Archive of Our Own

Mendocino National Forest
California

On days like this he doesn't know why he took up teaching, and he thinks he might not even like kids very much.

Even in the cool of the forest, it's hot. Sweat is running down his face, making his glasses slide inexorably down his nose, and he can smell the stink of it, knows it's soaking through his shirt and staining the fabric dark with saturated patches.

He can hear the brats giggling behind him as they trudge along in his wake, fat guys sweat more, whispered out carelessly loud. They don't even put their hands over their mouths, and when he turns, their collective gaze is mocking and judgmental.

Children of the fucking corn, he thinks. "Keep up," he barks resolutely, gesturing at the stragglers, and swinging his arm up and around to slap at where he can feel something crawling up the back of his neck. He pulls his hand back, and the cracked carapace of a large black spider is oozing yellow and messy all over his palm.

"That could be poisonous, Professor," one of the children sneers.

He scowls, wipes the gore on his pants leg as he keeps walking. "Most spiders aren't dangerous to humans," he declares. "Their fangs are either too short or too fragile to penetrate human skin."

He doesn't see the dead log in his path until he almost trips over it. He reels, barely keeps his footing, and a ripple of laughter breaks out. "Dead and dying trees are a natural and important part of this forest's ecosystem," he raps out frantically. "Who can tell me why?"

They stand in a mute semicircle, glaring at him for his temerity and daring him to point to one of them.

He licks lips gone dry. "Because when trees die and rot on the forest floor, essential nutrients are recycled by insects and other animals," he races out. "This is part of the circle of life, and one reason why clear-cutting and the construction of logging roads can be so devastating to the entire ecosystem. Any questions?"

Their eyes are insolent, their gum-chewing jaws moving rhythmically and idly, as if they're chewing the cud.

"Well. Our landscapes are under siege from a host of threats," he lectures, slicing a finger through the air at them. "Wildfires, climate change, invasive species, and increasing human population put these delicate ecosystems at risk. We must work together…" He nods for emphasis. "Together, to preserve our nation's rich biodiversity, to, to build. Yes, build…build ecologically healthy and resilient landscapes that can adapt and thrive in the face of natural disturbances."

When the hand floats up, his heart sinks. "Yes?"

"They grow pot near here," the girl says, and she winks a bright blue eye at him. "I read about it in the LA Times. There was this raid and the cops confiscated four hundred and sixty thousand marijuana plants. That's some pretty rich biodiversity right there, Professor."

He starts blustering back at her, while her long, spiky eyelashes blink slowly, and her lip curls derision at him.

"Yes, well. Thank you, Claire. You raise an interesting point…these illegal cultivation efforts result in massive environmental damage, and it's—"

It drops on his shoulder lightly for its size, and although he's somewhat distracted by the screaming, and the brightly colored kaleidoscope of children scattering into the woods as football-sized black missiles start hailing down on them from the trees, he could swear it cocks its head at him and calculates just where the skin of his neck will be softest.

He realizes he was wrong about the fangs a few seconds later as the ground looms up to meet him, but he finds he doesn't really mind, because he can't feel anything, and it's oddly peaceful. He can still see though, see the figure that approaches from off the trail, walks right up to him and stares down, while he gazes up into its eyes and wonders what's wrong with them.

Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge
Charlestown, RI

"We're not alone."

Castiel doesn't stop walking as he speaks, low and almost casual, but he does slow down, and his unease is palpable in the way his frame tenses and his fingers flex and fan the air next to his thigh.

Bobby darts his eyes around as he slips his Remington off his shoulder. They've been hiking the trail for just over two hours, wending their way through the mix of flat grasslands and wetlands that separate the coastal lagoon to their left from the Atlantic ocean, as they make for the barrier beach they're here to scope. It's been peaceful so far, no sign of what they're here to hunt, whatever it is that vanished all ten birdwatchers on an Audubon society nature walk into thin air. Bobby has let himself drift in the heat, unseasonable as it is for Rhode Island in early Spring, has let his focus wander across the simple beauty of the place.

Now he snaps back to attention, and…it's quiet, he realizes, the chatter of birds and the croaking of frogs suddenly muted. As he registers the hush, the tranquility of the place takes on a haunted, malevolent feel, and when he glances up, the blue sky has turned the same misty gray as winter breath. "What is it?" he asks brusquely, as he turns mid-walk to check their six, tracking his vision across the acres of sedge and rushes, the clumped red maple and deep pink swathes of swamp rose.

"I'm not sure yet." Castiel narrows his eyes as he looks out over the water. "But I think we can safely assume it's a non-native undesirable species."

The angel has taken to carrying a Predator crossbow he liberated from the trunk of the Impala, and his hand drifts almost idly to the weapon and unclips it from its sling. He rests the stirrup on the ground, the tip of his boot holding it firm as he eases the trigger pull up, plucks a metal bolt from a hip-mounted pouch, and slots it into the groove. Castiel performs the action slowly, his fingers deliberate, but Bobby has seen him repeat the motion just as precisely in a blur of deft movement too fast to track.

Castiel glances back beyond Bobby briefly, and his eyes are alert, gleaming molten. The speed with which he switches from placid to feral makes Bobby shiver, like it always does, makes him think the Predator crossbow says it all. It's been months, and even when the mojo is switched off there is still something outcast and exotic in Castiel's regard, an aloof, unblinking gaze Bobby suspects can see into his soul and dissect it; there is still something alien in the self-possessed way he carries himself. On the hunt it magnifies; the angel's poise becomes ruthless calculation and intent, his walk a stealthy, wolf-like lope that promises lethal speed. Dean calls it badass, and his eyes go wide and starved when he says it, but it makes Bobby think of full-moon fever and the wild, bloodthirsty, amoral things that lurk in the darkness. He pushes that thought away, grinds out a surreptitious, "Where is it?"

Castiel's response is terse, with an underlying note of long-suffering amusement. "Everywhere. Be on your guard."

Almost as the words leave the angel's mouth, Bobby sees them shimmer into existence in the shallows on both sides, forming from nothing, a reverse-melt into solid forms with grayish-green skin that glows phosphorescent. Narrow, wispy-haired skulls erupt straight out of their shoulders, and amphibious eyes bulge golden on the sides of flat faces bisected by black, sliced-in mouths that stretch from ear to ear. Tattered clothing hangs from their shoulders, and their arms are short, raptor-like forelimbs that end in clawed hands. The one nearest to him is wearing what looks like a pair of Nikon Trailblazers on a strap around its neck.

"Binoculars," Bobby murmurs as he moves closer to the angel. "I guess we found our birdwatchers." He tallies the hybrids ruefully and swallows down his fear as more flicker into phase. "All ten of them."

Castiel is already raising his crossbow and taking aim. "Don't let them herd you into the water," he says coolly. "It's their element, and they'll have even more of an advantage."

Bobby blows out as he pulls his cap down more firmly on his head, grunts as the things start to fan out and close in. "I'm getting too old for this."

The angel directs a bone-dry look his way, and his reply is utterly flat. "And you tell me this now?" He doesn't blink as he lets the bolt fly, and Bobby hears the serrated zip of the projectile as it cuts through the air. It buries itself dead center between the eyes of one of the hybrids to their left, and the thing lurches, flaps its lipless mouth and bays out a shrieking noise as it belly flops back into the lagoon it emerged from.

And then all hell breaks loose as the things attack.

Bobby gets off a single shot, sees the head of one of the things mist out in a gory splatter of scarlet flecks and globs of gray matter, and breathes out a heartfelt dammit for one second of helpless paralysis before a second mutant tackles him. It's heavy, because when it was still a person it had a body mass index in the late twenties, and it takes him down easily. The gluey, frogspawn slide of its hand around his neck has his guts flip-flopping as he fishes for his Bowie and brings it up and around in a clumsy arc, burying it in the back of the thing's neck as it pummels him. It screeches, a loud, unearthly yammering that makes Bobby's nerves flinch in hideous terror, as its eyelids close up, up, over its eyes.

Snatching a split-second to glance beyond his own tussle on the shingle, Bobby sees that the rest of the semi-human horde have Castiel smothered in confusion and are battering him so hard Bobby can hear the dull thud of the impact. The angel is staggering under the onslaught, lashing out wildly at the ghoulish dead as they chew into his defense, until a blow slams into the side of his head so hard Bobby sees his eyes spin in their sockets as he crashes down onto all fours. He's still conscious though, and he looks right at Bobby and smiles, his mouth dripping scarlet drool.

Bobby tears his gaze away as his own pain-crazed assailant hurls a stream of croaked-out invective at him. Its breath is rich with the stench of rotten, long-dead carrion, and he can see rows of sharp, white teeth in its upper jaw as it snaps hungrily at him. Up close, its skin is scaled like a fish, and its tongue flicks out at him, blue-black and dripping putrid slime. He goes in for the kill again, sinking the blade in, sawing it from side to side, and he's beginning to space out as its grip finally loosens and the pressure on his airways is gone. He sucks in oxygen, blinks away the spots in his eyes, and rolls the twitching form off him as he cranes his neck.

Castiel's sword is drawn now, and he's smiling again, his eyes glinting savage as the creatures prowl around him looking for a weakness. And then he explodes into a blur of fluid movement, the weapon a graceful silvery flash as he lunges, twists and feints, ducking them as they rush him. Every movement is adroit and economical, millennia of skill honed into a brutal, succinct dialogue of metal, flesh, and bone. There is no debate going on in this fight any more, Bobby can see, and he barks out a wry laugh as he watches the angel carve and slice, until the hybrid closest to the back of the group bellows out a harsh, guttural, ill-formed stream of words.

The result is instantaneous.

The fight stops abruptly as Castiel freezes, and Bobby is close enough to see the angel's face go ashen, his sword arm falling as if the weapon is suddenly too heavy to wield. The thing lifts its arm and points, jabbers out what sounds like the same phrases again, sibilant and accusing. Bobby strains to pick out what it's saying but it isn't any language he can recognize, and he gestures frantically as the remaining mutants start to pick up the chant. They're plodding their way in, relentless, and Castiel starts to fall back towards the sea, transfixed by them. Spell, Bobby assumes desperately, and he pushes up onto his feet, hollers the angel's name at the top of his lungs as he takes long, quick strides towards them, his knife ready.

At the sound of Bobby's voice, Castiel winces, passes a hand across his brow, shakes his head and blinks at the five, six, no, seven hybrids reaching out for him. His face snaps around then, his eyes fixing on Bobby, and the light is already starting to blaze eerily out of them. "Take cover," he yells.

Bobby doesn't need convincing. He hits the wet sand hard and buries his face under his arms as static electricity crackles, scorching heat explodes all around him, and high-pitched wailing fills his ears.

The kid is about a half-foot taller than when Dean last saw him.

He's some distance away, in the outfield, knees bent, feet apart, hands up and ready, his eyes glued to the hitting zone and the point of contact, in case a flyball heads his way. Dean knows the kid is out there because he's got a strong right arm and an eagle eye, and he's a team player, happy to back up the infield and the outfield. The kid has a good memory; he's good at keeping a bead on the score, knows the number of outs, the type of hitter he's up against, can pinpoint the location of any runner on base and think on his feet, shifting positions according to the situation, the pitcher, and the batter. Dean knows the kid knows to do all that because he remembers telling him, telling him outfielders are probably the most overlooked players in baseball, and it didn't matter if he wasn't batting, he was still vital to the game.

He explodes into action now, feet speedy as he darts to his right, his glove out and ready, and Dean tenses, his own fingers strumming the air in anticipation as the kid reaches—

"I'm sorry, but do I know you?"

Her face is slightly suspicious, slightly puzzled, but her eyes are warm brown, like they always were. Her arms are folded across her chest, a little defensive. "You just look really familiar, but I can't place you…"

She's wearing one of his old t-shirts, and that throws Dean for a second, so he fumbles his reply. "Uh. I don't think so…" She was dazed and confused in the hospital, he remembers, her eyes foggy with drugs when he hovered at the doorway to her room. Even though her eyes are curious, there isn't any real spark of recognition in them. He's safe, he reckons. "I think I just have one of those faces," he offers lamely, and he shrugs.

"Yeah, I guess," she tells him, and her focus is already drifting away, back to the game, past the modest throng of other parents who got off work early for Friday Little League practice.

"One of them yours?" Dean asks her, and he knows he shouldn't, hears his voice go a little faint as he does, because he loved her, loved her son too, and a part of him still does and always will.

"Yeah," she murmurs distantly, but she remembers her manners. "How about you?"

He's with it sufficiently to answer more smoothly, waves a noncommittal hand over at the cluster of kids on the diamond. "Nephew. I was just passing."

She's nodding distractedly, not looking at him, already taking the first steps away. She reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear, and the ring on her finger gives him a garish, mocking wink. His inner voice spits, cubic fuckin' zirconia at it, but it still glitters hurtfully as she strides away, back towards the tall guy in the baseball cap who's ruffling Ben's hair and looking back over his shoulder to see where she went.

"Your boy's good," he calls out after her, and he switches on his million-watt grin when she turns.

She paces backwards for a few steps before she stops, hands on her hips. "Yeah," she agrees, still a little wary. "He and his dad practice a lot."

Dean shifts on his own feet, bites his lip. "Well, you tell him outfielders are the backbone of the team," he says hoarsely. "You tell him it doesn't matter if he's not batting, he's still vital to the game."

After a beat, her expression softens a little. She smiles at him, and it's tolerant and amused, the smile she directed at him every time he told her he and Sid were headed out to the links for a round of let's-hit-balls-with-sticks. "Funny," she muses. "He says that himself, before every game." And then she spins back around, and she swings her hips a little as she goes.

"Yeah," Dean breathes out himself, because it isn't her fault, none of it, even if it hurts him a little to watch her go, even if a part of him imagines jogging after her, grabbing her arm and swinging her around. Don't go, he imagines himself saying. You do know me. "You tell him I said that," he shouts instead. "Me. Dean Winchester."

She glances back once more but she's too far away now for him to see the expression on her face, and the man is walking towards her, reaching for her hand.

Like the gun? she'd purred at him all those years ago, in some dive bar in Cicero.

"Dean Winchester," he echoes himself softly. "Like the gun."

The Impala is pulling into the parking lot as he walks across the grass, and Sam ducks his head and squints out past him over at the game as he clunks the passenger door closed. "I set a bunch of wards at their new house," Sam comments neutrally as Dean leans his head back on the seat.

"Yep, all good," Dean replies, and he's amazed his voice comes out so firmly.

"Plus, Bobby will still have his people checking in on them. And we know Cas cloaked them both anyway, when he wiped their memories," Sam adds, and his tone is still level and non-judgmental, because he's trying here, Dean knows, trying to be good with the shady crap Dean pulled when he asked Castiel to erase him from their existence. "So, at least we know Crowley probably has no clue where they are now they've moved."

Dean closes his eyes, sniffs, and then breathes out deep. "Thanks for tracking them down for me," he mutters.

There's a brief silence, then, "Are you alright?" Sam asks him tentatively, sympathetically.

"I'm alright." Dean clears his throat, forces a grin as he sidetracks. "You know, since we're down here and all…we aren't all that far from Kennedy Space Center."

His brother's face doesn't light up like he hoped it would. "Bobby called," he replies instead.

It's really all Sam has to say, because his voice is somber and careful, and a sudden streak of fear grabs Dean by the heart and doesn't let go, has him sitting bolt upright, impatience flaring through him while sheer dread quells it and tells him that maybe he'd rather not know. He finds he can't even gasp, no, and he feels the dull pressure that's been there in the distance behind his eyes all day suddenly start throbbing remorselessly, even as his brother throws him a look that assesses his symptoms and diagnoses sheer terror in the space of a second.

Sam raises a hand and hurries out more words, reassuring now. "He's okay, Dean, both of them are. You hear me? But they both got knocked about a little."

The relief takes a moment to calm him, and Dean knows he's blinking at his brother almost confusedly because panic has stolen his voice and his throat is so constricted by fright it feels like a noose is looped around it, choking the air from his lungs.

"They were jumped while they were checking out those disappearances in Quonochontaug," Sam continues, and he's cranking the ignition now, looking over his shoulder as he backs them out of the parking bay along to the throaty growl of the engine. "Birdwatchers, remember? Anyway, we were right, looks like more of the same…Bobby says it was a bunch of those weird half-and-half fish-ghoul things, like the ones we ran into in Galveston."

Dean finally manages a response, and it's just a parched scrape of air vibrating barely across his vocal cords. "But they're both alright? Cas is alright too?"

Sam nods as he eases them out onto the road. "He did his magic light trick, turned them into crispy critters. But Bobby says it was like they targeted Cas. And they said some things that seemed to really spook him."

Dean absorbs that for the span of a few still vaguely frantic heartbeats, before he finds the force in his voice again. "What things?"

Sam huffs. "Well, Bobby doesn't know. It was some weird mystical dialect. And Cas flaked out like he always does after he goes nuclear. He hasn't woken up yet." He side-eyes Dean for moment. "He's alright," he reiterates gently.

Dean tightens his jaw, manages to maneuver himself back into something resembling self-possession, and steadies his voice enough to joke, "Yeah, nine lives." It's weak and he isn't even really convinced he believes it himself, because no sooner has he said the words than he's mentally tallying just how many Castiel has used up so far, and how many he realistically has left now he's running low on juice. "He has nine lives," he repeats, because maybe if he says it enough it'll be true.

"Yeah." Sam's fingers tap out a way-too casual rhythm on the steering wheel as they tool along. "Hey, why don't you drop me at the airport?" he offers. "I can push onto New York by myself, get a head start on this haunting if you want to check in at Bobby's first, make sure everything's okay?"

Even through his anxiety, Dean can pick out the caginess in Sam's tone. It's a red flag to the fact his brother's scrutiny still sees too deep for comfort sometimes, and there's a moment where it bothers him, where he feels his cheeks start to heat.

"Dean?" Sam prods. "It'll set your mind to rest."

It will, Dean knows. "Yeah, okay," he says quietly.

He keeps his eyes staring forward as he speaks, doesn't glance to his right as they circle the park. He pays no mind to the loud smack of the ball on the bat, and the kid running across his peripheral vision, and he closes his ears to the sound of cheering.

He leaves the dream of a normal family in his dust forever.

Dean creeps into Castiel's room at six in the morning, when the sun is just starting to cast the sky orange on the horizon. Castiel is facing away from him, curled up and hugging himself defensively in his sleep.

Dean is stealthy, toeing off his boots and socks, easing his jeans and boxers down and heaving his t-shirt over his head. His cock is already at half-mast as he eases in under the covers and wraps himself around Castiel from behind, and the angel makes a barely conscious but pleased-sounding huff of welcome from the depths of the pillow.

"I missed you," Dean murmurs as he fits himself to the slope of Castiel's shoulder, the arch at the small of his friend's back, the curve of his ass, and the long sweep of his legs. And fuck, he did, he marvels, as he smoothes his hand across the sleek skin of Castiel's torso and up to the raised scar. He pulls Castiel in so tight to himself it's like they're joined down the whole length of their bodies, and he thinks he might never grow tired of this, six feet of perfect, warm skin and angular, wiry hardness pressed against him from chest to toes; thinks that just for a while he's putting all the crap out of his mind and letting himself have this.

He occupies himself kissing the vertebrae between Castiel's shoulders, inhaling the scent of Ivory soap and sweat, and tasting salt. A trail of vicious bruises wends its way up Castiel's back, and his shoulder blade is badly grazed, the skin blossoming raw. The rage that electrifies through Dean when his eyes fall on it surprises him. He manages to rein it in, nuzzles the purplish blotches, kisses the sore area and feels Castiel wince under his ministrations. "Tell me you're alright," Dean whispers into his skin. "Tell me what those things said to you."

He trails the tip of his tongue upwards, draws a circle around the knob of bone at the nape of Castiel's neck. He fastens his lips around it, scrapes his teeth along the hardness just under the skin, bites down until he feels give. Castiel's hand is on the globe of his ass now, pulling Dean in as he pushes back onto the rigid line of Dean's cock, so the tip of it nudges into the slot at the top of his legs. Dean groans at the promise of snug heat there, at his friend's fingertips sliding down to play deftly in his cleft as he drives deeper into the tight space, the slight resistance of sweat-tacky skin and the scratch of coarse hair forming exquisite friction against the head of his dick.

"I'm alright," Castiel confirms, and he twists agilely, so that Dean finds himself caught up in the tangle of his arms and legs. "And I don't really remember what they said," the angel continues blearily. "A spell of some kind perhaps…and I'm fairly sure they insulted me too, so there's that."

Castiel cants his head, kisses Dean slowly and damned thoroughly, his tongue exploring every nook and cranny of Dean's mouth until he pulls away and yawns, remembering his manners sufficiently to drift a slow hand up to cover it. His knuckles are split and bloody, and Dean snakes his own hand up, closes his fingers around Castiel's wrist, studies the broken skin darkly. "They were lucky you got there first," he growls, gazing briefly into the angel's sleepy, affectionate eyes. "I would have ended those sumbitches slowly."

Castiel flexes his hand into a fist, considers the battered skin. "Speed was of the essence, Dean," he concludes. "And you know I can take care of myself."

Dean responds with a noncommittal grunt, releases the hand, and dips down to mouth his way along Castiel's jaw. "I have to pull out in a couple of hours," he mutters as he laps at the pulse that flutters beside Castiel's larynx. "New York. Sam headed up there already…" He clucks sympathetically as he notes more bruises, the pooled-blood shape of fingers imprinted into the juncture of his friend's neck and shoulder. "This pisses me off," he gripes as he presses kisses to the evidence of a hard-won fight. "No one gets to mark you but me."

Castiel snorts in amusement, bares his throat obediently, and Dean grunts in satisfaction at his submissiveness, his whipcord strength pliant and yielding as Dean smears a silky trail of saliva along the protective script that underlines his collarbone. He entwines his fingers in the softness of Castiel's hair while the angel rubs at the back of his neck and uses the heel of his hand to knead the muscles of Dean's shoulder as they flex. Castiel's nipple is already rising as Dean flicks his tongue across it, exhaling a cool blast of air across the tender nub so that it stiffens even more. He hears his friend hiss from above him, and he chuckles, slides his palm down Castiel's ribs to massage the crest of the hip that rolls up into his touch. He contemplates biting at that sharp point of bone in the next few minutes, sucking a few hickies into the skin there, and the plan sends a heavy ache of want throbbing low and productive through his belly on its way to his cock.

Castiel hums agreeably as Dean flips a leg across his thighs, plants a hand either side of his face and leans forward to lick his way back in between the angel's lips, pulling at their plump succulence with his teeth. He nudges his dick against Castiel's lower belly, maneuvering a few inches further up the bed so his friend's morning wood is sliding behind his sac and brushing against his asshole. The sensitive skin there twitches reflexively, ripping a growl from deep in Dean's throat, before the disorganized shift and prod of Castiel's cock settles into long, slow strokes along Dean's perineum, in time with the curling dance of their tongues.

