Fic: Stay 2 Nites Get a Free Bible
Starting my fic exchange season with my sassy_otp fic for drabblewriter! Hope you like it!
Stay 2 Nites Get a Free Bible
Recipient: drabblewriter
Rated: PG
Fandom/Pairing: Supernatural, Sam/Cas
Word Count: 2800
Spoilers: set immediately post-5x17, spoilers through 5x18.
Warnings: Wing!fic, angst and schmoop
Notes: I went with the "Sam comforts Cas after Dark Side of the Moon" prompt, but it ended up being more "Sam and Cas comfort each other after 99 Problems." (It picks up about four seconds after the end of that episode.) Hope you like it! And thanks to teacupdiaries for her awesome beta skillz.
"Your brother is going to give himself to Michael," Cas said without inflection.
"Yes!" Sam shouted, grabbing his duffle, stuffing his guns into it roughly and tossing it onto his shoulder. "And we have to stop him! Come on!"
Cas didn't move.
"I said come on! You can zap us there before he does anything stupid." Sam strode around the bed, placing himself directly in Cas's line of vision. He put his knuckles on the bed, leaning down into Cas's face. "Let's go."
"I can't."
Sam paused. "What?"
"I. Can't." Cas repeated more clearly.
"No, I heard you. I meant, what do you mean you can't? Cas, we have to do something!"
"I mean, I CAN'T. In case you've forgotten, those marks on your ribs hide you even from me."
"The Impala--"
"Objects are much harder to track than humans. And even if I knew where he was...I don't have the strength." Cas closed his eyes, more to end the conversation than out of any weakness.
Sam knew Cas had been injured by the Whore -- he'd seen him fall, coughing blood, he'd found him lying dazed and disoriented when the fight was over. He knew Cas was already weakening and losing his powers.
But then, right then, with the Impala's fumes still hanging in the parking lot, Dean gone to fucking kill himself and abandon the world to flames but still so close and Cas just fucking lying there -- all he could feel was anger.
"So you're giving up on me, too." He bit out. "Fine."
He slammed his bag down and went for the door. He had to get out, get away, before he screamed in frustration.
"Come on, I'll take you home," he said to Pastor Gideon, who looked like he would very much rather go home alone. But Gideon wasn't stupid, so he picked up his gun and followed Sam, who stormed out without a glance at Cas's unmoving back.
By the time Sam had delivered Gideon to his dazed and shaken flock and walked back to the motel, he was starting to feel calmer. He didn't want to catch Dean and beat his face in anymore; now he wanted to catch Dean and stuff him in Bobby's panic room so Sam could yell at him until he came to his senses.
He was regretting snapping at Cas as well. He was trying his best, after all, and it wasn't his fault his powers were fading.
No, a voice inside him whispered, It's Dean's fault.
Sam shoved it down. Blaming anyone wouldn't help and any blame games would always lead straight down to Sam anyway -- drinking demon blood, killing Lilith, setting Lucifer free. It was Sam's weakness now, too, that was driving Dean. Sam knew Dean didn't trust him not to say yes to Lucifer. And why should he? Sam's track record wasn't great so far.
He opened the motel room door more civilly this time, only to find Cas on his feet, hands resting on the back of a chair, eyes closed, swaying, blood trickling down from his nose.
"Cas!" Sam cried, crossing the room in two long steps. "Hey, Cas--!"
He caught Cas's shoulders just as he started to collapse. "Hey, you're okay, hang on--"
"Sorry, Sam," Cas wheezed. "Tried--"
"No, no, it's okay. You don't have to do that. I know Dean, better than he knows himself sometimes. I know where he's going. We'll find him."
And Sam realized he did know. Dean was giving up and that meant giving up on his dreams, his most deeply-held illusions. The possibility of a normal life. Lisa. Dean would go to say good-bye to Lisa.
"We'll find him, Cas, I promise," Sam said quietly to Cas's bent head.
Cas didn't really seem to hear him. "Can't...can't get..."
"Shh, just lay down. We'll try again in the morning." Sam hefted Cas over to the bed, trying to maneuver him to settle sitting against the headboard.
