Chapter Text
{ DEAN }
Dean has only just made his way back into the living room when there are three firm strikes against the front door, signaling someone’s arrival.
“Expecting anyone?” he asks Bobby, eyebrow raised.
Late night visitors weren’t exactly uncommon with a hunter’s sleep schedule, but they sure as shit weren’t often bringers of good news, either.
“Who in the sam hell?” Bobby mutters in reply, rising from his desk before even getting the chance to fully sit down.
Following his father out into the hall, Dean catches a glimpse of fiery red hair and first assumes it’s Charlie who’s come by early.
Shit. He hadn’t had a chance to plan how he was going to break the Cas news to her. Too late now, huh?
“Can I help you?” Bobby asks their visitor, stepping back just enough to allow a better view of the woman in the doorway.
Sharper features, bluer eyes, shorter stature. Decidedly not Charlie.
Then who?
“We’ve got no time to talk,” she says, rushing past the confused man right into his own home. “Where is Castiel?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dean asserts, blocking her path as she nears the staircase. “I think it’s best you step it the fuck back, okay? Who the hell are you, and what do you want with Cas?”
“Anna,” she answers, matter-of-factly, and produces a small blade from the bag at her hip, slicing across her hand and beginning to use the blood to draw a sigil on the wall before anyone can get a defensive word out. “Milton.”
Forget the blood magic, did she say –
“The Anna?”
She sighs as if annoyed at everyone’s lack of urgency, nodding tightly in response.
“Where is Castiel?” she repeats, smearing the symbol to completion. “There was a wave of energy from this location signaling his memory was triggered before fading out again. If I’ve found him, there’s little time before he does, too.”
“He, who?”
“Listen. You’ve got protection, I’ll give you that,” she acknowledges, slipping the blade back into its resting place. “But it’s not strong enough, and the best I can do is mislead him temporarily.”
“Mislead who? All you’re doing right now is playing Picasso on our walls, lady.”
“Guys? Is something wrong?” Sam’s voice calls as he joins them from the other room. His eyes dart from Anna to her work and back before he follows up with, “What the hell is going on?”
Wouldn’t we all like to fucking know, is what he’s preparing to say when there’s a creak of footsteps at the top of the stairs. Another voice joins them, cautious, quiet, and horribly timed.
“Dean?”
Before he has a chance to warn him to stay back, Castiel has made his way into view. He stops when he sees Anna, an even mix of confusion and vague recognition in his soft blue eyes.
“Castiel,” Anna greets.
Dean can feel himself bristle toward the stranger in his presence, ready to defend him by any means necessary. But Anna doesn’t seem to pose a threat, not by the way her shoulders visibly sink with something akin to worry when she is met with guarded silence.
“You don’t remember, do you?” The worry deepens in her expression. “Not everything, at least. Not yet.”
“I’m sorry,” Cas pauses at the foot of the stairs, staying behind Dean, who straightens to shield him further. “Are you…?”
“The fall did more damage than I thought it would,” she says, mostly to herself, before meeting his eyes with steady confidence. “I’m a friend. I know it’s a lot to ask, but you’re going to have to trust me.”
“Now, hold on,” Bobby warns. “How are we to know you aren’t here to cause any harm to the boy?”
“If I wanted to hurt him, you’d all be dead by now,” she states, flicking her hair over her delicate shoulder. Her eyes flash a vivid white-blue to emphasize the threat, like an animal baring it's teeth. “I can explain, but we’ve got a lot of ground to cover and little time. I sense a heavy presence of protective energy somewhere in the house. Is there a saferoom?”
Whatever Anna was, she was powerful. And whatever she was here for, it wasn’t to use that power against them. Something Dean thinks they should consider themselves lucky for, by the looks of it.
The caution doesn't drain from Bobby’s stance, but he does close the front door and agree to show her all the same. Before he makes a move to lead her to the saferoom’s location, he looks to Castiel for approval. Something Bobby rarely sought from others.
