Archive of Our Own

Sometimes, when things are already going bad and something happens, one gets the distinct sensation that everything is about to get worse.

As soon as the witch throws his hand out towards Cas, that’s where Dean’s mind immediately goes to.

Because that’s just their luck, isn’t it? A murderous witch with a penchant for exploding people’s stomachs wasn’t enough. They clearly need an angel with an exploded stomach.

Cas sees the hand, and he must understand what that means. He tries to get out of the bolt of orange light running for him, but he’s just not fast enough.

The spell hits, and Dean just has a fraction of a second to process the fast growing light in the room before slamming his eyes shut, face hidden in the crook of his elbow.

It’s not enough.

He’s seen–well, not seen seen, whatever–an angel going nova, but this is—

This is more.

This is light, everywhere, photons streaming through all the room, endlessly pouring out of Cas.

Dean hears the witch scream, hears two bodies hit the ground, and he can spare only a fraction of his mind to hope that Sam had enough forewarning to cover his eyes. All the rest, his entire thought process, is busy praying that a flimsy arm is enough to shield him from the worst of it.

Dean’s elbow is no match for the light, but it’s enough for no part of him to melt out of its socket, though he can feel his skin burn, the back of his neck bubbling with the unbearable heat.

It’s an endless moment later that the light abates a bit, enough for him to squint out of his elbow-y hiding place.

The room is immensely darker than before, and not just because he knows that every lightbulb has shattered. It’s his pupils, working doubly hard to go from needle-like to big enough to see more than black with a spot of light right at the edge.

When he can see enough details again, he almost wishes he couldn’t.

There’s a corpse on the ground, smoking. The clothes are almost indistinguishable from the body proper, fabric and skin fused together in the charred remains of something exposed to heavenly grace without a shield.

Dean’s almost running to it when his mind realises that, no, it’s too short, too little. Wrong dimensions entirely.

Someone grunts from his left, and Dean swivels around, stumbling, to see his brother just now emerging from a tight curl on the floor.

Sam’s blinking furiously, adapting to the sudden drop in lighting. “What was that?” he asks, dazed, and that’s the moment Dean remembers.

Cas.

But there’s no Cas, no squinting heavenly tax accountant anywhere in the room.

“Cas?” he asks, swivelling his head around, avoiding the camera flash in the corner of his vision. “Cas?”

The walls start trembling, the chandelier swinging slightly overhead, when…something starts talking.

“I’M HERE,” it says, whatever it is. “DEAN, SAM, ARE YOU ALRIGHT?”

Dean slams his hands over his ears, sees Sam do the same. It hurts, this voice.

It’s too deep, too penetrating, too loud, too everything, and it hurts.

It hurts, but not enough to be incapacitating.

“Who are you?” Dean growls, but it’s not effective, not with the house still shaking, with his ears still covered, with this thing in the room with them.

“I AM CASTIEL,” the voice says, lower but still too loud. There’s the sound of glass, somewhere else in the house, shattering.

Dean still can’t see anything but the light, fucking up his sight. Anything could come out of the dark, and he wouldn’t know until too late.

“Castiel?” Sam says, and Dean swirls his arm around, smacks his hand into some part of Sam’s torso, grips the closest sleeve.

“YES,” the thing says.

The light dims, just enough so that Dean can look at its profile, and he has to swallow at what he sees past the eclipse effect.

There’s skin in there, bubbling skin, skin that swells and rips and rots and burns and swells again. Something breaks the surface, emerging from what was previously a lumpy piece of flesh. Blood sprays on the floor, but between a blink and the next the thing is just gone, skin back to cover a squirming mass.

It’s Hell all over again, and it’s not. It’s not, because the skin heals, broken and burnt and then unblemished, intact, an endless repetition of torment and health.

Dean has to look away, his stomach swirling, bile in the back of his throat, his eyes burning with the light, too much light.

Beside him, Sam retches.

He’s not had forty years to adapt.

“What—” And Dean has to swallow, swallow, swallow the bile down, force himself to breathe, to calm down. This isn’t Hell.

This. Is. Not. Hell.

“What are you?”

There’s silence for a moment. The light shifts, a part of it almost bending. Dean doesn’t look back at the flesh.

“I’M AN ANGEL OF THE LORD,” it says, and Dean’s ears hurt, they hurt, and—

And he recognizes the pain.

“Cas?” But it’s impossible, it’s—It’s impossible, Cas is a nerdy dude in a trenchcoat, he’s not—He’s not—

“HELLO, DEAN,” the light answers.

