Episode 24: Redemption (Part I Continued)

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It should have been me. But Dean went there. He went in my place.

Bobby jolts back to awareness at seven-fifteen in the morning according to his wristwatch, and he can still hear Castiel sobbing the words out to him before the angel finally loosed his hold on consciousness just after midnight. The torment that led up to that emotional collapse means Bobby isn't surprised to find himself staring at an empty couch, the quilts he placed over Castiel heaped messily on the floor.

He curses himself for the exhaustion that had him lower his guard, yawns because four hours sleep will never be enough, stretches so his back creaks and his shoulders pop. He leans into his hand for a moment then, because he's alone, finally alone, with no one depending on him. "Dean," he whispers. "Son. Goddammit." He sniffs, scrubs at his eyes, grits his teeth and sets his jaw, because he has to hold this together somehow. There can be no climbing into the bottle like he did after New Harmony.

A chill has set in while Bobby dozed in his chair. He pushes up, crosses into the kitchen and bends down to feed a couple of split logs into the stove. As he straightens, he sighs at what he can see through the window.

He waits a few minutes for the old copper kettle on the stovetop to heat up, pours what's left of last night's reheated coffee into the old Thermos flask he takes with him when he's walking the perimeter to check the wards are still intact. He pulls on his jacket, and slings one of the quilts over his shoulder.



The dogs are variously sitting and laying in a haphazard semi-circle around Castiel and a couple of them yip and whine at Bobby's approach, but Castiel is dumb and unreactive as Bobby drapes the quilt around his shoulders and sets the Thermos down at his knee.

"Dean wouldn't want this for you, son," Bobby begins as he lowers himself to sit opposite, and for a moment the tight rein he's keeping on himself flaps loose and he flounders, helpless to stop the sting of tears that threatens. He breathes deep, steadies himself. "You said he took your place, and-"

"Did you know that the word grief comes from the Latin gravis, Bobby?" Castiel interrupts him listlessly. "It means heavy."

Bobby didn't know that, but he reasons that he knows grief. He thinks on his own now, Karen, and the hurt and loss are still there, buried as deep as he buried her ashes the second time he killed her. "I've been where you are," he says. "Sam has too. This is different for him, he lost his brother, you lost your…" He stops, doesn't even really know how he was going to describe Dean. "But Sam was fixing to marry his girl out in California," he continues awkwardly. "So like I said. We've both been where you are."

Castiel's gaze drifts slowly over to focus on Bobby, and it is as dull and devastated as it was when Bobby took Dean from him and laid him in the grave. "Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows," he murmurs. "According to your William Shakespeare."

In his mind's eye, Bobby sees himself that first time, lost in sorrow that wrapped him as tightly as if he were stitched into his own burial shroud. "Shakespeare was right," he rasps out as Castiel blinks at him. "After my wife…it was like it suffocated me, like it was a blanket of sadness and regret, and it was so thick I couldn't see beyond it. But over time it started to fray, and it wore away in patches. And light came through." He shrugs, a minimal roll of his shoulders. "I guess you could say I adapted."

Castiel flinches, his eyes widen, and the quilt slips away down his arms as he sits up straighter. "My grief is all I have," he reproaches, his voice low. "It is my lifeline to him, and you ask me to set it aside and move on? You think I will gain perspective on my loss? You think I will adapt?"

His words are drawn out and deliberate, incongruously polite in the way they always are when Castiel thinks someone is being vaguely stupid, but the air is suddenly charged in a way that makes Bobby pull back involuntarily and defend himself. "No, that's not what I-"

"He is my second self, my soul, and I was designed to be with him. This emptiness I feel can't be filled, ever." Castiel's face is fracturing into lines of utter distress as he cuts Bobby off and keeps going. "My dreams are dead, all of them. My hope is dead. My future is dead."

His loss is stark and appalling in that moment, so much so that it takes Bobby a long few minutes to find a response. "Still and all, I'm here," he says eventually, and he knows it isn't anywhere near adequate. "I'm something you can count on when you're falling apart. And I'm solid."

It's like he never spoke, and Castiel is staring into space again, unseeing as he whispers, "I told him I would always keep him safe."

Bobby feels ill and useless as he pushes up. "You don't sit out here at night," he says quietly. "That's one of the rules." He turns and makes his way back towards the house.



The next time Sam wakes, it's day outside and he's alone in the bed, blankets and quilts piled over him. He huffs out the foggy feeling in his head, turns over onto his back. My brother is dead, he thinks, but the recall is dull and blunted.

He can hear noises downstairs, and he pushes up into cold that goosepimples his arms, reminding him of the odd dissonance of returning to wintry frost. He swings his legs off the bed, stands and shuffles to the window to pull the curtain aside and confirm he didn't imagine it. He didn't - Bobby's lot is patched with snow, much as it was last night, and Sam stares across the piled up junkers to the end, near the fence where his brother's tree stands, sees a lone figure sitting under it.

Swallowing past the sudden constriction in his throat, Sam drags his eyes away and pads out onto the landing to the bathroom, shivering in the chill. He flips the light switch, and nothing, like in the autoshop. Power cut, he thinks. Which likely means the well pump isn't working, and sure enough, when he twists the faucet the tap splutters out a few drops of water into his cupped hands before the stream dies away and a distant clanking signals air in the pipes. The dregs are barely enough to splash his face, but it wakes him up enough to clue into the fact that his bladder is about to pop, and he pisses loud and long. There's a bucket of gritty water from Bobby's rain barrel next to the toilet, the usual deal when the pump is down, and he sloshes a couple of gallons into the pan before he makes his way back to the bedroom. There are clean clothes in the bureau where he left them, and he dresses himself as swiftly as he can manage when his body still feels worn out and battered.

Bobby is in the kitchen, stirring a pot of something he's cooking on the old wood stove he fires up any time there's an outage. When he looks back at Sam, his face is pale, and he's red-eyed. "I was about to wake you," he says quietly. "I got some oatmeal on the go."

Sam pulls out the chair, slumps himself down in it. He's starving, he realizes, but he feels oddly disconnected from the gripe and pang of his empty belly. "Power cut?" he asks, nodding at the stove.

"Something like that." Bobby slops the oatmeal out into a bowl, tops it off with some milk from a covered jug. "Fresh from the cow," he says as he sets it down in front of Sam. "I got myself a cow. You'll need to learn how to milk her."

