A/N: I need to sit myself down and have a long discussion as to what constitutes a one-shot, because clearly I have no actual idea. However, at a guess, ten thousand words isn't it. Chopped into two chapters for manageability.
Title taken from Kansas' Carry On My Wayward Son, since I was one of like seven people who knew this song before it became Supernatural's unofficial anthem.
No actual, overt slash, but a lot of overtones and implications. There's some pining and some wishful thinking and maybe a few allusions, but it's not too terribly slashy.
The supports for the road sign are twisted and bent and broken, the sign itself lying face-down on the ground. In the end, because there is no longer either an all-powerful angel or supernatural steroid junky in the house, Sam has to get a crowbar out of the trunk and pry it up. He braces the edge of the sign on his knee, straining to keep it up, as Castiel ducks down and steals a two-second look at the white block letters stamped across the iridescent green. When he straightens back up Sam lets it fall.
"Denver, 138 miles," Castiel reports. He sounds even more hoarse than usual and it makes Sam cringe to hear it. The fallen angel doesn't talk much, never has, but he screams himself awake some nights, often enough that his voice never quite recovers. Sam doesn't ask what nightmares chase him through his sleep; they all have them, these days, Cas is just too new to the human thing to be numb to it yet.
"We're out of Kansas," Sam says, as if that means anything anymore. Once upon a time, Kansas meant forbidden memories and teasing hints of home. Now, it just means another four hundred miles of prairie between one coast and the other. And Interstate 70, which closed every single winter for thirty years running because two inches of snow may not be all that impressive but out in the Kansas prairie it's two inches of wind-driven snow and a whole lot of nothing else out there and it's far too easy to lose the road- hell, to lose everything- in that endless field of white. It's mid-November. They need to get someplace safe for the winter, and soon.
"Are we going?" Castiel asks as they head back to the car.
"To Denver?" Sam clarifies. He closes his eyes, calling on four years of sitting in the passenger's seat, pouring over atlases and road maps. They'd lost the Rand McNally national atlas back in St. Louis and Sam is still kicking himself for that.
"There's I-25. It runs south through Denver, I think," he says. If he keeps his eyes closed he can almost see the maps.
"In the mountains," Castiel says. Sam's gotten pretty good at reading him, can see the uncertainty. He sees the mountains as giant piles of rocks. He doesn't understand Sam's fear of them.
"Only barely," Sam tells him, as if that is in any way reassuring. "We need to get heading south. Last winter was bad, no reason to think this one will be any better."
"They will get better," Cas says as he opens the car door. Once upon a time he might have actually explained that, but all he does today is slide into the car and leave Sam in the cold to contemplate that.
It should sound like a promise, like hope on the horizon. Instead it sounds pointless, lifeless, and Sam spares a moment to pray. They need to find Dean soon, because without him Castiel has literally nothing left to live for.
Denver is still mostly intact so they stop there for a few days to restock. Sam hunts up a Wal-Mart and grabs the biggest, most detailed atlas he can find off the shelves, then gets the basic twelve pack of colored pencils, and Castiel spends the remainder of their time there carefully altering the pre-apocalypse maps to fit their new reality. Then he starts writing in the margins in at least three different languages, and while Sam is teetering on the line of genius in terms of geometric patterns and formulas- not so much in terms of intelligent life choices and trusting the right people, but that's neither here nor there- he freely admits he has no idea what the former angel is up to. Cas simply thinks differently than humans, always has and always will, and it is within neither his power to explain the difference or Sam's to understand it.
Sam takes his shotgun and his lighter and, after making sure Castiel is settled and safe, goes out to hunt.
Without the pressure of the demons boiling up from below, the threat of angels from above, the constant squeeze of the ever-dominant humanity all around them, the supernatural fauna has flourished. Hunters are not only acknowledged in this new world, they're heralded as heroes in most places, and Sam pays for their room and board and the Impala's filled-to-the-brim gas tank by taking on the creepies and crawlies and things that go bump in the night, the things that most people still half-refuse to admit exist. He wipes out a werewolf strain before it can properly take hold, calling on some locals hunters for backup- real hunters, deer hunters, not his kind of hunter- then does about a dozen salt-and-burns.
