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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.
When Castiel finds the abandoned farm building where Sam and Dean are being held, it’s late.
He pinpointed the place more by luck than skill: his memory of the map on Sam’s laptop screen, and hanging around the center of the town at dusk until the store with purple drapes and a pentagram in its window closed its doors and a black-clad woman emerged. When she climbed into her car and made for the dilapidated farm on the outskirts instead of one of the houses in town, he was sure he was onto something.
The sky may have been darkening, but there were enough passers-by in the town center that Castiel couldn’t be sure he wasn’t seen. It didn’t seem important, compared to finding Sam, finding Dean. It still doesn’t. The thought of a dozen hunters appearing with silver blades and shotguns—or a dozen newspaper crews with cameras, or a vengeful witch ready to kill him for interfering—is nothing next to the thought of losing them.
He pulls up at a reasonable distance from the farmhouse, killing the headlamps and hunching down in his seat as he watches the probably-witch emerge from her car and circle round the building to a barn out back.
Castiel spares a glance behind him. The road leading up to the farm is rough and narrow, barely more than a dirt track. A truck rumbles past on the highway, lit up in front like a fairground and then gone. In front of him, the darkness is enveloping.
He climbs out of the car and makes for the barn.
There’s a wide door in front, propped slightly open with a small rock. That must be where the witch entered. She’ll be watching it.
Castiel ducks into the shadows beside the barn and listens. He hears implements being placed on a table, the scrape of metal and bone, the sound of a match being struck. A low female voice humming, as though she’s simply making breakfast or checking her emails, going about her daily business like any other human being.
A muffled groan.
Ice fingers its way down his spine. It’s Sam.
Low voices. He presses himself into the wall and strains to catch them.
“Dean?” he hears. “That you?”
“Mmph.”
“Okay, good to know you’re alive. What happened? We knew it was the store owner. How’d she get the drop on you?”
A pause, in which Castiel imagines Dean’s scowl. “I got distracted.”
“Distracted.” Sam will raise an eyebrow, at this juncture. They’ll look exactly as they do when they’re arguing over whose turn it is to get the grocery shopping back at the bunker.
“She knew we were onto her, okay? She’s quick.” Dean pauses, then counters with. “Anyway, what happened to you?”
Castiel has heard enough. They’re here. They’re alive.
He circles around the side of the barn. Touches the gun tucked into the back of his trousers. He’s rarely needed one before now, and he isn’t sure how effective he’ll be with it. It isn’t as though he’s ever had to practise shooting. The cold night air chills him through his shirt, raising goosebumps on his forearms, and he suddenly misses his trench coat quite badly.
There’s a side-door near the back of the building. Castiel tries it softly, and finds it locked. This, at least, he knows how to do. It’s been more than a year since the angels fell from Heaven, and in the absence of flight, picking locks was one of the first skills he learned.
He leans in close to the door as he works. He feels his wings spread out behind him, instinctively. Perhaps it’s for balance; perhaps it’s to hide him; perhaps it’s just for the sake of working out the kinks, after so many hours crammed into the car. The ache of the injured one lessens a little as it stretches. It doesn’t hurt, the way it once did.
The lock clicks open, loud in the silence, and Castiel holds his breath. Nobody comes.
He opens the door. The back of the barn is in shadow. The carcasses of rusted machinery loom up before him, their skeletons blocking his view of the interior.
Castiel maneuvers himself through the doorway. He has to duck to fit his wings through it, wincing when his feathers brush the doorframe with a sound that seems louder than thunder to his ears, but that brings no magical vengeance down on his head. He creeps forward, peering through the skeleton of a dead machine.
He can see one figure tied to a pillar, its hands shackled behind its back. He sees the sleeve of a familiar plaid shirt. Dean.
He’s scrabbling on the dirt floor behind him—looking for a sharp stone or a piece of broken glass, something he can use to cut the ropes. To Castiel’s inexpert eye, he doesn’t look injured, and Castiel allows himself a flicker of relief.
Still, he’s at a loss as to how he’ll get Dean and Sam out of here. He can’t see Sam, but has to assume he’s similarly incapacitated. And Castiel—well, he may look like an angel, but he’s as helpless as a man right now. He has to assume that he’s just as vulnerable to magic. With his wings, he has no hope of sneaking close enough to untie Dean or Sam before he’s noticed.
He pauses. Gives his wings an experimental stretch.
He won’t be able to avoid notice. He still looks like an angel.
And how likely is it that this witch has ever seen one before?
----
There’s a generator out back, which must be powering the lights the witch is using to work by. It would make little sense for her to waste her power giving herself light to see by when the electrics in the barn are working.
Castiel eavesdrops a moment longer before he goes, to reassure himself that she has no intention of doing Sam or Dean imminent harm. Then he takes a deep breath and ducks back out the side door, propping it open with a brick.
There’s probably a simple way to kill the generator. Dean would know. Castiel thinks back to all the times he’s watched Dean tinker with the bunker’s power system, intent on his task and frowning in concentration, but the solution doesn’t come to him.
The problem, he thinks, is that he was always too busy watching Dean’s hands to register what they were doing.
Still, there are other methods. Simple can be effective. So, he pops open the front panel of the generator and smashes it with a rock.
The sound splits the quiet, so sudden it’s like a physical pain.
It has the expected effect. The humming stops.
Castiel ducks back inside the barn, kicking the brick away from the door so it falls softly closed behind him. He hears the front door slam shut, and he runs.
He’s at Dean’s side in an instant.
Dean blinks up at him, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dark. When he recognises Castiel, his eyes widen, and for a moment Castiel is struck with a memory.
Another abandoned outbuilding, not so different from this one. Lights going out, and Dean looking at him with amazement in his eyes.
Then, of course, it was the kind of awe that is mostly terror. Dean had looked at him as though he were a monster.
Now, it’s recognition; a brief flare of relief. For a moment—before he tamps it down with a hiss of, “Cas, what the fuck are you doing here?!”—Dean looks at him like he is a miracle.
It is a brief moment of elation. It flowers and it fades.
“Cas,” Dean says, again.
He hears Sam’s voice, from somewhere near the door. “Cas? Guys, what’s going on?”
He reaches for the knife he grabbed before he left the bunker and saws at the ropes binding Dean’s wrists. It only takes him a moment until Dean is free, wincing as he rubs circulation back into his hands.
“Here,” Castiel says, and hands him the gun. He makes for Sam.
That’s when the door bursts open.
