Tracks
Five
The sound of the Impala’s engine was both familiar and exotic to Castiel’s human ears, but the sight of it was entirely unmistakable. Bold rays from the afternoon sun danced across its metal surface, flickering gold on black like licks of fire, and inside it, Dean like a captain behind the wheel. He looked small at first as he came into view, a passage of time that lingered for far too long. Castiel wanted Dean here and now, out of his car and in front of him in one piece. He’d been scared half to death that one of the angels would find Dean first before he’d made it to Lawrence, but no, here he was, safe and alive as Missouri had assured he’d be.
And beautiful. More than beautiful. Seeing Dean wasn’t what Castiel had expected, far from it. But then again, when was Dean ever what Castiel expected him to be? As Dean’s car approached, Castiel felt the muscle in the hollow of his chest beat and skip to an unspecified, unpredictable tempo, his heart a blooming rosebush, its chambers like petals unfurled. How Dean had gotten from the driver’s seat of the Impala to a mere arm’s length in front of Castiel would forever remain a mystery to him, one he wouldn’t ponder for long. For a short time, he’d come to believe that he’d never set eyes on Dean Winchester again, but here he was, staring back at him in his usual manner of both trust and doubt, a look that was impossibly fierce and gentle at the same time.
In a vessel, Castiel sometimes felt as if he were looking at Dean through glass, a filtered view of something he’d once seen in its purest state, and also when he had been in his. Through mortal eyes that he could now call his own, he wondered if this was how the rest of the world saw Dean, how it viewed him, experienced him. The glass was gone, the filter removed. The sun was bright enough to cause Castiel to squint a little, but Dean was brighter, a beacon that wasn’t light or sound or whatever else intangible, but a person. A person he’d rebuilt. He would have to relearn Dean from a human point of view. He’d also have to learn how to cope with the effects Dean had on him.
Five minutes ago would’ve been a convenient time to start.
Had he still been an angel, he could’ve anchored himself to Dean’s soul, used its blinding, God-given sacredness as a means to sober himself up, but he could barely visualize it now, as if he were no longer capable of beholding such a sight even through his memories. It was as if that small miracle hidden at the core of all human beings, an entity of divine origins unknown even to Castiel, wasn’t even there at all.
As Dean had the habit of doing, he pulled Castiel’s head out of the clouds by throwing him off course and saying something completely unexpected, decorum be damned. “Dude,” he said, his face scrunching into a tangle of lines around his mouth and eyes, “no offense, but you’re sweating like a pig.”
It took Castiel a moment to realize that his appearance must have come as a shock to Dean. For starters, he was dressed in faded denim jeans and a t-shirt, which Missouri had handed him in exchange for his suit and coat, both pinned to the clothesline behind the house.
“I take no offense,” Castiel said in earnest. “I hadn’t taken into consideration the physiological effects of working in the sun.” He’d seen humans sweat before, Sam and Dean included. He’d seen hair lighten and freckles darken and skin burn after prolonged exposure to the sun, a celestial being that belonged to the universe for far longer than it did to humankind.
Dean whistled. “She really put you to work out here, didn’t she?”
“Missouri has been a gracious host. It’s the least I could do to help out around the house. I’m in her debt.”
Dean nodded, still looking at Castiel as if he weren’t quite sure what he was. After a moment, Dean asked how he felt.
“I feel horrible,” Castiel admitted, “and fantastic. I can feel… things. The air in my lungs, my heartbeat. I feel every nerve igniting.” It was unlike before when his body had functioned like a vehicle piloted by his grace. But this was life, human life. Real breaths and real human blood coursing through his mortal veins.
Dean looked almost amused. “You think yard work is good? Wait until you get laid.” That comment must’ve sounded a lot funnier in his head and definitely not as awkward. It didn’t help that the world seemed to have come to a sudden standstill, calm and quiet and a perfect breeding ground for some tension to build between Dean and a visually human Castiel, whose face was still red and flushed, his chest rising and collapsing more noticeably now than it had ever been before. In reality, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but this was Castiel, looking so unlike an angel to Dean that he couldn’t help but stare, and stare, and stare some more, the intensity of which pulled on Castiel’s newly discovered hormones in rushing and wild sensations too similar to something like panic for his own comfort. But then Dean extinguished that little moment, allowing Castiel to catch his breath.
