Chapter 7: If You're Broken Now I'll Mend Ya, Keep You Sheltered from the Storm

In the end Castiel didn't have much to say. One look in his eyes and Claire hung her head, heartily ashamed. "Dad, I'm so sorry."

He nodded, not saying anything, just looking at her, cataloguing every angle, every edge. Mapping her in his brain and preserving what he saw. "Thank you for coming home," he finally said and she pressed her lips together, staring a hole in the floor as her eyes flooded with tears.

"I just wanted to know," she whimpered.

"Then you just should have asked," he pointed out, voice mild but at the same time somehow achingly vulnerable and infinitely strong.

"I figured that out," she muttered.

"Good," he said.

And then silence ate up the air between them until Dean, who stood just behind and to the right of Claire, watching the tiny family drama play out, interjected. "You're still grounded, kid, I don't care what Cas says."

Claire grinned around the tears and snot that seemed to be making a break for it down her face.

Castiel snorted, saying, "Very well," but muttering "gamboge orange," under his breath. Neither Claire nor Dean really knew what aspect of the situation was gamboge orange, but they were equally unsure that they actually wanted to know.

From the hallway somewhere behind them Sam yelled, "Can we come in now?"

Before Dean, Cas, or Claire could answer Gabe made the question irrelevant by squealing "GROUP HUG!" at the top of his lungs and barreling into the entryway of the Novak/Winchester apartment and squashing as much of the Novak-Winchesters in question into an awkward embrace that was only made more awkward by the pizza the tiny baker still carried in one hand.

The hug ended fairly quickly, as soon as Dean gathered his wits enough to shout something along the lines of "GET THE GODDAMN PIZZA OUT OF MY FACE," but not before Gabe had given them a final squeeze and heckled Sam into joining them.

Once everyone was separated once again Dean folded his arms and glared at Gabe, "If my pizza's crushed because of you, I'm gonna fold you up like laundry and stuff you in the trunk of Sam's stupid Prius and never let you see the light of day again."

Gabe laughed him off, of course, made one last grab for the box of salad Sam kept carefully out of his reach, and darted off to the kitchen to grab plates for the (hopefully uncrushed) pizza.

All was as it should be.

It was four in the morning and Castiel couldn't sleep. He sat in the bookstore, surrounded by the vague shapes of shadow-draped shelves, rapping his fingernails in a jagged almost-rhythm against the chipped porcelain of his favorite coffee mug. Dean sometimes joked that Cas had an imperfection fetish. All his favorite things were chipped, scratched, scarred and battered.

Castiel took a gulp of coffee, trying not to think.

Dean was upstairs, safe in their apartment; sound asleep. Good, strong, amber Dean. He doesn't have an imperfection fetish. He probably could do a lot better than chipped, scratched, scarred, and battered Castiel.

But he hadn't.

And more than that, he'd chosen not to.

He chose Cas. No one else had ever done that before. Not until Dean Winchester. Dean, who chose him. Dean, who could have left, and almost did, but then didn't. Dean who stayed.

Castiel clung to that sometimes; in the dark, in the nights he couldn't sleep, in the days when he was dogged by memories and ghosts chewed up the edges of his shadow.

Emotions staggered through Castiel's body like drunken strangers that won't leave your house after the party they weren't invited to has long ended. He could have lost Claire today, yesterday, whatever. And he wouldn't have known it. She could have just winked out of existence and he wouldn't have known. Maybe the pieces would have eventually come together the next day, the next week, month, year, years. But in that moment, on that day, he wouldn't have known.

People say that secrets eat you up inside. Castiel considered himself, his whole tragi-comic existence, to be an example of that worn-out truth. His father's secrets, his brothers', Amelia's, his own, and now Claire's. Was it some sort of grotesque inheritance? The inability to face the facts square on?

Jimmy was the only honest one.

And Jimmy died. Castiel wasn't sure what to make of that, if it was some sort of metaphor or twist of irony, or was it just random chance? He didn't know, and he had the looming feeling that his inner monologue was growing a bit melodramatic. Claire wasn't like them, after all, she was just a teenager; doing was teenagers did best: not thinking ahead. It wasn't some sinister family inheritance come to spell out their fate in her blood.

