Chapter 1: The Stricken Angel
His Grace swirled within him, groping about, trying to properly re-moor itself to a vessel. To his vessel. The Jimmy Novak vessel. His True Self’s perfect human housing, made of skin and muscle, nerve and bone. He took stock of the vessel, seeking to enmesh his Grace in its structures more firmly.
Feet. Tottering this way and that, the heels of Jimmy’s dress boots clicking down the bunker stairs—sharp little clacks on creaking metal.
“Cas?”
Ears. To hear Dean Winchester’s voice. A jagged, electric-blue sound, blurring around the edges to a quiet amethyst. Was Dean speaking now? Or was this a memory? The memory of the moment the Lance snapped in two? Dean had spun toward him, Dean’s sea-green eyes sweeping over his features. Emotions, human emotions, rushing through those eyes, soft as silk. Relief?
Hands. Castiel rubbed one against a thigh. It trembled. Hands could touch physical things. And people. An image landed in his mind: Sam Winchester teaching him to hug. But hugs had rules! Confusing rules. So, he mostly refrained. Except when he couldn’t.
Eyes. Currently the least helpful sense organ. The room below—the War Room, with its mystifying electronic devices sprouting from every wall—swooped up and down, swayed from side to side. He blinked. It swooped. It swayed. It trembled.
Even the bunker’s two-story staircase trembled beneath his feet—
“Cas, buddy, you okay, there?”
Dean again. Behind him.
Not a memory—
His Grace suddenly surged through the vessel: a Celestial electrical storm. He jolted, stung. Every nerve circuit reconnecting, re-sparking.
And then—his thoughts, his memories, the behaviors he’d grown into. All of them. Rewired and live. For the first time since he’d climbed into his truck, Dean behind the wheel, driving him home.
Everything crashed in too close. His body, his, his—words in the barn. The taste of roses. Sea-green eyes looking away. The taste of ash. Everything too real, too raw.
“Cas!”
Sam. His voice a wash of emerald, tinged with a purplish red.
Sam, ahead of him, leading the way down the stairs, had stopped and jerked toward him so abruptly Castiel bashed into him. Sam steadied him with his free hand. The broken haft of the Lance of Michael—eight feet of splintered wood, of fractured legend, of menace—lay slung over Sam's shoulder.
“What’s happening, buddy?”
Castiel mentally retraced—tried to—the last few moments. Turned up nothing to account for Sam’s reaction.
“I—I’m fine. I’m good.”
Sam’s gaze scurried over him. Checking that…he wasn’t about to topple over? that his angel innards weren’t again oozing out his mouth?
Sam darted a glance toward Dean. Then leaned toward Castiel, his hold on Castiel’s arm tightening. “We’ll get this figured out, okay?”
Nothing to figure out.
“Quicker we get him to the Library, the better,” Dean said.
They clumped down the stairs again. Dean, carrying the remaining stub of haft with its vengeful blade, kept seizing hold of his elbow every time he stumbled. Nearly every step.
“Okay, come on, what the hell’s wrong with you!” No quiet amethyst. Only the jagged, electric blue—punctured with sharp, black spikes. “You call this good?”
“I’m fine. I’m perfect.”
I love you, Castiel had said to him, just hours ago. A deathbed truth. Nothing more. Nothing that would have consequences—
The steps rose and dipped, shifted and lurched, as if borne on the crests of invisible waves, tumbling him about. Castiel aimed his foot for the next crest—
The stairway yawed right. Chortling. Capricious.
He flailed, trying to compensate. Banged into the railing, pitched headlong over it—
Dean whipped over and grabbed him by his trench coat collar. Sam whirled about and caught him by an arm. They yanked him back to his feet.
“Fine, my ass,” Dean said. “Take this, Sammy.”
Dean thrust the blade at Sam, and Sam wrapped its haft in his great mitt of a hand along with the other. Dean grasped Castiel by the shoulders, twisted him around to face him. He shoved aside Castiel’s tie and shirt collar, prodded his skin with a finger.
“I don’t get it,” Dean said. “Nothing.”
