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whit_merulePrevious chapter --- Masterpost --- Next chapter
In which Dean, despite having his little brother back and the run of a villa in Tuscany, is a moody bastard, until he gets some messy work to do and some angels to boss around.
Dean, Sam, Gabriel, Castiel.
Dean was halfway across Missouri when an obnoxious archangel materialised on the previously unremarkable road in front of him.
Dean’s reflexes weren’t really at their best, what with… everything, so it was probably a good thing that the mocking illusion vanished just before Dean ploughed right through where he’d been standing, to the protesting sound of his baby’s brakes. Unfortunately, the sudden hard swerve, the effects of exhaustion and hours of carefully blanked despair, followed by a shock of adrenalin, had her wheels spinning off the side of the road. Not just off the road. Right into the path of the little spinney of maples that was really inconveniently placed right where Dean needed to swing her poor nose back around into the safety of the road’s shoulder.
C’mon baby, work with me here.
Prayers to his car always worked a hell of a lot better than any others Dean had ever tried.
He pulled her around, firm and coaxing, and she responded with a throbbing purr that let him know they were fine, he’d just swing her right headlamp around the side of this closest trunk, when –
Dean took his feet off the suddenly inert pedals and sighed. Then he waited for her wheels to stop spinning out in mid-air, two inches off the ground.
There was a far-too-cheerful rap against the passenger window.
“So, remind me again why I let you teach me how to handle one of these things?”
Dean gritted his teeth, and didn’t turn his head.
“I had it. Thanks.”
There was a familiar squeak-thump of the door, then the Impala settled comfortably under the weight of a second body right where there really really should not be a second body, not today. Not now. Traitorous car.
“So, Winchester the elder. Mind telling me why you’re haring off like the Coyote with the Roadrunner on his tail in completely the wrong direction?”
Dean rolled his head sideways and glared flatly at Gabriel.
Gabriel quirked one eyebrow at him like the world was fine, like Dean was being an unreasonably moody bastard, like –
Shit. Like he hadn’t heard.
Well, screw that.
“Cicero, Indiana,” Dean replied flatly. “Got a friend there who’ll take me in, give me a shot at a normal life.” Let Gabriel figure out the rest himself if he didn’t know.
Gabriel was staring at the side of his face. Dean didn’t look at him. Waited for him to ask. Should have been there himself, if he’d wanted to see how it played out. Might have made a fraction of a difference. Might even have managed to distract Lucifer for thirty seconds longer than Castiel had, or something useless like that.
Then Gabriel smacked him around the back of the head.
“Ow! What the hell, angel?”
“Back at you, Winchester. I look away for five minutes and you turn into the selfish martyr type? Who do you think you are, Harry bloody Potter with his trophy girl for the end of the war?”
Dean glared a hazy warning glare. “Look, screw you, okay? Sammy wanted this.”
“Yeah, and what about the lady in question? She volunteer to be a consolation prize?”
“Christ.” Dean dug his knuckles painfully into his eyes. “Gabriel, could you just… not? Just for once?”
“Hey,” Gabriel said, very helpfully. The warmth of his fingers flickered down the nape of Dean’s neck, never quite touching. “You’re kind of a mess, aren’t you? Didn’t you get my message?”
“You mean the message that said ‘don’t run away, interesting things happening here’?” Dean asked, running on his backup sarcasm batteries. “Yeah, that was real helpful. Thanks.”
Gabriel whistled softly through his teeth. “Okay, could have been a bit clearer there. Was kind of busy trying to convince Heaven’s hosts that your little boytoy wasn’t a pink bunny target in a shooting range.”
“Shut up, Gabriel.”
Dean could hear the smirk. “Ooh, something happened there, did it?”
“I’m fine, okay?” he growled.
“Yeah, sure.” Gabriel sounded just as sincere as Sam would, saying exactly the same thing in exactly the same situation. “Fine, meaning…?”
“Meaning, my brother just fell into the freaking Cage with two of your big brothers, and Cas is off taking on all of his douchebag relatives by himself, but hey, Sammy wants me to keep on going, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m going. And thanks, by the way,” he added bitterly.
Gabriel made a carefully sardonic noise. “Thanks?”
Dean waved a hand generally in his direction, without looking, because that was too much. Because Sam had wanted –
“For being there for them. Really. Very big of you to remember how to use angel air just in time to miss out on the important shit.”
Gabriel hummed, thoughtfully, annoyingly. Dean felt it reverberate through him, drag him out of the screaming blankness inside his own head and into fucking irritated. And of course, who but Gabriel could manage that?
