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Title: Children of the Wanderers (Rock of Ages translation) (2/2)
Part one.
-
It made sense, sort of, now that Dean knew how to look at it. There wasn’t time for any soul-searching about learning how deep his heritage went when there were more things after them that they needed to deal with. It was the implication of why he and Sam were the important ones, and going over the family tree taking up most of Rufus’ living room, starting on one wall and fanning out to cover the other three, all the deaths adding up, reasons to be glad polygamy used to be legal. Knowing you had more dead cousins than you could shake a stick at wasn’t the greatest feeling in the world.
There was a word for people who didn’t know their fathers, but nothing for people who didn’t know their mothers. You were supposed to know who your mother was. It was a given; she made you who you were in ways your father never could. Knowing about your mother was supposed to be a given, but here they were trying to figure it out. Forget lawyer, Dean thought – Sammy should’ve tried to be a historian, even a librarian. He was always way too happy doing all the reading.
They’d have to call Singer to see if he had any of the books they needed, and in the meantime they were going over family records to see if Mom ever willed them anything or left a note in one of his storage lockers. Right now, Rufus had broken out the coffee and he and Sam left Dean to go for a walk in the late evening.
He called Lisa, asked after Ben, made sure he was wearing his hamsa. “You made catcher, right?” He fiddled with his pendant, running his fingers over the worn letters, while Ben talked about pinch-hitting, and he was glad to listen. He’d be happy to talk for hours but hung up after thirty minutes to watch night creep up through the little park.
There were rituals to snare and bind demons – Dean knew at least three he could do with the stuff around him in the next fifteen minutes – but nothing on the books for angels. Too bad; if there were any, Cas would have a piece of his mind right now. And then again, angels were supposed to carry prayers up to heaven with them. “Shema.” Dean stopped, looked around to make sure no one was around, and dropped to a whisper anyway. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai ehad. Baruch shem kavod malchuto, l’olam vaed.”
The lights flickered, the smell of ozone coming on strong like before lightning hit. And there was Cas standing at the edge of the shadows and haloed by the streetlight. “Yes, Dean?”
“Good to see you too.”
“Do you need me for something?”
“King David, huh.” Cas tilted his head to look at, well, with Cas it might be a galaxy beyond the current scope of humanity’s understanding of the universe, or it could just be him looking away. “He’s why you pulled me out,” Dean continued. “Bloodlines, and heritage, and all that glory. Now don’t get me wrong here, it’s nice to know that sort of thing still matters outside of England. But here’s the thing.” Cas was looking at him again, and did he ever blink? “If you need someone even remotely related to David, I’m not the only one out there. There’s Sam, there’s got to be a few cousins somewhere –”
“I’m afraid that isn’t the case.”
“What?”
“You and Sam are among the last extant descendants of David.”
“Oh.” It didn’t feel like getting doused with water so much as it felt like getting hit with a baseball bat. Dean knew the difference. “Well, isn’t that special.”
“It’s quite special.”
“Among, so there’s more?”
“Very few.”
“How few?”
“A negligible few.”
“Negligible to the point where you need to drag me out of Hell for David insurance? Why?”
“I’m afraid I can’t speak of such matters.”
“Bullshit. The demon we saw, it said your team was running out of time.”
“Dean, I’m needed –”
“Not tonight, Josephine. You’re not flitting away, you’re not zapping off somewhere to swing on a star, you’re staying right here to give me some answers. Running out of time for what?”
Cas sighed, and Dean had to wonder where he’d picked that up. “In the past we’ve always been able to keep pace with demons and their attacks, but as of late, they’ve been far more focused, less chaotic.”
“As of late being since last May?”
“Since 1983. We cannot afford to wait, and they’ve managed to force our hand.”
“So because they know what they’ve been doing for over twenty years, I get pulled out of Hell. That doesn’t sit right.”
Cas’s mouth tightened, and his words got a little harsher. “As you know, they’ve been systematically culling the line of David. You and Sam are the last righteous men among them, and when you were pulled down, we laid siege to Hell to rescue you.”
“Just in case you needed me for something.”
“We do need you, Dean.”
“For what? What do you need me for?” He was on his feet, yelling right up in Cas’s face. “What work is there for me? What is it! Answer me!”
If any of it affected Cas, there was no way to tell. “Dean, you and Sam are to bring about the world to come.”
“The what now?”
“The world to come,” Cas repeated, as serene as anyone could hope to be.
Dean swallowed, worked his jaw around the words before he said them. “We’re the messiah?”
“You or Sam, likely you.”
Dean knew what it felt like for the bottom to fall out of the world; this was just the same. “There’s no one else you could’ve tapped for this.”
“As I’ve told you, we cannot afford –”
Punching Cas was a supremely bad idea, the guy was the fury and wrath of heaven wrapped in a thin layer of human and it felt like punching a steel door but damn did it feel good. Cas didn’t react more than moving his head, so Dean did it again. And again, trying to tackle him, yelling he could’ve afforded it a long time ago, he could’ve saved his family, the angels should have been there, there wasn’t a reason Cas couldn’t have been.
Cas rolled with it, grabbing Dean’s arms and tossing him away for Dean to get back on his feet and run back at Cas, yelling while he charged – what do you need me for, why did you wait, you fuck, you fuck. He got Cas down onto the ground, punching him and leaving bloody trails on Cas’s clean skin, but it only took a moment for Cas to get on top somehow and grab his leg and then pain like he hadn’t felt since Hell. He didn’t stop, kept going and grabbed at the first thing he could reach, fishhooking Cas’s cheek and dragging him aside to get on top again.
Dean punched and kicked and bit and fought like an animal and Cas was always there, fighting back as hard as Dean gave. Dean was screaming his throat dry and if Cas was saying anything Dean couldn’t hear it, didn’t want to hear it. It’d be excuses and fuck excuses, there had to be a reason for it all. There needed to be a reason.
“There’s a reason,” Cas whispered. Dean was too tired to stand, kneeling on the ground bloody and sore next to Cas, clean and fit as ever, lying where Dean had crawled off him. “Dean, I assure you there’s a reason why we couldn’t wait.”
“The whole –” He coughed out some blood from when Cas had clipped him good in the chest with a knee. “– the whole Y-six-K thing, right?”
“The seventh millennium is approaching.”
“And we can’t.” He coughed again, spitting out a chunk of a tooth.
“Let me,” Cas touched him, and Dean was suddenly whole again, his shoulder throbbing and then going as quiet as the rest of his body. He couldn’t stop himself from staring as Cas sat down, his coat falling out around him. “We can’t afford to tarry any longer. Lilith is amassing her forces and has been for some time.”
“Since 1983?”
“Some time longer. We can’t say.”
“You don’t know, or you can’t say?”
“We don’t know. We’re far from omniscient.”
“And the whole messianic age and world to come is what she doesn’t want, right?”
“She and many others like her.”
“Other demons?”
“Most every supernatural being on Earth.”
Dean laughed and fell back, landing on the wet grass and looking up at the slowly-turning sky. “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.”
-
Sam didn’t take the news well.
“They can’t – it doesn’t work that way!” He was pacing, running his fingers through his hair and keeping them laced together on top of his head, and the glance Rufus gave Dean told him he was also worried about Sam going for one of his old rifles.
Dean tried to reassure him. “I know.”
“No, that’s not it. Look, it can’t come just because, we’re not enough for it, just because you and me happen to be here.”
“It can’t come unless we’re here.”
“Yes, but, no, it’s not just us, they can’t force it just because we’re both here and, Davidic by heritage. It can’t work like that.”
“They know that,” Dean tried again.
“So why are they doing it?”
“Dean,” Rufus said, turning to face him. “You said they’ve been working this a while, and that they can’t set it up unless you’re here.”
“You can’t just set it up!” Sam went back to packing, waving his arms around. “It doesn’t work like that! We’re not Messiah insurance!”
“No, I’m pretty sure you are,” Rufus pointed out.
“This. This.” Sam stopped packing to stand and shake. “They pulled you out of the pit, but didn’t do anything when I got backstabbed by Ruby. Why do they need both of us? Why you more than me?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You goddamn should have! An angel right there, and you didn’t ask why?”
“I was kind of busy getting the shit kicked out of me.”
“You attacked him!”
“Okay, maybe I did, but –”
“Demons hunting us, angels using us, and you didn’t think to ask –”
“It took them forty years to get me out, Sam!” Dean was up in his face, yelling right back. “Forty goddamn years for a host of angels to get me out and I get you back in ten minutes, maybe they didn’t pull you out because I saved you before they could!”
-
Sam passed Dean another beer. They were sitting together on the hood of the Impala, watching the sun go down and the stars come out. They hadn’t been drinking long, barely getting started; Dean knew it’d be a while before either of them had enough alcohol in their system to deal with the news. He’d come back clean and fresh, and that included his tolerance – it’d be a while before he got his liver back to fighting strength. At least getting a buzz on didn’t take as long.
Clouds hushed the sky and a chill peered out from the trees; winter was coming sooner every day.
“I think it’s better this way,” Sam said.
Dean looked at Sam, who was looking at where the moon would be. “What do you mean?”
