whit_merule | In His Image: Regroup (Reply)

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In which everyone relaxes a little at the end of the world.
Dean, Sam, Castiel, Gabriel, Bobby.

Sam could never have said afterwards how long that time lasted, between settling down with half a library of ancient manuscripts and Pestilence’s endgame. The days and the time in them seemed to stretch out slowly, warm and languid like taffy, hovering on the edge of the world.

He and Castiel went running together every morning – gently at first, then more vigorously as Castiel’s body strengthened and healed, as he learned how to listen to it and to how it moved and how the muscles spoke to the skin and back again. Interestingly, Castiel took to cooking really well, once he had a few recipes to follow, but just couldn’t get the hang of laundry.

---

Dean was taking a break at the end of the world to teach an archangel to drive a car.

Their lives were weird. This bit was probably in the good-weird column, though.

Gabriel was easy. It was no effort at all to tell how far to push and when to back off, when to deflect and attack from another angle. It was maybe the longest Dean had gone in ages without actually having an argument. Not that they didn’t yell at each other – Gabriel was still annoying, and he could sulk with the best of them, and he had the attention span of a little kid about almost everything, and got all waspish and short-tempered when he was tired or hungry or actually had to work at anything that he should have been able to snap up without a thought, and Dean sure wasn’t above deliberately goading him or putting his feet up on the couch when he knew Gabriel wanted to sit down – but that’s all it was. Just yelling. Nothing serious or world-shattering under it, just... working off steam. Over in five minutes. He was pretty sure Gabriel was as surprised by that as he was.

Sometimes, now and then, he’d catch a wary and kind of awed sort of sideways look, like Gabriel was waiting for the catch. It usually vanished as soon as it turned up, but Dean always knew it had been there because Gabriel was like a hyperactive toddler acting up afterwards, louder and funnier and more inappropriate, like he thought that was the only way he knew to get along with people.

Dean got used to him disappearing for two minutes then popping back into existence after spending three days in fourth-century Madrid, or whatever. A guy had to have some me-time now and then, after all, especially if he’s mostly used to operating solo, and this way it didn’t actually take up any real time. He got used to Gabriel crashing onto his bed and passing out for hours at the weirdest times, because he kept forgetting to sleep when he was poking about in the past, or maybe just didn’t want to get fleas off the bedding (Dean kept reminding him not to drink the water).

He also got used to Gabriel off-handedly tossing him random objects from the past that he thought Dean might like, or stashing them in the trunk for Sam or Bobby. The intricate little clockwork dragon from 17-something was, he had to admit, pretty cool. So was the nineteenth-century Romanian vampire-killing knife – apparently they’d had a lot of trouble with vampires around then, and this thing almost made Dean wish they weren’t close to extinct now so he could try it out. There was a fascinating set of tiny lapis lazuli figures in the shape of different animals, which were apparently meant to invoke various properties of some of the old Egyptian gods to protect against different kinds of sickness or bad luck (Gabriel doubted they worked, he just thought they were neat). There was a pawn from the fancy ivory chess set of some Danish king, and a letter from Alexander the Great to some guy called Hephaestion, which Gabriel said smugly would blow some historians’ conservative little minds. There was really amazing food from all over Europe and Asia and Africa and the last three millennia. There were a few more books, these ones rescued from a fire that had almost consumed an apparently important collection of manuscripts stored in a house called Ashburnham (and really, Dean could have told them that was a bad idea). There was a strange jade pendant that looked like a contorted leg which was meant to be good against banshees, or possibly the Chinese equivalent, and a fancy swishy cane he’d pinched from someone’s front hall in eighteenth-century Vienna because he thought it was fun.

Gabriel was kind of a magpie, actually.

And he cared about Sam.

That did take Dean by surprise, and he had watched him closely for the first couple of days whenever Sam rang, or (as happened more and more often) when Gabriel rang Sam. Dean had already known that Gabriel was a really shitty actor when it came to anything involving emotions, and there was no way he could have hidden the casual gentleness that threaded through every word he spoke into the receiver, or the shocked sort of warmth that flickered into his face every time Sam’s number popped up on his cell. Every time, like he never expected it to happen again.

So, yeah, Gabriel was on their side. Where it counted.

After a while, Dean stopped waiting for him to slip up, and just enjoyed showing him the ropes.

He was a terrible driver. Dean was completely and utterly unsurprised.

