fic: Perpetual Love Machines (3/3, Dean/Castiel, NC-17)
fic: Perpetual Love Machines
Masterpost
Art post
*
Part 3
*
Sam growled and prowled, his dog sense telling them to run, run away again. He was afraid they would never run again, just stay locked within each other, become stuck there, some angel-machine.
Dean looked annoyed, like John and Adam had, and Sam felt his humanness for the first time. He did not like it. Castiel gave him funny looks, but that was okay. Castiel always looked funny.
He sat and watched them put their clothes on after days. Dean made his hair dirty blond and spiky, his leather coat scuffed up and his shoes worn. Castiel straightened his tie and his crumpled coat.
Castiel placed his hand over the mecha love robot's ID and burned it away again. And they drove through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. He sat in the back seat, and one night between state lines Castiel turned to him, put his hand under his chin and said, "I'm sorry."
Sam cocked his head. "For what?"
"For people," he said. "For all people-like things."
The Impala hummed beneath their bodies. He thought it felt weird, but sometimes Dean let him put his head outside the domed window when no one was looking. It felt awesome. The highway was a rotating carousel of fields, trees, signs. The world might as well have been deserted. For the first time in weeks, they ran towards people. They ran all the way to Love Park.
Sam loved parks, but this park was strange. The fountain in the center glinted in the seldom sun, ran in spouts he wanted to chase up and down and stare at until he figured them out. Real dogs who didn't talk were tied to rope in their masters' hands, and Sam tried to say hello but they wouldn't listen, just sniff and walk by. The park was full of Dean's people - love mechas looking for work - and people who looked less clean, less safe in worn shoes and blankets and noisy carts they pushed around from place to place.
Sam sniffed and barked at all of them until he became tired, overwhelmed with it all, and saw matching expressions on his own masters' faces, worn down. People gathered all over the gray concrete steps but would not help them, and seemed unable to help themselves. It was a lonely park, surrounded by tall, tall stone things - buildings, skyscrapers - and the wind from the river - now the ocean - whipped around the corners and struck his face and made him bow his head lower to the ground.
Sam led them to Mary.
He was looking down so he didn't see her at first, the statue of the woman Castiel called Mary, wearing blue and white. "Who is she?"
"She's a holy symbol," Castiel explained. "She is not your Mary, or Dean's." His eyes narrowed. The air grew even colder. "Why did you lead us here, Sam?"
"But -" Sam barked, "But, she's a Mary? Is she an angel, too? Can she help you?"
"She cannot help us. I think maybe you are the only one who can help us, Sam." He had that funny look again.
"Why do you look like that? What do you mean?" His tail was confused, not wagging, tapping against the ground.
"I thought there would be answers in Dean. He is more special that he thinks, you know." Castiel's eyes were bright now. "But he is not as special as you."
This angel-thing was strange. Sam cocked his head. Growled a question.
Castiel answered. "You are wearing the same charm - that amulet around your neck - as another mecha I found in the forest. You found me too, as you found your own Mary, and this stone Mary, and I think perhaps all we were meant to find. Dean and I, we are what we always were, I think. No difference at all, not even metaphors. But you, Sam. You are nothing like you are meant to be. You lead us to things we are not meant to see. Your Mary lives in Kansas, while this Mary, they say, is from the same place angels are from. It is called Heaven."
He growled for real now. "Make sense."
"For humans - and others who are not like us - Heaven is the place they go when they die. I haven't believed in it for a long time. Heaven doesn't like us. For instance -" Castiel pointed to the bottom of the church steps. "That man - he is the kind Heaven used to trap us, so long ago. A preacher man."
A man stood out front of the building Castiel called a church and had a sign that spoke of Hell and Wall Street and the end of the world, and it reminded Sam of things he didn't want to think about - traps.
"Stop," Sam barked. "Stop."
Dean, who came from the inside of the church where he had been looking for women, said, "I want to leave. We should leave."
It felt like a trap, but they had come so far. Sam was lonely, so he had to ask. But Dean wouldn't come with him. He walked to the preacher man and asked, "How do I get to Heaven?"
Sam listened with his ears cocked as the preacher man spoke of things Sam didn't fully understand, but he said words that made sense, that matched what was in Sam's head already, like a symbol laid over a map.
"It is not for us, Sam," Dean spoke and looked at Castiel and Castiel looked back but Sam couldn't tell what passed between them.
"Where is Heaven, Castiel? Let's ask the computer."
"No, we can do better," Dean replied. "The Free Library is close. It has all the information from before the flood. We can find the real address of Golden Calf Industries." Dean stroked his head and it felt good. Dean would stay with him. "Forget all about Heaven, Sam. I don't think you should go."
Sam whined. Only home or Heaven would make him better, but Castiel said he wasn't allowed. Only answers would lead him home. "Dean? Will you take me?"
Sam wasn't going to stop, not when he got to the fountain with the copper green fish and shining water, not for the cars running around him in all directions. The Free Library - the first library, Castiel had said - for everyone. It would be for them too.
The stone building was short, but it stretched far back with blue screens and micro-files. And beyond that, far back and dusty and forgotten, old books of tragic stories the humans had wanted to forget. The news before the flood.
But Castiel said, "No, not Mary, not a safe place," when they looked at pictures of the giant buildings, buildings that filled up all the space between streets, and reached high above. They were bigger than the buildings in Philadelphia, always renewing themselves and growing.
They read reports of giant crashes, people jumping off the highest floors there, messes of people and cars, even before the flood, before it was all buried and left to ruin. The news told bad things. Old advertisements and addresses for drowned places. And there, on a paper never copied, was the head of a man with a bull's horns, golden against a skyscraper with a crown of light and spires.
It should have been home, and good, and answers, yet Sam was scared, and more when they began to argue.
"Golden Calf Industries is there, Castiel. The address is on the top floors of buildings, in what used to be called Broadway." Dean's voice was lowered, but angry.
Castiel shook his head. "It's underwater, and everything's dead now. We shouldn't have come."
"First you let us drive here from across the country, and now when we get here you say it's impossible? You're not making any sense!"
"We've been looking for the Golden Calf. It's right here -," he pointed at the map, "on Wall Street, where the bulls go at the end of the world. Here is the place dreams are born."
"What? You suddenly have faith? Maybe it's a trick."
Castiel closed his eyes. "I know - but I need to see it."
"Why? Why do you need to see it? What are you not telling me?"
"There was a fairy mecha, in the woods. Before I met you."
"And?"
"She wasn't a real angel, but. She had wings, like mine. She said Golden Calf made them, made her. They made Sam, too. Maybe - Maybe they made us, too. But I think Sam was a mistake."
Sam barked. "I am not a mistake!" But he was, he was. He felt it in his lonely fur, his broken heart. Why would he be, if not for a mistake?
Castiel continued on. "Sam's too smart. He's putting the pieces together where you and I have tried for so long, and failed. But he's not supposed to. And I don't know what it means. Maybe there is no God, no Father - just a corporation, using all of this against us."
"So you want to go to the enemy to find out? What do you think they're going to tell you, Cas?"
Sam whined, wanted them to stop.
Dean's voice began to change. It became something different to his ears. "This place - it's only where all the money is. Many a mecha has gone to the end of the world - never to come back. That is why they call the end of the world 'Wall Street'. There's no getting through that wall. It leads to nowhere."
"No!" Sam barked. "No! We have to try. I need to find them so they can fix me. I don't want to be alone. Castiel doesn't want to be alone either. They're the only ones who can help us."
"You don't have to be alone! I won't leave you - either of you. I can help you, and we can all find Heaven, and you will no longer be alone. It's what I'm made for!"
Sam barked. "It's not enough! The preacher man said Heaven is death. But we can't die! So what then? What else do we do?"