“So you’re going the Harry Potter martyr route because Sam wanted you to do it?”
“Fuck off,” Dean muttered originally, and rested his head on the steering wheel.
“What if I said,” Gabriel offered, slow and obscenely gleeful, “that Sammy had changed his mind since last you saw him?”
Dean opened his eyes, very slowly, to stare at the familiar close-up of the Impala’s dash under his nose.
“Oh, and also, if Sammy thought it was a good idea to go jump into a great big hole in the ground with the devil, would you – wait, don’t answer that.”
Dean turned his head to stare. Gabriel’s eyebrows were waggling invitingly, and Dean would have let fly at him for daring to mock him over this, this of all things when he’d thought he cared about Sam, except… except for the twinkle in his eye, not quite cruel and almost – happy?
And hang on, what the hell was going on here?
Gabriel tipped his head to one side and grinned, positively grinned, full and light and strong, eyes sparkling like amber in front of a warm hearth. “And what about my little brother? You think your lady friend would thank you for going all googly-eyed at an angel every time he decided to flutter by? Hardly seems fair on the girl.”
“…Gabriel.”
Dean’s voice came out choked and dry, pleading.
Gabriel just smirked, slow and suggestive and fucking joyful.
“Want a lift there, Winchester?”
And Dean should know better, he should so know better, because this could be a shifter or an illusionist or any number of other things and “do you want to go to where Sam is” was a loaded question if ever he heard one given Sam had just leapt into the fucking Pit, but fuck it all if the answer wasn’t still, wasn’t always…
“Yes. Dammit, Gabriel, yes.”
Gabriel’s smirk went soft around the edges, and he leaned forward to press two fingers ever so gently to the centre of Dean’s forehead.
Dean squeezed his eyes shut.
“You know, tiger,” the same familiar voice commented dryly, after a moment, “my taste in real estate ain’t that bad.”
Dean opened one eye cautiously. He was still in the Impala.
Only instead of the bland highway in central Missouri, he was sitting in a landscape of pale terracotta earth and deep green. All ridged velvety lines of vineyards running in this direction then another, up and down hills, like soft patches of corduroy.
“I mean, sure,” Gabriel went on blithely, “a little hot pink all over the dining room walls, faux leopard print instead of tiles on the roof, mandatory hot tubs in every room including the library, sure, I get that. But call me mad, I usually steer away from the sulphur and brimstone theme.”
… Yeah, that was Gabriel alright.
Also there was a sprawling cream-coloured villa. With a real terracotta roof. With freaking pencil pines around it.
“You have a villa. In Tuscany,” Dean pointed out carefully, in case Gabriel had missed it. Or this was all some complicated trick.
“Don’t sound so surprised, Winchester. All bought and legally paid for decades ago. Funds of some crooked abusive bastard who spent eighteen years driving his wife and daughter to their deaths and swindling them out of their millions. Now, must be off, thousands of your species in need of clean water and shelter after my big bro’s delightful little shenanigans. Also there are two tsunamis still converging on the South American and Australian coasts that I should whisper away before they make landfall. Have fun!”
And Dean was alone in the car.
Somewhere in that sprawling Mediterranean-bright house bracketed between the Impala’s indicators, his brother was waiting. Apparently.
He stared at the scene in front of him, until it blurred into a watercolour of olive-green and grey and terracotta and vineyard verdance and smooth creamy plaster.
“Oh, and hey,” Gabriel’s voice purred in his ear. “Your brother hopped up on post-Apocalyptic triumph? Fucking hot.” Dean squeezed his eyes shut, then glared at the seat beside him. Still empty. Apparently that wasn’t worth a manifestation, or whatever the hell they did.
Gabriel’s laughter sounded inside his head. “Mine too, by the way. You should ask him about all this. More his kind of deal, the whole rescuing-righteous-men-from-perdition gig.”
“Screw you, angel,” Dean put in helplessly, and slammed his way out of the Impala.
---
Sam was in there. He was busily enthralled in a dictionary of the local dialect.
Not a glamour, then.
Dean was sorely tempted to hit something, except that the delighted brilliance of Sam’s smile, and the honest strength with which he swept Dean up into a hug, and the enthusiasm with which he started going on about Castiel talking round the angels of Heaven, talking for hours, soft and fervent, as Gabriel slid cheerfully into the gaps, slinging his arm around the shoulders of this angel or that, the familiarity and attention of an archangel, and all the time turning his eyes back to Castiel glowing with pride and devotion… yeah, okay, so Dean could maybe go with collapsing in a lounge chair by the pool (the freaking Olympic-sized pool, honestly) with a glass of cold wine that Sam had recommended (crinkly-browed and earnest) and that Dean knew nothing about but that tasted like something the Heaven he’d believed in as a kid might have made, and watching his little brother real and happy and ridiculously long-limbed like always, telling his story.
