#ladyataralasse

Life as Prophet of the Lord was busy; busy enough that there were whole stretches of time Kevin forgot everything he’d lost. Dead mom, dead girlfriend, dead life, he could forget it all when Sam and Dean distracted him. 

Kevin, figure out how to talk to dogs, would you, pal? Thanks. 

When Kevin was growing up, he was okay with not having a dad. His mother was parent enough. What Kevin wanted most were siblings. He regretted now the holidays he spent sulking because it was just him and his mom. It was, he’d thought at the time, a lonely way to grow up. A few years of perspective on what true loneliness felt like, and Kevin wished with everything he had his mother was there again. He wanted to hug her, to tell her he saw it now. She’d gone above and beyond, did everything she could to make every holiday, every birthday memorable.

Kevin was happy for those memories now, bittersweet though they were. But Christmas was approaching, and those memories were hard.

“Head’s up.”

Kevin looked up as Dean tossed him a bag. Jerky. Curried jerky. His favorite. The kind he liked was only sold in Asian markets, not the gas stations Sam and Dean frequented. Dean grinned at him. “Don’t say I never did nothing for ya.”

After Dean left, Kevin stared at the colorful bag in his hands for minutes. Siblings. Dean said they were family, and Kevin had been turning that over in his mind for months now. He’d never had a family. He’d only ever had a mom.

Sam and Dean definitely fit the bill of pain-in-the-ass big brothers. They were bossy and demanding. Dean was rough with him more often than not. Sam had ditched him when Dean was in Purgatory. All that aside, they’d done their best to support him. As easy as it would have been to blame them for his lot in life—they were the ones who’d unearthed the word of God, after all—Kevin was smart enough to realize it would have been a whole lot worse for him if they hadn’t been around. They did their best to take care of him.

And really, how much could one protect someone from a God-given edict? Prophet of the Lord wasn’t a title he could give up, apparently. So much for free will.

His mother was gone, but he had a family, and it was Christmastime. It had been a while since he’d observed Christmas. That year with his mom. Even on the run from demons and the King of Hell, his mom had made the day special. She always did. But his mother wasn’t here anymore, and Sam and Dean sucked at holidays. Kevin wasn’t a kid anymore. He could bring Christmas to the bunker. 

The idea gave him equal amounts satisfaction and anxiety. His mom always seemed to know exactly what he wanted. Kevin had no idea what the heck Sam and Dean could want or if they would appreciate the idea of Christmas at all. They were the epitome of damaged. Who knew what kind of trauma they’d suffered around Christmas to turn them off on the whole ordeal. Normal these two weren’t.

If he was going to do it, he was going to do it up right. Kevin got the impression John Winchester sucked at a lot of things, and gift-giving was probably one of them. That left one question:  In their heart of hearts, what was the one thing his makeshift family wanted? More importantly, how was he going to figure it out?

Well, if he could figure out how to let Dean speak to dogs, he could figure out how to find their heart’s desire. It was kind of creepy, but hey. He had good intentions. 

Decided, Kevin began to search through the library in search of something that could help.

~0~

The bunker’s library was an amazing, frightening place. What Kevin could do, the magic he could work if he had half a mind to, was frightening. Again, it was a testament to Sam and Dean that they never even joked about the power they could have if they were to take advantage of the spells they had available. 

Kevin shook that off and tilted his head as he stared at the ingredients list of the spell he was contemplating. He’d learned well from Sam and Dean or there was no way he would have known where to gather some of those things. They’d better end up appreciating this. He’d had to listen to the creepiest guy drone on about how most of the time, when a spell called for virgin blood, they meant blood that was pure—never sickly or filled with drugs or used in other spells. The guy had asked for a fair chunk of change and a healthy chunk of Kevin’s hair. Something about hair infused with the “aura of fear.” He tried to tell the guy there was a difference between fear and disgust, but whatever floated his boat. 

It took a certain amount of bravery for Kevin to swallow the concoction he brewed up. Nasty didn’t even begin to cover it. He shook his head vigorously and smacked his lips. He waited. What did it feel like to be able to hear other people’s thoughts? His head didn’t feel any different. He ran theorems in his head to make sure the spell hadn’t affected his knowledge base. Everything seemed to be in order. 

Then, a wave of dizziness washed over him. For a handful of rather terrifying seconds, Kevin’s brain warped and scrambled. He pounded on the side of his head as if, like an ancient television set, the picture might come in clear again. After a few hearty thumps, it worked. He could see straight again, but there was an odd reverb in his head. 

“That means it worked, right?” he asked out loud. Well, one way to find out. 

