The Game of God: Day 158 - part 6

Not over yet.

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— Day 158, continued —

Emerging into the early morning air, Dean obediently follows Teresa into the garden, leaving Alison and Cas to do whatever it is they do when not engaged in psychic lessons or competitive sarcasm. Belatedly, it occurs to him that maybe he and Teresa should try and find out. It’s not that he’s worried exactly, but he feels like he should probably be working on ‘concerned.’ With the Apocalypse still in progress, nothing they could possibly do would even rate ‘catastrophe,’ which is pretty depressing when you think about it, but there are a lot of levels below catastrophe they could be exploring and as their partners, he and Teresa will end up there with them one way or another. Cas and Alison have the exact same sense of humor, so yeah, they may just be spending their time discovering entirely unexplored vistas of sarcasm and making weird jokes that make even less sense than the punchline, and that’s when there is one (assuming he even recognizes it, which considering who he’s talking about, he can’t take as a given), but he just doesn’t think that’s all.

(And what the hell are sheepapodes?)

“Okay, so what—” He stops short when Teresa abruptly sits down on a clear piece of ground among the pepper plants, spindly limbs wrapped firmly around the thin frames Mercedes had designed. Belatedly, he realizes neither of them are wearing their coats and Teresa’s just wearing slippers. “Uh, shouldn’t we get our coats?”

“It’s fine,” she says, smiling up at him, and Dean realizes that actually, he’s not cold. “Part of my training; I can equalize with the weather. No other way a witch could tend the fields no matter the season. I can’t do it for more than a few hours,” she adds. “Yet, anyway. It takes a lot of attention. I can teach you how to do it yourself, but the earth is handling it for now. Sit.”

“It’s doing—you know, never mind.” He sits down across from her, horribly aware this should feel so much sketchier than it does. “Uh,” he starts, but her smile is impossible to resist, like this is—he’s actually not sure. “Okay, what are we doing again?”

“Nothing too weird,” she assures him. “My best guess is she wants to talk to you, and well—she made you a promise as well. You didn’t release her, so the best way for her to contact you and still satisfy the requirements of consent is to go through me. Better than another dream.”

No shit. “’She’.” Teresa cocks her head. “You use ‘it,’ sometimes, or ‘they.’ Is there a difference or is it random?”

“Context,” she explains, switching smoothly to Spanish. “The earth is singular and plural; all genders and none, and no concept of gender at all, and that’s just how it’s expressed in English and Spanish; it changes depending on the language. It’s not random, but which she selects at any given time is at her discretion. I don’t always understand why, so I just go with what she prefers.” Shifting so their knees touch, she holds out her hands, palms up, in what is unmistakably an order—it reminds him of Constanza instructing Zena one day, come to think—and automatically, he places his in hers. “Relax. Teaching Alison how to interact with the earth taught me a lot about how to minimize the drama. Ichabod’s been educational,” she adds. “We always took as literal scripture that it was dangerous for people to be introduced to the earth, and yes, it is, but it may not have to be. I think it may just be a matter of acolytes learning how to do it safely.”

He files that away for later thought, replying in the same language, “So what she’s been doing so far—I mean with me…”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.” Teresa answers. “I know this is a little late, but I was planning to talk to you about what happened in Laredo, and I don’t mean ‘someday in the far future’ but ‘maybe between New Year’s Alliance meetings’.”

“Why?”

“The reason for your promise—it really doesn’t exist anymore,” she answers. “I’m not convinced it was the right choice then, but no one else was either, and at the time…”

“It was,” he assures her. “Now what are we doing now?”

Her hands suddenly tighten around his, skin like warm sand and running water, calluses like stones, and the too-vivid memories of burial in solid earth and being unable to breathe fade, replaced with the thin, cold air at the peak of a mountain, surrounded by open sky; that’s the earth, too. He’s standing up to his ankles in a bubbling brook, breathing evergreens in a quiet forest; the scorching heat of the open desert closes around him, the heat of the sun beating on the back of his neck; there’s miles of ice around him, cold air filling his lungs with every breath as polar bears swim among ice floes nearby; crouching on the edge of Varkala Cliff in southern India with the taste of salt in his mouth, the Arabian Sea spread out before him; South Padre at night, the beach brilliant with lights from the hundreds of houses and hotels lining the shores of the Gulf of Mexico; he’s in Constanza’s garden with a dozen kids ten and under, playing tag under the early morning sun; and finally, he’s in the familiar warmth of late spring in Kansas, fields of corn that spread out forever.

He opens his eyes, breathless, and Teresa lets go of his hands, smile bright, but the brown eyes are wet. “What—what was that?”

“The context—the earth burying you—she had no idea it would be unpleasant, much less how Cas would react,” she answers, wiping her eyes. “She thought these would be better.”

“Much, thanks,” he agrees, the once-vivid memory stripped down to a shadow; he remembers it, sure, but not how it felt, and hopefully, that means Cas won’t, either. “Is it—is that what it’s always like for you?” She nods, a little dreamy, and he fights down a stupid sense of—envy? What the hell is wrong with him? “How the hell do you get anything done and not just—commune or whatever?” he bursts out before he can stop himself.

Teresa blinks, then starts to laugh, and Dean hopes to God he’s not flushing.

“You get used to it,” she explains breathlessly, which, okay? You can get used to that? “Besides, here’s pretty great, too. Fresh air. Horseback riding. Chocolate.” She grins. “Alison.”

Fair enough.

“Just now, though—with you—it was almost like being back in Laredo,” she continues. “Ichabod is my home now, don’t get me wrong, but my history starts there. Everyone here I teach—their history will be here, and it should be. But you made the offering on the border, like I did. Until now, there was no one of my tradition here but Manuel, and he hasn’t made the offering.” She leans back, smile fading as she looks at him. “What they did—we did to you, and yes, I know it was with your permission—it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t—we weren’t just using you and throwing you back when we were done.”

“I never thought they were just using me,” he says, horrified she might think that, that he might have given her a reason to. “I volunteered, okay? It was a job. I didn’t—you know—expect anything from them. I was there to help them, not the other way around. Still surprised they trusted me that much.

Teresa cocks her head. “You mean that.”

“Well, yeah,” he says in surprise. “I was a gringo, and I wasn’t even from the Valley, much less Laredo. Or even Texas. I didn’t know anything about you before that thing happened. Hell, I wouldn’t have even been there if—”

“—you hadn’t been in Las Cruces and heard a rumor in a bar about a monster in Laredo,” she says. “How many hunters heard that rumor, Dean? I know that bar; I used it. You were the only one that came to see what you could do to help. You didn’t know the area—for God’s sake, you’re from the Midwest, your knowledge of the border is Taco Bell, which yes, I love it too, but seriously—and when you got there and no one spoke English, you got a book of tourist Spanish to try to talk to people. And despite what was probably some serious discouragement, persisted to the point that half the town was talking about the weird gringo who was totally not a border guard but if he was in the store and you pretended not to have money, would buy you all the candy you want.”

Jesus. “Okay, not all the candy.”

“Under twelve, you’re putty,” she says, which, fine, she’s not wrong.

“It was my job,” Dean says desperately. “Monsters, I kill them or get rid of them. The place doesn’t matter; the people do.”

“You believe that,” she says. “Not many do. People can fake anything, but we always know the difference.” She sighs, sitting back. “When we talked a few weeks ago, I was trying to find out what you remembered. I was also trying to decide whether I should approach you about what you did in Laredo and tell you what happened. I wanted to, don’t get me wrong, but that was the problem; I couldn’t be sure it was also the right thing to do, for the earth, Ichabod, or you.”

He nods. “I’m not pissed about that,” he assures her. “Seriously, I knew going in what I was doing and why.”

“I know, but this changes things. Or could,” she adds, frowning for a moment. “That part’s up to you.”

“What part?”

“The earth wanted me to bring you out here so it could fix what hurt you and Cas when you dreamed of the offering tonight,” she says. “She would also like you to release her from her promise to you.”

The first, okay, cool, but the second… “What does that mean?”

“She’d like to be able to talk to you, if you’re willing to hear her,” Teresa says, sounding distracted. She takes a deep breath. “I have a request, however. From me: no mystical contract or anything, just something I’d like you to think about.”

Only Teresa could manage not to make that sound as ominous as he’s fairly sure it should be. “Sure, what?

“I’d like you to consider taking up your apprenticeship under me.”

Honest to God, he so didn’t see that coming. “My what?”

“Not that you really had one, but close enough,” she adds. “That’s the new part. I’d only planned to talk to you, give you some context on what happened, but now…honestly, I think that eventually I would have considered asking you anyway. It makes sense the more I think about it.”

Dean stares at her wordlessly.

“I get this is a lot to absorb,” she says reassuringly because understatement, “but here’s something to think about. The world before all this? We’re never getting it back. Even assuming we win on all fronts, too much has changed.”

Yeah. “I know.”

“You and I know the monsters have always been under the bed and in the closet, that it took generations of people like us to get them there and even more to keep them there. We can’t anymore; there aren’t enough of us and there won’t be, not for generations. And some things…” She makes a face. “Some things, we may not have the right to drive out again, assuming we even can.”

He already hates where this is going. “You’re saying the world is going to need more witches.”

“Everyone is going to need to know the basics of hunting and magic; that’s a given. We’re also going to need more hunters by avocation—which you already know—and more formal practitioners of all traditions that work on the side of humanity, not exploit it,” she answers. “In the entire Alliance, there are ten experienced practitioners and their twenty-two apprentices between us, and we need ten times that at minimum to handle the new world order, and that’s just in the Alliance itself. We’re recruiting apprentices as quickly as we can handle them, but that’s not easy, since up until recently, no one even knew we existed, and now, the number is only slightly higher.”

“Right, I get that,” he agrees. “But—”

“Dean, remember what you thought of witches before Mama?”

Oh, that “Yeah. But—”

“Even among those who know about witches, we don’t have the best reputation,” she says. “Now, people can’t just know about us; they have to trust us. They need to be willing to call us when needed, and those with potential need to come to us for formal training. What’s happening in Ichabod now with the geas: that’s just a taste of what we’re going to be dealing with: desperate people who find a way to get power and fuck everything up in the process.”

“And people who want power just to fuck shit up,” he says, and Teresa nods soberly. “And aren’t picky how they get it, either.”

“Exactly. Ichabod trusts me, but we’ve had two years and change, a lack of famine in our lives, and Manuel and I run patrol, so they’ve seen me fight; they don’t just know what I am but know me. In the Alliance, the mayors, the farm leads—they know I’m a witch, but the rest…Alison may have insisted on discretion, but it’s not like I argued the point much.”