Just this once.
And of course Gabriel hadn’t magically provided any swimsuits, so when Sam decided he needed to go for a swim, he had to do it naked. Not that Dean cared, but he was pretty sure Gabriel was watching somewhere. The pervert.
Speaking of naked…
“Dude, stop staring at my junk,” Sam ordered cheerfully after a moment.
Dean blinked, then scowled up at his brother. “Not your junk, Sammy.”
Sam followed his gaze down to the raised red welts on his right hip, then went a bit pink. “Oh yeah. From when Gabriel pulled me out.”
“Gabriel?”
“Well, obviously.”
“… Huh.”
Dean went for a swim too.
There was a matching handprint on the back of Sam’s neck. Lucky he had all that stupid hair, because apparently someone hadn’t bothered to be discreet when he got grabby.
---
By the time night came around, nothing had happened. That is, nothing had attacked them.
Dean wasn’t sure what to make of this.
Sam rolled his eyes in that stupidly exaggerated way he had and told him that no angel or human or demon or monster had access to this house and grounds unless Gabriel let them in.
… Which didn’t exclude gods, Dean noticed suspiciously.
Sam told him to stop being a paranoid bastard and go to bed.
Each bedroom had its own wing. Dean was sure the house hadn’t looked this big from the outside.
Except, well, it had been the home (or a home) of a sneaky archangel/god for at least sixty years, so. Okay.
Dean still insisted on sharing a room with Sam. Sam grinned and didn’t object.
The couch was a hell of a lot more comfortable than most motel beds, anyway.
Sam still snored a bit, when he flopped over after the first hour to sleep on his face. It was definitely him.
Dean didn’t sleep much. Didn’t really need to.
---
There was complete radio silence from anything angelic all the next day. It was confusing, then it was restful, then it was boring, then it was… kind of disturbing. Like, well done, you stopped Lucifer and Michael, now go and play in the nice safe doll’s house while the adults go off to work.
That said, it was a very nice doll’s house. Gabriel apparently had expensive tastes and no shame, especially when it came to bedclothes. No wonder shitty motel rooms had made him grouchy. He was also an indiscriminate magpie – again, colour Dean completely unshocked. The house was crowded with the oddest assortment of the weird and fascinating. One sideboard in one room, just for a random example, had a ridiculously elegant sculpture of coloured glass, a little Japanese painting of a winged horse, a single white feather, and a giant seashell around which some tree root had grown like an embrace, all ripples and whorls of muscular grey wood.
And that was before you even saw the bar.
As cages went, the place was pretty gilded.
Castiel had promised. Or Dean thought he had. Pressed to the point, something like evasion or desperation. Mouth cracking open, dry and stuttering but so lush inside, pressing forward into Dean all demand and anticipation of grief. Only, where was he now?
Important angel business, probably.
He lost Sam not long after breakfast to the nefarious and seductive clutches of the library. Which was, by the way, definitely not physically present inside this building. Huge as something you’d expect in a university, vaulted like something you’d expect in a castle, with those sliding ladders reaching up way over Dean’s head, it made Sam vibrate between flaily orgasm noises and little squeaks of distress over how completely and utterly uncatalogued it was.
Dean left him to it, and made his own discovery. The little lean-to shelter where he’d left the Impala the previous afternoon was now decked out like some restoration workshop for vintage cars, complete with all the right parts. It was about time he gave his baby a good thorough pampering, so Dean decided to let the implied “run along and play with your little toys” thing slide.
What were those angels up to, anyway?
Dean wasn’t sulking. He wasn’t. He’d let his little brother jump into Hell and be rescued and come back magnificent and happy and relaxed and less guilty-looking than Dean had seen him look for three years, and that was all good. Dean was all wise and mature and shit.
They went out for dinner. Sam worked out where they were on his laptop and decided that he needed to practise his Italian, so they drove to the nearest town and Dean let Sam stumble earnestly through talking to locals in search of “un buon ristorante.” Dean just sat down next to some old guy outside a bar and bought him a drink, then they both watched Sam’s increasingly confused progress with a mutual lazy glee. Manly shrugs, grimacing over embarrassing younger brothers, and basking in the evening sun were apparently an international tongue.
