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anactoriaTitle: Unfurl, Like A Wing In A Thermal
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Dean/Cas, Sam, Crowley, OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Word count: 20,000
Summary: After a run-in with a rogue Woman of Letters, Castiel finds himself with visible wings.
Being injured in the aftermath of the encounter and stuck on lockdown in the bunker is bad enough, but between attacking zombies, cultlike followers, and his tentative relationship with Dean, he soon finds that his injuries are the least of his worries.
Masterpost here.
It’s near midnight when they pull over at an almost-deserted gas station, Dean grumbling about needing a coffee and a piss.
They haven’t talked much since they left the motel. Most of the time, Castiel keeps his eyes closed and tries to ignore how he can feel the rumble of the engine in his bones, a dull kind of pain, like scraping his hand on rusted metal. Sometimes when he opens them, Dean is looking at him. Other times, he’s watching his own eyes in the rear view mirror.
Dean slows the car on the approach, looking the place over for curious eyes before he commits to turning in. Behind the window, a bored counter clerk flips through a magazine, not even sparing a glance up at the sound of the Impala’s engine. A trucker dozes in his cab, dead to the world. There’s nobody else in sight. Castiel watches them in the quiet, while Dean fills the tank and disappears into the gas station. The throb of his injured wing, the cramp in his muscles from the unnatural position the backseat of the car forces him into, have become background noise as the night has worn on and he’s gotten used to them, but the momentary quiet forces him into new awareness of them. He’d give anything to take a walk; to stretch his wings.
Dean emerges with two cups of strong black coffee. He hands one of them to Castiel through the car window, and Castiel takes it gratefully. It’s bitter and it burns his mouth when he sips it, making him wince. Bizarrely, the small pain is a relief from the bigger ones that are weaving themselves into the fabric of his consciousness.
“You okay?” says Dean. Easier for him to ask after the small pains than the larger ones he can’t fix. Castiel understands that. He nods.
Dean opens the driver’s side door, is halfway back in the car when Castiel finds his voice and says, “Wait.”
“What’s up?”
“I need—” He shrugs, and then winces at the involuntary way his wings move along with his shoulders. “It aches. Sitting in the car.”
Dean looks at him, raises one eyebrow. Castiel catches sight of his reflection in the side mirror and realises he’s pouting. The timbre of his voice has turned childish. Even now, after the months he spent human, it surprises him how quickly pain overrides all other concerns, how it reduces him to a creature of sensation and need.
He recalls, briefly, a night years ago, when he stood on the side of a darkened highway with a cell phone pressed to his ear, bewildered at the thought that Dean could sleep in the face of imminent apocalypse. That so small a thing as a human body could shut down all the concerns of Heaven and Hell in favour of its own needs.
He wonders what he would say to that self now. He understood the world so much more simply, then. He understood so little of it.
Dean casts a glance around the empty gas station lot, then sighs and says, “Fine. Not here.”
He climbs back into the car and pulls around the side of the building, into its shadow. Not quite out of view of the road, but less obviously visible. Castiel cracks open the passenger door and climbs out. The relief of stretching out cramped limbs is immediate and blissful, and he stands on his toes and arches his back, working out the kinks in his spine. His wings try to stretch out, too, an involuntary movement that he only notices because of the bandage that secures the injured one in place. That’s a kind of discomfort, too, but a different kind. There’s something about it that feels secure—like a hand to hold, a shoulder to lean on.
The press of Dean’s hand, near the place where his wing joins his back, startles him for a moment.
“Let me take a look at that bandage.”
Dean’s voice is gruff. Castiel turns his head toward it and finds their faces close enough that Dean would ordinarily take a step back and make an exasperated comment about personal space. Somehow, though, the barrier of Castiel’s wing between them seems to allow it, and Dean wets his lips and looks down at the bandage.
“So,” he says, when he’s no longer looking Castiel in the eyes. “You’re pretty much out of juice right now, huh?”
Castiel nods. “I’m not sure what happened,” he says. “It seems that my grace is—tied up in these.” He shifts, his wings shivering, and he is suddenly very conscious of the way Dean’s fingers sink between his feathers. It feels intimate; unfamiliar and natural both at once.
“So the one time you don’t look like a human, you pretty much are one.” Dean’s hand is still on his wing. His fingers brush through the soft down at its base, a movement so minute Castiel isn’t sure Dean knows he’s doing it. “Man, that sucks.”
Castiel almost smiles at him. “That seems like a fair assessment of the situation.”
“You’re okay, though, right?”
“I think so.”
Dean nods. “You gotta tell me if—if you’re not, okay? You gotta tell me.”
There’s a sound within the gas station building. A window closing.
Castiel glances in the direction the sound came from. He can’t see anybody at the window, but Dean’s hands drop away from him, and a frown spreads across his face.
“We should go,” Dean says.
Castiel sighs. He follows Dean back to the car.