The concept is so out of leftfield that Sam gapes a little as Bobby snags an oven mitt from the countertop so he can slop steaming hot coffee from an old kettle into two mugs. He sits down opposite Sam, slides one of the mugs across. "Coffee. We brew it up a couple of times a day, keep it hot on the stovetop best we can."

It tastes damn good going down, and Sam can already feel the buzz of caffeine in his system as he gulps the hot liquid. He wipes his mouth, eyes Bobby uncertainly. "Dean," he starts, and Bobby visibly winces, lifts his hand.

"I got the jist of it…managed to get some sense out of Cas."

Sam thinks about what went down in the lot after they touched down, and he swallows thickly. "Bobby, I'm sorry about losing it out there-"

"No," Bobby cuts him off, and his eyes turn bleak. "I never want to hear you say you're sorry about that, son. You don't have to be." The words come out of him slowly then, like it hurts him to say them. "I buried Dean. We managed to scavenge some gasoline for the backhoe…laid him in the Trapper, like you wanted. A Viking funeral. You kept saying that's how it should be. He's warded, nothing will get to him."

His brother is dead and under the ground. This loss is final, there is no get-out-of-jail-free card this time, and the reality of it strikes Sam dumb for a moment.

"You alright?" Bobby prods, and he grimaces as Sam looks back up to meet his gaze. "Stupid question," the old man concedes. "But after the last time…"

Bobby lets it hang there, and Sam takes a moment to think about the question, about the last time. There is a hollow feeling inside him, like there was then, and he wonders how he can fill it, how he can restore some semblance of meaning and direction to his life. He didn't manage to before, but maybe this time it will be different, because this time he is different. "I'm not alright, Bobby," he replies honestly. "But I think I will be. And I'm not going anywhere this time."

Bobby swallows hard, nods, and then he looks away from Sam for a moment, over towards the window. "Cas is out there. Sat out there all day yesterday too, while you slept. I took a blanket out to him. He won't eat." His voice turns barbed then, the kind of sharp belligerence that Sam knows is a sign the old man is fighting for control of himself. "He's a mess, keeps saying your brother was his second self or some crap like that. I was up all night with him." His tone goes pointed. "We're going to have to watch him."

Sam glances towards the window, but he doesn't want to think about Castiel. "I don't understand why it's so cold," he detours. "It's July."

Bobby rubs at his beard, seems to be selecting his words carefully. "There's things you need to know," he says at last.

It's relatively innocuous and it shouldn't have panic spiking in Sam at all after the last few days, but the weight of it is so damned heavy he can already feel it dragging him even lower than he is. He swallows through his unease and puts on his game-face. "Go on."

"You didn't leave for Rio two weeks ago. You left six months ago. It just turned January."

It isn't really a surprise, because nothing can surprise Sam anymore. He thinks on it, the fact Bobby looks like he's shed twenty pounds, the half-starved dog, the cold. It feels like winter because it is winter, and just like time moved differently in Hell, it moved differently wherever they were.

It's January.

He takes it in stride.

Bobby leans over to snag a bottle of Jack from beside the sink as he waits for it to sink in, then, "There's more," he goes on, and he unscrews the cap of the whiskey and tips a finger of the liquor into Sam's coffee. "You'll need it," he responds to Sam's look, and Sam doesn't doubt him.

On the table there is a stack of old newspapers, and Bobby lifts the top one off of the pile. "I kept these," he mutters. "I don't really know why." A minute of quiet passes before he takes a deep breath. "The world you know is gone," he tells Sam, unfolding the newspaper as he speaks. It's the New York Times, the entire front page taken up with a picture that is Sam's worst nightmare.



"Thing exploded out of the Pacific like fuckin' Godzilla about three days after you boys did your vanishing act from Easter Island," Bobby continues. "It's been rampaging off and on since then. Whole damn planet has gone to shit. The polar ice cap melted overnight, sea levels have risen by two hundred feet. Anything coastal is underwater…Eastern Seaboard, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Florida's nothing more than a bad memory, and that's just the States. Half of Europe's gone. Millions have drowned." His expression turns even more grim then. "The global economy don't exist anymore, we're in Year Zero. No one even knows where the President is. We're under martial law, but it's anyone's guess who's giving the orders…local militias mainly. It's down to pockets of resistance versus the things out there that are roaming what's left."

Sam stares at the picture, the creature he saw in the cavern caught from a distance on a wide-angle lens, surrounded by a city in flames, and looking like a Harryhausen monster from a B-movie. The Earth died screaming while they were trapped in its vaults, just like Meg said, and there is no taking this in stride; the reality of it is stupefying and the irony is bitter. "We didn't stop it," he whispers.

"Well, it's gone," Bobby replies. "Vanished three days ago, from what I've heard on the CB radio."

When they did the ritual, Sam realizes, as he casts his eyes back up. "What things are roaming?" he sidetracks hoarsely, as he tries to round up the brain cells that scattered and fled for the hills at Bobby's revelations.

"You name it," Bobby says. "Demons, vamps, ghouls. Those fish-mutants. Other things that sound like those fire-vampires you ran into in Rhode Island. Dragons, for Christ's sake. Sea serpents. Weird stuff right out of Lovecraft. It's like this gave every damn creature in the book a speedball, they're faster, stronger, smarter. Lot of missing out there…and that's only what we knew about up until telecommunications were cut off. It's speculation, but we're guessing more of those paths opened up while this thing was loose, let every monster and his wife, kids and dog out to party."

Sam swipes a shaking hand through his hair, tries to get his head back in the game. "What about this place, is it safe?"

Bobby grimaces. "Near as we can make out. We're off the beaten track enough not to have pinged anything's radar…not so far, anyway. We've laid wards, and I got a glamour set up to hide the place - go out through the gate and look back, and all you see is mountain. Seems to be keeping things out for now. I have the dogs just in case." He taps his fingers thoughtfully on the tabletop. "What's the deal with the demon? Only she passed all the tests."

Sam had forgotten Meg, and the reminder has him shake his head. "I don't even really know," he says. "That thing had her, it spat her out, and she wasn't a demon anymore."

Bobby's lip curls and his thought process plays out in his expression, punctuated by his recall of Sam's own murderous rampage through his home, Sam can see the memories there in his eyes as clear as day.

The old man's verdict carries a pointed undertone of suspicion mixed with distaste. "But she's still Meg. And still soulless."

