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.spn fic: A geometry for spirits (PG13) Dean/Castiel
A geometry for spirits (Castiel/Dean, Anna; PG13) ~1758
Inspired by some stuff in 4.16, indicated in notes which are at the end of the fic due to spoilers. A bit of language!kink too, because I seriously can't help myself. Possibly this is pre-Castiel/Dean, but I am going to slash it all the way.
A geometry for spirits
Anael captains the first garrison in Eden.
When Lucifer and the others fall she sees only a storm of light, silver and gold and blue, and stands steady when the ground quakes beneath her feet. Thousands of years later, when she has a heart to feel and blood to burn and run cold, she will think of that moment – looking back up Heavenward – and think, if she had had a heart on that long-ago day, it would have failed her.
Not long afterward one of her brothers comes, not as much a warrior as herself or the other angels who now fill the garrison and keep watch over creation. She has the sense of darkness hedging them about, wrongness already in a world still newborn to an angel’s eyes, and she knows Castiel sees it too.
"Perdition," Castiel says, out of nowhere, and Anael hears the meanings, layers of them, woven together as light and dark upon deep water: chaos-forgetfulness-forgetting-the-place-of-that-which-is-lost. They both feel it pressing upon them, the fabric of this new creation ready to rip.
Castiel looks around the garrison, down at the folds of the mountains and two great rivers and the generous curve of the earth.
"You know your mission," Anael tells him.
He regards her calmly for a moment before looking up at the stars. He has, Anael remembers, always been more comfortable going up, contemplating those things for which he was shaped. Something – in another eon she will call it regret – brushes at her, but this is duty now, and unlooked-for war, and Castiel has his part to play.
"Of course I do," he says, and obediently bends to his work.
* * *
"I can't fucking believe this, Cas. Why now?"
Now is today, in a motel room decorated with pictures of a man called Elvis Presley. Until Castiel's appearance, Dean had been sprawled on the cheap mattress, searching for a sleep no amount of exhaustion will let him find. Now, he's backed almost into the corner, glowering.
"When I said I would give anything to keep you from facing Alastair," Castiel says, "I meant it."
"Then why didn't you?" Dean eyes him, all roiling hostility and suspicion.
Castiel keeps silent. The logical reply Because nothing I could give would have gained us anything fades before the knowledge that, even if he'd fallen, or given himself to Alastair, they would have learned nothing. And more than that, more than logic, he thinks Dean has never had much experience with others sacrificing for him. Probably, Castiel thinks, Dean wouldn't have taken it in the spirit with which it was intended.
"So," Dean says. He shifts from one foot to another, arms still crossed, a restless near-stillness in him that draws all Castiel's attention. "Why the hell are you here?"
"Amends." Dean looks at him. "A gift, if you will." That earns more puzzlement, and uncertainty. Castiel fights the desire to sigh, his body's natural response to what he is coming to recognize as impatience. Free will for an angel never meant contrariness.
"I... do not do this lightly." He steps closer, Dean backs up; another step, Dean's next step takes him almost back against the wall. The wall is fake paneled wood, dark and, for a place and such as this, old. Dust and cleaning fluid stings Castiel's nose unpleasantly; the body will react, and tied to it as he is, he has to be aware of it. "You need whatever assistance I can give you." Whether I should give it or not, he adds to himself, but doesn't say.
"Dude, Cas." This close, he can see the finely detailed tendonwork and muscle of Dean's throat flex as he swallows, a cut from a razor, the worn edges of his collar. Even tense, every line of him shouts exhaustion. "Cas, what the hell?"
"All creation is balance and proportion," Castiel says absently. Beauty is closer, the symmetry that belongs to everything rock or air or flesh. "There are laws, boundaries."
"Really?" Dean inches back, soles scuffing on the carpet. "Because, um, I'm not sensing a whole lot of those right now."
