Fic: The Shape of Flight (SPN, Dean/Castiel)
Day 13 of the 13 days of happy things!
The Shape of Flight
Dean/Castiel, Sam. PG, 2,142 words
Summary: Maybe there's something better down this road than all the roads before it.
Notes: This odd little story is AU because it isn't firmly set in any particular time period. Mostly I think it's futurefic. It's hard to say. Thank you to dotfic for her encouragement and excellent beta.
The Shape of Flight
by Destina
There's a shack on the low edge of a sloped green field, a place built out of lumber scraps and leftover nails. It's the kind of place people throw together after the church they grew up in falls victim to rot and decay, or maybe after a storm rises up over the prairie and carries it away, leaving only broken boards in its wake. There's no cross to mark it, no path to its door, but the walls are whitewashed clean, and it shines bright in the late afternoon sun.
It's a place no one happens across, and no one needs to know about, unless they're looking for it.
You first hear about it from a man in Taos, someone whose name you haven't learned but whose tears seem to come from his throat, great choking sobs of grief and gratitude. His son is dead, but his daughter's alive. It's half a victory, but you've learned to take what you can get. You dose him with cheap whiskey from his own cabinets, served up in a jelly jar, and wait while he wipes the snot and blood from his face.
In the living room, Sam and the little girl, Theresa, are playing Candy Land, and Sam is losing. Sam was never any good at kids' games. There's only one he can play pretty well, and that's because you throw it every time just to see that look of annoyance on his face. You like the fact that he thinks you're predictable. You don't even mind that it's true.
"I knew something was wrong with him," the man says, the glass shaking in his hand. "The priest said he was possessed, but I didn't...I don't..."
"It's okay," you tell him, pushing the bottle toward him. "It's a shock to everybody. Nobody ever thinks it's really demons."
"No, not that," the man says, and you're beginning to get that there's not enough whiskey in the world for him. He raises his head, but his eyes are empty. "I believed, but not enough. I should have taken him to the church."
"You did," you say. It was the priest who called you. An old friend of Caleb's.
"No," the man says. "The white church."
You glance up. Sam meets your eyes, and you tilt one shoulder up, a silent gesture of confusion.
"The church for the fallen," he says. "For outcasts. Like my son." And then he puts his head down. His sobs distract Theresa from her game, and she comes into the kitchen, casting a wary eye on you.
"It's okay, Daddy," she says, putting a tiny hand on his shoulder.
Sam shoots you a look, but you're already headed for the door.
The next time you hear about it, a demon is up to its usual tricks, minutes from death and desperate to land a wound, any wound. Even a shallow cut would do.
"Winchesters," the demon whispers, spitting contempt and blood between its human host's teeth.
"Any last words?" you say, Ruby's knife balanced in your hand like it was carved from your arm. You like to taunt them. It never gets old.
"Heard from your angel lately?" the demon asks, tilting its head to one side like an especially intense puppy. "Oh, I forgot. He's dead."
You're really going to enjoy killing this one. You enjoy killing them all, but when they rub the barely healed sores of your life, it's even more satisfying.
"Or is he?" The demon laughs, and keeps laughing even when you catch it by the neck and hold it, strangling the giggles until Sam covers them with salt and turns them to screams.
"You've got something you're dying to tell us, so just say it," Sam says, standing back so the thing's salt-laced vomit won't hit his shoes.
"Winchesters," it says. A long string of spittle drips down its white-crusted chin. "Nothing special about you at all." It looks up at Dean with a vicious grin and black eyes. "Maybe you should go to church once in a while."
You know right away that there's a connection, but you'll be damned if you'll ask this thing for more. You shove the knife in deep, take a vicious pleasure in watching the light of its existence wink out.
"What the hell was that about?" Sam says. He hasn't processed it yet. You're glad.
"Fuckin' demons. Come on, let's go." You wipe the knife against the dead host's jean jacket, a black stain against dark denim, and turn toward the night outside. Fresh air, half moon. You think about who you could ask, who might have answers, but the list of allies is short these days.
