BEGINNING - YESTERDAY'S CHILD
"You look weary, my husband," Eve said to Adam. "Sit down, and I'll pour you a glass of wine. Oh, and Abel and Sarah brought some cheese for you to try."
"Another new type of cheese?" Adam said, smiling.
"You'll like this, Father," Sarah said, bringing him a tray. "We call it 'brie'. It's a soft cheese that you can eat by itself, or with bread."
"Or with apples," Abel said, and Sarah rolled her eyes, but she was still smiling. "Your son is forever inventing new food combinations," she said to her father-in-law. "He feeds me lamb, with fruit from the orchard." She went back to where Abel was sitting, and he pulled her onto his lap. "I thought you liked that," he said, kissing his wife tenderly on the cheek.
Sarah smiled mischievously. "It's not the food that I like, it's the method of delivery," she remarked.
Eve laughed merrily as she brought the jug of wine and four goblets into the sitting area of her and Adam's cottage. She loved her daughter-in-law. Sarah was a perfect match for Abel. Their younger son had been extremely shy and introverted before Sarah had come into the region. As soon as she had, Abel had fallen in love with Sarah, and she with him, and Adam and Eve had welcomed their daughter-in-law warmly. God Himself had performed their wedding ceremony. Cain had stood up proudly beside his younger brother, and Cain's wife Hekebah had served as Sarah's Matron, because Sarah had no family of her own.
Now, all three couples were blissfully happy. Cain and Hekebah had a boy and a girl, and they were expecting their third child in a couple of months. Usually, they would all get together for a family meal at least once a week, but Hekebah tired easily with her advanced pregnancy. So Sarah would take food to her sister-in-law, and help with the children, and Abel and Cain would tend to the animals and do repairs at their respective homes and farm enclosures. Sometimes, Sarah and Abel would make up stories to tell Cain's two young children, and Cain and his wife would chime in, providing different voices for the characters. After family dinners, Adam would sometimes bring out a fermented beverage he had been experimenting with, and he and his sons would partake as the women would smile indulgently at their husbands.
There had never been any serpent, nor any forbidden fruit tree. Nor had there ever been any sibling rivalry between Cain and Abel. The brothers were good friends, and there was no reason for Cain to be jealous of Abel, because Cain had a loving wife, and they had their children to love, too.
Abel and Sarah were childless, but they were happy that way. God had blessed them with each other, and with a happy, healthy and burgeoning family in their nieces and nephews. Cain and Hekebah would go on to have eight children, and Adam and Eve would live on for hundreds of years, serving as a shining beacon of love to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
At night, once the sheep had settled, Castiel and Gail would bed down for the night. Unless the weather was inclement, they would usually sleep on down feather blankets, under the stars. And they would sleep, deeply and soundly, every night. When they had first gotten there, Gail had told Cas that she would like to eat and sleep, just like the rest of their family.
There had been some discussion about staying indefinitely. How could they not consider it? This was truly Paradise; a world without murder, and jealousy, and pain, and death. Well, for the most part, at least. Eventually, Adam and Eve would be called to their reward, and the generations of family they had sired would miss them very much. But as far as crime, and hate, and intolerance, there was none. There was only love, and acceptance. One of Crowley's sons had married a Nubian, and one of his daughters had married a woman from the next village, and God the Father had officiated at both weddings with an equal amount of pride.
But Cas and Gail knew that they would have to move on from this place. Castiel had been unable to resist coming here with her, and seeing what their lives would have been like had they been allowed to be here together from the very Beginning. Death had said that he could use the Book three times, and he really only needed to go to Germany once. This trip had been a bonus. With all that they had been through lately, Cas had wanted Gail to experience true Paradise, if only for a short while. In actual fact, although it had been several years that they had been here, it would only seem like a minute or two to Sam and Dean.
"Have you been happy here, 'Sarah'?" Cas asked Gail, as they cuddled under the blanket. It was another cool night, just the way the couple liked it.
"Are you kidding?" she replied with a half-smile. "I may just wrap my arms around the nearest fruit tree, and refuse to go."
The couple smiled at each other, and Gail kissed Cas on the side of his face. "I love you, Cas...I mean, Abel," she amended. Then, she nudged him. "Hey, why'd you name me Sarah?"
Cas shrugged, giving her a gentle squeeze. "You were Sarah before, remember? Truthfully, it was the first Biblical-sounding name I could think of. Unless you wanted to be Nebuchadnezzar."