The woman from the shop strides through it, her black skirts swirling around her in the wind. “Okay,” she says. “Looks like you two have some friends dumb enough to—”
Her eyes land on Castiel. She stops. She stares. He watches her eyes follow the shapes of his wings; the involuntary half-step backwards she takes as she registers the size of them.
“You,” she says. “What are you?”
He swallows. Reaches within himself and tries to dredge up the memory of older, simpler times; times when he would have thought it only natural that human beings should cower before him. He tilts his head and looks at her. Tries to remember how it felt to study people like ants.
“What,” he says, “do I look like?”
“No,” she says. “I’ve heard things, but—no.”
“This is when you choose to disavow the evidence of your own eyes?” he asks her. “You should run.”
She opens her mouth. Hesitates. For a moment, Castiel thinks she will heed his words.
Then, her mouth snaps shut. “Why would you tell me to run?” she says. “Why haven’t you killed me already?”
He can’t find an answer. The witch’s eyebrows shoot up, her mouth curling in the beginning of a smirk. “You can’t kill me,” she realizes. “You’re not an angel. You’re just some other monster. And that means I can kill you.”
Her expression changes; becomes that of someone reciting from memory. She cups her hand, and a greenish glow begins to form in her palm.
“Sanguinem—” she begins.
A shot rings out in the darkness.
The witch’s body falls, the light in her palm extinguished. Castiel exhales, hard. He realises his hands are trembling.
Across the barn, Dean meets his eyes. Neither of them speaks.
----
They’re halfway back to the bunker, having abandoned the car Castiel stole on the other side of town, before either of them says anything.
“Seriously, Cas,” Dean says to him. “What were you thinking? We had the whole thing under control.”
Castiel glares at him in the rear view mirror. “That was not under control,” he says. “You were tied up in a barn.”
“We had a plan!” Dean looks at Sam, as though for backup. Sam glares at him, as though to say, Don’t get me involved in this, but he sighs and turns to Castiel.
“That was a dumb thing to do, Cas,” he says. “If anybody saw you—it wasn’t safe.”
Castiel crosses his arms. “It’s what either of you would have done.”
It worked, he doesn’t say.
You looked at me like I was amazing, he doesn’t say.
It would sound pathetic, if he said it aloud. He knows that their grumbling is a symptom of affection, of family. But that look Dean gave him, back in the barn—he wants to see it again. He wants it so badly it hurts.
Dean glowers and presses a button on the tape deck, filling the car with music in lieu of argument. They don’t talk much, on the rest of the drive. Castiel is nodding by the time they reach Lebanon, despite the loud music and the uncomfortable way he’s jammed into the back seat. It’s Sam’s voice that wakes him.
“Guys?” he’s saying. “Cas? What the hell is this?”
Castiel blinks his eyes open. They’re approaching the bunker, and Sam is gazing through the windshield in bewilderment. Dean brings the Impala to a halt and stares.
Castiel follows their eyes. There’s movement, up ahead.
Dean shuts off the tape player with a loud click. “I got no idea,” he says, “but it can’t be good.”
Castiel narrows his eyes, and the darkness ahead of them resolves itself into—people.
A dozen of them, maybe, standing before the bunker’s front entrance. Dean starts up the engine again and they part as the car approaches, making room for it to pass through, as though all moving on some unspoken cue.
Castiel looks out through the back window and catches a glimpse of one of the faces in the little assembly. She’s young, in her early twenties, perhaps, and wrapped in a hooded sweatshirt several sizes too big for her, pale thumbs poking through holes in the sleeves. She holds a mobile phone before her like a votive offering, the light from the screen illuminating her face. Her eyes shine.
She lifts her gaze from the screen as the car passes her. Her eyes find Castiel’s face through the window and stay there. She gazes at him open-mouthed.
He sees her lips move through the window, and though he can’t hear her, he sees what she’s saying.
He’s here! she says, and from the rapture on her face, she could be talking about God himself. He’s come to us.
“What the fuck?” Dean says, and his words come to Castiel as though they’re underwater. “What the fuck?”
The girl raises her cell phone, showing it to the person next to her—a middle-aged man in threadbare clothes, a ratty beard on his face and a heavy pack on his back—and then raising it as though in triumph. Castiel catches a glimpse of the picture on the screen—a blurry photograph, taken from a distance, but unmistakable.
It’s him, in his car outside the magic store, early in the evening.
His heart sinks. “Someone must have seen me,” he says. “When I came to find you.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know how they got here. I don’t know how they found us.”
Sam shrugs. “All they’d need is one person with computer hacking skills. If they got your license plate—there are eyes everywhere if you know how to look. Whatever Man of Letters it belonged to back in the day registered it in town? Lebanon isn’t exactly a big place. All they would’ve had to do is poke around in town, ask if anything weird’s been going on around here. I’ll bet someone would’ve sent them out here.”
Anything weird. Castiel shifts, suddenly very conscious of his physical form. How unwieldy it is; how conspicuous. He looks in the rear view mirror and Dean won’t meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Dean shrugs. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, bringing the car to a halt. There’s resignation in his voice, and Castiel understands.
They have more important things to worry about than apologies right now. Damage control.
Silence falls as Castiel opens the back door and climbs out of the Impala. It’s awkward, as always, and he feels like a creature of bathos, unsuited to the reverence with which he is being watched.
But then he’s out, standing up, and his wings stretch themselves to their fullest span—a reflex, independent of his volition. There is a gasp that makes its way around the crowd. How real they are; how unmistakable for a costume or a prop. The car doors close, loud in the hush, as Sam and Dean climb out to flank him. It occurs to him, vaguely, that they look a little like bodyguards.
Perhaps it’s not so strange an image. They have been taking care of him almost as long as he has been watching over them, after all.
Eyes turn to look at them, but only linger briefly. The people keep staring at Castiel.
They seem to be waiting for something.
“Okay.” Dean’s voice breaks the silence. “You got a good look at the freak show, you can write about it on your blogs, tell the world how it’s all because of aliens or GMOs or the real life Avengers or whatever. Ain’t like the great American public is gonna believe you. Now scram.”
Nobody moves. It’s as though he didn’t speak at all.
“Are you crazies deaf, or—”
One of them—the man with the heavy bag—takes a step toward Castiel. “What would you have us do?” he asks. He doesn’t even glance at Dean.
Castiel frowns. There’s a look in the man’s eyes. It’s wonder and terror, and relief and desperation, and a whole host of other things. It’s as familiar as starlight.