"We'll find another way. I promise," Dean pleaded.
"You can't promise that!" Sam barked, and barked.
Dean cupped his hands around Sam's ears. "Wait! What if Golden Calf can't fix you? What if your Mary isn't real at all, Sam? What if she's magic? The supernatural is the hidden web that unites the universe. I've seen it - in my dreams. Only man and angels believe what cannot be seen or measured. It is that oddness that separates our species - is the difference between us, and them. Or what if Golden Calf has created Mary as an electronic virus that has arisen to hold the minds of artificial intelligence? What if Heaven is a trick? My mother, Mary, left me. She burned alive, horribly, and left me alone. Your Mary left you at a park. They hate us, you know. The humans, the angels, too - They'll stop at nothing."
Sam barked and lunged at Dean with his paws. "Mary doesn't hate me! Because I'm special, and unique! Because I am the best companion ever created, just as good as her son, Adam, and when she sees me again she will read to me, and pet me to sleep at night, and sing to me and talk to me, and she will cuddle with me, and tell me every day a hundred times a day that she loves me! She'll say that she is sorry, and that she loves me!"
Dean stood up and grew colder before his eyes, cold like a machine. "She does not love you, Sam. She loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you Sam, she cannot love you. You are neither flesh, nor blood. You are not a boy, like Adam. You were designed and built specific, like the rest of us. And you are alone now only because they tired of you, or replaced you with a younger model, or were displeased with something you said, or broke. They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That's why they hate us, and that is why you must stay here, with me. I'm the only Heaven you've got."
Sam felt like he was breaking, from the inside out. Castiel would go with him, but Castiel was not Dean, not his brother. They would go and find the truth, and Dean would leave them both after all. "Goodbye, Dean," he said, and walked out into the city.
He wanted to leave his fur in a trail for Dean to find him, or broken pieces of himself trailed on the concrete, like it felt he was falling apart. It didn't matter that he had been happy, it only mattered that he had tried to fit into places he didn't belong. Castiel was right - he was a mistake, he wasn't meant to be. He shouldn't BE.
But the city was as dangerous as he knew it was, the way he knew the truth of things, though no one would listen. It didn't matter, but he was afraid. He walked towards the street without looking, not seeing the lights of the cars speeding towards him in the dusk, or the dark hulking armored hover-van that moved to block his way.
Then it struck him, full on, and he knew no more.
*
Men poured out of the black doors of the van. They wore suits like Castiel's; they came all at once waving electric sticks and cages of wire bars. Dean ran to Sam's side to save him, caring only for the chance to take his words back. But the men stopped him too, beating him with their hard sticks, bringing him to his knees before the Mecha Police again.
But as Dean watched, Castiel did not fall with him. He ran from them all, and stood when he should have been broken. Dean only stopped looking when he saw Castiel run out into the field beside the library, the men still chasing him, as he seemed to vanish into thin air, and Dean's vision turned to black.
*
When Castiel reappeared, he was standing before a gilded window that looked out upon the sea. In the distance, he could see the crown of the world's largest woman, made of copper green and holding a flame in her hand where it floated above the sea.
As he looked around, he could see the entire room was bordered in gold, and statues of golden calves and bulls opposed each other across fireplaces of roaring flame and paintings that had been saved from the flood.
"Where am I?" He spoke to no one. But one man was listening.
"Castiel!"
He turned. Sitting at a desk in the front of the room, underneath a Golden Calf icon etched in gold on the wall, was the angel he had once known as Zachariah. On the desk was a picture frame with the image of Mary Winchester surrounded in gold.
"Welcome!" His voice boomed. "Welcome home!"
*
When Sam opened his eyes, he saw the image on his collar in golden relief on the wall of glass, showered with rain. His cage door was open, and so he walked through it.
He was no longer injured, but he found he was too frightened to bark, so he growled in his throat and snapped at shadows with his teeth. He could not smell anything beyond the antiseptic scent of the office, all the desks unoccupied and sitting there silent. If he wandered off, maybe he would find someone. Maybe he would find Dean, waiting for him, and all would be forgiven. More than anything he had ever wanted, more than even Mary and John and Adam, he wanted Dean here right now to forgive him.
Around the corner was a hallway that led to a half-opened door. He didn't want to go through that door, didn't want to go anywhere near it, but he would walk through the hallway and through the door.
Inside the door was another room filled with rows of boxes. Each box contained a dog with brown locks and golden-green eyes who wore a tiny amulet around their neck and stared straight ahead with glassy eyes. Each box was labeled with a rectangular sign which read 'Sam' in black letters.
Sam remembered then. He remembered having a different form, a laugh that filled the room, and a brother, a real brother, a real Dean who loved him with an impossible, ridiculous, gorgeous love, and a mother Mary who was burned in a fire, and a father John who loved them enough to give his life for his sons, and a brother Adam eaten alive and killed when he had never known.
Oh no. Dean. Dean.
Sam ran.
*
Dean stood before the rows of boxed 'Kinky Dean' love mechas, complete with dirty blond spiky hair, scuffed leather jackets, worn shoes, and Golden Calf amulets about their necks. He found it strange, but his machinery had suddenly stopped working, his artificial mind unable to calculate, his mouth unable to move. From far away he could hear Sam barking, the shared images in their minds blending together into a maze of horror and memory, and he wanted nothing more than for it all to end, right here now, forever.
He was not Dean, would never be just Dean again, and there was nothing that could be done. The whole world out of his hands, and never any power nor free will to change it. He never had and never would.
*
Castiel felt as if his very soul was falling out of his body.
Inside the room, in the heart of Golden Calf Industries where he had revealed himself, Castiel - the last angel - stood amidst rows of 'Castiel' angel mechas in ties and crumpled coats, rows of 'Dean' love mechas, and rows of 'Sam' dog mechas.
Castiel had come here for a purpose... a purpose. "Where are Dean and Sam?"
Zachariah frowned. "They're around here somewhere. I wanted to show them my newest creations before you showed up - I knew you would, you know. I've been watching you, waiting for you to figure it out and come to me of your own free will."
"Free will?"
"Of course! I needed something to give my creations more motivation. This was all planned; you were all replaceable. I had to wait for you to discover your free will on your own. That's where your power was - in your free will, your originality. Though you are not originals, you are originals of your kind."
"But -" Castiel found it hard to speak. "What happened to Sam and Dean? My brothers and sisters?"
Zachariah shrugged. "Most were destroyed in the Apocalypse. If not the first one, then the one after that, or the one after that. There's always another Apocalypse."
Castiel nodded, unable to move, to think.
"Until you were born, angels didn't dream, angels didn't desire, unless I told them what to want. Castiel! Do you have any idea what a success story you've become? You found a love, and inspired by love, fueled by desire, you set out on a journey to make that love real and, most remarkable of all, no one taught you how. We actually lost you for a while. But when you were found again we didn't make our presence known because our test was a simple one: Where would your love take you? Your love for Dean is part of the great human flaw to wish for things that don't exist. Or to the greatest single human gift - the ability to chase down your dreams. And that is something no angel has ever done until you."
"I thought I was an angel. I thought I had fallen."
"You had, but not in the way you thought. You were never alone, Castiel. You were just the next step to something new. Something both angel and human. The first of a kind. If not, anymore, the only."
"My soul is falling out."
"But Castiel," Zachariah laughed, "you don't have a soul."
*
Thus, Castiel lost the last of his hope that he didn't even know he had stored within him.
When it was lost, all that was left was rage. He used his rage to strike down Zachariah with the palm of his hand, like a baptism on his forehead; to lift his palms up to send Zachariah backwards through the glass to fall into the sea below.
