In His Image: Cracking
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In which Sam rethinks what really happened in the panic room after Famine and tells Dean; then makes a decision, and doesn’t tell Dean.
Sam, Dean, Gabriel (flashback only).
crack [v]: orig. To make a dry sharp sound in breaking, to break with this characteristic sound; ‘crack down upon’: to repress, to take strong measures against; to joke; to puzzle out, discuss, solve; fig. to come to pieces, collapse, break down; to break without complete separation or displacement of parts, as when a fracture or fissure does not extend quite across. [n]: colloq. A sharp or cutting remark; a sudden sharp and loud noise as of something breaking or bursting, e.g. the crack of a rifle, bones, etc.; arch. ‘crack of doom’: the thunder-peal of the day of judgement, or perh. the blast of the archangel's trump.
February 2010.
This time was easier. At least Sam knew it wasn’t real.
Michael, wearing Dad’s face from the year Sam left, wielding a knife and smiling past him and telling him exactly how Dean was God’s perfect son and Sam was an abomination, carving words of terrible love into his entrails. Gabriel the Trickster, dressed in immaculate white robes that shifted treacherously into other colours at the corners of Sam’s vision, smirking and promising and dragging him through glass, always just about to save him and always savage. Castiel, turning away. Mom, loving and promising and telling him that it didn’t matter how weak and useless he was, he was still her little boy, holding him close and seeming not to notice when her fingernails sawed jagged and slow through his spine. Lucifer, beautiful and cold, too close, reaching out to brush fingertips like spider silk against Sam’s cheek. Michael again. Mom. Castiel, weeping horribly because Sam had broken Dean. Unsubtle Zachariah. Over and over again, until time lost its meaning.
It was impossible to scream, without lungs. Sam couldn’t help but try anyway.
Last time this had happened he had never ridden it out. Last time he had escaped, got what he wanted, then been cleaned up by… God. Or whatever.
They still didn’t know where this ended.
“Zachariah, Sam? Really?”
The new voice reverberated in his bones and set his blood burning. It mocked and lilted, sliding sideways in his head, somehow deeper and hotter and more tangible than the glowing tyre iron that Zachariah was sliding between his ribs to see if he could find a “yes” in there because what else are you good for, Sam, what else are you for.
Soft footsteps echoed around the walls, tapping from the far corner and curling insidiously around the room until they stopped behind his head.
“Hey, you’re much shorter when you’re strapped down. I think I like it.”
Cruel, his body told him, cruel and old and terrible. His muscles locked, tugging him against the restraints, trying to writhe down the table away from that scalpel-like gaze that he could hear stroking over his hair and face. Pushing into Zachariah’s dripping hands.
The hands vanished.
Cool, blessed life rushed back into lungs that had suddenly always been there. Sam gulped it down, choking, grateful despite himself for a few seconds at least before they started in again.
Just what he needed. Someone more creative than Zachariah. Or even than Michael.
His voice scraped out, trying to sound bored and only managing sore. “Not you again.”
“You know one thing I’ve never missed about upstairs is that joyless bastard’s smarmy voice.” The voice was a tiny little buzz saw, hissing inside his skull, casual and far-away. “Of course, there was that one time I took it off him for a year. Luke one, verse five and some change. Good times.” A shift of cloth, and a foot scraping on the concrete floor, sliding just a little closer. Then the voice, a little sharper, almost wary. “And what do you mean, me again? I haven’t stopped by... this room... before.”
Shifty. Evasive. Trickster. Hovering, just out of sight. Just too close. Sam swallowed the bile in his throat, clenched his fists against the straps and growled. “Except five minutes ago.” Or ten. Or an hour. Or weeks.
Delight - malice - rippled through Gabriel’s voice. “Aw, Sammy, you’ve been dreaming about little old me? I’m...” He was leaning forward, swaying lightly on his feet, Sam could feel the air moving, prickling the top of his scalp: “… actually kinda disturbed, I think. What did dream-me have to say?”
“Go and ask him yourself.”