“Missouri tells me your grace is gone,” Dean ventured, prepared at last to broach the subject hanging between them.
“That’s true. I expelled it.”
“Yourself?” Dean asked, to which Castiel simply nodded. Dean couldn’t comprehend what that meant or entailed, but still he tried to imagine, judging by the look on his face. “Uh, I guess I should welcome you to the club.”
Dean was being sincere, and Castiel thanked him for it. “It seems all right so far, I suppose. Besides, I haven’t been the biggest fan of my former club lately.”
Dean appeared to be juggling words, as if he weren’t quite sure how to hatch them so that they’d come out right. “Can you ever get it back?”
“Under special circumstances, perhaps, but I doubt it. Besides, I doubt I’d be able to go through with the Host’s demands if it came to that.” He looked beyond Dean for a moment, speaking more to himself when he said almost fondly, “Some changes are permanent, I’ve come to learn.”
“Not always,” Dean said, and his insistence bothered Castiel for reasons he preferred not to entertain. But Dean persisted. “Lucifer fell, right? And he’s swimming in shit tons of angel juice. There’s got to be some-”
Before Dean could deliver a speech about having options, Castiel interrupted. “Lucifer is the exception, not the rule. When he fell, he clutched every star he could grasp on his way down, pulling in innocent souls, sucking the grace out of our brothers and sisters as he passed them by in his descent. His power is stolen.”
Dean remained silent for a while before deciding that humor was clearly his only option. “Consider larceny officially added to his growing list of crimes. Dude’s a shoo-in for Guinness with that rap sheet.”
Castiel didn’t speak what thoughts crossed his mind at that remark. His mind, once so disciplined, wandered entirely too easily, thoughts scattered like seedlings caught in a windstorm. He couldn’t will himself to stop thinking as he’d been able to do as an angel. He couldn’t prevent a comparison to Lucifer, who reminded him that he, too, was a thief in possession of a vessel that shouldn’t belong to him, not like this.
He decided that now would be a good time to ask about the others. Dean was filling him in on Chuck’s plan to meet up in Detroit, which was about a fifteen hour drive from Lawrence, when Missouri came gliding down the front steps of the house, door slamming in her wake.
“Now I knew I heard that old clunker pull up to my curb,” she said, looking at Dean as if she were reading his mind. She probably was, and Castiel knew that it made Dean shift in his boots and rattle off a list of the most offensive curse words his imagination could come up with against his will.
Dean had spoken, but the words failed to register. Castiel would have to learn how to focus.
“Save the gratitude for later, Dean,” Missouri continued, shaking her head. “Tell Michigan it can wait until tomorrow. You’re spending the night, and that’s all there is to it.” Clearly, she must have ignored all Dean’s knee-jerk swearing. Conversations with mind readers were often one-sided as both Dean and Castiel had come to learn.
This time Dean didn’t speak. His thoughts were taken from him before passing over his tongue, and Missouri again shook her head, now with added emphasis.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about me,” she said. “I’ve survived in this business for longer than you’ve been alive, child. I can sense when an alien creature’s about to land on my doorstep.”
“Alien?” Dean repeated, confused.
Missouri and Castiel exchanged glances. “Angels aren’t born on Earth, Dean. Neither are demons,” he explained.
“You’re an alien?” Dean asked in disbelief.
“By your definition, yes.”
Missouri smacked the back of Dean’s head. “And he’s about the best friend you’ve ever had, too. You should pay a little closer attention to what he really is.” She paused long enough to allow Dean a moment to feel uncomfortable before dropping the issue. “Now how about you come on inside. Pie’s nice and hot.”
“Apple?” Dean asked, talking with his stomach.
“You know it, sugar.”
“You spoil me, Missouri.”
“Don’t sweet talk a sweet talker,” she said in her soft-spoken voice, and she turned to enter the house, expecting them both to follow.
--
Dean couldn’t help but marvel a bit at how comfortable Castiel looked coming in through the front door, almost as if it had been routine. He followed at Castiel’s heels, passing through the foyer where Missouri’s clientele waited to have their palms read and their futures predicted. This was where he and Sam had first met Missouri while investigating a poltergeist at their old home in Lawrence, the home that a demon set fire to in 1983, its embers still smoldering in Sam and Dean right beneath the surface.
