"If you don't have the character and fortitude to walk with someone through their worst moments with compassion and understanding, you don't deserve their best moments."
~ Pandora ~
This chapter contains extremely difficult subject matter. Please read the Content Warning if needed before proceeding.
"I took her to a place that was so incredible it wasn’t human. She actually meowed!” Eileen recited.
Sam laughed. It was quite possibly the single funniest scene he’d ever witnessed in his life. Second only to the look on Harry’s face when Sally proved, in the middle of a packed diner, that women can, in fact, fake orgasms, punctuated with a perfect one-liner from an onlooker: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
He didn’t care that he’d seen the movie more times than was healthy. It was part one of tonight’s double feature. As much as he enjoyed the movie, that pick was for Eilee. Liar Liar was his choice.
Eileen frowned, concerned, when she noticed Sam’s smile disappear instantaneously. He stopped in his tracks a step later. Sam looked back in Cas’ direction, wondering why he couldn’t hear the angel’s footsteps right behind them anymore. The look on Sam’s face changed the instant he saw the expression on Castiel’s. The angel stood frozen in place, popcorn bowl and a glass of root beer in hand, looking as though he’d just heard a far-off, blood-curdling scream. Sam felt sick to his stomach from merely seeing the seraph’s face. Before he could utter any sound, Cas disappeared before his eyes. Suddenly without anyone holding them, the stainless steel popcorn bowl and pint glass hit the ground. The glass shattered, shooting shards across the map room floor as the popcorn sloshed out of its bowl, overturning completely.
Without hesitation or a word, Sam put down his bowl and drink right quick, sprinting to Dean’s room. He flung open the door, finding Dean’s closet door hanging from one hinge, the jackets and shirts inside still rocking back and forth in the aftermath of Castiel outright ripping his coat and jacket off their hangers. Eileen walked up behind him, quick and quiet. He turned around, meeting her worried gaze.
“Dean?”
She didn’t wait for his answer to close in and wrap her arms around him. For a long moment, she pulled back to look at him again. Shaking his head, distraught, Sam bit his lip before he answered.
“Must be.” She didn’t need him to sign it. She read his lips as though reading words on a page. Truly scared, Sam pulled her back in, nuzzling his cheek into her silky brown hair. They held on tight to each other.
◇
"Dean!?"
Castiel hectically cast his gaze around, distraught. Baby was here, with Dean nowhere to be seen.
“CAS!”
The angel moved before Dean finished making the sound. Vaulting the aluminium highway rail, he found Dean hanging from the cliff by a sapling barely holding onto the rock and dirt it was anchored in. He dove for Dean’s hand, seizing his wrist, careful not to disturb the infant tree doing the heavy lifting.
“Cas! I didn’t…!”
He couldn’t put too much pressure on Dean’s wrist and hand without breaking them, and the angle was precarious at best. Castiel watched in horror as the sapling’s roots started to come undone. This time, they wouldn’t stop. Digging the side of his heel into the ground behind a small rock bought him only moments. It started to roll up out of the ground when he put too much weight on it trying to lift Dean. Desperate, his nose bleeding into the soil, he reached his other hand toward a wooden post the guardrail was bolted to, latching on telekinetically. He tried, but if he held it much longer, he’d burst a blood vessel that mattered. They started to slide.
Cas’ gaze snapped toward the Impala. He prayed that what Dean kept in the trunk hadn’t changed. Instead of pulling himself up, this time, he brought the tool he needed to him. A crowbar snapped into being in his outstretched hand.
Dean full-body twitched, startled when a deep boom akin to firing a steel anchor into the ground echoed through the air. Their slide stopped instantly. He laughed gleefully.
Holy shit!
He could breathe again! Taking an instant to think, Dean balled a fist. Something that couldn’t slip out of Cas’ iron grasp. Held it like his life depended on it. Letting go of the sapling, he made the turn onto his chest this time, grabbing at grass, dandelions, anything that didn’t have thorns, he hauled himself up high enough that he could latch his hand over Cas’ forearm and once they knew his hold was good, Cas pulled, dragging him up, across the grass and to his chest.
Dean laughed, giddy. “Cas…!” The sound was, Hey! and, Man, are you a sight for sore fuckin’ eyes! rolled into one. Lying on stones and dirt, Dean slipped an arm between the angel’s shoulder and the ground, going for a hug, maybe a kiss, only to collapse onto Cas’ breast and collarbone, dizzy. Shuddering like the air had turned arctic in a moment’s time. Panic hit. He’d almost…! Cas let go of the hand he held, hauling Dean up to lie on his chest until their breathing and panic mellowed out. He let go of the crowbar, tenderly wrapping that hand around the back of Dean’s head, holding him in the crook of his neck and shoulder.
Safe. You’re safe.
Senses catching up, Castiel realized he was shuddering too. Dean latched a leg over his, dragging their bodies flush together. As fear subsided, an unbridled need to do something he thought impossible three days before, ignited underneath it. Blazing to life like nothing he’d ever felt. Some small part of his brain kept logic switched on. Baby’s back seat… the only place near enough. But Cas… Cas wasn’t ready for what he wanted. They couldn’t. Not right now.
Starlight © Scarlett Dixon | In | K | L | R | T |
He moved, finally able to see Cas’ face and look the angel in the eyes. He froze, staring wide-eyed, taking in everything he could. A dark want burned in the angel’s eyes. They had to get up, get over the rail, and get to the car. If he kissed Cas, he wasn’t going to stop. Dean got to his elbows, then his knees, hauling himself to his unsteady feet, holding onto the guard rail. Minutes ago, he’d climbed over easily.
That was unwise on legs this wobbly. Cas’ hand on the back of his thigh helped him up onto steady footing. He went over the rail on his stomach, one leg, then… the heel of his trailing boot snagged on the rail’s back lip, sending him stumbling backward.
By some miracle, he stayed on his feet. The jumpscare set his heart racing again. He held himself up with one hand on each knee, looking on as Cas vaulted the railing and landed a little unsteadily, wiping fresh blood away from under his
nose. The instant the angel stood solid and strong on his feet, Dean damned near lunged at him. Coming together was a haphazard mess, hands tucked under clothing in the wrong ways, their entire arms wrapped around each other in the wrong places.
Only one thing was perfect: the way their devouring mouths came together.
For a long… long, long moment, Dean had the strangest impression that nothing else existed. Not the gravel and ground under his feet, the air around them, or the world beyond that. He couldn’t sense any of it. Nothing other than the heavy press of their bodies against one another and their welded lips.
Dean felt his legs about to go. Air. He needed to breathe. Dean parted their mouths no more than needed for air to slip between. He was gasping for air like a burned-out sprinter, his forehead wobbling against Cas’. The angel stood firm, an inhuman pillar Dean shamelessly clung to.
Words started stumbling out of his mouth. “I… Cas, this wasn’t me… it was an accident. A fucking accident—!”
“Dean—”
“I swear to you, I wasn’t trying to…” Kill myself. He couldn’t say it to the angel’s face. “I wasn't…” Dean’s uncomprehending gaze magnetically snapped to the cliff edge. “What the fuck…!”
“Dean…” Dean snapped his mouth shut, eyes fearfully fixing on Castiel. “I know.”
Dean’s breath left his chest, leaving him dizzy. The adrenaline crash hit, dropping his eyelids closed. In its place, something else rose. Heat. Blood rushed to his head—both of them. He’d prayed and…
I always come when you call.
Smiling with water in his eyes, Dean bowed his head. Cas always would. The thought was in his head unbidden as something greater than plain information; a foundation of profound truth. Dean slumped against the angel for a few seconds before prying himself away. Slipping out of Cas’ arms, he half stumbled aside along the guardrail’s support, heart still thumping in his chest, though gradually beating slower. Castiel followed him, arms at his sides. He stepped in closer as Dean’s breathing evened out, burning eyes fixed on Dean’s open lips, his instinctively falling open, inviting.
Dean gave in, no longer keeping himself from reading what those lips said unspoken, letting his gaze rest where it wanted, free of the need to look down and away. A quizzical tilt of Cas’ head asked him for another kiss—to breathe the same air again. Giving in to the carnal daze taking him over, Dean cocked his head to get at Cas as deep as he could, letting his head slowly weigh into the kiss.
His nose touched Cas’ skin, and he snapped his head back, blinking. Dean frowned. Confused, he slid sideways out of being wedged between the aluminium rail and his rescuer. Castiel watched serenely, letting him go. Dean took disoriented, zig-zag steps toward Baby on the rough gravel, bringing his hands to his forehead as Castiel shadowed him, concerned.
Letting his palms fall to cover his eyes, Dean wove under the momentary influence of another dizzy spell. He set his stance wide. Something was… off. He’d gone from sheer, unadulterated terror to feeling like he’d downed a triple hit of lust-laced valium—from sixty to zero—in seconds. It wasn’t… natural.
He turned to face Castiel, frowning and glaring hard, backing away.
“Back off.”
Cas stopped and cocked his head back like he’d been slapped. Hesitating, he reached out. “Dean…”
“Stop it. Leave me alone.” Castiel’s hand froze mid-air.
Understanding bloomed on Cas’ face, and Dean felt his emotions change, returning to the incredulous terror he’d felt realizing how near he came to plummeting down the cliff face. His anger began to boil, slowly rising. “Cas, you can’t do that to someone. I need… I need to feel…”
"Dean, you were uncomfortable, in distress. I could ease that, so I did.”
"Cas, you’re not listening. Don’t do that kind of thing to me.” Dean frowned as doubt snaked its way into his heart and had him questioning. “That night… yeah, I was out of my mind over the prospect of having you back. But… what I was feeling… How much of that was me… and how much was you? Were you making me feel that way?”
"No. There are certain effects opening myself up for someone might have. I don’t know anything certain. This is as new to me as for you,” Cas confessed, fear beginning to show through on his face, his eyes dropping away. Dean’s stomach lurched.
Stepping up on him, angry, Dean demanded, “Look me in the eye, Cas, and tell me you aren’t making me feel this way, the same way you cut my fucking strings, and switched off that panic.”
Cas shook his head, fear taking over his expression. “Dean, why are you doing this?”
"Answer the question, Cas.”
“Dean…”
“Answer the fucking question!” Dean took hold of Castiel by the collar and violently shook him. Cas didn’t so much as lift a finger to stop it, letting himself be moved.
"Dean, you’re… tearing apart the memory of something… extraordinary. I don’t understand… why?” he pleaded, slowly taking gentle hold of Dean’s hands.
The fury boiling up inside Dean reached its zenith. He cocked back a white-knuckled fist, ready to extract the answer he was demanding forcibly. He was only vaguely aware of the fog hanging heavily around his better judgment. Cas’s demeanour changed immediately. He didn’t need to read Dean’s mind to know that there was nothing his gentler side could do to keep their train on its tracks. Answering Dean’s aggression evenly in kind, Castiel came back ferociously, their trajectories circling as Dean, taken aback, started trying to extricate himself instead.
"Do you have any fucking idea what the Emptiness is? I spent thousands of years becoming intimately familiar with the agony corpses feel, consumed by maggots and rotting in the grave. I refused to give up—to sleep. I spent the process awake because that hellhole is the end of the fucking line! I wish that were the worst it had in store. I keep thinking this might be some special Hell constructed specifically to torment me. Afraid the other shoe will hit the ground any goddamn second now—that we’ll come apart in ways I cannot stop. That this is the Shadow’s elaborate torture ripping to shreds a bond I cherish more than my existence—until there’s nothing left!”
Cas turned away from Dean, keeping an unshakeable hold on him with one hand by the front of his jacket, shouting viciously into an empty sky, “If you think I’m going to lie down dead and let this happen, you have another thing coming!” Dean watched, shaken by just how close to insanity Cas’ outburst sounded. By how inhumanly inescapable the angel’s grasp on his clothing was. Cas slumped, bracing himself up with a hand planted on his knee, his breathing stilted, shaking fearfully, keeping himself standing with his grasp on Dean’s clothing instead of dragging him by it.
Dean frowned, his expression softening as he unclenched his lowering fist. Seeing Cas so weak, his evident pallor and sickly sheen of sweat, still driving himself to fight for this—for them—to the bitter end, shook him.
Before he realized what they were doing, his arms circled Cas, helping him upright again. The angel went slack, laying his head on Dean’s upper arm as though it took everything his vessel had left to remain conscious and standing. They figured out how to lean into one another without bringing each other down, and stayed that way. Holding Cas close, one hand flat on his back, Dean’s eyes darted about frantically, having a hard time taking on board what he’d been told. Thousands of years being eaten away…? “It’s been months, not—”
Castiel's patronizing laugh punctuated the sentence as he came back to life, animated by a frightening vigour. The seraph turned his burning gaze on Dean from close up. The burn wasn’t desire or affection. It was angry, white-hot, and terrifying. “For you,” he growled, wrapping a hand around the back of Dean’s head, pulling him close to look him in the eyes. “Answer to me; if everything I’ve suffered has amounted to nothing, you will answer me; why?”
Dean remained speechless facing the angel’s fury. He swallowed nervously, as afraid to ask the question as he was of the answer. “How long…?”
"Eight thousand years.”
Shoulders sagging, his grip on Castiel’s coat loosening, Dean asked helplessly, “Is what I’m feeling even real? Do you want this so badly, I don’t have a choice?” Fog scrambling his thoughts thinned. Dean knew full well where the blinding rage he’d nearly let loose on Castiel came from. A thing with a mind of its own, planted and thriving in the putrid soil of every awful thing he’d seen, done, and suffered. At a loss, he met Cas’ glare for moments, unable to look him in the eye thereafter, ashamed.
Seeing Dean fold and offer no defence smothered the angel’s flaming anger like water. His hold on Dean’s head became gentle again. “I’m able to affect what someone feels, Dean. I’m an angel.” Cas’ intent gaze asked Dean to look at him with words unspoken. Slowly, Dean did. “If I hadn’t heard your heartbeat that first night, I would’ve thought you lie dead beside me. Your trust was absolute. I hope some of that was my doing, but not the way you’re afraid of. What happened? What’s changed?” Castiel demanded, but softly. With every word Cas spoke, Dean turned his head further away again, almost cringing. Castiel’s tone returned to its gentler register. “Dean, talk with me.”
"I can’t, Cas… I can’t talk about it. Any of it,” Dean shrugged helplessly, childlike. There was too much that was too awful for words. He couldn’t say it out loud, but he didn’t want to carry it alone anymore. Cornered. Unwilling to stay, unable to go. There was no way out…
"I can help y—”
Snapping, Dean shoved Cas back against the side of the Impala. “You want to know? Fine! Look!” Castiel’s gaze fell for a moment as he gauged whether or not Dean’s inviting him in might inflict even more damage on the bond they shared. “Fucking look!” Dean shouted from inches away, shaking him again. Their unyielding gazes locked and stayed that way until Dean felt something give. He exhaled sharply, blinking. A single tear ran down from one of his eyes. Face devoid of comprehension, Dean wiped it away. Slowly, understanding followed.
Dean couldn’t speak aloud the things he carried—not even close—but he wanted Castiel to know, to understand. Resting a comforting hand on either side of Dean’s rigid neck and jaw, Castiel guided Dean’s face back toward him and looked into him, eyes wide, drawing nearer.
Castiel's piercing gaze transfixed Dean. Somehow, it rounded off hard edges—hypnotized—made his head wobble on his neck. Had him wanting to fall in, let go, and peacefully… drown.
The Night We Met © pimento-girl | DA | R | T |
◇
❗ "Where's your brother?!” The vicious shout fractured the silent night air, despite coming from inside a motel room. Castiel walked over the empty parking space outside the window into the room. Closed, smoke-discoloured venetian blinds couldn’t keep his eyes from seeing what transpired on the other side. Dean stood close behind him and to one side, near enough he could feel his warmth.
Dean scrunched his eyes closed and opened them again. The blinds were gone. He looked in on himself, witnessing the memory disembodied. He watched himself shrink back from his father as his dad took step after shuffling step closer, looking exhausted, ragged, fresh from a hunt, down into the bottom of the bottle in hand, his pupils so dilated they were almost black. The demon possessing John Winchester tonight was not one born of Hell, rather the cornfields of Tennessee.
"Don't shrug at me and tune out when I’m talking to you!” John swung. The hit landed on the side of Dean’s head square and with full force; it took his knees out from under him. He fell back into the wall, his shoulders and the back of his head making full-on contact. The hit robbed him of any control of his arms. Couldn’t break his fall. Another blow landed on the side of his mouth. He spent weeks after this worried he’d lose a tooth. Somehow managed to salvage it.
If he made too loud a sound, John hit him harder. So, he closed his stinging lips, gritted his aching teeth and kept quiet. John seemed to realize what he was doing couldn’t show. He stuck to body shots. Hits to the head landed in his, at that time, longer hair. On Dean’s raised arm. Long sleeves it was, then.
I lost Sammy.
When you screw up so badly it can get someone else killed, this is what happens.
I deserve it.
Water sprung into Dean’s eyes as he watched his father work him over from the sidewalk, through the motel wall. Suddenly, this weird vertigo got ahold of him, inexorably drawing him into the room even though his feet stayed in place on the pavement. No. No, no! His heart started beating frantically, fear he’d never shown before had the muscles in his face and neck taut, his eyes wide, and tears falling without his eyelids having to move at all. He would have given anything not to be inside this memory again, but felt powerless to stop it.
Cas’ arm came up in front of him, his forearm against his belly—he jumped at the touch—and, in an instant, the vertigo and fear disappeared. The gravity dragging him back into being that boy inside all over again had been severed with what seemed an odd, surprising finality. He turned his head to watch Cas watching him—them?—without pity or condolence, taking it in, unblinking.
Never look away from suffering.
Bobby’s words echoed in his mind. The corner of Dean’s lips turned up as he looked fondly over the angel’s profile. A blunt, aching feeling took a squeezing hold of his heart.
Castiel stood, watching, as the man Dean loved, trusted, and idolized lay down a beating on his son—his baby boy—that would kill Dean if he didn’t stop.
Then, he did. His hand went still, cocked back in the air. Dean found his feet again, the way he always did, as John turned and stumbled away, summoning every scrap of restraint he could muster.
“Get out.”
Dean looked up at his father, bewildered. John would lay one on him then send him to another room, out to the car, or somewhere out of mind if out of sight wasn’t possible, needing to pretend he didn’t exist for a while, but never… “Where am I gonna go?”
"I don’t know and I don’t care.” The words hit Dean in the face like a slap.
"Uhh… I need to—” …wash the blood off before I go.
He tried to say it, but the look on John’s face kept his mouth closed better than wearing an iron mask.
John lumbered up to him and brought his face in close to the quivering boy’s, looking him in the eye, daring him to flash the faintest hint of defiance at him. “Get the fuck out. Or I’ll kill you.”
The words hit harder than any physical punishment he’d ever taken. Dean felt something in him shatter. Hurting so badly and thoroughly, it was impossible to pinpoint what it was. Stunned speechless, unable to look his dad in the eye, Dean made one foot move, then the other. He almost forgot his jacket with keys and wallet in the pocketson the way out. He walked out the door feeling as though he was swimming through the air, dazed and untethered. He felt the body he lived in, the clothing he wore, his plasticky, numb skin, the blood pooling in bruises underneath and drying on it, didn’t feel real. The world around him didn’t feel like something substantial enough to hold on to, not anymore.