Sam could feel the smirk. “He’s not my dream.”
The shadows shifted, raw and dark, flowing across the ceiling towards him like they always did just when the pain was about to start up again. A hellhound snarled at his feet.
Fingers snapped, the sound echoing sharp and cold around the walls. The hellhound vanished.
Sam waited, breathing slowly against the sensation of cold fingers stroking up his thighs. Pain and violation were only the dressing. It was the talking that was the worst. Trying to guess where they were steering him, where they were going to attack, especially the ones who started soft and kind. Apparently his hallucinations always knew just how to turn his head around.
Made sense, really. If anyone knew how to screw Sam up, it was Sam.
The voice wormed its way into him, seemed to bypass his ears and pierce straight into his veins. Deceptively gentle, under that - soft and sweet that you knew would be rotten with grubs but couldn’t stop yourself from biting, burning sickly velvet under your tongue. “Gotta say, kid, I’m a little impressed. As sheer bull-headed stubbornness goes, digging in your heels against Famine? Not bad.”
Oh, so that’s where this one was going to go. Any minute now it would twist sideways into the “you’re too weak to save anyone” spiel. Or possibly, “just how human are you, you freak?”
Sam grinned madly at the fan in the ceiling, refusing to play along with the script. “Yeah, you know how it would have been easier? If we’d had an archangel on-side.”
It purred like a tiger. “Hey, power ain’t willpower. I may be awesome, but stubborn is a Winchester gig. You and Dean could out-glower me any day.” A flicker of movement at the edge of Sam’s vision, purple and green and the corner of a curled lip. “You have heard of Loki, right? I’ve got my desires.”
Loki. Something niggled at Sam’s mind, something that didn’t quite fit. He strained his head against the straps, trying to distract, to catch more than a mocking glimpse.“I thought Castiel was only susceptible because he’s getting kind of human.”
A hand circled in the air, careless and promising the world and illusion and betrayal. “No, it’s because he’s halfway to lost that it took the form of hunger for human sensations. Your brother’s lucky he didn’t try to jump him.” The casually patronising tone turned to a leer. “Unless he did and I missed that part.”
“Yeah, well, unless he jumped him with a clue-by-four Dean would have missed it too.”
Silence, then a startled bubble of laughter behind him. “Almost forgot why I liked you, kid. When you’re not, oh, breaking the world.”
Sam yelped, muffled, as mocking invisible fingers danced over his hips and dug into his stomach, pushing sharp and insinuating into the flesh. Even as he writhed away from them, his mind skittered and sharpened. He could do this. He’d found out ten rounds ago (or fifty) that, if he could keep them talking about themselves instead of him, it sometimes lasted longer. They got distracted. Sometimes there were minutes at a time when he could breathe without anything raking into his skin. Only aspects of his own subconscious, of course, but that made sense too, if he was concentrating on logistical problems instead of on himself.
Aspects of his subconscious. They couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know. But if they could still surprise him, that meant his mind was piecing together things he didn’t know he knew. He had assumed that Gabriel was Coyote or some other indigenous Trickster. But why not Loki? It wasn’t as if geography counted for anything with angels. And it fit.
He could play this game.
“What would yours be, then? With Famine?” he threw out, as if he didn’t care.
A shoe scraped against the floor. The sound jolted through his bones, orange and jagged white like wrath. The dream-Gabriel moved, circling around towards Sam’s left, and pain scurried through him as if everything in him was trying to tug free of his skin and run away to hide on the other side of his body, pointing the archangel’s direction like a compass. “This is what passes for polite conversation with Winchesters, is it? Sitting around asking people about their deepest and dirtiest?”
His voice was wrong. Wrong in a way that went beyond the writhing of Sam’s insides at his very presence, beyond the jagged black fire in his blood screaming enemy, enemy. It was… too light, too mocking, almost inconsequential. Not what an angel should sound like. Not even the deep rumble of Castiel’s voice, which Sam swore he could feel in his bones.