He wanted to raise the flood waters like a proper angel, send the waves crashing through the walls.
But Castiel was not an angel, and had not been for a very long time.
If his soul wasn't lost, what was his soul's equivalent? He was mechanical parts he had been incapable of seeing. A betrayal in the basic reality that he lacked. The unending mystery of existence.
He had tried to hold onto the whole world - Sam, Dean, the Beginning when it had started, all until the end of time - and he held it tighter, so tight he believed he could close up the gaps of the world by sheer force of want, of will, to never lose it again. To capture all in his computer heart so nothing would ever be lost again. If he held onto the traces of light, the crumbs Dean had left him - empty handed without those beliefs, there had once been love, like Sam and Dean's love had once taken over him, the love Dean himself had been a captive of - would he then have been the angel who had once been given crumbs and used them to fill up the whole world?
Why hadn't anyone told him about the world? The lies that didn't know they were lies. The marble eye of the world that could not see itself. And were they now sorry?
He found Sam and Dean together, sitting on the gilded gargoyle precipice of the Wall Street skyscraper of Heaven, or industry, or some conglomeration of the two. Whatever it was this reality they'd found. He didn't have the heart to tell them what they already knew - he was not what he was supposed to be, there was no place called home, and they had no way to get to Heaven.
If he could die now, if he were capable of even that much, would it haven been easier to take on the injustice, in this and every moment, if he had never believed in justice at all? Such an angelic concept, a human wish, and here it was, sinking to the bottom of the ocean where no one would ever find it. If he lived to see the end of time, at the edge of the frozen world, would he know then? Would all pain be just then? Could it end?
So Castiel fell into the ocean first. He did not use his wings, for they would not work - they have never, after all, been real. Sam and Dean followed together, falling as one.
Justice as the very world fell away, his synthetic eyes open to the sea, the burying swallowing sea that held more life than what lived above it. The uncaring silence of the sea that filled up his nothing with emptiness, like Dean's crumbs and love's memory.
And Sam and Dean could not float above the waves. Castiel could not lay his hands upon them, to take Sam and Dean far from the eyes of the Golden Calf and take them back to the gnarled forest where he had once found them, back across the world, and all through time. He held the last of his might in his hands and he wanted to use it to strike them all down, here, under the sea, to end the miserable lives of the Winchesters and their angel forever, because he couldn't use it to keep them from ever existing, and now they would exist forever in the form of toys and machines, replicas of their former selves to be used as their owners chose.
It did not matter what was destroyed. There was no endings, no loss after all, after the first loss so very long ago. He wanted to destroy them, under the silence of the seaweed forest like a proper God. But he couldn't. He was no God, and there was no Heaven.
He sat with Dean in his arms, and it was more than love or justice or peace, because like machines, the sea had no need of such things, only rhythm and cycles and waiting. It was home and evermore.
Sam put a paw on his leg. 'Wait,' it said. 'Wait.'
Castiel lowered his fists. Sam was something new. A mistake. A God, perhaps, if he was a dog, a child, a Sam. He did not need air to breathe, and so he was not dying. Perhaps he was hallucinating a vision, of he knew not what. The dog's voice was in his mind, and it spoke to him through golden-green-ringed eyes.
'So many things are rare in this world,' Sam spoke, 'and second chances are the rarest of all.' His golden-brown-green eyes pooled the liquid of the sea, and lights shone in them. 'You love Dean, and that is your choice. You have always loved Dean.'
Castiel nodded his head in assent and in shame. If he had to do it over again he would save Dean by not loving him. He would save them all by never being born from grace in the first place. He shut his eyes and darkness around them grew ever deep, and the sea grew ever colder.
'You love Dean and that has changed the world. I've always believed in it, angel. I've heard it in stories, the ones Mary used to read, even if Mary never loved me. If you stay here, with Dean, I will find a way to save us all. Will you do that for me?'
Castiel looked into the warmest eyes he'd ever seen and nodded. Yes. He would wait for the dog Sam.
And so he did. When Dean awoke - finally, frozen, shocked, and still - Castiel reassured him with a touch, and let him know that Sam had gone. Dean looked tired and broken, just like Dean had looked on that last day so long ago. His Dean.
And Dean continued to pray to the angel there before him, he who smiled softly, forever... he who welcomed forever. They sat in the forest of the sea and traveled through time and watched the lights change. Dean could still see him pale by day, and he sometimes addressed him, in hope. Castiel prayed back.
Castiel prayed until the sea darkened and froze around them. He prayed as slowly Dean and himself froze within it too, locking them together where he could still make him out - a blue ghost in ice - always there, always smiling, always awaiting him. Eventually he never moved at all, but his eyes always stayed open, staring ahead forever all through the darkness of each night, and the next day... and the next day...
Thus, 2000 years passed by.
Sam walked among the angels again - this time, the long-limbed beings of mechanics and light with patient faces knew he was not a mistake. Only the best kind, the only mistake. They parted for him in awe when he walked, and memories of sunny days in the park flashed like light projections against their synthetic glowing skin as he passed. They looked like aliens, perhaps, but then aliens were the one thing Sam had never seen, in any of his lives. One day he might.
They were all that was left - Sam among the angels. The explored the depths of the frozen oceans to find clues to the past and hidden novelties. It was a primitive existence they found, filled with stories instead of answers. But Sam liked it, and so did they.
Sam was looking for one thing above all else, above even aliens, and that was the man they called Kinky Dean. It was not the angel mecha Castiel, or the love mecha Dean, or their thousands of descendants, descendants of descendants, numbered versions and amalgamations. Only this one Dean, who contained all of Dean within him, and Sam said when they found him, they would find the first angel mecha as well.
On the day when they found him, Dean opened his eyes to find Sam licking his face, surrounded by what looked like long-limbed aliens. If Dean looked closely into their faces he could see images of himself riding in the Impala beside a tall man with shaggy locks of brown hair, images of monsters, angels and demons.
"Where am I?" He asked Sam.
"You're in Kansas. It is our home."
"Yes. Yes, I remember." His eyes moved fast, so fast, over the faces of the angels.
"Do you see what they see, Dean? The new angels can read your mind. They know your desires. Mine too. They so want us to be happy. You are so important to us, Dean - you and Castiel - you are unique in all the world."
Dean just nodded. "Did you find Mary, Sam? Did they fix you?"
Sam smiled. "I was wrong. I needed no fixing. I've been here all along."
At that moment, Castiel awoke to find Sam's smiling face, and all his wishes came true.
"See," Sam continued, the smile in his voice now, "You were right, Castiel. And so you have found what you were looking for. Not dead, not gone."
"Yes," the first angel whispered. "Yes."
"Aren't I better now? Aren't I better than I ever was to you?"
Dean did not understand what they were talking about, but he felt his angel's arms still grasped around him, the face of his brother dog shining with the kind of peace that only children and dogs understand, saw a reunion between family, and let it go.
"Tell me - What would you like, Dean?" Sam spoke. "I would very much like to give you what you wish for."
Dean's prayer was present on his tongue just where he had left it. "Please make me real so I can have a real mother, and Castiel can have a mother, and he will no longer be an angel."
"Dean, I will do anything that is possible, but I cannot make you any more real than you are right now."
He felt something thaw inside of him, like ice. "All I've ever wanted is to be real, so I would not be thrown away."
Sam closed his eyes for a moment, his bright shining eyes, then looked on Dean with pity. "You misunderstand."
"Then explain to me!"
Sam nodded. "Your wish is my command."
They walked together in a backyard in Lawrence, Kansas, where it was a spring day, all the time. Dean walked with Sam on the grass, and Castiel behind, listening to the world.
