Supernatural- "The Law of Conservation of Energy" (Ch 1)
One
Bobby knows this story better than anyone. It’s straight out of the Winchester handbook and classic enough that he can recite all the steps backwards, forwards, sideways and upside down. He can hear it and see it coming and have it hit him in the chest or in the back or in the kidneys and still, somehow, let it slide right off of him over and over and over again.
The Winchesters have a way of doing things that end in their worlds narrowing down into a single point. They’re like charging horses with blinders on or enraged bulls with lowered heads, stampeding right towards the sharp-dressed man waving a bright red cloth at them, neither of them realizing there’s something sharp and deadly waiting on the other side. For Winchesters, the center of the world-that single, narrow point- is always family. From there, the sharp and deadly things be damned.
Castiel isn’t a Winchester by blood but Bobby knows sometimes it isn’t as simple as blood. Being a Winchester simply means going bug fuck crazy whenever something or someone is threatening to end someone you love. The worst part is it’s fucking contagious in every possible way; it’s genetic, airborne, transmitted by touch, by sound, by sight, by smell, by simple proximity. Bobby is pretty sure all the exposure over the years has gotten him a barely manageable couple of cases of it himself.
In John’s case it had been all about Mary; the idiot had leapt straight into the deep end without a backwards look after her death, had dragged two scared little boys who’d just lost their mother in with him and never let himself regret it for more than a minute at a time. By the time he’d finally realized what was really important-what he’d still had- he’d had to sell his soul to a demon to keep it safe. He went to Hell.
With Dean it’s always been Sam; he makes all the hard choices so Sam doesn’t have to. He does the dirty work, carries the heaviest burdens, kills himself over and over again to keep Sam’s head above water. Being told since he’d been four that his life would never be as important as Sam’s had ended with him selling his soul to a demon to keep Sam alive. He’d gone to Hell.
With Sam it’s Dean, and because Sam is the smart one, because he’s always believed he knows better than anyone else, he tells himself he’s going to save the world, he’s going to do whatever it takes to keep his brother safe even if it means defying him, betraying his trust, choosing a demon. Sam sold his soul in a different way than his daddy and his big brother, but it led to all the same things in the end, led to the apocalypse and doing whatever it took to keep Dean alive, to keep from saying yes to Michael at the expense of paradise. And Sam went to Hell.
Castiel’s story isn’t any different than John and Mary’s or Dean and Sam’s or Sam and Dean’s. It doesn’t sound to Bobby like an exciting new twist on the shit storm that is their lives so much as a digitally remastered remake cut together with fancier effects but still the same footage. From the moment he’d met Dean, Castiel’s entire world had been pulled into the boy’s orbit. He’d gotten bitten by the Winchester bug and in angels it must have mutated into something vast and incomprehensible, because after an eternity serving loyally and not asking any questions, one measly year with Dean Winchester bugging the crap out of him is all it takes for Castiel to say fuck everything, he’s picking Dean and Sam over the universe. His big brothers threaten to end the world after that-a world with Dean and Sam in it-and the angel gets blown up protecting the boys like any other member of the family. Bobby isn’t sure if Cas went to Hell afterwards exactly, but there’s an angel equivalent, he’s sure, and the poor guy must have spent some time there, getting his official Winchester Club members’ card in the meantime. After that, when Cas comes back-because they always come back- he does everything in his power to keep Sam and Dean alive and whole and themselves despite the fact it’s slowly destroying him from the inside out. In the end, he goes ahead and gets blown up again for his troubles.
Then more dick brothers come along wanting to destroy the Earth, and by this time, Cas’s world has narrowed to that dangerous point that means Winchesters go nuts and make crazy demon deals to keep one another safe, even if it means resentment and trust issues and possible apocalypses in the aftermath.
Now he’s stewing in a Hell of his own making.
And so there you have it. The Winchester recipe for love and family and life. It never changes, just evolves, and that’s why the angel’s deal with Crowley doesn’t surprise Bobby when he takes everything that’s happened in the last six years into consideration. Hell, it’s not like he hadn’t sold his own soul to the same demon for the same reasons once before, as well.
