Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cas smiles at the young man through the glass, who snarls and bares his teeth at him. There’s a wild look in his eye, almost murderous in its hatred. It’s clear he has no intention of letting Cas anywhere near him, if he can help it. The fact that he can’t, in fact, help it, does not seem to be deterring him at all.

Cas can’t blame him. He knows the man can sense what he is, even through the thick window. It’s unclear how much he understands past that, feral as he’s become, but the recognition of the dominance Cas radiates is something he’s clearly almost overwhelmingly hypersensitive to.

How can he be anything but? He’s well over a decade past the limit of how long his body can naturally tolerate going without it. Yet he’s hundreds, if not thousands of terrible experiences beyond being able to let himself give in to what he so desperately needs.

It’s by far the worst case Cas has ever seen. By far the worst case anyone has ever seen, as far as he can tell. There doesn’t seem to be another known case of a sub surviving this long without falling into subspace, as far back as the historical record stretches.

They’d called Cas in because he’s the expert, but in truth, he’s as astounded as everyone else is. When the case had first landed on his desk a few weeks ago, he’d initially thought it was a joke.

Patient: Dean Winchester.

Designation: Submissive

Age: 24

Diagnosis: Submission Rejection Syndrome

Cause: Complete submission neglect

He’d had to call his assistant to confirm the age and diagnosis, and then the treatment center where the young man was being held.

“Complete submission neglect?” he’d asked, confounded. “Not complete.”

But the doctor he’d spoken to had confirmed it: Dean had never fallen into subspace in his life.

Cas hadn’t known how to react. He’d been speechless.

He’s the field’s top submission rejection therapist, and he’s never even heard of something like this.

“There has to be a mistake,” he’d said, dumbfounded.

“There isn’t,” the woman had told him. “We’ve run the tests over a dozen times. He doesn’t produce even the slightest traces of diophendramine.”

And the only way that would be possible is if the hormone production had never been triggered to begin with. Not once in the young man’s entire life.

No wonder his intake paperwork describes him as feral, Cas had thought, stunned. He shouldn’t even be alive.

It’s rare for a submissive who’s been neglected from birth in this way to survive even past five or six. The oldest patient he’d ever worked with suffering from the same syndrome had been barely nine years old.

“We’ve been treating him here at the Shurley Center for over a month,” the doctor had told him. “He’s made no improvements whatsoever. He’s declining rapidly. It’s generally against our policy to contract therapists outside our network, but at this point we don’t know what to do.”

That had been far from a shock. Cas, in truth, doesn’t really know what to do either.

He’s used to working with mostly children and teenagers, and a handful of adults who’ve been through such extreme mistreatment than even the bigoted state laws couldn’t justify leaving them in the custody of their dominants, whether familiar or “romantic” partners. Those patients are often scared and distrustful, but even they haven’t been able to resist giving in to their submissive natures completely.

The few cases of complete submission rejection he had encountered hadn’t been anything like what had been described in Dean’s paperwork. Always recognized as an illness of severely neglected children, Cas doesn’t have the slightest reference point for how to approach the young man’s treatment.

He’d almost declined the job, citing lack of qualifications. He’s never treated Complete Submission Rejection Syndrome in an adult, and he certainly doesn’t work with Submissive Retraining Centers, with their backwards views of how to “help” submissives learn to “accept their place.” His own success as a therapist has been entirely built on rejecting the principals the centers stick so firmly to, and he’s always been insistent that he cannot work effectively with a patient under those barbaric circumstances.

But while only a brief internet search of the Shurley center confirmed his fears over what they considered “treatment,” the short conversation he had with one of Dean’s doctors demonstrated that even they had run out of ideas.

“Your methods are…unconventional,” the doctor had told him, judgment leaking liberally into her words, “And they certainly go against our philosophy here at the Shurley center. But the submissive has remained unbroken by traditional treatments, and at this point he only has a few months, if things continue to progress the way they have been.”

She’d been unable to keep the resentment out of her voice; That, Cas hadn’t found to be a surprise. He’s a controversial figure in the field, to say the least, which has traditionally been built on the philosophy that submissives suffer no psychological issues besides that of “defiance,” and that they need a “strong” (violent) hand to break them back into their natural state.

Though Cas has been widely praised for his alternative approach, especially within the circles championing the rights of submissives, he’s also been widely ridiculed, and rejected by much of the mainstream establishment.

The fact that his methods have unarguably been more effective than traditional “treatment” has done nothing to endear him to the old guard. In fact, the more patients he successfully treated, the more papers he published, the more much of the field has shut their eyes against even considering a gentler approach.

The old philosophy of terrorizing “defiant” sumbissives into compliance benefits the dominants who control the field, both financially and socially. It’s a convenient narrative, that every problem one has with their submissive children and partners is the fault of the submissive, rather than the dominant. It’s a convenient philosophy, that there is nearly no such thing as submissive abuse, and that “resistance” against such abuse can be resolved through even more cruelty.

It’s not a mystery why Cas and his methods are so firmly rejected by those who believe in this idea. At only twenty-eight, Cas has resolved more issues of complete or extreme submission rejection than nearly any of his colleagues have, and guided dozens of patients who had been written off as too far gone to save back to health and happiness and life.

To those who have any true interest in the safety and peace of their submissives, Cas’s work has been of extreme interest. Even many of the publications who initially wrote him off as an undominant hippie had swallowed their pride and printed retractions after his consistent success had become clear. But to some, who’s interest in the field of submissive psychology is merely a business opportunity, Cas’s success is less important than the threat it poses to their bottom line.

It was rather shocking to him when the Shurley Center had called him, considering that their doctors and directors seem to be exactly the type in this unmovable camp. But a little digging had revealed that the violent methods employed in the Shurley Center had recently resulted in multiple patient deaths, a disturbing revelation that their credibility and license had barely survived.

Perhaps the back to back tragedies had invoked some minor change of heart from their board of directors. Perhaps they just knew that the center would not survive the publicity of another patient death, especially of one who is inevitably going to become extremely high profile once his unique circumstances become known.

“This is the most extreme case anyone has ever seen,” the doctor on the phone had told him. “Perhaps…extreme methods are called for.”

The irony of his own coaxing methods being labeled as “extreme” is not lost on him, especially in comparison to the center’s violent practices. But despite the obvious hostility, he hadn’t had the heart to turn the job down, knowing that if even these “doctors” are turning to him for help, he must truly be the young man’s only hope.

And so that’s how Cas ended up on a plane headed towards Lawrence, Kansas, touching down only hours ago.

And now he’s staring through the dusty glass at the snarling young man who will be his patient for the foreseeable future, wondering what he’s gotten himself into.

“Why is he bound like that,” he asks the woman standing besides him, outrage mixing in his chest with disgust.

He struggles to keep the anger he feels from leaking onto his face, knowing it would only frighten the glaring young man regardless of what had caused it.

The doctor besides him scoffs.

“Why do you think?” she asks him dryly. “He attacks anyone who comes in to work with him, especially his assigned dominants.”

Cas’s smile tightens.

And I wonder why that might be, he thinks, eyeing the young man critically.

He’s in a pitiful state.

Ankles bound together, wrists tied and pinned by a short rope to the wall, Dean can’t effectively hide the state his naked body is in, even from the prying eyes of a frightening stranger.

And what a state it is in. Scars upon scars, both old and new, layered over every inch of his skin. Whip marks and claw marks and burns, bruises and bites and blood, on his face, on his torso, on his buttox and thighs, revealing months and months of torture and rape disguised as medical treatment.

It makes Cas feel sick to his stomach.

Whatever neglect Dean had suffered to drive him so far from his submissive instincts to begin with, it doesn’t seem like the “care” he has received since arriving at the Shurley center has been much better.

“How long has he been in this state?” he finds himself asking.

This state of fear. Of compulsion rejection of even the strongest desire to submit.

This state of half insanity, driven by terror and starvation of the soul.

“He’s been like this since he arrived,” the doctor tells him. “Abandoned by his dominant for being out of control. He hasn’t said a word since, or submitted willingly to a single order.”

Finally, this surprises him enough that his eyes tear away from the battered young man.

“Direct orders?” he asks the doctor, disbelieving. “He’s still able to reject them?”

That shouldn’t be possible, for a submissive this far gone. For many submissives, even a few weeks without entering subspace makes resisting a direct order from a dominant extremely difficult, and a few months makes the same resistance almost completely out of the question. There’s a myriad of cases of submissives who’d been forced to do horrible things to themselves or others on the orders of a dominant, unable to resist after going too long without experiencing subspace.

More proof that submissives can’t be released from the custody of their dominants, people say. More proof that they need to be beaten and shown who they belong to.

It’s disgusting.

The woman snorts. “No, of course he can’t reject them. From what his previous dominant said, he hasn’t been able to reject orders for years. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t try to resist them.”

She purses her lips. For the first time, Cas reads the plastic nametag pinned to her white coat.

Dr. Naomi Shurley.

Nepotism. Of course.

“Since the day we took Dean in, there hasn’t been a single order that the boy hasn’t fought tooth and nail. Doesn’t matter what it is: Whether to bend over for punishment or simply eat his food. He screams like an animal, and struggles against his submission like some kind of madman. He knows he’ll have to do what he’s told eventually, but he still exhausts himself fighting obedience like it’s some sort of compulsion.”

Dr. Shurley tuts and shakes her head.

“I swear, it’s like he doesn’t want to recover,” she says disapprovingly.

Cas has to bite his tongue from cursing at her.

I’m sure he doesn’t, if he thinks “recovering” only means taking the same torture compliantly.

His heart throbs at the thought of what Dean has been through, at what a horrible position he’s been in for so long.

He can’t imagine how frightening it must be to be so completely under the thumb of your own neglected needs, to the point that you are unable to do anything but what you are told, no matter how repulsive or frightening what you are told to do may be. To be so emaciated by a lack of affection and kindness and love that you have been nearly driven mad by it, losing speech, rational thought, any emotion other than pure, reflexive terror.

Starved and alone, hungry for a submission, a trust, that you simply cannot find.

Because there is no one you can trust, no one you can be vulnerable around to who won’t immediately use such vulnerability to hurt you further. And yet, by the very condition of your inability to let go and be vulnerable, you are in fact forcefully made even more vulnerable by your own biology, as your ability to resist and say no to others is worn away.

It’s a horrible condition to be in, and Dean…Dean has been in this condition for years. Under the power of people who have done nothing but cause him harm.

It should make Cas wonder how much of the young man’s true self could really be left, after such a long time. It should make him doubt, more than he already does, that he has any power to guide Dean’s psyche back home.

Instead, as he drags his eyes away from Dr. Shurley and lets them land back on Dean’s tense, contorted body, he feels somehow more compelled, more drawn in by the strange passion of the man’s refusal to die.

His eyes, where they shoot terrified daggers at Cas through the window, are a stunning green, almost hypnotizing like the reflection of the moon on the water. There’s a wild look in them, though, unfocused and slightly off-center, like he isn’t quite looking Cas in the face.

That’s understandable. It must be excruciating for him to get anywhere close to making eye contact at this point, must be almost unbearable for him to do anything but drop his head and gaze low low low to the ground.

So deeply deprived of true submission, the fact that he is capable of even glancing up at Cas is a miracle, an astounding testament to his willpower.

Still, Cas can see the strain it is taking on the young man, see the way his whole body is trembling with the stress of resisting his desperate urge to duck his eyes.

But he doesn’t, even as another minute trickles by, stretched and taught as Dean himself.

It’s amazing, and Cas finds himself almost breathless with pride at the astonishing display of strength. Suddenly, the miracle of this man surviving for 24 years without ever once entering subspace starts to make a little more sense.

He’s beautiful, Cas thinks, and as if possessed, takes a step forwards, so his nose is almost touching the glass.

The young man reacts as if he had stepped through it. He flinches violently, fragile, defiant mask shattering like Cas’s heart as transparent terror jerks across it. Flinging himself backwards so he slams into the wall that he’s tied to behind him, he ducks his head towards his bent knees and flings his bound arms up over his head, as if to protect himself from a blow that couldn’t possibly be coming.

Disorientation, Cas recognizes, quicker than he recognizes the grief in his own chest. Decreased awareness of surroundings and weakened rational thought.

The clinical symptoms of the illness play in rote memorization in his mind as he watches them play out in the least clinical way possible.

The young man scrambles backwards like he’s trying to push himself into the wall, clearly trying to get away from a threat that isn’t there. It seems to register after a few moments, that no one is, in fact, hitting him, but this only seems to frighten him more. His head pops up, face plastered in a clear expression of panicked confusion. His eyes start to dance around wildly, like they are trying to understand what they are seeing.

As he watches, Dean’s bound hands reach up to grab at the bloodied rope that pins them to the wall. At first, Cas thinks the man is going to start tugging at it, frantically trying to get free.

Instead, he just wraps his fingers around what he can gather and clutches at it desperately, like he is trying to draw comfort from its cold strands.

Then, seemingly having forgotten about Cas and the doctor, he ducks his head back down to his knees and goes still.

Jesus, Cas thinks, horrified, enraged, furious, furious down to his bones.

That so much harm has been caused to this boy, this miracle man with the strength of will to survive twenty four years all alone. That he’s been mistreated and mistreated and mistreated to the point that even that astounding strength of spirit had been warped and nearly crushed.

He’s dying, Cas remembers, and he doesn’t know how he ever forgot, with how beaten and emaciated the man is. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten, exactly, but he’s unable to think of anything else, now, with Dean crumpled before him like a discarded piece of paper.

“This is outrageous,” he says, voice wavering with anger. He feels, and sounds, very very cold.

Besides him, Dr. Shurley- Naomi, sighs.

“He’s a fundamentally disturbed submissive. I don’t know what you expected.”

“I expected some form of treatment,” he snaps. “Not whatever relentless torture has been inflicted here.”

But clearly that was naive of him. He’d known what a nightmare these centers are.

…But he hasn’t been back to one in a very long time.

He’d…forgotten. The true extent.

And isn’t that something to be ashamed of?

Naomi glares at him without any hint of guilt on her face.

“Don’t be fooled by his diagnosis, or these intermittent pitiful displays. He’s the most defiant submissive anyone at this center has ever had the displeasure of encountering,” she says flatly. “We’ve tried every method to force him to submit, and still he resists. Still he insists on dying.”

“Still he insists on dying?” Cas spits, baffled. “He’s lived longer without entering subspace than any other submissive in recorded history.”

Naomi blinks back at him, unmoved.

“And yet, it seems his time has run out.”

It’s an unnerving thing to say, but Naomi Shurley seems to be an unnerving woman. Her cold blue eyes seem to pierce into Cas where he stands, and he shivers, trying not to shy away from her stare.

He glares back at her, trying to mimic the very person they are discussing, who’d managed somehow to hold on to defiance so firmly that even death seemed to cower away.

You're wrong, he wants to say. Dean is going to make it. He’s been able to survive you, after all.

But his words get tangled up in his indignation on the journey between his mind and his mouth, and he ends up just clenching his jaw, trying not to flinch away first.

He doesn’t want to break eye contact first, knowing this woman already thinks he’s no real dominant. He doesn’t want to give her another reason to dismiss him, to give her an excuse to further question his right to influence Dean’s care.

But he seems to be overthinking it, because Naomi glances away from him a moment later without much concern on her face. And in the awkward aftermath of the staring contest only he’d been involved in, he has to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality: That maybe he just doesn’t want to look back over to the beaten young man curled up against the wall, who isn’t glaring the way Cas had been so impressed by anymore.

He does now, wary, uncomfortable, and his heart clenches at the sight he is once again met with: A skinny young man covered in fear visible as blood, curled up and shaking from the terror of having been seen.

No longer a miracle, he seems now to be just another broken submissive, one that is so far gone Cas doesn’t have any idea if he can save him. Whatever fight had been so brilliantly present inside him before seems to have fled, now, like Cas’s sense of certainty and hope.

And Cas has to recognize what he doesn’t want to admit, said without empathy as it was. But there might be more truth to Naomi’s statement than he’s comfortable seeing. That Dean, from an objective scientific standpoint, doesn’t have a very high chance of survival.

After all, it’s not like he would be the first patient Cas had lost.

The room feels very cold all of a sudden, and Cas reaches up to touch the glass. It feels very chilly under his fingertips, and he wonders if Dean is kept undressed and shivering on purpose.

“You can write all the papers you want on submissive rights, Mr. Novak,” Naomi says besides him, “But we both know Dean must somehow be broken. He won’t live to see the leaves fall off the trees again if he isn’t. I can’t imagine your principles mean more to you than his life.”

They don’t. Cas has many times had to push himself beyond what he is comfortable with, to demonstrate a dominance he doesn’t like enforcing. But not every patient he’s had responds optimally to the gentleness and light touch he so deeply prefers. Especially in his adult patients, and especially as they get closer to recovery. Almost all of them end up needing a certain kind of sterness, a certain kind of severity, that Cas simply cannot stand.

There’s some truth to what Naomi says about him, just as there is some truth to what she says about Dean. He’s…not the most dominant of dominants. It’s been a boon, in his field, for the most part, where he deals with hypersensitive and frightened abuse victims. But he’s never been able to fully satisfy the needs of a healthy adult submissive. He’s never been able to perform the harshness their kind seems to inherently need to be content.

Cas pushes himself to what feels like extremes for the sake of his patients, especially the ones who seem to need him in their final stages of recovery for longer. But when he starts to be nearly unable to stomach the domination his patients require, that is usually the sign for both of them that they are ready for him to let go.

The last thing he would want would be to end up neglecting a submissive under his care because of his own squeamishness, or to make someone feel like there is something wrong with them for craving what they do.

It’s Cas who’s wrong, not the submissives. It’s him who’s unsatisfactory, not the other way around.

The patients he’s lost…he can’t help but wonder…

If maybe he could have saved them, if he’d been harsher, more dominant, from the beginning. If maybe what people like Naomi say is right, and he’s not dominant enough to give certain submissives what they need.

Cas feels his chest ache, staring at the man who’s gone still and blank, kneeling on the ground. Like his personality has been turned inside out, Dean now seems to have gone catatonic, breathing heavily with unseeing eyes that lack the sharpness that has disappeared like a mirage of wishful thinking.

Cas wonders how much time the young man spends curled up like this, blank and still. Is he ever awake when there isn’t someone hurting him?

Is awake closer to alive, and is it better?

Staring at the whip marks that streak like knife slashes down the young man’s back, Cas considers if he could ever do something like that to someone so powerless, even if it would bring them closer to the present. Even if it would save their life.

He doesn’t like his chances. Doesn’t like what they might imply about Dean’s.

He bites his lip.

There was a spark in him. I saw it, he tries to convince himself. It’s not going to come to that, and never will.

Not with anyone. Not because Cas is weak, though he is, but because his methods work. He doesn’t know what could have helped the patients he couldn’t save, but that doesn’t mean it was Cas that killed them. They wouldn’t have fared better in a place like this, none of them would. His success rate is so much higher than his opponents for a reason.

“Do you have a paper copy of Dean’s records I could have?” he says at last, leaving what Naomi had said unacknowledged. “I don’t have a printer in my rental.”

Naomi considers him critically for a long moment, pursing her lips, but eventually she seems to decide whatever crack she’s looking for isn’t going to appear at the moment.

“Of course,” she says smoothly. “You can pick them up from the secretary on your way out.”

The dismissal is clear, but Cas can’t say that he minds it. He doesn’t want to be here anymore, observing Dean through glass like a bug in a jar, unable to reach out to provide comfort.

“You start tomorrow, Mr. Novak. 4pm sharp. You’ll have an hour with him per day, initially. If your treatment proves effective, your time with the patient will be increased.”

She holds out her manicured hand, and Cas forces himself to take it. He can’t afford to be making enemies. Or at least, he can’t afford to antagonize the ones he already has.

“Thank you, Dr. Shurley,” he says, title feeling like the snake oil it is in his mouth. “I look forward to working with you.”

“And I, you,” Naomi says back, voice sleek as her ponytailed hair.

It’s a lie, and they both know it, but it’s one neither yet are willing to push. Cas wonders how long their uneasy truce can last, in an alliance teetering above the unacknowledged reality that they are fighting on opposite sides of this war.

Chapter Text

Cas spends the evening getting settled in his sublet and going over Dean’s files. He unpacks his things before he even dares to glance at the files, knowing in his gut that he’ll end up standing in the foyer for six hours reading instead of getting his new home set up like he needs to do.

It’s not like he’s moving in here permanently, of course, but he’s certainly going to be here for a while. Submissives suffering from Submission Rejection Syndrome usually take between three to five months to recover when under his care, and that’s when undergoing full-time or close to full-time treatment.

Cas…doesn’t like to rush things.

He doesn’t like to rush recovery. Especially not of something so sensitive.

Gabriel mocks him for his methods. Only taking on one to four patients at a time, depending on the severity of their illness and personal needs. Spending months, sometimes half a year, on just a few patients, sacrificing not only money but any hope of a personal life to make sure he can be there for them 24/7.

It’s certainly not the most profitable method. Despite the increasingly positive publicity he’d received over the past few years, his policy of only taking on a few patients at a time, and taking on the most extreme cases rather than the most well compensated, has certainly not left him rolling in money.

But he doesn’t have any doubts about how he does things. The people he treats need his undivided attention. The compensation he gets for his scientific publications brings in enough money, for the most part, that he doesn’t have to split his time in a way that would be detrimental to his patients’ needs.

So he’s more than prepared for the long haul, with Dean, especially considering the extremity of his case and how the center will insist on limiting their time together until he can prove the boy is making progress with him.

An hour a day, Cas thinks, shaking his head as he unzips one of his suitcases. It’s a pittance of time, in comparison to what Dean needs.

Though Cas sometimes rotates between a few patients at a hospital in a way that allows for only two or three hours per patient per day, he’s used to treating patients with the most severe cases in his own home, having them live with him for several months as they recover through full-time care.

It’s not a conventional method of treatment.

He doesn’t know if he’ll ever convince the director of the Shurley Center to release Dean into his custody for treatment, but his hope that this might come to pass eventually had led him to rent a nice quiet little house with two bedrooms.

He’s booked the place for three months, with the option to extend the lease if needed.

Cas suspects it will be needed.

Feeling slightly less unsettled by the time he has finished unpacking his things, he gathers the courage to fetch Dean’s medical files from the foyer and comes back to the bedroom to study them.

He sits down on the bed, notebook and pen accompanying the paperwork, and opens the first folder in his lap.

The first paper is the results of the young man’s most recent bloodwork, an overwhelming bombardment of numbers and charts and technical jargon that Cas has become adept at picking his way through. Ignoring most of the text, he zeros in on the center line graph which shows Dean’s hormone levels over time.

“Diophendramine” shows up in the graph’s key, but not in the image itself. Clicking his pen open, Cas circles the number underneath the most recent date, which shows the amount of Diophendramine currently present in Dean’s bloodstream- “0 mIU/ml.” Then he draws a dot on the graph marking where the levels should be for someone Dean’s age and weight.

“GOAL,” he writes besides the little dot. Then he stares down at it, marveling at how pathetic it looks.

The gap between the bottom of the graph and the marked point is very large.

Cas draws an arrow from the “0 mIU/ml” upwards towards his addition.

It doesn’t help very much.

Cas rubs his eyes, and looks back down at the paper, moving on to the next hormone of interest.

The diophendramine levels are non-existent, as he’d been warned about, but the sertranialine levels are extraordinarily low as well, which he didn’t expect.

Frowning in concern, Cas brings the paper closer to his face to read the tiny printed numbers under the chart.

Diophendramine: 0 mIU/ml

Testosterone: 430 mIU/ml

Sertranialine: 25 mlU/ml

Cas’s eyebrows raise to his hairline.

25 mlU/ml…That’s less than an eighth of what one would expect in an average submissive of Dean’s age and weight. And Dean isn’t the average submissive. He’s one who’s clearly suffering from extreme submission starvation. His sertranialine levels should be through the roof.

Cas’s brow draws together in confusion as he tries to make sense of what the data is telling him.

This isn’t what he’s used to seeing, even in patients with the most extreme cases of Submission Rejection Syndrome. The different functions of the two submission hormones usually result in two opposite extremes, with diophendramine levels presenting as much too low and sertranialine levels much too high. The extreme hypersensitivity to domination the submissive develops in response to not going into subspace should be reflected through hormone levels, with sertranialine levels far above where they should be as the submissive over-responds to dominant influences.

But Dean seems to barely be responding at all.

Is it possible that Dean somehow hasn’t developed generalized submissive starvation, despite his inability to enter subspace for so long?

But no. Naomi said Dean has been totally unable to resist dominant orders for years, regardless of how hard he fights them. That’s a sure sign of extreme submission starvation, and the behavior he’d observed today hadn’t disagreed with that.

The glaring had been impressive, but it had obviously taken an extreme toll on the young man; The trembling, the sheen of sweat that had covered his body, like looking even close to Cas’s face was taking as much effort as holding up the world. Just making eye contact with a neutral, unpostering dominant shouldn’t be anywhere near that difficult for a regular submissive, and wouldn’t be, if the lifetime the young man had gone without true domination didn’t make resisting any sign of it now extraordinarily difficult.

So why does he still fight it so hard? Cas wonders. Why does he starve himself even further, so that even the slightest suggestion causes him such pain?

It should be comfort, to him, an enormous comfort, to give in to doing what he’s told. It should be a comfort for any submissive, to obey the dominants around them. But for a deprived submissive like Dean, it should be almost impossible to resist giving in to, like a man lost in the desert rejecting a drink of water.

Of course, he knows the “treatments” Dean is being given must often be horrible, but in his experience, that hardly matters to submissives who have been this neglected. A dirty drink of water is still a drink of water, after all. And Naomi said he rejects even the mildest of orders, like being told to eat or sleep.

Shutting the file in his lap, Cas taps his fingers absentmindedly on the cover, trying to think back and remember if he’d ever seen something like this before.

He’d had patients who’d displayed compulsive defiance before, of course, but none who’d been suffering from such severe submission starvation. Even in those cases, defiance had been erratic, not consistent, and not nearly as effective, judging by the data given over by the hospitals.

Somehow, despite being bombarded by extreme displays of domination almost constantly, Dean is managing to resist it so effectively that the “treatments” seem to be only squeezing the slightest traces of sertranialine out of him, likely produced in the moments where he finally, reluctantly, is pulled under by whatever unhappy order he’s been given. Cas can’t remember ever seeing such dramatically resistant sertranialine production in a submissive-starved patient before, nor encountering the incredibly strong willpower it would take to forcibly hold back against the submission that would produce it.

Except…maybe…

Putting aside the medical file for now, Cas pulls out his phone. Opening his messaging app, he types out the message before he can think better of it.

To: Jody

When Claire first came to live with you, were her sertranialine production levels abnormally high, or abnormally low?

He sees the three dots indicating that Jody is typing pop up almost immediately, and her first message comes through after only a second.

From: Jody

???

Then, a moment later,

From: Jody

Weird question

Cas winces, realizing belatedly that it is a weird question. He feels awkward all of a sudden, and embarrassed, unsure if he overstepped by asking for something that could be considered private medical information, regardless of his relationship with the patient.

It’s not like Claire is his daughter, after all, no matter how long he’d looked after her.

But he never thinks these kinds of things through. He never realizes what’s going to make others uncomfortable until it's already happened.

Sorry, he types quickly. Wanted to compare something against a patient’s bloodwork. But you’re right. Forget I asked.

He clicks his phone off, then, and puts it to the side, trying to ignore how embarrassed he is, trying to refocus on what he was doing.

But it lights back up with the notification of another message almost immediately, and Cas can’t resist looking down at it again.

From: Jody

Don’t you have access to that kind of stuff anyway?

Cas picks up the phone once again, sliding the screen open. The empty chatbox appears in front of him, and Cas bites his lip, unsure exactly of what to write.

Because no, he doesn’t have access to Claire’s medical records from back then, almost 8 years ago now. He hadn’t even graduated yet, when he’d been treating her, and his lack of license had limited what information he’d legally been able to obtain.

He hadn’t exactly….officially been her therapist. It had been more of an informal situation, after what he’d seen in the Retraining Center.

He couldn’t have just left her there.

Cas bites the inside of his cheek. After a moment, he types: Licensing Issues. Didn’t have access to her files.

A moment passes, but Jody doesn’t respond.

Forget I asked, Cas repeats. I sent the question without thinking.

Then he puts the phone aside again, face down this time. He doubts Jody is going to respond again anyway, and he doesn’t have time for the wallowing his mind is wandering towards.

He needs to get back to work.

Grabbing Dean’s file again and popping the cover back open, he scribbles “raise sertranialine levels” besides the alarming line graph. It’s a deviation from his usual script, which usually reads “stabilize sertranialine levels,” but he knows it’s accurate all the same. There’s no way Dean will ever feel safe enough to enter the true submission of subspace if he isn’t responding to regular domination in a positive way.

And he knows that whether or not Dean responds to his initial dominant interactions is likely to be the determining factor in whether or not he gets more time to see the young man, and more control over his treatment. There’s no way Cas will be able to get Dean to fall into subspace right away, but if he can get the boy to respond to simple, unthreatening commands, the rise in sertranialine production will serve as immediate proof that his methods are effective.

And boy, does he need immediate, unargable proof. He’d known he was going to be met with hostility, entering into a Retraining Center with his reputation, but the vehemence with which Naomi defended the violent methods they’d been employing with Dean was just sickening.

He feels increasingly like it is inevitable that he is going to be stonewalled here. That, despite how the center had reached out to him, getting clearance to make the dramatic changes he needs to make to Dean’s treatment is going to be an uphill battle.

It had begun already, not only in how the directors had limited the amount of time he’s allowed to spend with Dean but in how they had refused to suspend Dean’s other “therapy sessions” despite Cas’s protests against them.

The best Cas could do was schedule his time at the end of the day, so he can be there to help Dean recover from the seven hours of brutalization.

He doesn’t think he could stomach going earlier, knowing at the end of his sessions that he would be leaving Dean to be immediately assaulted.

He can barely stomach the situation as it is right now, but it was either agree to these terms or abandon the young man completely.

And he hadn’t had the heart to do that. So now all he can do is hope his work with Dean is effective enough right off the bat that he is given more control, so he can remove the violent men laughably titled “submission therapists” from Dean’s miserable life.

There are two of them, as far as the documents he’d been provided had said. A man named Michael, and a man named Gordon. Up until now, Dean has spent four hours in the morning with Gordon, and four hours in the afternoon with Michael. Now, with Cas’s time squeezed in at the end, their hours have been cut down each to three and a half.

Cas intends to get that further reduced as soon as possible, and, eventually, to have Dean removed from their “care” completely. The treatments inflicted on Dean by their power are nothing less than torture, and it’s a miracle that Dean isn’t dead already, from how their cruelty must be accelerating his sickness.

“This is an extreme case,” Naomi had told him defensively after giving him Dean’s current treatment profile, when she’d seen his obvious shock. “We don’t jump to such severe forms of correction for most submissives that are admitted here. But Dean has not been responding to anything, and is viciously and erratically violent. We haven’t had a choice.”

The implication here, of course, is that Dean gives as good as he gets. But this isn’t true, of course, because Dean is under the center’s control, because he’s a submissive, because he’s starved and beaten and inching closer to dying with every day that passes.

That isn’t to say that the injuries Dean has inflicted on the employees of the Shurley Center aren’t alarming. Quite the opposite: Cas takes the “APPROACH WITH CAUTION” warning on Dean’s file very seriously, now reading through the damage he’s managed to cause. He’s put four previous therapists in the hospital, according to the documents, and caused two of them to quit entirely. He apparently nearly took a finger off of Gordon, and had caused enough damage to another man’s genitals to involve a workers comp payment.

Generally, Cas’s point of view on such injuries is that if you don’t want to get your penis bitten off, you shouldn’t be shoving it into the mouth of someone who doesn’t want it there. And he can’t say he’s going to lose any sleep over someone like Gordon getting a taste of their own medicine. But it’s true that not every injury Dean has inflicted seems to have been prompted by assault or beating, with several of the many many incident reports included in the binder describing sudden attacks against someone who merely strayed too close.

The bare, isolated room Dean was being kept in starts to make sense, as does the way he was restrained.

What doesn’t make sense is the small note on page 17 of the incident reports stating that euthenasia had briefly been considered, due to “the increasing danger the patient poses to others and his own declining quality of life.”

It makes Cas see red, and he slams the binder shut, unable for a moment to read any further. The fact that state sponsored murder is still legal in some states makes him want to punch a hole in the wall, and he has to walk in circles around his new home for a while in order to calm back down.

When he comes back to the bedroom, he flips the binder back open, avoiding the page he’d been in. He doesn’t need to read why the route of euthenasia was ultimately not seriously considered. He can guess.

The legal process of applying for authorization is complicated and expensive, and ultimately deemed not worth the effort in nine times out of ten.

They probably assumed Dean would die naturally before the paperwork was completed anyway, and hadn’t wanted the to be held responsible for the death of the longest surviving CSRJ patient of all time.

The same reason he was ultimately hired, eventually.

It’s ironic and sad, that Cas was plan B. But not that surprising, as he reads on, scanning the “treatment notes” provided by the sub’s therapists.

Because there is nothing in Dean’s “treatment” that can be described as anything but gratuitous pain, nothing that is in any way designed to coax a submissive in distress into allowing themselves to let go.

Instead, Dean’s “treatment plan” is nothing more than old school prejudice expressed in the most violent way, the inevitable end result of the idea that defiance in submissives is something to be forcefully broken rather than treated at its source.

Cas had had a difficult time reading through the descriptions when Naomi had first given them to him, and he has a difficult time reading through the same descriptions now, trying to prepare himself for what he will be picking up after tomorrow afternoon. What is described is merely patterns of assault and beatings, of orders meant only to degrade. Both “therapists” confess to regularly giving Dean tasks that are impossible to complete, punishing him and berating him when he inevitably fails. Notes about punishments and violences that Dean finds the most painful or upsetting are kept meticulously, not as a guide on what to avoid but as a map of what tortures to engage most frequently.

The “treatment” notes point out that Dean finds being fucked on his back more upsetting than being fucked from behind, and that he finds being burned on his genitals more painful than being whipped there. They note that he cries harder when he’s choked by hand than when he’s choked with an object, and that he’ll break quicker if you pretend you’re going to touch his hair if he follows orders than if you just start beating him straight from the start.

The notes even encourage the use of belts over whips, “despite the fact that they are less painful,” because Dean is nonetheless much more frightened of being beaten with this instrument, “likely due to association with childhood punishments.”

This vulnerability is simply listed as yet another thing to exploit, pointing out that on “good days” Dean can sometimes even be cowed by just the sound of a belt being taken off.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing is simply a list of Dean’s known likes and dislikes, so clearly used in the inverse way that it should be. It’s so simple and predictable in its innocence that Cas almost can’t get through it, knowing that the submissive had been denied even the smallest of comforts for so long, knowing that his transparent fears have been so easily used against him.

Dislikes:

Sex

Belts

Pain

Being shouted at

Being scolded

Being called “bad” and other degrading names

Being ignored

Likes:

Praise

Attention

Being touched

Being held

Being read to

Blankets

Warmth

It's so exactly what one would expect that it almost brings tears to Cas’s eyes, as he reads the unarguable proof that despite his extraordinary strength of resistance, the young man truly is no different from any other neglected submissive.

He wants to be told he’s done a good job, to be cuddled and rewarded, to be kept in soft things and know he’s been pleasing. He’s scared of being hurt, but even more scared of being rejected, of being discarded because he wasn’t good enough.

He’s not some perverse marvel of defiance like Naomi had insisted, Cas thinks. He’s just a submissive who’s been pushed past his limits, who’s been so mistreated he no longer believes he can gain kindness and praise by being good.

The screaming, the kicking, the refusal to relent to even the simplest order: It’s not intentional disobedience. It’s complete despair.

Dean has given up. He’s given up on pleasing anyone. Nothing he does seems to be enough for anyone anyway. He might as well kick and shout and keep the pain away for as long as he can, since the punishment doesn’t result in even the slightest form of forgiveness, no matter how well he takes it.

It’s enraging, and he finds himself so sickened that before he knows what he’s doing he’s opened his laptop and pulled his email up, and is typing Sam Wesson into the search bar.

The last email exchange they’d had, from almost a year ago, sits at the top of a long, seemingly endless list of sent files and attachments and responses. Titled Claire Novak- Custody Dispute Resolved, he can see the first sentence of his own reply in light gray underneath the bolded text, the beginning of an embarrassingly long thank you email that Sam had felt the need to call to follow up on.

Ignoring his own display of emotion for the moment, Cas hovers the display icon in order to copy the intern’s email address, which, he only remembers after he drops it into the new email draft, is associated with the young man’s college.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

It’s a sharp reminder that Sam is ridiculously young. A sharp reminder of how alone Cas is in this fight, that his best ally is a twenty year old student.

But Cas shouldn’t be so dismissive. That student had been the only one to respond to Cas’s plea to the submissive rights group when Claire’s custody had been in question, and though he’d officially gotten his case picked up pro-bono by one of their lawyers, he knows it was Sam who did all the work.

He’s the only contact Cas can really think to turn to now, nauseous with what he knows is being done at the Shurley center, and what is being done to Dean.

Drafting a new email, he starts typing furiously, driven by helpless distress.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Dear Mr. Wesson,

I hope it is not inappropriate for me to reach out to you again, but you were such an enormous help in settling Claire’s custody dispute last year that your expertise immediately came to mind. I am writing on behalf of a new patient I am seeing at the Shurley Retraining Center in Lawrence, Kansas, a young man suffering from Submission Rejection Syndrome.

I have been given little control over the submissive’s care at the center, and am extremely concerned for his well being. According to his files, he is being physically and sexually assaulted on a daily basis under the guise of “encouraging submission,” and is being deprived of food, clothing, and sleep in a way I believe is severely detrimental to his health.

Some preliminary research on my end has revealed that several of the Shurley center’s submissives have died as a result of their retraining methods over the past few years, and that, if not admitted to the center by a dominant who wants them returned, the center is one of those who sell unclaimed submissives on the open market at the end of their stay.

I fear that my patient will not even make it this far. Besides the fact that the stress of the “treatment” he is undergoing is certainly deteriorating his health, the injuries he has reportedly inflicted on some of the orderlies has resulted in threats to have him put down. Though there is a lengthy process the Shurley Center must undergo before euthenasia could be considered, the very fact that this has been discussed in any way is deeply deeply alarming.

Currently, I have little legal sway over the submissive in question, as he is not in my custody, and I have been allotted limited time to work with him. Is there any legal route I could explore to challenge the young man’s custody, or have the Shurley Center investigated? I would greatly appreciate any advice you may be able to provide.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Castiel Novak

Cas stares at the page after he finishes typing, cursor hovering over the send button, finger hesitant on the mousepad.

He reads back over his email, once, twice, three times, then sighs and puts his head in his hands.

Nothing he’s described here is actually illegal. No laws have been broken by the Shurley Center at all. He’d known that when he’d started typing, but the words had just poured out of him all the same.

The stress of being back in this kind of environment is getting to him. Being back in the training centers, in the midwest as a whole. It reminds him too much of things he doesn’t want to think about, hits him much too close to home. He doesn’t know how to handle it all, the disgust, the despair, the memories that bombard him like showers of guilt.

Rubbing his eyes, he X-es out of the email, resisting the urge before doing so to reread it yet again. It’s not going to tell him any new information, and the injustice of what he’s reporting isn’t going to change its present reality. He knows that intimately well.

I need to get a hold of myself.

He knew what he was walking into when he signed up for this. He’s far from naive about the state of submissive rights in this part of the country, and about how they are routinely treated. Not like he had been, growing up here. He’s far from the sheltered and oblivious child he once was.

It’s not exactly like it’s all sunshine and roses up north where he lives now in Vermont. Submissives have few legal rights when unclaimed, and how much they are allowed to participate in society is completely up to their guardian dominant. But at least submissives are legally recognized as people. At least they can participate in society, go to school, hold jobs, exist in public on their own, as long as their dominant allows it.

Abuse is still rampant, but there is some recourse to be found, at least in the most extreme situations. These are the situations Cas is usually called in to help remedy; The end result of circumstances he does not enjoy learning about, but that at least are at last being intervened in, even if it is sometimes too late.

Cas doesn’t like to think about the times it has been too late. He doesn’t like to think about a lot of things. It makes him too angry, and sad.

Like the fact that the submissives he works with are the lucky ones. Lucky to have a someone report their situation as abusive, lucky to have a sympathetic social worker make the call that it is. Lucky to be admitted to a hospital or service that actually wants to help them, and is willing to work with Cas even if they think his methods are strange and new.

Things are changing for the better. He knows this is true. So many of the hospitals he’s worked with up north have started phasing out their old style retraining programs based almost entirely on his advice. He knows there are people who care about submissives, even if they’re misguided. He knows many of those with more ignorant beliefs are just trying to do their best with no real guide.

But god…it’s hard to believe that sometimes, when he looks at all the misery there is ahead to slog through. It’s hard not to feel crushed by the weight of what he can’t change, and the knowledge of how many people just do not care about the people they’re supposed to look after.

Last year, a relatively popular psychology publication had run a small story on Cas. “The Man Leading The Submissive Psychology Revolution,” the piece had been titled. Cas had cut it out and taped it up in his bedroom, before taking it down less than a month later.

He’d received so much anger after that story had run, despite its limited audience and impact. Along with a dozen angry letters and over 600 hateful emails he hadn’t read, the piece had garnered just enough attention to gain him real enemies in the field. The flood of requests to access his papers seemed to come almost entirely from his detractors, and in the following weeks after the story had been run, it seemed like every medical journal in the country had published studies that sought specifically to discredit his own.

There had even been calls to have his license revoked, under the guise that his methods are abusive to the defiant submissives who “need a firm guiding hand.” That push hadn’t gone anywhere, thankfully, but the whole event left Cas firmly feeling like the interview had done more harm than good.

It had revealed to him what he’d already known: That many “experts” on recovery from submission rejection are no better than the brutes who had caused it, and have little to no interest in understanding the root causes of the syndrome, or the basic functions of how it progresses.

If they did, they’d know their “treatments” are only making it worse, only accelerating its path to its horrible end.

It’s a horrible cycle few dominants are ever compelled to consider in depth, but it is one Cas is intimately familiar with, and has seen up close many times. Mistreatment causes the submissive to become resistant to falling into subspace, as the fear of being vulnerable around those who’d cause them harm takes over. The resistance to falling into subspace causes hormonal dysregulation, as the natural modulation provided by regular deep submission is disrupted. The lack of sufficient hormone production causes symptoms like dizziness, anxiety, and disorientation in the submissive, which the body knows can only be resolved through sufficient domination. As a result, the submissive becomes hypersensitive to dominance and direct orders, as it searches for the regulation that it so desperately needs.

In a better world, no submissive would ever fall past this point. The symptoms of submission hunger would be addressed appropriately by the dominants around the individual. Hypersensitivity to domination would act as the plea for help it is meant to be, and dominants would do the job they were meant to do. They would take control of the submissive in order to care for them, using domination as a tool to restabilize the vulnerable person and allow them to regain their independence.

Submissives…aren’t supposed to be slaves. Not in Cas’s eyes.

To Cas, domination is a tool, a gift he was given in order to support submissives in navigating the world with autonomy. To Cas, the goal of domination is not to crush a submissive’s will but to strengthen it- To meet their needs of release and relief so they can then move within their lives unburdened.

His opinion is not the majority one.

Instead of understanding that hypersensitivity to domination requires a much gentler touch to handle, most dominants seem to only see it as a natural state for an uncooperative submissive to be in, the inevitable divine punishment for being resistant to subspace to begin with. Whatever mistreatment caused the submissive to become resistant to subspace to start with is usually inflicted in even harsher ways, as the submissive’s ability to resist or say no is worn down. This in turn, of course, causes the submissive to become even more closed off and afraid, making it even harder to enter subspace, which in turn makes it even harder for them to resist orders, which makes it easier still for the mistreatment to escalate.

General submission hunger becomes Submission Rejection Syndrome. The submissive loses their ability to think clearly, to communicate verbally, and falls completely under the control of dominant orders like someone cursed in a fairytale. Having had their increasingly unwilling submission so consistently taken advantage of, the submissive now associates any and all submissive instincts with fear and pain, making it impossible for the trust falling into subspace requires to bloom.

