Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He no longer has the grace left to feel the sun. It has been so long since he has been out in it that he doesn't even have the memory of its wavelengths oscillating across his skin.

He has just enough mind to remember his name, and he grips that remnant of his sanity in his fingers, in his teeth. Between his broken alulae. They flutter, and it hurts, but the pain is real and of his own choice, so he does it again, feeling the wind of his remaining feathers moving against his neck.

Castiel. He's Castiel.

He is an angel. His grace is at such a low flicker he can feel his flesh trying to age, the edges of the mask strapped around his face worn to sticky, raw skin that he does not have the power to waste healing and healing again.

He earned this mask after he bit off the nose of a human who was foolish enough to lean over his shoulder from the front to pluck feathers from his wings rather than approaching him from behind. (The nose tasted very bad. It was a terrible idea. What an awful texture. But Castiel doesn’t regret it.)

He has enough grace left to keep the chafing at his cheeks and the corners of his mouth, the skin worn torn under his manacles, from being anything more than an awareness. It's not pain, unlike in his wings. Just awareness. And perhaps this effort is a waste of the tiny, residual droplets of his pool of grace, but he will not let the humans see his discomfort, and so, he will not feel it.

Oh, is that how it works, Castiel?

Castiel is an angel. He is still an angel. His brethren have not come to free him, to save him from this purgatory–not even Anna, who he dropped to the ground to save, abandoning the safety of the skies when he heard her scream. But perhaps they got her anyway, these canny, terrible, mortal creatures. Perhaps they got all the angels, all of Castiel’s kin. Perhaps not even God can save them now.

But he is Castiel, and he is an angel, no matter how often the humans pluck his feathers and siphon his grace, leaving his ichor dribbling down his back from bloodfeathers they did not bother to pluck carefully.

He could have made this all easier for them, he supposes. Easier for himself.

He didn’t.

He never will.

Castiel will always be an angel.

And when he is free, he will burn them all.

Castiel doesn’t sleep, but neither does he have the energy for consciousness all the time. He thinks he might be a little insane, but what does that matter? Sometimes the madness is comforting, edged with a low, vibratory hum like bees tickling along his skin.

Are there still bees outside, after the Fall? He doesn’t know, but he doesn’t think there are. There are no wildflowers except those that grow in blood.

Once upon a time, time didn't matter to him, but now, it has no meaning at all. The only things that come into this cave are the humans that rip away the pieces of Castiel’s being, and the occasional gecko that wanders in, flicking its tongue in his direction mockingly before wandering back out.

Once in a while Castiel sticks his tongue back at it, behind his mask. The gecko doesn't respond.

It's so rude.

So Castiel ignores it, too.

But it’s not a gecko that he’s seeing. The shadow stretching in a dark splay over the ground isn’t that of an unfriendly, unmannerly little lizard.

“Fuck,” the human breathes. The torch in his upraised hand, soaked with pungent, combusting hydrocarbon chains, flickers orange light across his features. “Fuck, fuck.”

Well, that’s unusual. They don’t normally bother to talk at all, much less to swear. Perhaps the human thinks Castiel has died in captivity. That would be inconvenient for everyone: they wouldn’t be able to harvest from him, because grace dies with its angel, and if Castiel were dead, he wouldn’t be able to kill them first.

(That seems to make sense. Maybe. Around the edges.)

But Castiel doesn’t feel dead. He doesn’t think there’s much a human could do to him to make him dead that would happen without his awareness. His grace would keep him from oblivion even if he sought it.

This human, too, smells different than the others, even over the smoke and the dripping sharpness of the burning torch making Castiel squint.

He doesn’t smell cleaner, exactly. Nothing is clean here. Nothing has ever smelled clean, not once he was dragged from the traceless, dustless world of Heaven.

But this human smells… brighter.

He doesn't smell like blood and suffering–just grease and metal and smoke, the tingling, unfamiliar bite of motor oil. Under it, his skin and his sweat are sharper. Sweeter.

Citrus. Rainbows.

Don't be ridiculous, Castiel. Rainbows don't have an odor.

Then again, Castiel can think that rainbows smell like whatever he wants. He hasn’t smelled one in a long time.

But there are more familiar, stronger smells coming off the human, too, that make Castiel certain that he’s real, rather than one of the shadows on the wall that whisper to Castiel when he’s not looking at them. Metal. Leather. A knife. Gunpowder. Violence.

But everyone smells like violence. Has, since the Fall, since Heaven and Hell spat them all out into this strange, horrible, burning world.

Castiel thinks that if he could smell himself, he'd smell like violence too. But that isn't new. He did since before the Fall. Everyone said so. He was, once upon a time, very good at it.

Castiel thinks about closing his eyes again. He thinks about just letting them take what they want again. Humans never come alone. They travel in packs, as effective a predator as African painted dogs.

They’ll take what they want anyway. Even if he fights. Maybe especially if he does.

But Castiel’s never been very good at easy. He’s never been good at giving up.

So he opens his eyes. He stares, and lifts his chin.

He doesn’t have much grace, but maybe it’s just his fury that makes the narrow cave around him flash with reflections of white and blue, not the smoky, flickering yellow flame of the gasoline torch. He doesn’t have enough grace to him that his gaze glows automatically. He has to be angry for that, has to burn through what little he has, and normally, these days, Castiel is too tired for fury.

But at least being harvested like corn, like kelp, held down silently because he won’t let them hear him scream, was familiar. This perusal isn’t.

He can be angry about that, at least.

His own wan, blue-white light limns the human for a long, stuttering heartbeat in a way the shadows of the torch do not—wide eyes, a parted, juicy mouth, Pythagorean angles to the jaw and the cheeks. Layers of clothes, like the silk around a spider’s prey.

Who is the hunter here? Who is the spider, and who is the fly?

Castiel is neither: he is winged, and he is angry.

But the human doesn’t threaten. He doesn’t approach. He holds out his fingers in front of him, wide-spread, but there’s no weapon gripped them despite the guns and knives crowning his hips like love handles. Castiel can smell the blades: one quenched in demonblood, the other hauled screeching from the depths of the earth, pounded into submission.

“Hey,” the human says, nonsensically, rough and low. “Hey, shit, okay. Fuck.”

Castiel understands the obscenity, but not the reason for it. He doesn’t shit. Or fuck, for that matter. It doesn't matter, though. If this human is a stranger, if this human coming upon him is a surprise, they won't know enough of him to be wary of him.

Yet.

And then by the time he is, he will be dead. So.

He watches through the matted slits of his eyelashes.

“Buddy. Hey, uh. Angel. You’re an… angel. Right? Shit. Are you okay?”

The question is so unexpected that it penetrates the fog of exhaustion and pain and the dull, roaring, drum of anger. Castiel squints against it, like looking into the sun. The glow of his eyes dims and dies.

Castiel is not human, and so he has not been deemed worthy of being asked questions before, much less anything about how he’s doing. They have mined his wings like minerals and his grace like oil from the broken land outside that Castiel has not seen in… well, time has no meaning here, in this cave, and he doesn't have the grace to track it.

No one asks the land what it wants, before it's mined. No one asks of its condition.

“Hey,” the human says, again, more urgently, and this time Castiel opens his eyes fully and looks at him. Looks at him.

He is blinded.

It has been a long time (he thinks; he doesn’t know, but he thinks) since he saw the sun. He was once able to stare straight into it and admire the coruscation of its photons. The burst of sunspots always made him smile, like watching baby birds hatching free from the glowing surface, spitting beauty into lightnessness.

The sun and its baby bird spots were not like this. Sunlight was bright, and it was warm, and it was lovely, but it was not this kind of glory, streaked and scarred and still so radiant that Castiel’s throat automatically starts to vibrate with the thrum of a hymn.

Castiel doesn’t trust beauty anymore, if he ever did.

He feels his eyes flare, and he strains his body against his chains, lunging, his teeth bared behind his mask.

The sunspot beauty stumbles back, weaponless hands raised in front of him as if to deflect against anything Castiel can do to him.

“Ain’t gonna hurt you,” he says. “I’m not, man. What's your name?”

His name? Why does he want to know? Castiel’s no fae, to be held by name and Name. He might, once upon a time, have been able to hear those who call out to him, across the aether and the void, that’s true, but no one calls for him anymore. No one prays.

Faith is a lost virtue. Maybe even for angels.

Maybe you don’t really have a name anymore. Not one that matters to anyone but you, anyhow.

No. He’s Castiel. He is.

              But he doesn’t like that this human is asking. Perhaps they have figured out a way to bind him with it—carve it upon their own ribs, pull it from the mind’s eye of forgetfulness. If there’s anyone, anything, that is clever enough to do that, it is a human. Castiel squints suspiciously at him.

The human shrugs. “Just askin’. Can you talk?”

That seems a safe enough question. An unusual one, though. No one ever cares what Castiel has to say. Why would they? He’s never been good at telling anyone what they they want to hear.

Finally, suspiciously, Castiel nods.

The human stares at him. Castiel stares back.

“Not… gonna?” the human finally says.

Castiel narrows his eyes. Why should he? That wasn’t what he asked.

“Well, okay then,” the glorious human says, and smirks. “You don't have to yell, geez.”

Castiel opens his mouth to respond to that particularly stupid inanity, but nothing comes out.

Perhaps he doesn't remember how to talk anymore. Perhaps he has nothing to say.

The human loses his smirk, it falling from around his eyes before it leaves his lips, as Castiel closes his mouth. He sighs a little. His gaze falls to what must be the abrasions on the curve of Castiel’s jaw and cheeks from the edges of the mask—no, the muzzle—scabbed over, and as angry as Castiel is himself. At least they are unlike to still be weeping. Castiel won’t weep in front of a human. He won’t let any part of his body do it.

A voice from outside calls—a low, nasal thrum of a voice plosive, open vowels. A syllable strangled and drawn out. Another person, saying Dean.

Castiel stiffens. One human is bad enough. More are worse. They always bring more when they come for him.

The human’s jaw tightens, and a muscle tics. “Look, I ain’t got much time here. I let you go, you gonna tear my throat out?”

Maybe Castiel will. Human blood tastes terrible, but this human is very pretty. He doesn’t look much more clean, but maybe he’d taste better, because of the loveliness of his soul. Maybe arterial spray is more satisfying than cartilage.

Castiel considers again, then shrugs. His battered wings rustle behind him, the feathers rattling and crackling against each other in a way they shouldn’t. He hasn’t tried to look at them in… well, he doesn’t know how long. Only that he doesn’t want to see the wreck of what humans have ripped free, the mined quarry of what was once his feathers. Not now, not when freedom seems a possibility—though he’s still not sure why a human would free him, much less help him.

But then, he doesn’t understand humans. He’s long since stopped trying.

The human pauses, his eyes narrowing at Castiel, and the corners of his lips twist downwards. “Shit,” he mutters, scraping the stained, dirty fingers of one hand down the bottom half of his face. “Ain’t even gonna lie about it. Awesome.” A long, delicate muscle at the edge of his jaw ticks as he stares at Castiel. “Should just leave you here. Hell, if you’re property…”

Then he pauses, and something dark and ugly flickers down his face, like the shadow of a demon underneath a human’s skin.

But there’s no demon puppeting his flesh, wrapping too-long fingers around that soul. Just a consideration that is more dangerous. Castiel understands demons.

“You ain’t property,” the human says, low and dark, and Castiel doesn’t understand why he says it as a threat, when before he said the word as a fact. “You ain’t.”

He steps forward.

Fuck. It’s an angel.

Like, not a harpy, not a sentient vulture, not an evil roadrunner, and seriously, fuck Dean’s life that these are real things he’s run into (or on one horrible occasion, that flew right splat into Baby’s windshield). No, nope. What is chained up in here is definitely an angel.

Well. Okay, the angel’s naked. So. He’s an angel.

And hairy.

Okay. What? Focus, Winchester, what the fuck.

He’s heard all sorts of shit about them, especially from Meg—but she lies so much just to get a reaction out of people, licking her lips and laughing when they believe her, that it’s just safer not to listen to her at all. Frankly, she does exactly the same with the truth, too, and that’s what makes her dangerous.

(Yeah, Dean sometimes has thoughts about the fact that she’s riding in Baby’s hold right now, but even with all that she is, he wasn’t gonna leave her behind. Even though he’s pretty sure he’s gonna regret it at some point, and probably soon.)

Sure, there’s always been all kinds of rumors: why wouldn’t angels exist, if demons do? Still, before today, Dean’d never seen one, and he’s been through more portions of the Wastes than most. Neither had Benny, and Benny isn’t some sort of changed little bitty bitey, he’s been around and sucking blood since the very first days of the Apocalypse.

Dean came in here looking for water. Sometimes, some of these deep caves at the bases of hills, down down and down, there’s a tiny little spring. Just a mouthful or two. Just enough for a taste of something that isn’t tinged with guzzoline and smoke. He wasn’t gonna drink all of it! He’d have shared.

But this is what he found instead.

And it makes Dean sick to his stomach that the first thing he thought, seeing this angel crouching there with that mask digging oozing lines into his face, eyes half-closed, big, dark wings folded up behind him and dragging on the stone and dirt floor stained with streaks and splotches of fuck-only-knows-what, was, “Shit, Samuel’s gonna be so happy. He’ll be proud.”

The Campbell isn’t Grandfather, and sure as shit isn’t Grandpa, even though Dean knows that’s what he technically is. No, the big man is Samuel Campbell, thank you very much, and he runs the Bunker. And an angel would be a big-ass feather in his cap—no pun intended.

How long him being proud of Dean would last—well.

But that doesn’t matter.

Dean doesn’t know when he stopped believing in the Campbell’s whole ‘cause’—when exactly Dean stopped believing that finding the alphas of the monster species are going to be the way to save humanity from this dried-up hell of a world, after the Apocalypse, after the land burned for thirty days and thirty nights, and never really stopped smoldering.

Everyone’s got their own theory for how to bring humanity back to their glory days—Sucrocorp, the Men of Letters, the Stynes. The Bunker’s got its own way: they have demon blood to make ghouls to pull guzzoline from the Earth, and vampire teeth to hatch dhampir that laugh as they fight the Bunker’s wars. When their drums beat loud and unchallenged over their corner of the Wastes, everyone shivers, and maybe that’s a kind of glory all on its own.

They’re productive. Productive.

But maybe humans don’t deserve those glory days. Maybe they never did.

‘Cause sure as shit Dean’s pretty sure it wasn’t other monsters that put the angel here alone and in chains, staring at him with his eyes crusted slits over a mask chained behind his head. And when his big, dark wings rustle and Dean’s eyes go to them, when he raises his torch high to get a better look, his stomach does a whiplash like he just jammed on Baby’s brakes.

Look, Dean’s seen some shit. He has. Done it, too—enough that he sleeps well at night, and he knows what that says about him. He’s raised the knife to make monsters—to make people—talk; he’s run people down if they don’t get out of Baby’s way. She’s a war rig, and Dean’s been to war and come back. He can’t even say he came back changed, ‘cause he wasn’t anything like good to begin with.

No one is. Good doesn’t survive out on the road.

But he’s never done anything like this.

The wings Dean’s staring at, crusted with dried, dark blood, aren’t an act of war. They aren’t purposeful torture, looking for words. The angel is chained so low to the ground he can’t stand straight, his shoulders hunched down, his knees pressed into his stomach, cock bare against his thighs—because it gave access to the parts that mattered to someone.

Whole patches of feathers are missing, the skin at the base of them pimpled and oozing where they must have been yanked out by the root. Some of the ones that are left are twisted, stunted, like the tiny, shaky wildflowers that riot whenever the land gets a sprinkling of stinging, acidic rain, or gets a good spill of blood.

Maybe it is true, what Meg says about angels. “Pluck ‘em, fry ‘em, pretty little birdies, pretty little glowworms will make you new again. New like never before.” The worst things she says normally are true.

It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Metal cooled in demon blood will break most anything, so why wouldn’t angel feathers heal?. And even if it isn’t true: someone obviously believes it.

Shit, he’s in bad shape. He’s sagging to the side, and his eyes are closed. One of the scabs on his cheek is dripping, and the blood from it is running thick as Sucrocorp syrup.

“Hey,” Dean says, urgently, reaching out a hand, and the angel opens his eyes.

There’s a flash. There’s light.

Dean almost doesn’t stumble back far enough when the angel lunges at him.

So. Uh. Okay. Yeah. Still got some fight in him. That’s good, right? Even if he won’t talk to Dean—not that Dean can blame him.

It’s when Dean hears himself call the angel ‘property,’ when he hears Samuel Campbell’s voice out of his own fucking mouth, that he knows exactly what he’s gonna do.

Angel here isn’t Benny, isn’t Garth, isn’t Patience. He isn’t even Meg. There’s a pretty good chance that if Dean frees him from that mask and those manacles, he’s gonna find himself looking at his own intestines in pretty short order.

He’s got no idea what angels can really do—maybe no one does, not even Meg.

But he ain’t gonna leave him here, because this angel isn’t property.

He isn’t a thing.

None of them are.

No one is.

(No matter what the brand on Dean’s chest claims.)

“Look, you can understand me, I know you can,” Dean says carefully. And he stays out of range, this time. “I got some picks in the rig. For those.” He looks at the manacles. They’re simple. Crude. But under the dried blood, there are runes scratched deeply, right into the metal. “I can get ‘em off the bolt to the floor right now. But you gotta come with me back to the rig if you really want ‘em off.”

The angel rears back, his blue eyes flashing, and his manacles and chains jangle and squeal with rust as he yanks at them. He makes a low noise. His mouth moves, behind the mask, his jaw working.

It’s not a voice. Not exactly. Or maybe it is, but in the same way as a volcano is a kind of mountain.

Dean’s skull rattles with it. Pressure builds up in his ears. All of a sudden, he can hear his own heartbeat, the rest of the world muffled except for the sound of his own fucking blood. Beat. Beat. Beat. The pressure builds. It builds, and Dean would scream, except nothing makes him scream, not anymore—

Then it’s done, and the angel’s looking at him expectantly.

Well, fuck.

“Okay, maybe… don’t talk,” Dean mutters, lowering his hands from where he didn’t even realize he raised them to cover his ears.

The angel squints at him suspiciously. Then he tilts his head to the side, staring at Dean like a fucking happy little bluebird.

Shit. Shit, shit, this is such a bad idea, and Dean is the king of bad ideas—like, for example, the fact that the war rig is outside cooling off ‘cause he ran her too hard getting the fuck out of there while their road escort was dealing with, dying with, some vampires that came right out of nowhere.

The vamps peeled off the curve of the mountains as the war rig came through the pass, the whole spatter falling on them like an avalanche—plunk, plunk, plunk. Stroke of luck, really, in some ways, ‘cause Dean’s plan to lose the guard that Samuel sent to cover the war rig on its mission wasn’t as much a plan as an idea marketed with wishful thinking.

Except Dean doesn’t trust luck, and maybe he’s right about that: the slurping sounds and the screams that he could hear even over Baby’s acceleration as they drove away from their dying escort aren’t exactly what he’d call lucky.

They were dhampir, he told himself as he floored it, and Baby’s engine roared them away. Dhampir and ghouls and dog-boys. Half-lives. Warboys, made out of the dead and the dying and the blood of monsters, shocked into a fast existence with technology. They die early, and they die fast, if the furies of the road don’t get them first—of tumors in the ghouls that swell and burst, from the fact that dogboy teeth get so long they stop being able to close their mouths.

Better off true-dead, Benny said, rubbing the scars on his arm from where the Bunker must have drained blood from him to make more, more, more, watching out the window as their escort died, and died, and died, splattering their blood across the thirsty stones of the pass.  Unholy, Meg whispered, smiling, all bliss, and Dean hates to admit she might be right about at least one thing.

Patience just looked away, down at her hands, and didn’t say anything. But she didn’t cover her ears either.

But this angel here ain’t a half-life, bred to be used up. He’s all living and probably less angry than he should be, glaring at Dean from over the mask like he’s telling him to stop dicking around and just get the fuck on with it.

Alright, maybe Dean’s just projecting.

He’s not sure what he expects when he crouches down—when he reaches out his bare hands to touch the mask, ‘cause the angel is close, he’s so fucking close, and there’s just something coming off of him. It’s not a heat as much as it’s an electricity, raising the hairs on the back of Dean’s head, prickling all sweet.

But nothing happens when he touches. There’s nothing shocking here to drive him back, no curse, no repellant, no twenty thousand volts or BTUs to melt off his hand at the wrist. Just warm skin and the rasp of facial hair against the inside of Dean’s wrists.

The ties of the mask are knotted together, burred and matted so hard that Dean almost pulls his knife to get through them fast. But since he can only imagine how that would go, him drawing a knife right up near the angel’s face, he just picks. And picks, and picks, while a fallen angel breathes slow and low with their bodies so close that Dean can feel his heat.

‘Cause the dude’s naked.

Right.

Why’s he thinking about that again?

The angel should stink, Dean thinks. But this close, all he can smell is power, leashed and chained and weirdly sweet, and his fingers shake with it as his goosebumps prick and settle, prick and settle, sweat beading hot under his armpits, which sure as hell isn’t helping.

The mask falls away into his hands, and Dean catches his fingertips on a tiny, tiny little bright string leading away from the fabric, so bizarrely sharp it bleeds him before he yanks his fingers away and lets the mask fall to the floor. Spellwork, yeah, he should have known, but the radiance of it sparks out as soon as he’s cut.

But underneath the mask, the angel’s just… a guy. No fangs, no horrible fuckin’ gaping maw ready to swallow. Just a face. Handsome, even. Fuzzy with facial hair to go with the wild curls. Blue eyes, sharp nose. Just a face.

It ain’t a happy face, but hey, if the dude were smiling, Dean would be more scared. ‘Cause there are scabs and oozing, raw scrapes at the edges where the mask must have been digging in all this time, clots of it in his scruff, and if this is what happened from a mask, Dean’s a little afraid to find out what’s under those manacles on his wrists and ankles.

“There you are,” Dean says, ‘cause he’s a certified fucking idiot. “Hi.”

The angel scowls at him like he thinks Dean’s a idiot too.

“Okay. So that’s one. Okay, lemme just…” Dean starts, and reaches for his bolt cutters. “Don’t look at the cuffs when I do this. Don’t move.”

It says something about his life that he eats, shits and sleeps with a cursed knife strapped to one leg and a pair of bolt cutters on the other, but hey: Dean drives a war rig. She needs him, too.

Too many fucking people need him.

But. Bolt cutters. Anyway.

Dean’s the one who flinches at the sharp, meaty clunk of well-maintained grade-A forged titanior bolt cutters going through rune-spelled steel. The angel doesn’t twitch, but the angel also didn’t bother to acknowledge that he heard Dean’s warning in the first place, because he didn’t look away. Dean knows enough by now to shut his eyes before he puts his shoulder into the squeeze, ‘cause these things are cooled in demon blood and runed all the way up to his palms, and that shit means they’ll chomp their way through nearly anything… but not without a cost.

And, of course, ‘cause anything to do with demons means that they’ll fuck you over even if it’s just their blood you’re using, you pay it when you least expect it.

About half the time, Dean guesses wrong, but he didn’t this time: he sees the brilliant flash of hot, red hellfire through his eyelids as the metal he’s got pinched between the blades of the cutters rusts in a heartbeat, and then gives with a satisfying clang when he brings the handles together.

“One down,” he announces, mostly to himself. That flare of hellfire’s not so bad, when he’s ready for it.

So of course the next time he closes the bolt cutters and grips in tight enough to get some leverage, the titanior bites his palms and fingers instead.

“Sonofabitch!” Dean spits, and like he always does, he lets go of the bolt cutters (with just one hand: Dean’s not suicidal most of the time) to stare angrily at his palm.

Which, like always, doesn’t have a single mark on it.

Seriously, fuck demon magic.

“What’re you laughin’ at?” he growls at the angel. Who, of course, isn’t laughing.

The angel just blinks at him. Then turns his chin. And looks pointedly down at the chain still holding him to the floor.

This time, Dean almost laughs. Almost.

“Oh, a sense of humor, huh? Yeah, yeah, funny guy,” Dean growls, and rubs his palm against the side of his thigh again, shoving out the stinging, burning, numbing feel.

But this time, the chain gives. It gives under the demon-blood infused cutters without so much as a satisfying clang. This time, Dean watches the tiny little shining strand leading from the cuffs to the ground fall to the packed dirt and melt away into it like glowing spiderweb.

The angel doesn’t flinch. He shudders. He shudders all over, still crouched in front of Dean, low to the ground like he’s still protecting his belly. His wings making a sound like the wind through a cracked window.

Dean doesn’t know why that makes him look. Why it makes him stare. He knew the guy was an angel—could hardly miss that.

But maybe it’s because even with everything Dean’s seen, everything he’s done, there’s something especially horrible about the damage done to those big, beautiful, soft wings. It’s not the same as watching the squirming underneath a demon’s skin when holy water gets dripped onto their hands, or the way a vampire’s back will seal right up, over and over, no matter how many times they’re lashed.

It’s… desecration, what happened to the angel’s wings here. Maybe that’s the right word. What they did to the angel’s wings. Humans did; yeah. He’s sure of that much.

Maybe it’s just because Dean’s one of the few left alive who’s old enough to remember what birds looked like. Not buzzards, not harpies, not hawks or crows, not raptors. Soft birds. Little, colorful ones that chirped in the mornings and ate seeds, cute little cardinals in the snow, blue jays making a racket. Canaries.

Canaries were probably the first to die when the world ended.

But no matter how soft and fragile those wings look, Dean knows better than to reach out and touch, though.

He should have known better.

He’s free.

Castiel’s grace is still bound within the manacles. His wings are still torn, bound within their own flesh. He can’t split space, much less time.

Maybe you never could. Maybe you’ve just been a captive for so long you imagined that to soothe yourself. Maybe God was just dreaming, and now he’s turned over and this is a different dream, a different nightmare, maybe—

Stop. Stop. He’s free.

But maybe Castiel’s eyes don’t work; maybe they’re broken, too. He was wrong about the human and the prettiness of his soul. He must be, because the human just, he just, he—

He touched.

The human looks up at him from where Castiel knocked him back: kneeling wobbling and unbalanced at Castiel’s feet, still holding that metal instrument in one of his hands that smells of screams and suffering and things more unholy than either of those, and Castiel thinks this is how it once was. As it was, and ever shall be, world without end, except the world ended, and that’s why he’s here.

They’re all the same. They’re all the same, no matter how pretty they are, no matter the wet soft inside of the pink of the human’s lips, mouthing shit and sorry and didn’t I didn’t, because he did. He did, he reached right over Castiel’s shoulder and touched his wings, stroked covetous fingers down a covert like he meant to smooth it down rather than grab and yank and spill and—

Of course he meant to take. Of course he did, they all do.

But Castiel did not kill him. Just knocked him back. Just bruised him, his left shoulder sagging from where Castiel’s hand, his manacle, must have struck.

You could kill him.

He could. His angel blade itches under his skin. Under his manacles. He wonders what would happen if he drew it. Is it grace? Is it part of him? He’s never had occasion to find out. If he tries to push it free, will it sever his own wrist instead? Will he spill his blood and die here?

He won’t die here.

He’s manacled, but he’s free.

Even if the human tried to touch him, he’s free.

So he’ll let this human have his own life, in exchange for Castiel’s freedom. Castiel can give him that much. He will spare him this once, even though he has no more soul for mercy for humankind, even if this human does smell like rainbows.

You don’t have a soul, Castiel. You never did.

Right. Of course.

Of course.

He doesn’t kill the pretty human with his pretty soul and rainbow scent before he leaves, squinting into the sunlight that starts to tickle and trickle on his skin, photons dancing as Castiel emerges from the deep, stinking hole.

And Castiel is pleased with his own mercy as he goes, pleased as he raises his face into the scorching sun and the burn of ultraviolet, because there isn’t enough beauty left in the ugly world that he’s willing to sacrifice any more.

God? Are you there?

Then, smaller: Father?

But the world breathes around him, and there isn’t an answer.

Dean’s not exactly flexible enough to kick himself in the ass, but seriously, what the fuck was he thinking?

He didn’t mean to overstep. He really didn’t. And it ain’t nothin’ to do with politeness or any such thing, Dean ain’t memorizing a Men of Letters etiquette poem or any such bullshit, lah di dah. He just, y’know, wants to survive.

It was just… that damned feather.

In the red-hot toasty mess that was the angel’s wings, one fucking tiny little feather stuck up in all of the things that were broken and gutted and torn free. One perfect feather, black as an oil slick and no longer than Dean’s middle finger—except even with as little as he remembered about birds, he knew, just knew it wasn’t sticking out in the right direction.

But what the hell was he thinking? All the rest of ‘em were a mess, broken and spiny, and so what if one was sticking out, perfect in every other way? There was just no reason for him to reach out a hand right across the angel’s body to smooth down that little one.

There was no reason to touch the angel’s wings at all.

Dean knows all about not letting people touch where he hurts.

Well, okay, sure, there is a reason he tried to fondle what he knew other humans must’ve been mowing like fucking grass—but it ain’t a good reason, and it ain’t smart. It’s ‘cause Dean’s been driving for 17 hours straight through the night, running on adrenaline and chewed coffeeberries for longer. That, and plans and hope that they might actually all survive this, when Dean betrays everything he’s lived for.

And also, he’s a fucking idiot.