The spirits are restless. Castiel says the Reapers are still busy, still backed up from the clusterfuck that was the Apocalypse, and most likely will be for decades; a ripe breeding ground for pissed-off ghosts. And not all of them are the recently deceased, either. The long-dead are starting to misbehave as well. In that regard, a hunter's worth is in their knack for research, which means it's a good job it's Sam here and not Dean.
He never says that out loud.
The second night they're there, a local boy comes and fetches Sam from werewolf tracking. Sam goes with him without question, knowing exactly what the problem is.
"He's loud," the boy says as they approach the apartment complex Sam and Castiel had been staying in. Even before they enter the building proper Sam can hear Castiel's gut-wrenching cries.
"He's seen a lot," Sam says, as if that explains anything, and waits until the boy gets impatient and leaves before heading into the apartment proper.
Angels don't sleep, and therefore angels don't dream, but fallen angels apparently do both. And Castiel has waded hip-deep through blood and sin in this modern world, has seen and done things that would give anyone nightmares, let alone something as once-pure as an angel. Dean isn't the only one who's been to Hell.
Normally Sam would wake him up and talk him down, try to get him to calm down before letting him go back to sleep, but tonight he's too tired to deal with it and Castiel's long past waking up the neighbors. So he just drops into bed beside the former angel, wraps his arms around him and pulls him in close. Castiel pushes back into him, into his anchoring touch.
"Dean?" he asks muzzily.
Sam has never wanted what Dean has, not since Sam was in sixth grade and the assistant principal found Dean making out with Darcy McPhee in the guidance counselor's office and Sam figured out that what Dean has will always rank highly on the scale of skank. But in that moment he hears the devotion, the hope, in that angel's voice, and feels a bitter longing.
"Just me," he says, forcing all that crap aside. Castiel looks back at him for a moment before tucking his face into the pillow. He feels small in Sam's arms without his angelic might lending him size. "Always me. Sorry."
Castiel says nothing, but he doesn't pull away like he used to.
I-25 meets up with 40 in Albuquerque, which is fairly important since Castiel has been looking east to Texas ever since they crossed into New Mexico. Sam doesn't say anything to the former angel himself, knowing Castiel doesn't trust the few powers he still has- more like echoes of power, the shadows of the abilities he had once possessed- but he goes east anyways. Cas' Winchester Radar has always been dead-on; he'd found Sam, after all. And, as Pestilence had so reluctantly proved, there's still a little bit of angel in there.
They pinball their way across the state, following the jagged stop-start lines of the roads that haven't been completely trashed, until they reach Corpus Christi. Sam doesn't know much about the place save that it was a party town on the Gulf Coast, famous as a spring break resort; apparently it still serves a similar purpose, although the people here feel less festive and more desperate, trying to leave the ugly world behind. Castiel blunders about town for a little while, a fish so obviously out of water, flinching away from any alcohol thrust in his direction and twice escaping the clutches of some horny young thing by bolting. Finally he silently entreats Sam for help, the make the human weirdness make sense please look he's only ever used on Dean, and Sam steps in before Castiel accidentally gets them both killed.
In a dark-lit bar along a poorly paved back road, Dean's typical haunt, they finally strike gold.
"He didn't say his name," the bartender says. She's approaching the far side of middle age and has a deep voice with just a touch of smokiness. She'd be a kickass blues singer, Sam thinks. And she kind of reminds him of Ellen, so he forces himself to focus on the singer part. "Just cleared out a nest of them goat eaters and that shapeshifting maneater bitch."
Sam runs this through his mental supernatural encyclopedia and offers tentatively, "Chupacabras and a siren?"
"That's them. Man on a mission, that one."
Trying to right all the wrongs in the world, trying to solve all the little problems to make up for blowing the big one. Sam knows the feeling.
"He headed up the coast," she adds. "Think he was aiming for Houston."
"Thanks," Sam tells her, and means it. Money is no good these days and his only tradable commodity is his skill as a hunter, which she has no need for; words are all he has to offer.
