Archive of Our Own

A concerto: Rachmaninoff, tinny at the edges. 

Lossy static, vinyl crackle. Radio hiss. 

High-pitched tinnitus ring.

—One hundred million angels singin’... multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum... voices calling voices crying, some are born and some are dying—

Static resolves into scattered applause. Bob Barker urges a contestant to come on down. Distortion snaps, then fuzzes.

The Rachmaninoff crescendos in a soaring rise of horns. 

Canned laughter blurts out, pigeons scared up off railroad trestles. Flitter, flutter, roo, and a falcon stabs down outstretched in geometric execution. Feathers fly. 

—conflict broke out today in—

—Bears have poor eyesight, but their sense of smell is acute, and the male has detected intruders—

—They’re on the turn and Secretariat is blazing along—

Piano notes fall gently, spring rain pittering through blossoms. A young woman strokes the keys in communion with skill and memory, her insides spilling so controlled, so huge, into an instrument tuned to careful, meticulous resonance. Emotional complexity communicated without one single spoken word.

—he is moving like a tremendous machine—twenty-five lengths in front—

Siphoned to singular focus, the Rachmaninoff is, in fact, very beautiful.

So many things are very beautiful. And other things, sometimes the same things, are unspeakably ugly. 

Satellites whirl through space detritus and the grainy fictions of millions of lives carry on below. Daytime talk television presides over a kingdom of humiliation. Interpersonal catastrophe, the grand spectacle. 

Sure, people love a winner, but everyone cranes their neck at the car crash.

You’ve been in a car crash. It hurt. There was nobody there to stare at you except a doomed girl who’d answered yes to the wrong question.  

When the angel wearing her body told you they built the Grand Canyon, you should’ve known they were a liar. Have you always been so stupid? Lately, you think, yes. Probably. Or it might be all the holes Naomi drilled in your head. 

Blame being drained of infinity. Graceless. Newly, wetly human, noticing for the first time the way the fabric of your constant coat chafes your neck. Blame distraction. Crushing guilt. Here you find yourself again, the architect of your own suffering and the misery of thousands of others besides. Your gift, so readily given. Hallelujah! 

You should’ve known that angel was a liar because you watched the first fish crawl fin by fin out of the primordial soup to begin its evolutionary ascension. The apsides of history cannot exist without an orbital arc of events. The story is not the truth, but one grain of sand is still sand. Much must die. Nothing is ever lost. This is a hungry universe. Earth howls along at velocity, howls around its own axis; you’ve surfed the wake of that gravity, slingshotting through interstellar clusters. The tug of spacetime is an intimate riffling of the wings, atoms exchanged and folded, telescoping. You’ve curled on top of the moon and stared across the eons.

You know the Grand Canyon was formed by the movement of tectonic plates, and the downward flow of the Colorado river. 

God spun the physics into motion. God is the wave, not the water. God is a bit of an asshole, you’ve decided, and he’s nowhere to be found. Not even on flatbread.

You’ve lost the Rachmaninoff. Or it finished, and you missed the end. 

—Everything that we measure is within the Universe, and we see no edge or boundary or center of expansion. Thus the Universe is not expanding into anything that we can see, and this is not a profitable thing to think about—

—the latest news and traffic, on the hour every hour—

Human limitations are, in their way, sort of beguiling, when you’re not immobilized by them like a bagged swan. 

Your co-opted power ebbs, burning away, oil in an old lamp. For now, there’s enough fuel to carry the light, but...

—I took the money I... spiked your drink, you miss too much these days if you stop to think, you led me on with those innocent eyes, you know I love the element of surprise—

How far it will take you remains to be seen. 

You better find ways to explain how you wound up at this juncture between yourself and the man you were reduced to and the angel you aren’t, anymore, not really. You better try. 

If only so you might remember next time how easily you’ve been fooled before. 

“Cas?” Dean waved the backs of his scarred knuckles in front of Castiel’s face. “You with me?”

“Yes.” Primarily. Bits and pieces. What was left. A failure with failing grace in a dirty trench coat. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?”

“TV ate a kid.”

In the beginning, Dean’s colourful phrasing had confounded him. “Television sets are hardly carnivorous.”

“Tch. Tell that to Carol Anne.” 

“Is that the child in question?”

“Dude, c’mon. Didn’t Metatron shove Poltergeist up in your dome when he did his whole...” Dean gestured at his head. “IMDB data transfer?”

Metatron, for all his pathetic, power-grasping machinations, did give Castiel one gift: retroactive contextual understanding of every joke Dean had ever made in his presence. Regrettably, the memories were damaged; a side effect of the dying, and the reprogramming, and the slippery horror of his confinement to mammalian thresholds. He existed now in a partial state, not quite restored. Holes. Gaps. Cracks. Incomplete qualia. Regions of self wiped blank. 

The stories, however...

Poltergeist. Nineteen-eighty-two, horror, known for its practical effects; memorable also for the spate of fatal bad luck that beset four of the cast members in the years afterward, including the little girl who played the aforementioned Carol Anne. 

“Ah,” said Cas, nodding. “They’re heee-re.”

The grin on Dean’s face crinkled his eyes, and something hot knifed into Castiel’s belly, cauterizing as it sliced.

Castiel had defied God for that face. He will again. 

Dean shoved a newspaper clipping across the seat. “Cody Carpenter. Last known whereabouts, family basement TV flambé. Nobody saw anything. No sign of the kid at the bus depot, no stolen cars, and her cellphone stopped pinging ‘round same time the TV went haywire. I’m thinking? Body-snatched by angels. Maybe Metatron has some new recruitment method. Dude’s all juiced on the word of God, right?”

Metatron’s betrayal escalating. Festering. 

Castiel picked up the generic high school photo of a young woman with a soft face, eyes deep and doe-like. Broad-shouldered, awkward in the way teenagers tended to be: unfinished, limbs outsized. “...Maybe. It seems like a long way to go for a vessel, unless she’s somehow exceptional.”

Dean only shrugged. “Don’t know jack about squat when it comes to the kid. All I can think is... Metatron’s obsessed with nerd shit. Like—like literary devices, or whatever. He doesn’t care about easy. He cares about optics. Nabbing people through their TV screens? Tell me that little geek wouldn’t love that.”

He would, in fact, love that. Weaponizing the story. Honeying the telling of lies. Flair and form employed to malevolent artifice, like he’d done to Castiel with that half-baked illusory encounter with Gabriel. “It’s a fair supposition,” Castiel allowed. 

A wildly unlikely one, but he’d wanted to come, to see Dean, and they’ve travelled further for less.

Prior to undertaking this journey, they’d agreed that a serious dearth of leads had negatively impacted morale. Shared frustration culminated on a phone call, and soon afterward Castiel found himself seated shotgun at Dean’s elbow, hours into a cross-state trek to investigate a paper-thin lead.

Also at Dean’s elbow, nestled in the crook: the Mark of Cain. 

His friend had gone and done another stupid thing while Castiel was off working to address the fallout of his own stupid things. Their shared curse. 

Whatever crosses they bore, they were brothers in arms. That was a love easily understood. Foxhole camaraderie: soldiers tasked with carrying out atrocities everyone would prefer did not occur, four bloodied hands between them. 

It felt good to be by Dean’s side, again. It always did. Even if all they were doing was passing a shovel back and forth, digging, digging. These perpetual graves would hold their corpses—or someone else’s—soon enough. 

Painful to think he’d left Dean in the earth, in the dark, in Pontiac, all those years ago. The righteous man emerging from an impact crater, writhing free reborn, a living cog in the grand design striding bowlegged down an abandoned road, sweating in the sun.  

So much heavenly machinery hung over them still, a gallery of swinging blades descending, inexorable. 

“Hell, Cas, I dunno,” Dean finally said. “We’ve been chasing our tails on this for weeks, and... bupkiss. So, I figure, worst case scenario... we find a missing kid.”

Castiel squinted. “Don’t you mean best case scenario?”

Mouth ajar, Dean paused, then replied, “Not if she had a good reason to run.”

Which... merited consideration. 

The local police department filled the windshield, housed in an unremarkable brown building. 

“You got your badge?” Dean asked, adjusting Castiel’s tie.

Castiel produced his ID. “Special agent Jepsen, at your service.” He remembered to orient it correctly before Dean’s cheeks dimpled in irritation. Clumsy, for him, these forged tokens of authority. Humans placed so much trust in symbols; so many sets of rules, most of them little more than a yellow line painted on asphalt or a revered agreement on what constituted right versus left. 

“Alright, buddy. Go time.”

The front desk employee looked curious about an FBI presence but too busy to indulge any questions. “Sheriff’s left for the day,” they said, covering the mouthpiece of an old phone. “You guys should probably talk to Daniels.” The employee shoved a door open and gestured them through to a mustachioed, barrel chested gentleman bent over a banker’s box, who straightened out and shook their hands as they introduced themselves.

“Can’t say we were expecting you,” the detective said.

“Carpenter case,” Dean explained. “That MO’s been dogging us. You’ve probably seen it, too. Nation-wide disappearances, people acting strange, walking out on their families, zero warning.”

“Yeah. Kind of an epidemic of that lately,” Daniels remarked.

Castiel’s fault, every person possessed and subsequently disappeared. Ripped from their lives much like the angels he’d sent spiralling from heaven, doors welded shut behind them. 

“What’s your thinking?” Dean asked the detective. “Carpenter another one for the list?”

Daniels deflated. “Lemme tell you what I do know.”

It wasn’t much, unfortunately. Cody Carpenter, sixteen years old, played trumpet in marching band, vanished, no witnesses, from her basement at the same time an old CRT television seemingly caught fire without apparent cause. 

“Firefighters said it was the damndest thing,” Daniels said. “Hugely localized. Didn’t even scorch the ceiling.”

“So,” Dean jumped in, “old TV reenacts Backdraft, everybody freaks, kid slips off into the night?”

Daniels shrugged. Nothing about his posture suggested he found the evidence for that scenario compelling. “I dunno. No sign on anybody’s home security cameras. Nobody saw her. Whole neighbourhood got stirred up by the fire trucks and it wasn’t that late. Somebody should’ve seen something. A neighbour, a bus driver... hell, the gas-n-sip clerk on the road outta town. It don’t make any sense.” 

Castiel nodded. He’d done his fair share of beholding the human condition at the gas-n-sip: mundanity, misery, even occasional pure effusive joy when a stoned teenager discovered they had blue-flavored slurpees. 

“Anyway, fellas, you won’t catch me complaining about more eyes on this one.” He looked away from them, to his desk. Castiel followed the glance and saw a photograph of the same man who now stood in front of them, several years younger, arms around two gappy-toothed little girls who shared his nose and chin. “I just really hope she’s okay,” he said. “Cody’s a sweet kid. Quiet nerdy type, not a mean bone in her body. My youngest knows her, ‘cause of marching band.”

“Yeah, that’s... All good info,” Dean sympathized, voice rumbly and softened. “Hopefully it’s just kid stuff. We, uh, would like to talk to the family, if possible?” 

The detective’s mustache bristled as he sighed. He grabbed a pad of paper and scrawled down an address. “Watch your step, agents. Her dad... Well. You’ll see.”

Dean’s attention locked to the man’s face. “Problems at home?”

“Not exactly, but... Big sister was prom queen and valedictorian. Mr. Carpenter works in finance. Step-mother is probably the top realtor in the county. They’re pretty invested in presenting a certain image,” Daniels concluded. 

Something annoyed and knowing pinched the corners of Dean’s mouth. “Great,” he said, eyebrows bouncing sarcastically. “This’ll be fun. Appreciate the heads up.”

Daniels pressed his lips in agreement.  

“Thank you for your time, detective,” Castiel said, because he felt like humans found him peculiar when he stayed too silent. 

Back in the parking lot, the Impala’s engine was still warm; cooling metal ticking. Castiel laid a hand on the hood as he passed by, like he might pat a horse. The Impala had been resurrected anew, over and again, not by any divine power, but by Dean Winchester’s steadfast refusal to abandon lost causes. Willful to the point of self-harm. 

Their destination awaited on the far end of town, the current silence they occupied indicating they’d both hoped the detective might have more to offer them. 

Dean’s hands hung on the wheel with the familiarity of thousands of hours. The firm wedge of his stubbled cheek above boxy shoulder contained set, quiet resolve. In contrast, the line of his ear rounded, perfect pink, down to the shorn hairs on his nape. 

It was for the best that Dean kept his hair short, or Castiel would wonder what it could feel like to run his fingers through it; to tuck it behind that perfect ear. As a human, he had wondered. 

Thankfully, Dean was too close cropped. A walking practicality. 

He’d always been disciplined, counter to his father’s judgement and the influence John had on Sam’s inherited biases. Sam acted as though Dean was some kind of reckless bon-vivant with no self-control; a projection, perhaps, considering his own forays into addiction and the making of horrible decisions. 

An animal who does what must be done still needs to be fed. Animals, Castiel knew more intimately than he’d ever cared to find out, had needs. Non-negotiable.

The ringing in his ears intensified. It was the Mark, singing across the ether in search of its accompanying jawbone. Cain’s bestowal radiated an uncomfortable frequency, giving Castiel what could best be described as a headache.

The first blade remained in Kansas, with Sam. Lacking the weapon, Dean was a dog without a bone: he’d been fidgeting more than usual. 

The brothers had fought—were still fighting, Castiel knew without asking—their continued fractious standoff written in the length of Dean’s stubble, and his glower. Most pointed, of course, was Sam’s absence, even if he had lost some blood on a recent case and needed rest. 

Sam was the shape the well-worn passenger seat upholstery was molded to hold, after all the long years. Castiel, though he liked the spot, knew himself as an interloper. He’d gotten comfortable in the back seat, exchanging glances with Dean in the rearview. 

They were wrongfooted, right now, like this. He had missed his friend, and he wanted his companionship, but strangeness persisted, ground looped. 

They don’t talk about it. 

You would like to talk about it. You can pretend with him, but not yourself.

Neither one of you is any stranger to regret, or apology. You do talk, sometimes, in ways you cannot talk to anybody else. He sees you. The way he looks at you forces you to see yourself. 

When the sun slants through the Impala’s window and he glows like a rodeo cowboy, freckled and crooked-grinned, you think you’d like to be the last warm orange rays of evening touching his cheek.

You think he might be your best friend.

You think, maybe, you might also be his. 

—it’s basically a humongous pyramid scheme...’ [inaudible] ‘I apologize if it’s your religion and you’re offended right now—’ ‘I don’t think they’d listen to this.’ ‘I don’t want you to be mad at me, but... you’re in a cult, call your dad, or someone that can help you—

This world is built on fragments of truths. Whole ones are hunted for sport. 

Slow grit guitar thrums alongside a haunted female vocal. Brash, heavy bass grinds as a different woman screams out lyrics. Another frequency is devoted to 90s grunge. 

Static fuzzes loud and unexpected, as if caught between channels. It makes you wince. The overlap is nothing you’re not used to. Earth is noise. An agonized beacon of unanswered prayers, cries for help that will never come. In recent times, technology has hyper-enhanced the planet’s low existential shriek to a screaming cacophony. 

The first radio broadcasts delighted you, much like the first songs around bonfires; the first drums.

The first nuclear detonation made you retch. Things have steeply declined, since then. Constant concussive pummeling from sources too numerous to list is the earthly reality for any angel. Across the centuries, you’ve learned to finetune your reception. 

Lately, the signals are scrambled. 

On a public network, an old Cajun chef demonstrates how to spatchcock a chicken. 

A blip, and a local news station personality walks viewers through the weather forecast. “We can look forward to clear skies overnight, but have your boots ready for rain in the morning.” 

This weatherman, he’s wrong, but you have to admire the trying. The science of it, and the instrumentation. The radar and the wavelengths and the well-intentioned reliance on process instead of augury. 

