Twenty-five

Brooke stayed with Castiel in the cabin while Sam and Dean went out to destroy Dick Roman. Meg stayed behind, as well, watching the angel while Brooke napped on the couch. She had decided to get sleep while she could, since she was unsure how long all of this would take, or whether it would even go the way it was supposed to.

And, as it turned out, it did not go the way it was supposed to. Sam and Dean returned much sooner than expected, and they were pissed off and scared. Bobby, whose ghost was still hanging around, had gone vengeful, and had possessed a poor maid and dragged her out of the motel room where he had been stuck, and used her to go after Dick Roman. When Sam and Dean showed up, Sam remembered the maid's face, and knew that it had to be Bobby.

They'd been so close, but Bobby had attacked Sam, and then seemed to realize what he was doing, and had vanished, leaving the poor maid in a crumpled heap on the ground. Sam and Dean had had to abort the mission to kill Dick Roman so that they could take the woman to a hospital.

Brooke sat on the couch and muttered, "Goddamn it, Bobby…"

Castiel busied himself making food for Sam and Dean. He'd been cleaning, earlier, trying to make himself useful since he wasn't going to go with them to kill the Leviathans.

"Tell me, again, why you turned tail for some maid?" Meg asked, leaning against a post with a beer in her hand. "You were right there."

"Shut up, Meg," Dean replied.

"Because Dick made more Dicks," Sam explained. "He must've kept a chunk of the original somewhere. They'd all have to touch it." He went on to explain how they had seen multiple Dick Romans on all the security cameras at the place where Roman was supposed to be. He'd copied himself, so that it would be much harder to kill him; how was one supposed to tell who the original was?

As Brooke listened to Sam's explanation, she began to sense a shift in Castiel's Grace; it rose in pitch and frequency, which it only did when he was upset or injured. She looked past Sam, at her angel, who was shuffling about the kitchen looking busy, despite having nothing to do. Cass? she asked, but he did not respond to her.

"Hey, shifty, what's your problem?" Dean asked, apparently having picked up Castiel's odd behavior, too.

Castiel picked up a plate that was already dry and began to dry it again. "Do we need a cat?" he asked. "Doesn't this place feel one species short?" He glanced at Brooke, then looked away again, immediately, unable to hold her gaze.

"You got anything to say on the topic of Dicks?" Dean asked, ignoring his question about cats.

Brooke tried to hold her face together at his Dick question. Phrasing.

"Crowley was pretty sure that you could help," Dean continued.

"I can't help," Castiel snapped. "You understand? I can't."

Brooke stared at him. She hadn't heard that tone from his mouth in… a year? Not since before he'd become "God."

Now, though, his voice wavered, like he was on the edge of tears. "I destroyed… everything, and I will destroy everything again. Can we please just leave it at that?" He gazed at the floor.

Brooke stood up slowly, amazed that he had finally admitted, aloud, to anyone but her, what was truly wrong with him. All that fear bubbling up underneath his cheery exterior. The pain he had been trying and failing to hide…

But Dean stood up, too, and he was not amazed like she was. "No," he said. "No we can't."

"Dean," Sam said, but was cut off immediately.

"We can't leave it!" Dean snapped. He stared at Castiel. "You let these fucking things in," he said, his voice low. "So you don't get to make a sandwich. You don't get a damned cat! Nobody cares that you're broken, Cass. Clean up your mess!"

Brooke started to come forward, to beat the shit out of Dean—she was not exactly objective when it came to her angel—but Castiel had come toward Dean, as well. "You know," he said, staring at Dean with serious eyes, "we should play Twister."

Brooke could not maintain her anger at Dean after Castiel had said something like that. She sighed and sat back down on the couch. When he disappeared without her, however, she sat up straighter, staring around the room in shock, as if he were still there and had simply turned invisible. "Cass?" she whispered, terrified that he had gone off somewhere without her. He had never gone off without her, not in a long time.

The others spoke around her, about the reason that Castiel was needed in the fight against Dick Roman (all the Leviathans had inhabited his body, so he'd be able to pick out the real one from the copies) but Brooke barely heard them. "Cass?" she repeated, louder, trembling in panic. She realized, then, just how co-dependent she had come to be with Castiel, how much she needed to be near him, crazy or not. How much she craved his presence, his mind connected to hers.