He heads back outside, where a fallen angel waits in the car, and follows his brother's footsteps along the coast.
They don't make it to Houston.
Galveston Bay is sheltered by a long thin stretch of island acting as a buffer against the ocean proper, protecting the bay from storm surges and extreme tide effects. The sheltered bay offers safe docking to everything from twenty-foot motorboats to fishing trawlers to cargo haulers to- and Sam stares at this one until it's out of eyeshot and a bit longer still- a Navy aircraft carrier. But the city of Galveston itself is on the barrier island, so it's there they go, for food and gas and information. They get the first two and Sam gets them a hotel room for the night so he can tackle the third, and he's just gotten out of the car when he turns around and just about has a heart attack on the spot because Castiel is right there.
"Jesus, Cas," Sam gasps, collapsing back against the Impala. "Make some noise next time, please?"
"Something's here," Castiel says, not sparing Sam a single glance. He's staring out over the motel parking lot like he's afraid the whole world will disappear if he so much as blinks. "Something powerful."
Sam's first instinct is to grab a gun out of the trunk. His second instinct, more recently developed, is to push Cas back into the car and take off.
"What is it?" he asks instead. "Demon?" He hesitates before asking- there's been no reports, no sightings, no omens since the end of the Apocalypse. All signs point to the demons beating a hasty retreat to Hell, just like the angels returned to Heaven after Michael and Lucifer's bloody, deadly stalemate. But he can't think of anything else that would get this sort of a reaction from Castiel.
"No. Angel."
"What?" Sam demands, when his mind catches up and his voice starts working again. By then Castiel is already moving. Sam forces himself to get it in gear, catching up in three long strides and matching his pace to Castiel's. "Are you sure about this?"
"Not entirely," Castiel admits calmly. "But I intend to find out."
"Yeah, that's great," Sam says, trying really hard not to think about what the ever-loving hell could possibly play angel well enough to fool Cas. "But what I meant was, are you sure you should be going to check it out? Family reunions don't tend to end well for you, remember."
Castiel rolls his shoulders and Sam knows he's feeling the catch and pull of scar tissue over his shoulder blades. Or maybe he's feeling the lightness on his shoulders where there had once been the weight of wings. "I will be discreet," he says.
Sam remembers that long, bloody night- Castiel had presented with him a sterilized knife and a small mountain of gauze and a paper with a series of complicated sigils that he had too calmly requested Sam carve into his back. It had reminded him of Van Nuys, not so long ago back then, when Dean had been holding a box cutter and Sam had been holding Castiel, because even though he'd still been an angel he was too human to control his instinctive reaction to the pain. He remembers listening, unable to even do him the honor of watching his sacrifice, as Castiel blew away what little angel remained in him.
He still has those scars, a faint echo of a banishing sigil etched onto his chest. Sam's own nightmares feature them sometimes.
Sam slides his hands into his pockets and slouches a little, loosening his shoulders and letting them slump, trying to make himself look smaller, less intimidating. It's a little depressing that it still works for him now as much as it had when he first started doing it, back in his junior year of high school when he'd abruptly realized one day that he had three inches on his own father. Castiel looks at him, a question in his eyes.
"What?" Sam half-asks, half-challenges. "I can be discreet, too."
Castiel does something almost like smiling and Sam thinks that while he's not who Cas would choose to be here beside him if he had any say in the matter, then he's a close second, and the former angel is grateful for his presence either way. It's a good feeling; maybe he can't fix Castiel, but he can keep him from breaking further.
The angel- and it is an angel, Castiel confirms it the second he lays eyes on it- is wearing a reasonably attractive blond man. He has the sort of face that suggests smirking comes more naturally to him than smiling, and Sam has to fight the desire to dislike him on the spot. They watch from a distance as the angel smiles and laughs and drinks some form of amber-colored alcohol from the bottle- unusual for an angel- and flirts with a girl- very unusual- and spends a few minutes getting very familiar with a younger man- not even on the same scale of non-angelic behavior as the previous transgressions.