All those things—Castiel saw them before, only a few short years ago. In the eyes of the congregations he appeared to, clothing himself in the divine, full to bursting with unearthly power, drunk on hubris, travelling Heaven and Earth dishing out what he thought was justice, because he thought he knew it better than anybody else, because he thought he had the right. Sometimes in the eyes of the sinners he smote, right before they fell beneath his hands.
He has felt these things before, too. This is the way people look when they think they’ve found God.
He should have thought of this, before he left the bunker and showed himself. It occurred to him that hunters would want to kill him; that the curious would want to come and stare. This didn’t, and he curses himself for it.
He knows humanity well enough, by now. He should have remembered its desperation.
Castiel swallows. The man standing before him bends as if to kneel down, and suddenly he thinks that he might vomit.
“Stop!” he says, and his voice sounds harsh in the quiet. “Stop it!”
The man freezes; stares. Waits, again.
Castiel sighs. “It isn’t—” He breaks off. “I’m not what you think I am.”
“An angel,” says a voice from the back of the little group, “sent to save us.”
“We know you exist,” chimes in another. “You’ve walked the Earth ever since that night. The night the stars fell.”
Castiel looks at Dean, at Sam. Sam blinks back at him, helpless. Dean has a face like a thundercloud.
“I’m nobody’s saviour,” Castiel protests. “That isn’t why I’m here. I don’t—I don’t know any better than you. I don’t have anything to tell you. I’m the same as you.” He hangs his head. “I try to do my best, and mostly I fail. That’s all.”
They keep right on staring. The man’s expression turns beseeching, and Castiel sees it mirrored on a dozen other faces. A confused murmur passes through the group, but doesn’t turn into anything.
A voice at Castiel’s side says, “You’re hurt.”
It’s the girl in the too-big sweatshirt. Up close, she’s tiny, barely coming up to Castiel’s shoulder, and she’s young, maybe even still in her teens. She tucks her phone away in the big pocket on the front of her sweatshirt, and reaches up to indicate the bandage on his wing. It’s dirty from sneaking around inside the barn where Dean and Sam were tied up, and there’s a faint spot of blood seeping through to stain it. He must have hit it on something, earlier. The rusted machinery inside the barn, maybe. He’s vaguely surprised at not having noticed it before now.
The girl’s eyes are big and soft. Concerned.
“It will heal,” he tells her.
She gives a solemn nod.
“You should go,” he says. “I’m not— Whatever you came here for, I can’t give it to you. I don’t have the power to do that. I can’t heal you, or protect you, or—”
He breaks off, helplessly. A hand touches his other shoulder, and he starts, but when he looks around, it’s only Sam. Castiel hears the front door close, and realises Dean has disappeared into the bunker.
“Cas is right,” Sam says. “You can’t stay here. Just—go back home, get on a bus and go see your mom and dad, or go back to school, or—wherever you’re supposed to be right now.”
“I’m supposed to be right here,” the girl says. Her face is bright. She looks into Castiel’s eyes. “I didn’t come here to be healed, or to ask a favour, or anything like that. I’m here for you.”
There is a murmur of assent from the group, and Castiel’s heart sinks.
Persuading the people to leave proves to be a losing battle. Their eyes follow Castiel’s every move, and when he steps aside to talk with Sam, they drift in his wake as though he is a magnet trailing iron filings.
He leans in close to Sam and lowers his voice. “I don’t know what to do,” he says.
“Me either.” Sam sighs. “Look, it might be best if you kept out of the way for now. Might be the only way they’ll listen to reason.” He jerks his head in the direction of the door. “Go inside. Get Dean to rewrap that bandage for you.”
Castiel eyes the little crowd doubtfully. “You didn’t bring these people here,” he says. “This isn’t your mess to clean up.”
Sam gives him a rueful smile. “Hey, it’s on my doorstep and it’s happening to my family. Pretty sure that makes it my mess.”
Despite himself, Castiel feels a little spark of warmth in his chest. “Thank you, Sam.”
----
The door closes behind him, and he feels a wash of guilty relief.
All those eyes. All that wonder. It fills him with shameful memories, makes his skin feel like it no longer fits, like he’s about to burn out or burst open. He pauses a moment longer before he turns into the bunker.
He finds Dean in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, a whiskey bottle in one hand and a tumbler in the other. He raises an eyebrow when Castiel walks in, but doesn’t move, doesn’t offer him a drink.
“Are you alright?” Castiel asks.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Castiel shrugs, and the movement of his wings rattles the cooking utensils on their hooks. “You seem troubled.”
Dean snorts. “Yeah, well, Christian Rock Coachella just pitched camp on my doorstep. Excuse me if I don’t wanna break out the welcome banners just yet.”
“That isn’t what I mean,” Castiel says.
Dean sighs and sets down the whiskey bottle. He’s quiet for a long moment, and Castiel expects another dismissal. But Dean looks up, resignation in his eyes, and says, “I don’t know, man. I guess—seeing you pretend to be all badass of the Lord again, back there in the barn? And now seeing you try to convince those guys that isn’t you anymore?” His shoulders slump. “Kinda weirded me out.”
He rubs at his forearm, apparently unaware of what he’s doing.
“You know how that witch got the drop on me?” he says, after a moment. “She’d been selling wishes. That was where the zombie thing came from. People who’d been bereaved wished for mom or dad or Auntie Josephine to come back from the grave, and it came true—until the spell wore off and there was a rotting corpse in the front room.” He gives a short, mirthless laugh. “She had other things in her store too, though, and I got caught looking at them. Stuff for healing. Stuff for ending curses.” He pauses. “Don’t get me wrong. I know that shit comes at a price. I ain’t dumb enough to go messing with it. But for a minute there, I thought…” He trails off.
Ending curses. Castiel wonders which one of them Dean was thinking about.
Castiel would like to move closer. To touch him; to comfort him somehow. He feels as though he should be able to do that. But his wings are unwieldy, and the kitchen is full of breakable things just waiting to be knocked to the floor, and he finds himself standing rooted to the spot, one hand held out uselessly before him.
Dean gathers himself; pours another inch of bourbon into his glass and makes for the door. “C’mon,” he says, indicating Castiel’s bandage with a jerk of his head. “Lemme take a look at that.”
His arm brushes Castiel’s as he passes, and Castiel feels the ghost of the touch for a long moment afterward.
