Cas' Netflix-watching had apparently come to a swift end with Metatron's revelation that the Darkness was G-d's sister, offered as some sacrifice to enable Creation.
Now Cas was in the archives and library almost as much as Sam, poring over the earliest tracts on theology and cosmology the Men of Letters had, scoffing and raking his fingers through his hair by turns.
"What's up now, Cas? Another flying turtle myth got you down?" Sam asked, trying to lighten the mood.
Castiel snapped the tome in front of him shut with a flick of one finger and turned his blue gaze to Sam.
"Metatron's assertion makes no sense." He growled. "I mean, I wasn't created until the world was already mostly done, I barely even caught the Ordovician meteor event. So I wasn't there, I can't really know, but how can the Creator of all things, G-d who is One and his name One, how can he be one of two? This alleged sister . . ."
Sam saw his disconcertion. Cas seemed almost hurt by what Metatron had said. Sam tried to empathize, and that brought back some painful memories of John Winchester.
"It's hard to face the idea that our fathers are people. . ." he began, and abruptly stopped when he saw the look on Cas' usually stoic face.
"G-d is not 'people', Sam!" the angel's low voice rose in volume, but dropped lower in pitch, causing the glassware on the table between them to rattle. "Even using the term "Father" to refer to him is incorrect. He did not sire me, but created me with a word. G-d cannot be split, or lessened but by his own action and will! And Metatron's . . .Blasphemy can't be true, it can't be!"
Sam managed not to cover his ears, but was still shrinking back slightly from the outburst when he heard Dean yelling from the direction of the kitchen.
"What the HELL is going on in there? Cas, is that you? Sammy, what's . . ."
Cas saw the look on Sam's face, and glanced down at the hunter's big hands, wrapped around the glasses. His eyes flicked back to the sound of doors slamming open through the bunker and he sighed, curling his fists into the pockets of his trenchcoat.
"I'm sorry, Sam." He whispered, as he stood and turned to leave.
Dean entered the room as loudly as Cas seemed determined to leave it quietly. He glanced at Cas, then at Sam, the guilt in both their body languages palpable.
"Cas, what the hell? You haven't yelled about blasphemy since the last time Crowley sent us a surprise present. Sam, what'd you say?" seeing no immediate threat, he leaned against the upper railing, looking down on them both sternly.
"Just a theological discussion, Dean." Cas deflected. "I'm doing some research into Metatron's assertion of Amara's nature, and it's logically unsound."
"Nothing logically sound about younger sisters. Trust me, I know." quipped Dean, winking at Sam.
Cas seemed nearly ready to open the discussion again, but instead forced his fists further into his tan pockets and stalked up the stairs.
Sam could barely see Dean's slight touch to Cas' sleeve as he passed, and the look that passed between them. He's constantly monitoring him, just like he's keeping an eye on me, Sam realized.
Dean descended the stairs two at a time and sprawled in the chair beside Sam, glancing at the texts spread around the table.
"What were you two researching that led to Cas yelling, man?"
"Stuff about the Darkness. I was trying to make him feel better, but I kind of . . . compared his Dad to ours."
Dean leaned back, stroking his stubbly chin in a parody of thoughtfulness.
"See, now I want to hit you." He grinned, then sobered. "I mean, say what you want about Dad, and we both have, but at least he was there, mostly. And guided us, even if it wasn't the best path for kids. Most of the angels never even saw G-d."
"Yeah, I know. I think this Amara thing is really bothering him, though."
Dean turned his eyes away, and shifted slightly in his seat.
"Yeah, he's been touchy about that." He trailed off into silence.
Sam remembered the last time they'd all discussed the now-teenaged Amara, just following her escape from the abandoned mental institution in New England Crowley had been holding her. He'd been on-and-off unconscious for much of that fight, thrown across the room with a gesture by Crowley and Amara in turns. He'd woken just in time to see Dean and the angel exchanging accusations, Cas admitting he'd let Metatron go and Dean claiming Amara had overpowered him and escaped.
