Chapter Text
By the time Dean and Cas leave the diner, Sam’s already found a lead on demon activity in Nevada.
“I’m barely outta my damn grave, and we’re already back to business, huh?” Dean grumbles half-heartedly, but he knows as well as Sam and (probably) Cas—the angel, Dean’s found, is strangely perceptive, despite how oblivious he acts—how at home he feels behind Baby’s wheel, how all-powerful. He couldn’t have asked for a better homecoming than Sammy riding shotgun and Zeppelin blasting over the speakers, with Cas, and whatever he is to Dean besides pleasant to look at, in the backseat.
Too soon, they arrive at the motel Sam found via some questionable means Dean doesn’t bother to ask about. He’s stiff from sitting in the car for so long, and it’s a feeling he’s missed sorely for the past lifetime he’s spent under Alastair’s sadistic thumb.
Cas steps out as Dean adjusts to a standing position. He walks with ease, the holy bastard. “Are the demons here?” Cas asks, but Dean’s momentarily distracted by the conspiratorial rumble of his voice so near to Dean’s ear, deep like a cat purring and pleasurable in an entirely different way.
Dean shifts away a fraction to avoid thinking about what he’s feeling.
“Uh, no,” he answers belatedly. “This is where we’re dropping our stuff, Cas.”
Cas tilts his head. The suspicion which might have overcome his expression only a day or two before is absent now, and it makes Dean feel so comfortable and comforted that it actually circles back to uncomfortable. He feels like a middle schooler with a—
No. No, that’s not right.
“Humans sleep,” Dean explains before Cas’s next question comes. “We’re stayin’ in Nevada tonight no matter how fast or slow we take out the demons here, ’cause I for sure ain’t driving back to South Dakota.”
Cas thinks, then nods. Dean would do a lot of things he probably wouldn’t be proud of to understand what’s going on in his head, what gears are turning, what he thinks when he looks at Dean. There’s certainly something there, because he sure as hell doesn’t look at Sam with that glint in his eye, that fleck of—of a complex thing Dean doesn’t know how to name, or maybe doesn’t want to look too closely at.
“C’mon, Dean,” Sam calls from where he’s already across the parking lot, distant as if he’s giving them space. Dean wishes he were close enough to ruffle his hair, wishes he was still young and naive enough to promise Sammy unconditional protection by his side should he ever need it. But there are some things, Dean knows, that he just can’t protect his baby brother from.
Seems Dean’s ability to protect died with him, and Cas must’ve dropped it as he dragged the rest of Dean up to the light.
“Yeah, I’m on my way,” Dean grumbles, just barely slamming Baby’s door to get his point across. Get your ass over here, Sammy, he might’ve called, forty years or six months ago. Now, he merely follows, and his angel trails loyally after him, seemingly fascinated by a group of people milling about nearby, but just a smidge too dignified to show it outright.
Dean feels an insane but wildly tempting urge to reach back, to tug Cas along by the hand. He hates himself for it.
“This is it?”
Sammy snorts more than a little derisively. “Yeah, Dean. This is where all the cows were found slaughtered. Did you think the demons would all be sitting around at the local bar, waiting patiently for us to come ’n’ kill them?”
Dean kicks a box of rat poison, glaring up at the looming, shadowy warehouse Sam had led them to. Cas stands just behind him and a step to the right, a little too close for comfort, surveying the cracked windows over Dean’s shoulder.
“I do feel a presence,” Cas says. “But it’s—”
“What?” Dean prompts when Cas hesitates.
“Whatever’s in there is powerful,” he says, and steps past Dean to touch the warehouse wall with one hand, casting a strange sort of blue luminescence like distant starlight onto the stone and illuminating faint symbols there. “This is warding.”
Sam frowns. “Demon warding? So you’re saying it’s not a demon in there? Must be someone who hates them about as much as we do.”
“Enemy of our enemy,” Dean adds helpfully.
“No,” Cas refutes, then takes his sweet time with his explanation. Dean is just gearing up to ask what he means when Cas finally goes on: “It’s angel warding.”
Dean blinks. “Meaning?”
