Dean just ran, right into the blinding freezing wind. Toward what he hoped was the right direction. A moment later he nearly crashed right into Cas— Cas had run out to meet him. Cas grabbed Dean, hauled him bodily down the little stairs at the front stoop and practically threw him through the door, scurrying through right behind him. Together they tried to close the door, but it was simply impossible— the door just wouldn't close, the wind unbelievable now. Dean could hear Cas shouting something, but couldn't make out what he was saying; the roaring was so loud it sounded like a freight train was barreling down on them. Cas abruptly gave up on the door and switched to trying to drag Dean down the curving stairs, but Dean was still certain he could close the door if he only pushed hard enough (though he'd made exactly zero inches of progress). He felt absolutely desperate to close it, but finally Cas flung himself at Dean in a sort of sideways tackle, nearly hurling Dean down the stairs. Dean gave up and scrambled down the stairs, Cas just behind him.
Dean saw that Sam had just run into the map room from the kitchen with his pistol out. Dean tried to wave him back, yelling, "TORNADO! TAKE COVER!" but Sam couldn't hear him. The lights began flickering, the whole building started shaking, and the a massive gust of wind walloped Dean from behind with such tremendous force that Dean had to cling to the stair-rail with both hands just to keep from being flung headfirst onto the floor at the base of the stairs. Cas managed to hang on to the other railing.
Dean had a brief moment of thinking, very calmly, "Cas better not fall and hurt his wing again."
There was a weird, groaning sound and a sensation of sudden pressure, as if the whole bunker were being pressed inward. Sam dove under the map table. Cas reached out and grabbed Dean, whipped his right wing out and around both of them, and pressed his head down with one hand as both of them cowered together on the stairs. Dean's ears popped. All the windows overhead exploded.
Most of this part of the bunker was buried underground but there were a few high, skinny windows at the tops of the walls, as well as a skylight that was high above the map-table behind a metal-grate ceiling. The skylight and the skinny windows all shattered, completely, all at once, and shards of glass swooped down and whirled around the room for a horrifying moment. Dean staggered, but Cas's wing shielded him from the worst of it. In the next second an absolutely tremendous blast of wind hurtled down through the skylight, and this time it did knock Dean clean down the stairway onto the floor, Cas on top of him, as a friggin' gigantic tree branch came hurtling down into the room and crashed on the floor right in front of them.
It was far too late to get down to the dungeons or to a back room, or to cower in a bathtub or a closet, or whatever the hell you were supposed to do in a tornado. They had to take shelter here. Dean and Cas scrambled under the map-table to join Sam.
Once again all Dean could think was "Cas better not bump his wing," as if protecting Cas's wing from being bumped was more important, or at least more feasible, than trying to get any of the three of them to simply stay alive at ALL. Dean and Cas then got into a weird little wrestling match about who would shield who: Cas was trying to get on top of both Dean and Sam, Dean kept trying to get on top of Cas and Sam, and meanwhile Sam was trying to drag them both further under the table. Then the freight train hit the bunker head on.
The roar took over the world; there was nothing but noise. The lights flickered and died. It was absolutely pitch black. All the air seemed to suck away for a moment; Dean couldn't breathe, and was baffled to find himself almost weightless for a moment, the tornado somehow sucking them right up off the floor. Cas, Sam and Dean all abandoned any attempt at a plan, all three of them just clinging together desperately (though Cas had at least managed to get his good wing wrapped around both brothers). Dean could feel (but could not hear) that Cas was yelling something, but had no idea what he was saying.
Then the wind crashed back into the bunker like a tidal wave. Dean squeezed his eyes shut and kept clinging to Cas and Sam. It sounded like a nuclear explosion; Dean had never imagined wind could be so loud. Through the unbelievable roar he also distantly heard huge terrible THUNKS reverberating here and there, the floor trembling below them and the table giving occasionally sudden shudders above. Was the building collapsing? Was a tree falling on them? Were they being buried alive? Or carried away? Dean couldn't even tell.
