Fic: The Shattered One (30/?)
See the masterpost for disclaimer, summary, and previous parts.
“We have no idea where we are,” Sam said, seemingly to himself.
Dean cocked his head and glanced over his shoulder, enough to see Sam wandering around the tiny living room with his phone pressed to his ear. Mystery solved, he turned back to watching his son and Cas on the bed, keeping half an ear on the conversation while the other listened in helpless frustration as Daniel hiccupped and cried against Castiel’s chest.
“Wherever this is,” Sam continued, “there’s nothing outside but wheat fields as far as the eye can see. Not even roads, so we can’t even look for street names. But it seems safe enough… for now.” Sam paced in front of the single small bedroom. “I don’t know… Gabriel - yes, as in the archangel - just showed up and zapped us here, wherever here is.” A pause while the other person spoke. Then Sam said in a careful tone of voice, “Not exactly, he’s… when Gabriel brought us all here, he brought the Impala, too, so he’s not exactly… no, he’s just kind of… preoccupied.”
Dean suspected they were talking about him. Not that he cared. He was sitting in a shitty chair beside the only bed in the tiny house in the middle of nowhere. In bed, Castiel lay bare-chested with Daniel lying on top of him. Castiel had not woken since his fight with Lucifer. He’d started breathing again, but beyond that, there were no signs of improvement. Worse, no signs that Castiel was still in there. He looked scarily like a brain-dead coma patient, alive in the strict medical sense but nothing else. Even more disturbing, Daniel was unsettled. Dean had placed the baby on Castiel’s chest, hoping the child would bring Castiel around, but also because Daniel still needed to grace-nurse. Whenever Daniel was soaking up the good stuff, he was always quiet and content. Nothing blissed out the kid quite like a hit of angel grace. But for hours now, he’d cried non-stop. Not wailing, but a constant low-level sob like something was wrong but he was too young to know what.
And there wasn’t a damn thing Dean could do but sit there.
“I really don’t know,” Sam said lowly, like he was trying not to let Dean hear, but the house was too tiny to keep secrets. “Cas has hardly gotten any better since he killed Lucifer.” A sigh. “I wish I did. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Frustrated and helpless, Dean reached out and gently stroked Daniel’s naked back. The baby gasped at the contact, like he was feeling for something in it, then he resumed his off-kilter cry when he didn’t find it.
“Yeah, okay… I’ll keep in touch.” Sam hung up the phone and came into the bedroom, where Dean was still leaning forward and trying uselessly to calm his son.
Sam stopped next to Dean and looked down at the baby and angel. “The skin-on-skin isn’t helping?” he asked miserably.
“No,” Dean sighed.
When they first came to this little oasis in the wheat, they’d pulled Castiel’s ruined clothes off him, put him in sweat pants and a t-shirt of Dean’s, and put him in bed to let him recover. Then they’d started this wait-and-watch-and-see pattern as Daniel let them know that something wasn’t working like it was supposed to. For whatever reason, the baby wasn’t getting the sustaining grace he needed from the motionless angel. Desperate and at a loss, they thought maybe the two of them being skin-to-skin might make the transfer of grace easier in Castiel’s weakened state. Castiel’s/Dean’s white t-shirt lay discarded on the hardwood floor, mocking them for thinking its thin material could have made a difference.
Dean glanced up at Sam and saw his brother’s troubled expression. Even without a mirror, Dean knew his was even worse. And he most definitely didn’t want to talk about it, so he’d make them talk about something else. “Who was that on the phone?”
“Ellen.”
“They all okay?”
“Yeah, everyone’s fine.”
Dean slowly drew back, his hand sliding off Daniel, and sat back in the chair. “Where did Lucifer send them?”
“Belgium.”
Dean’s eyebrows rose.
“Yeah,” Sam snorted, like it might be funny if everything else wasn’t so decidedly not, “Ellen’s pretty pissed about it.”
“Bet Jo’s loving it, though,” Dean commented. He couldn’t really see Ellen getting a kick out of visiting a foreign country, but he imagined Jo was secretly (or not so secretly) enjoying the impromptu trip abroad.
