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All the town of Shafter knew them as the lovebug, though they were certainly not arthropodal but human. Well, say humanoid. To call either of the beings inhabiting the body Shafter knew as the lovebug ‘human’ would be a stretch at best. Their stay in Shafter was brief, a nine-day wonder, but any wonder that lasted nine days in the instant Internet age—that of full-season television releases, downloadable video games, and livestreamed political strife—well, such was a wonder indeed.
Just as it was impossible to comprehend the reason behind the sparks of joy and contentment the lovebug bestowed upon those in their presence, it was impossible to describe in meaningful detail the felicity of the lovebug. You could hear of how just a nod of appreciation from the lovebug could vanish the smart of handling an irritable, aggressive customer; how watching them lay on tester memory foam mattresses with their hands gently clasped could solve bubbles of anxiety and tighten your focus and resolve; could even see those affected sighing and reminiscing on the sight of them as if under a spell with your own eyes, but the true effect of the lovebug required proximity. Cross paths with the lovebug, and you would feel again all that which you had deemed the naïve dreams of adolescence— you would believe again in sincere kindness, in kindness that persisted through unspeakable despair.
Fortunately for Shafter, the lovebug was eager to explore every nook, cranny, and dusty old alley the town had to offer, and in this way, the whole town came to know their magic.
Nothing like the lovebug had ever before existed in Shafter. They had appeared, it seemed, from thin air and seemed to exist as well in thin air; no one could determine where they lived or if they had a car or bicycle—no one had even seen them on a bus. Rather, they had strolled, one day, into Jaci’s Red Wagon, ordered a heap of food, and brightened the day of everyone sitting in view of them. What was even more charming was that they seemed excited by everything members of the town had long ago deemed mundane—dandelions through cracks in sidewalks, the pen aisle in the town’s lone Staples, candy from the shop that had been there since the start of the last century. They never spoke or signed, but everyone knew their simple joy of living from the brightness in their eyes and the sparkle of their smile and knew that they intended to stay.
In fact, they seemed, at times, joyous in and kind to themselves: their hand would graze a rough patch of wall, and as if burned, they would draw it back to examine it with careful attention and, if the words of some townspeople were to be believed, smooth over and vanish any scuff as if it had never been there. They walked softly, always, ran gentle fingers across their own skin in what seemed like unconscious gestures, and never hopped up or down ledges but rather walked around until they found a set of stairs. Anyone who saw them knew that they were filled deeply with love, though for what or whom exactly, no one was exactly sure.
This indefinite lovebug infection wouldn’t have been a problem at all for Shafter, but it was the nature of this world that the mystical, grandiose descriptions of the lovebug that passed through town reached the ears of those who had returned to their friends, coworkers, and usually-scraps-of-families one day with glazed eyes and salt sticky against their sweaty, trembling fingers. It became the hunting community’s gospel that the lovebug was supernatural, and with this gospel came the direct and nearly inalterable conclusion that the lovebug needed to be exterminated. Little if anything could shake this conclusion, as the incident several months prior, wherein a girl who was odd but not occult had been tied to a chair and stabbed fully in the stomach with an iron knife that never started to sizzle had shown. For that was what—for some their entire lives—the hunting townspeople had been told: that which was not human was acceptable and, in many cases, including hunting, appropriate to kill.
The friends in higher places of the hunters of the Shafter area had been quite angry about having to undo that one.
Numerous local and less experienced hunters had tried capturing the lovebug and had all failed—both on the physical level of salt and holy water having no effect on the lovebug and on the emotional level of taking one look at the joyous, lovely lovebug and no longer having the heart to take their joy—, leaving the job to one grumbly Dean Winchester, angry to be called out on what seemed like such a mundane call, and his ‘angel friend’ Castiel, as other hunters privy to the whole business of the failed Apocalypse usually called him. They weren’t the oddest of pairs, but at times, they came close—Dean a stiff, stubbled, sort of unstable-reading man with beer tinging his breath and Cas, softer-gazed, but with a sharpness about him that usually betrayed that he was far more powerful than his form with the too-big trench coat necessarily indicated. What Castiel’s appearance did not indicate, and what he could get away with only because of others dismissing it as angelic oddity, was that his mind whirled with a blizzard of what could only surely be described as absurdity, and whenever Castiel could not condense that absurdity into acceptable speech, he swallowed it behind the teeth of his dead man’s vessel.
