SPN fic: The Hieroglyphs of Angels (Dean/Castiel, R)
Day 10!
The Hieroglyphs of Angels
Dean/Castiel, Sam, 4,020 words, R
Summary: Dean's been wondering some things about Castiel.
Notes: written for dotfic. Set during season 5. Many thanks to the marvelous smilla02 and teand for beta. Title is from a quote by Lydia Child: They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.
The Hieroglyphs of Angels
by Destina
By the time Dean was 20, he had stopped relying on his memories to be accurate. Too many after-hunt bar crawls where he got drunk and happy, and the alcohol conveniently fuzzed the details of the aftermath. Not as many hunts gone bad, where in the days after, only bits and pieces of what landed him in the hospital would materialize, but enough that there were chunks of Dean's life missing.
All things considered, Dean was not expecting to remember Hell in all its vibrant, horrible detail. He hadn't even had a brain, technically, which made it doubly perplexing and unfair. The fact that he wasn't able to forget his time on the rack (or his time off it), when so many of the good and important things were wiped clean, seemed backwards to him. And it was all there, every second of the torture, every misery leading up to the agonized decision he'd made, the moment he broke, the first time he ripped another soul apart...all of it.
Except for the last five minutes in Hell, of course. His last memory of the pit was white light, and then nothing until he woke in his own body to the darkness of the coffin, the smell of damp earth, and his own shallow, panicked breaths, harsh in the utter silence.
For over a year, it bugged him. Not like he could talk to anyone about it. He didn't have any desire to get into it with Sam, couldn't even imagine how he would start the conversation. Hey, Sammy, you know what I wish? I wish I'd seen those legions of angels coming to carry me out of Hell. Sam would get all earnest and concerned, and then he'd want to debrief Dean like a therapist, and Dean couldn't take it. Bobby wouldn't be much better. He'd probably offer Dean a bottle of whiskey and call it a day.
So Dean was stuck with watching Castiel, and thinking about the pictures of angels slaying demons in every reference book he'd touched in the last year and a half, and wondering.
After Lucifer was freed from his cage, the subject came up, but it wasn't like Dean had planned to ask. He and Cas were on the road together in those heavy days after Sam struck out on his own -- Castiel's request, wanting Dean's help to find Raphael -- and Cas was his usual silent self. Dean glanced at him every so often, but Cas only looked out into the passing dark like he could see entire worlds Dean couldn't.
"So, you said you were a soldier," Dean said.
Cas turned his head and stared at Dean. In the glare of passing headlights, his eyes glittered dark. "I was and am."
"No offense, Cas, but I can't picture it." Dean watched the road ahead while Castiel shifted in the seat beside him, small and wiry but as far from outwardly badass as seemed possible for an angel of the Lord.
"Surely you of all people know that the form of the creation is not a reliable indicator of a warrior's skill."
Dean thought that over for a second, because he couldn't decide if it was a directed insult, or just a general observation. Then he said, "So, what's it like fighting as a human?"
"I am not a human."
"In a human's body, whatever. Humor me." Without even looking at Cas, he could feel the glowering frown of irritation crossing his face.
"Tedious. Restrictive."
"Five dollar college words. C'mon, Cas, what's it like?"
"You're attempting to understand a concept for which you have very little comprehension. It's unlikely I can explain, given the limited vocabulary of your language."
"Thanks for reminding me yet again you're smarter than I am. Now could you answer the question?"
Castiel sighed, a peculiarly human sound, and one that reminded Dean he was sitting next to something in between, not human, not angel. "There are other realms, Dean. Other...places. Earth is not the sum total of creation."
"Okay," Dean said slowly. An intense urge to call Sam hit him then, so he could say dude, Castiel's about to spill his guts on the secrets of the universe, I'll put him on speaker. More than once the last few weeks, Dean had been glad for the break. He needed the breathing room and distance from his own dread and disappointment. But there were moments like this one, where the more Dean understood, the less he knew, and it would be nice to share that intense feeling of dumbness with Sam, who was the smartest asshole he'd ever met.
"For many of your millennia, my brothers and I have waged war in my Father's many kingdoms, on his behalf." Cas's voice became distant, softer. "I'm not the greatest of his warriors, but I have been praised for my cunning and devotion."
Dean raised an eyebrow, but for once, he kept his smart remark to himself. Even if it was tempting to use the oldest dirty joke in the universe on someone who would completely fail to get it.
"I lost count of the number of battles many of your centuries ago." Cas fell silent, and since he apparently wasn't moved to keep talking, Dean said,
"So you don't need a vessel to fight?"
"Of course not. This vessel is appropriate to the battlefield."
"Right." Dean tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, imaginary strains of Blue Oyster Cult playing in his head. "And if you went flitting around on Earth like you really are, you'd burn out the eyes of a bunch of poor dumb bastards who have no idea you actually exist."
"Precisely." Dean risked a glance Cas's way, and found Castiel squinting at him. "You show remarkable understanding."
