Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it, after many days (1/2)
Written: December 2011-February 2012.
Pairing: Castiel/Dean/Gabriel/Sam.
Rating: Teen.
Length: 12000.
Warnings: Established OT4, including mild Wincest. The primary focus, however, is on the relationship dynamics between all four of them: sex is only implied, and Sam and Dean don’t kiss that we see.
Download as epub or pdf (from mediafire).
Summary: The One In Which Sam Was Secretly Always An Archangel. Four years after stopping the (season 5) Apocalypse, their little family faces perhaps its most serious challenge yet when Sam remembers the angel he was a hundred years ago. Naturally, this involves caramel-and-salt popcorn, not-all-my-other-brothers-are-dicks drinking challenges, and scuba-diving on the Great Barrier Reef.
Notes: Part of my In His Image 'verse. Written for the worldwide-spn challenge. Takes place about four years after the events of In His Image, and therefore of canon season 5. Has a porny epilogue, which was actually published long before I finished the main fic: The air was dry with summer heat.
Also - the line about Gabriel and the dinosaurs is a nod to goldenusagi's Banter verse, in which Gabriel having killed the dinosaurs for unexplained reasons is a bit of a running joke.
AO3 link.
Now.
Gabriel was wearing an Akubra, and a t-shirt that read, “I ride my kangaroo to work every morning - ask me how!”
Castiel wasn’t sure, but thought it was probably meant to be ironic. Or possibly just irritating. It was sometimes difficult to know, with Gabriel.
It was almost a holiday. Three days, wandering leisurely up the broad white beaches along the Cape York Peninsula. Watching the sun come up over the many brilliant colours of the ocean, watching it set behind deep, soft-edged hills and the lofty umbrellas of the palms. Searching, but not for a monster (though for something perhaps more dangerous). Sometimes they flew, where there were few humans to see, skimming north with his and Gabriel’s physical wings spread to catch the updrafts where the land rose from the sea. Dean still wasn’t entirely comfortable with being carried through the air so high, even with Castiel’s arms around him, but Sam had always taken to it easily.
Now, of course, they knew why.
Mostly they walked, strolled, waited for Sam to sense that they were getting close, wandering in to fishing and tourist towns because Gabriel and Dean insisted on sampling the local ice cream cuisine and Sam needed the coffee. The further north they went, the older the Reef was, that great vibrant shoal of colour and life. Logically, their quarry would be at the heart of the oldest parts of the reef, the source of life from which it had spread all the way down the coast over the past eighteen million years.
This past hour, Castiel knew they were coming close. Gabriel was high-energy and high-speed, keeping up a running stream of chatter and mild snark in the way he did sometimes when he was trying not to think too much. It pulled Dean along with him, keeping him from slumping into that quiet defensive glower that Castiel could feel almost looming. Sam was excited, practically vibrating and trying not to show it.
Castiel found himself wanting to kiss all of them into submission and relief.
Then Sam stopped midstride, his body one long line of tension and hope, eyes fixed on a distant point out in the greens and brilliant blues of the reef. Gabriel was at his side in a moment, not even bothering to walk the ten metres back over the sand, and Castiel could see the tension in the fingers that closed hard around Sam’s wrist. Castiel reached out, seeking, feeling for that banked thrum of power somewhere out there under the waves, and yes, there. That was it.
“Dean,” he said, low.
Dean turned back, saw the little tableau, and Castiel watched the realisation and the fear mounting in his eyes for just a moment before he cleared his throat and grinned. “Way to go, Sammy.”
Castiel took a moment to miss the ease of the past few days, the way the reality of what they were doing had been, for a little while, suspended. Sam wrestling Dean down into the sand, all long tangling limbs and teeth flashing in laughter, and Dean trapping him in a headlock and rubbing seaweed into his hair. The soft weight of Gabriel’s head, still for once, resting on Castiel’s thigh. The background slough of waves, and the cheerful bickering of Winchesters. The sensation (still strange, even after several years of allowing himself to revel in human sensations and sensuality) of sand between his toes, sand in his clothes, the slippery give of rippled-wet sand under the weight of his sole, the sharp yielding dig of a broken seashell under his heel. The soft, wondering joy that crept over Gabriel’s face (as it always did, still) when Sam jogged over, grinning and happy, for no other reason but to bend down and kiss him. The sound of the gulls, and of palm cockatoos.
He came closer, and brushed his fingers gently over the nape of Sam’s neck. Sam had always been tactile in his affections and his reassurances, and appreciated the same in return.