Crap, he didn’t even think of that. He stares at her, wanting to deny it, but come on; it’s one thing for the leader of Chitaqua to say he trusts her (and witches in general), but it’s another for him to show it. Even in Chitaqua, he can’t be sure there isn’t some prejudice, possibly from the other Dean if not experience, and Cas probably hadn’t thought about adding a special class in ‘why witches are awesome.’

Then he realizes something. “I’m Ichabod.” At her raised eyebrow, he adds, “Alison volunteered Ichabod as the guinea pig for the Alliance.”

Teresa grins. “You got it.”

That’s actually fair. A better deal than Ichabod got; he knows Teresa, the earth itself confirms what she is, but Alison couldn’t even read him and was going on faith. “It’s not like they know and trust us much more, but… magic.”

“Magic makes everything sketchier,” she agrees. “I’m not saying it’ll change everyone’s minds, but it’s a place to start. It’s not like Chitaqua hasn’t earned some serious props the last few days. We can use that.”

She’s not wrong; it’s not that Chitaqua is that much better known and trusted, they’re just impressive and comfortingly mundane compared to witches. If he agrees, though, they’d have a de facto link with Teresa and the other witches and practitioners. Chitaqua needs to be trusted to do their job, that’s what he’s trying to make happen; as a bonus, the trust they earn would also be available to Teresa and hopefully the others, for whom getting trust will always, always be a lot harder.

“That’s not all, though,” Teresa says suddenly. “It’s also—personal.”

“What?”

“Mama didn’t send you away because they were done with you, Dean,” she says. “Outsiders are always welcome—seriously, that inbreeding shit left scars—and we have more than one gringo that stumbled into our world by sheer accident; the earth calls who it calls. They let you go because they thought you wanted to go. That doesn’t mean they actually wanted to.”

Dean tries to take that in, but it just doesn’t compute.

“Taking your memory and letting you leave—it was hard for them, Mama especially,” she continues. “You were there three months, Dean; they knew you. And not just as a hunter still willing to listen and learn from others, who was willing to change their mind, who didn’t insist they already knew best—”

“You actually met Dad,” Dean realizes, calm with horror; it’s weird how right now, Teresa has the same expression Amanda had when talking about John Winchester. Come to think, a lot of people have had that look over the years, which is why it’s so familiar.

“Once, when I started working the migrant circuit,” she answers grimly. “I’ll tell you about that sometime, but not until we’re drunk.”

“Fair enough.” Jesus, Dad, way to make friends literally nowhere. She really should have dropped him down an earth-created hole for a few minutes; probably wouldn’t have helped his attitude, but she’d at least have gotten some satisfaction out of it. “I’ll bring the Eldritch Horror.” Then, unable to stop himself. “Why—why Constanza especially? I mean, she was great. Really great, seriously.” She was, and that was before he started to sense those other memories. Not like a mother, but maybe a cross between a favorite aunt and Bobby, the kind of person you can go to for advice and who tells you you’re an idiot when you need to hear it, who always has a place for you to sleep and puts you on dishwashing rotation the next morning and expects you to help with the laundry and watch the kids for a couple of hours while she takes a break. Outside the threat of annihilation, his time in Laredo had been great, and the more he remembers, the more he realizes just how great it really was.

“It was through her that the earth met you,” she explains. “That’s the formal beginning of apprenticeship and it creates a bond—I mean that both metaphorically and literally. Not like what’s between me and Alison or you and Cas,” she adds, mouth twitching at what must show on his face. “It was just the first step, but—when we take apprentices, that bond is part of it, and it’s very personal. It’s how we pass down certain skills, but generally, its most frequent use is to stop our apprentices from killing themselves doing something stupid.” Dean nods; he met a lot of the apprentices and ‘doing stupid shit’ was a given no matter their actual age. “When the earth deactivated the link, that one didn’t go with it, not for Mama. You were ours from the moment you made the offering, but you were hers first. She’s not here now, but I am, and now that the earth’s spoken—well, I can feel it, too. Enough to pick the worst place and time to ask you this, I know, but—” She shrugs wryly. “We claim the very earth as our domain, Dean; we don’t easily give up what is ours.”

The little he’s starting to remember makes that much less terrifying than it should be (or he’s getting used to being claimed by people and/or entities, which just—yeah, not thinking about that). Except the part where it’s him. “You’re serious. You really want me as an apprentice?”

“Oh yeah,” she answers. “And it’s not just leftovers from Mama, though it’s definitely motivating. For one, even when you didn’t understand what we were or what we did, you respected our traditions and listened to what we told you. That’s rare when it comes to outsiders, especially gringos, and every one that we found that wanted to join, we claimed. For another, you already belong to my tradition, and in my bloodline, our service to the earth has always primarily been as hunters and protectors. Encouraging the fertility of the earth is part of that, but not all of us were into that, and we generally left it to those who really, really like farming—even got degrees in agriculture—and I was never that. Hence, Dina and Mercedes give me my instructions, which I relay to the earth.”

Dean can’t help but smile. “History degree, I remember.”

“In that sense, it’s the same job you’re doing now as a hunter, just formalized and with some bells and whistles,” she says. “And if it helps, you wouldn’t be the only one in first year apprentice training as an adult. Mercedes and Dina are both considering making an attempt to see if the earth will speak to them. I haven’t told them—because I can’t—that it won’t be a problem if that’s what they truly want. It has to be a free choice; the earth won’t hear them if they don’t come to her wanting to give their service, not just performing a duty.”

Which reminds him. “What about Manuel? He never…?”

“He heard and spoke to it when he was a kid, like I did,” she answers, eyes distant. “He finished his apprenticeship when I did, but he just never felt it. That’s normal; you don’t make the offering unless you’re sure it’s your road. But recently—Mercedes says he’s spending a lot of time in the garden doing nothing particularly interesting and looking like he’s enjoying it. She’s pretty sure as soon as Amanda’s class is done and we have Chitaqua-trained hunters to pick up the slack, he’ll re-apprentice and make the offering.” She smiles wryly. “I have to admit, I’m looking forward to that, too; it’ll be like going on vacation.”

Huh. “He thinks he made the wrong choice?”

“No, not that; the choice you make on whether or not to make the offering is never wrong,” she says, then pauses, thinking about it. “The kid he was—the man he was—wasn’t the person who felt the call to do it, much less wanted to. Now, he’s someone that does.”

“A thousand people,” Dean says without thinking: a dancer, a doctor, a lawyer, a person can be any of those or all of them, even at the same time (though that sounds exhausting as shit). “What would I have to do? Not that I’m agreeing,” he adds quickly, and Teresa immediately looks deliberately solemn. “Just—information.”

“From first principles, like any apprentice,” she says. “You made your offering, but that doesn’t mean you know how to use it, so the link will stay inactive while you learn.” So you don’t kill yourself really, really stupidly, she doesn’t need to say. “Some things will take more time, some less, but if you’re asking if you need to live here, no. Only when children are apprenticed do they need constant supervision, for obvious reasons. With adults, once the initial instruction is complete, it’s different. You’d need to come a few days a month for me to evaluate your progress and continue your instruction, and for you to ask me questions, but most of it is studying and practicing what I teach you on your own. Most of the adults that returned to us after the epidemic couldn’t just quit their jobs, even if they wanted to: most had families, friends, a life they were living. We wouldn’t ask them to give that up even if we could, and we’re not supposed to anyway. Our service heavily encourages familial bonds and friendships, participating in our communities, and living our lives fully.” She shrugs. “We can’t save the world if we’ve never met it, after all.”

He starts to nod agreement—that’s something hunters keep forgetting no matter how many times they learn—then pauses, glancing down at the slippered foot peeking out from the frayed hem of her jeans. Without thinking, he reaches out, pulling the hem back to reveal her ankle and—not surprising at all—the half-scabbed lines and whorls of the symbol carved into her skin. The ward lock that keeps the wards around the daycare raised until she breaks the lock herself or dies.

Teresa doesn’t move. “I can explain that.”

“You added a lock for the wards you put on the Wall,” he says mildly after examining it and noting the extras; that’s not the only thing she did, but he can’t quite remember where he’s seen the rest before.

It hits him again how easy it is to get distracted by shit like power and forget Teresa’s power is pretty much the least impressive thing about her. The same woman that worked out how to break a human sacrifice based in the brain would have no problem not only putting the lock for the wards around the daycare in the one place no one would think of—and why didn’t someone think of that? Alison sees her naked, for fuck’s sake!—but efficiently alter the original lock to add in the wards on the wall surrounding the entire town with a few more strokes of the knife and a band-aid. It’s not that it’s not possible to alter something already existing and activated, or even doing it while it’s still active without breaking it and starting over—he’s basically downgraded anything rated ‘impossible’ to ‘probably not going to happen, or at least not right now if we’re lucky—but that’s not power and sure as fuck not a lucky accident. That’s knowledge, that’s years of study and examination and observation, practice and experiments and thousands and thousands of failures until she got it right.

And on a guess, Ichabod or anything like this wasn’t something she was thinking of when she first started working on it, either; what he’s looking at probably was at least a year or two’s worth of research and work after she made the offering and exploring what she could do. Fucking around with the fundamentals is territory only an expert should explore, and you don’t live long enough to be an expert if you haven’t mastered the magical version of the scientific method. And really fucking significantly—to him—not a lot of experts actually ever bother with more than bells and whistles on the crazy-complicated shit even when it’s not related to human sacrifice.

Not that the ward lock is complicated; it’s simple, and that’s the thing. With something that simple, the only things to fuck around with are what you might consider the fundamental principles of magic and most people don’t do that (and survive). But Teresa—who knows better than anyone but maybe Cas not just the rules but why they exist—is doing what looks like a serious reinterpretation of a fairly important part of those principles. On a guess, the reason she even thought to try was ‘why not?’

(He lives with one of those kind of people, and honestly, he’s kind of pissed he didn’t recognize on sight another one. Or at least realized it when she worked out how to break a sacrificial circle located in the goddamn brain, Jesus. Cas didn’t notice, but no surprise there; he thinks powering Chitaqua’s wards with Lucifer’s Grace using two average sigils and weaponized linear time is something everyone does when they’re bored. Invisibility is for when you’re high.)

If she was the example the younger apprentices were following, the woman that would one day be instructing other witches once she made the offering, no fucking wonder Constanza was terrified of Teresa making the offer too early. She must have had nightmares about it for the almost-decade between the epidemic and Teresa’s twenty-first birthday.