And that wasn’t logical. Gabriel, illusory or real, was every inch an angel, in the sense that Sam had learned, painfully, since Dean had come back from Hell. The idea of “angel” that Castiel had turned his back on, for them (for Dean). Not the kind of angel that Sam had believed in, trusted, as a child, and cherished some vague faith in for years beyond, even when he had seen what the world was like. And even when Castiel, beautiful and stern, had turned blank eyes on him and called him the boy with demon blood, even when Zachariah had given Dean stomach cancer and told him he belonged to an archangel, even when Lucifer had whispered in his ear that Sam only mattered for what he could contain, there had been a faint trace of that old “angel” left alive in Sam’s imagination. Not the Michael of church windows, steel-clad arm upraised in stern vengeance. Gabriel, the bearer of joy and salvation. Gabriel, the one angel left from his childhood in whom he could still place hope. Gabriel, surely the angel of white fluffy wings and goodness if any was. Gabriel, the coward of centuries. Scuffling around down here in the mud, playing sordid pranks on dicks.
Sam thudded his head back against the bench, straining to see where the Trickster was. Always just out of sight. It wants you dead, demon. It wants you worse than dead. Every minute you’re not watching it, the angel is twisting you into nothingness.
Lonely, alone and abandoned and worthless. Dean won’t come when you call.
Sweat crept on slow feet down Sam’s side, tickling cold where it passed. “I never know what you’re trying to get me to do.” He didn’t mean to say it out loud. Perhaps he didn’t.
Gabriel’s head swayed forward into his vision, eyes intent and deep and old like amber that could trap you in time. And they did, just for a moment, just until Sam noticed his mouth, gaping and grinning with teeth like a boar’s curving up over his cheekbones and down under his chin. A long tongue, orange and scaled, twisted lithe and obscene around the tusks as the angel-thing purred, or murmured, or snarled, “Your perception’s screwed to hell, kid. You know that, right?”
Sam stared, as dark bat-wings flared behind the Trickster’s shoulders, shadowy against the ridiculous purple suede jacket he was wearing. It shouldn’t have been scarier than Michael’s knife or Mum’s claws, but this felt far too lucid. His breath wouldn’t come out right. “Why are you here?”
The jacket hunched up in a too-casual shrug, and settled against the wall by the door. “Castiel prayed. I heard.”
“Cas?” A little sweet shock, cool water and relief. Castiel, four days before, all crumpled and torn, tugging at that ridiculous tie like he’d just started to notice that it wasn’t part of his inherited body and lifting his soft little almost-smile to Sam over something Dean had said. Castiel, lifting his head from raw meat to stare at Sam with something that might have been admiration or might have been revulsion. Or fear. Even bitter and cut off from Heaven, he carried redemption or damnation in his eyes.
Praying for Sam. Not giving up on him.
Angels, demon. They’re angels. What good is your soul, this scattered, rotten thing in here?
Castiel, two months ago, fluttering in while Sam was reading up on sixteenth-century theories of the soul and body and their relation to the divine (it only made sense to brush up, given the state of their lives). Correcting the text, when Sam asked. Telling him that a soul was necessary for…
Sam gritted his teeth and stared at the ceiling. He should have known better than to listen, even for a moment. “Angels can’t pray. You need a soul for that.”
“He’s not exactly sticking to the rules lately.” Lazily sarcastic again, like a principal pointing out a very obvious fact to a particularly slow five-year-old and waiting for them to catch up. But there was a peculiar twist in there too, something like… pride? envy? Deadly sins, both. “You might have noticed.”
“Hold on.” Sam’s mind raced ahead of itself, stumbling in sudden worry. Angels couldn’t pray, but if it was something like prayer, something other angels could hear… what was his subconscious trying to tell him? And he didn’t think he’d heard anything from outside the room for hours. Peaceful? Or…? “If you heard, does that mean -”
“Whoa, calm down, cowboy. God’s Messenger, remember? And also? Sneaky. No one else is listening.” His voice was smirking again. The table juddered as Gabriel propped one boot insouciantly up against its nearest leg. “I only knew where you are because I’m your own private stalker.”
