FIC: Supernatural: Recrudesence 13 - 17
____________________________________________________________________________
*
If you look at your reflection in the bottom of a well,
What you see is only on the surface.
When you try to see the meaning, hidden underneath,
The measure of the depth can be deceiving.
The bottom has a rocky reputation.
You can feel it in the distance the deeper down you stare.
From up above it's hard to see, but you know when you're there.
On the bottom words are shallow.
On the surface talk is cheap.
You can only judge the distance by the company you keep.
~Joe Walsh - Eyes of the Confessor
_____________________________________________________________________________
*
“Cas?”
The old church was dark, dank, and smelled of mold and abandonment. But it still managed to hold an air of…contemplation and peace. Beautifully etched rafters arched high over his head, while tall widows - elegant even with the grime covering them - glowed from the reflected lights of the surrounding buildings. Faded paintings of holy figures ghosted across the chipped walls, but no one had disfigured the place. There was no graffiti, no real trash. It had been left as it had always been, a place for worship - though one left empty for a long time now.
“Cas?” Dean called again, nervously searching the shadows. His hand twitched toward his gun.
“I’m here.”
Dean jerked, seeing Castiel now, a hunched shadow in a room full of them. He was sitting in a pew near the front of the church, gazing at the altar. “Cas, what the hell is going on? What’s with all this Borne Identity bullshit about meeting in abandoned buildings?”
“This church was built in 1892.”
Dean shifted uneasily. “Fascinating. Why are we here?”
“There was a time when all Catholic churches contained an antimension. The one here was left behind when the building was abandoned. They most likely forgot its existence.”
“Good for them,” Dean said carefully, and ran his lower lip though his teeth. “What’s an antimension? And why do we care?”
Castiel looked up at him for the first time. “A holy relic, generally a sliver of bone from a Saint. It’s sewn into a cloth, and it is the core of the altar.” Castiel nodded at the huge, marble table in the center of the dais. “This one was from a woman who fought for her people, and died for her faith. That kind of sacrifice, that kind of devotion, it leaves something behind. The relic, among other abilities, deadens singular conversation on the ethereal plane.”
“Which means…?”
“It blocks angelic hearing for everything except prayer, which it amplifies. I want to be absolutely sure that this conversation remains only between us.”
Dean lingered, running a hand over the back of a filthy pew. “Is this a conversation we really need to have?”
Castiel looked as close to defeated as Dean had ever seen him - and seeing as the guy had once pounded him into the dirt while snarling about loosing everything that had ever mattered, that was pretty damned defeated. “Raphael has threatened - has promised - to tell you the full extent of my involvement in the events leading to Lucifer’s escape.”
Dean took a slow breath, confused. “Uh, I know the full extent of your involvement in that crap.”
“No. You don’t. And I may be risking our connection in telling you, but Raphael plans on throwing the information at you at the worst time, using it to shake your faith and distract you. He will use it to hurt you. I will not allow that, not when I can stop it by telling you myself.”
Dean rubbed a hand over his mouth. “How bad is this going to be?”
“I was sent, in part, to keep you and Sam…distant.”
The words were so abrupt, Dean had to replay them a couple of times to get the sense of them. He carefully didn’t let his jaw clench. “…distant. Define distant.”
Castiel focused again on the altar. “To keep you apart. We needed you not to trust Samuel.”
“Explain.”
The word was quiet, and came out calmly enough, but there was an undertone, an edge to it that threatened to make someone bleed.
Castiel dropped his eyes to the shadowy floor. There was no fear in him - after all, he and Dean both knew he couldn’t really touch an angel - but there was a tenseness…an awareness of what he was saying that went beyond the words, an awareness of what the words would mean to Dean.
“I didn’t know. Not at first, at least. I’m not trying to…excuse myself. I am responsible for my own actions, no matter the reasons. But I didn’t know, Dean.”
“You didn’t know what?”
