dean with an attempt at a reassuring smile, but Dean could still see underneath it the vast unknowable loneliness only Cas would ever know, the only angel left in the world after Dean, Sam, and their hunter buddies closed the gates of heaven, hell and purgatory in order to avert the apocalypse. Already having fought on the human side, Cas believed he would surely be killed if he returned to heaven when the gates closed, so he remained on Earth, where he met Dean and they fell in love. Dean, of course, would be forever grateful Cas stayed behind. Cas too said he didn’t regret it, but sometimes he got melancholy. He never talked about it, but Dean had always known that was what was behind his melancholy, so it was kind of a relief to hear him finally talk about it now.
“If you could talk to them, if you could see them now ... what would you say to them?”
“Nothing.” Cas’s smile turned bittersweet. “There is nothing to say. I disobeyed. Lucifer only refused to serve humans; I actively fought with them against my brothers and sisters. I would be eradicated, without doubt.”
“But you were doing what you thought was right!” Dean exclaimed. “And God made humans, too. Couldn’t you explain what you thought and why--?”
“No,” Cas interrupted him. “We are soldiers. I mean, we call each other brothers and sisters, but really we are my father’s army. When we were created, the word ‘coworker’ didn’t exist yet, or we might have gone with that one instead. We aren’t brothers like you and Sam, related in any way. We were each created individually. The sort of love that exists between you and your brother is beyond my ‘family’s’ comprehension. My superiors brook no disobedience. They already tried to ... reprogram me, but the effort failed. Besides, now, since remaining on Earth, I have broken countless other rules, marriage chief among them, also fornicating with a human, influencing and participating in human lives when there was no order to do so .... The list goes on and on, but my crimes were already more than sufficient to condemn me.”
Dean scowled. “With a family like that, who needs demons? People who treat you like that don’t count as a family. You deserve to be treated right. You deserve to be treated better than anyone in the world.” Dean hugged him close. No wonder Cas was so humble and fearful. He was an angel, so it looked different on him, but Dean had finally come to see Cas’s self-doubt as a form of low self-esteem. Having a family like that sure could do that to you. Dean would have thought that kind of thing only happened to humans, but apparently not. “You have a new family now,” Dean murmured, nuzzling him protectively, though soon enough it turned more sensual. “You’re with us now, Cas, and I promise, baby, I will always take good care of you.”
“By ... taking me to task for my imagined attempts to seduce you?” Cas said, smirking. He was kind of almost getting the hang of a joke.
“You love it when I ‘take you to task,’” Dean growled, and then he couldn’t hold back anymore, not like Cas wanted him to hold back. As desperate for him as he had been for hours now, Dean didn’t last long, but it didn’t matter; he could keep Cas going for hours upon hours, stroking his wings, and then, once he’d had a rest, Dean would be ready for another go.
Still, no matter what they did, somehow Dean could never get enough. He refused to see it as a problem, but the fact was that there was an unbridgable divide between humans and angels. Dean supposed in his heart of hearts that what he so craved was to know Cas, inside and out, the way Cas knew him. He loved listening to Cas wax on about whatever his heart desired, and he did sometimes for hours--usually about gardening tips; but occasionally about history--human, animal, or geological; mythology; linguistics; or religion. Dean could sometimes barely follow him, marveling at Cas’s vast supercomputer mind that could contain and process in one minute more information than a human mind could in a lifetime. Didn’t Dean seem like a puny little bug compared to the wonders Cas had known in all the eons he’d existed? Cas had lived to see Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, and Einstein. He’d seen every war, every civilization that rose and fell, every country born. He’d seen humanity evolve from sea creatures or whatever they evolved from. For that matter, Earth events probably didn’t even seem like much to him compared to whatever happened in other realms.
