SPN Fic: Something Primal

[luchia13]

Birthday Fic The First! You're up next, Tin Man.

Title: Something Primal
Rating: R
Genre and/or Pairing: Gen! Dean, Sam, Deinonychus!Cas (and then Standard!Cas)
Warnings: ANIMAL BRUTALITY, gore, mayhem, a dinosaur written by someone who isn't a paleontologist (but I do my best!), not quite crack, dark, dark humor, clingy brothers (for good reasons), incorrect outcomes of fights for the sake of story, people getting shot in the face, and if you're a member if PETA, look away. Look away right now.
Word Count: ~11,000.
Summary: Castiel turns himself into a dinosaur to save the Winchesters from an escaped zoo of demonic animals and save a seal (66, not an animal) in the process. And then things get weird.

Again: I am not a dinosaur expert. I am not an animal expert. I did lots of research, and many inaccuracies are intentional, but if you know something I don't, please tell me.


Something Primal

It’s a comfortable four in the afternoon when the dinosaur appears in front of Dean’s bed. The sun’s shining, Sam’s taking a nap on the other bed, looking more relaxed than he has since Dean made his deal, and Dean’s idly researching who could be in charge of their current demonic mauling problem. It’s the kind of afternoon that makes you think a nice glass of lemonade and a porch swing would be awesome, but no, he gets the random appearance of a bona fide Jurassic Park escapee.

He figures screaming for Sam to wake the fuck up while shooting the thing in the face is a logical reaction. The dinosaur - which looks a hell of a lot like the raptors in those movies - lets out this biting squeak noise and then hisses, lowering itself onto its haunches while Dean grabs his stupid brother’s arm.

Which is when he notices the tattered remains of a beige coat lying on the floor, and the fact the raptor isn’t attacking. In fact, the dinosaur looks like he’s frowning more than anything. It even has its crazy long tail politely avoiding hitting the ceiling somehow.

“Holy shit,” Sam says, grabbing onto Dean just as much as Dean is grabbing onto him. “Holy shit, Dean, there’s a dinosaur in our room.”

Dean considers the evidence in front of him. He notes the ridiculous blue of the thing’s eyes, the fact it just appeared, and remembers that it just took a bullet to the brain. “Dude, I think it’s Cas.”

The dinosaur makes a creepy not-quite barking noise, flapping its arms for just a moment, but it’s long enough that Dean notices the thing has feathers. They’re brown, boring feathers only really visible beneath the arms, although now that Dean’s not screaming and running away he’s noticing there’s a couple really long feathers on the tip of the thing’s tail. It looks like the dinosaur’s doing its best to look as unimposing as possible, which might explain how subdued all the feathers look, curled in on themselves.

“Is it a dinosaur or a bird?” Dean asks, and can feel Sam shrug.

“I think it’s a hybrid, turning into a bird sort of dinosaur. Missing link dinosaurs. Like the real velociraptors,” Sam says, and carefully lets go of Dean, stepping down off the bed. When Sam’s feet hit the floor, Dean’s brain snaps into action and he’s off the bed too, just about a foot closer to the potentially angelic dinosaur.

He stares straight into the dinosaur’s eyes.

It tilts its head, and its five-foot-long tail waves back and forth as it looks straight back.

“Holy shit, Cas, you’re a fucking dinosaur,” Dean breathes out, and the dinosaur hesitates for a moment before standing all the way up again. It’s still only about three fifths as tall as Dean is, but since it’s a dinosaur, height really isn’t the important thing going on here. “What happened?”

Castiel looks at him for a long moment, before twisting around, neck leading his broad triangular head as he turns towards the window, narrowly avoiding whacking them with his feathered tail. Even with the carpet, Dean shudders when he hears the dinosaur walk, the thump of claws still audible on the floor. He looks out the window, looks back at them, and then lets out that same not-quite-bark from before.

“I’m guessing we go outside,” Sam mutters.

“We can’t take a velociraptor outside,” Dean hisses.

Castiel makes a whine-bark noise, head jerking forward in a way that’s obviously pissed off. Dean throws up his hands. “What? You’re a fucking dinosaur! People will notice you!”

Castiel’s next noise is a clicking growl that sends every primate instinct in him into overdrive, grabbing onto Sam’s arm again. Luckily, this is definitely not something Sam will tease him about, because Sam looks about ready to wet his pants when Castiel takes a step towards them, eyes still latched onto them.

“We can go out,” Dean practically shrieks, Sam’s violent head-shaking rocking his entire body.

Castiel lets out an odd, cooing whine, and turns his head back to the window.

“Okay, here we go,” Dean says, and strides over to the door, opening it as quickly as possible. Castiel takes one look around the parking lot and steps out.

It takes a lot longer than Dean had expected for Castiel to get out the door. He’s probably eleven feet long, for fuck’s sake, most of it tail, and he shudders when he hears Cas’ claws hit the concrete.

“We see a lot of weird shit, Dean, but this is weird even for us,” Sam says when he reaches the doorframe.

Castiel turns, raises a single handclaw of doom, and the door slams shut in their faces, lock slamming home immediately afterwards. While Dean gapes at the door, Sam slides over to the window.

“It just got weirder,” Sam states. Dean frowns, moves towards the window, and is totally okay with his mouth dropping open when he sees that Castiel is circling a tiger in the parking lot, slow and deadly with his tail swishing constantly, body low to the ground as the tiger sits in the middle of the circle. “I’m guessing this is some sort of telepathic animal conversation.”

“Or the tiger knows not to piss off a fucking velociraptor,” Dean adds.

“I don’t think he’s a velociraptor, Dean,” Sam says, and watches the tiger’s head tick towards Castiel. “They were turkey-sized, and he’s about the size of a big dog.”

Dean nods. “So an eleven foot long big dog with talons, razor sharp teeth, and feathers isn’t a velociraptor?” He can’t help but pause. “You want to look it up?”

“Dean, he’s intimidating a tiger, I think I can wait.”

Castiel’s feathers puff up. It’s not like on a bird, where it just makes them look fluffy and stupid and adorable. It’s a visual cue to the fact that he’s going to fucking kill you, every muscle tensing, tail snapping, and Dean’s pretty sure he has new nightmare fodder for the rest of his life. The tiger leaps for him, and Dean can’t help but shout when Castiel’s completely covered by the tiger, tiny terrifying dinosaur body dwarfed by the big cat. He’s about ready to actually go out there and try to shoot the tiger without hitting Castiel, grabbing his gun from the nearby table, when Sam makes a gagging noise.

The tiger is on its side, dead. It has one enormous claw going straight through its neck, the other curving through the bottom of its mouth like a fishhook, and Castiel’s mouth is moving away from the remains of its shattered skull.

“Fuck,” is all Dean can really say, but he says it very sincerely. Castiel’s shiny brown feathers are tinged bright red when he moves back, rolling back onto his feet in a move that tells Dean this particular dinosaur is made to work like that. Castiel shakes his head, sending drops of blood onto the asphalt, and a sudden gush of black smoke erupts from the tiger. Castiel doesn’t even look back at it, simply walks his way back to the hotel room door, five-foot-long tail - hell, it might be six feet now that he’s looking - swishing away.

