Fic: The Sleep of Reason (Produces Monsters)
Title: The Sleep of Reason (Produces Monsters)
Word Count: 6445
Genre: Slash, Angst.
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Cas
Spoilers: up to season 6 finale.
Warnings: Mild gore. Explicit content.
Summary: “I am God now,” He said, “and there are no more accidents.” -The Last Book of Castiel, 1:9.
A/N: Title stolen from a Goya sketch. Scarletjedi is the awesomest beta of all time. Hugs not drugs.
“I am God now,” He said, “and there are no more accidents.”
The Last Book of Castiel, 1:9
†
Castiel had no time to pause and reflect on his decision. Not a moment to buckle beneath the sudden onslaught of omniscience.
He declared himself and saw that the world was unraveling.
†
First God went to Heaven and commanded the angels to kneel before Him. Those who obeyed he touched upon the forehead and said, “Rise and be forgiven. Be faithful.” Those who did not he struck down. He cut the wings from their backs and dropped them out of Heaven saying “Go alone. Learn love. And may you find your hearts before death finds you for I have taken your immortality and shall not give it back.”
Joshua was standing at God’s shoulder. He had not been asked to kneel with his brothers but as he watched the cleansing of Heaven he bowed his head and mourned for all the blood that soaked his beautiful garden. God saw this and put a hand on his shoulder. “It will help the roses grow,” He said gently.
With these acts God ended the war in Heaven.
2:13-15
†
One year had passed on earth since the death of Castiel the angel. But it might have been a thousand or it might have been a day; the history of the event didn’t matter. Castiel was buried and God was busy.
In Bautou a Chinese prophecy was spinning out of control. A woman screamed in the agony of labor, her hands clutching the stained sheets beneath her. She was alone in the room. Her family, outside the door, ignored the sound. But the desert idols were there, standing outside the house with patience, waiting for the child to be born.
God went to the edge of the village and began to gather the prophecy together, winding it around and around like a skein of yarn to send it back to sleep for another hundred years. The dust of the street, blown in from the desert, settled to the ground. The reeling clouds above began to break apart and shafts of the midday sun pushed through. A man coughed and wheezed and sat down on the edge of a stone well, his hands on his knees.
The baby was early and the mother was young. But she could feel that something was wrong. She cried and gasped the dirty air of her bedroom and closed her eyes. There was blood on the bed and no sister or aunt to tell her that the baby was facing the wrong way, no friend to reach inside and turn him around. She was dizzy and it was getting harder and harder to breath.
The desert idols swept closer to the walls. Peered into the human life and the womb, grasped with their ancient words in confusion as the wind died down and the baby’s heartbeat stuttered.
Out of the ground and the eyes of grandmothers, out of the dreams of working men, God drew the prophecy into his hands.
The man at the well cleared his throat and looked at God without seeing him. He was a hopeless man. A running man. And he knew that his baby was being born. Knew still that he would never be a father. Enough shame in him to go around. Enough shame in the young woman and her family.
It all meant very little to God. Except that he remembered a vague time when he had been like them. Full of so much self. Full of the thoughts of individuals. And he suddenly remembered that he had never said goodbye.
All of Bautou was silent for an instant while God paused and looked over his shoulder.
Behind him, in some other corner of the world, Dean Winchester was leaning against the hood of his Impala staring up at the sky. His freckles showed clearly in the light. His shoulders were sloped in exhaustion from the heat. His heart was beating in his chest, tuned to the purring engine of the car. There was sunlight refracted in his irises. Dean’s eyes were clear and open like the well.
God had forgotten how green Dean’s eyes were. How clearly they displayed his soul; how bright he was within, wretched and crystalline, like ice on a cracked window.
He reached out with just a flicker of his infinite wisdom and grace, traced it over the surface of Dean Winchester’s mind. He was expecting a warm sensation, like skimming his palm over the surface of a sunny puddle. But it was swallowing hot iron and burning coal.
Greif and Shame were boiling in the back of Dean’s throat. One startling, inconsequential, human moment blazed through the Lord and left him in ashes. He slipped down and it swallowed him.
-the sound of cracking glass shudders up Dean’s arm. It travels through the iron of the crowbar like an electric current and burns out his insides. The percussion shakes his wrist and elbow, and he can feel that he is crumbling at last. His foundations have always been shaky, it was only a matter of time before something did him in. The black metal sparks and caves slowly under each blow. His mouth tastes like blood and beer. His eyes are stinging.
