SPN fic: with plastic clarity
Title: with plastic clarity
Pairing: Sam/Cas
Type (friendship, romantic, other--please specify): ambiguous, though positive
Rating: G
Word Count (if applicable): ~2880
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any related character.
Warnings: eh
Notes: For
spnpairingbingo. Set immediately post-s9.
Sam lights three candles around his fifth long-shot spell, and a soft displacement of air behind his left shoulder puffs two of them out.
“You prayed,” Cas says to the back of his head. “I came as soon as I could.”
Sam turns around. “That was hours ago. Are you okay?”
Cas squints past Sam’s shoulder at the Babylonian mythology shelves and nods.
So, no. Then again, “okay” tends to be an overstatement for them anyway. Sam reaches around and pinches out the third light.
“You should know that Gadreel is dead.”
Sam tries to summon relief, prepares to quash down loss, realizes he feels little at all. “What happened?”
“He died fighting for Heaven. We could not have won without him.”
“So Metatron -“
“- neutralized, yes, though still alive. For the moment the Host has decided to prioritize reconstruction over vengeance.”
“Things must be changing fast up there.”
“He may be useful.” Cas flinches and twitches his shoulders. “He told me he killed Dean. Was he telling the truth?”
The sense of clean air that Cas brought into the bunker disappears; Sam breathes in fear, foggy and thick.
“Sam?” Cas leans on the table. “What happened to Dean?”
Sam puts his head in his hands. “I was hoping you’d know.”
“I don’t.”
“He went after Metatron with the First Blade, and Metatron stabbed him in the heart with an angel blade. I got him back here, went to -“ Sam considers his audience “ - do a spell, but when I got back to his room he was gone. All he left was this.” He slides Dean’s note to Cas.
“So he survived. How?”
Sam twists one shoulder up toward his ear. “Any ideas?”
“Have you considered that Mark of Cain may have given him some special protection?”
“Maybe. I don’t know what it was doing to him. You’ve seen him lately.”
Cas nods.
“Do you know anything about it?”
“About what it does? No more than you. But I believe I remember the circumstances of its creation.”
“Back to the frigging dawn of…” Sam’s been talking to himself for days (years, decades, he sometimes thinks), he’s forgotten he doesn’t snap like this. “Sorry, Cas. Anything you got.”
“No need to apologize. It is rather a remote lead, but unfortunately the only one I can offer.” Cas rests his hand on one of the library chairs tucked under Sam’s messy work table. “May I?”
“Yeah, of course.” Sam takes another minute to collect the books holding a few even more tenuous clues, then sits down across from Cas. “You ready?”
“What did Dean tell you?”
“Cain gave him the mark that Lucifer gave Cain.”
“That sounds accurate, if a bit sparse.”
Says Cas.
“The truth is, there was unrest for much of the time that angels and humans shared the garden. As Gabriel began to withdraw, Lucifer found himself overruled more and more. He turned to his human devotees for a power base, luring them closer by elevating them above other humans, and other humans began to follow.”
“Demon deals.”
Cas nods. “Michael and Raphael did not wish to risk moving openly against Lucifer, so they made an example of Lilith and expelled her from the garden.”
“Which Lucifer took as a move against him anyway.”
“Yes. And correctly, of course. But he was still outnumbered. Lucifer wanted the human family to suffer the same discord we did, and so he worked tirelessly to recruit one of the two sons of Adam.”
“Cain, obviously.”
“I believe he approached them both. Knowing my brother, I doubt it mattered to him which one he turned.”
Sam nods.
“Whatever happened, Cain agreed, and showed his allegiance with Lucifer by killing Abel. Whether this made him a monster or simply revealed him to be one, I do not know. He and Lucifer were expelled from the garden. He honored his exile, though Lucifer did not. That seems to be when he began his legion of Knights. I believe you know about them.”
Sam nods and moves around three green Post-its as Cas falls silent.
And stays silent, for several minutes, long enough for days of adrenaline to drain out of him completely. “This is helpful, Cas, thanks, but I can’t….I need to sleep. Can you stay for the night?”
“Of course.”
Good. “Did you pick out a room last time?”
Cas brushes Sam’s pile of books with his fingertips. “I will look through these tonight and see if anything of use comes to mind.”
“Thanks, Cas. I know things are….“ Sam shakes his head. “I’m glad you came.”
“Well, I hope I can be helpful.”
