apocabigbang: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, 2/3
MASTERPOST; PART ONE; PART TWO; PART THREE
the angel;
Castiel does not expect the slap against the back of his skull when it comes. He startles, spinning to face the assault and finding a hard-eyed Dean Winchester in the space there.
"You asshole."
Castiel blinks and rubs at the place where there is a slight dull tingle lingering at leisure. "What -"
"You know. Don't even try to pretend you didn't, because you totally did. And you suck at lying, so I could tell even if you tried." A waggled finger accompanies the threat.
A breath heaves from Castiel's lungs; he expected this much - resentment, doubt, the shove of Dean's words attempting to gut an answer from him. He did not expect the jolt of panic darting along his spine, through his chest, into his hands until they tremble at his sides. "This is precisely why I didn't tell you of the ritual, Dean. I knew you would immediately elect to sacrifice yourself for your brother's sake."
"It's not just him, Cas, it's Lucifer." Dean is loud and feral, sharp in his movements as Castiel turns to watch him. "If Sam dies, his body's up for grabs. Lucifer's gonna be on him like white on rice, man, you know that."
Castiel sweeps from the table onto his feet, governed by the surprising hot spike of anger flaring through his body. "And if you die, Michael will lay claim to yours."
Dean takes a halting step backward, as if afraid. Castiel reels his temper in quickly, taming the frayed strands of wrath and tucking them neatly within himself. "I know your willingness to sacrifice your life for your brother's well, Dean. I know that his death would mean relinquishing his body to Lucifer's holds. I know this would mean terrible things for all of us - war, death. The end of all things, most likely. But I also know that I could not allow myself to - I could not -"
Dean replaces his withdrawn steps slowly, shifts closer until the space between them shrinks to inches. The space yawns and tremors and Castiel longs to close it, to wrap himself around Dean, to attach himself and hold fast.
"Couldn't what?"
Castiel shakes his head. He is reminded distantly of a conversation they once had, long ago - your guilt, your anger, confusion - and pulls the lids across his eyes. "If given the choice, I would bear the loss of your brother far easier than the loss of you."
A silence drops and lingers with the heaviness of hurt and shock in the air. There is the click of Dean's throat when he swallows, the scuff of boots against floorboards, before Dean speaks: "It'd be a bigger loss than that, Cas. We're talking the whole world here. The whole war."
Castiel turns and slumps into his chair, turning his back to Dean. "Even that would not sway my conviction." The words are barely more than whispers, no more than weak sounds riding the edge of a defeated sigh. "I won't do it, Dean. I won't perform the ritual."
"It's not a choice." Dean's voice comes quickly, unfazed by Castiel's refusal; any other time, Castiel would spare a moment to appreciate the obstinacy he has grown so used to over the months. Now he can spare no such thing. Nothing is housed within his soul but grief and weakness, a fear to face the brink each of them balances upon. He can feel his spine bending under the burden already, and he hurts.
"Please," he tries, the jolt of hot panic diminishing the word to a bare husk.
"I'm doing it," Dean bowls over his plea. "I've made up my mind, I'm doing it. I can't let Sam - I can't let Lucifer just - "
He is shifting into Castiel's vision in a single fluid movement, kneeling at his side and grasping the hand that rests idly on the bony nob of his knee. There is a rawness, a pleading in the gesture that caves Castiel in completely, makes him feel worn and helpless and exhausted.
"Look, either you do it or I find somebody else - won't be hard, there's plenty of people gunning for my skin these days." He laughs, rude and feeble; the effort of the joke is wasted and Castiel only wants to hold him. To bury him away as a treasure, hold him within the palm of his hand, coil just a thread of himself within Dean's remade body or pull Dean into his own. He reaches out to touch and finds his fingers meeting Dean's cheek where it is rough and stubbled. He maps the curve of his cheekbone and blesses this man, this precious man, before him with the oldest silent prayers.
His fingertip finds the tickling arc of eyelashes and smooths across, down, fits into the slope below Dean's lip. "You cannot ask me to do this," and his spine is bending, cracking, bone splintering under the crush of duty and devotion and Dean.
"You're the only one I trust with this, Cas, please. It has to be you. Please." Dean clutches tighter at Castiel's hand, slipping a calloused thumb into the curved hollow of his palm. "It has to be you."
Castiel may never forgive himself, but he closes his eyes and after a long gulf of silence, he whispers, "Yes."
~ ~ ~
sam;
Over twenty-six years Sam has learned his brother's self-sacrificial streak well. If anyone could be counted on to find new and inventive means of martyrdom, it was Dean. This time it's Suicide by Enochian Sacrificial Rite, the text of it rendered from one of Bobby's faded papyrus scrolls almost too ancient to stay in one piece.
Sam absolutely cannot believe this.
"You have got to be kidding me," he says initially, affixing a stern glare at Dean's skewed smirk. He'd just swaggered in, wrestled into his coat and announced that they found a way to break the curse growing across Sam's back - first a fist-diameter blight, now a henna-brown map of growing intricacies eating its way halfway up his back and around his waist, dipping close to hips and reaching up for ribs. It didn't take much pressing before Sam did the math, that Dean's master plan was little more than a glorified bait-and-switch with some ancient runes and herb magic thrown around for good measure. He doesn't like how the numbers are adding up.
He cannot fucking believe this.
"You don't even know that it will work."
"Sam, give it a rest - there isn't another option here." Dean is surprisingly cavalier about this whole thing, which Sam is surprisingly not surprised about; Dean's always viewed his own destruction as little more than a ripple in the pond. It's no less infuriating now than it was five years ago.
Sam throws his arms out, and if a hint of desperation has bled into his voice he doesn't try to hide it. "How 'bout the one where you don't die, Dean?"
"It's not a choice, alright!" Dean's eyes are hard and wild, unreadable save for the barest streak of what Sam recognizes belatedly as fear.
Dean is afraid. Dean is actually afraid.
Sam suddenly feels ten years old again, shielded and small, cowering with a book in his hand and a gun in Dean's, all ill-fitting clothes and a rambling existence he never wanted.
"I'm not letting the son of a bitch get his paws on your dead body, okay? It's not an option, no way." Dean pauses long enough to square his shoulders before he's continuing, sharp and efficient in his impersonal sense of duty, his blind sense of self-sacrifice. It makes Sam itch all over, makes him want to grab Dean and punch him, shake him, make him bleed, make him stay, make him realize.
"Now we don't even know when this thing's supposed to spring, right? You could drop dead in the next ten minutes as far as we know. So the sooner we get this done the better." He puffs a heavy sigh and glances behind his shoulder where Castiel is quietly hovering, looking resigned and slightly cowed. Sam stares him down for a solid half minute, but the angel's eyes never once rise to meet his.
"Come on, Cas," Dean snaps. He pauses, skimming his teeth along his lip as he stares at Sam. "Don't follow us." The words are soft, pleading, and they hurt more than anything Sam thinks he has ever known. More than the slice of a blade through his back, more than being called a monster and knowing it to be true, more than fractured trust, more than deserving the break in it.
"Dean - "
But Dean just says, "stay here, Sammy," and blinks once, shakes his head slow and smooth, like he's actually asking, maybe even begging. Then he jerks his collar up around his ears, slaps the scroll against Castiel's chest, and storms out the door.
It's shock that keeps Sam rooted to the spot, then a helix of anger and desperation that have him scrambling for the door where the Impala is already pushing her rumble through the country quiet. Sam catches a quick image of Dean at the wheel - palms skimming the sun-blistered leather and a glint in his eye, Castiel slumped and hating himself and stupidly devoted in the passenger seat - and runs for the car, but she swings out of reach with a roar like a wild animal and Sam is left running into fuel-heavy whorls of dust, taillights scarring his eyes red, calling Dean's name until his heart feels ready to fly apart.
Dean is leaving Sam's life yet again and the only goodbye he offers is the squeal of tires and the singed smell of burnt rubber. It's fitting, Sam thinks, but that doesn't mean it's fair.
~ ~ ~
the angel;
Dean does not speak as they slide down the silver strip of road carved out of deep forests on either side. He drives with a measured detachment, cold against the world around him. Castiel knows he is deflecting an impossible weight - guilt, sadness, fear, uncharted depths that Castiel cannot name - in favor of completing the task at hand with as little interference as possible.
He knows it is difficult for Dean to do this, if the tremble of his hands and wet gleam of his eyes betray any fragment of the effort.
He wonders if Dean knows, can know, how difficult this is for him as well.
Castiel clutches at the scroll in his grip, thin threads of ancient paper wrapped around the hard curve of a blade he will soon push through Dean's heart. The same heart he once held in his own hands, breathed into and flooded with newly hot blood; the one he remade from dust and sewed within the bone cage of Dean's chest.
He can hear the furious rhythm of it even from here.
Castiel lowers his hand onto Dean's shoulder and squeezes, just slightly. It awards him a thin smile and the warmth of Dean's fingers slotting into place alongside his own; Dean laughs, though it is completely devoid of mirth.
"Guess polite conversation's out of the question, huh."
"Dean."
"What." The answer is terse, bitten through a cage of tightly-ground teeth. Castiel clutches the knife and parchment flush against his chest.
"I'm -" Castiel stops, unsure of the words. He is completely unprepared, unable to quantify something of this magnitude - the fierceness of this ache, how he is railing against each moment they build distance between themselves and the quiet house, and heaviest of all, the knowledge that this is necessary. He tightens his fingers around Dean's and stares at the window. He cannot look at him. "I'm sorry."
Dean is silent for a long moment. Eventually he nods, resolutely, but he does not meet Castiel's quick glance in his direction. "Yeah. I am too."
They drive and drive and do not speak a word. The sun is pale on the horizon by the time they coast to a silent stop, gravel popping beneath the slow turn of tires while Castiel can feel the last foundations of himself dissolving.
For humanity, he reminds himself. For the war. For Sam. For God.
But the truth remains the same that out of every being on the planet, Dean chose him, specifically him, to be the one to put this knife through his heart. Castiel cannot escape that. It crowds around him and curls into his bones and weighs on his shoulders, a stifling and malignant awareness; hopelessness.
He thinks he would rather walk the blood and flame roads of Hell for an eternity than bear this crippling weight a moment more.
But Dean tucks the car into a neat nest of shade and crawls from behind the creaking door a few minutes later. He swings a duffel bag of supplies over his shoulder and meets Castiel's eyes as he passes, just briefly, and Castiel knows then that he must complete this, even as it will be as much his end as it will be Dean's.
Because of humanity. Because of Sam. Because Dean asked him to.
~ ~ ~
the prophet;
Sam decides it's a good idea to drag him along. Chuck doesn't question it because honestly, Sam is in a blind rage and it's nothing short of terrifying. Chuck is not going to argue with that. It'd be like screaming into a hurricane or asking a volcano why it's erupting.
He prefers to just stay the fuck out of the way and go with whatever Sam says.
And Sam says he's coming with.
They lurch onto the highway in Bobby's old Camaro that lies forgotten now that it's not wheelchair-friendly. Sam is wild and scary, tearing up the road as he pulls the woods apart searching for his brother. "What the hell did you see?" he asks with a whip of his head. "Where are they?"