Shit, he knows he’s got no business still being alive. And maybe that angel didn’t mash him into a sunspot because Dean being alive despite his own dumbassery doesn’t exactly feel good?

So yeah, it’s those cheerful thoughts that drag his feet through the sand and the brick-red dirt as he crawls his way out of the hills. It’s a hot, sweaty hike, hotter even than it was when he went down there, when he crests the rise and spots Baby’s heavy, familiar bulk, the small scattering of her entourage.

She’s by herself, no pole-cars hunkering around her like chicks, no bikes leaning against her big, solid wheels. It’s nothing like what they left the Bunker with, no chrome, no silver, no crew of half-lifes following them around, laughing and barking and sniffing for carrion and blood and war.

But what’s left here is better. It is.

“Hey, amigo, that was a long whizz! Where’s all that water coming from?” Garth asks playfully, raising his own flask of the allotment from Baby’s converter. He still has a smear of blood drying on the corner of his mouth.

Benny, still working the pump behind him to fill his own flask, raises his head to give Dean a dry look over Garth’s shoulder. He’s not as cheerful. But he never is. Considering that Dean doesn’t know when the last time was he had a real gulp of blood rather than something out of a half-life or out of a corpse, Dean can’t blame him: he’ll drink water, but it’s a poor substitute.

“Heard you guys yelling,” Dean says, instead of answering the question that Garth asked aloud and that Benny’s asking with his eyeballs. “What’s up?”

“Fireworks,” Meg says seriously, leaning an elbow out the window from where she’s sitting in Baby’s fucking driver’s seat, because she’s got a death wish.

“Get the fuck out of there. One day, I’m seriously cutting your head off,” Dean says, jabbing a finger at her and maybe she can tell he even means it a little this time, because she pops the door and hops out, landing with a prim little ‘plumf’ on the thick sand underfoot. “You mean signal flares?”

Meg shrugs. “I was too busy being tortured to learn human,” she says, sweetly.

Well, fuckin’ touché.

They’re still a few klicks ride off where they’re supposed to be, and how much of a lead they’ve really got depends on whether or not any of their escort made it back to the Bunker alive. It wasn’t like Dean was gonna stick around and find out.

Dean’s pretty sure that no one riding with them before caught sight of the passengers riding under Baby’s floorboards in the hold, where Dean stashed them—they held the post as long as they could, until even Patience complained about how hot it was, how hard to breathe down there. By the time Benny had enough and was just about to punch his way up and through the boards, the riders ringing them were a little distracted by the attack of the things that go slurp in the night.

They couldn’t have been found out this fast. They couldn’t have. Right?

So he takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and doesn’t open them before he asks Meg, “What color were they?”

“We’ve got to ride,” she says, pointing a finger, perfectly serious in a way that’s a lot more terrifying than even the craziest things she says.

Dean’s not a demon, like Meg. He’s not a werewolf or a vampire or a dragonkin. He’s 100% pure human stock, Adam’s spawn, and even with as bare and empty as the Wastes are, he can’t hear the pop of the flares bursting overhead in the distance. But now that he’s looking, even with the merciless glare of the sun he can see them in the distance: a shower of orange and red colors and plumes of smoke in the sky that—now that he thinks about it—kind of do look like the drawings of fireworks he sees in old books sometimes.

Ah, shit. He thought they had more time.

There’s never enough time. Never would have been. But Samuel Campbell doesn’t check on his jail of horrors every day, gives ‘em rest days to ‘think about their answer’ before he starts on them all over again, or comes back to find ‘em dead. Today shouldn’t have been a day when he went asking, Dean’s cousins Christian and Gwen at his heels, Christian with the knife and Gwen with the whip.

But every moment since Dean pulled out of the Bunker’s dock with a big, cheesy smile on his face, a pod of guzzoline bumping along behind Baby, and Samuel Campbell’s prize ‘specimens’ wedged under the floorboards of Baby’s hold, was time they’ve been borrowing. Stealing.

But Dean’s really good at stealing.

“We’re almost out of water again,” Patience says. She’s huddled in the thin shadow of Baby’s bulk in the noontide sun, tucked under the sunshade. Even with that thin protection, she’s crumpled like a book out of Samuel’s library, and just as precious for it—but she hasn’t crumpled away. Not yet, anyhow. Her hair is short, like all of theirs, thick and oily, flat with heat and exposure; and her clothes are too big, made for a man Benny’s size, with the ends raggedy because they’ve already been torn in strips to use as bandages for… yeah. Whatever poor monster was the last one to wear it before her.

She’s too young for any of this, all of this, but even still: she makes the statement a statement, not a complaint.

But then her nose wrinkles, and she smacks her lips, moving her mouth from side to side. “And the water…”

“I know, kid,” Dean says—not without sympathy, because he does know. Even with them only taking sips, and those that didn’t need it as much taking less, the clean water stores they brought from the Bunker ran out quick. The water that Baby’s engine generates when she burns is water, sure, but it doesn’t smell good. Sure as shit doesn’t taste good.

But it’s sweet as candy when there’s nothing else but a dry, flat horizon in the distance, so much better than salt, and loads better than the blood in their veins getting so thick it burns to pee from the crystals in it. Dean’s been there, even if Patience hasn’t.

Yet.

“But we got plenty of guzzoline, yeah?” Dean adds. “We get a good run in, get those converters going—by the next time we stop, you’ll be drinking your fill.”

It's a lie, of course. Baby’s engines make some water when they burn—enough, just enough—but Dean hasn’t drunk his fill in years. Not in the Bunker, even with its huge, cool, silty underground stores of water, enough to bargain with, enough to grow with—enough to cool the walls even in the worst of the heat. Not anywhere. None of them have. Maybe not even Samuel.

Don’t get addicted to water, he told Dean once, and then laughed big and deep like that was a joke.

Maybe that’s why Patience squints right back at Dean; even she’s not young enough to buy that whopper. “Even with the detour?” she prods.

“Uh huh,” Dean says, even though he’s not sure of that yet.

No one contradicts him, even though he can feel Benny’s gaze on the side of his face.

Part of the deal with Sucrocorp—well, with Charlie—was that they were gonna have to leave something behind to make it not worth their while to come after Dean, and that ‘something’ was always gonna be that nice, fat, juicy fuel pod that Baby’s pulling behind her. But Dean didn’t count on having to floor the war rig into a detour around the sharp-tipped mountains, rather than going through all the passes, when the vampire camps attacked and Dean’s now-dead escort put out an SOS flare that the Men of Letters answered.

Dean knows how to push her until she gives, and they were gone, gone, gone by the time he could hear the low whine of the Men of Letters vehicles in the distance, so high a pitch that he could nearly see the rocks vibrating. Nearly burnt out Baby’s engines doing it, though, and it ain’t easy finding a spot for a lady as big as his Baby to rest her skirts and fan her face.

“Hello? Fireworks? Is anyone listening to me? Of course not, you’re all trying to die,” Meg says, again. And then, “Oh. Hiya, handsome.”

It’s that totally casual, interested little lilt out of Meg that makes him turn fast, even before Benny curses low under his breath. Yeah, that probably says something horrible about Dean’s life.

It probably says something even worse that Dean’s gun is out and pointed before he even completes the turn. The bolt cutters at one hip are heavy; the knife on his other is light, light, light, and his hand is on it, too.

But the sight in front of him makes his fingers loosen.

Not enough to make Dean let go of his weapons, though. Pretty much nothing does that.

The angel at Meg’s back is ablaze in the sunlight, all shoulders and legs shielded behind Meg’s smaller body.

He has his arm around her chest and a knife to her neck—big, and nearly white, a metal purer and brighter than pig iron or titanior, so bright in the sun that Dean squints at its glare as much as the angel is squinting at all of them. Dean’s got no idea where the fuck something like that even came from, because he sure as shit did not see anything like that in the tiny cave.

In the silence, the manacles and chains on his wrists flap, flap, clank against Meg’s front as he shifts and moves, and the big, broken wings clatter behind him like the sheets and sticks of plastic piping that have all outlived the Apocalypse. Blood trickles from his mask-wounded cheeks and down his chin, and when it drips onto Meg’s bare neck, it pops like oil drippings into a fire, strands of her hair smoking and curling as they burn.

She doesn’t flinch. Not even when the angel drags her backwards. One step. Then two.

Dean realizes where they’re heading probably before anyone else does. When the angel glances behind him. He grinds his teeth.

Oh, fuck to the no. No, he is not taking Dean’s Baby.

“Oh, I see, I see. I do like a little initiative in a man,” Meg singsongs. Her heels make snake tracks in the sand. She doesn’t help him move, and he’s not being careful with her as he drags her along, only her heels touching the ground—but he also doesn’t seem to have any trouble doing it, taking her weight as he moves, a full-body and nearly cooperative demon shield. The blade at her neck nicks her over and over, spilling her blood down her front, soaking her collar. The air is thick with the sulfur stink of it, even in this dry heat.

God, she’s a crazy bitch. Even for a demon. That’s really sayin’ something.

“Shut up, Meg,” Dean says, through gritted teeth. He lifts his knife hand and sights down his Colt’s barrel.

They don’t know that the knife at her throat would kill her. She is a demon, after all. But considering it’s a fucking angel who’s wielding it, are any of them gonna take that bet?

“Has that ever worked, Ken Doll?” she asks curiously. “Telling someone to shut up when they’re already determined to piss you off?”

What the hell. “Should just let ‘im kill you,” Benny mutters, shaking his head.

The angel’s eyes flick to him, and he makes a small noise in his throat that sounds like a scoff. He looks away from Benny, unconcerned as all fuck about the goddamned vampire who can move much faster than Dean’s ever dreamed off, and stares right at Dean again, like he can see the loaded bullet right up the Colt’s barrel.

“Deanie-beanie won’t let me die, though. You’re a hero. Don’t you remember?” Meg says, sweetly.

Except Dean isn’t. They all know it.

He bought into Grandpa Campbell’s ideas for the longest time. His whole life. He’s been a hunter since he could hold a knife, and a killer since he could hold a gun. He doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t believe in what they taught at the Bunker, what the Campbell taught them, what his dad taught them as he was teaching them about silver, about cold iron, about salt and saltpeter: that the Wastes kills humans slow and dry and dessicated, sucking their life like their water, but monsters still thrive out there ‘cause of the power of their alphas. Monster blood is rich and thick and even pieces of them can make new life; ain’t that why the Bunker has dog-boys to run on the sands, ghouls who regrow pieces as soon as they lose ‘em, dhampir that don’t need water or food, just the blood of the dead and dying?

If they can get the monster alphas, if they can just get to them, the humans win—ipso facto, bing bang boom.

Dean’s not sure when he stopped believing that humans deserve to.

Yeah. He’s no hero at all.

Which is why he squeezes the trigger twice, deliberately. With no warning at all.

He could’ve hit Meg. Sure. Hell, could’ve shot right through her, honestly. Dean wouldn’t have lost one moment of sleep over it, either. She’d’ve bitched like a, well, bitch, but it wouldn’t have killed her. His bullets are quenched in dead man’s blood and tipped in silver, and they’ll slay a werewolf and stop a vampire, but it takes a blade to kill a demon.

But with this spitty little pistol in Dean’s hands, at this distance, the bullets wouldn’t pass through her, wouldn’t hit what’s behind her. They’d get lost in her body rather than doing jack shit. Wasteful. Purposeless.

‘Unproductive.’

(He can hear Samuel Campbell’s voice in his ear. The scorn in it, in that word.)

So. Dean doesn’t miss.

The angel’s head snaps back in that sick, familiar ricochet of contact. He lets Meg go, the white-shining blade flinging out wide and to the side, and takes two stumbling, halting steps backwards towards Baby.

Meg, to her credit, doesn’t stay to watch him die. She skitters off to the side, squat to the ground, too fast, in that stomach-turning way that demons have when they actually stop pretending they’re human.

Well, that’s that, the—

Then the angel straightens back up. And the two bullets that Dean put dead center into his forehead plink, plink to the ground, rolling down his face and off his shoulders, like deadly raindrops. They don’t even leave trails in the shining, blood-smeared expanse of the angel’s naked skin.

Oh. Well.

Fuck.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

The smell in the big vehicle makes Castiel’s nose itch. Not in a bad way, though. It itches in the way of something awakening, like relieving the pressure from a limb compressed for too long. It smells like violence in here, but also living things. The human—Dean—with his rainbows and citrus and the gun in his hand. Warm skin and sweaty hair. Wet fur, and growing things, electricity and heartbeats.

Heartbeats don't have a smell, Castiel. And electricity isn't alive, even though it seems it sometimes, with the way the electrons rush and dance.

But it’s not the cave, this tight space. It’s not the humans who stole from him, and stole, and stole. It’s not being bound, and there is nothing trying to break him.

God? he tries again. But only the glare of the sun through the glass answers.

Maybe that’s answer enough. Maybe that’s direction enough.

The seat under Castiel is smooth and uneven. The truck—truck? He doesn’t know what it is, exactly, only that it smells alive, well-used, well-loved in a way that tickles the back of Castiel’s eyes. It has a fire in its stomach and a tremor in its guts. There are long lines of tiny stitches in the fabric of the seat underneath him, where it has torn and been sewn back together. Someone cared enough to make them even.

And when he starts the engine with a little push of his grace and the whole vehicle vibrates, it shivers along Castiel’s bones like he’s within the belly of a luxuriating, captive beast.

The sensation is novel. Not entirely pleasant.

When it lurches forwards, Castiel feels something in him lurch with it, vibrate with it. It’s not flying, but it’s motion. Yes, this is right. His wings are too broken to fly, he tried, he tried, but the feathers comb the wind and don’t take him along with them. How is he meant to find his Father, how is he meant to wake him from this nightmare, if he has to walk, like a human?

The horizon stretches in front of him, flat, heat rising from it in shimmering waves. In the distance, in the arc of the bright blue sky, little red-gold sparks rain down towards the ground in pulses of red and gold, like leaves falling as they burn. Pop, they say. Pop, like they burn in the heart of a fire rather than in the blue, blue sky.

Hm. Shards in the sky. That’s strange, even for Castiel.

But the vehicle under him is free, crawling forward. He’s free. They’re free. Aren’t they?

Castiel doesn’t understand what’s happening outside, but then, he didn’t understand what was happening when he was dragged out of Heaven, either, falling and falling. The chains around his wrists and his ankles clank and clunk annoyingly as he turns the wheel, maneuvering. The rig around him groans, but it gives, slanting towards the faraway salt lick of mountains. Shade, not this relentless, flat expanse.

There are picks in here, aren’t there? Lockpicks. The human—Dean said there were. Offered them. Castiel allowed him to keep his life—then, in the cave; now, again, when he saw the company that he keeps, smelling of sulfur and old blood and stolen heartbeats, laughing with eyes bright at the sight of Castiel so diminished.

All Castiel took in return was this big vehicle. That’s fair, isn’t it? Humans value their lives so much, after all.

But he doesn’t know how to use lockpicks. Wouldn’t know how to find them. All he knows is that he’s moving, and away, and there are shouts from outside…

And then he’s slowing. The rig stumbles and rumbles. Why? Why? Castiel shoves his grace at the engine, but it just grumbles.

Deceleration gathers in Castiel stomach, and he tries to lean forward to coax the big truck-not-truck to move, move, move with him, his wings fluttering painfully and ineffectually against the seat back behind him. Please, he says, and the glass in front of him rattles dangerously in its frame, like it can’t stand the sound of his voice. Like protest, the vehicle drags its wheels, lurching Castiel forward. Castiel pumps the pedals and he shoves the wheel to and fro, and the buttons and the bulbous stick beside him until the material moans its complaint, bending delicately and revealing an inch of—

Of—

Oh. How interesting.

Castiel’s still studying the stick that isn’t a stick, that, when he pulls it free, is actually a thin, coarse blade with the hilt formed into a ball, when there’s a pounding on the door beside him.

He’s stopped. He’s stalled.

He ignores the banging, because the dagger-not-stick is more interesting. Carefully, he slots it back into where it was. It slides in with a satisfying little clunk, and when he pushes the stick carefully along the slots and grooves carved into the console, it dutifully moves through the motions.

Humans are very clever. Castiel has no need for something like this, not when his blade fits between his blood vessels, slotting between where he has bones in his arm, but he appreciates the idea of hidden weapons. Of keeping blades where they are useful, and unseen.

The vehicle makes a small grinding sound of protest around him, shuddering as Castiel moves the stick to and fro. But since the vehicle stopped moving even when Castiel wasn’t ready for it to, he doesn’t think it has the right to complain.

“Hey! Hey, don’t you fucking—hey, bird boy!”

Castiel stops and scowls. He is not a bird. And he is certainly not a boy.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he can see the pretty human—Dean—hanging at the open window, his face low and his color high. His mouth is open as he pants, and his words come harsh with it. Sweat pearls down his face, carving rivers along the thin, yellowish layer of grime that has accumulated. He’s jumped up and onto the side of the vehicle, clinging, his foot on the step that Castiel didn’t need to use to jump in, and he’s hanging off some sort of handle.

Well, that’s inconvenient.

“Look, asshole, Baby ain’t going anywhere. She’s done with you,” Dean snarls, and in the silence of the engine under Castiel, he knows it’s true. She’s loyal, is this vehicle. Loyal to humans who lie and steal and torture, so what does that say about her? “So either you let me in and I let you hitch a ride, or we’re dancin’ until the cows come home. Capisce?”

Cows? There are cows? Castiel turns and frowns at him.

No. There aren’t any cows. Castiel would have smelled them. Besides, what would they eat? Even ruminants need to ruminate.

But now that Castiel’s attention has been caught, the human essays a smile. Like most essays, it’s a struggle. It’s a baring of teeth.

(He’s still pretty, though. He still smells pretty. Even with the snarl. Maybe, like the hidden dagger, because of it.)

“Look,” Dean says. He presses a free hand to his side, bending over it, then gulps air, and straightens again. He looks into the side of Castiel’s face, and Castiel looks away, back at the unresponsive wheel. “You get your feathery naked-ass butt back out here, I’ll get those manacles off you. Like I said I would. Right? Bet they’re a pain.”

Castiel narrows his eyes in consideration. He’s not a fool. The human made that offer before Castiel took this vehicle from him. Even if Castiel thought the taking was fair, considering that the human touched Castiel’s wing. He tried to take.

They always try to take.

But the rig really isn’t going anywhere, and Castiel can’t find God if he’s not moving.

Castiel jabs on a few more buttons in frustration. One of them, right in the middle of the wheel, sends up a deep, throaty blatt of a noise that reverberates through all of Castiel’s bones and sets his hair standing on end, his wings jerking against the back of the chair and striking the door in his startlement.

That is an awful noise, why would it do that? Castiel hits the top of the wheel with his fist.  (He ignores the human’s outraged “Hey!”)

But… the manacles are annoying, especially with the long piece of chain clanking around all over the place. It rattles Castiel’s teeth every time it hits something, every time it moves, every time it grinds against the exposed bone under the metal. He would like it gone.

Castiel turns and stares at the human. The human’s smile might be more genuine than it was a moment ago. But it might not. They lie, after all.

(Well… at least, Castiel thinks they do. That’s what he was told. The only ones he knew never bothered lying to him. They just took.)

So Castiel gestures until the human steps back, hopping downwards and off the side of the large vehicle until his boots hit the coarse, packed stone. Castiel thinks he’s being very generous, that he isn’t hitting Dean with the door when he opens it and slides himself free, feet-first. He doesn’t bother to use the step as he slips free and lets himself down.

“Good,” Dean says. “Good Feathers.”

Then, as Castiel’s feet touch the ground and his toes curl into the hot, coarse sand, the human strikes.

There’s a pressure. The pressure is awful, but then it’s done, and Castiel looks down.

There’s a hilt protruding from his chest.

The positioning of it is quite keen. Very expert. It’s turned sideways and slid between his ribs, angled just so to not catch against the bone. It’s a lovely stroke, as Castiel understands such things. He appreciates it. The tiny runes on the hilt sparkle prettily in the hot, hot sun. It’s a knife that has been kept clean. Sharp. It slid in very smoothly.

But it itches.

Castiel scowls down at it. That is a sensory kind of different, but it's not an interesting itch the way the smells in the vehicle were. It's just annoying.

Castiel reaches down and pulls the knife out, then drops it on the ground. He raises his head and frowns at Dean.

It's not that Castiel doesn't understand why he was just attacked. He's not even upset about it. He did try to take the big, ugly, living creature of a machine, with all its wheels and its kerosene blood and its loyal, burning, mechanical heart. It wasn’t his, and he never made the deal of trade for life for vehicle explicit. Stabbing would be a perfectly apropos punishment for being caught, and he was.

But doesn't the human know not to bother? Castiel is an angel. Even as low on grace as he is, that itchy little demon blade that Dean stuck into his chest won't do anything to him.

But the human's eyes are wide. His mouth parts, red and soft. The inside of his inner lip is wet, and Castiel’s eyes follows the gleam of it.

“Shit,” he breathes.

Castiel shrugs a little. It seems the only thing worth saying. He's not sorry he attempted to steal the big vehicle. Only that he failed.

The human rubs his own face. Then harder, like he’s trying to rub his nose off. “Okay,” he says, a little breathily. When he raises his head, the tip of his nose is adorably flushed. Castiel wonders what it would be like to bite it.

(Gently, though. Just a nibble.)

But then Dean straightens, gathering his dignity around himself and his mouth in a very unattractive sneer. It’s much less attractive than the cute little blotches of color on his face.

“Well, screw you, buddy,” Dean spits, and it doesn’t sound like a congenial offer. “The war rig goes nowhere without me. It's got a kill switch, and only I know the sequence.” Both his eyebrows go up, and his smile is unkind. “I’d say you’re only getting it outta me over my dead body, but, y’know. Kinda defeats the point.”

What?

Oh. Castiel blinks, distracted from his contemplation of the human’s nicely pointed, possibly edible, little nose.

Humans. Always so Father-damned clever. Castiel scoffs, mutters to himself and watches the sand shift into quivering, perfect concentric circles around his feet with the resonance of his voice. He bends down and picks up the knife.

Dean doesn’t step back, away from him. But he tenses.

Castiel understands that he is a threat—and Castiel’s wings, as disfigured as they are, mantle just slightly with the amused acknowledgement of it, because he is dangerous, of course he is, and this human should know it.  But he doesn't understand why Dean seems to tense even more when Castiel takes a measured step forward and offers the itchy little demon knife back to him.

Castiel frowns down at his own outstretched hand. He's sure he's doing this right. He's offering the hilt, not the blade. It's extremely nonthreatening…

Oh. Perhaps it's his wings displaying that Dean is interpreting as aggressive. Castiel consciously relaxes them, pulling them in and making them small and soft against his back.

There. Castiel is very nonthreatening now. He opens his eyes innocently wider as he proffers the knife again, hilt first.

A strange sound burbles in the base of Dean's throat and puffs like vapor from the corners of his pinched lips. His eyes surround themselves in crinkles before his lips part in a soft huff. “Wow. Slanger,” he mutters. “What’re you…? Okay, okay. Fuck. You don't gotta be cutesy ‘bout it.”

Castiel huffs back. He is not cute. He is an angel.

But Dean reaches out and takes the little demon knife from Castiel’s hand, slotting it into a sheath on the side of his thigh without even fumbling to match the tip to the opening, without looking at it—as easily as Castiel can withdraw his own angel blade into his flesh, swallowing it into his grace. He does so now, and watches Dean’s eyes widen at the glint of Grace and metal.

“Fuck,” Dean mutters. “Yeah. I… shit. Okay. I get what you’re putting down.”

Castiel frowns. He looks down at the ground between them. He hasn’t put anything down again, not since he dropped the knife.

But Dean’s gaze catches his. There’s sweat on his upper lip, glistening. His lower lip disappears, for just a moment, between his teeth.

“You don’t eat humans, do you?” Dean says, unexpectedly, and Castiel blinks in surprise. “Shit. Not that I guess it’d it’d matter if you did, it’s not like Benny and Meg are exactly saints, and even Garth… I mean, wait. Are saints even real?” He stops and looks at Castiel expectantly.

Castiel frowns at him. Which question is he supposed to answer? Is he supposed to answer any of them? He shrugs.

Dean rubs the bridge of his own nose with his knuckles. “You planning to eat me?”

Castiel squints at him. Why? Why does Dean keep asking things like that. Castiel doesn’t need to eat. So he supposes he should say no. But the question is still annoying, why would Dean consider himself any more appetizing than any other human?

He does look like many parts of him are edible.

Humans aren’t for eating, Castiel. Not even nibbling.

But why not? He might be tasty. Maybe. Now that Dean’s mentioned it. Maybe he’d taste like a rainbow, too, rather than blood. Like bright molecules and clean water vapor. That would be nice.

Castiel shrugs again. He wasn’t considering it before, but now he is.

(Maybe just his nose.)

“Fu-uuuuck,” Dean breathes, and rubs his face again—this time, between both his palms, the roughness of them grating audibly against his cheeks. “Well. ‘Kay. Promise is a promise, uh. I guess.” He jerks his chin at a crew of people watching them. They’re too far to be stabbed, Castiel notes. One of them is holding a large gun up, but her hands are shaking. “Get in, losers, we’re going…” Then he sighs. “Anyway. Patience, put that thing the fuck down before you shoot yourself in the foot, okay? I already tried that. Didn’t take.”

There are four, watching them. The girl holding a gun on Castiel is human, or she might have been once upon a time, but she’s staring at Castiel like she sees more than the wreck of his feathers. The big one smells of old blood and sharp teeth and older pain and other people’s death, and the little one like fresh flesh and forests and laughter. And one…

“Hiya, handsome,” the demon says, waggling her fingers at him, and the tortured soul she’s wearing sobs in agony.

This, Castiel thinks, is going to be a long journey.

This, Dean thinks, is gonna be a fuckin’ long ride.

“So,” Benny says, from somewhere around Dean’s feet.

“Shut up,” Dean answers, sliding out from under Baby’s belly and back into the hot, sharp teeth of the sun. He pushes to his feet and starts scanning the sky.

“Yeah? Didn’t say nothin’.”

“Benny, shut up.”

The words taste like desperation, which is just never a good flavor to begin with, but it’s one that Dean’s gotten unfortunately used to. The signal flares that Meg saw earlier have faded off, even the trails of them blown away, and with the horizon being so fucking flat aroudn these parts, he can’t even be sure where they were coming from anymore. Only the fact that Dean’s been riding this route nearly since his feet could reach pedals has kept him oriented to the fact that this fun little jaunt they took skimmed them even further off course.

But they were Bunker colors in the sky, to be sure, not the sharper, brighter greens of the Men of Letters; small favors that there hasn’t been an answer yet that reinforcements are on the way. He’s hoping that Sucrocorp didn’t see—or if they did, that they didn’t give a shit, ‘cause they really don’t care much about Bunker business. Too busy making sugar, keeping people smiling and drugged on it—Dean’s driven past the plots of sugar cane clacking like bones in the wind before.

Real small favors. Baby might be a war rig, but it ain’t like Dean’s got an army. And the Men of Letters do.

Dean ain’t sorry he’s got Baby’s engine rigged to jam if someone tries to start her without running the right sequence—‘cause if not, well, they would’n’t just be down shit creek without a paddle, they’d be standing under the shit avalanche. But getting her tip-top and ready to ride after her engine jammed was time they didn’t have either.

“Do you wanna be the one to tell him he can’t ride with us?” Dean says, real low, less than a breath. Benny can hear him anyway. Dean knows he can.

The angel turns his chin in their direction, some six feet of curled lip and blue eyes and shattered, kindling wings, completely ignoring where Garth is standing right in front of him rattling off something about… puppies and pigeons, probably, knowing Garth.

Then the angel raises an eyebrow.

He raises a fucking eyebrow at them, like he’s saying Try it.

Yeah. Yeah, okay. Point taken.

“Didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout anything,” Benny says, and thumps him on the shoulder, hard enough to rock Dean forward. “’Cept maybe that you must like him. Maybe you actually want him along, huh?”

Dean reels back. “What?” he spits.

When Benny grins, it’s with teeth that are sharp, because around them, Benny doesn’t bother trying to hide what he is. There’s no camouflage to be had here, in the barren Wastes. “Well, he put his bare ass on your Baby’s seat, and you ain’t tried to deep-fry him wings first, you know?”

Okay, yeah, that’s fair, but… wait. “What?”

“He’s naked, Dean.”

Dean blinks.

Shit.

Shit.

The big one—the vampire, Castiel supposes, whose blood throbs with the same age and power as the beat of the magma that Castiel can feel under the sere, cracked surface of the world—is Benny. The little one who talks and talks and talks is Garth Fitzgerald IV.

That makes sense. He has a big name and a big voice to make up for his size.  Castiel once thought the same of Zachariah, whose wingspan was never what he thought it should be.

But Zachariah didn’t have the smell of fur and fertile soil under his skin, or the shadow of fangs dropping over his thin, smiling lips when the sun hits his face just right.

Zachariah didn’t smile like that, either, though: wide-eyed, with soft lines carving the corners of a face that is too thin, but not unhappy with itself either.

Garth’s smile looks real.

Don’t be stupid, Castiel. Nothing here is real. This is all a nightmare that God is having, and when he wakes up—when you find him, when you wake him up—

Castiel shakes that off.

The smallest one is Patience, and she smells the most like a human. But she smells nothing like Dean. She smells like books left in the dark, and, maybe a little, like sprouts. But, more than that, she smells sharp.

