Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dean is in the kitchen taking a lasagna out of the oven when he gets the call. 

“You guys on your way home?” Dean asks without saying hello. He fits his cellphone up between the crook of his shoulder and his ear, holding it in place with his head tilted as he peels back the layer of tinfoil and takes a look beneath. Golden-brown cheese, just starting to bubble in spots. Perfect. “Dinner’s gonna get cold.”

“Dean,” says Sam, too calmly, and Dean knows immediately. Instantly, he knows. The oven mitt falls from his hands. “It’s Cas.”

*

He is stretched out along Baby’s backseat, his head in Jack’s lap and his legs hanging awkwardly to the floor. He is still. He is pale. 

The only sign that he’s alive at all is the rise and fall of breath in his chest, measured and easy and slow. 

“What the hell happened?” Dean demands. He wants to reach in and yank Cas out and shake his shoulders until he opens his eyes and frowns at Dean, he wants—but instead he does nothing. Instead he is frozen there, one hand on Baby’s door and one curled so tight that he can feel his nails cutting into his palm, unable to move. “Who did this to him?”

“An amatuer,” Sam says. He sounds like he’s speaking from a great distance, hollow beneath the blood roaring in Dean’s ears. “Turns out the witch we were after was self-taught, really inexperienced. She kept setting off spells that either worked halfway or were much more powerful than they should be, throwing anything and everything at us that she could think of. One hit Cas and he just… dropped. Been like this ever since.”

Cas’s face is utterly smooth, devoid of the scowl he likes to send Dean’s way when he’s being an asshole, or the quiet smile he gives Jack. There’s no divot of concentration between his eyebrows. His eyelashes don’t so much as flutter. 

Dean shouldn’t have let the three of them go off on their own. They’ve done it before and it’s been just fine, but he had a feeling about today, and he should’ve just listened to himself. Should’ve come with them. Should’ve been there to protect Cas. 

“We should get him inside,” Jack says. His voice sounds small, and for the first time since they got back, Dean looks at him: his wide eyes and the fear-pallor of his skin. “He must be uncomfortable.”

“Yeah,” says Sam, and then, when Dean still doesn’t move, “Dean?”

Dean forces himself to step forward, feeling stiff and disjointed like a wind-up toy that hasn’t been played with in years. He leans into the car and gets his hands beneath Cas’s arms as Jack guides his limp form upwards. He pulls him forward. 

He’s still so warm. 

Dean clenches his jaw tight. Swallows down the sound that wants to come out of him, hoarse and raw and wordless. 

It takes the three of them twenty minutes to get Cas out of the car and into the bunker, and they’re all sweating bullets by the time they’re inside. 

Cas ain’t a little guy, no matter what kinda smack Dean likes to talk. He’s broader than Dean and Sam even if he’s shorter, muscular in a way that seemed to have popped up a couple years ago out of nowhere and never left, and when he isn’t using those muscles to ambulate, the dude’s just dead weight. 

In the doorway they pause to catch their breath, one of Cas’s arms slung over Sam’s shoulders and one over Dean’s, and Dean lets the top of Cas’s head come to rest at his jaw. Feels the softness of his thick hair. Feels the weight of his skull there, and then the even, unhurried puffs of his breath against Dean’s neck. 

Dean closes his eyes for a second. Breathes in time with him.

“We should take him to his room,” Sam says. And they’re off again. 

Jack runs ahead of them to get Cas’s covers smoothed out—even though Cas doesn’t technically sleep, he usually spends the nights in his room, and for some reason it seems beyond his capabilities to make a fucking bed—and then he holds the door open for them all as they half-drag Cas inside. 

It takes a bit of situating to get Cas vertical: Dean cups the back of Cas’s neck so his head doesn’t flop around limp as a newborn’s, lowering him down as gently as his hands will allow while Sam and Jack get his legs up onto the mattress. 

Sam goes to pull the blankets up, but Dean stops him with an outstretched hand. Cas still has his shoes on.

Dean’s fingers feel too big as he unties them. Too thick and blunt and fumbling. He can feel Sam’s eyes on him, so he keeps his own downturned. 

By some unspoken word, the other two hang back and let Dean pull the blankets up too. They stand still as Dean tugs the covers over Cas’s chest, situate his arms atop them so he’s not trapped when he wakes up, smooths down any wrinkles. 

It feels too much like when Dean wrapped his body the last time Cas died. The horrible stillness of the room—of the man he is touching. Dean doesn’t let himself stop for breath. 

He is kneeling by the side of the bed when he’s done, his knees on the floor and his elbows on the mattress, and his neck bent in penance. 

Nobody has said anything for a very long time. Dean breaks the quiet. 

“Did she get away?” he asks. His voice is hoarse. “The bitch who did this to him.”

“Dean,” Sam starts, so Dean lifts his gaze to Jack. Pins him with it. 

“Did she?”

Jack shakes his head. “His gun went off when he fell. She’s dead.”

Dean’s jaw hurts with how tense it is. Dean’s knees hurt on the hard floor. He doesn’t move.

He would’ve liked to kill her himself. 

“And you don’t know what hit him? You don’t know what the spell was?”

Another shake of Jack’s head, but it’s Sam who speaks. “Even if we knew what she cast, there’s no guarantee that was the only thing that affected him. She was too messy, too slapdash. There were a thousand things happening at once.”

God, god he should never have stayed home. He’d let Cas talk him into it—Cas, who had told him the three of them were leaving on this case in the first place, who had convinced Dean to stay home and tidy up the bunker like he’d been planning to, who had said that it was just ridiculous for four people to travel three towns over and take care of one witch so Dean might as well sit this one out—and maybe he’s supposed to be angry at Cas for that, but instead he’s just angry at himself. It’s his own damn fault he finds Cas so persuasive. It’s his own damn fault that he’d rather stay home and be domestic than do his fucking job. 

“Call Rowena,” he says to Sam. One of Cas’s hands is at his eyeline, lying flat on the comforter where Dean had placed it, with his thumb curled slightly in. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t move. “See how soon she can come over and take a look at him. And you and the kid go eat the dinner I made you.”

He doesn’t have to look at Sam to know he’s nodding, heading towards the door. Jack shifts in place though, drawing Dean’s attention upward. 

Jack still looks afraid, and Dean feels that pinch of guilt he’s so used to feeling around Jack. Jesus, the kid has just seen his dad collapse right in front of his eyes, which he can’t exactly be normal about, and Dean’s been wallowing here in his own grief instead of making sure Jack’s ok. 

He opens his mouth to say something—what, he’s not sure; Dean’s never been good with reassurance and he’s messed up so many times with Jack that sometimes he’s afraid to try again—but Jack speaks before Dean can. 

“What about you?” he asks. “Are you going to come eat?”

Dean’s been insisting on family dinners lately. Now that Chuck is gone, and the world is down to a manageable, no longer pre-ordained level of monsters for them to contend with. Now that the odds of there being another apocalypse in Dean’s lifetime are incredibly slim for the first time he can remember. He lets them all fend for themselves during breakfast and lunch if they want to, but when it’s dinner time Dean cooks, gathering as much of his family around him as he can. Usually it’s just him and Cas and Jack and Sam, but Eileen stops by often even though she and Sammy decided they were better off as friends than lovers, and even Jody and Donna and the girls have driven down a couple times since the world didn’t end four months ago. 

Jack had taken to family dinners like a duck to water. He loves having his favorite people all around him, safe for once, smiling for once. Nothing more pressing on their minds than who will get the last slice of pizza. 

It’s one of the only positive things Dean’s given Jack. He hates that it’s being taken away like this. 

“Not tonight, kid,” he says. His bad leg is giving him hell in this position, and something about that seems fitting. He stays where he is. “I’m gonna stay with Cas.”

Jack’s gaze flickers from Dean to Cas and back again. He’s got a bad habit of twisting the sleeves of his sweaters down over his hands, stretching them out, and he’s doing it now; Dean decides to let it go in this instance. It’s bringing Jack comfort, and as small as that comfort may be, it’s bigger than what Dean can currently provide. 

“Is he—is he going to be ok, Dean?” Jack asks. “I don’t—I don’t—I can’t tell without my powers.”

Dean wishes he could lie to him. “I hope so,” Dean says. He looks at Jack. At his wide blue eyes. At his now-human hands. “I hope so.”

Jack nods, and Dean watches a swallow work its way down the pale slim column of his throat. “Dean?” Jack asks quietly. 

Dean thinks about praying. About kneeling in devotion of something, or letting the hunger of it push you to your knees. Dean thinks about how this sweet, fallible boy could have been the entity receiving all the world’s prayer, and is desperately grateful that he chose to pass those duties along to someone else in favor of a human life.

“Go ahead, bud.”

His hands twist. Twist. “I wish I could heal him.”

So do I, Dean thinks. 

“Go eat, Jack,” Dean murmurs. “It’s ok. Go eat.”

*

Dean falls asleep there on his knees at Cas’s bedside, forehead bowed down to his knuckles. 

He knows he’s dreaming when he looks up and he’s at the end of a long wooden dock, the lake stretched out placidly before him. There’s a fishing pole in his hand, free of the tension that signifies something caught on the other end; the sun glints off of the water harshly, yet here in this dreamworld Dean doesn’t have to shade his eyes. 

“Stop worrying,” Cas tells him. “I’m alive.”

He stands behind Dean and slightly to the right, nothing but flicker of movement in the corner of Dean’s vision. Dean wants to turn around and—but he can’t. Something keeps him staring forward. 

“I should have come,” he says rather than answering. Hundreds of feet away, a blue heron soars along the opposite shoreline, it’s tendril-like legs scraping the surface of the water. Dean’s voice is quiet in his throat. “Don’t know why I let you talk me into anything else.”

Cas sighs. His breath ruffles the hair at the nape of Dean’s neck: Dean’s three weeks past-due for a haircut, and he’s been growing it out with the tentative feeling that he’s going to be caught and punished for it. Nobody’s said anything yet. 

“You couldn’t have done a thing,” Cas tells him in his low, reasonable voice. “If you had come along you’d simply be angry at yourself for failing to save me in person, and we’d be in the exact place we are now.”

Dean can feel his mouth shoved down into a thin, hard line. 

They’re both quiet for a moment. The wind rustles through the trees that surround them, a soft, shushing noise that would soothe Dean if his heart wasn’t pounding the walls of his chest with both ribs. 

“So you’re awake,” Dean says. “Your body is asleep but you’re awake inside.” 

He knows Cas is nodding even though he can’t see him. “I can only assume the curse was meant for a human, and not for a being whose consciousness is so loosely tied up in their physical form. My mortal vessel is immobilized, but my grace is unaffected.”

“Then you just need a new vessel until we can figure this out?” 

Cas hesitates. “In theory,” he says slowly. “However it’s nearly impossible to find another willing participant—and finding someone whose form can hold mine is another matter entirely—”

“Take me,” Dean says. He doesn’t have to think about it. “Take me as your vessel, Cas.”

He feels Castiel go still behind him. 

“We know I can hold an angel,” Dean says, warming up to the subject even further as he gets going, “so you don’t gotta worry about that. I’m strong, I am, and it ain’t like you’d ever do anything to hurt me, anyway. And I’m obviously willing.”

“Dean,” Cas murmurs, and he sounds strangely affected. There’s a waver to his voice. “I can’t ask that of you.”

“‘Course you can, Cas,” Dean says gruffly. He doesn’t wish to examine why this idea makes him feel so warm, flush with purpose; why the prospect of housing Cas within himself and keeping him safe lights Dean up with yearning, the kind that feels like pressing down on a bruise. “Man, c’mon. I trust you. You aren’t Michael, you wouldn’t—it would be different with you.”

It’s too vulnerable even for a dream, and Dean has to shut his eyes against the words the moment they’re free. He’s glad Cas is behind him now. Doesn’t want to be seen. 

Cas makes a quiet sound, gentle and involuntary. “You know that I’ll be alright in my own vessel, even if it’s cursed,” he says. “It’s nothing more than prolonged slumber, as far as I can tell, and I have full confidence that Sam and Rowena will be able to break it sooner rather than later. I wouldn’t be… there is no danger if you do not wish to do this, Dean. You do not have to be a martyr for my sake.”

Dean’s hands shake on his fishing pole. He isn’t cold. 

“I—I—Cas.” He stumbles over his words. “I want—I’d like to. Please.”

He doesn’t know how to say that he isn’t being a martyr at all, that he is—that he’s indulging himself, almost. This isn’t sacrifice. It’s selfishness. It’s greed. 

Yes, he had said to Michael. To Castiel he is saying please, please, please. 

Cas says his name so softly that it does nothing more than ghost down the length of Dean’s spine. “You will have control,” Cas tells him. “I’ll make sure of that. I won’t push you to a corner of your own mind, and I won’t take your body from you. I will be… gentle with you.”

Dean feels himself smile slightly, and the sun is warm on his face. “I know,” he says. 

*

Dean’s not sure what wakes him up at first. 

The lamp on Cas’s beside table is still on, spilling gold onto the careful planes of his face; in that brief hazy moment between sleeping and full-consciousness, Dean can’t look away from him. He’s as still and as constant and as vivid as a sun. 

And he isn’t breathing. 

“No,” Dean says, levering himself to standing even though his knees and the joints of his hips ache after staying folded against the cold stone floor for so long. He ends up half-leaning against the side of the bed, gripping Cas by the shoulders as if that’ll do any fucking good. “Cas—c’mon, Cas—”

It’s alright, Dean, Cas says. Dean, slow down. 

Dean goes still. His eyes slam closed at the sound of him, at the—the feel of him. 

Cas’s voice reverberates through Dean’s skull, a beat caught beneath the tight skin of a drum, not so much words as the impression of them. Now that Dean’s been shocked awake, it’s obvious that Cas is there: like a touch to the back of Dean’s mind, like something curled heavy and warm around the core of him, cat-like. So purely Cas that Dean finds it unutterable. 

He says, “Cas,” again because it’s the only word he knows, and he shivers, and he realizes that he has the bedclothes wound up tight in his fists, made sweaty and flat beneath his gripping fingers. “Are you—you did it.”

I did it, Cas confirms. There’s awe in the timbre of Cas’s voice. How do you feel?

The question makes Dean laugh, something loose and jangling and helpless. He doesn’t know that he has the vocabulary to answer. He feels relieved. He feels protective, fiercely so, and on a level that he doesn’t quite understand he feels protec ted . He feels calm for the first time in years, settled even to that unreachable place at the root of his spine that has always remained restless and grasping and fearful, like maybe for a minute he can sit back and breathe deeply and not have to worry about everything he loves slipping from his hold if he doesn’t remain vigilant. 

He feels so differently than he had when Michael took him as his vessel that it seems like something else entirely is taking place right now. With Michael, Dean had been helpless: a silent observer in his own skin, relegated to solitary confinement in a corner of his own mind, his own thoughts and feelings and goddamn skin and bone locked into someone else’s control. It had been painful, walking around as Michael’s meatsuit. It had been so painful that eventually even thinking independant thoughts had hurt too bad, and any reprieve Michael gave him—false though it might have been—was welcomed. 

This is nothing like that. 

“I feel good,” Dean says. Understatement of the fucking year. Something shivers just behind his breastbone, and if he were a man who could get away with reactions like this, Dean would cry. “Are you ok? Do you… have enough room?”

Just like his voice, Dean doesn’t exactly hear Cas’s laugh—but he knows it’s happening anyway. He knows it’s happening like he knows his own heart is beating; like he knows there’s blood pumping through his veins. 

Yes, Dean, Cas tells him. That fond, amused sort of tone he sometimes uses when the world isn’t breaking in half around them. He’s not laughing at Dean, but there’s mirth in his voice anyway. Plenty of room. Thank you. 

Dean loosens his grip on the covers. Lets his eyes drift slowly open once more. 

Cas’s body—the one Dean has always known him in—continues to lay as still and cold as granite on the bed before him. It’s strange to look at. It… it doesn’t look like Cas without Cas inside of it. It looks like a paltry statue of him, rendered by an artist who hadn’t met him before they began to sculpt. 