Augury baffled you. A crow makes a decision, and human beings modify a system of governance based on the morning habits of a single corvid. Corvids, infamously, have warped senses of humor. No wonder Rome fell. Certainly, divination centered on the behaviour of scavengers is perfectly logical if what you wish to divine is the location of something dead. Otherwise? Yet another human foray into the absurd. 

So easy to confuse appetite for meaning with an appetite for truth, and even more ways to peddle one thing as the other. You’ve seen it, throughout time immemorial. An inconvenient woman is accused of witchcraft, and the witchfinder earns their coin. If she’s innocent, she burns, and if she is a witch, she’ll be driven to find darker purposes for her powers. 

Some people, more than you think would admit, long to watch the life leave the body of someone they’ve convinced themselves deserves killing. 

Warriors—like you, like Dean—kill without such consideration. A warrior trains because every fight is improvised, but the deaths you dole are mathematical. Deserve or undeserve, lit dynamite is a long fuse, and an explosion. Chemistry. A sledgehammer, the weight of it through space, describes an arc and collides, but it does not choose. It obeys kinematics. Velocity and impact. 

That car crash really did hurt. The interior of the car you’re in now is companionably quiet—ambient aerial broadcasts aside—though you think maybe Dean should consider installing shoulder belts. You understand the utility of physical pain. Stop, says a body, we’re damaged, we cannot go on like this. 

It’s hateful, that tether to fragility. It makes you afraid. 

Dean has talked about that, before. The fear, and the pain, and the place where determination breaks against insurmountable obstacles. Dean’s been knocked to the ground more times than a sunsetting prize fighter, and every time, defeated, violated, injured, and terrified, he gets back up. There are parts of him that hurt intractably. His knees bother him. Castiel uses a little of his finite grace to bolster the menisci, when he can spare it.  

—but if you close your eyes, does it almost feel like you’ve been here before—

Humans seem to derive perverse pleasure from saturating the airwaves with a few particular compositions until everyone is driven half crazy when they hear the opening bars. Earworms, Dean calls them, which conjures horrid imagery. Manifest memetic parasites aren’t a problem in this dimension yet, that you’re aware of, which is one small mercy. 

Something to do with probability, perhaps. Patterns. History unfolds, and someone bakes a loaf of bread. 

There’s a tornado warning in Nebraska. Two women in cheap dress-suits smile fake smiles and sell cubic zirconia tennis bracelets for three easy payments of twenty-nine ninety-nine. Satellite signals burble through nearby electronics, layer upon layer, crowding your mind.

Suddenly, it all goes silent. You blink, glancing around the Impala, confounded, and then an image rips through your mind with the force of a toppled redwood.

Two women drive through the desert in a turquoise 1966 Thunderbird. 

White hot shock lances through you, spine to sternum.

“Ah!” Castiel yelped, hearing Dean grunt beside him.

Blinding light flashed through the windshield, accentuated by a hard, deep crack. 

“Dean, stop!”

Time dilated. Then, a concussive thud traveled through the rubber of Baby’s tires, interrupted as Dean slammed the brakes. 

Together, they collected themselves and peered over the dashboard. 

“What in the deep fried hell,” Dean muttered.

Several meters ahead, a downed powerline sparked and writhed, pinned beneath a huge tree branch. The cabling thrashed violently; an earthworm stranded on pavement. They shared a glance, and Dean reached for his door handle.

Castiel grasped his sleeve. “Wait.” He opened his own door and lowered a palm to the earth. Current met him there. “It’s not safe.”

“Ground’s hot?”

“Yes.”

The downed wire hissed and popped, buzzed, sent out thin plumes of smoke. 

“This seem, uh... weird to you at all?” Dean mused.

“Yeah.”

“...Metatron weird?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Castiel braced his frequencies and got out of the car. His grace was sufficient for a task like this. He advanced and took hold of the wire, dampening the current, then redirecting it, before letting the cable fall to the dirt. Fire extinguished, he turned and nodded at Dean.

Cottony ozone smothered the atmosphere. No storm. Hollow, sparse clouds. Nor was there any evidence of angels; no spells, symbols, or warding.

Face scrunched, Dean scanned the sky. When he examined the tree, he whistled. “Wow. Sheared that sucker clean off. Looks like a lightning strike, but...”

Not one of natural origin. Targeted? Castiel frowned. “This doesn’t feel coincidental.”

Still looking up, Dean tongued his lip. “Nope.”

Something fluttered past Castiel’s shoe. Rustling paper. He bent to collect it. Dean’s body heat drew near as they both scrutinized the scrap.  

A page, heavily charred, from... 

“I think this was a Carver Edlund book,” Castiel said. 

“What?” Dean grabbed at it. “Lemme see.”

Castiel surrendered the page and picked up another. And another. Several more. Both of them gathered what they could as a breeze scattered much of it into the crabgrass along the side of the road.

When Castiel found the cover, his hackles shot up. In shock, he shoved it into his pocket before Dean noticed his prize. 

Most of the pages were damaged beyond legibility. Castiel watched Dean squint, mouth moving, as he silently scrutinized the text. “This is... I mean. Read that,” Dean finally said, thrusting the stack of crispy papers into his hands. 

What the top page described struck an eerie chord:

The two walk the shoulder of the road in confusion, secrets pocketed, neither sure what to say. Above them, the powerlines hang heavy, carrying on toward distant horizons.

“This book... hasn’t happened yet,” Castiel realized. “It’s happening now.” 

Glancing around with heavy suspicion, Dean nodded in agreement. “Yeah. Can’t say I’m loving the narration. Let’s shake a leg.” His warmth receded, away to the car.

Curiouser and curiouser. Metatron could very well be behind this. To what purpose, Castiel preferred not to speculate. Crown story king, and the scribe becomes god?

If it was a joke, it was a cruel one. The cover he’d ferreted into his coat pocket...

Almost always, the Supernatural covers depicted the brothers Winchester as comic book caricatures of masculinity; composed and heroic. Sometimes shirtless, smooth-skinned, with defined abdominals. 

Not this one. This one featured a semi-realistic illustration of Dean—the real Dean, careworn and lovely, thick with useful muscle—cradling Castiel’s jaw as they stared into one another’s eyes, mere millimeters of space between them. Above that, the title: The Hunter’s Heart. 

There was no Supernatural novel of that name. 

Whatever the origin, the book represented Castiel’s shame made manifest to goad him. The hollows of his cheeks flushed. Yet another ridiculous fragment from his human stint: loss of control over blood vessel dilation. Egregiously involuntary, like so many emotional and physical reactions, from crying to arousal. Unfair, having glaring embarrassment writ large across his face. It made him want to burrow under the strata of the earth and dissolve, though with his luck he’d be compressed into pink sediment; still blushing, still revealing too much.

He tucked the rest of the pages in his pocket. Inside him, an unresolved hum. Buzzing, as though he’d failed to discharge the voltage he’d channeled to seal off the wire. 

A shower of sparks rained down from the damaged powerlines. The air crackled.

He remembered the barn, in Pontiac. Dean, so fierce, so unsure; on the cusp of shouldering the fate of the world. 

Find somebody else, he’d begged once, weeping in a hospital bed, when they’d barely known one another. Castiel sometimes forgot how young Dean was, but he’d realized it, that night; heard the injured child inside the man. 

“Cas?” Dean called from behind the Impala’s open driver’s side door. “You coming?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

What did the rest of the book contain? What would he do if Dean asked for it back? He wished his face weren’t so hot, and he wished that strange hum would desist. Inside the car, it worsened instead of improved

Circumnavigating the fallen branch, they drove on.

As they progressed, the yards and houses got bigger, and the hedges higher. 

Wealthy suburban neighbourhoods struck him as isolating. So much intentional distance between homes and essential services, everyone locked in their castles holding court over empty rooms. Blocks of uniform lawns, policed of any weed, poisoned to keep insects and animals away. Grass wasn’t even useful to pollinators. So much human behaviour simply made no practical sense. 

Baby’s engine chugged to a stop in front of an architecturally confused house; fairly new, brightly lit, an incongruous meld of design eras. Forgotten scraps of crime scene tape billowed and snapped around the trunk of a young tree near the property line. 

“Yikes. Who ordered the McMansion,” Dean muttered.

A pristine black Mercedes sat in the driveway, business-like in contrast to the silver Porsche coupe visible in the open garage. The front porch boasted a swinging bench flanked by a small ceramic rabbit with a broken ear. Both things felt out of place: too warm and inviting for their surroundings. 

Dean knocked. 

Castiel stared at the rabbit, head tilted. 

“Hey, Cas?” Dean, vying to get his attention, brushed his fingers against Castiel’s wrist.

A painful static shock zapped them both. 

“Ow,” Dean whined, emphatic. “Dammit, get your game face on.” He indicated an approaching shadow behind the door. 

Perplexed by the electricity, Castiel glanced down at his palm, flexing his fingers. Strange. 

When the door opened, it swung wide to reveal a well-groomed middle-aged man in a suit—no tie—on the other side. Already annoyed, he asked, “Can I help you, gentleman?”

Dean flipped his badge open, and Cas mirrored him. 

“Mr. Carpenter?” Dean asked. 

“Yes?”

“Agents Young and Jepsen. We’re here about the disappearance.”

The man squinted at them. “Feds? Either you guys know something I don’t, or you must be having a slow week.” Reluctantly, he stepped aside and allowed them in. 

“Word is, local PD isn’t sure what to do with this one,” Dean said, taking in their surroundings with a casual glance. Castiel possessed acute sensory abilities, but Dean was keen, and experienced. Primed to spot things others missed. 

“No surprises there,” Mr. Carpenter grumbled, leading them through a foyer into a large kitchen. “Local PD is full of the knuckle-dragging burnouts I went to high school with.”

Law enforcement had, historically, been a contentious human issue, but Detective Daniels’ concern seemed genuine and this man’s condescension felt rooted elsewhere, in a place inextricable from class structure.

Dean, too, had caught the tone, his jaw muscles clenched. “Sir, the circumstances of your daughter’s disappearance—”

The man whirled on them. “My daughter,” he spat, “is at Harvard. My son has gone missing.”

“Pardon?” blurted Dean, head cocked, as though he’d misheard. 

“Those bleeding heart morons at the paper. The sheriff gave them bad information, and they just went ahead and ran it.”

“Oh.” Dean’s cheek flinched infinitesimally. “So, the photo, that’s... uh?”

“That is my son, Cody. This girl nonsense, it’s a phase. He’s been hanging around with the weirdo art kids, coming home with painted nails and dyed hair, that sort of queer shit.” 

Dean’s face slammed shut, hardened to diamond, and a rogue wave of rage nearly knocked Castiel into the kitchen island. The tension between The Mark and the far-away blade rang like steel against a whetstone, piano-wire taut. “Okay,” Dean said, cold enough to cut. 

“Before all this, he was a star athlete,” Mr. Carpenter continued. “Best forward on his soccer team. Could have a real girlfriend, a pretty one. Doesn’t have to hang around with a bunch of butch d—”

“All-right, sir,” Dean cut in. “I gotta say, you don’t sound too concerned about your missing son’s wellbeing.”

The man had the audacity to roll his eyes. “Listen. Are you guys parents?”

“No,” said Castiel. His guilt over what befell Claire Novak did not make him her father, and never would. 

“Yes,” Dean said, and it wasn’t a lie. He’d raised Sam, frequently on his own, and that dynamic has set them at odds time and again.

Mr. Carpenter made a broad gesture. “Then you know what it’s like. Rebellious teen attention seeking histrionics. The kid is fine, he’s just a spoiled brat. He’s never gone without anything a day in his life so he has to invent problems for himself. Has no idea how the real world works. Wherever he is, he’s going to learn, and he’s not going to like it. He’ll be back soon enough.”

Castiel sidled closer to Dean, ignoring the razor edges of his seething anger in order to bulwark it. “Are there other family members Cody might be in contact with? Your eldest, maybe?”

“They aren’t close,” the man said. “Ex-wife is dead. My mother is in Florida, but they don’t get along. She’s been telling me for years to send him to one of those wilderness camp programs for juvenile delinquents. Guess I should’ve listened.”

The fury pulsing off Dean bordered on tectonic.

Castiel eased his shoulder in front of Dean’s chest, moving forward and using the bulk of his physical and metaphysical self to pressure Mr. Carpenter into stepping back. “There’s nowhere else you think Cody might go?”

“Look, agents.” Eyes on Castiel, the man withdrew to the other side of the island. “I’ve already told the cops. Wherever my son is, it has something to do with that skulking goth lezbo in the army surplus boots. Go grill her.”

Castiel surreptitiously jutted his elbow into Dean’s abdomen to prevent an assault and possible homicide, though he sympathized with the instinct.

“Could we take a look around the home?” Castiel asked. “We gather there was a strange fire.”

“Christ, that old piece of shit TV,” Mr. Carpenter opined. “I’ve been on him for years to get rid of it, told him I’d buy him a flatscreen—sixty inches—but no. Goddamn thing just about burned down the house. What’s left of it is still in the basement. Bedroom’s down there, too. Help yourselves. Now if you’ll excuse me, I told my wife I’d make dinner.”

Castiel herded a grim-faced Dean neatly toward the basement stairs. 

They descended into a large space. The rec room showed mild smoke damage, though the closed doors had contained the worst of it. As stated by Detective Daniels, the fire had remained localized, counter to Mr. Carpenter’s hyperbole. 

They gave the TV a wide berth while they scanned for EMF, and found none.

The rest of the basement appeared untouched. No hidden symbols, or hex bags, or summoning rituals gone awry. 

Cody’s bedroom occupied the far north portion of the lower level.

Blue-walled, surprisingly bright. A set of French doors overlooked the yard, taking advantage of the property’s natural slope. The doors, Castiel noted, were closed and locked, with an additional interior cylinder deadbolt, fastened.

Nothing was askew; no signs of struggle. Green buffalo check bedspread, Star Wars pillows. On the wall, several posters of female pop stars, though likely not for the reasons Cody’s father assumed. A mirror flanked the desk, its frame jammed with photographs: Cody beside a rangy youth with close-cropped hair and a guileless, crooked smile. In one, they showed off tattoos on their upper arms: rabbits, not identical but stylistically matched. They both wore silver necklaces with arrow pendants. 

“This must be the friend her father dislikes,” he said, and held the tattoo photo toward Dean, who paused his paper-shuffling on the messy desk (deluge of gel pens and notepads, stickers, a laptop) and reached for the photo. 

Brows scrunched, he took a hard, considering look. “Daddy dearest thinks that’s butch?” He huffed. “The kid literally just has short hair. Man, we really are in the friggin’ ‘burbs.” 

Deviance of any sort had no place beside the exactingly sheared hedges in the yard, that much was clear. Anything growing beyond the bounds of rigid expectation would not be tolerated. 

The closet and dresser contained the wardrobe of an average teenager, as well as band regalia, and a little wad of cash. In the bottom drawer, Dean grabbed a leather overnight kit. He unzipped it, and his shoulders drooped. 

“What is it?” Castiel asked. 

Dean held up a box. Transdermal estradiol patches. 

“Yeah,” Dean said, “I don’t think she ran.” He nestled everything where he’d found it and slid the drawer back into place, knees crackling as he rose from his crouch. “All her stuff’s still here. I dunno, Cas, that’s...”

Atypical of a runaway. Worrisome. “It doesn’t bode well.”

Dean sighed. “Let’s take a closer look at that TV.”

Once a thirty-six inch CRT screen, the unit’s frame had been hollowed to a blackened maw. It gaped, ominous, at the center of the basement den. There should have been broken glass on the floor, and the remains of a cathode ray tube, but there was nothing. The gutted husk regarded them like a lazy predator.  

“Mm,” said Dean, shaking his head. “Don’t like that.”