That’s because she stinks of fear, Castiel. You have made her afraid.

Well, shouldn’t he? He is an angel, and he has killed humans and he will again. She should be afraid.

Dean isn’t afraid, though. He smells purely, sweetly human, and not of fear at all when he looks at Castiel out of the corner of his eyes. His mouth curves and is wet. Why isn’t he afraid?

It’s very frustrating.

Castiel doesn’t ask the demon’s name. There’s no point anyway. For one thing, he knows it, heard it already. For another, she’s already dead. Her death is itching along the surface of Castiel’s angel blade, and he scratches irritably at it, digging his nails into his wrists and shoving his fingertips underneath the manacles.

She waggles her fingers at him.

He’ll kill her first, he decides. Before any of the others. It will be a mercy, and Castiel is an angel. He knew what mercy looked like, once.

Dean huffs, looking back and forth at them with his hands propped on his hips. Then, when that doesn’t get a reaction, he stoops, picks up a rock and throws it at the demon.

His aim is good. But she catches it out of the air without even looking at him.

Then pops it into her mouth.

"Oh for fuck’s—right.” Dean sighs and scrubs his hand over his face again. “Ain’t we a Brady Bunch.” No one bothers to answer that, least of all Castiel. “So. Baby’s engine’s unjammed, and we’re fueled to ride. What're we supposed to call you, then, huh? Can't keep calling you Feathers or whatever."

He doesn’t look at Castiel as he says it. As if he can’t stand to. The tops of his ears are pink, like the sun has been licking at them.

Castiel feels his wings droop behind him, their tips dragging into the sere dust with a soft clatter. No, he supposes Dean can't call him that. Castiel’s feathers are very ugly right now. He wouldn't want to be called something that is ugly.

Even if he might kill them all someday. It’s still rude.

"Dean, amigo, you made 'im sad,” Garth says, looking severe.

"What?” Dean’s head whips back towards him. “What’re you sayin’, man, he’s a fucking bleeding angel…” He trails off, his eyes widening. “Shit, don't... dude, that's pathetic."

Castiel’s wings shrink further, pulling towards his back with a harsh rattle. He's not pathetic. It's not his fault humans took from him—took and took and took, and just because Dean isn't taking now doesn't make him any less human. Any less cruel.

Castiel could still kill him. Could still kill all of them.

But Dean hasn't taken. Isn't taking. Castiel heard from Garth—or at least, he thinks he did: Garth said so much that after a while Castiel stopped hearing. But Dean stole them, too, all of them, from a place called the Bunker, from a man called Samuel.

“We’re monsters,” Garth said, cheerfully enough. “But we’re not things.”

Isn't Castiel a monster, too?

But Castiel doesn’t have anywhere to go. These monsters do. Castiel’s Heaven is high, high up, where his wings can’t take him anymore. Where they probably couldn’t, even before they were so broken.

He turns away.

"Wha—c'mon. Hey. Ah, shit," Dean mutters at his shoulder.

"What do you want to be called?" the unpatient little Patience asks. She's still afraid of him, stinking with it, so Castiel doesn’t go near her, and the contact of her words is a shock. He turns towards her, looking at her where she’s still gripping the gun between both her hands. But for the first time, she doesn't flinch at his gaze. She’s staring at him so intently. "Can you tell me?"

He does. He tries.

She screams, thin and high, and the blood drips from her nose, splitting a tributary around her mouth.

"Feathers it is," Dean says, with a sigh, after they've sopped up the blood. Their bodies shelter her away from Castiel.

Maybe all humans see are your wings. Maybe you really are that ugly, Castiel.

Maybe he is. He made the littlest one bleed, and he wasn't trying to this time.

He opens his mouth and closes it, then pinches his lips shut before he does more damage that he doesn’t intend.

Then he crouches down in the dirt.

Dean doesn’t know what the fuck he was thinking, inviting an angel who can apparently fucking nearly kill people without even meaning to into his rig with them. And this is before he’s even got his manacles off him.

But Feathers does look genuinely sorry for the fact that he just tried to talk Patience’s ears off, maybe literally. He does. He reached out a hand to her, his blue eyes as wide and shocked as any of them, and then jerked it back, fingers curling into a fist, when she backed away from him, holding her nose and glaring.

And it’s not like every single one of them in Baby hasn’t killed people. Both accidentally and not so much.

Even Patience.

But the angel is squatting down on the ground now, which does… things to his bare, bare legs that Dean probably isn’t supposed to be looking at, the little grains of sand and dirt that have caught on his calves and the dark hair dusting his thighs and all the things betwee—okay, no, no, that’s the guy’s hand moving. Yup, hands. Hands are safe, except when they ain’t.

The angel trails his finger through the pale layer of sand and dirt over hardpack and stone, the chain of his manacles leaving a snake-trail around him. It takes Dean a second to recognize that it’s… writing. Actual letters.

Because yeah, Dean can read. Samuel Campbell made sure of that—productive, useful, useful, useful.

But that’s fucking script.

Not even print letters. Script, curves and flowy like Dean’s only ever seen in half-burned paintings, in books, and seriously, fucking, fucking angels.

Dean sounds out the letters, one by one. Castiel, it says, neat and pretty.

Yeah, of course the angel would have a highfalutin’ name.

Angel looks up at them, still crouching, his face raised like he’s praying. His cheeks have scabbed over where the mask had dug into them before, looking a week old rather than a few hours old, even though he still has blood dried on his chin, around his mouth. Muscles move along his hips as he balances himself, and Dean can see it from this vantage, he can see it all. His wings drag dark behind him, a little spread, getting dirty and dusty like the hair on his thighs that Dean sure as almighty fuck should not be looking at.

Dean doesn’t. He looks away. Up.

Mostly.

He watches Garth sound out the syllables—Casteel, Caystyel—sees the angel’s face go stormier and stormier as—he’s pretty sure—Garth gets it wrong every single damned time, and makes a decision before one of ‘em gets their faces smote off.

“Cas?” Dean sounds out the bite of it, the hiss of the syllable. He nods. Hard to get that wrong. “Okay. Yeah, that’s good. Cas. We can work with that.”

Castiel—Cas—doesn’t look pleased by that. He looks like he doesn’t give two fucks what Dean can work with.

Well, tough titties.

“Look, we’ve all got short names, dude,” Dean points out. “What, you think I want to be yelling ‘Ezekiah!’ when there’s vamps on the horizon? They’ll have teeth in my throat before I even get through your whole name—” He tilts his head briefly. “No offense, Benny.”

“None taken,” Benny says, with a smirk. “Ain’t like you’re wrong.”

The angel—Castiel—points at Patience, frowning.

“Dude, if anyone’s calling on her for help, we’re all screwed.”

“Hey,” Patience says, sounding stuffy-nosed, but at least she doesn’t look like she’s about to cry anymore.

Castiel considers this, head cocked. Then he sighs and nods.

“Hey!”

The angel shrugs. He shrugs.

Since Dean doesn’t want Patience to be messing around in his brainpan in revenge, even by accident, he bites down on the smile. Because he sure as shit shouldn’t be smiling at an angel, either, right?

“I don’t like you,” Patience tells Cas, her lips curling, and her voice sounding stuffed and nasal. “No matter what your name is.”

Cas considers again, looking down at her with his head cocked.

And then, to Dean’s real fucking delight, he sticks his tongue out at her.

Okay. Maybe it’s not going to be as terrible a ride with the angel as he thought.

“Look. Dude—Cas—if you’re gonna ride with us,” Dean says, and watches the angel’s back go stiff again, his wings spreading in puffy, angled, tree-branch threat. “I got one condition.”

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

“Wait—whoa whoa! Easy! What’re you doin’, man?!" Dean exclaims, and he looks alarmed enough that Castiel stops and looks down at himself.

He doesn’t see anything amiss. He put one leg in each pant leg. The zipper is in front. This is all correct.

He thinks it’s ridiculous that his ‘ass sweat’ isn’t permitted on the seat, considering that Castiel can smell that there has been semen and Gartner duct secretions and blood worn into those seats, and furthermore, Castiel doesn’t sweat.

But as far as conditions go, it is ridiculous and small and petty, and that makes it strangely acceptable.

Besides, as Dean pointed out, everyone else is wearing pants. Castiel doesn’t care very much about politeness, but it seems that pants are, indeed, correct.

Dean flaps a hand in front of him like a very small rudder wing. "No. Dude, you gotta, uh, it's gotta... your junk."

Junk? Castiel doesn’t produce waste. Castiel frowns down harder. He doesn't defecate or urinate either, but he doesn't think that counts as junk.

Dean’s looking. Then looking away. Then looking again, so he’s seeing something that Castiel isn’t? "No, uh, you gotta... mouse has gotta be in the house."

Castiel frowns harder. Mice? There are definitely no mice. Mice are very cute, and good at survival even in this terrible world, but the creature that lives in the back corner of the vehicle’s hold, is a rat, not a mouse. Is Dean concerned it will steal some fabric for a nest? It would have already, if it could. It’s from a mutated strain; likely infertile.

Dean sighs and scrubs his hand over his face. Somewhere in the back seat of the vehicle, the ‘rig,’ Benny is making small, vulnerable choking noises in low, sawing rasps.

He doesn’t smell like he’s dying, though.

"Your dick, man,” Dean says, and he sounds like he has sand stuck in his airway, as well. “You're not wearing underroos, so... you gotta put a hand in there, tuck down, make sure it doesn't get stuck in anything when you pull the zipper up, 'cause that hurts like shit."

Oh. So the mouse is Castiel’s phallus. He looks down at it, small and vulnerable, in its nest of dark curls, and nods approvingly. Yes, that is an appropriate metaphor. Mouse, house. Carefully, he works up the teeth of the zipper--extremely clever engineering—without catching flesh within. Then he nods his satisfaction again. Mouse contained.

The strangest ripple goes across Dean’s face, like the way tectonic plates cozy against each other before an earthquake. But his soul dances, dances, hot and bright, like sunspots. He rubs his ripe mouth with a knuckle, and the curve behind them is sweet. “Sure, Cas,” he agrees, lips twitching. “Something to be pleased about.”

Well, Castiel thinks so.

“You’re sitting up front with me?” Dean says it like a command. But the jitter of his mouth makes it, briefly, a question. Then he adds, “I don’t trust you savages not to kill each other in the back.”

Maybe he’s not so stupid.

Castiel looks at his manacled wrists and scowls at Dean, holding them out. The chains jangle with an ugly sweetness.

There was a promise. An agreement. Castiel will ride with them. He put on the pants. He wants these off.

“Well, y’know. I’m driving. But I got just the thing for that,” Dean says, with a terrible, inauspicious kind of cheer.

Then he hands Castiel some sort of a pointy instrument.

Dean really shouldn’t be laughing at the angel sulkily filing away at a manacle with a metal rasp. And that’s all it is: metal. No witchery, no demonblood, no titanior. Just pig iron, cold-hammered, old school. Ordinary.

He’s gonna be working a while.

But c’mon. There’s an honest-to-God angel in the cab of Dean’s war rig, one who Dean’s shot and stabbed with less effect than throwing sand in his face, wearing Dean’s jeans, and sulkily scrape-scrape-scraping away at a manacle with a hard look of concentration on his face. It’s pretty fucking funny. Not in the ‘ha ha’ way. Or maybe not just in the ‘ha ha’ way. In the ‘what is this life’ way.

That’s been Dean’s whole life, though.

They’ve only traveled a few klicks, finally getting turned into the right direction, and the deep, oozing gashes the mask left on his face are just a memory now. Within a few hours, Cas over there has already managed to file through one of the manacles, and he’s going at the second one like a man possessed—well, no pun intended.

Then there’s a loud clunk of him breaking right through the second one.

There isn’t a road to drive off out here, where everything’s flat, flat, flat—closer to Sucrocorp, there will be, something to make the ride a little easier for ladies that aren’t Baby—but if they were on one, Dean probably would have swerved them right off it at the bright flash that lights up the whole rig like fucking lightning.

“Hey!” Garth says, loudly, poking his head over the barrier between the front seat and the back; they pulled down the divider between the back seat and the cargo hold, since no point in pretending Dean ain’t got passengers now, and they might as well be more comfortable. He’s squinting and blinking like the same shiny lights were dancing in his vision as in Dean’s—maybe even more so. “What the heck was that? It made my fur tingle.”

Dean doesn’t double-take, but only because he has both hands on the wheel when he glances into his rearview and sure enough, there’s Garth in his whole-ass furry form, teeth and snout and all: his clothes are stretched so tight around the collar and shoulders that stitches pop when Garth shoves an arm over to get a handhold against the way Baby’s rocking.

But Cas? Hardass little angel Castiel doesn’t even look up as he grunts something that might or might not be an apology… and then he reaches back with the hand not holding the metal file. He puts said hand over Garth’s entire toothy, scary face, and pushes the whole-ass little werewolf back into the back seat like it ain’t no doin’ at all, sonofabitch.

Dean doesn’t even bother trying to hide his laugh about that. What can he say? Shit, sure, angel might kill them all once he’s gotten his cuffs the rest of the way off, but he’ll only take out Dean’s people over Dean’s dead body, and Dean himself has been living on stolen time for years anyway.

And if he makes ‘em all laugh for a little while, well, what’s the harm.

He sorta likes that kind of balls. Even if Garth is whining for a good long while about how hot it is in his fur before he gets the mojo back together to change.

“So.”

Cas doesn’t look up. The tip of his tongue sticks pink out of the corner of his mouth as he rasps, rasps, rasps. Dean almost feels a little bad about the fact that he does have lockpicks—of course he does, and a bigger set of bolt cutters in the back hold, too: if they stopped, he could probably have those things off pretty quickly, if they’re the same kind of metal the chains were. And Cas can get himself bitten or burned by the hellfire in those cutters himself this time, thanks.

But Dean only owes the angel so many favors, and stopping more than they already have ain’t one of them when Dean’s pretty sure the pops he heard not too far away in the distance weren’t the engine backfiring or Baby’s wheels going over old bones. He’s finally got her moving, finally gotten momentum again, and he ain’t stopping again until Baby calls it for the day, or Dean can’t drive anymore.

“So where’re you headed to that you’ve gotta steal a war rig to get there, huh?” Dean asks, not taking his eyes off the horizon. If he squints, he thinks he can see lumpy, purple-tinged shadows rising just barely off the impossible flatlands of the Wastes.

Other parts aren’t like this, he knows. Far away parts. Or he’s been told, anyway. Dean’s always lived here, in the Wastes, putting his head down in the Bunker whenever he needed water or resupply. Barely remembers a time before the Apocalypse, when he didn’t need to have caches of food out in the open, bare plains—when they had things like a house and a garden and running water.

But he does remember them. Sam doesn’t. All Sammy had was his books, and his messages, his little letters. And his dreams.

His fucking little dreams.

“There are trees bigger than a war rig, Dean! Redwoods. They’re from before the Apocalypse, and they survived! Near the coast, where the sand meets the salt. When things burn, there, they even grow back! California, they used to call it.”

There’s a hint of motion on the seat beside him as Cas peeks at Dean, and for a second Dean thinks that the big, scary, half-naked angel in his front seat is going to stick out his tongue at Dean in the same way he did to Patience—fucking hilarious.

But after a moment, he narrows his eyes suspiciously, then goes back to rasping.

“Angel of few words. I get it,” Dean says. Well, angel’s just gonna have to deal with Dean talking, because Baby’s not up to speed enough that he can put in some tunes yet. She’s got a couple of klicks more to go before her battery’s charged enough to work Dean’s radio and the lights in the back of the hold, so they don’t kill each other from boredom. “You goin’ to find your people, is that it? Your, uh, your alpha? You guys got one of those, too?”

It’s a dangerous question. Dean knows it is. Asking monsters about their alphas is the kind of thing that gets humans killed out of hand, and he can’t even blame those doing it, considering what Grandpa Samuel’s been doing in the name of… humanity, or some shit, for as long as Dean’s been alive.

This time, the teeth-grating noise of the file stops altogether. Cas’s wings make a soft clacking sound as they droop and move, scraping hard in a way that leaves little lines across the vinyl and cloth of Baby’s front seat.

Dean glances over. Castiel is watching him with that serious little pout on his face. After a moment, he shakes his head, and then looks back over his shoulder into the open portion of Baby’s hold with a frown.

Dean’s four passengers have settled down back there, made their own little individual nests in the broad span between trunk and back seat. They gave Patience the cushioned part. He can hear munching—Garth, probably. They’ve got a fair bit of dried provisions, one in the back and whole crates of ‘em in Baby’s bigger tank: no one blinks twice at Dean taking boxes from the Bunker’s stores when he’s going out in Baby, because he’s the one who makes sure the stashes out in the Wastes have something in ‘em for emergencies.

But he could only take a few days worth of the fresh stuff without someone getting real suspicious, real fast, and, well, water’s rationed even when he’s going out on a mission—taking more than the ride’s share for Dean himself would’ve gotten his little kidnap-escape plan pinged faster than Dean can put pedal to the metal.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “We’re lookin’ for their people. Well, Patience doesn’t have an alpha, right. I guess psychics don’t got ‘em, she says.” Not that Samuel believed her—which was why she was brought into the Bunker in the first place, locked up, titanior bars and a pig iron collar to match keeping her quiet, keeping her mind and her powers still while they tried to get intel out of her that she didn’t have to give.

If Dean looks close, he can still see the thin line on the skin of her neck where she wore the metal for so long. Too long.

So she ain’t got an alpha. But she’s got a grandma, she tells him, living out on the edge of the Wastes. She’s got a dad to go back to.

Dean would say he can relate, but Dad’s been gone a whole six cycles now. Six months.

Dean can’t blame Dad for leaving. Can’t blame him for going off on a mission with his big truck-runner and a trunk full of provisions and a promise to bring back more monsters for the project, something new to get new blood into the half-lives who run the Bunker, and never coming back.

Can’t blame Dad for going off and joining Sam and his redwoods and his California instead.

Dean can’t blame him. He can’t, right?

But helping these monsters, the ones that Samuel ripped out of the world and stashed in cages high, high up in the mountain that is the Bunker, tortured for info about their species alphas even when they bled and cried and died…

Yeah. Dean can do that much.

“Okay, no alpha,” Dean confirms. “You got brothers? Sisters?”

The rasping starts again, but this time, when he glances over, Castiel is watching him, not the motion of the file. His mouth is tucked and pinched inwards, lips white. There’s a thin, suspicious line of fury making grooves at the corners of his mouth.

Ain’t like he can blame the dude for being suspicious, what with… well, what with fuckin’ everything, that’s what. But he’s riding in Dean’s front seat wearing Dean’s spare jeans, wielding a file that Dean gave him to get out of his bindings, what the hell.

“It was just a question. I ain’t out for your feathers, ‘kay? I ain’t out for anyone’s feathers,” Dean snaps. “So you can stop fuckin’ looking at me like I’m gonna grab and yank.”

Cas blinks at him.

“Y’know what? Never mind,” Dean growls, and turns his eyes back onto the road.

So much for making conversation.

In this part of the Wastes, he’s traveling as much by sun and time and the feel of the road and the compass mounted in the center of Baby’s steering wheel as any landmarks, ‘cause there ain’t much in the way of landmarks to be had. But he can start to see the shadow of stone structures in the distance as the sun overhead starts to tilt to the side rather than shining right in Dean’s eyes, the outline of buttes more than a mirage but still way too far for any details, and he starts curving Baby in that direction.

She growls a little at the change in direction, slowing, and he winces as he hears the huff and smells the curl of oxidation. But even though he pushed her through the hottest part of the day in a way he wouldn’t normally, today, jammed her engine and then unjammed it, she gives for him, and her engine keeps beating, beating steadily, thumping quiet and rhythmic as she rolls.

He’s not sure how long it’s been silent in the front seat other than the relentless annoying rasp of the file punctuating the growl of the engine—doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care; in the back, Meg is singing something to herself, and Garth and Benny are talking quietly. Dean hears some names—Andrea and Bess.

 Dean almost smiles: Garth will talk about Bess until someone wants to rip their own ears off just to make him stop, but he’s only heard Benny mention Andrea once—and only after the first time Dean snuck into the holding cells with a flask of water for him.

Vampires don’t need water, but, it turns out, it helps when they can’t get blood. It was cool and sweet, right out of the dipping pool. Helped him to resist the torture, he said. Dean didn’t feel proud of bringing it to him then, and he doesn’t feel proud of it now—‘cause, again, torture.

But it was something. It was what Dean could do then, and this is what Dean can do now.

Castiel might not feel safe here. Well, fuck him anyway: the folk in Dean’s back hold do, and considering how and why they ended up in the Bunker in the first place, well, that ain’t nothing.

The sun has started to bleed scarlet into the horizon opposite the curves of the buttes Dean was angling towards when he feels a touch of fingers on the meat of his bared forearm—gentle, light. Dean doesn’t jerk away, but when he looks up, Castiel is looking at him. The white and strain is gone from his mouth. One of his wrists is free, his hand curled in his lap. The manacle breaking came with a surprisingly cheerful little clink, no light show this time.

But maybe that’s because what was under the metal of the cuffs is raw and chunky, and… oh, fuck, there the slippery glare of bone showing in patches there.

“Sonofabitch,” Dean says, low, and through his teeth. He’s seen worse, he’s seen much worse, but that ain’t good. “Get Benny to look at that when we stop.” Garth claims he was some kind of… tooth doctor, or whatever, out with his pack, but considering werewolf teeth just regrow after shattered jaws and getting ‘em yanked out whole—and yeah, Dean knows all that for a fact, unfortunately—Dean’s not taking any bets on him knowing what to do with any other species.

Castiel blinks at him, frowning down at his own wrist like he just noticed the wreckage of it.

Then he shrugs.

He shrugs.

“Uh. O-kay then,” Dean says, and turns his eyes back to his driving.

But after a moment, the tap on his arm comes again, and Dean looks at him. There’s enough shadow now through the windscreen that his mouth, his shoulder, are angles rather than darkness. Very deliberately, Cas nods—a big, exaggerated one, up and down.

“Okay?” Dean says, confused. What?

And this fallen Angel of the fucking Lord actually rolls his eyes at Dean, what the hell. He gestures with his hand between them and growls something under his breath that makes Baby’s cab rattle unpleasantly and some pressure build up behind Dean’s ears before Dean hastily says, “Whoa, okay, right. Uh.” Then, “Oh!”

Because Dean was saying something before he decided he was going to just shut his trap and start driving, just makin’ small talk to pass the road. Right? But what the hell was Dean rambling on about…

Oh. “You got… brothers?” he guesses.

Cas huffs in satisfaction that Dean got it. Then, a little nod.

“Sisters?”

Another nod.

Huh. “Do you know what happened to them when… y’know. When the world went to shit?”

When we destroyed it, Dean doesn’t say. He should. He should put it out there, even when it goes against everything that they teach in the Bunker, in the Men of Letters, probably even in Sucrocorp. (The Stynes are assholes. If they know, they don’t care.)

Who destroyed the world? We did.

Humans did.

But he can’t say it. Not aloud. Not yet.

This time, Castiel sighs. His nod is small, and when he raises his gaze, it’s to the sky that’s starting to turn the color of a bruise. His eyes fall, fall, fall, and crash into the terrible infinity of the horizon.

“Yeah,” Dean says quietly. He doesn’t apologize. Maybe he should. “You know where any of them are? That where you were headed for? Nice little aerie enclave out in the mountains somewhere, too high for dirty humans?

Castiel actually wrinkles his nose at Dean. Not angry. No pinched mouth or white lips or rageful eyes. Just… annoyed.

Maybe it’s because it’s too many questions, all at once, for someone who can’t do more than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ without popping Dean’s eardrums.

Or maybe it’s ‘cause Cas here has been tied up in some cave for so long, getting plucked like blades of desert grass get plucked up for water in the hard times, that the manacles on his wrist wore him down to bone… so how the fuck would he know what his sibs have been up to?

Yeah, Dean’s an asshole. But what else is new?

“So why’d you try to take Baby, then, huh?”

Castiel considers, twiddling the metal file between his fingers. He shrugs.

He shrugs.

Then he goes back to scraping carefully at his one remaining manacle.

Alright, maybe Dean’s not the only slanger between them.

Dean snorts, amused. As the sun sets, he carefully fiddles Baby’s lights, murmuring encouragements to her under his breath. They’re up to full speed now and have been for a while: they should be good, but ‘should’ doesn’t always mean ‘is’ out here, especially since Dean pushed her hard enough that she overheated earlier.

But the running lights spark on with a hum so low that Dean can feel it in his back teeth, illuminating the sand and dirt in front of them. A pair of eyes flash, or maybe it’s gemstones—there are still parts of the Wastes where the Fall burnt the ground hot and deep enough that there are diamonds and lightning-glass mixed in with the dirt, inorganic and pretty and deadly and useful. When Dean was a kid and out riding with Dad, he’d…

But none of that matters right now.

The bright spots skitter off and away: some kind of animal, then. There’s a little extra water from Baby’s filter tank stored in the back barrels, more precious even than guzzoline, and Dean can hear it sloshing softly and sweetly whenever Baby rocks.

Maybe Sam’s rain sounds something like this.

There has to be rain, right? If there are redwoods? Trees?

With the merciless sun all the way down now, Baby’s insides are gray and soft in just the reflected life of the front beams, and Dean lowers the cowl from over his lips with a breath of relief and pops the latches on the front glass so they can get some more air moving inside. There’s a low groan of pleasure in the back, and he glances back just long enough to see his passengers stirring.

“Hey, anyone awake back there? Hit me up,” he calls back, and holds his hand out. A little more grumbling, but then a dark head pops up over the barrier, barely a shadow in the rearview.

“I’ll give it to you if we don’t have to listen to your weird shit tonight,” Meg says, and waggles the food bar just behind her shoulder, where Dean can’t reach over and grab it.

“Nope,” Dean says, very cheerfully. “Driver picks the music—”

“If you finish that sentence for the thousandth time, I’ll rip your head off, pretty boy,” Meg says, equally cheerfully.

Dean rolls his eyes.

He doesn’t see it happen. Maybe he hears it. Maybe he thinks it’s the rush of night air past the window now that Baby’s at speed, the same way he thinks he hears drums pounding, pounding, pounding in the distance sometimes when in reality it’s the beating of his own heart. Because it’s whoosh and the wind and a clatter like branches falling and then—

Even in the rearview, Meg’s eyes bulge. The fingers wrapped around her throat are dark stains against her pale skin, but the blood from Castiel’s damaged wrist glows faintly, like cave worms, as it drips down the insides of his forearm. A droplet of it meets the open space of Meg’s neckline and there’s a sharp hisssss and the gagging stink of sulfur and smoke.

With his other hand, Castiel plucks the food bar out of Meg’s slack fingers, the chain still dangling from the manacle thunking and thumping softly against Baby’s seat back. And then, slowly, he settles back into the passenger side, letting Meg go with a little shove. There’s the soft, rattling clatter again—his damaged wings moving as he makes himself comfortable, Dean realizes a little too late.

Dean knows his mouth is open. He knows he should be watching the road. He knows he should be breathing.

But he isn’t.

That was so fast. That was so goddamned fast. Sonofabitch!

He yanks his eyes back and closes his trap and stares straight ahead, because… okay. Okay, so. Yeah.

But Castiel doesn’t eat the food bar. There’s no sticky munching that follows… whatever the fuck that was.

And when Dean dares to look sideways again, Castiel has his hand outstretched—to Dean, patient and still and unshaking even with the way Baby’s moving under them.

The blood on his arm has dried to a dark smear. His mangled wrist is still glowing a little.

“Uh,” Dean says, and, since he doesn’t know what the fuck else to do, takes it. And takes a bite, even though his stomach’s tight now with fight and what the fuck and maybe something else, but it’s not hunger anymore.

“Thanks,” he says, maybe a little too late, his mouth full and his eyes on the splay of light Baby’s casting in front of them, and if his eyes are still too wide, well, who’s to know?

Okay. Yeah. So. Here they are.

“Wow,” Meg says, a moment later. Dean can feel her gaze, and doesn’t look into the rearview to meet it. “Think someone’s got a crush.”

Despite the achy, rough scratch of her voice, she sounds more impressed than afraid. Which… well. Meg.

“Fuck you,” Dean says, but he doesn’t say it as cheerfully as he means to.

Still.

He breaks off the end of the food bar and offers it to Cas. Cas takes it from Dean, still with those careful, long fingers, and brings it up to his face. Dean hears the little noise as he sniffs it.

Even in the dim light Dean can see the wrinkle of his nose again before he recoils against the back of his chair so hard that his manacle clanks, and he nearly shoves it back in Dean’s direction.

Dean’s laugh is low and choked. But he takes the piece back and pops it into his mouth, chewing, chewing, chewing, ‘cause yeah, it takes fucking forever to get these to a consistency where they can be swallowed without choking. “Yeah, they taste like shit,” he acknowledges.

Sucrocorp stuff always does: salty and sour and with a weird plastering of sickly-sticky-sweet on top of it all. But they last forever, even if they get left in a cache in the sand, and it keeps Dean going. Even Patience never complains about them, because they’re still better than being hungry. They all know that much by now.

“You wanna pick the music, Feathers?” Dean asks, and points at the plastic rack sitting between the chairs. They’re his most prized possessions—one of the few things he’s got that are his rather than shared with everyone in the Bunker, take and give as needed. He runs his thumb carefully over the cassette tapes. They’re old, of course—not many vehicles can generate the power to run a music player anymore, and even Baby only can ‘cause of how big her engine runs—but they mean that Dean’s not in the silence when he’s driving, driving, driving.