“Night, Cas.” He turns and leaves before Cas feels like he has to return the pleasantry, shuffles back to his room, drops his jeans to the floor, and flops onto his bed.
He expects to toss and turn the way he usually does, for his fear for Dean to twist around him twined with his sheets, but it’s only moments before his eyes fall closed and -
- he runs through an empty Purgatory forest, storm clouds heavy over his head and humidity dense in his lungs, until he tumbles down a sand dune and lands flat on his back in the Cage, Lucifer passing Michael the First Blade inches over his face. “Sam, you should know by now,” Lucifer says, fingers tracing sigils on Sam’s chest, “angels are watching over you.” The brothers’ eyes flash a cold purple. “Ain’t that a bitch, Sam,” Michael says before raising the Blade -
“Sam,” Cas says from the doorway.
Sam breathes cautiously, flexes his fingers, touches his scars. He is awake; this is real. Cas is here. “Hey.”
“May I enter?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Cas comes in, carefully leaves the door exactly as ajar as he’d found it. “You are struggling.”
Sam winces. “Bad night, I guess. Sorry I bothered you.”
“I can help. If you want.”
“Dreamless sleep?”
“Yes. Or at least, more restorative sleep. I can…bring some of your better memories to the surface.”
Angels and their fucking mind control.
But he’s so fucking tired.
Better Cas than Lucifer, Sam supposes. “If you don’t mind, Cas, that would be great.”
Sam climbs as far as he can back into bed, stupidly wishing for a moment he’d pushed it up against the wall, and nods a little at Cas before sliding into a picnic on the deck after an hour of catch with Amelia and Riot, bowls of apples and almonds and quinoa clustered next to a red plastic pitcher of sweet tea…..
When he comes to, Cas is slumped against the headboard, his right palm open, arm reaching across his body toward Sam. Sam ineffectively tries to control his startle.
Cas scrubs his eyes and blinks. “I am sorry. Healing you was - the grace I have is less efficient than it was.”
“It’s okay, Cas. Whatever you did helped. I haven’t slept so well in…” Sam lets himself yawn and crack his back, lays out a relaxed morning routine for Cas to see. “In a while. I’m sorry that it took so much out of you.”
Cas uncomfortably mirrors his stretching, tipping his head an inch to the left. “Still. I understand that slumber is something of a boundary for humans, and I did not mean to cross it.”
“Well, you’ve touched my soul, so I think we’re at that point.” Maybe not quite his soul, Cas has felt his grace rattle through some psychic cavity where his soul should have been, but it’s too early not to err on the side of tact.
Cas tips his head to the right and squints slightly, but refrains from asking Sam to define the other qualitative parameters of that point, which is lucky, because Sam hasn’t the faintest idea what they are either.
Cas blinks down at his own outfit as Sam steps into his track pants. “You okay there, Cas?”
“I would usually clean these myself, but it seems imprudent, given my current condition.”
“Yeah, okay. I could stand to throw in some laundry, too. Let’s find you something to wear in the meantime.”
He leads Cas further into the bunker, two doors past Kevin’s room, and turns on a light to reveal the closet. “Went through the personal effects the Men of Letters left in their lockers when they went dark, see if there was anything useful. Wasn’t much, but most of the clothes were in decent shape once they were washed.”
Cas looks over the bedframe-turned-table and its mismatched piles of shirts, slacks, even standard-issue skivvies found and picked over by Dorothy and Charlie, and points to a small assortment off to the left. “What are these?”
Sam rubs his neck. “They’re the things I think were Henry’s. They should fit, if you want.”
“Oh, no, that’s alright.”
Sam goes to talk himself out of territorialism, but finds none to fight. “You help us. He’d be glad to help you.”
Cas touches the pile as reverently as he would the bones of a saint. “That’s very kind. Thank you.”
“Alright, I’m going to take a shower. Just leave your things in the washing machine and I’ll start it later.”
Cas nods.
Sam takes his time in the shower and shaves for the first time all week.
He shouldn’t be this calm. Not with Dean…gone.
But they need laundry, and he needs breakfast, and so Sam does some calming chores before heading into the library with a large tray of coffee, yogurt, and toast.
“I don’t know if you’re on food now or what, but help yourself.”
Cas pours himself a cup of coffee, black, no sugar. He’s close enough for Sam to see that he’s wearing a pink cardigan with blotches of ancient ink stains pooling around the right pocket.