Castiel's fingers flit lightly up and down the ridge of Dean's spine, and he moans into Dean's mouth, a soft, low sound of pleasure at once so innocent and so fuckin' hot Dean feels it in his heart and his balls at the same time. The angel slips a hand down in between them and rubs the pad of his thumb across the ridge of skin under the swelling bulb of Dean's dick, spreading the wetness that already beads there, the caress skittering deliciously across Dean's nerves so that he gasps. Castiel grunts decisively then, pushes up under Dean, his hand at Dean's shoulder, impatient as he grips Dean's thigh and urges him up.

Dean shuffles forwards on his knees, his cock bobbing and pointing the way, its one eye fixed unerringly on its destination as Castiel reaches behind himself to tug the pillows into a mound underneath his head, propping himself up. He opens wide for Dean, and his mouth is burning, velvet heat that has Dean stutter out an incoherent curse, a perfect wet vacuum as Castiel suckles greedily. The angel is wild-haired and debauched looking, his lips stained dark pink with the rush of blood, shiny with spittle and swollen luscious with Dean's own kisses, and their stretch and drag as he leans in almost as far as the base and pulls away are sweet and blissful. His eyes blink lazily, the lashes thick, sooty black crescents on his cheekbones as Dean grips the metal headboard and stares down avidly at his dick sliding in and out.

"Fuckin' gorgeous," Dean mumbles hoarsely, and he can hear his own breath, slow and strained, as Castiel's fingers close around his shaft, and the tip of his cock pushes into the firm, springy flesh that encloses him, bulging Castiel's cheek outwards. Almost-painful sensations rocket up Dean's length and he whimpers as Castiel pulls back, swirling his tongue across the fold of skin under the head, probing the slit. Castiel's hand is flat to Dean's hip, his thumb a distracting tickle as it moves over the jut of bone and his fingers splay out across Dean's asscheek. Dean brings one leg up, runs his fingers up the back of Castiel's head, a silent question that Castiel answers with a husky aaaah.

Dean pushes in, slow at first, speeding up until he's making shallow, fast thrusts that butt his cock up against the back of his friend's palate. Castiel swallows him deep, his teeth scraping the spine of Dean's cock, his fingers teasing the back of Dean's thigh and trailing up into his crack, his fingernail a tantalizing scratch across the rim of muscle hidden there, until he pulls off abruptly and slides lithely away, vanishing from sight.

Dean feels lips mouthing his sac then, feels the warm tip of Castiel's tongue at his entrance, hungry, wet swipes and pokes at the puckered skin that have Dean cursing and tilting his ass back invitingly, leaning his brow on the cool wall above the headboard and losing himself in hazy satisfaction for endless moments. Castiel is relentless, piercing deeper with each incursion before withdrawing to lick gentle, sloppy stripes from Dean's balls upwards, his thumbs pulling Dean's ass apart for better access. It isn't good enough for him though, because in one fluid move he's up on his knees behind Dean, hands urging him back almost roughly, and Dean is only too happy to oblige, falling down onto his elbows on the bed as Castiel resumes his assault, his hands like twin vises at Dean's hips.

Castiel eats Dean out like he's starving for him, his breath scorching, his lips clamped to the skin. It's filthy, unholy, the sounds the angel makes so obscene Dean thinks he could come from them alone, and Castiel's tongue is fervent and slick as it skips nimbly around the rim before stabbing in for a skillful twist and curl. Just the thought of it, pink and glistening as it works him open, has Dean only too willing to help, and he drives himself back onto the wet blade of it as it spears him, hears Castiel make a muffled, surprised mmmpphh sound. Dean grabs for his cock at the same time, gasping out tiny moans, barely biting off a cry as he feels the thicker, more solid press of a finger glide in deep and stroke almost curiously across his prostate, so that he ignites inside. He throws a heated glance over his shoulder, sees Castiel's own dick rising, engorged and angry looking, from its bed of dark curls. He decides he'll flip himself around to get his mouth on it and suck it dry, then finds he can't even concentrate on that as another whiteout of pleasure blinds him. He has to bury his face in the pillow to muffle his own strangled whines, just in case—

A creak, footsteps, his overactive imagination, fuck, no it isn't, because there's a soft knock at the door.

"Cas…?"

Dean freezes in utter horror, tensing so tight he wonders briefly and abstractedly if his ass might be cutting off the blood supply to Castiel's finger, which remains exactly where it is. He spares a frantic look back at his friend, hisses, "It isn't locked," through teeth clenched tight with anxiety, but Castiel just blinks at him almost dreamily, his eyes black with lust.

Bobby is quiet, considerate. "You up yet, boy?"

Castiel smiles slowly then, licks his lips deliberately. "No…" he drawls in the direction of the closed door. "I'm not up, Bobby. Not yet. But I hope to be at some point soon."

Dean widens his eyes at the subtext, frowns bloody murder, finally regains control of his slack jaw for long enough to mouth don't you fuckin' dare, as his friend shifts his finger assertively, buries it deep, crooks it and slides it idly and so damned skillfully across that spot again, once, twice, three times in succession. Dean's head swims hazily, and he shudders, has to sink his teeth into his knuckles to stop himself from whimpering out his rapture at the glorious shocky bursts.

"Only I'm heading into town in a while," Bobby continues obliviously. "Supply run. Thought you might want to come."

Dean tries to pull away, but Castiel's hand on his hip is like iron, holding him in place. "I'd like to come, Bobby," Castiel answers, and his eyes drift closed as he nuzzles Dean's ass. "I'd like to come very much. But I'm not quite ready."

Bobby sniffs. "Well. Looks like the boys got in last night," he says finally. "Car's outside. I could use the company. Maybe one of them might come."

Castiel's smile is sly as he snaps his eyes open again, winks at Dean and sucks in a mouthful of flesh, worrying at it with wicked teeth, the nips savage enough to make Dean squeak impotent fury. "Oh, I think that's highly likely, Bobby," he declares.

The angel's voice is deadpan and steady, as steady as the back and forth sweep of his clever finger, as steady as the bead of sweat Dean can feel trickling down between his shoulder blades when he wraps his hand around his cock again and starts to jack himself erratically, while the embers set by Castiel's remorseless pressure on the gland catch and start to blaze out of control. He gulps back a sob of pained ecstasy as he hears the scrape and creak of Bobby's boots on the stairs, pants it out as quietly as he can as soon as he thinks the old man might be out of earshot. "Fuck, Cas…gonna come, gonna…fuck."

The room spins as he's tossed over onto his back with no ceremony whatsoever, and Castiel is suddenly devouring him almost to the root, bathing him in sultry heat, throat constricting around him and drinking him down as he pulses and empties. Dean hears a reedy, incriminating cry start to make its way up his throat, and then Castiel is right there, swallowing down the noise, the taste of his tongue salt-bitter with Dean's own come, his lips bruisingly hard.

Dean gives as good as he gets for a minute, as he feels the thick, solid cap of his friend's dick nudge up behind his balls like it's feeling its way home. The pressure of it sends heady, delirious need skipping through Dean, and he fists his hand in Castiel's hair, pulls his head up. "I want you in me so damn much," he pants out. "So damn much, Cas."

Castiel's eyes are blazing passion down at Dean, his mouth is open, and his breathing is fast and shallow. He makes a small, choked out sound far back in his throat, sucks in his bottom lip, and the press of him there at Dean's core is suddenly harder and relentless, and it's the promise of pain and horror, it's Hell, it's Alastair, and it's terrifying and too much. It shatters the moment of reckless desire into a thousand pieces that can't ever be fitted back together and Dean flinches involuntarily, freezes, hears himself gasp out a strangled, "No. No…"

The pressure withdraws in the same second, and Castiel's eyes have gone liquid now, naked with something Dean can't even look at. He shifts himself further up, so that Dean can feel the wet smear of him in the crease of his thigh, dips his head in, and kisses Dean with a tenderness that constricts Dean's chest so tightly it's suddenly an effort to breathe. "You exist on the cusp of desperation, Dean," he whispers. "But you don't have to with me…you don't have to when we're like this." His hand is gentle on Dean's cheek as he continues, and his voice is smoky. "Ol g-chis-ge…beloved." He smiles. "We have no word for it in Enochian, you see…"

Castiel leans in again, plays chaste lips over Dean's, croons more sounds Dean doesn't recognize, even if he understands at some deep level what his friend is saying. "Od ol g-chis-ge ol zorge…Ol g-chis-ge in od olani oia amiran…"

Castiel starts to make small, rocking motions with his hips then, grinding his cock into Dean's lower belly, and Dean feels his tension drain out of him, feels safe, and he tracks his hands around to clamp Castiel's ass and pull him in closer, securing him in place with a leg tucked around the angel's thighs. "I'm sorry," he says softly.

"Sshhhhhh," Castiel breathes into Dean's open mouth. "You are my beloved, and you are my friend," he soothes, the words hot and devoted around Dean's tongue. "You are mine. And I am yours." He pulls his mouth away then, and his hand is a solid, tingling weight on Dean's scar as he circles his hips sinuously, pumps in, the slip-slide of him across Dean's skin rhythmic and leisurely.

It doesn't take long, less than a minute at the most, before Castiel chokes out a raw noise into Dean's neck at the same time as Dean feels a tremor run through his friend's body, feels slick, wet heat spurt between them. "I love you, Dean," Castiel whispers raggedly as he collapses on Dean and stills, his lips fluttering damply on Dean's skin. "I love you. I love you. I love you."

Some small part of Dean has known it all along, and he wraps his arms and legs around Castiel with something like desperation, because it's too much and yet it's not enough, will never be enough to describe his need for this. His heart is jackhammering its euphoria inside him, and he can feel the staccato percussion of Castiel's heartbeat keeping tempo against his chest.

I love you, Dean.

When Lisa said it to him in the dark, he'd curl his arm around her and say, Me too, while he stared over at the window and wondered what might be out there eating its way through civilians now he was benched. It got to be comfortable, and automatic, needed no thought or consideration whatsoever, got so the words were right there to be spoken, by rote, when she wanted to hear them.

I love you, Dean…I love you. I love you. I love you.

It overwhelms him. He doesn't answer.

The sun is streaming in through a gap at the top of the curtains when Dean blinks awake again, and his wristwatch tells him it's seven-thirty. He doesn't remember falling asleep, only remembers Castiel's weight on him growing heavier as his friend drifted away, his mouth pressed to Dean's scar. He stares blearily up at the cracked ceiling for a few lethargic moments while he gets his bearings.

He feels utterly sated, and the slow recall of what caused his contentment has his cock twitching hopefully at the thought of round two. He briefly debates coiling himself back around the warm body next to him, but his bladder is sending up distress flares, he could use a shower, and he can smell the aromas of coffee and bacon on the air. He cranes his neck and kisses Castiel's shoulder, notes that the abrasions there are less inflamed before easing himself away. He plucks Castiel's – his he notes with a wry grin – sweats off the end of the bed and tugs them on, followed by his t-shirt, before he pads downstairs, stopping off in the bathroom to piss like a Kentucky Derby winner. Partway down the stairs he gets a clue, swivels and sneaks back up again, eases the door to the spare room open and makes a cursory effort to ensure the mattress on the floor looks like he slept on it. "Fuckin' idiot," he admonishes himself as he agitates the sheet and blankets, and he feels like one, because he's damn sure the old man knows the deal anyway.

Bobby glances up from his newspaper as Dean shuffles into the kitchen, directs his one good eye at him and grunts a welcome through a split lip. "What time did you get in?"

Dean scratches his belly as he pours himself a mug of steaming joe, pulls out a chair and plants his butt there. "About five-thirty. Sam headed on up to New York on a job, so I bedded down in the spare room." He covers the lie with a gulp of coffee, and Bobby doesn't bat an eyelid, just slides a plate of toasted bagels over towards him. Dean liberates one of them and gestures towards Bobby's face, wincing. "That's a heck of a shiner," he declares, as he sinks his teeth into the bread.

"Tell me about it," Bobby says ruefully, and he reaches up to poke carefully at the puffy flesh. "Goddamn things came out of nowhere." He drains his mug, pushes up and heads to the stovetop, where bacon is sizzling in a skillet. "What's in New York?" he queries, as he spears a strip of the meat and flips it over.

Dean swallows his mouthful, washes it down with more coffee. "Haunting at an art gallery, college buddy of Sam's owns it. We helped her out a few years ago." He leans back in his chair, contemplates the room for a moment before he backtracks the conversation. "Sam said you told him those fish-guys zeroed right in on Cas, said something that rattled him pretty bad."

Bobby throws him a significant look as he fusses over the food. "Seemed that way," he confirms. "One of them sent me flying, but even after I took the damn thing out it was like I wasn't even there. They started in on him, herding him into the sea. I could've stripped naked and danced the can-can for all the mind they paid me."

Dean can't help blanching at that mental picture, and he sees Bobby roll his eyes before he turns back to the bacon and starts hooking it out onto a plate. "What did they say to him?" he prompts.

"I don't really know," Bobby muses. He pauses, shakes his head at the memory. "I couldn't make all of it out. It was a bunch of stuff…most of it sounded like gibberish. Spell, maybe."

Dean nods. "That's what Cas said." He swallows self-consciously as he realizes his slip. "I looked in on him just now," he adds hastily, and then he throws in a quick deflection for good measure. "And he told me he thought they were insulting him too."

The old man snorts at that. He sets the plate of bacon down in front of Dean, pours himself some more coffee and sits opposite again. "Well, whatever it was, it got to him bad…he went as white as a sheet and just – switched off. I hollered at him, and it seemed to bring him round." He stops, sips from his mug. "Then his eyes flashed like they do when he's about to smite your ass to kingdom come, and he yelled at me to duck and cover. I hit the deck, place lit up like a damn A-bomb, and after the noise died down he was out cold, and the hybrids were just charred bones."

Bobby reaches into his back pocket as he speaks, fishes out a piece of folded paper. He smoothes it out and passes it over. "It was just a bunch of sounds, consonants, vowels. It didn't seem to make proper words, but I wrote a couple of things I managed to pick out down before I hit the road away from there. All phonetic though."

Dean scans the paper, and Bobby is right, it's nothing recognizable. Except for…"Ol," he reads, and he sees Castiel's eyes, so damned blue and earnest with his devotion, can almost feel the soft tickle of the angel's lips on his skin as he murmured the words. "I'm sure that's Enochian," he ventures, before he reads the rest of words again, out loud this time. "Ol. Mal. Perg. Shoo. Dobe. Rof. Ay. Tase." He frowns at the old man. "Have you tried translating it from Enochian?"

Bobby tugs at his beard as he nods. "Yep. Nearest I found was malpirg – it's Enochian, like you said, it means fire." He blows out a sharp, reflective exhale. "Assuming that's what they actually said, and that's anyone's guess. None of the other stuff fits though." He throws up an apologetic hand at Dean's sigh. "Sorry, boy. It was hard to make any of it out. Fish lips."

Dean rubs a hand roughly over his chin, deliberates. "I don't know if I like him being out there," he risks stiltedly, because he knows how damned pathetic it sounds.

Sure enough, the look Bobby gives him is maybe two parts empathy, eight parts dripping sarcasm. "Dean, he's as safe as any of us on the hunt, probably safer with the mojo, and—"

"Not if he's being targeted," Dean counters. "This isn't the first time he's been singled out, you know that – what about New Jersey, those shadow-things in the sea? And those fire vampires, last time we were in Rhode Island. I just…" He stops himself, thinks about the rumpled pile of sheets and blankets on the mattress in the spare room, keeps going even if he knows his face is giving him away. "Bobby, I just – I don't want anything to happen to him. Not now, when things are, uh…" He grimaces, casts his eyes down, embarrassed as he feels his cheeks tingle, draws in a breath of courage. "You know. Different with him and me. Better. For, uh. All of us."

He figures that if he forks a chunk of bacon into his mouth and gets on with his chow the old man might let that one lie, but he's aware that Bobby is still examining him with beady eyes as he follows up the bacon with a hunk of toast. He squirms a little under the scrutiny, chews the mouthful to a manageable size before he squawks an irritated, high-pitched, "What?" out into the silence, spitting a modest shower of toast crumbs as he speaks.

"So. When I called, Sam said you were in Winter Park." Bobby's voice is serious. "How'd that go?"

Still pinned in place by Bobby's gimlet stare, Dean gives in and puts his fork down, thinks ironically that as painful as the memory of Lisa Braeden's blank mask of suspicious non-recognition is, he's almost grateful for the detour. "I went to see her," he confesses awkwardly. "I mean – not see see. She's still none the wiser. But it was – weird. Seeing what could have been, what I could have had. A normal family." He shakes his head, feels a strange and unexpected regret surge up inside him, like the yearning that swelled unbidden in his chest as she walked away. "I might still be there if Sam hadn't shown up in Cicero," he says wistfully. "I loved her, Bobby. I loved them both. I still do." He pauses then, gulps, and dredges up a shot of courage before he goes on. "Maybe it's not the same way I l—"

"You could have that back."

The voice is faded and tired, but it has a note underlying it that might be disappointment, or shock, or both. When Dean twists in the chair and looks towards the doorway, to the shadows where his friend is hovering, he sees that's exactly what it is.

Castiel's eyes are huge, stunned, inky blots in a pale, crestfallen face. "Just tell me where they are, Dean," he says, and he cards a distracted hand through his hair, messing it up even more, as Dean stares at him. "If that's what you want."

Dean rubs a hand roughly over his chin, thrown off-kilter by the distraught look on Castiel's face, because it's an uncomfortable gut-punch reminder of his friend's stricken expression when he asked Dean to stand with him before he opened Purgatory, and what happened afterwards. He smothers the memory, gropes for words, fumbles out, "Uh…I don't think that is what I want," and from behind him he hears Bobby give a quiet huff.

Dean swivels his head back to see Bobby's eyebrows hiked up in disbelief, and he throws up a helpless hand. "What?" he demands.

"You don't think?" Bobby echoes him witheringly, and he rolls his eyes.

"Wait, just – it isn't that simple," Dean defends, as he darts his eyes back to where Castiel still stands, sees that his friend's face has gone as guarded as Lisa's was, in place of the distress that marked him a few seconds before.

Castiel clears his throat and gives a composed shrug. "I'm sure it isn't," he says quietly. "So, why don't you give it some thought and tell me when you're sure. Since you don't seem to be presently. And since you have options."

Dean wants to tell Castiel that those options aren't any kind of options he wants, not really, but his mouth is goldfishing because he can't quite join the dots to find out how he ended up with this picture in front of him, and his friend is already walking back up the hallway.

"Tact," Bobby clips out brusquely as Dean pushes up and makes a beeline for the door. "Look it up. It's under T."

Castiel is reaching for the front doorknob, but he turns on his heel as Dean strides up behind him. His face is set steel, and he raises his hands before Dean has the chance to speak.

"You don't have to explain yourself to me, Dean," he says quietly. "And I know it isn't simple. I understand this, believe me. This is your family. And like I said, perhaps you need to think—"

"Cas, don't. Just…stop."

There's a flare of panic streaking through Dean's gut as he steps right up into Castiel's personal bubble, crowding him up against the door. He can tell the indifferent note in his friend's voice is contrived, can feel Castiel is wound up tight now he's pressed up close, his well-disguised skittishness a reflection of the tension that vibrates through Dean's own body. Dean wonders if his own eyes are as bleak as Castiel's as he clamps his hands to the angel's cheeks and licks his way into Castiel's mouth like he can't get enough, because it's true, he can't.

"Don't," he mutters again, into wet heat, sliding his fingers up into Castiel's hair. "It is simple." He hears the small, fragile, almost-but-not-quite inaudible sound that comes from the back of Castiel's throat, the thrum of his own heart in his chest. "It is simple," he says again.

The sound of the phone in the kitchen is loud and jarring, shakes Dean back to enough sense to realize he left the door to the room swinging ajar behind him, and that Bobby is probably getting an eyeful of this. He drops his hands and steps back, twisting swiftly as he hears the scrape of the old man's chair, the low timbre of Bobby's voice, Singer Salvage, and the usual patter, how his words speed up and become urgent.

Bobby turns to face him, directs a look Dean can't quite decode in their direction, and Dean mentally calculates the odds of it being the expression Bobby might pull out of his repertoire after witnessing him dry-hump a male-shaped angel of the Lord against his own front door. When Bobby puts his fingers up to cover the receiver, Dean isn't quite sure what to expect and half-wonders if it'll be an accusation. Sure enough, it comes out as an edgy snap.

"We got a problem. A big one."

Dean puts his hands out palm up, placates as best he can. "Look, Bobby, I know…I wanted to tell you, and I'm sorry, it just—"

"Not that," Bobby barks. "Idjit." He half-turns away, speaks into the phone again, quieter now, where? and when?, before he fishes a pen out of his pocket and starts scribbling details on the message pad. "We'll be there," he says down the phone, and then he puts it down and turns back, his eyes traveling beyond Dean. "That was Amelia Novak," he says simply.

Dean gapes for a few seconds as Castiel steps out from behind him and gestures for the pad, glancing at it briefly, his face impassive, before he tears the paper off and folds it.

Bobby shakes his head, blowing out wearily. "Her kid's gone missing. And she said…"

The sentence trails off into nothing, because Dean is looking at empty space.

He takes a confused step forward, blinks a couple of times. "Cas, you sonofabitch," he murmurs.

She doesn't know how much time has passed as she comes around, blinking open crusty eyes and shivering in the chill, wrinkling her nose at the earthy smells of rotting leaf matter and wood, inhaling something more fetid as she breathes deep to steady herself, base notes that hint at stagnant water, the stench of decay.

She paws feverishly for her cellphone again, hears a small, frustrated sob break up and out of her as her pocket shows up empty. She wipes angrily at her eyes. "Mom," she sniffs.

She looks up past the trees that arrow their way into the sky, and through the latticework of leaf fronds. The sky is nudging the pinkish-gray of early morning, but at ground level the forest is still dark and shadowy, the distorted tree trunks threatening and claustrophobic, the shrubs bulky with menace. Branches creak ominously around her, the leaves whispering to each other as she crouches at the base of her tree.

A sound startles her: the mournful hoot of an owl on the hunt, followed by the busy scurry of wildlife in the undergrowth, eyes, eyes, low down and furtive, spotlighting her like the glow of a lantern. Bear, her nerves scream at her in sheer terror, but her brain rewinds until she hears her teacher's voice, back away, never run, and do not climb a tree unless you have time to climb at least ten feet before the bear reaches you. As a last resort, play dead. She'd liked him, it occurs to her, as she curls herself up into a ball and slides her hands up to cover her head. "I'm sorry Professor," she mutters under her breath. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

The animal pokes its head out from a low bush. Raccoon, she realizes, with a choking sound of relief, and then, abruptly, something else is crawling across her senses, something more than her fear and anxiety, something more than the lurid images in her head, her friends covered in a seething mass of black, their screams as they stumbled and sank to the ground while she ran.

