"The peculiar thing about Castiel…"

An archangel speaks briefly with a brother. Angels of Thursday: more important than one would suspect. Missing scene 5x13

Michael feels them both fall through time: as sparks burning bright and hot through a current of cold temporal linearity. Annael comes first; crackling through the years, flowing backward from 2010 and burning like a meteorite as she rips her way back, back, back to John and Mary Winchester and she rides on wings dark with intent and hurt and so much doubt. She has always moved out of rage. Her motion tempered by anger. Wrath has always been in her touch and it made her a warrior of God. (She always used to need the silent touch of a brother to halt her furious hand.) This was what she was. What she is now… is different and more pitiable.

Shortly after her comes Castiel. He feels – of course – nothing like his sister and once superior. He does not blaze and gutter and flare as she does with her hurt and rage and fears. (Though has hurts and rage and fears.) He cuts through the fourth dimension as a streak of cold light that – despite the loss of heaven's fathomless power – still burns with a cool and unflinching intensity that Michael does genuinely and honestly admire. The archangel would never say this, for a house divided does not stand, but Castiel has more faith and more will than many who serve heaven. He holds the Winchesters like water in a hurricane and they know nothing of the storm.

He was always Annael's voice of reason before she fell.

(Which is why Michael arranged for them to be pitted against each other. The thought of them together, fallen, protecting the Winchesters is a formidable inconvenience. )

The peculiar thing about Castiel has always been a paradox in his making. Among the angels of his garrison he was always well liked and well loved by his brothers and sisters, other foot soldiers and guardians and watchers, but he always had the capacity for… creative thought. Annael saw something in him that she did not find reflected in the others. Something she must have recognized in herself because she was drawn always to her subordinate as a small planets are drawn into the invisible eddies and orbital's of stars. She circled him, though he followed her; and when she finally, finally fell the archangels looked into the garrison to trace any seeds of insurrection that could have been cast to make such a warrior fall. Eyes fell on Castiel, that paradox…

Castiel crash lands downtown, taking the impact and the inertia awkwardly and it rips up his vessel and drops him vomiting blood onto a sidewalk while his charges land gingerly on the asphalt twenty-five years in their past. His grace is bright and will burn forever but it's only the natural burn of his own power now. Michael knows not many of his brothers could survive without the strength of heaven behind them. Castiel is strong in that way, built to survive the fall. (Like he was meant to fall.) Michael is fascinated by the urgency the Winchesters give their injured comrade, carrying him to the nearest motel, laying him down, warding the room, exuding a lot of very mortal and very intimate and temporary worry for the immortal who would live to watch them die even if the world doesn't end.

But they can't see that. They see Jimmy Novak and that rumpled suit and Castiel's paradox looking out at them through a human veneer. It's a hypnotic non sequitur, but then again… Lucifer was always hypnotic too.

It's no trouble for Michael to correct Annael's errors at 485 Robintree, burn her out of her shell and send her streaking away. The Winchesters are on the path to their destinies and so he had a talk with his future vessel, sends them on their way to the future and keeps their angel behind in the past locked in a room, with wards that have no power. He does not quite know what he intends. So Michael takes John Winchester with him to The Prairie Court Motel and for the first time looks on the vessel housing his brother's spirit.

It's a deceptively weak looking shell – aren't they all? – pale and slender and disheveled looking, born of a old bloodline dating back to Mesopotamia. To the human eyes he is unremarkable as any faceless human on the street. Through Michael's eyes, however, the cool burn of Castiel's grace is a steady blinding glow, like a white nova revolving alone in the dark and sustained by no power save that of its own core. The spirit of an angel cut off from heaven. He is alone. (The Winchesters don't and will never understand the totality of his loss.) Like all the fallen, Michael pities his brother and for a moment he lifts John Winchester's hand and lies it on Jimmy's still face. His finger tips rest on his closed eyes with a weight like warm pennies and the archangel gathers power to wipe Castiel's grace away. Erase all that fear and doubt and weariness.

He plans to be kind to his brother. He won't even wake him…

Then he hesitates.

There's that paradox. Wound through his grace like a wire, electrified and singing and Michael takes a seat beside this peculiar angel. The dark sweep of Castiel's wings are threaded with crisscrossing lines of fate, tying him inexorably to the Winchesters, to Annael, to so many others and to a future that even the highest angels cannot see. These threads are adamantine and carry a note of eternity in them and around Castiel's neck a small amulet – given freely if begrudgingly – lies cool against his vessel's collarbone. A sign of his is faith, his damnable unyielding, unfaltering, bloodyminded faith in a Father who has left them – all of them without exception – behind to wonder at the darkness and horror of a Godless universe. And yet Castiel searches for Him still.

Momentary rage brings heat to John Winchester's fingers, lethal liquid flame.

Castiel is a fool. To have such faith but cast aside heaven. To doubt his brothers but not this ghost. To be so afraid, but utterly fearless. To be so abandoned, but so strong unaided. (Paradox.) How dare a mere angel of Thursday turn his back on his own kind? Scorn them? Reject them? Judge their actions as wrong? Michael seethes at the hubris of it, more infuriating than Gabriel's cowardice or Annael's doubts or Lucifer's pride because Castiel has faith and faith does not fall… and some part of Micheal wishes he could ask his brother how he does that. The heat fades easily as it came and he lowers his hand from the vessel's sleeping features. This vessel, too, is strange. (Maybe because it was destroyed once.) Michael would like to ask him about that too.

"Brother."

Castiel stirs slowly and opens Jimmy's eyes and his own… and looks at his brother with open sorrow. "Michael." He says it… strangely. Without hostility.

"I've seen the Winchesters."

The question in his stare.

"They are safe." John Winchester's hand is on Jimmy Novak's chest. Castiel's grace lies still and cool beneath. "Are you afraid?" Michael wants to know.

Castiel doesn't hesitate. "Yes."

"But not of me."

"Dying is not a fear. I have done that already."

"What do you fear?"

"Failure." A beat. "Dean and Sam Winchester alone. Your death. The death of my brothers. My sisters. Jimmy Novak lost. The victory of Lucifer. The victory of heaven. The loss of this world. A future four years in the making." He lists these things slowly and solemn, as thought he's thought of them before.

"You sound very afraid, Castiel."

For a long time they remain like that: Michael with a hand on Castiel and no intention now of harming him. Maybe one day. Soon even, but not now. Michael just studies that strangeness in the grace beneath his hand, this peculiar twist in one of God's soldiers that seems more the intervention of provenance than chance. Why this angel? Why of all the doubtful and rebellious in their number did this one pull Dean Winchester from hell? Why was Castiel given charge of Michael's vessel? Why was Castiel created with that spiral of strangeness built into him like a time-bomb, as though from the beginning it was always meant to be him with the Winchesters held in his hands like something precious?

"Are you unafraid, Micheal?" The question is plain.

"No, Castiel. I am not."

A pause.

"Okay." (It's such a human word.) Then he vanishes from under Michael's touch and is gone. Michael gazes into the empty room and wonders at the importance of Thursday angels.

***

"Castiel? Hey, hey – whoa, whoa, whoa." Sam catches one the angel's arms as he slumps in their ugly motel room.

Dean rushes up from his left, hooks an arm under his elbow. "Cas! You son of a bitch, you made it."

"I did." Considering who he was with two seconds/twenty-five years ago: "I'm very surprised."

Then he slumps again and the Winchesters catch him.

"Whoa! You're okay."

(Sam swears he sort of smiles before he falls.)

***

Author's Note: Because I like to think of Cas a little weird. The nerdy guy with wings: surprisingly interesting dude to write about. There's more where this came from, just you wait...