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alchemyaliceTitle: On the Wings of War
Author: Alchemy Alice
Genre and/or Pairing: Action/Adventure/Horror, Dean/Castiel
Rating: R for violence
Warnings/Spoilers: Up to 5.14-ish? It goes AWOL from there.
Word Count: No idea yet, but very, very long.
Disclaimer: Entirely not mine. Just playin'.
Summary: The Horsemen are not just people with fancy rings. They aren’t even demons with fancy rings. They are another species entirely, a force unto themselves, and Lucifer is kidding himself if he thinks that they are at his beck and call. They are separate. They are neutral. Dean Winchester is not built like them.
A/N: See? I haven't abandoned this! I am just very busy, and very slow. And we're reaching the end, which means that everything is going to be one huge fuck-off cliff-hanger after another, so if that really irritates you (it irritates me, so I understand) I recommend waiting until I finish the damn thing before reading through.
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Angels were at war over the crypt.
Crowley could see it from miles away, could see it from space, probably, if he had the inclination. With the dissolution of the Grigori, Seraphim were the ones left to rocket down, swords and wings aflame. They would do their best to seal the cage, but that wasn’t about to happen, not any time soon.
Zachariah had always been a great middle-manager, but he was terrible at battlefield tactics.
Carefully, Crowley inserted two fingers into his breast pocket, and felt the answering warmth of the bundle tucked there. It was nearly uncomfortable, even with so many layers of protective cloth between it and his host’s skin, but Crowley was willing to tolerate a fair amount of discomfort when the payout was large enough.
He was moored off the coast of Portugal, but the chaos felt like it was tossing and reeling right in front of him--he felt it as the lay lines shuddered over the crypt, and as things unnamed struggled to emerge.
Dark forms roiled beneath the water, several miles off-shore. “Shall we go find you some friends?” Crowley called out to them.
Something that could have been a wing or a claw or the torpedo from a submarine breached the waterline. “Right then,” he muttered. He scanned the controls of the yacht, its owner’s limp corpse long before disposed of overboard, and started the engine. He had some time before the others would be joining him, and he intended to enjoy himself.
***
When the sun rose and began to filter through the window with an unexpected intensity, Dean cracked open his eyes with a groan and then nearly flailed himself off the bed before he remembered why he was wrapped around Cas like some sort of octopus with wings.
...And wasn’t that just an awful mental image to start the day with.
Castiel himself looked as serene as he ever did, which wasn’t much. He regarded Dean with an expression that was half warmth and half irritated concern. “You should sleep more,” he chided, his voice a low rumble that Dean seemed to feel in his bones. “You expended a great deal of energy last night.”
“Oh did I,” Dean drawled automatically. He looked at Cas with concern, however. “How’re you feeling?”
“Like I’m beginning to encroach upon your record of being brought back from the brink of destruction.”
“Hey now. No one’s allowed to beat my record, ‘cept maybe Sammy. And he’s not allowed to work for it. Then again, neither are you.”
Castiel’s face registered vague disapproval, but then his gaze shifted away from Dean and those frown lines deepened. “Can you feel that?” he asked, after a second.
Dean had been doing his best to ignore it--the unearthly buzz that had replaced the roar of locusts as Abaddon burned. There’d been too many other things to worry about, getting out and staying safe and Cas...but Abbadon had left a vacuum, and now he could feel with that strange, Horseman-scale sense that things were clawing to the surface to try and fill the gap. There’d been news reports of mudslides and war and cult suicides for months now, but it was going to get a hell of a lot worse before it got better.
If it got better.
“Yeah,” he said eventually. “I guess we should get on that.”
Frowning, he prodded at his tenuous connection to the army that he’d basically left rudderless in Montana. He received a roll of confusion, anticipation, and damp in return.
Go to my comrades, he sent, still feeling pretty stupid for giving commands in his head, especially ones as formal as that. I’ll follow you there.