Something is watching her, something more than a raccoon. Somehow she knows this, knows that whatever it is, it's just as wrong as the things that hurtled at them from the trees.

Some part of her recognizes what it is.

Crack.

It's a twig snapping underfoot, she realizes, and now there's more movement, and she can hear the churring noise of fabric, the crunch of boots on mulch.

The figure looms up out of nowhere, and she gasps.

Whoever it is doesn't address her, but she hears rummaging, a rustling sound, smells phosphorus as a match strikes.

The man looks down at her with bright, interested eyes, studies her silently for a long moment while she shivers and stares up dumbly.

He cocks his head then, smiles whitely, and chuckles. "Well, well, well," he says, and his tone is part surprise and part amusement. "Seems my radar was pinging for a reason. Anyone ever tell you you've got your daddy's eyes?"

Bobby is heaving in deep breaths, his hand to his chest, when they arrive. He turns astonished eyes on Castiel, and his jaw is slack. He's gripping onto Castiel's arm, his fingers clawed and desperate, as he croaks out, "What the hell just happened?"

Castiel shrugs off his hand, ignores the tiredness that swells inside him after his exertion. He examines the house at the top of the driveway, finds it's larger than he expected, and for a moment he wonders why he expected anything at all. He ranges his eyes across a neatly kept lawn and tidy shrubs, before shifting back to the matter at hand. "You said we had trouble," he offers. "I assumed that meant we should travel fast and light."

Bobby splutters impotently at him for a minute before his head snaps around to scan the quiet suburban street. "Wait just a…you mean. What? Is this Amelia Novak's house? You flew us to California in…" He stops, goggles at his wristwatch.

"Nine tenths of a second," Castiel confirms automatically. "I'm afraid I'm not as fast as I once was now my powers have dwindled." He turns, takes a few steps further up the driveway, and then Bobby is tugging at his henley, pulling him to a halt.

"Wait a minute." Bobby's face is aghast, and he spends several seconds making manic shapes in the air with his hands. "You've brought us to this woman's home with no plan, no weapons, and no help," he goes on eventually. "What the hell were you thinking? Were you thinking at all?"

Castiel doesn't confirm that no, he didn't consider any of this rationally before he took to the air, only felt pulled, compelled to come here for reasons that are obscure even to him. Instead, he gestures behind them. "I stopped off for the weapons."

Bobby swings around, but the sight of the large duffel lying on the concrete isn't enough to mollify him. "What about Dean?" he snaps. "We could have done with his help on this."

Something burns at Castiel when Bobby says the name, something he hasn't felt since those last days of despair before he destroyed himself with the taint of Purgatory, something he knows is hurt at Dean's words back in Sioux Falls. It makes his throat go tight for a moment but he pushes it down, replies as nonchalantly as he can. "You were closer," trips off his tongue smoothly, and he hopes the disorientation of that microsecond of flight means Bobby might not be quite as astute as he was ten minutes ago in his kitchen, when it was clear from the old man's expression that he'd read Castiel like an open book. "In any case, he said he's meeting his brother in New York."

Castiel can tell his affected indifference isn't working from the beady-eyed examination that follows his words, but he squares up to Bobby's gaze and makes his own look a challenge. "Does the child's mother know about me?"

Bobby folds his arms across his chest and purses his lips angrily. "Sure she knows," he growls. "I called ahead, explained it all to her before we packed our bags and got in the truck to drive here. Don't you remember?" He cocks his head and tents his brows in exaggerated surprise. "No? Maybe that's because it never happened, flyboy."

His eyes still bore into Castiel as an awkward silence falls and hovers between them, and maybe it's the clumsy humanity that's creeping insidiously up on him that makes Castiel blink first. "You gave them new identities?" he detours quietly.

"Well, you upped and disappeared, left them defenseless," Bobby accuses.

After swiping suddenly nervous fingers through his hair, Castiel says, "It isn't that simple." The irony of his own echo of Dean's words isn't lost on him, and he stops and studies his boots for a few seconds. There is a fleeting memory in his mind, of feverish, agonizing pain, indoctrination that Zachariah called enlightenment, and over his shrieks and pleas and prayers for mercy there is the insistence of infallibility, the drilling of dogma, and the moment he gives in, please…no more, before climbing off the rack to his own shellshocked, stuttering reiteration of his faith and obedience. He thinks of it often, and sometimes he thinks of it as his own first seal, fancies that Zachariah was his Alastair, flaying his grace just as the demon flayed Dean Winchester's soul.

"You alright, boy?" Bobby's voice is less fierce now, still gruff but undercut with what might even be concern.

Castiel realizes he's hugging himself, and his breathing has gone fast and ragged. He unbraids his arms, forces them to hang down by his sides, and wonders if Dean would think this is karma. "It isn't that simple," he repeats. "It wasn't that simple. Back then, I mean. I had to…there were orders. Orders I had to follow, or I would have been – reassigned." He doesn't clarify what reassigned means as he flicks his eyes up again.

"Well. Anyway…" Bobby shrugs. "We assumed the kid might be a target, since she was a vessel. Dean said Anna told them as much. And it turned out her mom was already getting packed up to move out here near her brother, so we went one better, put them in witness protection."

Castiel nods, clears his throat and rallies. "We should see her now," he decides, and he steps around Bobby and starts walking again, only to be gripped by the bicep and hauled back.

"Will you stop?" Bobby's voice is ramping back up and his face is going red as he fumes hot again. "You're wearing the body of her dead husband, for Christ's sake. And it's the asscrack of dawn here."

Castiel feels a flash of annoyance himself, and he doesn't really understand why since Bobby's blustering doesn't typically rouse his own mood much higher than a low simmer. "Seeing me wearing the body of her dead husband would be preferable to identifying the body of her dead child, don't you think?" he retorts testily. "And she called didn't she? She must be awake. We're wasting time."

Bobby levels a glare at Castiel that he has seen reduce Dean to stammering ineptitude on many occasions. "Wait," the old man hisses. "There are things you don't know about this, things her mom said when she called that…" It's too late though, Castiel can see it in Bobby's gaze as it snaps abruptly away and past him, towards the house.

Castiel turns around, and he's staring at Amelia Novak's face, seeing an instant of astonishment flit across it before her expression settles into a strained combination of fear, grief, and antipathy reminiscent of the look she directed at him before he turned and walked away from her and her child in Pontiac.

Everything else blurs so that her face is the only thing in sharp, cruel focus, and the effect is instantaneous and incomprehensible, a sudden, overwhelming draining of will and focus that makes Castiel feel empty and unsure. He takes a step back, bumps into Bobby, solid behind him. "I don't know what to do," he says, and his voice floats up distantly from the hollow space inside him, comes out smaller and more guarded than he has ever heard it.

He feels Bobby's hand flat and steadying between his shoulder blades, propelling him forward, and the old man's reply is serious and reassuring.

"I'm right behind you, boy."

It's ten minutes before Sam gets back to him, and when he does his voice is sleep-slurred. "Whuh…? Dean, I—"

"Novaks," Dean raps out. "Do you remember anything about where Bobby might've stashed them – the new name, an address?"

After a brief silence, his brother sighs and scratches out, "Uh. California. Didn't Amelia Novak have a brother there or something? That's about as much as I can remember…you told Bobby to keep it to himself in case anything ever tried to get the intel out of us."

Dean chews his lip as he eyeballs Bobby's laptop. He's tried any number of password permutations, cracked his way into file after file, and nothing. "The old bastard's back catalogue is tight as a drum," he complains. "Though I've found out exactly what he used to get up to in the Dominican." He shudders. "Believe me, it isn't pretty. And Rufus too. Jesus. Brain-bleach me now."

A noncommittal and barely responsive grunt drifts over the line, followed by a barely-stifled yawn. "Dean. I've been up half the night on a stake-out," Sam mumbles. "You think I need images like that in my head right now?"

Point, Dean thinks. "Least you didn't see the pictures," he defends, and he snaps the phone shut. "Okay," he murmurs to himself then. "Doing it the hard way." He taps his way to what he's looking for. "Births, marriages and deaths, state of Illinois. Novak, James and Amelia whoever-you-were…"

It takes just under ten minutes of link after link, form after form, and as he searches it occurs to Dean that he has never thought about Jimmy, not really, hasn't thought much beyond the memory of the devious little bastard giving them the slip so he could go find his wife and kid. And now he's following a long, winding trail through Novak's life: smart but not very ambitious, married his childhood sweetheart, devoted family man, devout churchgoer, reported missing September 2008. There is his death certificate, nicely faked by Bobby so his wife could cash in the life insurance, and there is what Dean is looking for.

"Bingo," he celebrates as he scans the marriage certificate. "Amelia Schweitzer. Now let's track down your brother."

Less than a minute later, his phone blasts at him, and it turns out Sam is fully awake now, voice crisp and alert.

"What is this about, Dean?"

Dean rubs a hand across his brow. "Some trouble came up with the Novaks, the mother called. Kid's gone missing. Cas lit out after her, took Bobby with him. Cas has his cell but it's switched off, so I can't track him on the GPS. I need an address to head for."

He can almost hear his brother's brain thinking at him through the phone, and sure enough Sam asks, "Why didn't Cas take you too?"

Dean kids himself it's true when he answers. "He knew I was supposed to be driving up to meet you. So…"

A huff travels across the airways followed by Sam's voice crackling up and at him. "If she phoned, just check caller ID and follow up with her."

Dean rolls his eyes. "How stupid do you think I am? The number's restricted. She must've used star sixty-seven to block it." He snorts. "Bobby probably told her to if she ever had to call here."

Sam makes a clucking sound. "Well, you're in luck. Lucerne, it's on Clear Lake. I'm sure that's where her brother lived – back then, anyway. So, if you can find out her maiden name, maybe you can trace her bro—"

"One step ahead of you, kiddo," Dean tells him.

Castiel doesn't speak. He focuses on Bobby's voice, low and considerate, grounds himself with the old man's reliably bulky presence at his side.

The woman doesn't look at him. Her face is drawn, and her eyes dart about nervously, shadowed with worry. She's sitting stiffly on the very edge of the couch, wringing her hands over and over again, and Castiel remembers that Julie Ames sat like this, thinks how ironic it is that he had watched her and thought about this very scenario: Amelia Novak's vigil for her lost husband.

He finds that he can't stop watching her hands, the knuckles bloodless and bony, the fingers slender. She's wearing a wedding band, the twin to the one his vessel wore until Castiel cast the meaningless snare of it into the snow as he walked away from the woman's child that first time in Pontiac. As he watches her hands twist and curl, it occurs to Castiel that she must have used them to caress this body he wears, and he stares down at his own fingers, thinks of how another consciousness, Jimmy, used them to trail patterns on Amelia Novak's skin, used them to pull her close, and tangled themselves in her hair as the lips he speaks through kissed her. He wonders if that other consciousness is imprinted in him to the extent it said the words he says to Dean in the dark, if it breathed them into Amelia Novak's willing mouth as it drove the body he wears into her. The thought is vivid and sensual, and he blinks at a snapshot impression of her mouth, was it as soft as Dean's, is it?, and he can taste something sweet, her lipgloss, strawberry, I bought it for her, and I loved her once. He swallows. It isn't real, he tells himself, despite the wave of tenderness he can feel. It's recall that isn't his, a memory that seeped into his grace through a crack in the boundary wall between angel and mortal; the ghost of Jimmy Novak haunting him. It happened before, he remembers. Famine.

"So, you said your brother was one of the paramedics who found the schoolteacher? And this guy said something about a demon before he died?"

Bobby's question shakes Castiel out of his reverie, and he looks up to see that Amelia Novak finally has him in her sights, her examination of him a mix of fascination and revulsion. "He said there was a man," she says faintly, after licking her lips, and she doesn't look away. "He said a man found him in the woods, and that he looked down at him and his eyes went black. And I remembered it from before…and you'd said to call if anything like that ever happened again."

Bobby nods. "It's best that you did. Do you have any—"

"Can you find her?" the woman interrupts, her tone devoid of emotion and her eyes still locked on Castiel's. "You have – powers."

The question is clearly directed at him, and Castiel sees Bobby glance towards him in his peripheral vision, senses the old man's hesitance. He shakes his head, gathers himself enough to reply. "It doesn't work like that. I can find…" Dean, he's going to say. Dean, who he marked as his own and loves as his own, Dean, whose tug and call is as constant as the tides, Dean, who is his touchstone. He cuts off the words, and he doesn't know why. "Certain people," he tells her instead. "Not her."

She nods, barely. "Can you sense her? Can you tell if she's alive?"

This he can do, and his voice is firm. "She's alive."

The woman closes her eyes and he can see her crumple all through her body, see the way her face falls out of its rictus, the way her jaw unclenches and her shoulders drop, the way a tremor shakes its way down through her arms. Her lower back unlocks to hunch her forward with a gasp, and still her hands wind around and around, and in and out in their restlessness.

Her loneliness is a palpable thing in that moment, and Castiel feels a confusing hurt and compassion well up in response to it, feels seized with a need to reach out, to protect. There is a blanket on the couch, a sign someone might have slept there, he notes, but the house is still and silent, no sounds of life anywhere else. "You shouldn't be here by yourself," he says awkwardly. "I don't like to think of you being alone."

Her reply is suddenly sharp and raced out, as she snaps back to attention. "What business is that of yours? Is my welfare suddenly a concern for you? After all this time?" She laughs a harsh, frantic-sounding laugh. "Have you ever thought about what you did to us? You destroyed our family."

The accusation is ferocious and devastating, and Castiel hears the rustle of denim beside him as Bobby shifts uncomfortably. The cutting edge of her words is well deserved, he knows, but he answers the woman honestly, over the ache of his conscience. "No, you don't understand, what I did, it was – it was meant to be. Every second of your husband's life was leading to this, it was his fate, it was…it never could have been different for him." He pauses a beat. "I'm sorry."

Her eyes narrow. "Really? Are you really sorry?"

Castiel doesn't truly know if he is in the way she would understand it, only knows that what he said is the truth. He ignores her question and looks away. "It never could have been different for him," he repeats softly. "Or for me. I didn't – do this. There was never a choice, for him or for me…it was pre-ordained. He was the one. And there were bigger things at stake than him, or you." He speaks the words, but he doesn't know why he feels the need to defend himself. He looks at his hands again, and he realizes that he's sliding them one on the other, around and around, in a motion that mimics Amelia Novak's nervous gesture. When he glances up again, he sees that she tracked his point of focus, and she's staring at the movement herself, matching it with her own.

"He did that," she says after a moment. "Jimmy did that. When he was worried."

She looks up, and her eyes study Castiel in a way that seems more calculated now. "My sister-in-law is with me," she offers slowly. "She went home to do the school run but she's coming back. Jennifer…" She lets it hang there, and he can see her eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly, an unasked question, a glimmer of what might be hope.

Jennifer.

Castiel doesn't remember her, he can't, not really. And yet he finds he's able to put a face to the name, brown hair, anesthesiologist, two children, she made a pass at me one New Year's Eve, finds that he's sifting through stirred-up memories that don't really exist for him, people, places and events that he, Castiel, has never known or even thought of in passing. "I don't know Jennifer," he says aloud. "He isn't here any more, and I can't know these things, not really." His voice is as faint and desperate as hers was when she first spoke to him, and he finds that he can't look away from her stare, that her regard gives him a tight feeling in his chest, makes him feel stifled, claustrophobic.

"It's funny," she sidetracks after a moment. "We believed. We went to church, we prayed, and we never asked for proof. And then there you were, the evidence that it was all real, God, the angels, Heaven." She smiles, and it's twisted and bitter. "I still believe, but I don't go to church any more, and I don't pray. I saw your light, and you proved to me my faith wasn't in vain. And my faith died in the very same second."

Bobby clears his throat then. "Look, ma'am," he says gently. "I know this is difficult…and I don't mean to…but. We have priorities. We need times, locations if you can. Where did they find the teacher? And the other kids, you said they'd found some of them?"

The moment snaps like dry bones, and Castiel feels it recede into the past with something that dances between relief and crushing despondency, as the woman leans forward and pushes a notepad across the coffee table.

"It's all there," she says tonelessly.

Bobby snags it, flicks through the first few pages. There are photographs scattered on the coffee table where the notepad was, Castiel notices, and he doesn't think, reaches a hand across.

Amelia Novak catches it between her own so quickly he doesn't see her strike. Her grip is incongruously strong, her fingers cold. She gasps as she runs her thumb across his knuckles, and she draws him closer. Her eyes are blue, he notices, as blue as his own and covetous, and he's mesmerized by her, he's lost, he's at a loss. He isn't sure what this is or what she wants from him, and he's painfully aware of Bobby's alarm, can feel it radiate out from the man as he sits there next to him.

"I thought you were his ghost come to say goodbye to me," she whispers. "But you're solid. Real." She smiles, desperate and agonized, and her gaze is like a magnet, drawing him in. "I never said goodbye to him. He was my lover and my best friend…I was his, and he was mine, and I miss him. I miss him at night, in the dark, and I dream of him, dream that he might come back. And now here you are, and – is it possible…?"

Her words are an almost-exact facsimile of his own as he lost himself in Dean just hours before, and Castiel swallows through a sort of numb horror at her not-quite-spoken question, at her hope that he might be the answer. "No, it isn't possible," he mutters. "I'm not him. Please. Please…" He has no idea what he's asking for, only knows that he's as close to panic as he has ever been in his long existence.

Perhaps she sees it, because she drops his hand, and sits back. "You can have one of the pictures if you want it," she says, and her voice is distant and detached again.

Castiel feels himself being hauled out of his trance as Bobby pulls him back by the scruff, and it's Bobby who reaches across and slides one of the photographs away from the others. He slips it into his inside pocket, pushes up, heaving Castiel with him. "We'll find her," he says firmly. "Any chance we can borrow that truck outside? Only we flew, and we're out of airmiles."

Amelia waves a listless hand. "The keys are on the hallstand." She keeps her focus full on Castiel as Bobby turns away. "Claire missed you," she says suddenly, and her tone is harder than it was before. "She's had some problems."

Castiel frowns down at her, feels the strange, turbulent upheaval start up inside him again. "I'm not him," he insists again, and the thin rasp of his voice makes him sound like he's pleading.

"I didn't mean him," the woman answers frostily. "I meant you."

Dean is making good time and breaking every traffic law on the book, pedal to the metal, as the Impala streaks along route 83, through Nebraska's great plains. It's a vast plateau of semi-arid grassland, cattle country, and the rich smell of cowshit drifts in through the open windows and makes him think longingly of the steak and prime rib to be had if he had time to cut off the road to nowhere.

This stretch of the highway is deserted, making it no problem whatsoever for him to steer sharply over onto the verge when he hears his cell. "Cas? What the fuck?" he demands down the receiver as he hears his friend's sigh.

What am I doing, Dean? I have no idea.

The rueful undertone punctures Dean's irritation like nothing else can or does. "You tell me, buddy," he replies quietly. "Where you at? We narrowed it down to Lucerne, I'm on my way…you got a location I can make for?"

We're in the forest…Mendocino National Forest. The Novak child went missing somewhere in Snow Mountain Wilderness. We're taking the Overlook Loop trail, you'll need to head for…

Castiel's voice vanishes in a pop and fizzle of white noise that blasts up and out of the phone aggressively enough to make Dean flinch. "Cas?" he says. "You there? Say again, you're breaking up…Cas?"

…I said, you'll need to head for Summit Springs trailhead and access the trail from there…we're driving there now. Dean, we think a demon may be involved. The child's teacher was found, and he told the paramedics he saw a man with black eyes in the woods. Be careful.

Dean scowls. "Fuckin' typical. I'm a ways out. You got enough juice left to come get me?"

I doubt it. All I really want to do is sleep.

After rolling his eyes, Dean asks, "You got supplies? And bear spray, until the mojo switches back on?"

We stopped off. We're well equipped.

There's a brief silence before his friend's voice sounds again, muffled, like Castiel is holding his hand over the phone.

Dean. I need you here. I don't really know what I'm doing, and I think I've made a mistake. I need you here.

Castiel sounds odd, sounds a little shocked if Dean were to choose a description, and it pings his radar. "What's the deal, Cas?" he says, his voice rising with his worry. "What do you mean by mistake? Did something happen up there? With Amelia Novak?"

There's a minute of nothing before the angel speaks again.

I'm not sure. It's just – Amelia. It was strange, seeing her again. She was – unsettling. Things she said, they made me feel…I'm not sure.

Castiel's voice is breaking up but something about the remoteness of his tone is ringing klaxons in Dean now. "Not sure about what?" he barks. "Cas? You there? Dammit." He glares at his wristwatch. "It'll take me a day to get there. We'll talk when I find you, but just turn off the phone after this, okay? Save the battery…switch it on again this time tomorrow."

He pauses but there's no response, and he tries again. "Cas?" And Dean can't help it, doesn't even know if it's relevant or connected to the distance in his friend's voice, and when it slips out he knows he sounds a little desperate but he still says it. "Cas, I meant what I said. It is simple. Can you hear me? I meant it."

One final burst of static crackles before the call is gone, dropped, the line dead.

"Fuck," Dean hollers, and he slams his hand down on the horn, honks out his frustration at a herd of watching cows as they stare at him curiously.

Dean's voice comes through the phone in staccato bursts, odd, distorted words that don't add up to anything comprehensible before the line goes dead. Castiel stares at it like he might will Dean through the receiver, and the dull yearning he always feels when Dean isn't within reach starts its relentless, distant throb.

Bobby hasn't said anything since they left Amelia Novak's house, didn't offer much more than the odd that'll do, as Castiel trailed after him up and down the aisles at Vern's Camping Supply, but his mouth has been a grim line, and his eyes have been distant. It's Bobby's thinking face, Castiel has come to know, and he has used the communication blackout to backtrack through his disorientation in Amelia Novak's presence, to consider the power of the woman's grief and anxiety for her child, alongside the influence of his own guilt and false memories from a past life that was never his.

Now they're bearing left up a rough track that cuts through the outskirts of the forest, the truck jouncing along the deep ruts that mar the ground, and once Castiel slides his cellphone back into his pocket Bobby finally clears his throat.

"What the hell was that back there?"

Castiel has only been waiting for the question, has run the answer over in his mind on a constant loop. "Transference," he replies, with absolute certainty. "Her grief led her to substitute me for the true object of her feelings and impulses. I'm a physical replica…she looked at me and she saw him."

Bobby punches out a sound that's too blurred at the edges to be proper speech but manages to convey intense frustration even so. "Like I said," he retorts. "You're wearing the body of her dead husband, for Christ's sake." He shakes his head as he goes on. "Anyway, that isn't what I meant, Professor Freud. I meant you. What the hell was that?" He takes advantage of the lack of traffic to take his eyes off the road and fix Castiel with a searching look.