Chuck feels smaller than he ever has in his life, which is a lot coming from someone who lives their life in a permanent mental state of shrunken. "I don't - I don't know. I didn't see where - "
"You said there was a sign, a yellow sign, right? What did the sign say?"
Chuck shuts his eyes and holds onto the seat belt tighter. He's not much of a praying man, especially now, but even as unremarkable as his life is, he never would have expected it to end cooking in a flaming Camaro wrapped halfway around a telephone pole.
Metal is really quite malleable when you're throwing yourself down the road at eighty-five miles an hour.
Still, there are worse ways to go.
"It's a, uh - " He thinks, thinks really hard, and surprisingly it just pops right in. "No Trespassing! It's a No Trespassing sign - yellow with black lines, suspended by chains, just off the road."
Sam doesn't like that answer, or the next four that Chuck gives, and eventually the car lapses into the most uncomfortable silence ever. Occasionally Sam will mutter something under his breath or shake his head with a wheeze of laughter; once he even bites his fist and slams it into the bow of the steering wheel with a force that shakes through the entire dash. Chuck jumps and says, "Jesus." Sam doesn't respond.
Sam also doesn't like that it's fast becoming daylight and the sky is hesitating somewhere between gunmetal gray and a silvery kind of lavender. "We're running out of time," he says through his teeth.
Chuck swallows and twists his hands. "You never had a chance," he almost says, but stops just as the words collect in his mouth. Instead he stares out the window and watches the clouds move.
~ ~ ~
dean;
They dump the car half a mile back, on the east shoulder because Sam will think he left it there as a decoy and headed west; instead they cut east in a perfect parallel line. Castiel has the decency to allow Dean a moment alone with his baby, feeling her curves, her softness, her smell of dirty leather and steel; but Sam is smart and a lifetime working in tandem means they can't not think alike, even when actively trying to, so they've got to get a move on.
He cranks the door open and shuts it behind him, doesn't look back as he slaps the keys into Castiel's palm. "Give those to Sam," he says with a sad little smile and a shrug.
Castiel looks completely stricken, like Dean's just handed him the Holy fucking Grail.
Goddamn, but Dean's going to miss him. Cas and all his weird quirks and curious head tilts and how he just doesn't get it, while at the same time he totally does get it, more than anyone else, Dean thinks. How he's tenacious and faithful and obnoxiously stubborn, and how he's always just there, even when he's not saying a word, and how he's slowly sinking into humanity because Dean asked him to. Dean really hopes he's going to be okay; he hopes Sam will watch his back like he's going to watch Sam's.
And Dean knows Castiel is going to watch Sam's back because he's going to ask him to, and Castiel always does what he asks.
A sudden and fierce slice of ache cripples him - I can't do this on his breath, but he has to. He has to.
Castiel seems calm and balanced, though it's clear beneath the flesh he is slowly growing into that he's on the brittle edge of bursting. Yet on the outside, even on the inside with his stupid faith and devotion, he is unchanging and constant as he has always been, and Dean thinks in their own strange way, a little late in the game perhaps, that he maybe loves him. He thinks he maybe always has.
But he doesn't voice it, because then they're at a clearing and Castiel is leaning him against a tree and moving away to set up the ritual. Dean watches as he draws a sigil on the ground in salt and mixes herbs, recites prayers in arcane languages and waves runes and symbols in the air above them. Dean watches his hands, the quick pale flashes of them in the dark. He tries not to notice how much they tremble, because someone has to be the strong one here and he's certainly not feeling up to the task.
"Dean?"
Castiel's eyes are wide and black in the glow of a small fire whipping in front of him. The air is thick with burnt balsam and smoky thyme, rich and heady. Dean tries to swallow and step forward, but stumbles.
"We're ready."
"Yeah," Dean answers, because he doesn't know what else to say. Castiel directs him to the center of the salt sigil and seals it around him; Dean doesn't feel any different, but it's probably some magic thing. He thinks about asking, but what the fuck difference would it make anyway?
He already knows how this ends, already knows where he's going.
"Hey, Cas - "
He doesn't respond; just stares at Dean, unguarded and open. Castiel is in pain, Dean sees, and he hates that he's the cause of it, but didn't expect much more. He's got a knack for that lately - making angels hurt, making them doubt, and feel. Making them human.
"I don't regret it," Castiel says. Dean smirks and sinks his hands into his pockets.
"You're in my head." You're always in my head.
Castiel lifts one shoulder, just barely. The knife glints in his hand, a gleaming slice of promise at his hip. Dean catches sight of it and something inside him winds tight.
"So you know I - what I -..."
This time, it's a smirk instead of a shrug. "I already did."
That same tightened place deep inside Dean uncoils, a steady warm spiral until he's settled. "Tell Sam - "
"I will."
"Alright," Dean says. "Alright."
A short silence stretches between them before Castiel bends to swipe his fingers through a silver bowl of palm oil at his feet. He is suddenly in Dean's air, inches from him, tracing a sigil on his forehead and holding the blade he's about to kill him with - Dean is about to die, and yet it is the simplest, easiest death he has known. And sure it leaves Sam behind, but it saves him too, he ought to see that. It saves them all, in a way, and he's not tying up any ends but he's at least doing what he can, what he knows how to.
Death's not really all that scary now that Castiel is the dealer.
Dean actually manages a smile when Castiel looks at him. "I hope I don't see you again," he says, honest.
Castiel gets it. He nods and looks down where the blade is resting in his palm, creasing the skin red where he's squeezing it. When he looks up again he shifts closer, angles up just enough, and touches his mouth to Dean's.
It's a quick thing, barely more than a brush of lips, but it is everything and it is perfect and it is them.
Dean says, "do it," and Castiel does.
A great and terrible pain for the passage of a stuttered heartbeat and then Dean is melting to the ground with Castiel's arms a solid circle of warm stone around him, his hand closing over that intimate place where Castiel is forever burned into him.
There is a brilliant white clap of light and the shift of great wings and arms everywhere, it's bright, too bright, too loud, and Dean is burning alive, he is dying, he is going everywhere at once -
Then simply nothing.
~ ~ ~
the prophet;
The sky has graduated from sickly purple into fiery yellows with errant red streamers, orange flares, occasional ragged brown scraps. Chuck is standing at one end of the clearing, staring at the trees clear-cut black against the sky.
From here it looks like the whole world's on fire.
He thinks maybe it's just practicing for the future.
There are crickets everywhere, sporadic birdsongs, Sam sniffing and choking and calling for his brother somewhere off to the left.
There's nothing for it, though. Dean's a mess of blackish blood, skin pale and cold and waxy, almost an hour dead.
Castiel is still sitting on the ground where Sam shoved him. His hands are stained dark and he hasn't moved or said a word or done anything since they arrived and found him curled around Dean's pliant body, staring wide-eyed and moving his mouth to form words that have yet to take shape. He's a space cadet as far as Chuck can tell. Checked out, floating up in the stratosphere, whatever. The point is that Castiel is clearly not here; that it's just a dazed and mute replica of him that's slumped on the ground staring at Dean's legs splayed awkwardly from behind Sam's expansive back.
It wouldn't be so different from his usual weirdly quiet self if not for the blood on his hands, his coat, his face, the lines that look like teartracks on his face, but that can't be right because angels don't cry.
Chuck shakes his head at all of it.
Sam gulps down another sob and squeezes Dean tighter and rocks again and again and nothing happens. Dean lolls and stares unseeing at the sky while it struggles through orange-red to blue.
The whole thing is really just so, so fucked up.
Chuck tries to trace the cord back to where he was first set on the trajectory that landed him here. He gets as far back as his eighth birthday and first written story. Then decides he should probably just go back to birth and leave it at that.
Or maybe he wasn't supposed to end up here. Maybe it's not something about him, something in his blood.
Maybe he was just another guy, and then suddenly one day something shifted. Clicked. Locked.
He has no idea.
Figures it doesn't really matter.
He can see where Sam's shirt has ridden up a good four inches to expose a wide strip of uninterrupted tan - no more Property of Pestilence stamp, at least. And the sky is pretty and the birds are singing like it's not really the end of the world and everything's just peachy.
But Dean is dead and Castiel is in all likelihood irreparably cracked and Sam is holding onto his brother's corpse and shaking and terrified. Chuck can't find a whole lot to be happy about. It's not the first time he's had to see this and he's finding out firsthand it doesn't get any easier the second time around.
~ ~ ~
sam;
Dean is just a weight beneath a sheet, like the archetypal ghost. The road is surging the car in reckless jerks and Sam can hear the toe of Dean's boot knocking against the doorframe with every pothole and rattle. He has to stop twice, and get entirely out of the car once. He almost throws up into a ditch, but can't.
He gets back in the car and keeps driving. Chuck is in the passenger seat, but doesn't say a word. Castiel is in the back with Dean's head on his thighs, his fingers knotted up in Dean's hair, staring at him like he is something Castiel cannot figure out. Sam wants to push him away. He wants to say you don't have the right, even though he supposes if anyone does, it's Castiel. It doesn't stop him from being so angry it's just a blur, so angry he feels alight, dizzy with it.
He doesn't tell Bobby when they get back, and Bobby doesn't ask. He doesn't have to when he emerges onto the porch to see Sam digging Dean out of the backseat, hefting him into his arms and marching for the house. There are arguments against it - dead bodies don't go on couches and hunters should always be burned, it's the respectful thing to do - but this is Dean. And no one dares tell Sam any different.
They just leave him alone.
Bobby is fish-eyed and silent. Castiel is a machine; he stands completely still in the doorway for two hours, unsupported, arms at his sides. His eyes have gone blank and bottomless, not the usual constant shift of thought but just...nothing. As if he's rolled back into himself and left only an appearance behind. A very solid and familiar ghost, still wearing Dean's blood.
Eventually Chuck knocks Sam on the shoulder with an offering of two fingers of Johnnie Walker. The liquor swills around his mouth in a warm wash, burning his tongue clean and dragging down his throat with a singular purpose. He would thank Chuck, but his brother is dead. Sam can't find much reason to thank anyone for anything right now.
He stares at the shapeless sweep of cloth burying Dean's features, crisp white muddied with a shock of rust-dark crimson right in the center, and doesn't think.
~ ~ ~
"Sam," Castiel eventually says, when all the blood in Sam's veins has thickened to batter, slowed to a near halt.
He doesn't look up, but then he does - because Castiel exhales and slouches and says, "Sammy?" loud and panicked.
It's not his voice, not his posture or his expression. He still looks like Castiel as a whole, but there's something, something -
"What is it?"
Castiel raises his hands where the blood is flaking off in dry sheets, turns them back to front, back to front. He touches random points on his body - browbone, line of buttons down his shirt, stained coat lapels. Then his expression draws back and tightens again, into less frightened confusion than surprise.
"Dean is alive."
Sam is off the couch, crowded close all righteous anger and insult, in an instant. His hands find Castiel's arms, too solid for their narrowness; shake him, squeeze until the flesh gives beneath blood-stiff fabric, just a little. "Don't you say that, you know better, you know."
"No." Castiel rolls out of Sam's grip and cants his head, not cowing back but moving closer. "Dean is alive. I know he is alive."
Somewhere, Bobby says, "Alright, that's -"
"Don't say that," Sam cuts in. "Don't do that, don't do this. Not you, not - you know he's dead, Castiel, you killed him." A pause and then, again, "You killed him."