Dean beats a canyon into the body of his father’s car.
His car now.
He smashes apart this piece of his father that is left to him. John was a selfish bastard and he’d left Dean behind again. He’d gone away to die alone like a dog and left everything on Dean’s shoulders, like he always did. Well fuck that.
Because there are some things that Dean will not do. Not even for his father. Not even to save the world. He doesn’t give a shit. He won’t.
The crowbar clatters to the ground. His fingers are too numb to hold it anymore. His arm feels broken. His heart is broken. Dean looks around at the graveyard of beat up wheels that is Bobby’s back yard and thinks that he belongs here, with the broken things. Hot sweat has gathered under his collar and his arms. The breeze feels cold. Goosebumps rise on his skin.
Dean made a promise to John. And after this he could only fail (how could Dad not have known?) Dean will let the whole world burn down in hellfire before he ever hurts Sammy. He will never kill his brother. Not for anything. He would rather lie down and rust with these other old pieces of junk.
Because Dean is selfish too, god-damnit, and Sammy is all he has left-
The feeling of hard ground beneath his knees yanked the Lord out of Dean’s mind. Suddenly he was a solid body, gasping for air in the sandy street, looking at the face of the startled running man. The prophecy of Bautou spun out of his control. The baby with no eyes and eleven fingers was pushed from his mother’s womb.
God reached out with his hands, too disoriented to catch it. He could feel a heartbeat pounding in his veins and it tore apart his focus, intoxicated by the humanity of Dean Winchester’s memory. From seven miles away he heard the first warbling shrieks of the infant.
Gasping, fearful, the Lord and the running man stared at each other. There were none to witness the miracle: a man and a God seeing each other stripped bare for the first time in the honest light of the sun.
God picked up the pieces of his shattered objectivity before moving on to other parts of creation. On his way out he struck down the eyeless newborn with distracted hesitation.
†
In year after the Judeo-Christian apocalypse the first Lord abandoned His children and went into exile, hiding Himself in the darkest parts of the Universe, and an angel took his place. A New God.
The New God gathered up the Earth in his arms, the Milkway. He took responsibility for the billions of humans and their souls, their fettered forests and the bad dreams that lived within them. He did not create or change. He destroyed when it was required. But mostly He maintained. He blew cold wind down from the mountain tops to set the weather cycles in motion. He woke up the sleeping, unnamed saints of the world.
And even those whom He punished He loved.
He was a strange God. But a good one.
1:1-4
†
In the year of his rule he watched the human race with care and he tried to love them. Especially the good ones. He tried very hard. He never stopped trying. But there were so many and he was unpracticed and God soon discovered that the discrepancies between the unrepentant sinner and the average man were difficult to keep in focus.
He counted them. Saw them living and dying every second, those tiny beings with tiny destinies. They were like swaths of pastel colors growing old and flaking away, blurring together the longer he looked until he couldn’t see them clearly anymore. They were humanity. Individually they were nothing more than small composites of blood and soul. Together they were nothing more than a malfunctioning machine.
Humans were an asymmetrical art from with no utility. Sometimes they were beautiful, but mostly they were baffling and ugly and tiresome. Other more profound projects would necessarily follow them in time. The work of another God perhaps. Another artist.
And yet the death of an eyeless infant and an abandoned son weighed heavily on his conscience. He looked over the tapestry of self-destruction on Earth and could recall that, during his days watching over the Winchesters, everything had seemed urgent and imperative. Everything had felt as immense back then as it felt small now.
God narrowed his gaze.
Sam Winchester was stretched out over the rough covers of a motel bed in Idaho. His eyes were closed and his forehead was pinched against a headache. There was a glass of whisky on the nightstand. He was alone at the moment.
Dean was sitting beneath a cascade of hot water in the shower. His head was tipped back, resting against the stained tile, and his face was averted, turned just out of the way of the water so he could breathe open-mouthed. His knees were spread apart and his feet were braced against the wall. His expression, to the baffled eyes of God, was a distorted mixture of pain and pleasure. Dean’s lips were stuttered over the cadence of a short sound that seemed to imply both please and sorry, and yet was neither. The muscles of his body were tense and trembling. He gripped his sex in one hand and clutched at his thigh with the other.