Regular humans have the Enlightenment and Reformation and all that shit denoting sudden leaps in progress, spearheaded by a person (or a lot of people but one gets credit). It looks like that’s not the only kind, though, and Constanza must have known it. Not just witchcraft, but the practice of magic itself was on the verge of a great leap forward, the proof probably first seen in pre-adolescent Teresa’s homework and witnessed in the garden or workroom, because Tiny Teresa had personal power to burn and was probably there every afternoon after school trying to work out how to do something that she was told no one could possibly do, just to find out why not. Something literally no one had until that moment ever so much as questioned.

“Don’t tell—”

“I won’t,” he says, pulling the denim back down until the symbol is hidden again. It’s not that he doesn’t get the danger, but come the fuck on; the dawning Age of Magical Enlightenment (or Magical Reason, who knows?) in front of him probably has a better grasp of what she’s doing than he does or possibly anyone ever. Then he realizes something else. “No one can see it, can they?”

She makes a face. “Everyone that I don’t want to can, of course—Alison, Manuel, Sudha, Neer, Cas…” He makes the same face: of course. “At least at first. You, no. You shouldn’t even have thought to look, actually.”

He thinks of those extra, weirdly-familiar lines. “At first?”

A mischievous look crosses her face. “It was just something I’ve been playing with, just to see what happens. The wards at Chitaqua gave me the idea. Cas described how the closer you get, the more you don’t really want to—power does that by nature, great way of hiding something, but I started thinking about that, and it’s not like we don’t have the tools to do something similar manually. In fact, it occurred to me that dissonance might do the same thing,” she says eagerly, not noticing him fail dramatically at words. “Dissonance takes advantage of how people trust their senses, and I thought—” She stops as Dean starts to laugh, tipping her head to the side and trying to look severe but failing. “Okay, what?”

It takes him a minute (that definitely explains why Alison missed seeing that symbol), but he finally manages to get enough breath to talk. “You’re about two steps from invisibility—practical invisibility,” he says breathlessly and watches her face light up like a goddamn bonfire: example to prove them all, right here. All she’d needed was Cas to talk about the wards—just talk about them, for fuck’s sake—not to just make the first leap, but work on a goddamn prototype to test on her own body. And it worked.

Her biggest obstacle right now is literally lack of infinite knowledge, but hey, that’s something they can do something about. “After this is over, you and Cas get a magic day to yourselves,” he promises before she demands details; it’s not that he wouldn’t give ‘em, but he can’t imagine a way he won’t sound like a toddler explaining special relativity to a theoretical astrophysicist (except thanks to Cas’s ad hoc lectures, he probably could, which horrifies him on so many levels). Cute is the best he can hope for: useful, not even in theory. “Show him this, then make him tell you exactly how he powers Chitaqua’s wards while you’re at it. Trust me, it’s so much cooler when he tells it. And kind of terrifying,” he admits. “But once you get over that part, cool.”

“You are such an asshole,” she says without heat, but her expression is conflicted. “Dean, I get some things—maybe a lot of things—are going to remain need to know on both sides, maybe for a while. Maybe indefinitely. For everyone’s safety.”

That’s true, but it’s about time they start asking the question ‘how much?’ and for that matter ask it regularly, because that’s one answer that needs to change every time.

“I know,” he says, making a decision, and he doesn’t think Cas—knowing Teresa like they do, not just knowing who and what she is, but knowing her—will disagree. “This is different. Trust me, a magical day is optimistic—I’m guessing it’s gonna be three days before we’ll be able to pry you and Cas out of your workroom—you have one, right? Like Constanza’s?”

She smiles. “I do. When this is over, you’re going to get to see it and be impressed; even Mama didn’t get an entire town of engineers, programmers, architects, and interior designers to build it. The design documents alone… They knew more about what I wanted than I did.”

“I can’t wait.” Only belatedly, Dean realizes what she offered so casually. A witch’s workroom—any practitioner’s workroom—is a notch or ten above a hunter’s full arsenal and library; that shit is private. He doubts that many non-practitioners have ever seen anything more than the weird-ass room with herbs and shit hanging on the walls and some ominous dishes and a few glass containers of sketchy powders or leaves or bones or something.

Then again, not a lot of them were taught by a witch everything he needed to know for the next time that he dealt with one.

He didn’t remember Constanza’s before today—right now, actually—much less anything she or the rest of them taught him, but he’d kept something of it all this time. It’s pretty much the only explanation why he generally dismissed ninety percent of what he saw in any witch’s—or wannabe practitioner, no reason to insult real witches—home or creepy-ass shed or whatever they thought looked creepy enough to work. He knew what was important in one of those Carefully Weird Showroom For the Mundanes and Asshole Hunters (that being most of them, probably including him). It’s not that they didn’t use the stuff they kept there—they did—or never worked in there—they definitely did for simple stuff, otherwise no sense of ominous power soaked carefully into the walls—but that’s not where they did their real work. Which is also why he could tell a new practitioner or one that was painfully stupid; they actually thought the showroom was supposed to be real and really believed a collection of human skulls or hanging animal parts were required for display or something. New or stupid, though, your start value was always sketchy at best and that part, he never got wrong.

With the emerging memories, Dean also has a lot of—somewhat embarrassing in retrospect—context for why he met so few non-sketchy witches after Laredo, even when it came to shit like accidents, which could happen to anybody and by sheer law of probability, should have. The answer is pretty goddamn obvious; accidents by the non-sketchy set weren’t going to be in the same ballpark. On a guess, they probably tended to be a.) pretty unnoticeable by hunter standards (not dangerous, very localized, mostly weird), b.) too weird to believe even by hunter standards, though not by his (inconvenient or at worst alarming for a regular person, possibly toxic, but lethal never), or c.) most magic that could go really wrong was either thoroughly tested first or only performed—like anyone with common sense—in a properly built workroom. In any case, all problems or accidents would be taken care of well before anyone noticed, or if they did, before they could spread the word too far.

Come to think, he remembers Zena telling him about what happened to apprentices who screwed up. She’d been meeting with her study group in Constanza’s living room a month or so after they got rid of whatever the fuck that thing had been.

Three months: he remembers that now. He remembers why.

He’d been warned that he’d need at least a couple of weeks to recover no matter how he thought he felt; they’d either been trying to be kind or overestimated him like a lot (he’s not sure which one would be worse). After sleeping three days straight, the next week had seen him make the weirdly long journey to the kitchen on sheer will (he’d be fucked if anyone was bringing him a tray in bed, but Zena changed his mind on that pretty quickly. Also, that collapse in the kitchen had been (really) goddamn embarrassing. The second and third time had been even worse). At two weeks, he felt well enough to venture into more of the house than the bathroom—or at least, the parts where he wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. That plan failed when he was sighted on the stairs looking in no danger of collapse; if he was well enough to come out under his own power (and not pass out like an idiot in the kitchen again), he was well enough to dry—and eventually, wash—dishes, fold laundry, peel potatoes, help Constanza and Lita make tortillas, and tell them everything they wanted to know about northern hunters, which for some reason included telling them way more about himself than he’d ever told anyone, ever.

At three weeks, he’d graduated to playing with the kids outside in the mornings (and napping with them after lunch, though Constanza let him pretend he was babysitting), and since he was up and around, Zena invited him to join them one night and learn all about the glamorous life of an apprentice witch.

He remembers boggling at the idea of homework—and kind of still does—and listening as they tried to explain to a non-witch Really Advanced Witch Shit (Witch 101 it was not), sprinkled with complaints about what they could and couldn’t show him or were allowed to do outside the apprentice workroom or Tia Constanza’s supervision, when they’d sit for their next exam and move up, and the (generally) funny stories of those who had broken the rules, what they did, how everyone reacted, and the inevitable consequences.

To his own surprise, he had a really good time with them; only now does it occur to him that was the first time since high school that he spent any amount of time with anyone younger than Dad (excluding Sam), much less people in his general age range. Not only that, they were like him in ways that no one in his age group ever had been: some had been orphaned by the epidemic, had raised younger brothers and sisters or cared for elderly family members who had no one else at the age most kids were starting high school, and while they used the word ‘witch,’ what they were learning was how to be hunters, just ones who could talk to the ground and have it answer back and do cool shit. He does remember thinking how relaxing it was to just hang out without worrying about any itchy trigger fingers that only got itchier with the addition of half a bottle of whiskey-fueled paranoia, and the average hunter’s start value there really didn’t need the help.

(Christ, he may have actually mentioned that to Constanza later, fuck his life. Dad’s lessons on what not to talk about wouldn’t have covered what Dean would consider normal conversation with friendly people. He remembers what twenty-three year old him would have categorized as ‘normal conversation,’ and he can’t think of anything that wouldn’t have been—at minimum—alarming. Worse, they were hunters so he wouldn’t have even tried to filter for ‘civilian’ (though in retrospect, that wouldn’t have been better), and at that point, he was more comfortable with them than he’d ever been with Dad. He was babysitting, making dinner, and taking rotations in bathroom cleaning duty; he couldn’t lie to people he was living with and who were taking care of him, and God, they made it easy to want to be honest the way he’d never been able to risk with anyone else.

Despite what he must have told them (maybe the specific memories won’t come back, please God), Constanza still let him around the kids: hell, she let him be around other people and introduced him to the neighbors like a person. What the hell was she thinking? By their standards, he probably sounded like he was raised by hunter-shaped, probably drunk, wolves. Homeless drunk wolves, poorly domesticated and with variable levels trigger discipline depending on the difficulty of the job and the amount of post-mission whiskey, Jesus.)

He’s still trying to decide whether to share that with Teresa—she’d get the humor and horror—when all at once, the memory of that entire night slots into place.

“The price for screwing up is never so high that we can’t pay it in full,” Zena told him wryly after everyone left, getting them each a beer while he stacked up her books and tucked her papers into their folders before putting them out of the way, wondering if someone was doing the same thing for Sam at Stanford or if his dorm room now qualified a fire hazard. Settling back at the kitchen table, she braced a bare foot on the seat of his chair between his legs and grinned at him. Dark brown hair in a ponytail, wearing a UT Brownsville sweatshirt pulled over her tank top because Constanza’s preferred indoor temperature in a Laredo summer was ‘ice age’ and cut off denim shorts revealing miles of smooth, dark brown skin, she didn’t look any older than Sam the last time Dean saw him before he left for good. “If it were, it would be pointless to offer absolution at all and not just declare us unacceptable and kick us out of training, and that’s incredibly rare—well, the rarity is part of the reason Mariana turned into a disaster. But what shape the price takes is personal to who is paying it, so no two are ever alike; what seems like nothing to one person is everything to someone else.”