They cleaned up town after town, spending only one or two days in each, a sort of whirl of pointy, besigilled efficiency. Most of the situations followed the same pattern, which helped: four to ten demons working like sharks, just sort of an opportunistic mob rather than anything really organised, cutting the town off from the world outside and picking them off at their leisure.

In one town it wasn’t a pack but a pair of ancient daevas, the shadow demons he and Sam had run into back when they’d been hunting Meg and found Dad into the bargain. They fell to the blades just the same as regular demons, though, even if you couldn’t feel the metal bite into them. Gabriel had the advantage there, with his longer blade and his ability to see them even if they were hiding in the shadows around them, so Dean fell back into the light and just let him have at them. The sight of a former archangel, former pagan god, fencing in and out of shadows and laughing at them with blood streaking his face and hair, was actually kind of awesome. Not that he’d tell Gabriel that.

When Gabriel leaped in front of the daeva that had been about to eviscerate Dean and snarled in its face, like he was so done with having to remind it that he was older and far more terrifying than it was, then slashed it to shrieking pieces with bright steel, Dean was actually a bit surprised.

Though on reflection, he probably shouldn’t have been.

---

Gratiam animamque in unum angelum. Soul and grace contained within one angel.

Sam thought it was a metaphor at first, or gratia in the sense of a personal quality rather than real grace, or anima in the sense of animating spirit or life rather than soul. But the more he read of this woman’s encounter with an angel – an angel with both grace and soul – the more convinced he became that this unnamed angel existed, had lived on earth for at least a while, wasn’t lying to her. And if that were possible... well, it would explain a lot of things, actually.

Castiel didn’t believe it, though he was intrigued by the notion. Gabriel just refused to go there at all, and finally Sam had to give in and drop it.

“Look. Gabriel.” He changed tactics, went for another thing he had been wondering, even though it almost felt like the same question. “Why the no-name thing? I mean, you’ve stopped biting our heads off every time we use it, but you never call yourself anything, and Dean says you’re still making up a new name for every town you stop at.”

He could almost hear the lazy shrug over the phone, almost see Gabriel stretching himself like a cat, slow and deliberate and insouciant. “Gabriel and Loki don’t really fit anymore, do they?”

“I don’t know. I think they’re kind of what you make of them.”

“One’s an angel, one’s a god. I’m not, kiddo.”

“So pick your own.”

Gabriel made a rude noise and hung up on him.

---

“Okay, I’ll bite. Spill.”

“Hm?”

Gabriel pointed a spoon at him. “Either I’ve got the latest centrefold of Busty Asian Beauties stuck to my face, or you’ve been checking me out for twenty-plus minutes. Only you go all blushy and soulful when little bro calls so I’m pretty damn sure it ain’t the second, and your dick’s still in your pants which rules out the first, so, spill. What’s so fascinating about little old me?”

Blushy and soulful? Dean blinked, and grabbed for a brilliant and witty rejoinder.

“... I do not.”

Okay, so maybe he should look into the grab-bag before he grabbed.

Gabriel put his chin on his fist and actually fluttered his eyebrows, the douchebag. “Aw, humans. It’s so cute when they’re all in denial.”

“Screw you, Gabriel.”

“Nah, don’t wanna hurt the little sparrow’s chances. Once you go demigod you never go back.”

Dean cocked an eyebrow. “Pretty full of yourself for someone who’s probably got the staying power of a fourteen-year-old right now, aren’t you?”

“Oh tiger, don’t throw out challenges like that unless you’re drunk enough to follow through.” Gabriel’s eyes danced, all maddening brightness and warmth (which was, okay, a bit hot, but Dean so wasn’t going there, and besides, pretty much everyone in Dean’s life was hot, because Dean was awesome like that). “Sooo?”

Dean shrugged. “Just trying to work out which bits of all the flashy and shiny stuff are the trickster and which bits are the archangel and which bits are just... you know, you.”

Gabriel’s face froze over, then his eyebrows pulled together in a defensive little huddle. “What is it with you two and the questions? Look, I was an archangel and a trickster and now I’m neither, okay? There’s nothing left.”

Fine, touchy subject. Dean dropped it and went back to pinning demon omens on his map, looking for their next town. “Whatever. You still sound like Gabriel to me.”

Gabriel didn’t go back to his stupidly sugary cereal for almost ten minutes.

