Supernatural fic - "Saving Grace" (Part Fourteen)
See the masterpost for disclaimer, summary, and previous parts.
The frenzied distress in his chest eased off gradually over the next few days and instead settled into something almost as bad. Dread… thick, stalking, overbearing dread. Like the sick anticipation the seconds before a dislocated shoulder was wrenched back into place. Like a final in a class in high school Dean had missed too many classes of because of a hunt to have any hope of passing, those last fateful steps leading him to dropping out. Like standing at the bus stop with Sam and waiting for that ride that would carry him off to California.
Something big was coming.
Dean couldn’t sleep for the life of him. For days, he’d toss and turn until the sun was up again and he hadn’t caught but a couple of hours rest. Finally, he stopped wasting his money on motel rooms and took naps in the Impala whenever he could manage. It was getting to the point where he didn’t trust himself to hunt. He was punchy, haggard (mostly with concern for Castiel), and asking himself why he thought holding on to part of an angel’s grace had sounded like such a good idea at the time.
Instead, he spent his days driving. He wasn’t really headed anywhere, but that’s just what Dean did when he wasn’t hunting. Driving. Moving. It was operating on instinct and habits formed over a lifetime on the road.
He hadn’t heard from Sam since he left with Samuel, and Dean really hated that but he hated the thought of calling his brother even more. He couldn’t stomach listening to Sam’s voice say shit that the real Sam would never have said. He had enough to deal with without adding the guy impersonating Sam to the pile.
But the isolation was starting to get to him. Dean didn’t like to hunt alone. He never had. He could do it, sure, but like it… no. For that matter, Dean didn’t like being alone, hunting or otherwise. There were times when he almost actually missed Sam, soul or no soul, just for the company of another person.
The grace he was harboring certainly wasn’t helping. Huddled tight and forlorn in his chest, it made the absence of Castiel very visceral and very distressing. He hated it as much as he treasured it, because the grace might be giving off doom vibes, but at least Dean knew Cas was still alive.
It had to be about one in the morning, and Dean had pulled the Impala off on to a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and parked in the ditch. Exhausted, he climbed in the back, laid down on the seat, and fought for a few snatched hours of sleep. Lately, the grace was a weight inside him, heavy and sometimes downright uncomfortable. He missed when it had felt like air and laughter, light and dreams. He wondered if it would feel like that again when the war was over, before Cas took it back.
More times than not, Dean would end up curled on his side to sleep, arms crossed over his chest. He absolutely was not cradling the grace, because that would be a pansy-ass thing to do, but sometimes he thought he could still feel its warmth, like slivers of sunshine breaking through the clouds in the middle of a storm. He wanted to bundle that feeling close to him as much as possible. Dean used to be a mostly back, sometimes stomach sleeper, but since taking in Castiel’s grace, he found it easier to sleep with his arms folded if he lay on his side.
Not that he was getting much sleep, no matter what position he was in. Dean shifted in the backseat, trying to find that perfect spot where sleep would finally find him.
Something appeared in the corner of Dean’s eye and he twisted his neck to look out the window by his head. Upside-down, he saw Castiel standing outside the car.
Dean was up in an instant, spilling out of the car and standing to face Castiel in a matter of seconds.
“Cas!” he breathed in greeting. The grace in him was waking to Castiel’s presence, spinning slowly at first, then faster and faster, growing stronger with every revolution. Dean’s arms twitched and fuck, he really wanted to pull the damn angel into a hug. He barely managed to hold himself in check.
“Hello, Dean.” The angel looked more drifter than holy tax accountant. His clothes were tattered and dirty, his face lean and haggard. If Dean didn’t know better, his first inclination would be to feed the guy.
“It’s good to see you.” Understatement of the century. “But I have to say, you’ve looked better.”
“I’ve felt better.” Castiel’s eyes shifted darkly. “I wanted to see you before tomorrow.”
That felt ominous. “What’s tomorrow?”
“The battle with Raphael that will decide this war.” Castiel looked up at Dean, and there was part feral animal and part dispirited waif in his expression. “The brothers and sisters fighting with me against Raphael have campaigned long and hard to arrange this confrontation. It’s demanded costly sacrifices and necessitated very regrettable things, but it’s finally here.”
