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It’s a long time before the noise stops. He’s sleepwalking, he’s underwater. Someone takes the blade out of his hands and in his weak, coming-down state he doesn’t resist much. Or he does, it’s hard to remember. It doesn’t matter, though, because his awareness of the blade is perfect even when he’s not touching it. Someone, Sam, throws it across the room and Dean can feel it skitter across the floor. He sinks into a chair and stays there for a long time. Breathing.
Sam and Cas say things to him and to each other and Dean doesn’t think he responds to any of it.
Gadreel. That bone handle cold against his palm. The mark, alive.
The memory isn’t situated right: did he just kill Gadreel or is he about to do it? Is he still doing it? But then things shift back into place and he knows what happened.
Sam goes to bed because he’s angriest, or because he’s the only one of them who’s still mortal.
The pleasant golden light in the library feels unbearably bright as Dean returns to himself. He rests his face in his hands to block it out. When he looks up some time later, his vision and hearing have returned to normal, or at least to the range of a bad headache, and Cas is sitting across from him looking beat and staring off into the middle distance.
It’s where they sat earlier—right before—
“You should go to bed,” Cas says quietly, like he has no voice left.
Dean raises his eyebrows. “You first.”
Cas shakes his head, and the look he gives Dean then is awfully sad. “I’m still an angel.”
“Yeah—” Dean tries to smile at him and makes it about halfway— “I’m not.”
“Dean—” Cas says helplessly, and Dean regrets bringing up what, exactly, he might be, now.
“Forget it, Cas, it’s okay.” He waves a hand and pushes his chair back from the table.
“No, it’s not.” (Again with the ‘no,’ Dean thinks.) “We have to figure out what to do.”
Dean stands and shrugs, and Cas stands up to match him. “I know what to do,” Dean counters. “I’m gonna kill Metatron and get your friends back home before they turn into pumpkins.”
Cas narrows his eyes just slightly, but for once it’s not with confusion. “Metatron does fancy himself a kind of fairy godmother. The comparison doesn’t quite work beyond that, though.”
“He—well, yeah, I guess.” Also, what? “How the hell do you know Cinderella?”
“I don’t know what everyone’s so shocked about. Cinderella is a very old story.”
Dean crosses his arms and waits.
“Also, Metatron downloaded every story he knew into my brain when he had me captive. He knows a lot of them. Movies, books, television shows...”
“You’re joking. This is the first good news I’ve heard all day.”
Cas politely doesn’t note that it was probably good news earlier when he’d refused to kill Dean, which is big of him, but now Dean’s thinking it anyway.
“So you don’t sleep?” Cas asks him.
Dean shrugs. “Less and less.”
“And you never slept much to start with,” Cas says. (He’d know, the creep.) “Do you want something to eat?”
Dean thinks it over. No, is the truth, but he’d like to be hungry. “Sure,” he says, “why not,” and Cas nods at him and leads the way to the kitchen.
As they’re leaving the room, Cas pauses, and looks back to where the blade lays, then at Dean. “So,” he begins awkwardly, “you don’t...”
Dean clears his throat. Cas probably already knows this, but he still doesn’t want to say it. “Yeah.” He lifts his palm, and as they both watch, the blade twirls in place. “Doesn’t matter, now. I can leave it here because I can bring it to me whenever I want. Because it’s...”
“Part of you,” Cas finishes, and Dean practically shivers.
In the kitchen, Cas fills the kettle with water and puts it on the stove and they lean against the counter next to each other and wait for it to boil.
They’ve both got their arms crossed and Dean can’t help it, he says, “I don’t think I need to eat, either.” Because it’s a scary thing, or at least he knows enough to know it should be, even if he can’t quite summon the proper emotion.
When Cas shrugs, his elbow knocks against Dean’s. “I ate plenty of times I didn’t need to.”
“That’s true, I guess.” And weirdly, it does make Dean feel better. “Cas, earlier, with Tessa...”
He pauses for a long time but Cas doesn’t interrupt. There’s no noise but the roar of the burner under the kettle.
“She knew what it meant, that I had the blade. And she still killed herself with it. But something changed when I killed Gadreel tonight. Thing is, Tessa and me...” Dean runs a hand over his face. “She’s duty-bound, you know? She wants balance in the universe and all that. Deaths when they’re fated to happen, whatever that means. Souls to their rightful places. That’s her stake in this, always has been. So I know she wants Heaven open again. And she was pissed at me for ruining her suicide bomber play. But... we go way back. She wouldn’t hurt me for the sake of it, she wouldn’t be able to.
“But killing an angel with the blade, it did something to me. More with Gadreel than with her, but... I mean, she knew what she was doing. Wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t think it was going to help unlock Heaven, somehow.”
The kettle begins to whistle, quietly at first and then quickly louder. Cas flips the burner off, gets out a teapot and measures tea leaves into the strainer, then removes the kettle from the stove to pour it into the teapot. When he notices Dean has stopped talking, he looks up and says, “Go on.”
“Well...” Dean shakes his head. He’s pacing around the part of the kitchen they’re in as he talks. “She believes in fate, is what I’m saying. And that means she believes that what’s happening to me is part of this. It has to be part of this. So...” He stops and opens his hands, offers that up to Cas.
He turns fully from the tea to face Dean and leans back against the counter once again. “I don’t understand why you’d care what she believes,” Cas says frankly, and Dean feels such a rush of love for him that it’s almost overwhelming. “She believed it was okay to kill innocent people if she was also killing the angels she was targeting. She was wrong about that, too.”
“She isn’t wrong about Heaven, though, is she? She said souls are screaming to be reaped, stuck here, and she can’t help them. She was...” He looks at the floor, at their shoes.