Dean stayed where he was for a minute, shoulders stoic and bare toes curling into the hot pale sand, then rubbed his hand over his mouth and trudged back towards them. “Okay, so. Tomorrow we’re going swimming. Guess we should look into hiring the gear.”
Gabriel tipped his head against Sam’s shoulder and made a soft, curious noise, like he’d never really considered the human practicalities of this part. “Swimming?”
Sam blinked himself back into reality. “Uhm. More like diving, I think. Not like it’s going to be hanging around at surface level just to make things easy.”
“Dean needs short shorts,” Gabriel decided, with unholy glee.
Forty weeks ago.
Chamael had been the fifth archangel created - younger than Gabriel and Sariel, older than Raphael and Yrihel - and had taken on many of Lucifer’s aspects after that first cataclysmic war. He had been the Tempter, offering humans the chance to fail, giving them a chance to divide light from dark, but never falling himself. Gabriel’s task had been to deliver God’s message, be that judgement or forgiveness or joy; Chamael’s, Castiel recalled, had been one that had led him to be hailed, in some cultures and centuries, as a more implacable angel of death than Sariel, or than Death himself. At Sodom and Gomorrah, Gabriel had delivered God’s punishment in fire and salt and dust, but it had been Chamael, fresh-faced and stern and deadly-beautiful, who had offered them the chance to sin.
It was a task that brought him into closer contact with the depths of humanity than anything Michael or Raphael had ever been obliged to do, especially after the disappearances of Gabriel (sometime in the ninth century) and Sariel (in the seventeenth). Castiel had encountered the archangels rarely enough, but he remembered Chamael well: his dark fury, the ferocity with which he had protected his younger brothers, the gentle humour that had shown itself too rarely in the last few centuries. And he could not help seeing that, sometime in the nineteenth century, looking down on the wars and misery that clustered closer and closer in the world below, something had broken in the archangel. It had been visible to all the Host: his wings, once starkly black and silver with nothing of ambiguity, had begun to grow feathers in shades of every grey between.
In 1917, Chamael had left, and with him had gone Yrihel, quiet and sweet and unguessable. They had slipped away together, vanishing into the sodden mess of humanity in the red-stained mud of western Europe. Every angel had felt the moment when Chamael had torn out his grace, but Yrihel must have hidden it too cleverly for it to be found. Yrihel, the youngest archangel, had simply gone silent. Heaven had been left to Michael, the last of the Princes of the Presence, the four archangels who had once stood in the presence of God.
Chamael’s human form - his first human form, that is - was killed in a nameless trench somewhere in France. In the nine months of his mortality, he had saved three hundred and sixty-eight human lives, and he had not shot one German soldier. (He told Castiel later, in a quiet moment in a motel in Nevada, that he no longer knew how to tell whether any human was ever irredeemable, which “kind of put a damper” on spontaneous heavenly wrath.) Michael had declared him lost. Castiel had watched. Over the millenia, he and his kind had become accustomed to watching.
They did not, however, see the birth in 1918 of a child who did not remember that he had been an angel, nor his death twenty-eight years later; nor did they take note of the birth in that same year of a woman whose soul was far too old for an infant, nor of her death in 1983.
Chamael was the angel who had been obliged to become what Lucifer was meant to have been. Lucifer should never have had a natural vessel, and the appearance of one had been hailed in Heaven as a miracle that promised the End. In turning his back on Michael’s Heaven, Chamael had inadvertently helped to bring about its ultimate finale. Lucifer had had the potential to be Chamael; Chamael still had the potential to be Lucifer. It was only natural that the mind and body of Chamael’s last human incarnation should be so well matched to Lucifer that they could accommodate the Morningstar.
It was only fitting, however, that Samuel Winchester - and his human older brother - should have been the ones to thwart Michael and Lucifer’s intended end to all things. It was right (in a sense far deeper than the destiny that Michael and Lucifer claimed to perceive) that it should have been Gabriel, his angelic older brother who had preceded him to earth years ago, who snatched him back from Michael and Lucifer’s plummet into the Cage and set his feet on the solid earth again.
Sam did not remember being Chamael, all those weighty years: he chose his own path himself, and made his own way and his own life and loves. It was Sam’s strength, not the ghost of the archangel’s, that made him what he was; the soul, not the memory of grace, that had enabled him to overcome Lucifer in the end.
And when Chamael’s memories woke in the depths of Sam Winchester’s very human mind, they almost broke him.