There was a moment--a terrifying moment--of resistance. A day without instruction was too long, apparently, and Dean could feel the abstract pull of destruction the collective army was grasping at, and their inability to understand his dismissal of it. He resisted the urge to just push it away. Cas had told him to use what was at his disposal, and if the seething surge of energy bursting to fill the absence of Abaddon was any indication, he was going to need every bit of those resources.
Unconsciously scooting closer to Castiel, he thought of Hell-twisted things crawling from the darkness, and an unnameable army to sweep it all away. It was a violent, ugly thought, too close to ones he’d had in hell past the thirty year mark, but he let it take its course anyway, throwing it out onto the waters like bait.
After a long moment, a blur of acquiescence reached him, already becoming distant again, occupied with the order. Dean exhaled. He realized that his eyes were squeezed shut, but when he reopened them, it was just to see Castiel’s face, grave and knowing, but also without judgment. It unwound a knot of guilt somewhere deep in Dean’s stomach.
“This house isn’t protected,” he said roughly. “We should move.”
Castiel nodded. Then his lips twitched at the corner. “You’re going to have to let go of me.”
“Oh. Right.” Dean pulled his wings back and scrambled out of bed like he’d been burned. Castiel got up far more slowly, giving cursory glances to the bandages wrapped around his arms and torso, and choosing after a moment to leave them be. Dean cleared his throat.
“You good to fly?”
Castiel grimaced slightly. “I’m not sure. I’d rather not risk it, if you don’t mind.”
“No problem. But let’s go thank Omar for his hospitality. He’s been pretty damn tolerant.”
Omar, despite his tolerance, was very clearly glad to see them go. Malaeka took the liberty of shaking their hands, though, and as Dean spread his wings, one hand firmly on Cas’s elbow, she said, “May God respect your resistance.”
Dean could only smile back as the world shifted.
***
They drove until they hit Arizona, at which point Gabriel pitched forward in the back seat and gasped.
“Shit, are you going to hurl again?” Sam said, slamming on the brakes.
“Nah, just give me a minute.”
The Impala purred in neutral on the side of the road, and over her sound Sam and Bobby awkwardly listened to Gabriel take heaving breaths, bent down over himself. After a good five minutes, he finally sat up, pushing his hair out of his face. His eyes looked molten.
“Pentagram broken for good?” Sam asked dryly.
“Yup. And I’m back in business,” Gabriel said, like he hadn’t just been in what appeared to be crippling agony. He linked his fingers and straightened his arms obnoxiously to crack his knuckles. “Which means--”
“--no moving the Impala by--”
Gabriel snapped his fingers.
“--angel express. Dammit, Gabriel. Where the hell are we?”
“Just outside of Halifax. It’ll give us a nice view of the storm that’s brewing. Oh hey--now that’s something I haven’t seen in a while.”
Sam craned his neck forward to follow Gabriel’s sight line. “What--what is that?”
“Angels at war. Time for the grand finale, chicos. You ready?”
Sam sighed, and pulled out his cell phone. “I guess we don’t have a choice.”
But before he got finished dialling, he found his foot shooting out automatically to slam the brakes, even though they were already at a standstill. “Jesus fucking Christ!”
Dean grinned and waved like he wasn’t some mix of cheesy and terrifying, wings fanned out over the empty highway, Castiel looking both beaten and solid at his side. “What the fuck are you doing in Halifax?” Dean yelled, as Sam fumbled with the car door and finally toppled out of it in his haste. “You find us some more demons to gank? Because we’ve got backup lurking around here now.”
“How’d you find us?” Sam said, but his voice was muffled due to how his face was now buried in Dean’s shoulder, arms wrapped around him in a bear hug that was only partly hampered by the wings.
“Got my army of abominations to track you down. Jesus, Sammy, you’re gonna crack a rib or something.”
Sam stepped back. “We left you...in a bad spot.”
Dean snorted, and rubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah, I guess you did. So, uh, how’s it going?”
