Chapter Text
“Is it true?” Dean croaks.
Castiel, who had been staring straight ahead at nothing in particular, blinks and turns to face Dean. When he sees the weary detachment that has settled over the man’s face, his eyebrows draw together. Castiel already knows what Dean is asking—but he doesn’t want to have to be the one to answer.
An unknown feeling sits heavy in his chest. He recognizes that it is a feeling, but he can’t quite name what it is.
“Did I break the first seal?” Dean asks. His eyes are lidded, like the effort just to keep them open is too much. He pauses and then, with more emotion in his voice, “Did I start all this?”
From the first moment that he met Dean—at least, the first moment when they were both wearing the bodies they now inhabit—Castiel was struck by how strongly he feels and how clearly he wears those feelings on his face. He may not be able to interpret his own feelings yet, but somehow he’s always been able to read them in Dean clear as day. Even now, as he masks them in hopelessness, Dean’s shame and self-loathing scream out to Castiel. He still believes that he didn’t deserve to be saved. Perhaps even more so now.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Castiel nods his head a few times and answers, “Yes.” He pauses. He doesn’t want to go on, but he can tell that Dean wants him to, so he does.
“When we discovered Lilith's plan for you, we laid siege to hell and we fought our way to get to you before you—” Castiel turns away. He doesn’t want to be looking at Dean for this next part.
Before he can finish, Dean interrupts, “Jump-started the apocalypse.”
Unable to stop himself, Castiel turns back to Dean again. He isn’t looking at Castiel, he’s lying in the hospital bed staring straight ahead with a vacant look in his eyes. Castiel can’t watch it for too long before he has to turn away again, tilting his head back to gaze at the ceiling instead. Something huge and unrelenting is rioting beneath his sternum.
“But we were too late,” he continues, brushing past Dean’s interruption, staring up at the chipped texture of the tiled ceiling above.
Anger makes Dean’s voice shake when he responds, “Why didn't you just leave me there, then?”
Another feeling hits Castiel square in the chest and the force of it startles him. Unlike the other—which was merely uncomfortable—this one hurts. He suspects that it feels the same as the blade Dean sunk into his heart the first night they met would have felt—if he’d been human at the time.
“It's not blame that falls on you, Dean.” Castiel stares straight ahead as he says the words. Watching Dean, fractured and worn in the bed beside him, feels unbearable while they have this conversation.
“It's fate,” he continues, knowing that with these words he is bestowing upon Dean a great burden: “The righteous man who begins it is the only one who can finish it.” Castiel forces himself to turn and look Dean in the eyes when he finishes, “You have to stop it.”
A stray tear slips down Dean’s right cheek and Castiel wishes that he hadn’t seen it. The knife in his chest is twisting now.
Dean’s voice is just a hoarse whisper when he asks, “Lucifer? The apocalypse? What does that mean?” Each breath he takes shakes as he speaks. The mechanical beep of the heart monitor is a quiet pulse of noise in the background.
Conflicted, Castiel looks away from Dean once again—as if he can’t decide whether he can stand to look at him or not. He doesn’t feel like the terrifying agent of Heaven’s will that he’s meant to be.
Louder now, Dean demands, “Hey! Don't you go disappearing on me, you son of a bitch! What does that mean?” It startles Castiel and he feels the ruffle of his wings at his back. Dean is right, he was just about to disappear—ever the coward that he is.
“I don't know,” Castiel responds, straining to keep his voice even. He can’t look at him when he says it.
“Bull!” Dean yells, still angry.
Finally, Castiel turns back to Dean, frustrated that he doesn’t have the answer. “I don't. Dean, they don't tell me much.” He pauses, and then, “I know our fate rests with you.”
Just as quickly as it appeared, Dean’s anger drains from his face. He whispers again and his voice has a slight tremble to it now, “Well, then you guys are screwed. I can't do it, Cas. It's too big.” His voice breaks as he says it and Castiel aches at the sound.