There’s a knock on the front door. It’s like every Jurassic Park nightmare he’s ever had just rolled into one, because there’s a bloodsoaked not-quite-velociraptor knocking on the door.

“I didn’t know demons could possess animals,” Sam says, voice far away.

“I didn’t know angels could either, if it helps any,” Dean replies, and tries to take the words to heart. This isn’t just an angel, it’s Castiel, and as terrifying as he may be as a dinosaur, he’s not going to eat him.

The knock comes again, and this time he realizes Castiel’s probably headbutting the damn door. It makes him grin to picture not-so-big but definitely bad dinosaur angel Cas being defeated by the stunning modern technology known as a door. He opens it up, and the look the dinosaur gives him says Castiel is obviously unhappy about having to wait.

Since Dean’s never smiled at a dinosaur, he does. Castiel’s tail swishes some more. And hey, since Dean’s never petted a dinosaur, he does that too, scratches him carefully right on the top of his head.

Castiel’s tail slams into one of the nearby beams holding the overhang up, and he squats down in surprise.

“A really big, scary dog,” Dean praises. Sam looks at him like he’s crazy, but Castiel relaxes again. When Dean pulls his hand away Castiel sniffs him and makes a satisfied chirping noise. His head swivels over to Sam and he sniffs again, the same chirp noise rewarding him, and then the dinosaur’s just gone.

They stare at the bloody clawprints still trailing from the dead tiger in the middle of the parking lot, notice they trail straight into their hotel room, and decide that yeah, checking out would be a good idea. Dean stuffs Castiel’s coat into the back of the car, no matter how tattered it is.

---

When they stop for dinner a couple hours later, Sam pulls out the laptop and starts reading off some of the breaking news from dino town (and Dean will never be able to think of it as anything other than The Town Where Cas Turned Into A Fucking Dinosaur).

It starts with how an escaped tiger was found dead in the parking lot of a motel, unusual claw marks suggesting some unknown wild animal killed it and then retreated into an empty motel room with an unlocked door. It then goes on to say the tiger could definitely be the cause of all three mauling cases, although the zookeepers go on and on about how he was the gentlest tiger they’d ever seen. Apparently almost the entire zoo had escaped last night, and the tiger was the first escaped animal they’d recovered so far.

“If all the animals escaped, there’s probably more than a tiger hunting us,” Sam says grimly as he looks at the list of known animals to escape - lions, tigers, alligators, wolves, a cobra, a panda (which Sam said wasn’t a bear, but come on, pandas are totally bears), a rhinoceros, and a four-year-old monkey.

“It’s kind of weird that I’m most worried about fighting the demonic monkey,” Dean says.

Sam shrugs. “I’ve seen the documentaries. They bite and climb and shriek.”

“And they’re cute,” Dean mutters, frowning at the window. He’s had to kill things that qualified as cute - including demonic children, but he’s not thinking about that right now, or ever if he gets the chance - but a monkey might be just too cute to kill. And a panda, but pandas were huge, so he doubted that’d be much of a problem.

Sam also points out that Cas was a deinonychus dinosaur, which is apparently velociraptor’s big brother, which is pretty cool. It’s also pretty fucking funny to see the recreations of deinonychus with a big painted head and fluffy blue feathers, because he’s pretty sure the real thing would have gone cannibal on that color scheme first chance it got.

It gets a lot less amusing when Sam tells him that Cas had hollow bones like a bird, and that if he hadn’t been faster than the tiger, it’d only take one swipe of a paw and he’d have been snapped like a twig. Plus, they were supposedly pack hunters, and pack hunters were rarely as efficient working alone.

Sam notices him worrying, of course, because Sam knows Dean. “He’s an angelic dinosaur, Dean,” Sam reassures. “I’ve seen him stabbed through the chest and practically hung on a hook, and he got better. Cas can take care of himself against a zoo of boring old modern animals.”

Dean’s not sure any of the zoo animals really count as boring, just like he’s not sure a dinosaur, no matter how much of a fucking dinosaur it is, can take out every animal Sam’s listed. He just shakes his head. They need to leave before they end up fighting an entire zoo.

---

The road out of town is blocked by a rhinoceros.

“This isn’t going to get any less weird, is it,” Dean mutters, and gets the trunk open as fast as he can. The rhino is just pacing, looking a lot faster than he ever imagined an animal that big could be, eyeing them and the car with pitch black eyes.

Dean watches the rhino as Sam looks through the weapons. “What the hell do you kill a rhinoceros with?!” Sam shouts out, and Dean is right there with him, because seriously, how the fuck do you kill a rhino? “We need a…a spear or something! We don’t have a spear, Dean!”

“I know we don’t have a fucking spear!” Dean shouts back, and takes a step back when the rhinoceros’ pacing turns into a slow trot towards them. “Sam, just pick something.”

“I pick the wrong thing and we die, Dean.”

“Just pick something,” Dean says, well aware his voice is going higher by the second and not sounding like it’s going to stop anytime soon.

The rhino looks straight at him, and snorts.

“Oh, fuck. Pick something,” Dean states. “Pick something right now, or we’re going to die.”

“Shit,” Sam says, and hands him one of the shovels. “Okay, okay, the shovel’s sharp enough you could maybe get it on the stomach, but-”

He has no idea where Castiel the dinosaur came from, but suddenly the feathery dinosaur’s flung itself out from nowhere in an impossible ten-foot jump. He lands right on top of the rhino’s face, and the rhino screams as he rips at the animal’s eyes with the claws that’d already taken out a tiger.

“We’re leaving this to him,” Dean says, because he’s not a fucking idiot, and throws the shovel into the trunk, pushing Sam towards the passenger side door. The rhino charges, already blinded, and Castiel jumps off him as if it’s nothing. It veers back towards Castiel, and the dinosaur runs - and wow, that’s pretty awesome to just watch - towards the face of the cliff cut out when they made the road, screaming at the thing.

The rhino actually takes the bait. Castiel keeps hissing until the very end, when he jumps to the side (also awesome to watch, because holy shit, that dinosaur can jump) and the rhinoceros runs straight into the rock. The thing makes a pitiful, angry noise and crumples to the asphalt, but apparently that isn’t enough for Castiel. Dean doesn’t know if it’s the dinosaur instincts or a dedication to being sure the job’s done, but Castiel moves to the rhino’s neck and digs in, first with his hand claws, and then with his wicked foot claw.

The rhinoceros is still twitching when Castiel bites down and rips actual flesh out of the rhino’s throat. Black smoke erupts from its mouth.

Dean can’t do much more than stare at the scene in front of him, his grip on the Impala’s steering wheel white-knuckled and completely unnoticed, because Castiel is walking towards the car with blood still dripping from, well, everything. He click-hisses something at them, but Dean’s too busy mentally turning back into a scared little prehistoric mammal to try and figure it out. The click-hisses turn irritated, almost frantic, and Dean puts the window down.