But from what he'd seen, Amara didn't threaten Dean at all. It seemed almost like she'd trusted him. Maybe she remembered her early infancy,( it had only been a few weeks before) but Dean was acting strange around her too. Like there was something about her he hadn't told them.
Sam broke the silence, shifting the papers so Castiel's were on top of his own.
"He hasn't found anything of much use in proving Metatron wrong, but nothing that proves him right, either."
"Yeah, the lore seems useless for stuff that far back." Agreed Dean.
"I don't know if he'd want to talk to me, but could you . . . check on Cas?" asked Sam, trying to calm his hands, which were nervously fiddling with the texts, trying to assure himself by feel alone that none of his notes were visible.
Dean smirked. "You are such a girl. He's fine."
Sam shot him a glare, and his brother relented.
"Okay, fine. I'll see what he's up to. Just hope I don't get smote. Or smited."
"Smitten." Sam pointedly corrected.
Dean maintained his swagger up the stairs and hallway down one of the bunker's many long hallways, but his mind was racing. Why is Cas so twitchy? And how could he have let Metatron go?
Dean was no stranger to ill-advised mercy that came back to bite him in the ass later. It was more of a Sam failing, but still, no one who makes life-or-death decisions on a weekly basis could completely avoid it. Especially when those decisions often involved family and the closest thing to friends he'd ever had, not to mention the dozens of innocents who were always clustered around whatever fucked-up situation was going down as if they were moths, for G-d's sake.
But Cas had that righteous certainty. Not to say that he hadn't screwed up royally, on several occasions, but he didn't seem to dither and second-guess himself. Even when he'd had to kill angels, his own brothers in arms, he'd done it, never holding back the silver blade to protect the brothers Winchester or humanity as a whole.
Cas seemed less sure now, like the rug had been pulled out from under him, and there turned out to be no floor beneath. It was worrying to see the usually unflappable angel flapping.
Dean paused a moment, imagining Cas landing on water like a duck, wings going nuts, and that "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck" leg action seeming to run backwards as he hit a pond. He composed himself before knocking on Cas' door.
"Come in Dean."
The gravelly voice interrupted his first knock, and the door swung open.
Dean hadn't been in here often, since Cas had got his grace back and was no longer practically dying. The pajamas he'd recuperated in were neatly folded on the dresser, and the blankets he'd been cocooned in were folded to exact right angles and stacked precisely on the foot of the bed. The room was a drill sergeant's dream.
Except for the trenchcoat laying in a crumpled heap on the floor, and the blue tie being twisted in two pale hands, crushing the silk. Cas himself broke the parallel perfection of the room, laying awkwardly perpendicular to the bed, his shirtsleeves carelessly shoved up above his elbows. His dark hair was wild, too, and his blue eyes seemed tired.
Dean tried to think of something to say, some joke about why they couldn't have nice things, but shut up instead and deposited himself one of the large leather club chairs the Men of Letters had apparently bought in bulk and distributed throughout the bunker.
"What's up, Cas? Never heard you call me out for blaspheming, and I know you hate it when I say 'G-d dammit'."
The angel dropped the tie to the floor, and propped himself up on his elbows to look at the hunter.
"In the great scheme of things, your thoughtless invocations to a deity in whom you have no faith are of little importance. But if Metatron is right . . ."
Dean froze, unable to cope with the sound of the angel's voice cracking on the word 'right'. He knew Cas was something of a rebel in Heaven, always siding with humanity against orders from above, even managing to break through Naomi's brainwashing. But he'd always seemed somehow okay with G-d, even though to Dean's eyes there was nothing okay with a deadbeat deity leaving the universe in the hands of sociopathic angels and marauding demons. It seemed like that bedrock of faith was shaking, because of what Metatron had said. Somehow, the idea that G-d had sacrificed his sister shook Cas in a way nothing had before, though Apocalypses, Purgatory, multiple deaths all around . . .
"He's not right. Like you said, he's a blasphemer. And an asshole. I don't know anything about what G-d was up to before we came around, but I don't believe it, okay? And you shouldn't. Don't let that . . . Blas-hole get in your head." Dean babbled, trying to stop Castiel, an Angel of the Lord, from doubting, to at least try to comfort him somehow.
