Title: upon the just and the unjust
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Castiel, mentions of people from Chitaqua.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Angels only feel pain when they die." Without grace, Cass is just another left behind kid in a weak little girl's body. She's not the only one who has to deal. 5.04 AU, friendship fic.
Word Count: 1632
Notes: There can never be enough 5.04 AU. Written to break Novakfest block.
Warnings: Uh...one swearword?
Cass trips on a piece of debris and falls down.
In another time and place Dean might have laughed, cracked some lame joke about more walking and less flapping. Now he reaches down and hauls Cass roughly to her feet, ignoring the way her fingers clamp around his, the sharp hiss of pain through clenched teeth.
"You okay?" he barks back at her, eyes fixed forward on the distant road where their ticket out of this hellhole sits waiting. He means: Can you still fight, can you still run. Their scent is in the air and it's drawing the hordes out - from alleys, the doors of abandoned buildings, even the windows. They run past a Croat lying in a mess of blood and guts on the pavement, mouth still twitching through the overwhelming drive of hunger. Cass' foot slips again, Dean jerks her upright again. They're still losing speed.
"No," Cass forces out. "I think I...broke something..."
A shadow flashes out into their line of sight. Dean's other hand is already raised, blasting it back against the wall. There's little need to aim, not with the crazed, single-minded charge that is pretty much the Croats' only mode of locomotion, but that's the thing that makes them scary as hell. Scarier still is the one less bullet in Dean's gun, and Cass dropped hers a while back together with whatever remaining illusions they had that she's still some ace warrior of God.
You knew, Winchester, Dean thought, as they navigate the ruined street. He isn't the imaginative sort but he fancies he can feel the ground shaking under the march of many feet behind them, far too close for comfort. You fucking knew and you let her talk you into this suicide run anyway-
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he snaps.
Cass is trying to pry his hand off hers. "Let me go, Dean - "
"You don't call the shots anymore, Cass," Dean says. The strip of black in the distance is coming closer, he thinks he can see the silhouette of the jeep. "I do."
Then he stops and slings her over one shoulder, ignoring her as she pounds his back. She's lighter than he thought, her body thin and fragile like a shell filled with nothing more than light and air. By the grace of whatever deity stupid enough to stick around in this dying world they make it to the jeep with the nearest Croat nearly within grabbing distance. Several unwelcome passengers attempt to hitch a ride as Dean starts the ignition and roars away, but Cass snatches the gun out of Dean's hand and shoots them off.
"I'm not a child," she says, turning to Dean with her eyes blazing. Her hair sticks out in an unkempt halo around her face and there's dried blood on her chin, and she looks nothing more than a kid way out of her depth. "I am not."
"Sorry," Dean says, not really meaning it. He grips the wheel hard and wills the frantic beat of his heart to slow. His shoulders ache; he hadn't noticed before. "You are now."
The broken foot puts Cass out of commission for weeks, which also means puts her out of Dean's way. If it wasn't beyond her dignity to descend into a tantrum - and Dean suspects it's partially out of her desire to appear adult and in control - she would probably have as the first, politely worded requests to talk to him descend into flat-out demands.
The truth is, it's both their faults. Ever since the angels had quit Earth for greener pastures and Cass had lost her wings they'd been instantly reduced from an efficient, two-man team to washout rejects from the audition of Kindergarten Cop. Cass had discovered the joy of puberty while Dean had discovered he really wasn't cut out to be a caretaker of any sort. They've just both been in denial since then, but reality has been knocking for some time now.
As soon as Cass can find crutches and walk with them, she turns up at Dean's door, raring to continue the interrupted conversation from the jeep. They pointedly ignore the amused smiles from Risa and Yeager (and Chuck's more sympathetic expression) as Dean escorts Cass to his bed and sits her down. Every newcomer to the camp assumes that she's his kid, and after a while Dean just finds it too much of a bother to correct them.