Of course, “that’s my little brother, yesterday morning he was carrying the devil inside him and now he’s leaping around goofily trying to explain to some underage Italian chick about traffic lights” probably wasn’t quite so universal, but Dean was cradling that particular sentiment pretty close anyway. Just in case it broke if he tried to look at it too close.
---
Gabriel turned up the next morning, with five bottles of lethal-looking mead and a stack of pancakes.
Dean punched him in the face, and Gabriel gave him an aggrieved pout and didn’t break his hand.
“That’s for not telling me right the fuck away,” Dean informed him.
Gabriel kissed him lewd and cheerful on the cheek. “So next time don’t run off in a sulk before the action’s over. Hey Sammyboy, look, I found actual fruit.”
Sam, sprawled louche and shirtless over some cane outdoor furniture thing, smirked back at him like it was some private joke over the rim of his glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed in the elaborately top-of-the-TV-range kitchen. (Because Sam got private jokes with his angel, and all Dean got was the memory of the soft stubbled skin of Castiel’s throat, the way his breath went ragged when Dean’s fingers brushed almost by accident over the inside of his elbow, the taste and shudder of his breath.)
Gabriel stole half the pancakes, draped himself over another sofa like a colourful dramatic rug, and kicked off his boots.
“So, hey, disaster relief’s fucking exhausting,” he observed, like the world had personally offended him with this fact.
“Really.” Sam sounded deadpan and sort of fond, but it was probably hard not to when you were making yourself a stack of delicious pancakes. Dean should test that theory.
Gabriel made a face of woe. “People are so boring when they’re in shock and all their kids just got blown up. It’s depressing.”
And a few months ago, Dean might have smacked him down for saying something like that, but he thought he might be getting a handle on Gabriel now. After all, if Dean had spent more than forty hours straight seeing to the aftermath of all those earthquakes and mudslides and cyclones Lucifer had kicked off after he jumped Sam, he’d probably want to be all irreverent and inappropriate too.
Also, never let it be said that Dean could not be bribed with pancakes.
“Where’ve you been?” he conceded, sinking back into his own chair with a heaped plate of deliciousness and syrup.
Gabriel’s fingers made a lazy circle in the air over his head, like clicking was too much effort, and the (enormous, flat-screen) television taking up half one wall flicked smoothly on. Dean propped his feet shamelessly up on the arm of Gabriel’s sofa to watch.
“… di Etna. La nube di ceneri sopra il vulcano s’è dispersa, e l’eruzione inaspettata prevista ieri di vulcanologi sembra d’essersi calmata, una cosa impossibile secondo i conoscenti. L’errore si attribuisce a problemi meccanici. Il terremoto di martedì scorso vicino a Napoli…”
“Dude. English?” Dean prompted, around a mouthful of pancake, since Sam was apparently too busy frowning studiously at the television to ask.
“Heathen,” Gabriel mumbled, without heat, and the announcer’s voice switched smoothly into English.
Earthquakes, floods, mudslides, fires, across most of the world. Death tolls expected in six figures. But that was yesterday’s news.
Today, injured and dying were stabilising or recovering in larger numbers than expected, here and there, scattered across the globe. People believed missing under mud and rubble in China were being found, confused but healthy, a few miles from where they’d last been seen. Médicins Sans Frontières was cautiously reporting that the shortages expected due to the massive scale of global disaster were not as bad as anticipated – they had more resources, more medical supplies and, weirdly, more personnel than their records had shown. The out-of-season bushfires ravaging south-eastern Australia had all turned back into their own paths, and burned themselves out in the space of a few hours. In two of the places worst hit by earthquakes, the scattered corpses (hundreds of them or more) had been piled up overnight well away from where anyone was living and burned in one great pyre, with a record of their names and ages carved into the rock beside the ashes. And there were many camps of disaster victims across the world who had refused aid because aid had already arrived, though in the confusion no one was quite sure where the water tanks and trucks full of other supplies had arrived from. Someone had mentioned “anonymous donors,” which seemed as good an explanation as any, and of course people had more important things to think about just now.
It wasn’t everywhere, not yet. There was a hell of a long way to go. But it was a start. It was a pretty damned good start.
Dean didn’t notice his hands were shaking until the slice of pancake wobbled off his motionless fork and fell back onto the plate with a sorry little plop.
Sam was white and grim.
“All by yourself?” Dean asked quietly.
The soft purple cotton of Gabriel’s shirt hitched and wrinkled against the arm of the sofa as he shrugged. “I have minions. About a dozen. Clueless little brats, but they mostly leave me free to do the heavy lifting.”