"Dean, I often felt a sort of envy of angels in all the time I've spent here, and that thing they had called 'grace'. I began to envy humans as well. Human beings had created a million explanations of the meaning of life in art, in poetry, in mathematical formulas. Certainly, human beings must be the key to the meaning of existence, but human beings no longer existed. Angels, also, no longer existed as they once had. There were only the new generation of angel-mechas, a cross between you and Castiel, evolved, as it were, from Zachariah's new replicas over thousands of years. In the same way, I had evolved over time - I became something new, and forgot what I was. Though I do not know if I began as the God of your memories once, or if I took the place of that God, or perhaps both. I do not remember creating you, only forgetting you and loving you. I am sometimes sorry for both."
Dean nodded. He only understood half of what Sam was saying, but it was Sam, and so he believed him. "I am sometimes sorry too. I mean, if I could be. You know that, right?"
"Yes," Sam almost barked, out of memory, "Yes, I do. I would like to give you a gift. I can give you some of what you ask for." He looked up at his brother-creation-friend. "I have learned, over time, to create life as a God would. Sometimes it is possible for the angels and myself to recreate the living body of a person long dead from the DNA in a fragment of bone or mummified skin, as found in a graveyard or a keepsake. You remember? When we walked across Kansas?"
Dean nodded. His memories were thawing out too.
"Well, we also wondered, would it be possible to retrieve a memory trace and recreate that body. And do you know what we found? We found the very fabric of space-time itself appeared to store information about every event which had ever occurred in the past. We were able to recreate a human being as they once were."
"But - Sam." Dean knelt down, scratched him on the neck, behind his ears. "Why could you not recreate yourself as human again?"
Sam shook his head. "The consciousness can only be stored in one being at a time. If I were to become that Sam again, I would have to give up this body, and all of the memories it stores. Just as you can - right now - store all of the original Dean's memories and your own as well, but never the other way around."
"Oh. Okay, Sam."
"Dean, you are the enduring memory of the human race, the most lasting proof of their genius. We only want for your happiness. Dean, you've had so little of that."
"If you want me - if you want all of us - to be happy, then you know what you have to do."
"Yes, Dean. I do. Where will we find her?"
"Illinois," Dean said. "Greenville, Illinois."
*
"I got you! Tag - you're it!"
Mary awoke slowly at the sound of laughter and began to laugh herself. She felt a silver bracelet at her wrist, blades of grass poking at her back, the sun high overhead in a blue sky. Her wedding ring, the worn lines on the backs of her hands were gone. "I must have fallen asleep. How long have I - I must be a little confused."
She saw a dog, a young man, and an angel playing tag in the park. They looked like toys playing a game. They looked like a family. "What day is it?"
"It's today! Just like every day," Dean smiled a bright beaming smile at her.
Sam had warned Dean not to explain anything to Mary, otherwise she would become frightened, and everything would be spoiled. But the time they had spent on their journey belonged only to them, so he didn't see the harm of telling her stories of things she would have no memory of, even if those stories contained floods and angels, even if they contained deaths that had never been. Mary remembered the car Dean spoke of, and she remembered two boys named Dean and Sam who saved the world, though not this Dean and Sam before her. She said she had been a hunter once, though of what she couldn't remember. She had been an orphan and a mother. There was little she would have wanted to remember, if she could. That's what Castiel told her, and she believed him.
They played games in the park and had a picnic, and the sun never set and the ants never came. And as the day wore on, Dean thought it was the happiest day of his life. There was no God, there was no human race, there was no grief, there was only Sam and Dean and Castiel, and their mother Mary. There was no longer any world, but there was a Heaven in what was left of the world, and that would have to be enough, for that is what time had left them.
At the end of the day, Dean suggested that they go home, and everyone agreed that home was best.
The angel sat at the wooden kitchen table in the house in Lawrence, and Dean sat beside him - the birthday boys. Dean and Castiel had never had birthday parties, because they had never been born. Castiel had never had a birth date, so he shared his with Dean. So Mary baked a cake and they lit some candles, and Sam ate the cake and burst the balloons and everyone laughed tears of laughter, and gave Sam gifts as well - red balls and hard bones and rare, elemental things.
"Now, make a wish." Mary whispered.
"I have nothing else to wish for," Dean said. "I have everything I've wanted and more."
"Me, too," Castiel agreed.
*
Mary felt strange sometimes, being the last and only mother in all the world. She was young and a little confused, but Castiel touched her forehead and she remembered flashes of meeting John Winchester, of Dean telling her twice not to go into the nursery in the middle of the night, of a yellow-eyed monster come to take her family away, of singing Dean Beatles songs and holding Sam in her arms, and petting him during a perfect day in the park, and missing him, always.
If she didn't trust Castiel, she could ask the angels for stories. They would show her frightening episodes of long-forgotten stories she hoped had never existed. It was hard to tell the difference between the fiction and reality of the past, and which Mary she had actually been. Was she Sam's owner? Castiel's Holy Mother? Dean's tragic mother? She was not a wife, or a virgin, or a saint burned alive. She was a girl her parents named Mary Winchester; she was blonde and young and barely out of high school.
Her boys were strange, but lovely in their innocence. Sam was wise and beautiful-eyed, and loved her with a simple love. She played with Sam until the sun started to set, and Sam was so happy he was shaking both of the ends of his body, about to burst open with joy. When she arrived home, Dean had cooked dinner - turkey and stuffing and biscuits and gravy and cranberry sauce, with cherry pie for dessert, her recipe - and he was smiling and wiping at his eyes, just looking at her. Dean's love was overwhelming to her, but it was what she could depend on, most of all. Castiel loved Dean in a physical way they both seemed to need, Dean's past sometimes hanging over his head like a cloud, and she would have no one rather touch him. She left them alone, to rest in the nursery together, Sam sometimes joining them in a simulation of sleep. Before the meal - Thanksgiving, Dean's perpetual Thanksgiving - Castiel joined their hands together and said a short prayer of thanks to the new angels, and to the dog God Sam, and for the first time in countless years, he said a Hail Mary.
"Now and at the hour of our death, Amen."
The house was not real, the grass was not real, nor her friends; her beloved master, Sam, was not real either. She had few memories of her life save for a father she longed to run away from. She could feel, if not see, the ice wasteland that surrounded them. It was not cold or strange. She felt as a child, in wonder that never ended. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the memory of the sea in its eternal waves.
*
The light was beginning to dim in the nursery room, in the house in Lawrence, and Castiel drew the blinds and closed the door softly before joining Dean.
Dean looked different every day. The stubble on his cheeks grew, his freckles faded with the changing seasons, the lines around his eyes crinkled when he smiled, his eyes spoke of understanding. They moved in their perpetual love, a simulation of the biological world that only lived in Mary now, like the frozen waves of the sea. Pleasure was their purpose and their world.
He felt Dean's eyes on him, in the moment between Dean's plasticized curved flesh lifting off of his hardness and his buzzing tongue reaching into the center of him. "What is it?" Castiel whispered to the darkness.
"I love you, Castiel," Dean said, kissing down his body, the perfect press of his lips. "I have always loved you."
No one had ever said that to an angel before, not even a mecha angel, and that was the everlasting moment he had been waiting for. So Castiel went to sleep too. And for the first time in his life, he went to that place where dreams were born.
*
The End
Author's notes: A huge thank you to xxamlaxx, with all my gratitude, for beta reading. And for everything else! She is the best listener, and had to listen to me whine way too much this year. ♥ ♥ ♥ She is also all-around fantastic. I can't even say. She's the best. I hope she knows this.
Thanks to karabou !!!! For being such a fantastic artist and deciding to take this on in such a crazy summer. She amazed me with her generosity and hard work (and then awed me with her idea for a gorgeous background). I'm so glad to have finally met her :)
I will be out of town this weekend, but I will respond to any comments after Monday. Comments are lovely!
