I hope there're no ghosts when I dream/
Telling me to change everything they see/
Falling back into my memories.
-Nothing for Christmas (New Found Glory)
Mary got takeout from the diner across the street the next morning, and they ate breakfast in the boys' room. Castiel lay on the bed right where Sam and Dean had dropped him after his fit last night, watching them in silence, his expression unreadable. They had pinned a tarp from the trunk of the Impala over the shattered window, and were all quietly pretending not to hear when the breeze rattled it.
"He say anything?" Mary asked as she sat at the table and passed around the food, noting as she did so that both boys snatched their food like starving wild animals, though Dean was markedly the more aggressive of the two.
As there were only two chairs, Dean perched on the edge of the nearest bed with his back to Castiel and balanced his meal on his lap with practiced ease, while Sam took the other chair. Dean looked over his shoulder at the Angel in response to the question, but it was Sam who answered.
"Not a word," Sam told her quietly, glancing briefly at Castiel and then apparently deciding to speak as if the Angel wasn't even in the room, "I haven't seen him like that since Naomi."
"Hey, he didn't try to punch the hell outta me, so I'd say it was at least a little bit different," Dean pointed out, waving a handful of napkins he'd pulled out of his paper bag at Sam.
"I wasn't there for that," Sam retorted, taking the napkins and putting them on the table to be forever after ignored, "I was trying not to get my ass kicked at the time. No, I was talking about earlier."
"When we were trying to save wiener kid Angel?" Dean asked.
"Yeah, him," Sam replied, adding for Mary's benefit (though it was actually no help at all), "That was before we knew Naomi had gotten her claws into Cass."
"Naomi?" Mary inquired.
"Another Angel," Sam explained.
Dean was more emphatic, "A real bitch. Brainwashed Cass and had him spyin' on us."
"Brain melted is more like it," Sam corrected, but Dean did not acknowledge this.
"She even tried to have him kill me," Dean grunted, "That backfired a little bit, didn't it?" he looked at Castiel again, "But she did pull your ass out of Purgatory, so I guess she did one thing right anyway," if he'd been hoping for some sort of response or input from Castiel, Dean was disappointed, for the Angel merely looked at him expressionlessly and said nothing.
"Purgatory?" Mary repeated.
"That's where monsters and idiots who stand too close to expiring Leviathans go," Dean replied, then smiled crookedly despite the haunted look in his eyes that indicated touching on an old wound as he added, "I was one of the idiots. Cass was a few fries short of a happy meal at the time, so of course he was the other idiot. Sammy had the good sense not to get caught in the supernatural black-hole."
Mary noticed a look pass between the brothers, saw that Sam looked down and became preoccupied with staring at his breakfast, but while she expected an accusing look in Dean's eyes to explain Sam's poorly concealed flinch, there didn't seem to be one.
As usual, there was more they weren't telling her.
Because she expected that the boys would clam up and ruthlessly change the subject if she asked about either of them, she instead looked Castiel's way and observed, "He's been through a lot, hasn't he?"
Dean and Sam both looked at Castiel, and Dean answered dryly, "Yeah. Seems to be a side effect of joinin' up with Team Free Will."
Sam rolled his eyes by way of comment, and -in typical fashion- Mary felt that she was being left out of some private joke or conversation that her boys were having right in front of her.
"Seems like somebody's always trying to take what we won that night," Dean said after a moment of silence had passed between them, "Especially from Cass."
Sam shrugged, and concluded, "A free Angel is still a new concept for the universe. Several billion years of habit is hard to break."
Dean looked at Mary as if she needed the clarification on this particular subject, "Before we kicked the Apocalypse's ass, rebellious Angels usually got straightened out or fired in pretty short order."
"Literally," Sam put in.
Dean continued as if his brother hadn't spoken, "Hell, Heaven tried makin' Cass straighten up and fly right. But..." he frowned as he looked for words, then concluded, "It... uh... it didn't stick."
"Good thing too," Sam remarked, "We'd have pretty much been screwed if Cass hadn't switched sides," he sighed, adding, "We were almost screwed anyway."
"It's amazing the difference one well aimed Molotov cocktail can make," Dean said.
Cass did not respond, except to stare at him with the same unsettlingly blank expression he'd had ever since he woke up last night. Dean behaved as if Cass had responded normally, and turned back to the others to continue the conversation. But his eyes were dark with worry.
They all knew what they were doing. Sam and Dean were reminiscing about battles won, about times when things were bleak but they'd gotten through together. They were doing it as if that would build a wall to defend against the bad coming their way, as something of a defiant yell against whatever fate might try to take their Angel from them now. By stating what they'd come through so far, they were indirectly belittling this thing -this sickness and injury- that had hold of their Angel here and now. It was also to reassure themselves of their Angel's toughness, talking about all he'd been through and somehow managed to survive and recover from.