The Winchester handbook says you do what you can for your family. The thing it forgets to say is sometimes you fuck up everything else (like the world) in the pursuit of that.
In Bobby’s personal version of the handbook, he’s added a forgive and move on clause, especially when you have to move on to keep the end of the world from happening.
Bobby has always adapted well.
On the other hand, it seems despite the many times they have already done this, Sam and Dean haven’t learned things as well as Bobby has. Which just figures.
Bobby sighs and pushes past Sam at the desk before skirting around Dean on the couch, both of them doing their very best to not talk about-or think about- anything that happened with the angel who is currently sitting repentant and forlorn in the corner like a lost puppy.
Castiel looks up when Bobby stops right in front of him, pushing a piece of paper and a pencil into the bewildered angel’s hands. “Is there something I can do?” Castiel asks hesitantly, which earns a vaguely disbelieving snort from Dean and some uncomfortable shifting at the table from Sam.
Bobby wonders if either of the two idjits remember this was the guy who’d pulled them both from Hell. Might have done a piss-poor job the second time around, but Bobby likes to think what matters is not being in Hell. And like it or not, he’s probably their best resource on all things archangel. “Take this,” he grunts at the angel. “Write down everything you can think of that can kick Raphael’s ass. We’ll work by elimination.”
Castiel frowns at him like he’s already done this exercise in his head a thousand times before, but tentatively takes the paper and the pencil anyway. He settles the paper in his lap and starts scratching away with great concentration, and it is while he is like this that Bobby sees Dean look over at the angel out of the corner of his eye, tentative, uncertain. It’s like those first few weeks after Sam had set Lucifer free all over again, except more awkward because Castiel has stopped trying to defend himself hours ago (a trick Sam never really picked up).
A few seconds later (and definitely way too soon to be good), Castiel solemnly hands the paper back to Bobby. It reads, in very neat, very concise script:
God
Michael
Lucifer
Gabriel
Someone with all the souls of purgatory at their disposal
Bobby snorts, because of course the angel decides to stop being helpful now. “That really it?”
“That I am aware of,” Castiel answers, and Bobby sighs and passes the list on to Sam, who looks at it with a frown, before looking at Castiel with weighty, unreadable eyes.
Castiel stares distantly at his lap. If angels fidget, this is how they do it.
After a beat of prolonged silence, Bobby decides he wants to hit everyone with sticks. “Well okay then,” he begins. “What is it about all these things that makes them capable of kicking Raphael’s ass in the first place?” He might as well be reasonable. Someone ought to be. The world could end.
“Power,” Castiel answers vaguely, and Dean rolls his eyes at the angel for that one.
“Obviously, dude. He’s asking what makes them more powerful than you and Raph in the first place,” Dean clarifies, and apparently his frustration at the angel’s unhelpful equivocating is strong enough to pull him out of the dark, contemplative funk of betrayal he’s been nursing like a bottle of whiskey over the past few days. Thank God (or whoever) for that.
Dean and Castiel stare at each other.
Bobby sighs at the exact same time Sam does.
“I suppose in the simplest terms, it would be a matter of… size?” Castiel offers after a beat of carefully thinking over his words, like there aren’t any perfect ones in any language to explain this to a bunch of primitive humans. Either that or he’s wary of pushing the wrong button and pissing Dean off again.
“So what, his is bigger or something?” Dean snorts, because the idjit can’t help himself when he gets an opening that good.
“Yes,” Castiel answers seriously, and misses the bus on that whole thing, which takes the wind right out of Dean’s sails again. “He is older and has much more grace than I do. That is what it means to be an archangel, Dean.”
“Well, how does someone get to be an archangel?” Bobby pushes. “God just decided to stuff them with bigger batteries than you, right? How do we make your battery bigger?”
“That doesn’t involve opening the door to purgatory,” Dean qualifies, hastily. He slams the book on his lap shut. “Because we’re still not doing that.”
Castiel huffs and looks at Dean in a way Bobby thinks must be the angel equivalent of rolling his eyes. “Yes, we have established that, Dean.”
Dean scowls back. “Well, just wanted to clarify. You were looking shifty.”
