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alchemyaliceAuthor: Alchemy Alice
Rating: PG-13
Genre and/or Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam/Gabriel
Spoilers: Season 5
Warnings: Whoa guys, we could actually be reaching the end now. Like, next chapter. This will be the second to last, I'm pretty sure. I haven't finished something this long in years. Christ. Sorry for the late update in the meantime--this chapter was bitchtastically hard to write. I'm still unsure of it. Hopefully it works.
Disclaimer: Riffing on stuff that isn’t mine.
XIII.
What follows is mostly impossibly quiet. It’s so empty Dean has trouble believing it’s over at all—ever since Lucifer’s entombment in the Luxor everything has just seemed like one endless anticlimax, and he doesn’t know what to do with it.
The first night they just drink. Break out the bottle of Don Julio that Bobby’s been hiding in his bedroom for ages and split it amongst the five of them, this bizarre core alliance that somehow managed to become the epicenter of global holocaust and emerge mostly unscathed.
“So what the hell did you boys actually do?” Bobby says finally.
“We didn’t do much,” Dean says drily. “The angels powered everything.”
“We basically remade the sixty-six Seals,” Gabriel replies. “All at once, distributed over the world and dictated by terms established on the walls of the Luxor. An act of the Host that large hasn’t taken place since the war in Heaven. It’s all centered on the Luxor now, held together by Lucifer’s death on the final binding sigil.”
“Is that gonna be a problem later?” Bobby asks. “Having everything concentrated in one place?”
Gabriel shrugs. “Sure, next time someone wants to start an Apocalypse. But they’ll have to decrypt all of Michael’s writing, and track it down at the Luxor, which I understand is now buried under tons of cement, because it won’t be written anywhere else. And then they’ll have to start the process of seal-breaking all over again, and no one will have the wherewithall to do that for a long while. See, Hell has been ruled by one family since its conception, and now it’s faced with starting a new dynasty. And even the most powerful of fallen angels can’t hold a candle to how Sammael had been.”
“On the other hand, we just sealed up Hell,” Sam says. “Which means that while no demons can come up, all of the ones who are up already can’t go back down. Exorcizing is out. People will have no choice—either kill them, or get killed yourself. We’ve just made hunting an even more dangerous business.”
“Our work is never done,” Dean sighs. Castiel looks at him.
“Would you have it any other way, Dean?” he asks him.
Dean opens his mouth, then shuts it. Tries again. “I guess instead of giving ‘em hell, now we’ll just have to find something else.”
Bobby pours shots, and hands them around the table. “To Michael, then,” he says, leaning an elbow on the table to angle his shot glass at the rest of them around the table. “A real good general.”
“Who left me and the rest of the earth in one piece,” Dean adds. There are a thousand other small things they could say, but just like Gabriel said, they know Michael doesn’t want it. Dean has a feeling that Michael doesn’t want to think about much at all except maybe burying himself in the upheaval of upper management.
The archangel had left his sword, the warrior part of himself, buried in the cement of the Luxor.
Dean knows he’d probably do the same if his brother were gone for good.
They all down their shots, the three humans wincing slightly with the burn of the tequila, Gabriel and Castiel barely reacting. Sam eyes them.
“We’re gonna have to break out all the cheap stuff just to keep you guys the same level of wasted as us, aren’t we?”
Gabriel grins. “Don’t worry, I won’t drink Bobby out of house and home.” And then he’s holding a bottle of Godiva chocolate liqueur. He pours heavily for Castiel and himself. When he sets the bottle down he moves to toss his glass back, but Castiel stops him.
The angel murmurs, “To our lost brethren.”
Something about the way he says it makes them all know he’s including Sammael. Sam looks vaguely uncomfortable with the idea; Bobby sort of looks hard at the angels, like he can’t really decide what to think. Dean breaks the silence, though.
“I’ll drink to that.”
He misses the surprised and grateful look Gabriel shoots him, but as he tips back his shot his eyes catch Castiel’s, and he feels like he’s made a good choice.
***
Then the first night becomes part of a series of nights, because numbness is infinitely preferable to thinking about, well, basically anything. Things build up in the day—Sam keeps tracking the little pieces of news, small shards of evidence that the really big things are subsiding, but the world is still going to shit in multiple ways. It’s hard to be happy about the Dragon finally getting slain in East Asia when very un-supernatural dictators in the Congo are still committing genocide. There isn’t closure, because it wasn’t the Apocalypse. It wasn’t the end, and it isn’t even a beginning.
It’s a goddamn joke, is what it is.