"She's human," Sam notes warily, after a moment's hesitation. "If it's as bad as you say out there, it's in her interest to behave. And I don't know…maybe we need all the humans we can get?" Sam doesn't know if he actually means it or believes it, hasn't really weighed up the pros and cons. Part of him knows it isn't rational given the history, but he remembers the odd respect with which Meg pulled his brother's body out of the way on the beach. And beyond it all, he's overwhelmed, doesn't want to think about hard decisions. "She could be useful. So maybe we just - give her the benefit of the doubt. Like you did me."

After a long stare, Bobby sniffs. "We tattoo her. And she drinks a mug of holy water morning, noon and night. And wherever she sleeps, there's a devil's trap at the doorway just in case." He nods at Sam's forgotten oatmeal then. "Best eat, boy," he chides gruffly. "We can't afford to waste food these days."

It's Bobby's usual mix of stern but caring, and Sam spoons in a couple of mouthfuls obediently, washes it all down with a gulp of tepid coffee-with-a-kick as he marshals his thoughts. He's hungrier than he realized, and he wonders how it is he can be hungry at all when he has no appetite to speak of. As he chews, he contemplates the enormity of what Bobby has told him, spirals around it in ever-decreasing circles until he pulls up on a couple of the smaller details in the big picture, small details that matter even in the face of overwhelming loss. "You said Florida and California are both gone…"

"I got no intel on the Braedens," Bobby confirms somberly. "It happened pretty fast. I did get a message to Garth right after it all blew up…he was outside of Reno, said he'd detour and try to get the Novaks somewhere safe. That's the last I heard from him."

His tone is neutral enough, but Sam can read the subtext. "Don't tell Cas that," he says quietly. "If he asks, we tell him Claire's fine."

Bobby nods, continues more businesslike. "There's practicalities to this life. We run the generator for an hour first thing, so we have some water and power to the house." He points to a row of plastic water bottles lined up on the floor near the door. "Those should get us through the day. We got the cow for milk, some chickens. There's plenty of game, and we run into one of the outlying towns once every couple weeks for supplies. We're stockpiling canned goods, siphoning the gas out of every vehicle we come across."

Sam wonders then about the people, and Bobby continues as if he read his mind.

"Air National Guard mobilized out of Joe Foss Field early on, evacuated most of the townsfolk. We've run into some looters in town, mix of human and not, so stay frosty anywhere outside the gate. And you stay inside the house after sundown, just in case." He pauses, tugs a map out of his vest pocket and spreads it out on the table. "Plan is to move out of here when the weather warms up, head for Montana."

Sam blinks. "What's in Montana that's worth leaving here for if this place is secure?"

"Hunter camp." Bobby points to a circle drawn on the map. "In Swan River wildlife refuge, near Flathead Lake. Big and getting bigger, from what I hear on the CB grapevine. There's more safety in numbers. Tamara and Jonas Harper-"

"Jonas Harper?" Sam interrupts, and Bobby nods.

"He called here right after that thing first appeared, before the phones were knocked out. Said you gave him my number. Showed up about two weeks later with a bunch of kids in tow, and then he and Tamara lit out to Swan River with Missouri, Jody Mills, Marcy Ward, and a few townsfolk that were left."

Sam recalls how capable Harper had been, remembers how the ex-priest had clicked so unexpectedly with Castiel. There's a moment when he wonders if the other man's experience of loss might have been some use, before the thought is superseded by the realization that Bobby is still here, months on. "But you didn't go with them," Sam says, almost to himself. "Or Mira. And you didn't ward against angels, or Cas wouldn't have been able to bring us back."

Bobby huffs a little. "Well, you know. We wanted to wait. Just in case." He stops to take a swig of the whiskey, fixes Sam with bloodshot eyes. "Guess a little part of me never stopped hoping."

Sam smiles weakly. "You didn't seem that hopeful when I was on the other side of the door."

Bobby returns the smile, just about. "Precautions," he concedes. "You were towing a demon. But it's real good to see you, son." His voice catches in his throat as he speaks, and Sam swallows and nods as the old man leans back in his seat. He studies Sam for a long and meaningful moment. "Heading to Montana will mean leaving your brother behind," he goes on carefully. "It'll mean convincing Cas to leave your brother behind." He glances over at the window again and his brow furrows as he swivels back to meet Sam's gaze. "He's been out there since before I got up, and it's barely forty-three degrees. I took some hot coffee out to him, sat there with him as long as I could, but my knees were seizing up."

As a hint, it isn't even in the ballpark of subtle.



The cold outside is still a shock to the system, and Sam has to pull his jacket in tight and wrap his arms around himself as he trudges through the lot, casting a wary eye at the dogs who trot out from between piles of discarded tires and old wrecks to inspect him, hackles raised suspiciously. It occurs to him that he doesn't even know what he's going to say to Castiel after what happened on the beach, and the stunned expression on the angel's face as he took note of the amulet resting on Sam's chest and pieced it all together. As it is, Castiel doesn't acknowledge him as he crunches across the frost-stiffened grass to where the dug-over patch of earth cuts a black scar into the land.

The angel is motionless, a quilt draped loosely around him. His face is ashen, his eyes dull and shadowed, his lips tinged blue in the cold. He has one hand resting on the grave, as if to steady himself. He looks beaten, crushed, destroyed, and Sam's mind is suddenly filled with the horrifying possibility that Castiel might have thrown himself on the pyre if he had burned Dean. Sati, they used to call it, and Sam remembers reading about it in school. For a few ghastly seconds, he can almost smell burning meat and hear the screaming as Castiel immolates himself, and he has to bite down on his knuckle because it makes him think of the Cage. He forces it out of his imagination and his memory, but just as he's opening his mouth to speak, the angel cuts him off flatly.

"Have you come to tell me that I will adapt, Sam? That this will get easier?"

Sam knows the glacier that forms inside the newly bereaved, knows that it is impervious to everything but the time that slowly thaws it, until it melts into tears that fill a dead sea in the hollow space where the iceberg was. The sea is the barrier between two worlds, the world of the dead and the world of living, and crossing it is like traveling to a distant land. Some people sink and drown, some people swim. If you're lucky, you get a lifeboat. Dean had been Sam's lifeboat on that journey after Jess, and Sam doesn't honestly know if he can be Castiel's, but he can try. Ignoring the way his chest tightens, he rallies as best he can. "Maybe you will. Maybe you're stronger than you know, Cas."

