Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it, after many days (2/2)
Back to part one...
One month ago.
Sam took a deep breath, and sat down beside Castiel on the Impala’s bonnet. “I want to go looking for it.”
Castiel took the wine glass Sam was holding out to him, and squinted through the sunset glare off the car’s windows at his older brother’s human face. It had that scrunched-up, determined look that Sam got whenever he was set on something that he knew Dean wouldn’t like and which he was kind of terrified of himself; and it was that that told Castiel what he meant.
“You guys could really do with a hand upstairs - a real hand, not just a mostly-human freak with Chamael’s memories weighing in on the arguments sometimes. And I’ve been talking to Gabriel and, well… Raphael means well, but he isn’t a leader, and he doesn’t really get it, I remember that now. And it’s not like it would be something foreign, not like Azazel’s blood. It’s still me, just… more of me, and I remember it, and I know how to use it, and I…” Sam stopped, stared at his empty glass, shoved a hand through his hair, and plunged on. “I miss it. Especially the way things are down here. We could be doing so much more. I mean, having you and Gabriel to help, it’s great, but every day, every time I turn around and see a ghost going for Dean’s throat and I don’t have a clear shot at it, or something like that…”
Sam shifted restlessly against the bonnet. “I know what I could do, and it feels like such a waste of time to have to rely on you guys for the simple stuff that I should be able to do myself. When you could be doing better if you weren’t tied down to protecting two humans.” Sam shot a little testing glance sideways at Castiel, his mouth tight. “It doesn’t make sense not to. It’s the memories that make the real difference, after all.”
Castiel reached for the bottle, removed the cork with gentle, efficient movements, and poured Sam another glass. The rich red liquid, which he and Sam had all to themselves because neither Gabriel nor Dean bothered with it, swirled and danced around the bowl, bright and luxurious in the evening sun.
“Do you want to tell Dean, or shall I?”
The tension swept out of Sam in a little huff, his body shifting into one warm, sloping line of muscle and denim and damp skin against Castiel’s side.
“Together?”
---
Dean took it better than Sam seemed to have expected, although Castiel, who knew better than anyone the lengths Dean went to to try to make everything seem normal for Sam, was not entirely surprised. He nodded, grim but listening, when Sam explained that he meant to search; promised to help work out where Chamael’s grace might have landed; conceded that, with the number of supernatural things the abortive Apocalypse had stirred up, they could do with all the advantages they could get; even confessed, when Sam asked, that he didn’t really like it but that he trusted Sam to make that call himself.
Castiel was proud of him.
It was only later, in bed, that Dean ventured very quietly, “I should trust an angel with his own mojo, right?”
Castiel turned his head against the pillow.
Dean stirred a little, restless, tugging the sheets into a soft dry slither over Castiel’s chest. “I mean, it’s not as if he doesn’t know how to use it.”
“No more than you should inevitably trust every man not to do harm with his own hands.” Castiel’s hand sought out Dean’s hip under the blanket, and gave it a squeeze. “But I believe in Sam.”
Dean made a vague grunt. “Just. He doesn’t really have a stellar track record when it comes to… power.”
Castiel hummed vaguely, and thought of Sam as he had first known him. Suspicious and clever, playing his brother without entirely meaning to, inviting in the darkness to throb in his veins. Sacrificing his own soul for the world. “I think… this is different.”
“Yeah, that’s what he says. Every time.” Dean scrubbed his hand over his face in the dark. “Cas, tell me I’m being a dick. I don’t know what he was like back then. I don’t know what Chamael would do with it. But I know him damned well now, and… I’m not sure that he’s the best guy to trust with phenomenal cosmic powers, you know?”
Castiel let him have his doubting, here, safe in the dark. “I understand.” He was silent for a minute, listening to Dean’s breathing. Then he offered, soft and certain, “I don’t know what will happen, Dean. I only know that I fell, and the two of you were there to catch me; that Sam has turned back from the brink every time, at the call of someone who loves him; and that there are three of us now who will not let him go.”
Dean stayed quiet, his breaths stirring the air beside Castiel, slow and shallow and hot. Then he turned abruptly onto his side, and buried his face in Castiel’s neck.
Castiel ran his hands up the solid curves of Dean’s back, drew his nails over the top of the spine to soothe him, and tasted the faint salt of the skin just under his ear. Dean made a noise in his throat, tired and hopeful, and Castiel held him until he relaxed.
Then he pressed his lips into the soft prickle of Dean’s hair. “Go to him.”
Dean took a deep breath and nodded mutely into Castiel’s shoulder. Then he lifted himself up, hovering big and hot and sleek over Castiel’s body in the dark, and kissed him fierce as a promise. Castiel sank his fingertips into the muscle of Dean’s neck, arched up against him, and let him go.
Five minutes later, Gabriel crept into the room and between the cooling sheets to attach himself to Castiel’s side like a clingy starfish. To his brother’s demanding heat Castiel opened his arms, then his mouth, then his legs.
Now.
Castiel wasn’t very good at swimming. Dean and Sam had both spent long hours trying to teach him, in the lake by their house where Sam swam every morning when they were there, but those sessions often devolved into other less nautical (although equally physical) activities. The body that Jimmy had left him didn’t seem particularly inclined to move in the way demanded by water, and Castiel hadn’t ever seen any particular need to become more efficient at it.
Searching the crevices of the Great Barrier Reef, however, was something that would be more easily done if he had a means of propelling himself simply through the water. Flying every five metres underwater seemed wasteful, and somewhat contrary to the adventurous spirit with which Dean was currently striking out, be-suited and be-masked with an oxygen tank on his back.
After a moment’s consideration, Castiel manifested his wings, and adjusted their relation to physics just sufficiently to account for water’s increased drag and weight support, so that he might swim through water as if it were air.
Gabriel, he found, when he turned his attention outwards, had opted for a more showy solution. Having more control over his custom-made vessel than any angel bound to a truly human body could, he had grafted a long fish-like tail over its legs, and seemed rather smug about the fact. Sharpening his gaze, Castiel could see that the legs were still intact inside the tail, and that a few crude but powerful sinews attached the joints of the limbs to strategic points along the length of the tail. By these means, Gabriel could drive it in long, lazy waves, propelling his whole body forward to circle an amused Sam in casual figure-eights.
A few gestures and nods, and Gabriel and Sam set out to circle around the north side of the shoal and Castiel with Dean to the south. It was almost like any hunt: reading each other in silence, knowing half by instinct and half by senses where each of the other three was and what he was doing. But where Gabriel and Dean would usually be carrying out a mute commentary on everything that happened through lifted eyebrows and smirks and detailed gestures, here they were stiff and tense - had been ever since the wetsuits had come out - and were barely meeting each other’s eyes.