The chair beneath him feels brittle like he could crumple it with the slightest touch. He worries his lip between his teeth and desperately wishes there was anything he could do to help.
“Alastair was right. I'm not all here. I'm not—I'm not strong enough.”
It isn’t true. Castiel knows it’s not true. But then he looks at Dean and sees him looking away, fighting to hold back more tears, and he knows that Dean believes it. His nostrils flair and his lips tremble with the effort of trying not to cry. Castiel feels another pang echo in his chest when he sees the tears break free anyway.
“Well, I guess I'm not the man either of our dads wanted me to be,” Dean says, and his tongue darts out to wet his dry lips. He sounds defeated. Like he’s already lost.
His eyes flutter closed and he finishes, “Find someone else. It's not me.”
Dean squeezes his closed eyes and then blinks, ashamed, as another tear slowly slips down his cheek. It leaves a trail of wetness in its path before stopping on his bottom lip, just hanging there like it doesn’t want to leave him.
Neither of them speaks again for a while.
Castiel sighs. He knows what he’s going to do next. He knew before he even returned to this room to find Dean asleep, no longer attached to the breathing tube, but still with an IV in his arm and a heart monitor beating in tune with his heart. Still so bruised and broken and vulnerable. Castiel knows that he cannot make Dean invulnerable, but the rest he can fix.
He scoots his chair across the floor, closer to the hospital bed, and then leans forward. Dean’s face is still wet, his eyes red, but he’s no longer crying. His eyebrows pull together at Castiel’s sudden nearness.
“What’re you—” Dean begins to ask, but he trails off, watching closely as Castiel lifts two fingers toward him.
“Dean, I’m not supposed to be doing this,” Castiel says, his fingers stopped halfway between them, his expression grave. “I told your brother earlier that I couldn’t heal you and it wasn’t a lie. I am only supposed to do this when Heaven commands it.” He looks into Dean’s questioning green eyes and does it anyway, pushes his fingers gently to his forehead, and lets his grace surge forward from his vessel’s fingertips and into Dean. Castiel watches as the cuts at his eyebrow, his lip, and the bridge of his nose all light up with his grace and knit themselves back together. It leaves the freckled skin smooth, as if it had never been broken at all. He watches the bruising on Dean’s nose and neck disappear. Castiel feels the other things that he cannot see healing too—bruised ribs, sore muscles, a swollen throat, a concussion all melt away. There in one moment, and gone in the next.
Dean’s features relax in the time that it takes for the grace to heal him, and when he opens his eyes again Castiel can see the overwhelming relief in his eyes. Dean lets out a long breath and then the corners of his lips tip up ever so slightly.
“Thanks, Cas,” he says as he pulls out the nasal cannula. It’s clear that now that he’s healed, Dean is ready to sneak away from this room before any of the hospital staff notices.
This was his first true act of disobedience. Castiel had expected to feel guilt or shame, but instead, he just feels a weight on his chest lift. Curious, how he had never noticed it before. In its place, a warmth spreads, and his mouth turns upward into a smile as he thinks that whatever this feeling is, he likes it.
Dean knocks three times and then leans one shoulder against the frame of the door while he waits. He’s wearing the same clothes that he went to the hospital in: a black T-shirt, jeans, and boots. It’s the first time he can ever remember feeling this good after a hunt. If he wanted to run a marathon right now, he could. If that were the kind of thing he’d ever willingly do.
He’s holding the dark blue shirt he’d been wearing while he had tortured Alastair yesterday in one hand. When he’d gone to put it on in the hospital, he realized that there was blood smeared across the front. He isn’t sure whether the blood is his or Alastair’s but either way, he doesn’t want to wear it now.
There’s still dried blood crusted under his fingernails and he tries to push away the memory of Alastair’s screams while he was bound to the devil’s trap and at Dean’s mercy. Tries not to think about how he’d enjoyed it. Part of him still can’t believe that the demon who’d spent so many years in hell tearing him apart only to put him back together and start again—who eventually taught him his intricate methods of torturing souls in hell—is dead.
