Don't Tell Me Lies
Rating: PG/K+
Genre: General/Romance
Summary: Another fill for twoskeletons's request, "Castiel/Rachel. He doesn't have the answers for her questions." Castiel/Rachel.
Author's Note: AH YES, another unfilled Castiel/Rachel request. It breaks my heart, people, it does.
Seriously, will someone else write this pairing? Please? I would love to read fluff or smut that was not of my own devising.
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural. It belongs to Eric Kripke. The title comes from the song 'Made for You', by OneRepublic.
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"He who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning."
-Danish Proverb
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"Where were you?"
"Earth."
"With the Winchesters?"
"Yes."
Rachel's nose wrinkled for a split second, but she caught herself and forced her expression back to one of comparative but interested neutrality. She and Castiel were in his preferred heaven, sitting in the grass under the trees, away from the man who inhabited it. Today he'd traded in his kite for a bag of bird seed and was feeding the pigeons. Castiel was lying back in the grass, and she was straddling his waist, her fingers toying with his tie and shirt and jacket and trench coat.
He knew about her growing irritation with his friends. They called to him a lot, asked for an awful lot of favors. Unfortunately, though Castiel didn't always respond to their calls, he apparently got a certain look on his face when they tried, and Rachel probably knew it as his 'Sam and Dean are calling again' expression. "What happened?"
"Someone summoned the goddess Veritas. She was forcing people to admit… Unpleasant truths to one another. Dean initially thought that it may have been Gabriel's Horn that was responsible." He left out the part about Dean raising his concerns about Sam's demeanor, and prayed fervently that Rachel never found out about Sam's odd behavior because if she asked, he was a terrible liar and he knew it and she would know and start to suspect that Castiel was holding something back from her, and Castiel wanted absolutely no one knowing that he had raised Sam-
"Is she dead?"
"Apparently."
"Apparently?" Castiel smiled up at her. Vague answers rarely satisfied her anymore, and freedom of thought and speech fit Rachel like a glove.
"I checked in. Briefly. They were unaware that I did."
"Mm. I suppose one day I'll have to meet these two." Castiel's smile flickered into a wince for a moment.
"That might not be the best idea."
"Why?"
Castiel chuckled in a way that was not quite funny. "Sam is polite enough, but Dean can be… Abrasive. You'll probably take issue with him." The look on her face told him that she already did take issue with him. And she would probably take a lot more of an issue with him if she ever happened to hear the way Dean tended to summon Castiel: Sarcastically, with profanity or irritation attached.
"You think I can't hold my temper?"
"No." Castiel replied directly.
"Haven't I before?"
"Dean will test your patience in ways it has never been tested before. Even Balthazar would have trouble grating on you in such a way." She cocked an eyebrow at him, and he could tell that she was having difficulty thinking of someone who was more capable of pushing her patience than their brother.
"Speaking of which, where is our dear brother?" Sarcasm was an alien agent in her tone; It wasn't that it sounded wrong so much as it was… Foreign.
"In Bangkok, I believe. He moves around."
"Have you had any luck in getting the weapons from him?" Castiel sighed.
"No."
"Why do you keep letting him get away?"
"What would you like me to do, Rachel? Tie him to a chair and leave him there until he wants to talk?"
"I'm good at tying people up." The sheer earnestness in her tone when she spoke made him laugh. "No, really: We have ropes that can restrain him, and he's never been the type to handle being forced to stay in one place for long very well." It was true: Balthazar had always been restless, eager for something to do.
"If you think you can catch him, go right ahead." Balthazar would outrun her the same way he had when they were young. Rachel smiled, and he knew he would have to warn Balthazar to lay low for a bit: The way her eyes glittered told him that she had accepted the challenge. A moment later, though, they were dark.
"Why did he leave, Castiel? Why did he take the weapons? Why did he abandon us and make us think he had perished?" She stopped there, but Castiel knew her well, well enough to know that she was thinking I mourned him. We all did. How could he do this to us? His hand came up to toy with the hair hanging over her shoulder.
"I suppose you would have to ask Balthazar that."
