Work Text:
"Psychotically, irrationally, erotically codependent."
Zachariah about Sam and Dean
Ezekiel remembers his brother Zachariah walking around heaven, mumbling under his breath about the Winchesters. He remembers irritation showing in the hard lines on Zachariah's face, his pinched expression when he cursed their brothers' True Vessels, throwing around words as irrationally, erotically, codependent.
He remembers Castiel speaking of the love between those two brothers, those humans. How strong it was, how absolute, how pure. Castiel spoke of soulmates and feelings so powerful they could make a mortal man overpower the archangel possessing his body.
Back then, Ezekiel had not been able to comprehend. Of course, he had sided with Castiel to protect His creation, yet he had not believed humans were capable of such strong emotions, such bonds.
Now, he understands. Sam's soul is a battlefield. It's flayed and battered and bruised, bleeding and mangled. There is a war going on inside this man, guilt and regret and pain, grief and loss everywhere he looks, turning the world into muted grays and blacks with flashes of crimson. Where those feelings are strongest, Ezekiel can smell, taste and feel the rot, heady and cloying. It seeps through him and he suffers the shared pain as if its his own, sharp like shards of broken glass. He does not dwell here for long and buries deeper instead.
If Sam's soul is an ocean, then the surface is littered with decaying carcasses. The water would be brown and muddy here, the foam of an ugly yellow, and it would reek of death.
However, would one wade inside deeper until their head is submerged, they would find seemingly another world.
Ezekiel dives.
He leaves the pain and self-loathing behind, casts it off and opens his eyes to a world of brilliant color and wonderful smells. This is were Dean resides inside Sam, and the sight is beautiful. It's marvelous—bright greens and warm yellows, rich blues. It's like standing in Eden and watching the first humans frolicking through His lands. But Ezekiel does not see Adam and Eve here. Instead he sees Sam and Dean, and it's not a garden they're in.
It's the car, the Impala, he thinks it's called, the black, purring monstrosity of a machine that has long since stopped being a means of transport to become a home. Dean sits in the driver's seat with Sam at his side, and music is playing from the speakers, a bit muted and scratchy but they do not care. Sam's smile is content, his eyes are closed, and his fingers tap a rhythm against his denim-clad thigh.
Dean is grinning broadly, eyes sometimes leaving the road to look at his brother, and then they're full of warmth, of sweet affection, softness. When Sam looks back at him, his eyes are awed, filled with a kind of love that makes the one Lucifer had shown for Him look weak and inferior.
Ezekiel watches them from the backseat.
He sees them touching, apparently unwittingly. Their thighs push against each other, fingers brush and linger, gazes lock and hold.
He likes it here. It feels like being wrapped in one of his siblings' grace—it's warm and soft and full of comfort, and washes through him like his Father's breath, reviving shocks of electricity dancing beneath the surface.
So Ezekiel leans back into the leather of the bench and drinks it in, lets the love heal and strengthen him like the waters of heaven while he watches the bright world rush by on the outside as the two brothers talk and laugh and touch.