Starts after Sam's detox in "My Bloody Valentine" and goes AU from there.
Sam pulled himself up the stairs from the basement, thinking longingly of the shower—Bobby's place had great water pressure, and Sam felt like he had a layer of grime on his skin. Dean had taken the restraints off hours ago, but Sam had been too wrung out to get up; he had fallen into exhausted sleep instead.
There was a sticky note on the door at the top of the stairs. Bobby's blocky printing said I went into town for groceries. If your brother's still up make him get some sleep. Sam grabbed the note and crumpled it in his hand, smiling bitterly. As if Dean ever listened when Sam told him to take care of himself.
He turned into the kitchen and filled a glass. The water cut through the horrible taste in his mouth. He emptied the glass, refilled it, and turned to lean back against the sink. And stopped, glass halfway to his mouth.
Through the arch Sam had a perfect angle on Bobby's bed. Dean was lying on it, clearly dead to the world, with his head pillowed on Castiel's leg. The angel had one hand in Dean's hair.
It wasn't as if Sam didn't know Dean and Cas were...whatever they were. He wasn't sure they were actually sleeping together (and he would be perfectly happy never to get proof), but he had caught them kissing more than once, and it had hardly escaped him that Dean usually eased up a notch when Cas was around.
"Are you feeling better, Sam?" Cas asked, his voice low.
"Yeah," Sam said. "I'm gonna go get a shower as soon as I'm done with this." He gestured with his glass. "You might want to take him upstairs before Bobby gets back."
Castiel's brow furrowed. "Bobby already knows," he said. "He won't care."
"But Dean will," Sam said, and drained his glass. "Anyway. Let me know if you want a hand, but I need to clean up."
Castiel nodded.
"It's just a salt-and-burn," Dean said. "We don't need to bug him."
Sam regarded his brother with fond exasperation. "Pretty sure I didn't say anything about having him come on the hunt," he said. "I just thought you might want to see him." Dean shrugged, but didn't protest, which Sam thought was significant in itself.
A few minutes later Dean fished out his cell and called Castiel. He got voicemail, but Sam settled back in the passenger seat with a feeling of satisfaction anyway.
Two days later he was less pleased. Castiel hadn't called, nor appeared, and Sam could see Dean getting ever twitchier about it. There had been a series of voicemail messages on the theme of "Just checking in," shading into "Are you OK?"
Then they got back to Bobby's and discovered Karen, and for three days they didn't have time to think about anything else. At least, Sam didn't. But when the dust had settled and they were getting ready for bed that night, Sam left the spare bedroom for a second, and when he came back he heard Dean, snarling low, "If someone else is hearing this, you listen up—" and Sam backed right the hell off, far enough down the hall that he couldn't make out the words anymore. He waited until Dean stopped talking, and then a minute longer.
When he went back in, Dean was pulling on a t-shirt in perfect calm. But Sam said, "Maybe we should do some asking around about Cas. It's not like him to be out of touch for this long," and Dean didn't snap or deflect, just nodded.
They weren't directly plugged in to the hunter network these days—their roles in the beginning of the Apocalypse had gotten onto the grapevine, somehow, and no one wanted to talk to them—but Bobby knew everyone, and put the word out asking for weird rumors. There wasn't much to do but wait, so Sam waited, reading Bobby's books (there was always a book he hadn't read yet, no matter how many he went through) and watching Dean winding up tighter and tighter. By the time it had been a week since the last they heard from Castiel, it was basically impossible to talk to Dean without being barked at.
On the morning of the eighth day, Dean was in the shower when his phone rang—playing "Stairway to Heaven", and Sam went across the room in two long steps, yanking the phone out of Dean's jacket pocket.
"Cas, are you all right?" he answered.
There was a pause before a voice Sam didn't recognize said, "Um, is this Dean?"
"No, this is his brother," Sam said, one hand in his bag to dig for a pen. "Who are you and why do you have Cas's phone?"
"OK, his driver's license says James," the man said, not adding the surname; Sam assumed it was a test.
"James, yes, James Novak. Cas is…a nickname," Sam said. "He's been missing for a week. Are you—is he all right? Are you calling from a hospital or something?" Though there was no particular reason a hospital would be calling Dean's phone; a hospital presented with a John Doe would open up his wallet and from there find the old missing persons reports for Jimmy. Sam hoped they hadn't managed to track down poor Amelia.
"A nickname," the man said, managing to infuse the words with a deep skepticism.
"Yes," Sam said, coming up with a pen at last. "Look, can you just tell me where you are? We can come and get him."
"Get him?" Dean said, and Sam turned to see his brother, towel around his waist, standing in the door of the spare bedroom with an expression of heartbreaking hope. Sam made a face he hoped was reassuring.
