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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.
Disclaimer: The characters and the sandbox in which they play does not belong to me. I am simply borrowing for a short time.
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: Apologies again for the monstrous delays--my degree is currently taking up a great deal of my time. Also, I've been debating whether or not to post this before finishing the chapter that follows it, because there is a really annoying cliff-hanger at the end of this one, and given my highly unfortunate track record for updating, it could be another long while before I post next. So be warned, I suppose.
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 | Chapter Twenty-Two | Chapter Twenty-Three | Chapter Twenty-Four | Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Azrael took them home.
They hadn’t actually known what home was going to be, until they found themselves in South Dakota, amongst the ruins of Bobby’s house. Bobby looked at it with a mix of outrage and anger.
“What the hell kind of home do you think this is?” he growled.
“Apologies,” Azrael said, after a moment. “Let me just—”
She waved a hand. The air shimmered.
Sam blinked at the house. It looked…it looked like a house. It looked like Bobby’s house.
Bobby caught on quicker. “When’d you snatch it from?”
“A year ago. But it’s a duplicate; I didn’t take it from there, only made a copy.”
“Damn right you didn’t,” he grumbled. “You archangels messing with the time continuum—”
“I am not an archangel,” Azrael interrupted. She looked at them, motley crew that they were, and seemed faintly luminescent against the cool gray of the afternoon sky. “I was the first angel. But that’s all. I hold no rank among my brethren.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Sam asked.
“What we all have to do, Heaven, Hell and Earth alike,” she replied, like it was obvious and easy. “Learn to move on.”
And like that, she was gone.
“So that’s it, then,” Sam murmured.
Castiel stood, taking Dean with him. Together they looked like a single smear of ash and blood, unreal against the uncanny normalcy of South Dakota sky and an old salvage yard. Dean’s head lolled against Castiel’s shoulder, but his eyes were clear.
“I need a fucking drink,” he said.
Sam, Bobby and Castiel all said at once, “Me too.”
***
They didn’t actually drink first.
Bobby took one look at Dean and Castiel and said, “Y’all aren’t sitting anywhere but the kitchen floor until you’ve washed.”
“Guess I’m sitting on the floor then,” Dean rasped, “Because I don’t think I can stand, let alone take a shower.”
“It will take an hour or so before your body catches up with the healing Gabriel gave you,” Castiel said. He sounded strangely distant. Dean looked up at him from where he’d lolled his head on the angel’s shoulder.
“How ‘bout Bobby and I take the first showers, then?” Sam said, after a pause. “You should be up for it by the time we’re done.”
Dean waved an indistinct gesture of agreement at him. Bobby said, “You go ahead, son. You’re covered in zombie guts.”
“All too aware of that, thanks,” Sam said, and disappeared upstairs.
Into the sound of the water going on overhead, Bobby sat heavily down at the table.
Dean obligingly let himself be lowered to the floor. Castiel stepped away from him, looked with some interest at his blackened suit and hands, and then…
Dean blinked.
“Neat trick,” Bobby said eventually.
“Something it would have taken some effort to accomplish, in my previous state,” Castiel murmured. He looked immaculate, like time and the goddamn apocalypse hadn’t touched him. He didn’t sound accomplished, though. Just tired and slightly curious.
“Don’t say I never give you anything,” Dean said, without thinking.
Castiel glared at him, seemed on the verge of saying something, and then turned sharply away, disappearing in an echo of wingbeats as he did so.
Bobby rolled his eyes. “Idjit,” he said.
Dean leaned against the cabinets and slid a little further down onto the linoleum, leaving a smear of grease and viscera in his wake. “Part of my charm.”
It would take five days for Castiel to return to the house.
***
It also took those five days for Dean to not feel like he’d been run over by a semi anymore. But that wasn’t even really his main focus. The silence was.
Cas left, Sam and Bobby took their showers, and he had finally gotten up the energy to pull himself up the stairs, and then he was standing under the shower head, using up every ounce of hot water left, watching blood and ash and other unmentionable things disappear down the drain, and then the silence just seemed to descend, a shroud of stillness and shock that had him stumbling to his knees.
The tile was too bright, the water too hot, and every muscle he had (and some that he didn’t anymore) was trembling in huge, wracking shudders.