It’s dark. Black, endlessly, everywhere.

He can’t see himself. He can’t feel himself, and he floats, unseeing, unfeeling, in the endless black.

Time passes. How much? Irrelevant.

And then—

Light. Over there. Just a pinprick, not enough to see.

His whole essence shrugs, floats in that direction.

There is nothing else in the black. Just a tiny, minuscule dot of light.

He gets closer, somehow, and the pinprick becomes larger, and larger, and larger, until it’s larger than him, until—

It’s an eye.

It’s an eye, huge and made of light, compound like a fly’s, and fear overcomes him.

That’s not an eye, that’s—

Another light opens, somewhere beside him. Yellow sclera, purple iris, rectangular pupil.

Another eye starts shining, somewhere else. Glowing blue, a pupil like a cat’s that contracts and enlarges incessantly.

He tries to float away, tries to escape, but he can’t.

He can’t move, can’t get away.

He can only watch as, one by one, the eyes open, light so bright it hurts, but he can’t look away. It’s all kinds of eyes, human, animal, some that don’t exist outside a child’s fears.

This is not a blank space.

This is—

Dean wakes up.

“Dean,” Sam snaps.

“Sam,” Dean parrots back, not stopping in his tight circuits of the room.

“What do you want me to do?” Sam asks, frustrated. He’s been up all night trying to find what spell the witch used, to no avail. The five cups of coffee Dean ran to the gas station on the corner to buy him are littered all around the laptop, empty.

Dean hasn’t needed coffee tonight.

No, that ten-minute nightmare will be enough to keep him awake for a week.

“Have you found anything?” Dean asks, slightly more conciliatory. He recognizes that Sam is doing this only for him, okay? He can be nice.

Sam presses his fingers to his eyes in a gesture that’s a cross between hiding a yawn and underlining an annoyed sigh. “There’s not much stuff about angels,” he says, omitting the “But we already know that,” because he’s an awesome brother, sometimes. “Much less about the effect spells have on them.”

“But can you figure it out?” Dean asks, because that’s the important part. They have to figure it out.

Sam sigh-yawns again. “You heard him,” he says. “We just have to wait it out.”

“We can’t just wait it out,” Dean says, because they can’t. They can’t just wait it out, they can’t let Cas— “We need him to stop the Apocalypse.” That’s not all, but he doesn’t have the words to say what the rest is. He—They need Cas. He’s basically the only advantage they’ve ever had to their name, and he’s… Well, they haven’t ever had many friends either.

Sam shoots him a glance. The effect is ruined by the fact that he almost can’t keep his eyes open. “We’ll just have to wait,” he repeats. “Trust him.”

But Dean can’t wait.

Castiel spreads his wings to relieve a cramp. He hates having his ethereal form on the physical plane. This is why they take vessels when they come to Earth. His wings don’t cramp when they’re not subject to gravity, and he doesn’t have to drag them with him when they reside on another plane.

Has he always had wings this long? Or do they change with the shape of his vessel? After all, Jimmy Novak would have needed roughly a seven-metre wingspan to fly, even if he of course wouldn’t have had the muscles to move those extra limbs effectively.

That’s probably why Castiel now has six three-and-a-half-metre-long wings that he has to drag with himself wherever he goes. At least his grace–even as diminished as it is–lets him ignore the fact that a body with bones this dense and no proper musculature isn’t capable of flight.

This too will come to pass. He can already feel the spell’s hold on him weaken with every passing moment. It will fade, but he cannot presently tell when. Approximation and his knowledge of his own form tell him it’ll be roughly two months. He doesn’t like the uncertainty, but he cannot do anything about it. As his grace gets to know the spell, as it insinuates itself into the spell’s fabric to read it, he’ll have a precise estimate.

For now he can only wait.

A fish gets closer to him, attracted by the way his wings are lined with the light of his grace seeping through the gaps in his physical form. Castiel ignores the animal. Soon it will realise that he’s the most dangerous predator around. Then it will swim away, and Castiel will be alone again.

Sam wakes up when they’ve just crossed into South Dakota.

Dean knows because the see-sawing sound of his brother’s breaths stop. Fucking finally. Just existing close to a snoring Sam is torture enough without the head-splitting sleep-deprivation headache. Add to that the fact that he’s jittery with the remnants of his nightmare, plus he’s spent the night and the whole morning worrying about Cas. With Baby’s limited space, that’s the perfect recipe for a Dean who’s ready to crawl out of his skin to get out of here.

