[SPN] i have been in arkansas
Title: i have been in arkansas
Details: SPN, gen, ~2,900 words. Dean and Castiel both owe the swear jar quarters, but there are no other warnings. Sort of a coda to 5x08, "Changing Channels."
Summary: I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing/ Tried to listen to my instruments/ They don't say anything. -- The Mountain Goats, "Matthew 25:21."
Notes: Thanks very much to
aesc and
tropes for being helpful and honest betas; they are fully indemnified from all of my limitations and mistakes. And thanks as always to
shaenie, for being my cheerleader even in fandoms where she's got no clue what's going on. Feedback and constructive criticism are always welcome, particularly on this, as it's my first real stab at writing SPN and I'm still trying to get oriented.
Dean wakes to the sounds of a semi shuddering past in the night, headlights panning over their motel room: his bed, Sam's bed, piece of shit television, far wall, gone. Castiel's shadow sweeps across the room with the light, compass arrow to the angel's fixed point. He's seated at the cramped table by the window. The orange glow from the parking lot traces the edges of Castiel's face and coat, shines in his unblinking eyes.
"What time is it?" Dean asks, voice gravelled. Not that he gives a shit; it's just the thing you ask. The angel's in the same chair he'd been in when Dean fell asleep, which is maybe why Dean's hand didn't go for a weapon in the blank between when his eyes opened and when his brain came online. He can hear Sam's soft, heavy breathing in the other bed. It anchors him.
A moment passes, and then Castiel's head tips a few degrees on its axis, his spine and shoulders shifting to a new alignment. The coat rustles, a sound Dean's ears persist in hearing as wings refolding. He watches the angel slip back into the vessel like a driver ducking down into an idling car. He knows Castiel doesn't actually abandon the meat when his attention is elsewhere, but he does this thing where he recedes and leaves the shell of Jimmy sitting there, doors hanging open, keychain swaying from the ignition.
It takes very little effort for Dean to picture himself or Sam used the same way: taken up and dropped like gloves, left vacant until some angelic bastard sees fit to press back inside. He calls the image up now, as he does five or six times a day. The more he pictures it, the easier it'll be to tell Zachariah or Gabriel to go fuck themselves the next time one of them tries to talk Dean into taking one for the heavenly team.
"Three fifty-two," Cas answers, then: "Fifty-three." He makes the amendment a second before the alarm clock, which is facing away from him and towards Dean, jumps ahead a dim red digit. Apparently, he's reset himself to keep local time.
"You just been sitting there all night?" After they left Gabriel in the warehouse to watch the oil sputter out, Sam persuaded Cas to start waiting the nights out in their room if he didn't have any top-secret angel recon to do. Dude, if we leave him out here, either somebody's gonna stumble across him by accident-- somebody holy or unholy, clearly implied --or he's going to get arrested for loitering. Dean had rolled his eyes at that image, and Sam pulled him earnestly off to one side and said, Look, if someone locks him up again, how exactly are we supposed to get him back? I mean, how long would it take us to even realize he's gone?
Dean didn't argue much after that. Keeping Cas with them means he won't come banging down their door without warning in the middle of the night, and if they're lucky for once, it might keep other things from banging in on them too. Hexbags, Enochian sigils, angel guard dog: the Winchester version of traveling apocalypse-ready ADT system.
Castiel turns his head to watch a car travel past and says, "I have been in contemplation." He enunciates it like it's a place: I have been in Arkansas.
Dean presses the back of his head deeper into the pillow and scrubs a hand over his face, taking stock. It's only the ordinary exhaustion of being pulled out of sound sleep that he's feeling. Gabriel and the TV marathon hadn't really worn him out any more than the long haul afterward across three state lines. Still, sleep is hard to come by, even on the good nights. He's not gonna get this half-hour back anytime soon. "Of course you have. What's it this time: world peace? Godhunt 2010? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop?"
"Morality."
Dean lifts his hand away. Castiel's gaze jumps to Dean's face at the motion, watching Dean watch him, but he stays otherwise still. The damage he'd taken busting out earlier has vanished. Dean never catches Cas healing himself; he just looks up a minute or an hour after a fight to find that Cas has erased the cuts and bruises, leaving the vessel rumpled but pristine. "It is way too ... middle-of-the-night for this," Dean says, letting the complaint seep through his tone. "Morality? Really?"
