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A hut of mud, sticks and bone hid in a copse of dense grown trees. It huddled under the swaying branches and shivered with every passing wind. Inside it smelled of rot, cold and the thick meaty stench of a living body deprived of modern comforts. Sam knew his scent was as good as a bright beacon in the endless twilight, but there was little he could do about it. The bones and flesh he’d woven into his rudimentary shelter had so far been enough to throw off the beasts.
He had no idea how long he had been here. Like Heaven and Hell, there was no time, no consistent sun or fat moon to provide him context. There was no way of knowing how it all moved in relation to home. Perhaps centuries had passed already and he was like a victim of the Sidhe, planning a return to a place that had long ago forgotten him. Maybe time had paused there entirely and he would return with Dick’s blood still wet on the walls, Dean a handful of steps away.
What he did know was that he had stayed in here too long. Confinement in the dark was slowly wearing away at his calm. He had a long knife, wicked sharp and his gun, emptied of bullets long ago. He had his mind, it’s encyclopedic knowledge of the things that lurked outside. No rational man would leave this shelter with only those tools. He wasn’t sure how long he could remain rational.
“Castiel?” He called more out of boredom than actual belief that the angel would appear.
The sound of wings had Sam sitting up, unfolding out of his pathetic huddle. His clothes crackled with dried muck.
“Sam.” Castiel whispered into the darkness.
“Cas. Where have you been?”
“There is only this. Where else would I be?” The same answer he always gave. It offered Sam little comfort. Sometimes it seemed as though the journey had shaken Castiel back to sanity. Other times it seemed as though his insanity had shifted into something more like ancient sorrow.
“I don’t know. I just...I’d rather you stuck around, you know?” He pushed his hair out of his eyes irritably. It had grown long, longer than he liked it. It was grimy and knotted, shifting reluctantly under his fingers.
“You are lonely.” Something crunched as Cas shifted, moving forward. He came to sit at Sam’s side on the bed of leaves and the shredded remains of his jacket.
“Yeah.” He laughed rusty and rough. “Pretty goddamn lonely.”
“As am I.”
“I’m sorry.” Sam said softly, the words getting caught in the air between them.
“Yes. I know.” Castiel didn’t twitch or shift or breathe or any of the other signs that told Sam another soul had joined him in this tight space. He was comforted anyway. Just by the dim outline of Castiel in the dark.
“How long have we been here?” He asked to keep the conversation going.
“I’m not sure. My senses are dulled.”
“I know what you mean.” Nothing felt quite right here, sounds coming through cotton and sight smeared by fog and fear.
“I have discovered a way out.” Castiel said it as if it were a death sentence. Something heavy and impossible. Sam tried not to hope.
“How? Where?”
“We must walk in a straight line. I cannot fly and you cannot deviate from the path. It does not matter the direction.”
“And what...we’ll just walk out?”
“Yes.”
“...how did you find this out?”
“I remembered. Everything has been jumbled, but I was able to recall this.”
Sam tried to make out Castiel’s expression, but he’d never been good at that at the best of times. In the dark with too much fetid water under the bridge, he couldn’t even venture a guess.
“Ok.” He stood. “Let’s go.”
“It will be a difficult path. I do not know how long or what obstacles will be thrown in our way. But no matter what happens, we must walk straight.”
“How will we know which way is forward?” He put his hand to the crude doorway that broke his fingernails and scraped his skin raw. There had been too many dwelling places in his life to get attached to any of them now. Still. It had kept him safe. He kissed the rough bark of the entrance. It caught his chapped lips and tore a strip of dried skin from them.
“We choose a direction.”
“What if we get disoriented?”
Castiel doesn’t answer.
“Great.” Sam rubbed his finger over his injured lip. It pricked, a spark of pain that cut through the numbness.
Something rustled in the trees. The ground shook. A pack of beasts howled, atonal, long and unwavering. Sam squared his shoulders, put his feet to the path that had carried him to the copse. It wasn’t much one one, just a slight indentation in the ground that could be wholly random or the work of someone very light footed. He started to walk.
Castiel fell into step beside him.
“We should have breadcrumbs.” Sam shoved his hands into his sweatshirt pocket, fingering the knife there.
“There is no food here.” Castiel glanced at him. “And the birds eat them in the legend. Hansel and Gretel only return home by murdering the witch.”