“Didn’t know what they had planned. For all of us.” He hesitated, then looked up again at Dean. “For Sam, especially.”
“Planned?”
The angel rubbed his hands over his face. “I can see it now. Only now. At the time, I only thought their orders were…strange. Confusing. Occasionally contradictory. But even questioning why we were ordered to do something was perilously close to blasphemy. So I turned a blind eye.”
“Cas,” Dean said carefully, “if you don’t tell me what the hell your talking about, now, I may have to kill you. And don’t doubt that I’ll find a way to get the job done.”
Castiel closed his eyes. “We…I…was ordered to break your relationship with Sam, to sever it. To keep you from ever trusting your brother.”
Dean went cold, a chill that filled his chest and seeped into every part of him. It was like drowning on dry land. “What? Why? Why would you -?”
“Because we knew you were the only one who could have stopped Sam. For you, he would have done anything. He would have given up his vengeance. He would have turned his back on Ruby. He would have stopped drinking the blood.”
Dean made a sound, though it was too bitter to be a laugh. “No. That’s not true. I told Sam to stop a million times, and he never did. He never listened to me. Not once. I told him how fucked up he was getting, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care about what I wanted.”
Castiel looked almost pained. “He did stop, Dean.”
“When?” Dean demanded, not believing it for a second.
“Right after you faced the Rugaru,” Castiel said. “Before you ever knew he was drinking the blood, he stopped. He wanted to be human. For you.” There was a wealth of regret in the angel’s voice.
But Dean shook it off. “If he did, it wasn’t for long. He caved in pretty quick.”
Castiel sighed. “I did my job too well. Even now, after everything, you still doubt him. He stopped for as long as he had hope that you still cared for him. That there was love between you. He did not give way as quickly as you think, Dean; and not without some…prodding.”
“Sure,” Dean scoffed, stung by the accusation. “Though he was back in fighting form by Halloween, when he iced Samhain.”
“It had been so long since Sam had taken any demonic blood that destroying Samhain nearly killed him, Dean. You remember how he bled, how the headache kept you at his side for the following hours.”
Dean swallowed. “I was afraid that he’d finally popped something in that thick-skull of his.”
“He nearly did,” Castiel said tiredly. “But he couldn’t allow Samhain to go free… or stand to see you hurt. Samuel has not cared about his own life in a very long time, now.”
Dean shifted uncomfortably. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that, but it was information he’d never known what to do with. He still didn’t. “So, you’re saying that when Sam took out Samhain, he was clean?” he asked, pulling them back to safer ground.
“Yes.” Castiel looked up, his shoulders hunched, his hands hanging between his knees. “And we couldn’t allow that to continue.”
“What, you couldn’t let him not use?”
“The angels weren’t trying to stop the Apocalypse, Dean - they were trying to engender it. They wanted it. The only way they could get it, was for Sam to drink enough blood to kill Lilith and free Lucifer.” Castiel folded his hands, elbows on knees, leaning his head against them. “I thought I was there only to protect you, Michael’s vessel, as your brother decayed and became more and more unstable. I believed what I was telling you to be true, Dean, when I warned you about him, and when I warned you to tell him to stop. But later I began to wonder why I was not sent to tell him. Why were the messages going through you? Should he not hear these things for himself? And then other facts began to fail to add up. Why he was not sent with you into the past, why was he not shown what his mother had done? Why he was not told the truths you were given?”
“And…?” Dean asked, feeling numb.
“And… I eventually found that Sam was receiving different messages from other angels.”
The numbness spread, making the whole world feel dull and lifeless. “Other angels.”
“I know of at least one time when Uriel told Sam that he would only be allowed to live as long as he was useful. I suspect there were more.”
“That son of a bitch threatened my brother?” The anger was as instinctive and instantaneous as it ever had been when Sam was in grade school. At the same time there was the heavy, and familiar, burn of self-reproach. Why hadn’t he known - why hadn’t he noticed?