What was it with them and epic last stands? Dean was never going to be able to enjoy a Hollywood flick again.
“Is there anything I can do?” Dean asked.
Castiel looked intently at him, head tilting in a very familiar gesture. “You’ve already done more than anyone could hope to do.” The angel’s eyes dropped meaningfully to the spot between Dean’s clavicles.
Dean crossed his arms over his chest, but it was totally the cold air. “I feel like I haven’t done jack squat.”
“That’s not true,” Castiel replied in a rough, raw voice. He took a step closer to Dean. Dean’s chest tightened. “Through all the things I’ve had to do in this war, everything I’ve done that’s left its ruinous mark on my grace, I could feel you… the piece of me you carry that is still pure.” Castiel seemed to buckle just a little. “That has been an immense comfort to me. More than you will probably ever know.”
“Actually, I think I understand.”
And maybe Dean couldn’t really, not in a million years, but Castiel didn’t argue with him.
The night was still and calm, but inside Dean was raging. He couldn’t lose Cas… not after everything. He’d already lost too many people, not Castiel, too. Not Cas.
“Can you stay for a while?” Dean asked hopefully.
“A while… until it’s time.” Castiel’s shoulders slumped. “Like me, my brothers and sisters who have fought beside me, those who will face Raphael’s army tomorrow, are taking what solace they can tonight.”
In case it was their last night in existence. And Dean wanted nothing more than to be greedy and keep all those precious remaining minutes with Castiel, but…
Dean swallowed. “You know you’re always welcome to hang around, but if there’s somewhere else you want to go tonight…” No telling what kind of fantastic places would be on an angel’s bucket list. He remembered another last night alive and the misadventure at the brothel. Good times.
Castiel met Dean’s eyes with his own. “There is nowhere I would rather be.”
Dean mustered up a smile. Castiel, after a second, returned it thinly.
And this Dean was too damn practiced at. The night before the big fight, the threat of annihilation in the air and marking time with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Somehow, Dean and Cas ended up on the hood, side by side as they reclined back against the windshield, staring up at the stars. Once upon a time, Castiel would have looked ten kinds of awkward in such a relaxed pose, but the war made him sink into stolen moments of rest like a native.
It was peaceful. With the angel shoulder to shoulder with him, the grace in Dean was content. He could have fallen asleep easily, but he would not let himself miss one second of the night.
“Dean?”
“Hmm?” Dean rolled his head along the glass to look over at Cas.
Castiel cast a guarded, careful look at Dean. “Since my creation in the Beginning, I have always had my siblings and my Father, but I have never known true friendship before you. Thank you.”
Dean responded by shoving Castiel off the hood onto the ground, where the startled angel landed with a grunt.
Angry, Dean leapt off the car while Castiel looked up at him from the dirt in puzzled surprise.
“Don’t you fucking do that. Don’t you make any goodbye speeches.”
Castiel’s surprise became something close to anger, then it melted into patient care. “I’m being prudent… there are things I wish you to know if I -”
“No!” Dean reached down, gathered the lapels of the angel’s coat in both hands, and hauled Castiel up to his feet. “You’re coming back, so just shut up.” Dean stood nose to nose with Cas, his hands still fisted in the angel’s trench coat. Castiel didn’t resist him, only stared at him.
“I see,” Castiel finally said. “This is where you exercise your remarkable capacity for denial.”
“Until I pull something,” Dean countered smartly.
That made Castiel huff out a breath that another other day might have been a chuckle. “Very well… if not speeches, how do you propose to spend what time I have left… with you tonight.”
Dean narrowed his eyes at Castiel for the very deliberate choice of words and the significant placing of his pauses, then he let go of the angel’s coat (though failed to step back). Hell if Dean knew…
But suddenly he did.
“I want to see you.”
Castiel frowned. “You are looking at me right now, Dean.”
“No, I mean, I want to see you. Not your vessel.”
Comprehension dawned and Castiel’s eyes widened. “You want to see my true form?”
Hell yes.
“After what went down with Remiel, we know it won’t burn my eyeballs out of my skull.” Dean favored Castiel with a genuine, gentle look. “We’ve been friends for a while, Cas, and I don’t even know what you look like.”