"No G-d worth having would betray family, Cas. And no father of yours would, either."
"Blas-hole, Dean?" his head cocked to the side, a slightly quizzical and perhaps amused look ghosting over the sorrow for a moment.
Dean shrugged and grinned, hoping that maybe . . .
"But the problem isn't what G-d may have done to the Darkness, it's what the Darkness is. She . . . It was powerful enough to overcome you with ease, without hurting you at all, but still rammed your brother against walls and knocked him out."
Dean looked away, not wanting to explain what had happened, and not sure himself. He'd stormed in, ready to kill the girl. Or ready to try, at least. But he'd stopped. Not because she'd stopped him, but because he somehow couldn't. And then she'd bargained with Crowley for his safe passage out.
"I don't know what she is. Absolute destruction, I guess? The end of whatever came before G-d decided to try out this little experiment? But I think she's slowly getting stronger, and I don't know what we can do when she hits full throttle."
Cas shook his head with a sigh.
"The trouble with you humans, Dean, is that you look for the solution without knowing the question. We need to know if Metatron is right before we can hope to defeat her. Because if G-d has a sister, and I won't get too theological here, then everything I know, down to particle physics, flight vectors, the conjunction of Enochian pluperfect verbs, and the hypothalamus that I reconstructed in your skull . . .is wrong."
The awkwardness between Sam and Cas had cleared the next morning, to Sam's relief. He instead threw himself with renewed vigor into the oldest records the bunker had, and disappeared at random intervals, in a whoosh of wings, to retrieve rare texts from around the world to supplement his reading. Once Sam asked where he'd been, and when the angel had answered "Under a bomb shelter in Sderot, there are some books hidden there", had asked each following trip. Sam was seriously considering putting Post-It arrows onto the map table in the war room, to mark all the ancient sites and high-security vaults Cas had visited. Sam wished he could have gone along on the jaunt to the Hermitage, but the angel confessed he had only been in their dust-free room, and only for a moment.
Over the next week, everything went back to as normal as it ever was, though both brothers were careful to not mention the Darkness, Metatron, or G-d unless Cas brought it up first. Cas, for his part, was making peace by arguing with Dean about whether Jon Snow was actually dead and bringing back some acai berries from Brazil for Sam's smoothies.
Sam started going to bed earlier and earlier, with the excuse of "early morning running" and a few double entendres from Dean. So he had the pre-dawn hours to himself, mostly, and managed to finish the bowl, thanks to a one-credit ceramics class he'd taken at Stanford as an awkward attempt to get close to Jess. He carefully scored lines on the underside to ensure that it would break where it was supposed to, and spent days carefully inscribing the incantation in tiny Hebrew letters. It shouldn't have taken long, but consulting an obscure Talmudic chart, he'd determined the proper days of the week and times of day that were auspicious for Michael, and planned accordingly.
The longer I read all this rabbinic stuff, the more there is. Really wish I could get Cas to help with the Hebrew and Aramaic, though.. Then again, I made him work behind Dean's back with Rowena, and I won't do it again.
The ritual bowl invocation was more powerful than the quick spells they'd learned to summon demons or spirits. Sam hoped against hope that it might be powerful enough to communicate through the walls of the cage itself, and that he could just ask Michael (he seemed the safer option)what he should be doing.
Finally, just before sunrise on a Sunday, Sam bathed in one of the bunker's giant bathtubs, then jumped into the freezing water of the Solomon River, going completely under three times and saying Hebrew blessings, hoping his pronunciation wasn't too far off. He dried off as quickly as he could, teeth chattering in the December chill, dressed all in white, picked up the bowl, and climbed up the hill over the bunker.
Notes:
If you have a moment, I would love feedback - this is my first fic,and I have no clue what people (other than myself) like or find easy to read. Thanks, and Happy Hanukkah!
Glossary:
Sderot: a city in modern Israel
Talmudic: having to do with Talmud, the extended commentary on the Bible and codification of Jewish law, compiled in the 3rd-5th centuries, primarily.
Rabbinic: Having to do with or written by Rabbis