"For a human, you mean."
"I wasn't going to mention that aspect."
Miles fell away behind them before Dean spoke again, and when he did, everything in him was screaming that he shouldn't, that it wasn't something he wanted to know, but the words tumbled out before he could stop them. "You didn't need a vessel in Hell."
"No." He could feel Castiel's stare on him, that weirdly measuring stare Dean thought somehow could see much more than the expression on his face. Then Castiel said, "You wish to know what it was like in those moments of your liberation."
Dean shrugged.
"The human mind is not built to store and process transformation. Passing from one stage of being to another is...traumatic."
"So I've heard," Dean said dryly.
"Very well." Castiel squared his shoulders. "I did not lead the assault. Uriel took charge of the legion; I remained at his side, the prime position to carry out my specific orders. We laid siege to the vastness of Hell for more than a year, until finally we reached you." In a tone of infinite sadness, Cas added, "Many of my brothers fell."
"I'm sorry," Dean said awkwardly.
"I'm not." Castiel turned his face away, avoiding Dean's startled glance. "I didn't know you then. If I had known, I would have fought all the harder to reach you sooner."
"Wouldn't have made any difference," Dean said. Familiar bitterness welled in him. "I was ten years gone by that point."
"It would have made a difference to me." Dean recognized the tone; it was the same fierce intensity with which Castiel had once threatened to throw him back in the pit.
Dean cleared his throat, and this time, when the silence fell, he let it.
**
To Dean's surprise, he discovered he had more questions about Castiel - questions that never occurred to him when he was too busy trying to deny he'd been picked by God, and that angels were following them around -- and they started popping into his head at the oddest times. He didn't bother with asking most of them, but there was one that was grating on him. So when Castiel was good and drunk the night before they left for Carthage, Dean blurted it out.
Of course, Dean was good and drunk, too, so that might have accounted for what happened, after.
Dean passed Cas another shot of tequila and asked, "Just how old are you, anyway?"
"Older than your human mind can possibly fathom," Castiel said, and put back the shot in one gulp.
"Okay, so, older than dirt. Got it." Dean poured them both another shot and downed it. "Don't you even have some frame of reference? Like, older than the Earth?"
"Why is this relevant in the least to our mission to destroy Lucifer?"
Dean peered at him. "See, this is what I'm talking about. For a bazillion year old angel, I thought you'd be...I dunno. Wiser."
"I am exceptionally wise," Cas said, levering himself up from the kitchen table.
"Well, maybe, Solomon, but to me you're mostly impatient and kind of crabby." Dean looked up at him with what was either a cool poker face, or the face most people make before they're about to toss their cookies; hard to tell which one Cas might be seeing.
"And you, Dean Winchester, are petulant, arrogant and annoying at the best of times." Cas staggered back from the table, knocking over his chair.
"Quiet down in there, we have to kill Satan tomorrow and I need my goddamned sleep," Sam growled from his bedroll on the living room floor.
"Apologies," Castiel said, in the kind of overloud voice that could probably raise centuries of dead people from their slumber when paired with the right Enochian words.
"Touchy little nerd, aren't you?" Dean sneered at Cas.
A moment later - fast enough to give him vertigo and leave him out of breath - Dean was pinned against the wall, though Castiel was considerate enough not to use Dean's body to shake the house to its foundations. Castiel held him there, his fingers twisted into Dean's shirt, so near to the first mark Castiel had made on Dean's body, and when he had Dean's full attention, he began to speak. "I am older than the oldest star in this universe; I am older still than the first imaginings of the first life forms outside of Heaven. I am far older, Dean Winchester, than you, and you still have much to learn."
Dean leaned forward against Castiel's iron strength and said, "Oh, I know a thing or two you still haven't figured out," and it was just another inch, not even enough time to think about the consequences, before his lips were touching Castiel's, measuring Castiel's sharp breath of surprise.
Barely the blink of an eye later, Dean crashed to the ground, and Castiel was gone. Dean cursed and rolled over to see Sam looming over him, looking pissed and sleepy. "You think you and your boyfriend could keep your abusive sex quiet from now on?" he said.
"Fuck you, that was a fight." Dean planted a foot on the floor and shoved up to a sitting position against the wall.
"Right." Sam waved a hand at him, disgusted, and turned to pad back to the other room. "I don't have time for your clueless sexual crisis tonight. Just stop breaking things until 6AM, all right?"
Dean flipped him the bird.
In the morning, Castiel returned, less rumpled and more sober, ready to hit the road to Missouri. He didn't meet Dean's eyes for the first few hours, and that was okay by Dean; he had more serious things on his mind, and this wasn't the first morning-after-drunktown embarrassment he'd ever had to contend with.
Every so often, though, he couldn't help but think of the way his heart had been hammering, the way Cas's eyes had widened, and that tiny second he'd leaned into Dean's touch. It was no good, though; he locked the memory away tight. No point in dwelling on that, when they'd all probably be dead tomorrow.