Sam shrugged. “We saved New Mexico. You?”
“Killed Abaddon. Might’ve destroyed Montana, though,” Dean admitted.
“Guess I win.”
“Bitch, you do not.”
“Jerk. I totally do.”
“Can we get a move on?” Gabriel complained from the back seat, half his torso hanging out the window. “Because shit is about to seriously get real.”
Dean blinked. “How’d you get my car?”
***
The last sapling burst through the earth, a strong maple with shards of Grace shimmering strongly in its core. Michael mourned and blessed it at once, and then turned away from the Isle. The smell of sulfur hung in the air long after he left.
“Why Halifax?” he asked without preamble, as he materialized in a cacophony of wingbeats. Sam jerked slightly; Bobby swore; Dean, Castiel and Gabriel remained mostly unruffled.
“How’d your meeting with little bro go?” Gabriel asked. They stood in a row along a dock that was abandoned, despite the huge amount of ships and sailboats tied up, all perfectly ready for the sea. People had begun avoiding the ocean when the sky refused to lighten and an impossible storm seemed to descend on the entire breadth of the Atlantic.
“It was...as one could expect, unfortunately,” Michael replied. And then, with infinite patience, “Why Halifax?”
Gabriel shrugged. “‘T’sa nice view.”
Sam’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and pressed a few buttons. “Crowley’s in position. What’s the plan?”
Michael huffed out a breath, and looked out at the water.
Dean sniffed, and then stiffened instinctively. He pulled back slightly to look over at the archangel.
Michael was still for a long moment. And then very slowly, very deliberately, he turned and looked at Gabriel. “I don’t know,” he said. “What’s the plan, brother?”
Gabriel snorted, but Dean was looking between him and Michael now, and saw how his shoulders were locked tight, and is wry and open face had hardened into something bitter and old. “What makes you think I’ve got the road map, Mike?” he said lightly.
“Shit,” Sam muttered. “What now?”
Dean braced himself against the guardrail along the pier. Even Bobby was coiled now, waiting for the archangels to explain themselves. The air was burning with unmoored electricity as Michael waited, eyes locked on Gabriel’s and refusing to budge. He said quietly, “You had it for a short while at least, didn’t you?”
Gabriel clenched his jaw, and shook his head--a sharp, violent denial that was hiding too many things.
“Gabriel,” Dean growled. “What the hell?”
“He deserves to know,” Michael said.
Gabriel laughed hollowly. “Figured it out, huh? Funny, I thought I’d gotten good at blocking you out over the centuries.”
“It took some time,” Michael shrugged. “But you’ve used that disguise before, and while you were quite thorough with Dean’s memories, he doesn’t easily forget a pretty face. I told you not to make me pick sides.”
Gabriel let out a breath, and then his gaze slid over to Dean like he was the last person he wanted to be looking at.
Dean blinked.
Sam put it together. His eyes widened. “He was the chick in the bar?”
“Guilty as charged,” Gabriel said, not taking his eyes off Dean.
“You did this,” Dean growled, and he could feel the talons in his wings extending, but the full implications of that, now, just served to piss him off more. “You fucking did this. You son of a bitch, what the fuck?”
The archangel turned on him. “You refused to play by the rules. And I knew you’d continue to do so, no matter what I did. So I changed the game.”
“By turning me into some—some monster?” Dean started forward, but Gabriel stood his ground, Michael at his side, but apparently not on it either. Lucas Wynchestre’s pale face was impassive as he watched.
“Not just a monster,” Gabriel corrected. “I made you into a weapon. And might I add how well it's turning out so far? And how many times you'd be dead without it?”
“I can’t believe you. All this time you've been helping us, but you made this happen,” Dean hissed through clenched teeth.
“Who, me?” Gabriel said, all raised eyebrows and innocent eyes. “I would never. Some random girl just suggested it to you, and you were dumb enough, or maybe smart enough to listen.”
