Archive of Our Own ^beta

Title: Dean Loves Lord of the Rings… and Cas
Author/Artist Name: louistoef
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Dean Winchester/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Medium or Word Count: 4,730
Genre(s): Mashup, Romance
Warning/Content: none
Summary: Dean and Sam catch wind of a case, but something strange happens to Dea while they drive there. He finds himself stuck in his favourite story, Lord of the Rings. When he needs help, Cas turns up out of the blue. But what is going on here? Will they solve the case? And why does it all seem to connect to Dean and Cas in the end?

Dean Winchester sat behind the wheel of his car and thoughts kept racing through his head.

The miles passed by. Heading to a job that was seemingly nothing more than small fry. Scenery changed from city to plains and back. After a couple of hours they couldn’t see anything anymore but just kept on driving through the night. They were bored. Light gave way to dark. Dark gave way to stars. Nobody knew what the future held.

“I’ll be damned,” rasped Dean, his voice straining from disuse. They hadn’t spoken for hours.

“What?” Sam startled out of his musings.

Dean shrugged and stared out onto the dark road rolling by underneath the wheels. He couldn‘t explain his weirdass thoughts about space and wide, empty landscapes to his brother so he came up with: “I just sorta feel really zen right now, know what I mean?”

Sam’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What?” he asked again.

His older brother had always been prone to bouts of weird from time to time, but this was far beyond his usual behaviour, so Sam didn’t know how to respond.

“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I dunno,” Dean replied defensively as if it would explain his mindset. “I just feel in a Lord-of-the-Rings-mood, y’know? It’s like the old hobbit at the beginning, huh?”
He hummed the ‘huh’ in a questioning tone to make sure he had Sam’s attention. “The road goes ever on and on. It could take us anywhere, past mountains and rivers and at the end of it there is a quest to be fulfilled.”

“Dean, what’s gotten into you? Since when are you so poetic?”

His older brother didn’t answer, but asked Sam to shuffle through the box with cassette tapes until he found a specific one labelled “LotR tunes”

Sam asked himself who the person in the driver’s seat was, because since when did that happen? When he inserted the cassette, they heard the last strings of Rush’s ‘Rivendell’, and then:

“Enya? Dude, seriously?”

“What? It’s the title song of the first movie.”

“Ok, ok. I just didn’t know you were into those movies so much.”

“Yeah, well you wouldn’t know, would you? You were away at college when they came out. I might have joined a LotR LARPing community while you were gone and you’d never know. Now shut up, stare out of the window and brood, that’s what you do best.”

Ok, point taken, Sam thought. There was a gab in his brother’s life that he’d never know about and if Dean had taken a liking to Middle Earth to fill the absence of his father and brother, then it was really nothing he could say about it.

Sam tried to imagine Dean during the time John was off hunting and sent him all over the country to work his own gigs, and he himself was busy trying to be normal at college.

He had the vague notion that when everybody had left Dean, these movies and perhaps the book (you never knew if Dean liked to read or not, sometimes he said this, sometimes that) had given him solace when he was all alone.

He imagined his tough older brother, once he had come back from a hunt, having picked up a burger and some fries on the way back to the motel. Eating in silence, feeling like the walls were surrounding him.

He’d pick up a battered copy of The Lord of the Rings from way down deep inside his duffel, when the silence around him became too deafening. He would brush off a few grains of salt, which had fallen out of stray shotgun shells, and then he’d read until he fell asleep to distract himself from his own thoughts.

Sam sighed deeply. He understood now. He understood why Dean didn’t want to go on the search for their dad on his own. A bit of resentment he didn’t know he still held, broke away deep within. Unconsciously he must have blamed his brother a bit for dragging him back into all of this, but now after all the years, he realised how deeply alone Dean had been when he had collected him from Stanford. And anyway, he knew now that he could never get away from this, it was a quest and he had to see it done.

“Hey, Dean?” Sam asked Dean .

“Hm?”

“Who’s your favourite Lord of the Rings character?”

The answer was short but immediate, as if Dean had a favourite character at the back of his mind immediately.

“Eowyn. The chick is super badass.”

“Yeah, makes sense.”

“What does?”

“Oh, nothing.”

Eowyn. The one holding the family together and who took care of her uncle when he was under the spell of an evil wizard. Figures, Sam thought.

He couldn’t help think about Eowyn’s accomplishments now. Killing the leader of the ringwraiths while protecting her family, laughing at the face of death in the hope to be able to protect her loved ones. Yeah, he could definitely understand why Dean would like her best. Though if he asked him, Dean would surely play it down and just say that Eowyn was a hot chick or something.