----
They make it back to the bunker without stopping for longer than it takes Dean to refill the tank and pick up snacks for them to eat on the move. The first time, he comes back with a burger and a bag of fries that he leaves on the shotgun seat to dip into as he drives. He doesn’t comment, when Castiel finds his stomach rumbling and reaches across to take a handful, but the next time they stop, he orders double.
When they walk into the bunker’s library, Sam is sitting at the table, grim-faced in the light from his laptop screen. His eyes widen when they land on Castiel—his wings, his injury, the state of his clothes—but he doesn’t comment.
“You seen this?” he asks them in place of a greeting, and turns the laptop so they can see the screen.
Castiel squints at it. The video is fuzzy and unsteady, filmed on somebody’s cell phone, so for a moment he isn’t sure what he’s looking at.
Beside him, Dean lets out a sigh and mutters, “Dammit,” and that’s when Castiel sees it.
It’s them. Him and Dean, a few hours ago, standing outside the gas station. The shapes of his wings are black impossible shadows against the empty lot, even in the dark. The span of Dean’s hand, pale against his feathers.
The only mercy is that they’re both facing away from the camera. Nobody who didn’t know them would recognise them immediately.
“Dammit,” Dean says again.
On the video, the sound of a window closing.
Castiel glances sideways, at Dean. “The gas station clerk,” he says.
Dean nods. “The one time a civilian actually notices there’s something weird going on. Jesus.” He rubs at his eyes, and Castiel notices that he looks tired. As tired as Castiel feels, perhaps.
There are comments below the video. Castiel leans in to read them, catching himself on the back of a chair when he forgets about the new weight of his wings and they threaten to topple him forward.
Seriously? I’ve seen realer-looking pictures of Nessie.
whys that dude topless? looks like teh start of a bad gay porno to me.. :))
Ofcourse the sheeple are out in force, making jokes about what they don’t undestand. Their are things the government dont want you to know, and if you had half a braincell, you wloud know this already.
Angels are among us. I’ve always known. Welcome. <3
Got to admire his cosplay skills, but ComicCon isn’t til next summer, guys! :D
Dean huffs and snaps the laptop shut, narrowly missing Sam’s fingers. “Okay,” he says. “You done Perez Hilton-ing us? Rogue Woman of Letters, zombies, any of this ringing a bell?”
Sam gives him a serious look. “Guys, we can’t ignore this. We aren’t the only hunters who know how to use YouTube. And right now? Cas looks like nothing any of them have ever seen.” His gaze lands on Castiel, his brow furrowed. “You should be careful. Stay in the bunker. Don’t go outside unless you have to.”
Castiel nods. What else is he going to do?
Dean nods, impatient. “Got it. We’ll keep Big Bird here on lockdown.” He shoves the laptop back at Sam. “C’mon. Zombies.”
Castiel learned long ago that there’s no point taking offense at the way Dean glowers and grumbles—that it’s his way of expressing worry, and that worry is his default state when it comes to the people he cares for. It’s the only language he knows for these things.
Castiel lifts his arm, almost reaches over to touch Dean’s shoulder, to reassure him.
He thinks better of it before he makes contact. Nods and says, “Yes. Zombies.” He glances down at his bare chest. The bunker is deep and windowless, and there’s a chill in the air. His skin is coming out in goosebumps. “I think I’d like a shirt.”
Dean raises an eyebrow. “Thought you’d never ask.”
Sam says nothing. He’s smiling faintly, but when Castiel catches his eye, it fades.
----
He ends up wearing one of Dean’s old t-shirts, deconstructed with scissors to fit around his wings and held together with safety pins at his shoulders. Dean fastens them for him, careful to keep the sharp points away from his skin, but they’re cold and it makes him wriggle.
“Quit it. This is worse’n giving Sammy a haircut.”
Dean glares at him, the same way he does when he fights with Sam over something inconsequential, and Castiel can’t help his smile.
Dean stills. “Cas,” he says. “What?”
“Nothing,” Castiel says, after a moment. He lets the smile fade from his face.
He’d felt as though they were—close to something, earlier. Close to what, he couldn’t say. He knows it was a mistake, to get out of the car and linger there, just to feel the air on his skin and Dean’s hand on his feathers. Still, he wishes the moment had been longer.
Dean fastens the final pin and steps back to take in his handiwork. He snorts. “We gotta get you some actual clothes,” he says. “Fix ‘em up for you. We ain’t homeless anymore, no need for you to walk around looking like it.”
Castiel casts him a startled over-the-shoulder glance at that. We ain’t homeless, said so casually, as though it has always been a given that this is Castiel’s home, too.
He’s caught, suddenly, by the memory of sitting at the same table in the library where Sam is now, of a mouthful of reheated food that tasted better than Heaven and that turned to ash on his tongue when Dean told him, You can’t stay. Something clenches inside his chest.
Dean glances away from him, eyes flickering downward as he registers Castiel’s surprise.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Castiel points out. “Nobody else will see me, and you don’t care how I look.” He frowns. “But I would like my coat back.”
Dean looked at it doubtfully, back in the motel room, and said, “You wanna toss this out?” Castiel’s “No” was more vehement than he intended, but Dean didn’t look at him strangely, just nodded and folded it up with the rest of their things, mud and torn fabric and all.
