Map of the World: September 3
Sugar makes everything better
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—Day 31—
Castiel has adapted to mornings where his first interaction with Dean is generally both non-verbal and somewhat hostile, but through Chuck’s efforts this morning (he is extremely compliant at dawn), he found something to assist with that. As Dean stumbles unhappily into the kitchen, hair still wet from the shower, his expression melts into surprise as he blinks at the appearance of a coffee maker.
“Where did you get—never mind, don’t care.”
Castiel turns his attention back to updating the map for the route they surveyed last night, aware of the strained silence that has been in evidence since they returned yesterday. Dean went to bed soon afterward in what he assumed, considering that it was just after dusk, was an effort to avoid any further interaction. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, it was an unpleasant night, and the day doesn’t show any potential for improvement.
Abruptly, Dean swings a leg over the other kitchen chair, holding his second cup. “You look like shit,” he observes, watching him with unreadable eyes. “You were out pretty late. You get any sleep last night?”
Apparently, Dean didn’t either, if he noticed his return. “Not really.” For some reason, he can’t seem to keep his hand steady; the fresh bruise rising up on his forearm isn’t helping, and it’s an effort not to rub it. “The patrol should be here in a few minutes. I have—”
“Today we’ll keep it short,” Dean says suddenly, frowning at his cup. “You can skip this one, so finish that up if you want.”
Castiel nods, forbearing to mention he can hear everything from the kitchen, since Dean knows that perfectly well. That seems to be exactly the response that Dean is waiting for; with another unreadable look, Dean gets up just in time for the morning patrol to appear.
Ignoring them, Castiel tries to concentrate on finishing his corrections to the map.
As promised, it’s a very short meeting—shorter than even Castiel was able to manage himself—as is the meeting with the night patrol, and the abrupt dismissal is obviously a surprise to everyone, and not a pleasant one. Which shows how quickly people adapt to change, he supposes; they seem to have forgotten entirely that before the attack on Lucifer, Dean would generally only meet with the team leaders, and the rare meetings with the entire team were strictly confined to their orders. As long as he can remember, socialization afterward was almost non-existent.
Dean returns for another cup of coffee, lingering at the doorway and sipping it absently. Castiel wonders if he’s supposed to acknowledge his presence in some way or continue to pretend he’s not aware of it at all. It’s possible it was too soon to declare cohabitation a successful endeavor.
The arrival of Joseph and Alicia provides a welcome distraction, Joseph doubtless to argue that he’s well enough to return to regular duty, though Alicia’s presence is a mystery. After a few minutes of utterly failing to continue what he was doing, he glances up at a sudden burst of laughter to note Alicia’s seated herself on the arm of the couch, leaning over to look at whatever Dean is reading, close enough that her hair brushes against his shoulder.
At the unexpected sound of footsteps, Castiel looks up to see Joseph stop just short of the kitchen table, staring back at him, brown eyes wary. It’s an annoyingly common reaction to his presence that even almost two years of familiarity has only softened, not eliminated. Leaning an elbow on the table, Castiel doesn’t look away, letting the silence stretch between them; it’s been a very long time since sobriety played any part in his interactions with humanity. When Dean told him that day in the cabin that he preferred Castiel when he thought he was just a junkie, he could have told him that the only thing that made him unique among the residents of Chitaqua was that he was willing to admit it.
Hearing Dean’s laughter drift toward them from the living room, he abruptly remembers that he’s supposed to be helping Dean. Deliberately making his militia uncomfortable as opposed to inadvertently causing it by existing in their presence would probably be considered somewhat counterproductive to his current purpose.
“Do you require something?” he asks politely, dropping the remains of the pencil on the table and grimly amused by the way Joseph’s eyes widen at the uneven pile of wooden splinters and powdered lead.
Joseph licks his lips, eyes darting between him and the coffee maker, and belatedly, Castiel realizes he’s holding Dean’s empty cup. “Uh, coffee?”
Flattening his hand on the table, Castiel takes a deep breath and returns his attention to the maps, reaching for the last of the pencils and wondering vaguely if he could justify suggesting another supply run to acquire more because he keeps breaking them. Writing is far more work that he imagined; remembering the monks bent over parchment in monasteries armed with nothing but a quill and an ink well, he finds himself increasingly surprised that humanity didn’t abandon the written word long before the advent of Gutenberg.
“Then do it and leave. I’m working on something.”
The sounds of Joseph hunting up an extra cup—and apparently finding one, much to Castiel’s surprise—are too distracting for him to ignore, and so he hears Joseph muttering in Yiddish beneath his breath as he pours the coffee.
Castiel snorts. “Your ancestors called me far worse.”
Joseph jerks around in surprise, hissing as hot coffee sloshes across one hand from one of the cups. Sitting them both hastily on the counter by the sink, he spends an inordinate amount of time rinsing the coffee away and inexplicably lingers there after turning off the tap. When he turns around, Castiel observes a dull red blossoming across his cheeks before he grimaces.
“Forgot you could understand me,” he says ruefully. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s not the first time a human has implied I had a carnal relationship with livestock,” he replies. “Though granted, considering the plethora of shepherds, it tended to be limited to sheep.”
“They implied you…” He breaks off, looking appalled. “They thought an angel of the Lord came to earth to fuck their sheep?”
“They didn’t imply it,” he answers, mouth twitching unwillingly at Joseph’s expression. “They were both specific and explicit regarding what act they believed I was performing on their flocks.” Joseph’s expression doesn’t change. “To be fair, when they became aware of what I was—and that my intentions towards their sheep were perfectly chaste—they apologized.”
“You’re kidding.” Picking up his coffee cup, Joseph folds himself into the chair on the opposite side of the table, looking fascinated. “Wait, you said my ancestors? Like, humanity in general or—”
“Specifically yours,” he answers, feeling off-balance by Joseph’s blatant curiosity. “Why?”
“You never told me…” Joseph sits back in his chair. “Infinite knowledge. You still have all of it?”
“Yes.” He wonders if there’s something specific Joseph wants to know. “At least, all that was, is, and will be as of the moment I Fell.” Very little that has been of any use, he could add; the gulf between knowledge and experience is vast, and that was the first thing he learned here that infinite knowledge didn’t bother to cover. “Why?”
Joseph shrugs, reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck before pushing a stray lock of curly dark brown hair that came loose from his usual ponytail impatiently behind one ear. Picking up his cup, he stares at it for a minute before sitting it down with a sigh, mouth curving in a reluctant smile.
“Look, I just realized what my grandmother would do to me if she was here and heard what I just called an angel, okay? Give me a second, I’m imagining it out now.”
“Former,” he corrects him automatically, wondering why Joseph looks away, mouth twitching as he takes another drink of coffee. “She was Orthodox?”
“Very.” He grins over the rim of his cup. “And gotta tell you, the former thing? Wouldn’t have mattered at all.” There’s a thoughtful silence before he adds, “She died during my second year of rabbinical training. Never did go back.”
“How long were you lapsed?”
“More of a hiatus.” Setting his cup down, he absently traces the rim with one finger. “Faith wasn’t my problem. I just didn’t like the job.” Looking rueful, he shakes his head. “Now I regularly minister to sixteen separate faiths, so that worked out well. My Latin’s getting better.”
“It’s not, but by now everyone’s used to it.”
For some reason, that makes Joseph grin, and Castiel’s aware of a sudden sense of envy for the faith Joseph’s always possessed, a bedrock certainty that has always infused every word he speaks when carrying out each self-imposed religious duty. Dean chose him for his experience in the Israeli army in his youth and his familiarity with the American military, but it was only well after Joseph finished his training in Chitaqua that he became aware of Joseph’s unofficial status as Chitaqua’s de facto chaplain.
He still isn’t sure if Joseph’s omission of his rabbinical training was deliberate, or it simply didn’t occur to him to mention it. Both are equally likely—Dean didn’t ask for or felt any interest in anyone’s religious affiliations—but he thinks that Joseph might have guessed exactly what Dean’s reaction would have been if he suspected what Joseph would decide to do once he was established at Chitaqua.
“Not to mention what my ex-wife would say about impiety,” he adds with a faint smile, picking up his cup and taking a drink. “She—”
“You said you had no family living.” That was a question that was asked everyone who came to Chitaqua.
“I don’t.” He shrugs, brown eyes avoiding his. “We divorced before all this. Last time I checked, she left Philadelphia right after quarantine was declared and moved to New York to live with her sister.”
Sitting back in his chair, Castiel studies him. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Dean talked to me about re-establishing contact with the checkpoints,” Joseph answers, fingers tightening around the cup. “The DMV’s still alive and well in the east. It’s an easy check, all I need is access to a terminal on the border. I could hack into it myself if we had a goddamn internet connection out here.”
“You would know. You’ve been doing it without Dean’s authorization all this time.” Joseph stiffens. “Pennsylvania was zoned eleven months ago. Our last contact with the border was seven.”
Joseph doesn’t move, but the long fingers tighten around his cup. “Didn’t think you paid that much attention to what was happening.”
“I also know you weren’t inquiring only for yourself,” he continues and Joseph’s face drains of color. “Erica’s team accompanied you. She wouldn’t have authorized it, but you couldn’t have done it without help, and her team might have agreed if they had reason to.”
He glances into the living room where Alicia is entertaining Dean at this very moment, and Joseph closes his eyes. “Are you going to tell Dean?”
“Tell me what?” Dean says suddenly, appearing at the doorway and looking between them with a frown. Alicia peers over his shoulder with a nervous expression, eyes fixing on Joseph worriedly. “Cas?”
“Joseph needs your permission to survey the camp and see who might have family or friends that we could ask the border patrol to locate,” he answers, ignoring Joseph’s soft sound of negation, lost beneath the rustle of paper when Castiel folds up the unfinished map for later. Dean’s eyes widen but he betrays no other sign of surprise. “Dean?”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” he answers distractedly, coming into the kitchen and leaning a hip against the table. “Anything else?”
Joseph’s mouth works briefly before he shakes his head, looking desperately at his empty coffee up as if it might contain assistance. “No, that’s about it.”
“You’re cleared tomorrow,” Dean says, crossing his arms. “Vera’s not, so your team is still on stand-down from patrol. We still need to talk about what goes on the list for the border, but go around the camp and find out who needs info and how much. I assume you can get me an estimate on how much this’ll cost us?”
“Yeah, okay.” Getting to his feet, he darts an unreadable look at Castiel. “So—”
“So I was being too subtle about getting you to leave,” Dean observes, waving him toward the door. “Don’t let the beads hit you in the ass on your way out.”
Joseph cracks a reluctant smile, like a man spared moments before execution, before he heads toward the door, Alicia murmuring something as she follows, but then Dean taps the table, getting his attention.
“What?” With the lack of other people, the cabin is claustrophobic; before, he always had half a camp of buffer between himself and Dean’s constant, endless, pitiless disapproval. Surely doing it from another room isn’t too much to ask. “I need to finish this.”
“You want some coffee?” Dean asks, picking up Joseph’s cup on the way to the coffee pot. Disarmed, Castiel nods, watching him rinse out the cup and set it in in the sink before locating another cup and filling it as well as his own. It’s oddly fascinating to see him engaged in domestic chores; as far as he was aware, Dean here lacked them as much as he did, or at least, never bothered to share the principles of how they were accomplished.