**
Watching Castiel become more and more human was one thing, and Dean was weirdly okay with it. He knew Castiel didn't want it, and was suffering because of it, but the sneaky selfish part of Dean that hated to be one-upped liked knowing that Castiel had less of an edge on him. When Castiel started losing faith in God, that fit right in, too, because Dean was of the opinion God was a dick, and he shared it with Sam often and loudly, expecting that he'd be next for smiting, as things progressed.
He never was, though, and it infuriated him. Apparently there was nothing he could do to make God care.
Watching Castiel lose faith in Dean himself, though, was something completely different. Dean had gotten used to that feeling, over the years. Dad had never really thought Dean was good enough for much of anything - to stay in school, to really watch over Sammy - and he'd mostly been right. Sam had made no secret of the fact he thought Dean was weak and not up to the job for over a year now. Dean didn't even disagree. Much.
But Castiel...that was different. With the marks of Castiel's disappointment all over his face and body, it was hard to ignore just how far he had fallen in Cas's estimation. Maybe they were both falling at the same time, at more or less the same velocity - Dean toward his inevitable fate, and Cas toward the consequences of choosing his own fate - but Cas was going to hit much harder, and he might never get back up again.
Getting back up again was Dean's special expertise.
Dean rested in Bobby's panic room while Sam and Bobby made plans upstairs, and tried not to focus on the insignificant aches and pains everywhere Castiel's blows had landed. He'd had worse. Much worse. But he could count on one hand the number of times he'd been hurt this way by somebody he...well, somebody who mattered, anyway.
"Dean."
Castiel stood inside the door, an awful expression on his face, dark and moody and pained. Dean looked at him, and he thought about the things Castiel had said to him in the alley, all the angry disappointment and the frustration.
Dean had held that kind of anger toward Sam at one point in his life, though he'd tried never to see it or feel it. It lurked down deep in his heart, prowling there for the moment it could rear its ugly head; resentment at Sam's selfishness, how he had never really understood or appreciated all Dean had sacrificed for him.
Dean had only ever been disappointed that way by people he loved.
"Dean, I'm-"
"You know, Cas, I don't even know what you look like."
Cas blinked, thrown completely off the track of whatever he'd been about to say. It was comical, really, how easy it was to sidetrack Cas, and any other time Dean would smirk and joke and wind him up some more, but not now. He sat up gingerly, glad to see the worry in Cas's eyes. At least he wasn't completely done with Dean, yet.
"I've been looking at you in this dude's body for close to two years now, give or take," Dean said. "Sometimes I forget, this isn't really you."
"I am...as much myself in this vessel as you are in yours," Cas said, head tilted to the side as if Dean were some particularly troublesome puzzle to decipher.
"You know, someday? You're going to say something that actually makes sense, when we talk about these things." Dean gave Cas a half-smile, because there was so much he wanted to say, but talking about shit was low on his list of priorities at that moment. Castiel didn't smile back, but he did cross the small room slowly, and then he sat next to Dean on the hard cot, with its paper-thin mattress and ancient army blanket.
He raised his hand toward Dean's face, and Dean recoiled, knocking the hand away. "Don't. Don't heal them."
"I don't understand."
"I'm okay." If Castiel was still enough of an angel to do that reaching-down-into-Dean's-mind thing he always did -- so easily, like breathing, the way he could read Dean -- he'd figure it out.
"I don't intentionally read your mind," Cas said. "It's just that human beings are so exceptionally unguarded. Your thoughts and emotions bleed out everywhere."
"Bleeding: it's what we do." Dean shook his head.
"All human bodies are vessels, Dean." Cas folded his hands in his lap, and Dean noticed with a not-very-detached interest that they were trembling. "Yours contains a semblance of the energy that makes up what I am."
"Is that what you see when you look at me?" The idea of it was interesting, that he could be more than the weak, angry, useless, easily broken man he'd become accustomed to being over his thirty-odd years of life. That he could be...whatever it was he was, in Heaven. Something different. Something more. Something beautiful, to justify Castiel's faith.
Castiel raised his head and met Dean's eyes. "If I choose to."
"So you're not stuck looking at what everybody else sees, then." Dean gestured to himself, without ever breaking Castiel's gaze.
"I don't find it difficult." Abruptly, Castiel stood up and moved away, not quite to the door, but far enough that he was out of Dean's reach. He stood there with his back to Dean, swaying, as if pulled and pushed by an invisible wind in the center of the room.
"What did you look like when you put your hands on me, in Hell?" Dean got up from the bunk, noticed how Castiel tensed. "Did you leave a mark on me because you had to, or because you wanted to? Are you so bright that I'd be burned by being near you?"
"You ask too many questions," Castiel said, low.
It was too late to stop. In for a penny, in for a pound, so Dean took a deep breath and lifted one hand to run his fingers across the tense curve of muscle and bone at Castiel's shoulder, sweeping them down across his shoulder blade. "I wanted to see your wings," he said. "Not in shadow."
