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Picture this: midday. Somewhere outside Lawrence, Kansas. An abandoned church. A loaded gun and a Bible, laying side by side on the dusty altar. The Boy With the Demon Blood and the Angel of Thursday sitting side by side in the front pew.
“Why did you stop me?” Sam whispers into the silence. The church smells distinctly angelic—incense and ozone, and a heaviness in the air that he can only attribute to an angel’s grace. Every breath he draws in makes his head spin in time with his churning stomach.
Castiel replies simply, “I did not want it to happen.”
Sam steals a glance at the angel sitting beside him. Castiel sits in the pew like a schoolboy in class—back ramrod straight against the rotting wood, his knees touching, hands clasped in his lap. His unnerving gaze is fixated on the altar in front of them, where a decaying statue of Jesus on the cross hangs above. There is something so irritating about his nonchalance that drives Sam over the edge.
“Well, what about what I want?” Sam faintly registers the rising pitch in his voice and knows he sounds like a petulant child, but he finds that he doesn’t care. “You know what I want? I want to die, and I want it to be final. No more deals, no more games, no more angels puppeteering me around. I want it to be over.”
Castiel slowly turns towards him, his movements stiff and robotic, and fixes his wide blue eyes on him. In any other circumstance, Sam would’ve shrunk under that stare. But this is not any other circumstance.
“When you let me do this,” he says, “you have to promise me that you won’t bring me back. Not even for Dean.”
Something flits across the angel’s face, so briefly that Sam thinks he imagined it. He braces himself for righteous, holy anger, for Castiel to smite him there and then for making unwarranted demands. For being selfish. It’s nothing less than what he deserves, anyways. His death will not be a punishment—it will be retribution from God, the only thing worthy enough for a man as rotten as him.
But Castiel does none of that. Instead, he tilts his head, eyes squinted in confusion, and asks, “Why do you want to die?”
Sam can’t stop the incredulous laugh that bursts out of him. “Really? Why do I want to die? Do you want me to sit here and lament to you my greatest sins? Tell you what, Cas—I’ll humour you. I’m doing this because I’m the only person sane enough and brave enough to do what needs to be done. A long time ago, my father told my brother that, one day, he might have to kill me. And you know what? Dad said that to the wrong person—of course Dean couldn’t do that. He should’ve said that to me instead.”
“You truly believe that?” Castiel sounds so baffled that Sam starts to have second thoughts, but he pushes them away before they can take root and fester. If he starts to have doubts, he’ll fall into temptation. He won’t have the guts to do the right thing.
“Yes, I do. I’m a hunter—my whole life I’ve spent killing evil things, but when it comes to the one evil thing that needs to be killed, I’ve been too much of a coward to do it.”
A strange storm of emotions begins to brew in his gut the longer the gun lays on the altar, the longer he doesn’t just put a bullet through his skull and end it all. Why hasn’t he done it yet? Why is he hesitating? Distantly, he feels his breathing grow ragged, feels his chest start to tighten.
“You are many things, Sam Winchester,” Castiel says, “but you are not evil.”
Sam scoffs, turning his head away so the angel can’t see the tears brimming his eyes. “Yeah, that’s easy for you to say.”
“I suppose it is. I am an angel of the Lord, after all.” Castiel pauses, seemingly pondering on his next words, although it’s hard to gauge his emotions—his impassive expression and blank blue eyes betray nothing. The air grows thick and heavy, like how it does when it’s about to rain. Then Castiel, the self-proclaimed angel of the Lord, reaches forward and envelopes Sam’s hands in his.
Sam jerks in surprise, a gasp slipping out of his lips. Castiel’s hands burn cold against his skin, so inhumanly cold that it snaps him out of his panicked reverie. He tries to pull away, yet Castiel holds on stubbornly.
“Cas, what’re you doing—”
“If you were evil, do you think I would allow you to touch me? Do you think I would’ve touched you? Angels are warriors of God—we do not mingle with evil creatures if we can help it.”
Castiel squeezes his hands. Sam winces as the angel’s overbearing strength almost crushes his bones, but Castiel immediately notices his discomfort and releases his grip on him.