Daniel squirmed against Castiel’s skin, face scrunched and little hands balled in frustrated fists.
Dean’s gut clenched at the sight.
The baby’s cries being the only sound in the house was unbearable. That might have been why Dean blurted out what he did. “I was going to say yes to Michael.”
At first, Sam just stood there quietly. “I was going to say yes to Lucifer.”
They left it at that… acknowledgment of the lengths they had both been willing to go to for family before Castiel showed up and saved them all.
With a sigh, Sam shuffled a step back and said, “I’m going to go outside and see if I can find anything that might give us an idea where we are… you going to be okay here alone?”
‘I’m not alone,’ Dean wanted to counter, but he just nodded and waved, “Yeah, fine. Just don’t go too far. Stay in sight of the house.”
Whether he would or not, Sam didn’t bother with outright arguing with his brother. Having his family on their sickbed apparently got Dean the kid-glove treatment.
Sam turned and went out the front door.
And Dean might not be alone, but damn did it feel like he was.
He sat at Castiel’s bedside nearly an hour, listening to Daniel cry and not being able to do anything about it, when he had to get up to go to the bathroom.
Coming back, he was several steps away from the bedroom when Daniel went suddenly silent.
Dean rushed back into the room…
… only to find Castiel and Daniel were not alone in it.
Gabriel was there, standing on the far side of the bed. He had Daniel in his arms, holding the baby to his chest.
Dean stiffened at first at the sight, then he strode forward and glared across the bed at Gabriel. “What are you doing here? And who the hell said you could touch Daniel?”
Gabriel lifted his eyebrows arrogantly at Dean. “Not exactly the thank you I was expecting.”
“Why the hell should I thank you?” Dean’s eyes went to Daniel then back up into Gabriel’s face. “Give me my son,” Dean growled, because this was the guy who’d tormented him and Sam and beat the shit out of Castiel and not given two shits about saving the world.
A surprisingly calm expression settled over Gabriel’s face. “I’m actually trying to help.” Gabriel looked down at the baby against his chest and brushed one hand over Daniel’s back. It gave Dean pause. Because it was a shockingly gentle touch. Because he really took a moment to appreciate the fact that Daniel wasn’t distressed anymore now that Gabriel was holding him. On principle, Dean wanted to throw a fit, but despite himself a knot of tension in his spine loosened.
Belatedly, Dean wondered if Gabriel was petting Daniel’s wings.
“Frankly, I’m a little humiliated having to play angel wet-nurse,” Gabriel groused lightly, “but Castiel needs all his grace devoted to healing himself.” The archangel half-smiled and glanced down at Castiel. “Not that he wasn’t doing his damnedest to give the boy what he needed.”
Dean ventured a step closer. “So… Cas is still in there?”
“Oh, he’s in there… he’s just far away.”
Dean looked down at Castiel. Without the baby on his chest, Dean could see the scar of Daniel’s birth. When he and Sam had stripped Castiel to put different clothes on him, they’d been taken aback to see the mark. The day Daniel arrived, Castiel’s chest had borne the red irritation of some trauma, but he’d redressed before they could see that a scar had formed. But one certainly had, and as far as scars went, it was pretty kick-ass. Silvery-white scar tissue branded the shape of a tiny angel into the skin of Castiel’s chest. Small arms spread wide, tiny legs pointed like a diver, the fragile figure of a newborn body, the rounded shape of a head, and the whispery-faint pale impression of tiny wings had been seared into Castiel’s body like a little Vitruvian man with wings.
It took some effort for Dean to drag his eyes away from the shade of Daniel and look up into Castiel’s face, so still and slack. “But he’ll be okay, right?”
Gabriel turned a sharp, serious look on Dean. “I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what he did. It’s been known since the beginning - it was written - that the only angel equal to Lucifer was Michael. And then along comes Castiel, the little rebel angel, and he blasts Lucifer to kingdom come. And you expect him to just walk that off?”