Castiel's lips part, tongue chasing slick along them as his eyes work to blink and a shudder shoots through his body. Sam steps back.
There's something.
He can't place it but there's something decidedly not Castiel about all of this, something wrong, very wrong.
"Dean isn't dead." Castiel's eyes find the floor as some of the rigidity in his voice bends. "He's alive. He is...with me."
The laugh out of Sam's mouth is unintentionally sharp and strangely freeing. He looks from the mound of unmoving white to the center of Castiel's chest, his soft frown and shaking hands. "I don't need this sugar-coated symbolic crap right now, I just want my brother back."
"Sam, he is with me."
The air stops and Chuck coughs and Bobby says, "what in the hell are you gettin' at?", and Sam just stares. At the smears of blue that can't lie, the heat behind Castiel's face that isn't typical. It's new and yet familiar, that fury that feels like -
Sam stops breathing for one, three, eight heartbeats.
"Dean is alive," Castiel repeats.
"How?"
The frown deepens in something vaguely like apology. "I don't know. When he fell, I held him over the place we first touched. I felt a...shudder. A swell. I didn't know, I thought it was the pain of guilt, of loss, but, Sam - your brother and I have a bond. Even without the body we are drawn to one another."
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Bobby gripes behind his hand.
"When his soul departed his body, it followed the most familiar light it knew." Castiel's eyes cut to the side, where Chuck is open-mouthed and Dean is simply an empty cage. "I can feel him."
Sam slips a hand through his hair. "Dean's soul...left his body and climbed into yours? Cas, that's -"
"He is here, Sam, I know he is." The words are quick, clipped and emphatic, enough that Sam sees Chuck flinch in the corner of his eye, enough that he feels himself do the same. Castiel sighs, long and low. "Dean is alive. Sam - Dean is alive."
~ ~ ~
the prophet;
Chuck's life has, at least for the past year, been rife with shit crazy enough to send most people to the hills, or at least have them shouting for the men in white coats. Hell, Chuck's been close to doing both himself. More than once. It's the angels that are keeping him in line. He's beginning to wonder if there's a compassionate one left in the lot of them.
Except Castiel, but he's not really an angel anymore so much as he is a thing - a hybrid, a half-breed, missing link, what have you. Especially now that he's got Dean's soul holed up in his body, sharing space with some innocent shmuck who didn't know what the fuck he was signing up for when he agreed to be an angel suit, and oh yeah, an angel itself. It must be getting awfully crowded in there by now.
Not that Chuck actually believes Dean is inside Castiel's - Jimmy's, whatever - body, because that's ridiculous, but technicalities.
He's not the only one reluctant to believe it.
("I don't believe you," Sam had said. "That's not even possible. It doesn't make sense. Human souls can't just hitch a ride into another body, that's not how it works."
"It has nothing to do with physical bodies," Castiel had argued.
Something, Dean's humanity if what Castiel said was true, was brimming over into his words. They flowed easier and hit harder, snapped quicker, like how Dean talked. Chuck figured it was just a byproduct of going more or less batshit insane, but something in the tone of Castiel's voice, something in his easy mannerisms and the melting point he was easing into - some mid-place where the lines of angel and human blurred - felt genuine.
"There is a link - a tie that holds him to me and I to him."
"No." Sam shook his head, arms linked across his chest. "No. That's - no, that's bullshit, Cas. Dean is gone and you know it."
Sam had all the wild energy of a hurricane still wound up, bottlenecking as the hours kept ticking and Dean was never any closer to coming back. As it became slowly and inevitably more real.
Chuck made himself as small as possible against the arm of the couch and tried not to look at Dean's dead body slumped under the bloody sheet just six feet away. One hand had slipped from under the fabric, the skin of it bluish and thick. Chuck prayed, in so many words, to please just stop existing. Right fucking now, preferably.
Nobody listened. He wasn't surprised.
"I can't explain it, Sam," Castiel said with a careless fling of his arm. "Dean is alive and we are wasting time."
"Dean is dead, Castiel, you're the one who fucking killed him!"
"We need to return him to his body before it's too late!"
Chuck thought he would probably go to his grave without hearing Castiel shout in anyone's face. Turns out he was wrong.
"How am I supposed to trust that?" Sam had challenged with a sneer. "How am I supposed to trust the guy who just murdered my brother?"
And Castiel, he had straightened into his usual ramrod posture then, his eyes blanking out into full-on angel mode again. "Because otherwise, Dean dies and he will not come back this time. I can't keep him hidden forever.")
Ten minutes after Castiel finally persuades Sam to search the Singer archives for anything relevant, Bobby sets it straight that Sam won't be approaching any crossroads any time soon. Sam looks slightly sheepish, as if he'd actually entertained the idea, but Bobby explains why that would be the stupidest thing for him to do right now and Sam can't disagree. He just nods too many times and says, "Okay. You're right." Then keeps on searching.
Apparently the prospect of Lucifer popping in for a permanent visit is enough to muddy even the Winchester self-sacrificial streak.
That, or Sam's just not ready to give up hope yet.
They're coming up empty, which Chuck fully expected. Sam is a quivering mess of what he's supposed to be, though he's not as angry or devastated as Chuck would have expected. He suspects maybe it's shock. Or deflection. Either way, Sam is frantically swimming through piles of dusty tomes and giving horrible, gutted-animal noises of frustration when he doesn't dig anything up, but at least he's not punching holes in walls or ripping people apart limb from limb.
Little things, and all. Chuck's trying his damnedest to find something, however small, to be grateful for.
But Bobby is out of scotch now, so he's finding it increasingly difficult.
And Dean is still dead.
And the world is pretty much fucked.
He wanders into the kitchen, but all that's left is gin and he can't stomach the thought of puking his guts out at the end of the world, so he sits back down empty-handed.
Sam, Castiel, and Bobby are all shredded around the edges as they tear through page after page, some of them ripping with a rough whip of Sam's frustrated fingers. Piles of books appear on the floor, haphazardly discarded once they reveal no sliver of helpful information. Books tipped sideways, books spread open and face down, parchments wrinkled and sandwiched between stacks - the room is a mess and they just keep on going.
But for all their efforts, they don't find a fucking thing.
Eventually Sam flies back from the table and throws his chair into the wall and disappears outside for a cooldown period. Twenty minutes later he's back, red-eyed and smaller, to pull more dusty books from the shelves and revisit ones he's already systematically dismissed.
Chuck actually feels kind of sorry for him.
And for Bobby, who is clearly barely holding himself together with the cold body of a son lying in his parlor.
And for Castiel, who is occasionally fluttering his eyes and blinking back spills of blue-white light, bending at the waist and grasping his temples as if racked by terrible pain. As if he's fighting something, something relentless that's trying to push him straight out of his flesh.
They're a miserable lot, all desperate and run bone dry, and Chuck wishes not for the first time that he was able to do anything to help.
Instead, he does the only thing he knows how to do.
He finds a crinkled page near his foot and smooths it out as best he can.
And he begins to write.
~ ~ ~
the angel;
He can feel the swell and thrash of Dean within his body, wrapped within bone and flesh too small to contain him. He is a constant strain, growing and shifting relentlessly despite how he will not respond to Castiel's calls. He tries to placate Dean; to quiet him, to reel him in.
But Dean is a wild twist within a body that was never meant to hold an angel and a man and a soul as bright as Dean's. Jimmy has not spoken since the night Lucifer rose, though Castiel can still feel his presence slumbering; he is unresponsive, but the fact that he hasn't been thrown to oblivion sometimes grounds Castiel when he feels ready to fly apart.
Dean, though - Dean is different.
Dean is bright and furious and difficult, and he will not quiet when Castiel tells him, when he pushes his grace against Dean's glow and smothers the chaos of his true form to a bearable level. Castiel bends, softens beneath the crowd of Dean against his own soul. He gives and gives and feeds this space until Dean is a huge enough presence within him to drag him to the edge. Castiel can feel himself overbrimming, the truth of what he, even diminished, truly is bleeding out like light around the sharpened edges of a backlit door in darkness.
He dims himself and edges closer to leaving his vessel simply because he does not want to harm Dean, to burn him out of existence by simply being.
Castiel closes his eyes against crackles of energy that bubble to their surface, sews himself tighter within these cells and begs, quiet, quiet.
You are safe, he says, the message reverberated around their shared space. You are safe here with me.
The lie echoes and uncoils and permeates each corner of this unstable body as the shape of Dean's soul whips and quivers and does not hear.
Castiel winds himself tighter to soothe the terrible whir of a soul screaming, crying out against a bodiless burn and a limitless crush.
But in the swarm a sound slowly begins to take shape, a constant thrum coalescing into the familiar rhythm of a name - Cas, Cas, Cas, over and over and over, until Castiel opens his eyes and sees the answer.
~ ~ ~
sam;
They find a hieratic ritual and set it up - paint heiroglyphs on Bobby's parlor floor and scatter herbs, light candles, sprinkle earth. Sam recites a variation of the wpt-r over Dean's body - for Horus, for Set, for Thoth. He traces Dean's lips with the point of a copper blade, separates them and pushes the flat of the dagger against his tongue.
"I am Sekhmet-Wadjet who dwells in the west of heaven. I am Sahyt among the souls of On."
It ends and he waits, Bobby at his elbow, Chuck at the other. Castiel is across the room, watching the process with a hesitant eye, occasionally shuddering and curling into himself. Sam notices him mumble things sometimes, Dean or quiet or words of some language he is too young and too human to recognize. Errant sparks like blue lightning have begun crackling along his skin, tracing the thin paths of veins beneath the surface. At the closing of the ceremony, as Sam waits and a silence cold and heavy as the ocean's floor grows through the house, Castiel's head tips back on the end of a deep, guttural sound, then, "Sam," and a string of sharp sibilants, the blur of a low murmur.
Dean remains cold and still, unaffected by the ritual.
Sam goes to Castiel's side and lifts him up - tries to, but he's far too heavy and the effort has Sam straining and cursing below his breath. Castiel's hand like a vice finds Sam's arm and pulls, finds enough momentum to lift him up until he's leaning slack against the crook of Sam's shoulder. "Dean," he's saying, again and again. "Dean, calm."
Whatever he's weathering inside, Sam can't comprehend it. Castiel leans against him, the weight of his hand, burning fever hot, resting against Sam's shoulder, the slender line of his side flush against Sam's body. There's an energy bleeding into the air around him that's making Sam's hair stand on end, the kind of hum like before a bad storm hits, electricity thick as blood in the air.
"Calm," Castiel breathes. "Dormi, amabo te."
Sam watches his throat move to swallow. "What's going on?"
"He is...afraid." One eye cracks open a sliver and lets loose a quick burst of bluish light. "He doesn't recognize me. He must think he's dead."
"Or maybe he thinks you're Michael."
Castiel nods. "Or that."
"The ritual didn't work," Bobby says, weak from somewhere at Sam's back. "You got any bright ideas, angelface? Since you're the one who got us into this mess in the first place."
"He's strong." The words slide out around a sigh as Castiel's back melds to the wall. In the space of a moment he shifts from wild and feverish, sparking with electricity, to calm and collected - his usual self. He straightens up and Sam wonders if he imagines the affectionate squeeze on his shoulder before Castiel's hand drifts away, or if it really happened.