But Castiel couldn't quite stifle the urge to ask someone, to talk to someone who knew, who understood what their family was and what they'd done for, to, and because of each other. His hand went for his cellphone; it was nearby, he'd used it as a flashlight to avoid plummeting down the stairs when he skulked down here an hour ago to drink his coffee and quiet his mind.

He needed to talk to someone.

Normally he'd talk to Dean, wait until morning and curl around his partner and ask him all the questions of the universe. And Dean would listen; half awake but still attending to each word, weighing the sound and rhythm of them against their meaning. But Dean didn't know. He hadn't lived through all those years in that big, empty house full of big, empty people. Castiel loved Dean with everything he had, but there were some things the other man couldn't share.

Cas found himself tracing Jimmy's old home number against the dark, cold screen of his phone, fingers finding the spaces where buttons would have been on an old cell from the days before the ubiquitous smartphone. He considered calling Rafael but gave that up as hopelessly liver-colored. Zachariah was out of the question.

In the end he tapped out a simple set of digits and brought the phone up to his ear before he could change his mind and hang up.

"Yes, this is James Novak, I'd like to speak to my brother, Lucifer."

"What happened?" Lucifer almost sounded…concerned. But Castiel dismissed the adjective as too soft for a man like his brother. Perhaps tense was more fitting.

"Are we natural liars?"

"What?"

"Are we just born with the inability to live like normal people? Do we just come into the world ready to lie and cheat and just be terrible, terrible people until it kills us?"

"Jim-"

"What the hell is wrong with us, Lucifer?" Castiel demanded, and his voice sounded like it was strangling itself, caving in and tangling up like too much yarn.

"Jimmy! What the hell is going on?!" And even though Lucifer was shouting, it had the same strangled quality Cas' voice did, the sound of someone who wants to scream and rage but can't because it's nighttime and there are people sleeping.

Castiel sighed, sucking air in between his teeth in a single, tight hiss of sound, "Nothing. Nothing is going on. I just couldn't sleep." That made sense, didn't it?

The dead silence on the other end of the line told him that it most certainly did not.

"Did Claire get back okay?" Lucifer asked and it was quiet, measured, like he was wary and almost frightened by Castiel's outbursts and the writer-turned-bookshop-owner might have laughed under different circumstances.

Cas sighed again, collecting what was left of himself, "Yes, she did. She's fine. Thank you for telling me."

"So why the late-night freak-out, baby bro?" Lucifer asked, a sharp edge hidden in his carefully casual words.

"I couldn't sleep," Castiel repeated again, but even now it sounded weak.

"Weak-sauce. Boo. I expect better from you."

"Too bad."

Dead silence and then, "So, what's eating at you, Jim-Beam?"

Castiel huffed a sigh, "I was thinking about our family history a bit too much and started to…fixate on some reoccurring themes."

"Like lying."

"Yes."

"Heavy stuff, kiddo."

"Don't call me that. I know."

"Why'd you call me?"

"You were the only one left."

"Ouch, that stung a little, but we'll recover given time and some settlement money."

"No lawyer jokes."

"Draconian rules you've got there," Lucifer said dryly, "Are you gonna be this bad when I live with you?"

"Infinitely worse," Castiel deadpanned and it was almost like they were young again and nothing had gone wrong yet.

Silence unfolded around them and somehow it only managed to be a tiny bit awkward. Castiel could feel his eyelids drooping, heavy with the day behind him, cringing away from the day struggling to dawn outside.

"For what it's worth, kid," Lucifer hummed, a little off-key and grating, "I don't think we were born to be terrible people. It sort of just…happened."

"So we chose to be terrible people?" Castiel said flatly, the sarcastic 'thanks, brother, you're a comfort and a treasure' remaining unspoken.

"No, no, noooo…" a pause and then, "Shit, I've got nothing. Wow, I suck," Lucifer didn't sound ashamed so much as slightly surprised.