“We’ll take a look at it tomorrow,” Dean says. “Go help geek-boy. I’ll get the coffee on.”
But Dean turns into the bathroom instead of making for the kitchen, and when Castiel glances around the door, he’s standing stock-still in front of the mirror, looking his reflection in the eyes. After a moment, he rolls up the right sleeve of his jacket, fingering the raised skin where the Mark is branded onto him.
With his wings, Castiel can’t simply walk through the door. He has to do an awkward sideways shuffle, which ruins any intentions of stealth he might have had. Dean doesn’t look at him, though. He stares at the mirror like he’s looking for something.
Like he doesn’t really want to find what he’s looking for.
Show yourself, Castiel remembers. The words of the spell. It didn’t hit Dean, but he knows that doesn’t matter. He knows how little it takes to bring the fear welling up.
This time, he does reach out and touch Dean’s shoulder. Dean doesn’t say anything, only closes his eyes and shudders.
Castiel would like to reassure him. But he is so weakened now himself. So reduced. He wouldn’t know where to begin.
So he does what both Heaven and Dean have taught him to do, when there’s no hope of fixing the things that really matter, of smoothing the ragged edges of their selves and fitting them back together again. He turns to the mission. Zombies. Research. They can do that. They know how to do that.
He lingers a moment longer, then lets his hand fall to his side, and makes for the library. He hears Dean’s sigh behind him before he follows.
----
“Lemme take a look at that.”
Castiel starts, setting down the grimoire he’s holding close to his face. He sits at the table in the library, his chair turned back-to-front so to leave room for his wings, his book balanced on the chair back. It’s an uncomfortable position, and he’s been concentrating as hard as he can on The Necromancer’s Compendium to distract himself. The pain of his injured wing is dulled, mostly, by the supply of extra-strength, possibly-stolen-from-a-hospital painkillers Dean keeps slipping him, but it itches maddeningly beneath the bandage, and he has to remind himself constantly not to scratch it.
He sighs as he stands, stretches—careful of the lights with his wings; the first time he forgot about them led to half-an-hour of fumbling in the dark with flashlights as they tried to fix it—and follows Dean into the bathroom.
Dean’s quiet as he checks the bandage. He surprises Castiel when he touches his shoulder to get his attention and says, quietly, “How you doing?”
Castiel tilts his head to look at him. It’s the kind of question Dean and Sam ask one another; the kind that could mean a hundred different things, none of which they ever answer directly. Castiel turns over possible answers in his head for a moment before he says, “It’s healing. That’s what the itching means, isn’t it?” He frowns. “But I couldn’t fly on it, I don’t think.”
Dean gives him a considering look, distracted for a moment. “You think you could, on these? Once you’re healed up? Like, actually fly, like a bird, not just—” he waves a hand “—zap?”
Castiel shrugs. “It would be a shame not to try.”
“Your funeral,” Dean says, shaking his head, but the corner of his mouth twitches upward.
Castiel watches him. The way his hand hovers at the juncture between Castiel’s wing and the bare skin of his back; how the corners of his eyes crease up when his smile is genuine. Dean has lived so much of his life in the dark, but there’s light in him still. Sometimes Castiel sees it and it makes him feel like those other winged things, the moths and crane flies that flutter round the edges of candle flames and fear to touch.
The tips of Dean’s fingers brush feather, then skin, and Castiel’s breath catches in his throat.
Abruptly, Dean’s expression sobers. “But you know that ain’t what I was talking about. How are you? I mean—” He makes a vague, all-encompassing gesture.
“I’m weakened,” Castiel says. “My grace was fading before, and this spell—it’s cut off my access to it, somehow. It’s as though my power is—latent, somehow. Trapped in these.”
He moves his wings gently, and black feathers shiver in the periphery of his vision. Dean looks up at them, and his eyes linger there for a moment before he focuses on Castiel’s face again.
Castiel looks down. “I’m afraid I’m of little use to you like this.”
“Cas. Dude.” Dean waits until he looks back up, into his eyes. They’re standing too close together, but Dean doesn’t seem to have noticed. “That ain’t what I meant either.”
Despite himself, Castiel finds that he’s smiling. “I don’t want to be stuck this way,” he says. “It’s inconvenient. But—I’m okay. Dean, I’m okay.”
He expects Dean to say nothing more, change the subject, maybe clap him on the shoulder and leave, but instead he lets out an unhappy huff of breath. “I notice it,” he says, so softly Castiel has to strain to hear him. “I—sometimes I think maybe, now, I could take you down.” His hand drops from Castiel’s shoulder, finds his own forearm and lingers there.
Castiel looks at him—looks hard, at the creases in his forehead, the involuntary way he worries at the Mark. Remembers him watching his own eyes in the rear view mirror as they drove away from the graveyard. “Maybe you could,” he says. He isn’t sure if it’s the right thing to say.
Dean shakes his head. “I think about Sammy that way, too. Everyone I run into, not just the monsters. On a job, at the store—everyone.” He pauses. “Guess that’s just how I think now.”