“What? I’m sorry, but we just don’t speak dinosaur,” Dean says, and ignores the indignant Dean! that Sam hisses at him.

Castiel’s hiss is a lot scarier, after all. The dinosaur’s looking back into the woods, and after a moment Dean catches the tiniest glint of what’s out there. The swift, smooth line of an animal padding over the ground tells him it’s wolves, and from the hiss Castiel gives him makes him pretty sure it’s all of them.

“Hey Sam, how many wolves escaped?”

Sam frowns. “Seven, I think?”

Castiel looks Dean straight in the eye, and Dean glares. “Dinosaur or not, there’s no way in hell you can take out an entire pack of wolves. We can help-”

One hand clamps down on the front of the car, and they’re idling in a motel parking lot.

“There’s something weird going on here,” Sam says.

Dean rolls his eyes. “No, really?”

“Other than the animal battle royale,” Sam clarifies, and looks at Dean with a frown. “Cas wouldn’t have normally done this, would he? I mean, I can’t think of a single time he’s popped up for no reason other than to kill demons for us.”

Dean hesitates, but Sam does have a point. The closest things he can think of are smiting an entire town and capturing Alistair, and this is nothing like that. “Alright. What do you think’s going on then?”

Sam shrugs. “I don’t know. A seal?”

“An animal-related seal,” Dean states. It makes sense, in a freakish way. “Then why the hell’s Cas a dinosaur?”

Sam lets out a huffy, amused noise. “I’m going to leave angel interpretation to you.”

Dean wants to ask what the hell Sam means by that, but his brother’s already stepping out of the car, tossing “I’ll get us a room” over his shoulder. He shrugs and parks. If the angels really want them here, they’re probably not going anywhere for a while.

---

Only a few hours later, a dull thud echoes out from the door. Sam’s still frowning at the door, toothbrush close to hanging out of his mouth, when Dean gets up and opens it.

Castiel the dinosaur tumbles through, covered in blood and wheezing.

“You always ruin our rooms,” Dean states, but instead he pulls the rest of Castiel’s ridiculously long tail in through the door and shuts it. Sam’s already there with a couple of the bathroom towels, hesitantly wiping the blood away from Cas’ eyes (and hell, this is all going to be hesitant because if he even twitches the wrong way they could end up with four inches of razor claw in their thighs). Dean grabs the other towel. “What’d I tell you about those wolves, huh? Should have let us help.”

Castiel growls a little, and Sam scoots backwards pretty fast. Dean’s definitely leaning away from him, but since Castiel’s kind of leaning against him he can’t fully escape, so he swallows down the primal fear and carefully pats the dinosaur on the head. “But you did good anyway.”

He huffs, but it’s a satisfied and not completely scary noise, so they go back to cleaning up the blood. It takes them a while, considering Cas has the little feather coating thing going on. His arms are the most difficult, since that’s where the feathers look like genuine feathers instead of a softer sort of scale, but they get the job done. Sam takes the towels and runs them in cold water, and Dean checks over the rest of dinosaur Castiel to make sure there isn’t something permanently broken.

When he fell into the room, his left arm had been broken and quite a few ribs had been broken along with it. Dean shrugs. “Looks like you’ve recovered,” he says.

Castiel doesn’t even move. He just keeps sitting there, eyes wide open and looking at absolutely nothing. Dean swallows down the ear that he’s dead, because come on, he’s dealing with an angelic dinosaur for fuck’s sake. He clears his throat. “Cas? You okay? You can move now, you know.”

“He’s asleep, Dean,” Sam says from the bathroom, half amused and half exhausted. “Dinosaurs probably have clear eyelids or something. Or no eyelids at all.”

Dean’s pretty sure they have eyelids and Cas just has his open, but whatever. He shrugs and moves over to his bed, pulls the comforter off and drapes it over Castiel, curling his flexible tail around him like a cat so he can fit all of him underneath it.

Sam stares at the blanket-covered Castiel for a while when he sees him. “That shouldn’t be cute.”

“I know,” Dean agrees, staring right along with him. “I can still see his killer teeth, but he’s still kind of adorable.”

“Maybe it’s the comforter,” Sam suggests, and he has a point. The comforter’s a cheerful yellow and blue design that almost looks stylish. The angel picked a surprisingly high-class motel for them, and it showed.

Dean shakes his head. “I’m going to sleep. I can’t deal with thinking about this without sleep.”

The bed’s a little too soft for him, but he’s gone as soon as his head hits the pillow.

---

He wakes up in the middle of the night to see Castiel doing his best to be quiet about dragging an enormous snake into the bathroom before it bleeds all over the floor. Dean’s seen big snakes before, but that…well. That’s definitely the cobra Sam listed off, its head hanging limply from one side of Cas’ jaws, the rest of it dragging along behind him.

The claws can’t help but make noise, no matter how quiet he tries to be, but Sam’s still miraculously asleep. Dean shifts enough to look straight into the dinosaur’s eyes, and as ever, Castiel looks right back.

“Thanks, Cas,” Dean says through a yawn. Castiel makes a muffled noise from behind the snake, hesitates for a moment, and then vanishes right along with the snake.

It’s even easier to sleep after that.

---

“Housekeeping!” someone shouts from the other side of the door - Dean’s guessing it’s housekeeping - and he can’t do much more than groan and sit up.

Sam’s already dressed and armed with a pistol and Ruby’s knife, sitting in the chair next to the TV and staring straight at the door. Castiel sits next to him, hissing at the door but restraining himself from opening up the door and ripping into whatever’s on the other side.

“Demon?” Sam asks sharply, and Castiel huff-growls something that’s obviously a yes. Sam lets the gun fall onto the table and moves right towards the door. Castiel backs up, even if he looks like he wants nothing more than to do another one of those insane ten-foot-jumps of his and eat the demon on the other side.

Sam opens up the door, and the kind-looking woman with the housekeeping cart completely ignores him, instead pulling a gun out of one of the bins and aiming straight at Castiel. Luckily Sam’s faster, stabbing her in the chest before she can pull the trigger. Light sparks from the blade, and the woman falls flat on the ground, dead.

“What the fuck was that?” Dean demands, and the look Castiel gives him is enough to make his stomach churn in really unpleasant ways, because all of a sudden, he gets it. “Oh hell no. You’re turning human again.”

“Dean?” Sam calls from where he’s already checking over the body. “What’s going on?”

“It’s a seal,” Dean says. “A human kills an animal or something, and it breaks.” He glares at Castiel. “But one of them has to be a good person or animal or something, making Cas here their prime animal target if they’re coming in human suits.”

Sam’s head snaps up, looking from Castiel to Dean and back. “Shit.”

“And since we’re good at killing monsters, we’re good at killing animals, so they’re coming after us,” Dean says. “Because win or lose, the seal still breaks if the fight’s man versus animal.”