Maybe they’re the only reason he’s still sane, considering.

Cas considers them seriously, like he can read the labels in the dark. But then he shakes his head, and settles back.

He doesn’t complain when Dean pops in AC/DC—first songs of the night, hell yeah—even though there’s a groan of complaint from the hold when the first chords start.

But they’re on the highway to hell, ain’t they?

Ain’t they just.

 The music is wonderful.

It’s rhythm; it’s a pulse. It’s the low undercurrent of Dean’s voice, singing along. It’s aharmonic and then harmonic and then a high, screeching wail as they bump and move along the sands, as the cold of the night sets in around them, and Castiel understands that desire to scream to fill up the darkness, he does, he does, he does.

But he keeps his voice in. He wraps it up tight. Through the clear glassy screen of the front of the vehicle—“Baby,” Dean told him very sternly, and Castiel wouldn’t have asked why it was an infant when it’s the last thing from infantile, even if he could—the dunes stretch amber and dark and red in the two, spangled with eyes and quartz.

Dean still drives, and his hands are steady and large on the wheel.

The file that Castiel used on the manacles around his ankles and one of his wrists snapped an hour before, worn through with the strain he put on it. He offered the pieces to Dean, frowning. Dean shrugged. “Happens,” he says. “Next time we stop, I got you. ‘Kay?”

He’s got Castiel? But what does that mean?

Still. There was no music in the cave. Castiel hasn’t heard song since he felt it, since it spun tangents off feathers that were, then, more wavelength than flesh and finial. And it doesn’t matter if this feels different: it’s still good.

So little has been good.

Castiel can’t believe that a human can be good. It can’t be that simple. Humans are humans. They are what they are, venial and covetous and altogether stinky, and they destroyed the world.

But they make pretty music. They make vehicles that cross the land that they broke. And sometimes they cross it with monsters in the hold, sleeping, the sound of snoring rattling quietly through the interior. They give Castiel a piece of metal that will make him more of a weapon when he’s free, when this cursed iron is off his hand, that will make him dangerous.

It’s strange, and Castiel doesn’t understand, and maybe he would kill the human for this alone. He does not want to be confused. He doesn’t deserve to be.

But. The music.

So Dean drives, and he sings, and Castiel watches over him. He’s very careful with the next small rectangle of hydrocarbon chains and magnetized tape that he extracts from the box as Dean’s direction, deliberate when he slots it into the small gaping mouth that gobbles it up with rattles and pops that make Castiel jerk his hand back in surprise.

Dean laughs at him, low and rough, and Castiel scowls at him, but then the music soars again—another wail, this one atonal as a feather just ready to be brushed back into place, but all the shinier for its momentary asymmetry. Ah-ah—AH! We come from the land of the ice and snow—

Castiel blinks. Ice? Snow?

How interesting.

Maybe he’ll kill him after the next song.

He would like to hear the next song.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

It’s just past noon when Baby starts to groan softly, the scrape of her engine as familiar as the heaviness of Dean’s own eyes as his chin jerks. It wasn’t that he thought they’d have more time to ride—he knows his girl, knows what she can give, and he’s been pushing her. The beat, beat, beat of the sun overhead and the heat of the sand and land under her wheels gets to her, too. And her water conversion tank’s probably near to half full at this point—as good as it gets.

Also, the angel’s been fucking watching Dean drive the whole night and into the morning. Maybe it’s just Dean’s imagination, or the reflection of Baby’s headlights off the sand, but his eyes kind of glow in the darkness. Just a little.

Those eyes narrow as Dean carefully eases down on the brake, slowing the flow of guzzoline with the hand-pump in that way that lets Baby know she’s gonna get to take a breather. They narrow further as the momentum of her starts to pull backwards on them. In the hold, someone thumps—probably Garth, and the yelp that follows makes that much very obvious.

“How’s it that the little human nibble always remembers to hold on when the ride is slowing, and you never do?” Meg drawls.

“Mr. Fizzles says you should learn some manners,” Garth grumbles.

“Please don’t bring out Mr. Fizzles, brother,” Benny says. “Gives me nightmares.”

There’s a pause at that.

“There is a kind of… energy around him, though…” Patience says slowly, and this time, Dean doesn’t bother to bite off a smile. She’s a good kid, she really is.

“Him?” Benny groans. “Don’t be callin’ the cursed thing a him now, you’re just gonna give it ideas!”

Castiel turns his head to peer back at them, lifting himself up enough off the seat with the pressure of one leg to actually raise his whole body. His expression of “What is wrong with all of you?” is so clear that Dean doesn’t need words for it.

“Look, you chose to come along, dude,” he points out, grinning, and jerks a thumb at the door. “You can get off this funhouse ride any time you want.”

Castiel squints his eyes at him. Then, somehow, by the time they’re slowing to a crawl, Cas manages to even squint his mouth at him, his feathers puffing up a little around his shoulders, and hell, Dean thinks maybe even his hair rises a little.

Cute. Little weird. But far from the weirdest thing Dean’s ever seen.

As they come to a shuddering full stop, Dean pops the back hatch and his passengers slide out, bickering happily over who’s gonna set up the sun-shade and the panels to get Baby’s battery charged up. Cas’s squinty little stare has turned into a full-on glare. He opens his mouth, then squeezes his lips tight into a line. Then he points out the front glass, and jabs twice, like he can point Baby into motion again.

“’Nope’ is a full sentence. Where’re you in such a hurry to get to, anyway?” Dean asks, though he’s not actually expecting an answer.

Castiel’s shoulders hunch so suddenly his wings jerk upwards, the naked portions of them squeaking hard against Baby’s vinyl like sticky bare thighs. His lip curls upwards. The noise he lets out is too deep to be a growl, because it doesn’t even sound like it comes from his throat: the door frame rattles from the vibration.

Okay, touchy question. Right.

It doesn’t matter how scary Cas over there thinks he is, though. “Look, man, I get you wanna go like FloJo. But Baby needs her beauty sleep, and I need my four hours.” He’s actually got no idea who FloJo is, or was, but Ash said it once and it got stuck in Dean’s brain, dammit.

But he feels his own smile at the thought fade out. Ash is dead, has been these past few years. The Roadhouse was one of the few places in the Wastes that still had its own water pump; a waystation for every rider or driver crossing to drink up and fill their flask with something that wasn’t tainted with guzzoline burnoff, or spend one night that wasn’t in the cab of their rig or in the shadow of their bike.

Word on the sands was that a spatter of vamps got to it. Jo and Ellen have never had much to say on the attack. But Dean’s seen the wreckage of the place, more than once, in his time crisscrossing on his assigned deliveries, his missions.

Vampires leave a body count; they don’t come with ordnance.

If he had to guess: Sucrocorp raiders. No one likes to talk about human-on-human violence, not when there’s so much out there to kill and be killed, now. But Sucrocorp set up their own little watering hole not a klick from the wreckage, along with all the portable manufactured low-water high-cal Sucro products anyone could want to barter for.

It wasn’t the Bunker who did it, though. It wasn’t. It couldn’t have been.

Right?

Dean almost gets knocked into the driver’s side door from how hard Cas shoves him in the shoulder, what the fucking ow. “Hey!” he growls, and he’s never, but never going to admit how grateful he is for the distraction. “What the hell, dude!”

Cas scowls at him and jabs a finger at the glass again.

“You look here, Feathers,” Dean sneers, because enough is enough with the boss baby bullshit, and if the angel snaps his neck, well, then Dean won’t have to deal with him anymore. “If Baby blows an engine ‘cause I ran her too hot, through the hottest part of the day? We’re all stuck out here halfway between the ass-end of nowhere and vamp territory—pretty much until we either die or the Bunker catches up to us.” He snorts at Cas’s frown, his unimpressed scoff, complete with a proud little tilt of his chin. “You do not want that, Cas, you don’t. He ain’t gonna care that you can’t talk, ain’t gonna believe you even if you try to tell him you haven’t got an alpha to lead him to. If you think a little feather-plucking is bad, ain’t nothin’ to what Grandpa Samuel’s gonna do to you if he gets his hands on you.”

He regrets it almost the moment it’s out. Not because Cas’s scowl has turned any other way than, well, scowly, ‘cause it hasn’t.

But because, shit. They all know, of course. The monsters in the back, they talk about it. But Dean hasn’t said that aloud. He hasn’t admitted the Bunker’s sins aloud—much less his own part in ‘em. Not to Charlie, not to his mirror, not even to Baby. Not ever.

‘Cause. Yeah.

“So you can frown at me until kingdom comes again, or you can put that big shiny pigsticker you’re hiding up your ass right between my shoulder blades while I’m asleep. And then I am haunting you until Revelations and laughin’ all the way, ‘cause like I said: Baby goes nowhere without me, and you get her wake-up code over my dead body. You got it?” Dean finishes, but it hasn’t got quite the snap to it that he wanted.

Maybe it’s enough, because Cas doesn’t try to stare and point him into starting Baby up again. He slams his way out the passenger door in a full-on snit, hitting Dean in the arm and the chest with the flap of one scraggly wing as he goes.

Maybe he really won’t come back. Good fucking riddance.

But even after Dean’s lain down and gotten himself as comfortable as anyone gets in the midday heat, even with the fact that he’s been awake too long and driving for even longer, he’s still staring at the underside of Baby’s steering wheel for for much longer than he should before sleep catches up with him.

“You really sure ‘bout him?” Benny asks, low. “The angel.”

Dean blinks over his rationed flask of salty, sour water, but he still keeps his mouthful there, letting it soak into his tongue, the cracking corners of his lips, before he swallows. His eyelashes stick, crusted salty as they always are after a midday, and he uses a damp pinkie finger to unclump them.

What kind of question is that? No, of course he’s not fucking sure.

“Why?” Dean says, and then grins weakly, leaning an elbow on the window that Benny’s watching him through. He climbed up onto Baby’s side via her flank steps, has a hand on the grab bar to hold him up even though Dean’s pretty sure he could just balance on his tiptoes right where he is, like a crow. Benny’s always been better than most vamps at seeming human. It’s probably why it took the Bunker so fucking long to catch him. “Can’t say anything ‘bout his singing voice, Benny, that back there was all me.”

But Benny doesn’t smile back, not even to smirk. “Meg’s still got bruises on her neck,” he says, low and careful, over the sounds of Garth, Patience and Meg clunking around overhead and pulling down the solar panels.

Dean feels his own weak amusement hiss away like spilled water. “Shit,” he breathes. “What?”

Meg’s a demon. She doesn’t eat except when she wants to, she doesn’t sleep at all, and most of all: there’s a reason that Dean carries a special knife at his thigh. It works a treat against werewolves, too, and it’s heavy enough that in a pinch Dean’ll manage to take off a vamp head if he can get enough leverage behind it, but that ain’t what makes it special.

‘Cause he can sink an ordinary knife into Meg’s chest, put a bullet between her eyes, and all that would probably do is make her giggle.

Well, before she probably stuck her whole fist through his rib cage.

‘Cause, again. Demon.

But then… Dean literally did the same to Cas the other day, shot him and stabbed him and that Energizer Bunny just kept on… bunnying?

Yeah, maybe Dean hasn’t gotten enough rest out of that nap, even for him.

Dean scrubs the heel of his hand over his tired, scratchy eyes. Shit, he’s been driving too long for this to be a conversation now. He just wants to tuck into the deepest part of Baby’s hold, the only part that stays even a little bit cool even when the sun is trying its best to fry them like Sucrotofu, and sleep for a fucking week.

“Hell of a target, and I ain’t sure he’s all there.” Benny taps his temple meaningfully.

“Hm.” Dean’s not sure of that. But he’s also not not sure of it. Cas makes as much sense as anything else in the Wastes.

“Can’t save everyone, brother,” Benny says quietly.

“Yeah,” Dean says shortly. “I know.”

He does, too. He does.

There are only four of them here—Meg, Benny, Patience, Garth. That’s it. When Dean stole them from Samuel Campbell’s ‘collection,’ he didn’t try to take along anyone too wounded to ride or too broken to run. He left them all behind.

Some of them, Dean put into those cells himself—brought back from his distribution runs on the Wastes, so fucking proud of himself, ‘cause here he was: finding monsters, hunting things. This is how we save humanity, is what Grandpa Campbell told him, and once upon a time, Dean believed it.

That’s on him.

Benny stares at him like he expected more of an answer before he sighs. “Yeah,” he mutters, but it doesn’t sound like he’s agreeing with Dean before he pulls his gaiter up over his bearded chin and his downturned mouth and lets himself peel away from Baby’s side, falling with a thump, surefooted, to the ground.

But he gets everyone shuffled into position, putting away the sun-screen and checking all the joints and Baby’s big, heavy wheels to make sure they haven’t got anything on them to drag, while Dean puts himself to rights and gets ready to drive again. He runs through Baby’s checklist, then touches all his weapons—knife on his leg and in the gear shift; pistol nestled into its little holster on the door, by his left hand. Shotgun in the swing-down over his left ear, bolt cutter along his right thigh, slotted into the footwell.

Then, finally, when he’s sure no one’s watching, he flips down the tiny sun-blind above his forehead and touches the picture inside.

The heat’s treated it as badly as anything else; Dean’s not sure anyone would even recognize the figure in it as a woman, much less a sad-eyed woman holding a little nearly-blond boy with green eyes. He doesn’t know how it survived the Apocalypse when so much else didn’t.

But he’s glad of it, and the reminder it is. He’s real; Sam’s real. They weren’t grown in a Sucrocorp creche or made through the Men of Letters’ selective breeding program. They just… are.

And Dean’s gonna find that stupid brother of his, the one who ran away to the redwoods three years ago with a werewolf girl and a thing or two to say about the Bunker’s anti-monster mission statement, ‘cause Sammy always was smarter than he was. He’s gonna find his dad, who went out on a hunting trip six months ago and must’ve found Sammy along the way, ‘cause he just… never came back.

He's gonna bring the people in the back of his rig home.

He is.

“I think… what is that?” Patience says nervously, leaning forward to bump the last solar panel back into place.

“Is it a wind? Or a furious vexation,” Meg answers, with a sigh. She’s seated cross-legged with Dean’s bag of ammo in her lap just inside the hold, separating them out by size and caliber. (Dean watches as she sticks one between her teeth and swallows.)

“Don’t you worry, Patience. It’s the wind,” Garth says. His voice is cheerful as ever. But there are fangs showing at the corner of his mouth and hair furling free down his ears. He’s staring at Dean in the rearview mirror with eyes already slitted in the middle.

It ain’t the wind. It sure as hell ain’t.

“Everyone. Get in!” Dean shouts.

Dean doesn’t jump when the passenger side door slams open and Cas swings himself up and in from out of the fucking blue—and he doesn’t use the step or the grab bar to lever himself up, neither, just pop goes the weasel and he’s in the passenger seat, smelling like an angry little lightning storm.

Considering that lightning storms are death out here, that shouldn’t smell good.

Dean slams his way through Baby’s activation sequence and she lights up underneath him, waking up from her sleep with the comforting whine of well-charged batteries and a cooled-down engine.

They make it a whole klick before the purr and the yowls in the wind catch up with them.

No drums thumping in the wind. No announcing that they’re coming, coming, coming.

It’s the Bunker, but… it’s just foreriders. A scouting party.

Two polecats are waving back and forth on the long, vertical poles that poke up from the top of the four-wheel crawlers, just ready to drop them off onto Baby’s top to board. Their yowls and howls of “Valhalla!” and “holy, holy, holy!” clear over the sand, even over the sound of Baby’s engine. Their drivers wear goggles perched over the jut of their furry muzzles—stupid that they’re still called polecats when they’re almost all dog-boys, a mix between werewolf and human, resistant to heat and sand, the skin on their hands and feet so thick they don’t need shoes or gloves.

There are eight side-riders on bikes—at least one’s a dhampir that must be at the end of its half-life, cannon fodder riding to die. It’s wrapped up to everything but the eyes, not a hint of white, hairless skin showing, and Dean can see its blood bag slumped at its back, head jostling back and forth as the bike turns—

No. Not a blood bag. Not a blood bag, that’s a person there, being drained of blood to feed the vampiric half-lives of the creatures that they created—

Dean can’t think of that right now.

Can’t save ‘em all.

“Don’t let ‘em get off a signal rocket,” he warns, as Benny pops the side hatch.

“What do you think I am, brother, an amateur?” Benny asks, and his teeth are already showing, rows and angles of a cruel white. Garth already has the window open and he’s shimmying out and up. He kicked off his shoes, and his paws are showing, ‘cause… Garth.

“We’ve gotta teach you how to use a shotgun,” Meg says—Dean’s pretty sure it must be to Patience, ‘cause it ain’t to the angel in the front seat, who’s looking out at the approaching riders with a confused little frown, head tilted. Dean fists his pistol in his left hand, right hand on the wheel.

Might be an accident that the first rider who reaches them on its bike on his side, hissing and spitting—dhampir, with wide eyes with whites all around, bald head, thin lips disappearing into the impossible pallor of its face—wobbles rather than cutting in sharp, the way it was clearly planning to, spike in one hand and mine in the other, all ready to plaster to Baby’s flank. They know where she’s vulnerable, because Baby’s of the Bunker, too.

Might be an accident that the dhampir loses control of its bike, swerving—twisting—

It screams. Falls.

Baby shivers, just once, as it goes under the wheels, bike and all.

Might be an accident.

“You okay back there?” Dean calls back to Patience. It costs her to use her powers. Dean doesn’t know the price. Doesn’t wanna know.

“Don’t talk to me right now,” she says.

Dean doesn’t know if she closes her eyes or looks away this time when the howls start. Then the screams.

He’s never asked Garth and Benny what they think of dog-boys and dhampir—made of werewolf blood, vampire blood, and flesh and bone and sperm and eggs from the dead and dying. It’s tech that Dean doesn’t understand, lightning and some Sucrocorp gunk and Men of Letters tech.

But maybe it’s better to just not know.

(He thought that for a long time, even though he could hear the screams as Grandpa’s torturers worked on the monsters in their cells: where’s your alpha? Where’s your alpha? Until the answers they got were nothing but screams or howls or sobs. Until they were just body parts used for the creation of the Bunker’s workforce.)

Dean gets off a few shots on his side, hears a crash and a burn without having to watch it from his rearview. But Castiel is still watching out the window with a head-cocked curiosity when a rider pulls up beside him with a roar of a well-tuned engine, pointing a long handled gun in his face, laughing through a cracked, white mouth under too-large goggles—

“Winchester!” it hisses, and Dean’s name in its mouth is a curse. It doesn’t look at Cas at all.

Which is probably a mistake, ‘cause the angel reaches all the way out of the window and grabs the gun with both hands.

It goes off with a bang that’s too loud, echoing,and Dean flinches with his whole body to the side, wheel steady but shrapnel jerking against Baby’s side and interior with loud pings.

But Castiel has his body turned, broad bare shoulders and spread wings, feathers moving as he’s hit. He doesn’t flinch. Through the wide gaps in his feathers, out of the corner of Dean’s eyes from where he’s driving plastered against the driver side door, the angel keeps hold of the gun, and he yanks.

That rider goes under the wheels, too. This time, it’s close enough that there’s a squelch to go with the crunch.

When Dean chances a look sideways, Castiel’s frowning down at himself, and brushing shrapnel off his face and chest with flicks of his fingers, delicate and irritated like he’s brushing away fleas. They fall to the pocked vinyl around him with little pink, pink, plinks.

Then he fucking shimmies his wings to get the rest of it off his feathers, growling irritably to himself. He’s still holding the shotgun by its barrel, and he brings it up to his face, peering with one suspicious blue eye right up into the muzzle before he turns it around and puts it across his lap with a satisfied grumble.

Dean can’t laugh now. But it aches in him, in the pit of his stomach, round and sweet.

He doesn’t stop to get Garth and Benny back from their killing fields. He doesn’t need to. He just doesn’t shift up while they’re away, that’s all.

Not a half-klick gone, he hears motors, and when he looks into his rearview, he recognizes the silhouettes bent over the stolen bikes. The dead bodies they leave behind them are dark, shimmering smears in the sand, and then they’re gone.

Baby’s too big to feel the little thump when they land back on her, jumping from the backs of the moving bikes and hanging onto her grips with the kind of casual strength that only a monster gets—well, a monster or something born to die.

Benny’s mouth and chin are all blood down to his bellybutton when he climbs back in. Garth isn’t any better—he’s gone all furry, and he’s matted dark with it. Dean sighs: the hold’s going to stink of dried blood for a while until they can stop and get their clothes beaten out, get enough oil on their faces and hands to scrape it all off.

“How was it?” Dean asks.

“Mediocre,” Garth says, with a grin that’s all fangs.

It’s the demon who talks to him.

And it is the demon, becaues the soul within her is curled up, whimpering.

Maybe it’s not, Castiel. Maybe it’s your reflection in her eyes that you’re seeing. Maybe that’s the echo in your ears, because you are flightless and broken. A dodo.

But that doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter what he is, because someone always suffers, for demons.

He doesn’t understand why he was sent back to “the hold,” only that Garth was needed in the front seat to “sniff the wind.”

Castiel protested, because he could have easily sniffed the wind, too, and he’s sure he could do it better than a werewolf. But Dean threatened that Garth would be sitting on his wing, then, if all three of them were in the front seat, and as slight as Garth is, and as inhuman, Castiel doesn’t want that.

But now the demon is talking to him.

“Pretty,” she says, looking at him from too close. “Pretty, pretty unicorn with your sky eyes and your broken feathers. He does so like to rescue us monsters, doesn’t he?” She wiggles closer and inhales, her eyes going hazy and bleak and inky. “You don’t even have an alpha that his grandpappy would want to steal you for. I don’t either, but that didn’t stop them. They have a lot more practice at torture than most, for monkeys. Not that there are monkeys anymore,” she adds, a whisper out of the corner of her mouth.

Castiel scowls at her. Don’t speak to me, he thinks at her, as hard as he can. I don’t need your poison.

You can’t be poisoned, Castiel. Not by land or air or evaporated sea, and not even sulfur. So even if she stinks of it, it doesn’t matter.

Still.

But the demon laughs like she can hear him. “No alpha to sow the barren fields with his blood, no wings, no feathers left to steal or heal.” She shakes her head, grinning at him, and the darkness has spread to wash through the edges of her irises now. “Still, you’re shinier than most. Shiny as chrome. Are you shattered enough to please him, though?” she croons. “Tell me true.”

“Just ignore her, Hot Wings,” the vampire says, his eyes closed and his head leaned back against the hold’s jostling sides. “The spicier you get with her, the more she likes it.”

Castiel thinks that this is probably good advice.

He’s never been good at taking good advice.

So he reaches out his free hand, the one not ringed in iron and cruelty and intentionality, and places it firmly, spread over the mask of her face and the flash of her grin. And he shoves.

He doesn’t have much grace. His remaining feathers are pinfeathers, or they’re broken. He is diminished.

But still, as she slams back against the hold’s curved sides, his fingertips leave scorch marks against the edges of her face—bright, scarlet ovals that, for a moment, glow bright. The print of his thumb edges under the curve of her cheekbone.

“Hey!” the small one—the fearful one—snaps, almost in unison with Dean.

“God help me, don’t make me stop this car!” Dean barks.

Castiel frowns into the front seat. Why would he think that God would help him? God is asleep, and dreaming. Castiel is going to find him, and shake him awake. (Hard.)

He also doesn’t know why that makes Garth laugh, why that makes him pull his head in from where he has it stuck nearly out the window. “You tell ‘em, daddy!” he says, and this time, Dean shoves him.

“I started it!” the demon says, raising her hand with a bright laugh. She fingers the prints of Castiel’s fingers on her face and waggles her eyebrows at him in a grotesque wobble.

Castiel scowls at her, but he feels the expression fading in surprise as the little human one—Patience—edges closer to him. Her hair is clipped short to her head, like Garth’s and Benny’s and Dean’s, unlike the demon’s thick waves of hair, which are pouring over her shoulders and her bruised collarbones.

Maybe that’s the point. Unnatural.

Patience’s expression is wary. The blood isn’t crusted under her nose anymore, but if Castiel squints, he can still see the echo of it, thin and bright and iron, the way the little capillaries broke from the pressure when she tried to touch his mind. But still, she approaches in a careful shuffle. Her dark eyes drop to his hands, folded in his lap, following the dark stain of his one remaining cuff.

When her chin turns, when she looks at his wings, Castiel tenses. They spread and fill in threat, because he won’t cower. Not ever.

But he doesn’t expect her to say, her voice quiet even over the omnipresent rumble of the engine, “Do they hurt?”

Yes. Yes, they do. They hurt with a pain that is deeper than flesh, because these are his being, and parts of them have been stolen in great, greedy handfuls.

But maybe these beings here with him, riding in a great metal tomb with a fire in her stomach, maybe they do understand. Castiel saw the riders on the little two-wheels, their protruding muzzles and the way they couldn’t close their mouths, the way they howled in a way that sounded like wild joy but left blood gathered in the back of their throats. Half-lives. Inhuman in a way that monsters aren’t.

After a moment of consideration, he nods.

“I’m sorry,” she says, serious. “My grandmother, uh. She’s… I dunno. She’s witchy. Maybe she can help?”

Castiel blinks down at her. After a moment, he shrugs. He won’t let a human touch his wings. He doesn’t need a human’s help.

But the offer is small, and it’s kind. It’s very like the unpatient Patience.

He’s sorry he made her bleed, too. He didn’t intend it. Carefully, Castiel reaches out and touches the tip of her nose. Her medial rectus and inferior rectus muscles tighten in conjunction, extraocular muscles spasming, and she stares at his finger cross-eyed before she jerks back.

The noise she makes as she rubs at her eyes with her knuckles is soft and mirthful. He doesn’t have the urge to taste it the way he does when Dean laughs, but it’s pleasing enough all the same, and Castiel smiles down at her.

“So are you going home too?”

Castiel loses his smile. His home is unreachable.

Is it? Or is it just gone? Is it a memory? But you’re a angel, and your memory will never fade. When God wakes up, will he recreate what you’ve lost?

But that wasn’t the question she asked. He shrugs, once.

“Okay,” Patience says softly. She knocks on the shuddering wall beside her with a knuckle. “Well, here’s home for now, right? Even if Dean is weirdly attached to it. He’s a good guy, for a former Hunter.” Moving slowly, she taps Castiel’s manacle. It doesn’t seem to burn her the way it does him. “Bet he can even get this off,” she adds, helpfully.

What?

“Oh,” Dean says, rubbing his eyes free of brown-crusted sleep, after the next time they stop in the hottest time of the day. He grins, that terrible, disarming pink arch. Dust gathers in the sparkling hairs around his mouth, at the corners of his eyes, from driving with the windows open. “Oh. Yeah, shit. Forgot ‘bout that. Sure, guess I owe you one, huh? Took a shotgun blast for me and all. Cas, get over here.”

What?

Dean fiddles with tiny prongs while Castiel wafts the sticky, harsh air into motion with his wings, dust motes glittering as they fall, the now-familiar noises of the heavy, black rectangles being pulled off Baby’s top deck. He holds up his right wing when he sees Dean squinting in the sunlight, casting a moment’s shade over his frowning, lowered face.

The manacle doesn’t snap, worn away by the motion of the file, the way the other ones did. It squeaks in protest on its hinge. But as Dean pokes and pokes and pokes, it opens.

It opens. And falls away, plopping onto the sand between them with a rattle and a clink.

There’s no flare. No fanfare. No parade. Castiel’s shallow grace wobbles inside him, once, like the horizon under the light of the midday sun, before it settles, cool and calm.

Castiel is free.

He looks at the manacle.

He picks it up in his hands. He hefts it. It’s so small. So light. His blood is worn into its creases and its grooves. There are tiny, brighter scratches in the thick coating of blood soaking it from where Dean was working with his tools, like the twinkle of stars through clouds, through smog, through the destruction of the ozone.

And then Castiel turns around and flings it from him, out into the wastes and the sand and the emptiness, as hard as he can.

“Hah!” Garth says. “Nice. We’ll make a pitcher outta you yet!”

Castiel is not listening to him. He whirls on Dean, wings spread, eyes narrowed. He can feel his whole body vibrating in fury, his eyes glowing with it, his hair prickling with it.

All this time. All this time he had the tools to free Castiel, and he, he—he gave Castiel that tiny little rasp with that terrible, beautiful, opaque smile, and Castiel filed and filed and scraped and scratched until the metal broke on his feet, and then the file broke, leaving Castiel without a tool. And all this time—

Castiel yanks on the muscles of his vocal cords, making them small, small, small. He makes them vibrate at a non-seismic frequency, quiets the reverb until it will not resonate with a frequency that will break those tiny, fragile human eardrums. He’s been spending days listening to them. He understands it now.

"You're an assbutt," he says, very clearly.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

Alright, so Cas can actually talk without killing them all.

By the time Benny’s done hooting with laughter so hard that there's a dribble of blood trailing from the corners of his eyes, and he probably only kept from denting the inside of Baby's door pounding on it because he knows Dean would chuck him out with the motor still going, Cas is back to blinking those big blue eyes and turning his head to look confusedly at them all, innocent and dangerous as a new-hatched dhampir.