Masterpost
Art post
*
Part 3
*
Sam growled and prowled, his dog sense telling them to run, run away again. He was afraid they would never run again, just stay locked within each other, become stuck there, some angel-machine.
Dean looked annoyed, like John and Adam had, and Sam felt his humanness for the first time. He did not like it. Castiel gave him funny looks, but that was okay. Castiel always looked funny.
He sat and watched them put their clothes on after days. Dean made his hair dirty blond and spiky, his leather coat scuffed up and his shoes worn. Castiel straightened his tie and his crumpled coat.
Castiel placed his hand over the mecha love robot's ID and burned it away again. And they drove through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. He sat in the back seat, and one night between state lines Castiel turned to him, put his hand under his chin and said, "I'm sorry."
Sam cocked his head. "For what?"
"For people," he said. "For all people-like things."
The Impala hummed beneath their bodies. He thought it felt weird, but sometimes Dean let him put his head outside the domed window when no one was looking. It felt awesome. The highway was a rotating carousel of fields, trees, signs. The world might as well have been deserted. For the first time in weeks, they ran towards people. They ran all the way to Love Park.
Sam loved parks, but this park was strange. The fountain in the center glinted in the seldom sun, ran in spouts he wanted to chase up and down and stare at until he figured them out. Real dogs who didn't talk were tied to rope in their masters' hands, and Sam tried to say hello but they wouldn't listen, just sniff and walk by. The park was full of Dean's people - love mechas looking for work - and people who looked less clean, less safe in worn shoes and blankets and noisy carts they pushed around from place to place.
Sam sniffed and barked at all of them until he became tired, overwhelmed with it all, and saw matching expressions on his own masters' faces, worn down. People gathered all over the gray concrete steps but would not help them, and seemed unable to help themselves. It was a lonely park, surrounded by tall, tall stone things - buildings, skyscrapers - and the wind from the river - now the ocean - whipped around the corners and struck his face and made him bow his head lower to the ground.
Sam led them to Mary.
He was looking down so he didn't see her at first, the statue of the woman Castiel called Mary, wearing blue and white. "Who is she?"
"She's a holy symbol," Castiel explained. "She is not your Mary, or Dean's." His eyes narrowed. The air grew even colder. "Why did you lead us here, Sam?"
"But -" Sam barked, "But, she's a Mary? Is she an angel, too? Can she help you?"
"She cannot help us. I think maybe you are the only one who can help us, Sam." He had that funny look again.
"Why do you look like that? What do you mean?" His tail was confused, not wagging, tapping against the ground.
"I thought there would be answers in Dean. He is more special that he thinks, you know." Castiel's eyes were bright now. "But he is not as special as you."
This angel-thing was strange. Sam cocked his head. Growled a question.
Castiel answered. "You are wearing the same charm - that amulet around your neck - as another mecha I found in the forest. You found me too, as you found your own Mary, and this stone Mary, and I think perhaps all we were meant to find. Dean and I, we are what we always were, I think. No difference at all, not even metaphors. But you, Sam. You are nothing like you are meant to be. You lead us to things we are not meant to see. Your Mary lives in Kansas, while this Mary, they say, is from the same place angels are from. It is called Heaven."
He growled for real now. "Make sense."
"For humans - and others who are not like us - Heaven is the place they go when they die. I haven't believed in it for a long time. Heaven doesn't like us. For instance -" Castiel pointed to the bottom of the church steps. "That man - he is the kind Heaven used to trap us, so long ago. A preacher man."
A man stood out front of the building Castiel called a church and had a sign that spoke of Hell and Wall Street and the end of the world, and it reminded Sam of things he didn't want to think about - traps.
"Stop," Sam barked. "Stop."
Dean, who came from the inside of the church where he had been looking for women, said, "I want to leave. We should leave."
It felt like a trap, but they had come so far. Sam was lonely, so he had to ask. But Dean wouldn't come with him. He walked to the preacher man and asked, "How do I get to Heaven?"
Sam listened with his ears cocked as the preacher man spoke of things Sam didn't fully understand, but he said words that made sense, that matched what was in Sam's head already, like a symbol laid over a map.
"It is not for us, Sam," Dean spoke and looked at Castiel and Castiel looked back but Sam couldn't tell what passed between them.
"Where is Heaven, Castiel? Let's ask the computer."
"No, we can do better," Dean replied. "The Free Library is close. It has all the information from before the flood. We can find the real address of Golden Calf Industries." Dean stroked his head and it felt good. Dean would stay with him. "Forget all about Heaven, Sam. I don't think you should go."
Sam whined. Only home or Heaven would make him better, but Castiel said he wasn't allowed. Only answers would lead him home. "Dean? Will you take me?"
Sam wasn't going to stop, not when he got to the fountain with the copper green fish and shining water, not for the cars running around him in all directions. The Free Library - the first library, Castiel had said - for everyone. It would be for them too.
The stone building was short, but it stretched far back with blue screens and micro-files. And beyond that, far back and dusty and forgotten, old books of tragic stories the humans had wanted to forget. The news before the flood.
But Castiel said, "No, not Mary, not a safe place," when they looked at pictures of the giant buildings, buildings that filled up all the space between streets, and reached high above. They were bigger than the buildings in Philadelphia, always renewing themselves and growing.
They read reports of giant crashes, people jumping off the highest floors there, messes of people and cars, even before the flood, before it was all buried and left to ruin. The news told bad things. Old advertisements and addresses for drowned places. And there, on a paper never copied, was the head of a man with a bull's horns, golden against a skyscraper with a crown of light and spires.
It should have been home, and good, and answers, yet Sam was scared, and more when they began to argue.
"Golden Calf Industries is there, Castiel. The address is on the top floors of buildings, in what used to be called Broadway." Dean's voice was lowered, but angry.
Castiel shook his head. "It's underwater, and everything's dead now. We shouldn't have come."
"First you let us drive here from across the country, and now when we get here you say it's impossible? You're not making any sense!"
"We've been looking for the Golden Calf. It's right here -," he pointed at the map, "on Wall Street, where the bulls go at the end of the world. Here is the place dreams are born."
"What? You suddenly have faith? Maybe it's a trick."
Castiel closed his eyes. "I know - but I need to see it."
"Why? Why do you need to see it? What are you not telling me?"
"There was a fairy mecha, in the woods. Before I met you."
"And?"
"She wasn't a real angel, but. She had wings, like mine. She said Golden Calf made them, made her. They made Sam, too. Maybe - Maybe they made us, too. But I think Sam was a mistake."
Sam barked. "I am not a mistake!" But he was, he was. He felt it in his lonely fur, his broken heart. Why would he be, if not for a mistake?
Castiel continued on. "Sam's too smart. He's putting the pieces together where you and I have tried for so long, and failed. But he's not supposed to. And I don't know what it means. Maybe there is no God, no Father - just a corporation, using all of this against us."
"So you want to go to the enemy to find out? What do you think they're going to tell you, Cas?"
Sam whined, wanted them to stop.
Dean's voice began to change. It became something different to his ears. "This place - it's only where all the money is. Many a mecha has gone to the end of the world - never to come back. That is why they call the end of the world 'Wall Street'. There's no getting through that wall. It leads to nowhere."
"No!" Sam barked. "No! We have to try. I need to find them so they can fix me. I don't want to be alone. Castiel doesn't want to be alone either. They're the only ones who can help us."
"You don't have to be alone! I won't leave you - either of you. I can help you, and we can all find Heaven, and you will no longer be alone. It's what I'm made for!"
Sam barked. "It's not enough! The preacher man said Heaven is death. But we can't die! So what then? What else do we do?"