It doesn’t look like Cas, but it doesn’t look like Jimmy, either. Cas has lived in it too long. Cas has made it into something that fits him, with its heavy brow and broad torso and thick arms. 

“Hey Cas.”

Yes, Dean? 

“Do we hafta do something with your body? Put it somewhere to keep it cold until you can use it again or—or somethin’?”

Dean can’t quite hear Cas think, but he can tell that Cas is thinking. 

Cas still hasn’t tried to move Dean’s body, and Dean doesn’t think he will until Dean… until he asks him to. 

I don’t believe so, he says at last. It isn’t human anymore, not after I have worn it so long, so it won’t rot as your human form would. It should be fine in this environment until I have use for it again. 

“Good,” says Dean. His palms are still sweating a little; he wipes them on his jeans, right over the places where his legs ache from his sojourn on the floor. “Ok. Ok.”

Cas hums. 

It’s a response he’s given Dean many times—Dean’s not sure if it’s an angel thing or maybe just a Cas thing, this inclination toward saying a little rather than a lot—but whatever the case the sound vibrates through Dean now with a bone-deepness that has him catching his breath. 

“Should probably tell Sam,” Dean says. He’s no angel. He only half-cares what’s coming out of his mouth, speaking just to fill the silence, just to keep himself from sinking back into the pleasant cocoon of warmth his body and his mind have turned into and—and what? Fucking showing his hand, he supposes. “He might be pissed. And Jack, geez, the kid was all bent outta shape, thinkin’ it was his fault.”

Cas says, Like father like son, and Dean doesn’t know which of them he’s talking about, and Dean thinks that it could be all three. Then, We can tell them tomorrow. They’re surely asleep by now. 

There’s no windows down here of course, but Dean glances at the clock Cas has inexplicably on his dresser even though he’s got his hooey-angel-mojo internal passage of time thing going on. It’s nearly three am. 

He could wake them up, but they’ve had a long day. Maybe after they’ve slept a full night it’ll be less weird to hear that Cas is hitching a ride around inside Dean’s meat-suit, anyway.

Probably not. But maybe. 

“Alright,” he says, and wipes his palms on his thighs again. Nervous tick. He feels the rough scrape of denim on his skin. “Let’s just wait around somewhere ‘til morning, I guess.”

Honestly, this part might be worse than it was with Michael. Michael kept Dean locked away; the passage of time felt long and suffocating and eternal, but it was also indistinguishable. Dean was so busy beating at the walls of his own mind that he didn’t know when it was day or night, and certainly didn’t have time to get bored just sitting around waiting for the morning to arrive. 

Well, alright. Not worse. Really there ain’t much that could possibly be worse than… all that. But still, it’s never fun to be bored. 

Have you become nocturnal and I don’t know about it? 

Dean rolls his eyes. He wonders if Cas can see him even though he’s… inside him? Or. Well. Christ. He clears his throat a bit. 

“Angels don’t sleep, wise guy,” he says. “And I’ve got an angel wearing me.”

Like the smile earlier, Dean knows that Cas is frowning now. It makes him sit up a little straighter on the bed, his hands falling to rest unclenched by his thighs. 

You still need to sleep, Dean, Cas says. You’re still in your body, and you’re still human.

“Well Michael didn’t let my body sleep and I was fine,” Dean says, unsure why he’s arguing. It’s that old instinct that makes his skin strong as steel and his spine brittle as glass: pretend that everything’s ok and reject and gentleness extended to you before it’s snatched away. Pretend to be annoyed so they can’t see the fear that flickers in you as if you were still a child, like a flame unable to be snuffed. “I’m doing this for you, Cas, you don’t hafta treat me like I’m made of glass.”

Sometimes, in the pale half-light of an evening, in the easing moment after a hunt has been wrapped up and left Dean with just the breath jangling in his chest, just the itch in his veins, just the bullet cases at his feet—sometimes, if Cas is with him, Cas will nudge the back of Dean’s hand with his own like he’s gentling a spooked creature. He’ll drag his knuckles slow against Dean’s, long and deliberate, so there’s no way to avoid feeling the touch. So Dean remembers that he’s real. 

Cas does that now, somehow, inexplicably. Dean feels a touch on that persistent fear-flame—feels it smothered tenderly beneath the cup of Cas’s invisible palm. 

He’s incorporeal, he’s internal, he’s intangible. He touches Dean anyway. 

You were not ‘fine, ’ Cas says, firm and gentle. There’s always anger in his voice when they talk about the way Michael treated Dean, and it’s always strangely sublimating. Cas is so holy and so good, and his anger for Dean’s benefit burns like purifying flame. Sleep, Dean. 

Dean still feels emotion welled up behind his eyes. Worry for Cas that still clings to his bones, the pain of falling asleep in the position he had, hunger from a skipped day of meals that gnaws at his middle, the abject euphoria that catapults through him every time Cas speaks. 

He shoves all that down. He takes a slow breath. 

“Ok,” he says. 

It takes a minute to get standing, and then to stay upright on his aching knees—he’s fucking old, and the downside of having a god who isn’t constantly trying to weild you like a weapon is that he’s no longer making sure your body is in tip-top battle form, either—but once he does he turns around. Watches the pale still shape Cas’s body makes beneath the bedclothes, slightly wrinkled from where Dean’s ass had sat. 

He bends at the waist and palms the blankets smooth again. And then he leaves the room. 

*

Dean is nine years old and his father has left him five dollars for the weekend, held in place beneath the butt of a gun.

Here is what Dean knows: 

That he can walk to the gas station on the corner as long as Sam holds his hand the whole time. That he can buy a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and one can of chicken noodle soup with the five dollar bill, as long as he avoids name-brands. That Sammy will cry when he has to eat peanut butter sandwiches over and over again, but that he would cry harder if his stomach ached with emptiness. That Dean will save the can of soup until the very last day, when he can put a little water in it in order to make enough for them both to eat, and Sam will smile at the flavor of something new. 

That if he darts his hand out fast when the cashier isn’t looking, nobody will be any the wiser. 

Dad has been gone for two days longer than he said he’d be. Dean checks the lock on their motel door, and then he checks it again, and behind him he hears Sam wake up. 

Sammy starts to cry when he sees that John still isn’t back, big, gasping, silent tears that roll down his sleep-pink cheeks. Sam cries a lot. He’s only five, and just because he can read and he can almost run as fast as Dean and isn’t afraid of the dark doesn’t mean he isn’t still sad sometimes. 

Dean hates it when he’s sad. It feels like Dean messed up when that happens. If Dad were here he’d yell at Dean for letting Sam cry—and if Dad were here, Sammy wouldn’t have cried in the first place. 

“Hey,” says Dean, crossing the room and climbing up into Sam’s bed beside him. The covers are all messed up because Sam tosses and turns when he sleeps. He and Dean both have nightmares; only Dean has yet learned how to keep them quiet. “Hey, it’s ok, Sam.”

Sam lets Dean put an arm around him. His little shoulders shake. Dean can feel the bumps of his spine through the fabric of the hand-me-down shirt he wears, and it makes something in his throat go tight. 

“Hey Sammy,” Dean says. His heart is beating fast in his chest, but he tries to keep his voice level—excited-sounding. “You want a surprise?”

Sam stops sniffling. He looks at Dean from beneath the shag of his hair, grown too long after months of anybody neglecting to cut it. “Surprise?”

“Sure thing,” Dean says. “Hold on.”

He can feel Sam’s eyes on him as he gets out of bed and crosses to the duffel they’ve been living out of this weekend, rummaging his hand around the bottom until he bumps up against something long and thin. The wrapper crinkles as he draws it out.

“Tada!” Dean says, turning around and brandishing his offering toward Sam with a dramatic bow. Sam giggles, loud enough that Dean feels an answering grin creep up onto his face. “Chocolate!”

It’s soft, a little mushy from Dean having stuffed it in his pocket back at the gas station, and then in the bottom of the duffel once they got back to the motel—but he knows Sam ain’t gonna care. Chocolate is chocolate, and the kid hasn’t had anything but peanut butter sandwiches and watery soup for days. 

Dean makes Sam get out of bed to eat it, sets him up on the floor in front of the TV playing Tom and Jerry reruns all day. Dean keeps the gun across his lap, where it’s been resting the whole time John’s been away. Dean presses the cold line of metal into his aching stomach. Dean feels the emptiness snarl within him, and Dean looks at the stolen chocolate spread across his baby brother’s face, and Dean thinks good. Good. 

Dad gets back a day later with a bag of McDonald’s in each hand. 

There’s blood beneath his fingernails when he passes them over to Dean, and his breath smells like whiskey; he takes a hamburger out of the bag for himself and collapses on the foot of Dean’s bed, kicking his boots off as he unwraps his food. 

The smell of beef, of greasy bread and hot ketchup, hangs heavy in the air. 

Dean makes Sam wash his hands in the bathroom before he eats, and then they both sit on the floor with their legs crossed, spreading out the food John has brought them on the brown paper bags Dean smooths out: a cheeseburger and a coke for each of them, and an order of fries to split. 

“Eat slow,” Dean tells Sammy, even though he isn’t doing the same thing. It’s almost impossible for him to even breathe between bites, as hungry as he is. It hurts. “You’ll get sick.”

Sam does, only because Dean makes him alternate ravenous bites with slow sips of his drink. Even then Sam’s burger is gone too soon, and Dean only hesitates a little before he dumps the rest of the fries onto Sam’s half of their makeshift plate. 

Dean looks up to see if Dad is watching. He isn’t: he’s staring at the TV with glassy eyes, a beer in one hand. There’s a smear of ketchup on the side of his mouth. 

Dean shovels down the rest of his burger, drinks his coke so fast he gets a brainfreeze. 

He wishes he’d taken his own advice in about ten minutes when his stomach goes sloshy and sour, cramping tight with the sudden reintroduction of food after not much of anything at all the past two days. He walks as calm as he can to the bathroom and then he throws up his dinner in the toilet, hating the way the clench of his stomach makes him cry. 

“Shhh,” Dad says. Dean didn’t hear him come in. He flinches at the feel of a broad rough palm between his shoulder blades at first, instinctively cowering from John’s touch, but when it stays gentle and his father’s voice stays soft, he lets himself lean into it. Lets himself ache for the comfort. “Alright, boy. You’re alright.”

Dean doesn't know if he is. Dean feels stupid and shameful and so, so hungry, even though the very thought of food right now just makes him ill again. 

Somehow Dad gets Dean on his lap when he’s finished, gets his arm around Dean’s back and his hand on Dean’s sweaty forehead. Distantly, Dean hears the sound of the toilet flushing; distantly, Dean smells John’s scent, like old sweat and dirt and blood and booze. 

“Shouldn’t’ve eaten so fast,” Dad says. It’s stern, but Dean doesn’t care right now. “You know that Dean.”

“I know, sir,” Dean says. His father is moving Dean’s body into a shape that will make him fit on John’s lap: draping Dean’s legs to dangle toward the floor, pulling his head down to rest at Dad’s chest, folding Dean’s arms tight across Dean’s own stomach and then holding them in place with one huge square palm. Dean is a piece of paper. “I know.”

*

Sam is sitting at the kitchen table when Dean wanders in the next morning, his eyes huge and wet and red. When he meets Dean’s gaze his mouth parts like he wants to speak, but no sound comes out—and there’s hesitancy in his expression. In the way he stands. In the way he takes a careful step towards Dean. 

“Jesus Christ, Sammy,” Dean says, coming up short halfway to the coffee pot. “Who died?”

Sam’s face crumples slightly. “Dean,” he says, low. “It’s Cas. He’s… gone.”

Dean knows what’s really going on, but his heart leaps into his throat at the words anyway—his whole damn body goes cold. “Shit—“ he wheezes out, leaning heavily back against the counter. He’s so glad Jack’s not in here. “Shit, Cas, you tell him.”

Sam has time to look confused before Cas speaks. 

“Your brother invited me to take him as my vessel while I’m cursed,” Cas says with Dean’s voice. It feels… feels real damn strange. Dean can still see with his own eyes, can still move his own body, still think his own thoughts—it’s just his mouth he’s got no control over. All in all not the worst thing that’s happened to him. “It happened while you and Jack were sleeping, or else we would have told you first. I apologize for the fright, Sam.”

Sam’s no longer got that puppy dog grief look going on, but his eyes are still huge. Shock, Dean supposes. 

“That’s ok,” Sam says faintly, presumably upon reflex, and then, shaking his head a little as if to clear it: “Wait. You’re both in there?”

“Yep,” says Dean. Now that nobody’s crying—now that his fucking heart rate has gone down, fuck —he sets about pouring him and Cas a cup of coffee. He even adds sugar the way Cas likes it, ‘cuz presumably Cas can taste through Dean’s tongue. Weird. “I didn’t want Cas to hafta lay around bored for god knows how long until we figure this out.”

He leaves out the part about the desperation with which he’d begged Cas to take him. Each time he thinks of it his face gets hot and his stomach flutters, warring feelings of embarrassment over how shameless he’d been and satisfaction that it worked. 

He leaves out, too, how right it feels. Cas, safe down in the core of him. Protected. At home. 

“Holy shit,” says Sam bluntly. He has an expression on that Dean can’t quite decipher: shock and relief and something that looks uncomfortably like amusement. 

I believe we’ve stunned him, Cas says, and Dean chuckles. 

“What?” Sam asks. Dean watches him realize what just happened. Watches a bit of dread creep in with the rest of his expression. “Oh my god, you two are gonna be insufferable now, aren’t you?” 

“I don’t know what you could possibly mean by that,” Cas says with Dean’s voice, mild in the way that usually accompanies a bitchface. Dean laughs again right after—god, this must all look even weirder than it feels—and turns to the fridge, getting out eggs and bacon and a block of cheese. Cas ain’t dead or sleeping under a witch’s curse, and while Dean’s still distracted with worry that they won’t be able to lift it and get Cas back in the vessel he belongs in, the fact that he’s currently alright is cause enough for celebration. 

“Sure you don’t,” Sam says. He ducks into the fridge and grabs a bag of spinach, placing it onto the counter next to Dean in a clear bid to get some added to his own omelette; Dean scowls, but complies. “And you’re feeling ok, Cas? No side-effects of the curse on your grace?”

Dean lets Cas say, “I’m doing well, thank you, Sam,” as he cracks eggs into a bowl. “Dean is a very comfortable and generous vessel.”

Dean isn’t sure why the praise warms him so, why it flatters him to the point of having to tuck away a flustered sort of smile. He keeps his head down as the first omelette sets to sizzling in the pan. Keeps his face turned away. 

“Probably pretty boring in there,” he mutters. “I made you lay around for two and a half hours last night doing nothin’ while I got my beauty rest.”

Two and a half hours is hardly beauty rest, Cas says, a little testy and a little fond. I would have liked you to rest longer. Don’t be stupid. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says. He hopes futiley that Cas can’t tell the tips of his ears have gone hot. 

When Dean turns around to slide wheat bread into the toaster, the amused dread has won out as Sammy’s most prominent expression. “Good god,” Sam says. 

“Close your mouth,” Dean grumps. He feels flushed. “You’re gonna catch flies like that.”

Sam’s laugh is slightly hysterical. 

Jack wanders in as Dean’s finishing breakfast for everyone, too-long pajama pants and too-big t-shirt hanging off of his frame. The shirt’s got Archie from Riverdale’s face square in the middle of it, glowering sullenly out at the world—Dean had been talked into buying it for Jack the last time the kid accompanied him on a Walmart run. It hadn’t been difficult to persuade him. 

“Mornin’,” says Dean, sliding Jack’s omelette in front of him. “Cas is using me as his vessel until we break the curse on his body.”

Jack’s face brightens visibly, gone from dim and almost as morose as the kid on his shirt to perfectly cheerful in the blink of an eye. “That’s a wonderful idea,” he says happily. He tucks into his breakfast as Sam does the same on the other side of the table, and Dean feels a lick of satisfaction curl golden in his chest. “Hello, Castiel.”