It all came down. They’d been moving, fighting, struggling nonstop, for what felt like years. Dean couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept without nightmares, or woken up without the sound of someone else working, Sam murmuring over textbooks in the dark, Crowley saying something snide and useful, Castiel flashing in and out (on, fuck, wings that were his own, and that sunk in suddenly and terribly too). Even the brief stays in Marrakech had been full of the din of traffic outside, and the quiet murmur of Arabic in the apartments next door.
Now there was the metallic hiss of water, and nothing else.
It took him nearly an hour to leave the bathroom, part of it spent spitting bile into the toilet.
Sam had just looked up at him from the couch, his own hair already drying in absurd curls. Dean could only imagine what he saw. He’d looked at himself in the mirror, human and not, pale and mottled and wrong, and had to look away.
There was something shameful about being a freak without the wings to show for it.
“Feel human again?” Sam asked, with a soft, crooked tilt to his mouth that took away the sting of it. Dean knew what he meant.
“Human is overrated,” he said. “Now gimme the booze before someone gets hurt.”
That was the first day.
***
The days, weeks and months of dread and change and insanity began to catch up with them in unexpected ways. Sam knew he was a mess; he wandered around the house in a daze, picking up books and putting them down, eating like he'd forgotten how to do so. But what had happened in his mind seemed like an indistinct blur of happenstance and panic, and when he looked at himself in the mirror he looked tired and older, but not all that different, not at all. He could almost put it away, almost stop his hands from shaking sometimes.
He ended up getting drunk the first night with Dean and Bobby, but instead of passing out, holed up and read a bad spy novel, because at least in fiction things were obligated to make sense.
When he woke up the next day, novel crushed under his face, he felt strangely and suddenly alive. And he exhaled, slowly, with relief, because he realized that he was, just maybe, allowed to breathe for himself now.
It wasn't like that for Dean, though, and he knew it.
On that second day, when Sam felt like he could breathe the air without paying a price, he caught a strange, new expression passing over Dean’s face, and it wasn’t until it happened again when Dean’s back was turned away from him that he understood the source of it.
There was an ugly shift beneath his brother’s t-shirt, a roll of sinew and scar tissue that Sam realized with a lump in his throat would have translated to the arch and curve of massive, ashy wings. And then Dean’s face twisted up with shades of surprise and then resignation, and Sam had to leave the room before he broke down or said something idiotic and useless.
Dean didn’t talk about it, and Sam wasn’t prepared to push the issue. Instead they ate scrambled eggs in silence, and scattered to separate parts of the house, like dogs retreating to lick their wounds.
***
The house felt stable. Like it hadn't been displaced in time. Bobby didn't really want to think about that, so he didn't. Instead, he walked.
It didn't feel strange anymore, having working legs again. He'd used them in action, in fear and in anger, and that had just about adjusted him to the idea of them. He still got a secret kick out of it, though. So he walked around the maze of his property, feeling how it didn't just seem like it hadn't changed, it actually hadn't. This house, his house, had never been decimated by a demon son of a bitch looking for a fight. This house hadn't seen the near end of the world. It was, he realized, the only house about which anyone could say that.
And it was his. Snatched out of time or not, it was his. He sort of liked that.
Oddly content for the first time in years, Bobby walked, and watched Sam and Dean circle each other, and didn’t comment. Quietly, he realized that he was worried about where the hell Castiel was, and then wondered with no small amount of horror when he’d adopted yet another stray.
Whiskey offered no answers, but went down smoothly anyway.
***
On the third day, Gabriel came down. He looked about as tired as Sam seemed to feel all the time now. “Thought you might want an update,” he said.
Sam blinked at him for a second. Bobby was outside reacquainting himself with his property. Dean was upstairs. He didn’t really want to bother either of them. “What’s the update?” he asked.
“Zachariah and his contingent have been quarantined, and the warring Grigori have been beaten into submission.” Gabriel ticked them off his fingers. “The Eastern and pagan gods are staying their hand since Michael’s become an even scarier fucker than before, and I’ve got my old job back.”
“Congratulations?” Sam said cautiously, after a pause.
Gabriel exhaled, and gave him a look. “I left for a reason,” he said.
“But now that Michael has to go be Death, someone’s got to step up,” Sam finished. Dean had been right. This really just was the beginning.
What a mess.
Almost afraid to ask, he said, “What about Lucifer? We at least won’t have to worry about him anymore, right?”