The inability of the submissive to then enter the state required to produce diophendramine leads to increasingly physical symptoms, which, if left untreated for long enough, becomes acute organ failure and eventually, death.

Starved of their own submission on a biological level, it’s a horrible, tortuous cycle which Cas has made a career out of breaking. But his own failures haunt him, as do the millions of submissives he will never be able to see. There are days when he feels so alone, in his field, in the world, knowing how much he can’t change.

A new email chimes into his mailbox as he stares blankly at it, the confirmation of his appointment time with Dean tomorrow at the Shurley center.

The tiny noise and slight movement startles him deeply, and he jumps, dragged back to reality.

I’m doing it again, he realizes. Letting his despair get the best of him. Letting it cave in his chest and turn him immobile.

“Damn it,” he mutters, angry at himself. He still has work to do. He still has Dean to treat tomorrow, no matter how existentially despairing Cas feels about the young man’s circumstances.

He’d promised himself that he would stop doing this. That he’d stop letting it get in the way of his work, at least.

He’d promised himself that a long time ago. He’s yet to keep from breaking it, over and over.

“Fuck,” he says, a little louder, and he shuts the computer in front of him abruptly, like it's the source of his pain.

The sudden disappearance of the screen leaves his eyes struggling to adjust to the lack of light in the room, and he only realizes then how long he’s been sitting here, that the sun has mostly gone down.

Sighing, he pushes his laptop aside, and leans over to turn on the bedside lamp. Its glow is small and lonely, and he feels small and lonely himself.

His apartment feels too quiet, all of a sudden, and too big. He doesn’t know why he felt so optimistic, when renting it, that he’d convince the center to release Dean to him.

He doesn’t feel very optimistic now.

On the bed, Cas’s facedown phone buzzes, screen lighting up and illuminating a slight glow around its dark form. Looking at it in surprise, Cas picks it up and flips it over quickly, reading the notification that has appeared on the screen.

It’s from Jody.

You know, Claire is almost an adult. If you have questions, you should probably just ask her them yourself.

Cas blinks down at the message, overly bright in the darkness. His own hand looks strange with light and shadow as it holds the device, and Cas opens it, unsure how to respond.

He doesn’t, in the end, moving to turn off the bedside lamp, leaving the phone on the table while he goes to get ready for bed.

The predator lying in wait under the guise of tomorrow seems to watch him from outside of time, and Cas eventually falls asleep dreaming of green eyes that see him from every point in space.

Chapter Text

Dean starts screaming at the top of his lungs when he’s brought in to meet Cas in his office.

It’s a horrible noise, ragged and raw and terrified, and Cas jumps up from his chair when it slams like a train into his ears. Sure that the two orderlies dragging the submissive into the room are doing something terrible to hurt him, he scans the struggling young man in panic, heart pounding like a pulse in his throat.

But the orderlies aren’t doing anything to Dean, besides yanking him inside far too roughly, holding his body fast as it screeches and kicks and flails.

“Let him go!” Cas demands on instinct, affronted by the careless treatment.

The men ignore him, but he realizes a moment later that it’s an ill advised order all the same, when Dean manages to knee one of the guards hard in the groin and make a break for it.

He only makes it a few steps before the other orderly catches him again, grabbing him around his waist and pulling him backwards. Dean responds by screaming louder, and flinging his head back so hard that Cas hears a crack as it slams into the man’s face.

There’s a shout, and Cas sees blood pouring out of the guard’s nose, and it’s this that finally slaps him out of his shocked stupor.

“Dean, stop,” he orders, voice loud and dominant. He has to yell to be heard over the sound of all the shouting and cursing, over the chaos that had suddenly come through his door.

But he’s heard, he’s definitely heard, which is why Cas is almost rendered speechless when a moment later the sub swings around and socks the same orderly in the face.

He shrieks as he does it, a high-pitched, animalistic noise, so hysterically desperate that it makes Cas think of someone throwing themselves off a bridge. He throws the punch like a reflex, like he’s in excruciating pain, like the feeling of being dominated is comparable to being burned alive.

It’s so startlingly impossible to see that Cas claps a hand over his mouth in shock, all thoughts of therapy and professionalism evaporating from his mind as he watches reality warp before him.

It’s like watching that same person throwing themselves off a bridge suddenly start flying instead of falling. It’s like watching Niagara Falls pouring upwards, gravity forgotten on the ground.

It’s equally impossible, should be equally impossible, for a submissive this far gone to break free of an order like that. It’s insane, like watching someone punch through a brick wall, the blow landed on the guard in defiance of Cas’s demand requiring an equal amount of willpower and sheer strength.

The dark haired orderly stumbles back with a grunt, and Cas gapes, struck dumb as the half-dead submissive wrenches out of the man’s grasp.

“No!” he screams, eyes wild, chest heaving, as he bolts towards the still-open door.

He only makes it a few steps before the other, light-haired orderly makes a dive for it, slamming it shut just before the sub can reach it.

Suddenly finding himself trapped between two large threatening men, Dean stumbles back a few steps, blind panic transparent on his face.

“You bitch!” the dark haired one shouts, and Dean grabs the potted plant off the coffee table and hurls it with a raw screech at the man’s head.

The man lurches out of the way, and the plant shatters into nothing against the opposite wall, and Dean makes a dive for the desk lamp.

It’s Cas, this time, that he makes to throw the object at, and Cas feels his adrenalin spike as he gets ready to duck.

But then, as he watches, something seems to happen, as the boy’s bruised fingers tense around the ceramic base.

He seems to hesitate, seems to sort of- freeze, body trembling with strain, and Cas remembers that this impossible, berserker-state man in front of him is just a submissive driven out of his mind with fear.

A domination-starved submissive who he’d just given an order to, an order that should be- that is- impossible to resist.

He’s fighting it as hard as he can, harder than anyone else would ever be able to, but it’s wearing on him, the simple demand to stop pushing into his willpower second by second.

He can’t throw it at me, Cas realizes, at the same moment that Dean seems to, as the boy bursts into helpless, terrified tears.

The strain resisting seems to have taken on him is written all over his body, which is trembling with the effort of doing anything but collapsing pliantly to the ground. But this isn’t the first order he’s fought so wildly today, Cas realizes, as the moment of frozen misery allows him to see Dean clearly for the first time.

Cas remembers suddenly that Dean has spent seven hours already with dominants who have pushed him around and beaten him, has spent seven hours replaying scenes like this, trying desperately to push back against horrible orders he will inevitably have to follow.

The evidence of what had been done to him as a result of that is written all over his skin, new purpling bruises blooming over older green ones, still weeping wounds dripping across those just barely starting to heal.

He’s still naked, and Cas can see everything, from the blood on his thighs to the scratches on his genitals, to the bite marks that violently grace his pink nipples.

There are streaks of dried semen on his face and chest and hair, Cas notices for the first time, and his eyes are a deep sunken red that couldn’t have come from the tears he’d just started producing in despair.

He’s been sobbing all day, Cas realizes, punched in the gut by the shattered image of the beautiful submissive before him. He’s been sobbing straight through for months, maybe years.

Fighting day in and day out as he’s tortured, screaming and kicking against what he so desperately needs.

Because he’s not going to get it here, in any way that he should.

It’s heartbreaking, it’s heartbreaking, what this brave young man has been turned into, that he’s been driven so out of his mind with fear and pain that he’s become nothing but a reflexive kick. It’s horrific, how this boy with such a brilliant soul has been reduced to throwing potted plants from the corner.

But it’s still breathtaking, in its own way, this strength that seems to simply have no breaking point, this courage that seems to know nothing but how to endure. Even now, crying and frozen against Cas’s dominance, Dean doesn’t give in, arms still up and straining like he’s still trying to throw the lamp at his enemy.

No matter how much bigger and stronger that enemy may be. No matter how certain he is to lose.

The willpower in this man burns more brilliantly than the sun does, and will take longer than all the stars to burn out. There is more life in his little finger than most people have in their whole bodies, and Cas finds himself wanting nothing more than to see that life as it should be, healthy and happy and strong.

Who could he be, if that stunning strength was cherished like it should be, instead of stomped on, day after day after day? What could he do with that bravery, that courage, if he wasn’t using every ounce of it to stay clinging to life?

Perhaps it’s the fact that even in the face of the sub’s violence, Cas hasn’t given him any more orders to fight against, hasn’t berated him with waves and waves of domination until even Dean’s will had been snuffed out. Perhaps it's just that it’s suddenly too quiet in the room, and Dean is frightened, and Cas is a dominant who hadn’t yet caused him harm.

But in the suspended moment where they all find the limit of what Dean can push through, the young man’s gaze stops avoiding Cas’s face. He makes eye contact suddenly, directly and unambiguously, tears tumbling down his flushed cheeks like rain.

Shoulders shaking with sobs of panic and fear, there’s no defiance in the look, and maybe that’s what allows it at all.

Because it’s not another challenge that he can’t possibly hope to win. It’s a plea, clear as day, lost and sad and full of despair. It’s a hopeless appeal to the only dominant who hasn’t hurt him yet, as he realizes once again that he’s trapped.

Cas’s order to stop won’t let him erratically lash out at him in violence, and it’s obvious that he doesn’t know what else to do.

Help me, the eyes seem to beg, and Cas feels his own eyes start to sting, heart reaching out across the room with open arms.

I will, Cas promises. You’re not alone anymore.

I’ll see you healed and happy if it’s the last thing that I do.

Then the blond orderly blocking the door scoffs, and the moment is shattered. Frenzied aggression falls down back over Dean’s face like a shutter, and he swings around wildly and launches the lamp in the man’s direction with a scream.

The man throws his hands up, but the lamp lands nowhere near his head, shattering with a dramatic shower of ceramic and glass on the floor several feet to the right.

It’s an obvious tell, that Dean’s exhausted willpower is being worn down, that the order to stop isn’t something he’d managed to push through, just push off, for a few seconds or minutes.

I was right, Cas thinks, with a mix of sadness and relief, He’s a miracle of survival, but not defiance. He’s just like every other sub with SRJ. He’s lost his ability to reject orders completely.

And he knows it, judging by the despair on his face.

So do the orderlies, if the sickly satisfied way the blond one is smiling at Dean is anything to go by.

Cas wonders how often they take advantage of Dean, undesignated as they are. He wonders how often they wait around for a dominant to give an order like stop, just so they can then come in for the kill while Dean doesn’t have the power to fight back.

Domination is something that submissives are particularly vulnerable to, but all kinds of people are horrible.

Dean knows this better than anyone, and he starts crying harder, knowing he’s given himself away. Knowing he’s buckling under the pressure of the need to submit, with three frightening men around him ready to pounce.

Seeing his own fate in the curve of the blonde guard’s smile seems to end up being the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Burying his face in his hands, Dean stands crying for only a moment before his knees finally buckle as he gives in. Collapsing down to the ground among the sharp shards of ceramic, Dean curls up into a ball and flings his arms over his head, half hiding, half bracing for some inevitable blow.

There seems to be no relief in the submission, even underneath the fear, no release of tension as he finally gives in to what he needs. It’s disturbing to watch, almost wrong in a way that has his dominant instincts rearing back in alarm, as he himself receives no feedback that his dominance soothed the distressed sub at all.

It probably didn’t, Cas thinks, remembering the strange aspect to Dean’s hormonal graph.

Hypersensitive as he is at this point in his illness, his submission still seems to result in almost no sertranialine production, counterintuitive as it may be.

No wonder he fights everything tooth and nail. He doesn’t even get a momentary, shallow kind of relief from non-subspace submission. His symptoms of withdrawal must be constant, and giving in brings nothing but even more pain.

This isn’t good, though. Not only for Dean, but for Cas and his plan to treat the boy.

No one’s going to expect him to get Dean into subspace on day one, but he’s banking on coaxing out higher levels of sertranialine production in order to justify more time with his patient.

But, then, what did he expect with whatever the hell all that just was? Dean may have finally collapsed with exhaustion, but this is reluctant submission if he’s ever seen it.

He hasn’t had the opportunity yet to be gentle with Dean at all. And nearly a quarter of his hour is already up.

“Get out,” he says flatly, addressing the two orderlies. They look over in surprise at his tone.

Usually Cas would be embarrassed. Usually he wouldn’t speak to people like that at all.

And maybe he’s misreading the situation, and should be more polite.

But he hadn’t liked the way these men were handling Dean, no matter how volatile he was. He doesn’t like how the blond one smiled at Dean’s misery, and how the dark-haired one had called Dean a bitch.

He doesn’t think he’s misreading the situation.

“I said get out,” he says, pouring dominance into his voice. It doesn’t work on the undesignated, but it sure can sound threatening, and he’s getting sick of these two hovering around.

What he doesn’t expect is to hear a whimper from the floor in response, and to look down to see Dean struggling to push himself up on his arms.

For a moment, he doesn’t understand what the boy is doing, wondering warily as the orderlies leave if he’s gearing up to start throwing things again.

Might have dismissed them too soon, he thinks nervously, wondering if he really should have been more polite, just for the sake of his own safety.

But as the door shuts behind the men, Dean doesn’t jump up and lunge at him again. He looks truly exhausted, like all the fight has gone out of him, and Cas thinks he must have been running entirely on adrenalin, to be so completely unable to move a few minutes after throwing a plant at the wall.

But he looks, now, like…well, death, as much as Cas hates to think it. His face is white, and his arms tremble as they struggle to hold up his weight. He looks confused, and almost- hurt, like a kicked puppy, and it’s that that lets Cas understand what’s going on.

He thinks I was talking to him. He thinks I told him to get out.

And instead of fighting it again, this time he’s just obeying, just trying to drag himself up off the floor to obediently stumble back towards his isolated prison.

Because he doesn’t have the energy to fight back anymore, because he’s a starved submissive who in the end just wants to be good. Because his therapists regularly give him tasks that are impossible to achieve and then punish him for failing to please.

Cas thinks about the list of dislikes in Dean’s file. He thinks about how four of the seven things listed had had to do with being disapproved of.

He thinks he’s being rejected, Cas realizes, blinking down at the despondent boy on the floor.

And he doesn’t fight it, when he’s discarded, doesn’t fight what he sees as the end result of being bad.

Because he just wants to please Cas, just wants to please someone, but thinks the most pleasing thing he can do is go away.

Cas feels his heart burst in his chest, warmth and pain blooming in equal amounts for the beaten down miracle in front of him. Stepping over the pieces of glass around them both, Cas crouches carefully down besides Dean, who’s still trying to get up from the ground.

The boy flinches when he comes, and Cas wants to steal him away from this place, wants to tuck him inside himself where no one can ever cause him hurt ever again.

“Aren’t you a good boy,” Cas breathes, amazed and proud, feeling affection spilling out from inside him.

It grows stronger in his chest, as does the pain, when he sees how the boy freezes before him.

He doesn’t move, for a moment, doesn’t seem to even breathe, too stunned by what he’s just been called, too stupefied by the experience of being spoken to gently. He stares blankly at the ground, as paralyzed as if there were a viper in front of him, like he’s afraid that moving a single muscle might shatter the tentative thread tying Cas’s words to reality.

It hurts to see, that Dean is so beaten down, so completely ashamed of himself that he has no belief at all that what Cas just said could be real.

Hasn’t anyone ever called you good before? Cas wonders, but deep down he already knows the answer, confirmed by the complete disbelief and confusion in Dean’s eyes when the boy glances hesitantly up at him.

The submissive doesn’t have the courage, or ability, to speak, but he does shake his head, just very quickly once. It’s a timid, frightened movement, almost imperceptible in how small it is, but Cas knows he didn’t imagine it because of how Dean flinches after he does it. Clearly expecting to be hit for disagreeing, even over something so sad, it takes a few moments and several anticipatory twitches of pain before Dean seems to realize he won’t be slapped.

His big green eyes look back up at Cas through his lashes, searching, huge and confused. He doesn’t seem to remember that making eye contact should be frightening, until Cas smiles, and his gaze skitters shyly away.

“It’s true,” Cas confirms, and Dean’s brows draw together, baffled. “You thought I meant for you to leave, right?”

Dean nods nervously, confirming what Cas had suspected, and he tries to project warmth rather than sadness as he clarifies what he had meant.

“I didn’t want you to leave, just them,” he says kindly. “I’m very happy you’re here with me, Dean. And I’m very pleased with you for being such a good boy, trying to follow my orders when they weren’t even meant for you. You’re such a good boy for that.”

As Cas watches, about sixteen different emotions flicker over Dean’s face in the next second. Shock, confusion, denial, hope, fear, and a dozen others he can’t recognize that quickly.

Eventually, he settles on the obvious scrunched up expression of someone trying very hard not to cry.

He looks completely lost, like he has no idea what’s happening at all, and like he’s rapidly approaching another breaking point, spurred by the overwhelming experience of not being berated.

It makes Cas want to cry himself, seeing how sensitive Dean is to gentle domination, how easily he is coaxed into obedience and trust through just the slightest hint of affection.

The people he’s belonged to are monsters, he thinks, disgusted, mishandling such an easily dominated young man to the point that he’s driven to reflexive violence.

Because Dean is clearly nothing like Naomi had insisted, nothing like the paperwork had implied. He has an outstanding willpower, yes, but he’s clearly not defiant at all, is clearly aching for the slightest excuse to do whatever he’s told.

He’s just terrified out of his mind. He’s just never had anyone ever tell him that he’d done well.

Cas has to swallow around a huge lump in his throat. He puts his hand out, very slowly, mostly as an excuse to keep from speaking while he’s still sure his voice will break.

Dean shies away from it, initially, though Cas is moving it inch by inch as to show he doesn’t intend to cause harm. But the young man still looks frightened, and scoots backwards in a way that has Cas worrying he’s going to cut himself on the ceramic.

So he stops moving his hand, but doesn’t drop it, leaving it hovering in the air for the young man to come towards if he wishes.

He remembers how the patient notes had listed being held and being touched as things Dean adores. He remembers how that awful treatment description had implied that Dean will do all manner of terrible things in the hopes of his hair being petted.

Dean stares at his hand uncertainly, eyes still red and vulnerable and confused. After a moment passes, though, he crawls back towards Cas, and Cas waits for him to press his head into the waiting palm.

Instead, Dean pauses with his face a few inches from Cas’s fingers. He shoots Cas a shy, nervous look, like he’s still not quite sure if what he’s doing is right and is looking for some confirmation.

Cas smiles at him, and Dean lowers his eyes, and sucks the tip of one of the fingers into his mouth.

“Oh,” Cas breathes, startled.

It’s such a deeply submissive gesture that even Cas is surprised by it, coming from a young man who’d tried to throw a lamp at his head maybe five minutes ago. He pulls his hand away slowly, not wanting to allow Dean to sway this interaction in that direction, but also not wanting him to feel rejected.

“You want to please me very badly, don’t you, Dean,” he says softly.

The words come out his mouth without thought of what effect they might have on the submissive, a simple observation of fact that he can’t help but articulate, because it so completely goes against what he’d been repeatedly told.

But Dean’s face screws up further at the remark, looking painfully and shamefully seen.

It must feel humiliating to him, to have his natural urge to submit articulated, when it’s been nothing but discarded and rejected over and over and over.

What recourse has he had to protect himself, when ridiculed for failing to please, except to pretend that had never been his intention at all?

Tears leak from the young man’s already swollen eyes, and there’s a moment of true vulnerability on his face before he ducks his head in distress and shakes his head.

“No?” Cas asks, knowing that it’s a lie.

Dean does too, obviously, and he knows the truth has been caught. But he doesn’t know what else to fall back on, exposed like this, so he just wipes at his eyes and shakes his head again.

Half-heartedly, Dean sends a scowl in Cas’s general direction, and bars his teeth as if to say stay away. But it’s an underwhelming performance, weak and confused, in comparison to the fury he’d displayed before.

He doesn’t hate me anymore, Cas knows. It had been that easy. A few words of praise, and Dean had already melted to putty in his hands.

He’s not fooling himself, thinking this will be easy now, or that Dean’s walls won’t come back up as soon as he makes a misstep. But they’ll be just as easy to bring down again, just as easy to walk through. Dean has already shown him where the gate is, and given him the key.

It’s just kindness. Just an ability to stay calm when the submissive lashes out in fear, and a willingness to heap positive words and touch on him when he lets go.

Cas is more than willing. He’s more than willing to do that, for Dean. The poor thing deserves it, deserves much better than that.

Reaching his hand out again, Dean snaps his teeth at him, as if trying to remind the dominant that he bites. But again, his heart isn’t in the display, and his mask of anger falters a moment later, panic and apology shuttering over his face as he ducks his head and waits for Cas’s judgment.

It’s not being slapped that he’s worried about anymore, Cas can tell. He’s scared his aggression might cause Cas to stop being nice to him, or worse, prompt him to leave.

“It’s alright, sweetheart,” Cas reassures, and though Dean cringes, he now lets the hand approach him.

Cas places it in Dean’s unwashed, semen-crusted hair, unafraid of touching the mess. It’s not Dean’s fault, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated like a pariah because of it. He’ll be kept clean when Cas finally gets custody of him.

The boy keens when he feels Cas’s touch against his scalp, gentle and undemanding and good. His eyes flutter shut as Cas moves his fingers through the boy’s hair, petting him and gently massaging his skin.

“There’s a good boy,” Cas says warmly, and the silent tears on Dean’s face fall faster. “You’re gonna be a good boy for me, right, Dean?”

The submissive’s shoulder’s shake, and he doesn’t respond, even by nodding or shaking his head.

Cas can’t tell if he doesn’t believe he can be good, or if he’s just so far gone that he doesn’t even really understand what Cas is saying.

He’s surprisingly clear minded, for a submissive 24 years into submission rejection, but that doesn’t mean his thinking isn’t affected at all. It obviously is, considering his lack of verbal responses thus far, and obviously poor decision making skills.

It’s just a shame that he’s clearly being punished for his symptoms, which he doesn’t have control over at all. It’s just so unfair, that he’s being treated like he’s intentionally disobedient, when he’s obviously just been suffering without end.

You’ve been so horribly mishandled, Cas thinks mournfully, watching the submissive unconsciously push his head against the hand in his hair, begging without words for more touch.

The cruelty and incompetence of this center is simply outstanding. They speak of Dean like he’s a rebellious, untameable spirit, when actually, he might be one of the most submissive patients Cas has ever worked with.

All it takes is a few gentle words, and he’s docile. All it takes is for there to be any possibility of him achieving what he wants, which is to please.

Naomi had described Dean as nearly unbreakable. But Dean isn’t unbreakable because he’s so deeply defiant. He’s unbreakable because he doesn’t need to be broken. He’ll already do whatever anyone wants him to do, if he’s shown that he is, in fact, wanted.

But the dominants here just beat and bully him without reason, without giving him a way to make them happy. They give him tasks he can’t complete and dangle promises of kindness just out of reach forever, like a donkey with a carrot on a stick. They make him a Sisiphus and then get mad when he stops pushing the boulder uphill, taking his despair at the knowledge that he will never reach the top as proof as his own incorrigible will.

Is he even suffering from starvation of submission? Or is he just starved of the rewards of it, of the confirmation of knowing he’s done well?

If it’s the latter, prying Dean from the grip of the center might be easier than he had thought. Dean is obviously responding to him with incredible ease, and he can’t help but be hopeful that the behavior he’s seeing now is going to translate into high sertranialine levels right away.

Finding a way to get Dean into subspace will still be an uphill battle, but the prerequisite issue of Dean’s general willingness to submit seems somehow already close to solved.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, Cas considers. After all, Dean is basking in his affection right now, but it’s his willingness to follow directions that might make or break his sertranialine levels. It’s still submission, not kindness, that allows that to be produced, in the end.

“Dean,” he says very quietly, not wanting to break the state of relief that Dean has fallen into. “You’re being a very good boy for me right now.”

Dean huffs, and makes no move to wipe at his tears, even as Cas’s hand comes down to brush at his wet cheek.

He just shudders at the pleasure of hearing praise given to him, and turns his face slightly to kiss Cas’s palm. It’s such a sweet gesture that it sends a burst of fondness pulsing out from inside Cas’s chest, and he can feel his attachment and care for this young man growing strong within his heart already.

God, I hope I can help him. God, I hope that this works.

“I’m worried about us sitting on the floor here, though,” he says carefully, keeping the warmth transparent in his voice. “Especially you, with your bare skin.”

Dean doesn’t respond again, and Cas feels a flicker of doubt in his chest, as he wonders again if the submissive is responding primarily to his tone of voice.

If he doesn’t understand my speech almost at all, it will be a much longer battle to coax him into responding to my orders.

And though a longer battle may be inevitable for Dean’s overall treatment, it’s not something he wants to wait for to start seeing significant improvement at all.

Between Dean’s sickness and the way he’s being treated here at the center, time is not on their side. Waiting a month to see an increase in sertranialine production is not something they have the luxury of doing.

He needs to get Dean out of here fast.

“We’re among a bit of a mess, sweetheart. Usually I wouldn’t mind. But I don’t want the ceramic to cut you,” he continues.

The submissive tenses, which isn’t the reaction he wants, but is nonetheless a good sign that he’s understanding most of what’s being said.

“You’re not in trouble,” Cas says quickly. “I don’t mind that the lamp was broken. There’s too much clutter in here anyway, in my opinion.”

He’d hoped to sidestep the issue of Dean breaking the lamp and the potted plant all together, not wanting to remind the submissive and send him into a panic. But it seems he can’t entirely disconnect the mess around them to what had happened when the orderlies had brought the boy in, so he reassures the young man as directly as he can without triggering a full-blown meltdown.

I don’t mind that the lamp was broken.

Passive voice. Avoid any direct accusations or correlations between negative behavior and the submissive unless it’s something you plan on addressing and correcting directly.

Otherwise it’s too easy for fragile submissives to panic about misbehaviors that are truthfully out of their control.

It seems to work in this case, as, while Dean still seems somewhat tense, his shoulders relax a fraction, and he doesn’t spiral like Cas had feared.

“Nonetheless, I would like your help in cleaning up, my dear. Can you…” Cas stops himself. Neglected submissive. He can’t speak the way he would to anyone else.

“I want you to pick up the shards, and put them into the wastebasket behind you,” he says, gently but firmly, pushing domination into his voice. “Be very careful not to cut yourself. Leave the pieces smaller than your thumbnail on the floor, and I’ll sweep them up later. Do you understand, Dean?”

He waits with bated breath for Dean’s response.

Because he doesn’t know, truthfully, if Dean will understand, especially such a complex, multi-stepped order. And he doesn’t know, if Dean does understand, if he will follow it. The half-hearted scowling and snap at his fingers suggests that the young man is still very confused, very fragile, when it comes to allowing himself to submit. He might fall back on his usual reflexive defiance, in the face of a true order from a dominant, in some effort to pretend that it isn’t what he wants, or to protect himself from what he may believe is inevitable failure.

But it seems Cas’s initial gentleness has already imbued Dean with the hope that it might, if he’s very very good and careful, translate to praise and reward for following directions. His kindness has already sparked in Dean the hope, if not the belief, that there might be some possibility of success.

He opens his eyes slowly, face still half pushed into Cas’s hand. His movement is slow, and his pupils are blown, just a tiny bit, but Cas’s heart jumps when he sees it, because it is such a good sign.

Is it possible that Dean’s limited responses to his words wasn’t a sign of lack of comprehension at all? Is it possible that Dean, 30 minutes after meeting him, could already be experiencing the very edges of pre-subspace submission.

Cas feels something white and bright shoot through him as he watches Dean blink sleepily a few times, clearing his eyes as if waking up from a trance. It’s nothing like true subpace of course, the boy already straightening up, awareness already sharpening in his eyes, but it still sends the same adrenalin rush through Cas that he’d felt earlier when Dean had come screaming through the door.

But it’s excitement, and disbelief, that has Cas’s pulse quickening this time around, watching the dreamlike expression clear from Dean’s face.

He could be wrong, of course- it’s such a light, light level of the behaviors usually associated with it. But if he’s right, if Dean is leaning towards that already…

This is going so much better than he’d hoped.

“Do you understand, Dean?” he asks again, trying to maintain his calm demeanor and not let his excitement leak through his voice. “Do you want me to repeat the directions?”

If he was edging towards subspace, his long, multi-step order might have been unclear, for an entirely different reason than symptoms of Submissive Rejection Syndrome.

He almost hopes Dean does need clarification, because it might come closer to confirming what Cas has started to suspect, and he holds his breath as Dean blinks again, slowly, and draws his eyebrows together like he’s trying to think.

Like he’s trying to identify if he does need Cas to repeat the directions. Like he’s trying to pull the words into true consciousness, as if remembering something from a dream.

But after a moment, Dean shakes his head, and starts picking up the ceramic pieces in front of him.

Cas tries not to feel disappointed. It was a long shot, that Dean could already have been brought down enough to experience the cognitive disconnect of subspace and consciousness. With such light symptoms displayed, he shouldn’t have expected that at all.

The fact that Dean, after a moment to clear his mind, didn’t need help remembering what had just been said doesn’t mean for certain that Cas is entirely wrong in his assessment that some light pre-subspace state had just occurred.

And, even if Cas is wrong, it doesn’t mean the progress Dean has already made today isn’t amazing. Even if the signs of subspace he thinks he saw are just a figment of his imagination, Dean is still responding much better to Cas’s general domination than Cas had dared ever hope for.

“I’m going to be over on the couch, Dean, alright?” he tells the young man, who nods as he collects the pottery from around him. “You just come over when you’re finished. You’re being such a good boy, following my directions.”

Dean freezes when Cas says this, and curls into himself shyly. He obviously didn’t expect to receive praise even before finishing the task, just for attempting it, and Cas smiles at him, even though the lowered eyes can’t see it.

You’ll be receiving much more than that with me, Dean, he promises in his mind. I’m going to flood you with happiness.

He goes to sit on the couch then, and wait for the young man to complete the task. Usually, Cas would be helping, but it’s important during treatment for the submissive to be allowed to serve, and to not blur the lines of what that means in a given order.

It’s too easy for neglected submissives to interpret help as failure to complete the task themselves.

So he just crosses his legs and watches as Dean works, considering the way the submissive moves, the way he keeps his head lowered.

He’s crawling, though Cas hadn’t told him to do that. But it’s probably what he’s accustomed to here, and possibly what he was accustomed to wherever he’d come from before. Cas doesn’t mind submissives crawling, but he thinks it’s a ridiculous thing to expect of anyone all the time, especially when they’re trying to do regular chores and work.

But he isn’t going to say anything to Dean about it right now, knowing the young man could interpret the suggestion that he stand up as a scolding. And besides, he doesn’t know that it isn’t more comfortable for Dean to crawl right now, both in terms of his submission and his literal physical state.

Because, to be frank, the poor thing is a wreck. Skinny and covered in bruises and welts, Cas feels his heart clench watching him as he moves among the shattered pieces. The blood in between his legs reminds Cas of what the unfortunate submissive is being put through every day, and another reason he might have to avoid walking.

He wants to clean the submissive up as best he can, and tend to the myriad of injuries on his body. But Naomi and the head director had expressly forbidden it, saying that Dean needed to suffer the “consequences of his actions.”

“You aren’t to interfere in Dean’s treatment from his other therapists,” he’d been told sternly. “No feeding, no pain medication, no letting him sleep.”

He’d been given a similar refrain in regards to the gifts he’d brought for Dean, like blankets and clothes, which had been confiscated upon his arrival today.

Normally, Cas would have no issue ignoring the extremely ill-advised directions of people like Naomi Shurley. But he’d been too concerned about being fired immediately if he went against their demands right away, knowing he’d already stretched their patience by insisting on meeting Dean in a conference room rather than that steril, isolated chamber and insisting on having him brought unbound.

So he’d left his gifts at the front desk and hadn’t attempted to smuggle in any pain killers, praying that he’d make enough progress with Dean in the first few days to have those restrictive policies changed.

He’s hopeful that this might happen even sooner than expected now, watching Dean collect the last shards from underneath the display case.

There’s no way this won’t be reflected in his hormone levels. There’s no way Naomi will be able to deny that I should be given more time and control.

He reminds himself to ask her today when Dean’s next bloodwork will be drawn. He’s almost completely convinced now that his authority here will rise the moment the statistics come back.

Dean finishes his task, dumping the last ceramic pieces into the small wastebasket by the wall. As Cas watches, he lifts the basket and holds it in his arms, shuffling over to the couch on only his knees.

It’s not a movement that’s expected, but also not one he does anything to stop. He figures Dean wants to show him the result of his completed task, likely uncertain if he will be praised without providing the proof to Cas directly.

It’s far from necessary, of course, because Cas had literally watched him clean up the mess, and can see that there aren’t any more pieces on the floor. But he supposes Dean is not used to being trusted when it comes to following orders, nor is he used to being acknowledged when he tries. So Cas looks into the basket patiently when Dean presents it to him from the ground with his head ducked, smiling and nodding at the contents even though the submissive again is too curled up to see the reaction.

Kneeling before him with the basket raised like an offering, he’s a pitiful sight, and Cas promises himself that he’ll see this beautiful, ravaged submission the way it should be one day, translated through safety and happiness.

That he’ll see this beautiful, ravaged young man the same way. Not cowering from the ground in fear of being slapped for doing his best, but smiling up at him, secure in the knowledge that he’ll be appreciated.

“You did a very good job, Dean,” Cas says earnestly, letting dominant praise fill his voice. “You’ve done such a good job, been such a good boy. Thank you so much for working so hard.”

Reaching his hand out, he passes over the basket of broken ceramics to touch Dean’s hair again, intending to reassure him, and reward him for his obedience.

To his surprise, though, Dean jerks away from his hand, pulling the basket back and almost hiding behind it.

Cas’s eyebrows raise, and he leans further forward, concern now overtaking his calm.

“Dean?” he asks, wary. “Dean, it’s alright. You did well!”

Dean makes a choked noise of distress, and shakes his head.

At least, Cas thinks he shakes his head. He can’t see, from how Dean is covering himself with the raised basket. His hands are tense, though, where they grip it, and his body is ducked too low, like he’s afraid.

Firmly, Cas takes it by the edge and pries it from Dean’s grip, needing to see what’s going on behind it.

Dean resists for only a moment before he gives in, allowing Cas to take the basket and place it beside him on the ground. But it doesn’t help much with letting Cas see Dean at all, because in the same instant that the basket leaves him, Dean whimpers and flings his arms up in front of his face.

He’s shaking, and cringing like he’s waiting to be kicked away, and Cas finds himself wanting to cry again at how acute the young man’s fear is.

Compulsive belief in rejection, Cas thinks, and while it isn’t exactly unexpected in Dean considering his history, Cas can’t lie and say he isn’t surprised.

He knows Dean has been trained to believe he will always fail at the tasks he’s given, but it doesn’t seem to have presented this way in the boy for years. Usually, Dean screams and kicks trying to fight off orders he thinks he will inevitably fail at, rather than attempting them and then waiting to be punished.

It’s strange, because he would have expected Dean to exhibit the same behavior when he’d been given his task, if he had thought all along there’d be no hope of success. Cas had thought the unique experience of being treated gently had at least confused Dean enough into thinking the pattern had been broken, into thinking that he might be deemed as pleasing for following orders if only because Cas seemed so strange.

Cas would only predict this behavior if Dean had actually thought he could succeed, and then hadn’t. He would only expect such unhappiness if Dean had actually failed some way in his task.

But he hadn’t, as shown by the basket of shards and the clear floor behind the young man. He’d executed the simple task perfectly, and should be at least hopeful that this will be recognized.

Unless….

Cas considers the miserable boy in front of him, eyes narrowing on Dean’s raised arms, and especially his clenched fists.

“Dean, can I see your hands?”

Dean jerks, and lets out a sob through clenched teeth. He’s stopped crying, but he’s obviously about to again. Cas makes a mental note to give him water before he goes.

The submissive doesn’t move at Cas’s request, just bows lower, like he knows he’s being bad.

Like he knows he’s cornered and doesn’t see the point in trying to be good now, since he’s already failed at something bigger.

Cas’s grief grows.

“Dean, show me your hands,” he rephrases. But he says it very gently, not sternly at all.

The last thing Dean needs is to feel like he’s being reprimanded. To feel like his fear is his fault.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Dean starts crying again right away. It’s a miserable sight, complete despair on display, hope crushed the moment it started to grow.

His hand shakes as he displays it, guilty like it’s a murder confession, and Dean cringes immediatly after opening his fingers, waiting to be instantly hit.

But Cas doesn’t hit him, of course, just takes the hand softly in his own and pulls it in closer for inspection.

As he suspected, there’s a small cut on the submissive’s palm, just barely starting to bleed.

Cas sighs, and leans forward to give it a light kiss. Dean jerks, and shudders in fear.

Be very careful not to cut yourself, he’d told him.

He should have known this was how Dean would react.

“Did you get a cut, sweetheart?” he asks the boy rhetorically.

Anxiously, Dean tugs his hand away, and doesn’t respond.

Curling his hurt fist to his chest, he looks to the side with a mix of shame and fright, shoulders shaking in silent despair as unhappiness comes leaking out of his eyes.

He’s obviously waiting to be berated. He obviously thinks that he’s, yet again, failed.

And it’s so much worse, clearly, than if Cas were Michael or Gordon, who give him tasks over and over that he can’t succeed at. He clearly hoped that he would succeed here, clearly had actually let himself try, for the first time in who knows how long.

Years, Cas thinks, sorrowsick and pale. Years and years and years.

Cas can’t stand it, and without thinking at all he reaches out to the young man in front of him, clearly wracked with shame and guilt after doing nothing but everything he could.

“Sweetheart…” he says, but it’s a mistake, and he realizes this just a moment too late.

Because, as he watches, the crestfallen despondency that had characterized Dean until now goes stiff and terrified, and Cas realizes that Dean thinks he is once again cornered, that he’s once again proved himself to be nothing but a thing to be punished and punished with no way out.

It’s not even the fear of being beaten, Cas realizes all at once, that spurs Dean to go tense and spring. It’s the conviction that there will be no end to it, not ever, because he’s punished not for what he does but what he is, which is bad bad bad no matter how hard he tries.

Cas recognizes this very quickly and not quickly enough, as Dean stiffens, expression going wild with fear. He screams in false anger as Cas’s hand comes towards his face, and he smacks it away with more strength than his bruised arm shouldn’t have.

The submissive ducks away then with an angry shout, grabbing the bin besides him and hurling it across the room with a cry.

The ceramic pieces he’d just so carefully picked up go flying everywhere, wastebasket clattering as it hits the coffee table and then the floor lamp, before rolling to a stop on the rug.

Cas watches all this with his heart pounding, but without making a move. He’s not sure if Dean is going to lunge at him next, panicked and out of control as he is.

But the submissive doesn’t come flying towards the dominant, not like Cas might have expected. The idea doesn’t seem to even occur to him, as the noise of the wastebasket suddenly stops.

Face red with tears and frustration and anger, the submissive just screeches in misery and collapses in on himself like a demolished building. Tugging aggressively at his own hair as miserable, raw sounds force their way out of his throat, it’s clear that the only person he hates right now is himself.

It’s clear that it doesn’t occur to him to be angry at Cas, even as he expects Cas to beat him.

He thinks it’s his own fault. He thinks he lost his chance to be good.

Still startled, still in shock from the sudden direction this all had gone, Cas gazes in some alarm at the tipped over wastebasket, and ceramic pieces now scattered haphazardly around the room.

He looks around at the even bigger mess Dean has now created, from the result of his careful labor he’d so anxiously shown to Cas.

The message couldn’t be clearer.

Why do I even try. There’s no point, because it’ll never be enough. I’ll always be bad, always fuck up in some way, no matter what I do to try to fix it.

Feeling shaky himself, Cas glances over to the clock on the wall.

He has twenty minutes to clean up this mess. Not the pottery on the floor, but the shuddering young man.

Taking in an uncertain breath, he considers what to do.

He can’t keep acting without thinking. It’s clearly causing Dean harm.

“Dean,” he says slowly, and the boy flinches on the ground, like the very sound of his own name is painful. “I know you’re upset. It’s ok to be upset. But I’m going to speak, and I want you to try to listen, ok?”

Dean doesn’t respond, but Cas doesn’t expect him to. The poor thing’s chest is heaving where he is trying to breathe through his tears, and horrible, choked wheezing noises keep escaping from his throat.

Cas’s own chest aches with the phantom effort of trying to keep such sobbing quiet, and as he watches, the boy’s curled up shoulders shake violently above his hanging head.

“Alright. First of all, I want you to know you did a very good job picking up the ceramic. I know you were upset because you got a cut on your hand, and I told you to be careful not to get cut.”

Dean shudders, and Cas can’t tell if he’s listening, and if he is, if he understands what Cas is telling him. Cas aches with his own need to wrap his arms around the young man in comfort, but he holds himself back, knowing that Dean isn’t ready.

Not yet. Not yet.

If all goes well, Dean will be in his arms by the end.

“But Dean- and this is very important- I didn’t order you not to get a cut. I ordered you to be careful.”

He leans forward, and the couch shifts beneath him.

“Were you careful?”

Dean’s shoulder’s tremble, and he doesn’t respond.

Cas waits. He can be patient, even if the time can’t. He knows how important it is to give Dean the chance to slog through his panicked thoughts.

It’s a lot for the submissive to process. Not only Cas’s words, but his own emotions, his own confusion. The fact that he isn’t yet being beaten for being bad at all.

It’s too much for him, really, all at once, and Cas feels awful that he’s throwing so much at him in their very first session together.

He didn’t want things to go like this. He wanted to give Dean a simple task, and then praise him, and then be done.

He should have known that it’s never that simple. That it wouldn’t be so simple with this patient, who’s circumstances are some of the strangest that Cas has ever known.

Eventually Dean’s lack of response stretches long enough that Cas starts to wonder again if he’s too distressed to understand what’s being said.

Or maybe, he thinks, as Dean’s panicked sobs start to quiet, he just doesn’t know what the right answer is.

It was supposed to be a rhetorical question. But Dean’s body is tense, and he’s been dragged into traps all day.

This isn’t a trap, Dean. None of this was supposed to be a trap.

But there’s no way for Dean to know that, after months or years of nothing but.

“I think you were careful,” he prompts quietly, kindly. Dean lets out a wet gasp, and wipes at his eyes.

Head still ducked, he doesn’t move any more for a second or two, but Cas, once again, waits him out.

Finally, finally, there’s an uncertain nod, which Dean winces after like he think’s he’s done wrong.

But he hasn’t, and Cas feels pride burst inside of him, for how hard this young man is fighting to trust him.

He wants to trust me. He does.

He’s just so so lost that he can’t remember how.

“Good boy,” Cas praises him gently. “For answering me, and for being so careful. I know they both weren’t easy to do.”

The words settle like dust on Dean’s hunched over body- slowly and lightly, almost imperceptible at first.

But moment by moment, it seems to sink in to him then, that Cas isn’t yelling at him, that he still isn’t mad.

Close to half a minute has gone by before Dean seems to start to really process this, and it’s only then that he gains the courage to glance up. Shooting Cas a searching look of confusion and wonder, he sniffles, looking small and alone where he’s crouched on the floor.

Let me help you, Dean, Cas’s soul begs, and he reaches his arms out toward Dean with a smile.

“Good boys deserve rewards,” he offers the young man, without leaning forward. He’s learned his lesson about trying to touch Dean without warning.

But Dean will come to him. Cas knows he will, as long as he knows he’s allowed to. The desire for affection in this boy is like nothing Cas has ever seen. It cries out like being denied it is causing the submissive physical pain.

And maybe it truly is, because the expression on Dean’s face when he understands what he’s being offered is like that of someone drowning in the ocean being suddenly given the ability to swim.

He just- cracks, cracks open like a walnut shell, shock and desperation overwhelming his face and body language as realizes that Cas wants to hold him.

That Cas, by some miracle, isn’t angry at him, despite the cut, and the way he’d thrown the bin across the room.

The understanding dawns on him slow and beautiful as the sun rises, and Cas feels breathless as he watches grow.

“But-” Dean says, sounding baffled, sounding dazed, “Was…bad.”

And he starts to point, halfheartedly, at the wreck that’s all around him. Like it’s possible that Cas hadn’t noticed, like it’s possible there’s been a mistake.

But there hasn’t been a mistake, of course, and Cas shines with pride as he hears the young man speak: Not a reflexive “No!” like when he’d been wildly fighting off the orderlies, but a real response to what he’s being told.