So how could he have ended up here, in Dean’s arms, his own precious, beloved angel, letting him do to him all the delicious, unspeakable things he wanted to his heart’s content, pledging to be with him until Dean died of old age? How could Dean possibly have gotten so lucky? What went on in that amazing angel mind? What thought process had led to the glorious miracle of his deciding to belong to Dean? What exactly was Cas, anyway? Dean, a simple human, was surely no mystery to Cas, but Cas was so vast and deep he was utterly unfathomable to Dean, and that left Dean with an emptiness he could never fill ... but one thing was sure: he would never stop trying, in the simple human ways he knew how to. Right now, that meant pouring as much love into Cas--physical and emotional--as he possibly could.
He started as he always liked to, stroking Cas’s wings. For whatever reason, he was the only one who could see or touch Cas’s wings; they passed right through everything and everyone else most of the time. Cas had an explanation that had to do with something about the intensity of their connection vibrating on compatible frequencies, but Dean usually thought of it as something happened simply because he loved Cas so freakin’ much. Sam and Virginia loved Cas, too--lots of people did--but not like this, not enough to see this most divine, magical part of him. Dean had always found Cas’s wings awe-inspiring and magnificent, especially once he discovered what it did to Cas for him to fondle them. He loved the way it made Cas kind of collapse, no matter what he was doing, like he was an instrument and Dean knew how to play him just right. He loved the instant erotic groans it drew out of him. He loved the way it turned Cas into his plaything. Cas would submit to anything he wanted to do to him after a couple of minutes of wing-stroking. Cas often wasn’t in the mood for sex, but just a little of this and he was ready for anything.
He got even louder when Dean started touching his body, too--wilder, writhing and bucking, but at the same time, even more Dean’s to do with as he pleased. It had taken Dean all the time they had been together, but he’d finally figured out if he moved his hands over Cas’s wings really slowly and softly, it got him going even more than if he did it fast or powerfully, although sometimes Cas did shove his wing hard against Dean when he wanted it like that. It would always be a mystery to Dean why it worked and what it made Cas feel; all Dean could do was to try to figure out from Cas’s reactions what really did it for him.
“Yeah, you like that?” Dean purred as Cas made strangled gasping sounds. Dean was, oh-so-slowly, stroking his hand all the way down his wing, then returning to the base of it to stroke down a line below where he’d been before, methodically touching every last feather he had. It was making Cas get downright out of control, nearly thrashing off the bed, and Dean grinned. God, he loved life.
He kept Cas going like this, utterly mercilessly, for well over an hour, before finally making love to him again--or trying; instead, Cas frenziedly pushed him down, held him in place with his wings, and produced a bottle of lube out of thin air. Dean was gonna go ahead and assume that meant Cas wanted to be on top, which was just peachy by Dean. It was all peachy by Dean, especially as Cas started stroking him with those soft feathers in all the right places.
During a lull, Dean remarked on how touching all of Cas’s feathers had an even more extreme effect than Dean’s usual haphazard stroking did.
“Of course,” Cas murmured robotically, the power of normal-sounding speech drained out of him well before.
“Yeah?” prompted Dean, sliding up Cas’s body to kiss his mouth, careful not to touch his wings and thus bring the conversation to a premature end.
“Yeah,” Cas repeated. “Each feather is attuned to a slightly different frequency of the universe, so each feather feels ... different from every other.”
“SERIOUSLY?? Holy crap; that would be like having thousands of different erogenous zones on your body!” Dean grinned, imagining it.
“Millions,” Cas corrected, all the strength sucked out of his voice by their lovemaking.
Dean groaned, vicariously turned on by the idea, and started pitilessly fondling handfulls of feathers all over his wings, as Cas gradually lost the power even to move. “So ... your wings are like ... giant satellite dishes,” Dean said thoughtfully, “and each feather is like a little one.” Cas had talked before about being able to hear the host, back when the gate to heaven was still open. Maybe this was how he did it.
Okay, he guessed Cas was right when he said Dean tended to lose track of time, because Dean was most irritated when he heard Sam’s car pull up in the driveway. “What the hell?!” Dean squealed, just gearing up for another round. “He said he was gonna be gone all day!”
