#itzik manger | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

timetot · 6 months

Text

Fools Rush In

Chapter 1

chap 1/2, 5.9k words, rated T

Supernatural fic, Cas POV, TFW 2.0, Jupernatural, Yiddish folklore, the Wise Men of Chelm, about canon levels of Destiel

---

Summary: Castiel accidentally drops several hundred foolish souls in an 18th century Polish town. He regrets it for a long time, until he doesn't.

An unusually introspective Chelm tale featuring storytime with the Winchesters, the Law of Buttered Toast, tortured heavenly geometry metaphors, and a found family comprised entirely of schlemiels.

---

Notes: so this one isn't actually finished, but i wanted to get something posted for @jupernaturalweek! today is day 8: free space, but this behemoth could fit for several of the previous prompts (day 2: community | interfaith, day 4: home | reconnection, and day 6: judaica | stories)

the rest of this is entirely outlined and i'm hoping to have it finished by hanukkah, at which point i will cross-post to ao3. in the meantime, enjoy the wip and ask to tag if you'd like a notif when it's done!

Disclaimer: Sam and Dean are about as Jewish as I am in this—that is to say, they have one Jewish parent (Mary), they didn’t have their b’nei mitzvah, they don’t keep kosher or Shabbos, they celebrate some holidays and know some Yiddish and some children’s stories. If anything, they are even less connected with their heritage than I am, since I at least grew up with my dad and all the deeply Jewish philosophy he imparted on me. Dean has what he learned in four years, and Sam even less. If I messed something up, it’s not like the Winchesters would know any better than I do. That being said, I am open to corrections in the comment section for my own edification/enrichment. Or just let me know your favorite Chelm tale!

Content warnings: Naomi’s memory wiping.

---

"Khelem iz, vi ir veyst, a shtot und got iz, vi ir veyst, a foter.

Chelm is, as you know, a town, and G-d is, as you know, a father."

-Itzik Manger, "Ballad of Chelm," Lamtern in vint (1933)

---

The orders came down from on high several centuries before the end of days.

"Ishim, Mirabel, and Uriel will take the wise souls. Spread them far and wide. Castiel, Balthazar, and Benjamin will take the fools and place but one for each town."

"Is this not a task for a lesser rank of angel?" asked Castiel. "A cherub perhaps?" The distribution of souls seemed more the purview of Heaven's matchmakers than its warriors.

"It is not for us to question the will of Heaven," rebuked Anna, blinking harshly with her innumerable insectoid eyes. "Once the end times are upon us every soul must be in its proper place."

She was right of course, as she always was. Chastened, Castiel ruffled his feathers and accepted the souls, tucking them close inside his spinning wheels of fire.

The wise souls shone bright and ethereal. Mirabel’s peacock feathers fanned out behind them as they preened with pride. Ishim stared at his charges with thinly disguised fascination, passing them from one claw to the next tentacle, as if turning them over for inspection. Uriel held his souls as far away from his core as possible, a strange distaste written on the bared teeth of his lion’s maw.

Castiel thought Uriel ungrateful for his indisputably more glamorous task. His own souls were a dull, muddy brown. Nonetheless they pulsed with inherent power when he engulfed them, sending sparks sublime and sacred through his being. They felt heavy in his hands and his core.

Balthazar took three of his foolish souls and tossed them between two of his starlight limbs like the human juggler Castiel had once curiously observed at a masked carnival. Benjamin’s otter face tittered with amusement, but Anna’s rings spun quicker and her flames jumped high in reprimand.

“Take care,” she ordered. “Human souls are not playthings. You wouldn’t want to drop them.”

The angels took to the skies in separate directions, their precious cargo in tow. Had any human looked to the heavens that night they would have seen empyreal meteors streak across the stars in the south and the aurora borealis smear the night sky with blue and green in the north as Heaven’s servants set to work.

Castiel went from village to village, placing one foolish soul in each. In the morning, the parents-to-be would awaken, newly expectant with what was sure to be a challenging child. He had no concept of parenthood, yet he did not envy them.