It’s raw and ragged and hesitant as he himself is, but it’s a lovely sound to hear nonetheless. There’s a promise inside of it, a hope that Cas can latch onto, that Dean is not nearly as far away from him as he seems.

Just as quickly as he can lose control of himself, he can find his way back, with some coaxing and kindness as a guide.

“Not at all,” Cas soothes the young man, “You were just scared, because you thought you’d done something wrong. I understand. I know you want very badly to please.”

Dean sniffles, tears still silently falling down his cheeks, slower now, like they’re confused about what they’re for.

Dean doesn’t seem to know either, anymore, and he looks around slowly, hands twisting together in his lap.

“I…threw it,” the submissive tries again, nodding his head towards the tipped over waste bin. “Made a mess.”

Cas shrugs, awkward with his arms still extended.

“I don’t mind,” he says honestly, and doesn’t move.

His muscles are starting to ache, but he doesn’t want to lower his arms. He doesn’t want to make Dean think he’s missed his chance to be held.

Dean, for his part, seems to be trying to make sense of Cas’s words, mulling them over slowly as he looks down at his bare lap.

He doesn’t seem to be making much progress, which Cas supposes is fair.

“You still did what I asked,” he clarifies softly. “You still worked hard to listen, to be a good boy. What happened after doesn’t matter. I’m so proud of you, sweetheart, I really am.”

He really means it, and maybe that earnestness comes through in his voice, because Dean’s breath starts to hitch again, and he hesitantly lifts his arms.

And the sniffling turns back into real crying as Cas helps him stand, tugging the submissive towards the couch.

There’s no hesitation, no wariness at all- Dean just flings himself into Cas’s arms and starts crying into his chest as he’s pulled in tighter and held.

It’s like a marionette having its strings cut- all the tension just falls out of his body, all the defensive anger and fear. The knowledge that Cas, somehow, isn’t angry at him, dissolves his resistance like sugar on the tongue.

He’s so starved of praise, Cas thinks sadly, holding the young man close as he weeps and weeps and weeps with relief, with the overwhelming realization that he isn’t going to be made to feel ashamed.

That Cas is proud of him, regardless of what he thinks he did wrong.

“Such a good boy,” Cas croaks, with words cracking with the threat of his own tears.

It’s not something he plans on saying, though he doesn’t regret it after he does. But the tenderness comes up like it’s been punched out of him, an involuntary, helpless acknowledgement of the blessing of having this lovely young man in his care.

Because it is a blessing, not only to have the honor of helping him, but to be given, so quickly and so transparently, this tentative, desperate trust, that has been wrecked over and over and over. It must take so much courage, so much bravery, to let go the way Dean is finally allowing himself to, to allow himself to give in and find the release Cas so wants to give him, after so many years of having it taunted and yanked away.

“Sweetheart,” he mumbles, and tugs Dean even closer, ignoring the growing wetness he can feel on his neck.

It’s obvious Dean hasn’t been touched like this in a long time, because he sobs and shoves himself further into Cas’s hold, pushing desperately against his shirt.

Cas almost wants to take it off, so Dean can experience more of the skin to skin contact he obviously craves so deeply. But it wouldn’t be wise, with Dean still being sexually mistreated by his other dominants. He would inevitably interpret it as some kind of demand, even if it would be one he’d be willing to fill.

That’s not what Cas wants Dean to feel their relationship will inevitably lead it. It’s of great importance that he knows he is valued for something other than his abused body.

So instead, Cas just makes sure to wrap his arms tightly around Dean’s shoulders, makes sure that he rubs his hand as much as he can up and down his injured back.

It’s not easy, with all the open, burning welts along his flesh. But he traces his fingers along the paths between the aching wounds, and pets the soft, undamaged skin at the nape of his neck. Dean shudders in pleasure as he does it, shivering in open adoration in Cas’s arms.

He’s so transparently happy to be held that Cas never wants to let him go, is so overwhelmingly overjoyed to have been pleasing that Cas doesn’t know how the hell he’s going to leave him alone.

It feels abjectly cruel, to walk away after what he just witnessed, knowing what the boy will be left to tonight, what he’ll be facing again tomorrow.

Cas feels his breath catch as he looks down at the young man clinging to him like he’s a life raft, scared and alone and terrified of letting go. The sight punctures right through him, and he suddenly feels like can’t breathe, imagining pulling the sweet submissive off of him in a few minutes, callous as everyone else in his life.

I can’t, Cas thinks helplessly, even as he knows he will have to.

Guilt eats at him preemptively, and he tries not to let himself cry.

He can’t start, now that Dean’s finally stopping. Not now that the young man is finally, finally starting to calm.

Cas looks at the clock.

Five minutes, he thinks, blinking back tears. He swallows, and swallows again, getting ready for what he has to do.

“Sweetheart,” he says softly, and Dean pushes his face slightly further into Cas’s chest in response.

He hums, a soft, content thing, and it nearly breaks Cas’s resolve into pieces.

But it will be no better for either of them if he ends up leaving Dean with no warning at all. What if he doesn’t even have time to explain he’s coming back? That would be true torture for them both.

“I never really introduced myself, did I?” he tries, whispering, as Dean breathes warm and gentle against him.

The submissive shrugs, as if to show he doesn’t care if Cas did, because he doesn’t really care who Cas is.

Cas is sure he doesn’t. What does it matter who he is, as long as he’s kind and affectionate towards Dean? What does it matter where he came from, as long as he’s here right now?

Cas wishes it could remain that simple.

“Well, I think I probably should, now, because. Because I’m going to have to leave in a few minutes, sweetheart. But I’m coming back,” he adds quickly, when the submissive stiffens in panic, “I’ll be back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that…”

He could keep adding and the day after that forever, he realizes, so he cuts himself off and moves on with his explanation.

“My name is Castiel. I’m one of your new therapists. I’m going to be here for you until you get better.”

Cas risks looking down, then, and wishes that he hadn’t, because Dean is staring straight up at him in betrayal.

It’s the submissive who drops his eyes first, but he beats Cas to it by only a second.

Cas has much more reason to be ashamed. He had much more reason to look away.

But Dean doesn’t let go of him, even as Cas reveals who he’s working for, and Cas has to believe that that’s a good sign.

“I know…I know your other therapists are very rough with you,” he whispers into the boy’s hair, guilt kicking painfully at the bruises on his heart. “I know that they tell you you're bad. But I want you to know, Dean, that I don’t think you’re bad. And I’m not going to treat you like they do. That’s not…”

He chokes, and tries to convince himself he’s not lying when he continues, “That’s not how I do my work, or how I help people.”

Or it wasn’t, until he went and made a deal with the devil. Dean’s whipped back glares up at him accusingly from over the submissive’s shoulder, and Cas flinches at the knowledge of what will be done to the young man in the interval between today and tomorrow.

He’s a coward, for dancing around it with vague words, while Dean has to live through it day after day.

What meaning could Cas’s protests that he isn’t like that possibly hold to the boy, when he’s going to leave him here to be devoured all the same?

The guilt is already eating at him like acid. He doesn’t know how he can do this for months.

“Our sessions,” he pushes forward, “Will be much more like today. I…have no intention of bringing harm to you, sweetheart. I hope that soon you will come to believe that.”

Cas hopes that he himself can come to believe it to.

But maybe his own distress at the fact that he can’t take Dean from here right away is clouding his view, now, as the last minutes they have together disappear. Because Dean only curls a hand into his shirt and asks, “Tomorrow?,” like Cas coming back is all he wants in the world.

Once again Cas finds himself fighting not to cry.

“Yes, Dean, I’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll be here every day, I promise.”

He feels Dean squeeze him tighter, and he holds the submissive to his chest tighter as well. He looks at the clock.

One minute.

“Does that…make you happy, sweetheart?”

Dean nods into his chest.

“It makes me happy too,” Cas agrees, and he means it from the bottom of his heart.

They sit there in silence for the last moments of their time, with Cas petting Dean’s hair, and Dean clutching him. He worries that Dean will melt down again when they finally hear the knock on the door, but in the end, it’s Cas who has a harder time leaving.

He really almost loses it, when it’s the same two orderlies as before, who grab Dean roughly by his upper arms and haul him to his feet.

“Don’t hurt him,” he bites, but it’s more of a beg than anything else, knowing he has no real power here now that his time is gone.

“Sure,” one of them says dismissively, and they start to yank Dean away, who struggles to keep up without stumbling.

He looks back only once, a clear plea on his face, and Cas feels his heart being torn to shreds.

“Tomorrow, Dean,” he promises, and the submissive nods, like he’s trying to believe him.

And then the door shuts, and Dean is gone, and Cas is all alone.

Chapter Text

Cas goes to get dinner at a local diner, after that, and he tries not to think about Dean all alone in his cold room.

There’s no point in worrying about whether or not they’re going to feed him, because he already knows that they aren’t.

It makes him feel guilty as he eats his grilled cheese and soup, and he ends up pulling out Dean’s files again from his backpack and flipping through them in an effort at being productive.

He skims through the “patient history” section of the submissive’s files. There’s not much there, and it makes him sad, to think that Dean’s whole life has been reduced down to a handful of clinical pages.

What is included is not information that Cas really needs to know. A birth certificate, some arrest records from his teen years for petty theft and prostitution, a claiming file from the very day Dean turned 18. It’s all sad, and it’s all expected, the same old story he sees in most of his patients with SRS.

The information he really wants to know- family history, major traumas, personal interests…that all has to come from Dean himself. And right now, Dean is barely speaking.

Closing the files, he rubs his eyes, feeling a stress migraine coming on. The coffee the young waitress keeps topping off probably isn’t helping.

She’s come over to refill it maybe five or six times already, which Cas really thinks is sort of excessive. But he can tell by the green bracelet she’s wearing that she’s a sub, still young and claimed by her parents, so maybe she’s just very eager to please.

He doesn’t think much of it until the girl comes back over, once again with a pot of coffee in her hand. Cas is about to politely wave her off, but she beats him to the punch, putting the pot directly down on the table like she has no intention of topping him off.

“You’re that big sub therapist guy, right?” she asks bluntly, “Working over at the Shurley Center?”

Cas looks up at her in surprise, and she blinks back down at him, face smiling but somewhat guarded. Waiting patiently for him to respond, she doesn’t seem to have any plans to wander away, and Cas realizes at some point that he has to answer if he wants this situation to move forward in whatever way it seems like it can.

“Um,” Cas says, startled. “Yes, actually, I am.”

He doesn’t feel much like he has another choice. He’s not sure what to make of her knowing who he is.

It’s not…the first time he’s been recognized, but it’s maybe only the sixth or seventh. Cas’s work may be well known within the very specific field of submissive rejection psychology, but that hardly makes him a celebrity, especially among the general population.

The handful of times he has been recognized, it’s always been by older dominants, usually men. Colleagues in the field, who haven’t always been thrilled to run into him.

And perhaps he is just letting his own prejudices get in the way, but his waitress…is not someone he would expect to be familiar with his academic publications.

She’s maybe 19 or 20, blonde and very pretty. A submissive, as he’d already noticed, but not one that seems to be mistreated.

On the contrary. The girl seems quite comfortable approaching him, which is unusual in itself, and she doesn’t seem at all concerned about speaking to him alone.

Glancing over her shoulder, Cas notices an older woman working behind the counter, who’s watchful eye is trained on the both of them and isn’t making an effort to hide it.

The girl’s mother, he’d bet his life on it. Protective, but not in a possessive way. She doesn’t seem to have an issue with her daughter speaking to a dominant man by herself, but she also clearly isn’t going to let them out of her sight.

It’s nice to know there’s at least one submissive in Kansas who isn’t mistreated, Cas thinks ruefully, turning back to the girl.

“Jo,” her nametag says, and Cas wonders if it’s short for something. He wonders if she’d tell him if he asked. There’s a guarded suspicion to the way that she’s looking at him that seems at odds with her friendly demeanor.

“Thought so,” she says, and she sits down across from him, which Cas certainly didn’t expect.

Oh no, Cas thinks, off balance, realizing he’s not going to be getting out of this any time soon.

His migraine starts to pound in his head stronger. He hates trying to navigate social situations.

“I…didn’t know that it was common knowledge that I would be working here,” he prompts warily, unsure if he should be concerned.

Jo shrugs.

“It’s a small town. Things get around. You should probably get used to that, if you’re gonna be here longer than a week.”

She leans over and snatches a fry off of his plate then, shoving it unceremoniously into her mouth. Cas doesn’t say anything, uncertain if that’s normal for strangers to do, feeling increasingly like he is missing something big.

What that is slams into him like a bullet a moment later, when the girl pushes her hair behind her ear and says, “You’re here for Dean, right?”

Cas looks at her in shock, wondering for a moment if she’d been reading his file over his shoulder. But he dismisses that idea quickly, knowing the text was realistically much too small for her to see.

The more likely situation jumps out at him then, and he doesn’t know why it didn’t occur to him earlier.

“You know him?” he asks, and Jo shrugs noncommittally.

“Like I said, it’s a small town.”

It’s a small town.

Yes, Lawrence is a small town, of only a few thousand people. Cas doesn’t know why it didn’t occur to him earlier, that Dean might actually be from here. That the best place to look for information on him might be the city itself.

Because if he’d grown up here…gone to school, maybe even had friends and family…

His best source for information might be sitting right in front of him.

Literally.

Jo smiles at his surprise.

Quickly, Cas reaches into his backpack and pulls out a notepad, along with a pen which he clicks open right away.

“Can you tell me about Dean?” he asks hopefully. “You were friends?”

Jo shrugs again, sitting back in her seat.

“I dunno about that. Maybe something close to it. But I don’t know if Dean ever really had any actual friends, you know?”

Cas does not know, but it’s good information, important information, and he jots it down quickly on his pad.

“But you know him?” he prompts, and Jo glances over to her mother.

Cas glances over too, and catches the two of them sharing a look.

Something is being communicated between them, clearly, being decided. Cas can’t read it, but he sees the moment Jo’s body language changes, how she slumps in her seat, giving in.

“Yeah, I knew him well enough,” she admits.

She sounds sad, as she says it, and Cas doesn’t miss how she speaks in the past tense. He wonders how long Dean has been…the way he is now.

A while, he thinks warily, watching Jo and her mother exchange another look. There’s a reason the two of them are so leery of speaking freely to him, despite the fact that they know who he is.

They have reason to be protective of Dean.

That seems to be something we have in common.

Jo gives her mother a subtle nod, and to Cas’s surprise, the woman walks back into the kitchen, leaving Cas and Jo on their own.

There’s no one else in the diner yet, it being such an early time for dinner, and Cas didn’t expect the mother, at least, to feel safe leaving Jo and him by themselves.

Perhaps they know more about him and his work than they’re letting on, and thus trust him a bit more than they would otherwise.

Or perhaps Jo is just a lot stronger than she looks. He’s getting the impression there’s more to her than meets the eye.

“Look,” Jo says flatly, once the swinging kitchen door creaks to a silent stop. “I don’t know you. I don’t know if I trust you.”

“That’s fair,” he says diplomatically, and Jo waves him off.

“Yeah, yeah. Dean would kick my ass for talking to you. He didn’t trust dominants, ‘specially total randos like you.”

Cas takes a note on that, though it’s what he suspected. It doesn’t contradict his clingy behavior today- the submissive has been starved for a long time.

When he looks up, though, Jo is staring at him with an unimpressed look on her face, and Cas feels self conscious about his note pad.

Anxiously, he clicks his pen closed and puts it and the pad down on the table. Maybe he should only take notes when they’re very important.

“Sorry,” he says.

The girl shakes her head, obviously very uninterested in hearing him speak.

“The point is. I don’t trust you, and Dean wouldn’t either. But…he’s been really messed up for a really long time. And he’s obviously not…getting better.”

It’s the first time the girl displays any vulnerability, as she glances at him uncertainly, clearly hoping that he’ll contradict her.

But he’s not going to lie about the condition Dean is in. It’s clearly been critical for quite a while.

“Not currently, no,” he confirms. “But I only just started working with him today. I’m optimistic that he will make progress under my care.”

He responded well to me, he wants to assure her. But that’s private information he can’t divulge.

Jo doesn’t seem to be looking for it, in any case. She doesn’t seem nearly as hopeful as Cas feels.

“Yeah,” she says glumly. “And I guess you’re his best- his only real shot at this point, huh?”

Cas nods, because they both already know that it’s true.

“Well, then, whatever. I’m an open book, I guess. I read that stupid sub psycholoy interview you did- which was condescending, by the way- but I figure you can’t be any worse than those fucks from the center at least.”

“You can say that again,” Cas mutters, and then immediately wishes he hadn’t, as Jo shoots him a sharp, knowing look of alarm.

Then her face softens, bitter, defensive facade crumbling down, and she just looks like a teenager facing answers she doesn’t want to hear.

“He’s really in bad shape,” she says quietly. “Isn’t he.”

Cas just nods, not knowing what else he can tell her.

For a moment, Jo looks almost like she’s going to cry. Instead, she just slumps further down in her seat.

“He was always freaked that he’d get sent to that place eventually,” she mutters. “He knew what they did to people in there.”

“Did he speak about this often?” Cas asks, clicking his pen back open.

Jo gives him the stink eye for it, for a moment, but then seems to decide she doesn’t care.

“Sort of. He wasn’t really the type to talk about shit like that directly. It was more- implied. The jokes he made, offhand comments about where he’d end up. Stuff like that, you know.”

Cas does know. Gabriel was rather similar when they were growing up, always incapable of addressing his emotions head on.

Everything had to be a joke, if it was ever mentioned at all. Cas sometimes wonders if he would have understood what was going on sooner, if his brother had just said what he’d meant.

But that’s not fair. It’s not Gabriel’s fault. He can’t blame others for his own ignorance.

“So he knew he had…difficulty with true submission?” Cas asks delicately. He can’t reveal Dean’s actual diagnosis directly.

But Jo is clearly already aware.

“You mean that he couldn’t go down?” she says, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, he knew. He knew there was something wrong with him. I told him to go to the doctor, but he wouldn’t. Can’t really blame him, I guess.”

Cas can’t either. The “doctor” for such issues is really just more of the same of what’s happening to Dean right now in the center, though they might not be quite as cruel and violent, and you’d be able to go home at the end of the day.

It’s…quite surprising to him that someone like Jo would suggest Dean submit himself to this.

It must have been really bad, he realizes, even well before they considered admitting him to the center. She must have been scared for his life.

Though he doesn’t know if she knew Dean had never entered subspace, she could clearly tell that something was deeply wrong. It’s unlikely that she’s unfamiliar with the consequences of not “going down” for too long, as she’d called it, considering how well protected against the accompanying symptoms she seems.

“Was this when he was under the claim of a man named Alastair Masters?” he asks, recalling the name he’s seen on the claiming document, assuming the obvious symptoms someone like Jo would have noticed couldn’t have appeared all that long ago.

But Jo snorts at this suggestion, as if it’s ridiculous to even consider.

“No. This was way before that. I never saw Dean once while that bastard owned him. The dick wouldn’t let him out of the house.”

Cas looks up in surprise at the ferocity of her words, and the way she doesn’t dance around what being claimed is: being owned.

“Not ever?” he asks, and Jo huffs, and throws her hands up as if to say What does it even matter?

“Maybe a couple of times the first year. He always seemed really out of it, and he was obviously getting the shit kicked out of him. He never wanted to talk to me, and I didn’t know what to say anyway.”

No, Cas figures he wouldn’t either. There was no realistic help to be found, once a submissive was claimed, no matter how badly they were treated. Especially in these midwestern states, where submissives are still legally property, rather than any sort of person in their own right.

“That must have been difficult,” Cas says, and he means it completely honestly, but Jo puts her hand up like she’s annoyed.

“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” she snaps, and Cas briefly debates explaining that that’s not what that word means before deciding he prefers his body with his head attached.

“Noted,” he says, and Jo grunts, sitting up, pushing herself up from where she’s almost sunk as low as the table.

She seems irritated to be sitting up straight again, and gives Cas the evil eye like he’s the cause of this problem.

“What are you gonna do with all this information anyway?” she asks him suspiciously. “I don’t want it thrown back in his face.”

Cas knows what she means is I don’t want it used to manipulate him further. He doesn’t take offense at her wariness, especially not with what he’d seen today.

“I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with it, but it’s helpful to know my patient’s background and family history. It helps me develop treatment plans and to establish trust, to avoid triggers, and develop a relationship.”

“None of that meant anything,” Jo argues, which Cas doesn’t think is fair, since he doesn’t have specific examples to draw on.

But she seems satisfied with his general explanation, despite her complaints, maybe just relieved that he had an immediate answer for her besides “use it to develop my secret evil plan.” She keeps talking before Cas can try to defend himself or further explain, and Cas finds himself having to scribble quickly to keep up with her bombardment.

“Well, if you want family history, you should know this: Dean has a brother. He fucked off to god knows where, though, not long after Dean got claimed. The whole thing was fucked up. But yeah, if he’s got issues, probably like nine out of ten of them are related to Sam.”

“Sam- the brother?”

“Obviously,” she snaps. “Keep up. Look, I told you we weren’t really friends, and I meant it. Sam’s my age, not Dean, but both of them were barely around anyway. Their dad was a drunk bastard and he beat the both of them with a belt, but anytime someone called social services it was only Sam who got taken away.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he’s a dominant, obviously. No one cares about submissives. They always left Dean with his dad. But it was like every other month for a while that Sam would end up staying here for a week or two, cause someone stuck their nose into their business again and they had to sort everything out with the cops.”

“The- cops,” Cas stutters, struggling to keep up. “You were- a foster family?”

Jo scowls, and picks up Cas’s unused straw. She starts peeling down the paper wrapper in long strips.

“Yeah, I guess. Not I guess. Yeah, we were. Emergency placement and all that. But it was mostly Sam who ended up here, rarely anyone else. It was just- really bad. I guess his teachers kept calling the hotline. But he’d never be here for long.”

She huffs in frustration, letting the peeled straw fall to the floor while she plays with the long shreds of paper.

Cas would be indignant, but he knows it’s likely going to be her who has to sweep everything up later, so dumping her trash on the ground can’t really be considered rude.

“He would always lie, say everything was fine at home, so he could get back to Dean. Even Dean was telling him to cut it out, to just tell the truth so he could stay here for good, but he always said he wasn’t going anywhere without his brother.”

And Dean, Cas reads between the lines, wasn’t going anywhere at all.

No one was going to take a submissive child from a parent for abuse. It doesn’t count, in cases like that.

“It sounds like they were very close,” he says quietly.

“They were,” Jo responds, and she looks sad.

It is sad. Cas can’t let himself think about these things all the time or he’ll be too overwhelmed to fight against them, but it’s terrible, the endless cruelty inflicted on the vulnerable, and the way so few people seem to actually care.

It’s another few moments before Cas speaks again, still trying to scribble down all the information that Jo had launched at him in a flurry. The girl stares out of the window as he does so, and Cas can’t help but wonder what she’s really seeing.

“So,” he says at last, when he thinks he’s basically caught up. “This is how you know Dean. Through…this situation with Sam.”

“Yeah,” she agrees unhappily, twirling one of the paper strips between her fingers to make something like a tiny rope. She lets the other strips fall to the ground, again uncaring that she’s making more of a mess for herself to clean.

“I assumed you knew him through school,” Cas admits. Jo snorts, and he belatedly realizes that may be ignorant of him to assume.

“Nah,” she tells him. “Dean never went to school. Never got enrolled, you know?”

He nods, because he does. Submissives don’t have to go to school mandatorily. Not if a dominant parent doesn’t want them too.

“School only goes up to 8th grade for submissives around here anyway. But Sam always let me borrow his books.”

Jo slumps in her seat again, starting to wrap her mini rope around her finger. Cas feels a pang in his heart for her, for all that she is barred from for no other reason than her designation.

He remembers seeing her and being relieved that there was at least one submissive in Kansas who isn’t being mistreated. But he was wrong. They’re all mistreated, no matter how kind the people around them may be.

It’s all so deeply unfair.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s genuine, but Jo again just waves him off.

“Whatever,” she says. “Dean was always a dick about it anyway, making fun of me and Sam for enjoying school. He cut it out though when I stopped being allowed to go. He was always nice like that.”

Cas’s pen hovers over his pad again, now, and he stares down, not knowing what to write.

That’s not the kind of information he’s used to collecting, that’s easily made into bullet point notes. But it feels important, none the less, maybe more important than anything else so far.

Eventually, his pen meets the paper uncertainly, and he writes, simply, “kind.”

It’s inadequate, but he doesn’t know how else to describe it, to turn into letters the golden soul he’d seen today in Dean’s big eyes.

“How long was this going on for?” he asks, looking up again. Jo has nearly cut off the circulation on the tip of her finger with her paper rope, and is staring at it as it throbs, white and red.

“Forever, I think,” she admits, and she doesn’t sound as irritated now. Just lost, like those early memories send her reeling too. “You’d have to ask my mom to be sure. But I think…I was maybe five or so when Sam ended up with us the first time? But I really don’t think that was the beginning of it.”

As sad as it is, he’s sure Jo is right. Even if the abuse hadn’t started with Sam until then- and he doesn’t know that that’s true- Dean would have been about nine if his estimation of Jo’s age is right. It’s unlikely the father wasn’t already years into physical abuse of his elder son, the one with both less innate desire to fight back and less social protections to shield him.

“And it never stopped?” he asks.

“Nope,” Jo says. She pops the P at the end of the word. “Not ‘til Dean got claimed and Sam disappeared. Ran away, I guess. Didn’t say goodbye or anything.”

She’s clearly hurt, though she plays at disinterest again, staring intently at the now-pale finger Cas is getting mildly concerned for.

He understands why she’s unhappy. But he can’t judge Dean’s brother, without knowing the whole situation. He clearly loved Dean, and was likely devastated by his brother’s sudden disappearance from his life, into the jaws of a monster he couldn’t fight.

Cas thinks it’s very very likely the teenager was deeply traumatized, and felt there was nothing left for him to do but vanish.

“Can you tell me about that?” he asks gently, trying to tread lightly on a topic that’s clearly sensitive to Jo.

“What, Sam running away?” she says much too quickly. “It was a dick move, is what I can tell you. Dean was still around, once or twice, when his bastard dom let him out for whatever reason. Kept asking after Sam, like a fucking ghost. I didn’t know what the fuck I could tell him.”

The image brings even more pain to his already overburdened heart, and he’s light as possible as he redirects the girl from what obviously distresses her the most.

“What led to him being claimed to begin with?” he asks, which had been his original question. But he doesn’t want to embarrass Jo by correcting her directly, exposing how clearly she’s not over what had happened with Sam.

“Usual bullshit,” Jo bites in frustration, and she tugs the paper rope hard enough that it snaps. Cas watches with relief as normal coloring returns to her finger, and she wiggles it once or twice for good measure to make sure it’s still working as it should.

It is, thankfully, and Jo puts her hand back down, tapping her short nails anxiously on the table.

“Dad had a debt, I guess. Dean got sold to pay for it. Think he knew about the deal for a while, though he never said anything about it. But he seemed freaked leading up to his 18th birthday, and whenever the fucking dick who bought him came up.”

“Dean knew Alastair before he was claimed?” Cas asks, very interested. It’s not at all uncommon in situations where the parent sells the submissive upon turning 18 for the buyer to be a complete stranger. It’s actually- unusual, in a situation like this, for that to not be the case, for Dean to have been familiar with the man.

Jo goes quiet after he asks, for a few seconds, and he catches her glance towards the kitchen door that her mother had left through.

Like she’s not sure whether to answer him, and wants her mother to make the call.

Eventually, though, she seems to see there’s no point in trying to avoid what’s being asked, since Dean doesn’t have much hope besides Cas in any case.

“I think he was a…client, of Dean’s” she confesses at last, nervous tapping getting faster as she speaks. “He sort of…well, money was tight a lot I guess, his dad was always drinking and gambling…I don’t think he really had any other way to make money…no one would hire him, cause, yeah…”

‘Cause he was a submissive with an alcoholic, violent father, who wasn’t going to advocate for him or try to help him find work. Because there isn’t much else that will bring in cash quickly when you’re a desperate teenager with no safe adult to turn to, and there are many bad people in the world who take advantage of those who are vulnerable.

Cas is very familiar with the story, and he’d already known what Jo is trying to tell him from Dean’s paperwork. He nods and makes a note quickly, not wanting to make her talk about something she’s clearly uncomfortable with.

“I see. Thank you for telling me, Jo.”

Jo rolls her eyes again, and steals another fry. They’re cold now, but she doesn’t acknowledge this.

“Dean’s been messed up forever,” she tells him bluntly. “Like, from the time he was nine he wouldn’t talk to my mom, just Sam, and me sometimes. He didn’t trust anyone, especially not adults, and especially not dominant adults. He loved his dad, even though he shouldn’t have, but his dad wasn’t someone he could trust, you know?”

Cas nods, understanding what Jo is trying to tell him. Dean had never had an opportunity to form a bond that might allow him to enter subspace. The only people he trusted were people he needed to care for.

He’s never had anyone he trusted care for him.

“I understand,” he tells her.

“Do you?” she replies, raising a critical eyebrow at him from across the table.

But he can be honest when he answers her the way he wants to.

“I think I do. Dean is not the first difficult patient I’ve worked with, Jo,” he assures her.

He can’t promise that Dean will get better, but he can promise that the boy is in good hands.

He knows how to treat Dean’s illness, and he’s seen the steps in Dean’s unhappy story before.

More and more, the mystery young man is being revealed to be something he understands quite well.

This gives him hope, and it should give it to Jo as well.

But Jo just gives him a glare.

“How do you know my name?” she demands sharply, and Cas puts his pen down to point at the nametag on her shirt.

She looks down at it, and scowls deeper. She unpins the tag from her blouse.

“Whatever. I hope that that was helpful and all that jazz, because I really don’t want Dean to die. And to be honest I’m gonna be pissed off if he does, Mr. Miracle worker, cause you’re supposed to be the one who can help.”

“I’m going to do my best,” he tells Jo truthfully, recognizing that their conversation is winding down.

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s the best that I have.”

I’m not thrilled that that’s all I can say either.

Jo huff at his response, but it’s all false anger, just like Dean. Her eyes are getting dangerously wet.

She stands up, obviously not willing to cry in front of a stranger, and Cas starts to take out his wallet, recognizing that their conversation is done.

“Just leave your cash on the table,” Jo mutters, turning away to hide her face.

“Alright,” Cas agrees, pulling out three twenties.

She deserves a very large tip, after the stress he’s just put her through, and he can’t imagine she couldn’t use the money.

“Look, if you have any more questions, you can come back, or just, like, call the restaurant and ask to talk to me. I, like, really don’t want Dean to die.”

That much is clear, but he appreciates the offer anyway, knowing he likely will have more questions Dean himself won’t be able to answer for quite a while, even if things go well.

If they don’t go well…

Neither he nor Jo wants to think about that. But he’s the one who’s responsibility it will be.

“Thank you, Jo,” he tells her genuinely, meaning it more than he has in a long long while.

He cares very much already about seeing Dean made whole again. He cares more than he knows is really safe.

“Sure,” the girl says, and then she’s gone in a huff, flying back to the kitchen to her mother.

And then Cas is alone again, in an empty diner with a creaking door that swings like a taunt, reminding him that he has no one to turn to but himself.

Chapter Text

They grab him and drag him down the hall again and he’s scared because he doesn’t know where he’s going, he went down the hall before but he doesn’t remember where it leads, he doesn’t remember when he went down the hall or where it goes or why they’re bringing him or who the people who are grabbing him are. He doesn’t remember and when he tries to ask all that comes out is crying, and he doesn’t know where his voice went or if he ever had one or why he’s in trouble again because he’s always in trouble and he doesn’t have anywhere to hide.

He doesn’t have anywhere to hide in the White Room either but he’s been in the White Room for such a long time and now he isn’t anymore and he was here before but maybe he wasn’t but maybe he was, he remembers passing that plant, he remembers seeing that door, but maybe none of it was real because nothing is real anyway anymore nothing is real except the pain.

So he tries to run away again because he doesn’t want to go through the door because he’s scared of it, because he remembers it but he doesn’t remember what’s behind it and he wants to go back to his room and be left alone alone alone, his favorite part of the day is when they all go and leave him alone.

They grab him hard when he tries to run away and he falls and it hurts but he gets up again, but then the men take out the sticks and he doesn’t remember what the sticks do until they’re hitting him with them and then he remembers what the sticks do the sticks shock him until he screams.

So he stops trying to run away because he doesn’t want to get shocked anymore and they bring him down the hall and open the brown door he doesn’t want to go through and they make him go through it and everything looks like something he’s seen in a dream and he doesn’t like it because he doesn’t remember but also he does and he gets pushed on the ground and he doesn’t want to look up because there’s yelling around him and then the yelling stops and everything is quiet and then the nice man touches his chin and lifts his head.

And Dean remembers the nice man. He remembers the nice man a lot.

He cries when he sees the nice man because he forgot about the nice man because everything is so confusing now, he forgets everything now he forgets his own name sometimes, but even though he forgot the nice man still came back to see him.

The nice man said he’d come back. He said he’d come back tomorrow, so it must be tomorrow now, and Dean is happy that the nice man came back for him even though Dean was so bad and forgot.

He tries to tell the nice man he forgot so the nice man can punish him for that, cause he wants to be good for the nice man and he remembers that the nice man said he believes that he is.

Dean wants to prove the nice man right and be good. But his words get all tangled again because everything is so fuzzy and strange, and before long he doesn’t even remember what he was trying to say anyway, so he just lays down and lets the nice man pet him.

The nice man spends a long time petting him, on his hair and his face and his neck and his back, and he talks to Dean even though Dean isn’t answering, and he never gets mad that Dean’s so stupid.

He talks for such a long time, and he talks slow, and he talks calm, and Dean likes to listen to his voice. And after a while the voice starts to sound like words again, sometimes, or the echo of words heard while at the bottom of the pool.

They’re still hard to make out, hard to make sense of. But what Dean likes is that the nice man isn’t hitting him so it’s easier to listen, and he’s not yelling so Dean isn’t getting scared. And he keeps pausing for a long time in between his slow words, and it lets Dean think, think think like he hasn’t in a while, lets him start to think and sort the sounds into meaning.

He doesn’t get much of it at first, but it’s still nice to hear some of it, he still feels his heart jump when he recognizes his name.

Dean, he says. The nice man says Dean. He said Dean’s name yesterday too. It makes it feel real again.

He hears other things too, other sounds that turn suddenly into words like butterflies breaking out of a cocoon. Dean catches some of them in the air before they float float away, and he likes to look at them, likes to remember what they mean.

Good…………………..…………….inside…………………………...we……………….missed…………….yesterday…………boy…………..happy…………..alright…………good boy……….went to……….apartment…..hope that…..see……more time with you…..maybe soon if….doing so well….you’re a good boy, you’re doing so well, so well, I’m so proud of you, you’re doing so well…

Dean shivers because the nice man is talking to him and he’s saying nice things and they’re starting to make sense again. They started to make sense again yesterday too, he remembers that now, the nice man came to see him yesterday and he talked to him and he talked so much and let Dean listen without yelling or hitting so much that it started to make sense like it does now.

Dean forgot that words are supposed to make sense. He forgot so many things.

And he starts crying when he remembers that, that there’s so much he’s forgotten. He starts crying when he remembers that there’s something wrong with him now and he doesn’t know how to fix it, and how everyone hurts him because something’s wrong with how he thinks but the hurt doesn’t make it better at all.

He cries when he realizes he realized all this yesterday too, but forgot it again after the nice man left because everything got bad again.

He cries because he doesn’t want to forget again, but he thinks he’s probably going to.

He can’t stop crying then, and the nice man tries to shush him, and he tries to shush because he wants to be good for the nice man but he can’t be quiet because he’s always, always bad.

“You’re not bad,” the nice man tells him, and it hurts to hear because it isn’t true. “You’re not bad, sweetheart, you’re such a good boy. It’s not your fault. I promise it’s not your fault.”

Dean wants to ask what’s not his fault because it would be so nice for something to not be his fault. Everything’s always his fault everything’s been his fault for such a long time, Alastair said so and Dad said so and Sammy said so and no one else matters anyway. So he wants to know what’s not his fault but he can’t remember how to say the words he wants to say even though now he understands them.

So he doesn’t get to ask because he’s stupid, but that’s not so bad because the nice man starts to make him sit up and he holds Dean while he does that. Dean likes being touched nice but it always hurts. But the nice man sits him up and it doesn’t even hurt at all.

“Do you want some water, Dean?” the nice man asks, “Or some food? I got permission to bring some food for you this time. Are you hungry?”

He is hungry he’s so so hungry. But he’s not allowed to have food anymore he doesn’t think. Food is for good boys and he’s not a good boy so he hasn’t had food in months and months.

That doesn’t make sense. You’d be dead if that were true.

But it is true but it can’t be and he doesn’t know and he’s freaked out by the way he’s starting to recognize that his thoughts are broken. He’s freaked out by how fast his thinking is changing and changing.

Everything’s been the same for months and months and months and now things aren’t the same, his brain is different, his thoughts are becoming different.

This happened yesterday too.

Did it? Dean barely remembered what yesterday even means a few minutes ago, barely remembered that time exists outside of this very moment. But now he remembers, he remembers that yesterday means the day before this one and tomorrow means the day after. And he remembers that a day is when the sun is up and then it goes down and then it comes up again and that's a new day. And he remembers that he hasn’t seen the sun in years.

He’s still crying a lot.

The nice man is still holding him.

He is hungry. He would like food but maybe he didn’t understand what the man said. He’s not allowed to have any food.

They feed him with a tube in his throat. He remembers now. That’s why he hasn’t had food in months, and also how he’s still alive.

Maybe he doesn’t want to be anymore. Alive. Unless he’s with the nice man.

As soon as the nice man goes away he’s going to forget that too, that he doesn’t want to be alive. He forgot that he was alive, so he couldn’t remember that he doesn’t want to be.

He likes being alive maybe with the nice man. The nice man hasn’t hit him even once yet.

“Why don’t we have some food, sweetheart?”

Sweetheart. He likes being called sweetheart. No one ever called him that before.

The floor is gray. The carpet is gray. It’s soft, ‘cause it’s made of fabric. Not like the concrete or tile.

He nods tentatively down at it, not sure what’s going to happen next. But the nice man hasn’t hit him and now he can think better too, so maybe more good things are going to happen if he’s quiet and still and obeys.

“Alright, dear, hold on.”

He doesn’t want to hold on, especially when the nice man lets go of him. But he wants to be a good boy even though he’s really bad, so he waits and doesn’t move a muscle and hopes that the man will come back.

He does. That makes Dean happy. The man even gives him a kiss on the cheek.

That makes Dean flush and feel fuzzy but not in a bad way. He never got a kiss on the cheek before either.

Maybe he likes me, Dean thinks with some hope. It seems stupid to believe, because Dean is stupid, and bad, and the man hasn’t even fucked him yet he doesn’t think. But stupid bad boys think stupid bad thoughts, and so he can’t help but imagine that it’s true.

He would be so happy, if the man liked him. That would mean Dean did a good job.

There’s a sandwich being held in front of his face, and Dean doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with it.

He glances to the side nervously, towards the nice man. Maybe the nice man will tell him what to do.

“Dean, I want you to eat this, but only until you’re full. Don’t make yourself sick. Do you understand?”

It takes Dean a long time to see if he does understand. He has to think about the words for a little while, to remember what they mean, and then has to remember how to make his body do the thing that the words mean.

But the nice man doesn’t hit him for taking too long and the food doesn’t disappear. It’s still there, being held right in front of him when Dean does nod, when he’s finally sure the directions make sense.

“Good boy,” the man tells him when he takes the sandwich from his hand. Dean shivers with happiness, and the man touches his hair while he eats.

This is so nice, Dean thinks. He doesn’t mind that things make sense now, when they’re so nice like this.

The only thing that really doesn’t make sense now is why things are so nice. And who the man is, and what’s going on.

It doesn’t matter. Dean was told to eat, and he’s eating. He’s following directions and being good. None of the other stuff is important.

He feels good as he eats because it feels good to have food in his stomach, and to taste something he actually wants in his mouth. It feels good also because the nice man keeps saying nice things to him and touching him, and telling him he’s doing a good job.

That makes Dean feel strange, in a good way, like he’s getting a rush of some odd thing in his blood that is making the world sharper and less loose.

He realizes belatedly that the nice man had been telling him to do things earlier too, and that he’d been doing them, even when the words weren’t making very much sense.

But they make more sense now. Everything makes sense now. He’s not so afraid anymore.

The nice man’s name is Castiel. Dean got told that yesterday.

He’s one of Dean’s therapists. Therapists are like Gordon and Michael. They hurt bad brats like Dean until they die.

Castiel doesn’t seem like a therapist. He seems nice. He is nice. He gave Dean food.

Dean eats most of the sandwich before his stomach starts to get full, at which point he freezes, holding the food out awkwardly in the air.

He didn’t get any instructions about what to do after this, and he starts to get scared because he doesn’t want to do something wrong. He doesn’t want Castiel the therapist to stop being nice to him.

But Castiel the therapist is nice to him even though Dean is bad. He says, “Are you full?” and Dean nods because he is.

“You’re such a good boy for remembering to stop, sweetheart,” Castiel the therapist says, and Dean shuts his eyes ‘cause it feels good. “You’re such a good boy for eating all that, and doing exactly as I said.”

Such a good boy.

He’s not a good boy. He’s always bad.

But Castiel the therapist said he’s a good boy.

“‘M good?” he asks, and the words feel like cotton in his mouth, fuzzy and out of shape and confused.

But they’re clear enough, maybe, because Castiel answers him like he understood, he says “Yes, Dean, you’re such a good boy, such a good boy, my good boy, my Dean.”

My Dean.

Dean shivers.

He wants to belong to the nice man. He wants to belong to Castiel.

Castiel said he’s a good boy. He’s a good boy. He’s a good boy, because Castiel said so.

Maybe Castiel will tell Michael and Gordon that he’s a good boy. Maybe they won’t hurt him anymore.

He’d like to not be hurt anymore.

Maybe I could go home.

Home.

He forgot about home.

Home has Sammy. Dean misses Sammy. He’s missed Sammy for years and years now. He’s missed Sammy since before everything stopped making sense.

“Please give me the rest of the sandwich, Dean,” Castiel says, and he sounds gentle which is weird because Dean still has to do what he says. He can feel it because of how the man said it. He can feel how he needs to listen to him right away.

That always feels bad, usually, but Cas is nice and his voice is nice so Dean just gives the sandwich to him and then the feeling of need disappears.

“Good boy, sweetheart,” the man says again. Dean breathes out, and blinks as the world comes more and more into focus around him. He’s in a- room. Not like the cold, white room. A normal room. With carpet floors and chairs and lamps and a couch.

Like a room out in the…real world.

Where am I? Dean wonders vaguely, shooting a furtive glance up at the window behind the therapist man.

It has curtains in front of it, but he can see a glimpse of the blue sky, of tall buildings framed by clouds, of telephone wires. It startles him enough to make him look away, feeling like he’s done something wrong.

He didn’t know that wherever he is, it’s…part of the real world. That he’s not just trapped in some hell-like space, disconnected from reality and time.

It didn’t occur to him that he’s in a building somewhere, with other, normal buildings around it. It didn’t occur to him that the world is still outside, that it still exists.

He forgot up until now that it had ever existed at all.

Castiel tells him he has to go lie down on the couch then with a blanket on him and Dean doesn’t want to because he wants to look at the window. He wants to look at the little sliver of blue he can see through the curtain and think about how there are other things besides pain that are real.

He saw something move and he thinks maybe it was a bird. He forgot about birds. He wants to see another bird.

But Castiel the therapist told him to lie down and he can feel that feeling where he needs to do what the people say and it makes him so upset so he snarls and tries to bite Castiel when he touches him and then he hides his face because he doesn’t want Castiel to be mad.

And then Castiel says “What’s wrong, Dean?” but Dean doesn’t know and also he still has to listen. So he gets up and goes over to the couch and lies down quickly so Castiel doesn’t decide he’s a bad boy after all.

Castiel didn’t tell him which way he had to lie down, though, so he tries to turn his head so he can still see some of the window when he looks up.

Mostly he sees the curtain. But a tiny bit he can see blue, under the curtain, and Dean is happy he can stare at it and wait for another bird.

The nice man comes up behind him but Dean ignores him, staring very hard at the blue. There’s some white in it now, which Dean finds interesting. It’s moving slowly a little bit. Dean wants to touch it.

