Chapter Text
When Sam goes missing, it’s on a regular morning of a regular hunt in a regular town and almost right away after Dean mentioned everything is going great, and so Dean is trying very hard not to take it as the universe making fucking fun of him, and failing in this attempt in a glorious way.
It does feel like a fucking cosmic joke.
Since Dean is a professional, regardless of what his father used to tell him, he follows the safety protocol to the letter – he checks the motels and the morgues and the hospitals and the police station and the libraries and the bars, as improbable as that option is, and he even checks with the Sheriff and with the FBI headquarters nearby, and only then does he call Bobby to tell him his brother went missing.
Since Bobby is even better in his line of work, he has a list of potential creatures that could be powerful and stupid to kidnap a Winchester ready, while Dean unhappily picks up his phone and calls Meg to ask her if she might have heard of anything more evil than her interested in Sam, and not in the kinky way.
Turns out, she has.
Turns out, Crowley – the self-proclaimed king of Hell and douchebag extraordinaire – doesn’t like Sam and Dean exorcising all his demons and has decided to gain some leverage, so Sam is currently stuck in the dungeons somewhere under Hell, impossible as it sounds.
Since, again, Dean is a goddamn professional, he thanks Meg for the information, and he waits until he hangs up before he punches the nearest wall. (Even Meg would protest that, as pretending not to care, as she is, and worse, she would probably tell Bobby, or, even worse, Ellen, and Dean doesn’t have any energy left for that, not when his little brother is fucking missing. He knew they should have agreed to help Meg take down Crowley when they had the chance, but no, they had to be reasonable and smart and fucking cowards and force the two demons to divide Hell.)
When his phone starts ringing again, Dean picks it after the first ring, no surprise.
“Didja find anything out, son?” Bobby asks him, voice rough and gentle at the same time, as if he knows how much Dean is trying not to panic. Or drink the nearest bar.
Dean tells him.
“Damn,” Bobby says. “But it fits with my findings. Don’t you dare go on a suicide mission to rescue him!”
“We gotta get him back, Bobby,” Dean retorts immediately.
“But I will not watch both of you get killed, you idjit,” Bobby replies, because he is clearly used to Dean’s way of thinking.
“I can’t just sit here on my ass while that smarmy son of bitch-”
“You can’t just invade the King of Hell’s living room without a plan or fucking back up either. Now how ’bout you sit your ass down, take a couple’a deep breaths, and let me tell you the rest of what I’ve found?”
Dean lets out a barely audible sigh. “Yes, sir,” he says, only mildly annoyed, and drops to the nearest bench.
There’s silence on the other side of the phone for a moment.
Then- “Are you sitting?” Bobby asks, voice a lot more concerned that Dean is used to, which is the only reason (except maybe the fact that the world seems to be swimming around him a little) why Dean mutters yes instead of an angry comment.
“Good,” Bobby says, and Dean can hear him take a deep breath, bracing himself for something. “You need back-up, son.”
“No! Forget it, Bobby, I won’t let you-” Dean interrupts him immediately.
“If ya stayed quiet for one more minute, ya idjit, you’d find out I wasn’t offering. You need real help, not an old man with a head full of lore. You need someone useful – don’t you dare waste our time by telling me I am that, Dean, we don’t have time for that and this ain’t about me.” Bobby takes another deep breath.
Dean would make fun of him doing some hippie breathing exercise, if his head could stop fucking spinning for a minute and if he could hear anything beyond the pounding of his heart, and goddamnit, but Sam is probably being tortured in all kinds of ways, while Dean is sitting on his useless ass, listening to Bobby’s meditating nonsense, apparently and-
“You need an angel,” Bobby says.
-
Dean finds himself hesitating, standing in front of the ring of holy fire. He doesn’t particularly hate the idea, to be honest. As disgusted as his father was with the lesser forms of life, he never particularly minded using them for help when he needed it. This makes Dean relatively sure that John is currently not about to rise from the dead to show his son his displeasure and teach him his lesson, and that helps. And the truth is, he did run out of other options. He has no idea where exactly Sam is or how to rescue him, and Meg would never agree to help him with this, because it would mean leading her subjects to a certain death in Crowley’s hands (he wonders when it happened that he became besties with a fucking demon princess but well. Beggars can’t be choosers or whatever that phrase is, and Dean hasn’t been able to be picky about his, however hesitant, allies in a long while.) He knows Ellen and Jo and Ash would probably agree to help him, as would Bobby, eventually, if Dean pushed, despite this being his idea, but that on the other hand is something Dean is not willing to risk.
He has no idea how to make Meg risk her life and life of her people, and he will not risk lives of his and so…
And so he needs an angel, regardless of how dirty it makes him feel.
(Dean isn't proud of himself for feeling dirty about it. After all, it isn't his fault the angels somehow let themselves be known and it certainly isn't his fault humans came up with the summoning and binding rituals. He ignores the pang of guilt over the fact that John fucking helped with that.)
He sighs. Grabs his lighter and sets the holy fire aflame. Ignores the voice in his head saying he shouldn’t.
He thinks he manages to say the spell correctly. He stumbles over phrases and constructions of Enochian enough times that he would feel embarrassed if Enochian wasn’t so fucking complicated and if it mattered (it would, usually, he knows. The spells need to be said correctly, usually, because otherwise whatever you summon is able to get out. But John was nothing if not smart when he wanted to be and so he helped make sure minor stumbling and mistakes won’t allow the angels to break free.)
He finishes the spell, and stares at the circle, a little bit hesitant. As much as he has a general idea about what will happen, it is his first summoning.