“Hello, Jack,” Cas says fondly. “Did you sleep well?”

Dean perches on the corner of the table as he finishes up his coffee and lets Cas and Jack and Sam talk. He’s still there in his mind as Cas uses his voice, still very much present—it’s his choice to drift a little. To let the comforting sounds of his family’s easy chatter wash over him, finding relief in the fact that none of them are in any immediate danger. 

He can’t relax completely, can’t wander too far from his usual vigilance—after yesterday, he’s never going to be enough of an asshole to pretend he has a normal life even for one day again—but there is nothing active Dean can do in the moment to help any of them. They’re all fed if their body needs food, rested if their body needs rest, soothed if their minds need soothing; they’re safe. 

All Dean can do now is wait. 

*

They crowd around the bed that Cas’s body lays prone upon, all four of them and Rowena a tight squeeze in the little room. 

Dean doesn’t really know what she’s doing. Just because his disdain for all witches has lightened up for a select few doesn’t mean he’s got any idea what witchcraft actually entails—though he wishes he’d paid closer attention now, watching as she passes a bundle of smoking herbs above Cas’s vessel and murmurs a complicated twist of words in a language that he can’t place. 

He does trust her; she’s proven herself an ally, and she’s sacrificed much. He just hates seeing anybody mess with any part of Cas. Wants to know what’s being done to him every step of the way, even if it’s ultimately helpful. 

You’re very tense, Cas tells him, reminding Dean that it isn’t really Cas stretched out on that bed. Cas is wearing Dean like a coat. Cas is safe beneath the armor of Dean’s skin. 

Sorry, Dean says, automatically answering Cas in his head. He’s less surprised than he should be that that works. In the grand scheme of things, telepathically communicating with Cas is barely interesting enough to warrant a second thought. Just worried. 

About me? 

Yeah, dumbass, Dean says. About you. 

It’s sort of like praying, Dean thinks. Sending thoughts out to Cas, delivering them to his mind with sheer intention. Dean has spoken his prayers aloud, of course, but not always: when he was in Purgatory the first time, being tracked by any number of monsters, sometimes he couldn’t risk speaking out loud. Sometimes he had to just close his eyes and think of Cas. 

Sometimes, in the end, it wasn’t even words he sent Cas’s way. Just thoughts. Just feelings. Just want. 

I’ll be alright, Cas says, and Dean feels a bright pinch of guilt that Cas has to keep reassuring Dean about his own well-being. Dean’s being too needy again; better tone that down. This vessel has served me well, certainly, and I have… I’ve grown quite fond of it. But breaking the curse put upon it is not synonymous with my welfare. 

You deserve to be more than just ‘alright,’ Cas, Dean says, half-distracted as he watches Rowena lean in over Cas’s vessel and peel back the lapel of his coat to peer incongruously at his chest. Dean scowls at her back. You’re happiest in that vessel, so we’re gonna get it back for you. 

Cas is quiet for a long moment—long enough for Dean to think back on what he just said, and realize how it sounded. He flushes again—sort of feels like he’s been doing that all morning—and then he feels Cas glow warmly and softly beneath Dean’s own skin, as if he’s the swelling flame of a candle. 

Thank you, Dean, Cas murmurs. 

Oh, yeah, no problem dude, Dean says awkwardly, and wonders not for the first time in his life why he has such difficulties accepting earnestness, accepting something as simple as a goddamn thank you. 

But he doesn’t have time to worry about that now, because Rowena is turning around. 

“Curse,” she trills, sounding closer to delighted than anything approaching worry. “Something nasty. Archaic, too; I haven’t seen anyone bother with a curse like this since I was a wee lass celebrating my twentieth birthday the first time ‘round.”

If it wasn’t for the way Sammy’s looking at her—smiling and trying to act like he isn’t, somethin’ enamoured about his eyes that he thinks Dean can’t see when of course he can, he was there when Sammy had his first crush and he’s been there for most of ‘em since, he knows the kid’s tells—Dean might just snap. As it is, he feels Cas glow again, a feather stroked tenderly along the inside curve of Dean’s ribs. He settles back on his heels. Forces his jaw loose. 

“Medieval, right?” Sam asks. He’s watching her move around the bed. Dean glances sideways at Jack, sees him close to hollow-eyed, and gives the kid’s shoulder a squeeze. “Almost, uh… not religious, but traditional, in a sense?”

She flicks her gaze up at him, quick as a raven and twice as wry. “Very good, Samuel,” she says primly, and Dean doesn’t really wanna be in here while whatever this is is going on, but he’ll muscle through. For Cas. “Yes. It has all the makings of a ritual, albeit one gone long out of style.” 

“Ok,” Dean says. He’s trying very hard to hold back the way desperation wants to sour his tongue. Cas says that he ain’t gonna die, but they don’t know that for sure, do they? He needs to know for sure. He needs to. “Ok, so how do we break it?”

Rowena is frowning now. She passes a steady, slender hand over the length of Cas’s body, just an inch from the fabric of his clothes. 

“I believe you shall just have to wait and find out,” she says at last. Her accent makes the words sound mournful, the sanguine trill of a mourning dove. Dean is gonna drown on the breath in his lungs. “It’s so old that there is no counterspell I know of that will break it, and since the witch who cast it is dead, we cannot use, ah… muscle to find our solution.”

Rowena looks at him then, her thin red brows lifted, and speaks directly to Dean. Like she knows he wants to break something. Like she knows this matters most to him. “I can tell you that there is an element of time to it,” she murmurs. Her eyes are distant, as if she is looking at something that none of them, not even Sam, can see. “No, not time—of patience. There is one solution, and the curse will wait for it to be found.”

Dean opens his mouth to—to yell, to scream, to say something —

“Thank you, Rowena,” Cas says with Dean’s voice. “We appreciate your help.”

Rowena had known that Cas was using Dean as his vessel, Sam told her, but for some reason that gets beneath Dean’s skin like an itch she decides to act like it’s the first time she’s hearing about it. And like it’s delightful information. 

Her eyes fucking light up. 

“Oh, hello, lovey!” she says. Her smile is a wide red curve in her face, entirely too mocking in Dean’s direction. “I heard that you found yourself a new coat.”

“Hello,” Cas says solemnly. “Dean isn’t a coat.”

Jack laughs, happily enough that a little of the clouded tension seems to ease from the room. Even Sam smiles, standing at the head of Cas’s bed with his arms crossed and his eyes on Rowena. 

“Of course he is,” says Rowena. She stops in front of Dean as she leaves the room, and her small hand pats his chest: one, two, three. “And a handsome one at that. I’ll bet he keeps you very warm.”

Sam rolls his eyes, and Jack’s still grinning, and Cas says, “Dean is providing me with more than I ever could have dreamed to ask for,” and Dean—Dean wants to close his eyes. Dean wants to fall back into the place where Castiel seems to burn hot and bluebright within him, and sink down, and never come back. 

*

It is twenty-five years ago, and Dean sits back on his heels and wipes his mouth with the soft part of his wrist.

He knows to smile up through his lashes, lips still parted and pink, as the man standing above him tucks himself back into his jeans. Knows how to make his voice all sweet and low and pretty when he says, “Thanks, baby,” and takes the wad of bills the man passes him, wrinkled from his pocket and damp from the sweat of his palm. Knows how to count those bills, fast before the man leaves, and then stuff them down into his own pocket as the man lumbers off around the corner. 

The moon is high in the sky. It’s cold behind the bar, the alley he kneels in cast in graytones. 

Dean gets up. His heart in his throat is a little bird. 

He has to hold himself up against the wall for a minute, legs shaking like he’s been running for his life.

Dad ain’t with them right now, which is the only reason Dean gives himself this moment to catch his breath. John is three states over chasing a lead that Dean knew just from hearing about it won’t turn out to be anything, and Dean’s sure he’ll be off to another dead-end town after that, and another, and another, before he’s back. It’s just just Sammy back at the motel, sleeping soundly—the kid never wakes up, no matter how much noise Dean makes when he gets back late. Must need all the rest he can get to build up energy in a body that is growing so fast Dean can hardly keep track of it.

Dean hasn’t really grown since he was fifteen. Topped out just under six feet, six-one if he’s got boots on. Still, that’s ok. Some guys’ll pay more because they like how he’s slender like a whip, they like how he knows how to hold himself so he looks even smaller than he really is. 

He wants Sam to be as tall as he can get. He wants Sam to be broad and strong like their dad, with a wide stance and heavy shoulders that make other men nod at him stiffly with respect. 

Dean pulls himself up to stand. Puts his hands in his pockets, gripping the bills tight in one and his pocket knife in the other. He better get home. He’s got school tomorrow. 

*

Dean is quiet for most of the rest of the day. 

They all settle down to watch Beauty and the Beat in the Deancave, part of their ongoing Disney marathon—some of the few movies Dean never dragged Sam to see when they could get away from John, because he always thought himself much too old and much too butch for that kinda thing. Well, screw it: he likes a happy ending. And Cas and Jack wanna watch them, anyway. 

He can’t appreciate the charming animation and weirdly catchy songs as much as he wants to tonight, though. Because even though Dean knows where Cas is—safe inside of him, filling up all the empty shadowed places of Dean that haven’t been touched in years—it’s lonely in a strange-shaped, dreadful way to be sitting here on the couch without Cas warm at his side. It’s what they’ve been doing for so many months now, ever since the world didn’t end and Jack broke Cas’s deal with the Empty before giving up his powers: Sam and Jack stretched out on the recliners that were Dean’s first purchases for this room, and Dean himself curled up at Cas’s side while he forced them all to watch whatever movie he couldn’t get out of his head that night. 

Dean doesn’t like breaking routine. It’s never been something he’s had much of in his life, though what little there was he clung to with two rigid hands. Even John’s unreasonable, militaristic demands, hypocritical in how little he himself upheld them—wake up at oh-six-hundred hours every day, make your bed with hospital corners even though you’re waking up in a motel, keep your hair buzzed short all around your head like a helmet—were lifelines for Dean. Milestones he could achieve every day, hoping with childlike desperation for even the smallest reward of love, of affection. 

Moving into the bunker—his and Sammy’s first real home—changed things for Dean. It was a place he could call his own. It was a place he could depend on to always be there for him when it was time to return, like an oasis in the desert, no matter how much he asked of it. It was a place he could wake up in at the same time every day, make the same kind of coffee for breakfast, wear the same soft robe before trawling the same few websites for their usual kind of job offer. 

Dean doesn’t like breaking routine. Doesn’t like not having the same warm angel at his side while anthropomorphic furniture dances on screen and Jack laughs in delight. 

He knows Cas is in there. He knows it. He knows it. He just—it’s just that he hasn’t felt him in a while, and what if he’s… not?

Hey bud, Dean says tentatively. He feels stupid doing this, needy. He and Cas never talk during a movie unless it’s a Western and Dean needs to explain all the places where it’s historically inaccurate, or it's a rom-com and Dean has to keep making Cas swear to agree he won’t tell Sam about it. Movies are a sacred time. You in there? 

Of course, Cas says, sounding slightly amused. Dean feels dumber, ain’t no way around that, but there’s also no way around the relief that spills through him like water overflowing from a cup. Right where you left me. 

Right where you left me. Dean lets his eyes slip closed in the darkness of the room, some vain sorta hope that this will allow him to see Cas at all. Nothing. Not even the faintest flash of blue on Dean’s edges.

And you’re ok? 

It must be the hundredth time Dean has asked this today, maybe more, but he can never put a stopper on the words. Dean hadn’t realized how much he relies on silent, visual assessment to make sure that Cas is truly alright. 

He wonders how many times a day he usually drags his gaze up and down Cas’s body, checking to make sure he’s not busted or bruised or even just tired. The thought makes his face feel fervid with embarrassment. 

The laugh drops out of Cas’s voice. It dips down to a sweet-low place. I’m ok. 

“Ok,” Dean whispers. He peels his eyes open real quick to check that Jack and Sammy haven’t heard, but they don’t seem to notice, eyes glued to the TV. Upon it, Belle and the Beast are dancing, and her hand looks so small in his huge one. That must be what Cas’s trueform would be like compared to Dean, he thinks absently, if Cas could walk around down here like that without burning everybody’s eyes out. Only… only bigger. Cas, towering and enormous, powerful and otherworldly and beautiful, holding Dean’s wrist in his hand like it’s a matchstick. Like it was the smallest, most delicate thing in the world, and wrapped up all safe in Cas’s book-sized hands. 

Does it worry you, Cas asks, when you can’t feel that I’m here? 

Good old Cas. Getting straight to the point like a knife between the ribs. 

I mean, yeah, a little, Dean says. If it is possible to mumble while speaking telepathically to the angel inside your head, Dean does so. I just, I mean, how am I supposed to know you’re alright if I can’t feel you at all? I won’t know if something happens to you. 

This is what’s left unsaid: that it’s imperative Dean knows what happens to him. That it’s the most important thing. 

Nothing will happen to me, Cas says. He sounds so certain. I’m safe here, with you. But I’ll take care to remind you of that, if you’d like. 

Dean is big, with broad shoulders made for battering down doors, with wide bowed legs and a softening stomach and aches in all of his joints. Dean’s body is a wrecking ball. 

The screen flickers dark between scenes. Dean says, Thanks, Cas. 

*

He’s half-asleep by the time they’re all shuffling off to their respective rooms to get ready for bed, so he almost forgets the exact specifics of the situation he put himself in until he’s running the water for a shower. 

Dean stops, hands caught up in the bottom of the t-shirt he was getting ready to pull over his head and toss in the hamper. Jesus Christ. He can’t believe that this, out of everything, is what’s giving him pause—the idea that Cas is gonna see him naked for the first time, soaped up and exhausted and highly unsexy as soon as he steps under the spray of the showerhead and his hair gets plastered to his forehead—but it is, and he feels himself going hot all over, hands a little clammy just with the idea of it. 

“Um, Cas,” he says. His voice sounds too low and too gruff, that register it always slips in when he’s uncomfortable. It’s why so many people think he’s an asshole. He’s usually at least slightly uncomfortable. “Are you gonna—can you look away, or something?”

Oh, says Cas, evidently surprised though Dean has no fucking clue why. They’ve always been weirdly—weirdly Victorian with each other, modest in a way Dean so rarely is. A way, he realizes with a stomach-souring pinch of guilt, he taught Cas to adopt. He thinks that the last time Cas saw the bare skin of his torso, he was searing a claim upon it. He swallows. He presses a hand to his stomach, the inside of which is tying itself into knots. I’m surprised that bothers you, given the fact that you’re allowing me to use your body as my home. 

And ok, well, point. But it’s just—it’s just—

“That’s different, Cas,” Dean says. He’s surprised at how small his voice has suddenly become. He thinks of Purgatory, that first time ‘round: how when it was his and Cas’s turn to rest while Benny kept watch, Dean still never so much as rolled up his sleeves, Cas still never took off that goddamn coat. They could hold each other, there on the hard and cold and alien dirt, but even still there were layers between them. Right now, Dean is as close to Cas as he has ever been, and still there is something holding him back. “S’not—it’s just common modesty, dude, ok?”

Alright, Dean, Cas tells him, and to Cas’s credit he does not sound like he’s mocking Dean. He easily could be; what is Dean doing but providing a house which he forbids its owner from viewing? I won’t look. 

Dean showers as quickly as he can, not allowing himself to luxuriate in the steam as he’s always liked to do. The entire time, his heart throbs like a bruise at the base of his throat. 

*

They fall into a rhythm very quickly.

Dean finds that it’s easy to carry Cas around, almost giddily so. When he has a question for Cas, he asks it. When he wants to tell Cas about something stupid Sam said the other day, or show him a funny meme on his phone, or ask him to explain a spell in a language so old that Dean can’t even begin to place it, Cas is right there. Right there beneath Dean’s skin, because Dean begged him to be. 

Dean is still looking for a way to break Cas’s spell, relentlessly so, but it isn’t because he’s aching to get Cas out of his body and out of his mind. Cas is—Cas is Dean’s best friend. If Dean could always have the guarantee that Cas would be with him, forever and ever, he would take it. 