“This is how I always look.”
“Maybe you always look shifty lately,” Sam adds, with a pointed look that means he’s still pissed about the oops, forgot the soul thing.
“Not helping, Sam,” Dean barks back at his brother, because apparently he can call his angel shifty and look all accusatorily at him but no one else is allowed to.
“Yeah, well, neither is any of this,” Sam mutters back lamely, though he does turn back to the list. After a minute, his brow furrows and he sniffs to himself, clearly deep in thought. At least it’s something.
Bobby sighs and wordlessly grabs a bottle of rotgut to offer to the angel, who has gone all slump-shouldered and awkward again, like he acknowledges Sam’s hit. Castiel stares at the bottle like he wishes it were enough to get him drunk.
Silence reigns for a while longer. Bobby gives up peacekeeping and goes to heat up some MREs and get more booze.
By the time he gets back and doles out a pouch of something that is somehow too salty and flavorless all at once to all parties, Sam is getting an increasingly deep furrow in his brow.
“Well?” Bobby prompts, when he sees Sam’s eyes go from his book to the list, to Castiel, to the book, and then the list again. “Spit it out, son.”
Sam looks vaguely sheepish. “It’s just… Castiel said souls are energy, right? Pure energy.”
From the corner, Castiel eyes the contents of his MRE like he expects it to crawl out of the pouch and try to eat his face at any moment. Bobby had spent five minutes in the kitchen wondering if he should heat one up for the angel in the first place because he obviously wouldn’t need it, but didn’t want the dumbass to feel like he was being excluded because Bobby was pissed at him too.
These are the complicated feelings of men, or something.
“Yes,” Castiel answers Sam eventually, and gamely puts the tip of his index finger into some ubiquitous gravy with the consistency of jelly.
“And grace…what is that?”
“Energy,” Castiel answers, staring at his gravy-coated finger like he’d like to smite the stuff on principle. “We are filled with the energy of our creation; our births. Our Father gave us form and awareness and then filled us with the power of existence.”
Sam contemplates this, and is getting into the whole discussion enough that he seems to have momentarily forgotten his distrust of Castiel, which has the effect of making Dean look a little less tense from the couch. “So… what’s the difference?” Sam presses. “I mean, you can obviously convert the energy of a soul into energy you can use with your grace, if you need to convert it all. I’m not sure how it works.”
Castiel seems to consider it. “Human souls are compatible with grace,” he says after a while.
Sam hmmms. “So what happens when you use up a soul’s energy? Does it just… die?” He looks vaguely accusatory at Castiel when he says this, like he thinks the angel has murdered the eternal souls of whoever he’d taken from Crowley in Hell and sucked them dry like some sort of Chinese chi vampire before leaving their dry, shriveled husks by the wayside.
Castiel doesn’t answer for a moment, and for a second, Bobby worries that Sam and all his judgmental bitchfacing is right.
“Well?” Dean demands, when no one says anything else for a while.
“Souls are eternal,” Castiel says eventually, eyes flickering down to his own chest like he feels them in there, rolling around. “Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It is a rule my Father created and which we must all live by.”
“Physics,” Sam says, probably for Dean’s benefit. Bobby knows well enough about the laws of conservation of energy. He’s a goddamned mechanic, and engines run on combustion.
“Thought that rule only applied in a closed system,” Bobby says after a beat. “That apply here?”
The angel blinks. “The Earth is its own system.”
“Woah, woah, woah, so then shouldn’t you be good?” Dean asks, with another sidelong glance at the angel. “If you’ve got all the energy from those souls Crowley forwarded you.”
“That energy was…used,” Castiel explains. “Much as a car burns fuel.”
Dean balks. “So you’re telling me you fricasseed all those souls just so you could punch your big brother in the face, Cas? Fifty thousand people just cease to exist?”
Castiel looks vaguely irritated at the accusation of mass murder. “The greater part of the energy from the souls has been used, but the souls themselves-the essence of the people they had been- have not been killed. As I said, Dean, a soul is eternal. They have been…incorporated into my grace. They are not dead. They have not ceased to exist. They have simply been…changed in form.”
