[SPN] Fic: I'll Buy You Tall Tall Trees and All the Waters In the Seas
Title: I'll Buy You Tall Tall Trees and All the Waters In the Seas
Rating: PG for language and kissing and some very tame sexual references
Words: ~5500
Pairing/Characters: Emmanuel!Castiel/Daphne, Dean/Castiel
Warnings: If you hate Daphne and her very existence, you probably will not enjoy this. Also, in case you didn't get it the first two times, 7x17 SPOILERS!
Summary: He doesn't feel chosen or gifted, and he doesn't remember.
Notes: Basically my brain's version of 7x17, the super-extended but not-as-porny-as-I-hoped edition. DID I MENTION THE SPOILERS? There are spoilers. And at this point I should just probably install a giant permanent banner on my lj that expresses my thanks to the_reverand for putting up with my crap, but this is also not her fault. Apologies to Roger Miller for the title.
The first words in his memory are a gasped, "Oh, gracious!" He knows the woman is afraid, knows the things he's feeling are cold and wet, that he should have clothing but does not, that the woman wants to help him. But to her questions-- "are you all right?" and "what happened?" and "what's your name?"-- he only has one answer.
"I don't know."
"I think God led me there," she says in her living room after the dusty picnic blanket from the trunk of her car has been exchanged for an ill-fitting pair of sweatpants and overlarge t-shirt that carry a scent of cedar. He knows what picnics are, what houses and sofas are, what cedar smells like, how to read the words on the shirt, that it says 'Denver Broncos,' that Denver is in Colorado and a bronco is a horse. He knows to blow on his tea before he drinks it, knows the taste of lemon and sugar, knows that God created the heavens and the earth and man. "I think He wanted me to find you," she says.
Her name is Daphne and her hair is red and her eyes are green and the clothes are her husband's. He knows what war is and where Afghanistan is and what it means to be missing in action and to say, "I'm sorry," when Daphne explains and that the ring she's twisting on her finger is a wedding band. He knows what guest rooms are and to say, "Thank you," and that the quilt he pulls over himself is soft and warm.
He knows the feeling of doubt when Daphne says, "Maybe you'll remember something in the morning. We'll figure it out, don't worry."
He knows what sleep is and what dreams are; he does neither. He looks at the ceiling and thinks about all of the things that he knows, and by the time the sky begins to lighten outside, he knows that none of those things are anything about himself.
*
Daphne tells him that he's a miracle and that by rights he should have drowned instead of walking out of the river without a scratch on him. She tells him he must be hungry, and he knows what hunger is and that he doesn't feel it, but agrees when she says he should try to eat something. She prays her thanks to God over the food, and the words twist something inside of him that he can't name. She cuts her finger on a knife while washing the dishes and says, "Oh!" and before he knows what he's doing, his hand is on hers and the blood washes away down the sink and there's no longer a cut at all. She turns her hand over and over as though searching for where the wound has gone, and both her voice and her hands shake when she says, "Oh, my word," and crosses herself.
Her hands are wet and slippery and warm and still shaking when she clasps them over his and says, "You see? You're special. You're... you've been chosen for something. Now I know God brought you to me."
He feels doubt, fear. He doesn't feel chosen or gifted. After days of searching through missing persons matching his description (brown hair, blue eyes, five foot eleven inches tall, thirty to forty years old), and seeing a long line of faces only slightly less familiar to him than the one he sees in the mirror, he knows that no one is looking for him and knows disappointment.
Daphne wonders if perhaps there's nothing to remember, if perhaps he was created whole and new the day she found him. It isn't a comforting thought. She says, "I can't just keep calling you 'hey, you,'" and starts reading him lists of names. "Michael?" she says, and that same something that happens when she prays clutches at him unsettlingly. "Ham, Hannibal, Herschel... my goodness, who makes these things?" Samuel bothers him too. He likes Christopher but it is or was Daphne's husband's name (Daphne says 'was' and blinks away tears). She won't let him be John because she says it's too much like 'John Doe' and he doesn't like Adam. "What about Emmanuel?" she says. "It means 'God is with us.'"
He tries it out, calls himself by it in the mirror and watches the shape of his mouth around it. It doesn't cause him any strange unnameable feelings, seems to fit better than some things could, so he agrees. Daphne says it every chance she gets, and he gets used to it, learns to turn around when he hears it.
He doesn't understand his 'gift' or how to use it, isn't sure whether he should-- this, he tells Daphne. He knows it isn't normal not to need food or sleep or the toilet-- this, he does not tell Daphne, but she finds out anyway because of all the skills he's got from somewhere or other, lying is not one of them. She thinks him more special than ever and begs him to come with her to visit a friend who has a very sick child.
"I won't know what to do," he protests.
"You weren't even thinking when you healed my finger. You just did it. I don't think you have to know, I think you just can. And maybe it won't work, but there's no other hope for Alison. She's got weeks at the most, more like days. Please, Emmanuel, just try?"
His hands feel warm, then hot, against the downy-bald head of the listless little girl who's been brought home to die. He doesn't think anything, just feels, until he can feel that it's right. He feels right, feels a perfect serenity wash through him, and he knows that it's done. Alison sits up and asks for ice cream and her mother bursts into tears because Alison hasn't been able to speak since her last surgery.
He backs out of the room while the mother, Jennifer, is still sobbing and embracing her daughter and saying, "Thank God, thank God," and that's that: his purpose is clear.
When Jennifer comes to the house with a basket of muffins and a check for what he knows is a lot of money, he tries to refuse it. Jennifer explains that it's the balance of a donation fund that was set up for Alison's treatment. "Please," she says, "please take it."
"It wouldn't be right," he tells her.
"Please," she says.
"You'll need it for college now," Daphne says with a smile, hand on Jennifer's shoulder. "Please keep it." Jennifer finally agrees, and he is very grateful for Daphne.
*
Daphne is good to him. She continues to insist he eat, though she's well aware now that he has no need for it. "Just to taste it," she says. "I know you don't have to, but other people will think it's strange if you don't know what you like." He finds that he likes hamburgers, White Castle especially, apple pie and strawberries and broccoli and eggs sunny-side up.
When word starts to trickle slowly around that he can cure people's hopeless ailments, Daphne drives him all over Colorado, to Nevada and Oklahoma and California. At first he's uncomfortable in the car. Claustrophobic, Daphne says, but she talks to distract him, tells stories about her childhood and teaches him to play I Spy and makes him skip through radio stations to find out what kind of music he likes (classic rock, as it turns out, and classical piano). When someone assumes they're husband and wife, she doesn't correct them. "It's dishonest," she says, "but no one would believe the truth."