"Your brother told me that. And he told me I wasn't alone in the darkness, but I am. I always will be now. I am angry with him for taking himself from me, and I hate him for doing it." Castiel's anguish is suddenly undercut with a simmering fury that makes Sam think unpleasantly of the way he flew apart on the beach, but it switches off as abruptly as it flared, and the glint of rage in his eyes is snuffed out, dissolving their vivid blue back to lifeless gray. "And I am in love with him," he whispers then. "I miss him. I am lonely for him. He was my soul, and I long for him."

After a moment where they stare each other down and Sam searches for something to say, he finally works his throat hard enough to stumble out a response. "It gets bearable," he offers, with as much conviction as he can muster.

"I have seen the Lake of Fire, Sam."

When Sam meets Castiel's gaze again, the angel's eyes are wretched. "In Hell, I passed by an endless, blazing sea fueled by the souls of the damned," he confides, part fearful and part awed. "I saw them caught in the furnace, saw their flesh sear from them so that nothing was left but charred bones. I saw them made whole again, because the Lake of Fire is a place of punishment, a place of perpetual torment, not annihilation. Its heat is unquenchable and hungry, and I saw the souls buffeted high by the flames before they plunged into the inferno again. I heard their despair, and it made me tremble with terror as I fled." He sucks in a shuddering breath. "How can I bear knowing he is there in my place?"

For a second it clouds Sam's mind with doubt that he can get through this himself, much less be there for the angel. Even so, he's dogged, and he steels himself against the knowledge that his brother is screaming in Hell right now. "I know how that feels. He went there for me too."

The reply is a gasp at best. "But why…why? I don't understand why he did it, I don't. Why? When it was me who should have been cast down there."

Sam closes his eyes, and Dean is right there in his mind, his eyes earnest, his resolve rock-solid. "The one who begins it is the one who must end it, Cas," he says. "Dean said it was him, said he just knew. Remember his fortune cookie? An enlightened individual is one who knows his own true value. That's what he told me, and he thought it meant something. He thought it meant this."

Castiel makes an incoherent, muffled choking sound, shakes his head. He's weeping, Sam can see the jerky tremor of his shoulders under the quilt. "That's not the only reason why he did it, Cas," he continues softly. "Dean gave you a gift, because he loved you. Please-"

"And angels bring suffering to the ones who love them." Castiel puts his hand up, covers his eyes as he leans into it and goes on. "That's what she told me. Kali. And Gabriel told her, and he was right."

Sam waits a moment, then sits down there next to Castiel. "Dean gave you a gift," he repeats. "Don't waste it like I did. Don't waste his sacrifice. That's no way to honor him." The ground is freezing cold under his ass because it's January, fucking January, and Sam's mind is suddenly full of memories. "It's January, did Bobby tell you that?" he muses. "The twenty-fourth is Dean's birthday." He knows it's pretty random, but he keeps going. "We never made a big deal of birthdays. Dean was superstitious about it, thought it was tempting fate." He breaks off to bark out a painful laugh at the irony of the memory. "It was Jess's birthday too. And Dean's deal came due on my birthday, so I guess he was right at that."

Castiel cants his head to look at Sam, and his expression is dazed, his eyes swollen and clouded with pain.

"I know, Cas," Sam says. "I know. But don't lose yourself to this. You're the only piece of him I have left."

Castiel holds Sam's gaze, and after a moment of quiet, he shifts closer, so they're shoulder to shoulder. "Anything," he whispers. "I would have done anything for him, anything to keep him from harm."

Sam leans on Castiel, hears himself choke out, "That's how he felt about you," and lets his own tears flow unchecked.



It is January.

The twenty-fourth day of this wretched, savage month is Dean's birthday, and Castiel's mind is a raw, bleeding memory of how he kissed his way up and down Dean's body on the same day twelve months before; of how new they were to each other, of how Dean shivered and moaned underneath him, of how he carded his hands through Castiel's hair and rocked his hips up slowly, gasping and stuttering out nonsense as Castiel swallowed him down and drank from him.

January, lanuarius, is named for Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and endings; Janus, who had jurisdiction over all doorways, portals and passageways.

And keyholder of the gates of Hell.

January's birthstone is constancy.

There is mistletoe growing on Dean's tree, its silver berries glowing eerily in the dark green sprays. Mistletoe is a token of goodwill and friendship, an omen of happiness and good luck.

Castiel notes these things in his journal because they are significant.

He doesn't know how or why they are significant, and muses that he may be going mad.

He shows Bobby his notes the next time the old man comes out to sit with him. "These facts are significant," he insists, and he can't shake the feeling that he is running out of time.

"Why, son?" Bobby asks him, with infinite, sad weariness. "Why are they significant?"

Castiel stares at the words he wrote, and feels helpless. "I don't know why," he whispers, and he doesn't tell Bobby that he feels as if some cosmic clock is counting down the days, and that it matters. "But I will know. Soon."

He counts a page for each day between the day they arrived back in Sioux Falls - the fourth day of January, according to Bobby - and the day that will mark Dean's birthday, and at the top of the specified page he writes a reminder to himself. Today is Dean's birthday.

"Are you going to do something stupid?" Bobby broaches the matter in his usual blunt way, the words laced with suspicion.

Castiel gazes at him dumbly for a moment. Then, "Define stupid…" he offers.

Bobby's fingers are playing nervously over his chin, tugging at his beard. "I don't want to lose another son," he blurts out roughly, and he stands and stalks back through the lot.

There are no weapons in the house after that, Castiel notices. All of them are gone, hidden, the knives and scissors too. It makes him smile secretly to himself because he has his own weapon, one he could use to gut his grace as Rachel once tried to; and there are so many other ways to kill that he knows of, ways Sam and Bobby can't even imagine. But he won't do it, can't do it. He doesn't know why, but he knows his reticence is significant.

By the ninth day of January Sam and Bobby are leaving Castiel to his grief, but he knows this doesn't mean they have forgotten him or that they don't care about him; he can see that they do in each careful, assessing look they give him when they think his attention is elsewhere, can hear it in their hushed tones and the abrupt silence when he walks into the room, can feel it in the weight of their distant, attentive stares when he stumbles outside to sit with Dean.