Returning to the table, Dean sets the cup in front of Castiel before retrieving the small plastic containers of sugar and artificial creamer that’s joined the canned goods and other staples in the pantry and sits back down. He seems in no hurry to speak, however, watching Castiel take a wary drink of the coffee, mouth quirking at his grimace.
“Usually just a couple of Adderall in the morning to get you going, right?”
He stiffens, setting the cup down with unnecessary force. “I never developed a taste for coffee.” Or anything else, really.
“Did you try adding sugar?” Reaching over, he pulls Castiel’s cup in front of him without waiting for an answer, adding a spoonful of sugar, giving him a critical look, then adding another and a generous helping of powdered creamer before stirring it and sliding it back across the table. “Try again.”
Warily, Castiel takes another drink; the flavor isn’t nearly as harsh.
“Knew it.” Dean dumps another spoonful of sugar into the cup and stirs, then waits for Castiel to take a drink, grinning at his expression of surprise. “Gabriel’s candy thing,” he explains, taking a drink from his own cup. “Must run in the family.”
Looking at the creamy surface of the liquid, Castiel wonders why he never thought of doing that, then at Dean’s pleased smile, wondering why he did.
“So if I let you burn Dean’s journal in there,” Dean says thoughtfully, “can I start his cabin on fire?”
He jerks his head up to see Dean gazing at him over the rim of his cup, expression rueful, and the remaining anger drains away. “I probably should have told you before, but since you weren’t living there anymore…”
“Not the kind of thing you bring up over a couple of beers, yeah,” Dean agrees with a grimace before setting down his cup. “If I’d thought about it, I would have guessed he’d ask you to help, and there was no reason for you not to.”
“It still bothers you to have confirmation.”
“Yeah, a little.” Fingers tapping on the peeling linoleum surface of the table, Dean frowns. “It bothers me more that he even asked, though.”
“Why? It was my choice to help him.”
“And it was his to ask,” Dean answers slowly. “Free will isn’t a zero sum game. Just because someone agrees to do something doesn’t mean that there are some things you don’t ask anyone to do.”
He stares down at his coffee, throat tight. “I asked it of you first.”
“And he already had a gun to your head before he even asked the question.”
“It didn’t matter. I would have done it anyway, because he asked.”
“So he had more than one gun to use. You think he would have asked if he didn’t have them?” Dean blows out a breath, shaking his head. “Never mind, new subject. Coffee pot?”
“Chuck,” he answers. “He had one in inventory, I assume. He retrieved it quickly when I asked him.”
“At dawn?”
“Chuck was eager to return to bed, yes.”
Dean grins in approval as he picks up his cup again. “Okay, so Joe’s request this morning. He wants info on his family?’
“Ex-wife.” Taking another drink of his much improved coffee, he thinks he understands now why humans enjoy it. “He can’t contact her directly for obvious reasons, but he would like to get assurance of her safety.”
“He’s not the only one,” Dean says, waiting for Castiel’s confirming nod. “Let me guess; Dean only wanted loners?”
“The potential for hostages—”
“Yeah, and the potential they wouldn’t be totally devoted to his goddamn mission,” Dean interrupts. “Not like I can’t guess. I’m him, after all.”
“You’re not.” Dean raises an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have told you otherwise.”
Dean concentrates on his half-empty cup for a few moments. “Do we even have anything to trade? What did we use before?”
“I think we primarily used currency,” Castiel says uncertainly; his understanding of economics is entirely based on using credit cards under various aliases and the requirements of a few early jobs years ago. “We traded specialized ammunition as well, since we can manufacture many of those that can be difficult to acquire elsewhere, given adequate supplies. I wasn’t involved in the negotiations, so the details are—somewhat unclear.”
“Where the hell would he have gotten money?” Dean’s face goes through a series of expressions before finally settling on resignation. “Weapons trafficking, right. That’s a cash only business. Who was he working with?”
“Other hunters for the most part, especially those who were in the infected zones,” Castiel answers obliquely. “He was one of the few that was trusted to act as their agent. Even after we came here, Dean kept contact with his sources for some time in case our arrangement with the military here should become unstable.”
“When was the last border run?” Resting his chin on his hands, Dean looks at him speculatively. “Seven months ago, give or take?”
“We had a regular quarterly meeting with them until then, yes,” he agrees, not surprised that Dean worked it out for himself. “Then—”
“The Colt, the imminent death of Lucifer, I get it.” Dean makes an irritated sound. “So let me see if I got this. We traded at the border for weapons and information and the occasional blind eye so we could cross over looking for a lead on Lucifer?”
“I’m fairly certain,” Castiel says, “that the border guards aren’t aware of what Joseph’s doing.”
“I knew I liked him,” Dean says, flashing a grin. “Dean didn’t know about the information part, at least as far what Joe was doing, right? He wouldn’t have been okay with that.”
“No.”
“I’m guessing there isn’t a pile of money here somewhere—is there?” Castiel shakes his head. “Accounts? Where and under what names? How much is in them? How do I get to them? Do you know?”
“I know all of them,” he assures him. “Joseph has the authorization to access at least three of them to do the transfers, but the rest…”
“Why aren’t we buying supplies, then?”
“We acquired what we needed from the military,” Castiel answers, though Dean’s expression makes him wonder now; what they received other than MREs was basic, but enough to assure adequate nutrition for everyone. “There was no reason to take the risk, I assume.”
Dean eyes Castiel speculatively. “He didn’t tell anyone more than what they needed to know. Including you.”
“He told me a great deal, but sometimes it wasn’t clear why.”
“You don’t tell a laptop why, either.” Startled, Castiel looks up. “You know all the patrol schedules going back since you got here, all his accounts and contacts, you even know to the last can and MRE what we have in supplies and every last bullet in the armory, but when you took over—”
“Blackmailed into agreeing to stand in for him.”
“—you had no idea what to do with any of it.” Dean scowls into the middle distance. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“I make an exceptional computer.”
“You make a better partner,” Dean counters absently, picking up his cup and taking another drink, then raising an eyebrow at Castiel’s blank expression. “Wait, you thought it was you?”
Castiel stares back, unable to think of a response.
“Holy shit,” he breathes, sitting back in his chair. “All this time you’ve been doing this, and it never occurred to you—Cas, you had the information, yeah, but how were you supposed to know how to use it if he didn’t tell you?”
“I thought…” He hesitates. “I thought I was just supposed to know. You seem to understand.”
“Huh.” Dean abruptly leans forward, reaching across the table and picking up the latest map. “So this—”
“It’s not done yet. I’m still collating the information from the survey. Some of the roads—”
“Question,” Dean interrupts, carefully holding it by the edges as he places it on the table between them. “I told you to make new maps. Why are we color-coordinating the roads again?”
Castiel tries and fails to understand the relevance. “You mentioned the ones we had from the library and the earlier hand-drawn ones were outdated because of the changes in the highway system as well as the location of still-existing communities.”
“Didn’t ask for colored roads,” Dean says, tracing the air above a long, light-green line, mouth quirking when he finds the newly marked position of the unstable bridge Joseph and Vera discovered. “Or quality analysis—dark green means usable but shitty, right?”
“No, there’s a legend on the right that explains,” he answers impatiently. “What use would a map be for driving and discovering the location of existing population centers if we can’t find them or get to them because the roads are either degraded or non-existent?” Dean looks up with a grin. “You had Joseph acquire me the colored pencils and pens!”
“Helps to know why you’re doing something, huh?” Dean asks brightly, settling into his chair again with a smug grin. “Just saying.”
Castiel stares at him over the map, a warm feeling growing in his chest. “Your point is taken. I think.”
“Knowledge is power is bullshit,” Dean answers, taking another drink of coffee. “It’s figuring out how to use it that matters, and that part, we’re both still learning.”
“I didn’t want—to be of help,” he says slowly, not looking at Dean. “If I had, perhaps he would have told me more.”
“Maybe if you knew you could be, you would have wanted to,” Dean answers. “Good thing you got a coffeemaker, by the way.”
Castiel’s still trying to adjust to the abrupt change of subject when Dean gets up, grabbing both their cups and refilling them. Sitting down, he fixes Castiel’s coffee again and slides it across the table, watching his face as he takes a drink and smiling at the response. “Sugar makes everything better, trust me.”
“I believe you.”
“I was wondering what was going on with Joe the last couple of days,” he says thoughtfully, leaning both elbows on the table. “Alicia coming along today kind of cinched it, though why her… Anyone see you get the coffee maker? I know you noticed.”
“What—yes, the morning patrol was already in the mess,” Castiel answers. “They could have seen me.”
“Right, and I guess one of them told him I wouldn’t be going out for coffee anymore—like I do every day about this time, Jesus, he noticed before I did—and he figured he’d need the backup. And Alicia?”
“She was on the team that regularly accompanied Joseph to the border,” Castiel confirms, intrigued. “Erica trusted her, which is probably why Joseph was able to do it at all. Why?”
“Joe wanted to talk to you alone.” Dean grins at his expression. “Usually, you’re around me, which is a problem, except when I go for coffee in the morning. Today’s the first chance he’s had to talk to you since he was cleared for duty by Alicia—totally a coincidence there—and you messed up the plan by getting me a coffee maker this morning, so she came along to distract me.”
Castiel reviews his conversation with Joseph, remembering the diminishing wariness and the way Joseph watched him. “That’s what he was doing.”
“Did you know about it before he told you today?” Dean asks curiously.
“No, of course not, there was no reason for anyone to tell me. I guessed when he mentioned his ex-wife’s location.” Frowning, Castiel tries to decipher Joseph’s reasoning. “Why would he come to me—”
“He and Vera friends?” Dean asks out of nowhere. “I’m going to say yes.”
“They were in training at the same time,” he answers in confusion. “Why is that significant?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
He closes his eyes, reminding himself of the value of patience. “I have no idea where you’re going with this.”
“Maybe—work with me here—he went to you because he thought you could talk me into it? Not like he could talk to me if he thought this was policy,” Dean suggests. “Dean didn’t meet with anyone but the team leaders for official shit, right?”
“For the most part. Your insistence on meeting with the entire patrol is very new.”
“You did it first,” Dean points out reasonably.
“Because the team leaders were all dead, and I had no idea what I was doing.”
“So why do they think I’m doing it now?” Before Castiel can answer he has no idea, Dean rolls his eyes. “Maybe because I got the idea from you?”
“Even if that were true,” he replies in frustration, “why would he think I care enough to mention it to you?”
Dean sits back, staring at him for a long moment. “Well, you did, so he was right.” Glancing down at the table, he reaches for the map, expression brightening. “So, you decide where you’re taking me today?”
“How did you get used to seeing this?” Dean asks him at their final stop on the gamma route, surveying the remains around them. While exposure has burned out the last vestiges of surprise, the horror remains unchanged.
Castiel watched the rise and fall of more civilizations than this world even knew existed, humanity turning on itself in repeating cycles of destruction and only grieved for how little they seemed to care for the gift they’d been given in creation; this is nothing like that at all.
What was done here, to more places than he’s had the opportunity to see, is burned in his memory, a demonstration of Lucifer’s only true art; destruction, done in joyful malice, writing his promise of humanity’s eventual fate in the chunks of concrete torn from the ground and thrown like children’s toys over the broken asphalt of the remaining streets; the slow slump of the rotting buildings, their alleys congested with broken glass and shattered furniture barely hiding the bleached remains of bodies rotted to bare, scattered bone; all familiar landmarks of popular culture that Castiel had only just begun to learn if not understand broken and fading to nothing.
