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Castiel was bound, almost naked, bleeding, all the things that Dean had feared, chained with his arms spread wide, like a martyr, his torso still gashed with sigils, his bare feet bloody where they had scraped upon the flagstones of his dungeon. All the way here, Sam had wanted to talk about the possibilities but Dean had silenced him with a shake of the head. “We’ll know when we find them…” was all he had to say. His imagination, however, had been working overtime even as his lips stayed pursed in silence. There was still no sign of Adam, but here, at last, was Castiel. Or what was left of him. As they watched, Raphael dragged up Castiel’s head to reveal more blood and bruises, blue eyes dazed and barely comprehending, his dry lips scabbed from repeated blows. He looked as if he had been the dungeon for months and Dean wondered, with a chill, how long it had truly been, how long it had been before. To angels, who could manipulate time, perhaps a human afternoon could be made to last a century. He wondered for how long they had tortured Castiel last time to make him obey heaven’s commandments.
“Where are the Winchesters?” Raphael demanded.
Castiel spat out a mouthful of blood. “I don’t know.”
“And if you did know?”
“I wouldn’t tell you.”
“How long do you intend to keep up this ridiculous charade, brother?” Raphael demanded coldly. “You know you can’t withstand the will of heaven.”
Castiel’s voice was a low, hoarse defiance. “If the will of heaven isn’t the will of God then it isn’t heaven. All I have to withstand is the spite of archangels, angry because their apocalypse isn’t running to plan. Oh, and screw you.”
The blow was definitely more in anger than in sorrow, nothing measured about it – it almost snapped the angel’s neck. Castiel seemed to be riding Raphael’s last nerve. Sam darted Dean an anxious glance. “I think Cas may have been hanging around with you for too long.”
Privately, Dean was forced to agree. Raphael had the same look in his eye he had seen in the eyes of demons, angels, archangels, vampires, and various authority figures in uniforms for most of his adult life. Apparently Dean Winchester just was that annoying, and now it seemed that Castiel was getting pretty annoying too.
Raphael bent his head in close to that of his bleeding angelic brother. “Do you know what you are, Castiel?”
Dean wished that Castiel would stop answering the guy because every time he spoke, his scabbed lips bled anew. “Let me guess – rebel, traitor, renegade, abomination?”
Raphael’s smile was chilling in its certainty. “No, brother. What you are – what you truly are – is bait.”
That was when the metal doors clanged shut behind them.
Sam wondered if they had left them in here with a bleeding Castiel to make them realize the futility of resistance, or perhaps they just wanted them to know what bad shape their angel was in so when they started torturing him in front of them again, they would give in that much faster. He wondered too if anyone but he and Castiel knew how truly gentle his brash, self-loathing brother could be.
“You’re going to be okay…” Dean was saying with quiet conviction as he wiped the blood from Castiel’s face. He had already wrapped him in his trenchcoat – Castiel shivering as he pushed his arms through the familiar sleeves, seeming to need the comfort, not of clothing, but of its scent. Castiel had been prickly, angry, and defiant, even when sober, for their last few meetings, not to mention having gone completely postal with Dean in that alley, but now his resistance was minimal before he gave way and leaned against the man in whom he claimed to have lost all faith, Dean’s arm supporting him as they both sat in the corner, huddled against the furthest wall, while Dean gave him water and tended to his wounds. “You’re going to be okay…”
Given the underlying tremor of sheer rage in Dean’s voice, Sam thought his brother was doing well to sound even that soothing.
“As we’re trapped by angry archangels determined to make you into Michael’s vessel, Sam into a scattering of atoms, and me into a stain on the floor, I seriously doubt it,” Castiel retorted.
Dean managed a smile despite the way his face was taut with anxiety and anger. “That’s my pissy nerd angel. I knew you were still in there.”
“Where else would I be?”
The look Castiel gave Dean, their faces, as always, far too close together for normal human interaction, was a mixture of exasperation and adoration. Dean might be maddening and confusing and have seriously dallied with the prospect of becoming Michael’s vessel, but he hadn’t yet completely fallen off his pedestal as far as Castiel was concerned, Sam noted. Presumably Dean finding Castiel when he had been hidden away by heaven’s host hadn’t done a lot to take the shine off. There were times when Sam thought how much easier conversation would be between these two if Castiel learned to grapple with human vernacular and then he remembered Dean’s provocative ‘Blow me’ and supposed it was sometimes just as well that Castiel didn’t understand human slang.