John passed out on Dean’s bed within minutes. He never remembered what happened that night. Perhaps because it was easier for his conscience that way.
Dean turned to walk toward the car, freezing in place, his breath leaving his lungs when, out of nowhere, he came face to face with a staring creeper in a tan trench coat.
"The fuckin’ hell is your…”
The look in the considerably older man’s strangely vivid blue eyes made him feel… quiet. His gaze fell to the centre of the man’s chest, like he didn’t have enough strength remaining to hold his eyeballs up. Letting go of his breath, he bowed his head, his breathing going shallow, wincing out of surprise when a gentle touch appeared on his cheeks, guiding him to turn up his face. The man’s forehead gently leaned into his. Dean let out a confused laugh made of scarcely more sound than breath. His body hung from the hands on his face as though disconnected from his brain.
There was light—fire—so hot it burned blue, in the stranger’s eyes. It occurred to him that this is probably what someone homeless would feel like; out in the freezing cold day in and day out. Finally able to warm their hands by a barrel fire or around a mug of hot soup, for the first time in far too goddamn long… except that’s the way this man’s presence blanketed and warmed his soul.
The skin of his forehead made contact with Dean’s and it seemed to Castiel that in every way but the literal, the ribs caging his heart cracked straight down the middle and, like wrought iron gates, swung open wide, exposing the bonfire in his chest and letting the feeling fuelling it out into the world around him. It was into that bonfire he wordlessly invited the boy to discard anything and everything he needed to. The night's razor-sharp despair that shattered his heart and slashed up his will to carry on, and the pain wracking his body—that was all Dean gave over to be incinerated. The rest he kept for himself, knowing he could carry it.
Cas nodded as slightly as he smiled. He would have taken it all away if he’d been allowed. Dean, however, had made his choices. Castiel admired and respected them. Dean would never remember this. Stepping back, the seraph looked the boy over from head to toe. His heart was whole again, and he was young and hale—his wounded body would heal well. Any work he could do in this moment was done.
The boy blinked and started when he woke from the trance he’d fallen into. He had no idea how much time had gone by, but there were tears on his cheeks and he’d been standing there long enough his slightly open mouth had gone dry…
Dean looked on, gobsmacked, as a white glow started to show under the skin where Cas’ forehead and his—theirs? Whatever—touched, unable to shake the feeling that he was watching memory and reality intersect. He remembered lingering there on that cracked, buckling sidewalk, feeling shattered. He couldn’t do this anymore. Even little Sammy wasn’t reason enough. It hurt so fucking bad… then, it didn’t and this clean yet pungent smell tinged the air. He remembered looking around like he expected someone should be standing there. No one. Hunh…
He had to clean the blood off himself and his clothing. Find band-aids. Get his shit together. He could feel weak, but he couldn’t let anyone see that. Mistakes of that sort get you eaten alive out on the street.* Dean watched his younger self cross the parking lot and head toward the corner store for supplies he needed to shoplift. His too-big cargo jacket came in real handy. He already had an idea or two about where to find a bathroom he could use undisturbed.
Castiel's touch appeared on his shoulder, giving Dean a start. The sensation wrenched him out of his thoughts, putting his feet back on solid ground. He met Cas’ gaze head-on, swallowing the lump in his throat.
He’d spent his whole life looking the other way, shoving shit like this aside and soldiering on. Now, he recognized it for what it was: a scar. An indelible mark. A gnarled, mangled piece of him that would always be the boy in that room who’d first learned what the icy breath of Death felt like—not from some supernatural monstrosity—but by his father’s hands and words, under his father’s roof. Castiel’s other hand came up to cover his eyes, his thumb resting lightly on his lips. Dean laid his head into the touch, reaching up, stopping when his fingertips grazed the back of Cas’ hand. He started breathing in deeply through his mouth. Feeling his heart grow calmer in his chest, it returned to an even, steady beat. His shoulders relaxed. He hadn’t realized they’d been that hunched up.
Castiel took his hand away, letting the daylight in. Dean let his hand fall back to his side. Dean looked around, momentarily confused, wincing at the sudden change in light. Daylight? A pine tree line. Water. Just outside civilization. Far enough away, you couldn’t see it. Close enough, you could still smell it. A gentle breeze rustled the trees. Small, quick waves lapped onto the stony shoreline. Dean looked up, wincing at the sun’s obliterating brightness. He stepped back, unsteady.
Clunk… clunk. A wooden dock underfoot. They’d been here before. Dean looked at the angel, a sheen of vulnerable surprise in his eyes; Cas remembered. Castiel let his hand come away from Dean’s shoulder. Dean brought his hand back up, catching the seraph’s forearm. Dean stared down at where he held onto Cas, watching the seraph’s hand cautiously turn down, touching him in return. He didn’t know much, at least not compared to some, but he knew in that moment he wanted to hold and be held by the angel there with him. But… he couldn’t move. Drawn as he was, something in his head still occupied space between them.
“Dean…”
Letting out a sigh, Dean smiled. He didn’t have to look at Cas’ eyes to see the unabashed, inquisitive look he knew went along with the tone of voice.
Dean frowned. As much as he wanted to keep his sights on where Cas had his hand on him, a sound in his ear started getting louder, and louder, and louder until he had to know where it was coming from.
Castiel watched, concerned and looking for the source of Dean’s disquiet in their decidedly tranquil reverie as Dean’s attention seemed pecked at by something. Eventually, wrenched away from him entirely. Dean started and dropped his arm, pulling away the instant he blinked and found their surroundings changed…
◇
❗ The sound: water gurgling out of a restroom tap without an aerator. Dean stood aside as a gaggle of the bar’s lady patrons passed between them. None of them looked at either him or Cas like they existed.
Dean met Cas’ intent, expressionless gaze. Castiel watched as Dean processed and realized where and when they were. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Cas took a levelling breath as he watched Dean orient himself, forcing his legs to walk down the poorly lit hall. He stood in front of a heavy door held shut by a closer. The sign on the washroom door: MEN. His jaw and cheeks worked, brow furrowed, tendons in his neck went taut. Then came a hand on his shoulder. Something inside him gave. Feeling relieved—steadier—Dean reached for the grab handle, opening the door wide.
Within moments of the two men inside coming into view, it became apparent to Castiel what was happening. The jeans on the stocky man facing the wall, propped up by one hand against it, were undone and down to just below his ass cheeks. His skivvies were flying low, too. Lean, limber, bowed legs dressed in jeans bought ripped belonged to the young man on one knee between the flexing ass obscuring their view and the grimy, ceramic tiled wall.
Oily yellow lights lit the restroom that indelibly smelled of human effluence and vomit that no amount of cloying air freshener and an insufficient amount of cleaning product could hope to combat.
A pang of pain shot through Dean’s heart as he watched the legs in ripped jeans start to flail. His gaze involuntarily dropped to the floor. He didn’t need to look to know and feel what was going down. A large hand had an iron grip on the back of his head. Too much, too far in. He couldn’t breathe. It was blocking his throat completely. Even breathing through his nose did no good. Choking, he started to bring his teeth to bear, then the sudden violence of the thrusts against his face slammed his head back into the wall with stunning force.
His arms started frantically looking for purchase on the wall. Malnourished, he didn’t have strength enough to shove the sturdy john away. The only thing that might keep him from blacking out was trying to stand or to turn his head and fall sideways. The effort earned him a moment’s reprieve, saving him from vomiting and passing out.
As suddenly as it turned violent, it was over. The cumming penis straining deeper into his mouth stopped, then it was gone and a hand was caressing his face as he hacked up semen in his throat. Disgusted, stomach sick, his mouth and throat hurting, he slapped it away without thinking. That same hand came down backhand on his cheek, hard. One of the man’s feet took a step toward him. Seemingly, he thought better of it when Dean instinctively cringed and uselessly put up shaking arms in defence.
Pathetic. The trick laughed darkly as he tucked his slick penis away, zipping and buttoning himself up as he turned away from the boy on the floor, slumped against the wall coughing, gagging and wheezing for air after accidentally sucking another glob of cum into his lung.
The man met Castiel’s ice-cold gaze head-on as he walked out of the open restroom door, slipping by him, chuckling. “Your turn, pal.” Castiel icily watched him go, grateful the man would continue living his life as if Hell wasn’t real, only to discover that it is.
Castiel observed as Dean of long ago found his feet and pulled himself up to the sink, curling over it, retching up as much foul-smelling, curd-laden ejaculate as he could, turning on the cold water tap and spitting into the sink. It came out tinged pink with blood and snot.
Glancing Castiel’s way, eyes bloodshot and tears running down his face, the boy flipped him off. “Fuck off, pal.” Cas’ gaze promptly hit the tile floor. Dean’s voice sounded raw, weak, and wrecked. Speaking caused him pain. Dean couldn’t see him clearly through watering, bloodshot eyes, and he hadn’t spoken, betraying his voice. There was no need to alter the boy’s memory.
He backed out of the room, reaching for the edge of the door, wordlessly inviting Dean to close it. Dean started, letting it go. Castiel turned his gaze to Dean as the door creaked closed beside them. Dean tried to keep his gaze up, look him in the eye, and keep his eyes from watering worse than they already were. He succeeded at none of those things. What he’d done back then staved off him and Sam starving another four or five days. This time, John would return before things got worse. That did nothing to take the edge off how shamed, filthy, and worthless it had made him feel. It still did. His hand started heading up to cover his eyes.
“Dean, don’t—” Cas gave his head a gentle shake and brought in his hand to keep Dean’s from rising further.
"Feel ashamed?” Dean demanded, interrupting, his lips quivering slightly. Castiel decided against what he’d been about to say, seeming tense for a moment, only to have found something that gave him peace by the time he met Dean’s gaze again. Dean swallowed nervously as he looked Cas in the eye. What he saw therein—there was only one word to describe it. Reverence.
Castiel’s expression changed. He regretted realizing something too late. Lower this time, Cas’s hand came to his arm again. “Dean, leave. Please. You don’t need to be here with me for me to see your memories. I don’t want you anywhere near this because of me.”
Dean scoffed bitterly, sniffling. “I already am, Cas.” He shrugged helplessly, fixing his hardened gaze on the closed bathroom door. “I live with this shit every fuckin’ day.”
Castiel blinked, shocked, looking away from Dean, taking a small, weaving step backward when a second vertigo wave washed over him. He looked up to Dean, deepening fear and confusion taking over his face. For minutes now, a growing sensation, the onslaught of a fast-moving current, had been worrying him. Now, it began crashing into him, such that even a seraphim found it near impossible to keep steady on his feet. He wanted to stay. Unless he fought it, it would carry him away from this place and time.
“Cas?!”
Dean latched a hand onto the angel’s forearm when his gaze went unsettlingly distant. He looked like he might keel over backward. Castiel’s attention snapped back to here and now—to Dean.
Again, drifting away from Dean, Cas looked at the hallway wall as though looking through it. “Let go, Dean… I have to go.”
“Cas, what is it? What’s going on?” Dean’s hold on him got much tighter.
The seraph shook his head. Defeated, Dean let go of his hold on Castiel’s arm. What was happening? All this talk about choosing each other, about being what he needed him to be when he needed it, and now the angel was the one freaking and squirrelling the hell outta here? What the fuck?
Backing down the hall, his steps getting quicker with each one, Cas let his focus be taken from Dean and turned it to keeping his bearings in the swirling eddy of time and an odd species of gravity.
“Cas? Where the Hell are you goin’? I let you in and you just nope the fuck out?” demanded Dean, striding after him.
Cas spared Dean one last moment of his undivided attention. He’d turned his back on Dean and begun walking away without having realized it. He planted his feet in place and turned to look back, taking in the sight of Dean standing just beyond reach, one hand still up in the air a bit, hoping for him to reach back, the look on his face what—the-fucking at him, accusing, and hurt. The moment in time crystallized perfectly in his mind—both what was here in their minds and seeing Dean entranced in the world outside against the backdrop of a majestic hundred-year maple tree and the blue and violet twilight sky, blended. This place, this moment in time, was the beacon to which he would return.
Something deep, deep within him didn’t believe they lived in a universe cruel enough to rip them away from one another now. His perception returned to the dim roadhouse hallway—to Dean’s hurt and fear plain on his face. “I have work to do.” Stepping back on his heels, he turned away. His feet stopped walking him away from Dean. Leaving things this way was wrong. Too painful for Dean. Looking back over his shoulder, Castiel smiled, warm and loving, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back before you know I’m gone,” he promised. Cas let his feet walk him around the corner, giving up his hold on this time and place as he vanished from Dean’s sight.
Dean rounded the corner and started, freezing. The look on his face hardened. Son of a bitch was gone.
◇
❗ Castiel walked into the remote campground bathroom, dispassionately taking in the sickly yellow lighting. Spider webs clothed light fixtures and corners, littered with the tightly wrapped carnage of years of good eats for the facility’s resident arachnids. The distinct stench of decades of filth aerosolized by air dryers clinging to every surface of the repugnant structure. An unclean, unshaven beast of a man exited a bathroom stall. It only took a few steps before Cas saw the limp, lifeless-looking lower limbs of a young boy in ripped jeans from where he stood. The man continued about the business of rinsing his wilting penis off at a sink as if Castiel wasn’t there. Cas walked over to the stall, swinging the door back completely, taking in the sight of the boy before him, his heart breaking.
The man behind him started when the door moved for no apparent reason. The movement had drawn his attention back to the not-so-lively looking kid. The corners of a bunch of poorly folded hundred-dollar bills stuck out of one of the kid’s jeans pockets. Enough to convince the kid this was worth it. With no one there to stop the john, he tucked himself away, doing up his fly and walked back toward the stall, reaching for the money in the boy’s pocket. He was bent halfway down when something yanked him backward by the collar of his jacket, throwing him into the sinks and mirrors on the wall behind him with bone-snapping force, shattering the mirror. Shitting himself, terrified and confused, the man fled the isolated facility favouring his fractured ribs and cut leg.
Turning his attention back to the boy draped lifelessly over the toilet in the stall, Castiel frowned. Something wasn’t right. The boy’s arms lie loosely hanging off both sides of the toilet, one of them resting on the floor in his own puke, bile and blood. He’d tried to fight off the much larger man, not stopping until he couldn’t maintain consciousness. His jeans hung down around his mid-thigh. The blood running down the backs and insides of his legs was flecked with a sickening amount of debris. A shredded rectum and lower colon, torn anus. Kidney damage. He’d been unconscious while the worst of it unfolded. It was searing pain that finally blacked him out altogether. Internal bleeding. The contents of his bowels leaked into places it didn’t belong. Infection would likely kill him even if someone managed to find him.
His heartbeat was weak, his breathing too shallow. A candle’s flame only a breath away from being snuffed out forever. Castiel looked around, confused. This boy… wasn’t supposed to die here, but no one was coming. No one. There wasn’t anyone, anywhere around for miles who could find him before it was too late. The butterfly heartbeat in Dean’s chest twitched a wing for the last time.
Cas' uncomprehending gaze returned to Dean—the movement so smooth it was nothing if not alien. His expression turned at once present and warm, yet distant and all-seeing. Stepping back, out of the flow of time, Castiel watched as the first of a delicate web of synapses lit up, forming a hazy starburst at the root of every choice in every mind whose actions had intermingled with and influenced theirs. Each of those actions—their own and those of others—minute tributaries into a greater body of flowing energy. A burst of light sparked where their paths first converged. Islands formed in its course, where their ways separated from and returned to one another as they moved forward in time. Their bond grew deeper, wider, and brighter—always. Castiel laughed, a single, exhaled shot of breath. Absence…
The branching paths of all possible permutations of every choice either one ever made withered away as each choice was made—an incomprehensibly complex and intricate series of events that brought him through to this moment. Then, all at once, Castiel saw it.
Their love manifested before his eyes, taking shape as a function of time, space, a variant of gravity and the free radical choice. He saw it; dazzling, vibrant, and suspended in the solution of existence. It was exquisite and elegant, enduring and ever-changing, yet fragile, as only a natural wonder can be; and it didn't end here.
The sudden presence of bare skin under the fingertips of his outstretched hand snapped him back to where and when his vessel resided. This skin was softer, younger, more pliant and unblemished by scars accumulated over a lifetime of violence, but it was Dean's.
“No, you don’t, you stubborn mule,” Cas murmured, chuckling darkly. “Not yet.” Castiel moved Dean’s feet out of their awfully twisted position. Cradling Dean’s face in one hand, holding it away from the filth that coated the porcelain toilet base, he rested his palm on the boy’s tailbone, a radiant white light shining beneath it, spreading deep into Dean’s lifeless body.
Dean took in a strong breath, jerking awake. His stomach failed him immediately. What little was in his stomach, he threw up. Pushing himself up off the toilet, he used wadded-up toilet paper to wipe away as much of the filth on him as he could. He remembered being punched in the face at least twice. Probing his jaw and cheekbone, he felt almost no pain. Odd. He instinctively knew he should’ve been much sorer than he was. Missing teeth that he wasn’t. Then his gaze fell on the sinks and shattered mirrors on the other wall. He had no idea what had happened—didn’t give a flying fuck either—but letting someone bring him somewhere this far away from other people was a mistake he would never make again.
He left the outhouse, walking past the man in a dirty and worn tan trench coat leaning back, collar up against the cold, the bottom of one foot planted against the cinderblock wall, as though he were invisible. Stopping at the road, unsure of which way to go, Dean looked both ways. The street lights were dim in both directions. The forest beyond the cones of light was black—no city lights in sight.
Castiel’s gaze focused intently on the street lights to the right. The lights along the road in that direction slowly grew brighter, steadier. Dean reached into his back pocket, making sure he still had the john’s money before turning and heading right, inexplicably sure of which road to take to get back to Sammy.
Castiel bowed his head, knowing now why Dean called him here, and where he was needed next.
◇
Entropy © Winchester-Reload | In | JDA | P | R | T |