To his consternation, the weight of the souls did not lighten as he unburdened himself one by one. If anything, they felt heavier and heavier. He took them from within himself and passed them from one limb of numinous starlight to the next. Still, they weighed him down. His massive wings, blacking out the night sky behind them, beat with difficulty against the weight of his cargo. He found himself flying lower and lower, skimming across the mountaintops of eastern Europe.

This was his mistake, and one he would certainly come to regret.

It was only several short hours after the angels departed—a blink of an eye to supernal beings such as they—that one of Castiel’s wings caught on a jagged mountain peak. With a jolt, his flight came to an abrupt halt. To his horror, he felt his grip slip. The rest of his charges went tumbling down the mountainside like a bag of luminous marbles cut open at the bottom. His wings still tangled up in the rocky crags, Castiel watched in helpless dismay as hundreds of foolish souls streaked down to the village below, where faint firelight flickered in the darkness and wisps of smoke curled from chimneys.

Oh. Oh no. For the first time in his millenia-long creation, Castiel felt the urge to let slip blasphemous words.

"You have returned early, Castiel," Anna said as the garrison reconvened in Heaven. Castiel had been buzzing with anxiety, wheels clicking like grinding gears, for the longest handful of hours in his eons of existence.

“Yes,” he acknowledged and said nothing else.

Anna prompted them each for a debrief. Ishim, Mirabel, and Uriel’s deliveries went off without a hitch, sprinkling wise souls here and there throughout the world.

“The wise will do great things,” proclaimed Mirabel, “create ingenious inventions that push humanity forward, cure illnesses, care for the people in their communities.”

“Solve the problems that the foolish create,” Uriel grumbled.

“Somebody’s got to do it,” Balthazar said with a jag of laughter from his hyena’s mouth. “One per town, as you ordered, sister. To create problems or to provide a bit of levity perhaps.”

Benjamin nodded in agreement. Anna turned to Castiel expectantly.

“Ah. Well,” he said, flicking his zebra-like tail.

Anna batted her great lepidopteran wings slowly.

“You see,” he said, his halo blushing aurora purple.

Anna cocked her eagle’s head to the side.

“I dropped them,” he said, finally.

Anna stilled. “You… dropped them?” she repeated, uncharacteristically hesitant.

“Not all of them,” he rushed to clarify. “Perhaps… half? All in one village in what the humans call the Carpathians.”

Silence stretched out between the angels.

“Well that is sure to be one idiotic village in a few decades’ time,” Ishim said drily from his cuckoo’s beak.

Uriel laughed unkindly. “Perhaps you ought not be the Angel of Thursdays, Castiel. Perhaps we ought to call you the Angel of Fools from now on.”

The garrison exchanged amused looks. Any joking moniker from Uriel was sure to stick. Shame-faced, Castiel kept his many eyes fixed on Anna.

“I will accept whatever punishment is deemed necessary.”

“It is not up to me,” she said, with a hint of apology in her resonant many-layered voice. “I will inform our superiors of the error.”

Castiel hung his heads low in acceptance.

Next time he handles a soul, he will be sure to grip it tight.

---

The Righteous Man’s soul glowed dimly beneath the blood and gore of Hell. Its rusty red was but a few shades from the brown of the fools’ and it felt as heavy as all those souls combined. Castiel clung tight enough to leave a mark.

---

The Lucifer Sword’s soul was within its vessel in the Cage, or so Castiel assumed. He raised the body from perdition, leaving Sam behind.

He can’t seem to get a handle on this soul business. Either he grasps far too tightly or not at all.

---

Castiel remembers all of this curled up in a lumpy sleeping bag in the backroom of a Gas-N-Sip in Rexford, Idaho. His back aches from sleeping on it all twisted up, there's a mosquito bite on his left elbow that won't stop itching, and his stomach feels like it's about to eat itself, it's so empty.

He's never felt more like the Angel of Fools. Rather, he wouldn't, if he were an angel at all.

There's one small blessing, though Castiel is torn between calling it a curse: Naomi's conditioning seems to be meant solely for angels. Now that all his multi-dimensional awareness has been folded up into relatively uncomplicated three-dimensional human neural pathways, her needle-sharp control over his mind is fading. Every other morning, he wakes from dreams of Egypt—caught literally red-handed as he painted lamb's blood on unmarked lintels—or of Sodom and Gomorrah—smuggling children from the city walls as the holy sulfur and flame came raining down.