Clouds, he remembers. The white is clouds, and the blue is the sky. He used to watch them both with Sammy and find pictures in their twists and curves.

“Do you want to look out the window, Dean?”

Dean nods, because he does. He’s looking out the window now, and he hopes the therapist won’t make him stop.

He doesn’t expect the man to lean over him, briefly blocking his tiny pinch of blue, before pushing the curtains open entirely, bathing the whole room and Dean too in a sudden shower of light.

And then the man leans back and there is blue, so much of it, and clouds and other things too, and Dean shoots up on the couch before he’s caught by his own obedience like a dog reaching the end of its leash.

Choking, Dean falls back down as if pushed, the need to obey and be a good boy so so strong in his blood that it overrides everything else.

Even his chance to look out the window for real.

Dean wants to scream, staring up at the pockmarked gray ceiling.

“You can sit up, sweetheart,” Castiel tells him, and Dean does, pushing himself up quickly on his arms.

He gets dizzy, and the therapist man helps him so he doesn’t fall back over, and moves him around so he’s kneeling on the couch.

Leaning against the back of it, Dean shuffles forward and pushes his face against the glass, hungry for all he can see.

“Wow,” Dean says breathlessly.

He can see the whole world.

There’s a parking lot, and buildings, and some trees and even a road. Cars move along it steadily and Dean remembers that he knows how to drive.

Or, he used to. He doesn’t know anything anymore. He wouldn’t want to get in a car with himself right now. He thinks cars can be dangerous, if you don’t know how to use them. Maybe. It’s hard to remember.

“See that shop over there? That’s where I got your sandwich from.”

The therapist man is kneeling behind him now, and Dean’s gaze follows to where he points.

A big yellow M.

“McDonald’s,” he says thoughtlessly. The name comes to him from nowhere.

I like their burgers, he thinks. Then he wonders what a burger is.

“Yes,” Castiel says. He sounds amused, and Dean turns to him a little nervously.

He’s suddenly aware of how the man has been watching him the whole time, and how Dean wasn’t even thinking about being good.

Sitting back on his haunches, Dean tears his eyes away from the window. It feels painful to do, but it’s important.

Whatever’s going on out there isn’t as important as what’s going on in here. He doesn’t remember where he is, but he’s been here forever and ever. He’s not getting back out anytime soon. Maybe he never will.

“I’m sorry,” he says anxiously, twisting his hands together in his lap.

Is he being bad? He doesn’t want to be bad. Castiel the therapist keeps saying that he’s good.

He wants very badly to be good for Castiel the therapist. He’ll never look out the window again if that would make him good for Castiel.

It would feel like never drinking water again, now that he’s seen the world, now that he remembers it exists…but he needs to be good more than he needs water.

But Castiel is nice to him when he talks to Dean again, even though he could hit him and be mean.

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Dean. You have every right to look out the window. I’m so happy you’ve regained your curiosity so quickly.”

It’s a little confusing, what Castiel is saying, ‘cause he talks kinda strange, or maybe that’s just Dean’s brain, still. But he’s not yelling and also even though Dean is looking down at the brown leather couch he can hear that there’s a smile in his voice.

It makes Dean smile a little bit too.

“Did good?” he asks tentatively, and Cas pets his hair again. Dean melts and thinks he could stay here forever.

“Yes, Dean, you’ve done very well, you’re very good. You can look out the window as much as you want.”

Rewards already! Dean thinks, excited, squirming with happiness where he kneels. He never gets rewards, not ever!

But Cas keeps saying he’s a good boy and Dean feels all floaty, so he doesn’t even have it in him to be scared as he flings himself back over the back of the couch and presses his nose to the glass.

He’s getting a reward for being a good boy and it’s the best reward and he has no idea how he was a good boy but he doesn’t even care that’s not even scary now because everything feels so strange and light.

So he just watches all the cars move back and forth for a while, and watches the sun glint off their metal hoods. He watches people walk around in the parking lot and go in and out of shops across the street, and he imagines what it’s like to be them and if they’re as happy as he is right now.

The man moves away briefly, Dean can tell because his weight disappears from besides him on the couch, and Dean can hear him shuffling around behind him. But Dean doesn’t worry about it because Castiel is nice to him and also there’s a little boy with brown floppy hair coming out of the McDonalds.

Dean stares at him in fascination and wonders if it’s Sammy. He’s way too far away to really tell.

Sam was a teenager the last time you saw him, and you’ve been in bad places for a long time.

He waves the thought away and keeps staring at the boy. He hopes it’s Sammy. Maybe he’ll come in and say hi.

“Dean,” the man says behind him, and Dean listens though he doesn’t turn around. “I was allowed to bring some medicine for you this visit. Numbing cream. It should make you feel a lot better.”

Dean nods absently without really understanding, eyes locked on the kid across the street as he gets into a car with his mom.

Sammy doesn’t have a mom, and neither does Dean. It’s not Sammy, but Dean already knew that.

“Mmhm,” Dean agrees absently, watching the car drive away, feeling, for the first time since he saw the window, a pang of melancholy in his heart.

“Can I put it on your injuries, Dean? You can keep looking out the window if you’d like.”

So Dean nods without really knowing what he’s agreeing to, because he doesn’t care what happens to him as long as he can keep looking outside. The blue van with the boy and his mom in it pulls away, and Dean watches them leave, wondering where they’re going, wondering what they’ll see.

He hopes they have a good time.

Something cool and soothing touches his back, and Dean shivers, resting his head in his arms. The large leather cushion he’s leaning on sinks underneath his body weight, and Dean feels more comfortable than he has since he can remember.

Which to be fair, isn’t very far back.

But he realizes that he feels warm in here, even with his clothes off, unlike the in white room that he hates. The window glass is a little warm, and Dean thinks it must be hot outside.

Is it summer? he thinks, but he’s too shy to try to ask.

Words still feel strange and out of reach for the most part. What if he says them wrong? He doesn’t want Castiel to get mad at him.

Castiel might not get mad at him. But he might think Dean is stupid, which is true. But Dean doesn’t want Cas to think he’s stupid. He wants the man to like him.

So instead, he just murmurs, “Warm.”

Cas hums as he traces soft patterns on Dean’s back, which leave tingling numbness in their wake.

“You’re warm, or outside looks warm?”

Dean just nods, because he forgets how to say that they’re both true.

“Use your words, Dean,” Cas says gently, and Dean flinches because he didn’t know not talking was being bad, because with Michael and Gordon it’s the other way around.

He waits, ashamed, to get smacked, but then Cas doesn’t smack him even though he should. Dean waits and waits but it just doesn’t happen, the man just keeps making his skin feel better.

And then the need starts to hit him, and Dean remembers that he has to do what he’s told, that that was an order that he needs to follow.

He almost…forgot, for a minute, because the need didn’t really hit him as fast as it usually does. Even now, it doesn’t feel as…intense, as he’s used to it being.

Strange, Dean thinks, but he doesn’t give it much thought, because he still has to listen and also he wants to be good for Cas in any case.

Struggling to find the words he needs, Dean feels them come floundering out of his mouth like fish, flopping around pathetically on shore.

“I…the. Inside. And.” The other word. Not inside. Upside? Castiel had just said it. “Outside,” he remembers at last.

It’s not much of a triumph, knowing there’s some other word he could have used to communicate much more easily, but it wasn’t coming, and he had to obey.

He ducks his head, embarrassed at his broken tongue and mind, but the hand on his back pauses to rub his shoulder in a particularly comforting way.

“Good job, Dean. That was really good.”

And his face floods with heat, and his body floods with joy, and his blood floods with something like clarity.

Both, Dean remembers suddenly. The word he was looking for was both.

Too late to use it, but it still feels good to have.

Maybe Castiel will ask him another question and he can use it then. Maybe Cas won’t get sick of his voice and tell him to shut the fuck up.

“Thank you,” he mumbles. That’s what you’re supposed to say when someone is nice to you, he thinks. Lots of words are coming back to him now.

“Of course, Dean,” the man says, and then he tells Dean to lift his arm. Dean obeys, and he feels calmer as he does.

Castiel puts the cream on all the rope burns on his wrists and forearms, and the welt marks on the palms of his hands.

“It is warm outside,” he agrees, “And it is warm in here too. I put the temperature up a little, so you wouldn’t be cold. If you do get cold, let me know, and you can wear the blanket.”

The blanket. It’s under his knees right now.

“Not allowed,” he says vacantly. Cas pauses, and Dean ducks his head.

It’s true though. He forgot, earlier, because he forgets everything, and he’d put it on when Castiel had told him too. But he’s not allowed to have blankets. He’s not allowed to have anything. He’s supposed to be cold and bare all the time.

I’m naked.

He can’t recall the last time he noticed that. He can’t recall the last time he wasn’t.

There’s no self consciousness. It’s been far too long. Dean doesn’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

“It’s allowed with me,” Castiel reassures him. “I know, you don’t have any blankets at night. I’m…working on that. On getting you some blankets. On. Getting them to let you have them in your room.”

Dean doesn’t know who them is. He doesn’t think he wants to know.

Michael and Gordon probably.

He wants to forget his other therapists exist.

Dean blinks at the warm outside he’s not allowed to be in anymore.

You were too bad.

He doesn’t remember what he did, to end up in here.

Stupid.

He doesn’t remember anything at all.

Castiel finishes putting cream on his legs, and tells Dean to turn around.

“I need to do your chest,” he explains.

Dean listens because he has to, and also because Cas is nice to him. The need doesn’t feel quite as strong anymore, but he has no reason to try to fight it.

So he turns as Castiel’s firm hands move him, giving in with no resistance in a way he didn’t know he could let himself do.

It feels nice. It feels safe. It feels comforting, to let Castiel choose where to put him, and to go there without any doubt.

Descriptive words besides “good” and “nice” are coming back to him, finally. But he thinks they’re going to disappear again, soon.

The after-image of the sun he hadn’t seen in such a long time takes a while to disappear from his vision. He feels sad when his eyes finally adjust to the dark room, not knowing if they’ll ever be light-blinded again.

I don’t want to go back.

But he’s going to have to.

He feels empty as Cas takes care of his torso.

“You went away yesterday,” he says eventually, words still unfamiliar and odd, but not as heavy as they were not long before. “I…”

He hesitates, not sure what he’s trying to say exactly, but it’s important maybe, so he tries to push on.

“I think…I went away too.”

It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s the best way his broken brain can think to put it, the strange realization that he’d come back to life yesterday and then had once again died.

He thinks, even if he had all the words he maybe once had, it would be hard to put what he’s trying to say into them.

It’s such a surreal feeling. Such a disconnected, segmented fear. That he’d lost his own thoughts, and is going to lose them again, and he’ll be so far gone he won’t even notice that it’s happened.

Where has my mind been hiding all this time?

Why has it only decided to come back now, around this man?

I’m scared of dying again, when you go. Please don’t go. Please stay with me and keep me alive.

But he knows the man isn’t going to stay. He can tell, the moment the words leave his mouth.

Because Castiel pauses where he’s tending to Dean’s ribs, and goes stiff. Dean mirrors him, wondering if he’s finally in trouble.

He tries to loosen his muscles the moment he notices them tightening, knowing that if Castiel wants to hit him, he has no right to brace himself against it.

The man’s been so nice to him. It’s only right.

But Castiel still doesn’t hit him, still still still, and Dean feels his eyes getting wet as he gazes down at the rug.

“What do you mean, sweetheart?” the man says, and Dean shrugs, biting his lip, not knowing what else he can say.

“Use your words, Dean,” he’s told again. But Dean can’t, he really can’t this time, but his body doesn’t care and neither does his therapist. The need comes, not as fast and not as harsh as usual, but it still comes, burning through his veins with no escape.

And it’s like how it is all the time with Michael and Gordon when he’s trapped and has no way to listen, and Dean for a second feels like he can’t breathe, so afraid that he’s going to have to be bad after all.

“Can’t,” he begs, having nothing else he can offer. “Can’t- I don’t, I don’t know.”

“Ok, that’s alright.” Castiel says easily, sounding soothing and kind.

And just like that, the need vanishes like smoke.

It’s just…gone, and Dean is left staring after it in shock, having never known that it could do that, that it could just…go away.

That he can say no. And the need will release him, if the person he wants to please does first. That his own urge to obey will accept that he can’t do something, if the dominant who ordered him accepts that too.

Dean curls his trembling hands into fists and tries not to show how shaken he is. He tries not to think about why the other dominants don’t just say ok, that’s alright like Castiel did, when he screams and cries because he can’t do what they want.

It hurts, he thinks weakly. It hurts, to not obey.

Everything hurts, outside of this room.

He still feels dazed and shaky when Castiel finishes numbing his torso a moment later, when the man sits down besides him on the couch.

“I do think I know what you mean, Dean,” the man tells him softly, sounding gentle. Dean likes the understanding in his voice. “I think you’ve been disoriented for a long time.”

It’s true, and his eyes really start to sting then as the man points it out. Dean tries to hold his breath back to keep from crying yet again.

He’s been crying all day. He cries all the time. Looking out the window might have been the longest he’s gone without crying in…years.

“I’m very glad you felt less disoriented by the end of our session yesterday. I’m very glad you’re less disoriented now as well. I can’t begin to tell you how proud of you I am, Dean. The improvement you’ve shown in such a miniscule amount of time is, frankly, nothing short of miraculous.”

It’s hard yet again to really understand what Cas is talking about, because of the big words and because Dean’s getting lost. He’s not sure what his thinking has to do with being good, and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be improving at.

Nonetheless, there’s praise in Cas’s voice, transparent and overwhelming, and Dean sniffles as it’s heaped upon him without restraint, like warmth in a freezing winter storm.

“I’m sorry you became…disoriented again, after I left yesterday. I…Unfortunately I can’t promise it won’t happen again today. But Dean,” the man adds quickly, before Dean’s heart can start to sink. “I really think that you’re going to get better.”

And then he takes Dean’s hand in his own, and Dean stares down at it in shock, and he starts to blush and think that maybe he wasn’t crazy when he thought that maybe Cas likes him.

It’s hard to be too upset about anything, when Cas is holding his hand.

Even the prospect of him leaving seems distant and unimportant, because he’s here now, and he’s nice, and thinks Dean is good.

He thinks I’m going to get better!

It’s a happy thought, though he has no idea what he’s supposed to get better at.

Obedience? Sex? Taking a beating without screaming or squirming away?

Maybe next time Dean will have the courage to ask. Whatever it is, Dean knows he can do it, as long as Cas talks to him nice and holds his hand again.

“I’ll get much better, Sir,” Dean promises fervently, nodding quickly to show that he means it.

He doesn’t dare look up, but he feels the nice man’s hand cup his jaw, and his eyes flutter shut at the feeling.

“Oh, Sweetheart,” the man breathes, “You already have.”

It sends a burst of light through Dean that’s brighter than the sun still shining behind him, that feels warmer than the world outside that he may never again be able to reach.

But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if he never leaves this building again, if Castiel is here inside it with him. It doesn’t matter if Michael and Gordon beat him and beat him, as long as Castiel comes back to touch his face.

I did a good job, his heart pounds like a drum in his chest, I did a good job. Finally I did good.

The realization is so frantic inside him that it almost feels something like panic, but it isn’t panic because he’s never been so happy in his life.

He’s coming back tomorrow. He said he’s going to come back every day.

It makes Dean want to scream with relief and joy.

Because he can get through anything, anything in the world if only he can feel this way again. He can suffer through all the endless training that tells him he’s bad as long as Castiel at the end of it assures him he’s good.

It feels real, now, feels real in a way it hadn’t the day before, Castiel’s belief in him glowing like a solid thing in his chest. Because it’s been two days now and somehow Dean hasn’t broken it yet, because he’d thrown the trashcan across the room and tried to bite Castiel’s hand off and still the man had come back for him and is here now. Still the man had told him he’d been good.

I don’t understand, Dean thinks, but if he’s learned anything over his life it’s that he doesn’t have to understand why people treat them the way they do in order for him to have to accept it.

He’d never been treated like this before, though. He’d never been petted and told that he’s good.

But he is. He- Somehow, to Castiel, he is.

“I’m gonna remember this time,” Dean whispers, and all of a sudden he feels sure of it, sure that no isolation or pain can take this feeling away from him, this knowledge that he’d been good.

“It’s alright if you don’t, Dean. It will come back.”

Like today. It’s good that it came back today. But tomorrow’s gonna be different.

“I’ll remember,” he promises, and he really believes that it’s true.

And when Cas squeezes his hand Dean feels like he’s floating, and he doesn’t feel very scared anymore at all.

Chapter Text

“Look,” he tells Naomi directly after the appointment ends. “I can’t do my job if he’s being tortured every hour inbetween.”

The woman doesn’t even look up from her computer, unphased by Cas’s sudden presence. If she’d been startled by his dramatic entrance to her office, she doesn’t show it, clackity-clack of the keyboard she’s typing on betraying no pause of surprise.

“It’s not torture, Mr. Novak, it’s correction,” she says evenly, voice meticulously controlled as everything else about her being. “The methods employed at the Shurley Center are evidence based and scientifically proven to be effective. They are always engaged with the ultimate well being of the defiant submissive in mind.”

She’s completely emotionless, scripted lines replayed as flatly as if they’d been prerecorded. Cas tries to push past the uncomfortable feeling that he’s shouting into a phone demanding to speak to a customer service representative, while an automated message replays over and over assuring him that his feedback is of great value to the company.

It makes Cas’s blood boil, because this is an issue of his patient’s health and safety, and instead of being taken seriously, his concerns are being dismissed like those of an irritated fast-food customer’s.

“I don’t think you understand,” he says, struggling to keep his own words as leveled as Naomi’s. “His cognitive functioning is being severely impacted by the immediate trauma of what he’s being put through.”

“His cognitive functioning is being affected by the late-stage Submissive Rejection Syndrome he is experiencing at an extreme level. Considering you are supposed to be an expert on this subject, I find it concerning that you aren’t familiar with this symptom.”

The woman still refuses to look up from her apparently all-consuming work emails. It’s all so condescending that Cas has to resist the urge to grab her laptop out from under her hands, resist the urge to scream in her face that this is serious.

But of course, Naomi already knows this is serious. She just couldn’t care less, unless it affects her bottom line.

“I am very familiar with all the symptoms of SRS,” he snaps, words strained with the stress of trying to hold back his outrage. “I am telling you that I am seeing clear evidence that the treatment Dean is receiving here is aggravating these symptoms dramatically. I made significant progress with the patient during our first appointment. But between today and yesterday, every ounce of improvement I saw in him had been completely undone.”

It’s not the truth, but it’s very close to it, and it disturbs Cas to the core. He hadn’t expected the promising results of yesterday’s session to lead to immediate recovery, but he had expected at least some of the progress he’d made with the young man to have been retained over the next 24 hours.

It had only been a day, after all.

Instead, the figure that had been dragged into the conference room again was once again completely wild and feral, with little to no capacity to understand language or communicate, and apparently no memory of Cas whatsoever

Admittedly, the recovery from this state back to what he’d coaxed out of the young man a day earlier had been faster this time around, and in fact Dean had outpaced how far he’d come the day before by leaps and bounds when comparing his powers of speech. But it had initially taken almost ten minutes of talking to the curled up heap on the ground before it expressed some limited recognition of Cas’s voice, and most of the appointment had passed before the young man had again reached the same levels of functioning he had demonstrated in their initial session.

And that…that is not normal.

It’s normal for there to be some regression between appointments, which is why Cas prefers to work with patients 24/7. It’s also normal for patients who initially make progress to erratically backslide over the course of a few days.

The near complete amnesia, however, is not normal. The total loss of the language comprehension he’d managed to demonstrate a day earlier is not normal either.

That kind of regression doesn’t come from Submission Rejection Syndrome, no matter how advanced. That only comes from the experience of being kept in conditions so deplorable that the mind completely shuts down.

“The conditions under which Dean is being kept are utterly detrimental to his health and well-being,” Cas continutes, righteous anger hot on his heels. “You are depriving him of sufficient sleep, keeping him in near starvation, and inflicting physical pain on him during the majority of the time that he’s conscious. And yet you expect him to recover as a result of this treatment?”

“I expect him to break as a result of this treatment,” Naomi says coldly. “Let’s not get confused about our end goal.”

She looks up from her computer at last when she says this, and Cas immediately finds that he wishes she hadn’t. Her icy gaze is so apathetic it can’t even be considered a glare, and it freezes Cas’s indignation in its tracks with the immovable truth of how little she can be bothered to care.

It makes his breath catch, the profound disinterest in her expression, disturbing him almost more than Dean’s state.

“Our submissives are sent here because there is something wrong with them,” she continues flatly. “Because they’ve become recalcitrant against their dominants, and against their own natural instincts. Dean is an extreme case, but he’s still a submissive. He requires a firm hand to redirect him to his place.”

His place. Below dominants, is what she means of course, and below the undesignated as well. Not in any sort of literal sense that the submissive might find comforting, but socially and legally below.

Second class citizens, in some places. Legal property, in others.

But the effort to legislate submissives into a state of inhumanity doesn’t change the fact that they are, in fact, human. It’s a fact he thinks the people who run this center may have quite literally forgotten, especially when it comes to Dean.

It’s beyond the issue of what Cas sees as cruel and abusive. In the all-consuming focus on forcing Dean into submission, it seems that whoever is in charge of Dean’s day to day care seems to have lost sight of the fact that the man has other, regular needs.

Like sleeping, and eating, and not dying of infection as a result of his injuries. While Cas’s focus had initially been on the violent content of his “therapy sessions,” his most recent time with Dean has made him realize just how much the ways his other physiological needs are being neglected are interfering with his ability to heal.

“What he needs,” Cas snaps, voice tight and strained. “Is food. He needs to not be in constant physical pain. He needs sleep, the way every person on earth does. I mean, what are you thinking? Four hours a day, interrupted once at the two hour mark for 30 minutes? Do you have any understanding of what that kind of long-term sleep deprivation does to the human mind?”

“What it does to the submissive mind,” Naomi says forcefully, as if the word is the antonym of human, “Is wear down the unnatural will to defy domination, and prime it to be more receptive to submission.”

“What it does is drive them crazy,” Cas hisses, and there’s more anger in his voice than he wanted to show. “What it does is the same thing it does to everyone else, which is make them completely lose their minds.”

He’s seeing red again, he’s so furious at this woman’s neutrality. It makes him want to scream, thinking of the erratic, disjointed way Dean had been behaving, had been speaking, thinking of the way his hunger-panged body hadn’t even been able to consume more than half a chicken sandwich.

Despite how hungry he was. Despite how desperate he was for rest and comfort. He’d completely forgotten how to accept it, having had it withheld for so long.

How much of Dean’s symptoms are even submission rejection at this point? How much is just starvation and pain and exhaustion, pummeling his mind and body without end?

“His mind can’t heal if his body is this deprived of what it needs, don’t you understand?” Cas snarls, blood rushing as he thinks of Dean’s disoriented eyes. “I can’t work with someone who can’t retain any information, who can’t make any logical decisions because he’s in so much physical distress!”

He sounds pissed off, he knows he sounds pissed off, and finally, Naomi’s expression betrays a hint of irritation. Her eyes narrow on him like a beam of ice sharpening into a point, and Cas feels his blood chill in response.

He suddenly feels like he’s made a big mistake in allowing himself to speak to sharply, and he feels a prickle at the pack of his neck signaling danger, like he’s just walked into the path of a viper.

“Dean can’t make any logical decisions because he’s not supposed to make any decisions at all,” she corrects, voice steely. “This is your problem, Mr. Novak. You insist on seeing defiant submissives as misguided souls in need of rehabilitation, when in fact, they are perverse expressions of a will that simply should not exist.”

Closing the computer in front of her with a manicured hand, she stands in one fluid motion. Cas finds himself taking a step back on instinct, and curses himself after he does.

“They’re human beings,” he insists quietly.

“They are slaves,” Naomi responds.

She speaks no louder than Cas does, but her words sound much more certain nonetheless. And Cas curses himself for allowing himself to be intimidated, and he curses himself for allowing himself to lose control.

He should have kept his mouth shut entirely, or he should be screaming down the house, or both or neither or Cas doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything except for the fact that he feels ashamed of himself now, because he’s not strong enough to protect Dean in either direction.

Not strong enough to keep control over his own emotions, to negotiate calmly and icily like his mother. Not strong enough to explode with fury and force like his father, drowning everyone else’s desires out.

He’s not any image of what a strong dominant should be, and now he’s afraid that Dean is going to suffer for it.

Goddamn it.

How many times is he going to let this happen? How many times until he learns?

“I should remind you that it is your methods that are experimental, Mr. Novak, not ours,” Naomi continues. “The effectiveness of our methods are well documented. Yours, I’m not so sure.”

Heart pounding, Cas draws himself up straight, not sure what direction he wants to move in but unwilling to allow her to so easily dismiss his work.

“My patients have recovered from submissive rejection at a significantly higher rate than those subject to traditional treatments.”

“Your definition, of ‘recovered,’ Mr. Novak, is quite different from the general population’s.”

Cas pinches his lips together, not having a come back for this, knowing, depressingly, that it’s true.

Not an insignificant amount of the criticism that has been launched at him has been based on a complete dismissal of what he counts as a successful case. His stated goal of producing submissives who are healthy, happy, and autonomous is frequently cited as it’s own proof that the submissives he’s treated have not actually recovered from their sickness.

Because it’s the defiance in itself, that’s seen as the sickness, rather than a symptom. It’s the unwillingness of a submissive to blindly submit to any and all treatment by dominants that is seen as the issue needing to be “fixed.”

“And it is quite different from the center’s definition, I assume?” he asks.

“Quite,” Naomi confirms, and Cas feels frustration pounding at his temples.

“Then why, exactly, did you hire me?” he demands. “Why hire me if you never had any intention of allowing me to do what I’m being paid to do?”

Naomi, still standing besides her desk with one hand draped over the back of her chair, raises a sculpted eyebrow at him in distaste.

“I most certainly did not hire you, Mr. Novak,” she says haughtily. “In fact, I opposed the idea quite strongly when the issue was initially raised.”

And yet here I stand, Cas thinks, annoyed by her dramatics, waiting for her to get to the point.

“It was my father’s idea, and he couldn’t be talked out of it,” she adds after a pause. “He’s become rather stubborn in his old age.”

She tilts her head then, and looks at Cas like he’s nothing. Cas feels like nothing, under her gaze.

“He said that we needed someone to blame when the patient inevitably expired of his own accord,” she continues. “It might as well be someone like you.”

There’s silence after she says that, and Cas feels himself go still.

So that’s it then.

They have no intention of letting him succeed here, regardless of what he does or doesn’t do.

He doesn’t know why he didn’t realize this himself, but he didn’t. He doesn’t know now how to proceed.

“Dean has been responding well to my treatment,” he protests weakly.

“By your standards,” Naomi says, emotionless again.

He expects her to tell him to leave now, conversation seemingly done now that he’s been so totally dismissed. But instead, she walks around to a filing cabinet against the left wall of the office, and smoothly pulls out a drawer.

Her manicured fingers start walking down the yellow cardstock files, looking for something, and Cas resists the urge to take a step back once more.

It’s not like she’s going to take out a knife and gut me.

Though he’s certain she could do so with the same emotionless demeanor with which she’s done everything else.

“What are you doing?” he asks nervously, and is unsurprised when the woman doesn’t look up, or answer him directly like he would greatly prefer.

“Do you want to know why you were really hired?” she says curtly. “Why we invited you to come and work with Mr. Winchester at all?”

His palms are sweating with anxiety, and he tries fruitlessly to ignore it.

“I have no idea,” he says truthfully, and her red nails finally stop in their searching, delicate and threatening where they rest on whatever she’s found.

“Because no one here knows how to handle him anymore.”

She drops the words like scraps of paper, littered like they mean nothing to her at all. But Cas isn’t foolish enough not to feel chills down his spine at how ominous they are, no matter how casually they’re said.

What the hell does that mean? he wants to demand. But he holds his tongue, knowing he’ll get the same cryptic nonsense in answer.

But his gut twists as he watches the woman pluck a file seamlessly from the yellow separators, dark blue and thick with paper.

Cas eyes it in confusion as Naomi comes over to him, heels click-clacking like her fingers on the keyboard.

She holds it out to him, but Cas doesn’t take it, unsure if it’s poisoned, or if it will maybe bite.

“What’s this?” he asks, but once again Naomi doesn’t answer him directly, just raising a frightening eyebrow like she’s unimpressed.

“You seem convinced that Dean is….of a quite delicate constitution. I know, this idea is appealing to you. It must be difficult to be in your position, of such…delicate constitution yourself.”

Cas doesn’t step back this time, but her words shove him so forcefully he may as well have. Like a slap, their sting echoes in the silence after they’re spoken, and Cas tries to keep his face unaffected.

But the backhanded insult is so much more vicious than he expected, not because he puts any kind of cruelty past Naomi Shurley but because she doesn’t know him from a hole in the wall.

Yet apparently his insecurities are written all over him, available for everyone to see. Underneath his published pieces advocating for gentler treatment for submissives, underneath his demands that Dean be handled less roughly. Underneath even his own habit of overthinking every interaction with a dominant that he feels like he’s up against, a pathetic habit of posturing that clearly hides nothing at all.

You’re weak, he hears Naomi’s words say transparently. You’re a weak, pathetic dominant who can’t stomach even the most basic of submissive needs, and you’re not enough for anyone, much less someone like Dean.

The implication that he’s projecting his own desires onto his patient shines through loud and clear, and the worst part is that Naomi didn’t have to say anything close to any of that, because his own brain filled in the blanks all on their own.

“My conclusions about Dean’s pallet of needs are based entirely on my own observations,” he says tightly.

“And yet,” Naomi counters, infuriatingly calm, “You don’t know him very well, do you?”

Unable to argue, Cas just swallows, and struggles not to drop his eyes.

“You’ve met him, what, two times now? Over the course of two days? How much do you really know about what he needs?”

Nothing, his mind answers, at the same time his heart speaks over it.

Everything, everything, I know it all.

It’s all written in Dean’s big eyes, all over his flinching body that melts at a touch. The young man is as transparent as the glass on the window he’d loved so much to look through, and Cas can read the heart on his sleeve like it’s a How To guide to look after him.

At least…Cas thought he could.

He looks down at the folder Naomi is holding uncertainly, doubt creeping into his heart.

“What is this?” he asks again quietly, and Naomi sends him a look like he’s a fly in her trap.

“Documents that weren’t shared with you initially, because they weren’t deemed relevant to your case. But I now believe they may be of great interest to you, considering your…concern, over how Dean is being cared for.”

She holds the document out further, leaving Cas no comfortable choice but to take it.

It’s heavy, like there’s something guilty inside of it, and Cas resists the immediate reflex which tells him to drop it.

Almost like he knows it’s going to burn him. Almost like he knows he’s not going to like what he finds.

“He’s not what you think he is, Mr. Novak,” she tells him. “And we aren’t being as needlessly cruel as you seem to believe.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says bluntly, and she tilts her head like she’s considering his chances of survival.

Against what? Cas wonders, and he gets the unnerving feeling that she herself isn’t the predator she’s thinking he needs to look out for anymore.

“Did you ever consider, even for a moment, that we actually know what we’re doing?” she asks conversationally. “Did you ever consider that we’ve dragged Mr. Winchester into this state for a reason, besides just to laugh at his pain?”

The self awareness of what her treatment of the young man looks like to him is unsettling, because of course, he truly did not consider any other motive, not seeing how any other could be found.

But there’s something hanging in the atmosphere now that starts to make him question his own understanding of what’s going on here, and he clutches the folder in his hand tightly enough that he can feel the card paper buckling under the pressure of his hand.

“There’s something wrong with that boy, Mr. Novak, beyond just defiance,” Naomi says darkly. “You think you’re helping, but you’re bringing him back towards being something you aren’t going to like at all.”

Uneasily, Cas remembers the pages and pages of documents outlining the many injuries Dean had inflicted on the staff here. He remembers how the young man had put at least a few people in the hospital, and how he’d watched Dean almost take down two strong men despite his emaciated state.

He remembers that he doesn’t actually know what got Dean admitted here, after years of flying under the radar.

But then he also remembers the young man melting in his arms, curling so eagerly into his touch. He remembers how Jo had talked about him so sadly, and how he’d had a brother who’d clearly loved him so much.

“There’s a blanket in the offi- my office,” Cas says out of nowhere. “I brought it for Dean today.”

If Naomi is phased by the sudden change of subject, she doesn’t show it. She just waits for Cas to get to the point.

“I want it to be brought to him. Now. I want him to be allowed to keep it tonight.”

Naomi purses her lips, and considers him critically. Like he’s something strange stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

But she doesn’t dismiss him right out of hand, doesn’t bring up more of her politically funded studies. And Cas knows that he’s gotten his point across.

Give him the blanket, and I’ll play this little game of yours. I’ll look at whatever it is you think will rattle me so badly, as long as you allow Dean this one minor comfort.

It’s a tiny succession to demand, in comparison to what is needed, but he has no real leverage but his threat to leave the files untouched.

And he doesn’t trust that Naomi cares enough about Dean, even about hurting him, to bargain for much more than a piece of cloth.

Even that seems to be up in the air, and she seems to think about the idea like she isn’t sure.

After a moment, however, she finally nods, and Cas lets out a breath of relief.

It’s nothing, really. It’s nothing, in the grand scheme of things. But at least he won’t have to worry about Dean freezing tonight. At least he can convince himself he’s cared for the man in one small way.

Naomi shakes her head, but not like she’s denying him. More like she’s just disapproving.

“I suppose that can be arranged,” she agrees magnanimously. But there’s clear doubt in her voice, like she truly thinks Cas is making a huge mistake.

Cas couldn’t care less about what she thinks, though. The graciousness of her attitude scrapes him raw.

“Thank you,” he replies, not knowing whether he hopes Naomi picks up on the sarcasm or not.

He can’t tell, in any case, her face impassive as ever.

“You're welcome,” she says neutrally. “Have a good evening, Mr. Novak.”

And just like that, the conversation is over, and Cas leaves, feeling shaken and strange.

*******

He doesn’t go home immediately, instead circling the grounds around the center for a while, mind wandering this way and that. It’s a pleasant walk, despite his state of uncertainty, and despite the misery trapped in the building that owns the property. They nonetheless own a lovely estate, complete with cherry trees and a lakeside view.

He’d had an idea that he might take Dean out here eventually, after watching the man’s reaction to looking out the window to the road. It’s too bad, he’d thought, that the conference room looks out over the ugly concrete of the city, rather than the picturesque view hiding around the back of the building.

Now, however, he feels anxious, uncertain if the view is something Dean would even find pleasant. Is being taken out to sit by the lake something that would comfort Dean? Or is it merely something Cas himself desires, that he’s projecting onto his patient?

Pausing by one of the benches, Cas looks out at the water, and then lets out a sigh.

Naomi had really gotten to him. He’s hyperconscious of the weight of the files in his backpack, of the secrets it promises to provide.

Mentally, Cas debates whether or not he should even read them. It had been clear from Naomi’s reaction that they contain something the woman is convinced will alter Cas’s planned course of treatment dramatically. Perhaps dramatically enough that it would look more like what Dean is being subjected to now.

Is it wise to give in to her taunting?

Is there anything that could convince him of what she wants at all?

Watching the blue-gray water of the lake lap gently against the rocky shore, Cas thinks back to the way Dean had pressed his face so desperately to the window, the way he’d stared out to the ugly parking lot like it was something he was starved for. He thinks back to Dean’s halting, soft words of observation, of thanks and eventual promises.

I’m gonna remember this time. I’ll remember.

Cas’s lips twitch up, and his heart softens again, thinking of the submissive’s earnest words. He doesn’t know whether or not Dean will manage to follow through on his conviction, and certainly won’t hold it against him if he doesn’t. Still, it had been endearing, to hear the man so sure of himself. It had made him feel like he was doing something very right with Dean, to have the man so quickly convinced that remembering Cas and their sessions is important.

But he’s been wrong before, when dealing with submissives. And he knows he has a habit of erring on the side of gentleness, sometimes to the detriment of the patient he’s working with.

Usually, he’s able to justify it to himself with the belief that too light a touch is less damaging than one too heavy, especially to a submissive who’s been mistreated. But if he’s honest with himself, he knows not a small part of his bad habit comes from his own inherent discomfort with stricter applications of dominance.

Looking back at the imposing building hovering behind him, his eyes lock on the very top windows, where he knows the most volatile patients like Dean are kept.

Up there, they put unfortunate submissives through torture he can barely stomach thinking about, keeping them imprisoned with locks and guards and chains that attach immovably to cold walls. Trapped between hell and the outside world by six floors and infinite layers of security, the victims have no chance of escaping until the dominant who had them admitted to begin with comes to pick them up, or they are deemed “broken” enough to be sold.

There’s no question in Cas’s mind that what goes on up there is unarguably evil, that no secret files with secret truths could ever trick him into thinking it’s ok.

Slowly, though, his eyes drift downwards, falling lower and lower on the building’s shape. Eventually, they land on the ground level, and Cas is forced to confront the banality of the exterior behind him.

There’s two sets of mauve double doors, spaced maybe 10 or so yards apart. There’s a sign, reading “Welcome to the Shurley Center!,” and a row of trees planted near some benches to provide shade.

Underneath one of the trees is a young submissive in center-provided scrubs, who looks pale and drawn as she stares blankly out at the lake. There are visible bruises on her wrists, but she’s unbound and unaccompanied by any sort of minder, and looks more tired and sad than she does terrified.

It’s an uncomfortable reminder to him that not every submissive is here by complete force. That, as much as he doesn’t understand it, the lower floors operate almost like legitimate medical centers, providing domination to submissives who can’t find it anywhere else.

It’s an uncomfortable reminder that the chains and whips Cas finds so upsetting are more than standard among most dom/sub pairs. That most, if not all, submissives need much harsher domination than he’s capable of providing, in order to keep their needs satisfied long-term.

Only children and subs sick with trauma-induced submissive rejection can be sufficiently cared for with the gentleness Cas so craves.

The submissive under the tree accidentally makes eye contact with Cas, and he smiles at her, melancholy and unsure. The girl drops her eyes, but manages a halfhearted nod of acknowledgement, before she goes back to poking at the grass.

Sighing, Cas turns back around, and finally sits down on the bench. He feels yet again the wavering feeling of brokenness and confusion that has plagued him since his adolescence, watching his own psyche flinch from the practices that seem so routine to everyone else.

What’s wrong with me? he wonders, feeling all but 15 years old again, crying in his bedroom after being once again berated by his parents for not being strong enough.

Having grown up since then, he knows that there’s nuance to everything, knows that his parents are cruel and the centers are cruel, and also that he’s far softer than most.

They can both be true, but Naomi’s barbs still make him doubt himself, make him look down at his backpack and wonder.

What if he’s wrong about Dean? What if he really is just projecting his own desires onto someone he’s been charged with caring for, someone who’s more fragile and vulnerable to being hurt by his mistakes than anyone else he’s ever tried to help?

After all, he can’t deny that he’d enjoyed his brief time with Dean far more than he usually does with patients, that the man’s responsiveness to Cas’s touch and praise had satisfied something deep within him that doesn’t get satisfied very much.

Am I doing it again? Cas wonders, somewhat anxiously, opening his backpack on his lap and gazing down at the threatening contents. Am I pretending to myself that someone else is like me, just because I can’t bear my own loneliness?

If he’s honest with himself, he’s grown dangerously attached to Dean in an alarmingly short amount of time. He knows at least part of it has to do with how receptive he has been to Cas’s gentle version of dominance, and how much he’s improved after receiving it.

Almost like…it’s all that he really needs.

But that can’t be true. There’s no one else like him. Not long-term. Not once they’re recovered.

Cas pulls the folder out from the backpack and frowns at it. He thinks of Dean, and the overwhelmingly positive results he’s exhibited when handled with the gentlest of hands. He thinks of Naomi’s sociopathic response to the young man’s pain, and her clear distaste at the fact that Cas had been hired to treat him.

She has no investment whatsoever in seeing Dean healed. Whatever’s contained in these files was not handed over with the intent to help.

Ultimately, Cas knows he has a professional responsibility to review whateverthehell is contained in these documents anyway, no matter what manipulative purpose they might hold. But ultimately, he also knows that it’s in no way going to affect his style of domination with Dean for the time being, with how exceptionally well the man has been responding thus far.

Even if he needs a…”firmer hand,” as Naomi called it, eventually, that harshness clearly isn’t helping him right now.

Right now, the submissive is on a much quicker course to recovery than Cas ever could have hoped, as the result of treatment based on nothing more than Cas’s own observations and past experiences. It’s this that is going to guide him, at least initially, and there’s no use allowing Naomi to unnerve him into second guessing himself by throwing mysterious, ominous files in his lap.

It looks like it’s going to rain, so Cas zips up his back and starts to make his way back to the parking lot, throwing a small wave to the young submissive girl on the ground that her ducked head isn’t able to see.

Tomorrow, he promises himself, as he climbs into his car just as it starts to drizzle. I’ll deal with it tomorrow before I see Dean.

And he drops the files, untouched, into the glove compartment above the empty passenger’s seat, deciding to forget about it until the next morning.

But when the morning comes, it comes with reporters descending onto his house like flies, and the thought of the file slips far far far out of his mind.

Chapter Text

The first call comes at 4:38 AM, and Cas hits the red end call button as quickly as if he was snoozing his alarm. Thinking it must be a spam call, he rolls over and goes back to sleep without much thought, mild irritation the only real reaction he has.

The second call comes at 4:51 AM, and Cas does crack his eyes blearily open then, somewhat concerned.

But when he picks up the phone again, he sees that it’s a different number calling him, so he chalks it up to a coincidence and puts his phone on silent.

And he goes back to sleep then, peacefully oblivious for another two and a half hours, before he’s woken again not by his alarm but by an insistent knock on his door.

Stumbling downstairs, he’s still in his pajamas when he answers it, confused about why someone is bothering him at a time he considers to be the literal crack of dawn.

What’s waiting for him on the other side, though, makes his stomach drop, waking him up more sharply than a glass of cold water being thrown in his face.

About twenty people are waiting around on his front lawn, most carrying or setting up various pieces of television equipment. Four vans are parked in his driveway and out on the street, bearing the names of different local new networks and production companies. There’s already a woman dressed in a pantsuit speaking into a microphone in front of a makeshift recording station, and Cas sees three people carrying large professional-looking cameras on their shoulders. One gets pointed at him, and Cas jumps as the flash goes off.

The man who’d knocked on his door is yet another stranger, and he’s holding a recording device in his hand.

“Are you Mr. Novak?” he asks, and Cas slams the door in his face.

Heart pounding, he spins around and presses his back to the solid frame behind him, panic overwhelming him momentarily.

Fuck, he thinks, all traces of sleepiness gone, and he bolts back up to his bedroom, making a beeline towards his phone.

When he flips it over, he sees what his sleep had allowed him to ignore earlier- 108 missed calls, from at least 50 different unfamiliar numbers, and a barrage of text and email notifications he almost throws up at the idea of sorting out.

Opening his phone, he sees that quite a few of his acquaintances have messaged him, most notably his brother, who’s simply sent “Dude you’re on the news lol.”

Usually, getting an unexpected text from his semi-estranged brother would occupy him completely, but today he doesn’t even think about replying before following Gabriel’s direction.

Googling his own name, the first results are not the usual academic papers and professional contact information. Instead, it’s a slew of headlines and articles, all titled some variation of the same thing.

24 Year Old Submissive Confirmed as the Longest Surviving Patient of Complete SRS

Prominent Submissive Rights Psychologist Treating World’s Longest Surviving C-SRS Patient

At 24 Years, this Submissive has Outlived the Oldest victim of C-SRS By Over a Decade

Cas’s heart jerks when he sees that it’s not only the little local news stations that had been outside reporting on this, but that even the biggest networks have picked the story up.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, even Fox News all already have a short blurb written and published about the event. Most of these appear a few pages down in the Human Interest or Science sections of their respective papers, but a few websites give it more prominence, as a smaller headline on the front page.

Much worse are the tabloids, though, who seem to be dedicating entire spreads to the story, exploiting an angle Cas doesn’t expect and that he’s not sure if he’s going to be blamed for.

His hand is shaking when he clicks on the little icon for People Magazine, partially cut off headline becoming fully visible as the article opens.