---

The long nights and long days started to merge into each other – a few hours of sleep here, someone shoving coffee into Sam’s hands there – a blur of meandering four-way conversations and the thoughts and handwriting of people who died long ago.

Nettle was mentioned a few more times, and there were hints of gold dust, crystallised honey, and a bowl made from the wood of some plant associated with the dark – maybe yew? – but may seemed to be a washout.

Castiel discovered that he liked hot chocolate, and walking around the house and yard barefoot, experimenting with the different textures under his soles. His quiet, indefatigable curiosity seemed to be pulling him past his discomfort with sensation and the more corporeal aspects of being human – Sam had walked into Bobby’s bedroom the other day to find Castiel fingering all the clothes hung up in the wardrobe, playing with the feel of the different fabrics. He’d tried chicken one night, cautiously liked it (though he’d seemed to have difficulty getting past the fact that he couldn’t feel the whole life of the bird that it had been), and the next day experimented with eight different ways of seasoning it. One of them involved ice cream (yeah, Sam didn’t even know). The day after that, in town for a supply run, he managed to sneak nine different kinds of chocolate into the basket, and proceeded to play around with those.

Sam tried to contact Sariel with Castiel’s modifications to the summoning ritual, but there was no answer. It wasn’t like it had been with Castiel, where he could feel the target there and just had to put in more mental muscle to drag him into range. It felt like there was nothing there at all.

---

Gabriel was... good company. Apart from how he could still be irritating. Now they weren’t trying to kill each other, the competitive back-and-forth was actually kind of fun, and Dean could afford to laugh at his easy, completely inappropriate sense of humour. And Dean was laughing. That felt... sort of weird. Almost like it should be a betrayal, though he wasn’t sure what he was meant to be betraying. It was just easier, without the tension of being around Castiel and Sam all the time, all the weird little undercurrents going on there. It sort of reminded him of that time with Castiel, when Sam and he had split up and he’d realised, like a slap to the face, just how much simpler things could actually be without Sam around. How much easier it was to have fun when you weren’t keeping an eye out for losing your family all the time.

He felt guilty about that for a couple of hours when he worked it out, until he noticed, when Sam rang, that he was actually looking forward to speaking to him more than he had in a couple of years.

And to Castiel, too. Which was... interesting.

---

Gabriel was staring at Dean like he was some really intriguing new candy. It was sort of disturbing, especially since they were waiting for a demon to pop out of a sewer and try to eat their faces, and also Gabriel already had some ridiculously sweet purple and yellow sugar stick occupying his mouth. After about ten minutes of thought, which was the longest he’d been quiet all day, Gabriel took the candy out of his mouth and used it to pinpoint Dean like a sniper of sticky doom.

“Do you actually like your little brother?”

Dean gaped.

Gabriel jumped in front of his retort and derailed it like it was a train with the roadrunner in the second carriage and he was Wile E. Coyote. “Yes, yes, I know, you love each other with a love that is eternal and epic and could fuel North America’s power grid. I sat through more than a hundred Tuesdays waiting for that to give, remember? I mean, do you actually enjoy his company?”

There was an indignant snap-back retort waiting to leap off the tip of Dean’s tongue and smack him in his stupid smug face, except... well, it wasn’t actually smug for once. It was sort of interested, and a bit thoughtful, and maybe a bit pitying or something like it. Serious, anyway, which was unusual enough to make Dean actually stop and think for a moment.

Did he enjoy Sam’s company?

Okay, so they had this whole neurotic-obsessive thing going on, which wasn’t healthy by the standards of anyone in the world who didn’t rely on that to stay not only healthy but alive. And okay, so they found it kind of tricky to actually tolerate each other, and... well, Dean was having to admit lately that he and Sam weren’t actually friends. Hadn’t been for quite a while, if they ever really had. Not as adults. They were family, of course, which counted for a hell of a lot more, but didn’t do much when it came to relaxing at the end of the day in each other’s company and cracking a beer together and just talking about anything or nothing without dragging out years of accusations and suspicions.

They weren’t friends. And that was... sort of a relief to admit. To get the breathing space to be able to admit it.

Dean dropped his head and ran the meat of his thumb slowly along the edge of his dagger, watching the sharp of the blade press, just press, promising but gentle, against the skin.