Cas glares at him over his shoulder, still half-focused on the symbols. “Meaning, I can’t enter. No fully-powered angel could, except for archangels.”
“Oh.” Well, Dean’s stumped.
“My senses barely reach inside, but I feel something,” Cas adds. “If it’s a demon in there, it’s—” He winces. “It might be too powerful for the two of you.”
“All right,” Dean agrees after a moment. “How do we erase the warding?”
This time, it’s Cas who adopts an owlishly shocked expression. “You—” Cas cuts himself off, seems to exhale a fraction, even though Dean’s pretty sure he doesn’t need to breathe, and blinks slowly, even though he doesn’t need to do that either. He looks vaguely shocked, and Dean wonders if there’s some angel custom in this, something he’s not understanding. Or maybe the warding just can’t be broken.
“What?” Dean demands, angling for a straight answer.
“I assumed you wouldn’t want to,” Cas says, with no other explanation whatsoever. Dean gestures impatiently for him to continue, and Cas sighs, but complies. “Angels have not been very kind to you, and I did not exactly ask your permission to remain at your side.”
“You thought I’d ditch you the first chance I got?” Dean translates. He blinks. It hadn’t even really occurred to him, that to leave the warding intact would give him an opportunity to get rid of Cas.
The thing is, he doesn’t really want to get rid of Cas.
He draws himself up, projecting confidence and concealing vulnerability to make up for the soppy shit he’s about to say. “What about my argument with your angel buddy made it sound like I want you to leave?”
Cas is quiet, as if honest-to-God reviewing the entire conversation between Dean and Uriel in his freakishly good memory to come up with some courtroom-applicable evidence, but Dean doesn’t wait.
“So, how do we erase it?”
“Go in,” Cas replies simply, apparently by now used to Dean’s redirection or perhaps grateful for it, “and break the wall the symbols are on.”
“How’re we gonna do that?”
“Dean,” Sam interrupts, which is the first time he’s spoken since realizing the warding’s anti-angel, probably busying himself reading too much into Dean’s reaction. How’d I get stuck with such an asshole of a little brother? Dean wonders with more than a smidge of fondness. “I did keep all those weapons we never got to use, y’know.”
They crack the wall with a single well-placed grenade.
It’s the most fun Dean’s had since before his death. Even slaughtering his torturers can’t measure up to this.
At Dean’s victorious whoop, Cas steps cautiously through the threshold of the warehouse, the wall precariously holding up the roof but secured just as quickly when Sam—always the one to think ahead—presses a few formerly-scattered rotted planks beneath to hold it up. Surprisingly, it works. Damn, he should’ve been an architecture major.
“Well,” Cas says more than a little drily, clearly disapproving of their methods, “we’ve now alerted every deadly creature that could possibly be in this building to our presence.” And then, to Dean’s surprise, his eyes seek out Dean’s. “Thank you.”
The sincerity chokes a little, like a tightening noose. Dean looks away first. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Sam gives him a questioning look as they walk further into the building, following Cas half-blindly in the dark toward whatever entity he can feel here. Dean pointedly ignores it.
Cas stops in the middle of the warehouse floor. Dean has to dig in his heels to not run into him. “I sense—” He halts, thinks, like maybe it’s impossible, whatever he’s about to say. And then he adds, quieter, “I sense grace.”
Sam speaks up before Dean can. “Angelic grace?”
Cas gives him a long, bland look, as if to say no shit, and Dean briefly wonders how in the world he got to be so damn sassy.
“Does that mean—is it that other angel? The asshole?” Dean asks, like he doesn’t remember Uriel’s name perfectly well.
“Then why were there demon signs?” Sam adds.
Cas looks at them both, then faces the shadows, as if searching for something. He steps forward cautiously, like he’s stepping around shards of broken glass, and picks up something just ahead of him which is long and sharp and crackles in his hand.
Dean squints. It’s a branch.
Cas studies it. Seems to feel something within it, and if Dean looks long enough he might just see a faint glow, hardly noticeable in the dark. Like bioluminescence in the Mariana Trench. And then, as if Cas struck a match, his touch along one particular ridge illuminates it, the holy light spreading like flame from his hand across the brittle wood in spirals.