"Not an angel, not anymore," Cas murmured. "Wings aren't working."
Sam nearly dropped him. "Wings? You mean you actually have wings?"
Cas seemed to wake a little at that, even if it was just to give Sam another "stupid question" look. "Of course. Dean has mentioned my wings several times to you."
"He makes jokes about feathers and stuff, sure, but I just thought Dean was, well, being a dick. You have actual wings? Dean's seen them?"
Sam felt a pang. He'd thought he'd ridden himself of his childish fantasies of angels, any delusions of their goodness or mercy or compassion, but apparently he hadn't quite succeeded. Wings.
"They must be glorious," Sam said softly.
Cas stared at the wall. "I showed them to Dean when I first spoke to him with this vessel. The Righteous Man, raised from Perdition, yet he still demanded proof."
He smiled bitterly. "I thought that I would give him faith, but instead he gave me doubt."
"Yeah," Sam sighed. "That happens a lot around Dean."
"And you lost your faith as well. I'm sorry, Sam, that I couldn't be what you thought angels should be."
"You're getting closer," Sam said with a smile, sitting against the headboard beside Cas with his feet kicked up onto the dirty bedspread.
But Cas didn't smile back. "No. I'm falling. I'm not human but I'm no longer an angel."
"Don't say that, of course you're an angel. You'll feel better tomorrow, you'll see, you'll zap us to Dean--"
Cas shook his head. "That's not what I meant. Angels weren't just created by God to be His messengers. Angels are made to believe. We are faith. Our Grace is God's blessing and reward for that faith; an angel with no faith isn't an angel.
"And I've lost too much. The Whore proved that."
"The incantation?" Sam leaped on a new conversational track, trying to jog Cas out of his dark thoughts. "I wanted to ask you, if you would be...well, if you could teach it to us. We need all the weapons against angels we can get."
"It wouldn't help you. It doesn't work against angels."
"What...what did she do to you?" Sam looked Cas over more closely. They hadn't really made sure Cas was all right. They'd just stuffed him in the car and dropped him on the bed, confident that he'd be fine, that his angelic stamina would pull him through without harm. They hadn't really checked him. "You're okay, aren't you?"
"She grabbed hold of my Grace and pulled. If she hadn't been interrupted, she would have ripped it out of me and I would have fallen. Or died."
Sam felt ill. They'd come so close, God, and they hadn't even known it. Had barely even noticed.
"But angels, real angels," Cas continued, "they have too much Grace for a creature like her to touch. She'd have been burned alive.
"It's the last proof that God has abandoned me."
"Not completely -- he brought you back, didn't he? That's something."
"Or Raphael was right and it was someone else who brought me back."
"No, Cas, it was God. You left before we could tell you -- Joshua said God saved you, saved us. He put us on that plane to protect us from Lucifer and he brought you back to life after Raphael killed you."
Cas looked up, stunned, searching Sam's eyes to see if he was telling him the truth -- or maybe deeper; Cas always seemed to see right through him, right to the heart of him.
Sam could see it sink in. He'd never been the best at reading Castiel's expressions -- he generally couldn't maintain the intense eye contact for very long -- but Cas had never looked more human and more readable. Disbelief, uncomprehending joy, a painful twist of confusion, anger, bitterness, hope...
"I don't--" Cas sounded lost. "I don't know what that means. It doesn't change anything. He still won't help us, He is still letting all this happen, but I--"
"But he's your dad." Sam said. "And he just told you 'Good job.'"
Cas turned away, hiding his face. Sam put a hand on his shoulder, understanding welling in his throat to choke him. "You love him, and you hate him, even if you don't want to do either. You can't forgive him and you can't let it go."
"How do you manage it?" Cas asked brokenly.
"You should have asked Dean. He's the one who actually got along with Dad."
"I did."
"And?"
"Violence. And alcohol."
Sam laughed. "Don't forget sex. But I don't see any of those working too well for you."
"What about you, Sam? What do you do?"
Sam looked down at his shoes, crossed on the bedspread far in front of him. He didn't want to admit this part of himself aloud to Cas, but he didn't want to lie to him either.