He wonders if the action was Castiel's own, or if it translated to his muscles from the small part of Dean still alive and kicking somewhere inside unfamiliar flesh.
"Is he okay?"
Castiel moves away to slouch into the chair at his side, near enough to Dean's corpse that Sam doesn't follow. He wants to keep as much distance between himself and the truth of that, of Dean being gone, as possible. "I can't tell."
Sam huffs a laugh. "You can't tell? What does that mean?"
"Sam, this is as new to me as it is to you, or to Dean, or to anyone." One hand comes up to rub at Castiel's forehead, pinch at the juncture between his eyes. "I never would have thought this possible." He makes a noise, small and soft, and presses the same hand tight across his eyes.
A quick glance from Bobby and a shrug later, Sam is dropping into the chair across from Castiel. Five feet or less stand between him and Dean's body. Sam represses the free-fall dive of his stomach long enough to ask, "Can I talk to him? Is he, I mean...is he conscious?"
A pause. Castiel shakes his head and regains his standard lost expression. "He's not listening. I don't think he hears."
Sam bites his cheek against the dart of panic skating along his spine. "What's with the light show?"
Castiel's eyes are bright and sharp, inexplicable. "Dean was not meant to perceive an angel's true form. I can shield him from my presence to an extent, but - I don't know. I don't know how long I can protect him." He stands, wavers through what looks to be a dizzy spell, and sighs. "But there is someone who may help. Stay here. Don't try anything else until I return."
"Wait, Cas, you can't - "
But he's already gone, blinked out of the room behind a rush of wingbeats. Sam balls his fist against his knee and bites back a curse. He looks to where Dean is resting beneath a sheet now smeared with dirt and ash.
He thinks maybe he should familiarize himself with the concept of prayer again, but as soon as he gets past the please, God, he can't think of anything to say.
So he puts his head in his hands and he waits, instead.
~ ~ ~
the angel;
Gabriel says no.
He waits until Castiel has laid the complete situation out in front of him before he squints his eyes and hums, "Mmm, no. I don't think so."
"Why?"
It is the only word Castiel can summon, thready and weak as he forces back another surge of Dean - Dean crying out, Dean railing against a prison of light he cannot understand, Dean's anger, Dean's fear.
I'm sorry, Castiel says to no one. I'm sorry. We are all trying.
Gabriel shrugs and waves around a spoon slick with chocolate. His mouth opens to speak, but snaps shut as he inspects the small stain on the convex bend of the metal, then licks it deliberately away. Behind Castiel's shoulder, the bell above the diner's door chimes. It is a 1950's-themed building - gleaming red vinyl seats and chrome-edged tables, countless photographs of automobiles and film stars Castiel recognizes fleetingly from Dean's preoccupation with television. He thinks Dean would approve, if he could see it.
"I'm keeping my nose out of this as much as possible, little bro," Gabriel says around a mouthful of moist chocolate. He chases it with a slurp of strawberry milkshake, then shrugs. "I'm neutral, man. Ambivalent. Nonpartisan. Pacifist. Take your pick." He waves his spoon near Castiel's face. "I don't offer help to one side over the other. I don't play favorites. Cake?"
He offers the last bite, but shrugs and pops it into his mouth when Castiel does not reply.
Castiel twists his hands together beneath the table as a small waitress flutters a check onto the table and thanks them for stopping by. She has a sweet face and clear eyes, a swell of young life growing beneath her aquamarine apron. Castiel wonders if she is aware she just spoke to an archangel, if her child will be raised on firm foundations of God and prayer or if it will be left to find its own path. There is no way to know where the world will stand in six months' time. He hopes the child will sleep soundly under the assurance that angels are watching over them, but there is of course no way to be certain. He hopes, though. He prays.
He follows Gabriel as they move toward the door, waiting patiently as he pays for his meal with money he crafts from nothing. "I am asking you as a brother."
A slender finger pushes into his chest as Gabriel snorts. "Good to see the wonder-brothers are teaching you all about personal bubbles."
"Gabriel, I - "
Castiel does not expect the sudden jolt of pressure as Gabriel rounds on him, fists a hand in his shirt and drags him into a small, cloth-enclosed space. A curtain swishes behind Gabriel's shoulder as he puffs a deep sigh, feeding coins into a slot marked change. "You're like the thing that wouldn't shut up. Did you know that? You just don't quit."
He smiles when he says it, and Castiel gets as far as opening his mouth to speak before Gabriel's hand is on his chin, turning his head to face forward as a sudden pop of light flares in front of them, the brightness of it leaving clear afterimages on Castiel's eyelids.
"Smile pretty, Cas." The nickname that was once so endearing from Dean's mouth sounds bitter and mocking from Gabriel's. It rankles, but Castiel is stopped from retorting by the spin of his shoulders in Gabriel's grip.
Another flash, and Castiel closes his eyes. "What - "
"I won't help you," Gabriel says. He pauses momentarily to pose with a wide grin and two fingers extended behind Castiel's head. Another flash. "But I can point you in the right direction of someone who can."
Castiel stares at the small bulb in front of them as it erupts in another shock of light. The indigo curtain rips aside and Gabriel steps out to wait patiently as the machine beeps and buzzes. Castiel watches it with an abstract fascination and singles out the constant tone of his name riding the spaces between Dean's screams.
We are trying.
The machine silences and ejects a small strip of four photographs - Gabriel is dramatically posed in each of them, Castiel tousled and blank. Gabriel squawks with laughter as he leans against Castiel's shoulder, pointing to the third photograph where his fingers extend brightly from behind the dark mess of Castiel's hair. "Look at that," he snorts softly. "Never gets old. You know I once ruined a Rigaud doing that? Good times."
"This is urgent," Castiel snaps. "Who?"
Gabriel tears off one of the photographs and tucks it into the small pocket on the front of Castiel's shirt. "You'll be needing that," he says. At Castiel's frown, he rolls his eyes with a groan, the action familiar through Sam and Dean but never so dramatic that Castiel has seen. Gabriel purses his lips. "Cheese just slid right off your cracker there, didn't it."
Castiel frowns.
Gabriel tosses an arm over his shoulder and pulls him along, through the jingling door to the gravel parking lot beyond. The sun is warm and golden, the slight breeze refreshing after the recycled stale air of fried foods and cleaning solvents. Castiel wishes he could appreciate the simple beauty of the day - the giant revolving spokes of a ferris wheel nearby, the happy shrieks and untamed laughter of children sticky with sugar, the gentle float of balloons bobbing through a breath of wind - but Dean twists and flares and yells, and Castiel stumbles, draws himself in until his light is dim against Dean's soul.
"Go hang out at the intersection of Peachtree and Piedmont for a while," Gabriel continues, unaware of or unconcerned with the quick flicker of light from Castiel's mouth when he gasps. Dean is pushing, and pushing, and pushing, and Castiel can only keep backing off and edging away, allowing Dean room, remaining as hidden from full view as he can.
He refuses to harm Dean, even if it means slipping out of his own skin.
"Or any intersection, really. That just happens to be my favorite. Great little French bakery right on the corner."
Castiel stares, wide-eyed, at Gabriel's easy smirk, at the way he kisses the air and waves his hand in a gesture that Castiel knows, from Dean, to mean magnifico. "You're suggesting a crossroads?"
Gabriel pulls him along a crosswalk, his slow amble human and relaxed, starkly contrasted against the solid ridge of his arm riding Castiel's shoulders. He could crush him with no more than a thought, Castiel knows. For all his casual mannerisms and turns of phrase, Gabriel is anything but human.
"Yes, a crossroads," he mocks, dropping his voice to a low, gravelly pitch. "It's the only way you're going to get what you want. You know it and I know it. Heck, even the Little Antichrist Who Couldn't probably knows it - just doesn't want to fess up to it."
Castiel stops in place, wrenching out of Gabriel's grip, breathing ragged anger from between clenched teeth. "I won't deal with demons."
Gabriel shrugs as he spins on his heels to face the ferris wheel. "Alright, let Dean burn up in there then. Your funeral. ...Well, and his. Mostly his."
"I won't." The words have none of the conviction Castiel tries to force into them, weakened and frail as he fights to shield Dean from the brightness of true light, the flame that composes him. "I can't."
Gabriel squeezes his shoulder briefly, leaning close with a smirk. "Sure you can," he whispers, then leans back and bounces on his toes. "Love to stay and chat more, but, you know. Things to do, people to psychologically scar for life." He jerks a thumb in the direction of the distant glitter of lights and slow spin of a great wheel. "Rides aren't gonna ride themselves, right, bro?"
And with a chuckle and a wink he is gone and Castiel is alone and Dean is spinning recklessly within, whirling and burning and calling Cas, Cas, Cas in a voice that needs no breath to be heard.
~ ~ ~
the prophet;
He's out of notebooks. His main computer is out of commission due to being slathered in angel guts, and the backup is states away probably being smashed with the baseball bat of a very livid neighbor. Chuck shivers at the thought. Mr. Halberson's a nice guy, until you get on his bad side.
Chuck hates that he's most likely very firmly on the bad side now.
The apocalypse is hard enough without having to find a new place to drop anchor.
Chuck sighs.
The page in his hand is all full up and he only just realized ten minutes ago that he's been scratching a PaperMate against the back of a rare Babylonian protection rite. He pulls a crease out of the corner of the page and tucks the whole thing in his pocket. Bobby doesn't have to know.
"This is ridiculous," Sam mumbles as Chuck passes him a mug of coffee, fresh enough that steam still curls from the surface. They exhausted the whisky supply (and the vodka supply, and the brandy supply, and the gin supply because it did finally get that desperate) long ago and transitioned seamlessly from one vice into another. The coffee is bitter and tarry, more or less disgusting, but it's enough to keep them going for the time being.
Not that Sam looks like he could sleep any time soon, or ever again, but it's the principle of the thing.
"He should have been back by now. We're at a dead end, man. A complete dead end." Sam's hand rises and slaps back down against his knee as he shakes his head. "I don't know what else to do."
Chuck fingers the chip in his coffee mug. It's a relic, some splintered old yellow thing with perpetual coffee rings and grime along the handle. He wonders why the hell he's drinking out of something so gross, but takes a sip anyway. "Um, well. You could try calling him?"
They both know the suggestion is monumentally stupid. At least Sam is either nice enough or too exhausted to point that out.
He just stares into his coffee. "No. That wouldn't help. I know Castiel, he won't come until he's ready."
Chuck heaves out a sigh. It's been close to six hours now and Dean's body is still shoved under a wilty old sheet, the blood staining the front long dried to dull brown. He wonders briefly how long a body sits before the flies come or the...fluids start leaking.
He looks very pointedly away from Dean.
Sam makes a frustrated sound not unlike a tire losing all its air in one go. "What the hell is he doing out there? And what am I supposed to do, just sit here and do nothing? Watch Dean's - watch Dean lie there and hope for the best?"
Chuck blinks and blows on his coffee and has no idea what to say.
"God," Sam sighs, chased by a bitter laugh. "I can't - this isn't - "
"He'll be back," Bobby says softly in the background. Sam nods and sighs, sniffs a little crudely.
"Yeah," he says, nodding all the while. "Yeah."