“Sam was not my charge. I was not informed.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?” Dean sat down on a dirty pew across the aisle and a few rows behind Castiel. He went down so heavily it groaned.
“I can only speculate…but he knew you were…vulnerable. Still recovering. You were in no shape to help yourself, let alone him.”
“And he was no better.” Jesus. They had both been screwed beyond the telling, and he’d kept waiting for Sam to somehow make it better, to make it go away, to reach into the quagmire he’d been sinking into and pull him free…but the whole time Sam had been drowning too. “Is that when he started using again?”
But the angel could only shake his head. “I don’t know. Not for certain. But I know that -” Castiel took a breath, deep and ragged, “I know that what he was doing was not enough for the angels who were like Raphael. They wanted it to go faster. For Sam to fall faster. Uriel was with them. In many ways, he had been sent to watch me, to make sure that I did not interfere with their larger goals.”
“Starting the Apocalypse,” Dean clarified. “Damning Sam.”
Castiel met his eyes steadily. “Yes.”
Dean struggled to stay where he was, though his fists curled at his sides. “So what did Uriel do? Push Sam into it?”
“In a way,” Castiel confirmed. “He was testing the other angels - under orders from Raphael, I now suspect. Any who opposed the release of Lucifer were eliminated. When I assumed demons guilty of the slayings, Uriel and his ilk saw an opportunity. It wasn’t coincidence that the demon we captured was your tormentor, Dean. They wanted to make you face your fears. An archangel could have gotten the information from Alistair in seconds, but they knew that making you pull up your demon-trained skills would hurt you - which would push Sam toward his powers, to save you. They knew that Sam would know how agonizing that would be for you. How damaging. And they knew that he would know that there was no way you could survive an encounter with Alistair - not mentally and not physically.”
Dean swallowed. “So they used me to make Sam into exactly what they wanted?”
“You are not responsible, Dean,” Castiel said simply. “You had no choice. I took you. I made you do what I myself could not face. When Uriel said that we had been ordered to use you, I was relieved. I was coward.” Shame colored Castiel’s tone. “And when Sam found us… he was already changed. He saved us both, you know. Alistair… I could not defeat him. That was Sam’s first kill. And after that change… he was unable to stop. Physically. There was just… too much of it. It was a part of him, after Alistair.”
Dean cleared his throat, fighting off the taste of salt and bitterness on the back of his tongue. “He did it to save me.”
“Yes. In part.”
“And I judged him for it.”
“We both did.”
Dean looked up at the hunched angel. “Did you know? About what they wanted Sam to do? To become?”
Castiel shook his head. “I did not. I should have, but I didn’t. Not then. After Alistair was killed, while you were in the hospital, I was still arguing with Sam. He told me that the angels were behind the killings, but I didn’t believe him…not right away. I didn’t want to believe it.”
“It hurts to doubt your brother,” Dean agreed.
Castiel flinched slightly at the words, but nodded. “That’s when I began to question my orders. If Uriel was working to bring about the end of the world, and he had been made my superior…what did that mean for the rest of the Host?”
“It meant you were all fucked,” Dean said.
“Yes, it did. And you along with us.”
And boy, had they been. Bent over and fucked raw. And Sam had never had a goddamned chance, with both angels and demons planning his fall. “But you still did what they told you to do,” Dean half guessed, half accused.
“I did.” Castiel gazed now at the dirty light shining through the old window above the altar. “I was…a good son, a good brother, a good soldier. Though I suspected my orders were not right, it didn’t stop them from being my orders.” He glanced at Dean, and Dean could see the glimmer of an emotion in his eyes…something hot and heavy and uncomfortable. “And when they ordered me to open the panic room and let Sam out…I did it without hesitation.”
Dean shook his head, no so much in denial as full out rejection. “You let Sam out? We had him caged, contained, and you let him go?”