"Please tell me Gabriel didn't return from the dead and grab a new vessel," Sam says to Castiel. Gabriel might have tried to help them in the end- too little too late, really, although it's hardly his fault it all went pear-shaped- but Sam is not and will never be in the mood for him.
"It's not Gabriel," Castiel says, which isn't same as saying Gabriel is indeed dead, but Sam knows better than to press. "I believe I know who it is, but it's not…"
The angel kisses his boy toy farewell and waves off the others in the group around him. He finishes off his booze and wanders to the wall of the apartment complex courtyard he's currently in.
"He's dead," Castiel continues. "He died not long after I rebelled. I overheard my siblings talking about it."
Sam watches as the angel moves around the corner. His shadow stretches out behind him, impossibly tall in the sunset light, and Sam sees it blur and flicker. In the split second before it disappears, he can see something almost like wings unfolding.
"Time to go," Sam says, pushing away from the wall they've been somewhat hiding against and grabbing Castiel's arm.
"Too late for that," a new, accented voice says from behind them. Sam spins on his heel but Castiel goes slower, turns to face the newcomer like he's been expecting this and was simply waiting for this moment to hurry up and get here. "Did you really think I wouldn't notice you lurking here?"
It's the angel, naturally. He has his arms folded across his chest and a curious tilt to his head that reminds Sam rather sharply of Castiel. And Sam, who knows angels pretty damn well by now, can feel his power, complete and untarnished, Grace shining bright throughout him even if Sam's human eyes can't see it. He's not fallen or falling, and he's more dangerous than an army of demons.
Then Castiel steps forward. "Balthazar," he says, and that curious, amused gaze goes sharp and pins on his fallen brother. After a long moment the angel- Balthazar- makes an odd noise in the back of his throat.
"Cassie?" he asks, voice dangerously close to breaking, and Sam is echoing 'Cassie?' under his breath when the newcomer steps forward to pull Castiel into a rib-cracking hug. Castiel looks as awkward and uncertain as always and gamely attempts to hug back; Balthazar pulls away with a fond chuckle before Cas ends up hurting himself.
"They said you were dead," Castiel says, almost accusing.
"You should hear what they have to say about you," Balthazar counters, and Castiel somehow manages to not flinch.
Sam makes the mistake of shifting his weight, breaking the delicate spell and drawing the angel's attention back to him. Balthazar looks Sam over with an appreciative gaze that lingers a little too long.
"And you must be Sam Winchester," he says, stepping forward so he and Sam are facing each other directly. "The boy who destroyed the world."
"He had a lot of help," Castiel says darkly while Sam is still trying to decide how he's meant to respond to that.
"Yes, I know, but you can imagine what they have to say about you," Balthazar says, looking back at Sam for the last part.
Sam knows the demons still talk about his brother back in Hell, about the morbid masterpiece artist he had become under Alastair's tutelage. Somehow, knowing that he himself is the subject of angelic water cooler gossip doesn't make him feel any better. He remembers that old saying- Heaven doesn't want me and Hell's afraid of me- and wonders if he and his brother are on the verge of living it.
"We need to talk," Castiel says to Balthazar. The angel studies his brother, looks back at Sam, looks around and sees what's missing. After a moment he nods.
"Better to do it somewhere that at least pretends to be private," he says, and leads the way.
"The upstairs neighbors are very noisy," Balthazar says as he leads them into a bar. The door had been locked and the bar itself is closed, which hadn't fazed Balthazar in the slightest. The bartender comes out from the back room with a protest half-voiced that dies as she notices the angel and his companions, and she smiles a suggestive sort of smile that Sam tries very hard not to think about. "They were quiet for a while but they've started up again. Lots of bickering."
Sam's about to ask why he thinks they care about his neighbors before realizing what he means. Thinking Balthazar to be dead, the other angels had most likely not bothered to cut him off the way they had Castiel, so he's still tuned in to Angel Radio.
"Anything interesting?" he asks as he slides into the first available booth. Castiel sits next to him, more out of habit than conscious decision, while the angel smirks in amusement and sits opposite them.