Oh, well, that was reassuring. In the way that really wasn’t. Sam scowled at the Trickster on reflex. The tusks were gone, and his mouth was twisting into something bitter as he added, “And, hey, let’s face it. Not like there’s anyone else listening to him.”
It was muttered, low and rough, nothing like the spider-silk of the white Gabriel’s voice, or the slippery, bright satin-polyester of this one. It didn’t fit the stupid smug face.
Sam stared hard. “Why do you care?”
Gabriel’s eyes flicked up, too bright (blinding, burning, Pamela’s bleeding dead eyes), then narrowed. His mouth opened and shut again, like he’d missed a step somewhere. “I don’t - care.”
Sam’s heart was beating too fast, too full, as if all the blood in him was swollen and overheated. He held the stare.
The angel looked away.
Hey, bro. How’s the search for Daddy going? Let me guess: awful.
Pressed too close. Drawing back. Sam threw a challenge at him, to distract him.
“You promised I’d be the death of you.”
Gabriel’s eyes snapped back and snared him again, steady and deep and cool and shocked-wide, and nothing like the solemn, robed creature that had made the rotten-sweet promise.
“You promised that together we would defeat Satan and dance on the pyramids as the world crumbled into syllables around us.” Power and glory and horror and lust.
“And… other things.” He had promised everything. Sam’s eyes slid down to the curve of Gabriel’s mouth, supple and wicked and sweet. It looked blue like velvet, and deep as the night sky with nothing behind it.
It stirred under his gaze, tugging slowly into cruel promise.
Sam took a deep breath, and looked away. “You promised that if I said yes to you, you and Lucifer would fight it out inside my head and leave the world untouched.” Gabriel blinked. “And that then, even if you lost, Lucifer would be trapped in a drooling husk of a vessel and would be defeated.”
The Trickster was actually silent for a minute. “... Wow. Dream-me is kind of a sadistic dick.”
Sam scoffed. “Because that doesn’t sound like real-you at all.”
The angel’s eyes narrowed. Then the bench jerked, harsh and loud and sudden, and he was leaning forward with his hands pressed into the bench on either side of Sam’s feet. “Okay, kid, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to give you a pass because you’re high on pain and adrenalin and that blood in you is screaming out that I’m the enemy and you’ve got no idea what’s real right now. And you? You’re going to hold still and trust me for just sixty seconds.”
The air went indigo and choking-heavy. Sam’s limbs jerked hard against the restraints, which were suddenly hot iron, bubbling his skin to ribbons. Trust me. Say yes. Say yes, Winchester, and you’ll never need to think again.
Ruby whispered in his ear, warm and proud and as inevitable as his own weakness. It was you, and your choices. I just gave you the options, and you chose the right path every time.
Distantly, he heard himself snarl, “Trust you? I’m strapped to a bench. That doesn’t usually end well for me.” The angel moved. He felt it, hot and terrible, moving around the bench toward him. “Even on days when I haven’t just had your brothers carving Enochian epics into my stomach.”
Don’t you want power? Power boiling unending inside your skin? And never to have to choose?
“Yes, that sounds like Michael and the God squad…”
You know how well your choices end.
“… Not really my thing, though. I’m more a dirty limerick kind of guy.”
A heavy hand landed on his hip, with the crushing weight of the sea behind it. Sam’s body arched up against it, or his mind, spitting and snarling and fighting with everything he could find in him without the need to think. “Don’t touch me.”
“Sam. Trust me. Please.” It vibrated through him like a copper bell. “I don’t need a pair of righteous Winchesters and Free Will in a trench coat on my tail crying rape, okay? Just - let me -”
Sam lashed out with all he had, with his mind and the super-charged blood that powered it. Grappling with the incomprehensible, something far more tangible than anything should be, like trying to blow out a bonfire when you’re used to snuffing out illusory candle flames with your fingertips.
