FIC: Remaining Grace, Chapter 19: Bargaining [19/20]
Title: Remaining Grace, Chapter 19: Bargaining
Author: todisturbtheuni
Rating: NC-17.
Genre and/or Pairing: Angst; Hurt/Comfort; Romance; Castiel/Dean Winchester
Spoilers: Through the end of season 5, but some minor for season 6.
Warnings: Explicit sex; graphic torture scenes, which I'll warn for at applicable chapters; minor/side character death (neither Dean nor Castiel).
Word Count: 110K (total)
Summary: Sam's missing his soul, Castiel has a pissy archangelic nemesis, and Dean wonders if he'll be spending the rest of his life making sure the Apocalypse doesn't go ahead as scheduled. Still, though. He's happy to see Cas. Indiana wasn't really working out. Unabashed six-fix, in a universe where Castiel made a different choice, and things snowball from that point forward.
Masterpost!
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“Dean!”
“Come and get me, you son of a bitch-!”
Castiel ran, boots heavy on the dirt trail, heavier than his wings had ever been. It was moments like these that he missed them with an ache that set fire to his shoulder blades; he could already be at Dean’s side, a hand on the Wendigo, burning it out. The thing roared, an inhuman noise of rage, and Dean’s flare gun went off but the sound didn’t stop. Castiel saw the light go off, missing its mark, and heard the heavy thud of Dean hitting the ground, felt secondhand as the wind was knocked out of him.
He saw movement to his left and skidded to a halt. The Wendigo’s back was to him, and the monster was already hunching down over Dean, stretching out gnarled fingers to grab hold of the hunter. Castiel raised his own flare gun and fired. It screamed as it went down, collapsing forward, and Dean scrambled back on his heels to get out of the way of the burning monster.
Dean was panting, dirt streaked across his face, but he was grinning, too. Castiel edged around the pile of flickering ash and offered a hand to help Dean up.
“I hate Wendigos,” Dean grunted with no real venom. He let Castiel haul him to his feet, wincing when he put too much weight on his left foot.
“Is it broken?” Castiel asked, squinting down at Dean’s boot.
“Just sprained. We’ll get some ice back at the motel.” Dean lifted his free hand to brush a thumb through the graze on Castiel’s cheek; he felt the warm smear of blood over skin. “Any other damage?”
“I’m fine,” Castiel replied. “You should be more careful.”
“Okay, Mom,” Dean shot back, smirking.
“Come on,” Castiel said, exasperated, and yanked Dean’s left arm over his shoulders. Dean let out an indignant yelp. “You should,” Castiel repeated, urging him forward. “I have no idea why you feel the need to taunt every monster you hunt.”
“You’re the asshole who trapped an archangel in holy fire and told him he was your little bitch,” Dean groaned, but let Castiel take part of his weight.
“He was trapped,” Castiel pointed out. “The Wendigo was not.”
Ignoring this, Dean asked, “Wanna grab a bite to eat before we go back to the motel? Burgers.” He quirked his eyebrows.
Dean was, by no stretch of the imagination, fully healed. Castiel could still hear the silent scream from deep within his mind, the voice flayed open on a bed of lava deep within a Hell he couldn’t leave behind, but the dead look in his eyes had, at least, vacated; there were different thoughts and feelings bubbling inside him besides his pain, including a sudden rush of affection when Castiel tugged his arm tighter around his shoulders, a weird surge of pride as the Wendigo burned, things that were outside the event horizon of Sam’s death.
He was, at least, healing. There was a little more of the man that Castiel had once known resurfacing by the day, including a fixation on bad food and taunting monsters.
“You should ice your ankle,” Castiel pointed out reluctantly.
“We can grab ‘em and head back to the motel.”
Castiel considered the nutritional value of yet another late night eating cheeseburgers.
“Come on,” Dean groaned. “Our lives suck, man. The small pleasures are the only thing we’ve got.”
“There are pleasures that aren’t so likely to clog your arteries,” Castiel deadpanned, but he gave in, dumping Dean a little unceremoniously into the passenger side of the Impala. Dean sputtered, his thoughts tripping backward to the night before-and the night before that-and the night before that-and Castiel smirked as he made his way to the driver’s side, remembering the details with relish. The human mind got hung up on the most peculiar things: the exact sound Dean made when Castiel was first buried deep inside him; the glistening sweat in his dark blond hair when Castiel raked his nails through it; the way he squirmed, aborted little movements that Castiel stilled with a hand pressed into his lower back-
“Get us back to the motel and I’ll make you squirm,” Dean grouched halfheartedly as Castiel dropped into the Impala.
Castiel smiled. “Later. You’re hungry.”
Dean yanked him across the seat, but the kiss he pressed into Castiel’s lips was soft, warm, gentle; his fingers unknotted from Castiel’s shirt and cupped the back of his neck instead. Castiel relaxed into the touch, his thoughts blanking over with a brief hum of pleasure. When Dean released him, the hunter’s ears were slightly red, and his smile was vaguely embarrassed, as though he’d just done something unintentionally cute and accidentally enjoyed it.
“Shut up,” Dean grumbled, and Castiel ducked his head to turn the key in the ignition, hiding his smile.
Castiel ate with Dean and then left him with Dr. Sexy reruns and an ice pack around his ankle. “I could come with, you know,” he said with a grimace. “I’m not going to leap over the bar and start guzzling bourbon, or anything.”
“I know. It’s better not to torture yourself, though.” Castiel yanked on his boots. “It shouldn’t take long.”
“Don’t pretend to be FBI.”
Castiel sighed, Dean smirked, and Castiel packed badges into his jacket that he was sure he wouldn’t need. He had watched humanity for a long time, and he was fast discovering that even while human, his expertise lay in eavesdropping rather than direct questioning.
Bars were a good place for it. The nearest town was Oconomowoc; the meteor they were currently tracking had fallen in two pieces near the outskirts. Main Street was the only part of town at all active on a Thursday night, and conveniently lined with the type of dive bars where Castiel blended into corners with relative ease. He picked the first on the street and parked the Impala, trying to appear unobtrusive.
The bar was only half-full, mostly of locals crowded around two TVs, absorbed by the tail-end of the Brewers-Marlins game. Castiel seated himself at the bar, close enough to overhear if any of them mentioned something besides baseball, but he wasn’t hopeful.
“Can I get you anything, bud?”
Castiel turned his attention to the bartender, hovering in front of him with a rag, wiping down a glass.
“Just a Miller, thanks.” He opened his wallet for cash. He wouldn’t drink much of it-the taste had never appealed to him-but he’d already learned the hard way that sitting in a bar and drinking nothing didn’t get him anywhere with people. They viewed the behavior as suspicious.
“Haven’t seen you around before.” The bartender didn’t seem antagonistic about this. He’d already flipped a clean glass upright on the bar in front of Castiel and was filling it with golden liquid.
“Just passing through. Castiel.” He held out his hand.
The bartender shook it. “That’s a mouthful. Kevin.”
“Cas, for short.” He pulled the beer toward him.
“Got family in the area, Cas?”
“Yes,” he said, a little too slow. The bartender looked at him askance. “My sister is having a baby soon,” he added quickly.
Kevin paused in wiping down another glass, frowning. “Not Jennifer Berken? Didn’t think she had a brother.”
“No,” he replied; by the look on the bartender’s face, it didn’t look as if it would help to be related to Jennifer Berken. “Anna Milton,” he fabricated. “In Hartland.”
“Well, congratulations to her, then. Better that you’re not mixed up in that business.”
Castiel took a polite sip of his beer. “What business?”
The bartender glanced toward the men gathered around the television and leaned forward. Castiel did the same, hoping that this was a gesture of confidence and that he wasn’t about to be booted from the bar.
“Her husband came in here, week or so ago,” Kevin said. “Ranting and raving about how she’d cheated on him and saying he was going to kill her. Had to call the police. Got everyone riled up. It’s a small town, that kind of thing doesn’t happen much. He slept it off in a holding cell and vanished in the morning. She’s all on her own now. Poor girl. They grew up here, you know. High school sweethearts and all that.”
“That’s very sad,” Castiel murmured, heart sinking.