Castiel sighed into the phone, listening to the faint buzz of static across the speaker.

"Jimmy," Lucifer began and Castiel had to hold his breath to keep the gasp that tried to escape his lungs inside. Even now, twelve years later, hearing his brother's name casually thrown in his direction gutted him.

"Jim," Lucifer tried again and Castiel forced himself to listen this time, "We're not terrible people. I don't know what happened while I was in here, I don't know anything, really, but we're not terrible people. We just made some choices and some stuff happened that we regretted and it hurt us in the end."

A strange sad noise worked its way out of Castiel's throat and tears beaded up at the corners of his eyes.

"I met your kid today, remember?" Lucifer said lightly, "She's a good kid. You and Castiel; you were good kids. The family can't be all that bad. We're pretty terrible sometimes but sometimes the stuff we make is pretty cool."

The tears were hot and heavy at the edges of Castiel's vision, blurring everything, turning the pre-dawn world into a blue-grey smear, "Thank you."

"I'd say no problem but that would make me a liar and I must not tell lies," Lucifer sing-songed 'liar' and the last few words. Castiel wondered absently if his incarcerated brother was seriously making a Harry Potter reference after a very somber conversation.

A hysterical little giggle bubbled up, painfully tight in his chest as Castiel remembered 2003, sitting on the floor, fingers combing through 800+ pages at the speed of light, devouring Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with five-year-old Claire curled up against his chest, listening to words she half-understood rumble their way out of his smoke-scarred throat. Reading and reading and reading because that was the only way to drown out reality.

He wondered how Lucifer had gotten a hold of the book.

Tears finally escaped his eyes when he realized that Jimmy never finished the Harry Potter series and somehow that ridiculous little bit of nothing brought the whole tragedy of their lives to bear, crushing him down with the weight of it.

"I have something to tell you," he found himself telling Lucifer before he could stop himself.

"Shoot," Lucifer encouraged and Castiel swallowed down the lump in his throat.

"There was a fire, twelve years ago. It…changed some things."

"Fuck you and the ambiguity that statement rode in on, Jimbo, spit it out."

"My twin is dead, Lucifer. You were really the only person I could call."

"…Fuck."

"Yes, fuck," Castiel's voice seemed to grow stronger, the words blooming in his chest like a rain-starved plant finally getting the water is so desperately needed. "Here are the facts of life as I know it, Lucifer. Our father is missing, possibly dead in a ditch for all I know," ('and it could be your fault' he didn't say, because while he hadn't really moved on, the years had put some distance between then and now and the old argument just seemed rather pointless) "Our mother is still in a mental hospital and has not recognized me in over a decade. Both Zachariah and Rafael have reduced their interactions with me down to belated birthday cards and passive-aggressive Christmas greetings. My twin is dead in a house fire because I wasn't fast enough to save him. Amelia spent the eight years after the fire running all over the country, slowly pickling her liver and doing god-knows-what-else. She resurfaced and got clean just long enough to reconnect with what's left of us, tell us she was dying, and then get killed in a traffic accident. I've been in a relationship with a man named Dean for four years; I've been very fucking happy, thank you very much. I own a bookstore; our cousin Gabriel owns the bakery one door down and we live in the same apartment building. He makes my life a chocolate-covered hell and I wouldn't change a thing. I've been happy. I've been coping. And I don't know how to be the person you want me to be when you get released."

Lucifer went dead quiet.

"I'm fucking sorry, Lucifer," Castiel says and it's not really an angry hiss so much as a soggy cough.

And Lucifer surprised him. "That's fine."

"What?"

"Just give me a couch to sleep on. I'll be there."

"What?"

"Stop pretending you didn't hear me," Lucifer sing-songed, "If it didn't work when you were a cute little tyke it isn't gonna work now that you're all grown-up and grim."

Castiel choked on a laugh, "This doesn't fix as much as you think it does."

"Meh, I don't care. Life's a work in progress."

"Okay."

"Don't forget the couch. I have high expectations now. Don't ruin this for me."