He had heard Dean mutter a ‘feathery fricking prick teaser’ after Castiel had fluttered off on a recent occasion, and had thought about remonstrating that Castiel had no idea that his behaviour would, under normal circumstances, be that of someone letting another know that he liked him, he really, really liked him. Castiel just didn’t get normal human mores; he never had and quite possibly never would. He didn’t know the effect it had when he got in too close, gazed for too long, failed to moisten his dry lips while his breath sighed across another’s man mouth, looked unblinkingly into Dean’s eyes as if all the world’s truths were contained within them, sat on Dean’s bed while Dean was sleeping in it, crowded his space, and was eerily passive about letting Dean touch him, guide him, or even adjust his clothing for him, mostly uncurious and completely trusting. Given how long it was since his brother had had sex with anyone (or did Anna, like Castiel, count as an anything?) Castiel’s genuine innocence was the only reason, Sam presumed, why Dean had not shoved him up against a wall and at least kissed him. Dean had shown remarkable self-restraint in not doing so, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t costing him more and more of an effort.
Still, the comment was unwarranted and he had been about to say so, then Sam had seen Dean’s shrugging resignation warring with his undoubted sexual frustration and decided that he would be wasting his breath. Dean knew Castiel wasn’t doing it on purpose, but the effect it was having was still painful – literally, Sam presumed, from all that groaning Dean had done in the shower on the last time that Castiel had gazed intently into Dean’s eyes, breathed on his mouth, murmured something cryptic in a low, husky voice, and then disappeared in a flutter of feathers, leaving Dean hot and extremely bothered. Presumably Dean had decided that with nothing left to lose he might as well let Castiel know that when he looked at Dean that way, it made Dean want to fuck him. Except Sam didn’t think that Castiel had got that from what Dean had said. He suspected Castiel had just thought Dean was being a dick. Possibly because Dean was indeed being a dick. He was just being a genuinely sexually frustrated dick trying to push everyone away whom he loved before he sacrificed himself for the multitudes. Given the way Dean and Castiel could spend hours in an average week gazing intently into each other’s eyes apparently experiencing moments of perfect communication, they certainly could get their wires thoroughly crossed on occasion.
Dean handed Castiel to Sam, who was ready to sink down next to him and take his weight, to put his arm around his shoulder and help him sip the water. Castiel grabbed at it, growling that he was an angel and didn’t need water but still he drank and then took the aspirin that Sam offered him and downed the bottle in a ravenous gulp before drinking, drinking, drinking. Dean had crossed to the dungeon door – this parody of a prison in which they were trapped, complete with cobwebs and rusty iron everywhere, like the archangels had overdosed on Dumas at an impressionable age – and was calling out with the crisp clarity of anger:
“Just so you know, Raphael, you ass-wipe. You touch Cas again and I’ll kill you. I killed Zachariah. He thought he was untouchable and now he’s a feathery stain on the floorboards in Van Eyes. You come near Cas again, you lay a finger on him again, and I’ll turn you into an angel kebab.”
“And how exactly are you planning to make good on that threat, Deano?”
For a moment Sam thought it was Raphael and his heart missed a beat at the prospect of his own no doubt horrible death or more torture for Castiel, but when the doors creaked open as if they were auditioning for a horror movie, it was the Trickster who stepped through.
Castiel focused on him with difficulty through the blood in his eyes. “Gabriel,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of an angel who had just found a demon slug in his heavenly lettuce.
“Back at you, bro,” Gabriel retorted. “Incidentally, you look like shit.”
“Take it up with Raphael,” Castiel growled back in his ridiculously low and now even more ridiculously husky voice. He sounded as if his archangel brethren had been making him gargle with acid-covered nails. For all Sam knew they had been. Dean had said that Raphael claimed to have a better imagination than Zachariah.
Dean glowered at Gabriel in a way that was no more welcoming. “What do you want?”