Away from Amelia Novak's absorption of him, and bolstered by his own application of logic to the situation, Castiel finds he can at least attempt to present a reasonable-sounding defense of his reaction to her. "He was here," he tells Bobby. "Jimmy Novak. His consciousness, his experiences…they're woven through the fabric of this body." His voice is steady, disguises the uneasiness that starts churning inside him again. "My reaction wasn't real, wasn't conscious. It was involuntary. Sense memory."

Bobby grunts, "Uh-huh," in a self-satisfied way that suggests Castiel just walked straight into a carefully laid trap. "You didn't sound quite so sure of that on the phone to Dean," he leads.

Castiel casts a look to his left, sees the old man is wearing a smug expression. He refuses to be led, just matches Bobby's stare with a steely glare of his own, and prepares himself to parry the next question.

"Did you mean what you said back at my place? About giving that life back to Dean?"

It's a total change of direction but Castiel doesn't hesitate in his reply even if he suddenly feels short of breath, feels his pulse speeding up. "If he chose it, yes."

After his brief contemplation, Bobby's expression goes curious. "And what would you do if he did choose that?" he asks.

"I would let him go."

Castiel hears his voice break on it, and there is a split second where he acknowledges his subconscious fear that losing Dean might well be his penance for everything he has done. The thought of being alone, of never seeing Dean again, scalds his heart like the flames of Hell, even if he deserves it. But, "I would wish him well," he adds softly, and it is the truth. "He is my reason. I want him to be happy. They were his family. Perhaps they could be again."

Bobby's answer is unexpectedly edgy, even a little defiant. "Don't mean to pry, but what about what you want?"

It’s a simple enough question, but Castiel flounders helplessly as he considers it, thinks the answer might be so complicated he might never find the words to voice it, doesn't even know how to begin to find them. Instead he reiterates cautiously, "I want him to be happy."

Bobby gives Castiel a pointed look before he goes on. "He seems happy now. Where he is. With – you know. Present company." Then he shakes his head as he pulls the truck to a halt in front of a couple of squat posts that block the rough, narrow track they've been grinding along. "Trailhead," he sidetracks abruptly. "Guess we're on foot from here. We'll head for the coordinates where they found the teacher."

Despite the tangent, Bobby is still exuding what Castiel senses is a sort of complicated chagrin, but he can't quite work out why that is so he simply nods and slides out of the truck as Bobby maneuvers himself out the opposite side with a huff of effort.

The trailhead is sheltered and quiet, utterly still, a dead zone. It's disquieting, but Castiel thinks ruefully that the distraction of this new worry is almost a relief. "There are no sounds," he notes, as he looks up into the dense canopy. "No birds or insects."

Bobby ranges up behind him, dumps the weapons duffel down next to him. "Sounds or not, there's probably bears in there and worse," he grouses. "How soon do you think you'll get the mojo back?"

Castiel blinks, finds his head still feels vaguely muddled, his thoughts cloudy, his energy sapped. The electric tingle of what remains of his grace isn't furious, vital power enervating every fiber of his being; instead it's plodding and dull. "It's there," he decides, but he knows he sounds unconvincing. "But it's weak yet," he qualifies. "The bear spray was a wise precaution."

Bobby meets his gaze for a few seconds and quirks his eyebrows in a way that seems dubious before he speaks again. "You, uh…alright with this, boy? I mean, really alright with it?"

In the distance Castiel can see the mountain this place is named for rising up on the distant horizon, its higher elevations covered in a grayish-green haze of trees, its peaks still capped with snow, and the bright orange ball of the sun balanced on top of it. It's desolate, beautiful, but its peace is unsettling and eerie. "No I'm not, this place is definitely wrong," he replies, and as he speaks he can feel his unease prickling even more keenly.

Bobby grunts. "I didn't mean that. I meant – you know. The kid. Claire."

There's a strange formality in the consideration with which Bobby broaches the subject, Castiel realizes, as if the man thinks he should care, really care, and it's a brief, if troubling diversion from his sense of foreboding back into the turmoil of guilt stirred up by Amelia Novak. "I'm fine," he offers. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Bobby's face twists into an uncertain grimace. "It's just that – back there? With the mother? That was weird enough. But this, well. Claire, she's…well, in a way she's your—"

"No, she isn't."

The reply bursts out of him sharp and spontaneous, Castiel knows. "No, she isn't," he repeats. "I don't know her, not really. She doesn't know me."

But now she's there in his mind's eye, the spare, and he can remember how she stared at him from the porch that first time, how he could see in her eyes that she knew he wasn't her father any more even before he told her. He can remember how easy it was to entrance her with his light when he returned to this plane of existence, the tendrils of his grace trailing across her cheek like kisses, his voice persuasive in her ear, soothing her fright, say yes to me, and everything will be well…

Her hand was cautious as she reached up to play her fingers through his radiance as it bathed her, and her eyes were wide with awe. He remembers her hope and wonder as he flooded through her, her struggle as she fought his will at the very last second when she was still herself, before he engulfed her. He remembers her muffled terror and love as her father struggled for breath and begged for her life, and he remembers her grief as she clung to him and begged him to stay while his glow left her, her stricken expression as he stared back at her through Jimmy Novak's eyes.

He still doesn't know why he looked back as he walked away.

Bobby is casting an odd look at him, and Castiel realizes that words are rolling off his tongue unbidden. "She isn't," he insists again. "She – I'm…not. Her parent. I'm a replica. Like I said. That's all."

Bobby is still uncharacteristically gentle. "Just making sure you're okay with this, son. And even if this isn't genetics strictly speaking…well. Just keep in mind it might be hard for her, like it was for her mother." He clears his throat after a moment of silence. "So. Your angel radar is picking her up then? She's definitely alive?"

After a shrug, Castiel says, "I can't sense her, I'm assuming the demon has her and has warded her."

Bobby's eyebrows pull low, into a frown. "So, how is it you're so sure she isn't dead?"

Castiel isn't sure how to answer for a moment, doesn't even know how to describe this certainty he feels, but Bobby doesn't give him a pass, he stands, expectant, until Castiel throws up a hand. "I would know if she were dead," he says. "I would feel it. I would know. I would just know."

Bobby's stare has gone slitty-eyed and analytical at Castiel's answer. "Kid must be, what? Thirteen? Four—"

"Fifteen," Castiel interrupts decisively. "She's fifteen now."

The old man nods slowly, starts threading his arms through the straps of his pack. He already has his gun ready, and a bandolier of salt rounds draped around his neck. He stabs a finger down at the soil. "Lot of dead leaf matter and twigs," he observes. "Take it slow. Put your foot down flat and careful, and you'll make less noise. No point in tipping it off, whatever it is." He looks back and scowls as he eases his way onto the trail. "Assuming it didn't smell us ten miles out and knows we're here already."

For a moment Castiel watches Bobby pad stealthily away, and he forces himself to relax, lets himself feel safe in his company. Even if Bobby frequently laments his advancing age, Castiel appreciates his sharp mind and respects his instinct for the hunt, and while his honesty is often brutal, his bluntness leaves no room for doubt and ambiguity. Bobby isn't a politician, like Castiel's brothers, doesn't conceal his meaning and intent in obfuscation. For those reasons, Castiel is utterly clear on where he stands with the man, and he finds that it's a refreshing clarity. Bobby doesn't take any shit, Dean informs him regularly, and Castiel can't help a weak grin as the old man stops and turns back to demonstrate exactly that, his brow corrugating in annoyance.

"You plan on sitting this one out?"

Castiel squats down to retrieve his crossbow and sling, hefts the duffel up onto his back, and strides forward to fall into careful step behind Bobby.

After a few minutes, Bobby clears his throat. "If Dean did choose that, well. You're welcome to stay at my place. You're good with your hands, good on the hunt. I could use the help. The company too." He doesn't give Castiel the chance to respond before he continues gruffly, but not unkindly. "Take it or leave it."

The offer is a surprise that catches Castiel off-guard, and the flood of gratitude he feels leaves him speechless for a few minutes, until he regains sufficient equilibrium to offer a tentative, "Thank you."

He gets a grunt in response, and they push on, not talking now. After an hour or so, the trail narrows to not much more than a deer path that creeps over the face of the mountain in a roundabout, illogical fashion, detouring around rocky outcrops and threading through thick stands of moss-covered pine and spruce that rise up like dark walls on either side of them, just a rare shaft of sunlight playing warmly down to dapple the ground. Underfoot is a mix of hard-packed soil and hummocks of dry grass and brush, thick with fallen leaves and shed pine needles, scattered with seedpods and clumped toadstools. Castiel can feel the gradient change gradually as they march. The ground isn't yet steep, but they are ascending, and sometimes he can pick out the trail miles ahead, snaking through the trees on the higher slopes, briefly disappearing from sight entirely as it hides in dales and ravines, before twisting up and out again.

Castiel still feels the exhaustion of flight, has to fight the urge to drowse as he places one leaden foot in front of the other. But their surroundings are taciturn and judgmental, as if the forest is glaring at them, daring them to travel further. There are still no sounds except for the low rustling of their own progress, and when Castiel gazes up through the higher branches into the clear blue sky, he sees no birds wheeling and curling. The hush is as sinister and hostile as the one that heralded the attack near Quonochontaug, and the deadness of the place somehow manages to feel alive and hungry. He shivers, quells his lethargy, and maintains a state of alertness.

Bobby reads his mind. "Way too quiet for my liking. You picking anything up?" He circles as he speaks, eyes alert and darting around them, peering into the denser undergrowth and thickets they're passing through.

There is something, and Castiel breathes in deep, frowns at the sour odor of it. "Blood. Not fresh…not very old either. Hours, not days." He can taste terror on his tongue, rank and desperate. "Blood…and violence," he murmurs. "There are predators here. Someone was prey not far from here. Someone was – meat."

Bobby inhales deeply himself. "Someone?"

The look Bobby shoots him is suspicious, the look that Castiel categorizes as his I truly believe you would kill me while I sleep look, but Castiel knows what he knows and knows it precisely. "Human blood. Human adrenaline, fear, death. This place is steeped in it."

After a headshake, Bobby retorts, "I don't want to know how you can tell all that. Are we safe?"

Castiel sweeps his own eyes around them. "I'm not sure." His admission makes Bobby tsk, but they hike on.

The route continues silent and mysterious, with no signs of any life, only shadows that seem to reach out for them with clawed, greedy hands, and the same sickly, cloying miasma of dread and horror that has Castiel wondering if venturing into the depths of this forest was nothing so much as pure idiocy. As the thought occurs to him, he can feel his shoulders tighten instinctively, feel the urge to take flight and flee this place. He fights the compulsion, eases it down to a flex of his tired muscles, poises himself to react as best he can at a split-second's notice if he has to. I wish you were here with me, Dean he thinks.

He lets his mind wander for a second, loses himself in a comforting daydream, the heated press of Dean in the night, Dean's fingers winding through his hair as he breathes words Dean doesn't understand into his mouth, the feel of Dean under him as he treasures him with careful hands, the sounds Dean makes as Castiel traces his devotion across his skin with gentle fingertips while they move against each other in the dark. This is real, he tells himself, Dean is real. But still the image blurs, and green eyes turn blue and accusing as a ghost from another man's past encroaches.

He puts the woman out of his mind, for she doesn't belong there. He sets his jaw, moves ahead of Bobby to take point. Claire Novak is lost in these woods, and he will find her.

After an hour or so they come to a clearing bisected by a narrow stream cutting through the forest. Bobby squats in a beam of hot, dusty sunlight and cups a handful of the water, wiping the cool liquid across his face.

He glances up to see Castiel standing guard. The angel is motionless, seems lost in secretive thought, either that or bored beyond description. But Bobby knows his calm is deceptive; Castiel's shoulders may be loose and relaxed but his eyes are alert, constantly scanning their surroundings, and Bobby has hunted with him often enough now to be in no doubt that Castiel's whole body is coiled and ready to pounce beneath his camouflage of stoic reserve.

Even as his own eyes sweep around and in between the trees, and he strains his ears to pick up the slightest sound, Bobby finds himself speculating on what Castiel actually is now that he's falling closer and closer to – something. I have no soul, he'd said to Bobby randomly and almost viciously one night, after he screamed himself awake with Dean unconscious and oblivious on the couch in the study. Sometimes Bobby thinks on it, and it never fails to send chills up and down his spine, because it reminds him of the cold-eyed, stone-hearted fake Sam, Sham, looming over him with its knife raised. He isn't always sure what Dean created when he revived Castiel, but it sometimes makes him think of mad scientists and lightning bolts bringing dead, monstrous things back to life, and he can't help but stare and be appalled at what Dean made. And then he watches the heat that glows in Dean's eyes when his falling angel skewers him with his stare, and the way Castiel's gaze softens to transparent affection as he basks in that warmth.

Not for the first time, Bobby wonders if they know how much he sees, how much they give away, and he shakes his head at it again, for the umpteenth time, the fact his boy has found a warped sort of happiness and contentment with his angel after all that has happened. But now this, this odd spiral from Castiel's stricken expression as he hovered outside the kitchen door just a few hours before in Sioux Falls, to his confusion in the face of Amelia Novak's strange mixture of hostility and hope, and the disturbing intensity in his eyes as he stared at her. Sense memory, Castiel had said, and Bobby runs over it again in his mind as he pushes back up to stand, sets it alongside the angel's absolute certainty that the woman's child is alive, and tries to ignore the gnawing, unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Stop right there."

Castiel's tone is mild, but it's a command that Bobby obeys instantly. He doesn't even flinch at the fact he has been caught out, because he always has suspected Castiel can still hear every unspoken thought as clearly as if it was being hollered through a megaphone even if his powers have dwindled.

It turns out he's way off the mark.

"It's on your left shoulder," Castiel tells him. "Don't move."

Bobby curses inwardly, vows to give the angel a lecture in reverse psychology as his head twists reflexively and he finds himself nose to nose with a spider roughly the size of his fist. He swallows, slides his eyes back ahead of him, and stays statue-still as Castiel shrugs off his pack and unclips his crossbow.

The thing is crouched ready to strike as the angel pulls up the bowstring, and Bobby can't hold back his wince at the audible click that sounds as the string settles into the cocking mechanism. Castiel feeds in the bolt smooth and unhurried, lifts the bow and tucks the butt into his shoulder. His stare blazes at Bobby like methane as he takes aim.

Slanting his own gaze back to meet the creature's compound eyes, Bobby can see the sly intelligence that lurks there as it watches him, see it tense, see its long, segmented legs locking at every joint, the claws digging into the fabric of his shirt jacket. He can see its pointed jaws work, see the single drop of venom that pearls at the pointed tip of each fang that protrudes. He fancies that it's licking its lips, that it's hungry, that it's teasing him, that it will pounce the same second the bolt flies.

He hears the thunk of the shot, hears the zip of air splitting around the missile, hears his own yelp as it slices so close to his ear he can feel its draught. The trajectory is one hundred percent accurate and the bolt impales the thing, ripping it away as it flies on, and Bobby spins around in the same instant to see it embed itself in a tree a few feet behind him.

Castiel walks up past Bobby to stand and examine his quarry as he clips the crossbow back on its sling. Bobby leans in beside him, and he feels his guts do a leisurely barrel roll as he studies the spider. It's the size of a man's fist, its exoskeleton shiny black. Its legs droop and twitch slightly in its death throes, as yellow fluid oozes out of its cracked carapace, and Bobby doesn't even try to conceal his shudder.

"This could present problems," Castiel says thoughtfully. "If there are more of them."

As he speaks, the spider suddenly starts emitting a chirruping noise, quiet but insistent. Rhythmic too, Bobby realizes. "You think that's some sort of signal?" he suggests. "An alarm?"

Castiel doesn't reply, just swings his head around to look behind him, the movement so fast it makes Bobby blink. In that same instant, the ground underneath their feet starts to vibrate, and then comes a cry that hovers thinly on the air before soaring into a wail of sheer distress that rips through the abnormal quiet.

"What the hell…?" Bobby looks down, puts out his hands, widens his stance as the surface they're standing on starts to judder more violently. He casts his vision up again to see Castiel's eyes sparkle cold and calculating, see the angel smile the wolfish smile of a predator.

And then he's gone, crashing off the trail and into the trees.

Castiel can't fly, is too weighed down by his fatigue to take to the air again so soon. But he can run, and run he does, hearing his boots pound down into the soil as it rocks underneath him. He vaults a fallen log, rolls smoothly up to his feet, his balance perfect as he zig-zags around a dense thicket, and he can hear his near-human heartbeat thundering in his ears as he goes.

He can smell his quarry, the rank stench of sulfur, and he savors its acrid, familiar tang. He knows who it is, perhaps he knew all along, and it sends a fierce, heated delight coursing through him, a feeling of finally. He has his blade drawn already despite the effort it costs him, and he will look into the demon's black eyes and wreak the dream of vengeance that has comforted him so often in the night.

He catches a flicker of movement off to his right, tunes his ears to the low sound of pleading, and changes his course swiftly, bending his body agilely in space as he bounds up onto a boulder that blocks his path, hitting the ground at full speed. His prey is running from him but he has its scent, like a beacon that guides him. The demon is fast, and Castiel accelerates still faster himself, while every nerve pulses and every sense streaks to attention. Its nearness sends ecstasy thrilling though him, and he's barely aware of how the land pitches and dances around him, how the trees come loose of their moorings and smash to earth, how boulders clatter from the slopes of the rocky pass he's sprinting through.

He hurtles out the opposite side, and there the demon is. He's chanting loudly, ancient, abrupt words, and he holds a curved, ornate dagger in one hand, and the child's arm in the other. When his gaze falls on Castiel he scowls, stops the stream of words, and lets the girl go, so that she collapses and crabs clumsily away to press her back up against the rock.

Castiel skids to a halt on the shale, wipes his sleeve across his brow.

Crowley smiles at him. "So it's true," he says cheerfully. "I heard it through the grapevine, but nothing definite." He sidles to the right, licking his lips, and his eyes gleam. "I also heard you aren't packing the full load. The fact you haven't already burned me out of this meatpuppet makes me think I should test that theory."

Castiel rolls his shoulders, bends his knees slightly to compensate for the quaking ground. He keeps his eyes locked steady on the demon's, his ears closed to the child's heaving, panicked breath. He knows he can afford no distractions. "Maybe you should," he taunts. As he speaks, the ground lurches under them, and he sees Crowley's eyes give a telltale flicker. He attacks as the demon does, twisting as Crowley charges, and he feels the swish of the dagger under his chin.

The demon spins. "I'm fixing the mess you made," he snaps. "Calling in the cavalry." He points a decisive finger over to where Claire Novak huddles, but Castiel doesn't follow it. "That can help me do it." Crowley's eyes narrow then. "Either that or you. I'm not fussed either way."

The statement pulls Castiel up, and an anxiety beyond his concern for the child suddenly consumes him, a desperate keenness to know what the demon is implying, even if some small part of him is reluctant to hear it. "What mess?" he says hoarsely, and his heart freezes in dread at the question, at his fear Crowley might confirm his culpability in the vanishings they've been tracking. He puts out his free hand, palm down, conciliatory. "What cavalry? What does that mean? What do you know, Crowley? How can it be fixed?"

Crowley gives him a clinical look. "Do you seriously think I'm letting you get one over on me again? Do me a favor." His lips twitch into a hard smile that adapts itself into a snarl, before he darts in and thrusts with the knife.

Castiel hops back nimbly, slashes diagonally with his sword, feels it catch on fabric as Crowley jumps back, his face puce. The demon leaps up onto a rocky rise, lifts the hem of his jacket up. "This is a Paul Smith suit, you wanker," he bellows, before he launches himself full at Castiel, his eyes black with anger.

That the demon's strength matches his with his grace depleted is in no question, as Castiel is knocked to the floor by the headlong rush. He feels a bolt of pain rocket up from his hip to his back, but he steels himself, throws Crowley off and rolls, springing to his feet just in time to meet the demon's next advance with a roundhouse punch. The blow ends in the satisfying crunch of knuckles on bone. There is no finesse in it; it's visceral, brutal, human combat of the kind Dean has schooled remorselessly into him as they spar, and it sends a dizzying, seductive rush cascading through Castiel, a vicious, logical desire for justice undercut by a more frantic, disorganized need to save, protect.

Crowley staggers, comes back with his own swing. Castiel ducks under the fist as it flies towards his face, braces himself on one hand and kicks the demon's legs out from under him. "Tell me what you know," he grates out harshly, as he tucks his feet under him, but Crowley reacts blindingly fast, and Castiel barely catches sight of the knife as it slices through the air, barely registers the engraved sigil on the flat of the blade. He rises into a jump, lifting his legs above the shining metal as it arcs, and he hears the hoarse rasp of his own breath, Crowley's too, as he lands and kicks out accurately enough to send the weapon flying out of the demon's grasp.

Castiel snatches viper-fast, plucks the weapon from mid-air with his free hand as he tries to regain his balance, but the ground is undulating and heaving under him now, and its jolt sends him tumbling to the ground. He sees Crowley's tense, desperate expression in the same second his skull crashes onto granite. His vision grays so that he's only dimly aware of what happens next, only feels the flat surface under him rise, fall, shimmy from side to side, and hears a grinding, rending noise that builds into a roar that thunders around them.

But even through the tumult, he hears Claire Novak scream, and hones in on her terror.

Bobby has been staggering through the swaying, creaking trees, hoping to God one doesn't crash down on top of him, cursing their proximity to the San Andreas fault line even if he suspects this quake isn't natural at all. He has no idea if he's headed in the right direction, hopes the bent, cracked branches he's following mark Castiel's chaotic dash and not an elk trail.

He comes to a narrow ravine with rocks and smaller stones being shaken loose as it wobbles. He pulls off his pack, rests it on his head for protection, takes a deep breath and risks it, picking his way through as rapidly and carefully as he can, reeling with every aggressive heave of the subterranean tremors, seeing small cracks start to open up all around him.

He emerges into chaos, what seems to be the epicenter of the earthquake, a world of sheer violence that rolls and ripples as energetically as a storm-tossed ocean. There, over to the side, a dark-suited man Bobby recognizes with a heart-sinking sensation is scrabbling for something, and a yard away from him Castiel is pushing up onto his knees, sword in one hand and a shorter blade in the other, shaking his head like he's dazed. And there, snaking through the clearing, is a fissure that splits the rocky surface, forming a mouth in the earth, a mouth that grins invitingly.

Bobby swivels his head as he takes it all in, sees the girl balancing precariously at the edge of the rift, her face a ghastly white and her eyes stark with terror as she stares down. He sees her arms windmill frantically, sees her inevitable fall happen in slow-motion, hears himself yell out a horrified, don't you do it, boy, as Castiel erupts from the ground where he's kneeling.