He knows Sam and Bobby hope that embracing his pain will help him define and process his loss, that it will help him adjust to his new reality and reconstruct his life, but he can't make sense of it because he can't comprehend the incomprehensible. They hope that time will heal him, but it has no meaning, any of it, because they didn't stop it. The apocalypse happened, and is happening still, and Castiel feels outrage. "Give me a cause," he hollers up at the sky, until his voice fades and dies with the strain of his shouts. "Give me justification." There is no answer, and he thinks to take to the heavens to search for his Father like he did before, but what's left of his grace is stubborn and resistant to his call, and his wings barely unfurl, scarcely visible and fluttering weakly.

He knows Sam and Bobby hope his pain will mellow as it ages, knows they think his grief is an event that will pass, but Castiel knows it is a state of mind that will always be present, sometimes ebbing, sometimes flowing, but never gone; always persistent and unrelenting. And he invites it to stay, savors it, and mourns with a vigilant, stricken ferocity, mourns until he can hardly breathe with it. Sometimes he wonders absently if this is millennia of sorrow that has built up inside him, sorrow he was not made to feel without the soothing buffer of the Host. He is adrift in it, caught in a current he can't fight, swept and spun along in a torrent of dark water. The structure of his life is gone and he is in a void, without direction except for the tug of Dean that still pulls at his heart. Creatures like you and I were not built to love as humans do, Kali had told him, and Castiel's love has broken him just as she said it would; it has cut him open and now that his grace is not strong enough to shield him from emotion, his loss is a wound that gapes and suppurates.

Angels do not weep but Castiel sobs tears he dreams might revive Dean, and as they fall he remembers Meg's words on the beach at R'lyeh, and his guilty denial of the fix she suggested. He remembers the insanity of those first solitary moments of horrified realization, as he screamed out his sorrow and tried to claw the tattered remnants of the smashed body he held together again, tried to stitch it back to life with the frayed threads of his grace even if the result would have been a soulless monster. He wonders what might have happened had his grace been strong enough to do more than repair one broken bone, and he is tempted, so tempted that he leans over the dirt to blow out breath that would be life-giving if he was still what he was.

No hand crumbles the soil and breaks through, like it did in Pontiac as he watched from the spaces in between worlds.

The truth of it makes Castiel wail and shriek out sounds he didn't realize he had in him, the destruction and pain Kali spoke of, and he dedicates himself to it, his fury equal to his sadness. "I hate you for leaving me," he hisses, and then, as remorse swells, he presses his muddy hand to his scar and chokes out, "I love you, Dean, please tell me you are there, please…" He projects all of his love and need, waits to feel an answering flare of heat. Nothing, and he rubs, scrapes, tears frantically at his skin for hours until it smarts and stings, and his fingers are scrabbling at slick, bloody wounds soiled with the dirt of Dean's grave. The damage makes Castiel feel ill and dizzy with fever but at last, warmth, seeping through his palm, and he slumps into it, sobs out his relief and tells himself it is significant. The fat white flakes that are drifting down and settling on him are significant too. "Dean, look," Castiel whispers through his tears. "The clouds are pregnant with snow."

As the temperature drops, there is the scuff of a boot behind him.

"Please come inside, Cas," Sam says, and when Castiel slants his gaze upwards he can see ice crystals on his own eyelashes.

"I've been trying," he tells Sam, and he is sure to keep his jaw set firm so that Sam will not hear his shivering. "But part of me is gone. I am half a person, Sam, and this life…all of this, has no point to it without him. I look, but I see nothing. I hear, but I don't listen. I walk, but I don't want to leave his side. I eat, but I want to starve." He puts his fingers to his neck. "I speak…but there is a scream, stuck right here in my throat. I breathe, but I don't want this breath. My heart beats, but I want it to wither and die. This hemorrhage inside me can't be staunched, and this curse is not one I can bear."

Sam's face falls, suffused all at once with his own sadness. "I miss him too, Cas," he whispers. "But I'm trying, man. You have to try too, or else what is there?" He sighs, turns and walks back to the house. Mira is waiting on the porch for him and he leans into her and rests his head on her shoulder for a moment, before straightening and draping an arm around her as they disappear through the door. Sam has found someone, Castiel muses, and it makes him glad.

The afternoon drags on in its customary inertia, and the sky is bruised murky when Castiel hears a low snort. He turns again, to see Meg standing behind him this time. "I don't know why you stay," he says tiredly. "There's nothing here for you."

"There's a roof and a full belly if I do my share of the work," she retorts. "Sam and Bobby don't seem to care much as long as I help out and don't get in the way."

She pulls a bottle out of her pocket, unscrews the cap and upends it so that liquid pours out and into the soil, says, "Have a drink on me," and then swallows a mouthful herself. "One of the perks of the Apocalypse is all that free booze at the local liquor store," she tells Castiel, and she grins. "If Dean was here, he'd approve. Though I doubt he'd feel the same way about you sitting out here on his grave all day, blubbering." She considers Castiel for a moment longer. "You know, I thought you had more chutzpah," she mocks. "That's what I liked about you…you found a cause and stuck with it, and when someone knocked you down you got right back up. The little angel that could, taking on all-comers, even the Devil himself. But here you are, picking at your scabs and wallowing in your feelings instead of finding a solution."

"There is no solution," Castiel growls back at her. "I told you back on the island. I can't get there. My grace is too weak now, I'm not strong enough to pass into Hell."

She flaps a dismissive hand. "So find a shortcut. A back door."

Her words remind Castiel that January is named for Janus, who was guardian of all of the doorways in existence, and it is significant, he thinks.

"You know there are back doors," she's saying now. "That little gnome-guy used one to get in and pull the spare Winchester out of the Cage. I snuck through one myself after the Winchesters sent me back to Hell."

Castiel knows his face lights up in hope, but she shakes her head. "Sorry, Clarence, no can tell. My memory is pretty fuzzy since my juice got squeezed out of me."

Frustration wells up in Castiel. "The doors between the realms are locked against me now," he snaps. "My grace was the key, and without all of it, I can't-"

"So find a door that isn't locked," she offers. "Or find another key. Or you could always pray. But then again we both know God hasn't been taking your calls for a long time." She pouts. "Nor mine either. I got born again for nothing, so it seems." She sups her liquor, belches, and her vibe is suddenly irritable, her voice cracking as bitter as the coffee Bobby brings out to Castiel three times a day in his Thermos. "How do you stand it? The fall?"

