Characters not mine.

(Originally written for a "family" challenge on comment_fic.)


For angels, it was simple. Any other angel was a brother or a sister, from the brothers in one's garrison to runaway family like Gabriel to, theoretically, Lucifer, although it was only the archangels who still thought of him as that. One did not have to like them, or even tolerate them for more than five minutes at a time, for it to be so. They were all siblings.

Family was simple; it was the thousands of years of family dynamics that were complicated.

The Winchesters were far more complicated at the basic level.

Sam and Dean were brothers. This was the simple part, the part he found easy to understand. They were brothers because they shared parents, because they'd grown up together, because they had come to rely on having the other one at their back. And the more time he spent with them, the more he realized it was the latter part that mattered in the end, as Sam and Dean fought to protect each other and, occasionally, to let each other go.

But this comparitively simple family structure, bound together by blood - both as a metaphor for genetics and the amount they'd spilled for each other - was only the beginning.

Bobby was family, too, despite the lack of genetics. He fretted about them as a father as much as a friend and told them when they were behaving irrationally. Sam and Dean sought him out for advice. Castiel understood that there was some shared history between Bobby and the Winchesters, but Bobby's role in the family structure suggested that human families were as much about roles fulfilled as they were about blood.

That the Winchester family was messy and complicated he understood; his was exponentially larger and a tangeled web of fueds, after all. What he didn't understand about Sam and Dean's definition was that it was so malleable. Angels were nothing if not constant, their ideas and patterns worn deep along familiar ruts. Sam and Dean shaped their own bonds, changed them and forged new ones as they saw fit. THere were so many more possibilities, when such a system was in place.

But the biggest surprise where the Winchester family was concerned didn't occur until after he'd begun to loose his Grace. Until Dean began forging identification for Castiel as he did for himself and Sam, until Bobby's proclimation of "idjits" covered three people in front of him instead of simply two. Until, whenever he came back, he was met with a welcome, and eventually, a "Welcome home."

Sam and Dean's family was what they made of it. That was the only simple thing about it. And while he didn't understand what had led them to adopt him into it, he wanted to. As messy and complicated and nonsensicle as it was, the urge to introduce himself as "Castiel Winchester" these days somehow felt more pure than calling the likes of Zachariah a brother.