But he knows that Cas likes his own vessel. He knows that Cas is his own person, deserves to have his own autonomy, deserves not to be forced to watch two hours of cooking shows through Dean’s eyes when Dean gets so tired of reading archaic spellwork that he thinks he might scream if he doesn’t get a break. 

And honestly, what are the odds that Cas is as thrilled as Dean to spend every hour of every day at Dean’s side? Low, that’s what they are. 

And so the days roll on. And so Dean carries the candle flame that is Cas behind his ribs, sheltering him with the wind so he doesn’t gutter out. 

And so Cas sits in peaceful observance, never once making a move to control what Dean does. 

Three days into a stretch of fruitlessly scanning ancient texts and avoiding the door to Cas’s room where his empty body waits as cold and still as a morgue, Dean finds a case. 

It looks like nothing much at first. Just your standard vamp nest, a little on the small side, living in an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of a college town in Nebraska and picking off drunk students who wander home at night. Dean doesn’t even take backup—Sam’s taking Jack to see a movie he’s been anticipating for a couple months now, and it’s not a big enough deal to warrant interrupting their plans. It’s not a big enough deal to call them back home and make them go on another hunt when Dean got to, so selfishly, sit the last one out. 

He just packs up the Impala with all the fixings, and then he and Cas are off. 

It looks like nothing much at first. And it isn’t—at first. 

Dean doesn’t realize that there’s a problem until he turns around from ganking the last vamp, a spindly pale guy who had crouched in the dust like an animal, and sees ten more pouring in through the doorway. 

“Fuck,” Dean says, strangled. These monsters are brighter, smarter, faster; their eyes glint as they move toward Dean in a drove, their mouths crimson with blood—must’ve been out feeding while the two Dean just knocked off kept watch of their nest. “Fuck, shit .”

He swings, and makes contact, but that’s just dumb luck: it’s reflexes that have him moving at this point, and there’s no form to the wild arc his arm makes, the machete digging into the meat of the vamp’s neck with a dull thwack. He has to wrench the rest of the way through, sawing against bone in a way that makes his shoulders ache, and by the time he’s done, three more are on him. 

Dean, behind you, Cas says sharply, voice gone tight and urgent. Dean whirls around just in time—catches one in the shoulder and drags upward, and then back, and then across again for the neck, and then he is turning, breath hot and strained in his lungs, and taking out another two before their teeth sink like barbed wire into the meat of his neck. 

That is all he knows for a while. 

There are too many. Dean’s breath rips at his lungs, shreds them into tatters. Dean’s leg keeps catching every time he falls to the concrete floor, and he’s sure that if he were to put a hand to his knee he’d feel it swollen angry and hot beneath the fabric of his jeans, and Dean’s heart pounds, thudthud, thudthud, so hard that it’s all he can hear. 

Eight down. Two left. They circle him like he is prey. 

“C’mon,” he gasps, spreading his arms wide and bearing all the soft tender bits of his middle. “That all you got? You ready to die like the rest of your friends—”

Dean is a good fighter, but in hunter years, he is old. Dean is a good fighter, but Dean aches all over, and Dean is tired, and Dean’s human body trembles, covered as it is in blood and gore and viscera. Dean is a good fighter—but these vampires are better.  

They have backed him into a corner, and he was too goddamned stupid to realize it. He’s stuck here between the jagged, rusted edges of an ancient freezer and the two vamps that curve around him in a lethal figure-eight, their fangs exposed, their steps growing closer. They’ve got knives. Since when have vampires decided they need to carry knives? 

Dean’s legs shake as if he’s just been born. 

The flickering streetlight outside the gaping maw of a shattered-out window to Dean’s right throws their shadows into sharp relief, and they flit about this dungeon of a liminal space like birds. They dance with the dark spots that cloud Dean’s vision, growing more and more unified until most of his gaze is blackness. His shoulder blades hit the hunk of metal. One of his knees buckles, and the next swing he takes with his machete barely grazes the pallid skin of his enemy. 

The vampire hisses, feral. Dean’s spine burns: he heaves all of his strength into his next swing, aiming for the vamp’s neck with all that he is worth, but something—something isn’t right, something is wrong —

They’re both upon him. He’s knocked to the floor, hard enough that his head echoes dully where it clangs against the scrap metal freezer, and his machete is sent skittering out of his hand. Oh please, he thinks as they bear down upon him, their cold horrible weight, their blades beneath his skin and their mouths descending toward his thumping carotid, please, please, please … 

It is difficult for Dean to make sense of what happens next. 

One moment he’s on the ground, and death is making a pinprick tunnel of his vision; the next he’s on his feet by no movement of his own, and there is a blade he recognizes in his hand—but what is it? How did it get there? What is he—and in one fluid motion that he could never hope to replicate, Dean has tossed the blade and sent it hurling in a clean arc through both vamp’s necks, embedding it in the gray wall beyond. 

Their bodies collapse to the ground. 

A second later, Dean does too. 

Dean, Cas is saying, panic making his voice so loud in Dean’s head that he winces. Dean, god, Dean, oh I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have done that—I promised you that your body would be your own and I just violated that promise, and I am so deeply sorry—

“Cas,” Dean rasps. It has taken him three tries to get Cas’s name out of his aching throat; the rest were just air. “It’s ok. Hush now, it’s alright, Cas.”

Even Cas’s silence aches with remorse. It’s usually so comforting to be inhabited by him, the subtle radiation of his warmth a blessing, but now Dean’s jaw hurts from the sharp taste of metallic grace that dances along his tongue. 

It’s not, Cas whispers. I promised that I would take care of you. 

It hurts too much to talk, to get enough air in his lungs to give volume to his voice. Dean shuts his eyes right there on the gas station floor among the forest of dead bodies he’s found himself in, his palm still wrapped tightly around what he knows now to be Cas’s angel blade. 

Cas’s angel blade, that he summoned through Dean. To protect him. 

You did take care of me, Dean says. He’s swaying where he sits. He wishes that Cas would take charge again, rid Dean of the hundreds of little choices that come with each second of inhabiting a physical form. For a moment, when Cas had taken over, Dean had felt small and safe and held. You saved my life, Cas. If you hadn’t done that I’d be dead, ain’t no way around it. 

Dean would laugh at Cas’s stewing silence—he clearly wants to argue, but equally as clearly cannot—but he’s still catching his fucking breath. 

Still, says Cas. Dean can feel his agitation, his worry, his despair and his weariness and his pain and his—and something, something else, a deep well of something as soft as down feathers— I should have asked permission. 

Yeah, maybe if we were just sittin’ around the TV and you wanted to reach for the popcorn bowl, Dean says, although he knows that even then he wouldn’t have minded. There is nothing Cas could do with Dean’s body that Dean wouldn’t sign off on. Cas has been kinder to Dean than Dean has ever been to himself. But if you’d waited even one more second here it’d be my head rolling around on the floor. 

He can feel Cas shudder at the thought of that. 

Dean realizes that he has his free hand on his chest again. Pressing close, close, close. 

“Listen,” Dean murmurs. It feels important that he say this aloud, although privately he doesn’t think it’s such a big deal. “Pal, I trust you. More’n I trust myself. You do what you want. Make me dance a jig, I don’t care.”

Cas is quiet for a long long time, and it’s contemplative now. Dean lets him think. 

Dean’s whole body hurts, and he’s got an eight hour drive home. 

Dean, says Cas finally. Dean tries to perk up a little, but he’s so damn tired—and now that the fight is over, now that the adrenaline has worn off, the guilt is starting to sink in. The anger. If only he’d been faster, smarter, stronger. If only he’d done his fucking research as thoroughly as Sam does, or given in and taken backup, or, or, or. He fucked this up too, and now Cas is sad and it’s Dean’s fault. 

Yeah?

We should leave. You don’t want to be caught here. 

Cas is right, but the prospect of dragging himself up off the ground and stumbling the mile or so to where he’s parked his car in the woods off the highway makes Dean wanna cry like a little baby. He still hasn’t quite caught his breath. 

Come on, Dean, Cas murmurs to him. Dean doesn’t know if he is speaking lower than he usually does or if the exhaustion haunting Dean’s limbs is just making everything a little distant, a little dull. The angel blade disappears from Dean’s hand. That’s it. Good. 

Dean’s too out of it to burn the bodies. Surely there’s gonna be a ruckus when someone finds ten beheaded corpses off the 83, but that’s never been Dean’s problem and he’s not about to let it be. He rescues his machete from where it’s wedged halfway under a milk-pale shoulder, letting the gentle lull of Cas’s voice keep him upright.

He trips his way through the woods back to Baby. A third of the way in his foot catches on something in the underbrush, sends him sprawling to the ground. 

“Fuck me,” Dean says viciously. He pushes himself to a crouch with his hands, dizzy with embarrassment. It’s like he’s a fucking kid again. It’s like he’s eleven years old, stubby little legs too short to keep up with John as they run through the backwoods somewhere after Dean failed to keep quiet on a hunt, after Dean got them chased for miles. John had had to stop and pick Dean up at a certain point, throw him over his shoulder like he was a sack of grain; Dean had gotten in so much trouble for that. John had slapped him when he’d started to cry, and Dean still remembers the shape of John’s fingers raised and red on his own thin cheek. “Sorry. Sorry.”

Hush, Dean, Cas tells him, a mirror of the words Dean had said to him thirty minutes ago. Cas has lost the urgent apologetic tone with which he had been pummeling his voice; now he’s simply calm. Low. Providing an easy directive that Dean can follow without much thought, but be confident that he’s doing something Cas wants him to do no matter how small. Are you truly alright with me controlling your body? 

Dean, he. Dean wants him to. 

Dean nods. 

Thank you, Cas says, and his voice thrums through Dean’s body with reverence, like Dean has given him some great gift. Stupid. It isn’t anything. Dean isn’t… Just relax now. We’re safe. 

And against all odds, Dean does. 

*

It’s nothing like being controlled by Michael. Dean knew it wouldn’t be. 

Dean drifts. He can feel Castiel moving them, walking them the rest of the way through the forest and then sliding behind Baby’s wheel, but he barely registers it: Dean is a little paper boat, and he’s floating on the gentlest sea. 

He can still see out of his own eyes, still breathe with his own lungs, still feel the patchy blast of heat that sputters out of the Impala’s vents. He finds that those eyes blink slower, though. Finds that those lungs pump in a mellow rhythm. 

The Impala rocks back and forth and back. The road hums. 

That’s it, Cas says again. Quiet, like when Dean fell asleep on the couch a few weeks ago and Cas had woken him up and walked him to his room, all of his words low enough that Dean had never fully opened his eyes. Quiet. Dean can almost feel the touch of Cas’s warm guiding hand on his elbow. Just let me. 

It is unbelievably easy to. 

Distantly, Dean registers Cas pulling the Impala into a parking lot much sooner than Dean had been expecting. His plan had been to drive straight home after the hunt—he’d texted Sammy when he knew that his and Jack’s movie had already started and told him where he and Cas were going, and he’d wanted to get home today, or at least early tomorrow, to minimize Sam’s bitching about Dean’s “recklessness”—but he cannot muster the energy to care that this plan has been diverted. He wanders somewhere inside himself as Cas moves him to the trunk to get his duffel, and then to the front desk to book a hotel room, and then, slowly, because this is still Dean’s body and Dean’s body does still hurt, up the stairs and down the hall and through the door. 

May I undress you, Dean? 

Dean blinks. They’re standing in the bathroom, and the shower is already sending steam crawling across the mirror like ivy. 

Dean’s heart is clotted upon his tongue. He can see an image of himself in the mirror, shivery and unreal as if through fog: his clothes are rusted with blood, not a small amount of which is his own. 

He cannot find any of the reservations he had four nights ago, even though he prods around his mind like he’s searching for a bruise. Dean says, “Yeah, Cas,” voice rough.

Thank you, Cas murmurs. It’s so earnest that Dean feels he might shake apart. Cas always makes him feel like that. Has since day fucking one. 

Cas lifts Dean’s arms: shoulders rolling back and elbows bending forward, forearms crossed over his stomach as Cas uses Dean’s bloodied hands to grip the bottom of his shirt and pull it off smoothly over Dean’s head. 

Cas is better at keeping balance in Dean’s body than Dean is as he finishes undressing him. Boots are kicked off, socks peeled away, jeans discarded and boxers kicked aside. Cas uses Dean’s hand to balance his body against the counter. Cas walks Dean’s feet across the linoleum floor, and lifts them into the shower, and pulls the curtain shut with Dean’s hands. 

The water feels so good against Dean’s skin that he makes a tiny soft sound in the back of his throat. 

I know, Cas says. Somehow, Dean knows he’s whispering. I know, it’s alright, Dean. We’re safe. 

“I’m sorry,” Dean finds himself saying again. Cas is squeezing shampoo into one of Dean’s palms, lathering it between both, and then lifting them up to work the shampoo into Dean’s filthy hair. His nails scratch lightly at Dean’s scalp. Dean shakes, and shakes. “I shouldn’t have—I was stupid, I did bad, I’m—”

Dean. Dean. Cas tilts his head down, places a palm over his eyes so dirty soap and water doesn’t run down into them as he guides Dean further into the spray. Dean wishes that he could touch him. Dean… god. Nobody has ever done this for him before. Not since he was a very small child. Quiet, my little human. You tried your best, and your best is always good enough. 

That ain’t true and Dean knows it, but he just, but he can’t—but there is a part of him that just wants to listen to Cas desperately, and the words my little human have made it rise up within him like a wave. 

Dean tilts his head into the palm Cas wields. It’s Dean’s own rough skin that cups his cheek, but with his eyes closed it feels like Castiel’s.

“I should, um…” he wants to sink down into himself, curl up with Cas in the hollow behind his own ribs. He is a pebble sinking to the floor of a lake, finally resting on the soft silt bed—but Dean can’t rest. He fights it. “Should call Sam, let him know…”

Cas brushes Dean’s hair off of his forehead, and it’s wet and silky and clean beneath Dean’s fingers. Dean does not know why this touch makes him want to cry. I already did, Cas hums. Dean can hear the smile in his voice; how sweet-edged it would be if Dean could see it. You didn’t notice. 

“Oh,” Dean says dumbly. Cas is washing Dean’s shoulders. Dean’s neck, beneath Dean’s arms, Dean’s chest—which Dean only just now realizes Cas must have healed on the way home, because there’s no outward sign left that he’d just about been killed tonight. “Thank you.” 

Cas washes everything below Dean’s waist, too, and if this were a normal day—if anything about this was normal—Dean would be at the risk of implosion right now. But it is not a normal day. Cas’s touch is gentle, undemanding, kind to the point that Dean is closer to letting out the sob that has been building behind his chest than getting hard at the attention. 

Of course, Dean, Cas tells him. Of course. Of course. As if this is a given. As if it is natural to touch Dean like this. Thank you for letting me do this. 

Dean doesn’t even have the words to respond. He just shakes his head, jaw clenched and eyes squeezed shut against the building sting in his throat. 

Time passes like watercolors. Dean breathes in, breathes out, and Cas is turning the water off. Dean breathes in, breathes out, and there’s a towel around his shoulders, and then drying his hair, and then wiping the water from beneath his eyes. Dean breathes in. Out. He’s in sweatpants now, and a t-shirt. He is turning the light off. He is on his side in bed beneath the blankets, cheek pillowed on his hand. 

“Cas,” he murmurs. His voice is slurred, vowels heavy. Cas lifts Dean’s hand and uses it to pull the covers up to Dean’s chin, and Dean lets him, lets him, lets him. 

Yes, Dean? 

He doesn’t know what he wanted to say other than his name. He is asleep before his eyelids fully close. 

*

Dean learns how to drive at twelve years old, rattling down a West Virginia backroad.  

“You need to be fast about it,” says John, “and smart.” 