The angel turns his gaze on Bobby as he runs, and his face is set and calm. There is regret in his eyes, apology too. He throws out his arm, lets loose his sword, and it flies through the air, lands a foot from where Bobby stands, his boots rooted to the ground with shock.

Castiel dives and plunges headfirst into the chasm with a fluid, animal grace, and as he vanishes, the earth stops dancing.

Bobby stumbles forward on weak legs that buckle him to his knees at the edge of the wound in the earth. Heat is rising up out of it, accompanied by dank, sour air that makes him gag. He swallows the brackish bile that floods his mouth, plants his hands firmly on the edge, and leans forward to peer down. The hole appears to be bottomless, but a vague, greenish glow emanates out of the black, like phosphorescence. "Cas," he hollers, and the echo of his shout resounds up to mock him.

He bends at the elbows, squints to see if he can pick out any ledges that might have broken the angel's fall, the girl's too, he hopes.

"I wouldn't get too close."

Bobby jerks back up, finds himself staring into Crowley's amused face, and he starts saying the words automatically. "Vade satana—"

"Oh, come on," Crowley drawls. "Seriously? That stuff only works in the minor leagues." He strolls over to rest his butt on a rock, folds his arms in a way that's far too relaxed for Bobby's liking. "But you go ahead if it makes you feel better."

Bobby growls out, "You're going after kids now? That's minor league stuff in my book."

Crowley pulls a face, waggles his eyebrows. "Demon. Going after kids is in my job description, sweetie." He smacks his lips and smiles the smile of a shark sizing up an oblivious swimmer. "All that soft, tender flesh…much easier on the teeth. Like milk-fed veal, they are."

Bobby glances down into the crevice again. There are stones and rocks scattered nearby, and he reaches for one, lets it fall, listens hard for something, anything, the sound of impact, a cry, a splash, but there's nothing. "Jesus," he breathes out. "Goddammit, Cas." He barely manages it through the swelling sensation in his throat as he wonders if the angel caught the girl, if he had enough juice to unfurl his wings, enough space to spread them and arrest his descent.

"Word to the wise," Crowley says suddenly, and Bobby fixes wary eyes on him. The demon has his hand up behind his ear, listening, and he directs his gaze away from Bobby, a few feet over to the right, nodding his head briefly as he does. "I think you might be needing the mighty sword of truth and justice any minute now."

Bobby stirs himself to move, crawls the small distance to Castiel's discarded blade, cursing himself as a fool for letting his guard down so completely. As he goes, he hears something, a rustling, far-off but coming closer, getting louder, building into a low, steady clicking.

"They're drawn to it," Crowley says opaquely, and he shrugs. "It leads to where they came from."

Bobby pushes himself up, his knees popping irritably. "They?" He glances uncertainly down at the jagged rip, remembers his suspicion. "Did you do this?" he demands. "Did you work some spell to open this?"

Crowley smirks and steers around the question. "As long as you've got the sword, you should be okay. They won't touch me, they don't like their meat rotten." He levers himself up onto the rock behind him, crosses his legs at the knee. "I recommend seeking higher ground in the next, oh, fifteen seconds."

After a instant of deliberation, Bobby strides over to grab his pack, jogs to a boulder a few yards from where Crowley perches, and clambers up. As he turns, they stream out from the trees, a dense, churning swarm of shiny black arachnoid bodies that sends a wave of revulsion rippling through Bobby's guts. They're in a hurry, and they split apart around Bobby's rock like a black sea parting, seemingly oblivious to his presence as they scuttle on, carpeting the ground now and filling the air with the same steady chittering sound as the one Castiel ran through with his crossbow bolt.

Bobby follows their progress as they flood up to the edge of the crack in the earth and pour over it, down into the depths where his friend and the child fell, and the thought of what might be going on down there has his stomach turning itself inside out. He retches, eyes streaming as he presses his hand up to his mouth to hold back his breakfast. How the fuck am I going to tell Dean?, he's thinking dazedly as Crowley blasts out a shrill whistle. Bobby turns to see that the demon is shaking his head, his own eyes glinting.

"Don't panic old man, you could have a heart attack and fall off there," Crowley taunts. "Anyway, they'll be fine, assuming they've landed by now. Those things won't touch them."

Bobby manages to choke out, "How's that?"

Crowley slips down off his rock. "Let's just say I have a gut feeling about it." He swipes fastidiously at the seat of his pants before he claps his hands together. "Right, what's the plan?"

After gaping at the demon for a few confused seconds, Bobby sputters, "Plan?"

Crowley nods vigorously. "Plan. You know, for getting him out of there."

He fishes in his pocket, pulls out an object he tosses up to Bobby and after snatching it reflexively out of the air, Bobby finds he's looking at a cellphone. He scratches at his beard, feels as bewildered as he ever has as he meets the demon's eyes again.

"We're on the clock," Crowley clips out brusquely. "That path won't stay open forever. I'd get Starsky and Hutch on the horn if I were you. Couple of big, strong vessels is just what we need."

Dean is mid-yawn, his eyes gritty with the effort of long hours staring ahead at the road, when his phone sounds.

Where are you?

Bobby's voice comes through grim and strained, sends Dean's low-grade anxiety spiking back up to eleven and turns his mouth dry. He takes a deep breath, tries to keep at least three-quarters of his focus on the busy highway, licks around his teeth to moisten them before he replies.

"Uh…about twenty miles past Grand Junction. Everything okay? Cas okay? Only you don't sound okay…"

It's. Son, I don't know how to—

"Dean. How goes it?"

The demon materializes out of nowhere, safely out of reach in the backseat of the Impala, and Dean startles almost out of his skin, fishtails the car wildly in and out of the lane. "Fuck," he yelps. "Fuckdammit! Fuck. What the fuck? You fucker."

The demon gives him a fake smile. "I see you haven't lost any of your charm." He flicks his eyes front, leans forward to rest a hand on top of the shotgun seat and nods as Dean shrinks away from him. "Watch out for that semi-truck."

The truck is already blaring irately as it bears down, and the Impala rocks on her tires as the other vehicle screams by with bare inches between them. Dean growls out his response through teeth clenched tight with animosity as he fights the wheel to get the big car back on her true path. "What the fuck do you want?"

Crowley raises a cynical eyebrow at him in the rearview mirror. "Now there's a thought. But. All that aside, you're going to want to pull off and find the nearest mall. Sporting goods store should do it."

Dean barks out a sharp, uncooperative laugh, then sneers, "And exactly why am I going to want to do that?" He weaves threat into his voice under the coldness, and he's fishing in the door pocket for the bottle of holy water he started stowing there the last time Crowley pulled this stunt, sliding it into the crack between his thighs and unscrewing the lid. He's careful, surreptitious, but his anger is growing exponentially, boiling through his veins and nerve endings like lava as he finally confronts his friend's nemesis, and it swamps him with an overwhelming, primal desire to smoke the demon out and send it screaming back to the Pit.

"Because you're going potholing, mate. Or what is it you Yanks call it? Spelunking. And you'll need the proper gear so you don't fall and break your pretty face."

Crowley sniffs, settles back casually and stares out the window, taking in the view. Which is just fine, Dean thinks, as he launches himself into the swift, triumphant jerk of his elbow that should ensure the demon gets a steaming faceful of the liquid. As his hand swings up, fingers clamp around his wrist, stopping him and aborting the attack mid-air.

"I wouldn't," Crowley remarks amiably from where he winked into existence at Dean's right. "Not if you want to see the boyfriend again." He reaches up his other hand, extricates the small bottle from Dean's grip. "Why don't I mind this for you?" he adds, and now there is a harder, unpleasant edge to his tone. "After all, you need two hands on the wheel to drive safely."

Dean stares it out with him, drags himself back to some semblance of control. "I'll just let my intense hatred for you fester then," he says, lethally quiet. "Let it stew some more, before it pops its cap. Because if it's the last thing I damn well do, Crowley, I will end you. Slowly."

After a long, tense moment, Crowley smiles thinly. "Well, we'll see about that," he answers, and Dean imagines he can hear a hint of unease there. "But I should warn you…you're right. It will be the last thing you do."

The tension hangs heavy in the air between them. And then Dean unties the tangled knot of rage that twists inside him, lets his fury dissipate and trickle back down into the dark hollows and voids where it lives.

He switches his gaze back to the road and looks for the next exit.

Castiel wakes gradually, on the memory of plummeting, arrow-straight, arms out ahead of him, a cold wind blasting his face as he fell, before he managed to spread his wings to right himself. He vaguely remembers the sharp edges of rock tearing at the tips of his primary flight feathers and shredding them as he flexed his phalanges for each downstroke, desperately trying to counteract the drag of air and generate the lift and thrust he needed.

He isn't falling anymore, isn't flying either. He's lying on his side, and the surface under his cheek is icy and damp, the air at his back chilly. He manages to unfurl his wing, hears himself groan at the pain that streaks up his radius. Broken, he suspects, but he manages to curl the wing over himself for warmth anyway. The shoulder he's lying on is throbbing mercilessly, and he feels tired, more tired than he has felt in months. He thinks that perhaps he will sleep for a while and hope that he heals.

"It's really you."

The girl's voice is halting, and it floods back to him, her eyes wide and shocked in the dim light, his hand reaching for hers, their fingertips brushing before he stretched himself so far he felt his human shoulder dislocate. He blinks, levers a hand under himself and pushes up, squinting wearily over in the direction of the voice.

Claire Novak is sitting a few feet away, hugging her knees and shivering.

Castiel tracks his gaze briefly up from where she huddles, takes in a vast mountain of sheet rock, stepped ridges and angular blocks that don't seem to end but fade away into the clouds. "Yes. Although…" He frowns, drops his eyes back down to her face. "That depends on who you think I am."

The girl cocks her head. "Castiel," she says. "I know you're not my dad." She considers him, motions a hand up to her shoulder. "The feathers, they kind of gave the game away."

Castiel nods, clears his throat and tries to concentrate through the pain that waxes and wanes in his damaged wing. "So. How are you?" he asks her politely.

"Seriously?" The girl's look turns unexpectedly baleful. "Would you like a side of epic with that fail?"

After a second or two where he fumbles for an adequate response and remembers that Dean has often compared teenage girls to a diabolical-sounding foe he referred to as a MissyBender, Castiel adopts a more cautious approach. "I…don't understand that reference."

The girl sounds thoroughly disgusted as she answers him. "I've been chased by giant spiders that ate my friends, and kidnapped by a demon who tried to sacrifice me. And then I fell down a great big hole in the ground. How do you think I am?"

In the middle of her tirade there is a word Castiel picks up on instantly despite his discomfort and her peevishness. "He called it sacrifice?" he queries sharply, recalling Crowley's taunts before they fought, the demon's hint that he was cognizant of something, his assertion that this child could stop whatever that something is, or that he, Castiel, could.

After wincing and breathing in deep, the girl nods, her features twisting into a grimace. "He cut me, said he needed my blood." She holds up her hand, showing him a strip of bloodstained cloth she has wound around her palm.

"A sacrifice to what?" Castiel prods. "Did he elaborate? Did he say why it was necessary?"

She shakes her head. "No, and no."

Castiel tries to hide his frustration as he exhales, knows he only partly succeeds when the girl's mouth goes thin and indignant. "It would be useful to know," he defends. "And he had a ritual dagger…" He casts his eyes around him, can't see the knife anywhere, flashes back to the hilt slipping from his fingers as he reached for her. "It had a symbol engraved on the blade, did you see it?"

The girl's eyebrows knit together as she considers. "It was a circle," she decides. "With little squiggles. Wait, I can…" She pats around on the ground next to her, picks up a small stone, twists and uses one of its rough edges to score the rock behind her. "See? A circle. Three squiggles. I think."

It isn't anything Castiel has seen before, but he fixes the glyph in his mind as he folds his wings away and pushes himself up, rocking in place slightly as their surroundings swim around him. He shakes his head against the fog of lassitude that threatens to send him slumping to his knees, and once the feeling has passed he wraps his fingers about his upper arm on the side where his misshapen shoulder juts out, grits his teeth, and rams the displaced bone back into its socket with an audible click.

He hears the girl suck in a breath before she asks, "Shouldn't you be healing?"

She's pointing what could be termed a significant look at him, and her mother's parting words suddenly play out in Castiel's head again as he studies her. "How much do you remember of me?" he diverts.

She doesn't hesitate. "I remember that you fixed my dad when you took him again." Her blue eyes, the perfect copy of the ones he sees looking back at him from the mirror each morning, harden abruptly then. "You gave him back to us and then you snatched him away again," she accuses. "That was a shitty thing to do."

After an uncomfortable beat, Castiel tells her, "I'm sorry."

She casts her eyes down and doesn't acknowledge the apology. It's more than he hoped for after Amelia Novak's reaction, so he leaves it there and takes a step forward to assess their surroundings.

They are in a world of murky grays, the sky above them big and vacant, and the air cold and damp, with a viscous, slimy feel to it. When he shuffles over to look down from their ledge, Castiel can see the terrain dive away into a series of steep drops, crags and talus, intersected by jagged points that look like fanged teeth, before the slope gentles into shallower gradients that end in a distant, tiny strip of sand. Beyond it is an infinity of featureless water, and Castiel is drawn to gaze at it before he tracks his vision back to the beach that marks the boundary between land and sea. He fancies he can almost feel the wet grains and gravel of it under his bare feet, hear the waves lapping on the shoreline. He imagines climbing down, sitting there forever, being content to breathe his last while he watches the tide ebb and wash back in; he imagines himself becoming a feature of this landscape, rooted into the rock and finally at rest, at peace. The notion is surreal and disturbing, and he is suddenly filled with foreboding, the feeling that he has been here before.

Castiel twists, gazes up. The crevice they tumbled down is a clumsy, distorted isosceles triangle cut and smashed into the rock, its top point slender and curling, its lower border merging into the ledge where they landed. Around it, the mountain ripples with muscle formed by great pleats and folds of rock that narrow into long, sinewy tentacle-limbs that spill down around them. It is a brute, a beast, they are in its maw, and Castiel knows this place isn't as empty as it looks, senses on some instinctive level that they need to get away.

"What even is this place?" the girl blurts out, as if she is following his thought process and reacting to it. "How can we fall down a hole and end up in some other world, like – Narnia or something. Or is this the afterlife?" She paddles her hands in the air, taps her sneakered feet up and down in her panic. "Oh my God. Are we dead? Did we die?"

Castiel turns and hurries out, "We aren't dead," in what he hopes is a suitably reassuring way, although he suspects he might be trying to soothe his own nerves as well as the girl's. "I think this is…a rip in the space-time continuum."

She snorts. "That's out of Star Trek."

Looking up, Castiel sees that the cliff face above them is as pitted and ridged as the mile or so that lies below their landing zone. He examines it critically, bites his lip. "Yes," he concedes absently. "I watch reruns with Dean sometimes. It seems as good a description of our circumstances as any."

He picks his way in through the seams and ruts that splinter out from the granite walls of the rift, cranes his head to see as far as he can. There is no obvious source of light at the upper reaches, just shadows that lengthen and dissolve into black.

"It'll be nighttime soon," the girl says glumly.

"No, we're between," Castiel answers as he peers up. "Between space, between time, between dimensions. In the ether. There will be no night or day here, just in-between."

He's stepping back when she replies, "But it's getting dark."

That isn't possible, and Castiel turns to gaze at the horizon again. There in the distance, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away, is a dark shadow, an amorphous cloud mass. It's small from this far away, innocuous even.

Something is coming, he thinks from nowhere. It's wrong.

Castiel fists his hands, feels his grace, sluggish and impotent. He's fighting back a yawn already, but his worry, his need to leave this place, is suddenly even keener. "We have to l—"

"Are you going to be able to fly us out of here?" the girl interrupts.

The tremor in her voice is at odds with its previous belligerence, and Castiel slants his eyes down, notices for the first time that her face is ashen and there is blood matting the hair at her temple. He pulled her in tight to himself and cocooned her safely inside a wing, he recalls now, but the crunch of his landing must have sent her tumbling from his embrace.

His lowers his tone into something gentle. "I don't think I am."

She nods, doesn't seem to give it much thought, just scrubs her eyes with the back of her hand. When she speaks again, her voice is firmer. "We can climb. There's a climbing wall at my local YMCA. I know what to do."

Castiel knows what to do too, is already looking up again, plotting the route, complicated and circuitous, a meandering ascent that will wind them around and up by gradual increments until they grow too tired to continue, and then perhaps they will fall again, or lie down on a ledge like this one and die.

"Then…" He stops as he takes note of the doleful pessimism in her eyes, a dejection that is at odds with the confidence in her tone, and something, some basic instinct, tells him what to say next. "I think this calls for teamwork," he prompts carefully.

Her forehead creases, and Castiel sees something that might be hope, might be doubt, war its way through her eyes. "My dad used to say that," she tells him dispassionately.

Castiel feels an odd buzz of apprehension hum through him, clears his throat awkwardly. "Well…I think I may need your help. Can you help me?" He uses her name for the first time then, and his tongue knows the feel of it, almost as if it has formed that shape thousands of times, and his ears know exactly how his voice will sound when he says it, the pitch and timbre the same as it always was when his vessel said it in that other past that he sees glimpses of even though it wasn't his. "Claire," he says. "Claire…will you help me?"

She huffs softly. "Claire," she echoes him. "Claire…will you help me…" Her voice fades, and there is a moment when her eyes blur and shine at him. "You asked me that once before, Castiel," she whispers.

Voices, one he recognizes, and it's mad as hell, Bobby notes blearily. It's getting dark, and his eyes are tired from staring intently at the jagged black scar in the ground from where he still sits on his rock, Castiel's sword gripped tightly in his hand.

He slides awkwardly down to the ground and a few seconds later Dean emerges into the clearing, a heavy pack on his back. He's already maneuvering his arms out of the straps as he approaches, and as he eases its bulk down to the ground Bobby sees Crowley marching smartly along behind him.

"What the fuck happened?" Dean demands harshly. "Crowley says some hole in the ground opened up and swallowed Cas? The kid too? Are they still down there?" He's peering past Bobby as he speaks, sees the opening and strides over to it. "Shit," he says, and he sounds winded. He puts a hand up to the back of his neck as he turns around, his jaw slack.

Crowley hovers nearby, carrying a plastic bag. "That's no ordinary hole, gents," he chips in. "It's a path. Between dimensions."

Dean rounds on him, his shoulders tensing even more but Crowley smirks. "I'm here to help. So, like I keep saying," he adds, "it's a path. Like the Stargate."

Bobby ignores him, puts a hand on Dean's arm and leads him a few feet away. "Are you sure about this?" he asks, low and confidential. "I'm sure he worked some spell to open up that rift…I don't trust the bastard."

Dean's eyes widen. "You think I do?" he counters, voice loud enough to carry, loud enough that Bobby thinks he might be doing it on purpose. "I wouldn't trust the fucker as far as I could throw him." He sucks his bottom lip in, ramps it back down to a whisper. "In New Jersey Kali said something about paths, she said there were thousands of them. So if he knows something…" He turns, takes a threatening step back towards the demon and away from Bobby. "What is this?" he challenges. "And why are you so all-fired up to help us get Cas out of there?"

Crowley rocks on his heels, and his amusement is obvious as he looks from Dean to Bobby and back again. "Well, we were colleagues once, Cas and I," he teases. "Friends, even. We grew very close over that long year of lies, and plotting, and poor lovesick Cas bending over to grab his ankles so he could save you from Raph—"

"You shut your mouth, you sonofabitch, or so help me I will shut it for you."

Dean's tone is brittle with pent-up rage as he cuts the demon off, and Bobby takes a stride forward himself, stands elbow to elbow with Dean as he sees the younger man launch up onto the balls of his feet, his fight stance. "Wild stab in the dark, but seeing as it looked like he was trying to kill you when I ran up through that gorge, it seems to me Cas might not have felt the same way," Bobby responds dryly, while he exerts gentle, steadying pressure on Dean's shoulder.

After a sly smile, Crowley shrugs. "What can I say? I've got a special place in my heart for young Castiel, despite his shortcomings. And they are short, believe me." His mouth shows the gleam of teeth then, and he tracks his gaze away from Bobby to Dean. "And I must be going soft in my old age, but you two crazy kids? You deserve another chance."

Dean makes a rough sound of anger and exasperation. "Don't smile at me," he snaps dangerously. "And don't for one second think I don't know you want him out of there for your own reasons."

Crowley feigns indignation. "Oh ye of little faith." He sniffs. "Anyway. I'd fetch him up out of there myself, but…" He flicks his eyes down at himself. "I'd hate to ruin the threads."

Already turning away, Dean retorts, "Or it goes somewhere you don't want to be," as he drops to his knees, unzips his pack and starts pulling out tightly coiled ropes and cables, stacking them on the ground. "I got a mix of climbers and statics," he mutters. "Whole bunch of them. Slings too. We need to find a good solid anchor point, a rock, a tree…" His voice trails off as he glances up, and Bobby can see his face is drawn and strained. "This place gives me the fuckin' creeps," he spits with a shudder. "There's something off about it."

Crowley chuckles. "The woods are lonely, dark and deep, mate," he throws back over his shoulder as he starts picking his way back over to his rock. "So, best get a move on, eh? Since that path won't stay open forever."

Bobby senses Dean bristling, leans in closer. "Don't let him get to you, boy," he soothes. "Mind on the job, eyes on the prize." He frowns then, sees Dean's eyebrow rise in a query at the expression. "It's just what you said," Bobby imparts in a near-whisper. "About Crowley having his reasons. It doesn't make much sense to me, him wanting Cas out of there."

Dean's eyes go bleak. "You're going to tell me that Crowley wanting him out of there means we should leave him there," he races out, his voice faint and breathless.

Even if suspicion is niggling at him, Bobby shakes his head. "Not at all," he replies, and he makes his voice as firm as he can even if he's speaking under his breath. "He's family. We get him out. The kid too."

Dean closes his eyes hard, visibly swallows. He slumps back down onto his butt, passes a hand across his jaw, and Bobby can see that it's shaking. "Dean, you need to keep it together," he says gently. "Did Crowley say anything about how long that sinkhole might stay open?"

The headshake Bobby gets in response doesn't send his confidence soaring, and there's a moment when he plays his mind through the awful possibility of it closing before anyone climbs back out of it. "Anywhere Crowley doesn't want to be isn't going to be a walk in the park," he notes sourly.

The reply he gets is resigned. "Well. I only got about fifteen hundred feet of rope anyway. It's all I can realistically carry. So if it's any deeper than that, well…"

Dean doesn't continue, but his lips pull into a tight line as he directs his gaze into his pack again and retrieves a leather utility harness hung with hooks and clips. He stands and shrugs off his jacket before feeding his legs through the harness and buckling it around his hips. He sits back down on his haunches as he threads his arms through the shoulder straps, eyeballs Bobby for a long moment. A muscle in his cheek twitches, betraying his nerves.