“This way, it’s not just us.” Sam had uncapped his bottle and hadn’t made a move to drink it otherwise. “I mean, if we were, maybe if we’d been fated to bring about the world to come since before we were born because of who our parents were, who knows what we’d be doing.” Looking down at it, he finally brought it to his lips and took a long drink. “But it’s not just us.”
“Anyone with the right heritage.”
“Yeah. Exactly. Not everyone, and not just anyone, but it could be a lot of people.”
“Except there’s maybe six to choose from.”
“Dean.”
“What? It’s true.”
“I know. But, that’s not what I’m trying to say.” He took another drink, almost draining the bottle. “I’m trying to say that if it’d gone another way, with destiny-capital-D, I don’t know. At least now there’s some…some room, I guess, to make a choice about this.”
It always came down to the choices you made. Dean rolled Sam’s words around in his head, trying to figure out what he hadn’t said out loud. “You don’t think it’s us.”
“I think it could be a lot of people.”
“Do you think it’s coming?”
Sam laughed. “Dean, if you’d asked me that a year ago, two years, maybe I’d have said yes.”
“Maybe?”
“It’s that angels are trying to force it to, what, the ones that are talking to us won’t say why, and demons are gunning for us and have been since before we were born, and we’re wanted by both sides. And what they want, it’s not something that they can set up like a set of dominoes. It’s up to us. All of us.” He swung the bottle around, signifying the rest of the world that wasn’t sitting on the Impala drinking beer, the people that had been at Sinai when Moses came down. “It can’t come unless we’re all ready for it.”
“And if I ask you now, do you think it’s coming?”
Sam laughed again. “God, I hope so.”
-
When they were completely in the middle of nowhere, they’d just curl up in the Impala; on the nights when they were just slightly to the left of it, they shacked up in the nearest motel. Even something a few rungs below a Motel 6 was still a clean place to sleep with indoor plumbing. Although Sam never quite got over that one place in Ohio where he’d had to pay for a shower. Dean thought of that look on Sam’s face when he flopped down on the bed. “Well, could be worse.”
Sam let his bag fall to the floor. “How?”
“Ohio, remember?”
He hated teasing him, but it was worth it for the full-body shudder. “Never mind.”
Dean lay down, head on the pillows. “Does the shower work?”
“Let me check. Yeah, it works.”
“It’s a start.” While Sam pissed, it occurred to Dean to check something else, so he scooted to the edge of the bed to open the drawer – huh. He hadn’t been expecting that. Maybe some things really were universal.
Sam made a face at the book Dean was reading. “Do those things come industry-standard?”
“That or they grow like mushrooms in damp motel rooms.”
“Well. Okay.” Sam rooted around in the desk and grabbed a pen. “Time to get started.”
Dean smiled and passed the Gideon Bible over, leaving Sam to write his own footnotes about the right translation for Hebrew-to-English-by-way-of-Latin. He’d done that for years when they were on the road together with Dad, and Dean rolled his head around on the pillow to get comfortable and Sam clicked the pen open, shut, open, shut. With Sam busy like that and Dean tired like this, he could almost pretend they were nineteen and fifteen again, and Dad was out killing a ghost, and he’d be back in tomorrow and – no. He sighed and opened his eyes. There wasn’t time for that.
“Do you ever wonder what the next guests think of your commentary?”
“I hope they find it useful.”
Good old Sammy.
-
There were ways to gank angels out of their vessels, and the way Cas had explained it, it was sort of like ripping someone’s soul out – you could do it if you had the right grip, and it wasn’t easy or pleasant for anyone involved. The way Jimmy Novak explained it, Cas had been roaring and fighting the whole way out, and Jimmy had tried his best to hold on but hadn’t been able to keep his metaphorical hands from slipping. Whatever had gotten to Cas was just that strong.
The first words out of Jimmy’s mouth were what Dean would’ve guessed someone would say if they woke up without an angel inside of them: disorientation, worry, fear, where am I, who are you, that whole shebang. He didn’t understand what he was saying exactly, though, not until he calmed down enough to stop using Yiddish and switch to English. That also made sense, him going back to the first language he’d learned to speak in that moment of panic.
Jimmy didn’t look like Cas. Dean watched him practically swallow the burger whole without bothering to chew. Sure they were the same height and had the same eyes and wore the same clothes, but the way the two of them looked, how they walked, the way they held themselves, it wasn’t Cas in the body sitting across from him right now. Even their voices were different, Cas’s all flat and gruff and Jimmy’s accent round and slanted at the same time.
“So what do you remember?”
Jimmy shook his head and took another long drink of his soda. “Before he left? Bits and pieces. Images, sounds – impressions, really. An angel inside of you, it’s kind of like being chained to a comet.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun,” Dean said.
“Understatement.”
“Cas said he needed us for something.” Sam pressed, “Please tell me you remember that.”
Jimmy shook his head. “That, he didn’t talk about.”
“But he did talk to you.”
“Sometimes. Not as much after I let him in, but we’d still talk.” Something soft fluttered over his face. “He didn’t tell you anything?”
“Just that we needed to stop by where you we found you.”
Both sets of Jimmy’s grandparents came over years after all of Sam and Dean’s family was firmly entrenched in the United States. They’d made their way from Europe through China, trading one ghetto for another, until they finally reached America – Vienna to Shanghai to Ohio. He had a wife and daughter waiting for him somewhere, a life that had nothing to do with what made him special enough for an angel to take interest in him.
“Why did you say yes to Cas?” Dean asked when Sam was in the shower and otherwise too busy to listen in.
“Because he asked my permission. Because he told me that I was needed, that I was chosen for God’s plan as part of a deeper purpose.”
“And you believed him just like that.”
“No.” He didn’t even smile like Cas because Cas didn’t smile. “We talked, and – argued. It took…” He looked away, smile fading. “He always told me I was the one he needed.”
It turned out Jimmy was the one he needed, but not the only one he could use: a fourteen-year-old Claire Novak channeling the might and fury of a messenger of the Lord was a sight Dean knew he wouldn’t forget anytime soon. He looked a little too happy to be smiting the demons, but hey, they were the same ones who’d ripped him out of Jimmy in the first place to torture his vessel and get their hands on what intel they could. Dean could forgive Cas a little bloody revenge. Okay, a lot bloody, but the principle was the same.
When Cas knelt down next to Jimmy, speaking too quiet for Dean to hear them, it was pretty easy to imagine what he was saying: thanks for the meatsuit, I’ve got a brand new one, time to shuffle off. He didn’t know what Jimmy said to get Cas back inside – maybe he reminded him it’d be nice and roomy in there – and then the pure light of creation and Heaven filled the space again, and Claire was panting on her knees as Castiel strode forward in his old-new vessel.
“Why’d you go back into Jimmy?” Sam asked after Cas zapped them back to their hotel room.
“Because he asked me to take him.”
“Were you testing him to see if he’d give up his daughter willingly?”
“No.” Cas almost sounded offended at the accusation. “I had no need to test Jimmy’s faith, nor Claire’s. But he asked this of me, and I obliged him.” He looked back and forth at the two of them sitting on the edge of the beds. There was something almost human in his face, something that said there was something he couldn’t say to Dean and Sam, and didn’t want to try.
“I made sure to thank her,” he said, like them knowing that would help. Dean knew it did for him; at least the equivalent thanks, for keeping his vessel safe when he’d been dragged away from it, soothed the past few days just enough to let him think he wouldn’t need to drink to get to sleep tonight.
Thing was, demons alone weren’t strong enough to gank Cas. Not even a whole nest of them could do it, even if they’d gotten to him after chasing him across the world from Yemen to Australia to Michigan. They’d have to be working with something else, and knowing that was worth opening a bottle for, definitely.
Hell, maybe he should ask Cas take him to Australia when this whole thing was done. No way he hadn’t earned a vacation by now.
-
Indiana wasn’t Australia, but a fancy hotel would do in a pinch. It was raining enough to make Noah cry, and Dean wouldn’t have been surprised to see the wind blow some kittens and puppies around. Anything would’ve been worth stopping at, and that they happened to be in a place with chocolates on the pillows – well, who cared that they were in the middle of nowhere?
Sam, of course. Trust him to be untrusting. Sometimes that was just a pain in the ass, but in this case, it wasn’t paranoia. If you knew people were out to get you, it was just being perceptive.
Although Dean had to guess even Sam wasn’t expecting this many people. Maybe Dean should’ve noticed something was up when the hotel seemed bigger on the inside – which it was, because it had to be to house all the gods in attendance. He could barely see to the far end of the table. It wasn’t all of them, but there had to be at least sixty already, with more coming in and the room just getting bigger to fit, everyone under the roof staring at him and Sam. They were the only humans present, the guests of honor at this little shindig.
Baldur clinked a knife against a wineglass. “Ladies, gentlemen, those that are otherwise, welcome and thank you for coming. This I thought I’d never see again, so many gods under one roof.”
“Oh, we are so, so screwed,” Sam whispered to Dean.