Dean thought, Maybe we'll go Oz.
Or, what had Cas said that one time, Antarctica? With a bunch of cows?
"I DON'T WANNA GO TO ANTARCTICA! PLEASE!" Dean yelled, hopelessly. But he couldn't even hear himself yelling.
They were helpless. Like ants in an avalanche.
At last the noise began to lessen.
It faded further. The wind lightened. There was a moment of near-silence that seemed astonishing, almost magical. Next came a series of loud thumps and crunches, some from nearby and some from far away, as objects that had been whirling in mid-air hit the ground.
It was still pitch black; the lights were still all out.
The sound faded, more and more, and died away. Dean's ears were ringing.
They huddled there for a few moments longer. Sam was pressed up next to Dean's side and Cas was now pretty much lying on top of them; he'd managed, somehow, to keep his good wing wrapped almost completely around both brothers through the entire thing.
Dean felt snow hitting his face, soft little dots of cold in the dark.
Cas's wing slowly relaxed its hold.
"You guys okay?" Dean said.
"Uh. Yeah," said Sam in the darkness.
"I'm all right," said Cas.
It took a moment to sink in. We're all alive. We're all okay. Dean felt such a rush of relief he had to just put his head down for a moment. He tightened his grip on Sam's arm, and felt a hand on his shoulder— Sam's hand, apparently— tighten back.
"I guess that was a snow-nado?" said Sam in the dark. "One of those hybrid blizzard-tornadoes they were talking about last month? I forgot all about those."
"I am not going to forget about those again," said Dean.
Cas shifted his weight off of them, and lifted his wing off. Dean suddenly remembered the broken-wing issue, and he said, "Oh, god, Cas, your wing, is your wing okay?"
"It's all right," Cas said. "Some scratches, I think. But I think the bandages protected it pretty well. It feels all right. It was the other wing I was worried about, actually, but it's okay too."
Then Dean felt Cas suddenly tense. "Meg!" Cas said, and Dean felt him scramble around a little, obviously trying to find his way out from under the table in the dark. There was a clunk sound that had to be Cas's head hitting the underside of the table.
"Hold on, Cas, wait, wait, I got a light," called Dean, managing to grab hold of Cas's arm to slow him down. They crawled out from under the table, fumbling their way through the snow and twigs in the darkness, and finally Dean managed to get his phone out and turned on its little light.
And then they all just gaped for a moment.
There was an entire friggin' full-size spruce tree lying across the map-table.
A gigantic spruce tree, just lying there in the room. And the poor lovely vintage glass top of the table had been split right down the middle. The room was completely full of sticks and branches and shards of glass and snow. All the loose equipment that had been against the walls— the old headphones, the gas masks, some of the sound equipment— was simply gone. Only the things that had been bolted in place were still there.
Thick flurries of snow were drifting in from above, swirling around in a light breeze from the door, and beginning to pile up on the floor.
Cas said "Meg," again, and began running through the bunker, Dean and Sam trailing after him.
Sam groaned in dismay as they went through the library. Books were all over the floor, jumbled everywhere, chairs upended, the little desk lamps all shattered. There was also a huge tree limb— perhaps the one that had come crashing in so dramatically when the skylight first broke— sitting peacefully right in front of the fireplace.
Further back in the bunker there was less damage. The kitchen was kind of a mess, but nothing they couldn't clean up. Further back still, the bedrooms all seemed okay.
And Meg was okay. She was cowering under Cas's bed in the corner in a terrified little ball, her eyes huge and dark, all her fur sticking up in such alarm that she'd turned pretty much spherical. But she was okay. Cas laid on his stomach and reached his hand over to her, but he couldn't reach her, and she wouldn't budge. Then he extended his right wing, which reached her easily.
She sniffed the feathers. And sniffed again.