The village of fools was not a memory she stole from him for it hadn't been a rebellion, simply an accident. They wanted him to remember his mistakes, as long as they weren't defiant, so that the shame kept him obedient.

It may not be a newly recovered memory, but Castiel finds himself revisiting that night in the Carpathians often lately, in the brief lulls between customers and the long hours of restless tossing and turning before he finally slips into unpracticed slumber. Watching the angels plummet to Earth, their wings burning to tattered sinew and bone, had been a lot like watching the souls fall to that tiny ramshackle town in the mountains, except that this time he had watched from below instead of above. He had dragged his brothers and sisters down to his level instead of simply letting them slip from the heavens. Either way, it was all his fault.

If not the Angel of Fools, he was certainly the king of them. The leviathans, Purgatory, Metatron—just the latest in a long string of foolish decisions.

Limited by just two eyes and two hands, Castiel can’t perceive souls anymore, the fuzzy edges of their auras pulsing gently behind a human’s eyes and around their heart. He’s not sure if he himself even possesses one. Had a soul sprung into being, cradled in his human ribcage, to replace the grace Metatron had torn and scraped from his core? Metatron seemed to think so with his jab about living a long life and returning to Heaven only in death, just another human soul among billions. There is no way for Castiel to tell anymore, but if he did indeed have a soul, he is certain it would be the same mud brown, flickering dully, as the fools’.

He doesn’t deserve even that much.

Dean visits him in Rexford for a case. Castiel aches for him even as the sting of Dean’s rejection clenches around his heart. Dean’s judgmental ribbing about Castiel’s current employment reminds him of Ishim’s critical eyes and Uriel’s sardonic name-calling. He is certain if any of his siblings saw him now they would let him know exactly how ugly his soul was, if it even existed in the first place. They would sneer at how low he’s brought himself.

When Ephraim tries to kill him, it is out of pity and a perverted sense of mercy. He is not the first of Castiel’s brothers to try to kill him, and he will not be the last. There are many more angels dead at his own hands.

Dean leaves again in the morning, gone as quickly as he came. If there is a reason Dean cast him out into the desert, he won’t tell Castiel what it is, but he can hazard a guess. What use is Castiel to Dean now that he is graceless, powerless? He is a liability more than anything, making mistake after mistake in his hubris. That’s fine. In Rexford, he is carving out a simple life, one he has some modicum of control over. There is dignity in the day-to-day grind of lottery tickets and burnt coffee and gas station taquitos. Besides, he doesn’t trust himself with the levers of the universe any longer.

Still, he misses Dean’s laughter, his incomprehensible movie references, his steady eye contact. He misses Dean’s soul, still wounded angry red from decades in Hell, but glowing warmly now after several years topside. He’s greedy for it.

After all these centuries, Castiel has found a reason to envy the souls he spilled. At least they had each other. Why should there be only one fool in each town? It is desperately lonely to be a foolish soul stranded by himself.

---

Dean apologizes to Cas while the King of Hell drives needles into Sam’s possessed body in the next room. Turns out, Dean made his own stupid mistake in the service of keeping Sam alive. Castiel is an angel again, at the cost of stolen grace. Needs must, but he can’t help the dreadful feeling that his act of cannibalism will loop right back around eventually; an ouroboros eating its own tail.

“I got played,” Dean says through frustrated tears.

“I thought I was saving Heaven. I got played, too,” Castiel responds. He has to remind himself it was Metatron who tricked him, Metatron who scooped out his grace, Metatron who pulled the trigger and cast all the angels out of Heaven.

Dean smiles weakly. “So you’re sayin’ we’re both a couple of dumbasses?”

“I prefer the word ‘trusting,’” Cas equivocates. “Less dumb. Less ass.”

Dean huffs out a silent laugh, more a quick shake of the shoulders and self-deprecating smile than anything else. Castiel can tell neither of them quite believe it.