“It has to be with some kind of boundary line though,” Sam says, and looks straight at Castiel. “There’s a boundary, right?”

He shifts, and nods.

“Okay, could we make it to the boundary by driving?”

He shakes his head, making an urgent, emphatic hiss noise while he does it.

“Right, the rhino,” Dean points out. “They’ve probably got elephants and stuff out there too, so there’s not much of a chance we’ll get out safely on the road.”

Castiel nods, and after a moment of consideration - head tilted, eyes staring at the doorframe - he holds up two claws and makes an obvious walking motion with them. After Sam nods, his hand curls abruptly and he lets out a low growl-hiss noise.

It’s really, really intimidating to see those things waggling through the air.

“So we walk, get out of the border, and then we…fight something?” Dean asks.

Castiel’s tail whaps the ground, obviously unhappy, and he shakes his head.

“We get out and it’s over,” Sam guesses, and Castiel nods, looking around the room. “Okay, so we get out of this town and we’re alright and the seal’s safe.”

Again, Castiel nods.

“Alright,” Dean says, and grabs some clothes out of his duffle, already making a list of everything they’ll need in his head. “We pack up and we start walking.”

---

There’s nothing quite like hiking with a deinonychus by your side.

For one, they’re fast. Even walking, Castiel seems to be strolling along while Dean and Sam trudge forward through the forest. Plus dinosaurs like Cas were made for this sort of environment, and it shows whenever Castiel leaps forward to do a quick scout around the area to make sure everything’s okay. Neither of them are particularly happy about him doing that, since there might be a demonic hunter somewhere around, but he comes back fine every time.

Plus they get a break from the constantly unsettling fear they can’t help feeling when there’s a dinosaur walking around them.

“So how far is it to the border?” Dean asks Castiel, and probably gets way too much enjoyment out of the irritated I can’t talk look he receives.

Which is when the monkey drops down from a tree and straight onto Sam’s head, clinging for all its worth. Sam grabs at it, but the thing won’t let go, so Dean does the only thing he can think to do. He runs forward and barrels straight into Sam, tackling him to the forest floor.

As soon as Sam hits the ground, Castiel’s there, jaws snapping right around the monkey’s torso and wrenching him off Sam, shaking it one single time, and black smoke screams out of the primate’s mouth.

But apparently that isn’t enough for Castiel, since he lets out a high-pitched shriek that sends Dean and Sam huddling against each other and tosses what’s left of the monkey into the air, impaling it on a dead tree branch.

“Oh my god,” Sam whispers, face drained of any blood it may have had left while the monkey’s limp body drips blood onto the forest floor.

“At least we know the monkey’s not coming back, right?” Dean says weakly in an attempt to bolster his brother’s spirit.

Castiel looks at them, and Dean’s not entirely sure he’s comfortable with traveling with a deinonychus anymore, because angelic or not, he can see that the creature’s barely holding back from eating that monkey. There’s not a doubt in his mind that the only reason Cas isn’t feasting on monkey is that they’re already freaking out about him biting into a monkey while it was attached to Sam’s skull.

Castiel looks like he actually understands what’s going on, though, and instead of walking towards them he sits at an angle away from the tree, watching something not them for a while, giving them time to collect some of their dignity back.

“You alright?” Dean asks. When Sam nods, Dean moves aside, smiling shakily. “Man, I told you those monkeys were clingy little bastards, right?” And cute, but he was ignoring the cute part for his own sanity. Then again, everything loses a lot of cuteness when it’s demonic and attacking his brother. “Alright. We’ve got to go.”

Sam nods. He watches Sam stumble a few times, but he finds his footing eventually, Dean walking carefully and watching the treetops too. Castiel stands and practically heels to Dean. He isn’t sure whose benefiting from the action, but he’s not complaining - it keeps Cas from ripping into monkeys and keeps Dean from having to worry Cas is going to be ripping into monkeys.

“Seriously, Cas, is there any way you can think of to tell us how long we’ll be walking?” Dean asks after a few more minutes of walking. Castiel simply tilts his head to the side. “Okay, are we going to be walking past sunset?”

“Uh, Dean?” Sam asks. “I think there’s something following us.”

Castiel’s head perks up from where he’d been simply staring at Dean, but doesn’t turn around. Dean follows his lead, frowning at Sam. “Alright, what’s left on the list of escapees?”

Sam frowns. “Three lions, one more tiger, four alligators, and a panda.”

Castiel makes a whistle-bark sort of noise, and Dean frowns at him. “What, we’re missing something from the list?”

“Oh, you didn’t get all the wolves, did you?” Sam says, and obviously looks pleased with himself for speaking dinosaur.

Dean rolls his eyes. “Seriously? All that fuss to get us away from the wolves and you didn’t even kill all of them?” He shakes his head. “How can you look at yourself in the mirror?”

He gets a spine-jerking hiss in reply, and man, there’s no comeback quite as effective as I’m a dinosaur. Sam snickers at him from his other side, and Dean clears his throat, trying to muster as much dignity as he can. And really, he’s about to give up on that, considering Castiel continuously scares the crap out of him whenever he decides to even twitch the wrong way. “So you think it’s the wolves again? How many’d you leave alive, Cas?”

Castiel holds up all three of his claws on his right hand, and yeah, that pretty much proves Dean’s point. But it also says Cas took down four wolves all by himself, which is even scarier. If this is what one deinonychus can do on its own, he definitely doesn’t want to meet the rest of the pack.

“So do we have a plan other than hide while Cas kills them?” Sam asks.

The sound Castiel makes is so pleased and sated that Dean shudders.

“No offense, buddy, but I’m going to be very happy when you’re back to possessing a human,” Dean tells him. Castiel looks at him without making a single noise other than his feet pushing through packed dirt with sounds closer to a kid digging through sand or a breeze drifting through the leaves above than the thud-step of Sam and Dean. He’s not an expert on reading dinosaur expressions, but he’s gotten good enough to know this one’s very, very complicated.

It occurs to Dean that if Cas wants to stay a dinosaur, they’re going to be dealing with him like this for what could possibly be the rest of their lives.

Sam stops walking and frowns at them. “I think there’s more than just wolves-”

Castiel shrieks as a bullet grazes his back, feathers sheared off before it embedded itself in a nearby tree. He immediately ducks down behind Dean, no matter how badly they can tell he wants to just leap over, sniff the man out, and rip him to shreds.

“Looks like we’re up,” Dean shouts, and the wolves start howling.

“We’ll cover you,” Sam says, and Castiel chirps out something that sounds almost grateful before ducking around Dean, and running.

They kind of forget to cover him, because holy shit, that is one fast dinosaur. It’s nowhere near cheetah speed (he had Sam read that off earlier, since Jurassic Park had pegged these guys at ‘cheetah speed,’ which was up to seventy-two miles per hour) but it’s definitely faster than he gets to drive in a residential zone. His tail acting as a rudder, body low to the ground, it’s almost like those roadrunner cartoons, considering the tiny tufts of dirt that his claws dig up and toss backwards.