They’re also just waiting, Dean realizes, for a thousand small things. For the other shoe to drop, but most importantly, for news from the Host. Because for all intents and purposes, angels don’t need to be on earth any longer.
Gabriel seems fairly sure that the call is going to come soon, because he’s making the most of his time—his days are filled with chocolates and Bailey’s and his nights…dammit, Dean does not need to know about the nights. Judging by the way Sam seems to carry himself around in a haze, he really, really does not need to know. At all.
Jesus.
Cas, on the other hand, is just…quiet. Dean’s always known that the angel is wound tighter than a clock spring, but now it’s even more evident. Dean sighs. It’s not like he’d forgotten Sam’s ridiculous little speech, but he’d honestly not thought he would ever get a chance to react or even think about it. And this thing with Cas is just so…unshakeable, and yet so fragile at the same time. Hell, a small part of him is still trying to get his head around the whole ‘male vessel’ part of the equation. Sam must have experimented in college when Dean wasn’t looking or something, because the situation with Gabriel seems to not be phasing him all that much and it’s the first Dean’s heard of any sort of other-team-batting from his brother. But as for him, hell no. He’d maybe considered it once or twice when drunk off his ass, but he’d never actually done anything.
With Cas, though, it feels like inevitability, but also like frailty, and Dean realizes that he’s just not accustomed to feeling so much for someone other than Sam. And with an entirely different set of feelings, too.
And now Castiel looks at him with caution, as if he doesn’t know where they stand, even though he totally should because clearly Dean was ready to be ground zero for Lucifer’s final parting shot without Michael’s protection because he wanted Castiel safe. He needed him safe.
Dammit, he should not feel so goddamn protective of a being apparently half made out of metal who could tear him to pieces one-handed. It’s just not necessary.
Except when it is.
At least he’s sticking around for now. Dean had asked him.
“Everything will depend, no doubt, on Michael’s return to power in Heaven,” Castiel said, looking out at the yard from the porch. He was holding a beer, but wasn’t drinking it. “There will be trials and other measures taken for Zachariah and those who followed him. I may even be called for my own transgressions.”
“Dude, that happens, you call me and I will go up there and kick Michael’s ass myself,” Dean said flatly.
Castiel granted him the smallest of smiles. “Thank you, Dean. I doubt that will be necessary.”
“So, in the meantime…?”
“In the meantime I will stay here, if I may.”
“Absolutely, man. S’not like our job’s done yet. We’re just waiting out the aftermath before we start up again, I imagine.”
Castiel had nodded, seemingly satisfied, and then went quietly back to keeping his peace, which just made Dean more nervous than ever about when that call from Heaven would come.
Finally, after four days of hazy unawareness, spent doing a whole lot of nothing, Michael pays Dean a visit in a dream. He’s back in his Calvin Klein model form (though this time, with flaming and crackling wings), which makes Dean snort.
“So is that what you really look like, or are you just set on being the hottest guy in the room?”
Michael smirks slightly. “It’s the closest approximation of me without my light. Or would you prefer that I alight in your mind as, what was it you thought, a smaller version of the sun?”
“Nah. I’m happy with the whole no-blindness thing, don’t get me wrong, but it still stings a bit.”
They’re sitting on the dock this time, Dean in a fold-out chair and Michael leaning back against one of the posts. He looks out on the water, his face carefully serene.
Dean sees right through it. Michael may not have intended to, but he showed enough of himself in sharing Dean’s headspace for Dean to know what’s what.
“I’m sorry about Sammael,” he says. He’s not sorry about Lucifer.
Michael closes his eyes for a moment, then reopens them. “It was inevitable. Millions of years ago, right after he brought the first war down on our heads, I held the hope that one day he would ask forgiveness of our father, and that we would welcome him once more. But he…he was always so stubborn.”
“Still. He’s your brother.”
“Yes. Yes, he was.”
The ensuing silence is strangely companionable. Brothers-in-arms syndrome, Dean suspects. But he does feel a weird kinship with Michael, a measure of trust earned by Michael just being there, accepting his every action, probably judging but nonetheless still with him after a whole life of sinning and hard times.
Eventually Dean breaks the silence. “So are you just hanging out here for the night, or were you gonna tell me something?”
Michael sighs. “It’s honestly a welcome respite from the chaos of Heaven. We’ve been remiss for centuries.”
“Been doing housekeeping then?”
“A great deal of it. Not that there is a great deal I can do myself—we will remain directionless until Father chooses to grant us revelation once more.”
