#everyone blame nightalp for this

[shanastoryteller]

The boy with the demon blood is always watching him.

His gaze had been alternatingly reverent and despondent before Lucifer’s rise. After, it’s cold, appraising, and only when Dean isn’t looking. It reminds Castiel of the few times that Michael has set his eyes on him and it makes the place on the back of his back itch where his wings would be. Lucifer’s vessel should not remind him of Michael. It’s not right.

They’re sitting in a diner, a cup of coffee in front of him that he has no intention of drinking, Dean is in the bathroom, and Sam is staring at him again, lip pulled back just enough that Castiel can’t tell if it’s a grimace or a snarl. He is not well versed in humanity, but he wishes for this to stop. It’s distracting. “What is your problem?”

“You,” Sam says bluntly, which Castiel had not expected. “I don’t trust you.”

“Because your judgement in this area is without reproach,” he says, surprising himself. It’s just that Dean is predictable. Understandable. Sam is not. It’s frustrating.

That look on his face is almost a smile. “Exactly. I trusted you in the beginning. You’re an angel, a being of good, who brought my brother back to life. Why wouldn’t I?” He shakes his head, a faint look of disgust on his face that Castiel is used to seeing there.

He thought Sam’s self recrimination was wholly centered on his role in releasing Lucifer. He does not know what to do with the realization that some of it is directed towards him. “I am still all those things.”

“No,” Sam says. “You’re the good soldier who left my brother to rot. I tried to save him and couldn’t. I nearly destroyed myself doing it. You could have saved him and didn’t. You could have prevented all of this if you’d pulled him out before he broke the first seal. But you didn’t, and then you left him there for another ten years, letting Alistair sink his claws into him.” He leans forward. “My brother was only useful to you broken. I’m not going to forget that again.”

Anger rushes through him. Dean is often frustrating. Sam is infuriating. “I was following orders.”

He realizes too late that he’s only confirming Sam’s assertions. To his credit, he doesn’t appear at all satisfied with the admission. “That’s why you and Dean get along, you know. Two good little soldiers in a pod that rebelled too late and are suffering the consequences.”

Sam has not spoken of Dean like this, has not been anything but accommodating and sorrowful to his elder brother since killing Lilith. His description of their actions sounds too much like Lucifer for Castiel’s comfort. They’re nothing like him. It is Sam who is the devil’s foil. “What are you, then?”

“An idiot,” he says. “You and Ruby are the same, manipulating us both to start this stupid apocalypse. I know you let me out of the panic room, Castiel.”

He goes very still. There are several defenses available to him, but all only confirm Sam’s assertion that he’s a good little soldier that rebelled too late, that he was as Ruby. Perhaps this is where so much of Dean’s frustrations around his brother come from. He is not right, but it is difficult to find the words to prove him wrong.

“If you were going to try and deny it, that would have been the time to do it,” he says dryly. “If you hadn’t, the apocalypse would have been averted. I can’t kill Lilith if I’m dead and even if one of you had done it, it still wouldn’t matter. Lucifer can’t puppet a corpse. Over before it begins.”

Castiel means to choose his next words carefully. Instead, he says, “You have not told Dean.”

Sam shrugs, looking at the window, his eyes tightening in pain. “He needs something – someone – to hold onto right now. It can’t be me, so it’s you. But I’m watching you, Cas. Manipulate my brother again, and I’m not going to care how useful you are in averting the apocalypse or what it’ll do to Dean to lose faith again.”

“Why can it not be you?”

He looks over at him, startled. It’s nice to be able to be the one to put him off balance for once. “What?”

“Why can Dean not hold on to you?” he repeats. Despite every attempt from heaven and hell to prevent just that, it seems to him that Dean is holding onto his brother more tightly than ever.

Sam’s expression shuts down, but not before Castiel sees the tidal wave of grief there. “You didn’t know him before hell. You don’t know what you took from him by leaving him there.”