He’s got a beer in one hand, balanced against his knee. Dean’s legs aren’t quite long enough to reach the pedals comfortably, he’s got to strain forward, and each time the car hits a pothole there is a moment where he sinks down and the dashboard rises up and he is breath-held-terrified that he won’t be able to see the road—but John is smiling. His thunder-heavy cliffside of a face is smiling at Dean in a way he’s seen only a handful of times before, and the giddiness of doing something that makes Dad this happy with him is enough to mostly waylay Dean’s fear. 

“If somethin’ kills me and you boys need to get away quick, you can’t waste time remembering which pedal does what,” John continues. He takes a drink, his eyes scanning from Dean’s small hands white-knuckling the wheel to the pitted road winding out before them. “Those couple seconds could be the thing that gets Sammy killed, too.”

All the land is thick and green with summer out here, and the dirt peering up out of the holes in the road is russet red like a clay pot. Dad’s got the windows rolled down. The air comes in smelling sweet and sharp like grass. 

“I wouldn’t let anything get Sammy, sir,” Dean says, biting his lip hard as he eases the Impala around a turn that springs up outta nowhere. 

The smile dims from John’s face. “You better not,” he says. 

Dean thinks of last week. Last week, when Dad had come back to the motel late to find Sam and Dean wedged into the same bed together watching a movie, wide awake even though it was hours past Sam’s bedtime. John had grabbed Dean by the wrist and yanked him out of bed hard, yelling something about how it was Dean’s job to make sure Sam was safe and healthy, and Sam could never be safe and healthy if Dean let him stay up all night. 

Dean hadn’t really heard. His brain goes all white-hot and fuzzy when Dad yells, thoughts coming so fast that they all blend together into a tangle he can’t parse through. 

He knows it happened though. Still got the bruise on his wrist to prove it. 

It’s just that he forgets about bedtimes a little bit. Dean tries so hard to remember everything, but he never got one, and sometimes he forgets.

Dean stretches down, and down, and eases the gas with the tip of his toe. 

*

When Dean wakes, Cas is talking to Sam on the phone. 

“We’ll be home early this evening,” Cas says with Dean’s voice. It’s clear that they’re in the middle of a conversation; it’s clear that this isn’t what has woken Dean. There is light pouring into the room through the curtains, bright enough that it must be late morning. Jesus, this is longer than Dean’s slept in years. “Don’t worry, Sam, we’re both alright.”

Dean wades in and out of wakefulness as Cas and Sam speak, his eyes fluttering slowly open and shut as he wakes up more fully. He could move, probably, and Cas would surely let him—but he doesn’t want to. He is content, he realizes. He is perfectly happy not to do a damn thing until Cas makes him. 

Cas and Sam finish talking—Sam says, with something that Dean’s hazy mind registers as faint amusement, to tell Dean “hi”—and then Cas uses Dean’s hand to hang up the phone. 

Good morning, Dean, Cas says. How are you feeling?

Fucking amazing, that’s how he’s feeling. Dean doesn’t remember the last time that waking up after a bad hunt didn’t feel like the morning after drinking a liquor cabinet and then getting into a car crash. Today he feels calm, and centered, and warm. He’s floating a little, but he still feels tethered to that place in the core of him where Cas roars like a hearth, like he could wander and wander and never get lost. Like as long as Cas is here with him—a lantern, a north star—Dean will be drawn inexorably home. 

“Um, good,” he says.

Cas laughs gently. The sound feels like champagne in Dean’s throat, like strawberry bubbles, and his sleepy brain registers it with uncomplicated pride. He made Cas laugh like that. 

Good, Cas echoes. It sounds fond. Dean has the feeling that he is being laughed at, but it doesn’t feel mean-spirited or cruel; just like Cas is happily amused, and Dean is the reason why. 

Cas rolls him over. Cas stretches, stretches until Dean feels his spine pop deep between his shoulder blades, and Dean lets out a grateful sigh. 

His good mood lasts until he sees the clock on the bedside table and registers how late he actually slept. 

“It’s ten am?” Dean says. Last time he slept ‘til ten he was a fucking demon, which is not the worst thing he did during that time but also not an action that bears repeating now. He sits up, the blurry cloud of happiness he woke up into dissipating like morning dew under the heat of the sun, already feeling guilty about the time he wasted sleeping when he could’ve been home figuring out how to break Cas’s curse. “Shit, why didn’t you wake me up, man?”

You needed the rest, Cas says firmly. He’s got that stubborn tone going on, that unyielding wall that lets Dean know he ain’t gonna relent come hell or high water. Stop with this foolishness. 

“ Stop with this foolishness, ” Dean parrots back in a mockingly roughshod attempt at Cas’s voice. “I’m not being foolish, I’m being right. Shoulda been on the road hours ago.”

He stumbles out of bed, legs feeling a little weak beneath him, a little watery. It’s strange to be coming back to himself, to his body, so abruptly: like getting a bucket of ice dumped on his head. It takes Dean a moment to remember how to ambulate the disparate hinges of his limbs, how to stack his body on both flat feet so that he doesn’t go toppling over. 

This just makes his anger at himself deeper. It’s been, what, twelve hours of letting Cas take the reins? Half a day of depending on him, most of which Dean spent asleep, and Dean’s already having trouble figuring out how to operate on his own again. 

His heart is beating a little too fast. If this is difficult, he cannot imagine what it’ll be like when Cas isn’t riding around in his ribs. 

Don’t be stupid, says Cas, which, Jesus Christ, if Dean could just turn it on and off like that would he be in this situation? What good would it have done any of us if you were trying to drive home while exhausted? 

“Done it plenty of other times, Cas,” Dean snaps. He is standing in the bathroom next to the shower Cas washed him in so tenderly last night, and his skin is flaring red. He is running his hands under the tap and using them to try to flatten his hair. It springs back up persistently. 

And why should you have to now? Your life is no longer ruled by an outside source, Dean. There is no apocalypse nipping at your heels. You may take all the time you need. 

Dean is drying off his hands. Dean is slipping on his t-shirt, messing his hair all up again. Dean is avoiding his own face in the mirror. 

Dean pulls on a flannel. Buttons it. “That’s not true,” he says, and his jaw is tight. 

He does not like how gentle Cas’s voice is, which makes Dean ache to hear. Why not? 

“Are you kidding?” Upon instinct Dean meets his own eyes, expecting to see Cas looking back through them. “In case it’s slipped your mind, you’re fuckin’ cursed, Cas, and me sleeping just ‘cuz I fucked up a hunt and got beat all to hell isn’t exactly helping to solve that problem, is it? I got shit to do. Responsibilities. I can’t just—I can’t just ignore them because I’m tired.”

He turns and barrels through the bathroom doorway before Cas can answer, hitting the lightswitch and darkening the room behind him.

You’re throwing a tantrum, Cas says. 

Dean stops mid-step. 

“You wanna stay cursed, Cas?” he asks. He hates the harshness in his voice, the anger that serrates its edges—he doesn’t want to be this man, to use his fear like a weapon, to make others afraid just because he doesn’t know how to cope with his own crap—but he cannot stop it. His hand is on his chest again; he balls it tight into a fist. “Fine. Stay cursed.” 

Cas’s silence is icy. 

Neither of them talk as Dean loads up Baby. Neither of them talk as he returns the key to the front desk, as he pours himself a shitty cup of coffee from the carafe in the lobby, as he climbs back into the Impala and starts her up. Neither of them talk as he adjusts the mirror. 

When he meets his eyes, only he stares back. 

Dean drives. 

*

Dean drives, and drives. It’s eight hours back to the bunker without any stops, but he slept in too late to avoid rush hour traffic where the town bottlenecks onto the interstate, so each mile of road crawls by at a snail’s pace. 

He’s not angry anymore. He never really was, not at Cas, just—it’s instinct for Dean to turn every too-powerful emotion he has into a sharp edged weapon, especially when the emotion is as negative as the guilt he’d been feeling earlier. It’s instinct for him to snap out at people when he’s feeling vulnerable, especially when they… especially when he loves them so bad. 

And he loves Cas. He loves him. He loves him. Loves him in his own body when he’s scowling at Dean or looking at him with so much tenderness that it hurts, loves him in Dean’s body, a bright little candle flame that heats Dean slower and softer than anyone ever has. 

“Cas,” Dean says, horrified to find that his voice is already thick and his eyes are already hot and he just wants to—wants to go back to how it was this morning, sweet like sunshine, before he ruined it. “I’m. Man, I’m sorry.”

Cas has not given up the promise he made Dean almost a week ago now: Dean feels him, always, glowing through his veins. The touch of him now is so gentle that Dean’s jaw aches. 

Dean, says Cas, quiet in Dean’s head. He doesn’t sound angry anymore. Dean has been so tense that he hasn’t even been leaning fully against the back of his seat, his spine and his shoulders so knotted up with the sharp sickness of knowing somebody is mad at him—of knowing Cas is mad at him—that he actually feels sore now when he lets a little of that tension go. His heart is crooked in his throat. It’s alright. It’s ok. 

Dean doesn’t want to be driving anymore. Dean wants to pull over on the side of the road and crawl into the backseat and curl up as if he is a child, his knees to his chest, his hands over his eyes, and he wants to sleep. And he wants Cas to be ok. And he wants Cas to be with him. 

Dean doesn’t say that. Dean breathes in, and then Dean breathes out, his hands so tight around the steering wheel that the stitching on the leather is imprinting upon his palm. 

“It’s not,” Dean says. The sky is getting darker the further they drive, blue and gray and purple on the edges, and it’s still early afternoon but the world does not take note. Everything is hazy and breath-held; everything is waiting. “I always—I’m, I’m a dick to whoever’s nearest when I feel bad, and more often than not that’s you. And I’m sorry, Cas. I’m an asshole.”

Cas is getting warmer, rounder, softer, so that Dean feels almost like he’s swallowed the sun. Cas feels so fond. Cas feels like he—like he— 

You aren’t an asshole, Cas says. Dean can feel him in the back of his head, the palms of his hands, in every breath he takes. Dean can feel him glowing there. You care so much, Dean, to the point where the idea that you might not be doing all you can to help one of us is debilitating. You carry so much weight on your shoulders, even now that the world is saved, and I wish you would let me—I wish you would let me share some of that burden.  

“Cas,” Dean says. Hand on his chest again, always trying to feel him. His voice is too touched, scraped and open and bare. “Don’t say that.”

Cas’s hum drifts down Dean’s limbs. I’ll say what I like. 

It’s not that funny, but the sheer relief of the fact that Cas isn’t angry anymore has Dean giving half a breathless laugh. He relaxes a bit further into his seat, not quite restful but not guarding for attack, either. 

The traffic dissolves at last, and the road roars into a dull, comforting hum as the Impala picks up speed again. They are headed, at last, towards home. 

“And I, uh…” It’s going to rain any minute now; Dean can smell it in the air through the cracked window, sharp and bright and earthy, the promise of a thunderstorm. It reminds him of Cas. “You know I’m not gonna stop until I break your curse. You know that, right, Cas?”

He can hear the way Cas would be looking at him. I know, Dean. 

Dean nods. Nods, and thinks of Cas’s body so still in his room back at the bunker, and thinks of Cas so vibrant and alive behind Dean’s windpipe. “Good,” he murmurs. 

*

He is saved from Sam bitching at him about not taking more backup by Sam making relentless fun of him instead. 

“Sounded like you were pretty relaxed,” Sam says with a grin as they’re all eating dinner, pulling that obnoxious little brother face that he’s never grown out of even though he’s thirty-fucking eight. “Y’know, when you were letting Cas drive your body around.”

Dean glares at him over a spoonful of squash soup. “I was sleeping,” he says shortly. 

“This morning, maybe,” Sam says, and dunks a piece of bread into his bowl. “But not last night. Me and Cas talked most of the way back to your motel. You were out of it, man.”

Dean’s flushed bright red, he can feel it, and he’s not even sure why. It’s not like Sam knows how it felt to have Cas summon his angel blade through Dean’s body; it’s not like Sam know that after, when Dean was halfway to a panic attack for no damn reason, Cas bathed him in the shower, and touched him with more kindness than Dean can remember ever being touched with before. It’s not like Sam knows that all Dean’s been thinking about since they got home is how he can get Cas to do that—any of that—again. 

“Fuck off,” says Dean eloquently, pointing at him with a spoon, “and eat your dinner.”

Jack laughs—shit, Dean’s been trying to swear in front of him less. Well, so much for that—and even Cas, curled within Dean’s chest like a cat, glows rosy pink with amusement. 

Sammy rolls his eyes, but he’s grinning, and it’s not like Dean has ever really been able to fault the kid anything that makes him this giddy. Unfortunately, embarrassing Dean has always been at the top of that list. 

The barrage of teasing lets up a bit when Jack launches the room at large into a discussion about the next Disney movie they’re getting ready to watch, and Dean sits back and lets Cas put his two cents in on this one. 

He’s happy to let the conversation drift from yesterday. Cas hasn’t brought up the fact that there were three times the amount of vamps in that nest last night than they thought there would be, and Dean is grateful. It’s not that he’s necessarily trying to keep it a secret—he’d tell Sam and Jack if they asked. He just doesn’t wanna bring it up after the fact, when he knows both of them will feel guilty about not having been there to help. 

Like father like son, Cas had said. 

“I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t really mind,” Jack says. He is smiling, always smiling—he is so young. “I just like spending time with you guys. It doesn’t matter what we watch.”

Sometimes Dean wants to pick Jack up and carry him to bed and make him stay there, warm and safe, and stand in the doorway of his bedroom so nothing can get to him. Jack is so innocent, especially after becoming human for good, so uncomplicatedly easy to please, and the terror that something will get in here and break him occasionally sneaks up the back of Dean’s neck with such a chill that it’s all he can do not to go wrap Jack in his arms and not let him leave. 

Sam is smiling at Jack with that gentle smile he always gives him. “Even if Dean makes us watch another Western?”

Dean knows the script. He’s supposed to scowl at Sam, or pretend to kick him under the table, or say “Hey, don’t disrespect your elders.” Dean’s supposed to do something other than sit here wishing he could put every member of his family deep inside his heart like Cas is, carry them around safe, protect them with the flesh of himself. 

And Jack, he—Jack smiles up at Dean. Round blue eyes and crooked teeth and his hair messy and golden. “I like Westerns!” he says happily. “Dean always has such interesting things to say about them.”

Jack’s only four, but his body looks twenty. Dean looked younger than Jack does when men started paying to fuck him. Dean was Jack’s age when Sam became his child. 

“We can watch whatever you wanna watch, buddy,” Dean says, and he knows his voice is too gruff, his eyes suspiciously downturned—so he hugs Jack when they’re all done eating. He hugs him, holding Jack’s bird-bone frame in against himself, and wonders what kinda monster you’d have to be to want to hurt someone this small. 

*

Dean is retreating to his room later when Cas speaks up. 

Did it really relax you? he asks, and Dean stills halfway over the threshold. When I was the one in charge of your body. 

Dean’s breath stops instantly, and then starts up again as quick and uneven as a stuttering engine. He fumbles with the door. He gets himself inside, and shuts it firmly behind him. 

“Um,” he says stupidly. His palms itch suddenly, so he wipes them on his thighs; there is undeniable heat clouding at the base of his throat and spreading up his neck, his jaw, his cheeks. “Yeah—yeah, Cas. Thought that was pretty obvious.”

Why? Cas asks. He doesn’t sound judgemental, just curious, but Dean starts to feel a little bit dizzy anyway. He sits on the edge of his bed heavily, the mattress groaning beneath him. 

“Well I guess it just… it’s kinda, it’s kinda nice,” he stutters. His eyes are closed, he realizes. He focuses on where he can feel Cas, lit all up throughout him. “To not have to make all the decisions. Like, um, you were saying this morning, I guess. Nice to not have to be in charge all the time.”

Of course, Cas murmurs, as if he is finally coming to understand something. 

Dean doesn’t understand much of anything at all. 

The two of them are quiet for a few seconds as Dean bends over and unties his boots, lining them up neatly beneath the lip of the bed. He’s tired, god, he’s tired—but there is something like anticipation breathing down the back of Dean’s neck and making him too damn jittery. He knows he won’t be able to sleep, not in this state. Not when Cas lives in the hollow of his throat, collecting knowledge of Dean like gathering wildflowers. 