“Cas? What do you say?”
“I was coming to find someone when there was a knock at the door,” he replies. “Dean’s music – I think it triggered something. Who I am, it’s coming back to me in pieces. Fragments. But her voice…” his eyebrows pull together, contemplative. “Her voice was somewhere in the noise.”
Anna smiles for the first time at that, looking like all hope isn’t lost, and it shifts her default stone cold bitch expression into something much kinder. Pretty, almost.
Y’know, if it weren’t for the whole aura of someone who could drop them all like flies.
“Alright, I’ll be goddamned if this goes sideways, but follow me,” Bobby says.
“Bobby, are we sure about this?” Dean asks in a hushed tone as he passes, receiving a nod of agreement from his brother.
“As sure as we’re gettin’ any time soon.”
He leads them down the basement stairs to a large metal door in the corner of the room with a bank vault mechanism keeping it locked from the outside. Opening it, he ushers the others inside and pulls it shut behind them.
The space is fairly small, with a cot, two desks, storage for rations, and a few places to sit. The floor painted with an all-encompassing devil’s trap, guaranteeing no demons getting in were going anywhere.
Anna gets to work, making another cut across her – somehow no longer wounded – hand and using her blood to paint a similar sigil to the one she’d left upstairs.
“What do you know about your mother?” is the first question she asks, pointedly looking at Dean.
This catches him off guard.
Their mother?
“What does our mother have to do with any of this?” Sam responds.
“Good,” she ignores his question. “The less you know, the more I know she kept quiet.”
He makes a vain second attempt, asking, “Kept quiet about what?”
“Mary Winchester was just another hunter trying to get out of the game,” she begins as if she hadn’t heard him. “She’d moved to a small town in the middle of nowhere to get away from it all, and then she met Lily Novak.”
“My mother,” Cas states hesitantly, receiving a nod of confirmation in return.
“Your mothers were best friends. Inseparable. Mary would never have let anything hurt Lily. So, when her husband, Chuck, started acting strangely, she noticed. But – she had only dealt with demonic possession, not angelic, so she couldn’t read the signs for what they were. When nothing came of it, she had no choice but to write it off,” She takes a seat, commanding her audience’s attention. “Besides, she’d just received the news that Lily’s prayers had been answered, and she was to be a first-time mother. Not long after, she discovered she was unexpectedly pregnant with her own future firstborn. You, Dean.”
There's a whole hell of a lot to process here.
Firstoff. Angels were as real as demons. No fluffy wings and halos, every reason to ask himself if he should've been doing some more soul searching when it comes to religon all these years.
Second. Anna was likely one of them, if the context clues right in front of him meant anything.
Third. Chuck Novak had been possessed by an angel - something they apparently were capable of doing. Willing victim or not, it confirmed the Nephilim theory, but not necessarily what Dean had to do with any of it.
“When Castiel was born, he became the first and only of his kind, more powerful than any Nephilim or being before him as the son of the archangel, Remiel.”
Oh, and fourth. Cas wasn't human. Not entirely, anyway.
Cool, cool, cool. Okay.
“The angel of dreams,” Sam says, and of course he would know that. The kid is a walking encyclopedia. “I’ve read about him.”
“There was unrest amongst the angels when the child was found out, and Remiel was sent to the cage for breaking one of heaven’s ultimate rules,” she continues. “The other archangels sought to eliminate the threat, but they found no weapon forged would harm Castiel… accept one.”
She looks at Dean.
“Me? Why me?”
“To every archangel, there is a Sword. A human soul built to withstand their grace, a perfect vessel to host them when they visit God’s earth. One that can stand strong in battle if needed to defend creation. When Castiel was born, an abomination called for an anomaly.”
His first Instinct is to defend Cas against the abomination accusation, but he bites his tongue and listens.