“Thought you might need a lift home. What with you having so brilliantly got yourselves trapped here and all. Amazing that. I kept wondering when you two bozos would finally learn how to follow the yellow brick road and when you did it was to walk straight into a trap.”
Dean said furiously, “You knew Cas was here? You knew what those sons of bitches were doing to him and you left him here? What’s wrong? Nothing good on the TV that night or do all you angelic scumbags just get off on pain, especially when it’s your own brother being tortured?”
Castiel said huskily to Gabriel, “We don’t need any help from you.”
Sam decided it was time to inject a note of sanity into the proceedings. Loudly, so as to drown out the other two, he said, “Thank you. We’d love a lift.”
All three turned to look at him in surprise, as if they’d forgotten he was there until that moment. Conversationally, he continued, “Unless you weren’t really offering, just trying to provoke Dean and Castiel, which, I have to tell you, wouldn’t be much of a feat as that’s pretty easy to do right now. In fact I would think a child of four, with or without a lollipop, could probably manage it.”
Clearly genuinely confused now, Castiel said, “What do lollipops have to do with our imprisonment?”
Dean rolled his eyes and said, “Cas, you need to stop being so literal.”
“Why?”
“Because sometimes words don’t mean anything, they’re just the way that humans fill up the silence. Roll with it.”
“What is the point of expanding energy on words that have no meaning?”
Gabriel gave Dean a winsome smile. “Tell the truth now, you really do know why so many of Castiel’s brothers are happy to torture him, don’t you, Dean?”
“No,” Dean lied stolidly. “I have an annoying geeky little brother and I find I can get through the day without torturing him just fine.”
“For three decades, maybe. Try three millennium and see how tolerant you feel.”
Brightly, Sam said, “You said something about a lift?”
“We don’t want any favours from him,” Castiel growled.
“Yes, we do,” Sam said firmly. “We want any favours that are going that don’t involve us being made into angel meat suits.”
“Or line dancing,” Dean interposed. “I may have been willing to let Michael wear me to the Prom, but I have some standards.”
Castiel looked at him in confusion. “What does…?”
“It doesn’t,” Dean said forcefully. “Line dancing has nothing to do with anything, so don’t ask.”
Castiel gazed unblinkingly up at Dean, blood trickling unheeded down his face to caress the line of his full lower lip and then, with agonizing slowness, trickle onto his chin. “You are a very strange man,” he said.
As if he could not stop himself, Dean used his thumb to wipe the blood from Castiel’s chin. “Oh, and like you’re the most normal angel on the block.”
They gazed into each other’s eyes, their mouths a breath apart and then Gabriel coughed pointedly and Dean self-consciously moved back.
Sam helped Castiel to his feet, feeling how much it hurt Castiel to move him, the angel slack in his grip, stubborn and defiant in spirit but physically half-dead, Dean hurrying to take Castiel’s right side, cradling him as gently as if he were made of glass. Castiel leaned against Dean, their faces touching, stifling a whimper, eyes closing as he fought the waves of pain. Sam gave Gabriel a pleading look while even Dean’s glare had more desperation to it than hostility. They were at the end of their rope and Castiel was barely conscious. Without help, they weren’t going to make it home.
Something flickered in Gabriel’s eyes that could well have been compassion. “You Winchesters are pathetic,” he told them, “and you’ve dragged Daddy’s bestest behaved little angel down with you.” But even as he spoke he was stretching out two fingers in his left hand and one on his right. A fraction before he was touched, Sam saw the fingers so gently press against Dean and Castiel’s foreheads, and then there was a rush of air, a gasp for breath and he found himself standing outside Bobby Singer’s.
Dean said urgently, “A little help here.”
Sam turned in time to see Castiel about to pass out and grabbed his left arm to hold him up. Between them they carried him into Bobby’s house. “Where’s Gabriel?” Sam asked.
“Who cares?” Dean said darkly. “He left Cas alone in that place with his psycho brothers.”
“Did you somehow fail to notice he just saved all our butts?”
“A day late and dollar short,” Dean grunted. Sam decided this was one of those times when he would be better off holding his breath. Dean’s thinking had narrowed for the moment: Angels had tortured Castiel. Angels sucked. Except for Castiel. Who didn’t suck – or blow. Alas.
