The Last Angel

Word Count: 1000. For the E/O Challenge to write a not!drabble of 200. 500 or 1000 words.

Warnings: Deathfic, major character death (albeit in an AU), Endverse

Summary: In the 2014 AU, Cas doesn't die in that old school building fighting the Croats, but that means he has to deal with Future!Dean's death.

Someone says: where's Cas? Cas thinks he replies: I'm here; but he can't be sure. That last explosion had rattled his head so much he thinks there is nothing left inside his skull but honeycomb crunch and air.

Grenades. Someone had brought grenades and blown to Hell of the Croat ambush Dean had sent them into.

Dean. Cas' breath hitches.

They're all supposed to be dead. Cas remembers that part of the plan; the part Dean had never said out loud, but that Cas had read in those dead green eyes. He hadn't called their glorious leader on it, because Cas understood. Understood the desperation; the last throw of the dice; the lack of malice behind the play.

After all, they might get lucky. Someone might have grenades.

So here they are. Cas blearily surveys the damage, counts the survivors. Risa, Charlie, Imran. Frank. Though maybe he can't really count Frank, who's screaming and holding a gushing bloody stump where his right leg should have been. Their little resistance cell had never had much by way of medical resources, and now their doctor's a smear of guts and grey matter next to where Cas is kneeling, Frank won't last the night.

Risa has her arms around Charlie, whose hair is now red with something other than hair-dye, and she's gently rocking the younger woman. Imran is sitting with his back to the wall, staring at nothing with the blank eyed look of someone who's seen too much. Cas knows how that feels, but shoves it aside and gets slowly to his feet, moving stiff and awkward as if this human body of his had lived every one of Castiel's angel years.

All the drugs that prop up his crumbling mind have long worked their way out of his system. His hands are shaking and his innards are trembling, but he ignores that too.

"That bastard's probably dead, you know that don't you?" Risa yells after him as he half walks, half staggers towards the gaping hole in the wall where the door used to be, but he shrugs off the words even as they stab him like knives.

It takes him a while to find Dean. His Dean, not the younger, fresher, more naïve version sent to mess Cas up even more than he was already. That Dean's gone; a memory once more where he can safely reside, with his passion and his integrity intact. Cas is happy to let that Dean go, because he'd said goodbye to him a years ago. Come to terms with the death of the man he'd pulled out of Hell, grown to love the man who'd taken his place.

His Dean is lying still on withered grass underneath a late-blooming rose, face pale, eyes closed. There isn't a mark on him and for a moment, Cas wants to believe that Dean is merely sleeping, a parody of that fairy tale, what was it now – Snow White? Sleeping Beauty? Cas side-tracks into trivia to avoid the inevitable, because the overwhelming pain in his chest won't permit anything else.

It's so hard to breathe. He falls to his knees next to Dean's outstretched body, reaches out to touch; realises his hand is resting on the imprint of a previous life and that undoes him, finally.

Shuddering sobs wrack his body, silent but deadly. His body's hollowed out and filled again with stones as weighty as his own mortality. Moving without volition, Dean's body is gripped in his arms, Dean's head is heavy where it flops obscenely against his chest, the corpse already cooling in the evening air. Cas rocks Dean just like Risa had rocked Charlie; a mother, lover, brother, friend.

Time passes. A hand grips his shoulder, a voice is talking to him. Risa.

"Cas, come on. We need to get out before more Croats come. Cas. Please. He's gone, there's nothing you can do for him now. We have to leave."

He doesn't respond. He can't. His throat has closed up and his mind has closed down. He barely registers when Risa goes, or that the sun's departure means the temperature's dropping, so what little breath he has left comes out in small puffs of mist. His world has narrowed down to the raw chains of his grief and the cold, dead body in his arms.

x0x0x0x

It's fully dark when Cas feels it. A spark taking light somewhere deep inside, in a part of him that he'd thought was long dead. It takes him a few moments, he doesn't know how long, to recognise it – the warmth of it; that pure, perfect glow.

His grace.

Tears he had been unable to shed earlier begin to fall; heavy drops like summer rain splash onto Dean's blank face as slowly Cas' human form begins to fill with light – too little, too late, he thinks, tasting bitterness in his mouth like rue.

There is one thing this rediscovered grace is good for. Castiel stands in one fluid motion, letting anger flow through sinews he'd thought atrophied through long disuse, gripping Dean close. The air around him shudders as his wings unfurl and gravity loosens its hold. He had forgotten how it felt, the touch of the wind from the stars ruffling his hair and the song of Heaven beckoning him home.

He ignores it all, just as he'd ignored Risa earlier. Castiel knows what matters now, the only thing left for him to do as the last angel to walk the earth.

His grace blossoms, grows - until the whole garden is filled with light, and still Castiel doesn't stop. He's a reactor gone nuclear, an atomic bomb of righteous sorrow; and finally he explodes into the purest, brightest light a human could never see – and he is gone, taking Dean with him.

In the garden, dark ash flutters down like feathers, the soil bearing an imprint of the great expanse of two beautiful wings, outlined in charcoal across the withered grass and the blood red roses.

x0x0x0x