Castiel nods. Dean used to think that angels didn't get rhetorical questions. After talking to Uriel and Zachariah -- the dicks -- he'd figured out that it was just Cas. "Gimme a minute and I'll wake up Sammy," he says, half-reaching for the covers. He's never managed to stonewall Cas out of a conversation, like he can with Sam sometimes, but he's learned that if he can find a detour weird enough Cas will occasionally give it up rather than try to wrestle them back on course. "He was yammering about this earlier. Philosophy's more his thing."
"Don't. There's no need." His voice, like Dean's, sounds sleep-roughened, but it's only the rasp Cas always has. Disuse, maybe. Jimmy didn't have it, and the Cas of 2014 had lost most of it, like an accent faded over time. A pause rises up, and neither of them try to fill it; Dean thinks that maybe Cas'll let this go.
Then Cas adds, "Besides, you're the one who brought it to my attention."
"I'm always starting shit I don't want to finish," Dean mumbles to the ceiling. "When exactly did I do this?"
"Last year. When Uriel and I tried to kill Anna. You told Sam that, for angels, we were 'pretty fucking amoral.'" He thinks for a moment, then says, "I think you also called Uriel a 'self-righteous son of a bitch.'"
Dean twitches when Cas mimics his own intonation, like profanity is a second language Cas is learning by rote. He vaguely remembers the conversation. He's pretty sure Castiel wasn't there for it, but he's over being surprised by disclosures of angelic eavesdropping. "Yeah, probably. I was pretty pissed at you that night. What about it?"
Castiel tilts his head back against the window, an unsettlingly human gesture of fatigue. Reluctantly, Dean rolls onto his side and props himself up onto his arm, the way he would as a kid when Sammy would get himself all wrapped up in some late-night soul-searching kick and Dean would have to ride it out until Sammy wound down enough to fall asleep.
"Morality's a human concept. Angels don't have it." Castiel looks over and assesses Dean's face, takes in the frown Dean can feel forming. "Following God's orders is righteous. By definition. We never had to wonder. If we did something wrong, we'd be punished, or we'd Fall." His hands shift where they're resting on his thighs, suit fabric hissing under the touch. "For millenia, I didn't think about it. Then I started to question Zachariah's orders, and since then ..." He lifts a shoulder, the unfinished sentence clear in its uncertainty.
"You didn't kill Anna," Dean reminds him. The statement hangs in the air for a moment, a ball tossed and uncaught.
"No," Cas allows. "I didn't kill her." There's something out of step in where he puts the emphasis. "But I've done ... other things. Some, I wish I hadn't done."
Dean grimaces. Apparently, his fairly fucked karma dictates that he's going to spend the rest of his life in conversational retreads of all the shitty moves he and other people have made, and how they do or don't regret them. He swings his legs off the edge of the bed and sits up, recycled motel air clammy on his skin as the blanket slips away. "Look, I'm the last person who should be giving anyone advice on righteous--" He flinches away from the word. "--on morals." The grin he hauls up to cover the slip is bargain-basement. "Did you forget the thing with Chastity and the den of iniquity?"
In his head, Alastair is slurring when a righteous man sheds blood in Hell, smiling with a mouth full of blood.
Castiel shakes his head, shifting forward in his chair. Only a few feet separate them in the small room. "That was sin. Sin's ... not the same as immorality. Or I don't think it is. There are things you believe. Sacrificing yourself for others; that's moral to you. Sacrificing Jesse Turner wasn't." He frowns. "Your morality is complicated. You do things I find confusing, inconsistent. But I don't believe you're immoral."
"Well, I find things you do 'confusing and inconsistent' too," Dean retorts, uncomfortable with whatever not-quite complement Castiel's kind of giving him. "Especially when it comes to killing children. But I don't think -- shit." He dugs a thumb in between his eyebrows. "You made some crappy calls, Cas, but you're not a bad guy."
"No," Cas concedes, turning over his right hand where it rests on the table and studying the palm. It's the hand that held the little plastic knife when he was an action figure, Dean remembers. "I'm not. But I am ... without morality. It's starting to bother me."