"The symbols you draw." Perhaps inevitably, Castiel focuses on the amulet around Dean's neck, the horned man with his enigmatic smile, senses through his shirt the tattoo inked high on his chest. "Those are old. Very old."
"Okay, thanks, Yoda." And still this close, Dean's breath brushes warm across Castiel's cheek, smelling of alcohol and a long day. "Are you gonna stand here all day pretending you're not all up in my personal space, or did you actually barge in for something?"
"I did." Danger presses on him, standing so close; angelic memory never fades, so he hears the voices of Michael and Seferiel as clearly as though they are with him, their voices a revelation.
Your care for your work has always endangered you, Castiel.
"I invented them," Castiel says. His borrowed body pushes at him, aware suddenly of Dean's human solidness, flesh and bone, the sturdy length of him. "The devil's traps and symbols you use… They're a lot different now, of course, but they still do what they need to."
"Could have fooled me." The accusation stings, and Castiel has to make himself not look away. Shame, he tells himself. Regret.
"That circle was drawn with the ashes of holy wood mixed in with salt and consecrated earth. The only way it was going to break was if something from the outside broke it." Someone. He gathers himself against the memory of Uriel's death, has to fight the tightness in his chest and spiraling loss. Grief is what that is, maybe. When he does not separate past and present, and time blurs into what it is for angels, Uriel's body lies before him, the shadows of his wings stretching immense and black across the floor.
"Cas?"
"Yes." Castiel draws a breath for concentration, presses two fingers to Dean's left arm, under the cotton, in the heart of the scar that still marks his skin. Dean jumps and tries to move away, more than halfway to a curse, but Castiel holds him, holds to him with will and command. Cas Dean mouths at him, and he's working his way toward being angry enough to do something about it, but Castiel keeps touching him, despite muscle tense under his fingertips.
"Angels have their own script," he murmurs against Dean's mouth. Dean trembles against him, for the knowledge or Castiel being so close, Castiel can't say. Dean's skin warms quickly, a shock of heat as when Castiel had taken him and hauled him up out of loss and forgetting.
"When I was sent down to the garrison, my first assignment was to find ways to keep Lucifer and the lesser demons in the pit, and if they should find their way out, ways to put them back." He hadn't felt lonely at the garrison, even surrounded by soldiers like Anael and Uriel, but he'd felt the distance, so far from home. The letters he'd invented had brought heaven down to him, and reciting them now does the same thing. Anha beyam gimle thalen, the letters he'd first seen in the sky, the skeletons of powerful words; he traces them into Dean's arm. "So I took the symmetries among the stars and applied them to the earth. The symbols represent balance, certain… orders. The true reality of a thing. It's hard to explain."
Dean sighs and goes limp against the wall, head rolling as though his neck can't support the weight. His eyes look some place far away, out, maybe, among the stars where the letters of angels come from. Hanev uri zehah cas, Castiel whispers each letter to the curve of Dean's jaw, to salt and earth shaped into strong, breakable flesh. "The first time I walked among humans was to teach them these, so they could defend themselves against demons."
He traces a circle for the great binding ring, the characters that stand for the cardinal directions. East goes over his own thumbprint, North at the base of his middle finger and South on the lower curve of his palm. The pentacle angles through it, made to constrain spirits; around it go other characters, the true signs for the planets and stars, and the letters Castiel had seen when he'd connected them together.
"I can't give you the symbols for the true names of the angels," Castiel says to the warm space under Dean's ear. That would be treason, and a death sentence. "But I will give you mine."
"Cas…" Dean says brokenly. He looks up, eyes drugged and glassy with distance. His cheek brushes Castiel's, rough on rough. "Don't."
"I can't… perch on your shoulder, Dean." He allows himself a smile. "But draw this on any surface – just trace it, inside a circle, it doesn't matter how – and I'll come."
He writes only the first character of his name, the only one that's needed between the two of them. The summoning won't work for any other creature, man or demon or angel. It's the mixing of form and will, the letter and the force of Dean's wanting behind it – that's the summoning.