For all he knew it was a really inappropriate question to ask an angel, like asking your buddy to pull out his wang for a look-see, but he wasn’t going to take it back.
When he had a moment to process it, Castiel didn’t look offended. If anything, he looked touched. “Very well.” Then he took a few steps backward, giving himself room. “I’ll unveil my wings first… if you are unharmed by seeing them, I will show you the rest of me.” Cas smiled. “All of me.”
Dean fidgeted in anticipation and watched, eyes wide, almost afraid to blink in case he missed something.
Against the dark road and open countryside, Castiel stood and squared his shoulders.
One second there was nothing, then the next the space behind Castiel was filled with color and light as the angel’s wings snapped out, sharp and quick, like a diving falcon pulling up out of free fall. Dean flinched then stared. They were enormous, arching away from Castiel and curling inward, like they were holding the world still for Castiel to do with as he wished. There weren’t feathers. There were layers of light and colors, mostly honeyed browns and tawny tans, but brilliant golds, silvers, and white danced across their surface like sunlight on a lake. And the closer Dean looked, the more he felt the impression of feathers… or at least their shape. They were there like the afterimage of a bright light floated on the back of the eyelids after the light was gone. Dean thought he saw the outline of a bird-like wing, though it was oft lost in the shifting light and color. Maybe the idea of feathers came from him, his mind, or maybe it was part memory of the shadows Dean had seen on the barn wall the first night he met Castiel.
Wherever their perception of form came from…
“Awesome!”
Castiel smirked. “Prepare yourself.”
That made Dean squirm with excitement.
The prism of wings began to grow… taller, wider, brighter, stronger… until the sky was fairly filled with the kaleidoscope of light. The browns were overtaken by the white, silvers, and golds. The light reached right up toward the stars, a massive presence of energy. A Chrysler Building of awe-inspiring enormity, made entirely of light and color. It was everywhere and overwhelming, but somehow it was not there, too. Every moment felt like Dean couldn’t be absolutely sure he was actually seeing what he was seeing. Like one of those damn Magic Eye posters in every mall in America that always made Dean’s eyes hurt. Dean felt like he went cross-eyed when he realized he was peering at another plane, seeing something his body was not equipped to gaze upon… he could see how most people had their eyes scorched.
While he was looking, his body was practically exploding. The grace in his chest was pushing at the boundaries of his body, fit to bust out in eagerness to rejoin the brilliance he was seeing. Dean wanted to go with it, lose himself in all that magnificence and become one with it.
There were moments of darkness, like slimy oil streaking across the color, and the grace in Dean twinged. He knew he was seeing Castiel’s disease, the result of his dangerous choices. But the blackness seemed so far removed from the elegance of the rest of it all.
Dean was lost in staring, then he physically started when he realized that, just like the impression of feathers earlier, he got an impression of Cas. In that light, though he didn’t see it, he could still discern features. The blazes of bright blue were Castiel’s eyes, the dark colors the hue of his hair, the warmth the touch of his skin, the suggestion of the power to reach out the shape of his hands. It was like this enormous blinding force was casting a tiny shadow… the shadow of Jimmy Novak’s body.
Then it was over, just as quickly as it began. The light was gone. So were the colors. The air no longer danced with the angelic energy that had set the world on the cusp of deliriously happy free fall. It made everything after dark, dull, and ponderously heavy. Dean blinked and found himself looking at Castiel, holy tax accountant, looking just a bit self-conscious.
Dean braced himself against the Impala to keep from toppling. “Holy shit, Cas! That… you… that was amazing! Fuck, I’ve never seen anything that beautiful.” He must have been thunderstruck to outright call Castiel ‘beautiful’. Luckily, no one outside the two of them was there to be a witness to it.
Castiel actually looked embarrassed. “I’m not extraordinary. Your soul doesn’t look so different… only much smaller.”
“There is no way my soul looks anything like that. That was…”
“Heavenly?” Castiel suggested with a smirk.
Dean laughed and couldn’t stop himself from putting a hand to his chest. Inside, the grace was throbbing in a wonderfully tight way.