---

It is several more years and additional cosmic pratfalls before Castiel finds his faith rewarded. Trusting in Kelly, in Jack, is his first choice in a long time—perhaps since placing his faith in Dean during the Apocalypse—that doesn’t come back to bite him. Well. He did die during Jack’s birth. But even that he cannot regret, now that the bunker is bustling with Apocalypse World refugees, with Jack and Sam and Dean, newly dispossessed of Michael. Even Mary on treasured occasions.

He had such a short time with Jack between his own resurrection and Jack’s stranding in the Apocalypse World. Already he’s grown into a sharp young man. Castiel can see Dean’s influence in his stubbornness, the way he shoulders the burden to care for everyone around him. Sam’s is just as clear in Jack’s curiosity and his drive.

Castiel is not blind to the parts of himself in Jack, but it’s easy to overlook the earnestness and love in favor of the faults; chiefly, the insecurity. Jack has clearly linked his own sense of value to his usefulness. Without his powers, Jack is floundering.

Castiel’s grace is long-since restored, though with most of it burned up in Metatron’s spell, he is not nearly as powerful as he once was, even before his promotion to the rank of seraph. Castiel remembers all too well the helplessness he felt locked in a flesh body. Though there are certain elements of humanity he misses—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, afternoon naps, the slowed perception of time—it was like a part of himself was missing when he was human. Castiel does his best to alleviate those feelings of worthlessness and loss in Jack—taking him out on hunts, just the two of them—but still Jack is often frustrated with himself.

This culminates in an early morning breakfast in the bunker kitchen. Dean is frying up more than enough egg scrambles and bacon for whoever blearily wanders in. Maggie cheerily hoovers an unholy amount of food in two minutes flat before bustling off to the library for a hunt briefing with Sam. Stevie orders her eggs with highly particular cooking instructions—Dean rolls his eyes, but complies. Charlie slinks in and out to retrieve her morning coffee, doctoring it with enough sugar to keep a trickster’s sweet tooth satisfied and grunting a thanks in Dean’s direction. He stares at her retreating back, a conflicted longing around the edge of his downturned mouth.

It’s nice, having the bunker so full. It reminds Castiel a bit of life in the garrison, though angels did not so much live in each other’s pockets as much as they existed together as one, singular notes in the harmony of Heaven, cogs in the machine that kept each other and capital “e” Everything running smoothly. After all, there is no one multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent without the sinusoidal wave itself. Angels are defined as the empty distance between each other, between the troughs and crests of the cosmos. Castiel should know—removing himself from the wave threw the whole thing into discordance. Now it is a flattened thing, the frequency tuning lower and lower to the weakest of radio waves, stretched out to almost nothing as the wavelengths are plucked from it. Only nine angels left in Heaven. The absence of wavelengths. What is the absence of empty gaps?

Tortured geometrical metaphors aside, the point is that Cas has grown to appreciate his independence, but he still misses being a part of something larger. He has had the Winchesters for the past decade—or at least, for interrupted periods of the last decade—and now he has Jack. The presence of the refugees from the Apocalypse World is comforting, even though many still glance at him with suspicion when they think he is not looking. He cannot blame them for their wariness. Their world burned in holy fire at the hands of Heaven. Those that stuck around the bunker seem to have accepted Castiel into the fold—some begrudgingly and others wholeheartedly—as an extension of Jack, whom almost all of them have adopted as a brother or son or leader after the months he spent defending them against Michael’s forces.

So it is that everyone who comes into the kitchen offers Cas a friendly wave or at least a simple nod. He often migrates into the kitchen once Dean is up and banging pots and pans together. For his part, Dean took a while to warm up to the presence of all these strangers in his home. They’re still mostly “Chief” Sam’s people, but after a while, Dean’s caretaking instincts kicked in and he’s taken to making a ridiculous amount of breakfast in the mornings. Despite Castiel’s own distaste for food, he enjoys simply sharing space with Dean as he cooks. Castiel has been permanently banned from helping after a disastrous baking incident involving the over-application of yeast, so he mostly sits at the table with a book.