“I did,” the angel said, mercilessly. “I opened the door, and sent Sam to Ruby. To the demon who would guide him to Lilith. He knew he had to get there before you. He knew you were not strong enough to kill her, no matter what I had told you. He wanted to kill her, for you - both to save you and to avenge you. He had lost your love. He was happy to give his life so you would not loose yours.”
“Jesus Christ, Cas.” Dean started, not sure what he was going to say, what he even could say…then he realized what Cas had said. “’Happy to give his life…?’ Sam thought he was going to die?”
“He had no illusions that he could take down Lilith without paying the consequences. And even if he survived the fight, you had said that he was to be hunted.”
Dean felt his stomach churn. “But I called him. I told him that he was still my brother…”
“I changed the message on Sam’s phone. I made him think you wanted to kill him. As I was ordered to.”
The air in the room felt too thin, too cold. It burned going down and left him half-suffocated. “So when I came pounding on the door at the convent, screaming for him..?”
“He assumed you were there to finish the job.” Castiel confirmed. “If it makes you feel any better he had most likely no plans to fight you. He only wanted to kill Lilith before he died. He would have let you kill him.”
The silence that followed was so deep that Dean could hear the old church knock and groan under its own weight. He could hear the rats the scurried through the place. He could see Castiel waiting for him to speak, calmly waiting for the explosion. But Dean’s mind was…blank. There was nothing. He felt as dry and hollow as a piece of straw…and as light - like he’d blow away in the slightest stirring of air. He waited to feel…something. Anger. Betrayal. Rage. But there was just nothing.
And one look at the angel told Dean that Castiel wasn’t looking for forgiveness, he didn’t need Dean’s approval. He was simply taking a weapon from Raphael’s hands. He probably never would have told Dean at all if he wasn’t sure Raphael would. It wasn’t that he didn’t regret his actions, but Dean was not the person he was seeking forgiveness from.
Which begged a question.
“Are you going to tell Sam any of this?”
“I already know.”
*
Part 12 Part 14
*
If you look at your reflection in the bottom of a well,
What you see is only on the surface.
When you try to see the meaning, hidden underneath,
The measure of the depth can be deceiving.
The bottom has a rocky reputation.
You can feel it in the distance the deeper down you stare.
From up above it's hard to see, but you know when you're there.
On the bottom words are shallow.
On the surface talk is cheap.
You can only judge the distance by the company you keep.
~Joe Walsh - Eyes of the Confessor
_____________________________________________________________________________
*
“Cas?”
The old church was dark, dank, and smelled of mold and abandonment. But it still managed to hold an air of…contemplation and peace. Beautifully etched rafters arched high over his head, while tall widows - elegant even with the grime covering them - glowed from the reflected lights of the surrounding buildings. Faded paintings of holy figures ghosted across the chipped walls, but no one had disfigured the place. There was no graffiti, no real trash. It had been left as it had always been, a place for worship - though one left empty for a long time now.
“Cas?” Dean called again, nervously searching the shadows. His hand twitched toward his gun.
“I’m here.”
Dean jerked, seeing Castiel now, a hunched shadow in a room full of them. He was sitting in a pew near the front of the church, gazing at the altar. “Cas, what the hell is going on? What’s with all this Borne Identity bullshit about meeting in abandoned buildings?”
“This church was built in 1892.”
Dean shifted uneasily. “Fascinating. Why are we here?”
“There was a time when all Catholic churches contained an antimension. The one here was left behind when the building was abandoned. They most likely forgot its existence.”
“Good for them,” Dean said carefully, and ran his lower lip though his teeth. “What’s an antimension? And why do we care?”
Castiel looked up at him for the first time. “A holy relic, generally a sliver of bone from a Saint. It’s sewn into a cloth, and it is the core of the altar.” Castiel nodded at the huge, marble table in the center of the dais. “This one was from a woman who fought for her people, and died for her faith. That kind of sacrifice, that kind of devotion, it leaves something behind. The relic, among other abilities, deadens singular conversation on the ethereal plane.”