Castiel walked forward to stand close to Dean. Dean stared at Castiel’s face, unable to look at him without thinking about what he truly was, beyond the mask of humanity. No wonder he’d seemed almost an alien creature to them sometimes… he was so different from the vessel he wore. They had known that intellectually, of course, but they still found themselves expecting humanness from him because the face they saw was human.
A soft touch drew Dean’s attention from his awed thoughts and he found Castiel touching his shoulder, the same place where Dean bore a brand from Castiel saving him from Hell. As if Dean ever needed further reminder that Castiel was not a lanky man in a suit than that single mark.
“Thank you,” Dean said hoarsely.
“You were right,” Castiel replied gently, “it’s only fitting that you know me as I know you.”
At that, Dean cocked his head. “Is it something like that you see when you look at me?” He’d said human souls were kind of like miniature versions (though Dean still didn’t really believe it).
Castiel nodded, his eyes sparkling. “When I want to, yes.”
If that was true, Dean could sort of understand now how Cas could have always been touting Dean’s goodness and righteousness, if he really saw anything like that in the hunter.
The softness in Castiel’s eyes left, replaced with hard resolve when his mind seemed to wander elsewhere, fixated and attentive. “I have to go now.”
Fuck it. Dean stepped into Cas, throwing his arms around the angel and hugging him tight. After a heartbeat of holding awkwardly still, Castiel’s arms folded around Dean in return. They stood on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere at night locked in a strong embrace. Since no one was there to see them, Dean let the hug last way past the cut-off mark for decency between two grown men. Dean didn’t care, and Castiel didn’t know that he should.
“Be careful,” Dean growled.
“I will,” Castiel whispered into Dean’s shoulder.
“Come back.”
“I’ll try.”
Even then, it seemed like a Herculean effort to remove his arms from around the angel. Castiel seemed just as reluctant to let go. When they were standing facing each other, Castiel spared a moment to take in Dean and the Impala together, his expression thoughtful.
Before Dean could ask, Castiel was gone in a rush of air.
The grace in Dean was hurting at the sudden distance.
Dean turned toward his car…
…and suddenly found himself and his baby in front of Bobby’s salvage yard hundreds of miles away from where he’d been. He looked around at first, confused, then he laughed.
Castiel knew Dean didn’t like to be alone.
Part Fifteen
The frenzied distress in his chest eased off gradually over the next few days and instead settled into something almost as bad. Dread… thick, stalking, overbearing dread. Like the sick anticipation the seconds before a dislocated shoulder was wrenched back into place. Like a final in a class in high school Dean had missed too many classes of because of a hunt to have any hope of passing, those last fateful steps leading him to dropping out. Like standing at the bus stop with Sam and waiting for that ride that would carry him off to California.
Something big was coming.
Dean couldn’t sleep for the life of him. For days, he’d toss and turn until the sun was up again and he hadn’t caught but a couple of hours rest. Finally, he stopped wasting his money on motel rooms and took naps in the Impala whenever he could manage. It was getting to the point where he didn’t trust himself to hunt. He was punchy, haggard (mostly with concern for Castiel), and asking himself why he thought holding on to part of an angel’s grace had sounded like such a good idea at the time.
Instead, he spent his days driving. He wasn’t really headed anywhere, but that’s just what Dean did when he wasn’t hunting. Driving. Moving. It was operating on instinct and habits formed over a lifetime on the road.
He hadn’t heard from Sam since he left with Samuel, and Dean really hated that but he hated the thought of calling his brother even more. He couldn’t stomach listening to Sam’s voice say shit that the real Sam would never have said. He had enough to deal with without adding the guy impersonating Sam to the pile.
But the isolation was starting to get to him. Dean didn’t like to hunt alone. He never had. He could do it, sure, but like it… no. For that matter, Dean didn’t like being alone, hunting or otherwise. There were times when he almost actually missed Sam, soul or no soul, just for the company of another person.
The grace he was harboring certainly wasn’t helping. Huddled tight and forlorn in his chest, it made the absence of Castiel very visceral and very distressing. He hated it as much as he treasured it, because the grace might be giving off doom vibes, but at least Dean knew Cas was still alive.