“Tried to convince Chris, tried to tell him-hey, man, maybe the doctors were wrong. Maybe you should take it as a miracle, or something. He wouldn’t believe it, though. Too stubborn for his own good.” Kevin shrugged. “Anyway. Enjoy the beer, man. Let me know if I can get you anything else.”
Castiel sat at the bar a long time, only finishing half of the syrupy beer, watching the other patrons filter out in victory when the game wrapped up in Milwaukee’s favor. When there were only a handful of others left, the door blew open; a Midwest autumn chill swept through Castiel’s jacket.
“Guinness,” a familiar voice called out.
A second later, Balthazar was on the stool beside Castiel, watching Kevin fill a glass with dark liquid.
“Why are you drinking that?” the angel muttered, eyeing the now-flat Miller in front of Castiel.
“Not for pleasure,” Castiel said, wrapping his fingers around the glass.
“Obviously.” Balthazar drank down a quarter of the pint immediately and set it back on the bar with a satisfied sigh.
“Why are you here?” Castiel asked, watching Balthazar eye the few patrons left in the bar, all hunched over their individual beers at separate tables.
“Looking for you. Impala's outside. Gabriel’s acting strangely.”
“I didn’t think that was my problem anymore,” Castiel said pointedly, raising his glass.
Balthazar rolled his eyes. “Just thought you might like to know, mate. He keeps vanishing-sometimes for weeks at a time. But he’s not going to Earth. No idea where he’s going.”
“Does he always come back?”
“So far, yeah.”
“Then I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Making sure Inias will have a good home,” Castiel replied.
“Thought that wasn’t your problem anymore.”
“Heaven isn’t watching over them.”
“So you will?”
Castiel stayed silent, staring at his beer.
Balthazar sighed, more heavily this time. “Cassie.”
“It’s my fault,” Castiel said flatly. “They would never have considered it otherwise. The least I can do is make sure that they’ll be happy.”
“You can’t guarantee that.”
“I can try.”
Balthazar rested a hand on his shoulder. They stayed at the bar until Kevin closed for the night.
The woman inside the house was pregnant and alone.
Castiel felt his own discomfort, just beneath his skin, aching and itching; he missed the rumble of the Impala’s engine, but the car attracted enough attention when the engine wasn’t growling, and the last thing they wanted was a suspicious neighbor coming out to shoo them off. And Castiel couldn’t move from this spot, didn’t want to. His eyes were snared on the woman in the window, the unkempt red hair, the shadows beneath her eyes, the hand smoothing mindlessly over her still-flat belly while the other hand clutched a mug of coffee. She was wan and shivering in the predawn light, a crocheted blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
“You sure it’s her?” Dean asked, leaning across the front seat toward Castiel.
“Yes,” he replied, watching the woman as she lifted the mug to her lips and took a tentative sip. “The trajectory is right, and her husband was sterile. They’ve been unable to conceive.”
Dean raised his eyebrows in silent question. “Her husband left her,” Castiel clarified. “He was at the local bar last week, ranting about her unfaithfulness. The bartender is still telling the story.”
“But she wasn’t,” Dean pointed out needlessly. “Just happened to get in the way of falling angel sperm.”
Castiel rolled his eyes, Dean smirked at his own joke, and the woman looked down at the hand rubbing her stomach. Her eyes were red from tears cried hours earlier, but the corner of her mouth quirked up, momentary awe flitting across her features, and the discomfort in Castiel eased.
“Which one is it?” Dean asked.
“Inias,” Castiel answered. “His Grace was closest.”
Dean snorted.
“What?” Castiel asked absently, still watching the woman.
“Better hope she doesn’t name him that. Kid’ll be bullied for years.”
Castiel smiled. “Inias responds well to bullying. With or without Grace, that doesn’t change.”
“Think they’ll be okay?”
Castiel’s fingers twitched on the windowsill. He willed himself to leave them behind, a grieving woman alone with one of his Fallen soldiers, and tried to take comfort in the fact that they would have each other.
“He’ll have a normal life,” Dean pointed out, as though trying to be reassuring. “As normal as any of us get, anyway. More normal than ours. That’s something, right?”
Castiel nodded and finally looked away. “There’ll be more,” he said, defeated. “The war has made a lot of angels feel...obsolete.”
Dean squeezed Castiel’s shoulder, his hand warm. “We’ll find them.”
They crossed the country several times over in the following few months, picking up cases and tracking meteors to their landing sites. Castiel’s back complained about motel beds and ghosts throwing him into walls, and his adjustment to being human was far from over. He had nightmares about Hell, dreams of wandering that burning labyrinth while his garrison died around him, and woke up sweating and screaming just as often as Dean. The memories had never bothered him before-haunted him, of course, but not interrupted his functioning.
Now, though, there were days when he was jumpy and moody, days when he snapped at Dean for no real reason, days when they got into shouting matches because they were both irrevocably damaged. There were nights when he woke up sobbing from formless dreams, and Dean could barely put hands on him to soothe him, his skin crawled so painfully; there were days when several millennia of memories crowded in on him and threatened to suffocate him. With Dean relatively functional again, Castiel’s rigid control of his new humanity failed.
“It’s okay,” Dean soothed when Castiel was at his worst. “This is what being human’s like, man. It sucks sometimes.”
Castiel knew that, but he didn’t have to like it.
He took comfort in the little things: reading stories on long car rides, the ones that he had begun to forget the finer details of; warm mugs and travel cups of tea and milk, the kind that towed him slowly to wakefulness in the morning; long runs that Dean had started joining him on, grumbling all the way as he adjusted to sneakers after being so long in boots; the bright pop of citrus in an orange; the touch of the wind ruffling his hair or the sun caressing his skin; Dean breathing softly on the back of his neck in the middle of the night as they curled close together beneath the blankets. Being human was often a frustrating, painful enterprise, but there were things he cherished, too, things that reminded him of why he’d chosen this path.
Whenever they crossed through the midwest, they stopped at Bobby’s for a few days.
“If it isn’t the prodigal sons,” the old man shouted from the porch the first time they passed through. Jody ducked out through the door and grinned when her eyes met Castiel’s. It had been a long night in the country outside of Des Moines, and Castiel was still bruised from where the Woman in White had attempted to rip open his chest, but he still embraced the sheriff tightly, ignoring the pain.
“He missed you,” she whispered conspiratorially in his ear.
That much was obvious; Bobby hugged Dean as though he would never let the Righteous Man go again.
“I missed you, too,” Jody added, with another quiet smile, and Bobby clasped Castiel’s shoulder as Dean jokingly picked Jody up in an enthusiastic hug.
“You both seem better,” the sheriff told him the next day. She hoisted herself up on the hood of a beaten-in junker beside him, giving a little shiver in the brisk autumn breeze. It was early October, and a short-lived Indian summer was fading fast.
“Hunting is good for him,” Castiel said honestly. “It is for me, as well.”
“And your angels?” Jody asked.
“Safe,” Castiel replied, thinking of Hester and the beaming parents-to-be in Detroit, Samandriel and the quiet pleasure of a middle-aged couple in Flagstaff, the others who Fell sporadically and were slowly integrating into homes that were good or good enough-and if they weren’t, then someday he and Dean would intervene, somehow.
“Will there be any left in Heaven?” she pressed curiously.
Castiel nodded. “The legions are many. There will always be angels in Heaven.”
“Do you ever miss it?”
Castiel thought of the overbright place he had once preferred in Heaven, where a red kite sailed in a cloudless blue sky and the grass was stained, now, perpetually dark with his own blood. He remembered the endless drone of existence, of obedience, of faith, of worship, and thought of the tumult of the last few years, the uncertainty, the pain. He felt Dean, washing dishes in Bobby’s kitchen and laughing at something the other hunter said. He remembered his wings and surreptitiously rubbed a hand over the scar on his forearm, reassurance of its continued presence.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Not often. I miss my brothers and sisters the most, I think.”
“Will they remember you when they grow up?”
“It’s unlikely.” The thought made his stomach clench unhappily.
“What about when they die?”
Castiel shrugged. “They might, or they might not. This is unprecedented.” Dean’s right, he thought, a little morosely, and felt Dean brighten smugly in the distance. That should be my tagline.
Jody linked her arm through Castiel’s and leaned against his shoulder. It was comfortable, comforting-human and yet simple, uncomplicated.
“What’s Heaven like, Castiel?” she asked. “How does it work?”