“No,” Cas says, in response to no question in particular. Probably Dean’s. “No, Dean, Sam—I believe this is a trap.”
On the tailend of his final word, as if on cue, the shadows erupt.
Dean draws his demon blade in record time, but the figure from the dark isn’t gunning for him. Instead, it lunges at Sam, and for a moment its face is cast in the light from the branch, highlighting dark eyes locked in focus and set in a disturbingly human-looking woman’s face.
Cas leaps forward around the same time as Dean. Despite starting further away, he gets there faster, some trick of the wings cast across the warehouse walls by the light he’s dropped to the dusty floor, still glowing. He grabs the woman before she can land a blow on Sam, and throws her like a particularly bothersome sack of potatoes toward the wall. She hits it with more than enough velocity to crack a spine, but she doesn’t appear troubled in the least. The light flickers a fraction, and her weapon is made clear by the blue-tinted light; a silvery blade, identical to the one Cas always pulls from nowhere on the rare occasions when he’s startled.
She’s an angel. She must be, however weak she seems compared to Dean’s.
She looks at Cas, really looks, and visibly jerks in surprise. Cas, from his tense stance in front of Sam and Dean, having positioned himself like their guard dog, doesn’t look in the least shocked.
“Castiel?” she asks, in the same tone an old war vet might address a member of his platoon from decades upon decades ago.
“Anna,” Cas snarls back.
Dean presses closer, checking Sam over before pushing him just a fraction back from the two angels, to Sam’s immense irritation. “Oh, so you two know each other,” Dean states the obvious, faux-causally. Cas doesn’t look at him, but Anna does; her eyes flicker with something he can barely read, a strange hybrid of dread and recognition. “Wanna fill us in?”
The branch’s light flutters, half-dead. Cas flicks a hand at it almost absentmindedly, and it brightens again, flashing in Sam’s face and briefly blinding Dean. He wonders why Cas bothers, considering he seems able to see in the dark just fine.
“This is Anna,” Cas introduces without looking away from her. They remain at a standstill, no more than seven feet apart, wielding blades they seem oddly reluctant to use on each other. “She’s an angel who betrayed heaven.”
Anna narrows her eyes at him. “We still have at least one thing in common, then.”
This gives Cas visible pause. His guard stutters and falls, giving Anna enough time to push past him, single-minded in her mission to get to Sam. Dean blocks her, and is rewarded with an iron grip—yes, he wasn’t imagining it, it is weaker than Cas’s, for whatever reason—around his arm and a harsh collision with the floor multiple feet away.
His spine smarts, but he’d do worse than brave some pain for Sammy. Her weakness is her determination—it’s all too easy for Dean to stalk up behind her while Cas makes a foolish attempt at reasoning with her, and it’s almost no effort at all to stab her in the back with his demon blade, right behind her heart.
She hardly even turns but to scoff. She pulls the blade from her back, focus flitting between Sam, who’s already caught on with Dean’s plan and is retreating into the shadows, and Dean’s pitiful attempt at stopping her. When she looks him in the eye for the second time in this whole encounter, Dean smiles like he’s won, and for once he really has.
Cas notices first. Anna is still preoccupied with the demon blade, and then with Sam’s location. But Cas—his eyes follow Dean’s to his hand, and widen in shock. The glow of the branch illuminates the source of the strange weight in Dean’s hand, the power he can feel thrumming in the air this close, the silver glint.
The angel blade is missing from Anna’s hand, and is instead resting, for the first time, in human hands.
In Dean Winchester’s hands.
Anna whirls when she finally realizes that she doesn’t have her weapon. Her eyes fall on Dean, and he thinks there’s something like a growing of the dread in her eyes, like a prophecy has been fulfilled that she didn’t like at all upon first hearing.
Dean smiles. This time, Anna doesn’t scoff.
“Give it to me,” she demands. Her grace, which he figures must’ve been a second lure she set and turned out to be just as effective as the cow carcasses, flickers in the branch, and the rest of it—a lesser amount than Cas’s, thus allowing her past the warding—boils in her body. Dean can almost sense it after all the time he’s spent with Cas; the rage infused in it, the angelic sense of unfulfilled justice.