Cas he writes, for Mercury and swiftness, and that has always been Castiel, swiftness to obey.
At least, Castiel thinks as he steps back and steadies Dean's shaking body, until recently.
"Come on," he says quietly, "you should rest now."
"Can't sleep" Dean sighs, voice still absent, gaze a long way away. He obeys, though, for once, allows Castiel to haul him awkwardly over to the bed and lay him down. He manages his legs by himself, toeing his boots off, but leaves the covers to Castiel, who needs a moment and a few impatient grunts to figure out that Dean wants them.
"You came up with all that yourself," Dean mutters. His eyes are almost present now, a little clearer than before. "All that magic stuff."
"I did," Castiel says. He searches the statement for pride, but can't find any; he'd been created for that work, more than holding a sword. "I was… I was not always a soldier, although it's been a long time since I've been anything else."
"You should talk to Sammy." Dean turns his face into the pillow, and his next words are muffled. "Pairrvgeeks."
"I'll let you get some sleep," Castiel says. He watches Dean's breathing even out, the suddenly fluid relaxation of a body wound tight against life and fear. "Call me if you need me."
And Dean says, all unexpected, when Castiel had thought to hear only deep, slow breath, "You can stay, Cas."
Cas does.
.notes: The letters Cas uses are vaguely derived from a bit of Greek and Hebrew, and the idea of an angelic language used to control demons belongs mostly to the Lesser Key of Solomon, although I took liberties.
The fic was inspired by part of 4.16, specifically, Castiel's insistence that the devil's trap he drew should not have broken (and the fact that he seems fairly comfortable with systems of magic... man, now I have images of he and Bobby talking shop). This put it into my head that Castiel is the angel who basically created the original system of protective magic that people could use to ward off or control evil spirits, and was originally posted to the garrison on Earth to develop the system and teach it to people. Then, war being war, his deployment ended up lasting far longer than he thought, and he's much more a soldier now than he was in the beginning. So yeah, all this is the canon in my head XD
(It also totally explains [in my head] why Cas is not so good at fighting, heh heh.)
Inspired by some stuff in 4.16, indicated in notes which are at the end of the fic due to spoilers. A bit of language!kink too, because I seriously can't help myself. Possibly this is pre-Castiel/Dean, but I am going to slash it all the way.
A geometry for spirits
Anael captains the first garrison in Eden.
When Lucifer and the others fall she sees only a storm of light, silver and gold and blue, and stands steady when the ground quakes beneath her feet. Thousands of years later, when she has a heart to feel and blood to burn and run cold, she will think of that moment – looking back up Heavenward – and think, if she had had a heart on that long-ago day, it would have failed her.
Not long afterward one of her brothers comes, not as much a warrior as herself or the other angels who now fill the garrison and keep watch over creation. She has the sense of darkness hedging them about, wrongness already in a world still newborn to an angel’s eyes, and she knows Castiel sees it too.
"Perdition," Castiel says, out of nowhere, and Anael hears the meanings, layers of them, woven together as light and dark upon deep water: chaos-forgetfulness-forgetting-the-place-of-that-which-is-lost. They both feel it pressing upon them, the fabric of this new creation ready to rip.
Castiel looks around the garrison, down at the folds of the mountains and two great rivers and the generous curve of the earth.
"You know your mission," Anael tells him.
He regards her calmly for a moment before looking up at the stars. He has, Anael remembers, always been more comfortable going up, contemplating those things for which he was shaped. Something – in another eon she will call it regret – brushes at her, but this is duty now, and unlooked-for war, and Castiel has his part to play.
"Of course I do," he says, and obediently bends to his work.
"I can't fucking believe this, Cas. Why now?"
Now is today, in a motel room decorated with pictures of a man called Elvis Presley. Until Castiel's appearance, Dean had been sprawled on the cheap mattress, searching for a sleep no amount of exhaustion will let him find. Now, he's backed almost into the corner, glowering.