Then he stepped back, leaning against the pier. He finally looked away from Dean, and instead turned to Castiel. And suddenly he looked ancient and weary and not like a trickster or even an archangel.
“I didn’t want to be a part of this, okay?” he said, deathly quiet. “I didn’t want this battle. But if you weren’t going to go the way it’s all been written, then you needed an alternative. And this was it.”
Castiel said lowly, “You can’t just make a new road and then leave us to walk it, Gabriel.”
“And I haven’t, have I?” he snapped. “You didn’t give me much of a choice, summoning me like you did. Haven’t I bled for you?”
“After you flew in the face of Heaven,” Michael said, but now, now Dean could hear it, practically taste it--the sickly sweet caramel rage of betrayal. It rolled off of Michael like an avalanche from a mountain.
“I wasn’t going to,” Gabriel said, his own rage banked back into deathly quiet, so that Dean could barely hear him over the crash of waves and his own anger. “But you put your faith in these monkeys, didn’t you? This was me, doing the same thing--and taking out some Goddamned insurance along the way.”
Then he looked at the rest of them.
“Everything has its price,” he said, unflinching. “Victory too. And I know that out of everything you monkeys want, that’s what you want most. So that’s what I’ve given you. Deal with it--you’ve been doing fine so far.”
“Gabriel,” Castiel began.
“I’ll check in with Crowley,” Gabriel cut him off, and was gone, leaving the rest of them staring out at violent seas.
Finally, Dean said, “And he moved my fucking car, too.”
Castiel was, surprisingly, the only one who smirked at that.
Dean felt deflated, now that his anger was mostly burned out. There were no such thing as earth-shattering revelations when the actual, physical earth was about to shatter under the weight of End Times. And a part of Dean wasn’t just unsurprised, it was thankful. Like it or not, putting on the ring somewhere along the line got him a crack at Lucifer on his own terms (well, sort of on his own terms). Hell, it let him save Cas.
Also, he had a sinking feeling that Gabriel was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to orchestrators of this whole mess. They may have been off book all this time, but that didn't mean that several someones hadn't been hastily scribbling in the margins as they went along.
Sam rolled his eyes, like he couldn’t believe Dean, and looked at Michael. “You found that all out?”
“I’ll admit to being very curious as to what happened the night Dean were influenced to change himself,” the archangel replied. “So, I took the liberty of freeing some of the memories that had been suppressed. What I found...well, it fit Gabriel. I didn’t put it together until after Abaddon came to us, however. But I thought you ought to know who was responsible, if not for all of this, at least part.”
Dean silently added that Michael had perhaps been waiting a long time to punish his younger brother for running away from home, and that this opportunity had been a bit too good to miss. Family, he thought dryly.
“He knew you’d find out,” Sam said, looking numb. “That’s why he was so angry you were siding with us.”
“No doubt,” Michael said.
“You realize that you have really crappy timing, don’t you?” Bobby broke in. He was still standing off to the side, having chosen not to participate in most of the madness, but now his arms were crossed, and he looked ready to give Michael one of his patented slaps upside the head. “Gabriel’s an ally, one of our very few, I might add, so no matter how much shit he may have put us through in the past, we still need him.”
Sam ground his teeth. “Next time I see that bastard, I’m going to stake him in the chest.”
“That will do little damage,” Castiel noted absently. “It would best be done with an angel’s sword.”
“I can’t believe I let him in me.”
“Whoa,” Dean said, holding up his hands. “Hold the phone. You what?”
Sam winced bodily, and started to explain when suddenly Michael startled, and goddamnit, archangels just didn’t fucking startle.
“We need to get to the crypt,” he said urgently, looking out at the water with something akin to dread. “Now."
Dean rolled his eyes, because he'd just about reached his holy shit quotient for the century. "Fan-fucking-tastic. Did we even settle what the plan was?”
Michael ignored him, didn't even wait for him to follow. In a flurry of wingbeats he was gone.
Sam huffed. "Great."