Anyone who knew the story of the failed Apocalypse knew that Castiel should have departed to heaven and never come back a long time ago, but everyone also saw how well the two worked together and therefore tended not to question Castiel’s extended stay on Earth. Though Dean had a brother he had once hunted alongside, Sam Winchester had left the life years ago—after something had happened, as Dean would tell the story—, and anyone else aside from Castiel who tried to join Dean on hunts without fail had a terrible time dealing with his temper and quickness to blame. On his side, Castiel hardly needed physical help to slay anything, but he didn’t always know where to start or what points to take between ‘find’ and ‘kill,’ and Dean was helpful for filling in those blanks. As the years passed, Dean and Cas’s only real successful hunts started to be with each other. They were each other’s needle and thread, each other’s ‘best friend’ as Dean would say, and neither could successfully be swapped out. Castiel understood this bond and the fact that the only way it could conceivably be broken would be to explain it to Dean. Dean did not understand it because it never occurred to him to try, and had he tried, he would have failed, since he was inherently non-equipped for the task.
So, Dean regarded Cas with an earnest but at times stilted appreciation. Cas regarded Dean…with the blizzard.
“This sounds like the cleanest-fucking-cut monster-of-the-week case of all time—the son of a bitch hasn’t even attacked anyone yet!—and not a single chucklefuck in this shithole town can handle it. Unbelievable.” In Dean’s cupholders sat a bottle of beer, and when Dean reached down to take a swig, he did so with the knowledge that Cas would correct the wheel if he started to swerve. “Got any ideas, Cas?”
“No. It is unusual for the supernatural to evoke joy in those who come across it, however.” Dean tilted his head towards him in acknowledgement, perhaps agreement.
The final component strengthening Dean and Castiel’s bond was their preferred mode of travel. While, true, Castiel could make them appear wherever they wanted with rapidity, Dean had always been fundamentally uncomfortable, at the very least, with angelic travel. And though the slowness of this method of travel had irritated Castiel at first, he had come to rely on it—one of the only times he ever got, really, to be alone with his thoughts. And there was that about Castiel which made moments of isolation a vital necessity, for anyone like Castiel must occasionally be themselves, and in all company, Castiel was surely not. In the Impala, Cas had hours to sink his feet into the imposing, amassing pit of torrential snowfall that was his core.
When they came upon Shafter, it was sunset, and the pink sky was bright and beautiful as anything as Dean pulled the Impala, which Cas had most certainly floated along the last few miles, gas lights blinking, into the nearest gas station. It was at this gas station, too, that, just feet from their bumper, they found the lovebug, who was not really a lovebug at all but rather their respective brothers they had mutually left in hell, turning to stare at them with bright, glittery eyes that somehow spoke nothing of the same set of brothers they had watched fall into the Cage 10 years prior.
“Fuck,” Dean said, with feeling, and Castiel was the first out of all of them to recover from his shock enough to slap down the angel depowering sigil Dean had on the dashboard, leaving Michael weaker than Castiel as he flitted from the passenger seat to the lovebug’s side, grabbing them and then depositing them in the trunk. “Nice moves, Cas,” Dean said. The snacks the lovebug had been picking up from the gas station store rested on the slimy, gasoline-stained ground. Not a drop of gas entered the Impala’s tank that day.
“We’ve gotta kill him,” Dean said on their way straight back to Kansas. Better not to risk it with what they had in their trunk, and Dean didn’t have to worry about nodding off at the wheel.
“Hmm,” Cas acknowledged.