It probably takes two seconds, and there’s already a wolf screaming.

“Let’s go kill a demon,” Dean finally says after a high-pitched shrieking roar follows the wolves’ snarling, and Sam nods. They’re low to the ground too, Dean with Ruby’s knife and a couple of his favorite guns, Sam with a sawed-off shotgun in hand and another couple pistols and a knife somewhere on him, and it doesn’t take too long to find the demon, since he’s still dressed in the bright orange hunter vest.

The hunter isn’t the problem. The fact the hunter’s crouching in a ditch and flanked by four demonic alligators is.

“Fuck,” Dean hisses out.

Sam nods, glancing back towards the very loud and very violent-sounding dinosaur versus wolves brawl going on. “How long do you think it’ll be before he’s okay to go again?”

Dean glares at him. “That’s not the kind of rifle Cas can just shrug off if he gets hit.” It’d probably rip through him and break a third of the bones in his birdish skeletal structure, and Sam knows it.

“As soon as we attack him, those alligators are going to kill us,” Sam hisses. There’s another pained, bit-off yelp from deeper in the forest. “If you’ve got a better idea, feel free to share.”

He pauses. “They’re leaving dead bodies even when they could just keep going.”

Sam nods, the same idea obviously unraveling in his head. “Because then the possessed creature’s useless for the seal.”

Dean grins and checks one of his pistols. Loaded, safety off, good grip, steady arms, ready to go. “Man, I wish demons always went down that easy.”

He doesn’t give Sam the chance to try and do it because demon or not, there’s still some hunter guy inside that body somewhere. Dean turns, looks down the ridge, and aims straight for the guy’s head. One bullet, and one black eye’s ripped out of his skull, smoke roaring out of his mouth as the alligators turn towards them and start towards them.

“Run!” Dean shouts, and Sam’s a good brother because he yanks Dean up along with him and they’re running the way they’d been heading before. He’s not particularly worried about Castiel catching up because he’s ridiculously fast. He’s mostly worried about the other animals that might be waiting. Those and other possessed humans that might get Castiel on his way towards them, but with the way Cas could probably trot along at a lazy twenty miles an hour, he’s not that worried. Shooting fast things is hard, and shooting smallish fast things is even harder.

“We’ve got one tiger, three lions, and a panda left on the list,” Sam shouts at him. “The town had a population of something around three thousand.”

Dean’s pretty sure they’re dealing with a finite number of demons possessing all the people and critters, meaning that if they’ve got five demons that were waiting in the ditch and three wolves, there’s eight demons to worry about. And if Cas gets all the wolves, that’s four more that could be recycling into other animals and people, giving them a potential entire pack of lions and a tiger, lions and a person, a tiger and a panda and two people, or some other combination.

Fuck, he hates probability.

Castiel tears through a clearing and straight towards them. He’s covered in blood, completely healthy, and looking very, very satisfied. It really shouldn’t make Dean smile, because that’s one terrifying image, but he finds himself grinning at Cas anyway.

When he knows they’re both fully aware Castiel’s back, the dinosaur goes back to his super-speed and circles back around, most likely to check on the alligator status. They slow down to a jog instead of the usual oh-fuck-it’s-going-to-eat-me run they’ve developed over the years, Sam looking just as tired as Dean is.

“So you know how I’m not okay with you using your demonic mojo?” Dean pants out.

“It doesn’t work,” Sam hisses back, and they’re not even walking. Dean stares at him, and Sam has the decency to at least look a little guilty. “I tried it on the alligators. My demon-ganking doesn’t include animals, apparently.”

Dean groans. “Well that’s just fantastic. The one time I’d actually accept you using your crazy psychic powers, you can’t.”

“Hey, we’ve still got an angel dinosaur on our side,” Sam says, even going far enough to clench a hand around Dean’s shoulder. “We’ll get out of here. We always do.”

He gives Sam a weak smile. “Good try, Sammy, but Cas isn’t entirely reassuring to have around.” It was reassuring to know you could point at an animal, say sic ‘em, and be sure that there was going to be a prehistoric monstrosity obeying. And yeah, Castiel was still Castiel, but he was also more than a little deinonychus. He trusted the Cas part, but he’d be more than happy to part with the dinosaur part.

“Dude, all we have to do is walk forward and stay alive without killing any animals,” Sam says, and leads by example. Dean follows him, rolling his eyes. “Seriously. Walk, survive, not kill animals, and that’s it. We do this every day.”

“Yeah, but the animals don’t usually start a fight,” Dean mutters. Castiel circles back around and falls into lazy step with Dean as they keep moving forward, guarding even more intently than usual. “How are the alligators?”

Castiel tilts his head to the side and makes a worried whistling noise, crouching a little lower to the ground.

“Oh shit, they’re not possessed anymore?” Sam asks, and Dean can’t help but be impressed because there was no way in hell Dean could have guessed that one first try.

“We can’t take on the entire posse,” Dean states, and it’s true. Even with Warrior Dinosaur Castiel they couldn’t take out an entire lion pride, a tiger, a panda, and three possessed people at the same time, even if Sam’s powers work on the animal-possessing demons in human bodies. He turns and glares at Castiel. “Can’t you call in backup or something?”

Castiel looks at him for a long, nerve-wracking moment, and slowly shakes his head.

Dean clears his throat. “Alright, we make a big devil’s trap, get all of them inside, exorcize them all-”

“We’d have to lure giant man-eating cats into the trap and still get out before they kill us.” Sam frowns. “The situation sucks, yeah, but what we’re doing right now is probably the best plan. We’ve got the knife, we’ve got Cas, Cas has us, and we’ll be careful.”

Dean frowns. “I don’t like this.”

“No sane person would like this, Dean,” Sam snaps out. “I’m still worried that the rhinoceros might not be dead.”

The satisfied hiss-click noise Castiel seems to unintentionally let out gives them a pretty definitive answer to that question, though.

Dean shakes his head. “Okay, at least we don’t have to worry about that. So we’re just walking.”

And they do. They walk for what seemed like hours, up ridges and down slopes, Castiel circling around every few minutes. Sometimes he comes back bloodier, sometimes he comes back wet and cleaner, but it slowly sinks into Dean’s mind that Castiel always comes back, and probably always will.

After one much longer circuit, he returns with a strip of distinctly tiger-striped skin still in his mouth.

“One more animal down,” Dean mutters. Satisfied, Castiel moves aside, spits the remains out, and moves back to Dean’s side. He looks down at the dinosaur. “You know tigers are an endangered species, right?”

Castiel just looks right back.

“Dinosaur,” Dean says. “Right. I forgot I was talking to an extinct species.”

And they walk.

“They’re probably planning an ambush,” Sam says while they take a short break near a stream, Castiel downstream cleaning more blood off while the humans drink out of their water bottles, since only god knows how safe the water is, especially when being stalked by demons.

“Yep,” Dean says.

Sam looks him straight in the eye. “Cas can’t take on three lions and survive, Dean, dinosaur or not.”