Looking with Dean’s eyes at the decaying remains of a great city, he thinks he might understand what he meant when he said that decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. He can’t look at the desecration of humanity’s own creations and not see Lucifer’s guiding hand, no matter who performed the actual destruction.
“I didn’t,” he answers. “I simply stopped looking.”
Dean nods tightly. “That works.”
He thought so as well, and he was wrong.
The dark grey cast of the sky edging toward nightfall reminds him how long it’s been since they’ve seen the sun as more than a faint, sickly yellow outline behind the thick hang of clouds over them, stripping the faded color from the world drop by endless drop. Morningstar would appreciate the irony.
“We should not remain in the open for long,” he says automatically, even though the quality of the silence around them must inform even Dean that the city is empty of everything living but the two of them.
“There’s nothing here,” Dean says, but not in refutation of Castiel’s statement. “I mean—not just—there’s nothing here. No stray animals, no birds, no—no cats, Cas. Where the hell are the cats?”
“Their absence makes sense, considering the disappearance of the other wildlife outside the cities.” The patrols didn’t mention it, despite having explored several of the routes in the city and knowing about the disappearance of wildlife, and he makes a note to have Dean remind them of the definition of ‘everything’ when reporting their observations. “I assume they’re related.”
Dean looks at him incredulously, and Castiel can see how his fingers flex nervously against his jeans, the restless shifts of his body between moments of too-sudden stillness. He forgot what Dean was like before; before he hid behind the polished surface of cool detachment that nothing could hope to breach; before it stopped being a surface at all.
“I read Dean’s notes on the cities,” Dean says. “Croats and demons weren’t the only ones that hung out here. It was monster central, and then what, they had a group meeting of abominations against nature and decided to move on?”
“That is part of the reason that you wanted to conduct a statewide survey,” Castiel reminds him.
“‘We’ did that,” Dean tells him. “It was your idea.”
Bracing a hand on the jeep, Castiel eases up onto the hood, sliding back enough to keep the entire street—and Dean—in view, and switching the handgun to his left so he can reach for his rifle without interference. Dean’s eyes track his movements with a thoughtful expression.
“Your idea,” he says, getting Dean’s attention again. “I simply gave the appropriate orders.”
“Maybe,” he says grudgingly, not willing to confirm for some reason of his own. “I still got a lot to learn.” The subtext is unmistakable; what if I can’t do this?, and far beneath it, and why the hell are you going along with this?
Oh, that reason.
“How disappointing,” Castiel tells him, resting his chin on one hand. “I had assumed that nine days would be sufficient time for you to learn how to do what it took Dean Winchester five years to build.”
Dean’s eyes narrow. “Don’t try so hard, Cas. I still don’t like you.”
“Would another six hours be sufficient?” Castiel sits back. “Standard operating procedure is by its very nature monotonously predictable. You’ve already expanded it a great deal beyond what we did before. In any case, without the hunt for Lucifer, we have time for you to learn.”
He pauses, trying to decide how to say ‘otherwise, there would be nothing for anyone to do’, because Dean Winchester was nothing if not singularly focused. There’s a reason that Castiel could so easily cultivate such time-intensive hobbies and still have time left to participate in semi-regular missions.
“Because the search for Lucifer was kind of the be-all and end-all before this. So gotta give them something to do,” Dean interprets with a snort. “Not a surprise. Founding an entire paramilitary organization to do it is the part I kind of didn’t see coming.” Shrugging, he shifts the rifle awkwardly, before glancing down the street toward the crossroad. “Be back in a second.”
“Don’t—” Castiel doesn’t cut himself off quickly enough and earns himself an amused smirk. “Please stay where I can see you. Consider it a personal favor.”
“No problem,” Dean agrees as he turns away. “Yeah, Mom, and if any strangers offer me candy, I’ll just say no. Happy?”
“Immensely.”
Castiel leans back against the windshield, cross-legged and relatively comfortable as he watches Dean make his way down the street, craning his neck upward to study the devastated skyline, eyes flickering over the buildings, the road, taking in a single street that represents everything that this world has become, everything he has to learn about how to live in it for as long as they have left.
When he reaches the crossroad, Dean crouches to study the asphalt for an inordinate amount of time before he stands up again and rubs his palm over his thigh, shifting the rifle back to his shoulder when it starts to slide down.
Observation of Dean in Kansas City over the last few days has been both fascinating and alarming by turn. To his lack of surprise, Dean’s an excellent hunter and even more sharply observant than his predecessor. However, it also highlights Dean’s experiences in his world have given him no context at all for living in this one.
Castiel mentally notes to himself to suggest Dean wear his weapons even in the confines of the camp until he’s more used to their presence and can wear it with the same instinctive ease as his clothing even when combat is not imminent, to treat each moment as if it will be. He does appreciate the irony of having to instruct Dean Winchester in how to carry his weapons like he carries his body: even more the fact he’s teaching this Dean Winchester some of the same lessons that Castiel learned from his counterpart.
Eventually, Dean abandons the crossroad, still frowning absently as he reaches the jeep. Tossing his rifle onto the hood, he smirks at Castiel’s wince before shoving it over far enough to climb up beside it, rubbing his hand against one raised knee before he abruptly reaches out, catching Castiel’s right hand and flipping it over. Even now, despite his best efforts, there are still smudges of faded ink, and the unfamiliarity of having to use a writing implement so consistently shows in the bruised groove on his middle finger and first joint of his thumb, the tip of his index finger bright red.
He’s not sure what startles him more; that Dean did it at all, or the fact that he didn’t react to the sudden movement as a potential threat.
“Huh.” Dean cocks his head, thumb tracing briefly over the gun calluses, a ghost of warmth that he can feel settling far beneath the skin long after it should be gone. “Ambidextrous or really motivated?”
“Ambidextrous,” he says blankly. “Why—”
“You usually carry right,” Dean says absently, eyes flickering to his left hand. “You write with your right, at least until your hand cramps up and you switch. It was bothering me. Let’s see your left.”
Castiel sets his gun on his lap and obediently extends his left hand and Dean’s fingers close around his wrist, pulling it closer. After a few moments of study, he nods to himself and sits back with the thoughtful expression Castiel saw him wearing earlier, hands braced on the hood of the jeep.
“You switched hands to use Ruby’s knife to kill those demons in the city, too,” he says. “Just now, you switched the handgun to your left, even though if we were attacked right now, that’d be the first weapon you’d be using to defend yourself. Your left doesn’t have enough calluses for you to pull a trick like that unless it’s hardwired.” He pauses, looking at nothing before meeting Castiel’s eyes. “Do you hide it?”
He flexes his hand against his knee at the question, suddenly aware of the pull of muscles beneath the skin.
“As an angel, Grace compensated for my lack of—practical experience with a human body. As it began to diminish, I did learn how to perform some tasks when required…” Castiel stops himself; he’s never told anyone this.
“So when you lost your Grace, you had to learn how to do what it had been taking care of, right?”
Castiel nods warily.
“Christ.” Dean leans back on one hand, stunned. “That must have sucked. I mean—” He gestures with his free hand. “Having to learn how to do everything from scratch.”
“Observation was one of my primary means of learning how humans used their bodies. As Dean was my first instructor in combat—”
“Yeah, most people are right handed, so he would have handled that first,” Dean agrees. “Then he’d have covered your left, since you would have told him about that if he didn’t notice first.”
“Yes, of course.”
“So you’re fine with either hand, doesn’t matter which you use, you’re not hiding it or anything, it’s just habit, that’s the reason your left doesn’t have the calluses your right does. Because in the middle of an Apocalypse, you’re the kind of guy who checks the camp wards every morning, cleans his guns three times a week, keeps an arsenal in his closet, needs two weapons just to sit on the porch and won’t leave the camp without three visible, but slacks off on the range when it comes to his left hand. In a militia camp. In the middle of an Apocalypse. Because that, that makes sense.” Dean raises his eyebrows sardonically. “You’re really good at the junkie thing, gotta give you that one. Almost made me forget you’ve always been a soldier. You wouldn’t fuck off on something like that without a pretty good reason.”
Castiel wonders if Dean would be surprised if he told him that ‘almost’ was as close as he ever came himself. “Habit can be pernicious.”
“When I asked about Sidney that day, you said ‘they’,” Dean says softly. “Tell me it’s unrelated and I may think about pretending to believe you.”
“That’s not the reason,” he answers, startled. “Sidney is—himself. He simply dislikes me—”
“‘They’,” Dean says flatly, eyes hard.
“—which is a feeling that most of the human population shares, and the feeling is mutual, I assure you,” he bites out. “However, if you must know, when this camp was founded, there were only three members: Dean, Chuck, and myself, and Bobby, of course, though he was more a very long-term visitor. When Dean began to recruit, the people we came in contact with were not always entirely trustworthy or even sane. We also were not yet familiar with the military units here.” He licks his lips. “The habit of paranoia is difficult to excise, especially when living in a militia camp during the Apocalypse. Is that sufficient?”
Something flashes through Dean’s eyes briefly, there and gone so quickly that Castiel almost thinks he imagined it.
“Makes sense,” is all he says before glancing back at the crossroad with a fleeting expression of confusion. Turning his attention back to Castiel, he waves a hand at the street. “Anyway, you’re probably thinking that coming here was pretty pointless.”
“I’m sure if I knew your reasons, that would not be my foremost thought,” he answers, unbearably relieved at the change in topic. “Please enlighten me.”
“Funny.” Dean settles back on the hood again, looking at Castiel speculatively. “Any thoughts you wanna share with the class?”
“Why I think that Lucifer left the city? Why any of this is happening at all? The lack of cats, which is as much a mystery to me as it is to you, though is consistent with the fleeing of the wildlife?”
“The city’s not just abandoned, it’s destroyed.” Dean glances at the building beside them, sheared off mid-way up its length with razor precision. “I get there were bombings when Croatoan went epidemic, but some of this—is it like this everywhere?”
“That would depend on how much faith you place in the state of journalism at this time.” Dean nods sour agreement. “Lucifer’s influence is strongest in places that were abandoned due to Croatoan. Twenty-six cities in this country; eighty-five on this continent; one hundred eighty-two worldwide at last estimate, though there’s no way to be certain. We tend to rely on unofficial channels since Croatoan became epidemic, as most official channels can be somewhat—questionable in their interpretation of current events.”
“And let me guess, military units were sent to all the cities to help contain the epidemic,” Dean says sourly. “Jesus Christ, not just quarantine of the states: martial law. Bobby would have a shitfit if he knew.”
“He did,” Castiel agrees, mouth twitching at Dean’s expression. “The bombing of Houston was not the first, it was simply the first that was admitted to.”
Dean doesn’t look surprised. “Kansas City—was it the first one?”
“It wasn’t the first attempt to—sanitize, I think is the term.” Dean winces. “But it was among the first that was isolated in a failed attempt to stop further contamination. That was one of the reasons Chitaqua was considered viable for us. The military units stationed here were practical. Dean had a very good relationship with them.”
Dean nods, but there’s obviously something else on his mind.
“Cas,” he says finally, “it’s been five years since Lucifer got out of the cage. What took him so long? I mean, the Apocalypse is stalled now, but this wasn’t a blitzkrieg before, either. Why not just, I don’t know, use the mojo and kill everyone instead of fucking around with the Croatoan shit?”
