"The Wings In The Windows"
"The Wings In The Windows"
Destiel;AU: Dean has an angel, who watches over him on his worst days.
When Dean Winchester was four years old, he stood at his mother’s funeral in a suit and tie. At such an age, not many children would fully understand the depth of the situation or the complexity, but Dean was a clever child. He understood many things, most definitely including the tremendously sad fact that he would never see his mother again.
Every so often, Dean’s gaze wandered to his feet, with his black dress shoes sinking into the maroon carpet of the room provided by the funeral home. Maroon is quite the dark color, because never would a bright color be appropriate for a funeral, and Dean understood this as well. The room was somber, yet warm, with its mahogany walls and carpet of a similar shade. The lights were dim as were the feelings of every man and woman in that room, including the four year old and his baby brother. The final, somber touch was the mahogany coffin that was placed in the front of the room, with the beautiful blonde woman lying still inside it.
Out of all of the many faces in the room- those of friends, family, neighbors of Mary Winchester- two faces exactly stood out to Dean: the faces that he saw every day and would continue to see every day, one of which being that of Sammy, Dean’s baby brother, barely six months old. Sammy looked nothing but content, calm and happy in his stroller, so blissful and so blissfully unaware of the world. Whether to envy or pity the smaller child, Dean wasn’t quite sure.
The other face that caught Dean’s attention was that of his father. With such a circumstance and following such an event, John Winchester was certainly anything but the generally cheerful, playful mad he had been known to be. At the loss of his mother, Dean felt almost as if he had lost his father as well. While not lost at all, John had transformed into something of a generally grump, tired man. All he had left were his sons. Dean knew this, and made an agreement with himself to make his father proud to his best effort.
Dean found himself with his eyes darting every which way, searching the very corners of the room for nothing in particular. Something caught his eye, just from the corner, but when he spun his head around to fully see, there was nothing at all significant in sight.
Dean could have easily decided that he imagined it, but he found much more solace in the idea of it being real, and right outside the window, watching him. In the years to come, it crossed his mind quite often that maybe the shimmering black wings of an angel that he had seen were simply a product of his worried mind, but not once had he fully doubted their realness.
Mary Winchester used to tell her sons, “Angels are watching over you.” Dean found that she was absolutely right.
At nine years old, Dean Winchester fell into a river. It had been a playful day, as he and Sammy jumped along the rocks by the riverside. The river had even seemed inviting at first, in the blazing summer heat. Dean leaned over the rocks many a time to splash his face with the icy, cooling water, and he’d even splashed Sammy with it to be met by giggles and shrieks from the small five year old.
All of a sudden and out of nowhere it seemed, Dean was falling, limbs useless against the pull of gravity. He shouted and flailed, and he could faintly hear a panicked call of “Dean!” from his younger brother. He thrashed and kicked and grabbed for the rocks, but his fingertips only dragged against the smooth, eroded stone.
Dean was wet, suddenly, freezing water chilling him right through to his bones. He found comfort in the delusion that it was like a swimming pool in which he had dived to best surpass the wait of getting used to the cold, when in reality the river was so impossibly far from a swimming pool, with its ravenous currents that tossed Dean every which way, its rocks that scraped Dean’s legs up so easily, and its icy coldness that didn’t fade a bit.
Sammy was still screaming; Dean could hear it faintly over the roar of the waves in his ears. Either Sammy was running or Dean was being pulled farther away, because Sammy’s screams of a mess of “Help!” and “Dean!” got softer by the second. When Dean tried to shout a reply, a consoling message assuring Sammy that he would be fine, or possibly a terrified scream of his own, he could barely make a choked sound as the river water filled his mouth.
And then, just as they had been five years ago, shimmering and absolutely glorious, the back wings danced in the corner of Dean’s vision for barely a second before they were gone, with no trace left but the wisp of hope in Dean’s heart.