“Grim.” Sam joked, but it fell flat. After a moments thought, he stopped and reached out with the knife. He scored the closet tree with an x. The constant damp in the air left the bark soft and susceptible to the blade.
“You should not waste it on such petty things.”
“What does it matter?” Sam tucked the knife back into his pocket. “It’s not even silver. The only thing it’ll do to the things that live here is annoy them. Even if it was silver...they’re already dead. I can’t kill them again....Can I?”
“I don’t believe so.” Castiel looked away. “It’s intent that matters. Walk the path.”
“Is it lined with good intentions? I’m good at those.” Sam muttered and tried to ignore the unsettled knot in his stomach. It had been there since he’d arrived. Where hunger once lived there was only anxiety and frantic moths.
The perpetual dim light hides the worst of the things in the dark. Sam used to hate that. He missed the thin beam of his flashlight and Dean’s answering ray a few feet away. After a while though, he grew grateful for the low light. He didn’t want to see what lay beyond him. If he couldn’t do anything about it, then why would he want to know about it? For the first time in many years, he wished that he lived in ignorance of all of this.
“Hansel and Gretel is an apt comparison.” Castiel said suddenly, breaking the tense silence. “The two of us led into the dark by an absent father. Left here to find our own way home or perish.”
“It’s not really about the woods, those stories. Most fairy tales mean something else.” Sam counted a hundred more paces before marking another tree.
“I don’t understand.” Castiel said after another long pause.
“It’s not complicated. Like Red Riding Hood. Young girl goes into the wood and she’s told not stray from the path.” He kicked idly at a pile of leaves, wincing as a small skull skittered out from underneath to shatter brittly against a tree trunk. “She encounters the wolf. He’s the male sexual appetite. Trying to woo the innocent girl into a life of sin. When that doesn’t work, he consumes the model of virtue, her grandmother, and poses at her to seduce the girl again. It’s a warning to girls to stay out of strange men’s beds basically.”
“And the wolf is slaughtered. For being himself.”
“Yeah. Well. That’s how it goes, isn’t it?” Sam thought about Madison with a pang. It had been a long time since he’d remembered her. Or Jess. They were faded dreams lost under too many layers of other lives, other horrors.
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Castiel muttered and Sam shivered, trying to sink deeper into his sweatshirt. “Why do you never say what you mean?”
“Me?”
“Humanity. Everything is allegory, story, metaphor, lies and lies and lies.” He didn’t sound angry particularly. But he never sounded particularly anything these days.
“Dunno. Guess that’s how we were made.” Something slithered in the dark, out of sight and almost out of mind. His fingers clenched around the knife. “We like to come at things sideways.”
“Demons always attack from behind and angels are forthright. Forward. Do you think that’s intentional?”
“No idea.” He rolled the idea over, ignoring everything that screamed at him to charge to the right and take out the yellow eyed beast he could just see shambling through the dark. “What does that make the other monsters then?”
“Above and below.”
“I really didn’t think there was a way to make this place creepier.” Sam wrinkled up his forehead, trying not to flick his gaze to the hidden sky or the fog-clad ground.. “Thanks for proving me wrong.”
They walked a long way in silence after that. Their footfall barely creased the air, leaving it free for the noise of passing beasts. Occasionally, Sam could make out a fight. An angry scream of a harpy or the frantic clicking of an oversized insect or the tearing sound of a shifter leaving behind it’s skin in defense. Nothing came quite close enough to get their scent.
“I need to rest.” He decreed, plopping down on rock.
“You do not. It’s in your mind. There are no wants or needs here.” Castiel stood before him. The ends of his trenchcoat stirred a little in the ever present wind that crawled under clothes to leave a permanent chill on Sam’s skin. “You could walk forever.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” But he grabbed for Castiel’s hand and used it to lever himself back to his feet. The angel didn’t acknowledge the liberty, only began to walk again as soon as Sam had risen. Yet when Sam made to drop it, Castiel’s hand suddenly clenched around his. Sam could feel the too-much-unnatural strength of it, but it comforted rather than pained him.
There was no one left to comment. They were alone with the beasts and they could cling to each other if the wanted. Sam didn’t try to escape the implacable strength of Castiel’s hold. One hand on Castiel, one hand on his knife.
“Hello pretty pearls.” Something purred in the dark, huge and eyes the color of ripe cherries. If cherries glowed.
“Fuck.” Said Sam and then it was on him.