“Now, we all know why we’re here.” Baldur’s voice boomed out around the room. “The Messianic Age of Jewish lore looms over us. Now, I know we’ve had our little disagreements, and we’ve managed to put those behind us. But it’s time to once again look towards the future, or once again, we’ll find ourselves without one. Now, we do have two very valuable bargaining chips,” and everyone turned to look at Sam and Dean, “the last righteous princes of the line of David. And thanks to Ma’at,” a small Middle Eastern woman with her hair pinned up stood to smile and bow at the round of applause, “we have enough information to allow us the position to make –”
“Allow?” An old man with an eye patch and fuck, the nametag ‘Odin’ stood up. “We don’t allow anything. This is our world again.” Most of the room said something in agreement, almost none of it in English. “Because a few birds are doing their best to force the end of the world before it happens, and it’s not even the end times yet. Jormungandr is still asleep, and Rocabarraigh hasn’t yet arrived.”
A tall, blond woman with the nametag ‘Brigid’ and her face split down the middle into ugly and pretty stood up next, and cleared her throat before speaking. “We need to remember why we’re here. Not just because of the princes, but stability. Neutrality towards one another.”
“All these angels understand is violence,” Kali growled. “This has to end in blood. To them, it’s their creator or us, and they never compromise. We have to show them we’re not who we used to be, make a stand for ourselves.” She looked at Sam and Dean like they were animals she might find in a pound. “I say we kill them.”
What Baron Samedi said next Dean didn’t understand, not in the exact vocabulary, but he could tell the guy was agreeing with Brigid and getting Kali’s dander up and enjoying himself. Dean couldn’t blame the guy for that. He glanced at Sam, who glanced right back, and they would’ve managed to slip out the back quietly if Horus hadn’t noticed them inching towards the door and crashed a chandelier right in front of them.
“Stay,” Kali commanded.
“Come on.” Dean turned around and held his hands out in surrender. “You don’t really need us here for this, do you? We can just go take a nap while you work out the details.”
“As a matter of fact, we do.”
“All right then.” Dean looked around the room, up and down the tables, nodded, “Okay.” He licked his lips, took a deep breath, then walked back to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down next to Ganesh and across from Loki. “Hey there. How you doing?”
“And what do you think you’re pulling?” Ganesh rumbled.
“Come on, Sam.” Dean pulled out the chair on his other side. “Grab me a drink, will you?”
“Listen to me, boy –” Odin started.
“No, sir, you listen.” Dean stood back up. “You’re all out of options here, and you know that. We know that. We know that you know that. And any other night of the year, I’d be doing my best to, well, kill you. My brother and I, we eat gods for breakfast. But this is, hey, this is a night that’s different from all other nights.” He fought to keep his voice steady. “You incestuous bastards. So even though there’s nothing I’d love more than to slit all your throats, you dicks, I’m gonna help you out. See what I can add to the conversation and maybe make it a bit easier for everyone here when the shit really hits the fan.”
Sam sat down next to Dean and handed him the water; Dean took a bigger drink than he needed to keep his hands from shaking. “So tell me, what exactly did you all get from teaming up with Lilith? Because if I know my demons, and I do, there’s nothing she won’t do to screw you over the moment she has a chance.”
Maybe it was something in the water, maybe it was because they wanted him to, but when Amaterasu opened her mouth and started to speak in Japanese, he understood her just fine. “Please remember that we have demons of our own. We can handle yours without any fuss.”
“Really.” Dean clenched his teeth in another fake smile. “Because it looks like there’s enough tricksters here to make sure everyone here knows you can’t trust anyone that wants to make a deal.”
“And there’s enough tricksters here that everyone here knows ways to get out of them,” Loki smiled.
Sun Wukong slammed a hand against the table. “This is hardly a case where an enemy’s enemy is a friend. We’ve labored and toiled and we can’t see that gone for nothing. We delay this, we stop their god from coming, we deal with the demons then. We can hold ourselves till then.”
“Like the first time we found ourselves without that competition?” Baldur’s laugh boomed out. “Oh, yes, we’ve come far since then.”
“Hold your tongue there,” he growled.
“If you insist.”
Ganesh grinned at Dean. “Do we have to worry quite so much? Their birds are in enough of a frenzy we won’t have to worry about them, and like we said, their demons aren’t going to put up much of a fight against all of us.”
“You know, you didn’t say, did your own little bird tell you how your creator abandoned your world?” Baron Samedi twirled his hat on his fingers. “For a supposedly loving parent, he sure doesn’t stick around.”
“And you would know, how?” Dean shot back.
Mercury was suddenly behind them, hands on their shoulders. “As nice as your enthusiasm is, perhaps it is for the best if the children leave the room.”
It didn’t feel like Cas’s zapping, which didn’t feel like anything and moved him to another place in the time between seconds; this was closer to being thrown out of a bar by the seat of his pants. He landed facedown on the bed, and when he recovered enough to realize where he was, Dean swore; at least they could’ve given them fresh chocolates.
“Well, there goes that plan,” Sam said from the floor. Bastard hadn’t even tried to aim both of them.
“It was worth a shot. Hey, it got us out of there, didn’t it?”
“Except now they’re planning our fate without any input whatsoever.”
“Bite me, bitch.”
“Jerk.”
“So what’s our plan now?”
“Door’s locked.” Sam sighed. “We can’t run, we can’t wait, we can’t bargain, we can’t fight.”
“We could always pray.”
“Of course we can.”
“Aww, come on, it’s worth a shot.”
“Sure it is.”
“You got any better ideas?”
Sam glared. “If you insist.” Taking a deep breath, turning East, he started, “Adonai s’fatai tiftach, ufi yagid t’hilatecha.” Bending and bowing and straightening up, “Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu veilohei avoteinu, elohei Avraham, elohei Yitzchak, veilohei Yaakov.”
Dean hadn’t heard Sam pray in years. This was just plain recitation, nothing in the words, not even the hope they’d work, but Sam’s kept his face clear and his eyes shut the way he’d always done. “Haeil hagagol hagibor v’hanorah, eil eil-yon –”
There was a crash somewhere outside the room, stopping Sam right away, shaking the room like they were in an earthquake or on a volcano. It went on for almost a full minute before stopping. Dean looked up from between his arms at the cracked ceiling. “What the Hell was that?”
“I – don’t know.” Sam checked the door again, and this time it opened. It must’ve been soundproofed, because all the noise came rushing in: screaming, shouting, roaring battle cries, tidal and huge – divine, even.
Dean stepped into the hall, motioning for Sam to follow a little behind. Whatever was going on, it was still pretty far away – bigger on the inside, remember – and if they could hear it from here, they really shouldn’t be going closer. But that was kind of their job description, so down the hall they went.
“Ugh.” The smell hit them next, brimstone and ash and something – Dean stumbled back, turning to clutch at a wall until the world stopped spinning. Years ago he and Dad did a case in a slaughterhouse; it smelled like this, except this was worse.
“Dean?”
He swallowed, took a deep breath. “Let’s keep going.”
There were more sounds, blood flowing out from under the doors to soak into the carpet and get their boots wet, light flashing through the cracks. Dean looked at Sam, who looked back at Dean and nodded. On three, he and Sam kicked opened the doors.
Dean suddenly remembered what he’d said about angels getting their hands dirty. Bodies were piled up around the room, some of them still moaning, blood everywhere from the table to the ceiling. There were pieces of things scattered around, like people had been ripped apart without anyone caring about making a mess – entrails, fingers, hearts still beating, hands still clutching swords or glowing or trying to crawl towards Sam. He kicked it away. There wasn’t any point to trying to avoid stepping in anything – the carpet squelched under their boots – just the worst of the squishy stuff.
And in the middle of the room, with hands stained to the elbows and a sword still dripping, stood an angel, a terrifying and awesome warrior of God. He and two others, and they were all that was left.
“The sheer arrogance,” Kali swore, four swords to the angel’s one, and he was still holding his own, dancing with her, clashes ringing out in time with flashes of the shadows of an angel’s wings. “You think you’re the only ones who matter. There are many of us, and we were here first. If anyone gets to end this world, it’s me.”
“Your world, Kali.” He blocked, moved, spun about, “If it’s your world you want to end, that’s fine by me.” His blade went right through her where her heart would be, and she crumpled and wailed. “But not ours. It’s not yours to decide.”
In one swift motion and graceful arc, he pulled his sword out and spun around and cut off Loki’s head, who’d been coming up right behind him. The head rolled over to where Sam and Dean were standing, and a moment later, the guy was right there too, one boot holding it in place. They had to look down to make eye contact, and wasn’t that a kick in the head.
“Relax,” he smiled. “They’re just pagans. Oh, shoot, where are my manners?” He was suddenly clean, hair combed back and even his sword was polished and sparkling, and he held out a hand, “Gabriel. Pleased to meet you.”
“The. Archangel.” Sam didn’t exactly ask for confirmation so much as declare it.
“God is my strength, that’s me.” He grinned. “Now, what say we blow this popsicle stand?”
Dean did his best to say something. “Uh.”
“You’re welcome for saving your asses, by the way. They were planning on carving you up and eating you. Literally. You should’ve seen the kitchen.”
“Thank you?”
Loki moaned under Gabriel’s foot, and he kicked the head aside. “You be quiet. The monotheists are having a discussion.”