Only seconds passed before a thick rope was being tossed to Dean with a much louder and closer shout of his name that certainly did not belong to Sammy but to their father. The rope burned his palms, but Dean relished both the rope and the feeling with all his heart, and soon he was on the grass, coughing and gasping for oxygen. His legs bled in more places than one and, in the nine years of his life, he had never been more exhausted. Still breathing heavily with inhales that shook his entire small frame, Dean fell asleep while John patched him up on the living room couch.
At sixteen, Dean was caught smoking pot behind his school with a female friend who may have been a bit more than just a friend. Fantastic, it was, absolutely fantastic, Dean thought- the best he’d ever felt in his life. And his friend- God he loved her. She was fantastic. She was beautiful and so very fantastic and perfect and Dean didn’t know what he would do without her. While he thought he would be generally sad and lonely without the girl, he probably would just be sober and generally alright.
But she was gorgeous and wonderful and Swan felt like he could stare at her forever and he did stare at her for what felt like forever, though he mostly stared at her chest. She was giggling and grinning and soon she was kissing Dean, knocking the breath right from his lungs and the blunt right from his fingertips. She kept giggling against Dean’s mouth and Dean couldn’t help but giggle along, even though he would deny it until the end of time because he was Dean and Dean was much too manly to giggle.
Dean’s girlfriend brought her own blunt right to her silky lips and only millimeters from Dean’s and inhaled, right before kissing Dean again and breathing smoke into his mouth. It was bliss, pure euphoria, but only for a moment before there were footsteps, loud and dramatic against Dean’s ears but seemingly to barely make an impression on those of his friend. She grinned, mumbling a low swear but seeming not nearly as terrified as Dean, who stared with horrified wonder in his glazed eyes at the school principal who was walking toward the pair with a determined stride and anger written in billboard letters across his features.
Twenty minutes of lecturing in the principal’s office later, Dean was in the car with his father, sitting in the backseat as opposed to the passenger’s because he couldn’t bear to sit so close to the man in the front.
“Getting high with your girlfriend in the back of your school…” John sighed, assessing the situation with sternness and exasperation. Dean knew- he didn’t need to hear it again. He knew what he did and he was sober by then, and he was ashamed and he hated himself and the last thing he needed was to be reminded. “What the hell were you thinking”
Dean didn’t say a word. He couldn’t possibly. He did nothing for the extent of the drive home apart from wallow in shame and keep his eyes on anything and everything but the man who was glaring through the rear view mirror, feasting his eyes on the disappointment that was his eldest son.
The instant Dean was in the house, he was flying upstairs and locking the door to his room because John just let him. He was on the phone soon, angry and embarrassed with no limit to his rage, shouting and calling his girlfriend a bitch. “My dad freaking hates me now because of you and your goddamn weed!”
“Screw you, Dean!” She shouted in reply, and after just minutes of useless arguing, she hung up and left Dean still angry at himself and everything else, but lonely and will an obnoxious beeping ringing in his ear.
Dean ended up sitting on the edge of his bed and staring out the window at the trees and sky that were slowly darkening as the earth turned its back to the sun for the night. And soon, he was it again- a flash of feathers passing by the corner off the window, black as the night surrounding them.
Twenty one years old and visiting from college, Dean broke his younger brother’s leg. Sammy- who by then insisted on being called Sam, though he secretly has a soft spot for the nickname- had been helping Dean fix up the ’67 Chevy Impala that his father promised would be his the minute it was working well enough again.
It wasn’t in very good shape at all, so Dean had decided to replace the engine himself. Sam was under the car, with his legs- which had grown freakishly long- sticking out extensively. Dean has the engine in his arms as he heaved it across the garage, stopping every few seconds to catch his breath. Though, even with all of Dean’s precision and experience with cars, the fact that someone was in the garage with him had somehow retired to the back of Dean’s mind.
At the bump of Dean’s toe against Sam’s shin, Dean was startled and the engine slipped easily from his oil-slick fingers. The instant he realized what was happening, he tried to grab for the engine, but the attempt wasn’t fruitful in the least as it was already too late. There was a crash and a crack, and Sam was shouting and swearing and trying to get himself out from under the car, to no avail. Panicking, Dean used all his strength and more to hurl the engine as far as he could, which was only a yard or so. Sam gasped as his leg was freed and winced, panting, as Dean tugged on his arms to pull him out from under the car.