"I get angry." He pulled up his knees, wrapped his arms around them the way he used to when he was a gangly teen waiting for his dad to return from a hunt. "We used to fight, all the time. It drove Dean crazy, how we couldn't stand to be in the same room without arguing. I don't even know what the hell we were fighting about most of the time. Eventually I left...but I stayed angry."
"And that helps?" Cas looked genuinely curious.
Sam shrugged. "Sometimes. Anger's an easy emotion. Safe. You don't have to deal with anything if you're angry."
He'd learned it the hard way -- for himself, for Dean, for the whole world.
"I'm familiar with anger," Cas said.
"I thought angels weren't supposed to have emotions."
"Righteous anger is an exception."
Cas's face changed in concentration, like he was actively trying to change his desperation into anger by sheer force of will. Sam watched, bemused. I wonder if he can actually do that.
"Are you angry yet?"
Cas frowned thoughtfully. "Yes. But I think I'm mostly angry at Dean."
Sam laughed. "Me, too. When we catch him, we can take turns punching him."
"How can he do this? He was the one who told me that things were worth saving, that life is worth the pain. I believed him and I lost everything." Cas's voice was rising, his fists clenching where they rested in his lap. "He's giving up. Now, after everything. My brothers are dead; Lucifer walks the earth with no one to oppose him. What good is your free will if you're too weak and broken to use it?"
Wow, Cas wasn't kidding about the righteous anger. Cas had always seemed small to Sam, lost in an oversized coat, but not now, his voice making the windowpanes shake in sympathetic rage. This was a creature demons would fear.
"Dean's been through a lot, Cas," Sam tried. "Humans can only take so much before breaking. He was telling the truth to you back then, he was right, there are good things worth saving, but he just doesn't see any other way out of this."
It seemed to work, bringing Cas down from angelic wrath to his usual penetrating intensity. "Your brother believes you will say yes to Lucifer."
Sam flinched.
"Do you think I will?"
"No, Sam, I don't." Cas shifted on the bed, coming up to his knees and moving face to face with Sam, almost too intimate. How can Dean stand to have Cas stare at him all the time, Sam thought frantically. It's like being taken apart.
"Maybe when I first met you -- tainted by demon blood, under Ruby's sway, convinced of your own strength and righteousness and unwilling to bend to the will of others. When all I knew of you was 'the boy with the demon blood' and the dark path you were walking.
"But I know you now, Sam Winchester, and there is no part of you that would let Lucifer in."
Sam let out a shuddering breath that felt like it took half of his body with it, a huge weight flowing out from him. He tried so hard, his whole life he'd tried, and now for the first time in years he felt like maybe it would be enough.
"I thought--" he had to stop, swallowing around the lump in his throat. "I thought I was an abomination."
"You are," Cas said with his knifelike honesty. "But those are Heaven's rules, Sam. They don't have anything to do with who you are."
A laugh bubbled up. "So what, I'm not kosher? I'm like pork?"
"More like shellfish," Cas said, a ghost of a smile curving his lips.
The laugh turned genuine. Like shellfish. Not evil, not tainted, not doomed. Just...shrimpy.
And then his brain, his stupid smart brain kept clicking along the tracks. Shellfish, verses from Leviticus, and the rainbow God Hates Shrimp signs he used to paint at Stanford to bring to protests and rallies because how could God hate love and Cas was close, so close, kneeling in front of him on the bed, eyes wide and earnest and knowing with the hint of a smile still playing on his lips.
Sam leaned forward, closed the gap and kissed him.
Cas was frozen for a moment, hard like a marble statue, then he softened and kissed Sam back, awkward and uncertain but there with him.
"What about that?" Sam asked, half-apprehensive and half-playful. "Is that an abomination?"
Cas licked his lips. "Yes."
Then he scooted his knees forward a few crucial inches until he was almost sitting on Sam. His mouth a breath away from Sam's lips, he murmured, "But I think we stopped playing by Heaven's rules a long time ago."