A hut of mud, sticks and bone hid in a copse of dense grown trees. It huddled under the swaying branches and shivered with every passing wind. Inside, it smelled of rot, cold and the thick meaty stench of a living body deprived of modern comforts.
“Fuck.” Sam sat up, panting hard. “Castiel?”
“Sam.” The flutter of wings and Cas was beside him.
“What happened?” He pushed his hair out of his eyes irritably. It had grown long, longer than he liked it. It was grimy and knotted, shifting reluctantly under his fingers. “We were walking.”
“You remember.” Castiel sounded...pleased.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You don’t usually.”
“Usually?” Sam stared at Castiel’s face, unreadable in the dark. “How often has this happened?”
“I have lost count.”
“Hell. I’m sorry.” He saw Dean, under a piano, electrocuted, choking...and it had never gotten easy. It had never gotten funny or even less horrifyingly painful. Not even so many years later. “I keep forgetting?”
“Yes..”
“And we’re always trying to get out of here? Walking like you said you remembered?”
“I did not recall it. That is the lie you asked me to tell you.”
“Why would I tell you that?”
“Because you said it was better to have hope.”
“Oh.” Sam laugh hollowly. “There is no way out, is there?”
“I believe the Leviathans would have found it long ago if there were. Instead they needed someone to open it from the outside.” Castiel sat down beside him. “Perhaps Dean...”
“You don’t think he can?”
“I am aware of what it took for me to do so. He is capable. But it is...difficult. Time consuming.”
“You don’t have to lie to me. I’m sorry I made you.” It curdled in him that he had reached a point of desperation that he would ask for that. “Hope is probably overrated by now.”
“I have learned to live without it.” Castiel agreed.
They were sitting quite close together. Sam reached over and picked up Castiel’s hand. Even in the dark he could make out dark bruises. His fingers slotted neatly over them and he let out a low hiss.
“Did I do this?”
“It’s nothing that I did not do to you.” Castiel turned his palm upward. Sam stared at his own striped flesh.
“We were holding on tight.”
“There is little else to cleave to here.”
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” Sam rattled off, the words familiar and sweet on his tongue though he couldn’t say why. He’d made a point of becoming overly familiar with the Bible in the year of the Apocalypse. Those words had never been sweet, but bitter as tears. “Looks like we were making a decent enough attempt to become one here.”
“I do not believe that was what the verse was intended to mean.” Castiel studied their joined hands, the gravel in his voice harsher and deeper. “Do you wish to walk?”
“There’s no-” He stopped himself. There wasn’t a point. But what should they do instead? Sit here in the dark and wait for a release that might never come. “Yeah. Let’s walk.”
Sam choose a different direction this time. He didn’t bother saying goodbye to the hut. He’d be back, apparently. They walked to what Sam decided was West. They had done his newly dubbed East last time.
“Go west, young man.” He laughed, humorless to himself. “Why do you think I remember this time? If I haven’t all the others before?”
“You used to remember each time. Then they started to fade and then there was only the hut and the days preceding it.” Castiel reached for Sam’s hand again and he willingly gave it, though he could now feel the deep welts the tight grip left on him. It didn’t hurt enough to give up the comfort of it. “I believe your mind is attempting to shield you. It has been damaged by such things before. Perhaps it has built up an immunity.”
“That’d be nice to believe.” He could imagine his brain as one large callous, immune to further incursion. If he had been to the edge and jumped, maybe next time he would fly. “But I doubt it.”
“I have no other theories. Each time is the same. We walk, you die, you return to the hut. Eventually you call me and I return.”
“What do you do before I call you?”
“I attend to your body if there is something left. I do not wish for the shifters to get ahold of it.”
“Oh. That’s smart. You bury it?” The ground was wet enough, a perpetual creeping mold replacing more familiar, healthy plants.
“How would I accomplish that?” Castiel asked, ever mild. “There are no shovels and my hands alone cannot dig deep enough. My strength has waned.”
“So what do you do?”
“I weigh them down with rocks and send them into the river.” Castiel said as though it were obvious.
“There’s a river?” Sam strained, but could not make out even the most distant sound of running water.
“Yes. Your original dwelling was along it’s shores. The monsters do not seem to care for it and you thought perhaps it was the key to escape. You built several rafts in attempt to reach the end.”
“What happened?” He asked though he thought he already knew.
“The others fear the waters because that is where the Leviathans lived.” Castiel said. “They are returning here. Or perhaps not all of them escaped the first time.”
“They ate me.”