“You were the one who said he might be able to do it,” Dean argued. “If it was to save Daniel…”
“Well, that was the theory, but honestly,” Gabriel gave a fatalistic shrug, “I didn’t think Castiel could pull it off. A stronger angel, maybe, but the little angel of Thursday…? Truth is, he’s not much, as angels go.”
“He’s the best of your sorry lot,” Dean snapped.
Gabriel didn’t react caustically to that, which was shocking. “Normally I’d take umbrage to that, but given recent events… you know, Dean-o, for the first time I might actually agree with you.”
Would wonders never cease.
Then Dean remembered that Gabriel had never actually answered his question. “But… but Cas is going to be okay, right?”
Something strangely warm flashed behind Gabriel’s eyes as he regarded his unconscious brother. “At this point, I’m done underestimating him. He’ll recover… no doubt for the sake of you and this child alone.”
Dean swallowed a mixed-bag of feelings at that, because Gabriel was the last person he was going to pour his heart out to.
Then there was an awkward silence while Gabriel let Daniel soak up his grace.
“So where are we?” Dean finally asked.
“Someplace safe… does the rest matter?”
“What about Detroit?”
That earned a snort. “There is no more Detroit. Since you’ve been tucked away here, we angels plucked out as many humans not infected with the demonic virus as we could in a mad grab-and-dash… then we wiped out the city to take care of the ones that were.”
Dean should be upset about that, he really should. Because angels did make mistakes, they weren’t perfect, and no doubt innocents were left behind, uninfected people that were destroyed when the city was. But honestly, after the near-miss he’d had with his own family, Dean couldn’t spare anything for strangers. He couldn’t even claim excessive force, because he’d seen a future overrun with Croats. If stopping that from happening meant taking out an entire city, and a few innocent people with it, well…
“Fine… next question, why were you there? With Michael? You rejoin the angel-squad?”
Gabriel looked uncomfortable. And, for a second, he looked resistant to telling Dean jack squat. Maybe the silence was just as awkward to him as it was to Dean that he answered him at all. “Since Lucifer’s death, I’ve rejoined the Host, yes. I’d been gone so long that it’s weird being back… you have any idea what it feels like to return after being the one that ran away from home?”
Dean didn’t, but Sam would.
“Well, let me tell you, aaaawkwaaard. But before that, I was busy busting Castiel out of a ring of holy fire.”
Dean jolted. “You what?”
“That’s right,” the archangel’s eyebrows rose, “you didn’t know about that… guess I can forgive you a little for not kissing my feet in gratitude the second you saw me. Yeah, big brother Lucifer had Castiel in a burning cage.”
“And you set him free,” Dean said in disbelief.
Gabriel shrugged and glanced down at Daniel like it was a small thing he’d done. When, in fact, it had directly led to Castiel’s show-down with the Devil.
Dean narrowed his eyes. “What happened to all that ‘I’m not getting involved’ crap you kept telling us?”
“I wanted to stay out of it, believe me,” Gabriel acknowledged. Then he seemed to tense, curling inward like a dog too used to being hit (and from the cavalier bastard that shied from nothing, it looked extremely out of place). “Then Lucifer killed so many of my brothers and sisters at once…”
The suicide-bomber demons in Omaha.
Gabriel scowled. “Losing them like that, all at once… no angel could ignore that.”
The archangel looked harrowed by the experience… just as Castiel had looked stricken and bereft at the mass-slaying of his brothers and sisters. It had hit Gabriel just as hard, obviously. Seemed there was no escaping family in Heaven any more than one could on Earth.
“And I thought, if that was hard, losing them, how painful would it be to lose thousands more? Because if Lucifer won, that’s what would happen. Lucifer would have to kill countless angels to secure his place. So I made a choice. Let one brother die to save the others.”
But even then, even after having gone the whole ‘the needs of the many’ Spock route, Gabriel looked haunted by losing his brother. The damned brother, yes, but Dean knew what it was like to love a brother despite the darkness inside him and the wicked fate he’d been destined for.
Dean didn’t want to feel bad for Gabriel - hell, he didn’t want to like the guy - but at that confession, it was hard to really, truly hate him.