They had many more experiences to draw on than Mary did of course. But still, even knowing the Angel for just a few months, Mary had come to understand several things about him, and she realized that fear they'd seen the night before could not have been all natural, because Castiel didn't fear pain, didn't fear being maimed, didn't fear getting killed. His fears were real and powerful, but they didn't find their source in any of those things. He flinched visibly in face of Dean's anger, but what he feared above all -Mary knew- was that Dean might die. That any of the Winchesters might die, especially if he could have done anything at all to prevent it was apparently more than he could bear, and he was willing to face death and "cosmic consequences" to avoid it. Mary knew this, because she had seen it, and because she felt that same fear for her boys all the time. It was the first thing she'd realized that she and Castiel had in common.
Last night's terror could not have come naturally from Castiel. It had to have been artificially induced. Sam himself had -apparently unknowingly- suggested it when he referred to Naomi's brainwashing, which had apparently brought on a notably unnatural fear response so strong that Sam found it memorable even now.
It was then that Mary remembered what she'd read about what made Angels lose feathers, and she realized that the spell hadn't been primarily a physical attack, but a psychological one. The spell's express purpose had been to rapidly bring the Angel to the level of stress that caused feather loss. Castiel was continuing to molt (though last night's cloud of shed feathers was still the most recent) which suggested the spell was still affecting him.
"What's the best way to counteract an ongoing spell?" Mary asked suddenly, and both Sam and Dean stared at her in surprise before quietly looking at each other and avoiding looking at Castiel, then looking back at her and answering almost simultaneously:
"Kill the witch."
Mary nodded thoughtfully, pushing aside the remains of her breakfast, "Then we've got work to do."
Over the sound of Dean's protests, Mom and Sam collectively decided that he should stay at the motel.
"I hate babysitting," Dean objected.
Sam exhaled sharply and gave his brother a stern rebuke, "Powers or no powers, Cass is not a baby in a trench-coat," he paused before adding thoughtfully, "Not anymore anyway."
"My point exactly," Dean said.
"What?" Mom inquired, but they ignored her.
"Look, someone's got to go through all the traffic cams in the areas around that farmhouse to see if we can spot Harrow... or at least her car. That might as well be you," Sam persisted.
He had a point, but Dean didn't want to admit that.
"Besides," Mom insisted, "Castiel shouldn't be left alone, even if Harrow isn't looking for him. And there's no arguing that he responds best to you, which counts for a lot right now, especially if he has another fit like he did last night."
"He bounced me off the wall, Mom," Dean reminded her sharply.
"And then he let you go, and you talked him down the rest of the way," Mom retorted.
Dean didn't appreciate that Mom had a point and Sam had a point and the only point Dean had was that he didn't want to stay here, sitting helplessly while his best friend deteriorated in front of him. Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he acknowledged that he was being damned selfish.
"Okay. Go. Find the witch," he addressed his final comment to Sam, looking his brother straight in the eye, "Give her a bullet for me, okay, Sam?"
"Okay," Sam nodded.
After they left, Dean sat at the table with his laptop. Technically, he was reviewing camera footage from the area surrounding the farmhouse, but the street the farmhouse was actually on didn't have a camera, and there were a lot of ways to go from there, and a lot of time to look at, especially since they didn't know if the witch had been at the farmhouse when they had been there, or any time since. It was an enormous -probably futile- task, and Dean's thoughts quickly strayed from it.
When he sat back to take a break, he became aware that Cass was watching him, just as he had been all morning, actually. It dawned on him gradually that Cass looked as if he were afraid Dean might suddenly vanish, lending further weight to Mom and Sam's argument that Dean should stay.
"You forget how to blink?" Dean asked after awhile, hoping Cass would react in some fashion that would let him know the Angel actually understood.
But Cass simply lay there, continued to stare at him with that unsettling intense silence of his. Dean frowned at him for a bit, then he decided to try a different tactic.
"You know what that Demon said to you is complete crap, right?" Dean asked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer from the Angel. He shook his head, continuing after a moment's thought, "I was a mess after Hell. The only thing I even knew how to do anymore was be angry. It was all I had left. Anger. And hate. And fear. That was it, that was all I was, all I knew how to be anymore."
Cass didn't react to this admission, though probably he'd already known. From almost the moment they'd met on Earth, Cass had seen right through him, to how worthless he'd felt, how broken he'd been on the inside. Dean had always wondered if Cass had actually read his mind at the time or if he'd just... known somehow; but he'd never felt like asking, since he wasn't sure he'd like the answer either way.