"What did you need?" Dean asks, as though he doesn't already know. Cass scowls in a way that shows she's on to him. She'd stop at once if she knew how young it makes her look, like Sammy stranded without his favorite cereal. "If you'd just drop in once in a while," she says, "I wouldn't need to come knocking your door down - "
"Should we be here to hear this?" Risa asks, eyebrow raised.
"Feel free to leave," Dean says with a shrug. "We're only in the middle of an important meeting to figure out how to kill the Devil and all."
There are a few unsure looks towards Cass, but those stop once Dean says, "She stays," and some of the tension uncoils from the rigid set of Cass' shoulders.
She'll tell Dean what she thinks in the privacy of his cabin later, after everyone has left. No one takes a kid seriously, unless he's covered in blood and walking like an extra off the set of Night of the Living Dead. It's a whole new world but there's still comfort in following the old hierarchies, the old cliches, the man with a gun and a purpose. Keep the children safe. Everyone knows that you can't save the world without securing the future.
When Dean tries to think of Cass as an adult, in a woman's body, or with, mind-blowingly, with kids - his imagination fails. Not because the probability of all of them living that long is staggeringly low. It's because Cass is Cass, she's been a badass little girl for as long as he has known her, kicking ass and taking names. She's thousands and millions of years old inside, a few decades are nothing to her, much less than the physical development of a body that for a long time meant to her little more than a grafted-on coat. The incongruence of her appearance with her true nature, the worn red material of her jacket is as much Cass as her grace, her very essence. She doesn't ever change.
Only she has. Dean sees it in her as he might see a mirror, the matching paths of the cracks that the Apocalypse has forced through them. It's time to stop playing pretend.
"You can't come hunting with me anymore," Dean says.
Cass looks away, seemingly aimlessly, out of the window, searching the heavens as though they still had the answers, as though they ever had. Frustration teems beneath the even surface of her voice when she says, "I'm your partner, Dean. I go wherever you go. I promised."
"That was then." Dean glances at her, doing her the courtesy of not stooping down to her level. "You almost got both of us killed back there, and you know it," he says, getting straight to the point. Gentleness is for children and puppies and Cass is neither.
Cass gnaws on her lip, her eyes turning down towards her curled hands in hatred. "This body..." she murmurs. "It betrays me, time and time again, despite all my knowledge, my experience..." With a restless motion her fingers flex and press pinkish crescents into the softness of her flesh. "I should have taken the father instead," she snarls.
It takes a moment for Dean to figure out what she's saying, and when he does he sighs. "Stop acting like you're still an angel," he says. "You can't just ruin lives here and there as you please."
Cass' lip whitens as she applies more pressure to it. When she speaks again, her voice is low, distracted. "Do you know," she says, "angels only feel pain when they die."
Dean waits for a point to materialize.
"They can go on battling, forever," Cass goes on, retreating into some inner world. "Dying means an end to your part in the great plan. Dying means...you cease the good fight. To live is to remain important. Do you understand?"
"I do," Dean says, though he's not entirely sure he cares to follow the thread of Cass' logic to its inevitable conclusion. It sounds like a philosophy a die-hard hunter might live by, something John Winchester might privately think as he pursued an evil that seemed incapable of being caught. It sounds anathema to Dean's own plans, the Colt that promises to end Lucifer once and for all.
He's tired. Sometimes he moves on clockwork, hard-won instincts snapping his guard up in the right place and sending a bullet in the right direction, and it seems like he won't ever wind down until he does. Then he's hit by everything at once; where he is, how he came here, Sammy's face and the Devil smiling behind it like a black and twisted stain.
When Dean does die, he thinks he won't feel anything but relief.
"Come on," he says. "I'll walk with you back to your cabin. We can talk more in the morning."
Cass nods like a puppet and lets him straighten her up. He brushes a finger across her cheek and feels oddly responsible for the desolation in her eyes, the smile that stays only on her mouth when she says goodnight.
When he comes back the next day, the bed is empty and the curtains billow gently in the breeze coming through the open window.
-end-
If the ending does not make sense to you, think of this fic as A World Without: Clairestiel Edition. Sorry this is so abrupt, twas mostly a writing exercise.