He thought of the hundreds of billions of souls, the divided lands, of the best way to explain. “What are your happiest memories?”
He felt her smile against his shoulder. “My son being born. Marrying my husband. Graduating from the police academy. Rescuing my first dog from the shelter. Reading Song of the Lionness for the first time.”
“What is that?” Castiel questioned, frowning.
“A book series about a girl who pretends to be a boy so that she can become a knight. They were kind of an obsession when I was a kid.”
“A worthwhile story,” Castiel agreed. “Heaven is all of those things. Tailored to your life-to your soul. It’s peace. Where you can be with the people you love or loved, forever.”
“But those are just memories.”
“There are exceptions. For soulmates, for example. They share a space.”
“Like you and Dean,” Jody said.
Castiel laughed. “I don’t know if we qualify,” he mused. “Until a few months ago, I didn’t have a soul. I’m not even sure I’ll go to Heaven; I’m an abomination. Hell or Purgatory are equally likely.”
“But your friends are in charge,” Jody protested. “Aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Castiel agreed. “But if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that change is unpredictable, and Gabriel is erratic in temperament. And I have done him no favors. He was quite happy in hiding, and now he’s quite miserable, and it’s all my fault.”
“You did what you thought was right,” Jody said. “I think it was, too. Everyone deserves a choice.”
Castiel tipped his head in gratitude, even though she couldn’t see it.
“Those are the only people who share?” she asked. “Soulmates?”
“There is a rebellion happening among retired hunters in Heaven,” Castiel said. “A particularly eccentric man who goes by Ash has made it his job to locate hunters in their various Heavens and reunite them with one another, and with whoever they wish to see. He pulls them out of their recycled memories, their peace, and gives them another choice.”
“I want that,” Jody said. “Screw peace.”
Castiel chuckled again. “I’m sure that Bobby will see to it that you’re found,” he reassured.
“I’d want to see my husband,” she murmured. “My son. Living my life on repeat...that would be really dull, don’t you think?”
“You wouldn’t know,” he pointed out. “You wouldn’t remember death, or anything unpleasant.”
“But it would be a lie,” she said. “Part of what makes the good is the bad. And I do hate the bad. The way they died...” Her voice caught, and Castiel squeezed her arm a little tighter. “But without that, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“I told Dean, once, after Sam had fallen into Hell and ended the Apocalypse, that he could only have peace or freedom, not both.”
“Can’t have both, huh.”
“No. I think they are mutually exclusive states of existence.”
She smiled again, lifting her head from his shoulder. “Well, here’s to freedom, then.”
They were quiet a moment, watching the sun sink closer to the horizon.
“Gabriel,” Jody huffed finally. “The archangel. Is erratic and miserable.”
They caught one another’s eye and laughed, and by the time they were done, Jody was wiping her eyes with shaking fingers and Castiel’s stomach ached.
“Balthazar reports that he’s been very irritable lately,” he finally managed. “Vanishing for days and weeks at a time. No one knows what he’s up to. He certainly hasn’t been here.”
“Would we know?” Jody asked, still grinning.
“We would know,” he confirmed, smiling back.
Dean was eighty-two days sober, and he still craved whiskey, a constant drone at the back of his mind that was never quite silent. At times, it blended into other things-missing Sam, worrying about Cas, absorbed into a hunt-but it was always there, needling him. No matter how much water he chugged (and he did chug water, now; he carried a liter bottle everywhere he went and constantly felt as though he was drowning), he thirsted for it, the rich dryness of it, the thing that somehow made him feel more hydrated than any amount of water ever could.
But he didn’t throw himself in the path of temptation; he left the bars to Cas and avoided the liquor aisle in supermarkets. He focused on hunting, picked up the odd job here and there that didn’t require him to come within fifty feet of whiskey, and they scraped by on credit card scams and cheap motel rooms and as many free meals as they could con out of grateful survivors of supernatural fallout.
And the weird thing-the horrible thing-was that he was happy. Happy enough, anyway. Happier than he’d been at Lisa’s; happier than he’d been since before Sam’s swan dive, maybe even since before Hell. Life hadn’t been this straightforward in so long, just moving from case to case and taking their work where they could find it, living in each other’s pockets, and sometimes he looked over from the driver’s seat of the Impala and expected to find fresh-out-of-Stanford-Sam sitting there, making a face at him.
He was never disappointed, exactly, that it was always Cas looking back at him instead-Cas of the newly-shaggy hair that he wasn’t ready to cut yet; Cas of the perpetual stubble that he couldn’t bear to part with; Cas of the piercing blue eyes and the handprint burned into his forearm and his newfound affinity for Dean’s old jackets and the smile that didn’t make his lips move but made the corners of his eyes crinkle instead. He loved Cas, his angel, his partner, his best friend, the man who was making him sappy in his middle age even if only internally, but sometimes he missed his brother and the days when Sam was riding shotgun and Cas was staring at him in the rearview mirror from the backseat.
Dean was eighty-two days sober, and he still craved whiskey, and he still had his ear to the ground for any sign of Crowley, and he was awkwardly and uncomfortably happy, when there was a rough, stuttered knock on the door of their motel room, then a thump as whoever stood on the other side collapsed against the door.
Cas had been half-asleep, sprawled on top of the blankets on his stomach and still in jeans and a t-shirt, but he jerked awake at the sound with the kind of sudden alertness that only hunters and soldiers and Angels of the Lord ever managed. Dean pushed back from his seat at the table, handgun held loose at his side, and waved Cas to the other side of the door, where he’d have a clear shot at whatever stood beyond it. Given the current gentle scritching sounds against the door, it was more likely that whatever it was would collapse over their threshold the second Dean turned the knob than succeed in attacking them, but years of hunting had taught him it was better not to hope for the best.
He pulled open the door, just a foot, wide enough for Cas to see out, his finger light on the trigger, and he felt the drop in his partner’s stomach with sickening clarity; Cas’s eyes widened just a fraction and he fell back half a step, lowering his weapon. Nothing fell into their motel room, but someone shuffled a step back from the door, and there was a gruff “easy, son” and a firm “it’s okay, kiddo.” Cas’s eyes, blue and shocked, flicked to Dean. His chin jerked up, and Dean yanked the door the rest of the way, finger off the trigger.
These days, Cas reminded Dean of Missouri in what he could see and sense; like the old psychic, he could see through the lie of flesh to the demon beneath, could feel the traces that monsters left behind, had a firm intuition that was rarely wrong when it came to hunting, though Dean wasn’t sure if that was due to his clairvoyance or just the millennia spent as a warrior. And Cas didn’t sense a damn thing off about the thing or things behind the door, even though Dean’s stomach turned and he felt as though he’d been tipped sideways into a nightmare.
Sam’s shadowed, bloodshot eyes were locked on Cas, and he breathed shallowly, short bursts ragged with anxiety. His hair was lank, greasy, his shirt soaked through with patches of sweat, his face twisted in guilt and the kind of raw pain that Dean remembered flaying him alive after getting out of the Pit. He hunched, as though trying and failing to curl in on himself, bringing him down to a height closer to Dean’s than he’d been since he was a teenager.
“I tried to kill you,” he rasped out.
Dean moved instinctively to intercept Sam’s line of sight, taking in, numbly, that both Bobby and Gabriel hovered just behind his brother, Bobby’s features torn with anxiety, Gabriel more battleworn than Dean had ever seen him. Finally, Sam’s hazel eyes tracked to Dean’s face, blinking rapidly. He was shivering wildly, on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, and Dean reached out, still dazed, to wrap firm hands around Sam’s shoulders in an attempt to ground him.
“Hey, Sammy,” he said, trying to be gentle, but his voice came out all wrong, tight and choked. “That wasn’t you, okay?”
“Dean,” Sam registered, finally, and lifted one clenched hand from where it was locked at his side to press his palm too hard into Dean’s chest. Something metal and half-sharp poked into his chest where it was crushed against Sam’s hand, and when Dean reached up to pry Sam’s fingers off, his brother flinched back from the touch. The pendant, warm and gold, dropped; the cord tangled up in Dean’s fingers. He glanced down at the amulet he’d thrown away nearly a year ago, stunned.