Gail laughed and laughed. She had always thought that Cas had a good sense of humour, but it tended to go overshadowed in their modern family. Or maybe she should amend that to: what was left of their family. But the couple had had lots of opportunity to talk here, because when the stars came out at night, there wasn't much else to do. So he had assured her that he could make everything right, and she believed him. If they could get their family members back in the current era, Cas could fix what he needed to fix in the past, and then, the current era would be Paradise.
There was one other thing that they could do when the stars came out and the sheep were dozing, and they had been doing a lot of that, too. With all of the deaths in their family and all of the missions they'd been on, the couple's romantic life had been severely lacking.
Cas was caressing Gail lightly under the blanket as she was still giggling over his joke. "I guess I should consider myself lucky that I even have a name at all," she said, raising an eyebrow. "Aren't a lot of Old Testament women just referred to as 'so-and-so's wife'?"
He was kissing her neck now. "Maybe we should simply refer to me as 'Gail's husband', then," Cas said softly. "That's all I've ever wanted to be, anyway."
"You say the most romantic things," she said. She took his hand and kissed it, licking the knuckle. "Too bad more of those men didn't think like you do. I don't think a lot of them even thought of women as people, back then." She sighed. "I wonder how things would have changed throughout history if we had all been a big, happy family in Genesis, like we are right now."
"Unfortunately, we will never get the opportunity to find out," Cas said, sighing.
"I'm sorry, sweetie. I didn't mean to make you sad," Gail apologized. "We've been so happy here. I want us to leave on a happy memory."
"And so we will," Cas replied, smiling again. He couldn't fault her for expressing herself, and the way she felt. He loved it when they shared their hopes, their dreams, and their feelings in general. That was all that he had ever wanted. Instead, he had been given a lonely and emotionless existence for the most part, punctuated only by brief bursts of colour when Gail had been allowed to wander into his sphere of existence. Was it any wonder that he had wanted her with him from the very beginning, this time?
Cas kissed her on the mouth, and his hand went between her legs. Gail had already had them open for him, and he was touching her lightly. She moved closer to him, and he understood that she wanted him to hurry, so he did. Anything she wanted. They were being given a rare opportunity now, and he didn't intend to miss a moment of it.
A minute later, Gail said, "Cas, I need you now," and he was glad, because he didn't know how much longer he could stand not being a part of her. So he entered her slowly, and when the two of them started to move together, all he could say was how much he loved her, and how much he would always love her.
And then, in the morning, they were gone.
MIDDLE - ANGEL IN HER KISS
Gail was sitting beside Sam at the bunker table, looking at his laptop screen. He was scrolling through the locations of the Demon hangouts that he and Dean knew about.
"I gotta go see a man about a horse," Dean told them. He left the room as Sam rolled his eyes. "Believe me, you don't want to know," he said to Gail.
A few minutes later, the door at the top of the stairs creaked open, and Gail looked up to see Cas coming down the stairs. But, even though he was deathly ill, he hurried down.
"Oh, hey, Cas. Good to see you. It's been a while," Dean said, walking by his friend on his way to the coffee machine.
But Cas was looking right at Gail, and as they made eye contact, she stood slowly from her chair. Cas strode around the library table, and Gail was already walking around to meet him halfway. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her to him, and she put her arms around his neck.
Gail had a split second to wonder how freaked out Sam and Dean were going to be about this, and she smiled through the kiss as Cas's mouth came down on hers and he wrapped his arms tightly around her waist, pulling her body close to him. Then Cas's tongue touched her lips, and she opened her mouth to his.
Sam and Dean were looking at the two of them, astonished. Cas and Gail were the only ones who knew who they were together in these scenarios. Just as they had been Abel and Sarah to the first Biblical family, as far as the Winchesters were concerned, their new human acquaintance and their long-time Angel friend had never met each other before.
Eventually, the kiss broke, and Gail and Cas looked at the brothers, amused at their expressions. "What's the matter? Haven't you ever heard of love at first sight?" Cas said, and Gail laughed merrily. She loved her husband any way she could get him, but Past Cas was turning out to be a much more relaxed, funny Cas than she was used to. Maybe when they got back to the present timeline, she would have a talk with the guys about letting Cas get a word in edgewise, every once in a while.
"Excuse us, for a minute," Cas said to the Winchesters. "We're going to my room. We'll be back in a few minutes. Maybe an hour."
He linked hands with Gail, and led her towards the hallway. She was laughing again, picturing the brothers' looks of bewilderment. They went down the corridor to his room, and because this was the timeline when they had first met, Cas stumbled over to the bed when they got there. He was low on his Grace. But Gail knew exactly what to do for him, because she'd done it before. She rushed across the hall to the bathroom and prepared the cure, just as she had that night. But this time, it didn't seem gross, because she loved Cas. And this time when she brought him the glass of water, he drank it down eagerly, because he loved Gail.