Somehow that got Dean’s words back. “Was all this necessary?”
“What do you mean?”
“The –” he waved his hand around the room. “The this. The slaughter.”
Gabriel burst out laughing. “Come on, they’re not dead-dead. They’re just…killed. There’s a difference. They’ll be fine. Eventually. They should respawn okay in a year or two.”
“You could’ve just zapped us out of here, or –”
“Holding spell on us,” Sam reminded him. “He had to kill the one making it.”
“And I even asked them politely, but they weren’t willing to risk this little confederacy, so,” Gabriel shrugged, “we had to take them all out just to be sure.”
“We?”
“Mike and Raphie left to catch the runners.”
“Yeah.” Dean looked around, at the bodies pinned to the ceiling and the guts on the walls. “Job like this, you need the big guns.”
“Thank you. I always take pride in my work. There’s not much chance to do a good smiting these days.”
“We should –”
“Get out of here? My thoughts exactly. You were thinking about Australia, right? Adelaide’s really nice this time –”
“We should do something for them.”
“What?”
Dean swallowed, crossed his arms over his chest, jerked his chin to Kali’s body, the room’s new centerpiece. “We should do something for them.”
“At least clean it up in here,” Sam offered.
“And why should I?”
Dean smiled without feeling it. “God wept for the Egyptians.”
Gabriel looked from Dean to Sam, Sam to Dean, eyes and face sharp as his sword, then broke it when he grinned. “You two really are just as righteous as Cas told us.”
-
They ended up at a little bed-and-breakfast over in California somewhere in the Napa Valley, one of the places that even forged credit cards couldn’t easily afford. Traveling with hedonistic archangels had its perks. He and Sam even got their own rooms.
Individual bathrooms messed with the forced quaintness, though, so around two his bladder demanded he get out of bed and deal with more pressing Earthly matters. Normally, he’d do his business half-awake and fall back to sleep without a fuss, but tonight, with Sam’s room on the way to the toilet, he had to stop and wake himself up so he wouldn’t miss anything. Sam was still awake, talking to Gabriel. The bedside lamp was on, making a little island of light in the dark, and Dean clung to the wall to stay hid.
“He never wanted blind faith, Sam. It’s not meant to be easy.”
“It’s not the struggle. You can’t have a crisis of faith without faith,” Sam whispered back. “Being able to maintain it –”
“Free will is your gift. God gave it to you so you’d be able to make the right choices. It’s not just because of who you are. That’s part of it, Sam, but it’s more in the choices you make.”
They were both barefoot. Dean didn’t know why he noticed that, but there they were, neither of them wearing shoes, and maybe he noticed it was because it was so normal to take your shoes off when you were getting ready for bed before you got sidetracked with debate about fate and free will. It was probably the most polite thing to do when you were talking about the nature of God and faith and righteousness with an archangel.
“I didn’t choose this destiny deliberately. It wasn’t something I set out to accomplish.”
Dean stood there a while, listening to them debate, thinking all they needed was some Gematria and it’d be the Yeshiva they’d never had. Sam didn’t notice him at all, but Gabriel glanced over just as Sam started to talk about zekhut and what that meant for him and Dean, and with a twitch of his hand, the door slowly swung shut. Well. He could take a hint.
-
“What?” Sam asked the next morning when he sat down at their table and Dean nearly choked on his pancakes in shock.
“Where’d that come from?”
Sam tipped his fedora back a bit. “I had it stashed in one of Dad’s storage units. Gabriel got it for me this morning.”
“Nice of him.” He smiled. “Did I ever tell you it looks good on you?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“Well, it does.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
-
Not that Dean would admit to it, but the look on Sam’s face when he saw his old tallis was almost enough to make a one-time exception for chick flick moments, and getting back to morning and evening prayers was pretty nice. It was nearly their old routine before all this crazy destiny train stuff started going down. Then again, after the past two months, ganking a skinwalker in Arizona and a nest of vampires in Colorado was almost relaxing. It all came down to what you were used to, and what it took to faze you.
Angels sitting across from you in a diner kind of set the bar pretty high. Raphael had been gathering intel bit by bit, enough to puzzle it out, and Cas thought it would be best if he delivered the news in person.
The first confederacy of pagan gods had gone pretty much unnoticed by Heaven in the sudden absence of God. This one would’ve been the second, and it was the shaky alliance with demons that tipped the angels up to it. Plenty of people didn’t want God back – power vacuums and shaky treaties, a chance to rip the world apart and start over, monsters running wild, some of them still angry about what happened in Egypt. Signs and portents were popping up all over the world, nothing done at random anymore.
“We’re still preparing,” Raphael said, warm breezes fluttering the napkins. “We can’t let our work go for naught.”
“So when we get everyone ready and the Messiah comes…” Dean let the end of the sentence hang.
Raphael picked it up. “When he arrives, God will follow.”
“Sort of a hard reboot to the universe?” Both angels stared at him.
“How would we go about bringing Him back?” Sam asked.
But the angels were already gone, leaving them stuck with the tab.
“God, I hate it when they do that.”
-
Hanukkah was always Dean’s favorite holiday. The story of the Maccabees, fighting against impossible odds to triumph in the end, was basically the story of the Winchesters. And even though he’d never admit it to anyone, not Cas or Rufus or even to Sam, the idea of getting home back – of being able to get your home back, of it not being gone forever, was something he always wished he was strong enough to see through.
Sam, of course, loved Pesach. Most years it meant salad instead of sandwiches and eggs instead of oatmeal at breakfast, but they always managed to find a Hillel or Chabad house open for at least one seder, and the few times they’d managed to take a breather at Rufus’ there was the chance to take stock and think, they haven’t gotten us yet. We’re still free. Sam told him once, four and forty-four years ago, that it was the idea of leaving this life for a better one that he liked, the idea that there were better times coming still.
Rufus had already cleaned the house top to bottom, Sam and Dean arriving in time to help him switch the plates over and drop the last forbidden foods off at the closest food bank. He and Sam were cutting up carrots for the soup, chopping up the goat – “Beats lamb by a mile,” Rufus always said – and that left Dean to take some time to call Cas for a visit and some answers.
“So what’s in it?” Dean rubbed the chain of his amulet, letting his fingers brush over the letters he’d memorized long ago. “What makes it so special I gotta hang onto it?”
“It’s a name,” Cas told him.
“That’s it? A name? Of who?”
“To be more precise, it’s the name.”
Dean blinked. “Wait. The name? The big one? Jehovah?”
“Not quite.” Cas looked at the amulet. “It’s the name as it’s meant to be said in the Temple.”
“So when it gets built back up and we’ve got the space to say it, this opens up and we get to read it.” Cas nodded. “And all the angels of heaven are betting that when we say His name, He shows up.”
“That’s correct.”
“So you’re bringing about the world to come to bring God back. Seems a little backwards.” Dean swallowed, wiped his face, huffed a breath, “You sure it’s gonna work? That He’ll show?”
“He’ll come,” Cas promised.
Dean waited alone until Sam called to him to come inside.
Seders weren’t supposed to be happy, not really, and they weren’t supposed to be an ordinary dinner party either, but this year made this night more different than the any of the rest the three of them ever had. Everyone felt different this year. What they’d gone through these last few months, and what they knew would be coming – in all the days of their life – made the whole thing feel more than a little strange. It wasn’t all metaphor anymore. Sam sang the four questions as usual, Dean shuddered at slaying of the first-born son as usual, and Rufus brokered the argument over who’d open the door as usual. It wasn’t in the siddur but it was just as ritualized.
“Well, someone’s got to get it.”
“You,” Sam pointed to Dean.
“No, you.”
“Why not both of you?”
“All right, if he says so,” Dean chuckled.
“If he says so,” Sam answered.
Rufus kept smiling. “You two had better –”
Knock, knock.
Everyone stopped. There was another knock on the door. They kept quiet, and there was another.
“Somebody should get that,” Rufus said to no one in particular.
There wasn’t more knocking. It could’ve been anything. Someone here by accident. A demon. A vacuum cleaner salesman. Mormons. But Dean knew that wasn’t who was on the other side of the door, that there was only one person it could be. Dean glanced around, clenching his hands to keep them from shaking. Sam was right behind him when he undid the lock and opened the door.
He’d never seen the guy in his life, and he didn’t look like any of the illustrations he’d seen in picture books when he was a kid. No flowing robes and white beard, the guy had a close-cropped brown one and jeans and a jacket instead, but there was no mistaking who this was. There was a lot he wanted to say to the prophet, but all he could think of was, “What kept you?”
“Dean, be polite,” Rufus called out. “Let him in.”
“Right, right,” he stepped to the side, pulling the door open farther, “Won’t you come in?”
“We’ve already got some wine for you,” Sam offered.
Dean watched Elijah sit down at the table, sighing like he’d come a long, long way. And really, he had. Rufus passed him his cup, and he took a long drink. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Last year, he’d opened the door to no one, nothing, no future and no hope. But now, after what he’d gone through? Next year – no way Dean was looking forward to the year that was coming. But next year – Sam’s hand on his shoulder, always together fighting for the future, the world to come – next year, in Jerusalem.