He continued to follow Castiel past the staircase on his left and into the sitting room to his right, an area sectioned off by strings of beads, charming and rustic in their appeal. A soft diffusion of light illuminated the room through large panels of windows dressed in sheer white linen that dared to make Missouri’s living space glow.
Dean sat beside Castiel, both of whom looked entirely too domestic sharing a sofa, its dated pattern a small flowerbed, and its cushions sometimes failing to separate them as one or the other shifted positions. Missouri returned with two slices of steaming pie cooling beneath heaps of vanilla ice cream. She smiled at Dean when the thought crossed his mind to put a boot on her leather-embossed coffee table, a preempted action she made a point not to dismiss.
It pleased Castiel to see Dean here in Missouri’s home, here in the sitting room and later on seated at a dining room table instead of a restaurant booth or at a barstool. He thought he detected something like unease on Dean’s face, though, as if he expected Armageddon to descend on their doorstep, or as if he were still figuring out what exactly Castiel was now. But his smile said that he was trying to understand, so Castiel decided not to bring it up.
Besides, it was easier to keep up the pretense of normalcy, even if only for a little while. He’d barely admit to it, but it was far easier slipping into mortality than he’d ever thought possible. Upon becoming human, he thought he would have quite literally and figuratively fallen flat on his face, but it wasn’t so. Even before he fell, he had learned human impulses, taking them in like secondhand smoke from Sam and Dean. He’d learned to want, to fear, to feel. He’d tried to smother these out or bury them in a place where they could no longer be reached, but he hadn’t tried hard enough. He hadn’t succeeded back then, but maybe he could find tendrils of success in past failures and grasp hold of them now.
After a second serving of pie and a round of coffee, Dean and Castiel finished the outside work together while Missouri busied herself in the kitchen. She’d promised them a meal fit for kings, and then scolded Dean for the next five minutes straight for referring to himself as royalty in his head.
--
Nighttime found Castiel alone in one of the house’s spare bedrooms. He carefully folded the coat and suit that Missouri had handed back to him, and placed his clothing in an empty duffel bag Dean had supplied earlier. At some point in time, this holy tax accountant getup had started to feel like his own, and he supposed that now it truly was. He remembered how quickly he’d shed the coat under the Kansas sun as he wandered through the field, lost. As an angel, he hadn’t realized the impracticality of this particular item of clothing in certain environments, but as a human it hadn’t taken him long to understand. He supposed he would wear this particular ensemble again at some point in the future. He imagined himself dressing in it, one article of clothing at a time. Earlier that morning, he’d discovered that he put his left sock on before his right one, and he realized that this would be one of the many routines he would have to perform day after day from this point on. Sam and Dean had many routines that Castiel had observed, and he wondered which ones of theirs he’d fall into and which ones he’d forge for himself.
People on Earth fell into all sorts of things. They fell into habits. They fell into love. To Castiel, Dean was the first true wonder of the human world. Even as an angel, he’d had hopes and dreams for Dean that weren’t part of the Host’s master plan. Originally, he’d set out with the Winchesters to help stop the seals from breaking and therefore to prevent Lucifer from walking the Earth, but that soon morphed into something else. Sam and Dean were vessels in the eyes of Heaven and Hell both, but to Castiel they’d become something far greater.
Dean had become something more to him. Castiel reclined on the bed and allowed his eyes slowly to close, daring to think thoughts that he’d kept at bay as an angel, that he’d denied himself the pleasure of having-thoughts he refused to admit even existed. He’d already fallen from grace and lost his connection to the Host, and there was no one sharing his mind and body now, only himself.
He could picture a scenario behind closed eyes so perfectly, a scenario he supposed would never come to be, in which one of them might make a grand confession.
“I was perfectly content before I knew what love was, or at least I thought so at the time,” Castiel would say, extending his words to Dean like bait, a hook for Dean to take if he wanted to.
“You loved God, didn’t you?” Dean might ask.
And Castiel would answer, “I obeyed God-until I disobeyed, I suppose, but love and obedience are two very different things, I’ve come to learn.”
That was Castiel’s first fantasy as a human. His second followed soon after.