They don’t speak again until they reach the bathroom. Dean looks at him, then. “How about you?” he asks. “You okay?”
Castiel lets out a sigh. “It’s disturbing,” he admits. “I don’t understand what they want from me.”
Dean shrugs. “They wanna feel like there’s somebody out there who knows what the hell’s going on. ‘S where it all comes from, right? Religion, whatever.” He shrugs. “I mean, I get it, you know? I ain’t saying it’s right, and I sure as hell ain’t saying I don’t want them off of my lawn. But I get it.”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Castiel says, helplessly. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that nobody does. I don’t even know how to save myself. I don’t know how to save—”
He breaks off abruptly, swallowing his words because he knows where they are going. If he could save anybody, could make things okay for anybody, it would be Dean. And he doesn’t know how, but Dean doesn’t need to hear that, and Castel doesn’t need to say it.
Dean nods and opens the first aid kit. “I get it,” he says again, and he starts bandaging.
----
Sam is still outside when they’re done. He has propped the front door open with a fire extinguisher. Dean frowns and moves to look through the gap, and Castiel peers out cautiously from behind him.
He expects to see Sam talking earnestly to the little crowd, perhaps calling parents or spouses to ask them to come collect their loved ones. Instead, he’s handing out coffee and packet soup in a collection of mismatched mugs from the bunker’s cupboards.
Dean narrows his eyes. “What the hell, Sammy?” he says.
Sam frowns right back at him. “What was I supposed to do, Dean? These people are cold. Some of them have been here for hours, and they don’t have any way of getting home, and—”
Dean opens the door and faces up to him, arms crossed over his chest. “No way,” he says. “No. I can see what you’re thinking, and—just no.”
Feeling his stomach twist up with guilt, Castiel inches away from the conversation.
As Dean and Sam argue, he finds himself next to the sweater girl, who’s sitting on the ground cross-legged with a mug of something caffeinated steaming between her hands.
She looks up at him and her face brightens, and a different kind of guilt spears through him.
He can’t bear to step away, though maybe it would be kinder in the long run. He can already picture the disappointment in her eyes.
“What’s your name?” he asks her, instead of leaving.
“Elinor,” she tells him. “My sister called me Elmo.” She smiles faintly; it refers to something he doesn’t know about, he realises.
“Where is your sister?” he asks.
“She went to be with an angel,” she says, softly. “That’s what she said. I thought she was crazy. But when I saw you—”
“That’s why you came here,” he realises. “You think I can take you to your sister.”
A sister who went to be with an angel. A vessel. Even if Castiel could contact the angels in Heaven in his current state, what hope would he have of persuading one to abandon its Earthly home?
“Can’t you?” Elinor asks.
He sighs. “I wish I could, Elinor. I truly do.”
Her disappointment is visible. But after a moment she sighs and says, “I miss her.”
Castiel nods and lets her go on.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong—she can be a pain in the ass. She borrows my shoes without asking and she never puts the milk back in the refrigerator. But she always makes me hot chocolate when I’m feeling down. I don’t even have to ask. It’s like she just knows, you know? And she sings these dumb songs, doesn’t even care if people think she’s crazy. And she listens to me talk about all my stupid TV shows and doesn’t tell me to shut up. And I—I always know she’s got my back.” She looks down. “At least, I thought I knew that.”
Castiel touches her shoulder.
“I know,” he tells her. He pauses. “I’ve lost brothers and sisters before. Comrades. But back then—I always felt that it was necessary. Justified. It’s only since coming to Earth that I’ve really understood what it is to miss someone.” Or to fear missing them, or to miss them even though they’re standing right beside you. “I only wish I knew how to make it better.”
She looks sideways at him. Her eyes widen in surprise. Of course—nobody expects an angel to talk this way.
But she puts her hand over his and says, “Yeah, it sucks,” and he begins to hope that he’s gotten through to her. That she’s seeing somebody she can talk to, instead of something to pray to.
Not everybody else is so easy. After his conversation with Elinor, Castiel finds them coming to him one by one, telling their stories in low voices.
Trevor—the man with the heavy bag—lost his wife to cancer two years ago, and when Castiel tries to explain that she’s likely in Heaven, passed through the veil, it’s clear that all he hears is, I can’t bring her back.
Then there’s Nina, a thin woman with a strange distance in her eyes, as though she’s looking at something the rest of them can’t see. Her father was a pastor, she tells him—or something of the kind, anyway, the head of a sect that believed themselves to be chosen ones. The idea makes unease twist in Castiel’s guts.
“He lost his faith,” Nina says. “Abandoned us. But now you’re here. I saw you and I knew you were calling to me. That I was chosen again.”
Castiel shakes his head. “I never called anyone,” he says. “Human beings aren’t mine to choose. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
The smile on her face and the shine in her eyes remain undimmed.
----
Night falls, and there’s no sign of their uninvited guests leaving.
Dean and Sam retreat back inside the bunker, and Castiel hears their muffled conversation through the door.
– No way, Sammy, this ain’t a sanctuary for strays!
– It’s gonna be cold tonight, we can’t let them freeze.
– Hey, nobody made them come here.
– Nobody’s gonna make them leave, either, Dean. You don’t think they’re actually gonna take our advice?
A pause and – They’re freaking Cas out, dammit, can’t you see that? He didn’t ask to be fucking worshipped—well, not recently anyway. A bunch of people turned up on the doorstep claiming you were the Messiah, would you want them crashing on your floor?
Castiel sighs, and opens the door. He steps through and closes it behind him.
“I don’t mind,” he says, softly.
Dean turns to stare at him.
“I don’t know what else we can do,” he amends. “I knew there would be consequences to my leaving the bunker, and I have to take responsibility for them. I know I didn’t ask these people to come here, but they’re here because of me. I can’t simply—let them sleep outside.”
It was hard, sleeping rough. He remembers that—how all the little human indignities that would’ve been minor inconveniences at any other time piled up on him and grew heavy. Most of the people outside—they don’t know that yet. He won’t allow them to, if he can help it.
Perhaps Dean sees the memory on his face, because he makes a disgusted noise and his shoulders sag in defeat.
“Fine,” he says. “But you gotta lay down the law to them, okay, Cas? No plus-ones, no inviting their friends to the party, no telling the goddamn internet where they are. Nobody goes further than this room. And I’m locking everything the fuck down.”
He stalks out of the library.
Sam looks after him. “Huh,” he says, and turns to follow. “I guess we better look for bedding.”