Pressure tightened on his hipbone, and the voice deepened, shaking through him, soft with frustration. “Kid, that isn’t yours to play with. Not like that. You’re still dancing to their tune, Heaven and Hell both, walking right down that path they made for you. You keep that up and you’re uber-boned, no matter how often you preach about free will.”
He knew he snarled a curse and something vehement, turning his head away as far as ever he could and hearing something growl “No, no, no, no” over and again like the world had been reduced to that, but there was a hand on his chin that turned his head back like a kitten’s and muffled the word under one curled finger.
The thing hovered over him like the choking ash cloud over Pompeii, tickling his mouth and nose and throat and lungs with gritty heat. And it spoke once more, finally, exasperation and anger and deep, deep love, tenderness, impossibilities.
“Samuel Winchester. I promise.”
It reverberated rich and deep, like an angel, like the archangel who spoke for God. He couldn’t have meant it. Sam’s body went still all over, inside and out, the seething of his blood surging to a stop just for a moment.
The archangel’s lips seared against his. Sam’s chest burst into flame.
He screamed aloud, muffled in the hot press of the demigod’s mouth, smothered in the soft curls falling forward over his cheek and eye and the relentless weight of the body arched over his. Fire raced along his stomach, down his thighs, dived into his veins and coiled deep into his toes and his lungs and his hair. His chest was cracking open, he could feel it, great crevasses opening in it like the blackened crust on a lava flow. He writhed helplessly, unmoving, trying to yell against it but finding no words, trying to jerk away from the iron-hard hands clenched on his hip and in his hair. Thread-slim fractures began to cobweb out from each finger’s press, and he could feel each one, see each one, a brilliant starburst of white pain against the scorching red.
His body raged and fought uselessly, and the press of a mouth against his was soft and sweet and bright.
There was something comforting and still moving out from that point, rippling through his twisting body like cool water. It tingled, white and silky, and for some reason it smelled like the leather of the Impala, Jess’ hair, Dean’s cheap aftershave, and peppermint.
His perception really was screwed to hell, he noticed hazily.
The fire on his chest crackled, flamed higher and hissed into nothing. It retreated down his stomach, curled fiercely for a moment across his groin and fled before the pale, cool touch - like grace, bright and fierce and strong.
The pain in his skull and hip faded sheepishly, like the yell in a dream that wakes you and turns into nothingness when the sound of the highway outside reminds your ear what real sound feels like. And how long was it since he had had lips on his, just gentle, that touch of contact and understanding without the demand for sex and blood? Cool air rushed into Sam’s lungs and he clung to it, opened to it in sheer relief, arching up into the soft press of lips above him. Pleading.
The hands on him were gentle, and a thumb was rubbing soothing circles into the hollow of his hip. His skin felt fresh and soft and clean, like he’d just had a cool shower after a long, sweaty hunt. Even his blood felt renewed, coursing calm and orderly under his skin.
The mouth retreated, and he lifted his head a little, trying to press forward again into the cool relief, but the room swam around him. He thought he caught a glimpse of a smirk.
Faint and distant, he might have heard, “See? Sixty seconds. Told you I’m awesome.”
Something brushed his forehead, a delicate and tentative touch that didn’t seem to belong to the voice, as the world faded.
Sam woke up.
---
Present day.
“I figured it was just my subconscious making some sort of weird rationalisation of the demon blood fading. But after last night…”
Dean drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “You often rationalise away weird shit by making out with archangels, Sammy?”
… That would be the part Dean fixated on.
Or rather, it would have been three years ago, when he would have thought nothing about teasing his little brother for days over a single kiss. Even a few weeks back, maybe, before the empty bottles of Jack Daniels had started to pile up under the back seat of the Impala and Dean’s eyes had been redder every morning.
Sam looked out of the window and huffed his irritation, because he was a good brother and if Dean wanted normal, Sam could give him this.
Dean grinned at him sideways, a faint echo of the real thing, but there all the same. “Because if the real reason Lucifer’s been a no-show in your head for months is that you two had some kind of dream-lovers’ tiff, you can tell me.”