"I'm not sure I want to do that," the man on the phone said. "This is pretty damn weird."
Sam choked down a laugh he knew would sound hysterical and said, "Weird is kind of par for the course around Cas. Just…can you give us somewhere to meet you at least? He's a friend and we've been worried about him." Dean's face clouded over and he strode into the room, reaching for the phone. Sam turned to avoid him as the man thought things over.
"OK," he said, as Sam ducked a grab. "OK, how long will it take you to get to Pittsburgh?"
"If you mean the one in Pennsylvania…thirteen, fourteen hours," Sam said. "We'll call you from an hour or so out." Dean, his mouth set in a grim line, resorted to actually tripping him and snatched the phone as Sam flailed for balance.
"Let me talk to Cas right the fuck now," Dean snapped into the phone. "What do you mean you can't?" Even as he spoke he was reaching for a pair of boxer shorts. Sam turned to his own bag, shoving things back into it, as Dean dropped his towel to put the shorts on. "Well try again," Dean said, his voice rising. "Goddammit, I'm not fucking around here, asshole, you—hello?" He held the phone away from his head and glared at it. "Fuck!" he exclaimed, punching the speed dial.
Sam didn't have to be able to hear it to realize it had gone straight to voicemail. "You probably could have done better at convincing him we're psychos, but I can't really think of how," he said mildly.
"Shut up and pack," Dean growled.
Sam let Dean drive until they had to pull over for gas. He'd been keeping a careful eye on the speedometer, which had been hovering much too close to 90 for his liking, and as soon as Dean had pulled up next to the pump and turned the engine off Sam said, "Gimme the keys, Dean."
"Sam," Dean began, but Sam overrode him.
"You're gonna get us pulled over, and I don't feel like wasting a day dodging cops. So give me the keys."
Dean's hands clenched on the wheel till they were white-knuckled. But after a second he pulled the key from the ignition and held it out.
"I'll get some drinks," Sam said quietly, and took the keyring.
They hit Interstate 79 well after dark, and when they saw the first signs for Pittsburgh Sam tried Castiel's number again. (Dean hadn't agreed that he was too keyed up to talk to whoever-it-was on the other end so much as he hadn't argued when Sam told him, but it worked out to the same thing.) They'd tried a few times over the course of the trip and gotten voicemail, but this call connected.
"I'm having second thoughts about letting you near this guy," the man on the phone said with no preamble.
"Sorry about that," Sam said, ignoring Dean's glower from the passenger seat. "We've been worried, things got a little tense."
Thoughtful silence on the other end, and then a sigh. "Yeah, OK. Which direction are you coming from?"
Sam remembered Pittsburgh as a morass of tiny, hilly streets where three rights only occasionally made a left, but the directions he got stuck to major, well-marked roads; an hour and a half later, they pulled into a large parking lot behind an apartment building. There were cars scattered around, and a man leaning against one that sat under a light pole. He straightened as Sam parked the Impala a few spaces away. Dean was out the passenger door almost before the car came to a complete stop. Sam scrambled out in time to hear Dean bark, "Christo!"
The man raised one eyebrow and said, "Gesundheit?" He was a bit less than Dean's height, with a neat goatee, dressed in jeans and a tee and a long coat that might have been charcoal grey in the sodium arc light. His breath steamed in the cold air.
"Very funny," Dean said, "now where the fuck is Cas?" He was nearly on the guy before Sam got a hand on his arm.
"Dean, give him a second, OK?" He turned to the man and said, "I'm Sam, this is my brother Dean. Like I said, we've been worried about Castiel."
The guy's eyebrows lifted and Sam kicked himself for using the angel's whole name. But all the guy said was, "I'm Alan. Your...friend is at my place. He's been there for almost four days."
"If you did something to him," Dean said, and Sam tightened his grip.
"Look," Alan said, sounding like he was being patient with an effort. "I'd rather not talk about this here, OK? So how about you follow me and I'll explain when you see him."
"Screw that, I'm going with you," Dean said.
"Dean. I will ride with him, OK?" Sam said; the look of Oh hell no on Alan's face at the prospect of Dean getting in his car was unmistakeable.
Alan's car was a tiny boxy thing that Sam only barely fit in. As it and the Impala started a third set of headlights appeared as well on the far side of the lot; Sam glanced at them and then at Alan, who shrugged. "Friend of mine, keeping an eye on things," he said, and Sam couldn't fault him for that.
The trip took only fifteen minutes or so, during which Sam didn't try to ask any questions; he could tell Alan wasn't as calm as he was pretending to be. They drove through residential areas rife with the kind of small streets Sam remembered and up a long slope, the Impala close behind. Finally Alan led the way into a neighborhood filled with small post-War houses on eighth-acre lots and pulled up to the curb. They were high up, with a vantage over a river on one side and down into Pittsburgh's small downtown on the other.
