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Sam hides the postcards whenever he can, especially the most difficult ones; the ones that read like a rant, or sound despairing. No point handing something over to Dean that’ll only make him feel like he’s a prisoner, too.
Part of him has been, metaphorically at least, for six and a half months, since the day on a hunt when Castiel shouted out suddenly, doubled forward, then flew up into the air -- backward and away from them at a hundred miles an hour. He had disappeared into a vortex that was invisible, except for how you could see it pulling him into itself like a threaded needle through a buttonhole.
It was their first clue God might be back in the house.
Not that they’d had any idea what it was all about that afternoon. The first clear signs had been vague chatter about it among other hunters they reached out to. Then word started around about a crap ton of angel sightings – grim angels of few words, on a mission they still haven’t been able to get a handle on even after all this time.
“We can’t even know if it’s truly The Almighty returned,” Sam had pointed out one long night when Dean seemed ragged enough to think about praying to Him directly and giving him a piece of his angry, drunken mind. “…or just the latest flavor of power struggle upstairs.”
“Yeah, well, I think we do know enough,” Dean wouldn’t be dissuaded. “There’s been a fuckton more smiting going on since that day, hasn’t there? Not like anything we’ve seen before- those angels are dead set; marching in lockstep. Reminds me why I despise ‘em.”
Sam started to say ‘not all of them’ and caught himself. Cas was still half angel but… how long had it been since he’d marched in lockstep? Had he ever? Even before he’d met them?
Add those on to Dean’s own personal feelings, and …yeah, Sam got it. Why this was as hard as it had been after Purgatory - or maybe worse.
~*~
“Son of a bitch….” Dean grits the words out.
This particular postcard Sam can’t hide; it falls from thin air somewhere near the ceiling of the bunker study. It flips, flutters, lands right between them on the table. Just like that.
“Let me…” He reaches for it but Dean’s faster.
“No… Sammy, it’s okay….gotta see it. S’been a while. Hasn’t it?”
~*~
Hello…. I don’t know your name, but I remember you. Your voice. Your eyes. I remember us in a motel parking lot in Tucson. It had a large neon sign on a twenty-foot pole, so big it threw green light across most of the driveway. Gravel. I like the sound of walking on gravel, the way it crunches under a shoe. We walked to the far end where it was darker, and you pressed me against a car. You were tense, but then it poured from you in waves – relief. It was gentler than I expected, the way you kissed me…
That was how the first one had read. Sam kind of wished Dean had found it and not him, but… well, he hadn’t stopped reading it, either. Had he?
It kind of made his heart hurt for both of them.
The cards arrived regularly for weeks after in bunches or in spates, showing up randomly around the bunker; under the door, on floor of the walkway to the kitchen or in the bathroom sink. On the back seat of the Impala or on the dash, sometimes. There was nothing, ever, in the ‘to’ field except from Castiel scrawled across the lower right hand side at an angle.
I can feel you looking for me with your mind. I think you’re praying, though I don’t receive the words. I should be able to hear them. Maybe it’s the drugs.
I long for you, too. I miss you.
I’m told I’m delusional - that you don’t exist, and I am not half-seraphim. Apparently it’s usual for the sickest here to think they possess super human power. I sense that I’m not crazy, though. I was, I think, actually crazy at one time. Briefly. I know the difference.
They never discuss it, Sam and Dean, but they both get that the cards are entirely generated in Castiel’s head; they’re pure stream of thought.
The first crop had been almost amusingly gift-shoppy; ‘Greetings from the Buckeye State,’ ‘Howdy from Austin,’ and ‘Anchors Away in Anchorage’ in huge type on glossy cardboard over Technicolor photographs. Not that Castiel was physically in any of those places. His mind was simply trying to send the most correct thing and went a little overboard on the mid-20th Century kitsch.
After a while, they turned more home-made looking; bright and festive – colored paper and pencils, glitter and sketches of animals and jungles or beaches in his broad writing hand, like he was trying to send something of himself in them.