“No,” Dean replies flatly. He spins the blade in his hand, getting a feel for it. Turns out his promise to Uriel wasn’t false at all.
“You don’t understand,” Anna insists. “I know he’s your brother, but we can’t let him live.”
“Is this—” An epiphany comes to Dean. “Is this a ploy to get me to agree to the plan? Is Michael not brave enough to face me himself? Did he send you to threaten my brother?”
“No,” Anna snarls. “Didn’t you hear? I betrayed the angels.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not helping you either.”
“Dean,” Sam chides mildly, placing a hand on Dean’s shoulder that’s more reassuring than Dean would ever admit.
“No, Sammy, we’re not doing shit for her,” he snaps. “She tried to kill you.”
“Dean,” Cas chimes in, and Dean reluctantly looks over at him. He looks distinctly pained, and the grace when he lights the branch anew is a duller blue, almost gray. “She’s right.”
Dean squints. “What? I thought you were over this, Cas, your weird thing about Sam—”
“He’s the vessel of Lucifer,” Anna interrupts.
Dean blinks. Readjusts everything he’s been told of his destiny, of the world. Steps back, but doesn’t lower the blade, and feels Sam physically shudder behind him, like he’s been told a loved one just died. Or that he’s going to eventually be pitted against one.
“No,” Dean denies, fruitlessly.
The branch flickers. Cas lights it again despite having just done so, reminiscent of a nervous tic, a distraction. For the first time, Dean realizes it’s for his sake. So he can see.
It doesn’t do much to help Cas’s case.
“Cas,” he says, tone flat as a dead man’s cardiogram. He’s not sure whether to be angry or to collapse into a weeping heap. He settles on rage. “Cas, you—”
“I was going to tell you.” It’s the first time Dean’s ever seen anything even close to guilt on Cas’s face, but he’s too furious to appreciate it.
“You lied to me,” Dean snarls. “About my destiny, about Sammy’s, about everything that matters.” He stalks toward Cas, all of the prowl of a hunter in his stalk, but the angel isn’t frightened. No, he only looks sorrowful. “I thought you were—I don’t know, choosing sides. I thought you were choosing us.”
“There’s no such thing as your side,” Cas cuts in. “Just ours, and Lucifer’s.”
Dean scoffs. “I ain’t on your side, not after this bullshit.” The blade shakes in his hand, dangerously close to Cas. But he still doesn’t appear worried. “You all can fight your war and die in it yourselves. You won’t be needing me and Sammy.”
“It’s your destiny,” Cas argues, and that’s Dean’s last straw.
He pulls a hand back, braces himself, and punches the angel in the face.
Cas stumbles a bit, which is a testament to the immense force of Dean’s blow, but otherwise isn’t affected. Dean wishes he had the strength to stab him; he wishes that that face wouldn’t haunt his nightmares for years if this is how they end—he wishes a lot of things that won’t come true, not now, he figures, and not ever.
“You can take my destiny back up to your Lord in heaven and shove it right up his Almighty ass,” Dean snaps. He steps back, the blade still shaking in his hand, and something deep in Dean’s chest bays for blood, anyone’s blood. “Same goes for Sammy’s. Don’t let me ever see you again, Castiel.”
Cas looks after him with an expression mingled with shock and something like hurt.
A week ago, Dean thinks, there would’ve been fury written all over his face. He’s changed, he realizes, not for the first time, but certainly in the most urgent context, but why?
“Well, this is quite a scene I’ve stumbled in on.”
Dean whirls toward the voice on the opposite end of the warehouse. Anna reaches for a weapon that isn’t there, and Cas takes an audible step back once he recognizes the face of the intruder.
“Uriel,” Cas greets from behind Dean. Dean grits his teeth.
“Yes,” Uriel agrees. “I see you’ve found our fugitive.”
Dean backs up to his left so he can face the two of them, just in time to see Cas stiffen. After a pause, he confirms, “I have.”
“Well, why haven’t you apprehended her?”
