"Do we really need to do this, Dean?"

"Yes! Now quit stalling, Sam."

"Fine. Okay. I'll play along. Let's go."

". . . Damnit!"

"I don't understand." Castiel watches the brothers with obvious confusion as he tucks away his lockpicks into his jacket again after the painfully slow entry to the abandoned home, his first lesson in "B&E 101." His voice is serious, contemplative, and he looks between the Winchesters as if attempting to understand a complex negotiation, still attempting to wrap his mind around the rules as they had been set out to him. " . . . Why would paper beat rock?"

"Because paper always does. It doesn't matter though. . . because Dean always throws scissors." Sam mutters, casting a too-shrewd look at his brother before shouldering his bag and continuing on his way to the small downstairs bedroom with its musty mattress, the apparent prize of the competition. Some part of Castiel feels guilty that he's glad Dean has lost, that he will be stuck sharing the living room with him. His own sleeping arrangement had been predetermined: Castiel assumed it was because they felt one of them needed to keep an eye on him, in case their wards failed.

"Bitch!" Dean calls after his brother, receiving an eye roll rather than the customary rejoinder in response. This had the air of routine, all of it, but there is something off about it too. Perhaps if he just understood. . .

"But if you always throw scissors, then wouldn't he be able to anticipate and know to throw rock, as he did? Doesn't that make the results a foregone conclusion . . ."

"Forget about the game, Cas." Dean commands, dumping his duffle bag onto the living room floor, and eyeing the area with determination, an instant dismissal of the other topic. There isn't much to see. The top floor of the house shows obvious storm damage, a sizeable tree partially uprooted and canted into the upper floor. Signs of a tornado still linger, a line of damage through the surrounding acreage, but the weeds have begun to grow through the path, the storm long gone. Someone had come through and cleared out much of the furniture and all of the belongings, but a few things still remained. The mattress, soaked by the storm and left to dry out (or mildew) for months, and a sagging couch in the same condition.

Dean eyes the couch and drags the cushions off it, tossing them onto the floor and throwing his camp roll down as well, before turning and looking at Cas. "You gonna stand there and watch me all day, Cas, or you gonna get to work? I don't know about you but every time I try writing bizarre ancient languages at night in the dark, my handwriting . . ."

Castiel shakes his head slightly, pulling himself out of his thoughts and spurring himself into action, silent as he paces the walls. He judges the points of the compass based on the slant of the early evening sun through the windows, and draws the stub of chalk out of his jacket pocket. Suddenly conscious of Dean's eyes on his back, Castiel stills and turns to meet his stare, stopping himself before he can begin the glyphs and sigils.

"I'm gonna go see if I can't get us some power." Dean remarks unnecessarily, and Cas has the impression that had he not turned, Dean would still be standing there watching him despite chastising Cas for doing the same thing.

Minutes later, Sam slips out of the back bedroom, shrugging into his suit jacket, his hair tamed and tie loose around his neck, waiting for him to button his collar. He halts in his steps when he sees Castiel watching him, and Cas can see him reaching for a ready lie to explain the attire.

Turning, Castiel redirects his attention to the wall instead, and Sam's excuse dies on his lips as Cas begins shaping patterns on the walls. Frowning, Sam watches him a moment, before he finishes his trek out of the house, leaning against the wall next to Dean. "You ever get the feeling Cas knows more than he's letting on?"

"All the damn time. Guy's been around awhile." Running his wrist over his forehead to keep the sweat and grime out of his eyes, Dean squints at his brother suspiciously. "Why?"

Sam shrugs, pulling a face. "It's nothing." Holding his hand out, he shakes the feeling off. "Keys."

Dean drops the keys into his brother's hand, giving the house up as a lost cause. "Flashlights and camp lanterns. This place is fried."

"I'll call if I find anything."

"Call either way. And take care of my baby."

"Goes without saying. You sure you don't want to do the legwork?" Dean narrows his eyes at his brother, looking for a hidden commentary and sure he's missing one, with how innocent Sam looks. "I mean, I don't want you to start feeling cooped up babysitting Cas every time. . . just doesn't seem fair, right?" Raising his hands, Sam rests his fist atop his open palm, and now Dean knows he's screwing with him, a smirk curling up the corner of Sam's lips and a smug amusement in his hazel eyes. "Rock, paper, scissors? Best out of three?"