When the door opens Dean pushes away from his spot against the frame and smiles—the one he gives Sammy when he wants to convince him that everything’s okay.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Sam asks, pulling the door open wider. There’s a frantic note to the surprise in his voice that raises it a few octaves. He looks Dean over and his eyebrows pull down in confusion as he notices the lack of cuts and bruises that had covered his brother just an hour ago.
Dean holds out his arms to present his newly healed body.
“Tada! Cas healed me.”
Sam’s head jerks back in surprise, his eyebrows still furrowed. “What? He told me he couldn’t heal you.”
Dropping his hands, Dean shrugs, “Yeah, he wasn’t supposed to.” He pushes past Sammy into the room. Immediately, he spots his watch and amulet on top of the dresser and makes a beeline for them, throwing his bloody shirt by his duffle at the end of his bed.
Sam scoffs and closes the door. Dean slips the amulet over his head and lets it rest where it belongs against his chest.
“So what,” Sam asks, clearly annoyed, “when I ask him to heal you he can’t, but suddenly when you ask he can?”
As he snaps his watch into place, Dean rolls his eyes even though he’s facing away from Sammy and his brother can’t see it.
“I didn’t ask,” Dean says and at this Sam scoffs again, this time even louder than before.
“Man,” Sam shakes his head and sighs, “I can think of a few times that would have been a nice trick to have up our sleeves.” Dean hears him move to sit on the end of the bed and he can just picture him sitting there with a stick up his ass.
Dean turns to face Sam again and raises his eyebrows, a question in the gesture.
“I mean the most obvious thing that comes to mind is a few years ago when you were dying. When I took you to that so-called ‘Faith Healer’.” While Sam just rolls his eyes at the phrase Dean scowls at the memory. It’s one he tries not to think about too often. Not only had a man died in Dean’s place, but then they’d had to stop that girl who’d actually deserved to be saved from being healed too.
“Yeah, I guess,” he mumbles. His mind turns that memory over and over in his head, all the moments of that week blurring and crashing together. He doesn’t want to look too closely at any of them. It’s just another entry on the ever-growing list of times he was saved when he shouldn’t have been.
“No, I’m serious, Dean. I spent two days thinking you were going to die. Do you know what I would have given to have some angel come down and just magically heal you?”
Dean doesn’t want to hear about what Sam would have given, but he doesn’t tell him that. He’s too busy ruminating on Castiel’s words from earlier. We were too late. It’s fate. You have to stop it. It’s all still echoing in his head.
Dean glances over at Sammy, and he can see that he’s not going to let this drop.
“Look, he said he’s only supposed to do it when Heaven commands it, or whatever. And they didn’t command it then, okay? You saved me, and it all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”
For them anyway.
“Yeah, Dean, but like you said—they didn’t command it today either, did they? Sounds to me like the rules don’t always apply when it’s you.”
Dean bites the side of his cheek. He wants to argue, but he’s not sure he has any room to. He started the goddamned apocalypse and the stupid angels still saved him from hell. Cas still healed him today, even though he’d failed with Alastair. Even after he told him that he can’t be what they need him to be. The righteous man who begins it is the only one who can finish it. They don’t even realize that they’ve got it all wrong. Dean could never be the righteous man, the one who’s strong enough to defeat Lucifer. Sure, he’s saved a few people over the years, but he can’t actually save the whole world.
No, he’s just the one who’s damned it.
Rather than admitting all of that to Sammy, he instead opts for: “Yeah, well, if I ever understood what those dicks were thinking, all of our lives would be a lot easier.”
Dean moves to sit on the other bed and Sam closes his eyes and rolls his neck from one side to the other in frustration.
“Yeah, I guess,” he concedes, “I just don’t understand—if they can just heal people like that, why don't they do it more often? Just think of all the good they could do, Dean.” Sammy is so sincere, so righteously angry, so naive. Not for the first time, Dean wonders if the angels didn’t pick the wrong brother.