If Dean confessed that he couldn’t stand to lose Castiel, then Castiel would say something along the lines of, “I fell so you wouldn’t.”
He shook his head, thinking he’d gotten the characterization of Dean all wrong because obviously Dean would never say such a thing. Too chick flick, not enough smooth-as-silk pick-up line.
“I’m not asking you to stay, but I’m not telling you to go, either. I think we both know what’ll happen if you stick around.” It wasn’t perfect, but the sound of it in his head made his skin prickle and his spine shiver, and he felt all but lost in small fantasies of Dean until he caught the sound of a figure standing at the door.
Missouri had sent Dean upstairs with a cup of tea. That was the excuse, the prop that brought them together. There usually was one, a prop, sometimes a phone call asking for help to prevent a seal from breaking, a call of distress requiring the fire of an angel’s fist to get the job done.
Dean ambled around the room, his fingers grazing along the top of the oak dresser and touching upon the tip of the lampshade finial to see how hot it’d gotten. He paused at the sight of the amulet, which Castiel had placed on top of the stack of folded clothes in his bag. At Castiel’s gesturing, he picked it up, slipped it over his head, and then proceeded to run through the list of standard questions to ask. What if Zachariah found them? What if Hell found them first? What would happen in Detroit?
Castiel spoke his lines, answering according to the script of knowledge imbedded in him since his creation. Dean didn’t deviate from his own script, and he was right not to. Seals were breaking at speeds faster than they could be stopped. Lucifer’s forces were mobilizing, and Michael’s, too. This was what mattered, and not the glint of green in a particular man’s eyes, the shine of his lip, or the tongue that danced behind it. How did men cope with temptation? He’d ask Dean, but it would sound too much like asking permission. Permission for what, he didn’t know. Access to the private chambers of Dean’s heart? Permission to tread quiet deer tracks of his own across the snow that had piled there? A battle loomed over their heads like a storm cloud promising a flood to rival Noah’s, and although he’d already said to hell with his fate and his original purpose for existence, he was still a warrior and could still fight. He still had a cause, just a different one.
That night, sleep came slowly at first before total consumption. Castiel sat in his dreams on the ocean floor, the surface a ceiling he could see, but he hadn’t been made tall enough to touch.
--
After Dean had devoured the last of the bacon strips at breakfast, and after his and Castiel’s duffel bags had been loaded into the Impala, Castiel waited outside on the front steps with Missouri while Dean, still inside, checked in with Sam.
“Those boys are in it for life,” Missouri said. “Always another case, another battle to be fought and won.” Castiel nodded in agreement, absently observing a diligent little bee circling one of the rosebushes he’d pruned the day before.
“Is that what you signed up for?” she asked, a note of concern in her voice that tugged at his heartstrings.
“I haven’t considered any alternatives,” he admitted. Truthfully, he dreaded even to think about them.
“He’s tired,” Missouri said, speaking about Dean. “For years now. He tries, but he’s built so many walls.”
It was true. Hadrian’s didn’t hold a candle. By this point, Castiel had lost sight of the bee. Perhaps it had buried itself inside the sweet center of one of the blooms, or flown off while he wasn’t looking.
Missouri continued to press the issue. “I’m surprised you can see them,” she said, referring to the walls again.
Castiel asked why it surprised her, and she almost snorted in response. “Because they all fall at your feet, sugar.”
“Not all of them.”
“Almost all of them,” she corrected, lightening the mood with a sweet, self-satisfied voice, but then she looked at him directly, studying him as if she could render him inside out. She probably could.
Dean chose that particular moment to come barreling out of the house like a rocket, bringing news about the others and their ETA in Detroit.
“Don’t be a stranger, Dean,” Missouri said, giving his shoulder a light punch for emphasis. Castiel had grown fond of Missouri in their short time together. She possessed a rare kindness and insight into the human condition that he could learn a lot from. He also enjoyed her cooking and the stories she had to share about Sam and Dean before Castiel had known them, and ones about John Winchester, too. Her anecdotes had become another lens through which Castiel could glimpse Dean, and there was always delight to be found in that. She hugged Castiel goodbye at the curb, and it struck him that he’d never been hugged by anyone before. He found it to be a rather pleasant experience.