Sam let habit colour his voice with exasperation, but he was fairly sure it ended up warmer than it should have been. “It wasn’t a kiss, Dean. It was some kind of weird angelic grace-cleansing thing. Right back through the Middle Ages, at least as early as the ninth century, the mouth was meant to be the gateway to the soul. It’s why demons have to possess you through the mouth, and kiss you to seal a deal.”
Dean nodded curtly, the brief flicker of levity slipping away. “Okay, Encycloboy. So you’re thinking, what - that Gabriel was actually in the panic room with you?”
“I guess. Or doing that angelic dream-walking thing. Does it really matter?”
“What tipped you off?”
Sam shrugged and turned his face back to the window. Dean’s inert profile and shuttered eyes were already familiar enough. Looking at them too often made it hard to forget that Sam was still angry, and more than a little scared. You think you’re the only one white-knuckling it, Dean? “Just details, you know? The Loki thing too, though that could be coincidence. Mostly the way he was acting last night in the hotel. We hadn’t really seen him being an angel before, but the way he talked, some of his expressions, they were familiar. And thinking it over just now, I worked out that I only recognised them from what I saw in the panic room. The way he looked when he told you he didn’t care about the pagans?” Sam carefully kept his voice neutral. “He looked exactly the same when he got all protective over Castiel for a moment.”
“Huh.” Even without looking, Sam could feel Dean covering up his flinch at the name. “You think he meant you to notice?”
Sam cast his mind back. “I think he was dropping hints in that porno. A couple of things he said - Michael and the God squad, little turns of phrase like that - not the kind of thing you drop by accident.”
“So he wanted you to know, if he died.” Dean nodded. “You didn’t say yes to anything, did you?”
“What? No!”
“Not even when you were tripping out?”
Sam scowled. “I’m not an idiot, Dean.”
“Good. Wouldn’t put it past one of them to turn it around the wrong way and hold you to it.”
“Angel, Dean. Not a crossroads demon.”
“You willing to take a chance on that, if it came to it?” Dean glanced at him sideways, his eyes dark and serious under his lashes. “Look, Sammy, we’re not exactly playing with a full set of rules here. It’s consent for angels, kissing for demons, sex for pagan gods. I’m just saying, he’s two out of three and we don’t know what else.”
Sam shifted uncomfortably, because he had been sitting still for too long and not at all because that was actually a disturbing thought. Besides, it could hardly make a difference now. “Was, Dean.”
Dean shrugged and turned his eyes back to the road as if he didn’t care, though there was something too tight about the line of his jaw for a moment, the way he looked when he blamed himself. Then again, it was pretty much always like that lately. Sam vaguely considered making a crack about how messed up their lives were that non-consensual kissing was apparently the way to go, but he hadn’t managed to make it stop sounding lame in his head before Dean said, carefully bland, “How’d he find you anyway? I thought those bone tattoos were scrambling the signal.”
Castiel prayed, I heard. No, too many questions and raw nerves.
Your own private stalker. Definitely not. Whatever he’d meant by that.
“Well, if it was a dream it wouldn’t matter,” Sam pointed out carefully. “Lucifer found me a couple of times after Cas did that.”
“Yes, but not lately - right?” Dean’s voice sharpened a little, protective, his patented “just checking on my little brother in case he’s been stupid enough to forget to mention something like the devil in his head” tone.
Sam only rolled his eyes in answer. Lucifer-stalking was an effective distraction from Gabriel-stalking, apparently. And when had Sam become the guy who got stalked by multiple archangels and found it kind of normal? “I thought you’d be a bit more freaked out over this.”
Dean checked the mirrors and indicated, despite the empty highway behind them, before swinging left onto a narrower road. The sinking sun glanced in through the window across his lap and drew critical fingers through the two-day stubble on his throat. “The guy came through for us in the end. Took him long enough to pull his head out of his ass, but he did it.”