Cas gestures helplessly toward Dean, as if that sums it up. Dean suddenly doesn’t like being waved at like he’s some fucking animal, so he wields the blade higher, lets it catch the dying light.
Uriel sees it, and visibly wavers. But doesn’t leave.
“We’re only here for the traitor,” Uriel reassures, as if he thinks Dean gives a single flying fuck what he’s here for.
Dean realizes he’s backing up, and halts himself. Sammy, who’s standing just to the right of him even now, a witness to the events of his post-assassination attempt, steps just a fraction behind Dean, and at any other time Dean would mock him for it. But not now.
Anna is standing tensely near the opposite side of the warehouse, weaponless now that Dean’s stolen her blade. Dean briefly feels pity for her, facing the wrath of the entirety of heaven, with an uncertain future ahead.
At least she told them the truth, unlike a certain other angel.
But she tried to kill Sammy.
“Take her,” Dean decides. “Ain’t our problem.”
Uriel appears satisfied. He approaches Anna, who, with significantly less grace running through her veins than the other angels in the room, looks decidedly cornered.
Dean feels Sam about to do something stupid before he even opens his mouth. “Wait,” Sam calls, and his voice echoes across the warehouse. All the angels in the room turn to him with palpable disdain, like they always do. Well, Dean thinks, at least he finally knows why. “She’s with us,” Sam goes on. “You’re not taking her.”
“Sam,” Dean snaps under his breath.
“Dean,” is Sam’s only reply.
God, sometimes Dean regrets the way he raised his stubborn-ass little brother.
Anna does that angel head-tilt thing, only it’s much less captivating than Cas’s. She’s looking at Sam like she’s seeing him for the first time. Dean wants to stab her and not stop until her grace is spilled out on the floor, until he can pretend the mangled corpse beneath him is Cas’s.
“What would heaven do with a traitor, anyway?” Sam reasons. “Just before a war? She’d only be a burden. A waste of time, a drain on resources and concentration. If you let her stay on Earth, she can help to defeat Lucifer.”
Anna looks vaguely affronted by this, but wisely doesn’t say anything.
“No, no,” Uriel says, like this is all a mildly irritating misunderstanding. “She’s marked for execution. That’s what’s done to all traitors.”
He says it more than a little pointedly, and Dean watches curiously as Cas swallows, his trepidation most likely invisible to everyone else in the room besides Dean.
“We’re taking her.” Uriel gestures at Cas. “Come on, Castiel. Grab her.”
Dean fully expects Cas to take Anna’s arm and disappear in a whirl of wind and feathers, but he doesn’t. He looks at Uriel for a long moment, then at Dean, seemingly in consideration. He reaches up to touch his nose where Dean punched him as if to feel for a lingering ache. And then he does what Dean’s never seen any other angel do before—under direct orders, he refuses.
“No.”
Uriel looks thoroughly caught off guard. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I’m not going back to heaven,” is all Cas says in reply.
“What? Why? Surely not for these two humans! Come on, Castiel, they’re ants. There’s a million other like them,” Uriel argues.
“No,” Cas repeats, “there isn’t.”
And he steps toward Sam and Dean.
Uriel blinks. His weapon appears in his hand, but doesn’t raise it, as if he isn’t sure it’ll do any good. “You’re betraying heaven for—for what? Two humans, one with demon blood in his veins, and a traitor and fugitive of heaven?”
Demon blood? Dean thinks.
Cas takes another step toward them, angling himself as if in defense. “Yes.”
“You fool,” Uriel spits. He looks astonished, and angry, and somewhat disturbed. “You’d do all this, for them?”
Dean would like to ask the same question. But there’ll be time for that later.
Anna does her best to creep away from Uriel while he’s arguing with Cas, but to no avail. “No,” Uriel snaps, “I will not lose two traitors.”
Just as Dean sees Cas tense in realization, Uriel lunges at Anna, and disappears with her in a whirl of feathers. The light from the branch finally fully dies in the millisecond afterward, drowning them all in darkness.
Shit, Dean thinks, staring into the deep warehouse shadows. The sun is cresting the hills outside, bathing the Impala in faint a faint yellow glow, and all Dean can think is shit, how are we going to deal with this?