“But what you asked is how I felt.” Castiel turns. It’s awkward, with his wings fanning out behind him, the movement too big for the small space, but the conversation seems to require him to look Dean in the face. “That is you. Not the Mark.”
Dean doesn’t answer, doesn’t look at him, and Castiel reaches out to cup his jaw, to turn Dean’s face back to him. Dean’s skin is warm beneath his fingers, his eyes wide and puzzled.
“I don’t mean that it isn’t a problem,” he says. “It’s acting on you. I know that. We all do.” He swallows. “But that doesn’t erase all the other things you are. We’ll fix this. And on the other side—you will still be there.”
He thinks about the crack of his unfurling wings, about stolen grace, about the black souls of Purgatory, about sitting in a mental hospital with the legions of the dead marching through his head. He’s talking to Dean right now, but there are so many versions of himself he could be talking to instead.
“Cas,” Dean begins, and then appears to think better of whatever he was going to say and falls silent again.
Castiel feels the shift of muscles in his jaw, the scratch of stubble, and realises he’s still touching Dean. He slides his hand down to Dean’s shoulder and leaves it there. Dean radiates warmth through his clothing, and it’s so very human, so very real, familiar and strange both at once.
He inches closer. Dean doesn’t move away.
“Guys!”
It’s Sam’s voice, out in the corridor. The bathroom door swings open, and Castiel lets his hand drop to his side. Dean takes half a step back.
Sam’s face appears in the doorway, his brow furrowed.
“Check this out,” he says, jerking his head in the direction of the library, where his laptop sits open on the table. “North Dakota. We got zombies.”
----
Dean and Sam leave thirty minutes later. Dean takes the wheel, while Sam balances his laptop across his knees in the shotgun seat, a map on the screen in front of him while he talks into his cell phone.
Castiel watches them go from the door of the bunker, and when he retreats back inside and closes it behind him, the place feels bigger. It’s too quiet, and his footsteps echo off the walls.
He is alone, and it’s strange and unpleasant. Even with stolen grace, his awareness of the Host is usually somewhere in the back of his mind, a low hum that he can tap into when he has need of it. And when he was human, sleeping in the Gas ‘n’ Sip, the noise of passing cars and the awareness that there would be customers early in the morning kept him from feeling quite so isolated. The bunker is quiet as a grave. Quieter, given recent occurrences. Castiel imagines that the world could end above his head while he hides away and reads books and sips coffee, and he wouldn’t even know.
He’s almost gotten used to his wings, within the confines of the bunker and his earthly family. He hasn’t really minded. The way his injuries bring Dean closer to him, give an excuse for touches he would otherwise shy away from—it’s almost been enough to make him grateful he was hurt. Until now. Now, he feels his body like a lead weight, like a steel trap, and he paces the library until he catches a lamp with the edge of his wing and sends it tumbling to the floor.
The crash brings him back to himself, and he sighs. At least picking up the broken glass will give him something to do.
It’s a painstaking task, requiring care lest he cut himself on a jagged edge and damage this too-fragile form yet further. He picks up a large shard between his fingertips and looks through it. It reflects his eye back at him in sickly yellow.
He remembers Dean, then. Standing before the bathroom mirror, searching his own face for signs of the demonic, for the thing he fears he really is.
Castiel has no spell for showing the true nature of things. He can’t show Dean to a mirror and tell him, See how human you are. Perhaps he cannot help at all.
Still, when he’s done cleaning up, he sets aside Sam’s volumes of zombie lore, and picks through the scant box of papers they’ve managed to collect on the Mark of Cain. There’s little enough that he’s been over it several times already, and soon his optimism dwindles and he finds himself staring at a page of Latin that he’s read a dozen times already. It tells him nothing he doesn’t already know. The gist of it is, Love saves.
Castiel has seen enough of Earth to know that love alone is not enough.
It occurs to him that if it were, he would be able to fix things so easily.
The thought itself isn’t a surprise to him. Its clarity is.
----
His cellphone lights up with a text late the next morning, while he’s sipping bitter black coffee and wondering why it tastes so much better when Dean makes it.
not sure this is our girl, it reads. looks like witches. fuckin awesome. :-/
be careful, he sends back, but he gets no reply.
For hours.
He tries calling, eventually. Every number he dials goes straight to voicemail.
Castiel pictures cell phones lying smashed on the side of the road. He tries not to picture Dean and Sam lying broken beside them.
He does his best to tamp down on his panic, to placate it with Google searching and pacing and, eventually, alcohol, the way that humans do.
It won’t let him. Sam and Dean are seasoned hunters, he tells it. They’ve dealt with witches before, he tells it. They know what they’re doing, he tells it, but it won’t be reasoned with. His heart rattles like a panicked bird inside his ribcage and won’t settle.
Early evening, sun burning a line of orange along the horizon, he climbs into one of the cars from the bunker’s garage, his wings shoved up painfully against the roof.
He follows the road Sam and Dean took. Let the world see him if it will.