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No trace of the Archangel’s murderous magic: No fractal rot threading through his vessel’s skin, weaving an Enochian spell. No rupturing Grace seeping out his vessel’s mouth.
The steps billowed and plunged.
Absolutely nothing for anyone to be troubled about.
“I told you, I’m fine. ”
“Let’s hurry up and get the Angel of Bullcrap to the Library,” Dean said. “Since he’s fine and perfect.”
They inched down the stairs, the brothers crowding onto the same step as his, bookending him to the left and right, their fingers clamped onto his biceps. One more treacherous flight to go.
“You’re wobbling like a bobblehead,” Sam said.
“That’s not true. In my truck, a bobblehead—”
Dean huffed a laugh, a rose-and-gold sparkly sound, his warm breath tickling Castiel’s cheek—
With no warning, his multidimensional True Form took a violent spin within him. His scalp seemed to lift right off his head, and all his blood rushed to his feet. Everything—Sam’s plaid shirt, the stairway’s metalwork pentacles, the walls and ceiling and, and—the entire world—zoomed miles away, as if speeding off on a comet's tail. A roar whooshed through his ears—a howling wind, a sea thrashing inside a conch shell, a thousand angel wings beating inside a cathedral of bone—
He flung out his hands—
Nothing to grab! He found Nothing, only Nothing—!
He Fell—
Through the dimensions.
He Fell—
Sam and Dean caught him.
The brothers caught him before he collapsed to the bunker steps in a tangle of limbs and trembling GraceLight.
In all the years he’d known them, whenever he Fell, they caught him.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said. For everything.
“Sit, buddy,” Dean said.
Dean eased him onto a stair and scooted in beside him. Sam parked his XXL body on the stair below, propping the butt of the Lance beside him, like a guardian angel on alert.
“I-I hear roaring,” Castiel said. “Dots and zigzags screaming through red—behind my eyes.”
“Great. About to faint,” Dean said.
Castiel squinted through the shrieking red. “That’s not possible. Angels don’t faint.”
“And they don’t wobble like bobbleheads. Put your head between your knees.” Dean’s hand nudged the back of Castiel’s head downward, until it paused just above his knees, which were almost lost in the shimmers and squiggles.
“Dean, that’s not between,” Castiel said.
“Close enough.”
“Gets the blood pumping to your brain,” Sam said.
Head Bent Toward Knees = Blood Pumps To Brain
?
“Why did the blood stop?”
Dean’s fingers, still resting on Castiel’s nape, lightly squeezed. “Why do all your questions sound like you’re FBI, demanding information?”
“Because we get only two choices,” Sam said over Castiel’s head. “Questions that hit like punches, or—”
“Rumbly statements, like his classic—” For no apparent reason, Dean’s voice dropped a register and roughened. “‘I’m the one who gripped you tight,’ said with all the expression of a rock.”
“I’m much more expressive than rocks,” Castiel mumbled to his legs. “They’re barely conscious.”
“But not much more forthcoming.” Dean’s fingers brushed across Castiel’s neck. “C’mon, Cas, tell us what’s wrong.”
Dean, Dean, I could stay in your near-embrace forever—if not for the pestering.
“No more screaming dots or squiggles.” Castiel rose, wobbled—
Dean pressed him back into a sit. “Give it a few.”
“Keep your head down,” Sam said, “and tell us about your bobblehead.”
Castiel tucked his chin into his collar and peered up at Sam from beneath his eyelids. “Are they in your lore books?”
“Can’t say I’ve seen mention of them.” A smile quavered on and off in Sam’s voice, like a butterfly’s gossamer wings folding and unfolding.
“Then you should append a note. I’m certain it was a mutant shapeshifter—taking the form of a tiny plastic basset hound, lurking on my dashboard. Its constant head bobbling was…disturbing. So, I—”
“No, no, you gotta lemme guess,” Dean said. “You…” It was a long, dragged out Youoooo, Dean's finger springing to attention in the air, and then slicing off the word with a sweep and stabbing down onto Castiel’s knee. “Smote it.”
“Yes. Liquified it into a puddle of goo.”
Silence.
Castiel glanced up—
But Sam coughed into his fist, and Castiel couldn’t quite catch his expression—something like, a hundred of those gossamer butterflies taking flight from wildflowers, laughing softly?