"What?" Bobby prods wearily.

"Cas said something weird happened with Amelia Novak," Dean blurts out, and then he stops, his eyes glued to Bobby's face.

Bobby sighs, tugs his cap off, and scratches his head. "Weird is right," he concedes ruefully. "She's a mess, I guess maybe he felt bad for her, guilty too. But it was almost like…" He stops, thinks back.

"What?" Dean's eyes are desperate now. "Jesus, Bobby. What? Weird how?"

He isn't sure how to put it into words, but Bobby gives it a try. "She was saying stuff, saying she thought Cas was Novak's ghost or something, saying stuff about her sister-in-law, like she thought Cas would remember her." He mulls it some more, the odd way the angel had seemed to feed off what the woman was saying despite his denials, the unblinking stare he aimed at her, and he suddenly realizes the only time he has ever seen Castiel look at something that intensely before, it was Dean.

"And?"

Dean's voice jolts Bobby back to the now. "And – well, it was like he was tapping into it or something," he goes on. "Like he could remember, like he was miles away, lost in memories. He was wringing his hands…I never saw him do that before. And she said her husband used to do it when he was worried."

Dean's voice goes taut. "You're saying he had memories of being Jimmy Novak? What memories? Did he say anything?"

Bobby shakes his head. "Well, no…fact, he got upset about it, said he wasn't Jimmy, said he couldn't remember those things. He told me it was false memories, stuff Novak left behind." He throws up a helpless hand, helpless because he doesn't know if he's any more convinced by the angel's weak assertion now than he was a few hours before. "But it was in his face. Familiarity. And—"

"Are we doing this or not?" Crowley hollers from his rock.

The both turn their heads, shouting, "Shut the fuck up!" in unison.

"And what?" Dean hisses. He drapes a couple of webbing slings around his neck and hooks his arm through a coil of rope as he stands. "Bring the pack, the anchor stuff is in there."

"And he said he knew the kid was alive," Bobby continues quietly, reaching for the bag as he rises himself. He sees the obvious conclusion forming on Dean's face, shakes his head. "It wasn't his angel radar. He said he just knew." He pauses a beat. "Like a parent would," he emphasizes meaningfully. "Like when you see parents on the television news saying they know their missing kid is alive."

Dean is scanning the clearing, stops to shoot a swift, perplexed doubletake at Bobby. "Are you saying he's turning into Jimmy Novak? How is that even possible? Jimmy Novak is dead." He points over to a nearby fir tree and starts walking. "That one."

Bobby picks up a coil of rope and follows. "Better push on that with all your weight, make sure the quake didn't loosen it at the roots," he urges.

Dean drops the slings in a messy heap, plants his hands on the trunk and pushes with all his might. "It's rock solid," he says as he kneels and starts looping one of the slings around the base. "And there's no way," he backtracks. "This happened before, remember? Famine had him chowing down on White Castle like his life depended on it. And he said it was a trace element of Novak back then. That's all it is this time too." He slants his eyes up. "Rap ring?"

The pack is heavy with a large assortment of metal rings, anchors and hexes, and after a few seconds of rooting about Bobby plucks out the required device and hands it down. He watches as Dean threads the sling through the metal ring, waits until the knot is tied good and tight before he voices what's been preying on his mind since he saw the angel come so undone under Amelia Novak's unsettling gaze. Aware of the demon watching interestedly from his rock, he keeps it low and confidential. "Cas said it was transference, what Amelia was doing. Substituting him for her husband. Which makes sense." Bobby pauses, goes on carefully, "But it got me wondering if it might be a two-way street. Because of what happened at my place this morning."

Dean freezes rigid for a second before he responds. "Jesus. Do you think he could be lying down there hurt, thinking I'll just pack my bags and head back to Lisa's if he doesn't get out of there?" The words are wrenched out of him raw, and he dips his head into one hand as he speaks, crumples down onto his butt at the roots of the tree.

"Well…" Bobby supplies reluctantly. "When I asked him about it he said he wanted you to be happy, said if you wanted that, he'd let you go."

Dean twists his head around fast, and his eyes are huge. "You spoke to him about it? For Christ's sake, Bobby, why—"

"Because I had the exact same thought," Bobby cuts him off. "And because I care about what happens to him too, boy." As he says the words it occurs to Bobby for the first time just how much he does care, and he continues, voice quieter but no less firm. "I care about his well-being. His welfare." He exhales slowly. "Grumpy little bastard that he is. I wanted to make sure he knew that if you did choose that, he'd still have a home."

After a long, tense moment, Dean looks away, clears his throat. "If Crowley knows anything about these paths, whatever the hell they really are, we need to get it out of him," he sidetracks. "And we should have another anchor, just in case."

Bobby nods, gestures towards a second tree a few feet away. "I'll set it up. And I'll try and work on him when you're down there, maybe he'll let something slip."

Five minutes later he's watching Dean ease himself gingerly over the lip of the fissure, a helmet with a halogen lamp buckled under his chin, and his pack and a coil of rope on his shoulder. A couple of strong-beam flashlights are hooked to his belt and pointing down, their light vanishing into the black depths. His knuckles are white where they grip the rope ahead of where it feeds through the harness and descender, and he's biting his lip.

"Be careful, son," Bobby warns, as he drops to his knees.

Dean barks out a hoarse laugh. "You know me and holes in the ground. We go together like—"

He's cut off by a piercing whistle. "By the way, watch out for the flock of giant spiders," Crowley calls affably when he has their attention.

And dammit, Bobby had forgotten, and he bites off a curse as Dean's eyes widen. He holds up his hand and fists it. "About yea big. Cas shot one in the woods. It was nasty."

Crowley hails them again. "You're a vessel, they should leave you alone."

Bobby doesn't suppose it'll make a difference anyway, and he knows he's right when Dean takes a deep breath and rolls his shoulders before descending until only his head is visible. He stops then and looks Bobby in the eye for along moment. "What you said, about Cas having a home…" he broaches, a little hesitant. "I worry about that, you know. If something happened."

Bobby manages a smile. "Well, you don't have to worry."

Dean grins at him, just barely. "If…you know. If," he says meaningfully. "Make sure Sam doesn't do anything stupid, huh?"

He doesn't wait for an answer, drops into the void. The lamp bobs about in the darkness until it disappears completely, but Bobby keeps searching for its glow.

They stop for a rest on a narrow shelf after what Castiel judges to have been an hour or more of weaving their way up ridges and the intermittent cracks that connect them, inching across flatter, angled slabs like worms, using the friction of clothing to propel themselves. He looks out at the bruise that still mars the distant sky before turning to consider their next move.

At this level, the mountain is layers of slate, granite, and limestone folded together and buffed to a fine sheen, its gunmetal blues and grays lit with a sprinkling of glassy white, green and yellow quartzite, and swirls of red-pink coral. Castiel can see the tendrils of precious metals, the cursive loops of the mountain's vascular system. They pulse life with their gleam of silver and gold, and he can smell iron and coal as the rock exhales, a terrible beauty birthed here in the nothingness between dimensions, and crouched alert, as if it waits for something.

They have reached the point where the rift starts to narrow to a groove eroded into the solid stone over time immemorial. It coils like a snake about to strike, and up closer Castiel can see that it vanishes into the monolith through a skinny aperture, an eye that seems to focus squarely on him as he studies it. It isn't wide enough for them to have passed through easily as they fell together. It's closing, he realizes, and he clambers up on to a jagged ridge for a closer view.

Claire Novak watches him from a boulder where she sits. "What happened to you anyway?" she asks frankly. "Why can't you fly us out? Why aren't you healing?"

Castiel can't help but grimace at her questions, and after a swift glance to her face, alight with curiosity, he flicks his gaze back to the rift. "I flew too close to the sun," he offers cryptically as he pushes up onto the next vertical shelf of rock. "My…" He pauses, wonders how to put it. "My battery is drained."

The girl rests her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands, and her gaze goes skeptical. "And there isn't anything you can do to recharge it?"

There is a moment after she asks him when Castiel feels utterly detached, feels like he is floating on the outskirts of a half-remembered, half-fantasized effigy of himself, a live conductor for the souls, as he recalls how their power thrilled through him as he tapped into their fuel, how they galvanized him with their heat and energy as he absorbed them, how intoxicating they were, and how brightly he shone as their force made him feel Godlike.

He snaps back into himself, into reality, with a strained, "No. There's nothing I can do." Nothing he will ever do again, he knows, and even the thought of it has him unnerved and parched in his throat. "I'm just – not what I was," he adds, and it's all he can do to get the words out, baked dry as they are. "I won't ever be that again."

She sighs and seems accepting of his explanation or is too tired to interrogate further, so he gathers himself and returns to his examination of the mountainside. Here on the outside he can plot their progress via a scattering of convenient slots, edges, and bumps; see an infinite number of permutations that translate into flowing upward motion. But the belly of this beast is an unknown quantity, a black void framed by rock, and no doubt intricate and deadly. He shivers involuntarily at the thought.

Castiel, what have you done?

The voice is as loud in his ear as if his brother is standing next to him. Castiel gasps, chokes out the name as he whirls, bent at the knees and poised to defend himself, and he wonders abstractedly why it should be no real surprise that Balthazar is here even though his presence is a shock that runs through Castiel like the cold blade of a knife.

There is nothing, no one but the girl, gazing up at him quizzically.

"Balthazar," she says slowly, considerately, playing out each syllable as if she is trying out their sound for the first time. She frowns. "I know him, know your memory of him. He's your brother. Something happened to you, you were called back…they tortured you. But he helped you."

Castiel swallows, and his reply is hoarse. "He haunts me now." He stares past her, down at the beach, even more distant from this vantage point, and there is the glimmer of a dream-memory where he walked with Balthazar across sand, and how his brother's gaze was at once warm with pity and hard with censure. "I killed him," Castiel murmurs. "I killed many of my brothers and sisters. The things I've done…" He swallows as he slants his eyes towards her again. "You can never imagine them."

She blinks up at him, her eyes rapt and reverent, and Castiel recalls again what her mother said.

"You've missed me," he says softly. "Me, Castiel. Your mother told me this. But you shouldn't. You should fear me, scorn me, hate me. I took a child and used it, even while the little humanity I'd learned screamed that it was wrong. You should miss your father, who gave himself up for you. He was the better man."

The expression on her face flickers as she contemplates what he said. "What if my dad hadn't done that?" she ventures carefully.

"Then your mother would have been left with nothing," Castiel tells her.

Twenty minutes after Dean vanishes into the crevice, Bobby hears distant hammering, and he heaves out a breath he wonders if he might have been holding in all this time at the relief his boy has hit something solid enough to set up his second line. After that there is only silence, and after another short while passes Bobby pushes up, glancing suspiciously at Crowley.

There is barely any light now, and the demon has a flashlight perched beside him as he thumbs through a magazine. When he becomes aware of Bobby's appraisal he reaches into his bag and pulls out a stack of offerings. "I popped into Borders on the way back," he says. "Reader's Digest? Or I've got People, Time, and Newsweek. Oh, and the New York Times. Playboy and Playgirl." He leers. "For the articles, of course. This could be an all-nighter, so I stocked up."

Bobby remembers how the demon jerked his chain over his own deal, and he feels his dislike surging instinctively. "What the hell are you even doing here?" he snaps. "How is it you know to show up here now, when the kid and her mom have been on silent running for three years?"

Crowley cocks his head, contemplates him for a moment. "She's a vessel," he offers. "That's powerful medicine. I've been on the lookout for her since she gave us the slip first time round." He looks down, rifles through the magazines. "I've got O magazine too, if that's more your style." He glances up again with a smirk. "Oprah's one of mine, you know."

Bobby glowers back at him and refuses to be thrown off-track. "And what the hell do you know about that?" He stabs a finger at the crack in the earth. "What kind of crap are you pulling now?"

The demon raises a warning finger. "Not guilty," he hisses. "That was here already, one of many, I might add. They're everywhere now, haven't you lot noticed? I just knew how to find it. So, don't blame me for this mess."

That pulls Bobby up, and he cocks his head, eyes the demon doubtfully because there's something about Crowley's expression, the meaningful glitter in his eyes that manages to be both sly and sincere at the same time, something about his vehemence, that speaks of honesty. "What do you know about all this?" Bobby fishes, and he grits his teeth and forces the question to come out a little more diplomatically than before.

Crowley smiles thinly. "Oh, don't tell me," he scoffs. "This is where I do my evil monologue isn't it? It's where I throw out a few barbed insults while giving the entire plot away for the audience." His tone goes scalpel-sharp, and his body seems to vibrate tension. "I'm not the exposition fairy, mate, and this isn't the Department of Backstory. Forget it."

He doesn't break Bobby's gaze for a full minute, his eyes gone obsidian, and when the chime of the demon's cellphone sounds Bobby thinks it's almost a relief. Crowley slides it out of his pocket and squints at it. "Excuse me, Robert," he says icily. "Important matters of state to attend to."

It dawns on Bobby as he watches Crowley talk into the phone, too low for Bobby to pick out what's being said, and he plays it out in his mind again, joining the dots as he goes: Amelia Novak's halting, shocked voice telling him the what, where and when. Telling Crowley too.

When the demon ends the call and looks back up, Bobby smiles himself.

"I'll be checking my landline for your wiretap when I get back to Sioux Falls," he growls.

There is a bulge of rock just past the eye of the mountain, and after they squeeze past it, they sit for a few moments in a silence that might be companionable.

They're in a chimney of sorts, dank-smelling and cavernous, lit only by the dim green glow cast by pockets and stripes of crystals that sparkle in between dark, carved-in ruts and corrugations that track the rock like veins and arteries. Castiel takes his bearings, tracks his eyes as high as he can see, and his weariness flares suddenly as he does, makes him turn his face into his shoulder to stifle his yawn. The henley he's wearing is Dean's, pilfered from Dean's duffel, and Castiel inhales his friend's familiar scent, blinks hard, and thinks longingly of sleep, of Dean's arms around him and Dean's even breaths soft at the nape of his neck. The distraction warms him briefly, fills him with a fierce, diamond-hard need that sharpens his motivation, steels him against his exhaustion. I will see you again, he vows inwardly.

"We have to break this ascent down into sections we can manage," he decides out loud. "Speed is important, but so is stamina. We need to move from rest to rest." He feels the girl shiver next to him as he speaks, and without pause for thought, he unhooks his crossbow sling, places the weapon down beside him and pulls the henley over his head. "It's torn from our fall," he says as he offers it to her. "But it's better than nothing."

She takes it wordlessly, pulls it on over her shirt. "Sounds like you don't need my help," she mutters as she turns her face upwards. He can see her sharp movements as she darts her eyes about them, and her voice is small and doubtful when she speaks again. "It looks difficult. And my hand is sore."

Castiel turns to gesture to the closest and most discernible of the cracks he hopes might line the walls all the way up. As he does, his knee knocks into his crossbow and sends it skittering away, so that he has to lean forward and streak his hand out reflexively just in time to stop it from falling back into the abyss.

Beside him, the girl yelps and grabs a handful of his t-shirt. Her face is appalled when he glances around at her. "I thought you were falling," she says weakly.

Castiel holds up the crossbow. "It belongs to Dean," he says as he clips it back in place. "I don't want to lose it." He fakes a confident smile then. "I won't fall," he reassures her as convincingly as he can, and he points over at the crack again. "Those are the paths out of here." He looks up, spots a wide ledge about fifteen feet further up. "We rest there."

He levers himself backwards on his behind, twists as agilely as he can against the ache of his overstretched muscles, ignores the dull, far-off throb of his damaged wing as it makes itself known through the nerves of the body he wears now. He pushes up into a crouch. "Do exactly as I do, go where I go," he instructs. "You're shorter, but I'll use handholds you can reach. Set your feet precisely and use your legs to push up. And remember to breathe."

Just below the rock where they sit is the rough ledge that is his first foothold, and Castiel pushes his boot in slowly and carefully as he rises to lean out and grip a sharp vertical protrusion of granite with his fingers. He pushes up warily, sliding his foot along the crack inch-by-inch, eyes fixed to his next handhold.

"I can't," the girl confesses forlornly from behind him.

"Then you'll die here," Castiel says sternly, without looking back. "And so will I, since I won't leave you." He pauses a beat. "Would you be responsible for my death?" he goads then. "Would you leave your mother alone to mourn you as well as your father?"

He hears her gulping sounds fall quiet, hears the rubbery squeak of her sneakers on the rock, hears the tiny gasp of panic as she launches herself.

"We're fine," Castiel tells her, gentler now. "Don't get too close. Hang back so you can see where I put my hands and feet."

He continues on, looking up, ignoring the sick feeling at the pit of his stomach, his own fear of this place. As he moves further from what little light seeps in through the aperture, the hand and foothold ciphers that decode the puzzle they're climbing through are harder to pick out even with his keen vision. He finds them only by groping, and he chisels his fingers into tiny furrows that Claire Novak's hands will fit perfectly, flexes and strains the digits to gain purchase, feeling his fingertips and knuckles split and graze as he goes. He contorts his hands around small bulges and gnarled twists of rock that will nestle perfectly in the girl's palms, squints against dislodged flakes of grit and the occasional flurry of small stones that erupt and bombard his face. He moves his feet slowly and precisely, his toes striving for accuracy as they wedge into indentations and slots, and slither along seams, his belly pressed close to the rough surface. He searches constantly for the next ledge, the next notch, mapping each point three, four, five moves ahead as he goes, keeping every milestone on his route within the girl's range, never overreaching.

He glances back just once, sees her following in his wake, her eyes alert to every nook and cranny Castiel uses, her mouth a firm line, every careful movement an exact copy of his own, and he feels something he thinks may be pride.

"I'm sliding down," Dean says out loud, with schooled calm, as he slowly descends. "I'm doing it bit by bit, I'm being careful. I have a way out. I'm not trapped, I can get out of here any time I want to."

The mantra is working. It's working, he tells himself, and never mind that he knows something is watching him, can feel its gaze strumming a tune across his sixth sense.

He's on his third line, six-hundred feet once he gets to the end of this one he knows, and there's nothing, no crumpled bodies on any of the rocky shelves that jut out intermittently in this vertical tunnel, elevator shaft to Hell, and, "Fuck, no," he grates out, and he can feel cold sweat pop out of his pores at the thought, almost hear the shrieks and howls of the damned. They're far away but getting closer, chasing me, they're chasing me.

He spins, frantic, as the sounds get louder, and his lamp, fire, flame, furnace picks them out, the surging, teeming, monstrous mass of them, their eyes, their fangs, their claws, as they caper about him, too many to fight, demons.

This isn't a crack in the ground, it never was. It's a crypt, a tomb, a mausoleum, a pine box six feet below an anonymous field in Pontiac, Illinois, where Bobby and Sam buried him because the smell was too bad to keep driving with him on the back seat even with the windows down. So, they stopped at Home Depot and bought the lumber, hammered it all together and picked him up, an end each, and he was mannequin-stiff by then, his limbs frozen in rigor mortis and his hands set in claws, his jaw clenched around the rattle he made as his broken heart weakened and died, and his terrified brain shut down.

"Fuck, no," Dean whispers again, and he knows it's mind-tricks, knows he can't remember any of that, knows he can haul ass back up and out of here to the World, knows he has the lifeline in his hand. But he's swinging at the end of the rope, his back crashing into rock, or is it bones?, and there's a jackhammer noise, his heartbeat, or is it thunder?, and there's flashing, his flashlight beam, or is it lightning, is it the cussin' weather?

"That's no line, Dean," Alastair hisses sibilantly in his ear. "That's a chain…and that's no harness, that's my rack…now let's see how long it takes for me to slice, and dice, and pare, and carve you into a new animal—"

"No," Dean cries, his voice reedy with panic. "You're not real. This isn't real." But his hand is touching earth that crumbles under his fingertips, and he's digging, feeling it spill in around him, tasting its chill flakes on his tongue, inhaling the soil as he reaches up, twisting desperately to spit it out. "Help me. Please. Someone help me…"

Someone did.

Good things do happen, Dean.

"Cas," he chokes, and he snaps his eyes open. His heart is thudding, blood pulsing in his ears like the perfect storm is whirling around in his head, and it is the perfect storm, it's earth, darkness, the air damp and musty like it was in his box when he woke.

Flashback, he realizes, and his guts flop about inside him like a beached fish, acid burning the back of his throat. He feels the first industrious heave and cranes his neck as best he can as he retches up what's left of his last meal.

He spits out lumpy, brackish saliva, presses his hand up to his mouth. "This isn't my grave," he stutters, and he closes his eyes, bites down hard on the joint where his thumb meets his hand. "This isn't my grave."

He swings lazily at the end of the rope and slow-breathes, each exhale a low whistle of air. In-out, in-out, calm, calming, the way Sam showed him.

"I have a way out," he mutters hoarsely. "I'm not trapped, I can get out of here any time I want to. This is not my grave."

By the time they reach the twentieth rest stop, Castiel has lost track of time and has no idea how far they've come. He hauls the girl up onto the ledge beside him and she sprawls there, her breath coming out in frenzied pants, her teeth clicking together.

Now that he's used to the dark, Castiel can see more clearly, and she has her hands up, shielding her face. An idea springs to mind, and he slides his hand around into the pocket of his jeans, pulls out his cellphone and nudges her until she emerges. "Here," he says. "There won't be a signal, but it has games on it. Angry Birds. Words with Friends." He feels a little foolish, shrugs. "They help distract me from my dreams."

She cocks her head. "What do you dream about?"

The sense of déjà vu is powerful, the image of himself sitting on the side of Dean's bed in some anonymous motel, what were you dreaming about?, and Castiel's reply hitches in his throat, comes out hoarse. "Things I've done…awful things, things you shouldn't know. Things I regret."

She doesn't comment on that, snatches the phone from him too swiftly. "What level of Angry Birds are you on?" she asks.

The redirection is a relief, and Castiel runs with it. "Poached eggs," he admits sheepishly. "For some time now." He isn't surprised when she snorts much as Dean does when he teases Castiel for his ineptitude at the game. "The pigs are devious foes," he adds defensively. "When they laugh, it distracts me from my strategy."

She clicks on the phone, and the bluish light shines up and reveals the wet shine of tears on her cheeks as she asks, "What about Warzone Earth?"

Castiel blinks at her, debates how much he should reveal and decides to mix vagueness with cold, hard fact. "That isn't going to happen. We stopped the Apocalypse."

The girl does that thing Dean does that he calls facepalming, accompanied by a huff and a flat, "It's another game."

Castiel feels his brow furrow as he thinks on his response. "Is it a free game? Dean only lets me have free games."

She gives him a long, unimpressed stare, during which one eyebrow rises gradually into a judgmental arch, but then she busies herself, her thumb swiping rapidly and flicking up and down as necessary.