“On more than one occasion.”
“So...wait. You’re feeding my corpses to them? They’re worse than shifters.”
“Not here. They are known here and do not bother to cloak themselves. What else would you have me do?” There’s an edge of distraught frustration there, heavy and real and shit! Of course Castiel felt. Felt deeper and harder for all that emotion was a new, fresh thing to him. It was stupid to believe otherwise.
“Sorry. Sorry.” He soothed, his thumb drawing circles over the top of Castiel’s hand. “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters.” Castiel corrected. “But there is no other solution.”
“Did we ever try to cross the river?” He asked out of idle curiosity.
“Many times. There is only more of this on the other side.”
“How did we pass the time? Before I started asking you to lie to me.” Silence returned, but the pressure on Sam’s hand increased. “It’s ok. Whatever it is. Tell me.”
“You told me stories.” Castiel admitted, face tilted upwards to the canopy that blotted out the sky. “And I gave you mine.”
“What kind of stories do angels tell? I mean, you said that they can’t. Not really. Stories are a human thing.”
“I have lived a long time. I told you about people, places...things that you were curious about.” Castiel relaxed his grip, blood flowing back into Sam’s fingertips. “I told you about the movement of bees and the way the flowers push through the ground in the spring. You asked me how it felt to be God, but I didn’t tell you.”
How had he forgotten all of that? He wanted to hear it all again. To write it down somehow and record it. The things an angel had seen... he’d forgotten how curious he’d been when they had first met Castiel. It had all gotten lost. So many lost opportunities.
“And what did I tell you?”
“Fairy tales. Memories of hunts and your time at college. Plots of books you liked.”
“Were we happy?” It sounded pleasant. Far better than walking in silence towards nothing. Towards another death.
“It was only another match in the dark.”
A branch snapped off to their left. Sam’s hand was on his knife a beat too late. The vampires come, a tight circle of them with their teeth exposed and madness in their eyes. He barely has time to register the pain.
A hut of mud, sticks and bone hid in a copse of dense grown trees. It huddled under the swaying branches and shivered with every passing wind.
“Cas.” Sam gasped and stood, practically stumbling into the angel when he reappeared.
“I’m not sure this return to memory is a kindness or a curse.” Castiel steadied him.
“Neither am I, but knowing Winchester luck: curse.”
“Did you want to walk? We could stay here...”
“No.” He said firmly. “We should go. North.”
“We did North last time.” Castiel said firmly. “Do you not recall?”
“I got eaten by vampires.”
“Mauled by a wendigo. You are missing a small period of time.”
“Is that how the memory loss started last time?”
“No. You lost far greater pieces.”
“Ok. Well let’s go logically. What happened this time that didn’t the time before?”
“Nothing. We walked. We spoke of stories and you made a few sarcastic comments. We did not get far before the wendigo appeared.”
“So there was nothing?” Sam sat back onto his leafy bed. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“The logic of this place has escaped me.” The admission seemed to take something out of Castiel. He sat down next to Sam and on impulse, Sam reached for his hand.
“You know what else doesn’t make sense? If you’re getting rid of my body every time and this is a new one, how come I still have the bruises?” He could see them in the dark, four deep ugly swells that Castiel’s fingers slid over easily. “I mean. I don’t have any bite or claw marks.”
“You did not touch me this past time.” Castiel said slowly. “We did not hold hands.”
They both stared down at their joined fingers.
“Ok.” Sam licked his lips. They were chapped and peeling, but intact. “So if I want to remember, I have to stay in contact with you. Were we touching a lot the first time around? Before I told you to lie?”
“Yes.” Castiel looked away. “That would explain it all. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”
“It’s this place. It muddles everything up.” Sam reassured him. “Why would it...maybe because we came in together?”
“We are not designed for this place. We cannot expect it to react well to our intrusion.”
“I thought angels came here when they died.”
“I have not seen one. Have you?” Castiel challenged, eyes flashing. “I have seen demons. Fields of demons. But not one other angel. I am not meant to be here. Nor are you.”
“I wonder where angels go.”
“Oblivion perhaps.” Castiel stood, pulling Sam to his feet with him.
“You said...” Sam fumbled through his memory. It was as slippery and betraying terrain as the slick mud and mold outside. “That I lived somewhere before this. I built another shelter?”
“The first.” Castiel looked down, toeing the edge of Sam’s makeshift bed.
“I want to see it.”