Then Cas took her in his arms and said, "If I had all of this to do all over again, I would never, ever let you go. I would have done everything differently. Everything."
But even as Cas was saying it, a frisson of doubt was running through him. He had Gail with him now, and the Winchesters waiting for them back in Africa. But if he did as he was supposed to do, what assurance did Cas have that Death would let Castiel keep them, this time?
Cas looked at Gail, and she was giving him the doe eyes now. Death was not going to take pity on them. An ancient entity like him cared nothing for love, and laughter, and light. Death just wanted the accounts balanced. Cas kept thinking that if he improved himself throughout the centuries, that circumstances would change for the better. But every single time he'd tried, everything went horribly wrong. This wasn't about Germany at all. It was about Castiel. And, tragically, it was about Gail, too.
END - NEVER WITHOUT YOU
Cas and Gail sat there on the bed in his old room at the bunker, hands clasped together. He had just told her that he would never let go of her.
But if he held to that promise now, what would happen to them all? Could Cas fix everything that had gone wrong in all of their lives? Or maybe the more important question was: SHOULD he?
He looked away from Gail now, because it was too difficult to think of what he had to think of next while he was looking at her sweet face. Cas had to put his emotions aside and think like the army General he used to be. The problem was not Death, or Castiel, or what the price of tea was in England. The problem wasn't even what Castiel had opted to do in Germany. It was love. Love was like a disease, a virus that infected your blood, and your vessel, and your brain, so badly that it rendered you incapable of logical thought and sensible judgement. If individuals did not love, they could not suffer the intense and exquisite pain of having their loved ones ripped away from them. It was a simple enough equation to understand. Castiel may not agree with Stu on the interpretation of numbers, but one thing the two men could agree on was that numbers didn't lie. The common denominator here was obvious. Cas had considered pulling the trigger on the biggest and most heartbreaking decision of his existence before, but he had lacked the courage. But he had the courage now, because it was fueled with love, and compassion.
Cas looked at his wife. He gently disengaged one of his hands from hers and touched her face. "You and I will never meet," he said, and he moved his hand to her forehead.
Gail gasped. "No, Cas! Don't - "
But that was all she was able to get out. Cas modified her memory, and then he disappeared.
Gail was sitting in the back of the Impala as Dean hung up his cell phone. He turned to Sam. "He says he's not coming," he told his brother. "He can't. He's too sick."
"Too sick?" Sam said, puzzled. "Cas is an Angel. How can he be sick?"
"An Angel?" Gail said, startled. "Your friend is an Angel?"
"Oh, way to go, Sammy," Dean said, rolling his eyes. "We just met this girl. Why don't you tell her all about the Men of Letters, too, while you're at it?"
"If Cas was gonna come over to help us, she would have found out what he was anyway, Dean," Sam pointed out.
"Well, he's not coming," Dean said bluntly. "I don't know what's going on with him these days. Half the time he's AWOL, and the other half of the time it sounds like he's got the plague, or something. Can Angels be psychosomatic?"
Gail's head snapped up. Where had she heard that word before, recently?
"Ooooh, that's a big word for you," Sam teased his older brother.
Dean was annoyed. "You know, I wish everybody would quit talking to me like I'm the village idiot when I use words that are more than one syllable," he fumed. "Just because I didn't go to a fancy college to learn how to talk down to people..."
The brothers began to snipe at each other, but Gail was no longer paying attention. Dean had said the same thing to her and Cas on Kilimanjaro, about Sam.
"It's a good thing he's got that page from the Book of Life, because I'm going to kill him," Gail murmured aloud. But nonetheless, she was starting to smile. Now she knew why this had felt so weird. Her other half was missing. Obviously, Cas had forgotten that God the Father had given Gail the power to overcome the memory modifications she had experienced in the past. Either that, or his heart hadn't really been in it. She hoped that was the case. Gail understood why he had done that, and the part of her that didn't want to kick his Angelic ass thought it had been a really sweet and self-sacrificing gesture. But there was no way. If he thought he was getting away with this, he was nuts.
"You guys are in luck," she told the Winchesters. "I'm a healer. If you'll take me to where your friend is, I can cure him."
Dean had been skeptical, but after Gail had persuaded Sam she was on the level by healing a small cut on his arm, the brothers became convinced. So Dean drove to the motel where Cas was holed up and pounded on the door until Cas opened it.