His little brother is trolling him, the bitch, calling him out on the farce of a game. Dean rubs a grimy hand to the back of his neck and tries to ignore the implications of that, eventually settling on gruff and dismissive. "Get." Waving his brother away, Dean busies himself with picking up his tools. "You're burning daylight, and you've got a drive to get there and back."

"It's an astronomy professor, Dean. It's not like he's holding typical office hours." Sam laughs, and jingling the keys in his hand he makes his way across the gravel and weed strewn yard to the Impala. Dean watches him until he's past the waist-high weeds, until the car disappears through the copse of twisting oaks and is gone.

Glancing at his watch, Dean notes the time the same way he always has any time he lets his brother out of his sight, making a mental note of when exactly he should start worrying if he hasn't heard back. Old habits are a comfort, in their way. Particularly when everything else is up in the air.

Castiel's still writing on the walls when Dean slips inside, silent and tense enough that each sharp motion, each violent drag of the chalk along the wall, probably hurts. Cas doesn't look like a man decorating a house, he looks like a man cutting his way through enemies one slash of chalk at a time. Dean shoves his hands into his pockets as he approaches, resisting the urge to lay a hand on Castiel's shoulder as he stands back to watch.

"I'm almost done." Castiel breaks the silence, addressing the wall before him, a series of lines that twist and bend and intersect, a complex geometric pattern interspersed with Enochian symbols that Dean recognizes, though to him they have no meaning. They crawl around the outer walls, squares and pentagrams and circles hashed with straight lines, binding together and confining the symbols that Dean's come to recognize as the angelic language that Castiel branded into their ribs, painted onto Bobby's windows in his blood. This, though, it's like nothing Castiel's put together before for them.

"This looks. . ."

"Demonic." Castiel confirms with a twist of disgust to his lips, and suddenly Dean recognizes the patterns. Alistair's handiwork at the morgue, keeping the angels away to allow him to kill the reapers. Crowley's mansion, inlaid into the walls themselves. "Profane." There is power in this, beyond the reach of even the most powerful of angels in those angular lines and the binding shapes, power to ward away the armies of hell with each twisting angelic sigil that Castiel brought into it. . . but there is cost, too. Castiel sweeps the chalk along the walls with the air of a man slitting his own wrists. Hell, Dean's seen Castiel cut himself up with less expression. The way Cas talked about the Enochian he'd painted up in his blood, it sounded like a prayer, which made sense for the Cas and his fellow angels no matter how dickish they are. Dean doesn't imagine the elite of Hell put up much in the way of prayers, though. And the last person to bring the angelic language into Hell, to adapt and modify and twist and contain it in this way and teach it to all the good little demons, was also the last person to split Heaven in war. "Blasphemous."

With a flick of his wrist, Castiel draws his knife and slashes it deeply across the inside of his arm beneath his rolled-up shirtsleeves, pressing his hand to the welling blood before raising it to the wall. He hesitates, eyes closed, lips drawn back into a grimace, the muscles in his neck visibly corded, and when he presses his hand into the wall it's the movement of a man walking up to the gallows and tying the noose himself.

The handprint he leaves behind is a signature in scarlet, Heaven's once obedient soldier signing off on something he could barely force himself to look at. Dean knows the shape of that hand, the length of each of those fingers, the spaces between. He doesn't pretend to know what it means to Cas, though, to leave it here.

The man was willing to go serve himself up for execution, but Dean had handed him the task of protecting not just himself, but both Winchesters while they slept. Gave him the task of protecting everything he had left in the world.

Turning on his heel, Castiel brushes past Dean on his way towards the front door, leaving Dean staring at that bloody handprint among the chalk. He hears the angel pause there, can picture him with his bowed head and closed eyes even without turning to face him, anticipates what he's thinking before he says it.

"'Whatever it takes.'"

His footsteps are loud on the porch, and the wood sighs beneath his weight as the angel drops himself heavily onto the step.

Dean gives him a moment to pray this time, before he joins him.

