#fracturedlayers

@fracturedlayers liked the starter call (still accepting)

                          CASTIEL DOESN'T REALLY KNOW THE STANDARD PROTOCOL of interacting with someone who was supposed to be a baby and then decided to grow up into a young adult within minutes. He prepared for childbirth and raising an infant (doula classes and 87 books on child rearing were very educational), but not handling a teenager. Is Jack a teenager? His body says yes, but how can his mind be ready? Castiel doubts he'll find any books on this particular philosophical question. Either way, he wants to get to know Jack — not because he feels responsible and promised Kelly to take care of him, no, he just wants to be there because Jack is family. 

Gabriel knocks gently on the door to his nephew’s room before entering.  And when he does enter, he walks slowly, unassumingly, to the end of the boy’s bed. And then he perches there.  

      “ . . . . I’m gonna start . . . by sayin’ you never have to do anything you       don’t wanna do.  Not ever.  An’ anyone who says otherwise . . . doesn’t       deserve you, Jack.  You’ve done your best, and it may not mean much       comin’ from an uncle you barely know, but I’m really, really proud of you.       And maybe in time I’ll do enough for that feeling to be reciprocated.       I’ll keep trying to get better for you.  Secondly . . .”

He conjures a pair of snazzy Nike running shoes in Jack’s size.  Shoes with laces.

       “So, darling.” 

The tiniest, blackest-eyed man perches on the irascible detective’s favorite chair.  Chances are, overwhelmingly, that he knows it’s Holmes’s favorite chair.  Chances are  that one eyebrow perks near the top of his domed forehead because he’s prickling and probing for nerve damage of the highest order, and considering the pastime fun.      “Are the dull ways of the plebeian masses bothering you enough       to do something reckless?”

That voice is changeable as mercury, a sing-songy reedy tenor like a badly-tuned oboe, inexplicably childlike and creepy.  

     “If you say yes I might even tell you how I let myself in.  Course,       that’s a bread crumb, right? Either of us could break into someone’s       home undetected in our sleep.”  

He’d been hoping his phone would ring the minute he mailed the other one to Tony. It had been with him every second - even when they’d been fighting. Sam rolled his eyes sometimes when he caught Steve flipping it open and shut.

“It’s not gonna ring,” Sam said once.

Steve could taste the bitterness in his words. “It might.”

“If it was going to, he wouldn’t have exiled us from the country.”

Sam had a point, but Steve...missed Tony. Maybe it was stupid, but he did. Sure, they argued all the time, but Steve wouldn’t bother arguing with him if he didn’t respect him. Tony wouldn’t be able to get under Steve’s skin if Steve didn’t care about him.

The quiet sound of the ringer made him jerk awake. Steve stared at it for a long few moments, unsure if he was dreaming. It buzzed again in his hand, the front screen lit up with a single word.

Gabriel would exalt Jack above the stars for looking at him like that, because that is precisely the look Gabriel’s own dearest charge, Castiel, always sports. The same pensive soul-searching earnest contemplation.  

Castiel isn’t here this Father’s Day.  He got in his car and drove off in the night, and Gabriel, a champion of free will, let him.  Once again the Archangel finds himself in the place to mourn a still-living brother whom, it seems, he cannot save. 

Except by looking after Castiel’s own child, who stands here, wishing him a happy Father’s Day. 

Gabriel is usually the sort for extensive, crafty forethought, but today, he doesn’t control his impulses. 

He throws his arms around Jack, and pulls him tight.  

       “Thanks, bubba.” 

Nothing moves but Jim’s mouth, as he speaks his high slender words of mockery: 

     “ ‘Thus the native hue of resolution        Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.’ ”