Whatever mystery God had intended to look into was lost. He paused, fascinated, and curled up behind the fall of water like a resting breeze to watch.
Dean was seeking a moment of pleasure. The flush of his chest and the huffing of his breath made that much obvious. But whether he was here looking for the pleasure itself or for distraction God didn’t-couldn’t know.
Dean twisted under his own ministrations. Stretched his neck back and accidentally swallowed some water. He coughed and spat it out, making a low musical sound in his throat. God peeked beneath Dean’s eyelids and saw a mind in conflict. A mirage of sexual fantasies muted by some bitter emotion.
Humans were so hopelessly subject to their own accidents.
God uncurled to leave, bored with the repetition of the deed, when Dean’s gasps took shape again. His voice returned to that short sound. It was a word. God looked for a definition and found none. He listening closer and still it was unintelligible. A million connotations branching away from it but he couldn’t pinpoint the core of the meaning.
Which was impossible. He was God. And this thing, idea, whatever it was could not be outside his purview. He focused on Dean’s mouth, wet lips and clumsy tongue, as the word was repeated. It slipped away like a snake.
A deep inhale.
Dean drew taught suddenly, quaking as his spine arched. His free hand slapped down against the floor of the shower and he reached his completion. God, distracted by the motion, flickered his attention away from Dean’s mouth and down to watch it happen.
And heard the word spill out of Dean’s voice.
“Cas!” Choked in the forlorn rasp of a drowning man.
The Lord looked up, stunned. Dean’s green eyes opened slowly.
It was his name. Castiel.
How had he ever lost something so important?
He reached out, heedless of the steam and the wet and the fragility of the man before him. Heedless of everything but that word. His name. He reached out and found himself within the last remnants of a tattered daydream. It was confused. Stark and lewd. And as the Lord lingered it began to fray and give way to Dean’s memories.
-the heat of Cas’ breath puffing against his neck sooths the goose bumps on his shoulder. Soft lips brush his skin and a loose and scratched voice mumbles his name-
“Dean” with such cold conviction that it settles like food poisoning in his belly. Cas is going to leave, Dean can see it in his eyes, and he isn’t ever going to come again when they call. The next time he cries out in the dark no one will answer. The next time he will be eaten alive. And he’ll die waiting-
rolls into the waiting arms and warm voice. A year ago this would have been unmentionable and unthinkable. But he has no will for that kind of denial now. They’ve all been too close to too many things they should never have known. Dean’s life is like one of those Greek myths that Sam is always mumbling on about. Prometheus brings fire to the people and Zeus straps him to a mountain. Icarus melts his wings. Dean Winchester lies down with an angel-
as he kneels he can feel Ozone through the back of his neck. The crackling storm of Cas’ anger. And however much Dean has trusted what was between them in the past he fully expects to die now. He waits for the sound of snapping fingers and the sensation of his snapping spine. When he glances up Cas’ eyes are blue and hard, full of blame and betrayal. They are like ice-
sunlit ocean water is the best (and stupidest) metaphor he can come up with. Cas’ eyes are abrasive and healing, cleansing. And the planes of his body are like fitted harbors, molded for this kind of sin, shaped for Dean. The sweat on his body is chilling, he is hot only where Cas is pressed against him-
The Lord pulled away, blinking as if he’d just stepped into the sun. He gathered himself together like scattered glass shards and holds his identity close to his chest as he withdraws.
Castiel.
He withdrew from that particular point in time and space. Brushed away all the specifics to get a hold on the bigger picture again.
Except for his name. He held that before him like a torch. And, heavy as it was, there was still a little room left over in his arms.
So he scooped up the weeping child-ghosts of a civil dispute in Nigeria on his way by.
†
By the end of his reign many had forgotten what he was, though only a little time had passed. They conveniently ignored who he had been because Heaven was reordered, it was clean and crystal and brimming with new prophecies and plans. The angels stopped taking interest in men and began to take interest in themselves. They appointed oracles. Historians. Philosophers. A new age gained momentum.
During this time God took a very “hands off” approach. He was often to be found in Joshua’s garden just walking. He was following footprints that were much older and much bigger than his own. And he would sometimes be heard to whisper “Father” to the lilies. And he would sometimes be seen etching “Son” into the mud.