He closes his fingers, briefly, into a fist. "My Father gave humanity free will. You used it to steal knowledge. He gave us knowledge. He left. We drifted. Now we're taking free will." The line of his throat moves as he swallows, Adam's apple shifting. Distress seems to bind Castiel more tightly into Jimmy's body, and Castiel will react in startling, physical ways he never seems to register. Dean's never seen Cas hungry or thirsty, but pain, distress, the body remembers.
Dean gives into the urge for sarcasm, sketching a vague circle in mid-air around Cas's silhouette. "So, how's that working out for you?"
Cas makes an arid, scraped sound, like that one had caught him in the gut. "Not well," he admits, and his arms fold tightly against his ribs. It occurs to Dean that the rasp of Castiel's voice always sounds like he had shouted himself hoarse only days ago, yelling commands, or hollering into the wind. Like he is only soft-spoken because shouting didn't work.
Wincing, Dean rubs at a wrinkle in the fitted sheet. "You're not doing that bad. I mean, you haven't fallen yet, right?"
Castiel shoots him a burning look. "Only because the others can't find me. I still have my Grace, but that doesn't mean anything, not if it isn't God running the garrisons of Heaven. After all, they haven't Fallen either." He leans forward, eyes fierce and reflecting the dim orange light. "Don't you see? I've rebelled against the Hosts, Uriel murdered angels for Lucifer, Zachariah's planning Armageddon -- and Gabriel. Gabriel." He makes the noise again, and it is the closest Dean has ever heard this Cas, his Cas, come to a laugh. He remembers the hollow, strung-out mirth of the Cas in 2014, and is nauseated by the thought that this could be its antecedent. "He was the first, after Michael and Lucifer, and how long has he been here -- hiding, playing. We can't all be right. Maybe none of us are. But here we are, transgressing, and no One higher has come to punish us. Do you see?"
"Cas," Dean says, scooting down to the end of the bed, closing the distance between them. He can feel the air begin to spark with Castiel's agitation, taking on the tang that comes before a lightning strike.
Castiel whispers harshly, "The angels are no more righteous than humanity these days. My brothers -- is that even the name for them? Were we always just -- commissioned by the same side? And my Father--" His face twists, lips pressing together, but Dean sees that he cannot force himself to take the word back. "My Father is missing, and I have to know--"
He clamps his jaw shut and pushes the palms of his hands together, hard, bending over them with eyes closed. He draws a deep breath. It would be a posture of supplication, except for the anger running through him.
"I have to learn," he corrects himself, "how to decide what to do. But when I find Him, I don't know if He'll find my actions righteous. I don't know if He's going to raise me up or cast me out."
Dean runs a hand through his bristling hair and wonders what kind of a cosmic fucking joke it is that's got an angel stuck in a forty-dollar motel room, asking the fuck-up he resurrected from Hell for spiritual advice. It isn't one, he decides, just one more indication that God's exceeded his own roaming capabilities. Prophesies cropping up like signposts, destiny bearing down on them with horns blaring, souped-up headlights, and they're just two of the three guys digging frantically in the glove box for maps, cursing the lack of cell phone signal, burning rubber for the nearest off-ramp as the engine rattles and whines.
"Look on the bright side," he offers. "By the time he rolls back into town, we'll probably be too dead for even him to yell at."
"Too dead for Him too--" Cas demands, yanking up straight, and Sam makes a sudden, snuffling noise, rolls over, and shoves a pillow off his bed onto the floor. Dean freezes, half-turned. The last thing they need is for Sam to wake up to one more whispered argument and think they're keeping secrets from him, when all Dean wants in this moment is for at least one of them to get to sleep through the night.
After several long seconds, Sam's breathing settles back into a steady ebb and flow. The sound is defenseless, and entirely human. Dean gives himself a moment to just look at his brother: the soles of his feet kicked free of the blankets, the arm curled under his head, the tangle of his hair. Very carefully, he slides back and stretches across the gap between their beds to snag the sheet and pull it back around Sam's shoulder.
When Dean shifts back to his former spot, he finds Castiel has gone still as well, and is watching him with an alert expression. Not wary, the way he usually is at their moments of fraternal solidarity, but thoughtful.
"I'm beginning to understand your sense of humor," he informs Dean. "I think this is a bad sign."