Colours, and movement. The weight of water impeded his human ears, but it was a simple matter to keep his eyes clear; and even with most of his attention dedicated to other senses, the visual panorama beneath the water was thrilling. The coral shelf was a riot of colours: corals, sponges, anemones, fish, sea cucumbers, starfish, and lichens. The joyous buzzing sensation of life pattered against him, millions of small and tiny and infinitesmal lives.
A silvertip shark turned away from the intruders with a flick of its tail, slid away from the coral shelf and down into the dusty blue depths beyond. Castiel watched its graceful, efficient movements until it faded into the shadows, then angled his wings down and dived.
It was safer lower down, but the physical danger to Dean was minimal here, certainly insignificant compared to a regular day on the job. Dean’s perception of the grace hidden somewhere within this coral shoal would be far more limited than either angel’s, and only a murmur next to Sam’s. If he were any other human being he could have touched wherever it resided and felt nothing, disturbed nothing; but the bond between his and Sam’s souls, not to mention his increased sensitivity to grace since his resurrection, meant that at close range he should be able to feel its tug. It was logical, therefore, for Dean to swim farther from the bottom, closer to the centre of the reef, while Castiel cut a broader, swifter arc around its base.
Awesome. Dean’s voice slid warm and familiar into that place of Castiel’s mind reserved for the perception of prayer. I just found a giant spotted slug.
“Most likely an Argus sea cucumber,” Castiel replied, projecting the subtle audio vibrations that would be produced by his voice in air directly to Dean’s inner ear.
Argus? Wasn’t that some Greek watchdog thing with a metric crapload of eyes?
“Hence the name, I imagine. That particular species is also called a leopard, marbled, eyed, or ocellated sea cucumber. Don’t poke it - they self-eviscerate to dissuade predators, and it takes them some energy to regrow their innards.” The pale fingers of a grove of anemones rippled searchingly over a coral ledge, and with the edge of his vision Castiel saw the dark red flank and the flash of white as a cinnamon clownfish darted back to safety.
Seriously? The tone of Dean’s prayer suggested the giant spotted slug had just gone up several awesomeness points. Talk about shitting yourself in terror. And, hey. When do I ever just poke random things?
The lonely tug of lost grace was calling him around to his left, urging him to dive into the solid mass of coral and find it, touch it. “You always just poke random things, Dean. Especially if they’re cursed.”
I didn’t poke that weird-arse sun disc in Ohio!
“Only because Gabriel poked it first,” Castiel pointed out. Around the next corner, and the next, up and over the shelf, and it was coming no closer. It felt farther away, probably on the north side where Gabriel and Sam were searching.
Dean’s thoughts conceded, not bothering with actual words to project, that this was a fair point. Then, in a tangential way that suggested he was looking for anything but the obvious to think about, How does your great angel/human dictionary know all those names for some weird sea vegetable anyway, when you don’t get what I mean when I say Lucifer’s like Sam’s evil twin? Who decides what goes into it? I bet there’s a hell of a lot fewer people on this planet who know what an ocellated sea cucumber is than an evil twin.
“I don’t know.” Castiel glided around a projecting blade of rock and arrowed further up and in, closer to Dean, sending fish scattering under the shadow of his wings. “I’m sure Sam would have a theory.”
Then he felt it - the throb of that familiar grace that Yrihel had hidden so well, too well, casting it millions of years back in time and losing it in the vastness of the oceans. The surge and the pull of it, as it reached out for the first time in aeons to answer its brother’s touch.
He closed his hand around Dean’s arm, flexed his wings, and carried them toward the glimmering surface, with Gabriel’s “Found it!” ringing triumphantly through their minds.
One week ago.
“The effects of Anna’s grace were limited, local. The effects of an archangel’s would be… immense. Global, in their repercussions.”
“Don’t tell me you killed the dinosaurs, Sammy.”
“Nah, that was me.” Gabriel tossed a peanut into his mouth and took his time over eating it under the weight of three stares, emanating the smug ability to derail conversations. “What? I had a weekend off, and I was bored.”
Dean looked rather like he wouldn’t put it past Gabriel, but Sam’s mouth was soft and comfortably exasperated. Castiel had noticed that Gabriel’s claims to have done everything interesting in history had been getting increasingly outrageous ever since Sam had got his memories back, and thus his ability to contradict them.
“Creation, not destruction,” he put in gently. “On a massive scale.”
Sam nodded. “And it’d be something pretty damned unique and impressive, too. Like… the Amazon rainforests.”
“Uh, guys?” Gabriel pointed to the television, which obligingly switched to the previous day’s Discovery Channel. “Like the only living organism that you can see from space?”
… world heritage area, and among the seven wonders of the natural world, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef. It covers more than three hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres, an area bigger than the United Kingdom, Holland and Switzerland combined. Blessed with an abundance of marine life, the Great Barrier Reef is comprised of over three thousand individual reef systems and coral cays and hundreds of islands, with some of the world’s most beautiful sun-soaked, golden beaches.
The Great Barrier Reef is threatened by climate change, continued declining water quality from catchment run-off, loss of coastal habitats from coastal development, and, as a result of the increased water temperatures and a decline in water quality, high levels of coral bleaching. Mass coral bleaching events due to elevated ocean temperatures occurred in the summers of 1998, 2002 and 2006, and coral bleaching is expected to become an annual occurrence.
“Space is nice, by the way,” Gabriel dropped into the silence. “Peaceful. Sort of big.”
Castiel mostly noticed the way his fingers were drumming against the arm of the chair.
Dean cleared his throat. “Sammy? Thoughts?”
Sam was staring at the screen, wide-eyed, even though it had frozen on one still as soon as Gabriel’s focus had shifted, wholly and completely, to Sam. It showed all blues and azures, an aerial shot, thousands of tiny life forms busily working away under the surface, sustaining others who sustained others who sustained others who sustained a thriving tourist industry despite the fact that all of them were dying.
Castiel touched his arm, and murmured, “Sam?”
Sam started, and looked up at him with wide worried eyes. Then he gathered himself, and smiled. “Sounds good. Let’s look into it.”
“Okay.” Dean stretched out in his chair, going for casual in a way that screamed “going for casual” and that all three of them knew him too well to buy. “Guess we’re touching up our fake passports.”
Gabriel snorted. “Please. As if you need passports.”
Dean waved a hand dismissively. “Sure, not when you’re travelling by angel air, but what if we get locked up for something?”
Dean and Gabriel were very good at covering potentially awkward moments with chatter.
“You know, most people don’t plan what if I get locked up for something into their holiday schedules.”
“Most people aren’t us. There’s probably bunyips. Or demon spiders. Or something.”
“And a great star fell from heaven, burning as it were a torch,” murmured Castiel, “and it fell upon the fountains of waters.”