That’s not a hyperbole. He knows what it feels like, both to have his skin flayed off and to flay someone else’s.

Anyway. Sam wakes himself up, because that’s just how loud he snores, and turns to Dean with an accusing squint.

Dean rolls his eyes. “You were snoring loud enough to wake the dead,” he offers before Sam can go around accusing him of emitting noise.

Sam squints a bit more, but then he yawns and winces when he moves his neck. He must have one hell of a crick for sleeping in that position.

“Where are we?” he asks, smacking his lips. He always gets a dry throat when he sleeps in the car.

“Half an hour out of Sioux Falls,” Dean says, shooting him a glance.

It’s, well, it’s something, that Sam doesn’t comment on their destination. He got in the car without kicking up a fuss, but he also fell asleep before they could agree on where to go.

He may have taken it for a given that they’d cruise aimlessly across the contiguous States until they found a case, but then again…

Dean grimaces at the thought, more eyes that he can count opening in the back of his mind, flesh bubbling and healing and melting between every blink of his eyelids.

Then again, Dean was and still is pretty insistent that they find a way to bring Cas back to his body.

Or, well, Jimmy’s body.

Whatever, just—

Just.

Bobby’s bound to have a book or, hell, an entire shelf of books about spells, right? So stopping in Sioux Falls for…a bit, makes perfect sense, right? Just so they can brush up on stuff, get a crash course in spells about…

Fine, yeah, it’s all about Cas.

It’s just—

Look. Dean’s seen things in all these years, okay? Even without the Hell-nightmare that was Cas’ skin bubbling and burning and deforming to accommodate extra parts, all the rest—

Dean feels bile in the back of his throat just thinking about that.

What the fuck. What the fuck.

Angels aren’t supposed to be—They’re not supposed to—

Cas isn’t—

But…

Dean takes a deep breath, trying to calm his suddenly-rabbiting heart.

He hits the volume up button and tries to stop thinking.

Castiel’s wing bats at the strange box that’s descended over his resting place. It’s transmitting images (he can see the waves running inside the cable attached to the box, climbing it to a screen far, far above the sea bottom), but he doesn’t care about that. He cares only about the fact that the box is annoying, swimming around him, filming him. He knows that no human will ever see these images–his grace is blinding to them, and he can change the transmission with only a moderate exertion of energy–so he’s not really worried about accidentally killing anyone.

Still, this is annoying. There aren’t any other creatures around Castiel, so why would humans be interested in an overly-bright photo of something they can’t understand resting on the sea bottom?

Castiel bats at the box again, but it keeps trying to get closer. His rings snap into motion, spinning irritatedly, and his eyes all narrow on the annoying object. He reaches a hand, sears the material the thing is made of, and begins beating his wings, faster and faster, rising higher and higher in the water until he’s just twenty metres under the surface, until he’s resting under the pressure of just 202,650 Pascal. There he snaps the cable connecting the box to the ship he can now see, dark against the rays of the sun, and throws the object to the annoying humans who were watching him. Then, he spreads his wings wide and flies away, far away.

He appears among the snows of what humans call Annapurna I. The cold bites at his rings, but his flames clear a circle all around him, revealing stone that hasn't been exposed to the air in millennia. Castiel wraps his wings around himself, dropping to the newly-cleared ground.

He likes the sea, but he doesn’t like it enough to be prodded at by a human craft that doesn’t know when to quit being annoying. This corner of the Earth, though, at an altitude where the pressure is no longer enough to sustain human life, should be safe from them. Castiel fervently hopes so.

His grace will be busy fighting the spell for the next six weeks, three days, four minutes, seven seconds and…well, Castiel doesn’t care for more precise measurements, even if he has reserved a corner of his mind for a caesium-133 atom so that he can count its periods of radiation as humans do. It is an imprecise way to measure time, Castiel has found, but it is the way it’s done on Earth, and in Heaven there’s no need for measurements of any kind. If Castiel wishes to keep track of time, he can only adopt the human way of doing so. At least he can independently verify it with his own clock.

So Castiel settles in to wait out the spell, sitting on one of the tallest emerged mountains on Earth, and counts the corpses buried under its snow to pass the time.

The ceiling has copious amounts of moulding spots. No surprises, this motel is cheap even for them. The covers are scratchy, and the white has been yellowed by age—or something else, but he’s trying not to think about it for his own peace of mind.