“It’s evening,” Cas murmured, sounding sensual and spent. These were some of Dean’s favorite times, lying in bed with the golden late-day sun gently lighting Cas’s face, naked together, touching each other whenever and however they felt like. Cas’s wings slowly opened and closed, like a butterfly intent upon a flower, and Dean knew it was one of Cas’s expressions of greatest contentment and happiness. Dean touched one of his wings, eliciting a soft, involuntary moan from Cas, and he withdrew his hand, not wanting to make Cas noisy now that Sam was home. Instead, he simply marveled at those gorgeous wings.
“Baby, you have the prettiest wings in the whole wide world.”
“I have the only wings in the whole wide world ... at least, on a human form.”
“Still, I’m sure they’re the prettiest wings ever on an angel.”
Cas hesitated. He’d once said angels were not vain about their wings, but Dean had begun to suspect he meant they weren’t allowed to be vain about their wings, and now, in the shelter of the safety of his new life with Dean, he finally felt free to talk about them, at least a little: “I never thought so; I thought of them as scraggly and sparse. It was Michael who had the most magnificent wings of us all.”
Dean reached for one very carefully, just touching a fingertip to one of the soft, vibrant feathers, and still, even at this little touch, Cas couldn’t help but sigh. He pressed his forehead against Dean’s cheek. “Well, whatever you say, I still think no other wings could be awesomer than yours,” Dean said. Dean was the only human who could see them, and even he couldn’t see them very well, since they appeared transparent. Only in certain kinds of light--like right now--could he make out the individual feathers, their vivid blackness and shininess. He was used to Cas and his oddities by now, even all the amazing things that he could do, but getting a good gander at his wings was the one thing that still sometimes filled him with awe. “What’s it like,” he could not help but ask, “having wings?”
“I do not know what it’s like not to have wings,” Cas replied. “To be honest, I’ve always felt a bit sorry for humans, that they don’t have them. I suppose it’s only because flight is so fundamental to angels, but to have no choice but to move laboriously to one’s destination along the ground or in an airplane ... I mean, I enjoy it, when I get to travel with you, but otherwise, it would be dreadful and terribly boring.”
Dean grinned. “Not when you’ve got wheels like mine. Then it rocks.” Still, he could get what Cas was saying. For Cas to be pinned down would be to take away that sense of peace and freedom he had like the butterfly on the flower; it would be to make Cas no longer Cas. “Yeah, that’s part of you: you can always fly away. Just always come back to me, ’kay, baby?” he said, kissing him, feeling Cas melt into the kiss. “Forever, right? You’re mine forever.”
Cas’s smile was bittersweet again. “I am more yours forever than you are mine forever,” he said wistfully, stroking Dean’s jaw, gazing at his face. “I’ll be with you your whole life long, but you ... when at last you die and your soul goes to heaven, I’ll be unable to follow.”
“Aw, come on!” Dean said. He couldn’t stand the idea. “You can--can’t you--well ... we’ll spend the next fifty years figuring out a way to fix that, ’cos I ain’t spending eternity away from you, that’s for sure.” It was unthinkable, for Cas to be stuck here on Earth, alone, away from Dean in heaven, Cas’s home to which he could never return ... all because Dean got him stranded here in the first place. “Anyway,” he said, thinking of other times he’d been to heaven, “you know as soon as I got there, those dicks’d just put me back in my body so they could start the apocalypse again. I’d be back here in no time,” he blustered, but Cas, never fooled, only smiled faintly and gazed at Dean like he was imprinting his face and this moment upon his mind for those days when they were finally, eternally parted. Dean’s entire life would scarcely register as a blip on the eons Cas had been alive. Did their days together that seemed so wonderfully endless to Dean pass in a flash for Cas?
What would Cas do here, alone? Jimmy once said Cas would have faded away like smoke on the wind if he hadn’t had Dean’s love to sustain him. Now that Cas could no longer connect to heaven’s power, he had to eat and sleep like any person, and Dean’s love was somehow part of what kept him going. Would he slowly fade and disappear without Dean here? “We’ll open the gate,” Dean said suddenly. “When I die, or right before I die or whatever, we’ll open the gate again, so you get your fix of heaven juice to keep you going. Maybe you can even sneak in there with me,” Dean said with a grin, knowing Cas would unceremoniously shoot down that idea and not caring; they had a lifetime to come up with something better.