They were happier and more relaxed when they weren’t together. For now. But Dean sort of thought that might change. That he’d like to change it. That maybe Sam might actually be the kind of man he’d like to be friends with. If they could just get something stable, something sure. If they could stop getting killed every other week and trust each other and the world around them... if they weren’t all in all to each other, if Dean had someone else to talk to about the things Sam just wasn’t interested in, another shoulder to punch when Sam’s was all prickly and moody... yes. Sam was a cool guy and Dean could really like hanging out with him, arguing and drinking and just being in each other’s space.

They could be friends. And that was even better to admit.

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, to the tip of his dagger. “I think I do.”

Gabriel made a small noise in his throat, amusement and satisfaction like there’d been more hanging on that than he’d let on, and leaned back against the wall to wait.

---

“You know Sam pretty much looked like someone had just kicked his dead puppy when we got to Bobby’s and found you’d left, right?”

Dean tossed it out there, casual, in the middle of tracking down a demon who’d gone to ground in an old grain silo. He’d expected to be flipped off. He hadn’t expected the stunned, defensive anger that suddenly staged a hostile takeover of Gabriel’s face.

“Screw you, Winchester.”

“Hey.” Dean lifted his hands in an “easy there, big boy” kind of gesture. “I’m just saying.”

After that, he began watching Gabriel again. Only this time he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for.

---

“Just so we’re clear, if you hurt my little brother again I will find a shotgun and come after you.”

Dean opened one eye and squinted bemusedly across the canyon between the beds. “Says the guy who trapped him in some cult TV show with mutant vampires.”

Gabriel just grinned, lazy and sharp. “Hey, that show is art. Hilarious art. Not my fault he pissed off the locals.”

---

It was the spiel that tipped Dean off eventually.

Gabriel was just too practised at this. Saying what people needed to hear, covering all the major points quick then going back over them again slower and in more detail, factoring in the kids and the old people and the sick or injured in ways that Dean had never really had to think about, offering solutions unprompted to questions that Dean would never have thought of but which, yeah, now he came to think of it were exactly the questions that a bunch of civilians defending a whole freaking town would want to ask, and doing it all with a kind of charm and humour under the serious tone that kept people listening without challenging, made it real without being hopeless, heading off the belligerent heckling and the despairing pleas before they could even get started. Dean would have been floundering after five minutes, trying to work out which bits to highlight and what people needed to hear. And okay, so, archangel brain, Gabriel could probably do all those calculations a whole lot faster than Dean could, but still...

It felt rehearsed.

Dean waited until they finished up and the local farmer who seemed to be shaping into a pretty good community leader adjourned the meeting. As they tromped out of the town hall into the afternoon sunlight, he turned to point smugly at the angel. “Sam Winchester.”

Gabriel looked at him like he thought maybe that last demon had held him down, scrubbed off the purple marker, then bashed Dean’s head into the wall a few times for kicks.

“Samantha Winchester,” Dean went on deliberately. “Dean Smith. Robert Harvelle. D’Angelo. Novak. Red hair and cowboy boots. Repton, Nevada. Pine Springs, Minnesota. Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico.”

Embarrassment crawled all over Gabriel’s face.

Dean crowed and slapped his shoulder. “You’re busted.”

---

dean: hey smmy guess who was dressng himself up as lits of differnet peopel and going around tipping off those dmeon towns before elisina fields

dean: hint , he keeps stealing my shampoo

“Yeah?”

“You.” Sam hurled it at him like the unexpected water balloon that declares water-balloon war. “You were the one going around telling all those little towns the demons were picking on how to defend themselves.”

Gabriel groaned, and there was a muffled sound like he’d just thumped his head into the pillow. “Go on, laugh it up.”

Sam shook his head vigorously, couldn’t stop his face splitting into this stupid excited grin. “Dude, we were tracking you all over the internet.”

There was a puzzled pause, like this wasn’t the direction he’d expected this conversation to take. “The internet.”

“Well, yeah. People put it all online. They were linking up, helping each other, swapping tips, sharing stories, letting each other know they were going to be okay – Gabriel...” Sam took a deep breath to steady himself, to deal with just how important this was. “You put the weapons out there. You gave humans the tools to fight for themselves.”

“Shut up, I’m blushing.” He was obviously aiming for dry and snarky, but Sam suspected it was probably true.