Sam lets himself laugh. “Yeah. Definitely Henry’s.”
Cas tentatively presses a hand down the left side of the garment. “What made you suspect it was his locker?”
Sam smiles. “It had more books than clothes. More Asimov than Heinlein. And a few Polaroids of a kid the right age to be my dad.” Strange, he realizes, that he’d known Henry for days and his father for decades, but recognized Henry’s library before Dad’s face.
Loss is always strange, no matter how much of it he survives.
“So. Any leads?”
Cas shakes his head. “I attempted to trace him, but it appears the Mark has a cloaking effect.”
“Makes sense, if Cain stayed under the radar for that long.”
“Well, he certainly stayed hidden, for someone so infamous.” Cas scrunches his eyebrows together.
“What?”
“Well, the names of Cain and Abel were little known until the Abrahamic record begins. But Cain and Abel themselves were represented in human mythologies long before and well outside of that. Hodhr and Baldr, Set and Osiris…”
“Yeah, but we’ve met those guys.”
“All of them?”
“Half of them.” Sam takes the point. “But they didn’t exactly match up with the mythological record.”
“Precisely. If, throughout history, these entities became so heavily associated with a story not their own, the discrepancies may lead us to useful information about the forces acting on Dean now.”
“That’s a pretty broad net, but it’s worth a shot.”
They decide to keep their search limited to mythological figures they know, but when he comes back juggling half of the Egyptian mythology section, he finds Cas with just as high a stack of Viking lore.
“Perhaps this was too much.”
“Not much else to go on, though.” Still, this bloodless stack of books could last them forever. He almost wants it to. “Let’s give it three days to look through.”
Cas nods and opens the reddest of his books.
With his laptop away, there’s no clock in Sam’s line of sight, nothing to mark the passing hours except the slow shifting of documents from unread to read, unknown to unhelpful. Sam’s shifting and crunching and need to hit the head echo uneasily against Cas and his perfect posture, which is so constant that he’s a little startled when Cas looks up.
“Any luck, Cas?”
“Well, I think I know why this record is so muddled.” Cas flips a giant book around to pages written in Old Norse and scattered with hot pink tabs.
“Yeah, that clears it right up.”
“Sorry.” Cas walks around the table to stand behind him and points to the figure next to one of the tabs, a vertical cone that peaks slightly higher than the characters around it. “That’s not a rune. It’s a name.”
“Who?”
“Formally, they referred to him as Loki.”
“Gabriel?”
“I doubt he shared his true identity with this particular scribe, but yes. This character represents his horn.”
“And he was what, screwing with them for kicks?” Of course he was. “What happened?”
“The mythology suggests that Loki tricked Hodhr into killing Baldr with a weapon which was supposed to be harmless, and Hodhr was subsequently killed in retribution for this crime.”
“Yet somehow, Baldr was alive and cannibalizing five years ago.”
Cas nods. “Gabriel seems to have spread the word of Baldr’s death. Worshippers remembered Baldr as virtuous and brave and Hodhr as a stooge at best, though later reinterpretations vilify him further.”
“You think Gabe set Hodhr up.”
“Even more cruelly than it initially appears, yes, though no motive is apparent.”
“Yeah, since when does he need a reason.”
“Whatever Gabriel did, he could not have done it without Baldr’s involvement.” Cas frowns. “That was defensive. I apologize.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Cas fixes him with that creepily angelic stare. “It is difficult, to be reminded that my brothers are not who I wanted to believe they were.”
“That sucks.” Sam picks the pink tabs out of the book and snaps it shut. “If Gabriel pulled the whole thing out of his ass, it’s not going to help us get to Dean.”
“No, of course not.” Cas collects his reading. “I’ll put these back.”
Sam winces. “No, just leave it on the next table. We’ll get it later.”
“Alright.” Cas makes three uneven but balanced stacks of books, purposefully inspecting each spine to ensure that the books are piled in order.
Or just to avoid Sam for a couple of minutes. Which, he thinks, is not unreasonable. Get it together, Winchester.
Cas eventually turns back around. “How about you? Do you have any leads?”
“Well, I haven’t been able to rule anything out yet.”
“Can I help?”
“That’d be great.” Sam goes to slide a random stack across the table, then thinks better of it. “Actually, I bet there’s a Coptic Bible somewhere in here. Maybe you could see if there are any other historical influences on that translation of Genesis?”