Lawrence, Kansas - October 29th, 1983

Kneeling penitently by the bedside, the dim, oily yellow light on the master bedroom wall lent her wavy, honey blonde hair a warm, ethereal glow. Clothed in a white cotton and lace gown, her knees resting on an ornately embroidered prayer pillow, her voice took on a hypnotic, lilting quality as she murmured her nighttime prayer aloud. Mary opened her self and heart and, rather than speaking directly to God, let the whispered words pour out of her very soul into the ether for anyone who might be listening and hear.
"Heavenly Father, hear my supplications. I cry unto thee; I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle. While the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Maketh me to lie down in green pastures: leadeth me beside still waters. Restoreth my soul: leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Lord, I pray, lend my husband your protection where he walks in the shadow of death. May thine angels watch over my sons: their wings and grace offer shelter from the storm.
“I ask naught for my own sake. You are my Lord and Saviour, and I fear no evil: for thou art with me. May thy goodness and mercy follow me and flow through me all the days of my life. Ere the end of my days is upon me, I offer my immortal soul unto You. May it dwell in the house of the Lord forever. This, unto you, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son and Saviour. Amen,” Mary recited. A prayer she had taken up the day she set aside the ways of her Hunter heritage and committed herself to John and, before long, to their firstborn son. Then, just months ago, came their second blessing and newborn baby boy.
She bowed her head, her gaze at last leaving the cross adorning the wall opposite where she knelt at the bedside.
The daughter of Samuel Campbell crossed herself. Watch over my boys, please.
A gust of wind disturbed her hair, tickling her cheek. Wind from the direction of a closed window. She snapped her head toward the window, still closed, but before it, a trench coat wearing man loomed in shadow, outlined by moonlight, his features indistinct. “Please, Mary, listen to me. I don’t have much time. You are going to die.” Mary dove for the nightstand, producing a knife from the drawer. Castiel berated himself. Perhaps not the best choice of tidings to lead with. She lunged and dodged a half-hearted attempt at fending her off, burying the knife between the intruder’s ribs, and by what she knew of anatomy, the blade reached his heart.
Something happened then she did not expect.
Laughter. Kind, warm—loving, even?—laughter, and a knowing, affectionate sigh.
She watched, dumbstruck, taking the gold cross on her necklace in hand, recoiling, and stepping away as the man took hold of the knife and slowly removed it from his chest without the slightest indication of feeling pain—quite the opposite. In fact, he was smiling at her; the inexplicable amusement to it put her ill at ease. Clouds drifted in, obscuring the moon behind him, and revealing his face.
Dean hadn’t acquired his habit of stabbing first and asking questions later anywhere strange. “I heard your prayer, Mary Winchester.”
Her breath caught, but at the same time, peace came over her. There was a smell in the air. Sharp yet… clean. Something in his eyes, something in the tone of his voice… she felt much of the tension in her leave her body. “Who… who are you?”
The man smiled lovingly. “You know the answer.”
“That’s not—”
“Possible?” Castiel supplied, chuckling gently at the irony, considering whom she’d prayed to scant minutes ago.
Eyes fixated on him, shaking her head, she looked down for a moment as he offered up the bloody knife in hand, handle first. In that instant, the vastness of the chasm between belief and knowing became clear to her.
Tears welled up in her eyes. “Are you… here, for me? Right now?”
Raising one hand in a supplicating gesture, Castiel set aside her knife on a dresser. “No, no. Not now. Not me. I cannot say when. I’m only here to warn you and to do as you’ve asked.” He offered up his open, empty palms to assure her he meant no harm.
Mary swallowed, finding her proper voice. “I’m… going to die? How?” If he wouldn’t lift a finger to change things, she didn’t intend on going down without giving her murderer Hell first.
Shaking his head regretfully, Castiel replied, “I cannot say, and I cannot prevent it, Mary. It is necessary. All I can do is give you time to put the affairs of this world, your heart, and soul, in order.”
"Wuh… H-how long?”
"Not long.”
"You can’t stop it, or you won’t?” she demanded, her tone bitter. She had a whole lifetime ahead of her. Dean was such a little sparkplug already, and baby Sam was only months old. First words, first steps, kindergarten, school, so many more birthdays, camping trips, families of their own… and she wouldn’t be there for any of it?
Sighing sympathetically, Castiel answered her, his voice caring and soothing. “It would irrevocably alter future events—necessary ones. If not for that, I would.”
Sharp pain in her chest sobered her. Mary exhaled. “What will their future… their lives be like?”
Castiel forcibly kept his eyes from watering as he watched Mary’s expression dart between anger, defiance, and finally, acceptance and grace. He smiled softly. Such fortitude in someone so small. “It will be difficult for your sons, but they will always have each other.”
Mary nodded, believing, but still needing to ask. “I don’t understand. Why would God send someone—”
“I am an angel,” Castiel insisted, to make her say it and believe it.
She nodded. “…Why would H-He send an… angel… to watch over my sons?”
Castiel cast his gaze heavenward. “God didn’t. I’m here of my own volition. God is… capricious and indifferent to humanity. He’s not listening to your prayers.” Castiel’s gaze drilled into her. “He ceased to value humanity long ago.”
There wasn’t the faintest trace of a lie in his eyes. Mary scoffed. “Aren’t angels God’s messengers? If you weren’t sent here, why do you care?”
Castiel sighed, solemn. “Because, one day, your sons will help a new God, one who values humanity—who recognizes and protects the sanctity of all life—rise to power. You are their mother. For their existence, you have my eternal gratitude. I want to… offer you whatever peace I can, before the end.”
"You sound like…” She couldn’t shake the impression he was talking with her like a dear friend. “Why do you care if I’m at peace before I die? People die without rhyme or reason, without warning or peace, every day…”
Castiel smiled kindly. “I owe it to you, to Dean, to—”
"To Dean…?” Mary demanded, frowning.
"Yes." The angel’s expression turned fond.
Realization slowly morphed her expression. She inhaled deeply. “You’re not just here for me… are you?”
For a moment, Castiel’s gaze wandered to where Dean slept peacefully on the other side of the wall, considering obfuscating the truth. He couldn’t lie. “No.”
Mary 's eyes narrowed. “My son isn’t just a means to an end to you, is he?”
“No.” With a subdued smile, Castiel gently shook his head. Approaching her, he intended to offer a reassuring touch, so she might spend her remaining days hopeful and unafraid. He stopped when she tensed defensively. “I will watch over and protect him, Mary. Always. I promise you.”
Mary relaxed and smiled, understanding and awe beginning to show through in her expression. Water rose in her eyes. “I believe you.”
Castiel nodded reassuringly before releasing her from his unwavering gaze. He turned to the window behind him, wistfully looking to the full moon hanging low in the sky. Mary had the distinct impression he was leaving.
Mary © JJPADTK | Tw |
“Wait. What’s your name?”
As he turned back to face her, the clouds moved away, and the moon's curvature happened to wreath his head with a crescent of blue-white light. The angel smiled serenely. “Castiel.”
◇
❗ Castiel stood, arms crossed, one foot weighing down the side rung of a kitchen stool whose legs were hovering precariously an inch or two off the floor. Balancing on the stool, straining for a jar of sweets atop the fridge, stood a young child with a shock of blonde hair and a determined, mischievous glint in his eye. Castiel smiled fondly on the boy. He didn’t have to have seen this before to know what was coming. In the end, the few moments of childish, impish delight Dean experienced were worth preventing him from falling and breaking his wrist.
An ill-judged swipe at the jar sent it off the edge of the fridge. It fell to the counter, breaking. The boy was quickly down off the stool, fright taking him over. John Winchester stormed into the room, all fury and no restraint. Castiel watched serenely, unable to reach out and affect events in any way that either would remember. Part of him hoped that, somehow, the shared moment of mischief and being there with him, bearing witness and feeling for him—not pity or sorrow—but loving empathy, would, in some small way, reinforce the child’s thus-far indomitable spirit.
No matter how hard John hit, Dean never stayed down.
The Life of Dean Winchester © petite-madame | In | T |
◇
Dean walked out of the bar and into the night, “lettuce”—a word for money he’d never heard before tonight—from a pool table harvest in his back pocket. About four hundred dollars. Somehow, he’d managed to extricate himself before the guy sobered up and realized how far down he was. That said, they weren’t long for this town. Not anymore. Someone loses money like that and has the right kind of friends… shit can get ugly quick. The last thing he needed was his kid brother mixed up in something like that. It was time to move on. They couldn’t wait for Dad anymore.
He turned up his collar, the comforting flip and swish of his Zippo sparking a Pavlovian craving for the nicotine hit incoming from the cigarette in his mouth. Hiking his shoulders up against the cold, he leaned back against the wall. Hanging up his boot heel on the gritty brick, he tried not to think about the kinds of things he might be leaning on outside a joint like this as he let the smoke take the edge off.
Dean frowned; his gaze fixated on the broken, concrete sidewalk riddled with crushed gum in various stages of wear and greying colours. He couldn’t shake this feeling crawling up his ribs and onto his shoulder blades. Taking one last deep drag to see if that got rid of the itch, he settled, hacked out a slight cough, and waited. Nope. Fuck it. Whatever it was, his feet wanted to be moving, so that’s exactly what he was gonna do. He’d learned long ago to listen to shit like this—when his body started feeling some odd kind of way.
Fashion said the rips in his jeans looked cool. All they were fucking good for was letting the cold in, said he. Problem was, it made him look like he had more money than he did, so he kept wearing the “cool” jeans. Whatever it took to make folks less likely to turn up their nose at him and walk away disgusted because he looked and smelled as poor as he was.
Plastic’s sharper burn told his mouth he was down to the filter. A decisive flick of his middle finger sent the discolored white butt sailing out onto the empty street. Striking pavement, glowing embers scattered from the end. Exhaling the last smoke through his nose, he zipped up his coat and sunk his hands into his pockets. This feeling crawled up the back of his neck and head the way it always did when he took a chance like this and stayed out ‘til closing time. He had to get back to the motel before Dad showed up and gave him Hell for leaving Sammy alone again…
Leather soles of black polished shoes that had walked miles beyond counting beat concrete under the weight of a man dressed in an unremarkable suit, a rumpled white shirt with an unbuttoned collar, a dirty tan trench coat, and a loose, conspicuously blue tie. A man with dark, unkempt hair and searing blue eyes. Hands in his coat pockets, he moved with an uncanny smoothness along the sidewalk. Unlike humans, one of whom whose body he wore as a living, breathing costume, he could see far more at any given time than their limited biology was capable of. Humans paid no mind to where their feet fell, not caring one bit what scraped and crunched between their footwear and the ground, announcing every step.
He remembered a time when failing to care about such things earned the human in question a gruesome end at the claws, paws and maw of a stronger, faster, better predator. In comparison, he knew where every pebble, every scrap of made-man debris lay in waiting to betray his presence with sound. He stepped around or over the stones primed and ready to alert anyone nearby. He did it effortlessly and effectively, as though he walked on ground that was hardly there.
Then, smoothly and purposefully, the footfalls of this urban jungle’s most dangerous predator exited the same bar behind him and fell in step. The boy in the ripped jeans ahead picked up the pace, ignoring the burn in his skinny, malnourished legs if it meant getting inside, out of this cold even one minute sooner. Where the boy ahead turned, the man behind him followed. If it had been two, three, or even four turns before their paths diverged, he would have thought nothing of it. But… the boy in the ripped jeans was smart. He knew how to figure out if someone was following him; taking a few turns at random, in quick, but not too quick, succession, heading nowhere you were actually going, toward more people, not less, and always, always, stick to the light.
The boy with ripped jeans wasn’t quite sure yet, but the man in human costume was.
This businessman in a dark gray suit with fashionably barbered hair, and a silver ring on the finger that showed a man to be married, was tailing the boy ahead.
Grey Suit Man knew this boy, too young for the drinks he was buying, had money on him, won hustling the pool tables. A lot of it. He’d lost at cards tonight. That money would fend off divorce if he could get his hands on it. Carried by that starved wisp of a kid, it was money ripe for taking. If in the process of taking it for himself, say this twink’s pants happened to inexplicably slip off his pert little ass, well, who in their right mind could pass up an opportunity like that?
Perceiving the thoughts clearly, the man with a blue tie and blue eyes heard them as if they were said aloud. His unaffected expression turned cold and hard, his eyes murderously narrow. The instant he spotted a shadow tall and deep enough to conceal him, he walked straight into it and disappeared. Grey Suit Man’s eyes were never capable of seeing him to begin with. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, walking on the “right” side of the world to be seen by human eyes. He stood stone still against the brick wall, beside concrete stairs. His eyes locked onto Mr. Grey Suit. Instead of moving his eyes in their sockets, his centred pupils dictated the turn of his head as the sharp-dressed predator walked by, oblivious.
Falling in step behind him, it was mere seconds until Grey Suit strode past a collection of trash cans, a slender wooden scrap leaned up against one.
Watching Over You © zjab121212 | Tw | T |
The next instant, the board was gone from his peripheral sight. The impossible occurrence snapped Grey’s head toward the trash heap, instantly standing every hair on his body on end, but his feet kept on moving. The wooden slat had fallen, at the perfect instant, between his steps, which meant it caught between the calf of his outside leg, the shin of his inside leg swinging forward at full speed and by lever action sent the trash cans skidding and clanging to the sidewalk like gongs in the night as he pitched over forward onto his knees, palms and forearms, narrowly avoiding breaking his nose on the sidewalk.
“FUCK!!”
The boy in ripped jeans broke into a sprint and disappeared around a corner before Grey’s sight found him again. Cursing flowed freely while he picked himself up, as hurt by shame and failure as he was by his gashed open palms, wrists and knees. With a fingernail, he pried a pebble out of his profusely bleeding skin. “Godammit.” There were many, many more. His slacks were garbage. He turned around to go back the way he came, screeching out a shameful sound at the shock of coming nearly nose-to-nose with a man whose presence alone made him believe incarnate evil was real. He leapt backward so fast he felt as though his flesh, skin, and organs wanted to be away from this man faster than his skeleton could follow.
Again, he toppled over a trash can, struck his head off the ground, losing more skin, this time on the backs of his hands. Quaking with equal parts rage, pain, and fear, he cried out as he managed to relieve some pain by lying on his back. By instinct alone, he pointlessly held up a bleeding, shaking hand that wordlessly pleaded with the man in a tan trench coat to not come any closer. Not to hurt him.
If, in that instant, he didn’t already believe in the devil, the man’s
eyes glowed blue, his lips moved and out came a sound Hell’s cesspools vomited up. “GO HOME.”
Suddenly, pain didn’t matter. He was up and sprinting for his life away from whatever the fuck was wearing a man’s skin standing beneath the streetlight, his face indiscernible through the shadow on it except for two glowing blue points of light that extinguished the instant before he vanished as though he was never there at all. Tears were suddenly streaming down his face, and a wailing, endless cackle haunted the night air as he scrambled down the street, falling twice more before he found his car and locked himself inside. Mad with fear, he reached for the rear-view mirror and tilted toward both sides of the back seat, so afraid he couldn’t turn his head on his neck to look. He slowly panned the mirror back to the far side of the car and went sheet white at seeing the pitch black shadow with glowing blue eyes sitting in his back seat.
“Hello…”
Grey couldn’t hear what he assumed would have been his name. His shriek drowned out the sound as he flailed uselessly in the driver’s seat of the car, trapped inside by locks that wouldn’t fucking work! And windows that wouldn’t roll the fuck down! And a seat belt that wouldn’t fucking unbuckle! The man-shaped shadow came at him through the seat, and his scream went silent. A burst artery in his brain and a heart that beat itself so hard and fast its muscle ripped took his life as patrons stood outside the bar,
uselessly dialling 9-1-1 and trying to get into the car.
The apparition had never existed. The man with blue eyes, a blue tie, and tawny trench coat sat on a rooftop peacefully watching over the boy in the ripped jeans at a motel many blocks away. There was nothing of him, or anything else, present in the car. Nothing other than the predator’s broken mind and putrid conscience.
◇
The backwater bar stank of spilled booze, spit, blood, mud, manure, and food from upset plates ground by foot traffic into the grooves between wooden floorboards. Conglomerate detritus transformed into a kind of permanent, repulsive grout by a wet mop night after night. The only thing in the air heavier than the odour of closely packed, infrequently showered human bodies was cigarette smoke. Music at this volume obscured all but the closest of conversation. To human ears, anyhow.
Castiel sat on a hardtop bar stool, keeping up the appearance of being contemplatively focused on his drink as he sorted through the multitude of sounds and thoughts assaulting his senses.
Excessive hairspray. Pungent perfume. A text message. Horrible date. This guy smells like a brewery.
CLACK. The cue ball rolled, its trajectory altered by a divot in the table’s battle-scarred felt.
Deafening music. “Don’t rock the jukebox!! wanna hear some Jones. ‘Cause my heart ain’t ready for the Rolling Stones…!”
Two cargo jacket-clad bodies collided. One much lighter than the other.
"Watch where you’re goin’, kid.”
"Oop. Sorry, dude. My bad.”
A drunken stumble, a scoff, a dismissive hand wave, and a roll of eyes. “Yeah, whatever.”
Castiel smirked. One of them walked away lighter in the pocket than he was a moment ago. Booted feet, a sauntering gait inherent to bowed legs, circled around and casually wandered past the poker tables in the quietest corner of the bar.
Instead of wallets, these men carried rolled money. If Dean could make a mark of just one of them, he and Sammy would be flush for a couple months, probably more. One of the players had his jacket hung over the chair back, pockets facing away from the table. Dangling there like the money in the inside breast pocket was meant to be his. By the make of the jacket, it was an unbuttoned pocket, not zippered. Dean moved across the floorboards, stepping lightly, smoothly. Eyes off the tables, keeping expressionless and nonchalant. These guys were touchy about an observer tipping off other players to the nature of their hand.
A blink later, he had the money between his fingertips.
Glancing back over his shoulder, Castiel watched as the young man skillfully lined himself up to casually brush past a player at the table on the way to a pinball machine. His prize: the pocket’s monetary contents in a jacket size or two bigger than his and about four sizes bigger than one that fit him. The seraph discreetly slid his arm off the bar, the beckoning gesture of his fingers at a precise moment obscured by his coat.
A whisky glass on the poker table moved, seemingly without reason, drawing the gaze of a player in a cowboy hat.
A loud, long whistle at the table jolted Dean badly. The money hit the floor. Shit!
“Weeell, looky, boys. What have we here?” His drawl was southwestern and thick.
“You little shit…!” The mark sitting where the jacket hung from shoved their chair back so fast it knocked into a petrified Dean and toppled over, clattering on the floor. There were suddenly three grown, large men standing, glaring at him with dark and dangerous resentment in their eyes. Before his brain could catch up to what happened, a large hand had him by both shirts and jacket, its owner cocking back the other hand to clean his clock.
“Hands off the kid, Barton,” the player who’d made him ordered, something threatening in his voice. The fist coming at him stalled in mid-air. “I said, hands off.”
“Who died and made you…”
The cowboy’s eyes burned like a brand. “You really gonna deck this starving whisp of a kid for your dumbass mistake?”
“’Ey! Fuck you—!” A thick, challenging finger pointed at the cowboy.
The rodeo hand stood fast, a champion rider’s belt buckle in plain view from where Dean was being held captive, and suddenly everything in the air was different.
He was slighter than Dean’s captor, but tougher and meaner, and he knew it. If they did throwdown, he’d come out on top. “Let the kid go.” He said it slow and low, one side of his nose curling in with disgust—last chance, asshole.
The hand on Dean’s jacket three-inch punched him in the chest, putting him back on his heels. His would-be assailant turned to sit down. The cowboy rolled his eyes, sighing. Rick Barton was many things. Intelligent was not one of them. “Barton. Yer money.” Barton cast a sour, pissed off glare at Dean’s saviour and snatched his bill roll up off the floor, stuffing it into his front jeans pocket. The cowboy settled casually back into his seat, like he hadn’t been hair’s breadth away from fisticuffs over a street rat he didn’t know from Adam fifteen seconds ago. The others were happy to peacefully return to their game.
Aggressively perceptive, the cowboy looked Dean over. Dean couldn’t recall ever being assessed like that before in his life. Like he was being seen down to his very fucking bones. It made hair everywhere on him stand on end. Something he batted away from his consciousness like a buzzing mosquito crackled to life in the nerves down low in his gut.
If that whiskey glass hadn’t shifted and caught his eye—he still wasn’t sure how that happened, either—he’d never have seen this kid. He was good. Really fuckin’ good. The kid’s stomach growled. So, he’d been right about that, too.
“You’re pretty good, kid. How’s about learning to pick pockets the legal way?” Dean stayed silent and cautious. “Well, legal-adjacent, anyhow.”
Dean looked like he needed to bolt. That or take a piss real bad. He stayed put, though. The cowboy’s one eyebrow went up, his gaze fixed on the kid. It was either bravery and desperation, or dumbass ignorance keeping this kid in place, and he was getting’ the feelin’ the needle on that was leanin’ heavy in favor of the former. The rodeo hand smiled. He reached into his pocket and peeled off a few bills. Six-zero bucks. He held it up in the air between two fingers.
“Kid, you can take this and run. I won’t stop you. Neither will anyone else. Or…” He leaned in close, one elbow on his knee, piercing hazel eyes looking up at Dean from under the brim of his hat. “…you can take a seat and play. When the money’s gone, you’re done. What’s it gonna be?”
Dean swallowed hard. He cleared his throat. “Play.”
The wrangler’s smirk turned into a toothy, handsome grin. He shunted his chair to the side and put Dean on his left. “The game’s poker, son. Have a seat.”
John had taught him poker. The rules, the mechanics and variants. He’d played against Bobby for Smarties and won—sometimes—but it was here and now, his ass planted firmly in the hot seat, the gun of starvation pointed at his temple, that he truly learned how play. Two hands in, he knew half the tells at the table. He kept his own in check. Played it smart and straight, mostly.
Two rounds turned into four. Four turned into more. And more…
Five hundred bucks up and three hours later, it was closing time. He knew full well the reason he was walking out of there with the money he’d won in his pocket was because this cowboy with a gold cross strung around his neck on a delicate chain was a good man, and no one at the table was brave enough to raise a hand against him.
The rodeo hand had taken him under his wing that night. Waxed philosophical about the game, about life and how the two mirrored each other. The need for balancing instinct and deception with proven plays. How to survive with minimal losses and make the right move at the right moment.
He’d learned more in three hours than John taught him in years, soaking it in like a sea green-eyed sponge. Cards come and go like the wind. You don’t play against a force you can’t predict. You ask for its blessing and play the men around you. The guy with a tic that has him knuckling an itch at the bottom of his nose when he’s in a bad way. The guy whose banter suddenly turns stilted when he’s been slick as a hooker’s cooch the whole time. The guy who pretends to have a chip-twirling tic, but has no tell even when shit’s getting hairy and it’s him that’s your real problem.
He’d played. He’d won. Beginner’s luck? Maybe, but just maybe… he was actually good at this. Like, really good.
Wrangler-man asked him to wait out on the patio while he cleared his tab.
Dean took out a cigarette, popped his Zippo open one-handed and lit it.
The cowboy stepped onto the veranda, smiling and nodding an unspoken greeting Dean’s way. Donning his hat, leaning against the rail with one side of his hips down, his boot toe planted on the ground outside his other foot, he dug into his back pocket, drawing his jeans tighter around his hips. In that instant, something low, low down in Dean moved at the sight. Popping open his smoking case on automatic, intent on keeping Dean’s company a few minutes more, he laughed at what greeted him inside the case. Empty.