On to Part Four!
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.
When Castiel finds the abandoned farm building where Sam and Dean are being held, it’s late.
He pinpointed the place more by luck than skill: his memory of the map on Sam’s laptop screen, and hanging around the center of the town at dusk until the store with purple drapes and a pentagram in its window closed its doors and a black-clad woman emerged. When she climbed into her car and made for the dilapidated farm on the outskirts instead of one of the houses in town, he was sure he was onto something.
The sky may have been darkening, but there were enough passers-by in the town center that Castiel couldn’t be sure he wasn’t seen. It didn’t seem important, compared to finding Sam, finding Dean. It still doesn’t. The thought of a dozen hunters appearing with silver blades and shotguns—or a dozen newspaper crews with cameras, or a vengeful witch ready to kill him for interfering—is nothing next to the thought of losing them.
He pulls up at a reasonable distance from the farmhouse, killing the headlamps and hunching down in his seat as he watches the probably-witch emerge from her car and circle round the building to a barn out back.
Castiel spares a glance behind him. The road leading up to the farm is rough and narrow, barely more than a dirt track. A truck rumbles past on the highway, lit up in front like a fairground and then gone. In front of him, the darkness is enveloping.
He climbs out of the car and makes for the barn.
There’s a wide door in front, propped slightly open with a small rock. That must be where the witch entered. She’ll be watching it.
Castiel ducks into the shadows beside the barn and listens. He hears implements being placed on a table, the scrape of metal and bone, the sound of a match being struck. A low female voice humming, as though she’s simply making breakfast or checking her emails, going about her daily business like any other human being.
A muffled groan.
Ice fingers its way down his spine. It’s Sam.
Low voices. He presses himself into the wall and strains to catch them.
“Dean?” he hears. “That you?”
“Mmph.”
“Okay, good to know you’re alive. What happened? We knew it was the store owner. How’d she get the drop on you?”
A pause, in which Castiel imagines Dean’s scowl. “I got distracted.”
“Distracted.” Sam will raise an eyebrow, at this juncture. They’ll look exactly as they do when they’re arguing over whose turn it is to get the grocery shopping back at the bunker.
“She knew we were onto her, okay? She’s quick.” Dean pauses, then counters with. “Anyway, what happened to you?”
Castiel has heard enough. They’re here. They’re alive.
He circles around the side of the barn. Touches the gun tucked into the back of his trousers. He’s rarely needed one before now, and he isn’t sure how effective he’ll be with it. It isn’t as though he’s ever had to practise shooting. The cold night air chills him through his shirt, raising goosebumps on his forearms, and he suddenly misses his trench coat quite badly.
There’s a side-door near the back of the building. Castiel tries it softly, and finds it locked. This, at least, he knows how to do. It’s been more than a year since the angels fell from Heaven, and in the absence of flight, picking locks was one of the first skills he learned.
He leans in close to the door as he works. He feels his wings spread out behind him, instinctively. Perhaps it’s for balance; perhaps it’s to hide him; perhaps it’s just for the sake of working out the kinks, after so many hours crammed into the car. The ache of the injured one lessens a little as it stretches. It doesn’t hurt, the way it once did.
The lock clicks open, loud in the silence, and Castiel holds his breath. Nobody comes.
He opens the door. The back of the barn is in shadow. The carcasses of rusted machinery loom up before him, their skeletons blocking his view of the interior.
Castiel maneuvers himself through the doorway. He has to duck to fit his wings through it, wincing when his feathers brush the doorframe with a sound that seems louder than thunder to his ears, but that brings no magical vengeance down on his head. He creeps forward, peering through the skeleton of a dead machine.
He can see one figure tied to a pillar, its hands shackled behind its back. He sees the sleeve of a familiar plaid shirt. Dean.
He’s scrabbling on the dirt floor behind him—looking for a sharp stone or a piece of broken glass, something he can use to cut the ropes. To Castiel’s inexpert eye, he doesn’t look injured, and Castiel allows himself a flicker of relief.
Still, he’s at a loss as to how he’ll get Dean and Sam out of here. He can’t see Sam, but has to assume he’s similarly incapacitated. And Castiel—well, he may look like an angel, but he’s as helpless as a man right now. He has to assume that he’s just as vulnerable to magic. With his wings, he has no hope of sneaking close enough to untie Dean or Sam before he’s noticed.
He pauses. Gives his wings an experimental stretch.
He won’t be able to avoid notice. He still looks like an angel.
And how likely is it that this witch has ever seen one before?
There’s a generator out back, which must be powering the lights the witch is using to work by. It would make little sense for her to waste her power giving herself light to see by when the electrics in the barn are working.
Castiel eavesdrops a moment longer before he goes, to reassure himself that she has no intention of doing Sam or Dean imminent harm. Then he takes a deep breath and ducks back out the side door, propping it open with a brick.
There’s probably a simple way to kill the generator. Dean would know. Castiel thinks back to all the times he’s watched Dean tinker with the bunker’s power system, intent on his task and frowning in concentration, but the solution doesn’t come to him.
The problem, he thinks, is that he was always too busy watching Dean’s hands to register what they were doing.
Still, there are other methods. Simple can be effective. So, he pops open the front panel of the generator and smashes it with a rock.
The sound splits the quiet, so sudden it’s like a physical pain.
It has the expected effect. The humming stops.
Castiel ducks back inside the barn, kicking the brick away from the door so it falls softly closed behind him. He hears the front door slam shut, and he runs.
He’s at Dean’s side in an instant.
Dean blinks up at him, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dark. When he recognises Castiel, his eyes widen, and for a moment Castiel is struck with a memory.
Another abandoned outbuilding, not so different from this one. Lights going out, and Dean looking at him with amazement in his eyes.
Then, of course, it was the kind of awe that is mostly terror. Dean had looked at him as though he were a monster.
Now, it’s recognition; a brief flare of relief. For a moment—before he tamps it down with a hiss of, “Cas, what the fuck are you doing here?!”—Dean looks at him like he is a miracle.
It is a brief moment of elation. It flowers and it fades.
“Cas,” Dean says, again.
He hears Sam’s voice, from somewhere near the door. “Cas? Guys, what’s going on?”
He reaches for the knife he grabbed before he left the bunker and saws at the ropes binding Dean’s wrists. It only takes him a moment until Dean is free, wincing as he rubs circulation back into his hands.
“Here,” Castiel says, and hands him the gun. He makes for Sam.
That’s when the door bursts open.