-
It made sense, sort of, now that Dean knew how to look at it. There wasn’t time for any soul-searching about learning how deep his heritage went when there were more things after them that they needed to deal with. It was the implication of why he and Sam were the important ones, and going over the family tree taking up most of Rufus’ living room, starting on one wall and fanning out to cover the other three, all the deaths adding up, reasons to be glad polygamy used to be legal. Knowing you had more dead cousins than you could shake a stick at wasn’t the greatest feeling in the world.
There was a word for people who didn’t know their fathers, but nothing for people who didn’t know their mothers. You were supposed to know who your mother was. It was a given; she made you who you were in ways your father never could. Knowing about your mother was supposed to be a given, but here they were trying to figure it out. Forget lawyer, Dean thought – Sammy should’ve tried to be a historian, even a librarian. He was always way too happy doing all the reading.
They’d have to call Singer to see if he had any of the books they needed, and in the meantime they were going over family records to see if Mom ever willed them anything or left a note in one of his storage lockers. Right now, Rufus had broken out the coffee and he and Sam left Dean to go for a walk in the late evening.
He called Lisa, asked after Ben, made sure he was wearing his hamsa. “You made catcher, right?” He fiddled with his pendant, running his fingers over the worn letters, while Ben talked about pinch-hitting, and he was glad to listen. He’d be happy to talk for hours but hung up after thirty minutes to watch night creep up through the little park.
There were rituals to snare and bind demons – Dean knew at least three he could do with the stuff around him in the next fifteen minutes – but nothing on the books for angels. Too bad; if there were any, Cas would have a piece of his mind right now. And then again, angels were supposed to carry prayers up to heaven with them. “Shema.” Dean stopped, looked around to make sure no one was around, and dropped to a whisper anyway. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai ehad. Baruch shem kavod malchuto, l’olam vaed.”
The lights flickered, the smell of ozone coming on strong like before lightning hit. And there was Cas standing at the edge of the shadows and haloed by the streetlight. “Yes, Dean?”
“Good to see you too.”
“Do you need me for something?”
“King David, huh.” Cas tilted his head to look at, well, with Cas it might be a galaxy beyond the current scope of humanity’s understanding of the universe, or it could just be him looking away. “He’s why you pulled me out,” Dean continued. “Bloodlines, and heritage, and all that glory. Now don’t get me wrong here, it’s nice to know that sort of thing still matters outside of England. But here’s the thing.” Cas was looking at him again, and did he ever blink? “If you need someone even remotely related to David, I’m not the only one out there. There’s Sam, there’s got to be a few cousins somewhere –”
“I’m afraid that isn’t the case.”
“What?”
“You and Sam are among the last extant descendants of David.”
“Oh.” It didn’t feel like getting doused with water so much as it felt like getting hit with a baseball bat. Dean knew the difference. “Well, isn’t that special.”
“It’s quite special.”
“Among, so there’s more?”
“Very few.”
“How few?”
“A negligible few.”
“Negligible to the point where you need to drag me out of Hell for David insurance? Why?”
“I’m afraid I can’t speak of such matters.”
“Bullshit. The demon we saw, it said your team was running out of time.”
“Dean, I’m needed –”
“Not tonight, Josephine. You’re not flitting away, you’re not zapping off somewhere to swing on a star, you’re staying right here to give me some answers. Running out of time for what?”
Cas sighed, and Dean had to wonder where he’d picked that up. “In the past we’ve always been able to keep pace with demons and their attacks, but as of late, they’ve been far more focused, less chaotic.”
“As of late being since last May?”
“Since 1983. We cannot afford to wait, and they’ve managed to force our hand.”
“So because they know what they’ve been doing for over twenty years, I get pulled out of Hell. That doesn’t sit right.”
Cas’s mouth tightened, and his words got a little harsher. “As you know, they’ve been systematically culling the line of David. You and Sam are the last righteous men among them, and when you were pulled down, we laid siege to Hell to rescue you.”
“Just in case you needed me for something.”
“We do need you, Dean.”
“For what? What do you need me for?” He was on his feet, yelling right up in Cas’s face. “What work is there for me? What is it! Answer me!”
If any of it affected Cas, there was no way to tell. “Dean, you and Sam are to bring about the world to come.”
“The what now?”
“The world to come,” Cas repeated, as serene as anyone could hope to be.
Dean swallowed, worked his jaw around the words before he said them. “We’re the messiah?”
“You or Sam, likely you.”
Dean knew what it felt like for the bottom to fall out of the world; this was just the same. “There’s no one else you could’ve tapped for this.”
“As I’ve told you, we cannot afford –”
Punching Cas was a supremely bad idea, the guy was the fury and wrath of heaven wrapped in a thin layer of human and it felt like punching a steel door but damn did it feel good. Cas didn’t react more than moving his head, so Dean did it again. And again, trying to tackle him, yelling he could’ve afforded it a long time ago, he could’ve saved his family, the angels should have been there, there wasn’t a reason Cas couldn’t have been.
Cas rolled with it, grabbing Dean’s arms and tossing him away for Dean to get back on his feet and run back at Cas, yelling while he charged – what do you need me for, why did you wait, you fuck, you fuck. He got Cas down onto the ground, punching him and leaving bloody trails on Cas’s clean skin, but it only took a moment for Cas to get on top somehow and grab his leg and then pain like he hadn’t felt since Hell. He didn’t stop, kept going and grabbed at the first thing he could reach, fishhooking Cas’s cheek and dragging him aside to get on top again.
Dean punched and kicked and bit and fought like an animal and Cas was always there, fighting back as hard as Dean gave. Dean was screaming his throat dry and if Cas was saying anything Dean couldn’t hear it, didn’t want to hear it. It’d be excuses and fuck excuses, there had to be a reason for it all. There needed to be a reason.
“There’s a reason,” Cas whispered. Dean was too tired to stand, kneeling on the ground bloody and sore next to Cas, clean and fit as ever, lying where Dean had crawled off him. “Dean, I assure you there’s a reason why we couldn’t wait.”
“The whole –” He coughed out some blood from when Cas had clipped him good in the chest with a knee. “– the whole Y-six-K thing, right?”
“The seventh millennium is approaching.”
“And we can’t.” He coughed again, spitting out a chunk of a tooth.
“Let me,” Cas touched him, and Dean was suddenly whole again, his shoulder throbbing and then going as quiet as the rest of his body. He couldn’t stop himself from staring as Cas sat down, his coat falling out around him. “We can’t afford to tarry any longer. Lilith is amassing her forces and has been for some time.”
“Since 1983?”
“Some time longer. We can’t say.”
“You don’t know, or you can’t say?”
“We don’t know. We’re far from omniscient.”
“And the whole messianic age and world to come is what she doesn’t want, right?”
“She and many others like her.”
“Other demons?”
“Most every supernatural being on Earth.”
Dean laughed and fell back, landing on the wet grass and looking up at the slowly-turning sky. “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.”
-
Sam didn’t take the news well.
“They can’t – it doesn’t work that way!” He was pacing, running his fingers through his hair and keeping them laced together on top of his head, and the glance Rufus gave Dean told him he was also worried about Sam going for one of his old rifles.
Dean tried to reassure him. “I know.”
“No, that’s not it. Look, it can’t come just because, we’re not enough for it, just because you and me happen to be here.”
“It can’t come unless we’re here.”
“Yes, but, no, it’s not just us, they can’t force it just because we’re both here and, Davidic by heritage. It can’t work like that.”
“They know that,” Dean tried again.
“So why are they doing it?”
“Dean,” Rufus said, turning to face him. “You said they’ve been working this a while, and that they can’t set it up unless you’re here.”
“You can’t just set it up!” Sam went back to packing, waving his arms around. “It doesn’t work like that! We’re not Messiah insurance!”
“No, I’m pretty sure you are,” Rufus pointed out.
“This. This.” Sam stopped packing to stand and shake. “They pulled you out of the pit, but didn’t do anything when I got backstabbed by Ruby. Why do they need both of us? Why you more than me?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You goddamn should have! An angel right there, and you didn’t ask why?”
“I was kind of busy getting the shit kicked out of me.”
“You attacked him!”
“Okay, maybe I did, but –”
“Demons hunting us, angels using us, and you didn’t think to ask –”
“It took them forty years to get me out, Sam!” Dean was up in his face, yelling right back. “Forty goddamn years for a host of angels to get me out and I get you back in ten minutes, maybe they didn’t pull you out because I saved you before they could!”
-
Sam passed Dean another beer. They were sitting together on the hood of the Impala, watching the sun go down and the stars come out. They hadn’t been drinking long, barely getting started; Dean knew it’d be a while before either of them had enough alcohol in their system to deal with the news. He’d come back clean and fresh, and that included his tolerance – it’d be a while before he got his liver back to fighting strength. At least getting a buzz on didn’t take as long.
Clouds hushed the sky and a chill peered out from the trees; winter was coming sooner every day.
“I think it’s better this way,” Sam said.
Dean looked at Sam, who was looking at where the moon would be. “What do you mean?”