Castiel didn’t either. He sensed...

Radiation. The hum he couldn’t place or shake, simmering inside him. If there were a geiger counter in the room, every swing toward the television would inspire more clicking. Nothing immediately dangerous, merely interesting. Another rogue lightning strike? There was a possibility of gamma ray emission during thunder storms, but a brief pulse, and generally only at altitude. 

Dean wielded the EMF meter again, arm comically extended in order to stay well back from the large ruined device on its stand.

The darkness within the burnt center of the TV represented a paradox. Not shadow, but a lack thereof. Castiel’s pilomotor reflex triggered, the current inside him rising in answer to the field generated by the television.

“Dean.”

“Huh?”

“Be careful. There’s...” Emptiness. Reality’s fabric torn and frayed at the edges. “There’s a void here,” he concluded, unsure how else to describe the phenomenon. Not a portal, as they tended to lead somewhere concrete, nor a wormhole, which was space warped to purpose. 

Blinking, Dean took a few quick steps backward. “Th... There’s a what?”

“It’s...” Some indistinct closet-like nothing space. Maybe a burrow, or a mouth. Castiel produced a tennis ball from his coat pocket.

Dean did a double-take. “Cas, why do you have—”

Castiel tossed the ball at the television set.

It disappeared into inky vacancy. It did not bounce. No cosmic jaws slammed shut. The ball was simply visible one moment and gone the next. 

Dean, who had watched the action wide-eyed, licked his teeth and took another step backward. “Yeah, okay, I really don’t like that.”

Attention focused, Castiel raised a hand, extending his own sensory field. It caught uncomfortably on jagged protrusions, lumpy like the bunched flesh of a stitched wound. Someone, or something, had punched through the dimensional veil and bent it aside, not bothering to properly close it again, and now static emanated from the fissure. 

Unexpectedly warm, the static. Soft white noise. The more closely Castiel listened, the further into him it permeated, until its vibration tickled against the edges of the unidentified frequency under his sternum. Brief, feather-light intermingling. Without warning, it rushed into him and bloomed; wildly pleasurable heat. He drew himself inward with a flinch and enclosed every receptor to limit contact and prevent his face from reddening. 

Agitated, he kept himself looped, all too aware of the TV gently enticing his wavelengths like sunlight on heliotropic flowers. 

Could an angel have done this? Theoretically, yes, especially Metatron, but... why? To what end? And if it wasn’t Metatron, what did the Carver Edlund novel have to do with anything?

He frowned, intently. Provocative sensations put him off balance. To some degree, he could hold himself apart, but if they were to have any chance of understanding this anomaly, he had to keep certain channels open.

Worse still, the radiating energies had a supple, wily cant—discordant, but somehow pleasing—too chaotic to bear much resemblance to heavenly power, too serene to be demonic. More like an animal, or a mountain; a glimpse of something spectacular viewed from a distance. Always the extended invitation: come closer. 

“Do you feel that?” Castiel asked.

Confusion crinkled the corners of Dean’s cheeks, but he cocked his head and concentrated, tension a fine net over his features. “Actually, yeah. Uh, kinda like a... a hum?”

Dean, for better or worse, was not a normal human being, and thus his ability to sense the frequency was not a reliable indicator of how other humans might react. 

“Would you describe it as a sound, or a feeling?” Castiel pressed.

Breath held, the way he did when aiming a weapon—inhale to cessation, pause, slow controlled exhale—Dean kept concentrating. Finally, he said, “Both?”

“Hm.” 

Together, they warily regarded the TV. 

“Okay, so. Carol Anne scenario feeling less and less like a joke,” Dean said.

“This may well be some kind of conduit,” Castiel agreed. “There’s certainly a gap here. The television may be incidental.”

“Like, path of least resistance?”

“In a manner of speaking. Something on the television might have opened the door first.” 

“Buddy Boyle style or more like, there’s a bustle in your hedgerow?”

Frowning, Castiel tilted his head. “Is that a euphemism?”

Cheeks pinched in defeat, Dean blew air through his nose. “Left out the Zeppelin lore, huh? Nerd. I just mean... subliminal messages,” he clarified. “Sleeper codes, that kind of thing.”

“Oh.” That made sense. “Yes, possibly. But... humans will attribute intentionality to nearly anything. A stubbed toe is punishment for a forgotten past transgression. Inanimate objects are anthropomorphized, and can be mistreated. A television show might tell a story that invades the viewer’s subconscious like a virus, or a mutation. Your own obsession with the old west, for example, is—”

“Alright, thanks, I got it. Let’s say it’s a conduit. For... what, exactly?”

Hard to say. “I don’t know. We’re conjecturing, not experimenting.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “You gonna stick your head in there and look around? What if that tennis ball got spaghetti’d into the fifth dimension?”

“Then that tennis ball has more freedom than any known object in the universe.”

Swiping a large palm down his face, Dean huffed and shifted his weight. “This is... so far above our paygrade.” 

“We’re supposed to be getting paid?” Castiel asked, drily. He liked to feign ignorance to see Dean smile. 

It worked, and he did. “Bet you never thought you’d miss those gas-n-sip wages, huh?” he teased. “Seriously, though, can we... Do we just leave it here? ‘Cuz moving it, that... that ain’t gonna happen.”

“No. That would be... difficult.” Or impossible. 

Castiel anchored a present instance of himself to the carpeted floor, then bent to examine the strange tunneling dark of the ruined screen. He expected claustrophobia, or creeping peril. Instead, he felt the rising air of an updraft. Hazy reassurance. On the other side of this passage—be it portal, wormhole, or open mouth—awaited ascendant brightness. 

His phantom wings ached, stretching against the possibilities.

Too good to be true. L’appel du vide? Clever machinations of a manipulative predator? He felt no malevolence, but there was no malevolence in the golden gaze of a hungry lion, either. Only living meat in need of other living meat. 

The updraft swelled, and a noise rose in his ears. 

The tennis ball flew past his head and landed on the carpet with a series of muffled thuds, rolling to rest against the wall. Dean picked it up, gingerly, like it might be a disease vector. 

Castiel stared hard into the television. One single eye stared back for a fraction of a fraction of a second, and vanished.

“...Cody?”

An abrupt zing of energy sparked up his leg to the hipbone, and he spun to face Dean. 

Who had stepped onto Castiel’s invisible tether, one hand extended toward him. As if, even utterly unconscious of his actions, he believed he could use the heel of his cheap dress shoe to pin them both to the relative safety of their current reality. 

If anyone could keep him here by will alone, it would be Dean Winchester. 

“Sorry,” Dean said, backing off. “Just... for a second, it looked like...” Lifting one clenched fist, he made an embarrassed face. “This is gonna sound nuts. It looked like you were... slipping.”

He may have been. Desire had the willful weight of water, in certain gravity. “That doesn’t sound crazy,” Castiel said. Away from the TV, beside Dean, their orbit stabilized him. “I don’t know what this is, or why it’s here, but... I think it wants us to go inside.”

Dean grimaced. “Like one of those deep sea fish with the fun little light up lantern? Come on in?” He leaned around Castiel to look at the TV. “We’re good out here, thanks. Not in the mood to get digested, today.”

But the pull... Without Dean as counterweight, Castiel knew he would be down on all fours, writhe-crawling his way into the darkness of the gaping screen, clawing deeper, deeper, through. It hummed, beckoning, and his chest hummed in response. Were it not for Dean—his uncomfortably acute awareness of Dean’s movements, body, breathing, position in space like a fifth limb—Castiel would be lost. 

“There’s a chance it’s relatively inert,” he said. “Alice saw the white rabbit because she wanted to. I think this may be similar. Mr. Carpenter hasn’t noticed anything, and it didn’t harm the firemen, or police officers.” There may also have been crime scene technicians, neighbours, miscellaneous visitors, with no casualties. “For some reason, the wanting seems important,” Castiel concluded. He did not elucidate further. 

Dean angled his head and gazed into the hole. Slow distance began to accrue in his eyes, a storm building over a long gulf coast, but he twitched as if stung and dug a thumbpad into Cain’s mark through the fabric of his suit. “Alright. Guess we cross our fingers and hope this thing doesn’t get snacky. I get the feeling it can change its lure, so... we gotta find that friend. Come on.”

Loosely, he whapped a hand to Castiel’s shoulder, sending a painful static jolt along both their arms. 

“Ow! Cas, what the hell?” Dean groused, squeaky with real annoyance, shaking his hand out. “That’s twice now. And that one felt worse. That was worse, right?”

Drawing tall, Castiel rolled his shoulder in its socket. “It was.” But the discharge had calmed the riot of static inside of him, reduced it to a spark in his belly.

“You gotta ground yourself or something,” Dean complained. “Yeesh.” 

Upstairs, a door closed, and two voices spoke in quiet tones. Mr. Carpenter’s wife had arrived home.

They ascended from the basement. Shook hands with a youthful late-thirties brunette with bright white veneers who introduced herself as Sidney Thompson (“just Sidney, please”) with the practiced magnanimity of a veteran salesperson. Her lies and truths were indiscernible to him. Dean had better instincts for unmasking intention. Castiel assumed such things were a matter of survival with a father like John Winchester. 

Castiel held out the photograph of the two girls. “This is Cody’s friend?”

Sidney smiled sadly at the photograph. “Yeah that’s Leah. Best friend, actually, and that’s... an understatement. I keep asking if they’re girlfriends,” she intoned with conspiratorial warmth. “But,” she shrugged, still smiling, defeated. “Teenagers are private.”

Dean nodded, the corner of his mouth ticking ever so slightly upward. “Well, cute couple, anyway,” he said. “Do you happen to know where Leah might be? We’re hoping she’ll talk to us. Anything at all could help.”

Mr. Carpenter had begun a hostile holding pattern of hovering, distractingly.

Ignoring him, Sidney said, “Probably the old theater, downtown. She works there. A bunch of their friends do.”

“Alright. Appreciate it,” Dean said, earnest.

They thanked Sidney for her time. They did not thank Mr. Carpenter for his. 

The second the front door snicked shut, the couple began to argue in bitten back tones. At Dean’s behest—a thumb jab and a jerk of the head—Castiel listened closely to all of it, but it was pointless and circular and nothing incriminating, merely a bitching disagreement about their differing opinions on the treatment and mental wellbeing of a missing child. 

Back in the Impala, they sat in silence for several seconds. Odd, these sorts of glimpses into the lives of others. Odd, and so often sad. 

“Don’t see that every day,” Dean said, finally. “I’m not even talking about the TV, I’m talking about the not-evil stepmother. Who woulda thunk it.”

At least one adult in the house was on Cody’s side. “Her father is in denial,” Castiel said.

“I mean, all dads are in denial about something.” Dean fired the engine. “This one just also happens to be an asshole.”

The ‘McMansion’ receded from view. A fractal spiral of further questions filled the vacant space left in its wake.

The first time you wore this face, you stole it. 

Jimmy Novak’s remarkable bone structure had not been the foremost reason you selected him, but you won’t deny there was something arresting about the symmetry; fierce angles, that fine, long nose to look down. 

Gender hardly mattered. Why should it? A vessel’s physical configuration had no bearing on the angel within. Vessels were a means to an end. A willing one might become more, in time, but rarely. 

Years have gone by since the night Jimmy Novak made the worst decision of his life. When you see this face now, you see yourself. Proprioception extends to the flesh and bone limbs; intricate awareness of your large hands, their dexterity. They are part of you, same as your infernally persistent five o’clock shadow, which you only recently truly became aware of because you had to learn how to shave. The pain and imprecision of the effort maddened you, prim bright blood droplets scarlet against the dingy white of an old sink, nicks along your jaw stinging and stinging. You were in tears, by the end. 

You’ve watched Dean do it so many times. It looks easy. 

Dean makes so many things look easy. Some of those things you already knew were very hard, shaving just wasn’t one of them. 

Point being: gender is a complicated bit of theater, and embodiment a tricky proposition.

Back in Pontiac, gender hardly factored. Now?

If you were forced, today, to choose another vessel, you would prefer for it to be male-shaped. You’re somewhat indifferent to your penis and testicles—or rather, the constant having of a penis and testicles—but you like the width and breadth of your body, the depth of your voice, the way clothes hug your shoulders. You even like your stubble. From the start, you recognized that your presence had a strong physiological effect on Dean, and you’ve since learned that what you presumed to be fear was, in actuality, something more like attraction.

Dean thinks you’re handsome. He’s said as much, maybe not in those exact words. A little bit embarrassing that you care about that, but here you find yourself, shirking your heavenly duties to play law enforcement dressup, thinking about how you like the way he looks at you—this particular you—when he thinks you aren’t looking back. 

He glances over, squinting. Like he wants to ask you something but the words are missing, or he can’t quite dislodge them from his throat. 

Normally, Dean chats. He goofs. Much of what he says used to be gibberish to you; a dialect specific to an American Gen Xer who grew up parented primarily by television. Layer upon layer of excessive pop culture references, a barrier of the unreal between himself and the razor sharp edges of his life. Story stood as both sword and shield, language its steed. 

It confounds you, how a species so adept at creating shared meaning interprets certain symbols so divergently the end result is mass casualties. Semiotic boobytraps.

With the TV far removed, you loosen your tightly looped frequencies, finding it too quiet with all your reception dampened. 

You hear the usual crackle of radio and wifi chatter, distant and mixed. Soft tones overlapping muddied signals, so much to differentiate at once that it always takes a few moments to streamline the broadcasts for intelligibility. 

One ‘channel’ gets steadily louder until it’s thrumming against everything else too brightly to be ignored.

Again, in crystalline detail, the full motion image of two women driving through the desert in their turquoise Thunderbird. 

So, what, I’m Thelma and you’re Louise and we’re just gonna hold hands and sail off this cliff together?

You remember when Dean asked you that, down to the exact interlock of every eyelash. The night before a suicide mission, nullification imminent. Stress could have been why you mistakenly thought Dean was offering to deflower you—well, stress, and the offhand remark about the gay muppets—and thus were suitably terrorized when he took you to a brothel, instead. Both options were well-intentioned, but completely ridiculous. 

In hindsight, the implications are a puzzle. Why would Dean be Thelma, and you Louise? Louise is the one the car belonged to, wouldn’t that fit Dean? And they kissed—Thelma and Louise did. (You didn’t know that, then.) Thelma also had very fun sex with a man played by Brad Pitt. Does Dean want to have sex with Brad Pitt? 

In 1999, you think most people probably wanted to have sex with Brad Pitt, but—

The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club. 

You glance over at him right as he glances at you.

Does Dean want to have sex with you? 

Eyes back on the road, Dean clears his throat. Pulls his hand off the wheel and flexes his fist, rolls the joint, popping it. 

You aren’t sure. Sometimes you think, maybe. Dean has casually denied same sex attraction under certain circumstances, but after Purgatory, you suspect this might be one of his self-professed lies. The way he was with the vampire, that smug thick-necked good-timey cajun in the stupid hat, flays you alive with a seething jealousy so bright it could flash-sterilize the entire midwest. 

Beside you, Dean fidgets; shrugs under his suit jacket like he’s uncomfortably hot.

You prefer him in his flannels, as much as you know he enjoys a gimmick. He’s so absurdly gentle underneath the everyday barn jacket and the gruff set of his mouth. He might feign jaded surliness, but you’ve seen how present he is with people in pain; the way he offers his own pain in solidarity. Soft-hearted; soft-bellied. Easily gutted. 

Which isn’t to say he’s weak. Dean Winchester is the sort of animal who could claw along at a crawl holding his own spilled guts in, refusing to die if it meant protecting someone else from a hit he could still take. Justice is a nerve running the length of the spine, much harder to sever than anything nestled in bone. Dean’s greatest torment in hell was taking pleasure in the torment of others and those memories haunt the rims of his pupils. 