“There’s the dramatic irony of humanity destroying itself for his entertainment,” he offers, mouth twitching at Dean’s glare. “Obviously, he couldn’t do anything on this plane without his true vessel—”
“Which cuts it two years and change, which don’t get me wrong here, but we could do it faster ourselves with a few nukes. I mean, he’s an archangel. It’s not like he doesn’t have the power.”
“Dean, any angel could commit wholesale genocide of humanity. I could have done it when I still had Grace. You might not be familiar with our work; have you heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? Obscure, I know, but—”
“Fuck you.” Dean crosses his arms, looking mutinous. “So why didn’t he just do that instead of fucking around with Horseman, Croatoan, and the slow decline of western civilization first?”
“—far more obscure are the times angels actually did commit wholesale genocide on earth.” Dean blinks, startled. “Death is easy, Dean; when I was an angel, I could wipe out humanity in less time than it would take you to draw a breath. Any angel could do it, but the keyword here is could. Lucifer is still an angel, even in Hell. Like the Host, he must ask permission to take a vessel, he must keep any promise he makes, and he believes in prophecy, that this will happen in only one way. Prophecy said he must kill Dean Winchester, as he was the only person who could stop him from taking the earth and ending the Apocalypse.”
“It didn’t happen like that in my world.”
Castiel nods, conceding the point. “Your method of ending the Apocalypse didn’t follow accepted canonical prophecy. It must have been a shock to the Host when you succeeded. I wish I could have seen their expressions…”
“Considering I didn’t actually end it, yeah.” Dean’s expression darkens. “Cas didn’t want me to give in to Michael, even after I told him what happened here. He was so sure we’d find another way to do it. That’d we’d have time—” He starts to shake his head before stopping mid-motion, an arrested look on his face. “Before I even came here the first time, he didn’t want me to be Michael’s vessel.”
Castiel fights down alarm. “To be Michael’s vessel is to be a slave.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said.” Dean frowns. “You know, I never really thought about it, what would have happened if I’d died before Sam did what he did.”
It’s not, actually, a lie. “I don’t know.”
“That night—I asked you why you didn’t realize that the Apocalypse hadn’t ended, and you said—”
“I told you that I Fell,” he answers shortly. “Even if it had ended, there’s no way to be sure I would have sensed it. In this form—”
“Diminished, yeah, I remember,” Dean interrupts, eyes growing distant. “But that was your second answer. Your first was that you didn’t notice, because you were distracted. I thought you meant having to save me from those fucking demons, but Dean was already dead—you said you felt him die—before you even knew I was there.”
“Dean—”
“Cas didn’t want me to give in to Michael, because he was so sure there was another way we could win this, like we had all the time in the world to figure it out. I never really thought about it, why he was so fucking sure, even before I told him about here.” Abruptly, Dean looks at him again. “Why was he sure, Cas?”
“The righteous man—”
“Who broke on the fucking rack started it and has to stop it and true vessel of Michael, who was the only way to stop Lucifer; I know the litany, chapter and verse, now get to the part where it was wrong. Cosmic event, Lucifer kills Dean Winchester, the only person who can end the Apocalypse, game over, except it’s not. You said prophecy was clear on this; it had to be him. The Apocalypse is still going on—”
“And it will continue to do so, world without end—possibly literally—because Dean Winchester is still alive.”
Dean goes still, but he’s not surprised, not at all.
“Cosmic events are noticeable,” he continues, not meeting Dean’s eyes. “That night, nothing happened, it couldn’t, because there was a Dean Winchester still living when Lucifer killed Dean. The first time you left this world coincided almost perfectly with the moment you returned again.”
“How? This isn’t even my world.”
“This world was your world at the moment of your birth, when you broke on the rack of Hell, on your resurrection, and when your brother freed Lucifer from his cage,” he says. “When you chose a different path, two futures were created, but we share a single past. As long as you’re here—and alive, of course—the Apocalypse won’t end except at your death or when Lucifer is either within the confines of his Cage or killed.”
He watches Dean, eyes fixed in the middle distance as the highly organized mind of a hunter ruthlessly slots each fact into place and looking unflinching upon the whole.
“You knew that night.” Cool green eyes bore into his. “So what was the bullshit about Lucifer’s army coming? Just fuck with my head while you kept the camp busy or what?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I was doing, it’s not as if the moment Lucifer returns to earth—and eventually, he will, with or without an army—he’ll know as well as I do that the Apocalypse is still very much in progress.” Dean’s hard expression cracks, uncertainty creeping in. “He believes in prophecy, which perhaps explains his tardiness—there’s no reason to rush the end of humanity when the war is over and he’s won—but when he returns, the first thing he’ll do is come to Chitaqua. Our wards are excellent, but he’s an archangel; he’ll break them eventually, and when he does…”
“He can’t see me in the cabin,” Dean says quietly. “That’s why you like those wards so much. Even if someone told him—even if they were pointing right at me, he couldn’t see me.” Swallowing, he meets Castiel’s eyes. “For thirty-six hours.”
“Lucifer doesn’t handle disappointment well,” he answers, fixing his gaze on the hood of the jeep. “If he breaches Chitaqua’s wards, he won’t find any of the militia alive.”
“Except me,” Dean counters bitterly. “All I have to do is hide in the cabin and let everyone die, right?”
“By the time the thirty-six hour time limit has expired and you’re conscious again, he’ll have long since left.”
Dean’s jaw tightens. “And you didn’t think I should know…” He stops, looking startled when his voice breaks. “Me being here is the reason he didn’t win, and you didn’t think I should fucking know about it?”
“No,” he answers deliberately. “I didn’t.”
That seems to silence Dean, at least briefly. “Wanna tell me why?”
“If you are returned to your world now, knowing that you’re the reason that the Apocalypse has stopped here, how does this story end?”
“You and your stories,” Dean mutters. “How do you think—”
“You return to your home with a new set of burdens to carry to fuel your self-disgust,” he interrupts, watching the blood drain from Dean’s face. “Our fates here are sealed. Taking it upon yourself the responsibility for that seems excessive. I won’t give Lucifer the satisfaction of destroying two Dean Winchesters.”
The flat look in Dean’s eyes dissolves into curiosity. “You really hate him, don’t you?”
“I’d go to Hell itself and incite rebellion against him and have him dragged on his knees before me on my ascension to the throne of Hell to answer for his sins.” He’s thought about this, perhaps too much. “However,” and this is true, surprisingly enough, “I don’t hate myself more than I hate him. Or humanity, for that matter.”
Dean cocks head, looking unexpectedly curious. “You think you could? Like, take over Hell and rule it and everything?”
“Why not? Eternity in Hell is a very long time, and I’d certainly have time to try.” Sliding off the jeep, he asks, “So are we ready to return to the camp?”
“Yeah. No, wait.” Dean glances at the crossroad again, frowning.” I wanna make one more stop before we go back.”
Dean spends far more time than absolutely necessary exploring the street despite the fact it’s not noticeably different from their previous stops. He stops briefly at both crossroads, looking faintly dissatisfied, before making a very leisurely return journey, looking up every so often as if he’s never seen buildings before.
When he returns, obviously reluctant, Castiel’s suspicions are confirmed; as much as anything else, Dean simply wanted out of the camp for a few hours, and the patrol routes make an excellent excuse that also has the benefit of being perfectly true. As he watches Dean’s approach, he makes a mental list of all the routes patrol has ever or could ever use that are close enough to the camp for them to return easily but afford Dean several hours of freedom from confinement behind its walls.
Pleased with his solution, he doesn’t comment on Dean’s visible reluctance to admit there’s no reason for them to linger, watching him climb up on the hood, feet braced on the bumper with a determined expression. He supposes he could offer reassurance that they can stay until dusk if Dean wishes, but that would deny him both the pleasure of watching Dean’s efforts to come up with a reason for the delay as well as finding out what he’ll decide to use.
“So, Lucifer’s army,” Dean says abruptly.
“That subject would not have been my first guess,” he observes, bracing an elbow on the jeep. “I was certain it would be the weather.”
Dean’s eyes narrow.
“Excellent choice,” he adds quickly, biting back a smile. “Lucifer’s missing army, yes. Please continue.”
Dean takes an ordinate amount of time settling himself on the hood of the jeep before deigning to bestow his attention on Castiel. “Why hasn’t he come back yet?”
“I don’t know,” he answers patiently. “I have theories and possibilities, but Dean, as I told you, this is prophecy, and he’s still an angel; he believes in it as much or more than the Host did. If you were given a script that was guaranteed to work, would you deviate from it?”
“Even if something else was faster and more likely to actually work in less than five years’ time?” Dean asks skeptically. “Angel thing?”
“Sentient creation thing,” Castiel corrects him. “Angels also lack imagination, and in case you weren’t aware of this, aren’t terribly flexible when it comes to—anything, really.”
“Five. Years,” Dean enunciates blandly.
Castiel sighs. “Lucifer was in the Cage for millennia, and infinite knowledge can’t replace witnessing humanity’s progress from fleeing before the mighty mammoth and death due to lack of antibiotics. Plagues used to be much more effective before mass communication and germ research, and the infrastructure to support containment. The only thing that worked as expected is the actual infection rate and incurability of Croatoan, and because it was working, however slowly, there was no reason to change it, even if he were to consider doing so, which I doubt. That would require actual effort on his part, not to mention he’s terrible at…” Dean’s smile of satisfaction makes him pause. “What?”
“Nothing,” Dean answers, chin in his hands. “I was just—so he doesn’t have an army until he brings it from Hell?”
“I didn’t say that,” Castiel says, suspicious and not sure why. “Technically speaking, he has an army now for the purpose of taking advantage of the destabilization of the world. It’s just not a very good one, but territory is technically being held in his name, however incompetently.”
“Uh huh.”
“In the sense of humans fleeing those places and Lucifer taking advantage of the concept that possession is nine-tenths of the law and claiming it in the absence of any resistance,” he explains. “His followers on earth move in and take de facto possession.”
“That’s the saddest excuse for a war I’ve ever heard of,” Dean comments in disgust.
Castiel snorts. “I’d like to see what he would make of waging war. The entertainment value alone…” He trails off at Dean’s there-and-gone grin. “What?”
“Nothing,” Dean answers promptly. “Tell me more about his shitty army. What’s wrong with it? Too small or something?”
“The size of his army in this case is irrelevant,” he answers warily in the face of Dean’s earnest attention. “Even given the near-infinite resources available to him in Hell, he wouldn’t have any idea what to do with it no matter the size.”
“He fought a war in Heaven,” Dean points out. “That he almost won.”
“He was among the first and most powerful archangels in existence when he fought a war in Heaven against his own kind—and invented the concept of war, in case that needed saying—and even with a quarter of the Host behind him, at least another quarter in sympathy with him, and the element of surprise—and I assure you, Dean, we were all very, very surprised—he still lost,” he answers testily. “There was no ‘almost’.”
Dean’s smile widens. “Mea culpa. He didn’t almost win.”