“No, seriously Gabriel. You let people choose to be strong. No one else would have thought of that. Hell,” he thumped his fist on the table in emphasis, “we wouldn’t have – we’re too used to being all secretive and lying our way around saving people to tell them how to save themselves. Gabriel, this could change everything. If we live – if the world comes out the other side –” Sam broke off and pushed a hand through his hair, blinking and blinking again at the enormity of it, like the world would be different each time he opened his eyes. Then he dropped his voice, and went on, “And even if it doesn’t, Gabriel. If the world starts to break down and we go all post-Apocalyptic like that future that Dean saw, Croats or whatever else they come up with next? If people know this stuff, if they know how to fight... we might just... maybe one day someone could rebuild.”

There was a stunned silence. Which was probably fair. Sam was a little stunned by his tirade himself.

Then, cautiously, “Don’t... make too much of it, yeah? I figured it was the most useful thing I could do, without... you know. Picking a side. Showing myself.”

Sam snorted. “You did pick a side, Gabriel. Not Heaven, not Hell. That’s what we were trying to do all along.”

“Yeah, I... kind of gathered that.” Sam thought he heard a bit of a smile somewhere in there. “Might have shoved it in Lucifer’s face, actually.”

Sam laughed, couldn’t stop himself. “All this time? Ever since we found out who you were?”

Gabriel groaned, and his voice came out all pillow-muffled. “Yeah, pretty much. So sue me, you’re all persuasive and puppy-dog eyes and shit.”

“Wow. I just...” Sam laughed again, shaking his head. “Sorry, I’m just having to rethink about half the bad things I ever thought about you.”

A wounded noise reverberated down the line. “Only half?”

“Well, the rest were about your hair and your sense of humour, so, yeah, about half.”

There was another moment of stillness, then Gabriel’s voice curled into his ear, all innuendo and rich amusement. “You think about my hair that much, Sammy-boy?”

Which, yeah, point, but Sam’s thoughts were already running on ahead of themselves. “So I was kind of a bitch to you in the panic room, but in my defence, I had just been hallucinating a much nastier version of you.”

Gabriel made a noise, a bit more amused than embarrassed. “You mentioned.”

“What about my dreams?” Sam tapped his pencil on the table.

Gabriel went suddenly cagey. “What dreams?”

“Apparently,” Sam drew it out, grinned into the mouthpiece, knowing he’d already won, “something was keeping Lucifer out of my dreams, right up until around when you died.”

“Fuck.” The embarrassment was back. “That little prophet’s going to be writing me down as some kind of an altruist, isn’t he?”

Sam laughed, low and warm. “Yeah, so much for your reputation, hardass.”

Gabriel grumbled at him, with a sort of tentative incredulity that made Sam wonder when someone had last teased him, and got his own back by hanging up. Sam snickered at the phone, then looked up. Castiel’s eyes were fixed on his book, but the inhabited initial at the top of the page he was looking at was the same one that had caught Sam’s eye just before he’d made the call.

“Perhaps I ought to have done that too,” Castiel said quietly.

The warmth and triumph fled, and left worry in their place. “Hey, Cas, no. You really thought God was out there.”

And besides (he didn’t say), angel or not, handling a whole town full of folk who are already in a state of panic would take a hell of a lot of people skills, and those really weren’t Castiel’s strong point.

Castiel’s pen resumed its scratchy, delicate dance over the pad of paper by his book. “Thank you, Sam; but I believe I was wilfully ignoring the meaning of ‘omniscient’.”

Sam thumped his shoulder, and went to get him some more hot chocolate.

---

They sort of got into the habit of just leaving the phones on, linked up, while Dean and Gabriel drove and Sam and Castiel went through books. Wasn’t like any of their cell phone companies noticed all the extra minutes when they were linked through Radio Gabriel, or whatever. It helped stop Gabriel from getting bored, which was important, and meant there were always four of them there to turn over any new weird thing the bookworms came up with. Of course, Dean and Gabriel still did most of the talking, unless they could get Sam riled up, but Dean was used to that. And it was sort of nice to have all of Sam’s little busy noises in the background, the kind he made when he was studying, his little grunts of frustration and huffs of my-brother-is-so-annoying and stupid little yelps of discovery. And Castiel’s perfect silence (though you could still feel him there), broken by dry little comments when you least expected them, and just occasionally a little thoughtful noise hummed in his throat. It felt like they were there in the car with them, just a bit, the sort of background noise that Dean’s life was meant to have in it.