The woman from the shop strides through it, her black skirts swirling around her in the wind. “Okay,” she says. “Looks like you two have some friends dumb enough to—”
Her eyes land on Castiel. She stops. She stares. He watches her eyes follow the shapes of his wings; the involuntary half-step backwards she takes as she registers the size of them.
“You,” she says. “What are you?”
He swallows. Reaches within himself and tries to dredge up the memory of older, simpler times; times when he would have thought it only natural that human beings should cower before him. He tilts his head and looks at her. Tries to remember how it felt to study people like ants.
“What,” he says, “do I look like?”
“No,” she says. “I’ve heard things, but—no.”
“This is when you choose to disavow the evidence of your own eyes?” he asks her. “You should run.”
She opens her mouth. Hesitates. For a moment, Castiel thinks she will heed his words.
Then, her mouth snaps shut. “Why would you tell me to run?” she says. “Why haven’t you killed me already?”
He can’t find an answer. The witch’s eyebrows shoot up, her mouth curling in the beginning of a smirk. “You can’t kill me,” she realizes. “You’re not an angel. You’re just some other monster. And that means I can kill you.”
Her expression changes; becomes that of someone reciting from memory. She cups her hand, and a greenish glow begins to form in her palm.
“Sanguinem—” she begins.
A shot rings out in the darkness.
The witch’s body falls, the light in her palm extinguished. Castiel exhales, hard. He realises his hands are trembling.
Across the barn, Dean meets his eyes. Neither of them speaks.
They’re halfway back to the bunker, having abandoned the car Castiel stole on the other side of town, before either of them says anything.
“Seriously, Cas,” Dean says to him. “What were you thinking? We had the whole thing under control.”
Castiel glares at him in the rear view mirror. “That was not under control,” he says. “You were tied up in a barn.”
“We had a plan!” Dean looks at Sam, as though for backup. Sam glares at him, as though to say, Don’t get me involved in this, but he sighs and turns to Castiel.
“That was a dumb thing to do, Cas,” he says. “If anybody saw you—it wasn’t safe.”
Castiel crosses his arms. “It’s what either of you would have done.”
It worked, he doesn’t say.
You looked at me like I was amazing, he doesn’t say.
It would sound pathetic, if he said it aloud. He knows that their grumbling is a symptom of affection, of family. But that look Dean gave him, back in the barn—he wants to see it again. He wants it so badly it hurts.
Dean glowers and presses a button on the tape deck, filling the car with music in lieu of argument. They don’t talk much, on the rest of the drive. Castiel is nodding by the time they reach Lebanon, despite the loud music and the uncomfortable way he’s jammed into the back seat. It’s Sam’s voice that wakes him.
“Guys?” he’s saying. “Cas? What the hell is this?”
Castiel blinks his eyes open. They’re approaching the bunker, and Sam is gazing through the windshield in bewilderment. Dean brings the Impala to a halt and stares.
Castiel follows their eyes. There’s movement, up ahead.
Dean shuts off the tape player with a loud click. “I got no idea,” he says, “but it can’t be good.”
Castiel narrows his eyes, and the darkness ahead of them resolves itself into—people.
A dozen of them, maybe, standing before the bunker’s front entrance. Dean starts up the engine again and they part as the car approaches, making room for it to pass through, as though all moving on some unspoken cue.
Castiel looks out through the back window and catches a glimpse of one of the faces in the little assembly. She’s young, in her early twenties, perhaps, and wrapped in a hooded sweatshirt several sizes too big for her, pale thumbs poking through holes in the sleeves. She holds a mobile phone before her like a votive offering, the light from the screen illuminating her face. Her eyes shine.
She lifts her gaze from the screen as the car passes her. Her eyes find Castiel’s face through the window and stay there. She gazes at him open-mouthed.
He sees her lips move through the window, and though he can’t hear her, he sees what she’s saying.
He’s here! she says, and from the rapture on her face, she could be talking about God himself. He’s come to us.
“What the fuck?” Dean says, and his words come to Castiel as though they’re underwater. “What the fuck?”
The girl raises her cell phone, showing it to the person next to her—a middle-aged man in threadbare clothes, a ratty beard on his face and a heavy pack on his back—and then raising it as though in triumph. Castiel catches a glimpse of the picture on the screen—a blurry photograph, taken from a distance, but unmistakable.
It’s him, in his car outside the magic store, early in the evening.
His heart sinks. “Someone must have seen me,” he says. “When I came to find you.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know how they got here. I don’t know how they found us.”
Sam shrugs. “All they’d need is one person with computer hacking skills. If they got your license plate—there are eyes everywhere if you know how to look. Whatever Man of Letters it belonged to back in the day registered it in town? Lebanon isn’t exactly a big place. All they would’ve had to do is poke around in town, ask if anything weird’s been going on around here. I’ll bet someone would’ve sent them out here.”
Anything weird. Castiel shifts, suddenly very conscious of his physical form. How unwieldy it is; how conspicuous. He looks in the rear view mirror and Dean won’t meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Dean shrugs. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, bringing the car to a halt. There’s resignation in his voice, and Castiel understands.
They have more important things to worry about than apologies right now. Damage control.
Silence falls as Castiel opens the back door and climbs out of the Impala. It’s awkward, as always, and he feels like a creature of bathos, unsuited to the reverence with which he is being watched.
But then he’s out, standing up, and his wings stretch themselves to their fullest span—a reflex, independent of his volition. There is a gasp that makes its way around the crowd. How real they are; how unmistakable for a costume or a prop. The car doors close, loud in the hush, as Sam and Dean climb out to flank him. It occurs to him, vaguely, that they look a little like bodyguards.
Perhaps it’s not so strange an image. They have been taking care of him almost as long as he has been watching over them, after all.
Eyes turn to look at them, but only linger briefly. The people keep staring at Castiel.
They seem to be waiting for something.
“Okay.” Dean’s voice breaks the silence. “You got a good look at the freak show, you can write about it on your blogs, tell the world how it’s all because of aliens or GMOs or the real life Avengers or whatever. Ain’t like the great American public is gonna believe you. Now scram.”
Nobody moves. It’s as though he didn’t speak at all.
“Are you crazies deaf, or—”
One of them—the man with the heavy bag—takes a step toward Castiel. “What would you have us do?” he asks. He doesn’t even glance at Dean.
Castiel frowns. There’s a look in the man’s eyes. It’s wonder and terror, and relief and desperation, and a whole host of other things. It’s as familiar as starlight.