Which is probably good, because Dean’s pretty sure that laughing at Cas when a second ago he was all puffed-up with outrage—shit, it wasn’t just his feathers making a big wad of spun sucrose behind him, Dean thinks that maybe even his chest hair was standing on end—will probably get him picked up and tossed as far as Cas tossed that manacle.

"Well well. I like a man who keeps his tongue in his head," Meg announces. She hasn't looked up from drawing little bloody sigils on her own arm with one sharp fingernail, dripping them onto the sand from where she’s seated on Baby’s open rear hatch. Dean can feel the tingle and ache of power in his back teeth.

(She’s a terrible idea. Just... awful. But there’s no doubt that whatever she’s been doing with those sigils, it’s mostly kept them from being followed somehow. Even if it does leave blood smears across Baby’s upholstery.)

"Isn't the expression a civil tongue in his head?" Patience pipes up quietly, her eyebrows furrowing.

Dean closes his eyes for just a second. He really is glad that the Bunker and the Campbell didn't have her for long enough to make her... strange, like all the rest of ‘em.

No. Call it what it is: damaged.

But he's also pretty sure she's still been with them long enough to know better than to ask Meg, of all people, things like that.

"Don't give a shit if it's civil," Meg says, and without even checking his mirrors Dean knows she's running her tongue over her teeth as she grins. A sucking sound that sends a tiny little shiver down his back follows. "If it's quiet, it's not wagging. Harder to rip it out."

"Is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?" Garth says—actually, that's such a reasonable fucking question that Dean almost feels everyone turning around to look at their friendly neighborhood werewolf.

"You aren't ripping out my tongue, demon. I'll kill you if you try. So none of the silly semantics matter," Cas says, placid as all shit, like that's just that.

It’s more words than he's ever heard Cas string together ever, considering that until this very moment they didn’t think he could talk without exploding Dean's eardrums.

There's still something a little off about his speaking voice, something that raises the hairs on the back of Dean's neck to a prickle. It's too deep, too much—rough as gravel under Baby's wheels, as the grind of her motor when Dean was still learning to change her gears. Like Cas isn’t sure how to make things smooth, so he'll grind them until they are, never mind that the 'things' are in his own throat.

Dean can... kind of respect that, actually.

"Aww. Aren't you sweet," Meg croons.

"Sing it, brother," Garth says approvingly, and laughs.

Yup. Yeah. They're all weird as fuck.

The next miles are quiet. Peaceful, almost. Just 'cause Cas has decided he can talk, doesn't mean he's gonna, apparently. In the storage seats, Dean can hear Meg counting knives and bullets and guns—again; shit, she’d better not be eating them—and Garth excitedly telling Patience about Bess and their pup, but it all blurs into the familiar roar of Baby.

Garth can hunt, so they’re not just living on Sucrocorp bars: whenever they have to stop, he still somehow sniffs out meat even as far out in the Wastes as they are, even if it’s just some weird little bird or an undersand crab or a fish with legs. The next day, when he comes back after cool-down, he gives Dean the meat to cook over the hottest part of Baby’s engine for him and Patience.

(He eats the heart and the guts up himself, popping them into his mouth with a little “Hmm!” like he’s eating a bob of Sucrocorp candy. Ew.)

Benny doesn’t need much blood, he says. Took a gulp or two from the last hunting party that came across ‘em in the wastes, though Dean can’t imagine that half-life blood tasted good at all. If it ever gets too bad, well, Dean’s got a vein or two he can open. And as far as anyone knows, Meg doesn’t have to eat.

(Dean did not know until recently that she could eat fucking rocks and bullets.)

Sure, Dean can hear drums sometimes on the wind when he’s dozing off to sleep, see fire in the sky that ain’t no fuckin’ comet, but no one knows the Wastes better than he does. He puts on Fleetwood Mac to drown it out, singing about landslides. Cas doesn’t sing along, but Dean sees his finger tap, tap, tapping on the edge of the seat between them, his wrist bloody and messy. But bare, now.

It's good. It's real good.

It doesn't last. It can’t. Nothing ever lasts out here. Everything dries up and dies.

But right now, it’s good.

Garth’s pack sneaks up to them, and Dean means that really fucking literally. One moment, they’re driving, and the next, Garth pops up over Dean’s shoulder, so suddenly that Dean nearly swerves. “Stop!” he yelps.

Of course, there’s no stopping Baby’s bulk just like that, so it’s a quarter klick before he finally coaxes her to stillness. They haven’t even stalled completely yet when Garth climbs out the rear window—he doesn’t even open the door, just squirms his whole ferret body out the back window like Baby’s still in motion, and takes off towards a low, barely-obvious rise of rocks and a small hill like Baby’s on fire.

Dean understands why a group of vamps is called a splatter. Oh, does he understand it. But until this moment, he’s not sure he really understood why a group of werewolves is called a pack. Two or three, maybe six… that’s a raiding party, right?

This ain’t a raiding party.

He can’t tell how many there are of them: they’re moving too quickly, furred and then skin and then fur again in the cooling evening air. Someone is snapping and someone else is growling, but then there’s a cry of “Bess! Bess, where’s Bess, get your ass out here, girl—” before it turns into growls again. They’re a pack, ‘cause they’re packed together—

And when their heads all turn as one towards the rest of them, climbing slowly out of Baby…

One woman pulls free of the mass of moving, tangled, furred-not-furred bodies, the chorus of growls rising higher and higher in waves behind her, prickling at Dean’s nerves and making him itch for his gun. She’s blond, and pretty enough. Her hair’s short, her pants raggedy and dirt-stained, like everyone’s is out here, top wrapped in layers of graying scraps with some of them sagging off her shoulder. She’s ordinary.

She’s ordinary.

“Bess!” Garth breathes, and starts jogging.

Well. Huh. So Garth’s Bess is still alive after all this time—and not just alive, hale and well and carrying that kid of theirs slung on her hip as she smiles at him and reaches out an arm. Which… y’know, that’s a miracle all on its own, out here? A happy ending for all, and Dean takes a deep, shaky breath, ‘cause y’know, he didn’t fuck this up, he somehow didn’t fuck this up—

So it comes as a total surprise when a beat-up black wing spreads right in front of him, hard enough to knock him stumbling back against Baby, and what the fuck is it with Cas still using his goddamned limbs to move Dean around now that Dean knows he can actually talk?

“Hey!” he barks. Well, wheezes, with the wind knocked out of him.

“Stay,” Cas says, and…

Wait, are his eyes glowing?

“Oh. Well. Fuckity fuck fuck, will you look at that,” Meg says. Her head tips to the side. She’s not looking at Dean or Cas. She’s looking at the perfectly ordinary blonde who has a wide smile and tears running down her face as she reaches out her arm for Garth. “You know, I didn’t see this coming. Nice going, toothpick!” she calls out.

Garth sticks his thumb up in her direction without so much as looking at her.

Dean’s missing something. He knows he is. “What?” he snaps, and shoves at the wing in front of him, ignoring Cas’s growl—though it’s really hard to ignore the fact that he’s now squashed against Baby’s side by it. Shoving it is like trying to shove a transport.

“Can’t you tell, brother?” Benny says, and when Dean looks at him sharply over the edge of Cas’s wings, there are teeth prickling out of his mouth. What the hell?!

“Tell what?” Dean demands, and Meg laughs.

“What? What do you mean, what? She’s the werewolf alpha,” Benny hisses, shoving Dean even further behind them, and what the almighty fuck?

“Hiya, sweetie!” Garth says, and kisses the woman happily on the cheek.

"Stay a day. I know Patience doesn’t know the way to her place, nose-blind like she is. But maybe some of the pack knows where there's a witchy woman to be found in the Wastes, right?" Garth says. “If not, we can sniff her out.” He taps the side of his nose, smiling. “A witchy lady out here made Mr. Frizzles for me, you know.”

A gift for his kid, he said. He wouldn’t leave the Bunker without that stupid little puppet, he said. Fortunately, it’s so weird and ugly that it wasn’t hard to find.

Shit, Garth talked and he talked and he talked, about things that mattered and things that just… didn’t, until, well, Dean just stopped listening. They all did, didn’t they? Dean wouldn’t have thought that Garth could keep a secret, not with his mouth, hell, not with a lockbox like the one that holds the keys to the Bunker’s water stores.

Dean knows what Samuel Campbell must’ve done to Garth to try and get where his alpha is to get out of him.

Werewolves can grow back most everything. Teeth and fingers and feet.

Garth never said one fucking word about alphas.

Damn.

“You know we can’t, man,” Dean says. Just because they haven’t heard the drums of a Bunker war ride since the day before doesn’t mean they can stay. All it takes is one raider to spot Baby’s bulk through a glass and a distance. They’re not Sucrocorp, but everyone knows the Bunker pays in water for info.

It just so happens that the info before was always about monsters and caches of minerals, that’s all. And now, well. Now Dean’s stolen what was never meant to be kept, and someone’s gonna have to pay for it. They might not know what he took, but everyone’s gotta know by now that Samuel Campbell’s grandson, his best driver, has gone rogue.

"We got a spring. A little one," Garth says, leaning close, low, and Dean just about feels his own eyebrows try to merge with his hair. "In the caves. I…” His face scrunches, but he raises his chin again. “Yeah, sorry, amigo, you know can't tell you where it is, but—"

"No, man, shit, no," Dean says hurriedly, his eyes going wide.

Fresh water? They’ve got fresh water, out here in the Wastes? Even he licks his lips automatically at the thought of it.

Is it ‘cause Garth’s pack has got their alpha out here? Is it luck? Just ordinary fucking luck?

But Dean won’t think about it. He’s not thinking about it for even one second.

"But. We got it, you know? Water,” Garth says, in a low, pleased, shaky sigh, and his voice trails off. “It’s so sweet. Maybe it’s even sweet as I remember. Fuck, I…” His eyes focus again on Dean’s. “Y’know, let us fill up a tank for you. Those tanks you got in Baby’s back. Before you go.”

“What? Can’t ask that of you,” Dean says, sharply. Shit, forget the whole alpha business: if anyone had any idea that Garth’s little pack has a water source of their own, the real fucking deal, if the Bunker knew… he doesn’t even want to think about it.

Garth’s been keeping more secrets than just his alpha.

“You weren’t asking,” Garth says with that terrible, trusting, cheerful smile. “Hombre, you brought me home. An’ I’m offering you provisions to get you to your brother. To your home. Y’know?” He smiles. “But y’all gotta come back and visit, after you find him. Yeah?”

Dean’s still thinking about that when the first howl rises up into the darkening evening sky.

The howls that rise in answer send chills up the back of Dean's neck.

Because they’re not the yapping or the growling of the thin-furred, fang-mouthed dog-boys that work the Bunker or hunt on the trail, with their little yells that become crooning yelps of Valhalla, Valhalla, the way they snip and snap and snarl at each other.

No, the noise that the pack lets out is deeper, and wilder, and sweeter, and it vibrates right into Dean's marrow, leaving him shaky.

It makes him feel like prey, and Dean's Bunker-born, a fuckin' ex-hunter with a shotgun and a demon blade.

"They're singing," Cas says, his head thrown back, eyes wide. He has his wings up and out, spread enough to be vulnerable rather than tucked protectively close and tight to his back for the first time that Dean's seen. Maybe it's just Dean's imagination, but are his feathers thicker?

"Oh yeah? Is that what that is?" Benny says, his whole face squished up. He looks like he’s got a headache. Well, his hearing is more sensitive than a human's.

"Pretty," Cas says insistently, frowning at him, and that, that makes the tight, cold quiver in the pit of Dean's stomach warm and loosen.

Even Patience has got a smile on her face watching the kids—they call 'em pups, what the heck—tumbling around until they're sandy and all one color from their hair to their bare feet, going back to their parents to get some of it patted and fussed off them until they're at least half clean before they go at it again.

They’ve got kids here. Little ones. Tiny little baby werewolves.

It’s fucking amazing, is what it is.

They run up to Patience and try to pull her in with them... well, until Garth calls out, "No, no, she can't be nipped, go bother Meg!" and they pile on the fucking demon until she's buried in a rough, squirming pile of probably feral and maybe slightly rabid children. Pups?

No, shit, they’re children. They ain’t dogs. That's just too weird.

Well. They are clawing. And... biting.

"Uh," Dean says, as one of them clamps down his mouth on Meg’s forearm and shakes his head from side to side.

"That's why I didn't want 'em bothering Patience!" Garth says. "Meg can take it."

Then he wanders away like he's not even a little bit worried she's gonna hurt one of 'em if they get a little too bitey.

Dean listens to the wind. There’s none of Meg’s furious vexations—whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. No drums, no roar of the motor. No flares brightening the sky. He looks back at where Benny’s still hanging close around Baby’s open back, but the wolves have lured Patience back out, and they’re offering her… well, whatever it is, it’s bloody and dripping, and Patience looks a little green around the gills. But she’s alright. Meg’s buried under a pile of kids by this point, and her laugh is loud and a little alarmingly wet, but… she’s alright, too.

Cas is staring into the distance, frowning, wings wafting back and forth like the hand-sized dust moths that flit around a Sucrocorp grain silo. But that’s just… Cas.

“Guess I’ll take you up on the water,” Dean says, like that isn’t a really big fucking deal, He licks his lips again, grinning. “Thanks.”

There’s no drums, when the attack comes.

If Garth smells like a tree, the wolves smell like a dark soil, and ferns, and the forest, even in this world where so little grows. They howl like singing, and the little ones tumble across his feet and ricochet off Castiel’s hip and his calf and keep moving, always moving.

They smell like living things.

They die like mortals.

Castiel doesn’t recognize the clatter of gunfire at first, because it sounds like the spatter of rain from far away.

But it doesn’t rain on the Wastes. Only blood rains and flows, and Castiel watches wolves jerk and twitch and dance in a way that has no rhythm before they fall. They pull up again, growling, bleeding, but slowed. Diminished.

He recognizes the sound of gunfire when Dean runs to Baby’s back and pulls out a gun. It’s big. “Just two watermelon seeds,” Meg says, handing him something the size of her hand. “Plant ‘em well, Prince Charming.”

“Don’t need more’n one,” Dean says, and the gun he sets up has its own feet to stand upon—the size of his body, long and slender and strangely delicate.

The wolves close ranks around the little, the vulnerable. They run out towards the line of popcorn guns, the shadowy arc of oncoming death, and now that Castiel is listening, there is the purr of a motor in the distance.

But. Garth’s pup. He sees her running towards the circle of guarded pups, the hunters turned into a herd, streaming towards the shallow hill underneath which he can smell the sharp brightness of water.

He sees her running, and running. He hears the clatter.

She falls. She rises, torn through. She falls—

When Castiel does what he does, he doesn't think of plagues or lamb's blood or firstborns. He doesn't think of little milk-teeth with barely blooded roots and the soft stinks of babyhood.

No, Castiel doesn't think at all. He doesn’t need to.

His grace carries him between, and then between, high and low. His wings flare. They are still gapped of feathers like a broken smile, but they’re enough. The cover the small figure, who is still, desperately, trying to change what can’t be changed yet. She’s still small and immutable. Infinite.

And Castiel will protect that.

But the bullets punch into the curtain of Castiel’s feathers, then tumble to the ground as they hit his flesh. They're imbued, and the impact stings—ichor slicks his feathers, drips down his flanks, stains the top of his borrowed, gifted, unnecessary pants.

It hurts. It all hurts.

He hears his name, the cut-off truncated title they gave him, in Dean’s deep voice—mingled with obscenity, as it so often is with him: “Fuck, Cas!”

But it's just pain. Just that. Castiel's flesh is not mortal, not anymore. He is unbound. And he knows what to do with pain.

He knows how to give it back.

The bullets don't stay with him, and they fall into the sand around Castiel’s feet with small, fell thumps.

Then he moves.

More ichor purls down his chest in a thick, glowing sheet by the time he reaches the cowards. They fire and they fire and they fire. And then when they realize he will not stop, he will not die, not at their hands, their guns click and click and click, aimless, metal striking upon metal with no fire left to light.

They’re human, he realizes. Their lives are full, and this is how they chose to live them.

He doesn’t use his mouth on them, these smelly, snarling baby-killers spitting epithets at the pack that fed and clothed Castiel’s traveling companions, who gave them sweet water, who sang for the joy of singing. They don’t deserve Castiel’s saliva, or the edge of his teeth, or his desperation.

Castiel doesn’t have claws, or fangs, like the wolves do, but he doesn’t need them to rip humans apart. To end them. He is not desperate anymore. He is deliberate.

He doesn’t even need his grace. Just his strength, and of that he has plenty. Just his fury, and of that he has even more, more than anyone.

They’re human. They’re not the twisted, pathetic creatures that Dean calls dhampir and ghouls and dog-boys. They bleed, and bleed, red red red splashing in wide gouts, and they shriek in a way that is not music, but is an endpoint all the same.

They beg, and they pray, on their knees and wide-eyed, then soundless and throatless with their last air whistling from the naked white and pink and red of their gullets as the werewolves arrive behind Castiel, as they rip and tear and revenge themselves upon the cowards.

The humans’ prayers go unanswered.

Everyone’s does, these days.

When Castiel gets back to the camp, Garth’s pup is whimpering, and there are puddles of darkness underneath her hindquarters and soaking into her garments. The micturition reflex isn't too unexpected. The baby is a juvenile, and Castiel knows he must stink of violence. She doesn’t know he won’t hurt her; can’t trust that he won’t, and he doesn’t blame her for that.

He could hurt them. He could.

They all know it now.

“Sorry,” Cas says, quietly. He crouches down and holds out an arm to her. He’s not quite sure what he’s apologizing for.

“Did you kill them?” she asks, in her little voice.

He nods.

She’s cradling her arm when she stands, and there’s the stain of a bullet there that she scratches at until it falls out with wet plop. She puts a finger into the hole it left behind, but then she looks up at him and smiles in satisfaction. Her teeth are still flat and harmless, but her expression isn’t when she raises her chin.

“Good,” she says, and then her parents arrive.

 "Cas," Garth says hoarsely. His eyes move to where Castiel knows he’s shedding broken bits of feather vane, dripping ichor onto the sand that flashes with Grace-brightness for a moment before the parched land sucks it greedily up. He watches little flowers appear, irises and crocuses, purple and yellow and blue. One of Castiel’s bloody footprints is limned in phlox. A trail of flowers follows him in from the Wastes. “Buddy, you…”

Then Garth breathes, shaking his head as if he’s clearing mites from his ears, the air stuttering as it passes his glottis. It’s not fear on his face when he says, more clearly, “You okay?”

Castiel is… touched. Of course he is okay, but that Garth would ask after his well-being is unexpected.

He’s an angel. He’s an angel, and a murderer, and with the pup looking up at him wet-eyed and wet-pantsed, if Castiel had a soul to damn he would do it all over again.

“Why?” Bess asks, her eyes wide and wet. There’s fear on her face, for all the blood that’s soaking her, wet to the elbow, her hands still tipped with claws as long as Castiel’s coverts. But Castiel doesn’t blame her for her fear. “You saved her. Those bullets they were using… I can smell the silver and the blood. You could have died.”

Maybe. But he didn’t.

"Innocent," Castiel says, finally, looking down at Garth’s pup. It's the only explanation he has. It's the only one he needs. She’s crouched down, now uninterested, parents and terror forgotten now that she’s no longer wearing the wet, stained pants. They’re lying discarded behind her, pale thighs wiggling as she squats.

She’s poking wide-eyed at the tiny wildflowers edging the drops of Castiel’s blood. Then she plucks one and puts it into her mouth.

Castiel could do without Garth lunging at him, hugging him so hard that Castiel feels claws dig into his back, Castiel's wings prickling with alarm over being so contained, so touched. But Garth ignores the way he must be feeling the razor edges of Castiel’s feathers against even his werewolf hide.

"Thank you," he says, muffled, wet and alarmingly mucusy.  “Gonna name my next baby after you.”

“Stop leaking on me,” Castiel commands, alarmed, and Garth laughs.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

When they leave, Patience stays behind with the pack.

“They say they can find my grandma Missouri,” she says. “That, uh… that I smell like her, and her smell tickles a lot.”

She’s addressing Dean, but Castiel nods his agreement.

“Tickles, huh?” Dean says, and he covers the corner of his mouth with his fingertip as if suppressing it. He turns to look at the rest of them. “That make sense to you lot?”

“Yes,” Castiel says simply.

“I mean, I guess, if they say so,” Benny says, with a shrug. “But they’d know better than me. I ain’t got much of a sniffer for anything but blood.”

Meg shrugs. “I’d say more ‘tingly.’ But with her around, who can smell anything but fur?” She jerks her chin in Bess’s direction. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand. Werewolfism is contagious, y’know. Don’t wanna find out if she can make me a werewolf. Too sexy for my… well, whatever.”

“Wait. What? You all knew she was… y’know,” Dean says, flapping a hand in the direction of Garth’s mate. “You know!”

Well, of course Benny knew that Garth’s mate, Bess, of the little pup and the throb of power beating, beating, beating in her breast and her hands, was the alpha of the werewolves. Castiel’s not sure how Dean didn’t know.

Humans are so small and so strange and petty.

The sun rises and sets, and rises again, and Baby moves with it, and Dean sings through the nights. Eventually, he sings the same songs over and over again, until Castiel starts to learn them. The demon occupies herself with counting bullets and setting them out in neat rows, sorting them out with the guns gathered from the attackers. The wolves seemed happy to give away as many of them as they wanted, bloodied piles carried on their arms like kindling and strange belts of bullets, gathered up along with the human meat even though Dean turned away too fast when they started to eat.

The soul within Meg isn’t screaming, or crying. It’s just counting the bullets, too, countin’ one two three.

“You don’t have many more seeds to plant,” she tells Dean, shaking the bag gently. “Gonna be ordinary soon. Gonna have to find something that isn’t death to grow.”

Dean doesn’t say anything to that.

Castiel and Benny take reluctant turns in the front seat. The hold looks so much larger without Garth and Patience within it. The full drums of water slosh in a sweet, musical rhythm as Baby rocks.

But then, when they stop for one day, it’s not noon, it’s evening. Castiel blinks up in surprise at a night sky that’s not moving as Baby moves, that’s not glimpsed through a window moving widdershins to the driving. The arc of the stars is cool and bright and nova, and for a moment, he thinks he can feel God breathing.

But still. They’re not moving. They’ve been in motion for so long that Castiel’s body wants to go, go, go, remembering a little too well how long he was forced to be still, and bound, and chained.

He points at the road ahead, frowning, the corner of the horizon—but he did this once before, and it didn’t do Castiel any good then, either.

Dean chuckles softly. “Look, man, I’m beat. We’re gonna hit Sucrocorp territory tomorrow, and might have to get out and burn fast. Gotta take a full night sometime.” He pats Castiel’s shoulder, and, accustomed to it now, Castiel doesn’t twitch. “And, ‘sides, we gotta get you clean. You really stink of old blood something fierce. They’re gonna smell you coming.”

Castiel lowers his head and sniffs himself.

Oh. He really does.

How disgusting.

But Dean shows him how to take off his pants and beat them in satisfying thwumps against Baby’s side to knock off the dirt and the blood that isn’t worn into the fibers, and then how to coat his body in thick, pungent oil and then scrape, scrape, scrape the dirt away. (He throws a soiled scrap of cloth at Meg when she hoots and whistles and says lewd things through her fingers.)

As the wind starts to kick upwards, sending sand blasting towards the sticky oil still on their bodies, they climb up to the top of Baby’s broad roof to get away from the scatter. Benny grumbles something about his beard and disappears inside. When they’re both done, Dean takes the cleaning tool—shaped like an elbow, slender and pocked with hammer-marks—and leans over the edge, tossing it carelessly in through the window of the driver’s seat and into Baby’s front—her cab, Castiel knows now.

"There you are. Look'it you," Dean says, and his fingers touch Castiel’s chest gently. Something about the way he says it, low and rough, makes Castiel’s coverts puff. Dean's smile brightens his face and his soul in a little spark as his eyes go to the movement. "All fuzzy and clean."

He sounds happy to be saying it, happy to be looking at Castiel’s flesh, and that makes him strangely proud. Dean can't see the glory of Castiel’s rings or the shine of his growing grace, not with his pathetic, pretty human eyes. But he can see Castiel’s flesh, and he likes it.

And that's good, too, in its own way.

But still. Fuzzy? Castiel's not sure he likes that. He frowns at Dean.

"What? You are. Cute ol' hairy fairy."

Oh, no, Castiel is very sure he doesn’t like that. "I'm not a fairy."

But it makes Dean laugh. Even with as tired he is, it makes his soul glitter like the fragments of quartz in the empty sand, underneath the sun, almost too bright. "Sure," he says. "Sure, Cas."

Castiel has no way to control the way his wings fluff further, though he knows it's with irritation rather than pleasure, prickly and razor-edged within the thick wax of sheaths. Or the way Dean's eyes go to them again.

"They're kinda lookin' better now, huh?" he says. And he looks nearly as proud of it as Castiel feels. "Even if you are leaving gross feather flakes all over Baby's insides."

Castiel frowns at him. His pinfeathers are coming in. They’re growing, and they’re healing, and that’s good, but… "I can't reach the sheaths."

You aren’t complaining. You don’t complain. It’s a statement of fact, Castiel.

"We ain't got condoms, bud." Then Dean's mouth twists like he bit into something inedible. Or more inedible than those terrible bars he ingests. "Why'd I say that?" he mumbles to himself, then scratches at the hair on the back of his neck with his blunt, grease- and oil-stained fingers. He cleaned himself too, but he didn’t denude himself the way Castiel did.

Castiel watches long fingers moving through the delicate tuck of Dean's hair where it's shorn short and spiky, and he gets a good idea. A wonderful idea.

"A trade," he says.

Dean's eyebrows go up. "Dude, you literally don't even have a shirt on your back."

Of course Castiel doesn’t, what need would he have for a shirt? How would he even wear one over his wings? He frowns at Dean momentarily, but the human being nonsensical is just... Dean.

Castiel gestures back at his wings. “You can help. But. Don't. Don't... take,” he says. There’s enough power to the command of it that Baby grumbles and shakes underneath them. Castiel pats her in apology.

"I won't," Dean starts, his face twisting. “Fuck, Cas. I’d never.” Then, "Not unless I gotta," he continues, more slowly.

Castiel stills. He opens his mouth. Breathes in the honesty of that in a great gust. It doesn’t smell like rainbows, but it doesn’t smell bad, either. It doesn’t smell like old sweat. Like lies.

He doesn’t thank Dean for it.

"If you take," Castiel says, low with a fury he doesn't yet feel, a pain of betrayal he can only imagine and all the sharper for it, "I will kill you."

Dean doesn't make a funny of it, not even one Castiel doesn’t understand. Perhaps he knows that Castiel’s not joking. "Yeah," he says simply, and reaches over to set a hand gently on Castiel’s wing.

Castiel almost kills him anyway, for that. He feels his wing jerk in protest at the contact toomuchtoomuch human, hands, human, humans stink and they kill and humans take, and knows the way Dean's whole body goes tense, too.

But his wing doesn't lash out. Castiel doesn’t lash out. After a moment, he feels the siffle of breath against his feathers as Dean resumes respiration.

"It was a stupid idea to do this this high up," Castiel says, bemused, after a moment. "If I pushed you off, I mean. You would probably die. By accident," he adds, because this is an important detail.

There's more breath, airy with it, as Dean makes a hoarse, huffy noise that is his silent laugh. When Castiel looks over his shoulder to confirm—yes, there it is. So pretty, in the corners of Dean’s eyes and setting off little signal flares in his soul.

"Ain't wrong about that," Dean comments. But neither of them move to relocate back to the dirty, dusty level of Baby's wheels. "So, uh. How do I do this?"

"Why did you offer if you don't know?" Castiel asks.

Dean pinches him, in the soft web of Castiel’s wing. He pinches him!

Castiel snarls, and this time his wing does flap in annoyance at Dean, shoving at him. But Dean is laughing again, his low rumble like the vibration of Baby warming up for her ride underneath them, and he must be gripping at a handrail, since Castiel is unsuccessful in shoving him more than a little bit.

"Assbutt," he grumbles.

"You're the one whose wing-ding just tried to push me off the top of my own rig, dude."

He's right, Castiel. You did.

Chastened, Castiel hunches his shoulders. He mutters something that, under the right light, might sparkle like an apology.

But Dean's laugh sparkles more, and this time, when his hand settles on Castiel’s wing again, Castiel doesn’t flinch.

"Ew," Dean mutters, as his fingers tease at the first stiff, waxy sheath enrobing the base of Castiel’s newest feathers. Castiel watches him suspiciously over his shoulder as Dean pokes him a few times. "Dude, why're you so weird and prickly back here, are you half porcupine? Porcup-angel? What... huh." He presses harder, clever, rough fingers pinching. Tweaking.

Ouch!

But then there's a sense of relief so keen it's nearly painful when Dean presses his fingers together and the feather-sheath splits under the pressure, releasing a bright, sweet spark of grace all along Castiel’s senses, like a burst of sweet fruit in his mouth.

Castiel isn't sure which of them lets out a stranger noise. He knows he lets out a low sound, but thinks the stranger noise must be Dean, because it resembled the sound made by the harpies who swooped down on them last night, talons spread, breasts swinging.

"Shit," Dean says, after the squawky noise.

"Do that again," Castiel says, and Dean, of course, does exactly the opposite: he stops.

He's so difficult.

"Wait, uh, that was... good? Not painful? You're not gonna pull my guts out through my nose?"