Sam hadn't kissed that many people in his life -- less than Dean, but more than Dean liked to imply -- but kissing Castiel was nothing like any of them. Cas was inexperienced and enthusiastic, awkward with fatigue and with a body not his own, but no one Sam had ever been with had ever known him like this, had ever seen all the way to the heart of him and found him deserving. Even Jess, as wonderful as she was, even to her he had given everything but the truth. He couldn't stand for her to see the darkness he carried. But Castiel, he saw it and blessed him for it.
"Show me your wings," Sam said suddenly, breaking the kiss and pulling away just enough to speak. "Please."
Cas hesitated, eyes sliding away. Sam caught his face in his hands, brought him back, held his gaze. "If I'm not an abomination, neither are you."
Cas closed his eyes as if in pain. Sam lifted his hands away, afraid he'd hurt him somehow. But then the dim light from the cheap lamps began to flicker, and the shadow they cast of Cas on the wall grew and stretched, unfolding in an impossible arc of wings that bent along the walls and ceiling of the too-small room, the tips meeting on the wall above Sam's head.
Sam forgot to breathe.
The wings were massive, awesome in the truest sense of the word, filling a space much larger than the room, than the world. But they were damaged; even Sam could see it. Not feathers torn out, nothing so literal, but they were faded in places, translucent, transparent. Parts were simply missing, gaps slashing impossibly across the entire width, open and jagged. But the wings spread anyway, dark and encompassing, wrapping them both in a fierce and battle-scarred embrace.
"Castiel," Sam whispered. "They're glorious."
Cas reached out and laid a hand along Sam's face, sadness and gratitude and hundred other things written in one look. Then he shuddered and slumped, his hand falling down and the lights flashing before going out entirely. In the darkness Sam reached for him, grasped his shoulders.
"Cas?"
"It's all right, Sam," Cas said, his head turned so his breath ghosted across Sam's wrist. "I'm tired."
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked you to do that. You need to get some rest." Sam tugged on his shoulders, guiding him down in the dark to lie beside him on the bed. Enough light came in through the window to make out Cas's eyes, still open and watching him.
"Go to sleep," Sam said, gentle but insistent. "Rest up. And then tomorrow we'll go and beat some sense into my asshole brother."
Cas nodded and closed his eyes. "Tomorrow."
Stay 2 Nites Get a Free Bible
Recipient: drabblewriter
Rated: PG
Fandom/Pairing: Supernatural, Sam/Cas
Word Count: 2800
Spoilers: set immediately post-5x17, spoilers through 5x18.
Warnings: Wing!fic, angst and schmoop
Notes: I went with the "Sam comforts Cas after Dark Side of the Moon" prompt, but it ended up being more "Sam and Cas comfort each other after 99 Problems." (It picks up about four seconds after the end of that episode.) Hope you like it! And thanks to teacupdiaries for her awesome beta skillz.
"Your brother is going to give himself to Michael," Cas said without inflection.
"Yes!" Sam shouted, grabbing his duffle, stuffing his guns into it roughly and tossing it onto his shoulder. "And we have to stop him! Come on!"
Cas didn't move.
"I said come on! You can zap us there before he does anything stupid." Sam strode around the bed, placing himself directly in Cas's line of vision. He put his knuckles on the bed, leaning down into Cas's face. "Let's go."
"I can't."
Sam paused. "What?"
"I. Can't." Cas repeated more clearly.
"No, I heard you. I meant, what do you mean you can't? Cas, we have to do something!"
"I mean, I CAN'T. In case you've forgotten, those marks on your ribs hide you even from me."
"The Impala--"
"Objects are much harder to track than humans. And even if I knew where he was...I don't have the strength." Cas closed his eyes, more to end the conversation than out of any weakness.
Sam knew Cas had been injured by the Whore -- he'd seen him fall, coughing blood, he'd found him lying dazed and disoriented when the fight was over. He knew Cas was already weakening and losing his powers.
But then, right then, with the Impala's fumes still hanging in the parking lot, Dean gone to fucking kill himself and abandon the world to flames but still so close and Cas just fucking lying there -- all he could feel was anger.
"So you're giving up on me, too." He bit out. "Fine."
He slammed his bag down and went for the door. He had to get out, get away, before he screamed in frustration.