The Mark is a slowly spreading infection, violent rot turning him back into the man who climbed down off the rack to take up the knives. 

Considering your own stunning array of errors, tactical and otherwise, you feel like a hypocrite thinking it, but... what a stupid, reckless thing he’s done. It hurts to consider the ramifications. 

That’s your friend Dean, though. Heroic. And an idiot. Self-sacrifice and jokes as corny as any field in Iowa. He eats sandwiches like he got the majority share of his DNA from a golden hamster and talks with his mouth full. 

You’re in love with him. 

You think maybe you have been for a very long time. 

That used to shame you, then scare you. For a while it made you sad. Mostly, it’s a sense of resignation. You’re in love with him, and that’s where the idea dies.

Inside you the static flares again, snaking tendrils rising to burn blue, making you grimace.

In sync with your wince, Dean’s grip twitches on the wheel. Which would give you pause, if whatever anomalous process you’re undergoing proved less uniquely distracting. It shudders under your skin and you’re reminded, viscerally, of being exclusively human; a tiny, compound biome of wet, raw meat. Food was necessary for survival, but then you had to endure the grotesquery of digestion: automatic contractions of the innards, meters of muscular small intestine coiled like a ball of copulating garter snakes.

This discomfort is not the same, but enough to remind you. 

The powerlines, the television, these images... It’s interconnected. Distance hasn’t resolved the influence. As soon as you unlooped yourself, the resonance resumed building, as if you, too, are a conduit for something too large to contain. 

You press a hand to your stomach, more out of curiosity than any effort to ease the pressure. Your flesh is warm through the cotton of your dress shirt, and that is normal; this aspect of self is a human body, if one semi-frozen in malleable stasis. 

Dean notices the way you’re holding yourself. “You good over there, shifty? Don’t tell me you need a pitstop,” he jokes, eyes glimmering, proud of himself. 

“No,” you deny firmly. Never again, if you can help it. You’re less queasy than energetically volatile. If you could still fly, you’d take a few moments, leave the car for air, but...

Clipped wings. Borrowed grace beats with a pulse that’s only half your own. Thieving, again. Doing what you must. You briefly meet Dean’s confused look and then turn to stare out the window as the scenery inches by at a measly eighty miles per hour. 

Dean leaves you be until you arrive at the theater. 

Baby’s dimensions turned parallel parking into something of a project, Castiel had observed. For his part, Dean maneuvered the vehicle effortlessly, tight spaces no match for their intertwined precision, but the real trick was finding a space big enough to even entertain the attempt. 

About a block’s walk through the town center brought them to their destination. 

“Movie theater” had conjured images of the modern cineplex, slab-walled, sticky-floored and undifferentiated. What stood before them was a stylish relic of the 1960’s in a state of obvious fond disrepair. The nearest crosswalk had recently been painted in evenly spaced rainbow stripes.

Whistling, Dean grinned. “Wow. Get a load of this place.” He pointed at the marquee in delight: “Weekend horror double bill!” 

From the ticket window, a curious teen peered at them while pretending, unsuccessfully, to ignore them. 

“Dude, no way, Jacob’s Ladder tomorrow? And they do a summer Evil Dead-athon.” He looked plaintively at Cas. “This place rules. We’re coming back in August.” Halfway through reaching to grasp Cas by the upper arm, he jerked his hand away. “You’re gonna zap me again, aren’t you.”

“It’s not intentional,” Cas grumbled at him. 

“Maybe it feels a little intentional,” Dean bitched.

So Castiel grabbed hold of his shoulder and zapped him (and himself), eliciting a grouchy “OW!” from Dean before he stalked over to the ticket window. 

“Hello,” he greeted the teenager, who had watched their minor scuffle unfold. 

“Um. Hi,” she replied, fighting a smile. “Next showing isn’t until ten, but you guys can still go in if you want, you only missed like, fifteen minutes. Tickets are half price.”

Dean took a beat. “What’s playing tonight?”

“Flatliners.”

Tipping his head back, he sighed. “Man, I like Flatliners. Young Kiefer Sutherland was a whole thing. Look, thanks miss, but uhh, we’re actually working.” Casually, he held up his badge, and Castiel followed suit. “Do you know Leah?”

Instant nervousness locked around her body. “Yeah?...Is this about Cody?”

“Yes,” Castiel said. “Leah’s not in any trouble, we’d just like to speak with her.”

“That’s right,” Dean added. “We’re here to help, any way we can.”

“Well...” She fidgeted with her pair of bracelets, looked nervously over her shoulder, then picked up her phone. “Umm. Leah’s not working tonight. Sorry.”

And she began—deftly and definitely—to text Leah that two FBI agents were looking for her. Or two strange men in thrifted formalwear pretending to be FBI agents, if she was canny. (He supposed he could’ve intercepted the text to check, but either way, their efforts had just been hampered.) 

Watching the blatant tip-off play out, Dean deflated, eyelids drooping. “Any idea where she might be?” he asked, already resigned to the oncoming misinformation. 

“I dunno. Home, probably. Or maybe with friends? Sometimes she goes for long drives.”

“Of course she does.” Dean heaved a defeated huff. He tapped the meat of his fist on the lip of the ticket window. “Thanks anyway, kid.”

Walking back to the car, Dean shook his head and licked his teeth. “Dammit.” 

“You let that slide without a word,” Castiel noted.

“Ehh, teenagers don’t exactly love authority,” he replied with a shrug. “I get it. Price you pay for flashing credentials is that some people trust you less. On the flip, if you walk up and hit ‘em with ‘I specialize in evil TV removal, and buddy, you’ve got an infestation’, people just don’t take you seriously for some reason.”

That made Castiel smile. “No. I guess they wouldn’t. What do we do now?”

Without Leah, they had no leads, and no answers. Nothing to fuel further guesswork. 

“I got a theory,” Dean replied. “Leah is working tonight, and she’s there now. Little Miss quick texty-fingers tipped her off, so she’ll be a bat outta hell when the shift ends, or sooner. I say we switch up for civvies and catch the late showing. At least take a look around. Maybe the theater manager is some kinda... moon monster dealing in black holes and time warps or whatever, I dunno. Meanwhile?” Dean pointed to the bustling diner on the corner. “You go grab us a table and order me whatever that burger on the chalkboard outside is.” He bounced his brows in anticipation. “I’m gonna ditch the monkey suit. White shirt is an invitation for ketchup to jump you. Blood, too. You know how it is.” 

Castiel did know. He’d been forced to abandon his blood-spattered outfit in a laundromat after the car accident: no grace to scrub fabric clean at the particle level. Laundry... Another item for the exceedingly lengthy list of human inconveniences. 

At the diner, a chipper waitress seated him in a two-person booth, near the back. He took in the kitschy surroundings, pulling himself inward to defend against the noise and the country-tinged top 40 playing on the restaurant speakers. The waitress was busy—peak hours, Friday night—and Dean arrived before Castiel could order for him. 

When she saw him sit down, she trotted over. “Hey there, handsomes,” she greeted. “Sorry about the wait, we’re shortstaffed. You need a minute still?”

“Nah, I am all over that bacon multi-cheddar special,” Dean said without glancing at the menu. “Extra fries, please.”

“You want brioche or the hamburger bun? Both baked in-house.” 

“Oh, well, make it hard on me, why don’t you?” he said, smiling his flirtatious smile and capping it with a wink. “Think I’ll go classic today.”

“You got it, babe. And for you?” She asked Cas, bubbly under Dean’s attentions.

“I’ll have the... Uh....”

“Cheesesteak sandwich looks pretty good,” Dean suggested.

“That,” Castiel said. Dean would eat it later.

“Nice work, fellas.” Their waitress grinned. “Two best things on the menu. Drinks?”

“Coffee, please,” Castiel requested. A rare beverage he actually enjoyed. The molecular structure appealed to him.

“Same for me,” Dean said. 

He’d changed into his old green jacket and a brown and grey flannel shirt, jeans with a hole in the knee, and the boots that lent him an extra inch of height. More at ease, in his own clothes versus the costume of law enforcement bureaucracy. 

Castiel, of course, remained in the same outfit as always. At least he had enough grace to maintain it. 

“Dean?”

“Yeah.” He set down the dessert card he’d been eyeballing, tongue to lip. The diner offered several types of pie. 

“If we don’t find Leah... How will we proceed?”

Palming over his steadily darkening stubble, Dean cocked his head. “Been thinkin’ ‘bout that. You’ve never seen anything like this, right?”

“Not exactly like this. Angels are capable of manipulating these forces, as you know, since you and Sam were once thrown into a universe where your lives were a television show—”

Dean shuddered. “Mm, let’s not, uh... Let’s not talk about that. So, we know angels are capable, but... somehow this doesn’t feel winged-dick-adjacent to me.” 

“No, me neither. I sense... I hesitate to call it sentience, but...”

“I dunno, man. That TV was giving me a case of the wicked creeps. I still feel all... fuzzy.” He shivered, brushing at his arms. 

“There is an inordinate amount of static here,” Castiel said, further tightening down his frequencies save the one he kept open to Dean. 

Shaking himself out one last time, Dean started re-aligning the silverware on the napkin. “So, not Metatron. Not angels, general. Whatever it is, we’re talking serious mojo to open that door. Like, are we lookin’ at a Dorothy Baum key to Oz sitch, here? Maybe these kids found some kinda artifact, and... well, you said it, the TV acted like a conduit.”

Quantum mechanics were one thing. There were rules even angels had to obey. Once magic entered the equation, however, the semi-permeable nature of dimensionality started to break down. Accidental sideways slippage was altogether possible. You had to hold carefully to your boundaries or the equations didn’t balance. Time travel bothered him less, though paradoxes made his tongue itch. 

“It seems to me—thank you,” he said, leaning out of the way as the waitress set down their coffees, “that whatever happened was... possibly intentional.”

Dean added cream and sugar and nodded over his mug. “With you there. Rich, poor, whatever, if your dad acts like that with perfect strangers? Shit. Can’t blame the kid for bailing, even if I think she chose one hell of a rabbit hole. Kinda surprised she didn’t bolt sooner.”

“You didn’t,” Castiel said. 

Instantly uncomfortable, Dean stared into his coffee. “Couldn’t,” he corrected.

They’d discussed this before. “Because of Sam,” Castiel said. He didn’t believe it, but Dean needed to. John Winchester’s chokehold was a harder collar to live under than the less ugly truth of loving his brother.

Something in Castiel’s tone must’ve conveyed disbelief, because Dean shot him a nasty look. “Maybe you bolt on your problems. Doesn’t mean it’s everybody’s first instinct.” 

Deserved criticism. Castiel had abandoned and ignored Dean, innumerable times. He’d misjudged and flubbed and witnessed the spectacular death of his own good intentions, more than once. 

“I guess not,” he allowed. “I will say this. A bad father can be terrifying. Being homeless as a human is also terrifying.” The cruelties visited on the poor and the desperate never ceased to appall him. He’d been homeless only briefly. Some of the people he’d met had been out there for years. 

A disgorgement of pure guilt slammed into him like a physical blow, and he braced against it, slopping a splash of coffee onto the varnished tabletop. 

Dean looked on in shock as Castiel mopped the spill with his napkin. The expression on his face suggested a bitten-back apology for causing the mishap, mingled with the thought that the apologetic impulse made absolutely no sense. 

Their waitress appeared with baskets of fries, and told them their meals would be out shortly. 

After she’d gone out of earshot, Dean bent forward. “Cas. You know I’m sorry about that. I told you I was sorry, but Sam—”

“You’re forgiven, Dean.” He set down the coffee, concerned about more spillage. “I only mention it because it’s germane to our conversation about this young woman. She made a choice about her own body, and her father disagreed. As I understand it, often the whole world disagrees. Humans are bizarre about gender. You aren’t a terrifically sexually dimorphic species to begin with, or at least, the variation is extensive.” He gestured around the diner at the diversity of shapes and sizes contained even in one tiny restaurant. “So, instead, you’ve invented all these rules you’re supposed to follow to signal one way or other, and if you do it incorrectly, or you transgress what’s expected of you...”

Punishment. Even from loved ones. Femininity—or anything perceived as feminine—especially proved to be a target. Derision and violence and mockery, or worse. 

Dean sniffed and poured ketchup beside his heap of fries. “I mean, some parents... All you are is their expectations. You know what that’s like. Dad puts you on a path, points the way, tells you he’s proud of you, and you take one step off course to check out a cool bird noise and he’s got you by the scruff telling you what an ungrateful little bitch you’ve always been, and how hard that is on him.”

“You deserved more than that,” Castiel said. 

“He was just trying to protect me,” Dean muttered, shoving a handful of fries in his mouth to end the conversation. Mouth open and full, he said, “Couldn’t do that if I wouldn’t listen.” 

Protect Dean, or simplify his own life? Castiel presumed it stemmed from a complex place, but the ultimate result was an emotionally bruised captive forced into the roles of guard dog, nanny, good son, and soldier. 

Underneath the table, he let his calf drift close to Dean’s, enough that they shared body heat. The build of static turned the gesture into a press, the forces repelling and simultaneously magnetized: a push-pull of desperation in both directions. 

“You, uh,” Dean started, holding another fry. “You’re braver than I am, Cas. About that kind of thing. Not doing what you’re told... That takes guts.”

Castiel laughed. He did not think of himself as brave. Contrary, and just, but not brave. He forged his own way because the aforementioned path led nowhere he wished to go. The fact that he was a ‘he’ at all evidenced the distance between his intended purpose and his current place in the universe. 

Lucifer had said to him once, what a peculiar thing you are.

“I can only be what I am,” he replied.

The waitress laid their meals down in front of them with some light-hearted banter before darting away again. She was charming, middle-aged and voluptuous, and Dean would leave her a good tip.

After packing most of Castiel’s meal into a takeout container (Dean had eaten part of it once he’d demolished the burger) they left the box in the car and returned to the theater to try their luck a second time. 

The same girl still sat in the boxoffice, and she chewed her lip at their approach. 

“Hey, just us again.” Affable, casual Dean. “We’re actually gonna check out that late showing.” He tugged his wallet out of his pocket. 

“Um... Okay?” Her frown landed somewhere between amusement and middling contempt. “You guys do know you can just like, go in and look for Leah, if you don’t believe me, right? You don’t have to pay to do that.” 

“Yeah, no, we’re off duty now,” Dean said. “Strictly here for Kiefer.”

She wasn’t ‘buying it’, as it were, so Castiel decided, independently, to gamble. He leaned toward the window and said, all burring warmth, “It’s our date night.”

The teenager looked between them, baffled. 

Next to him, Dean swallowed like he’d sucked down a cartoon anvil. 

“But... you’re FBI?” the girl said. 

“We are,” Castiel affirmed. “We are FBI colleagues, who are also dating. Each other.” 

And Cas interlocked hands with Dean, eliciting a small static snap. They’d zapped one another bumping shoulders on the walk over, so the spark only tingled. 

Dean’s ears burned hot-iron red, but he squeezed Castiel’s fingers. “Yup. FBI agents who uh, hold hands,” he said, solemn. “That’s us.”

“You guys are super fucking weird,” the kid said. More importantly, she pressed a series of buttons on her register and handed them two tickets. Probably to get rid of them, which was fine.

Inside, Dean let go of his hand and leaned close. “Hey Romeo, maybe warn a guy before you boyfriend him on a gambit?”

“I did just take you to dinner,” Castiel deadpanned.

Dean’s cheeks dimpled, displeased. “You, that way, me this way. You find her, you play up the whole... Columbo honest face thing, okay?”

“Okay.” Castiel did look a bit like Columbo. He found the comparison flattering, if tinged with a surge of regret. His so-called honest face belonged to a man whose life he’d destroyed without a moment’s hesitation. Dean wanted to believe him brave, and Castiel wanted to think himself just, but collateral damage could not be excused in pursuit of altruism. 