We could do it again, Cas says. 

Dean’s mouth is very dry. “What?” he croaks.

We could do it again , Cas repeats dutifully, and Jesus, does he sound nervous? Dean’s heart is going to escape the confines of his chest any second now. Dean’s heart is going to fall right out of him and dry up on the bedroom floor. If it helps you, of course. If it makes you feel better. 

Of course it makes him feel better. How could it not? It’s Cas, it’s Cas, it’s Cas. 

“Does it... How does it make you feel?” Dean manages to ask, and his hands want to shake. “I don’t wanna take advantage of you, I don’t—”

It makes me feel better, Cas says, something certain and tender in his voice that rips at the filaments of Dean’s insides. I like to know that you’re safe. That you’re happy.  

Sometimes the words Cas says hit Dean like an open palm to the face, sudden and striking, and they leave a burn behind them. “Cas,” he mutters, standing in the middle of his room with his arms at his sides. “I dunno—I dunno what to…”

Do you trust me? Cas asks. 

Dean would let Cas hurt him badly if he wanted to, he knows this deeply—as deeply as he knows that Cas never would. It is trust that Dean has rarely placed in another. It is handing someone the blade that will kill you and knowing that they would never turn it upon you, even if you asked. 

“Yeah,” Dean whispers.

And would you like to do it again? Cas asks him, low like a voice whispered right against Dean’s ear. Would you like to? 

Dean wipes his eyes with the back of his hands. Dean nods. 

He can feel it, instantly: it’s Cas that breathes with these lungs, that blinks with these eyes, that takes this body and relaxes it so completely it’s a wonder the knees don’t buckle. Cas, dawning golden like a sunrise.

Cas lifts Dean’s hand and cups Dean’s cheek with it. 

There, says Cas, resonant. He strokes Dean’s thumb over the thin soft skin beneath his eye, and the gesture is so strange and small and special that Dean can’t help the noise that shivers out of him. There, just relax now… 

It is like falling asleep, if sleep lacked the promise of guilt-riddled, hellish dreams guaranteed to wake Dean up drenched in his own sweat. Dean tips backwards and it’s down that catches him, it’s a cloud, it’s someone’s arms, warm like a home is warm and gentle like a kiss is gentle. 

Cas walks them to the mirror hanging on the back of Dean’s closet door, his steps as measured and as confident in Dean’s body as they always are in his own, and puts up no fight. Not even when Cas stops in front of that mirror so Dean’s body is framed perfectly within it. Not even when Cas lifts Dean’s eyes to meet themselves in their reflection, and a shock of heat beams through Dean’s heart. 

It is Dean’s face looking back at him, but Cas is the one using it. And Cas is looking at Dean exactly the way he always has—with fervid and fixed focus, with a fondness so great that Dean sometimes cannot bear it, with… with affection. With joy, and awe, and something that is terrifyingly like love. 

Dean doesn’t try to use his own mouth to speak, doesn’t even want to. Cas, he says in his head instead, praying to him without thinking about it. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to say. Cas lifts his hands and runs them tenderly over Dean’s clothed waist, his thighs, down each arm, across his stomach. Dean is small, so small, one spinning planet in the cradle of a galaxy. Cas… 

Cas begins to slip Dean’s flannel off his shoulders, pulling it carefully down his arms so that the sleeves of his undershirt don’t get bunched up, and Dean lets him. Dean lets him.

Somehow, Cas knows exactly what to do to make sure Dean feels warm and comforted and—and cared for. Safe, as Cas had said earlier. Perhaps it’s instinct, or perhaps—and more likely—he’s simply doing what feels good to him in Dean’s body as he finds a pair of worn-soft pajamas in Dean’s drawer and pulls them on, as he slips Dean’s gray robe over his shoulders, as he ties it loose enough around Dean’s waist that he can breathe, but tight enough that it still feels like he’s being held. 

Thank you for saying yes to me, Cas says. Some time has passed. Dean is not sure how long. Dean is curled on his side with his back to the room the way he only allows himself when he feels absolutely safe, which is to say never since he was a very little boy. The covers are pulled up to Dean’s chest, the covers have been smoothed of wrinkles by Cas using Dean’s hands, and Dean is doing a good thing by keeping Cas safe in his heart, and Dean loves him, and Dean loves him. It is an honor, Dean, the likes of which you couldn’t begin to understand. 

“Me too,” Dean slurs, half-asleep already, mouth feeling clumsy and unwieldy and slow in his control. He can breathe between each beat of his heart; the headache that has lingered between his eyebrows since he was four years old has faded to nothing, and Dean feels drunk with the absence of pain. “‘S an honor for me, too.”

Cas hums within him, an awed little sound. He presses Dean’s hand into his cheek again. He tilts Dean’s face into it, and Dean eats up the touch as if it’s really Cas’s skin. 

Dean drifts to sleep wondering if there is a way he can always have Cas this close. 

*

Dean’s dreams are infrequently pleasant. They are best, he thinks, when they are not his alone. 

“Hey there, Cas,” he says quietly beneath the buzz of cicadas. The lake is so clear today that he can see the bottom where his line is cast: silty mud, and tiny bright fish that weave as fast as the blink of an eye through the tall green reeds growing out toward the sun. 

Dean tips his head against the back of his chair, closer to where he can sense Cas hovering. It feels so strange not to have Cas using Dean as his vessel. It feels remarkably lonely not to see his face. 

“Hello, Dean,” Cas murmurs. He drifts closer. Dean can see his reflection like a vague distortion in the water, an image his eye refuses to catch upon—something huge, something towering, something blue. But he still just sounds like Cas. 

Neither of them speak any further. Dean doesn’t catch anything—he never does in these dreams—but Cas stands there behind him the entire time, solid and dependable and beloved though Dean cannot touch him, and wards the nightmares away. 

*

When Dean wakes, Cas is running his hands slowly and lightly over the skin of Dean’s torso, which has been exposed in his sleep. 

“Cas,” Dean sighs, and it trembles out of him. He arches into the hand Castiel skates along his hip bone, a touch that is innocent and exploratory and which puts a growing heat low in Dean’s belly all the same. “Cas, man, you—you—”

Cas is sliding a hand up the center of Dean’s chest. Cas is cupping his palm over the place where Dean’s heart thunders beneath his skin, and Cas is skimming fingers along the waistband of Dean’s pajama pants, and Dean’s breath shudders in his chest. 

May I? Cas asks, sweet and soft and absolutely aware of the fact that Dean is putty in his hands, that Dean is whatever Cas wants him to be, that Dean is his. Cas drags a single finger from one side of Dean’s hips to the other, and it’s slow, slow, and it leaves a trail of shivers in its wake.

“Yeah,” Dean whispers. His eyes are still shut because Cas has not opened them. His heart beats up toward his own palm, made lovely because it belongs to Cas right now. “Yeah, Cas, please…”

Cas lifts Dean’s hand, giving Dean only a moment to ache for the contact back before he slips it beneath Dean’s waistband and wraps it around his cock. 

Dean ain’t young anymore, he doesn’t wake up hard most mornings like he used to, but here, today—it don’t take much to get him there. There is something about the knowledge that it’s Cas touching him, even if he is using Dean’s hand, that is so much more electrifying than when Dean touches himself. 

Does that feel good? Cas asks him liltingly, a note in his voice that lets Dean know Cas is aware the answer is an enthusiastic yes. He lifts Dean’s hips up in order to slide his pajamas and boxers off, and even the clench and tremble of Dean’s abdomen as it’s held aloft is good to feel.  Because Cas put it there. Because Cas trusts Dean, and Cas wants to make Dean feel good. Tell me. Use your voice. 

And again, again, again, Cas somehow knows just what Dean wants. It’s a handjob for Christ’s sake, Dean’s received them in the hundreds—but not like this. Not from this man. 

Dean finds his words tangled up with it. Tangled up somewhere beyond the shut seam of his eyelids, somewhere in all of that heat that is building in his stomach and in his throat. 

“I...” says Dean, soft and nowhere near as deep as he’s been forcing himself to speak since he was sixteen, because he cannot control any aspect of himself right now—because he does not want to. His breath drifts out of him. “Cas, I—oh—”

Cas is doing something with his wrist, twisting it just the right way, swiping his thumb over the head of Dean’s cock all nice and slow and, and deliberate, like he’s trying to coax a reaction from Dean, like there is nothing in this world he cares about so much as Dean’s pleasure. That’s it, Dean, he murmurs, so low that his voice vibrates at the base of Dean’s spine. He slides Dean’s other hand up his chest again and rolls Dean’s nipple between two nimble fingers. Dean moans, too far gone to be embarrassed by it. Let me hear you. 

“It feels—it feels real good, Cas,” he gets out, as shaky as a confession. He wants Cas to know. He wants Cas to know that he makes Dean feel good always, always. “Cas… c’mon…”

Thank you, Cas says softly. He breathes with Dean’s lungs. He lets Dean’s legs fall open upon the sheets, knees parted, the soft secret parts of Dean’s thighs exposed to the warm bedroom air. Thank you, you sound so lovely. 

Dean feels shivery and diaphanous inside, like the disparate particles of himself are shimmering down into gold. Cas is thanking him. Cas thinks he sounds lovely. 

I bet you look lovely, too. Cas’s voice turns low and gentle-edged, curling golden like honey. Dean is so close. Dean is so close that he wants to sob with it. You’re so beautiful, Dean, your soul and the surface of your skin… Do you trust me, Dean? Do you trust me to do something with you? 

Dean’s breaths hitch in the back of his throat like little trembling whines, each inhale dragging, each exhale full of too much air. I love you, Dean thinks. “Anything,” he says, breathless, “Cas, anything.”

Cas moves him slow. 

Dean is not quite aware of what’s going on, the movements coming to him in drifting sounds, in blurry snapshots of sight: he feels Cas slide the blankets aside, feels the sway of his body as Cas sits them up and drapes Dean’s legs off the side of the bed, feels the floor cool beneath his feet as Cas stands. 

Cas isn’t touching Dean’s cock any more, and an achy shivery tearful feeling has made itself a home in the winding curvature of Dean’s veins. 

It’s ok, Cas hums. He is walking Dean to the closet mirror across the room. He is blinking with Dean’s wet eyes, slowly, and when those eyes find Dean’s reflection they flare open wide. Oh, Dean…

Cas braces one of Dean’s arms against the frame of the closet. Cas lifts Dean’s other hand and wraps it around his cock again, and the renewed touch nearly sends Dean to his knees. 

Watch, says Cas. The word is gentle and unyielding; Dean would not try to disobey him even if he wanted to. Watch yourself, Dean, for me. 

Dean does. 

He looks—he’s—Dean is flushed fervent pink high up on his cheekbones and the tops of his ears, all along his soft chest, down his stomach with its coarse hair, with the scars that rip across it. His legs are bowed, and they shake where he stands. The handprint Cas left on his shoulder all those years ago, faded from time, from the cycle of other people Dean’s body has belonged to, stands out as bright and as shining as a star. His mouth is red-bitten, parted, a flash of his tongue visible each time he draws a gasping breath, and his eyelids hang half-lidded and heavy where he struggles to keep them open for Cas. For Cas. Because Cas asked him to. 

Cas lets Dean’s head drop down to rest his temple on the pillar of his propped up arm, but he keeps Dean’s chin tilted up. Keeps Dean watching. 

Dean looks... dirty. Filthy, and wanton, and desperate. Dean looks like he has never enjoyed anything more, and he hasn’t, and he hasn’t, and it’s because of Cas. 

Cas, who lives in Dean’s heart, who is Dean’s best friend, who wants to make him feel good. 

The last time I held your soul like this, you were clinging to me in Hell, Cas whispers, thunder, a hurricane. There is sweat beaded along Dean’s hairline. There is so much feeling shining out of those eyes. You were so small and fragile, my little human, yet you were still the strongest and most beautiful being that I have ever seen. You continue to be. Look at you, look at you, shining so brightly for me. 

Dean moans again, closer to a whine, thin and high in the back of his throat. He is beyond words, and Castiel seems to know this: That’s it, he says again, breathless as if he himself is feeling Dean’s pleasure—and oh. Oh, god, he probably is. He can probably feel each jolt of heat that sears Dean, each spine-tingling curl of pleasure, each crooked beat of Dean’s swollen heart. When Dean comes, it will be with this body that is as much Cas’s as it is Dean’s right now, and they will be—they will be coming together, unified, and it will be their blood pumping and their hearts beating—

They come, and pleasure rises up through Dean like a tidal wave. 

Dean, Cas says. Dean, Dean. Oh, I—

No man has ever touched Dean this kindly before. Not even himself. 

Dean is drifting again, a leaf caught in a breeze. He has the vaguest notion of Cas using his grace to clean the mess they’ve made—the shimmering warmth of it, the absolution, the peace—and the low gentle throb of his voice murmuring to Dean all the while, words whose shapes Dean does not know but whose meanings feel like softness. His eyes are shut again, but that seems to be ok, because Cas could just open them again and he doesn’t. His skin is hot. 

Time moves like a watercolor painting. 

Dean is warm and small and held. 

Sleep, Cas says. Dean is on his side in bed again, wrapped up once more in his softest clothes, beneath his softest blankets. Sleep, Dean.

I love you, Dean thinks. He does. 

*

Sometimes they want Dean to come too, want to know they’re man enough to give him pleasure—but not this one. 

Dean knows his type. Dean’s been sleeping with men like him often enough for the past five years, off and on whenever he can simply think of no other way to be able to eat that week, that he clocks him the moment he gets his sweaty hands on Dean’s skin. He likes when Dean tenses in his hold. He likes when Dean pushes back against the hand he’s got braced over the nape of Dean’s neck, keeping his face pressed firmly into the musty pillow beneath him. 

He doesn’t touch Dean below the waist once he starts fucking him, and Dean is weirdly grateful for that. The man says whore, says pretty, says slut. The man comes with a grunt. The man collapses on top of Dean, all of him heavy and angular, his breath clammy on the bumps of Dean’s spine. 

Dean is paid silently. Dean is shivering even though it’s the middle of August and the air conditioning in this motel room is broken, making the air as thick as soup. Dean slides his clothes back on and leaves fast, and the man watches him from the bed, hard eyes glinting flinty. 

They remind him of his father’s eyes. 

Dean parked Baby two blocks away, and he walks to her now through the muggy Louisiana night, his knees as soupy as the air is. He doesn’t have a bed to get back to tonight—with Sam at school and John off god knows where, Dean is utterly alone, and he usually don’t see the point in booking a room that only he will sleep in. It’s money that he doesn’t have enough of to waste. Better to curl up on Baby’s back seat and wait out the dawn. 

If he gets to her, that is. 

Dean stops half a block away. He sits on the curb, heavy. He turns his head to the side and throws up on the sidewalk, money clenched tight in one hand. 

There’s nothing in him but a couple beers, an effort at fortifying himself after not having to do this for nearly a year, and he regretted them the moment that man pushed him down onto the mattress. They made Dean’s movements sloppy, his reflexes slow; the man wasn’t doing anything he didn’t pay for, nothing Dean told him not to, but—but—

His was the first touch Dean’s felt since Dad kicked him out four months ago. Dean’s skin still crawls with. Dean still aches for more of it, even though it makes him ill. 

Dean is empty, Dean is hollow. Dean drags himself to his feet.

*

Something changes. Something shifts. 

Cas doesn’t have to ask, and sometimes he doesn’t—to work the ache from Dean’s knuckles, to add a little more sugar to their coffee, to shoot a hand out and catch Jack when he stumbles after insisting upon spinning around and around in the middle of the library until his legs turn to jelly—but he almost always does anyway. Dean, he will say, quiet in Dean’s ear while he’s getting dressed in the morning, May I? And Dean will say yeah, yeah, of course. 

Of course. 