“Ouch,” he said, taking a drink. “Customized punishment; talk about paying for your sins.”

“The thing is, it’s not a punishment—I mean, it doesn’t have to be, and I don’t mean just if you’re a developing masochist or something,” she explained, playing with her bottle. “The price is just an expansion of lessons we already learned, or should have; the form that takes is what’s personal. I wouldn’t have believed it either, but my cousin—who trust me has no reason to lie—enjoyed paying hers. She said it was something she would never have been allowed to do so soon otherwise. However, that was also the only time she ever had to make payment; she never made another error.” She took a long drink, green and blue painted toenails wriggling against his thigh. Reaching down, he lightly circled her ankle with one hand, running a thumb absently over the knob. “The price is exactly the same whether your error was accidental or deliberate, no matter your reasons. Whether you see payment as a lot of fun—seriously, I’m not fucking with you—or punishment depends very much on why you made the error.”

Dean remembers both skepticism and reluctant belief. “You mean you can literally pick a punish—price that can be either awesome or shitty depending on the intentions of the person?”

“There are advantages to being a witch in service to the earth when you’re teaching future witches,” she answers wryly. “Rebellion is natural; we try to remove as many opportunities as possible for anything disastrous to happen, but removing all opportunity or punishing it uniformly would deny us the right to learn and grow. We’re supposed to make mistakes during our apprenticeship, when it’s safe and we can be corrected. Without the opportunity to make mistakes, without rebellion, it would also mean that, at least until the offering, there’d be no way to assure we developed our own sense of right and wrong, not just responded to punishment or reward. The offering, of course, would take care of that problem very quickly—and permanently—but even the deepest flaws can be corrected if those who carry them are discovered early and given the opportunity to learn and grow. Of the Thirteen now, five were considered risks and of those five, two were a mild surprise when they survived the offering and one…well, a surprise would understate the case. Glad, don’t get me wrong, but ‘shock’ might also be a word to use here.”

“Why?”

“The word ‘sociopath’ might be used without being dishonest,” she answered alarmingly, blowing out a breath. “Trust me, if you met Consuela, you’d get it.” Dean nodded; he’d met more than one hunter that made him want to sleep with gun in hand, one eye open, and with a wall at his back and three locks on the door.“Tia Constanza said that wasn’t itself a problem, though.”

“Wait, seriously?” He lowered his bottle. “How is that not a problem?”

“No one’s inner compass is true north,” she explains. “We’re all working constantly to keep in the northeast or northwest quadrants and hope for the best. Consuela’s compass—how did Esperanza put it?—didn’t work and couldn’t even be calibrated without Consuela doing it herself, manually and basically in the dark on faith by guess, if that makes sense. It wasn’t her fault—that’s how she was born—but that didn’t make her less dangerous. Recognizing the problem would be hard enough when you have no reference for what that even is—seriously, wouldn’t it sound like people were fucking with you if someone described basic empathy, much less how feelings work? I wouldn’t buy it—but then actually doing something about it…” Her expression changed to a sympathy that surprised him. “Let’s say her road was the hardest anyone could ever take. No one said it, but no one liked her odds for the offering, but it was her choice, and in any case, all the other options were worse. She was brilliant, very powerful, charming as fuck, manipulative as hell, and if she went wrong, the consequences could be catastrophic. So they did what we’re supposed to do; trained her, corrected her mistakes, and when she was ready to make the offering, left it to the earth to decide. And it did. She’s our best in the field now.” Zena took a drink, shaking her head. “She left for her latest assignment a few weeks ago, before Mariana was brought in. God I wish she’d been here.”

Dean frowned. “Why?”

“Unlike the rest of us, Consuela’s inner compass was set manually and now has the earth behind it to help,” Zena replies. “Honestly, for some things, I think hers may be better than ours could ever be; she has to think about it, every decision, and sure, some things may get easier, but she doesn’t take anything for granted. The earth can only do so much even with consent without changing who she is, and it won’t ever do that, so a lot of the time, it’s up to her to figure it out. She doesn’t do it by guess in the dark, though, not anymore. She turns on every goddamn light by hand and studies it from all angles and doesn’t stop until she knows. She may not always be right, but Constanza says she’s also never actually wrong.”

And wasn’t that food for thought.

“Anyway,” Zena continued, “she isn’t affected by feelings, personal or otherwise—not saying whether or not she has or understands feelings, but anything’s possible—so in some things, she’s always true north without a quiver. If she’d been here, Mariana would have been on trial the next morning, her power burned out as well as her ability to access it by dinner, and she would have been executed well before there was any risk she’d fix herself, or even realize she could: three days end to end if Consuela decided to sleep and I doubt it. She would have done it herself, too, no fucking around or feeling sad for the poor little girl whose parents died during the epidemic and didn’t know better.” Zena’s mouth twisted. “She knew what she was doing, come on; she meant to kill everyone here. The only thing she didn’t mean to do was get herself killed doing it.”

Zena turned in her chair, dropping her feet to the floor, expression serious. “Remember this if nothing else, Dean—I’ll ask Tia Constanza to make sure you don’t forget, somehow—when it comes to people with inborn power, there are no guarantees as long as they’re still alive. You can block them, drain them, burn them out, and even burn out their connection to their power, but those are all still temporary. Blocks can be broken, power can be renewed from its source, and the connection to that source can and will heal, given time; their own power will heal it for them, assuming they can’t find someone else to do it before that.”

Dean froze, bottle forgotten in his hand. “You’re kidding.”

“It gets worse,” she says soberly. “If they manage to unblock themselves or heal from a burnout—and they will, it’s just a matter of time—it’ll be harder, much harder, to do either one to them again. It’s not like cutting off a leg; inborn power, however it works, wherever it is, or if it’s anywhere, has—not sentience or sapience, I don’t think, but something. For whatever value of that something, though, it knows who it belongs to and that it should be with them. It will work actively to get back to them when separated and make damn sure whatever caused the separation won’t work again. A witch who gets unblocked—by someone else or who manages to do it themself—can kill everyone around them by accident from the overflow, and I don’t think it’s actually an accident. At least, I don’t think the witch had anything to do with it, whether they’d be okay with it or not.” She suddenly flushed, laughing uncertainly. “I know it sounds crazy—even using ‘hanging out with witches and sleeping with an apprentice’ as your standard—but our history is very long and very thorough and that is our best guess on the ‘why’; that no one with inborn power can ever lose it for good is fact, with no exceptions.”

Yeah, definitely something he needed to remember. “Not even the earth can take it away?”

“When it comes to inborn power, no,” she said, relaxing, probably because he didn’t try and argue (talk out his ass about shit he knew nothing about). “If I were guessing—and I totally am—she doesn’t have the authority to do it. We’re ashes and dust—made of her body—and genetics play a part in who is born with power and the ability to use it, sure, but that’s just the container; the power itself is a force of Creation. Likely it’s well above her paygrade to deal with that shit, to be honest. You really can’t blame her. She has plenty to deal with when it comes to all things earth, trust me.”

“So you’re saying only God could do it?” he asked, amused.

Zena thought about it for a minute. “Well, we’re talking Creation,” she answered finally. “So yeah, definitely God. Maybe some of the gods with authority over Creation—hint, most don’t have nearly as much authority as they would have you believe—but even then, good luck finding one who one, isn’t a terrible idea on concept to even consider talking to, two, would care, and three, would be objective enough to make a judgement, or at least not have any reason to want to keep whoever intact and use them for greater glory, worshippers, who knows—gods, man, what can you do?”

He laughed (he really did). “So you’re saying, bad options mean no options.”

“Perish the thought, gringo; you just gotta use your imagination.” Finishing her bottle, she got up and shoved his chair back, straddling his lap. Grinning, Dean took a final swallow from his and set it out of the way. “If I were shopping for help, I’d start with someone with a natural claim to Creation’s obedience, and I mean written into natural law from the start that even the earth wouldn’t be able to argue against. Though better if it’s someone she doesn’t even want to challenge: that means they may not be the type to kill you immediately upon summoning for blasphemy, presumption, or the sheer fuck of it. Even better, someone considered a neutral even to the gods: translation, someone they generally won’t fuck with for love, money, or worship. My choice?” Draping her arms over his shoulders, she pretended to think about it. “An angel.”

He laughed (again, Dean thinks in distant horror. That poor naïve fuck, he had no idea), and got the edge of her nails on the back of his neck for it. “You’re fucking with me.”

“Asshole.” Reaching up, she pulled off the ponytail holder, dark hair spilling around them like a living curtain. “Me, if I was gonna start there, I’d shoot for the moon,” she murmured, and Dean’s ability to talk in any language suffered an immediate breakdown. “Not just any angel. If I were summoning, I’d get the balance and the karma.”

Dean paused to blink. “Uh—the what?”

“That’s our best translation to date of what to call them. They’re the one who determined the balance of all Creation and interpreted natural law at the dawn of Time.” She grinned at his incredulous expression, leaning in for a kiss. “If they even existed, I should say,” she added breathlessly, pulling off her sweatshirt. “If they did, though, hell yes, I’d summon them.”

It took him a minute watching that; the camisole was kind of thin and—this being summer in Laredo and you know, hot—not a damn thing underneath. “Uh. Why—” Then he gets it. “Oh God. You mean the guy’s a natural law lawyer?”

“More arbitrator, but yeah, pretty much,” she agreed. “I’m a witch and a lawyer; you bet your ass I would want to talk to the universe’s first lawyer who argued cases before Creation itself and won. I don’t know a single lawyer who wouldn’t sell their souls for that. I mean, those that haven’t sold them already for six figure salaries and yachts.” Still grinning, she kissed him, fingers catching the hem of his shirt, and somehow—no fucking idea how—he realized where this was going, which was pretty goddamn obvious, sure, but Zena. “So, how about you take off—”

“Not here!” he managed, sounding horribly like Sam at age eleven when he ran across the Playboy channel at one of the (very few) motels with cable, much less anything above basic. “Constanza catches us again…” A week of dishes if he was lucky; otherwise, laundry duty, and he swore everyone changed three times a fucking day when his turn came up. Sliding an arm around her waist, he stood up, other hand balancing her beneath her ass.

With a laugh, she wrapped her legs around his waist, and Zena had a lot of leg to work with. “Think you can make it up the stairs without dropping me?” she asked sweetly. “What a man.”

“You bet your ass,” he told her sincerely, turning toward the stairs. “Only way I’ll drop you is on purpose.”

