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“Pardon me,” Castiel says as he edges his way to his window seat.
(“I wouldn’t buy that for just anyone,” Dean said in that teasing way of his, trying to hide the hurt that comes from separation again so soon.)
The old woman sitting in the aisle seat moves her purse aside. It’s large enough to stow a jumbo bag of those cheese curls that Dean loves, as well as a small dog. Cas tries not to take up too much space in his seat. They’re packed tightly in a plane that seems too small to get off the ground safely.
“You speak Arabic,” the old woman notes, eyeing him carefully.
Castiel smiles. He might not have wings to take him anywhere he wants to go any longer, but the automatic translation that he’s always possessed still kicks in when he needs it. She wanted to hear Arabic, so that’s what he spoke.
“I speak many languages,” he replies in French, allowing himself a small smile.
The old woman smiles back. “As do I. I don’t suppose you know English as well?”
She switches again on the second sentence. Cas nods in response, and her smile grows still wider.
“Amina.”
She extends a hand and Cas takes it. Beneath them, the plane shudders to life and begins to trundle off down the runway. For a moment, Cas can understand why Dean hates the things so much. It’s a special sort of impossible for a plane to get off the ground.
“Castiel.”
According to the ticket, the flight is going to take upwards of thirteen hours. He might as well get to know his seatmate.
“Where are you headed?”
Amina rifles through her purse. “Bakka, eventually. My sister lives there. We have not seen each other in many years. Not since I came here. I’m making this for her grandson.”
A pair of knitting needles and a half-completed knit hat emerges from her bag. Castiel waves away what looks like a slice of homemade bread when she pulls that out as well. Despite his refusal, she deposits it in his lap before starting up her knitting again.
“And you?’
“I’m doing…missionary work in Syria.”
In that he’s completing a mission, anyway. He supposes that it’s close enough to the truth that he doesn’t feel badly about lying to her.
She raises an eyebrow. “You think that’s what those children need? Bibles?”
“I’m helping build a school.”
It slips out before he can stop it. In a weird sort of way, he wishes that’s what he was doing. Instead of searching for some ancient relic he likely won’t find, he could be helping the people who need it most.
He knows they’re saving the world. But it’s hard to believe when there’s still so much bloodshed.
Amina’s face softens. “Good. That’s good.” She glances down at the bread in his lap. “Now eat up. You’ll need your strength.”
It doesn’t take much longer for her to rope Cas into holding her yarn for her while she tells him about her childhood back in Bakka and what it was like to come to the United States as a young woman. Castiel just listens, utterly fascinated. This is what he loves about humans. Each one of them is a story within themselves, just waiting for the right audience.
Thirteen and a half hours later, Cas reaches over and gently shakes her shoulder. Amina blinks awake. As she readies her purse, Cas gets her carry-on down off of the luggage rack.
“You look after those children, now,” she says.
She squeezes his hand firmly in hers before shuffling off of the plane.
When Cas arrives at the library in Raqqa where Sam had thought he’d be able to find the trail to the fruit, it’s to find a bombed-out shell of a building instead.
He doesn’t know why he’s surprised.
Just in case, he ducks into the skeleton of the building. The mosaic on the wall is still beautiful—an iris, Cas thinks—even with half of the tiles missing. His footsteps echo hollowly as he makes his way inside. The sun beats down through a hole in the ceiling, casting an odd speckled pattern on the floor.
Behind the missing chunk of ceiling, a girl a few years younger than Claire sits with a book in her lap. When she hears Cas’s footsteps, her head jerks up.
“It’s all right,” Cas says, hands extended slightly so she can see he’s not armed.
She stares at him for a few seconds, gauging the danger, before setting the book carefully on the ground and getting to her feet.
“The books. Are there many left?”
The girl shakes her head solemnly. “No.”
She stoops to collect the book and hugs it to her chest, like she’s afraid he’s going to take it away from her.
Cas sighs imperceptibly, not wanting to give the impression that he’s frustrated with her. What was the point of flying halfway around the world?
“Why do you want them?”
“I’m…looking for something. Something very old. My friends and I need it to rescue their mother. She’s in danger. And we thought the library would have answers.”
Right now, honesty seems to be the best policy. She keeps her eyes trained on him. When he mentions Mary, they seem to soften.
She scuffs at the ground with her toe. “I’ve been rescuing the books. I didn’t want them to go to waste. Do you think you could use them?”
For the second time in less than a week, he finds himself thinking how incredible humans are. They are in the middle of a war-torn city, a civil war nearly a decade in the making. This girl has never known peace, but she knows words. And that is somehow enough.
Cas smiles. “May I?”
He earns a small smile in return.
The girl’s name is Leila, and her mother sets an extra table setting for Cas the moment he walks in the door. She glances questioningly at her daughter, but she seems to understand when Leila comes in from the other room, toting a pile of books.
While dinner is cooking and Leila is sorting through her collection, trying to determine what would help Cas the best, he plays soccer with her brothers in the street outside. When one falls, Cas presses the tip of one finger to the boy’s bloodied knee and the other to his lips. They all watch in quiet fascination as the wound heals.
“This is everything. Mythology and religion,” Leila says when he comes back inside, sweat gleaming on his forehead and two very giddy boys behind him.
“I can’t thank you enough.”
She smiles. “I always wanted to be a librarian.”
Several days later, when Castiel boards another plane in Lebanon, he has both Amina and Leila on his mind.
Maybe one day he’ll come back to build a school after all.