"That's not possible."
"There's a lot of shit that shouldn't be possible," Dean said. He gave Castiel a little push, forced him to turn around and face Dean. "Angels. Demons. God. Heaven. Forty years in Hell. But here we are." He pushed him again, focused on the haunted expression on Castiel's face, the way he didn't try to push back. Not this time. "Your face is Jimmy Novak's face, your voice is Jimmy Novak's voice." They had reached the wall, and this time, Dean pushed Castiel up against it, though he didn't hold him there; nothing outside of holy fire could hold an angel of the Lord where he didn't want to be.
Nothing but this.
"I just want to know what-"
This time, Cas was the one to end the conversation, hands locked around the sides of Dean's face, holding him in place for the kiss. Such an utterly human kiss, the way he seemed to be searching Dean's heart with it, pressing in slowly to unfamiliar territory -- yet so careful, as if afraid he could split Dean open, tearing him apart a piece at a time, starting with the tiny cut on Dean's lip.
When Cas pulled back, he looked wrecked, terrified; Dean knew exactly how he felt.
Castiel's hands still framed his face, and he brushed his thumb over the cut on Dean's cheek, and over his throbbing lip, but those small pains didn't vanish. Castiel smiled, a tiny, rueful smile, and Dean kissed that smile away, replaced it with words Cas didn't quite speak, that didn't need to be said, anyway.
It wouldn't matter, in the end. They still had to find Adam, and they didn't have much time.
But they had this, for a moment, and Castiel was letting Dean have it, have him, as much as Dean was letting Castiel have him in return. It would have to be enough.
**
There would come a time, far in the future, when much was put right, and many things restored to a semblance of order. Castiel's faith in Dean had been proven time and again. Lucifer was caged and Sam was back by Dean's side; this, most of all, made the world a good place for Dean, but Castiel an archangel wasn't low on the list, either.
Cas stopped answering the cell phone - probably no way to get a signal up there or over there or whichever direction Heaven was - so Dean had to resort to alternative methods of communication.
Dean summoned him to a field in nowhere, Indiana, nothing around but cows and corn and grain silos, just to be on the safe side. When Cas appeared in the lazy afternoon sunshine, he looked the same as always, trenchcoat magically pressed by Heaven's laundry, eyes as blue and compassionate as Dean remembered.
There was something else, though. Castiel was smiling. Not a token smile, but a real one, and Dean figured maybe, it was in response to his own big grin.
"Hello, Dean."
"Long time, no see." Dean pointed up toward the cloudless blue sky. "You get everything squared away up there?"
"More or less." Cas glanced around. "Where is your brother?"
"Tucked away somewhere safe. I let him out of my sight sometimes now. In case you hadn't heard."
"A vast improvement for Sam, I'm sure." Now Cas's eyes were positively twinkling.
"Ha ha, guess what? You're still not the funniest angel in the garrison."
"I never claimed to be." Cas turned serious then. "You must have summoned me for a reason. What is it? Is there trouble?"
"Not exactly. I wanted to tell you something." Dean shrugged off his jacket, tossed it and his keys in the tall grass. "You know, when I ganked Zacariah, I never closed my eyes. Kept 'em open the entire time."
"Dean. That's not...you would have been blinded."
Dean shook his head, trying to suppress the joy inside him, its own kind of light. "Saw it all, Cas. All that holy essence or grace or whatever. Just looked like a bunch of light to me."
Cas stood there, looking dumbstruck, right up until the moment Dean went to him, tugged the trenchcoat from his body. "You're not this dude anymore, and I still want to know. What you look like," he said, or demanded, it might have been the same thing at the brass tacks. "Show me, Cas. Show me."
After a moment, Cas moved a hand over Dean's eyes, and a fraction of a second later, a gentle radiance glowed through it. Bright, but not unbearable. Dean pulled Cas's hand away from his face, opened his eyes, and for the first time, saw what so few men before him had ever seen.
Castiel's wings seemed to fill up the sky, blood red and electric white, shining like sun and polished steel, nothing Dean had ever imagined, or could have ever dreamed.
Beautiful, he thought, but there had never been a word written for this. Not in Dean's clumsy language, anyway.
There wasn't any way to touch Castiel that way, not really, and soon enough Castiel looked as he had always appeared to Dean, though the look of needful anticipation on his face was entirely new. Dean knew it for what it was, and later, he spread the human form of Castiel out in that same field, saw him as he was and as he could be, knowing he was seen the same in return.
They practiced two or three different kinds of blasphemy, or so Castiel informed him solemnly, though he was smiling into Dean's skin at the time.
At the waning edge of day, half-asleep, Dean heard a soft flutter of wings, and curled his fingers around Castiel's arm, unwilling to let him go.