Gabriel, who had wooed Castiel with Solomon’s Song, slanted him an amused, dark look. “The Bible, sparrow? Seriously?”
Castiel shrugged. “I like it. It is poetic, in places.”
“So’s the Marquis de Sade. Speaking of, there’s a gent who knows how to throw a good -”
Sam cuffed Gabriel over the back of the head. “Don’t you start. Australia it is, guys.”
Now.
Gabriel was the first back to the boat. When Dean reached the ladder, Gabriel reached down to give him a hand up, mouth twisted awkwardly at the side and eyes too rich and dark. Dean looked up at him, half out of the water and visibly hesitating between accepting and protesting that he wasn’t too old to climb a ladder thanks very much. Then he curled firm fingers around Gabriel’s wrist, and let himself be hauled roughly up onto the deck.
By the time Castiel had swung himself up onto the boat, Dean had already toed off his flippers and set aside the oxygen tank. Gabriel’s skin was thrumming almost audibly with the heady weight of the alien grace inside him, and he was jiggling up and down, hands shoved deep into the pockets of the jeans that were his only concession to modesty. He hadn’t bothered to do them up, so they rode dangerously low on his hips, already soaked around the waist with the water creeping down his back and chest as if it was seeking refuge from the sun.
Castiel stalked over to him, brushed his hands aside, and remedied the situation with stern fingers. Gabriel rolled his eyes extravagantly skyward and muttered something rude about mother hens, which Castiel cut off midway by licking the seasalt from his mouth.
“You can do this naked or clothed, Gabriel, not both. Unless you want to be distracted by your jeans falling down halfway through.”
“Why are you always the sensible adult?”
“Sam’s the sensible adult,” Castiel pointed out gravely. “Which is why you should keep your trousers on.”
Dean cleared his throat pointedly. “Speaking of, guys.”
Sam clambered up the last rung of the ladder and unfolded into a sleek dripping tower of wetsuit and muscle and nervous grin. “So. Let’s do this.”
Gabriel’s skin crackled with white-hot power under Castiel’s fingers; and his eyes, which had once flickered silver like any angel’s in moments of turbulence and power, began to glow a deep burnished gold.
Castiel stepped away from him, and left him standing alone in the centre of the deck.
“Dude. Lose the equipment,” Dean offered gruffly. “Oxygen tanks? Kind of explosive. And I’m not paying for the wetsuit if you go all angel-flamethrower on it.”
Sam pulled a face at him, and stripped down on deck for the second time in two hours, quick and business-like as if he were changing for a hunt. This time, there was no helpfully lascivious commentary, just the slap of the waves against the hull and Dean’s carefully controlled breathing at Castiel’s side. Then Sam came over to them, tall and smiling and beautiful, and looped an arm around Castiel’s neck. He leaned in, pressed his forehead against Castiel’s, and just breathed for a moment. For luck, he would probably have said; but it was possible, it had to be possible, that it would have to serve as goodbye.
Castiel raised his hand and smoothed the tangled wet hair back from Sam’s cheek; turned his head just a little and brushed his lips against the corner of his softened mouth.
Too soft for Dean to hear, Sam breathed, “If it comes to it - take care of them for me, yeah?” Castiel felt the slow curve of his lips against the scratch of his own stubble. “I know you can this time.”
This time - this time, Castiel didn’t reply “That’s not possible,” and he didn’t lie, because by now it wasn’t even a question. He just sighed, leaned into Sam’s strength, and smiled.
“Am I a zookeeper?”
Sam laughed a little, half breathless. “If you were you could lock them up to keep them out of trouble.”
Castiel stepped back, squeezed his shoulder, and let him go. “I promise, Sam.”
Sam looked at Dean, who shrugged.
“Don’t get killed,” Dean ordered, with the weight of everything else that didn’t need to be said behind it.
“Yeah,” Sam shrugged back, then punched Dean’s shoulder and grinned, sharp and bright. “I’ll do what I can.”
Then he turned his back and approached his other older brother, hips rolling easy and sure with the slow pitch of the deck. Walked away from them, out of their protection; and Castiel was struck by a sudden illogical dizziness. The emotions that came with a soul were strange and turbulent, and after several years he was still not quite familiar with their ways. It made no sense to fear this thing now, so abruptly and queasily, when he had previously feared it only as much the slight chance of failure deserved. He had no part in this battle - all he could do was protect Dean.
Castiel reached into the carefully folded depths of himself within his vessel and shook free his wings; just physical enough to be substantial, flushed with just enough grace to withstand the searing blast if something should go wrong. Dean, beautiful and human and raw beside him, squared his jaw at the sound, and shoved his shoulder in against Castiel’s.
Dean was his strength.
Sam stopped in front of Gabriel, reached out, and ran his hands up his arms. Gabriel looked at him, serious and tender and deep, and reached out to touch his cheek.
“Hey there, handsome.”
Sam grinned at him a bit, a deliberate little twist of the mouth and the bright flash of teeth. “We’ve been here before,” he pointed out, the shadow of a tease. “Panic room. Our first date.”
Gabriel made a shaky, dismissive noise. “Before I died. Doesn’t count.”
Castiel could hear the eye-roll. “First kiss?”
“Stull Cemetery,” Gabriel insisted promptly, and one of his hands crept up to fit over the handprint on the back of Sam’s neck as if he were the shell of an egg.
Sam leaned in to smirk against Gabriel’s hair. “Cheat.”
“Get on with it,” Dean muttered.
Sam flipped him off. Then he took Gabriel’s face between his hands, gentle, reverent, and bent his mouth inexorably down to kiss him.
Castiel turned to Dean, and wrapped him up safe in his arms and wings and determined love.
For a minute or two, there was nothing but warm darkness, the too-loud thud of his own heart against Dean’s, the damp living huff of Dean’s breath chased out and caught in again against Castiel’s cheek. He held on, fingers biting into Dean’s shoulder and arm a tight implacable band around his waist, burrowing into him and hiding in him in a way that he rarely allowed himself, and waited.
He could understand Sam and Gabriel taking their time here; wanting a minute, just a minute, for the closest thing they could get to privacy now. A minute, to be just them. To remember what it had been like before Gabriel had kissed Castiel, and Dean had kissed Gabriel, and over long nights of four to a bed the touches between Sam and Dean (accidental and less so) had crept gradually over the lines of brotherly touching to something far closer in intensity to that soul bond that they had always shared.
Then he heard - felt - Gabriel’s voice, as gentle perhaps as he had ever known him to be. “Hey. I got you.”