Daphne works part-time answering phones for a mail-order clothing company to supplement her military benefits, but she can only take so much time off without losing the job entirely, and he worries that he is a burden. She tells him not to. "We're doing God's work," she says, gripping his forearms with her small soft hands. "They can fire me right this minute if they want to. This is more important." Still, she teaches him to drive, or reminds him how to, because he apparently did know at some point in his still-inaccessible past, or else is a very fast learner. He can't get a driver's license, of course. "Just don't speed," she tells him the first time he goes away without her, kisses him on the cheek and says, "Be careful," very softly, and the warmth of her lips stays as if branded on his skin all the way to South Dakota.
He arrives at a small apartment at the back of a taxidermy shop that he knows stinks of formaldehyde, but not why he recognizes the smell. The man he's there to see, Mackey, is rough and suspicious, searching for any sign of evil with strange symbols painted on the floor and a drink that is (inexplicably obviously) laced with holy water. "Are you satisfied? I give you my word that you'll come to no harm," he says when Mackey has muttered 'Christo' under his breath and watched his reaction intently. Mackey's eyebrows go up in surprise, but then he lays a knife on the weathered table between them.
"That's silver," Mackey says. "I guess you don't trust me any more than I trust you, so I'm gonna let you take that and make a little cut in your skin, anywhere you want, just enough to draw blood. But just to let you know, I got bigger and sharper where that came from if you try anything." They both watch as a cut bleeds a few drops and then seals back up up into unmarked skin, and Mackey says, "Goddamn." With his blind eye working again, Mackey produces a wad of bills that he won't allow to be refused. "Last time I checked, God don't pay. I don't like owing favors, and a man's gotta eat," he says. He doesn't correct Mackey on the point of eating.
"I think it's all right if you take it sometimes," Daphne tells him over the phone before he begins the drive back. "Not ask for it, and not like what Jennifer tried to do, but I have to admit, the bill on my gas card is through the roof this month." Her laugh is like a tinny bell over the staticky connection.
It still feels wrong, like he shouldn't profit from these abilities he's somehow been given because they're meant to give and not take, but it's wrong too to put Daphne under financial strain on top of everything else she does for him, so he keeps strict track in his head of where every bit of money goes, every gallon of gas and quart of oil, and if Daphne is on the road with him, he uses it for rooms for her to sleep in and food for her to eat, nothing for himself. Nothing, at least, until it starts snowing. He doesn't feel the cold, hasn't since he recovered his bearings after the river, but Daphne points out that he'll look strange to others without a coat, and while Christopher's older clothes that Daphne says were long unworn before she ever knew him fit well enough, the pea coat that was bought just before Christopher was deployed is far too large and it makes her eyes well up to see him in it.
"I don't mind when it's things I don't remember him in," she sniffs, tugging at the sleeves and picking at the collar. "And I know he's not coming back, I've known it for two years, ever since that man came to the door and told me he was missing, but--"
"I understand," he says. One of the brimming tears escapes and he wipes it away with his thumb and she wraps her arms around his middle underneath the coat and breathes deeply into his shoulder. She feels fragile and soft against him and he's not sure who she's holding onto or whether the wash of loneliness belongs to her or to him. She lets go after a while and scrubs her face in the bathroom and they go shopping for clothes that never belonged to anyone she knew.
*
Daphne goes to church on Sundays, wherever they happen to be. The place near home (and it's strange, he reflects, that he's started cautiously thinking of it as home, but it feels good to) is small and dark and full of incense and gives him an itch he can't scratch, but he goes with her when he can because it's not much to ask of him and it makes her happy. The rote words of church prayer are not like driving or breathing or chewing-- it's like he never knew them, and they feel empty and hollow. He lets his lips move and makes the sounds but asks silently for guidance, though he's not sure there's anyone listening.
One week, they're stopped on the way out by an old woman. Daphne introduces him as her husband, having forgotten that she once told Mrs. Thornburg about her real husband being missing in action. There's an uncomfortable few minutes of prevarication and discomfort on the receiving end of Mrs. Thornburg's joy, and he's forced to say he lost his wedding ring in Afghanistan.
"I'm sorry," Daphne says when they're alone. "I don't tell many people about Chris because they just feel sorry for me. I moved here because all anyone did back in Boulder was feel sorry for me and check up and bring casseroles and treat me like I might faint or explode or something, and I even started to hate going to church because every single Sunday our names got read out with the people who needed praying for and I had to deal with it all over again every week." Her voice gets louder and higher as she speaks and she's absently piling more potting soil than needed around the bare-root rose that arrived in the mail yesterday.
"It's all right," he says, takes her trowel away and gets a palmful of dirt from gripping her gloved hand to still it.
"I was as lost as you were when I found you," she says. She turns and looks up at him and takes his other hand too, and he can feel the warmth and brittle strength of her hands through the garden gloves.
He doesn't know what it is to be loved, or doesn't remember. How it feels or how to recognize it, whether the radiant thing that seeps into his bones whenever he's around her is just a reflection of her faith in him and in God and in this calling they've found. He doesn't know what it is to love, either, whether the swelling lightness in his chest is just gratitude or something else. He doesn't know how to kiss or if he ever has but he thinks that he wants to, so he does, just a brush of lips to lips that barely touches. When he moves back, her eyes are still closed and slow to open again, and he can sense her longing acutely enough that he could almost pull it out of the air and hold it in his hand.
He learns about kissing, about touching and holding and pleasure and lust, and Daphne has a lot to say about sin if pressed, but she doesn't seem to count this. Whereas the nights spent in the bed he no longer uses were long and fretful and too quiet, nights spent next to Daphne with her small hand splayed over his heart bring comfort in watching her sleep peacefully and the assurance of not being alone in the sound of her breathing. It isn't all that easy-- there is Christopher's memory to contend with, Daphne's guilt about it, even though she herself says that he would want her to be happy. "I would be your wife," she says, "if I could."
"It doesn't matter," he tells her with her hair tangling around his fingers.
There's another offhand question about wedding rings from the mother of a schizophrenic college student. They pick one out together, a plain white gold band. There's a smaller, thinner one that goes on Daphne's finger on top of the two that are already there and that he won't ask her to remove. There's not much ceremony to it, no vows, except that Daphne says, "Promise me one thing-- even if someday you remember everything else, don't forget me."