“Just try it, baby,” she said encouragingly, leaning close to murmur in his ear, “Hurry.”

“Dean?”

“Zena,” he says, startled; a decade and change, but it’s as new and bright as an insect preserved in amber. Like it just happened.

José had been restoring a sixty-seven Camaro—Dean spent hours in his garage, the guy was working on an automotive engineering degree, so he paid attention. Susana was attending a culinary school and interning at a variety of restaurants and brought leftovers and experiments to the study group: they ate squid and goat cheese canapes (that was when he learned those existed and what they were) and baked cranberry brie on bread with twelve grains and a thousand ingredients that somehow tasted amazing anyway and creamed bacon and spinach fancy-name-for-soup, proving for all time bacon was the perfect goddamn food. Tania was a vegan environmental activist, but she seriously loved that bread and it was a fight to get it, every time. Fransciso was a six foot three inch ballet dancer with the local troupe, possessed not one fucking bone in his body as far as Dean could tell, and could out-eat Dean (but not, as it turned out, outdrink). Diana was the oldest of them, whose parents had died in the epidemic fourteen years before; though barely seventeen at the time, with Tia Constanza’s and the rest of the family’s help, she fought for and was finally awarded custody of her little brother and two little sisters. She’d just come back after seeing the brother, the youngest, start college; of the two girls, one was a senior majoring in pre-med on track to graduate top of her class a year early (Jesus), and the other was starting her first year of graduate school in the same discipline as Diana.

He forgot them; it seems impossible. “Her—uh, study group. I hung out with them a few times.”

Teresa raises an eyebrow, and he wonders frantically if the earth told her something about that last part with Zena—he didn’t quite get to the definitely not fade to black part but that was a good night—before he remembers in relief that no one can read his mind, even the earth. He suddenly wonders if Teresa is psychic, separate from the earth. José was; he could pick up strong feelings and it annoyed the hell out of him. As José put it, it was an uncomfortable ability to have on concept, but his only randomly bothered to work so you never really got used to having it, much less actually actively using it (though Dean’s pretty sure his reaction to being introduced to that Camaro was what got him the invite to help, but then again, José’s first meeting with the Impala was what got Dean that garage invite in the first place). Diana had some amount of clairvoyance, but luckily, according to her, it was short term and pretty weak. Constanza told him that psychic abilities other than those that came with the offering tended to either be latent—usually showing up after the offering—or random, unreliable, and varied between ‘mildly inconvenient’ and ‘this is bullshit, I don’t need to know this or care.’

Then he realizes there’s a question he should have asked before now. Not knowing won’t change the answer, though. “Uh—Zena. Did she…”

“She made the offering two and a half years after you met,” Teresa says with a smile, and Dean breathes out, startled by the intensity of his relief. “Literally on her thirtieth birthday: six-oh-eight AM.” He chuckles: of course she did. “When I began hunting full time on the migrant circuit, she took my place in the Thirteen and yes, as of the last time I was in Laredo, she still worked at Legal Aid making many very expensive lawyers feel very, very inadequate.” On a guess, the number of (American) employers abusing their off the books, undocumented employees has decreased significantly in a rough fifty mile radius and fuck knows what she’s doing when it comes to ICE’s shitty raiding habit, but he assumes they really, really hate it. Was doing, he corrects himself, amusement vanishing; Texas was the latest to be zoned. The Valley is on the other side of the state from Houston, but nuclear fallout…how far does that spread? Why doesn’t he know that? “There are fifteen holding the border as of now—literally,” she adds, holding Dean’s eyes. “Mama finally got them to agree to start expanding the number. They were way too attached to that mystical number thirteen despite the fact it wasn’t actually mystical.”

He swallows. “You can still sense them?”

“No, the earth here isn’t the earth there; it’s only singular when it’s something that concerns or threatens the earth or Creation in toto, not just individual parts.” Seeing his expression, she nods understandingly. “No, I don’t get it either and when I asked for clarification, the answer’s resulting headache assured I’d never try again.” She wrinkles her nose fastidiously. “When I asked if she could tell me anything—and believe it or not, it took me a lot longer to ask about them than it took you to ask about Zena—the answer was both baffling and pretty thorough. Short version: the border holds, the Fifteen—that’s when I found out about the two additions—are strong, all is well, now could I turn my attention to important things, meaning here.” Dean can’t quite stop the laugh—mostly relief—and Teresa joins him. “Individually, she can’t tell me anything—here, she’s never even met them—but at least some part of my family is still alive and protecting the border, and I’m pretty sure Mama and Zena are among them.”

Constanza and Zena aren’t exactly the helpless type. “Did José ever get the Camaro running?”

Her grin is different now. “Yes, and there’s a story; ask Manuel, he was there. I would try, but I didn’t understand any of it. There was a carburetor—something—involved, though. That was the funny part, apparently.”

God, he has to hear that. “Give Joe a list of everyone you want to check on,” he says impulsively, wondering why the hell he hadn’t offered before. For fuck’s sake, this is one of the few things they can do for people other than monster-hunting. “Check with everyone in Ichabod,” he adds, and her eyes widen. “Uh, start with permanent residents, though.”

“That’s—generous,” she starts carefully. “But when we asked, they said, even if they could do it—”

“They can, it’s not that hard if you can find it out via computer, and we can get it for half of whatever they told you it might cost and pay most of that with shitty military surplus,” he tells her, and her mouth falls open. “We pay for Joe to get semi-restricted, supervised computer access for an hour or two—I think,” he adds uncertainly, because actually, that’s not exactly what Joe said, he just nodded at Dean’s interpretation. He may need to follow up on that, come to think—well, maybe Cas can and tell him about it. “Joe was a network administrator, and I think this might explain that despite the fact one of our regular budget items is really expensive whiskey, I’ve never actually gotten any.”

She snickers. “Don’t tell me Joe—of all people—was embezzling?”

“He hid it in plain sight,” Dean tells her. “To notice, I’d have to have actually read the reports he turned in detailing expenses and also care.” She starts to laugh. “So Joe’s probably getting the border personnel drunk and hacking their network right in front of him, then giving them the shittiest rifles that the lowest bidder could provide the military in return. Yeah, we can definitely afford it.”

“Thank you,” she says sincerely, and he watches her fingers sliding through the scrub grass, swirling the dirt like someone else would water in a pond, it so ripples out in tiny, impossible circles. Every so often, it seems to climb up her fingers before sliding back down again in what Dean can’t help but think of as affection.

Seeing him watching, she shrugs. “The earth can be a little possessive. The border—not to mention most of the southwest, Mexico, and Central America—has had witches of some tradition for centuries to claim it, to serve it, care for it, listen to it, even if we were just passing through; she hasn’t, not in a long time. Thinking about it, I can see why she’d be a little wary when the subject came up.”

“So she’s happy you’re here,” Dean blurts out, though yeah, that part’s obvious. “I mean—happy you’re here, or…” He can’t think of a way to ask that doesn’t sound insulting or weird. You’d think having offered to it, he’d have a little more to work with, but either the memories are still pending or he was really, really bad at it. He has a bad feeling it’s probably the latter.

“I know what you mean, and yes, it’s personal, not just ‘acolyte showing up yay’,” Teresa says. “She’s different here, and I don’t think it’s because she was asleep so long.”

“How?”

“In Laredo, the earth is a constant presence in our lives, but it’s been awake for generations, so we can always feel it in the background no matter where we are on the border. There were a lot of us, though, and a lot of witches pledged to it, so it was personal—it knew us—but not personal. Here, she’s not just a presence; she’s here. I mean actively here, and not because she needs something or has questions. She wants my attention, of course, but she’s fine with just—I guess ‘hanging around’ is the best interpretation.” Teresa laughs self-consciously, but Dean doesn’t miss how she watches him or how she relaxes when he just nods. “I told you that we’re strict traditionalists; when we want to talk to the earth, or when it wants to talk to us—unless it’s urgent or something with our immediate duties—we draw a formal circle and offer blood. Her—not so much. The first time I drew a formal circle to talk—after the one I did to introduce myself and make my claim—she was baffled. When I explained, she thought it was ridiculous.”

Teresa laughs, shaking her head. “She didn’t see the point of—ritual for ritual’s sake, basically,” she continues, amusement in her voice. “Unless it was a formal petition or something invoking natural law, of course; that meant invoking power she couldn’t control, and of course I should be protected, that’s common sense. But when it’s just me and I want to talk, I’m just supposed to talk; she’d be listening and hear whatever I said. I meditate if I need to discuss something complicated—or she does and needs my full attention so I can understand—but that’s as formal as it gets. For value of casual chat, though, she’s nailed that in realtime.”

Dean tries, he really does, but— “The earth is—chatty? Seriously?”

“Yes, I should have mentioned that was also a surprise,” Teresa admits. “To be fair, in Laredo, I wasn’t a senior witch or anything special; I know I made it sound very dramatic, but I wasn’t any more important than any of the other apprentices or witches. The only reason I was one of the Thirteen was because there was literally no one else at the time, and by the time I started on the migrant circuit, I was very replaceable. So maybe the earth’s chatty on the border, just with the older witches. Esperanza is the eldest and most senior now; I really wish I could ask her.”

His imagination—which has been going above and beyond when it comes to shit like Hell recently—fails on concept when it comes to anyone or anything being chatty with Esperanza. She’s the kind that you politely as fuck answer when she asks a question and try to avoid her notice otherwise. She also preferred essays to short answers, which converted to time would be an hour and a half at bare minimum and no guarantee you’d be allowed to sit. It wasn’t that she was mean or anything; it was that she was one hundred and one with more confirmed kills in the last month than he had had in a year. In a one on one, he genuinely doubted he could beat her, no magic required. Younger, stronger, and faster wouldn’t mean shit to her; everything she would have come up against her entire life would have been the last two as a given and with power attached, and sometimes, she’d be outclassed there, too. She’d know every possible way to deal with all of those and even more she’d made up herself, and at that point, a tactical evaluation of those around her was probably reflex (it’s not something you can miss feeling no matter how old they are or frail they pretend to look). He’d be down before he even realized she was doing anything. Talk about a living, breathing example of what Cas meant about training his students to understand that speed and strength were only tools that could be countered. “Uh—”

“Yeah, not surprised you remember her again already. She’s hard to forget, even with the earth’s help,” Teresa tells him wryly, and yeah. “I don’t buy it either. Tia Esperanza, not chatty. Little terrifying, though.”

“Thank God,” Dean says in relief. “I thought it was just me because I was a gringo hunter and also not a witch.”