The sound of the Impala’s engine was both familiar and exotic to Castiel’s human ears, but the sight of it was entirely unmistakable. Bold rays from the afternoon sun danced across its metal surface, flickering gold on black like licks of fire, and inside it, Dean like a captain behind the wheel. He looked small at first as he came into view, a passage of time that lingered for far too long. Castiel wanted Dean here and now, out of his car and in front of him in one piece. He’d been scared half to death that one of the angels would find Dean first before he’d made it to Lawrence, but no, here he was, safe and alive as Missouri had assured he’d be.
And beautiful. More than beautiful. Seeing Dean wasn’t what Castiel had expected, far from it. But then again, when was Dean ever what Castiel expected him to be? As Dean’s car approached, Castiel felt the muscle in the hollow of his chest beat and skip to an unspecified, unpredictable tempo, his heart a blooming rosebush, its chambers like petals unfurled. How Dean had gotten from the driver’s seat of the Impala to a mere arm’s length in front of Castiel would forever remain a mystery to him, one he wouldn’t ponder for long. For a short time, he’d come to believe that he’d never set eyes on Dean Winchester again, but here he was, staring back at him in his usual manner of both trust and doubt, a look that was impossibly fierce and gentle at the same time.
In a vessel, Castiel sometimes felt as if he were looking at Dean through glass, a filtered view of something he’d once seen in its purest state, and also when he had been in his. Through mortal eyes that he could now call his own, he wondered if this was how the rest of the world saw Dean, how it viewed him, experienced him. The glass was gone, the filter removed. The sun was bright enough to cause Castiel to squint a little, but Dean was brighter, a beacon that wasn’t light or sound or whatever else intangible, but a person. A person he’d rebuilt. He would have to relearn Dean from a human point of view. He’d also have to learn how to cope with the effects Dean had on him.
Five minutes ago would’ve been a convenient time to start.
Had he still been an angel, he could’ve anchored himself to Dean’s soul, used its blinding, God-given sacredness as a means to sober himself up, but he could barely visualize it now, as if he were no longer capable of beholding such a sight even through his memories. It was as if that small miracle hidden at the core of all human beings, an entity of divine origins unknown even to Castiel, wasn’t even there at all.
As Dean had the habit of doing, he pulled Castiel’s head out of the clouds by throwing him off course and saying something completely unexpected, decorum be damned. “Dude,” he said, his face scrunching into a tangle of lines around his mouth and eyes, “no offense, but you’re sweating like a pig.”
It took Castiel a moment to realize that his appearance must have come as a shock to Dean. For starters, he was dressed in faded denim jeans and a t-shirt, which Missouri had handed him in exchange for his suit and coat, both pinned to the clothesline behind the house.
“I take no offense,” Castiel said in earnest. “I hadn’t taken into consideration the physiological effects of working in the sun.” He’d seen humans sweat before, Sam and Dean included. He’d seen hair lighten and freckles darken and skin burn after prolonged exposure to the sun, a celestial being that belonged to the universe for far longer than it did to humankind.
Dean whistled. “She really put you to work out here, didn’t she?”
“Missouri has been a gracious host. It’s the least I could do to help out around the house. I’m in her debt.”
Dean nodded, still looking at Castiel as if he weren’t quite sure what he was. After a moment, Dean asked how he felt.
“I feel horrible,” Castiel admitted, “and fantastic. I can feel… things. The air in my lungs, my heartbeat. I feel every nerve igniting.” It was unlike before when his body had functioned like a vehicle piloted by his grace. But this was life, human life. Real breaths and real human blood coursing through his mortal veins.
Dean looked almost amused. “You think yard work is good? Wait until you get laid.” That comment must’ve sounded a lot funnier in his head and definitely not as awkward. It didn’t help that the world seemed to have come to a sudden standstill, calm and quiet and a perfect breeding ground for some tension to build between Dean and a visually human Castiel, whose face was still red and flushed, his chest rising and collapsing more noticeably now than it had ever been before. In reality, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but this was Castiel, looking so unlike an angel to Dean that he couldn’t help but stare, and stare, and stare some more, the intensity of which pulled on Castiel’s newly discovered hormones in rushing and wild sensations too similar to something like panic for his own comfort. But then Dean extinguished that little moment, allowing Castiel to catch his breath.