Gradually her fur settled down, and the wild look began to leave her eyes. Cas petted her for a minute, with the flight feathers of the wing, till she began to look a little calmer. Then he rose, led Dean and Sam out and closed the door.
"She's safest in there," he said. "Let's go check on the damage."
They walked back to the kitchen and got some flashlights, and then went back to the foyer to study the damage. They all looked at the spruce tree on the map table for a long moment. It looked truly bizarre lying there in the glow of their flashlights.
Cas said, "That species doesn't grow here. Those only grow in the Rocky Mountains."
Sam said, "What? You mean... the storm carried it all the way from Colorado?"
"Probably," said Castiel. Sam and Dean gazed at the tree for a while longer, and then started looking around at all the other tree branches, and the broken glass, and all the snow, and the broken windows. Cas went up to the front door to look outside.
"We're lucky it missed us," called Castiel, from just outside.
Dean panned his flashlight around the room and said, "You call this a miss?"
"Come look," said Cas, and Dean and Sam clambered up the stairs to take a look.
There was now just a pleasant little snowfall going on outside. It looked almost peaceful now, and there was no wind at all. And now that the tornado-part had blown by, the sky was actually faintly grey instead of absolutely black. Dean could even see the end of the retreating storm, a distant black mass on the horizon, moving further and further away.
They climbed up the little steps right outside the door to see what Cas was looking at. The light was pretty faint, but even so they could see a tornado-track carved into the earth in the field opposite outside the bunker. The track was huge, a big swath gouged into the earth that looked a quarter-mile wide. It had scoured the earth completely clean, down to the bedrock. Every single tree and bush and rock and twig was simply... gone.
It had missed the bunker by no more than two hundred yards.
"Dean. Sam," said Cas, turning to them. "You can't do this again. You have to either free the elementals, or get out of their way. You can't just come back into their path like this. Especially not for me. You should have gone north."
"And leave you here alone? Not likely," said Dean.
Cas sighed and shook his head. He looked back over at the tornado's swath of destruction.
"I tried to talk to it as it went over," said Cas. "I was asking it to change its path."
Ah. That was what he had been shouting, in the middle of the chaos.
Cas added, slowly, looking at the dead-straight path the tornado had cut across the landscape, "But it didn't change its path. Actually... it wouldn't even speak to me, Dean." He paused a long moment, and added, his voice a little soft, "I won't be much help after all. Maybe you're right, Dean. Maybe it's better if you work without me. I just won't be much help anymore."
It took Dean a moment to understand what Cas was talking about, and why he looked so solemn. Then he remembered:
Air elementals only talk to flying creatures.
And this one had refused to talk to Cas.
Now that the adrenaline was fading, the cold was really starting to bite. Dean gave a little shiver, pulled his jacket tighter, and suddenly he thought of Sarah saying, Bundle up that angel, Dean. He looked over at Cas then, and realized Cas was shivering too, pretty hard actually. In fact he was bare-chested— the toga-blanket he'd been wearing originally had totally vanished. He also seemed to have a whole set of cuts that Dean hadn't fully noticed before in the darkness. Only then did Dean remember Cas that had been lying on top of both of them, bareskinned from the waist up, exposed to every branch and piece of glass that had been whirling around the room.
Dean shoo'd Cas (and Sam) back inside, saying, "Okay folks, nothing to look at here. Time to warm up and clean up. Sam, get the first aid kit, would you? And maybe see if you can get us something to drink?"
Dean lit a fire in the fireplace (both for heat and for light), using the dead branches that were helpfully scattered everywhere. Then they both made Cas stand still by the fire for a wing-inspection and cut-inspection.
They ended up picking a lot of pieces of broken glass out of his feathers. The right wing looked surprisingly good, given that it had taken the brunt of the falling glass; the feathers on that wing were a bit frayed and muddy, but everything looked intact and Cas said nothing was hurting. And it turned out the cuts on his back and arms weren't all that bad; Cas said he'd still had one of his blankets on for a while, though later it had blown away later (never to be seen again, apparently).