"I couldn't possibly," he says, because he can't fathom it even though he's aware that it's possible to forget anyone and everyone.
*
When the snow's all thawed except for dirty plowed-up piles at the sides of parking lots, Emmanuel arrives home after healing a young woman's multiple sclerosis in Idaho to find a strange man on his porch and a horrible creature with a face that could surely belong to the Devil himself rolling dead down the front steps and Daphne tied to a chair. There are demons walking the earth and they're looking for him, and he shakes hands with Dean, who's full of pain and loss and guilt and desperation. He's gotten better at reading people these past few months, what to focus on to know how to help them. Dean is troubled and he has killed, but he is a good man. He saved Daphne and leaves her with what protection he can-- symbols drawn on the back of the antique rug in the entryway and thick lines of salt at the doors and windows, things Emmanuel remembers from Mackey's place and now one or two others he's been to. He can tell Dean doesn't think more demons will come now that their real target knows they're after him; Emmanuel tends to agree.
"I don't feel like a bad person," Emmanuel says when Dean asks if it's strange not knowing his past, if he could have done bad things. It's not the first time it has occurred to him that maybe he's here and is the way he is as some form of penance, of atonement, but it's true that he doesn't feel that he is or was bad. He hopes that he would know, feel the darkness in himself that he can sometimes sense in others, but it's not as though his gifts, whatever they are and wherever they're from, are an exact science.
Dean has more problems than just his brother. He has a friend who betrayed him and hurt his brother badly enough that his only hope is a miracle. Emmanuel feels a kinship, a shared struggle, with everyone he helps, but it's very strong with Dean in a way that nags at him like prayer. It could be the name Sam, which has never given him good feelings for some reason that his own mind won't allow him to know.
It's a long drive to Indiana and the old car's radio barely works. Every time the station fades into static, Dean runs through the dial until he finds another one he likes, always classic rock. "I like this song," Emmanuel says when 'Free Bird' comes weak and quiet out of the speakers somewhere in the middle of Nebraska.
"Seriously?" Dean says on a tight laugh. "I guess you get a pass for not remembering the last thirty-some-odd years of this shit being played to death." But he turns it up and drums his hands on the steering wheel and seems a little lighter for a few minutes.
He trusts Dean, likes him. He doesn't get a chance to know many people long enough to like them, only to know if they are sick or healed. Daphne has no family and few friends; he has neither aside from her. Still, he means it when he tells Dean that his life is good.
"You're exhausted," he observes at the Iowa border when Dean's grimacing his way through his third can of Red Bull.
"Yeah, well, unless you can heal the tired too, I'm just gonna have to suck it up. Sooner we get to Sam, the better."
"I can drive if you like. Although I should warn you that I don't have a license."
"Buddy, if we get stopped by the cops, we're in bigger trouble than driving without a license."
"Dean, is this car stolen?"
"You want me to say no?"
"Not if you'd be lying."
Dean smirks and pulls over and is slumped against the passenger door asleep within minutes of being back on the highway. Occasionally, when Daphne has bad dreams, he's been able to calm them, as he might for someone plagued by hallucinations. He has her permission to, and she likes that he does it, that he watches over her. He's healed others without their consent, of course, because they couldn't give it, but there's always been someone who could give it for them. But Dean isn't comatose or insane-- he's in full possession of his faculties and is simply making pained sounds in his sleep.
Once, he cured a woman's inoperable brain tumor at her husband's request, and she ripped the breathing tube from her throat and was angry. "I'd made my peace, you bastard," she said to her husband. "You can't play God like this," she said to Emmanuel. He never found out how the couple got on afterwards; he rarely does, although sometimes they send letters or money if they know where to send them.
But while he worries that Dean might view taking away the nightmare as some kind of invasion, it hurts to see him suffer and call out the name of the friend who betrayed him-- "Cas,"-- like his heart is breaking, so he reaches across the seats and touches his fingers to Dean's temple, and Dean sighs and stills and sleeps peacefully until the car needs gas near Des Moines.
Dean doesn't question Emmanuel not having slept at all on the long drive, although if he did, Emmanuel would trust him with the truth. He's still curious, though. "So, how's your amnesia thing work? Did you have to learn to read and tie your shoes and stuff all over again?"
"No. The only things that seem to be missing are the memories of who I am and where I came from. I could read, knew things about the world. Sometimes I discover something that I must have already known. Driving, for example, or the fact that I seem to be able to understand French."
"You remembered how to drive?" Dean looks over at him, looks away, frowns and swallows hard.
"I think so. When Daphne tried to teach me, some sort of instinct took over. Muscle memory, I think it's called."
"Yeah," Dean says, and his voice sounds rough.
*
He still trusts Dean, even when he emerges from a convenience store outside Gary with blood on his hands and a demon in tow. He does not trust Meg, and thinks that he wouldn't even if he couldn't see the horror that is her true face. He knows Dean doesn't trust her either, but he does trust that if Dean says they need her help, they need it. Sam's problems don't begin and end with what's wrong in his mind; it's embroiled in a long and convoluted series of events that's resulted in demons lying in wait outside the hospital.
Meg and Dean are loud enough even several yards away that he can't help but hear. They're talking about him and he walks closer. "You know what he did," Dean says. "And you want to tell him and hope that he just takes it in stride? He could snap, he could disappear, who knows?"
"I gather we know each other." It's a suspicion he's been ignoring, and the look on Dean's face as he turns confirms it.
"Just a dollop," Meg says. Her face is still disgusting, an abomination, and the one she wears for the outside world isn't much better, a laugh in everything with a flippant cavalier attitude that doesn't belong in danger this serious.
"You just met yourself," Dean says when Emmanuel asks to be told. "I've known you for years." He's not sure if it's true that he'll be fine when he hears it, but he needs to know. And then he's being told he's an angel, and that being an angel isn't pleasant, no perching on clouds or harps or wings, just blood and violence and corruption, and then all the pieces fall together.
"Am I Cas?" He asks, but he doesn't need to hear the answer. He doesn't remember, but he knows, knows in something deep and white-hot inside of him. He doesn't remember how to ride a bike, if he ever knew, but he knows Dean is right, that the power to stop these demons is there. He can feel it, if he concentrates very hard, and even if he couldn't, he still trusts Dean. And if he really is Cas, if he's really betrayed Dean and is responsible for Sam's insanity and everything else that's happened since, he owes it to Dean and Sam and whomever else he's hurt, owes it to them to try.