"It was painful," Castiel tells him, because it's true. "But it was good too. It felt right." He frowns and looks over his shoulder. "And no. That would take too much effort. Your guts don't belong in your nose. Or out of it." He can say that with moderate certainly.

"That's what I say, too!" Dean tells him, and Castiel would frown at him for being even more nonsensical than usual, but Dean's fingers do that painful, sweet little pinchpinchrub motion again and Castiel thinks his eyes are too busy crossing at the bright, hurt-sweet flares of it, of it to complain that Dean makes no sense. If he had more eyes to cross still, he's sure they would cross too.

"That is very nice," Castiel tells him, hazed with it. Time was meaningless again, for a little while. "Yes."

"I'm glad," Dean says. His palm is warm and tingling when he sets it in the middle of Castiel’s most tender, delicate new feathers. "Hey, uh. Thanks."

"Why? You're preening me." Castiel supposes he could preen Dean, too, if Dean wanted. Just his hair, anyway.

"No, uh, I mean... for Garth. And his pack. And his pu—his kid, dammit, now he's got me doing it too. You didn't have to help. ‘Specially not the way you did, jumpin’ between her and, y’know. Everything."

"His pup?" Castiel clarifies.

Dean groans, but it trails into a laugh. "Yeah. Yeah, okay. His pup."

"You're thanking me for something I didn't do for you," Castiel points out. "I didn't think of you at all."

"Sure, well. Don't mean I'm not grateful anyhow."

Castiel considers this. After a moment, he nods. Then he wriggles his wings. "You stopped preening," he complains. "I'm not grateful for you stopping."

"Alright, bossypants."

Castiel squints at him. "They're your pants," he points out.

Dean makes a soft airy scoff sound, behind Castiel. But he doesn't stop. So that's alright.

"I, uh... I think your, wing, uh... it's doin' something," Dean says, over Castiel’s shoulder, after a long moment. An eternity.

It takes a long time for the words to penetrate through the tingling, sparking, delicious fog. Castiel blinks, and he feels the grit on his eyelashes and on the surface of his corneas. He hasn't blinked in too long.

"My wing?" he says, and his voice comes out in a low rumble. Dean flinches, one hand flying up to cup at his ear.

Too low. Not the right frequency, Castiel.

Castiel tries again. "It feels good," he says instead.

"Yeah, heh. I got that. But, uh... y'know. You're kinda setting off your own little fireworks here every time a new feather comes out of the waxy stuff, just sayin', and... pretty sure it, uh. Just healed my arms…?” Dean’s voice arcs up, perhaps a little too high. That’s the frequency of alarm.

"That's good," Castiel says, calmly. He didn’t know that was going to happen. But it’s not bad that it did. "You shouldn't let Benny drink your blood. You need it more than he does."

"He needs it to live, dude."

"So do you."

Dean makes a little scoffing noise, but his fingers comb pleasantly through the fine, new reveal of pinfeathers. Castiel can feel the heady pulse of that blood through his fingertips, along the tiny vessels at the base of each delicate, pretty, sticky new feather.

"Why?" Castiel finally asks.

"Why what?"

"Why do you give what's yours?" Castiel turns and looks at him. It's true, what Dean said: the angry lines of sun and heat and blade and bullet are wiped from Dean’s forearms now. Castiel smiles, pleased. He didn't mean for it to happen, but he likes it nonetheless. "You give and give. There will be nothing left of you soon," he says.

Dean scoffs. "Ain't that fragile, Cas."

But he is. He is. He’s human, and like sunshine, he will disappear in the dark.

But he’s here now.

Castiel tenses his smaller muscles of his wings, airing his feathers at Dean carefully, and Dean laughs. Perhaps they tickle him the same way Dean’s fingers and his pulse tickle Castiel, so pleasantly.

"Well, now, lookit you, all fixed up, handsome and fluffy."

"I'm not," Castiel complains.

"Handsome?"

"Fluffy," he growls.

He doesn’t know why that makes Dean laugh again, but it's warm against Castiel’s wings as if Dean is leaning his face into the crux of his feathers.

Getting Charlie out of Sucrocorp is a clusterfuck.

And the less said about that, the better.

“So much for that safe passage. Guess we’re not uncoupling the guzzoline pod?” Dean says, and wrenches the wheel to the side. Baby cries out, metal screaming, and they tip and wobble alarmingly before she catches her bulk and gets her wheels underneath her again.

“Shut your mouth,” Charlie says, sprawled facedown across Cas’s lap with her legs still flailing out of Baby’s open door. “And drive!”

(Dean would say that he doesn’t know who looks more shocked about the situation they’ve just found themselves in, Charlie or Cas, but it’s definitely Cas.)

There’s a gate coming up in front of ‘em, because Sucrocorp has metal for those: gates.

Well, screw that. ‘Cause the Bunker has metal for war rigs.

“Hang on!” Dean says, and he almost misses the fact that there’s no thump from Garth never holding on when he’s supposed to.

Instead, Meg goes “Wheeee!” as Baby powers herself right through the gate, roaring sweet and bright, with her head held high like the unstoppable lady she is.

By the time the sounds of sirens—sirens, what the hell, really—die out behind them, Baby’s engine is starting to groan a little, the turn of her wheels limping and halting, and Dean can smell smoke. “Sorry,” he says, patting her wheel gently. “Just a little longer, ‘kay?”

“We should stop. Cool her off,” Benny says. Then, “That was some real fine drivin’, brother. Thought we were gonna tip sideways, you turning like that.”

“I’ll say,” Charlie says, with her face smooshed into Dean’s leg. She clambers herself upright and wedges herself between Cas and Dean, using Cas’s fucking thigh as a handhold. And then, like an afterthought, she reaches around Cas’s whole body and pulls closed the door behind her.

Dean has to hold down a laugh that’s maybe just a little hysterical.

“Hi!” Charlie says cheerfully, running both her hands through her short, red hair before turning to a wide-eyed, fluffy-winged, terrified-looking angel that looks like he’s trying to become part of the vinyl. “Did we just become best friends?”

Charlie thinks it’ll be at least two days before Sucrocorp sends Leviathans after them. They’re not touching the sweet water that’s in the tanks in the back for anything except for drinking—and since Patience and Garth are gone, it’s just been Dean, though Benny’ll take a sip here and there if he’s offered—so those supplies are still amazingly, shockingly high. But when Dean checks Baby’s water runoff tanks at their next stop, he frowns. Shit.

He tracks back, touching her too-hot underside, following his fingers along the surface of her conduits, until… moisture.

“Sonofabitch. Got a leak in the pipes,” he says, pulling his fingers back. Fuck, a bullet must’ve gotten her but good when they were on their way; Baby’s iron skirts’ll hold off most, but again: Sucrocorp. Ordnance.

“Thought so,” Benny says, nodding. He taps his ear. “I could hear it.”

“You sure you weren’t a black thumb in a past life?” Dean says, grudgingly impressed.

But Benny grins at him, fanged and bright. “Not human, remember? Ain’t got a past life.”

Oh. Right. Right.

Meg’s surprisingly quiet—suspiciously obedient—when Charlie goes after her with a, “Hi! I’m Charlie! You’re gonna help, right? Oh, you’re a demon? Cool!” and puts her to carrying buckets of sand dampened with the water left in Baby’s tanks, packing it around where Baby is steaming. Dean leaves them to it to focus on the holes with Benny. He sort of hates to admit how much easier it is to do repairs when the guy holding the pipes in place for Dean to patch doesn’t need gloves against the heat of the metal, or even a jack to do it.

It’s still hot, sweaty work, ‘specially in the middle of the day when Dean would normally be napping, and he can feel his boots dragging when they’re done, dizzy with how tired he is. But when he looks around, Cas is nowhere to be found.

Like… nowhere. Not in the hold, not…

He couldn’t have walked off, could he? No, not even Cas is that crazy. Besides, why would he…

But he could fly off. He could probably fly off, now that his wings are okay. Couldn’t he?

Wasn’t like there’s anything keeping him here.

Dean stops short, and pushes his fingers through his hair, then down the thick layer of beard he’s been building up.

Cas’s wings are… they’re something, now. Something different. Something healed. Something a little bit holy. All Dean has to do to look down at his healed arms to know that: his straight fingers like they’ve never been broken, the clean lines of his scars wiped out like he’s never had to prove to another human that he ain’t vamp, demon, or were.

Cas ain’t broken, not like the rest of them. Not anymore.

“Hey,” Benny says, abruptly. “Let me drive the rig. Just for a while.”

Dean whirls around so fast he almost trips over his goddamned bootlaces, and he automatically turns to look at his rig, not at the vampire. “What?”

Meg—what the hell, she’s in Baby’s driver’s seat again? Dean curls his lip at her, but she blows him a kiss through the window… goddamned fucking demon, and he means that very literally.

“Look,” Benny says quietly, ignoring Meg being… Meg. “I ain’t asking for your rig’s start codes. Just… you’re human. Y’know?”

“Yeah?” Dean says, and he feels his lips draw back up and over his teeth. Yeah, he’s human—hundred percent fucking pure, from before the Apocalypse, before they destroyed the world, Adam’s spawn. “What ‘bout it?”

“You ain’t doin’ this alone, brother,” Benny says, softly, and Dean doesn’t know what to say to that. “Take a load off. You been drivin’ for days. You got us out. Like Garth said. Let us help get you home, brother. Yeah?”

Maybe it’s a sign of how tired Dean is that he doesn’t argue. That he can’t argue. The world is blurring in front of him to gold and ochre and the shadows of mountains that don’t get any closer no matter how long Dean seems to drive.

He climbs in—Meg even scoots right over into the passenger side without complaining about it, without one little nasty crack.

“Where’re you meaning to go, anyway?” he finally asks her.

“’Anywhere the wind blooooows—doesn’t really matter to me?’” she says, batting her goddamned eyelashes at him.

That shocks a choked laugh out of Dean. “So much for you complaining about my music.”

Meg grins. “I’ll fuck you if you stop playing it.”

Oh, what the fuck. He shoves her out the passenger side door, kicking her on her way with a foot on her hip, and she’s still laughing when she falls.

“I’ll navigate,” Charlie says, stepping primly around where Meg is sitting in the sand, legs spread obscene as anything around herself, cackling like the fucking demon she is. And the little redhead who just left behind her whole life to climb into Dean’s rig pulls out—

Oh, well, shit. That is a map, ain’t it? And not a raider one, not a sketch on a bit of paper, not… oh, no, that is a map, a whole book of them. And it is labeled, mountains and roads and hills, waystations and supply stations and caches out to the very edges, and if the Bunker knew that Sucrocorp had that…

Charlie smiles at Dean’s wide eyes like what she’s holding in her hands isn’t worth more than the water in his hold—isn’t worth more than both their lives, if she’s caught with it. No, nope, because she’s Charlie, she just taps her chin, casual as anything. “Might be that I got wind of a little camp of raiders out near the big salt. ‘Bout… two days out from here, along the edge of the mountains?” She taps on the edge of the map, where the world dips into the salt sea. “Leader’s human and tall as an orc, they say. Well, if orcs were real,” she adds.

Coolness prickles up and down the back of Dean’s spine, and it’s not the wind. And suddenly, suddenly, fuck the map, he’s awake again.

Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam.

“Charlie, I love you,” he breathes.

“I know,” Charlie says, serene. “Hey, if you’re looking for Dreamy McFeathers, he’s up there.” She points up towards the roof. “So go hang out up there and, I dunno. Take a nap while I consult my astrolabe.”

“Your astro—what?”

“Kidding,” she says, and laughs.

Dean runs through Baby’s startup sequence, and he thinks her purr isn’t as loud as it should be, maybe a little unhappy when he slides out of the driver’s seat and lets Benny take his place. Dean’s still hanging off the side of the door by the handhold as Benny sets his hand on a shift that’s probably still warm from Dean’s own skin, and pulls delicately into first gear.

“Take care of her,” Dean says, worriedly.

(He probably deserves the way Benny rolls his eyes at him for that.)

But since there’s no fucking way that Dean can stand to watch someone else driving his rig, his Baby, not even from the back seat… well, he starts climbing.

It’s been a long while since he’s been up here with his girl in motion, and with the sun starting to turn red at the edge of the endless Wastes, it’s…

It’s nice. Maybe it’s pretty, even, the land turning the pink of bloody water.

Cas has his legs tucked underneath him, his chin resting on one knee and his wings flopped out behind him. It wasn’t Dean’s imagination: they do look really good, full and thick, all feathers now without raw, angry patches of skin between them, no more porcup-angel prickles, and he lets himself have a weird quiver of satisfaction about that, too.

"Dude, what’cha doing up here again? We thought you fell off.”

Cas turns just his chin and narrows his eyes at him. But he doesn’t bother to say “I don’t fall off things, stupid human.” He doesn’t need to.

“Yeah, yeah.” Dean stabilizes himself on one of Baby’s exhausts as Benny drives them—very carefully—around a bumpy stretch. “Well, you're gonna scare the pigeons if you stay out here.”

It's probably kind of wrong for him to think that a murder angel is kind of adorable like this, perched on top of Baby with his wings behind him like a cape, the wind whipping his crazy hair. Dean’s probably gonna get himself smited—smote? Well, whatever—one day, when Cas has enough of his nonsense.

That should probably be a scary thought.

Well. Yeah, it is, but not for the right reasons.

Cas blinks slowly at him. He looks into the sky and scans the dimming horizon, the wind of them moving teasing through his thick, dark hair. Then he turns back to Dean. "No. No pigeons,” he says, very solemnly.

Dean chuckles. Yeah, that’s Cas for you. "They're winged rats anyway." And that doesn't keep people who are starving from snacking on whatever they can find of them. Dean's only seen them around the strongholds; the Men of Letters keeps a flock of them, serve ‘em roasted over charcoal like the snoots they are.

Cas considers this like he can see the shape of the words coming out of Dean's mouth rather than the sound of ‘em. His eyes trace the curve of Dean's lips.

And there shouldn't be something about the way he's staring, so still even despite the wind and the fading sun. They were just talking about pigeons and rats. Nothing about this should be making Dean's mouth tingle like there's more to Cas's eyes than just attention.

Like Cas has to remind Dean that one of the two of them can keep their eyes on the road in dangerous curves, he says peacefully, "Correct phylum. Wrong class."

Dean laughs. Because he has to, but also because he wants to. He settles down beside their angel, and feels Cas’s hand come up to take his hand, easing him the rest of the way down—like Dean hasn’t been balancing on top of moving vehicles since he could walk upright.

The laughter dies out delicately as Cas turns to him. As he turns Dean by the chin, strong fingers pinching him and moving him like Cas is posing a doll.

Then he’s close. He’s so fucking close, his forehead brushes against Dean’s and then rests there, one strong hand curving over the back of Dean’s neck as if to hold him in place.

Like Cas even needs to do that, when Dean’s frozen where he’s sitting? What the hell is happening here?

But Cas’s eyes are closed, the thick, dark fan of his lashes long enough that if Dean tilted a little more, he thinks they might brush his cheeks, his cheekbones. But Cas just holds there, his lips parted, and his forehead burning a deliciously cool brand against Dean’s hairline, like Cas is sheltering him from the sun that’s already set behind the infinitely far mountains. He’s breathing in little puffs, in through the nose, out through the mouth, like some kind of meditation.

Dean doesn’t have an explanation for why he doesn’t pull away. Why he stays just where he is, their foreheads resting together as the sun sets, the wind barely able to whip between their lips from the cruise of Baby’s ride because of how close they’re settled right now.

“What’re you…?” he manages. It’s gotten to be full dark. He’s got no fucking idea when that happened.

“I wanted to taste it,” Cas says, opening his eyes. He doesn’t move away, and from this venue his eyes are like the ocean that Dean barely remembers from the before times, drowning and lovely, and fuck Dean if Cas doesn’t look for all the world like he’s pouting. “The laughter. But you stopped.”

“You’re such a weirdo, sunshine,” Dean says. He leans back enough that they’re not… forehead snuggling, or breath cannibalization, or whatever the fuck it is that Cas thinks he’s doing. “You never said what you were looking for.”

There’s no pause. “God,” Cas says.

And that’s it. Full stop.

Okay. Dean’s got a feeling that ain’t a metaphor. He’s real? he wants to ask. He hears us?

But if he did, why would Cas be out looking for him?

“I ever tell you, uh… why I’m out here? What I’m looking for?”

“No,” Cas says, and then, because he’s such a sassy little shit, he says, “But I expect you’re going to tell me now.”

Dean barks out a laugh. Cas doesn’t try to weirdly eat it this time. “Yeah,” he says, and closes his eyes.

He tells Cas about Sam, and the werewolf girl he ran away those years ago with when Samuel Campbell wanted to take her back to the bunker. He tells him about redwoods, too big to put arms around, bigger than Baby, and the shadow of greenery on the camp that Sam managed to get him just one letter about—just one, a year ago. Dean remembers trees, but only barely. It’s almost too much to imagine that Sam lives among them. (That, maybe, Dean will, too. Maybe. Maybe soon.)

He tells him, quietly, about Dad, tugging on the edge of the jacket he wears. It was too big for him once, when he was a kid, but he wore it anyway, then. He wears it now. It’s not too big anymore.

“Dad was a hunter, too.” Dean scratches at the itchy layer of his facial hair; he’s gonna need to take a knife-edge to it soon.

Dean doesn’t blame Dad for not taking Dean when he went. Lot easier for a single human and a single ride to disappear off into the wilderness. He doesn’t blame him at all.

(He does. That’s a fuckin’ lie. But Dean’s here, now, out and free and driving Baby, and not by himself, either.)

“Was,” Cas observes. “You’re a ‘was,’ too, you know. And now you’re your own thing.”

“Yeah,” Dean says.

There’s a vampire driving the war rig, sweet water gifted from the husband—ah, shit, call it what it is—the mate of the werewolf alpha sloshing in the hold. The demon down there is singing Bohemian Rhapsody in a voice that’s… actually pretty fucking melodic, especially compared to Charlie’s yowling mingling along with it.

“Yeah,” Dean repeats, and elbows Cas in the side.

He doesn’t explain why he did that when Cas complains. He smiles, and smiles, eyes closed as the moon wheels overhead, and lets Benny drive the next few miles, longer than he’s ever let anyone behind Baby’s wheel before.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

“So.”

“So?”

“Don’t you ‘so’ me, Dean Winchester.”

Castiel really does find the conversations Charlie has with Dean very confusing sometimes.

(Almost as confusing as he finds Charlie’s conversations with Meg. He thinks they shouldn’t be left alone together. He thinks that he saw Charlie petting Meg’s hair in a way that looked covetuous, and that hair is unnatural. He doesn’t know why Benny almost laughs himself into bloody tears when he says that, either. Castiel does not like that vampire sometimes.)

"It's okay, you know. That you like him,” Charlie continues.

"Well, why shouldn't I?” Dean answers, but his voice has gone low and rough. “I mean, yeah, he's a weird little dude, for a, uh. Bitey immortal creature of the end times and all—"

"Dean," Charlie says, like the word is an endpoint of itself. A full stop, not a soft, singing beginning. “Wait. Bitey?”

"Shut up. You know how it is, Charls."

"I really don't. And it's not just because I don't have a dick. And there shouldn’t be biting. Wait, should there?”

"It's not... it isn't...  oh, goddammit, Charlie!"

"If you say being with him isn't productive, Dean Winchester, I'm disowning you."

"But it isn't." Then, mildly, "Ow."

"Productive. Can you hear yourself? What are you, a Sucrocorp creche? Who the Frodo cares?"

"Frodo?" Castiel asks, poking his head over the edge of the perch that he’s come to prefer, here on top of Baby, where the wind can comb his hair and his feathers. Besides, he’s seen a sphinx spiraling above them, and, once, three hippogriffs—all of whom turned tail so quickly they dropped feathers when he stood, letting his grace lick down his feathers to show them who had the better wingspan.

“Who is Frodo? I can hear you talking when you whisper," he also adds, maybe unnecessarily. He can hear most things. "But I don't always understand what you're saying."

Dean's hand has dropped to his gun, but relaxes after one gentle, comforting clench on it. He scrubs his knuckles over his face. "Yeah," he mutters, sounding sour and embarrassed about it. He doesn't meet Castiel’s gaze. Castiel frowns, but Dean doesn't meet that, either.

Charlie doesn't defend herself at all. She just blinks up at him, wide-eyed.

Castiel, a little belatedly, realizes he’s never seen her with a weapon. Has he?

He finds this very worrisome. But as he opens his mouth to ask if she would like a knife, at the very least, Dean shakes his head like he's shaking off a weight. "Gotta put a bell on you, Cas," he decides.

What a delightful thought. "I like bells," Castiel says, distracted away from knives. "They're melodious. A pretty frequency." He tips his head. "But where would you get one? Where would you put it on me?"

He doesn’t know why that makes Dean flush a rich, rich pretty red, his skin warming, or Charlie hoot a sound as atonal only a living thing can be, but he's pleased by both of these things. Castiel wriggles closer to the edge, feeling his wings spreading in display. They are full and fluffed; Dean does that to him. "May I have a bell?" he asks, smiling. Teasing, as he slips off Baby's top and lets himself fall, his wings cupping the air to slow it but not to stop it. He touches lightly to the ground.

"Enough of you, featherface," Dean grunts, but he still smells delighted as he shoves at Castiel’s chest.

"You should give him a bell," Charlie says, sounding so pleased with herself that Castiel leans closer to get the scent of it from her. "Didn’t you hear him, Dean? He wants one."

(Castiel likes her. He likes her a lot.)

"Fuck you both," Dean says, and laughs, and it's prettier than any bell.

Castiel still makes sure to offer Charlie a knife. He doesn't forget. It's a very small one, because she has small hands. Black glass, made of the pressure between Castiel’s hands and set hard into a chunk of metal that was once a pipe, and wrapped in cloth. But the blade is edged with diamond dust gleaned from the tears of the world around them, and blessed. Sand is the only thing there is in abundance that can become sometimes worth killing with, and Castiel has blessings to spare.

"Thanks, Cas," she says. She handles it between her small hands with a very worrisome lack of competence. “Is that… geez, is this glass?”

"It won't break. If you drop it," he says, frowning.

"Won't drop it."

Of course, Charlie will. Does. Over and over, fumbling it into the sand even when Dean tries to help, when Benny tries to help. Even when Meg tries, laughing, until Charlie is laughing, too. They laugh a little too much, and stand a little too close. That blade will hurt Meg if Charlie stabs her with it by accident, but she drops it too much for that to be a worry, Castiel supposes.

Still, she picks it up again, every time.

“Nothing for me, Clarence?” Meg says, sidling up to him in the wake of the last unsuccessful attempt. Charlie is wonderful, Castiel thinks. She’s also quite hopeless.

“No. Not unless I’m sticking it between your ribs,” Cas tells her, frowning.

But the smile the demon gives him makes him pause. The way she’s watching him makes him frown. There’s something. Something…

“Your soul,” he says, so startled he feels his feathers rise on their vanes. “It’s…”

He doesn’t remember the last time he heard it screaming. The last time he heard it weeping.

When Meg looks out of her eyes at him, grinning, the woman inside her looks out, too, serious, serious, serious.

“Shhhh,” she says, and holds her finger up to her lips. “Don’t be a smeg. Our little secret.”

Castiel doesn’t like Lee, though Dean says that he’s an ally. A friend. He gives them all sips of water, insistent on it, but he also clasps Dean’s hand and holds it for too long, long enough that sweat builds between their palms, and Dean can’t afford to lose that kind of moisture out here.

Lee's vehicle is too clean, without enough wear on it. It feels like an ‘it,’ not a her. Not like Baby, who roars defiance alongside.

“Safe passage all the way to the salt flats,” Lee says, and smiles, creamy white as bone. “I got you, Dean.”

Got. That’s a word.

Lee smells covetuous. Like he doesn’t understand ‘got.’ Like wants more than he'll have.

Like a sinkhole.

When flares rise up behind them and they have to drive and drive and drive, Castiel’s not sorry for Lee’s crumpled, bloody body, left to rot in the sands. He hopes something eats it. Something unpleasant.

He’s only sorry for the cost of it.

Because Meg leapt, when they would have dragged Charlie out along with the map in Lee’s hands—the half-living and broken-furred ambush that Dean’s ‘friend’ led them right into, armbands around their arms and the same mark on their shoulders that Dean wears scarred into the flesh of his chest.

She flew—bright and violent, the spear held overhead in both hands glowing in the hot sunlight like she was avenging, like she was holy. Blood streamed from her wounds and spattered as she twisted from the bullets turning her around and around, and still she flew, wingless.

"Witness!" she laughed, and they did. Castiel did.

And when she fell, she burned.

Out of the corner of Castiel’s eyes, Benny clutched at Charlie, hauling her back into the bed of the rig by the back of her shirt and one leg, flinging her helter-skelter to a mobile kind of safety that even Castiel knew was dubious. "No!" she said. Sobbed.

But as Meg fell towards those below them, those who would drag them down, the soul inside her was laughing, laughing as loud as Meg herself was.

The half-lived and the broken-furred she fell amongst weren't laughing as they died, and died, and died.

Dean is silent, after that. They all are.

You can tell me anything, Castiel wants to tell him. You need to take, not just give.

But Dean opens a vein for Benny the next time they stop, and Castiel has to look away from the bubble of it, the soft slurp.

“I remember the way,” Charlie says, low, her voice husky with the tears still wasting water down her small, thin face. Then, more strongly, “I know the way.”

“Yeah,” Dean says.

But Dean doesn’t sing along with the next song.

Or the next. Or the next.

He doesn’t play any music at all.

Samuel Winchester’s soul is pretty, under his skin, and his long frame. Pretty enough. It’s not as fine as Dean’s, but then again, no one’s is. He has long legs and long bones, and wide, wide eyes.

(His hair is also unnatural. But it hurts to think that, now.)

Dean stumbles, on his way out of Baby, missing the high step and nearly turning his ankle underneath him as he jumps down from the war rig’s high cab. But he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t slow. As Castiel folds his wings behind himself and climbs down after him, the two brothers crash together like tectonic plates, but nothing falls. No one crumbles into dust.

They build into a mountain range instead, joined by broad arms. The dust settles around their feet, but they slap at each other’s backs—thump, thump, thump. Percussive rather than harmonic.

“You stink,” is the first thing Sam says, drawing back.

“Your hair’s long,” Dean answers, in the same tone.

Even Castiel can tell that’s not an equivalency. But they both grin at each other, thumping and shoving like Dean’s said something very clever indeed. When they start to talk again, it’s over each other, their words merging and overlapping like a chorus.

“Shit, what happened to that girl? Was she worth it? How long’s it been? Sammy, fuck—”

“Long enough you shouldn’t be calling me ‘Sammy’ anymore, jerk.”

“I’ll show you a jerk, bitch!”

“Slanger?” Castiel offers carefully, folding his hands, into the trade of insults. He would like to be included.

They both pause. Dean lets out a small, rumbly noise deep within his throat, like he’s growling, incensed. But his soul twinkles at the edges, and the corners of his mouth float upwards to answer it.

Castiel sees Sam study him. He sees eyes that are a murky brown-green, bright and alive, like a flourishing algae pool in the back of a cave. They widen as they trace the thickening outlines of Castiel’s wings, over his shoulder. Castiel won’t preen for him—he is an angel, and he has nothing to prove to Sam Winchester—but he does hear his flight feathers bunch with the weight of another human’s gaze, rustling.

Dean says that Sam won’t harvest him. Won’t hold him. He says that Sam would never, and that’s why they’re here in the first place. Why they drove around a great, beautiful crack in the ground, navigating up a slant that made Baby groan and cry out. How, so near to here, they drove through a plain of ash, the wheels kicking up great, coughing clouds of it, heavy and sticky and stinking until Castiel’s wings were matted with it and Benny made into a ghost from where they had to get out and push and push and push, their feet sinking too until they hit bedrock.

Dean says Sam is worth it.

Which is why Castiel will let Sam stare at his wings, and will not kill him for that.

“Yeah, this is Cas,” Dean says. “He’s…”

An angel. Of course. That’s all Castiel is to anyone. That’s all he’s ever been—

“—My buddy.” Dean flashes him a smile, a real one, out of the corner of his mouth, out of the curve of his eyes. “Quiet sort. Nothin’ much to say unless he’s gonna sass me.” The smile widens. “Or call us slangers right outta nowhere, I guess.”

Castiel narrows his eyes at the side of Dean’s face. “You deserve it,” he mutters.

“The sass or the name-calling?”

Castiel thinks. “Both,” he decides, after careful consideration, and Sam hoots, through his nose, like an owl.

“You see?” Dean says, but he doesn’t look at Castiel when he says it. He’s staring at his brother. His eyes are wet, but nothing falls from them, because Dean won’t waste water. The tremor of the smile at the corner of his lips is manic, frantic, like dancers under a fae spell. “He’s alright. Cas is alright.”

“Thank you, Dean,” Castiel answers, seriously.

Sam’s lips twitch. He wipes the corner of his mouth with the knuckle of his thumb, pressing inwards as if to quash it. “See what you mean,” he says, with a soft chuckle. “Hi, Cas.” And he holds out a hand to Castiel.

Castiel takes it gently, gently. He gives the fleshiest part of the palm a little squeeze, bouncing it carefully between his thumb and forefinger. “Plump,” he says, approvingly, releasing it. “With muscle, too.”