"Hush," Castiel said, and in the near-dark, invisible, his wings unfurled, Dean was sure of it; opening, unfurling, no tethers to bind them now.
end
The Hieroglyphs of Angels
Dean/Castiel, Sam, 4,020 words, R
Summary: Dean's been wondering some things about Castiel.
Notes: written for dotfic. Set during season 5. Many thanks to the marvelous smilla02 and teand for beta. Title is from a quote by Lydia Child: They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.
The Hieroglyphs of Angels
by Destina
By the time Dean was 20, he had stopped relying on his memories to be accurate. Too many after-hunt bar crawls where he got drunk and happy, and the alcohol conveniently fuzzed the details of the aftermath. Not as many hunts gone bad, where in the days after, only bits and pieces of what landed him in the hospital would materialize, but enough that there were chunks of Dean's life missing.
All things considered, Dean was not expecting to remember Hell in all its vibrant, horrible detail. He hadn't even had a brain, technically, which made it doubly perplexing and unfair. The fact that he wasn't able to forget his time on the rack (or his time off it), when so many of the good and important things were wiped clean, seemed backwards to him. And it was all there, every second of the torture, every misery leading up to the agonized decision he'd made, the moment he broke, the first time he ripped another soul apart...all of it.
Except for the last five minutes in Hell, of course. His last memory of the pit was white light, and then nothing until he woke in his own body to the darkness of the coffin, the smell of damp earth, and his own shallow, panicked breaths, harsh in the utter silence.
For over a year, it bugged him. Not like he could talk to anyone about it. He didn't have any desire to get into it with Sam, couldn't even imagine how he would start the conversation. Hey, Sammy, you know what I wish? I wish I'd seen those legions of angels coming to carry me out of Hell. Sam would get all earnest and concerned, and then he'd want to debrief Dean like a therapist, and Dean couldn't take it. Bobby wouldn't be much better. He'd probably offer Dean a bottle of whiskey and call it a day.
So Dean was stuck with watching Castiel, and thinking about the pictures of angels slaying demons in every reference book he'd touched in the last year and a half, and wondering.
After Lucifer was freed from his cage, the subject came up, but it wasn't like Dean had planned to ask. He and Cas were on the road together in those heavy days after Sam struck out on his own -- Castiel's request, wanting Dean's help to find Raphael -- and Cas was his usual silent self. Dean glanced at him every so often, but Cas only looked out into the passing dark like he could see entire worlds Dean couldn't.
"So, you said you were a soldier," Dean said.
Cas turned his head and stared at Dean. In the glare of passing headlights, his eyes glittered dark. "I was and am."
"No offense, Cas, but I can't picture it." Dean watched the road ahead while Castiel shifted in the seat beside him, small and wiry but as far from outwardly badass as seemed possible for an angel of the Lord.
"Surely you of all people know that the form of the creation is not a reliable indicator of a warrior's skill."
Dean thought that over for a second, because he couldn't decide if it was a directed insult, or just a general observation. Then he said, "So, what's it like fighting as a human?"
"I am not a human."
"In a human's body, whatever. Humor me." Without even looking at Cas, he could feel the glowering frown of irritation crossing his face.
"Tedious. Restrictive."
"Five dollar college words. C'mon, Cas, what's it like?"
"You're attempting to understand a concept for which you have very little comprehension. It's unlikely I can explain, given the limited vocabulary of your language."
"Thanks for reminding me yet again you're smarter than I am. Now could you answer the question?"
Castiel sighed, a peculiarly human sound, and one that reminded Dean he was sitting next to something in between, not human, not angel. "There are other realms, Dean. Other...places. Earth is not the sum total of creation."
"Okay," Dean said slowly. An intense urge to call Sam hit him then, so he could say dude, Castiel's about to spill his guts on the secrets of the universe, I'll put him on speaker. More than once the last few weeks, Dean had been glad for the break. He needed the breathing room and distance from his own dread and disappointment. But there were moments like this one, where the more Dean understood, the less he knew, and it would be nice to share that intense feeling of dumbness with Sam, who was the smartest asshole he'd ever met.
"For many of your millennia, my brothers and I have waged war in my Father's many kingdoms, on his behalf." Cas's voice became distant, softer. "I'm not the greatest of his warriors, but I have been praised for my cunning and devotion."
Dean raised an eyebrow, but for once, he kept his smart remark to himself. Even if it was tempting to use the oldest dirty joke in the universe on someone who would completely fail to get it.
"I lost count of the number of battles many of your centuries ago." Cas fell silent, and since he apparently wasn't moved to keep talking, Dean said,
"So you don't need a vessel to fight?"
"Of course not. This vessel is appropriate to the battlefield."
"Right." Dean tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, imaginary strains of Blue Oyster Cult playing in his head. "And if you went flitting around on Earth like you really are, you'd burn out the eyes of a bunch of poor dumb bastards who have no idea you actually exist."
"Precisely." Dean risked a glance Cas's way, and found Castiel squinting at him. "You show remarkable understanding."
"For a human, you mean."