“Sammy I’m calling 9-1-1, I’ll be right back,” Dean muttered before he rushed into the house, leaving Sam alone to trail his hands along the floor, unsure whether to clutch his very broken leg or to refrain from touching it at all.
Dean spent the day with Sam in the emergency room, feeling indefinitely like the absolute worst brother in the world. Sam assured him, again and again, “Dean, it’s fine, I’m fine, it’s not your fault,” but Dean couldn’t at all take any of that in.
At the end of the day that had been filled with pained groans and profuse apologies, Dean saw something marvelous in the window: the wings.
The fifth time Dean saw his angel, 23 years after the first, was, by far, the single most horrific day of his life. He sat in the hospital in a rockety plastic chair with Sam by his side in another. Both brothers had their wet, terrified eyes glued to the man in the hospital bed in front of them, who was unconscious to the fullest extent of the word. Not quite dead, though. Dean and Sam hung on to that little shred of hope like a falling man to a rescue rope.
John had been in a car accident- a brutal one, as his sons had heard. There were gashes in his head, leaking blood into and through the bandages strapped over them. Sam and Dean watched in horror as the bandages turned red, one after another, and had to be replaced.
The heart monitor beeped, slowly and steadily, but the beeping grew slower and more erratic as the heart it monitored began to falter. Every breath in the room was held, from doctor to nurse to Sam to Dean. Slowly but very surely, the beeps decelerated, and soon the weren’t a series of beeps but a single beep as John flatlined. The defibrillator was of no use.
And in the hospital window, out of the corner of Dean’s eye, the wings were there but Dean could barely take the time to acknowledge them.
Pacing at home, late that night, Dean ended up shouting into his darkened living room.
“If you’re here, come the hell out!”
Dean’s words echoed back and reverberated in his ears. In the moments to come, there was silence.
“I’m tired of your damn hide-and-seek; you’re an angel, for God’s sake; just come out, alright?”
Dean had never spoken to his angel, never thought it necessary. It was crazy, maybe- he was crazy, maybe. That didn’t stop him from screaming into every corner of the room and begging for his angel.
There was nothing. Nothing at all and no one at all in that room with Dean. Exasperated and exhausted, he fell back on his heels into an armchair, burying his face in his hands. What a damn angel- not even there when Dean was at his worst.
Dean sat for a moment, eyes closed and cursing internally at himself and the world and especially his angel- why not now? Why always, but not now?
Though, as Dean lowered his hands and blinked his eyes open with a deep sigh, he saw a man standing in the center of the room, and the sight of this man was a stab of light, a stab of hope, right to Dean’s chest.
“Hello, Dean,” said the man, shadows of black wings spreading and becoming visible to Dean, who felt like dropping to the carpet and sobbing because his angel was right there, right in front of him.
“What’s your name?” Dean asked as he stood, stepping close to the angel slowly but certainly not hesitantly. His angel.
“My name is Castiel.” The angel’s voice was monotonous and low, and quite possibly the most beautiful sound Dean had ever heard. “I’m an angel of the Lord.”
“I know what you are,” Dean murmured in absolute wonder, stepping finally right in front of his angel. Castiel radiated warmth, hope, everything Dean’s ever wanted and everything Dean’s ever missed. “I’ve known you all my life.”
“And I, you.” A small grin was brought to Castiel’s lips, and what beautiful lips they were, Dean thought. What a beautiful angel he was.
Slowly, still, Dean raised his fingers to Castiel’s face, trailing his fingertips over the soft skin. It was so warm, so wonderful. So hopeful and so glorious. With barely a thought, Dean leaned forward and pressed his lips to Castiel’s because it simply felt like the right thing to do. And it was exactly the right thing to do. It was everything Dean’s ever wanted and nothing at all another person could possibly give him. His angel.