Submissive Who’s Survived 24 Years Without Subspace is Being Treated at a Center Under Investigation for Two Deaths

A 24 year old submissive who’s miraculously survived his entire life without entering subspace is being treated at a Submissive Retraining Center that has been under investigation for two recent deaths.

The patient, who’s name is being withheld to comply with privacy laws, is now the longest surviving individual suffering from Complete Submission Rejection Syndrome by more than 10 years. Submissive Rejection Syndrome, also known as SRS, is a condition in which a submissive finds it difficult or impossible to enter subspace, often due to a history of trauma and abuse. Complete Submissive Rejection Syndrome, or C-SRS, is an extremely rare presentation of SRS in which the affected submissive has never entered subspace in their life. A result of extreme and long term child abuse, it is unknown how common C-SRS is, because it is thought that affected individuals often die before the condition is ever detected, usually around four or five years old. The condition, even when caught early, is nearly always fatal, with a recovery rate of less than 11%.

At 24 years old, the unnamed submissive has outlived the previous longest surviving C-SRS patient by 11 years. Yet, he is being treated at a Submissive Retraining Center which is currently under investigation for the deaths of two of its patients last year. Angela Robinson, 27, and Mark Wu, 38, died within three weeks of one another as the result of the extreme methods used by the Shurley Center in Lawrence, Kansas. While a spokesperson for the center previously defended their methods and what was called a “spotless track record,” leaked documents reveal that employees of the center regularly engage in treatments that many experts have called dangerous and detrimental to patient’s health.

Submissive Retraining Centers have come under fire in recent years for practices that advocates claim are abusive and counterproductive. With little oversight regarding how they are run and few mandatory safety requirements, sending even the most defiant submissives to retraining centers has become highly controversial as an increasing number of researchers condemn their use.

One such researcher is Castiel Novak, a prominent submissive rejection therapist who our sources say has been hired by the Shurley Center to treat the unnamed C-SRS patient. Mr. Novak has made waves in the world of submissive psychology for his unconventional methods of treating SRS and compulsive defiance, gaining both respect and criticism for his refusal to use corporal punishment.

“Submissives are people,” Mr. Novak was quoted as saying in an interview with Psychology Today. “They respond to trauma like people do, and recover from trauma the same way- not through further pain and humiliation, but through positive reinforcement and stability.”

While Mr. Novak’s methodology remains hotly debated, there’s no arguing with his results. In comparison to the average C-SRS recovery rate of 11%, Mr. Novak boasts a C-SRS patient recovery rate of 78%, a record some in the field have questioned as too good to be true. Others, however, have pointed out that detractors have no evidence of fraud besides the stunningly promising statistics, and have suggested that Mr. Novak’s success rate is evidence that we should be rethinking how we treat submissive defiance overall.

Yet, according to our source, Mr. Novak’s time with the unnamed 24 year old C-SRS patient has been severely restricted, confined to one hour a day while more traditional treatments are continued.

“They only hired him cause the b*tch is dying,” our source was quoted as saying, referring to the C-SRS patient in a stunningly derogatory way. “They don’t know what to do with him, though, now that he’s here. No one wants to lose their job ‘cause some hippie wants to spend eight hours holding a prayer circle or some shit, you know? It’s obvious the guy doesn’t have any idea how to handle a submissive as crazy as this one. He’s gonna get his ass kicked, in my opinion.”

That opinion has yet to be realized, however, and only time will tell if the miracle worker will be able to work his magic on the miracle patient, especially having been given so little control. If you have any more information on the situation or the Shurley Center, our editor can be reached at [email protected].

Cas’s blood is rushing in his ears as he finishes reading the article. He doesn’t have any idea what he’s feeling, or any idea how to react.

He didn’t expect this to see this much interest in Dean’s case at all, once it was revealed, and he certainly didn’t expect the mainstream media to be nearly as critical of the Shurley Center as he is.

Perhaps the tide has turned more than he thought, in terms of public opinion of such centers.

He’s only scared that this development, and the bad press, is going to get him kicked off Dean’s case entirely. Though he hopes it should be obvious he isn’t responsible for this, considering the vulgarity of the quote included from the magazine’s source.

Still, he calls the center as soon as he finishes reading the article, sitting down on his bed because he finds it hard to keep himself standing.

Expecting to have to speak to Naomi again, he’s surprised when instead the secretary directs his call to the center’s director, who, though he’d apparently been the one to decide to hire him, Cas has had very little contact with.

“We’ve been trying to get in contact with you all morning,” the man says sharply, immediately upon picking up the phone.

Cas winces.

You and everyone else in the world.

But he can afford to ignore the reporters hovering outside. He can’t afford to ignore the people who control his access to Dean.

“I’m sorry,” he apologizes quickly, “I-”

“Have you spoken to the media?” the director barrels over him, clearly uninterested in hearing Cas’s excuses.

No pleasantries at all then. Time to do damage control.

“No,” he defends himself quickly, “No, this wasn’t me. I would never break patient confidentiality like-”

The director once again interrupts him.

“That’s not what I meant,” he says dismissively. “We’ve already identified the employee who spoke to the press, and he’s been terminated. I’m talking about the reporters outside your house, and the many journalists who I assume have been trying to contact you for comment. Have you spoken to any of them?”

Cas blinks in surprise at the urgency in the man’s voice, not having expected to be asked about the people harassing him at all.

In his panic, he hadn’t paused to actually think about why they’re camped out on his lawn, why every newspaper and magazine under the sun is blowing up his phone.

It only dawns on him now, as the director speaks quickly into his ear, that the reporters aren’t just blindly trying to get a boring picture. That they’re trying to reach him for comment- in other words, for his take on the situation.

Which, as the director must know, isn’t going to paint the center in the most flattering light.

The spotlight isn’t just on Dean and I, he realizes. It’s also on the center, and how they treat their patients.

It’s on the fact that a miracle like Dean is in the hands of a business that’s being investigated for reckless negligence.

Something starts to shift in Cas’s brain.

“No,” he says slowly, “I haven’t spoken to anyone.”

Not yet. That part remains unsaid.

But it’s leverage, leverage Cas hadn’t had until now, something he can hang over the center’s head the same way they hang access to Dean over his.

It’s leverage that might allow him to enact a serious change in Dean’s treatment, the power in this situation suddenly at least partially in Cas’s hands.

“Good,” the director answers him brusquely. “Let’s make sure to keep it that way.”

He can’t hear any relief in the man’s voice, but he’s not sure a man like that is capable of emotion in any case.

“You are being made the head therapist for Mr. Winchester’s case, effective immediately,” the man continues. “His other therapists have already been removed from his treatment roster.”

Cas’s heart leaps in his chest like when he’d opened his door to the reporters, now for a completely different reason.

“Sir-” he stutters, elated.

The director hammers on.

“We will be releasing a statement later today addressing the confidentiality leak, and announcing- clarifying who has control of Mr. Winchester’s treatment. You are not to speak to the press under any circumstances. Is that understood?”

Do we have a deal? Cas hears underneath the words. Over the moon, Cas nods, before realizing that the man obviously can’t see him.

“Absolutely,” he agrees wholeheartedly, thrilled with this turn of events.

He gets off the phone not very long after this, and has to resist the urge to jump on his bed with joy.

Things are looking up, Dean, he thinks, body thrumming with energy. And he starts to make plans right away.

Chapter Text

“Let him sleep,” is his first order of business, spoken over the phone to Naomi. “I can’t come in right away anyway, and he needs to rest.”

He wants to, of course, come in right away, to break the wonderful news to Dean that everything is going to be changing.

But he can’t, with how unexpected it all is, with how unprepared he is for this turn of events. He has to sort out the details, figure out exactly how things are going to be changing, and has to fend off the flood of reporters besides. His phone hasn’t stopped buzzing all morning, and he’s trying to figure out if he can block everyone who’s not in his contacts. He doesn’t want to have to change his number for something that will blow over in a few days anyway.

And besides, what he’s telling Naomi is the truth. Dean has been kept awake at night for months with intermittent shocks to his collar, being allowed such limited sleep that Cas doesn’t know how he can still function at all. He’d become convinced after watching the man’s disoriented behavior yesterday that this is the most pressing issue affecting the submissive’s cognition, even more than what’s being done to him by the other “therapists.” There’s no way Cas can do any real work with the man until he’s finally been allowed to crash for at least a solid twelve hours, and now that Michael and Gordon are out of the picture, Dean might as well use this time to catch up on sleep.

“So sleep disruption should be halted?” Naomi says unhappily. She sounds pissed, but Cas couldn't care less.

“Absolutely,” Cas confirms absently, phone pressed to his ear, scribbling buy more McDonalds? on his notepad. “Actually, take that stupid collar off him too. He doesn’t need it. And let him down from that wall.”

The thought of the young man trying to sleep in the position he’d seen him in on the first day tugs at his heart, and he adds the last instruction quickly as he remembers it, remembers how Dean’s arms had been bound unnecessarily above his head.

As if he’s been strung halfway up just to make every moment he’s left alone just as miserable as when someone is beating him. His arms must be aching and screaming from lack of circulation all night.

But Naomi, predictably, sounds incredulous when she speaks again.

“You want us to untie him?” she demands, sounding like she thinks he’s insane. “The patient is dangerous, Mr. Novak!”

Cas huffs, finally pausing in his notetaking to actually give Naomi his full attention. She seems determined to misinterpret him whenever possible, and he doesn’t want that to end up having negative consequences for Dean.

“I am very aware of that, Ms. Shurley,” he tells her, “Which is why I did not tell you to untie him. Only to let his arms down from where I assumed they are still currently pinned to the wall. It’s uncomfortable and inhumane.”

“It’s necessary for the safety of our staff members,” she insists, and Cas scowls, irritated beyond belief.

“He’s one mistreated, domination starved submissive, who has no choice at this point but to follow any orders he’s given. Please don’t try to tell me keeping his arms and legs bound is not enough. If your team of strong male security guards cannot handle him like this, I don’t even know what to say.”

He doesn’t love the idea of keeping Dean’s hands and feet tied up either, nor does he love the idea of leaving him in that bare room, even temporarily. But despite what Naomi may believe, he isn’t nearly naive enough to ignore the fact that some safeguarding is necessary.

She’s right when she says that Dean is dangerous- he’d seen it first hand when the man had been dragged into the conference room on the first day. But he’s still only one person, one very mistreated person, and he knows that many of the “safety precautions” that have been inflicted on the submissive are merely more excuses to hurt and degrade him further.

Cas isn’t going to allow Dean to pose a threat to the staff, as much as he dislikes them, but neither is he going to allow the staff to continue to harm Dean under the guise that they have no choice in the matter. He remembers very well the sick pleasure the orderlies had clearly gotten from manhandling Dean, and doesn’t intend to allow a repeat performance, of that or any other abuse.

Naomi huffs on the other end of the line, less outraged now, but still unhappy.

“I must severely recommend against this,” she tells him shortly, but Cas just waves her off.

“Don’t wake him, get the collar off him, and let him down from the wall,” he reiterates firmly. “I’ll call you again in a few hours with further instructions, but I have to figure out some details first.”

These “details,” of course, are the entire course of Dean’s treatment, transferred to Cas’s control as unexpectedly as it has been. But he’s excited as he hangs up, honestly excited, visions of Dean soon bundled in blankets and showered in sweets bouncing around in his mind.

He’s convinced, after his first two meetings with the young man, that it will not take much effort to dissolve that tendency towards defensive violence. It had taken very little to de-escalate what he’d seen so far, and he’d had Dean cuddled up happily against him after only a few minutes of kindness.

In the immediate moment, the best he can do for Dean is allow him to sleep under a blanket, curled up on the ground of his cell. But he’s sure that within a matter of days, he’s going to have changed the man’s entire situation dramatically.

He’s disappointed that he can’t take Dean home with him, of course, and there’s some anxiety within him at the nagging suspicion that he’s terribly unprepared. But overall, Cas is thrilled, and he starts planning right away, thinking about what Dean will need, and all the things he will want.

Plans dancing in his head like dreams, he ends up at Target in the early afternoon, filling his cart with things that will turn dreams into reality. Piles and piles of blankets and pillows, to make whatever more suitable room he eventually has Dean transferred to as comfortable for him as humanly possible. Pajamas and sweatpants and oversized hoodies, so the submissive doesn’t have to wear those terrible scrubs.

Disinfectant and bandages and ibuprofen, non-perishable snacks like chips and beef jerky… Cas builds in his mind an idea of all Dean will have access to in his new room, all he will give the submissive explicit permission to use or have whenever he wants.

He even buys a few books, remembering how Dean’s paperwork claimed he enjoys being read to, and optimistically throws a pair of sneakers into the cart as well.

Maybe he’ll be able to take Dean outside sooner rather than later. Maybe he’ll even be able to take Dean off the center’s grounds. Cas doesn’t know what the policy is on that, but he makes a note to find out.

By the time he checks out, he’s grabbed enough to total well over $200, but he swipes his card without flinching at the price, too happy with the future that now seems so immediate and sure.

Between what the center is paying him now that he’s working for them full time and the exposure the flurry of press is now giving him, Cas doubts he’s going to have to worry about money for a while, though of course that’s never been his motive. But it’s nice to feel not only like he has money to spend, but someone to spend it on besides his boring self.

He’s just piled his enthusiastically numerous purchases into his trunk when he feels his phone buzzing again. He almost ignores it, thinking it’s another reporter calling, before he remembers that he’d figured out how to block anyone who’s not in his contacts.

So he slams the trunk shut and pulls out his phone, and frowns when he sees it’s Naomi.

Dean must have woken up, he thinks, though it’s earlier than he expected, and he’s not sure why she’s calling instead of just sending him a text.

So it’s with some unease that he picks up the call, and holds his phone up to his ear.

“Hello?” he says, somewhat warily.

And then his heart drops at the words he next hears.

“The patient’s awake,” Naomi tells him flatly. “And we have a situation. We need you to get over here right away.”

***********

He breaks every traffic law known to man in his effort to get to the center as fast as possible, which ends up allowing him to peel into the parking lot 20 minutes later rather than the expected 35.

“What happened?” he demands, as soon as he’s inside the building, and Naomi scowls at him like she almost wishes he hadn’t showed up.

“I told you were making bad decisions,” she snaps, and Cas resists the urge to strangle her right then and there.

“What happened?” he repeats, as the woman starts to walk quickly down the hall.

“You underestimated him, is what happened,” she tells Cas as he follows her, speedwalking with adrenaline coursing through him, resisting the urge to run.

He’s not even entirely sure where they’re going, though he has a good idea. But bolting ahead of Naomi would be stupid in any case, without first extracting what information he can.

Maybe realizing that Cas is about to start shouting at her for being evasive, Naomi finally starts to speak plainly, getting to the point.

“He woke up about 30 minutes ago,” she tells him tightly, “And Kubrick went into his cell to give him his food.”

Kubrick. That’s the blond orderly’s name. He’d seen it on the man’s nametag the other day.

“And?” he prompts.

“And Dean attacked him!” she snaps loudly. It’s the first time Cas has seen her lose her cool.

It’s also the first time he’s heard her call Dean by his first name, and it’s that more than anything that makes Cas realize something is really wrong. Because Naomi is rattled, honestly rattled, like she actually feels out of her depth.

It frightens Cas, because he doesn’t know what could have happened to make her respond like this, but he knows it has to be really bad.

“He overpowered him, and got the keys off his belt, and managed to uncuff himself in a matter of seconds,” she rushes on. “He got halfway across the building before security was able to catch up to him.”

Her story moving as fast as her suited legs, Cas struggles to keep up with them both.

“Dean’s out of his room?”

“Yes, Dean is out of his room,” Naomi fumes, exasperated, and makes a sharp left turn in the opposite direction from the cell as if just to prove her point. “I was right there, and I watched him walk straight out of it.”

Following the woman, Cas glances over to her in confusion, at her stressed face and urgent movements. She’s clearly making a beeline to wherever Dean still must be, and the obvious question is on the tip of his tongue before she barrels over it without notice.

Why didn’t you just order him back? Why don’t you just order him back now?

He doesn’t get a chance to talk, though, as she continues to rant, clearly overwhelmed and infuriated.

“All because you insisted on giving him that stupid blanket,” she spits, enraged. “We’ll be lucky if we don’t have a lawsuit after this!”

What? he thinks, baffled, but again, he doesn’t get a chance to ask. Because it’s at this moment that they finally reach their destination, turning the corner into one of the common rooms and straight into a scene Cas almost can’t comprehend.

Because Dean…Dean has already choked Kubrick to unconsciousness, and he’s clearly a second away from breaking the man’s neck.

What the fuck, he thinks blankly, but doesn’t even come close to saying, voice having evaporated like smoke.

Distantly, he hears Naomi come to a stop behind him, hears her voice hiss “Look what you’ve done,” in his ear. And he does look, or tries to, tries to sort through the image in front of him, tries to process the bombardment of information he’s receiving.

The room is a wreck, chairs knocked over, glass table smashed, shattered pieces all over the floor. Some kind of struggle had clearly led up to this, but it’s over now, tension unsatisfied and drawn tight.

It’s turned into some kind of horrible standoff now, with Dean cornered against the wall using Kubrick as a hostage, and three security guards crouched at each exit, pointing guns directly at the submissive’s head.

What the fuck, he thinks again, still stunned into silence. Dean hasn’t spotted him yet, and he doesn’t know what will happen when he does.

Because Dean isn’t…he’s not like he was, when Cas saw him yesterday. There’s something very very different about him now.

It’s not just about the aggressiveness. Cas had seen that in him before. But it had been unfocused, reflexive violence, almost animalistic in its out of control ways.

This, though. This is very clearly human. This isn’t reflexive at all.

His eyes are wild, but there’s a sharpness to them, a terrifying intelligence that hadn’t been there only the day before. The entire situation is unarguably premeditated, thought out in a way that the young man from yesterday wouldn’t have been capable of at all.

Crouched defensively against the back wall of the room, Dean has laid Kubrick’s unconscious body stomach-down on the ground, and has one knee pressed into the small of the man’s back. The blanket Cas had been so insistent on gifting him last night has been wound up on itself to form a rope, which he’s wrapped twice around Kubrick’s neck in a way that reminds Cas of a strangling viper.

He’s wound each end around his own hands too, clenched in fists, and is using it to pull the front of Kubrick’s body halfway up the ground. With his knee still pressed aggressively into the man’s back, the way Dean is holding him up by his neck is clearly putting enormous pressure on the man’s throat.

Airway already likely very restricted, it would only take Dean leaning backwards a little more to throttle the man completely. And a sharp tug would not require much force behind it to snap the man’s neck fast as a blink.

Cas’s blood chills as he takes in the calculated way Dean has set himself up, at the sharp, vicious fury in his eyes.

Dully, he realizes why they don’t give Dean more give on the rope when he’s tied up in his cell. He wonders how many times he’s gotten a rope around someone’s neck before.

“If I call the police, they’re going to shoot him,” Naomi tells him under her breath, “And we can’t handle that kind of bad press right now, not after what’s already happened.”

It’s a psychopathic response, revealing exactly where her priorities lie, but for once Cas is grateful for her complete lack of empathy, because it’s what’s currently keeping Dean alive.

“They’ve been like this for the past 20 minutes,” she adds as an afterthought, still keeping her voice unusually quiet.

The both of them are still half-hidden behind the wall of the entryway, yet to be spotted, and Naomi seems to have an interest in keeping it that way.

Cas, still trying to make sense of the situation, decides to follow her lead for now.

“He’s not listening to orders?” he asks, also quiet.

Naomi snorts.

“He’s not listening to anything at all.”

She points over Cas’s shoulder, and Cas sees what she means after a moment, spotting the blue colored fabric stuffed into the submissive’s ear.

It had obviously been torn from the blanket he’s now choking Kubrick with, and it shows unarguably that Dean had planned this in advance.

Smart, Cas thinks darkly, and something cold falls over him at how clever it all is, at how quickly the submissive had managed to twist the smallest of freedoms into violence.

It unsettles him, how the blanket he’d specifically chosen for the man because of its softness had been so unflinchingly turned into something that could kill.

The idea that a blanket could be used like that had never even occurred to Cas. It scares him, and in some way he feels hurt, knowing his urge to help had been taken advantage of so fast.

“If we still had the shock collar on him, we’d be able to end this right now,” Naomi says harshly. “I warned you that all of this was a bad idea. I warned you that he isn’t what you thought.”

It’s true. She had warned him. And it seems, to an extent, that she was right. Cas doesn’t know where the gentle young man from yesterday has fled to, but what’s been left behind is nothing like what he’d thought he’d started to see.

Because it seems that Dean truly is ridiculously dangerous, half dead and still managing to end up in a draw with three large men holding guns. It seems he was wrong, thinking that the center was being overzealous in the precautions they took with the man, seems that he really can break out from his cell and nearly kill someone using nothing but a blanket and his hands.

The echo of Naomi’s warning that there is something very wrong with Dean rings inside of him, and for a moment he wonders if the entire thing was an act. The helplessness, the disorientation, the gentle softness in the way he’d so quickly melted under Cas’s touch. His responsiveness had seemed too good to be true. Had it been, after all?

But then Cas looks at Dean, really looks at him, backed against the wall with no escape to be seen.

He looks vicious, yes, but he also looks terrified, cornered and wild with fear. Chest heaving with the strain of trying to hold back his panic, his beaten body shakes with the effort of keeping himself from collapse. His eyes, white rimmed and petrified, jump around erratically, looking for an escape, though the fear in them betrays that he already knows there’s none to be found.

He’s trapped, and he knows it, scared for his life, with no defense other than the pretense of aggressiveness and the hostage he knows he can’t keep holding onto forever. The whole image hits Cas in the chest like a kick, and his heart caves in from the overwhelming weight of trying to hold itself up.

It’s like his mind flips inside out all at once, and he sees the entire situation from Dean’s torn apart perspective.

The young man has been trapped here for months, being tortured, being beaten and hurt and driven literally insane. He’s had almost no understanding of what’s going on this entire time, almost no understanding of where he is, of why these things are happening to him. His ability to think and process the events around him have been so completely worn down by submission starvations and the miserable conditions of his life. Even yesterday his understanding had been extremely foggy, just barely grasping at the threads of thought and language.

But then he’d gone to bed, and actually slept for the first time since arriving here. The positive effects of the submission he’d experienced had had time to fully settle into his body.

He’d likely woken this morning with a clearer head than he’s had in years. To him, it must have felt like waking up from a nightmare only to find himself in hell.

No wonder he’d wildly attacked the first person who tried to get close to him. No wonder he’s ready to snap Kubrick’s neck, after the way he’s been treated by him and everyone else.

Except me, Cas thinks grimly, stepping out from behind the wall, a plan starting to form in his mind.

There’s a sharp intake of breath from in front of him, and Dean’s expression flickers like a broken television screen, startled and vulnerable like he hadn’t expected Cas to be here.

Or maybe he’d forgotten about Cas’s existence completely, only remembering now at the sudden sight of him. Because he seems confused about how he’s supposed to react to Cas’s presence, whether he’s supposed to be scared or relieved or pleading.

Like he’d tripped on Cas’s abrupt existence as solidly as tripping on a rock, the startled moment of true emotion lasts barely more than a second. Almost immediately, Dean seems to come to the conclusion that there’s no help to be found in Cas either, and his angry, snarling expression descends back over his face like a prison gate slamming shut.

His grip on the blanket he’s using to semi-strangle the man below him tightens, and Cas feels every person in the vicinity tense, hears the safety click off of a gun.

“Don’t,” he barks abruptly, holding his hand out to the security guard beside him. “Give me the gun. Right now.”

The man looks surprised by his request, and he takes Cas in dubiously, like he’s thinking of how unlikely it is that Cas knows how to even hold the weapon.

He’d be right in that assumption, but that isn’t the point, and he reiterates his demand in a sharper tone.

“Give. Me. The. Gun.”

The security guard looks back to Naomi.

“Listen to him,” she says, and the man does.

Cas flicks the safety back on as soon as he’s holding the weapon, weight of it unfamiliar and alarming in his hands. He takes a few steps to the right, moving away from both Naomi and the security guard.

Dean tracks his movements with a sharp, frightened gaze.

“It’s going to be ok, sweetheart,” he murmurs, mostly for his own benefit.

Then he crouches low to the ground, puts the gun down in front of him, and sends it skittering across the tile floor in Dean’s direction.

It comes to a stop a foot or two in front of the submissive, and the moment hangs in the air like a penny flipping.

He feels the complete shock descend on everyone in the room, including Dean, and the young man gapes at the ground in absolute disbelief, floundering with the unexpected reality.

Then the penny drops, and Dean dives for the gun, carelessly dropping the blanket he’d been holding so tight. It slides harmlessly off Kubrick’s neck as the man hits the ground with a thud, suddenly safe in the moment he’s discarded, no longer required for protection.

Instead, Dean fumbles with the gun in transparent panic, obviously frightened he’s going to be shot before he can get it aimed.

But he’s reacting to the turn of events much quicker than anyone else is, and within a moment the man has the weapon locked and loaded in his hands, pointing straight at Cas’s head from where he’s kneeling on the ground.

It’s exactly what Cas expected him to do, is exactly what he planned for. But it’s one thing to plan for having a gun pointed at you, and another to actually be staring down the barrel.

Heart pounding, Cas tries not to panic, slowly raising his hands in the universal sign of surrender. Dean’s eyes follow them up in transparent distrust.

“Jesus,” he hears someone whisper somewhere behind him.

Hopefully not, Cas thinks with less humor than he would like.

“It’s alright, Dean,” he says, though he knows Dean can’t hear him, trying to keep his expression kind.

The man curls his lip back angrily to bare his teeth. His eyes are red rimmed, shining with blind fury and sharp, sharp fear.

“Go,” he hisses, and his voice is raw and flayed. Completely unlike how it had been the day before, it sounds now like he’s been screaming for hours.

“I can’t, Dean,” he says sympathetically, heart pounding in his chest. The submissive doesn’t answer, unable to hear him.

He just keeps glaring daggers at Cas like there’s no one he hates more in the entire world. The gun is shaking, because his hands are shaking too.

“Go,” the man says again, but instead Cas starts to stand very slowly. Dean’s eyes widen in terror as he realizes he’s not being listened to.

He jumps up, and lifts the gun like he’s going to shoot it. But he doesn’t, even though he clearly knows how.

It’s not the first time the submissive had held a weapon like this, Cas can tell. Maybe not even the first time he’s been aiming it at a person. The submissive holds it like it’s familiar in his hands, and stands like he’s braced for the force of the shot. Like he knows what the force of shooting someone feels like.

But the barrel of the gun is still shaking, no matter how Dean tries to steady it. His chest is heaving with unsteady breath.

He knows Cas is about to call his bluff.

“Don’t,” he begs, as Cas takes a step forward.

“It’s alright,” he reassures, and Dean takes a step back.

Bumping into the wall behind him, Cas sees real panic take over his expression, as he recognizes that he has nowhere to run, that Cas isn’t going to stop moving towards him.

“I said go! Get the fuck away from me!” he shouts, voice rising to a hysterical pitch.

It’s the longest sentence he’s heard Dean say so far, and the one that shows the most presence of mind. He clearly knows who Cas is, and he clearly wants to seem like he doesn’t care, like he’s just as willing to pull the trigger on Cas as he is on anyone else.

But it isn’t true. At least, Cas really really hopes it isn’t. He’s betting both of their lives on the belief that Dean isn’t actually going to shoot him.

It’s…a pretty huge gamble to be making, for someone he barely knows at all. But Cas doesn’t see what other option he has, other than to let the men behind him kill his patient.

And he’s obviously not going to allow that, no matter how dangerous Dean has turned out to be.

It’s not his fault, he pleads mentally for them to understand. He’s been trapped and tortured for months.

The man has every reason to be wildly desperate to get out of here, to be willing to kill to keep these people away. He has every reason to have no issue with snapping Kubrick’s neck if necessary, having obviously been taken advantage of by the man dozens upon dozens of times.

To Dean, every single one of these people at the center are his captors, people who torment and torture him without end. To Dean, dominants are nothing less than monsters, creatures who have a terrifying power over him that Cas can barely begin to comprehend.

He only hopes he’s formed enough of a connection with Dean to stand out as different. That the kindness he’d shown Dean when he was much less capable of defending himself will translate now to some reluctance to harm him.

It seems, so far, that it has.

“Please,” Dean begs, as Cas steps forward yet again. “I’m going to shoot you. I’m gonna.”

It’s not a threat. It’s more of a plea- a desperate appeal to Cas to get himself out of danger.

“No, you’re not, sweetheart,” Cas murmurs. “You’re my good boy.”

The submissive can’t hear him, but his eyes visibly catch on Cas’s lips as the last words come out of them, eyes wide and hypnotized and afraid.

He’s the just the same as he was yesterday, Cas thinks, sadness almost choking him. His walls are just built much higher now.

But he’s the same person who’d stared up at the sky through the window with open wonder, who’d gone still with amazement as Cas had touched his hair. He’s the same affection-starved young man Cas had wrapped his arms around on the couch, with the same desperate desires, barely more hidden now than they were before.

“Good boy,” Cas says again, and he says it slower this time, making sure Dean can really read his lips.

The effect is immediate. The tears in the submissive’s eyes finally spill out and over, and he lets out a guttural noise, miserable and confused.

“Stop it,” he protests weakly, “Stop doing this to me.”

Doing what? Cas wonders. Protecting you?

Cas doesn’t know. But whatever it is that Dean is referring to, it’s clearly upsetting him enormously.

He looks devastated, and it’s only as Cas finally gets within arm’s reach of the submissive that it occurs to him that maybe that’s what Dean is afraid of: Stop doing this to me means stop making me care. Stop making me feel like I matter, and like maybe you do too.

I was right, Cas thinks, as he steps directly up to the gun, crowding a hyperventilating Dean against the wall. He can’t hurt me. At least, he can’t kill me. Not after I’ve tried to help him.

Because, despite what Naomi insists, despite the display Cas himself had just observed, Dean is not a pathologically violent criminal just barely contained by the center.

He’s a frightened young man who’s been violently mistreated for years and years, who’s willing to kill the monsters who keep him captive for the same reason Theseus was willing to kill the minotaur: To escape the maze with his life.

But Cas isn’t a monster keeping Dean trapped in a maze to slowly hunt him down, and thus he isn’t being seen that way. At least not anymore. He’s a person to Dean, because he’s treated Dean like a person, and the submissive doesn’t want to harm him because of it.

“I’m not going to hurt you either, sweetheart,” Cas says, close enough to Dean now that he could lean in and kiss him.

The gun is pressed directly up against his chest, and it’s still shaking. Dean is still shaking too.

The man’s eyes are lost, and his expression is one of complete despair. Like he doesn’t understand what’s going on inside of himself at all and it’s scaring him. Like he’s only realizing now that his own emotions can hold him back from pulling a trigger just as strongly as an order from someone he biologically has to obey.

Has he never had any autonomy at all? Cas wonders sadly. How thoroughly has his will been ravaged that he didn’t even know it’s affected by his own heart?

“Give me the gun, Dean,” he says quietly. He’s close enough now that if he projected his voice, Dean would most certainly hear him.

But he doesn’t want to compel Dean in that way, and wants to prove to the man, and maybe himself, that he truly doesn’t have to.

He tugs the gun gently out of Dean’s grip without any real resistance, and for a moment considers unloading the bullets from it as his first course of action before he remembers he has no idea how to do that.

So instead he crouches halfway down without breaking eye contact with the submissive, and drops the gun on the ground, hoping the safety PSA videos are being dramatic and the slight impact isn’t going to erratically set it off.

It doesn’t, and, still looking at Dean, he kicks the gun to the side.

Again, he hears it skid across the ground again, and hears the sound of one of the security guards scrambling to pick it up.

“Everyone can put their weapons away now,” Cas says loudly. “No one is in danger anymore.”

Dean can hear him, he can tell by the way the submissive flinches, and then relaxes he realizes the words aren’t meant for him.

They’re meant for everyone else, though no one moves for another moment.

“Now, please,” Cas reiterates, once again making his voice more stern.

One by one, he hears the sounds of the safeties being clicked back on, and of metal being tucked back into leather belts.

He can tell that the guns are gone when the tension around Dean’s eyes finally relents. It’s a miniscule movement, almost imperceptible, but he’s very close to Dean right now and is also watching the man very intensely.

So he sees the way that the sudden absence of pointed weapons in the room doesn’t draw out the fear from Dean’s body like it should. He sees the way something sort of- wakes up in Dean’s eyes instead, like he’d been in a trance and now all of a sudden he isn’t.

His eyes widen, and he looks at Cas in transparent alarm. It’s clear that the submissive is still scared out of his mind. Maybe not scared for his life, but he’s still very very afraid.

Afraid of what? Cas wonders, as he watches the young man’s breathing start to quicken again, as he watches the pulse in his throat start to jump.

Too late, the obvious answer to that question comes to him, once he’s already on the ground with pain pounding in the back of his skull, and on his cheek where Dean’s nails have just clawed his face open.

Oh, he thinks, as Dean screams his head off somewhere above him, and a crowd of security guards tackle them all to the floor. Of course. He’s afraid of me.

He sits up just in time to watch a guard wrestle Dean to the ground and stick a vial in his neck, and to watch Dean, a few seconds later, go limp.

Chapter Text

Dean drifts towards consciousness feeling comfortable.

It’s such an unfamiliar feeling that he almost doesn’t recognize it as his own at first, and for a while he just floats, warm and safe.

He can’t move very much, but he finds he doesn’t mind. It sort of feels good, like being held very tight.

Experimentally, he squirms a little bit against it, more out of curiosity than any real desire to get free. He finds that he can’t separate his legs, and that he can’t separate his wrists from where they’re behind him, but he can wriggle his whole body around somewhat, not completely pinned down.

He also finds that squirming against the hold doesn’t hurt him, even though he can’t get out of it. Whatever’s wrapped around his limbs is strong, but exceptionally soft, and Dean lets out a soft sigh at the feel of it, liking how it’s gentle against his skin.

“Stop moving, Dean,” a nice voice tells him. It could be a scold, but it isn’t at all.

It’s just saying something that he should do and so he does it, and that feels good too, to do what the voice says.

It makes something warm spread out inside of him, like hot food in the stomach heating him from the inside out. Dean feels happy as he drifts off again, feeling settled in his mind and his body.

There’s something squishy underneath him, and heavy on top of him. He floats between the two sensations for a little while longer, the order to be still keeping him calm and mostly asleep.

Eventually, though, he does start to squirm again, consciousness and curiosity tugging at his sleeve.

“Are you waking up, sweetheart?” the same voice as before asks him softly. Half aware, Dean doesn’t quite know what’s being said.

But it’s a question, and it’s not shouted, so Dean wants to answer it, but all that he manages is an absent hum.

There’s something in his mouth that stops him from speaking. But that’s ok, because he doesn’t have anything to say anyway. It’s sort of nice to not have to worry about talking, to know he couldn’t answer the question even if he knew what was being asked.

“Don’t be frightened,” the voice tells him, words floating down gentle as the touch brushing his cheek.

I’m not, Dean thinks easily.

He hums again, because he’s unable to speak.

“You’re safe,” he’s told, and then the voice stops talking, apparently content to wait for Dean to wake up bit by bit at his own pace.

It takes a long time, as unaccustomed as Dean is to waking comfortably, the gentle way everything feels around him keeping him lulled and still for a long long while.

Very very slowly, though, the nagging suspicion that something is wrong starts to pick at him, tugging his consciousness forward as if caught on a fishing hook.

It’s something about what’s in his mouth, Dean thinks, or at least that’s what he first starts to become aware of, brow scrunching together as he tongues curiously at the foreign object that he finds he can’t push out.

Dean’s used to having all kinds of things in his mouth, cocks and fingers and underwear and metal and rubber. Whatever’s in there right now is definitely rubber, which isn’t an unfamiliar taste. But it’s too…

Too small. Too small, to be what Dean knows he’s supposed to be gagged with. There’s no ache in his jaw, and the gag isn’t choking him, huge fake dick pushing his tongue down and cramming itself down his throat.

And oh right, the thing in his mouth is a gag, not a disconnected sensation, and the things that are keeping him from moving his limbs are ropes, and the thing on top of him is a heavy blanket.

And his heart starts to pound in alarm as he realizes that that voice must be connected to a person, a dominant, which means there’s someone in here with him and Dean can’t move because he’s tied up and all at once it doesn’t feel good anymore at all.

Dean’s eyes shoot open, suddenly wide awake, alarm slamming into him like a truck. Breathing harshly, he takes in the unfamiliar room around him, which isn’t his cell it isn’t his cell where am I where am I leave me alone!

There’s a man in front of him, sitting on the floor besides the couch, and Dean recognizes him and then he really starts to freak.

Because that’s- that’s the man, that’s the man who messed with Dean’s head and got him to act like a mindless happy slave and then who Dean almost shot and oh god oh god it all comes back to him in a rush and he flips, letting out a scream through his gag.

He really starts to fight then, wild panic bounding through him, he twists and strains against the ropes all around him with much more real strength than he’d put into it before. But they don’t budge, they never fucking budge, and the best he can do is swing his bound legs back and then slam them hard into the man’s stomach when he stands and tries to come close.

He really puts his strength into it, and it really knocks the man backwards, and Dean hears him stumble and fall and then gasp for the breath that the hit had knocked out of him.

And blind fear overtakes him then, because now he’s really gonna get it, because he’s still fucking trapped you stupid idiot you’re still trapped and now he’s angry, but what does it matter when the man was already angry, Dean had a gun pointed at him the last time he was awake.

Fear blanking his mind out and messing with it almost as bad as all the shit they’d been doing over the past few months, he shoves himself off the couch while knowing full well he’s not going to get away, crying out in pain and confusion as he suddenly feels himself being choked.

Because he’s- he’s wearing that fucking collar again, he hadn’t noticed because it doesn’t feel the same, doesn’t feel tight and heavy and bruising around his neck. But he’s still wearing it, he’s clearly still wearing it, and its clearly chained to the wall, because it’s fucking choking him so badly that it hurts and he can’t breathe and he’s so tied up that he can’t even get himself upright again to get the pressure off.

“Dean,” he hears behind him, voice breathless like it’s still recovering from being hit. Dean keens in fear, and twists and turns faster, trying to get away even though he knows there’s no hope.

Still struggling to breathe, he flinches as he feels strong arms wrap around from behind him, bracing himself to be manhandled into a better position to beat.

Instead, the arms lift him right back onto the couch he’d fallen off of, laying him down gently on his back and specifically tugging up on the collar to make sure it isn’t choking him anymore.

“Are you alright?” the man says in concern, hovering over him.

Dean stares shaking up at him in stunned terror.

Because the man above him-

The man above him-

I had a gun, Dean thinks helplessly. I had a gun, and I gave it away.

So fucking stupid. So fucking stupid, to trust a dominant. He should have shot them all when he had the chance.

He never would have gotten out alive, but what does it matter? This all could have been over, and he would have gone down swinging, taking at least a few of these fuckers with him.

Now he’s all tied up and trapped again, all ‘cause Dean was too stupid to realize that of course this man is working with them, ‘cause he’s too stupid to remember what his dad taught him, which is to never ever trust a dominant.

Worthless piece of shit. Mindless fucking obedient bitch. Don’t even have enough backbone to stay loyal to your own fucking family.

He wouldn’t have- he wouldn’t have trusted him, he wouldn’t have, but he’s so- he’s been so fucking confused, where the fuck am I, what’s going on, all he remembers is pain and pain and pain until yesterday, when he’d woken up alive again.

Breathing harshly through his nose, Dean tries to push past the overwhelming urge to drop his eyes in submission as the dominant above him stares down at him. He throws his gaze wildly around the room in an attempt to avoid doing so, and in an attempt to orient himself in any way at all.

He’s in- an office? A conference room?

No, a break room, he thinks abruptly.

There’s a counter with a microwave and a coffee pot on it against the wall behind his head. He can’t see it now, but he remembers it from before. He’s been here before. With the man. Castiel.

It’s completely out of sync with the rest of his memories, which are disjointed, screaming blurs of fear and pain inside of steril, clinical rooms. Where am I where am I, hell, it had felt like hell, not somewhere that would have a fucking break room with a coffee machine.

But he’s been- something is wrong with him, they did something to his brain, he remembers the white room and a room with the smell of antiseptic, full of wires and needles and beeping noises, and it had meant nothing but fear to him until now, those had been machines, they’d been drawing blood.

Dean almost goes white with terror understanding that the people in the white coats had been doctors, they’d been doing this to him, doing something to his mind so he couldn’t think anymore, and the dominant is still hovering over him and he’d called himself a therapist, that’s a doctor, what are you doing to me, what have you done!?

A cry of fear and anger breaks out of him, and he flings his bound legs out almost on reflex, kicking towards the man again before he can think better of it.

Get away from me! he thinks furiously, and Castiel must be a fucking idiot because he isn’t standing any ways further from Dean than he had been the first time, and Dean’s feet slam like a bullet once again into the man’s stomach.

He gasps like he had the first time, wind knocked out of him, falling backwards for the second time in a collapse that seems to be borne of significantly more pain than surprise this time around.

But while Castiel must be some kind of moron, Dean isn’t, at least when it comes to how to handle himself in a fight. He’s more alert than he was before, and he’s learned from his past mistakes. He’s not going to give the man a chance to get his breath back and order him to stand down. And he’s not going to let the man somehow convince him to stand down either, like he had so stupidly before.

It doesn’t matter what distracted recollections are tugging at his conscience, doesn’t matter whether or not the sound of Castiel’s voice calling him a good boy comes from a real memory or his pathetic imagination. Dean has to get the fuck out of here before they do whatever they’d done to his brain again, has to get out and get back to Sammy and Dad before this strange “therapist” can put him back under his hypnosis and make him think he doesn’t even want to leave.

So the instant that the man stumbles backwards, Dean flings himself up on the couch. The training dad had beaten into him is finally back within his grasp, and it’s half a second before he’s managed to dislocate his own shoulder, crouching on the couch and stepping on his own bound hands, before jerking himself upwards with a snap.

The pain is white hot and excruciating, and Dean bites down on the rubber gag as it washes through him, glad now that the damn thing is in his mouth so it can keep him from shouting in pain.

It makes him want to curl up into a ball and cry, but desperation keeps him moving, knowing he only has seconds before the “therapist” will have recovered his voice, knowing that he’ll be in for a much worse hell if he can’t pull this off.

I can’t let him order me to stop, Dean thinks, heart bounding, and he breathes harshly as he maneuvers his entire body through the loop of his bound arms behind his back, squirming around so he’s stepping backwards through them and pulling them up over his knees.

The movement stretches the throbbing dislocated shoulder, as he pulls his arms out farther than they are meant to go in order to fit his entire body through them. But it’s done a moment later, allowing him now to have his wrists tied in front of him instead of behind, and Dean doesn’t waste another moment, launching himself at the dominant on the ground.

The man is just starting to sit up, and Dean growls as he lands on top of him, knocking him backwards again. Castiel’s head hits the ground with a loud thump, and he blinks up at Dean, dazed and shocked, opening his mouth to say something that will spell Dean’s complete demise.

No! Dean thinks, and he throttles him, cutting off the man’s air and thus his words.

Castiel’s eyes widen in panic, and he starts to claw at Dean’s hands, but it’s clear he has no idea how to fight.

His nails dig in wildly at Dean’s skin, rather than going for his pinky to rip it backwards and break it. He bucks erratically at the weight of Dean’s body keeping him pinned down, rather than using his legs to try to clamp down on Dean’s own and flip them.

It’s pathetic, nothing like Alastair or his dad, nothing like the vague memories of the way his other therapists had manhandled him when he’d attacked, or how they’d expertly called for backup and shocked him to unconsciousness.

It’s clear that this man has no backup, and from the way he’s not even trying to reach for the remote for the shock collar, Dean guesses he doesn’t even have it on him.

Used to just ordering people around. Not this time, asshole, Dean thinks.

But the thought comes without the viciousness that should be behind it, the complete helplessness in the man’s eyes doing something sick to Dean’s insides. It’s clear the man hadn’t been at all prepared for Dean to attack him like this, even after he’d nearly strangled Kubrick to death, even after he’d nearly shot Castiel with a gun.

But he hadn’t, and maybe that’s why he’d been restrained so halfheartedly, in a style that was so easy for Dean to get out of. Dean tries to feel some satisfaction at the fact that he’d surprised the therapist, that he hadn’t been so easily manipulated this time like he had been before. Instead, he only feels guilt, watching Castiel’s stupid, betrayed eyes roll back into his head finally, confused as Dean had felt upon waking.

