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Every morning Castiel weighs his grace in one hand, checking to see how much there is left. His grace is growing smaller and smaller every day, and he knows it is close to the end.
When he tells Dean, Dean’s face remains turned away from him for a long moment. "So what are you going to do with it?" Dean asks. "What will you do with what’s left? Do you know what you want to do?"
Castiel knows what he wants. He would like to change himself, just enough, so that he can look at himself in Dean’s mirror and not feel unhappiness. Just enough to know that when he blinks out of existence, he will leave behind some small measure of good to weigh against all the bad.
"Yes," Castiel says. "I want to do good things."
So he does.
--
Castiel performs miracles with the grace he has left. He goes out and does his good things, he does his good work. Some days he goes out looking for miracles, walking up and down interstates, changing tires, offering his cell phone, getting to crash sites before anyone has even dialed 911. Some days he sits on a bench, at once in a small park just outside Lebannon and and every park in the world all at the same time, and waits for miracles to come to him. He sits on his bench and listens for prayers, to see what kind of good he can do.
He hears many voices. Help me please, oh please, some people call. Please, they say, but with others it is simply a sudden surge of pain, of suffering so deep and wide that it has to escape, hurt so deep that it needs a place to go. So he follows the thread of hurt back to its source, and lifts whatever pain he finds there. Blindness, paralysis, cancer. He lifts a tree off a trailer in Michigan. He saves a child falling out of a two-story window in Tuscon, and this miracle is caught on camera. He makes the local news.
When he gets home, Dean is sitting on the couch, watching the news story on his laptop. Castiel’s face is there on the screen, frowning rather as he is interviewed by a reporter. Castiel had not meant for any of his good works to be publicized.
"My hero," Dean says when he catches sight of Castiel. He is smiling.
"I didn’t mean for anyone to see," Castiel tries to explain. "It’s not about that," he says, though that’s not quite true. Being a hero was what he had used to want more than anything, performing some astonishing feat, creating some kind of miracle that would cause Dean to look at him with wonder and love, to got out and do something so grand that when he returned, Dean could not possibly turn him away. Castiel has wanted to do some kind of good work that would earn him the kind of welcome you give to heroes, to soldiers returning from war: To have someone waiting with their arms open wide, laughing and crying and saying that they are so glad to see him, that he can rest now, that now he has atoned for all his past mistakes, that all the pain he has caused could be swept away by one immense good thing, so that when he dies for the last time, his ledger is clean. To do something so great that he would have angels waiting for him in heaven with their swords raised in salute.
He knows that all he can do are a few small good things. Nothing great, nothing grand. Just so he can know, deep in his heart, that he did good with everything he had left.
He can’t explain it to Dean, not the way he wants. "I don’t want to be a hero. That's not what I am," he says, and Dean’s smile fades somewhat. "I just don’t want to have been a waste. Not completely."
--
Dean calls him that, now: My hero. He doesn’t say it like he means it. Instead Dean says it when Castiel does little things, tiny little human things that carry as much weight as his fading grace. When Castiel picks up the remote off the floor. When Castiel gets up and goes into the kitchen to get Dean a beer. When Castiel takes a list and drives to the grocery store.
My hero, Dean will say, and he’ll say it like he’s laughing at Castiel a little, in the way that Castiel understands that friends sometimes do, and sometimes he will say it like he doesn’t like the taste of it on his tongue. There’s only one time Dean says it like he means it, once, as he’s lying there burning up in his bed with fever, when Castiel gets back from the 24-hour pharmacy two towns over with Tylenol and Gatorade.
"My hero," Dean croaks, and he closes his eyes while Castiel places a cold wet washcloth on his forehead. He doesn’t say it like it’s a joke. He says it like it’s the truth.
--
Castiel spends an afternoon in a children’s hospital. He stays until the corridors are empty and the rooms are closed shut. It’s a miracle, they say later, after he has left. There’s no other word for it. A miracle. But when he gets home that evening, his grace is light in his hands. He has spent too much too quickly.
"Let me see," Dean says that night, and Castiel shows him what he has left, the pale blue light flickering between his palms.
"A week?" Dean asks. "A day? How many more miracles do you have left, Cas?"
"I don’t know," Castiel says.
"Don’t go tomorrow," Dean says. "Just stay with me and Sam. You don’t have to be a hero. Hunt with us. Just one whole day, just all of us together."
"I have to," Castiel says stubbornly, "there is more to do, i don’t have the time. There are people out there, Dean, they are suffering. They need help, and this is my work."
Dean hands him his grace back and stands up. "Okay," he says. He stands there in the doorway to Castiel’s room. The glow of the lamp casts him in tired shadows that dance all over his face, and Castiel thinks he looks so weary. His shoulders sag a little.
"If it’s so important to you," Dean says, and sets his shoulders against the weight of tomorrow, and Castiel looks down at the fading grace in hands and then and there, makes up his mind to save enough for one last miracle. Something for Dean. Something to help him carry that weight. Something good.
--
Castiel heals a hiker with a broken leg. He stands inside a burning highrise apartment and holds the ceiling over his head until twelve firemen escape. He finds a dead kitten on the side of the road, and even though it belongs to no one, even though no one is crying over its loss, he touches its head with one finger and gives it new life. That miracle still feels incomplete, so he places the kitten in his pocket and takes it back to his bench. He sits there until the long shadows of the afternoon sun slant across his face, until he has found the kitten a home.
He checks his grace. It feels so light, as light as a sparrow’s feather resting in the palm of his hand.
Dean is so quiet when he shows him his grace. Dean is reaching out with one careful finger, but he stops short of touching Castiel’s grace.
"What are you going to do with it?" he asks. "Save a baby? Stop a tsunami? What's left, Cas? I think you might have actually saved the world already."
"I don’t know," Castiel says. "Something good."
--
It is Dean’s voice this time, calling for him. Dean is calling him, over and over. Castiel, he is saying, Castiel, I need you now. I need you here. Please, oh please.
He finds Dean at a hospital just outside Cheyenne. Dean’s jacket is covered with blood, Dean’s face is wet from crying. "Sam," he is saying, "that fucker got to him, oh, Cas. It looked so bad. I'm all fucked up. Cas, I was so goddamned scared."
"Do you need a miracle?" Castiel asks him anxiously. His grace is so light. There is almost nothing left. Surely there is not enough for this, but he would try anyway, if Dean wanted him to. "I don’t know if I can help. Dean, I have no more miracles," he says hopelessly.
"I don’t need a miracle," Dean is saying. He sounds oh so tired. And there’s something else, there in his voice. It’s the same thing Castiel has heard from the mothers of the children he had saved. Thankfulness. "I just need you here." And Dean does something he has never done before: He throws his arms around Castiel and presses his head into Castiel’s chest.
"Oh," Castiel says in wonder. "I see."
And he does. He has been so loved Dean for so long, but he has spent his life loving Dean by doing things for him, thinking that was the only form love could take. And here is Dean saying that he could love Dean best by just being here, just Castiel, with or without his grace; just Castiel with his arms around Dean’s shoulders, helping him hold up the weight of the world. Just by sitting here beside him through every long night, and maybe holding his hand.
So he carefully tightens his arms around Dean. Lets Dean’s head rest there on his chest. Lets the last of his grace flow through him, to hold him here for as long as it lasts. This will be his work, from now until the end of his life. And he says to Dean, so quietly, I am here. I am here. For as long as I can, I will stay right here.