He reappeared, on the floor… on a Twister pad… playing himself.

Brooke nearly collapsed in relief. She went over to him, weak-kneed, and sat cross-legged on the floor before him. "Castiel," she whispered.

He glanced up at her.

"I love you."

A smile lit up his whole face, his blue eyes shining in delight. "I love you, too," he said, brightly.

###

Later that night, Brooke sat around with Sam and Dean, trying to help them with their Dick Roman situation, since Cass was still out of commission. Dean sat in front of a laptop screen, staring at footage of Dick Roman; he'd been doing that for half an hour, and they weren't getting anywhere.

"There's no real point in looking for a tell," he said. "They all downloaded Dick's brain. They've all got the same tells."

"All right," said Sam, pacing back and forth. "Then I think the question is, 'What would the real Dick be doing?'"

"Is that the best you can do?" said a voice that Brooke had not heard in a long time. She spun around from looking over Dean's shoulder at the laptop screen and stared at ghost of Bobby Singer, who now stood in the room with them.

"Bobby," Brooke said, her voice cracking on his name. She brought her hands up to her mouth.

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, smiling. "Hey, girl," he said, but his eyes were sad.

Slowly, she reached out and touched his shoulder, half-expecting her fingers to go right through him. He was solid, but touching him induced a bone-deep chill in her body, and she pulled her fingers away. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she sniffed and held them at bay, forcing a smile onto her face.

"Bobby," Sam murmured. "We didn't know if you—

"Well, you should've," Bobby cut in. "You got the flask." He glanced down at Dean, shaking his head. "Dumb. You should have burned it right off."

Everyone stared at the ghost.

"Bobby," Dean began, but he was cut off.

"I'm still jonesing to go back," Bobby admitted, his voice a low growl. "Grab some poor bastard, kamikaze 'im, goin' after Dick." He rubbed at his arm, seeming to shiver. "It's bad." He stopped talking, noticing the footage of Dick Roman still playing on Dean's laptop. The laptop lid suddenly closed, and Bobby breathed heavily.

Dean stood up.

"Let's be real," Bobby said. "I damn near killed you. And that woman." The maid.

"It wasn't your fault, Bobby—not really," Sam said.

"Right," said Bobby, nodding. "That's just what ghosts turn into."

Brooke, standing there, staring at Bobby, felt her heart break all over again for the man who she had come to see as a father, or at least a stand-in for one.

"I really bet the farm I could outsmart that," Bobby continued.

"So, what's it feel like?" Dean asked.

"What? Goin' vengeful?" Bobby took a deep breath, glancing off into space. He looked at Brooke for a moment, then turned his eyes back to Dean. "It's an itch you can't scratch out. Look… I'm done. Go get Dick. But don't do it 'cos you think it'll scratch the itch. Do it 'cos it's the job." He stared at around at all three of them, then, his eyes wide and serious. "And when it's your time… go."

…

They built a fire, to burn Bobby's flask, to send him off for good.

Brooke withstood the freezing cold of a ghost's embrace to hug Bobby, since the last time she had seen him had been the day that Castiel had walked himself, under the influence of the Leviathans, into the reservoir. He patted her back awkwardly.

"Here's to… running into you guys on the other side," he said, with a small smile. "Only… not too soon. All right?"

Dean tossed Bobby's flask into the fire, and all three stood and watched as Bobby vanished in a plume of flames.

Brooke was a hair's breadth from a complete breakdown when she turned away and saw Castiel, invisible to all but her, sitting on the steps, watching. His eyes met hers as she reached out to him, with a hand, and then collapsed, sobbing. She hadn't had time, before, to truly process Bobby's death; she'd been too worried about Castiel being in a coma, and then being insane after he woke up. Now, she had no more strength left to hold back the tide of tears, that image of Bobby disappearing in fire seared into her brain.

In the same moment that her knees hit the floor, Castiel appeared, crouched in front of her, the wind from his wings rustling her hair, cooling her face where it touched her tears. He touched her shoulder, and they were gone.