“I’m being held in Heaven,” one of them read. “I’m sure, now; they got a detail wrong. They gave us an outdoor recreation hour and water fell, but there was none of the smell. Ozone. The scent of rain on the earth and the grass, the life rain carries. Earth may not be Heaven but there are things about it that are truly heavenly. Whereas Heaven…. It’s a poor substitute for Earth when it mimics it. Funny, isn’t it? I would pay dearly for an hour with actual sunshine on my face. I’d kill to ride behind the two of you again, to hear the rain hiss under the tires, smell the wet highway through the windows and listen to your voices from the front seat. That was heaven.”
“I think it’s hopeful,” Sam said during that time, when the messages were thoughtful and unpressured. “He knows he’s not nuts. He can feel that you’re getting these.”
“I had the same thought,” Dean had nodded, thumb swiping over where Castiel ‘signed’ it. “Maybe they’re going easier on him; not drugging him out of his gourd. They’re more…coherent.”
I tried…. the messages on the cards all said in one form or another. I thought I put things right enough in Heaven that I’d be forgiven for rebelling. I should have known….I guess I did know. That I would pay. I’m holding on. I have hope…
Hope for what? Escape? Forgiveness? That Sam and Dean would find him?
They’d tried every day, every avenue they could think of; searched through lore, looked for experts on Acts of God, looked for word of any doorways to Heaven still ajar. They’d even attempted to meet with some of that new crop of angels despite the fact that running into them never went well for anyone.
Then a week ago, the notes took a sudden, horrible turn: The cards themselves turned to plain index with no drawings. The paper arrived tattered, dog-eared, scuffed and mangled like they’d been walked on hard and kicked around a dirty floor for hours on end. The words on them were mostly pleas, peppered with ….sorry, sorry, sorry, noooo……sorry, I’m ….sorry.
“They’re beating him,” Dean had said under his breath, as close to tears as Sam had seen him in a long time. “Or worse. They left him rotting in a room for all these weeks and now…”
They both knew torture and brainwashing weren’t reserved only for Hell.
The cards stopped arriving all together. The worst was not knowing if Castiel had been destroyed, or if he’d stopped because he felt Dean reading them and hurting for him.
Maybe his tormentors had pushed him beyond hope. Or words.
~*~
Sam could see that this new one was very bad from Dean’s expression; the way his jaw clenched, how his eyes went far away and furious.
“What?” he asked, and then flinched when Dean tossed it right-side-up on the table.
It was covered in gore; dried blood stains, flecks of flayed-off skin and hair, thin feather vanes and a broken quill. It was a wordless scream, that …mess. That’s what it was. Pain and a scream written in Cas' own blood and bone.
Sam felt his stomach tighten and try to turn on him.
In the middle of the card was one word – faint, tiny.
Dean….
Castiel had remembered his name.
“That’s it,” Dean was on his feet and headed out of the room, toward the dungeon Sam guessed. “We’re calling him….”
“Are you nuts? Crowley said he’d kill us if he ever sees us ag…”
“Me. He said he’d kill me. You, he has a grudging respect for. Plus he’s never been convinced you won’t come in handy someday, that Luci won’t be back looking to make you his meat suit and Michael won’t get me to say yes. So we’re summoning him and you’re quizzing him…”
“Why?”
“’Cause if anyone’s got one of these new angels in his pocket, it’s Crowley. He’s gonna get us an audience…and I’m gonna talk my way into heaven and bust Cas out.”
‘If there’s anything left to bust out’ went unsaid.
“Dean, if there are no more doorways ajar then how….”
“Probably have to die again.”
“Shit…..no. C’mon….” Sam was still following him, though.
To the dungeon. And likely beyond, whether Dean liked it or not.
Funny, most people hoped to go to Heaven someday. Them? They’d be fugitives, aiming to get their asses in and back out, somehow. The faster the better.
Go figure.