Then, light, the piercing absolute light of Heaven washing against his wings, caressing and encompassing them, warmer and much deeper and vaster than Anna’s had been. But Anna’s human body - and her soul, if she had had one then - had been destroyed by it, too much too fast. Sam was stronger than she had been, far stronger, and he could look on Gabriel’s true form without flinching; but so was Chamael greater than Hanael. The real difference here was Gabriel, and the patience with which he could feed Chamael’s essence, trickle by trickle, back into Sam’s soul.
Dean’s fingers were pressing four bruising points into the back of his neck. Minutes, whole minutes, slower than any in Creation, with Dean’s thigh cramping against his.
Then it was only sea air and sunlight warming his wings.
Castiel shook out his wings and let Dean loose, just as Gabriel said “Dean,” his voice rough and quick, and Castiel’s heart that didn’t have to beat stood still. Because - this human, this beautiful great soul who had done so much, loved so hard - no, just Sam. Dean crossed the deck in two strides to where Sam was kneeling with one hand pressed over his eyes, with both of Gabriel’s clamped around his wrists. The archangel’s eyes slid up over Sam’s head to lock on Dean’s face, and his voice was hoarse and empty like he had spent himself holding back the ocean.
“I need you to pull the rest of him through.”
Dean’s hands hovered, clenched and unclenched like he was forcing them not to break, then closed fierce and tight on Sam’s hunched shoulders. “How?”
Gabriel hissed, low and hasty, let go and stepped back, staggering with the roll of the boat. “It doesn’t matter how, just do it!”
Dean dropped to his knees with a jarring thud in front of Sam. He spoke firm and low, one jagged edge of sound. “Look at me, Sammy.” One hand swept up from Sam’s shoulder to span the side of his face, curling possessive around the corner of his jaw. “Look at me.”
And that was all. The touch of Dean’s hand, the sound of his voice, the tug of his soul, and something infinitesmal fell back into place. Sam raised his head and laughed, clear and happy.
Castiel’s breath deserted him in a heady rush, and he didn’t care.
Gabriel was cackling somewhere, hysterical and relieved, and Dean was swearing and punching Sam in the shoulder, and Sam’s wings were unfolding from the naked planes of his back. Reaching out across the deck, out beyond the rails on either side, and they were nothing like Castiel remembered. Nothing here of the stark angel of black and silver, not even the greys of that angel when he learned to doubt. These wings were all shades of bronze and tan and copper and cream and warm rich browns like suede. And rippling through it all, not merely edging the feathers as it did for Castiel and Gabriel, the bright golden hue of grace and soul combined.
Chamael. The fifth archangel, the boy with the demon blood, the man who had fought off Lucifer and stopped the Apocalypse, whole and beautiful. And now, suddenly and completely, Castiel let himself think of standing in Heaven with this brother at his side, of how magnificent he would be, how new. How much he could show them all, of what it meant to think and to choose, and to take responsibility.
For the first time in a long time, Castiel prayed, and gave quiet thanks.
“Cas, get over here,” Sam laughed, muffled like he had a mouth full of someone’s hair, and Castiel couldn’t see whose because they were a messy sprawl of limbs and wings on the deck. So he came over there, and went down on his knees beside them, and let himself be pulled into the tangled four-way embrace. Gabriel’s half-beard scraped over his forehead, and Dean’s hand was too tight on his thigh, and Sam’s ribs were heaving with breath and life under his arm, and someone’s knee was digging into his side, all relief and delight and trust.
Then Gabriel sat back on his heels, grinning like a lion, and pointed at Sam’s wings. “You two muttonheads are so freaking predictable. Mystery spot? I never stood a chance.”
Dean leaned back to look, blinked, then huffed out a breathless amused kind of sound. “Seriously, Sammy?”
“What?” Sam scowled half-heartedly, and craned his head around to look.
Nestled in the most sensitive inner curve of each wing, in the soft triangle between the wrist and Sam’s side, was the mark of a handprint in deep burnished gold. But these weren’t a match to the marks on Sam’s neck and hip, from where Gabriel had dragged him back from Lucifer’s cage - rather, they fit the white splotches that Dean was currently digging into Sam’s and Castiel’s thighs.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Sam said, resigned and a little awed, “You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?”
“Nope,” Dean confirmed cheerfully.
Gabriel ruffled Dean’s damp hair up backwards. “Goes both ways, tiger. No more demon deals for you. Now you’ve got two angels with markers on your soul.”
Dean swatted at him, tucked two fingers into the waistband of his jeans and tugged him into a kiss like a prayer and a duel until they were both out of breath. Then he grinned at him, a finger’s width from Gabriel’s lips, and growled in a tone that went straight to the most sensual pit of Castiel’s stomach, “Thanks.”
Gabriel’s eyes gleamed challengingly at him through the curtain of dark lashes. “Back at you.”
“Okay, so,” Sam put in plaintively. “Before you guys jump each other, there’s something I gotta do.”
“The reef?” Castiel asked softly, letting his lips drag across the velvet warmth of Sam’s collarbone. Because, considering its current state of crisis, that was what he himself would do in Sam’s position; and Sam’s sense of duty and imperative was only so far from his own as Dean’s sense of humour was from Gabriel’s.
Sam hummed agreement, nuzzled into Castiel’s throat for a moment, then rose to his feet in one easy, fluid movement. “Looked after me for close on twenty million years. Even by angel standards, that’s kind of a while. Least I can do is return the favour.”
He flexed his wings, wide and strong, stirred up the water around the boat with their passage, then held his hand out to Dean with that terrifying Winchester grin of I-just-dare-you that had got them all into so many ridiculous situations and prank wars.
Dean’s eyes went wide into his Oh hell no expression.
“Come on, Dean. You let Cas and Gabriel and you don’t trust me?” Sam’s whole face was lit up with his delight as he closed his hands around Dean’s shoulders.
Dean narrowed his eyes and lifted his chin like a challenge, even as he stepped in and slid his arm snug into place around Sam’s waist, as if it had been made to fit there. “If you drop me in the water, so help me, Sammy…”
The rest was lost in a rush of wings, then the boat was quiet.
Tomorrow would bring new complications, no doubt; a new chapter. A happy ending was a stagnant thing: real living never settled. But Castiel had lived stagnant perfection for billions of years, and learned nothing.
After a minute, Gabriel nudged his elbow into Castiel’s side. “Hey. You’re kind of awesome, little bro.” He paused, considering. “Like Teflon.”
“Thank you, Gabriel,” Castiel said gravely.
“Shut up. I’m trying to have a moment here.” Gabriel wrinkled his nose at him. “We’d all be a stupid mess without you, okay?”
Castiel tipped his head back, watched the sun strike copper fire through Samuel’s pinions as he tilted and slid sideways through the air, laughing into Dean’s neck.
“I think the same is true of each of us.”
“Sap.” Gabriel made a face, rumpled up Castiel’s hair mercilessly, and spread his great wings to the sky.
Read the epilogue (NC-17, Gabriel/Sam)...