But Cas didn’t shoot it down, he only smiled his sad little smile at Dean and said nothing. Dean had to change the subject. “I tell ya why I’d want wings--one and only reason: so you could get me as hot and crazy, touching them, as I do you. Know what I’m sayin’?”
A smile scattered the dark clouds over his expression from before, considering this. “I would really enjoy that. I could ‘take you to task’ for your pitiless stimulation of mine.”
Dean chuckled, but what remained unresolved from their conversation before seized him and he could not help but say, “But if you did disappear--Cas, if you died, your soul or essence or whatever would go to heaven, right? So we could find each other there again someday?”
Cas seemed surprised Dean could not know the answer to this question. Anticipating Dean’s reaction to the answer, his voice was uncharacteristically gentle as he said, “No, Dean. Heaven is our home, the place we come from. Just as a human doesn’t go to Earth when they die, angels don’t go to heaven when they die. When an angel kills another angel, it is with the understanding that they are ending the existence of that angel, forever.”
Dean couldn’t help gripping Cas’s upper arms very tightly, couldn’t help the intense tone of his voice as he asked, “But--but then what happens to you guys??”
Cas quirked his head, considering. “I’ve always imagined our energy dissipates throughout the universe to become parts of other things, as your bodies decay in the soil and get used for sustaining the life cycle of this planet. But no one knows for certain. I like that human bodies are recyclable. I only hope that I, too, will be ... recycled when I come to my end.”
Dean felt his expression twitching. He couldn’t control it. All this was unthinkable. Cas would live longer than Dean would, for sure, but Dean had promised to take care of him now that he had to live as a human, so Dean had to start thinking hard about ways to make sure Cas was taken care of after he was gone ... only it seemed so huge and impossible, so far beyond his puny human powers. He only ended up freaking out for part of a minute before managing to get himself back under tight control. Whatever; he’d done the impossible before. Whatever it took, however difficult a task it might be, he would just have to work at it until he’d found a way. There simply was no other option.
“You keep saying my love is what keeps you going here on Earth, but could you be a little more specific? You’re really not being too helpful, Cas,” Dean said, hauling a bale of straw from the trunk of the Impala so Cas could spruce up his backyard year-round nativity scene.
“Perhaps it would help if you explained to me why you keep asking me this,” Cas said, lugging cleaning supplies, since the holy family was fairly dirt-covered by now after a rainy summer, and two of the wise men under the tree collected a lot of bird droppings.
“I told you: I’ve got to find a way to keep you going here, you know, after I’m gone.”
“And I told you: It is something over which you have no influence.”
“You don’t know that. Everyone said we couldn’t close the gates, but we did it. The Winchesters always have a few tricks up their sleeves.” Dean threw down the bale of straw next to the nativity scene and sat on it while Cas got to work. It had never occurred to Dean how ironic it was that Cas doted so fondly over symbols of a family who not only treated him like shit but who actually would kill him given half a chance, but that was Cas: devoted and forgiving to the end, no matter what someone had done to him.
Cas set down his cleaning supplies and sat next to Dean on the strawbale with a sigh. “Angels are love, Dean. Because God is love. Love is our essence. Your love for me feeds my essence. That you let me love and serve you in return allows me to continue to be an angel, in some respect, since that is an angel’s function.”
Dean was relieved. “So all I’ve gotta do is find someone else to love you before I die, and we’re golden!” he said, getting excited. “But not until I’m practically dead!” he said then gruffly. “I’ll be so fuckin’ jealous. But still! Still, it’ll be worth it. Just ... not until I’m already almost dead, okay, Cas?”
Cas gave him that wise, knowing smile. “You say it like it’s so easy.”
“Falling in love with you is the easiest thing in the world,” Dean said simply. “I’ll be beating ’em all off with a stick.”
“There has been no one to beat off,” Cas said seriously, while Dean chortled at his phrasing. “Many humans look their whole lives for love and never find it. In any case, our connection is in large part a result of my touching your soul and repairing it when you were in hell, which will never be repeated with another person. It is all right, Dean,” Cas said, one of his strange smiles dawning on his face. “I’m content to live only as long as you do and fade away thereafter. It is so much more than I ever hoped for, so much more than my family believes I deserve.”