Dean popped his case back open. Runnin’ on empty, too. Letting out a sharp laugh at the irony, Dean offered up the smoke he’d finished stoking.
“You’re not sick, are you?”
Dean smiled kindly, shaking his head. “Nope.”
“All right, then.” He accepted the cigarette and took a long draw. Dean didn’t mind in the slightest. He was walking out of here tonight, set for a long time, because of this man. “Hot damn…! I’ve needed that goin’ on an hour now. I don’t even know your name… Gideon.” The wrangler said it around the cigarette pinched between his lips, extending a hand.
Dean nodded, shaking on it. “Dean. Glad I had one left.”
Everything about the wrangler paused, other than the hand returning the cigarette, and fixed on him. “Over four hours sittin’ at the table, an’ I still cain’t get a bead on ya. What brings you to a place like this?”
“Been on the road long as I can remember.”
The rodeo hand nodded slowly. “Been everywhere, from nowhere.”
“Pretty much.” Inhaling a draw, Dean changed lanes. “That was one hell of a game. Lady Luck had her skirts up for us to-night.”
The cordial air of the cowboy’s southern hospitality took on a hard edge. The kind that had Dean standing up a little straighter and listening. He tipped his hat up, speaking so he looked Dean right in the eyes. “Son, lemme give you the most valuable piece of advice you’ll evah hear: always, and I mean always, respect a lady. Or you will come to rue the day you didn’t.”
Dean nodded, standing corrected. “Heard.”
The cowboy smiled lopsided, giving up the smoke in turn. There was a good soul in this one. Proud, but not too proud. The boy stood there sucking back the nicotine hit, hand buried in his pocket, his gaze on the ground a second too long. Somethin’ in him he couldn’t explain had him standin’ up tall and liftin’ the hat off his head, hangin’ it on this kid’s bowed head. “You played a damn fine game tonight, son.”
The way the kid’s breathing hitched made him pull his hand back.
Keenly aware the hat on his head was probably worth more than every piece of clothing he’d ever worn in his whole life put together, a swell of emotion filled Dean’s chest, threatening to overwhelm him. He lifted a tentative hand snuggin’ down the cowboy hat; it couldn’t have fit better if it were made for him. He felt, in that moment, like it was. Like it should’ve been. Something in him lashed itself to the feeling, wanted it, in ways nothing like anything he’d ever felt.
He pinched the hat’s crown. Taking it off, Dean bit his lower lip. He couldn’t keep it. It’d wind up ruined or their father would think he’d stolen it, and he’d pay bloody Hell for it. Dean put on the best bullshitter’s smirk he could manage. “I can’t. Not today… but one of these days, maybe…”
There was a light in the kid’s eyes—a belief—that made the wrangler smile as he accepted his jet black Stetson back, combed back his hair with one hand and set it right on his head. “You got heart. Whatever it is that moves this world respects that, and you’ve got luck, kid. Practice. You’ll be playing as well as, or better than anyone at that table, soon enough.”
Dean beamed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been praised for something without being made to feel like a good-for-nothing screw up over something else.
The wrangler blinked. God damn, this kid was a looker. A good few years older and…
He leaned in a hair too close. “Heh. Don’t get cocky. At least not until you fill out quite a bit more. Otherwise, you’ll wind up getting’ your ass kicked, maybe left for dead. Like the rest of this life, the game isn’t always about winning. More often than not, it’s about—”
“Knowin’ when to fold ‘em,” Dean said, parroting the lyric. “And get the Hell outta Dodge.”
The cowboy laughed, giving him an approving nod. “Whip-smart, kid. Exactly.” His gaze, settling on his aging pick-up, and the sigh that escaped him telegraphed the next words from his mouth. “Look, I gotta head out. The missus‘ll have me dancing a gallows jig under the willow tree if I don’t git my arse home. Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
Something in the middle of Dean’s back prickled; a hard lesson learned the hardest of ways. “Nah, I’m good. Thanks, though.” Dean held out a hand, wearing a closed smile.
The cowboy, his grasp strong and sure, took it, a cockeyed smile lighting up his face. He gave him one good, solid shake. “Stay sharp, kid.” He winked, smiling affectionately. “You’ll be all right.”
◇
❗ Dean looked down over the gravel parking lot from the rotting porch leading up to the side door of the mission, keeping eyes on Baby parked in the bitter cold, Sam asleep in the back seat. His gaze wandered up to the darkening mid-afternoon sky of a snowless northern winter day. Afternoon shade would soon become twilight.
He’d lost at poker. John found out and forbade him from using his money to play cards ever again. He would. One day. He knew that. But right now, his father’s fury scared him more than his empty stomach hurt.
His stomach started talking, sounding loud in the uneasy silence of those lined up to ask for whatever food the Angels of Mercy Mission had to give. A few heads turned at the sound, and a few more sets of eyes looked, trying not to be noticed. He smiled uneasily, but it disappeared the moment he had his mouth hidden behind the collar of his oversized jacket. It’d been four days since he last ate or drank anything that didn’t come from public water fountains, or grocery store and restaurant dumpsters. Sam had the last of their food for breakfast, and he’d go hungry for dinner tonight without help. Some friggin’ canned meat and bread that didn’t have mold on it to be cut off would be nice. Really fuckin’ nice. It was all he wanted right then—not to taste the taint of mould and rot on his food for one fuckin’ day this week.
The mission only let in a few at one time, each beggar escorted around the shelves by mission volunteers. To prevent theft. Theft, from a place already giving you shit for free when others needed help, just like you. He couldn’t understand some people. Looking to his right, down the ramp built for wheelchairs, he couldn’t help the sting of shame he felt. He didn’t belong here. The life his father’s vengeance forced them to live… never able to set down roots, or find work. Attend school. Life didn’t have to be this way, and he hated it. He was tired… no, exhausted to his bones, the reservoirs of his heart runnin’ on empty.
It'd been so long since they’d had a home of any kind. Even some rundown ghetto apartment felt like a luxury beyond reach.
A hand reached out and touched his coat arm. He jumped at the touch, startled. Christ, he was in a bad way. Couldn’t get his brain to hold onto reality well enough to know he was being spoken to because it was his turn. Maybe it had been a day or so longer since he ate than he realized. Probably ‘cause keeping a grip on reality meant feeling hunger-induced nausea clawing at his nerves, and he didn’t want to feel anymore.
The woman smiled kindly, bringing him in with a gentle hand behind his arm. Blonde. Slim, wearing a knit sweater, lightly made up, blue-eyed, and generous. She reminded him so potently of his mother, not necessarily in her face, but in her faith, charity, guiding touch, and friendly, welcoming warmth that it took everything he had not to tear up and cry. Most of all, he hated that something so mundane and commonplace to anyone with a home and family made him so weak when he felt just a moment of it.
She watched the boy perk up as he stepped inside, out of the cold. The minute smile at one corner of his mouth was barely there, but it was real.
Dean looked her in the eyes.
Things are gonna be alright.
Giving her a grateful nod, he stepped up to where an older woman, visibly cooler in how she welcomed people, stood manning reception at a high counter, log book laid out in front of her.
Suddenly nervous, Dean tried to flash her a charming smile, but it wouldn’t take. She didn’t much care about what he did manage, anyway. “I, uh… I’ve never…”
“Have you been here before?”
“No. Never. I haven’t…” …needed it before. But no, that was a lie. He’d needed it more times than he could count. Only about the age he was now did he think he could finally go to a food bank and not get his father in trouble for it. Bring social services down on their heads.
She fixed her gaze on him, waiting. This woman would make bank at a poker table.
He managed a winning smile he genuinely meant. “Things have been tougher than usual… lately. Found a leaflet over at the church, and I… hoped I could find some…” The word stuck in his throat. “…help.”
She softened a little at that. “Driver’s license, please, and we need something with proof of address on it.”
Shit. He felt his expression fall. He couldn’t help it. “We, heh, I don’t have my… uhh…” He wasn’t carrying ID with his proper name on it. He hadn’t thought this through. He didn’t want to offer up a precious false identity either.
“You don’t have any ID?”
His gaze suddenly locked on the counter, Dean shook his head. “I don’t. Our house burned down with everything inside not long ago…” She didn’t need to know it happened ten years ago, not ten days. The water in his eyes wasn’t exactly fake, either. It still hurt. It always would.
“You don’t have a fixed address?”
“Yeah. She’s parked in the lot outside.”
“Your… girlfriend?”
Dean laughed. “No! No, my car.”
“Where are your parents?” The question slapped in a way his ego resented. He’d been finding his own way for fuckin’ years.
“Our Mom died in the fire. Dad’s… I don’t know where he is.”
“Our…?”
“Yeah. Me and my little brother. He’s asleep in the back seat.”
Something in her face changed in a way he didn’t like. Sour. Unease started prickling between his shoulder blades.
“What’s his name?”
For a split second, there was a fond smile in his eyes at just the thought of his brother. “Sammy.”
“Sam…?” she prompted, clearly wanting a last name. He swallowed. He wanted to give their real names, to tell her the truth. But… what if he found out? If their dad found out he’d given out their real names, he wasn’t gonna be happy, at the very least, if not outright pissed off. The thought of John angry made him abruptly queasy.
“I’m Dean.” Not exactly a graceful side-step of the question. He flashed her a charmer’s smile. The way her face changed… shit. She wasn’t a mark. Someone to con. He’d chosen wrong.
“I need your names for our records. I can’t take you in without them,” she insisted, with the tone of a DMV agent refusing to bend the rules. Pity gone, and shields up. His jaw tensed. Trapped. Truth it was, then.
“I… look. I can’t. It might get Dad in trouble. He… hasn’t been the same since. It’s been a little more than two weeks since the last time we saw him. He left us food and money for a few days. I’ve kept my brother fed, but I haven’t… it’s been a little bit since I ate anything that wasn’t garbage. Look, we’re not local. I get that you provide for your neighbours, and we’re not from here…” His sight locked on the three Wal-Mart bags of food in someone’s hands leaving the mission the way they came in, snapping back to her the instant the angle was awkward. “I wouldn’t need nearly that much. A couple cans of meat and a loaf of bread might get us through until our dad comes back.” He watched her face, desperate to change the trajectory of her reaction with every word he spoke.
“I’m sorry, son. You’ll have to visit the food banks in your own town. I can’t take you in if you didn’t live in town before the fire. I wish we could help you, but these rules are in place to protect the community we’re mandated to serve. If you can tell me where you’re from, I can find a good few minutes to look through our phone books and find the banks in your hometown…”
Where you’re from…
Dean nodded, looking down, his expression twisting, shifting on his feet. He straightened it out where she couldn’t see the worst of it and looked up. Eight states away, and ten years ago is where we’re from. He didn’t dare say that, though. In the short time he met her eyes, there wasn’t a trace of give anywhere. Getting testy wasn’t the answer. These were good people, doing one Hell of a lot of good for too many people.
A boisterous young girl came bouncing around the corner out of a hallway off to the side of the counter. Fine featured. Firey-haired and delicately freckled. Happy. She froze on the spot when her eyes met his. It was hard to tell whether the look on her face was awe or fear. Whatever it was, it was odd. He softened his face and gave her a reassuring smile. It was automatic by now. The same thing he did for Sammy when he knew the kid was scared and needed to feel safe, even though they weren’t.
He didn’t like the way the lady behind the counter looked at him.
“Sweetheart, head down to the basement and find your father. He’ll be happy to have more help.” Her voice was absent the slightest hint of her suspicions.
The young girl spent the entire sentence staring at him as though she couldn’t look away, even though she wanted to. Suddenly, she shuddered and looked at the woman behind the counter, confused. Her brain caught up before the lady could repeat herself. “Yes, ma’am.”
With that, she was gone and descending a set of stairs out of sight.
He gritted his teeth. Screw his fucking pride. Sammy needed to eat tonight. Breakfast had been too slim already.
“Please, ma’am, can…”
“Son, I can’t. I’m truly sorry.”
He bit his lip. She was. His smile was sad and defeated. His breath shook when he took it in. “Yeah… I, uh… I’m sorry, too.” He looked at the folks in line behind him, shoving his hands in his pockets, unconsciously looking for his smokes and Zippo. “Sorry to use up your time. Thank you.” He meant every letter of it. As he fell out of line, the person behind him, wearing an impatient look, stepped in.
He looked around the tiny church building. It had been a church a long time ago, but the city had grown, and the world moved on. The shelves weren’t full, but by no means empty either.
The thought of grabbing a few things and making a run for it took hold of him. He didn’t know if he could get to the car and pull out safely before the elder men of the congregation got to him. Most of all, he hated himself for thinking it; stealing from those who already have next to nothing. No. Never, ever.
Bowing his head, shoulders hunching in, he tried to meet the eyes of some of the waiting patrons as he left empty-handed, but he couldn’t hold it. When his boots hit the gravel, he stopped. Sammy was sleeping in the back seat, and he didn’t remotely have his shit together. One smoke, maybe two, and he’d have himself steady enough he could put on a smile and show Sammy patience and care instead of irritation. He took a deep breath, sending the hurt in his heart out with the exhale, and tapped a smoke out of the pack, lighting it.
Getting it lit was as far as he got before his eyes and mouth twisted up so badly he had to yank the cigarette out from between his lips or drop it. If he couldn’t find help with food tonight, there was only one thing for it: a mouth and throatful of nothing he could eat. The sob he was biting down on hurt his throat. The instant he knew it wasn’t coming out, he had to breathe. In… out, and again.
“Hey!”
Dean hardly heard it above the sound of his clothing rustling as he swiped tears away from his eyes.
“Sir!? Hey!”
Dean frowned. The steps up to the food bank intake door were empty. Whoever it was, they were young, female, and definitely talking to him. He turned in the direction of her voice, seeing no one. The side door near the back of the building creaked open, the light inside spilling across the gravel in the near-twilight of a deep grey, rainy, late afternoon. She peeked barely half her face out before she realized he’d heard her and ducked back inside, quickly reappearing with three full bags of groceries in hand. Much more than your average ten-year-old should lift.
She waved him over frantically, about to be caught. That snapped him out of it. Dropping the unsmoked cigarette between his fingers, he darted over, picked up the three bags in one fell snatch, and backed away.
For some reason, his gaze was fixed on her brilliant green eyes. The same red-haired, fine-featured sprite from earlier. The care and love he saw there made his eyes water. “Thank you.” How raw and vulnerable his voice sounded shocked him. The little girl smiled, glad of what she’d done, what the rules of adults said be damned. There wasn’t a shade of doubt in her eyes. She disappeared.
Turning on his heels, he hauled the bags to the car, throwing open the back door. Christ, those hinges needed oil. Sam jolted awake when the bags hit the floor. Dean knew he didn’t have a moment to spare.
Still, he looked up to the cross atop the dilapidated one-time church and something in his heart soured, shrivelled up, and dropped off the vine. It hadn’t been God who answered his need for help. It was one pure-hearted, brave human girl who recognized when her elders had done wrong. Because of his mom, how she’d believed it beyond doubt when she’d told him angels were watching over him, he’d always kept space in his heart for the possibility that what she believed was real.
Not anymore. He was done begging a God who didn’t give a shit about what he’d done to their family for a goddamn fucking thing.
What he did believe in was right here on earth: humanity, the kindness in that little girl, and whatever guided her to save them from starvation a little while longer.
Loud voices from inside the mission spurred him into action. His ass hadn’t landed on the seat yet before he had the key turned in the ignition.
“Dean…?”
Sam was scared. “Buckle up.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Sam did. There was such a good soul in that kid. It would be a cold day in Hell before he let the worst of life they were forced to live anywhere near it.
Throwing the gear shift into reverse, he thanked his lucky stars the parking space beside them was empty. He gave Baby just enough gas to swing out of the spot fast enough to throw Sam sideways in his seat, but not so much her wheels only spun in the gravel. He floored it to the driveway mouth, his foot on the brake for a fraction of a second until he knew the narrow side street was empty.
A quick look in both directions, he chose to turn toward the side streets that looked empty of traffic and gunned it out of the parking lot, burning rubber before the furious pastor who flung open the side door of the mission could gather his wits enough to remember what Baby looked like, or what their license plate was…
Crouched atop the church roof’s shingled spine, steadying himself with one hand on the cross, his wings resting softly on the roof, tucked down to keep from catching the storm-bearing wind, Castiel smiled down on the boy he cared for better than anyone he would ever know, grateful Dean would be spared this scar on his mind and heart. Dean had to be allowed to make choices of his own free will, and to experience what followed from them, no matter how it shattered his heart to bear silent witness. He knew the night Mary burned, he couldn’t prevent all harm, but for twenty-four years, he would never fail to whenever opportunity arose…
The heavy metal door slammed closed. She jumped at the sound. “What did you do?” her father demanded.
Taking a deep breath, she held on to the truth of what the angel had told her about the boy and his brother. “I gave him food I know he needed.”
“You know him?” The tone of her father’s voice took on a darkness she didn’t remotely like.
“No.”
“It’s a sin to lie, Anna.” She’d never liked the righteous authority with which he nearly always said it. She would find herself in confession for this. That was wrong. The fire in her heart told her so. She had nothing to confess. Her actions were God’s will.
“He’s a good, selfless person. He saves people!” Her father was taken aback by the force with which she said it, perturbed by the words she used. Oddly… specific for a child her age.
“You said you didn’t know him.” The severity in her father’s voice scared her, but she stood firm.
“I don’t.” Her eyes were watering.
“You know we serve many, many people in this city who need every scrap of food in this church! Someone will receive less than they should have or go hungry because of what you’ve done.”
“He’s starving right now! So’s his little brother. He doesn’t deserve help less than our neighbours. They turned him away empty-handed at the desk!” Not until the sentence rose to her mouth did she become well and truly angry that he’d been treated this badly.
Her father visibly twitched when it clicked for him that they might have his name in the mission records. “Stay here, young lady.” He ascended the stairs two at a time, leaving her alone in the half-darkness and silence.
“God, am I crazy? Did I get it wrong…?” the short, slightly cherubic girl asked. Doubt wracked her so viscerally she couldn’t hold her hands still.
The angel’s soft, kind laughter found her ears. “No. Your choice was right and good. You have my word.” His voice was deep, its sound rich. Like thunder, but with kindness instead of violence.
Anna started, turning on the man who professed to be an angel guised as a human, angry. “Why didn’t you tell them?!”
The angel sighed. “Things… aren’t that simple, Anna. They would have made certain… assumptions. Reacted badly. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“They would have thought you were a bad man. Trying to hurt me.”
The angel’s lips and eyes smiled sadly—regretfully. “Yes.”
“Tell me the truth: did I do a good thing?” Tears welled in her eyes, her high, tiny voice warbling. “Did I make a difference?”
For someone so young, she bore the burden of her blessing with astounding grace. Something she would see and admire in Dean, and he, in turn, in her, when the time came.
His smile was small and soft. Then, the angel’s watering eyes fixed on hers, boring into her very soul. The sound of his voice poured into the passage they made, his broad hand resting comfortingly on the side of her arm, taking both her trembling hands in one of his. “Yes. More than you’ll ever know. Thank you.” She stared, wide-eyed. He was gratitude incarnate. The shaking in her hands… stopped, and he… he smiled. She believed.
The man wearing a shabby tan trench coat quietly stood and turned away, looking around the surrounding shelving. All that needed to be said and understood had been. Enrapt by the sight of him, she stared in awe. Not at his striking blue eyes, the sharpness of his jaw and nose, or any other mundane thing that might have drawn her gaze and stirred emotions and sensations she couldn’t comprehend yet.
It was the corona of light around his head; the look of it akin to images she remembered seeing of flares erupting from the surface of the sun, but there were distinct rings, and many. Such was their arrangement and movement that no matter which direction he looked, he always seemed to have a fluctuating, many-pointed, webbed crown of light. A “halo”… this is what an angel’s halo looks like, she realized. Not some ridiculously gaudy, man-made golden ring, but pure light. The first of God’s creations adorned upon the second. There was a weak shimmer of the same bluish-white light in his eyes’ irises. Despite the light emanating from him, the room stayed dimly lit. It was light, but not the kind she usually saw.
She shook herself and looked down, getting control of herself. Her eyes were sore from just looking at it. She rubbed them and kept her head bowed. It felt as though she’d seen something private human eyes ought not see. She looked up when the man stepped deeper into the room. He walked slowly, his footfalls quiet, made by leather soles on shiny yet scuffed black shoes. The sound weighed heavier on her with his every step. Looking along the shelves, his gaze was intent as they were empty.
“Everyone’s having a hard time right now. No one has much to give.” It wasn’t her fault, but she felt profoundly ashamed. She needed to explain it. Here, among them, was an emissary of God, and this paltry-stocked pantry laid plain the depth of selfishness in them all.
The angel smiled back at her. “Don’t berate yourself, little one. Those who have plenty—more than they could have use for in a human lifetime—give nothing, and only take more. Those who already have next to nothing give anyway, remembering well how those without struggle.” His laugh was quiet and rueful. “Something I know not how to change. Though, like you, your father, and everyone here, I will do the one small thing I can… give.”
His hand touched the vacant metal shelves beside him. Light appeared between the palm of his hand and the cold metal. Empty boxes on the shelves… shifted. Some rattled and jumped. A box beside her suddenly tipped over with a thud. She jumped out of her skin, stifling her cry so as not to draw attention from adults. Cans of meat rolled out and clattered to the ground. Someone was bound to have heard that. She picked up a can. It wasn’t liquified and canned meat she knew was less than desirable. It was the good kind. Tunafish. Salmon. Chicken. She stared at the side of the box. Empty. They had emptied it before the doors opened that morning. It had been empty before he…!
Footsteps—her father’s and someone else’s—sounded loud coming down the stairs in a hurry. She looked for the man but… nothing. No one. Nowhere. She ducked, checking through the rows of shelves, moving boxes, searching for him. Gone without a trace. She knew one thing for certain: she didn’t want him to be.
“Anna! What are you doing? You could have knocked something down on your head and hurt yourself!” Her father quickly checked her over, his wrath dissipating into concern. The worst of his fears allayed, he turned stern again, though not truly mad anymore. “Come upstairs. Now.”
“Reverend Milton!” Anna knew the boy speaking to her father. A young congregant named, quite unoriginally, Matthew.
“What is it?”
He put down the box in his hands and started frantically peeling down the shelf, opening box after box as he went. “Where did all this food come from?”
Her father turned to her, his expression severe. “Anna, where did this come from? Who delivered it?”
She beamed joyously. Blinking as she tried hard to meet her father’s gaze unashamed, dilute, blood-reddened tears fell from the inside corners of her eyes. Her father recoiled, one hand going up to his mouth.
“The angel.” His daughter’s awestruck expression and tone sent a chill down his spine. It looked halfway to madness. “It’s a miracle.” She looked around the broken-down, cobwebbed basement as though she’d never seen anything more wonderful in her life. Going down on both knees, her father brought out his handkerchief and wiped the tears from her eyes before she could see herself in a mirror. He pulled his daughter into a dearly tight hug, placing a firm, chaste kiss on the crown of her head.
Bewildered, he watched as the young man held out yet another box, emptied this morning before they’d opened the pantry’s doors, now full again.
Reverend Milton looked up at the boy, at a loss, whispering, “Praise be…”
His expression turned grim as he scanned the room, his heart heavy with guilt.
The boy they’d turned away…
Never should have been.
◇
Halo © The Friendly Pigeon 2024 | B | In | P | Sq | T |