“Where Swords are ultimately destined as weapons to be wielded, you are also the only one that can be used against him. Humanity’s free will gives you the most power any man could ever hold in his hands – the choice to fight with him or against him. Alone, he’s more powerful than anything in creation. Together, you’re fatal. That's why they needed to keep you apart.”
“If I’m such a threat, why the hell didn’t they kill me when they had the chance?”
“When Swords die, they reincarnate. Instead of testing the theory things would go the same, they sent you away. Altering your mother and father’s memory to leave them convinced they were escaping the grief of Mary’s beloved Lily’s loss.”
That explained his father’s faded memory of the home and people they left behind when moving away from their hometown all those years ago. What the angels hadn’t taken from him, John had taken from himself, washing away any details he was left with more and more with each bottle he abused.
"They didn't think to check for a written record of the strange events involving Chuck Novak or he and Lily's unborn son, however."
She pulls a leatherbound journal out of her bag, turning to lay it out on the desk behind her. Inside, she flips through entry after entry in handwriting Dean recognizes as his mother's.
“You were all safe, for a time. It was your mother’s place as a hunter at heart that sent everything down the path to destruction. When she agreed to a favor to an old friend, she got tangled up in the knight of hell Azazel’s plan to create a psychic army. She killed him, but at the cost of her own life.”
This wasn't news, not now, all these years later. Bobby had long since told them the cover story for a car wreck on the way home from visiting their Aunt Ellen was something he'd had to get involved in. The guilt ate away at him to this day, something Dean had seen in his eyes a thousand times now. But he'd forgiven him. As a hunter himself, he understood - they were protecting the innocent kids he and Sam used to be.
It doesn't take the sting away. That day sticks with him, bullshit or not. The pain was real. He can still hear his Aunt Ellen's tear-stained voice telling him, "Dean, I'm sorry, baby, but your mom, she's been in an accident..."
The weight of his brother's hand on his shoulder pulls him back into the moment. Sammy always knew when he was needed, an anchor to reality, even without saying a word.
“One of Azazel’s underlings stole her things, including this journal," Anna is saying, tapping the pages in front of her with her pointer finger. "In the wrong hands, he spent the last few years looking for the boy who he believed to have an angel for a father. Hoping, if his theory was right, he could use him for hell's purpose.”
She digs in her bag once more, this time finding a smaller notebook than the last. The cover is well-worn and the pages are warped from being read time and again.
“It was John Winchester who found a second journal detailing Mary’s plans to help her old friend on what she believed to be a routine hunt, becoming obsessed with the idea of avenging her death. Where he ended up was in the hands of that very demon, Crowley,” She leans back in her chair. "When John wouldn't talk, he tortured out what little information he could. Leading him to Sam and Dean, thinking they knew something. That they were hunters, too.”
They all knew how that ended. With John dead.
“What about the red eyed demon that I saw before I crashed my car? Was it the same?” Cas asks, having been quietly taking in the whole conversation.
“Yes. When Sam and Dean were rescued, Crowley escaped, but not before taking everything off their person just as he had with their mother."
He runs through the possibility of clues that could've been on him, and he nearly laughs out loud at the absurdity. There was one thing that could've given Castiel away with no question.
"You've gotta be shitting me," Dean cuts off her next sentence, shaking his head. "The polaroid. That I kept in my wallet. It had his name on it."
“A face to the name Mary had written about, the one Lily had chosen for her unborn son. With it, he was able to find Castiel.”
“How do you know all of this?” Sam asks.
“We were able to apprehend Crowley, and… control the problem.”
Before he has a chance to speak again, the ground beneath them begins to shake, sending them all into varied states of confused panic.
Anna looks terrified, which probably meant they were shit out of luck.
"Someone's found us."
The door bursts open.
Three people come into view, stepping over the doorway. The eldest has whiskey-golden eyes and a mischievous smile on his face, flanked by two blonde, stoic looking twenty-somethings that could pass for fraternal twins.
Gabriel lifts his hand in a playful wave directed at his little brother.
“Miss us, kid?”