“It must’ve been awful to see her die like that. You’ve known her for a long time.”
“Yeah, well. She was a reaper. Not exactly BFF material.”
Once, in Wyoming, Dean told Tessa she was the aching, missing thing he’d felt in his gut for a year. His rightful death. She’d hated him, sometimes, and sometimes she’d been kind to him. Either way they’d been tied together. Bizarrely, Dean wonders who will reap him now, if not her. It would’ve been nice, for her to be the one to lead him in.
When he looks up — when he realizes he’s been lost in thought — it’s to see Cas watching him. Dean’s brow lowers in confusion and he touches his cheek to find it wet. He rolls his eyes at himself, drags a palm over his face to dry it.
Cas takes a step toward him and puts his hand on Dean’s arm. “We can fix this,” he says to Dean.
“I know,” Dean agrees. They can fix it: They can kill Metatron, because Dean has Cain’s mark on his arm and an ancient blade in his library. He pulls at it with his mind and it lifts up from the ground. It’s funny, it’s not like he can see the room, exactly, but he knows what’s there. He knows he’d be able to tell if anyone were nearby. In fact, he has a distant knowledge of Sam in his room, awake, that he shouldn’t have. How much do angels know about the blade, he wonders? How much did Gadreel know when he showed up tonight? Not enough.
From where he stands in the kitchen, he sets the blade in the center of the library table, handle toward one of the seats. There’s more to it than just power, obviously. The urge to kill Gadreel had been unquestionable, and Dean knows it wasn’t exactly strategic, in big-picture terms. So he’s definitely going to have to be stopped, after Metatron, because he isn’t going to stop by himself.
“Cas, how do you guys choose who reaps who?” Dean asks.
Cas gapes at him for a second. “Damn it, Dean,” he says, and pulls Dean into a hug. A hand on the back of Dean’s head, he tells him, “If you’ve ever trusted me, believe me when I say we can fix Heaven without losing you.”
“Sure I trust you,” Dean agrees, and lets his head drop to Cas’s shoulder. Behind Cas’s back, Dean’s hands rest in two handfuls of his trench coat. “You’re an idiot, though. Hey, do angels have them? Someone to take your spirit to the next place?”
Cas holds him tighter. “We don’t have souls. We are spirits. We don’t—” Dean wishes he could see his face because he sounds choked up— “we don’t go anywhere, after.”
“What if you’re human, too? Like you sometimes. Do you have a soul?”
“I don’t know,” Cas says, very quietly. “I think maybe not.”
“It’s okay. Might be better that way, anyway, you know? I mean it’s either a fake loop of memories or downstairs, right? You’re not missing anything.”
“You saw Ash and Pamela together in Heaven, you know there’s a way to see the people you love again.”
Dean disentangles himself finally and they break apart, although they’re still close enough to touch. “I guess, man. I don’t really think about it much. You know, doesn’t apply, and all.” He holds up a hand before Cas can argue. “Don’t promise I’m not going to Hell, ‘cause you can’t. You know you can’t.”
“Dean,” Cas says, and levels him with a stare with the crackling energy of divine power behind it. “I would rip this world apart before I would let you go back there. And you should believe that.”
“Okay.” Dean lifts a hand, hesitates halfway, then touches the pad of his thumb to Cas’s cheek, until the rest of his fingers too rest against his sweet face. And then he drops his hand back to his side. “I believe you. I mean it.”
“Then why doesn’t it matter?” Cas asks him, sadly.
“I just feel fate pushing me along, I guess.”
“That’s why you have to choose!” Cas exclaims, hands thrown up in frustration. “I never thought I’d have to argue free will to you.”
“Yeah, well. Look, let’s not right now, okay? I don’t need to sleep but it’s still night, right? Let’s do something more...”
“Peaceful?”
“Sure.”
“We’re going to drink this tea, then,” Cas says and turns to get mugs out of the cabinet.
“Whatever you want. We should probably put another kettle on, it’s been awhile.”
“No, I kept the teapot warm.” He clinks the mugs down onto the counter and pours steaming tea into both of them.
Dean raises his eyebrows. “That’s a good angel trick.”
“It’s not the worst one,” Cas agrees. He holds Dean’s mug out to him. “Let’s go outside.”
Dean shrugs. “Sure. Why?”
“Because I’m scared you’re forgetting what it’s like to be a person, and standing on earth might remind you.”
Dean huffs almost a laugh. Why not. “Right.”
So they sit on the paving stones behind the bunker’s side wall, leaning against the building, and drink green tea, and soon the sun stains the dark horizon red, what they can see of it through the trees.
It’s nothing Dean ever wanted before, but being not-quite-human with Cas is pretty good. Maybe he’ll be too not-quite-human to die, anyway. Except he knows he’s not, the same way he knows he’s not going to be stopped, the same way he knows he’s going to kill Metatron soon. He hasn’t been wrong so far: Abaddon, Gadreel.
Maybe it’s the blade that knows it.
“Hey, Cas,” he says, after they’ve been quiet a few minutes in the sweet morning air, looking out at the trees.
“Hm.”
Their empty mugs sit beside them on the ground. The birds have been calling for awhile, and they’re getting louder and louder as the forest wakes up. “You think it’ll be Death—like, himself? That wouldn’t be so bad. Had a few meals together and all, sort of. I mean, long as it’s not a stranger...”
Cas doesn’t reply, and Dean knows he’s hurt him by not being able to get around this idea. He thinks Cas might walk away, but of course he doesn’t. Instead, Cas shifts his hand from his own lap into Dean’s, palm up, and lets Dean hold on to it. The morning breaks, and on the library table the blade twirls idly.