Chuck wishes he'd thought of something similar to say, something simple and honest and helpful, but hey. Nobody ever said he was good with words.
continue
the angel;
Castiel does not expect the slap against the back of his skull when it comes. He startles, spinning to face the assault and finding a hard-eyed Dean Winchester in the space there.
"You asshole."
Castiel blinks and rubs at the place where there is a slight dull tingle lingering at leisure. "What -"
"You know. Don't even try to pretend you didn't, because you totally did. And you suck at lying, so I could tell even if you tried." A waggled finger accompanies the threat.
A breath heaves from Castiel's lungs; he expected this much - resentment, doubt, the shove of Dean's words attempting to gut an answer from him. He did not expect the jolt of panic darting along his spine, through his chest, into his hands until they tremble at his sides. "This is precisely why I didn't tell you of the ritual, Dean. I knew you would immediately elect to sacrifice yourself for your brother's sake."
"It's not just him, Cas, it's Lucifer." Dean is loud and feral, sharp in his movements as Castiel turns to watch him. "If Sam dies, his body's up for grabs. Lucifer's gonna be on him like white on rice, man, you know that."
Castiel sweeps from the table onto his feet, governed by the surprising hot spike of anger flaring through his body. "And if you die, Michael will lay claim to yours."
Dean takes a halting step backward, as if afraid. Castiel reels his temper in quickly, taming the frayed strands of wrath and tucking them neatly within himself. "I know your willingness to sacrifice your life for your brother's well, Dean. I know that his death would mean relinquishing his body to Lucifer's holds. I know this would mean terrible things for all of us - war, death. The end of all things, most likely. But I also know that I could not allow myself to - I could not -"
Dean replaces his withdrawn steps slowly, shifts closer until the space between them shrinks to inches. The space yawns and tremors and Castiel longs to close it, to wrap himself around Dean, to attach himself and hold fast.
"Couldn't what?"
Castiel shakes his head. He is reminded distantly of a conversation they once had, long ago - your guilt, your anger, confusion - and pulls the lids across his eyes. "If given the choice, I would bear the loss of your brother far easier than the loss of you."
A silence drops and lingers with the heaviness of hurt and shock in the air. There is the click of Dean's throat when he swallows, the scuff of boots against floorboards, before Dean speaks: "It'd be a bigger loss than that, Cas. We're talking the whole world here. The whole war."
Castiel turns and slumps into his chair, turning his back to Dean. "Even that would not sway my conviction." The words are barely more than whispers, no more than weak sounds riding the edge of a defeated sigh. "I won't do it, Dean. I won't perform the ritual."
"It's not a choice." Dean's voice comes quickly, unfazed by Castiel's refusal; any other time, Castiel would spare a moment to appreciate the obstinacy he has grown so used to over the months. Now he can spare no such thing. Nothing is housed within his soul but grief and weakness, a fear to face the brink each of them balances upon. He can feel his spine bending under the burden already, and he hurts.
"Please," he tries, the jolt of hot panic diminishing the word to a bare husk.
"I'm doing it," Dean bowls over his plea. "I've made up my mind, I'm doing it. I can't let Sam - I can't let Lucifer just - "
He is shifting into Castiel's vision in a single fluid movement, kneeling at his side and grasping the hand that rests idly on the bony nob of his knee. There is a rawness, a pleading in the gesture that caves Castiel in completely, makes him feel worn and helpless and exhausted.
"Look, either you do it or I find somebody else - won't be hard, there's plenty of people gunning for my skin these days." He laughs, rude and feeble; the effort of the joke is wasted and Castiel only wants to hold him. To bury him away as a treasure, hold him within the palm of his hand, coil just a thread of himself within Dean's remade body or pull Dean into his own. He reaches out to touch and finds his fingers meeting Dean's cheek where it is rough and stubbled. He maps the curve of his cheekbone and blesses this man, this precious man, before him with the oldest silent prayers.
His fingertip finds the tickling arc of eyelashes and smooths across, down, fits into the slope below Dean's lip. "You cannot ask me to do this," and his spine is bending, cracking, bone splintering under the crush of duty and devotion and Dean.
"You're the only one I trust with this, Cas, please. It has to be you. Please." Dean clutches tighter at Castiel's hand, slipping a calloused thumb into the curved hollow of his palm. "It has to be you."
Castiel may never forgive himself, but he closes his eyes and after a long gulf of silence, he whispers, "Yes."
~ ~ ~
sam;
Over twenty-six years Sam has learned his brother's self-sacrificial streak well. If anyone could be counted on to find new and inventive means of martyrdom, it was Dean. This time it's Suicide by Enochian Sacrificial Rite, the text of it rendered from one of Bobby's faded papyrus scrolls almost too ancient to stay in one piece.
Sam absolutely cannot believe this.
"You have got to be kidding me," he says initially, affixing a stern glare at Dean's skewed smirk. He'd just swaggered in, wrestled into his coat and announced that they found a way to break the curse growing across Sam's back - first a fist-diameter blight, now a henna-brown map of growing intricacies eating its way halfway up his back and around his waist, dipping close to hips and reaching up for ribs. It didn't take much pressing before Sam did the math, that Dean's master plan was little more than a glorified bait-and-switch with some ancient runes and herb magic thrown around for good measure. He doesn't like how the numbers are adding up.
He cannot fucking believe this.
"You don't even know that it will work."
"Sam, give it a rest - there isn't another option here." Dean is surprisingly cavalier about this whole thing, which Sam is surprisingly not surprised about; Dean's always viewed his own destruction as little more than a ripple in the pond. It's no less infuriating now than it was five years ago.
Sam throws his arms out, and if a hint of desperation has bled into his voice he doesn't try to hide it. "How 'bout the one where you don't die, Dean?"
"It's not a choice, alright!" Dean's eyes are hard and wild, unreadable save for the barest streak of what Sam recognizes belatedly as fear.
Dean is afraid. Dean is actually afraid.
Sam suddenly feels ten years old again, shielded and small, cowering with a book in his hand and a gun in Dean's, all ill-fitting clothes and a rambling existence he never wanted.
"I'm not letting the son of a bitch get his paws on your dead body, okay? It's not an option, no way." Dean pauses long enough to square his shoulders before he's continuing, sharp and efficient in his impersonal sense of duty, his blind sense of self-sacrifice. It makes Sam itch all over, makes him want to grab Dean and punch him, shake him, make him bleed, make him stay, make him realize.
"Now we don't even know when this thing's supposed to spring, right? You could drop dead in the next ten minutes as far as we know. So the sooner we get this done the better." He puffs a heavy sigh and glances behind his shoulder where Castiel is quietly hovering, looking resigned and slightly cowed. Sam stares him down for a solid half minute, but the angel's eyes never once rise to meet his.
"Come on, Cas," Dean snaps. He pauses, skimming his teeth along his lip as he stares at Sam. "Don't follow us." The words are soft, pleading, and they hurt more than anything Sam thinks he has ever known. More than the slice of a blade through his back, more than being called a monster and knowing it to be true, more than fractured trust, more than deserving the break in it.
"Dean - "
But Dean just says, "stay here, Sammy," and blinks once, shakes his head slow and smooth, like he's actually asking, maybe even begging. Then he jerks his collar up around his ears, slaps the scroll against Castiel's chest, and storms out the door.
It's shock that keeps Sam rooted to the spot, then a helix of anger and desperation that have him scrambling for the door where the Impala is already pushing her rumble through the country quiet. Sam catches a quick image of Dean at the wheel - palms skimming the sun-blistered leather and a glint in his eye, Castiel slumped and hating himself and stupidly devoted in the passenger seat - and runs for the car, but she swings out of reach with a roar like a wild animal and Sam is left running into fuel-heavy whorls of dust, taillights scarring his eyes red, calling Dean's name until his heart feels ready to fly apart.
Dean is leaving Sam's life yet again and the only goodbye he offers is the squeal of tires and the singed smell of burnt rubber. It's fitting, Sam thinks, but that doesn't mean it's fair.
~ ~ ~
the angel;
Dean does not speak as they slide down the silver strip of road carved out of deep forests on either side. He drives with a measured detachment, cold against the world around him. Castiel knows he is deflecting an impossible weight - guilt, sadness, fear, uncharted depths that Castiel cannot name - in favor of completing the task at hand with as little interference as possible.
He knows it is difficult for Dean to do this, if the tremble of his hands and wet gleam of his eyes betray any fragment of the effort.
He wonders if Dean knows, can know, how difficult this is for him as well.
Castiel clutches at the scroll in his grip, thin threads of ancient paper wrapped around the hard curve of a blade he will soon push through Dean's heart. The same heart he once held in his own hands, breathed into and flooded with newly hot blood; the one he remade from dust and sewed within the bone cage of Dean's chest.
He can hear the furious rhythm of it even from here.
Castiel lowers his hand onto Dean's shoulder and squeezes, just slightly. It awards him a thin smile and the warmth of Dean's fingers slotting into place alongside his own; Dean laughs, though it is completely devoid of mirth.
"Guess polite conversation's out of the question, huh."
"Dean."
"What." The answer is terse, bitten through a cage of tightly-ground teeth. Castiel clutches the knife and parchment flush against his chest.
"I'm -" Castiel stops, unsure of the words. He is completely unprepared, unable to quantify something of this magnitude - the fierceness of this ache, how he is railing against each moment they build distance between themselves and the quiet house, and heaviest of all, the knowledge that this is necessary. He tightens his fingers around Dean's and stares at the window. He cannot look at him. "I'm sorry."
Dean is silent for a long moment. Eventually he nods, resolutely, but he does not meet Castiel's quick glance in his direction. "Yeah. I am too."
They drive and drive and do not speak a word. The sun is pale on the horizon by the time they coast to a silent stop, gravel popping beneath the slow turn of tires while Castiel can feel the last foundations of himself dissolving.
For humanity, he reminds himself. For the war. For Sam. For God.
But the truth remains the same that out of every being on the planet, Dean chose him, specifically him, to be the one to put this knife through his heart. Castiel cannot escape that. It crowds around him and curls into his bones and weighs on his shoulders, a stifling and malignant awareness; hopelessness.
He thinks he would rather walk the blood and flame roads of Hell for an eternity than bear this crippling weight a moment more.
But Dean tucks the car into a neat nest of shade and crawls from behind the creaking door a few minutes later. He swings a duffel bag of supplies over his shoulder and meets Castiel's eyes as he passes, just briefly, and Castiel knows then that he must complete this, even as it will be as much his end as it will be Dean's.
Because of humanity. Because of Sam. Because Dean asked him to.
~ ~ ~
the prophet;
Sam decides it's a good idea to drag him along. Chuck doesn't question it because honestly, Sam is in a blind rage and it's nothing short of terrifying. Chuck is not going to argue with that. It'd be like screaming into a hurricane or asking a volcano why it's erupting.
He prefers to just stay the fuck out of the way and go with whatever Sam says.
And Sam says he's coming with.
They lurch onto the highway in Bobby's old Camaro that lies forgotten now that it's not wheelchair-friendly. Sam is wild and scary, tearing up the road as he pulls the woods apart searching for his brother. "What the hell did you see?" he asks with a whip of his head. "Where are they?"
Chuck feels smaller than he ever has in his life, which is a lot coming from someone who lives their life in a permanent mental state of shrunken. "I don't - I don't know. I didn't see where - "
"You said there was a sign, a yellow sign, right? What did the sign say?"