"Come on, I'll take you home," he said to Pastor Gideon, who looked like he would very much rather go home alone. But Gideon wasn't stupid, so he picked up his gun and followed Sam, who stormed out without a glance at Cas's unmoving back.
By the time Sam had delivered Gideon to his dazed and shaken flock and walked back to the motel, he was starting to feel calmer. He didn't want to catch Dean and beat his face in anymore; now he wanted to catch Dean and stuff him in Bobby's panic room so Sam could yell at him until he came to his senses.
He was regretting snapping at Cas as well. He was trying his best, after all, and it wasn't his fault his powers were fading.
No, a voice inside him whispered, It's Dean's fault.
Sam shoved it down. Blaming anyone wouldn't help and any blame games would always lead straight down to Sam anyway -- drinking demon blood, killing Lilith, setting Lucifer free. It was Sam's weakness now, too, that was driving Dean. Sam knew Dean didn't trust him not to say yes to Lucifer. And why should he? Sam's track record wasn't great so far.
He opened the motel room door more civilly this time, only to find Cas on his feet, hands resting on the back of a chair, eyes closed, swaying, blood trickling down from his nose.
"Cas!" Sam cried, crossing the room in two long steps. "Hey, Cas--!"
He caught Cas's shoulders just as he started to collapse. "Hey, you're okay, hang on--"
"Sorry, Sam," Cas wheezed. "Tried--"
"No, no, it's okay. You don't have to do that. I know Dean, better than he knows himself sometimes. I know where he's going. We'll find him."
And Sam realized he did know. Dean was giving up and that meant giving up on his dreams, his most deeply-held illusions. The possibility of a normal life. Lisa. Dean would go to say good-bye to Lisa.
"We'll find him, Cas, I promise," Sam said quietly to Cas's bent head.
Cas didn't really seem to hear him. "Can't...can't get..."
"Shh, just lay down. We'll try again in the morning." Sam hefted Cas over to the bed, trying to maneuver him to settle sitting against the headboard.
"Not an angel, not anymore," Cas murmured. "Wings aren't working."
Sam nearly dropped him. "Wings? You mean you actually have wings?"
Cas seemed to wake a little at that, even if it was just to give Sam another "stupid question" look. "Of course. Dean has mentioned my wings several times to you."
"He makes jokes about feathers and stuff, sure, but I just thought Dean was, well, being a dick. You have actual wings? Dean's seen them?"
Sam felt a pang. He'd thought he'd ridden himself of his childish fantasies of angels, any delusions of their goodness or mercy or compassion, but apparently he hadn't quite succeeded. Wings.
"They must be glorious," Sam said softly.
Cas stared at the wall. "I showed them to Dean when I first spoke to him with this vessel. The Righteous Man, raised from Perdition, yet he still demanded proof."
He smiled bitterly. "I thought that I would give him faith, but instead he gave me doubt."
"Yeah," Sam sighed. "That happens a lot around Dean."
"And you lost your faith as well. I'm sorry, Sam, that I couldn't be what you thought angels should be."
"You're getting closer," Sam said with a smile, sitting against the headboard beside Cas with his feet kicked up onto the dirty bedspread.
But Cas didn't smile back. "No. I'm falling. I'm not human but I'm no longer an angel."
"Don't say that, of course you're an angel. You'll feel better tomorrow, you'll see, you'll zap us to Dean--"
Cas shook his head. "That's not what I meant. Angels weren't just created by God to be His messengers. Angels are made to believe. We are faith. Our Grace is God's blessing and reward for that faith; an angel with no faith isn't an angel.
"And I've lost too much. The Whore proved that."
"The incantation?" Sam leaped on a new conversational track, trying to jog Cas out of his dark thoughts. "I wanted to ask you, if you would be...well, if you could teach it to us. We need all the weapons against angels we can get."
"It wouldn't help you. It doesn't work against angels."
"What...what did she do to you?" Sam looked Cas over more closely. They hadn't really made sure Cas was all right. They'd just stuffed him in the car and dropped him on the bed, confident that he'd be fine, that his angelic stamina would pull him through without harm. They hadn't really checked him. "You're okay, aren't you?"