It makes him a weird sort of a hunter these days, he knows, but neither Bobby nor Ellen were fans of summonings, and Bobby aimed his shotgun at John’s face and told him to leave his sons in Sioux Falls when Dean was young enough that he hadn’t had to participate in any of the test summons. (He would wake up to screams, back when he and Sam still lived with John. He knows enough about how difficult it was to find the bindings that wouldn’t kill the angels, but Bobby had gotten them out before he was forced to become a part of it.)
He sighs. Leans back against the wall and waits, and then he sighs again and reaches for the book to check if he really did everything the right way, but then-
Then the air starts vibrating with power and Dean shivers.
It should be terrifying, he thinks.
It is terrifying, if he’s being honest, but more than fear, Dean finds himself in awe of such power, and horror at the fact that somehow his father decided to help bind such power, when the angels had stayed off Earth for millennia.
The lights pop, and for a moment there is nothing but darkness. Dean automatically reaches for his gun, even though he knows it wouldn’t help him, even though he knows he could hurt the angel with it, but never kill, because while angel blade bullets definitely are a thing – John made sure of that – Dean doesn’t have any at him right now, because he was stupid and because he trusted the binds of the spell and –
The lights come back on somehow, the lightbulbs magically fixed, and Dean wishes he had time to wonder about that, but he can't.
There is a man standing in the middle of the summoning circle.
He’s… annoyingly handsome, Dean decides, not that it matters. Not to Dean, at least, although he knows he’s possibly one of very few people who isn’t going to pay attention to the angel per se.
(Dean hadn’t known who exactly would answer his summons. His father certainly didn’t like this, Dean knows, but after a few times when the angels died after being repeatedly summoned by the same dicks, for less than savoury reasons, the government forced him to change the basic summoning formula to not allow people to choose.)
The angel is dressed in an ill-fitting suit with a crooked blue tie and an oversized trench coat, and he looks… sad. Tired. Somehow fragile in that huge impersonal circle of burning holy oil despite the power Dean knows is there. The angel crosses his arms on his chest, the gesture something between defence and anger and fear.
“Hi,” Dean says, like an idiot.
The angel blinks at him, his head tilted to the side as if he is cosplaying as an extremely adorable, extremely confused, kitten.
“Hello, Dean,” he says, his voice ridiculously deep, and maybe a little bit hot, and Dean wants to ask how he can know that, but he doesn’t really care that much, not when the longer they are here, the longer Sam is in Crowley’s ugly, disgusting, useless hands.
“And you are…?”
The angel continues to blink at him in that confused way. “An angel of the Lord. You already know that if you summoned me.” He blinks some more. “Oh,” he says, surprised, once he realises what Dean means. “You want me to introduce myself?”
“Obviously,” Dean mutters. “Don’t people usually ask that?”
The angel smiles at him, almost sad. “No, not really.”
Dean forces himself to swallow around the sudden nausea. Yes, that does sound like something John would support. Especially since he didn’t seem to remember his older son’s name either, in the last few months of Dean’s stay with him.
He forces himself to take a deep breath. Rolls eyes at himself for doing the same meditating bullshit he makes fun of Sam for.
“Well, I do.”
The angel continues smiling at him, though now it seems much more genuine. “Castiel,” he says. “My name is Castiel. What are your orders?”
“Right to the topic, are you?” Dean replies, ignoring the shiver of discomfort that runs through him. He so doesn’t want to be giving this guy orders, angel or not. “I’m a hunter. As is my brother. And he was- fuck. Do you know Crowley?”
The angel – Castiel – stiffens, but nods. “We have… met,” he says.
“Then you know he’s a smarmy bastard. He’s got my brother. I need your help with the rescue mission.”
And at that, all traces of a smile on Castiel’s face just… disappear.
“I understand,” he replies, his voice tired and calm and deep and it absolutely doesn’t do anything to Dean, hearing it. Not at all. “You want me to rescue your brother.”
He sounds, for lack of better words, exhausted.
More than that, he sounds afraid and disappointed and resigned and-
And…
“No!” Dean says, empathetically, when he connects the dots. “No, man – Cas – Castiel! I want you to help me to save my brother. Getting into that thing must be like getting into the Death Star, no fucking way someone could get there alone. What kind of a dick would order you to go on a suicidal mission like…” he trails off, looking at the exhausted, sad smile Castiel is giving him. “Fuck. People ask that.”
“They… do,” Castiel confirms. “Though they usually ask for gold from the Federal Reserve System, when they ask for things like this.”
“That’s impossible,” Dean replies. (Not that he planned to break in there, but Sam did have a stage, in his childhood, when he wanted to be a robber, and Dean is nothing if not a supportive older brother.) “There is security specifically against the angels.”
Castiel smiles at him again, with that sad, tired smile. “Of course. But as you know, the angel must stay at your service and obey your orders until they fulfil the initial order. Some people-”
It takes all Dean’s inner strength not to scream, or vomit, or punch the nearest wall.
“They cheat,” he finishes. “They ask for impossible to… Fuck, man, I-”
He can’t deal with it. Not now. Not when Sam is in danger, not when Dean can’t actually fix this. He never should’ve summoned the angel. He doesn’t have any means to fix this, and he doesn’t think he can ignore it now that he knows.
He takes a deep breath.
Again.
Sam would be fucking proud.
“It won’t be like that, Castiel,” he says. “I swear. We get in together, we rescue Sam, we get out. Together. And then you are free to leave.”
Castiel looks at him from his circle of fire. He looks, more than anything else, sceptical. He nods anyway.
When Dean starts saying the spell to remove the fire, he almost wishes it would remove him as well.