On to Part Three!
Author:
anactoriaCharacters/pairing: Dean/Cas, Sam, Crowley, OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Word count: 20,000
Summary: After a run-in with a rogue Woman of Letters, Castiel finds himself with visible wings.
Being injured in the aftermath of the encounter and stuck on lockdown in the bunker is bad enough, but between attacking zombies, cultlike followers, and his tentative relationship with Dean, he soon finds that his injuries are the least of his worries.
Masterpost here.
It’s near midnight when they pull over at an almost-deserted gas station, Dean grumbling about needing a coffee and a piss.
They haven’t talked much since they left the motel. Most of the time, Castiel keeps his eyes closed and tries to ignore how he can feel the rumble of the engine in his bones, a dull kind of pain, like scraping his hand on rusted metal. Sometimes when he opens them, Dean is looking at him. Other times, he’s watching his own eyes in the rear view mirror.
Dean slows the car on the approach, looking the place over for curious eyes before he commits to turning in. Behind the window, a bored counter clerk flips through a magazine, not even sparing a glance up at the sound of the Impala’s engine. A trucker dozes in his cab, dead to the world. There’s nobody else in sight. Castiel watches them in the quiet, while Dean fills the tank and disappears into the gas station. The throb of his injured wing, the cramp in his muscles from the unnatural position the backseat of the car forces him into, have become background noise as the night has worn on and he’s gotten used to them, but the momentary quiet forces him into new awareness of them. He’d give anything to take a walk; to stretch his wings.
Dean emerges with two cups of strong black coffee. He hands one of them to Castiel through the car window, and Castiel takes it gratefully. It’s bitter and it burns his mouth when he sips it, making him wince. Bizarrely, the small pain is a relief from the bigger ones that are weaving themselves into the fabric of his consciousness.
“You okay?” says Dean. Easier for him to ask after the small pains than the larger ones he can’t fix. Castiel understands that. He nods.
Dean opens the driver’s side door, is halfway back in the car when Castiel finds his voice and says, “Wait.”
“What’s up?”
“I need—” He shrugs, and then winces at the involuntary way his wings move along with his shoulders. “It aches. Sitting in the car.”
Dean looks at him, raises one eyebrow. Castiel catches sight of his reflection in the side mirror and realises he’s pouting. The timbre of his voice has turned childish. Even now, after the months he spent human, it surprises him how quickly pain overrides all other concerns, how it reduces him to a creature of sensation and need.
He recalls, briefly, a night years ago, when he stood on the side of a darkened highway with a cell phone pressed to his ear, bewildered at the thought that Dean could sleep in the face of imminent apocalypse. That so small a thing as a human body could shut down all the concerns of Heaven and Hell in favour of its own needs.
He wonders what he would say to that self now. He understood the world so much more simply, then. He understood so little of it.
Dean casts a glance around the empty gas station lot, then sighs and says, “Fine. Not here.”
He climbs back into the car and pulls around the side of the building, into its shadow. Not quite out of view of the road, but less obviously visible. Castiel cracks open the passenger door and climbs out. The relief of stretching out cramped limbs is immediate and blissful, and he stands on his toes and arches his back, working out the kinks in his spine. His wings try to stretch out, too, an involuntary movement that he only notices because of the bandage that secures the injured one in place. That’s a kind of discomfort, too, but a different kind. There’s something about it that feels secure—like a hand to hold, a shoulder to lean on.
The press of Dean’s hand, near the place where his wing joins his back, startles him for a moment.
“Let me take a look at that bandage.”
Dean’s voice is gruff. Castiel turns his head toward it and finds their faces close enough that Dean would ordinarily take a step back and make an exasperated comment about personal space. Somehow, though, the barrier of Castiel’s wing between them seems to allow it, and Dean wets his lips and looks down at the bandage.
“So,” he says, when he’s no longer looking Castiel in the eyes. “You’re pretty much out of juice right now, huh?”
Castiel nods. “I’m not sure what happened,” he says. “It seems that my grace is—tied up in these.” He shifts, his wings shivering, and he is suddenly very conscious of the way Dean’s fingers sink between his feathers. It feels intimate; unfamiliar and natural both at once.
“So the one time you don’t look like a human, you pretty much are one.” Dean’s hand is still on his wing. His fingers brush through the soft down at its base, a movement so minute Castiel isn’t sure Dean knows he’s doing it. “Man, that sucks.”
Castiel almost smiles at him. “That seems like a fair assessment of the situation.”
“You’re okay, though, right?”
“I think so.”
Dean nods. “You gotta tell me if—if you’re not, okay? You gotta tell me.”
There’s a sound within the gas station building. A window closing.
Castiel glances in the direction the sound came from. He can’t see anybody at the window, but Dean’s hands drop away from him, and a frown spreads across his face.
“We should go,” Dean says.
Castiel sighs. He follows Dean back to the car.