You betrayed me too, Dean tells himself, trying to reclaim the anger that had been fueling him.

His mind is all muddled, but he knows the man had pretended to be nice to him while he was too messed up to understand that he was trapping him as well. He knows the man had talked him down from shooting the whole room, only to tie him up again for more torture.

Something is wrong. Dean is in- in hell, or some kind of fucking lab, being experimented on like a rat, being tortured for reasons beyond his understanding that this man must have a hand in somehow.

He’s- he’s a therapist, he’d said so, he’s on their side, Dean should kill him now and be done with it while he knows he can get away with it.

The man had been stupid enough to come into this room alone with him, without the remote for the shock collar, without backup, without the windows and cameras that would display what’s going on. They’re alone, and no one is gonna come after Dean this time if he gets rid of the man for good. He won’t be able to set off the alarms like that woman had last time, won’t be able to order Dean to stop or, or fucking hypnotize him into giving up willingly like he had before with the gun.

Dean stares down, arms shaking, hands loosening around the man’s neck. There are already bruises forming in a ring where he’d been strangling him, and Dean feels nauseous looking at them.

He’ll wake up in a few minutes, and he’ll use that damn voice to tell you to stop. Even if you get out of the ropes by then, he’ll raise the alarm and they’ll all hunt you down.

They’ll kill you this time. He won’t be there to stop them. Not after what you’ve done.

Breathing harshly, Dean’s fingers twitch.

He’d kicked the man in the stomach, and the man had asked him if he was alright.

He’s one of them.

He’d brought Dean a sandwich.

He’d also tied Dean up again so he couldn’t get away.

The ropes don’t hurt.

Actually. Nothing hurts. Except his dislocated shoulder, throbbing with heat.

But the rest of Dean feels…fine, and the hazy memory of the therapist putting something nice on his welts as Dean had stared out the window floats down to him like a feather taking its time.

What? Dean thinks, confused again.

He doesn’t remember the last time he wasn’t in pain.

But, with the exception of his self-injury, he isn’t now, and Dean looks down at himself uncertainly, becoming aware of his own body for the first time.

To his amazement, he finds neither whip marks, nor smooth, impossibly uninjured skin. Instead, he is startled to see that he’s dressed, in something soft and checker-patterned that doesn’t irritate his wounds.

Pajamas, his mind supplies, and he pulls his hands away from Castiel’s throat more in fascination than anything else, lifting his bound arms to stare at the fabric covering them, mesmerized.

He can’t remember the last time he saw himself dressed. Certainly not during the infinity of time he’s been here, and not for a long time before that either. Alastair said subs were meant to be naked.

But now he’s not anymore, and, dazed, he shakes the sleeves down to investigate what’s underneath it.

His arm is wrapped in bandages, and Dean becomes aware of the feeling of bandages covering most of his body underneath the clothing.

What? Dean thinks again, something vulnerable and afraid wavering inside him like a branch in the wind.

He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know what’s going on.

They’re hurting me, he thinks helplessly, looking down at the unconscious man who must have been the one to patch Dean up.

It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense because Castiel is one of them, he’s a dominant and dad had told him to never trust dominants and he was obviously, obviously right. The last time he’d trusted a dominant he’d ended up trapped in Alastair’s basement for years and years, being driven insane, and then yesterday he’d trusted a dominant again and had now woken up tied up and gagged with his collar chained to the wall.

But he’d also woken up dressed and with his injuries having been tended to, apparently, and that shouldn’t matter but it does and Dean almost screams in frustration because it’s fucking happeneing again.

Even unconscious, the man is somehow doing something to him, doing the same thing he’d done with the gun, controlling him controlling his feelings and stopping him from hurting him even without having to use his orders.

Damn it, damn it! Dean seethes, but he doesn’t scream because fuck that could wake Castiel up, and if he’s too pathetic to kill the man then he only has a few minutes to get the fuck out of here, before the dominant wakes up and uses the terrifying voice that makes Dean do whatever he wants.

Stumbling up off the man, panic starts to seize Dean again as he realizes he no longer has the upper hand, as his own weakness folds down on him and suddenly cages him in with a limited amount of time that is rapidly ticking down.

Falling back down on the couch, Dean pulls against the ropes on his wrists, trying to find some give to get out of them.

But just because the ropes are soft and haven’t been tied tight enough to cut off his circulation doesn’t mean they aren’t immovable, Dean discovered, and he grunts with frustration and increasing alarm as he finds no way to loosen them.

I need some kind of knife, Dean thinks, looking around wildly. The glass from the coffee pot would work, if he could shatter it, but the give on the chain on his collar isn’t nearly long enough to reach over there.

Think, damn it.

What’s in reach that’s sharp, or at least, that could be made sharp?

There’s nothing, really. Even the lamps and potted plants that Dean can see around are all well out of reach, and he suddenly remembers trying to throw one at Castiel’s head at some point during those confusing hypnotic sessions.

He didn’t beat me for that, he recalls, and it’s a confusing thought, so he tries to push it out of his mind. He doesn’t have time for it, for the uneasy feeling that that’s somehow related to why he’s miraculously able to think again after all this time.

Instead, he allows himself nothing more than a feeling of frustration before his eyes land on the window.

Maybe…?

It seems like a long shot, but he shoves himself around on the couch so he’s kneeling in front of it, pulling his tied wrists back, ready to swing.

But he stops again as soon as his gaze lands on the sickeningly familiar view.

The Mcdonalds across the street. The highway in front of it. The parking lot below him, filled inexplicably with news vans but otherwise exactly the same as he remembers it.

He knows this place. Too out of his mind with whatever haze they’d put inside of him, he hadn’t recognized it when Castiel had let him look out the window, hadn’t recognized what it all meant.

He’s not out of his mind with confusion anymore, though, and his eyes narrow on the fast food place he’d been so many times before.

Hey look, Sammy, they built my favorite burger joint across the street! Getting ready for me to arrive I guess, huh?

Stop it, Dean, that’s not funny.

It’ll be great! Whipping at 11, go grab a big mac at 12. Be back by 12:30 for the daily rape.

Jesus Christ, Dean, I said that’s not funny! Cut it the fuck out!

Oh.

Oh.

I’m at the center, Dean realizes.

His stomach flips, drops, does something he doesn’t understand, realizing he’s still in Lawrence, realizing he’s so close to home, realizing he’d ended up here eventually, just as he always knew he would.

Even though Alastair promised him he wouldn’t. Even though…

Dean hears a groan of pain from the floor.

He’s waking up! he thinks, heart jumping in his chest, and he pulls his wrists back, ready to swing.

Curling the hand on his uninjured arm into a fist, Dean slams it into the window, which shakes with an enormous bang.

It doesn’t break, though, so, panic fueling him, Dean swings his fist back again, slamming it back into the glass once again. Then he does it again, and again, and again, fear coursing through his veins, pain ricocheting up his knuckles through his bones.

But he ignores it, knowing much worse awaits him if he hesitates, and the glass shudders under the bombardment of his fist, booming like his heart trying to jerk itself out of his chest. He’s loud enough that a few of the reporters in the parking lot look up at him, but Dean pays them no mind as they lift their cameras, focusing intently on where cracks are starting to appear on the glass.

He keeps hitting the pane there, keeps ramming all his strength into it, and finally, finally, Dean feels a sudden blast of hot wind on his face as his arm flies through the hole it has made.

Jagged edges scraping along his skin as it pushes through, Dean breathes heavily for a moment, watching the blood drip down his arm, thinking inexplicably of how kind Castiel had been when he’d shown the man the cut on his hand.

Unimportant. The man is waking up. He won’t be kind now, when he realizes what Dean has done.

I need to get out of here. I need to get back to Sammy.

Sammy needs him. He- Sammy- Dean isn’t supposed to be in here. He’s supposed to be- taking care of-

Alastair.

No.

Sammy.

No.

Where am I?

Dean yanks his arm back.

Gripping one of the shards that sticks out of the uneven hole, he pays no heed to the way it slices his hand open as he pulls back on it until it snaps.

Spinning around, he shoves himself away from the window on the couch, relieved to be away from the view of those outside. He’s even more relieved to find that Castiel is still mostly unconscious on the ground, though his eyes are fluttering like he’s waking up.

No!

Dean starts cutting at the ropes around his wrists, with his blood rushing loudly in his ears. It’s an awkward angle, but his dad had trained him for this, and it only takes seconds more to cut through the ropes than it would have if his hands had been untied.

See, Sam, he wasn’t putting me through it for nothing. It sure is coming in handy now, believe it or not.

He’ll have to tell Sam about it when he sees him again. Dad too. He’ll be proud of Dean.

He won’t be mad. He’ll be proud.

Dean wasn’t supposed to end up in here.

But he won’t be mad, if Dean can get out.

He’ll help Dean stay out, help him hide, Dean knows it. He won’t send him back, now that Dean can show him he’s somehow normal again.

Thinking straight, mostly. Not falling apart at the seams. Dad will help him. He won’t give him back to Alastair. He won’t send him back here. ‘Cause Dean is good now, he doesn’t need to be locked up and beaten because he’s so pathetic. Dad won’t call him pathetic.

Maybe he will. But it doesn’t matter. He’ll help Dean, and he won’t have to come back here. And Sam will see that dad was right all along.

These thoughts slam into Dean, rapid fire, as he saws away at the ropes around his ankles, and then, a moment later, at the ones around his knees. They don’t stop until a moment later when he starts tugging at the chain on his collar in fright, realizing belatedly he’s not going to be able to cut through it and dropping the shard of glass to clutch at what’s around his neck.

But his hands don’t close around the cold metal he expects, and he freezes, startled into hesitating despite the time pressure.

Because instead of unyielding iron, thick and heavy with the wires inside of it, his fingers brush against malleable leather, and…soft fur, padding the band on the inside.

It’s not the shock collar, Dean thinks, with the presence of mind for the first time to notice how much lighter it is around his neck.

Again, confusion hits him, as he looks down at the man who must have taken the dreaded thing off of him.

Why would he do that? He wonders, baffled. Why would he take it off, after seeing what I can do?

He doesn’t have much time to ponder the question, because, as he watches, the still-unconscious man’s eyelids start to flutter. So Dean throws the question out of his mind like a piece of trash out a car window, reminding himself that, whatever had influenced Castiel’s confusing decision, he will most certainly be regretting it as soon as he becomes conscious enough to think.

And all it will take then will be one word in that terrifying, dominant voice Dean can’t fight against, and the man will have Dean completely in his control once again, with no hope and no chance to get away.

With a shaky breath in, Dean gropes for the shard of glass on the couch without tearing his eyes away from the subtle signs of the man’s increasingly light slumber.

Bringing the shard up to the collar, he pushes two fingers under the band and finds he is able to tug it out about an inch and a half away from his neck, once again using Castiel’s kindness against him as he cuts the thing off and rips himself out of it.

Then he tears the gag out of his mouth and flings it aside, pushing himself up on shaky legs.

He wants to bolt towards the door right away, but that would be stupid, because the man is going to come after him the second he wakes up if Dean lets him.

So instead of running, he grabs one of the ropes he’d discarded and ties it around Castiel’s limp arm, then drags the man a few feet across the floor and ties the other end around the foot of the cabinet across the room.

See how you like it, he thinks bitterly, even as he stumbles away.

It won’t hold the dominant for very long, but it should buy him a few minutes at least. Dean’s willing to bet that Castiel has never had to deal with being unwillingly tied up before, and it’s going to take him much longer to figure out how to free himself than it had taken Dean to do the same thing.

He takes his little makeshift glass knife with him on a whim, though he knows it’s not going to do much to protect him if push comes to shove.

It’s not going to come to that. I’m going to get out of here.

He’s going to get out of here, and get back to dad and Sam.

The door is unlocked when Dean goes to open it, and he throws one last guilty glance at the man on the ground before leaving through it.

Someone will find him eventually, if he really can’t get out of the ropes.

The man isn’t like Dean. He’s a dominant, which means he matters. There will be people who care if he lives or dies, and people to help him if he can’t help himself.

But Dean’s on his own. He’s on his own to get out of here, just like he always has been.

So he pushes his guilt out of his mind and slips down the hall, leaving Castiel forgotten in his wake.

Chapter Text

He stumbles down the hallway dazed and limping, pain radiating from his shoulder, and from his arm. His whole body is aching, perhaps not as miraculously healed as he’d first thought, and he’s relying on the wall to hold him up only a few turns into his escape attempt.

Everything is spinning around him, and he’s sweating, having used any reserve of energy he had punching through a reinforced window.

Keep going, he thinks. You have to keep going.

This is his only chance to get away. The therapist he’d knocked out won’t stay unconscious forever, and the way he’d tied the man up will only hold him for so long.

Sooner or later, the man is going to raise the alarm, and Dean’s money is on sooner, judging by how the man’s eyelids had been fluttering as he left.

But the truth is that Dean isn’t going to be going anywhere if he faints from exhaustion, and after his little stunt with the blanket and the gun, he’d bed his life on the fact that running into absolutely anyone who works here is gonna mean game over for him.

There’s no way they don’t have an APB out for him already, whether or not anyone’s raised the alarm. They all saw what he did last time, and how far he got, and there’s no way he can fly under the radar to just walk out of here.

So Dean ends up sinking into a ball behind a large decorative plant around the corner from some kind of large lounge, telling himself he’s just getting his bearings, that he just needs a moment to regroup.

It’s hard not to start crying once he does so though, realizing how exhausted he is, realizing that he’s overwhelmed and cornered and once again completely alone.

His own thoughts feel about as solid as jell-o, and his memories as warped as something seen through it. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the spot between the wall and the plant’s container is the only safe place left for him, like there’s a thousand snipers already in position to shoot him the instant he moves out from behind it.

Pull yourself together, Winchester, he tells himself, breathing heavily, staring blankly down the gray, nondescript hallway.

It seems surreal to look at it, so normal, so unintimidating, knowing that this is the building he’s been held in all this time. It seems surreal, to think of the screaming, terrifying months of pain and blood and rape, knowing that this facade of calm had lied just beyond those locked doors all this time.

It doesn’t make sense, but nothing’s made sense for months and months and there’s no reason that’s going to stop now.

The only difference between then and the present is Dean’s ability to recognize how much nothing is clicking at all.

The center, he thinks vacantly. I’m in the retraining center.

That, it seems, makes the least sense of all.

Not because it doesn’t match up with what has been happening to him for months, but because it wasn’t…he wasn’t…

He wasn’t supposed to end up here.

That was the whole fucking point.

They said they wouldn’t take me anymore, he thinks weakly. And Alastair said he wouldn’t let me go.

Besides, he's been to the center, many times, and it never had looked anything like this. Like- an office building rather than a torture chamber.

Maybe it was a different McDonalds, he hopes halfheartedly. Maybe it’s not the center after all.

Though he can’t imagine where else he would be.

As if to fan his doubt, though, it’s at this moment that one of the many doors down the hall opens up, and two nurses in hospital scrubs come out of it, pushing some kind of metal cart in front of them.

Hospital scrubs? he wonders, confused, catching a glimpse of some steril, medical looking room behind the women before the door swings shut.

It tugs at those same strange impressions that had bombarded him before, that he’d been somehow- tested on, or something, stuck with needles and while men with clipboards made observations and wrote things down.

Is he in a- hospital? Does that make sense?

But then why does he have so many relentless memories of being hurt?

He doesn’t have time to think about it before the women turn and start coming down the hall in his direction, and Dean cowers back, hoping against hope that they won’t notice him hiding against the wall.

“--crazy,” one of them is saying, voice excited and full of gossip. “Becky said she saw it happen, you know.”

The second voice sounds more critical, like it isn’t quite sure it believes that.

“What?” the second nurse says. “She was in the parking lot like an hour before her lunch break?”

Dean hears a sound like a person humming “I don’t know.”

“According to her,” the first voice says, and then the sound of them rolling the cart down the hallway stops.

Dean peeks up just enough to peer through the long, fanned out leaves of the plant he’s hiding behind, and is graced with the sight of the two women having stopped right in the middle of the hall.

Goddamn it, he thinks, as he watches the one with dark skin put her hands on her hips.

“That seems a bit convenient,” she says, raising her eyebrow.

The other nurse, a redhead with her hair in a ponytail, shrugs like she doesn’t know what to say.

“That’s what she told me,” she insists, and the dark skinned woman rolls her eyes.

“Becky likes to tell stories, is what I think. Didn’t she say she was there yesterday when the sub got hold of a gun?”

Dean goes cold when he realizes that they’re talking about him.

His breath hitches, and for a moment he’s sure that they must have heard him, but neither turn in his direction, or away from each other at all.

“No, she said her boyfriend was there.”

“Oh please. Jared? Jared is not her boyfriend.”

“She said-”

“They had sex like two times more than a year ago. That poor guy has been trying to shake her off ever since.”

The redhead frowns, and turns towards the cart like she’s going to start pushing it again.

Please, Dean begs, but the woman just leans forward, resting against the handle as she picks up her phone.

She seems a little miffed at not being believed, and the other woman looks a little exasperated at not being listened to.

“Charlie, you have got to stop listening to that girl. I don’t know why you even still talk to her.”

“I don’t talk to her, she talks to me. She talks to everyone except you, ‘cause you’re intimidating.”

The dark skinned woman smirks.

“Oh yeah? I’m intimidating?”

The redhead- Charlie- turns halfway towards her friend, who steps closer.

“Not to me,” she murmurs, and then suddenly they’re kissing, and Dean drops his eyes, startled and confused.

They’re both dominants, aren’t they?

He wouldn’t usually be able to tell from just watching such a short and unimportant interaction, but he’s so oversensitive to such things right now that he can almost feel it radiating off of both of them.

So he doesn’t know what to think, because he’s very rarely heard of dominants having sex with each other, and only in the context of a joke. And he hadn’t really believed such rumors could be real, outside of group sex with one or more subs.

Because why would someone put up with sex if they didn’t have to? Why would someone let another person inflict domination on them, unless they were forced by their own biology?

But neither of the two nurses seem like they’re being forced, or like they’re uncomfortable. They kiss for a very long time.

“Stevie,” he eventually hears the redhead mutter, “Not here.”

There’s a sigh, but the sounds of kissing don’t continue, and Dean figures it’s safe to look up.

It is. The women aren’t kissing any longer, though they’re standing very close to one another.

Through the interrupted green stripes of the plant’s tall leaves, Dean can see their hands tangled together, resting on the cart’s handle. The image makes a strange pang echo inside of Dean, that feels lonely no matter how he tries to ignore it.

Castiel held my hand, he remembers out of nowhere.

It’s a stupid thing to think. Castiel doesn’t like him any more. Dean knocked him out and ran away because he’s bad.

“I’ve been thinking about quitting,” Charlie confesses abruptly, and the other nurse, Stevie, looks surprised.

“How come?”

Charlie steps back like she isn’t happy. The split picture of her figure moving in between the leaves looks strange, and it takes Dean a moment to make sense of her again once she stills, outline broken up by long stripes in the foreground.

“You’re kidding, right? After yesterday?”

“You don’t feel safe?”

“It’s not-”

There’s a huff, and a long pause of silence. Dean feels torn between wanting the woman to continue, hungry for every crumb of knowledge about what the fuck is going on, and wishing desperately that they could have had this conversation somewhere else.

“I mean…come on, Stevie. You don’t see what I see?”

Another pause. Then, “We just run the numbers.”

Stevie doesn’t sound so certain anymore.

Charlie purses her lips, and reaches up to her ponytail to tug her hair tie out, letting the sheet of orange spill around her pale face like a wave.

She looks younger like that, less professional. Dean swallows, uncomfortably reminded of Jo.

This woman is a dominant. She’d hurt Jo. She’ll hurt you too, if she catches you.

The only good dominant is Sam.

But it becomes harder to remember that, as Charlie starts fiddling with her hair tie nervously, eyes troubled and anxious on her face.

“I don’t know if I can use that as an excuse anymore. Becky said they were gonna shoot him, even before he got hold of the gun.”

“Becky-”

“Becky’s telling the truth,” Charlie continues flatly. “About that, she’s telling the truth.”

Stevie doesn’t question it, this time, though she has no more evidence than before. But she seems to understand some underlying message that is lost to Dean, and as he watches, she seems to deflate.

“I don’t know, Charlie. It pays well, doesn’t it? It’s not like the hospital’s gonna take us back, now that they know about us.”

Not a hospital, then, Dean notes silently, still watching, painfully curious about what’s going on, about why his own escape attempt seems to be disturbing the two so much.

Maybe they’re just upset at how badly behaved he is? After all, if this is the retraining center, and it seems like it most likely is, Dean is here to be broken and forced to mind his betters. Maybe it’s truly unnerving for dominants, to see that Dean is still so disobedient and badly behaved.

He knows it’s unnerving, actually, but he’s learned to expect anger as a reaction.

Not…whatever this is. This defeated sadness, this conspiratorial whispering.

“I don’t know if it matters anymore,” Charlie tells her friend- girlfriend? Girlfriend, most likely. “Like, there’s gotta be work somewhere, but even if there isn’t, this whole place is just too messed up.”

He expects the other nurse to argue in some way, but she doesn’t.

“Have you read the reports?” she asks instead, voice low and serious.

There’s clearly some significance to what she’s asking that Dean isn’t aware of, and he can practically hear the capitalization of The Reports in her words.

What reports? Dean wonders, but Charlie doesn’t echo him like he thinks she might. Rather, she scoffs, like that shouldn’t even be a question.

“Obviously,” she mutters. “Wonder who leaked it.”

“Well, Gordon isn’t here today, soooo….”

Gordon.

Dean recognizes the name, and he jolts at the sound of it. His mind provides an image of a dark skinned man with piercing eyes, and Dean shudders at the memories associated with him.

“Oh, shit? He got fired?”

“I mean, I’m just guessing, but who else could it have been?”

“True,” Charlie admits, but she seems to lose focus after that, suddenly absorbed in something on her phone.

“It’s all over twitter already,” she says, and Stevie scowls.

“Great.”

“‘The Punch.’ It’s trending. With videos.”

“Great.”

Dean has no idea what they’re talking about anymore.

“Come on, Charlie, get off your phone. We’re gonna be late.”

Charlie ignores her for a few seconds, but then clicks the thing off, looking up as she puts it in her pocket.

“I thought this sub-guru guy was supposed to make them not want to jump out of windows?” she asks, putting her hair back up in a ponytail.

“I don’t know, babe,” Stevie sighs, “I just work here. And so do you, for the time being, so we better get moving if we don’t want to get chewed out.”

And finally, finally, she starts pushing the cart again, making her way down the hall.

Charlie follows her, still fixing her hair, and she rolls her eyes at her girlfriend’s insistence.

“Whatever,” she says casually. “Naomi can go fuck herself. And so can Becky, ‘cause she definitely just saw this shit on twitter.”

Dean is still and silent until the pair turn the corner at the end of the hall behind him, which doesn’t take very long. He stands up as soon as they’re gone, though, feeling shaky, unsure if he’s glad he heard that conversation or not.

He’d only understood maybe a third of it, but what he had been able to make sense of had made it very clear how hard it will be to get out of here.

Everyone seems to be talking about him, after yesterday. They all know about the crazy sub who’d gotten hold of a gun.

It doesn’t bode well for him, and he approaches the corner the nurses had disappeared around warily, peeking around it, unsure what he will see.

But it’s only more hallways, uniform and endless, and Dean wants to tear his hair out, wondering if he’s trapped in some infinite, purgatory-like maze.

The only part of the view that doesn’t look identical to literally everything else he’s seen are the increasingly small figures of the two nurses, at least 20 doors down now, and Dean has to resist the urge to run after them, to beg them to help him get out of here.

Stop it, he tells himself, forcing his body back around the other wall so he can no longer see them. They’re not gonna help you. No one’s gonna help you.

They’re dominants. They’d only been gossiping. It had been more sympathetic than he would have expected, but it still had only been gossip.

He’s on his own to get himself out of here, just like he always is.

A wave of dizziness hits him, and he leans back against the wall behind him, not allowing himself to sink back down to the ground.

You’re not in hell. You’re in a building. You can get out of a building.

Even if he doesn’t know what kind of building he’s trapped in. Even if he’s hopelessly lost.

Aimlessly, Dean tries to shift through his grainy, sand-shifting memories for some information that could be of use to him. An idea of where the elevators are, maybe, or the schedule of the employees he’s so intent on avoiding.

His search turns up nothing, though, no secret hidden maps or escape routes. He doesn’t even remember ever seeing this part of the building, doesn’t remember seeing anything except whips and needles.

Needles.

Machines and. And doctors.

Dean glances down the hallway towards where the nurses had come from, recalling the flash of medical equipment he’d seen before the door had swung shut behind them. Uncertainly, he starts towards the room for no other reason than that he has no other leads, no other memories associated with this place that could shed light on what the fuck is going on.

Maybe whatever’s behind the white door will trigger some kind of recognition, and will bring some clearer memories to the forefront of his mind. Maybe something in there will be useful in helping him get out of here, or at least help him figure out where he’s going.

Maybe.

The door creaks when he opens it, and Dean peeks in nervously, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody else in the room. So he slips in quietly and shuts the door behind him with a click, relieved to find that he can lock it from the inside.

No one can find me now.

He feels safe for the first time since he’d woken.

Turning around, Dean peers around the steril, white room, small and filled with wires and machines.

There’s a medical bed, complete with paper lining covering it, and he gets the eerie feeling he’s been in it before, or one that was almost identical.

What is this place? he wonders, wary, stepping farther in and reaching out to lightly touch an empty saline drip hanging from a rolling frame.

The nurses had said that this isn’t a hospital, but it certainly looks like one. Yet, when he approaches the window against the wall to look out of it, he sees the same view he’d seen from the other room, with the McDonalds and the highway and the parking lot.

He knows this place. This is the retraining center. He even recognizes the script on the sign on the lawn, pattern having been memorized even though he’s never learned how to read.

Welcome to the Shurley Retraining Center!

He and Sam used to laugh about the false perkiness whenever they drove past the building.

This really is the center. He must be trapped on the upper floors, where he’d never been before.

He’d always wondered what went on up here. What would be waiting for him when he eventually got locked away.

Now he knows. Pain and torture and doctors that poke and prod at him, writing down his every reaction and charting every step of his death.

I’m not supposed to be here, he thinks weakly, like his disbelief can somehow protect him from reality.

But it can’t protect him from reality, of course, and Dean turns slowly back to face it with dread and loneliness thick in his stomach like bad milk.

Ridiculously, he feels betrayed, and tries to swallow back the miserable feeling of abandonment welling up within him as the truth of his situation settles into the cracks of his heart like dust.

Stupid.

It’s not like he was under any impression that Alastair cared about him. It’s not like he thought the man saw him as anything more than something to beat.

But he’d still- he’d still been Dean’s dominant, for, for four or five years, at least, before everything starts to get hazy in his mind and he loses track of time.

And that hadn’t….of course that hadn’t meant anything to Alastair, Dean had known that, he got told all the time how sick of him and his shit the dominant was. He got told all the time that he was a dirty worthless brat, so it shouldn’t hurt, to know he’s been discarded, when Dean knows it must have been deserved.

But.

But Alastair had promised.

He’d promised Dean wouldn’t end up here, if he went with him. He’d promised he could handle Dean, no matter how bad he was.

Clearly, Dean had been too awful though for even someone like Alastair to deal with. Clearly, he’d been so relentlessly defiant and bad that even the extraordinary heavy hand the man had handled Dean with hadn’t been enough to keep Dean under control.

He got rid of me.

It hurts like being shot. It hurts like dying.

But Dean has been dying for a long time. He’s used to it, by now.

Floating over to the medical bed with his mind starting to get hazy around the edges again, Dean sits down on top of the paper sheet and listens to it crinkle beneath his weight. He starts picking at the paper right besides him, shredding it anxiously, thoughts of subtlety and secrecy long gone from his head.

It’s probably bad to rip up the paper, but Dean’s already as bad as can be. He’d been left here by his dominant to get experimented on until he dies, because he doesn’t know how to be good.

I don’t remember what I did.

Did he do anything in particular, or did Alastair just finally get fed up?

Did he just get fed up with him, like Dad got fed up with him?

The last thing he remembers before he went crazy is Alastair telling him he’s not allowed to kill himself.

He cried so hard, ‘cause he wanted to die. After that, the memories get blurred.

His pathetic brain couldn’t handle his own life, probably, so he lost his mind after a while. Alastair must have dumped him here after he got sick of Dean just screaming and biting, though he has no idea how long ago that was at this point.

“Bad boy,” Dean mumbles, moving from picking at the paper to picking at the bandages on his arms, pushing down his sleeve to tug at the wrappings in distress.

He doesn’t deserve them. He’d strangled his new dominant after the man had given him clothing and called him good.

Why did I do that?

It’s getting hard to remember.

It’s getting hard to remember a lot of things, actually. Distantly, Dean recognizes that something weird is happening to his brain again. It’s starting to get muddled, and his willpower is starting to dissipate, and he’s flowing away from himself like a drop of dye in the water.

I’m fading.

It’s so much like dying that Dean doesn’t know what to do except bury his face in his hands.

No. Please, not again.

He didn’t like being gone. He doesn’t want to be gone again.

But he knows his own ability to exist is tied to someone else wanting him to. He knows he only came alive again because his new dominant was nice to him, and now he’s dissolving again because it’s been too long since Dean did as he was told.

I don’t want to do as I’m told. I want to run away.

He almost forgot that that’s what he was doing.

The thought still feels loose in his hands, like a helium balloon threatening to float off the second he dares to let go of it. So he tries to keep it in place, and stands up again, dizzy, knowing there’s no way out of the hell he’s trapped in except to try to push his way through it.

After all. There won’t be any relief if he goes back to the dominant like a good boy, no matter how much his body is crying for it.

It’s crying for a kindness Dean isn’t going to get, after what he’d done. He’d choked Castiel and been so fucking bad and now if he gets caught the man will kill him, or make him wish he was dead.

Oh, god, Dean thinks, feeling nausea wash through him.

He has to get out of here before he completely loses the will to try to. He has to run away before he forgets how.

He stumbles back out of the room without any real awareness of where he’s going, reckless and mindless, not looking out anymore for people who might spot him at all. The only thought in his mind is to get out of here, get out get out, and he clutches the idea in his hands as tightly as he can like it’s water that’s spilling out of all the cracks.

It gets smaller and smaller inside him as he rushes down the empty halls, like it’s fading away fast as he is. By the time he does find the elevators he’s mostly forgotten why he was looking for them, and he stares at them for a long time before approaching, confused about what he wanted to do.

He remembers, eventually, because he hears someone’s voice not too far away and it scares him, because he knows he’s gonna get in trouble for being out of his cell. And that prompts him to wonder why he’s out of his cell to begin with, and oh right, he was running away.

The thought feels physically painful to him as it comes, heavy like a stone on his shoulder with sharp edges that dig into his flesh.

Bad boy. Bad boy.

He wants to turn around and run towards the voice and beg it to forgive him for being bad.

They won’t forgive you, he remembers, exhausted. They’ll just hit you and hit you and never tell you you’re good ever again.

He’d deserve that. Deserve it for being bad. But he’s scared, and so tired of being hurt.

Dad’s gonna shout at you. He’s gonna take his belt off.

He’s coming for Dean. He’s coming for him, or, or Dean has to meet him, he has to go downstairs and outside so the man can beat him ‘cause he’s bad.

He’s going to be angry if he has to come inside and get me.

It’s that thought that pushes him forward, finally, pushes him towards the elevator and has him pressing the button.

He can’t stand the idea of Dad being mad at him. And he’s gonna be mad if Dean is a weak little bitch who can’t even get himself outside to meet him.

Stupid mindless obedient slut. Don’t you know who you belong to? Don’t you know who you’re supposed to obey.

Supposed to listen to Dad. Not stupid fucking dominants. Dad.

Dad’s gonna sell him to Alastair if he doesn’t. Except that he already did that.

What?

The elevator’s here. Dean gets inside it. It’s going to take him outside.

Dean wants to go outside. He hasn’t been outside in so long.

It’s warm outside.

Castiel had said it was warm.

Maybe Castiel would have taken him outside if Dean had asked like a good boy. If he hadn’t choked the man to unconsciousness.

Too late now. No more nice men for Dean. He doesn’t listen and he hurts people, so he has to be in trouble all the time.

Dean sinks down into the corner of the elevator with his back to the wall, and watches the doors in front of him shut.

This isn’t outside.

He’s in a box that won’t let him out.

All over again. All over again. What is he gonna tell dad?

I’m gone again, he recognizes absently, My mind is all gone and crazy.

At first he’s too tired to care, but then he isn’t anymore and he cares a whole lot, grief welling up inside him from nowhere.

Because he’s dead again and no one's gonna help him and he can’t be alive by himself.

Stupid. Pathetic slut.

Dad’s gonna be mad. Dad’s gonna beat him.

Dad sold him to Alastair a long time ago.

And Alastair left him here.

Nobody wants him.

Even Sammy doesn’t like him any more. He’s too broken. His brain doesn’t work.

He feels the elevator stop, and hears the doors in front of him open. But he only peeks up from the ball he’s curled up into, before ducking his head back down and refusing to move.

This isn’t outside. He wanted to go outside.

It’s only more inside though. Dean can never get away.

So he just sits there on the ground and shivers miserably, knowing inexplicitly that he’s failed at something very important, though he can’t remember anymore what it was.

It doesn’t matter. He always fails.

Bad boy.

Bad boys don’t get to go outside.

Bad boys get hit and also get their brains messed up so they can’t think anymore, because when they think they think bad things and don’t listen.

I miss Sammy.

Sammy was nice to him, except when he was mad. He got mad at Dean a lot before Dean got sold.

Dean tries not to think about the mad times and tries to think about when Sammy was nice to him. Like when they used to play hopscotch and jump in puddles when it rained.

Where am I?

It doesn’t matter. He’s alone. He feels sad, but he usually does.

He’s too sad to lift his head when he hears the doors shut in front of him again, because it doesn’t matter that they shut since they didn’t lead to outside when they were open anyway.

And he’s too sad to lift his head when he feels the elevator moving up up up again, because Dean doesn’t care where he is going.

He’s still too sad to lift his head when the doors open once more, even though there’s a person in front of him. But then the person talks and it’s Castiel and Castiel was nice but Dean choked him, so he feels afraid when he hears the man say his name.

“Dean,” he says, and Dean’s head flies up in panic, because Cas sounds stern and he looks stern too because he hates Dean now ‘cause he was bad.

“No!” Dean cries out, and he flings his hands over his own ears, because he doesn’t want to hear what the man is going to say.

‘Cause Cas is gonna shout at him and also hurt him and make him do things with his voice that will be bad and make Dean cry. But he’ll have to do those things anyway ‘cause he’s a stupid slut who’s in trouble, and Dean remembers finally that what he’d been trying to do was run far away run far far away.

“Leave me alone!” Dean begs. “I want to go outside! Don’t make me do things! I want to go outside!”

His eyesight gets blurry so he can’t see Castiel’s face anymore, but he feels so scared and he feels so so sad.

Because he thinks now he’ll never get to go outside and he wants to so badly, and he’s gonna get whipped and it’s gonna be awful and Dean wants to go but he can’t.

“Let me go,” he pleads. “I want to leave. Let me go, please please please.”

He could attack Castiel again to make him let Dean go, maybe, but it hurts so badly to think about doing that now and his limbs don’t listen, and he’s so tired of fighting all the time god he just wants to be left alone.

So he doesn’t attack again, just wipes at his eyes, and is startled when they clear to see Cas still standing in the elevator doorway, looking back at him with a surprising amount of sympathy.

“Dean,” he says, voice firm but not unkind. “You’re very sick.”

The words are slightly muffled because of how hard Dean is trying to plug his ears, but he still hears them perfectly, which is very very upsetting.

Because Dean doesn’t want to hear them, even though they’re not an order, he doesn’t want to hear them so badly and he wishes he could put the words back in the man’s mouth.

“No,” he sobs, but it’s not really a disagreement. It’s pure denial more than anything else.

Because the truth is too horrible to look at, though it’s there whether he acknowledges it or not.

But he knows, deep down, why he hadn’t been able to make it out of here, why he’d collapsed in the elevator instead of running away like he’d planned. He knows why his mind is falling apart once again, re-entering the same withdrawal it’s been in for years and years.

“You are, sweetheart,” the man continues. “You’re very very sick, and have been for a long time. I think you know that already.”

He’s still calling me sweetheart, Dean thinks hysterically, and he clings on to the fact in terror as despair and dread wash over him.

Because he knows he’s trapped, and was from the very beginning. He was never going to get out of here, with him…being what he is.

Because he’s not trapped by the guards, or the guns, or the gates. He’s trapped by his own biology, and it’s been killing Dean his whole life.

I don’t care, he thinks miserably. The treatment is worse than dying.

He doesn’t want to get hit anymore.

“I don’t care!” he shouts, half-mad with fright, hands still clasped over his ears. “Leave me alone! I don’t have to listen to you!”

For the first time, some irritation is visible on the dominant’s face, and Dean flinches as the man lifts a terrifying eyebrow.

“Oh, you most certainly do.”

His voice is immovable, like a brick wall that won’t budge, and Dean feels himself go pale at the sound of it.

“Stand up, Dean,” he orders sternly, domination bleeding through like blood. “Do not even think about attacking me again. You’re going to keep your hands by your side, and you’re going to come quietly. We will not be having a repeat performance of what happened this morning. Is that understood?”

“No!” Dean cries out in panic, but a moment later he’s nodding anyway, and a moment after that he feels himself drawn up to his feet as if he were pulled by a string.

He really starts crying then, starts sobbing, because he’s so fucking afraid, and he can’t even lift his arms to wipe his tears off his face because Castiel told him he wasn’t allowed.

But he shakes, shakes so violently he almost falls back over, and only doesn’t because his need to obey is so huge.

“Come, Dean,” the dominant says evenly, and Dean sobs before shuffling over with his head bowed.

He expects the man to hit him when he gets close enough, but he doesn’t, instead just putting his hand on the small of Dean’s back to guide him out of the elevator.

The doors close almost immediately after Dean steps past them, having been held open much too long by Castiel’s hovering.

“Put your hands behind your back,” the man tells him, and Dean does, not even bothering to try to fight his own compulsion.

There’s no point. He can’t win. And the therapist is already angry enough.

It’s hard to hold his arms steady, though, as Cas binds them, because he’s trembling with so much fear.

His shoulder is still throbbing, and it aches as it’s pulled backwards, but he doesn’t dare make the slightest noise of complaint.

“There we go,” Castiel says finally, when he’s satisfied that Dean’s arms are secure. “Don’t try to get out of this, Dean,” he orders, and Dean nods, completely defeated.

Use your voice, sweetheart, he remembers Castiel saying.

But he can’t. He’s crying too hard.

Bad boy. Bad bad boy.

He can’t do anything right.

I’m in so much trouble, he thinks hysterically, and the shame of it feels hot and consuming in his chest. He can’t bear to be looked at, all of a sudden, knowing he’s in disgrace, and he curls into himself as far as he can while still following Castiel’s order to stand.

The dominant guides him back to the room he’d escaped from with a strong arm wrapped around his shaking shoulders. It feels comforting, but Dean doesn’t let himself lean into it, knowing it’s only there so he can’t run away.

I wasn’t going to try.

He can’t anymore, even if he wanted to.

But he’s lost any tiny bit of trust the dominant had innocently given him. He’s shown Castiel how bad and disobedient he is, and now the man has no choice but to treat him like everyone else does.

It makes him sickeningly afraid, and sickeningly ashamed, knowing he’s taken advantage of the man’s kindness towards him.

He doesn’t deserve it, and never has. Whatever’s in store for him now, he’s brought on himself. He’s earned every bit of pain he’ll be getting.

The walk back to the office/break room is absolutely miserable, because they keep passing people and the people keep staring. They point at him and say things to each other and Dean can’t stop the tears from falling as it happens, because he knows they’re talking about how bad he is and what a stupid brat Castiel’s been saddled with.

It feels like he’s being paraded through the building just so everyone knows exactly how worthless Dean is, and he wants to throw himself out a window just to avoid the accusation he can see in every stranger’s eyes.

They even pass Charlie and Stevie, who gape at him openly, and Dean feels himself burning in humiliation as they walk past, unable to look up from the ground.

So much for their sympathy.

It’s like he wanted to prove to absolutely everyone that he’s being treated exactly the way he deserves.

Bad boy. Bad bad bad boy.

Disobedient ungrateful stupid worthless brat.

By the time they reach the door he’d run out of this morning, Dean can barely breath because he’s crying so hard.

He doesn’t want to go into the room. He knows bad things are going to happen to him in there. He knows he’s gonna be punished, maybe worse than he’s ever been punished before.

And he’s scared of being punished, even if he knows he deserves it, and he’s scared that Castiel is gonna kill him, even though he deserves that too.

But no one cares that he’s scared, ‘cause bad boys like Dean are supposed to be scared, and he isn’t allowed to run away any more.

So he just trails in after Castiel as the dominant opens the door, and tries to brace himself for what’s coming.

And if he hears a lock click shut behind him where he knows there hadn’t been one before, well.

There’s nothing Dean can do about that but hate himself, so hate himself he does.

Chapter Text

Cas had…underestimated Dean.

Wildly, wildly underestimated Dean.

He’d thought he was taking proper precautions, after what he’d seen yesterday. He’d thought he’d learned his lesson, after seeing the man almost strangle someone to death with a blanket.

He was….wrong.

Apparently, being bound at the wrists, knees, and ankles wasn’t enough. Apparently, being gagged and collared and pinned to the wall was child’s play compared to what Dean is capable of.

He does admit, upon waking, dizzy and gasping for breath, that he might have overestimated Dean’s unwillingness to hurt him after managing to disarm him of the gun. But for the most part, Cas is absolutely floored by the way Dean had managed to overpower him, and fundamentally shaken by the ferocious expertise that the young man had displayed.

That should not exist in any regular person.

Because the way Dean had managed to escape hadn’t been just about some overwhelming willpower. The submissive had launched into his attack like he knew exactly what he was doing- like he was prepared, despite his simultaneously obvious disorientation.

Dean had reacted to waking up bound in the conference room like a sleeper agent at go-time. He’d knocked the breath out of Cas before he could recognize the danger he was in, and then dislocated his own shoulder to move his bound arms from behind his back to his front.

It was a move Cas would never have even been able to imagine, and Dean had launched into it without even a blink of hesitation, almost like he’d done it before.

Almost like he’d been trained to get out of situations just like this.

It’s a thought he can’t help but have, when he wakes up to the wreck of the conference room. That Dean has some sort of…training, both of combat and of escape.

Because the scene he’s met with doesn’t imply blind desperation, but an intelligence and coordination Cas doesn’t know how to respond to.

The reinforced window above the couch has been punched through, and there are glass shards scattered around sharp as knives. They’d clearly been used to cut through the young man’s bindings and leather collar, which he’d oh-so-carefully chosen as a more comfortable replacement to heavy iron.

Yet none of the shards have been left within Cas’s own reach, something that becomes exceedingly frustrating once he notices his own bindings, which Dean had so thoughtfully gifted him. Having clearly been dragged while unconscious intentionally away from anything sharp, the rope Cas finds around his own wrist is attached to a cabinet completely across the room.

His phone, conveniently, is also across the room on the couch.

Begrudgingly impressed, Cas ends up having to spend nearly 30 minutes painstakingly unknotting his bindings, a time period he spends with his emotions swinging wildly between astonishment, worry, and irritation.

Being choked to unconsciousness had been extremely unpleasant, and frankly, extremely frightening as well. He’s been attacked by patients before, but never with such terrifying proficiency, and he’d honestly been scared for his life.

Because Dean had been like a heat seeking missile when it came to weakness, going right to throttling Cas as a way to remove the threat of being dominated without even a moment of hesitation or guilt. Cas truly hadn’t known if the submissive was going to stop, and he’s in some way as hurt as he is disturbed at how ruthlessly Dean had once again twisted every bit of kindness into a weapon.

By the time he’s managed to get himself out of the bindings, Cas’s irritation has sunk into something closer to actual anger. His worry for Dean is still present, of course, but it’s smaller now after half an hour has passed without the alarms going off that would indicate the submissive has been caught.