“No, she makes everyone feel inadequate and like you should be better armed and watching her very closely for sudden movements,” Teresa assures him. “To be fair, she’s hunted the border since before she made the offering; her default setting is ‘pre-combat.’ Though honestly,” she adds, blowing out an annoyed breath, “she could probably turn that shit off, but I guess it’s way more fun to make everyone twitchy.” She makes a face. “Anyway, chatty. Usually the earth’s quiet when I’m busy or talking to someone, but some people, she’s less discreet if we’re talking about something she finds interesting. With Neer and Sudha and Manuel—or Alison, Dina, Mercedes, and even Tony—it can feel like she’s working on how to join the conversation through me. It’s a work in progress.”

“Okay, I get everyone but Tony,” Dean says, thinking, and then realizing how that sounded, he quickly corrects himself. “Not that he’s not cool, but your brother, your girlfriend, the agricultural experts, and your students, that makes sense. Job related and personal life.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” she agrees, mouth quirking, and he remembers, right, her active interest in someone not her acolyte is also pretty new. “When Tony found out what I am—that was back when he was our very cranky surprise mayor—he would ask after her, how she was doing, if there was anything she needed Ichabod could help with. And you know Tony—he was being polite, yeah, but he also genuinely meant it. That surprised her—which was nice, not being the only one feeling that all the time—and since then, he always has her attention. He talks to her when he has shifts in the fields, too—says it’s only polite—and while she doesn’t always understand him, she really enjoys it. If he asks her anything, she always tries to get him an answer, including getting clarification if she doesn’t understand the question.” Her mouth curves into a maliciously pleased smile. “And when his ass needs to get back inside, drink some water, and rest, she informs me. We take turns, but Alison has the best luck. She whines, it’s hilarious.”

Dean grins, surprised by his own interest. “What else? Is different, I mean.”

“The earth is curious, that’s a given, but here, she’s curious about everything, even things that have no relation to her,” Teresa continues. “If she doesn’t understand, she wants context so she can—and let me tell you, that’s an adventure in itself—and if that fails…she doesn’t give up, not really, and that was a surprise. She just waits, and when it comes up, she tries again; about half the time, she gets it on the second or third try, but Dean, that’s just the start—once, it took her eleven separate attempts before she got it, and we have some in progress working on their twentieth attempt with no sign she’s going to stop until it clicks. And people—I thought in Laredo it paid attention, but if she were human, she’d be the most determined stalker ever. But in a good way,” she explains. “She knows everyone—individually, I mean—whether or not they have the potential to be hers. Or more—she consideres everyone here hers, just not everyone meant for direct service, something like that. Though that part is best guess, I’m not sure she even knows what to call it.”

She pauses for a moment, thinking. “I thought I might be imagining it—it’s easy to slip into thinking of the earth here as just another person when she’s really, really not—but I’m starting to think the problem is our definition of ‘person’ is far too narrow. She contacted you during that Croat attack; in itself, that’s odd above and beyond. She knows the rules of combat; she’s very careful when I’m working or fighting about dividing my attention and never has. Which isn’t exactly hard; we’re bound, my attention on something means hers is as well.”

Dean nods, but actually, he does have a question. “About that. I’ve been in Ichabod several times, and we’ve talked about Laredo at least. The earth laughed because Cas wanted to farm! I mean, it didn’t seem to care about me then. It really didn’t notice me until I was outside Ichabod?”

Teresa is quiet for a long time, and glancing down, he sees her fingers have paused in the swirling of the bare dirt. “In return for what you did for us, for the promise you made—and for what you sacrificed to keep that promise, and don’t ever think we didn’t understand losing the memories was a sacrifice, a big one—the earth made you a promise, too; to let you go, so you could live your life as you would have had you never come to Laredo,” she answers slowly. “As Cas told you, the earth’s standards are very high when it comes to consent; we belong to it, and it protects us, even from our own ignorance or recklessness if it can. The earth—singular, in toto—released you from your promise five months ago, but that didn’t matter if you didn’t release it from its promise. If I’d introduced you in a formal circle, she might have told me it released you and wanted to acknowledge you, but that’s probably the only way I can think of it happening without compromising consent. In a sense, she may have felt that she couldn’t notice you, not under the terms of the promise, unless you did it first. That’s part of the reason I was debating what to tell you and how much; we made you a promise, too, and I didn’t want to risk breaking it, even by accident. It’s far too easy,” she adds ruefully, “for what we want to interfere with objective judgment, and we try to match the standard set by the earth in all things.”

Dean blinks at the idea she wanted to tell him enough that she couldn’t be objective; that apprentice bond thing must have been screwing with her or something.

“I can’t say she broke the earth’s promise, even technically; she has the natural right to simple contact with anyone. Hearing her isn’t guaranteed, of course—you need to know how, either an inborn sense or by being taught—but that’s irrelevant. Honestly, I get the sense it was the result of surprise; permanent wards drawn on a continuous surface are much stronger, especially when active. She was watching the battle closely with me, and you were one of the very few living humans out there. When you hit the ward line while it was already fully active—well, I’m not sure how she could avoid recognizing you; it probably was the equivalent of bumping into her. Her timing—I’m not saying the best time to say hi is during battle, but you weren’t actively occupied with saving lives, fighting to protect your own, or running quickly away from an army of Croat death.”

That’s true. “Okay, that makes sense. And tonight?”

“Anyone with any sensitivity would have felt something, but unless they knew what, they wouldn’t really notice or care. That it triggered a memory that isn’t in your linear memory anymore—the earth wouldn’t do that deliberately; that would be a breach of promise. Assuming it even could get through whatever Cas used in the binding between you, and it can’t. Saying ‘hi’ is one thing; you might hear it or not. Actually getting into your mind—no, breach of promise or not.”

He forgot about that. “So it was random, an accident. All of this.”

“Yes,” she answers, and Dean has a moment of—something? Disappointment? Why?—before she adds, “Except not really. At least, the result. She was being opportunistic tonight; she was watching for something she could use, she just didn’t expect the perfect storm of Sudha and Neer making the offering and you picking up enough to trigger the memory of your own offering. If you’d told Cas after the Croat battle what happened, he would have recognized what you experienced and spoken to me, and she would be able to explain that she would like you to release her from her promise.” Startled, he sees Teresa’s distant gaze. “Tonight—it was luck, but she’s taking advantage of it. That Cas was affected—that upset her very much. Which tells me that if she’d deliberately triggered that memory, she would have stopped it the moment she sensed Cas reacting to it.”

That makes sense; pissing off an angel—mortal or not—probably isn’t ever a good idea. “So you said she considers everyone in Ichabod hers?” he asks, deciding on a change of subject. “How’s she about everything going on now?”

Thankfully, Teresa goes with it. “If we were must-see TV, the big party was the season opener and we’re living the entire damn season now. With everything happening, at this point, it’s binge territory.”

“Can’t blame her,” Dean admits, not even pretending he should care about whether this should qualify as weird; he literally has no idea. The earth finds all this some fucking good drama; it’s not like she’s wrong. “Is she—worried? About what’s happening? I mean, would she understand what that even is?”

Teresa thinks about it carefully. “Yes and no, but not as it applies to abstract potentials,” she says finally. “Concrete possibilities, yes, and for that matter, concrete possibilities that she’s experienced or could experience, and generally in an immediate timeframe—a season at most. Like when I asked about Laredo, where she knows I came from and made my offering: she worried that my inquiry meant I wanted to go back, or that I’d feel I have to because the earth there took my offering.” She shakes her head and starts to smile, eyes distant for a moment. “We cleared that up pretty thoroughly, but I certainly don’t mind reminding her, anytime she wants.”

That love is part of Teresa’s bond with the earth was a given, but somehow, he didn’t expect it to be like this; it’s not just part and parcel of her service, but—well, personal.

Abruptly, her smile fades, replaced with worry. “She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—express an opinion on Sudha and Neer’s progress, but anticipation—that, she definitely felt. I would have said before that the earth doesn’t interfere with when someone chooses to make the offering, but now I wonder—in Laredo, the earth really didn’t need to give an opinion; we had an entire tradition built to assure no one went out until they were ready. Here, it’s only me and my judgment, and honestly, my judgment shouldn’t be in play at all when it comes to when to make the offering, any more than my teachers in Laredo decided when any of us would. The offering is personal; whether I think someone is ready has nothing to do with if they actually are; I can give my opinion, but that’s all it is, and should only be a factor in their decision, not the reason they make it. That’s why we train so much to do it: so that each of us can make that decision with full information on what we’re doing and why.”

“You think she—called them?” Dean asks, though he’s pretty sure that’s where this is going. “Or something?”

“I do,” Teresa says bleakly, and oh no, he can see where this is going. “If they were ready and were just waiting for me, she might have had to. Because I—”

“She noticed you were stressing about them and decided you needed one less thing to worry about?” Dean tries, biting back his grin at her expression. “Look, I know nothing about this but from what you told me—and assume I understood a tenth of that—I seriously doubt the earth was thinking anything but that you did your job and what was left was up to her—and them.” Then, at her faint frown, dark eyes distant, “The earth have any thoughts to share?”

“No,” she answers, still looking into nothing. “Very non-chatty. And super obvious about being non-chatty.” Her eyes clear and she sighs. “I’m overthinking it.”

“You did your job teaching them,” he says. “The earth must think you nailed it. Can’t see her calling them unless you had.”

“I don’t know what’s worse,” she says in annoyance. “Knowing that I was being ridiculous and still not able to stop myself, or feeling better now after listening to you tell me the blindingly obvious after telling me you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You gotta hear Cas one day,” he tells her. “He can convince you he knows exactly what he’s talking about and that he’s right when you not only know he doesn’t know shit, he just told you he doesn’t know shit. Though the last part he only does when he really wants to fuck with your head.”

“He thinks it’s funny,” she says, one hundred percent correct on all points, but then, she knows him. “Well, angel: talk about a voice of authority. He can still do that?”

“Oh yeah,” Dean confirms. “But somehow, mortality made him a lot better at it, and somewhere along the line, he worked out how much fun it could be to use it.”

“Oh God,” she says in a different voice, meeting Dean’s eyes. “No wonder she wants to talk to him so much. Infinite being living in his own mortal flesh, not just a loaner; the earth doesn’t like fakers,” she adds distractedly, and Dean would laugh, but hey, she’s right about that shit. “She probably thinks he can bridge what she doesn’t understand about me and wants to know, and did I mention she’s curious about everything? She wants tips.”