“Can’t think of a bigger liability than that asshole walking around free. And,” Dean raised an index finger from the steering wheel in emphasis, “it’s creepy as hell, him walking around wearing Adam’s body like that. Hey, you know it is.”
It was a habit of Dean’s to forget that Castiel’s body was not his own either. Cas said nothing.
On these long drives, Dean could not help but fill up the space with his voice, and he often went through different methods of filling that space. To Castiel’s distaste, this often meant talking about his sexual exploits, and this drive was no different. Dean had many stories of this sort to tell, but it had long ago struck Cas that Dean never seemed particularly attached to any of them. It seemed to Cas that, with most of the stories, Dean told them just for the sake of telling. “Wish we could have stayed longer,” Dean said for this moment of confined silence, “don’t know if I ever told you this story, last time we were here when those idiots almost butchered that girl, there was this hot fucking chick in one of the seedy bars around town. Dolly Parton tits, face half plastic, the whole shebang, you know? She could still move her lips, though. Knew exactly what to do with ‘em.” And what we could do together if only you’d allow, righteous one, Castiel’s blizzard hacked like a bloody chunk of flesh from the maw of a choking predator. “Hey,” Dean nudged him with his elbow, “maybe this time I could have found you a chick, huh?” How strange, how sorry, how significant that I have found here and now the heaviest burden of my lifetime. Dean’s words then stretched further back, to all those times he had tried to get Castiel to join in his activities, and Cas switched his focus with all the infallibility and precision of a literal switch to the music flowing through the car’s speakers.
One thing you could learn quite quickly about Dean Winchester—unlike many other things—was that he had a rigid and unwavering taste in mid-to-late 20th century rock music. And both because he assumed Castiel incapable of forming an opinion on such things and because he had never very well valued the opinions of anyone save his father, this was what played on the Impala’s radio at all times.
But Castiel did opine—naturally, within the blizzard of his thoughts—on such things, and when he was otherwise free to roam the Earth, he often listened to music beyond what Dean enjoyed; hardly, anymore, did he truly listen to the songs Dean hummed along to, and as the drive stretched into darkness, he let himself forget all but the glint of Dean’s brass ring and the flash of his stubble in the reflection of the headlights, letting the tune and words constructing it play out in his mind,
Cuando el amor llega así
De esta manera
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
No sabe llorar
And he added, as many of the human societies he’d visited over the centuries had been apt to, Arca, 2017 CE.
And then, he felt it, the strange thing—how, in the same way that the lovebug had been able to swallow the worries and create anew the hope of all who saw them, so too did this ability to touch extend into Castiel’s angelic and thereby always, to the loosely defined servants of heaven, ajar mind.
The lovebug did not speak, but Castiel could sense the way that they latched onto and turned over those beautiful lyrics that saddened him so deeply and, with them, finally came to that horrid, correct conclusion. Cas scrunched his hand up in his trench coat at the realization. Whereas until then, during the drive, the lovebug had been solemn, frustrated, sad, and angry, they pinged now with something that was none of those things, and they were directing that ping at Cas.
Michael had heard him!
Cas glanced to Dean, who of course could not hear and mercifully could not know, then checked again that the lovebug was secure in the trunk. It was unfortunate that his precious solitude in the storm was now untenable, but unbearable that another now knew his truth. No one could know: to breach the blizzard of Castiel’s thoughts was to breach the veil of death. In the open, this secret would ruin him. It would destroy him.
Castiel curled his lips into a snarl. Dean didn’t notice. Dean never noticed. The odd times they discussed the darker aspects of their lives with each other were like pulling teeth. Dean’s lack of attention was the one piece of light through the clouds—that he would not notice Castiel’s distress, nor the sharp spear of hatred Cas sent back to the lovebug and their subsequent response of confusion.
Castiel would not contest their deaths now. He would kill them himself before they got the chance to kill him—to kill the creature peering in feral snow blindness through the tiny, human eyes of a dead man.