“This way, it’s not just us.” Sam had uncapped his bottle and hadn’t made a move to drink it otherwise. “I mean, if we were, maybe if we’d been fated to bring about the world to come since before we were born because of who our parents were, who knows what we’d be doing.” Looking down at it, he finally brought it to his lips and took a long drink. “But it’s not just us.”
“Anyone with the right heritage.”
“Yeah. Exactly. Not everyone, and not just anyone, but it could be a lot of people.”
“Except there’s maybe six to choose from.”
“Dean.”
“What? It’s true.”
“I know. But, that’s not what I’m trying to say.” He took another drink, almost draining the bottle. “I’m trying to say that if it’d gone another way, with destiny-capital-D, I don’t know. At least now there’s some…some room, I guess, to make a choice about this.”
It always came down to the choices you made. Dean rolled Sam’s words around in his head, trying to figure out what he hadn’t said out loud. “You don’t think it’s us.”
“I think it could be a lot of people.”
“Do you think it’s coming?”
Sam laughed. “Dean, if you’d asked me that a year ago, two years, maybe I’d have said yes.”
“Maybe?”
“It’s that angels are trying to force it to, what, the ones that are talking to us won’t say why, and demons are gunning for us and have been since before we were born, and we’re wanted by both sides. And what they want, it’s not something that they can set up like a set of dominoes. It’s up to us. All of us.” He swung the bottle around, signifying the rest of the world that wasn’t sitting on the Impala drinking beer, the people that had been at Sinai when Moses came down. “It can’t come unless we’re all ready for it.”
“And if I ask you now, do you think it’s coming?”
Sam laughed again. “God, I hope so.”
-
When they were completely in the middle of nowhere, they’d just curl up in the Impala; on the nights when they were just slightly to the left of it, they shacked up in the nearest motel. Even something a few rungs below a Motel 6 was still a clean place to sleep with indoor plumbing. Although Sam never quite got over that one place in Ohio where he’d had to pay for a shower. Dean thought of that look on Sam’s face when he flopped down on the bed. “Well, could be worse.”
Sam let his bag fall to the floor. “How?”
“Ohio, remember?”
He hated teasing him, but it was worth it for the full-body shudder. “Never mind.”
Dean lay down, head on the pillows. “Does the shower work?”
“Let me check. Yeah, it works.”
“It’s a start.” While Sam pissed, it occurred to Dean to check something else, so he scooted to the edge of the bed to open the drawer – huh. He hadn’t been expecting that. Maybe some things really were universal.
Sam made a face at the book Dean was reading. “Do those things come industry-standard?”
“That or they grow like mushrooms in damp motel rooms.”
“Well. Okay.” Sam rooted around in the desk and grabbed a pen. “Time to get started.”
Dean smiled and passed the Gideon Bible over, leaving Sam to write his own footnotes about the right translation for Hebrew-to-English-by-way-of-Latin. He’d done that for years when they were on the road together with Dad, and Dean rolled his head around on the pillow to get comfortable and Sam clicked the pen open, shut, open, shut. With Sam busy like that and Dean tired like this, he could almost pretend they were nineteen and fifteen again, and Dad was out killing a ghost, and he’d be back in tomorrow and – no. He sighed and opened his eyes. There wasn’t time for that.
“Do you ever wonder what the next guests think of your commentary?”
“I hope they find it useful.”
Good old Sammy.
-
There were ways to gank angels out of their vessels, and the way Cas had explained it, it was sort of like ripping someone’s soul out – you could do it if you had the right grip, and it wasn’t easy or pleasant for anyone involved. The way Jimmy Novak explained it, Cas had been roaring and fighting the whole way out, and Jimmy had tried his best to hold on but hadn’t been able to keep his metaphorical hands from slipping. Whatever had gotten to Cas was just that strong.
The first words out of Jimmy’s mouth were what Dean would’ve guessed someone would say if they woke up without an angel inside of them: disorientation, worry, fear, where am I, who are you, that whole shebang. He didn’t understand what he was saying exactly, though, not until he calmed down enough to stop using Yiddish and switch to English. That also made sense, him going back to the first language he’d learned to speak in that moment of panic.
Jimmy didn’t look like Cas. Dean watched him practically swallow the burger whole without bothering to chew. Sure they were the same height and had the same eyes and wore the same clothes, but the way the two of them looked, how they walked, the way they held themselves, it wasn’t Cas in the body sitting across from him right now. Even their voices were different, Cas’s all flat and gruff and Jimmy’s accent round and slanted at the same time.
“So what do you remember?”
Jimmy shook his head and took another long drink of his soda. “Before he left? Bits and pieces. Images, sounds – impressions, really. An angel inside of you, it’s kind of like being chained to a comet.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun,” Dean said.
“Understatement.”
“Cas said he needed us for something.” Sam pressed, “Please tell me you remember that.”
Jimmy shook his head. “That, he didn’t talk about.”
“But he did talk to you.”
“Sometimes. Not as much after I let him in, but we’d still talk.” Something soft fluttered over his face. “He didn’t tell you anything?”
“Just that we needed to stop by where you we found you.”
Both sets of Jimmy’s grandparents came over years after all of Sam and Dean’s family was firmly entrenched in the United States. They’d made their way from Europe through China, trading one ghetto for another, until they finally reached America – Vienna to Shanghai to Ohio. He had a wife and daughter waiting for him somewhere, a life that had nothing to do with what made him special enough for an angel to take interest in him.
“Why did you say yes to Cas?” Dean asked when Sam was in the shower and otherwise too busy to listen in.
“Because he asked my permission. Because he told me that I was needed, that I was chosen for God’s plan as part of a deeper purpose.”
“And you believed him just like that.”
“No.” He didn’t even smile like Cas because Cas didn’t smile. “We talked, and – argued. It took…” He looked away, smile fading. “He always told me I was the one he needed.”
It turned out Jimmy was the one he needed, but not the only one he could use: a fourteen-year-old Claire Novak channeling the might and fury of a messenger of the Lord was a sight Dean knew he wouldn’t forget anytime soon. He looked a little too happy to be smiting the demons, but hey, they were the same ones who’d ripped him out of Jimmy in the first place to torture his vessel and get their hands on what intel they could. Dean could forgive Cas a little bloody revenge. Okay, a lot bloody, but the principle was the same.
When Cas knelt down next to Jimmy, speaking too quiet for Dean to hear them, it was pretty easy to imagine what he was saying: thanks for the meatsuit, I’ve got a brand new one, time to shuffle off. He didn’t know what Jimmy said to get Cas back inside – maybe he reminded him it’d be nice and roomy in there – and then the pure light of creation and Heaven filled the space again, and Claire was panting on her knees as Castiel strode forward in his old-new vessel.
“Why’d you go back into Jimmy?” Sam asked after Cas zapped them back to their hotel room.
“Because he asked me to take him.”
“Were you testing him to see if he’d give up his daughter willingly?”
“No.” Cas almost sounded offended at the accusation. “I had no need to test Jimmy’s faith, nor Claire’s. But he asked this of me, and I obliged him.” He looked back and forth at the two of them sitting on the edge of the beds. There was something almost human in his face, something that said there was something he couldn’t say to Dean and Sam, and didn’t want to try.
“I made sure to thank her,” he said, like them knowing that would help. Dean knew it did for him; at least the equivalent thanks, for keeping his vessel safe when he’d been dragged away from it, soothed the past few days just enough to let him think he wouldn’t need to drink to get to sleep tonight.
Thing was, demons alone weren’t strong enough to gank Cas. Not even a whole nest of them could do it, even if they’d gotten to him after chasing him across the world from Yemen to Australia to Michigan. They’d have to be working with something else, and knowing that was worth opening a bottle for, definitely.
Hell, maybe he should ask Cas take him to Australia when this whole thing was done. No way he hadn’t earned a vacation by now.
-
Indiana wasn’t Australia, but a fancy hotel would do in a pinch. It was raining enough to make Noah cry, and Dean wouldn’t have been surprised to see the wind blow some kittens and puppies around. Anything would’ve been worth stopping at, and that they happened to be in a place with chocolates on the pillows – well, who cared that they were in the middle of nowhere?
Sam, of course. Trust him to be untrusting. Sometimes that was just a pain in the ass, but in this case, it wasn’t paranoia. If you knew people were out to get you, it was just being perceptive.
Although Dean had to guess even Sam wasn’t expecting this many people. Maybe Dean should’ve noticed something was up when the hotel seemed bigger on the inside – which it was, because it had to be to house all the gods in attendance. He could barely see to the far end of the table. It wasn’t all of them, but there had to be at least sixty already, with more coming in and the room just getting bigger to fit, everyone under the roof staring at him and Sam. They were the only humans present, the guests of honor at this little shindig.
Baldur clinked a knife against a wineglass. “Ladies, gentlemen, those that are otherwise, welcome and thank you for coming. This I thought I’d never see again, so many gods under one roof.”
“Oh, we are so, so screwed,” Sam whispered to Dean.