Castiel cocks his head, studies her curiously, and somewhere in his mind he realizes this is the first time he has really looked at her since R'lyeh. Her face is haggard, her hair stringy, her skin gray, her lips chapped and chewed. She carries the aroma of stale liquor and cigarette smoke with her, and her clothes are filthy.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Castiel reminds her, "You fell up. In a manner of speaking."

Her smile is too bright, bright enough to be desperate. "It doesn't feel that way."

"Back on the island, you said you thought God had saved you," Castiel points out.

Her expression rearranges itself into something harder, contemptuous. "I said that so you wouldn't kill me." She pauses to wrap her jacket around her, and Castiel sees that she's shivering in the cold. "It doesn't feel like salvation," she murmurs. "It feels more like eternal damnation. To be one of them, to be brought so fucking low. I haven't been redeemed, I've been condemned."

She's already turning around, slightly unsteady on her feet; drunk maybe, Castiel assumes. There isn't much else to do. She looks back over her shoulder at him, and she has already cycled to her next mood change, in that way the inebriated do. She smiles, winks, and she's cheerful. "Maybe I need to make the best of it. After all, when one door closes another one opens, isn't that what they say?"

It's an unexpected tangent but Castiel thinks it sounds familiar, and significant, so significant that he pulls his journal out of his pocket and writes it in one of the spaces on the same page he has set aside for Dean's birthday, while Meg drifts back towards the house.

These things are significant:

When one door closes another one opens.

Find a door that isn't locked.

Or find a door you have a key for.

Castiel studies the words, traces the tip of his finger over them. When one door closes another one opens, and Castiel knows the adage, somehow and from somewhere - and suddenly there it is, in a flash of memory. "It's my fortune," he murmurs to himself. "A prophecy…a sign, it's a sign. But a sign of what, what door, where…"



It hits like a lightning bolt: sudden clarity, knowledge that has him gasp at its logic and reason, and its sheer simplicity.

He feels a brief moment of panic…how much time is left? He has lost track, and tempus-fugit-tempus-fugit.

He flicks through the pages.

Fourteen days.

A plan, he thinks. Tactics, a scheme. He is a battle-hardened strategist, and he will need to be wily, he will need to be devious and shrewd, and he will need to lie.

A sound drifts in through the gaps in Castiel's thoughts, a dreary bellowing. It's the cow, he realizes. It's time for the evening milking, and Bobby is already trudging around the side of the house. Castiel pushes up, waits through the head rush, and then trots off in pursuit. "Wait," he calls, and Bobby swings around, the surprise plain on his face.

Castiel slows to a walk, because he's faint and breathless from the exertion. "I feel better," he announces, and he points to the bucket in Bobby's hand. "I need to feel busy. Will you show me how?"

The old man's expression turns dubious for a moment as he contemplates Castiel, and then his eyes fix on Castiel's hands and his nostrils wrinkle in distaste. "You'll have to scrub those."

Meg is leaning on the side of the shed smoking a cigarette, and she stubs it out as Bobby and Castiel approach. "You look perkier," she notes, and Castiel shrugs.

"Bobby is going to show me how to milk the cow," he tells her, and she brays out a laugh that sends a frisson of annoyance flaring through him. "Its name is Meg," he adds snidely.



Sam gestures out the window at Castiel where he sits on the hood of the Impala, bundled up in a jacket Sam recognizes as being Dean's, scribbling industriously in the journal Dean gave him. "How convinced are you by that?"

Behind him, Mira snorts. "Well, you know him better than me. But I'm not convinced at all."

It's enough to poke Sam's own doubt. Even so, "Bobby thinks he's doing better," he points out.

"Bobby loves him," comes the reply. "Bobby doesn't want to think he might lose another son. So Bobby chooses not to see."

Sam persists. "He's been eating, even helps Bobby milk the cow most evenings. He isn't sitting out there all day."

Mira pushes up and pads over to stand next to him, her coffee mug in her hand, and she clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "Back in the old country before we got out, a friend of my mother's thought she saw one of the men who killed her family. But she coped. She was normal, did the normal everyday things. She was calm, so calm we didn't realize what she was planning."

Her tone is crisp, dispassionate, and Sam has learned enough about this woman he loves to know that her detachment is a self-defense mechanism. He slides his eyes sideways at her. "Which was…?"

"To make us think she was fine until my mother's guard lapsed for long enough for her to stop watching the gun." Mira shrugs. "She shot him, then herself." She drains her mug, and her eyes narrow speculatively as she stares through the gap in the curtain. "Can he die?"

Sam knows Castiel can - he saw his friend drowned lifeless, though he has no real idea whether or not another miracle resurrection might have followed even without Jonas Harper's resuscitation skills. "Honest, I don't know," he murmurs. "Maybe. Meg said he told her his grace has pretty much dried up since we got back." He studies Castiel again, the angel's stillness that more than ever seems to be masking something pent-up and colossal even if Castiel claims there is little left of him. "I don't know," he says again, and then, "Bobby hid the guns."

Mira gives him a wry smile. "It's a waste of time to hide them from him, I told Bobby this. If he wants to do it, he'll find a way…and if he doesn't want to do it, then leaving him unarmed puts him at risk, especially if his grace is fading." She leans over to deposit her mug in the sink before her expression turns thoughtful. "Perhaps he won't do it because it's a sin."

Sam winces. "I don't think he believes anymore," he says quietly, from that dark space inside him that doesn't really believe anymore and hasn't for a long time.

Her eyes soften. "I don't think anyone really believes anymore," she says, and then she pauses. "It hasn't been long. He'll find purpose, maybe. And perhaps that will help him. But he should have a weapon in the meantime. Especially with the demon here." Her eyes narrow and she spits out the last with a baleful undercurrent to her tone, because Meg's presence has been a sore point with her since day one.

Sam sighs, keeps his own tone neutral. "She hasn't caused any problems."

"Yet. Look, I get it. She's still here because you and Bobby are-" Mira stops abruptly, continues more carefully after a brief pause. "You have other things on your mind. But this…" She stabs a finger at the window. "A fallen angel mourns his lost grace. How do you know a fallen demon doesn't grieve for her lost taint? She could…" She scrunches up her face, clutches at the thin air with her hand in the way she does when a word doesn't come naturally to her.

"Recidivate," Sam fills in.

Mira snaps her thumb and fingers together with a flourish. "Exactly."

"But Bobby tattooed her," Sam says. "And he's got her glugging holy water three or four times a day."