In his room, the voices were like faraway whispers in his head.  As he walked down the hallway, the voices became clearer and then distinct. Dean was in the kitchen, and Sam was in the library. Kevin would have known that anyway, but he was fascinated by how easy it would have been to track them by their inner voices alone.

Kevin turned toward the kitchen first only because it was closer. He stumbled to a stop again just outside the door, startled when a wave of something that twisted his gut and squeezed his heart hit him with the strength of a hurricane wind. He was disoriented by the images and thoughts that came with it. It took him almost a full minute to understand what was happening. Not only could he hear Dean’s thoughts, but he could see the accompanying memories and feel the emotion attached. Guilt. Dean was sick with it. It was what Kevin felt knowing he’d gotten his mom killed, Channing killed, but amplified a thousand fold. Kevin would have had to live centuries more, have more blood on his hands, have made so many more wrong choices to understand this kind of guilt.

He took a shaky breath and peered around the corner. Dean was sitting at the kitchen table, staring off into space. There was a beer in his hands, but Kevin heard his passing wish that it was something stronger. Sam had told him once the only good thing about Dean getting stuck in Purgatory was that it had dried him out. He’d been well on his way to becoming an alcoholic like Bobby or worse, their father. According to Sam, Dean had started drinking heavily after Cas betrayed him, and it had only gotten worse when he thought Cas was dead. Then Bobby. Then Sam’s illness.

Dean stared at his beer and called up the memory of whiskey burning in his throat, spreading numbness through his blood. His emotion carried a tinge of desperation. He wanted to forget. Kevin couldn’t tell what at first, but slowly, he got the idea.

Cas. Every other image flickering through his head was of Cas. Cas the first time he saw him, all power and righteousness. Cas kicking ass and taking names. Cas out of his depth, wide-eyed and nervous in the “den of inequity” Dean had brought him to. Cas after he’d expelled the Leviathan, looking worn, ashamed, and vowing to make it up to Dean. Cas cupping Dean’s cheek, his hand lingering for seconds after he healed the wounds he’d inflicted. The look on Cas’s face when Dean told him he couldn’t stay in the bunker.

Wait, what?

Castiel wasn’t Kevin’s favorite person by a long shot, but that didn’t mean he took any joy in what had happened to the ex-angel. Cas’s decision to leave the bunker had never made sense to Kevin. He couldn’t imagine the kind of identity crisis that would happen when someone went from being a millennias old, incredibly powerful, celestial wavelength of intent to being a human with nothing. No family. No last name. No background. No friends.

No wonder Dean was so guilty. They were family. That was what Dean had told Kevin. Dean, Sam, Cas, and Kevin—broken as they all were, they were family. It had been the only thing Kevin could hold on to on the worst days, that the brothers would look out for him. They took him out when he got too stressed. Dean might have been emotionally constipated, but he sure knew how to pull out a heartfelt pep talk when Kevin needed it most. Yet he’d left Cas to his own devices? On purpose?

Dean’s thoughts turned to more recent memories. Cas dressed in a Gulp n’ Sip uniform. How the mighty had fallen. Kevin put his hand to his stomach, rubbing away the echo of the twist in Dean’s gut. Cas had been so angry at first, but Cas had forgiven him, and that, Dean thought, was not something he deserved. Dean’s mood swung again when he remembered Cas in the Impala getting ready for his date-that-never-was. It was a very different twist at the center of Dean’s gut then, one that rocked Kevin to his core.

Jealousy and, as Cas unbuttoned his shirt, a stirring of attraction.

Dean gulped down the rest of his beer in hurry, denying and ignoring those fleeting emotions. Kevin retreated quickly, not wanting to be seen. He pressed his back against the wall in the hallway while Dean talked himself out of calling Cas… just to check in on him. His thoughts turned bitter, and a memory flashed. He was talking to Sam, but it wasn’t Sam. No. It was someone… inside Sam, telling him Cas had to go.

What the hell?

This was all much more than Kevin bargained for. All he wanted was an idea of a halfway decent Christmas present for his surrogate brothers. Instead he’d uncovered the mountain of lies Dean was harboring and a man who, apparently, didn’t know he was being possessed by an angel. 

Were these the kinds of secrets he wasn’t supposed to keep to himself? Merry Christmas, Sam and Dean, this isn’t going to shake your relationship all. But then, he should have known. The Winchester brothers didn’t want things so much as they wanted their family and understanding.

Shaking his head, Kevin followed Sam’s thoughts to where he was in the library. 

