[Fic] Domesticated | Chapter Four
Title: Domesticated
Author: kototyph
Artist: levanera
Summary: Being the only angel in the entire Pacific Northwest can be tiring, even if these days Castiel spends more of his time shoveling manure than fighting off the hordes of hell. It's an occupational hazard, unfortunately; he earns most of his living rehabilitating wild animals a few miles outside Spokane. Wild animals like Dean, for instance- a mountain lion who's entirely too smart for his own good. There's a man in Castiel's dreams named Dean too, but that part's just a huge coincidence.
Winter is a slow season at the sanctuary, and Castiel spends most of his free time with Dean. It's hard to tear himself away, sometimes; he knows the animal can't really respond with a human level of affection, but the cat is always seems so pleased to see him. It's been such a long time since anyone (real)was.
One evening, when Castiel finally drags himself home, there's a message on his answering machine.
"Hello, brother! This is Inias, and I am calling you on the telephone. Hester assures me that if I speak loudly and clearly into this device, you will hear my voice and answer me, but a young lady has just informed me you are currently unavailable for conversation. Please use the telephone to return this 'call' I have sent, as I wish to speak with you on the topic of the upcoming concordance. Thank you. Goodbye."
"You did very well," Castiel assures him, returning the call after he's eaten and, to use Balthazar's charming terms, attended to the processes of excretion. "I've never received so clear and coherent a message."
"I'm so glad," the other angel gushes. "I seldom use human technology, even now that I live among them." Inias, as Castiel remembers, is currently assigned to tend the sick and wounded of the Sudan.
"Now, to our topic. Castiel, you must give me your honest opinion," Inias says, voice quieting. "I do not wish to attend the convocation."
"What? Why?" Castiel asks, taken aback. Balthazar's defection is understandable, given his temperament and the creeping cynicism he's developed over the years, but Inias' filial piety has been a constant force in their garrison's long separation from Heaven.
"I do not wish to leave here," Inias confesses. "Uriel will send me away, when I feel as though I am finally where I belong."
"Inias," Castiel breaths.
"Brother… brother. I have fallen in love."
"Oh, Inias," Castiel says softly, letting his head fall.
"Nothing will move me from her side. Will you tell him this? Please, will you tell him?"
And Castiel can only answer that he will, of course he will.
"I was married once," Castiel tells Dean, head on the man's shoulder.
These nights seem to last for years, just the two of them together, while the landscape around them changes. Sometimes they're here, on the lake, where the sun sets in perpetuity and the water glitters gently under its rays. Sometimes they're in the car, or the motel, at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or some nameless truckstop in the Midwest. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they don't.
Castiel might be going crazy, but he finds that he doesn't really care, as long as Dean is there.
"Whoa, married? Really?" Dean says, angling his head awkwardly to look down at him. "I never pegged you as the type, Cas."
"We separated after only six years," Castiel admits, turning his face into Dean's neck, breathing in the smell of warm skin and leather.
Dean shifts so they're leaning on each other, his cheek on Castiel's temple. "You fall out of love, or something?"
"I told her who I was," Castiel says. "What I was. I couldn't bear to be dishonest with her any longer."
"She didn't take it well, I guess."
"It challenged many of her beliefs. In the end I believe it was easier for her to assume I was insane, rather than change the way she viewed the world." He stares at the ripples in the cool green water below, and wonders if he's imagining the shadow that moves under them.
Dean's arm is around him and his hand is on his shoulder, the heat of his fingers bleeding through the coat. "Hey, Cas. Anyone who bails on you just because of a little crazy didn't deserve you in the first place."
"It was... painful, to see her distance herself. To see her decide not to trust me."
Dean doesn't say anything for a moment, and Castiel looks up at him, freckled nose and gleaming green eyes in the soft evening sunlight. "This makes you uncomfortable."
Dean gives him a wry half-smile. "Not uncomfortable, really. Just bringing back some bad memories of my own."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be, dude." He's quiet for a moment, taking another sip of beer before saying, "I understand. You don't just give up on somebody like that."
The puma has been living in the old grizzly pen for just over three weeks when Castiel notices the tracks.
It's only luck he sees them at all, coming by unusually early in morning. The frost is retreating fast under the dawn's assault and it leaves the edges of the footprints soft and amorphous. But they are, unmistakably, footprints, and they lead up to the puma's cage door, parade up and down the length of the tall outside fence, and finally retreat back in the direction of the road that runs through the forest preserve.
More worrying, though, is that the puma's tracks follow them, up and down, step for step.
The tracks are there the next morning, too.
