Fic: Gradient
Title: Gradient
Words: 1,475
Genre: Angst, AU (after season 5), friendship, preslash?
Rating: PG 13
Characters: Dean, Cas.
Pairing: Dean/Cas if you're nearsighted, (which I am).
Warnings: none, vague torture.
Summary: In which a man is put back together and an angel is undone.
A/N: This is old. Like, first SPN fic I ever wrote (but never put anywhere) old. It's been tweaked since. Hope you enjoy it anyway, haha.
White is a color for beginnings. Anything that is white starts that way. And while people can talk philosophy over white pages or white paint, these are poor metaphors because they give no information on the actual concept. White isn't a color, or a shade, or even an absence of these things. White is a state of being.
There is no such thing as "fixing white".
***
Dean Winchester is gray.
He was red. When Castiel finally reached him.
Save him, said Heaven. And a garrison of angels smashed into hell like sparrows cracking at a window. It was slow and costly. Castiel saw many of his brothers fall. They crumbled to ash and blew across Styx, falling like snow on the black river.
Hell had Dean buried deep; at the bottom of the labyrinths and lakes of blood; underneath the brimstone and rages of the earth. They drowned Dean in shadows, trying to snuff out the candle of his humanity. They flayed away his resolve with pain and repetition for thirty years, until it splintered and snapped. It was only ever a matter of time. Then they took the hooks from his shoulders and wires from his spine and pulled him off the rack. Alastair gave Dean the tools of the trade.
Dean used his mechanics hands to learn the gears of the human soul, how to strip it apart, how to put it back together. Dean sang his favorite songs and tapped his feet while he worked. He chatted like a bartender. He hit on the beautiful ones, told stories to the youngest. He smiled and joked and laughed; all the things he'd stopped doing his last year alive, he did in Hell.
But Castiel saw everything in Dean's shoulders. He was dark with hate and anger. He was bright with agony and guilt. Castiel had waded through running blood and organs, across fields of the writhing soundless skeletons to get to him. He brushed past the grasping fingers of the nameless mutineers and burned the fringes of his tired faith to find the righteous man. And Dean was a ruinous, red shape, guarded like a precious stone at the bottom of Hell.
Dean was a man, with green eyes, who sang rock songs as he carved road maps into the damned.
Castiel was alone. He spoke the name of the man and saw the woman on the rack sag in relief as the knife left her navel. Dean turned. A long moment in Hell unrolled between the gazes of a hopeless man and a wretched angel.
"Fuck off," said Dean as if he knew why Castiel had come, "I belong here."
For an instant Castiel felt Heaven slip from his grasp. He reached out and grabbed on to Dean, beautiful somewhere beneath the blood, whose soul sang even louder than Heaven's orders. In his desperation, in his fear (it was the first time he'd ever felt fear) Castiel burned his mark into Dean's soul. Dean Winchester was saved.
And if Castiel wondered, as he wrenched free the screaming, thrashing human, who was going to save him now...of course he didn't wonder, that was heresy. But he knew his perfection was gone. In hindsight he understood that he had been ideal. And he knew that now he would never be whole again.
"Put me back, you son of a bitch!" Dean spat and hissed as Castiel stripped away the judgment and sewed him gently back into his flesh, "I swear I will find you," he snarled. "Damn you! And I'll carve every road in Jerusalem into where ever it hurts the most you delusional, fucking..." Dean didn't believe in angels, even then. Hell had made him vicious and unforgiving, and he wanted to go back. Castiel tried to take that away too, the blood lust, but it was stuck fast.
***
Castiel is gray.
It was a slow process, and it was Dean's fault. Castiel pulled Dean from the pit and reassembled him with care. He cradled Dean's soul in his arms until the world took it back and he gave Dean the mercy of Heaven. (But it wasn't Heaven's mercy after all, it was prophecy, the mercy belonged to Cas.)
Dean didn't even thank him. He dragged Castiel down instead. He pushed it farther than it had to go. He invented loopholes and argued semantics until he found more than mercy in Cas, until he found the cracks. More often than not it was for Sam's sake. But something wonderful was ruined for the longevity of Dean's stubborn morals.
And for humoring a human, for giving a shit, Castiel was cast out and hunted by his own.
Lucifer wanted Sam. Michael wanted Dean. Heaven wanted Castiel's head. Sam wanted to stop the apocalypse. Dean wanted more time, or sometimes less. Poor fucking Cas just wanted his faith back. He wanted to scrub himself clean of the doubt Dean had infected him with.
I rebelled for you... And you failed.
Sometimes, Cas would look at Dean with an open expression of beaten acceptance. As if he had always known Dean would undo him.
I should have left you in Hell.
No, Cas never says that. It goes without saying, really.
***
When the Apocalypse is over Dean goes to see Lisa. And then he goes to the park and tries to remember who he's supposed to be. Or maybe he tries to figure out who he isn't anymore. He looks into the silent, breezy peace of the park and tries to think of Heaven.
The shadows of the swing set, the play gym, the merry-go-round, shudder beneath the cover of the twisting leaves. Dean tries to think of Heaven, but all he sees is Hell. It's there, in his eyes, behind his eyes, stuck beneath his fingernails. He can smell the tang and the rot. He can feel the fabric of their faces, taste the refreshing mint of their hope when they looked up from the rack and saw what they thought was a man. He can hear the prayers he flayed from their lips.
God, help us.
God helped Dean. At the expense of many good and pure things.
Dean doesn't know God personally. But when he looks back, sees all the trouble Castiel has been through for him, he thinks God is a son-of-a-bitch.
The forms of the playground fade into the mist of a heavy rain. It falls like benediction, sent to wash the earth as clean as it can. Dean turns his face to the sky and shouts as loud as he can, voice unheard even to himself in the wrath of the maelstrom.
***
When the Apocalypse is over, Castiel doesn't go back to Heaven after all. He goes to Delaware and sits alone by an unmarked grave along the river. The water is low. The continent needs rain.
He spends some of the time just smelling the grass and the dirt. They were smells he missed in heaven. He missed Dean's smell too, hadn't realized Dean had a smell until it was gone. He misses it now (stale coffee and motor oil; strength and security) in the same aching way he misses the man. It's Castiel's first experience with how time can lie; it's been a day since he last saw Dean but it feels like much longer. He misses Dean's lopsided beauty, how he has always been an imperfect bundle of sin and emotion but somehow always finds it in himself to do good. He misses Dean's green eyes. He misses Dean's anger. He just misses Dean.
He spends the rest of the time asking the question he hears whispered in the minds of his brothers.
Why would God bring back an angel ready to fall?
God didn't even put him back together. However Castiel reforms his brothers will never forgive him. And he has no doubt of God's love for him, not anymore. But when he wonders, as he looks into himself at the cracks and fissures that mar his perfection, if even God can make something pure again?-- he thinks the answer is "No".
The river is low. Castiel waits, wondering if he dares to help an entire river when his efforts to help a single man were so disastrous. At sunset, the rain comes by itself.
Castiel sits in it, thinking; asking, but not praying.
***
Seven days after the world is saved, Castiel finds Dean and kneels at his feet. They are in the mud of a lonely Kansas playground.
"I'm lost." He tells his friend.
Dean reaches down with one hand, like he might lay his palm on the forehead of an angel, and pulls Castiel up to his feet by the lapel of his jacket.
"Funny," says Dean, his voice hoarse from shouting, "cuz I've been looking for you."