“Now, we all know why we’re here.” Baldur’s voice boomed out around the room. “The Messianic Age of Jewish lore looms over us. Now, I know we’ve had our little disagreements, and we’ve managed to put those behind us. But it’s time to once again look towards the future, or once again, we’ll find ourselves without one. Now, we do have two very valuable bargaining chips,” and everyone turned to look at Sam and Dean, “the last righteous princes of the line of David. And thanks to Ma’at,” a small Middle Eastern woman with her hair pinned up stood to smile and bow at the round of applause, “we have enough information to allow us the position to make –”
“Allow?” An old man with an eye patch and fuck, the nametag ‘Odin’ stood up. “We don’t allow anything. This is our world again.” Most of the room said something in agreement, almost none of it in English. “Because a few birds are doing their best to force the end of the world before it happens, and it’s not even the end times yet. Jormungandr is still asleep, and Rocabarraigh hasn’t yet arrived.”
A tall, blond woman with the nametag ‘Brigid’ and her face split down the middle into ugly and pretty stood up next, and cleared her throat before speaking. “We need to remember why we’re here. Not just because of the princes, but stability. Neutrality towards one another.”
“All these angels understand is violence,” Kali growled. “This has to end in blood. To them, it’s their creator or us, and they never compromise. We have to show them we’re not who we used to be, make a stand for ourselves.” She looked at Sam and Dean like they were animals she might find in a pound. “I say we kill them.”
What Baron Samedi said next Dean didn’t understand, not in the exact vocabulary, but he could tell the guy was agreeing with Brigid and getting Kali’s dander up and enjoying himself. Dean couldn’t blame the guy for that. He glanced at Sam, who glanced right back, and they would’ve managed to slip out the back quietly if Horus hadn’t noticed them inching towards the door and crashed a chandelier right in front of them.
“Stay,” Kali commanded.
“Come on.” Dean turned around and held his hands out in surrender. “You don’t really need us here for this, do you? We can just go take a nap while you work out the details.”
“As a matter of fact, we do.”
“All right then.” Dean looked around the room, up and down the tables, nodded, “Okay.” He licked his lips, took a deep breath, then walked back to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down next to Ganesh and across from Loki. “Hey there. How you doing?”
“And what do you think you’re pulling?” Ganesh rumbled.
“Come on, Sam.” Dean pulled out the chair on his other side. “Grab me a drink, will you?”
“Listen to me, boy –” Odin started.
“No, sir, you listen.” Dean stood back up. “You’re all out of options here, and you know that. We know that. We know that you know that. And any other night of the year, I’d be doing my best to, well, kill you. My brother and I, we eat gods for breakfast. But this is, hey, this is a night that’s different from all other nights.” He fought to keep his voice steady. “You incestuous bastards. So even though there’s nothing I’d love more than to slit all your throats, you dicks, I’m gonna help you out. See what I can add to the conversation and maybe make it a bit easier for everyone here when the shit really hits the fan.”
Sam sat down next to Dean and handed him the water; Dean took a bigger drink than he needed to keep his hands from shaking. “So tell me, what exactly did you all get from teaming up with Lilith? Because if I know my demons, and I do, there’s nothing she won’t do to screw you over the moment she has a chance.”
Maybe it was something in the water, maybe it was because they wanted him to, but when Amaterasu opened her mouth and started to speak in Japanese, he understood her just fine. “Please remember that we have demons of our own. We can handle yours without any fuss.”
“Really.” Dean clenched his teeth in another fake smile. “Because it looks like there’s enough tricksters here to make sure everyone here knows you can’t trust anyone that wants to make a deal.”
“And there’s enough tricksters here that everyone here knows ways to get out of them,” Loki smiled.
Sun Wukong slammed a hand against the table. “This is hardly a case where an enemy’s enemy is a friend. We’ve labored and toiled and we can’t see that gone for nothing. We delay this, we stop their god from coming, we deal with the demons then. We can hold ourselves till then.”
“Like the first time we found ourselves without that competition?” Baldur’s laugh boomed out. “Oh, yes, we’ve come far since then.”
“Hold your tongue there,” he growled.
“If you insist.”
Ganesh grinned at Dean. “Do we have to worry quite so much? Their birds are in enough of a frenzy we won’t have to worry about them, and like we said, their demons aren’t going to put up much of a fight against all of us.”
“You know, you didn’t say, did your own little bird tell you how your creator abandoned your world?” Baron Samedi twirled his hat on his fingers. “For a supposedly loving parent, he sure doesn’t stick around.”
“And you would know, how?” Dean shot back.
Mercury was suddenly behind them, hands on their shoulders. “As nice as your enthusiasm is, perhaps it is for the best if the children leave the room.”
It didn’t feel like Cas’s zapping, which didn’t feel like anything and moved him to another place in the time between seconds; this was closer to being thrown out of a bar by the seat of his pants. He landed facedown on the bed, and when he recovered enough to realize where he was, Dean swore; at least they could’ve given them fresh chocolates.
“Well, there goes that plan,” Sam said from the floor. Bastard hadn’t even tried to aim both of them.
“It was worth a shot. Hey, it got us out of there, didn’t it?”
“Except now they’re planning our fate without any input whatsoever.”
“Bite me, bitch.”
“Jerk.”
“So what’s our plan now?”
“Door’s locked.” Sam sighed. “We can’t run, we can’t wait, we can’t bargain, we can’t fight.”
“We could always pray.”
“Of course we can.”
“Aww, come on, it’s worth a shot.”
“Sure it is.”
“You got any better ideas?”
Sam glared. “If you insist.” Taking a deep breath, turning East, he started, “Adonai s’fatai tiftach, ufi yagid t’hilatecha.” Bending and bowing and straightening up, “Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu veilohei avoteinu, elohei Avraham, elohei Yitzchak, veilohei Yaakov.”
Dean hadn’t heard Sam pray in years. This was just plain recitation, nothing in the words, not even the hope they’d work, but Sam’s kept his face clear and his eyes shut the way he’d always done. “Haeil hagagol hagibor v’hanorah, eil eil-yon –”
There was a crash somewhere outside the room, stopping Sam right away, shaking the room like they were in an earthquake or on a volcano. It went on for almost a full minute before stopping. Dean looked up from between his arms at the cracked ceiling. “What the Hell was that?”
“I – don’t know.” Sam checked the door again, and this time it opened. It must’ve been soundproofed, because all the noise came rushing in: screaming, shouting, roaring battle cries, tidal and huge – divine, even.
Dean stepped into the hall, motioning for Sam to follow a little behind. Whatever was going on, it was still pretty far away – bigger on the inside, remember – and if they could hear it from here, they really shouldn’t be going closer. But that was kind of their job description, so down the hall they went.
“Ugh.” The smell hit them next, brimstone and ash and something – Dean stumbled back, turning to clutch at a wall until the world stopped spinning. Years ago he and Dad did a case in a slaughterhouse; it smelled like this, except this was worse.
“Dean?”
He swallowed, took a deep breath. “Let’s keep going.”
There were more sounds, blood flowing out from under the doors to soak into the carpet and get their boots wet, light flashing through the cracks. Dean looked at Sam, who looked back at Dean and nodded. On three, he and Sam kicked opened the doors.
Dean suddenly remembered what he’d said about angels getting their hands dirty. Bodies were piled up around the room, some of them still moaning, blood everywhere from the table to the ceiling. There were pieces of things scattered around, like people had been ripped apart without anyone caring about making a mess – entrails, fingers, hearts still beating, hands still clutching swords or glowing or trying to crawl towards Sam. He kicked it away. There wasn’t any point to trying to avoid stepping in anything – the carpet squelched under their boots – just the worst of the squishy stuff.
And in the middle of the room, with hands stained to the elbows and a sword still dripping, stood an angel, a terrifying and awesome warrior of God. He and two others, and they were all that was left.
“The sheer arrogance,” Kali swore, four swords to the angel’s one, and he was still holding his own, dancing with her, clashes ringing out in time with flashes of the shadows of an angel’s wings. “You think you’re the only ones who matter. There are many of us, and we were here first. If anyone gets to end this world, it’s me.”
“Your world, Kali.” He blocked, moved, spun about, “If it’s your world you want to end, that’s fine by me.” His blade went right through her where her heart would be, and she crumpled and wailed. “But not ours. It’s not yours to decide.”
In one swift motion and graceful arc, he pulled his sword out and spun around and cut off Loki’s head, who’d been coming up right behind him. The head rolled over to where Sam and Dean were standing, and a moment later, the guy was right there too, one boot holding it in place. They had to look down to make eye contact, and wasn’t that a kick in the head.
“Relax,” he smiled. “They’re just pagans. Oh, shoot, where are my manners?” He was suddenly clean, hair combed back and even his sword was polished and sparkling, and he held out a hand, “Gabriel. Pleased to meet you.”
“The. Archangel.” Sam didn’t exactly ask for confirmation so much as declare it.
“God is my strength, that’s me.” He grinned. “Now, what say we blow this popsicle stand?”
Dean did his best to say something. “Uh.”
“You’re welcome for saving your asses, by the way. They were planning on carving you up and eating you. Literally. You should’ve seen the kitchen.”
“Thank you?”
Loki moaned under Gabriel’s foot, and he kicked the head aside. “You be quiet. The monotheists are having a discussion.”