“Which means…?”
“It blocks angelic hearing for everything except prayer, which it amplifies. I want to be absolutely sure that this conversation remains only between us.”
Dean lingered, running a hand over the back of a filthy pew. “Is this a conversation we really need to have?”
Castiel looked as close to defeated as Dean had ever seen him - and seeing as the guy had once pounded him into the dirt while snarling about loosing everything that had ever mattered, that was pretty damned defeated. “Raphael has threatened - has promised - to tell you the full extent of my involvement in the events leading to Lucifer’s escape.”
Dean took a slow breath, confused. “Uh, I know the full extent of your involvement in that crap.”
“No. You don’t. And I may be risking our connection in telling you, but Raphael plans on throwing the information at you at the worst time, using it to shake your faith and distract you. He will use it to hurt you. I will not allow that, not when I can stop it by telling you myself.”
Dean rubbed a hand over his mouth. “How bad is this going to be?”
“I was sent, in part, to keep you and Sam…distant.”
The words were so abrupt, Dean had to replay them a couple of times to get the sense of them. He carefully didn’t let his jaw clench. “…distant. Define distant.”
Castiel focused again on the altar. “To keep you apart. We needed you not to trust Samuel.”
“Explain.”
The word was quiet, and came out calmly enough, but there was an undertone, an edge to it that threatened to make someone bleed.
Castiel dropped his eyes to the shadowy floor. There was no fear in him - after all, he and Dean both knew he couldn’t really touch an angel - but there was a tenseness…an awareness of what he was saying that went beyond the words, an awareness of what the words would mean to Dean.
“I didn’t know. Not at first, at least. I’m not trying to…excuse myself. I am responsible for my own actions, no matter the reasons. But I didn’t know, Dean.”
“You didn’t know what?”
“Didn’t know what they had planned. For all of us.” He hesitated, then looked up again at Dean. “For Sam, especially.”
“Planned?”
The angel rubbed his hands over his face. “I can see it now. Only now. At the time, I only thought their orders were…strange. Confusing. Occasionally contradictory. But even questioning why we were ordered to do something was perilously close to blasphemy. So I turned a blind eye.”
“Cas,” Dean said carefully, “if you don’t tell me what the hell your talking about, now, I may have to kill you. And don’t doubt that I’ll find a way to get the job done.”
Castiel closed his eyes. “We…I…was ordered to break your relationship with Sam, to sever it. To keep you from ever trusting your brother.”
Dean went cold, a chill that filled his chest and seeped into every part of him. It was like drowning on dry land. “What? Why? Why would you -?”
“Because we knew you were the only one who could have stopped Sam. For you, he would have done anything. He would have given up his vengeance. He would have turned his back on Ruby. He would have stopped drinking the blood.”
Dean made a sound, though it was too bitter to be a laugh. “No. That’s not true. I told Sam to stop a million times, and he never did. He never listened to me. Not once. I told him how fucked up he was getting, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care about what I wanted.”
Castiel looked almost pained. “He did stop, Dean.”
“When?” Dean demanded, not believing it for a second.
“Right after you faced the Rugaru,” Castiel said. “Before you ever knew he was drinking the blood, he stopped. He wanted to be human. For you.” There was a wealth of regret in the angel’s voice.
But Dean shook it off. “If he did, it wasn’t for long. He caved in pretty quick.”
Castiel sighed. “I did my job too well. Even now, after everything, you still doubt him. He stopped for as long as he had hope that you still cared for him. That there was love between you. He did not give way as quickly as you think, Dean; and not without some…prodding.”
“Sure,” Dean scoffed, stung by the accusation. “Though he was back in fighting form by Halloween, when he iced Samhain.”