“I still think it was jacked that it was up to the angels at all,” Dean grumbled. “God should have stopped Lucifer.”
Gabriel snorted and shook his head. “You still don’t get it, Dean.”
“What?”
“Could you kill Daniel?”
Dean reacted to the question like a physical strike. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything. The angels are God’s children. He’s our Father. Surely you can see the parallel… and the dilemma.”
“Gabe… all I can see is that the family upstairs is severely screwed up.”
Gabriel actually chuckled. “I won’t argue with you on that.” He made a face. “And don’t call me ‘Gabe’.”
“Why not? Too stuck up?”
Gabriel gave Dean what almost amounted to a teasing look. “Save the pet names and terms of endearment for your angel.”
“Whatever.” Dean realized quite suddenly that he wasn’t on edge. He’d relaxed. Gabriel looked pretty chilled out, too. “Crap… did we just have a moment? Did we bond or some shit?”
The archangel tipped his head in introspection. “You know, I do have this sneaking suspicion that if Sam were here, I’d want to braid his hair,” Gabriel answered in false falsetto.
Dean couldn’t help it… he laughed.
In the silence that followed, Gabriel resumed brushing his hand down Daniel’s back. As he did, he stared down pensively at the child. “You know,” he said after a minute, “he’s pretty remarkable. Depending on the interpretation of events, some might say it was actually this little guy that saved the world.”
“He was remarkable before that.”
“Why, Dean Winchester, I daresay this boy has you wrapped around his little finger.”
It was a day of firsts… Gabriel agreeing with Dean, Dean agreeing with Gabriel…
Now that the red-alert was over, Dean went over to the bed and sat on the edge, next to Castiel. He studied the angel quietly a moment. Was he just imagining the hint of color in Castiel’s cheeks, the sense that maybe he wasn’t as deathly-still as before, now that he wasn’t trying to give any of his grace to Daniel?
He hoped it wasn’t just a matter of him seeing what he wanted to see.
“Hey, Gabe?”
A long-suffering sigh preceded the archangel’s resigned/annoyed, “What?”
“Thanks.”
Next
“We have no idea where we are,” Sam said, seemingly to himself.
Dean cocked his head and glanced over his shoulder, enough to see Sam wandering around the tiny living room with his phone pressed to his ear. Mystery solved, he turned back to watching his son and Cas on the bed, keeping half an ear on the conversation while the other listened in helpless frustration as Daniel hiccupped and cried against Castiel’s chest.
“Wherever this is,” Sam continued, “there’s nothing outside but wheat fields as far as the eye can see. Not even roads, so we can’t even look for street names. But it seems safe enough… for now.” Sam paced in front of the single small bedroom. “I don’t know… Gabriel - yes, as in the archangel - just showed up and zapped us here, wherever here is.” A pause while the other person spoke. Then Sam said in a careful tone of voice, “Not exactly, he’s… when Gabriel brought us all here, he brought the Impala, too, so he’s not exactly… no, he’s just kind of… preoccupied.”
Dean suspected they were talking about him. Not that he cared. He was sitting in a shitty chair beside the only bed in the tiny house in the middle of nowhere. In bed, Castiel lay bare-chested with Daniel lying on top of him. Castiel had not woken since his fight with Lucifer. He’d started breathing again, but beyond that, there were no signs of improvement. Worse, no signs that Castiel was still in there. He looked scarily like a brain-dead coma patient, alive in the strict medical sense but nothing else. Even more disturbing, Daniel was unsettled. Dean had placed the baby on Castiel’s chest, hoping the child would bring Castiel around, but also because Daniel still needed to grace-nurse. Whenever Daniel was soaking up the good stuff, he was always quiet and content. Nothing blissed out the kid quite like a hit of angel grace. But for hours now, he’d cried non-stop. Not wailing, but a constant low-level sob like something was wrong but he was too young to know what.
And there wasn’t a damn thing Dean could do but sit there.