It's just you and Sam, and what the two of you don't know might fill a hundred books and not get you any closer.
You haven't called for Castiel once since the moment he vanished from your arms, his grace bleeding out from the strike of a weapon forged in dimensions you can't imagine. You haven't, but now you do. Not out loud, not so Sam will know you're doing it, because then he'll have questions and you're fucking tired of questions. Just the breath of his name on your lips, the truest prayer you've offered in years.
He doesn't answer. You're not surprised, but you kill a fifth of whiskey anyway, and Sam doesn't ask why. Sam never asks why.
**
There's a motel room off I-80, a flea-infested rathole so dismal Sam won't even take his clothes off to get in the bed. You've slept in worse, but not by much.
It's in this room you work it through, piece by agonizing piece, setting the stones down in some kind of order.
You think of Anna, of her soft skin and her doe eyes and her cherry lips, her patient acceptance of all your many and varied flaws, and how she cast you back into your world, and then tried to take it from you with only a vague apology. You think of how she touched you, how she clasped her hand gently over Castiel's mark on your body. Now you know it for what it was, though it's taken you a long time to see - what she offered you, and what you were really taking.
This train of thought takes you to Meg, who possessed a beautiful girl, and your strong brother. And to Raphael, who was a slender man, and a regal woman.
That half-formed thought in the back of your head - the one you never let take shape - coalesces into something that makes your eyes burn. You catch your lip between your teeth, rub a hand over your face.
"I think Castiel is alive," you say out loud, though it's 2AM and you're still drunk and Sam is passed out under the orange bedspread.
Like he'd never been asleep, Sammy rolls over and squints at you, then turns on the light. When he sees your face, he sits up, concern written all over him. Not like he's never seen you cry before, but this really is a new low. You scrub your face two or three more times with a shaking hand.
Dean, how? and do you really think so? and that's not much to go on, he says. And you don't have any answers for him, only a gut instinct you've ignored for so long, you have trouble letting it rise. When it does, it's the hum in the telephone pole, the static on the radio, the piercing cry that shatters glass, but softer now. Constant.
"It's him," you say, and then you pass out.
**
There's a fractured dirt road leading off the sloping two-lane asphalt. You turn your baby down it and stop, feeling her reassuring rumble under the touch of your nervous fingers.
Above you, the sky darkens, turns an ominous dark grey; the sun slants sideways against it, everything more vivid under the contrast. Beside you, Sam's hands are restless, out of their element. There are things Sam can research, patterns he finds in the smeared ink of old things, but some things have to be seen.
Have to be found, to be believed.
You're not sure how you know this is the right road, but you do. Like he's reading your mind, Sam sighs, then says, "It's just a road, Dean."
What he doesn't say: we've been down too many to count, so what's one more?
What he doesn't say: maybe there's something better down this road than all the roads before it.
You stop listening for what he doesn't say, and you nod. Slowly, you make your way down the road, and the straightness of it surprises you, the slow rise and fall of it, inevitable, as it narrows toward the place at its end.
**
When you pull open the door, stale cool air rushes out to meet you, and you step inside, Sam at your shoulder.
There's a man in a dark jacket, not a priest, or not dressed like one, anyway. His head is bent as he listens to the woman kneeling beside him. They face the altar, where some form of towering fake Jesus is conspicuous in its absence, and the hushed murmur of penitence rises up toward the sky.
You know him on sight, and you stop, because he didn't want to be found, didn't want you to find him. Something made him come here, something you don't pretend to understand. There's so much you haven't understood, but it's dawning on you now.
Sam doesn't say a word, but he steps away from you, clearing the way.
Castiel turns, goes to his feet, not gracefully, and his eyes are wide. You can't breathe, can't find even the air it takes to speak a single word.
"You couldn't find a fucking phone?" is what you end up with, when breath comes back into your lungs.
The kneeling woman starts, her prayers interrupted by your outburst, not that you care. Sam snorts, loud enough for you to hear, and Castiel shrugs, a tiny motion, though you recognize the joy in his eyes.