“No!” Dean snapped, getting up to pace, upset. “So, what, my soul lives in paradise forever and you just--cease to exist?! Fuck, no! As long as you’re still kicking, there’s a chance we could be together again!”
Cas considered. “That is true, I suppose. But, Dean, every moment we spend together is impressed into the fabric of time. It’s remembered by the universe forever, so even if--even were I to disappear and cease to exist, I would never really die. I would go on existing in your heart forever ... right?”
“That’s not good enough,” Dean growled. “I need you here, the real you, right here, with me, forever. Period. Okay? Okay. So: we just need to find someone to love you--later on--MUCH later on--and then you need to mess with their soul or something so you have that connection thing, and that’s that. I’m sure we’ll fine-tune the plan over the years, but at least now we have something to go on. And then you keep trying on this end, and I’ll keep trying in heaven, to find a way to get back to each other. You cool with that?”
Cas seemed thrown off, but his eagerness to make Dean feel better about all this won out. “Y--yes, Dean,” he stuttered.
“Okay, good. Now, you need help with this thing, or can I mow the lawn?”
Dean mowed while he fondly watched Cas putter around his beloved nativity scene. It really was a monstrosity, dolls of all different sizes in various states of disrepair representing the different characters. A neighbor dog had gotten at the Jesus doll, which now had teeth marks in its head and right arm. Cas even had an AT-AT walker in there, since he couldn’t find enough sheep. Also, barns are dirty places, and Cas was all about realism, so it lacked any of the romantic sheen of most nativity scenes, focusing instead on the humble and the ordinary. Still, it made Dean smile every time he looked at it, because it reminded him of Cas. Sam and Virginia found it downright creepy, but it made Cas so happy, Dean couldn’t help but love it a little, himself.
Cas was still at it when he finished mowing, so he got a beer, sat in the shade and watched Cas clean, unable to help thinking it over and honing their plan. Cas glanced up at him, into his eyes, which he did whenever he wanted to know what Dean was thinking about; angels could read your mind just by looking in your eyes. When he saw what it was, he smiled, moving on to clean G.I. Joseph. “Love is the most powerful force in the universe, Dean,” he murmured. “Why do you think angels are more powerful than demons? Demons embody hate and fear. Angels are love. Love can do anything. Love can reach across time and space. It can heal, it can renew, it can create. It can overcome any obstacle. It’s the fabric and the origin of the universe. Never forget it.”
He said it because he could tell Dean was still fretting. “Cool,” Dean said absently. “Just gimme a love gun and I’ll blast through everything that gets in my way.”
Cas chuckled softly, though he looked a bit disappointed, like he could tell Dean didn’t really get it. “Oh, Dean. You think only in terms of guns.”
“Or knives. Knives are good. Fists are fine, in a pinch. I’ve even been known to use a taser.”
Cas was silent for a while, cleaning and spreading clean straw around the nativity scene. At last, he said quietly, “Some things, you can’t fight.”
Dean knew what he was trying to say. Cas didn’t believe they could be together again after Dean died, didn’t believe Dean would find a way to save Cas. Dean planned to spend their lives finding a way; Cas probably planned to spend it helping Dean come to terms with failure, but that just wasn’t how Dean rolled. “I’ve spent my whole life fighting, Cas,” he said at last, taking a long swig. “I don’t know any other way.”
When Sam and Virginia returned from shopping that afternoon, they suggested all four of them go out to dinner. The fact was that Cas did way more than his fair share of the cooking, which made everybody feel guilty, but nobody else was in the mood to cook tonight, so going out to dinner was a good solution. Anyway, Cas was always entertaining in a restaurant, asking the waittress about the most obvious things, taking forever to decide and then ordering something weird, marveling over the most commonplace items on the menu. He was usually over the moon with whatever he ordered, although Dean didn’t think he’d ever been happier than he was with the green bean casserole he once ended up with, singing its praises nonstop for a good twenty minutes, attracting the notice of all the nearby patrons. Having Cas around guaranteed that things would always stay fun.