After a few moments where she ignores him, Castiel takes advantage of this strange truce they seem to have reached to lean his head back against the rock and close his eyes. His lethargy is closing around his shoulders like a shroud, and he wants to clutch it to him, wrap himself lazily in its length and fall into slumber. "We can't rest for long," he murmurs. "Don't let me sleep."

He rouses to a sharp jab in the ribs, shakes his head as he tries to drag himself out of his stupor. He doesn't know where he is, and it's dark. The air around him is thick with tension, as if this place is frozen with terror and barely holding in a scream, and his skin prickles with fright. "Dean, how long have I slept?" he mumbles confusedly, as he sits bolt upright and scrabbles around him for a weapon. "Dean? Where are we?"

There's a sniff from next to him, a voice he doesn't recognize at first, disapproving but also a little shaky. "You didn't sleep. You asked me not to let you sleep, so I didn't."

Reality slams back into him, a body blow, bringing disappointment with it. "But I do want to sleep," Castiel complains testily. "I want to sleep." He can't hold back his yawn now, and she makes a clucking sound.

"We can't sleep," she chides. "Don't you want to see Dean again? You love him, don't you? You did then, I felt it. It was…intense."

Castiel eyes her dubiously, suddenly feels more alert albeit a little unsure over how to answer her question. He taps his fingers nervously on the rocky surface beside his thighs, finally settles on forestalling. "Even I know it would be somewhat odd to discuss that with you while I wear this body."

She talks on as if he never spoke and her tone is high-pitched and brittle, gives away her agitation. "Dean was pretty cool. Took me and my mom home afterwards, got us packed up and then drove us to a motel while his brother cleaned up the mess. He gave my mom some protection charms, told her about this tattoo she could get so she couldn't be possessed again. And some friend of his got us new last names, mom said. Money too." She pauses for a breath, tangents abruptly. "I knew that guy was a demon…I felt it. Maybe I should be like Dean, be a hunt—"

"We don't want that for you," Castiel cuts in roughly, and it falls quiet. "Uh. I mean…" He fumbles for the right words to qualify his outburst. "Your mother doesn't want that for you. I'm fairly sure."

She radiates even more tension out into the small space between them for a few seconds before she slaps his cellphone down into his lap. "We should keep going," she says shortly. "I don't need to rest any more."

Castiel is just formulating a response when he hears it: rustling, like the wind through the trees, accompanied by a chittering sound, communication, a signal, and in the same instant that he makes the connection with what he and Bobby saw in the woods they flood onto the ledge, a river of them, the walls of the rift suddenly seething alive with them.

He's opening his mouth to yell out a warning, reaching a hand to grasp the girl, but she's already crying out and stepping back too far. She drops into nothing, no!, and Castiel seizes whatever is left of his grace, fires himself forward like a bullet from a gun, arm outstretched to her just as it was the first time she fell. No!, and he crashes down and skids along his front towards the lip, feeling his skin abrade and tear with the speed and force of his effort. No!, and he grabs wildly into the void where he can sense her horror flourishing even if they are both traveling too fast for him to see her with his human eyes. Yes!, his fingers lock around her wrist, so slender and fragile in his fist, and the wrench of her at the end of his arm as he arrests her plunge has him groan, pain streaking through him as he pulls back to stop his own slide over the precipice, his cheek pressing into stone that rips into his skin.

She's screaming nonsensically, legs kicking wildly, and while it isn't a weight that would ordinarily trouble Castiel, in his worn-out near-human state it's a burden, and it's as much as he can manage to have her dangle and wriggle in space while he steels himself to haul her back up. And, the spiders, he thinks frantically. He knows he's defenseless and vulnerable like this. He doesn't look for them, expects to feel the tickle of their legs at any moment, the loving press of their fangs piercing his skin, and the acid surge of their venom in his veins, but he can't feel them swarm over him. He cracks his eyes, gasps out his relief as he sees them scurry on, splitting around him, spilling over the edge, continuing down into the depths.

Once the distraction of them is past, he levers his free hand under his chest and pushes up a few inches on a gargantuan effort. The girl shrieks, her face moon-white in the darkness, her eyes huge and desperate, and now that he is listening Castiel can pick out words in her clamor.

"Daddy, don't let me fall," she sobs. "Don't let me fall. Dad, please don't let me fall. Don't let me fall. Don't let go. Daddy, please…"

It lights something in Castiel like a fuse, and he doesn't know what it is, this flood of emotion, devotion so different from what he feels for Dean but no less powerful. He only knows that he will never let her slip from his grasp, and he clings on doggedly, and pulls with all his might. "I won't…I won't let you fall," Castiel stutters, and he says her name, not like before, not calculated. He chokes it out as if she is cherished, because in this moment he cherishes her for her father, who no longer can. "Claire. I won't let you go. Claire. Claire…"

She is suddenly light in his arms because his body is flooded with human adrenaline, with fervor, with intent, and with love, and he heaves her up, wraps an arm about her, grinds his boot heels along the surface to give him the friction he needs to shuffle them away, back from the edge until his spine is pressed up against rock. He grips her tight against his chest and hushes her as she shakes and shudders, and he feels her tears soak through his t-shirt.

"Daddy," she cries, and her voice is a strangled, painful thing in the juncture of his neck and shoulder. "Dad. I miss my dad."

Castiel rocks her back and forth, puts a hand up and strokes it across her hair. "I know," he croons, and he kisses the top of her head. "I know you do."

The flashlights hooked to Dean's belt illuminate some of the gloom, but it's thick and murky, like driving through fog.

He's being damn careful, three hexes or a couple of spring-loaded cams threaded into cracks for each anchor, followed by a cautious descent down the rocky face. He eases down onto tiny outcrops, semi-flat ridges, and shallow ledges carefully, lest he slip, uses every indentation and crack he can find to help distribute his weight and take the strain off the rope.

The sudden jolt that drops him three or four feet further down the shaft and sends him crashing into the wall in a fraction of a split second has him gulp in air, has his heart freeze in his chest as he grips the line, eyes pressed closed in panic while his own mortality taunts him. He tries to remember how many hexes he used to anchor himself to the ledge above. One gone, he guesses, once he's capable of clear, rational thought. Two to go.

He digs his boots frantically into crumbling stone, and his hand scrabbles and picks at the wall, while his guts twist and contort themselves into a snarl of double and triple knots. He holds himself as still as he can, his brow pressed against the cold, slimy surface.

He's on his last-but-one rope.

"Cas," he croaks into the rancid atmosphere. "You fuckin' idiot. I'm killing you myself when I find you."

He looks down to where dark tunnel continues on below him, and he forces himself to ignore its malevolence, forces himself to ignore the way the walls seem to be closing in on him. He's sure the shaft is narrowing, healing up from within, like a puncture wound, and he briefly wonders whether its flesh might knit together around him and seal him in here like a splinter embedded in a fingertip.

He digs his toes in again, swallows hard before he loosens his brake hand and lets the rope continue its slow, controlled slide through the descender.

"Shouldn't we start climbing again?"

Castiel has been dozing, content to slump there with the girl's warmth seeping into him through his t-shirt, but he cracks his eyelids as her voice breaks the quiet from where she rests her head on his shoulder. Her tone is despondent, and he suspects that maybe she has realized this is where their climb ends, that there is no real hope for them because he's so tired now he can barely stir even to open his eyes properly. He knows he'll need days, days they don't have because he can see that the chimney is tapering, narrowing, as the frayed edges of this rip in the fabric between worlds weave together again. He thinks about it in a disconnected way that insulates him against anger or despair at their fate, and he lets his eyes fall closed again.

"I'm thirsty," she persists. "Hungry too. We should start moving again." Her stomach rumbles as she speaks, and she lays her palm on it, rubs circles there.

"I just need to rest," Castiel mutters. "I need to sleep for a while. Then things will be better. It isn't far now."

The lie trips uneasily off his tongue, he knows, because he has lost the habit and hopes never to regain it, but she doesn't notice. Instead she sighs.

"Before," she murmurs. "When you called my name. It was like my…" She stops for a second, completes her thought awkwardly. "It was just really weird."

Castiel makes the effort to slough off his fatigue and pull himself to some semblance of alertness as he considers her words for a few moments. "When we take a vessel we pull that vessel's consciousness within us," he ventures. "We wrap ourselves around it, we soothe it and comfort it. We treasure it. It's considered humane, although…well." He smiles ruefully. "Perhaps we tell ourselves that to set us apart from the demons when they take a host."

He sits up straighter, and she threads her hand under his bicep and around it, grips her opposite wrist so that she's holding onto him, his arm trapped in hers. She isn't shivering anymore but she still plays one foot over the other continuously, a nervous gesture that reminds him of the graceful, serpentine curl of her mother's anxious fingers.

"Some part of them seeps into our grace," he tells her. "It imprints there…a trace element of them that remains after we have left, and we experience it like an echo, like faded memories of things that happened in the past, and—"

He stops abruptly, momentarily dazzled by blue, Amelia Novak gazing up at him when he wasn't Castiel at all. It's another recollection that isn't really his but it sends a feeling of want surging in him, undercut by a familiar tingling sensation, familiar because it's the same sensation that skips through him when he's in close proximity to Dean. It makes his heart thump faster, but he ignores it and presses on. "I never thought to suppose we might leave an echo of ourselves behind when we left. But you remember some of me, even from that brief time."

She answers him in a whisper. "I dream of places I've never been to. Places I don't think even exist…not for me, anyway. People, and things, and worlds I've never known. I dream of flight, and I wake up wanting it so bad. I look up at the sky and I want to fall into it."

As she speaks, Castiel can feel her body relax against his arm, and her feet fall still, as if she is finding some kind of peace in her recollection. "I remember your light…" she goes on. "It was beautiful. Pure, and it poured through me like everything I ever wanted. I remember your power, the strength of your will. It was…" Her voice goes wistful. "It felt right, I felt right, felt like I could do anything, achieve anything. That no one could stop me. It was like soaring, spacing-out. It was a high. A trip." She lifts a hand then, snaps her fingers, the click resounding loudly. "And then you were gone, and everything was gray again."

Her expression is meditative, nostalgic; her words are a disconcerting reminder of Castiel's own dependence and craving, and how it sent him skyrocketing. He knows all she is describing, and more, but before he can formulate a response, she shrugs, casts a cautious look up at him from under her eyelashes. "I've looked for it," she confesses tentatively. "I've tried to find it again. I've done some stupid stuff." Her voice cracks. "My dad would be so ashamed of me."

Her words turn the air into glue he can't breathe, as Castiel's own shame rises unbearably and focuses itself into a single, bleeding, complex wound of knowing that brings with it a sudden hyperawareness of his own ability to inflict, and to harm. It bludgeons him with an oppressive sense of tragedy at the fact the innocence of the past is irretrievable now, that his existence is strewn with broken things that can't ever be salvaged or repaired, and grief and remorse explode from somewhere deep and limitless inside him. "I'm not beautiful," he says softly. "I'm not pure. And I'm not to be missed, or mourned. I'm not the only landmark in your life, and you need to let go of me. And your…"

He trails off, distracted again by the fever-heat coursing through him, a tickling that somehow, some way, comforts him. And suddenly he knows, curses himself for not having recognized what it was the second he first felt the warmth start burning in his chest, in the scar Dean left there. Heart's ease, he realizes, Dean, in the same moment Claire Novak makes an urgent, breathless sound and unlaces her arm from his to spring to her feet.

"Oh my God," she gasps as she looks up. She waves eagerly, looks down at Castiel. "We're getting out of here," she cries, and he smiles at her through his exhaustion and despair, as she cups her hands around her mouth and hollers up at the figure they can both see hanging there in mid-air, fifteen or so feet above them.

Castiel pushes up himself, and Claire whoops beside him, jumps to punch the air, before her knees buckle suddenly, so that he has to snake out an arm to support her. He keeps his eyes on Dean then, watches how his friend doesn't react, how he reaches up one hand to his face, curls and hunches in on himself, and doesn't seem to see or hear them.

Something is wrong, he thinks.

Almost three hours, the glow of Dean's wristwatch tells him. Almost three hours he has been descending this crevice, and now the murk has cleared and he's staring down at the bottom, at nothing but earth and shale, flat and empty and impossible, because the shaft has gradually narrowed to less than ten feet across now, and it's impossible, there's no way, no damn way he could have passed them sacked out on some ledge.

The bottom, nothing, and he can hear Crowley in his head, scornful and mocking, that path won't stay open forever. Dean dips his head in his hand, can't find the oxygen he needs to breathe through the pain of loss, and can't blink back the sting of tears. The scar on his shoulder starts to throb and scorch, as if it knows, and he rubs angrily at it through his shirt, chokes back a weak, futile, "No."

Out, he has to get out of here, up to the surface, to think it through, work out a plan. "I'm not leaving you, Cas," he grates out. "I'll find a way. I did before."

He slams his palm onto the rock, defiant, because it's a promise, and the noise he hears in the moment of stillness afterwards is familiar, a hiss through air, a thud as it buries itself in the crumbling dirt and rock barely inches from where his hand is splayed out on the wall.

A crossbow bolt.

Dean looks at it, exhales so fast his head spins, and he presses his hand back to the scar as he blinks hard and looks down again. Earth, shale, the end of the line. He swivels his eyes up again, rubs at them with his knuckles, because his mind must be playing tricks on him. But the bolt is still there, and he reaches out to tap at it, finds that it's solid, it's real, and it's as impossible as the vacant patch of ground below him.

His heart is a jackhammer trying to smash its way out from behind his ribs as he fishes a glow stick out of his pocket, snaps it and shakes it so that its green light flares eerily. He swallows, drops it. And – nothing, the light vanishes, swallowed up by thin air on its journey down.

He takes a deep breath, shouts it out, "Cas?"

No reply, just his own voice resounding hollow and mournful around him in this enclosed space. Dean sucks in his bottom lip, unhooks the last rope, plays it out cautiously, squints down at the end as the rope…keeps going. And keeps going for longer than it should, he's damn well sure of it, and right as he's opening his mouth to holler his friend's name again, at the top of his lungs, there's a hard wrench that almost pulls the line from his hand, followed by one, two, three sharp tugs, and an explosion of fiery heat in his shoulder that has him gasp at the burn.

"Fuck," he breathes out, and he plays out the rope he's hanging from until he's just inches above the bottom of the pit. "Okay," he says, as he steels himself. He swallows, lowers himself more carefully, gapes as his boots seem to sink into the ground. He lifts one, can almost feel what looks like earth cling to him, and now that he's up close to it he can see that it has a nebulous, imprecise quality to it. "Like the Stargate," he marvels. "Wormhole…"

He takes a deep breath, and then he doesn't hesitate any longer, keeps going. It feels cool and moist as it engulfs him, feels like drizzle on his cheeks, and damp strands seep into his nostrils. And then it's gone, and he's hanging five feet above a narrow ledge, looking at Castiel.

The angel's face is drawn and tired, his eyes huge. He has one hand pushed up under his t-shirt and pressed to the mark Dean left on his chest, and he's holding his crossbow in the other. There's a teenage girl standing next to him, her eyes equally wide and blue, her face smeared with dirt and tears. Claire Novak. Castiel doesn't say anything, but his eyes flicker closed for a few seconds before he folds himself down to sit on the rocky ledge underfoot.

Dean lets the rope out, plants his feet on solid ground, real solid ground. He looks up briefly, and stretching above him into the distance is the shaft he just descended. "That's…" He looks back at Castiel, feels a sickly lurch in his stomach as it dawns on him that if this ledge had been much further down he would have started his climb back up without them ever realizing he was there. "I couldn’t see you," he says. "The shaft ended. It looked like solid ground from up there."

Castiel nods. "Event horizon," he replies hoarsely. "We need to leave. This tear is closing."

The girl has her hand on Castiel's shoulder, Dean notices, almost possessive as she stares back. "Do you have any water?" she asks, and Dean nods, eases off his backpack to fish out a bottle, and hands it to her as he moves closer. She snatches it, uncaps it and gulps down long draughts, her eyes never leaving Dean's.

Dean kneels down, and he needs to savor this moment, can't help putting out a hand to touch his friend's cheek even though he wants to pull him in tight and bury his face in his neck. "Man, you look wiped," he says gently as he plays the pad of his thumb back and forth along Castiel's cheekbone. "But you're alright, huh?"

Castiel's eyes drift closed, and he turns into Dean's palm, brushes his lips across it. "I'm very tired, Dean," he says, and there's a deliberateness about his tone despite his obvious exhaustion, a firmness that rings alarm bells in Dean. "This tear is closing," the angel repeats. "There isn't much time." He opens his eyes then, pins Dean with a steady gaze. "You need to take her up first."

And there is no damn way, not in a thousand lifetimes. Dean shakes his head. "That's not happening, Cas," he insists, and he doesn't care that his friend's face falls. "I'm not leaving you here."

Dean can sense the girl's anxiety ratchet up a few notches as he speaks, can see her in his peripheral vision, chewing on a thumbnail, her eyes darting between his face and Castiel's. He reaches out and pats her on the leg. "It'll be fine," he reassures her. "I know what I'm doing."

Castiel's eyes go liquid and fond, and he curls his lips up in a half smile. "It has to be this way, Dean," he murmurs. "We can't—"

"Yes, we can," Dean interrupts, and he's already fumbling for Castiel's hand, pressing it up against himself just like Bobby described to them months before, just like he saw himself in Calumet City after Veritas, and at his grandfather's compound. He doesn't care that they have an audience, he leans in close and rests his brow on his friend's, staring right into the blue while he feels Castiel's breath mist his lips. "It took me near on three hours to get down here, Cas," he whispers. "The sides of this place are closing in further up."

He feels Castiel's hand cool at the back of his neck, and the angel's reply is low and desperate, a breathless ramble because he knows what Dean is offering, ordering. "I swore to myself I never would again, Dean…I don't want to. Don't make me do this. Please."

Dean grips his wrist even tighter, makes it an order. "I'm telling you to do it, Cas. Else none of us is getting out of here."

Castiel's mouth hardens into a firm, obstinate line. "It will hurt you," he says.

That's a fact, Dean knows it, heard his own brother's cries as Castiel reached through the substance of skin, muscle and bone to look for that intangible, essential thing Sam lacked. "I know," he answers. "Sam, remember? And Samuel too." He grins, even though his fear is making his voice shaky. "I'm good with it. And come on…it's better than staying down here to die, huh?"

Castiel's jaw clenches. "It's worse when there is a soul there," he whispers, but his look turns defeated and his tone is resigned as he continues. "I won't take too much."

Dean nods, braces himself as he feels the pressure under his sternum, sees the second it starts, the way Castiel's eyes turn to quicksilver, and then there is only light, the needle-stab of blinding pain, and the sound of his own cry soaring up around him.

The sky is tinted pink with the first rays of the sun, and the dawn chorus is starting up from high in the trees, breaking the eerie stillness of before, so that Bobby wonders if the birds somehow sense that the place feels safer. And it does: there's a lightness to the air, the miasma of dread seeping away with the first glimmer of day on the horizon. His eyes feel dry, but he barely blinks in moisture, unwilling to drag his gaze away from the crack, narrow as it is now. He tells himself he isn't giving up, hasn't given up, that Dean's head will emerge any second now, but he thinks he might be at the point where he's kidding himself, maybe even formulating what he's going to say to Sam when he tells him.

Over to his right, Crowley clears his throat. "Toon with a brother named Castor," he announces.

He's done it a couple of times, pitching crossword clues to Bobby, and Bobby supposes it might even be a ceasefire of sorts, like playing soccer in no-man's land. He curls his lip at the demon. "Olive Oyl."

Crowley smiles, writes it on there, and then slaps the newspaper down beside him on the rock with a flourish. "Done. I do like a good cro—"

"Thank Christ."

Bobby's heartfelt words cut the demon off, as the sound and sight of the three figures snapping into existence on the opposite side of the clearing have him sliding off his rock so fast he scrapes the small of his back on the jagged stone. He stumbles over on jelly-legs, reaches a hand out as Dean's knees buckle, and helps support him the rest of the way down to the ground. "What the hell happened?" he demands down into Dean's ashen face and blurry, bloodshot eyes that are already at half-mast.

Castiel doesn't look that much better, but he's already moving past Bobby and the air is going tense again, charged with something new, with ozone and rage. "Call your mother," he says curtly as he goes, and he throws his cellphone across to the girl, where she hovers next to Bobby.

She catches it smartly and starts pressing the numbers rapidly. When she starts talking her voice is already breaking, and she sags down onto the grass next to Dean. Bobby sinks to his knees beside them both, sets Castiel's sword down next to him, and pats the girl clumsily on the shoulder as Dean slumps against him, groaning, a hand pressed to his chest.

"What happened?" Bobby growls again, but Dean just shakes his head, mutters a curse. In his peripheral vision, Bobby can see that Crowley is up on his hind legs too now, and the demon's face is set, his eyes twinkling in a way that's aggressive, his fingers strumming the air at his side.

"You wouldn't happen to have my knife by any chance, would you?" Crowley asks.

Castiel offers him a grim half-smile, holds out empty hands. "Oops. It looks as if you waited for nothing."

Crowley shrugs carelessly. "Can't blame a girl for trying. But, no matter. It's not important now." He smirks. "Bigger fish."

He saunters a few feet to his left, and Bobby notes how Castiel matches Crowley's stride step for step, keeping himself between the demon and their huddle on the ground, shielding them. The sudden flex of muscles underneath his hand tells him Dean sees it too, and Bobby presses down reassuringly. "I got it," he murmurs, and he reaches for the sword, pushes up.

"I'm just glad to see you're in one piece, partner," Crowley continues with mock cheer. "I'd hate to see anything happen to you."

The angel's response is utterly flat. "If you touch her again, I—"

"You and whose army?" Crowley jeers. "If you could take me out, you would have done it by now."

Castiel waits a beat. "I don't need an army," he counters, still impassive. "And I may be weaker than I once was, but if I set out to find you there will be nowhere you can hide from me."

The demon throws his head back and brays out a malignant laugh. "You can't follow me to Hell," he retorts then. "You don't have the cojones anymore."

Castiel advances slowly, and Bobby can see how the angel is sizing Crowley up, knows Castiel's outward calm is the veneer for something that seethes and roils and protests beneath his skin, something that threatens to explode out of him at any minute, tick, tick, tick, as his fuse sparks and fizzes like a cartoon stick of dynamite. "I am a fallen angel," he says softly. "I have preyed on souls, murdered my own brothers, aspired to Godhood, and claimed my Father's throne for myself." He stops, tilts his head and contemplates the demon for a few seconds. "Treachery, all of it. And it means you can't hide from me in your home, Crowley, because when I end I will be cast down to the Lake of Fire in perpetuity. And I will spend my eternity in Hell hunting you, and when I find you – which I will – I will lay down my vengeance on you."