"Yeah, well, bad signs everywhere these days. It's the freakin' apocalypse, what else is new." If a car were to drive past right now and light the room, he thinks it's possible that at least one of them might be smiling.
"Dean."
"Yeah?"
"Was it harder to obey your father's wishes when he was alive and missing, or when he was dead?"
Dean smirks and looks down, fingers finding and snapping the loose thread at the unraveling corner of the blanket. He feels stupid doing it: as though Cas can't see through him just because Dean tilts his face down in the dark. "Truth is, I don't think his wishes and his orders had all that much in common, some days." He grunts out a laugh, tastes the residue it leaves in the roof of his mouth, like smoke. "When it came to Sammy, they never did. That last year, and then the couple of years after ... If I followed them, it was so I could use them as the reasons for what I was doing. Or as reasons to wuss out, when I knew what I had to do and was too chickenshit to do it."
In the quiet, he feels the edges of the angel stretch out past the confines of the vessel, not the stormcloud pressure of a minute before, but a careful extension. Castiel's consideration brushes like fingers over Dean's brow, his jaw. Dean breathes evenly and raises his head back up, does not shift under the feel of Cas looking past his body like he's gazing into water past the ringed walls of a well.
"Yes," Castiel says. The handprint on Dean's shoulder is warmer than the rest of his body, and the heat of it seeps through him. "I see." When headlights sweep the room again, Cas's face is smooth, and he leans back to settle himself against the back of the chair.
"You should sleep," he tells Dean.
Dean snorts quietly and turns to punch at his pillow, reshaping it. "Ain't that the truth." Fatigue is still lapping at the edges of his thoughts like an outgoing tide. He takes a deep breath and tries to cast himself adrift in it. This may be one of the rare nights when he'll manage to go back under. As he fits his shoulders into the dip of the mattress, he says, "Hey. Try not to spend all night brooding about this, okay? It's bad for the complexion."
Cas's mouth tilts, just where the corner catches the light, and he cocks his head in acknowledgement. "Then out of regard for this vessel," he replies, "I will turn to contemplation of humor, instead."
His voice is gentle. Dean, pulling the covers closer, hears it as the lie it is.
*
(Cross-posted to Dreamwidth and LJ, but comments are welcome at either.)
Details: SPN, gen, ~2,900 words. Dean and Castiel both owe the swear jar quarters, but there are no other warnings. Sort of a coda to 5x08, "Changing Channels."
Summary: I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing/ Tried to listen to my instruments/ They don't say anything. -- The Mountain Goats, "Matthew 25:21."
Notes: Thanks very much to
aesc and
tropes for being helpful and honest betas; they are fully indemnified from all of my limitations and mistakes. And thanks as always to
shaenie, for being my cheerleader even in fandoms where she's got no clue what's going on. Feedback and constructive criticism are always welcome, particularly on this, as it's my first real stab at writing SPN and I'm still trying to get oriented.
Dean wakes to the sounds of a semi shuddering past in the night, headlights panning over their motel room: his bed, Sam's bed, piece of shit television, far wall, gone. Castiel's shadow sweeps across the room with the light, compass arrow to the angel's fixed point. He's seated at the cramped table by the window. The orange glow from the parking lot traces the edges of Castiel's face and coat, shines in his unblinking eyes.
"What time is it?" Dean asks, voice gravelled. Not that he gives a shit; it's just the thing you ask. The angel's in the same chair he'd been in when Dean fell asleep, which is maybe why Dean's hand didn't go for a weapon in the blank between when his eyes opened and when his brain came online. He can hear Sam's soft, heavy breathing in the other bed. It anchors him.
A moment passes, and then Castiel's head tips a few degrees on its axis, his spine and shoulders shifting to a new alignment. The coat rustles, a sound Dean's ears persist in hearing as wings refolding. He watches the angel slip back into the vessel like a driver ducking down into an idling car. He knows Castiel doesn't actually abandon the meat when his attention is elsewhere, but he does this thing where he recedes and leaves the shell of Jimmy sitting there, doors hanging open, keychain swaying from the ignition.
It takes very little effort for Dean to picture himself or Sam used the same way: taken up and dropped like gloves, left vacant until some angelic bastard sees fit to press back inside. He calls the image up now, as he does five or six times a day. The more he pictures it, the easier it'll be to tell Zachariah or Gabriel to go fuck themselves the next time one of them tries to talk Dean into taking one for the heavenly team.