“He took on seven wolves and survived,” Dean replies, but he knows it’s true. Lions swipe and usually strangled their prey; Cas could dodge, but coordinated paws swinging at him with four hundred pounds of possessed cat behind it could be a lot harder to get around, let alone survive.

And as much as he doesn’t want to admit it, the more time Cas spends as a dinosaur, the more dinosaur-like he seems to think. The days of politely moving a poisonous snake out of the hotel room so they could sleep were gone, replaced with him trotting over with the ripped-open remains of a tiger in his mouth. They need a crafty dinosaur, and as good a reputation deinonychus seem to have on the intelligence front, dinosaurs thought like dinosaurs, not like an angel trying to save a seal and stop the apocalypse.

“We’ll be okay,” Dean says, and Sam nods, even if they both know he’s lying.

When they head back out, it’s to the distant sound of a lion’s roar. Castiel makes an answering hissing noise, staying in place for a long while before Dean whistles at him. It snaps the dinosaur out of his predatory mental bitchfight, and he heels, just like always.

---

The lions don’t hide from them. They sit right in the middle of a clearing, the male standing tall and proud while the lionesses crouch nearby, looking like they’re made of dull gold and know it. And they’re big, looking like they’re twice Cas’ size.

Who, by the way, takes one look at the lions, and runs away.

“Fuck,” Dean hisses, because yeah, they have enough firepower to eventually shoot the big cats dead, but then they’re one step closer to Lucifer escaping hell and while Dean isn’t exactly a fan of being in hell again, there’s no fucking way he’s letting hell anywhere near Sam. Yeah, he let a seal break once before, but that was to avoid the destruction of an entire town.

The lionesses creep forward, the grass rustling slightly beneath their feet, and Sam loads the shotgun. “We’re not dying here.”

Dean wants to scream for Cas to get his ass over here, but instead he pulls out one of his pistols, as much good as it’ll do against a fucking lion. “I really wish I had a grenade or something, you know? Or a flamethrower.” Yeah, flamethrower would be the way to go. He’s seen the documentaries on brush fires and how they slaughter wildlife on the plains in Africa. He’s pretty sure he’d cause a forest fire if he used one, but if it took out the lions Dean wouldn’t really have a problem coping with that.

The lead lioness swerves to the right, the other still moving slowly towards them, and Dean takes a deep breath. “Alright, I’ll get the one on-”

Castiel leaps out of nowhere and lands perfectly on the lead lioness, feet ripping into one side, hands into the other, immediately followed by his mouth diving into the hole his front claws are already working on. The lioness rears back, roaring, and the other lioness is tearing across the clearing. Before the second can reach him, he’s already leapt off the first lioness with one last cruel swipe with his enormous feet claws, and vanishes again.

The first lioness tilts, trying to compensate with a shuffle of her legs, and falls to the ground. It gives them a good look at what those claws really did to her body, and Dean feels like he’s going to vomit. She’s torn apart straight to the ribs, flesh hanging off her frame like someone did a lazy job of skinning her and ripped the muscle off too. The lioness lets out a single rumbling whine, and demonic smoke pours out of her mouth as the ground beneath her turns a telling dark red.

The remaining lioness roars, but it’s nothing compared to the male’s furious roar. It pounds through Dean, shaking him like he’s standing on top of a subwoofer, and that’s it. He grabs a handful of Sam’s clothing, not even bothering to see what he’s grabbed, turns around, and runs. Sam stumbles, but he gets with the program pretty fast, batting Dean’s hand aside as he takes the lead.

Castiel’s answering roar from behind them is further incentive to get the fuck out of Dodge, along with the pained sound the lion makes.

“He’ll be fine, Dean,” Sam shouts at him, and Dean blinks. He hadn’t even known he’d slowed down, but Sam’s in trouble and Cas is a dinosaur more than capable of taking care of himself, so he runs.

They run until they’re face to face with the panda.

It turns to look at them with its big panda face, munching on a piece of bamboo that Dean guesses came along with the meatsuit, and Dean shakes his head. “Dude, there’s no way I can kill a panda.”

Sam hesitates, eyes moving from Dean to the panda and back. “It’s going to try and kill us, though.” The panda just looks at Sam and munches on, completely intent on its meal. Sam frowns. “It is trying to kill us, right?”

The panda rolls onto its back and is generally adorable, thoroughly enjoying its meal.

“Oh that’s not cool!” Dean shouts at the panda. “Act evil, damn it!”

“This is cruel,” Sam groans. They can still hear the dinosaur-lion fight behind them, and they’re watching a big, cuddly, fluffy black and white bear happily chomp away at a plant. “Even the monkey was vicious and demonic. Are you sure it’s possessed?”

Dean cocks his head to the side, watching its big paws curl around the bamboo, and moves a little closer to the panda. He pauses, and picks a rock up from the ground.

“Dean!” Sam hisses.

He turns to glare at him. “We need to know if it’s going to attack!”

“That doesn’t mean throw a rock at it!”

Dean rolls his eyes, drops the rock, and picks up a clump of dirt instead. “This work better for your delicate sensibilities?”

Today has been a really shitty day, but Sam’s bitchface cheers him up enough to almost make it tolerable. He looks like he wants to go call animal services or something when he eyes the dirt, but he frowns and nods at Dean after a long pause. “Just be careful, okay?”

Dean’s not sure if he’s supposed to be careful about throwing dirt at the panda or being attacked by a cuddly ball of fluff, so he decides to be cautious about both. He lets the dirt clump fly, backing up as soon as it’s out of his hand, and watches.

It hits the panda square in the shoulder. The panda makes a surprised sort of rumble, turns to look around at where its shoulder had been, and after a moment it goes straight back to his bamboo like nothing happened.

Another bone-shaking roar erupts from behind them, where Castiel’s fighting lions. Sam looks at Dean, who shrugs. “I guess we just walk around the panda and head for the barrier again.”

The panda, now all out of bamboo, shifts onto his feet and looks around the clearing before heading towards the way they came, looking pretty intent on finding more food and ignoring Dean and Sam. It ambles around, looking at the trees and underbrush, still mostly harmless.

Castiel comes hurtling out of the woods, everything but his back covered in blood. He takes one look at the panda, hisses, and starts towards it.

“No!” Dean shouts, running towards them without even realizing he’s doing it. “Cas, stop!”

Castiel meets his eyes, slows down only a few feet away from the panda, and the panda lunges at him, one paw slamming into Castiel’s skull. It rears up on its back legs as Castiel falls to the ground, obviously trying to shake it off, but the panda’s already moving in again, obviously about to fall back onto its front paws and crush the deinonychus’ fragile bones in the process.

“Damn it, Cas, move!” Dean shouts, and he can see Castiel trying, the claws on his feet digging into the dirt as his hands do the same, trying to push up off the ground in time, but the panda snarls and is already falling.