Sam is at the library, because of course Sam is at the library and has left him here. Just a glance, enough to see that Dean basically didn’t sleep at all last night either, and he was all, “Actually, you know what, I think I can do this on my own. You stay here and rest.”

Not that Dean isn’t grateful. The words swim in front of his eyes on an okay-ish day, so trying to concentrate on reading with exactly twenty-three minutes of fitful sleep under his belt would be a losing battle. A sisyphean effort, read a line and go back to the beginning because he’s understood exactly nothing, not even the commas. Rinse and repeat, until Dean can’t take it any longer and needs to do something, anything, with his body.

So instead he’s staring at the ceiling, and he’s ignoring the health hazards in the room, which his mind helpfully highlights in neon colours and blaring sirens.

It’s been three weeks since they left Bobby’s, a month since the nightmares started, and he’s no closer to getting rid of them as he was with the Hell ones.

Well, at least he got a reprieve from the rack. From the fire back into the frying pan, but still better than nothing.

Now he just sees bubbling skin without it peeling off the muscle, hooray. Bring out the party horns.

When playing connect-the-mould-spots starts making him feel restless–but no way he’s taking more showers than needed in that bathroom–Dean closes his eyes.

Hey Cas, he finds himself thinking, almost unconsciously. It’s happening more and more frequently, this calling out for Cas, this praying, even if he knows that Cas won’t come, not until the spell has run its course, however long that’ll end up taking.

He didn’t say, and why would—

Why wouldn’t you say? Dean asks, too aggressive even inside his own mind. You could’ve said, and then—

And then what?

And then he’d know. If Cas had said, Dean would know how many days have to pass, until—

Until you’re back. Because you’ll…be back, right? Right? You’ll come back, and then—

And then?

And then…something, anything! Back to normal, probably, hopefully, even if it’s not—Even if Dean’s not that sure that—

Things will go back to normal, he thinks, and he doesn’t even know if he’s still praying or not, he just knows that things will go back to normal, they have to. Because if things don’t go back to normal, then something will change, and change is never good. Change is always bad, always means someone dying, and then Dean will be alone.

Cas can’t die.

You can’t die, Dean prays, half-question, half-demand. Not again. Not now. I—

No. There’s no “I”. Cas can’t die, not again, and that’s that.

Cas can’t die. That’s final. He can’t die because otherwise things will change, and Dean will be alone again, and Dean—

Dean doesn’t want to be alone again.

He doesn’t want to be alone, and he’s fine with things as they are, and…

And Cas can’t die, that’s all.

Cas can’t die, and Cas won’t die, if he just—

If Cas just comes back, then Dean will make sure he doesn’t die. He can protect Cas, and then Dean won’t be alone.

But Cas needs to come back.

Castiel sits on a tree. The spell has regressed enough that he now can suppress his flames, hide them back into the ethereal plane he keeps them on while he’s on Earth. He won’t burn this forest.

By now, the wind can pass through his wings almost without ruffling the feathers, which is good, because having all of his six wings materialised meant that he spent most of his time cleaning them from all the dirt they picked up. It was tedious and annoying, and his true form got in the way of his vessel's arms. He fervently hopes he’ll never have to clean his wings on Earth ever again.

There are humans on the ground, amongst the trees. Castiel can see them. They’re mostly just walking around, so he looks at them, maps their paths, tries to discern patterns in something that doesn’t have any. Humans are like that. They don’t do what’s logical, and they don’t do what’s emotional: they are a blend of both, and they’ll be rash just as often as they fully think their actions through.

Angels aren’t emotional, because angels aren’t supposed to have emotions. But that’s a lie, isn’t it? Because Castiel is an angel, and he has emotions. Or he feels something that he calls emotions because it’s close enough to what he sees in humans. It doesn’t make a difference.

Angels aren’t emotional, or, rather, they’re not supposed to be. It’s a lie, all a lie, and Castiel knows that it is only because he’s rebelled. He knows that angels are not just what they are told they are. He knows because he chose to stay on Earth, to ally himself with humans—two, but really just one. And he’s forsaken his family for it. He’s forsaken everything he’s ever known and believed in just because…

A child screams, and Castiel tenses, but he’s not been seen. They just saw a bird take flight, and now they’re laughing, and Castiel is confused. Birds take flight every day, at every hour, and yet this child was startled and then delighted by it. Why?