"Interesting," Meg says, when it's clear she means anything but. She's playing with tarot cards, laying them out on the staffroom table in wide branching patterns only she understands. Castiel sits beside her, unwrapping the sandwich he's brought for lunch.
"You are, ostensibly, one of the big cat keepers," he says, taking a bite. Honey and peanut butter stick to the roof of his mouth, make his next words come out thick and slurred. "This should concern you."
She purses her lips, lays out another card-the Magician, upright. "Sorry to break it to you, man, but that cougar of yours isn't a big cat. Big cats belong exclusively to the genus Panthera, and anything else I don't have to give a shit about."
"I caught him digging at the base of the fence the other day. That's not normal for cats, is it?"
She shrugs, lays the Knight of Wands next to the Magician. "They'll try anything if they're determined to get out. The Siberian tigers, Kisa and Styopa? Go through a fence a month apiece. Little bastards," she adds fondly.
"I'm concerned about him," he admits to his sandwich, playing with the edge of Ziploc bag he'd packed it in. "He trusts humans too much. What if it's a poacher?"
Meg pins him with an unimpressed stare. "What if it's a random crazy who masturbates to mountain lions? Think about it, Jimmy. These enclosures are double-fenced, steel-reinforced and locked up like Fort Knox. There's no way anyone's getting in, and what poacher would shoot an animal he can't get at to take away?"
"I suppose that's true," he allows, and Meg snorts.
"Don't worry, your pretty kitty probably has a secret admirer from one of the school groups that came through last week. It'll get colder and they'll get sick of it soon enough."
Dean's sleeping while asleep, which should be impossible, Castiel thinks, combing his fingers through the short bristle of the man's hair. Sunlight slants across the motel sheets, turning the short strands gold and bronze.
Or perhaps Dean's not asleep at all, because the caress makes him sigh, a soft smile crooking his lips and Castiel can't resist tracing the small lines that bracket that mouth, those eyes, fingers slow and uncertain in the wake of a sudden surge of nameless emotion.
Dean is beautiful, Castiel thinks again, hazily.
"Cas," the man murmurs against Castiel's fingertips, a hint of a laugh coloring his voice. "Tickles."
So very beautiful.
Meg has the annoying habit of nearly always being right, but Castiel has no patience for her laissez-faire tactics. The day after their discussion, Castiel gets up in the somehow more profound darkness just before dawn, grabs a cattle prod from the staff storeroom, and goes to see exactly who is visiting his Dean at so early an hour.
Of course, the mysterious visitor doesn't show that morning, or the day after that. On the third day, Castiel's alarm clock fails and when he reaches the enclosure there are tool marks on the lock into the cage, small chunks taken out of the bars where someone's tried to worry them open. On the ground, a half-empty pie tin lies crumpled, and the puma's still licking his chops as he trots up to the wire.
Castiel curses Meg, Crowley, Asmodeus, Mammon and all the princes of hell, glaring at Dean when he rears up to greet him with ecstatic purring.
"The next time someone tries to break into your enclosure you need to eat them, not their pie," Castiel snaps, which earns him a throaty "Rrowwr!"
There's frost but the ground has frozen solid, and what little indication there is of footprints is fading quickly. Castiel traces the faint tracks as they grow fainter, through the enclosures to the wide weedy field that marks the boundary between the sanctuary and the Mount Spokane preserve. They cross within feet of his trailer.
He loses the trail there, where clover and grass become roots and leaf litter, and stares angrily into the dormant forest, breath fogging in the freezing air.
In summer, he never would have seen it. But it's late autumn now and the trees have been left stripped and bare, and there, fifty feet into the tree line, Castiel can see the vague outline of something long and black.
It's a car, an older model. (Dean's car, it looks like Dean's car, what-?) There's a path through the underbrush from where it was driven off the main road to this little clearing, and signs that someone has been using it as the base of a campsite. Castiel marches past a fire pit ringed by rocks and full of ash, and kicks spitefully at some of the stones as he comes up to the driver's side door.
He pounds on the roof with a fist and shouts, "Come out with your hands up!" Mostly because he's always secretly wanted to, and because wielding the crackling cattle prod makes him feel strangely empowered.
There's no response, no movement behind the frost coating the windows, and Castiel is raising his hand to bang again when someone says, "Um," from behind him, and Castiel spins to face them.
Sam has a sheepish expression and an armful of firewood. "Hi, Mr. Novak."
"You?"
"Me," the volunteer admits. "Can you put that thing down?"
Castiel raises the cattle prod between them. "No."
Sam lets the firewood drop, revealing the gun in his right hand. "Please?" he asks again. He looks extremely apologetic about having to insist.