A gunshot echoes through the clearing, and the panda moves back onto its hind legs, snarling again as red stains the black fur on its arm. Sam pumps his shotgun and reloads as Castiel finally skitters away for a moment, shaking his head, and lunges straight for the panda’s eyes. The panda falls with a sound that almost reminds him of a lamb bleating, and Castiel paces around him, eyes flickering from Dean to the panda.

It takes Dean a while to realize that Castiel is waiting for orders, long enough that the panda’s already back on its feet and swaying its way towards Castiel. Castiel dodges easily, but there’s a hesitance in his gait, never turning his back to Dean.

“Go for it,” Dean says, feeling like an idiot at some gruesome underground animal fighting tournament the moment the words leave his mouth, but he has to. It’s either the panda or, potentially, the world.

The words are enough for Castiel, since he lunges forward before the bear has a chance to do anything to defend itself. Dean shuts his eyes as soon as he sees the claw on Castiel’s left foot dig into its already injured shoulder. A life of seeing gruesome things happen right in front of him doesn’t mean he likes to see it, and yeah, he’s kind of desensitized from spending forty years hanging around in Hell, but sometimes he thinks that might have made it worse to see. The shrieks and growls and the sounds of the fight do nothing to help, and when he remembers that he told Castiel to do this, it isn’t any better.

The panda lets out a high, hopeless whine and Dean can hear the smoke pouring out of its mouth. He takes a deep, somewhat shaky breath and opens his eyes, only to immediately wish he hadn’t.

Castiel’s crouched next to the panda’s body, ripping its ribcage open as he idly chews on some other organ Dean can’t even try to identify.

“Cas,” Dean says, knowing how weak it sounds. Castiel glances up and focuses entirely on him once again, but doesn’t stop. It’s a carnivorous parody of the panda with its bamboo, Castiel munching away at what could be the liver, hands still ripping the ribs apart. Dean swallows. “Castiel, stop.”

He gets hissed at, but Castiel’s hands stop, even though he’s still chomping on his prey.

And that’s what it is, Dean realizes. Castiel’s a fucking dinosaur, a vicious hunter down to his bird bones and maybe even deeper, and during this whole thing he hasn’t gotten to actually eat anything he’s killed. Angel or not, that had to be hard to ignore, and from the looks of things, Castiel isn’t exactly trying to avoid being an out-and-out deinonychus anymore.

Castiel shifts sideways a bit, still looking a bit jarred from the earlier blow to the head. Dean thinks he probably has a concussion of some sort, but Cas is still going strong other than a somewhat starry look in his eyes. Incredibly strong, really. And he keeps on watching Dean.

“Is that all of the animals?” Dean asks, and Castiel nods. “But we still have to make it over the perimeter thing?” Again, a nod. Dean grins at him. “Well that won’t be too hard now, will it?”

Castiel pointedly looks down at the panda, and then back at Dean, head cocking to the side.

He clears his throat. “Well, uh.” Dean hesitates. “Okay, I guess.”

Dean has to worry for a moment that Castiel’s going to come over and nuzzle him with his bloody face with how hard his tail’s wagging, but instead the dinosaur waits politely for Dean to turn away, and he walks off to a sound that sounds disgustingly similar to breaking a lobster in half.

“Sam,” he calls, and doesn’t blame his brother in the least for leaving. If Castiel wasn’t kind of his responsibility, Dean would have walked away as soon as he went after the panda. He frowns when there’s no response. “Sam?”

“Over here,” Sam snaps out from somewhere to his left, and Dean has to wonder what the hell he’s done to piss his brother off so much.

He sighs, and walks towards Sam’s voice. “If this is about the panda-eating thing, I’m not apologizing.”

“That’s alright,” a woman’s voice called out. “We were fairly certain it wouldn’t work, but they sent specialists for a reason.”

Dean’s not surprised when he rounds the corner to see Sam on his knees with a woman standing behind him, gun pointed directly at the back of his skull.

“I’m going to kill you,” Dean states, drawing his own pistol.

The woman smiles, eyes flickering black for a moment. “I know. It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for the cause, but first, let me explain.” She shifts just enough to keep both Sam’s skull and Dean in view. “I need to kill your dinosaur. I’m well aware that only the dinosaur body would die and that your angel friend inside would live on, even bring the dinosaur he’s inside back to life. You call him, I shoot the dinosaur, you kill me, and life goes on.”

Dean glares at her. “And we’re a step closer to the end of the world. Not going to happen.”

She shrugs. “Then I’ll kill your brother. But really, Dean, think about this for a moment. Nobody really gets hurt if you call your dinosaur over, except for me, and that’s exactly what you want, isn’t it?”

“What makes you think he’d even show up?” Dean snaps. “He seems pretty intent on having some panda express right now, so-”

The demon frowns, and looks almost genuinely surprised and sympathetic. “I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

She shakes her head. “Dean, we’re an older breed of demon than humanity is used to. I’ve seen things that…well.” The demon shrugs. “The point is that the mind of a dinosaur is more closely related to a bird’s than you think. You were the first thing he saw, and any good angel knows he’s supposed to be subservient, so you’re his pack leader. He’ll follow your orders.” She grins. “To the letter, to the death.”

“Like with geese?” Sam asks, sounding genuinely interested and completely drawing attention to himself again, and Dean wants to smack him so hard his hand itches.

The demon’s actually plenty enthusiastic about the topic, smiling as she says, “Oh, did you read the Konrad Lorenz study on geese? I know for a fact he gives the geese far less credit when it comes to intelligence than they should have gotten-”

Sam snorts. “Please. Geese fly into jet engines all the time, they can’t be that smart. I heard some of them imprinted on Lorenz’s boots and thought his shoes were their mommy.”

There’s a flicker in the woods, one that Sam has to have seen but Dean barely catches it out of the corner of his eye, and suddenly he doesn’t feel like punching his brother so much. Sure, the demon’s starting to frown again, but it seems more like a debating frown than an about-to-shoot-you-in-the-head frown. “They were bright yellow. Obviously they were going to be more interesting than some guy leaning over them. And raptors do it too, so don’t go saying it’s only migratory birds-”

“I wasn’t going to!” Sam says hastily, and Dean simply stands and watches Castiel slink towards the demon’s back. “And I don’t remember reading anything proving the raptor imprinting theory, anyway.”

The demon rolls her eyes, and Castiel slinks a little closer. “I was a kite before I went to hell, you know. I’m the authority here.”

Sam frowns at her, completely ignoring her authority jab. “How did a bird end up in hell?”

The demon shrugs. “Ate a martyr.”

“Get her,” Dean snaps, and Castiel lunges as soon as the words leave his mouth, Sam managing to shift just far enough that she wouldn’t be able to shoot him in the head by reflex. She shrieks, gun twisting back behind her to aim straight for Castiel, but Sam’s helping too. Released, he slams a hand sharply into her elbow and her arm jerks to the side, the gun firing into the trees instead of into Cas’ side. Sam knocks it out of her grip, and Castiel keeps gouging away at her back, letting out a triumphant hiss when he gets to her ribcage.