Humans don’t make sense, Castiel muses from the top of his tree. They marvel at the slightest and most natural of things, and they don’t react to the true wonders of life on Earth.

How could they take electricity for granted, when most of them don’t even know how it’s harnessed or how it works? How could they not take a moment every time they use a telephone to thank a candlemaker who wanted to talk to his ill wife? How would that child who marvelled at a bird taking flight react to an airplane?

Humans are a social species. They thrive off contact with other humans, and they wilt when they don’t have that contact. They work with each other, and that lets them surpass their limits, lets them harvest the power of electrons, lets them change their surroundings. Their world works only because they work together. Though they remain ignorant about the intricacies of their life, if they encounter a problem there is always someone who is more knowledgeable and can assist.

It’s by working together that humans can overcome the limitations in their creation. They can fly now, something that they weren’t created to do, something that they made possible just because they could, just because some of them looked at the sky and studied the flight of birds and found a way to imitate them and leave the ground behind. Humans built a way to fly that relies on many of them cooperating, and then they offered it to everyone. That is more than angels have ever done for each other.

A lot of what humans do is done for love, or because they care about each other or their world or humanity as a whole. That doesn’t happen in Heaven, not even when love is the only thing they feel, the only thing they are commanded to feel for their Father’s creations.

Castiel doesn’t understand love, but he doesn’t understand any other feeling either. It is probably in the nature of emotions to escape understanding, but that doesn’t mean that he will stop trying. Being on Earth, choosing Earth and humanity, opening himself to these feelings, has given him a new perspective on Heaven.

Sometimes he wonders why he chose humanity, but the answer is so obvious that he doesn’t linger long on the question. He may no longer be able see it, but he still remembers Dean’s soul and how it shone even in the depths of Hell, even weighed down and dirtied by ten years spent torturing others. It really shouldn’t have surprised him that he chose to follow Dean, even if it meant going against what Heaven had always told him, because of what Heaven had always told him. If his Father is found in His creations, and if the most luminous creation is the closest to Him, then it would only be logical to follow Dean on the path of God. It was not logical, and it was not easy, but he chose it, and he’d choose it again, and again, and again. Even his Father confirmed that this is the right choice, that Castiel was right in choosing and choosing Dean.

Sometimes he wonders if he chose to follow Dean out of love for his Father, and then he answers himself. It may have been because of that, in the beginning, but now it’s no longer love for God that keeps him on this path.

No, not for God.

He misses Cas, okay? He misses Cas, and it’s not doing him any favours that he has to wait for an unspecified amount of time to see him again, because…

Well. He misses Cas. And, yeah, he knows that at any given time he has no idea when or even whether he’ll see Cas again, but this is different.

Every other time he knew that Cas would just appear as he always is, a nerdy dude in a trench coat who never understands Dean’s references and will tilt his head at the slightest confusion. This time, he has no idea what he will see.

If Cas even comes back, that is. Dean wouldn’t begrudge him the desire to stay far away from this whole Apocalypse business. Away from Dean, because what else is he but a magnet for trouble, pain and death?

But Cas will come back, won’t he? He said so, that night six weeks ago, when Dean couldn’t look at him without seeing Hell or the horror of divinity. Because that’s what Cas is, what angels are, right? Unspeakable horrors that only come to Earth to rain fire and brimstone over humans. Be not afraid. There’s a reason for that, and Dean never understood it before all this.

Because, yes, Cas, when you strip him of Jimmy Novak’s corpse–and it is a corpse, now, only animated by something alien, something that needs it in order to interact with…anything, really–is just a ball of flames, eye-searing. He’s made of wings, six, with countless eyes in all shapes and forms and even some that Dean is not so sure exist. He’s made of rings, spinning and circling and interlocking, and he’s not—

He’s not human.

Dean knew that, of course he knew that. He’s known ever since he clawed his way out of his own grave that whatever picked him up from Hell couldn’t be human, but he’s never, never looked at that head-on since he got to know Cas. He just shoved the fact that angels, by definition, aren’t human in a heavily-padlocked drawer in his mind and refused to ever look at it again.

Because Cas looks human, even if he doesn’t act like one, and all of Dean’s excuses sound fake and hollow and terribly childish to his own ears.

Cas isn’t human. Full stop. That’s the truth, that’s what Dean has to accept.

Cas isn’t human, and Dean misses him more than he’s ever missed his father when he was late getting back from a hunt and Sam was crying.

So Dean misses Cas. That’s normal, isn’t it? Everyone misses their friends when they’re away, right?