"When I said I would give anything to keep you from facing Alastair," Castiel says, "I meant it."
"Then why didn't you?" Dean eyes him, all roiling hostility and suspicion.
Castiel keeps silent. The logical reply Because nothing I could give would have gained us anything fades before the knowledge that, even if he'd fallen, or given himself to Alastair, they would have learned nothing. And more than that, more than logic, he thinks Dean has never had much experience with others sacrificing for him. Probably, Castiel thinks, Dean wouldn't have taken it in the spirit with which it was intended.
"So," Dean says. He shifts from one foot to another, arms still crossed, a restless near-stillness in him that draws all Castiel's attention. "Why the hell are you here?"
"Amends." Dean looks at him. "A gift, if you will." That earns more puzzlement, and uncertainty. Castiel fights the desire to sigh, his body's natural response to what he is coming to recognize as impatience. Free will for an angel never meant contrariness.
"I... do not do this lightly." He steps closer, Dean backs up; another step, Dean's next step takes him almost back against the wall. The wall is fake paneled wood, dark and, for a place and such as this, old. Dust and cleaning fluid stings Castiel's nose unpleasantly; the body will react, and tied to it as he is, he has to be aware of it. "You need whatever assistance I can give you." Whether I should give it or not, he adds to himself, but doesn't say.
"Dude, Cas." This close, he can see the finely detailed tendonwork and muscle of Dean's throat flex as he swallows, a cut from a razor, the worn edges of his collar. Even tense, every line of him shouts exhaustion. "Cas, what the hell?"
"All creation is balance and proportion," Castiel says absently. Beauty is closer, the symmetry that belongs to everything rock or air or flesh. "There are laws, boundaries."
"Really?" Dean inches back, soles scuffing on the carpet. "Because, um, I'm not sensing a whole lot of those right now."
"The symbols you draw." Perhaps inevitably, Castiel focuses on the amulet around Dean's neck, the horned man with his enigmatic smile, senses through his shirt the tattoo inked high on his chest. "Those are old. Very old."
"Okay, thanks, Yoda." And still this close, Dean's breath brushes warm across Castiel's cheek, smelling of alcohol and a long day. "Are you gonna stand here all day pretending you're not all up in my personal space, or did you actually barge in for something?"
"I did." Danger presses on him, standing so close; angelic memory never fades, so he hears the voices of Michael and Seferiel as clearly as though they are with him, their voices a revelation.
Your care for your work has always endangered you, Castiel.
"I invented them," Castiel says. His borrowed body pushes at him, aware suddenly of Dean's human solidness, flesh and bone, the sturdy length of him. "The devil's traps and symbols you use… They're a lot different now, of course, but they still do what they need to."
"Could have fooled me." The accusation stings, and Castiel has to make himself not look away. Shame, he tells himself. Regret.
"That circle was drawn with the ashes of holy wood mixed in with salt and consecrated earth. The only way it was going to break was if something from the outside broke it." Someone. He gathers himself against the memory of Uriel's death, has to fight the tightness in his chest and spiraling loss. Grief is what that is, maybe. When he does not separate past and present, and time blurs into what it is for angels, Uriel's body lies before him, the shadows of his wings stretching immense and black across the floor.
"Cas?"
"Yes." Castiel draws a breath for concentration, presses two fingers to Dean's left arm, under the cotton, in the heart of the scar that still marks his skin. Dean jumps and tries to move away, more than halfway to a curse, but Castiel holds him, holds to him with will and command. Cas Dean mouths at him, and he's working his way toward being angry enough to do something about it, but Castiel keeps touching him, despite muscle tense under his fingertips.
"Angels have their own script," he murmurs against Dean's mouth. Dean trembles against him, for the knowledge or Castiel being so close, Castiel can't say. Dean's skin warms quickly, a shock of heat as when Castiel had taken him and hauled him up out of loss and forgetting.