Chapter Twenty-Two
Author: Alchemy Alice
Genre and/or Pairing: Action/Adventure/Horror, Dean/Castiel
Rating: R for violence
Warnings/Spoilers: Up to 5.14-ish? It goes AWOL from there.
Word Count: No idea yet, but very, very long.
Disclaimer: Entirely not mine. Just playin'.
Summary: The Horsemen are not just people with fancy rings. They aren’t even demons with fancy rings. They are another species entirely, a force unto themselves, and Lucifer is kidding himself if he thinks that they are at his beck and call. They are separate. They are neutral. Dean Winchester is not built like them.
A/N: See? I haven't abandoned this! I am just very busy, and very slow. And we're reaching the end, which means that everything is going to be one huge fuck-off cliff-hanger after another, so if that really irritates you (it irritates me, so I understand) I recommend waiting until I finish the damn thing before reading through.
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Angels were at war over the crypt.
Crowley could see it from miles away, could see it from space, probably, if he had the inclination. With the dissolution of the Grigori, Seraphim were the ones left to rocket down, swords and wings aflame. They would do their best to seal the cage, but that wasn’t about to happen, not any time soon.
Zachariah had always been a great middle-manager, but he was terrible at battlefield tactics.
Carefully, Crowley inserted two fingers into his breast pocket, and felt the answering warmth of the bundle tucked there. It was nearly uncomfortable, even with so many layers of protective cloth between it and his host’s skin, but Crowley was willing to tolerate a fair amount of discomfort when the payout was large enough.
He was moored off the coast of Portugal, but the chaos felt like it was tossing and reeling right in front of him--he felt it as the lay lines shuddered over the crypt, and as things unnamed struggled to emerge.
Dark forms roiled beneath the water, several miles off-shore. “Shall we go find you some friends?” Crowley called out to them.
Something that could have been a wing or a claw or the torpedo from a submarine breached the waterline. “Right then,” he muttered. He scanned the controls of the yacht, its owner’s limp corpse long before disposed of overboard, and started the engine. He had some time before the others would be joining him, and he intended to enjoy himself.
***
When the sun rose and began to filter through the window with an unexpected intensity, Dean cracked open his eyes with a groan and then nearly flailed himself off the bed before he remembered why he was wrapped around Cas like some sort of octopus with wings.
...And wasn’t that just an awful mental image to start the day with.
Castiel himself looked as serene as he ever did, which wasn’t much. He regarded Dean with an expression that was half warmth and half irritated concern. “You should sleep more,” he chided, his voice a low rumble that Dean seemed to feel in his bones. “You expended a great deal of energy last night.”
“Oh did I,” Dean drawled automatically. He looked at Cas with concern, however. “How’re you feeling?”
“Like I’m beginning to encroach upon your record of being brought back from the brink of destruction.”
“Hey now. No one’s allowed to beat my record, ‘cept maybe Sammy. And he’s not allowed to work for it. Then again, neither are you.”
Castiel’s face registered vague disapproval, but then his gaze shifted away from Dean and those frown lines deepened. “Can you feel that?” he asked, after a second.
Dean had been doing his best to ignore it--the unearthly buzz that had replaced the roar of locusts as Abaddon burned. There’d been too many other things to worry about, getting out and staying safe and Cas...but Abbadon had left a vacuum, and now he could feel with that strange, Horseman-scale sense that things were clawing to the surface to try and fill the gap. There’d been news reports of mudslides and war and cult suicides for months now, but it was going to get a hell of a lot worse before it got better.
If it got better.
“Yeah,” he said eventually. “I guess we should get on that.”
Frowning, he prodded at his tenuous connection to the army that he’d basically left rudderless in Montana. He received a roll of confusion, anticipation, and damp in return.
Go to my comrades, he sent, still feeling pretty stupid for giving commands in his head, especially ones as formal as that. I’ll follow you there.