“I really don’t know,” Sam said lowly, like he was trying not to let Dean hear, but the house was too tiny to keep secrets. “Cas has hardly gotten any better since he killed Lucifer.” A sigh. “I wish I did. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Frustrated and helpless, Dean reached out and gently stroked Daniel’s naked back. The baby gasped at the contact, like he was feeling for something in it, then he resumed his off-kilter cry when he didn’t find it.
“Yeah, okay… I’ll keep in touch.” Sam hung up the phone and came into the bedroom, where Dean was still leaning forward and trying uselessly to calm his son.
Sam stopped next to Dean and looked down at the baby and angel. “The skin-on-skin isn’t helping?” he asked miserably.
“No,” Dean sighed.
When they first came to this little oasis in the wheat, they’d pulled Castiel’s ruined clothes off him, put him in sweat pants and a t-shirt of Dean’s, and put him in bed to let him recover. Then they’d started this wait-and-watch-and-see pattern as Daniel let them know that something wasn’t working like it was supposed to. For whatever reason, the baby wasn’t getting the sustaining grace he needed from the motionless angel. Desperate and at a loss, they thought maybe the two of them being skin-to-skin might make the transfer of grace easier in Castiel’s weakened state. Castiel’s/Dean’s white t-shirt lay discarded on the hardwood floor, mocking them for thinking its thin material could have made a difference.
Dean glanced up at Sam and saw his brother’s troubled expression. Even without a mirror, Dean knew his was even worse. And he most definitely didn’t want to talk about it, so he’d make them talk about something else. “Who was that on the phone?”
“Ellen.”
“They all okay?”
“Yeah, everyone’s fine.”
Dean slowly drew back, his hand sliding off Daniel, and sat back in the chair. “Where did Lucifer send them?”
“Belgium.”
Dean’s eyebrows rose.
“Yeah,” Sam snorted, like it might be funny if everything else wasn’t so decidedly not, “Ellen’s pretty pissed about it.”
“Bet Jo’s loving it, though,” Dean commented. He couldn’t really see Ellen getting a kick out of visiting a foreign country, but he imagined Jo was secretly (or not so secretly) enjoying the impromptu trip abroad.
Daniel squirmed against Castiel’s skin, face scrunched and little hands balled in frustrated fists.
Dean’s gut clenched at the sight.
The baby’s cries being the only sound in the house was unbearable. That might have been why Dean blurted out what he did. “I was going to say yes to Michael.”
At first, Sam just stood there quietly. “I was going to say yes to Lucifer.”
They left it at that… acknowledgment of the lengths they had both been willing to go to for family before Castiel showed up and saved them all.
With a sigh, Sam shuffled a step back and said, “I’m going to go outside and see if I can find anything that might give us an idea where we are… you going to be okay here alone?”
‘I’m not alone,’ Dean wanted to counter, but he just nodded and waved, “Yeah, fine. Just don’t go too far. Stay in sight of the house.”
Whether he would or not, Sam didn’t bother with outright arguing with his brother. Having his family on their sickbed apparently got Dean the kid-glove treatment.
Sam turned and went out the front door.
And Dean might not be alone, but damn did it feel like he was.
He sat at Castiel’s bedside nearly an hour, listening to Daniel cry and not being able to do anything about it, when he had to get up to go to the bathroom.
Coming back, he was several steps away from the bedroom when Daniel went suddenly silent.
Dean rushed back into the room…
… only to find Castiel and Daniel were not alone in it.
Gabriel was there, standing on the far side of the bed. He had Daniel in his arms, holding the baby to his chest.
Dean stiffened at first at the sight, then he strode forward and glared across the bed at Gabriel. “What are you doing here? And who the hell said you could touch Daniel?”
Gabriel lifted his eyebrows arrogantly at Dean. “Not exactly the thank you I was expecting.”
“Why the hell should I thank you?” Dean’s eyes went to Daniel then back up into Gabriel’s face. “Give me my son,” Dean growled, because this was the guy who’d tormented him and Sam and beat the shit out of Castiel and not given two shits about saving the world.