“Missouri tells me your grace is gone,” Dean ventured, prepared at last to broach the subject hanging between them.
“That’s true. I expelled it.”
“Yourself?” Dean asked, to which Castiel simply nodded. Dean couldn’t comprehend what that meant or entailed, but still he tried to imagine, judging by the look on his face. “Uh, I guess I should welcome you to the club.”
Dean was being sincere, and Castiel thanked him for it. “It seems all right so far, I suppose. Besides, I haven’t been the biggest fan of my former club lately.”
Dean appeared to be juggling words, as if he weren’t quite sure how to hatch them so that they’d come out right. “Can you ever get it back?”
“Under special circumstances, perhaps, but I doubt it. Besides, I doubt I’d be able to go through with the Host’s demands if it came to that.” He looked beyond Dean for a moment, speaking more to himself when he said almost fondly, “Some changes are permanent, I’ve come to learn.”
“Not always,” Dean said, and his insistence bothered Castiel for reasons he preferred not to entertain. But Dean persisted. “Lucifer fell, right? And he’s swimming in shit tons of angel juice. There’s got to be some-”
Before Dean could deliver a speech about having options, Castiel interrupted. “Lucifer is the exception, not the rule. When he fell, he clutched every star he could grasp on his way down, pulling in innocent souls, sucking the grace out of our brothers and sisters as he passed them by in his descent. His power is stolen.”
Dean remained silent for a while before deciding that humor was clearly his only option. “Consider larceny officially added to his growing list of crimes. Dude’s a shoo-in for Guinness with that rap sheet.”
Castiel didn’t speak what thoughts crossed his mind at that remark. His mind, once so disciplined, wandered entirely too easily, thoughts scattered like seedlings caught in a windstorm. He couldn’t will himself to stop thinking as he’d been able to do as an angel. He couldn’t prevent a comparison to Lucifer, who reminded him that he, too, was a thief in possession of a vessel that shouldn’t belong to him, not like this.
He decided that now would be a good time to ask about the others. Dean was filling him in on Chuck’s plan to meet up in Detroit, which was about a fifteen hour drive from Lawrence, when Missouri came gliding down the front steps of the house, door slamming in her wake.
“Now I knew I heard that old clunker pull up to my curb,” she said, looking at Dean as if she were reading his mind. She probably was, and Castiel knew that it made Dean shift in his boots and rattle off a list of the most offensive curse words his imagination could come up with against his will.
Dean had spoken, but the words failed to register. Castiel would have to learn how to focus.
“Save the gratitude for later, Dean,” Missouri continued, shaking her head. “Tell Michigan it can wait until tomorrow. You’re spending the night, and that’s all there is to it.” Clearly, she must have ignored all Dean’s knee-jerk swearing. Conversations with mind readers were often one-sided as both Dean and Castiel had come to learn.
This time Dean didn’t speak. His thoughts were taken from him before passing over his tongue, and Missouri again shook her head, now with added emphasis.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about me,” she said. “I’ve survived in this business for longer than you’ve been alive, child. I can sense when an alien creature’s about to land on my doorstep.”
“Alien?” Dean repeated, confused.
Missouri and Castiel exchanged glances. “Angels aren’t born on Earth, Dean. Neither are demons,” he explained.
“You’re an alien?” Dean asked in disbelief.
“By your definition, yes.”
Missouri smacked the back of Dean’s head. “And he’s about the best friend you’ve ever had, too. You should pay a little closer attention to what he really is.” She paused long enough to allow Dean a moment to feel uncomfortable before dropping the issue. “Now how about you come on inside. Pie’s nice and hot.”
“Apple?” Dean asked, talking with his stomach.
“You know it, sugar.”
“You spoil me, Missouri.”
“Don’t sweet talk a sweet talker,” she said in her soft-spoken voice, and she turned to enter the house, expecting them both to follow.
--
Dean couldn’t help but marvel a bit at how comfortable Castiel looked coming in through the front door, almost as if it had been routine. He followed at Castiel’s heels, passing through the foyer where Missouri’s clientele waited to have their palms read and their futures predicted. This was where he and Sam had first met Missouri while investigating a poltergeist at their old home in Lawrence, the home that a demon set fire to in 1983, its embers still smoldering in Sam and Dean right beneath the surface.