Not like this. This is Sam-at-Stanford levels of missing, with a fun twist that was never there when Dean was alone with Baby and the open road.

Well, of course it’s different. He may love Sam, but he’s not in love with him.

Dean freezes, just one long instant of absolutely blank static in his mind.

“What the fuck,” he breathes, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? It—It explains it, doesn’t it? Why he’s been moping since Cas disappeared, why he always mopes when Cas leaves, why he misses him entirely too much.

Why he’s spent the last year and change desperately trying to avoid thinking about kissing an angel.

Why he hasn’t objected to Cas’ abysmal understanding of personal space in so long.

Why purposefully staring at Cas doesn’t bore him after thirty seconds.

Because he’s in love with Cas.

It makes sense, too much to brush it to the side, too much to ignore.

He’s in love with Cas.

Cas, who left, looking like a nightmare given a physical form.

Cas, whom Dean doesn’t even know if he’s coming back.

Well. Fuck.

The last of the spell vanishes. His grace swirls around for a moment, disoriented, free of enemies for the first time in two months, then settles again with a quiet hum.

Castiel opens his eyes, all of them. He stretches his wings, high in the sky, wide to his sides, low in the ground. He shakes them out, ridding them of the last remnants of the spell’s mist that clung to him for so long. His rings spin faster for a moment, elated, and his flames burn brighter.

Castiel’s vessel doesn’t react to the turmoil of his true form. This isn’t a physical process, and as such requires no physical input. For that, no human realises that the man in their midst, walking through the crowded streets of this city, is not one of them. That he’s not a man at all.

Castiel keeps walking, and it’s a reflex more than anything, an emulation of the people all around him, of those who look like the body they see when they look at him. He keeps shaking himself, getting reacquainted with himself and his form outside of a malignant intrusion.

He is not human. Moments like this are when the thought, dormant in its obviousness, resurfaces to his consciousness. He’s not human, and that is why he has spent six of the last eight weeks flying from deserted place to deserted place, out of sight, protecting humans from his own true appearance. But now, now he doesn’t hurt them anymore, not even with the slight headaches he’s been immediately healing from the crowds all around him for the last three days.

He can go back now.

His flight wings spread wide, poised to carry him far from here, but…

Castiel reins them in, then his rings start to spin in the opposite direction and he spreads his wings again.

The sun beats over him, heat and light and radiation, but he doesn’t pay it any mind. The sand stretches to the horizon, an endless theory of dunes and valleys that will change at the slightest breath of wind.

Castiel sits, even if it makes no sense for him to do so. Gravity doesn’t make his joints ache, none of them. He doesn’t let it.

He may go back. His grace has fought the spell out of him, has destroyed the very fabric of it so that he may rejoin human society as someone effectively masking as one of them, without need for more subterfuge.

He may go back, yes. He may rejoin the struggle to halt the Apocalypse, to cancel the very plan he was created to follow, but…

This shouldn’t even be a problem. He should already be there, asking where he needs to go, what he needs to find. He shouldn’t be sitting in a desert, under the light of a ball of gas like many others whose only merit is keeping humanity’s planet in a stable orbit. He feels the pull, the longing calling him back, and it wouldn’t be difficult to find the right car, not when it’s so distinctive, even if he can’t sense its owner’s soul as anything more than a reflection in those things he holds dear.

One of Castiel’s wings twitches. He contracts the muscles, brings it closer to himself, forces the instinct of going, just going, out by smothering the aborted movement that should have carried it out.

He can’t go, not immediately, because he has spent his entire life, ever since he was created before time began, working towards a goal. And now, after little more than one of Earth’s revolutions around its star, after two more lunar cycles, after an amount of time that should feel like no more than a blink of his eyes, a revolution of his rings, he’s trying to stop that plan. He’s working against everything he’s ever known, against his family, against his Father’s plan, with tactics he would never have considered even a year ago, and for what?

For whom?

He knows the reason, and he knows the man, the soul that pushed him out of his orbit, out of his place in Creation and made him hunted, a rebel, just for…for following his Father’s order, for loving humanity, for loving a human, the brightest of his Father’s creations.

He doesn’t believe he would be welcomed back into Heaven, but that’s not why he doesn’t go back. He’s chosen his path, and he can’t, he doesn’t want to go back.

