What Profits the Angels
Characters: Sam, Castiel
Word Count: 1600
Episode/Spoilers: "On the Head of a Pin"
Summary: A confrontation between Sam and Castiel. Precedes the final scene of the episode.
He couldn't return to the garrison, Castiel realized as Anna vanished as peremptorily as she had appeared. Not yet, not until he'd had time to pray and to meditate upon whom he could trust. Instead of going back to the barracks, then, he ended up in a hospital restroom, trying to ascertain that no blood or other trace of the latest struggle remained visible on his form.
Castiel approached the mirror somewhat distrustfully; he was accustomed to catching sight of a vessel's reflection in a still pool of water or the polished metal of a shield, but he'd never needed to look at one before. He paused as he leaned toward the glass, intrigued by the vivid color of the host's irises as the pupils contracted under the harsh florescent light. Guileless, wide eyes peered quizzically back at him, as if a human expression could reveal the thoughts of an angel. Displeased, he schooled the face to blankness and finished his task. A man entering the room as he walked out gave him an appreciative look; Castiel sighed inwardly and ignored him.
Uriel had chuckled out loud when Castiel returned to their most recent home in his most recent vessel. 'We left Hellas millennia ago, brother. It's safe to—'
'This man was most convenient,' Castiel informed him.
'Of course,' Uriel replied, his brown eyes glinting with mirth. Uriel professed indifference to the appearance of their hosts, but he preferred to take a vessel with the dark eyes and skin that God had given to the first humans. He also secretly loved the range of non-verbal expressions that a corporeal form offered, and he slouched about as the rest of their brothers and sisters appeared, his smirk growing broader with each new arrival.
'For creatures without vanity, angels always seem to pick the prettiest packages,' he observed when their number was complete.
'We know what an aesthete you are, Uriel. We chose them for you,' one of the others called back, laughing. She wasn't among the slain. Castiel didn't know if she was one of the lost.
He strode through the corridors, ignoring how the low ceilings and featureless hallways compounded the claustrophobia of being confined in a physical body. A faded poster of a seascape hanging in a waiting area showed that someone else found the blank walls equally oppressive, but the picture did little to ameliorate their effects.
A few days after they'd taken on their current human forms, Castiel had found his brother on a rocky beach, staring out at the ocean. This was the first time they'd been stationed so far from the familiar body of water that their last vessels had called 'mare nostrum'—
'Their sea?' Is anything more arrogant than a Roman, Castiel?'
'A Persian, an Assyrian, a Babylonian…,'
'Oh, very well.'
—and both of them missed the salt air. Possessing a body had many inconveniences, but the glorious creation of the sea could only be appreciated fully through the human senses.
'Do you remember that trireme at Salamis?' Uriel reminisced.
'Do I look as though I've forgotten Salamis?' Castiel responded, though in point of fact walking amongst the Lacedemonians at Thermopylae, not sailing with the Athenians at Salamis, was what made him vow to never again take a beardless young man as a vessel.
Uriel's lips quirked. 'For heaven's sake, all they did was proposition you.'
'Repeatedly,' Castiel reminded him, 'and explicitly.'
Uriel smiled again before his good humor faded. 'I went to see the Nile,' he said.
'And?'
Uriel glowered at the rough gray surf. 'It seems our Father's design for it was not good enough for them.'
Sam leapt to his feet to block Castiel's entrance the instant he saw him. Castiel stood his ground, and as Sam reached him he clearly sensed what he had suspected earlier: there was something unidentifiably dark, even vile, in the young man. Something that hadn't been there before angels spirited away his brother to do their dirty work.
"Dean's going to be okay," Sam hissed, "so unless you've learned how to heal in the past couple hours, you don't belong here."
Castiel lifted his chin higher as Sam loomed in. "You may be able to kill demons, Sam," he said, hiding his aversion to whatever Sam now carried within him, "but you cannot intimidate me."
At the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway, Sam let him just far enough into the room to avoid attracting attention. "We both know Uriel could never have forced Dean to go in there with Alistair," Sam said tightly, arms crossed over his chest. "Did you even think about what could happen when you asked him to do it?"