He continued to follow Castiel past the staircase on his left and into the sitting room to his right, an area sectioned off by strings of beads, charming and rustic in their appeal. A soft diffusion of light illuminated the room through large panels of windows dressed in sheer white linen that dared to make Missouri’s living space glow.
Dean sat beside Castiel, both of whom looked entirely too domestic sharing a sofa, its dated pattern a small flowerbed, and its cushions sometimes failing to separate them as one or the other shifted positions. Missouri returned with two slices of steaming pie cooling beneath heaps of vanilla ice cream. She smiled at Dean when the thought crossed his mind to put a boot on her leather-embossed coffee table, a preempted action she made a point not to dismiss.
It pleased Castiel to see Dean here in Missouri’s home, here in the sitting room and later on seated at a dining room table instead of a restaurant booth or at a barstool. He thought he detected something like unease on Dean’s face, though, as if he expected Armageddon to descend on their doorstep, or as if he were still figuring out what exactly Castiel was now. But his smile said that he was trying to understand, so Castiel decided not to bring it up.
Besides, it was easier to keep up the pretense of normalcy, even if only for a little while. He’d barely admit to it, but it was far easier slipping into mortality than he’d ever thought possible. Upon becoming human, he thought he would have quite literally and figuratively fallen flat on his face, but it wasn’t so. Even before he fell, he had learned human impulses, taking them in like secondhand smoke from Sam and Dean. He’d learned to want, to fear, to feel. He’d tried to smother these out or bury them in a place where they could no longer be reached, but he hadn’t tried hard enough. He hadn’t succeeded back then, but maybe he could find tendrils of success in past failures and grasp hold of them now.
After a second serving of pie and a round of coffee, Dean and Castiel finished the outside work together while Missouri busied herself in the kitchen. She’d promised them a meal fit for kings, and then scolded Dean for the next five minutes straight for referring to himself as royalty in his head.
--
Nighttime found Castiel alone in one of the house’s spare bedrooms. He carefully folded the coat and suit that Missouri had handed back to him, and placed his clothing in an empty duffel bag Dean had supplied earlier. At some point in time, this holy tax accountant getup had started to feel like his own, and he supposed that now it truly was. He remembered how quickly he’d shed the coat under the Kansas sun as he wandered through the field, lost. As an angel, he hadn’t realized the impracticality of this particular item of clothing in certain environments, but as a human it hadn’t taken him long to understand. He supposed he would wear this particular ensemble again at some point in the future. He imagined himself dressing in it, one article of clothing at a time. Earlier that morning, he’d discovered that he put his left sock on before his right one, and he realized that this would be one of the many routines he would have to perform day after day from this point on. Sam and Dean had many routines that Castiel had observed, and he wondered which ones of theirs he’d fall into and which ones he’d forge for himself.
People on Earth fell into all sorts of things. They fell into habits. They fell into love. To Castiel, Dean was the first true wonder of the human world. Even as an angel, he’d had hopes and dreams for Dean that weren’t part of the Host’s master plan. Originally, he’d set out with the Winchesters to help stop the seals from breaking and therefore to prevent Lucifer from walking the Earth, but that soon morphed into something else. Sam and Dean were vessels in the eyes of Heaven and Hell both, but to Castiel they’d become something far greater.
Dean had become something more to him. Castiel reclined on the bed and allowed his eyes slowly to close, daring to think thoughts that he’d kept at bay as an angel, that he’d denied himself the pleasure of having-thoughts he refused to admit even existed. He’d already fallen from grace and lost his connection to the Host, and there was no one sharing his mind and body now, only himself.
He could picture a scenario behind closed eyes so perfectly, a scenario he supposed would never come to be, in which one of them might make a grand confession.
“I was perfectly content before I knew what love was, or at least I thought so at the time,” Castiel would say, extending his words to Dean like bait, a hook for Dean to take if he wanted to.
“You loved God, didn’t you?” Dean might ask.
And Castiel would answer, “I obeyed God-until I disobeyed, I suppose, but love and obedience are two very different things, I’ve come to learn.”
That was Castiel’s first fantasy as a human. His second followed soon after.