This led Sam to ponder about the question of Eowyn’s heart. It would always belong to her brother and her uncle but what about the love that exceeded family?

She had been in love with Aragorn, and Sam remembered how that ended. Then she had found what she looked for in Faramir, but how was this gonna help Dean in any way?

He snapped out of his stupor when Dean announced: “Maybe we should watch the movies the next time Cas is down here, what ya think?”

Sam cleared his throat. “Yeah, sounds good.”

The next song on the cassette was Zep’s Misty Mountain Hop and Sam knew clearly who Dean’s heart belonged to. Question was: Was Cas more like Aragorn or more like Faramir?

“Holy fucking crap,” Dean ran off like a squadron of monsters was after him, which as usual, was true.

They had found the monster they were searching for but it turns out it wasn’t just the one monster, but a whole band of goblin-like creatures, which to make the cliché even more evident, ran around swinging scimitars and were gurgling in an unintelligible language.

While Dean ran, he grabbed his phone from his pocket and yelled into it as soon as the connection established.

“Dude, orcs, motherfucking orcs are after me!”

“Can you repeat that?” Sam sounded completely dumbstruck.

“Full on Moria goblins with swords, Sammy. Big swords. Get help!”

Dean ran along further down the street. The nearby houses seemed to be completely empty as he passed, so he wouldn’t be able to find anyone who could help him there, either.

Up ahead, he saw that the street was ending in a wide bridge over a swiftly flowing river and he gurgled out an exasperated sigh as he sped towards it. Typical Winchester luck again.

“No, no, no, no, nooooo.” He was already on the bridge, running at full speed, when he saw that it was broken in the middle. Turning back and searching for another way wasn’t an option because he had a platoon of monsters on his ass. The gap wasn’t that wide, and if he sprung off at his current speed he could make it over, so with a loud cry of “Shiiiiiiiit,” he took off over the gap and jumped.

For a few seconds, he thought he’d made it, the other edge of the broken bridge got closer and closer, but with rising panic, Dean felt himself fall before he safely reached it. He reached out and his fingertips just caught the edge.

“Ok, ok, fuck.” He didn’t know for how long he could hold himself like this, but in the next second he knew he wouldn’t have to, because a familiar blue eyed face peeked over the edge and a hand reached down towards him.

He took Cas’ hand and felt himself lifted upwards as if he weighed nothing, only to be set on his feet next to Cas and Sam who had probably prayed his ass off to get the angel here and to take him with him when he went to rescue Dean.

“Awesome timing you got there,” Dean panted and grinned with relief. “And can I just say…” He raised his arm and made a theatrical gesture with his open palm. “Fly, you fools!” He intoned in a deep, authoritative voice.

He raised his eyebrows and grinned at them expectantly.

“Heh, heh?” he encouraged when Cas just continued to frown and Sammy gave him a bitch face with his head cocked to the side.

“We did fly indeed, but why do you take us for fools, Dean?”

“It’s a movie quote, Cas. Dean thinks he’s hilarious.” Sam said and rolled his eyes.

“Hey don’t you look at me sideways with that attitude. How about we find out what those things were and why they were after me, and is it just me or does this stink like a trickster to you? I’ll roast the son of a bitch before he can even crack a laugh about this shit.”

Turns out the monster they were hunting really was a trickster, Cas assured them but he couldn‘t quite make out the energy signature of the being. With their “wing man” as Dean called Cas, at their flank, they found out pretty quickly where the trickster was gonna be, but whenever they got close enough to strike, he threw new Middle Earth monsters at them. They had to fight against the goblins of the Misty Mountains, against the Uruk-Hai with their overlong lances and the deformed orcs of Mordor.

“Can we please gank the son of a bitch, before he throws something really nasty at us, like the Balrog or Sauron himself?” Dean panted after they had been chased through the city again, which looked even more ruined now that they had been here for days and all those different goblin breeds had attacked and chased them.

Today they hadn’t even taken the car to get to town anymore in the hope to avoid an open confrontation for once but now they walked back to their hideaway through woods, exhausted and sore from the fight against weapon carrying monsters.

They had wanted to stay in a motel, but the town had been completely empty when they got here. If it was part of the trickster’s illusion or not, they did not know. So they had taken up camp in a disused backward cabin which was miles away from the town.

They walked in single file through the dewy grass while the day waned, painting the landscape in a soft evening light as they passed by woods and hills and a long river to their left side. While they walked on, the road which eventually turned to the cabin slowly became visible through the bushes on the right hand side.

When they were about half a mile from their shelter, Dean held up his hand and listened. Did he really hear the sound of hooves now?

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered and beckoned his companions forward, moving faster as he went.