One month ago.
Sam took a deep breath, and sat down beside Castiel on the Impala’s bonnet. “I want to go looking for it.”
Castiel took the wine glass Sam was holding out to him, and squinted through the sunset glare off the car’s windows at his older brother’s human face. It had that scrunched-up, determined look that Sam got whenever he was set on something that he knew Dean wouldn’t like and which he was kind of terrified of himself; and it was that that told Castiel what he meant.
“You guys could really do with a hand upstairs - a real hand, not just a mostly-human freak with Chamael’s memories weighing in on the arguments sometimes. And I’ve been talking to Gabriel and, well… Raphael means well, but he isn’t a leader, and he doesn’t really get it, I remember that now. And it’s not like it would be something foreign, not like Azazel’s blood. It’s still me, just… more of me, and I remember it, and I know how to use it, and I…” Sam stopped, stared at his empty glass, shoved a hand through his hair, and plunged on. “I miss it. Especially the way things are down here. We could be doing so much more. I mean, having you and Gabriel to help, it’s great, but every day, every time I turn around and see a ghost going for Dean’s throat and I don’t have a clear shot at it, or something like that…”
Sam shifted restlessly against the bonnet. “I know what I could do, and it feels like such a waste of time to have to rely on you guys for the simple stuff that I should be able to do myself. When you could be doing better if you weren’t tied down to protecting two humans.” Sam shot a little testing glance sideways at Castiel, his mouth tight. “It doesn’t make sense not to. It’s the memories that make the real difference, after all.”
Castiel reached for the bottle, removed the cork with gentle, efficient movements, and poured Sam another glass. The rich red liquid, which he and Sam had all to themselves because neither Gabriel nor Dean bothered with it, swirled and danced around the bowl, bright and luxurious in the evening sun.
“Do you want to tell Dean, or shall I?”
The tension swept out of Sam in a little huff, his body shifting into one warm, sloping line of muscle and denim and damp skin against Castiel’s side.
“Together?”
---
Dean took it better than Sam seemed to have expected, although Castiel, who knew better than anyone the lengths Dean went to to try to make everything seem normal for Sam, was not entirely surprised. He nodded, grim but listening, when Sam explained that he meant to search; promised to help work out where Chamael’s grace might have landed; conceded that, with the number of supernatural things the abortive Apocalypse had stirred up, they could do with all the advantages they could get; even confessed, when Sam asked, that he didn’t really like it but that he trusted Sam to make that call himself.
Castiel was proud of him.
It was only later, in bed, that Dean ventured very quietly, “I should trust an angel with his own mojo, right?”
Castiel turned his head against the pillow.
Dean stirred a little, restless, tugging the sheets into a soft dry slither over Castiel’s chest. “I mean, it’s not as if he doesn’t know how to use it.”
“No more than you should inevitably trust every man not to do harm with his own hands.” Castiel’s hand sought out Dean’s hip under the blanket, and gave it a squeeze. “But I believe in Sam.”
Dean made a vague grunt. “Just. He doesn’t really have a stellar track record when it comes to… power.”
Castiel hummed vaguely, and thought of Sam as he had first known him. Suspicious and clever, playing his brother without entirely meaning to, inviting in the darkness to throb in his veins. Sacrificing his own soul for the world. “I think… this is different.”
“Yeah, that’s what he says. Every time.” Dean scrubbed his hand over his face in the dark. “Cas, tell me I’m being a dick. I don’t know what he was like back then. I don’t know what Chamael would do with it. But I know him damned well now, and… I’m not sure that he’s the best guy to trust with phenomenal cosmic powers, you know?”
Castiel let him have his doubting, here, safe in the dark. “I understand.” He was silent for a minute, listening to Dean’s breathing. Then he offered, soft and certain, “I don’t know what will happen, Dean. I only know that I fell, and the two of you were there to catch me; that Sam has turned back from the brink every time, at the call of someone who loves him; and that there are three of us now who will not let him go.”
Dean stayed quiet, his breaths stirring the air beside Castiel, slow and shallow and hot. Then he turned abruptly onto his side, and buried his face in Castiel’s neck.
Castiel ran his hands up the solid curves of Dean’s back, drew his nails over the top of the spine to soothe him, and tasted the faint salt of the skin just under his ear. Dean made a noise in his throat, tired and hopeful, and Castiel held him until he relaxed.
Then he pressed his lips into the soft prickle of Dean’s hair. “Go to him.”
Dean took a deep breath and nodded mutely into Castiel’s shoulder. Then he lifted himself up, hovering big and hot and sleek over Castiel’s body in the dark, and kissed him fierce as a promise. Castiel sank his fingertips into the muscle of Dean’s neck, arched up against him, and let him go.
Five minutes later, Gabriel crept into the room and between the cooling sheets to attach himself to Castiel’s side like a clingy starfish. To his brother’s demanding heat Castiel opened his arms, then his mouth, then his legs.
Now.
Castiel wasn’t very good at swimming. Dean and Sam had both spent long hours trying to teach him, in the lake by their house where Sam swam every morning when they were there, but those sessions often devolved into other less nautical (although equally physical) activities. The body that Jimmy had left him didn’t seem particularly inclined to move in the way demanded by water, and Castiel hadn’t ever seen any particular need to become more efficient at it.
Searching the crevices of the Great Barrier Reef, however, was something that would be more easily done if he had a means of propelling himself simply through the water. Flying every five metres underwater seemed wasteful, and somewhat contrary to the adventurous spirit with which Dean was currently striking out, be-suited and be-masked with an oxygen tank on his back.
After a moment’s consideration, Castiel manifested his wings, and adjusted their relation to physics just sufficiently to account for water’s increased drag and weight support, so that he might swim through water as if it were air.
Gabriel, he found, when he turned his attention outwards, had opted for a more showy solution. Having more control over his custom-made vessel than any angel bound to a truly human body could, he had grafted a long fish-like tail over its legs, and seemed rather smug about the fact. Sharpening his gaze, Castiel could see that the legs were still intact inside the tail, and that a few crude but powerful sinews attached the joints of the limbs to strategic points along the length of the tail. By these means, Gabriel could drive it in long, lazy waves, propelling his whole body forward to circle an amused Sam in casual figure-eights.
A few gestures and nods, and Gabriel and Sam set out to circle around the north side of the shoal and Castiel with Dean to the south. It was almost like any hunt: reading each other in silence, knowing half by instinct and half by senses where each of the other three was and what he was doing. But where Gabriel and Dean would usually be carrying out a mute commentary on everything that happened through lifted eyebrows and smirks and detailed gestures, here they were stiff and tense - had been ever since the wetsuits had come out - and were barely meeting each other’s eyes.