So what’s keeping him? What made him stop in the desert, an ocean away from that soul he can no longer see but still remembers in all its vivid details, to think? What’s there to think? He was created to do one thing and one thing only, and that presently means going back to the place called the United States of America and finding the right car. Nothing else matters, because Castiel has made his choice and nothing will make him go back on it.

His wings snap open, all of them, and his rings stutter in surprise before spinning faster with determination.

Angels are supposed to follow orders, but Castiel has chosen to ignore them.

He is not supposed to be able to love, but this blink of an eye that lasted one year showed him that’s untrue.

His wings fold, and he flies.

Vampire blood should be cold, Dean muses for the umpteenth time in his life. He doesn’t know why, but their blood just feels like it should be cold. The fact that, instead, it’s hot makes sense, if he ignores the fact that technically vampires should be dead and as thus room temperature.

“That was the last of them,” Sam says. He’s breathing hard, they both are, because that’s just what killing off a nest of vamps will do to you. No matter how TV makes it seem effortless, decapitating something while that something is moving and trying to kill you in turn is a pretty good and damn exhausting workout.

Dean drags his sleeve over his forehead. It comes back bloody, but whatever. This is one of those flannels not even he can salvage. An arterial spray is an arterial spray, living or undead the source may be. When hunting vamps or whatever else whose death will turn a room into a slasher movie, it’s always better to dress in the worst clothes z have on hand. If they get ruined, you won’t mourn for long.

Burning the bodies takes a while, not least of all because they’re heavy, but in the end–hours later–there’s just a smouldering pile of ashes in the middle of a clearing and Sam takes his earbuds out. Dean shakes off the torpor that took him in the last hour and a half and stretches to get a bit of feeling back. And to wake up. Can’t really drive half-asleep.

It’ll take a while to get back to the motel, but at least they don’t have to be anywhere tomorrow. They can sleep in.

Sam’s head lists to the side slowly, in increments, until he’s snoring against the side window.

Dean keeps driving, music turned just loud enough to keep him focused on the road and not on how tired he is.

Cas, he thinks, and then nothing else. It’s been like this for a while, since, well, since he realised that he’s…in love with his best friend. He thinks, prays, not sure he knows the difference anymore, just that, Cas, just his name, and it’s enough. It feels like enough, even when it’s not, even when it can’t be because Cas isn’t here, and he won’t—

Dean shakes his head, tries to dislodge the thought.

No. Cas will be back. He said he would, and he will.

Cas will come back, and then—

And then what?

And they’ll keep trying to stop the Apocalypse, and Dean will keep ignoring this…this feeling that he’s just going through the motions, that’s what he should do, what he wants to do, is to take Cas’ hand, who cares if it’s bubbling, if his bones burst with the heat of his flames, if Cas has more eyes than Dean can even conceive.

Who cares about Cas’ form. He’s Cas, just Cas, whatever he appears as.

He’s in love with Cas, and that’s enough, but he doesn’t want it to be. He wants other stuff, he wants…He wants.

He wants.

And there’s no way he’s ever saying that, not until Cas gets back, and not after, because love just means death.

But—

“Hello, Dean.”

“Son of a bitch!”

“Dean, what the hell?!”

After they’re back in the right lane and Sam has stopped insulting Dean’s driving, Dean pulls over.

“Cas,” he greets, “a little warning next time?”

Cas just tilts his head, and it hits Dean that he can see him, without light, without glimpses of blackened and bubbling skin, without nightmarish eldritch bits overimposed.

It’s Cas, just Cas, in his usual human attire. Not body, just…attire. Jimmy’s corpse is, ultimately, Cas’ clothes.

“Cas!” Sam says. He turns a smile to the backseat. “We were worried.”

“I am sorry for causing you worry,” Cas says. His face is devoid of any reaction, but, then again, that’s normal.

God, Dean missed him.

“Your...thing,” he says, gesturing vaguely to Cas. “The spell. All gone?”

Cas nods. “Yes. My grace burnt it out over the course of the last two months. It was a particularly tenacious spell, that is why it took so long to get rid of it.”

“But you did get rid of it, right?” Sam asks.

Cas looks at him, and Dean finds that he can’t stand not being the sole focus of that intent gaze. Maybe the in love thing didn’t really come out of left field, after all.

“Yes,” Cas says. “I have been completely free of it for the past day.”

“Then why didn’t you come back immediately?” Dean asks without thinking, and only when Sam shoots him a glance does he really think about how it could sound. “I’m glad you came back,” he tells Cas, looking him straight in the eyes, smiling, willing him to believe it and discard the longing that came out as a question.