“Dean what is it?” Sam asked when they could already see the house.

“Nazgul.”

“What?”

“Ringwraiths, Sammy. Now move.”

They ran the last few yards to the house and closed the door against the rising fog outside.

“Are we talking like, ringwraiths, like the real deal?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do, ok?”

Sam didn’t bite, but gave a jerk with his head and a bitchface which had Dean groan.

“I’ve read the book, ok smart ass? Frodo, Sam and Pippin walk towards Buckleberry and get overtaken by the Black Riders several times. Satisfied now?”

“I am,” Sam grinned, having proven his theory about Dean being an avid Tolkien reader.

Cas had just watched the exchange quietly but now he spoke up: “I don’t understand what’s going on. This trickster lets creatures of myth come to life? Creatures that come from out of a book and movies?”

“Basically,” Dean nodded.

“It must be directed at you, Dean,” Cas stated.

“How do you figure that?”

“You were the one who immediately recognised what the noise in the woods meant and you know which creatures are being sent after us. I assume that Sam isn’t as acquainted with the material as you are. So we gotta figure out what makes the monster tick, right? And why it specifically comes after Dean. Also, we need to know the driving motivator behind the original tale.”

Cas looked from one hunter to the other, waiting for them to confirm his theory.
Dean walked over to where Cas stood and clapped his back in approval. “We may make a hunter out of you yet, Cas.”

Cas smiled happily at Dean and Sam just looked on with a peeved expression.

“Right, so we gotta find and destroy a ring now?” He spoke up when the seconds of Dean and Cas staring at each other lengthened.

“I don’t think it’s that simple. I mean we don’t have a Ring of Power, obviously, so it has to be something else. Something else that’s precious and that I couldn’t stand to be parted from.”

“The colt?” Sam suggested.

“The demon killing knife?” Cas asked.

“Somehow I don’t think so. Something powerful, something I’d miss, that I’ve grown attached to…” Dean wondered and Cas furrowed his brow, searching for something else that would be irreplaceable.

Sam groaned at their combined stupidity. “Guys, this is about Cas.”

“How do you mean? I thought this was about Dean?”

“It is. Partially.” Sam raised his hands in a violent gesture when the others just looked at him confusedly. “Look just trust me on this, alright?”

“So you’re saying the Ringwraiths out there, they’re after Cas?” Dean looked angry, his gaze searching for the nearest weapon to defend the angel.

He found a rusty iron wrench and armed himself. “Let them come.”

“Dude, calm down. If they’d really want in, they would find a way, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah, wait for the darkest hour of the night, then they’ll strike.” Dean sat down at the old wobbly table and laid the wrench down exhaustedly.

“That leaves us some time to prepare and find out more about this. There are still things that I don’t get. I mean, didn’t the ring want to be found? I don’t see Cas willingly going away with them.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Cas said.

“Well you did often enough,” Dean muttered.

“What?”

“You went away.” He spoke up louder now. “You went with the angels or with Crowley and you just packed up and left in Purgatory as well,“ he continued while Cas just stared at Dean in shock. “You always leave… us.” Dean said empathetically, but it seemed obvious that he had wanted to end his sentence differently.

Sam rooted up his computer in the awkward silence that followed, everyone in the cabin was aware that Dean had really wanted to say was ‘You always leave me’ but nobody wanted to allude to that fact directly.

“Right, but that actually helps us,” Sam tried to distract the others. “We know what this thing is about. It’s about the two of you and somehow, the trickster can see inside Dean to throw his fears at him by casting us into something you like.”

“Awesome,” Dean quipped. “Nothing like a monster twisting something that means something to a person.”

“You know perhaps that was that weird vibe you had, while he drove here, the feeling like you were inside your favourite story.”

“Yeah, could be. Glad this ain’t about you, Samsquatch. I wouldn’t wanna be stuck in the Wizard of Oz if someone paid me.”

“You think the trickster will maybe target Cas next, since this is also about him?” Sam asked.

“Possibly,” Cas answered.

“Well, that ought to be quick. Mr. I-don’t-understand-that-reference over here has seen like one porn movie and a road runner sketch in his entire existence. But hey, beats hanging out with Ringwraiths any day, huh?”

The darkest hour of the night swept around and Cas shook them both awake when he had seen dark figures roaming around the house.

Dean, Sam and Cas huddled close together, each with an arsenal of weapons by their side.

“Hey, too bad we don’t have any Numenorean daggers of the on us, because that would be a thing that can hurt those suckers.”

“Geek,” Sam quipped and felt avenged for all the times Dean had called him that in the past.

“Yeah, whatever.”