He had teleported them outside somewhere, and it was cold, but Brooke could barely feel it. She was blinded, entirely, by pain. The pain of losing Bobby; the pain of caring for a half-insane angel who had once been her rock; the utter exhaustion of… everything. Of remembering everything: keeping Castiel's secrets to the detriment of everyone else; crawling along the ground toward him and pulling pathetically at his pant legs as he caused blood to pour from every orifice in her head; being thrown down by him, when she was so used to being picked up. There was so much going on in this meltdown—Bobby had simply been the cherry on top of the cake. Rather, the straw that broke the camel's back.

Castiel sat, cross-legged, in the grass and pulled Brooke into his lap. She was hardly aware of him for a long time, crying so hard that she could hardly get a breath in. Slowly, though, in small increments, she became aware of a constant presence. A presence that had been there from the beginning of all of this. And for once, in the past few weeks, his mind seemed steady, as if the need to comfort Brooke gave Castiel the strength to find his own peace of mind.

Slowly, slowly, she felt his hands on her back, in her hair. Stroking, soothing, gently pulling at strands of hair. He had pushed one hand into her shirt so that the flat of his hand rested on her back, skin-on-skin. Warmth radiated from him. And he was murmuring something… At first she didn't know what he was saying; he wasn't speaking English. But eventually, as she calmed more and more, she began to understand: He was murmuring to her in Enochian.

It was not, exactly, a romantic-sounding language, but it had become something of a lullaby to her. Always, when their minds were connected, there was a steady stream of Enochian going in the back of Castiel's mind, and so, in the back of hers. He was able to think hundreds of thoughts all at once, and only the ones he thought directly to her were ever thought in English. All the rest, all those small thoughts to himself, or memories playing in his mind, were in Enochian. It was the last thing she heard when she fell asleep, and the first thing she heard when she awoke: that calm, steady, overlapping voice speaking hundreds of times at once, in Enochian.

And so, as Castiel held her in his arms, calm for the first time in weeks, he murmured, gently, softly, a steady stream of Enochian, and his words were thus:

"Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer. / From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I / For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy. / I will abide in thy tabernacle for ever: I will trust in the covert of thy wings. Selah…" [Psalm 61:1-4].

He said these words, over and over again, in his native tongue, the long vowels humming in his throat like music.

When the same prayer had been repeated perhaps a dozen times, Brooke was finally able to hear it for what it was. Castiel repeated it, still, a dozen more times, slowly, all the while rubbing her back, playing with her hair.

And Brooke began to calm. Eventually, her tears stopped, and her breathing slowed. She began to grow incredibly sleepy, warm and comfortable in Castiel's lap, and tired out from a good cry. She found herself nodding, her head resting against his chest. He sat with her for a time; it was impossible to know how long, for she was hanging between awake and asleep, and time is altered in those states. Now, instead of a prayer, she heard only the constant hum of his Grace, and, faintly, his heartbeat.

As she drifted off, completely, he stood, cradling her in his arms, and teleported back into the cabin. Gently, he lowered her down onto the couch. His face hovered above her like a dream. I can help you sleep, if you like, he said, his voice a gentle whisper.

She silently accepted his offer, and he pressed two fingers to her forehead.

She was gone into deep and dreamless sleep.

###

The good cry and dreamless sleep had been just what Brooke had needed. When she awoke the next morning (with Castiel right there to offer her a bowl of oatmeal with freshly-picked fruit from some orchard in France) she felt like a new woman. And that was just what was needed to go off and face Dick Roman.

As they stalked the halls of the big fancy building later that day, while Meg distracted the guards and Sam went off to find Kevin, Brooke felt that nothing could stop them. Castiel seemed a little more put together than he had been in the past few weeks, and he and Dean had been speaking to another as friends again. Now they were here to face the Big Bad, and, despite the danger, Brooke felt that all was right with the world again.

Oh, how wrong she was.

Finally, they found the bastard. It had taken endless minutes of skulking through the building, going door to door and window to window. Three was a crowd, so Brooke stayed back to watch their rear, to guard the entrances and exits as they moved through them, while Castiel sneaked a peek at each new Dick Roman, looking for the real one. They found him, and they stabbed him, and they stabbed him again.