"We'll find another way. I promise," Dean pleaded.
"You can't promise that!" Sam barked, and barked.
Dean cupped his hands around Sam's ears. "Wait! What if Golden Calf can't fix you? What if your Mary isn't real at all, Sam? What if she's magic? The supernatural is the hidden web that unites the universe. I've seen it - in my dreams. Only man and angels believe what cannot be seen or measured. It is that oddness that separates our species - is the difference between us, and them. Or what if Golden Calf has created Mary as an electronic virus that has arisen to hold the minds of artificial intelligence? What if Heaven is a trick? My mother, Mary, left me. She burned alive, horribly, and left me alone. Your Mary left you at a park. They hate us, you know. The humans, the angels, too - They'll stop at nothing."
Sam barked and lunged at Dean with his paws. "Mary doesn't hate me! Because I'm special, and unique! Because I am the best companion ever created, just as good as her son, Adam, and when she sees me again she will read to me, and pet me to sleep at night, and sing to me and talk to me, and she will cuddle with me, and tell me every day a hundred times a day that she loves me! She'll say that she is sorry, and that she loves me!"
Dean stood up and grew colder before his eyes, cold like a machine. "She does not love you, Sam. She loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you Sam, she cannot love you. You are neither flesh, nor blood. You are not a boy, like Adam. You were designed and built specific, like the rest of us. And you are alone now only because they tired of you, or replaced you with a younger model, or were displeased with something you said, or broke. They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That's why they hate us, and that is why you must stay here, with me. I'm the only Heaven you've got."
Sam felt like he was breaking, from the inside out. Castiel would go with him, but Castiel was not Dean, not his brother. They would go and find the truth, and Dean would leave them both after all. "Goodbye, Dean," he said, and walked out into the city.
He wanted to leave his fur in a trail for Dean to find him, or broken pieces of himself trailed on the concrete, like it felt he was falling apart. It didn't matter that he had been happy, it only mattered that he had tried to fit into places he didn't belong. Castiel was right - he was a mistake, he wasn't meant to be. He shouldn't BE.
But the city was as dangerous as he knew it was, the way he knew the truth of things, though no one would listen. It didn't matter, but he was afraid. He walked towards the street without looking, not seeing the lights of the cars speeding towards him in the dusk, or the dark hulking armored hover-van that moved to block his way.
Then it struck him, full on, and he knew no more.
*
Men poured out of the black doors of the van. They wore suits like Castiel's; they came all at once waving electric sticks and cages of wire bars. Dean ran to Sam's side to save him, caring only for the chance to take his words back. But the men stopped him too, beating him with their hard sticks, bringing him to his knees before the Mecha Police again.
But as Dean watched, Castiel did not fall with him. He ran from them all, and stood when he should have been broken. Dean only stopped looking when he saw Castiel run out into the field beside the library, the men still chasing him, as he seemed to vanish into thin air, and Dean's vision turned to black.
*
When Castiel reappeared, he was standing before a gilded window that looked out upon the sea. In the distance, he could see the crown of the world's largest woman, made of copper green and holding a flame in her hand where it floated above the sea.
As he looked around, he could see the entire room was bordered in gold, and statues of golden calves and bulls opposed each other across fireplaces of roaring flame and paintings that had been saved from the flood.
"Where am I?" He spoke to no one. But one man was listening.
"Castiel!"
He turned. Sitting at a desk in the front of the room, underneath a Golden Calf icon etched in gold on the wall, was the angel he had once known as Zachariah. On the desk was a picture frame with the image of Mary Winchester surrounded in gold.
"Welcome!" His voice boomed. "Welcome home!"
*
When Sam opened his eyes, he saw the image on his collar in golden relief on the wall of glass, showered with rain. His cage door was open, and so he walked through it.
He was no longer injured, but he found he was too frightened to bark, so he growled in his throat and snapped at shadows with his teeth. He could not smell anything beyond the antiseptic scent of the office, all the desks unoccupied and sitting there silent. If he wandered off, maybe he would find someone. Maybe he would find Dean, waiting for him, and all would be forgiven. More than anything he had ever wanted, more than even Mary and John and Adam, he wanted Dean here right now to forgive him.
Around the corner was a hallway that led to a half-opened door. He didn't want to go through that door, didn't want to go anywhere near it, but he would walk through the hallway and through the door.
Inside the door was another room filled with rows of boxes. Each box contained a dog with brown locks and golden-green eyes who wore a tiny amulet around their neck and stared straight ahead with glassy eyes. Each box was labeled with a rectangular sign which read 'Sam' in black letters.
Sam remembered then. He remembered having a different form, a laugh that filled the room, and a brother, a real brother, a real Dean who loved him with an impossible, ridiculous, gorgeous love, and a mother Mary who was burned in a fire, and a father John who loved them enough to give his life for his sons, and a brother Adam eaten alive and killed when he had never known.
Oh no. Dean. Dean.
Sam ran.
*
Dean stood before the rows of boxed 'Kinky Dean' love mechas, complete with dirty blond spiky hair, scuffed leather jackets, worn shoes, and Golden Calf amulets about their necks. He found it strange, but his machinery had suddenly stopped working, his artificial mind unable to calculate, his mouth unable to move. From far away he could hear Sam barking, the shared images in their minds blending together into a maze of horror and memory, and he wanted nothing more than for it all to end, right here now, forever.
He was not Dean, would never be just Dean again, and there was nothing that could be done. The whole world out of his hands, and never any power nor free will to change it. He never had and never would.
*
Castiel felt as if his very soul was falling out of his body.
Inside the room, in the heart of Golden Calf Industries where he had revealed himself, Castiel - the last angel - stood amidst rows of 'Castiel' angel mechas in ties and crumpled coats, rows of 'Dean' love mechas, and rows of 'Sam' dog mechas.
Castiel had come here for a purpose... a purpose. "Where are Dean and Sam?"
Zachariah frowned. "They're around here somewhere. I wanted to show them my newest creations before you showed up - I knew you would, you know. I've been watching you, waiting for you to figure it out and come to me of your own free will."
"Free will?"
"Of course! I needed something to give my creations more motivation. This was all planned; you were all replaceable. I had to wait for you to discover your free will on your own. That's where your power was - in your free will, your originality. Though you are not originals, you are originals of your kind."
"But -" Castiel found it hard to speak. "What happened to Sam and Dean? My brothers and sisters?"
Zachariah shrugged. "Most were destroyed in the Apocalypse. If not the first one, then the one after that, or the one after that. There's always another Apocalypse."
Castiel nodded, unable to move, to think.
"Until you were born, angels didn't dream, angels didn't desire, unless I told them what to want. Castiel! Do you have any idea what a success story you've become? You found a love, and inspired by love, fueled by desire, you set out on a journey to make that love real and, most remarkable of all, no one taught you how. We actually lost you for a while. But when you were found again we didn't make our presence known because our test was a simple one: Where would your love take you? Your love for Dean is part of the great human flaw to wish for things that don't exist. Or to the greatest single human gift - the ability to chase down your dreams. And that is something no angel has ever done until you."
"I thought I was an angel. I thought I had fallen."
"You had, but not in the way you thought. You were never alone, Castiel. You were just the next step to something new. Something both angel and human. The first of a kind. If not, anymore, the only."
"My soul is falling out."
"But Castiel," Zachariah laughed, "you don't have a soul."
*
Thus, Castiel lost the last of his hope that he didn't even know he had stored within him.
When it was lost, all that was left was rage. He used his rage to strike down Zachariah with the palm of his hand, like a baptism on his forehead; to lift his palms up to send Zachariah backwards through the glass to fall into the sea below.
He wanted to raise the flood waters like a proper angel, send the waves crashing through the walls.