And, happily, Cas's broken wing really was okay too. The bandage was now a torn-up wad of muddy, soaking vet-wrap, though, so Sam fetched Cas's movie-chair (it was upended in a corner in the tv room, but was intact), and made Cas sit in front of the fire, while Sam cleaned his broken wing thoroughly and re-did all his bandages. Dean also made Cas change from his muddy, wet jeans into some warm pants. Then Dean and Sam changed their clothes too. They all bundled up in another layer of winter clothes now, with two new blanket-togas for Cas.
Everybody's okay, thought Dean. We're all okay.
Sam heated up some more cider (fortunately the gas stove was still working), and they had cider laced with a little whiskey. Or whiskey laced with a little cider might have been more accurate. Then, with all three of them at last somewhat warm and dry and cleaned up, they took a tour of the rest of the bunker.
The power was out; this was a relatively minor problem that they could fix tomorrow once there was enough daylight to assess the bunker wiring. The heat was out too; this was a more urgent problem, as it was still snowing and pretty damn cold. The cell phones weren't getting any service, which probably meant that Lebanon's one-and-only cell tower had not survived. That meant no phone, and no internet. The skylight and all the skinny windows needed to be boarded up immediately, and there were branches everywhere, and a ridiculous amount of snow (laced with broken glass, just for fun) in the map-room. And the poor map had been shattered and there was that fifteen-foot-tall spruce tree lying across it.
But they had the fireplace, the stove worked, they still had all their food. All the damage was repairable, given a little time.
And when they made a tentative foray outside, Dean was astonished, and thrilled, to find the Impala sitting peacefully in a little snowdrift, completely intact. It had been an extra hundred yards farther away from the tornado, and there wasn't a single scratch on it.
With the discovery that the Impala was unscathed, the mood turned almost festive. They'd had a lucky escape! They were all okay! Even the Impala was okay! Soon all three of them had plunged into work, Cas setting candles everywhere to light things and then helping to shovel out the snow, while Dean went outside to board up the skylight with some leftover sheets of plywood. Sam, under orders from Cas, went around picking books up so that they wouldn't get wet in the melting snow. ("The books are fine right now, Sam, just disarranged," Cas had advised. "But if they get wet the older ones will be destroyed.") Sam soon reported that the virtually all the books were still there and were even intact, just all jumbled. The skylight didn't take Dean very long to board up— turned out you could just walk right up to it, from the outside— and soon he and Cas were circling through the upper floors, doing what they could to seal off the remaining broken windows with the rest of the plywood, scraps of lumber and a few tarps. Most of the glass-splinter-filled snow was shoveled out, and then they gathered all the loose branches and heaped them into a pile near the fireplace. Dean set the water dripping in all the bathrooms, every faucet and shower running slowly, to try to keep the pipes from freezing until they could get the heat back on. And Cas whipped up a batch of cookies to keep them all going.
As midnight approached they had got the worst of it under control. Pretty soon Dean was standing in the map-room, his hands on his hips, surveying the room, while Sam and Cas picked up the last of the small branches. This room had taken the worst hit. It would need a thorough cleaning, and there would have to be some real window repairs later, of course, and the map-table needed fixing; but for now things looked remarkably good.
"Hey," said Dean, "I just realized. The elemental took my Christmas tree. It was by the door. Haven't seen it anywhere."
Sam laughed and said, "Maybe the elemental wanted its own Christmas tree. It's probably halfway to Ohio with it by now."
"But look," Dean said with a grin, pointing to the huge spruce tree that was still lying across the map-table, "the elemental brought us a better tree! You know what... I got an idea."
Dean went and fetched a winch from the garage, and after a great deal of struggle, they managed to wrestle the spruce tree upright, first sawing it off flat at the base and then propping it up against the metal staircase. Cas pointed out that it was actually just a small spruce tree, only fifteen feet tall, which apparently was small by Colorado spruce tree standards. But it still seemed absolutely enormous in that little room. It was also pretty heavy, but Dean wouldn't rest till he had got the thing upright and tied it to the metal staircase for stability.