"Goodbye, Lucifer."

"Nice couch. None of that shitty furniture you had in college."

Castiel hung up.

He sat in the dark with his cold coffee for a little while longer, staring at nothing and wondering what he didn't know about the year he wasn't speaking to his brothers.

Dean woke up to the smell of slightly burnt sausage. He weighed the possibility of more sleep against the probability of Cas blowing up the kitchen and/or giving them all carbon monoxide poisoning. His self-preservation instinct won against his laziness and he crawled out of bed to face the sight of Castiel frowning at the stovetop like it had personally wronged him.

"You're just so…puce. Puce and disagreeable," Cas chastised the cooking apparatus and Dean tried really hard not to find the furrow between his eyebrows just a little bit cute.

"What the hell are you doing?" Dean yawned instead of commenting on the cute frown because commenting on something as sappy as an adorable expression would force him to give up his man card for good and he just wasn't ready for that quite yet.

Also it meant the frown was now pointed in his direction rather than the stove and that was definitely a bonus.

"Cooking. I would think that was obvious."

Dean yawned again, "Sausage is on fire."

Castiel spared the pan a glance and glared back at Dean when he saw the sausage was only smoking slightly and not actually ablaze. "You," Cas said, each word measured and precise, "Are a liar."

"And you are a crappy cook."

Cas narrowed his eyes irritably at him and went back to poking a lump of what might be eggs with a spatula, scooping a paperback book up with his free hand and finding the place he left off.

"Okay, stop before you catch yourself on fire," Dean moved over to nudge, and then when nudging didn't work, shove Cas out of the way. "I swear to god, you're a hazard."

"Hmm, love you too," Castiel said in that infuriatingly absent-minded way of his, blue eyes glittering at him from behind the pages of the book.

"Give me the spatula before I'm forced to hurt you," Dean grumbled at him.

Castiel held onto the spatula just long enough to force Dean to struggle for it a second before surrendering control of the kitchen.

"So cardinal," Cas hummed indulgently and Dean snorted at him.

"Damn right," he muttered despite the fact that he had no real idea what Castiel meant by that.

Cas knew it too, the little shit; he just smirked at him some more and asked, "Would you like some coffee?"

"Yes." Dean side-eyed him as Castiel hovered over the coffee maker, book still in hand, "If you give me your black sludge of death just to spite me I'm gonna be pissed."

Castiel gave him a carefully blank look, "I don't understand."

"Liar," Dean chuckled, looking away and focusing on salvaging breakfast.

He could feel Cas smile at him behind his back, though. "Yes," the bookshop owner said simply. A moment later a perfectly innocent, normal cup of coffee slid over to rest beside Dean's elbow.

"Thanks," Dean gave Cas a smile and the got another Cheshire Cat grin in return.

"You two are so weird," Claire interrupted them, voice heavy and sleep fogged.

"Good morning," Dean and Cas chorused, making the teen grumble incoherently at them as she fumbled around for her own mug.

Claire sniffed, "Is something burning?"

"Hmm?" Cas didn't bother to look up from his book, hopping up to sit on the counter beside the stove and Dean, "Toast."

"Toast, very descriptive," Claire muttered.

"Toast," Cas said philosophically.

"Cas?" Dean said, tone deceptively even, "Is the toaster smoking?"

Claire, who had scooted over to investigate the apparatus, squeaked and jumped back, "Shit!"

"Language," Cas corrected absently.

"Dad!"

"Cas!"

With a sullen ding the toaster spat out two thoroughly blackened pieces of bread.

Castiel blinked owlishly at them before plucking one of the slices from the metal slot and taking an experimental bite. "Not bad," was his only observation.

"Cas, I love you," Dean turned to him, putting a hand on his knee, "but please never every try to cook anything more complex than a sandwich," he finished gruffly, trying to choke back laughter.

Cas narrowed his eyes at him, kicking his heels against the lower cabinets absently, "More toast for me."

"Dad," Claire, who had no compunctions about laughing at her father, wheezed, "Please stop eating that."