“Why?” His head snapped up in one of the inhuman jerks that reminded Sam just what he was dealing with.
“Why not?” Sam challenged. “Sounds like it was in a more defensible position. I could go with taking more time between deaths.”
“No.” Castiel took a step back which was less than effective with their hands still joined.
“Jesus, what is it? What about that place can be worse than anything else?”
“You were given the luxury of amnesia. I was not.” Castiel snapped. “You let yourself forget. You must have known what was causing it and you just let it all go. Binded me with ugly promises and I have had to carry the memory. Now you want to go back? No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” Castiel tugged Sam forward hard and he stumbled until they were nearly eye to eye. Luminous blue even here in the dark, Castiel’s eyes swept over his face. “If you see this. If you do this. I will not allow you to forget again. You will not ask me that of me.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Good.” The thin line of his mouth turned from Sam, his profile hard as rock. “Perhaps one day we will be even on that score.”
“What did I do to you?”
“Do you wish to see where you lived?” Castiel kept his gaze on some distant point and he was as remote as the missing moon.
There was an acre of meaning that Sam was missing. He should step back and think, puzzle over the clues that Castiel was offering up like breadcrumbs. He should heed the warnings and his former selves plans. He knew better.
“Show me.”
“As you wish.” Castiel pressed his fingers to Sam’s forehead. Memories of a thin itching wall that crumbled before him echoed as they travel, the air knocked loose from Sam’s lungs. They landed loosely on the soil, both of them stumbling with their footing.
If any further evidence had been needed that Castiel wasn’t at full power, that proved it.
“It’s behind you.” Castiel coughed once, then dropped Sam’s hand.
“You aren’t coming?” He asked, the edge of desperation honing into his voice without permission.
“No.” Castiel took a few cautious steps, then dropped into a loose, easy squat.
The light here was different, Sam realized. It was a little brighter. More like the fading end of autumn then the beginning of winter. Sunlight, filtered and diffuse, filtered in. And there was a river. Castiel sat beside it, watching the water pass as though he were a statue carved on it’s banks a century before.
Sam could sit down next to him and watch the river go by. He could drink in this new sight after so long of the same endless grey of the forest. He could forget what lay behind him. But Sam wasn’t good at leaving the unknown at his back. Resolute, he turned.
It was no hut. No crude shelter. It had been built by someone without proper tools or knowledge, only the idea of a log cabin and too many books crowded in his head. A one room cabin with a thick tanned skin pulled taut over the entrance as a door. Blood had been shed and painted onto the skin, along the doorway. Some of the patterns were protective sigils that he recognized in his own handwriting. Others were new complicated Enochian painted in thin steady lines. They hadn’t worked on these while rushed. This had taken time, meticulous and fine.
“Ok.” He squared his shoulders, unpinned the skin and went in.
It was one rough room. In the center was a hollowed blackened pit, the remains of some long running fire. Light trickled in from the hole in the rough left open for the smoke. To the right was a pile of skins and furs, it looked like a much more appealing bed than a half-hearted pile of leaves. To the left was another neat stack of skins, but these had been cured more thinly and were covered in rough green marks. He knelt by them. The ink must have been crushed mold, leaves and water. Whatever he could find that would create pigment. A single feather, gold and richly beautiful in this world of too much blandness, had been cut into quill sharpness. Sam picked it up delicately. The tip was dark with ink, but the rest was unsullied. He must have written with a careful grip to keep the condition so pristine.
The makeshift parchment didn’t contain new information. The first few sheets were little more than meticulous tick marks. He set those aside, not yet ready to count what was doubtless some kind of time reckoning. Beneath them was a recreation of Dad’s journal with Sam’s augmentations and memories. It was a compendium of monsters. Useful if someone else stumbled across this place.
“Something to pass the time.” He said out loud and the words echoed a little in the empty space.
There were a few empty sheets, places his words had not yet colonized. Underneath them were another few sheets and they arrested his heart. He sat down hard on the floor, leaning against the wall. It was familiar and he imagined the fire roaring, the quill spinning idly through his fingers and the parchment propped on his lap. It was a parody of a hotel room and the laptop settled over his thighs.
He had written poetry. Nothing original. Bits and pieces of recalled lines or stanzas. Offerings to someone who had come to a love of poetry too close to the end to memorize it. This was a gift. Precious pearls that he could offer to the person that shared this space with him.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul. - Neruda
And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow. - Gilbran
I have been astonished that men could die martyrs
for their religion--
I have shuddered at it,
I shudder no more.