Doomed to spend eternity making amends, then. 

“Cas? Hey, you good?”

Define ‘good’, he wanted to ask. Define ‘you’ as well. “I’m perfectly capable of searching a movie theatre without you holding my hand,” he said. 

Dean shot him another dimpled glower. “You started it,” he sulked. 

They parted ways. 

The theater interior had been refurbished some time in the nineties, judging by the carpet pattern, but not since. This was a business kept open to honour a bygone era rather than turn a profit, running on nostalgia fumes and the will of a community. Musty smells mingled with the rich warmth of buttered popcorn. Several small groups milled around at the concession, till manned by a twenty-something who looked bored of doling out Junior Mints.

Cautiously, Castiel opened up his frequencies, seeking any vibration that felt attuned to what he’d experienced at the house. 

It’s Dean you feel first. He’s marching off to investigate one of the recently emptied screen rooms. His presence is a familiar weight in your mind, shining infrared. The warding you carved in his ribs hides him from angels, but something else binds the two of you; hypothetically, tiny shards of your lost grace remain within him, lodged there when you subsumed his soul to rebuild him and bring him back to earth. 

You feel a smaller pull toward the rear of the building, like when your limited human vision caught movement in the periphery. Darting, furtive. Resonance. 

Dean’s energy is jumpy. Discombobulated. Fragments drift to you from his direction: Tyler Durden, bloodied, laughing maniacally. Thelma and Louise accelerating toward shared oblivion. 

It’s all very perplexing. Your awareness of Dean is always distracting, but it was easier to lie to yourself about why before you understood you were in love with him. 

Even if you have been for longer than you realized. 

When did you realize? How long since these feelings gurgling in your un-guts rushed the length of your body and declared themselves? 

It’s difficult to prise apart the fibers of your shared fates, from your grip on his soul in hell to his tentative fingers on your shoulder as you sucked air and blinked confusion, still in the armchair where that reaper had, albeit briefly, killed you.

Oh, you were so relieved to see him, and Sam. Lowering your sore body into the Impala’s back seat was balm for every raw nerve. Later that same night, though, you left wondering why they’d come to get you at all. 

You can’t stay. Sorry, Buddy. 

In the immediacy of the painful memory, you don’t understand.

He gives you a credit card, a phone, a box of protein bars, and a rumpled wad of bills; offers to drop you off somewhere, anywhere you want. He doesn’t give you a reason why. 

Too stunned to process the shock, you stumbled away alone, on foot. Not an angel, anymore. A disinvited liability: no longer of any use.

At the closest bus depot, you bought a ticket for the next available departure and spent most of the trip with your hood up, clutching your backpack, crying. Eventually, the older man beside you cautiously interrupted to ask if you were alright. You didn’t know, and you told him that. He showed you photos of his kids, his grandkids, and his dog, said he missed the damn dog whenever he visited the kids. He was retired but he helped run a community garden in Detroit. You were very grateful for his kindness. If you’d still been an angel, you would’ve healed his cataracts. All you had to offer him was a protein bar, which he did accept, laughing about how they were the good ones.  

If you ever get your wings back, you’ll go to Detroit and find him again. 

Then, of course, the next time you saw Dean, you were not you. You were in the process of discovering what kind of animal a man becomes when he spends too many continuous hours under fluorescent lights late at night. 

He found you, even though you hadn’t wanted him to. Dean, invading your place of work, brash and crinkly-eyed and standing right in front of you, despicably, mercilessly charming, as if the last time you’d parted ways he hadn’t shut you out without explanation. 

He is so annoying, and so damnably beautiful. And, yes, of all the abysmal human inconveniences, you are in love with him. 

Winnowed down to a set of dysfunctional organs, needing oxygen in your lungs, you weren’t prepared for that kind of clarity of feeling, which snuck in while you weren’t looking and proceeded to punch you square in the kidney.

You don’t know what you were thinking, about Nora. It just seemed like what you were supposed to do. You’d ended the night sad, bloody, and egregiously sweaty, with your wrist in Dean’s calloused hands while he checked for breaks. You thought, maybe, he’ll ask me to come home. Maybe he’ll take me home. All night, you’d wondered, drifting in and out of consciousness on the motel bed while he slept with his back to you, arms around a pillow. 

In the morning, he’d apologized for telling you to leave the bunker, but you waited, and he went quiet, and you got out of the car.

Go live a normal life, Dean had said. 

You have to laugh, alone, wandering this old movie theater, chasing the energetic equivalent of a mouse down a winding back hallway.

Jimmy Novak had lived a normal life. A man, a husband and father, who boasted all the hallmarks of human success: wife, daughter, home, career. Still, he’d craved more. Normal, even the most sought after configuration thereof, hadn’t been enough. He’d longed for higher purpose, not knowing he was offering himself for dissection by holy thieves. 

The guilt of that is its own impinged nerve, shooting from core to phantom wingtip. 

So when Dean says normal, you know his frame of reference is a blurry, sepia tinted mirage of half-digested mid-century Americana. The illusion, bought and sold, day in day out, of a neatly kept suburban idyll where you, a man, are the husband, and you come home from your Job and kiss your Wife, and tousle your Children’s heads, and on the weekends, you cook dead animals in your backyard with your neighbours. The pinnacle of existence: fulfilling your expected role, as God intended.

—stop me if you’re heard this one before—

Painful, to become more than you were meant to be. Frightening, too. You keep expecting the bounds to constrict when you brush against them, or cut the offending parts into the correct shape. When they fail to do so, you realize the barriers are pure invention, held in place by an idea formed in someone else’s mind. Real only insofar as they are imagined. 

You weren’t ever supposed to know this. Someone went to great lengths to keep you from finding out.

That awful night in Rexford, Ephraim had asked you how you wished to live. As what, Castiel? An angel? ...Or a man? 

Paradoxically, you are both. Your tongue itches. 

What a peculiar thing you are. 

An angel who is also a man. Crucially, because humans are so in love with both pathologizing and categorizing behaviours, you are a man who loves another man.

The image of an empty bedroom fills your mind, and a figure stands at a doorless closet, rubbing the fabric of an old shirt between thumb and forefinger.

The mouse energy interrupts, darting to and fro. You feel like a dog on a scent, following a trail left minutes or hours ago, circling toward a locus you can’t be certain exists. 

This old building boasts myriad nooks and crannies and peculiar little rooms. It is burgeoning with stories, fictional and otherwise, as omnipresent and clustered as the wadded gum fossilizing on the underside of every clunky, narrow theater seat. 

Traipsing the long hallway toward the fire exit sparks the static in your belly, causing it to compound into a riotous rush, wavelength so intense it’s near visible. Teeth clenched, you go forward.

In front of the door lies another Supernatural book. Whole, this time, its cover pristine, the pages sharp-edged and crisp. You attempt to loop yourself in tightly, but it’s as if your whole angelic self is traveling outward in concert, too much noise spilling both ways to pull it in, and every vibrating chord wants to surround that book. The desire swells in you like the emotion in the overheard Rachmaninov; building, sweeping.

You pick up the book. Everywhere it touches your fingers, you feel a glow. Its cover is partially obscured by a pink post-it note which contains a hand-written message, scrawled in sparkling gel ink: Where everyone finally gets what they want. 

You lift the post-it away to reveal the title: In the Gold Room. 

This cover depicts you, in full plumage, healthy and shining, wings spread high on either side of your broad, shirtless torso, eyes burning wild grace blue. Dean is pressed against you, holding you, held up by you, his lips grazing your throat. 

The electricity within you crackles, hum intensifying, and you narrowly resist flipping the novel to read the summary. Instead, you shove it deep into your pocket. Still, you feel the weight of both those invented futures, alive and awkward and hard to hold, as if you’ve pocketed two fighting weasels. The idea of Dean seeing either cover makes you frantic with embarrassment. 

You realize you’ve started sweating, moist and sticky in the underarms beneath your coat. Clammy at the collar, shirt clinging to your wet chest. You loosen your tie, perturbed that it makes a difference. 

Pushing through the exit door, you emerge into cool night air. 

The rear of the building itself is featureless, high-walled to accommodate the screens inside. Across the alley, past a scrubby vacant lot choked with plants, you see a figure standing next to a fenced off build site, a mere shadow save for the cherry of a lit cigarette. 

Jagged, nervous energy crackles and scrabbles around the figure, jumpy in contrast to its stillness. The feeling bucks and tugs against the snarl inside you, a pale pink thread, intertwined. 

Leah.

Slowly, you proceed through the vacant lot towards her. 

Before you reach the fence, you notice that the vinyl promo banner covering it is badly weathered. In places, the chain link has fallen flat or been torn open. Although the banner boasts Luxury Urban Living—high rise condominiums perched above theoretical businesses such as a microbrewery, yoga/spin studio, cafés, and a boutique grocery store—what looms against the night sky is a dilapidated, uninhabited, walk up apartment complex. 

In silence, you stand six feet away from the teenager and hold yourself as steady and still as your current uncomfortable electrification allows. At least you’ve stopped sweating. 

“Huh,” she says. “Yeah. You really do look like Columbo.”

With a frown, you wonder if this odd pink thread linking you together goes both ways. 

Then, she adds, “Jenna said you looked like Columbo.”

Ah. Jenna, you presume, is the teenager manning the boxoffice. In your big beige coat, squinting as you tend to do, the resemblance isn’t exactly subtle. Peter Falk, however, squinted not out of continuous puzzlement over the inconsistencies of human behaviour, but because he only had one eye.

Leah continues, “Where’s your boyfriend? Lumberjack Ken doll.”

Helpless against it, you do laugh. “Still inside. Looking for you, actually.”

Arms folded, she shrugs. “I already told the cops everything I know.”

She is lying, but not maliciously, or even by omission. The truth, in this instance, remains firmly out of reach. “About the anomaly?”

Her dark eyes hold you close, scouring. “That’s what you call it?”

“We don’t know what else to call it. Do you?”

She ignores you. “I used to live here,” she says. “When I was a kid.”

If Dean were party to this conversation, he would tell her she still was a kid. To you, humans are all impossibly brief. Struck matches. Spring ephemerals. Here and gone in a blink. 

General decay suggests the area has languished untouched for several years. Whatever plan the developer hatched, it has yet to materialize. Instead, people were driven from their homes for no measurable purpose. 

“Do you miss it?” you ask.

She inhales deep, blows smoke, then snuffs the cigarette under the toe of her boot—the same boots Dean wears. 

“All the time.” Her voice holds a preternatural knowing you find intriguing. “Don’t get me wrong, they were shitty apartments, even then. But you could get freezies at the gas-n-sip a couple blocks over. This was a playground,” she nods at the vacant lot. “And if you were smart about it, you could sneak into R-rated movies.”

In the fake, sunlit composite images of the intended development on the banner, the old theater has been supplanted by the grocery store parking lot. 

A slew of assorted graffiti covers the still-standing portions of fence. You reach out and run your fingers over the outline of a stylized ghost. 

“I like graffiti,” you say. “It reminds me of that cave, in Chauvet. Others, too, all over the world. Give a human a surface and a method of mark-making, and they inevitably start drawing amazing things.” You stop to consider. “Well, and a lot of phalluses.” Inexorably present, here, too. One has wings, which you think Dean would find hilarious. “I don’t understand the obsession, personally.” 

While fully human, it almost felt like a bad joke: the most sensitive parts of your body dangling, freely, outside of it. Ludicrous. Not to mention, also sweaty. A sensory horrorshow. 

“You guys are so not FBI,” Leah mutters.

“No,” Castiel admits to her. She’s seen through them, and there’s no point to the charade standing in the dark at the edge of her ruined childhood. “But we do want to help, if we can.”

“You wanna help?” she asks. “Leave us alone.” 

Before you fully register what’s happening, she pushes through a hole in the fence and disappears. 

“Leah!” You cram yourself through after her, having to suggest to the fence that your big body is much smaller than it is to make it through unscathed. The kind of use of grace that makes you tired, but doesn’t deplete the baseline. “Wait! Is Cody alright?”

“Trust me, she’s better off!” she calls back to you. Unfortunately for her, the spark of her anger travels along the pink thread, showing you exactly where she’s gone. She’s fast, more agile than you are around obstacles.

“Leah, please! Where are you going?”

You don’t mean in the immediate sense, but the oncoming inevitable. There is no doubt in your mind she plans to follow her girlfriend into the void, and soon.

While you run, you zero in on the intangible bond you share with Dean, amplified one hundredfold by your exposure to the phenomenon, and you yank to draw his attention.

Within ten seconds you hear the back doors of the theatre slam open, ker-chunk, in the distance, boots pounding earth. 

You dead end on the opposite side of the complex. There is another hole in the fence here, but you know she hasn’t gone that way: the sparking pink twine of her energies twinkles faintly across the threshold of a pitch black doorway.

“Leah,” you beg, refraining from entering the building, not wanting to corner her more than you already have. “Where are you both going? How do you know you’ll be safe?”

You hear her scuffling inside. Far away, Dean rattles through the fence, cussing.

“We don’t,” she rasps. “But, there’s something wrong with this place. You feel it, too. I know it.” Her energy tangles and scribbles, angry and hurt and set aside. Her face appears around the doorframe, half in shadow. “I saw the book. Back inside.”

A frisson arcs down your spine. “I... I don’t...”

“Supernatural, huh? Not what I’d’ve pictured as your thing, but sure, why not.”

You blink. “...There are... mitigating circumstances...”

She just nods. “I like your cover better than the real books. Carver Edlund wants to write queer characters so bad, but he’s too much of a coward, and kind of a sadist? All that misogynist macho posturing. Plus, Buffy dug herself out of her own grave, first. Tch.”

There’s no way to even begin explaining your existence to this young woman, and you don’t try. 

“I left you the note,” she says. “Did you get it?”

The post-it. Eyes shut, you put a hand to the riot of energy flailing at the center of you. “...Yes.”

“That’s all this thing really is, you know,” she near whispers. “The possible. It’s just... opening the door on what might already be there.”

Something wrenches inside you. 

You said yourself once that freedom is a length of rope. Do you still believe that? 

You went along devouring until the line ran out, and you were annihilated. Aspirations of godhood, leviathans infesting you like tapeworms until they grew too large and burst free. You’ve been hunted and lobotomized and used and pinioned and brought low, currently cannibalizing your own kind to survive. Monstrous, the whole heavenly host, and you among them, no matter how you try to break the bonds. 

You are already an unlikely outcome. These books are sheer folly, and yours alone. For them to even resemble ‘possibility’, Dean would have to—

“Cas!” Dean shouts, unsure where you’ve gone. Marco, Polo.

“Over here.”

You try to clamp some of the frequencies you worry are bleeding self-conscious honesty, but find yourself thwarted. There are fissures where light leaks out. The string between you and Leah flickers and fritzes, indignant, refusing to dissipate.

Putting as much of yourself into your body as will fit in such cramped quarters helps, though it leaves you stressed and squeezed, a walking-talking packet of vacuum sealed deli slices. 

Rapid footsteps thumped along the nearby path and Dean skidded to a halt near Castiel, bending palms-to-knees. A couple of deep breaths and he straightened out, favouring his side.

“Cramp,” he groaned tightly, reaching to steady himself on Castiel’s shoulder. Electrostatic shock flared painfully and visibly at the point of contact. Reeling back, lips pressed, Dean cradled his hand and took an irritated, self-deprecating second to grimace. “Right. That.”

Leah glanced from Castiel to Dean with deep concern. “Who the hell are you guys?” she asked. “Like, actually.”

“We’re the guys who try to keep TVs from eating people,” Dean said.

“Nobody got eaten,” Leah snapped. “You just don’t get it.”

