A/N: This is the next story in a mild AU/canon divergence series called The Other Guardian 'verse. There is a more detailed note about it on my profile, but in brief: after Dean is raised from Hell by Castiel, an entire year passes before the Lilith rises and the seals start to break. During that time, Castiel is assigned to watch over the Winchesters, and finds himself growing closer and closer to Sam.

This story is set in the fall, and centers around an encounter between Sam and Uriel, who isn't pleased with how close this "abomination" has been growing to Castiel.

Special note: In terms of 'verse chronology, this story is actually set after "Looking for Love in Las Vegas;" though originally a standalone story, "Las Vegas" has now been edited so that it fits into the Other Guardian 'verse. Also, I apologize for posting so late; this story is meant to be set in early October, not November.

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Uriel did not make himself difficult to find. The instant Castiel reached out with his grace, seeking the essence of the other angel, he felt an answering flare somewhere on the physical plane, barely far enough away to warrant the extension of his wings. In the seconds between ether and air, he wondered if Uriel had been waiting for him.

The roof of the church was cloaked with darkness and fallen leaves, the branches of the heavy trees that rose like monoliths on both sides of the sanctuary nearly bare already, though autumn was still new. The stars cast across the firmament illuminated the silhouettes of saints and apostles lined up precariously along the gutter, shoulder-high statues of rough, pale stone that glowed brutally stark against black sky. Uriel stood between Michael and Peter, poised at the very edge of the roof, looking down on the rustle of soft voices and men and women in black streaming through the church doors, their footsteps crackling on the leaf-strewn steps. Castiel folded his wings and took a step toward him, his eyes boring into the other angel's back.

"You raised your hand against him."

Uriel glanced over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised. The floodlights from the ground below cast strange shadows across his face. "Him?" he repeated, tipping his head toward the coffin being carried out of the nave, rocking in unsteady hands. "Trust me—he did this to himself."

"Don't play games with me, Uriel," Castiel ground out. He took another step forward, the yellow leaves splayed across the shingles withering before they even felt the crush of his weight. "I am here about Sam."

The name came out too sharply, whipping the leaves between them into a frenzy as Castiel saw again the uncertainty on Sam's face, felt the suffocating burn of foreign grace in his nostrils and raging across Sam's brutalized skin. Uriel sighed, turning away from the late mourners at last.

"Of course you are. Though I have to say, Castiel—I expected you much earlier. Really, who could have imagined that after months of hovering over the Winchesters like an embarrassing cliché, you wouldn't drop by to check on them for seven days?"

Castiel felt something inside of him clench, the same nauseating sensation he'd felt the moment he landed in the Winchesters' motel room and the proof of what Uriel had done blazed before his eyes. Seven days. Seven days attending to the affairs of Heaven, and then to return to find that in his absence Sam had been attacked not by some creature he and Dean set themselves against, but by an angel—an angel who belonged to his own garrison, who had been specifically instructed to stay away from him. His eyes flickered to Uriel's hands, those tenuously coiled fingers a perfect match to the scar where his grace that had curdled against Sam's skin, seared a brand all the way down to the crack in the bone.

Sam had seemed so tired, half-crumpled against the bathroom door as Castiel studied his injury and Dean predictably lost control of his temper. His face was sallow, and the hollows beneath his cheekbones had become dark pits, his entire form shrinking back against the wood as Castiel gingerly turned his arm over to inspect the burn, and the shadow handprint that lay beneath the skin, the shape of Uriel's contorted fingers carved into the bone. From the way Sam hissed as the pad of his thumb just brushed the edge of the blister, Castiel could only imagine the agony he had been in, the impossibility of sleep under the searing ache of grace that should never have been turned against him. Seven days, and Sam had not called for him, not even a whisper reaching out to him across the stars. There had been hesitation in those wide hazel eyes, as if Sam were reluctant to be touched, and Castiel did not know why, unless he was simply no longer willing to stand so close to angels, after what had been done to him. What Uriel had done to him.

The memory of Sam unable to hold his gaze sank into the hollow space in his chest, and Castiel's wings flickered in the thin autumn air, part of him longing to forget Uriel entirely and fly back to Sam as swiftly as possible, to do all in his power to lift the shadow from those resigned hazel eyes. But Dean hadn't been interested in his help. And there was something he needed to do before he could return and assure Sam that nothing like this would ever happen again. Castiel ground his hands into fists and felt the sinews straining in his vessel's fingers, his grace repairing the damage almost before it was done.