"I thought you were trying to replace my father, giving me orders and saying I wasn't seeing the big picture, sounding like you wanted to answer every question with 'I'll tell you when you're older'," Dean smiled a little at the recollection, "And that pissed me off. Then you... you told me you did have doubts, that you really weren't told all that much, didn't really know so much more about what was going on than we did. And I thought, 'My god, he's not trying to be my father, he's trying to be my brother, but the poor holy bastard don't know how.'"
Dean paused reflectively again before continuing, "There's nothin' I don't know about bein' a big brother, tryin' to take care of your kid brother, teach him, protect him... wishing he'd stop asking so damn many questions, that he'd quit trying to lose that innocence of youth so damn quick. And sometimes not knowin' the answers, but feelin' like you should and just getting frustrated and angry and takin' it out on him without meaning it... I knew all about that."
Cass tilted his head just slightly, almost quizzically, proof that he was listening.
"My first thought was 'If even Angels can have doubts, maybe even make mistakes, then maybe we actually have a shot at winning this thing.' My next thought was, 'If even the Heavenly Host doesn't know what it's doing, we are all so far beyond screwed it ain't even funny.' It wasn't until later that it finally hit me: I'd had a friend that whole time, one hadn't asked for and didn't want or know what to do with. I didn't know jack about what to do with this... thing that wasn't my father or my brother… or anything like anybody I'd ever known."
Dean halted, idly poking around on his laptop for a little before speaking again.
Quietly, his voice barely a whisper, he continued, "I'd had an empty space and didn't even know it. And that scared me more than all the rest. To have that kind of connection with something I didn't even understand, didn't know anything about, probably shouldn't trust, wasn't even sure could understand what friendship was... Hell, I wasn't sure I knew what friendship was. And, if I didn't, how was an Angel supposed to? I didn't know how to handle it, and I knew I sure as hell wasn't good enough to be friend to an Angel," he hesitated, "I mean, I thought y'all were a bunch of dicks... but you were still freakin' Holy... and goddamned terrifying."
Of course, not as terrifying as the thought of having something else -someone else- that he loved and might lose before all was said and done. That possibility had terrified him most of all, though he suspected that caring so deeply had never really been optional. Something had happened when Castiel dragged Dean's soul from Hell, a bond had been forged then that Dean at least hadn't expected, and that neither he nor Cass had been remotely prepared for.
"'Course, you were really family from the moment you switched to our side, weren't you?" it wasn't actually a question, or if it was Dean already knew the answer, "'Cause when you commit to something, you don't half-ass it. No, it's the whole ass or everybody can just pack up and forget the whole thing. You threw in with us, and you expected to die for it. But you never looked back. Not once. Whenever it came down to us or Heaven... you always stood with us, even when we treated you like crap."
It was difficult to remember that those wide blue eyes staring at him were actually just those of a vessel, not the... well... soul might not have been technically correct but it felt like the right term... he was actually addressing. It was impossible to imagine Cass any other way, but Dean inexplicably felt himself trying to do it, which was a little disconcerting.
He kept talking, "And we did do treat you like crap, I know. And it wasn't fair. It wasn't right."
Cass tilted his head in the opposite direction of before, and Dean had this mental image of a dog watching a hamster run on a wheel, and suspected that perplexed fascination might be about all Cass was getting out of this. But he'd started on the wheel now, and it was too late to stop.
"We didn't know how to have an Angel as part of the family any more than you knew how to be free. I guess maybe we couldn't see a picture bigger than ourselves, and you couldn't see one smaller than the universe, and that made it easier to pretend you didn't need us, that you could do just fine without our help. Made it feel like it was okay for us to just keep looking out for ourselves, leave you to... just deal with whatever the hell you had goin' on."
He knew he technically didn't have to keep talking. Cass never seemed to have any difficulty reading Dean's silences, in fact often seemed to struggle more with his words. There had certainly been times when Deah broke off mid-sentence, and Cass had almost never batted an eye, probably assuming that humans sometimes just stopped talking for no particular reason.
No, Cass deserved more credit than that. He probably knew exactly why Dean sometimes stopped talking right in the middle of a thought.
Dean sighed heavily, "That's given you a damned warped view of what family is, I know it has. I know you think you're this... this third wheel, and that's okay somehow, that we'll be fine on our own without you... but it's not true, and it never was. But... as much as we've needed you, you've needed us, and we weren't there for you like we shoulda been. And I just... I guess what I wanted to say is, don't let what that damned Demon said get to you... the truth is you deserve better than us, better than me. You've always deserved better."
Castiel remained silent, just looking at him with what appeared to be blank -yet untroubled- incomprehension. That was frequently his expression when Dean talked to him, and he'd expected nothing else at the moment. Castiel's listening silence was solid and comforting, and Dean realized it was all that he could ask for right now. In fact, all that really mattered was that he was still here, still alive, still with them.
They could figure out the rest.