Chuck shuts his eyes and holds onto the seat belt tighter. He's not much of a praying man, especially now, but even as unremarkable as his life is, he never would have expected it to end cooking in a flaming Camaro wrapped halfway around a telephone pole.
Metal is really quite malleable when you're throwing yourself down the road at eighty-five miles an hour.
Still, there are worse ways to go.
"It's a, uh - " He thinks, thinks really hard, and surprisingly it just pops right in. "No Trespassing! It's a No Trespassing sign - yellow with black lines, suspended by chains, just off the road."
Sam doesn't like that answer, or the next four that Chuck gives, and eventually the car lapses into the most uncomfortable silence ever. Occasionally Sam will mutter something under his breath or shake his head with a wheeze of laughter; once he even bites his fist and slams it into the bow of the steering wheel with a force that shakes through the entire dash. Chuck jumps and says, "Jesus." Sam doesn't respond.
Sam also doesn't like that it's fast becoming daylight and the sky is hesitating somewhere between gunmetal gray and a silvery kind of lavender. "We're running out of time," he says through his teeth.
Chuck swallows and twists his hands. "You never had a chance," he almost says, but stops just as the words collect in his mouth. Instead he stares out the window and watches the clouds move.
~ ~ ~
dean;
They dump the car half a mile back, on the east shoulder because Sam will think he left it there as a decoy and headed west; instead they cut east in a perfect parallel line. Castiel has the decency to allow Dean a moment alone with his baby, feeling her curves, her softness, her smell of dirty leather and steel; but Sam is smart and a lifetime working in tandem means they can't not think alike, even when actively trying to, so they've got to get a move on.
He cranks the door open and shuts it behind him, doesn't look back as he slaps the keys into Castiel's palm. "Give those to Sam," he says with a sad little smile and a shrug.
Castiel looks completely stricken, like Dean's just handed him the Holy fucking Grail.
Goddamn, but Dean's going to miss him. Cas and all his weird quirks and curious head tilts and how he just doesn't get it, while at the same time he totally does get it, more than anyone else, Dean thinks. How he's tenacious and faithful and obnoxiously stubborn, and how he's always just there, even when he's not saying a word, and how he's slowly sinking into humanity because Dean asked him to. Dean really hopes he's going to be okay; he hopes Sam will watch his back like he's going to watch Sam's.
And Dean knows Castiel is going to watch Sam's back because he's going to ask him to, and Castiel always does what he asks.
A sudden and fierce slice of ache cripples him - I can't do this on his breath, but he has to. He has to.
Castiel seems calm and balanced, though it's clear beneath the flesh he is slowly growing into that he's on the brittle edge of bursting. Yet on the outside, even on the inside with his stupid faith and devotion, he is unchanging and constant as he has always been, and Dean thinks in their own strange way, a little late in the game perhaps, that he maybe loves him. He thinks he maybe always has.
But he doesn't voice it, because then they're at a clearing and Castiel is leaning him against a tree and moving away to set up the ritual. Dean watches as he draws a sigil on the ground in salt and mixes herbs, recites prayers in arcane languages and waves runes and symbols in the air above them. Dean watches his hands, the quick pale flashes of them in the dark. He tries not to notice how much they tremble, because someone has to be the strong one here and he's certainly not feeling up to the task.
"Dean?"
Castiel's eyes are wide and black in the glow of a small fire whipping in front of him. The air is thick with burnt balsam and smoky thyme, rich and heady. Dean tries to swallow and step forward, but stumbles.
"We're ready."
"Yeah," Dean answers, because he doesn't know what else to say. Castiel directs him to the center of the salt sigil and seals it around him; Dean doesn't feel any different, but it's probably some magic thing. He thinks about asking, but what the fuck difference would it make anyway?
He already knows how this ends, already knows where he's going.
"Hey, Cas - "
He doesn't respond; just stares at Dean, unguarded and open. Castiel is in pain, Dean sees, and he hates that he's the cause of it, but didn't expect much more. He's got a knack for that lately - making angels hurt, making them doubt, and feel. Making them human.
"I don't regret it," Castiel says. Dean smirks and sinks his hands into his pockets.
"You're in my head." You're always in my head.
Castiel lifts one shoulder, just barely. The knife glints in his hand, a gleaming slice of promise at his hip. Dean catches sight of it and something inside him winds tight.
"So you know I - what I -..."
This time, it's a smirk instead of a shrug. "I already did."
That same tightened place deep inside Dean uncoils, a steady warm spiral until he's settled. "Tell Sam - "
"I will."
"Alright," Dean says. "Alright."
A short silence stretches between them before Castiel bends to swipe his fingers through a silver bowl of palm oil at his feet. He is suddenly in Dean's air, inches from him, tracing a sigil on his forehead and holding the blade he's about to kill him with - Dean is about to die, and yet it is the simplest, easiest death he has known. And sure it leaves Sam behind, but it saves him too, he ought to see that. It saves them all, in a way, and he's not tying up any ends but he's at least doing what he can, what he knows how to.
Death's not really all that scary now that Castiel is the dealer.
Dean actually manages a smile when Castiel looks at him. "I hope I don't see you again," he says, honest.
Castiel gets it. He nods and looks down where the blade is resting in his palm, creasing the skin red where he's squeezing it. When he looks up again he shifts closer, angles up just enough, and touches his mouth to Dean's.
It's a quick thing, barely more than a brush of lips, but it is everything and it is perfect and it is them.
Dean says, "do it," and Castiel does.
A great and terrible pain for the passage of a stuttered heartbeat and then Dean is melting to the ground with Castiel's arms a solid circle of warm stone around him, his hand closing over that intimate place where Castiel is forever burned into him.
There is a brilliant white clap of light and the shift of great wings and arms everywhere, it's bright, too bright, too loud, and Dean is burning alive, he is dying, he is going everywhere at once -
Then simply nothing.
~ ~ ~
the prophet;
The sky has graduated from sickly purple into fiery yellows with errant red streamers, orange flares, occasional ragged brown scraps. Chuck is standing at one end of the clearing, staring at the trees clear-cut black against the sky.
From here it looks like the whole world's on fire.
He thinks maybe it's just practicing for the future.
There are crickets everywhere, sporadic birdsongs, Sam sniffing and choking and calling for his brother somewhere off to the left.
There's nothing for it, though. Dean's a mess of blackish blood, skin pale and cold and waxy, almost an hour dead.
Castiel is still sitting on the ground where Sam shoved him. His hands are stained dark and he hasn't moved or said a word or done anything since they arrived and found him curled around Dean's pliant body, staring wide-eyed and moving his mouth to form words that have yet to take shape. He's a space cadet as far as Chuck can tell. Checked out, floating up in the stratosphere, whatever. The point is that Castiel is clearly not here; that it's just a dazed and mute replica of him that's slumped on the ground staring at Dean's legs splayed awkwardly from behind Sam's expansive back.
It wouldn't be so different from his usual weirdly quiet self if not for the blood on his hands, his coat, his face, the lines that look like teartracks on his face, but that can't be right because angels don't cry.
Chuck shakes his head at all of it.
Sam gulps down another sob and squeezes Dean tighter and rocks again and again and nothing happens. Dean lolls and stares unseeing at the sky while it struggles through orange-red to blue.
The whole thing is really just so, so fucked up.
Chuck tries to trace the cord back to where he was first set on the trajectory that landed him here. He gets as far back as his eighth birthday and first written story. Then decides he should probably just go back to birth and leave it at that.
Or maybe he wasn't supposed to end up here. Maybe it's not something about him, something in his blood.
Maybe he was just another guy, and then suddenly one day something shifted. Clicked. Locked.
He has no idea.
Figures it doesn't really matter.
He can see where Sam's shirt has ridden up a good four inches to expose a wide strip of uninterrupted tan - no more Property of Pestilence stamp, at least. And the sky is pretty and the birds are singing like it's not really the end of the world and everything's just peachy.
But Dean is dead and Castiel is in all likelihood irreparably cracked and Sam is holding onto his brother's corpse and shaking and terrified. Chuck can't find a whole lot to be happy about. It's not the first time he's had to see this and he's finding out firsthand it doesn't get any easier the second time around.
~ ~ ~
sam;
Dean is just a weight beneath a sheet, like the archetypal ghost. The road is surging the car in reckless jerks and Sam can hear the toe of Dean's boot knocking against the doorframe with every pothole and rattle. He has to stop twice, and get entirely out of the car once. He almost throws up into a ditch, but can't.
He gets back in the car and keeps driving. Chuck is in the passenger seat, but doesn't say a word. Castiel is in the back with Dean's head on his thighs, his fingers knotted up in Dean's hair, staring at him like he is something Castiel cannot figure out. Sam wants to push him away. He wants to say you don't have the right, even though he supposes if anyone does, it's Castiel. It doesn't stop him from being so angry it's just a blur, so angry he feels alight, dizzy with it.
He doesn't tell Bobby when they get back, and Bobby doesn't ask. He doesn't have to when he emerges onto the porch to see Sam digging Dean out of the backseat, hefting him into his arms and marching for the house. There are arguments against it - dead bodies don't go on couches and hunters should always be burned, it's the respectful thing to do - but this is Dean. And no one dares tell Sam any different.
They just leave him alone.
Bobby is fish-eyed and silent. Castiel is a machine; he stands completely still in the doorway for two hours, unsupported, arms at his sides. His eyes have gone blank and bottomless, not the usual constant shift of thought but just...nothing. As if he's rolled back into himself and left only an appearance behind. A very solid and familiar ghost, still wearing Dean's blood.
Eventually Chuck knocks Sam on the shoulder with an offering of two fingers of Johnnie Walker. The liquor swills around his mouth in a warm wash, burning his tongue clean and dragging down his throat with a singular purpose. He would thank Chuck, but his brother is dead. Sam can't find much reason to thank anyone for anything right now.
He stares at the shapeless sweep of cloth burying Dean's features, crisp white muddied with a shock of rust-dark crimson right in the center, and doesn't think.
~ ~ ~
"Sam," Castiel eventually says, when all the blood in Sam's veins has thickened to batter, slowed to a near halt.
He doesn't look up, but then he does - because Castiel exhales and slouches and says, "Sammy?" loud and panicked.
It's not his voice, not his posture or his expression. He still looks like Castiel as a whole, but there's something, something -
"What is it?"
Castiel raises his hands where the blood is flaking off in dry sheets, turns them back to front, back to front. He touches random points on his body - browbone, line of buttons down his shirt, stained coat lapels. Then his expression draws back and tightens again, into less frightened confusion than surprise.
"Dean is alive."
Sam is off the couch, crowded close all righteous anger and insult, in an instant. His hands find Castiel's arms, too solid for their narrowness; shake him, squeeze until the flesh gives beneath blood-stiff fabric, just a little. "Don't you say that, you know better, you know."
"No." Castiel rolls out of Sam's grip and cants his head, not cowing back but moving closer. "Dean is alive. I know he is alive."
Somewhere, Bobby says, "Alright, that's -"
"Don't say that," Sam cuts in. "Don't do that, don't do this. Not you, not - you know he's dead, Castiel, you killed him." A pause and then, again, "You killed him."