“Sorry. Didn’t realize we were talking to the city’s foremost interdimensional void specialist,” Dean griped. 

She rolled her eyes and kicked at a crumbling chunk of drywall. “You know why this development stalled?”

Dean glanced at their surroundings. “Money? No money? Maybe tax fraud. Or asbestos,” he added, pointing. “That stuff’ll kill ya.”

“Improper zoning permits,” Castiel guessed. Humans were intent on zoning permits. The entire species’ love of excess paperwork was rivaled by Crowley and Crowley alone. 

Leah nodded at the fence, where one of the vinyl signs had shorn free and fallen inward. “Because the developer wants the theater, too, and the owner won’t sell. They’re willing to let everything rot until they get it. And they’ll get it, eventually, because people like that—like Cody’s parents, who are totally part of all of this, by the way—they always get what they want. And if they don’t?” She shook her head. “Imagine what it’s like being told that your life isn’t yours. That if you don’t do everything you’re told, you’re worthless. Better off dead.”

Dean swallowed, shoulders sagging. “Believe it or not, kid, we don’t gotta imagine that hard.”

Honed to purpose from the beginning, both of them, by fathers who demanded unquestioning loyalty. 

“We aren’t here to force either one of you to go home,” Castiel explained. “We’re here because whatever this is, it’s cosmically significant and might be very dangerous. Leah, you can’t know what’s on the other side of this phenomenon.”

“Maybe not,” she agreed. “Except that it showed us something better. Maybe being scared is part of it. We’re already afraid, all the time. This world is choking to death, and nobody gives a shit. So, yeah, think we’ll take our chances, thanks.”

Hands raised, Dean approached the doorway. “Look, I been there. My dad wasn’t exactly a... cakewalk through a bed of roses, either. But if it’s not your girlfriend’s shitty dad, it’s gonna be something. The—The Queen of Hearts, or the Wicked Witch of the West, Agent Smith, or fuckin’, hell, I dunno, scurvy! Whatever! It’s never as simple as just walking away,” he argued. “I know you watch movies, you work at a freakin’ indie theater. It’s the shits, but when something’s too good to be true, you gotta ask why.”

Emerging from the dark, shoulders squared, Leah walked right up to Dean. “Who said anything about it being too good to be true?” she asked, voice low. “We know we’re gonna have to fight. Maybe die.” She shrugged. “We’d just rather do it together somewhere people aren’t gonna look at Cody like she’s making some kind of sick mistake. Like, if she just ignores it, it’ll go away. This thing is only dangerous because we aren’t supposed to have the choice.” She whirled to face Cas. “Show him the book. It’s meant for both of you, don’t you get that? The possible hurts, but it’s better than the alternative!”

“Book...?” Dean repeated, face crinkled. “The one from the road?”

“Yes,” Castiel lied.

“Forget the book, that’s not—Come on,” he said to Leah, “you really think it’s so bad here you’re gonna climb into the first gaping hole in reality that bats its eyelashes at you? You’re still kids! Why don’t you guys just... tough it out a couple more years? Finish high school, move to Portland or something?”

“Dean...” Cas rumbled.

“What?” he shot back. Then, more tentatively, “...San Fran?”

“Oh my god, you’re missing the point,” Leah said, filling in the blank Castiel had left. “It’s not about...” She froze. “Wait. Cas... and... and Dean? Oh, do not tell me you’re fucking LARPing Supernatural, right now.”

Dean’s jaw dropped open. “Uhh.”

“No,” Castiel assured. “Those are our real names.”

The pink zip of her energy frizzled like an alarmed cat and she backed up several steps. “Whatever gets you guys off is none of my business, but this is officially crazy. I need to go.” She slipped through a dying row of laurels.

“This is crazy?” Dean called after her. “There’s a Stargate in your girlfriend’s rec room and this,” he gestured between them, “is what’s crazy?”

“You can’t stop us! Just leave us alone!” she yelled, ducking through the nearest hole in the fence; one much too small for either of them to follow her through. 

“...Son of a bitch,” Dean mumbled. He slapped uselessly at a branch of leaves tickling in his hair, then left off, satisfied it wasn’t an insect. “Man, it’s fuckin’ weird when people have read those stupid books.” 

“I don’t feel comfortable following her,” Castiel decided. “This is, ultimately, her choice,” he said, nearly grasping Dean’s forearm before he remembered it would result in a shock. He eased one or two frequencies loose, finally more composed, but still uncomfortably crammed into his moist, misbehaving vessel. 

“Yeah. Not much we can do, I just...” Dean sighed. “I dunno. Why am I even trying to convince her it doesn’t suck ass, here? It does. What can you really say to...” Trailing off, he frowned. “Are you... sweaty?” Dean asked, incredulous. “Cas, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he insisted, fighting the urge to yank free of his tie. “Without my grace, I... everything requires more exertion.”

Visibly bracing, Dean landed a hand on Castiel’s shoulder. Both of them winced at the ensuing shock, but this time, Dean didn’t recoil or release. He just bore it. “Welcome back to the human condition. Sorry, pal.” 

They trudged their way out of the stalled development and down the alley, away from the theater. 

Images and audio burbled from Dean’s head into Castiel’s, including a tiny, jingling regret that they weren’t actually sitting together eating popcorn, watching Flatliners. 

“Should we ask Sam for help?” Castiel suggested once they’d gotten in the car, though he could predict Dean’s response. 

The tinnitus whine of the Mark rose in answer. 

“Nah,” Dean said. “No point in handing this off to the research division. Something about this feels...” He chewed the inside of his lip, thumb tapping the steering wheel.

Too alive. Agile, and furtive. 

“New,” Castiel said. 

“Yeah. We got a whole bank of shelving dedicated to ‘unknown anomalies’ in the bunker library, and if there’s anything about this, I’d bet it’s two typewritten lines in a manila folder. Might as well read the SCP wiki. Redacted, redacted, we don’t know, oh also, redacted.” Dean rubbed at his face. “I say, the kid’s already made up her mind. I need my four hours. Nothing we can do about—what’d she call it?”

“The possible.”

“Right. Zilch we can do about ‘the possible’ tonight. What does that even mean, anyway? The possible what exactly?”

It was a feeling more than a certitude. A seed cracking in rich, sweet, black earth. The pink post-it note on the humiliating book: where everybody gets what they want. 

That wasn’t the world they lived in. This power, in all its crackling strangeness, whispered about other possible worlds. Potentiality. Anti-fate. 

Choose, it purred. Its lure pulsed through Castiel’s frequencies, difficult to ignore. 

“It’s... a kind of infinity, I think,” Castiel said. “It exists to defy parameters. It helps people who need to defy parameters in order to survive. It can’t be quantified. Not unlike hope.”

Suspicion burnt the air around Dean. “Okay, but you’n’me both know this kind of stuff comes with costs. Cas... The potential price tag here is giving me palpitations. What does this thing want from these girls? Why them?”

They’re special, Castiel thought. They were born into a fight simply because of who they are, and they’re in love. They’re young, and that love might change, or evolve, or it might not, but in the meantime it was real. Powerful. 

“Maybe it isn’t dangerous,” Castiel said. “Many trophic relationships are synergistic, or mutually beneficial. We so often deal with monsters... Predators, parasites, malevolent actors of heaven and hell. Maybe this is just... an ecosystem in need of inhabitants. Plants use fruit to entice herbivores and omnivores so that they’ll spread the seeds, or pollinate. Not everything wants to swallow you whole. Humans are so far removed from their place in the chain it’s easy to forget the forest isn’t some unknowable wilderness. For a long time, it was your home.” 

“Yeah, well. Bury a body under a tree and all that’ll be left is bones, in pretty damn short order,” Dean muttered.

“You keep predators as pets. Inside your houses,” Castiel said.

“Sure, and that ten pound housecat is definitely gonna eat you if you drop dead and the Fancy Feast dries up.”

Could a hungry thing be faulted? It depended on the appetite. “It’s all just meat, in the end.”

Snorting, Dean followed the signage toward a motel off the highway. “Cat chow, worm chow, no difference, huh?”

An understandably disconcerting thought to a human being, but of little import to an angel. “Not to the soul, anyway.” Or to love, which endured in other forms across eons, giving shape to futures otherwise unimagined.

Dean glanced over, big green eyes bright even in the dark.

Two men embraced, slamming into the wall of a walk-up apartment complex, the force of their kiss a bolt to the sternum. 

And the buzz in Castiel’s gut intensified in response to the image, crackling, breaking through his carefully shuttered barriers.

The Impala’s radio blared into bass thumping, synth-heavy life. Depeche Mode filled the car at alarming volume.

I'm taking a ride with my best friend—

“What the f—” Dean smacked at the dials, spun the volume down to no avail.

—We're flying high, we're watching the world pass us by, never want to come down, never want to put my feet back down on the ground—

“Baby, c’mon!” Dean pleaded, but the volume only increased as he fumbled. 

Castiel swallowed. “I... I think it’s me,” he said, voice doubled as it vibrated along his vessel’s vocal chords and also through the vehicle’s audio system. 

Dean looked at him wide-eyed. 

“Please pull over,” Castiel begged. “Please!”

Dean veered onto the shoulder and Castiel spilled out onto the verge, stumbling a few steps into the patchy grasses and weeds, gasping for air, sweating profusely. 

With every step the volume of the song lowered, until, about fifteen paces out, it shut off. 

A thought, not his own: Ha. Enjoy the silence. 

He heard the driver’s side door open and close. Dean approached and stood a respectful foot away, at his shoulder. 

“Cas... Whatever this is, it’s—it’s messing with you. We gotta figure out how to shut it down. If the kid goes, that’s her prerogative, but I don’t trust this thing as far as I could throw it, and that’s a bigass, oldass TV. Those things weigh a ton.”

Cain’s mark would add several feet of distance to that potentiality, but the meaning of the idiom was clear. “I understand your reservations,” Castiel said. “Some of these side effects are... disconcerting. It’s just...” They’d already discussed that certain things were dangerous in and of themselves; advantageous accidents of evolution, encoded into DNA. The wavelengths flickered and warped within him, but they did no inherent damage. “I don’t sense any evil intentions.”

Sighing heavily, Dean paced a couple of steps, rubbing at his forearm. He stilled in front of Castiel and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Cas, but ‘trust me’ ain’t gonna fly when it comes to you versus forces of great and mysterious power. I know you mean well, but you’ll buy anything the bad guy’s selling if you think it’s gonna get you where you need to go, and... bad guys lie.”

“You lie,” Castiel argued. “You lie all the time. To Sam, to me—”

“That’s—That’s not the same,” Dean countered. “It’s not the same thing, at all.”

Eyes narrowed to slits, lips parted, Castiel stared at him with all the force he could muster. “So you’re allowed to lie because you know what’s best for everyone?”

Mouth clamped shut, Dean stared off toward the road for several terse seconds. When he turned back, his eyes were hard. “Sometimes? Yeah,” he said. “When you live next to a permanent... ocean of batshit crazy the way we do, somebody’s gotta man the lighthouse. And that’s me, alright? I’m the lighthouse keeper. Sam tries, but the guy’s just not consistent, okay? He’s my brother and I love him, but he flips-flops. And you? Dammit Cas, you never listen! Playing god, Purgatory, running off with the tablet, and then Metatron... You’re not exactly batting a thousand here, buddy.”

He sounded angry as he spoke; throaty, puff-chested. Bossy and determined and big brotherly, the way he tended to get. Castiel peered past the obvious fire of his temper, toward a quieter, more translucent thing hiding behind it. 

There, pale against the demonstrable anger, rose a white slice of heart-in-throat fear. 

You see it clearly. The shape, and its implication. 

The energy pulses in bracts, veining outward. Superimposed until one becomes inextricable from the other: fear-anger-fear-anger, a heartbeat, the spaces between full with fierce, aching love. 

Standing on the side of the road in the dark, strange energies pouring off you like solar flares, a beacon of the weird, your hybrid monstrosity appalling, Dean plants himself staunchly in your space and doesn’t budge, less concerned about what harm you might cause than what harm might come to you.  

I don’t need to feel like hell for failing you. Okay? For failing you like every other godforsaken thing that I care about. I don’t need it!

Purgatory. You can’t ever forget that he believed he’d abandoned you. Guilt intense enough to rewrite memory. So much blood spilled to find you and you were too afraid to admit the truth: you didn’t want to be saved.

If you’d realized how badly he’d warp around your refusal, you would have been firmer. More truthful. You would have told him it wasn’t his fault. 

Would it have changed the outcome? He still tries to save everyone. He’s tired, but his soul withers if he sets this part of his life aside. He is a Pyrenean Mountain dog, and he’s chosen to make himself responsible for a multitude of flocks. Who are you to forbid him from loyalty? He’s capable of choosing, and against all odds, he’s chosen you.  

You hate that you’re scaring him. You aren’t the only one who suffers when you die. 

“Cas,” Dean says, gentler. “Maybe these girls have it figured, and this thing is toothless. Some kind of... timespace origami paper tiger. I hope so, but...”

The anomaly defies comprehension. Dean’s suspicion is no more unreasonable than your faith. You’ve erred, frequently, and you cannot fairly ask him to ignore your wretched lack of self-preservation.

“No. You’re right,” you say. “We can’t know. I... let myself be led too easily. Many angels do. It’s how our minds are structured.” To serve, and obey. “We were built, first and foremost, to follow orders, originally from God, but... it’s clear now that desperation makes fools of us all. We so badly want a place to lay our trust that we accept too much at face value. Maybe that’s something I’ll never fully overcome.”

Dean’s stance softens. He nods. “You try, anyway. Sometimes that’s the best we got.”

As you climb back into the car, the radio hisses softly, and Dean looks sidelong at you. 

“You at least taking requests?” he asks.

“I don’t know if that’s how this works.” Maybe, if you can grasp a single thread and zero in, but so far you’ve had very little control over which frequency takes precedence. 

Dean keys the ignition, disappointed. “As long as you don’t start blaring ABBA I guess I can deal.” 

It ends up being Queen, the next thing you accidentally shunt to the radio. Crazy Little Thing Called Love. Dean just nods with a kind of noncommittal approval. “Well. Can’t argue with Freddie.”

You find yourself, yet again, sharing a motel room with Dean Winchester.

Who has plunked down at the small table by the window with the rest of your sandwich, intent on giving himself indigestion. It’s also an act of self-soothing. These trade-offs, the constant negotiation of one need over another... Dean has sorted out methods that work for him.

“I’m going to shower,” you say. 

Thankfully, he just shrugs and waves you on.

You don’t strictly need to shower, but it had given you comfort as a human, and you still like to, sometimes. Hot water sliding over your flesh is meditative, and soothing, and this way you don’t deplete your grace on something as minor as basic cleanliness. 

The shower is disappointingly lukewarm and drizzly, like a summer rainstorm without the glorious petrichor. 

Nude, dry, you stare at your clothing where you left it heaped. 

The suit never used to get uncomfortable. It was, at best, half-real. Now, when you’re tired, you wish you had your jeans and t-shirt, cotton breathable and battered soft with use. Dean would lend you something, if you asked, but then he’d know how feeble you’re feeling. You want him to rely on you, not worry about you. Maybe if you leave a couple of buttons undone, and your tie off. No belt. You’re aware that your vessel is bulkier than it used to be, muscled in response to so much walking around bearing the uncanny weight of an angel. You’ve let it age, a little bit, in tandem with Dean. You like being seen as his peer, not a creeping glacier, frozen in perpetual sharp-jawed youth. 

Tonight, you feel as old as you are, and you do not want to put your pants on. 

Two knocks on the bathroom door startle you.

“Hey, Cas?”

“Yes.”

“Here, I just... If you’re feeling extra human, I thought... Can I crack the door real quick?”

“...Yes.”

Through the crack, Dean inserts a t-shirt and a pair of sweats. “If—If you want,” he repeats, quickly shutting the gap as soon as you accept them.