Now that he knew there was something off, Kevin could hear the double timbre to Sam’s thoughts. There was someone thinking right along with him, reading the same passages. That someone—something, Kevin supposed—was calm. It’s thoughts came with a separate whisper, a murmuring in a language Kevin couldn’t discern. Enochian, he supposed.  It freaked him out a little, but it didn’t seem malevolent. Still, he would be pissed in Sam’s place.

Then again, both the brothers would be pissed if they knew he was poking around in their heads, so what did he know?

Sam set his book down and looked at the seat across from him. A sad half smile lit his features as he looked at the empty seat across from him. Kevin expected it to spark some memory of Dean sitting there, but instead, the image he got was of a whole different library. A university library if Kevin wasn’t mistaken. Sam pictured not Dean but a pretty blond girl closer to Kevin’s age than his.

“All work and no play make Sam a dull boy,” she said and leaned across the table, flashing him an alluring smile.

“Dull boy now, rich as hell lawyer later,” Sam said in his memory, but the emotion attached with the memory was happy.

As the memory faded, wistfulness turned to a not-so-quiet ache. Kevin had no trouble identifying the emotion that emanated off Sam. It was as thick in the air as the undulations coming off Dick Roman seconds before he exploded. Loneliness. Not the solitary kind. This was the loneliness that struck even in the middle of a crowded room, perhaps especially in the middle of a crowded room.

Sam thought how nice it would be for one person, just one person to understand him. Understand everything. He’d never gotten the chance to tell Jess everything about who he really was. Amelia didn’t know. And Dean preferred not to acknowledge there was a huge part of Sam he would never understand. Wouldn’t it be nice for someone to know all of him?

As Kevin watched, Sam went ramrod straight and his eyes glowed blue. “Kevin Tran,” he said, looking right at Kevin with a steady, piercing gaze.

Kevin swallowed hard and shifted his weight. “Uh, hi… Um…”

“Ezekiel,” the angel supplied. 

Kevin did his best to explain what he was trying to do, but he didn’t know how much Ezekiel understood. Angels were strange that way. He remembered Dean talking about how they didn’t feel, and he wondered now how badly the elder Winchester missed his asshole angel when Cas was…off. “Look,” he said when Ezekiel just stared at him. “I don’t know how the whole Christmas thing is supposed to go by heaven’s standards. I wasn’t really the religious type before all this.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, my mom used to tell me life gets busy. You forget to appreciate the people in your life. Why not use Christmas as a day to show your appreciation, you know? Everyone’s off work and school. It’s this one day set aside to show the people you care about that you really care.”

Ezekiel nodded. “I see.” A slow smile spread across his face. “I think I can help you.”

~0~

It fell on Kevin to collect Cas from the little slice of life he’d managed to chip away for himself. If it weren’t so heartbreaking,  it would have been funny to think that mild mannered, socially awkward, endlessly adorable Steve had once been Castiel, Angel of the Lord. It was hard to believe this was the same being that had poofed around the world in a few minutes to collect the necessary ingredients for his demon bomb or the one with the impressive wingspan who could scare the hell out of Crowley… or scare Crowley back to hell. One of those. 

Cas did the sliding eyes dance where he glanced at Kevin, hope in his eyes, but glanced away, quashing that hope flat as he did. “It’s very nice of you to invite me, Kevin, but I don’t think I’ll be welcome.” 

It went on like this until Kevin said the magic words. “Dean wants you to come.”

The ex-angel started to squirm when they pulled into the bunker’s garage. “You’re sure Dean said this was okay?” 

Zeke pulled into the garage then, saving Kevin from answering. Let him explain. 

“I’m sorry, brother, truly,” Zeke said when he had explained the basics of why he had Dean send Cas away. “I made him choose between his brother and his…” Zeke looked Cas up and down. “Well. You. What he wants most is you safe here with him, but I didn’t give him that choice.”

Kevin watched as Cas’s eyes turned from disbelief to pure fury. He took a step back as the ex-angel approached, looking for that second every bit as intimidating as he had at full power. “You made me one more thing Dean has to be guilty about?”

Zeke held his hands up in a placating gesture. “Peace, brother. It’s Christmas. These humans…” He gestured to Kevin and to the stranger he’d brought with him. “Have been telling me of the spirit of Christmas. It’s a spirit of-”

“Giving,” Cas said, his voice still  hard. “Togetherness. Kindness to your fellow man. Yes, I’m aware. It’s a very peaceful time.” He took a step back, relaxing his tense posture. His eyes darted between the other three. “I was also discovering how lonely this time of year can be.” His eyes bored into Zeke’s. “When you’re away from your only family.”