Dean may have banned Castiel, but despite Jack’s equally poor cooking skills, he is allowed in the kitchen under close supervision. Privately, Cas thinks Jack has perfected Sam’s hangdog puppy dog eyes: one of Dean’s many weaknesses. On this particular morning, Jack has already burnt a few panfuls of eggs, so Dean gently redirects him towards coffee and toast.

Castiel looks up from the entomology book he's been idly skimming when Jack lets out a frustrated groan. Jack stares down at a piece of toast he had dropped straight on the floor, blinking back the angry tears welling up at the corner of his eyes.

Cas is up, out of his chair, and resting a calming hand on Jack's shoulder before it can turn into a full meltdown.

"It's alright, Jack. It's just toast."

"Exactly!" Jack grumbles. "It's just toast and I can't even get that right." He gestures towards the stove with the blackened remnants of his attempt at a veggie scramble.

Cas shoots Dean an only slightly panicked look, but Dean doesn’t see it, busy bending down to pick the offending piece of bread off the kitchen floor.

“That ain’t true kid,” Dean says, waving the toast around as if it is a key piece of evidence in a trial. It had clearly landed butter side down, smearing grease in a small spot on the concrete. “Look, you buttered the right side of your toast.”

The nonsense statement seems to stump Jack out of his impotent anger. “Huh?”

Castiel is just as confused.

Dean sweeps the bread into the trash and turns back to the stove. “I dunno, it’s just from this story Mom used to tell me when I helped her in the kitchen as a kid. I was four, I probably got in the way more than I helped.”

Castiel steps on Dean’s foot. He yelps and glares at him before noticing the return of Jack’s sullen expression.

“Ah shit, I didn’t mean-” Dean sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. Castiel knows the feeling. It’s painfully easy to make a misstep in parenting. “It’s just- I dropped things all the time, but she never got mad. She’d just brush it off and tell me about the law of buttered toast.”

“What’s that?” Jack asks. He looks curious despite himself, like he’s furious that he’s letting himself be distracted from beating himself up.

“Pretty sure it’s a Chelm story—a Yiddish folktale,” Dean clarifies. He pauses and tosses some turmeric into the scramble he’s frying, clearly taking a moment to collect the fragments of his memory. “I think it goes like this: it’s a well known law of the universe, at least in the town of Chelm, that whenever you drop a piece of bread, it lands buttered side down.”

“Corollary of Murphy’s Law?” Castiel interjects. He’s all too familiar; it seems to govern their lives.

“Bingo,” Dean says, shooting a smile over his shoulder. “So this woman is making her breakfast one morning when she drops a piece of bread and to her surprise it lands buttered side up.”

Dean turns off the heat and piles a couple of plates high with eggs and potatoes and bacon. With a hand on Jack’s shoulder he guides all of them to the kitchen table and plops the food down in front of himself and Jack.

“She rushes to the rabbi. Obviously this is a serious matter, so it requires a rabbi,” Dean says wryly.

Jack cracks a small smile, idly moving his food around his plate without eating.

“The rabbi gathers all the elders and the wise men of Chelm together to ponder the problem.” Dean says ‘wise men’ with a lopsided sarcastic smile. Cas doesn’t quite get the joke, but that’s not uncommon. He’s given up on asking. “After seven days of fasting and prayer and debate, they finally figure it out. The rabbi summons the woman back and tells her: ‘It’s all very simple. The laws of the universe remain unbroken. The issue is, you buttered the wrong side of your bread.’”

There's a beat of silence before the punchline hits and Jack dissolves into laughter. His whole face lights up with it, the golden glow of his soul shining through in the tilt of his lips and the crinkles around his eyes. Even without his grace, Jack's soul pulses strong and brilliant.

Dean exchanges a sly smile with Cas. Crisis averted, breakfast saved.

---

The Buttered Toast Incident, as Castiel has dubbed it in his mind, seems to have unlocked a treasure trove of similar parables from the depths of Dean’s memory. Perhaps not parables; although Dean tries to wring significant life lessons and meaning from them, almost all of them are absurd little tales with backwards logic and ridiculous solutions to what should be simple issues. It becomes eminently clear that the supposed “wise men” of Chelm are quite the opposite.