“It had been so long since Sam had taken any demonic blood that destroying Samhain nearly killed him, Dean. You remember how he bled, how the headache kept you at his side for the following hours.”
Dean swallowed. “I was afraid that he’d finally popped something in that thick-skull of his.”
“He nearly did,” Castiel said tiredly. “But he couldn’t allow Samhain to go free… or stand to see you hurt. Samuel has not cared about his own life in a very long time, now.”
Dean shifted uncomfortably. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that, but it was information he’d never known what to do with. He still didn’t. “So, you’re saying that when Sam took out Samhain, he was clean?” he asked, pulling them back to safer ground.
“Yes.” Castiel looked up, his shoulders hunched, his hands hanging between his knees. “And we couldn’t allow that to continue.”
“What, you couldn’t let him not use?”
“The angels weren’t trying to stop the Apocalypse, Dean - they were trying to engender it. They wanted it. The only way they could get it, was for Sam to drink enough blood to kill Lilith and free Lucifer.” Castiel folded his hands, elbows on knees, leaning his head against them. “I thought I was there only to protect you, Michael’s vessel, as your brother decayed and became more and more unstable. I believed what I was telling you to be true, Dean, when I warned you about him, and when I warned you to tell him to stop. But later I began to wonder why I was not sent to tell him. Why were the messages going through you? Should he not hear these things for himself? And then other facts began to fail to add up. Why he was not sent with you into the past, why was he not shown what his mother had done? Why he was not told the truths you were given?”
“And…?” Dean asked, feeling numb.
“And… I eventually found that Sam was receiving different messages from other angels.”
The numbness spread, making the whole world feel dull and lifeless. “Other angels.”
“I know of at least one time when Uriel told Sam that he would only be allowed to live as long as he was useful. I suspect there were more.”
“That son of a bitch threatened my brother?” The anger was as instinctive and instantaneous as it ever had been when Sam was in grade school. At the same time there was the heavy, and familiar, burn of self-reproach. Why hadn’t he known - why hadn’t he noticed?
“Sam was not my charge. I was not informed.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?” Dean sat down on a dirty pew across the aisle and a few rows behind Castiel. He went down so heavily it groaned.
“I can only speculate…but he knew you were…vulnerable. Still recovering. You were in no shape to help yourself, let alone him.”
“And he was no better.” Jesus. They had both been screwed beyond the telling, and he’d kept waiting for Sam to somehow make it better, to make it go away, to reach into the quagmire he’d been sinking into and pull him free…but the whole time Sam had been drowning too. “Is that when he started using again?”
But the angel could only shake his head. “I don’t know. Not for certain. But I know that -” Castiel took a breath, deep and ragged, “I know that what he was doing was not enough for the angels who were like Raphael. They wanted it to go faster. For Sam to fall faster. Uriel was with them. In many ways, he had been sent to watch me, to make sure that I did not interfere with their larger goals.”
“Starting the Apocalypse,” Dean clarified. “Damning Sam.”
Castiel met his eyes steadily. “Yes.”
Dean struggled to stay where he was, though his fists curled at his sides. “So what did Uriel do? Push Sam into it?”
“In a way,” Castiel confirmed. “He was testing the other angels - under orders from Raphael, I now suspect. Any who opposed the release of Lucifer were eliminated. When I assumed demons guilty of the slayings, Uriel and his ilk saw an opportunity. It wasn’t coincidence that the demon we captured was your tormentor, Dean. They wanted to make you face your fears. An archangel could have gotten the information from Alistair in seconds, but they knew that making you pull up your demon-trained skills would hurt you - which would push Sam toward his powers, to save you. They knew that Sam would know how agonizing that would be for you. How damaging. And they knew that he would know that there was no way you could survive an encounter with Alistair - not mentally and not physically.”
Dean swallowed. “So they used me to make Sam into exactly what they wanted?”