That's his answer because he didn't have one himself. He didn't know why Balthazar, who up until the apocalypse had been every bit the friend and brother and soldier and good person they knew him to be, would abandon his family, steal the only weapons that might be able to put a stop to the conflict and fake his death.
Castiel could sense the tangent that Rachel had gotten onto, and knew that some more questions were about to come: Ones that he'd heard before, dreaded because, much like her last one, he did not have a feasible answer or explanation for them.
"What will happen if you can't get the weapons back from him?" Not the question he was expecting, but none the less unpleasant.
"I don't know."
Rachel didn't respond right then, but the way her eyes bore into his it was impossible for him not to tell that she knew he was lying.
"Will your plan still work without them?"
"What plan?"
"You know what plan." He did. It wasn't a lie, per se, because he knew she knew he had some kind of plan. One that he had failed to disclose to her apart from assuring her that yes, he did have a plan; he wasn't plunging into the war blind. But Rachel had never been one to handle curiosity of this nature very well, and the fact that she was allowed to ask questions now was making her even more persistent in her quest for answers.
"…It should." Castiel answered slowly.
"How?"
"Rachel," Castiel was slightly pained. "Don't."
"Don't what?"
"You know I can't tell you my plan."
"Why not?"
"I… Just can't. Not now."
"Don't you trust me?" The expression on her face and the slight glint of hurt that passed through her eyes made Castiel's heart break a little.
"Of course I do. You know I do. I just…" He broke off, flustered. Castiel had no way to explain this to her. No answer as to why she, his closest ally in heaven, his lieutenant, his most trusted friend and lover, did not and could not know about his plans. If he lied to her and said he didn't have one, she would know. If he told her a fake plan, she would know it was false. He had to leave the specifics up to her imagination: If he left the possibilities wide open, she would be less likely to guess them.
Rachel couldn't know about the souls. More importantly, she couldn't know about the lengths he was going to get them. More importantly than that, she couldn't know about him working with Crowley. And most importantly, she absolutely, positively could not know about purgatory and what Castiel would become if he absorbed even half of the souls within.
Rachel was not a mindless follower anymore. If Rachel had been the angel she'd been prior to the apocalypse, she might have gone along with Castiel's plan simply because he was the leader. But Castiel had made her strong willed, independent, and more prone to questions. When he thought about it, he realized that most of what she said nowadays was in the form of a question unless she was explaining something specific.
The chances of Rachel agreeing with Castiel's plan and even going along with it were slim to none. She had never been near-human and forced to associate with a demon to save the world, had never had to cross that line, and she wouldn't now. She would fight him, try to change his mind. And if she couldn't, Castiel knew that she might abandon him.
The thought made the muscles in his throat tighten convulsively, and he wondered if this feeling might have given rise to that human saying of having your heart caught in your throat.
"I just… I have to keep it quiet for now, Rachel. I promise you'll know as soon as I can tell you." And when you do see what it is, please don't hate me. Or leave me. "Can we change the subject?" He slid his hand over the one resting on his chest and, with a swift, fluid movement, pulled Rachel off him and down to lie beside him. A huff of air escaped her at the sudden upset, but her lips almost morphed into a smile, halted only by the fact that he had been purposefully evasive a moment before and was continuing to be so right now.
"Hm." That was a 'You can try, but don't expect me to go along with it' sort of noise. Castiel took it a step further and rolled on top of her, mirroring the same position she'd been in a moment before, and then leaning down and kissing her. Rachel was unresponsive for a moment- she wasn't stupid, she knew what he was up to- but then slowly melted into it like she always did.
As she began to reach up and tug his coat off, Castiel couldn't rid himself, even in a moment like this, of the little voice in the back of his head that seemed to haunt him constantly now with only a single sentence:
You have to answer her eventually.
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Yup.
SO, I don't feel like I hit the prompt quite on the head. I forgot the exact wording and had half the story done before I realized that the quote sounded a lot more like "He doesn't have the answers for ANY of her questions" than "He can't answer SOME of them". I was in the vibe of the story by the time I realized that and couldn't undo it.