It happened in a moment of laughter and easy laziness, all four of them “knocking back” together in the study after a long day. Comfortable domesticity had slid suddenly into high battle alert, as Sam’s peaceful, teasing mind spiralled abruptly into bright shards and pain.
The stiffening and writhing of his body, the little noises of panic as his awareness of reality vanished, were only secondary symptoms next to the state of his mind. Castiel reached out, shoved in without ceremony, meeting no resistance: Sam’s mind was turned inward, buried under an onslaught of impossibly age-old memories, heavy and sharp-edged and smothering.
Castiel dove on instinct, bracing himself against the wave, slowing and containing it, realising as he did so that Gabriel was beside him. Gabriel’s grace lashed across his, desperate and confused and viciously stubborn, and Castiel dug in his metaphorical heels and locked his mind around his brother’s, giving Gabriel a moment to take stock. Gabriel growled, mind and body, and Castiel dimly felt it vibrate through his physical arm where it was pressed in tight between Gabriel’s chest and Sam’s shoulder.
Can’t turn it back. Can’t lock it up. Can’t... Fuck, Castiel, hold.
Castiel slipped and dug in tighter, closing steely and defensive against a fresh hot tangle of sensory and emotional impressions.
What is it? Who is it?
I don’t know, I can’t see, I can’t feel anyone but Sam, Castiel, and I can’t find him under all this. Castiel, I need -
Then it all scattered, their hasty dam shocked out of place and swamped, as a jostle and a hard shake and an angry voice jolted Castiel back towards the physical plane.
“… the hell do you think you’re doing to him? Sam! Sammy! Gabriel, if you’ve hurt him, I swear by-”
Castiel’s eyes snapped open, and he hurled Dean across the room.
The shock of it froze Dean against the wall, just for a moment. Then he struggled to his feet, eyes burning, and Castiel stepped between him and the rigid form of Gabriel.
Sam convulsed, slamming his elbow into the wall. Gabriel couldn’t hold his mind and his body at once. Their time was short.
“What are you doing to him?” Dean growled, dark and promising violence.
“Trying to save him. Dean, be still,” Castiel commanded, brooking no negotiation. “You must trust-”
“Chamael,” Gabriel gasped, sudden and shocked. “Chamael.”
Castiel turned to him, thoughts stuttering to a halt for a moment. Because surely…
Dean took advantage, dived past him, reaching desperately for his brother’s shirt. Castiel caught his elbow and spun him around, spreading his wings in the same instant, and carried him to central Arizona.
Dean broke away as soon as his feet touched gritty earth, furious and betrayed. “The hell, Cas? Take me back!”
Castiel shoved him, hard, and pushed right into his space, matching wrath for wrath. “You think you are the only one who loves your brother, Dean? Still?” Dean opened his mouth, derailed for just long enough for Castiel to override whatever he had been about to snarl back. “Only a fool demands answers of the surgeon while he operates. If Gabriel’s hold is broken, Sam’s mind will be shattered and lost.”
“What is it, Cas? Tell me that. What happened to him?”
Castiel hesitated, a moment too long. Chamael. The memories, too vast and aged and beyond human experience.
“I don’t know.”
Dean’s eyes narrowed. “The hell you don’t.”
“I’m not sure, Dean.” Castiel placed a hand flat against his chest, warm and firm. “But you can’t be there. Sam is responding to your agitation. As is Gabriel. As am I.”
“Fuck you, Cas,” Dean spat out, bitter and desperate, tears tracking down his face. “He’s my brother.”
“He is ours too, Dean.” He is our brother. Castiel grabbed for Dean’s head, cradled his face between his hands, fierce and protective, and did not let him pull back. “Dean. I must go to him. Gabriel cannot do this alone.”
Dean punched him. Castiel let it break his skin, and fled.
He and Gabriel cradled Sam’s body between them, as Gabriel held back the weight of one archangel with the sheer bloody stubbornness of another, and Castiel, quick and precise, painstakingly pieced all Chamael’s memories into place around and between all the memories that were only Sam Winchester.
Ten hours passed before he could withdraw, leave Sam sleeping properly on Gabriel’s chest, and go back for Dean.
It was not a good beginning.
Dean blamed Gabriel at the time. In retrospect, regular close exposure to the grace of an archangel and something very like one must have been wearing that wall thin for years, not to mention the shock of hosting all of Lucifer. In retrospect, too, the strange vivid dreams that Sam had been having in recent weeks should have been a warning. Retrospect was all very well, but the sight of Sam convulsing, gasping, unhearing, in Gabriel’s arms was not one to elicit a rational response from his brother. And it had, in the end, been Gabriel whose touch (the lightest of brushes with one wing, casual and laughing) had dissolved the last of that wall into nothing and left Sam flooded with the knowledge of what he had been.