There’s one in which the townsfolk of this so-called Chelm are felling trees at the top of a hill for their new synagogue. They carry each log down the hillside. Once someone points out how much easier it would be to roll them down the hill, the would-be carpenters applaud the idea and carry all of the logs back up to the top so they can do just that.

Dean tells this one to Jack during a hand-to-hand training session in the bunker’s gym as he adjusts Jack’s stance. “Lower your center of gravity and use your opponent’s weight against them. You’re making it harder on yourself than it needs to be.”

Well, that particular tale works better than most as a teaching tool. There’s a similar story about driving a cart through the village with logs piled lengthwise. The cart can’t make it through a narrow street because the logs would hit the buildings either side. Instead of readjusting the logs to be parallel with the street, the townsfolk demolish the buildings to make way for the cart.

Castiel finds it difficult to believe anyone would be as stupid as the villagers in Dean’s stories, especially not en masse, but he supposes that’s the point.

“So the humor is derived from the subversion of the seemingly obvious solution,” he muses.

Dean rolls his eyes. “It ain’t funny if you explain the joke, Cas.”

Jack grins from ear to ear. He eats up Dean’s folk tales with enthusiasm, lighting up with laughter no matter how groan-worthy the punchline. Dean relates them with a rhythm that speaks to years of repetition, though sometimes he has to pause and squint into the middle distance as he scrambles to remember the details. Castiel can picture him at age nine or ten recounting them as bedtime stories for Sam.

This supposition is confirmed on the fourth or fifth Chelm story, the first with Sam in the room. For once, it’s just the four of them gathered in the library, poring over esoteric texts on archangels and scouring the web for any hint of Michael’s activities.

After several fruitless hours, Dean, very clearly reaching the end of his rope, slams his book shut and leans over the table towards Jack.

“Hey, kid, want to hear another story?”

It’s the first time Dean has dropped the pretense of a life lesson and just wants to tell a story for the story’s sake. Jack’s eyes flick towards Sam as if to ask permission to break from research, but Sam’s eyes are glued to his laptop screen, his mouth pulled into an annoyed line, resolutely ignoring Dean’s interruption. He’s had a lifetime of practice at that. Castiel, on the other hand, has only known Dean for a precious sliver of his long existence and finds his attention wandering to Dean, as it is wont to do.

“What’s six plus six?”

“Oh, is this one a riddle?”

“Something like that. Come on, what’s six plus six?”

“Twelve,” Jack says slowly, squinting, as if he’s fairly confident in his answer, but suspicious of Dean pulling the rug out from under him.

Indeed, Dean’s grin broadens. “Nah. In Chelm, it’s nine.”

Jack’s brow furrows in confusion. Sam looks up from his screen, surprise and recognition on his face.

“And what misapplication of mathematical rules did they use to arrive at such a conclusion?” Castiel prompts.

Dean opens his mouth to continue, but Sam interrupts. “Dude, you’re telling it all wrong.”

“What? No, I’m not,” Dean says, affronted.

“Yeah, you are,” Sam throws back. “It’s seven plus seven equals eleven. Not even Chelm logic gets nine from six and six. And it’s Chelm, not Helm.”

He pronounces it with a perfect voiceless uvular fricative.

Dean squints, counts on his fingers, and—evidently failing to produce nine from six and six—slumps in his chair, defeated. “Whatever. You tell it then, nerd.”

Castiel and Jack turn their heads towards Sam in unison. On the spot, he squirms under the scrutiny. “Um. So there’s this mother, right? And she and her husband both remarried. And they each had four children from their previous marriage-”

“Now who’s telling it wrong?” Dean interrupts smugly. “Come on, Sammy, it’s all in the delivery.”

“Well at least I didn’t start with the punchline!”

“It’s effective storytelling-”

The story itself is forgotten in the ensuing squabble. Cas accepts that he may never know how to arrive at eleven from seven plus seven and exchanges a long-suffering look with Jack. Castiel loves them both, but a decade spent in the company of siblings, with all their indecipherable in-jokes, stories, and long-running arguments can grate on the nerves at times. Now, with Jack’s mirrored confusion and exasperation, he has a kindred soul in the Winchester household.