"Check it out!" Dean said, as he tied off the last rope. "That is the biggest Christmas tree I've EVER put up!"
"Wait, wait, the decorations are almost done," said Sam. Partway through the tree-winching effort Sam had gone and grabbed some leftover popcorn from last night, and now he was stringing it onto a piece of string. Soon he produced exactly 1 strand of popcorn-on-a-string, all of two feet long, to put on the gigantic spruce tree.
Sam put it on the tree, Cas watching curiously, and then Dean and Sam backed up to look at it. They both started cracking up. (Cas just looked puzzled.) Maybe it was just giddiness from having survived at all, but it really did look funny: the tree seemed simply gigantic, wide branches sticking out practically filling the room, huge and impressive, while Sam's one little string of popcorn barely reached across one branch.
"Like it?" said Sam, still laughing. "Are the ornaments evenly spaced? Did I miss a spot? Should I adjust anything?"
"It's perfect," said Dean. "It's just missing one thing. Cas, um, could you just go up there, for a sec? Just walk up on top of the staircase? Oh, and, um, can you hold this candle?"
Cas gave him kind of a narrow look, but he took the candle and walked up to the top of the stairs. Right by the top of the tree.
"Could you put your wing out a little? Perfect! Yes! Hold still!" Dean said. "Stay right there." He got his phone out and took a picture, in the dim flickering light, of Castiel standing there right at the top of the staircase, by the top of the tree, holding the little candle.
An angel on top of their Christmas tree.
Cas was still looking a little puzzled, but as he saw Sam's and Dean's expressions, he began to smile a little bit. Dean took one more picture while Cas was smiling, and looked at it.
Sam was leaning over Dean's shoulder to look, and he said, "Ha! That came out great!"
Dean had to agree. In the photo Cas looked downright majestic, standing there at the top of the enormous tree holding the candle. The photo had even captured his half-confused, half-pleased smile.
"Cas, just so you know, you make a totally kickass Christmas-tree-angel," Dean said, "Best one we've ever had. Come on down. Merry Christmas, everybody. Sorry, Sam, but I think your presents are on their way to Ohio. Actually they were completely ruined and full of broken glass anyway."
"It's the thought that counts," said Sam with a grin. "Your present got ruined, too."
"What was it?"
"A bottle of tequila. It's totally gone. Guess it got shattered somewhere. It was the good stuff, too."
"Dammit," said Dean, with feeling.
"Both your presents are still intact," said Cas suddenly. "I made some pies while you were you were gone. I put them in the fridge and it turns out they're still okay."
"Well, Cas," said Dean, "Just for that, your present is actually still here too, since I had it zipped up in my jacket. It still needs some work, but here it is."
Dean grabbed the bag that had been stuffed in his jacket during the entire ordeal— it had been sitting on the map-table while they worked— and he handed it to Cas.
Cas pulled out a wad of black fabric, looking at it curiously. He shook it out; it was a black polarfleece jacket.
"Oh," said Cas, "Um. Thank you, Dean, but... I'm afraid I can't wear this. But it was very thoughtful of you."
"No, no, it's not done yet," said Dean, "I had a plan. See, I was talking to this lady in the sewing store, which is a terrifying place on Christmas Eve just by the way. There were ten million ladies there doing all these lady things. But anyway, I was telling her about my friend who'd had back surgery and needed a special jacket and she said, the awesome thing about polarfleece is, apparently it's super easy to cut and sew. So she recommended I buy a whole jacket, not just fabric, and then modify the jacket. So— here, actually, we can just do it right now! Sam, go grab scissors and some safety pins, would you? Here, Cas, come over to the fire."
