Smoke

Cas woke him by trailing kisses across his shoulders, murmuring good morning with his lips pressed to Dean’s skin.

By the time they made it out of Dean’s room it was mid-morning, and Sam greeted them with a raised eyebrow. Right. Being pleased for them didn’t mean a free pass on the judgment when they spent a bit of extra time in bed, then.

Ignoring Sam, Dean made a bee-line for Hannah.

“You busy?” he asked.

Hannah looked up from the book she was reading, her gaze shifting a little away from Dean, to the side and behind. To Cas.

“No,” she said. “What do you need?”

“I need to know how you came back,” Dean said. “And how you found us in that room. I need anything that can help me get rid of these demons who are threatening Cas.”

“They’re not-” Cas started.

“Don’t argue with me,” Dean said. “They said they needed bits of you for the spell. They almost sliced and diced you right in front of me. How is that not a threat?”

From Cas’ silence, that hit home. From the look of satisfaction on Hannah’s face, Dean wasn’t the only one who thought Cas should pay more attention to his own safety.

“I’ll tell you everything I can,” Hannah said. “I don’t know how much it’ll help, but anything I can do, I’ll do. I still feel awful about the last time I saw you, Castiel. If I can make it up to you-”

“You feel awful?” Cas asked. “I let you die.”

Dean held up a hand before they could get into it about who had more guilt.

“It was a shitty situation all round,” he said. “And I’m sure you both wish it had gone differently, but let’s focus on what we need now. All right?”

By the time he had Cas and Hannah settled at the table, Bela had joined them. She sat next to Hannah, taking the angel’s hand and lacing their fingers together.

“You want to know how I found you?” Hannah asked. “I heard Castiel’s prayer. I followed that to the building. And then I followed your prayer to the room.”

“It’s quite convenient that you both like to pray to anyone who’ll listen,” Bela said. “I can barely imagine such faith.”

Neither Dean nor Cas said anything at that.

“As for the rest,” Hannah said, “we never really knew what happened to us when we died. Angels. We’ve been taught for as long as we remember that, when we die, we simply cease to be. But Castiel kept returning, suggesting he must be returning from somewhere.”

“Turns out,” Bela said, “that Hell and Purgatory are just two of the realms setting themselves up as afterlives.”

“There’s more?” Dean asked.

“Of course,” Cas said, as though it should have been obvious to everyone. “Hades and Valhalla and thousands of other afterlives exist. You didn’t think Hell and Heaven were the only places souls reside?”

Dean kind of had, but he pulled a face that he hoped made it look like his world-view wasn’t shaken. Hannah frowned at Castiel.

“But they’re adjuncts of Hell or Heaven. Pocket realms. Or, sometimes, connected to the fairy-realm. We can travel to them, if we wish. We couldn’t leave the place where Bela found me. And I tried. I knew the situation in Heaven, and I tried to leave, to get back and help. I couldn’t.”

Cas made a sound that could have been anything.

“Other afterlives aren’t adjuncts,” he said. “That’s just what those in charge wanted us to think. But it doesn’t match what I’ve seen.”

Dean hadn’t had chance to really think about it before, but Hannah looked at Cas as though he could see things she couldn’t. He wondered why. Cas had only just got all of his Grace back, but he was pretty sure that, all things being equal, Cas was a lot stronger than Hannah. Did that mean he could see things Hannah couldn’t?

“You think we’ve been lied to?” Hannah asked.

“I know we’ve been lied to,” Cas said. “The question is how much, and exactly what the truth is. In any case, some realms are harder to enter than others. Purgatory was locked up tight enough that it took a battalion to break me out. I was at full strength then, more or less, and I couldn’t have gotten out on my own. And it’s never made sense to me that we’d just…blink out of existence when we die. Not when almost nothing else does. The multi-verse is a closed system.”

That confidence in his voice was almost terrifying, bringing home to Dean how much Cas saw that he didn’t. He reminded himself that Cas had some areas where he was willing to learn from Dean. Besides, it was impressive, as well as slightly scary, and Dean just had to deal.

“So there really is an angel Heaven?” he asked. “And, what, Bela found it?”

Bela shrugged.

“I told you. The realms are fractured. I walked right out of Hell after centuries spent trying to break free. I didn’t mean to end up where I did, and I still don’t really know how it happened. But it did, and where the beings I found there couldn’t see a path back to Earth, I could.”

“And they followed you?” Dean asked. “You followed her?”

Hannah nodded.

“Yes. Bela…” She stopped and smiled fondly at the other woman. “Bela found me when I had all but given up, and she had such drive, such passion, that I found enough hope to follow her. I can see, now, Castiel, why you found it so compelling to follow Dean.”

Cas gave her a tight smile, as though not entirely comfortable with the comment, but he also sneaked his hand onto Dean’s knee.

“Bela, being human once, won’t have been meant to be in that realm,” Cas said. “Just as Dean found a way out of Purgatory, Bela will have been given a path to follow from a place where only dead angels should be.”

Bela nodded as though every part of that made sense.

“It took a long time to find our gateway home,” Hannah said. “We had a lot of time to talk. To get to know one another.”

“To realise two beings this hot should be seeing what they could get up to together,” Bela added.

“And on this walk, you somehow learned about the symbols on the cuffs? On Cas’ collar?”

Hannah shook her head.

“Of course not. Bela was in the darkest pit of Hell. She shouldn’t have been, but it did give her a place from which to find a great many secrets out.”

“I heard Ruby talking to Lilith,” Bela said. “I heard a demon whose name no-one would speak refer to herself as Meg. I learned to keep out of their way, especially if there was any danger they might meet. There were others, who you won’t know, and I’ve always been good at acquiring things. In this case, I acquired knowledge.”

“And does any of this knowledge tell you how to knock this Demon-King nonsense on the head?” Dean asked.

Bela pursed her lips and looked Dean up and down.

“It might,” she said. “How do you feel about a trip”