Dean runs forward and kicks the gun away, since Sam’s busy avoiding the woman’s fall to the ground and Castiel’s manic tail-swinging , but with Castiel practically swarming over her, he can’t even manage to see her skull for more than a second without Castiel getting in the way. He grits his teeth. “Cas, get out of the way!”

He’s not sure if Castiel doesn’t hear him or just ignores him, because he’s practically going artistic now with his front claws, ripping some unknown pattern into her back. Dean takes a deep breath and does his best to ignore the bile building in his throat. “Castiel, you’re going to break the seal.”

Castiel takes one long look at him, cocks his head to the side, and slams a foot down so hard on the demon’s back that he can hear her spine shatter beneath his foot, hear her body break right along with the seal.

Instead of smoke pouring out of the dead woman’s mouth, the tell-tale golden flash of a demon truly dying erupts from the body. The light flares against Castiel’s dark coloring, making the brown feathers on his body flash a strange red-gold color, the blood burning darker tints on the feathers, on his claws and teeth. Vicious blue eyes stare straight at Dean, satisfied.

Dean has hunted a lot of inhuman things, but he can’t remember ever seeing something so monstrous as Castiel the dinosaur in that moment.

“Dean,” Sam says, quiet and careful, and puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder for a moment. His arms are poised to shoot Castiel in the head with the same gun he’d held on the demon, the action completely instinctive. “It’s still Cas in there.” Somewhere, he adds onto the sentence, because only God knows how much of his angel stalker buddy is left inside the deinonychus’ mind.

He lowers the gun, and Castiel finally moves, shaking himself like a dog to get rid of some of the blood before walking carefully towards them.

“You broke the seal,” Dean says, still not sure what the hell he’s supposed to think about all of this, let alone understand what’s really going on.

Castiel doesn’t even look at him, simply bends down when he reaches their feet, touches a wicked, bloody claw to one of Sam’s feet and another to Dean’s.

The Impala and the motel parking lot suddenly surround them, no dinosaurs or possessed zoo animals in sight. Not even a squirrel scampers past.

It’s easy to just climb into the car and head out, easy to drive away and leave it all behind.

“That was pretty fucked up,” Sam says when they’re thirty miles past the town limit.

“Yep,” Dean says, and that’s the end of it.

---

It takes Dean two weeks to get up the courage to go somewhere without Sam in eyesight. It takes Sam probably a week and a half to be okay with not having Dean in immediate grab-and-run-for-our-fucking-lives distance, so Dean doesn’t feel like too much of a wimp when it comes to the situation. Plus, his cell phone’s fully charged and he picked this specific motel because it had a park across the street, so he’s not too far from Sam just in case a gorilla or something drops from the sky and starts trying to murder them.

Castiel takes ten minutes to show up.

The first thing he feels is such a wave of relief that he’s embarrassingly glad he’s sitting down, because Castiel’s human-shaped again and genuinely looks like Cas, even if he’s missing the beige trench coat (which Dean’s holding, so no real big surprise there) and looks more run-down than Dean’s seen before. But Castiel isn’t a dinosaur and doesn’t look ready to kill something and feast on its still-cooling corpse, so Dean can’t help but smile at him.

Castiel doesn’t smile back. In fact, Castiel doesn’t even look at him. He sits right next to Dean on the park bench, stares out at the city block of grass, trees, and a horseshoe pit, and doesn’t even glance at him.

Dean clears his throat. “Rough week?”

“You could say that,” Castiel states, and starts looking at the dirt instead of the park. “What do you need, Dean?”

“You okay?” Dean asks, genuinely concerned, and wishes he could take it back as soon as Castiel turns and looks at him. His eyes are just as blue as he remembers, just as piercing, but there’s still a monster lurking in there, something primal and seething beneath the surface.

“I needlessly broke a seal because my vessel’s instincts told me you’d be in danger if I didn’t,” Castiel says, cold and dark and full of self-loathing. “My mind knew you’d be fine, but I did it anyway. That’s not something I can ignore.”

“But you can ignore me, is that what’s going on?” Dean can’t help but ask, and Castiel turns away again. “I mean, usually we get a little debriefing visit, but this time we only get a fear of circus animals and more information than we ever wanted on dinosaurs.”

Castiel glares at the dirt. “What is there for me to say?”

“Well, why were you a dinosaur for one,” Dean snaps back. “And if all that pack leader shit was true, and why the fuck you decided to eat a panda-”

“God’s creatures are sacred, and I can’t take one as a vessel against its will,” Castiel interrupts, obviously trying to get past these questions so he can just flap his wings and disappear again. “The deinonychus agreed, as a demon had killed his entire pack.”

Dean stares at him for a long moment, because of all the answers he’d been expecting, that was really, really far from any of them. “How old are you?”

Castiel looks at him. “Very.” He nods, accepts that it’s probably as much of an answer as he’s going to get, but before he can steer the conversation back to where it needs to be, Castiel lets out a sharp breath that makes Dean worry all over again. “I.” He pauses. “I much prefer humanity.”

“I do too,” Dean says, and tries to get the angel at least a little less tense. He can honestly say he’d never expected to need to calm down Castiel, but the guy looks like he’ll start hyperventilating. Dean holds out the coat, hoping to distract Cas from whatever’s got him so freaked out. “Here, you left this with us.”

It seems to do the trick, since Castiel takes a deep breath and takes the coat from him, shaking it out and looking at all the holes and tears in the fabric. Castiel runs a finger along one of the bigger rips, tracing it as he says, “I’ve never wanted anything so badly as I wanted to kill that demon.” He stills his fingers and glances at Dean. “She was spared a lot of suffering thanks to you.”

Dean frowns. “What, because of this pack leader thing?” Castiel simply nods and carefully avoids touching Dean while he puts the trenchcoat back on. “I thought that meant you’d have stopped when I’d told you to stop, not killed her quickly instead of torturing her.”

“You don’t understand how filial imprinting works,” Castiel says. “I don’t intend to explain it to you. It’s enough to say you were upset and in danger, and I wanted to resolve the situation.”

Dean stares at him. He notices the way Castiel’s not quite avoiding him and looks like he hates it, catches the twitch of Cas’ throat, the uneasy way he holds himself. “Holy shit, you’re still all pack follower and stuff, aren’t you?”

“It will wear off,” Castiel says firmly, and it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself more than Dean. “For now, leaving you alone seems to help me remember my true loyalties.”

He frowns. “What if it doesn’t wear off?” Dean asks, and it’s not just curiosity that makes him ask. This could be a very bad, very scary thing.

Castiel looks at him, hard and cold and with a tint of apprehension. “It will, Dean. It has to.”

Or else floats in the air that held Castiel’s form only moments before.

The thought shadows Dean all the way back to Sam.

------------------

THERE ARE SO MANY NOTES FOR THIS FIC THAT IT HAS ITS OWN POST, FOUND HERE. This includes who would really win the fights, more about our good friend mr. deinonychus, and me rambling about oxygen levels in the Cretaceous period and how having loose skin and fat lets mammals rule the world and stuff.