"She's compromised by her past. She is human, maybe, but she has no soul."

Mira gives him a sidelong glance when she says that, and Sam can see the assessment in the look, the reference to his own past, and his soulless rampage through humanity. "I was given another chance," he says.

"You were resouled," she parries smartly. "But what would have happened otherwise?"

Sam knows the answer to that, saw it in Dean's eyes when his brother stared him down through the hatch in the panic room door, and he knows there would have been no other option, not really. He sighs again, and Mira nudges him.

"You want to see the good," she says softly. "That's who you are. But when you focus too hard on the good, you sometimes look past the bad. We just need to be careful. If you're going out with me today, Castiel needs a weapon. Bobby is old, and slow." She shrugs at the look Sam gives her, snipes affectionately, "It's true," as she shuffles back to her chair and sits down to pull on her boots. "We'll go further this time," she decides. "Bobby says there are farms nearer to Fort Pierre where we might find fuel."

Sam exhales slowly. "What do you think of this plan to head to Montana?"

"I think it's a bad plan," she replies bluntly. "But I also think it's a realistic plan. We can't stay here long-term. There's water there, game too…coalmines and an oil refinery close by for fuel. It's defensible. And there is safety in numbers." She gags dramatically. "Even if the fucking winters will be miserable. So…we keep harvesting fuel. So we don't run out of gas on the road." She pushes up again, stretches. "It's a shame none of us can fly a plane. There must be many abandoned aircraft at Joe Foss Field, and at Glawes too. There's an airport in Kalispell, not far from Flathead Lake."

Sam bounces it back without really thinking. "Dean is afraid of flying." It pulls the breath out of him in a heavy, painful twist of oxygen leaving his lungs, so he has to gasp for his next inhale. Mira doesn't react, her eyes don't flicker away from his as he rides it out, the sheer lack of his brother and the knowledge of where Dean is.

"My aunt…" Mira says after a few moments. "Remember I told you about what happened to us?"

At Sam's nod, she continues. "She lived with us always, from when I was a baby. She was my second mother. She died there, in the mud, stripped half-naked. And after the men left, I came out of my hiding place and found her. I walked back into the house. Her cup of tea was there. It was still warm. Her breakfast, half-eaten; her fork with a mouthful of food on it waiting for her to come back inside and complain about being disturbed so early on a Saturday. Her glasses were right where she put them down on the table to go and see what the shouting was. She had been doing a crossword in the newspaper. I could smell her perfume, and she was all around me…her presence. Everything was the same, but nothing was. She no longer existed. She was gone."

She clears her throat. "I ate the food from her fork, put my lips where hers had just been. I kept her glasses. The newspaper…it's still in my bag. I look at it, at the ink from her pen, faded now. I imagine her reading the clues, I imagine her smiling as she finds the right word. I look at the paper and if I think hard enough, I can see her writing the words. It's proof that she was here even if the space she filled is empty."

Sam won't give her platitudes, she never has with him, has only put her hands on him and her arms around him as he leans on her. He presses his hand to his chest, feels the hard shape of the amulet under his shirt, proof that Dean was here. "I miss him," he whispers.

"And you always will, moja ljubav," Mira says. "There is never enough time, not really." She pauses a beat, then motions her head towards the window. "You should tell him we're heading out. He might worry if he can't find you. You should - you know. Say goodbye."

Any one of them could die, anytime, anywhere. Sam knows that's what she means and he almost smiles at the irony of some things staying the same in this cowardly new world. "Yeah, I'll go see him," he says, and he bends to drop a kiss on Mira's hair as he passes.

Just like every time he steps off of the porch, Sam's focus is drawn to his brother's tree in the near distance, and he has to drag his eyes away from it and dig his fingernails into his palms to distract himself.

Castiel has stopped writing, and he looks up from where he's playing his hand over the metal skin of the car as Sam approaches, and queries, "Do you see this?"

He points at a spot beside his thigh and Sam leans in to examine it, the gleam of silver through a scratch in the finish. For a few seconds he feels helpless, clueless, because this was Dean's department and Sam's big hands never were as dexterous as his brother's when it came to mechanics. "She could rust, I guess," he offers generically. "Bobby probably has something we can use on it."

Castiel frowns. "It wasn't there before." He says it seriously, thoughtfully. "It wasn't there yesterday."

Sam flounders some more. "It's an old car," he notes, and it occurs to him that his brother's baby hasn't been parked there for just over a month at all, because time raced away while they were gone. "We should maybe have Bobby cover her, so-"

"Put your hand on her. Flat. Like this."

Castiel spreads his fingers out, inclines his head like he's listening, like he's fascinated by something. His fingers are dirty, the tips stained and the nails rimmed in a rusty red that is nauseatingly familiar.

"Is that blood on your fingers?" Sam accuses, and he knows he sounds anxious. "That looks like blood."

Castiel nods briefly, and his handwave is matter-of-fact. "The dogs were fighting. I had to intercede."

It's an everyday occurrence, the skinny mutts scrapping noisily somewhere in the lot, and Sam lets it go with a breath of relief for the simple things. "Well, you should wash your hands before you eat with them," he says, as idiotic as he knows it sounds. He puts his own hand down to the metal then, feels the faint heat of the car's winter sun-warmed paintwork against his palm. "Am I looking for something in particular?" he asks.

There is a moment when Castiel studies him with what seems like a touch of his old critical stare, like he's gauging Sam, debating whether to let him into a secret. It's not unlike their first meeting and it catches Sam off-guard, makes him shift uncomfortably before Castiel prompts, "Do you feel anything?"

"Uh…" Sam furrows his brow, baffled. "I need more…what am I-"

"Her grace," Castiel jumps in, and his demeanor is somehow hopeful now. "Look how it shines. I saw it once before, with Dean, just after he brought me back." He stares down again, long fingers playing over the bright streak. "He was here," he murmurs. "He was here, Sam. His hands were here, right where our hands are."

There is never enough time, not really, and the space Dean filled gapes like a crater stretching into infinity. I miss my brother, Sam thinks again, but he doesn't say it out loud this time. He leans his butt on the hood of the car for a moment, and maybe he does feel a haphazard buzz of something skittering its way up his spine, or maybe it's just the shudder that seems to have settled permanently in his bones since R'lyeh. "I'm heading out on a supply run with Mira," he diverts. "We might be a couple of days."