Cas smiles back, tentatively like he’s still not sure how to move those muscles. “I am happy to be back with you,” he says, and of course he means you and Sam, of course it’s a plural “you”, but…

But Dean can dream a little bit, right?

Sam clears his throat. “Can we go back to the motel now? We were up all night burning bodies.”

Dean jerks out of his and Cas’ staring match with a guilty squirm of his stomach. “‘course.”

Castiel holds no delusion about what is possible and what is not. He will watch over Dean (and Sam), he will come when Dean calls, always, but he won’t expect more than is realistic.

That is alright. Castiel has spent his life serving a Father he has never seen. This is nothing in comparison, because Dean acknowledges his presence, shares his time with Castiel, smiles at him.

Castiel misses seeing Dean’s soul acutely, but he knows that he cannot remove the warding on his ribs, not even for a quick glimpse. Dean’s safety, his comfort, must be put over everything else.

“That’s creepy,” Dean whispers, mindful of his brother sleeping on the other bed.

“I apologise,” Castiel whispers back. He almost turns, but Dean takes his arm, shaking his head.

“Don’t,” he says. “I can’t sleep anyway.”

“I can…” Castiel lifts his hand, but Dean shakes his head again.

“No, actually…” he heaves a deep breath, his eyes closing even in the darkness of the room. “I… Can we just… Do you want to get out of here?”

Castiel follows him outside. The stars are becoming invisible, their light overridden by the sun rising beyond the mountains on the horizon. Dean walks to his car, but he doesn’t open it. Instead, he carefully hoists himself on the hood, his toes just barely skimming the ground from how far from the edge he’s sitting, and pats the metal beside him.

Castiel doesn’t sit, but he leans against the car. He lays a hand on the hood, reverent, and sends his grace to clean out the smallest nooks in the motor, the ones Dean, for all his dedication to this vehicle, simply can’t reach.

They sit like that for a while, just looking at the rosy colour of the sky taking over the blue of the night, at the sun rising, at this corner of the world slowly waking up again.

“I missed you,” Dean murmurs in the end, his eyes still on the far horizon. “I was... worried.”

“I am sorry.”

Dean shakes his head. “No, Cas, that’s not…That wasn’t your fault. You went away because you had no other choice.”

“Seeing my true form would have hurt you,” Castiel says, justifying himself even if Dean doesn’t see the need for him to. There is no need, after all. Castiel has not pledged his immortal loyalty aloud.

“I know, Cas,” Dean snaps, but it’s not in anger. “I’m just… I…” He huffs a breath, frustrated, and he turns to Castiel.

Castiel takes an unnecessary breath, because—

“I missed you,” Dean confesses. His eyes are shining with the reflection of his soul, and it’s the most beautiful thing Castiel has ever seen in his eternal life.

This is nothing, on the grand scale of things. This is just a small admission, something that warms Castiel’s core all the same, something that stokes his flame like nothing else before, but it is something. This is Dean saying more than he likely intends to, his soul betraying him from where it overflows from his eyes.

Maybe…

Castiel takes his hand, and Dean looks down at it, surprised. “I missed you too,” Castiel confesses quietly when their eyes meet again.

Dean’s mouth part in wonder.

Castiel squeezes his hand, gently, smiling, letting just a small pinprick of his grace shine through to illuminate their immediate surroundings.

Dean tugs him forward, and he goes, for how could he not. Dean’s legs part to accommodate him, his hands coming up to frame Castiel’s face. They look at one another, and Castiel’s rings stop spinning, his wings suspended in an endless moment of waiting.

“Cas,” Dean whispers. Like before, Castiel doesn’t resist the tugging.

They meet halfway in a kiss, and Castiel’s flames spark, every part of his true form participating in the simple yet enormous joy of lips sliding against lips, of Dean cradling him close, of gently pushing Dean backwards, of laying him on the hood of his car and kissing him with all the love, all the devotion that an angel is capable of.

That Castiel is capable of.

When Dean needs to breathe, when Castiel rears his head back by only the space a human needs to draw breath, the light of dawn reflects in Dean’s eyes, plays with his soul.

“Cas,” Dean says again, a confession, a plea, worship.

“Dean,” Castiel answers in the same way, because Dean’s name contains everything. Everything Castiel is, everything he will do for this man. His Righteous Man.

Dean doesn’t say it with his words, but his soul fills his eyes with it all the same.

“I love you too,” Castiel smiles, and then kisses him again.