There was a moment--a terrifying moment--of resistance. A day without instruction was too long, apparently, and Dean could feel the abstract pull of destruction the collective army was grasping at, and their inability to understand his dismissal of it. He resisted the urge to just push it away. Cas had told him to use what was at his disposal, and if the seething surge of energy bursting to fill the absence of Abaddon was any indication, he was going to need every bit of those resources.
Unconsciously scooting closer to Castiel, he thought of Hell-twisted things crawling from the darkness, and an unnameable army to sweep it all away. It was a violent, ugly thought, too close to ones he’d had in hell past the thirty year mark, but he let it take its course anyway, throwing it out onto the waters like bait.
After a long moment, a blur of acquiescence reached him, already becoming distant again, occupied with the order. Dean exhaled. He realized that his eyes were squeezed shut, but when he reopened them, it was just to see Castiel’s face, grave and knowing, but also without judgment. It unwound a knot of guilt somewhere deep in Dean’s stomach.
“This house isn’t protected,” he said roughly. “We should move.”
Castiel nodded. Then his lips twitched at the corner. “You’re going to have to let go of me.”
“Oh. Right.” Dean pulled his wings back and scrambled out of bed like he’d been burned. Castiel got up far more slowly, giving cursory glances to the bandages wrapped around his arms and torso, and choosing after a moment to leave them be. Dean cleared his throat.
“You good to fly?”
Castiel grimaced slightly. “I’m not sure. I’d rather not risk it, if you don’t mind.”
“No problem. But let’s go thank Omar for his hospitality. He’s been pretty damn tolerant.”
Omar, despite his tolerance, was very clearly glad to see them go. Malaeka took the liberty of shaking their hands, though, and as Dean spread his wings, one hand firmly on Cas’s elbow, she said, “May God respect your resistance.”
Dean could only smile back as the world shifted.
***
They drove until they hit Arizona, at which point Gabriel pitched forward in the back seat and gasped.
“Shit, are you going to hurl again?” Sam said, slamming on the brakes.
“Nah, just give me a minute.”
The Impala purred in neutral on the side of the road, and over her sound Sam and Bobby awkwardly listened to Gabriel take heaving breaths, bent down over himself. After a good five minutes, he finally sat up, pushing his hair out of his face. His eyes looked molten.
“Pentagram broken for good?” Sam asked dryly.
“Yup. And I’m back in business,” Gabriel said, like he hadn’t just been in what appeared to be crippling agony. He linked his fingers and straightened his arms obnoxiously to crack his knuckles. “Which means--”
“--no moving the Impala by--”
Gabriel snapped his fingers.
“--angel express. Dammit, Gabriel. Where the hell are we?”
“Just outside of Halifax. It’ll give us a nice view of the storm that’s brewing. Oh hey--now that’s something I haven’t seen in a while.”
Sam craned his neck forward to follow Gabriel’s sight line. “What--what is that?”
“Angels at war. Time for the grand finale, chicos. You ready?”
Sam sighed, and pulled out his cell phone. “I guess we don’t have a choice.”
But before he got finished dialling, he found his foot shooting out automatically to slam the brakes, even though they were already at a standstill. “Jesus fucking Christ!”
Dean grinned and waved like he wasn’t some mix of cheesy and terrifying, wings fanned out over the empty highway, Castiel looking both beaten and solid at his side. “What the fuck are you doing in Halifax?” Dean yelled, as Sam fumbled with the car door and finally toppled out of it in his haste. “You find us some more demons to gank? Because we’ve got backup lurking around here now.”
“How’d you find us?” Sam said, but his voice was muffled due to how his face was now buried in Dean’s shoulder, arms wrapped around him in a bear hug that was only partly hampered by the wings.
“Got my army of abominations to track you down. Jesus, Sammy, you’re gonna crack a rib or something.”
Sam stepped back. “We left you...in a bad spot.”
Dean snorted, and rubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah, I guess you did. So, uh, how’s it going?”
Sam shrugged. “We saved New Mexico. You?”