Gabriel blinked slowly, a strange set to his mouth. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Yeah, my brother chose his cage for good this time.”
There’s a flavor of finality to the way that he says it, bitter and awful, that makes Sam clench his jaw and look away.
After a long second, in which Gabriel’s gaze seemed caught in the middle distance, Sam made a decision. He got up from his chair and crossed the kitchen. He rummaged through the cabinets for a second while Gabriel watched him in bemusement. After a few seconds, he found what he was looking for and tossed it at the archangel.
It was a Twix bar.
Gabriel stared at it for a moment, and then the corners of his eyes crinkled up just slightly.
Thank god, Sam thought, not entirely ironically. Not everyone’s broken irreversibly.
***
(What Gabriel didn’t say to Sam, was this:
In the time it took for Dean to break down in the shower, and for Sam to make eggs the following morning, months in Heaven had passed. Months in which Michael beat his soldiers into submission, tasked them with justice, and fought them down to his will with every atom that existed in him. And that Gabriel had been there with him, at his side, for every moment of it.
Gabriel didn’t say that after all had been said and done, Michael disappeared, and in the time it took for another day to pass on earth, Gabriel had spent weeks searching for him, only to find him in the abyssal darkness of space, where the nearest star was lightyears away and they were both wrapped up in the frozen night of sky that did not belong to them or their creator.
Michael had gone there to escape. Gabriel had followed him.
He found the archangel (no longer an archangel, not really) spinning slowly like a planet out of orbit, lost.
“Aren’t you needed back home?” Gabriel asked, after a time. It could have been a microsecond or an aeon.
“The reapers do not need my constant supervision,” Michael replied. He continued to revolve, his wings arched and jagged shafts of light that faded and emptied into the void.
Gabriel didn’t say what Michael told him there after a long and painful period of waiting, in the outer reaches of nothingness. Didn’t say that Lucifer’s last words were echoed in the icy cold of dwarf stars and Michael’s own, distant, horrified voice.
He didn’t say that those last words were Tu amo, I love you, please don’t leave me here, in this place of darkness.)
***
The fourth day was better off not spoken about, in Heaven or on Earth.
***
The fifth day, Castiel appeared and nearly gave Bobby a heart attack. “Jesus!” he said, nearly dropping his beer. “I’m startin’ to see what Dean keeps saying about giving you a goddamn bell.”
Castiel regarded him with a small smile. “I apologize. Is Dean here?”
“‘Course he is. Didn’t think you’d want to see him, though.”
The smile twisted into something of a grimace. “My feelings about it are…mixed, at best.”
“Understandable. Boy’s given me more gray hairs than hunting ever has.”
Castiel nodded.
After he didn’t answer further, Bobby added, “He’s out in the yard. Alternately, there’s beer in the fridge if you want one.”
Castiel paused, head tilting slightly, and then opted for the refrigerator.
***
That evening, Dean came in from the outdoors to find Castiel parked at the window in the kitchen, looking out at the setting sun. There was a neat row of empties lined up on the counter beside him.
“Cas,” he said in surprise. “You’re back.”
Cas inclined his head slightly, but didn’t turn around.
Sam came in behind Dean, took one look at the two of them, and then raised his hands in surrender. “I’ll be upstairs. Nice to see you, Cas,” he said, and scrammed, though not before clapping Dean on the back and giving him a significant look, which Dean stalwartly ignored.
“You’re mad at me,” he stated. Might as well get straight to the point, and honestly, Dean had been snappish and worried with him gone.
Castiel sighed, and didn’t look at him. “I’m angry at a lot of things.”
“Join the fucking club, but that’s not what concerns me. Where did you go?”
The angel shifted, and Dean thought he could see the faint impressions of spiked wings ruffling in the air at his back. It somehow made the emptiness he felt behind him a bit more bearable. He waited.
“It doesn’t matter,” Castiel said.
“It matters to me,” Dean said sharply, and then winced. He was usually a little better at keeping that shit to himself.
It made Castiel turn around, though, which he supposed was good. When he didn’t get a verbal answer, however, he sighed, and tried again.
“You’re mad at me,” he repeated, more resignedly. “Look, dude, I did what—”
“I know what you did,” Castiel interrupted. “I hardly need an apology from you for saving my life, Dean.”