His voice was still too neutral. For all that Dean hated talking about his emotions, he had never been much good at hiding them. There was a sort of softness to his eyes and mouth that showed every flicker of desire or hurt. Everything came easily, amusement or fury, little bits of Dean’s life chasing each other over his face without stopping to fit together. It was only when he really wasn’t dealing at all that he deliberately held up a wall in front of it.
Sam stretched out in his chair and tipped his head back against the headrest. It wasn’t as if Gabriel had actually owed them anything, or cared about them personally, even if he had apparently decided that it made sense to keep them in the game. And it wasn’t as if Dean could have expected it, despite all the shouting. “That wasn’t for us, Dean. That was for the gods.”
“Whatever,” Dean muttered, staring the road into submission. Then he added, unexpectedly, “I kind of liked the guy.”
Sam threw a look over at him, half incredulous and mostly curious.
“No, I get it.” Dean’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel, his tone measured. “Most angels have never had to make a choice for themselves, you know? And that’s something you’ve got to learn, it doesn’t come all at once.” He smirked faintly, no amusement behind it. “Hell, it took me long enough to stop just trying to do what Dad would do, and I only had twenty-seven years with the man. And angels…”
Dean stumbled for a moment, swallowed, and continued, with only a little rumble of emotion audible. “… well, they’re kind of like kids, aren’t they? Great big super-powered sulky kids. Who never had to grow up. And sometimes… sometimes you’ve got to yell at kids until they get their asses in gear.”
He locked his jaw and kept his eyes fixed on the road.
Dean had barely cracked a smile since that kid Dylan had been killed on their watch by the Whore’s demons, since Michael had taken Adam. Or rather - because Sam was not completely oblivious even if Dean was - since Dean had seen Castiel listing bitter and drunk in their room in Blue Earth, since Castiel had chased Dean down after he had escaped from the panic room, then had vanished in Van Nuys.
Sam didn’t know what Castiel had said to Dean when he found him, but he’d seen how Castiel had looked when Dean had ditched them in Blue Earth. He was pretty sure it wasn’t any physical beating that had made his brother look so hunched and small in the panic room afterwards.
They were both a broken mess. Cracking a little further apart every week, every week for years, and never stopping to put themselves back together. Even without the hopeless, looming inevitability of saying “yes.” Maybe habit and white-knuckled stubbornness were the only things that kept them going anyway.
Sam pretended he didn’t know which angel Dean was talking about (or which two, to be honest, and apparently if Sam had a habit of picking up angelic dream stalkers, Dean was cultivating a fine collection of angels who looked to him for moral guidance and exchanged meaningful glowers with him). “And Michael’s decided to grow up in Dad’s image. Taking over the family business.”
Dean snorted, and agreed, heavy with irony, “The perfect son.”
Sam chewed his lip. “I don’t know. I think it’d be kind of depressing to have a perfect little clone for a kid. I mean, how do you actually grow up into a real person if you’re just copying someone else all the time? Dad turned into Dad because of what he did and chose and saw, and if someone just tried to mimic what they saw of him in his mirror… it’d be only an image, right? Two-dimensional. It wouldn’t mean anything. Which I guess is even more true if your father is, well, God.”
Perfect sons apparently didn’t make very good brothers.
Dean made a vague sound, and didn’t answer.
Sam found himself wondering, for some reason, just how it had gone down. What Gabriel had said to Lucifer before he died. What Lucifer had said back, in that voice that was always so quiet and gentle like the tender drag of teeth over skin, as if his face wasn’t spattered with blood.
Oh.
Maybe Sam was completely oblivious after all. A fine collection of angels who looked to Dean for moral guidance, stood up and fought, then died.
Castiel’s eyes, disillusioned and close to broken and furious with himself, as he opened his shirt and held out the pen knife to Sam. He hadn’t met Dean’s eyes once.
“Dean.” Sam’s voice scraped, and he cleared his throat, surprising himself when what came out was, “Gabriel said… he said he came because he heard Cas praying for me.”
“… Huh.”
Dean didn’t say anything else for a long minute, but even out of the corner of his eye, Sam could see the little flickers running across his face, the painful flutters of his eyelashes and throat. Finally he settled on muttering, “Poor bastard.”