Sam nodded tightly at the television. “Etna?”
“Yeah, like Etna. Bit above your average seraph’s paygrade, plugging that up. You okay there, Sasquatch?”
Sam tore his eyes away from the screen with an obvious effort, and shot a hunted sort of a look in Gabriel and Dean’s general direction. “Mostly. Guess I just thought it was over, you know?”
“Hey.” Gabriel tossed a strawberry at Sam. It landed neatly in the centre of his plate. “It is over. It’s done. Lucy’s in timeout. Just left us all his smashed toys to tidy up after him, because he always was a little bitch like that.”
His voice was light in a don’t-you-dare-argue-with-me sort of way, and Dean could have kissed him for the way he could just scoop up all Sam’s guilt and dump it without even a question right where it belonged.
Sam took in a little breath, then let it out, less shaky. “Okay. So, um. Someone’s going to notice, aren’t they? I mean, all this is way, way beyond…”
“Yeah, well.” Gabriel’s teeth flashed in the flicker of the television screen, bright and set and dangerous. “I figure we’re kind of past subtlety at this point, don’t you?”
“Uh, guys?” Dean waved his fork at the television. “Speaking of subtlety.”
“… potential biological attack, calling himself an angel of the lord. Refugees in the camp say that he promised them the barrel would, quote, never run dry, and that the water would always be ‘pure and untainted.’ Those refugees who did drink from the barrel before authorities could confiscate it claimed that the water was clean and fresh, and preliminary tests on site suggested that it was free of any known water-borne diseases, but police attempts to locate the man for further questioning have been unsuccessful. The barrel has been removed for thorough analysis.”
“Fuck.” Gabriel’s head fell back hard against the arm of the chair, knocking into Dean’s boot. “Raniyel. And these, ladies and gentlemen, are Heaven’s most canny when it comes to mingling down here in the cheap seats. Guys, I’ve got to go.”
Dean looked at the slump of Gabriel’s shoulders – just tired now, not dramatic at all – and at the fretful knot of Sam’s hands between his knees. So much for Sam having a rest.
“Okay.” He put his fork back on his plate with a deliberate clink, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “How can we help?”
Which is how Dean came to find himself teaching another earnest young angel not to hold his Red Cross badge upside down.
---
“But we are performing miracles, in the name of our Father.”
Haliel was intense and stoic, in a way that Dean suspected actually meant he was thrilled and terrified to be helping on earth for the first time in a few millennia. It was kind of painful, but there were definitely angels out there with worse attitudes.
Dean pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay, first? Probably best to leave the big guy out of it, yeah? We still don’t know what he’s up to or what he cares about, if anything. Do your miracles in the name of the people you save. Or, hell, Cas, if that rocks your boat. Secondly – dude, it’s not a miracle if there’s some guy standing there telling you he did a miracle. That’s just an argument. You gotta let people find out for themselves and get all worked up about it so they can decide it’s a miracle on their own because there’s no other explanation. Sorry, but that’s how humans work.”
The angel’s big dark eyes went wide and soft, like a wounded deer. “But you know we exist. You tell stories about us.”
“Yeah. We’re great at stories. Here’s another: you, me, sewerage workers. Let’s go.”
---
The next week flitted by in a blur of third-world scenes and a babble of different languages. Gabriel had them working with different angels every day, and Dean’s crash course in look-normal-and-let-people-fill-in-the-blanks got polished to a T. They all meant so well, but seriously – had Castiel ever been that naïve? Or was it just that Castiel had always had conviction, in one thing or another, and these angels had no idea where the script had gone?
It turned out that Raniyel had a sly little sense of humour that made Dean ache for someone else’s. Rachel had a stern idea of justice and a habit of speaking out to ask questions that made Dean suspect she would, eventually, take to this whole thinking-for-yourself idea in a kind of terrifying way. Sarafael found facial expressions fascinating, kept tripping over his own feet unless he was distracted because he was confused by his vessel’s legs, and was surprisingly good with kids.
The days stretched out longer than they probably should have, because they were jumping about in and out of different time zones and neither of them wanted to go to bed until they were stumbling on their feet, until they were completely useless and consented to be zapped back to Gabriel’s house to crash. And, yeah, it was exhausting, it was draining, it was confronting and terrifying, but… they were helping. It was working. Finally, after a lifetime of not being able to fix things after the damage was done, Dean always had a point-and-shoot angel at his side: a powerful, earnestly benevolent creature who would listen to Dean telling him (or her) what people needed, how it could be fixed, how they could make things better.