Humans are so fragile, and Sam is Dean’s, too. Sam matters. Castiel understands that things matter, now. That he has both muscle and even a little layer of adipose tissue is a luxury in this stripped-down existence. Other humans must think him very handsome.

Once upon a time, Dean asked if Castiel was going to eat him. Castiel didn’t know the answer then, and he doesn’t know it now. It’s Dean’s own fault: he put the idea into Castiel’s head.

He does think about biting him. Castiel thinks about how it would taste, if he licked a path across those little stars on Dean’s shoulder. If he opened his mouth and then closed it, hard enough to feel the skin give under the pressure of his teeth.

He doesn't think he would enjoy the taste of Dean's blood. The rush of iron and copper and phospholipids tasted very bad when he bit off that human's nose. So why is he thinking about biting Dean?

But he wants to. He'd want to. He wants to nuzzle that dirty patch on the side of Dean's neck, lick it until it's skin and clean, clean, clean, and all Dean smells like is citrus and rainbows and the burning grace of Castiel’s saliva. He wants to outline his clavicle with his mouth and sing into the hollow behind his ear. Delicious.

Maybe he is bitey, like Dean calls him.

Castiel does not have any desire to bite Sam Winchester.

Even if he probably is handsome.

Sam stares down at his own hand—still outstretched—like something about the gesture surprised him before huffing, and turning his gaze back to Dean. “Uh, okaaaay, then,” he says, stretching the vowels wide open, like a fan blossoming.

Dean snorts, and punches him in the shoulder. “So where’s Dad?” he says.

Castiel doesn’t know humans well. He doesn’t claim to understand them.

But even he knows that the shallow furrow that appears between Sam Winchester’s eyebrows is not a sign of good things to come.

Even he knows that crease spells the end of a childish hope.

“How the hell would I know?” Sam says, so matter-of-factly it’s like a death blow of itself.

Dean stills. He’s never still. He sings. He taps his feet. He’s annoying.

But he stills now.

“But… Dad was with you,” Dean says, low and knowing and so sure. Castiel knew this about him. He’s always seemed so certain. “He’s been with you all this while. Joined up with you after he left the Bunker…”

He trails off, his words leaving contrails behind themselves. Comets, that burn as they go.

 “What? Dean, you know Dad would have cut his own nuts off before he came anywhere near me again. You know what he yelled at my back before I left? ‘Monsterfucker.’ That’s the last I ever saw of him.”

And Sam laughs.

He laughs.

Dean doesn’t laugh. And neither does Castiel, because it isn’t funny.

“That isn’t funny,” Castiel tells Sam, because it seems that Sam doesn’t know. He knows his voice is severe, because there is a light that is gone from Dean’s eyes, and the smile that he had tucked away like a snack into the corner of his mouth is swallowed. Laughter shouldn’t do that.

Sam’s laughter gets swallowed, too, leaving his eyes wide. “No,” he answers finally. His eyes flick to Castiel’s wings, and then away, down the long stretch of sand and stone that was the horizon now. “I guess it’s not. But he’s still not here.”

But Dean rallies, because it's what he knows how to do: rally. Fight. “Well. Shit,” he says, succinct and quiet. “Great. Well, uh.” He shakes his head. “You found that green place of yours, though, right? With the… the trees. The redwoods.” His jaw clench a little. He doesn’t look behind himself, behind them, at Baby’s bulk. “There room in your little paradise for a few monsters like us to rest our heads, too?”

The hesitation on Sam tastes like ash. Like arsenic. Like something that meant nothing to Castiel, but would poison Dean.

Castiel doesn’t think Dean’s brother smells good anymore. In fact, he thinks he’d like to see the rich, bright color of his blood. Smell the iron in it. He’s made Dean uncertain.

“Oh,” Dean says. He bares his teeth in a smile. “That’s how it is.”

“No! No, that’s not, uh… ah, shit. Dean…” Sam says. “Did you come all this way ‘cause… but you’re here. You’re here. You made it.”

He still says it like it’s a wonder. Like it’s a joy, even though Dean’s face looks like it has forgotten joy, despite the terrible little smile he wears.

“We are,” Castiel says, before Dean has to, and he knows it sounds like a threat.

Because it is. They are here, he and Dean and Meg’s ghost following behind them and tossing her hair, for however long she stays, and Charlie, and Benny. They are here, and they are alive—mostly alive—and they have come all this way.

If they came all this way to be betrayed, Castiel will kill Sam Winchester. He will paint the sand with broad strokes of Sam’s blood, and hardy sempervivum will grow in it.

“Did you really think…?” Sam starts, and then flinches. He passed one broad hand over his face, and looks at Castiel. Maybe so he won’t have to look at Dean. “Of course you can stay with us. As long as you like.” He gestures around himself to the rough tents, the battered little flock of two-wheeled vehicles, like skinny chickens. “But… this is what we’ve got.”

A frown creases the frozen wasteland of Dean’s face. “What?” He looks around like he had to confirm the meanness of it. The hungry looks, the sunburnt faces. The scarcity.

Sam shakes his head. “Dean, you drove through the redwoods to get here. You must’ve seen them.” He met their eyes again. His voice wobbles, then strengthens. “The… cold place. With the ash.”

Dean looks up. Castiel wasn’t aware he’d looked down.

“Yeah… that was it.” Sam shakes his head. “Before. There was a volcano, I guess. Must’ve gone off pretty recently, ‘cause the ash was still fresh on the ground. Had to leave our vehicles behind, ‘cause there was something in the ash, gummed up the works. This, like, white powder stuff just tore up the gears, and—”

Castiel knows of ash. He knows of destruction. Of volcanos. He knows how long it took for him to get it out of his wings, how long Benny was scraping it out of his beard, after they pushed and pushed and pushed.

But he knows this, too.

“It will be beautiful,” Castiel says, interrupting the meaningless, rambling flow of Sam’s words—something about contact pneumonia, about inhalation, about how they had to get out before they died. About how everyone left, because having nothing is better than having death.

Those deposits that coat the ground now would have come from deep within the earth, spat free in the eruption—rich in sulfur. Inorganic, selenium, magnesium, calcium, zinc. They would have stuck in human lungs, that’s true. But the sand will drink them, and become soil.

“Things will grow from it,” he says.

Things that the world has lost. Castiel could see the seeds trembling with eagerness underneath the layers and layers of wastes and desolation. He just didn’t understand then what they meant.

Sam frowns at him. But all Dean says, low and hopeful, tilting his chin in Castiel’s direction, is, “In how long?”

“In a lifetime,” Castiel answers, honestly. Simply.

And that’s that.

That was that.

Dean is curled upon himself, like a cooked shrimp. His hands are slack and empty by his sides, and he has his head resting on Baby’s steering wheel. He is bowed low.

Castiel understands. Or, at least, he thinks he does. When he fell, he looked up—up and up and up. He didn’t scream, the way he could hear his siblings screaming as they all burned towards the ground. He just looked up, and saw the line of Heaven, and the way the horizon swallowed it, finally.

He had the chance to say goodbye.

But when he landed, he saw cooked shrimp, too, in the beds of the seas that boiled in the heat of Armageddon—their pink, tightly twisted remains. Unlike Castiel, they didn’t fall. They couldn’t.

They were already where they were.

There was nowhere for them to go.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

Dean should’ve known. He should’ve fucking known.

Baby is quiet around him. Everyone is. Benny told everyone to leave him alone, and they did—even Charlie, which is how Dean knows that his face must’ve really been something, and for once, he just didn’t care who he scared off.

Dean found Sam, all right. He found him. He’s safe. There’s the miracle of it all.

But they’ve run low on miracles.

That girl Sam ran away with all those years ago? Dead. Wolfed out and attacked when there wasn’t enough water, wasn’t enough food. That paradise that Sam was looking for? Found it, alright, those redwoods… and as of a year ago, it’s a wreck like everywhere else in the Wastes, dry and dust that’s killing them.

Sam’s whole camp now is four kids too old for their time: runaways, hungry and tired and dirty like everyone else. One’s from Sucrocorp, two from the Men of Letters. Dean thinks one of them is named Maggie, but he was too focused on the way their eyes went wide and they licked their lips when he gave them each a cup of water from Baby’s stores.

They’ve got even less than Dean had. Has.

There’s no paradise to be found here.

He hears the rustle of feathers. Ignores it, at first.

He’s seen Cas move—so quiet. He doesn’t rustle unless he wants to. He doesn’t rustle unless he doesn’t care who hears.

But he lets Dean hear him. Then he raps his knuckles on the edge of Baby’s frame, like he’s asking for permission. Maybe he’s asking Dean—maybe he’s asking Baby. He’s funny like that.

“Are you alright?” Castiel asks.

Dean doesn’t raise his head from the steering wheel. “Peachy.”

“Do you know what a peach looks like? I didn’t think they existed anymore.”

He can almost see Cas’s grumpy little frown. A harsh, small sound, almost a laugh, escapes from Dean. They grow peaches in Sucrocorp, in vats of goo. All of ‘em exactly the same. Dean’s never had one, of course. “Kinda. Like a butt, right?”

Castiel considers this. “A little,” he says, measured. “Come out here, Dean.”

He wants to say ‘no.’ He wants to say ‘fuck you.’ He wants to say ‘why are you even here? Go on, now, git, fly off. You can now, right? You can.’

But all that makes it out is “Why” before he can’t say any more, choking on his own failure.

Why, why, why? It’s a fair question. Castiel thinks about it. But he doesn’t think that “Because the sky is soft at this time of day, and it won’t bite you, and you should be under the sky and not closed up in the metal that brought you here, like you are climbing into your own coffin” will be an answer that Dean accepts.

“Because you’re sulking,” he decides.

Dean’s whole body moves with the offense of it. “Screw you.”

“Okay,” Castiel says agreeably. “Will that help?”

Dean’s breath chokes out of him so hard that Castiel is momentarily alarmed by the violence with which it leaves him, the way his whole body bows into it—but he thought the same of coughing, as well, and Dean’s internal organs stay internal rather than flying out of him like a sea cucumber’s.

There’s no more offense when Dean mumbles, “Cas, you’re really something, you know that?”

Of course he is. He’s an angel. It doesn’t seem worth a reply. “Come out here, Dean,” he says, and this time, Dean emerges.

He moves slowly, warily, climbing down Baby’s high sides with a surety that seems more the rhythms of his body than conscious thought. There’s no harsh sun for him to blink into, because it’s just tipped below the horizon, washing the rises and falls with shadow. It’s cooler here than it was in the midlands of the Wastes, here at the edges of the great salt flats.

Dean's smiling again by the time he turns back around, but it's as empty and bright as a cloudless sky that Castiel can no longer reach.

"Dean," Castiel says, and then falls silent.

Dean's soul is still beautiful—still his. Still gleaming prettily. But it doesn’t shine from his soul, his pores. He smells of old sweat. Despite the smile, there’s salt and peptides smeared on his cheeks, crusting on the collar of his jacket. Tears going old, drying. His knuckes are bruised and bloodied, already swelling and puffy. They weren’t, when he walked away from Sam.

He's diminished. Smaller.

But Dean still tries to stand straight, bring his broad shoulders broader underneath his jacket, even as the brightness inside him recoils and shrinks away. "Yeah, Cas," he says, and his voice is rough, as if he has been screaming. "Yeah, what d'you need?"

What does Castiel need? Why is Dean even asking? Who cares what Castiel needs?

Castiel once told Dean that if he kept giving of himself, he'd have nothing left. But no blood or time or sleeplessness ever diminished him before.

Castiel isn’t the one who had a dream to lose.

"I need to understand," he says simply, and that, that makes Dean blink.

Perhaps it surprises Castiel as well.

"What's to understand?" Dean says, with a laugh that grates like falling down the side of a volcano--rough and scraping all the way down. "Looks like I’ve been chasin' will o' the wisps right into a dead swamp, I guess. Fuckin' miracle I ain't dead or ended up in quicksand, right? I dunno.” He runs his thumb over a knuckle, and there’s a smear of blood when he lifts it away. He sticks it into his mouth and speaks around it, low and muffled. “Maybe a miracle everyone riding with me ain't all dead 'cause of it."

Castiel blinks. "If I were dead, it would be because of my choice,” he says. “And why would they be, any more than anyone else?" He thinks that makes sense. "It doesn't matter if you left the Bunker because of them. You left with them."

Dean's mouth pinches like the logic is too painful.

"Garth and Patience are home, now,” Castiel adds. “Benny is where he chooses to be."

"Meg's dead," Dean says, low.

"Meg is where she chooses to be, too."

"Oh, you know all about that, do you, huh? Angel?"

The words are cruelly said. Cruelly spat. Castiel is an angel, and the truth of Castiel’s being is an epithet in Dean’s mouth. But Castiel doesn’t understand why, not this time.

"Yes," he says simply, remembering the laughter, wild and bright, coming from Meg. From both of them—the demon and the possessed, entwined, falling, burning, like asteroids more than angels.

Meg didn’t have a home. She was a demon, and she couldn’t even call her own body her home, because it wasn’t her own. He wonders if Hell ever had a place to contain her, or if she fit in as badly there as Castiel once did in Heaven.

Or maybe Hell rose the way Heaven fell. Maybe her choices were the only home she had. Bad, good. He understands that, a little.

The cruelty fades from the corners of Dean's lips, the sneer trembling. He sighs, and tips his head back.

"What do you need, Dean?"

Dean flinches. Castiel wonders if he’s ever been asked that before. When he answers, it’s too quickly. "Doesn’t matter."

"It does to me."

That volcanic laugh again. "Y'know. I really think you mean that."

"I do," Castiel says, scowling. His wings prickle with the offense of it.

And after a moment, Dean's smile peeps out—shy, like an instant of shade in the relentless sun. "Yeah," he says, more softly. "Yeah." He tips his head back. "Guess... guess I need... I don't know what I need. A way out."

"Of?"

"Of my head."

Castiel must be thinking on that for too long, because Dean snorts. "Not my soul or my, my brain or whatever. Don’t need trepanning, dude.”

“That’s good. I don’t know how to do that safely,” Castiel says, very seriously.

Dean chokes out a laugh, rubbing the heel of his hand over his lips, but this one isn’t a lava field. “Yeah, well. Just... I need, I guess. Need to feel like I did something right. For once. 'Cause I know I didn't. Ain't never done a fucking thing that—"

"You saved me," Castiel says, simply, and Dean stops short. Stops like Castiel struck him to stop the stupid blasphemy coming from his lips. He doesn’t know why Dean does this.

"Oh," Dean says, and his eyes are wide with the surprise of it. “But…”

“You did.” Castiel frowns at him. “Stop arguing with me.”

Why is Dean bothering? Castiel is correct in this. He knows he is. Dean’s pink, edible lips part, dry between them rather than that delicious, shining softness, like they have something to say nonetheless.

But he doesn’t argue, and this deserves a reward.

So Castiel leans in. He puts a hand on Dean's shoulder and feels the strength under it, the tension. And then he leans up and he tastes.

Dean’s mouth is soft and startled and parted. He tastes like dark soil and salt and the complex enzymes of the tears he only let Baby see. He tastes like sunshine, but not the one with teeth and claws that they hide from at midday—the softer kind that dries Castiel’s wings when they're unpleasantly wet.

He doesn't move, even when Castiel pulls back, the whites of Dean’s eyes around his irises the nacre of pearls, his pupils prettily swollen.

"I didn't do that because you saved me. Or because your lips were dry. Or even because you invited me to screw you. Or maybe you were supposed to screw me? I’m not sure," Castiel adds, when Dean lets out that funny little choking noise again. He’s starting to find it entertaining. "I did that because I wanted to." He tips his head. "Are you out of your head now?" he asks, interested.

"Cas," Dean says, like prayer. And then he's upon him.

Castiel lets himself be pressed back into Baby’s shelter, her dry eveningtide, fading shade starting to blur into the darkness starting to shroud them—terribly obedient, but he knows he will be rewarded for this.

And he is.

He is.

“You wanna?” Dean says, low. His thumb feathers at the line of the pants that Castiel still wears, for everyone’s comfort rather than his own. His thumb dips deep into the waistband, sweeping back and forth. “You get what I’m talking about?”

It's all just flesh, touching Castiel. It's mortal, and fragile, and such a little thing. But it’s wonderful.

“No mice here,” Castiel responds, tugging aimlessly on Dean’s pants too, and is rewarded, at least a little, by the quirk of Dean’s laughter at the corners of his mouth, even though his eyes are so terribly, terribly sad. “But I like mice,” he says, a little sadly.

“You would,” Dean agrees, and his mouth meets Castiel’s, tight and curved with a smile, and yes, that’s better than the slack softness, that’s so much better.

He knows what kissing is, of course, though he hasn’t had experience of it before today—either kissing or being kissed. He was never the kind of angel who tried things. Who tasted.

But he’s tasting here, and being tasted. He’s wanting here.

He would like to see Dean naked, see him clothed in nothing but his own flesh and hair and sweat, but Castiel doesn’t ask for that. Not here. He wouldn’t ask Dean to be so vulnerable, not when he knows how fragile human flesh is. He tastes his neck, but doesn’t let himself bite, not when he can feel the pulse thrumming against his lips. He lets his hand pull in slow rasps over the hard plane of Dean’s chest under his layers of clothing, the way his ribs are too sharp for the breadth of his shoulders and his stomach not soft enough.

Dean doesn’t have Sam’s layers of comfort, just muscle and bone and gristle and pink, pink lips, but Castiel finds him beautiful all the same, and Dean lets himself be explored, pushed back against Baby’s cooling bulk. Lets himself be turned back and forth so Castiel can see it all in greedy patches, Castiel tugging his shirts away and pushing them up impatiently, kissing the lean pull where Dean will never have wings, but his shoulder blades spread like them anyway as he arches.

(He does hit Castiel on the head when Castiel licks his armpit, though, nosing through the curling, darker fur there. Humans are so strange.)

Dean bends so prettily over Baby’s broad side step, too. His back is heaving with breath like he will shake apart, like he can raise himself up and catch flight with his intake of oxygen. His legs are trapped within his pants, pushed downwards to his ankles, but he doesn't try to escape, thighs splayed generously. His penis hangs low and full, thickening so sweetly, ruddy and heady and Castiel can smell the musk and the heat of him over citrus and impossible rainbows.

It's mortal and fragile and lovely, because Dean is. He is.

Castiel touches his strong back, his trembling thighs, the gap between them. He touches the bud of his coccyx, the full plump of his buttocks. He touches the small, wrinkled orifice between Dean’s buttocks with a careful finger.

It's not made, anatomically, for penetration. For intercourse. He knows this much about humans. But Dean shivers all over when Castiel does it, and Castiel can smell the heady, delicious pheromones of his arousal thickening.

He also knows that humans are strange, and strangely creative. They do all sorts of things they aren't meant to. Aren't built for. They're impossible, and terrible, and terrifying, and Castiel is afraid.

But not afraid enough that he won’t do it.

He learned that from Dean, too.

"Use some spit," Dean says, rough and shaky. He has his head lowered, but it doesn’t seem to be in shame.

Saliva? Castiel frowns and prods at the little hole, feeling across its ridges and folds with his thumb. Yes, Dean shivers sweetly with it, and Castiel can smell the dribble of precome in the air now, but that won't be enough. Will it? Dean seems to not be very good about taking care of himself, of avoiding damage to his body.

So Castiel gathers some of his grace, and oh, that's better. Ethereal, not slippery. And when his finger slides into Dean's body—Into him, into him, oh yes, yes, Castiel's glowing finger surrounded by heat and flesh and the delicate squeezing tug of strong musculature—it's smooth, and easy. Not quite effortless, but the effort is a pleasure of itself.

“God!” Dean chokes.

Castiel frowns down at his half-bared back. He wants to bite him for that. If God is sleeping, Castiel doesn’t want to wake him. Not anymore. “No. Castiel,” he insists.

“Smartass.”

“Your ass,” Castiel points out.

He likes the sound of Dean’s laugh, muffled in his forearm as it is. He likes it almost as much as the way he shivers and wriggles when Castiel, carefully, carefully, moves himself within him.

The noise Dean makes when Castiel sets his tongue to the inviting little space stretched taut around his fingers is delightful. Thin and choking, "Fuck, Cas! Oh holy shit, you kinky asshole, fu-uck!"

Castiel’s mouth is too busy to reply to that.

When Dean comes, his seed splatters across Baby's broad flank in pale, shining streaks. His whole body shudders in spasms that look like he should break from them, legs splayed wide and trembling and thick enough to fit Castiel between them. His hole clenches beautifully around Castiel's fingers, the ripples of his body rhythmic, tight and exquisite.

His head hangs low again when he's done, panting. Exhausted. When Castiel draws his fingers out, Dean’s flesh clings to him, greedy, and so, carefully, he replaces them inside Dean, and Dean lets out a soft choke of shock, maybe protest, his legs trembling.

"T-too... too sensitive," he says. "Take 'em out before I clench down aga—ahhhh."

His words end in a long, shaky breath. Castiel watches his fingers slowly withdrawing, a little sad to lose that connection, even if Dean asked for it.

But his grace gleams on Dean's hole. For a brief flash of pretty glory, Castiel sees it shining on his insides in the way dusk has fallen all around them, before Dean’s body squeezes and returns to its tight, dark furl.

Castiel’s grace stays within Dean. It's not needed. Maybe it should burn him, unfiltered as it is. Maybe it’s dangerous for humans. He should have thought of this.

But Dean whines softly with the contact, his hips swaying. “Fuck,” he whispers again, and lets his head drop to Baby’s surface with a thunk loud enough that Castiel blinks, alarmed. “Can… can feel that. In me. What the fuck.”

“Good?” Castiel asks. And it matters, that question.

“So fuckin’ good, sunshine,” Dean says, muffled and shaky and lovely, and laughs. "C'mere," he says. "C'mere," like prayer rather than command, and as obedient as he has ever been to prayer, Castiel goes.

The feel of Dean's hand, short nails scratching gently through the fine hairs on Castiel’s stomach, sends a bubble through him, the same painful-sweet spark as breaking through the sheaths of his feathers. He shivers, and breathes hard, harder. His breath makes vapor arcs in the air.

"You're up, big boy," Dean says low, and his fingers work apart the jeans that he put on Castiel’s body himself.

"No mice here either," Castiel says, his voice blurred and dark and uncontrolled in a way that should hurt, since he feels the vibration of it in his own throat. But this time, Dean doesn't flinch.

Dean grins instead, wide and sloppy. "Nope, no mice for sure," he says, and reaches in to grip Castiel’s penis. Castiel’s whole body shudders with it. "Mmm. Nice?"

"Yes," Castiel says, rendered into a gasp. And then, "Yes!"

Dean laughs against him, against his shoulder, and that's nice, too. That's citrus, and sweet, and bright as the sensations that are licking up into Castiel’s pelvis, as keen as pain every time Dean's hand moves on him. His knees wobble and that's strange, too.

This makes Castiel weak.

But it's good.

"You go ahead and come whenever you want, sweetheart," Dean says, and reaches around Castiel’s body, holding him in, dragging him against Dean himself.

Is he going to take?

But he's touched before. And he's never taken.

He doesn’t take enough.

But Castiel can give, here.

He pushes his wing into Dean's palm impatiently, and Dean laughs again, but he grips the root of it, where all the hard muscles hold it to Castiel, where it's not delicate or breakable, and that's good, that's so nice, and, and--Castiel doesn't know what to do with nice.

The sound Castiel lets out as he's squeezed, as he's stroked, the little twist up near the pink, full head as Dean slides the soft sheath of skin over glans, makes the air vibrate around them, but Dean doesn't wince. He doesn’t pull back. Not when Castiel thinks he must be gripping Dean's arm hard enough to bruise his mortal flesh.

But Dean doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop.

He never stops giving.

Today, Castiel gives, too, pleasure flaring him shiny as chrome, spending bright over Dean’s hand.

Dean’s kinda sore the next day.

It’s not like he’s never had anything up his ass, but it’s been…

Okay, so he’s never had anything bigger than a finger up his ass. And Cas, from what Dean can tell, had three up there. And his tongue.

Kinky fucking angel.

It didn’t hurt, not at all—Dean has no idea what kind of voodoo-hoodoo Cas did to make that happen—but the pressure of it was so fucking much, stretching him open, stripping him as raw as a wire.

He can feel it every time he shifts on the seat. Every time he takes a corner hard. Every time he moves his weight.

So he keeps moving his weight.

Beside him, the corner of Cas’s mouth kicks up in a smile. “I can smell you,” he announces, like that’s a completely normal thing to say. “You smell amazing.”

“Prob’ly smell like you.”

“No,” Cas says, totally seriously. “You smell like rainbows.”

“Walking Skittle, that’s our Dean,” Sam chuckles.

Dean’s almost tempted to tell him exactly what they were up to just to gross him out. But he doesn’t.

He’s sore, and it’s real, and fantastic; it’s a reminder of something pretty fucking wonderful every time he moves, and that’s good, ‘cause…

‘Cause.

When they stop, it’s not when the sun is high. Castiel rouses from the comfortable drowse of it. He’s gotten to enjoy the feel of Baby moving. He thought of riding up top, but Dean smelled so good.

He wasn’t singing, though. He didn’t put in his tapes.

So when Castiel opens his eyes, he knows something is wrong.

Sam’s already climbed out. Everyone has. It’s just them still here.

Dean is looking down at the narrow, long box that’s always sat next to his right knee. He’s running his fingers back and forth down the stained, yellowing cases. Ledd Zeppelin. Blue Oyster Cult. AC/DC. Fleetwood Mac. Tucked in the very edge, nearly underneath the dash, Air Supply.

The labels are too faint to read, but Castiel’s heard them enough over the past few days to know their positions by heart. So does Dean. He counts them with his fingers now, but this time, he’s staring at them.

“We’ve stopped,” Castiel observes, when it seems like Dean isn’t going to speak. “It’s not noontide yet.”

“No. Wanted to get some… some distance. Before it’s too hot to travel.”

Castiel frowns. He doesn’t understand.

“We’re… shit.” Dean heaves out air, humid and slow. His fingers start counting  the little boxes again, from the beginning. “You hear the drums, right? They’re comin’. Ain’t no way to stop ‘em. So we… we’re gonna hit the salt flats.”

Castiel feels his wings, his hair, prickle in alarm.

The salt flats? He saw them in passing. In falling. He saw the fish rotting on the surface of the evaporated sea, the delicate lace skeletons of what were once coral, the salinity turned scratchy. An infinity of dryness.

Not even he saw where they ended.

It’s not a place for humans. It’s not a place for the living.

“We’re gonna…” Dean’s breath catches. He tries again. “Baby’s got a quarter tank left, and the fuel pod. Right? We’re gonna drain her. She carries premium guzzoline, and Sam’s crew, they’ve got spare bikes stashed near here. Fucking bikes.” Dean laughs, low and rough, and Castiel doesn’t think he imagines the scorching lava bitterness of it. “But if Baby’s tank can feed ‘em, well. What else do we need, right?” He thumps on the dash with a closed fist. His knuckles are still swollen from the day before, the scabs fresh enough to be red on the edges where platelets pull.

Castiel doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand.

"Guess... guess you don't need one, do you. A ride, a bike. What with your wings all fixed up and all. But one's yours for you. If you want it." He meets Castiel’s eyes. "Benny’s leavin’, and if you gotta go another way than the way we’re goin’ too, well. I'll wish you well and sayonara here, I guess? Why drag it out."

Castiel feels his wings drag downwards in dismay, loud against the vinyl underneath him. Dean's fingers jerk out towards him before he fists them back at his side, dragging his short nails up and down the coarse, worn fabric of his pants. Scratch scratch.

Like the way they dug into Castiel’s back, into the roots of his wings.

“You’re running,” he says. Into the salt, into starvation and dehydration. Benny would be able to survive there, at least for a time, if he went. So would Castiel.

But there won’t be any groundwater there for humans, not even tainted with lead and cadmium arsenic. No pretty little pumps underneath the sand. What little liquid remains underneath the salt is so concentrated it crackles as it moves, as it dries and dies.

Castiel won’t ask Dean if he wants Castiel to go with them. He won’t.

“No,” Dean says, his mouth gone hard. Then, without softening, “Yeah.”

“It’s death.”

Death is hungry. He’s thin and tall and always so hungry.

Dean’s cheek kicks, like a jerked knee, and then smooths out. “Everyone’s dead out here, ain’t you heard?” he says. “Half-dead, on their way, or there.” He heaves out a long sigh. “You hear the drums? Pretty soon, they’ll be the only thing you can hear. We saw ‘em the other day, the colors in the sky. They’re comin’. Full fuckin’ force of the Bunker, out for little ol’ me. Charlie, too, from the fireworks. Should be honored.”

“Honor is stupid,” Castiel spits.

“You said it,” Dean sighs, and lets his head fall back. Outside, there’s the noises of metal and people calling back and forth. Wheels rub on the sand, and there’s a stink of rubber on a surface that is too hot. But in here, the sounds and smells are muffled, where everything smells like metal and the road they’ve traveled and Dean.

Dean lets his fingers caress his tapes again, his other hand smoothing against Baby’s dashboard, her wheel. He touches something that rattles in the deep groove in her door on the driver’s side, clicking it back and forth with his finger dipping in and away, in and away. His hands move, move, move.

Saying goodbye, Castiel realizes. Saying goodbye to Baby.

No.

No.

“So. You comin’ with us?” Dean says softly. His eyes are still closed.