Alan strode up onto a porch, sorting his keys as he went; Sam tried to keep Dean from crowding him. The person in the third car parked and turned his car off, but didn't get out. At the door Alan turned and said, "I have a call going to Greg out there. He'll be able to hear it if you two pull anything, got it? And I have the feeling you don't want to talk to the police any more than I do."
Dean's jaw set, but he nodded, and so did Sam.
The house was tall and Alan led them up two flights of narrow stairs to a finished attic. Sam let Dean precede him up the stairs, and nearly ran into his brother's back when Dean's head broke floor level and he stopped dead for a long beat. Then he burst into motion, pushing past Alan, and Sam got a view of the room just in time to see Dean dropping to his knees next to a pile of blankets on the far side of the room.
Castiel's clothing, or at least most of it, was piled on a director's chair near the makeshift bed. There was a blanket pulled up to his collarbones. Even in the forgiving light of the compact fluorescent in the ceiling, he looked pale—paler than usual—and his brow furrowed as if his dreams were unpleasant.
Sam wasn't sure whether angels dreamed at all; Cas hadn't seemed to in his pseudo-coma after returning from the past. Then again, angels didn't sleep, either, and if this wasn't sleep it was a damn good imitation.
"Cas," Dean croaked, and laid his hand on Castiel's shoulder with infinite gentleness. "How did he get here?" He didn't look away from Castiel's face.
"I was doing a...ritual," Alan said, and Sam tensed. "The Abramelin Operation is meant to bring one to the knowledge and communication of the Holy Guardian Angel." He spoke the description like a quote, in a tone of portentousness that had a wry thread that suggested he knew it sounded overblown. "I've been working on it for the last six months. Fasting, praying daily, the whole bit. Three mornings ago was the last day. I said the incantation. I don't know what I was expecting. There've been a couple writeups from other people who did it, but they tend to be light on the details. So you know, could've been anything—lights, tentacles, wheels within wheels, who the hell knows, there's probably a reason the angels always start with Fear not. Except I said the words and there was a bang and all of a sudden there's this guy in a suit in my attic. He was awake for about two seconds and then he dropped like a bag of rocks." Sam stared. Dean seemed to be stuck on Cas, but Sam could tell he was paying attention. "I didn't realize he had a phone for the first two days and then I had to find a cord that would charge it. Then I called you, and the rest you know." Alan paused, sucked on his teeth, and said, "And now you're saying Cas is short for Castiel, and that makes me think maybe I got pretty close."
Sam tried to decide exactly what to say to that, but before he could Dean said, "Is he hurt?"
"Cuts on his chest," Alan said. "I bandaged them. They're...weird."
"Weird how?" Sam asked, as Dean shoved the blanket down to reveal a mass of bandages that covered most of Castiel's chest.
Alan shrugged and said, "They're not random. They make a sigil."
Sam felt his eyebrows go up again at the word, but uncommon vocabulary wasn't the big issue right now. "I don't suppose you remember what it looks like?"
"Oh, yeah," Alan said. "I drew it." He went over to the set of bookshelves that took up most of one of the walls and picked up a piece of paper. Sam took it and said, "Oh, shit."
"What?" Dean demanded, looking over his shoulder. Sam turned the paper so Dean could see it.
The angel-banishing sigil was clearly recognizable.
Alan dismissed his watchful friend not long after; Sam didn't know what they'd done to be worthy of trust, and he didn't care either. They were offered the use of the spare bedroom, which Dean refused in favor of wrapping himself in a blanket and camping out on the floor next to Castiel's pallet.
From there they had nothing to do but more waiting. Dean refused to leave the attic room except to go to the toilet. Sam brought him food with no comment.
A day and a half later, Sam was doing research. He didn't know how much longer they were going to be able to stay here; Alan had carefully not said anything, but Sam could tell he was wondering when they'd be taking the unconscious guy off his hands. So Sam was working on how they'd get Castiel out of here and at least back to Bobby's. Dean was pretending to read a paperback.
They both froze when Castiel twitched and gasped. There was a long moment when no one moved, and then Cas's eyes opened—Sam might have expected it to be sudden, but instead they drifted open slowly, like Castiel really was waking up.
"Cas?" Dean said, carefully, and Castiel turned his head just enough to focus.
"Dean," he said. He sounded horrible, and a look of confusion crossed his face. "Where am I?"
Dean set the book down. "You're...safe," he said.
"I'm going to go get some water," Sam said, fully expecting to be ignored, and stood. Neither Dean nor Cas so much as glanced at him.
The last thing he saw as he went down the steps was the way Dean's shoulders, for the first time in more than a week, were relaxing.