“Killed Abaddon. Might’ve destroyed Montana, though,” Dean admitted.
“Guess I win.”
“Bitch, you do not.”
“Jerk. I totally do.”
“Can we get a move on?” Gabriel complained from the back seat, half his torso hanging out the window. “Because shit is about to seriously get real.”
Dean blinked. “How’d you get my car?”
***
The last sapling burst through the earth, a strong maple with shards of Grace shimmering strongly in its core. Michael mourned and blessed it at once, and then turned away from the Isle. The smell of sulfur hung in the air long after he left.
“Why Halifax?” he asked without preamble, as he materialized in a cacophony of wingbeats. Sam jerked slightly; Bobby swore; Dean, Castiel and Gabriel remained mostly unruffled.
“How’d your meeting with little bro go?” Gabriel asked. They stood in a row along a dock that was abandoned, despite the huge amount of ships and sailboats tied up, all perfectly ready for the sea. People had begun avoiding the ocean when the sky refused to lighten and an impossible storm seemed to descend on the entire breadth of the Atlantic.
“It was...as one could expect, unfortunately,” Michael replied. And then, with infinite patience, “Why Halifax?”
Gabriel shrugged. “‘T’sa nice view.”
Sam’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and pressed a few buttons. “Crowley’s in position. What’s the plan?”
Michael huffed out a breath, and looked out at the water.
Dean sniffed, and then stiffened instinctively. He pulled back slightly to look over at the archangel.
Michael was still for a long moment. And then very slowly, very deliberately, he turned and looked at Gabriel. “I don’t know,” he said. “What’s the plan, brother?”
Gabriel snorted, but Dean was looking between him and Michael now, and saw how his shoulders were locked tight, and is wry and open face had hardened into something bitter and old. “What makes you think I’ve got the road map, Mike?” he said lightly.
“Shit,” Sam muttered. “What now?”
Dean braced himself against the guardrail along the pier. Even Bobby was coiled now, waiting for the archangels to explain themselves. The air was burning with unmoored electricity as Michael waited, eyes locked on Gabriel’s and refusing to budge. He said quietly, “You had it for a short while at least, didn’t you?”
Gabriel clenched his jaw, and shook his head--a sharp, violent denial that was hiding too many things.
“Gabriel,” Dean growled. “What the hell?”
“He deserves to know,” Michael said.
Gabriel laughed hollowly. “Figured it out, huh? Funny, I thought I’d gotten good at blocking you out over the centuries.”
“It took some time,” Michael shrugged. “But you’ve used that disguise before, and while you were quite thorough with Dean’s memories, he doesn’t easily forget a pretty face. I told you not to make me pick sides.”
Gabriel let out a breath, and then his gaze slid over to Dean like he was the last person he wanted to be looking at.
Dean blinked.
Sam put it together. His eyes widened. “He was the chick in the bar?”
“Guilty as charged,” Gabriel said, not taking his eyes off Dean.
“You did this,” Dean growled, and he could feel the talons in his wings extending, but the full implications of that, now, just served to piss him off more. “You fucking did this. You son of a bitch, what the fuck?”
The archangel turned on him. “You refused to play by the rules. And I knew you’d continue to do so, no matter what I did. So I changed the game.”
“By turning me into some—some monster?” Dean started forward, but Gabriel stood his ground, Michael at his side, but apparently not on it either. Lucas Wynchestre’s pale face was impassive as he watched.
“Not just a monster,” Gabriel corrected. “I made you into a weapon. And might I add how well it's turning out so far? And how many times you'd be dead without it?”
“I can’t believe you. All this time you've been helping us, but you made this happen,” Dean hissed through clenched teeth.
“Who, me?” Gabriel said, all raised eyebrows and innocent eyes. “I would never. Some random girl just suggested it to you, and you were dumb enough, or maybe smart enough to listen.”