“No,” Castiel tells him firmly, and this time, it’s not Dean’s cheek that twitches, it’s his whole jaw.

“Fine,” he says, barely opening his mouth. “Where’re you goin’, then?”

“With you,” Castiel says. “With you, and Baby.”

This time, there’s no twitching. Dean’s eyebrows tuck together and make a sandy, worried line in the middle of his forehead. Then the corner of his lip curls. “So, what, I’m Thelma and you’re Louise and we’re just going to hold hands and sail off this cliff together?”

There’s no cliff, and there’s certainly no sailing on the salt sea. Castiel doesn’t know who Thelma or Louise are.

But none of that matters.

“No,” Castiel tells him, and pokes him in the cheek. Dean flinches with his whole body, but he opens his eyes, turning to Castiel with a scowl on his face, and that is much better, that is so much better.

You prefer his smiles, but you’ll take him being willing to fight, won’t you, Castiel.

Yes, yes he will.

“We’re going home,” Castiel tells him, and points.

Dean doesn’t know if Cas is a fucking genius, or insane in the membrane, but when he tells Cas that, Cas just says, “I’m perfectly sane, but then 94% of psychotics think they’re perfectly sane, so I guess we have to ask ourselves: What is ‘sane?’”

Then he adds, because he’s Cas, “And I don’t know what membrane you’re talking about, but my menisci are fine. Thank you.”

Dean blinks at him, but Sam howls out a big moosey laugh and says, “That’s the most I’ve ever heard you say, Cas, and that’s what you pick?”

Benny mutters, “Lucky man, can’t hardly get him to shut up otherwise.”

Cas just sneers at him, Benny sneers back, Charlie sighs at both of them and bluntly says, “Penises,” and it’s so fucking normal that Dean has to laugh.

And if there’s some hysteria in it, who can blame him?

Home, Cas called it, and Dean doesn’t know what to do with that. How to feel about that.

But he’s right, is the most insane thing of all. Sonofabitch, he’s right, ‘cause if the whole force of the Bunker is on the road and on the Wastes and looking for Dean… who’ve they left behind to defend it? Little warbabies and hunters too banged-up from their recent rides out into the sand, freshly-hatched dhampir and dog-boys whose teeth have barely broken the surface of their gums.

On any other day, Dean would have said that taking the Bunker would be impossible. It’s called the Bunker for a reason. But the Men of Letters pulled back after the werewolves, after Garth. Sucrocorp’s probably licking its own wounds after that clusterfuck. If Samuel Campbell called, would they even answer?

If they make it back. If they don’t get caught up. If if if if.

But it’s not the when that even Dean knows is waiting for them on the great salt flats that used to be, not that long ago, the ocean.

(He’ll never hear it again, now, except maybe in the slosh of the water in Baby’s tanks.)

“Well, Padawan?” Charlie says, from her position behind Benny on his bike, and holds up the precious scrap of map that she’s got left—torn out of Lee’s cold, dead fingers after he sold them out. “We ready to ride?”

“This is gonna be awesome,” Maggie says.

It isn’t.

It isn’t.

Maggie’s the first to die. Dean’s not even sure how: only that one minute, she’s there in his rearview, and the next, her bike is turned sideways, and she’s spinning limply out on the sand, and there’s red spreading under her.

They don’t slow. They don’t stop. Sam’s beside Dean with the bag of ammo, neatly organized into little clumps like bags of seeds (Meg, fuck, you were such a bitch, fuck you for dying shiny the way you did, fuck you for making Charlie cry). Charlie is strapped into the hold with a makeshift seatbelt, yelling out directions with her compass and her map staked and ready, hammered out flat with nails right through Baby’s floor. Cas is up top, and Benny’s clinging to the side of the rig with a shotgun, and then a rifle, and then a pistol.

And yep. Cas can fly. He sure can. So there’s that.

Not that Dean figures that out before the angel fucking plucks a polecat from the top of its pole, like a ladder, goes up, up, up like a firework, and then just… lets him drop.

Right into the windshield of Samuel Campbell’s drummer car, ‘cause Cas is a dramatic little bitch sometimes, too.

(Dean could kiss him on the mouth, because holy shit, the sound of that drumming was even getting to him. He gets that it’s supposed to be as intimidating as fuck, hearing it on the wind, hearing it and knowing that the Bunker is coming, and it is, it is.)

They’ve got the head start, though, and Baby’s engine isn’t just grumbling with momentum, she’s roaring, hot and bright. Dean’s sorry, he’s so fuckin’ sorry, but he’s sorry for so much these days that Baby’s not even the first thing he gets to apologize for.

Dean doesn’t even know the last name of the kid from the Men of Letters, when he goes down. Kevin, he thinks, but Dean’s got the wheel and they’re going home. They’re fucking going home. They’re going home, they’re taking the Bunker, there’s no stopping them now.

There’s no stopping them now.

There’s no stopping them—

But when Benny screams, Dean stops hearing Baby's roar. Stops hearing Charlie’s directions. He doesn’t slow, he can’t, they’re pedal to the metal and the metal’s on fire, but he sticks his head out of the rig’s window, and—

Benny’s one arm is burnt. Dean knew the polecats were throwing shit at Baby before Cas took care of them like a hawk going after rabbits in one of those old picture books. He felt her shudder as they splattered, but he didn’t know what they were throwing. She’s still on fire, still smoldering, and so is Benny. Dean doesn’t know how much of the blood on him is his, but he’s fangs and fury and dripping with it, slippery. He's going to fall. He's going down.

“What the fuck are you doing, Dean, just—” Benny says, and his hand slips on the grip right next to Dean’s shoulder, and—

And fuck this.

Dean twists. He leans out. He grabs. Dean feels it when one of his shoulders pops out of its socket, but he doesn’t let go of Benny’s hand, his forearm, his collar. Sam’s got him by the back of his pants. He can hear a motor coming that's not Baby. He can hear it, and there ain't a fucking thing he can do about it, 'cause he ain't letting go of another friend. He's not. He's not.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees the whoosh of Cas’s wings overhead, the heavy arc of the feathers up top, black as sins, sees him dive, dive, dive—

Fuck, he’s so beautiful like that. So goddamned beautiful.

The car that pulls up beside Dean is ordinary. Just another sand-rider, ‘cause Samuel Campbell doesn’t drive anything that stands out. “I’m just another hunter,” he always said. “For humanity,” he always said.

But he looks into Dean’s eyes, serious and sad. Dean’s mother had his eyes. Dean has his eyes.

Dean’s grandfather raises his shotgun, and says, “Mediocre.”

He fires.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

Castiel only knows, in the aftermath, that the man he killed, whose car overturned when Castiel separated his head from his shoulders, was Dean’s grandfather. Sam’s, too, he supposes.

Not that he cares about that.

The man didn’t look like anything. He didn’t look like a monster who held other monsters, who tortured them for what they knew, who thought that they were worth less than humans and so their pain had no price.

He just looked like a human with a shotgun and no hair.

But they scattered, the broken little dogs and the half-blooded vamps dying slowly in the sun, when Castiel let the body tumble amongst them. He kept the head tucked under his arm, but that was only an accident.

They weren’t supposed to stop. They weren’t supposed to stop. They weren’t supposed to stop until they were home.

But Baby has stopped now.

Dean is in the back. Castiel doesn’t like seeing him in the hold. Dean doesn’t like being in the hold—he can’t stand it, can’t stand to watch anyone else driving Baby. That’s why he always rode up top whenever Benny was behind the wheel.

“Sam,” he’s saying, his voice small and thin. Wet, even though Dean never wastes water. “Sam. To start her. To start her. Three clicks—one to the right. One to the—are you listening? Sam.”

Castiel’s blood freezes.

He understands. He understands what that is. What those words mean.

“Over my dead body,” Dean told him, once. Twice.

The shotgun blast took Dean in the chest. In the stomach. There’s bone showing. Something moves down below, pink and sinuous and intestinal. There’s a soft plip, plip, plip. Castiel can’t tell what’s jacket and what’s stained and what’s loss. What’s loss, imminent. He can’t count the capillaries. Can’t count the destruction.

No.

Dean subsides into heavy, labored breathing. Plip. Plip. Plip. Blood pools under him, rolling down his sides. Plip.

Sempervivum won’t grow in that.

“To the right,” he repeats. “Under the dash. With your knee. Just a nudge. Then under the radio. Flick to on. Then go. Go home. Driver picks… driver picks…”

Dean trails off. There’s air moving in the silence. There’s air moving from too many places.

“Sorry,” he says, and then he’s quiet.

“N-no, don’t you—no. I’m getting you some water,” Sam says, and pushes himself backwards, moving like a land-crab, like his limbs have turned into carapace. He’s shaking all over. Benny moves to take his place.

Dean doesn’t need water. Even the sweetest, cleanest of waters won’t help.

Sam jumps, splashing clear sweetness, wasting it across the bare, infertile inside of the hold, when Castiel grabs him and spins him. His eyes drop to the head still under Castiel’s arm, his eyes, if anything going wider. Castiel lets it fall to the floor with a thump and roll away, grimacing. He doesn’t care about that.

He’s just a human, Castiel. He’s just a human. He’s mortal, and if he dies, he dies, he dies—

Castiel puts a foot on the voice and squashes it.

"Take my blade," Castiel tells Sam, arching his head back and up in illustration, pointing at the shallow course of his internal jugular vein, thumping with the reverberations of his carotid beside it. Sam’s eyes are wide and blank and afraid and uncomprehending through his mask of drying blood even as Castiel extrudes his angel blade from his arm.

But Sam doesn’t take it even when Castiel tries to put it in his fingers, and Castiel growls low in exasperation. What is it with these boys? Why do they not take knives when they’re being handed to them? The proper way, even?

It’s too late, Castiel. It’s too—

It’s not. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

"Cut. Cut here. Grace," Castiel says. Then he sighs at the lack of comprehension. There’s no time. There’s no time. "I'm an angel, you assbutt."

Sam jerks in place like someone grabbed a handful of his feathers and yanked.

Wait. Sam doesn't have feathers, has never had feathers to yank, to bleed. Castiel’s forgetting.

"What?" Sam hisses. "Your grace? No, fuck, no, I—what, Cas? Dean told me how he found you, what they’d done to you. I'm not—he'd never—"

No, Dean wouldn't. On any other day Castiel would smile at Sam’s objection—at Sam’s acknowledgement of him as a person, as a being that matters, because for a long time Castiel didn't matter, wasn't a person, and it was humans that made him that way.

But Dean and Sam are humans, too. Reminding beings of their personhood is why they are here, and that is who Sam and Dean are. That’s not their terrible, beautiful mortality.

The smell of rainbows is fading as Dean dies, as his flesh betrays him, and it's making Castiel terrible, making him need.

He has been graceless before. He has been used before.

He has never had the chance to give before. To be useful, the way Dean has let him be.

It may come to the same. It probably will. Castiel will be dry. His wings will crumble, crumple. He will be dust; he did not come from dust, but to dust he will return. He’s never going to find God, now.

But.

But he hasn’t been looking that hard.

And Castiel will not let the rainbow fade, not when he has seen it burn against the horizon, lighting up everything with its brightness and its hope.

"He needs it," Castiel insists, simply. "And it's mine."

Grace is Castiel’s to have. Castiel’s to give away. His choice. His very own.

Like Dean is his choice. Like Dean is his very own.

One of these he is willing to lose.

The one that is breathing shaky, tiny, wet scrapes of breath, he isn’t.

But Sam shakes his head again. "Cas..." he says, low and thumping and aching and hoarse, "No. You don’t get it. It ain’t just because Dean would kick my ass and probably stab you, too. Angel grace that literally comes just out of you, just like it is... yeah, it maybe could heal him, but it'd kill him first. Like the difference between putting gasoline in a combustion engine and lighting a pool of it on fire.”

“No,” Castiel says, because he has to. “No.”

He can hear Dean talking, now, to Benny. “B-before I… before I go,” he whispers, tugging with weak fingers on Benny’s jacket. “You gotta take my blood, man. I’m… you gotta. Don’t let it be wasted. You gotta.”

Each word comes labored, but Dean fights them out, breathless and whistling and terrible, because Dean Winchester fights for everything.

“Don’t gotta do shit, brother,” Benny says, because they always forget how much Castiel can hear. “And sure as hell I don’t gotta do that. For one thing, your angel would pull my balls out through my throat, and what’s gonna be wasted then, huh?” His voice is casual and swinging and lilting despite the scorched wreckage of his arm and his shoulder, but his posture is slumped, like he’s singing a lullaby over an empty cradle.

“Not… not…” Dean gasps out.

Castiel knows what Dean is going to deny. What they’ve all denied, except for Castiel.

Because Castiel is Dean’s angel, and if he would kill for him, why wouldn’t Castiel die for him too? Why wouldn’t he let him die in fire and hope rather than despair? He pushes the blade insistently at Sam again by the hilt, but Sam’s face is twisting, now, malleable as the side of a volcano as the heat of the lava reshapes it.

Charlie would do it, Castiel thinks. But she’s in the hold, woozy and rattled, and in the first place, he doesn’t trust Charlie with a knife.

Death is talking outside, when Castiel looks out the open panel, the shattered door that he hopes Dean can’t see from the angle where he’s lying. Dean would hate seeing Baby so damaged.

Death isn’t human, and he doesn’t look it: wizened and dry as the land, thin and so, so hungry. Castiel wonders if he was once jolly and slippery and sweaty, in the greenery-rich world before the Fall. His power breathes with him as he moves, balancing himself on his scythe. He’s saying something about deep dish pizza.

“You can’t have him,” Castiel says to Death. “He’s not yours.”

“Cas…” Sam says worriedly. “Who are you—”

Castiel ignores him. Death doesn’t even glance in Sam’s direction when he meets Castiel’s eyes.

“They’re all mine,” Death says, not unkindly. “Eventually. Some sooner than others. Some surprisingly late.”

“No,” Castiel insists. Dean said the same. But Castiel still denies it. “No.”

Death doesn’t bother saying anything to Castiel again, though Castiel knows he has no such thing as breath to waste. The sky behind him is a beautiful, vicious, merciless blue. He leaves a shadow but no footprints.

You can’t stop Death, Castiel. All you do is kill. You are violence and the harvested land and the earthquake, and beautiful things don’t happen at your hand. Just look.

Look.

The rainbows are fading. They’re the color of blood, now.

Castiel hovers his body over Dean and ignores Sam’s worried, soft noise. He touches the wound, dripping and wet and airy, bubbling softly like a river. He touches all the wounds. He anoints them. There are so many, so wet and soft and crimson.

“Hey,” Dean wheezes, and smiles through the blood on his pale, pale lips. His body is broken. His face is terribly, beautifully, spared. Castiel runs a thumb over Dean’s cheek to find his freckles in the dirt, but the tenacious scabbing of blood is keeping the constellations from him. Then he puts a finger on the bottom lip of Dean’s pretty mouth, carefully, to stop him from talking.

“Long day,” Castiel says. “You’ve had a long day. Rest.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, nearly inaudible, against Castiel’s thumb. But Castiel feels the motion of it, the words. Dean’s eyes start to drift, gone soft and unfocused, disconjugate.

“I’m here,” Castiel tells him. “I’m here.”

“Sam…?”

“Here too.”

Sam is. But he’s plastered at the edge of Baby’s flank with his wrist stuffed into his mouth, flesh blanching with the force of his lips and teeth on his own skin. His shoulders move, his face damp, but the sob is silence. He just looks at them. He watches, disbelieving. Charlie can't see, and Castiel is glad of it. She shouldn't watch this. She should stay wonderful.

“Proud of us,” Dean says, wet and bubbly and thick, and closes his eyes.

Castiel turns his angel blade on himself. On his own neck.

Well, what else would he do? No one else is willing to do it for him.

It’s a jagged cut. Ugly. It’s not nicely done. But it’s efficient, and there’s a beauty in efficiency, too.

The grace bursts from it, soaking and cleansing and burning, and it gushes from Castiel’s mouth too, because he has cut too deep, and he knows it. That was always his intention.

But that’s all right. That’s perfect.

He leans down. With his mouth, with his tongue, with force and with desire and with desperation, he forces the grace in his own mouth past Dean’s lips.

Maybe his grace will burn Dean from the inside out. Maybe it’ll burn them all. Maybe it’ll take Dean’s brightness and his rainbows and the way he always tries, tries, tries, and it’ll explode them all to smithereens. Maybe it’ll burn the world down around them.

That would be alright. Castiel thinks that would be alright, too.

He’ll burn, with Dean. He’ll see everything in this terrible world burn, without him.

Dean’s eyes snap open. The grace soaking down Castiel’s front, bathing Dean’s skin, spatters into them, too, marring the elegant, lovely green.

And Dean screams and screams and screams soundless, and Baby screams around them, her metal vibrating and groaning, because Dean has poured his blood and soul and hopes into her, and she knows him—this rig made for war and repurposed for rescue knows him.

Dean’s flesh, his beautiful, fragile, responsive flesh that Castiel has bruised and loved and licked, shudders and spasms against the onslaught of power. Castiel can feel Sam clawing at his back, yanking at his shoulders, but it’s when his wings become too hot to touch that he feels Sam slam himself backwards, against the edge of Baby’s hull.

Sam should know better. But neither of the Winchester brothers, Castiel has noted, know what it means to say ‘should.’ To follow ‘should.’

But then, neither does Castiel.

Because he shouldn’t be doing this.

Castiel shouldn’t be forcing his grace through Dean’s body, agony, as much cautery as healing. He shouldn’t be feeling the ripple of Dean’s trapezius and erector muscles rippling unnaturally, spasming, as feathers Dean doesn’t have try to force their way out from underneath Dean’s skin, shove through his shoulder blades. He shouldn’t feel air rushing from where there should be no air.

And he shouldn’t be feeling his wings melting, burning, bright, bright, and beautiful, until they are nothing but ash, and Castiel is blinking and blinded and aching all over, the world muffled around him.

He’s naked again. Oh. He burnt off his clothes.

But as muffled as the world is, he can still hear the sound of Dean breathing.

It’s not wet anymore. There aren’t bubbles. He isn’t the Little Mermaid, turning into foam.

“What the…” Sam says, low and shaky and sharp.

“My grace,” Castiel manages in explanation. The world contracts around him. Outside, he hears Death sigh. Out of the corner of his eyes, through walls he shouldn’t be able to see through, Castiel watches him turn away. He’s saying something about chicken tenders now.

Dean would probably like those. If they still existed.

Castiel’s not able to explain to Sam: Dean’s had his grace in him before. It’s not the first time. His grace has filled Dean in gentler times. A different kind of healing. And it didn’t burn him then.

It doesn’t burn him now.

In the end, the explanation doesn’t matter, because Castiel can hear Dean breathing, slow and easy, and his soul refracts prettily at the edge of Castiel’s vision.

Then the darkness has him.

Castiel flails himselt out of the darkness and into a marshmallow. It clings to him, wrapped around his legs, his torso, like a shroud, swallowing him whole, and it’s only when he hears a riiiip that he realizes.

It’s not a shroud. Well. Maybe it is a shroud.

But they haven’t laid him upon a bier or an altar. No, this is a bed, and beside him…

“Where am I?” Castiel demands, and he knows his tone is demanding and he does not care. “I’m going to be very mad if you’re dead!” he says, preemptively angry.

“Nope, not dead,” Dean says, and smiles shakily, from a chair beside the bed. His lips are full, and wet. Healthy. His eyes are bright, with lines at their corners and making shadows of his pretty cheekbones. “Shit, Cas. You almost were, though. Weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Castiel says simply.

Dean stares at him, but there’s nothing more to say than that. Castiel was almost dead. But he isn’t, is he?

“Where am I?” he asks.

“You’re… we’re… we’re home. The Bunker. Home,” Dean repeats, like he’s not sure whether to believe it. Like he’s not sure how that word is supposed to sit on his tongue. “You were right. It was… easy.”

Castiel tries the word out. Tastes it. “Home.” Round and labial and humming. He likes it. “How?”

“Drove right up. Samuel Campbell’s head tied to Baby like a hood ornament. Kind of got the message across, I guess,” Dean says. “Sam’s running the show, now.”

Castiel considers this. “Acceptable,” he decides.

Dean chuffs something that sounds like real humor between his teeth before it fades. He reaches out a hand. Pulls it back. “Cas, your… your wings.”

“Mmm.” Yes. His wings.

“Cas, they’re gone.”

Castiel shrugs.

Yes. He knows they are. He can feel the emptiness on his back where they’re supposed to be, the tightness where there are no roots. He can feel the lightness of his torso, the urge to lean back to keep feeling something, anything, where there is nothing to feel. “They’re grace. I don’t have much.” Any, right now. Probably.

But he can see it shining underneath Dean’s skin, and the delicate lacy tracery of it in Dean’s veins makes him smile.

Dean eyes Castiel’s smile mistrustfully. “Will… they gonna grow back?”

“Maybe,” Castiel allows. He doesn’t know. Maybe. Possibly. Probably.

Once upon a time, having them back was important to Castiel. Having them whole and clean. He had them that way again, for a short while. Dean helped with that. Helped it happen. Cared for them, preened them like they mattered. They did.

Then something else mattered more.

“You can stay here, y’know. Long as… long as you want. Before you go to find God again. I know it’s, uh, it’s stone walls. Enclosed.” Dean licks his lips. “You ain’t good with that, probably.”

“No,” Castiel says. “This is a cave.” Dean starts to object, but Castiel isn’t done. “But I’m not bound or shackled. Not anymore. And nothing in this Bunker would hold me if decided to leave.”

“Well, shit, why don’t you just give it to me straight, then?” Dean says, and for some reason, he sounds a little… angry?

Castiel blinks at him. “I did,” he says slowly. “I just did. I know you can understand me. I’m using a human voice.” Then he sits up—hard. "You're not furry anymore!" Castiel says, and he doesn't know if it's surprise or dismay in his own voice.

“Wait—what, that’s what you want to talk about, now?!”

“Yes!” Castiel insists.

Dean stares at him. But after a moment, he chuckles small and stiff, and runs his hand over the bare line of his chin. There's a faint line of darker color and stiffer skin where the sun has kissed and bitten him but hasn't yet had the chance to kiss lower. "What can I say, we don't all look as good fluffy as you do, Cas."

"Not fluffy," he complains, but he lets himself sag back against the wall and look around. The stone of the walls leans down around him. The pressure of it shudders down feathers he doesn’t even have anymore, and they prickle against something he can't fight, something he can’t fly through and away. He can’t see the sky. He can’t see the sky.

You could. You could tear it all down, stone by stone. You could ruin it into rubble and fly free and have nothing above you but sky and the universe. It would be easy.

Yes. Yes, it would. Yes, Castiel could. He’s very good at destruction.

But he doesn't need to be. Not all the time.

"It's cooler," he says finally. Grudgingly. "Inside. Here."

The tension untangles from Dean's shoulders like delicate ropes. "Yeah?" Dean says finally, and a smile struggles onto his mouth. It's working hard, but it seems real. He breathes out air that trembles and wobbles at the corners. "Kinda nice, right? Sometimes."

"A little," Castiel admits, and holds out his arms. “Come here. I deserve a reward. For not dying,” he says.

Dean blinks. Once. Twice.

Then he grins.

Castiel can still have rainbows indoors. He can still have sunlight indoors. He has it pouring over him now, a heavy, warm, living weight settled on his chest and between his legs, the hair of the insides of Dean's thighs sending little shivers of static up Castiel’s nerves.

“Hey, wait, what’re you… I’m heavy,” Dean mutters, and tries to shift his weight.

“You’re perfect,” Castiel says, tugging him close, and it’s true.

The sound that Cas makes when Dean lets his teeth scrape against his skin is devastating. A whimper in bass—so soft that Dean feels it as much as he hears it. In his breastbone. In his ribs. Cas's fingers dig into his hips, hard pinpoints of pressure. He could break bone, it'd be easy.

It’s only been a few days, but his wings are starting to grow back: cute little nubby things that they are, the tiniest of feathers still sheathed in that weird, flaky dark wax, bones mostly cartilage so delicate they bend.

But Cas doesn't break where Dean touches. Just grips. Holds. He’s fucking insatiable, is what he is. Barely lets Dean out to piss, or eat. (They’re not even gonna talk about all the bite marks Cas leaves on him.)

“Don’t wanna know,” Sam said, the last time Dean emerged, wobbly-kneed, with his thighs cramping. Dean thinks Sam’s gonna lose all his hair, pulling at it the way he does all the time, but it’s his own damned fault for taking over as head of the Bunker.

“Oh ew. But congrats!” Charlie said.

Dean feels the shiver of those cute little wings against the mattress underneath Cas’s back. But his back arcs as sweet as anything, like a prism in the sun, when Dean scrapes his teeth gently over his nipples, one at a time, snagging gently on the little nubs in a catch of pleasure.

"Wanna do something," Dean mumbles.

"Okay."

"For you."

"Okay."

"To you."

"I don't know how often you want me to say 'Okay,'” Cas complains. “Do you take pleasure in making me repeat myself?”

Dean snorts. "Maybe it was better when you didn't talk."

Cas snorts, that huffy little "Hmph" that Dean should not find so fucking cute.

“Just for that? I’m rimmin’ you until you scream for mercy. Then I’m riding you until the cows come home,” Dean says, and shoves Cas down to the bed.

Cas ain’t much of a screamer. Much less for mercy. But he does squirm so pretty, so damned pretty, wings flittering and fluttering back and forth when Dean puts him on his hands and knees and licks and nips and bites, sucking one of those full, big balls into his mouth from behind when he gets down there. And fuck, that grace of his feels real good inside Dean when Cas comes—more a warmth than a liquid, and maybe there’s something to the whole healing business, because fuck he’d swear he can feel it right in his veins when it pours into him.

He stays there, perched in Cas’s lap, feeling him go soft and smaller inside him, still wet, long after they’re done. Cas’s fingers trail back and forth over the spunk that Dean left on him, too, rubbing it right into the thick mat of hair on his chest, his belly.

Yeah, Dean should probably not be finding that hot.

Dean can’t wait until his wings are healed. Until they’re big enough to wrap around him again. Next time, he’ll kiss the thick, jagged, ugly scar across Cas’s neck—the one thing that never healed, that never will. One of Cas’s hands curves possessively over Dean’s ass. Dean’s sore, but it’s a good sore.

“There are never any cows,” Cas tells him, sleepily, and Dean laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

"Dude. Are you talking to my rig?" Dean demands.

Castiel pats Baby's sunwarmed top gently from atop her, careful not to thump. It's not that she can't handle being treated more roughly. It's that she doesn't deserve to, after all she’s done for him. For them.

"Yes," he says, simply.

"Oh yeah?" Dean's lips do a small, pigeon flutter. He slings one arm up and grabs Baby's entry bar, hauling himself through the open door and into her cozy innards with a hard, lovely, fluid tug of muscle. "What's she sayin', then?"

"She is glad to be going. She's built for the conflict," Castiel says fondly. Baby rumbles agreement underneath him as Dean goes through the rhythmic dance of starting her, the patterns of his hand underneath the dash, back and forth as he unkills what was never dead in the first place. Her engine turns over with a warm, smoothing grind, motion and potential. "Built for war."

Castiel understands. He was, too. Is.

"Yeah, well. So'm I," Dean says, poking his head out the window and craning his neck around as if insistent on meeting Castiel’s gaze to make his point. "What's that say about all of us, huh?"

So Castiel drapes himself along Baby's roof on his stomach and smiles down at him. His feathers rustle with the pleasure of it as he drapes them all along the sides, spilling darkness down and down and down.

Dean isn't made for war, not really. Castiel’s precious human isn't. Being good at it isn't the same thing. He's not like Baby at all. Not like Castiel.

But it's cute that he thinks he is.

"That we're fucking nuts," Castiel says, he thinks agreeably enough.

Dean huffs, but Castiel thinks that the color in his sweetly bare cheeks isn't the sun. "Speak for yourself." Yes, Castiel was doing that. "You gonna stay up there today?" Dean says, in that decisive roughness that makes the roots of Castiel’s wings tremble happily. But for all the jut of his jaw, Castiel's human is smiling back up at him. Happy. "Or you gonna ride with me?"

Charlie’s coming, too. She’s got ‘people,’ she says, in Sucrocorp. They’ve seen the fires of it burning even from here.

Castiel can’t wait to meet them.

"Both, of course," Castiel says.

Both, always.

They’ll be meeting Benny on the way. Castiel isn’t looking forward to the stink of blood he and his vampires will carry. They’re ‘taking the fight’ to the Men of Letters.

Dean may not be built for war, but the road is his home, far more than the Bunker ever will be.

And Castiel will always be in that home with him. He will ride. Sometimes he may ride up top, sometimes within. Sometimes, he will ride a tailwind, and keep watch. He knows this, knows this like the feel of Dean's fingers gently preening the most sensitive feathers where they grow soft, prickle-tipped, or tickling the hairs at the back of Castiel’s neck with a careful fingernail.

Neither of them rides alone.

Neither of them rides alone, anymore.

Dean doesn't argue.

And Castiel raises his face to the sun. He lets the new, fragile feathers speckling his wings like blades of grass on the sere, broken earth flick the wind through them as Baby starts to move underneath him. Carry them both.

When Dean starts to sing "Highway to Hell," the rough prettiness of it curling into the air over the sound of the engines starting behind them, one and then another and then a roar, Castiel tips his head back and roars along.

~fin~