They stare at each other for a moment of shared horror of the earth learning more about the mortal condition from Cas. “Maybe he—can’t do that for her,” Dean tries with literally no hope of that being true.

“She’s already learning something from him; she watches him constantly when he’s here,” Teresa says calmly, like you do when all hope is not just lost, but murdered in front of you while you begged for its life. “Though what…I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.”

She’s not nearly worried enough, which means she hasn’t considered what will happen once Cas figures out why the earth wants to talk to him. He won’t just answer her questions, every goddamn one; he’ll tell her new questions she should ask and answer them, too. He’ll teach her about sarcasm, fuck their lives “Sorry,” he says, which is pretty much the best he can do here.

The back door opening interrupts them. Teresa twists around in transparent relief and Dean doesn’t even pretend he doesn’t feel the same way. “Almost dawn,” Alison says, looking at them warily. “You have a meeting with Wendy and the others in about thirty minutes. Food and coffee, at the same time even.”

“We’ll be right in,” Teresa agrees brightly, and Alison’s wariness doubles before she goes back in.

“Wendy figured out the instructions in the toner?” Dean asks, standing up and automatically extending a hand to help Teresa to her feet.

“She thinks so,” she answers, dusting off her jeans. “Whoever did it made a hell of a mess with the instructions, so it took time to get them in their original form in full. Last night, Wendy was trying to reproduce it to see if she was right; we’re checking her results when she gets here. I’ll be calling a meeting this morning as soon as we’ve confirmed, but honestly, I don’t think she can be wrong. We’re just barely qualified to even validate her work; at her level, she can’t make mistakes on something that—as far as her specialty goes—is pretty basic. Infusions have very, very little margin of error when you’re anything less than a full master, especially at the lower levels; if it works, there are very few variations on the steps to get there and she knows every one of them. She probably could guess what they did before she even finished examining it, but you don’t get to her level without checking every possibility one at a time for extras. When it comes to amateurs,” she adds in disgust, “they never run out of new and surprising ways to fuck up, and generally in ways that take them a significant amount of time and effort to pull off.”

Dean takes a second to parse that. “They take easy shit and not only get it wrong, but make it harder while still being wrong?” She nods in genuine despair. “The more you know. Can’t wait to hear what Wendy found.” Following her to the door, he realizes he should probably mention the—thing. “Look, about the apprentice thing—”

“You don’t have to answer now,” she says, grinning at him as she reaches the first step. “Take some time.”

“I’ll tell you before we go home,” he says, not saying ‘if we survive’ because Cas is right; if you’re going to fight, there’s literally no reason to believe you’re going to lose.

Holding open the door, she looks back and nods. “Okay.”

---

They’re just leaving Alison’s street through the alley when Dean says, “The earth says—uh, sorry about the—thing. She showed me—uh, anyway, that was supposed to fix it.” He glances at Cas. “Did it? For you? And how? I forgot to ask.”

Cas gives him an amused glance. “While the Xanax hasn’t worn off yet to allow more testing, yes, it did. Why it worked… The earth’s grasp of contamination is probably better than my own; what she showed you was formed to take advantage of it so it would pass to me immediately.”

“Good,” he says, relieved, then—way too late—realizes something. “Teresa said the earth couldn’t read my mind. How did it—”

“She didn’t read your mind; she showed your mind something, which isn’t the same thing,” Cas says, and Dean squints at him significantly, because he’s not seeing the difference. “What she did wasn’t in your mind; she has no more access to your mind than Alison does. This—” He pauses briefly. “You might consider it the equivalent of the earth standing outside your house holding a TV for you to watch through a window.”

Dean thinks through the analogy (really good, actually). “How much did you have to dumb that down?”

“Technically, it’s not a lie,” Cas admits, and yeah, he figured. “The earth’s binding with you wasn’t broken, merely rendered inactive, and while her claim predates my own, mine takes precedence as is my right. I assure you, she cannot read your mind any more than she can read mine.” Dean’s preparing another question when Cas asks, “Is there something else you want to talk about or do you wish to avoid it altogether by asking for a technical explanation? You’ve never cared before, but if you truly desire it, I’m willing to indulge your curiosity. I must warn you, however, that I’ll need to acquire several reference texts for you—or reproduce them from memory, as I’m not sure they still exist—and also teach you the languages needed to read them. Two have never been successfully taught to a human, but there’s no reason not to try. I’ll need to assure Vera has an adequate grasp of neurology should surgical intervention be necessary while studying the intermediate grammatical rules governing the use of irregular verbs, especially those referring to events occurring partially out of time or involve spacetime in flux, but—”

“Oh God, shut up. I wasn’t—” He blows out a breath. “Teresa thinks I should—I mean, she offered—she asked me to consider becoming her apprentice.” He glances at Cas, who nods and says absolutely nothing whatsoever. “What do you think?”

“She’s a very competent instructor,” Cas answers. “If Sudha and Neeraja are any example—”

Should have seen that coming. “I mean,” he interrupts before Cas breaks down exactly what he likes about Teresa’s method, “what do you think of—you know, me doing it?”

Cas frowns. “It’s your decision, Dean. I’ll support whatever you choose.”

Reluctantly, he realizes that as the one with actual relationship experience (or Lisa did and tried to teach him), he’ll have to break this down. “It’s my decision,” he says clearly. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear your opinion. That’s why I asked.”

“Oh.” Cas considers for several moments, then nods firmly. “I don’t see how it would affect your duties in Chitaqua,” he starts, and belatedly, Dean realizes how he should have phrased that. “I assume Teresa will propose a realistic schedule, but you regularly visit Ichabod already, so you’ll simply add meeting with Teresa for further instruction to those visits. If you mean how the camp will react…” He pauses and Dean is really glad he didn’t stop him, because actually, yeah, that’s also a thing. “I don’t see any problems. Training at Chitaqua covered practitioners, of course, but I wasn’t specific other than how to identify those who are unethical and the variety of magic they may be exposed to as well as how to deal with the most common types used by those practicing the darker arts. It would certainly help confirm the practice of magic itself is neutral, and as we now have access to ethical practitioners through our allies, normalize their presence among us should we need their assistance. Which we most definitely will.”

Good to know. “Cool,” he says, because that’s genuinely helpful information to have and useful when he cares, but that’s not right now. “How would you feel about it, though? Not as my second,” he adds quickly. Cas frowns, and yeah, he was afraid of that. “We’re—you know. Partners. What I do affects you, just like what you do affects me. You get an opinion and the right to tell me about it. You’re kind of supposed to, actually.”

“Oh,” Cas says in a completely different voice. Just as they’re reaching the end of the alley, he says, “It would be strange.”

Coming from Cas, that’s—yeah, he needs more here. “Okay?”

“As an angel, Creation was my domain. It owed me obedience, and that includes the earth, of course,” he explains. “Even now, however, the earth seems to believe that nothing has changed—though it does find my mortality unsettlingly fascinating—and explanations haven’t seemed to clarify matters.”

“The earth knows the earth,” Dean agrees, adding warily, “Maybe it feels like it knows you better now, being mortal now and everything.”

“I received the same impression, which was even more unsettling,” he admits, mercifully unaware it might have some specific reasons to be interested in that, thank God. “You gave the earth your service, however temporarily, before we met; should you choose to renew it, there shouldn’t be any conflict. It would be interesting to observe you when you began to practice, however.”

He has no idea what that means but apparently he’s going to find out—might find out. If he does it. “Cool.” Then, “Conflict? What conflict?”

“It’s not as if the earth would attempt to challenge my claim to you or deny my right to precedence,” he continues casually enough that it takes way too long for the words to register as the nightmare fuel they are. “Having to meditate to successfully challenge it to single combat for such a presumption would be—well, needs must, no matter how boring it would be.”

Dean stops short to rewind with an option to panic. “What?”

“You needn’t worry,” Cas says reassuringly, stopping and turning to face him, like the fact this conversation exists isn’t the fucking opposite of reassuring forever. “I’m skilled in combat on all planes of existence. Even the corporeal, though yes, that did take some time. I’d win, of course.”

Truthfully, he hadn’t even gotten far enough to worry what happened if he lost—this is Cas, after all—due to being stuck at what would happen when he won. There’s a list, each item more horrifying than the last, starting with the personal ‘Teresa is gonna bury us alive literally’ but also the existential-except-really-fucking-literal ‘what happens if you kill the earth?’ as the question ‘can you?’ has just been answered. Of course. “Uh.”

“Though the question is moot; the earth can’t challenge an angel,” Cas finishes, and Dean catches the tiny uptick at the corner of his mouth just before the number of questions reaches three digits and the limits of Dean’s presumed claim to sanity (which is doing way better than he would have thought). “Nor can an angel challenge the earth. Natural law prevails, and even in this form, I doubt either of us feel any need to test that.”

Dean would be pretty pissed, but honestly, he’s way too fucking relieved. “Fuck you,” he says, not sounding anything but ‘utterly grateful I don’t have to think about this shit ever again.’

Then Cas’s expression turns wary and oh God, no. No. “There is something, however.”

Any other time he’d say he can’t even imagine what that is, but the last five billion years of his life—or five seconds, whatever—have proved he can imagine a fucking lot. “What?” he says in resignation, bracing himself.

“The only reason the earth still has any claim on you is because when I rescued you from Hell, and thus established my claim to your soul, the Host didn’t consider the earth’s prior claim important enough to order me to break it entirely.” Dean nods impatiently; good to know, but whatever, get to the part that’s gonna star in his next nightmare. “If you choose to do this now,” Cas says carefully, and oh God, this is gonna be bad, ‘dead earth and all the witches and the US government and Lucifer chasing them’ bad, “the earth cannot renew its claim to you without formally requesting my permission and receiving my full consent.”

Dean nods again, waiting for the epic horror to come (and getting a little tired of the suspense, come the fuck on).

“What she did tonight—and outside Ichabod’s walls during the attack—could technically be considered a violation of my rights if I chose to argue the point, but—” he makes a face, “—that seems rather petty. She was probably far too excited to find you again to fully consider all the technicalities attached to her actions, and truly, I can’t blame her for that.”

Dean waits, but—nothing. “Okay, fine, got it. Now what’s the something you’re worried about?” When Cas blinks at him, Dean grits his teeth. “It’s bad, I get it. Just say it.”

A long moment passes. “That’s all.”

Reviewing the last few minutes frantically, he tries to find something and—nothing. “What do you mean?” he demands, too worried he missed something to risk relief yet. “What was it? Use small words.”