Destiel;AU: Dean has an angel, who watches over him on his worst days.
When Dean Winchester was four years old, he stood at his mother’s funeral in a suit and tie. At such an age, not many children would fully understand the depth of the situation or the complexity, but Dean was a clever child. He understood many things, most definitely including the tremendously sad fact that he would never see his mother again.
Every so often, Dean’s gaze wandered to his feet, with his black dress shoes sinking into the maroon carpet of the room provided by the funeral home. Maroon is quite the dark color, because never would a bright color be appropriate for a funeral, and Dean understood this as well. The room was somber, yet warm, with its mahogany walls and carpet of a similar shade. The lights were dim as were the feelings of every man and woman in that room, including the four year old and his baby brother. The final, somber touch was the mahogany coffin that was placed in the front of the room, with the beautiful blonde woman lying still inside it.
Out of all of the many faces in the room- those of friends, family, neighbors of Mary Winchester- two faces exactly stood out to Dean: the faces that he saw every day and would continue to see every day, one of which being that of Sammy, Dean’s baby brother, barely six months old. Sammy looked nothing but content, calm and happy in his stroller, so blissful and so blissfully unaware of the world. Whether to envy or pity the smaller child, Dean wasn’t quite sure.
The other face that caught Dean’s attention was that of his father. With such a circumstance and following such an event, John Winchester was certainly anything but the generally cheerful, playful mad he had been known to be. At the loss of his mother, Dean felt almost as if he had lost his father as well. While not lost at all, John had transformed into something of a generally grump, tired man. All he had left were his sons. Dean knew this, and made an agreement with himself to make his father proud to his best effort.
Dean found himself with his eyes darting every which way, searching the very corners of the room for nothing in particular. Something caught his eye, just from the corner, but when he spun his head around to fully see, there was nothing at all significant in sight.
Dean could have easily decided that he imagined it, but he found much more solace in the idea of it being real, and right outside the window, watching him. In the years to come, it crossed his mind quite often that maybe the shimmering black wings of an angel that he had seen were simply a product of his worried mind, but not once had he fully doubted their realness.
Mary Winchester used to tell her sons, “Angels are watching over you.” Dean found that she was absolutely right.
At nine years old, Dean Winchester fell into a river. It had been a playful day, as he and Sammy jumped along the rocks by the riverside. The river had even seemed inviting at first, in the blazing summer heat. Dean leaned over the rocks many a time to splash his face with the icy, cooling water, and he’d even splashed Sammy with it to be met by giggles and shrieks from the small five year old.
All of a sudden and out of nowhere it seemed, Dean was falling, limbs useless against the pull of gravity. He shouted and flailed, and he could faintly hear a panicked call of “Dean!” from his younger brother. He thrashed and kicked and grabbed for the rocks, but his fingertips only dragged against the smooth, eroded stone.
Dean was wet, suddenly, freezing water chilling him right through to his bones. He found comfort in the delusion that it was like a swimming pool in which he had dived to best surpass the wait of getting used to the cold, when in reality the river was so impossibly far from a swimming pool, with its ravenous currents that tossed Dean every which way, its rocks that scraped Dean’s legs up so easily, and its icy coldness that didn’t fade a bit.
Sammy was still screaming; Dean could hear it faintly over the roar of the waves in his ears. Either Sammy was running or Dean was being pulled farther away, because Sammy’s screams of a mess of “Help!” and “Dean!” got softer by the second. When Dean tried to shout a reply, a consoling message assuring Sammy that he would be fine, or possibly a terrified scream of his own, he could barely make a choked sound as the river water filled his mouth.
And then, just as they had been five years ago, shimmering and absolutely glorious, the back wings danced in the corner of Dean’s vision for barely a second before they were gone, with no trace left but the wisp of hope in Dean’s heart.