“Since then, while he sulked within the Cage about the grievous injuries done to him, the sum total of which is more or less that humanity’s existence is a source of existential pain to him, the Host has had millennia to learn the art of war both in heaven and on earth,” he continues, warming to the subject. “Simply because Lucifer was created to be a soldier doesn’t mean he has the least idea how to wage a war on earth, or even experience enough to understand how to fight it. The Croatoan virus has three purposes: the reduction of the population via attrition, the dissolution of your social and political structures to create world-wide anarchy, and to make a frankly ridiculous philosophical point in an argument with my Father that started almost before time began.”
“Okay, but if me dying was the way to win,” Dean says slowly, sounding puzzled, “why even bother? Kill me, it’s done, he’s won.”
“Other than prophecy said so?” Castiel shrugs. “Conquest is much easier when the other side of the war can’t even step on the field and fight.”
“So he’s stacking the deck, I get that part.”
“He’s not stacking the deck; he’s eliminating the need for a deck to be stacked,” he explains, fighting for patience. “Consider this: in five years, Lucifer has only taken territory as his own after humans abandoned it due to the spread of Croatoan; he didn’t have to fight for any of it. Currently, his entire army, such as it is, consists of Croatoans, who are not known for their ability to strategize or have enough brain matter to do so even if he wanted them to, those demons under his personal control, who are carefully conditioned against any sign of independent thought, and human followers, the quality of whom you can probably guess.”
“Sounds pretty terrifying to me,” Dean says with a shrug. “Yeah, conquest would be pretty fucking easy when we’re too scared to even step on the goddamn field.”
“Humanity’s response to terror generally consists of finding new and improved methods of destroying it,” Castiel says dryly. “Unfortunately, that also includes using it against each other. His method of conquest will work eventually simply due to a lack of resistance, but it’s both slow and almost painfully inefficient. Not to mention that watching humanity destroying itself has to eventually pall from its sheer monotony compared to the variety available to him in Hell.”
“Like watching paint dry,” Dean agrees, mouth starting to twitch suspiciously.
“I could have done it myself in far less time, given a few competent lieutenants and a working understanding of how to proselytize to the masses in a way that encourages them to join me in wreaking havoc upon the earth, which I have, seeing as that was within my job description for most of my existence,” he continues unthinkingly. “Lucifer’s followers joined him despite the fact that their eternal suffering was a feature of their soul’s final reward, which is only attractive to a very specific subset of the human population, and not what anyone bent on world conquest would usually consider a valuable addition to their army. That he doesn’t seem to realize this—”
Dean looks like Castiel just handed him a large, gaudily wrapped present. “Bingo.”
“What…”
“So your little cult at Chitaqua,” Dean says gloatingly, “you’d take that global? I’m assuming sex wouldn’t be required or dude, gotta tell you, the human body has some limits, even yours. Don’t think you could keep up with those kind of numbers.”
“You mean as an angel or as a mortal?” He waits for Dean’s grin to fade. “Even as an angel with Grace, creating a religious imperative to bind my followers and build an army would only be useful if I had among them those that could effectively wage war on my behalf, not to mention knowing how to do it myself.”
“So if you were conquering the earth tomorrow, that’s what you’d do?”
“Isn’t that what Castiel in your world did?” he asks challengingly. “All I lack is the power to do it.”
“He didn’t actually go to war,” Dean explains, as if that’s the problem with this scenario. “More of a love and fear thing, convert and join my army of the new world order or be smited immediately.”
“I don’t have access to that kind of power.”
“Lucifer has a lot of power, too. Doesn’t seem to be helping him speed this up any,” Dean says, then starts to frown. “Cas? What’s wrong?”
“You think I would…” he fails to finish the sentence; putting it into words would be almost as obscene as the act itself. Pushing off the hood, he turns away, tossing over his shoulder, “Are you ready to return?”
“Cas, come on, I don’t think you’re planning to take over the world and become the new god!” Dean says, sounding some inexplicable combination of amused and irritated. “I was just thinking—”
“What possible reason would I want to?” he snaps. “Playing Risk would have many of the same benefits, none of the drawbacks, and take far less time.”
Dean blinks. “You’ve played Risk?”
“Only when stripping was involved.” He opens the door of the jeep. “It’s getting late.”
“Yeah, time’s like that.” Dean sighs, looking faintly guilty. “Cas, stop. I wasn’t checking to see if you were thinking of world conquest. What you said—Cas was reading from the same playbook as Lucifer, I guess. I mean, Lucifer’s making us kill ourselves and Cas was converting us, but neither of them were willing to fight, even though they had to know they’d win.”
Hand on the frame of the half-open door, Castiel reluctantly closes it. “There is no such thing as a guarantee when it comes to war. Both Lucifer and your Castiel would know that from experience. Lucifer waited until he was certain he could win before he went to war against the Host, and he still failed.”
“That’s against other angels.”
“And he was an archangel,” Castiel answers, drifting away from the door. “In terms of power, most of the Host were as far beneath him as you are beneath us.”
“And you still won.” Dean’s expression darkens. “Even against humans, they weren’t willing to take the risk. Guess we got lucky they never tried to test that.”
“Considering that you assume you’d lose before there’s even a battle to be fought, yes, I’d say so.”
Dean’s head snaps up, startled, before he makes a face. “Okay, maybe I deserved that. Feel better?”
“Actually, yes,” he admits. “Provided we have put to rest the suspicion I have a latent desire to achieve world conquest or godhood, that is.”
“I’m convinced,” Dean assures him, raising both hands in mock defeat. “I didn’t really need convincing. Though you know, not a lot of people would say no if they had the chance.”
“You would.”
“I hate Risk. Not seeing how doing it in real life would be much better. That’s how I know you mean it.” Before he can answer that—or make enough sense of Dean’s answer to find an appropriate response—Dean cocks his head, mouth curving playfully. “Okay, gotta know. An eternity of preaching the word of the Lord, so you’re pretty good at the convincing thing. So why didn’t it work on me?”
Castiel sighs; he should have known. “Maybe I’m less skilled than I think I am.”
“Maybe you’re avoiding the question,” Dean counters. “Don’t get me wrong, you made an effort, I’ll give you that much, but that couldn’t have been your A game.”
This is exactly the conversation that Castiel would prefer to avoid.
“You wouldn’t understand.” That was a mistake; Dean straightens, looking challenging, and reluctantly, he says, “You’re my charge.”
“You mean him, right?”
“No, I mean you as in you, second person singular, sitting in front of me here, as much as he was until his soul left this plane of existence.”
There were many reasons he didn’t mean to live beyond Dean’s death and hoped to precede him if at all possible, not least of which was what it would feel like when that bond broke. The eternal seconds between the death of Dean and this Dean’s arrival are seared into his memory so deeply he can barely think of it without nauseous horror, like an abyss opening up beneath him that promised not oblivion but tortures that even Hell could not hope to match.
“Like the job of being a charge is now fulfilled by me in the absence of your actual charge, the dead guy?” Dean asks with some combination of annoyance and contempt. The response is so predictable that Castiel could have scripted this conversation himself. “Dude, at least with the Apocalypse, me taking over the lead role here was kind of a good thing.”
“You make it sound like a fate worse than death.”
“Since death seems to be the only way you’re getting out of it, yeah.” Dean gestures, but the significance of it is beyond him. “I mean, the Apocalypse is one thing, but being tied up to a person who you barely know—you know what I mean. What if you hated me?”
He frowns. “Why would I hate you?”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Not the point. I’m just saying, you don’t get any input, it just—you Fell, and you’re still bound by that? What, heaven doesn’t have toilets to clean when you piss them off, so they came up with the charges thing?”
Abruptly, Castiel is so angry he can barely think. “Is that how you felt about your bond with your brother?”
That wipes the smirk off Dean’s face instantly. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Was that insulting?” he asks bitterly. “I apologize. I assumed by what you said that you were speaking from experience.”
“That isn’t the same thing,” Dean grinds out, looking outraged. “Me and Sammy, that’s nothing like—”
“The only difference between how you feel bound to Sam and how I am bound to you is my Father wasn’t John Winchester, and there was no genetic relationship,” he interrupts, too frustrated to care how Dean interprets that. “You may regret our connection, but I don’t. It’s one of the few things that I’ve never regretted.”
Dean starts to answer that then stops himself, staring at Castiel for a long moment before visibly calming himself.
“Okay, let’s try this again. What is a charge?”
“Why? So you can continue to mock me because you find it an amusing way to pass the time?”
“No,” Dean says, keeping his voice deliberately even. “Because this is a stupid fucking thing to fight about, and I want to know.”
It’s tempting to ignore him, but since he agreed to help Dean, they’ve avoided the kind of fights that at one time would have led to teleportation and since he Fell, a variety of both substances and activities that in hindsight he’s beginning to think might have been a mistake. He also suspects conflict when they both share a single finite space is going to be far more unpleasant than when they were in different cabins on different sides of the camp and had very few required interactions. Last night is not something he wants to repeat in the near future.
“To be entrusted with a charge is very rare; it’s been millennia since the last time it happened,” he says finally. “It’s covenant, to be entrusted with a human soul to care for and protect from harm. The opportunity to know Creation in that way is a gift.”
“Even if it wasn’t a choice,” Dean says slowly, not quite a question.
“Perhaps perspective would help,” he answers, thinking of Uriel and Zachariah and the other angels Dean met. “No angel has ever been other than joyful in being given this. There is no way to know my Father’s will—” he falters there, not sure he wants to examine this too closely, “—but perhaps it is not given unless it is desired.”
“And you did.” Dean doesn’t look away. “Before or after you dragged my ass out of Hell?”
“Always,” he answers in surprise. “My Father didn’t have to make you my charge simply because I rescued you.” He stops again, longer this time, thinking of all the ways he could have been killed during the endless search of Hell. Stronger angels fell to demon hoards or were lost within the infinite horrors and traps that made up the vastness that was Hell, soldiers who he knew were his superior in all ways.
Among the Host, he was a soldier, but only one of many equal in skill, and without the drive of competition, he felt neither shame nor satisfaction in how he ranked among them. Yet he succeeded, driven almost to mindlessness once he sensed—once they all sensed—Dean break on the rack; when time was no longer of the essence, it became the only thing that mattered. In retrospect, he wonders why: taking him back to earth was simply a matter of choosing when he would be resurrected and going to that point in time… For the purposes of the Host—to better assure that Dean would be willing to become Michael’s vessel—the more time Dean spent as a demon would be preferable, knowing his weaknesses as well as his strengths.
Castiel didn’t know Dean’s ultimate purpose then—and not for the first time, he reflects on the weaknesses and strengths of the Host’s secrecy—but if they told him to assure Dean would be returned to humanity whole in body but irreparably shattered in essence, it would have changed nothing. His obedience to that point was unquestioning and absolute, his faith without flaw, and he would have understood his instructions. There would have been no difference except in one thing; he would have committed his first act of disobedience within the bowels of Hell, and the Host would never have known it.
“When the Host first accused me of caring too much for you, they said I was becoming too human, that my service was given first to my Father and not to humanity.” Dean nods, obviously remembering that time as well. “They were correct regarding my feelings, but they believed, and I suppose still do, that it was a flaw that I should be able to correct when I became aware of it.”