Sam said, “I suppose this wouldn’t be the moment to talk about it being time to talk to Cas about the birds and the bees and the way that sometimes when a demon hunter and a renegade angel love each other very much…”
“Sam?” said Dean.
“Yes, Dean?”
“Shut up and help me get Cas into bed.”
“I kind of thought I was…”
“Shut up.”
He shut up and helped Dean to lay Castiel carefully onto one of Bobby’s beds. Then Dean sat on the side of the bed and gazed down at Castiel with raw anxiety and something that looked a little like longing.
“He’s tough, remember?” Sam tried to sound bright and positive but suspected there was something of a quaver in his voice. If Castiel died he didn’t think that Dean was going to make it.
And because he did not think it was more important to stay on his high horse than get some practical assistance, he went out into the gasoline-scented shadows of Bobby’s yard and prayed to Gabriel:
“I hope you can hear me. I wanted to say ‘Thanks, for the rescue’. I appreciate it. We were probably toast without you back there and—”
A rush of feathered air. “No ‘perhaps’ about it. You were totally toast.”
“I want to ward against Raphael, but I didn’t want to ward against you.”
Gabriel, who could have been bestriding the world like a colossus but had chosen to inhabit this oddly attractive little vessel instead, looked up at him in an incalculable fashion. “Is that a metaphor?”
“I’m trying to tell you I’m grateful. We all are—”
“They’re not, because your brother has made my brother as much of a stubborn little shit as he is, but I’ll take a ‘thank you’ where I get it. Now—get to your next request?”
“Can you fix Cas? Because your brother really did a number on him and I’m not sure he’s going to make it.”
“No one can ‘fix’ Castiel. Thanks to a certain Winchester he’s now permanently broken.”
Sam could not disguise how aghast he was and Gabriel softened, patting his arm.
“But even if I can’t fix him, I can heal him.”
“What’s the difference?” Sam’s legs were so much longer but Gabriel was moving with so much energy that he could still hardly keep up.
“You know the difference. Your brother broke my brother. He’s rendered him unfit for original purpose.”
As they strode into the room, Dean, who had been wiping the blood from Castiel’s face, looking up with something like a snarl. “We don’t need him—”
“Yes, we do,” Sam said firmly. “We need his help and we’re grateful that he’s offering it because we don’t want Castiel to be lying there in pain and bleeding to death when he could be out of pain and healed, do we?”
He really did try not to talk to Dean as if he were five, but sometimes, when Dean and Cas got together, they spiralled straight into the kindergarten and although he liked to think his own patience was almost inexhaustible, today he could hear the thin tinny warning sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped.
Gabriel cocked him a surprised and approving look and waved a dismissive hand at Dean. “Move.”
Offering the snarl of a bad-tempered dog, Dean reluctantly vacated the bed and Gabriel sat down where he had been. Castiel started to tell him that he didn’t want his help and Gabriel said, “One more word out of you, baby brother, and I’m going to teleport you straight into hell. Let the demons deal with you. Which would be amusing for me and destabilizing for hell.”
As Dean started forward, mouth open to tell Gabriel what he would do to him if he even thought about— Sam clamped a hand over his mouth and said, “Please, Gabriel. I know they’re annoying, but Cas is bleeding all over Bobby’s floor and we all know I’m the one who is going to end up having to mop that up.”
Shrugging, Gabriel murmured, “Oh, in that case—”
He had never realized that it cost something to heal someone that badly hurt. Cas made it look effortless. Or perhaps healing an angel who had been injured by other angels just took more out of even an archangel than healing a mere human, because Gabriel definitely flinched, but kept his hand on Castiel’s, riding out the discomfort, before sitting back with a sigh. “Raphael really did a number on you, didn’t he…?”
Dean was practically elbowing Gabriel aside to see if Cas was healing, as the bruises faded and the cuts cleared up, but Sam caught Gabriel's arm when he staggered to his feet. “You look to me like you could do with a cookie and some juice,” he said. Gabriel stumbled a few steps and would have gone down if Sam had not caught him and sat him in a chair as the room clearly revolved around him.