They heard the back door creak open, but before they could move there, the front door opened as well, and nine shadows rushed into the room, all in long black ropes.

“Hey, assbutts!” Cas yelled. “I’m not coming with you.”

“Yeah, you tell ‘em, Cas. Did you hear that? He’s not going anywhere!”

The wraiths stopped moving and instead every one cast back it’s hood. Dean had fully expected to see long, wavy ghost hair and eviscerated faces, but instead he saw the faces of angels, some he recognised, some he didn’t.

“Balthazar, Anna, Hester, Hannah, Uriel, Zachariah, Michael, Raphael and Lucifer,” Cas named them.

“Sounds like a weird ass compilation of random angels, don’t you think? And who’s Hannah?”

“You haven’t met her,” Cas announced and from the way Hannah cast a mild enchanted gaze towards Cas, Dean thought he really didn’t want to meet her, like ever.

“I still don’t get why especially those angels are here?”

“Man, Dean that’s so obvious.” Sam bit out.

Dean just continued to look confused, Cas shrugged.

“They all came between you, one way or another?” Sam asked incredulously because Dean and Cas seemingly didn’t get it.

“Oh, yeah.” Realisation daunted on Dean. “But that’s over now, tell you what angel nooks…” He seemed unsure of what to do, but raised his arm and pointed towards them. “Leave now and never come back, you hear me?”

As soon as Dean had said those words, the angels in their black ropes disappeared as if they had never been there.

“Son of a bitch, they just listened.” Dean was flabbergasted. “I didn’t even have to do the whole Gollum act on them.”

“Did that just seem to easy to you too?” Cas asked.

“Yeah, kinda. And somehow I don’t think this is over.”

It turns out that Dean was right and the trickster wasn’t yet done with teasing them because the next morning they woke up, Sam with an unquenchable thirst for demon blood, Dean feeling like he had just gotten out of hell and Cas filled with divine purpose and righteousness.

They all had to shake themselves a couple of times to remember that the time when Cas had first gotten into their lives was now long past and Dean grumbled: “Seriously, you had the choice between babysitter porn and Roadrunner and you chose our crappy ass lives as your favourite story in the whole wide universe?”

“Yes, it appears that I did.”

“No offence dude, but your taste in stories sucks. How do we even bust out of this one?”

Again, it was Sam who came up with the solution. “The answer is simple. Dean’s illusion already holds the answer. You gotta make different choices than before, concerning the angels.”

“What?”

“Well, they were all standing in between you, right? So you need to make sure they’re not anymore.”

“That sounds… yeah. Yeah that might actually work.” Dean turned round to Sam again but he was gone. “Sammy?” He then turned round, but Cas was also gone.

Dean found himself back at the Impala, talking to Anna, with her coming on to him. She said the exact same things to him like on the night she became an angel again. This time around, he turned her down.

The scene switched again and Dean suddenly found himself in the barn, seeing Cas and Uriel enter it. But it wasn’t ‘past Cas’ coming in, but ‘now Cas‘. The moment passed by exactly as they remembered, but Dean didn’t kiss Anna goodbye. Consequentially, Cas never looked unbearably sad like when it had happened for real, but instead softly smiled at him.

The scene dissolved and it took a while to form again. When it did, the next illusion was of them at Chuck’s house, Raphael just about to kill Cas. Since Cas didn’t really need to distract the archangel’s attention in the illusion, he teleported himself and Dean out of there.

So it went on. They were being thrown into more scenes from their past, always with the prerogative to change their decisions when it came to angels taking influence in the events.

Cas didn’t let Uriel take control of him. He and Uriel appeared in the motel room like they had the first time and Sammy wasn’t his adorable puppy version about meeting angels this time. Just before Uriel would have zapped Dean away to the warehouse to torture Alastair, Cas flew them out first.

Cas also didn’t let Zachariah brainwash him into joining forces with the corrupt angelic squad again. Dean was trapped in the room in Van Nuys again, not taking Zachariah’s manipulations seriously this time and they flew out of there in time to stop Sam from killing Lilith which effectively derailed the apocalypse they had lived through.

“This should stop it, right? We won’t meet anymore of them now?” Dean asked, when the scene dissolved again against his expectation.

The next illusion found them all that Balthazar’s mansion but Balthazar wasn‘t there. Instead they found Sam again and Cas filled him in on the different choices they made while Dean complained: “Fuck I’m getting whiplash from all this zapping around. What’s the point of this thing?”

“We choose different paths this time, Dean. The paths we would have chosen if we had had the choice.”