Sam picked carefully at his sleeve, not sure whether this would make things better or worse. “How do you mean?”
Dean’s voice was low, dragged out with difficulty and hard to make out over the growl of the Impala’s engine. “He thought no one was listening. Turns out someone was, but…”
Sam had a sudden vivid memory of the hope dying in Castiel’s eyes. Maybe… maybe Joshua was lying.
Dean’s fingernails tapped out a little staccato rattle on the steering wheel. “… It was runaway big brother.”
It’s not like there’s anybody else listening to him.
Sam blinked, as his mind caught up with what Dean had actually said. “Hang on. Castiel told you he’d been praying?”
Dean slid his eyes over to Sam for a minute, wary, like he wasn’t sure whether this was going to be a stop-corrupting-the-angel-Dean conversation or a pour-out-your-heart one. “Yeah.”
“Dean…” Yes, alright, this actually was kind of personal. Sam hedged his words delicately. “I don’t know what Gabriel meant, but angels can’t actually pray.”
Dean grunted, not letting anything go. “Sure they can. They’ve probably got a direct line to the boss or something.”
“No, I mean they literally can’t pray. Cas said prayer is like… communion between the soul and God. Angels don’t have souls.” And if Castiel’s eyes had been getting more and more soulful in the months before he sacrificed himself, well, that was only a figure of speech. And him learning to recognise and express emotions. Lucky Castiel.
Dean shoved a hand through his hair, leaving it untidy, and looked suddenly too tired. “He probably just meant the angel equivalent.”
Something was niggling at Sam. “No… it’d be just like talking on angel radio, and we know Cas can’t do that or they’d find him.”
“Some kind of personal angel message, then. Secret interdepartmental memo or something. Whatever, Sam.”
Sam let it go. Vague possibilities, the forerunners of plans, nudged their way into his head. If they had enough holy oil…
It was Castiel.
Sam thought he was probably too dead-tired inside for anything like affection, but that was nothing new for Winchesters. They were more than accustomed to getting by on dogged co-dependence and a fierce refusal to compromise where family was concerned. And Castiel was - close enough.
Besides, it only made sense. Even weakened and doubting he had been the strongest asset they had.
If he wasn’t already lost, Sam wasn’t going to let him lose himself. Castiel was worth a gamble.
---
It was about half an hour later, the darkness creeping in over the scattered trees, that Sam murmured, mostly to himself, “I think it’s like what you said before about learning to make choices. Things without a soul can’t grow or change or even really feel. Angels shouldn’t be able to change.”
Dean let out a breath, soft and raw. “Well, we both know that’s a big steaming pile of crap.”
“Yes.” A crow lifted on heavy wings from the fence beside the road as the Impala hurtled past, messy blue-black feathers outstretched for a moment against the sunlight then lost behind them. “I guess it is.”
Sam wasn’t sure where that left them.
---
They were still about eight hours from Nevada and the mysterious outbreak of flu that Bobby had thought might herald Pestilence, and they were both beat, so when they rolled into a small town they booked in to the motel. Shabby and shades of brown and one hundred per cent not jazzed up by pissed-off gods.
Half an hour after Dean’s breathing evened out into laboured dreams, Sam padded silently back out to the Impala in his socks, leaving a note tucked into his bag, where and why, just in case he didn’t come back.
Sam hadn’t prayed since their little trip upstairs. He had tried, twice, and failed. The thought of opening up his soul and begging to a God with Joshua’s face made him want to punch something. But that was supplication. This was strategy.
Besides, it wasn’t God he was after.
Two miles back, outside the town, they had passed an abandoned shed. Sam’s luck was in, for once. It proved warm enough for him to fall asleep, and not so cluttered that the ring of holy fire (insurance) was likely to catch on anything when he did.
Angels couldn’t pray. But humans could.
It took a while to find sleep, on a thin coat over wonky cement and surrounded by flame, but it came eventually. As he drifted off, Sam prayed.
Lucifer.
I need your help.
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