“Wait. So I heard about this before.” Dean sits forward. “Uriel once said something about revelation. You mean, he was making it up?”
Michael looks at him. “We have not received revelation for a thousand years.”
“Jesus. Sorry. So you’re still up shit creek without a paddle, basically?”
Michael grimaces. “You could say that. Things will be better now, I hope—there is no need for our presence on earth, so whatever problems that may arise won’t be taken to your door. But we’ve been left without purpose. Without orders. And that is…not how we were meant to live.”
“Yeah, I’ve sort of got that impression.”
Unexpectedly, Michael shifts, twisting himself over to dangle his legs over the side of the dock and then just jumps, landing on the surface like its glass. His wings make the water sizzle. He shoves his hands into his pants pockets.
“Wow. Did Jesus have to pick that trick up from you?” Dean snarks.
Michael grins, a bit delightedly. “Jesus could never do this. He was a man. I held his hand as he walked, and the people believed what they saw.” He looks back at Dean. “Jesus was human. He was like you. We should have remembered that—remembered the greatness of your kind. If we had, things perhaps would not have gotten so bad.”
Dean squirms slightly. “Then what are all of you going to do?”
“Many things. Some will be content to return to watching, but not many, now that they have been reminded of what they were created for. Some will fall.”
Dean chokes. “Seriously? After all of the ones you just lost?”
Michael drags one wing hissing across the water. “I think many will find it preferable to live and die as humans, forgetting briefly that their purpose is unknown, than bear the burden of knowledge.”
Dean mulls this over, and says, “So I’m not going to just be hunting demons anymore, am I? I’m gonna be taking in fallen angels when they all start tapping into angel radio and getting confused.”
“That is hardly a duty for you particularly, Dean. You will find, I imagine, that for all the friends you’ve lost in the past years, you’ll have gained many for what you did in Las Vegas.”
“And that is a sentence I didn’t expect to hear from anyone, ever.”
Michael considers this, and then laughs quietly.
“What’s gonna happen to Cas?” Dean asks. “He’s…well, I get the feeling he’s anxious. Gabriel too.”
“Gabriel I may have need of in the coming years, but I have already spoken to him about this. He is hardly the good example of how to cope with Father’s absence, but he is also not the worst. He and Aziraphale both have been resilient on Earth in ways the younger of us could learn from, and should. As for Castiel, he chose a righteous path long before anyone else did,” the archangel answers with a shrug. “If anything, he should be allowed to choose his own fate. His removal from the Host has been reversed, however he chooses. He should find that his grace is strengthening.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Michael gives him a long look. “Are you going to ask him to stay?”
Dean frowns. “No way, man. I’ve already asked more of him than I’ve asked of anyone else, ever.”
Michael just stares at him, then shakes his head. “Some things aren’t asked of someone. They are asked for.”
And with that infuriatingly cryptic comment, he's gone. And Dean feels like an ass, but he doesn’t quite know why.
***
At breakfast the next morning, Dean relates the news. Sam nearly chokes on his coffee.
“Angels are going to choose to fall? Now?”
“What could they possibly want in Heaven anymore?” Gabriel counters, a tad bitterly. “We’ve just proved ourselves incapable of functioning without proper leadership, and the only leadership we’re going to accept is our Father’s, or maybe Michael’s. And Michael is deferring power to God. We’re obsolete. We might as well tear ourselves down to earth.”
“But you’re here, and you haven’t fallen,” Sam counters.
“Yeah, and I get to live with knowing that my family’s still screwed up and Dad’s still gone. For the most part, the Host knew about the former, but not about the latter, because the archangels kept giving orders like everything was fine. Now? Everyone knows. And everyone’s seriously depressed, because apparently, we can’t be trusted anymore.”
“I do not want to deal with angelic psychotherapy,” Dean says. “Pretty sure we’re not qualified.”
“’Swhy I’ll be helping out sometimes,” Gabriel agrees.
Castiel doesn’t say anything. Dean starts to panic.
***
Finally he catches him after dinner the same day, this time on the roof, which means Dean has to clamber up through the attic window and grumble that he is just getting too old for this shit. Castiel watches him with measured amusement as he eases himself down on the shingles. The breeze catches the tails of the angel’s trenchcoat and the tips of his wings, which whir peaceably, small sparks standing out like fireflies against the night sky. “Good evening, Dean,” he says.
“Hi,” Dean says. And then he feels abruptly out of words, like the entire dictionary has just fallen out of his head irrevocably. He doesn’t even know what conversation he wants to start, let alone how to start it. After an awkward silence (and goddammit, it’s been a long time since they’ve had a truly awkward silence, and Dean’s fucked up again, hasn’t he?), he settles on the most straightforward.