Between Gabriel’s grumbling about the Winchester motel-based lifestyle, or Dean’s absolutely hilarious retelling of embarrassing Sam baby stories, they did actually get work done. Dean would get the stay-at-home wives to check the stats on the latest town they were seeing to if something occurred to him that they’d missed. Sam would ask Gabriel to jump back to this particular year when they stopped for the night to see if he could get a better version of this eye-witness account he was trying to disentangle. Castiel was getting close to working out this ritual or hex bag or whatever, he said, there was just one thing missing and he wasn’t sure what. Gabriel wasn’t actually that helpful – he could toss back ideas about the properties of various herbs and metals and spices and dust and how humans had twisted them around into ingenious new things over the years, which made Sam geek out, but it was Castiel who was best at working out how they’d all fit together, at reshaping words and sigils into something that had real power.

Bobby sometimes wandered through, but he’d take himself off again soon enough, grumbling that no one could possibly get any work done with those muttonheads chattering on in the background.

It was kind of difficult to keep on topic with Gabriel around, even if they actually had one. Somehow a serious conversation about how to get Lucifer to actually jump into the hole once they had the rings would turn into a complicated three-way attempt to explain to Castiel why humans kept dogs as pets. When Gabriel vigorously denied that any Winchester was qualified to comment on how a functional human being might relate to a poor defenceless little animal, Sam stuck his oar in, all tolerant indignation, to bring up that retriever he’d had for, like, two freaking weeks that time he’d run away. Dean had to shout that one down, of course, and Gabriel just made an amused noise and growled that no one as freakishly far away from the ground as Sam could know anything about animal husbandry. Castiel took the opportunity of Sam spluttering to put in, all smooth and helpful, “You would be the expert on animal husbandry, naturally.” And when everyone just stopped for a moment to work out what he meant, he finished, bland as if it was the weather, “I trust that Crowley, the goat, and the chess board were impressed.”

Gabriel actually stuttered into speechlessness, a palpable moment of wait-did-he-just that had Dean cracking up, because who’d’ve thought? He missed whatever Sam said, something smirk-laden about knowing better than to let a sneaky ninja angel near his phone, and only tuned in again for Gabriel’s stunned but sort of impressed “You little minx.”

And then it was back to Lucifer and tricking him into the hole, and a few possibilities floated that probably wouldn’t really work or relied on something they didn’t have. Then Sam wandered off to get something or do something, and Castiel was solemnly telling them about some little incident over the laundry that morning, something very deadpan about Bobby and Sam. Just telling Dean because he knew Dean would enjoy it, sketching for him in a few words the feeling of just being there, being part of that house with those people there, familial and domestic. And Dean was grinning along, saying “Yeah?”, fond and easy, and it was... comfortable. All of them.

It wasn’t until Gabriel just sort of cocked an eyebrow at him and didn’t say a thing that he realised – hey, this was them, being a team. Team Free Will. It was actually working.

Castiel had probably meant for this to happen, the sneaky-ass son of a bitch.

---

SW: call cas

dean: why whats up

SW: nothing, jerk. :P just call him.

dean: ?

SW: he misses you. 4 some reason.

dean: ? talked to him 2 hours ago

SW: no, you called me and cas ws in the room at the time. you always call me.

dean: jesus hes an angel not preteen girl

---

... Dean could ring a friend if he wanted to. Any time.

“Dean.”

Dean felt all the tension just sliding out of his muscles, like the rumble of that voice was a Magic Fingers or something. “Hey, Cas, how’s it going?”

There was a slightly baffled pause. Dean liked to think that he was actually pretty good at reading Castiel’s pauses. They were an important part of the Language of Cas, and this was a baffled one.

“Much as it was going two and a half hours ago. Why have you called?” Not irritated, just sort of bemused.

Dean chuckled. “Because Sam’s a giant girl, apparently. Hey, listen, you bookworms over there know there’s a game on in two hours?”

“A game?”

“Football.” Dean tipped back his head on the seat, feeling all lazy and post-adrenalin in the warmth of the late afternoon sun striking through the window, the warmth of Castiel’s voice curling down through the phone to reach him. “You guys should take a break. Put the phone in the middle of the room and we’ll do the same this end. We can explain how it works to you, and you can tell us it’s pointless, and we can agree with you, and we can all throw stuff at the TV and yell at the umpire. It’ll be great.”

This one was a Considering The Peculiar Habits Of Humans pause. Possibly with an ounce of How Did I Get Stuck With Dean Winchester.