They make it back to the bunker without stopping for longer than it takes Dean to refill the tank and pick up snacks for them to eat on the move. The first time, he comes back with a burger and a bag of fries that he leaves on the shotgun seat to dip into as he drives. He doesn’t comment, when Castiel finds his stomach rumbling and reaches across to take a handful, but the next time they stop, he orders double.
When they walk into the bunker’s library, Sam is sitting at the table, grim-faced in the light from his laptop screen. His eyes widen when they land on Castiel—his wings, his injury, the state of his clothes—but he doesn’t comment.
“You seen this?” he asks them in place of a greeting, and turns the laptop so they can see the screen.
Castiel squints at it. The video is fuzzy and unsteady, filmed on somebody’s cell phone, so for a moment he isn’t sure what he’s looking at.
Beside him, Dean lets out a sigh and mutters, “Dammit,” and that’s when Castiel sees it.
It’s them. Him and Dean, a few hours ago, standing outside the gas station. The shapes of his wings are black impossible shadows against the empty lot, even in the dark. The span of Dean’s hand, pale against his feathers.
The only mercy is that they’re both facing away from the camera. Nobody who didn’t know them would recognise them immediately.
“Dammit,” Dean says again.
On the video, the sound of a window closing.
Castiel glances sideways, at Dean. “The gas station clerk,” he says.
Dean nods. “The one time a civilian actually notices there’s something weird going on. Jesus.” He rubs at his eyes, and Castiel notices that he looks tired. As tired as Castiel feels, perhaps.
There are comments below the video. Castiel leans in to read them, catching himself on the back of a chair when he forgets about the new weight of his wings and they threaten to topple him forward.
Seriously? I’ve seen realer-looking pictures of Nessie.
whys that dude topless? looks like teh start of a bad gay porno to me.. :))
Ofcourse the sheeple are out in force, making jokes about what they don’t undestand. Their are things the government dont want you to know, and if you had half a braincell, you wloud know this already.
Angels are among us. I’ve always known. Welcome. <3
Got to admire his cosplay skills, but ComicCon isn’t til next summer, guys! :D
Dean huffs and snaps the laptop shut, narrowly missing Sam’s fingers. “Okay,” he says. “You done Perez Hilton-ing us? Rogue Woman of Letters, zombies, any of this ringing a bell?”
Sam gives him a serious look. “Guys, we can’t ignore this. We aren’t the only hunters who know how to use YouTube. And right now? Cas looks like nothing any of them have ever seen.” His gaze lands on Castiel, his brow furrowed. “You should be careful. Stay in the bunker. Don’t go outside unless you have to.”
Castiel nods. What else is he going to do?
Dean nods, impatient. “Got it. We’ll keep Big Bird here on lockdown.” He shoves the laptop back at Sam. “C’mon. Zombies.”
Castiel learned long ago that there’s no point taking offense at the way Dean glowers and grumbles—that it’s his way of expressing worry, and that worry is his default state when it comes to the people he cares for. It’s the only language he knows for these things.
Castiel lifts his arm, almost reaches over to touch Dean’s shoulder, to reassure him.
He thinks better of it before he makes contact. Nods and says, “Yes. Zombies.” He glances down at his bare chest. The bunker is deep and windowless, and there’s a chill in the air. His skin is coming out in goosebumps. “I think I’d like a shirt.”
Dean raises an eyebrow. “Thought you’d never ask.”
Sam says nothing. He’s smiling faintly, but when Castiel catches his eye, it fades.
He ends up wearing one of Dean’s old t-shirts, deconstructed with scissors to fit around his wings and held together with safety pins at his shoulders. Dean fastens them for him, careful to keep the sharp points away from his skin, but they’re cold and it makes him wriggle.
“Quit it. This is worse’n giving Sammy a haircut.”
Dean glares at him, the same way he does when he fights with Sam over something inconsequential, and Castiel can’t help his smile.
Dean stills. “Cas,” he says. “What?”
“Nothing,” Castiel says, after a moment. He lets the smile fade from his face.
He’d felt as though they were—close to something, earlier. Close to what, he couldn’t say. He knows it was a mistake, to get out of the car and linger there, just to feel the air on his skin and Dean’s hand on his feathers. Still, he wishes the moment had been longer.
Dean fastens the final pin and steps back to take in his handiwork. He snorts. “We gotta get you some actual clothes,” he says. “Fix ‘em up for you. We ain’t homeless anymore, no need for you to walk around looking like it.”
Castiel casts him a startled over-the-shoulder glance at that. We ain’t homeless, said so casually, as though it has always been a given that this is Castiel’s home, too.
He’s caught, suddenly, by the memory of sitting at the same table in the library where Sam is now, of a mouthful of reheated food that tasted better than Heaven and that turned to ash on his tongue when Dean told him, You can’t stay. Something clenches inside his chest.
Dean glances away from him, eyes flickering downward as he registers Castiel’s surprise.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Castiel points out. “Nobody else will see me, and you don’t care how I look.” He frowns. “But I would like my coat back.”
Dean looked at it doubtfully, back in the motel room, and said, “You wanna toss this out?” Castiel’s “No” was more vehement than he intended, but Dean didn’t look at him strangely, just nodded and folded it up with the rest of their things, mud and torn fabric and all.
