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lady_bug_kayAuthor: ladybugkay
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Dean/Castiel (well, it's gen, but with future Dean/Castiel in my head)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2311
Warnings/Spoilers: If you've seen through "In The Beginning," you're good. Also, this isn't entirely consistent with canon.
Summary: Mary told Dean every night before he went to sleep that angels were watching over him. This is how she knew.
Disclaimer: Well, Eric Kripke, WarnerBrothers and the CW all own the rights to the characters and the show, but I own this notion and the words describing it. Even though I make no money from it.
Note: A bit of fic to dip my toe back in after far too long away. It's not very good, but it's something I've wondered about. Title from Jewel's song of the same name.
When Dean is three months old, Mary wakes up in the middle of the night with the certain knowledge that her baby is going to grow up to be somebody important, and that if that yellow-eyed son of a bitch has his way, Dean won’t ever get that chance. She doesn’t know how much time she has before the demon makes his move, but there’s no way in hell or on this earth that she’s letting anything happen to her beautiful baby boy.
Not her Dean.
Mary sits up and swings her feet to the floor, climbing out of bed in a single smooth motion, and when John wakes up enough to ask her what’s wrong, she lies without a qualm and tells him she’s just going to check on Dean. Then she makes her way up to the attic where all the boxes belonging to her parents sit gathering dust and spends the rest of the night digging through piles of research and protective amulets. Nothing is enough, though, and in the morning, she calls every last hunter she knows, because she isn’t too proud to beg, borrow, or barter for the lives of the ones she loves.
It’s Ty, one of her father’s few friends, who calls back three weeks later to apprise her of a ritual requesting an angel’s intervention, and Mary thanks him with her heart in her throat and her eyes on the ridiculously long lashes that lie against Dean’s cheeks while he dreams.
He’s such a good baby, Mary thinks, never making a fuss, and his smile is bright enough to light the whole house in the dead of night.
Ty warns her that he doesn’t know if the ritual will work, and that even if it does, it doesn’t guarantee an angel will show up or will offer any kind of protection, but Mary looks at little Dean and is absolutely confident that no angel could deny her in the face of his charms. She performs the ritual the next day, while John is at the garage, and after the taste of the last word begins to fade from her tongue, Mary sits down on the floor of Dean’s nursery room and lays him out on his blanket in front of her. Running her fingers over his smooth cheeks and down the length of each tiny, curled finger, she waits.
She’s still waiting – watching Dean kick his feet, smiling at his giggles when his flailing hands grab his own toes – when the house starts to shake. Dean shrieks with laughter at the motion, waving all his limbs in the air at the new game that must have been devised purely for his amusement, but Mary rises to a crouch, slipping her old hunting knife from its sheath in the small of her back.
Just in case. For the first time since she married John, Mary regrets letting her old life go, because she is keenly aware of precisely how out of practice she is when it comes to hunting and the thing about rituals is that there are always unforeseen ramifications.
There is a white-hot, blinding light, one that makes Mary think everything might have gone the way it was supposed to, but when it fades, she sees a young man with long hair and beads around his neck who doesn’t resemble a being capable of protecting a child from a cold, let alone evil things that go bump in the night and try to steal your soul. Her eyes narrow and her knife rises, prepared to fight for all she is worth and then some, but the man makes an almost infinitesimal gesture with the fingers of one hand and her arm fall to her side of its own volition.
But she’s still breathing, so she thinks it might be safe to say that she didn’t summon a demon by mistake.
Maybe.
“You have no need of weapons,” the man says, his eyes meeting hers with an unnerving intensity. “I have come, at your behest.” He doesn’t blink, and Mary finds her eyes watering as she strives to hold his merciless gaze that is the only thing about him that suggests he might be more than a mere human.
“You’re an angel,” Mary says, the words thick and unwieldy in her mouth, not quite a question, and she watches bemusedly while the man in front of her dips his head in reply. He isn’t the most incongruous possible response to her prayers, but neither does he resemble her idea of fierce loyalty armed with a sword or a divine being with awesome and ineffable power. “If you’re an angel, then why do you look like you belong in one of those artist communes?”
The man cocks his head to one side in an oddly liquid motion, making her wonder if all angels have this kind of strange physical grace. “Your eyes could not withstand the sight of me as I am, so I have borrowed this body for our meeting.”
Anger curdles in Mary’s stomach and the hair rises on her arms. “ ‘Borrowed.’” She laughs bitterly, the disgust sour in the back of her mouth. “You mean you’re possessing him.”
“He is a devout man, in his own way, and prayed for something such as this to occur. I shall return his body, unharmed, once we have concluded our talk.”
Looking more closely at the angel, Mary experiences an unaccustomed sense of calm and trust. There is something in his eyes that speaks of age and wisdom, and it is this, in conjunction with the immense power beginning to hum against her skin, that she wants protecting her son. Putting aside her passionate aversion to humans not being in control of their own bodies, she forces herself to focus on what the being in front of her might be able to do for Dean, because it is Dean who is important here, more so than any ideals or ethical concerns she may have about angelic methods.
“Do you know why I asked you for help?” Her voice betrays her determination, but she is glad to hear it gives nothing away of her desperation. She has to make him understand how important this is, and it won’t work if she comes across merely as distraught and paranoid.