Castiel's lips part, tongue chasing slick along them as his eyes work to blink and a shudder shoots through his body. Sam steps back.
There's something.
He can't place it but there's something decidedly not Castiel about all of this, something wrong, very wrong.
"Dean isn't dead." Castiel's eyes find the floor as some of the rigidity in his voice bends. "He's alive. He is...with me."
The laugh out of Sam's mouth is unintentionally sharp and strangely freeing. He looks from the mound of unmoving white to the center of Castiel's chest, his soft frown and shaking hands. "I don't need this sugar-coated symbolic crap right now, I just want my brother back."
"Sam, he is with me."
The air stops and Chuck coughs and Bobby says, "what in the hell are you gettin' at?", and Sam just stares. At the smears of blue that can't lie, the heat behind Castiel's face that isn't typical. It's new and yet familiar, that fury that feels like -
Sam stops breathing for one, three, eight heartbeats.
"Dean is alive," Castiel repeats.
"How?"
The frown deepens in something vaguely like apology. "I don't know. When he fell, I held him over the place we first touched. I felt a...shudder. A swell. I didn't know, I thought it was the pain of guilt, of loss, but, Sam - your brother and I have a bond. Even without the body we are drawn to one another."
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Bobby gripes behind his hand.
"When his soul departed his body, it followed the most familiar light it knew." Castiel's eyes cut to the side, where Chuck is open-mouthed and Dean is simply an empty cage. "I can feel him."
Sam slips a hand through his hair. "Dean's soul...left his body and climbed into yours? Cas, that's -"
"He is here, Sam, I know he is." The words are quick, clipped and emphatic, enough that Sam sees Chuck flinch in the corner of his eye, enough that he feels himself do the same. Castiel sighs, long and low. "Dean is alive. Sam - Dean is alive."
~ ~ ~
the prophet;
Chuck's life has, at least for the past year, been rife with shit crazy enough to send most people to the hills, or at least have them shouting for the men in white coats. Hell, Chuck's been close to doing both himself. More than once. It's the angels that are keeping him in line. He's beginning to wonder if there's a compassionate one left in the lot of them.
Except Castiel, but he's not really an angel anymore so much as he is a thing - a hybrid, a half-breed, missing link, what have you. Especially now that he's got Dean's soul holed up in his body, sharing space with some innocent shmuck who didn't know what the fuck he was signing up for when he agreed to be an angel suit, and oh yeah, an angel itself. It must be getting awfully crowded in there by now.
Not that Chuck actually believes Dean is inside Castiel's - Jimmy's, whatever - body, because that's ridiculous, but technicalities.
He's not the only one reluctant to believe it.
("I don't believe you," Sam had said. "That's not even possible. It doesn't make sense. Human souls can't just hitch a ride into another body, that's not how it works."
"It has nothing to do with physical bodies," Castiel had argued.
Something, Dean's humanity if what Castiel said was true, was brimming over into his words. They flowed easier and hit harder, snapped quicker, like how Dean talked. Chuck figured it was just a byproduct of going more or less batshit insane, but something in the tone of Castiel's voice, something in his easy mannerisms and the melting point he was easing into - some mid-place where the lines of angel and human blurred - felt genuine.
"There is a link - a tie that holds him to me and I to him."
"No." Sam shook his head, arms linked across his chest. "No. That's - no, that's bullshit, Cas. Dean is gone and you know it."
Sam had all the wild energy of a hurricane still wound up, bottlenecking as the hours kept ticking and Dean was never any closer to coming back. As it became slowly and inevitably more real.
Chuck made himself as small as possible against the arm of the couch and tried not to look at Dean's dead body slumped under the bloody sheet just six feet away. One hand had slipped from under the fabric, the skin of it bluish and thick. Chuck prayed, in so many words, to please just stop existing. Right fucking now, preferably.
Nobody listened. He wasn't surprised.
"I can't explain it, Sam," Castiel said with a careless fling of his arm. "Dean is alive and we are wasting time."
"Dean is dead, Castiel, you're the one who fucking killed him!"
"We need to return him to his body before it's too late!"
Chuck thought he would probably go to his grave without hearing Castiel shout in anyone's face. Turns out he was wrong.
"How am I supposed to trust that?" Sam had challenged with a sneer. "How am I supposed to trust the guy who just murdered my brother?"
And Castiel, he had straightened into his usual ramrod posture then, his eyes blanking out into full-on angel mode again. "Because otherwise, Dean dies and he will not come back this time. I can't keep him hidden forever.")
Ten minutes after Castiel finally persuades Sam to search the Singer archives for anything relevant, Bobby sets it straight that Sam won't be approaching any crossroads any time soon. Sam looks slightly sheepish, as if he'd actually entertained the idea, but Bobby explains why that would be the stupidest thing for him to do right now and Sam can't disagree. He just nods too many times and says, "Okay. You're right." Then keeps on searching.
Apparently the prospect of Lucifer popping in for a permanent visit is enough to muddy even the Winchester self-sacrificial streak.
That, or Sam's just not ready to give up hope yet.
They're coming up empty, which Chuck fully expected. Sam is a quivering mess of what he's supposed to be, though he's not as angry or devastated as Chuck would have expected. He suspects maybe it's shock. Or deflection. Either way, Sam is frantically swimming through piles of dusty tomes and giving horrible, gutted-animal noises of frustration when he doesn't dig anything up, but at least he's not punching holes in walls or ripping people apart limb from limb.
Little things, and all. Chuck's trying his damnedest to find something, however small, to be grateful for.
But Bobby is out of scotch now, so he's finding it increasingly difficult.
And Dean is still dead.
And the world is pretty much fucked.
He wanders into the kitchen, but all that's left is gin and he can't stomach the thought of puking his guts out at the end of the world, so he sits back down empty-handed.
Sam, Castiel, and Bobby are all shredded around the edges as they tear through page after page, some of them ripping with a rough whip of Sam's frustrated fingers. Piles of books appear on the floor, haphazardly discarded once they reveal no sliver of helpful information. Books tipped sideways, books spread open and face down, parchments wrinkled and sandwiched between stacks - the room is a mess and they just keep on going.
But for all their efforts, they don't find a fucking thing.
Eventually Sam flies back from the table and throws his chair into the wall and disappears outside for a cooldown period. Twenty minutes later he's back, red-eyed and smaller, to pull more dusty books from the shelves and revisit ones he's already systematically dismissed.
Chuck actually feels kind of sorry for him.
And for Bobby, who is clearly barely holding himself together with the cold body of a son lying in his parlor.
And for Castiel, who is occasionally fluttering his eyes and blinking back spills of blue-white light, bending at the waist and grasping his temples as if racked by terrible pain. As if he's fighting something, something relentless that's trying to push him straight out of his flesh.
They're a miserable lot, all desperate and run bone dry, and Chuck wishes not for the first time that he was able to do anything to help.
Instead, he does the only thing he knows how to do.
He finds a crinkled page near his foot and smooths it out as best he can.
And he begins to write.
~ ~ ~
the angel;
He can feel the swell and thrash of Dean within his body, wrapped within bone and flesh too small to contain him. He is a constant strain, growing and shifting relentlessly despite how he will not respond to Castiel's calls. He tries to placate Dean; to quiet him, to reel him in.
But Dean is a wild twist within a body that was never meant to hold an angel and a man and a soul as bright as Dean's. Jimmy has not spoken since the night Lucifer rose, though Castiel can still feel his presence slumbering; he is unresponsive, but the fact that he hasn't been thrown to oblivion sometimes grounds Castiel when he feels ready to fly apart.
Dean, though - Dean is different.
Dean is bright and furious and difficult, and he will not quiet when Castiel tells him, when he pushes his grace against Dean's glow and smothers the chaos of his true form to a bearable level. Castiel bends, softens beneath the crowd of Dean against his own soul. He gives and gives and feeds this space until Dean is a huge enough presence within him to drag him to the edge. Castiel can feel himself overbrimming, the truth of what he, even diminished, truly is bleeding out like light around the sharpened edges of a backlit door in darkness.
He dims himself and edges closer to leaving his vessel simply because he does not want to harm Dean, to burn him out of existence by simply being.
Castiel closes his eyes against crackles of energy that bubble to their surface, sews himself tighter within these cells and begs, quiet, quiet.
You are safe, he says, the message reverberated around their shared space. You are safe here with me.
The lie echoes and uncoils and permeates each corner of this unstable body as the shape of Dean's soul whips and quivers and does not hear.
Castiel winds himself tighter to soothe the terrible whir of a soul screaming, crying out against a bodiless burn and a limitless crush.
But in the swarm a sound slowly begins to take shape, a constant thrum coalescing into the familiar rhythm of a name - Cas, Cas, Cas, over and over and over, until Castiel opens his eyes and sees the answer.
~ ~ ~
sam;
They find a hieratic ritual and set it up - paint heiroglyphs on Bobby's parlor floor and scatter herbs, light candles, sprinkle earth. Sam recites a variation of the wpt-r over Dean's body - for Horus, for Set, for Thoth. He traces Dean's lips with the point of a copper blade, separates them and pushes the flat of the dagger against his tongue.
"I am Sekhmet-Wadjet who dwells in the west of heaven. I am Sahyt among the souls of On."
It ends and he waits, Bobby at his elbow, Chuck at the other. Castiel is across the room, watching the process with a hesitant eye, occasionally shuddering and curling into himself. Sam notices him mumble things sometimes, Dean or quiet or words of some language he is too young and too human to recognize. Errant sparks like blue lightning have begun crackling along his skin, tracing the thin paths of veins beneath the surface. At the closing of the ceremony, as Sam waits and a silence cold and heavy as the ocean's floor grows through the house, Castiel's head tips back on the end of a deep, guttural sound, then, "Sam," and a string of sharp sibilants, the blur of a low murmur.
Dean remains cold and still, unaffected by the ritual.
Sam goes to Castiel's side and lifts him up - tries to, but he's far too heavy and the effort has Sam straining and cursing below his breath. Castiel's hand like a vice finds Sam's arm and pulls, finds enough momentum to lift him up until he's leaning slack against the crook of Sam's shoulder. "Dean," he's saying, again and again. "Dean, calm."
Whatever he's weathering inside, Sam can't comprehend it. Castiel leans against him, the weight of his hand, burning fever hot, resting against Sam's shoulder, the slender line of his side flush against Sam's body. There's an energy bleeding into the air around him that's making Sam's hair stand on end, the kind of hum like before a bad storm hits, electricity thick as blood in the air.
"Calm," Castiel breathes. "Dormi, amabo te."
Sam watches his throat move to swallow. "What's going on?"
"He is...afraid." One eye cracks open a sliver and lets loose a quick burst of bluish light. "He doesn't recognize me. He must think he's dead."
"Or maybe he thinks you're Michael."
Castiel nods. "Or that."
"The ritual didn't work," Bobby says, weak from somewhere at Sam's back. "You got any bright ideas, angelface? Since you're the one who got us into this mess in the first place."
"He's strong." The words slide out around a sigh as Castiel's back melds to the wall. In the space of a moment he shifts from wild and feverish, sparking with electricity, to calm and collected - his usual self. He straightens up and Sam wonders if he imagines the affectionate squeeze on his shoulder before Castiel's hand drifts away, or if it really happened.
