Underage!Dean/Castiel. Dean crashes a college party and then drunk/high porn with Cas.
Inias visits his brother’s grace-tree often.
Time doesn’t pass for him in the earthly way it does for Castiel. He observes Castiel and his humans from time to time, much in the way Castiel told them he observed the bees. That within their patterns, the back-and-forth for nourishment, for the bolstering of the hive, the family, that Castiel saw their Father’s plan at work. Inias still looks for the perfection in their relationship, but it is still so flawed in his eyes.
Perfect, Castiel told Sam once in passing as he’d pointed proudly to one of the hives he kept on their farm. He had insisted, and neither Dean nor Sam had had the heart to deny him; Inias had seen. He observes from time to time, silent when his heart longs to call his brother home.
Castiel had sensed him once, and called to him: Brother, come and see. Brother, behold what beauty our Father has bestowed on this earth. Inias had manifested in his vessel (a young man suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer that he had cured with less than a thought) to speak with his brother, for he knew it was how his brother best related to his heavenly family now. So earthly, so… diminished. He would weep were he not so overjoyed to commune with Castiel, his beloved captain.
They spoke then of many things late into the night and in the morning, as the sun rose and washed out the beauty of the lights of their brothers in the heavens far above, Castiel asked one last boon of his soldier.
Take my blade, he’d commanded. One last command from the true head of his garrison to a loyal footsoldier: Take my blade, and do what I cannot bring myself to. Be my brother and my surgeon, and cut out this rot within me before it lays me low, he had said, no trace of madness in the blue of his vessel’s eyes.
He showed Inias his wings, then; illness in every fiber of his grace, wings tattered and rotten in ways no human eyes could ever comprehend. Inias wept, and cried out his rage to the heavens above as he removed Castiel’s grace. Twenty-three trees were downed in the ensuing storm, split by lightning and uprooted by fierce winds. Several small animals drowned in the rushing of the overflowing streams that day, but Inias felt it no great loss.
His brother deserved more than such small sacrifices from a world he’d given everything to preserve, and were it up to Inias everything would be made to pay.
But he had his orders; and he had always excelled in obeying his captain.
Inias hurls the grace into the sky and watches where it lands. It’s another day, another night, before the bright remains of his brother’s madness takes form. The craggy slope on which the ash tree (ash: beloved of druids and shelter of witches, used to ward against evil and in binding love potions) takes root and springs to life shatters into uniform lines. Moss grows during the warm seasons, and ice fills the land in winter.
Inias sees; he watches over what’s left of the angel that was his brother until the last winter.
Sam Winchester grows ill that winter; his brother, as always, follows him down while trying to save him. Castiel, still half-mad more than half-sane, watches over them, using what limited magic or technology available to humans to bring relief to them. He brings steaming bowls of soup, hot brews that bring grimaces to his friends’ faces, bitter medicines.
Sam’s lungs fail him and he is rushed to a hospital. The ensuing stress is too much for Dean, and his heart gives out. He does not respond to attempts to revive him, although Castiel pleads again and again with his unresponsive body from the restraining arms of his nurse. Sam follows soon after, as is the Winchester custom; the brothers, always together, even with Castiel.
Knowing what must come next, Inias travels with a thought to his brother’s tree; he thinks, perhaps, to offer the maddened grace back to Castiel. Perhaps now Castiel will come home, he thinks. Perhaps now that all that holds him to this world has left it, he will leave it too.
But it is the precious ash tree’s final winter, as it is Castiel’s; as it is his beloved Winchester’s. When Inias arrives, he finds he is too late. The tree, still somehow in sync with his brother’s heart, is dead, frozen down to the roots despite the spring thaw Inias can feel upon the air.
Following the coda to the last order he received from Castiel, Inias carves the Enochian symbols for C, D, and S upon the aged and deadened bark, then he flies home to mourn his lost brother and his brother’s chosen family.
_______________________________
PS: Original poster, if you’d like me to remove the fanfic from your photo, I will. :)
