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alchemyaliceAuthor: Alchemy Alice
Rating: PG-13
Genre and/or Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam/Gabriel
Spoilers: Season 5
Warnings: Last one, dudes. Sorry for the wait again, hopefully this is somewhat adequate. Thanks for staying with me, though! I really had doubts about whether I'd be able to finish this, but all of the encouragement went a long way towards assuring that I did. So, here we are.
Disclaimer: Riffing on stuff that isn’t mine.
XIV.
So this is how it went down: It started with headaches, then turned into a clusterfuck, and now it’s just…it just is.
Sam doesn’t pretend to understand why. He doesn’t even pretend that he’s fixed now, or that anything is. He’s lying in bed, Gabriel curled around him with one leg thrown proprietarily over his thighs, staring at the ceiling. The sunshine is hazy through the curtains. Ash has been drifting in the air for days now. He says, “How long will you be gone?”
“Dunno,” Gabriel answers. “As long as it takes. But not all at once.”
Sam turns to study the archangel’s face. “So you’ll be around?”
“No getting rid of me.”
He snorts. “I suppose I can deal.”
He suspects, actually, that it couldn’t have turned out any other way. All his life, he’s imagined constancy as his dream, his escape from transience, but really, he meant what he had said to Adam, even now—the way he lives now, it’s become part of him in ways irreversible. But maybe the bottom line is that while this may be true, it’s possible that he can find happiness in this ever-shifting landscape.
Gabriel will be in and out of his life—unpredictable, still a Trickster because that instinct doesn’t just go away after a millenia--and Sam would never deny him his new role, a new purpose when Heaven has never been so purposeless.
Michael comes to visit in sparse moments, taking brief snatches of Dean’s unconscious and giving reports on what’s happening upstairs. It’s never much, mostly administrative arguing and a few harsh applications of traditional holy vengeance, but Dean is pretty pleased to hear of Zachariah’s banishment.
“Dude, how do you even banish an angel?” he asks, sitting on the dock with a beer in hand. Michael lounges next to him.
“Trap him in an animal vessel,” he answers matter-of-factly, “Then place him in Purgatory.”
“Badass.”
“Yep.” Michael steals Dean’s beer. Dean is fairly certain now that Michael just visits to get a breather. Heaven clearly is not agreeing with him, which Dean supposes is understandable, given that the archangel has spent the last thirty years indulging in Dean’s alternately horrifying and hedonistic life. Dean finds he doesn’t really mind. The dude gives him good dreams.
Dreams that include Zachariah trapped inside a goat.
Michael catches his thought and smirks. “Actually, I’m fairly certain Anna insisted on a platypus.”
Dean nearly spits beer all over himself.
After two weeks, Chuck comes by in a battered pickup truck. With him, is a manuscript. Looking exhausted, he sets it on Bobby’s kitchen table.
“The Winchester Gospels,” he says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “They’re finished.”
“How’d you even finish them?” Sam asked. “I thought you weren’t getting word from Heaven anymore.”
“I’m not. I mean, I’m not getting it before it happens. And at this point I’m not getting anything, now that the job’s finished, I guess. Do you have anything to drink?”
Gabriel decides to be obnoxious and conjures him O’Douls. Chuck looks at it in disgust, but drinks it anyway.
“See, I got it all after the fact. Soon as Lucifer died, all of it just flooded in. I thought I was gonna explode.”
“You thought—?”
Castiel puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder, and Dean shuts up with a growl. Chuck looks vaguely terrified.
“I, um. I’m here because I thought you might want to read it. And, you know, cut out some things, as you see fit.”
“Why would we—”
“Uh,” Sam says, catching on and feeling like he’s just reached his embarrassment quotient for the next thousand years. “How personal does this one get, Chuck?”
Chuck looks like he wants to puke. “…Fairly? Um yeah…fairly personal. I couldn’t help it! It was just there in my head, and it doesn’t go away until I write it!”
“Oh for fuck’s sake. I am done with this full-frontal bullshit,” Dean says, and snatches the manuscript off the table. He starts flipping through it. Then he raises his eyebrows. “Chuck…”
“I know I’m sorry!”