“Certainly.” Cas takes a pile to drop off in the Scandinavian section on his way and returns quickly with one black volume opened in his hands. “It would be helpful if you could tell me as much as you know about the deities in question.”
“Well, I’ve only met Osiris.” Sam explains the case, leaving out superfluous details, like the way he’d inadvertently talked Dean out of feeling guilt for Amy’s murder.
“So he allows his victims to determine their own moral failings.”
“More or less.”
“Gabriel’s influence seems unlikely, then.”
Sam scoffs. “Very.”
“And he is known as a resurrected deity, so his continued survival is less suspicious than Baldr’s.”
Sam nods.
“Still, you successfully contained a god.”
“It was actually a pretty standard case. If Set really did kill him, then the fixation on justice makes him more or less an amped-up vengeful spirit. Dean and I have been dealing with them since we were kids.” He laughs and tells Cas one of those stories that’s funny less because it’s amusing and more because it needs to be, about the time he was ten and Dean was fourteen and they fought off a spirit obsessed with poodles and eggs. Well, and power tools. “I don’t know how we didn’t die.”
“Angels were watching over you.”
Sam bites his cheek until he can taste iron and swallow sharp words: maybe that was the problem.
“What were they even fighting about?”
“Who?”
“The archangels. They didn’t start fighting because they cared so much about humans, clearly. So why get so invested?”
Cas reaches down and straightens a pile of index cards. “I do not remember the pretexts for their earlier arguments. I suspect they would sound quite foolish now.” He moves on to the pens, twisting the caps to line up to the tiny lettering. “I think they reminded each other of our father. Such love seems difficult for angels to forgive.”
“You know, you guys are a lot more human than you think.”
Cas nods. “Not something I would have known just a few years ago, but yes. I think perhaps we are.”
“Hey, were you….” Sam trails off, isn’t sure what he’s asking.
“I have no recollection of contact with you or your brother until his extraction.”
Sam nods and pretends that means something.
“Apparently there was some concern about angels becoming compromised due to attachment to their charges. Obviously unfounded, of course.”
It’s Sam’s turn to flinch with surprise, but Cas smiles tentatively, tells Sam that there was a joke somewhere. “Perhaps it may not have been entirely unreasonable.”
Pairing: Sam/Cas
Type (friendship, romantic, other--please specify): ambiguous, though positive
Rating: G
Word Count (if applicable): ~2880
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any related character.
Warnings: eh
Notes: For
spnpairingbingo. Set immediately post-s9.
Sam lights three candles around his fifth long-shot spell, and a soft displacement of air behind his left shoulder puffs two of them out.
“You prayed,” Cas says to the back of his head. “I came as soon as I could.”
Sam turns around. “That was hours ago. Are you okay?”
Cas squints past Sam’s shoulder at the Babylonian mythology shelves and nods.
So, no. Then again, “okay” tends to be an overstatement for them anyway. Sam reaches around and pinches out the third light.
“You should know that Gadreel is dead.”
Sam tries to summon relief, prepares to quash down loss, realizes he feels little at all. “What happened?”
“He died fighting for Heaven. We could not have won without him.”
“So Metatron -“
“- neutralized, yes, though still alive. For the moment the Host has decided to prioritize reconstruction over vengeance.”
“Things must be changing fast up there.”
“He may be useful.” Cas flinches and twitches his shoulders. “He told me he killed Dean. Was he telling the truth?”
The sense of clean air that Cas brought into the bunker disappears; Sam breathes in fear, foggy and thick.
“Sam?” Cas leans on the table. “What happened to Dean?”
Sam puts his head in his hands. “I was hoping you’d know.”
“I don’t.”
“He went after Metatron with the First Blade, and Metatron stabbed him in the heart with an angel blade. I got him back here, went to -“ Sam considers his audience “ - do a spell, but when I got back to his room he was gone. All he left was this.” He slides Dean’s note to Cas.
“So he survived. How?”
Sam twists one shoulder up toward his ear. “Any ideas?”
“Have you considered that Mark of Cain may have given him some special protection?”
“Maybe. I don’t know what it was doing to him. You’ve seen him lately.”
Cas nods.
“Do you know anything about it?”
“About what it does? No more than you. But I believe I remember the circumstances of its creation.”
“Back to the frigging dawn of…” Sam’s been talking to himself for days (years, decades, he sometimes thinks), he’s forgotten he doesn’t snap like this. “Sorry, Cas. Anything you got.”