It had to be about one in the morning, and Dean had pulled the Impala off on to a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and parked in the ditch. Exhausted, he climbed in the back, laid down on the seat, and fought for a few snatched hours of sleep. Lately, the grace was a weight inside him, heavy and sometimes downright uncomfortable. He missed when it had felt like air and laughter, light and dreams. He wondered if it would feel like that again when the war was over, before Cas took it back.
More times than not, Dean would end up curled on his side to sleep, arms crossed over his chest. He absolutely was not cradling the grace, because that would be a pansy-ass thing to do, but sometimes he thought he could still feel its warmth, like slivers of sunshine breaking through the clouds in the middle of a storm. He wanted to bundle that feeling close to him as much as possible. Dean used to be a mostly back, sometimes stomach sleeper, but since taking in Castiel’s grace, he found it easier to sleep with his arms folded if he lay on his side.
Not that he was getting much sleep, no matter what position he was in. Dean shifted in the backseat, trying to find that perfect spot where sleep would finally find him.
Something appeared in the corner of Dean’s eye and he twisted his neck to look out the window by his head. Upside-down, he saw Castiel standing outside the car.
Dean was up in an instant, spilling out of the car and standing to face Castiel in a matter of seconds.
“Cas!” he breathed in greeting. The grace in him was waking to Castiel’s presence, spinning slowly at first, then faster and faster, growing stronger with every revolution. Dean’s arms twitched and fuck, he really wanted to pull the damn angel into a hug. He barely managed to hold himself in check.
“Hello, Dean.” The angel looked more drifter than holy tax accountant. His clothes were tattered and dirty, his face lean and haggard. If Dean didn’t know better, his first inclination would be to feed the guy.
“It’s good to see you.” Understatement of the century. “But I have to say, you’ve looked better.”
“I’ve felt better.” Castiel’s eyes shifted darkly. “I wanted to see you before tomorrow.”
That felt ominous. “What’s tomorrow?”
“The battle with Raphael that will decide this war.” Castiel looked up at Dean, and there was part feral animal and part dispirited waif in his expression. “The brothers and sisters fighting with me against Raphael have campaigned long and hard to arrange this confrontation. It’s demanded costly sacrifices and necessitated very regrettable things, but it’s finally here.”
What was it with them and epic last stands? Dean was never going to be able to enjoy a Hollywood flick again.
“Is there anything I can do?” Dean asked.
Castiel looked intently at him, head tilting in a very familiar gesture. “You’ve already done more than anyone could hope to do.” The angel’s eyes dropped meaningfully to the spot between Dean’s clavicles.
Dean crossed his arms over his chest, but it was totally the cold air. “I feel like I haven’t done jack squat.”
“That’s not true,” Castiel replied in a rough, raw voice. He took a step closer to Dean. Dean’s chest tightened. “Through all the things I’ve had to do in this war, everything I’ve done that’s left its ruinous mark on my grace, I could feel you… the piece of me you carry that is still pure.” Castiel seemed to buckle just a little. “That has been an immense comfort to me. More than you will probably ever know.”
“Actually, I think I understand.”
And maybe Dean couldn’t really, not in a million years, but Castiel didn’t argue with him.
The night was still and calm, but inside Dean was raging. He couldn’t lose Cas… not after everything. He’d already lost too many people, not Castiel, too. Not Cas.
“Can you stay for a while?” Dean asked hopefully.
“A while… until it’s time.” Castiel’s shoulders slumped. “Like me, my brothers and sisters who have fought beside me, those who will face Raphael’s army tomorrow, are taking what solace they can tonight.”
In case it was their last night in existence. And Dean wanted nothing more than to be greedy and keep all those precious remaining minutes with Castiel, but…
Dean swallowed. “You know you’re always welcome to hang around, but if there’s somewhere else you want to go tonight…” No telling what kind of fantastic places would be on an angel’s bucket list. He remembered another last night alive and the misadventure at the brothel. Good times.
Castiel met Dean’s eyes with his own. “There is nowhere I would rather be.”
Dean mustered up a smile. Castiel, after a second, returned it thinly.
And this Dean was too damn practiced at. The night before the big fight, the threat of annihilation in the air and marking time with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Somehow, Dean and Cas ended up on the hood, side by side as they reclined back against the windshield, staring up at the stars. Once upon a time, Castiel would have looked ten kinds of awkward in such a relaxed pose, but the war made him sink into stolen moments of rest like a native.