Colours, and movement. The weight of water impeded his human ears, but it was a simple matter to keep his eyes clear; and even with most of his attention dedicated to other senses, the visual panorama beneath the water was thrilling. The coral shelf was a riot of colours: corals, sponges, anemones, fish, sea cucumbers, starfish, and lichens. The joyous buzzing sensation of life pattered against him, millions of small and tiny and infinitesmal lives.
A silvertip shark turned away from the intruders with a flick of its tail, slid away from the coral shelf and down into the dusty blue depths beyond. Castiel watched its graceful, efficient movements until it faded into the shadows, then angled his wings down and dived.
It was safer lower down, but the physical danger to Dean was minimal here, certainly insignificant compared to a regular day on the job. Dean’s perception of the grace hidden somewhere within this coral shoal would be far more limited than either angel’s, and only a murmur next to Sam’s. If he were any other human being he could have touched wherever it resided and felt nothing, disturbed nothing; but the bond between his and Sam’s souls, not to mention his increased sensitivity to grace since his resurrection, meant that at close range he should be able to feel its tug. It was logical, therefore, for Dean to swim farther from the bottom, closer to the centre of the reef, while Castiel cut a broader, swifter arc around its base.
Awesome. Dean’s voice slid warm and familiar into that place of Castiel’s mind reserved for the perception of prayer. I just found a giant spotted slug.
“Most likely an Argus sea cucumber,” Castiel replied, projecting the subtle audio vibrations that would be produced by his voice in air directly to Dean’s inner ear.
Argus? Wasn’t that some Greek watchdog thing with a metric crapload of eyes?
“Hence the name, I imagine. That particular species is also called a leopard, marbled, eyed, or ocellated sea cucumber. Don’t poke it - they self-eviscerate to dissuade predators, and it takes them some energy to regrow their innards.” The pale fingers of a grove of anemones rippled searchingly over a coral ledge, and with the edge of his vision Castiel saw the dark red flank and the flash of white as a cinnamon clownfish darted back to safety.
Seriously? The tone of Dean’s prayer suggested the giant spotted slug had just gone up several awesomeness points. Talk about shitting yourself in terror. And, hey. When do I ever just poke random things?
The lonely tug of lost grace was calling him around to his left, urging him to dive into the solid mass of coral and find it, touch it. “You always just poke random things, Dean. Especially if they’re cursed.”
I didn’t poke that weird-arse sun disc in Ohio!
“Only because Gabriel poked it first,” Castiel pointed out. Around the next corner, and the next, up and over the shelf, and it was coming no closer. It felt farther away, probably on the north side where Gabriel and Sam were searching.
Dean’s thoughts conceded, not bothering with actual words to project, that this was a fair point. Then, in a tangential way that suggested he was looking for anything but the obvious to think about, How does your great angel/human dictionary know all those names for some weird sea vegetable anyway, when you don’t get what I mean when I say Lucifer’s like Sam’s evil twin? Who decides what goes into it? I bet there’s a hell of a lot fewer people on this planet who know what an ocellated sea cucumber is than an evil twin.
“I don’t know.” Castiel glided around a projecting blade of rock and arrowed further up and in, closer to Dean, sending fish scattering under the shadow of his wings. “I’m sure Sam would have a theory.”
Then he felt it - the throb of that familiar grace that Yrihel had hidden so well, too well, casting it millions of years back in time and losing it in the vastness of the oceans. The surge and the pull of it, as it reached out for the first time in aeons to answer its brother’s touch.
He closed his hand around Dean’s arm, flexed his wings, and carried them toward the glimmering surface, with Gabriel’s “Found it!” ringing triumphantly through their minds.
One week ago.
“The effects of Anna’s grace were limited, local. The effects of an archangel’s would be… immense. Global, in their repercussions.”
“Don’t tell me you killed the dinosaurs, Sammy.”
“Nah, that was me.” Gabriel tossed a peanut into his mouth and took his time over eating it under the weight of three stares, emanating the smug ability to derail conversations. “What? I had a weekend off, and I was bored.”
Dean looked rather like he wouldn’t put it past Gabriel, but Sam’s mouth was soft and comfortably exasperated. Castiel had noticed that Gabriel’s claims to have done everything interesting in history had been getting increasingly outrageous ever since Sam had got his memories back, and thus his ability to contradict them.
“Creation, not destruction,” he put in gently. “On a massive scale.”
Sam nodded. “And it’d be something pretty damned unique and impressive, too. Like… the Amazon rainforests.”
“Uh, guys?” Gabriel pointed to the television, which obligingly switched to the previous day’s Discovery Channel. “Like the only living organism that you can see from space?”
… world heritage area, and among the seven wonders of the natural world, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef. It covers more than three hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres, an area bigger than the United Kingdom, Holland and Switzerland combined. Blessed with an abundance of marine life, the Great Barrier Reef is comprised of over three thousand individual reef systems and coral cays and hundreds of islands, with some of the world’s most beautiful sun-soaked, golden beaches.
The Great Barrier Reef is threatened by climate change, continued declining water quality from catchment run-off, loss of coastal habitats from coastal development, and, as a result of the increased water temperatures and a decline in water quality, high levels of coral bleaching. Mass coral bleaching events due to elevated ocean temperatures occurred in the summers of 1998, 2002 and 2006, and coral bleaching is expected to become an annual occurrence.
“Space is nice, by the way,” Gabriel dropped into the silence. “Peaceful. Sort of big.”
Castiel mostly noticed the way his fingers were drumming against the arm of the chair.
Dean cleared his throat. “Sammy? Thoughts?”
Sam was staring at the screen, wide-eyed, even though it had frozen on one still as soon as Gabriel’s focus had shifted, wholly and completely, to Sam. It showed all blues and azures, an aerial shot, thousands of tiny life forms busily working away under the surface, sustaining others who sustained others who sustained others who sustained a thriving tourist industry despite the fact that all of them were dying.
Castiel touched his arm, and murmured, “Sam?”
Sam started, and looked up at him with wide worried eyes. Then he gathered himself, and smiled. “Sounds good. Let’s look into it.”
“Okay.” Dean stretched out in his chair, going for casual in a way that screamed “going for casual” and that all three of them knew him too well to buy. “Guess we’re touching up our fake passports.”
Gabriel snorted. “Please. As if you need passports.”
Dean waved a hand dismissively. “Sure, not when you’re travelling by angel air, but what if we get locked up for something?”
Dean and Gabriel were very good at covering potentially awkward moments with chatter.
“You know, most people don’t plan what if I get locked up for something into their holiday schedules.”
“Most people aren’t us. There’s probably bunyips. Or demon spiders. Or something.”
“And a great star fell from heaven, burning as it were a torch,” murmured Castiel, “and it fell upon the fountains of waters.”