He dragged Cas over to the fire again and began fiddling with the jacket, holding it up and eyeballing it against Cas's wings. Sam came back in a second with the scissors and pins, and a ruler as well— he'd seen right away what Dean was up to.
Together, Sam and Dean cut two big slices up the back of Cas's polarfleece jacket, dividing the back into a central vertical strip flanked by two side strips.
"Now put it on, Cas," said Dean, handing it to him. Cas suddenly got the idea, and there was soon a hopeful little half-smile on his face. He carefully slipped it on, with Sam and Dean's help.
It fit him perfectly. The sleeves were even the right length. And Cas had simply slid it right on over his wings. The central back-piece hung down between the wings, and the side pieces came down around the sides of the wings. Dean fiddled a little bit further, trimming here and there, till the strips fit around Cas's wings perfectly.
"My idea was to put velcro on the bottoms of the strips here," said Dean. "See, then you can put it on easy, like you just did, and then velcro the pieces together below your wings. For now we can just pin them closed or something." In fact Sam had already figured this out and was already fastening the sides with some safety pins.
"Dean, it's so warm," Cas said. He zipped up the front and immediately looked warmer than he'd looked in weeks. It was kind of startling to see him wearing actual clothes on his top half, actually, instead of the familiar blanket-toga look. He suddenly looked very dressed up.
Cas ran his hands over the front of the jacket and repeated, "It's so warm."
Dean grinned at him. "We'll make you more later. A flannel shirt for tonight, for sure, since it'll be a chilly night— we can cut up one of mine. Then later, more shirts and maybe some vests and stuff. This is just a start."
Cas was actually smiling. Despite the elemental; despite their terrifying experience; despite everything, Cas was smiling.
They had a strange little dinner at one in the morning— more cookies, some pieces of Cas's pies, and some soup that Sam warmed up.
"Not the Christmas dinner I was planning for you all," said Sam, "But it works."
"Not the Christmas I was planning for you all," said Dean. "But it works." And as he looked around the three of them, huddled around the fire, he thought, They're NOT going to die. I won't let them. They're my family. We're going to stick together, like those three lost animals, and we'll be okay.
He looked over at Cas, who was dunking a chocolate chip cookie in his chicken noodle soup (Sam was obviously itching to say something about that, but was valiantly refraining from comment). As the night's work had worn on, it had become clear that Cas had started to accept that maybe he couldn't come on hunts; the way the elemental had refused to listen to him must have rattled him, for already he'd made a few comments already about "your" (not "our") trip to Florida. But now Dean found himself reconsidering. Having Cas at their side during the tornado had just... felt right. It had felt right.
So now that Cas seemed determined to think he wasn't useful, Dean felt increasingly determined to prove that he was. Could there possibly be some way to get him to Florida after all? Maybe in a second car or something? Maybe they could fit his wings in the Impala after all, if Dean modified the back seat a bit?
They'd work something out.
The three lost animals gotta stick together, Dean thought.
It was getting damn frigid and they were going to have to get through a night without heat; there was really no way they could find and fix the power problem in the darkness. So that night they all slept together in Cas's room, which was the bedroom that was deepest into the bunker and farthest from the cold windows. Dean dragged his mattress back in and they pushed the two mattresses together on the floor, and then heaped practically every blanket in the entire bunker on top of the two mattresses. Sam joined them, and little Meg nestled between them all.
Cas insisted on lying so that his right wing could spread across both Dean (closer to Cas) and then Sam (farther from Cas) to add a bit of warmth. The temperature dropped down to near zero that night, really brutally frigid, but with the wing and the blankets they were actually quite comfortable.
And all Dean was thinking, when he finally drifted off, was, Gotta stick together. We gotta stick together.
A/N -
Next up: Dr. Mac comes to visit, and we finally learn how Cas's wing is doing. Up Sunday I hope.
Hope you liked this! If there was a scene you particularly liked, or an idea or a bit of dialogue, I always love to hear what your favorite part was!