“You think we should all watch football. Together.” Castiel sort of sounded like he was poking at the idea with a stick to see if it was alive or possibly rabid, but sort of like he might be smiling too.

Dean heard his voice go softer. “You do know watching a game’s not really about the football, right?”

“I had gathered, Dean.” And there he was, Dean’s angel back again, warm and wry and fond in Dean’s ear.

“Good. Great.” Dean cleared his throat, and definitely didn’t grin stupidly. “Tell the others the studying’s off-limits after 6:30, yeah?”

“I will, Dean.”

Dean snapped the phone shut, to find that Gabriel was looking provocatively dreamy at him. “You know. If I ever get my powers back, first thing I’m going to do is trap you two in a honeymoon suite in Vegas.”

Dean flipped him off, which only made Gabriel’s grin stretch into a thing of unholy glee.

“With a door that won’t open until someone inside ’fesses up and goes down on one knee. Or, you know, both knees, if you’re a direct kind of guy. And start a betting pool with Sammy.”

“Bite me.”

“My money’s on five weeks. If I write the instructions on the inside of the door.”

“So help me, I will stop the car and make you walk.”

Gabriel smirked, and revved the engine terrifyingly. “Oh yeah? Who’s got the wheel, hot shot?”

“... Shut up.”

---

Except that at 6:20, Castiel called back to say that Sam was trapped in his own mind.

He had tried to contact Chamael, it seemed, but he had gone too deep or something had grabbed him and held him under, and they couldn’t wake him. It took them two minutes to get in the car and on the road, Dean white-knuckled and grim at the wheel, because if there was any of them with a chance of burrowing into Sam’s subconscious and sorting this out it had to be Gabriel. Gabriel just looked kind of fiercely pale and didn’t argue, which was good because if he had Dean would have had to punch him.

Five hours later, and less than an hour from Sioux Falls, Castiel rang again, to say that Sam had managed to wake himself. He didn’t know what had gone wrong, apparently, only that Chamael couldn’t come.

If there had been a question, by that stage, of their turning back and going off to find something else to gank, Castiel laid it to rest by mentioning quietly that he had figured the last ingredient for the possets, and that it had to be prepared then blessed in its entirety by the hand of the archangel of death. Sariel not being available, they would have to try what the hand of a powerless angel could do, and leave the rest to chance. They were as ready as they were going to be.

So now they just had to find Pestilence.

Dean let Gabriel take the wheel.

---

Dean was out of the car before Gabriel had touched the handbrake, leaping up the porch steps and in through Bobby’s front door in a couple of strides. “Sammy?”

“Living room,” Bobby yelled from the kitchen.

And there he was, Dean’s floppy giant of a little brother, awake, just rising from the couch beside Castiel to meet Dean, all long sheepish limbs and too much hair and huffed annoyance at the fuss. Dean’s brother, who kept going out and risking all of himself over and over on the outside chance of saving the world, or even just a few people in it.

Dean grabbed him into a rough hug and thumped his back, squeezed him tight to make sure he wasn’t about to vanish or turn into something he shouldn’t be.

“No more angel-summoning,” he dictated firmly into that stupid hair.

He felt the low rumble of amused irritation against his chest and under his arms like it was a part of himself. “Yeah, okay Dean.”

“Good. Good.” Dean cleared his throat and stepped back, and his gaze skipped irresistibly sideways to the skinny hunched figure with the dark mussed-up hair and the warm, inescapable eyes sitting on the other side of the couch. “’Cause, hey, we’ve got all the best ones here already.”

“Hello, Dean.”

Wow. That gravelly weird purr-growl voice just didn’t sound as bone-deep and strong over the phone as it did in person. And they’d been getting more relaxed talking on the cell and everything, without the constant physical presence hanging around, but where did they start now?

Damn, but he’d missed the way that little nerd angel looked at him.

Dean reached over and sort of thumped him gently on the shoulder, only his hand wrapped around it on the way instead and stayed there all warm and close for a moment. “Hey there, angel.”

Then the Beetle’s engine throbbed back into life outside, her gears crunched horribly in Gabriel’s special way, and she pulled away and grumbled off into the night.

Sam’s forehead crumpled up like soggy paper.

“... That little fucker,” Dean sighed.

Bobby was standing on the porch steps with his arms crossed in his you’re-all-idjits way, glaring after the retreating tail lights, with Dean’s duffle and Gabriel’s collection of weird odds and ends at his feet.