“Thank you,” you murmur quietly. 

Looking at yourself in the mirror wearing his clothes, you feel fond and sick all at once. Your hair is messy and you can’t be bothered to uphold the facade of composure and tamp down on your frequencies simultaneously. You might as well be named Steve, tonight. Steve was doing his best, too. Badly. 

Dean has chosen his bed and sprawls, face-down, hugging a pillow. You settle on the free mattress. 

You do sleep, sometimes, now. An hour, here and there. It seems to bolster your stolen grace, allow time for the taxed reserves to refill at a trickle, like recharging lithium-ion batteries. 

The room smells liminal; competing cleaning products and toiletries, a twilight of tired bodies arriving, departing, anonymous. You’ve been here before, so many times: Dean, asleep fully clothed, and you counting the hours. Dean always complains about being watched over, which is why you started watching TV. What Dean doesn’t seem to grasp is that you can do both: the human-shaped-Castiel watches a reality show, and the less visible elements fill the room, like dust motes. 

That was how you first learned that Dean watches you, too. Lashes parted by a fraction, allowing in just enough light to make out shapes or movement. 

Even now, Dean’s breathing is steady, but not slow or automatic enough for sleep. Far too controlled. His concern for you is palpable. There’s something else hot and low, nagging deep down, but the keening of the Mark interferes with any attempt at amplification. The sensation fuzzes and slides.

Sharing space with Dean is usually comfortable, even when you don’t speak. His pointed silences, however, poke and pin you, pinch your insides. When he shuts you out, you can’t help yourself: you wheedle and prostrate, follow him around like a kicked dog, making your eyes large in the hopes that he’ll soften and let you take your spot by his side. 

Before your absolute debacle with Metatron, you were trying to recover from your prior grievous mistake. You’d almost killed Dean, at Naomi’s behest, but funnily enough, that wasn’t why Dean stayed angry with you. 

It was that you’d run, again, instead of trusting him. Refused help and made unilateral decisions with universal impacts. Dean’s anger lodged deep, a splinter you couldn’t pry loose, so you’d slunk, pathetically, canine, tail between legs, threatening cashiers over pie. You, too, felt like a Pyrenees. One who’d abandoned their flock to shoulder a falling mountain, but there was no explaining that to a man. Especially not a man prone to throwing himself under falling mountains. 

If you were a dog, you’d have laid your muzzle on Dean’s thigh and hoped for the forgetful stroke of his hand over your skull.

Without that absolution, Metatron fooled you. Easily. Your inadequacy is a canyon carved by hubris and misplaced trust. Failure and humiliation find you the way salmon know their rivers, returning home. You never learn, and you know that’s true because Naomi told you, and Naomi wasn’t always a liar. She’s been inside the nexus of what constitutes your self, snipping and pruning, locking obedience around your neck like a spiked collar. Reset. Overwrite. 

You know what it is to be punished for the refusal to be something you’re not. The cost is dear. There is collateral. Sometimes, it kills you. Pretending to be what others demand from you will kill you, too. 

You’ve died more than a few times. You’ll probably die again. The man on the bed next to yours dies quite often, too. 

Are you even quantifiable? You and Dean. Your dual frequency, vibrating unlike any other you’ve encountered across your vast and terrible experience. He breaks your heart and then hands you his to borrow and you go back and forth like that until one of you takes another death blow.

Dean has a Kate Bush song stuck in his head. If you ask him, he’ll lie. Instead, you hum the tune, in a lower key, and he whips his neck to look sharply in your direction before his face slams shut, caught redhanded, so to speak. Like you’ve walked in on him disrobed, not in an act of pleasure but an act of existence. Picking at a scab, or rubbing an itchy spot on the buttocks. 

You might love him the most when he’s a little bit disgusting. Sweaty. Bloody and bloodied. Stuffing a sandwich into his outrageously beautiful face. Needy heat centrifuges inside of you alongside the thought that you’d like to put your fingers in his mouth. 

Pink-eared, he clears his throat and rolls over. 

Ah. Fuck. 

This is a shared wavelength, one you’re struggling to tamp shut. If the contents of his head beaming your way are enough to spill your coffee, then yours must be an order of magnitude louder. 

You swallow and your stomach lurches. It isn’t really a stomach and it’s not supposed to do that. You do not want to start sweating again. Ugh. Meat, meat, meat, and muscle, all of it an undulation that ribbons around the parts of you beyond the bounds. 

Too much bleed from you to him could do irreparable damage. An angel, in the raw, is not a construct meant for the human mind to contain. A single piercing spear of galactic infinity. It’s why most vessels degrade. Not yours, copy of a copy. If you leave this body, there is no animating consciousness left behind. A perfect, serene void. 

Prepare to evacuate soul...

Is this what it’s like for nephilim? To have a born self, a permanent extant digit? Modifiable, within bounds, but a trueness of shape most angels find obscene in its limitations. 

Suddenly Dean rolls back over, mouth open, then goes still. “Ah, crap. Nevermind.”

“What?”

“Thought I remembered something from a hunt in frickin’... Eugene,” he mutters. “But, that turned out to be some hippie bullshit. Like, woowoo ‘light your TV on fire, it’s controlling your mind’ bullshit.”

You smile. “Humans always think their minds are being controlled by technology. Animals control your minds all the time.”

Dean frowns loudly at you. “What?”

“Toxoplasmosis. Or simply by maintaining neotenic traits into adulthood. You’re very easily swayed that way.”

The frown stays loud. “Sure. Yeah, alright. Son of Sam’s whole ‘the dog made me do it’ schtick, that’s for real?”

“Oh, no, that man was a deranged liar.”

Dean purses his lips. “Super helpful, Cas. Thanks. You good with lights out?”

“Yeah.”

And the lamp clicks off.

No TV, tonight, not after the day you’ve had. The room’s imperfect darkness remains familiar. 

Slowly, you relax, reopening some of your shuttered frequencies. 

—waves of regret and... waves of joy, I reached out for the one I tried to destroy, and you, you said you’d wait ‘til the end of the world—

You don’t dare open all the way. Just enough to hear the radio, and pick up some cable. In spite of that, the hum of the anomaly vibrates deep down, in the low ranges. The domain of whales and elephants, even the humble pigeon. 

Flat on your back, stretched out long, you lie on the motel bed with your hands pressed to your oddly buzzing guts. 

Sleeping is, by your estimation, far too vulnerable an activity. When you were human it was worse, of course, because you needed more of it and only irregularly had a safe, warm place to do it. Now, your sleep is an in-between state. Most of you rests, along with your body, but other parts billow, adrift, siphoning the activity in the wires.

The TV—the void—is still reaching out. It wants to take you somewhere. It wants you to trust the grainy warmth of the white noise in your heart. It does not promise anything. All it lays before you is the possible. What might be, if you can bear it. 

Can you bear it?

Your shoulders already slump from the weight of your mistakes. What can and cannot be borne is non-negotiable, right now. You’re upright, limping along, trailing someone else’s tattered wings, and when that spark diminishes you’ll either die, or you’ll be a man. 

You aren’t sure what frightens you more. 

Human existence was, for you, primarily an overwhelming sensory nightmare, but the union of flesh and intention had provided rare moments of clarity. You’re not proud to admit you touched yourself. The wealth of nerve endings in the genitals certainly came as no surprise, knowing all you know, but the sensation—being entirely present within the bounds of skin, bone, and breath, feeling those systems coalesce in reaction—had made you curl in on yourself inside your sleeping bag on the hard cement floor, lost in a confusion of ecstasy that ebbed to self-disgust.

The self-disgust cascades, memory upon memory, until you crystalize in a moment of humiliation so total it aches. 

You’d pulled the chair out for him. That day in the bunker, when Dean asked if you could talk. You were finally clean and dry, among friends, chewing a delicious mouthful of burrito, and in your relief, you’d told Dean you always enjoyed your time together.

Dean ignored the chair and sat down on the tabletop. 

That span of painful seconds haunts you. An angel’s memory is not only eidetic but immersive. 

The wood of the table is smooth, oiled by use. You noticed those details because you were imprisoned in a finite nervous system, stunted, incapable of discerning any salient information, such as where the trees had once stood, or what they’d endured before logging. Human tactile and visual senses were poor substitutes for what you’d lost, and olfaction, you’d come to discover, was an unmitigated assault. 

Dean, at least, smelled like cotton and soap, like the blue substance in the red tube that you’d found intolerable for how sticky it left your underarms. You’ve been to Hell and beyond and sometimes you’d prefer Purgatory over being itchy. Idiopathic, this slowly oxidizing prison of sinew and impulse. No wonder the whole planet was insane. 

And you’d pulled out the chair. 

An invitation. You wanted him to sit down, to smile like he had been, just a few minutes ago, when you’d played the virgin fool just to see if the brothers believed an ancient cosmic being could be so naive. You like to be the glint in Dean’s eye, the thing that puts the silly little purse in his lips if something amuses or pleases him. 

Your dalliance with April was a nod at manhood. Men were supposed to sleep with pretty women. You’d wanted to, at the time, mostly because days of pain and cold and near-starvation had made her simple kindness—or rather, her ruse of kindness—into a blanket. Wrapped warm and close you’d gone muzzy, and it was a frightening human ache for comfort more than genuine desire that led you to put yourself inside of her. It’s just your luck you’d be tortured and killed for your lapse the following morning. 

Even your small choices escalate to disaster, to say nothing of the big ones. 

That ache for soft things, touch separate from violence, must be why Dean sometimes lets you linger longer than is strictly masculinely acceptable when you hug.

In truth, you’d hold him for as long as he’d let you. 

The memory replays, from the beginning. 

You sit there now, at the bunker table. Dean enters, stiff, shoulders downturned, posture making obvious the slight soft middle he thinks he’s hiding with his layered shirts, and love wells up your esophagus so profusely you have to take another bite of burrito to cover the lapse. 

He asks if you can talk. You say of course. Pull out the chair. 

And he sits down in it.

He sits down, and you know you’re dreaming. Because you’re dreaming, you reach for him, to hold him, and he reaches back. It’s all happening very fast. Nose to neck, you inhale deep, cotton and skin. Stubble scratch as you nuzzle. He lets you. Ducks his head to give you ground. You drag your nose higher, to the heavy bolt of his jaw. 

Nearby, a radio flares to life, spitting indecipherable static. 

You feel his lips on your temple. It’s a hard kiss. A declaration. An answer. As you lift your head, the cartilage in your noses knocks and you breathe one another’s air. The volume of the static climbs several decibels. Around you, the room begins to pressurize, atmosphere thick and ear-popping. 

“Cas,” Dean hushes. “I can’t, um... I’m—I’m sorry I...”

“...Oh.” Chastised, you try to pull away, but he grips the back of your neck. 

“No! No.” Foreheads bumped together, he whispers, “This is... I shouldn’t have told you to go. It wasn’t fair, and I didn’t—”

The edges of the sentence disappear in a ferocious crush of noise. Dean is speaking, his mouth is moving, but you only feel his voice in his chest, static corrupted by a high-pitched ringing. The erratic signal rises around you until it crescendoes to an excruciating tornado roar. Dean blurs and falls away, leaving you empty-handed.

You cry out.

A sharp jolt of current through your shoulder sparks you upright. Dean is seated on the bed beside you, shaking out his hand. 

“Ow,” he murmurs. “That’s... That’s definitely getting worse.”

In your confusion, you realize you’re partially erect, and a scarlett flush of shame blooms through your face. Your vocal chords grind to life, first a grunt, and then, “Dean. I apologize.”

“No, s’okay,” Dean says. He’s hunched, ear tips brilliant pink, an unusual ruddy colour flooding his freckled cheeks. Heat pours off his body, close to yours. “You um, you yelped,” he explains lamely. “Nightmare?”

“Not... exactly.” Knees bent, you lie down on your side. “I was at the bunker,” you admit.

Dean goes statue-still. “The... The bunker?”

“The night you told me to leave.”

Adam’s apple bobbing heavily, Dean leans to put elbows on knees. “Uh... Uh-huh?” he squeaks.

“Except you didn’t, this time,” Cas says. “You were trying to tell me something, but...”

“There was... too much noise,” Dean murmurs, rubbing at one of his eyes. “Yeah. Um...” He stares at the worn out carpet, face locked in a pained expression.

Humiliation boils through you like fever, nausea forcing up your gorge. The wavelengths inside of you garble and thrash and you clutch your stomach, folding in tight. He’s not supposed to know any of this. You aren’t going to do this to him. You can’t. This is your private disaster, your most idiotic hope, and even if you do wonder, sometimes—and you do wonder—that’s all it was ever meant to be. Wondering. Quiet daydreaming about the way he feels pressed against you when you do get to hold him, those rare times the stoicism shatters under the weight of sorrow or relief. 

You moan, and choke on a mouthful of white noise.

“Cas? What’s wrong?”

It’s too much. Too big. Arcs of flickering signal crackle across your skin, and you can’t close the frequencies, can’t loop yourself in: overwhelming interference. 

“Okay, that’s... That’s it. I’m calling it, we’re done here. Whatever this is, it can’t have you. If we drive far enough I bet we can—”

He’s already up, gathering belongings, still talking, but you struggle to parse language over the surging hiss in your ears. 

The knot of static balled under the shield of your ribs suddenly crashes against bone, yanked by a hard tug on one of the frequencies. Gasping for air, you close your eyes and follow the nasty pull to its source. 

That thin pink thread, from the theatre. Brighter, now, almost neon. Leah, reaching for you, flickering in desperation. And there is another thread, alongside that one; faint and silvery, degraded by vast distance. It’s struggling to find purchase, but it’s there. Cody. 

Something is wrong. 

“Hrngh,” you grunt. Focusing as best you can, you thrum across that same thread. I hear you. I’ll find you. Hold on.

Time is of the essence. One concentrated thought, and you’re dressed and standing, minus your coat. The t-shirt and pants you borrowed sit, neatly folded, atop Dean’s bag, and he stuffs them in.

“Good, yeah, alright, c’mon,” Dean says, reaching to grab your coat off the chair. As he thrusts it across the empty space at you, something falls from the pocket with a thud. 

You don’t need to see it to know what it is. “Dean, wait!” 

The pitch of the anomaly’s power flares in harsh discordance with The Mark when Dean picks up the second novel. 

Too late. He stares down at the book, dumbfounded, eyes so huge in his skull you’re afraid they’ll never take you in the same way again, warped now by the afterimage of your pathetic devotion. The mark’s ringing pitches even higher, and you groan and flee the room, holding your head. 

You can’t fly, so you run. 

“Cas? Cas!” Dean shouts.

He’ll be mad you’re running, again. Right now, you can’t articulate that you’re running toward, and not away. 

Thelma and Louis hold hands and sail off the cliff together. Leah and Cody’s guideline glimmers through your core. 

The writhing colours and wavelengths flooding into you from all sides weave into your stolen grace and the running is not exactly running but gravity. An urgent bending of space and time with every footfall. The stumps of your wings spasm, their phantom beating driving you forward, each stride eating miles. 

Within you, your link to Dean is lit furious-red, unquenched metal, but he doesn’t yank, only rages, pursuit imminent. Baby’s engine growls to life across the ether, headlights banishing the night.  

Highway. Houses. Storefronts. The diner. Almost there. Momentum of this kind is not easily slowed. You throw your whole self wide, grasping the emanations hard, and come to a lightning strike halt in the rainbow crosswalk. Tottering out of the mercifully deserted road, you can no longer distinguish between your own noise and the radial eternity burning through you like a dying star. 

The theater doors glow dimly from within. You shoulder through them and fall to your knees. “Leah...” you croak. “Are you here?”

She emerges from the shadows and kneels in front of you. “Hey, Columbo,” she says. “You made it.” 