Sam said later that perhaps it wasn’t so much that the wall wore thin, as that he finally felt safe and sure enough, to the depths of himself, to let Chamael out.
And so Sam was Gabriel’s brother as well, and Castiel’s. Some days Castiel suspected that Dean found that particular fact stranger than the fact that he had once been an angel.
---
“So.”
“So.”
“You okay there, Sammy? You’re looking kinda beat up.”
“Yeah. Apparently I knocked myself about pretty good.”
“So. Archangel, huh.”
“Yep. For… quite a while now.”
“So… what do I call you?”
“Dean. I’m still me. Just… got some more memories, that’s all.”
“Yeah, but… who was he? You? Before? You remember not being… you. That’s gotta be… weird.”
“I made a choice to become this, Dean. And now I’m choosing to stay.”
“… Okay.”
“Gabriel’s pretty hurt, you know. What you said to him after...”
“Gabriel can bite me.”
“Nice, Dean.”
“No, seriously, Sam. If he hadn’t been poking around in your head these last four years, shoving his grace into you for fun sexytimes, weakening that wall thing that angel-you made to keep you in when he - you - fell, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“And that’s different from what you and Cas - hell, you and Gabriel sometimes - have been doing, how exactly?”
“Newsflash, Sam - I don’t have an archangel stashed away in my noggin.”
“How the hell was Gabriel meant to know about that? Or Cas, come to that?”
“He should have known that something like this could happen. He should have said.”
“Something like this?” A pause, and a shift in the air, to something less heated and more fraught. “Is it - is it really so bad, Dean? Me being… what I am?”
“No, Sammy. No. Of course not. Just… it’s going to take some time, okay? Just to… get used to it.
“Tell me about it. Dean, I… I know it’s kind of freaky, okay? As all hell. But I’m not going after my grace. I’m not going to change.”
“… Hey. Did you see the ice age?”
“… Dean.”
“Come on, Sam. Because that had to have been pretty neat.”
“Yes, Dean. I saw the ice age.”
It was a tentative peace.
Now.
“Drop bears.”
“Nope.”
“Hoop snakes.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Giant killer alligators.”
Gabriel grinned around his ice cream, his mouth stained weirdly green. “That’s Florida.”
“Awesome.”
“… Australia just has crocodiles. Especially up north.”
“Giant killer ones?” Dean asked, almost hopeful.
“They’re crocodiles. What do you think?”
“Yeah, point. Bunyips?”
“A few dozen different kinds of water monster in the lakes and rivers and billabongs across the country, one of which was called bunyip in one local language, but yeah, mostly.”
“Riding kangaroos to work.”
“Only me. Because I’m that awesome.”
“Christmas in summer.”
“Well, obviously.” Gabriel spun on his heel in the middle of the street, arms stretched out dramatically, encompassing pale blue sky and dusty red earth and the sun beating off the grey weatherboard shop fronts and the dog panting on his side in the shade of the eucalypts. “It’s December 23, hot shot - does it look like winter here to you?”
“It’s Australia. It’s meant to be freaky hot.” Dean shuddered. “Summer Christmases. Talk about unnatural.”
“Hey.” Sam’s large hand curled around the back of Castiel’s neck. “How’re you going?”
A warm throb of affection stirred itself in Castiel’s chest. How very characteristic a question - to him, who had least reason of all of them to be nervous about the coming day. Castiel gave the question careful consideration anyway, because Sam usually had reasons for asking.
“Concerned,” he decided after a minute, “but not afraid.”
Sam’s thumb brushed thoughtfully back and forth through the hair at the nape of Castiel’s neck. “You don’t think we’re all gonna screw this up horribly and kill each other afterwards?”
It was said lightly, as if signalling a joke; but there was a little pulse of anxiety beating low underneath it, a little thread saying, this is on me, I chose this, this could ruin us.
Castiel looked ahead, to where Dean’s head was leaning down towards Gabriel’s, the warmth in his laugh muted but genuine, heartfelt. Gabriel’s throat was a soft vulnerable curve edged by golden sunlight as he tipped his face to grin back.
“Hey, are the sheep poisonous?” Dean’s tone suggested that he could forgive any country summer Christmases if it offered him something as interesting as poison sheep.