“I’m sorry,” Sam muttered, still wrecked and shaking. “I’m so, so sorry, it was all a mistake, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t-”
Dean crushed the amulet in his fist and yanked Sam down into a hug, folding his arms around his brother, eyes shut tight, and Sam’s babbling turned into broken syllables, mutters that burst out of him and then subsided. He swayed on his feet, and he didn’t touch Dean, his hands clenching and unclenching at his side.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Dean said, and held Sam at arm’s length, fingers curled loosely around his shoulders. His eyes darted everywhere, over Dean’s shoulder, around the motel room, flitting in terror between Cas and everything else but not meeting Dean’s gaze again. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded, voice flat.
“Gabriel turned up with him yesterday,” Bobby said gruffly, glancing sideways at the archangel beside him.
“Yesterday,” Dean said, gently tugging Sam further into the motel room. “It took you this long to-you couldn’t fly him-”
“No,” Gabriel snapped, “I couldn’t. It takes a fuckton of energy to extract anything from the Pit, let alone Lucifer’s cage, and that’s not even mentioning the piece I had to get out of Purgatory. I’m about as useful as Castiel right now, though at least I’ll eventually recover.”
“You should have come straight here,” Castiel said, but there was no real venom in his voice, just shock.
“Would’ve, if that knitting pattern on Dean’s ribs didn’t conceal you from angelic sight. You’re too close to Dean, it’s hard to get a fix on you. Lucky for you the old man is relatively stationary.”
“C’mon,” Dean coaxed, glancing behind him at the bed. “Little further.”
Sam had to be cajoled into sitting; it took effort to unlock his knees and perch him at the edge of the bed, and Gabriel hovered within three feet of them the whole time, hand half-raised as though about to forehead-touch it all away.
“What’s wrong with him?” Dean said roughly, eyes locked on Sam. He heard Bobby close the door of the motel room, a soft click that echoed through Sam’s wild mumbles and the otherwise strained silence.
“He’s been in Hell,” Gabriel replied, pity twisting his features before they fell back into detached disinterest. “There’s only so much I can do, no matter how many favors I call in. He’s been down there for five months now, that’s a good fifty years Hell time, and God only knows how much more you can tack on for being locked up with the special criminals.”
“Favors?” Castiel repeated from across the room; he was perched on the table, directly behind Sam and therefore out of his line of sight.
Gabriel grimaced. “Sort of. Guy didn’t really owe me anything. He just likes order. I appealed to his sense of organization.”
“I was going to kill him,” Sam interrupted, breaking from his wild darting glances around the room to stare up at Gabriel, eyes full of terror. “I was going to-Cas, and Dean, I was going to, oh, God, I didn’t care, I didn’t even care-”
Gabriel flinched and closed the gap, dropping a hand to Sam’s shoulder, and he quieted, eyes clearing momentarily. Dean noticed again how haggard Gabriel looked, with shadows under his eyes to match Sam’s, hair sticking out at odd angles; when he pulled his hand back, it shook. He collapsed-gracefully, but it was still a surrender to gravity-into a sitting position on the floor, legs folding beneath him.
Sam blinked down at the archangel. “Sorry,” he said quietly, stiller, somehow.
“S’okay, kiddo,” Gabriel replied, hunching forward, elbows on his knees and face in his hands. “We’ll figure it out.”
Dean yanked the cord over his head, letting the amulet fall to his shirt. “How the hell did you keep this on you?” he asked; Sam looked back up at him.
“It was on me when I jumped into the Pit,” Sam replied, a little jerky, but at least his gaze was steady. “I picked it out of the trash when you threw it away. Thought you might want it back. Someday.”
“You’re a sentimental piece of shit, you know that?” Dean muttered, but he was smiling so hard that it felt like his face would split in two.
“Jerk,” Sam mumbled, smiling a little, but then his face fell. “God, that was-that was fucked up, what-what happened.”
“Yeah, what else is new,” Dean replied, crouching down in front of Sam. “But we’re okay. We’re all okay-”
“Speak for yourself,” Gabriel groaned beside him.
“And you’re gonna be fine,” Dean said firmly, ignoring the archangel. “We’ll get off the road a while, get you better-”
“I told you we should have just made them come to South Dakota,” Gabriel said, emerging from his hands to glare at Bobby across the room. Bobby stared back, his features just as hard. “I told you we were just going to end up going right back there-”
“And I told you, if you wanted to go find them and convince them that Sam was alive-”
“I wasn’t going to leave him with you,” Gabriel snarled. “He’d be dead again by now and what a waste of two fucking months that would have been-”
“Everyone just shut the hell up,” Dean snapped, and Sam smiled, strained. “How long does this last? The lucidity?”
“Not all that long,” Gabriel replied, flopping back onto the carpet. “Thirty minutes tops, steady degradation after fifteen. He’s still lucid, still in there, just, you know, crippled by the guilt and the trauma and the torture and he can’t really get over that, so-”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said mildly, “maybe you would like to spend dozens of years in a box with your asshole brothers and see how you do coming out the other side-”
Dean knew it was wrong and twisted but the laugh reared up inside him anyway, and soon, he was hunched over on the floor, braying with the absurdity of the entire situation, numb with relief at having his brother back soul included, and Cas was chuckling across the room; even Gabriel managed a few tired snorts when Bobby dissolved into snickers, too. Dean managed to roll up onto his knees and, still laughing, hugged his brother hard enough to squeeze the breath out of him, and this time, Sam hugged him back, overlong arms squeezing him weakly, and just like that, Dean was home.
“He’s asleep.”
Cas leaned forward at Bobby’s scuffed-up table, rubbing his eyes. “Couch or panic room?”
“I’m banishing you to the basement.” Gabriel collapsed heavily on the couch. “You two can’t do a damn thing for him. I should be closer.”
Dean eyed the archangel warily, but Gabriel flopped back into the cushions and closed his eyes, and there was no way he could hope to move the asshole at this point.
“Fine,” he conceded. “Come get us if anything happens.”
“You’ll probably hear me screaming in agony,” Gabriel muttered, pressing an arm over his eyes. “Should wake you up.”
Cas rolled his eyes-he’d taken to doing that a lot, lately-and got up from the table, wincing through the ache in his lower back. It echoed to Dean, intensified uncomfortably as they stumbled downstairs, exhausted. The drive had been long, and Gabriel was barely able to keep up with Sam, who was in a perpetual state of decay.
Dean thought he might even be exhausted enough to sleep, which was a first, when it came to Sam being in any kind of danger.
“It’s always something with us, huh,” he said tiredly, yanking his shirt off over his head.
Cas stripped out of his jeans with the same efficient, heavy movements. “You’re a Winchester,” he pointed out, fighting a yawn. “If it’s any consolation, though, there are no other wayward brothers to worry about. Gabriel promised that Death saw Adam safely to Heaven.”
“How the hell did Gabriel get Death to help him?” Dean grumbled, collapsing onto the old rollaway. The mattress groaned beneath him.
“Not our problem,” Cas said immediately, rolling into bed beside Dean, who stretched out his arm automatically, letting Cas curl into his side. “What’s the phrase? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Yeah, I know, and believe me, no love lost on the guy, he once killed me a hundred and three times-”
“Indeed,” Castiel said darkly, and Dean’s skin prickled the way it used to whenever Cas got especially smitey.
“Yeah, well, despite that,” Dean continued. “He looks like he’s in bad shape, and he did get my brother back, so-”
“You would do well to remember that Gabriel only ever does things for partially selfish reasons,” Castiel muttered into Dean’s shoulder. “There was something in it for him. I’m just not sure what it was. Until we find out, though-on accident, probably, because I don’t actually want to know-I suggest we pretend that there is no reason, Dean.”
“You’re really sick of this shit, aren’t you,” Dean mused, tilting a tired smile down at the dark head of hair cradled on his chest.
“I think I’ve had enough Apocalypses for a lifetime, yes,” Castiel said, and this time, he did yawn. “I don’t want to accidentally start another one just because you’re curious.”
“Hey,” Dean protested.
“Go to sleep, Dean.”
Dean smiled and closed his eyes, curling his arm a little tighter around Cas. “Bossy,” he murmured, but Cas was already asleep, a soft snore drifting out against Dean’s skin, and Sam might have been falling apart twice an hour and, yes, there was an archangel with a killer headache collapsed on the couch upstairs, but this, to Dean Winchester, felt an awful lot like peace.