“It’s incredible what we’ve learned from you shaved apes over the centuries,” Gabriel said, head down, breathing carefully, like a man with six shattered ribs. “Without Torquemada I wonder if it would even have occurred to Raphael to carry on like that. You’re just so inventive in your unpleasantness.”
“I thought we were made in God’s image?”
“You were also given free will, and look what you’ve chosen to do with it.” Still, Gabriel accepted the whisky and downed it in one gulp, trying to shake off the soul-bruise left on him by angel sadism. When he looked up at Sam, his face was oddly vulnerable. “It isn’t what Raphael did. It’s that he enjoyed it. There was a time when he would never have—”
Having examined Castiel with a thoroughness that neither of them seemed to have found strange—although Sam was just outside the circle of mutually dependant craziness enough to see how it looked—Dean was now coming down from his rabidly savage place of stifled fear and fury to be slightly ashamed of his horrible manners.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly to Gabriel, “for the touchy-feely fix-it, and, as for Raphael, we did kind of trap him in a circle of fire and Cas did call him his little bitch, so, I guess there was some payback due. But we’re grateful for the rescue.” Huge concession. Pause. “I’m grateful.”
Gabriel forestalled him with an upraised hand. “Okay, enough fulsome gratitude. I wouldn’t want you to strain something. Incidentally, he’ll need to sleep for a while. His grace needs to recover.”
“Raphael sliced up his grace?”
“Metaphorically sliced it, burned it, poured acid on it, jumped up and down on it in high heels, and put it through a cheese-grater. So, let him sleep and don’t call me back here accusing me of putting him into a coma. Just ward the place and lie low for a few hours while he finishes healing.”
Sam accompanied Gabriel outside as Dean stayed sitting on the bed, gazing fixedly down at a drowsing Castiel. They were holding hands without noticing, their bloodstains mingling together, and gazing at one another, Castiel’s eyes fluttering as exhaustion pressed down on his lids but he didn’t want to stop looking at Dean, who was still Dean, and not yet Michael’s vessel; Dean whom he could gaze at for a thousand centuries and still find new things to wonder at and marvel at in the light of his eyes.
“You shouldn’t judge us all by him,” Gabriel offered.
“Raphael?”
“Castiel. We’re not all remedially slow on the uptake.”
“You’ve been in the world for longer.”
“I was better at interacting with humans when I’d been in the world a week. I’m not saying I don’t care about him but, damn, is he an embarrassment.”
“It’s not like Dean’s been…” Loyalty to his brother made Sam just sigh and shrug. “There’s been crossed wires from both sides.”
“I’d just rather my brother didn’t die a virgin.”
“Dean doesn’t want that either.”
“Well, maybe he should stop trying to shove that responsibility off on some random sex-worker and man up and do the job himself, then? Because as long as your brother is breathing, my brother isn’t going to be looking at anyone else.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It really isn’t. Your brother’s just a blatantly bicurious, emotionally constipated, inarticulate jerk.”
Although he had absolutely intended to stay calm, Sam said in an angry undertone: “You don’t know him or understand him. There is so much more to Dean than you could ever—”
Rolling his eyes, Gabriel said, “That’s why you like Castiel better than me, isn’t it? Because he thinks your brother is the most perfect being to ever smell like beer and bad take out.”
“I like Castiel better than I like you, because he never murdered my brother a hundred days in a row.”
“Good times. That was fun.”
“Not for me.”
“You should try to mind less.”
“About my brother dying? What, like you did, when you ran out on Heaven so you wouldn’t have to watch it happen?”
Gabriel inclined his head in acknowledgement of the hit, but added, “Just so you know, Samuel—waspish is not a sexy look on you.”
“Are you going to stay out of the fight?”
“I always do.”
“Even though you could maybe do some good if you—”
“By ‘do some good’ do you mean ‘murder some of your brother-angels’? Because, I’m not up for that and in my place you wouldn’t be either so let’s not pretend otherwise. Just because you have one brother and mine are legion, doesn’t mean that I don’t feel it when….” He broke off. “Anyway, I’m Switzerland. I will always be Switzerland. Only without the cuckoo clocks, incontestably sexier, and with a much better sense of humour.”