The angel’s reply is not in words, but he turns the full weight of his gaze on Dean. Mary can tell the moment his eyes reach their new focus because the angel goes suddenly still – all potential and barely restrained intensity. There is a tension running through his borrowed body that Mary doesn’t understand, and she follows the direction of his stare to try to see whatever it is he does when he looks at her son with those eyes that almost glow with an indescribable fire.
When she looks, though, there is just Dean. He is a beautiful baby, with his big green eyes and his little nose and his adorable mouth, and Mary is reasonably certain there has never been a baby more wonderful than hers, even speaking without the bias of having given birth to him, yet Dean is still, for all his looks and winsome ways, just a baby. The angel, however, stares fixedly at him, and the fascination seems to go two ways, judging by Dean’s wide eyes and the crinkling of his nose as he smiles, bright and shiny, at the stranger looking down at him. Mary begins to think that her presence here won’t be necessary at all, because if the angel is paying this much attention to Dean already, then it might not require outright begging to acquire the divine protection she so desperately wants for her son. Maybe Dean will make her point all on his own.
“His name is Dean,” she offers quietly, loath to draw even the smallest portion of the angel’s attention away from the object of his reverent study. “Dean,” the angel repeats, a note of awe just barely audible.
Dean chortles happily at the sound of his name in the man’s voice, and Mary is not as surprised as she thinks she should be to witness the angel smile in an equally pleased reaction.
“You wish our protection for him,” the angel says, speaking without turning his head.
More than anything, Mary thinks. “I made a deal,” she confesses, “to save someone I love, and I don’t want the bastard I dealt with to get his hands on Dean.”
He’s just a little baby, so terrifyingly helpless, and if her father didn’t stand a chance against that demon, then what hope does her little boy have without some kind of real protection? Mary wants Dean to have some full-on, no-holds-barred, Heaven-sent protection, and she wants as much of it as she can get.
The angel’s eyes remain fixed, rapt, on the tiny form lying before them, and Mary lets hope fill her lungs and steal her breath. “No,” the angel agrees, “evil must not have the opportunity to touch a soul as bright as this one.”
The relief is almost devastating in its force, and Mary sits down abruptly on the floor beside Dean, her shaking hand reaching out to smooth the soft feathers of his hair. “You’ll protect him, then?” That’s all she wants, for her sweet, beautiful baby boy to be safe and grow up strong and happy.
The angel raises his head to look her squarely in the eyes for a brief moment before returning his focus to Dean. “Yes,” he says. “I will watch over him.”
Mary pulls Dean into her arms greedily, gratefully. “Thank you,” she says, though the words will never be enough. How do you show your appreciation for something so momentous? “Thank you.”
“He is,” the angel begins, then pauses a moment as if selecting his words with care, “a truly remarkable soul.”
Of course he is, Mary thinks. His father is John Winchester, the man his mother loves so much she made a deal with a devil to bring him back to life. His grandparents are Samuel and Deanna, two brilliant hunters and wonderful people. And he is so friendly, sweet, and good-natured that he charmed the entire maternity ward within hours of his birth. Of course he is an exceptional child.
Was there ever any doubt?
When the angel jerks his head up sharply, a harsh motion after all the grace and hypnotic intensity that has come before, it is obvious the time has come for him to leave. Yet Mary finds she can’t let him go without knowing something.
“Would you tell me your name?” she asks.
Those unnervingly direct eyes turn toward her, peering down past the surface of her thoughts, and Mary wishes once again that she could see what the angel sees when he looks at her little boy with those same discerning eyes. What must Dean look like that he can fascinate an angel to the degree he has fascinated the one standing in front of her now?
“Castiel,” the angel answers finally, and the word is spoken low, without any hint of pageantry or fanfare that the name of an angel might seem to imply
“Castiel,” Mary repeats, the way he did moments before. She holds Dean close against her body, and when the angel takes a step back and to the side, Dean squirms in her arms, attempting to track the movements of his new favourite person.
Castiel stands for a moment, formidable and inscrutable, all his inimitable being concentrated on one little human child for one last look, and then he inclines his head and says with obvious reluctance, “I must go.”
It is clear he would stay if he could, and something inside Mary feels a curious sense of satisfaction that someone else, someone as important and powerful as an angel, values Dean the way she does. It isn’t just a mother’s bias. Her baby is special, even if she doesn’t have any idea how or why, and it feels rather like vindication knowing she has asked for and been granted angelic intercession on his behalf.
Another blinding flare of light accompanies the angel’s disappearance, but Mary is too busy adoring Dean to do more than experience a surge of gratitude for what she has been given in answer to her prayers. Looking down at her son, his smile transformed into an adorably confused expression by the abrupt absence of his latest entertainment, Mary traces one precious eyebrow with her index finger and begins to hum a lullaby.
She has what she wants. Nothing else matters.
That night, when she lays Dean down in his crib, Mary kisses his foreheard and whispers to him that angels are watching over him. She wants him to know, because he is hers and she loves him, and because there are things in this world bad enough that sometimes you need a little help from above – or anywhere else you can get it. Whether there will be other angels in addition to Castiel guarding her son or not, whether that bastard demon shows up in a few years’ time and forces her to make good on her willingness to pay any price to bring John back, whether any of a hundred things she doesn’t know about will try to hurt her family, Mary is content in the knowledge that there is at least one angel out in the world who considers Dean as precious as she does and is actively engaged in making miracles happen should the need arise to keep him safe.
If nothing else, Mary thinks, she will always know she has done something truly good for her son.
All might not be right with the world, but if there is an angel watching over Dean, that just might be good enough for Mary Winchester.
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