He thinks the same way he thinks when there's cancer or insanity or blindness--get the bad thing out--when he slaps his palm onto the first demon's forehead. When the light streams out of human eyes and the demon becomes nothing more threatening than a dead man lying on the ground, the memories begin to return. Wings and holiness and manifesting them in a symbol-scrawled barn. Looking in Dean's eyes and learning Dean doesn't think he deserves to be saved. The gates of Hell and everything beyond them and one bright soul that had to be reached at any cost, and how great that cost was, and Dean teaching him humanity laughing in a brothel and swearing at him from the passenger seat of the Impala, "Brakes, goddammit!"
Two more demons, and he remembers his faith in Dean being shaken, an alley and brutality and finally blood on a wall and doubts dispelled and remorse. Another and another bring all his mistakes, Sam's soul and breaking his wall and Crowley, blood and war and why he knows the scent of formaldehyde, why he knows desperation so easily when he sees it because he was so, so full of it. All his crimes, all his wrongs, stained glass forming into his own image and blistering pain and souls streaming out of it and he remembers everything, everything.
Meg calls him 'Clarence' and he remembers kissing her and wants to burn out her eyes, and Dean says, "Cas?" and all he wants to do is run away because he can't stand the way Dean is looking at him, can't stand knowing where that dark empty troubled thing inside Dean came from.
"Don't defend me," he tells Dean, because he doesn't deserve it. He doesn't deserve to be walking around. He deserves the Hell that Dean went through and worse, deserves all the souls of Purgatory clawing at his insides and all the pain that goes with it. He was a false God, an evil God, a walking talking smiting strike against his Father's name. "I can't possibly fix it. So why did I even walk out of that river?"
"Maybe to fix it," Dean says with that angry conviction that Castiel remembers now has always been so beautiful about him, and Dean opens the trunk of the car, holds out a dirty brown bundle of cloth. "Everything you did-- to me, to Sam, yeah, it was bad. It was worse than bad, like the no words for it kind of bad. But I know you did it 'cause you thought it was what you had to do, okay? I know you remember feeling that. It went wrong as hell and there's a lot you should've done different, but damn, Cas, remember that time me and Sam started the freakin' apocalypse? And I didn't think I was ever going to forgive you, and maybe I still don't because it's your fault Bobby's gone and Sam's in there playing Drop-Dead-Fred with the Devil, but we wouldn't be in any of this right now if I could've stuck it out in Hell a little longer. So this is on you but it's on me too. It's on Sam and Ruby and fuckin' Crowley and an assload of dead angels and on God, wherever that asshole is. Everybody built a little piece of this shithouse. And you were gone, and even as pissed as I was and as much time as I spent wanting to hate your guts, I needed you there, okay? Not any old dude with some heavenly mojo, but you, and I knew it was impossible, but I kept--"
Dean looks down, shakes his head. Castiel knows now that the empathy he felt as Emmanuel, the emotions and histories he could sense under people's skin, were just another manifestation of the angelic powers he couldn't remember or access except to blindly heal, but he's more aware of them than he ever was when he knew he was an angel, because as Emmanuel it was all he had to guide him, and he can feel what Dean can't bring himself to say: that Dean hoped, that Dean missed him. "As gone as I knew you were, part of me always believed you'd come back."
The thing Dean's holding out is the old familiar overcoat, which smells of mildew and is torn and bloodied, covered in the marks of Castiel's transgressions. It's a fitting mantle to take up while working to repair the damage he's done. He remembers the moment in which he said the wrong thing, hubris and desperation-- 'Superman going to the dark side. I'm still just Castiel'-- and watched Dean's trust in him die. That Dean has kept the coat, fished it out of the water and carried it with him all this time, there's so much faith wrapped up in it that he remembers what it feels like to explode.
There's so much wrong that he needs to right. Emmanuel healing people, it has been a penance, but it's not enough. There may be no such thing as enough. He can't reverse all the deaths, can't bring back his brothers and sisters-- Balthazar, Rachel, all of them who so badly wanted to place their faith in him and his cause-- but he can help Sam, undo that atrocity. He once wished for Dean to have some faith, and he sees it now, finally, placed or misplaced in him. It may have always been that way.
He puts on the coat and remembers the poor pious Jimmy Novak, who sacrificed himself and his life and his soul (Heaven, the last time Castiel saw it, was a field of blood for its natives, but the human souls granted rest there went unaffected, and Jimmy was spending his forever in a sunny Sunday with his wife, who was younger and knew nothing of demons or angels or being abandoned, teaching their daughter who was never yet a holy vessel to ride a bicycle), and he can feel Dean's cautious faith and hope flickering at him like the tree-broken sunlight in Jimmy's perfect Sunday.
"Welcome back, Cas," Dean says, quiet and rough and choked.
"Thank you," Castiel says, which isn't enough, but there's nothing else to say, except, "Dean," as Dean steps closer.
Castiel remembers the feeling of Daphne's arms sliding inside a different coat on a different man while thinking of a different someone-else. He's no longer the Castiel that Dean knew, that Dean loved in the silent and grudging but all-consuming way that Dean loves, and Castiel knows he doesn't deserve this moment of serenity and relief and comfort, but he takes it, guiltily, holds tight to Dean and sighs at strong hands pressing into the joints of his incorporeal wings, and for this tiny stretch of time, simply is. It doesn't diminish the love that the part of him that is still and will ever be Emmanuel and everything he's done and learned and experienced felt and feels for Daphne, but it's different. Daphne is the quiet warm simplicity of a sunrise. Dean is the awe of the sun itself coming into being. They're both wonders. He's never kissed Dean before, would never have dared before even if it had occurred to him to do it, but now it does because he's been Emmanuel and understands things that he didn't before, and it's longing and faith and anger and love and hate woven in lips and teeth and breath, perfect and guilty and sorry and there.
"Damn," Dean says when they part. His fingers in Castiel's hair and against his neck and shoulders and back and hipbones have more pressure, more presence, than Daphne's feathery reverent touches, larger and stronger. It will hurt Daphne to know about this, he knows, but he knows too that she'll understand and won't begrudge him this reunion if they live through whatever's going to happen next, and he's kept his promise not to forget her. He'll love her and he'll love Dean and nothing that happens tonight will change that. "Knock 'em dead," Dean says as he steps back, disentangles their arms, and his voice breaks.