“They put Uriel over you to control you,” Dean replies. “If caring was part of the charge package and everything—”
“Being entrusted with a charge is not the equivalent of a love potion, Dean. I didn’t have to like you to love you as my Father’s creation,” he answers impatiently. “I loved spiders as my Father’s creation, but I don’t feel any particular fondness for those that end up in my shoes, and I deal with that without any feeling of regret.” Before Dean can ask if he’s like a spider—this is Dean, and there’s no possible way he could say anything else—he hurries on. “What the Host wanted for you was not—strictly speaking—contrary to my duty to you as my charge. That I saw differently was a problem, and was possibly why they didn’t execute me at the first sign I was wavering. Without me, they had no claim on you at all.”
“Ownership.” Dean’s eyes narrow. “You mean you personally, not the entire Host?”
“It’s always personal,” he answers softly. “The Host as you know it is not as it always was. I claimed your soul by right of combat, and the victory, as well as the spoils, were mine to do with as I would; no angel would relinquish their rights so easily. What is ours we keep, and we’ve gone to war against each other for far less than possession of a human soul. They knew the rules; I felt no need to tell them I knew them as well.”
Dean blinks after a long moment, nodding jerkily before looking away, a sharp reminder of the limits of human tolerance.
He debates for a moment before adding with deliberate lightness, “In addition, you were also my charge, by my Father’s order, not the Host’s, and you might say what my Father has joined together—”
“No one can sunder?” Dean covers his face, groaning theatrically, and Castiel relaxes. “Dude, we’re, like, angel-married? You never told me that.”
“On certain planes of existence—”
“What, the astral?” Dean says, muffled, as if he’s desperately trying not to laugh.
“—it could be interpreted like that, yes. And despite the fact you have never put out, there can be no annulment except by my Father’s will.” Dean’s head jerks up, startled. “As even death seems more a suggestion than a rule at this point, merely Falling certainly couldn’t change that.”
Dean looks away before he can make sense of his expression, palms rubbing rhythmic circles against his knees before he abruptly seems to notice what he’s doing. Bracing it behind him, he grins in Castiel’s direction. “So the Host couldn’t control you, couldn’t replace you, and when they pushed, you blew them off before they could take the combat option. No wonder they wanted to kill you.”
“It’s a very long list by now,” Castiel agrees thoughtfully. “I certainly made an effort the last five years to add to it.”
Dean hesitates. “And that doesn’t bother you. The charge thing, I mean.”
He supposes Dean’s doubts are understandable; he certainly made every effort to make him believe the opposite.
“I don’t regret he was my charge or that you are now,” he answers honesty, meeting Dean’s eyes. “You aren’t a replacement, Dean. If I’d been given the choice—” No, that’s not right. “Covenant is a promise that can’t be broken, but that might be because no one enters into one who will ever want to break it.
“To be fair, the Host didn’t realize what a charge was, and until you, I didn’t, either. If I had understood better what it meant, I would have been far less spiritually stressed our first year of acquaintance. I don’t think an angel has ever caused their vessel to develop an ulcer, but it was a very close thing.”
Dean blinks incredulously before he begins to laugh, and something in Castiel warms at the sound of it, easy and uninhibited and light, pleasure without the stain of anger or bitterness, free of mockery or contempt. He doesn’t remember the last time he heard Dean laugh as he has today: this Dean, or his counterpart.
“I’m pleased my trauma amuses you,” Castiel observes, watching Dean’s shoulders shake. “Do you need more time?”
“No, just—” Dean’s shoulders tighten as he looks up, face flushed and green eyes dancing. “I don’t know, this conversation started about one of the biggest angelic rebels ever who Fell because he hated humanity, and I’m talking about it with the biggest angelic rebel ever who Fell because he was doing his job.”
Castiel feels an uncomfortable prickling sensation spreading across the surface of his skin at Dean’s words. “Your hierarchy of rebellion is rather flawed. Most if not all the angels who rebelled against Heaven or who chose to leave were far more powerful than I, and none of them lost their Grace in the process.”
“Lucifer got a cage in Hell but a nice prophecy if he just waited for a while. Gabriel got to be a pagan god when he jumped ship. Hell, at least Anna got to be born human, which is pretty much what she was going for in the first place.” Dean props his chin in one hand, grinning at him. “You Fell and got trapped in a kinda-human body you can’t stand, shitty food you gotta eat anyway, crappy living conditions in a militia camp, mortality, and while not knocking the benefits of orgasms or anything, if sex was the only highlight—” He shakes his head. “Jesus, you make worse deals than I do, and that’s saying something. You’d been living here long enough to get the low-budget preview of the entire shitty apocalyptic movie that would be your mortal life, not like you didn’t know what you were getting into.”
Castiel tries to think of a response to that and fails.
“You wouldn’t even make it easy for the Host and just Fall already like a normal angel,” Dean continues cheerfully. “You never give up on anything. I’m not sure you even know how.”
For a moment, Castiel can’t breathe, staring at Dean mutely.
“Cas?” Dean straightens, looking at him in concern. “Hey, what—”
“We should go back,” he says flatly, turning to open the door of the jeep, dust swirling lazily around his boots. “There are creatures other than Lucifer’s who hunt at night and watch the roads for the unwary. That the animals are returning could mean they are as well.” Castiel starts the engine, waiting impatiently until Dean is safely inside the vehicle before locking the doors and jerking the jeep into drive.
“Whoa,” Dean says with a grunt, hand braced on the dashboard from the sudden start. Despite the fact his eyes are fixed on the windshield, Castiel can feel Dean’s focus on him in his peripheral vision. To his relief, however, Dean does not attempt to resume their conversation, eyes fixed on the world outside of the windshield.
Their return to the camp is interminably long and utterly silent.
One of the few privileges of being one of the first to settle in Chitaqua was the choice of accommodations. Dean, unsurprisingly, chose a central location, easily accessible to everyone in the still-growing camp. It took him several days to notice where Castiel settled, showing up at the gaping doorway with an uncomfortable frown that was an unspoken question as to why Castiel would choose the cabin as far from him as possible.
Proximity to Dean wasn’t actually a consideration at the time, though the fact that Dean assumed it might be was probably an indication of how the next two years of their lives would unfold. What had attracted him had little to do with anything but the slight incline that the cabin was placed on, which made it the highest point in the camp. It was nothing like flying, to sit on the peak of the roof and observe the world forever from the level of the ground through human eyes, but it was all he had, as painful as it was impossible to give up.
Coming here is a privilege he rarely accords himself, and only when he’s certain not to be observed; only when he is sober, only when he is clean, only when he hasn’t fucked himself to exhaustion; only when the confines of his mortal body, of this camp, of this tiny world close around him too tightly; only when he can’t stop himself from remembering that once, none of those things were true.
A human body has no context to translate what can only be experienced in an incorporeal form; he can remember when he had wings, flew the currents of spacetime and light and thought, his existence bound by nothing but infinity itself, but in a body defined by its own sharp limits, he can’t remember exactly how it felt.
He can’t remember it as it must have been, not in a form that has no context for it. He’s not sure what to call this, however, how to define what he does here, what he feels here, when he looks over the confines of a mortal world. When the wind blows across the land and the moon hovers fat and dream-blurred behind the clouds in a sky that stretches the length of a single place and a single time, when he breathes in the clean smell of summer, spring, winter, fall, and wonders how they would feel on wings that have never existed here and every time, every time, he thinks it might have been like this.
Night has turned the world into a hyperreal black and white vision of rolling hills broken by the stark outlines of trees, ink-dark dips of lakes and ponds and pencil-narrow loops of rivers twisting through copses of young trees and newborn meadows. In the spring the landscape blooms into a riot of colors, bluebells and sunflowers, wild strawberries draped over overgrown bushes, patches of unexpected mint and sage scenting the air.
Bracing a bare foot against the rough surface of the tile, he studies the world beyond the protection of the camp walls. He can remember exploring it in those early days when Dean’s absences were more frequent and of greater length, surprised to realize how much different Creation was when in a form that was part of it, with an immediacy and intimacy that within his vessel he never felt, having no context to understand it.
The scent of wildflowers and rain-drenched grass that crowded the air and filled his lungs with every breath, the rough texture of leaves and softness of petals between his fingers and the firm smoothness of grass beneath his feet, the spectrum of colors in all their infinite shades everywhere he looked had been overwhelming, distracting, a sensory experience that made him wonder how humans managed to do anything at all when exposed to all of this at once. Familiarity eventually eased the feeling of sensory overload, but nothing could diminish the wonder of it, not just of Creation, but of humanity’s own creations tucked within it; concrete and steel and glass rising dizzily toward the sky, asphalt roads cutting marker-thick trails between cities and towns and houses, outlining cultivated farmland in golden-brown sheets and carrying the vehicles that travelled between them.
Experiencing the noise of a metropolitan city, crowds moving unthinkingly through the world that they created within the world they were given, the libraries that carried only a fraction of man’s progress in the written word where there once was nothing but uncertain human memory and oral records lost in their unremembered history, computers with instantaneous information available at a touch, the Sistine Chapel, television, Picasso and Rembrandt and Mozart and Metallica, the internet: a people who once crouched around tiny fires in terror of the world that could so easily have killed them finally claimed it and invented it in their own image. As an angel, Castiel knew this was what they were, what they were supposed to become, but only mortal, within a body that changed from minute to minute, hour to hour, and rarely of his own will, did he begin to understand what perfection meant and why humanity would never achieve it. Perfection was to say there was a finite limit to be reached, a place that they must stop and could go no further, and limits were the only thing the human mind could not comprehend.
When Dean’s absences grew less frequent and of shorter duration, when Castiel joined his team and their mission began to coalesce into a singular focus, the last of his freedom came to an end. His world was contained within the narrow parameters of Dean’s camp and its wards, broken only by the unyielding structure of Dean’s missions and his goal.
Idly, he wonders if this Dean will feel the same, surprised to find himself wondering if he should ask, or if he needs to. He won’t, not yet, wanting to prolong the illusion of freedom for a little longer, the possibilities still only glittering potential, before he has to acknowledge again the reality of their absence.
You never give up on anything. I’m not sure you even know how.
Of course, this Dean is insane, so anything is possible. He might not even understand the question should Castiel choose to ask, which would be a fair trade, considering how often he asks questions that Castiel didn’t know required answers, much less what those answers were supposed to be. Far more unsettling, however, are the questions that Castiel wasn’t aware existed, that Dean asks him, that he now asks himself. It’s not simply that he doesn’t know the answers, but that they might not exist, and perhaps never will, unless he discovers them for himself.
The Fallen sometimes kept certain aspects of what they were before, those most compatible with human minds and human bodies, but none, as far as he knew, had ever been born into bodies that could be used as vessels by other angels. None had ever Fallen into the body of their own vessel, its very genetics designed to contain and channel the entirety of folded space and living light that made up an angel. Remembering how he’d sensed the dissonance of Dean Winchester out of time and space before he was able to suppress it, the sense of what and who he was, he didn’t himself know how or why he felt it, only wanting it to stop instead of wondering why on earth he felt anything at all.
The vastness of the loss that encompassed what he gave up didn’t lead to particular interest in discovering what remained, or if anything had beyond what little before Dean’s arrival he already knew of and ignored as so much less. He wonders now, and the reasons for that are far more complex than simply for the protection of the man sleeping in the cabin beneath him.
Dean thinks he doesn’t know how to give up when his life reflects someone who has never done anything else. He’s wrong—the number of reasons is infinite, and time will end well before the number of digits do—but once said, he can’t forget it.