If Dean confessed that he couldn’t stand to lose Castiel, then Castiel would say something along the lines of, “I fell so you wouldn’t.”
He shook his head, thinking he’d gotten the characterization of Dean all wrong because obviously Dean would never say such a thing. Too chick flick, not enough smooth-as-silk pick-up line.
“I’m not asking you to stay, but I’m not telling you to go, either. I think we both know what’ll happen if you stick around.” It wasn’t perfect, but the sound of it in his head made his skin prickle and his spine shiver, and he felt all but lost in small fantasies of Dean until he caught the sound of a figure standing at the door.
Missouri had sent Dean upstairs with a cup of tea. That was the excuse, the prop that brought them together. There usually was one, a prop, sometimes a phone call asking for help to prevent a seal from breaking, a call of distress requiring the fire of an angel’s fist to get the job done.
Dean ambled around the room, his fingers grazing along the top of the oak dresser and touching upon the tip of the lampshade finial to see how hot it’d gotten. He paused at the sight of the amulet, which Castiel had placed on top of the stack of folded clothes in his bag. At Castiel’s gesturing, he picked it up, slipped it over his head, and then proceeded to run through the list of standard questions to ask. What if Zachariah found them? What if Hell found them first? What would happen in Detroit?
Castiel spoke his lines, answering according to the script of knowledge imbedded in him since his creation. Dean didn’t deviate from his own script, and he was right not to. Seals were breaking at speeds faster than they could be stopped. Lucifer’s forces were mobilizing, and Michael’s, too. This was what mattered, and not the glint of green in a particular man’s eyes, the shine of his lip, or the tongue that danced behind it. How did men cope with temptation? He’d ask Dean, but it would sound too much like asking permission. Permission for what, he didn’t know. Access to the private chambers of Dean’s heart? Permission to tread quiet deer tracks of his own across the snow that had piled there? A battle loomed over their heads like a storm cloud promising a flood to rival Noah’s, and although he’d already said to hell with his fate and his original purpose for existence, he was still a warrior and could still fight. He still had a cause, just a different one.
That night, sleep came slowly at first before total consumption. Castiel sat in his dreams on the ocean floor, the surface a ceiling he could see, but he hadn’t been made tall enough to touch.
--
After Dean had devoured the last of the bacon strips at breakfast, and after his and Castiel’s duffel bags had been loaded into the Impala, Castiel waited outside on the front steps with Missouri while Dean, still inside, checked in with Sam.
“Those boys are in it for life,” Missouri said. “Always another case, another battle to be fought and won.” Castiel nodded in agreement, absently observing a diligent little bee circling one of the rosebushes he’d pruned the day before.
“Is that what you signed up for?” she asked, a note of concern in her voice that tugged at his heartstrings.
“I haven’t considered any alternatives,” he admitted. Truthfully, he dreaded even to think about them.
“He’s tired,” Missouri said, speaking about Dean. “For years now. He tries, but he’s built so many walls.”
It was true. Hadrian’s didn’t hold a candle. By this point, Castiel had lost sight of the bee. Perhaps it had buried itself inside the sweet center of one of the blooms, or flown off while he wasn’t looking.
Missouri continued to press the issue. “I’m surprised you can see them,” she said, referring to the walls again.
Castiel asked why it surprised her, and she almost snorted in response. “Because they all fall at your feet, sugar.”
“Not all of them.”
“Almost all of them,” she corrected, lightening the mood with a sweet, self-satisfied voice, but then she looked at him directly, studying him as if she could render him inside out. She probably could.
Dean chose that particular moment to come barreling out of the house like a rocket, bringing news about the others and their ETA in Detroit.
“Don’t be a stranger, Dean,” Missouri said, giving his shoulder a light punch for emphasis. Castiel had grown fond of Missouri in their short time together. She possessed a rare kindness and insight into the human condition that he could learn a lot from. He also enjoyed her cooking and the stories she had to share about Sam and Dean before Castiel had known them, and ones about John Winchester, too. Her anecdotes had become another lens through which Castiel could glimpse Dean, and there was always delight to be found in that. She hugged Castiel goodbye at the curb, and it struck him that he’d never been hugged by anyone before. He found it to be a rather pleasant experience.