"What did you think you were doing?"

Uriel tipped his head, bemused, but Castiel did not let him speak, throwing his hand out toward the blackness at his back.

"You were told to stay away from them."

Uriel's face remained neutral, but a shiver of emotion rippled through the wings at his back, too brief for Castiel to tell what it was. "Unless Heaven required otherwise," he finished, a languid shrug rolling through his vessel's powerful shoulders. "I was asked to drop by."

"What you were asked to do was deliver a message," Castiel said. The roof of the narthex was wide, but much of the space was occupied by the silent apostles, and already he and Uriel were only a few feet apart, the darkness bristling with their bowed wings. "You were not sent to lay your hands upon him."

"Well," Uriel modified, "it was only one hand."

Castiel's wings snapped open at his back, his grace scorching like lightning through the feathers and leaving the acrid scent of ozone twisting in the bitter air. Uriel shifted as if to step back, and then caught himself at the edge of the gutter, the shadow of a laugh breaking from his lips.

"I'm surprised at you, Castiel. There's no need to be dramatic. I admit it wasn't my finest moment. I lost my temper—"

"You crossed a line, Uriel," Castiel interrupted, and felt the stone of the building quiver as the gravel edge of his true voice seeped into the words. "Can you not understand what a heinous thing you've done? You harmed a soul. Even after the burn heals, he will carry the mark of your grace on his soul for eternity."

"It was a mistake," Uriel bit out, and though the words almost seemed repentant Castiel could see the first sliver of anger shimmering in his dark eyes, his hands trembling slightly as he cast them out at his sides. "One infinitesimally small error when I lost patience with a creature on whose soul mine is far from the first mark. If not forgivable, certainly it's at least understandable."

Castiel lifted his gaze to the stars arrayed in the sky above them, his brow furrowed as his eyes slipped briefly closed. "We are angels, Uriel," he said, the words almost a whisper. "We are their guardians. We are not given God's grace so that we may twist it and raise it against them as a sword."

Uriel's head tipped to one side, and his expression was cold. "How strange, then, that we have been called to do so again and again."

In his eyes, Castiel could see the glowing specter of Gomorrah, the city purged even of its stone by the might of the angel before him—and then other catharses, the plagues of locusts, the blood of firstborn sons. Castiel remembered a time when he had stood by and watched the cities of sin burn, and thought nothing of it; but somehow what Uriel had done felt so different, directing his devastating will against one fragile being. Against Sam. Sam, who had struggled to meet his eyes, who had not so much as whispered his name in seven days. Castiel could not stand to think he might never say it again.

Uriel was silent for a long moment, waiting for a reaction; at last the other angel let his head plunge back, his vessel's thick neck exposed as he released a heavy sigh. "Aren't you tired of it, Castiel?" he asked, the angle of his neck narrowing his eyes to slits. "Being forced to coddle and pander to these beings who are so much lesser than ourselves? Thousands of years bending and scraping for a planet overrun with insignificant little beasts who can barely keep their souls pure in the millisecond between cradle and grave?"

"Sam Winchester is not insignificant."

Castiel was not certain where the words had come from—was only certain, utterly certain, that they were true. He had lived an eternity and never known anything like Sam. Uriel only laughed, a breathless, truncated sound that always seemed to encompass such cruelty.

"He is a blink. He is a candle on a birthday cake. One breath and he is nothing but a collision of particles again. Atoms in the void."

Wrath was reserved for God. Angels had not been designed with fury in mind. But as his hands shook against the fall of his long coat and something like fire sparked along every nerve, agitating the stolen heart pounding in his chest, Castiel could not deny that this was rage, so thick in his blood that it was growing hard to breathe. It was all he could do to keep his voice level. "He—they—they are God's most exalted creatures, Uriel. It is them that He holds in the highest honor, above even the archangels. Our only purpose is to safeguard their souls."

"Well," Uriel murmured under his breath, "maybe it's time we sought out a new purpose."