“We’ll take a look at it tomorrow,” Dean says. “Go help geek-boy. I’ll get the coffee on.”
But Dean turns into the bathroom instead of making for the kitchen, and when Castiel glances around the door, he’s standing stock-still in front of the mirror, looking his reflection in the eyes. After a moment, he rolls up the right sleeve of his jacket, fingering the raised skin where the Mark is branded onto him.
With his wings, Castiel can’t simply walk through the door. He has to do an awkward sideways shuffle, which ruins any intentions of stealth he might have had. Dean doesn’t look at him, though. He stares at the mirror like he’s looking for something.
Like he doesn’t really want to find what he’s looking for.
Show yourself, Castiel remembers. The words of the spell. It didn’t hit Dean, but he knows that doesn’t matter. He knows how little it takes to bring the fear welling up.
This time, he does reach out and touch Dean’s shoulder. Dean doesn’t say anything, only closes his eyes and shudders.
Castiel would like to reassure him. But he is so weakened now himself. So reduced. He wouldn’t know where to begin.
So he does what both Heaven and Dean have taught him to do, when there’s no hope of fixing the things that really matter, of smoothing the ragged edges of their selves and fitting them back together again. He turns to the mission. Zombies. Research. They can do that. They know how to do that.
He lingers a moment longer, then lets his hand fall to his side, and makes for the library. He hears Dean’s sigh behind him before he follows.
“Lemme take a look at that.”
Castiel starts, setting down the grimoire he’s holding close to his face. He sits at the table in the library, his chair turned back-to-front so to leave room for his wings, his book balanced on the chair back. It’s an uncomfortable position, and he’s been concentrating as hard as he can on The Necromancer’s Compendium to distract himself. The pain of his injured wing is dulled, mostly, by the supply of extra-strength, possibly-stolen-from-a-hospital painkillers Dean keeps slipping him, but it itches maddeningly beneath the bandage, and he has to remind himself constantly not to scratch it.
He sighs as he stands, stretches—careful of the lights with his wings; the first time he forgot about them led to half-an-hour of fumbling in the dark with flashlights as they tried to fix it—and follows Dean into the bathroom.
Dean’s quiet as he checks the bandage. He surprises Castiel when he touches his shoulder to get his attention and says, quietly, “How you doing?”
Castiel tilts his head to look at him. It’s the kind of question Dean and Sam ask one another; the kind that could mean a hundred different things, none of which they ever answer directly. Castiel turns over possible answers in his head for a moment before he says, “It’s healing. That’s what the itching means, isn’t it?” He frowns. “But I couldn’t fly on it, I don’t think.”
Dean gives him a considering look, distracted for a moment. “You think you could, on these? Once you’re healed up? Like, actually fly, like a bird, not just—” he waves a hand “—zap?”
Castiel shrugs. “It would be a shame not to try.”
“Your funeral,” Dean says, shaking his head, but the corner of his mouth twitches upward.
Castiel watches him. The way his hand hovers at the juncture between Castiel’s wing and the bare skin of his back; how the corners of his eyes crease up when his smile is genuine. Dean has lived so much of his life in the dark, but there’s light in him still. Sometimes Castiel sees it and it makes him feel like those other winged things, the moths and crane flies that flutter round the edges of candle flames and fear to touch.
The tips of Dean’s fingers brush feather, then skin, and Castiel’s breath catches in his throat.
Abruptly, Dean’s expression sobers. “But you know that ain’t what I was talking about. How are you? I mean—” He makes a vague, all-encompassing gesture.
“I’m weakened,” Castiel says. “My grace was fading before, and this spell—it’s cut off my access to it, somehow. It’s as though my power is—latent, somehow. Trapped in these.”
He moves his wings gently, and black feathers shiver in the periphery of his vision. Dean looks up at them, and his eyes linger there for a moment before he focuses on Castiel’s face again.
Castiel looks down. “I’m afraid I’m of little use to you like this.”
“Cas. Dude.” Dean waits until he looks back up, into his eyes. They’re standing too close together, but Dean doesn’t seem to have noticed. “That ain’t what I meant either.”
Despite himself, Castiel finds that he’s smiling. “I don’t want to be stuck this way,” he says. “It’s inconvenient. But—I’m okay. Dean, I’m okay.”
He expects Dean to say nothing more, change the subject, maybe clap him on the shoulder and leave, but instead he lets out an unhappy huff of breath. “I notice it,” he says, so softly Castiel has to strain to hear him. “I—sometimes I think maybe, now, I could take you down.” His hand drops from Castiel’s shoulder, finds his own forearm and lingers there.
Castiel looks at him—looks hard, at the creases in his forehead, the involuntary way he worries at the Mark. Remembers him watching his own eyes in the rear view mirror as they drove away from the graveyard. “Maybe you could,” he says. He isn’t sure if it’s the right thing to say.
Dean shakes his head. “I think about Sammy that way, too. Everyone I run into, not just the monsters. On a job, at the store—everyone.” He pauses. “Guess that’s just how I think now.”