All those things—Castiel saw them before, only a few short years ago. In the eyes of the congregations he appeared to, clothing himself in the divine, full to bursting with unearthly power, drunk on hubris, travelling Heaven and Earth dishing out what he thought was justice, because he thought he knew it better than anybody else, because he thought he had the right. Sometimes in the eyes of the sinners he smote, right before they fell beneath his hands.
He has felt these things before, too. This is the way people look when they think they’ve found God.
He should have thought of this, before he left the bunker and showed himself. It occurred to him that hunters would want to kill him; that the curious would want to come and stare. This didn’t, and he curses himself for it.
He knows humanity well enough, by now. He should have remembered its desperation.
Castiel swallows. The man standing before him bends as if to kneel down, and suddenly he thinks that he might vomit.
“Stop!” he says, and his voice sounds harsh in the quiet. “Stop it!”
The man freezes; stares. Waits, again.
Castiel sighs. “It isn’t—” He breaks off. “I’m not what you think I am.”
“An angel,” says a voice from the back of the little group, “sent to save us.”
“We know you exist,” chimes in another. “You’ve walked the Earth ever since that night. The night the stars fell.”
Castiel looks at Dean, at Sam. Sam blinks back at him, helpless. Dean has a face like a thundercloud.
“I’m nobody’s saviour,” Castiel protests. “That isn’t why I’m here. I don’t—I don’t know any better than you. I don’t have anything to tell you. I’m the same as you.” He hangs his head. “I try to do my best, and mostly I fail. That’s all.”
They keep right on staring. The man’s expression turns beseeching, and Castiel sees it mirrored on a dozen other faces. A confused murmur passes through the group, but doesn’t turn into anything.
A voice at Castiel’s side says, “You’re hurt.”
It’s the girl in the too-big sweatshirt. Up close, she’s tiny, barely coming up to Castiel’s shoulder, and she’s young, maybe even still in her teens. She tucks her phone away in the big pocket on the front of her sweatshirt, and reaches up to indicate the bandage on his wing. It’s dirty from sneaking around inside the barn where Dean and Sam were tied up, and there’s a faint spot of blood seeping through to stain it. He must have hit it on something, earlier. The rusted machinery inside the barn, maybe. He’s vaguely surprised at not having noticed it before now.
The girl’s eyes are big and soft. Concerned.
“It will heal,” he tells her.
She gives a solemn nod.
“You should go,” he says. “I’m not— Whatever you came here for, I can’t give it to you. I don’t have the power to do that. I can’t heal you, or protect you, or—”
He breaks off, helplessly. A hand touches his other shoulder, and he starts, but when he looks around, it’s only Sam. Castiel hears the front door close, and realises Dean has disappeared into the bunker.
“Cas is right,” Sam says. “You can’t stay here. Just—go back home, get on a bus and go see your mom and dad, or go back to school, or—wherever you’re supposed to be right now.”
“I’m supposed to be right here,” the girl says. Her face is bright. She looks into Castiel’s eyes. “I didn’t come here to be healed, or to ask a favour, or anything like that. I’m here for you.”
There is a murmur of assent from the group, and Castiel’s heart sinks.
Persuading the people to leave proves to be a losing battle. Their eyes follow Castiel’s every move, and when he steps aside to talk with Sam, they drift in his wake as though he is a magnet trailing iron filings.
He leans in close to Sam and lowers his voice. “I don’t know what to do,” he says.
“Me either.” Sam sighs. “Look, it might be best if you kept out of the way for now. Might be the only way they’ll listen to reason.” He jerks his head in the direction of the door. “Go inside. Get Dean to rewrap that bandage for you.”
Castiel eyes the little crowd doubtfully. “You didn’t bring these people here,” he says. “This isn’t your mess to clean up.”
Sam gives him a rueful smile. “Hey, it’s on my doorstep and it’s happening to my family. Pretty sure that makes it my mess.”
Despite himself, Castiel feels a little spark of warmth in his chest. “Thank you, Sam.”
The door closes behind him, and he feels a wash of guilty relief.
All those eyes. All that wonder. It fills him with shameful memories, makes his skin feel like it no longer fits, like he’s about to burn out or burst open. He pauses a moment longer before he turns into the bunker.
He finds Dean in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, a whiskey bottle in one hand and a tumbler in the other. He raises an eyebrow when Castiel walks in, but doesn’t move, doesn’t offer him a drink.
“Are you alright?” Castiel asks.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Castiel shrugs, and the movement of his wings rattles the cooking utensils on their hooks. “You seem troubled.”
Dean snorts. “Yeah, well, Christian Rock Coachella just pitched camp on my doorstep. Excuse me if I don’t wanna break out the welcome banners just yet.”
“That isn’t what I mean,” Castiel says.
Dean sighs and sets down the whiskey bottle. He’s quiet for a long moment, and Castiel expects another dismissal. But Dean looks up, resignation in his eyes, and says, “I don’t know, man. I guess—seeing you pretend to be all badass of the Lord again, back there in the barn? And now seeing you try to convince those guys that isn’t you anymore?” His shoulders slump. “Kinda weirded me out.”
He rubs at his forearm, apparently unaware of what he’s doing.
“You know how that witch got the drop on me?” he says, after a moment. “She’d been selling wishes. That was where the zombie thing came from. People who’d been bereaved wished for mom or dad or Auntie Josephine to come back from the grave, and it came true—until the spell wore off and there was a rotting corpse in the front room.” He gives a short, mirthless laugh. “She had other things in her store too, though, and I got caught looking at them. Stuff for healing. Stuff for ending curses.” He pauses. “Don’t get me wrong. I know that shit comes at a price. I ain’t dumb enough to go messing with it. But for a minute there, I thought…” He trails off.
Ending curses. Castiel wonders which one of them Dean was thinking about.
Castiel would like to move closer. To touch him; to comfort him somehow. He feels as though he should be able to do that. But his wings are unwieldy, and the kitchen is full of breakable things just waiting to be knocked to the floor, and he finds himself standing rooted to the spot, one hand held out uselessly before him.
Dean gathers himself; pours another inch of bourbon into his glass and makes for the door. “C’mon,” he says, indicating Castiel’s bandage with a jerk of his head. “Lemme take a look at that.”
His arm brushes Castiel’s as he passes, and Castiel feels the ghost of the touch for a long moment afterward.