"I never stopped calling," Castiel says, and the low hum in your brain flares, recedes, stops, a firefly winking out. Cas sighs, a sound of relief, and the moment breaks.
When you pull him close, you're too rough, but he rests his hand on your back, and he's blood and bone and real and yours, even if he never wanted to be, even if you're still not sure what the fuck you're doing, and that dangerous live current of need and fear and desire that's sparked in you since Hell spat you out goes quiet, finally.
**
There's a silence in the room so loud, you barely dare break it with the rustle of clothing, or the hitch in your throat when you look at him. It's all pretty strange, but then again, weird is the fabric of your world.
He sheds clothes the way birds shed feathers, unselfconscious, a small smile turning the corner of his mouth. Like a key slipped into an invisible lock, that smile strikes you, draws you in, and you cup one hand behind his head, hold him steady while you kiss that corner, and then all the rest of his smile, and he shivers against your hold. There's still power in him; you feel it, warm against your fingertips where they press into his skin.
You spread him out on a bed, your fallen and familiar angel, and he looks at you with amused eyes while you try to figure out what to do first. You want to kiss him. You want to fuck him, and do filthy, inspired things to him. You want to prove something you still can't give voice to, not that it matters anyway.
Instead, you run your hands across the tops of his shoulders, cup them beneath his shoulderblades. Your hands rest there, and a troubled look crosses his face while he shifts beneath you. You're not sure what you expected to find there, and for a moment, your face grows warm.
Slowly, you let him go, and your hands smooth out across the rough sheets, tracing the absent shape of what you've never seen. You think too small, you suppose; you know the vaguely terrifying mass of him, the weight of what he used to be, and it breaks your heart. You have at least that much left to give.
"Do you miss them?" you ask, because of all the questions you haven't found words for, this is the easiest.
He smiles at you, no sign of tears in his eyes. His hands move over you, sweep down your imperfect human skin, and he says, "I don't need them, now."
In the dark, in the quiet, together, your hands trace the shape of flight.
end
The Shape of Flight
Dean/Castiel, Sam. PG, 2,142 words
Summary: Maybe there's something better down this road than all the roads before it.
Notes: This odd little story is AU because it isn't firmly set in any particular time period. Mostly I think it's futurefic. It's hard to say. Thank you to dotfic for her encouragement and excellent beta.
The Shape of Flight
by Destina
There's a shack on the low edge of a sloped green field, a place built out of lumber scraps and leftover nails. It's the kind of place people throw together after the church they grew up in falls victim to rot and decay, or maybe after a storm rises up over the prairie and carries it away, leaving only broken boards in its wake. There's no cross to mark it, no path to its door, but the walls are whitewashed clean, and it shines bright in the late afternoon sun.
It's a place no one happens across, and no one needs to know about, unless they're looking for it.
You first hear about it from a man in Taos, someone whose name you haven't learned but whose tears seem to come from his throat, great choking sobs of grief and gratitude. His son is dead, but his daughter's alive. It's half a victory, but you've learned to take what you can get. You dose him with cheap whiskey from his own cabinets, served up in a jelly jar, and wait while he wipes the snot and blood from his face.
In the living room, Sam and the little girl, Theresa, are playing Candy Land, and Sam is losing. Sam was never any good at kids' games. There's only one he can play pretty well, and that's because you throw it every time just to see that look of annoyance on his face. You like the fact that he thinks you're predictable. You don't even mind that it's true.
"I knew something was wrong with him," the man says, the glass shaking in his hand. "The priest said he was possessed, but I didn't...I don't..."
"It's okay," you tell him, pushing the bottle toward him. "It's a shock to everybody. Nobody ever thinks it's really demons."
"No, not that," the man says, and you're beginning to get that there's not enough whiskey in the world for him. He raises his head, but his eyes are empty. "I believed, but not enough. I should have taken him to the church."
"You did," you say. It was the priest who called you. An old friend of Caleb's.