Castiel can't fly, but that doesn't mean he's completely defenseless. The angel slips slightly sideways through time and jabs the prod right between the young man's shoulder blades, nodding with satisfaction as Sam gurgles and falls to the forest floor, spasms shaking his big body.
"I'm calling the police," Castiel decides, picking up the gun.
"Wait!" Sam manages. "Wait, please wait, m'sorry. I c'n explain."
"I very much doubt that," Castiel says, grabbing him by his jacket collar and dragging him back towards the sanctuary.
"Really!" Sam yelps, trying and failing to gain any kind of purchase on the frozen ground. "I swear!"
"So. Sam Hagar," Castiel says, after he finds the application again. "Is that your real name?"
"Not so much," Sam says. "Mr. Novak, is all this duct tape really necessary?"
Castiel ignores him, flipping through the next few pages. "You really are everything we look for in our applicants. It's almost too good to be true."
Sam shifts as much as he's able to, with most of a roll of shiny grey tape affixing him to one of Castiel's kitchen chairs, not quite meeting Castiel's eyes.
"Sam?"
Sam bites his lip. "It's, uh, no. It's all made up."
Castiel sets the résumé aside and stares at him over folded hands, and Sam sighs.
"Look. De-Snickers, is... he's like a brother to me," he says. "I love him. We grew up together."
"Snickers is a wild animal," Castiel reminds him, although relief is spreading through him. Not a poacher, then.
"He's not happy here," Sam pleads. "You've got to see how much he hates that cage!"
"The state of Washington does not allow the keeping or breeding of wild animals by private owners," Castiel points out. "You've been keeping him illegally, which means secretly, and certainly means a cage much smaller than ours."
"You-it's wasn't like that," Sam says. "He's not... usually..." He sighs. "Okay. This is going to sound completely crazy, I know, but Dean is in danger. He's-"
There's a perfunctory knock at Castiel's door and then it swings open, Meg calling out, "Yo, Jimmy, hope you realize it's ten am and you missed-"
Castiel expects the surprise, the double-take. What he doesn't expect is the slow, sultry grin that follows. "Well, isn't this interesting," she purrs.
Her eyes have come over black as tar, and Sam stiffens where he's taped upright.
"Interesting, interesting. Now, what did Sam Winchester do to deserve being taped to your chair, Jimmy?" she asks with a laugh as she saunters closer. There's a knife, suddenly, flicking out from her fingers like a snake's tongue and trailing over the bob of Sam's throat as he swallows.
"What are you doing, Meg?" Castiel asks, fairly calmly he thinks.
"Eh, whatever. I don't think this concerns you anymore," she says, just as Sam repeats "Meg?" in a strangled voice, staring at her like he's seen a ghost. They know each other. How do they know each other?
"Meg, what-" Castiel tries again, reaching to grab her wrist. With a careless sweep of her arm she's knocks him sideways into the opposite wall, and Castiel just lies there for a moment, stunned by the impact.
"Mr. Novak!" Sam calls, but Meg is straddling him where he's taped immobile to the chair, and she brings the knife in close, scraping at the outer edge of his eye socket.
"I've been watching you, Sammy," she says coyly. "I've been waiting for you to do your thing and move on. But you're still here, why? And where oh where," a thin red thin appears just above his cheekbone, "is big bad brother Dean?"
What?
"What do you want with Dean?" Castiel pants, using the wall to push himself up.
Meg looks back at him, head cocked. "What do you know about Dean, Jimmy?" she asks curiously, and behind her Sam widens his eyes and shakes his head slightly.
"Dean, he," Castiel says, stalling for time as he climbs to his feet. He's trying to think of how he can get her away from Sam, get her alone. "He's tall, he has- a leather jacket," and freckles, and eyes the color of summer grass and peridot. "I've seen him around," Castiel says with perfect honesty.
Of course, he's thinking of his Dean, the one who lays his head in Castiel's lap and smiles and calls him Cas, always Cas, but Meg doesn't know that.
"Okay, little vague, but 'leather jacket' does just scream Winchester," Meg says dryly.
"I've seen him hanging around a car in the woods," Castiel temporizes, remembering Sam's campsite. "It's… old, and black."
"The Impala," Meg says, clapping her hands together. "Oh, goody."
She climbs off Sam's lap and beckons Castiel forward with the knife. "Field trip. Let's go check out that car, Jimmy."
Sam is staring at Castiel with a mixture of confusion and betrayal, and when Meg turns to go for the door Castiel tries to convey with his expression that he's buying Sam time, leading the demon with the knife away so Sam can escape.
"On second thought," Meg says, spinning around. "Jimbo, cut Sammy-boy loose. It's better to never leave a Winchester to his own devices."
Or not.
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