"Three fifty-two," Cas answers, then: "Fifty-three." He makes the amendment a second before the alarm clock, which is facing away from him and towards Dean, jumps ahead a dim red digit. Apparently, he's reset himself to keep local time.
"You just been sitting there all night?" After they left Gabriel in the warehouse to watch the oil sputter out, Sam persuaded Cas to start waiting the nights out in their room if he didn't have any top-secret angel recon to do. Dude, if we leave him out here, either somebody's gonna stumble across him by accident-- somebody holy or unholy, clearly implied --or he's going to get arrested for loitering. Dean had rolled his eyes at that image, and Sam pulled him earnestly off to one side and said, Look, if someone locks him up again, how exactly are we supposed to get him back? I mean, how long would it take us to even realize he's gone?
Dean didn't argue much after that. Keeping Cas with them means he won't come banging down their door without warning in the middle of the night, and if they're lucky for once, it might keep other things from banging in on them too. Hexbags, Enochian sigils, angel guard dog: the Winchester version of traveling apocalypse-ready ADT system.
Castiel turns his head to watch a car travel past and says, "I have been in contemplation." He enunciates it like it's a place: I have been in Arkansas.
Dean presses the back of his head deeper into the pillow and scrubs a hand over his face, taking stock. It's only the ordinary exhaustion of being pulled out of sound sleep that he's feeling. Gabriel and the TV marathon hadn't really worn him out any more than the long haul afterward across three state lines. Still, sleep is hard to come by, even on the good nights. He's not gonna get this half-hour back anytime soon. "Of course you have. What's it this time: world peace? Godhunt 2010? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop?"
"Morality."
Dean lifts his hand away. Castiel's gaze jumps to Dean's face at the motion, watching Dean watch him, but he stays otherwise still. The damage he'd taken busting out earlier has vanished. Dean never catches Cas healing himself; he just looks up a minute or an hour after a fight to find that Cas has erased the cuts and bruises, leaving the vessel rumpled but pristine. "It is way too ... middle-of-the-night for this," Dean says, letting the complaint seep through his tone. "Morality? Really?"
Castiel nods. Dean used to think that angels didn't get rhetorical questions. After talking to Uriel and Zachariah -- the dicks -- he'd figured out that it was just Cas. "Gimme a minute and I'll wake up Sammy," he says, half-reaching for the covers. He's never managed to stonewall Cas out of a conversation, like he can with Sam sometimes, but he's learned that if he can find a detour weird enough Cas will occasionally give it up rather than try to wrestle them back on course. "He was yammering about this earlier. Philosophy's more his thing."
"Don't. There's no need." His voice, like Dean's, sounds sleep-roughened, but it's only the rasp Cas always has. Disuse, maybe. Jimmy didn't have it, and the Cas of 2014 had lost most of it, like an accent faded over time. A pause rises up, and neither of them try to fill it; Dean thinks that maybe Cas'll let this go.
Then Cas adds, "Besides, you're the one who brought it to my attention."
"I'm always starting shit I don't want to finish," Dean mumbles to the ceiling. "When exactly did I do this?"
"Last year. When Uriel and I tried to kill Anna. You told Sam that, for angels, we were 'pretty fucking amoral.'" He thinks for a moment, then says, "I think you also called Uriel a 'self-righteous son of a bitch.'"
Dean twitches when Cas mimics his own intonation, like profanity is a second language Cas is learning by rote. He vaguely remembers the conversation. He's pretty sure Castiel wasn't there for it, but he's over being surprised by disclosures of angelic eavesdropping. "Yeah, probably. I was pretty pissed at you that night. What about it?"
Castiel tilts his head back against the window, an unsettlingly human gesture of fatigue. Reluctantly, Dean rolls onto his side and props himself up onto his arm, the way he would as a kid when Sammy would get himself all wrapped up in some late-night soul-searching kick and Dean would have to ride it out until Sammy wound down enough to fall asleep.
"Morality's a human concept. Angels don't have it." Castiel looks over and assesses Dean's face, takes in the frown Dean can feel forming. "Following God's orders is righteous. By definition. We never had to wonder. If we did something wrong, we'd be punished, or we'd Fall." His hands shift where they're resting on his thighs, suit fabric hissing under the touch. "For millenia, I didn't think about it. Then I started to question Zachariah's orders, and since then ..." He lifts a shoulder, the unfinished sentence clear in its uncertainty.