Dean looked at Castiel for a second more, and then went over to stand next to him by the window. He still couldn’t get over how it all looked the same, the dust on the glass and the faint smell of old whiskey and leather and wood. He hunched his shoulders as he shoved his hands in his pockets, no reply coming readily to mind.
So he reached over and tugged at the collar of the angel’s trench coat. “It kinda looks like you want to hear one, though,” he said. “And honestly, I can’t give you one because I’m not exactly sorry things turned out the way they did.”
Castiel regarded him, all righteousness and fury and a strange, penetrating darkness that Dean was disconcertingly familiar with. He didn’t say anything, though.
“You’d have done the same thing I did,” Dean pressed. “You already have. Couple of times, in fact. I think I’ve lost score. You can’t be mad at me for that.”
“Of course I can,” Castiel said irritably. “I can forgive you for it as well, however.”
“Well,” Dean said, and realized belatedly that he’d moved into Cas’s space, following his grip on the trench coat. “That’s okay, then.”
“Dean. Nothing about this is okay,” Castiel murmured, looking down at Dean’s hand. “I don’t know what I am, I don’t know what you are.”
Dean stilled. Oh.
After a second, he swallowed. “Cas. You know me.”
Castiel looked at him. “I don’t even know myself anymore. I have known every part of me for millions of years, and now I don’t know any of it.”
Dean took his hand away like he’d been burned. “Oh,” he said. He sounded distant even to himself. When he spoke next he found himself not wholly aware of what he was saying. “You gonna try and find out, then?”
“If I may,” Castiel replied, his voice oddly inflected in a way Dean didn’t know how to read.
“Who am I to stop you?” Dean said. He backed away, might have stumbled. “Hell, I understand. It’s taking me some time to adjust too, you know.”
“Of course. I shouldn’t have come so soon, I should have—” Castiel stopped, and looked out the window again. “I’ll give you some time,” he said, more quietly. “We may both need it.”
The wing beats that accompanied his departure sounded like leather and sandpaper.
Dean leaned heavily against the counter, and didn’t move for some time.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
Author: Alchemy Alice
Genre and/or Pairing: Action/Adventure/Horror, Dean/Castiel
Rating: R for violence
Warnings/Spoilers: Up to 5.14-ish.
Disclaimer: The characters and the sandbox in which they play does not belong to me. I am simply borrowing for a short time.
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: Apologies again for the monstrous delays--my degree is currently taking up a great deal of my time. Also, I've been debating whether or not to post this before finishing the chapter that follows it, because there is a really annoying cliff-hanger at the end of this one, and given my highly unfortunate track record for updating, it could be another long while before I post next. So be warned, I suppose.
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 | Chapter Twenty-Two | Chapter Twenty-Three | Chapter Twenty-Four | Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Azrael took them home.
They hadn’t actually known what home was going to be, until they found themselves in South Dakota, amongst the ruins of Bobby’s house. Bobby looked at it with a mix of outrage and anger.
“What the hell kind of home do you think this is?” he growled.
“Apologies,” Azrael said, after a moment. “Let me just—”
She waved a hand. The air shimmered.
Sam blinked at the house. It looked…it looked like a house. It looked like Bobby’s house.
Bobby caught on quicker. “When’d you snatch it from?”
“A year ago. But it’s a duplicate; I didn’t take it from there, only made a copy.”
“Damn right you didn’t,” he grumbled. “You archangels messing with the time continuum—”
“I am not an archangel,” Azrael interrupted. She looked at them, motley crew that they were, and seemed faintly luminescent against the cool gray of the afternoon sky. “I was the first angel. But that’s all. I hold no rank among my brethren.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Sam asked.
“What we all have to do, Heaven, Hell and Earth alike,” she replied, like it was obvious and easy. “Learn to move on.”
And like that, she was gone.
“So that’s it, then,” Sam murmured.
Castiel stood, taking Dean with him. Together they looked like a single smear of ash and blood, unreal against the uncanny normalcy of South Dakota sky and an old salvage yard. Dean’s head lolled against Castiel’s shoulder, but his eyes were clear.
“I need a fucking drink,” he said.
Sam, Bobby and Castiel all said at once, “Me too.”
***
They didn’t actually drink first.
Bobby took one look at Dean and Castiel and said, “Y’all aren’t sitting anywhere but the kitchen floor until you’ve washed.”