Brooke, now that they had found the true Leviathan leader, stood beside Castiel, shoulder to shoulder, as they watched the destruction of him. But he did something strange as he died: he laughed.

Brooke took one step back, but snatched Castiel's hand at the same time. Why is he laughing? she demanded, as the air in the room began to pulsate. Every cell in her body told her to run far away, but she grasped her angel's hand harder, instead. Sam burst into the room, with Kevin—

—Brooke covered her face with her arm, clutching Castiel's hand so hard that she could no longer feel her fingers, as Dick Roman exploded into black goo—

###

Brooke gasped like a fish out of water as she came to her senses again, on her hands and knees beside a standing Castiel. Slowly, she rose to her feet, looking around at the dark woods surrounding them. "W-Where are we?" she asked, breathing heavily.

Castiel did not answer her, but pressed two fingers to her forehead for a moment. Suddenly, she was clean again, and not covered in goop.

"Thanks," she muttered, still glancing around.

Castiel began to move through the woods, and Brooke followed instinctively. She saw, just ahead, a shape on the ground. It was…

"Dean," Castiel called, and came to stand before Winchester. "Wake up." His voice was very low, and very serious, and his mind seemed whole again, and familiar to Brooke. It felt… the way his mind had felt, long ago, when she had first met him. Cold, distant, yet not quite as cold and distant as it had been back then. He seemed to have barricaded his emotions against something.

Brooke, who was beginning to freak out a little bit—where were they?—watched as Dean awoke and stood up.

"Good," said Castiel. "We need to get out of here."

"Where are we?" Dean asked.

Castiel looked at him, and then at Brooke. Then he turned back to Dean. "You don't know?"

Dean stared at him, thinking. "Last I remember, we ganked Dick."

Castiel's mind, whole a moment ago, slipped again. His eyes were very wide, as he asked, "And where would he go, in death?"

"Oh fuck," Brooke said, finally sifting through Castiel's thoughts enough to figure out what he was trying to tell them. "Fuck," she repeated.

"Wait," said Dean, glancing around again. "Wait, are you tellin' me—

"Every soul here is a monster," said Castiel. "This is where they come to prey upon each other for all eternity."

Brooke wanted to bury her face in her hands, but was too stressed to do so. She was on high alert, jumping at every twig snap in the background.

"We're in Purgatory?" Dean said. "How do we get out?"

Castiel glanced away. "I'm afraid we're much more likely to be ripped to shreds."

Dean turned slowly, to look around some more, over his shoulder, as things began to appear in the trees. Strange creatures with glowing red eyes—

Castiel was about to leave them both.

Fuck no, Brooke thought, and latched onto his wrist, digging her fingers into his flesh until she felt them bite into his skin.

The Leviathans know I'm here, Castiel hissed, silently. I must leave you both. or they'll come after you, too.

Brooke only dug her fingers into his skin harder, and the Grace in her blood and bones flared to the surface, blinding her and shining light upon the shadows surrounding them. When she spoke, she spoke in two voices, her own, and the angel's: You will not leave me, Castiel. I Am You.

Dean stood and stared at them both as they fought silently.

Castiel argued, wordlessly, for a few moments longer, then he conceded, closing his eyes and bowing his head.

"Cass?" Dean asked, worry clear in his voice. He turned to Brooke when the angel would say nothing. "Brooke, what—

But Castiel teleported them away, and the rest of Dean's words were snatched by the torrent of his wings.

"You committed the acts," Brooke said, as they stood side-by-side in the dark. "But I was an accessory—to deceit, to murder, to it all."

Castiel's head was still bowed beside her.

"If we are to be punished for our sins," Brooke whispered into the night, now holding Castiel's hand instead of digging her nails into his wrist, "then we will be punished together."

…

Our Father, who art in Heaven,

Hallowed be thy Name.

Thy Kingdom come.

Thy will be done

On earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

As we forgive them that trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.

END.

A/N: We've come to the end of the second book in this series. Thank you so much for those who continue to read, and I hope that, if nothing else, this story offers you a distraction from the insanity of 2020. The third book in the series will be titled, "Held," and I will be uploading the first chapter of it shortly, so keep an eye out! Probably, by the time you're finished reading this chapter, it'll already be up. I love you all - Fira.