Gabriel leers. “I bet it’s hot.”
Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. “When are you leaving, again?”
***
Sam tracks down Tom at the hospital in Mesquite. He’s been stuck there since he left Vegas, going through multiple surgeries and now on physical therapy, which is basically an even bigger anticlimax than what the Winchesters are experiencing. Jefferson’s with him though, apparently, along with Raphael.
“Wait, Raphael is hanging out with mudmonkeys?” Gabriel splutters. “Since when?”
“Since they became the ones with greater roles than ours.” Raphael’s booms sonorously over the speakerphone. Sam fleetingly wonders whether the archangel is actually making the effort to enhance the signal on the hospital phone just for dramatic effect. He hears Jefferson snort.
“I think we’re done with roles, actually,” Jefferson says dryly, his own voice as tinny as usual through the long distance wires. “I don’t know about you boys, but I’m about done with this Biblical crap.”
“Cram it, buddy,” Gabriel says. “We’re made of Biblical crap. Little harder for us to ignore it.”
“Dude, tell your brother that it’s not against the rules to do a laying of hands on my damn leg,” Tom shouts down the line.
“It’s his choice,” Gabriel replies. “Sorry.”
That wasn’t the whole of it, of course. Once again, Dean is pretty sure that God is either off dead in a ditch somewhere, or too occupied with some sort of millenium-long holy bender to consider the full consequences of this whole it’s-the-Apocalypse-oh-wait-just-kidding thing. Giving angels free will (or just cutting them loose, however you see it) is roughly the equivalent of letting a bunch of toddlers loose in Legoland, except for instead of playing with plastic bricks, they were potentially free to play with the entire world. With full knowledge of the scope of angelic power, Dean’s really not sure it’s a good idea; so at this point, he’s pretty glad to hear that Raphael’s taking the hands-off approach, even if he’s maybe taking it a bit too seriously.
It really is a good thing that angels were mostly built to be inherently moral. Sure, some fall and turn into demons and have to be dealt with, and some saunter vaguely downwards like Crowley, but for the most part, they’re jerks but not evil. And that keeps them from ruling the world. Dean has a feeling that there’s not much appeal for them in that anyway. Righteousness trumps power in their books, or something like that. Especially with Lucifer gone, and unable to seduce his brethren.
“Hey, Jefferson,” Sam says into the phone. “What’re your plans nowadays? Going back to hunting?”
“Sure, unless you got a better idea,” Jefferson replies. “Dunno what else I’m good for, seeing as Melissa’s gone.”
Melissa had been his wife. Sam looks at Dean, who nods. “How about being a resource, then? You did a lot for us back there. Kept people in line. You could do that, now.”
“How’d you figure?”
They offer him the Roadhouse. He’d known Ellen and Jo briefly, and pauses after they explain.
“If you think I’m good for it,” he says, after a second. “The Harvelles are a hard act to follow.”
Sam thinks back to how Jefferson had been the first on his feet when Zachariah busted into the Bellagio, how he’d held his ground against angels and demons with unusual tenacity, and the way the other hunters respected him. “You’ll be fine,” he says. “So long as you want it, you can have it. You know, if you’ve had enough of the road.”
Jefferson is smart, and more practical than the Winchesters in the most essential ways. So he knows when he’s being given a chance to move on, no strings attached. “Yeah. I’ll take it. So long as you make a point of stopping by every once in a while.”
“I think we can make that happen,” Dean says.
They hear the phone being passed over, and the speakerphone getting turned off. Then it’s just Tom. “Hey, guys?” he says tentatively. “What’s it gonna be like now?”
“Different,” Sam says.
“But mostly the same,” Dean finishes.
***
Bobby plays host for a month. Dean fixes cars, gets a new tail light for the Impala. Castiel stays close to him, always. Sam eventually notices.
“So,” he says, leaning against the hood of a beat up Pontiac. “You guys finally worked things out?”
Dean looks up at him, and then at Castiel, who is perched on a pile of cars about five yards away. His eyes are on the horizon, wings nearly aflame as the evening comes on. He had been closer, before, but Sam had put on his I-want-to-talk-to-you-seriously face on, so Dean had silently requested that he move. The whole telepathic link thing is turning out to be a real boon. Dean is plotting ways to use it against Sam indefinitely, if he can actually get Cas to go with it.