“Since when have you been telling Chelm stories anyway?” says Sam eventually. “I haven’t heard any since I was, like, twelve maybe?”

“Aw, you jealous that Jack gets bedtime stories and you don’t, Sammy?” Dean needles with a fake pout.

“Shut the fuck up. I was just curious what reminded you of them.”

Dean shrugs, turning to Jack. “Nothin’ in particular. Jack likes ’em. Don’t you, kid?”

“I do,” Jack affirms with a grin, clearly relieved to once again be involved in the conversation. “They’re funny.”

Dean smiles at Sam and waves towards Jack as if to say ‘See?’

“I find them quite perplexing,” Castiel says, although he was not consulted. “I don’t understand how an entire town could continue to function when all the inhabitants are knocking down buildings to make way for carts and building walls around the village to keep out the cold.”

“You’re missing the point, Cas,” Dean says. “They’re just fairy tales.”

“And what, pray tell, is the point of an entire village of idiots?”

Dean looks around the library as if searching for said point. Eventually, he simply shrugs. “Not letting common sense get in the way of a really good idea? I dunno. Not everything has to have a point.”

“They’re just fun,” Sam agrees. “You can laugh at the hapless schmucks and their misadventures but also relate to them a bit.”

Dean snaps his fingers and points towards Sam. “’Zactly. We’re all schlemiels here.”

That’s certainly true, Cas thinks with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. Who in the room hasn’t made a cosmic fool of himself on more than one occasion?

“Besides,” Sam adds, “it’s best not to think too hard about how the town functions. They’re harmless idiots. Maybe they’re knocking buildings down or building staircases in the middle of the synagogue, but they’re usually not hurting anyone.”

“Usually?” Jack prompts.

Dean claps his hands together. “I haven’t told you how Chelm gets destroyed!”

“Chelm gets destroyed?” Jack looks heartbroken, like Dean just kicked a puppy right in front of his eyes.

Dean hesitates, eyes flicking towards Cas for help. Castiel just raises an eyebrow, refraining from throwing Dean a lifeline. It’s not like he’s familiar with the story himself.

“No help at all,” Dean mutters. “Don’t worry, kid, no one dies.”

The attempted reassurance does little to alleviate Jack’s crushed expression.

“The way it goes is this,” Dean says. “Chelm’s got a rat problem. They're everywhere, getting into the pantries and the winter food stores."

Sam leans back in his chair, eyes fixed on Dean as he launches into the story, a small nostalgic smile tugging at his lips. His laptop is still open in front of him, but—for just a moment—Michael is the furthest thing from all of their minds.

“A traveling merchant sells the town a mouser cat. ‘Perfect!’ they all think. ‘The cat will eat all the rats and that's the problem solved.’”

Jack nods, but his face is still twisted up in worry over the fate of his beloved Chelmites. So far, no foolish logic.

“‘But what's the cat gonna eat once it runs out of rats?’ asks one villager. ‘Field mice and rabbits, I suppose,’ someone else answers. ‘And when it runs out of woodland critters? The only thing left in the town will be us!’”

Ah. Here we go.

“So they all get it into their heads that the cat’s gonna eat them once it gobbles up all the other animals in Chelm. Now they've got all their panties in a bunch about it, they decide they’ve gotta nip the problem in the bud. They chase the cat around but it’s way too wily for them. It ends up on the roof of the synagogue. The shammes—that’s like the caretaker I think—” Dean shoots Sam a look for confirmation, though neither of them are exactly regular synagogue or temple attendees; Sam nods—“yeah, he climbs up and tries to throw it off the roof. He falls ass over teakettle off the roof and breaks his leg, but obviously the cat lands on its feet.”

Jack huffs out a small laugh.

“The cat books it into the synagogue. All the townsfolk are so worked up that they light the whole thing on fire.”

“No!” Jack gasps in horror.

“Yep,” Dean says, shaking his head with faux mournfulness. “The fire spreads and next thing you know, Chelm’s in ashes. So it goes.”

“What happened to the cat?” Jack asks, his brows drawn together.