“Yeah I get that, but I still don’t get this.” Dean knew he didn’t make any sense. now he didn’t even have to, because instead of Balthazar who they expected to be here, they saw Gabriel, long lost archangel and trickster, appearing out of nowhere.

“Yes, you muttonheads, because there is a lesson to be learned here.”

“Gabe, you’re alive?” Dean asked incredulously while the others just seemed stunned into silence by Gabriel’s sudden appearance.

“I appear to be, yes.”

“Wow ok, so you turn up here after having been gone for over four years and you’re doing…what exactly is it that you‘re doing?”

“I am showing you and my little brother over here that if you had the chance, you would have made different decisions, decisions that would ultimately bring you two closer together, so in the end it’s nothing but unfortunate circumstances and your fears that keep you apart.”

Dean let the realisation sink in, his heart fluttering rapidly at the implication of Gabriel’s words and still not able to believe that he was actually talking to him. He looked up, willing his hands to stop shaking.

“Why do you care, Gabe? What’s it to you? You didn‘t care enough to stick around, letting us believe you were dead and all.”

“I don’t know.” The archangel admitted. “Guess I’m a sucker for happy endings and I actually wanted to see you lot again. I can‘t say I‘m sorry that I kept away for so long because I love the quiet life, far away from trouble and you all seem to absorb it somehow. But I sure missed you all.”

“A simple hello is too normal for you? Why couldn‘t you have let us known you were alright? We mourned you,” Sam said curtly but was cut off by Cas running over to Gabriel to embrace him.

“It’s good to see you, Gabriel. I‘m glad you‘re here.”

“Me too, little bro,” He hugged Cas back shortly. “And for your question, Sam, I didn’t want you to know that I was still around, so I had to go. Do you think with me on the board, this war would have ended peacefully? Just imagine Raphael and his little crusade to open the cage back up and how it would have gone if I’d have to fight another one of my brothers. No, no. Better to stay away.”

He looked at them, now a little rueful. “But hey, I’m back in the game and I thought what better way to get into your good books again than to let these two,” he motioned between Dean and Cas, “finally know that they’re being stupid and should just get it all out in the open. No sense in hiding how you feel for each other.”

Dean and Cas looked at each other, without the usual walls of something else between them, and they saw that Gabe was right. It didn’t really matter if they chose different ways to go, because the one thing that was always certain is that they were joined together. No matter what else happened. Dean would always forgive Cas when he tried to save the world and made it all worse. They would always have each other’s back and choose themselves over armies, heaven and hell. In the silence that followed while they were staring at each other, Gabriel spoke up again.

“I think this is the moment where I loudly announce that I still owe one of you a trip into their favourite story and I guess Dean and Cas have stuff to talk about. C’mon Sam, fancy a trip to Oz?”

“As long as you don’t twist it around,” said Sam, clearly seeing that his brother needed some alone time with Cas.

“Ah, you know me…”

“Yeah, Gabe. That’s kinda the problem.” But nonetheless, he walked off with Gabriel, their difference in height almost comical as they turned their backs towards them.

Dean and Cas heard Gabriel snap his fingers and Sam’s voice in the distance shouting out to them “See you later, Eowyn and Faramir” and suddenly they were in the Impala, driving along a desert street, the flaring heat being lessened by the cool breeze through the windows.

Dean looked over at Cas with an expression that was filled with all he had to say but never had, and Cas looked back with the same expression. It was comforting to know that Dean wasn’t alone in his loss for words, so they just kept on driving in silence.

They passed rock formations which reached higher than anyone could climb, saw plains that no one would be able to wander through while the sun added a glow to the scenery which was almost magical, if you actually believed in that sort of thing.

Still they drove on, the silence comfortable, not pressing, because what words could they ever find for all their secrets now finally lying out there in the open? Their long held love for the other finally laid bare, being made absolute by the knowledge that it was there and neither heaven nor hell could ever change that. Whatever choices they made, whatever decisions they altered, they would always end up here. Belonging together for better or worse.

When they passed a deep clear lake, Dean took the figurative hop over the mountain and parked the car. He got out and held his hand out to Cas, who exited the car as well and took it without question.

They stood there, looking down at water that was so clear that they could see everything reflected in it perfectly. It showed the mountains in the distance and a bird circling overhead which spun away as they watched. Just as clearly, it showed when the hunter pulled his angel in by the lapels of his trenchcoat and finally, after all the whirlwind and battles that was their lives, acknowledged that he loved him with their first kiss.

It was neither Galadriel’s mirror, nor was it the Kheled-zaram at the East Entrance to Moria. But it was magical as well, because Dean and Cas came to terms with the fact that destiny did not have to be a bad thing. Some things are certain, and the fact that they would always love each other, was one of them.