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An angel of the Lord gets into a brawl in the corner of a dusty roadhouse out in an ass-crack cranny of the deep southwest and knocks out half a set of teeth between three nasty large wasted men and Dean would make him a necklace of still-bloody molars he’s so proud if he didn’t half to pry six more off him with the help of his giant younger brother to keep him from dying there. The bouncer comes stumbling along after his fourth tall tequila and waves a thick hand at them, and they’re gone, Dean promises, pulling Cas up by his elbows out of the sweaty biker pile. Still a little buttoned up even after turning in his Holy Roller card, he doesn’t understand the possible homoerotic overtone of it all, but Dean does, bemusedly, and he wouldn’t have Cas any other way.
The owners stand behind the bar and glower, and all the patrons have got their stools turned fully around. A kid far too young to be there watches the scene and swipes popcorn into his mouth by the handful, while you could hear a pin drop above the jukebox. Dean jerks his chin up at Sam as he pushes Cas along towards the door. The unresisting crowd parts around them. “Hey, pay the people for their trouble?” he barks over his shoulder at Sam.
“Again? I told you we should never take him out on weekends. Ever. He’s got no control!” He’s far taller than anyone here in town, but with his shoulders hunched in embarrassment, a little fear, it’s hard to pick him out of the crowd as he shoves along, too.
Dean growls. “I’ve seen you clean the floor with your face plenty of times, so don’t preach to me, or to him. Now, pay the good people and let’s go.”
Sam relinquishes what he’d won for the night hustling pool with no pleasure, and pushes his hands into his pockets as they leave.
“If I were still a capital ‘A,’” Cas mutters when they stumble out of the bar. His own mouth is still full of blood from a split gum, and doesn’t seem keen on spitting it out. He steps out of Dean’s reach to turn around, punch drunk but not drunk. One thing he hasn’t lost mojo-wise is his hollow leg of biblical proportions, to the injury of Dean’s wallet, and they agree to quit feeding the habit. “If I were still an angel with the capital ‘A’, I would have smote them,” he says, in his lower register.
Dean pats his shoulder and tries to keep him standing. “Yeah, Cas, you would’ve. They’d be just a greasy burn mark on the floor when you were through with them. Not even enough to polish both your shoes.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs, and his lashes fall, drunk on fading adrenaline and warm, as if remembering the sensation of a trusty knife in his hand. “I was a good warrior. Better, after I met you. I became very proud, and my resulting fall was proportionate to my hubris.”
“Yeah, you were a little full of yourself,” Dean murmurs, cutting down the train of thought—and it’s there, that goddamn betrayal-knife of Cas in a room, sucking down baddies’ souls like it’s uppers or downers or uppers mixed with downers just trying to save the world and save Dean in his stupidly desperate, reckless, holy fool way. He’d been a loaded junkie with his finger on the world self-destruct button, even though he clocked in well-over a thousand years and you’d think he’d know better after all that.
Cas looks at him now and every time it seems Cas is ready to die again (as he had, as God) just to make it okay, but Dean won’t let him.
“Hey, well, you gave the Winchesters a run for their money. And I hear we tossed the Devil and Michael back into the cage, or something crazy like that, which makes you especially badass, Cas,” he says. He doesn’t intend for the thickness in his voice when he lowers his chin, making sure that Cas is really paying attention to him. “You’re here, now. And that’s that. We’re not dwelling on it, Cas. Over and done. Okay.”
Cas nods, like he’s considering arguing the point, and thinks better of it at Dean’s increasingly firm grip on his shoulder. “You only caged Lucifer with my extensive help, as I remember,” he does say. “Which indicates a large proportion of that bad-assery may be attributed to me.”
“Don’t split hairs, dude.”
Cas squints, and for a second, Dean makes zero sense to him again. “I was not separating hairs, Dean.”
Dean smiles fondly and his hand slides, slides, slides up into the hair at the bottom of Cas’s head instead of letting him go. Sometimes it still feels like gripping a loaded sawed-off, touching Cas. “Still are pretty badass, you know,” he murmurs. “If we had anything to hunt, you’d hunt the hell out of it. But you kind of cleaned the place out when you were jacked up.” He rubs the skin behind his ear, and Cas’s eyes smile, while his split lip bleeds.
“I’m sorry.”
“What, for putting me out of a job? Jesus, Cas, I could kiss you for that.”
The angel looks infinitely pleased with Dean’s approval and turns to stumble towards the Impala. Dean waits, then turns. Sam has come out of the door as well and shakes off the bar-reek from his coat beneath the single light over the parking lot. Must have seen something because he’s got that goddamn canary-stuffed face on, but at least he’s not pissing about his hard-earned cash gone again. “What did I tell you, Dean?”
He rolls his neck and sighs, falling in brotherly step. “Fine. You predicted the future. Good for you. You win driving duty for tonight.”
Dean rubs his eyes, which get older every day watching headlights on pavement, but he could handle instead closing them and leaning on Cas in the backseat. Letting him fidget with Dean’s hands, as he is want to do now, as if he can finally, really feel his own skin. Letting him speak Enochian with Sam, letting them say whatever they will, gossip like old ladies about him, maybe—whatever—as long as he can just rest.
“Then I pick the tunes,” Sam says, already rubbing his own weary eyes at the thought of half-illuminated road whizzing ahead for hours. “Neither of you two are complaining, either. You’ll listen to Dylan and you too will like it. No more telling him that ‘Black Dog’ is a special protection spell for the car.”
Ahead, still reeling with pride, joy, and sparks behind his eyes, Cas is spitting out long rivers of black blood from his mouth in the dark, onto the blacktop and watching it with boyish fascination. He grins and watches the trail of it, blood washing his teeth faintly purple-black, and manages to make it look endearing.
Dean shakes his head, not knowing whether to laugh or—well, he’s just going to laugh at this point. He can’t help it. He loves this, loves Cas, loves Sam. That’s more than enough for him.
“I’m overwhelmed with joy,” he says as he slides into the backseat seat, waiting for Cas, and goddamn folk music comes out of the speakers.
before
God came down like a comet into Four Corners, November 19th, 2011, after many months slowly falling out of power, chipped away by the six rebellious angels who stood against him, Sam Winchester’s scheme and quick hands with Archangel’s sword he’d found in a Topeka thrift store dipped in some spare unicorn blood, Bobby Singer’s brushed-up sigil finger-painting, and Dean Winchester’s unspoken prayers that came everyday, asking him to stop. To put monsters back in the world, to let things run their course, to set danger and free will and pain and freedom loose again. To quit throwing tantrums and get his ass home.
He’d heard Dean ask him please, Cas, come back to us—come back to me, Cas, one more time as he’d prepared to splatter his brother across the room they’d trapped him in and end this annoying uprising, and finally, inexplicably, found himself turning into Sam’s knife, blowing his jimmy-rigged divinity apart but not his Jimmy-rigged body, and waking up in a crater in the desert to Dean’s hands on his face, wiping away dirt, blood. Cas hears him praying again.
Cas. Open your eyes. Cas. Cas. Cas!”
Funny, but his prayers sounded raw, like he’d been crying. And they had sound. Huh.
Finally, he’d growled, “Dean. Please. Could you shut up? Your thoughts are so loud they are hurting my head.”
The hands on his skin stopped.
Then Dean laughed breathlessly and gripped both sides of his face. “Dude, you got the holy shit knocked out of you and blew a Utah-sized hole into Arizona. That’s a regular old headache you have,” he says, as Cas’s eyes give him a world that is suddenly, suddenly human. Bright, so bright, and there’s Dean overhead, looking shaken and happy. “You have unicorn blood in your hair, too.”