Go on... Epilogue.
Author: todisturbtheuni
Rating: NC-17.
Genre and/or Pairing: Angst; Hurt/Comfort; Romance; Castiel/Dean Winchester
Spoilers: Through the end of season 5, but some minor for season 6.
Warnings: Explicit sex; graphic torture scenes, which I'll warn for at applicable chapters; minor/side character death (neither Dean nor Castiel).
Word Count: 110K (total)
Summary: Sam's missing his soul, Castiel has a pissy archangelic nemesis, and Dean wonders if he'll be spending the rest of his life making sure the Apocalypse doesn't go ahead as scheduled. Still, though. He's happy to see Cas. Indiana wasn't really working out. Unabashed six-fix, in a universe where Castiel made a different choice, and things snowball from that point forward.
Masterpost!
Go back to chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
“Dean!”
“Come and get me, you son of a bitch-!”
Castiel ran, boots heavy on the dirt trail, heavier than his wings had ever been. It was moments like these that he missed them with an ache that set fire to his shoulder blades; he could already be at Dean’s side, a hand on the Wendigo, burning it out. The thing roared, an inhuman noise of rage, and Dean’s flare gun went off but the sound didn’t stop. Castiel saw the light go off, missing its mark, and heard the heavy thud of Dean hitting the ground, felt secondhand as the wind was knocked out of him.
He saw movement to his left and skidded to a halt. The Wendigo’s back was to him, and the monster was already hunching down over Dean, stretching out gnarled fingers to grab hold of the hunter. Castiel raised his own flare gun and fired. It screamed as it went down, collapsing forward, and Dean scrambled back on his heels to get out of the way of the burning monster.
Dean was panting, dirt streaked across his face, but he was grinning, too. Castiel edged around the pile of flickering ash and offered a hand to help Dean up.
“I hate Wendigos,” Dean grunted with no real venom. He let Castiel haul him to his feet, wincing when he put too much weight on his left foot.
“Is it broken?” Castiel asked, squinting down at Dean’s boot.
“Just sprained. We’ll get some ice back at the motel.” Dean lifted his free hand to brush a thumb through the graze on Castiel’s cheek; he felt the warm smear of blood over skin. “Any other damage?”
“I’m fine,” Castiel replied. “You should be more careful.”
“Okay, Mom,” Dean shot back, smirking.
“Come on,” Castiel said, exasperated, and yanked Dean’s left arm over his shoulders. Dean let out an indignant yelp. “You should,” Castiel repeated, urging him forward. “I have no idea why you feel the need to taunt every monster you hunt.”
“You’re the asshole who trapped an archangel in holy fire and told him he was your little bitch,” Dean groaned, but let Castiel take part of his weight.
“He was trapped,” Castiel pointed out. “The Wendigo was not.”
Ignoring this, Dean asked, “Wanna grab a bite to eat before we go back to the motel? Burgers.” He quirked his eyebrows.
Dean was, by no stretch of the imagination, fully healed. Castiel could still hear the silent scream from deep within his mind, the voice flayed open on a bed of lava deep within a Hell he couldn’t leave behind, but the dead look in his eyes had, at least, vacated; there were different thoughts and feelings bubbling inside him besides his pain, including a sudden rush of affection when Castiel tugged his arm tighter around his shoulders, a weird surge of pride as the Wendigo burned, things that were outside the event horizon of Sam’s death.
He was, at least, healing. There was a little more of the man that Castiel had once known resurfacing by the day, including a fixation on bad food and taunting monsters.
“You should ice your ankle,” Castiel pointed out reluctantly.
“We can grab ‘em and head back to the motel.”
Castiel considered the nutritional value of yet another late night eating cheeseburgers.
“Come on,” Dean groaned. “Our lives suck, man. The small pleasures are the only thing we’ve got.”
“There are pleasures that aren’t so likely to clog your arteries,” Castiel deadpanned, but he gave in, dumping Dean a little unceremoniously into the passenger side of the Impala. Dean sputtered, his thoughts tripping backward to the night before-and the night before that-and the night before that-and Castiel smirked as he made his way to the driver’s side, remembering the details with relish. The human mind got hung up on the most peculiar things: the exact sound Dean made when Castiel was first buried deep inside him; the glistening sweat in his dark blond hair when Castiel raked his nails through it; the way he squirmed, aborted little movements that Castiel stilled with a hand pressed into his lower back-
“Get us back to the motel and I’ll make you squirm,” Dean grouched halfheartedly as Castiel dropped into the Impala.
Castiel smiled. “Later. You’re hungry.”
Dean yanked him across the seat, but the kiss he pressed into Castiel’s lips was soft, warm, gentle; his fingers unknotted from Castiel’s shirt and cupped the back of his neck instead. Castiel relaxed into the touch, his thoughts blanking over with a brief hum of pleasure. When Dean released him, the hunter’s ears were slightly red, and his smile was vaguely embarrassed, as though he’d just done something unintentionally cute and accidentally enjoyed it.
“Shut up,” Dean grumbled, and Castiel ducked his head to turn the key in the ignition, hiding his smile.
Castiel ate with Dean and then left him with Dr. Sexy reruns and an ice pack around his ankle. “I could come with, you know,” he said with a grimace. “I’m not going to leap over the bar and start guzzling bourbon, or anything.”
“I know. It’s better not to torture yourself, though.” Castiel yanked on his boots. “It shouldn’t take long.”
“Don’t pretend to be FBI.”
Castiel sighed, Dean smirked, and Castiel packed badges into his jacket that he was sure he wouldn’t need. He had watched humanity for a long time, and he was fast discovering that even while human, his expertise lay in eavesdropping rather than direct questioning.
Bars were a good place for it. The nearest town was Oconomowoc; the meteor they were currently tracking had fallen in two pieces near the outskirts. Main Street was the only part of town at all active on a Thursday night, and conveniently lined with the type of dive bars where Castiel blended into corners with relative ease. He picked the first on the street and parked the Impala, trying to appear unobtrusive.
The bar was only half-full, mostly of locals crowded around two TVs, absorbed by the tail-end of the Brewers-Marlins game. Castiel seated himself at the bar, close enough to overhear if any of them mentioned something besides baseball, but he wasn’t hopeful.
“Can I get you anything, bud?”
Castiel turned his attention to the bartender, hovering in front of him with a rag, wiping down a glass.
“Just a Miller, thanks.” He opened his wallet for cash. He wouldn’t drink much of it-the taste had never appealed to him-but he’d already learned the hard way that sitting in a bar and drinking nothing didn’t get him anywhere with people. They viewed the behavior as suspicious.
“Haven’t seen you around before.” The bartender didn’t seem antagonistic about this. He’d already flipped a clean glass upright on the bar in front of Castiel and was filling it with golden liquid.
“Just passing through. Castiel.” He held out his hand.
The bartender shook it. “That’s a mouthful. Kevin.”
“Cas, for short.” He pulled the beer toward him.
“Got family in the area, Cas?”
“Yes,” he said, a little too slow. The bartender looked at him askance. “My sister is having a baby soon,” he added quickly.
Kevin paused in wiping down another glass, frowning. “Not Jennifer Berken? Didn’t think she had a brother.”
“No,” he replied; by the look on the bartender’s face, it didn’t look as if it would help to be related to Jennifer Berken. “Anna Milton,” he fabricated. “In Hartland.”
“Well, congratulations to her, then. Better that you’re not mixed up in that business.”
Castiel took a polite sip of his beer. “What business?”
The bartender glanced toward the men gathered around the television and leaned forward. Castiel did the same, hoping that this was a gesture of confidence and that he wasn’t about to be booted from the bar.
“Her husband came in here, week or so ago,” Kevin said. “Ranting and raving about how she’d cheated on him and saying he was going to kill her. Had to call the police. Got everyone riled up. It’s a small town, that kind of thing doesn’t happen much. He slept it off in a holding cell and vanished in the morning. She’s all on her own now. Poor girl. They grew up here, you know. High school sweethearts and all that.”
“That’s very sad,” Castiel murmured, heart sinking.
“Tried to convince Chris, tried to tell him-hey, man, maybe the doctors were wrong. Maybe you should take it as a miracle, or something. He wouldn’t believe it, though. Too stubborn for his own good.” Kevin shrugged. “Anyway. Enjoy the beer, man. Let me know if I can get you anything else.”