Rural Nebraska, Fall 2006

Surveying the farmhouse living room dispassionately, Castiel walked over to the yellowed ivory phone on the end table beside the couch, waiting for its ring. Absentmindedly, he picked up the TIME magazine sitting beside it, flipping through with quickly waning interest. When he’d perused every headline article inside two minutes, he and his gaze wandered around the rest of the room. From the walls to the carpets, couches, curtains, cushions, rugs, and throw blankets, it was as though this hunter and his wife had referenced a dark piece of toast when choosing the colour palette for the space. Unfortunately, this had more to do with decades of tobacco and cigarette smoke clinging to every surface in the room, rather than the actual paint, floral wallpaper, wood and upholstery.
Seeking any object that might harbour a well-defined echo of its owner, Cas’ divining hand came to rest on the back of a still-fragrant recliner that was, no doubt, the favourite seat of Joshua Armstrong. Castiel listened so long as he could to the jumble of inane but comfortable conversation between the hunter and his wife of thirty-plus years. Water welled in his eyes and a knot tied itself tight in the centre of his chest, when he considered the prospect of conversation alike in nature, many, many years down the road… with Dean.
The phones rang, the tinny sound of old phone bells issuing from five locations around the house. Collecting himself, Castiel answered the call, attempting his best imitation of Joshua’s southern drawl.
“Uh… hi. Is this Josh?” Sam inquired, nervous. His Dad hadn’t parted ways on the best of terms with many acquaintances.
It struck Castiel how young and distraught he sounded. “Speakin’. Who’s this?”
“My name is Sam. Sam Winchester. You might remember my father—”
“Of course. John. What’s this about, son?”
The relief in Sam’s tone at not being told to take a hike or sworn straight off the phone was plain in his voice. “My brother. He’s… he’s in a bad way. I’m hoping you might have some ideas about how to… heal him,” Sam explained, having to break from speaking to keep his voice on as even a keel as he could manage. The weight of his tone told anyone listening who didn’t already know: Dean didn’t have much time left.
“Hmmmn. Only two powers in the universe you can petition for that kind of help, boy. The Darkness, or the Light. Each of ‘em has its price,” Castiel warned the younger Winchester. Ain’t nothin’ in this world for free, Castiel mused silently.
“I’ll pay it. I don’t care what it is,” Sam insisted.
Castiel sighed, shaking his head. If they only knew… “That’s foolish talk, son. The kind that gits you killed.”
It wasn’t a warning; it was a statement. Sam’s stomach sank. This man spoke the truth, and Sam knew it. To make matters worse, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his words were personally prophetic. At this point, Cas was convinced this kind of sacrificial thinking was hard-coded into Winchester DNA.
“Sir…” Sam had to take a breath to keep from pleading with the man like a child. “Please. Dean’s all I have.”
“Dean…” He hadn’t meant to say Dean’s name aloud. In all these years, he’d never had cause to say it. It was such a small thing, but he missed the sound. Falling into a long silence, Castiel’s head took on an eavesdropping tilt. The angels were talking. Someone had harnessed an arbiter of Death—a Reaper. Something that powerful at the beck and call of a human being endangered not just the humans in its environs, but any vessel-wearing angel nearby.
“Sir?”
Returning his awareness to the here and now, Castiel responded somewhat disjointedly. “Nebraska. Find a preacher. By the name of Le Grange… off the… the Ninety-Six, on the road that takes you ‘round the w-west side of the reservoir, turn west-southwest at the junction of five roads… it’s a large white tent, beside a country estate home. There will be signs.”
“This ‘Le Grange’… why him? How can he help us?”
“Word is, he can help anyone, if the good Lord sees fit…” The good Lord. The words left a foul taste in Cas’ mouth. “…and has, many times. Take him there. Do not take ‘no’ for an answer, Sam. He’s the real McCoy,” Castiel asserted, his tone as commanding as he could muster.
Sam laughed, half-heartedly. “Heh. You know my brother…”
Softening considerably, Cas answered the boy honestly. “I know his sort. I’m in love with one.”
Again, Sam found himself laughing, half out of relief, the other half; amusement. There was no lie in anything this man had said. He had quite the spitfire for a wife if he could make that claim. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You just did. Do as I‘ve told you. It will save your brother’s life.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Armstrong. I…” Sam let out breath, relieved. Water came to his eyes, turning everything he saw into a collection of straight, bright streaks of light. His thanks seemed like woefully inadequate recompense, but they were all he could offer. “Thank you.”
At the Armstrong home, a clatter sounded in the kitchen, drawing Castiel’s attention. The opening swing of a sticky screen door with a loud, whining spring signalled Mrs. Louise Armstrong’s return home from the supermarket. “Good-bye, Sam.”
With an abrupt clack of static on the other end, the call ended. Sam frowned at the receiver. The good-bye was unsettlingly familiar, yet he’d never met the man before. Shaking it off, he paced the room, running his hands through his hair, trying to keep his lid on. Joy and relief overtook him. The certainty in the man’s voice was absolute… but he knew he shouldn’t give himself false hope. Even if they got there, Le Grange had a congregation. They were all as badly off as Dean—or worse. How could they possibly have any hope of being noticed, then chosen, from among the throng of worshippers?
None of that mattered now. Dean needed rest. He needed to look at a map, then sleep. Donning his jacket, Sam headed out to the Impala for road maps of the continental United States, committing the directions to memory as he walked. First thing in the morning, he’d break camp, pick Dean up at the hospital, and they’d head for Nebraska.
Castiel lifted his finger off the hook flash. Noiselessly setting down the receiver, he turned toward the mantle over the fireplace. In the centre of it, kept company by two vases filled with wilting wild flowers on either side, sat a small but finely crafted wooden box. Inlaid with a design rendered in mother of pearl, white pine and maple, the body and base were made of bevelled, varnished walnut. A gold, ornately engraved plaque named its contents:

Joshua David Armstrong

◇
Born
12th of September, 1946
Died
19th of July, 2006
Not two months prior. Castiel smiled knowingly. Wishing not to be the reason for a heart attack that might send Mrs. Armstrong along to join her husband, in a blink, Cas stood on the front porch of the Armstrong family's modest rural home, gaze turned skyward. Turning his overcoat collar up against the wind and misting rain, he descended the front steps. Next stop: Nowheresville, Nebraska.
◇
Filing into the makeshift place of worship alongside the Reverend’s flock, avoiding eye contact, Castiel took up residence behind human camouflage lining the exterior of the tent. Sam and Dean weren’t here yet, but it wouldn’t be long. They weren’t far now. Castiel leaned back into a cold aluminium tent pole, letting out a resigned breath, carefully remaining inconspicuous. Even now, years before he would choose to descend into Hell in search of this man’s soul, there was a gravity acting on him like nothing he’d experienced before. He knew now where it was coming from. The angel fixed his gaze on two aisle seats in the second row. Desperate, but not too desperate. The hopeful filed in and seated themselves as if those two chairs weren’t there…
Castiel heard Dean and Sam conversing outside well before laying eyes on their faces.
“If you know evil’s out there, how can you not believe there’s good out there, too?” Sam demanded of his skeptical brother. Cas couldn’t help but smile. He might not have the affinity for Sam he did for his elder brother, but he admired Sam’s innate sense of the right, good and just.
“Because I’ve seen what evil does to good people—” Dean responded.
“Maybe God works in mysterious ways,” a sweet, lilting voice chimed in from nearby. The brothers stopped, ears perked. Dean’s face lit up the moment the voice’s owner came into view, dressed for Sunday but wearing her skirt a hand or two shorter than Christian modesty usually dictated.
“Maybe he does. I think you just turned me around on the subject,” Dean replied, dialling up the charm despite the fact he was standing there with one foot planted firmly in the grave. Cas smiled, subtly shaking his head. On the precipice of death, and there he was angling for intimacy that, in his condition, would put him in the ground. Some things never change. Not a bad way to go, though…
“Yeah. I’m sure,” the young woman retorted. Even her gentle, musical voice didn’t do much to take the edge off her sarcasm. Castiel watched the throng, listening as the woman’s—Layla’s—mother stood from her seat, asking their neighbours to save their seats until she returned with her daughter, currently lingering outside in fresh air. The discomfort Layla felt thanks to her condition—an inoperable brain tumour—made the company of many people in such close quarters difficult to stomach.
“I’m Dean, this is Sam,” said Dean, rolling with the punch as well as any he’d ever taken, extending a hand.
Taking and shaking it with one intrigued eyebrow up and a smile, she replied, “Layla… so, if you’re not a believer, then why are you here?”
“Well, apparently my brother here believes enough for the both of us,” replied Dean sardonically, pointing a thumb at Sam.
“I see.”
Layla’s mother came up beside her, putting her arms around her daughter, shepherding her back into the tent. “C’mon, Layla. It’s about to start.”
“All right… ‘bye,” she replied, her voice lighter and sweeter than any Dean had ever heard—and resentment-free. With a quick wave and a charming glance back at the brothers, she returned, with her mother’s arm around her, to their seats.
The moment Layla and her mother were out of earshot, Dean opened his mouth, saying under his breath, “Betch you she can work in some mysterious ways.” Sam could only shake his head, roll his eyes and laugh in reply as he followed Dean into the tent.
Dean took in their surroundings as he’d been trained to. The exits… video surveillance… the police present… any churchgoer that might be just a bit too burly… he took note of it all. “Yeah… ‘peace, love and trust’, all right,” he observed, directing Sam’s gaze to a security camera with a subtle upward jerk of his head and eyeballs. Sick to death of organized religion’s hypocrisies, Dean set his sights on the nearest seats he found.
“No. Not there. Up front,” Castiel whispered from the shadows in a dim corner, eyes glimmering bluish white.
Sam was about to follow Dean’s lead until something in the back of his mind stopped him. He, in turn, stopped Dean with a hand on the shoulder. “Come on.”
“What are you doing? Seats right here,” Dean said, not keen on getting any closer to the front of the crowd.
Scanning the tent for the closest seats to the stage, Sam spotted two oddly vacant seats near the front of the makeshift ‘pews’. He coaxed a resistant Dean forward. “We’re sitting up front… come on!”
“What? Why? Oh, c’mon, Sam!” The exertion of the exclamation made Dean wince.
“You all right?”
“This is ridiculous,” Dean griped, almost childlike, but going along anyway. Two short years, and the luxury of such youthfulness would be one this young man could no longer afford. Sam put a protective arm around his brother as they walked up the aisle. “I’m good… dude, git off me.”
Obliging, Sam kept his hands away and eyes on their free seats. No one seemed particularly interested in having or saving them. “Perfect.”
“Yeah. Perfect,” Dean shot back. He was not a keener who liked sitting at the front of class.
“Take the aisle,” Sam insisted. His brother rolled his eyes.
The two settled into their seats, Dean grudgingly. Within seconds, the Reverend began his sermon. Castiel set his feet in motion, moving clandestinely, unseen, threading his way through the gathered faithful like a ghost. “Each morning, my wife, Sue Ann, reads me the news. Never seems good, does it?” he posed to the crowd, all of whom answered back like robots programmed to respond in the spaces between his words. Seemed as though each one he looked at was sicker than the last. The whole sordid pageant set Dean’s nerves on edge, made his teeth itch. “Seems like there’s always someone committing some immoral, unspeakable act… but I say to you: God is watchin’!”
“Yes! He is!”
Castiel couldn’t help snickering and shaking his head, glancing around the room at this motley collection of souls. If they only knew how wrong they were.
The irony of it? They walked further from The Way here, in a counterfeit House of God, than anywhere else. The powers at work here were unholy, yet they flocked to them anyway. Moths to a flame, with eyes so feeble they were incapable of discerning the difference between hellfire and the Lord’s light.
“God rewards the good and he punishes the corrupt…! It is the Lord who does the healing here, friends.”
<Dean.> Castiel impressed the thought upon the preacher as he walked. To the Reverend’s credit, he didn’t flinch, betraying only the barest instant of hesitation.
“The Lord, who guides me in choosing who to heal, by helping me see into people’s hearts.”
An unsettlingly unanimous chorus. “Amen!”
Smoothly coming to a stop, standing at Dean’s left hand, Cas lifted his hand out of his pocket, holding his palm behind Dean’s head. Almost close enough to brush the back of his buzz-cut hair, but not quite. Twenty-two years and some months since he’d last known Dean’s touch. The temptation to feel it again was strong. Dean rearranged himself slightly in his seat. He leaned closer to Cas, leaving the angel wondering for a fleeting moment if Dean sensed his presence.
“Yeah,” Dean scoffed. “Or into their wallets.” The remark drew ire from many in the crowd within earshot, Layla and her mother included. Sam shot a look to kill his direction.
“You think so, young man?”
Dean darted his gaze around the room in confusion, not having intended to speak so loudly. Hell, he hadn’t intended to say it out loud at all. “Sorry.”
“No, no. Don’t be. Just, mind what you say around a blind man—we got real sharp ears.” Dean laughed, though not so enthusiastically as the rest.
<Dean,> Castiel repeated, more forcefully this time, a shimmer of grace in his eyes. Reverend LeGrange cocked his head, listening, managing to keep his poise in front of the crowd, his hands on the pulpit steady. It was nothing more than momentary flashes of events to come, but Castiel showed Roy it was not this man’s time to die.
The Reverend focused on Dean. There was an aura behind Dean’s head bright enough for even a blind man to see, if that man was at all spiritually inclined to begin with. Cas swiftly scanned the room. There were a handful of others who could see a glimmer of it as well—Sue Ann Le Grange, among them.
“What’s your name, son?”
Clearing his throat uneasily, Dean responded truthfully, even though he’d definitely meant not to. “Dean.” His ill-at-ease feeling grew with every passing second. Feeling like he was caught between the lion’s maw and a rat pit had him wanting nothing more than to bolt.
“Dean,” the Reverend repeated. Dean frowned slightly when Reverend Roy didn’t sound the least bit surprised at the name, nodding in knowing acceptance. “I want you to come up here with me.” Murmurs and a crescendo of applause rose from the crowd, but Dean remained in his seat, shaking his head. There were others here suffering much worse. He was very likely the most un-Godly person in the tent. No way did he deserve healing before anyone else.
I’m not worth it.
Others in the crowd, though disappointed they were not called on, rejoiced that someone would find good fortune this day and encouraged him to rise and join the Reverend on stage. “C’mon, Dean. Go on!”
Flashing a disarming smile and with a politely dismissive wave of the hand, Dean stayed planted in his seat. “No. It’s okay.”
Sam’s stunned gaze, riveted on Reverend Roy, turned his brother’s way, utter disbelief plain on his face. He’d been shit out of ideas about how to draw the Reverend’s attention this whole time! By sheer dumb luck, Dean manages it all on his own, and still, he insisted on being passed over. “What are you doing?” he demanded, aghast.
Confused, Roy stammered out, “Y… you’ve c… come here to be healed, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, but… uh, look, you should pick someone else,” Dean replied, having to raise his voice above the bewildered voices of the congregation.
An amused, affectionate smile formed on Cas’ lips. Hard-headed as ever. He looked Dean’s way and though he couldn’t afford to touch him, there were other ways to motivate the stubborn ass. Wispy filaments of his grace emerged from the palm of his hand, brushing against the back of Dean’s head, taking root.
Dean twitched his head uncomfortably, eyelids drooping closed for a split second until he forced them open while, at the same time, he felt his resistance give way.
“Oh no… no,” Reverend Roy insisted. “I… I didn’t pick you, Dean. The Lord did.” Dean sincerely doubted that. Letting out breath he’d been keeping in his chest, he looked back over his left shoulder. There was nothing there. Though he also could’ve sworn there wasn’t nothing there.
“Get up there!” Sam pressed, anxious Dean might succeed in putting the preacher off if he kept this up. Dean turned to his wide-eyed brother and, in the end, couldn’t bring himself to fathom not going through the motions even if it did break Sammy’s heart when this place proved itself a house of smoke and mirrors.
Cas carefully moved his hand away from Dean, cautiously retreating when he recognized the change in his demeanour. Sue Ann invited him forward with a wave. Dean rose slowly, the taser shock having done a number on muscles other than his heart, hobbling up onto the stage. Bringing a supportive arm up behind him, the preacher’s wife ushered him up to join her husband.
Confident Dean wouldn’t back out now, Cas allowed himself a subdued smile and made his way, undetected, through the faithful and out of the tent. The dark power that would give Dean his life back wouldn’t obey a summons with an angel’s aura close by. Ducking out of sight between campers parked outside, Castiel retreated through the veil into the space between planes, concealing himself from both the perception of the shackled reaper and angels keeping watchful eyes on Reverend Roy Le Grange and his congregation.
Death © 2025 Petite Madame | In | T | Tw |
◇