“No need to apologize. It is rather a remote lead, but unfortunately the only one I can offer.” Cas rests his hand on one of the library chairs tucked under Sam’s messy work table. “May I?”
“Yeah, of course.” Sam takes another minute to collect the books holding a few even more tenuous clues, then sits down across from Cas. “You ready?”
“What did Dean tell you?”
“Cain gave him the mark that Lucifer gave Cain.”
“That sounds accurate, if a bit sparse.”
Says Cas.
“The truth is, there was unrest for much of the time that angels and humans shared the garden. As Gabriel began to withdraw, Lucifer found himself overruled more and more. He turned to his human devotees for a power base, luring them closer by elevating them above other humans, and other humans began to follow.”
“Demon deals.”
Cas nods. “Michael and Raphael did not wish to risk moving openly against Lucifer, so they made an example of Lilith and expelled her from the garden.”
“Which Lucifer took as a move against him anyway.”
“Yes. And correctly, of course. But he was still outnumbered. Lucifer wanted the human family to suffer the same discord we did, and so he worked tirelessly to recruit one of the two sons of Adam.”
“Cain, obviously.”
“I believe he approached them both. Knowing my brother, I doubt it mattered to him which one he turned.”
Sam nods.
“Whatever happened, Cain agreed, and showed his allegiance with Lucifer by killing Abel. Whether this made him a monster or simply revealed him to be one, I do not know. He and Lucifer were expelled from the garden. He honored his exile, though Lucifer did not. That seems to be when he began his legion of Knights. I believe you know about them.”
Sam nods and moves around three green Post-its as Cas falls silent.
And stays silent, for several minutes, long enough for days of adrenaline to drain out of him completely. “This is helpful, Cas, thanks, but I can’t….I need to sleep. Can you stay for the night?”
“Of course.”
Good. “Did you pick out a room last time?”
Cas brushes Sam’s pile of books with his fingertips. “I will look through these tonight and see if anything of use comes to mind.”
“Thanks, Cas. I know things are….“ Sam shakes his head. “I’m glad you came.”
“Well, I hope I can be helpful.”
“Night, Cas.” He turns and leaves before Cas feels like he has to return the pleasantry, shuffles back to his room, drops his jeans to the floor, and flops onto his bed.
He expects to toss and turn the way he usually does, for his fear for Dean to twist around him twined with his sheets, but it’s only moments before his eyes fall closed and -
- he runs through an empty Purgatory forest, storm clouds heavy over his head and humidity dense in his lungs, until he tumbles down a sand dune and lands flat on his back in the Cage, Lucifer passing Michael the First Blade inches over his face. “Sam, you should know by now,” Lucifer says, fingers tracing sigils on Sam’s chest, “angels are watching over you.” The brothers’ eyes flash a cold purple. “Ain’t that a bitch, Sam,” Michael says before raising the Blade -
“Sam,” Cas says from the doorway.
Sam breathes cautiously, flexes his fingers, touches his scars. He is awake; this is real. Cas is here. “Hey.”
“May I enter?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Cas comes in, carefully leaves the door exactly as ajar as he’d found it. “You are struggling.”
Sam winces. “Bad night, I guess. Sorry I bothered you.”
“I can help. If you want.”
“Dreamless sleep?”
“Yes. Or at least, more restorative sleep. I can…bring some of your better memories to the surface.”
Angels and their fucking mind control.
But he’s so fucking tired.
Better Cas than Lucifer, Sam supposes. “If you don’t mind, Cas, that would be great.”
Sam climbs as far as he can back into bed, stupidly wishing for a moment he’d pushed it up against the wall, and nods a little at Cas before sliding into a picnic on the deck after an hour of catch with Amelia and Riot, bowls of apples and almonds and quinoa clustered next to a red plastic pitcher of sweet tea…..
When he comes to, Cas is slumped against the headboard, his right palm open, arm reaching across his body toward Sam. Sam ineffectively tries to control his startle.
Cas scrubs his eyes and blinks. “I am sorry. Healing you was - the grace I have is less efficient than it was.”
“It’s okay, Cas. Whatever you did helped. I haven’t slept so well in…” Sam lets himself yawn and crack his back, lays out a relaxed morning routine for Cas to see. “In a while. I’m sorry that it took so much out of you.”