"You didn't kill Anna," Dean reminds him. The statement hangs in the air for a moment, a ball tossed and uncaught.
"No," Cas allows. "I didn't kill her." There's something out of step in where he puts the emphasis. "But I've done ... other things. Some, I wish I hadn't done."
Dean grimaces. Apparently, his fairly fucked karma dictates that he's going to spend the rest of his life in conversational retreads of all the shitty moves he and other people have made, and how they do or don't regret them. He swings his legs off the edge of the bed and sits up, recycled motel air clammy on his skin as the blanket slips away. "Look, I'm the last person who should be giving anyone advice on righteous--" He flinches away from the word. "--on morals." The grin he hauls up to cover the slip is bargain-basement. "Did you forget the thing with Chastity and the den of iniquity?"
In his head, Alastair is slurring when a righteous man sheds blood in Hell, smiling with a mouth full of blood.
Castiel shakes his head, shifting forward in his chair. Only a few feet separate them in the small room. "That was sin. Sin's ... not the same as immorality. Or I don't think it is. There are things you believe. Sacrificing yourself for others; that's moral to you. Sacrificing Jesse Turner wasn't." He frowns. "Your morality is complicated. You do things I find confusing, inconsistent. But I don't believe you're immoral."
"Well, I find things you do 'confusing and inconsistent' too," Dean retorts, uncomfortable with whatever not-quite complement Castiel's kind of giving him. "Especially when it comes to killing children. But I don't think -- shit." He dugs a thumb in between his eyebrows. "You made some crappy calls, Cas, but you're not a bad guy."
"No," Cas concedes, turning over his right hand where it rests on the table and studying the palm. It's the hand that held the little plastic knife when he was an action figure, Dean remembers. "I'm not. But I am ... without morality. It's starting to bother me."
He closes his fingers, briefly, into a fist. "My Father gave humanity free will. You used it to steal knowledge. He gave us knowledge. He left. We drifted. Now we're taking free will." The line of his throat moves as he swallows, Adam's apple shifting. Distress seems to bind Castiel more tightly into Jimmy's body, and Castiel will react in startling, physical ways he never seems to register. Dean's never seen Cas hungry or thirsty, but pain, distress, the body remembers.
Dean gives into the urge for sarcasm, sketching a vague circle in mid-air around Cas's silhouette. "So, how's that working out for you?"
Cas makes an arid, scraped sound, like that one had caught him in the gut. "Not well," he admits, and his arms fold tightly against his ribs. It occurs to Dean that the rasp of Castiel's voice always sounds like he had shouted himself hoarse only days ago, yelling commands, or hollering into the wind. Like he is only soft-spoken because shouting didn't work.
Wincing, Dean rubs at a wrinkle in the fitted sheet. "You're not doing that bad. I mean, you haven't fallen yet, right?"
Castiel shoots him a burning look. "Only because the others can't find me. I still have my Grace, but that doesn't mean anything, not if it isn't God running the garrisons of Heaven. After all, they haven't Fallen either." He leans forward, eyes fierce and reflecting the dim orange light. "Don't you see? I've rebelled against the Hosts, Uriel murdered angels for Lucifer, Zachariah's planning Armageddon -- and Gabriel. Gabriel." He makes the noise again, and it is the closest Dean has ever heard this Cas, his Cas, come to a laugh. He remembers the hollow, strung-out mirth of the Cas in 2014, and is nauseated by the thought that this could be its antecedent. "He was the first, after Michael and Lucifer, and how long has he been here -- hiding, playing. We can't all be right. Maybe none of us are. But here we are, transgressing, and no One higher has come to punish us. Do you see?"
"Cas," Dean says, scooting down to the end of the bed, closing the distance between them. He can feel the air begin to spark with Castiel's agitation, taking on the tang that comes before a lightning strike.
Castiel whispers harshly, "The angels are no more righteous than humanity these days. My brothers -- is that even the name for them? Were we always just -- commissioned by the same side? And my Father--" His face twists, lips pressing together, but Dean sees that he cannot force himself to take the word back. "My Father is missing, and I have to know--"
He clamps his jaw shut and pushes the palms of his hands together, hard, bending over them with eyes closed. He draws a deep breath. It would be a posture of supplication, except for the anger running through him.