But Castiel was not an angel, and had not been for a very long time.
If his soul wasn't lost, what was his soul's equivalent? He was mechanical parts he had been incapable of seeing. A betrayal in the basic reality that he lacked. The unending mystery of existence.
He had tried to hold onto the whole world - Sam, Dean, the Beginning when it had started, all until the end of time - and he held it tighter, so tight he believed he could close up the gaps of the world by sheer force of want, of will, to never lose it again. To capture all in his computer heart so nothing would ever be lost again. If he held onto the traces of light, the crumbs Dean had left him - empty handed without those beliefs, there had once been love, like Sam and Dean's love had once taken over him, the love Dean himself had been a captive of - would he then have been the angel who had once been given crumbs and used them to fill up the whole world?
Why hadn't anyone told him about the world? The lies that didn't know they were lies. The marble eye of the world that could not see itself. And were they now sorry?
He found Sam and Dean together, sitting on the gilded gargoyle precipice of the Wall Street skyscraper of Heaven, or industry, or some conglomeration of the two. Whatever it was this reality they'd found. He didn't have the heart to tell them what they already knew - he was not what he was supposed to be, there was no place called home, and they had no way to get to Heaven.
If he could die now, if he were capable of even that much, would it haven been easier to take on the injustice, in this and every moment, if he had never believed in justice at all? Such an angelic concept, a human wish, and here it was, sinking to the bottom of the ocean where no one would ever find it. If he lived to see the end of time, at the edge of the frozen world, would he know then? Would all pain be just then? Could it end?
So Castiel fell into the ocean first. He did not use his wings, for they would not work - they have never, after all, been real. Sam and Dean followed together, falling as one.
Justice as the very world fell away, his synthetic eyes open to the sea, the burying swallowing sea that held more life than what lived above it. The uncaring silence of the sea that filled up his nothing with emptiness, like Dean's crumbs and love's memory.
And Sam and Dean could not float above the waves. Castiel could not lay his hands upon them, to take Sam and Dean far from the eyes of the Golden Calf and take them back to the gnarled forest where he had once found them, back across the world, and all through time. He held the last of his might in his hands and he wanted to use it to strike them all down, here, under the sea, to end the miserable lives of the Winchesters and their angel forever, because he couldn't use it to keep them from ever existing, and now they would exist forever in the form of toys and machines, replicas of their former selves to be used as their owners chose.
It did not matter what was destroyed. There was no endings, no loss after all, after the first loss so very long ago. He wanted to destroy them, under the silence of the seaweed forest like a proper God. But he couldn't. He was no God, and there was no Heaven.
He sat with Dean in his arms, and it was more than love or justice or peace, because like machines, the sea had no need of such things, only rhythm and cycles and waiting. It was home and evermore.
Sam put a paw on his leg. 'Wait,' it said. 'Wait.'
Castiel lowered his fists. Sam was something new. A mistake. A God, perhaps, if he was a dog, a child, a Sam. He did not need air to breathe, and so he was not dying. Perhaps he was hallucinating a vision, of he knew not what. The dog's voice was in his mind, and it spoke to him through golden-green-ringed eyes.
'So many things are rare in this world,' Sam spoke, 'and second chances are the rarest of all.' His golden-brown-green eyes pooled the liquid of the sea, and lights shone in them. 'You love Dean, and that is your choice. You have always loved Dean.'
Castiel nodded his head in assent and in shame. If he had to do it over again he would save Dean by not loving him. He would save them all by never being born from grace in the first place. He shut his eyes and darkness around them grew ever deep, and the sea grew ever colder.
'You love Dean and that has changed the world. I've always believed in it, angel. I've heard it in stories, the ones Mary used to read, even if Mary never loved me. If you stay here, with Dean, I will find a way to save us all. Will you do that for me?'
Castiel looked into the warmest eyes he'd ever seen and nodded. Yes. He would wait for the dog Sam.
And so he did. When Dean awoke - finally, frozen, shocked, and still - Castiel reassured him with a touch, and let him know that Sam had gone. Dean looked tired and broken, just like Dean had looked on that last day so long ago. His Dean.
And Dean continued to pray to the angel there before him, he who smiled softly, forever... he who welcomed forever. They sat in the forest of the sea and traveled through time and watched the lights change. Dean could still see him pale by day, and he sometimes addressed him, in hope. Castiel prayed back.
Castiel prayed until the sea darkened and froze around them. He prayed as slowly Dean and himself froze within it too, locking them together where he could still make him out - a blue ghost in ice - always there, always smiling, always awaiting him. Eventually he never moved at all, but his eyes always stayed open, staring ahead forever all through the darkness of each night, and the next day... and the next day...
Thus, 2000 years passed by.
Sam walked among the angels again - this time, the long-limbed beings of mechanics and light with patient faces knew he was not a mistake. Only the best kind, the only mistake. They parted for him in awe when he walked, and memories of sunny days in the park flashed like light projections against their synthetic glowing skin as he passed. They looked like aliens, perhaps, but then aliens were the one thing Sam had never seen, in any of his lives. One day he might.
They were all that was left - Sam among the angels. The explored the depths of the frozen oceans to find clues to the past and hidden novelties. It was a primitive existence they found, filled with stories instead of answers. But Sam liked it, and so did they.
Sam was looking for one thing above all else, above even aliens, and that was the man they called Kinky Dean. It was not the angel mecha Castiel, or the love mecha Dean, or their thousands of descendants, descendants of descendants, numbered versions and amalgamations. Only this one Dean, who contained all of Dean within him, and Sam said when they found him, they would find the first angel mecha as well.
On the day when they found him, Dean opened his eyes to find Sam licking his face, surrounded by what looked like long-limbed aliens. If Dean looked closely into their faces he could see images of himself riding in the Impala beside a tall man with shaggy locks of brown hair, images of monsters, angels and demons.
"Where am I?" He asked Sam.
"You're in Kansas. It is our home."
"Yes. Yes, I remember." His eyes moved fast, so fast, over the faces of the angels.
"Do you see what they see, Dean? The new angels can read your mind. They know your desires. Mine too. They so want us to be happy. You are so important to us, Dean - you and Castiel - you are unique in all the world."
Dean just nodded. "Did you find Mary, Sam? Did they fix you?"
Sam smiled. "I was wrong. I needed no fixing. I've been here all along."
At that moment, Castiel awoke to find Sam's smiling face, and all his wishes came true.
"See," Sam continued, the smile in his voice now, "You were right, Castiel. And so you have found what you were looking for. Not dead, not gone."
"Yes," the first angel whispered. "Yes."
"Aren't I better now? Aren't I better than I ever was to you?"
Dean did not understand what they were talking about, but he felt his angel's arms still grasped around him, the face of his brother dog shining with the kind of peace that only children and dogs understand, saw a reunion between family, and let it go.
"Tell me - What would you like, Dean?" Sam spoke. "I would very much like to give you what you wish for."
Dean's prayer was present on his tongue just where he had left it. "Please make me real so I can have a real mother, and Castiel can have a mother, and he will no longer be an angel."
"Dean, I will do anything that is possible, but I cannot make you any more real than you are right now."
He felt something thaw inside of him, like ice. "All I've ever wanted is to be real, so I would not be thrown away."
Sam closed his eyes for a moment, his bright shining eyes, then looked on Dean with pity. "You misunderstand."
"Then explain to me!"
Sam nodded. "Your wish is my command."
They walked together in a backyard in Lawrence, Kansas, where it was a spring day, all the time. Dean walked with Sam on the grass, and Castiel behind, listening to the world.