"No, not more toast for you, I'm pretty sure that stuff is more charcoal than bread," Dean backed her up, squeezing Cas' knee to emphasize his point.

Cas gave him an unimpressed look but lowered the charcoal briquette masquerading as breakfast food.

Breakfast passed in much the same way; Dean eventually giving Cas' culinary attempt up for lost and just starting over, this time with the addition of waffles from the waffle-maker he may have stolen from Sam's apartment last weekend. They bickered and bantered and it was nice. Cas looked tired and Dean was tempted to bring it up but one look from the other man told him that now was not the time and he let it be. Claire moaned a bit about her grounding but gave up fairly quickly when she found that neither of her parental figures was particularly inclined to be sympathetic. Sam turned up, wearing short and sweaty from his morning run, bitching about his missing waffle-maker almost before he got through the door. He ended up staying for more than his fair share of waffles and a veritable mountain of eggs. Luckily, Gabriel was at work. Their supply of syrup was safe from a tiny man's enormous sweet tooth. Un-luckily for them, Gabriel would whine about missing 'family breakfast' all day.

It was nice. It was right.

And for the first time Cas thought maybe, just maybe, there might be room for Lucifer.

Or this could all go down in flames and be the hot mess he knew it would be from the start. Either way, at least right now he had Dean and Claire and stolen waffles.

And Sam too. Who stole the waffle-maker back, the bastard.

The wind nipped and tugged at Castiel's clothes and a shiver snuck its way up his spine. He stared at the heavy concrete brick of a building in front of him and tried not to think too much. The paperwork was signed, everything neat and tidy and legal. Well, as legal as it could get when he was signing with another man's name. All that was left was this.

The automatic doors slid open, the faded early October light flickering quicksilver bright across the smooth glass. Castiel could almost imagine he could hear them swoosh back and forth.

Lucifer, a dark shape getting bigger and more solid as he approached. Castiel resisted the urge to lean back, to let Dean's Impala support his weight as he watched his brother come closer and closer. Dean himself sat impatiently in the driver's seat. Cas could feel a pair of warm green eyes burning into the spot between his shoulder blades. It was more comforting than the former artist wanted to admit.

"Y'know," Lucifer called conversationally before reaching them, "I always said it'd be a cold day in hell when I'd walk out of here. Well, the funny farm's pretty close to hell and it's pretty damn cold out here, what do you think, Jimbo? Kinda ironic?" Lucifer was close now, close enough for Castiel to pick out all the tiny details he didn't want to see. The scruffy blonde hair, the strained stitching on the army surplus duffle bag slung casually over the eldest Novak's shoulder, the cunning blue eyes.

"Hello, Lucifer," Castiel said because he couldn't find any other words in the void of his head.

"Hey, baby bro. You don't have a ping-pong table, do you?" his voice rose in pitch and took on a dramatic, breathy quality, "My therapist says I need an outlet for my rage." He smirked and his voice settled back into its normal tone and rhythm, "Really, I just got pretty fucking awesome at one-man ping-pong while in the land of the loonies."

"No ping-pong table," Castiel said flatly, choking back the urge to comment on the ragged patchwork quilt of colors he could almost see threading their way through Lucifer's tone, his attitude, his jagged, awkward words. He had to make Lucifer believe he was Jimmy. He had to be Jimmy. Just for now. Until Lucifer proved he could be trusted. Or until Cas proved to himself that he could trust Lucifer. And Jimmy couldn't remember indigo was part of the rainbow half the time.

But Cas wanted to have this, to have the second chance at family he'd wanted for so long.

"No ping-pong table, but we do have a halfway decent couch."

Author's Note: Ack. This chapter, man. I struggled so much with this one and I have no idea why. I wrote and rewrote sections over and over and I've gotten to a point where I'm just posting it because I have no idea what to do to make it better. I hope you guys liked it, I really do.

As always, thank you to everyone who reads this fic. You're wonderful and I appreciate you all!

P.S the chapter title comes from the song 'Lego House' by Ed Sheeran