"No," the man says. "The white church."
You glance up. Sam meets your eyes, and you tilt one shoulder up, a silent gesture of confusion.
"The church for the fallen," he says. "For outcasts. Like my son." And then he puts his head down. His sobs distract Theresa from her game, and she comes into the kitchen, casting a wary eye on you.
"It's okay, Daddy," she says, putting a tiny hand on his shoulder.
Sam shoots you a look, but you're already headed for the door.
The next time you hear about it, a demon is up to its usual tricks, minutes from death and desperate to land a wound, any wound. Even a shallow cut would do.
"Winchesters," the demon whispers, spitting contempt and blood between its human host's teeth.
"Any last words?" you say, Ruby's knife balanced in your hand like it was carved from your arm. You like to taunt them. It never gets old.
"Heard from your angel lately?" the demon asks, tilting its head to one side like an especially intense puppy. "Oh, I forgot. He's dead."
You're really going to enjoy killing this one. You enjoy killing them all, but when they rub the barely healed sores of your life, it's even more satisfying.
"Or is he?" The demon laughs, and keeps laughing even when you catch it by the neck and hold it, strangling the giggles until Sam covers them with salt and turns them to screams.
"You've got something you're dying to tell us, so just say it," Sam says, standing back so the thing's salt-laced vomit won't hit his shoes.
"Winchesters," it says. A long string of spittle drips down its white-crusted chin. "Nothing special about you at all." It looks up at Dean with a vicious grin and black eyes. "Maybe you should go to church once in a while."
You know right away that there's a connection, but you'll be damned if you'll ask this thing for more. You shove the knife in deep, take a vicious pleasure in watching the light of its existence wink out.
"What the hell was that about?" Sam says. He hasn't processed it yet. You're glad.
"Fuckin' demons. Come on, let's go." You wipe the knife against the dead host's jean jacket, a black stain against dark denim, and turn toward the night outside. Fresh air, half moon. You think about who you could ask, who might have answers, but the list of allies is short these days.
It's just you and Sam, and what the two of you don't know might fill a hundred books and not get you any closer.
You haven't called for Castiel once since the moment he vanished from your arms, his grace bleeding out from the strike of a weapon forged in dimensions you can't imagine. You haven't, but now you do. Not out loud, not so Sam will know you're doing it, because then he'll have questions and you're fucking tired of questions. Just the breath of his name on your lips, the truest prayer you've offered in years.
He doesn't answer. You're not surprised, but you kill a fifth of whiskey anyway, and Sam doesn't ask why. Sam never asks why.
**
There's a motel room off I-80, a flea-infested rathole so dismal Sam won't even take his clothes off to get in the bed. You've slept in worse, but not by much.
It's in this room you work it through, piece by agonizing piece, setting the stones down in some kind of order.
You think of Anna, of her soft skin and her doe eyes and her cherry lips, her patient acceptance of all your many and varied flaws, and how she cast you back into your world, and then tried to take it from you with only a vague apology. You think of how she touched you, how she clasped her hand gently over Castiel's mark on your body. Now you know it for what it was, though it's taken you a long time to see - what she offered you, and what you were really taking.
This train of thought takes you to Meg, who possessed a beautiful girl, and your strong brother. And to Raphael, who was a slender man, and a regal woman.
That half-formed thought in the back of your head - the one you never let take shape - coalesces into something that makes your eyes burn. You catch your lip between your teeth, rub a hand over your face.
"I think Castiel is alive," you say out loud, though it's 2AM and you're still drunk and Sam is passed out under the orange bedspread.
Like he'd never been asleep, Sammy rolls over and squints at you, then turns on the light. When he sees your face, he sits up, concern written all over him. Not like he's never seen you cry before, but this really is a new low. You scrub your face two or three more times with a shaking hand.
Dean, how? and do you really think so? and that's not much to go on, he says. And you don't have any answers for him, only a gut instinct you've ignored for so long, you have trouble letting it rise. When it does, it's the hum in the telephone pole, the static on the radio, the piercing cry that shatters glass, but softer now. Constant.