A surprisingly calm expression settled over Gabriel’s face. “I’m actually trying to help.” Gabriel looked down at the baby against his chest and brushed one hand over Daniel’s back. It gave Dean pause. Because it was a shockingly gentle touch. Because he really took a moment to appreciate the fact that Daniel wasn’t distressed anymore now that Gabriel was holding him. On principle, Dean wanted to throw a fit, but despite himself a knot of tension in his spine loosened.
Belatedly, Dean wondered if Gabriel was petting Daniel’s wings.
“Frankly, I’m a little humiliated having to play angel wet-nurse,” Gabriel groused lightly, “but Castiel needs all his grace devoted to healing himself.” The archangel half-smiled and glanced down at Castiel. “Not that he wasn’t doing his damnedest to give the boy what he needed.”
Dean ventured a step closer. “So… Cas is still in there?”
“Oh, he’s in there… he’s just far away.”
Dean looked down at Castiel. Without the baby on his chest, Dean could see the scar of Daniel’s birth. When he and Sam had stripped Castiel to put different clothes on him, they’d been taken aback to see the mark. The day Daniel arrived, Castiel’s chest had borne the red irritation of some trauma, but he’d redressed before they could see that a scar had formed. But one certainly had, and as far as scars went, it was pretty kick-ass. Silvery-white scar tissue branded the shape of a tiny angel into the skin of Castiel’s chest. Small arms spread wide, tiny legs pointed like a diver, the fragile figure of a newborn body, the rounded shape of a head, and the whispery-faint pale impression of tiny wings had been seared into Castiel’s body like a little Vitruvian man with wings.
It took some effort for Dean to drag his eyes away from the shade of Daniel and look up into Castiel’s face, so still and slack. “But he’ll be okay, right?”
Gabriel turned a sharp, serious look on Dean. “I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what he did. It’s been known since the beginning - it was written - that the only angel equal to Lucifer was Michael. And then along comes Castiel, the little rebel angel, and he blasts Lucifer to kingdom come. And you expect him to just walk that off?”
“You were the one who said he might be able to do it,” Dean argued. “If it was to save Daniel…”
“Well, that was the theory, but honestly,” Gabriel gave a fatalistic shrug, “I didn’t think Castiel could pull it off. A stronger angel, maybe, but the little angel of Thursday…? Truth is, he’s not much, as angels go.”
“He’s the best of your sorry lot,” Dean snapped.
Gabriel didn’t react caustically to that, which was shocking. “Normally I’d take umbrage to that, but given recent events… you know, Dean-o, for the first time I might actually agree with you.”
Would wonders never cease.
Then Dean remembered that Gabriel had never actually answered his question. “But… but Cas is going to be okay, right?”
Something strangely warm flashed behind Gabriel’s eyes as he regarded his unconscious brother. “At this point, I’m done underestimating him. He’ll recover… no doubt for the sake of you and this child alone.”
Dean swallowed a mixed-bag of feelings at that, because Gabriel was the last person he was going to pour his heart out to.
Then there was an awkward silence while Gabriel let Daniel soak up his grace.
“So where are we?” Dean finally asked.
“Someplace safe… does the rest matter?”
“What about Detroit?”
That earned a snort. “There is no more Detroit. Since you’ve been tucked away here, we angels plucked out as many humans not infected with the demonic virus as we could in a mad grab-and-dash… then we wiped out the city to take care of the ones that were.”
Dean should be upset about that, he really should. Because angels did make mistakes, they weren’t perfect, and no doubt innocents were left behind, uninfected people that were destroyed when the city was. But honestly, after the near-miss he’d had with his own family, Dean couldn’t spare anything for strangers. He couldn’t even claim excessive force, because he’d seen a future overrun with Croats. If stopping that from happening meant taking out an entire city, and a few innocent people with it, well…
“Fine… next question, why were you there? With Michael? You rejoin the angel-squad?”
Gabriel looked uncomfortable. And, for a second, he looked resistant to telling Dean jack squat. Maybe the silence was just as awkward to him as it was to Dean that he answered him at all. “Since Lucifer’s death, I’ve rejoined the Host, yes. I’d been gone so long that it’s weird being back… you have any idea what it feels like to return after being the one that ran away from home?”