Gabriel, who had wooed Castiel with Solomon’s Song, slanted him an amused, dark look. “The Bible, sparrow? Seriously?”
Castiel shrugged. “I like it. It is poetic, in places.”
“So’s the Marquis de Sade. Speaking of, there’s a gent who knows how to throw a good -”
Sam cuffed Gabriel over the back of the head. “Don’t you start. Australia it is, guys.”
Now.
Gabriel was the first back to the boat. When Dean reached the ladder, Gabriel reached down to give him a hand up, mouth twisted awkwardly at the side and eyes too rich and dark. Dean looked up at him, half out of the water and visibly hesitating between accepting and protesting that he wasn’t too old to climb a ladder thanks very much. Then he curled firm fingers around Gabriel’s wrist, and let himself be hauled roughly up onto the deck.
By the time Castiel had swung himself up onto the boat, Dean had already toed off his flippers and set aside the oxygen tank. Gabriel’s skin was thrumming almost audibly with the heady weight of the alien grace inside him, and he was jiggling up and down, hands shoved deep into the pockets of the jeans that were his only concession to modesty. He hadn’t bothered to do them up, so they rode dangerously low on his hips, already soaked around the waist with the water creeping down his back and chest as if it was seeking refuge from the sun.
Castiel stalked over to him, brushed his hands aside, and remedied the situation with stern fingers. Gabriel rolled his eyes extravagantly skyward and muttered something rude about mother hens, which Castiel cut off midway by licking the seasalt from his mouth.
“You can do this naked or clothed, Gabriel, not both. Unless you want to be distracted by your jeans falling down halfway through.”
“Why are you always the sensible adult?”
“Sam’s the sensible adult,” Castiel pointed out gravely. “Which is why you should keep your trousers on.”
Dean cleared his throat pointedly. “Speaking of, guys.”
Sam clambered up the last rung of the ladder and unfolded into a sleek dripping tower of wetsuit and muscle and nervous grin. “So. Let’s do this.”
Gabriel’s skin crackled with white-hot power under Castiel’s fingers; and his eyes, which had once flickered silver like any angel’s in moments of turbulence and power, began to glow a deep burnished gold.
Castiel stepped away from him, and left him standing alone in the centre of the deck.
“Dude. Lose the equipment,” Dean offered gruffly. “Oxygen tanks? Kind of explosive. And I’m not paying for the wetsuit if you go all angel-flamethrower on it.”
Sam pulled a face at him, and stripped down on deck for the second time in two hours, quick and business-like as if he were changing for a hunt. This time, there was no helpfully lascivious commentary, just the slap of the waves against the hull and Dean’s carefully controlled breathing at Castiel’s side. Then Sam came over to them, tall and smiling and beautiful, and looped an arm around Castiel’s neck. He leaned in, pressed his forehead against Castiel’s, and just breathed for a moment. For luck, he would probably have said; but it was possible, it had to be possible, that it would have to serve as goodbye.
Castiel raised his hand and smoothed the tangled wet hair back from Sam’s cheek; turned his head just a little and brushed his lips against the corner of his softened mouth.
Too soft for Dean to hear, Sam breathed, “If it comes to it - take care of them for me, yeah?” Castiel felt the slow curve of his lips against the scratch of his own stubble. “I know you can this time.”
This time - this time, Castiel didn’t reply “That’s not possible,” and he didn’t lie, because by now it wasn’t even a question. He just sighed, leaned into Sam’s strength, and smiled.
“Am I a zookeeper?”
Sam laughed a little, half breathless. “If you were you could lock them up to keep them out of trouble.”
Castiel stepped back, squeezed his shoulder, and let him go. “I promise, Sam.”
Sam looked at Dean, who shrugged.
“Don’t get killed,” Dean ordered, with the weight of everything else that didn’t need to be said behind it.
“Yeah,” Sam shrugged back, then punched Dean’s shoulder and grinned, sharp and bright. “I’ll do what I can.”
Then he turned his back and approached his other older brother, hips rolling easy and sure with the slow pitch of the deck. Walked away from them, out of their protection; and Castiel was struck by a sudden illogical dizziness. The emotions that came with a soul were strange and turbulent, and after several years he was still not quite familiar with their ways. It made no sense to fear this thing now, so abruptly and queasily, when he had previously feared it only as much the slight chance of failure deserved. He had no part in this battle - all he could do was protect Dean.
Castiel reached into the carefully folded depths of himself within his vessel and shook free his wings; just physical enough to be substantial, flushed with just enough grace to withstand the searing blast if something should go wrong. Dean, beautiful and human and raw beside him, squared his jaw at the sound, and shoved his shoulder in against Castiel’s.
Dean was his strength.
Sam stopped in front of Gabriel, reached out, and ran his hands up his arms. Gabriel looked at him, serious and tender and deep, and reached out to touch his cheek.
“Hey there, handsome.”
Sam grinned at him a bit, a deliberate little twist of the mouth and the bright flash of teeth. “We’ve been here before,” he pointed out, the shadow of a tease. “Panic room. Our first date.”
Gabriel made a shaky, dismissive noise. “Before I died. Doesn’t count.”
Castiel could hear the eye-roll. “First kiss?”
“Stull Cemetery,” Gabriel insisted promptly, and one of his hands crept up to fit over the handprint on the back of Sam’s neck as if he were the shell of an egg.
Sam leaned in to smirk against Gabriel’s hair. “Cheat.”
“Get on with it,” Dean muttered.
Sam flipped him off. Then he took Gabriel’s face between his hands, gentle, reverent, and bent his mouth inexorably down to kiss him.
Castiel turned to Dean, and wrapped him up safe in his arms and wings and determined love.
For a minute or two, there was nothing but warm darkness, the too-loud thud of his own heart against Dean’s, the damp living huff of Dean’s breath chased out and caught in again against Castiel’s cheek. He held on, fingers biting into Dean’s shoulder and arm a tight implacable band around his waist, burrowing into him and hiding in him in a way that he rarely allowed himself, and waited.
He could understand Sam and Gabriel taking their time here; wanting a minute, just a minute, for the closest thing they could get to privacy now. A minute, to be just them. To remember what it had been like before Gabriel had kissed Castiel, and Dean had kissed Gabriel, and over long nights of four to a bed the touches between Sam and Dean (accidental and less so) had crept gradually over the lines of brotherly touching to something far closer in intensity to that soul bond that they had always shared.
Then he heard - felt - Gabriel’s voice, as gentle perhaps as he had ever known him to be. “Hey. I got you.”
Then, light, the piercing absolute light of Heaven washing against his wings, caressing and encompassing them, warmer and much deeper and vaster than Anna’s had been. But Anna’s human body - and her soul, if she had had one then - had been destroyed by it, too much too fast. Sam was stronger than she had been, far stronger, and he could look on Gabriel’s true form without flinching; but so was Chamael greater than Hanael. The real difference here was Gabriel, and the patience with which he could feed Chamael’s essence, trickle by trickle, back into Sam’s soul.