“What happened, Bobby?” Sam bit out, sort of curt like an annoyed kitten. “Where’d he go?”

“He said, he ain’t a pet,” Bobby said, with deeply unimpressed sarcasm.

Dean snorted, and hauled his duffle up onto his shoulder. “Yeah, just a cowardly son of a bitch. Grab that bag, Sammy? Most of it’s for you anyway.”

He stomped back onto the porch, to find that Castiel had done his silent ghostly wafting-about-the-place act that he seemed to manage to do even on human feet. He was framed in the open door, looking down the road in the direction that Gabriel had vanished with a faint pin-scratch frown between his eyes.

Dean grimaced, and said softly, “Sorry, Cas. I really thought he’d stay this time.”

Castiel blinked, and turned the full force of his gaze on Dean, reached out and held him and anchored him steady in it. Then the corner of his mouth softened, just a bit, one of his little barely-there smiles that meant the world. “It’s good to see you, Dean.”

It felt like a promise.

Dean cleared his throat and nodded, smiled back in a stupid shameless sort of way, and didn’t break his gaze. “Yeah. Yeah, you too, Cas.”

“Stop blocking up my door, ya lunk-headed lovebirds,” Bobby grumbled behind them.

Was it weird that Dean was kind of getting used to cracks like that?

---

The collection Gabriel had left was... okay, fascinating and kind of amazing, but Sam kept getting frustrated by the fact that there were obviously some significance to each object and Gabriel had skipped out without telling them. Why this painted ceramic bowl, all oranges and reds and deep splashes of blue? Where was it from, and when, and was it mystical or something he’d associated with Sam for some reason or just something he thought was pretty? Dean wasn’t much help – Gabriel hadn’t even said where he’d been half the time, apparently, and Dean’s mental timeline of history was fuzzy enough that he didn’t really have anything to pin the few random facts that Gabriel had thrown at him onto. The difference between 540 and 901 to Dean was just a matter of numbers, not defined by any cultural shifts or major historical events. There were a couple of stories, which Dean could be relied on to retell vigorously, but Sam still felt like Gabriel should have been there doing it himself. The best he got for most of the objects was something like the vague “Oh yeah, some Danish king I think” with which Dean acknowledged the little ivory pawn.

Was this what Gabriel always did? Do something stupid, let people down, then act out and play the fool to amuse (or irritate) you back into submission? Just to let you down again afterwards?

There was just one thing for Castiel: a small bird, a dove, carved out of pale jade, all flowing lines and soft curves, just the right size to rest in the palm of his hand. It seemed to mesmerise Castiel: he went very quiet, concentration like steel, and just looked at it for a long time.

“Hey.” Dean slid onto the couch beside him, and reached out to touch Castiel’s wrist, eager and almost reverent, like Castiel was made of glass and Dean didn’t want to get his grubby fingerprints all over him. “What’s that?”

For a minute it seemed that Castiel hadn’t heard, but then he murmured, in a soft thrum deep enough to slide into something infinite and profound, “A memory of a time when God turned his back.”

Sam blinked. A dove... “That really happened? All the world really flooded?”

Castiel turned the little bird over in his hands, ran the tip of one finger along the carven hollow of one wing. “Not all the world; but all the world these people had ever known, so great a valley that when it flooded, they could not see the way through the grey and the rain to get to land. They had just enough warning to make great rafts, and to load their family and their livestock onto those; but they had food for only thirty days. Those who fought amongst themselves for the rations found it ran out faster, and the people on those rafts died; those who gave it first to the weakest among them found they had more than they had believed. And after forty days, the skies cleared, and God had Gabriel send a dove to show them the way to land.”

Castiel paused. He looked like something ancient and remote, except for the rumpled shirt and the chocolate on the left cuff where he’d got a bit too excited over the stove before lunch. “I disobeyed there, for the first time. I was one of those deputed by Gabriel to see to the increase or depletion of each raft’s food. To one man I gave more than I ought, because he was tired, and desperate, and feared for his wife, and I was not sure that I understood. I always suspected Gabriel knew, and said nothing.”

“So the dove, then...” Even sitting down Dean was a bulky, hovering shape next to Castiel’s slim lines, like he wasn’t sure if he should be trying to be useful or not.

Castiel’s fingertip brushed over the top of the bird’s head, a gentle benediction. “The closest our Father ever came to an apology.”

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