Joshua did not talk to the Lord during these moments because the resulting conversations were like trying to speak with three separate people who were standing right next to each other but did not even realize they were in the same room.
2:22-24
†
God lay still within a nebula bed. Around him were blankets of stardust burning out blue and gold and green. He swirled them into faster motion, listening to the explosions of molecules and atoms colliding, creating friction. He pushed and pulled them into destruction, twisting them to a middle point. Out of these old ashes a heavier star would take the place of its progenitor. New worlds, new stars, new galaxies in the making.
In the midst of this nursery God thought long and hard about the dead.
Castiel had died because the world needed a better god and he wanted to help. He had ascended because his world was crying out for help but God could hardly understand the language it cried out in.
He had to find his angel again.
†
On a Tuesday in some August of the Twenty First century (by human reckoning) a subspecies of Galapagos butterfly went extinct. The last of them struggled through a gust of wind to rest on the underside of a fern frond and was gobbled up by a Mocking bird.
God had Heaven’s new historians record the event. Though it wasn’t uncommon for species to vanish in those days, God was touched by that particular loss. He told the historians that the butterflies had been a big deal in His youth. They had been created to help run the earth.
“My father was subtle in setting up the relationships of the world,” God said. He explained that one butterfly, anywhere, was enough to begin a hurricane on the other side of the globe. And trillions of them, all beating their tiny wings together, generated the ordered chaos that kept all the other creatures alive; that made the rain that watered the grass that fed the antelope the lion hunted. God laughed as He explained it.
He’d begun to laugh more and more in those last days. But His angels thought He looked sad.
3:5-8
†
So he went to the only place where he knew he could find Castiel for sure.
Sam and Dean were sleeping in Colorado. God put a safe distance between himself and the brothers first, settling himself into a rocky outcrop on the shore of Wales. He sat and stretched his legs out in the sand, took off the shoes of his vessel. Behind him the rocks rose up in the sheer cliffs of the Gower Peninsula. The tide was low.
He closed his eyes and sighed, a stale gust that rushed out of his seldom used lungs. Then he cupped his hands and caught a droplet falling from Dean’s mind, cradled it like a leaf catching rainwater.
Castiel was nowhere in this memory. But there was something else familiar.
-she tells him his baby breath is sweet. She rubs her nose in his hair and pinches his toes gently so that giggles bubble out his belly. The walls sway as she sits down in a chair with his fragile body cradled against her chest and her own shaking, laughing lungs. He sucks on her knuckle and she tastes like ocean salt and lilac soap.
Her arms are harbors. They are constant and perfect and he feels safe. Even though beneath her beautiful eyes and her warm chest there is the smell of ash. There is hate in her. And regret, coagulated like old, diseased blood in the bottom of her stomach. It’s calcified in the bones of her ribs and the base of her spine.
There is grief in her beyond his capability to know. It’s suffused in her skin and the light of her mouth. An early ending to all of her mistakes, doubts written in the fine print of the whorls of her fingertips. She is more aware of her history than most. The reasons for her love and her fierce protection are misplaced. She loves with a mother’s loves, but she also loves out of spite.
This memory is just a blueprint for what he will be looking for the rest of his life. He clutches at her hair and her clothes, fights against the unclear haze of colors and shapes. It is already too late for him. Her history is in him, in the baby’s blood. And Dean can feel through the burn of her hands what a catastrophic life he will lead.
She sings him a song that is not a lullaby when he begins to cry. A song that is heavy and deep, like long searching-
The first lapping hisses of high tide stung his toes. He opened his eyes and saw the blue sky confused with the blue horizon. For an instant he did feel like Castiel again, then the memory was sucked away with the wave.
His insides were scraped clean. Emptied and washed out by the abrasive cut of the sand and the salt spray on his face.
Dean’s beginning had been part of plan. He’d been born with a fortune in mind. But that was in another world, set up by another God. In this new world there was no such thing as “meant to be” anymore. Destines were unraveling and the world was hurtling through space on momentum alone, like a stone skipped across suddenly placid waters. It could go for a long time, but it eventually it had to sink. Eventually this windup toy would wind down.
And what then of the God who had been the angel Castiel?
†
Soon Heaven was a place that ran itself.