“Yep.” Gabriel smirked at him indulgently. “Everything’s poisonous. Especially the sheep. Also, rocks in the shallow water, and old cans and bottles on the beach.”
Dean eyed him narrowly. “That’s your I’m-secretly-telling-the-truth face.”
“Stonefish and blue-ringed octopus. Do your research. If you get yourself stung, I’m making your brother do all the resurrection paperwork.”
Sam’s hand was all damp heat and gentle strength at the back of Castiel’s neck.
“No, I don’t,” Castiel said, firm and low. “I trust each of you.”
Sam’s long easy stride faltered for just a moment; then he leaned over and pressed his mouth hot and grateful and sweet against the corner of Castiel’s jaw.
---
Castiel went with Dean to hire the boat for the following day. That is to say, Castiel stood back and listened with quiet fascination to Dean’s and the owner’s passionate discussion of this particular vessel’s mechanics, specifications, adaptations, and personality quirks. Apparently boats could be as individual as Dean insisted a car could, to the discerning and devoted individual.
When Castiel stepped softly into place beside Dean and settled a familiar hand on his hip, the boar’s owner didn’t bat an eyelid. Dean called it a personality litmus test; Castiel liked the quiet statement of possession it made. Either way, the deal was settled within two minutes.
While Dean was signing off on the paperwork, the man chatted his way a list of reef marine life they should keep an eye out for. Castiel privately doubted that Dean would be in any mood for admiring sea urchins and manta rays, but he had to admire the rather hopeless ingenuity of humanity when the man recommended seeing off a great white shark attached to your leg by poking it in the eye.
Dean grinned his easy, charming grin. “Not a problem. I’ll just set Cas here on it.”
The man - James Phillip Ladurie - laughed, sun-bleached and friendly. Castiel smiled a little with him, enjoying the amusement Dean found in playing on the discrepancy between Castiel’s true strength and the slight appearance of his vessel beside Dean’s solid form.
When they were out of sight, alone in the angle between the wall of the kiosk and the rise of a sand dune, Dean stopped, reached for Castiel’s wrist, and pulled him into a rough hug. His breath misted hot and restless over Castiel’s ear and the edge of his cheek, and Castiel turned his face in to nuzzle along Dean’s jaw, to press a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth.
Dean exhaled, quiet and frustrated, and leaned into him a little.
This was still new. Dean, daring to reach out and ask when he needed it.
Castiel slid his fingers into Dean’s hair and held him there, let Dean’s heart beat slow and strong against Castiel’s, separated only by a few inches of flesh and bone and cotton. For all that Castiel had many he loved now - truly loved, had learned to love, not just an inherited love that had been sown in him at his creation - this soul, burning bright and stubborn under his hands just as it had done since he had seized it in the Pit, this was by far the most precious to him.
Dean grunted against his cheek, turned his head to kiss him once, fierce and brief, then pulled back. “Seriously, Cas. No sharks.”
“No sharks,” Castiel promised him gravely.
Dean grinned at him, almost easy, and ruffled his hair up in the way he knew Castiel found irritating. “Let’s go see if Gabriel’s managed to get them arrested yet.”
Monsters and evils were one kind of a challenge. Castiel suspected that this, what they were facing now, was perhaps the hardest one they’d faced together yet, as a family. But they’d made it this far.
Thirty-nine weeks ago.
While he was technically aware of every single event in human history, Castiel was endlessly fascinated by the stories people told about themselves. This applied both to Chaucer’s version of the Trojan war and to twentieth-century critics’ commentary on Chaucer. Dean had called him a nerd and then bought him the out-of-print, costly Riverside Chaucer for Christmas, because the internet had told him that it was the definitive edition.
“Hey.”
Gabriel, curled up into a ball in the frankly extravagant nest of blankets and cushions he’d built in front of the television, raised his head warily.
Castiel watched over the top of his book as Dean held out a giant bowl of hot caramel- and salt-coated popcorn, which Gabriel could easily have fetched for himself if he’d wanted to. “Since you’re parked in front of the TV anyway.” He shrugged, aiming for casual and coming off as awkward. “Just made up a big batch, so…”
One of Gabriel’s eyebrows crept up, like a bemused and ironic caterpillar, and Castiel wondered for one sharp moment whether he should glare a warning at him, before he said something sarcastic and irreparable. But all he said was a half-mumbled, “Thanks,” and he snugged the bowl into his lap.
(There were some aspects of the human sensory experience that Castiel suspected he would never understand, caramel with salt being among them.)