He felt the lovebug shift with anxiety and then seem to communicate with someone who was not him but who could be no one else. Castiel dismissed it as him misinterpreting—or perhaps the torment of the Cage had affected Michael’s mind as much as his voice.
It was necessary now for Cas to go silent and soldierly, the way he had been shaped into before the first fingers of his grace had touched Dean’s soul. Though he could have left the cramped, human space containing Dean Winchester, he did not. He would not. He would never.
They reached the Bunker.
Dean slapped a palm against Cas’s leg, just above his knee. “Help me haul him inside.” Cas stared for a while at that patch of his body.
Cas nearly forgot to leave the car, and when he remembered, he moved with the awkward folding, unfolding, and gait of a thing alien to the world it was lodged in. “You get lost on the way?” Dean asked, standing with his arms crossed at the trunk.
Cas shrugged.
“Michael didn’t do anything to you on the ride, did he?”
“Of course he didn’t,” Cas spat. Not on the ride and not yet, that was, but Cas wasn’t going to give him the chance.
Dean grinned. A pissy Cas was a fun Cas—when that pissy Cas wasn’t pissy at or because of him. “You got it in for biggest brother or something?”
Cas shook with fear, primarily, that was tinged with rage. Dean saw only the rage. “Well, let’s get him inside first. I’ll even let you do the honors, though, ‘kay?” Cas would have done so even if Dean hadn’t offered. He would take Michael’s life no matter what, no matter, even, if Dean begged at his feet for him to stop. And so it was that he ripped open the trunk to cast his dead man’s eyes on the lovebug with such a callous, ferocious gaze that, in their fear, the lovebug forgot to struggle as Castiel hauled them onto his shoulder, Dean calling out an appreciative, “Right on, Cas,” as he stepped forward to unlock the Bunker. As Castiel followed behind him, he heard, in the mind of the lovebug, a sort of not-mumbling, a semi-tactile idioglossia that drew from Castiel a cruel, quiet laugh. Even if Cas could understand the crazed mumblings of a post-Cage Michael, nothing the archangel could say to him would change the death sentence Castiel had deemed vital to his own livelihood.
Dean and Cas threw the lovebug onto the dungeon’s floor and lit a ring of holy fire around them—but not before the lovebug had started to thrash and kick and gotten multiple fists to their face and body for their troubles in grabbing an archival book Dean and Cas had deemed ultimately harmless for them to have and more trouble than it was worth to try to take. “I’m gonna go make some calls, see if anyone has any ideas on how to get information out of this fucker or even wants any information from him. Watch him for me, Cas.” Cas nodded, but he didn’t intend to watch.
With Dean gone from the room, he narrowed his eyes at the lovebug and dug from the blizzard,
And all of my stumbling phrases never
Amounted to anything worth this feeling
All this heaven never could describe such a feeling as I’m hearing
And he tagged it, as many of the human societies he’d visited over the centuries had been apt to, Florence Welch, 2011 CE. With the lovebug now arisen from the floor, Cas beamed his eyes at them, coursing his tumultuous, searing power through his dead man’s body, that which had been killed by reason of housing the monster pacing behind its eyes. They heard him again and this time gave a single, solemn nod. As he marched from the room, the lovebug gazed upon his back with pity and plea.
It was, indeed, for good reason that Dean and Cas were regarded as the best of the best on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The Bunker’s weapons room had arms that could kill nearly anyone—including the three archangel blades they had plucked from the ashes of archangels whose deaths had come before the one that was soon to be. Castiel grabbed Lucifer’s blade, for he could not risk Michael coming out of this alive. Cas had lived longer than most beings could comprehend without knowing let alone being himself, the blustery creature that he was, and he refused with all of his heart to give that up. Anyone truly knowing him would force him to give that up, and Michael knew.
With the Devil’s archangel blade against his wrist, Castiel was stopped in the doorway leading to the lovebug by Dean calling a greeting down the stairs as he started to go down them. Cas did not expect Dean to be there, but the lopsided smile Dean gave at the sight of him made it so that he was not—could not be—mad at this interruption of his killing of Michael.