“Guess I’m sitting on the floor then,” Dean rasped, “Because I don’t think I can stand, let alone take a shower.”
“It will take an hour or so before your body catches up with the healing Gabriel gave you,” Castiel said. He sounded strangely distant. Dean looked up at him from where he’d lolled his head on the angel’s shoulder.
“How ‘bout Bobby and I take the first showers, then?” Sam said, after a pause. “You should be up for it by the time we’re done.”
Dean waved an indistinct gesture of agreement at him. Bobby said, “You go ahead, son. You’re covered in zombie guts.”
“All too aware of that, thanks,” Sam said, and disappeared upstairs.
Into the sound of the water going on overhead, Bobby sat heavily down at the table.
Dean obligingly let himself be lowered to the floor. Castiel stepped away from him, looked with some interest at his blackened suit and hands, and then…
Dean blinked.
“Neat trick,” Bobby said eventually.
“Something it would have taken some effort to accomplish, in my previous state,” Castiel murmured. He looked immaculate, like time and the goddamn apocalypse hadn’t touched him. He didn’t sound accomplished, though. Just tired and slightly curious.
“Don’t say I never give you anything,” Dean said, without thinking.
Castiel glared at him, seemed on the verge of saying something, and then turned sharply away, disappearing in an echo of wingbeats as he did so.
Bobby rolled his eyes. “Idjit,” he said.
Dean leaned against the cabinets and slid a little further down onto the linoleum, leaving a smear of grease and viscera in his wake. “Part of my charm.”
It would take five days for Castiel to return to the house.
***
It also took those five days for Dean to not feel like he’d been run over by a semi anymore. But that wasn’t even really his main focus. The silence was.
Cas left, Sam and Bobby took their showers, and he had finally gotten up the energy to pull himself up the stairs, and then he was standing under the shower head, using up every ounce of hot water left, watching blood and ash and other unmentionable things disappear down the drain, and then the silence just seemed to descend, a shroud of stillness and shock that had him stumbling to his knees.
The tile was too bright, the water too hot, and every muscle he had (and some that he didn’t anymore) was trembling in huge, wracking shudders.
It all came down. They’d been moving, fighting, struggling nonstop, for what felt like years. Dean couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept without nightmares, or woken up without the sound of someone else working, Sam murmuring over textbooks in the dark, Crowley saying something snide and useful, Castiel flashing in and out (on, fuck, wings that were his own, and that sunk in suddenly and terribly too). Even the brief stays in Marrakech had been full of the din of traffic outside, and the quiet murmur of Arabic in the apartments next door.
Now there was the metallic hiss of water, and nothing else.
It took him nearly an hour to leave the bathroom, part of it spent spitting bile into the toilet.
Sam had just looked up at him from the couch, his own hair already drying in absurd curls. Dean could only imagine what he saw. He’d looked at himself in the mirror, human and not, pale and mottled and wrong, and had to look away.
There was something shameful about being a freak without the wings to show for it.
“Feel human again?” Sam asked, with a soft, crooked tilt to his mouth that took away the sting of it. Dean knew what he meant.
“Human is overrated,” he said. “Now gimme the booze before someone gets hurt.”
That was the first day.
***
The days, weeks and months of dread and change and insanity began to catch up with them in unexpected ways. Sam knew he was a mess; he wandered around the house in a daze, picking up books and putting them down, eating like he'd forgotten how to do so. But what had happened in his mind seemed like an indistinct blur of happenstance and panic, and when he looked at himself in the mirror he looked tired and older, but not all that different, not at all. He could almost put it away, almost stop his hands from shaking sometimes.
He ended up getting drunk the first night with Dean and Bobby, but instead of passing out, holed up and read a bad spy novel, because at least in fiction things were obligated to make sense.
When he woke up the next day, novel crushed under his face, he felt strangely and suddenly alive. And he exhaled, slowly, with relief, because he realized that he was, just maybe, allowed to breathe for himself now.
It wasn't like that for Dean, though, and he knew it.
On that second day, when Sam felt like he could breathe the air without paying a price, he caught a strange, new expression passing over Dean’s face, and it wasn’t until it happened again when Dean’s back was turned away from him that he understood the source of it.