Cas’s eyes narrow. “I would have to give formal permission to the earth to reactivate its claim to you,” he says, spacing each word. “As I have claimed your soul. Your answer to the earth requires my answer be given first.”

The part that will get to him later is that it takes him a while to understand why this basic fucking fact is supposed to be new or world-ending drama. “Yeah, I got that part,” he says, spacing each word (with malice afore-fucking-thought). “That’s it?”

For a long moment, Cas searches his face, starting to look uncertain. “I thought the reminder would upset you.”

“Upset me?” Dean echoes incredulously. “That would upset me? After trying to work out where you run and hide if you killed the earth? Or if there’d even be an earth. Would there?”

“Yes of course, it would just be—” Cas stops himself, thank God, because there are goddam novels in that ‘just’ that he doesn’t want to read and he can’t believe he made such a basic fucking mistake as ask. Then the corner of Cas’s mouth twitches. “Yes, that’s all. I apologize for alarming you over such a mundane detail. I’m also flattered that you genuinely seem to believe I can defeat the earth in single combat. I should be worried that your grasp on reality seems to have become rather poor, but in this case, I don’t care. Please continue as you will.”

“Whatever,” Dean says ungraciously (Cas would totally win, come on) and feels the cold brick of the alley wall against his back for only a second before he’s way too distracted by the feel of Cas’s mouth.

Way too soon, Cas eases back, though why, no idea. “Truly, I do apologize for any distress I may have caused you. I’ll make it up to you.”

“Now would be great,” Dean says encouragingly, and Cas seems to agree, but then he pulls back again. “More than that. Way more, come on.”

Cas laughs. “We should get back to headquarters.” Okay, yeah there’s that. With a final kiss, Cas steps back, but cool fingers slide through Dean’s, pulling him with him. “There are a few things we must do today.”

And all that, yeah. With a sigh, Dean nods.

“In regard to Teresa’s offer, it’s not a decision to be made lightly,” Cas says. “And it certainly should not be made today.”

“What do you think? And don’t say it’s my decision; I know that,” Dean says before Cas can say anything that leads them down more hypothetical paths of potential terror; it’s not like they don’t have a fucking fear geas already taking care of that, not to mention actual concrete reasons for terror actually in progress. “I just—I don’t know what I’m asking here. I don’t even know why Teresa asked or why it would want me. Not like it did before.”

Hearing the words out loud, though, may just be the answer. “Dean—”

“It’s been over ten years,” he says before he can stop himself. “So why now?” It’s stupid, he gets that, but… “I mean—to help Teresa, I get that part. If that’s the reason, then I should do it, right?”

“No, it’s not.” Something in Cas’s voice makes him look at him. “Permission denied, at least until I’m sure you haven’t lost your mind.”

“What?”

“Not that I need to,” he adds as Dean jerks his hand away. “The earth wouldn’t accept you under these circumstances.”

“Why? The only surprise is she would want me at all. Either of them!” Dean snaps, stepping back. “For fuck’s sake, Teresa—she doesn’t even know I’m—was a demon!”

“You were a demon after you were broken on the rack,” Cas says. “You left the Pit of Hell just as you entered it, as you were at the moment of your birth: your soul fully intact, human.”

“What I am now doesn’t change what I was,” he replies. “And I was in the Pit for longer than I’ve been alive on earth. Why would the earth want anything to do with me now if it wasn’t for Teresa?”

“You didn’t have a clear calling to serve it,” Cas answers, like it should be obvious. “Your calling as a hunter was enough to permit it, but you did not belong to it nor did you want to. That’s the only reason it could let you go at all; it certainly didn’t want to.”

Dean licks his lips. “You can’t know—back then, sure, you’d know, you knew all things. But now—you gotta see this is different. I’m different now. You can’t know.”

Cas looks at him for a long moment. “A human soul at birth is potential,” he says. “Potential unrealized, but potential for almost anything, anything at all. No one is born for or to do anything; that is and will always be a choice.”

“Prophets—”

“Do you realize how many on earth at any given time carry that potential for divine prophecy? You can’t; I do. At the moment I fell, fifteen million individuals. Any of them—quite literally—could become prophets should certain choices be made, certain events occur. At any given time, a very limited number of that total are actually fit to do so, and even fewer desire it, but that’s because they made themselves fit by the life they lived, the choices they made, and the opportunity to do even that is random chance.

“Only certain genetic lines carry the correct sequences to permit them to carry out divine will, much as only certain lines can act as vessel for an angel or avatar of a god, but that too is subject to random chance. Whether individuals born within those lines will carry the correct sequence, whether they will live long enough to experience those random events, to make those choices, all are subject to the vagaries of chaos. And that doesn’t even include random mutation in the general human population, which is occurring constantly. Even we were sometimes surprised, or insert equivalent when you know all things.”

Sure, he knew angels (by that he means ‘everyone not Cas’) lied but— “I was the only one—I mean, besides Dad—that could start the Apocalypse.”

“Yes, my Brethren—much like the gods—have a terrible habit of mistaking ‘interference’ with ‘divine will’,” Cas says, and something in his voice makes Dean wonder what gods he’s talking about. “Promise, lie, manipulate, threaten, blackmail, extort, even torture a person, a family, an entire genetic line, for centuries, eons, alter events and memories, force choices and assure there is only one answer, then call it predestination and claim there is nothing you can do to escape it. You must forgive me; perhaps mortality has encouraged a more cynical view of such doings. That natural law permits it—” Cas’s expression changes. “The protections enshrined in natural law for humanity were decided before you were fully sentient and barely adequate even then. It must have been assumed that more would be added as your development stabilized to maintain the balance.”

Despite everything else, Dean has to take a moment to snort. “Too late now.” Cas starts to answer, then frowns, shaking his head. “What does any of that have to do with me?”

“They planned you for eons, Dean; the very fabric of human development was warped to create you in this time, this place,” Cas says, which sounds a lot like confirmation of the Host no matter what Cas thinks he’s saying. “And truly, you must ask yourself, why?”

“Why what?”

“If your destiny were written with so indelible a pen,” he says deliberately, “why would the Host need to do anything but wait for you to fulfill your purpose? Why would you need them constantly telling you how inescapable your fate was and showing you terrible alternatives to it that could not possibly happen as predestination means only one path? You know this, Dean. You are the one who taught me.”

Right. He does, actually, know that.

“You can be anything,” Cas continues inexorably. “You were born human; in Hell, you became a demon; you were rescued and became human again. You’re human now. Your time in Hell as a demon—while to be deplored—has no relevance other than it is a part of you, and among the countless other parts that made you who you are now. You are, were, and will be what you make yourself. The earth would not ask for what it does not want; Teresa would not have considered offering this unless the earth indicated its agreement; even with its agreement, she wouldn’t have offered at all unless she desired it as well. Who you were when you were in Laredo it could not claim, nor did you want to be; the man you are now is the one that the earth could claim, and—I can only speculate, of course—has some reason to believe you aren’t opposed to her doing so.”

Dean searches his face. “What changed?”

Cas’s mouth quirks. “Those called to divine service—it’s a myth, that you’re born to it, will thee, nil thee; it’s a choice, and one made not once but every moment that you serve. Some seem to feel that call for as long as they can remember, but that’s not true of all or even most. Some feel it in adolescence, some in early adulthood, some when they’re near the end of their natural lives, and some at any time between. They don’t feel that call, they can’t, until they become the person that wants to serve. Even then, they may choose not to, for many reasons or none at all; that’s your right as a human.”

“So you’re saying that now I’m—that I’m feeling it now?” he demands. “I think I’d know if I felt it! Wouldn’t I?”

“There’s no way I could confirm or deny that, even if I could read your mind,” Cas concedes. “But I do have a question: why did you ask me how I’d feel if you did?”

“Because you’re my partner,” Dean answers. “If you weren’t okay with it, then I wasn’t going to do it.”

“If you truly didn’t want to do it, it wouldn’t have occurred to you to ask,” Cas says reasonably. “If you did ask, you would have asked questions with answers you already knew, answers that would support the decision you had already made. Assuming you wouldn’t have told Teresa no immediately, which noticeably, you did not do.”

Dean doesn’t answer; even if he wanted to argue, he can’t, because—yeah.

“Teresa’s tradition isn’t an easy one,” Cas muses. “It demands adherence to a very strict ethical standard with very little, if any, deviation. I understand why when you first met Constanza that her tradition appealed to you; you hold yourself to the same standard, though you do not tolerate even imagined deviation. Truly, it might be good for you to be exposed to those who permit—even encourage—mistakes when made in good faith. It might let you learn to accept the possibility of forgiving yourself for your own, or at very least, those you imagine you might possibly make at some point or could have made in the past but didn’t.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Bullshit. I don’t—” He stops at the incredulous expression on Cas’s face. “Where are you getting this from? I don’t do that.”

“You’re technically correct, in the sense that I was being extremely tactful while still avoiding an outright lie, the line between those being very nearly invisible,” Cas says flatly. “I completely excluded your propensity to judge yourself for mistakes made, might have been made, or could have been made, by entirely different people, at different times, under entirely different conditions, and each and every single variation of such that you can imagine, which from my experience is truly infinite in number or so close it might as well be.” Dean shuts his mouth, which isn’t admitting shit, it’s just—it’s really early, weird shit happened and it’s not even dawn yet and he needs more coffee. “We’ll discuss that another time—I’ll need a great deal of alcohol, I suspect. As I said, your decision can wait.”

Dean nods, glancing out at the street, fighting the urge to tell Cas that if Cas wanted to talk about it (or anything), he’s okay with that and Headquarters can wait. It won’t, though, and it’s not just the rest of the day waiting for them; there’s Joe.

Not thinking about it was great, but it can’t last forever; nothing does. He’s got to deal with what his fuck up means to Chitaqua, to his teams, the command structure, he’s got to tell Cas; it’s bullshit that he is even thinking about how he also lost the first person outside his own family, outside Cas, that was the closest thing he’d ever had to a real friend, the kind that sticks around for life. Like that fucking matters when the world is about to fucking end.

“Yeah,” he says, starting toward the mouth of the alley without deviation. “Let’s go.”

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Well! That's it for now.

I will never not feel silly saying this about supernatural fanfic but this genuinely means a lot to me and I'm forever grateful for the friends I made along the way. A huge thank you to every one of you that subscribed and shout out to those who stuck it to the end.

Special thanks of course to Seperis not only for writing this but for always letting us play around with DtA. I will always carry this story around in my heart and on my bookshelves, even if it updates tomorrow or if it never updates again.

And most importantly: Happy second anniversary to Them!