It was peaceful. With the angel shoulder to shoulder with him, the grace in Dean was content. He could have fallen asleep easily, but he would not let himself miss one second of the night.
“Dean?”
“Hmm?” Dean rolled his head along the glass to look over at Cas.
Castiel cast a guarded, careful look at Dean. “Since my creation in the Beginning, I have always had my siblings and my Father, but I have never known true friendship before you. Thank you.”
Dean responded by shoving Castiel off the hood onto the ground, where the startled angel landed with a grunt.
Angry, Dean leapt off the car while Castiel looked up at him from the dirt in puzzled surprise.
“Don’t you fucking do that. Don’t you make any goodbye speeches.”
Castiel’s surprise became something close to anger, then it melted into patient care. “I’m being prudent… there are things I wish you to know if I -”
“No!” Dean reached down, gathered the lapels of the angel’s coat in both hands, and hauled Castiel up to his feet. “You’re coming back, so just shut up.” Dean stood nose to nose with Cas, his hands still fisted in the angel’s trench coat. Castiel didn’t resist him, only stared at him.
“I see,” Castiel finally said. “This is where you exercise your remarkable capacity for denial.”
“Until I pull something,” Dean countered smartly.
That made Castiel huff out a breath that another other day might have been a chuckle. “Very well… if not speeches, how do you propose to spend what time I have left… with you tonight.”
Dean narrowed his eyes at Castiel for the very deliberate choice of words and the significant placing of his pauses, then he let go of the angel’s coat (though failed to step back). Hell if Dean knew…
But suddenly he did.
“I want to see you.”
Castiel frowned. “You are looking at me right now, Dean.”
“No, I mean, I want to see you. Not your vessel.”
Comprehension dawned and Castiel’s eyes widened. “You want to see my true form?”
Hell yes.
“After what went down with Remiel, we know it won’t burn my eyeballs out of my skull.” Dean favored Castiel with a genuine, gentle look. “We’ve been friends for a while, Cas, and I don’t even know what you look like.”
For all he knew it was a really inappropriate question to ask an angel, like asking your buddy to pull out his wang for a look-see, but he wasn’t going to take it back.
When he had a moment to process it, Castiel didn’t look offended. If anything, he looked touched. “Very well.” Then he took a few steps backward, giving himself room. “I’ll unveil my wings first… if you are unharmed by seeing them, I will show you the rest of me.” Cas smiled. “All of me.”
Dean fidgeted in anticipation and watched, eyes wide, almost afraid to blink in case he missed something.
Against the dark road and open countryside, Castiel stood and squared his shoulders.
One second there was nothing, then the next the space behind Castiel was filled with color and light as the angel’s wings snapped out, sharp and quick, like a diving falcon pulling up out of free fall. Dean flinched then stared. They were enormous, arching away from Castiel and curling inward, like they were holding the world still for Castiel to do with as he wished. There weren’t feathers. There were layers of light and colors, mostly honeyed browns and tawny tans, but brilliant golds, silvers, and white danced across their surface like sunlight on a lake. And the closer Dean looked, the more he felt the impression of feathers… or at least their shape. They were there like the afterimage of a bright light floated on the back of the eyelids after the light was gone. Dean thought he saw the outline of a bird-like wing, though it was oft lost in the shifting light and color. Maybe the idea of feathers came from him, his mind, or maybe it was part memory of the shadows Dean had seen on the barn wall the first night he met Castiel.
Wherever their perception of form came from…
“Awesome!”
Castiel smirked. “Prepare yourself.”
That made Dean squirm with excitement.
The prism of wings began to grow… taller, wider, brighter, stronger… until the sky was fairly filled with the kaleidoscope of light. The browns were overtaken by the white, silvers, and golds. The light reached right up toward the stars, a massive presence of energy. A Chrysler Building of awe-inspiring enormity, made entirely of light and color. It was everywhere and overwhelming, but somehow it was not there, too. Every moment felt like Dean couldn’t be absolutely sure he was actually seeing what he was seeing. Like one of those damn Magic Eye posters in every mall in America that always made Dean’s eyes hurt. Dean felt like he went cross-eyed when he realized he was peering at another plane, seeing something his body was not equipped to gaze upon… he could see how most people had their eyes scorched.