“Sammy, you’re forgetting the most important point here. They’re dicks. They don’t heal people because they’re all heavenly assholes.” Except for Cas, a traitorous voice whispers in his head.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Dean has the idea a few days later.
They’re still staying at a motel in Pennsylvania, someplace that Sam had checked into after he’d figured out where the angels had taken Dean. It’s one of those times they often have between hunts when Dean feels restless like he should be somewhere else, doing something more important. But for once, there’s nothing else to do, so he just sits around the motel room watching TV until it’s late enough to head over to the bar across the street to drink some stale beer and hustle some pool.
So, of course, there’s plenty of time for him to spend with his thoughts spiraling. He hasn’t yet admitted to Sammy what Cas told him in the hospital. Dean knows he needs to, but he just can’t imagine saying the words out loud to anyone. How is he supposed to tell his little brother that the seals are breaking left and right, the demons are all working together to raise Lucifer, and all of it is his fault? But that it’s all just fine because he’s going to be the knight in shining armor in the end? He’s going to save friggin’ the world. How? He doesn’t have a clue, but Cas has faith in him, so it’s gotta be true, right?
And, when he’s trying not to think about the apocalypse, he’s thinking about what Sammy said instead—about how it would have been nice to have had the angel’s healing mojo in the past. But when it comes down to it, it’s not them he wishes they’d had the angels around to save. It’s everyone else—all of the people they hadn’t been able to save. Or worse, the ones that they’d damned.
In particular, he can’t stop thinking about Layla. The girl who’d had more faith than Dean could ever dream of. He was chosen to be healed when she had deserved it so much more. Before the other night, he hadn’t thought about her in years. He’s been too much of a coward to look her up because he knows what he’ll find. She’d told him she only had six months, and that time was up long ago. There’s no way she’s still around to save now.
But angels can do a hell of a lot more than just heal people. They can travel back in time too.
Dean hasn’t done this before and besides feeling stupid—which he’d expected—he’s surprised to also find himself a little bit nervous. He waits until late that night when Sam’s asleep, and then he slips out the motel door into the parking lot, lit only by the fluorescent motel lights.
He walks all the way over to Baby and leans against her. How the hell does a prayer even work? Does he just start thinking it at Cas? Does he say it out loud? Can Cas even hear prayers? Dean has no idea, but to be safe he decides to say it out loud and to start by speaking directly to Cas.
“Cas, uh, can you hear me?” he asks and then waits for a beat, then two before letting out a huff of air that isn’t quite a laugh. This is stupid, he feels stupid.
Already he’s close to giving up, close to turning around, going back into the motel room, and pretending like this never happened. But he isn’t doing this for himself, not really. He thinks of Layla and closes his eyes tight.
“I’m praying, okay. I—I need to talk to you. I need your help with something.”
Slowly, Dean opens one eye. Then the other. He’s still alone, and he’s starting to get cold.
“Come on,” he says, letting his head fall back so he can look up into the night sky. It’s a crisp but cloudy night, so he can’t see any stars or even the moon.
“Please,” he says, and it feels like begging.
Just as he’s about to give up, he hears the distinct ruffle of wings that he’s come to associate with the arrival of an angel and tenses up in anticipation. Dean pulls his gaze from the sky, but no one stands in front of him.
“Prayer is a sign of faith.”
Dean spins around, startled at the sound of Castiel’s deep, gravelly voice from behind him.
He wonders if Cas means to imply that Dean has faith in him. There’s certainly no other angel he’d be caught dead praying to.
Dean holds a hand to his chest, trying to slow his racing heart. Telling himself it’s just the surprise that set it off—and absolutely not anything else.
“Jesus, Cas, do you always have to sneak up on me like that? One of these days, you’re gonna give me a heart attack.”
Cas doesn’t respond, only tilts his head slightly in that way he does when Dean has done or said something that he doesn’t understand. It strikes Dean that he’s starting to understand the angel just by watching him. That he’s starting to feel like he knows what he’s thinking, without having to be told. But, he hardly even knows the guy, so how could that be true?