"I wasn't going to mention that aspect."
Miles fell away behind them before Dean spoke again, and when he did, everything in him was screaming that he shouldn't, that it wasn't something he wanted to know, but the words tumbled out before he could stop them. "You didn't need a vessel in Hell."
"No." He could feel Castiel's stare on him, that weirdly measuring stare Dean thought somehow could see much more than the expression on his face. Then Castiel said, "You wish to know what it was like in those moments of your liberation."
Dean shrugged.
"The human mind is not built to store and process transformation. Passing from one stage of being to another is...traumatic."
"So I've heard," Dean said dryly.
"Very well." Castiel squared his shoulders. "I did not lead the assault. Uriel took charge of the legion; I remained at his side, the prime position to carry out my specific orders. We laid siege to the vastness of Hell for more than a year, until finally we reached you." In a tone of infinite sadness, Cas added, "Many of my brothers fell."
"I'm sorry," Dean said awkwardly.
"I'm not." Castiel turned his face away, avoiding Dean's startled glance. "I didn't know you then. If I had known, I would have fought all the harder to reach you sooner."
"Wouldn't have made any difference," Dean said. Familiar bitterness welled in him. "I was ten years gone by that point."
"It would have made a difference to me." Dean recognized the tone; it was the same fierce intensity with which Castiel had once threatened to throw him back in the pit.
Dean cleared his throat, and this time, when the silence fell, he let it.
**
To Dean's surprise, he discovered he had more questions about Castiel - questions that never occurred to him when he was too busy trying to deny he'd been picked by God, and that angels were following them around -- and they started popping into his head at the oddest times. He didn't bother with asking most of them, but there was one that was grating on him. So when Castiel was good and drunk the night before they left for Carthage, Dean blurted it out.
Of course, Dean was good and drunk, too, so that might have accounted for what happened, after.
Dean passed Cas another shot of tequila and asked, "Just how old are you, anyway?"
"Older than your human mind can possibly fathom," Castiel said, and put back the shot in one gulp.
"Okay, so, older than dirt. Got it." Dean poured them both another shot and downed it. "Don't you even have some frame of reference? Like, older than the Earth?"
"Why is this relevant in the least to our mission to destroy Lucifer?"
Dean peered at him. "See, this is what I'm talking about. For a bazillion year old angel, I thought you'd be...I dunno. Wiser."
"I am exceptionally wise," Cas said, levering himself up from the kitchen table.
"Well, maybe, Solomon, but to me you're mostly impatient and kind of crabby." Dean looked up at him with what was either a cool poker face, or the face most people make before they're about to toss their cookies; hard to tell which one Cas might be seeing.
"And you, Dean Winchester, are petulant, arrogant and annoying at the best of times." Cas staggered back from the table, knocking over his chair.
"Quiet down in there, we have to kill Satan tomorrow and I need my goddamned sleep," Sam growled from his bedroll on the living room floor.
"Apologies," Castiel said, in the kind of overloud voice that could probably raise centuries of dead people from their slumber when paired with the right Enochian words.
"Touchy little nerd, aren't you?" Dean sneered at Cas.
A moment later - fast enough to give him vertigo and leave him out of breath - Dean was pinned against the wall, though Castiel was considerate enough not to use Dean's body to shake the house to its foundations. Castiel held him there, his fingers twisted into Dean's shirt, so near to the first mark Castiel had made on Dean's body, and when he had Dean's full attention, he began to speak. "I am older than the oldest star in this universe; I am older still than the first imaginings of the first life forms outside of Heaven. I am far older, Dean Winchester, than you, and you still have much to learn."
Dean leaned forward against Castiel's iron strength and said, "Oh, I know a thing or two you still haven't figured out," and it was just another inch, not even enough time to think about the consequences, before his lips were touching Castiel's, measuring Castiel's sharp breath of surprise.
Barely the blink of an eye later, Dean crashed to the ground, and Castiel was gone. Dean cursed and rolled over to see Sam looming over him, looking pissed and sleepy. "You think you and your boyfriend could keep your abusive sex quiet from now on?" he said.
"Fuck you, that was a fight." Dean planted a foot on the floor and shoved up to a sitting position against the wall.
"Right." Sam waved a hand at him, disgusted, and turned to pad back to the other room. "I don't have time for your clueless sexual crisis tonight. Just stop breaking things until 6AM, all right?"
Dean flipped him the bird.
In the morning, Castiel returned, less rumpled and more sober, ready to hit the road to Missouri. He didn't meet Dean's eyes for the first few hours, and that was okay by Dean; he had more serious things on his mind, and this wasn't the first morning-after-drunktown embarrassment he'd ever had to contend with.
Every so often, though, he couldn't help but think of the way his heart had been hammering, the way Cas's eyes had widened, and that tiny second he'd leaned into Dean's touch. It was no good, though; he locked the memory away tight. No point in dwelling on that, when they'd all probably be dead tomorrow.