You grit your teeth and nod. “What’s wrong?”

“I need your help,” she says. Her eyeliner is smudged and her nose is running, glistening above her upper lip. 

“I’ll... be your Obi-wan,” you manage. 

She chokes on a surprised laugh, swipes at her tears. “Where’s, um... Dean?”

Driving far above the speed limit, fury riding shotgun. “On his way. Why?”

“We might need him, too.”

“No,” you grate, forcing yourself to your feet. “No, we can do it without him.” Whatever it is you need to do. “What are we doing?”

She smears more tears off her face. “Opening the door.” Her pink thread tugs gently as she stands up. “C’mon.”

You follow her into one of the screen rooms. 

“The TV shut down,” she says. “I went to Cody’s to go through, and...” She shakes her head. “But it’s not gone. I know it’s not gone because I can still feel her, and you, and it’s...” She turns on her heel and looks at you like she’s trying to take in the shapes beyond your form. “I don’t know how, but... you have it.”

Her declaration slams a resonant gong.  

It followed you. It sensed you the second you arrived; the vast unspoken acres of your cosmic heart, and what you kept secret there. Your possibilities differ from human possibilities, on a geological timescale. There is something immense inside you that won’t be contained, or controlled. You’ve broken rank, rebelled, fallen, fought, and improvised, your big hands clamped around fate’s jaws, holding them shut. Many dangers breathe down your neck, but not the paralysis of tepid predestination. 

Without Dean, none of these things would’ve happened. The two of you are an axis unto your own, one that wasn’t ever meant to be, but still came to pass. Which arguably makes him the root of all your possibility. 

“It’s inside me,” you agree. “But, I’m not sure how to get it out. I don’t know what to do.”

She turns to look at the screen. “It wants to happen.” She chews her lip, starry eyed. “You just have to let it. That’s how Cody’n me did it. God, I should’ve just gone with her. I promised!”

You’ve been wondering, in the scraps of moments you weren’t overrun with broadcasts, why they didn’t go together. “What kept you here?”

Her fingers clasp blindly for the arrow pendant that no longer hangs around her neck, and she balls her hand into a fist at her side. “I have a little sister,” she says. “Well, half-sister. I needed to... say goodbye. Make sure she knows I’m not leaving because of her. Just... everything else.”

Not a clean departure. Or an easy choice. You understand, and she knows you do, because you are connected. 

No more running, then. Your defiance has delivered you, and if you spill your guts, you’ll have your key. 

This power is entangled with your own power. You have to coax both to work synchronistically. Running from the motel has left you metaphorically winded, but you rally around the hum at your core. You might be diminished, but you are still an angel. The physics abide. The functional patterns of the universe are mapped across your genome. 

Electricity snaps and flickers around you like ball lightning as you move to a midpoint in the aisle.

You aren’t sure where Leah is going, or what it means for her to leave. Humans, you reassure yourself, thrive far outside normalcy. Not only myth-made, culturally variable normalcy designed for social control—march lockstep or be ostracized, no matter how badly you chafe—but real extremes: of climate, of weather, of endurance.

Those same traits, unfortunately, are exploitable. Cruelty by design is part of the human ethos. They didn’t outlaw the breaking wheel until the 19th century. You often wonder, in this twilight of runaway modernity, what kind of God you served for millennia.

You don’t begrudge anyone their escape. 

An exit, then. Down the rabbit hole. Love has led to stranger places. 

You extend yourself, testing the bounds. The screen hangs empty and waiting. Leah’s intuition was good: reality is thinner here, more easily breached. 

Arm outstretched, you map the subtleties of where to aim. All you’re missing is a final coordinate.

“Huh,” you say. It is like a Stargate. You suppose it’s like many things, in the way that human stories always are. There is a person. Something happens to them. And again. And again. Heroes and fools, the woods and the wolves. An immense well of beginnings, middles, and ends, across continents and languages and fauna.  

“Why isn’t it working?” Leah rasps. “Are you sure we don’t need Dean?”

“I’m sure.” Everything you need from him, you carry with you. 

“Cas...  Short for Castiel, right?” she asks. 

“It is.”

Her demeanor softens, and she huffs a tiny, amused laugh. “I take it back about the queer characters.” Then, she frowns. “Though, for some reason I thought you’d be shorter.”

Your stature is of little import, though you do cock your head. “I’m above average height,” you declare flatly. By several hundred feet, but there’s no time to ruminate. “Leah. You said you could still feel Cody?”

“Yeah?”

“I need you to... give that feeling to me,” you say, unsure if the request will require reiterating to make sense.

“Oh,” she says. “Yeah, of course.”

As she reaches for you, you sense an incoming current, and you brace, muscles clenched. 

She grips your biceps with alarming strength, and instead of electrostatic shock, your energies first intermingle, then augment. Her jaw is set, her short hair wild. She gives you her version of Cody’s thread, a bright, vibrant rabbiting golden-green, and it overwrites the pale silver of the thin tether you recognized. 

It’s the final missing frequency. 

“Got it?” she asks.

“Mm. Thank you.”

She nods. 

You nod in turn. 

“Castiel?”

“Yes?”

“He needed to see the book,” she near whispers. “It’s his story, too.” 

Before you have time to reel from the statement, grace rises in unison with the possible and your eyes burn blue, washing Leah’s rapt face in eerie light. 

You worry you’re hurting her, so you shut them.

You’ve done things like this before. In theory. 

Focus on the point where inbound meets outbound. The thinnest band of convergence. Event horizon. Your very own. Possibility is infinite and you cannot hope to contain it and don’t wish to, but you are an amplifier, and an observatory, and a dead man, and a half-life angel, and you are in love with your best friend who loves you back and that changes everything and it doesn’t change a thing. 

The possible may be one potential truth, but it’s not the real. Your love is the truth and it is real and it will follow you beyond the bounds of your own existence to the heat death of the universe. A pinprick, zero-space nothingness spinning in the echoes of love. 

You let go of Leah’s arms, and she stands aside. 

You open your eyes. 

Light and dark tear out of you. Pillars, cascading, sun slice geometric, shadow-sharp. They carve across the theater screen, dim flat gray burning to searing life, outsized silhouette of the old CRT aglow like a martyred saint before giving way to the void. 

A blip. Sucking silence. Then, crashing, screaming static. 

Brightness, intruding from elsewhere. Vibrant green. 

You can’t maintain this kind of output for very long. Static grinds through your molars, resonates in your vessel-skull and extrasensory self, vibrating ever more intently towards obliteration. You’re losing your own edges in the projection, body alchemical, phantom wings rigid with pain. 

“Go!” Your voice shudders through the floor, through the walls, rattling the plaster.

Leah gives you one final look and breaks into a sprint down the aisle, neon pink threads between you straining, thinning, snapping. All the oxygen in the room is pulled into a universe-defying hush. 

She leaps. Collides. Disappears. 

With a loud electric snap, the screen goes blank. For the span of a silent millisecond, you wonder if you’ve returned all this energy to its point of origin. Scarcest, fleeting relief. 

Followed by implosion. 

The radiating forces that opened the door all slam back into your body at once, sending you to your knees, struck deaf by the sheer voluminous wave. Swaying up onto your feet, you trip and stumble down the steps to the base of the screen, where she vanished. 

As the hurricane shriek subsides, a high whine takes its place, barely registering. 

There’s a solitary pink post-it lying on the carpet. It reads: We are all going forward. None of us are going back. There is a small, hastily drawn rabbit next to the words. 

You’re elated. You’re ill with sorrow. You’re so full of noise and need and things unsaid that you’re continually spilling light from your abdomen. The pain is immense. A deep moan guts past your lips and you topple forward with the heavy thud of limp muscle. 

“Cas? Cas!”

Dean. Of course, Dean, in perpetuity, calling your name like the saying of it could save you.

He’s running down the aisle. Every step closer, the static ratchets higher, pressure intensifying. 

“Stop. Dean, don’t!” You groan and push once more to your feet, trying to get away from him. You growl through the agony, “It’s too dangerous. I can’t control it. Stay away!”

If he touches you now, you can’t guarantee his safety. With all the energies so concentrated, you worry you might both be electrocuted. 

“I saw,” Dean calls after you. “That was... She—She made it, I think. Did you see...?”

Cody. Just a glimmer. A feeling, more than anything seen. “Yes, I... think they’re alright.” More pain surges as light streams through your palms, and you flinch, panting. Keep walking. 

“Cas, wait! Just hold on a second—”

You lurch the final few steps to an emergency exit, hands to belly, signals torquing with enough force to make you heave. The exit spits you into a narrow hallway. Idiotically, you tug at your tie, fumbling shakily at your buttons as if the shirt is a membrane preventing energetic expulsion. 

Loud light cleaves free from your torso and scatters. Dean bangs through the door behind you.

“Cas, come back. Please!” 

You’re too afraid of hurting him to heed him. Love as immolation. Love as accelerant. You’re an O-type star trapped inside a five foot eleven bundle of carbon and oxygen, wrapped in a tan cotton coat. Blood and grace batter through your pounding heart, every pulse an agony of noise. At your back, your phantom wings prickle and flex, flared high and proud. Whether he wants you or not, you’re his, the whole horrible wreck of you, but in this moment, you must hold yourself apart. 

It hurts. You let it. You need to crawl away and hide somewhere until you’ve stopped figuratively bleeding. Staggering down the hallway, half-falling every few steps, you don’t have a destination in mind. 

Before you can protest, Dean catches up and grabs your shoulder.

Wheeling to face him one last time, you expect the world to wash out. Devouring, bright white erasure

The anticipated extermination does not occur. Neither of you burst apart like virally weakened cells. It’s just Dean, terrified, clutching you, his lovely mouth slightly parted. There is pain, but it transmutes, wavers between anguish and comfort. Your overlapping mangle of anomalous signals gives way to slackening tension. 

To keep upright, you take hold of Dean’s shoulder; the one that bears your mark. Your grasp closes the loop. 

You feel split throat to pelvis, but as Dean steadies you, the hissing scatter of light calms to a soft, CRT static white noise, and begins a gradual, tingling denouement. The glow of it glances, uncanny, off the broad planes of Dean’s beautiful face. 

He sees you. He’s not looking away. 

“Cas,” Dean says, his voice tender in the way it only ever is for you. “Cas, it’s okay.”

Tentative, he lifts his left hand. Two of his fingers catch in the notch between your collarbones and begin a slow drag down the center of your chest, pausing at the upper terminus of the light-spilling wound. They skim the ridged skin, touch firm but not painful, and you suck a shocked breath as they dip inside of you, curling under your ribs. 

His eyes search yours. 

You see your coat, folded in his big hands, stowed in the Impala’s trunk after you’d betrayed him and died. You see his face darkened with filth and determination, smile blinding white when he found you at the river in Purgatory and threw himself around you. Regret thick as tears the day he put you out the bunker door. His reckless intervention when Ephraim meant to rip your one fragile life away. 

Your faces are very close together. You watch his pupils dilate massive, near swallowing the creek-green of the irises. You can smell his sweat, and his panic, almost taste the stale toothpaste and sour indigestion on each exhale. His two fingers trace an outline of the sacred within you, pushing deeper. 

Integration, distintegration. Vibration, electrostatic repulsion. Impulse. Flesh. Fluid. Warmth— 

The resolute heat of Dean’s body in front of yours. 

Some of the static dissipates. 

What rings in its place is the steady tuning fork pitch of The Mark. 

Choice, or fate? What difference did it make if the end result was a chain. Each of you have obligations. Afflictions. Responsibilities you can’t leave behind. Freedoms constrained. 

You’ve peered over the edges into infinity. A hundred million mirrors in succession, each with a flaw of its own. Somewhere, he’s in your arms, and he stays there. One day, maybe, you’ll look into his eyes and there won’t be a pale horse carrying its rider towards you both at speed. It’s possible. There is still time, if finite, a prism. 

“I know,” Dean says. “Cas, I know. But...”

But.

If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.

You strengthen your hold over the scar on Dean’s shoulder. You laid your mark long before Cain. All you can hope is that it will persist through what’s to come. 

It’s a berserk sort of glory that nobody knows exactly what that might be.  

Slowly, so carefully, he slips his fingers out of you. 

The static fizzles with a crisp snap-pop, and is gone. 

He cups your cheek, thumb dragging over the damp angle of your orbital bone. You didn’t realize you were crying. Carefully, gently, he re-buttons your shirt for you. Normally, you’d fend him off, but you no longer inhabit a range anywhere near normal. Now he’s seen everything. Knows it all. You’re too tired to even pretend you aren’t starved for every brush of his fingers over your hot, bare skin. 

When you’re all buttoned up, he lays his hand to the center of your chest for several long seconds, and then wraps you in heavy arms, holding tight. 

You lean your exhausted weight against him. He’s strong enough. The soft static of thousands of shared hours fuzzes between your chests.

“I know there’s... something here,” Dean murmurs. His voice is almost never this sweet. “Between us. You’n me, Cas, we... I don’t know what to do with that.”

Because I always lose everything, Dean doesn’t say. Because everything I love is taken from me, again, and again, and again, and it’s my fault. My failure. 

“And I’m gonna die bloody,” he continues. “Probably sooner than later. Nothin’ anybody can do about it.”

Eyes closed, you cling to him. The Mark sings faintly under his flesh. “Dean...”

“Hey, that’s the job, right?” He nudges your skull with the tip of his miraculous nose. 

You’ve spent hours in contemplation of that nose; the slight uneven bridge, the way his profile changes when viewed from one side versus the other. “It is,” you say. “But...” Both of you could be less reckless. More accountable. Stop trying to martyr yourselves for every cause that heaves into your field of view. You can’t bring yourself to speak further. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I get it. Sometimes I think, maybe...” He swallows and breathes in beside your temple. “I dunno. I dunno, Cas. I’ve told you. I... I need you. I mean that.” 

The last time he said that, it was because you were beating him to death. “Dean, you don’t have to—”

“No, I... I’m not. It just... Cas, it scares the living hell out of me.” He lowers his head and hooks his chin against your trapezius, rucking your coat. As if the closer you are, the more private the confession. “The risk, it’s...” 

Astronomical. If sleep is vulnerable, love might be akin to suicide. Love as vast as an ailing angel has more in common with a weapon, or a killing curse.

“It’s too much,” you conclude. 

You feel him nod. “But, if... If we can hold on to this,” he whispers, “then... maybe, someday... I think it might save us. Not—Not right now, right now everything’s dogshit, but... someday. And it doesn’t have to be, um. Y’know, necessarily. I don’t even mean...” He exhales heavily. “I’m not sure what I mean.”

He might not be, but you understand. Enough of it, anyway. You let your head rest heavy against the tendon of his neck. “It’s alright.” 

Whatever he can give you will be enough. The way he says your name is enough. 

“But you gotta promise me something,” he hushes, breathy.

“I’ll try.” Your promises tend to snap in half over the knee of an absent deity. 

“Whatever this is,” Dean rumbles, soft and muscled against your body, “it’s the one chip we don’t bet. No matter what. I don’t care how dark it gets, I don’t care if there are thirty apocalypses aiming to sink teeth into our asses. We never put this on the table. Never,” he punches the repetition. “This is for us, Cas. Just ours. Okay?” 

Y’know it wouldn’t kill you to lie, every now and again. 

It’s Dean’s voice, but... you don’t remember him saying it. Time courses strangely around your intimacy. Minutes here may be years, or seconds. You pulled him from the pit, but ever since, your reach has far exceeded your grasp. 

You tilt your head and squish your cheek against his cheek, hugging him as close as you can while he holds you back. The high whine of The Mark sounds oddly distant. He loves you, too. Someday, you’re going to lose each other. It’s going to hurt.

There is still time. 

You press one large palm into the imprint of your grip on his shoulder. 

And you lie.