While he was looking, his body was practically exploding. The grace in his chest was pushing at the boundaries of his body, fit to bust out in eagerness to rejoin the brilliance he was seeing. Dean wanted to go with it, lose himself in all that magnificence and become one with it.
There were moments of darkness, like slimy oil streaking across the color, and the grace in Dean twinged. He knew he was seeing Castiel’s disease, the result of his dangerous choices. But the blackness seemed so far removed from the elegance of the rest of it all.
Dean was lost in staring, then he physically started when he realized that, just like the impression of feathers earlier, he got an impression of Cas. In that light, though he didn’t see it, he could still discern features. The blazes of bright blue were Castiel’s eyes, the dark colors the hue of his hair, the warmth the touch of his skin, the suggestion of the power to reach out the shape of his hands. It was like this enormous blinding force was casting a tiny shadow… the shadow of Jimmy Novak’s body.
Then it was over, just as quickly as it began. The light was gone. So were the colors. The air no longer danced with the angelic energy that had set the world on the cusp of deliriously happy free fall. It made everything after dark, dull, and ponderously heavy. Dean blinked and found himself looking at Castiel, holy tax accountant, looking just a bit self-conscious.
Dean braced himself against the Impala to keep from toppling. “Holy shit, Cas! That… you… that was amazing! Fuck, I’ve never seen anything that beautiful.” He must have been thunderstruck to outright call Castiel ‘beautiful’. Luckily, no one outside the two of them was there to be a witness to it.
Castiel actually looked embarrassed. “I’m not extraordinary. Your soul doesn’t look so different… only much smaller.”
“There is no way my soul looks anything like that. That was…”
“Heavenly?” Castiel suggested with a smirk.
Dean laughed and couldn’t stop himself from putting a hand to his chest. Inside, the grace was throbbing in a wonderfully tight way.
Castiel walked forward to stand close to Dean. Dean stared at Castiel’s face, unable to look at him without thinking about what he truly was, beyond the mask of humanity. No wonder he’d seemed almost an alien creature to them sometimes… he was so different from the vessel he wore. They had known that intellectually, of course, but they still found themselves expecting humanness from him because the face they saw was human.
A soft touch drew Dean’s attention from his awed thoughts and he found Castiel touching his shoulder, the same place where Dean bore a brand from Castiel saving him from Hell. As if Dean ever needed further reminder that Castiel was not a lanky man in a suit than that single mark.
“Thank you,” Dean said hoarsely.
“You were right,” Castiel replied gently, “it’s only fitting that you know me as I know you.”
At that, Dean cocked his head. “Is it something like that you see when you look at me?” He’d said human souls were kind of like miniature versions (though Dean still didn’t really believe it).
Castiel nodded, his eyes sparkling. “When I want to, yes.”
If that was true, Dean could sort of understand now how Cas could have always been touting Dean’s goodness and righteousness, if he really saw anything like that in the hunter.
The softness in Castiel’s eyes left, replaced with hard resolve when his mind seemed to wander elsewhere, fixated and attentive. “I have to go now.”
Fuck it. Dean stepped into Cas, throwing his arms around the angel and hugging him tight. After a heartbeat of holding awkwardly still, Castiel’s arms folded around Dean in return. They stood on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere at night locked in a strong embrace. Since no one was there to see them, Dean let the hug last way past the cut-off mark for decency between two grown men. Dean didn’t care, and Castiel didn’t know that he should.
“Be careful,” Dean growled.
“I will,” Castiel whispered into Dean’s shoulder.
“Come back.”
“I’ll try.”
Even then, it seemed like a Herculean effort to remove his arms from around the angel. Castiel seemed just as reluctant to let go. When they were standing facing each other, Castiel spared a moment to take in Dean and the Impala together, his expression thoughtful.
Before Dean could ask, Castiel was gone in a rush of air.
The grace in Dean was hurting at the sudden distance.
Dean turned toward his car…
…and suddenly found himself and his baby in front of Bobby’s salvage yard hundreds of miles away from where he’d been. He looked around at first, confused, then he laughed.
Castiel knew Dean didn’t like to be alone.
Part Fifteen