“Yeah. We’re good,” he says.
It’s been more than good. They’re sort of going about it backwards, in Dean’s mind at least—when they went bed the first time, they were both too astonished, too awed by their luck to be anything but slow and gentle with each other, every movement a deliberate and cherished thing. As days went on, they’d moved on to more heated encounters, moving confident hands across hard and responsive planes of skin. They're more like the encounters Dean is used to, even though they will never be like those in his past, not really, because everything they do seems to mean so much nowadays. But it's what they need at the moment--Cas with his battered faith, and Dean with his battered goddamn everything--they need meaning now, so they're shoving it onto each other as much as they can, with every touch and every word. It's hardly perfect, and maybe not even healthy, but it's something.
Dean blinks, and studies Sam’s face. His brother was clearly expecting more than that, so he scrapes for something else that isn’t going to be either sappy or TMI. “He’s staying. Permanently, that is.”
“Joining the hunt?” Sam asks.
“Yeah. That’s cool with you?”
Sam shrugs. “Could use some moments of divine intervention, sure.”
Dean throws a look at him. “Gabriel won’t always be there?”
“Yeah. We have an agreement.”
“An ‘agreement’? The hell?”
Sam smirks. He can’t help himself. “Yeah, Dean. It involves a safe word.”
Dean nearly knocks himself out on the Impala’s raised engine cover. “Dude. I hate you so much right now.”
“You totally deserve it.”
His brother looks seriously at him, though. “Sam. You’re okay?”
Sam just meets his eyes squarely. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”
“Good. Because I think we’re beginning to wear out our welcome.”
They both turn to look at Bobby, who seems to be having an aggravated theological discussion with Gabriel, the both of them gesticulating wildly on the porch.
Sam nods, though he also smiles a bit.
“Just a bit,” Dean shrugs. “Though I dunno if we can top Vegas. You know, ever.”
“To be honest, I’d really rather not.”
“Yeah, very true.” He turns. “Hey, Cas.”
When Sam looks back, Castiel is at Dean’s shoulder, deep in his personal space. Dean doesn’t flinch anymore, though; he just leans back into it slightly, and glances up at what Sam can only assume are Cas’s wings.
“Yes, Dean?” Cas says calmly, his expression one that Sam can only describe as beatific.
“Any word on angel radio about a job we could take on? Something to get back in the game?”
They start trudging back towards the house. Castiel says, “There are a great many things to do, Dean. Or have you forgotten that there are now thousands of demons loose on Earth?”
“Right, thanks. You’re a regular ray of sunshine.” But Dean’s slinging an arm around the angel’s shoulders—Sam thinks he even catches a glimpse of his brother dipping his head down slightly to nose into the spiky black of Cas’s hair. Gabriel watches them approach.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he says, with a sly grin. “How do you feel about a cockatrice?”
“Dunno. Is it evil?” Dean asks.
“Mm, rather.”
“Can we kill it?” Sam asks.
“Sure thing.”
“It’s certainly a viable option,” Castiel affirms.
“You’re forgetting the part where it looks like a dragon and has to be viewed with mirrors if you don’t want to turn to stone,” Bobby says acidly. “Idjits.”
Dean looks at Sam. They both shrug.
There’s a lot to do. Starting with some ridiculous creature they know practically nothing about? Seems oddly appropriate. The losses they’ve racked up are tremendous—Biblical, one can now completely unironically say. Dean still feels the sting of it, and he knows that a part of him won’t be recovering from that any time soon, and really just shouldn’t anyway. But they’re standing on the porch of the closest place they've had to a home, the Impala's fully stocked and still purring with health, and for the first time in a while, he feels whole. They’re not puppets anymore. They’re just men trying to make good choices.
Men and angels, shadowboxing and flailing wildly around trying to save the world from random evil shit. He hopes God approves, but really, it doesn't matter.
He looks at Cas, who meets his glance with uncanny understanding, who unbelievably, impossibly loves him with a fierceness he’s only beginning to discover. He says, “We can work with that.”
Cas nods.
Finis.