I could be martyred for my religion.
Love is my religion
and I could die for that.
I could die for you. - Keats
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.-Rossetti
In went on, but the theme was clear. At the end, inscribed in Castiel’s finer thinner writing was only,
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
Sam looked up from the pages and he could see the little house (for that was what it was, not a shelter, not a hut. This was a house. A home) for what it had been. The bed large enough for two, the soot around the fire marked with two sets of footprints.
He picked up the sheets of checkmarks and began to count, heart a leaden weight. He was only up to 210 when Castiel brushed inside. The angel stood frozen in the doorway, eyes casting desperately around every crevice before resting on Sam.
“We were....” Sam trailed off.
“Yes.”
“How many of these are there?” He pointed at the tick marks, lead in his chest and dropping into his stomach. “What was I basing them on?”
“The fire. The logs are wet, they burn slowly.” Castiel sank into his meditative squat again, this time by the burnt out pit. He shifted his fingers, bruised and pale, over the air as if they could be warmed by the ghost of flames. “We called the burning through of two a day.”
“How many?” He asked again.
“Nineteen years, two months, one week.”
“Jesus.” Sam looked down at the parade of tick marks. He tried to imagine nearly twenty years of these walls and only the two of them with nothing else for entertainment or hope. How intertwined had they become? “When did I start to forget?”
“You were drawing a map.” Castiel shifted under the bed and drew out a much larger folded piece of parchment. “We kept it well hidden. I would head North, you South. Or East and West. Days where we walked and returned here only in death. I would tell you what I had seen and together we made this.”
It unfolded broad and useless over the floor. They had apparently taken to naming swatches of the woods by some unknown scheme. The directions Castiel had walked in were graced with simple, frightening things like ‘The Darkness’, ‘The Chasm of Despair’ or ‘The Tooth of the Beast’. Sam’s areas had taken on more whimsical, but probably less accurate, names ‘The Shire’, ‘Albuquerque’ , ‘Delta Quadrant’ and ‘Burkittsville’’.
“I did not connect our separation with your memory loss.” Castiel frowned. “But I believe now that you must have. When you returned, you frequently rejected physical advances. Damaging your own memory. Why would you do that?”
“It probably hurt to remember. I run away sometimes.” Sam traced the spidery lines of the map, a guide to an unknowable place. “We were here nearly twenty years? I was probably starting to go a little crazy.”
“You left me.” Castiel pressed his hand down on a blank piece of the map, the rough unexplored edge.
“I’m sorry.” Sam put his arm around Castiel’s shoulders, the trenchcoat a familiar drag along his skin. “I shouldn’t have.”
“But you did.” Castiel closed his eyes. “This place is already punishment enough. To be given succor and then have it removed...it was cruel to both of us.”
“I won’t do it again.” Sam promised. “I’m so sorry, Cas. You didn’t deserve this.”
“Didn’t I?” Castiel stood, shaking off Sam’s hold. He turned a loose circle, taking in the room. “I have assumed that this was my punishment. There are no other angels here. No true comfort. How else would my father punish one who has dared assume his mantle? Hell is the absence of God’s love. The absence of all love.”
“This isn’t hell.”
“Isn’t it?” Castiel laughed and it drew up the hair on the back of Sam’s neck. “Or have you forgotten what life can be like? How you can bathe in the world even when all else is lost? There is no life here. No love. No hope. We are bereft. You asked me to lie to you, but I couldn’t. Not for long. Why should you have the luxury and not me?”
“It’s not a luxury.” Sam got to his feet. “I was foolish to run off. It’s never the right decision. I run away and the people I leave behind bleed out. I can’t seem to learn that lesson.”
“I have missed you.” Misery entered, robbing Castiel of his ragged smile. “I’m going mad again. Your madness. Mine. I don’t know.”
“I’m here.” Sam reached out and pulled Castiel into his embrace. The Castiel he once knew would have been stiff, but somewhere along the way, he had learned to soften. He went pliant against Sam, face buried in the crook of his neck. “I won’t leave you alone again, I promise.”
“You have promised me before.” But Castiel didn’t protest any further.
“I made you a lot of promises, didn’t I?” He asked rough into his dark hair. “What were they?”
“To have. To hold.” Castiel said into his collarbone.