He wonders if the action was Castiel's own, or if it translated to his muscles from the small part of Dean still alive and kicking somewhere inside unfamiliar flesh.
"Is he okay?"
Castiel moves away to slouch into the chair at his side, near enough to Dean's corpse that Sam doesn't follow. He wants to keep as much distance between himself and the truth of that, of Dean being gone, as possible. "I can't tell."
Sam huffs a laugh. "You can't tell? What does that mean?"
"Sam, this is as new to me as it is to you, or to Dean, or to anyone." One hand comes up to rub at Castiel's forehead, pinch at the juncture between his eyes. "I never would have thought this possible." He makes a noise, small and soft, and presses the same hand tight across his eyes.
A quick glance from Bobby and a shrug later, Sam is dropping into the chair across from Castiel. Five feet or less stand between him and Dean's body. Sam represses the free-fall dive of his stomach long enough to ask, "Can I talk to him? Is he, I mean...is he conscious?"
A pause. Castiel shakes his head and regains his standard lost expression. "He's not listening. I don't think he hears."
Sam bites his cheek against the dart of panic skating along his spine. "What's with the light show?"
Castiel's eyes are bright and sharp, inexplicable. "Dean was not meant to perceive an angel's true form. I can shield him from my presence to an extent, but - I don't know. I don't know how long I can protect him." He stands, wavers through what looks to be a dizzy spell, and sighs. "But there is someone who may help. Stay here. Don't try anything else until I return."
"Wait, Cas, you can't - "
But he's already gone, blinked out of the room behind a rush of wingbeats. Sam balls his fist against his knee and bites back a curse. He looks to where Dean is resting beneath a sheet now smeared with dirt and ash.
He thinks maybe he should familiarize himself with the concept of prayer again, but as soon as he gets past the please, God, he can't think of anything to say.
So he puts his head in his hands and he waits, instead.
~ ~ ~
the angel;
Gabriel says no.
He waits until Castiel has laid the complete situation out in front of him before he squints his eyes and hums, "Mmm, no. I don't think so."
"Why?"
It is the only word Castiel can summon, thready and weak as he forces back another surge of Dean - Dean crying out, Dean railing against a prison of light he cannot understand, Dean's anger, Dean's fear.
I'm sorry, Castiel says to no one. I'm sorry. We are all trying.
Gabriel shrugs and waves around a spoon slick with chocolate. His mouth opens to speak, but snaps shut as he inspects the small stain on the convex bend of the metal, then licks it deliberately away. Behind Castiel's shoulder, the bell above the diner's door chimes. It is a 1950's-themed building - gleaming red vinyl seats and chrome-edged tables, countless photographs of automobiles and film stars Castiel recognizes fleetingly from Dean's preoccupation with television. He thinks Dean would approve, if he could see it.
"I'm keeping my nose out of this as much as possible, little bro," Gabriel says around a mouthful of moist chocolate. He chases it with a slurp of strawberry milkshake, then shrugs. "I'm neutral, man. Ambivalent. Nonpartisan. Pacifist. Take your pick." He waves his spoon near Castiel's face. "I don't offer help to one side over the other. I don't play favorites. Cake?"
He offers the last bite, but shrugs and pops it into his mouth when Castiel does not reply.
Castiel twists his hands together beneath the table as a small waitress flutters a check onto the table and thanks them for stopping by. She has a sweet face and clear eyes, a swell of young life growing beneath her aquamarine apron. Castiel wonders if she is aware she just spoke to an archangel, if her child will be raised on firm foundations of God and prayer or if it will be left to find its own path. There is no way to know where the world will stand in six months' time. He hopes the child will sleep soundly under the assurance that angels are watching over them, but there is of course no way to be certain. He hopes, though. He prays.
He follows Gabriel as they move toward the door, waiting patiently as he pays for his meal with money he crafts from nothing. "I am asking you as a brother."
A slender finger pushes into his chest as Gabriel snorts. "Good to see the wonder-brothers are teaching you all about personal bubbles."
"Gabriel, I - "
Castiel does not expect the sudden jolt of pressure as Gabriel rounds on him, fists a hand in his shirt and drags him into a small, cloth-enclosed space. A curtain swishes behind Gabriel's shoulder as he puffs a deep sigh, feeding coins into a slot marked change. "You're like the thing that wouldn't shut up. Did you know that? You just don't quit."
He smiles when he says it, and Castiel gets as far as opening his mouth to speak before Gabriel's hand is on his chin, turning his head to face forward as a sudden pop of light flares in front of them, the brightness of it leaving clear afterimages on Castiel's eyelids.
"Smile pretty, Cas." The nickname that was once so endearing from Dean's mouth sounds bitter and mocking from Gabriel's. It rankles, but Castiel is stopped from retorting by the spin of his shoulders in Gabriel's grip.
Another flash, and Castiel closes his eyes. "What - "
"I won't help you," Gabriel says. He pauses momentarily to pose with a wide grin and two fingers extended behind Castiel's head. Another flash. "But I can point you in the right direction of someone who can."
Castiel stares at the small bulb in front of them as it erupts in another shock of light. The indigo curtain rips aside and Gabriel steps out to wait patiently as the machine beeps and buzzes. Castiel watches it with an abstract fascination and singles out the constant tone of his name riding the spaces between Dean's screams.
We are trying.
The machine silences and ejects a small strip of four photographs - Gabriel is dramatically posed in each of them, Castiel tousled and blank. Gabriel squawks with laughter as he leans against Castiel's shoulder, pointing to the third photograph where his fingers extend brightly from behind the dark mess of Castiel's hair. "Look at that," he snorts softly. "Never gets old. You know I once ruined a Rigaud doing that? Good times."
"This is urgent," Castiel snaps. "Who?"
Gabriel tears off one of the photographs and tucks it into the small pocket on the front of Castiel's shirt. "You'll be needing that," he says. At Castiel's frown, he rolls his eyes with a groan, the action familiar through Sam and Dean but never so dramatic that Castiel has seen. Gabriel purses his lips. "Cheese just slid right off your cracker there, didn't it."
Castiel frowns.
Gabriel tosses an arm over his shoulder and pulls him along, through the jingling door to the gravel parking lot beyond. The sun is warm and golden, the slight breeze refreshing after the recycled stale air of fried foods and cleaning solvents. Castiel wishes he could appreciate the simple beauty of the day - the giant revolving spokes of a ferris wheel nearby, the happy shrieks and untamed laughter of children sticky with sugar, the gentle float of balloons bobbing through a breath of wind - but Dean twists and flares and yells, and Castiel stumbles, draws himself in until his light is dim against Dean's soul.
"Go hang out at the intersection of Peachtree and Piedmont for a while," Gabriel continues, unaware of or unconcerned with the quick flicker of light from Castiel's mouth when he gasps. Dean is pushing, and pushing, and pushing, and Castiel can only keep backing off and edging away, allowing Dean room, remaining as hidden from full view as he can.
He refuses to harm Dean, even if it means slipping out of his own skin.
"Or any intersection, really. That just happens to be my favorite. Great little French bakery right on the corner."
Castiel stares, wide-eyed, at Gabriel's easy smirk, at the way he kisses the air and waves his hand in a gesture that Castiel knows, from Dean, to mean magnifico. "You're suggesting a crossroads?"
Gabriel pulls him along a crosswalk, his slow amble human and relaxed, starkly contrasted against the solid ridge of his arm riding Castiel's shoulders. He could crush him with no more than a thought, Castiel knows. For all his casual mannerisms and turns of phrase, Gabriel is anything but human.
"Yes, a crossroads," he mocks, dropping his voice to a low, gravelly pitch. "It's the only way you're going to get what you want. You know it and I know it. Heck, even the Little Antichrist Who Couldn't probably knows it - just doesn't want to fess up to it."
Castiel stops in place, wrenching out of Gabriel's grip, breathing ragged anger from between clenched teeth. "I won't deal with demons."
Gabriel shrugs as he spins on his heels to face the ferris wheel. "Alright, let Dean burn up in there then. Your funeral. ...Well, and his. Mostly his."
"I won't." The words have none of the conviction Castiel tries to force into them, weakened and frail as he fights to shield Dean from the brightness of true light, the flame that composes him. "I can't."
Gabriel squeezes his shoulder briefly, leaning close with a smirk. "Sure you can," he whispers, then leans back and bounces on his toes. "Love to stay and chat more, but, you know. Things to do, people to psychologically scar for life." He jerks a thumb in the direction of the distant glitter of lights and slow spin of a great wheel. "Rides aren't gonna ride themselves, right, bro?"
And with a chuckle and a wink he is gone and Castiel is alone and Dean is spinning recklessly within, whirling and burning and calling Cas, Cas, Cas in a voice that needs no breath to be heard.
~ ~ ~
the prophet;
He's out of notebooks. His main computer is out of commission due to being slathered in angel guts, and the backup is states away probably being smashed with the baseball bat of a very livid neighbor. Chuck shivers at the thought. Mr. Halberson's a nice guy, until you get on his bad side.
Chuck hates that he's most likely very firmly on the bad side now.
The apocalypse is hard enough without having to find a new place to drop anchor.
Chuck sighs.
The page in his hand is all full up and he only just realized ten minutes ago that he's been scratching a PaperMate against the back of a rare Babylonian protection rite. He pulls a crease out of the corner of the page and tucks the whole thing in his pocket. Bobby doesn't have to know.
"This is ridiculous," Sam mumbles as Chuck passes him a mug of coffee, fresh enough that steam still curls from the surface. They exhausted the whisky supply (and the vodka supply, and the brandy supply, and the gin supply because it did finally get that desperate) long ago and transitioned seamlessly from one vice into another. The coffee is bitter and tarry, more or less disgusting, but it's enough to keep them going for the time being.
Not that Sam looks like he could sleep any time soon, or ever again, but it's the principle of the thing.
"He should have been back by now. We're at a dead end, man. A complete dead end." Sam's hand rises and slaps back down against his knee as he shakes his head. "I don't know what else to do."
Chuck fingers the chip in his coffee mug. It's a relic, some splintered old yellow thing with perpetual coffee rings and grime along the handle. He wonders why the hell he's drinking out of something so gross, but takes a sip anyway. "Um, well. You could try calling him?"
They both know the suggestion is monumentally stupid. At least Sam is either nice enough or too exhausted to point that out.
He just stares into his coffee. "No. That wouldn't help. I know Castiel, he won't come until he's ready."
Chuck heaves out a sigh. It's been close to six hours now and Dean's body is still shoved under a wilty old sheet, the blood staining the front long dried to dull brown. He wonders briefly how long a body sits before the flies come or the...fluids start leaking.
He looks very pointedly away from Dean.
Sam makes a frustrated sound not unlike a tire losing all its air in one go. "What the hell is he doing out there? And what am I supposed to do, just sit here and do nothing? Watch Dean's - watch Dean lie there and hope for the best?"
Chuck blinks and blows on his coffee and has no idea what to say.
"God," Sam sighs, chased by a bitter laugh. "I can't - this isn't - "
"He'll be back," Bobby says softly in the background. Sam nods and sighs, sniffs a little crudely.
"Yeah," he says, nodding all the while. "Yeah."
Chuck wishes he'd thought of something similar to say, something simple and honest and helpful, but hey. Nobody ever said he was good with words.
continue