Dean clapped him on the shoulder. “’Course you did, buddy. Way to not overreact.”
“Thank you.” Castiel again rose—and wobbled.
“Stubborn sonuva—” Dean said.
The brothers hoisted him upright, and, clutching him, they all clanked down the remaining four steps and into the War Room. And no matter how vehemently he commanded his vessel to stop shaking, it refused to obey.
“Bobblehead, bobblehead,” Dean said. “Minus the droopy ears.”
Castiel steered one foot forward, and then the other. “I’m perfectly fine,” he managed. “Michael’s Grace, vesseled inside his Lance and freed by Crowley”—Crowley, of all creatures; why hadn’t the King of Hell sped off with the powerful weapon intact and left him to die? Instead, Crowley had scooped up the Lance from the barn floor where Sam had dropped it, snapped it in two, and tossed off a nonchalant, “The magic's in the craftsmanship. You’re welcome,” disappearing before any of the rest of them—too stunned—got around to thanking him—“healed me completely.”
“Yeah, yeah, perfectly fine, perfectly healed,” Dean said. “I got him, Sammy.”
Dean looped Castiel’s arm over his shoulder, wrapped his arm around Castiel’s waist, and half carried him, Castiel reeling. They staggered past the War Room’s table map of the world, its wall map of the United States, its bank after bank of untrustworthy computers, and into the windowless Men of Letters Library, their bodies pressed close.
I want to press closer to you. I want to crawl right under your skin.
But he nearly pulled away. This room: Concrete. Brick. Oak.
It closed around him like a tomb.
Dean tugged him closer.
“You all right there, Cas?” Sam said.
“I don’t understand Crowley,” he said.
Sam clomped ahead, Crowley’s moose. He plunked the Lance pieces onto the nearer of the two library tables and pulled out a chair, angling it toward Castiel. Humans found this room spacious, but everything about it suffocated him. The dearth of natural light, its feeble replacement the scattered table lamps and the wall sconces and the pendant lights pressing down upon their heads. The sanitized, recirculated air. The massive oak furniture. The looming bookcases, stuffed with the knowledge accumulated by the Men (and Women) of Letters.
Not least of all, his own vessel, the God-reconstructed body of the former Jimmy Novak.
Oh, for his wings!
That he might fling them wide wide wide !
And swoop above cloud-wreathed mountains!
Dart over sun-sparkling seas!
Flash across vast plains—
“It’s easy, Cas,” Sam said. “Crowley’s hoping for a comeback of your Agents Beyoncé and Z act.”
Sam and Dean lobbed goofy grins at each other, sharing some incomprehensible non-Enochian joke.
Then the room reeled left, taking Castiel with it.
Sam’s hands grabbing, Dean’s grip tightening. Their grins vanishing into the limbo for lost smiles. Something more complicated creasing their brows.
A…a fond concern?
We are fighting, Sam had told him. We’re fighting for you, Cas.
Tears pricked Castiel’s eyes. Tears. The only other time he’d experienced tears, besides a few hours ago in the barn, had been during Naomi’s torture sessions. These were not the same kind of tears. No agony, his will forcibly twisted to another’s, his loyalty not his own to give—the tears wrenched out of him.
No, these tears were welling up. Freely. Almost a, a gift?
These were—
These were—what? Something new. Something complicated. Something—
I love all of you, he’d said.
—something completely confusing.
Tears, love, pain.
Was love—this craving to be close, this intoxication of, of…affection? this magnetic pull of, of…physical attraction? this expansive feeling that not only filled the entirety of his vessel’s small heart with the colors of rainbows, but rainbowed the immensity of his True Form from raggedy wingtip to raggedy wingtip—was love just another kind of pain?
Castiel studied Dean. Dean—and Sam—were helping him lower into the chair. Dean met his gaze, held it. Castiel let his Grace reach out, just lightly, toward the dazzle of Dean’s soul—too bright, too beautiful, too near. A soul blazing crimson with defiance—white-hot loyalty at its core.
Dean patted his shoulder and drew away.
His Grace drooped.