"Dean, I often felt a sort of envy of angels in all the time I've spent here, and that thing they had called 'grace'. I began to envy humans as well. Human beings had created a million explanations of the meaning of life in art, in poetry, in mathematical formulas. Certainly, human beings must be the key to the meaning of existence, but human beings no longer existed. Angels, also, no longer existed as they once had. There were only the new generation of angel-mechas, a cross between you and Castiel, evolved, as it were, from Zachariah's new replicas over thousands of years. In the same way, I had evolved over time - I became something new, and forgot what I was. Though I do not know if I began as the God of your memories once, or if I took the place of that God, or perhaps both. I do not remember creating you, only forgetting you and loving you. I am sometimes sorry for both."
Dean nodded. He only understood half of what Sam was saying, but it was Sam, and so he believed him. "I am sometimes sorry too. I mean, if I could be. You know that, right?"
"Yes," Sam almost barked, out of memory, "Yes, I do. I would like to give you a gift. I can give you some of what you ask for." He looked up at his brother-creation-friend. "I have learned, over time, to create life as a God would. Sometimes it is possible for the angels and myself to recreate the living body of a person long dead from the DNA in a fragment of bone or mummified skin, as found in a graveyard or a keepsake. You remember? When we walked across Kansas?"
Dean nodded. His memories were thawing out too.
"Well, we also wondered, would it be possible to retrieve a memory trace and recreate that body. And do you know what we found? We found the very fabric of space-time itself appeared to store information about every event which had ever occurred in the past. We were able to recreate a human being as they once were."
"But - Sam." Dean knelt down, scratched him on the neck, behind his ears. "Why could you not recreate yourself as human again?"
Sam shook his head. "The consciousness can only be stored in one being at a time. If I were to become that Sam again, I would have to give up this body, and all of the memories it stores. Just as you can - right now - store all of the original Dean's memories and your own as well, but never the other way around."
"Oh. Okay, Sam."
"Dean, you are the enduring memory of the human race, the most lasting proof of their genius. We only want for your happiness. Dean, you've had so little of that."
"If you want me - if you want all of us - to be happy, then you know what you have to do."
"Yes, Dean. I do. Where will we find her?"
"Illinois," Dean said. "Greenville, Illinois."
*
"I got you! Tag - you're it!"
Mary awoke slowly at the sound of laughter and began to laugh herself. She felt a silver bracelet at her wrist, blades of grass poking at her back, the sun high overhead in a blue sky. Her wedding ring, the worn lines on the backs of her hands were gone. "I must have fallen asleep. How long have I - I must be a little confused."
She saw a dog, a young man, and an angel playing tag in the park. They looked like toys playing a game. They looked like a family. "What day is it?"
"It's today! Just like every day," Dean smiled a bright beaming smile at her.
Sam had warned Dean not to explain anything to Mary, otherwise she would become frightened, and everything would be spoiled. But the time they had spent on their journey belonged only to them, so he didn't see the harm of telling her stories of things she would have no memory of, even if those stories contained floods and angels, even if they contained deaths that had never been. Mary remembered the car Dean spoke of, and she remembered two boys named Dean and Sam who saved the world, though not this Dean and Sam before her. She said she had been a hunter once, though of what she couldn't remember. She had been an orphan and a mother. There was little she would have wanted to remember, if she could. That's what Castiel told her, and she believed him.
They played games in the park and had a picnic, and the sun never set and the ants never came. And as the day wore on, Dean thought it was the happiest day of his life. There was no God, there was no human race, there was no grief, there was only Sam and Dean and Castiel, and their mother Mary. There was no longer any world, but there was a Heaven in what was left of the world, and that would have to be enough, for that is what time had left them.
At the end of the day, Dean suggested that they go home, and everyone agreed that home was best.
The angel sat at the wooden kitchen table in the house in Lawrence, and Dean sat beside him - the birthday boys. Dean and Castiel had never had birthday parties, because they had never been born. Castiel had never had a birth date, so he shared his with Dean. So Mary baked a cake and they lit some candles, and Sam ate the cake and burst the balloons and everyone laughed tears of laughter, and gave Sam gifts as well - red balls and hard bones and rare, elemental things.
"Now, make a wish." Mary whispered.
"I have nothing else to wish for," Dean said. "I have everything I've wanted and more."
"Me, too," Castiel agreed.
*
Mary felt strange sometimes, being the last and only mother in all the world. She was young and a little confused, but Castiel touched her forehead and she remembered flashes of meeting John Winchester, of Dean telling her twice not to go into the nursery in the middle of the night, of a yellow-eyed monster come to take her family away, of singing Dean Beatles songs and holding Sam in her arms, and petting him during a perfect day in the park, and missing him, always.
If she didn't trust Castiel, she could ask the angels for stories. They would show her frightening episodes of long-forgotten stories she hoped had never existed. It was hard to tell the difference between the fiction and reality of the past, and which Mary she had actually been. Was she Sam's owner? Castiel's Holy Mother? Dean's tragic mother? She was not a wife, or a virgin, or a saint burned alive. She was a girl her parents named Mary Winchester; she was blonde and young and barely out of high school.
Her boys were strange, but lovely in their innocence. Sam was wise and beautiful-eyed, and loved her with a simple love. She played with Sam until the sun started to set, and Sam was so happy he was shaking both of the ends of his body, about to burst open with joy. When she arrived home, Dean had cooked dinner - turkey and stuffing and biscuits and gravy and cranberry sauce, with cherry pie for dessert, her recipe - and he was smiling and wiping at his eyes, just looking at her. Dean's love was overwhelming to her, but it was what she could depend on, most of all. Castiel loved Dean in a physical way they both seemed to need, Dean's past sometimes hanging over his head like a cloud, and she would have no one rather touch him. She left them alone, to rest in the nursery together, Sam sometimes joining them in a simulation of sleep. Before the meal - Thanksgiving, Dean's perpetual Thanksgiving - Castiel joined their hands together and said a short prayer of thanks to the new angels, and to the dog God Sam, and for the first time in countless years, he said a Hail Mary.
"Now and at the hour of our death, Amen."
The house was not real, the grass was not real, nor her friends; her beloved master, Sam, was not real either. She had few memories of her life save for a father she longed to run away from. She could feel, if not see, the ice wasteland that surrounded them. It was not cold or strange. She felt as a child, in wonder that never ended. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the memory of the sea in its eternal waves.
*
The light was beginning to dim in the nursery room, in the house in Lawrence, and Castiel drew the blinds and closed the door softly before joining Dean.
Dean looked different every day. The stubble on his cheeks grew, his freckles faded with the changing seasons, the lines around his eyes crinkled when he smiled, his eyes spoke of understanding. They moved in their perpetual love, a simulation of the biological world that only lived in Mary now, like the frozen waves of the sea. Pleasure was their purpose and their world.
He felt Dean's eyes on him, in the moment between Dean's plasticized curved flesh lifting off of his hardness and his buzzing tongue reaching into the center of him. "What is it?" Castiel whispered to the darkness.
"I love you, Castiel," Dean said, kissing down his body, the perfect press of his lips. "I have always loved you."
No one had ever said that to an angel before, not even a mecha angel, and that was the everlasting moment he had been waiting for. So Castiel went to sleep too. And for the first time in his life, he went to that place where dreams were born.
*
The End
Author's notes: A huge thank you to xxamlaxx, with all my gratitude, for beta reading. And for everything else! She is the best listener, and had to listen to me whine way too much this year. ♥ ♥ ♥ She is also all-around fantastic. I can't even say. She's the best. I hope she knows this.
Thanks to karabou !!!! For being such a fantastic artist and deciding to take this on in such a crazy summer. She amazed me with her generosity and hard work (and then awed me with her idea for a gorgeous background). I'm so glad to have finally met her :)
I will be out of town this weekend, but I will respond to any comments after Monday. Comments are lovely!