"I have to learn," he corrects himself, "how to decide what to do. But when I find Him, I don't know if He'll find my actions righteous. I don't know if He's going to raise me up or cast me out."
Dean runs a hand through his bristling hair and wonders what kind of a cosmic fucking joke it is that's got an angel stuck in a forty-dollar motel room, asking the fuck-up he resurrected from Hell for spiritual advice. It isn't one, he decides, just one more indication that God's exceeded his own roaming capabilities. Prophesies cropping up like signposts, destiny bearing down on them with horns blaring, souped-up headlights, and they're just two of the three guys digging frantically in the glove box for maps, cursing the lack of cell phone signal, burning rubber for the nearest off-ramp as the engine rattles and whines.
"Look on the bright side," he offers. "By the time he rolls back into town, we'll probably be too dead for even him to yell at."
"Too dead for Him too--" Cas demands, yanking up straight, and Sam makes a sudden, snuffling noise, rolls over, and shoves a pillow off his bed onto the floor. Dean freezes, half-turned. The last thing they need is for Sam to wake up to one more whispered argument and think they're keeping secrets from him, when all Dean wants in this moment is for at least one of them to get to sleep through the night.
After several long seconds, Sam's breathing settles back into a steady ebb and flow. The sound is defenseless, and entirely human. Dean gives himself a moment to just look at his brother: the soles of his feet kicked free of the blankets, the arm curled under his head, the tangle of his hair. Very carefully, he slides back and stretches across the gap between their beds to snag the sheet and pull it back around Sam's shoulder.
When Dean shifts back to his former spot, he finds Castiel has gone still as well, and is watching him with an alert expression. Not wary, the way he usually is at their moments of fraternal solidarity, but thoughtful.
"I'm beginning to understand your sense of humor," he informs Dean. "I think this is a bad sign."
"Yeah, well, bad signs everywhere these days. It's the freakin' apocalypse, what else is new." If a car were to drive past right now and light the room, he thinks it's possible that at least one of them might be smiling.
"Dean."
"Yeah?"
"Was it harder to obey your father's wishes when he was alive and missing, or when he was dead?"
Dean smirks and looks down, fingers finding and snapping the loose thread at the unraveling corner of the blanket. He feels stupid doing it: as though Cas can't see through him just because Dean tilts his face down in the dark. "Truth is, I don't think his wishes and his orders had all that much in common, some days." He grunts out a laugh, tastes the residue it leaves in the roof of his mouth, like smoke. "When it came to Sammy, they never did. That last year, and then the couple of years after ... If I followed them, it was so I could use them as the reasons for what I was doing. Or as reasons to wuss out, when I knew what I had to do and was too chickenshit to do it."
In the quiet, he feels the edges of the angel stretch out past the confines of the vessel, not the stormcloud pressure of a minute before, but a careful extension. Castiel's consideration brushes like fingers over Dean's brow, his jaw. Dean breathes evenly and raises his head back up, does not shift under the feel of Cas looking past his body like he's gazing into water past the ringed walls of a well.
"Yes," Castiel says. The handprint on Dean's shoulder is warmer than the rest of his body, and the heat of it seeps through him. "I see." When headlights sweep the room again, Cas's face is smooth, and he leans back to settle himself against the back of the chair.
"You should sleep," he tells Dean.
Dean snorts quietly and turns to punch at his pillow, reshaping it. "Ain't that the truth." Fatigue is still lapping at the edges of his thoughts like an outgoing tide. He takes a deep breath and tries to cast himself adrift in it. This may be one of the rare nights when he'll manage to go back under. As he fits his shoulders into the dip of the mattress, he says, "Hey. Try not to spend all night brooding about this, okay? It's bad for the complexion."
Cas's mouth tilts, just where the corner catches the light, and he cocks his head in acknowledgement. "Then out of regard for this vessel," he replies, "I will turn to contemplation of humor, instead."
His voice is gentle. Dean, pulling the covers closer, hears it as the lie it is.
*
(Cross-posted to Dreamwidth and LJ, but comments are welcome at either.)