“Well, I’m here to remedy that, at least for these few days.” He looked to the stranger. “This is Ian Williams. He was my first vessel.”

“Hello,” Ian said. He was surprisingly chill considering the epic amounts of crazy going on around him. 

“Ian is going to let me take him for a few days,” Zeke said. “Sam is well enough to survive a few days without my assistance now.” 

Cas cocked his head and looked at Ian. “Do you not have your own family to return to?” 

Ian laughed. “Not me, man. I’m a drifter. Happy that way. You never know what kind of adventures you’re going to have,” 

“Clearly.” 

“And how are you going to explain this to Sam?” Cas asked. 

Zeke looked down. “I may have to tamper with his memories. For his own good of course.” 

“Of course,” Cas said, his tone dry. 

“He’s not yet well, brother. It’s for the best. But can’t we all have a few peaceful days? For Christmas.” He gave as a knowing look. “For Dean.” 

Cas’s lip twitched. “For Dean,” he agreed.

~0~

When Sam walked in beside Cas and Ian—Zeke—Dean’s expression was nothing short of hilarious. It was panic followed by confusion followed by panic again. 

“This is Ian,” Sam said. He looked confused, but whatever insane story Zeke had told him seemed to be at least enough for the younger Winchester brother not to shoot him. “He knows about the Men of Letters. Cas hitched a ride with him, apparently.” 

“Just passing through and wanted to meet the last of this great line of men and women,” Zeke said, shaking Dean’s hand in greeting. “For a few nights.” 

Kevin hid a laugh behind his hand. Dean’s eyes were wide as saucers. Kevin had never seen him speechless before. He looked over at Cas, his eyes hopeful and longing. 

“Really?” Dean looked at Zeke, and even without his mind reading powers, Kevin could hear the real question in that single word.

“Of course. For a time.” 

Dean grinned. He really grinned. He looked like a kid on Christmas. Which was, in fact, the point. He clapped Zeke on the shoulder and then turned to Cas. “I’m glad you’re here.” 

Cas’s smile was huge. “I am, too.” 

They stared at each other for three long beats. Then Dean obviously couldn’t help himself. He grabbed Cas’s hand and pulled him in for a back-slapping hug. “Merry Christmas, Cas.”

~0~

Zeke, it turned out, was really good at the Christmas thing. He’d gone Kevin one better and managed to drag Charlie and Dorothy out of Oz for the holiday. The Men of Letters bunker had never felt so full and happy.

They were all gathered in the common room around the TV. Charlie sat with her legs thrown over Dorothy’s lap. Sam sat beside Zeke, deep in conversation with a man who just seemed to get him. Dean and Cas sat on the loveseat, so close their legs were touching. Kevin couldn’t get used to the way they kept gazing at each other.

Charlie giggled and leaned over to whisper in Kevin’s ear. “Dude. I read about their eye sex but man… seeing it in person it is totally obvious. How have they not…” She gestured between them. “I mean, come on.”

Kevin almost choked on his eggnog. “I, uh… I mean, I haven’t really seen them together until now. It’s always been you know…”

“Demons and monsters and running and bleeding?” Charlie suggested.

“Yeah. Basically.” 

“I feel ya.” Charlie looked over at them again. “Still. From here, doesn’t look like it would take much to get them to, ya know, resolve some of that tension.” 

Dorothy scoffed. “Just looking at them makes me hot and bothered.” She grinned at Charlie. “I’m going to have to jump you later.” 

“As if you need an excuse.” Charlie leaned forward to kiss her, and Kevin thought it had to be the hottest thing he’d ever seen. 

Merry Christmas to me. 

“Anyway,” Charlie said, looking back to him. “Do you think mistletoe would work?”

“What are you guys talking about?” Sam asked, clueing in to the whispering around him. 

“Nothing,” Kevin said, his voice squeaking. 

“Uh huh. Well, anyway.” Sam walked over to the TV. “In the spirit of the season, I think it’s time we fix one of the greatest travesties of our time.” 

“The Jonas Brothers?” Dean asked.

“They broke up.” 

“Dude. How do you know that?” 

“Whatever. No. You and Cas need to see It’s a Wonderful Life.” 

“Come on, man. That-” 

“It’s happening. Deal with it.” Sam fed the Blu-ray into the player. 

Soon they were all settled with egg nogs and Christmas dinner between them, bantering as the movie played. Cas and Dean were smiling at each other. Sam had found a friend in Zeke, if only for a few days. They were surrounded by makeshift family and friends.