Settling onto the step beside Castiel, shoulder to shoulder looking out over the peaceful Iowa field, Dean follows the line the storm took with his eyes, the shallow tear in the earth that is slowly healing itself, felled and broken branches in the bramble of trees in the distance: weeds and rain and wind, and eventually you wouldn't even be able to tell it had happened at all. Beside him, Castiel's hands hang loosely between his knees, elbows braced on his thighs, feet resting on the bottom step and eyes closed, but he registers Dean's presence beside him, the line of parallel points, shoulder to hip and hip to knee and boots nearly touching, where the narrow step isn't enough distance for him not to feel Dean's warmth.

"Cas."

He can feel Dean's voice in his bones, he thinks, and he hates himself for how he needs that, for how he flinches at his own name, the nickname they laid against him like evidence.

"Cas, you're nothing like Lucifer. I've met Lucifer, trust me, you ain't him."

It's such a hollow line. Dean jumps right to the chase without preamble as if simply by declaring it so that he can make it true, and Castiel can't help shaking his head slightly and opening his mouth to respond, but Dean takes the reaction as encouragement. As a sign that Castiel's listening. He plows on, his voice gaining confidence, demanding attention. "You're not God either, and I think you knew that even while you tried to fill his shoes. Truth is, Cas, you never had a chance, for the same reason I know for damn sure you're not like Lucifer. You care too much to be either of those assholes."

Only Dean Winchester would think the best way to comfort someone who committed blasphemy for him was to call God an uncaring asshole. He must notice something change in Castiel's posture, because Cas can feel Dean's gaze shift off the horizon, catches the glint of green in his peripheral as he opens his own eyes and looks out towards the first strains of sunset caught behind clouds on the horizon.

Dean's hand on his bare forearm is a surprise, but he doesn't pull away as Dean draws his arm out, his hand curled behind Castiel's own blood-stained fingers to keep them in place as he examines the new cut along his arm, fingers of his other hand laying more of the medical gauze that Castiel was beginning to hate along his skin. It seems to give him something else to focus on, makes the words easier, and Castiel tries not to let the action mean more than that, his hand cradled in Dean's, resting on Dean's knee.

"You should have heard some of the voicemails I left my father, when he disappeared on me. Some of the things Sam said when they fought. Hell, some of what I said. I was pissed, and he was. . ." Shaking his head slightly, Dean seems to be forcing the words out now, and he pauses in his examination. "My father wasn't there for me, most of the times I needed it. I get what he was doing. . . But it wasn't enough for him, and it fell to me to take care of things. Be the good son, the good soldier. I fucked things up more often than I got them right, but. . ." Shrugging, Dean's fingers twitch against the back of Castiel's hand, and he resists the urge to turn his palm in Dean's, interlock their fingers, offer unwanted comfort for an old injury that has been left to scar. "Thing is, no matter the shit we said to each other, all three of us, he knew we loved him. And I figure if John Winchester was bright enough to figure that out, to read between the lines, we gotta assume that God is too."

"So, I won't claim I get it. . . I'm not the most religious guy, you know that. My experience, God's just another deadbeat dad, Heaven's a holodeck stuck on reruns, angels are all egotistical dicks of some kind or another, present company no longer excluded. . ." Ducking his head, Castiel gives a quiet, staid puff of humorless laughter, and misses Dean's faint smirk that blooms with it, but dies slowly on his face as he continues. ". . . And in the end, I've still spent more time in Hell than I have on earth." It's a disturbing thought to both of them, falling like a stone into the conversation that somehow seems to settle in Castiel's stomach, adds the rough edge of pain to Dean's voice, and for the first time since he started speaking Castiel wishes he would stop, wants him to go on, wants to understand. "There are times Hell still feels more real than anything up here. Hard to know what to believe in."

Dean's fingers slot into place between Castiel's, weatherbeaten, tanned, knuckles scraped from his work or the fight at Bobby's or from any of the multitude of fights before that Castiel had never witnessed or been there to heal him from, that had laced the creases with fine white scars, and Castiel can feel the calluses and flaws of Dean's palm against the back of his hand as he squeezes Cas's own to draw his attention. He waits until Castiel's wide unblinking stare shifts from his bloodstained and chalk-dusted palm and Dean's battered fingers up to Dean's face, finally.

"But I believe in you, Cas."

And whether or not Castiel thinks it of himself any longer, Dean firmly believes that he too deserves to be saved.