"She grabbed hold of my Grace and pulled. If she hadn't been interrupted, she would have ripped it out of me and I would have fallen. Or died."
Sam felt ill. They'd come so close, God, and they hadn't even known it. Had barely even noticed.
"But angels, real angels," Cas continued, "they have too much Grace for a creature like her to touch. She'd have been burned alive.
"It's the last proof that God has abandoned me."
"Not completely -- he brought you back, didn't he? That's something."
"Or Raphael was right and it was someone else who brought me back."
"No, Cas, it was God. You left before we could tell you -- Joshua said God saved you, saved us. He put us on that plane to protect us from Lucifer and he brought you back to life after Raphael killed you."
Cas looked up, stunned, searching Sam's eyes to see if he was telling him the truth -- or maybe deeper; Cas always seemed to see right through him, right to the heart of him.
Sam could see it sink in. He'd never been the best at reading Castiel's expressions -- he generally couldn't maintain the intense eye contact for very long -- but Cas had never looked more human and more readable. Disbelief, uncomprehending joy, a painful twist of confusion, anger, bitterness, hope...
"I don't--" Cas sounded lost. "I don't know what that means. It doesn't change anything. He still won't help us, He is still letting all this happen, but I--"
"But he's your dad." Sam said. "And he just told you 'Good job.'"
Cas turned away, hiding his face. Sam put a hand on his shoulder, understanding welling in his throat to choke him. "You love him, and you hate him, even if you don't want to do either. You can't forgive him and you can't let it go."
"How do you manage it?" Cas asked brokenly.
"You should have asked Dean. He's the one who actually got along with Dad."
"I did."
"And?"
"Violence. And alcohol."
Sam laughed. "Don't forget sex. But I don't see any of those working too well for you."
"What about you, Sam? What do you do?"
Sam looked down at his shoes, crossed on the bedspread far in front of him. He didn't want to admit this part of himself aloud to Cas, but he didn't want to lie to him either.
"I get angry." He pulled up his knees, wrapped his arms around them the way he used to when he was a gangly teen waiting for his dad to return from a hunt. "We used to fight, all the time. It drove Dean crazy, how we couldn't stand to be in the same room without arguing. I don't even know what the hell we were fighting about most of the time. Eventually I left...but I stayed angry."
"And that helps?" Cas looked genuinely curious.
Sam shrugged. "Sometimes. Anger's an easy emotion. Safe. You don't have to deal with anything if you're angry."
He'd learned it the hard way -- for himself, for Dean, for the whole world.
"I'm familiar with anger," Cas said.
"I thought angels weren't supposed to have emotions."
"Righteous anger is an exception."
Cas's face changed in concentration, like he was actively trying to change his desperation into anger by sheer force of will. Sam watched, bemused. I wonder if he can actually do that.
"Are you angry yet?"
Cas frowned thoughtfully. "Yes. But I think I'm mostly angry at Dean."
Sam laughed. "Me, too. When we catch him, we can take turns punching him."
"How can he do this? He was the one who told me that things were worth saving, that life is worth the pain. I believed him and I lost everything." Cas's voice was rising, his fists clenching where they rested in his lap. "He's giving up. Now, after everything. My brothers are dead; Lucifer walks the earth with no one to oppose him. What good is your free will if you're too weak and broken to use it?"
Wow, Cas wasn't kidding about the righteous anger. Cas had always seemed small to Sam, lost in an oversized coat, but not now, his voice making the windowpanes shake in sympathetic rage. This was a creature demons would fear.
"Dean's been through a lot, Cas," Sam tried. "Humans can only take so much before breaking. He was telling the truth to you back then, he was right, there are good things worth saving, but he just doesn't see any other way out of this."
It seemed to work, bringing Cas down from angelic wrath to his usual penetrating intensity. "Your brother believes you will say yes to Lucifer."
Sam flinched.
"Do you think I will?"
"No, Sam, I don't." Cas shifted on the bed, coming up to his knees and moving face to face with Sam, almost too intimate. How can Dean stand to have Cas stare at him all the time, Sam thought frantically. It's like being taken apart.