Yes, just another kind of pain.
***
Castiel blinked once, hard and deliberate. The barn, their fond concern, the swoop and dart of his perfect wings—these memories like knives in his ears. With the same deliberate effort, he settled his Grace, his torn and frayed feathers fluttering in the ether about him. Time to recover. Time to be of use.
“It’s late,” he said. “You two should sleep. I’ll sit here quietly. Or…or I could watch over you?”
Dean’s spine tightened stiff as a stick; his arms crossed and locked. “Dammit, Cas, tell me you’re not still doing that.”
Only when I fear you’re in danger from angels. Only when—
“Only when you call to me in your dreams.”
Oftentimes, Hunt Dreams, the flickers of Dean’s soul in sleep, restless and fierce, calling out to his Grace not in words but in resonance: protect, protect, protect.
“I do not call to you in my dreams.” Dean’s teeth took bites out of the words.
“Dude, you totally do.” Sam’s facial muscles twitched, his lips forming a wriggly line—maybe trying to bottle up his laughs? “I can hear you clear down the hall.”
Dean thwacked his fist against the table. “I don’t! End of discussion.”
From Sam, more lip wriggling. Yes, most likely trying not to laugh. The nuances of human emotions were often difficult to interpret. Angels expressed only five: fear, anger, shock, disgust, and, rarely, trust, usually subverted. But he, Castiel, the Angel of the Lord Tainted by Exposure to Humanity, had experienced many more. Especially around the Winchesters: admiration, amusement (when he understood Dean’s cultural references), confusion (when he didn’t)—
And sometimes joy, brief and piercing, bursting forth within him—as if his entire being, vessel and True Form, might soar up in wildly effervescent arpeggios of GraceLight. When Dean surprised him.
As well as bitterness, defeat, and despair, when he’d sought out God to aid them, and God told Joshua the Apocalypse wasn’t His problem.
“Sam, so help me—”
Dean’s rat-a-tat-tatted words broke into Castiel’s musings like gunfire. He must take time later to reflect on terror. On shame. And now: love.
“Methinks thou dost protest too much, bro.”
“What is that, a spell? What the hell language—”
“Shakespeare,” Sam and Castiel said in unison.
“Remarkable poetry,” Castiel added. “Almost Neanderthalic in its sonic complexity. But Will’s plays, his exploration of the ‘human condition’”—he gestured the finger quotes, even though Sam and Dean wouldn’t detect their little swirls of Celestial Light, their rapturous trills of ultra-sopranic notes—“I found difficult. I asked him to explain some of the subtleties, but—”
“You met Shakespeare, the actual Shakespeare?” Sam folded his five-hundred-crunches-per-day body into the chair beside him.
“Now you’ve given Sam heart eyes.” Dean—no five-hundred-crunches—dragged another chair to the head of the table and plopped in catty-corner. “If this Hunter gig hadn’t worked out, he’d be flittin’ around in tights, booming sonnets.”
Sam gave his brother a full-bodied eye roll, shoulders and all. “What he means to say is, I once toyed with the idea of becoming an actor.”
An actor. Even back in Shakespeare’s day, the possibilities had pulled at him: to disappear into personalities vastly different from your own.
He rested his hand on his breastbone and lightly stroked. If only he could.
“Will asked me to audition—said I had the perfect look. But I didn’t get the part. He told me I was too”—Castiel made more lovely, lilting air quotes—“‘stiff.’”
“Imagine that,” Dean said.
“The actual Shakespeare,” Sam said. “And you two were on a first-name basis! What part?”
“Puck.”
“Puck?” Dean swung his boots up, thunked them onto the solid oak, almost knocking off a wok-like, iron spell bowl. “A hockey puck?”
“Not a rubber disk, Dean. The mischievous sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Different vessel, of course: slender, male, my hair a spiky, golden-blond—sort of like the flamboyant crest on the golden crowned crane.”
Both brothers’ jaws dropped. Neither spoke.
Attempting to visualize his Elizabethan vessel?
Dean’s boots hit the floor. “You wanted to play a friggin’ fairy ?”