Only seconds passed before a thick rope was being tossed to Dean with a much louder and closer shout of his name that certainly did not belong to Sammy but to their father. The rope burned his palms, but Dean relished both the rope and the feeling with all his heart, and soon he was on the grass, coughing and gasping for oxygen. His legs bled in more places than one and, in the nine years of his life, he had never been more exhausted. Still breathing heavily with inhales that shook his entire small frame, Dean fell asleep while John patched him up on the living room couch.
At sixteen, Dean was caught smoking pot behind his school with a female friend who may have been a bit more than just a friend. Fantastic, it was, absolutely fantastic, Dean thought- the best he’d ever felt in his life. And his friend- God he loved her. She was fantastic. She was beautiful and so very fantastic and perfect and Dean didn’t know what he would do without her. While he thought he would be generally sad and lonely without the girl, he probably would just be sober and generally alright.
But she was gorgeous and wonderful and Swan felt like he could stare at her forever and he did stare at her for what felt like forever, though he mostly stared at her chest. She was giggling and grinning and soon she was kissing Dean, knocking the breath right from his lungs and the blunt right from his fingertips. She kept giggling against Dean’s mouth and Dean couldn’t help but giggle along, even though he would deny it until the end of time because he was Dean and Dean was much too manly to giggle.
Dean’s girlfriend brought her own blunt right to her silky lips and only millimeters from Dean’s and inhaled, right before kissing Dean again and breathing smoke into his mouth. It was bliss, pure euphoria, but only for a moment before there were footsteps, loud and dramatic against Dean’s ears but seemingly to barely make an impression on those of his friend. She grinned, mumbling a low swear but seeming not nearly as terrified as Dean, who stared with horrified wonder in his glazed eyes at the school principal who was walking toward the pair with a determined stride and anger written in billboard letters across his features.
Twenty minutes of lecturing in the principal’s office later, Dean was in the car with his father, sitting in the backseat as opposed to the passenger’s because he couldn’t bear to sit so close to the man in the front.
“Getting high with your girlfriend in the back of your school…” John sighed, assessing the situation with sternness and exasperation. Dean knew- he didn’t need to hear it again. He knew what he did and he was sober by then, and he was ashamed and he hated himself and the last thing he needed was to be reminded. “What the hell were you thinking”
Dean didn’t say a word. He couldn’t possibly. He did nothing for the extent of the drive home apart from wallow in shame and keep his eyes on anything and everything but the man who was glaring through the rear view mirror, feasting his eyes on the disappointment that was his eldest son.
The instant Dean was in the house, he was flying upstairs and locking the door to his room because John just let him. He was on the phone soon, angry and embarrassed with no limit to his rage, shouting and calling his girlfriend a bitch. “My dad freaking hates me now because of you and your goddamn weed!”
“Screw you, Dean!” She shouted in reply, and after just minutes of useless arguing, she hung up and left Dean still angry at himself and everything else, but lonely and will an obnoxious beeping ringing in his ear.
Dean ended up sitting on the edge of his bed and staring out the window at the trees and sky that were slowly darkening as the earth turned its back to the sun for the night. And soon, he was it again- a flash of feathers passing by the corner off the window, black as the night surrounding them.
Twenty one years old and visiting from college, Dean broke his younger brother’s leg. Sammy- who by then insisted on being called Sam, though he secretly has a soft spot for the nickname- had been helping Dean fix up the ’67 Chevy Impala that his father promised would be his the minute it was working well enough again.
It wasn’t in very good shape at all, so Dean had decided to replace the engine himself. Sam was under the car, with his legs- which had grown freakishly long- sticking out extensively. Dean has the engine in his arms as he heaved it across the garage, stopping every few seconds to catch his breath. Though, even with all of Dean’s precision and experience with cars, the fact that someone was in the garage with him had somehow retired to the back of Dean’s mind.
At the bump of Dean’s toe against Sam’s shin, Dean was startled and the engine slipped easily from his oil-slick fingers. The instant he realized what was happening, he tried to grab for the engine, but the attempt wasn’t fruitful in the least as it was already too late. There was a crash and a crack, and Sam was shouting and swearing and trying to get himself out from under the car, to no avail. Panicking, Dean used all his strength and more to hurl the engine as far as he could, which was only a yard or so. Sam gasped as his leg was freed and winced, panting, as Dean tugged on his arms to pull him out from under the car.