Cas uncomfortably mirrors his stretching, tipping his head an inch to the left. “Still. I understand that slumber is something of a boundary for humans, and I did not mean to cross it.”
“Well, you’ve touched my soul, so I think we’re at that point.” Maybe not quite his soul, Cas has felt his grace rattle through some psychic cavity where his soul should have been, but it’s too early not to err on the side of tact.
Cas tips his head to the right and squints slightly, but refrains from asking Sam to define the other qualitative parameters of that point, which is lucky, because Sam hasn’t the faintest idea what they are either.
Cas blinks down at his own outfit as Sam steps into his track pants. “You okay there, Cas?”
“I would usually clean these myself, but it seems imprudent, given my current condition.”
“Yeah, okay. I could stand to throw in some laundry, too. Let’s find you something to wear in the meantime.”
He leads Cas further into the bunker, two doors past Kevin’s room, and turns on a light to reveal the closet. “Went through the personal effects the Men of Letters left in their lockers when they went dark, see if there was anything useful. Wasn’t much, but most of the clothes were in decent shape once they were washed.”
Cas looks over the bedframe-turned-table and its mismatched piles of shirts, slacks, even standard-issue skivvies found and picked over by Dorothy and Charlie, and points to a small assortment off to the left. “What are these?”
Sam rubs his neck. “They’re the things I think were Henry’s. They should fit, if you want.”
“Oh, no, that’s alright.”
Sam goes to talk himself out of territorialism, but finds none to fight. “You help us. He’d be glad to help you.”
Cas touches the pile as reverently as he would the bones of a saint. “That’s very kind. Thank you.”
“Alright, I’m going to take a shower. Just leave your things in the washing machine and I’ll start it later.”
Cas nods.
Sam takes his time in the shower and shaves for the first time all week.
He shouldn’t be this calm. Not with Dean…gone.
But they need laundry, and he needs breakfast, and so Sam does some calming chores before heading into the library with a large tray of coffee, yogurt, and toast.
“I don’t know if you’re on food now or what, but help yourself.”
Cas pours himself a cup of coffee, black, no sugar. He’s close enough for Sam to see that he’s wearing a pink cardigan with blotches of ancient ink stains pooling around the right pocket.
Sam lets himself laugh. “Yeah. Definitely Henry’s.”
Cas tentatively presses a hand down the left side of the garment. “What made you suspect it was his locker?”
Sam smiles. “It had more books than clothes. More Asimov than Heinlein. And a few Polaroids of a kid the right age to be my dad.” Strange, he realizes, that he’d known Henry for days and his father for decades, but recognized Henry’s library before Dad’s face.
Loss is always strange, no matter how much of it he survives.
“So. Any leads?”
Cas shakes his head. “I attempted to trace him, but it appears the Mark has a cloaking effect.”
“Makes sense, if Cain stayed under the radar for that long.”
“Well, he certainly stayed hidden, for someone so infamous.” Cas scrunches his eyebrows together.
“What?”
“Well, the names of Cain and Abel were little known until the Abrahamic record begins. But Cain and Abel themselves were represented in human mythologies long before and well outside of that. Hodhr and Baldr, Set and Osiris…”
“Yeah, but we’ve met those guys.”
“All of them?”
“Half of them.” Sam takes the point. “But they didn’t exactly match up with the mythological record.”
“Precisely. If, throughout history, these entities became so heavily associated with a story not their own, the discrepancies may lead us to useful information about the forces acting on Dean now.”
“That’s a pretty broad net, but it’s worth a shot.”
They decide to keep their search limited to mythological figures they know, but when he comes back juggling half of the Egyptian mythology section, he finds Cas with just as high a stack of Viking lore.
“Perhaps this was too much.”
“Not much else to go on, though.” Still, this bloodless stack of books could last them forever. He almost wants it to. “Let’s give it three days to look through.”
Cas nods and opens the reddest of his books.
With his laptop away, there’s no clock in Sam’s line of sight, nothing to mark the passing hours except the slow shifting of documents from unread to read, unknown to unhelpful. Sam’s shifting and crunching and need to hit the head echo uneasily against Cas and his perfect posture, which is so constant that he’s a little startled when Cas looks up.
“Any luck, Cas?”
“Well, I think I know why this record is so muddled.” Cas flips a giant book around to pages written in Old Norse and scattered with hot pink tabs.
“Yeah, that clears it right up.”