If Uriel were beside him, he would have silently said something witty about the futility of entering a staring contest with an entity that doesn't need to blink. Uriel was dead, though, and all Castiel could think of was Sam's conciliatory tone when he interposed himself between the angels and his brother back at their motel. An unfamiliar sensation flickered within him, and he suspected it was not a response to that new darkness lingering about Sam.
"In the past few days, Sam, I have mourned the deaths of seven of my sisters and brothers," he said patiently. Impatience was what had brought them to this point. "There was very little I would not have gladly done to forestall another loss."
Sam's arrogance lessened. "I didn't know angels were…," he muttered, looking over his shoulder at the bed and then back again. "Did you get demoted because you didn't do this gladly?" he asked in a milder voice.
"Yes," Castiel confirmed. His rank was none of Sam's business, but Dean would no doubt tell him anyway. "Your brother may want to speak with me when he awakens, Sam. Please let me in."
Disarmed by the courtesy, Sam stepped aside. "It could be a while," he warned.
"I have nowhere else to be," Castiel said truthfully. He suppressed a flinch as he passed close by Sam and approached Dean's bed, wrinkling his nose at the smell of antiseptic that had supplanted incense in modern places of healing.
He and Uriel had found their previous vessels at an asclepium, he remembered: Castiel's, an injured soldier who had asked only for a better end than the one his festering wound would give him; Uriel's, a proud, iron-haired man in purple-trimmed garments who'd wept as he pleaded with the god to take his life instead of that of the dying infant he'd laid before the altar.
'The child is past help, brother,' Castiel reproved as he gingerly grasped the little creature and held it at arm's length for scrutiny.
'The old man was too grief-stricken to realize he had the same fever. It was a kindness to take him first,' Uriel explained, cocking his head and rifling through his host's memories. 'Five sons and daughters, all dead before him…they are mere mayflies, Castiel! Why would He become one of them?'
'He need not explain himself to us,' Castiel admonished as the squirming baby began to cry feebly. He ransacked his own vessel's memories for guidance, to no avail.
'His fondness for them is beyond explanation,' Uriel grumbled, but his hands were gentle when he took the child and tucked her against the crook of his neck, murmuring to her in her grandfather's voice as he gave her rest to ease her final hours.
Castiel's borrowed skin crawled as he felt Sam behind him. "He no longer needs the respirator?" he asked, his wings itching to unfurl. It would not do to reveal that he sensed something different about the young man.
"They took him off the respirator this morning," Sam said after a slight pause; Castiel realized that in his fatigue and distraction, he'd articulated the word according to its etymological roots rather than with its actual pronunciation. Sam came closer. All of Castiel's instincts urged him to spin about and strike…
"There's blood on your coat, Cas," Sam said, the concern in his voice as real as the pollution in his aura. "Are you okay?"
Castiel hung his head. If Sam Winchester turned from the side of the angels, they would have none but themselves to blame.
"It's from the fight with Alistair. I am fine," he said, sitting down next to Dean. Sam shuffled over to stand on the other side of the bed and hovered uncertainly, presumably waiting to be asked about Alistair's death. Castiel found that he had neither the desire to hear lies nor the perceptiveness to discern the truth. Dean could question Sam later; Castiel's inquiry would accomplish nothing but straining their fragile truce.
"I can't heal Dean, but I can pray for him," he told Sam. Steeling himself for contact, he stretched out his hand across the bed. "Will you join me?" he invited.
Sam's eyes widened, and he stepped back. "I'm, uh…I'm going to find Dean some ice," he mumbled, turning away.
That strange feeling flooded through Castiel again as he recalled how Sam had once stuttered at the honor of shaking an angel's hand. He had a vague idea that it might be remorse.
"Samuel," he called as Sam reached the door. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?"
Sam's face twisted as he glanced down at his brother's battered form. "I guess that depends on what it profits the angels, doesn't it?" he countered, and took his leave.
'Good riddance,' Uriel would have said.
Castiel tilted his face toward the heavens and wept.
Further author's notes:
An asclepium is a temple to the god Asclepius; people in the Greco-Roman world would go to one to pray for a cure. Thermopylae and Salamis were the sites of a land and naval battle (respectively) between an allied group of Greek city states and the Persian Empire at the beginning of the fifth century BCE. There were probably no angels actually present at the time. Uriel's complaint about the Nile refers to the Aswan Dam, which prevents the annual flooding that is a natural part of the ecosystem.