The Angel had a thick blanket around his shoulders, and his hair was sticking up in about seven different directions. Gail had to bite her cheeks to keep from laughing. She reminded herself that Sam and Dean had no idea what was going on here; she was a stranger to them, and Cas was like their brother. They would think she was crazy if she started to laugh, accusing her husband of having "sex hair".
Cas was ill, of course, because the two of them had never met at the bunker. But that didn't matter. Dean strode into the room and said, "This is Gail. She's a healer. She told us she can cure you of whatever the hell it is you've got going on, here. So sit down, shut up, and do what she says."
Cas smiled sadly at Gail, and she gave him a toothy grin. It was a pity that this incarnation of hers was a human, or else she would have sent him a message over their frequency. Something along the lines of "nana-nana-boo-boo".
She moved swiftly past him to the desk in the room. There were a couple of water glasses sitting on top of it. She grabbed one. "I'll be right back."
When Gail returned with the glass of water, she sat down on the bed next to Cas. They made eye contact, and then Cas gave her an almost imperceptible nod. He drank the glass of water down. Then he handed the glass back to her, and their hands touched for a moment. Gail started to smile. Now, they could -
Cas touched her forehead, modifying her memory again.
Dammit! Gail was getting really pissed off, now. Cas was gonna get it good, the next time she got her hands on him. Had he forgotten that he was only the second-most stubborn person in the known universe? He ought to know; he was married to the first.
But this time, Cas tried to get cute. If "cute" meant being a pain in the butt, that was. He told Dean that he was too sick to receive visitors, and he refused to give his friend the location of the new motel to which he had moved.
Gail let out a frustrated breath. "Give me that," she said, yoinking the cell phone out of Dean's hand.
"Look, Cas," Gail said angrily into the phone. "I need your help. My brother Frank is being held captive by Demons. Crowley's having him tortured right now, and he's going to die a slow, painful death. Do you want that on your conscience?"
Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Wow. This girl didn't mess around, did she? But Dean was smirking a little, too. She might not know Cas, but she sure knew how to push his buttons.
Sure enough, Cas sighed, and gave them his location. He didn't want that to happen to Frank. He loved Frank. Gail had known exactly what to say to get Cas to capitulate.
This time, when Gail brought out the glass of water, she stood out of Cas's reach. She even handed the glass to Sam to give to Cas, just in case. And after Cas drank it, she said, "You know, I used to have this boyfriend. He thought he was really, really clever. And he was, for a while. But he forgot that I'm smart too, and I'm stubborn as hell. He tried pushing me away, but I told him he was wasting his time, and mine. And I reminded him that we had a couple of friends who would be getting mighty anxious to see us, back at the place where we just saw them."
The Winchesters were looking at her and Cas, thoroughly bewildered. Gail was trying not to look at the expressions on their faces. She was getting fed up with Cas, but also, in another way, it was too funny. Poor Sam and Dean. Every time they went through this whole song and dance, it was a new experience for the brothers. Of course they would be confused. But she couldn't help herself. Cas needed to stop it.
He seemed to realize that, too. Cas looked at the brothers. "Please excuse us for a moment," he said to them.
"Why, what did you do?" Sam joked, and Cas's lips twitched. Dean did a double-take. Had Cas actually understood that was supposed to be a joke? Maybe they were finally rubbing off on him.
The brothers shrugged. "OK, well, I would ask you what the hell is going on here, but I know you're just gonna give us some b.s. Angel crap," Dean said impatiently. "But don't take too long. We've gotta find this Frank guy before those Demons make mincemeat out of him."
Sam and Dean left the room and as the door closed behind them, Gail winced. "I wish he would quit saying that," she remarked. "It hurts just as much every time he does."
Cas got off the bed and started to move toward Gail, but she backed up and held up her hands. "Stop, right there," she said quickly. "That's close enough."
Cas did smile, now. He couldn't help it. She was just so cute.
"You're going to have to stop this, sweetie," she told him. "It's getting ridiculous. Poor Sam and Dean. They have no idea what's going on. And the current Sam and Dean are waiting for us back in Africa, with only Death for company. We've got to rescue them from that." She sighed. "Look, Cas, I understand what you're trying to do, here. But you can just forget it. I'm not going to let go of you."
"I was trying to let go of YOU," Cas said softly.
"Well, now that we've seen how well THAT'S worked out for you, I need to ask you a question," Gail said to her husband. "You once told me that love trumps everything. Do you still believe that?" He was silent, so she said again, "Tell me you still believe that, Cas. Please."