He’s back on uncertain territory. It’s the only kind he ever seems to be in with Sam. “Is he very different?”

Dean does not appear overly different from an outside perspective. His personality and priorities seem roughly the same as they were reported to be before hell. Traumatized, perhaps, but it’s not as if Dean is any stranger to that.

Sam laughs and Castiel flinches before he can think not to. “Our father’s words haunted him, you know. That he had to either save me or kill me. In some ways, selling his soul for me was a relief. Not only was it a complete rejection of that order, but it meant that if I did have to be killed one day, he wouldn’t be the one to do it. Not that he ever would, because people have tried to manipulate him into it before. Me included. So I guess you can take some sort of pride in it, being the one who succeeded.”

Castiel regrets starting this conversation. He thinks that Dean cannot possibly still be in the bathroom and wishes he would return. “You are not dead.”

“If you’d left me in the panic room,” Sam says. “I would be.”

That is likely true.

“It was perfect,” Sam says bitterly. “Me, strung out on withdrawal, alone and isolated and hallucinating and dying. Dean with all of his worst nightmares confirmed. Except he’s faced that before and it still didn’t end with me dead. He needed a push. He needed a way to save me or kill me that wouldn’t be his fault, his hands, that he could drink and hide from. And leaving me to detox alone in that room did that, gave him an out that he told himself he could live with.” He tilts his head, mocking and sharp, and Castiel would very much like to stop seeing Michael in Sam Winchester’s face. “But you never wanted me to actually detox. Not with Lilith still alive when I’d need years of training to be strong enough to kill her without it. You didn’t want me clean. You wanted me twisted so far around that I’d be easy to control.”

Zachariah had wanted that. Castiel hadn’t known. He was just following orders.

Dean might accept that explanation. Sam never will. He believes blindly following orders to be a weakness. It’s difficult to argue against it when he’s right. If Castiel had not followed orders he did not understand, they would not be here. But following orders is all he’s ever done.

“I should have known better,” Sam says. “That’s on me. Dean played his part too, but he’s got enough to deal with right now.”

“You intend to let him continue blaming you,” Castiel says. Dean’s mistrust and anger hurts him. It’s easy to see. Here he has the information to rid himself of it, at least partly, but he’s keeping it to himself.

His mouth twitches into something that’s almost a smile. “It’s me or him. He went to hell for forty years for me. I can spare him this.”

Castiel tries to imagine Dean’s reaction if he uncovers how close he came to Sam’s permanent death, how it was something he chose and could have prevented and did not because of actions and assurances that Castiel gave him.

Sam is an abomination. He is, also, human, and no amount of demon blood down his throat is going to change that.  

“Before hell, Dean might have forced me to detox, but not alone,” Sam says softly. “He never would have left me to die alone.”

He searches for something safe to say, something to extricate himself from this conversation. What he settles on is, “You and Dean’s relationship confuses me.”

Sam laughs again. Castiel doesn’t flinch this time. “He pushes me to leave and then blames me when I do,” he says, exhaustion leaking into his words. Sam often looks tired. Castiel has never wasted time wondering precisely why. Perhaps he should have. “It never occurs to him that if he just stopped pushing, I’d stop leaving.”

A self fulfilling prophecy. The apocalypse was supposed to be like that, except that in the end heaven and hell had needed quite a lot of work to get it started. Destiny isn’t as easy as Castiel had been told it would be. “Why are you telling me this?”

It’s that cold, assessing glance again. Comparatively, it’s almost comforting now. It’s better than the grief. It must be exhausting, mourning a man who’s right in front of him. “So you know to watch yourself, Cas. I’m looking properly now. And I see you for exactly who you are.”

It’s not an idle threat, not from Lucifer’s vessel, not from the man who killed Lilith, but there’s a shiver down his spine that’s not quite fear. He’s a low ranking angel, all things considered. Like a god on earth, but celestially insignificant. He is to take orders, to follow his father’s will and his brothers’ guidance and never stray from this well trodden path.

No one has ever seen him before.