Providence, Rhode Island, 2007

Cas watched, placidly perched on the curb as the flatbed transport truck sped past, well over the speed limit for residential streets. A pickup truck drove behind it, loaded with steel pipe on its way to new construction at the suburb’s outskirts. The seraph fixed his sight on an oncoming car at the crossroad. By Castiel’s will, the driver couldn’t see the stop sign. The transport driver swerved, laying on his horn and air brakes with a deafening screech. The pickup driver jolted out of his long-day stupor and furiously pumped his brakes, swerving to match the big rig. The straps holding the pipes were old. Too old. Castiel smirked as he walked out into the street.
Snap!
The truck hit a pothole that dropped its side, strewing its load across the roadway. Castiel watched as the pipe dug into the asphalt and stood on end, the world about him moving at an almost comically slow pace. Instead of allowing the pipe to continue on its natural path alongside the truck, Castiel stepped underneath as the pliant metal bar bounced up from the pavement, his hand closing around the flexing tube. Every muscle in the vessel he wore coiled and, in a smooth arc, heaved. The pipe-turned-javelin lanced through the air, through the windshield, and clean through the heart of the man Dean pursued. His body went taut from shock as he died, bringing the already-braking car to a cold stop.
Dean brought Baby to a screaming halt. Castiel watched transfixed, taking agile, almost reverent steps toward Dean as he exited the car, his steely fury turning to disbelief, confusion, and finally, acceptance of what his eyes had seen. “Holy…”
He circled ‘round Baby’s trunk, moving cautiously. The forget-me-not blue car’s engine was still running. Blood dripped from the pipe onto the leather back seat. The man’s slack face and vacant eyes came into view. Dean knew immediately—he was gone.
Dean frowned. He’d prayed. It was a split second, and it wasn’t even words, really. It was a feeling—a hope. Please, God, don’t let this evil sunuvabitch get away. He couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen, but something was… off. Heart hammering in his chest, Dean opened the car door, pulled the parking brake and reached for the keys, killing the engine. He thought for a moment, as the cold steel bar kissed his cheek, he could smell something. Something fresh and clean washing the stench of the rapist’s death from the air…
Had something… or someone, really been listening? Heard his prayer?
He stood and looked around helplessly. Water came to his eyes as he futilely looked around, trying to see something, anything that could explain… but there was nothing. No one. Whether Sam had been here or not, with Father Gregory’s soul presumably at rest by now, this man died. His eyes came to rest on the street sign planted in the ground on the kitty-corner beside the dip where the curb blended into the road. He couldn’t focus his eyes to read the sign, but he couldn’t look away from the spot.
Castiel stood quietly rooted in place, saved from himself by the strangest feeling. His body wouldn’t move. The urge to reveal the briefest glimpse of himself through the liminal divide between them seized his heart and mind so powerfully he’d never felt anything like it. It was terrifying and exhilarating. If he so much as twitched a finger, he would do it, but he couldn’t and he knew it. He couldn’t interfere. He couldn’t risk Dean remembering him when they first meet. Dean had to be allowed to live his life, to make his choices, ask his questions and find his own answers. No matter what his foolish, twitter-pated heart wanted.
He wanted to reach out, to feel Dean’s skin and cheeks under his fingers, to feel his body heat against him again after all these years. To be that close to him, and become much closer. Castiel breathed in deep, realizing his vessel hadn’t been for some time. The awed, open, hopeful look on Dean’s face held the angel’s gaze captive. Beautiful.
A hand touched Dean’s shoulder. Dean started, and the rapture between them crumbled.
“Buddy, you okay?” Dean blinked, disoriented. The pickup driver… right.
“Me? Yeah! Yeah…” Swallowing, Dean wetted his paper-dry throat. “I’m good.”
The driver of the pickup sighed, relieved. He would be lucky if this mess didn’t cost him his job. “We gotta call the police,” he said, shaking his head.
“Yeah… you do that,” Dean answered distantly, gaze wandering back to the curb and road sign.
“Man, you sure you’re okay?”
Dean chuffed, looking at the dead man slumped in the driver’s seat of his car. He smirked. “I’m all good. Don’t worry ‘bout me.”
What a mess. He was a witness. He couldn’t leave the scene; leave, and he’d force the cops who showed to ask, “Why?” The one question you never want to give a law-dog reason to ask. Tends to lead to a whole lot more “whys”. They would try to find him, and Baby wasn’t what you’d call an inconspicuous ride. Dean sighed, eyes rolling as he shook his head, stuffing his hands in his pockets against the chill in the nighttime air as he leaned back against Baby’s grille. Unintended, his hand closed around his cigarettes and lighter. He inhaled and sighed, putting his fingers to work on lighting a smoke. What the Hell, why not? It was gonna be a long-ass night…
Hands buried in his pockets, Dean’s shoulders and head hung, heavy with the weight of what he couldn’t explain, as he took long strides along the slanted sidewalk up to their motel room door. For the barest moment, he hesitated opening it.
Jangled his keys in the lock, and with some difficulty… chack.
Dean sighed, stepping in the door. He found Sam packing, despondent. Not just that, upset. He shut the door gently behind him. Didn’t hurt, giving the kid space to be angry. More to the point, he had no idea how to say what he needed to say. Ah, hell, there was nothin’ for it.
“How was your day?”
Sam gave his head this little shake and kept stuffing washed clothes into his duffle. No, kid wasn’t angry, but… somethin’ was wrong. Really wrong.
“You were right. It wasn’t an angel. It was Gregory.” Sam tucked his chin down into his chest, seeming damn near like he might cry. Taken aback, Dean looked on and let out a disbelieving chuff. Sam, the one who believed, had been on the watch that disproved his faith. Here he was, the one who didn’t believe in Heaven at all, well… he’d just witnessed what might well be the proof he’d been demanding all along. Or, Gregory had absolved the sins of these sick fucks in confession, and that’s how he knew who the bad seeds were.
It stung how strong the urge was to let himself believe. Something in his heart, for reasons he couldn’t name, wouldn’t give up the holy ghost. Unscrewing his flask’s cap, he poured himself a mouthful of whiskey to take the edge off his resentment and the memory of what might’ve been one cold, hard evening a long time ago, if not for one selfless young girl, not a God worth less than a damn. He passed the flask over to Sam in consolation. Kid looked like he wouldn’t say no.
Sure enough, Sammy helped himself. Shucking off their dad’s jacket, Dean gave his mouth and nine o’clock shadow a soothing stroke, frowning. He’d spent the drive back to the motel wanting to believe. In the end, no… just the same now, as back then, it was a good-hearted human priest, not some Heaven-sent angel, who’d kept bad things from happening to good people. The rapist in the forget-me-not car had punched his own card drivin’ like a fuckin’ maniac.
“I just, uh… I wanted to believe, so badly…” The warble in Sam’s voice caught him. Dean took a breath in, gaze fixing on his baby brother.
Whoa. Kid really is about to cry. This ain’t about God or angels. What’s eating…
“It’s so damn hard to do this… what we do. We’re alone, and there’s so much evil out in the world, Dean. I feel like I’ll drown in it. And when I think about where I’m headed, how my life could end up…”
Sammy might be runnin’ shy on hope, but they’d always—always—pulled through before this time would be no damned different. He wasn’t getting all up in his feelings or anything, sitting with his little brother, keeping him company while he was afraid of dying. It’d been a long day. His feet were killin’ him.
“Yeah, well, don’t you worry ‘bout that. I’m lookin’ out for you.” He was. He always would. Even if Sam didn’t, he believed, with everything he had, that there was a way out of this. A way to get this monkey off his brother’s back so he could get back to livin’ whatever life he actually wanted.
“Yeah. I know you are.” Then, he saw it. The brave face his brother wore, for a split second, showed what was underneath. They weren’t kids anymore, and this wasn’t some shadow in the closet. The monster that killed their mother… and their father, had designs on him, and he couldn’t see a way out.
“But… you’re just one person, Dean, and I needed to think that there was something else watching, too, y’know? Some higher power… that all this evil is the flipside of a greater good. That maybe…”
Sam choked on what he wanted to say. “Maybe what…?”
“Maybe I could be saved.”
Dean looked away. No clever retort. No empty hope. Only the sting of the fact that this was too big, and the faith Sam placed in him all his life, wasn’t enough. Not anymore.
“But! Uhh, heheh, y’know that just clouded my judgement and you’re right. I mean, we gotta go with what we know. With what we can see—what’s right there in front of our eyes…”
He could barely hold on to listening to Sam with what came roaring to life and clawed its way up from the back of his mind. Whatever sent Sam after this guy had been right. Even though he’d kept Sam away, the man was dead. Like some higher power wouldn’t be denied. The way the angel’s mark died… it wasn’t right. He wasn’t perfectly sure of what he’d seen, and he was no rocket scientist, but every other pipe that had fallen off the rack kept bouncing in the direction the truck skidded. This stray pipe behaved like none of the others and accelerated backward, like… like it had been thrown. Physics just didn’t work like that.
Now, maybe the guy had been moving fast enough to catch one through the windshield and end up gored, but he’d slammed on the brakes. He was almost at a dead stop when that thing punched a hole clean through his heart and didn’t stop until nearly two feet of it stuck out past the back of a sturdy seat six inches thick, or more. He’d have had a hard time making that shot into a skidding vehicle with a handgun, nevermind a flexing, randomly bouncing ten-foot length of pipe. If Sam and Father Reynolds had given Father Gregory his last rites, he was at rest when it happened.
Which meant that there was somethin’ else going on.
The last thing he wanted to do was give Sammy false hope, but…
“Heh. It’s funny you say that…”
Suddenly, he had Sam’s undivided attention. “Why?”
“Gregory’s spirit gave you some pretty good information. Guy in the car was bad news. I barely got there in time.” He didn’t want to say what he’d stopped out loud. Not for Sam’s sake; for his. Without the adrenaline rush of the chase, it turned his stomach.
Sam’s brow furrowed. “What happened?”
“He’s dead.”
Sam went wide-eyed. After all that fuckin’ preachin’ about…! “You…?”
“No.”
Father Gregory had asked him to kill the man. Dean had made sure he’d be nowhere near the guy when it happened, but he was still…
“I’ll tell you what, if…” Dean said what came next like he had to pry each word out of his throat. “If I hadn’t seen the way he died with my own two eyes, I never would’ve believed it. I mean, I don’t know what to call it…” If he called what he’d witnessed what it looked like, there was no goin’ back.
“What? Dean, what did you see?”
Dean shrugged slightly, heart racing. He’d seen what he had. There was no denying it. “Maybe… God’s will.”
Sam took a breath because he had to. He’d stopped somewhere along the way. “Dean, you’re the one who stood on the steps of Father Reynolds’ church and told me you didn’t believe. Just because he’s dead…”
"Sammy, I didn’t kill him. She didn’t kill ‘im. Nobody did. What killed ‘im, shouldn’t have, but it did.”
Sam frowned. Dean sounded positively manic. “Dean, quit pussy-footing around it and tell me.”
Dean sighed hard and gave in. “There was this construction truck carrying some pipes. He was driving way too fast. I was chasing him. An’ for a second, it crossed m’mind, ‘Please, God, don’t let this evil sonuvabitch get away.’ Next thing I knew, brakes were squealin’, the truck swerved, he swerved, I swerved to keep from rear-endin’ ‘im… the pipes the truck had on its rack came loose. One of ‘em—just one—hit the guy straight through the heart like somebody’d thrown a fuckin’ spear. I mean, he didn’t look like he was still goin’ fast enough for the thing to go all way through him the way it did.” Dean told the story as much with his mouth as his hands.
“You’re fucking with me.” Sam gave him this sideways look.
“No! I’m not. It went through his body, and through the fuckin’ seat! And not by a little. By, like, a lot. It’s not like he ran into the back end of the whole bunch of pipes at top speed. It was just one, it didn’t move like any of the others, they were all lyin’ on the ground. Didn’t end up stuck in his engine block or the seat beside ‘im, nuthin’. Sammy, it went straight through his fuckin’ heart. I’d have a hard time getting it that precise if I was shooting a moving target on-range.”
“Jesus…”
“I don’t think so. It felt like there was malice to it, and there was this pungent smell. Clean. Not like you’d expect from a dead guy. He died instantly. His heart didn’t even need to stop. He just didn’t have one anymore. Sam, he’d been out on a date, and tried to rape the girl with him. That pipe punched his heart clear out of his body.”
“My God…”
Dean scratched at the back of his head with a little more vigour than he should’ve. He left a couple of aching tracts of skin on his skull. “What you said, ‘bout angels bein’ vengeful… nothing like bedtime stories… this felt like vengeance, and not by the hands of man.” Sammy slumped back and lightly bit inside his lip, exhaling like it’d been punched out of his chest. “Sam, I don’t want to give you false hope, but…”
“You saw what you saw,” Sam finished, taking a couple slow breaths, nodding.
Dean nodded, a consoling expression on his face. “I did, and I can’t explain it.”
As much as he wanted to give Sam time to get not just hopeful but excited, they needed to get some rack and get the hell outta Dodge. He turned around and looked out the window, peeking past the lace curtains. “Sam, I had to stay at the scene and give a statement. The police have seen me. They decide to do any sniffin’ around, and they might come knockin’. It ain’t gonna be long before one of ‘em matches my mug to a banker robber on the news.”
“Fuck!” Sam whipped the shirt in hand at his duffle bag. It didn’t go in.
“Yeah. I know we wanted to chill, and you paid for the week, but…”
“We need a few hours sleep.” Neither of them was in good enough shape to drive.
“Yeah. Let’s wash, pack up, and set alarms.”
Sam nodded, grudglingly gettin’ up and gettin’ on it…
Settling himself into the branches of the tree overhanging the motel’s roof, Castiel chuckled quietly, allowing himself the slightest smile. He never had and never would interfere with Dean’s will. Still… stoking some faith in his heart couldn’t hurt.
God’s Will © The Friendly Pigeon | In | P | Sq | T | Tw |
◇

New Harmony, Indiana, 2008

GONG.

