#like...no! cas did not pull dean out of hell or brand him or betray heaven because he was in love with him!!

[nobodymitskigabriel]

I do still like destiel as a ship but part of the reason i've fallen out of touch is with it is because the fandom tendency to boil down every single one of dean or cas's actions involving the other to "they were secretly in love the whole time" is possibly the least interesting interpretation of them you could come up with.

[sylvanfreckles]

I've Got Red in My Ledger

By Grace Undone: Chapter Five

A devastating betrayal and an arcane ritual leave Castiel fighting for his life...his human life. When his grace is brutally torn out of his body and he's left to die on earth the only thing the Winchesters can do is try to pick up the pieces.

(I'm just doing one story for the entire month, so please enjoy the thirty-one chapter beginning of the flare 'verse. You can read other stories in the 'verse here, and you can read this fic on AO3 here.)

“Cas?” Dean shifted around on his bed so that he was sitting with his feet on the floor. “Is that…is it really you?” He didn’t want to breathe, didn’t want to hope. Good things just didn’t happen.

A tired sigh hissed through the phone. “I’m here.”

“Where? How? Damn, man, you were…I thought…” emotion choked off Dean’s voice and he cleared his throat. “Where are you?”

“Dean Winchester,” the other voice was back, a little stronger than before. “Can you find this phone? If I leave it here with Castiel?”

“The hell is going on?” Dean demanded. “Let me talk to Cas again.” He was on his feet now, pacing, fighting down the knot of dread in his stomach.

“He’s too weak. They took…I didn’t know it would be like this, you have to believe me.”

“Took what? What did they take?”

A sound like a sob filtered through the phone’s speakers. “His grace. Naomi, she…she took his grace.”

Dean’s stomach dropped right down into his socks. Part of him had always wondered if Cas might make the choice to become human again someday, especially after Lucifer had taken Jack’s powers. He wondered what it might have been like if all four of them had been able to grow old together, but not like this.

He swallowed hard to clear the lump in his throat. “Can you put Cas back on?”

“I can’t…Please, you have to hurry. She’s—Naomi—we’re leaving soon and she’s leaving him here.”

“Where’s ‘here’? Dammit, where are you?”

“Near a place called Kansas City. I think there’s a river nearby. I don’t—I have to go!”

“Wait!” Dean lurched forward, as though to physically keep the woman on the phone, but his phone had already beeped to show the end of the call. “Dammit.” He jabbed at his phone to redial the number and pressed it to his ear, but it just kept ringing until it dumped his call into an inactive voicemail.

At least Kansas City was a start. He and Sammy could get rolling in ten minutes and be there by sunrise.

….

Jedaia ended the call with Dean and pushed the phone under Castiel’s shoulder, near one of his hands, just as Malachi strode into view.

“Let me heal him,” Jedaia begged as the anarchist approached. “Please, just let me heal him.”

“That’s enough,” the male angel snarled, pulling Jedaia away from Castiel. “He’s getting what he deserves, and now so am I.”

Castiel wearily stared up at him. He was prepared for Malachi to further abuse him, now that the ritual was over, but to his astonishment the male angel seemed fixated on Jedaia.

“You didn’t think we brought you here just to help with the ritual, hmm?” Malachi taunted. He smiled down at Castiel and pulled Jedaia against him, twisting a hand in her pale hair to drag her head up. “Naomi isn’t the only one getting a power boost tonight.”

“No!” Jedaia twisted in his arms, but it was clear she had never been trained as a soldier. An apprentice Rit Zien, perhaps, or one of the scribes that had served under Metatron, but not a warrior.

“Yes. Didn’t you realize we only needed two for the ritual? Why else would we have brought you out here?”

“That’s enough, Malachi.” Naomi’s voice had strange harmonics to it now, and he thought he could feel her power dancing along his skin like a static charge when she drew closer to the struggling angels. “We’ll have to find another ritual site.”

Naomi had changed. He was sure her true form would have been the most altered, but even her earthly vessel was different. She stood taller, though that could have just been the way she was holding herself and not an actual change of height, and her close-cropped gray hair had been replaced by a silvery-white mane that cascaded down her back. Her skin seemed to almost glow; and when she glanced in his direction, he saw that her eyes were now so pale they were almost white.