His bewilderment at the young man’s lethality has similarly settled into real wariness, and he starts to think he should be more worried about what the lack of a lockdown means for the staff’s safety rather than the other way around.

What if he’s killed whoever’s in charge of raising the alarm? Cas thinks in panic, standing up on shaky legs.

It might be paranoid, but Cas is done underestimating what Dean is capable of, and how strategically the submissive thinks ahead. The ache around his own throat is proof enough that the young man knows to cut off the voice that could stop him before trying to free himself in any other way.

So Cas ends up making a beeline for the main security station as soon as he’s out the door, heart pounding in his throat at the idea that Dean could have been driven enough to harm whoever’s in there. But when he pounds on the door, it swings open after only a moment, revealing a portly guard in a light gray uniform with a puzzled expression on his face.

“Everything alright?” the man asks, looking mildly concerned, and Cas becomes aware that he must look like a mess, hair and clothes mussed from wrestling with his patient, panting for breath after having run frantically down the hall.

The ache around his throat must also rapidly be forming a ring of visible bruises, judging how the guard’s eyes drop down to Cas’s neck as his expression shifts to more genuine alarm.

So Cas makes a great effort to disguise the transparent relief he’s feeling at the fact that the guard isn’t a bleeding corpse, recognizing distantly that if Dean hasn’t yet done anything worthy of putting the building into lockdown, Cas certainly doesn’t want to be what raises the red flag.

“Sub givin’ you trouble?” the guard continues, eyebrows raised and eyes locked on Cas’s throat. “We’ve got backup on call, if you want it.”

Fuck.

Cas waves him off.

“No, no,” he says, trying to sound casual. He’s not a good actor, though, and his voice comes out raspy as he probably should have expected after being choked half to death.

The guard’s eyebrows move threateningly higher, and Cas clears his throat.

“I, um. I just need to check something,” he tries, and makes a motion like he’s asking to move past the guard.

The guard hesitates for a second like he’s trying to figure out what’s going on, but he must not be the most brilliant of scholars, because he doesn’t seem to figure it out. He steps aside, still looking confused, and Cas moves into the little station.

It’s cramped inside, with about a dozen display screens crammed next to each other, and two other guards sitting between a small table.

Totally uninterested in doing their jobs, they seem to be playing cards. Only one of them, who seems to be much younger than the other two, looks at all embarrassed when Cas comes in.

“Uh, hey,” the young one says sheepishly, putting the cards down. The other guard, who’s balding, turns around.

“Novak?” he says, bemused.

Cas lifts an awkward arm in greeting.

“Yes, hello,” he responds stiffly, trying to work out how to examine the screens without giving away what’s going on.

In the end, he has to accept that he’s just not a good liar, because he comes up with nothing and waits too long, and the men start looking at each other like they think he’s insane.

“I, um, just need to check something,” Cas repeats awkwardly, and drifts over to the myriad of screens on the right wall, trying not to look panicked.

The screens themselves aren’t easy to parse out, flickering between several different displays every few seconds, each segmented into four different sections.

It’s hard to understand what he’s seeing, much less find a specific person without giving himself away. The center is huge, and Dean could be anywhere, in any tiny grainy corner tucked away.

Yet it only takes Cas a few moments to find him, curled up in a ball in what seems to be the elevator.

He looks tiny where he sits scrunched up in the corner, head tucked into his knees, and Cas’s heart clenches in his chest when he sees him, looking completely defeated and small.

Immediately, the majority of Cas’s anger drains out of him as he takes in the black and white projection, as it becomes very clear very quickly that the frightening ferocity Dean had displayed in the conference room had not been able to sustain itself outside of it.

He’s completely lost, Cas thinks, but it becomes clear that that isn’t true, as the sudden light of what must be the elevator opening bathes the submissive, who doesn’t react at all.

He continues not to react as the camera angle changes, to reveal from outside that the elevator has arrived at the first floor.

But Dean doesn’t look up, doesn’t bolt towards the now-obtainable exit. He just sits there, so completely still that if Cas hadn’t already been looking at the picture he would have thought the whole area was empty.

It’s heartwrenching to see, especially so soon after Dean had made himself so threatening, like every ounce of passion that had been behind his attack had been drained out of him in the last half an hour.

Subsickness, Cas thinks with a pang, and feels ashamed to realize that he’d almost forgotten Dean still suffers all the symptoms, no matter how good he is at fighting them off.

They catch up to him eventually.

They seem to have caught up to him now.

It’s been two days since he let me dominate him. He’s completely drained himself of whatever clarity he had left.

Cas thinks it’s very likely that the submissive doesn’t even know where he is anymore at all.

“Shit, are you looking for the sub?” one of the guards says behind him.

Damn it.

One of the geniuses finally put it together.

“I’ve found him,” he corrects, just as the image of Dean in the elevator flickers to a different, unknown room. “He’s in the elevator. It will not be a problem to retrieve him.”

Like he hadn’t spoken, the young guard yelps “Oh, shit,” and the older one snaps “Lockdown” at the exact same time.

He hears the sudden scraping of cheap plastic on tile, like the men playing cards are abruptly standing up.

Cas sees red.

“Do not,” he snaps, spinning around fast as a snap. Just in time to see the young guard diving for a large red button, the man freezes in place with his arm outstretched like he’s been frozen in a block of ice.

“I will handle it,” Cas tells him sharply, and the man looks over to his superiors uncertainly.

“There are- protocols,” the portly guard blusters.

“I. will. handle. it.”

Two of the guards take a step back.

Good, he thinks, furious, and snaps his eyes over to the younger guard with such ferocity that the man, without a word, drops his arm.

Any goodwill he’d felt towards the bumbling trio has rapidly evaporated, recalling how swiftly and aggressively the center’s forces had descended on Dean yesterday after they’d raised the alarm.

I can be aggressive too, he thinks darkly, imagining a repeat performance of guns and angry men surrounding Dean as he is now.

Protectiveness raging like a wildfire inside him, he brings his hand up sharply when one of the guards makes the mistake of trying to speak.

“Dean is my patient,” he cuts the man off. “Control of his care was transferred to me yesterday, as I am sure you are aware. I am informing you that calling a lockdown on my patient is not in his best interest, and is not necessary. I will not allow it. Is that understood?”

It’s a complete bluff. He does not have the authority to override safety protocols, but he’s betting on the men being too thrown off by his confidence to question him.

There’s a moment where he’s not sure if it’s going to work. Both the larger guard and the rookie glance at the balding man in confusion, who looks as uncertain as they are.

“Uhhh…” the man says.

Cas narrows his eyes at him.

Pursing his lips, the ringleader narrows his own right back.

He seems to come to a decision in that moment, and Cas’s breath catches in his throat, but when the officer speaks, it’s only to give him a warning.

“We’ll be watching from up here, Novak,” the man says sternly. “Things better not get out of control.”

Trying not to show how relieved he is, Cas nods, as if this is a matter of course.

“That won’t be an issue,” he agrees, trying to sound authoritative.

“We’ll be calling a lockdown if it becomes one,” the balding guard adds unnecessarily.

He’s clearly flustered, and trying to make it look like this was a joint decision, and Cas plays along because he doesn’t want to rock the very unstable boat.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less from professionals like you,” he says dutifully.

The youngest one gives him a look like he can tell Cas is being facetious, but the two with more authority look pleased, so Cas figures it doesn’t matter.

Struggling not to roll his eyes or show his frustration with how much time they’re wasting, he’s able to glance back at the screens and confirm that Dean is still in the elevator while the head guard nods like something’s been settled.

“Good luck, Novak,” he says, like Cas is going to war.

“Thanks,” Cas responds dryly, and then bolts out of the room.

*************

Dean doesn’t really fight him once Cas does come to retrieve him, but he’s not willing to take any chances anymore, regardless of how exhausted the submissive seems. He’s learned the hard way that Dean is capable of extreme violence when he feels threatened, and that, at least for the time being, he is going to continue to see Cas as a threat.

It’s a perception he’s hoping will change, eventually, but that he has to take seriously while it lasts. He has enormous sympathy for Dean, but wishful thinking isn’t going to stop another assassination attempt.

The submissive is a serious threat, and he’d nearly killed Cas in an attempt to escape. His assault had been driven by fear, but Cas cannot do good work with a patient who’s regularly putting his life in danger.

He can’t help Dean if he lets the submissive create an environment where Cas is constantly on edge.

Cas doesn’t like being stern, but he knows this extreme violence is a behavior he can’t allow to continue. He has to approach Dean like the threat he clearly is, and there have to be consequences for almost murdering him.

That doesn’t mean he’s going to devolve into whatever brutality Dean clearly expects from him, unhappy with the young man though he may be. But for both their safety, thoroughly addressing the way the young man is crying his eyes out is going to have to wait until they are back in the conference room and Dean is properly restrained again. He can’t afford to soften himself the way he wants to, while Dean’s defiance has any ability to become volatile.

So he’s very clear about the parameters of how Dean is to behave walking back, and he binds the submissive’s arms behind his back before they start moving, just in case. He marches Dean back to the conference room with an arm around the man’s shoulders, and resists the urge to offer reassurances about how he isn’t in trouble, because it isn’t true.

By the time he gets Dean back into the room they started in, Cas feels exhausted, burnt out and cornered by the reality of this patient who he really doesn’t know how to handle.

Contemplating what he’s supposed to do with the man now and trying to remember if he’s ever had a patient this stubborn, Cas tells Dean to go sit on the couch, mostly to stall having to address what had happened.

But Dean responds to this order by hissing at him and collapsing on the ground, and Cas struggles not to show his exasperation.

“Dean, please,” he says, resisting the urge to add a snarky “can we not.”

It would be cruel, to be so dismissive while Dean is clearly in such distress.

But it’s ridiculous, the lengths to which Dean will go to defy the most banal orders, for literally no other reason than to say he had.

They both know there’s no actual reason he should be so resistant to sitting on the couch, and that there’s no actual way he can fight the order off, as casually and unaggressively as it had been given.

He’s helpless to it anyway, because he’s sick, which is a very sad thing, but Cas still struggles to feel anything but incredulity as he watches Dean pant pointlessly on the ground.

So he just waits, until finally Dean lets out a shriek like he’s being tortured, and stumbles miserably over to the couch like he was shoved.

“Fuck you,” the man sobs, before collapsing on it in despair, curling up with his knees pressed to his chest and his face hidden against them.

He makes a truly pitiful sight, dressed in pajamas that make him look younger, favoring his right side where his dislocated shoulder must still be paining him. It does tug at Cas’s heartstrings, and he feels his own frustration turn inwards, at the fact that his sense of empathy isn’t infinite, at the fact that he doesn’t know what to do.

It’s been only a few hours of trying to handle this new, sharper version of Dean, and already Cas is starting to wonder if he’s met his match. He already feels ridiculously worn down, tired and in pain from being half murdered, on edge at the idea that it could happen again. Fed up with the incredible relentlessness with which Dean resists any and all help, he struggles to come up with any way to approach him that he might respond to, starting to doubt that there’s any way to reach him at all.

He’s up against a willpower he can already tell is stronger than his own, and he fears that the submissive is going to be lost to him if he can’t find a way to establish some level of trust.

This can’t just be a battle of wills.

If it’s a battle of wills, Dean is going to win.

And if Dean wins, Dean dies. Cas doesn’t think he can live with the guilt of allowing that to happen, now that he can see it coming so far ahead.

Looking at the shuddering, furiously petrified young man on the couch, Cas tries to reach back in his memories for him, trying to find some blueprint of what he can do to help him.

But the only patient he can remember who’d even come close to this level of unbelievably endless obstinance was Claire. And Claire had been a child, and her rebelliousness wasn’t literally a threat to Cas’s life.

“You’re not allowed to attack me, Dean,” he reiterates just in case. Without looking up, Dean sobs, despondent like he’s been told his family is dead.

Yes, I know, it’s a tragedy. No more murder attempts for today.

His irritation isn’t fair. The submissive is scared out of his mind. Cas isn’t unfeeling towards that. He wants to comfort the man.

But he doesn’t know how, without undermining the severity of what Dean had done. He doesn’t know how, in a way that won’t just have Dean screaming himself hoarse or finding some other loophole to kill him.

It almost hadn’t fully sunk in earlier, drunk on adrenalin as Cas had been. But Dean had ripped his own shoulder out in order to strangle Cas into unconsciousness, in the blink of an eye that had very intentionally been too fast for Cas to get a word out in protest.

That’s…a pretty big deal.

It doesn’t make him feel great, being alone with Dean again, and that doesn’t make him feel great either, that he can recognize his own wariness.

He shouldn’t be wary of his own patient. He can’t be wary of his own patient and also build the relationship he needs to successfully treat him.

Sighing, Cas rubs his thumb in between his eyebrows, feeling a migraine coming on.

We need to establish some trust, he thinks firmly. They can’t continue on like this. They’re both going to die of stress.

Think, genius, think. There’s got to be something Dean will respond to.

He already knows Dean responds to praise and rewards, but he can’t offer those things right now, he just can’t. Dean had almost killed him, and though he isn’t angry about it, exactly, he knows just telling Dean everything’s fine and he’s good would be like giving a child candy to get them to stop throwing a tantrum.

Easier in the short run, much harder in the long run. Cas can’t keep working in an environment where he doesn’t know that he’s safe.

But he also knows full well that berating Dean in any way while he’s so fragile will be completely counter productive, and he doesn’t have the strength of will to inflict more distress on the submissive while he’s so miserable, even if he thought it would help.

He needs some kind of structure. Stability and rules. Reasonable and predictable consequences when he messes up, so he doesn’t scare himself shitless like this. So he can feel safe submitting both when he’s well behaved and when he’s in trouble.

But how to establish and impose consequences Dean can trust, when he’s already in the middle of a nervous breakdown? The young man is like a Chinese finger trap. The harder Cas tries to pull out his submission, the tighter Dean will grip it to keep it from getting free.

He can’t just try to force the man to submit, not to any kind of punishment, no matter how mild. That will just become another battle of wills, one Cas will inevitably lose.

Even if he can force Dean with orders to allow whatever mild unpleasantness Cas comes up with, the submissive will just find another outlet to defy him, possibly dangerously, like a dam that keeps springing a new leak every time he tries to cover the old one up.

Because Dean’s wounds aren’t just cracks to be covered up. They have to be addressed and healed in their own time.

Dean has to want to submit. He has to want to get better, or he’s just going to keep getting worse.

Cas has never really had a problem before in trying to coax patients into wanting to submit to him. He’s dealt with defiance, and he’s dealt with being frozen out, but those behaviors have always transparently been borne of fear, and the refusal to submit had never meant the absence of the want.

It’s part of submissives’ biology. It’s part of who they are, inseparable from the rest of their being. The idea of a submissive who doesn’t on some level want to submit to him is as incomprehensible as a human being who doesn’t want to be loved.

But Dean is…

Dean is very very strange.

He’s very strange, and he’s very unhappy, and Cas is starting to wonder if he can’t find a way to coax the desire to submit out of Dean because the desire really doesn’t exist.

Fundamentally, Dean seems desperately unhappy. He seems deeply, deeply disturbed, mind and will out of sync with his own body, like they’re all fighting against each other and tearing the poor man apart. But it’s all there, far too present to ignore, driving the submissive’s actions in a way that feels much more purposeful than pure fear would.

“You really hate being a submissive, don’t you,” Cas says, like a realization.

Dean kicks at one of the glass shards that had earlier been abandoned on the couch, and sends it flying with all his strength at the floor.

It shatters against it, full of anger and pain, and the sound of it almost seems like an accusation, telling Cas he’s doing the wrong thing.

For the first time, he really wavers, wondering if he’s actually in the wrong.

Does he have any right to tell Dean what to do, when it’s clearly making him so incredibly upset? Does he have any right to force Dean to live, when the young man seems determined to die?

Staring at the figure so wracked with despair on the couch makes Cas’s heart ache like his wrist under his father’s angry grip. He wonders what had become of the uncomplicated submissive of a few days earlier, who, in his illness-induced simplicity, had one desire and one desire alone: to please.

Was that….better?

Was that better, just because Dean was happier? Was that better, just because it’s closer to what Cas had expected?

“Of course I hate it,” Dean rasps, and Cas looks up in surprise at the unexpected reply.

The young man hasn’t lifted his head, but there’s no doubt that he’s spoken, and Cas feels huge sadness at his words.

“It’s not a punishment,” Cas offers back to him, not knowing what else to say.

Dean just curls in on himself tighter, shoulders shaking in distress Cas can’t soothe.

“You don’t get it,” he mumbles, and his voice sounds choked and wet, like he’s still crying, unobserved, endlessly into his knees.

He’s mostly conscious again, Cas recognizes distantly. Even being given just one or two orders had relieved the submissive of much of his confusion, as resentfully as the orders had been obeyed.

Why does he resist it so much? When he’s clearly in so much pain without it?

“You could explain,” he prompts the young man gently.

But “I hate you,” is all Dean murmurs back.

Do you? Cas thinks.

It’s starting to seem more like the man just hates himself. Hates his desires, hates his fundamental needs. Has some sort of deep seated repulsion of what exists innately within him, like he wants to tear it out of himself with his teeth.

Even if it’s so wound up in the rest of him he just ends up eating himself alive.

Cas sighs, a long, sad thing that doesn’t know where it’s going.

“Can I set your arm?” he asks eventually, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

The injury must still be hurting the man, still unaddressed.

Dean lets out a bitter laugh that falls back into a sob like it tripped.

“You can make me do whatever you want,” he says hopelessly.

“I want you to want yourself not to be in pain,” Cas replies. “And I can’t force you to feel any way but how you do.”

It’s true, and Cas understands the importance of his own observation only after he’s spoken it, thinking of what he wants in Dean’s submission, what he wants in the young man’s acts of obedience.

He doesn’t want to force Dean to do anything. He only wants Dean to want peace for himself, and that’s the only thing he can’t order Dean to do.

“Fuck you,” Dean chokes out, finally lifting his head. It shoots up, eyes bright and red-rimmed, voice sounding suddenly hateful. “Fuck you, I hate you, no you can’t set my arm, fuck you.”

He spits out the words, sharp and infuriated, obviously expecting them to be overturned, for his own good.

But Cas can’t be that kind of hypocrite, not after what he’d just said.

He’s getting the impression that it’s very important to Dean that he has the autonomy to hurt himself, and that forcing him not to feels like a greater violation to him than having pain inflicted by someone else against his will.

It’s…a disturbing thought, but Cas learned a long time ago that he can’t force his own alarm to dictate the behavior or feelings of other people. And he knows from personal experience that the desire to be happy isn’t something you can will into someone else’s heart.

“Alright,” he accepts unhappily, and that does seem to surprise the submissive.

The man stares at him with a blank, disbelieving look as he watches Cas slide down the wall to sit on the ground, and Cas watches him back as the man’s toes tense in confusion and dig into the leather beneath them.

Dean’s tells are transparent, despite his posturing, like he’s never noticed how easily he gives himself away. Cas has the depressing thought that he may have never noticed his own tells because they never made any difference, attempts at pretending not to be scared having had no effect whatsoever on what ended up happening to him.

“I never really got a chance to introduce myself, did I?” Cas asks conversationally.

Dean starts, and then scowls and drops his head back to his knees.

The look he shoots Cas before his face disappears again seems to suggest that he feels he’s been tricked, somehow, into keeping his head up for this long, like Cas had intentionally agreed not to fix the man’s arm just to confuse him into dropping his act.

Cas doesn’t address the glare, or the way Dean has gone back to pointedly ignoring him, deciding to pointedly ignore the fact that he’s being pointedly ignored right back.

Dean can still obviously hear him.

“My name’s Castiel. You can call me Cas, if you’d like, or Sir if that makes you feel more comfortable. Though I…sort of doubt that’s the case right now.”

He’s sort of hoping to make Dean laugh a little, but he doesn’t, and Cas sighs, continuing on.

“I’m your new therapist. I did briefly introduce myself to you when we first met, but you were quite disoriented, so it’s ok if you didn’t remember. Some things have changed since then in any case, for the better, I hope.”

“I remember,” Dean snaps, without lifting his head, and it takes Cas a moment to understand that he means he remembers Cas explaining who he is.

Which must mean he remembers the rest of that encounter as well, must remember how quickly he’d melted under Cas’s touch. Cas wonders how Dean feels about that, and wonders if the man will start screaming again if he asks.

Probably, Cas acknowledges, so he decides to move on, saving that conversation for another, hopefully calmer, day.

“That’s good,” he says generically instead. “I think I told you I’d be seeing you every day, which is still true. But some…events happened, and your other therapists have been removed from your team. So. I’ll be the only one overseeing your care, from now on.”

And that’s a good thing, he wants to add, when Dean initially doesn’t react. But he doesn’t say it, hoping that Dean will come to that very obvious conclusion himself.

Cas watches it happen, very slowly, watches the submissive tense, then, reluctantly, peek up again.

“What?” he mutters, eyes distrustful and confused.

Cas nods, trying to communicate the appropriate amount of sympathy without making the young man feel ashamed at what’s been done to him.

“Michael and Gordon?” he says. “They’ve been completely removed from the picture. You don’t have to see them anymore.”

Dean’s green eyes widen, before they flitter anxiously to the side. The man sniffles, and bites his lip, almost shy.

“Gordon got fired,” he murmurs, and Cas’s eyebrows raise in surprise, because he didn’t know that.

He wonders how Dean knows that, before deciding that this is not the time to ask.

The submissive looks half shell-shocked, half ready to shut down again, like he thinks Cas might be teasing him to laugh at his hope.

But he isn’t, of course, and he doesn’t know how else to reassure Dean, other than to confirm that what he is feeling is real, and very very much understood.

“That must be a relief to you,” he says carefully. “I know he wasn’t…kind.”

Dean bares his teeth again.

“He fucked me with a fucking hot iron and kept saying he was gonna stab out my eyes,” he says harshly, and Cas’s breath is knocked out of him as suddenly and firmly as when Dean had kicked him in the stomach.

What the fuck, he thinks, blindsided into silence, unable to croak out even the most generic of platitudes as his mind struggles to adjust to what he’d just heard.

He finds that it can’t, really, and maybe Dean figures this out too, because he only watches Cas choke on his inability to find a response for a few seconds before dropping his eyes back down to his knees.

“Whatever,” he mutters, “I’m fucking used to it.”

His eyes look dangerously bright.

“You shouldn’t be,” Cas stutters out finally, fervently, meaning it with every bit of his overstretched heart. “Dean that’s- that’s horrific, I, I don’t. You shouldn’t be used to anything like that, and you never have to fear such violence from me.”

Dean sniffles again.

“Fuck off,” he says despondantly, and rests his cheek on his right knee so he’s looking straight off to the side.

Cas’s sympathy grows so large in his chest he thinks it might stretch out to completely envelope the man on the couch, even though he’s on the opposite side of the room.

“I mean it Dean,” he insists honestly. “I don’t even believe in hitting.”

That makes Dean scoff.

“Yeah, we’ll see how long that lasts.”

It’s such a depressing thing to say, a mix between a taunt and a cry of despair. It’s a promise that Dean is going to do everything he can to bait Cas into finally snapping, while at the same time being an admission that he doesn’t think he has any other choice.

He just is bad, so he’ll be treated bad. He’s not what he’s supposed to be, so he’ll be punished for this endlessly without any expectation that he’ll change.

It’s miserably unfair, but Cas gets the unsettling feeling he’s significantly more aware of how unfair it is than Dean is, even though Dean is the one living with the brunt of the injustice.

But what does justice matter, to someone who has no power? What does justice mean, to someone who only wants to escape from more pain?

“I’m not going to be baited into beating you, Dean, no matter how you behave.”

This makes Dean angry, and his head flies up once again, face red and puffy from where he’d been sobbing for so long, and twisted with the anguish of having no understanding at all.

“Fuck you, stop fucking lying,” he hisses. “I almost strangled you to death, do you expect me to believe you’re not even gonna punish me? I’m not a fucking moron, fuck you fuck you, just get it over with you sadistic cunt!”

Dean rages at him with all the conviction of an abused dog, shouting obscenities while transparent fear shines bright and unavoidable through every part of his body. He’s obviously scared shitless of whatever he imagines Cas is gonna do to him, and can’t bear the anticipation anymore, so convinced something horrible is in store.

He’s wrong, of course, but Cas has to admit it’s a fair thing to be worried about, since Dean has yet to receive any specific clarification about how his disobedience is going to be addressed.

It isn’t fair to leave someone so traumatized waiting and wondering like this, and such anticipation is usually something Cas very much tries to avoid. But the truth is that he still doesn’t know what should be done with Dean, and his heart deeply resists any and all suggestions his mind comes up with.

The young man just seems too fragile right now to bear much of anything, and Cas doesn’t know how to lead them both out of this situation they’re in with their sanities intact.

He considers the submissive, who’s still frozen on the couch per Cas’s order, breathing heavily and gritting his teeth in transparent fear.

“I’m not lying,” he finally settles on saying carefully, thinking over every word as it comes. “I don’t hit. That isn’t how I punish. Nor do I do so by inflicting any physical harm.”

It’s not entirely true. He’s been pushed into imposing some limited corporeal punishment in the past, when his patient’s needs truly could not be satisfied through gentler methods. But for the purposes of what Dean is worried about, he can truthfully say he never has or and never will engage in such cruelty.

“That doesn’t mean I’m not going to address what happened earlier. My methods are not so lax as that.”

Dean cringes, and draws in a shaky breath, but the truth is that Cas’s words are meant more as an assurance than any kind of a threat.

It’s hard to interpret Dean’s reaction to see if he understands this, under the instinctual dread, but Cas knows there’s no way deep down that the submissive actually wants the way he’d lashed out to be ignored.

He needs structure, Cas thinks, consistency. He wants to know where he stands.

He’s petrified of facing the consequences of his actions, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want there to be any at all.

Cas had seen it, in that flash of a moment where the submissive had looked so ashamed of himself. He’d felt it, in the moment Dean had handed over the gun, in the very fact that Cas had woken up again after being strangled rather than ceasing to breathe all together.

The submissive doesn’t want to be like this. He doesn’t want to cause such harm, to be so destructive.

He wants to be stopped, but his repulsion towards his own submission is too strong to allow him to stop himself. So someone else has to stop him, but no one’s been able to, because no one’s been able to break his seemingly endless willpower.

But Cas’s intention has never been to break any part of anybody, and just like that, he understands what he needs to do.

It’s like a lightbulb goes off in his head, as he watches the young man, watches how even as his fear obviously heightens at Cas’s words, he slumps very slightly, like he’s relieved. Like he’s resting against the wall of Cas’s boundaries, against the limits of what Cas will tolerate.

Oh, Cas understands, and the corner of his mouth twitches like it wants to smile.

Not a good idea right now, while he has to be stern, but he already feels satisfaction bleeding warm into his blood.

“You don’t think punishment can exist without pain,” he observes mildly, and Dean flinches, before sending an incredulous look.

“Fuck kinda question is that?” the young man asks, and now Cas does smile, unable to hold back his amusement at Dean’s absolute refusal to show the slightest bit of deference towards an idea he doesn’t share.

Cas tries to keep his feelings from showing on his face too dramatically, knowing Dean will completely shut down if he thinks he’s being laughed at. Which Cas isn’t doing, though quite quickly he can feel his own earlier exasperation folding itself into the new shape of fondness.

The submissive’s unending obstinance really is somewhat impressive, even if it does venture well into the realm of ridiculous as well.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he says easily, Dean’s attitude rolling right off his back. “Can I ask you why you’re under that impression?”

He already knows, but he wants Dean to verbalize it. Such exercises help patients articulate unhealthy concepts they’ve internalized, which gives them a solid target to start deconstructing.

He’s not sure Dean is going to participate, at first, as the young man initially responds only by looking taken aback. But then his expression flickers into one of conflicted irritation, like he can’t decide whether to entertain this stupidity.

It’s likely he thinks he’s being mocked, on some level, but in the end his desire to prove his point wins out.

“What the fuck else would be the fucking point, then?” he snaps, irate and impatient. “Ain’t no one gonna be scared of punishment that don’t hurt like a bitch!”

It’s the sad mantra of abused subs that Cas has heard many times, though he’s never had it said to him with such blatant annoyance before. The “are you fucking stupid?” that’s implied underneath the words is so inconspicuous that Cas almost snorts, despite the gravity of the whole situation.

The submissive’s trauma isn’t something to laugh at. But it’s a little funny how easy it is to distract Dean from his fear by baiting him into an argument.

He really is quite the contrarian, Cas thinks, unexpectedly delighted by this discovery. Like happening upon a fossil in a stream while collecting unspectacular stones, Cas pockets the find like the precious thing it is.

For the first time, Cas feels like he’s seeing part of Dean’s real, true personality, the one that existed before he got so sick and is desperately fighting its way back to the surface.

Cas finds it wonderful, but he can also see already how it would rub many dominants the wrong way, even when Dean isn’t trying to piss them off. He must be quite the handful even when he’s healthy and happy, and it’s easy to imagine that Dean has often gotten himself into trouble just by existing, his natural outspokenness and willpower a quick trigger for insecure dominants.

But Cas isn’t so easily bothered by opinionated submissives. He finds it a rather pleasant change, in all honesty, never having found bland agreement in every conversation particularly interesting.

I think you and I are going to get along very well, Dean, once you get over this phase of trying to kill me.

“Do you think the point of punishment is to make you afraid of it?” he prompts the man gently, knowing this conversation is a step in moving Dean on from that murderous urge.

“Obviously,” Dean snaps, and Cas has to bite his cheek to keep the smile threatening to bloom in check.

“To what end?”

The submissive growls in exasperation, and for the first time, uncurls from his hunched up ball.

“To make me listen!” he responds loudly, obviously angry with Cas’s refusal to understand. “To make me do what they fucking want, ‘cause getting punished is worse! What kind of fucking dominant are you, asshole, if you don’t already know that full fucking well!?”

Another dominant might rise to the taunt, the implication, that he’s somehow weak for not knowing how to inflict pain. But Cas isn’t the kind to be prompted into aggression by mockery, and he just nods in understanding, pleased that Dean’s outrage that seems to be stabilizing into non-violence the longer they talk.

This kind of purposeful, non-hysterical defiance is a good thing, Cas knows, and would be a good thing even if he didn’t find himself charmed by it. Dean is obviously not remotely ready to actually stop throwing pointless darts at him, and this kind of attitude is a safe way to do it.

The defiance is something Dean needs right now, not only to save face, but to maintain his own sense of self in such frightening chaos. The sharp words are like barbs on a wire wrapped protectively around his own existence, marking the boundary between where he ends and Cas begins without actually stopping them from seeing each other through it.

Better than having him screaming in rage or shaking in petrified silence.

Better than fighting to communicate through a brick wall.

“I’m the kind of dominant who doesn’t approach any part of submission as a matter of cruelty, and doesn’t treat discipline like it should be some kind of threat.”

He speaks very firmly, but softly at the same time, refusing to raise his voice to match the volume Dean’s trying to set.

Things have to be quiet to be calm, and Cas absolutely needs Dean to be calm for this. It’s going to be intense enough for him as it is.

“Fuck off,” Dean spits, derisive.

“I will not,” Cas answers, neutral and blunt.

Dean’s lip wobbles, and he drops his eyes at the immovability of the dominant’s response. Like he’s uncertain if the words require defensiveness, he pulls one of his outstretched legs back up to his chest.

He sniffles, and he shifts slightly, craning a little bit down on his left side.

The one with the dislocated shoulder. He’s trying to relieve the strain of having that arm pulled behind his back.

It must really be hurting him, if he’s letting himself respond to the pain at all.

“I’m nervous about letting your arms free, after you strangled me,” he explains quietly. “If I untie you, do you promise you won’t try to find a way around my directions not to attack?”

“No,” Dean says immediately, with great resentment.

His stubbornness isn’t as funny when it forces Cas to keep hurting him.

This self flagellation really needs to end.

But he’s not going to solve all Dean’s psychological problems in one afternoon, and they’ve already been here for most of an hour without Cas finally biting the bullet.

The time hasn’t been wasted. He’s very pleased with how much progress Dean’s made. But it’s getting close to dinnertime, and Cas doesn’t intend to leave Dean undisciplined, or without a properly long period of comfort during and after the consequences he’s going to face.

Cas stands up.

Dean stiffens on the sofa before him.

“That concerns me, Dean, that you’re not willing to commit to that,” he says honestly. “You know I can’t allow that kind of violence to repeat itself.”

Like it’s a challenge, the submissive clenches his jaw against whatever battle he imagines he sees in the words, drawing his other leg back up so he’s once again curled up in an angry ball.

“Try and stop me,” he mutters shakily, and then immediately flinches, like he expects to have something heavy thrown at his head.

Cas only looks at him seriously.

“Oh, I very much intend to. But not by beating you senseless and you seem to fear.”

That has Dean snarling, and jerking forward on the couch like he thinks he can somehow be intimidating while unable to move off it, compelled by Cas’s directions as he is.

“I ain’t scared!” the man hisses, and Cas knows his line here, the one that the bad guy is supposed to reliably say:

You should be.

It’s what Dean’s used to hearing. Cas wonders how many times he’s played through this exact exchange, trembling.

Cas doesn’t intend to put the man through it yet again.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he replies instead. “I don’t plan on giving you a reason to be. I’m here to take care of you, you know.”

The anger on Dean’s face just sort of freezes when he says that, like it doesn’t know where it’s supposed to go.

It will find some new way to manifest momentarily, Cas is sure, but he doesn’t subject the poor man to being watched while he that gets sorted out.

He’s had his emotions publicly batted around enough for one day, and his turmoil isn’t on display for Cas’s amusement.

So Cas doesn’t watch it, content to occupy himself with what he’d been intending to do for a while now, which is to collect the gag Dean had discarded this morning from the ground and go to wash it in the sink.

He turns off the water, then, and grabs a piece of paper towel to dry the gag with, turning back to Dean with his heart in his throat.

The submissive is staring back at him with huge eyes, once again petrified. It seems to have dawned on him that whatever’s going to happen is going to happen now, and that he doesn’t have anywhere to run this time.

He’s trapped on the couch, Cas’s order as much of a restraint to him in his hypersensitivity as the ropes binding his arms behind his back.

It’s so horribly sad that Cas feels his own will wavering, feeling like a monster for frightening Dean in any way at all. Even knowing he’s not planning anything remotely cruel for the submissive, he almost doesn’t know if he can go through with it.

It’s what he needs, Cas reminds himself. You’re not hurting him in any way.

The man’s fear is wildly disproportionate to the situation because of the way he’s been violently mistreated, and the only only way to dissolve that complete terror is to show Dean that Cas’s discipline is nothing to be afraid of.

“I suppose that doesn’t mean much to you,” he admits quietly. “Recalibration, as opposed to punishment.”

Dean doesn’t seem to have the presence of mind to answer him, anymore, or even to posture, because he just sits frozen, like a prey animal cornered by a predator.

His face is still littered with bruises that have yet to fade, and Cas’s gaze is drawn morbidly to his split lip.

“I’ll explain to you what I see as the difference, shall I?” he asks.

It’s a rhetorical question, but he’s still disappointed when the submissive doesn’t come back at him with some snappy, disrespectful response.

Sighing, he continues on anyway, hoping at least some of what he’s saying will help put Dean at ease.

“Punishment- at least, the way I have seen the word punishment generally used,” he starts, “Seems to refer to something done to maintain control over someone, regardless of how that someone feels about it. I don’t entirely disagree with your assessment, Dean, that what most people refer to as punishment seems primarily intended to simply invoke fear.”

Frowning, Cas studies the rubber gag in his hand as he dries it, rubbing it carefully back and forth within the expanse of the paper towel that grips it, turning it this way and that as he goes.

“To be honest, I’ve always found this practice to be quite repulsive,” he admits softly. “Which isn’t what most people expect from a dominant, but I’ve been told I’m quite the unusual type.”

There aren’t any bite marks on the gag, yet, he notices, and he thinks that that’s probably a good sign. He’d bought this one specifically for Dean, after all, judging that the moderate size would not put undue strain on the man’s jaw.

Still, he might have expected Dean to be clenching down pretty hard anyway, during the stress of this morning, but he hadn’t been. Maybe Dean does find it more comfortable to wear a gag than his dramatic rejection of it suggested.

Cas hopes so. He doesn’t want Dean to feel ill at ease, especially during what he has planned.

“It’s just always seemed unjust to me,” he adds, checking the gag for missed dirt one last time, “that so many people feel entitled to the obedience of others who never agreed to provide it. And it seems ridiculous that anyone could coerce someone through physical violence and have the audacity to call it submission."

He looks up at the young man on the couch again, who’s still unmoving and pale.

“Submission is a gift, Dean, one that can’t be beaten out of someone who doesn’t want to give it. That’s why you’re still so sick, even after all this time.”

Finally, this invokes from Dean some tiny reaction, a tiny twitch of his face, like Cas’s words have given him an electric shock.

His expression sort of- flickers, like his thoughts are coming back online, and he shakes his head once before pausing in uncertainty, then shakes his head once again.

“I- no,” he stutters, body tense as a bowstring, shoulders curled up in a way that must be excruciating when taken together with his injury.

But he doesn’t seem to notice.

“No, I, it ain’t, I ain’t….”

The young man trails off, somewhere between having lost his train of thought and never having had the words he needs to begin with.

“You’re not what, Dean?” Cas prompts quietly, but Dean just swallows and looks at his knees.

“Not sick?” he asks, after the man declines to fill in the blank.

It makes the most sense, in regards to what Dean could have been trying to protest, but the lack of reaction from the patient makes Cas feel like it isn’t what he was thinking.

His gut sinks.

Oh.

“Not…submissive?” he tries, even softer.

Dean cringes, and Cas knows that he’s right.

Oh.

“Dean…”

He sighs, feeling his heart bleed out like a bullet wound.

“Sweetheart, I’m not going to hurt you. But there are parts of you that are very out of sync. It’s causing you serious pain, and you’re lashing out at everyone because of it. You need some real readjustment or it’s just going to keep getting worse.”

As Cas watches, the submissive’s already pale face literally goes gray like he’s just felt his own heart stop beating. The man’s eyes drop to the gag in Cas’s hand.

“That’s what recalibration is, by the way. It’s the act of realigning something that has drifted off track.”

Slowly, Dean shakes his head, eyes wide and glassy. He starts crawling backwards on the sofa like he has anywhere he can go.

Cas aches for him, for his fear that shines so bright it almost whites out even his own steady logic.

“I know that whatever name I put to it, receiving any sort of discipline can be frightening, or upsetting. But I promise I’m not going to hurt you, and that ultimately, I am not going to cause you harm.”

He takes a step forward, and Dean goes wildly tense.

“I swear on my life that you will feel better after this, Dean, not worse,” Cas tells him, and then he crosses the rest of the room.

Dean gasps, and tries to scramble away, drained of blood and all his bravado. Almost immediately, the submissive finds himself backed up against the arm of the couch, stiff and horrified, unable to move any farther away.

Cas sits down besides him, and Dean belatedly pastes on a snarl, the last useless defense against whatever terror he’s imagined the dominant will bring.

“It’s alright,” he assures the submissive, gripping the gag between his fingers. His other hand comes out to grip Dean’s defiantly jutted out jaw.

The man tries to tear his head away, but Cas doesn’t let him. It’s hard to stabilize Dean’s head and shove the ball between his lips at the same time, but he manages, catching the submissive in the middle of a shout while his furiously bared teeth are unclenched.

Pushing it in between them before Dean can react, the submissive’s eyes go wide as it happens, and Cas claps his hand over the man’s mouth instantaneously so the submissive doesn’t just spit it out on instinct.

For a moment, he doesn’t even try.

He just– stops, eyes going wide in surprise and confusion, body going limp like a kitten scruffed by the neck. His growling cuts off like somebody’s taken the needle off a record player, and he just blinks up at Cas like he’s not sure what to do.

It’s as if he’s so startled by this turn of events that it has stunned him into silence, like he’s so shocked that Cas actually managed to get the ball in his mouth that it has confused him into calming down.

“Oh,” Cas says quietly, almost equally as taken off guard, not expecting the man’s defiance to evaporate like a switch had been flipped the moment the gag was slipped into his mouth.

It’s not that Cas has never seen this kind of reaction before, or seen a submissive switch on a dime to become docile. But in his experience it’s only the most excruciatingly submissive of patients who are sensitive enough to almost collapse at the experience of being so lightly dominated, having their instincts triggered like a gun.

He hadn’t expected it from a submissive as defiant as Dean, and the guilt over that kicks him in the chest.

Because within only a matter of days he’d forgotten, he’d forgotten what he’d seen right at the start:

That Dean is one of the most submissive patient’s he’s ever had, one of the most responsive and easily dominated submissives he’s ever met. That this, all of this, is a performance driven by pure fear, designed to push people away and hide that sensitivity that makes Dean so open to attack.

And it had worked on him, so quickly. He’d so quickly forgotten that he’d already seen the docil young man hidden beneath all of this.

Swallowing with guilt, it’s Cas who drops his eyes first, unable to handle the hesitant vulnerability inside Dean’s the obvious question of why does this feel good?

The poor thing had obviously expected excruciating pain, somehow or other, and Cas pulls his hand away from the man’s mouth, feeling like a monster.

“There we go,” he murmurs, trying to sound gentle. “That’s not so bad, is it?”

Dean’s breath hitches, and Cas releases the pressure on his chest, sitting back on his own heels.

For a second, the submissive doesn’t move, doesn’t try to sit up or even blink, just stays laid backwards staring at the ceiling, processing the feeling of his own instincts being triggered without hurt.

Then he sort of- twitches, and inhales like maybe he hadn’t even been breathing, and starts to push himself upright again.

He fumbles back into his original pose, kneeling on the ground, looking dazed, gag still held firm in his mouth with the straps, unbuckled, hanging down.

“There we go,” Cas says again kindly, and Dean blinks like he’s waking up from a trance.

He looks absolutely wrecked, hair mussed and clothes rumpled from wrestling, cheeks streaked with tear tracks he hadn’t been able to wipe away. His eyes are red rimmed from hours of crying, sunken and dark from years without sleep. Face still decorated with the bruises violent men had inflicted on him, he seems to Cas a glass figure already strewn with cracks, barely held together by its own tension and one touch from shattering completely apart.

He’s never truly submitted to anyone, Cas remembers sadly. Not once in his whole entire life.

Anyone else would have expired from the exhaustion of it a long time ago. Everyone else had, who’d suffered the same conditions.

Dean is alive out of sheer spite and stubbornness. How can anyone expect him to know how to let go of that, when it’s the only thing keeping them together?

How can anyone expect him to recognize that it’s what’s strangling him to death at the same time?

Cas isn’t surprised when Dean finally flinches, like he’s just realized what he’s doing, and when he spits the ball out of his mouth and onto his lap.

He also isn’t surprised when the submissive again flinches dramatically after doing this, looking at Cas in transparent panic, the flash of his real emotions only appearing for a second before he once again growls and sets his face into a snarl.

“Let’s try again,” is all Cas says, mildly, and he leans forward to pluck the gag from where it had plopped onto the couch cushion. Bringing it up to press against Dean’s mouth, he doesn’t scold Dean for the way he keeps his teeth locked together in an empty performance of anger.

But it’s too late for such a performance to be believable, and it wavers visibly as he levels Dean with a stare.

The man’s breath hitches, obviously feeling the pull back towards the submission Cas had started to lead him into. He’s just halfheartedly throwing stones now, unsure what he can still get away with after bending so visibly, and Cas intends to show him the answer as kindly but firmly as possible.

At the end of the day, it’s Cas who’s meant to decide, and Dean who’s meant to obey. So Cas makes the decision about when the gag is going into Dean’s mouth, and Dean, bending under it, obeys him.

His lips part hesitantly when Cas starts pushing against them, centimeter by centimeter, and he makes a shy, confused noise, like he isn’t sure about what’s happening.

But that choice isn’t his, and Cas, gentle as he intends to be, isn’t going to allow Dean to make it. It isn’t good for him, to be allowed to confuse their roles like that, and this entire day has only gone to show how agitated such confusion makes him.

Dean has thrown off proper domination for long enough. Cas has finally coaxed him into a place where it is possible for him to submit, so it’s time he learned what that feels like.

Cas pushes through the submissive’s resistance kindly but very firmly, and Dean whimpers like he’s uncertain as his mouth is nudged gradually open by a will that isn’t his own.

