Chapter Text
Rolling down the side of a mountain came with many problems. Sam was bruised, scraped, and cut to hell, and Dean hadn’t stopped laughing at him for six hours. But the worst of it was his hair.
When he was little, John made him keep it short. Too much bother for Dean to be looking after Sam’s hair. As soon as Sam was old enough to comb his own hair, he rebelled against his father, and grew it out long. When he started college and didn’t have to listen to John or Dean anymore, it had gotten down to his shoulders. Jess didn’t like it, so he’d cut it shorter for her. Back on the road with Dean, though, Sam thought maybe he understood his dad’s point about how much bother it could be. But then Jo gave him a spell. Once a month, he had to burn some herbs and recite a bit of Latin, and his hair would never tangle and would stay soft and shiny with only basic care.
So it had literally been years since he’d dealt with this kind of mess. He didn’t know where to even start detangling. It would probably be easier to cut it off and start over. Sam was reaching for the scissors when he heard wings.
“Hello, Sam.” Castiel examined Sam and gave him a puzzled look. “What happened? Dean said you needed a miracle, but you don’t appear to be injured too badly.”
Sam couldn’t help the grin, although he swore that he was going to kill his brother later. “It’s all right, Cas. Dean’s an idiot. He’s making fun of me for my hair.”
Castiel stepped closer, looking intently at Sam’s hair. Just when Sam was about to crack some kind of joke to break the tension, Castiel said, “It will be difficult, but I don’t think a miracle is required. If you’ll allow me, I can try to untangle it for you. I would hate to see you cut it off.”
“You would?” That was a surprise to Sam. “I didn’t think an angel would even notice something like that, let alone care.”
“Most angels wouldn’t. But the time I spent in rebellion, and taking on your memories, I’ve learned to see as humans do.” Castiel frowned. “That’s not quite right. Any angel can see as humans do, within a human vessel, but I’ve learned to interpret what I see in a human fashion instead of translating it to angel vision. It’s usually not worth the bother, but for you, it is.”
“I can imagine.” He wouldn’t want to see his soul every time he looked at himself either. “You wanna try to fix my hair, go ahead. You really can’t make it any worse. Just tell me if you give up so I can cut it.”
“The best is when I can do both. It’s difficult, and I can only maintain it for a few minutes, but often well worth it. Seeing the light of your soul shining through your hair is worth it.” Sam sat on the floor at the foot of his bed. Cas sat behind him, reaching out and running a hand over Sam’s hair.
When Cas found a place to start, it felt surprisingly good. “Where’s an angel learn how to deal with giant messes of hair? I'd have thought you guys just use your grace to keep it under control, like your clothes.”
“We do. I’m working out what I need to do with your hair as I go. The delicacy required, though, I learned during my rebellion. It’s very like managing my wings then.” Castiel tugged gently on a particularly stubborn knot.
“Okay, people have said all kinds of things about my hair in the past, but that’s the first time I’ve ever heard it compared to an angel’s wings,” Sam said, trying to keep the grin in check. He didn’t say it out loud, but he decided that was a pickup line that just might have worked on him.
“It’s a rather odd comparison, I agree, but it works.” Castiel worked quietly for a bit, and the feeling of Cas’s fingers in his hair relaxed Sam a lot. “Are you okay, Sam?”
“Yeah, I’m great. You’re really good at this.” Sam leaned back against the bed, careful to keep his head tilted enough forward that Cas could keep working.
“What about the other injuries? I didn’t notice anything serious, but they do seem rather extensive.”
“Oh.” Sam stretched his limbs, making sure to keep his head as steady as possible. “Well, sleeping tonight’s not gonna be fun, but I’m okay. For falling down a mountain, this isn’t bad at all.”
Cas’s fingers stilled in Sam’s hair. “How did you come to fall down a mountain?”
“Well, I didn’t fall, exactly,” Sam admitted with a chuckle. “More like got thrown down by a pissed-off skinchanger and rolled for a few hundred yards. It was really steep and it had rained recently, so I couldn’t get hold of anything to stop myself until I went off the cliff.”
“Fell off…” Castiel’s fingers tightened in Sam’s hair. He released them right away. “I apologize. I assume the cliff wasn’t very high?”
“Nah, barely taller than me, maybe seven feet or so. And I landed in a juniper bush, so that kept me from breaking anything aside from branches.” Sam scratched at a scrape on his arm. “Didn’t help with the hair at all, though.”
“That explains this.” Castiel held out a twig for Sam’s inspection. “I don’t know whether to check you for curses or declare you the luckiest human alive.”
“I wonder that myself sometimes. I mean, I know I’m cursed, Azazel and all. But to be alive, after everything I’ve been through…” Sam shook his head. “Well, I know I’ve got a literal angel looking out for me, but even that had some huge luck involved.”
Castiel put a hand on top of Sam’s head to hold it still. Somehow, that made whatever he was doing to Sam’s hair feel even better. “How so?”
“You rescued Dean. How many other angels would have decided to tolerate me, let alone look out for me like you have? Can you honestly tell me that I’m not lucky that my brother’s guardian angel would care enough about me to storm Lucifer’s Cage?”