Virginia picked a seafood restaurant, which treated them all to a detailed lecture about the different species of sea animal and the order in which they evolved. Apparently Cas really dug sea life; Dean had never seen him this excited while talking about evolution. He scarcely paused to give his order (trying to order sea slugs, then electric eel--not having consulted the menu--before Virginia and Sam quickly recommended shrimp and he accepted their suggestion, eager to get back to the discussion), before returning to a detailed timeline of the evolution of the mollusks.
When the food arrived, Cas seemed baffled at the appearance of his shrimp, and then of everyone else’s orders, remarking that they seemed unrecognizable, as if he’d expected a pile of raw shrimp on his plate with no seasoning or vegetables or anything else. “You each got a different kind of fish,” he noted then, looked at his companions’ plates each in turn. “Don’t all the fishes taste more or less alike? I always thought sea cucumbers looked delicious,” he said avidly. He began to say something else, when his entire expression changed, and he sat up much straighter. Dean saw his wings rise high above his head, almost as in triumph. They looked different--much ... blacker. In fact, if Dean didn’t know better, he’d say that for the first time ever, they appeared opaque. “I ... I feel wonderful!” Cas exclaimed, then looked at his plate of shrimp, as if it was the cause.
Then Dean noticed Sam and Virginia staring, open-mouthed, at Cas’s wings, too, and he realized that, for some reason, suddenly he wasn’t the only one who could see them--which meant everyone else in the restaurant could see them, too. They were in a booth with three walls, but surely it wouldn’t be long before they attracted some serious stares. “Cas!” Dean hissed urgently. “Your wings! They’re visible! Put ’em away!”
Cas looked at him for a moment, flummoxed, then seemed to see what Dean meant more in his eyes than in his words. His wings abruptly disappeared. His eyes were darting around, as if ... as if perceiving things none of the rest of them could. Dean saw Sam and Virginia glance at each other in alarm out of the corner of his eye. Dean was staring intently at Cas. “The gate,” Cas said in monotone. “It’s open. I must go.”
“Cas!” Dean yelled, grabbing at the space where he was a split second before, but he was gone.
Cas had been gone for hours. The only missive from him was a cryptic text to Dean’s phone, which read, “They found a way through. Headed for the other gates. Will stop.” He never really had gotten the hang of texting.
They’d taken turns praying, asking for Cas at least to stop by to let them know what the hell was going on, but still no Cas. “Fuck this,” Dean finally growled. “I know how to make him come home.” He drove out to Cas’s property where there were no neighbors to hear him yell and threaten, and threw his arms up to the dark sky. “Castiel! You better get your ass home right now! You once told me you HAD to answer my heart’s true wish, and I wish more than anything in the world for you to get here now! NOW, Cas, you hear me??” It was what he wished for more than anything, not least because he was getting worried. ‘The gate,’ he’d said. He couldn’t really mean the gate to heaven, could he? Dean hoped he meant one of the other gates, because demons and monsters were way easier to handle than vengeful angels who wanted to make you into their skin suits, but his wings appearing, his saying he felt wonderful ... not to mention the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that Dean couldn’t seem to get rid of, all pointed in one direction.
Dean prayed again, getting louder and cursing more and more, at last crying and begging. “CAS!” he finally screamed. “COME HOME!” His voice echoed out over the flat, empty land, the wind blew through the weeds, the stars twinkled silently back at him, and Dean had never felt more alone.
He drove home, still praying, and slammed through the door to the house, where Sam and Virginia were waiting up. Sam was on his feet as soon as he saw Dean. “Call the other hunters,” Dean said, trying his very best to sound impassive, but he, at least, heard the quaver in his own voice. “Something’s wrong. We’ve gotta get to the gate to heaven and close that motherfucker up again--and do it right this time!”
“You’re sure it’s the gate to heaven?” Sam asked anxiously. “Cas told you?”
“No. Cas never came. That’s why I’m sure.”
On to Part 2!