Castiel sat at the bar a long time, only finishing half of the syrupy beer, watching the other patrons filter out in victory when the game wrapped up in Milwaukee’s favor. When there were only a handful of others left, the door blew open; a Midwest autumn chill swept through Castiel’s jacket.
“Guinness,” a familiar voice called out.
A second later, Balthazar was on the stool beside Castiel, watching Kevin fill a glass with dark liquid.
“Why are you drinking that?” the angel muttered, eyeing the now-flat Miller in front of Castiel.
“Not for pleasure,” Castiel said, wrapping his fingers around the glass.
“Obviously.” Balthazar drank down a quarter of the pint immediately and set it back on the bar with a satisfied sigh.
“Why are you here?” Castiel asked, watching Balthazar eye the few patrons left in the bar, all hunched over their individual beers at separate tables.
“Looking for you. Impala's outside. Gabriel’s acting strangely.”
“I didn’t think that was my problem anymore,” Castiel said pointedly, raising his glass.
Balthazar rolled his eyes. “Just thought you might like to know, mate. He keeps vanishing-sometimes for weeks at a time. But he’s not going to Earth. No idea where he’s going.”
“Does he always come back?”
“So far, yeah.”
“Then I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Making sure Inias will have a good home,” Castiel replied.
“Thought that wasn’t your problem anymore.”
“Heaven isn’t watching over them.”
“So you will?”
Castiel stayed silent, staring at his beer.
Balthazar sighed, more heavily this time. “Cassie.”
“It’s my fault,” Castiel said flatly. “They would never have considered it otherwise. The least I can do is make sure that they’ll be happy.”
“You can’t guarantee that.”
“I can try.”
Balthazar rested a hand on his shoulder. They stayed at the bar until Kevin closed for the night.
The woman inside the house was pregnant and alone.
Castiel felt his own discomfort, just beneath his skin, aching and itching; he missed the rumble of the Impala’s engine, but the car attracted enough attention when the engine wasn’t growling, and the last thing they wanted was a suspicious neighbor coming out to shoo them off. And Castiel couldn’t move from this spot, didn’t want to. His eyes were snared on the woman in the window, the unkempt red hair, the shadows beneath her eyes, the hand smoothing mindlessly over her still-flat belly while the other hand clutched a mug of coffee. She was wan and shivering in the predawn light, a crocheted blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
“You sure it’s her?” Dean asked, leaning across the front seat toward Castiel.
“Yes,” he replied, watching the woman as she lifted the mug to her lips and took a tentative sip. “The trajectory is right, and her husband was sterile. They’ve been unable to conceive.”
Dean raised his eyebrows in silent question. “Her husband left her,” Castiel clarified. “He was at the local bar last week, ranting about her unfaithfulness. The bartender is still telling the story.”
“But she wasn’t,” Dean pointed out needlessly. “Just happened to get in the way of falling angel sperm.”
Castiel rolled his eyes, Dean smirked at his own joke, and the woman looked down at the hand rubbing her stomach. Her eyes were red from tears cried hours earlier, but the corner of her mouth quirked up, momentary awe flitting across her features, and the discomfort in Castiel eased.
“Which one is it?” Dean asked.
“Inias,” Castiel answered. “His Grace was closest.”
Dean snorted.
“What?” Castiel asked absently, still watching the woman.
“Better hope she doesn’t name him that. Kid’ll be bullied for years.”
Castiel smiled. “Inias responds well to bullying. With or without Grace, that doesn’t change.”
“Think they’ll be okay?”
Castiel’s fingers twitched on the windowsill. He willed himself to leave them behind, a grieving woman alone with one of his Fallen soldiers, and tried to take comfort in the fact that they would have each other.
“He’ll have a normal life,” Dean pointed out, as though trying to be reassuring. “As normal as any of us get, anyway. More normal than ours. That’s something, right?”
Castiel nodded and finally looked away. “There’ll be more,” he said, defeated. “The war has made a lot of angels feel...obsolete.”
Dean squeezed Castiel’s shoulder, his hand warm. “We’ll find them.”
They crossed the country several times over in the following few months, picking up cases and tracking meteors to their landing sites. Castiel’s back complained about motel beds and ghosts throwing him into walls, and his adjustment to being human was far from over. He had nightmares about Hell, dreams of wandering that burning labyrinth while his garrison died around him, and woke up sweating and screaming just as often as Dean. The memories had never bothered him before-haunted him, of course, but not interrupted his functioning.
Now, though, there were days when he was jumpy and moody, days when he snapped at Dean for no real reason, days when they got into shouting matches because they were both irrevocably damaged. There were nights when he woke up sobbing from formless dreams, and Dean could barely put hands on him to soothe him, his skin crawled so painfully; there were days when several millennia of memories crowded in on him and threatened to suffocate him. With Dean relatively functional again, Castiel’s rigid control of his new humanity failed.
“It’s okay,” Dean soothed when Castiel was at his worst. “This is what being human’s like, man. It sucks sometimes.”
Castiel knew that, but he didn’t have to like it.
He took comfort in the little things: reading stories on long car rides, the ones that he had begun to forget the finer details of; warm mugs and travel cups of tea and milk, the kind that towed him slowly to wakefulness in the morning; long runs that Dean had started joining him on, grumbling all the way as he adjusted to sneakers after being so long in boots; the bright pop of citrus in an orange; the touch of the wind ruffling his hair or the sun caressing his skin; Dean breathing softly on the back of his neck in the middle of the night as they curled close together beneath the blankets. Being human was often a frustrating, painful enterprise, but there were things he cherished, too, things that reminded him of why he’d chosen this path.
Whenever they crossed through the midwest, they stopped at Bobby’s for a few days.
“If it isn’t the prodigal sons,” the old man shouted from the porch the first time they passed through. Jody ducked out through the door and grinned when her eyes met Castiel’s. It had been a long night in the country outside of Des Moines, and Castiel was still bruised from where the Woman in White had attempted to rip open his chest, but he still embraced the sheriff tightly, ignoring the pain.
“He missed you,” she whispered conspiratorially in his ear.
That much was obvious; Bobby hugged Dean as though he would never let the Righteous Man go again.
“I missed you, too,” Jody added, with another quiet smile, and Bobby clasped Castiel’s shoulder as Dean jokingly picked Jody up in an enthusiastic hug.
“You both seem better,” the sheriff told him the next day. She hoisted herself up on the hood of a beaten-in junker beside him, giving a little shiver in the brisk autumn breeze. It was early October, and a short-lived Indian summer was fading fast.
“Hunting is good for him,” Castiel said honestly. “It is for me, as well.”
“And your angels?” Jody asked.
“Safe,” Castiel replied, thinking of Hester and the beaming parents-to-be in Detroit, Samandriel and the quiet pleasure of a middle-aged couple in Flagstaff, the others who Fell sporadically and were slowly integrating into homes that were good or good enough-and if they weren’t, then someday he and Dean would intervene, somehow.
“Will there be any left in Heaven?” she pressed curiously.
Castiel nodded. “The legions are many. There will always be angels in Heaven.”
“Do you ever miss it?”
Castiel thought of the overbright place he had once preferred in Heaven, where a red kite sailed in a cloudless blue sky and the grass was stained, now, perpetually dark with his own blood. He remembered the endless drone of existence, of obedience, of faith, of worship, and thought of the tumult of the last few years, the uncertainty, the pain. He felt Dean, washing dishes in Bobby’s kitchen and laughing at something the other hunter said. He remembered his wings and surreptitiously rubbed a hand over the scar on his forearm, reassurance of its continued presence.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Not often. I miss my brothers and sisters the most, I think.”
“Will they remember you when they grow up?”
“It’s unlikely.” The thought made his stomach clench unhappily.
“What about when they die?”
Castiel shrugged. “They might, or they might not. This is unprecedented.” Dean’s right, he thought, a little morosely, and felt Dean brighten smugly in the distance. That should be my tagline.
Jody linked her arm through Castiel’s and leaned against his shoulder. It was comfortable, comforting-human and yet simple, uncomplicated.
“What’s Heaven like, Castiel?” she asked. “How does it work?”
He thought of the hundreds of billions of souls, the divided lands, of the best way to explain. “What are your happiest memories?”