“So, I didn’t tell you at breakfast…Michael says you can choose whether you stay here or you go. You’re welcome in Heaven again.”
“Yes,” Castiel agrees. “I can feel my grace returning.”
“Yeah. Can see it, too.” Dean nods towards his wings, which look brighter than they had in previously days.
The angel smiles slightly. “I am glad you can see them. Even though I know that the sight Michael has given you will allow you to see terrible things as well.”
“Yeah, I’ve been getting that.” Dean has. Little flickers of ghosts outside the property, small pockets of power in Bobby’s supply room. It’s damn distracting, but Dean has a feeling it will come in handy on the hunt.
Castiel studies him and says, “You’re sure that you’ll continue with the hunt, after all that’s happened?”
“What else am I gonna do?” Dean says. “There are demons out there now, way more than before, and they can’t even be exorcized, they have to be full out ganked. I can’t settle down and fix cars or something knowing that.”
“You told me once that you were tired.”
“I am. I mean…I’m tired of being important. I’m tired of being played like a fucking violin. But things are different now. We’re back to basics.”
“Saving people, hunting things?”
“Yeah,” Dean smiles. “Exactly.”
Castiel nods. “You seem happier now. Better.”
Dean grins. “Saving the world does that to a guy.”
But Castiel doesn’t look that happy about it—he just looks away, falling silent. Dean’s smile drops away. He says, “Cas. What I said before, about not wanting to be a head shrinker for angels? It um…that didn’t apply to you.”
Castiel looks back at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean. Look, I’m really crappy at this, but if you want to talk about stuff you’re dealing with and everything, I’ll listen. Because I know you guys are sort of in a bad spot.”
“I’ve had more practice than many,” the angel shrugs. “I should be considered fortunate, that I questioned my faith first before it had a chance to destroy itself before my eyes.”
“Whoa, destroy, Cas? What about the sigils at the Luxor, with Sammael’s sign?”
“I…I believe it was a true sign. But I can’t know.”
“What’d the pendant tell you?” Dean asks.
Castiel looks down, like he’s failed, which is just so many levels of ridiculous. “The only time it would have burned would have been the moment when Father let Lucifer die as Sammael. And at that point—“
“—our whole fuckin’ world was on fire,” Dean finishes. “I get it.” But then he leans over a bit to find Castiel’s gaze, seeking it out with the same persistence with which he usually avoids it. “But Cas, I guess what I’m asking is, is that enough? D’you feel like you can have faith, even with just that little sign?”
“I don’t know,” Castiel says.
And that shit’s just not gonna fly. Dean scoots tentatively closer, and then even closer when he notices that Cas lifts his wing slightly to accommodate him. “Cas,” he says, more quietly, “You were resurrected. I was. Sam was. Lucifer was forgiven as he fell.”
“Then what was the point?” Castiel asks fiercely, and Dean feels a crackle of static energy from the wing behind his back zing across metallic pinions. “What was the point of this whole exercise, if it only ended in the deaths of soldiers? Why would Father have let this get so out of hand and then give us the smallest of tools to make it right?”
“What, you think I know? I’m not the guy with intimate details of what goes on upstairs.” Dean moves again to face him. “But, do you want my opinion?”
When Castiel looks at him now, it’s with utter focus, and Dean feels scraped raw with it. “Yes, Dean. I do.”
Dean takes a breath, lets it out. “I think he’s giving you free will. He left you all alone, let you deal with your shit without dealing with him. It’s douchetastic—I mean, like, shittiest parenting ever—but that’s what I think. Because look where he stepped in: with you. You, Cas, the only angel who took free will and did something good with it. You’re his success. So’s Michael, and Gabriel, and all the others who decided that if things are worth saving, they should stop just waiting for orders that won’t come, get off their asses and save them already.”
Part of him is just thinking aloud, but another part of him is remembering the way Michael walked out onto the water for the whim of it, and not because there was purpose to the action. How he’d dipped his wing in the water just to watch the steam rise. How he’d never done anything before that, none of them had except for Gabriel, just because they wanted to. So Dean’s not really sure what Cas could possibly think, especially since he’s pretty sure he’s venturing into rambling territory at this point. But when he looks back over, his breath catches.
Castiel is looking at him with stunned awe, with reverence of which Dean feels like he has no business being on the receiving end.
“Dean,” Cas says, low and raspy, “Do you truly believe this?”