“My apologies.”
“It’s okay.”
Silence swells in the abandoned church. Then Castiel speaks again. “Do you remember when we first met, when you reached out to shake my hand? I was so hesitant to reciprocate, mostly because it had been many years since I’d last been on Earth, but I must admit there was a part of me that was…afraid. Disgusted, even, at the thought of shaking hands with an abomination. With the boy with the demon blood.”
Sam huffs out a weak laugh, any fight draining out of him as a bone-deep exhaustion takes its place. “Oh, I remember that. You must be really regretting shaking hands with me, huh? Considering I started the freaking apocalypse.”
“You started my doubt, Sam.” Castiel holds his gaze with such intensity that Sam can’t look away. “For millions of years, I was God’s most obedient soldier. I took pride in doing his holy works, in ridding the world of sin. I never thought twice about any of it—if God ordered it to be done, it must be done. When Heaven told me about you, about your role in the apocalypse, I was certain you were the Antichrist incarnate. But you proved me wrong, again and again. Despite everything, you tried to be good.”
The angel seems to hesitate—when did angels ever hesitate?—before laying a gentle hand on Sam’s knee. Then he says, “You are good, Sam.”
The world shifts slightly. The air bends like light refracting through a prism, and everything in the church becomes off-kilter, as if he’s trying to remember it from a dream. He has the nauseating feeling of floating, or falling from a great height, his stomach swooping low and the back of his neck prickling with cold sweat.
Sam looks down at his trembling hands—they look like someone else’s, some poor bastard’s broken body he’s inhabiting. This can’t be real, because this exact situation has been a silly fantasy he’s had since he was a child. This can’t be real, because it means his prayers have finally been answered. All those lonely years spent rotting in motel rooms, kneeling by the bed and clasping his hands together, just praying and praying for someone to grip his shoulders tight and tell him, This is the way that you are, this is why you’ve always felt different, this is why that’s okay—it has all led to this.
His faith, no matter how feeble, has been rewarded. But not by God—by an angel who rebelled against Heaven and everything he knew to save one small, insignificant human. To save him.
“Oh, God.” The words are punched out of him, short and strangled. Then the world’s turned askew, and suddenly he’s staring at the weeds growing between the cracks in the stone floor, his head between his knees as a hand rubs up and down his back, light as a stone skimmed across the surface of a pond.
“Breathe, Sam,” Castiel murmurs somewhere above him. “It’s all right.”
Sam breathes in one ragged breath after the other. Was this how John the Apostle felt when he received those visions from God, he wonders. Did his hand shake when he wrote Revelations? Did he realise how close he was to divinity, how close God was to him? Did he realise that God chose him? That God knew him inside out, saw the rottenness at his core, and said, I choose you despite, despite, despite?
The hand rubs soothing circles between Sam’s shoulder blades, and the realisation hits him all at once—God may not have chosen him, but Castiel has. And that has to be the only thing that matters.
Eventually the raging storm inside him passes. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” Sam hears himself mutter as he sits up. The hand leaves his back, but he can still feel its imprint on his skin, like it’s been branded on him. He turns away from Castiel and wipes the tear stains off his face, embarrassment filling the void behind his ribcage. He can’t remember when he’d started crying.
Castiel tilts his head, regarding him with that piercing gaze of his.“You are not okay, Sam.”
“Yeah, I’m not.”
The confession carries the guilt it always does—growing up with a father like John and a brother like Dean has taught him that admitting he isn’t okay means dumping a burden on someone else. So he learned to shut up, keep his head down, say “I’m okay” and never really mean it. His family had enough on their plate anyways.
In a weird, lopsided way, Castiel is family, but he’s also a celestial being of such light and divinity that Sam can’t even begin to dream of. He’s holy in a way Sam isn’t, and a part of him is afraid that if he dumps his sins on the angel, he’ll corrupt him like he corrupts everything he touches.
“Sam, look at me.”
Cold fingers grasp his chin. Sam lets Castiel turn his head towards him, but he keeps his eyes down. Looking into his eyes feels like stripping naked in front of him.