Castiel nods, gathers his courage and his remorse and his purpose, and goes inside to find Sam. Somehow, he'll fix it. It's the only possible reason he could be here at all.
Rating: PG for language and kissing and some very tame sexual references
Words: ~5500
Pairing/Characters: Emmanuel!Castiel/Daphne, Dean/Castiel
Warnings: If you hate Daphne and her very existence, you probably will not enjoy this. Also, in case you didn't get it the first two times, 7x17 SPOILERS!
Summary: He doesn't feel chosen or gifted, and he doesn't remember.
Notes: Basically my brain's version of 7x17, the super-extended but not-as-porny-as-I-hoped edition. DID I MENTION THE SPOILERS? There are spoilers. And at this point I should just probably install a giant permanent banner on my lj that expresses my thanks to the_reverand for putting up with my crap, but this is also not her fault. Apologies to Roger Miller for the title.
The first words in his memory are a gasped, "Oh, gracious!" He knows the woman is afraid, knows the things he's feeling are cold and wet, that he should have clothing but does not, that the woman wants to help him. But to her questions-- "are you all right?" and "what happened?" and "what's your name?"-- he only has one answer.
"I don't know."
"I think God led me there," she says in her living room after the dusty picnic blanket from the trunk of her car has been exchanged for an ill-fitting pair of sweatpants and overlarge t-shirt that carry a scent of cedar. He knows what picnics are, what houses and sofas are, what cedar smells like, how to read the words on the shirt, that it says 'Denver Broncos,' that Denver is in Colorado and a bronco is a horse. He knows to blow on his tea before he drinks it, knows the taste of lemon and sugar, knows that God created the heavens and the earth and man. "I think He wanted me to find you," she says.
Her name is Daphne and her hair is red and her eyes are green and the clothes are her husband's. He knows what war is and where Afghanistan is and what it means to be missing in action and to say, "I'm sorry," when Daphne explains and that the ring she's twisting on her finger is a wedding band. He knows what guest rooms are and to say, "Thank you," and that the quilt he pulls over himself is soft and warm.
He knows the feeling of doubt when Daphne says, "Maybe you'll remember something in the morning. We'll figure it out, don't worry."
He knows what sleep is and what dreams are; he does neither. He looks at the ceiling and thinks about all of the things that he knows, and by the time the sky begins to lighten outside, he knows that none of those things are anything about himself.
*
Daphne tells him that he's a miracle and that by rights he should have drowned instead of walking out of the river without a scratch on him. She tells him he must be hungry, and he knows what hunger is and that he doesn't feel it, but agrees when she says he should try to eat something. She prays her thanks to God over the food, and the words twist something inside of him that he can't name. She cuts her finger on a knife while washing the dishes and says, "Oh!" and before he knows what he's doing, his hand is on hers and the blood washes away down the sink and there's no longer a cut at all. She turns her hand over and over as though searching for where the wound has gone, and both her voice and her hands shake when she says, "Oh, my word," and crosses herself.
Her hands are wet and slippery and warm and still shaking when she clasps them over his and says, "You see? You're special. You're... you've been chosen for something. Now I know God brought you to me."
He feels doubt, fear. He doesn't feel chosen or gifted. After days of searching through missing persons matching his description (brown hair, blue eyes, five foot eleven inches tall, thirty to forty years old), and seeing a long line of faces only slightly less familiar to him than the one he sees in the mirror, he knows that no one is looking for him and knows disappointment.
Daphne wonders if perhaps there's nothing to remember, if perhaps he was created whole and new the day she found him. It isn't a comforting thought. She says, "I can't just keep calling you 'hey, you,'" and starts reading him lists of names. "Michael?" she says, and that same something that happens when she prays clutches at him unsettlingly. "Ham, Hannibal, Herschel... my goodness, who makes these things?" Samuel bothers him too. He likes Christopher but it is or was Daphne's husband's name (Daphne says 'was' and blinks away tears). She won't let him be John because she says it's too much like 'John Doe' and he doesn't like Adam. "What about Emmanuel?" she says. "It means 'God is with us.'"
He tries it out, calls himself by it in the mirror and watches the shape of his mouth around it. It doesn't cause him any strange unnameable feelings, seems to fit better than some things could, so he agrees. Daphne says it every chance she gets, and he gets used to it, learns to turn around when he hears it.
He doesn't understand his 'gift' or how to use it, isn't sure whether he should-- this, he tells Daphne. He knows it isn't normal not to need food or sleep or the toilet-- this, he does not tell Daphne, but she finds out anyway because of all the skills he's got from somewhere or other, lying is not one of them. She thinks him more special than ever and begs him to come with her to visit a friend who has a very sick child.
"I won't know what to do," he protests.
"You weren't even thinking when you healed my finger. You just did it. I don't think you have to know, I think you just can. And maybe it won't work, but there's no other hope for Alison. She's got weeks at the most, more like days. Please, Emmanuel, just try?"
His hands feel warm, then hot, against the downy-bald head of the listless little girl who's been brought home to die. He doesn't think anything, just feels, until he can feel that it's right. He feels right, feels a perfect serenity wash through him, and he knows that it's done. Alison sits up and asks for ice cream and her mother bursts into tears because Alison hasn't been able to speak since her last surgery.
He backs out of the room while the mother, Jennifer, is still sobbing and embracing her daughter and saying, "Thank God, thank God," and that's that: his purpose is clear.
When Jennifer comes to the house with a basket of muffins and a check for what he knows is a lot of money, he tries to refuse it. Jennifer explains that it's the balance of a donation fund that was set up for Alison's treatment. "Please," she says, "please take it."
"It wouldn't be right," he tells her.
"Please," she says.
"You'll need it for college now," Daphne says with a smile, hand on Jennifer's shoulder. "Please keep it." Jennifer finally agrees, and he is very grateful for Daphne.
*
Daphne is good to him. She continues to insist he eat, though she's well aware now that he has no need for it. "Just to taste it," she says. "I know you don't have to, but other people will think it's strange if you don't know what you like." He finds that he likes hamburgers, White Castle especially, apple pie and strawberries and broccoli and eggs sunny-side up.
When word starts to trickle slowly around that he can cure people's hopeless ailments, Daphne drives him all over Colorado, to Nevada and Oklahoma and California. At first he's uncomfortable in the car. Claustrophobic, Daphne says, but she talks to distract him, tells stories about her childhood and teaches him to play I Spy and makes him skip through radio stations to find out what kind of music he likes (classic rock, as it turns out, and classical piano). When someone assumes they're husband and wife, she doesn't correct them. "It's dishonest," she says, "but no one would believe the truth."