They both just stand there looking at one another for a few seconds, the chirp of a cricket and the faint buzz from a vending machine the only sounds that Dean hears. In this moment, somehow Cas looks more human than Dean can ever remember him looking before. Something about it sends a spark ricocheting through his stomach.
Castiel breaks the silence, “I came because you called for me, Dean. You said you needed my help?”
Dean shakes his head and squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. He’s not sure what that feeling was but he brushes it aside. Get it together Winchester.
“Yeah, um, I—I wanted to see if you could—if you would—do something for me.” Dean scrubs a hand over his face. Though he’s still uneasy at being in the presence of an angel—even if it is just Cas—at least some part of his nervousness now stems from the fact that he’s a little bit afraid that what he’s about to ask is going to piss the angel off.
Cas stands statuesquely still in that eerie way that he often does. It always reminds Dean that the man in front of him isn’t a man at all, but something cosmic—something other.
But then, he squints his eyes—seemingly confused—and Dean relaxes just a fraction. He feels laughter at the sight that Cas makes bubbling in his stomach but pushes it down. He can’t imagine what he could be confused by, Dean hasn’t even asked for anything yet.
Dean takes a deep breath. It’s now or never, he guesses.
“You know how you healed me last week after the fight with Alastair?”
Castiel doesn’t answer, but he nods and somehow finds a way to squint a little more.
“Is that, maybe, something you could do for someone else?” It’s almost comical, the way Cas looks like he’s trying to work through a puzzle in his head.
Dean waits. He needs to gauge Cas’s answer to this before he goes any further.
In the lingering moments it takes him to respond, Dean fidgets, looking down at his feet.
“Can I?” Cas finally answers. “Yes, I can heal almost anything. Any natural human injury or illness at least. There are likely some supernatural curses or ailments that I could not heal.”
“So, cancer, then,” Dean looks up from his shoes into the deep blue of Cas’s eyes and asks, “could you cure someone’s cancer?”
“Yes, Dean, I can cure someone of their cancer.” Dean can tell that Cas is still trying to figure out what he’s getting at, why he’s asking these questions.
“Okay then, how about this. Would you? Would you heal someone’s cancer?”
Cas opens his mouth to answer but then he hesitates.
“Dean, I don’t understand—”
“For me Cas, if I asked you to heal someone for me, would you do it?”
Dean is looking at him like all of his hope has been stuffed into the question he’s just asked. But, still, Castiel doesn’t understand.
“Dean,” he pauses and raises his eyes to meet Dean’s.
“I am only supposed to heal humans when Heaven has commanded it,” he finally answers. As soon as the words have left his mouth, disappointment etches itself into Dean’s face. It pulls his eyebrows down, darkens his eyes, tugs his lips into a frown. Castiel doesn’t like it. He doesn’t want his words to do that.
“But, Cas, you just did it last week. You said that you weren’t supposed to heal me, but then you did anyway,” Dean points out, his words tinted with just a small shred of remaining hope.
After healing Dean, Castiel had awaited punishment from his superiors for his disobedience. But days passed and it never came. As far as he could tell, Heaven hadn’t even noticed what he’d done.
“Well, yes,” Castiel answers, his words measured, “but I wasn’t supposed to. And I could have been punished for doing so.”
“But you weren’t, right?” Dean asks.
Castiel tilts his head and watches the man across from him for a moment. Dean sounds like he hadn’t thought about that possibility until now.
“No, I’m not sure that Heaven noticed what I did this time, but if they had, I would have been punished.” He’s sure of it.
Dean’s jaw tightens. He opens his mouth to say something but stops before any words have left his lips. He pauses, eyes narrowing, and then starts again.