Tilting his head up, Castiel stares at the sky for a pensive moment. “It isn’t prayer if I have no faith that you’re listening. Even if you were, the chances of getting an answer if I were to ask a question would be so close to zero as to render it meaningless. If there is some point to be made, I have yet to see it.” (For humanity, the point isn’t perfection, because the infinite has no limit; there is always something more to strive toward.) Closing his eyes, he shakes himself free of the thought, but it lingers on the edges of his consciousness, ready to assault him given the least opportunity or excuse. “This is ridiculous. I don’t even have the excuse of intoxication or chemical assistance for this.”
The sound of something scraping against the wood jerks his attention back to the once-silent night. This late, most of the camp is either sleeping or engaged in activities in their cabin that tend to demand their entire attention, and in any case, none of them would have any reason to come up here. Frowning, he focuses on the fragile quiet, now aware of the not-quite random, almost furtive scrapes and nearly inaudible grunts. After a particularly jarring snap of wood, an unmistakable voice drifts toward him, the words muffled but considering their source, he can easily guess what’s being said. The only question is if it’s him or the cabin that is being more viciously maligned.
Standing up, he follows the increasingly frequent sounds across the length of the roof, peering over the edge to see Dean clinging to rotting slats apparently by nothing more than his fingernails and sheer force of will. As if aware of being observed, Dean cuts off a particularly convoluted description of his antecedents, jerking his head up to stare at Castiel accusingly from behind narrowed eyes, silently condemning him for making his life so difficult that despite the fact this is a terrible, terrible idea, he’s doing it anyway.
Bewilderment, Castiel thinks: that’s another word I didn’t know before I met you. At least, not this often.
“You’re going to fall,” he observes. “What are you doing?”
“Thought it was a nice night for a broken leg,” Dean grinds out, turning his attention back to grimly navigating the wall of the cabin without any noticeable reluctance despite the sheer lack of hand and footholds. “Match the foot you broke, you dick. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It wasn’t broken,” Castiel corrects him automatically, eyes flickering down to the thin t-shirt and grey sweatpants Dean wore to bed, a strap crossing his chest leading to the bag banging against his hip, and fixing incredulously on the inexplicably bare feet whose toes are barely clinging to the edge of the least stable slat possible. “Why aren’t you wearing—” Dropping to his knees, he reaches down to catch Dean by one wrist as the slat he was reaching for crumbles at the first touch of his fingers. Dean’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t fight Castiel’s hold even as his toes scramble for purchase on crumbling wood. “There’s a much easier way up. Would you like me to show you for future reference?”
“Yeah, sure, but maybe right now you could pull me up?” Dean curses when the wood begins to splinter more under his weight, jerking his foot back and staring down at it unhappily before turning that gaze on Castiel again with the addition of a sense of feeling personally betrayed by both Castiel and his cabin. The fact that Castiel is supporting his full weight and that the only thing between him and a short fall to the ground followed by a long period of intense pain is his hold on Dean’s wrist seems to be of very little interest to him at all. “Or you know, hang here all night. How’s it going?”
He honestly has no idea how to answer that.
“Yeah, I’m great, thanks for asking,” Dean adds as he extends his other hand toward Castiel imperiously, a silent but unmistakable command that his expression implies he’s annoyed that he even has to make. “Nice trick and everything, but I wasn’t serious about literally hanging here all night. You can do it one handed, really impressed. Now pull me up.”
“I wasn’t—” Huffing a breath in sheer aggravation, he takes Dean’s other hand and pulls him to the dubious safety of the roof, not bothering to hide the lack of effort involved. On Dean, the pretense, which he doubts he’d even notice, would be wasted. Letting him go, he puts himself between Dean and the edge, which earns him a brief scowl before Dean turns his attention back to maintaining his balance on the uneven tiles. “Do you want me to show you how to get down without killing yourself?”
“I just got here,” Dean points out, looking around the stretch of roof warily. “I brought alcohol,” he adds, jerking his chin at the bag hanging over one shoulder and immediately shifting his feet when the motion throws him off. “What?”
“You came to the roof to drink?”
Dean rolls his eyes. “I’m not that much of a dick. I brought enough for you.”
“You want us to drink on the roof?” Castiel asks slowly, wondering if this might be a particularly strange acid flashback. It’s the most likely explanation. “Do you see any potential drawbacks to that plan?”
“Who has to go get more beer when we run out? That’d be you, in case that wasn’t pretty goddamn obvious,” Dean answers irritably. “For the record, I’m usually running for my life when I’m this far off the ground. Kind of different doing it for fun. Is there anywhere—” He looks around, licking his lips nervously. “Where the hell were you sitting, anyway?”
“Over here,” he answers helplessly, reaching for Dean’s arm, surprised again when Dean doesn’t stiffen at the contact, content to let Castiel guide him toward the center of the roof and far enough from the edge that even drunk, Dean would have to make a concerted effort to fall to his death, and only then if Castiel already fell off and been rendered unconscious.
Settling on the ridge facing the camp walls, bare feet braced comfortably against the incline, Dean hooks the bag around a loose nail before he frowns, craning his neck to look at Castiel expectantly. “You gonna stand there all night?”
“I thought you’d fallen asleep,” Castiel says, feeling defensive and not entirely sure why. Sitting down beside Dean, he gives the bag a dubious glance. “If I’d known—”
“I was faking it,” Dean assures him, mouth curving briefly in smug pleasure at his success. “If I’d known you’d be climbing the roof to get away from me, I could have stayed at the other cabin tonight.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he answers shortly. “I would leave if your presence was a problem.” Which he only belatedly realizes is an admission of something, at least from the way Dean’s gaze sharpens, but of what he isn’t sure.
“Okay,” is all he says, however, reaching for the backpack and pulling out two bottles of beer. As he passes one to Castiel, he adds, looking around with exaggerated thoroughness, “You come up here a lot? View’s great. Really—dark.” Cocking his head, he looks into the moonless night for a long moment, and Castiel’s surprised to see the tension melting from his shoulders, one corner of his mouth quirking in unconscious appreciation. “I bet it’s amazing during the day.”
“It’s quiet. Not that I object to company,” he adds when Dean pauses, bottle halfway to his mouth. “I worried that I might have disturbed you last night.”
“You were up here?” Dean looks surprised and something else before he abruptly takes a drink and stares intently into the darkness, bottle hanging loosely from one hand.
Castiel considers the fact that neither of their lives to date would indicate that they’d be allowed to die by something as mundane as a drunken plunge from a roof and twists the lid off his bottle, staring at it for a few seconds before taking a deep breath.
“It wasn’t you.”
He gets a raised eyebrow and a hint of a disbelieving smirk and supposes that wasn’t a very good example of his ability to convincingly proselyte on demand. Or even introduce reasonable doubt.
“Not in your being,” he clarifies, ignoring Dean’s snort. “Admittedly, your presence is the reason for the dissonance of my existence, but I’ve come to terms with the fact you’re not actually responsible for that.”
“Thanks.” Reaching over, Dean roughly taps their bottles together. “Here’s to dissonance. Drink up.”
The beer is slightly warm and more than slightly flat since the refrigerator is still a work in progress and their supply of ice is sharply limited, but cold beer is a rare occurrence, and in any case he’s always chosen his alcohol by its proof, higher being better. From the look on Dean’s face at the first taste, however, the refrigerator’s status as semi-broken will be coming to an end very soon.
“How did you know where I was tonight?” he asks; it’s possibly the least important question he’s ever asked in his life, both mortal and not.
Dean shrugs. “I played ‘if I were an ex-angel that needed to think where would I go?’ That didn’t require going down the porch stairs, I mean.” Turning the bottle between his knees, he takes another drink, eyes fixed on some point in the distance. “Wanna tell me what’s going on with you?”
To his own surprise, he hears himself answering with the truth. “What you said earlier—” He frowns. “It was unsettling.”
“About how you Fell?” Dean blows out a breath. “Yeah, kind of figured. Listen, I didn’t mean—”
“It was a compliment,” he interrupts. “I understand that. I don’t understand why you see it—” He struggles for the appropriate word; English has so many limitations. “Is that how you see what happened?”
“So what part was I wrong about?”
All of it, Castiel wants to tell him; it has to be, somehow. “I don’t know.”
“Get back to me when you figure it out.” A short silence follows before Dean seems to come to some kind of decision. “‘They’ is everyone in Chitaqua, isn’t it? That’s why you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Dean, I’ve given everyone very good reason to dislike me.” He gives Dean a sidelong glance. “Including you, for that matter.”
Dean inclines his head and takes a drink, as if he could wait all night.
“I only look human.” Aware of Dean’s attention, Castiel forces himself to continue. “I’m not. Humans can sense that.”
Dean lets out a quiet breath. “Not just habit.”
“No,” he answers, staring at a chipped tile near his foot. “Human instinct, especially with hunters, is very highly developed, especially with something that appears to be human and isn’t, and never has been.” Even demons can pass more easily, something that he often required considerable chemical assistance to avoid thinking about in depth.
“And people don’t like it. Like Sid?” There’s a pause. “Everyone? When did it start?”
“After I Fell. Grace apparently covers many things, including that. At first…” He hasn’t thought about those first weeks in a long time, the problems it caused he didn’t anticipate, the slow realization of what changed. “At first, I didn’t understand the reactions, even from those I met before, and when I did, I—didn’t handle it well.”
“I’m betting they handled it worse.” Startled, he looks up to see Dean regarding the night in disgust. “People are gonna be people. Always thinking up new ways to be shitty at it.”
“They can’t control it, for the most part—”
“Can’t control what they feel, maybe,” Dean allows with obvious reluctance. “What they do about it? Different story.”
“You don’t.”
Dean pauses, glancing at him over the rim of his bottle. “Don’t what?”
“In Dean’s cabin that day,” he says, forcing out the words. “You didn’t know until—”
“You slammed me up against the wall at light speed,” Dean finishes for him, scowling briefly in memory. “Yeah, so? I’ve known you—well, between you and Castiel—five years. Why would I…” His eyes abruptly narrow. “Did Dean—”
“No, of course not. That’s also not the point.”
“Then what the hell’s the point?” Dean asks in exasperation, and the fact he asks that question tells Castiel everything and absolutely nothing. “So you’re not human. You weren’t human when I met you, you’re not human now. My brother had demon blood in him and is Lucifer’s fucking vessel, and I was a demon, in Hell, and that’s just my immediate family, so come the fuck on. You gotta have tentacles or something these days to get my attention when it comes to weird, so good luck there.”
Tentacles. “I haven’t yet discarded the possibility that you’re insane.”
“Dude, wouldn’t be a surprise,” he agrees, clicking their bottles together before taking another drink. “What, it bothers you or something?”
“No,” he answers in unthinking honesty. “It’s simply new.”
“What you are shouldn’t matter. What you do, that’s what matters.”
What a terrifying thought. “What I’ve done isn’t an improvement.”
“Yeah, well.” Dean shrugs, tapping his bottle thoughtfully against his knee. “Fallen angel junkie hippie drug dealer sex addict cult leader, rescues time travelling Dean Winchesters from death by demon and runs an Apocalyptic militia camp like nothing’s wrong because you wanted them to have every second they could get before they knew it was the end. And in your free time, you make people and cabins invisible, make a fuckload of maps, and teach me how to be—well, myself, one world over. Now tell me what you do doesn’t matter.”
He never learned the word for this feeling. It’s possible there actually isn’t one.