“You are not responsible, Dean,” Castiel said simply. “You had no choice. I took you. I made you do what I myself could not face. When Uriel said that we had been ordered to use you, I was relieved. I was coward.” Shame colored Castiel’s tone. “And when Sam found us… he was already changed. He saved us both, you know. Alistair… I could not defeat him. That was Sam’s first kill. And after that change… he was unable to stop. Physically. There was just… too much of it. It was a part of him, after Alistair.”
Dean cleared his throat, fighting off the taste of salt and bitterness on the back of his tongue. “He did it to save me.”
“Yes. In part.”
“And I judged him for it.”
“We both did.”
Dean looked up at the hunched angel. “Did you know? About what they wanted Sam to do? To become?”
Castiel shook his head. “I did not. I should have, but I didn’t. Not then. After Alistair was killed, while you were in the hospital, I was still arguing with Sam. He told me that the angels were behind the killings, but I didn’t believe him…not right away. I didn’t want to believe it.”
“It hurts to doubt your brother,” Dean agreed.
Castiel flinched slightly at the words, but nodded. “That’s when I began to question my orders. If Uriel was working to bring about the end of the world, and he had been made my superior…what did that mean for the rest of the Host?”
“It meant you were all fucked,” Dean said.
“Yes, it did. And you along with us.”
And boy, had they been. Bent over and fucked raw. And Sam had never had a goddamned chance, with both angels and demons planning his fall. “But you still did what they told you to do,” Dean half guessed, half accused.
“I did.” Castiel gazed now at the dirty light shining through the old window above the altar. “I was…a good son, a good brother, a good soldier. Though I suspected my orders were not right, it didn’t stop them from being my orders.” He glanced at Dean, and Dean could see the glimmer of an emotion in his eyes…something hot and heavy and uncomfortable. “And when they ordered me to open the panic room and let Sam out…I did it without hesitation.”
Dean shook his head, no so much in denial as full out rejection. “You let Sam out? We had him caged, contained, and you let him go?”
“I did,” the angel said, mercilessly. “I opened the door, and sent Sam to Ruby. To the demon who would guide him to Lilith. He knew he had to get there before you. He knew you were not strong enough to kill her, no matter what I had told you. He wanted to kill her, for you - both to save you and to avenge you. He had lost your love. He was happy to give his life so you would not loose yours.”
“Jesus Christ, Cas.” Dean started, not sure what he was going to say, what he even could say…then he realized what Cas had said. “’Happy to give his life…?’ Sam thought he was going to die?”
“He had no illusions that he could take down Lilith without paying the consequences. And even if he survived the fight, you had said that he was to be hunted.”
Dean felt his stomach churn. “But I called him. I told him that he was still my brother…”
“I changed the message on Sam’s phone. I made him think you wanted to kill him. As I was ordered to.”
The air in the room felt too thin, too cold. It burned going down and left him half-suffocated. “So when I came pounding on the door at the convent, screaming for him..?”
“He assumed you were there to finish the job.” Castiel confirmed. “If it makes you feel any better he had most likely no plans to fight you. He only wanted to kill Lilith before he died. He would have let you kill him.”
The silence that followed was so deep that Dean could hear the old church knock and groan under its own weight. He could hear the rats the scurried through the place. He could see Castiel waiting for him to speak, calmly waiting for the explosion. But Dean’s mind was…blank. There was nothing. He felt as dry and hollow as a piece of straw…and as light - like he’d blow away in the slightest stirring of air. He waited to feel…something. Anger. Betrayal. Rage. But there was just nothing.
And one look at the angel told Dean that Castiel wasn’t looking for forgiveness, he didn’t need Dean’s approval. He was simply taking a weapon from Raphael’s hands. He probably never would have told Dean at all if he wasn’t sure Raphael would. It wasn’t that he didn’t regret his actions, but Dean was not the person he was seeking forgiveness from.
Which begged a question.
“Are you going to tell Sam any of this?”
“I already know.”
*
Part 12 Part 14