“Hey, buddy, came down to ask if you think I should call Tina about this. Seems like her thing, but you know her. A whole fucking bucket of sand up her vag about getting calls.”
“You should call her,” Cas said, with a silent thought of apology to Christina. His compassion for humans aside from Dean was lacking, but he tried because Dean felt he should. Christina, I realize his venom. It is mine above all, and it is my desire for us all that he one day lose his fixation on demeaning women, or at the very least transmute it into something useful.
“You’d usually tell me not to,” Dean said. Nothing was going as normal: Dean hadn’t questioned his behavior in what was encroaching on a decade and Dean usually left him to himself on those select hunts when they needed to bring someone back to the Bunker. Dean did not talk to him unless he needed help looking up a spell, wanted advice, or desired the physical presence of company. And though Castiel deeply enjoyed talking to Dean, every time they spoke, it made it that much more difficult for Cas to keep the blizzard within his mind rather than spilling its years of stockpiled slush out of his mouth.
He needed to kill Michael, soon.
“This is an exceptional circumstance,” Cas said simply. The words made Dean purse his lips in consideration, but he accepted the logic and neutrality of Castiel’s actions with only this featherlight bit of prodding. Finally, he left Cas to do what he intended to.
The moment the sound of Dean’s footsteps disappeared up the stairs, Cas turned on the lovebug and shot them a wide, bright toothy smile.
The lovebug grimaced. They would not cower.
They knew.
He saw them start to fumble with the book they had wrestled into their hands. And then he slipped the Devil’s archangel blade into his hand. It settled wrong in his palm as the other archangel blades did; it was heavy and hot to the touch, as if the metal itself was indignant at such a lowly, raving creature as Castiel daring to use it. It didn’t matter. It would work, and it would snuff the one person who could destroy him from the face of the world.
Castiel stepped close to the ring of flame and raised the archangel blade up close to point at the lovebug’s eyes. I will strike this through you, it will kill you, and you will be gone. And I will live on. I’ll tell Dean that I brought this blade in as a precaution, that you started to struggle, and I killed you. You’ll never reach him, and he won’t even suspect that something didn’t happen in exactly the way I told him it did.
Castiel wound his arm back with the intent to kill, but the motion died with a simple one from the lovebug—that of them holding up a piece of paper, offering a slight smile. Castiel reached to snatch the sheet, to prevent at least this scrap of the book from being incinerated in the flare of holy fire after his stabbing of Michael, but then, he saw that there were pictures inscribed atop the black of letters with the red of blood. Castiel could not see where the blood had come from but knew that the lovebug must have cut themselves, somehow, out of his sight just as they had apparently ripped out pages of the book.
The paper was divided into thirds. In the first frame was this: Dean, the rugged, righteous man he was in the vibrant, evocative hue of red; Castiel; and Michael to the side—a heart between Dean and Castiel. Castiel snarled at the sight, the presumed mockery, but the next frame showed Dean and Castiel with the heart again but with Michael twice, the lines composing the second Michael-figure fainter. The final frame showed the two Michael-figures with a heart between them.
Castiel couldn’t comprehend it: there was something he wasn’t understanding—he knew that—and that thing seemed immense and essential. He looked to the lovebug and watched with awe as their eyes flashed, not glowed, and he knew, viscerally, that the person standing before him was no longer Michael. He backed up several steps in shock, peered closer, and thought hard at the lovebug, breathlessly in awe even in his own mind, Adam?
Adam nodded, a giddy smile appearing across his face, glad that they had finally gotten through to him.
Even if the pictures weren’t clear enough, the fact that Adam was still around—if not quite how he was, though neither was Michael…well, that would be well enough proof. Cas let the archangel blade drop to floor and clatter against the concrete.
He began to laugh. He stepped forward and took the lovebug’s hands in his own, and they laughed with him.