Dean’s fingers were pressing four bruising points into the back of his neck. Minutes, whole minutes, slower than any in Creation, with Dean’s thigh cramping against his.
Then it was only sea air and sunlight warming his wings.
Castiel shook out his wings and let Dean loose, just as Gabriel said “Dean,” his voice rough and quick, and Castiel’s heart that didn’t have to beat stood still. Because - this human, this beautiful great soul who had done so much, loved so hard - no, just Sam. Dean crossed the deck in two strides to where Sam was kneeling with one hand pressed over his eyes, with both of Gabriel’s clamped around his wrists. The archangel’s eyes slid up over Sam’s head to lock on Dean’s face, and his voice was hoarse and empty like he had spent himself holding back the ocean.
“I need you to pull the rest of him through.”
Dean’s hands hovered, clenched and unclenched like he was forcing them not to break, then closed fierce and tight on Sam’s hunched shoulders. “How?”
Gabriel hissed, low and hasty, let go and stepped back, staggering with the roll of the boat. “It doesn’t matter how, just do it!”
Dean dropped to his knees with a jarring thud in front of Sam. He spoke firm and low, one jagged edge of sound. “Look at me, Sammy.” One hand swept up from Sam’s shoulder to span the side of his face, curling possessive around the corner of his jaw. “Look at me.”
And that was all. The touch of Dean’s hand, the sound of his voice, the tug of his soul, and something infinitesmal fell back into place. Sam raised his head and laughed, clear and happy.
Castiel’s breath deserted him in a heady rush, and he didn’t care.
Gabriel was cackling somewhere, hysterical and relieved, and Dean was swearing and punching Sam in the shoulder, and Sam’s wings were unfolding from the naked planes of his back. Reaching out across the deck, out beyond the rails on either side, and they were nothing like Castiel remembered. Nothing here of the stark angel of black and silver, not even the greys of that angel when he learned to doubt. These wings were all shades of bronze and tan and copper and cream and warm rich browns like suede. And rippling through it all, not merely edging the feathers as it did for Castiel and Gabriel, the bright golden hue of grace and soul combined.
Chamael. The fifth archangel, the boy with the demon blood, the man who had fought off Lucifer and stopped the Apocalypse, whole and beautiful. And now, suddenly and completely, Castiel let himself think of standing in Heaven with this brother at his side, of how magnificent he would be, how new. How much he could show them all, of what it meant to think and to choose, and to take responsibility.
For the first time in a long time, Castiel prayed, and gave quiet thanks.
“Cas, get over here,” Sam laughed, muffled like he had a mouth full of someone’s hair, and Castiel couldn’t see whose because they were a messy sprawl of limbs and wings on the deck. So he came over there, and went down on his knees beside them, and let himself be pulled into the tangled four-way embrace. Gabriel’s half-beard scraped over his forehead, and Dean’s hand was too tight on his thigh, and Sam’s ribs were heaving with breath and life under his arm, and someone’s knee was digging into his side, all relief and delight and trust.
Then Gabriel sat back on his heels, grinning like a lion, and pointed at Sam’s wings. “You two muttonheads are so freaking predictable. Mystery spot? I never stood a chance.”
Dean leaned back to look, blinked, then huffed out a breathless amused kind of sound. “Seriously, Sammy?”
“What?” Sam scowled half-heartedly, and craned his head around to look.
Nestled in the most sensitive inner curve of each wing, in the soft triangle between the wrist and Sam’s side, was the mark of a handprint in deep burnished gold. But these weren’t a match to the marks on Sam’s neck and hip, from where Gabriel had dragged him back from Lucifer’s cage - rather, they fit the white splotches that Dean was currently digging into Sam’s and Castiel’s thighs.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Sam said, resigned and a little awed, “You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?”
“Nope,” Dean confirmed cheerfully.
Gabriel ruffled Dean’s damp hair up backwards. “Goes both ways, tiger. No more demon deals for you. Now you’ve got two angels with markers on your soul.”
Dean swatted at him, tucked two fingers into the waistband of his jeans and tugged him into a kiss like a prayer and a duel until they were both out of breath. Then he grinned at him, a finger’s width from Gabriel’s lips, and growled in a tone that went straight to the most sensual pit of Castiel’s stomach, “Thanks.”
Gabriel’s eyes gleamed challengingly at him through the curtain of dark lashes. “Back at you.”
“Okay, so,” Sam put in plaintively. “Before you guys jump each other, there’s something I gotta do.”
“The reef?” Castiel asked softly, letting his lips drag across the velvet warmth of Sam’s collarbone. Because, considering its current state of crisis, that was what he himself would do in Sam’s position; and Sam’s sense of duty and imperative was only so far from his own as Dean’s sense of humour was from Gabriel’s.
Sam hummed agreement, nuzzled into Castiel’s throat for a moment, then rose to his feet in one easy, fluid movement. “Looked after me for close on twenty million years. Even by angel standards, that’s kind of a while. Least I can do is return the favour.”
He flexed his wings, wide and strong, stirred up the water around the boat with their passage, then held his hand out to Dean with that terrifying Winchester grin of I-just-dare-you that had got them all into so many ridiculous situations and prank wars.
Dean’s eyes went wide into his Oh hell no expression.
“Come on, Dean. You let Cas and Gabriel and you don’t trust me?” Sam’s whole face was lit up with his delight as he closed his hands around Dean’s shoulders.
Dean narrowed his eyes and lifted his chin like a challenge, even as he stepped in and slid his arm snug into place around Sam’s waist, as if it had been made to fit there. “If you drop me in the water, so help me, Sammy…”
The rest was lost in a rush of wings, then the boat was quiet.
Tomorrow would bring new complications, no doubt; a new chapter. A happy ending was a stagnant thing: real living never settled. But Castiel had lived stagnant perfection for billions of years, and learned nothing.
After a minute, Gabriel nudged his elbow into Castiel’s side. “Hey. You’re kind of awesome, little bro.” He paused, considering. “Like Teflon.”
“Thank you, Gabriel,” Castiel said gravely.
“Shut up. I’m trying to have a moment here.” Gabriel wrinkled his nose at him. “We’d all be a stupid mess without you, okay?”
Castiel tipped his head back, watched the sun strike copper fire through Samuel’s pinions as he tilted and slid sideways through the air, laughing into Dean’s neck.
“I think the same is true of each of us.”
“Sap.” Gabriel made a face, rumpled up Castiel’s hair mercilessly, and spread his great wings to the sky.
Read the epilogue (NC-17, Gabriel/Sam)...