"Not to outsiders, no," Balthazar answers. He offers the bartender a surprisingly charming smile as she comes over with three beers and watches her as she leaves, and Sam thinks that Dean would really hate this guy. He's too much like Dean himself in all the wrong ways. "It's all politics. There is some talk about extending mercy to the surviving humans, but that's the radical sect. There's always one of those. No need to worry about them unless they go quiet."
The way he says 'extending mercy' leads Sam to believe he means the sort of mercy typically offered to badly wounded soldiers on battlefields. He sips at his beer and tries very hard not to think about how little a chance they'd stand if the angels decided to be merciful.
"Have they said anything about Dean Winchester?" Castiel asks, subtle as a jackhammer. Good ol' Cas.
"Misplaced your Righteous Man, have you? Isn't he a little redundant now?" Balthazar asks, and Sam bristles and thinks that Dean isn't the only one who might have issues with this guy. He drinks his beer to keep himself from saying something stupid- Castiel had spoiled him, had gotten him used to angels who would take all sorts of verbal abuse without flinching. But Balthazar is not Castiel, and Sam has no idea where the lines not to be crossed are with him.
"After…" Sam begins finally, pauses as he tries to figure how to phrase their failed attempt at aborting the Apocalypse. Finally he decides the angel doesn't really need the details and skips over it. "We got split up. Cas found me pretty quick but Dean…" He trails off helplessly, the rest of the story fairly obvious.
"Hmm." Balthazar rests his chin on his hand as he gazes at the two sitting across from him. After a moment he rouses again. "Unfortunately, Enochian warding works on all angels, not just the unfriendly ones, so I can't track him. All I've got is a rumor."
"We'll take it," Sam says, almost desperate.
"A couple of months ago a hunter with some serious skill rolled through town," the angel says, taking Castiel's beer since he has yet to touch it. "I try to avoid hunters, so I never actually saw him, but he sounds like your boy."
"What makes you say that?" Sam asks. Balthazar finishes off Castiel's beer and takes the three bottles and lines them up on the edge of the table.
"He had a gun, an old six-shooter," he says casually. "Wouldn't let anyone else touch it." There was a brief pause, then Balthazar puts one finger on the lip of the first bottle and tips it casually forward, sending it to shatter on the ground. "I could feel its power three miles out."
It had never occurred to Sam to wonder what the Colt looks like, feels like, to angels and demons. He doesn't spare the time to ask now. The Colt gets around like a bad case of pinkeye in a kindergarten class, but the man Balthazar is talking about simply has to be Dean.
"Which way?" Sam says. For a long moment Balthazar merely looks at him. Then he puts his finger on the second bottle and tilts it, rolls it so the mouth is pointing in the direction as he names it.
"North," he says, and Sam doesn't wait for the second bottle to hit the ground before he's gone.
Sam watches Castiel watch Galveston dwindle to nothing in the rearview mirror. It's the first time the former angel has ever expressed any interest whatsoever for where they've been, focused instead as he always is on where they're going.
"We'll come back," he says softly. Castiel swings those blue eyes down to meet Sam's gaze and Sam can't even pretend to understand the emotion there. He tries to imagine what it would be like, thinking he's the last man on earth and finding out one day that he isn't. Cas may have been downgraded to human but Balthazar hadn't seemed too bothered by this, and he'd been friendly enough, even if he'd made it clear he was only helping because Castiel had asked. Sam would have thought stoic, quiet Castiel would have no friends in Heaven willing to take such a risk for him. He's grateful he was wrong.
"When?" Castiel asks.
"When we find Dean," Sam says. It's always when, never if.
"And if he's gone by then?" Cas presses, glossing over the finding-Dean thing like Sam does.
"Then he's gone," Sam tells him. "He's an angel, Cas. He'll drop in when he feels like it. It sucks, but that's how it's always been."
Castiel says nothing, not acknowledging Sam's gentle dig. But he stops watching the mirror.
I-45 north from Galveston picks up 35 at Dallas, which runs within twenty miles of Lawrence, and Sam isn't exactly inclined to overlook that coincidence. Lawrence, the town where it all began and ended, the town it always keeps coming back to.