Dean considers, and then says, “Yeah. Yeah, I think I do.” And then, because he feels like he might not get another chance to, “You can choose to do whatever you want now. You could stay on Earth, even. That is, if you wanted to.”
Castiel seems to search him for a long moment, absorbing him, and then he looks down at his bent knees. “Why would I choose to stay here?” he asks, after a moment.
“Well, Heaven’s not sounding too appealing right now, given everyone’s running around with existential crises, or whatever,” Dean offers. But no, that’s really not good enough. So not good enough that even Sam, that ridiculous gigantic girl, told him to man up. So he adds on, “And I…that is, I’d like it if you stayed.”
“I would be able to help you on your hunts, now that my powers are returning,” Castiel says, and finally Dean starts to get it through his brain that the angel is giving him an out, an opportunity to just keep demanding things that he has no right to take without offering him anything in return. And that just…Dean can’t do that anymore, because he’s noticing now how it’s reducing Castiel, hurting him in some indefinable way, and it makes him clench and itch with the desire to fix, reaffirm. And he realizes that it’s because Castiel doesn’t know how to do this, he can’t fill in all the blanks Dean’s been leaving, and Dean is a complete idiot for not knowing that, because he did know, he just didn’t think.
He can’t believe he’s about to do this. But clearly words aren’t cutting it.
Like he’s about to handle a precious relic, he reaches carefully for Castiel, bringing his fingers up to brush along his jawline, up to curve against the back of his neck. “Cas,” he says, brushing his thumb in quiet circles beneath the angel’s ear, “Stay. Not just for the hunt, though.”
He turns Castiel’s face towards him, and Castiel lets him. So he moves closer, feeling the angel’s warmth and electricity, and presses his lips slanting across his mouth, lingering on the angel’s bottom lip, trying to pour the mess of affection and possessiveness and hope he’s inadvertently built up inside him over the past two years into the gentlest of touches. Cas doesn’t respond at first, holds himself still as if moving will make Dean leave. When Dean pulls back to look at him, though, his exhale is sudden, shaky. “Dean?”
It’s the look that finally brings the right words to him. Cas is looking at him with unabashed, disbelieving hope, of the sort where Dean really needs to figure out what the hell Cas has been reading in him all this time, because it was clearly very mistaken. But, first things first.
“Cas, you said before that you followed me. Is that still true? That is, would you want to…?”
“Dean.” Castiel stares at him, and then shifts so that his back is to Dean. He’s pulling his coat off, and then he says, “Look at the back of my neck.”
Bewildered, Dean moves forward, and eases the collar of Cas’s jacket and shirt back from his skin. Curving up in a sweep from beneath the collar up into the angel’s hair and further towards his jaw, beneath his ear, is a single sigil. It doesn’t take Michael’s encyclopedic knowledge for Dean to know what it is.
“That’s—“
“Your mark upon me. I am for you, Dean. I will be until I die.”
Dean, stunned, pulls him around to face him. He shakes his head. “Cas. You’ve, what, assumed that you’re only good as my lackey or something? You don’t deserve anything back? Cas, you pulled me from the Pit. I’ve been bearing your mark for years. I’ve been yours since I met you in Perdition.”
Cas looks away. “I could not possibly claim…not when Michael was there, and you are so important, Dean—“
“Didn’t I tell you I was tired of being important?” Dean cuts him off. He slides the hand he has on Cas’s shoulder up to the sigil, warming the skin beneath, pulling the angel’s magnetic gaze back to him, where he needs it.
And finally Cas responds, pulling Dean closer to him, framing his face with shaky fingers as if he’s not sure whether Dean is real. He says, “I don’t think I could leave if I wanted to.”
And Dean kisses him fully then, reveling finally in how not-fragile this suddenly is, how firm Castiel is in his grasp as he extends them both fully out on the roof, how vast clockwork wings are blocking out the sky around him leaving only him and Cas in the world after living and dying for one another in silence. They scrabble against shingles and move against each other, interlocking, pieces sliding together. Dean finds himself cupping the base of Cas’s wing, and it feels like silk stretched across steel, and it trembles at his touch, and he finds himself trembling equally as Castiel finds the dip of his lower back and unerringly presses the place where he’d blessed the marks of the trumpeter with words and holy water. It’s obscene and chaste, each of them reduced to whispered names, exchanged and kept in clandestine places.
It’s Dean taking, at last, and Cas doing the same even though he was never designed to, and it's Dean thinking yes, this is a world in which I am not cursed.