Dean stood there for a moment, hands shoved into his pockets, looming like a sheepish boulder. Then he squared his shoulders a little, lifted one foot and prodded at Gabriel’s blanket-swathed knee. “Scoot up, angel.”
Gabriel hesitated a moment before wriggling over to one side and nudging the blankets barely open next to him. Dean took the inch and made a mile of it, as you had to do with Gabriel when he was in this wary and unwanted sort of mood, shoving his way into the nest and knocking the archangel’s shoulder firmly against his own.
Instead of looking at him, Gabriel eyed the television narrowly, until it conceded defeat and started spontaneously showing a Dr Sexy marathon.
Dean carefully stole some of his popcorn.
They were all getting better. Learning how to work around each other’s weak points, rather than shove against them. Learning how to fix things when they broke. Castiel thought they could manage this, together.
Two episodes later, shoulder fitted snugly against shoulder, Gabriel muttered, “You’re a little bitch when you’re grumpy, you know that?”
Dean let out a slow breath, then kicked him under the blanket. “Yeah, you might have mentioned before. Once or twice. Sammy too.”
Gabriel’s mouth twisted into something too soft to be a smirk, and he cocked an eyebrow at Castiel over Dean’s head.
Castiel turned a page. “Don’t look at me. Dean and I never argue.”
Dean snorted, a soft, amused puff of air, which turned into a swallowed hiss when Gabriel abruptly snaked an arm around his waist, nipped the side of his neck, and appropriated his shoulder as his own personal chinrest. “So, if some dick stuck you in this show and you were forced to have a threesome with Dr Sexy and one of the chicks to get out - Piccolo or Wang?”
Dean laughed, startled, and leaned back into Gabriel a bit, his voice a low rumble of amused relief. “I don’t know, big man. You think someone’s likely to?”
Castiel smiled to himself, and returned his attention to Criseyde and Pandarus.
Now.
Gabriel insisted on a good hotel, except there weren’t any that matched up to his standards of decadence because the town was too small and apparently spas weren’t what counted as luxury out here. So instead Sam insisted on a pleasant B&B run by an old Torres Strait Islander couple, in which the dressers were overrun with seashells and glass dolphins and the beds were as soft and deep as any Castiel had ever lain in.
Only, there were two bedrooms.
Castiel watched Sam’s eyes slip from Dean’s stiff jaw to Gabriel’s too-nonchalant shrug. He didn’t need to dig below the surface to see the fears and desires in all of them; could see how a night alone with Sam would play out for either.
Dean’s fear of losing his brother pulsated pale inside him: that whatever he would hold in his arms in twenty-four hours would be some other creature, too ancient and bright for Dean’s hands, for Dean’s protection. And coupled with that, the queasy fear of being left behind, of being the only human remaining in their strange little family. As if he thought they would tire of the mortal, in their own (eternally long) time.
Gabriel - Gabriel feared hurting Sam, feared that his own strength and control would not be great enough to keep from burning Sam out when he passed over Sam’s old grace; or perhaps to keep from mutilating his soul beyond repair so that Sam was an angel again, only a soulless angel, with nothing of his human self remaining. Killing Sam through his own inadequacies. Losing Dean to grief and fury, losing Castiel to Dean’s needs. Breaking the family. Losing Dean even if they succeeded - that Dean would not forgive him, and that the sundering would come about that way. Some way. Gabriel’s old fear, the broken family, one way or the other. Because even now, after four years (so short in his lifetime, so long for the humans), Gabriel could still never entirely believe himself beloved, wanted, included, trusted. Dean’s instinctive reaction when Sam’s memories had returned - to blame the person he had trusted most to protect Sam - had done more damage than perhaps either Gabriel or Dean had recognised.
Dean would be rough and tender and quietly desperate tonight, pressing bruises into Sam’s skin, digging his thumb into the soft human flesh to prove that it wouldn’t burn him, not yet. Possessive and jealous, never moving away from Sam’s mouth for long, keeping it for his own. Gabriel would be sweet with him instead, sweet and insistent. Would want to be held down and claimed, until he was breathless and wordless and lost. To feel Sam’s strength and love to the depths of him. And both, both would spend all night secretly glad and savagely guilty that Sam was with him, and not with the other.
Castiel pushed down the urge to lock Dean and Gabriel together instead, to make them kiss and bite and shove and hold, and himself to take away from Sam the need to look strong and relaxed. To pin Sam’s powerful body to the mattress and take him apart, touch by touch, to hold him down and break him and keep him, and remake him into something loose and sated and sure.