Only the garden, and by extension Joshua, was like a shipwrecked dingy on a lonely rock. All of the divine city was growing and changing while Joshua stayed the same.
And Joshua was worried because the Lord had stopped confiding in him.
2:26-29
†
Joshua was the only one that God could trust. All the others were concerned with grand designs and new universes. But Joshua still tended the garden and pulled the weeds. There was still plain old dirt caught underneath his fingernails.
He was pruning the rose bushes-his hands, ungloved, were a mess of tiny puncture wounds and abrasions-when he caught God wandering about the garden. There was a pile of dead rose buds at his feet.
“Hello,” Joshua said because Joshua was like that. God had to smile.
“Hello,” he answered. They stood side by side in the shade and looked at Joshua’s good work. Every detail was paid careful attention, every root was watered.
“You would have done right by them,” said God thoughtfully. “You would have made a good Father.” He looked at Joshua with warmth in his eyes but Joshua only shrugged and pulled another dying blossom from its branch.
“I know gardening,” he said. And maybe that was true.
God touched his friend on the shoulder and left for earth again. There was an itching in his fingers and a hole in his chest.
He leaned against the brick wall behind the empty apartment building where Sam and Dean were drinking quietly. The alleyway was littered with fast food trash and cigarette butts and the smell was unpleasant. God turned his face aside and bore it because there was nowhere else for him to go. What he needed was here.
-the stale taste has been in his mouth for days. Along with that familiar burn between his shoulder blades, a stress that sits at the base of his neck and makes him feel like a flimsy tree about to snap. He forces the door closed with his elbow and pushes her up against it. He covers up the taste of metal in his mouth with the whisky still on her tongue. She laughs against his lips and he holds her hips still with his hands, mouth his way around her neck, measures his pace by the permission of her breathing.
He gives her all of his patience, wakes up the sleeping parts of her body. He uses coarse words like feathers against the curve of her ear. She arcs her back and loosens her knees, slender hands scraping up the abused muscles of his back.
He holds himself in perfect control until her desperation is clear. And finally, then, at last, he lets go and allows himself to take. For five minutes he buries his face in her neck and gasps clean air in the circle of her arms. He holds her close while they both spiral upwards together, makes sure she can’t see his expression. He wants her to be too wrapped up in her own body to notice that he holds onto her like someone he loves.
She has one of at least fifty different names and he won’t remember it a week from now. He lets her go just in time after it’s over.
There is nothing unconditional about sex, not really. It’s a business-like action, as far as Dean is concerned, a handshake. A mutual agreement between two people acting towards a common goal. But if you play it right it can feel unconditional. If you’re careful you can lose yourself for a few moments and never be judged for anything. You can be accepted however you shudder and fall apart.
†
He was a mild god after His wrath was forgotten.
2:17
†
Another motel room. They were in Wyoming this time. Every light in the room was turned on and their shadows were cast in a confusing mess of different shades on the floor. There was a plastic basin full of pink water by their feet. A heap of bloody hand towels were soaking inside it. Sam was studying the wall with his mouth set in a grim line and Dean was bent over Sam’s shoulder, carefully sewing up the ugly wound across his back.
Dean treated Sam’s skin like it was precious, like it was the fabric that held the world together. He threaded the needle gently through and pulled it gently out again. In every touch it was clear that Sam was everything. Their entire story was folded up inside the red envelope of that wound; betrayal and forgiveness and all the little things they still held against each other.
And love, of course. Unconditional, unbreakable and unacknowledged.
Sam accepted the presence of Dean’s hands like they were his own. When he took a swig of the whisky he offered Dean a mouthful without thinking about it. Nobody said “thank you” or “don’t mention it.” To do so would have been absurd. Like thanking your well for giving you water.
God watched them through the window from beneath the shadow of a burned out streetlamp. He wasn’t invisible that day. He was a man in his thirties wearing a tan coat and black shoes-blue tie. He looked like Castiel, to anyone who would know to look. But there was no danger of being seen. The Winchesters had no reason to look for him. No reason to suspect that God would be standing in a parking lot in Winton, Wyoming to spy on them.
The television was on in the background. When Dean rose and took the basin into the bathroom to clean up Sam watched the screen with apathy. A few minutes later Dean returned and stood next to him to do the same.