There was an ugly shift beneath his brother’s t-shirt, a roll of sinew and scar tissue that Sam realized with a lump in his throat would have translated to the arch and curve of massive, ashy wings. And then Dean’s face twisted up with shades of surprise and then resignation, and Sam had to leave the room before he broke down or said something idiotic and useless.
Dean didn’t talk about it, and Sam wasn’t prepared to push the issue. Instead they ate scrambled eggs in silence, and scattered to separate parts of the house, like dogs retreating to lick their wounds.
***
The house felt stable. Like it hadn't been displaced in time. Bobby didn't really want to think about that, so he didn't. Instead, he walked.
It didn't feel strange anymore, having working legs again. He'd used them in action, in fear and in anger, and that had just about adjusted him to the idea of them. He still got a secret kick out of it, though. So he walked around the maze of his property, feeling how it didn't just seem like it hadn't changed, it actually hadn't. This house, his house, had never been decimated by a demon son of a bitch looking for a fight. This house hadn't seen the near end of the world. It was, he realized, the only house about which anyone could say that.
And it was his. Snatched out of time or not, it was his. He sort of liked that.
Oddly content for the first time in years, Bobby walked, and watched Sam and Dean circle each other, and didn’t comment. Quietly, he realized that he was worried about where the hell Castiel was, and then wondered with no small amount of horror when he’d adopted yet another stray.
Whiskey offered no answers, but went down smoothly anyway.
***
On the third day, Gabriel came down. He looked about as tired as Sam seemed to feel all the time now. “Thought you might want an update,” he said.
Sam blinked at him for a second. Bobby was outside reacquainting himself with his property. Dean was upstairs. He didn’t really want to bother either of them. “What’s the update?” he asked.
“Zachariah and his contingent have been quarantined, and the warring Grigori have been beaten into submission.” Gabriel ticked them off his fingers. “The Eastern and pagan gods are staying their hand since Michael’s become an even scarier fucker than before, and I’ve got my old job back.”
“Congratulations?” Sam said cautiously, after a pause.
Gabriel exhaled, and gave him a look. “I left for a reason,” he said.
“But now that Michael has to go be Death, someone’s got to step up,” Sam finished. Dean had been right. This really just was the beginning.
What a mess.
Almost afraid to ask, he said, “What about Lucifer? We at least won’t have to worry about him anymore, right?”
Gabriel blinked slowly, a strange set to his mouth. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Yeah, my brother chose his cage for good this time.”
There’s a flavor of finality to the way that he says it, bitter and awful, that makes Sam clench his jaw and look away.
After a long second, in which Gabriel’s gaze seemed caught in the middle distance, Sam made a decision. He got up from his chair and crossed the kitchen. He rummaged through the cabinets for a second while Gabriel watched him in bemusement. After a few seconds, he found what he was looking for and tossed it at the archangel.
It was a Twix bar.
Gabriel stared at it for a moment, and then the corners of his eyes crinkled up just slightly.
Thank god, Sam thought, not entirely ironically. Not everyone’s broken irreversibly.
***
(What Gabriel didn’t say to Sam, was this:
In the time it took for Dean to break down in the shower, and for Sam to make eggs the following morning, months in Heaven had passed. Months in which Michael beat his soldiers into submission, tasked them with justice, and fought them down to his will with every atom that existed in him. And that Gabriel had been there with him, at his side, for every moment of it.
Gabriel didn’t say that after all had been said and done, Michael disappeared, and in the time it took for another day to pass on earth, Gabriel had spent weeks searching for him, only to find him in the abyssal darkness of space, where the nearest star was lightyears away and they were both wrapped up in the frozen night of sky that did not belong to them or their creator.
Michael had gone there to escape. Gabriel had followed him.
He found the archangel (no longer an archangel, not really) spinning slowly like a planet out of orbit, lost.
“Aren’t you needed back home?” Gabriel asked, after a time. It could have been a microsecond or an aeon.
“The reapers do not need my constant supervision,” Michael replied. He continued to revolve, his wings arched and jagged shafts of light that faded and emptied into the void.
Gabriel didn’t say what Michael told him there after a long and painful period of waiting, in the outer reaches of nothingness. Didn’t say that Lucifer’s last words were echoed in the icy cold of dwarf stars and Michael’s own, distant, horrified voice.
He didn’t say that those last words were Tu amo, I love you, please don’t leave me here, in this place of darkness.)