His words left Castiel cold. A hush seemed to fall over the night, not so much as a leaf scraping over the shingles as he stared across the roof at his brother, this warrior who had battled beside him since the earth split and unlocked Hell, and searched for answers in the shadows of his face. All at once he could feel the chill in the midnight air, the whisper that winter was gnawing at autumn's heels. The mourners were gone from the steps below. Uriel's mouth was set into a grim line, but otherwise his expression revealed nothing, as impassive as the graven saints. Castiel pressed his lips together.

"Be cautious of your blasphemy, Uriel," he said, softly because the whole world seemed to be listening. "Remember why Lucifer was cast out of Heaven."

Uriel's back was to the light, but his eyes glittered nonetheless, harsh with malice. "Perhaps you're the one who should exercise caution, Castiel. There's more than one way for angels to fall."

Castiel's wings whipped back, lashing a torrent of leaves into the air around him as his grace burned through his vessel, his outrage glowing in his narrowed eyes. "You are out of line," he growled, his true voice rattling the windows of the clerestory below them. "You have let your emotions cloud your judgment."

Uriel's laugh was sharp and incredulous, snapping in Castiel's ears like a breaking bone. "I—I have let my…" His wings beat feverishly against his back, casting wild shadows across the shapes of the silent apostles. "How can you say that to me, while you stand there defending the spawn of a demon and the worst kind of human weakness—"

"Enough," Castiel ground out between his teeth, the command chasing a crack through the dark panels of stained glass. But Uriel barely seemed to hear him, his voice rising until the whole roof rang with it.

"You were not so sentimental when you served in Heaven. Don't think I've forgotten who you were in the days before you were sent to Hell to retrieve Dean Winchester's soul. Every last one of us had something to say about the Righteous Man being brother to the last of Azazel's abominations, the boy with—"

Castiel's wings swept forward, a tidal wave of his grace crashing into Uriel before he could spit out the words. For an instant, through the blinding haze of his fury, he thought Uriel would be thrown from the roof—he caught himself at the edge of the gutter, one thrashing arm locking around the neck of Saint Peter, and where his hand scrabbled at the saint's back Castiel saw the stone disintegrate around his fingers, Uriel's own unsteady grace carving through the layers of rock as though it were sand. Castiel's wings retreated once more, his gaze locked on Uriel's startled face as he watched surprise and indignation and then at last, always, a deep, thrumming rage swirl through his dark eyes, his fingernails hissing as they dug into the stone. Castiel stood his ground, only the leaves moving in a sinister wind.

"You will not call him that."

Castiel could not imagine how he had ever said those words himself, staring into Sam's earnest, hopeful eyes with the warmth of that reverent hand cradled in his palms. He could not imagine how the words hadn't burned his lips on the way out.

Uriel got slowly to his feet, untangling his limbs from the disfigured apostle and brushing the dust of broken stone from his suit with long, slow strokes. When his eyes found Castiel's again, they were black as the pits between the stars overhead, the bonfire of his grace seething just under his skin. "You have lost your way, Castiel," he said, so quietly the wind almost swallowed the observation. "You are so far gone you can't even see what they've done to you. But take my word for it: you are diminished."

Castiel's wings shifted at his back. "What I am, Uriel, is very tired of dealing with you." He erased the last bastion of distance between them, the toes of their shoes brushing as Castiel regarded his subordinate with hard eyes, the night air suddenly so cold that he was watching Uriel through the fog of his breath. "Sam Winchester is under my protection. Harm him again, and there will be consequences."

"Is that a threat?" Uriel challenged.

"It is a warning," Castiel told him, never blinking as they exchanged stares. Uriel's body tensed, as if preparing for a clash, but Castiel could see that one of his wings was still curled in, protecting the spot where his grace had slammed into Uriel's, leaving a mark of its own. After a long moment Uriel backed down, the impression of his grace dwindling to a simmer.

"I understand," he said, a shower of white dust drifting from his clenched fist.

Castiel nodded. "Good." Then he turned away and evaporated into the darkness, letting his wings carry him back to where he truly needed to be—a dimly lit motel room with a new crack in the bathroom mirror, and a bond he prayed was only bruised, not broken.

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Only the epilogue to go, which will hopefully be posted later tonight. Thanks for reading, everyone.