"It's him," you say, and then you pass out.
**
There's a fractured dirt road leading off the sloping two-lane asphalt. You turn your baby down it and stop, feeling her reassuring rumble under the touch of your nervous fingers.
Above you, the sky darkens, turns an ominous dark grey; the sun slants sideways against it, everything more vivid under the contrast. Beside you, Sam's hands are restless, out of their element. There are things Sam can research, patterns he finds in the smeared ink of old things, but some things have to be seen.
Have to be found, to be believed.
You're not sure how you know this is the right road, but you do. Like he's reading your mind, Sam sighs, then says, "It's just a road, Dean."
What he doesn't say: we've been down too many to count, so what's one more?
What he doesn't say: maybe there's something better down this road than all the roads before it.
You stop listening for what he doesn't say, and you nod. Slowly, you make your way down the road, and the straightness of it surprises you, the slow rise and fall of it, inevitable, as it narrows toward the place at its end.
**
When you pull open the door, stale cool air rushes out to meet you, and you step inside, Sam at your shoulder.
There's a man in a dark jacket, not a priest, or not dressed like one, anyway. His head is bent as he listens to the woman kneeling beside him. They face the altar, where some form of towering fake Jesus is conspicuous in its absence, and the hushed murmur of penitence rises up toward the sky.
You know him on sight, and you stop, because he didn't want to be found, didn't want you to find him. Something made him come here, something you don't pretend to understand. There's so much you haven't understood, but it's dawning on you now.
Sam doesn't say a word, but he steps away from you, clearing the way.
Castiel turns, goes to his feet, not gracefully, and his eyes are wide. You can't breathe, can't find even the air it takes to speak a single word.
"You couldn't find a fucking phone?" is what you end up with, when breath comes back into your lungs.
The kneeling woman starts, her prayers interrupted by your outburst, not that you care. Sam snorts, loud enough for you to hear, and Castiel shrugs, a tiny motion, though you recognize the joy in his eyes.
"I never stopped calling," Castiel says, and the low hum in your brain flares, recedes, stops, a firefly winking out. Cas sighs, a sound of relief, and the moment breaks.
When you pull him close, you're too rough, but he rests his hand on your back, and he's blood and bone and real and yours, even if he never wanted to be, even if you're still not sure what the fuck you're doing, and that dangerous live current of need and fear and desire that's sparked in you since Hell spat you out goes quiet, finally.
**
There's a silence in the room so loud, you barely dare break it with the rustle of clothing, or the hitch in your throat when you look at him. It's all pretty strange, but then again, weird is the fabric of your world.
He sheds clothes the way birds shed feathers, unselfconscious, a small smile turning the corner of his mouth. Like a key slipped into an invisible lock, that smile strikes you, draws you in, and you cup one hand behind his head, hold him steady while you kiss that corner, and then all the rest of his smile, and he shivers against your hold. There's still power in him; you feel it, warm against your fingertips where they press into his skin.
You spread him out on a bed, your fallen and familiar angel, and he looks at you with amused eyes while you try to figure out what to do first. You want to kiss him. You want to fuck him, and do filthy, inspired things to him. You want to prove something you still can't give voice to, not that it matters anyway.
Instead, you run your hands across the tops of his shoulders, cup them beneath his shoulderblades. Your hands rest there, and a troubled look crosses his face while he shifts beneath you. You're not sure what you expected to find there, and for a moment, your face grows warm.
Slowly, you let him go, and your hands smooth out across the rough sheets, tracing the absent shape of what you've never seen. You think too small, you suppose; you know the vaguely terrifying mass of him, the weight of what he used to be, and it breaks your heart. You have at least that much left to give.
"Do you miss them?" you ask, because of all the questions you haven't found words for, this is the easiest.
He smiles at you, no sign of tears in his eyes. His hands move over you, sweep down your imperfect human skin, and he says, "I don't need them, now."
In the dark, in the quiet, together, your hands trace the shape of flight.
end