**
Watching Castiel become more and more human was one thing, and Dean was weirdly okay with it. He knew Castiel didn't want it, and was suffering because of it, but the sneaky selfish part of Dean that hated to be one-upped liked knowing that Castiel had less of an edge on him. When Castiel started losing faith in God, that fit right in, too, because Dean was of the opinion God was a dick, and he shared it with Sam often and loudly, expecting that he'd be next for smiting, as things progressed.
He never was, though, and it infuriated him. Apparently there was nothing he could do to make God care.
Watching Castiel lose faith in Dean himself, though, was something completely different. Dean had gotten used to that feeling, over the years. Dad had never really thought Dean was good enough for much of anything - to stay in school, to really watch over Sammy - and he'd mostly been right. Sam had made no secret of the fact he thought Dean was weak and not up to the job for over a year now. Dean didn't even disagree. Much.
But Castiel...that was different. With the marks of Castiel's disappointment all over his face and body, it was hard to ignore just how far he had fallen in Cas's estimation. Maybe they were both falling at the same time, at more or less the same velocity - Dean toward his inevitable fate, and Cas toward the consequences of choosing his own fate - but Cas was going to hit much harder, and he might never get back up again.
Getting back up again was Dean's special expertise.
Dean rested in Bobby's panic room while Sam and Bobby made plans upstairs, and tried not to focus on the insignificant aches and pains everywhere Castiel's blows had landed. He'd had worse. Much worse. But he could count on one hand the number of times he'd been hurt this way by somebody he...well, somebody who mattered, anyway.
"Dean."
Castiel stood inside the door, an awful expression on his face, dark and moody and pained. Dean looked at him, and he thought about the things Castiel had said to him in the alley, all the angry disappointment and the frustration.
Dean had held that kind of anger toward Sam at one point in his life, though he'd tried never to see it or feel it. It lurked down deep in his heart, prowling there for the moment it could rear its ugly head; resentment at Sam's selfishness, how he had never really understood or appreciated all Dean had sacrificed for him.
Dean had only ever been disappointed that way by people he loved.
"Dean, I'm-"
"You know, Cas, I don't even know what you look like."
Cas blinked, thrown completely off the track of whatever he'd been about to say. It was comical, really, how easy it was to sidetrack Cas, and any other time Dean would smirk and joke and wind him up some more, but not now. He sat up gingerly, glad to see the worry in Cas's eyes. At least he wasn't completely done with Dean, yet.
"I've been looking at you in this dude's body for close to two years now, give or take," Dean said. "Sometimes I forget, this isn't really you."
"I am...as much myself in this vessel as you are in yours," Cas said, head tilted to the side as if Dean were some particularly troublesome puzzle to decipher.
"You know, someday? You're going to say something that actually makes sense, when we talk about these things." Dean gave Cas a half-smile, because there was so much he wanted to say, but talking about shit was low on his list of priorities at that moment. Castiel didn't smile back, but he did cross the small room slowly, and then he sat next to Dean on the hard cot, with its paper-thin mattress and ancient army blanket.
He raised his hand toward Dean's face, and Dean recoiled, knocking the hand away. "Don't. Don't heal them."
"I don't understand."
"I'm okay." If Castiel was still enough of an angel to do that reaching-down-into-Dean's-mind thing he always did -- so easily, like breathing, the way he could read Dean -- he'd figure it out.
"I don't intentionally read your mind," Cas said. "It's just that human beings are so exceptionally unguarded. Your thoughts and emotions bleed out everywhere."
"Bleeding: it's what we do." Dean shook his head.
"All human bodies are vessels, Dean." Cas folded his hands in his lap, and Dean noticed with a not-very-detached interest that they were trembling. "Yours contains a semblance of the energy that makes up what I am."
"Is that what you see when you look at me?" The idea of it was interesting, that he could be more than the weak, angry, useless, easily broken man he'd become accustomed to being over his thirty-odd years of life. That he could be...whatever it was he was, in Heaven. Something different. Something more. Something beautiful, to justify Castiel's faith.
Castiel raised his head and met Dean's eyes. "If I choose to."
"So you're not stuck looking at what everybody else sees, then." Dean gestured to himself, without ever breaking Castiel's gaze.
"I don't find it difficult." Abruptly, Castiel stood up and moved away, not quite to the door, but far enough that he was out of Dean's reach. He stood there with his back to Dean, swaying, as if pulled and pushed by an invisible wind in the center of the room.
"What did you look like when you put your hands on me, in Hell?" Dean got up from the bunk, noticed how Castiel tensed. "Did you leave a mark on me because you had to, or because you wanted to? Are you so bright that I'd be burned by being near you?"
"You ask too many questions," Castiel said, low.
It was too late to stop. In for a penny, in for a pound, so Dean took a deep breath and lifted one hand to run his fingers across the tense curve of muscle and bone at Castiel's shoulder, sweeping them down across his shoulder blade. "I wanted to see your wings," he said. "Not in shadow."