Cas could break Dean if he wanted to. He could take Dean over completely, push him down further and further like he did with Jimmy so long ago before he knew anything else—but he won’t. What happened to Jimmy Novak is, Dean knows, one of Cas’s greatest regrets in the world. He is sure that Cas feels guilt over it every day. 

Cas doesn’t have to ask Dean, but he does it anyway. 

*

They stand in the middle of the cereal aisle as Dean consults the shelf with deliberation. 

Dean likes grocery shopping. There’s something kinda nice about wandering up and down the aisles with a list in one pocket and his wallet in the other, setting things in the cart as they catch his eye. Something kinda nice about being in a big busy place where every person is in their own world, hand-picking things that will nourish them or their families later. 

It’s not at all like shopping when he was a kid. John would leave him with a five dollar bill to stretch across a weekend—a weekend which always, inevitably turned into longer after John found a lead he decided was worth leaving his kids alone in a motel room a few more days for. 

It has taken a bit of time to grow past that sharp, panicked anxiety of shopping. That worry that he’s not getting the best bargain, that he’s forgetting something important, that they just won’t have enough. It’s taken time… but it’s getting better. Easier. 

When Sam asks him to pick up quinoa, Dean does it. It’s frivolous and unnecessary, and that’s safe, these days. When Jack asks for the most sugary breakfast cereal known to mankind, Dean buys it, because Dean knows what it’s like to be a kid and want something just because you want it. 

We’ll have to smuggle that past Sam, Cas says into Dean’s ear. He sounds very serious about it, as if they are discussing battle tactics rather than getting their son a treat, and Dean thinks—Dean thinks, god, maybe it’s good that Cas isn’t standing beside him in the flesh because it’d be so hard not to turn around and kiss him right now. 

“Eh, Sam’s a big softie,” Dean says out loud. He’s the only one in this aisle right now, nobody around to think he’s crazy for talking to himself. He grabs a box of the stuff Jack likes, and then Fruit Loops for himself, because he’s a man of taste, thank you very much. “Once he sees how happy this makes the kid, he’ll never be able to say no.”

Hm, Cas murmurs, a knowing hint to his voice that Dean doesn’t really get. 

He doesn’t let it trouble him. He pulls his list out and glances at it—eggs next—and heads that way. 

You need flour, Cas says as Dean flips up the lid of a carton to check that none of the eggs are broken inside. They aren’t; he sets them in the cart, on the seat part where a baby would go. Sam got those blackberries from the farmer’s market last week, remember? And you wanted to make a pie. 

Dean snaps his fingers, swinging the nose of the cart around. Thanks, Cas, he says in his head. He grabs a block of cheese as he passes that section, and sets it down amidst a bag of potatoes and a carton of milk, some pickle-flavored chips Cas talked him into getting, a new oven mitt because Dean’s has a hole in it. Anything else you can think of before we head out?

Lube, Cas says. 

Dean nearly drops the flour as he’s pulling it off the shelf. “Cas!” he hisses. The woman at the end of the aisle shoots him a dirty look, and he turns his face away quickly, sure that it’s flaming red. Cas, he says again, in his head this time. There is heat crowding up beneath his jaw. What the fuck, man?

There is something I’d like to try with you, and lube would certainly make it more pleasurable, Cas says calmly. His voice is doing that thing it does, ringing down low like a gong between Dean’s shoulder blades, and Dean shivers. That is—that is, if you want to continue having sex. I’m sorry, Dean, I shouldn’t have presumed. 

Dean is pushing the cart blindly now, no idea where he’s headed. Having sex. Having sex. Cas just said they’re having sex.

No, Cas, I—I want. Yeah, he fucking wants—wants so bad that he’s about to get hard in a fucking Walmart. I do. Um, presume away, man. 

God, he loves the feel of Cas’s smile. Like wind rippling through a wheat field. 

That makes me so happy, Dean, Cas says. There is that feeling, like Cas is petting Dean’s soul. Dean sways a little, holding on tight to the handle of the cart. You make me so happy. 

Dean has to stop. Has to shut his eyes, the sounds of the supermarket gone faint around him. 

Um, he stutters, resisting the urge to go quiet and fall backwards into Cas like he wants to. So badly he wants to. I already—I already have lube. At home. 

Cas is radiating warmth from Dean’s epicenter, and Dean is so filled with it, so far from being lonely, that he wants to cry. He is always wanting to cry these days. He thinks that if he did, Cas wouldn’t be anything but kind to him.

Good, Cas whispers to him. He must be able to feel that Dean can’t really function right now, that Dean’s experiencing system failure so severe that he’s just swaying on his feet here in the soup aisle, because he takes control of his hands, loosening them so the metal handle stops biting into his palms. He takes control of Dean’s feet, lifting them one by one and setting them down steadily as he moves Dean’s body forward. That’s very good, and helpful. Do you use it on yourself? 

Dean laughs a little wildly, voice faint, voice caught up in a rush of breathlessness. Who else would I use it on? 

And he knows what face Cas would be making at him here, all baleful eyes, all lovely, serious mouth, all angled brow. Anyone else you’ve slept with, Dean. 

Cas, Dean says. He doesn’t know where the bravery to say this is coming from. The words trip down his tongue. I ain’t slept with anybody since before you died. 

Cas goes quiet after that. Quiet and still, like maybe Dean has stunned him too.

Oh, Cas murmurs eventually. 

Yes—yes, Dean would kiss him if he was here. Soft at the corner of his mouth, until he smiled. 

*

You need reading glasses, says Cas.

They are curled up in one of the armchairs in the library—part of Dean’s gradual but effective mission to make the bunker comfy—and Dean is dozing while Cas uses his eyes to read a giant book Cas has balanced across Dean’s lap. 

Dean swims slowly back up to awareness, blinking heavily. He’s toasty, both from Cas and from the blanket Cas wrapped around him before he started reading, and his stomach is full of the pie he made earlier in the afternoon, and for the first time in a long time, not even his bad leg aches. 

He squints down at the page. It’s utter nonsense to him, squiggly little letters in some language he was never taught to read. They are a bit blurry, the way all text has been for the last couple years. “No I don’t,” he says. 

Cas huffs at him. You’ll get headaches if you carry on like this. 

“Eh,” says Dean, and shifts around a bit, pushing into the soft plushness of the upholstery. “You’ll make me better if I do, right doc?”

He can imagine the way Cas would be looking at him, an eyebrow raised like Dean’s an idiot, a smile fighting to appear on his mouth to let Dean know it’s all a show. Of course, he says. They’re joking around, but Dean feels a tug behind his heart anyway—of course Cas would make Dean feel better. A forgone conclusion. But I would be quite annoyed about it. 

Dean smiles lazily, letting himself sink back into himself as Cas takes his body over again and lifts the book a bit higher. Worth it. Definitely worth it.

Cas sighs—Dean feels it—and starts to read again, murmuring the words in that low voice. It’s enrapturing to listen to, even though Dean has no idea what he’s actually saying; Cas has got a good speaking voice, anybody with ears can tell that, and even though it’s different now in that he’s not using Jimmy’s vocal chords to vocalize, his voice is still undeniably his own. Dean would recognize it anywhere. 

The words are a winding and looping and lulling melody, like poetry. It is the easiest thing in the world to listen to him.

*

Dean is twenty-nine, and there is a man smiling softly at him with a knife sticking out of his chest. 

His name is Castiel. He has not hurt Dean. He pulled Dean from a place worse than Dean can say, and he left the shape of his hand on Dean’s skin.

*

Cas has three of Dean’s own fingers inside of him, and Dean is imploding around a sob. 

It’s never been this slow, this aching. Not with anyone. Nobody has ever touched Dean with such single-minded devotion, such selflessness: not any one night stand he’s ever had, not anyone who’s ever paid him, not even Cassie or Lisa. Nobody’s ever been able to reduce Dean to a quivering mess with a whisper of his name and a turn of their wrist—none of them had ever tried. 

Cas tries. Cas tries like making Dean feel good is the only thing he’s ever truly wanted to do, and god… god, is he succeeding. 

“Cas,” he begs quietly, the hand that Cas isn’t controlling fisted so tightly in the sheets that he thinks he might rip them on accident. He can hear himself breathing in the room, loud like the scratch of sandpaper on wood. He’s going to yell. He’s going to dissolve. “Cas, please. ”

Cas is relentless in his slow, thorough pace. He has control of only this one hand, but that’s enough: Dean is flayed open. Dean is flayed open, all the pulpy softness of himself that he’s never quite managed to scrape out utterly exposed to Cas, utterly at his mercy. His heart beats as fast as a rabbit runs, and he knows that Castiel can feel it. 

You’re doing so well, Cas tells him. Cas fucks Dean slow and unabated on his own hand, but it’s those words that fill Dean on up. It’s those words that turn everything rosy and aching. You feel so good, so unbelievably good. All the glory of Creation cannot compare to you. 

And nobody’s ever—nobody’s ever said shit to Dean like this, either, their voice throbbing with an earnestness that makes itself a home in the marrow of Dean’s bones. Men used to call him pretty sometimes, like it was a violation for that to be true, and sometimes John would as well, spit out like an insult, like he couldn’t be a man if he was. Hell—even people who never came close to fucking Dean have thought it was their place to comment on his appearance his whole damn life. 

But now there is Cas. Speaking of Dean’s glory, his… his goodness. 

Cas, touching Dean like he is anointing the body of Christ. 

“Please,” says Dean, softer now. It’s as reflexive as it is futile; Dean squirms atop the sheets, raw and exposed like a livewire, and he hates Cas’s steady brutal pace, and he hates the sweet, intense stretch he feels, and he loves it, and he never wants it to stop. He never wants Cas to stop. God, he wants Cas to stay. “Cas, Cas—sweetheart—”

Cas burns. 

He rips through every inch of Dean’s body like wildfire. Dean bows up off of the bed, his back an arch, just his hips and his shoulders left making contact with the pillows he is propped up against as Cas says his name, says Dean, Dean, Dean, like a spell or a prayer, maybe—an angel praying to a human man, words hand-delivered on a platter as if they are Communion. Dean, Cas says, and takes control of Dean’s second hand, wrapping it around Dean as his other picks up speed, and then… god, god he isn’t even using words now, just humming in a frequency that Dean understands down to his bones, down to the stardust knitted through his skin: mine, mine, mine. 

Dean comes with his head thrown back, Cas’s name on his lips.

It is over too soon. 

He breathes there on the covers, hard and fast. Cas has lifted both of his hands, has placed them palm-up at Dean’s sides; Dean doesn’t want to move them yet. Dean doesn’t want to move. Dean wants Cas to do what he will with him. 

Dean is cold suddenly, and sharply, brightly aware of the emptiness of his bedroom. Of the fact that it’s just his body in this bed. Nobody to wrap around him, nobody to tangle his legs together with. 

Cas’s hearth-heat is gone. It’s—it’s fucking stupid, but the suddeness of all of this is making Dean feel empty, cast off, alone. He feels something rolling in his stomach, rolling—

Dean, Cas says, and the word sighs through him. He lifts Dean’s hands. He drags them up Dean’s torso, slow, gentle, nails scratching lightly at Dean’s skin. He cups Dean’s cheek with one, and parts his lips with a thumb, and then he… and then he slides two fingers in, in, pressing against Dean’s tongue, and Dean’s whole body settles at the gesture. Settles, spine turning to silk. 

At the ease of it. At the purpose. At the feeling of being filled again. 

There you are, Cas rumbles. That’s it, my Dean, just like that. Good. I’m right here with you, and you are so good, and there’s nowhere else I'd rather be. 

That can’t be true. But in this moment, it’s easy to believe. 

*

Jack decides that he wants to rewatch Sleeping Beauty, so they pile into the Deancave—bowls of popcorn and big mugs of hot chocolate, courtesy Dean, in hand—to do so. 

Dean likes it because Jack likes it. Jack smiles at the bright colors, the whimsical music; he presses himself into Sam’s side when Maleficent rears up large and terrifying, but he doesn’t look afraid as much as he looks enthralled. 

If Dean’s being honest—which, he’s been sorta trying that on for size lately—he kind of just likes it ‘cuz he likes it, too. It’s nice to spend an hour with his family watching a kid’s movie where the villain is defeated as surely as the tide rises and falls, and true love prevails every time. 

So he’s a romantic. Sue him. 

Prince Philip leans over to kiss Aurora and it works, she wakes up, her eyes blinking open at him big and soft and smiling. 

Something in Dean’s chest catches. His heart stutters. 

*

He waits until everybody else has gone to bed.

Cas today. Not quiet enough that Dean’s worried Cas is mad at him—well, not that worried—but quiet enough that Dean can feel dread settling down deep in his bones. Dread that Cas is already regretting what they’ve been doing lately, dread that Dean made it too weird by liking it too much, dread that what he’s about to suggest is gonna ruin things forever. Dread that if he doesn’t suggest it, Cas will never be free.

Dean dries the last of the mugs with hands that he wills steady, and places it upside down in the cabinet. 

“Cas,” he says softly. 

Cas is doing that thing again. That thing where he feathers attention along the inner shell of Dean’s ribs. Dean is going to fold delicately inwards, a house of cards, a crushed up piece of paper. 

Dean, Cas answers. 

“Cas, I have. Um.” Dean needs to stop. Dean needs to sit down, his legs like water, unable to hold him up. He hits the chair hard. “Um.”

Cas takes control of him without asking, and Dean is bowled over by the relief that makes him feel. Cas soothes the tension from Dean’s shoulders, he softens his spine, he unfurls his clenched fists—fists that Dean hadn’t even realized were balled up so tight. He settles Dean, as he is so good at doing.

Dean’s candle flame, his sunshine, his every star. 

What’s wrong? Cas asks him. He is demanding nothing of Dean, just inquiring with enough genuine worry that Dean wants to tell him. Wants to soothe him back. 

“I have an idea,” Dean says. He’s whispering, he realizes. His head is tipped down, his shoulders and his spine liquid gold from how Cas drips along them, his eyes closed lightly to block out the world. Nothing but the two of them. “It’s probably—it’s probably stupid, I dunno, I just…” 

Archaic, Rowena had said. An element of patience. Of time. Traditional. Only one solution. 

Cas lifts Dean’s hand and cups it around Dean’s cheek, a gesture that seems to have become his automatic way to comfort Dean. Well, it works. It works.  

It’s almost like Cas is really touching him. 

I’m sure it’s not stupid, Cas says. Not unless you are suggesting something that will put you in danger, in which case, I can already tell you that I won’t like it. 

Dean laughs despite himself, a quiet huff in the back of his throat. He tips his head further into his own palm, because that palm is wielded by Cas. 

“No,” he says. “Nothin’ like that.” And then he stops. And then he gathers his resolve ‘round his shoulders like a cape. “I think I know how to break your curse.”

*

Dean has not been back to this room where Cas’s empty vessel lies since Rowena first told them about the curse. 

The air is still in here, and the one lone lamp glowing golden on the bedside table has given this room the impression of a thing caught in amber—something frozen in time. 

Cas’s body’s still face is empty and unrecognizable. 

“I don’t know if it’ll work,” Dean says. He is caught, too, just frozen here at the foot of the bed with his sweaty palms and his too-hopeful heart. He wants it to work. He wants Cas to be ok. He is terrified of how alone he will be when Cas is no longer safe within him, how empty and hollow he will feel. “I’m—I’m sorry in advance if it doesn’t.”

If it doesn’t, then it’s not your fault, Cas says. We shall simply try something else. 

His words are kind, and Dean is sure he means them, but he can hear the nerves in Cas’s voice. The hope. He must want so badly to have his own vessel back. To have his own body, his own autonomy, no longer forced to obey the whims of Dean’s actions. 

Dean doesn’t blame him. 

“Ok,” Dean says shakily, taking another step closer. Another. He curves around the end of the bed to come stand at the side, and he feels his pulse burrowed in the meat of his palms. 

There is that face Dean has known for twelve years, and loved dearly for most of that time. But it’s not the face he loves, nor the body that goes with it—it’s Cas. 

And Cas deserves this. Cas deserves to be saved. 