There was silence in Winton. It was laid like a heavy blanket in the motel room, draped beneath the buzzing of the television. God tipped his head and listened to it. Such silence. Deep and familiar, with a taste like fresh wind or cold drinking water.
He put his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the lamppost, just watching the man who had saved the world do nothing. Where are you, Dean? He wondered.
-Hell.
There is no fire. Hell is too wet with blood to burn.
Screams suck the sound from the shadows and create a vacuum. Over this void is the joyful laughter of Dean Winchester. He laughs while they scream for their sons and daughters, as he once screamed for Sam. He laughs as they cry. Some of them will never learn, he knows, but the tough ones will come to depend on him in time. They will start to love their pain.
And every year or so, quite by accident, three seconds of silence fall. Dean breathes it in like spring and laughs again. Such silence-
God broke away, confused. His shoulder slipped on the lamppost and he nearly lost his balance. Somehow, this was a memory about love.
But he knew for a fact that there was no love in Hell. So there was something buried deeper, half-forgotten, but clearly not lost. He stood up straighter and stepped closer to the window. The glow that came through the glass nearly touched the toes of his shoes.
“Where are you?” he heard himself ask out loud.
-he struggles and bites and curses, but the arms won’t let him go. He scratches and tears and shrieks, but is cradled like a newborn. Searing light wraps around him and carves the filth of Hell away. It is harsh. It is agony.
“Quiet please,” says the voice.
Dean goes limp as the dead. He stops struggling while the disease is sucked away. The gangrenous parts are cut off. The tumors are dug out. The evil is scrubbed out of him and Dean curls into the arms and weeps. All his flaws are bared naked for this being to see. All his sins. Dean admits himself a coward. Hands stroke up and down his back.
Don’t let me go. Dean begs. Don’t let me go.
He is drawn closer, nearly clean now. And the voice says to him,
“You will see me again.”
But who (or what) could love a ruinous scab like Dean Winchester? He knows in his heart that he will never find this again. It is in his blood to be forever abandoned and left behind.
Don’t let me go.
The light is withdrawing. The dark, clean and empty, is closing in. And Dean asks one last time, though he knows it won’t do any good.
Please don’t let me go-
This time God pulled back slowly and had to shake the distance from his eyes. He was angry and sad. He was remembering how much he loved Dean the first time he saw him. And how much he hated him the last. How Sam and Dean had talked and talked and talked about family. About trust. How they had, in the end, left Castiel on the outside again.
He went back to Gower and stared down at the gray sea. It rose to high tide as he stood there. Rushed in and began to boil against the rocks. Here, at last, was his wrath. Here was his anger. And here was where the angel was buried. Steam hissed out of the water and the sour sent of seaweed wound up.
I was going to love him no matter what.
The sea dropped away again. The dead bodies of fish and crustaceans were left scattered on the shore.
Dean had not been the only one to break his promises.
†
Only Joshua ever dared to speak freely in the Lord’s presence. So that when God came into the garden one day, dressed as a man and thinking deeply, Joshua asked Him in surprise:
“Where have you been standing, Lord?” For, to Joshua’s eyes, God was covered in strange shadows that trailed like loose threads from the soles of His feet and the palms of His hands. The Lord’s eyes, that day, were blue. They looked at Joshua with sadness.
“In the dark,” He answered. “Listening.”
“Lucifer once listened in the darkness,” said Joshua softly. “And you cast him from your side.”
“Did I?” said God. “It feels like someone else did my work sometimes. Perhaps I aced rashly. But it has been done now and it must remain as it is or change without me. I have finished meddling.”
3:3-7
†
“Castiel?” came the voice of Joshua, clearly surprised to find that it was not the Lord walking in his garden.
Castiel had been stomping in his bare feet through the mud near some azalea bushes, just feeling the cut and grate of tiny pebbles between his toes. Just spending some time in something a little unclean. He looked up but did not smile.
“Yes?” he asked. And his voice was the used husk of a human. He sounded tired even to his own ears and Joshua’s frown grew deeper. He moved close, a humble being with brown eyes and scars up to his elbows.
“What do I tell them when you’re gone?” he asked. “They’re beginning to believe in you.”
Castiel shrugged.
“Tell them a lie,” he suggested.