They saw Gabriel, now and then, fluttering by to check in for a minute or two, always grinning and casually bossy when the other angels were around. He’d turn up for longer, though, when they were alone at the house, sometimes for as long as half an hour; and there, he’d be sharp and sarcastic, or warm, or grouchy, or genuinely amused, like he was comfortable. Like he needed the break from being a leader.
Castiel never showed, though.
Sam was getting quietly impatient with having Dean on his couch when they had a whole house to themselves, probably because he was hoping to get up to athletic naked things with grinning short archangels. Dean eventually, cautiously, chose another bedroom, though not having Sam close by meant he woke up sweating and strangled in thousand-thread-count sheets more often than not. But that was his own problem, and he wasn’t about to go knocking on Sam’s door in the middle of the night like a kid who thought there were monsters in the cupboard. A non-Winchester kid, anyway.
Also Dean was getting some serious blue balls here. Because whenever he wasn’t dreaming about bad crap he was dreaming about… really good crap, and this time he had the visuals and the sounds and the feel of him to remember, and no boner-killing horror getting in the way.
And Dean wasn’t blind, so he couldn’t really miss the way Sam would light up when Gabriel appeared, all broad grins and happiness, or the way his eyes always flicked over in Gabriel’s direction as soon as the angel spoke, or moved, or smiled, or just if he hadn’t looked that way for a while. It was also pretty near impossible to miss the way Gabriel did the same thing. Sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, his eyes would follow Sam with this soft, wondering sort of expression, like he couldn’t really believe he was allowed to be here, like this.
It was all sort of ridiculously gooey, but Dean was a good brother, and didn’t say anything.
And so here they were, with Gabriel and Sam doubled over laughing at something completely ridiculous, with Dean trying his hardest to keep his scowl straight and tell the archangel that he was so not funny.
“Sweetcheeks, I’m hilarious and you love me.”
And the wink and the leer were so over-the-top, and Dean was so exhausted, that he just had to crack up, which of course sent Sam into renewed gales of laughter. Sam, not in a hole, alive and leaning back in his chair, one bare foot kicked forward against the table, ridiculous hair falling over his hand as he covered his face and laughed with a freedom he hadn’t had for years.
And yes, okay, Dean could give Gabriel that.
---
Of course, when Castiel did eventually show his face, it wasn’t to talk to Dean. It was, apparently, to yell at Gabriel.
Dean padded quietly through the darkened villa, managing to avoid all Gabriel’s weird clutter even though he seemed to like leaving big decorative things around all the doors, following the low pissed-off growl of Castiel’s voice.
“… agreed, Gabriel. They deserve rest.”
Gabriel’s voice was quick and determined, like he’d already planned his arguments. Like he thought Castiel was worth convincing. “Y’think I wouldn’t rather be doing this alone? Don’t get me wrong, I love the guys upstairs – well, some of them – but kind of clingy, yeah? There’s too much for just me right now, little sparrow. I need them – we need them – and that means we need Sam and Dean.”
“Gabriel,” Castiel murmured, tired and warning.
“You want them learning humanity off me? From the outside? You wanna do this right, sweetheart, they gotta learn humans from humans, and you know it.”
“Sam and Dean are exhausted, to the depths of their souls. I can’t ask them –”
“Have you tried?” Gabriel raised his voice. “Hey, Dean, has he tried?”
Sneaky demanding little bitch. Like he didn’t know the answer.
Dean moved forward the last couple of steps, to lean in the frame of the kitchen door where the light from the lamp fell low and yellow. “Not a word.”
Castiel turned his aggrieved expression on Dean instead. He was looming pointedly over the chair of a completely unconcerned Gabriel, and his trench coat (incongruous over jeans and a dark green tee) was thick with sea muck.
Dean lifted his eyebrows sarcastically. “Hi, honey. Rough day at the office?”
Castiel glanced down at his clothes like he’d forgotten about them, then frowned them clean. “There was a pair of hydras in the Caspian Sea.”
“Of course there was.”
Gabriel graciously took one foot off the table long enough to kick out a chair. “Hey there tiger. Sit down. Tell little bro here it’s the polite thing to do among human-shaped objects.”
“Sure. Why not.” The chair legs scraped loud over stone in the quiet air. “You gonna join us, Cas?”
Castiel blinked and took a soft, deliberate step backwards. And now he was doing that thing where he tried to avoid Dean’s eyes again. What the hell?
“I should…”
“Yeah. Busy, right?” Even though Castiel had promised Dean not to just disappear.
“Bobby will probably want me to –”
Dean sat forward. “Hold on, Bobby?”