“You did not corrupt me,” Castiel says. His voice is so soft it makes Sam tremble.
He scoffs, pulling himself free from his grip. “I thought you said you wouldn’t read my mind anymore.”
“I didn’t have to.”
Sam tries not to think about the implications of that, of the fact that he’s unwittingly let an angel slip under his skin and see the darkness at the pit of him. Instead he bites down on his bottom lip, hard enough to taste blood on his tongue.
“You saved me,” Castiel continues. “You gave me the apple, but you didn’t make me bite into it. That was my choice—a choice that has freed me.”
“Wow, I didn’t know you went to Bible school,” Sam jokes weakly.
Castiel’s eyebrows furrow in confusion. “It is a reference to the Bible. I thought it was an apt analogy.”
“No, I was—” Sam huffs, a faint amusement rising in him. It’s almost ironic how the angel who fell for humanity is also the angel who understands the least about it. Even the archangels were more culturally educated, he thinks.
They lapse into silence. It's still midday, like when Sam had first walked into this church, but everything seems so much brighter. The sunlight spilling through the broken window illuminates a cyclone of dust motes spiralling endlessly upwards. The air is punctuated with the sounds of birdlife and insects outside, and the empty pews no longer feel as cold and lifeless as before.
Sam looks at the altar in front of him, where the Bible he’d brought with him rests next to his gun. His gaze trails upwards to the dirtied face of Jesus Christ from where he hangs on the cross.
He’s still broken. He still wakes gasping from nightmares, still hears Lucifer’s singsong voice echoing down a hallway of the bunker, still grieves his father and his mother and who his brother could’ve been if they’d been dealt a different hand in life. Demon blood, the most evil thing in the world, still runs through his veins. He’s long accepted that there is no fixing him, because his problem is much deeper-rooted than that. The problem is him.
Yet he knows, despite his countless mistakes, that he has been punished enough. His life is not a sacrifice that is needed anymore.
“What will you tell Dean?” Castiel asks.
Sam sighs. “I don’t know if I’ll even tell him. He doesn’t need to know any of this happened. That I tried to…”
That I tried to kill myself, that I wanted to die without ever telling my brother.
“It would be wise to tell him. He needs to know that you are okay.”
Shame swells in him as he imagines Dean’s face, contorted with a mixture of anger and worry. He can almost hear the sound of his yells echoing off the bunker walls as he tells him the truth. Dean carries Dad’s anger like a responsibility, like it’s his job to hold onto it even when Dad’s been long dead. Sam used to as well, before it drained him and he was left an empty shell, too tired to be angry at all. He doesn’t know if he can deal with Dean just yet.
“I’ll tell him when I’m ready,” he says.
Castiel nods as if he believes him—believes in him. The absolute faith this angel has in him will never cease to amaze him. “Will you be okay now?”
When have I ever been okay? “I feel better now. Thanks for…” Sam trails off, and both of them turn to look at the gun on the altar. “Well, thanks for everything.”
“You don’t need to thank me.” Castiel places a heavy hand on Sam’s shoulder. The sound of his wings unfurling reverberates in the church before it abruptly stops, and the light fades. “Do you want me to take you home?”
Sam pauses. He hadn’t thought about going home because, well, he hadn’t planned on it. The Impala is still parked outside, and he imagines the panic on Dean’s face when he realises that his beloved Baby is missing from the bunker’s garage. Driving his car back to him will be the first step in mending whatever it is between them.
“I’ll drive.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Castiel nods again, patting Sam's knee awkwardly before vanishing in a flurry of feathers. The one thing Sam likes most about him is that he doesn’t push—he knows exactly how long to stay, and he leaves when the time is right. In the silence of the church, Sam lets himself sit back in the pew. His gaze settles back on the altar.
The gun. The Bible. The itch in his trigger finger, the knowledge of a quick and painless death. He could bargain his way into Heaven if he really wanted, even if he knows that Hell is probably where he’s going to end up.
He thinks of Castiel leaving him without another word. The trust in his eyes.
He thinks of the Impala outside. Of Dean.
Not today.
Sam stands up and walks out of the church without looking back.