Dean sits himself down slowly on the edge of the mattress, hips angled, one hand placed carefully upon the pillow by the body’s head to hold him up. Dean breathes deeply. Dean closes his eyes. 

He moves through the stillness, the stillness, the stillness. He touches Cas’s mouth with his. 

A match is struck upon the length of Dean’s spine, a quick phosphorus flare. 

Light pours out of him. 

It streams from his eyes, from his open mouth. It is white-hot and the cool blue of starfire, it is bigger than understanding, it is incomprehensible—it is Cas. Cas, Castiel, all the world’s light, Dean’s best friend and the man that he loves, Jack’s father and the world’s savior and a solar flare. 

Dean’s body is rigid, frozen while Cas cascades from him and into his own body. He can do nothing but watch, half-tilted, as the Cas-light courses into the vessel beneath him and lights it up like a Christmas tree, so bright that Dean can see it swirling beneath thin skin. So bright that for a moment Dean is blinded, tears springing to his eyes as Cas grows so brilliant-hot it hurts. 

Just when Dean thinks that he might suffer the fate Pamela had all those years ago, eyes burned out of her skull with the blazing holiness of Castiel, everything stops. 

He is left panting above Cas. Panting, arms shaking, tears running down his cheeks like rain.

Beneath him, Cas’s eyes flutter open. 

And there he is. His perpetual squint, his messy hair, the life-flush on his stubbled cheeks. The breath in his chest, which rises slowly and evenly, and the way that breath clouds against Dean’s cheek. 

“Hello, Dean,” Cas says. 

Dean makes himself sit back, even though all he wants to do is drape himself over Cas and nuzzle his face down into the soft, warm crook of his neck. Dean makes himself sit back, and he tries to breathe around this barren ache of emptiness.

“Cas,” he says, voice catching and making it rough. He palms at his own cheeks to avoid reaching down and cupping Cas’s. “Are you—did it work? You ok?”

“Yes,” Cas says. There is wonder in his voice; Dean feels it, even though it’s not resonating through him anymore. A smile spreads over Cas’s face like the dawn, and Jesus—there’s that expression he keeps hitting Dean with, all that gentleness in it, and seeing it on Cas’s own face is… God. God. Cas lifts his hand, and Dean holds his breath. “Dean, I—”

The bedroom door busts open, Sam and Jack piling through with wide scared eyes and bedhead. 

“What,” says Sam, “the hell is going on?”

“We heard a loud noise,” Jack says. His gaze is fixed on Dean, Cas’s body hidden from view by the hunch of Dean’s wide shoulders. “Like singing.”

“Sounded more like a comet to me,” Sam says. He steps further into the room, and Dean can tell the moment he sees that Cas is awake—the shock on his face, the smile, the confusion, the relief—and then he’s coming forward and helping Cas sit up with the biggest grin he’s worn in a while, and Jack is yelling Cas’s name and bounding forward to leap onto the bed and curl all his limbs around Cas like a little octopus, and in all the hubbub Dean is shuffled off the bed, onto his feet. 

He watches them all. Sammy’s mile-a-minute questions, and Jack’s little kid snuggles in a grown kid’s body—and through it all, Cas’s quiet smile. His patience. His calm answers to Sam’s questions, and his soft kiss to Jack’s sleep-messy hair. 

Dean can still feel him on his lips. 

“So what broke the curse?” Sam asks, because of course he does. Kid could never leave fuckin’ anything well enough alone. “How’d you all figure it out?”

Cas is watching Dean. Dean can feel it, his steady, fever-blue gaze, unrelenting on Dean’s face as he stares down fixedly at a loose thread on Cas’s bedspread. 

“Dean figured it out,” Cas says quietly. 

Dean shrugs. They’re all looking at him now. “It was just—yeah, I dunno, I, I just had an idea.”

A pause. “Ok,” Sam says slowly. “So… what was the idea?”

Dean makes the mistake of looking up. 

There is Cas. There is Cas, just looking back at him, and Dean thinks I miss you, even though he’s right there. 

“I sort of…” Dean wants to crawl into Cas’s lap. He wants to put his arms around Cas’s neck and he wants to hide there, his ear turned against Cas’s soft warm chest so that he can hear his heartbeat. “Well, it was like in that movie, right? Sleeping Beauty?”

God, he hates when they all look at him. He’s bright pink, he knows he is, flushed like he was when Cas walked him in front of that mirror and made him come so hard from just a hand job that he almost said I love you out loud—only this time, he’s blushing for much less pleasant reasons. 

“You kissed him?” Jack asks. 

Dean grips the back of his neck with a clammy hand. “Yeah,” he mutters. 

“And that woke him up,” Sam says, speaking very carefully. 

“He’s awake now, ain’t he?”

The room is quiet. 

“That’s cool,” Jack says pleasantly. There is so little judgement in his voice—so little surprise—that Dean can’t help but jerk his head up to look at him. He is curled beneath one of Cas’s arms, eyes sleepy, hands fiddling with the long ends of his sleeves. He is smiling happily up at Dean. “I’m glad it worked.”

“Uh, yeah.” Sam’s eyes are darting furiously between Dean and Cas. Dean has never seen him bite his tongue so hard. “Cool,” he says, voice strained. 

“Cool,” Dean repeats flatly. He sounds too harsh. He can’t look at Cas. “I’m goin’ to bed.”

Nobody stops him. It’s probably easy to see that he’s not in any kinda mood to talk right now, what with the tears still drying on his face, and the rigidity in his shoulders—rigidity that Cas would’ve soothed away had he still been riding Dean around like his own private car, and—

And Dean stops that train of thought. Stops it, crossing the silent hallway while Cas’s bedroom door slams into an echo behind him. 

He stands for a moment in this hallway. Lets the cool silent dark of it surround him, as lonely as a tunnel. 

Dean goes to his room. 

He gets ready for bed quickly, perfunctorily, just stripping down to a t-shirt and boxers and not bothering with a shower or the soft pajamas Cas seemed to like so much. His room is cold: not from a draft, because there is nowhere for a draft to get in this far underground, but from the fact that there is no way for any sunlight to get in, either. This far below the earth, below any light, you are always a bit cold unless you have a heater going. Unless you have someone curled up close with you, their body warming your body, a cozy little feedback loop. 

Dean does not. Dean turns out the light. Gets into bed on top of the covers. 

Cas could come to him, he thinks. He imagines it: Cas, slipping through Dean’s door like a shadow, like a guardian angel, and crossing to stand over Dean, and touching his cheek so gently with his own hand, this time—

Cas doesn’t come. 

Dean doesn’t sleep for a very long time. 

*

There is a moment where he sits up in the morning and goes dizzy with the disorientation of not having Cas right at his fingertips. 

The thing is that—the thing about Dean is that he hates to be alone. He hates it, with a vicious kind of fear that makes him feel four years old again, staring up at the last home he’ll know for thirty years as it goes up in flames. Logically he knows that he’s not really any more alone than he’s ever been, but the contrast of going from having Cas all the time to not even waking up in the same room as him…

Well. The morning is not off to a good start. 

It’s early, early enough that Sam probably isn’t back from his run yet. Dean slips on his robe and a thick pair of socks—there’s little bananas riding skateboards all over them—to protect him from the chill of the bunker floor, and then he heads to the kitchen. 

He makes coffee by the light of the stove clock, not bothering to turn anything else on. His hands are entirely his own. 

Dean is halfway through making breakfast when Sam wanders in, hair wet from a shower. 

“Morning,” Sam says. 

Dean grunts at him. Gestures to the coffee pot with his elbow, and the two empty mugs that sit before it. 

Sam pours himself one and wraps his giant hands around it, the mug looking tiny and delicate in his grip as he leans the small of his back against the counter to Dean’s right. He holds his coffee close to his chest, and the steam wafts up toward his steady, serious face.

“So you kissed him,” Sam says eventually. “And it worked.”

Dean’s jaw is clenched so hard that his head aches, and his stupid rough hands do not want to cooperate as he flips a pancake in the skillet. They feel too harsh, too clumsy; he rips the pancake as he gets it turned to the other side. 

“Sam,” he says shortly. A warning.

But Sammy ain’t gonna back down—he never does. That’s just not who he is. 

“I know you love him,” Sam says quietly. 

Dean flinches at the words. Flinches, like there might be somebody standing behind him. Cas, Jack. John Winchester, with hands just a bit rougher than Dean’s. He sets the spatula down. He grinds his teeth. 

It is not that he feels shame. He doesn’t. He doesn’t feel shame. He is—Dean is good, he thinks, with who he is, and with who he loves. Who could be ashamed of loving Cas?

But that doesn’t mean he wants it spoken aloud. Especially before he has even given voice to it himself. 

“He loves you too,” Sam says before Dean can get his voice to work, before Dean can force words up out of the tightness of his throat. “It wouldn’t have worked if he didn’t. And plus—I mean, the way he looks at you? The things he does for you? The way he talks about you, Jesus... You know he loves you, Dean.”

Dean doesn’t know that. Cas is the best, the kindest, the most—Cas is so good, intrinsically. There is every chance that Cas feels such fondness for Dean only in friendship, but it just seems so intense because Cas doesn’t know how to do things halfway. 

Dean loves Cas, and it is a desperate starving human sort of love, the kind that is shaped by the way Dean’s been scarred. He wouldn’t be surprised if Cas was above all that. An angel, a—a good man. 

“Stay outta this, Sam,” Dean says quietly. He can recognize that Sam’s trying to do a good thing here. Don’t mean Dean wants him to. “Please.”

Sam is quiet for a long time. Dean picks the spatula back up. 

“I just want you to be happy,” Sam says finally. His voice sounds young in the moment, but Dean can see him out of the corner of his eye, see his broad shoulders, see the shaggy length of his hair. Sometimes Dean still can’t believe how tall he’s gotten. “Both of you.”

Dean thinks of being young. Of doing anything and everything he could think of to keep Sam safe. Of all the things he did that he will never, ever tell Sam, because he might be grown up, but he is still Dean’s kid. And you protect your kids from bad things. No matter what. 

It does not matter if Dean is happy. He was never that kid who was shielded from things that harmed him, and he still isn’t now.

The smile that Dean shoots Sam is wide and sharp and strains Dean’s face, and he knows that it is the most reassuring expression he has. 

“I’m happy,” he says. He is gripping the spatula so tight that it presses deep into the flesh of his palm. He looks at Sam’s broad shoulders, his strong muscles, his healthy body that gets enough to eat every day. Sam is safe. He is, he is. “And so’s Cas, now that he’s got his body back, so why don’t you just—”

Movement in the doorway. Dean knows who will be there before he even looks up. 

“Hey, Cas,” Sam says, too loud and too innocent. Dean would roll his eyes if Cas wasn’t looking right at him. “How are you feeling, man?”

Cas looks… he looks soft and touchable and sleepy, standing there in an old t-shirt of Dean’s that’s much too small for him and a pair of Sam’s sweatpants that gather, too long, at his ankles. Dean had almost forgotten that in the weeks before Cas had been cursed, he’d been experimenting with more human clothes, changing up his outfits for comfort rather than practicality as the frequency of their hunts dropped and their time spent together in the bunker increased. 

Dean had almost forgotten—but not quite. It hits him like a kick to the chest, seeing Cas look so human. Crinkled eyes and hair that won’t lie flat and clothes that would be soft against Dean’s cheek. 

“I’m alright, thank you, Sam,” Cas says. But he’s looking at Dean. He’s looking at Dean, and his voice sounds low like a touch. “No remaining ill effects.”

Dean says, “Great,” a little too loudly, a little too gruffly, and tips the last pancake from the frying pan onto the rest of the stack. “So we’re all feelin’ awesome.”

He can feel Cas and Sam watching him as he puts the pancakes down on the table, which he set before Sam invaded the kitchen and decided to give him the third goddamn degree. 

It’s not like Dean was planning on eating this morning—his stomach is in knots, sick and sour, hurting in that place right up beneath his ribs with what he did last night, with the fact that now they all know , with the fact that Cas didn’t come to Dean after everyone had gone to bed and say it’s ok, say here, let me, and kiss him back—but now it’s like he’ll scream if he can’t get out of this fucking room. 

And he manages it. Their gazes track him all the way into the hall, their muffled murmurs float out and catch Dean’s ears—but he doesn’t let that stop him. Dean wraps his arms around himself, around his echo-empty hollow self, and heads for the Deancave as fast as his feet will take him without running. 

He doesn’t bother putting on a movie or a show. He just shuts the door behind him and then slumps onto the couch, first sitting up straight and then slowly, self-indulgently, allowing himself to droop down until he is nestled on his side with one cheek pressed hard to the knuckles of one hand. 

Dean closes his eyes. 

He’s being an idiot. He knows that. He just—he just needs some time. 

It isn’t that he wants Cas to have to use him as a vessel again. It isn’t. 

It is just that Dean wants him close. 

Dean wants him there, right there, warm and bright, and Dean wants to be able to keep him safe, Dean wants… Dean wants to be kept safe by him. Dean is lonely, Dean is lonely like an empty cardboard box is lonely, like a lighthouse, like a watchtower, and Dean wants Cas next to him always. 

Filling him up. Giving him a light to see by. 

My little human, Cas had said. He’d been the one small enough to weave through the picket fence of Dean’s ribs, but that had not mattered: Dean was small in the way that meant safety when Cas held him like that. His soul, Cas said. His soul, clinging to Cas like it had in hell. 

My little human. And Dean is. Dean is his. 

He has bitten the inside of his cheek bloody. He turns his face into the rough back of his hand and pretends that pain is why his eyes burn hot. 

The door creaks open. The door clicks shut. 

Footsteps, arcing around to the front of the couch. A quiet weight at Dean’s hip. 

He feels Cas’s hand in his hair before either of them speak, and it’s the first time Cas has touched him with his own hands in ages, and not even screwing his face up tight will stop the tears from spilling free from Dean’s clenched-shut eyes and down his temples.

“Dean,” Cas whispers, very softly. He is close. He is so close that his breath stirs Dean’s eyelashes. Dean wants Cas to lay down on top of him, just lay on down, and press Dean into the couch until Dean can’t tell the two of them apart. Dean wants to be kissed. “Oh, Dean.”

Dean covers his own eyes with one hand. He’s making sounds that he’s not proud of, little hitching sobs that don’t go anywhere, that die in the back of his throat. 

“It’s ok,” says Cas. He folds Dean’s hand into one of his own, lifting it away from his still-shut eyes, and then he unfurls Dean’s hand so that it blooms like a flower, and places a kiss to the center of Dean’s palm. 

Dean has to look at him then. Has to blink up at him.  

Cas is blurry through tears, shadowed in the dark of the room—but he is so beautiful. His dark bent head, and those blue eyes looking out at Dean with the steadiness of planets, and his mouth like a treasure in Dean’s hand. 

Castiel, Dean prays. He couldn’t speak if he tried. He loves Cas, and he loves him, and he loves him. Please. 

Cas smiles at him, the movement of it a caress in the shallow cup of Dean’s palm. 

God, how Dean had missed seeing him. 

“I adore you,” Cas murmurs quietly. He leans forward, dropping Dean’s hand. He leans forward until he’s right over Dean, so warm and so dear and so close, and Dean’s heart wants to split through flesh and bone. “And I love you. Dean, my darling friend. Thank you for saving me once again.”

Cas kisses him. He kisses him. He kisses him. Solid and alive on top of Dean, their heartbeats beating as one. 

*

Dean is forty-two years old, and he is on his side in bed with an angel’s arms wrapped tight around him. 

“I love you, too,” Dean whispers. 

It is morning, and they have nowhere to be. Sam is in the other room eating cereal with Jack, and in a few hours they will lie about that, looking at Dean with big innocent eyes, and Dean will act like he doesn’t know he’s being had and make them a second breakfast anyway. It’s raining on the surface of the earth above them, but that’s alright: it’s warm here, beneath these sheets. 

These soft sheets, heated by two bodies that are allowed to be gentle and slow and quiet together. 

Cas kisses the nape of Dean’s neck. He tightens his arms around Dean’s waist. 

They are safe. 

Dean sleeps.