He felt her smile against his shoulder. “My son being born. Marrying my husband. Graduating from the police academy. Rescuing my first dog from the shelter. Reading Song of the Lionness for the first time.”
“What is that?” Castiel questioned, frowning.
“A book series about a girl who pretends to be a boy so that she can become a knight. They were kind of an obsession when I was a kid.”
“A worthwhile story,” Castiel agreed. “Heaven is all of those things. Tailored to your life-to your soul. It’s peace. Where you can be with the people you love or loved, forever.”
“But those are just memories.”
“There are exceptions. For soulmates, for example. They share a space.”
“Like you and Dean,” Jody said.
Castiel laughed. “I don’t know if we qualify,” he mused. “Until a few months ago, I didn’t have a soul. I’m not even sure I’ll go to Heaven; I’m an abomination. Hell or Purgatory are equally likely.”
“But your friends are in charge,” Jody protested. “Aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Castiel agreed. “But if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that change is unpredictable, and Gabriel is erratic in temperament. And I have done him no favors. He was quite happy in hiding, and now he’s quite miserable, and it’s all my fault.”
“You did what you thought was right,” Jody said. “I think it was, too. Everyone deserves a choice.”
Castiel tipped his head in gratitude, even though she couldn’t see it.
“Those are the only people who share?” she asked. “Soulmates?”
“There is a rebellion happening among retired hunters in Heaven,” Castiel said. “A particularly eccentric man who goes by Ash has made it his job to locate hunters in their various Heavens and reunite them with one another, and with whoever they wish to see. He pulls them out of their recycled memories, their peace, and gives them another choice.”
“I want that,” Jody said. “Screw peace.”
Castiel chuckled again. “I’m sure that Bobby will see to it that you’re found,” he reassured.
“I’d want to see my husband,” she murmured. “My son. Living my life on repeat...that would be really dull, don’t you think?”
“You wouldn’t know,” he pointed out. “You wouldn’t remember death, or anything unpleasant.”
“But it would be a lie,” she said. “Part of what makes the good is the bad. And I do hate the bad. The way they died...” Her voice caught, and Castiel squeezed her arm a little tighter. “But without that, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“I told Dean, once, after Sam had fallen into Hell and ended the Apocalypse, that he could only have peace or freedom, not both.”
“Can’t have both, huh.”
“No. I think they are mutually exclusive states of existence.”
She smiled again, lifting her head from his shoulder. “Well, here’s to freedom, then.”
They were quiet a moment, watching the sun sink closer to the horizon.
“Gabriel,” Jody huffed finally. “The archangel. Is erratic and miserable.”
They caught one another’s eye and laughed, and by the time they were done, Jody was wiping her eyes with shaking fingers and Castiel’s stomach ached.
“Balthazar reports that he’s been very irritable lately,” he finally managed. “Vanishing for days and weeks at a time. No one knows what he’s up to. He certainly hasn’t been here.”
“Would we know?” Jody asked, still grinning.
“We would know,” he confirmed, smiling back.
Dean was eighty-two days sober, and he still craved whiskey, a constant drone at the back of his mind that was never quite silent. At times, it blended into other things-missing Sam, worrying about Cas, absorbed into a hunt-but it was always there, needling him. No matter how much water he chugged (and he did chug water, now; he carried a liter bottle everywhere he went and constantly felt as though he was drowning), he thirsted for it, the rich dryness of it, the thing that somehow made him feel more hydrated than any amount of water ever could.
But he didn’t throw himself in the path of temptation; he left the bars to Cas and avoided the liquor aisle in supermarkets. He focused on hunting, picked up the odd job here and there that didn’t require him to come within fifty feet of whiskey, and they scraped by on credit card scams and cheap motel rooms and as many free meals as they could con out of grateful survivors of supernatural fallout.
And the weird thing-the horrible thing-was that he was happy. Happy enough, anyway. Happier than he’d been at Lisa’s; happier than he’d been since before Sam’s swan dive, maybe even since before Hell. Life hadn’t been this straightforward in so long, just moving from case to case and taking their work where they could find it, living in each other’s pockets, and sometimes he looked over from the driver’s seat of the Impala and expected to find fresh-out-of-Stanford-Sam sitting there, making a face at him.
He was never disappointed, exactly, that it was always Cas looking back at him instead-Cas of the newly-shaggy hair that he wasn’t ready to cut yet; Cas of the perpetual stubble that he couldn’t bear to part with; Cas of the piercing blue eyes and the handprint burned into his forearm and his newfound affinity for Dean’s old jackets and the smile that didn’t make his lips move but made the corners of his eyes crinkle instead. He loved Cas, his angel, his partner, his best friend, the man who was making him sappy in his middle age even if only internally, but sometimes he missed his brother and the days when Sam was riding shotgun and Cas was staring at him in the rearview mirror from the backseat.
Dean was eighty-two days sober, and he still craved whiskey, and he still had his ear to the ground for any sign of Crowley, and he was awkwardly and uncomfortably happy, when there was a rough, stuttered knock on the door of their motel room, then a thump as whoever stood on the other side collapsed against the door.
Cas had been half-asleep, sprawled on top of the blankets on his stomach and still in jeans and a t-shirt, but he jerked awake at the sound with the kind of sudden alertness that only hunters and soldiers and Angels of the Lord ever managed. Dean pushed back from his seat at the table, handgun held loose at his side, and waved Cas to the other side of the door, where he’d have a clear shot at whatever stood beyond it. Given the current gentle scritching sounds against the door, it was more likely that whatever it was would collapse over their threshold the second Dean turned the knob than succeed in attacking them, but years of hunting had taught him it was better not to hope for the best.
He pulled open the door, just a foot, wide enough for Cas to see out, his finger light on the trigger, and he felt the drop in his partner’s stomach with sickening clarity; Cas’s eyes widened just a fraction and he fell back half a step, lowering his weapon. Nothing fell into their motel room, but someone shuffled a step back from the door, and there was a gruff “easy, son” and a firm “it’s okay, kiddo.” Cas’s eyes, blue and shocked, flicked to Dean. His chin jerked up, and Dean yanked the door the rest of the way, finger off the trigger.
These days, Cas reminded Dean of Missouri in what he could see and sense; like the old psychic, he could see through the lie of flesh to the demon beneath, could feel the traces that monsters left behind, had a firm intuition that was rarely wrong when it came to hunting, though Dean wasn’t sure if that was due to his clairvoyance or just the millennia spent as a warrior. And Cas didn’t sense a damn thing off about the thing or things behind the door, even though Dean’s stomach turned and he felt as though he’d been tipped sideways into a nightmare.
Sam’s shadowed, bloodshot eyes were locked on Cas, and he breathed shallowly, short bursts ragged with anxiety. His hair was lank, greasy, his shirt soaked through with patches of sweat, his face twisted in guilt and the kind of raw pain that Dean remembered flaying him alive after getting out of the Pit. He hunched, as though trying and failing to curl in on himself, bringing him down to a height closer to Dean’s than he’d been since he was a teenager.
“I tried to kill you,” he rasped out.
Dean moved instinctively to intercept Sam’s line of sight, taking in, numbly, that both Bobby and Gabriel hovered just behind his brother, Bobby’s features torn with anxiety, Gabriel more battleworn than Dean had ever seen him. Finally, Sam’s hazel eyes tracked to Dean’s face, blinking rapidly. He was shivering wildly, on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, and Dean reached out, still dazed, to wrap firm hands around Sam’s shoulders in an attempt to ground him.
“Hey, Sammy,” he said, trying to be gentle, but his voice came out all wrong, tight and choked. “That wasn’t you, okay?”
“Dean,” Sam registered, finally, and lifted one clenched hand from where it was locked at his side to press his palm too hard into Dean’s chest. Something metal and half-sharp poked into his chest where it was crushed against Sam’s hand, and when Dean reached up to pry Sam’s fingers off, his brother flinched back from the touch. The pendant, warm and gold, dropped; the cord tangled up in Dean’s fingers. He glanced down at the amulet he’d thrown away nearly a year ago, stunned.