Then he stepped back, leaning against the pier. He finally looked away from Dean, and instead turned to Castiel. And suddenly he looked ancient and weary and not like a trickster or even an archangel.
“I didn’t want to be a part of this, okay?” he said, deathly quiet. “I didn’t want this battle. But if you weren’t going to go the way it’s all been written, then you needed an alternative. And this was it.”
Castiel said lowly, “You can’t just make a new road and then leave us to walk it, Gabriel.”
“And I haven’t, have I?” he snapped. “You didn’t give me much of a choice, summoning me like you did. Haven’t I bled for you?”
“After you flew in the face of Heaven,” Michael said, but now, now Dean could hear it, practically taste it--the sickly sweet caramel rage of betrayal. It rolled off of Michael like an avalanche from a mountain.
“I wasn’t going to,” Gabriel said, his own rage banked back into deathly quiet, so that Dean could barely hear him over the crash of waves and his own anger. “But you put your faith in these monkeys, didn’t you? This was me, doing the same thing--and taking out some Goddamned insurance along the way.”
Then he looked at the rest of them.
“Everything has its price,” he said, unflinching. “Victory too. And I know that out of everything you monkeys want, that’s what you want most. So that’s what I’ve given you. Deal with it--you’ve been doing fine so far.”
“Gabriel,” Castiel began.
“I’ll check in with Crowley,” Gabriel cut him off, and was gone, leaving the rest of them staring out at violent seas.
Finally, Dean said, “And he moved my fucking car, too.”
Castiel was, surprisingly, the only one who smirked at that.
Dean felt deflated, now that his anger was mostly burned out. There were no such thing as earth-shattering revelations when the actual, physical earth was about to shatter under the weight of End Times. And a part of Dean wasn’t just unsurprised, it was thankful. Like it or not, putting on the ring somewhere along the line got him a crack at Lucifer on his own terms (well, sort of on his own terms). Hell, it let him save Cas.
Also, he had a sinking feeling that Gabriel was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to orchestrators of this whole mess. They may have been off book all this time, but that didn't mean that several someones hadn't been hastily scribbling in the margins as they went along.
Sam rolled his eyes, like he couldn’t believe Dean, and looked at Michael. “You found that all out?”
“I’ll admit to being very curious as to what happened the night Dean were influenced to change himself,” the archangel replied. “So, I took the liberty of freeing some of the memories that had been suppressed. What I found...well, it fit Gabriel. I didn’t put it together until after Abaddon came to us, however. But I thought you ought to know who was responsible, if not for all of this, at least part.”
Dean silently added that Michael had perhaps been waiting a long time to punish his younger brother for running away from home, and that this opportunity had been a bit too good to miss. Family, he thought dryly.
“He knew you’d find out,” Sam said, looking numb. “That’s why he was so angry you were siding with us.”
“No doubt,” Michael said.
“You realize that you have really crappy timing, don’t you?” Bobby broke in. He was still standing off to the side, having chosen not to participate in most of the madness, but now his arms were crossed, and he looked ready to give Michael one of his patented slaps upside the head. “Gabriel’s an ally, one of our very few, I might add, so no matter how much shit he may have put us through in the past, we still need him.”
Sam ground his teeth. “Next time I see that bastard, I’m going to stake him in the chest.”
“That will do little damage,” Castiel noted absently. “It would best be done with an angel’s sword.”
“I can’t believe I let him in me.”
“Whoa,” Dean said, holding up his hands. “Hold the phone. You what?”
Sam winced bodily, and started to explain when suddenly Michael startled, and goddamnit, archangels just didn’t fucking startle.
“We need to get to the crypt,” he said urgently, looking out at the water with something akin to dread. “Now."
Dean rolled his eyes, because he'd just about reached his holy shit quotient for the century. "Fan-fucking-tastic. Did we even settle what the plan was?”
Michael ignored him, didn't even wait for him to follow. In a flurry of wingbeats he was gone.
Sam huffed. "Great."
Chapter Twenty-Two