“We got married.” Sam set his hand into Castiel’s hair. It didn’t feel dirty the way Sam’s did. “I married you. Here. And we lived together. Why would I want to forget that? What the hell was wrong with me?”
“Love cannot live here. I thought I had made the clear.”
Sam closed his eyes. He thought about Dean, who he loved with a rooted surety that rivaled every other fact of his life. He thought about Bobby, his rough voice and pained repeated goodbyes. He thought about Jess, her soft hands and laughter.
“I don’t believe that.” He decided. “Maybe this place worked at me, but it can’t kill that piece of me. I’m human. I love.”
“Samuel.” Castiel pulled away again. “You don’t know that.”
“Then I’ll prove it.”
He ducked his head and kissed the thin line of Castiel’s lips. They were rough on his. He licked a slow, tight line over the seam and Castiel opened for him with a sigh.
And Sam remembered.
Poetry and stories and the painful crawls through the unfeeling woods. A hundred hundred deaths until the pain became meaningless. Building this house with only his ever sharp knife and Castiel’s diminished strength. They had collided into each as slowly as a star collapsing into a black hole and with the same inevitability.
He had made love to Castiel for the first time the day they completed the roof. With careful hands, he had laid the angel against the furs of their bed and undid him. He had pressed promises with his tongue and fingers into the fields of pristine white skin.
He had accepted the feather from the unseen wings that should not have a physical manifestation. Castiel had offered it up with a bemused smile as if he wasn’t quite sure why he was doing it. The first thing Sam had done was write a line of poetry, quill sharp and an answering smile on his lips.
Of all people, he knew what forced proximity could do to a relationship. He and Dean waxedwaned, pushedpulled, hatedloved at each other until it was amazing anything remained of either of them. But Castiel was different. He gave where Dean was stubborn, spoke when Dean would be silent. They jarred against each other in different ways and fit together into something new.
It had been good. Sweet as honey and soft as silk, a balm in the darkness.
He knew why he had given it up. The first slip slide of memory and the quick draw of conclusion. The realization that Castiel was the preserver of Sam’s memory and that meant he was holding onto something for Castiel in return.
“I ran to keep you strong.” Sam realized, pulling back from the kiss. “When we were together, I was keeping the remains of your grace from you. You couldn’t fight, couldn’t hold your own against the monsters. You died too many times. I couldn’t bear it.”
“That is a terrible reason.” Castiel decreed, licking at his lips as if holding onto the taste of Sam there a little longer. “A fool’s bargain. Didn’t you think I would rather have the pain than to be without you?”
“It made sense at the time.” He frowned. “I was losing it while I was figuring it out. Memory going and I just knew I had protect you.”
“Winchesters.” Castiel made it sound like a curse word and Sam couldn’t blame him. “I do not require your sacrifice. I require you.”
“You have me.” Because with memory came feeling. And Castiel was wrong. Love lived here as surely as it did on Earth. “I love you. Nothing can take that away. I swear to you.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know what love is, you dumb angel.” Sam crowded him up against the wall, dipped his head to kiss him again. “Love is all we have, the only way we can help each other.”
“Euripides.” Castiel dropped his hands to Sam’s waist.
“So love me.” Sam begged. “Help me.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing?” Castiel challenged.
They made love like it was the first time on the furs of monsters they had slain. They made love like kings and queens of old, like gods and monsters, like the cursed and the blessed, like anyone that had ever found pleasure in another body. Sam renewed his vows in eager moans and coaxed the answering calls from Castiel.
It wasn’t just a match in the dark. It was fire that burned through the unending sameness and branded them both beneath the skin.
Purgatory rattled and shook and the world exploded into light.
“Uh.” Said Dean.
“Hi.” Sam said stupidly, covering Castiel’ nakedness with his body. Sunlight broke through a dirty window and candles burned in a semicircle around them. “Figured out how to get us back?”
“Yeah. Long story. So.” Dean gestured between the two of them.
“Twenty years of long story.” Sam offered in return.
“Damn.” Dean whistled.
“It was a love story.” Castiel offered as blandly as if nothing had changed.
“Is.” Sam corrected, absently.
A once abandoned house moldered down a dirty road and under a copse of dense grown trees. It leaned a little to one side like a listless drunk. Inside, it smelled of tomato sauce, plastic wrapped cakes and the sharp scent of Irish Spring clinging to the last of the shower’s steam. A television muttered to itself, mingling with the laughter of two men and the low murmuring voice of a contented angel.