“Jeez, bro!” This time, Sam didn’t conceal his laughter—it rattled the library books in their shelves. “Shakespeare desecrated with a ‘friggin’’?”
“Friggin’ fairies, friggin’ Shakespeare,” Dean said. “And friggin’ Cas with spiky blond hair!”
A question surfaced from the ancient part of Castiel that catalogued human oddities—perfect for this moment. And not just because they were talking about Shakespeare.
“Sam, something has always puzzled me. Why did males play all of Shakespeare’s roles, even female ones?”
“Lemme guess.” Dean scooped up the spell bowl’s iron pestle and bounced it from hand to hand. “Everybody LGBT-LMNOP back in them days?”
Sam rubbed his temples and groaned. A sudden headache? Castiel stretched out his first two fingers.
Sam waved him away. “Convention, Cas. Less enlightened times. Dean would’ve fit in perfectly.”
“Yep,” Dean said. “All them bar wenches to sample.”
Castiel’s shakes abruptly intensified. He wrapped his wings around his Grace, wrapped his arms around his body, trying to hide his agitation from the brothers. “Dean does make strong distinctions between acceptable male and female behaviors.”
Dean shot up his hand and flapped the pestle around. “Right here, I’m right here, guys. And hey, the other teams can play by their rules. I’m gonna play by mine.”
Dean’s rules. Dean’s stupid rules. Dean’s rules sometimes seemed to bend themselves over backwards, to practically flip themselves inside out, to gyrate on their axes, or to whirl with his whims. But never did they—
I love you, Castiel had said. And the words had tasted like roses. And ash.
A torturous longing bloomed under his skin. To touch Dean. To curve his palm around the sweep of Dean’s cheek. To hold Dean close and bury his nose in Dean’s neck and breathe him in, breathe in that complicated collage of Dean-smells: motor oil, guns, motel soap, testosterone. Pain reverberated through Castiel’s heart, his longing battering it, battering it, battering it, with each pulse of his blood.
But God—or Whatever—forbid his desires ever show up on his face.
Not unless Dean…
Castiel drew a shuddering breath. “You never break your rules?”
Dean slammed the heels of his hands against the table’s edge and pushed, shoving his chair back a good foot, putting more distance between them. “What’s with the third degree?”
“Chill, bro,” Sam said. “He’s not grilling you.”
Third degree, chill, grill. While their words made no sense, Dean’s bristly antagonism, greenish-black, ripped through Castiel’s True Form like a tornado laying waste to dark skies.
“I…I’m trying to figure out—”
“Figure out what ? ”
You, Dean.
Memories blaze with a terrible power: like Angel Grace, they can smite or heal. Take the memory of Dean trailing his fingertip down Castiel’s beard in Purgatory.
Hadn’t this violated Dean’s rule about “personal space”? Wasn’t it what humans would call an intimate gesture? His cheek still remembered the warm touch of Dean’s fingertip. His Grace still remembered the warm touch of Dean’s chuckle—like a breath of sunlight piercing Purgatory’s endless fog. Nice peach fuzz.
He should stop this. He shouldn’t pursue this. It would accomplish nothing.
He couldn’t stop.
“I…I’m trying to understand—”
“Understand what ? ”
Us, Dean.
Castiel said nothing.
“Quit being a jerk, bro,” Sam said.
“Bitch.”
“Love you too. How ’bout you get off your ass and get us beers?”
“First decent idea you’ve had all night. Because you, my angel friend,”—Dean leaned over and punched Castiel’s arm, hard—“need one, take the edge off this weird post-Lance-goring mood you’re in.”
“Yes,” Castiel said. “My ‘weird mood.’” Its seed planted in that instant he’d believed he’d breathed his last. “But though my powers are much diminished”—thanks to Metatron, to an only distant connection with Heaven—“alcohol still has little effect on me—unless I drink a store.”
“You’re a mean drunk, I hear.” Dean disappeared into the kitchen.
Castiel’s fingers cringed into his palms. A mean drunk. A mean, drunken, poor excuse of an Angel of the Lord.