"When I was sent down to the garrison, my first assignment was to find ways to keep Lucifer and the lesser demons in the pit, and if they should find their way out, ways to put them back." He hadn't felt lonely at the garrison, even surrounded by soldiers like Anael and Uriel, but he'd felt the distance, so far from home. The letters he'd invented had brought heaven down to him, and reciting them now does the same thing. Anha beyam gimle thalen, the letters he'd first seen in the sky, the skeletons of powerful words; he traces them into Dean's arm. "So I took the symmetries among the stars and applied them to the earth. The symbols represent balance, certain… orders. The true reality of a thing. It's hard to explain."
Dean sighs and goes limp against the wall, head rolling as though his neck can't support the weight. His eyes look some place far away, out, maybe, among the stars where the letters of angels come from. Hanev uri zehah cas, Castiel whispers each letter to the curve of Dean's jaw, to salt and earth shaped into strong, breakable flesh. "The first time I walked among humans was to teach them these, so they could defend themselves against demons."
He traces a circle for the great binding ring, the characters that stand for the cardinal directions. East goes over his own thumbprint, North at the base of his middle finger and South on the lower curve of his palm. The pentacle angles through it, made to constrain spirits; around it go other characters, the true signs for the planets and stars, and the letters Castiel had seen when he'd connected them together.
"I can't give you the symbols for the true names of the angels," Castiel says to the warm space under Dean's ear. That would be treason, and a death sentence. "But I will give you mine."
"Cas…" Dean says brokenly. He looks up, eyes drugged and glassy with distance. His cheek brushes Castiel's, rough on rough. "Don't."
"I can't… perch on your shoulder, Dean." He allows himself a smile. "But draw this on any surface – just trace it, inside a circle, it doesn't matter how – and I'll come."
He writes only the first character of his name, the only one that's needed between the two of them. The summoning won't work for any other creature, man or demon or angel. It's the mixing of form and will, the letter and the force of Dean's wanting behind it – that's the summoning.
Cas he writes, for Mercury and swiftness, and that has always been Castiel, swiftness to obey.
At least, Castiel thinks as he steps back and steadies Dean's shaking body, until recently.
"Come on," he says quietly, "you should rest now."
"Can't sleep" Dean sighs, voice still absent, gaze a long way away. He obeys, though, for once, allows Castiel to haul him awkwardly over to the bed and lay him down. He manages his legs by himself, toeing his boots off, but leaves the covers to Castiel, who needs a moment and a few impatient grunts to figure out that Dean wants them.
"You came up with all that yourself," Dean mutters. His eyes are almost present now, a little clearer than before. "All that magic stuff."
"I did," Castiel says. He searches the statement for pride, but can't find any; he'd been created for that work, more than holding a sword. "I was… I was not always a soldier, although it's been a long time since I've been anything else."
"You should talk to Sammy." Dean turns his face into the pillow, and his next words are muffled. "Pairrvgeeks."
"I'll let you get some sleep," Castiel says. He watches Dean's breathing even out, the suddenly fluid relaxation of a body wound tight against life and fear. "Call me if you need me."
And Dean says, all unexpected, when Castiel had thought to hear only deep, slow breath, "You can stay, Cas."
Cas does.
.notes: The letters Cas uses are vaguely derived from a bit of Greek and Hebrew, and the idea of an angelic language used to control demons belongs mostly to the Lesser Key of Solomon, although I took liberties.
The fic was inspired by part of 4.16, specifically, Castiel's insistence that the devil's trap he drew should not have broken (and the fact that he seems fairly comfortable with systems of magic... man, now I have images of he and Bobby talking shop). This put it into my head that Castiel is the angel who basically created the original system of protective magic that people could use to ward off or control evil spirits, and was originally posted to the garrison on Earth to develop the system and teach it to people. Then, war being war, his deployment ended up lasting far longer than he thought, and he's much more a soldier now than he was in the beginning. So yeah, all this is the canon in my head XD
(It also totally explains [in my head] why Cas is not so good at fighting, heh heh.)
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