He stretched out his hand, and lightly touched the inside of Sam’s wrist.
“We stay together,” he told them, low and definite.
Gabriel’s eyes went honey-deep and sharp; Dean relaxed a little, and slipped his hands into its familiar spot in the small of Castiel’s back; Sam smiled his brilliant lopsided smile; and no one raised an argument.
Twenty-four weeks ago.
“Uriel.”
Castiel paused outside the motel room, scenting gun oil and old rags and tequila on the air. Dean’s voice, thrown out like a lazy challenge, just a little slurred around the edges with drink, made him reconsider his impulse to stay the night.
Sam made a rude noise. “Exactly what he looked like from down here. Overzealous on the hard stuff, not interested in the rest of it. Crap sense of humour.” Castiel heard him toss back a shot. “Not afraid to call his superiors out on something if it went against his judgement, but his judgement was shit.”
“Okay.” The click and slide of a gun barrel being taken apart, professional and easy. “Balthazar.”
Sam hummed thoughtfully. “Irreverent, lazy. Doesn’t know when to stop. Takes loyalty personally. I’m pretty sure he covered for Cas to me, once or twice.” That, Castiel had not known. He made a mental note to hunt Balthazar down and frown at him. “No good at the whole ‘good of the whole before good of the one’ thing, but freaking fierce if anything threatened you once he liked you.”
“So, not actually a dick?”
“Nope. Your default.” This time it was Dean who knocked back a shot.
“Michael.”
A brief silence, then Sam sighed. “Honestly? Big brother. Kind of like you could have been, if, you know, Dad had left you in charge of an army instead of just me. And the bits where he isn’t like you are the bits where he’s even more like Dad. He’s… screwed up, but he really tries. Just… really, really not that good at listening.”
Dean’s voice was ironic and a little heavy. “Yeah. Kind of got that.”
Castiel could hear the half-hearted smirk in Sam’s voice. “Drink up.”
Dean snorted, but obeyed. Then, predictably, “Lucifer.”
Sam barked out a short laugh, and knocked back a shot straight away. “Bastard ran off and left me to deal with his workload. Do you know how much lore confuses me with him, Dean?”
“Fuck, yes,” Dean slurred, fervent and heavy. “You think I haven’t been reading up?”
Sam’s voice vibrated between teasing and something deeper, something that ached. “Aw, look at you. Little Dean, all growed up, doing his research all by himself.”
“Screw you, angel.” It was amiable, casual, almost easy, and followed by the sounds of a brief scuffle.
There was a pause. Then,
“Castiel.”
Sam laughed, more freely. “If you want to get smashed, Dean, don’t let me stop you.”
Castiel stepped back through the folds of space, opened his wings, and left them to it.
Now.
The wind blew cool and salt in Castiel’s face. The speed and the wind felt almost like flying - lazy physical flying, not true angelic flight - save for the thrum and purr of the boat underfoot. Dean steered her from the harbour as tenderly as if she had been his own sleek car, skudding out away from the wide pale sweep of the bay’s arm and the dark pillows of the hills beyond. Sam was helping by lounging around in the cabin with him, all long limbs and lazy pointless comments of the sort that made Dean roll his eyes and smile, just a bit.
Castiel turned his face toward the eastern horizon, the strange vastness of the ocean. Vaster than space, because it meant more, just as a tiny human soul was inexplicably greater than the immense grace of any angel. He tried to categorise the hues of the water that heaved and scattered under the prow according to the colours of precious and semi-precious stones. Erinite, sapphire, peridot, indicolite, turquoise, Pacific opal, chrysolite, blue zircon, and the logical aquamarine. Clear and beautiful as any of them, but sparkling and shifting, changing. Living. Not frozen, like a jewel, like an angel’s vessel. Alive and true.
Angels had been warriors for millenia; but first, first of all, they had been built for wonder and delight. Too many of his brothers had forgotten it.
The buzzing warmth of Gabriel’s grace and body settled against Castiel’s arm, as the only angel who had never quite forgotten leant his elbows on the rail and made a lascivious comment about selkies. Castiel purred something unimpressed and indulgent, and watched the waves with him.
“It’s remarkable,” he observed after a while. His voice was a deep rumble in his own ears, as if the motion of the water had lulled it into submission. “Even with only human vision, there are so many colours in it.”
Gabriel tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the metal of the railing, nails rattling a jagged compound rhythm. “Guess Dad did a decent job of it.”