†
On the last day of the Lord’s rule Joshua found him standing at the feet of a giant oak near the center of the garden. And as Joshua approached he saw leaves falling, one at a time, from the boughs of the tree. They jerked and fluttered to the ground as if pulled down by invisible fingers. Like pedals from a daisy, berries from a bush, little men from their lives; the Lord Castiel plucked the oak tree bare.
When he sighed a hurricane formed off the coast of Cuba. He rolled his shoulders to push down a mountain slide in the Rockies. Cracked his knuckles and lightning lit up Brazil. Brushed an eyelash from his cheek, fever swept through Botswana. Then he caught the last leaf as it fell and crushed it in his palm.
He said nothing. But the tree began to burn. It crackled and roared and rose high enough that all in Heaven could see the flames. It burned until it was nothing but ashes on the ground. Then the Lord knelt down and picked up the ash with his hands. He threw it to the wind and it scattered away.
The Lord was gone. He came never again to Eden or to Heaven.
A sapling grew, green and new, out of the ground where he’d been standing. But it was a willow tree and not an oak at all.
Some say he went to earth and lived as a human until the end because he had always been fond of humans. But the angels do not bother with the small and uninteresting lives of men anymore. And so they do not really know.
3:13-17
†
Castiel stood with his back to the void. Voiceless and in whispers it called to him. Warm and indistinct, it froze his heart with terror and made him yearn. He closed his eyes but the darkness was there too, inside him.
He was looking at death and he wanted it. He wanted it. He wanted-
He was breathless with it.
He went to the only person he knew who still lived with such darkness, who faced it every morning without flinching or surrendering. He went and stood shivering and swaying, gasping and sweating in the doorway of a man who did not even wake to his arrival. Castiel stumbled forward and his footsteps were loud and earthly on the wooden floor. The figure in the bed jerked out of his dreams and flashed to his feet, a moonlit revolver in his hand.
“Dean,” Castiel whimpered as his limbs failed him and pain flared through his belly.
“Cas?” Dean croaked and dropped the gun.
Castiel curled to his knees and leaned over his aching viscera, bared the back of his neck to Dean’s mercy. And he prayed, scraping the paper-like skin of his ankles on the rough wood, that Dean could stop this slow plummet. He buried his face in his hands. They smelled like dirt.
Dean was beside him. All burning touch and messy humanity.
“Help me,” Cas whispered.
“How?” Dean took hold of his shoulders. “What’s happening? Jesus, you’re burning up. Are you in pain?”
Yes, Cas sputtered and spit came from his mouth but no words. His lungs didn’t have the air. He gasped to fill them, tried to remember how to make them breathe on their own. Wrapped himself more tightly around the conflagration inside.
“Cas, what do you need?”
I don’t know. I don’t-
-teeth against his neck. Hot breath. A needy whine that rose with the pressure in his own chest-
I need my God. My Father. I have been forsaken again.
-fingers twisting within him. A tendril of fire and heat in his groin, his spine. At his lips where Dean-
“Cas!”
I need forgiveness. I must repent.
Once, heavy with fatigue in the back of the Impala, watching the back of Dean’s sunburnt neck, Castiel had told himself a lie. It was just before the end of the world. Just before he’d lost his way.
-a beloved body, known in all its parts, stretched like a shelter above him-
“Don’t let me go,” he gasped.
“I’m right here. Cas! What do you need? Tell me, damn it!”
Death. I want-
Dean’s firm hands under his chin forced him to look up. And Dean’s eyes were green, fractured crystal and bruised soul even without the sunlight. Cas grabbed his mortal’s face and saw that, even if he wasn’t forgiven, he was wanted.
“You,” he managed at last and crashed into Dean’s mouth like an asteroid.
Dean made a muffled sound and hesitated. Then his arms wrapped around Cas and held him still and steady. Dean kissed him until the disaster was over and the pain faded. Until Cas’ body remembered itself. And then, when Cas thought he would suffocate after all, Dean pulled back just a little.
“I am still unbelievably pissed at you,” he growled.
Cas nodded, wordless. He buried his face in Dean’s neck and hid there for a while.
Dean made an angry noise in the back of his throat, but held on tight and didn’t let go.
Sam was on the other side of the room. Watching. He kept his mouth shut, having always been the smart one.
†
That is all that is written of the last days of the Lord.
3:18