Somehow that got Dean’s words back. “Was all this necessary?”
“What do you mean?”
“The –” he waved his hand around the room. “The this. The slaughter.”
Gabriel burst out laughing. “Come on, they’re not dead-dead. They’re just…killed. There’s a difference. They’ll be fine. Eventually. They should respawn okay in a year or two.”
“You could’ve just zapped us out of here, or –”
“Holding spell on us,” Sam reminded him. “He had to kill the one making it.”
“And I even asked them politely, but they weren’t willing to risk this little confederacy, so,” Gabriel shrugged, “we had to take them all out just to be sure.”
“We?”
“Mike and Raphie left to catch the runners.”
“Yeah.” Dean looked around, at the bodies pinned to the ceiling and the guts on the walls. “Job like this, you need the big guns.”
“Thank you. I always take pride in my work. There’s not much chance to do a good smiting these days.”
“We should –”
“Get out of here? My thoughts exactly. You were thinking about Australia, right? Adelaide’s really nice this time –”
“We should do something for them.”
“What?”
Dean swallowed, crossed his arms over his chest, jerked his chin to Kali’s body, the room’s new centerpiece. “We should do something for them.”
“At least clean it up in here,” Sam offered.
“And why should I?”
Dean smiled without feeling it. “God wept for the Egyptians.”
Gabriel looked from Dean to Sam, Sam to Dean, eyes and face sharp as his sword, then broke it when he grinned. “You two really are just as righteous as Cas told us.”
-
They ended up at a little bed-and-breakfast over in California somewhere in the Napa Valley, one of the places that even forged credit cards couldn’t easily afford. Traveling with hedonistic archangels had its perks. He and Sam even got their own rooms.
Individual bathrooms messed with the forced quaintness, though, so around two his bladder demanded he get out of bed and deal with more pressing Earthly matters. Normally, he’d do his business half-awake and fall back to sleep without a fuss, but tonight, with Sam’s room on the way to the toilet, he had to stop and wake himself up so he wouldn’t miss anything. Sam was still awake, talking to Gabriel. The bedside lamp was on, making a little island of light in the dark, and Dean clung to the wall to stay hid.
“He never wanted blind faith, Sam. It’s not meant to be easy.”
“It’s not the struggle. You can’t have a crisis of faith without faith,” Sam whispered back. “Being able to maintain it –”
“Free will is your gift. God gave it to you so you’d be able to make the right choices. It’s not just because of who you are. That’s part of it, Sam, but it’s more in the choices you make.”
They were both barefoot. Dean didn’t know why he noticed that, but there they were, neither of them wearing shoes, and maybe he noticed it was because it was so normal to take your shoes off when you were getting ready for bed before you got sidetracked with debate about fate and free will. It was probably the most polite thing to do when you were talking about the nature of God and faith and righteousness with an archangel.
“I didn’t choose this destiny deliberately. It wasn’t something I set out to accomplish.”
Dean stood there a while, listening to them debate, thinking all they needed was some Gematria and it’d be the Yeshiva they’d never had. Sam didn’t notice him at all, but Gabriel glanced over just as Sam started to talk about zekhut and what that meant for him and Dean, and with a twitch of his hand, the door slowly swung shut. Well. He could take a hint.
-
“What?” Sam asked the next morning when he sat down at their table and Dean nearly choked on his pancakes in shock.
“Where’d that come from?”
Sam tipped his fedora back a bit. “I had it stashed in one of Dad’s storage units. Gabriel got it for me this morning.”
“Nice of him.” He smiled. “Did I ever tell you it looks good on you?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“Well, it does.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
-
Not that Dean would admit to it, but the look on Sam’s face when he saw his old tallis was almost enough to make a one-time exception for chick flick moments, and getting back to morning and evening prayers was pretty nice. It was nearly their old routine before all this crazy destiny train stuff started going down. Then again, after the past two months, ganking a skinwalker in Arizona and a nest of vampires in Colorado was almost relaxing. It all came down to what you were used to, and what it took to faze you.
Angels sitting across from you in a diner kind of set the bar pretty high. Raphael had been gathering intel bit by bit, enough to puzzle it out, and Cas thought it would be best if he delivered the news in person.
The first confederacy of pagan gods had gone pretty much unnoticed by Heaven in the sudden absence of God. This one would’ve been the second, and it was the shaky alliance with demons that tipped the angels up to it. Plenty of people didn’t want God back – power vacuums and shaky treaties, a chance to rip the world apart and start over, monsters running wild, some of them still angry about what happened in Egypt. Signs and portents were popping up all over the world, nothing done at random anymore.
“We’re still preparing,” Raphael said, warm breezes fluttering the napkins. “We can’t let our work go for naught.”
“So when we get everyone ready and the Messiah comes…” Dean let the end of the sentence hang.
Raphael picked it up. “When he arrives, God will follow.”
“Sort of a hard reboot to the universe?” Both angels stared at him.
“How would we go about bringing Him back?” Sam asked.
But the angels were already gone, leaving them stuck with the tab.
“God, I hate it when they do that.”
-
Hanukkah was always Dean’s favorite holiday. The story of the Maccabees, fighting against impossible odds to triumph in the end, was basically the story of the Winchesters. And even though he’d never admit it to anyone, not Cas or Rufus or even to Sam, the idea of getting home back – of being able to get your home back, of it not being gone forever, was something he always wished he was strong enough to see through.
Sam, of course, loved Pesach. Most years it meant salad instead of sandwiches and eggs instead of oatmeal at breakfast, but they always managed to find a Hillel or Chabad house open for at least one seder, and the few times they’d managed to take a breather at Rufus’ there was the chance to take stock and think, they haven’t gotten us yet. We’re still free. Sam told him once, four and forty-four years ago, that it was the idea of leaving this life for a better one that he liked, the idea that there were better times coming still.
Rufus had already cleaned the house top to bottom, Sam and Dean arriving in time to help him switch the plates over and drop the last forbidden foods off at the closest food bank. He and Sam were cutting up carrots for the soup, chopping up the goat – “Beats lamb by a mile,” Rufus always said – and that left Dean to take some time to call Cas for a visit and some answers.
“So what’s in it?” Dean rubbed the chain of his amulet, letting his fingers brush over the letters he’d memorized long ago. “What makes it so special I gotta hang onto it?”
“It’s a name,” Cas told him.
“That’s it? A name? Of who?”
“To be more precise, it’s the name.”
Dean blinked. “Wait. The name? The big one? Jehovah?”
“Not quite.” Cas looked at the amulet. “It’s the name as it’s meant to be said in the Temple.”
“So when it gets built back up and we’ve got the space to say it, this opens up and we get to read it.” Cas nodded. “And all the angels of heaven are betting that when we say His name, He shows up.”
“That’s correct.”
“So you’re bringing about the world to come to bring God back. Seems a little backwards.” Dean swallowed, wiped his face, huffed a breath, “You sure it’s gonna work? That He’ll show?”
“He’ll come,” Cas promised.
Dean waited alone until Sam called to him to come inside.
Seders weren’t supposed to be happy, not really, and they weren’t supposed to be an ordinary dinner party either, but this year made this night more different than the any of the rest the three of them ever had. Everyone felt different this year. What they’d gone through these last few months, and what they knew would be coming – in all the days of their life – made the whole thing feel more than a little strange. It wasn’t all metaphor anymore. Sam sang the four questions as usual, Dean shuddered at slaying of the first-born son as usual, and Rufus brokered the argument over who’d open the door as usual. It wasn’t in the siddur but it was just as ritualized.
“Well, someone’s got to get it.”
“You,” Sam pointed to Dean.
“No, you.”
“Why not both of you?”
“All right, if he says so,” Dean chuckled.
“If he says so,” Sam answered.
Rufus kept smiling. “You two had better –”
Knock, knock.
Everyone stopped. There was another knock on the door. They kept quiet, and there was another.
“Somebody should get that,” Rufus said to no one in particular.
There wasn’t more knocking. It could’ve been anything. Someone here by accident. A demon. A vacuum cleaner salesman. Mormons. But Dean knew that wasn’t who was on the other side of the door, that there was only one person it could be. Dean glanced around, clenching his hands to keep them from shaking. Sam was right behind him when he undid the lock and opened the door.
He’d never seen the guy in his life, and he didn’t look like any of the illustrations he’d seen in picture books when he was a kid. No flowing robes and white beard, the guy had a close-cropped brown one and jeans and a jacket instead, but there was no mistaking who this was. There was a lot he wanted to say to the prophet, but all he could think of was, “What kept you?”
“Dean, be polite,” Rufus called out. “Let him in.”
“Right, right,” he stepped to the side, pulling the door open farther, “Won’t you come in?”
“We’ve already got some wine for you,” Sam offered.
Dean watched Elijah sit down at the table, sighing like he’d come a long, long way. And really, he had. Rufus passed him his cup, and he took a long drink. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Last year, he’d opened the door to no one, nothing, no future and no hope. But now, after what he’d gone through? Next year – no way Dean was looking forward to the year that was coming. But next year – Sam’s hand on his shoulder, always together fighting for the future, the world to come – next year, in Jerusalem.
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