“I’m sorry,” Sam muttered, still wrecked and shaking. “I’m so, so sorry, it was all a mistake, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t-”
Dean crushed the amulet in his fist and yanked Sam down into a hug, folding his arms around his brother, eyes shut tight, and Sam’s babbling turned into broken syllables, mutters that burst out of him and then subsided. He swayed on his feet, and he didn’t touch Dean, his hands clenching and unclenching at his side.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Dean said, and held Sam at arm’s length, fingers curled loosely around his shoulders. His eyes darted everywhere, over Dean’s shoulder, around the motel room, flitting in terror between Cas and everything else but not meeting Dean’s gaze again. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded, voice flat.
“Gabriel turned up with him yesterday,” Bobby said gruffly, glancing sideways at the archangel beside him.
“Yesterday,” Dean said, gently tugging Sam further into the motel room. “It took you this long to-you couldn’t fly him-”
“No,” Gabriel snapped, “I couldn’t. It takes a fuckton of energy to extract anything from the Pit, let alone Lucifer’s cage, and that’s not even mentioning the piece I had to get out of Purgatory. I’m about as useful as Castiel right now, though at least I’ll eventually recover.”
“You should have come straight here,” Castiel said, but there was no real venom in his voice, just shock.
“Would’ve, if that knitting pattern on Dean’s ribs didn’t conceal you from angelic sight. You’re too close to Dean, it’s hard to get a fix on you. Lucky for you the old man is relatively stationary.”
“C’mon,” Dean coaxed, glancing behind him at the bed. “Little further.”
Sam had to be cajoled into sitting; it took effort to unlock his knees and perch him at the edge of the bed, and Gabriel hovered within three feet of them the whole time, hand half-raised as though about to forehead-touch it all away.
“What’s wrong with him?” Dean said roughly, eyes locked on Sam. He heard Bobby close the door of the motel room, a soft click that echoed through Sam’s wild mumbles and the otherwise strained silence.
“He’s been in Hell,” Gabriel replied, pity twisting his features before they fell back into detached disinterest. “There’s only so much I can do, no matter how many favors I call in. He’s been down there for five months now, that’s a good fifty years Hell time, and God only knows how much more you can tack on for being locked up with the special criminals.”
“Favors?” Castiel repeated from across the room; he was perched on the table, directly behind Sam and therefore out of his line of sight.
Gabriel grimaced. “Sort of. Guy didn’t really owe me anything. He just likes order. I appealed to his sense of organization.”
“I was going to kill him,” Sam interrupted, breaking from his wild darting glances around the room to stare up at Gabriel, eyes full of terror. “I was going to-Cas, and Dean, I was going to, oh, God, I didn’t care, I didn’t even care-”
Gabriel flinched and closed the gap, dropping a hand to Sam’s shoulder, and he quieted, eyes clearing momentarily. Dean noticed again how haggard Gabriel looked, with shadows under his eyes to match Sam’s, hair sticking out at odd angles; when he pulled his hand back, it shook. He collapsed-gracefully, but it was still a surrender to gravity-into a sitting position on the floor, legs folding beneath him.
Sam blinked down at the archangel. “Sorry,” he said quietly, stiller, somehow.
“S’okay, kiddo,” Gabriel replied, hunching forward, elbows on his knees and face in his hands. “We’ll figure it out.”
Dean yanked the cord over his head, letting the amulet fall to his shirt. “How the hell did you keep this on you?” he asked; Sam looked back up at him.
“It was on me when I jumped into the Pit,” Sam replied, a little jerky, but at least his gaze was steady. “I picked it out of the trash when you threw it away. Thought you might want it back. Someday.”
“You’re a sentimental piece of shit, you know that?” Dean muttered, but he was smiling so hard that it felt like his face would split in two.
“Jerk,” Sam mumbled, smiling a little, but then his face fell. “God, that was-that was fucked up, what-what happened.”
“Yeah, what else is new,” Dean replied, crouching down in front of Sam. “But we’re okay. We’re all okay-”
“Speak for yourself,” Gabriel groaned beside him.
“And you’re gonna be fine,” Dean said firmly, ignoring the archangel. “We’ll get off the road a while, get you better-”
“I told you we should have just made them come to South Dakota,” Gabriel said, emerging from his hands to glare at Bobby across the room. Bobby stared back, his features just as hard. “I told you we were just going to end up going right back there-”
“And I told you, if you wanted to go find them and convince them that Sam was alive-”
“I wasn’t going to leave him with you,” Gabriel snarled. “He’d be dead again by now and what a waste of two fucking months that would have been-”
“Everyone just shut the hell up,” Dean snapped, and Sam smiled, strained. “How long does this last? The lucidity?”
“Not all that long,” Gabriel replied, flopping back onto the carpet. “Thirty minutes tops, steady degradation after fifteen. He’s still lucid, still in there, just, you know, crippled by the guilt and the trauma and the torture and he can’t really get over that, so-”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said mildly, “maybe you would like to spend dozens of years in a box with your asshole brothers and see how you do coming out the other side-”
Dean knew it was wrong and twisted but the laugh reared up inside him anyway, and soon, he was hunched over on the floor, braying with the absurdity of the entire situation, numb with relief at having his brother back soul included, and Cas was chuckling across the room; even Gabriel managed a few tired snorts when Bobby dissolved into snickers, too. Dean managed to roll up onto his knees and, still laughing, hugged his brother hard enough to squeeze the breath out of him, and this time, Sam hugged him back, overlong arms squeezing him weakly, and just like that, Dean was home.
“He’s asleep.”
Cas leaned forward at Bobby’s scuffed-up table, rubbing his eyes. “Couch or panic room?”
“I’m banishing you to the basement.” Gabriel collapsed heavily on the couch. “You two can’t do a damn thing for him. I should be closer.”
Dean eyed the archangel warily, but Gabriel flopped back into the cushions and closed his eyes, and there was no way he could hope to move the asshole at this point.
“Fine,” he conceded. “Come get us if anything happens.”
“You’ll probably hear me screaming in agony,” Gabriel muttered, pressing an arm over his eyes. “Should wake you up.”
Cas rolled his eyes-he’d taken to doing that a lot, lately-and got up from the table, wincing through the ache in his lower back. It echoed to Dean, intensified uncomfortably as they stumbled downstairs, exhausted. The drive had been long, and Gabriel was barely able to keep up with Sam, who was in a perpetual state of decay.
Dean thought he might even be exhausted enough to sleep, which was a first, when it came to Sam being in any kind of danger.
“It’s always something with us, huh,” he said tiredly, yanking his shirt off over his head.
Cas stripped out of his jeans with the same efficient, heavy movements. “You’re a Winchester,” he pointed out, fighting a yawn. “If it’s any consolation, though, there are no other wayward brothers to worry about. Gabriel promised that Death saw Adam safely to Heaven.”
“How the hell did Gabriel get Death to help him?” Dean grumbled, collapsing onto the old rollaway. The mattress groaned beneath him.
“Not our problem,” Cas said immediately, rolling into bed beside Dean, who stretched out his arm automatically, letting Cas curl into his side. “What’s the phrase? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Yeah, I know, and believe me, no love lost on the guy, he once killed me a hundred and three times-”
“Indeed,” Castiel said darkly, and Dean’s skin prickled the way it used to whenever Cas got especially smitey.
“Yeah, well, despite that,” Dean continued. “He looks like he’s in bad shape, and he did get my brother back, so-”
“You would do well to remember that Gabriel only ever does things for partially selfish reasons,” Castiel muttered into Dean’s shoulder. “There was something in it for him. I’m just not sure what it was. Until we find out, though-on accident, probably, because I don’t actually want to know-I suggest we pretend that there is no reason, Dean.”
“You’re really sick of this shit, aren’t you,” Dean mused, tilting a tired smile down at the dark head of hair cradled on his chest.
“I think I’ve had enough Apocalypses for a lifetime, yes,” Castiel said, and this time, he did yawn. “I don’t want to accidentally start another one just because you’re curious.”
“Hey,” Dean protested.
“Go to sleep, Dean.”
Dean smiled and closed his eyes, curling his arm a little tighter around Cas. “Bossy,” he murmured, but Cas was already asleep, a soft snore drifting out against Dean’s skin, and Sam might have been falling apart twice an hour and, yes, there was an archangel with a killer headache collapsed on the couch upstairs, but this, to Dean Winchester, felt an awful lot like peace.
Go on... Epilogue.