Gabriel snapped himself up a bright blue cocktail. “Hate to shoot you in the foot if you’re looking for a handy exit line, kitten, but when Singer wants you you’ll know about it.”
“What’s Bobby got to do with anything?” Dean demanded again.
Castiel turned his exasperated frown of everyone-around-me-is-a-disappointment on Gabriel. The angle of his jaw stood out dark and rough against the smooth pale skin of his collarbone. “You didn’t tell them?”
Gabriel arched one eyebrow delicately. “Not exactly been flush with free time over here. I’d say that particular snippet rates somewhere below, oh, the collapse of all the tunnels in the London tube network on the priority list. Also? I might have sort of supposed that you would have mentioned it. Up until the point where someone else, and I believe he’s even sitting right in this room, mentioned that you haven’t dropped by for so much as tea and biscuits.”
And hadn’t that been an awkward conversation to accidentally provoke. Although, that explained what had woken Dean up just now. He’d thought he’d smelt candy. Meddling sneaky bitch.
Castiel’s hands closed careful and tight over the back of the chair in front of him, warm and deeply shadowed in the lamplight. “Dean. Bobby has kindly expanded and refined his usual nation-wide searches to cover the globe. Your methods of communication and information-gathering are, for some purposes, far more efficient than ours; so I, and a small contingent of other trustworthy soldiers, have been chasing down his leads to quell all the unusual supernatural activity stirred up, deliberately or otherwise, by recent events.”
“Wow.” Dean had to chuckle a bit at that. Because, Bobby coordinating a crack team of angel hunters? “That’d keep him happy.”
Castiel ducked his head, and a tiny smile played at the corner of his mouth. “He does seem to be enjoying himself, yes.”
“So, gotta ask, Cas. Why Bobby and not us?”
“Bobby can fight from the safety of his kitchen.” Castiel’s gaze was steady and bright and far too sincere for that to be the whole story.
“Yeah, sure. And…?”
“Dean.” Castiel sighed, let the name escape his mouth like a mistake. “As you no doubt heard. I was reluctant to ask you or your brother to put your lives on the line again, so soon, for something that I and my angels should be able to handle ourselves.
(My angels. Wow. So, okay, Dean had already known that Castiel was more or less running the place, but the brusque sort of way he said that, and the sharp powerful line of his shoulders against the black gleam of the window behind him… yeah, definitely hot.)
Dean shifted surreptitiously, and sternly lectured certain parts of his body on appropriate reactions at appropriate moments.
“Help me out here,” Gabriel put in, poking curiously at something orange and squashy in his glass. “I’m pretty sure there was this whole Apocalypse thing not so long ago that got fought out over the whole question of getting to make your own choices. Just trying to remember which side of it these two crazy kids came down on.”
And wow, Castiel really had been hanging around Sam too much, because that was one epic bitchface.
“Gabriel. I know these boys. They are incapable of saying no to such a request, regardless of personal cost. To ask would be unfair.”
Dean leaned forward, lowered his head until Castiel had no choice but to raise his and meet Dean’s eyes. “You know us. Okay. Just how restful do you think it is for us, sitting around doing nothing?” Castiel’s eyes narrowed, like he was confused and intrigued all at once, and it was a good look on him, Dean thought, helplessly besotted. He overrode the response he could see building behind Castiel’s eyes, and laid down, warm and firm, “You know what’s a rest for me now, Cas? Not having Michael and Lucifer hanging over us. Knowing that Sam will still be Sam at the end of every day. Fixing things I can fix. This, what we’re doing with Gabriel and his gang? It’s good. Really good. Okay?”
Castiel was staring at him with dark eyes like he was willing him to lie down, be soothed, be inert, which, screw that. “You should not have to keep giving of yourselves in this way.”
“Yeah, well. I ain’t dead yet, angel.” Dean leaned back and grinned at broad and happy into intent blue eyes, because this was his life, and this was good. And for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long he wasn’t just living from day to day, wasn’t just hoping to survive another minute, another hour, keep his little brother together for another week. It almost felt like he might be able, just for a little, to keep it.
“Apparently not,” Castiel murmured, and smiled, just a tiny thing, private and awkward, but it lit Dean up inside like… eggnog at Christmas, or something poetic like that. Then he stepped back, and his shoulders resettled in that subtle way that always meant he was just about to take off.
“Cas. Stop.” Dean leaned forward over the table and grabbed his wrist.
Castiel looked down at the fingers wrapping around his skin like a strange and inexplicable thing.