“So let me get this straight. You guys have all that power right at your fingertips, but if you use it to do something good for someone, Heaven’s gonna get pissed at you for it? That’s bullshit, Cas.” Dean sounds angry, but Castiel’s not sure whether he’s angry about the realization, or with him. He doesn’t think it’s him, but he’s never sure. When talking to Dean, Castiel often has trouble understanding so much of what he says. And that’s not even taking into consideration all the things he doesn’t say but somehow expects Castiel to know. There are so many human intricacies that he just doesn’t understand.
“Dean,” Castiel asks, hoping to get some clarity, “what did you call me here for?”
“Cas, I want—no, I need you to do a favor for me. I need you to heal someone for me.” Dean levels the full weight of his stare at Castiel and he feels every ounce of it.
“Who?” Castiel asks.
“Well, it’s sorta complicated,” Dean pauses, purses his lips. “It’s a girl I met three years ago. Her name was Layla. She had a brain tumor.” Something about the soft way he says her name makes Castiel’s stomach twist but—yet again—he’s not sure what the feeling is. All the millions of years he’s been alive and he can’t understand even the simplest of feelings that he’s begun experiencing since meeting Dean.
But there isn’t time to dwell on that now—so instead, he asks, “and you want to find her and have me heal her of this tumor?”
“Well, yes, but—” Dean stops, looks down at the ground again, and says, “she’s dead by now, I’m sure of it. When I met her, she told me that she only had, like, a few months left.”
Castiel pauses, beginning to understand now where this is going and why Dean has been so unsure in asking.
“So, we would need to go back 3 years to heal her,” he finishes and chooses that moment to finally look up at Castiel who’s struck, not for the first time, by the pure unrelenting emotion in his green eyes.
“Dean, I am not allowed to heal people without explicit permission to do so. I’m certainly not allowed to go back in time to heal someone who has already died.”
Dean’s shoulders drop in disappointment. Castiel feels something drop inside of himself as well.
But, he thinks, if his previous indiscretion wasn’t punished by Heaven, possibly wasn’t even noticed, then perhaps he could—
“It’s okay Cas, I understand.”
Castiel watches Dean rub the back of his neck with one hand. He looks uncomfortable, like he wishes he hadn’t asked, hadn’t prayed to Castiel at all. It makes Castiel want desperately to take back his answer. To find a way to make it work.
“Well,” Dean says. He lets out a long breath and begins to turn as if to leave.
Watching Dean retreat, Castiel feels something clench inside of himself.
“Wait.”
Dean freezes, eyes darting from where he’d been looking toward the motel and back to Castiel’s, searching for something in his face.
Castiel wonders what the punishment for this disobedience would be. He’s never been in trouble with Heaven before, but he’s seen others punished for their disobedience. He knows that somewhere there is a prison for those who have garnered Heaven’s wrath. And of course, who could forget the most famous disobedient angel, Lucifer, cast out of Heaven by God himself.
Surely nothing Castiel could do for Dean would warrant that severe of a punishment. In fact, Castiel was tasked with watching over the righteous man and assisting him in any way to stop Hell from breaking the Seals. If doing as Dean has asked helps him focus on stopping the breaking of the Seals, then perhaps it would even please Heaven.
But Castiel would need to be very careful. The past is a tricky thing, so many strands all tied together so precisely. Even the smallest move could unravel it all.
Dean watches Castiel’s face as he considers, his eyes moving quickly back and forth over his features. Whatever he sees must please him because the corners of his mouth have turned up now into a smile. He looks hopeful, Castiel thinks, and a warmth spreads through his chest at the sight.
“If we are to do this, we will need to be very careful, Dean. We must not do anything that will change your own future. And under no circumstances can you interact with your past self at all.”
Dean is nodding now and smiling so fully that Castiel can see most of his teeth and how his tongue pokes out ever so slightly from behind them. The look on Dean’s face brightens his eyes and wrinkles the skin at the sides of them so deeply. He has never seen this smile from Dean before, so genuine in its joy and so bright that it lights Castiel up too.
He is hit by the unnerving realization that he would likely do anything just to make Dean smile like this again.