He let out a breath. "Yes, of course I believe that. That's why I wanted you to be without me," Cas said soberly. "Think of all the suffering you've undergone, ever since you had the misfortune to fall in love with me. Camelot, the New World, that time in New York when I couldn't get to you in time...Or how about now, when we've lost family member after family member, until the grief has almost made us lose our minds? Love is a disease, Gail. I'M a disease. If you would let me do this, all of that pain and suffering would just go away."
Gail was beside herself. "If I could trust you enough to get closer to you right now, I would smack you!" she exclaimed. "Don't you dare stand there and say that to me! After all the time we've been together, don't you dare stand there and call yourself a disease! Our love isn't a disease, Cas. It's the best thing that ever happened to either one of us, in our entire miserable lives. I don't care about any of that stuff, Cas. Bring it on. I would go through all of that again, for the rest of eternity. Do you know why? Because it doesn't even come close to the pain and suffering I would go through if I wasn't with you. When we got married, you vowed to obey me, and we joke about that from time to time. But, I'll tell you what: I'm invoking that, right now. I'm ordering you to stop, Cas. Just stop. It doesn't matter what you try to do, I'll fight you every time. You're always saying you want to see me happy. Well, this is the way to do it."
She was a little out of breath from her big speech now, and she was still angry, too. Cas recognized that look on her face. Like any husband who had ever been skating on thin ice with his wife, Cas knew that it was time to do some serious groveling.
"Do you remember when we went to see that Rom woman?" he said to Gail. "The one who told us our fortunes, when we were in Romania, looking for the Hell Tablet?" he started to say.
"Oh, yeah. I think I might remember something about that," Gail said in a sarcastic tone. "That was way back, when you and I were together. Correction: back when you WANTED us to be together."
Cas frowned. He had really hurt her. Now he felt bad. Which was the whole point, of course. Gail did understand where he had been coming from, but he couldn't be allowed to get away with it.
"Look, Cas," she said, sighing with frustration. "You and I are married. We even had two weddings! Either we're united, or we're not. We were happy, Cas. Weren't we? Despite all of the turmoil, all of the crap that was thrown our way, weren't we happy?"
"Yes," Cas answered immediately. "Of course we were. I'm sorry, my love. I'll use the page, and I'll go back and do it all over again. I'll do it perfectly, this time. You'll see. We'll be happy again, I promise. I'll see to it, personally."
"Yeah?" she said skeptically. "Just like you were going to see to it this time? And the time before that, and the time before that? Look, Cas, I get it. I really do. I get the urge to go back, too, sometimes, and erase all our mistakes. Make everything perfect. Believe me, I do. But nothing is ever going to be just perfect, and if you keep on doing this, you'll end up with nothing. Not even me. Please, Cas. Please. Promise me you'll stop. I can't take this anymore."
Cas relented. How could he not? This whole thing had been about making sure that Gail would not be unhappy. But she was certainly unhappy right now, wasn't she? And truthfully, he had been inconsolable without her. Every time he had done the re-set and found himself holed up at a cheap motel, deathly ill and alone, Cas had been miserable, and filled with self-doubt. Was this really the right thing to do? If it was, why did he feel like he had done something very, very wrong?
Luckily, his wife was extremely obstinate, unwilling to accept the amended status quo. Cas lifted his head and said, "This is our Prologue. This, right here. I will now take the Appendix page, and use it for the third time, to go back to Germany. And this time, my other and decidedly better half will be coming with me."
Cas reached his hand out to Gail. "We will have to go back to Nazi Germany, to fix my mistake." Then, he sighed. "Because you insist on saddling yourself with me, I feel like I owe it to you to explain a couple of things, first. You and I will be on the wrong side of the equation, when we get there. We will be German, members of the Reich."
Gail's heart clenched painfully. Maybe she should have left well enough alone. They were going to be Nazis? Now, she was terrified. She looked at his hand, but she didn't take it. Not yet.
"What are you going back there to do, Cas?" Gail asked him warily.
Suddenly, Dean pounded on the motel room door. "Cas! Let's go! Chop chop!" he shouted. "We've got a Hunter to rescue!"
No, you don't, Gail thought sadly. But, in a few more years, you and Sam are going to have a very close friend. Another brother. And if Cas and I can work out some kind of a deal going forward, who knows what else might happen?
"There's no time to explain right now," Cas said to her. "Do you trust me?"
She let out a breath. "Yes, of course I trust you, Cas," Gail told him. She took his hand.