“Seriously, Cas.” Dean squeezed, just gently, felt the tips of his fingers pressing against muscle and unbreakable bone. “Why the radio silence? I mean, busy, sure, I get that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stop by here and there, just to check in.”
“I could ask you the same question.” Castiel’s eyes slid up to his, dark and inexorable, sweet and potent as honey.
Dean’s eyes flickered sideways to the chair where Gabriel… had been, and when had he vanished without even one last quip?
“You have Sam back,” Castiel pushed, gentle and almost curious in his detachment. “You have no further need of me. And you have not called. Not once, though your brother prays to Gabriel hourly or more. What should I make of that, Dean?”
The last few words dropped, stark and unaccusing, onto the table between them.
“Okay, you know what? Screw this.” Dean shoved his chair back and was around the table in three steps, pushing right into Castiel’s space. “Look. If you’re trying to let me down gentle or something, fuck that. Just tell me. I get it, man, I do, end of the world, going out with a bang, wanting to grab at something before you lose it. Been there, you know? But if you’re done –”
Castiel’s hand closed over Dean’s mouth, too soft to be ignored. And his eyes, his face, were right there, warm and powerful inches away from Dean’s body.
“Why must you always assume,” Castiel purred, impatient and way way too close and hell yes come closer, “that the eve of an apparently hopeless battle is a new experience for me?”
Dean huffed half-heartedly, busy mapping and memorising the pattern of long lashes, which ones knotted with their neighbours and which ones stood soft and dark and free. “Well, excuse me for not taking advantage of a guy when he’s –”
The tips of long, elegant fingers pressed cautiously against the swell of Dean’s lower lip. “I am not a child, Dean. I know my own mind, and I stand by my choices.”
“Fuck, Cas.” He sighed out on a shudder, felt the bruising heat of fingertips slide just over into the moistness in front of his teeth. “Why do we always end up in an argument here?”
The fingers quivered, and vanished. Dean pressed forward after them, itching to touch, rubbed his nose against the rough, breathlessly amused velvet of Castiel’s cheek, relished the heat of his thigh sliding carefully against the outside of his angel’s, and what the hell was he doing?
“Dean,” Castiel rumbled, stern and tolerant, like he still had questions and accusations but all the urgency had gone out of them. “You have never once given a sign that you wanted me to stay.”
“I made you promise to stay!”
Castiel’s other hand slid up over the waist of his sleep pants, spanned his naked back broad and hot and strong, making questions irrelevant.
“Yes, when you thought you would lose your brother. Forgive me if I’d rather be something more than a crutch.”
Dean gave in, just a little – lifted his hand and touched, heat of skin under cotton, drew three fingers down over the corrugation of ribs to rest in the hollow of Castiel’s hip.
“Cas.” Dean’s lips murmured the silent sound of skin on skin under Castiel’s ear, all independent of his deliberate voice. “This is me. You think if a guy kisses me and I don’t like it, I’m just going to sit there all meek and mild and not tell him to back the hell off?”
Castiel’s breath hitched. Then he… went very still.
“Bobby is praying to me.”
Dean’s fingers bit in warm and tight just above a bony elbow.
“… Oh, no, Cas, don’t you dare.”
“If you want me, Dean, you know how to call me.”
The air was empty and cool.
“Fuck.”
---
“Slipped out, did he?”
Dean looked up. Gabriel was a grey and purple shadow between the pines.
“Hey. Aren’t there lives you should be saving?”
“Could be. But, hey, you’re not the only guy who gets to care about his family.”
“Right.” Dean caught the cold beer that Gabriel held out, and took a swig. “He can’t be serious, can he?”
“Don’t think little bro ever leaned to joke about things like that, kiddo. You either, I’m guessing.” After a minute, the toe of his boot bumped sort of gently against the arch of Dean’s bare foot. “You gonna call him?”
Dean balanced the bottle carefully on his knee. “So… you and Sammy?”
“I don’t know. Up to him.”
“You ever ask him?”
The corner of Gabriel’s mouth curled, sharp and rueful in the shadows. “Touché, Winchester.”
---
After a couple of hours of pacing the vineyards and thinking, Dean prayed.
It was kind of long and rambling, and really embarrassing, but there were some things that were easier to get out when the person in question wasn’t right there in front of you, staring at you with sharp blue eyes that never missed a thing.
Also, it offered the sort of cowardly option of pretending the other person was too busy to hear you.
Castiel didn’t come. But when Dean woke up in the morning, there was a soft black feather, longer than his forearm and rimmed with deep gold, lying on the pillow beside his head.
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Date: 2012-05-24 12:14 am (UTC)