Castiel sharpened his gaze to focus on the micro-lives teeming below the surface, millions of thriving, wriggling creatures to each drop. “He, and they.”
Gabriel made a sharp, amused noise. Castiel looked sideways at him, at the soft edges of him, at the way the light curled around his throat and hair as if it had known and loved him for a very long time.
“How much do you think he did?” he asked quietly, of the archangel who had once carried God’s word. “At every step along the way? Did he intend the melanistic leopard and the coral polyp and the mountains of Spain?”
His brother was quiet for a while, but it was the quiet he put on when he was steeling himself to answer something honestly, without the mask of play. “Used to figure it was everything,” he replied in the end. “Then I thought, well, just the bits he likes, on the days he gets bored with his X-box and wanders out of his basement. Now?” He tipped his head a little, grinned at Castiel like they were both in on the maddest of jokes. “I think maybe he gave everything the potential and just… nudges sometimes. Puts interesting options in the way.”
Castiel thought about that for a while, watched the bright butterfly-flashes of fish appear and vanish in the water below him. “We know he wanted humanity.”
“Nah.” Gabriel shoved at Castiel’s arm with his shoulder, and Castiel obediently moved his arm, let Gabriel slide in warm and unfathomable against his side. “We just know he wanted something with the imagination to think of him, and go further than him. Don’t mean he was nudging monkeys towards being apes and apes towards being people. Could just as easily have been really sneaky hermit crabs.”
There was something under his voice, a vibrating edge of need, that drew Castiel’s mind back suddenly and vividly to the previous night. To Gabriel and Dean kissing each other hungry and possessive over Sam’s thigh, while Castiel knotted his fingers in Sam’s hair and dragged him in for his own mouth. To Gabriel climbing up Sam’s body to steal Castiel’s breath from them both, leaving Dean’s mouth behind him where it could be put to most effect.
Castiel turned his head now and brushed his lips against Gabriel’s temple, let him feel them curve into something close to a smile. “Why did we let you take us to the Creation Museum last time you got bored?”
The oldest of all angels, save for the two locked in the Cage, nudged Castiel in the ribs with a sharp elbow and peeked up at him coyly through his eyelashes. “You’d look really cute wearing a hermit crab.”
“Dean. The angels are discussing evolution again.”
Castiel looked, and Sam was grinning down at them from the upper deck, balancing easily with the roll of the boat, all lazy and relaxed and wind-mussed. Soft, and touchably human.
Gabriel made a soft noise beside him, like he’d been hurt.
“Don’t make me turn this boat around, boys!” Dean sang out from the cabin.
Then Sam had hopped over the railing and was down on the lower deck with them, crowding a half-grumbling Gabriel back so he was caught against the rail and Castiel’s body.
“Hey,” he murmured, sweet and low against the edge of Gabriel’s jaw, against Castiel’s shoulder. “You’re mine. I trust you.”
Gabriel scoffed half-heartedly, and shoved at Sam’s shoulder with not nearly enough force to move it. “Then you’re a sentimental half-wit, Winchester. Get off me.”
“Sure,” Sam said amiably, and tangled his hand in Gabriel’s hair to kiss him wet and playful and deep. A low growl shook through Gabriel’s body where he was pressed between them, and he pushed up into Sam’s mouth, all heat and teeth, so suddenly that Sam had to snake an arm firmly around Castiel’s waist as an anchor. The boat rolled underfoot, and Castiel hooked one elbow through the rail, pinned Sam and Gabriel’s legs steady with one thigh, and held on to them both.
Sam pulled back, chest heaving, and glared down at Gabriel in that fond, why-am-I-surrounded-by-idiots way he usually kept for Dean. “I can take your grace, and my old memories, and I took all of Lucifer. You’re not gonna lose me.”
Gabriel’s teeth flashed, bright and sharp. “Keep it that way,” he said flatly.
Sam beamed sunnily at him. “So. Nearly there. Dean’s going to pull her over, or whatever you say when it’s a boat, just up here by this big shoal-thing.”
“How precise can you be?” Castiel asked
Sam shrugged, and shifted off them to lean on the railing himself. “Couple of hundred cubic yards. I can feel it almost all around me now - still room in that for a bit of legwork, though, to find it exactly.”
Gabriel hummed thoughtfully. “So what you’re saying is, it’s about time you took off all your clothes and got all wet.”
Sam’s smile went happy and indulgent under the curtain of his hair. “That’s pretty much the shape of it, yeah. You joining me?”
Onwards to part 2...