Dean hadn't taken a car out of Texas, they learn in Oklahoma City. He'd hitched a ride with a supply truck instead. In the interim the truck had gone and come and gone again, and would like as not be back sometime within the week, if they were willing to wait. Meeting Balthazar had lit a fire within Castiel, had brought back that scary-intense angel focus, and Sam has to rein him in, has to remind him that making good time will only set them back that much more if they're working off bad information. Balthazar had said north, but that means nothing; just about everything in the continental US is north of Galveston.
And winter is settling in, cold and snowy and invasive. Dean had gone north two months ago in early October. Now it's December, and even Oklahoma already has a light dusting of snow. Sam watches the northern horizon, and the former angel, for storm clouds and waits.
The second hunt in Oklahoma City on goes bad; the spirit gets the drop on him, as spirits sometimes do, and he gets thrown through a plate glass window. Time seems to slow down enough for him to literally feel his skin slicing and splitting open. Then he hits the ground and real time snaps back in a heady rush and he lies there, gasping and dizzy, feeling his blood escaping into a warm pool around him. He has enough time to think that maybe taking on turbo-charged post-apocalyptic spirits alone wasn't his brightest idea, and that this was always going to happen and it had only ever been a matter of when, and to wonder how long it will take Castiel to figure out Sam isn't coming back.
Then the spirit flickers into view just above him, delighted grin on its face, and the world erupts with the familiar sound of fire and the spirit is torn to shreds. Sam has just enough time to thank God Bobby had taken the time to teach Castiel how to use a shotgun before the world goes blurry and dark.
A few minutes later he's back among the living, drinking straight from a bottle of whiskey as Castiel carefully redoes the bandages he'd hastily slapped on to keep Sam from bleeding to death while Cas dealt with the ghost. The former angel does his work by the light of burning bones and Sam watches the firelight shift on the planes of Castiel's face and turns his eyes a deep indigo, and thinks that this is practically the classic hunter idea of a romantic date. He swallows down more whiskey to keep his mouth occupied so he doesn't actually come out and say something like that.
"How often do you follow me?" he asks, when he can trust himself to speak. Castiel spares him a glance.
"Not often," he says. "When I need to." Like that answers anything. A moment later he rocks back on his heels and looks at his handiwork. It's not half-bad, Sam thinks, considering no one ever actually taught him how to do this. Dean would be proud. Hell, Sam is proud, not to mention grateful.
Sam has never asked if Castiel wanted to go hunting with him, but Cas hasn't ever said anything about it, either. Despite Sam's best efforts, the former angel has picked up some of Dean's more annoying habits, including his refusal to actually talk about things. Sam makes a mental note to ask from now on, because he can see in the tiny tremors of Castiel's hands, in the way he sticks a little too close to Sam's side, that Sam had scared the hell out of him.
When they let him leave the hospital the day after next- and that's one of the few things Sam likes about this new world, that he can go to a hospital after getting the crap kicked out of him on a hunt and be perfectly honest about what happened- he heads back to the hotel and finds Castiel sitting on the bed with the atlas in his lap.
"Heard the truck driver was here yesterday," he says conversationally as he sits down on the other bed, facing the former angel, and tries not to wince. The doctor, knowing his patient to be a transitory who would be gone within a day, had used stitches that anyone with a steady hand and a decently sharp pair of scissors could take out.
"Yes," Castiel says. "I spoke to him. He said Dean rode with him to Kansas City. Dean said something about going to Missouri before he left."
"Missouri?" Sam echoes. It doesn't seem right, doesn't feel right. Dean would have happily added a hundred miles to his trip just to leave a buffer between himself and Lawrence; it makes no sense that he would go so close to the town without actually going to it.
Then he remembers another conversation, similar in ways to this one, way back when angels were still caring beings that Sam prayed to every day and the thing that killed Mom had no name.
"Missouri," he says again, and Castiel looks at him questioningly, hearing the change in his voice. "Missouri, of course. Not the state. Grab the stuff, we gotta hurry."