“Relax, the cat was fine!” Dean assures him. “Nine lives, yeah? Even more than a Winchester.”

Castiel himself is on his sixth.

“And all the villagers survived,” Dean continues. “They moved away and found new homes, becoming the local village idiots wherever they settled.”

“Spreading their particular brand of Chelm logic throughout the world,” Sam tacks on.

Castiel supposes it serves as a sort of origin story for foolishness in the wider world. The end of Chelm is just the beginning of something new. It’s bittersweet, but he can see how it would strike a chord with diaspora Jews—with Sam and Dean in particular, whose own childhood home burned to the ground, though Castiel doubts that Dean has consciously drawn that parallel himself.

Jack hums thoughtfully and after a lengthy pause says, “I don’t think I like that one. It’s sad. I bet they missed each other.”

“Eh.” Dean shrugs, a ‘whatcha gonna do?’ gesture. “Life’s sad sometimes. Even in Chelm.”

“I guess,” Jack grumbles, his head hanging low. He flips a page in his book without reading anything on it.

Sam clears his throat to get Dean’s attention and nods significantly towards Jack.

‘What?’ Dean mouths back, evidently content to leave it at that.

Cas rolls his eyes. “Any cheerier Chelm stories in the repertoire?” He, too, makes a subtle gesture towards the now despondent Jack.

Dean finally catches on. “Oh, uh… yeah, lemme think.”

Jack perks up, just a bit.

“Dean’s always starting at the end,” Sam says. “Has he told you how Chelm was founded?”

“I must’ve.”

Jack and Cas exchange a look and shake their heads.

“I don’t believe you have,” Castiel denies.

“No? Damn. Derelict in my duties. You’ll like this one,” Dean says to Jack. “It’s got an angel in it.”

Despite himself, Castiel leans forward in his seat, mirroring Jack’s interest. He doubts there will be any factual merit to the story; human tales of angels are invariably flawed depictions, galling and fascinating in equal measure. Castiel is still trying to dissuade Dean of the notion that he has a harp hidden somewhere in his trenchcoat.

“Legend has it that after dear old grandpa got done whipping up the universe, he sent the angels out to populate the world, sprinkling souls here and there. He gave one angel in particular two sacks; one with the wisest of souls and the other with the most foolish souls. The angel was supposed to scatter them evenly. One wise soul and one foolish soul in each town.”

Oh. That’s… uncomfortably familiar.

“But the sack of foolish souls was super heavy.”

“More fools than wise men in the world,” Sam says wryly.

“Right. So the angel flies lower and lower, dragged down by the weight of the fools, until whoops!” Dean mimes dropping a heavy load. “Butterfingers! He drops the sack and aaaall the souls fall out in one spot. The spot where they eventually built Chelm.”

Jack laughs, much more satisfied with this story than the previous.

“The angel didn’t get in trouble did he?”

Dean shrugs. “Dunno. Friend of yours, Cas?” He turns towards Castiel, but his grin fades when he takes in Castiel’s stricken expression.

“Cas?”

And then all eyes are on him. If Castiel could sweat, he would.

“It-” Cas coughs, tries to school his expression, but the damage is done. He can practically see the cogs turning in Sam and Dean’s brains. “It didn’t happen exactly like that.”

“No,” Dean says, amused understanding dawning across his face, like Christmas, Chanukah, and New Years just came early. “No way.”

Cas closes his eyes and—not for the first time—wishes he still had his wings, if only to beat a hasty retreat from this conversation and hang out on Saturn until his ego could heal.

“But-” Sam looks more confused than anything else. “That’s not how souls work.”

“You are correct, Sam,” Castiel says, getting to his feet. “It is not how souls work.”

Wings or not, he can still turn around and walk straight out, leaving the library echoing with Dean’s uproarious laughter and Jack’s confused “Wait, what’s going on?”

Even at his own expense, it’s nice to hear Dean let loose laughter that carefree and open. After he’s done licking his wounds, Castiel will surely forgive him for it.

#jupernatural #jupernatural week #supernatural #claire writes #chelm fic #castiel #spn fic

1 note · View note