“Sammy I’m calling 9-1-1, I’ll be right back,” Dean muttered before he rushed into the house, leaving Sam alone to trail his hands along the floor, unsure whether to clutch his very broken leg or to refrain from touching it at all.
Dean spent the day with Sam in the emergency room, feeling indefinitely like the absolute worst brother in the world. Sam assured him, again and again, “Dean, it’s fine, I’m fine, it’s not your fault,” but Dean couldn’t at all take any of that in.
At the end of the day that had been filled with pained groans and profuse apologies, Dean saw something marvelous in the window: the wings.
The fifth time Dean saw his angel, 23 years after the first, was, by far, the single most horrific day of his life. He sat in the hospital in a rockety plastic chair with Sam by his side in another. Both brothers had their wet, terrified eyes glued to the man in the hospital bed in front of them, who was unconscious to the fullest extent of the word. Not quite dead, though. Dean and Sam hung on to that little shred of hope like a falling man to a rescue rope.
John had been in a car accident- a brutal one, as his sons had heard. There were gashes in his head, leaking blood into and through the bandages strapped over them. Sam and Dean watched in horror as the bandages turned red, one after another, and had to be replaced.
The heart monitor beeped, slowly and steadily, but the beeping grew slower and more erratic as the heart it monitored began to falter. Every breath in the room was held, from doctor to nurse to Sam to Dean. Slowly but very surely, the beeps decelerated, and soon the weren’t a series of beeps but a single beep as John flatlined. The defibrillator was of no use.
And in the hospital window, out of the corner of Dean’s eye, the wings were there but Dean could barely take the time to acknowledge them.
Pacing at home, late that night, Dean ended up shouting into his darkened living room.
“If you’re here, come the hell out!”
Dean’s words echoed back and reverberated in his ears. In the moments to come, there was silence.
“I’m tired of your damn hide-and-seek; you’re an angel, for God’s sake; just come out, alright?”
Dean had never spoken to his angel, never thought it necessary. It was crazy, maybe- he was crazy, maybe. That didn’t stop him from screaming into every corner of the room and begging for his angel.
There was nothing. Nothing at all and no one at all in that room with Dean. Exasperated and exhausted, he fell back on his heels into an armchair, burying his face in his hands. What a damn angel- not even there when Dean was at his worst.
Dean sat for a moment, eyes closed and cursing internally at himself and the world and especially his angel- why not now? Why always, but not now?
Though, as Dean lowered his hands and blinked his eyes open with a deep sigh, he saw a man standing in the center of the room, and the sight of this man was a stab of light, a stab of hope, right to Dean’s chest.
“Hello, Dean,” said the man, shadows of black wings spreading and becoming visible to Dean, who felt like dropping to the carpet and sobbing because his angel was right there, right in front of him.
“What’s your name?” Dean asked as he stood, stepping close to the angel slowly but certainly not hesitantly. His angel.
“My name is Castiel.” The angel’s voice was monotonous and low, and quite possibly the most beautiful sound Dean had ever heard. “I’m an angel of the Lord.”
“I know what you are,” Dean murmured in absolute wonder, stepping finally right in front of his angel. Castiel radiated warmth, hope, everything Dean’s ever wanted and everything Dean’s ever missed. “I’ve known you all my life.”
“And I, you.” A small grin was brought to Castiel’s lips, and what beautiful lips they were, Dean thought. What a beautiful angel he was.
Slowly, still, Dean raised his fingers to Castiel’s face, trailing his fingertips over the soft skin. It was so warm, so wonderful. So hopeful and so glorious. With barely a thought, Dean leaned forward and pressed his lips to Castiel’s because it simply felt like the right thing to do. And it was exactly the right thing to do. It was everything Dean’s ever wanted and nothing at all another person could possibly give him. His angel.