Daphne works part-time answering phones for a mail-order clothing company to supplement her military benefits, but she can only take so much time off without losing the job entirely, and he worries that he is a burden. She tells him not to. "We're doing God's work," she says, gripping his forearms with her small soft hands. "They can fire me right this minute if they want to. This is more important." Still, she teaches him to drive, or reminds him how to, because he apparently did know at some point in his still-inaccessible past, or else is a very fast learner. He can't get a driver's license, of course. "Just don't speed," she tells him the first time he goes away without her, kisses him on the cheek and says, "Be careful," very softly, and the warmth of her lips stays as if branded on his skin all the way to South Dakota.
He arrives at a small apartment at the back of a taxidermy shop that he knows stinks of formaldehyde, but not why he recognizes the smell. The man he's there to see, Mackey, is rough and suspicious, searching for any sign of evil with strange symbols painted on the floor and a drink that is (inexplicably obviously) laced with holy water. "Are you satisfied? I give you my word that you'll come to no harm," he says when Mackey has muttered 'Christo' under his breath and watched his reaction intently. Mackey's eyebrows go up in surprise, but then he lays a knife on the weathered table between them.
"That's silver," Mackey says. "I guess you don't trust me any more than I trust you, so I'm gonna let you take that and make a little cut in your skin, anywhere you want, just enough to draw blood. But just to let you know, I got bigger and sharper where that came from if you try anything." They both watch as a cut bleeds a few drops and then seals back up up into unmarked skin, and Mackey says, "Goddamn." With his blind eye working again, Mackey produces a wad of bills that he won't allow to be refused. "Last time I checked, God don't pay. I don't like owing favors, and a man's gotta eat," he says. He doesn't correct Mackey on the point of eating.
"I think it's all right if you take it sometimes," Daphne tells him over the phone before he begins the drive back. "Not ask for it, and not like what Jennifer tried to do, but I have to admit, the bill on my gas card is through the roof this month." Her laugh is like a tinny bell over the staticky connection.
It still feels wrong, like he shouldn't profit from these abilities he's somehow been given because they're meant to give and not take, but it's wrong too to put Daphne under financial strain on top of everything else she does for him, so he keeps strict track in his head of where every bit of money goes, every gallon of gas and quart of oil, and if Daphne is on the road with him, he uses it for rooms for her to sleep in and food for her to eat, nothing for himself. Nothing, at least, until it starts snowing. He doesn't feel the cold, hasn't since he recovered his bearings after the river, but Daphne points out that he'll look strange to others without a coat, and while Christopher's older clothes that Daphne says were long unworn before she ever knew him fit well enough, the pea coat that was bought just before Christopher was deployed is far too large and it makes her eyes well up to see him in it.
"I don't mind when it's things I don't remember him in," she sniffs, tugging at the sleeves and picking at the collar. "And I know he's not coming back, I've known it for two years, ever since that man came to the door and told me he was missing, but--"
"I understand," he says. One of the brimming tears escapes and he wipes it away with his thumb and she wraps her arms around his middle underneath the coat and breathes deeply into his shoulder. She feels fragile and soft against him and he's not sure who she's holding onto or whether the wash of loneliness belongs to her or to him. She lets go after a while and scrubs her face in the bathroom and they go shopping for clothes that never belonged to anyone she knew.
*
Daphne goes to church on Sundays, wherever they happen to be. The place near home (and it's strange, he reflects, that he's started cautiously thinking of it as home, but it feels good to) is small and dark and full of incense and gives him an itch he can't scratch, but he goes with her when he can because it's not much to ask of him and it makes her happy. The rote words of church prayer are not like driving or breathing or chewing-- it's like he never knew them, and they feel empty and hollow. He lets his lips move and makes the sounds but asks silently for guidance, though he's not sure there's anyone listening.
One week, they're stopped on the way out by an old woman. Daphne introduces him as her husband, having forgotten that she once told Mrs. Thornburg about her real husband being missing in action. There's an uncomfortable few minutes of prevarication and discomfort on the receiving end of Mrs. Thornburg's joy, and he's forced to say he lost his wedding ring in Afghanistan.
"I'm sorry," Daphne says when they're alone. "I don't tell many people about Chris because they just feel sorry for me. I moved here because all anyone did back in Boulder was feel sorry for me and check up and bring casseroles and treat me like I might faint or explode or something, and I even started to hate going to church because every single Sunday our names got read out with the people who needed praying for and I had to deal with it all over again every week." Her voice gets louder and higher as she speaks and she's absently piling more potting soil than needed around the bare-root rose that arrived in the mail yesterday.
"It's all right," he says, takes her trowel away and gets a palmful of dirt from gripping her gloved hand to still it.
"I was as lost as you were when I found you," she says. She turns and looks up at him and takes his other hand too, and he can feel the warmth and brittle strength of her hands through the garden gloves.
He doesn't know what it is to be loved, or doesn't remember. How it feels or how to recognize it, whether the radiant thing that seeps into his bones whenever he's around her is just a reflection of her faith in him and in God and in this calling they've found. He doesn't know what it is to love, either, whether the swelling lightness in his chest is just gratitude or something else. He doesn't know how to kiss or if he ever has but he thinks that he wants to, so he does, just a brush of lips to lips that barely touches. When he moves back, her eyes are still closed and slow to open again, and he can sense her longing acutely enough that he could almost pull it out of the air and hold it in his hand.
He learns about kissing, about touching and holding and pleasure and lust, and Daphne has a lot to say about sin if pressed, but she doesn't seem to count this. Whereas the nights spent in the bed he no longer uses were long and fretful and too quiet, nights spent next to Daphne with her small hand splayed over his heart bring comfort in watching her sleep peacefully and the assurance of not being alone in the sound of her breathing. It isn't all that easy-- there is Christopher's memory to contend with, Daphne's guilt about it, even though she herself says that he would want her to be happy. "I would be your wife," she says, "if I could."
"It doesn't matter," he tells her with her hair tangling around his fingers.
There's another offhand question about wedding rings from the mother of a schizophrenic college student. They pick one out together, a plain white gold band. There's a smaller, thinner one that goes on Daphne's finger on top of the two that are already there and that he won't ask her to remove. There's not much ceremony to it, no vows, except that Daphne says, "Promise me one thing-- even if someday you remember everything else, don't forget me."