Sam looks torn between being disgusted and fascinated at this revelation. The muscles in Dean’s cheek are twitching in a way that means he’s clamping his teeth together and grinding a little to keep quiet. Bobby would bet money on it being because even if those people had been in Hell, and even if 90% of them had probably deserved to be there (not forgetting that they might have one day become a demon that had to be ganked), it still sucks that they’d just stopped being them and had been shoved into the swirling mass of whatever it is inside an angel without any say in the matter.
“So grace and souls are compatible power sources,” Sam sums up quickly, because he sees the way Dean is quietly simmering on the couch and they should probably get to the point before Dean snaps, “and that makes it possible for the energy from a soul to transform into a part of you.”
“Yes,” Castiel says. Bobby furrows his brow, trying to catch up to where Sam’s ridiculous brain is trying to go with this. He thinks he’s getting an inkling of something, but not much more.
“Would you please get to the point?” Dean demands, not bothering to hide how much he does not understand what’s happening or how much that worries him. The fate of his angel (and the world, but that has always been secondary to family to him) hinges on their ability to figure out an alternative that does not mean opening the door to Purgatory and letting all sorts of badness out. “How the hell is any of this gonna help us?”
“Because,” Sam says, holding up Castiel’s list and waving it at his brother, “if energy can’t be created or destroyed, because if grace and souls are compatible sources of power, because if Cas can turn souls into a part of himself without frying himself, then why can’t we just find out wherever the energy from one of these dead archangels’ graces went and shove it into Cas instead? It has to be out there, right? If it’s eternal.”
Silence.
Then, after what seems like hours, Castiel huffs a breath and very slowly says, “It is a… possibility I had not considered.”
Dean frowns slightly. “Yeah but where do angels go when they die?”
Everyone looks expectantly at Castiel.
Who scowls. “I was dead. I had no awareness of where I was. Either time.”
“It’s something worth looking into,” Sam insists. “And we at least know of one archangel who died on our turf.”
“Gabriel,” Castiel murmurs, looking, for a moment, mournful at the reminder of a lost brother. Maybe the only other one in all of heaven who had found something on the Earth that was worth saving.
Dean still looks kind of skeptical as he considers their options. “Gabriel’s grace, huh? You really okay taking on that kind of juice, Cas?” And Bobby knows it’s a fair question; archangel grace had exploded Castiel once, after all. Granted, another angel was still attached at the time, but Dean’s just making sure here. Bobby has always known Dean as the Winchester who took the best care of his stuff.
In the meantime, Castiel fixes Dean with those too-serious, too-tired eyes and after a moment of brief hesitation, the angel nods. “I believe I can do it without causing myself irreparable damage,” he says, just a tinge of hopeful in his voice, “and as it is the only feasible idea we have come across yet, I feel we should explore it further.”
Sam is triumphant.
Dean snorts and leans back against the sofa, brow furrowed like he’s not sure if he believes the angel just yet, but looking a lot like he really wants to. It’s always been amazing to Bobby that a kid who’s so used to getting his hope stomped on time and time again always seems to find a way to keep hold of a little somehow.
Bobby sinks down into a chair with a huff to eat his lunch and thinks maybe things are going better this time around. At least no one is crying this time, and if Bobby knows these Winchesters like he thinks he knows them-which is better than anyone else- those awkward, sideways looks, those inappropriate barbs and scoffs and all the tiptoeing steps around each other mean that it might only take a few months of beating the shit out of each other before whatever is it that’s wrong between them is fixed again, as best as they can be fixed. Maybe the world doesn’t even have to end in the meantime either. “Well okay then,” he grunts, and twists open the top to his lukewarm beer decisively. “How do you suppose we find a dead archangel’s grace, anyway?”
Sam runs a hand through his hair. “Whatever the answer is, I doubt it’s in any of these,” he says, gesturing to the stacks of open books in front of him. “No offense, Bobby.”
Bobby shrugs and sips his beer before turning expectant eyes on the angel. “Well?”
Castiel, looking vaguely relieved, sets his MRE down on the end table-still completely full- and says, “Perhaps we should go to the source.”
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