“Sorry.” Cas walks around the table to stand behind him and points to the figure next to one of the tabs, a vertical cone that peaks slightly higher than the characters around it. “That’s not a rune. It’s a name.”
“Who?”
“Formally, they referred to him as Loki.”
“Gabriel?”
“I doubt he shared his true identity with this particular scribe, but yes. This character represents his horn.”
“And he was what, screwing with them for kicks?” Of course he was. “What happened?”
“The mythology suggests that Loki tricked Hodhr into killing Baldr with a weapon which was supposed to be harmless, and Hodhr was subsequently killed in retribution for this crime.”
“Yet somehow, Baldr was alive and cannibalizing five years ago.”
Cas nods. “Gabriel seems to have spread the word of Baldr’s death. Worshippers remembered Baldr as virtuous and brave and Hodhr as a stooge at best, though later reinterpretations vilify him further.”
“You think Gabe set Hodhr up.”
“Even more cruelly than it initially appears, yes, though no motive is apparent.”
“Yeah, since when does he need a reason.”
“Whatever Gabriel did, he could not have done it without Baldr’s involvement.” Cas frowns. “That was defensive. I apologize.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Cas fixes him with that creepily angelic stare. “It is difficult, to be reminded that my brothers are not who I wanted to believe they were.”
“That sucks.” Sam picks the pink tabs out of the book and snaps it shut. “If Gabriel pulled the whole thing out of his ass, it’s not going to help us get to Dean.”
“No, of course not.” Cas collects his reading. “I’ll put these back.”
Sam winces. “No, just leave it on the next table. We’ll get it later.”
“Alright.” Cas makes three uneven but balanced stacks of books, purposefully inspecting each spine to ensure that the books are piled in order.
Or just to avoid Sam for a couple of minutes. Which, he thinks, is not unreasonable. Get it together, Winchester.
Cas eventually turns back around. “How about you? Do you have any leads?”
“Well, I haven’t been able to rule anything out yet.”
“Can I help?”
“That’d be great.” Sam goes to slide a random stack across the table, then thinks better of it. “Actually, I bet there’s a Coptic Bible somewhere in here. Maybe you could see if there are any other historical influences on that translation of Genesis?”
“Certainly.” Cas takes a pile to drop off in the Scandinavian section on his way and returns quickly with one black volume opened in his hands. “It would be helpful if you could tell me as much as you know about the deities in question.”
“Well, I’ve only met Osiris.” Sam explains the case, leaving out superfluous details, like the way he’d inadvertently talked Dean out of feeling guilt for Amy’s murder.
“So he allows his victims to determine their own moral failings.”
“More or less.”
“Gabriel’s influence seems unlikely, then.”
Sam scoffs. “Very.”
“And he is known as a resurrected deity, so his continued survival is less suspicious than Baldr’s.”
Sam nods.
“Still, you successfully contained a god.”
“It was actually a pretty standard case. If Set really did kill him, then the fixation on justice makes him more or less an amped-up vengeful spirit. Dean and I have been dealing with them since we were kids.” He laughs and tells Cas one of those stories that’s funny less because it’s amusing and more because it needs to be, about the time he was ten and Dean was fourteen and they fought off a spirit obsessed with poodles and eggs. Well, and power tools. “I don’t know how we didn’t die.”
“Angels were watching over you.”
Sam bites his cheek until he can taste iron and swallow sharp words: maybe that was the problem.
“What were they even fighting about?”
“Who?”
“The archangels. They didn’t start fighting because they cared so much about humans, clearly. So why get so invested?”
Cas reaches down and straightens a pile of index cards. “I do not remember the pretexts for their earlier arguments. I suspect they would sound quite foolish now.” He moves on to the pens, twisting the caps to line up to the tiny lettering. “I think they reminded each other of our father. Such love seems difficult for angels to forgive.”
“You know, you guys are a lot more human than you think.”
Cas nods. “Not something I would have known just a few years ago, but yes. I think perhaps we are.”
“Hey, were you….” Sam trails off, isn’t sure what he’s asking.
“I have no recollection of contact with you or your brother until his extraction.”
Sam nods and pretends that means something.
“Apparently there was some concern about angels becoming compromised due to attachment to their charges. Obviously unfounded, of course.”
It’s Sam’s turn to flinch with surprise, but Cas smiles tentatively, tells Sam that there was a joke somewhere. “Perhaps it may not have been entirely unreasonable.”