"I couldn't possibly," he says, because he can't fathom it even though he's aware that it's possible to forget anyone and everyone.
*
When the snow's all thawed except for dirty plowed-up piles at the sides of parking lots, Emmanuel arrives home after healing a young woman's multiple sclerosis in Idaho to find a strange man on his porch and a horrible creature with a face that could surely belong to the Devil himself rolling dead down the front steps and Daphne tied to a chair. There are demons walking the earth and they're looking for him, and he shakes hands with Dean, who's full of pain and loss and guilt and desperation. He's gotten better at reading people these past few months, what to focus on to know how to help them. Dean is troubled and he has killed, but he is a good man. He saved Daphne and leaves her with what protection he can-- symbols drawn on the back of the antique rug in the entryway and thick lines of salt at the doors and windows, things Emmanuel remembers from Mackey's place and now one or two others he's been to. He can tell Dean doesn't think more demons will come now that their real target knows they're after him; Emmanuel tends to agree.
"I don't feel like a bad person," Emmanuel says when Dean asks if it's strange not knowing his past, if he could have done bad things. It's not the first time it has occurred to him that maybe he's here and is the way he is as some form of penance, of atonement, but it's true that he doesn't feel that he is or was bad. He hopes that he would know, feel the darkness in himself that he can sometimes sense in others, but it's not as though his gifts, whatever they are and wherever they're from, are an exact science.
Dean has more problems than just his brother. He has a friend who betrayed him and hurt his brother badly enough that his only hope is a miracle. Emmanuel feels a kinship, a shared struggle, with everyone he helps, but it's very strong with Dean in a way that nags at him like prayer. It could be the name Sam, which has never given him good feelings for some reason that his own mind won't allow him to know.
It's a long drive to Indiana and the old car's radio barely works. Every time the station fades into static, Dean runs through the dial until he finds another one he likes, always classic rock. "I like this song," Emmanuel says when 'Free Bird' comes weak and quiet out of the speakers somewhere in the middle of Nebraska.
"Seriously?" Dean says on a tight laugh. "I guess you get a pass for not remembering the last thirty-some-odd years of this shit being played to death." But he turns it up and drums his hands on the steering wheel and seems a little lighter for a few minutes.
He trusts Dean, likes him. He doesn't get a chance to know many people long enough to like them, only to know if they are sick or healed. Daphne has no family and few friends; he has neither aside from her. Still, he means it when he tells Dean that his life is good.
"You're exhausted," he observes at the Iowa border when Dean's grimacing his way through his third can of Red Bull.
"Yeah, well, unless you can heal the tired too, I'm just gonna have to suck it up. Sooner we get to Sam, the better."
"I can drive if you like. Although I should warn you that I don't have a license."
"Buddy, if we get stopped by the cops, we're in bigger trouble than driving without a license."
"Dean, is this car stolen?"
"You want me to say no?"
"Not if you'd be lying."
Dean smirks and pulls over and is slumped against the passenger door asleep within minutes of being back on the highway. Occasionally, when Daphne has bad dreams, he's been able to calm them, as he might for someone plagued by hallucinations. He has her permission to, and she likes that he does it, that he watches over her. He's healed others without their consent, of course, because they couldn't give it, but there's always been someone who could give it for them. But Dean isn't comatose or insane-- he's in full possession of his faculties and is simply making pained sounds in his sleep.
Once, he cured a woman's inoperable brain tumor at her husband's request, and she ripped the breathing tube from her throat and was angry. "I'd made my peace, you bastard," she said to her husband. "You can't play God like this," she said to Emmanuel. He never found out how the couple got on afterwards; he rarely does, although sometimes they send letters or money if they know where to send them.
But while he worries that Dean might view taking away the nightmare as some kind of invasion, it hurts to see him suffer and call out the name of the friend who betrayed him-- "Cas,"-- like his heart is breaking, so he reaches across the seats and touches his fingers to Dean's temple, and Dean sighs and stills and sleeps peacefully until the car needs gas near Des Moines.
Dean doesn't question Emmanuel not having slept at all on the long drive, although if he did, Emmanuel would trust him with the truth. He's still curious, though. "So, how's your amnesia thing work? Did you have to learn to read and tie your shoes and stuff all over again?"
"No. The only things that seem to be missing are the memories of who I am and where I came from. I could read, knew things about the world. Sometimes I discover something that I must have already known. Driving, for example, or the fact that I seem to be able to understand French."
"You remembered how to drive?" Dean looks over at him, looks away, frowns and swallows hard.
"I think so. When Daphne tried to teach me, some sort of instinct took over. Muscle memory, I think it's called."
"Yeah," Dean says, and his voice sounds rough.
*
He still trusts Dean, even when he emerges from a convenience store outside Gary with blood on his hands and a demon in tow. He does not trust Meg, and thinks that he wouldn't even if he couldn't see the horror that is her true face. He knows Dean doesn't trust her either, but he does trust that if Dean says they need her help, they need it. Sam's problems don't begin and end with what's wrong in his mind; it's embroiled in a long and convoluted series of events that's resulted in demons lying in wait outside the hospital.
Meg and Dean are loud enough even several yards away that he can't help but hear. They're talking about him and he walks closer. "You know what he did," Dean says. "And you want to tell him and hope that he just takes it in stride? He could snap, he could disappear, who knows?"
"I gather we know each other." It's a suspicion he's been ignoring, and the look on Dean's face as he turns confirms it.
"Just a dollop," Meg says. Her face is still disgusting, an abomination, and the one she wears for the outside world isn't much better, a laugh in everything with a flippant cavalier attitude that doesn't belong in danger this serious.
"You just met yourself," Dean says when Emmanuel asks to be told. "I've known you for years." He's not sure if it's true that he'll be fine when he hears it, but he needs to know. And then he's being told he's an angel, and that being an angel isn't pleasant, no perching on clouds or harps or wings, just blood and violence and corruption, and then all the pieces fall together.
"Am I Cas?" He asks, but he doesn't need to hear the answer. He doesn't remember, but he knows, knows in something deep and white-hot inside of him. He doesn't remember how to ride a bike, if he ever knew, but he knows Dean is right, that the power to stop these demons is there. He can feel it, if he concentrates very hard, and even if he couldn't, he still trusts Dean. And if he really is Cas, if he's really betrayed Dean and is responsible for Sam's insanity and everything else that's happened since, he owes it to Dean and Sam and whomever else he's hurt, owes it to them to try.