“I’m sorry, Sam, I should’ve apologized long before this. You were trying to be kind, and I—”
“Hey, forget it.” Sam rose to his feet and scanned the library stacks opposite Castiel. He selected a heavy tome, bound in black leather, with a fist-sized sigil embossed in red—a scorched red, veined with black rot—on the front. Michael’s Sigil. “Cas, buddy, when you said you were ‘gonna find God’—”
I sought You everywhere. In stars. In atoms. In silver-lit night. In mauve-bright dawn. O God, my God—why did You forsake us?
Sam snapped his book shut. Faced Castiel. “Your eyes. They blazed with your conviction. And then Joshua said— Said what he said. I can’t come close to imagining what it must’ve been like for an angel to lose his faith.”
Castiel shook out his angel blade from his trench coat sleeve and laid it on the table. It’d been like…like God had hurled him onto Hell’s rocks. Then He’d reached His Almighty Hand into Castiel’s True Form and ripped out his metaphorical guts.
Castiel’s Essence writhed in gruesome pain for hours.
“I yearned for God to crush me. To let loose His Almighty Hand and finish me off. Except, if God destroyed me, or if I took matters unto myself…”
Castiel lifted the blade. It trembled so hard it scattered the light—Celestial steel turned to cracked glass.
“There’d be no angel on the side of you Winchesters, no angel to help you battle the others.”
So he’d sought oblivion the Dean Winchester way. He drank. And drank. And drank. And ended up with a hangover as massive as Jupiter.
And he’d raised his eyes to Heaven and called God a sonuvabitch.
“Cas…” Sam said, his voice soft, the murmur of a brook.
Sam stepped closer and touched his fingers to the back of Castiel’s hand. “Thank you. Thanks for all your help over the years.”
“Thank you for all those times you’ve helped me.”
“You became family. That’s what families do.”
“Is it?” With his thumb and fingers, Castiel spun and flipped his blade, finishing in the position for an overhand strike. How many times had he used his blade on other angels? How many times had they used theirs on him? “Tell that to my angelic brethren.”
“Yeah, well, your side of the family’s dysfunctional. Speaking of which, what about now that we know Chuck is God? Does that make his behavior more tolerable for you?”
A rush surged through Castiel’s veins, hot, like a torrent of the blackest of Hellfires. Hate? Was he capable of hate? Of hating his Father?
“Before, God was The Unknowable. The Unfathomable. But we saw Him take off and abandon our universe, leave it to struggle on its own—simply to reunite with his sister Amara. He is the Supremely Selfish…capital-A Assbutt. Why could He not be bothered to repair the wings of His Sons and Daughters? Why did He not return us to full glory? So that we, those of us who still hold firm to our original mission—to protect His Creation—could best carry it out?”
A ripple of thunder rolled through the room, quiet, violent, like a distant storm: Castiel’s tattered wings rising in the Celestial ether. They fluttered uselessly, unable to catch a current and gain lift. They sang, but their Song was only a tattered echo, a failed phantasm of their original, majestic Hosanna. Sam’s glance flew to the wall behind Castiel. His book fell from his hand, hit the floor with a whump.
And still his wings struggled to gain flight in Song, their pale, broken tones reverberating from bookcase to bookcase, from floor to ceiling, and back and back and back to him, seeming without end. Castiel braced himself, and then he turned his head to follow Sam’s stricken gaze.
WingShadows. Gigantic, shredded WingShadows.
Sam stooped, retrieved his book, and smoothed the crumpled pages. “I’m sorry, Cas, about your wings. Look, after our beers, if you need anything during the night, wake me. Even if it’s just to talk.”
For a moment longer, the Song resounded throughout the room, wearily echoing from every nook, every cranny. Then it drifted away, ghosting back into his memory. Where it belonged.
He slipped his blade up his sleeve. “And if you need to talk, pray to me. I’ll come.”
“Maybe I will, about the Lance, if I find no answers here.” Sam leaned his shoulder against a bookcase and leafed through his book, The Lore of Michael the Archangel, the turning pages sweetening the air with their almond-vanilla smells of old paper and old ink. But a harsher, sharper stench crept after these aromas—as if Michael’s Sigil were expelling noxious fumes with each word Sam read. “It frightens me. And I think it’s why you’re shaking, though you won’t admit it.”