Dean didn’t, but Sam would.
“Well, let me tell you, aaaawkwaaard. But before that, I was busy busting Castiel out of a ring of holy fire.”
Dean jolted. “You what?”
“That’s right,” the archangel’s eyebrows rose, “you didn’t know about that… guess I can forgive you a little for not kissing my feet in gratitude the second you saw me. Yeah, big brother Lucifer had Castiel in a burning cage.”
“And you set him free,” Dean said in disbelief.
Gabriel shrugged and glanced down at Daniel like it was a small thing he’d done. When, in fact, it had directly led to Castiel’s show-down with the Devil.
Dean narrowed his eyes. “What happened to all that ‘I’m not getting involved’ crap you kept telling us?”
“I wanted to stay out of it, believe me,” Gabriel acknowledged. Then he seemed to tense, curling inward like a dog too used to being hit (and from the cavalier bastard that shied from nothing, it looked extremely out of place). “Then Lucifer killed so many of my brothers and sisters at once…”
The suicide-bomber demons in Omaha.
Gabriel scowled. “Losing them like that, all at once… no angel could ignore that.”
The archangel looked harrowed by the experience… just as Castiel had looked stricken and bereft at the mass-slaying of his brothers and sisters. It had hit Gabriel just as hard, obviously. Seemed there was no escaping family in Heaven any more than one could on Earth.
“And I thought, if that was hard, losing them, how painful would it be to lose thousands more? Because if Lucifer won, that’s what would happen. Lucifer would have to kill countless angels to secure his place. So I made a choice. Let one brother die to save the others.”
But even then, even after having gone the whole ‘the needs of the many’ Spock route, Gabriel looked haunted by losing his brother. The damned brother, yes, but Dean knew what it was like to love a brother despite the darkness inside him and the wicked fate he’d been destined for.
Dean didn’t want to feel bad for Gabriel - hell, he didn’t want to like the guy - but at that confession, it was hard to really, truly hate him.
“I still think it was jacked that it was up to the angels at all,” Dean grumbled. “God should have stopped Lucifer.”
Gabriel snorted and shook his head. “You still don’t get it, Dean.”
“What?”
“Could you kill Daniel?”
Dean reacted to the question like a physical strike. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything. The angels are God’s children. He’s our Father. Surely you can see the parallel… and the dilemma.”
“Gabe… all I can see is that the family upstairs is severely screwed up.”
Gabriel actually chuckled. “I won’t argue with you on that.” He made a face. “And don’t call me ‘Gabe’.”
“Why not? Too stuck up?”
Gabriel gave Dean what almost amounted to a teasing look. “Save the pet names and terms of endearment for your angel.”
“Whatever.” Dean realized quite suddenly that he wasn’t on edge. He’d relaxed. Gabriel looked pretty chilled out, too. “Crap… did we just have a moment? Did we bond or some shit?”
The archangel tipped his head in introspection. “You know, I do have this sneaking suspicion that if Sam were here, I’d want to braid his hair,” Gabriel answered in false falsetto.
Dean couldn’t help it… he laughed.
In the silence that followed, Gabriel resumed brushing his hand down Daniel’s back. As he did, he stared down pensively at the child. “You know,” he said after a minute, “he’s pretty remarkable. Depending on the interpretation of events, some might say it was actually this little guy that saved the world.”
“He was remarkable before that.”
“Why, Dean Winchester, I daresay this boy has you wrapped around his little finger.”
It was a day of firsts… Gabriel agreeing with Dean, Dean agreeing with Gabriel…
Now that the red-alert was over, Dean went over to the bed and sat on the edge, next to Castiel. He studied the angel quietly a moment. Was he just imagining the hint of color in Castiel’s cheeks, the sense that maybe he wasn’t as deathly-still as before, now that he wasn’t trying to give any of his grace to Daniel?
He hoped it wasn’t just a matter of him seeing what he wanted to see.
“Hey, Gabe?”
A long-suffering sigh preceded the archangel’s resigned/annoyed, “What?”
“Thanks.”
Next