"I'll need the weapons bag."

It's casual, but is it too fast? Is it Sam's imagination that the air is suddenly taut and charged? He can't tell; can't tell if Castiel's eyes are shining with the sorrow of unshed tears, or glinting alert and sly.

"My grace is all but gone," the angel goes on. "I need the weapons to protect myself and Bobby if anything should happen."

His tone is oddly placid in comparison to the abrupt vibe of being switched on and psyched up, and it makes Sam even more unsure. He wavers despite the conversation he just had with Mira, and doesn't reply for a moment.

Castiel raises an eyebrow, one corner of his mouth hitching up a little. "I'm not going to do anything stupid, Sam."

He's imperious now, utters it like a challenge, an edge of annoyance cresting the words. They hang there in the quiet, expectant, and is that the light of sanity in Castiel's gaze, or is it the gleam of the madman? Sam can't decipher it, and his uncertainty can take it no longer. He makes a decision, knows Bobby will likely whale on him for it. "Come on," he answers on a sigh, and he straightens from where he's been lounging to make his way around to the back of the Impala, Castiel tagging along.

"Hidden in plain sight," Castiel observes wryly, as Sam uses his shirtsleeve to rub at the sigil scrawled on the inside of the trunk once he pops it.

"Bobby figured it was the last place you'd look," Sam confirms, as Castiel reaches for his crossbow and picks his way idly through the guns.

The angel huffs out a brittle, gravel laugh. "I wasn't looking. Like I said, I'm not planning anything stupid."

He focuses square on Sam, and Sam remembers how there was always something fey and tense about Castiel when he lied before, the wary dart of his eyes away to focus on anything but Dean, the miniscule ruffle of his composure that was there and gone so fast Sam had always wondered if he was imagining it. But here and now, Castiel's gaze is unblinking, and his shoulders are relaxed. Even so, Sam makes it blatant. "You better not be playing me, Cas."

After a patient sigh, Castiel assures him, "I'm not playing you, Sam."

He keeps pointing that flat, relentless stare at Sam, until Sam himself feels self-conscious and his eyes falter. He clears his throat harshly. "Well. See you soon, Cas," he says. "Stay frosty, huh?" And he turns to head for the truck.



The wound on Castiel's chest burns, and it means something.

The scrape on Dean's car is lustrous silver that draws Castiel like a magnet. It's familiar, and it means something.

When one door closes another door opens, and it's Castiel's fortune, and it means something, just as Dean's did.

Castiel writes it all down still, keeping a record he will leave where Sam and Bobby can find it. But his pen moves slower now, and his vision is gritty and blurred. He feels hot even in the winter freeze, but although the blood burns in his veins he finds he shivers.

It's getting darker as dusk approaches. Bobby walks by with the bucket, on his way to milk the cow, Cheney trotting along behind him. He snaps his fingers, time to go in. Castiel nods agreeably, but it isn't time to go inside, it's time to leave now that he has what he needs.

It takes one hundred sixty-five Bobby-sized strides to get to the small corral the old man constructed behind the house for his cow, and Castiel counts them down, like he has each time he has accompanied Bobby on this chore so that he could be sure. He knows the cow will be waiting by the gate, that it will amble after Bobby as Bobby walks the twenty steps from the gate to the shack in the corner of the enclosure.

Castiel slides into the Impala, places his journal on the shotgun seat, and counts down the ten minutes it will take Bobby to tether the cow, wash his hands, slosh soapy water on the animal's udders, and make himself comfortable on his milking stool. Now is the precise moment when the cow will bellow out its discomfort and shift on her hooves as Bobby leans in to start stripping out the milk, and Castiel has timed it perfectly, turns the key in the ignition in the same instant he hears the animal's distant bawling.

The engine coughs and fires loudly enough to make him wince, eases off to a throaty purr as Castiel recalls Dean's cursory roadcraft advice, just point and go, yellow lights mean drive faster. Brake, shift, just like Dean showed him, and Castiel clicks the lever up into drive, raises his foot so the car grinds forward slowly. Gas, and Castiel presses down tentatively on the pedal, feels her muscles coil and tense under him as she creeps forward a little faster. He pushes harder and she snarls keenly as she speeds up. He takes a deep breath and heads through the lot to the gate, where he jolts her to a halt.

He must conserve what is left of his grace for what is to come, so Castiel deals with the padlock securing the chain around the gate the old-fashioned way, using the lock picks Dean keeps in the glovebox, before steering the car out under the sign and onto the road. Chain rewound around the gate and padlock replaced, he glances over his shoulder just once as he drives away, sees nothing behind him but a cracked, gnarled rock face: the glamour spell Sam and Bobby have spoken of. It reminds Castiel of the mountains in the other worlds and he shivers, tells himself the memory isn't a bad omen.

At the top of the road, Castiel turns left. After a couple of minutes he sees the first signpost, and five minutes after that he's on I-90. It's the same route Dean took to get them to Black Hills national park on their hunt for a Christmas tree, and the road is as deserted as it was back then, the fields that border it draped in spotless ivory just like they were on that journey. Castiel can't see the blacktop that lies beneath the white powder, but he centers the car between the poles that line the road and presses on. Bobby will know he's gone by now, and Castiel can imagine the old man's gruff dismay as he shouts impotently at the empty spot where the car was, can almost hear his enraged yell, boy, what the hell are you doing? He knows Bobby will be calling Sam on the CB radio, knows that Sam might already be speeding his way back to Sioux Falls, might even be there by now and following Castiel's trail, driving the truck through the ruts the Impala is cutting into the snow.

The car slides and glides, shimmies and skids on ice, each lurch sending a burning sensation rippling out from Castiel's shredded chest. It's a sign, and he rubs at it with his right hand while he steers with his left, feels the oozing, wet warmth of the wound warm his cold-numbed fingers. Find a door you have a key for, Meg had said, and she had been flippant and not entirely sober. But it was significant, because Castiel knows where there is a door he has a key for.

He keeps heading west until he reaches the split in the road that will take him in a southerly direction, and the big car streaks across the broken land, mile markers and exits flitting by, until the sky darkens and only the sparkle-dance of moonglow on silver lights the way.

The hours split apart around them, the present moment fading into the past as Castiel drives towards his future.

Towards Devil's Gate pass and the abandoned cemetery at the center of Samuel Colt's iron trap.



Episode 24: Redemption (Part II)