“If you were truly lucky, he’d have gotten an angel who could do it right. Or one who wouldn’t have gotten so far off the reservation that he thought it acceptable to risk your life to take you and Dean out of the fight.”
Sam laughed. “Maybe. But just the fact that you tried… and then you came back to the reservation and fixed my head. Can’t ask for too much.”
“Sam, you deserve it,” Castiel said, smoothing some hair forward.
Sam reached up to touch the hair, and was pleased to find that Cas was, in fact, making progress. “You’ll never get me to agree, you know. Tell me about angel wings instead. Or something amazing you’ve seen or done.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know! You’ve been around a while, you have to have seen something amazing. What did angels do before there were humans? Did you get to watch the Earth and sun and moon form? Were dinosaurs as cool as they look in the movies?” Sam cut himself off there, because he knew he’d start babbling some really stupid questions if he kept going.
Castiel chuckled softly. “The first time I took a host on Earth, it was a triceratops. We were sent to investigate the state of the planet, see how God’s plans were coming along, and Balthazar convinced a few of us to sneak away and create some mischief.”
“Mischief. Why doesn’t it surprise me that Balthazar was involved?”
“Because you met him after he chose to abandon his responsibilities. Before then, he was one of the most loyal and honorable of angels. I still can’t believe he blamed me for his choices.” Castiel handed Sam another twig. “I never ran away from Heaven, from my duty. I rebelled, yes, but that was because I believed Heaven had lost its way. Once humans arrived, Balthazar left off his mischief and served with distinction.”
“Oh. So you ran around as a dinosaur? How do you get permission from a dinosaur to use it as a vessel? Were they actually intelligent?”
“No more than any other animals.” Sam could definitely feel the difference now as Castiel ran his fingers through Sam’s hair. “Once humans came along, we were no longer permitted to take animals as hosts, but until then since there was no other choice we could. We were only supposed to if it were necessary, but… mischief.”
“Heh.” Sam closed his eyes, imagining a bunch of angels tromping around in dinosaur bodies. “Wait a minute. What about when you were avoiding Heaven after you got back from Purgatory?”
“For one thing, that was guilt and shame over the crimes I had committed, not running away to indulge whatever whims struck me. For another, I would have gone back much sooner, except that Naomi wouldn’t allow it.”
“Oh, wow, yeah. I keep forgetting just how long Naomi had you under her control. I’m so sorry we didn’t help you sooner.”
“You didn’t know.”
“We knew something was wrong.” Sam reached up and felt his hair. “Wow, you’re doing a really good job with this. Thanks.”
“Sometimes I miss taking care of my wings this way. I always found it relaxing. I’ve tried not letting my grace do it, but it’s not the same.” Castiel went to work on another section of Sam’s hair. “Watching the sun and planets form isn’t as exciting as it sounds. You have to remember, the videos are sped up immensely. The process takes hundreds of millions of years. It was exciting the day Theia crashed into the Earth as it was coming together.”
“Theia?”
“A planet-sized object that struck the forming Earth to create the moon. There was panic in Heaven – we knew that God had designated the Earth as the eventual home of his creations, so to see it nearly destroyed was terrifying. God sent reassurances through the archangels, but it wasn’t until the moon started to come together that we understood.” Castiel paused while he worked out a particularly stubborn knot. “For millennia, I looked to the moon for reassurance that God’s plans always resulted in something beautiful. Then the Apocalypse happened, and I can’t find the moon in the results of that. The intended results of the fight occurring or the actual results.”
“Well, it’s not the moon, but if it weren’t for the Apocalypse, Dean and I wouldn’t have met you. Dean would still be dead, I probably would be too. That’s worth, like, Tycho crater or something.”
“Having you and Dean is a good result. I hadn’t thought to look at it that way.” Castiel continued working through the tangles in Sam’s hair. “Later on, when life came along, it got a bit more interesting. I’ll never forget the day we all descended on the Earth to watch as the first animals began to leave the water. Even then, I was a troublemaker… I nearly stepped on a fish. Lucifer caught me just in time and told me there were big plans for that fish.”
Sam snorted. “And now he probably wishes he’d been just a couple seconds slower.”
“Probably. Although God could probably have found another fish. I’m grateful for it; I like life as it came to be.”
“Me too.”
“Even juniper bushes?” Castiel handed Sam yet another twig.
Sam chuckled. “Hey, that juniper bush may have saved my life! If I’d landed just wrong, I could’ve broken my neck. And I’m sure not minding you taking care of my hair for me.”
“That’s good to know. Tangled hair is much easier to fix than a broken neck. Skinchangers, on the other hand, I could do without.”
“Yeah, I know. But that’s the job, you know? We deal with the crap out there so that others don’t have to.” Sam shifted his weight a little. “How’s it coming?”
“Nearly done.” Castiel ran his hands through Sam’s hair, and Sam could feel the difference. “What happened to the spell you normally use to prevent this?”
“Forgot it was time,” Sam said, trying not to laugh. “I’ll do it tonight, can’t call you after every hunt. But thank you. I’m glad I didn’t have to cut it off.”