Malachi bared his teeth and forced Jedaia around to face Naomi. “You promised me, Naomi! The only reason I went along with your little scheme and didn’t gut him on the spot is because you promised I’d be an archangel too!”

“And you will be. But not now. We’ll have to secure a new site first.”

“No!” Malachi twisted around and forced Jedaia onto her knees. “I get what’s coming to me now, not later.”

Naomi just scoffed and strode over to the nearest post that supported the roof. She stared at it critically for a moment, then turned back to face Malachi. “Fine. You’ll get what’s coming to you.”

Then Naomi raised her hand and slapped the post. In the split second before her hand touched the wood, Castiel saw the angel banishing symbol appear as though Naomi had just written it in her own blood. He curled back in on himself as Malachi and Jedaia let out a scream, but to his surprise he wasn’t banished along with them.

But…no. Of course not.

He was human now.

Sharp footsteps brought Naomi closer to him, but he barely had the strength to look up at her, much less put up any kind of fight. The angel—or maybe it was archangel now—crouched next to him and studied his face with pitying eyes.

“You should be thanking me. He was planning to kill you.”

He stared up at her, aware of the phone buzzing against his arm as someone tried to call him. Naomi smirked and easily extracted the phone from its hiding place, no matter how feebly he tried to stop her.

She held it up between them and answered the call, pressing the speakerphone button.

“Cas?” Dean’s voice was faint but distinct, and raw with worry. “Cas, man, can you hear me? Say something.”

“He’s here,” Naomi said, keeping her eyes focused on Castiel’s. “If you hurry, he might even still be alive.”

“Listen here you ugly bitch…”

Naomi stabbed the button to end the call and dropped the phone next to Castiel’s face. “There’s one more thing,” she announced.

He bit back a groan of pain and turned his face toward the floor, avoiding her gaze. The wounds on his back burned, like he’d been branded instead of cut, and his wrists and ankles were torn from pulling against the chains that had tied him down. Then sudden pain blossomed through his body, white-hot and burning with cold, as she struck at him with her grace. He cried out and tried to roll away from her, but his body seized up in agony as soon as his back touched the ground. She struck again, lashing at him as though her grace was a whip, and his tattered clothing tore along new lines of pain.

After a few more lashes she growled and knelt to grab a handful of his hair. “There’s nothing left for you in Heaven now, Castiel. Whatever fraction of a soul you might have will sink down to the depth of the abyss for all of eternity for what you’ve done. You’ve betrayed your own kind, over and over, and for that you are banished.”

Her grace cracked across his face, breaking his nose, and she dropped his head to stand back up. “Pray that we never meet again.”

The lights around them seemed to flicker, the flames in the hanging censors streaming up into the air for a moment, and the silhouette of wings spread out from Naomi’s shoulders. Whole, healthy wings, not the same ragged things he and the other angels had been left with. Then, with a rush of wind that blew out half the flames, she was gone.

All that was left was the pain in his body and the buzzing in his head.

No…the buzzing of the phone.

Slowly, painfully, Castiel rolled up on his side and managed to pull the phone close enough to see the screen. There was a crack running through the tempered glass, but enough of the display remained that he could see the green icon to answer an incoming call. His hand shaking, blood smearing over the screen, he finally managed to touch the right spot on the screen to accept the call. “Dean?”

“Cas! Thank…thank something, man. Is she still there?”

He curled around the phone and coughed wetly, tasting blood in the back of his throat. “’m alone.”

“Good. Listen, man, just stay on the line, all right? We’re coming.”

Castiel tried to answer, but even breathing too deeply hurt, and he just tucked the phone closer to his face. Tears were leaking out of his eyes, running down his cheeks and across the bridge of his broken nose, but he didn’t know if they were from the physical pain or the roaring, empty grief that was consuming him from the inside.

“You’re doing great,” Dean’s voice was strong, encouraging, like a lifeline keeping him from utter despair. “We’re on the way, Cas, I promise. Just hold on.”

[Previous chapters: (1) (2) (3) (4)]