“I’m grateful for your help.”
“See, that’s the difference between you and Dean. Whatever Cas does for him will never be enough.”
“Dean loves Cas. He would die for him.”
“I don’t doubt it, I just doubt he has the wherewithal to live for him. Face it, Sam, our brothers are self-loathing dimwits with a martyr complex.”
“But we love them anyway.”
Because he wanted Gabriel to say it, which, sighing Gabriel acknowledged with another shrug. “Yeah, okay, we love them anyway. Sometimes we have no idea why we love them, and yet, somehow, we do. Don’t forget to ward this place behind me. My brothers are fanatics with platinum level daddy issues and they’re not going to give up on their Big Shiny Stupid Plan.”
Sam put out a hand and then somehow, found himself being tugged down so that their lips could briefly meet.
“You’re welcome.” Gabriel was gone, in a whisper of air, before Sam could work out if it was the help or the kiss to which he had been welcome. Even as he was left rocking on his heels from the brief touch of archangel lips, a feather floated down and he caught it, seeing the flicker of light in it before it turned to mute magnificence, like something that might have fallen from an eagle’s wing. As angels didn’t moult, he had to presume it was a consequence of how much had been taken out of Gabriel by healing Cas. When he ran his tongue over his lips, he could taste candy, as expected, but behind it something rich and sweet, like persimmons and pomegranate. As a brief tremble of longing ran through him at the taste, he wondered if that was what it was like for Dean and Cas when their hands touched or their breath grazed the other’s open mouth.
“Oh, so we’re all idiots,” he said aloud; not especially grateful for that revelation; because perhaps in the greater scheme of things it mattered less how many angels could dance on the head of a pin than how utterly crap they were at arranging a first date. “Because it might be nice to be asked,” he offered to the cosmos, which sent him no reply though he briefly hoped for another beat of fiery wings.
But they weren’t allowed nice things and there was never time for dinner and a show in their world, there was only the next dark vision, awful prophecy, or looming apocalypse; even when he could still taste the wine of angels on his lips. Except it wasn’t the tears of those repenting that he could taste, but the sadness of a jester who had once been a soldier until he laid down his sword; the one who had found the courage to sit out the fight. In another life he liked to think that he and Dean had done the same, except how many would have died without them? And wouldn’t their ghosts have crept into their dreams? Could they ever, as something other than hunters, know true peace? That life was a heat haze in a desert, a lost oasis that could only be imagined but never reached. Their life was this until they dared the hour glass one time too many, and then there would be silence.
“Not point in being morbid,” he said aloud. Their lives were loss and danger but that didn’t give them the right to give up on the fight. He went in to Bobby’s house, closed the door, picked up the chalk and salt and sage and began to draw the necessary wards that might keep them invisible for long enough that they could continue to be hunted.
Dean sent him a searching look. “You okay?”
“Getting Cas back was a huge win.”
Dean looked down at the sleeping angel. “Thanks for calling Gabriel.”
“Sometimes a Hail Mary is all we have.”
“It’s not that I’m not grateful. I just don’t know how he can—”
Sit it out. Not care.
“It isn’t that he doesn’t care, Dean.”
It’s that his brothers are made of fire and when he lets himself love them, he gets burned right down to the quick.
“He has a funny way of showing it.”
Like you don’t? But, like Cas, he might know that Dean had faults, but he couldn’t feel it, not in his heart. In his heart Dean was a thing that shone like silver, just as in Dean’s heart, he was a thing that shone like gold, whatever he did, whatever mistakes he made, he was always there, safe, untarnished; his better-self preserved. Love might be a terrible thing but sometimes it was all that mattered, and it could sustain one even through the black distempered rage of hell.
“We’ll get through this,” he said, reassuringly, because Dean had that bled white look he got when someone he loved danced a little too close to death. “Cas is going to be fine.”
“Damn right, he is. We’re all going to be fine, Sammy.”
And tomorrow the world would try to murder them again, because it always did, but tonight, Cas was healing as he slept, Dean was holding the hand of an angel against his heart without even noticing that was what he was doing, as if it were as natural as breathing; and he—he could still taste pomegranate on his lips.
End