GONG.
GONG…
There was a goddamn chiming clock in the house. Of-fucking-course there was. Every stroke of the hellish sounding bells wound every muscle in him that wanted to run tighter, but his feet were rooted to the spot. The ensuing silence was anything but. It was screaming in his ears. Dean tried, with everything he had, to put a look on his face that told his not-so-little brother there was fight in him yet.
“I’m sorry, Dean. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
Fuck off, Ruby. He wanted to say it, but showing his bitterness felt like admitting defeat. The words died in his mouth, fermenting an acrid, foul taste. Or maybe that was bile…
ARROOO!
The others, they heard a dog’s howl, but him? The sound those things made… blasted the bulwark he’d built up around his heart to smithereens. I’m going to Hell.
TACK…
TACK….
TACK.
Claws and heavy paws on the hardwood floor. A low, raspy, warbling growl sounded from the throat of something utterly unnatural.
“Hellhound.”
“Where?” He didn’t have to turn to see. He could hear the tears running down his brother’s face in his voice.
Calling it a hound was maniacally comical. It was no such fucking thing. Eyes lit up red with the evils festering within. Teeth… so many teeth. Like no teeth he’d ever seen on a living thing. Sharp and jagged like whoever designed these things had chipped shards of crystalline, glassy rock and driven them into the gums of its masterwork in fear and suffering. Mounted them there to torture their creation as horrifically as its prey. More than one row of them. Its teeth gnashed as it glowered down at him, cutting into its gums and twitching lips. Putrid blood oozed from its lips and jaws, mutilated and misshapen with dried blood and self-inflicted wounds. The thing stood taller than the doorway.
Sam… it’s teeth! It’s fuckin’ teeth…!
Dean couldn’t make a sound, let alone form words.
TACK.
TACK.
Sam’s heart damn near seized when the old man’s body in the chair, and then the whole table moved like something gargantuan was squeezing by.
The tone of the snarl rumbling out of the demonic repo mutt changed. Dean broke and ran. Sam and Ruby followed dead on his heels. Dean ducked as the sound of a wall caving and exploding into wood shrapnel and plaster debris met his ears. He bolted through the drawing room doors, slamming one closed, reaching for the other after Ruby, then Sam passed the threshold, not slowing down in the slightest. Dean dug into his inside jacket pocket for the bag of goofer dust and began to pour. The door heaved against his head and knocked a little dizzy into him. Sam and Ruby threw their full weight against the door, bracing it as he frantically worked a line of protection out of the bag. Suddenly, it was gone. Quiet. Dean peeked through the lowest window pane. The hall was empty, but devastation remained in its wake.
His mind raced as he peered through the glass, searching for sight of the abomination hunting him down. Right about now was when he usually managed to pull some batshit crazy escape out of his ass… Come on! Something! There’s gotta be something…!
Getting to his feet on shaky legs, he ran to one window, then the next. Every ingress he could think of… fuck! They didn’t have nearly enough of the stuff prepared. He’d have given both testicles to have some devil’s shoestring on hand…
“Gimme the knife. Maybe I can fight it off!”
Sam turned on Ruby, perplexed. If she’d been able to fight them off this whole time, then why the fuck…? “What?” If she wanted something from him, there was no better time to demand it. But, Ruby? She was asking.
“C’mon! That dust won’t last forever.”
Staring at the knife, Sam frowned. Something was wrong. Very wrong, and he couldn’t see it. But, if there was even the slightest chance…
“Wait!” Dean bellowed. “That’s not Ruby!”
Ruby scoffed. “Do you want to die?”
“It’s not her face!”
The demon’s expression took on a cruel, smiling twist. Sam felt as though his stomach spilled his guts onto the floor. They were just gone. Lillith. He pulled back the knife and went for the killing strike. Too little, too late. Her arm was already flying. He nicked her incoming arm but… nothing. Didn’t even faze her. Then he was thrown and pinned by a force that felt like thousands of stabbing pins holding his body in place. It felt shaped like… a hand. A monstrous, enormous hand. Lillith was much, much bigger than the body she occupied and not remotely humanoid.
Dean lunged, and her other arm went up. He crumpled against a gargantuan hand he couldn’t see. It didn’t just throw him. It lifted him like it was picking up a feather, laying him out on the table like a pinned butterfly, crushing the air out of his chest with a press that might as well have had thousands of nails welded to the underside. He felt his skin starting to break and cried out in agony.
It took every wisp of breath in him to speak. “Rgh! How long… you been in her?” He couldn’t keep his terror out of his voice.
She stood there, arms outstretched, hunched toward them like a predator. “Not long,” Lillith crooned. When she moved her head to look at the flesh and bones she wore, it was clear something unhuman, something more comfortable in it’s own body than a human’s, was moving it. “I like this much better. It’s all grown up… and pretty.” A half blink and her eyes turned… white?!
If she kept flattening him like this, his head would pop off and he’d shit and piss himself before he died.
“Where’s Ruby?” Sam demanded.
Lillith’s eyes rolled. “She was a very bad girl. I sent her far… far away.” No one is coming to save you. Either of you. The body she wore was taut; under so much strain from containing her being, head to toe, that muscles and bones in her neck snapped and crunched when she cocked it to one side. Lillith looked down on Dean with disdain, like some woefully inadequate afternoon snack.
“I should’ve seen it before, but you all look alike to me.”
Her face said it, dripping sarcasm, without saying a word. You wound me. When her gaze turned on Sam, she might as well have been glaring at a tomahawk steak. “Hello, Sam. I’ve been wanting to meet you…for a very, very long time…” All he could do was radiate the disgust he felt at what the look on her face wanted. It seemed she simply acted on what the body she wore felt for him, fascinated by its novelty.
She came close enough, and when she spoke, the smell carried on her breath was death. In all ways that mattered, the body she animated was already dead and reeked of it. Still, she kissed him like a lover, holding him in place by an inescapable vice grip on his jaw.
Their lips met. Her tongue slipped out of her mouth across his. She wasn’t kissing him, she was fucking tasting him. His face twisted up, sick with her stench and revulsion at the sexual advance. He didn’t care if he wound up breaking his jaw to get away. He couldn’t take another second of it. It took every scrap of self-control he had not to vomit.
“Hm… soft.” The way she put weight on the word turned his stomach, making clear what she thought of him. Weak. A plaything.
One side of her mouth snarled up in amusement. There would be time for what she wanted… later. There might only be rotting flesh waiting for him inside her, but defiling him with that putrescence before discarding this used-up husk would be half her fun.
He steeled himself as he wrenched himself free and she released her hold, loath to damage her prize… yet. “All right. You have me. Now let my brother go.”
The look she gave him spoke her mind. Why would I ever do that? “Silly goose, if you want to bargain, you need to have something I want… Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
“Is this your big plan, huh? You drag me to Hell, kill Sam, then become Queen Bitch?” Lillith scoffed. Sam’s eyes started to water. They were at her mercy; it was already over. Still, Dean was trying to keep her off of him every second he could.
“I don’t answer to puppy chow.” Her mouth hung loose, but her eyes grinned an evil smile as she let him feel the weight of every step she took toward the door. A twist of the handle and the door swung open wide, swiping away the dust; his last vestige of protection. The other door crunched and broke as the rancid behemoth shouldered its way through.
“Sic ‘im, boy.”
Claws splintered the flooring it walked on with every step. More than one seemingly growing from each cuticle on the foot of a seething, writhing mass of putrid, coiling muscle and protruding, obsidian bone. Nothing could grow from something alive and look like that. No matter which way it swung or swiped its limbs, something sharp enough to snag, rip, tear, or cut protruded to make every movement flesh-rending. The wood under its feet bowed, snapped, and splintered under the thing’s bodyweight and its claws’ traction.
The hound brought its head through the doorframe, rearing up to its proper height, its eyes’ focus never leaving his. The torn flesh of its throat flapped with the rise and fall of the thundering growl filtering through its viciously bared teeth. The distinct impression that it was looking down at him with contempt born of keen, malevolent intelligence sent something above and beyond fear tearing through his heart. Water blurred his vision. This creature was death and suffering incarnate. His one-way ticket to Hell.
The demonic doberman growled and lunged. It ripped him out from under Lillith’s crushing grasp, taking a tentative bite of his leg, whipping him down onto the floor with dizzying force, as though it was taste testing him to see if it would like what it was about to eat. Pain like nothing he’d ever felt before. This was just the entrée. Worse awaited him in Hell.
“No! STOP!”
Sammy … it’s killing me.
Another bite ripped into his thigh, and the thing gave its head a shake, as though daring him to show any signs of life. It’s killing me. Why’s it…? “Don’t…!” Dean pleaded. It let go, glaring down at him as though considering where to get a taste next. Sheer terror rolled him onto his front. Had him trying to drag himself away with his arms alone. His legs were tattered. Useless. As if he’d taken one grasping arm too far, the hound angrily slashed his back wide open. Dean was thankful for small mercies. He couldn’t feel the bottom half of his body anymore. He still felt it when its paw crushed him down to the floor, keeping him still so that it could take a tenderizing bite of his arm and shoulder.
“Stop it! NO!”
Sam…?
“GRAAAGH!”
Screaming. Someone was screaming… Sammy. Had to be. Where is he?! I’ve gotta help him! With primal dread, he realized, No, not Sam. Me. That’s me screaming. I’m
not in my body anymore.
Done gnawing that part of him, Lillith’s lapdog rolled him onto his back with a backhand swipe of its barbed paw. Ripped his groin and stomach to shreds. He looked. Parts of him that were supposed to be in were out…
There were no words anymore, only pain and screams. It pawed at his chest, sliding him back toward it like a pup with a chew toy, gouging deep tracts into his flesh, cutting his ribs to pieces. His screaming went quiet. Without air to leave the body, there’s nothing to carry sound, and his air was leaving through his shredded chest rather than his throat. He wheezed out with the last air he had, “Sam…” but it made no sound.
Then, row upon row of jagged teeth sank into his chest, his collarbone, and throat. The hound chomped and shook him. His strings snapped. He willed it, but his body wouldn’t move.
Cold. All he felt was cold. Then… nothing. This is what dying feels like? Heh. It’s not so bad…
Sam fought to free himself, no matter how it hurt.
Satisfied her hound would finish Dean Winchester, Lillith turned on his younger brother.
“Don’t! Stop this! No…!” Sam screamed futilely, all impotent fury and no hint of what power he had locked away inside of him. All of it, now hers for the taking.
A sweet, menacing cackle trickled out of her lips. “Yes.”
Sam’s gaze snapped away from his brother and locked onto Lillith.
She prowled toward him, one hand rising, pointed at him. A blinding white light sparked and quickly blinded him. He closed his eyes, turning his head away.
Shaking, Castiel held himself immobile, crouched on the moss-speckled, tarry shingles of a nearby rooftop as Dean’s last shallow breath left him, and his stout heart beat for the final time. Castiel watched, confused, as Lillith turned on Sam. He couldn’t fight back. Pinned. Trapped, with no understanding of his untapped power. He couldn’t even reach it. He writhed in her grasp in agony. Unable to think, let alone resist. Lillith’s intent turned to killing him; to obliterating all of him but the seed of power in his immortal soul. Sam… Sam wasn’t stopping this.
He couldn’t. His vessel and soul would break before the walls that kept his ability to fight back beyond his reach.
Castiel took off from his rooftop with one giant wingbeat and, in one great leap, landed atop the roof, directly above Sam.
Sam blacked out.
Lillith may have thought herself powerful compared to her degenerate unholy kin, but she was an infant, no older than the earliest Christian stories. It was time she knew the might of angels—the kind of power born of eons. Kneeling, open palms pressed flat against the tarry rooftop, Castiel erected a barrier between the Winchester boy and his nemesis; severed her pinioning hold on him entirely. The barrier dissected her demonic arm below the elbow from her spirit body.
A wail as could deafen a banshee
shattered the evening quiet in this sleepy, painfully quintessential suburban American neighbourhood. Believing themselves to have heard a woman scream bloodcurdling murder, the houses surrounding the home where Dean lay drowning in his heart’s blood, his lungs filling with more of it every passing moment, turned into hives of worried speculation, debate and hushed, concerned calls to local police.
A smell like no other hit Sam’s nostrils. Whatever hope he’d held out broke. “Dean!”
Sam’s agonized cry for his brother shook Castiel like a slap to the face. His whole face quivering, Castiel held back tears threatening mutiny against forced composure.
It was done; the suffering of Dean’s earthly body finished. Twenty-four years watching over him, preserving his life, only to witness it end at this precise moment in time. His breath trembled as he took it in. Dean’s feet stood firmly planted on the path that would bring them together. Without the Hell he would know through the coming months, they would never meet. No rebellion would come to pass in Heaven.
Ruby © JJPADTK | In | R | Tw | T |
Some mistakes would never be made. A feckless, uncaring God never cast down, with Jack never enthroned in his place, and empowered to break his chosen father free from the Shadow’s eternal torment. Dean’s friendship, his love, his touch… without everything to come, he would never know any of it. They could never be. There was nothing he could do to change or prevent the cruelty awaiting Dean…
Castiel let his forcibly stilled face fall into shadow and hang low as tears, large and many, fell from eyes wide open and aching, breaking open on the shingles beneath him, splattering against his polished shoe leather. There he stayed, crouched on his haunches, as Sam laid his brother down, made for Baby’s trunk and came away with a gas can in hand.
Looking down, eyes now wide and unblinking in horror, the angel watched as Sam doused the room around Dean and Ruby’s lifeless bodies with gasoline.
He was done with this life. Done. It had cost him his mother, his father, now his big brother. There was nothing left for him here. He wasn’t so far gone from school that he couldn’t go back. Re-take the SATs and apply again. Probably score even better this time around. All that tied him to this life—his brother’s remains—would burn, as their mother had. He would be free to live whatever life he chose and never look back.
With a one-handed trick, Sam snapped open and lit his Zippo.
NO.
Not a word; a potent, arresting feeling. He could hardly see the flickering flame through his tears. All of him but his shaking hand holding the lighter, froze.
Castiel’s heart thrummed out deep, hard beats in his chest. His breathing turned jagged. Without a body to return to, the last of Dean’s ties to this plane would be severed. He could never be risen. One errant twitch of the wrong muscle and Sam could drop the lighter.
He couldn’t speak to Sam. If he did, the boy would recognize his voice when they met.
The agony and misery of grief cut up Sam’s heart in ways he’d never thought possible. Something—someone—who had always been there, been the foundations he built himself on, who’d always made him feel at home, who had been his home…
Gone.
“Sam! What’s gotten into your head, boy?” Sam started, snapping the lighter closed like he’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Bobby…!?” Sam’s throat seized up on him. Still, he tried to force it out. “He’s…!” Dead. Gone, and bound for Hell. He couldn’t say it.
Sam dropped the gas can and lighter and came at Bobby. Bobby didn’t even think, he just wrapped his arms around the boy and held on tight. Sam was bawling, and it seemed to Bobby that he was a lost, scared child again. His mother had burned to death while he watched. He was too young to retain any concrete memory, but a thing like that leaves a mark on the soul. His father had died to buy back his brother’s life. Now his brother had been torn to shreds before his eyes. It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fucking fair.
Eyes locked on the sight of Dean’s body—the boy seemed oddly smaller than he remembered—Bobby let out a sob and held his son in his arms even tighter, tears finally falling.
Bobby shook his head. “Not here, son. Not like this. He deserves better.”
A police siren sounded in the distance, jolting Sam out of his tears. He fought
to get his breath back. Not a word needed to be said between them. Police were
minutes out, if that. Meeting Bobby’s gaze, Sam nodded. The aging hunter
couldn’t help carry his brother. He wiped his eyes and nose with his sleeves.
Frantically searching the floor, he found his lighter. Handing Bobby the gas
can, Sam rolled Dean’s limp, lifeless corpse onto his back, pinned his feet in
place with knees bent, and in one near-backbreaking heave, slung his brother
over his shoulders.
“Guh!”
Tears still streaming from his eyes, wide with grief, flushed in angry red splotches on his face from exertion, Sam steadied himself. Stepping inches in one direction then another, he held his breath until Dean hung balanced over his centre of gravity. The reek of gasoline stung his nose and eyes. The stench of shit, piss, blood and the breath of the dead saturated his senses. He could taste it. His dead brother’s blood and effluence soaked further into his clothes by the second.
Sam gritted his teeth. “You stupid sonuvabitch!” He growled out a sob, blinking tears out of his vision, holding his brother tighter to him. The way Bobby looked at him begged him to meet his gaze. Hold on to me, son. I’ve got you. Sam nodded, sucking back a noseful of snot before it ran down his face.
“Bobby. Grab the keys.”
Setting aside the jerrycan, Bobby dug into Dean’s shredded jacket pockets. Grimacing at the smell, he came away with Baby’s keys in hand. Without another word, Bobby picked up what he could carry in two hands and ran for the car quickly as he could for his age and with his back as it was. Sam carried his brother to the front door, waiting until the Impala’s headlights were in sight to step onto the porch, sparing Dean impact against any doorframe, as though he might feel it. Which he never would.
The sob shot out of his mouth. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He held tight to his brother’s sleeve as he made his way down to the sidewalk. Bobby opened the trunk.
“Open the back door.”
Bobby clenched his teeth together, hesitating.
“Open the fucking back door!” Sam hadn’t meant to rip into him like that. It broke his heart even more to see the way Bobby flinched. The elder hunter nodded, understanding in his eyes. He dug out the bivouac tarp, laying it out on the back seat so that Sam could lay Dean’s upper body on the seat, and pull him the rest of the way into the car with it.
The way Sam wrapped the tarp over his big brother, like he was wrapping him in a sleeping bag, not his death shroud. Closed the boy’s eyes. Turned his head to lie against the seat back, like he was sleeping. Godammit! Dean looked like a boy again, barely out of his teens. As though death had washed his face clean of the stresses and weight of his living years. A pair of tears fell. He wiped them away from his eyes, letting out a hard sigh. Dean was gone, and the brother he left behind would end up jailed for the carnage inside the house if they didn’t keep their shit together and haul ass, now.
“Sam…” Bobby said it gently. Sam’s expression went taut, nodding, reticent to take his hands off where his brother’s lie, peacefully crossed over his heart under the bivvy tarp. Sam stood, closing the car door, marching around behind the trunk. Sam looked him dead in the eyes.
“Keys.” Wasn’t a request.
“Son…”
“You need to figure out where we’ll find a coffin, then bury him, and give me directions.” By the set of Sam’s jaw and hardness in his eyes, this wasn’t a discussion.
Sighing, Bobby nodded, handing over the keys. Sam was right, and sirens were close.
Something burned in the boy’s eyes Bobby decidedly did not like.
Horror © TheFriendlyPigeon | B | In | P | Sq | Tw | T |
◇

Willow Tree Motel - Topeka, Kansas, May 2008

Distant thunder rolled as Castiel let the motel door swing closed behind him.
A memory echoed through Castiel’s mind.
“What were you dreaming about?”
He still didn’t know what Dean had dreamt of that night. Dean never answered the question.
Castiel cocked his head to one side as he stared down at the empty, neatly turned-down motel bed, unconcerned with doing anything. It existed so far removed from the last time Dean occupied it, there was nothing of him in it but a memory that hadn’t yet come to pass. He’d lain down to sleep above the comforters, curled up on his side, exhausted, worried and out cold. Dean had tucked his leather jacket snug around his shoulders, hair scruffed up from tossing and turning, boots still on, smelling of clothing worn for too long, dirt, dust, coffee, soft drinks and fast food; smelling like the road.
“Mmnuh… Cas…”
Dean had mumbled his name in his sleep. Cas’ blood burned through his cheeks as the angel recalled seating himself beside Dean, drawn by curiosity as much as by a feeling he didn’t learn the word for until more than a decade later.
A moment that, from his point of view, happened nearly forty years ago, that hadn’t yet happened. It was extraordinarily strange, but… comforting. Death—Hell—wasn’t the end. It was their beginning, if they truly had one.
Coming back in time… this was his choice. It wasn’t God’s grand design. There was no plan. Yet here he was, drawn and moved by a calling and instinct he couldn’t explain or quantify, brought to exactly where he needed to be, exactly when he was needed. It wasn’t destiny or fate. It simply was. The beauty of the artfully subtle order to chaos was breathtaking, even now. The angel’s lips parted. He took a breath to top up his lungs properly.
There was an elegance to it. It wasn’t fate that brought him here—it was the current of Life itself. Even with every reason to choose to love differently, he hadn’t. Even if given the choices again, and again, and again, the decisions would never be different.
He was no longer needed here.
The seraph upended the contents of the plastic shopping bag in hand onto the foot of the bed. A sixty-cc plastic syringe. A catheter tube purchased on five-finger discount from a hospital. Scissors. A razor. Two litres of bottled water. Face cloths. Nail clippers. Gloves—the kind that snap against your wrist before a medical exam. Vaseline. Soap—mild, natural, and earthy; the one least affronting to his senses, and, hopefully, appealing. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Something for his underarms and something subdued and fresh-scented for his skin when ready. Everything he needed to present a human body in such ways that another might enjoy it.
His clothes had to be washed. He untied his shoes and slipped them off, tucking a sock in each one. Castiel tossed his coat, then jacket down onto the bed. Leaving the lights off in the outer room, he flipped on the soft, uncleanly yellow bathroom light. He turned on the shower and let it run steaming hot in the chill of a long-empty room.
Teeth brushed and mouth rinsed, Castiel put a hand up to wipe clear a swath through the condensation on the mirror. He flattened his palm on the glass, holding it in place. Lean, lithe, strong digits… broad hand, a pronounced network of veins. Moving his fingers, he watched as the joints, muscles and tendons slid and rolled until they naturally settled flat, their sheath of skin wrinkling in the places to which it was accustomed.
Cas blinked, and the feeling of Dean weighing on him, the Impala’s hard edges digging into his backside, was as present in this time as it was then, and it stole his breath. The seraph pushed his hand across the mirror, leaving his reflection visible, warped by streaks of water. He let it fall away, the tips of his fingers carving downward-arcing streaks through the condensation on the glass.
James Novak looked a dead ringer for his grandmother on his father’s side, rendered in the masculine. One more step back in time—that’s all it would take. To bring Dean back… a gift. A woman—raven-haired, fine-featured, with fierce, steely blue eyes. Someone who could make moot the anguish his cravings for a man’s body inflicted. To be able to hold him with a woman’s hands, wrap a woman’s body around him.
He'd paid it little mind then, but Castiel remembered it now. Pressed hard against the groove where his leg joined his pelvis and the inside of his thigh. A thick, unbelievably hot swell, pulsing in time with the beats of Dean’s heart, getting harder, longer, fuller with each one. He could bring back a woman through whom he would kiss Dean’s cockhead with labial lips’ arousal-slick softness. Envelop his penis in sweltering, taut, ribbed and slippery flesh it craved to the ends of its deepest roots. Fill his hands with the kind of full, pillowy breasts that had drawn his gaze all his life. Return to him wearing a body able to create and carry new life.
His gaze wandered and settled on the lips Dean’s eyes so often found, without conscious understanding of why. Eyes into which Dean couldn’t bring himself to look, at first. Jaw and cheekbones that had known the tender, cradling touch of Dean’s hands; hands that willed him to live, to come back to him every time, even though he had been foolishly trusting, or prideful and overreaching. No matter what his sin, he’d known better love and forgiveness at the hands of a damaged, selfless human man than from his own high and holy Father.
He braced himself on the counter when, taken unawares, the sensation of Dean’s hand around his penis, firm and sure, stroking him through orgasm damned near flinched his knee out from under him. The feeling was nearly as real and potent now as their first night. It took everything he had to keep from emptying himself right there and then. Remembering stoked a sharp ache in his heart.
If his knee hadn’t slammed into the cabinet door, he’d have gone straight down. The angel gave his head a shake, unable to contain a burst of laughter. No doubt, one of the many reasons sex was best had on a soft, horizontal surface.
Weaving a little and chuckling at the ridiculous nature of the quandary he was in, he let the memory fade. One of God’s mightiest creations—a seraph!—weak-kneed for the touch and kiss of someone so infinitesimally small…!
Laughter fading, when he met his own gaze in the mirror again, his expression turned placid—all uncertainty fled. He wanted to feel it again, with this vessel. None other.
Blinking and topping up shallow air in his lungs, he exhaled the tension holding his shoulders up tight. He reached for his tie, swaying it loose and pulling it off. Undoing his shirt buttons as he turned, he headed back out into the bedroom. Untucking his shirt, he took hold at the back of the collar and off it came, overhead.
◇

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

~ William Butler Yeats ~
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
◇
← Previous • Home • Next →

Pandorakiin

© Pandorakiin 2025
Header © Winchester-Reload 2020 | P | R |
The contents of this site is forbidden from being added to the knowledge base of any form of AI or chat bot in any form, by any means, in perpetuity.
There are no exceptions.
Not the death of the author, artists or any other extraordinary, unfortunate or otherwise unforeseeable circumstance may void this assertion.
Enjoying the journey so far? Share this story with Supernatural friends!