"That's not possible."
"There's a lot of shit that shouldn't be possible," Dean said. He gave Castiel a little push, forced him to turn around and face Dean. "Angels. Demons. God. Heaven. Forty years in Hell. But here we are." He pushed him again, focused on the haunted expression on Castiel's face, the way he didn't try to push back. Not this time. "Your face is Jimmy Novak's face, your voice is Jimmy Novak's voice." They had reached the wall, and this time, Dean pushed Castiel up against it, though he didn't hold him there; nothing outside of holy fire could hold an angel of the Lord where he didn't want to be.
Nothing but this.
"I just want to know what-"
This time, Cas was the one to end the conversation, hands locked around the sides of Dean's face, holding him in place for the kiss. Such an utterly human kiss, the way he seemed to be searching Dean's heart with it, pressing in slowly to unfamiliar territory -- yet so careful, as if afraid he could split Dean open, tearing him apart a piece at a time, starting with the tiny cut on Dean's lip.
When Cas pulled back, he looked wrecked, terrified; Dean knew exactly how he felt.
Castiel's hands still framed his face, and he brushed his thumb over the cut on Dean's cheek, and over his throbbing lip, but those small pains didn't vanish. Castiel smiled, a tiny, rueful smile, and Dean kissed that smile away, replaced it with words Cas didn't quite speak, that didn't need to be said, anyway.
It wouldn't matter, in the end. They still had to find Adam, and they didn't have much time.
But they had this, for a moment, and Castiel was letting Dean have it, have him, as much as Dean was letting Castiel have him in return. It would have to be enough.
**
There would come a time, far in the future, when much was put right, and many things restored to a semblance of order. Castiel's faith in Dean had been proven time and again. Lucifer was caged and Sam was back by Dean's side; this, most of all, made the world a good place for Dean, but Castiel an archangel wasn't low on the list, either.
Cas stopped answering the cell phone - probably no way to get a signal up there or over there or whichever direction Heaven was - so Dean had to resort to alternative methods of communication.
Dean summoned him to a field in nowhere, Indiana, nothing around but cows and corn and grain silos, just to be on the safe side. When Cas appeared in the lazy afternoon sunshine, he looked the same as always, trenchcoat magically pressed by Heaven's laundry, eyes as blue and compassionate as Dean remembered.
There was something else, though. Castiel was smiling. Not a token smile, but a real one, and Dean figured maybe, it was in response to his own big grin.
"Hello, Dean."
"Long time, no see." Dean pointed up toward the cloudless blue sky. "You get everything squared away up there?"
"More or less." Cas glanced around. "Where is your brother?"
"Tucked away somewhere safe. I let him out of my sight sometimes now. In case you hadn't heard."
"A vast improvement for Sam, I'm sure." Now Cas's eyes were positively twinkling.
"Ha ha, guess what? You're still not the funniest angel in the garrison."
"I never claimed to be." Cas turned serious then. "You must have summoned me for a reason. What is it? Is there trouble?"
"Not exactly. I wanted to tell you something." Dean shrugged off his jacket, tossed it and his keys in the tall grass. "You know, when I ganked Zacariah, I never closed my eyes. Kept 'em open the entire time."
"Dean. That's not...you would have been blinded."
Dean shook his head, trying to suppress the joy inside him, its own kind of light. "Saw it all, Cas. All that holy essence or grace or whatever. Just looked like a bunch of light to me."
Cas stood there, looking dumbstruck, right up until the moment Dean went to him, tugged the trenchcoat from his body. "You're not this dude anymore, and I still want to know. What you look like," he said, or demanded, it might have been the same thing at the brass tacks. "Show me, Cas. Show me."
After a moment, Cas moved a hand over Dean's eyes, and a fraction of a second later, a gentle radiance glowed through it. Bright, but not unbearable. Dean pulled Cas's hand away from his face, opened his eyes, and for the first time, saw what so few men before him had ever seen.
Castiel's wings seemed to fill up the sky, blood red and electric white, shining like sun and polished steel, nothing Dean had ever imagined, or could have ever dreamed.
Beautiful, he thought, but there had never been a word written for this. Not in Dean's clumsy language, anyway.
There wasn't any way to touch Castiel that way, not really, and soon enough Castiel looked as he had always appeared to Dean, though the look of needful anticipation on his face was entirely new. Dean knew it for what it was, and later, he spread the human form of Castiel out in that same field, saw him as he was and as he could be, knowing he was seen the same in return.
They practiced two or three different kinds of blasphemy, or so Castiel informed him solemnly, though he was smiling into Dean's skin at the time.
At the waning edge of day, half-asleep, Dean heard a soft flutter of wings, and curled his fingers around Castiel's arm, unwilling to let him go.
"Hush," Castiel said, and in the near-dark, invisible, his wings unfurled, Dean was sure of it; opening, unfurling, no tethers to bind them now.
end