They don’t speak again until they reach the bathroom. Dean looks at him, then. “How about you?” he asks. “You okay?”
Castiel lets out a sigh. “It’s disturbing,” he admits. “I don’t understand what they want from me.”
Dean shrugs. “They wanna feel like there’s somebody out there who knows what the hell’s going on. ‘S where it all comes from, right? Religion, whatever.” He shrugs. “I mean, I get it, you know? I ain’t saying it’s right, and I sure as hell ain’t saying I don’t want them off of my lawn. But I get it.”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Castiel says, helplessly. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that nobody does. I don’t even know how to save myself. I don’t know how to save—”
He breaks off abruptly, swallowing his words because he knows where they are going. If he could save anybody, could make things okay for anybody, it would be Dean. And he doesn’t know how, but Dean doesn’t need to hear that, and Castel doesn’t need to say it.
Dean nods and opens the first aid kit. “I get it,” he says again, and he starts bandaging.
Sam is still outside when they’re done. He has propped the front door open with a fire extinguisher. Dean frowns and moves to look through the gap, and Castiel peers out cautiously from behind him.
He expects to see Sam talking earnestly to the little crowd, perhaps calling parents or spouses to ask them to come collect their loved ones. Instead, he’s handing out coffee and packet soup in a collection of mismatched mugs from the bunker’s cupboards.
Dean narrows his eyes. “What the hell, Sammy?” he says.
Sam frowns right back at him. “What was I supposed to do, Dean? These people are cold. Some of them have been here for hours, and they don’t have any way of getting home, and—”
Dean opens the door and faces up to him, arms crossed over his chest. “No way,” he says. “No. I can see what you’re thinking, and—just no.”
Feeling his stomach twist up with guilt, Castiel inches away from the conversation.
As Dean and Sam argue, he finds himself next to the sweater girl, who’s sitting on the ground cross-legged with a mug of something caffeinated steaming between her hands.
She looks up at him and her face brightens, and a different kind of guilt spears through him.
He can’t bear to step away, though maybe it would be kinder in the long run. He can already picture the disappointment in her eyes.
“What’s your name?” he asks her, instead of leaving.
“Elinor,” she tells him. “My sister called me Elmo.” She smiles faintly; it refers to something he doesn’t know about, he realises.
“Where is your sister?” he asks.
“She went to be with an angel,” she says, softly. “That’s what she said. I thought she was crazy. But when I saw you—”
“That’s why you came here,” he realises. “You think I can take you to your sister.”
A sister who went to be with an angel. A vessel. Even if Castiel could contact the angels in Heaven in his current state, what hope would he have of persuading one to abandon its Earthly home?
“Can’t you?” Elinor asks.
He sighs. “I wish I could, Elinor. I truly do.”
Her disappointment is visible. But after a moment she sighs and says, “I miss her.”
Castiel nods and lets her go on.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong—she can be a pain in the ass. She borrows my shoes without asking and she never puts the milk back in the refrigerator. But she always makes me hot chocolate when I’m feeling down. I don’t even have to ask. It’s like she just knows, you know? And she sings these dumb songs, doesn’t even care if people think she’s crazy. And she listens to me talk about all my stupid TV shows and doesn’t tell me to shut up. And I—I always know she’s got my back.” She looks down. “At least, I thought I knew that.”
Castiel touches her shoulder.
“I know,” he tells her. He pauses. “I’ve lost brothers and sisters before. Comrades. But back then—I always felt that it was necessary. Justified. It’s only since coming to Earth that I’ve really understood what it is to miss someone.” Or to fear missing them, or to miss them even though they’re standing right beside you. “I only wish I knew how to make it better.”
She looks sideways at him. Her eyes widen in surprise. Of course—nobody expects an angel to talk this way.
But she puts her hand over his and says, “Yeah, it sucks,” and he begins to hope that he’s gotten through to her. That she’s seeing somebody she can talk to, instead of something to pray to.
Not everybody else is so easy. After his conversation with Elinor, Castiel finds them coming to him one by one, telling their stories in low voices.
Trevor—the man with the heavy bag—lost his wife to cancer two years ago, and when Castiel tries to explain that she’s likely in Heaven, passed through the veil, it’s clear that all he hears is, I can’t bring her back.
Then there’s Nina, a thin woman with a strange distance in her eyes, as though she’s looking at something the rest of them can’t see. Her father was a pastor, she tells him—or something of the kind, anyway, the head of a sect that believed themselves to be chosen ones. The idea makes unease twist in Castiel’s guts.
“He lost his faith,” Nina says. “Abandoned us. But now you’re here. I saw you and I knew you were calling to me. That I was chosen again.”
Castiel shakes his head. “I never called anyone,” he says. “Human beings aren’t mine to choose. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
The smile on her face and the shine in her eyes remain undimmed.
Night falls, and there’s no sign of their uninvited guests leaving.
Dean and Sam retreat back inside the bunker, and Castiel hears their muffled conversation through the door.
– No way, Sammy, this ain’t a sanctuary for strays!
– It’s gonna be cold tonight, we can’t let them freeze.
– Hey, nobody made them come here.
– Nobody’s gonna make them leave, either, Dean. You don’t think they’re actually gonna take our advice?
A pause and – They’re freaking Cas out, dammit, can’t you see that? He didn’t ask to be fucking worshipped—well, not recently anyway. A bunch of people turned up on the doorstep claiming you were the Messiah, would you want them crashing on your floor?
Castiel sighs, and opens the door. He steps through and closes it behind him.
“I don’t mind,” he says, softly.
Dean turns to stare at him.
“I don’t know what else we can do,” he amends. “I knew there would be consequences to my leaving the bunker, and I have to take responsibility for them. I know I didn’t ask these people to come here, but they’re here because of me. I can’t simply—let them sleep outside.”
It was hard, sleeping rough. He remembers that—how all the little human indignities that would’ve been minor inconveniences at any other time piled up on him and grew heavy. Most of the people outside—they don’t know that yet. He won’t allow them to, if he can help it.
Perhaps Dean sees the memory on his face, because he makes a disgusted noise and his shoulders sag in defeat.
“Fine,” he says. “But you gotta lay down the law to them, okay, Cas? No plus-ones, no inviting their friends to the party, no telling the goddamn internet where they are. Nobody goes further than this room. And I’m locking everything the fuck down.”
He stalks out of the library.
Sam looks after him. “Huh,” he says, and turns to follow. “I guess we better look for bedding.”
On to Part Four!