***
The fourth day was better off not spoken about, in Heaven or on Earth.
***
The fifth day, Castiel appeared and nearly gave Bobby a heart attack. “Jesus!” he said, nearly dropping his beer. “I’m startin’ to see what Dean keeps saying about giving you a goddamn bell.”
Castiel regarded him with a small smile. “I apologize. Is Dean here?”
“‘Course he is. Didn’t think you’d want to see him, though.”
The smile twisted into something of a grimace. “My feelings about it are…mixed, at best.”
“Understandable. Boy’s given me more gray hairs than hunting ever has.”
Castiel nodded.
After he didn’t answer further, Bobby added, “He’s out in the yard. Alternately, there’s beer in the fridge if you want one.”
Castiel paused, head tilting slightly, and then opted for the refrigerator.
***
That evening, Dean came in from the outdoors to find Castiel parked at the window in the kitchen, looking out at the setting sun. There was a neat row of empties lined up on the counter beside him.
“Cas,” he said in surprise. “You’re back.”
Cas inclined his head slightly, but didn’t turn around.
Sam came in behind Dean, took one look at the two of them, and then raised his hands in surrender. “I’ll be upstairs. Nice to see you, Cas,” he said, and scrammed, though not before clapping Dean on the back and giving him a significant look, which Dean stalwartly ignored.
“You’re mad at me,” he stated. Might as well get straight to the point, and honestly, Dean had been snappish and worried with him gone.
Castiel sighed, and didn’t look at him. “I’m angry at a lot of things.”
“Join the fucking club, but that’s not what concerns me. Where did you go?”
The angel shifted, and Dean thought he could see the faint impressions of spiked wings ruffling in the air at his back. It somehow made the emptiness he felt behind him a bit more bearable. He waited.
“It doesn’t matter,” Castiel said.
“It matters to me,” Dean said sharply, and then winced. He was usually a little better at keeping that shit to himself.
It made Castiel turn around, though, which he supposed was good. When he didn’t get a verbal answer, however, he sighed, and tried again.
“You’re mad at me,” he repeated, more resignedly. “Look, dude, I did what—”
“I know what you did,” Castiel interrupted. “I hardly need an apology from you for saving my life, Dean.”
Dean looked at Castiel for a second more, and then went over to stand next to him by the window. He still couldn’t get over how it all looked the same, the dust on the glass and the faint smell of old whiskey and leather and wood. He hunched his shoulders as he shoved his hands in his pockets, no reply coming readily to mind.
So he reached over and tugged at the collar of the angel’s trench coat. “It kinda looks like you want to hear one, though,” he said. “And honestly, I can’t give you one because I’m not exactly sorry things turned out the way they did.”
Castiel regarded him, all righteousness and fury and a strange, penetrating darkness that Dean was disconcertingly familiar with. He didn’t say anything, though.
“You’d have done the same thing I did,” Dean pressed. “You already have. Couple of times, in fact. I think I’ve lost score. You can’t be mad at me for that.”
“Of course I can,” Castiel said irritably. “I can forgive you for it as well, however.”
“Well,” Dean said, and realized belatedly that he’d moved into Cas’s space, following his grip on the trench coat. “That’s okay, then.”
“Dean. Nothing about this is okay,” Castiel murmured, looking down at Dean’s hand. “I don’t know what I am, I don’t know what you are.”
Dean stilled. Oh.
After a second, he swallowed. “Cas. You know me.”
Castiel looked at him. “I don’t even know myself anymore. I have known every part of me for millions of years, and now I don’t know any of it.”
Dean took his hand away like he’d been burned. “Oh,” he said. He sounded distant even to himself. When he spoke next he found himself not wholly aware of what he was saying. “You gonna try and find out, then?”
“If I may,” Castiel replied, his voice oddly inflected in a way Dean didn’t know how to read.
“Who am I to stop you?” Dean said. He backed away, might have stumbled. “Hell, I understand. It’s taking me some time to adjust too, you know.”
“Of course. I shouldn’t have come so soon, I should have—” Castiel stopped, and looked out the window again. “I’ll give you some time,” he said, more quietly. “We may both need it.”
The wing beats that accompanied his departure sounded like leather and sandpaper.
Dean leaned heavily against the counter, and didn’t move for some time.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.