“But what you asked is how I felt.” Castiel turns. It’s awkward, with his wings fanning out behind him, the movement too big for the small space, but the conversation seems to require him to look Dean in the face. “That is you. Not the Mark.”
Dean doesn’t answer, doesn’t look at him, and Castiel reaches out to cup his jaw, to turn Dean’s face back to him. Dean’s skin is warm beneath his fingers, his eyes wide and puzzled.
“I don’t mean that it isn’t a problem,” he says. “It’s acting on you. I know that. We all do.” He swallows. “But that doesn’t erase all the other things you are. We’ll fix this. And on the other side—you will still be there.”
He thinks about the crack of his unfurling wings, about stolen grace, about the black souls of Purgatory, about sitting in a mental hospital with the legions of the dead marching through his head. He’s talking to Dean right now, but there are so many versions of himself he could be talking to instead.
“Cas,” Dean begins, and then appears to think better of whatever he was going to say and falls silent again.
Castiel feels the shift of muscles in his jaw, the scratch of stubble, and realises he’s still touching Dean. He slides his hand down to Dean’s shoulder and leaves it there. Dean radiates warmth through his clothing, and it’s so very human, so very real, familiar and strange both at once.
He inches closer. Dean doesn’t move away.
“Guys!”
It’s Sam’s voice, out in the corridor. The bathroom door swings open, and Castiel lets his hand drop to his side. Dean takes half a step back.
Sam’s face appears in the doorway, his brow furrowed.
“Check this out,” he says, jerking his head in the direction of the library, where his laptop sits open on the table. “North Dakota. We got zombies.”
Dean and Sam leave thirty minutes later. Dean takes the wheel, while Sam balances his laptop across his knees in the shotgun seat, a map on the screen in front of him while he talks into his cell phone.
Castiel watches them go from the door of the bunker, and when he retreats back inside and closes it behind him, the place feels bigger. It’s too quiet, and his footsteps echo off the walls.
He is alone, and it’s strange and unpleasant. Even with stolen grace, his awareness of the Host is usually somewhere in the back of his mind, a low hum that he can tap into when he has need of it. And when he was human, sleeping in the Gas ‘n’ Sip, the noise of passing cars and the awareness that there would be customers early in the morning kept him from feeling quite so isolated. The bunker is quiet as a grave. Quieter, given recent occurrences. Castiel imagines that the world could end above his head while he hides away and reads books and sips coffee, and he wouldn’t even know.
He’s almost gotten used to his wings, within the confines of the bunker and his earthly family. He hasn’t really minded. The way his injuries bring Dean closer to him, give an excuse for touches he would otherwise shy away from—it’s almost been enough to make him grateful he was hurt. Until now. Now, he feels his body like a lead weight, like a steel trap, and he paces the library until he catches a lamp with the edge of his wing and sends it tumbling to the floor.
The crash brings him back to himself, and he sighs. At least picking up the broken glass will give him something to do.
It’s a painstaking task, requiring care lest he cut himself on a jagged edge and damage this too-fragile form yet further. He picks up a large shard between his fingertips and looks through it. It reflects his eye back at him in sickly yellow.
He remembers Dean, then. Standing before the bathroom mirror, searching his own face for signs of the demonic, for the thing he fears he really is.
Castiel has no spell for showing the true nature of things. He can’t show Dean to a mirror and tell him, See how human you are. Perhaps he cannot help at all.
Still, when he’s done cleaning up, he sets aside Sam’s volumes of zombie lore, and picks through the scant box of papers they’ve managed to collect on the Mark of Cain. There’s little enough that he’s been over it several times already, and soon his optimism dwindles and he finds himself staring at a page of Latin that he’s read a dozen times already. It tells him nothing he doesn’t already know. The gist of it is, Love saves.
Castiel has seen enough of Earth to know that love alone is not enough.
It occurs to him that if it were, he would be able to fix things so easily.
The thought itself isn’t a surprise to him. Its clarity is.
His cellphone lights up with a text late the next morning, while he’s sipping bitter black coffee and wondering why it tastes so much better when Dean makes it.
not sure this is our girl, it reads. looks like witches. fuckin awesome. :-/
be careful, he sends back, but he gets no reply.
For hours.
He tries calling, eventually. Every number he dials goes straight to voicemail.
Castiel pictures cell phones lying smashed on the side of the road. He tries not to picture Dean and Sam lying broken beside them.
He does his best to tamp down on his panic, to placate it with Google searching and pacing and, eventually, alcohol, the way that humans do.
It won’t let him. Sam and Dean are seasoned hunters, he tells it. They’ve dealt with witches before, he tells it. They know what they’re doing, he tells it, but it won’t be reasoned with. His heart rattles like a panicked bird inside his ribcage and won’t settle.
Early evening, sun burning a line of orange along the horizon, he climbs into one of the cars from the bunker’s garage, his wings shoved up painfully against the roof.
He follows the road Sam and Dean took. Let the world see him if it will.
On to Part Three!