"Maybe when I first met you -- tainted by demon blood, under Ruby's sway, convinced of your own strength and righteousness and unwilling to bend to the will of others. When all I knew of you was 'the boy with the demon blood' and the dark path you were walking.
"But I know you now, Sam Winchester, and there is no part of you that would let Lucifer in."
Sam let out a shuddering breath that felt like it took half of his body with it, a huge weight flowing out from him. He tried so hard, his whole life he'd tried, and now for the first time in years he felt like maybe it would be enough.
"I thought--" he had to stop, swallowing around the lump in his throat. "I thought I was an abomination."
"You are," Cas said with his knifelike honesty. "But those are Heaven's rules, Sam. They don't have anything to do with who you are."
A laugh bubbled up. "So what, I'm not kosher? I'm like pork?"
"More like shellfish," Cas said, a ghost of a smile curving his lips.
The laugh turned genuine. Like shellfish. Not evil, not tainted, not doomed. Just...shrimpy.
And then his brain, his stupid smart brain kept clicking along the tracks. Shellfish, verses from Leviticus, and the rainbow God Hates Shrimp signs he used to paint at Stanford to bring to protests and rallies because how could God hate love and Cas was close, so close, kneeling in front of him on the bed, eyes wide and earnest and knowing with the hint of a smile still playing on his lips.
Sam leaned forward, closed the gap and kissed him.
Cas was frozen for a moment, hard like a marble statue, then he softened and kissed Sam back, awkward and uncertain but there with him.
"What about that?" Sam asked, half-apprehensive and half-playful. "Is that an abomination?"
Cas licked his lips. "Yes."
Then he scooted his knees forward a few crucial inches until he was almost sitting on Sam. His mouth a breath away from Sam's lips, he murmured, "But I think we stopped playing by Heaven's rules a long time ago."
Sam hadn't kissed that many people in his life -- less than Dean, but more than Dean liked to imply -- but kissing Castiel was nothing like any of them. Cas was inexperienced and enthusiastic, awkward with fatigue and with a body not his own, but no one Sam had ever been with had ever known him like this, had ever seen all the way to the heart of him and found him deserving. Even Jess, as wonderful as she was, even to her he had given everything but the truth. He couldn't stand for her to see the darkness he carried. But Castiel, he saw it and blessed him for it.
"Show me your wings," Sam said suddenly, breaking the kiss and pulling away just enough to speak. "Please."
Cas hesitated, eyes sliding away. Sam caught his face in his hands, brought him back, held his gaze. "If I'm not an abomination, neither are you."
Cas closed his eyes as if in pain. Sam lifted his hands away, afraid he'd hurt him somehow. But then the dim light from the cheap lamps began to flicker, and the shadow they cast of Cas on the wall grew and stretched, unfolding in an impossible arc of wings that bent along the walls and ceiling of the too-small room, the tips meeting on the wall above Sam's head.
Sam forgot to breathe.
The wings were massive, awesome in the truest sense of the word, filling a space much larger than the room, than the world. But they were damaged; even Sam could see it. Not feathers torn out, nothing so literal, but they were faded in places, translucent, transparent. Parts were simply missing, gaps slashing impossibly across the entire width, open and jagged. But the wings spread anyway, dark and encompassing, wrapping them both in a fierce and battle-scarred embrace.
"Castiel," Sam whispered. "They're glorious."
Cas reached out and laid a hand along Sam's face, sadness and gratitude and hundred other things written in one look. Then he shuddered and slumped, his hand falling down and the lights flashing before going out entirely. In the darkness Sam reached for him, grasped his shoulders.
"Cas?"
"It's all right, Sam," Cas said, his head turned so his breath ghosted across Sam's wrist. "I'm tired."
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked you to do that. You need to get some rest." Sam tugged on his shoulders, guiding him down in the dark to lie beside him on the bed. Enough light came in through the window to make out Cas's eyes, still open and watching him.
"Go to sleep," Sam said, gentle but insistent. "Rest up. And then tomorrow we'll go and beat some sense into my asshole brother."
Cas nodded and closed his eyes. "Tomorrow."