Dean stretched and popped a whole row of vertebrae with the movement. He groaned at the feeling, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck on both sides. Tina was either a taciturn bitch or talked your ear off, and this call had been a case of the latter. He rubbed his face and turned around to start on his way downstairs again and jumped as he saw that Cas was standing right behind him.
“Jesus, Cas! What the hell?” Cas hadn’t done something like this in ages.
Cas, however, his expression strange, did not answer. He instead cocked his head towards the doorway and then walked down to the dungeon, not checking even once if Dean followed, though he did. At the doorway, Cas stopped and fixed his gaze upon what Dean saw was an empty room.
“What the hell?” Dean asked, stalking inside; the first thing that caught his eye was that the ring of holy fire was extinguished and then that the floor bore the massive imprint of archangel wings. “You—you killed him? Now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
It took Cas longer than it usually did to respond. He drew a single sheet of paper from his coat pocket—about a third the size of a regular sheet from a book. As the lovebug had started on the wingprints, Castiel had torn it from the other frames in an immaculate, delicate tear.
Dean took the sheet from Cas’s hand and stared at it in obvious confusion. “Michael…drew this?” he asked.
Cas nodded.
“Why’d he draw himself twice?”
Cas shook his head. “He didn’t.”
Dean squinted and drew the picture even closer to his face. If it wasn’t Michael, then…. “That’s….”
“Adam,” Cas confirmed.
“And there’s a heart between them!” Dean announced. “You mean to tell me that son of a bitch was—all that time in hell—and to my little brother? That’s fucking sick!” Dean’s eyes shone with rage. “If I’d have known, I’d have made sure the last thing that motherfucker saw was my boot, a pool of his own blood, and a shitpit gas station floor!”
Cas nodded.
“Is that what happened? You killed Michael because you found out he was using Adam as—as his…fuck toy or whatever the hell?” He looked slightly uneasily over to the wingprints, “Damn shame you had to get Adam too. With all that going on, I’d have to call it a mercy killing, though….”
“Yes. Michael thought relaying this information to me would inspire sympathy.”
Dean snorted a laugh. “Yeah, well, clearly, he was wrong.” He stepped over to inspect the wingprints burned onto the floor. “Makes my fucking skin crawl just thinking about it. You know, I would rather die than have something like that happen to me.” He bent down and drew a finger through the ash. He examined it in pensive silence for a moment, then dusted his fingertips together and stood again. He turned to Cas. “Well, Tina just about melted my brain out of my ears, so what do you say we just leave this for tomorrow?”
Cas didn’t say anything.
“I’ll take that as a yes. ‘Night, Cas,” Dean said and, blessedly, shoved the slip of paper back into Cas’s hands before leaving. Castiel smiled fondly down at the picture before looking to the ashen wingprints he and Michael had crafted together—design tips courtesy of a bubbly Adam’s finger swipes through the air—before the lovebug’s escape.
“Pillars,” Castiel said to himself. The blizzard shifted, spun, and blew, and the lines continued on,
…of my heart
Everything got shattered in the dark
Tried to be evolved
Does it really matter at all?
And he added, as many of the human societies he’d visited over the centuries had been apt to, Hayley Kiyoko, 2018 CE.
Slowly, Castiel stepped into the former circle of flame. It was blissful to be alone again; it was blissful to blend again into the blizzard.
From a separate coat pocket than the one he had drawn the picture of Adam and Michael out of, he pulled the pictures of himself and Dean. For a while, he simply stared at them, observing the immaculate curves and contours the lovebug had crafted Dean’s face from, marveling at the beauty of the features as did the Ancient Greeks with their newest styles of lifelike sculpture.
The blizzard hurled from its unrest, Why must we love where the lightning strikes and not where we choose?
And again, But I’m glad it’s you, righteous one, I’m glad it’s you.
Castiel shifted his fingers and, with the gentlest monstrous touch, ran a thumb down the browning lines composing Dean Winchester’s lips.