“I get where you’re coming from, though.” Dean stares at his bottle, expression melting into something darker. “Everyone here sees him when they look at me. Even Chuck. I mean, he tries to hide it, but I can see it and—dude, I’m getting your thing for acid. I’m tempted to trip my ass off for a couple of days just to feel normal; it can’t be more surreal than my life.”
“Do I—”
“Not once.” Dean glances at him curiously. “You don’t see him at all. Is it the being out of time thing?”
“No, I suppressed that for my own sanity. The migraine was ridiculous.” At Dean’s expectant look, he sighs, but in all honesty, he’s curious how Dean will react to hearing this. “There are also physical differences you must take into account, and not merely scars. You are two years younger, you weigh seventeen pounds more, your muscle development—”
“How the hell,” Dean says incredulously, “could you guess my weight?”
“It’s not a guess.” He ducks his head to hide the beginnings of a smile. “Some abilities are inherent to what I was created to be and were retained after I Fell. In general, they tend to be both distracting in a corporeal body and of no possible practical application whatsoever. This is one of them.” He hesitates, but the temptation is far too strong to resist. “The body you wear is one that I created. I could identify Dean Winchester by his blood vessels and note the changes that have occurred since his resurrection. Having met you, I could now even identify which Dean Winchester of the two of you was the original owner of those blood vessels.”
“Holy shit that’s creepy,” Dean says wonderingly, taking an appalled drink. “Anything else?”
“Your counterpart,” he continues with no idea why he’s adding this, “also didn’t borrow my clothing.”
Dean almost drops the bottle. “You noticed that, huh.”
“Strangely, yes, it becomes apparent when doing laundry.”
Dean blinks. “You do laundry?”
He opens his mouth to answer that inanity and hears instead the unfamiliar sound of his laughter, effervescent and startling, belly tightening as he gasps for breath between each shocking burst, Dean’s “What the hell? I never saw you—Jesus Christ, get over it,” almost lost beneath it. “Sorry I made laundry day suck for you. I’ll stop.”
Eventually it eases off and Castiel straightens, fighting back another burst of ill-timed hilarity. “How, exactly, did you think we—”
“Dude, I figured you got the groupies to do it.”
“The groupies, as you call them, are extremely well-trained soldiers, and several don’t disarm even when engaging in sexual activity. I’m not that stupid.”
“Whoa.” Dean takes another drink, eyes wide. “That’s—never mind. I didn’t think about—uh. I can use—”
“I don’t mind,” he says quickly. He suspected as much his disinclination to use his counterpart’s weapons. “Chuck may have some in storage somewhere, but the supply situation has become precarious. Your supply run to the city was needed badly, and I do appreciate the surplus of toilet paper more than I expected now that I contemplate the alternative.”
“You’re welcome.” Dean carefully focuses on the horizon, which he supposes means perhaps a change of topic would be a good idea.
“Will you tell me now what you were looking for in the city today?” Dean frowns at his bottle, looking embarrassed. “You were looking for something specific.”
“Yeah, kind of.” Rolling the bottle between his palms, he frowns. “So the military is gone, right? Which is also weird, I guess. I mean, I don’t know, maybe they have orders to leave regularly or something?” He gives Castiel a hopeful look.
“I know they occasionally had changes of personnel from what Dean said, but other than that…” He doesn’t know. He never asked, was never interested enough to particularly care. “Why?”
“Yeah, I was just thinking…” Dean gives his bottle a resentful look. “It’s the tanks.”
“You were serious about stealing a tank?” Despite his inebriation, Dean’s plan for doing so was surprisingly detailed, and he was tempted to let him try.
“Jesus,” Dean breathes, closing his eyes. “Couldn’t you just pretend you didn’t remember what I said that night? That’s the point of getting drunk and pretending to forget.”
“No.” He ignores Dean’s sigh. “You were looking for the tanks?”
“Not to steal one,” Dean answers with an unconvincing scowl. “Look, those reports from the patrol, two weeks of nothing happening, right? Demons and Croats and Lucifer’s flunkies, Lucifer takes off with them for his army, whatever, it’s Lucifer, who the hell knows what he’s doing. Cats and dogs don’t like him, they aren’t there—”
“Or rats,” Castiel interrupts. “Never mind, your concern for the local wildlife seems to be contagious. Supply runs were always enlivened by competition with them for supplies. We were lectured on rabies regularly; it was annoying.”
“Uh.” The frown deepens unexpectedly. “There weren’t any rats. I mean, I didn’t ask—”
“You took Chuck. If there were rats, everyone on this planet would have known about it. The wildlife is one thing, but if there was a mass exodus of rats, much less cats or dogs, that’s not something we should have missed. They were legion.”
“Yeah, and the tanks,” Dean says. “Cas, what happened to the tanks?”
“The military took them with them?” he hazards; he has no idea what the military does with its tanks when they leave. It seems logical, but humans sometimes aren’t.
“Yeah, I thought so, too. So I went back to those first reports you ordered—that’s why I was faking sleep tonight,” Dean adds, gleeful that he fell for it. “First one, the bathroom guy—Phil, right?— Phil’s first literary effort—”
“Five thousand six hundred and eighty-two words with complete documentation of his team’s excretory habits as well as a riveting description of the exact dimensions of every pothole on their patrol route.” Dean grins at him. “It’s not easy to forget. I’ve tried.”
“Like a nightmare, but more boring,” he agrees. “All of that, plus everything he saw, including the color of the sky at five minute intervals. Other than that, nothing happened, right? Fast forward a few weeks, and the only thing that’s different is that he’s up to twenty pages and Cas, in case you missed this, he’s hitting on you and using word count to express his affection.”
Castiel blinks. “What?”
Dean waves a hand. “In this case, you being oblivious and him going above and beyond to get you in bed works out. I read all his reports back to back, because of everyone here, he’s the most motivated to find something—anything—to get your attention. So why would he leave out watching the tanks leave the city?”
Castiel frowns, uncertain; he didn’t know humans expressed sexual attraction with reports. Usually, they simply ask. “He wouldn’t?”
“Exactly,” Dean says triumphantly. “So if the tanks aren’t in the city and no one saw them leave—and he would have, guy was motivated—where are they?”
“The patrol’s reports were very basic for the first three days,” Castiel says slowly. “Before that—”
“Yeah,” Dean says, green eyes fixing on Castiel thoughtfully. “Day we had that little chat in Dean’s cabin. And you went to written reports, which makes sense now that I know you were trying to sober up and worried you’d fuck up and miss something.”
Castiel nods a little numbly. “I didn’t know if I’d—slip. It’d been a long time since I tried to abstain for more than a day or two.”
Dean smiles in satisfaction. “Thought so. Good call, by the way: it made this a lot easier. Anyway, that’s a few days where we can’t be sure what happened because human memory is like that and they forgot to mention it, even Phil, fine. Maybe orders came in for them to move out—which would be a weird coincidence with Dean’s attack on Lucifer, and the mass animal migration of cats, rats, every fucking supernatural entity in the state that we somehow missed…”
“They didn’t leave.”
“Not in three days,” Dean says. “Unless there were other exit points we weren’t watching, maybe—”
“There weren’t.” He stares at his bottle for a moment; he’s far too familiar with failure to be surprised. “When they said the city was empty, it didn’t occur to me to wonder about what had happened to the military units.”
“The imminent arrival of Lucifer’s army probably distracted you,” Dean says thoughtfully, fixing him with a sardonic look. “Another Dean Winchester showing up. Being responsible for an entire militia camp while effectively going through withdrawal. Your leader’s death. The Apocalypse? Whatever! Let’s get onto the important subject of the missing military units and those goddamn tanks; what’s up with that?”
“That does not excuse the fact that I didn’t notice—”
“I mean, sure, you’d had three entire days to learn how to do what it took Dean five years to figure out,” Dean continues blithely. “I mean, how hard can it be to run a camp in the middle of the apocalypse when your entire leadership is dead and their replacements are still working on finding their asses with both hands? While hiding an alternate version of your dead leader? I can keep this up for a while, so either get over yourself or go get us something stronger than beer so we can do this right, make a night of it.” He smirks. “Modeling human skills. Watch and learn.”
“You’re incredibly frustrating.” Even to himself, his voice sounds strange. “I understand what you’re trying to do.”
“You just don’t believe it.” Dean nods. “We’ll work on that. Moving on. Our last stop, when I asked you to stop and let me look around, it was because that was the first time I saw tracks from one of the tanks.”
Castiel straightens. “That’s why you wanted to do beta and gamma first in Kansas City; they were the ones with the most regular crossover with the routes the military used.”
“From what I could tell, only a tank could use most of theirs,” Dean admits, rubbing his knee before cupping it tightly, frowning at nothing. “It was at the crossroad.”
So that’s why Dean was interested. “It crossed there?”
“More like it stopped there.” Dean shifts uncomfortably, rubbing his palm against his knee one last time before closing it around the neck of his bottle. “The tracks stopped like it hit a wall or something.”
“Was there any sign of—”
“Crossroad demon? Yeah, I was thinking that, too. No fresh burials or anything, but from where the tracks stop and for about twenty-five, thirty feet, the asphalt was different.” Dean shifts his bottle to his other hand and taps it against his knee, expression tense. “It was weird.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“The entire city was fucking creepy,” Dean snaps, but the green eyes don’t quite meet his. “Saying ‘the asphalt is creeping me out’ was pretty much status quo. Also, crazy.”
“Crazy is a relative state. At this point, it might also be considered a positive selection trait for survival.” Castiel finishes his bottle and tucks it inside the bag. “We can ask patrol tomorrow about the military units leaving and review the reports to see if there is anything we might have missed.”
Dean nods reluctantly, but the tension doesn’t ease, and belatedly, Castiel realizes how late it is.
“You should sleep,” he says, earning himself a snort from Dean. “The morning patrol will require instruction at dawn before they go out and the night patrol will report to you directly afterward before they go off-duty”
Dean gives him an exasperated look. “You know, I never asked about that. Why do I have to see them all before and after? You didn’t.”
“I had them write their reports so anything of interest could be discussed before they went back on duty the next day,” he answers absently, wondering what else he missed in those reports. He can remember them, yes, but the experience of taking notes makes him think re-reading them might be of assistance. “It reduced the amount of time I had to spend listening to inane attempts at casual conversation or blank staring.” Dean scowls at him. “You need to know them, Dean; they’re your soldiers. In your case, listening is educational. You also seem to enjoy it.”
“A whole lot of nothing happening,” Dean says, sounding sullen as he finishes his beer. “Gotta talk about something.”
“Which you also don’t seem to have any problem doing,” he points out, getting to his feet. “Now, if you will turn your attention to your survival—difficult for you, I know—let me show you where to climb down and perhaps avoid your untimely death.”
Dean flashes him a grin. “Aww, Cas. It’s like you like me or something.”
As they reach the edge of the roof, Castiel looks down at the earth below them. “You’re very frustrating,” he says finally. “In ways I did not know existed prior to meeting you.”
He thinks he can hear Dean rolling his eyes. “Thanks.”
“I don’t know if the number of ways is actually infinite or only seems to be, but it seems I’ll have the opportunity to find out.” Castiel glances at Dean. “Follow my instruction exactly. If you slip, I’ll catch you.”
Dean snorts. “I know.”
I knew the is fic was well written. It had to be by how popular it was. But DAMN!