He thinks the same way he thinks when there's cancer or insanity or blindness--get the bad thing out--when he slaps his palm onto the first demon's forehead. When the light streams out of human eyes and the demon becomes nothing more threatening than a dead man lying on the ground, the memories begin to return. Wings and holiness and manifesting them in a symbol-scrawled barn. Looking in Dean's eyes and learning Dean doesn't think he deserves to be saved. The gates of Hell and everything beyond them and one bright soul that had to be reached at any cost, and how great that cost was, and Dean teaching him humanity laughing in a brothel and swearing at him from the passenger seat of the Impala, "Brakes, goddammit!"
Two more demons, and he remembers his faith in Dean being shaken, an alley and brutality and finally blood on a wall and doubts dispelled and remorse. Another and another bring all his mistakes, Sam's soul and breaking his wall and Crowley, blood and war and why he knows the scent of formaldehyde, why he knows desperation so easily when he sees it because he was so, so full of it. All his crimes, all his wrongs, stained glass forming into his own image and blistering pain and souls streaming out of it and he remembers everything, everything.
Meg calls him 'Clarence' and he remembers kissing her and wants to burn out her eyes, and Dean says, "Cas?" and all he wants to do is run away because he can't stand the way Dean is looking at him, can't stand knowing where that dark empty troubled thing inside Dean came from.
"Don't defend me," he tells Dean, because he doesn't deserve it. He doesn't deserve to be walking around. He deserves the Hell that Dean went through and worse, deserves all the souls of Purgatory clawing at his insides and all the pain that goes with it. He was a false God, an evil God, a walking talking smiting strike against his Father's name. "I can't possibly fix it. So why did I even walk out of that river?"
"Maybe to fix it," Dean says with that angry conviction that Castiel remembers now has always been so beautiful about him, and Dean opens the trunk of the car, holds out a dirty brown bundle of cloth. "Everything you did-- to me, to Sam, yeah, it was bad. It was worse than bad, like the no words for it kind of bad. But I know you did it 'cause you thought it was what you had to do, okay? I know you remember feeling that. It went wrong as hell and there's a lot you should've done different, but damn, Cas, remember that time me and Sam started the freakin' apocalypse? And I didn't think I was ever going to forgive you, and maybe I still don't because it's your fault Bobby's gone and Sam's in there playing Drop-Dead-Fred with the Devil, but we wouldn't be in any of this right now if I could've stuck it out in Hell a little longer. So this is on you but it's on me too. It's on Sam and Ruby and fuckin' Crowley and an assload of dead angels and on God, wherever that asshole is. Everybody built a little piece of this shithouse. And you were gone, and even as pissed as I was and as much time as I spent wanting to hate your guts, I needed you there, okay? Not any old dude with some heavenly mojo, but you, and I knew it was impossible, but I kept--"
Dean looks down, shakes his head. Castiel knows now that the empathy he felt as Emmanuel, the emotions and histories he could sense under people's skin, were just another manifestation of the angelic powers he couldn't remember or access except to blindly heal, but he's more aware of them than he ever was when he knew he was an angel, because as Emmanuel it was all he had to guide him, and he can feel what Dean can't bring himself to say: that Dean hoped, that Dean missed him. "As gone as I knew you were, part of me always believed you'd come back."
The thing Dean's holding out is the old familiar overcoat, which smells of mildew and is torn and bloodied, covered in the marks of Castiel's transgressions. It's a fitting mantle to take up while working to repair the damage he's done. He remembers the moment in which he said the wrong thing, hubris and desperation-- 'Superman going to the dark side. I'm still just Castiel'-- and watched Dean's trust in him die. That Dean has kept the coat, fished it out of the water and carried it with him all this time, there's so much faith wrapped up in it that he remembers what it feels like to explode.
There's so much wrong that he needs to right. Emmanuel healing people, it has been a penance, but it's not enough. There may be no such thing as enough. He can't reverse all the deaths, can't bring back his brothers and sisters-- Balthazar, Rachel, all of them who so badly wanted to place their faith in him and his cause-- but he can help Sam, undo that atrocity. He once wished for Dean to have some faith, and he sees it now, finally, placed or misplaced in him. It may have always been that way.
He puts on the coat and remembers the poor pious Jimmy Novak, who sacrificed himself and his life and his soul (Heaven, the last time Castiel saw it, was a field of blood for its natives, but the human souls granted rest there went unaffected, and Jimmy was spending his forever in a sunny Sunday with his wife, who was younger and knew nothing of demons or angels or being abandoned, teaching their daughter who was never yet a holy vessel to ride a bicycle), and he can feel Dean's cautious faith and hope flickering at him like the tree-broken sunlight in Jimmy's perfect Sunday.
"Welcome back, Cas," Dean says, quiet and rough and choked.
"Thank you," Castiel says, which isn't enough, but there's nothing else to say, except, "Dean," as Dean steps closer.
Castiel remembers the feeling of Daphne's arms sliding inside a different coat on a different man while thinking of a different someone-else. He's no longer the Castiel that Dean knew, that Dean loved in the silent and grudging but all-consuming way that Dean loves, and Castiel knows he doesn't deserve this moment of serenity and relief and comfort, but he takes it, guiltily, holds tight to Dean and sighs at strong hands pressing into the joints of his incorporeal wings, and for this tiny stretch of time, simply is. It doesn't diminish the love that the part of him that is still and will ever be Emmanuel and everything he's done and learned and experienced felt and feels for Daphne, but it's different. Daphne is the quiet warm simplicity of a sunrise. Dean is the awe of the sun itself coming into being. They're both wonders. He's never kissed Dean before, would never have dared before even if it had occurred to him to do it, but now it does because he's been Emmanuel and understands things that he didn't before, and it's longing and faith and anger and love and hate woven in lips and teeth and breath, perfect and guilty and sorry and there.
"Damn," Dean says when they part. His fingers in Castiel's hair and against his neck and shoulders and back and hipbones have more pressure, more presence, than Daphne's feathery reverent touches, larger and stronger. It will hurt Daphne to know about this, he knows, but he knows too that she'll understand and won't begrudge him this reunion if they live through whatever's going to happen next, and he's kept his promise not to forget her. He'll love her and he'll love Dean and nothing that happens tonight will change that. "Knock 'em dead," Dean says as he steps back, disentangles their arms, and his voice breaks.
Castiel nods, gathers his courage and his remorse and his purpose, and goes inside to find Sam. Somehow, he'll fix it. It's the only possible reason he could be here at all.