Castiel spares a glance back, his gaze falling on Dean, tracking to the girl, who is staring at him with wide eyes, and falling briefly on Bobby before he directs it back to the demon. "So if you harm my family again, any of them, never let your guard down," he continues coldly. "Never stop looking behind you, never stop listening for the beat of my wings, Crowley, because you will never be fast enough to outrun me. I will tear out my grace myself to follow you into the Pit if I have to, and you will know my wrath."

The curbed ferocity of the pledge has an icy chill running up and down Bobby's spine, and he can see that Crowley is daunted by it, see the way the demon's eyes narrow and a muscle twitches impotent anger in his cheek.

"Oh, never you mind, mate," Crowley snaps scornfully. "There's always plan B."

In the next instant the demon is gone, and after a long moment Castiel turns to face Bobby. His tension seems to drain out of him from the top down, and he rubs at his jaw absently as his eyes drop down to Dean again.

"I don't suppose you got enough volts left to beam us to the car?" Dean's voice creaks out from foot level, and Bobby looks down to see that Dean is bracing himself clumsily on one hand, dazed and exhausted.

A weary headshake is the only answer they get.

Dean comes around to jolting, and the low chatter of distant conversation. He cracks his eyelids, winces as sunlight has his pupils shrinking self-protectively. His head is pounding relentlessly, and he has an odd, bruised pain dead center of his chest, as if he's been kicked hard by a mule. Cas, he remembers, and he presses his palm there, swallows against the sickly emptiness he can sense, accompanied by an unpleasant squirming just under his skin, like someone pranked him with the super joy buzzer.

"You alright?"

Dean cants his head as much as he's capable, to see Bobby sitting in the driver's seat, staring ahead.

"I'll live," he replies, with a sort of dreary triumph, and he's not really surprised by how raw and tired his voice sounds, reckons he must have shredded a few more octaves when he screamed.

He's riding shotgun, his shoulder wedged uncomfortably under his chin and his temple juddering slightly against the window frame. He shifts himself more upright, can't hold back a groan as the crick in his neck makes itself known. He casts his eyes down, sees that the old plaid blanket he stows in the trunk is covering him.

"You were shivering," Bobby informs him as he plucks at the thick fabric and pulls a face. "Seemed like you were in shock or something. Had to carry you most of the way back to the car."

Bobby's eyes flick up to the rearview mirror as he talks, and then back to Dean before he faces front again. The muted conversation Dean could hear in the fog between unconsciousness and awareness is still drifting up from behind them, and he can't help but tune into it more sharply now he's awake.

He half-turns in his seat, meets vivid blue, two sets, pinning him so critically he almost recoils. "Jesus fu—"

A sharp poke in the thigh from Bobby cuts off the curse. "Fudgin' laser eyes of doom," Dean continues awkwardly instead, "times four. That's all I need when I'm feeling like cr—"

"Dean." Bobby again, barked out urgently.

"Crawling," Dean fields. "Crawling into the nearest bed and sleeping for a week."

Bobby snorts. "You get a day to sleep it off, boy, and one only. I'm booking us into a motel after we take the kid home to her mother."

The girl is watching Dean curiously, her eyes analyzing him, and it feels too much like the way Castiel sometimes fixes Dean with a look that suggests clinical examination. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, Dean finds himself thinking, and it's suddenly uncomfortable to be faced with the reality of this child, with the shell of her father sitting right next to her. He looks away, pulls his blanket up higher, rests his cheek on the seatback, but he's sure he can still feel her stare.

"That thing you did back there," the girl says suddenly, but when Dean darts his eyes back her focus is on Castiel again. "I don't get it. You said there wasn't a way to recharge."

Dean hears Bobby suck in an agitated breath beside him as he does the math, and the old man throws him a baleful look but doesn't comment.

"Souls have power we can draw on," Castiel concedes reluctantly. "But it isn't something I—"

"You could have used me," Claire interrupts, and it's almost accusing.

"It wasn't an option for me," Castiel tells her, and he shrugs. "I can't draw energy from the souls of my vessel's bloodline without destroying them."

Dean sees the play of emotions on the girl's face as she considers the response. "But – that place was closing up, Dean said," she counters, unfazed. "And you knew it didn't you? So, you could have done it, and then you could have gotten out of there yourself."

Castiel smiles at her, and there is a rare gentleness in the gesture, a gentleness Dean has only ever seen directed at him, in quiet moments when everyone else in the room has faded into the background. "That doesn't mean it was an option for me," he reiterates. "I've destroyed enough souls." He glances across at Dean, and it's a hurt, guilty look. "I never want to do it again. Never."

Claire's eyes narrow shrewdly. "Is that what you meant when you said you'd done awful things? Things you regret?"

Castiel's expression goes bleak as he nods. "I need to make up for it now. I need to try, at least."

The girl hardly waits for him to finish, and Dean recognizes it so well, remembers it from Sam when he was a kid, and from Ben too; the way a child can cut right to the point, to the heart of the matter, with utter confidence and absolute clarity, convinced of their own rightness.

"When I used to do something bad, my dad never whacked me upside the head like my friends' dads sometimes do," she says. "He said that'd be too easy, and he used to just tell me to go to my room and think about it, think about what I did and how it might have made people feel. And it worked. It made me never want to do those things again. So, maybe that's how you make up for it. By thinking about it and living with what you did. Because a whack upside the head is too easy."

And fuck, if Dean doesn't remember that too, remembers exchanging rueful looks with Lisa as Ben thundered up the stairs as ordered, slammed his bedroom door, and stomped about overhead. Dean can't help grinning at the memory, and he finds he can do it and feel wistful without the underlying sense of regret he has felt before, the sense of things left unfinished.

Beside him Bobby clears his throat in a way that sounds pointed. "Seems like good sense," he offers.

The girl nods emphatically, before raising an inquiring eyebrow at Castiel and moving right on into what Dean concedes is the natural follow-up, even if it makes him wince inwardly.

"What would have happened if you hadn't done those things?"

Dean sees something flash across his friend's features, thinks it might be utter distress, and Castiel goes utterly still. The angel's remorse hits Dean like a sucker-punch, makes his throat constrict painfully, but he pulls his thoughts back on track and manages to get the words he wants to say out. "We'd be dead. If he hadn't done those things, we'd all be dead." He speaks with quiet conviction, and as he does, Castiel's eyes flicker shut, his face pales, and he rubs at his temple.

They fall into a reflective silence then, Castiel staring out the window, and Dean slides himself around to take in the view himself. They're in the suburbs, passing blocks of tidy houses, lawns with kids on swing-sets and jungle gyms, cars and trucks on driveways, morning joggers and dog-walkers out taking the air, the drone of ride-ons and weed-whackers. It's mundane, Dean thinks; it's smalltown America, it's Cicero, it's Stepford, and he isn't a Stepford bitch and never was, he knows.

"Tell your mom I'll have her truck back in a couple of hours," Bobby starts, and Dean snaps back to see they're turning off the road and onto a driveway. The car has barely stopped before the girl is scrabbling at the doorhandle. She almost falls out, recovers, and then she's gone, a blur of long legs sprinting for the house. There's a shrub part-concealing the doorway, but Dean sees the crack of dark that appears at the top as it opens, and Claire vanishes from sight.

There is a stillness that falls on them then, a few seconds that seem melancholy. Castiel slides over to the other side of the bench seat and pulls the car door closed before settling back. He rests his hands on his lap, fingers laced together, and he stares out the window again. He seems composed, seems miles away, but Dean knows enough now to see it in Castiel's eyes, knows his serenity is a front.

"That's that, then," Bobby declares as he clunks the car into reverse. "Kid must've been desperate to see her mom," he adds as he backs them off the drive.

True that, Dean thinks, even if he suspects Bobby said it as some kind of sop. The angel doesn't acknowledge it though, and Dean wonders if he registered what was said.

"I'll head back up onto the highway," Bobby tells him as they start to roll forwards. "We passed a couple of motels on the way in. I'll get a cab back up to the trailhead and fetch the tr—"

"Wait, pull up!" Dean yelps it out, snakes his arm across to grab Bobby's wrist as he catches sight of movement behind them.

Claire Novak is at the end of the driveway, waving her arms frantically, her mother standing a few yards behind her, and Dean sees Bobby's face rearrange itself into a grin as he grinds them back there.

The girl trots along the verge to meet them, pulls at the doorhandle on Castiel's side, motions him out. Dean can see she's holding a cellphone, and she tugs Castiel a few feet away. He lets himself be chivvied along, glancing back at Dean just once, his face moving from frown to sheer bewilderment.

"I want a picture of us together," Claire announces. "Put your arm around me and smile."

Castiel blinks at her. "I don't understand…why—"

"Because my dad called my name one more time," she says simply. "And he reached down and picked me up just like he always did. That's why."

It brings a sudden lump to Dean's throat, the way Castiel slips a cautious arm around the girl, the way the strain on his face gives way to indulgent tenderness, the way his cheeks tint with self-conscious color and his eyes glow with something like wonder. It's a look Dean knows he has worn on his own face, a look he remembers seeing John Winchester wear, Bobby too; the mixed delight and pride of a father, and right out of leftfield it hits Dean, almost poleaxes him with its weight and impact. Cas could have this, he thinks, and the realization of it is somehow terrifying.

Pictures taken, Claire taps her fingers rapidly across the keypad. "I got your number when I used your phone before," she says. "I sent you the pictures, and put you in mom's contacts."

She pushes the phone into her back pocket, rests there under Castiel's arm for a moment before maneuvering herself out of his embrace and stepping back. Dean isn't sure if she's waiting for something, thinks Castiel looks a little unsure himself as his brow furrows and he looks from Claire to Amelia Novak, who's walking towards them now.

"Your father was a truly good man," Castiel tells the girl then, and Dean knows he doesn't imagine the care and regret there as his friend goes on. "So, remember him. Miss him. He loved you. I know this. You are his life's work. And he would be proud of you."

Claire smiles again, a small curl of her lips, and she cocks her head, so damn Castiel that Dean finds himself thinking on Bobby's words, wondering for the first time just how much Jimmy Novak there really is in his friend. "My dad reached down and picked me up just like he always did," she repeats, and she spins, runs up across the lawn as her mother approaches.

Amelia Novak nods at them and hovers there uncertainly, her face pale, her arms wrapped around herself protectively. "There's this theory," she says to Castiel finally, her voice hesitant. "It's called the identity of indiscernibles. It supposes that two or more objects or entities, or whatever, are identical…are one and the same, if they're exactly similar in all respects."

Dean sees the way Castiel's body locks taut, the way his fingers flare out. The weight of it hangs there, until Dean hears his friend let out a long exhale. "I'm not him," he tells her. "I'm sorry."

She smiles. "I know that really."

She turns to walk away, but Castiel takes a sudden step after her, reaches out a hand, lays it on her narrow shoulder, and she freezes at his touch.

"I could take it away," he says softly. "Make it so you forget everything, forget me, forget him. So you could get on with your lives, both of you…without your sorrow."

Fuck, and it's all Dean can do in that moment not to involve himself in this, not to slam his way out of the car and take this in hand, even though he doesn't really know what he'd say, doesn't know if he'd tell Cas to have at it and exorcise this ghost that sprung from nowhere, or tell him, don't learn that from me too.

As it is, the woman's decisive headshake makes the decision. "No…oh no, no, no. I want to remember him." She twists to face Castiel again on the words. "I want to remember the first time I saw him, and the first time he noticed me looking and looked back," she says.

She stops, and her eyes are starting that wet shine that Dean knows means tears. And suddenly it's right there in his mind, front and center, the question he hasn't ever wanted to ask himself since he drove away from the hospital leaving behind a woman and child who looked at him like they didn't know him, because they no longer did. He clenches his fists, digs his nails into his palms and tells himself again that it was the right decision, that things were different and they're better off without him, as Amelia continues, her expression far away and wistful with memories.

"I want to remember the senior prom and the first time he kissed me. I want to remember the moment I knew I loved him, I want to remember our first time and what a nervous wreck he was, me too…" She pauses, puts her fingers up to wipe her eyes. "I want to remember the look on his face the first time he held Claire. I want to remember the feel of him, and his eyes, and his smile, and his love."

She lets out a shuddering sigh at the end of it, and her shoulders un-hunch and square themselves. She's small, fragile looking, but Dean thinks she looks strong and robust in that moment, as strong and robust as Lisa Braeden did when she swung her hips and left him in her dust on her way back to someone who wouldn't get her and her son killed one day, someone without a trunk full of guns, someone who didn't spend his nights next to her dreaming about Hell or gazing over at the window and longing to be out there in the dark, where the wild things were. I was right, he tells himself. I was wrong. But I was right too.

"I'll be okay," Amelia says firmly. "So will Claire."

Castiel nods slowly. "Goodbye Amelia," he says.

Amelia smiles. "Goodbye."

"I don't recognize this at all." Bobby is frowning as he studies the glyph Castiel drew for them, and he flicks his eyes up. "And Crowley mentioned – what? Calling in the cavalry? He told me that crack, path, whatever you want to call it, was there all along. He said there were others."

Castiel nods. "Like the will-'o'-the-wisps, in New Jersey," he confirms. "Folklore would have it that they were paths…tears between worlds that have existed since time began, since the chaos that preceded it. Kali herself said there were thousands of paths."

Bobby drums his fingers on the tabletop. "And Crowley says he has a plan B," he notes thoughtfully. "We need to find out what he's up to. If we can figure out what plan A was, we'll have something to go on."

Castiel nods, glances over his shoulder as Dean emerges from the bathroom in his jeans and t-shirt, towel-drying his hair up into hectic spikes. Dean's face is a blank mask, but his eyes are flitting everywhere except Castiel's, and he's exuding the same low-level tension that Castiel first sensed as they drove away from Amelia Novak's home. It reminds him that he hurt Dean down there in the rift, reminds him that Dean has options, and he detours swiftly away from the anxiety that triggers. "Cavalry…" he prompts. "Is it significant? I don't understand what it means."

Dean snorts. "Means reinforcements." He drops the towel, yawns widely, and stretches. "What was down there anyway?" he asks as he reaches for the paper with the symbol on it. "Any sign of what he meant? The cavalry?"

Castiel remembers his fear, the sense of doom he felt there, its bleak strangeness entwined with its familiarity, the feeling he had been there before. "There was nothing; it was a dead world," he recalls. "And still it was – alive. With something…I don't know what. But I felt I knew it." He can't hold back his shudder. "That it knew me."

Dean shuffles backwards, sits on the bed and examines the paper, chewing his lip. "Well, I know this," he declares. "I've seen it somewhere before, I'm sure of it."

Bobby leans back in his chair. "But you can't remember where," he surmises ruefully.

Dean shakes his head, yawns again. "It'll come to me. I just…" He flops backwards, lets the paper drift down to the floor, burrows into the bedclothes. "I have to sleep," he mutters. "It'll come to me."

When Castiel looks back to Bobby, the old man's eyes are focused narrowly on him. "You're not going to go making a habit of that again, are you?" he says, with typical forthrightness, his eyebrows snaking up under the peak of his cap.

Castiel hears the echo of Dean's cry, feels guilt slither inside him, and he shakes his head dumbly.

Bobby simply nods as he stands up. "I'll head back to get the truck," he tells Castiel, and he gestures over towards the bed. "Take care of him. If he feels anything like I did afterwards, it'll hurt like hell for a while."

Bobby pauses for a moment, then he pulls something out of his jacket pocket, puts it down on the table, and Castiel can see that it's the photograph he took from Amelia Novak's collection. "Thought you might want to keep a hold of it," he says gruffly, before he pulls his cap down more firmly on his head.

He turns, walks to the door and stops with his hand on the doorknob. "I never had a kid," he says, without turning around. "My wife was pregnant when she – passed. Sometimes I wonder if it might have been a boy. I think about him, what he might have looked like, what he might have done with his life. He'd have been about Dean's age." He clears his throat. "Or maybe a couple of years older." He doesn't wait on a response, closes the door quietly behind him.

Castiel thinks on what Bobby said, wonders why the man shared it with him. He recalls Bobby's offer of a home, and how his bluntness sounded so sure and decisive. He looks at the photograph. It's a few years old, he can tell. Claire's cheeks are fuller, her hair in braids. She's smiling gleefully up at her father and Jimmy Novak is entranced by his child, his eyes alight with pride, the moment preserved forever. Castiel remembers Claire's words, reaches for his cellphone, and there it is, like she promised, there they are, a little off-center but captured in close-up. Her expression is one of joy and amazement, and his is too as he gazes at her, awestruck and enchanted by her smile. She looks like her father, has his eyes, Castiel notes, and he completes the thought that follows it so naturally. She looks like me, has my eyes.

He reads the text message underneath, and he feels a warm bloom of happiness inside. He moves to close the blinds, casting the room in semi-darkness, pads stealthily to the bathroom and showers as quietly as he can, before propping himself half-upright on the pillows of the unoccupied bed, phone in his hand. He's exhausted, stifles a yawn, but he clicks the phone on, gradually absorbs himself.

"You pissed at me or something?"

Castiel starts at the mumbled-out question, squints at the clock on his phone and sees that he has lost track of an hour or more. "No," he answers as he stares over at the frowsy head that hovers barely inches above the pillow. "Why would I be pissed at you?" He holds up his phone. "Claire Novak sent me her Words with Friends name."

Dean flops his head down again and buries his face in the pillow so his words come out muffled. "I can hear you yawning. Go to sleep."

He is tired, Castiel realizes, even more than he thought, his weariness bone-deep. He sighs, taps out a message and hits send, waits on the reply and smiles before settling himself down to a dramatic, swooshed-out sigh from the other side of the room that makes the atmosphere suddenly seem troubled again and reignites the niggling apprehension he felt earlier. "You seem…vexed," he observes cautiously after a beat. "I thought you might be pissed at me, in fact. I hurt you…and I know what I did, the souls, repels you."

After squirming restlessly for a few seconds, Dean says, "You could have that, you know? A family. I never even thought about what being part of a real family could mean for you, until I saw you with the kid."

Castiel didn't expect that at all, registers the statement with something like astonishment, and all at once his mind is crowded with affirmations, declarations, promises and vows that jostle to be spoken aloud. "But Dean," he protests. "It already means something to me because—"

"Because of him," Dean cuts in quietly. "Because some part of you is him, deep down inside. He was a family man wasn't he?" Dean's voice is thick, obscured by the bedding again, but Castiel can sense his friend's anxiety as he continues. "If you want that, you got it. You have options, you can walk away from this. We're good…I just want you to know that."

After swallowing back a spike of anguish as he remembers what he overheard at Bobby's, Castiel chooses his words carefully. "It already means something to me because I already have a real family. This family, our family. But…" He falters helplessly for a moment as he tries to describe it, these traces of a past consciousness that was never his, and how they reverberate inside him. "I have no identity in the way you understand it, Dean," he says. "I'm not a person, not really."

He raises a hand, cuts off the agitated noise of protest Dean makes. "Ta onta ienai te panta kai menein ouden," he says, and he leaves time for the explosive huh? he knows will follow it. "All entities move, and nothing remains still," he translates then. "I heard a Greek philosopher say this in Epheseus a long, long time ago, Dean. Panta rhei…everything flows. We're always moving towards something. And I never thought of it before, not until now."

After a moment, Dean grouches, "Tell me like I'm five." 

The tension is dispersed, just like that, and Castiel smiles. "I'm moving towards something, Dean," he says. "I'm becoming a person, here inside this shell. But there are fragments here, impressions of the person this body used to be, and perhaps they will be a part of the person I become, the me I become."

A snort erupts, followed by an energetic rustling sound, and Castiel can make out the dim process of clothing being shed and flung into the corner of the room. It's followed by a terse, "Come to bed. And no one uses words like vexed. Jesus."

Castiel strips efficiently, slides into the space Dean made for him, and after a second's hesitation, he folds himself around Dean. "You're a part of me too," he breathes into Dean's skin. "You'll be a part of the person I become." He runs his palm up Dean's ribs, feels the agitated twitch of muscles and hears his friend's hiss of discomfort. "I hurt you," he repeats in a whisper. "I'm sorry."

Dean shifts away, heaves himself over to face Castiel. He's close, just inches away, close enough for their proximity to send blood coursing eagerly through Castiel's groin despite his fatigue, close enough for him to feel the twitch of Dean's cock against his own, close enough for him to see Dean's gaze turn hungry as Castiel takes the initiative and wraps his fingers around them both there, close enough for him to see Dean's eyelashes flutter as he leans in to plant an open-mouthed, wet kiss on Castiel's lips.

Dean's tongue slides against his just briefly before Castiel feels it hot on his jawbone, his ear lobe, as Dean tips his head and buries his face in Castiel's shoulder, his stubble abrasive on Castiel's skin, his mouth sucking so hard it stings. Dean's hand finds Castiel's thigh and clamps itself there, and he thrusts lazily into Castiel's fist as Castiel uses the pad of his thumb to smear the liquid that oozes across their tips.

Castiel glides his fingers up and down their lengths slowly, lacking the energy to do much more, but still the pounding of his heart, the mad rush of blood in his loins, and the velvet hardness of Dean nestled close to him, are overwhelming. He gives himself up to it, loses himself in Dean, just as he knows he always will, every pitch and roll of their bodies bringing him closer to release. They are both soaked in it now, Castiel's hand slick with it and waves of pleasure crashing and breaking over him, and they crest together, warm liquid pulsing over Castiel's hand and Dean a shuddering anchor as he groans out his climax.

They hold fast to each other, the sound of their breath loud in the silence, Dean's fingers kneading at Castiel's flank for a few moments until he emerges from Castiel's shoulder, his eyes bright in the dim late afternoon sunlight that seeps in through the blinds. He kisses Castiel, a gentle, fast, sated press of lips, says, "Turn over."

When Castiel does, Dean curls around him. "I know what it is to destroy souls," he murmurs, his breath damp and warm at Castiel's nape.

Castiel can't help flinching at his friend's reference to what they both have done. "But you had no choice," he chokes out hoarsely, his shame making his voice crack.

"Don't…Cas." Dean slips his hand over Castiel's hip to his abdomen, and the pressure is gentle and steadying. "I know you thought it was the only way," he says. "I know how that feels too. And down there? You did that for me, because I asked. It was my decision, not yours, and I would make it again every damn time, with no regrets."

Castiel feels a sharp nip on the line of his shoulder then, and he winces even as he pushes back into the graze of blunt teeth on his skin. Dean's voice goes fierce and needy. "Because you're not lying down and dying on my watch if there's a way around it, Cas, even if that's the way. You're not the only one in this. You're a real person to me, and I need you here, because I don't think I can do this, any of it, without you. It is simple."

In the hush after he speaks, Dean traces his fingers up to his mark, splays them out there. He pulls Castiel tight to him and Castiel feels soft, lingering kisses start to map the back of his neck, like before when Dean needed to assure himself of the reality and security of this, of them, whatever they are.

"I can't be him for them, Dean," Castiel breathes out, and he relaxes into the embrace. "But I can be me for you."