It's a tense moment, a charged one, and Dean's been a con man and a ladies' man long enough to know when he's got someone hooked. He doesn't need Sam to point out what's going on between them—the kid might be book-smart, but even with the obvious confusing qualities this is still more Dean's area. But Castiel's still struggling with it all, the strangest combination of world-weary and born-yesterday, hunted and drowning in his own guilt, and Dean's his one reliable anchor right now. . . and he's his own bucket of issues that they really shouldn't crack.

Dean's not going to turn what he just said into another line, a 'last night on earth' or a 'carpe diem.'

He breaks the moment, turning away, rapping his knuckles against Cas's knee and drawing the angel to his feet with their linked hands before pulling his away. "Come on." His voice is gruff again, and he tucks his hands into his jacket pockets restrainingly as he sets off through the gravel and weeds. "Old Winchester coping method, while we've still got some sunlight left. Bring the chalk."

He doesn't have to look back to see the confusion on Castiel's face.

He's dealing with enough of his own.

"Pretty sure this is it, Dean."

Finger plugged into his ear, cell phone pressed against the other, Dean steps back from where he'd been directing the gun-toting angel with a hand on his elbow, as shots ring out in the open field, the sharp ding of their metal target being perforated further in rapid procession making it hard to pick out his brother's words right away.

"What?"

"The Grace. That hit from Iowa Central Community College, it pans out. Professor here was having a stargazing party the night Cas fell." Casting a quick look at Castiel as the gunfire falls silent, he gives a noncommittal grunt of understanding for his brother, before addressing the inquisitive gaze fixed on him. "It's Sam, he may have a hunt for us. Why don't you go take a look? I'll be right there."

Either Dean is getting worse at lying, or Castiel is just good at seeing through him: disbelief steals over the fallen angel's face in the moment before he turns away, and Dean winces to see it. He doesn't stop Castiel's progress to the wind-torn remnants of a tin shed and the concentric circles they'd chalked into the corrugated side, though. Turning away, Dean lets out a low breath and nods, though his brother can't see it.

"Okay. Tell me."

"Professor Sinestra's got the date and time recorded, called it in to the usual stargazer societies. . . group of about ten students outside of Fort Dodge witnessed a pretty spectacular meteor event to the western horizon about the time Cas crash landed."

"That's about . . . what, two hundred miles from Sioux Falls? That track with Anna?"

"This isn't a precise science, Dean . . . I'm not sure the events compare. Anna's fall, she wasn't taking a body along for the ride. And anyway, it's not as wide an area as between where she ended up in Ohio and where we found the tree in Kentucky."

"Good enough for me, then. What else you got?"

"Well, I'm digging into the area now. I'll grab the papers, hit the library, see if we can dig up any unexplained anything out that direction where it might have landed."

"Start looking for miracles." Dean orders, and behind him he hears a rustle of movement in the grass. Squinting his eyes shut, Dean lets his breath out slowly, and speaks as much for his brother's benefit as his own. "Son of a . . ."

"Dean?" Sam's voice over the line is ignored as Dean turns, cellphone still trapped against his cheek.

Castiel is perhaps two feet away, as if he'd simply arrived out of thin air as he always had before, expression blanked and grip on his gun loose. He speaks only once Dean has turned to him, gravel in his voice and pain in his eyes confirmation enough that he'd heard, even before his words. "Miracles. Anna. Sioux Falls."

"Cas. . ."

Sam swears quietly over the line, catching on, and Dean ignores him as he drops his hands to his sides, still holding the phone.

"No." No more lies. No explanations. No attempting to plea with him, to sway him. Not after everything he'd done, what he'd gone through to get this shot at redeeming himself in the eyes of the people who mattered the most to him, only to find that they'd been planning to send him right back. Holstering the pistol, Castiel sets off in stiff strides, crossing through the track of the tornado towards the abandoned house.

"Son of a bitch." Dean repeats into the line a moment later, and Sam rumbles his agreement, though he doesn't know the half of it from Dean's perspective.

"Want me to pack it up, head back. . .?"

"No. Keep digging. I'll talk to Cas." Turning in place, Dean scrubs a hand over his jaw, already trying to put together something to say, eyes alighting on the tin 'target,' and the cluster of X-marked bullet holes that had been Dean's demonstration, peppered now with Castiel's own attempt, only three off mark as he learned to sight, and the rest crowded amongst Dean's.

"We need him, Dean."

"Yeah, I know."

That much was clear either way.