But only Cas has to be certain, and finally Dean seems to understand that the decision has already been made for him. He folds under it, allowing his gaze to drop submissively as his jaw unlocks in acceptance, pliant as Cas pushes the rubber ball against his tongue, lips stretching to accommodate the intrusion.

It’s obviously an unfamiliar feeling to him, not being gagged, but being obedient, being dominated and made into something malleable. He looks timid and confused with the gag in his mouth, like he’s not sure if he likes it there, and further isn’t sure if he likes the fact that his opinion on that doesn’t seem to matter.

Because it’s in his mouth anyway, and he’d let Cas put it there without consulting him first, and now he’s holding it quietly and obediently between his teeth, having somehow been made to mind without being forced.

“Be a good boy, Dean,” Cas tells him as he pulls his hand back, knowing the man will know that means to keep the gag in place.

Dean does keep it in place, but it obviously makes him feel incredibly vulnerable, because he keens shyly, blushing bright pink. He ducks his head, painfully unsure, and Cas sees tears spring into his lowered eyes.

They aren’t tears of terror anymore, though, Cas knows, or of anger, but tears of timid hope and fear of rejection. Contrite and blindsided by his own submission, Cas knows it must be frightening, to have your soul peeled back and displayed in such a way.

He’s so insecure in his own obedience, doesn’t know how to gain approval with it at all. But he wants approval, wants praise for doing a good job, and that’s excruciatingly clear as Dean curls in on himself while still keeping himself displayed.

He wants Cas to see that he’s obeying him, that he’s keeping the unbuckled gag in his mouth without being forced to, even as he’s burning with shame for doing so. Entire face red and tears shining dangerously in his eyes, he’s obviously incredibly conflicted, incredibly embarrassed at his own behavior, that he’s minding without being absolutely compelled.

But at this point, even the hope of receiving gentleness is enough to keep his teeth clenched around the gag. Even the hope of pleasing Cas, pleasing someone, has finally broken down his unhappy walls.

His eyes are begging Cas to keep his promise, to be nice to him and not humiliate him for what he must be sure is an unsatisfactory performance of submission. His whole body cries out for comfort while cringing in fear of rejection, and Cas feels an overwhelming pride at this man’s bravery, at how hard he’s trying to trust Cas’s kindness after everything he’s been through.

“See?” Cas says encouragingly. “I knew you could do it. I knew you could be a good boy.”

Dean’s face scrunches up as Cas reaches out to stroke his hair, and the tears start streaming silent and hot down his cheeks like his anger is literally melting out of him.

Shushing him, Cas leans forward to wrap his arms around the submissive, who melts against his chest immediately, tucking his face into his neck.

There’s something so painfully earnest about him like this, something so heartbreakingly sweet, and Cas feels his own heart reaching out to tuck Dean safely into it, where he’ll be warm and cherished forever.

It’s a dangerous feeling to have for a patient so quickly, Cas knows, especially one who he isn’t sure is going to survive. But with Dean’s hands clutching timidly at his button down shirt, so soft and vulnerable and brave, Cas doesn’t know how to do anything but give into the emotion, so give into it he does.

He kisses Dean on his brown hair as they kneel among the scattered shards of broken glass around them, and rests his chin on the man’s head, looking up. Staring up at the hole in the window where the young man he’s holding had punched through the pane, Cas wonders how long it will take for the reality of the world to leak into their hideaway now that the first crack has formed.

“It’s gonna be ok, Dean,” Cas says with a guilty pang, not knowing for sure that it will turn out to be true.

“I’m going to take care of you, my dear,” he corrects much more honestly. “I’m not going to leave you, no matter what you do, or what happens. I promise you won’t drive me away.”

In all likelihood, the man will be back to trying to rip his throat out tomorrow, the way he’s been disarmed being a temporary fix. How much progress he’s actually made, and how much Dean will retain, remains to be seen. The possibility that he’s made no permanent progress at all is a very real one, and he can already see forward to the months ahead and know that they will be very difficult for both of them.

He’s not going to leave the submissive, though, no matter how aggressive he is. He’s not going to abandon his charge like a project that gets too difficult to bother trying to finish.

“You’re mine now, Dean,” he tells Dean softly, whispering into the man’s hair. “I take care of what’s mine, and I don’t let go of what I know belongs to me. Not ever.”

Dean shivers at the words, in the right headspace now to receive them, as possessive as Cas knows they are.

It’s not how he would speak, usually, but it’s something he thinks Dean needs to hear, having had his compulsive defiance subdued at least for the foreseeable few minutes.

“You’re not going to see Michael anymore, or Gordon, or any of the other lowlifes who called themselves your dominants. I’ve gotten rid of them, and now you are none but my own. Do you understand?”

There’s no response, not even a nod, but Cas doesn’t take it as any sort of insolence. The submissive is floating far under the waters of his own capitulation, heady with the long awaited feeling of release.

Cas’s father wouldn’t have taken that as any kind of excuse, would have shaken Dean violently at the very least to wake him up and probably have hit him too. He’d spent enough time at the receiving end of long lectures to know what his father would have to say about the man’s behavior, and Cas’s willingness to accept it without complaint.

Allowing silence is allowing disrespect. It is the submissive’s obligation to respond to their dominant at all times, and not holding them to their duty only breeds more rebellion.

Cas had never agreed with such attitudes, even when he’d been young and much more easily led. He agrees with it even less now, in the minority though he may be, and only takes Dean’s silence as proof of how soothed the man had become underneath the power of Cas’s painless form of discipline.

It gives Cas some hope, that maybe he is on the right track, that maybe he isn’t as far in over his head as he feels. It gives him hope, that maybe the sensitive young man he’d drawn out so easily at first isn’t as far down underneath the surface as he’d feared.

Because the depth of the misery in Dean’s heart seems almost endless, with the shards of who he was before sunk like stones at the bottom. And Cas doesn’t know if he has the strength to dive down that far, without breaking under the pressure of the miles of water on top of him, or losing his way in the darkness.

He meant what he said, though. He isn’t going to leave, not even if Dean’s whole soul caves in on top of him. He’ll be here until the end, if the end is indeed where they’re headed, and will let himself be crushed if he has to.

Chapter Text

He has Dean keep the gag in his mouth for 20 minutes without interruption, and gets some work done in the meantime. Sitting above Dean on the couch directly next to where the man is kneeling, he types away on his computer, reaching down occasionally to brush the submissive’s hair in the quiet.

It’s important for Dean to know he isn’t being ignored.

It’s equally important, though, that the submissive be given space to process his own feelings and contemplate his actions, and that he recognizes that Cas expects him to behave whether or not he’s being given his full attention.

It’s good. Peaceful, aside from the occasional growl on Dean’s part when he’s petted. Even that’s a good thing, really, since it tells Cas the man is coming back to himself, and he lets the half-hearted aggression go without comment, proud of how Dean continues to hold the gag in his mouth even as he seems to regain his clarity.

Overall, the scene feels deceptively calm, and would be perfect if not for the eight billion other problems Cas now has to address in regards to Dean’s care.

Most urgently, the fact that his patient’s arm is still dislocated, and Cas has no idea how to fix it.

He’s not a doctor, at least not of that kind, and has never had a reason to learn emergency medical treatment of such a serious nature.

That may…be a problem moving forward, considering the level of Dean’s violence and the ease with which he seems accustomed to harming himself.

This is ridiculous, Cas thinks, reading through the fifth instructional article. I’m in a medical center.

But he has no allies here, no one he can really trust to take care of something so sensitive while Dean is in such a fragile state. So far, he’s met no one he would feel comfortable letting within 10 feet of Dean, much less allow to reconnect the man’s injured shoulder.

Looking at the little informational graphic included on the web page doubtfully, he glances down at his patient, and weighs how willing he is to use the man as his test subject if he decides to try to do this himself.

Not very.

But would exposing him again to one of the center's abusive employees be any better?

He navigates back to his search results and clicks on another educational article, doubtful that this one will be any more valuable to him than the last five.

At 5:40, he decides that enough time has passed that he can risk speaking to Dean again, trusting that he’s stabilized enough through his submission to not be immediately set off again.

“How’s your arm?” he asks gently, and the young man flinches at being addressed.

Which is fair. Cas hadn’t spoken to him in a while, and had backed off on the petting when he’d started obviously stiffening up instead of relaxing.

So he takes a moment to respond, and Cas is patient during it. He can only imagine what Dean’s mental state is like right now, after having been put through such emotional turmoil, and having fallen so sharply into the cloudy fear of domination withdrawal.

He should be somewhat better by now, after his quiet period of submission, but Cas can’t tell exactly how much better, what with Dean still not speaking because of the gag.

The man shrugs, though, an awkward, somewhat pained movement in which one shoulder moves higher than the other.

The uninjured one, of course. Cas feels a pang of guilt for allowing the injury to go unaddressed for so long. It’s clearly still paining the submissive.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you, earlier,” he says quietly. “When I held you down.”

He tried to be careful, but he’s not sure how successful he was, unfamiliar as he is with the injury. At the time, it had seemed most important to get the gag into the submissive’s mouth as a way to reestablish his domination, afraid that continued chaos would set off another violent episode Cas is not equipped to handle.

But he thinks he may have underestimated the severity of the damage, misled by the continued intensity of Dean’s defiance and his patient’s lack of expression of pain. The articles he’s reading now are making him think again, making him think that a person who’s capable of ripping their own arm from its socket without even hesitating is also probably used to bearing a lot of pain.

To his surprise, though, Dean shakes his head after a moment of pause, denying that Cas had in any way worsened it.

Cas isn’t sure if he believes that, but it’s a good sign that Dean doesn’t feel inclined to hold it against him.

Sighing, Cas shuts his laptop and stands, ignoring how Dean cringes again as he does.

“I have pain meds,” he offers weakly. “Ibuprofen, Advil….”

Nothing stronger, at least for oral consumption. He hadn’t thought he’d be dealing with such serious injuries, now that Dean is officially in his care.

All he has besides generic pain meds is what’s left of the numbing cream, and that’s designed for surface level injuries, not muscle deep wounds that might need weeks to completely heal.

To his surprise, Dean rejects even the barest of help though, shaking his head again much more forcefully at the suggestion of over-the-counter pills.

Cas looks down at him uncertainly, not knowing whether or not to force the issue. He imagines the man must have some bad experiences with being given “medicine,” and the last thing he wants is to trigger Dean and end up in another confrontation.

On the other hand, he knows Dean must be in really bad shape, and it’s his responsibility to look after his patient, even when his patient is resistant to treatment.

“Let me show you what I have,” he eventually settles on, walking over to the counter with the sink and the coffee maker, kneeling down in front of the cabinets beneath them.

Placing his computer down on the ground besides himself, he opens the doors to the cupboard and starts rooting around inside.

This is where he’s chosen to keep most of his supplies for Dean, much of which he had planned to show the man before the whole…incident had occurred. The swiftness with which Dean had attacked him had meant he’d been given no chance to explain himself, to reintroduce himself to the more clear-headed version of his patient and lay out how things would be changing.

But he has all sorts of things in here for the man, changes of clothing, extra blankets and pillows, non-perishable food he’d planned to allow Dean to access at will.

He may have to…reconsider some of his original ideas, now that he knows what the submissive is capable of. And he may need to significantly bulk up on the dominance-related items he’d brought in and tucked away with everything else, recognizing now that a few extra ropes and a blindfold is likely not going to be enough.

One problem at a time, Cas thinks tiredly, dragging out his box of first-aid supplies.

He can’t solve every problem at this exact moment, but he can offer Dean some pain relief.

Bringing the cardboard box over and setting it down in front of the submissive, he starts pulling things out and putting them on the ground between them, displaying them for Dean’s consideration.

“Ibuprofen and Advil, like I said. Tums and Benadryl too, though those aren’t really going to help with this. Unless maybe you want to sleep it off?”

But Dean rejects this as well, eyes wide as he once again shakes his head. He looks petrified of the unthreatening pill bottles in front of him, pulling away in alarm when Cas uncaps one to show that it hasn’t been opened.

“No?” Cas asks rhetorically, and he bites his cheek, feeling helpless against Dean’s distress.

He doesn’t have the heart to force the issue, though, after what the man has been through today. So he begins putting the bottles back into the bin, trying to ignore how Dean visibly cowers at the rattling.

“I guess you don’t like pills,” he says awkwardly. “That’s alright, I’ve had quite a few patients with the same anxieties. I’m afraid this is all I have for you today, in terms of pain medication. I have a hot pack too, if you think that will help?”

The submissive doesn’t nod at this, only shooting Cas a confused, vulnerable look that communicates more about how he’s used to being treated than Cas would like. But he doesn’t deny the offer, and he doesn’t look terrified of it like he was of the pills, so Cas pushes his thumbs into the pack to mix together the chemicals and feels it get warm in his hands momentarily.

Dean does jerk away from him when he moves to lay it against the injured shoulder, and growls again when Cas doesn’t immediately back off.

So Cas does, then, pulling back and laying the pack in between them on the floor, letting Dean figure out the issue with that idea himself.

He squirms unhappily against his bonds, and Cas raises an eyebrow at him.

“I don’t feel safe leaving your arms untied anymore, Dean,” he says honestly. “You’re doing a very good job accepting your punishment, but we have a long way to go before leaving your hands free is something I feel comfortable doing.”

Unsympathetic, Dean sends him an angry look, peeling his lips back to bar his teeth again even with the gag still between them.

For a moment, Cas thinks he’s going to drop it in defiance, but he doesn’t. He just drops his eyes to glare quietly at the ground, and hunches in on himself even further.

Cas sees it for the resentful acceptance that it is, and picks the hot pack back up carefully.

“Good boy,” he murmurs, moving back towards him with it, placing the bag of heat gently on his tender shoulder.

Dean visibly stiffens against the praise, like he is forcing himself not to melt at it.

Here we go again, Cas thinks with some exasperation. The obstinance is certainly back to some extent, now that the submissive’s state of mind has somewhat stabilized.

But it’s not nearly as vicious as it was before, and Dean does soften not long after he starts scowling as Cas, tucked besides him, holds the warmth steady above his shoulder blade.

Some trust has been built through the last hour’s drama, apparently, and Cas feels his own self growing fonder as Dean continues to pout at the ground.

He keeps the gag between his teeth nonetheless, and Cas is glad of it.

It’s clearly doing wonders for his agitation.

The hot pack is clearly helping too, easing at least some of the pain he is in. The pout fades relatively quickly in face of the way the warmth must be helping, and as Cas watches, Dean shuts his eyes, clearly grateful for the way it seeps into the ache.

It’s not a relaxed expression, and Cas worries, looking at the still set of Dean’s mouth, watching how his eyebrows pull in towards each other, tense against what he’s trying to bare. If anything, it seems like the medical attention has only eased his hurt enough that he’s not completely focused on pretending not to feel it, the loosening of his body only allowing his muscles enough give to twist themselves back into the shape of the pain he’s been trying to hide.

Concern rises in Cas’s blood quickly, that what he’s offering to help Dean isn’t nearly enough.

“Do you-” he starts to say, then stops, reframing his statement, “I’m going to pull your shirt down on this side, Dean, so I can put the hot pack against your skin.”

Dean stiffens, but doesn’t fight, accepting Cas’s decision, and Cas tries to accept it too, knowing it’s his responsibility to see the man cared for.

He’d given in to the submissive’s panic about the pills because it seemed so serious, but he can’t allow Dean to keep denying himself medical care over smaller feelings of discomfort or fear.

He’s obviously not in the best place to be making such decisions for himself, considering that he’d been the one to dislocate his shoulder to begin with.

Cas moves slowly, though, as he comes around to Dean’s front again, pulling the hot pack off and placing it on the ground before he starts to unbutton the man’s pajama shirt. He takes care to be clinical, knowing what Dean has been put through, and only opens the front to the spot above the submissive’s navel, knowing that should be good enough.

Dean still makes a small noise of distress when Cas tugs the shirt off his right shoulder, letting it hang off him and bare the skin. He doesn’t know if the noise is the result of general fear or whether it’s alarm at Cas’s visible shock, which comes too quickly and visceral for him to hide.

Because the bruising is enormous, circling Dean’s shoulder in blue and purple and leaking like spilled ink into the muscles of his pecks. Discoloration far darker and deeper than Cas expected it to be, he gapes openly at the dent where Dean’s shoulder is supposed to be locked into place, starting to feel nauseous just looking at it.

“Oh my god,” he says faintly. “This needs to be set.”

It’s so obvious that Cas is almost speechless at it, and he feels like a moron with the heat pack in front of him.

Feeling like he’s been trying to put a band-aid over a bullet wound, it’s exceedingly clear to Cas now that he had no understanding of how serious this is, and that real medical attention is needed.

I’m not a doctor, Cas thinks hopelessly, and admits it a second later.

“Dean I- I don’t know how to set this. We need a professional to help you.”

Dean’s eyes widen, and he shakes his head in fright, obviously thinking of the many “medical professionals” who’s “care” he’s experienced and not wanting to be subject to that again.

Cas doesn’t know what reassurance to offer him. He’d call a local doctor, but he highly doubts the center would allow in anyone not already under contract with them.

“Dean,” he says, lost again, guilt pouring into him from every angle. “I’ll just hurt you further, I’m sure of it. I need help.”

Dean breathes out, looking conflicted.

Then, to Cas’s surprise, he tries to say something behind his gag.

It’s nothing intelligible. Unable to close his mouth and without significant use of his tongue, all that comes out of the man’s mouth is a soft “Ah” sound that stutters and folds in on itself shyly a moment later, as Dean realizes he’s not going to be able to make himself understood.

He’s not supposed to be allowed to, right now. But the volume and tone of the noise had told Cas that whatever the submissive had been saying hadn’t just been a protest, and the despondent way the man looks at Cas now makes him feel like there’s really something that needs to be said.

So he plucks the gag from Dean’s mouth lightly, keeping it held only a few centimeters from the man’s lips. He wants to make it very clear that it’s going right back between them momentarily, and Dean doesn’t protest this expectation.

He just quietly licks his lips with his head bowed, then says, “I can do it, Sir,” in a soft voice.

Cas almost drops the rubber ball at the honorific, unexpected as a daffodil bursting into bloom from Dean’s mouth. Staring after it, it takes him a moment to reply, so charmed by the sound of the man speaking to him as if he’s his own.

“Do…what?” he asks stupidly, and then his brain catches up to him, like cold water doused on some small fire that the submission had ignited. “Oh! Oh. You can…set a dislocated shoulder?”

Dean nods.

“Your own?”

Dean nods again, and Cas feels alarmed.

He must look doubtful, because Dean speaks again, quickly, an insistence to his tone that hints at the fear beneath it.

“I’ve done it before,” he promises, like that fact should be reassuring. “Bunch’a times. Please. Sir.”

He really doesn’t want Cas to call a nurse.

Cas really doesn’t want to either. But he’s incredibly disturbed by the causal way Dean talks about such serious injuries, and by the implications of why the man might have had to learn to take care of such injuries himself.

“Alright,” Cas says anyway, because he can’t bear to keep staring at Dean’s bruised shoulder and allowing it to go untreated.

Dean looks down, like he’s ashamed.

“Need my arms in front. Untied. Sorry. Sorry,” he winces. “I ain’t lying, I promise I ain’t.”

“I didn’t think you were,” Cas soothes him, concerned with how certain the man is that he won’t be believed, despite the fact that he hadn’t given Cas much of a reason to trust him.

But he doesn’t like how familiar Dean seems to be with being denied medical care because of his habit of lashing out, and doesn’t like the genuine surprise that unrolls on the submissive’s face as Cas moves behind him to start unbinding his arms.

As if he hadn’t actually expected Cas to allow him to treat himself. Like he expected to just be left to suffer instead.

“I probably shouldn’t have tied your arms behind your back anyway,” Cas admits, putting the gag to the side as he starts working at the knots. “I didn’t realize how hurt you were.”

This seems to confuse Dean further, and he looks back at Cas hesitantly.

“Deserved it,” he murmurs, and Cas feels sad.

“You did not,” he tells the man firmly. “You don’t deserve to be hurt further because you panicked.”

Dean’s gaze turns incredulous.

“Deserve to be fuckin’ put down,” he spits in response, and he seems to believe what he’s saying. But he’s also definitely pushing back against Cas’s forgiveness on purpose, a challenge to what he doesn’t understand.

“You most certainly do not,” Cas says, a little more sternly, and he grabs the gag again to push it against Dean’s lips. “Do not talk about yourself that way. Open.”

Dean does, startled by the domination, only having the presence of mind to look affronted after the ball is already back in his mouth.

It doesn’t take long for him to look contrite again, though, accepting Cas’s judgment that he’s not allowed to speak.

“Good boy,” Cas says softly, as soon as he sees Dean’s head duck, and he feels the man twitch at the unfamiliar praise.

It doesn’t take him long to unbind Dean’s arms, very familiar with tying and untying ropes. He’s less familiar with how to address a dislocated shoulder, and lets Dean guide his limbs back to the front of himself slowly, careful against the strain of moving the injured one.

“What do you need me to do?” he asks, but the submissive just shakes his head, shuffling around on his knees so he’s facing the couch.

As Cas watches, he raises his dislocated shoulder out in front of him and braces it against the seating. Other hand coming up to grip the braced arm’s elbow, he takes a deep breath, and clenches his teeth hard around the gag.

Then he shuts his eyes and jerks himself forward with a loud snap, and his shoulder locks back into place. Dean goes white, and, without a noise, collapses, and Cas’s heart leaps as he dives in to catch the man.

“Dean!” he yelps, and the sub grunts as he’s pushed upright, leaning heavily on Cas’s side for support.

“Jesus,” he mutters, as Dean goes from white to gray.

He hadn’t realized the process was going to cause this much pain.

“You need to lie down,” he decides and Dean whines and tries to shake his head.

Cas isn’t having it.

“Lie down, Dean. On the couch. Now.”

The man cringes, and does as he’s told.

He brushes a few stray glass pieces from around Dean’s head as he lies back, and softens considerably once he’s obeyed, grabbing the weighted blanket from where it had been discarded earlier and tucking it up around the submissive’s neck.

With his arms free, Dean pushes back against the blanket seemingly on instinct, and Cas catches his wrists in his own grasp, pulling them up so they’re held above the man’s chest.

From the way the submissive goes limp immediately and the frightened noise he makes, Cas knows the movement had been made in reflex, a habituated defense against being cared for rather than another genuine attempt at defiance.

Still, he keeps Dean’s wrists held firm as he levels the man with a look.

“Is the blanket hurting you in some way?” he asks, and it’s spoken earnestly, but Dean just lowers his eyes and shakes his head, looking ashamed.

“Then why are you fighting it?” Cas continues, and again, it’s a genuine question, albeit one he knows Dean doesn’t have the answer to.

He wants Dean to realize that, though, realize how reflexive so much of his defiance is, fear driven and in the pattern of self harm. The man does seem to realize it, at least partially, as Cas gazes at him, a lost look taking hold of his expression.

He shrugs slightly, and then cringes again, like he thinks Cas is going to shout at him for it, or tell him that’s not a good enough answer. But if Dean doesn’t know why he fights so much, then he doesn’t know, so Cas just sighs, and leans over to grab the rope he’d just unwound from Dean’s arms off the floor.

“You’re so squirmy,” he comments, somewhat amused, as he rebinds Dean’s wrists in front of him. “I think I might need a new setup for you, to keep you where you need to be.”

It’s a true observation, but he allows affection to seep into his voice, not wanting the man to feel like he’s being scolded.

To be honest, Cas couldn’t really care less if Dean pushes off his blankets or moves around after he’s told to be still. It only matters now because the man is so sick, and because he’s demonstrated a concerning pattern of violence.

Nonetheless, Dean lets him tie his wrists together without a fight, looking disproportionately remorseful for his so-called transgression. He whines again in apology, and turns his head to the side like he can’t bear to be looked at, and Cas wonders how a submissive so desperate to please could have ever ended up in the position he’s in.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he sighs, laying the man’s hands back down and pulling the blanket up over them again, “You don’t have to feel so ashamed.”

Tucking the heavy duvet up under Dean’s chin again, Cas sits beside him on the couch, looking seriously at the mistreated young man.

“I’m not mad at you,” he tells him gently. “But you clearly have a habit of self harm that expresses itself through defiance. This isn’t something that I’m going to allow to continue, Dean, now that you’re under my care. Do you understand?”

Dean shakes his head, not like he’s arguing but like he genuinely doesn’t understand what he’s being told. It doesn’t shock Cas, and he lays a solid hand on Dean’s chest, offering more pressure over the thick duvet.

The man clearly finds being held down calming, when he isn’t in the middle of a meltdown.

“You compulsively reject any and all attempts to care for you, defying orders you know will only bring you comfort. You lash out violently in ways you are sure will only bring you horrible retribution, and then defend this retribution through the idea that you brought it on yourself. Even insisting that it would be fair to have you put down.”

Cas tilts his head.

“Dean, do you want to be put down?”

Dean’s eyes well up with tears, and he jerks up like he’s attempting to escape.

Using the hand already against the man’s chest, Cas pushes him back down forcefully, and then holds him there using all his body weight as the sub shudders like he’s afraid.

But it’s not Cas he’s afraid of, and so the dominant doesn’t move, knowing that Dean needs to be held in place right now, that he needs to see that he can’t get away from himself.

“You don’t have to answer that right now,” Cas tells him calmly, as Dean blinks up with him with large, startled eyes. “But you do have to stop fighting me every time I try to help you, just because you don’t know how to handle it.”

Dean is tense beneath him for a moment, like a deer in the headlights, before he drops his eyes and lets his body wilt.

He nods, and Cas says “Good boy,” and Dean shies away from the words like they aren’t meant for him.

Contemplating the young man below him quietly, Cas wonders if he’s ever met anyone so resistant to what they desire.

It’s like he has to be completely broken down before he stops resisting it, like he has to be screaming and crying in fear and pain before he allows himself to accept any kindness.

That isn’t going to fly, with Cas. Dean is going to learn to accept kindness whether or not he thinks he deserves it. He’s going to learn to submit to the affection he clearly wants so badly, no matter how it scares him at first.

“Dean, I’m going to come under the covers with you, and I’m going to hold you. I am not going to hurt you, and I’m not going to touch you in any sexual way.”

Dean breathes in sharply, and shakes his head. Cas ignores him, and moves to pull down the covers.

The submissive kicks and squirms, but it isn’t anything like the true aggression of the morning, now more like a half-hearted protest he knows will fall on deaf ears.

It does, because Dean’s yearning to be held is like a neon sign above his head, and Cas knows it’s much more real than his reflexive, self-hating struggling. The man doesn’t know how to ask for what he wants, and doesn’t know how to accept it when it’s given, so Cas is going to have to make those decisions for him until he remembers how.

“Don’t try to hurt me, Dean,” he orders smoothly as he slides under the blankets, wrapping his arms around the bound submissive. He doesn’t tell Dean to stop fighting, though, wanting him to make that decision for himself.

It doesn’t take very long. Dean has already bent to Cas’s dominance a while ago, and the wriggling is just a performance of confusion. He’s still holding the gag in his mouth throughout it, and he allows himself to be manhandled so he’s tucked up against Cas’s chest with limited whining, apparently as reluctant to actually get away from the hug as he is to be brought into it.

Tugging him close, Cas shushes him, positioning himself so Dean is squished up against the back of the couch but also mostly on top of him. Arms strong and immovable where they hold Dean in place against his torso, it only takes a few seconds after the blanket’s been pulled back up before the man stops straining against him.

With a whimper, Dean goes limp in his grasp, cheeks pink with embarrassment and confusion.

He’s embarrassed because he likes what Cas is doing to him, Cas knows, and is confused because he doesn’t know why he isn’t being hurt. And he feels like he should be fighting back harder against what he wants so badly, but Cas isn’t letting him, and he’s rapidly losing the willpower to resist at all.

“Are you done?” Cas asks Dean without malice, who’s pink cheeks turn positively red. He turns to hide his face against Cas’s neck, under his chin, apparently too overwhelmed to allow himself to be seen. But after a moment without retribution, he nods hesitantly against Cas’s collarbone, and Cas releases his arm from around Dean’s back to come up and stroke the submissive’s hair.

“I know,” he says sympathetically. “Submission is very hard for you, isn’t it.”

Dean sniffles unhappily, but doesn’t try to get up again, staying obediently where he’s been put. Cas feels proud of him for that, and proud of how he’s held the gag in his mouth the whole time, subdued and quiet and dutiful.

He’s clearly calmer now, has been throughout this whole conversation, the experience of being made to hold something in his mouth in apology having been very effective in its purpose.

It had been good for him, Cas thinks, to have to submit without being compelled through orders, and he makes a mental note of how well Dean had responded for the future.

“You’ve done a very good job with this,” he tells Dean kindly, letting his fingers tap on the part of the rubber ball that’s visible. “I know it hasn’t been easy.”

It hasn’t been, and the submissive tears up at the praise, looking conflicted and uncertain and shy. Cas rubs his thumb along his pink lower lip, and Dean lets him, fascinated and frightened by how pleasant he seems to find it.

He can tell the submissive likes the way he can feel the vibrations on the inside of his mouth when the gag is touched too, so he taps the rubber again, watching in amusement as Dean shivers.

Oral fixation.

There might be another reason this punishment had been so effective.

Cas reminds himself to bring in his tootsie pops.

Dean clearly doesn’t know how to handle being made so transparent though, face absolutely aflame.

“Do you want it out?” he asks softly, letting his thumb move from Dean’s skin to the gag, scraping over them both very lightly.

Immediately, Dean makes a noise like a dry sob, and nods quickly, burning with humiliation now that attention has been drawn to it again.

It’s almost too much for him, being made to submit to the gag and Cas’s cuddling all at once. Cas can tell Dean is nearing his breaking point, unable to handle much more of himself without falling apart.

Still.

Still.

He’s clearly enjoying both of these things so much. And it’s so obviously done him good, to have to face that to some extent, eyes so much more alert and aware now.

Cas’s thumb presses against the gag, pushing it deeper into Dean’s mouth. Despite his protests, the man accepts it in without a noise of complaint, tongue softening and moving underneath the intrusion to accommodate it.

The man’s eyelashes flutter at the feeling, and that settles it for Cas.

“A few more minutes, I think,” he tells Dean, and the man whimpers, but doesn’t resist when Cas pushes down on the back of his neck to guide his head down.

Pressing the nape with just enough strength to feel unyielding without being painful, Dean only tries to push up against the hold once, mostly like he’s testing Cas’s boundaries. They don’t budge, though, and Dean relaxes after that, allowing himself to be held down with his forehead rested against Cas’s upper chest.

“Good boy,” Cas says again, and Dean audibly moans, and then cringes, and Cas pulls the blanket up and over their heads to cover them both.

He’s acting on a hunch, mostly, watching the way Dean seemingly just cannot stand to have his desires seen. In the sudden darkness under the duvet, Dean stiffens only briefly, before his body loosens, and his breathing starts to even out.

I was right, Cas thinks, scrunching down further on the couch so they’re both more firmly hidden.

Dean likes to hide. He feels safer when he feels like no one can see him.

And he’s less ashamed when he can’t see himself.

It’s sad, and irrational, but Cas allows the submissive to take comfort in the feeling anyway, waiting quietly as minutes pass and the man’s body loosens against his.

Still holding his neck, it becomes clear Dean has no thought anymore of fighting against it, so Cas starts pushing his thumbs into his nape, massaging the base of his skull.

Dean huffs quietly around the gag, breath hot against Cas’s shirt. Slowly becoming as limp as well cooked spaghetti, the submissive makes small, breathy noises of pleasure he doesn’t seem to be aware of at all.

Curling in so he can rest his own forehead on Dean’s skull with the man’s face still smushed against his own chest, he kisses the man’s hair, and then kisses it again when he hears a pretty, grateful sound at the gesture.

“Do you still want the gag to come out, sweetheart,” he whispers, after about four or five minutes have passed.

He feels Dean go still against him, and feels the bound hands between them curl into his shirt.

He can’t see the man in the darkness under the blanket, but he puts his own hand on the man’s cheek and waits.

Slowly, very slowly, Dean shakes his head yes. It’s much, much less certain than before.

But Cas abides by his request anyway, somewhat surprised that the submissive’s answer hasn’t changed. Fumbling without sight, he finds one of the straps hanging from Dean’s mouth and tugs on it gently, peeling the whole contraption from between the man’s teeth.

He seems a bit reluctant to let it go, but he does, and Cas reaches above himself on the couch to let it drop quietly onto the cushions outside the blanket.

Against his own torso, Dean feels warm and comfortable, pliant where he rests his cheek on Cas’s ribcage.

He’s moved himself down a little, shuffling lower as they cuddled, but Cas can’t say that he minds. It likely makes Dean feel secure, to be “lower” than his dominant on the couch, even though they’re pretty much totally horizontal at this point. But it may make Dean feel more under control anyway, and the fact that he’s seeking that feeling out is a very, very good thing. So he just touches Dean’s hair again, and listens to the man sigh, like he’s forgotten he’s supposed to be afraid.

“How’s your jaw?” he asks, voice low in the false dark. It feels like nighttime under here, even though it definitely isn’t.

Dean takes a long time to answer him, like he’s remembering how to speak.

“Fine,” he whispers back, and though Cas misses the honorific, he’s also relieved to hear Dean neither groveling or growling at him anymore. He just sounds…normal, now, like he’s much more present in his own mind, much more aware, neither terrified nor furiously self hating like when he’d spoken before.

It’s a good sign, that he’s something closer to stable and is still willing to accept Cas’s domination. At least while he’s under the blanket.

“And your head?” Cas adds, finding the man’s forehead and tapping it gently. “Feeling a bit clearer now?”

Another long pause, and Cas hears Dean sniffle. Like it’s dawning on him that it does.

“Yes,” he croaks. “Yes, I…yeah.”

He sniffles again, a little bit louder.

Cas feels himself ache for this young man who’s been lost to himself for so long.

“I’m glad,” he says earnestly. “I’m glad you feel better.”

The bound hands squished between Dean’s chest and Cas’s stomach curl up slightly within the fabric beneath them. There’s something both incredibly urgent and incredibly timid about the clutch, like the man is trying to hang onto a lifeline that he isn’t sure is really there.

It’s not exactly a shock when Dean suddenly moves lower, shuffling himself down until he’s knelt, still hidden, between Cas’s legs, and his head is level with the dominant’s crotch. It’s not a shock when he feels the man’s lips suddenly mouthing over the zipper of his jeans, earnest and overwhelmed and eager to please.

Dean had been half hard since he’d first had the gag shoved in his mouth forty minutes ago, after all, something Cas had been hyper aware of throughout most of this interaction. It’s not uncommon for his patients to react in such a way to domination, but it’s rare that he finds a submissive who reacts so strongly to such a light level of control.

It’s also rare that Cas finds himself this affected by it. Unprofessional as it is, he can’t deny that he finds Dean’s sensitivity incredibly appealing, that feeling how the man’s cock had stiffened as he’d been held down against Cas had stirred something inside of himself as well.

But he knows he can’t let their relationship go that direction this quickly. He has sex with his patients on occassion, when their needs manifest in that way, but he tries to avoid it in general, especially with submissives who have been sexually traumatized. He knows it’s far too easy for them to start believing that’s all he keeps them around for, so he tries to steer such interactions towards the platonic unless the submissive’s desires truly cannot be otherwise fulfilled.

Even then, he never initiates such sexual elements, and never gives in to them this early on.

“It’s alright, sweetheart,” he says, reaching down to push Dean’s face away gently. “I don’t need that from you right now.”

Dean’s breath hitches, and almost immediately, he sucks the fingers nudging him away into his mouth.

“Dean.”

“I can be good,” the submissive says in a very small voice, as soon as Cas has pulled the digits away. “I. I know I’m bad. But I won’t bite. I. I won’t…”

He starts to lower his head again, so Cas catches him by the chin, and pulls him back up to lay flat against him.

Dean doesn’t fight, but lets himself be led by the jaw, melting easily with his face tucked against Cas’s neck as Cas wraps his arms around the man again firmly.

He’s still half-hard where his penis is pressed into Cas’s thigh, but neither of them acknowledge it.

“I’m not saying no because I think you’re bad,” Cas assures him. “I’m saying no because I think you’re very confused right now, and because I don’t ever want you to think you have to offer me sex for not hurting you in the ways that you’re afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid,” Dean mumbles defensively, sounding sulky as he speaks into Cas’s collarbone. “Just wanna suck your dick. Don’t gotta make such a big deal about it.”

Cas feels his lips twitch in amusement.

There you are.

Nice to meet you, Dean. At last.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “But I do think it’s a big deal. Sex is a very intimate thing.”

Dean is snuggled close enough against him that Cas can literally feel his eyebrows pull into a scowl against his skin.

“Yeah, like I ain’t ever got a cock shoved in me before,” he mutters. “Fuckin’ intimate my ass.”

Then he stiffens against Cas, like he expects to be hurt for the coarse way he’s speaking. For acknowledging the reality that has been his life.

Cas rubs his back lightly, feeling the rough texture of the bandages concealed underneath the man’s shirt. It seems to be a pattern with Dean, that he prefers all signs of vulnerability to remain hidden, though the armor that keeps them out of sight is no thicker than a piece of fabric, or an easily distracted scowl.

The wall of aggressiveness that protects the man’s soft insides is made of mirrors. Just looking at it, you’d see the whole world stretching out before you, an infinity of reflective anger to fight through to get to whatever’s on the other side. But in reality, they’re as thin as a pane of glass, and shatter apart the moment they’re touched, the moment they’re seen for what they are.

“You’ve been mistreated,” Cas observes without accusation, stating a fact as plain as the man’s freckles. “It’s given you a terribly warped idea of what dominance is, and what expectations I will have of you as a submissive under my care. Sexual service is not something I will ever demand of you, Dean, nor will I harm you for speaking your mind.”

How much Dean really understands of what he’s told, Cas isn’t sure. He still can’t see the man’s face, under the covers, and though his patient seems much more alert and present now, he may still struggle to grasp what Cas is saying.

Being awake and alert doesn’t grant you access to communication in a foreign language, and that’s what kindness likely is to Dean at this point, whether spoken through his actions or his words.

“You didn’t even punish me,” the submissive says unsteadily, voice wavering dangerously in the dark, and Cas knows he was right.

It’s a baffled, frightened accusation, almost like that incomprehensible fact is more alarming to him than just having to suffer through a beating.

I’m sure it is, right now at least.

The unknown is always scary, and submissives in particular like stability and consistency, which Dean seems to have been given very little of thus far. Cruelty seems to have been the only real steady constant in his routine, which Cas is now disrupting, and he can’t blame the man for lashing out against it, horror show as his life has been.

With time, Cas hopes to establish gentleness as his new standard, but that has to start right now if he doesn’t want Dean to keep spiraling into panic.

“Of course I did,” he assures him firmly, since he knows assurance is what Dean is really looking for. “You held the gag in your mouth for more than half an hour. I’m very proud of you, and now all is forgiven.”

“It didn’t even hurt!” Dean cries in reply, and he thumps his bound hands on Cas’s chest in distress.

There’s no force behind it, but he’s clearly getting agitated again. It’s obviously another mild attempt at pushing Cas’s boundaries in an attempt to find them, and it breaks Cas’s heart, because he already has found them, but doesn’t know how to recognize anything but overwhelming brutality as a consequence for stepping over the line.

Cas isn’t going to be taunted into beating him, though, despite the tantruming. But he realizes he’s going to have to respond very quickly and consistently to such shows of defiance, lest Dean spiral out of control again in an attempt to find some kind of structure.

“No, but it was very difficult for you nonetheless, was it not?” he asks bluntly, catching the man’s wrists and pinning them down to his chest so he can’t raise them up to hit him again.

It’s not supposed to be a real punishment, just the display of dominance that the man is looking for, the reminder that Cas is not going to allow him to lash out with physical violence. But Dean reacts in panic, reeling back as far as his arms will extend, lifting the blanket up with him as he goes.

It makes a half-formed tent where it’s draped over his body, letting the light in underneath it where it doesn’t reach down to the couch. Dean cringes at the brightness, then mutters a curse as he seems to realize he can’t get the cover off himself without the use of his arms, so Cas reaches up with the hand not clutching the man’s wrists to pull the sheet off him in one quick motion.

Revealed to the room they’d both been hidden from again, Dean blinks down at him as if he is startled to find that they both still exist.

Object permanence, Dean, Cas thinks dryly, and Dean scowls at him like he can hear his thoughts.

“Don’t matter,” he mutters, in response to Cas’s question. “That ain’t a punishment.”

Despite his obstinance, he already seems calmer, and doesn't try to yank his hands away from Cas’s grip again.

Good boy, Cas thinks, and sits up after him, still trapping Dean’s hands against his chest.

The man leans back as Cas comes up, lowering himself from where he’d been raised on his knees to sit back on his heels so he isn’t taller than the dominant.

He doesn’t seem to notice he’s doing it, but Cas does, and makes careful note in his mind.

“It is in my books,” Cas explains without anger.

“Then your book is dumb as shit,” Dean snaps back, and then flinches violently again.

He seems to expect to be hit almost every time he speaks, yet intentionally tries to provoke Cas each time he opens his mouth.

“I’ve found my book to be quite effective, actually, in achieving my goals,” he continues patiently. “Which is not to brutalize submissives into some idealized picture of compliance, but to see my patients made happy and healthy by my hand.”

Dean stares at him without comprehension.

“I’ll just keep being bad if you don’t beat me.”

Smiling at the submissive softly, Cas lets go of his hands. The man looks surprised, but draws them back to himself uncertainly and lays them without aggression back down in his lap.

“You’re not being bad right now,” Cas tells him, and Dean's expression becomes even more bemused.

“Sure I am,” he argues, too mystified to remember to sound hostile. “Backtalkin’ left’n right….not my fault you’re too dumb to realize it.”

His voice turns sullen at the end, and Cas lets out a breathless laugh, which has Dean flinching a little at the unexpected sound.

Peering at Cas in bewilderment, he draws his knees up to his chest and rests his hands on them, nervous like he’s looking at some strange animal he’s not sure is safe to approach.

Cas smiles at him, trying to project an air of stability. “I like your ‘balktalk,’ Dean,” he assures the man, using air quotes. “I don’t consider that ‘being bad,’ and it isn’t something I’m going to try to train out of you.”

Dean glares suspiciously.

“What are you gonna try to train outta me, then?” he demands, and Cas holds his hands out in his own lap as if to show he has nothing in them.

“Nothing really,” he promises, “Except your tendency towards self-harm, as I said.”

Not saying anything, Dean looks towards the door like he’s thinking about bolting. But it’s locked, so Cas doesn’t worry.

“I don’t think people can be trained like animals,” Cas goes on while Dean’s still listening. “And I’m not here to try to break you into being some slave.”

Scoffing, Dean’s mouth twists into a bitter line, the direct opposite of the pliant circle it had made so comfortably around the gag.

“Don’t know if you got the memo, but I already am one, buddy,” he says resentfully, body all unhappy angles and tense muscles. “Have been for a fuckin’ long time.”

The depression is obvious in his body language as he speaks, and Cas sees his eyes drift to the window he’d stared so desperately out of a few days before. It’s clear he doesn’t expect to see the other side of it ever again, and Cas feels his gut twist as he remembers the way the man had sat terrified and disoriented in the elevator, stating over and over that he wants to go outside.

For the first time, it occurs to Cas that Dean may not have been allowed outside for a much longer time than the time he’s spent at the center.

What had Jo said? That she’d seen him around a handful of times in the first months after he’d been claimed, and not since?

It’s been nearly seven years since Dean was sold to that man. Has it been nearly seven years since he’s been outdoors too?

“So forgive me for not buying what you’re selling,” the submissive continues, tearing his eyes away from the sky. “‘Cause the way I see it, unless you’re gonna put your money where you’re mouth is and let me go, your just another fucker who’s tryin’ to mess with my head.”

Guild slams into his heart like atoms in a supercollider, both shattering apart at the speed of light. He has a hard time remembering for a moment what his excuse is, for treating Dean this way, and it’s like a hand has gripped his soul like a vice as his own morals get squeezed out of him.

Speechless, he gropes around in the darkness of his own brain, stumbling into memory upon memory of his fucked up childhood but finding none of the explanations he’s looking for. Like Dean’s glare is an accusation pointing a finger back to his own youth, he thinks with shame of Claire’s eyes seething at him in the center, of his own brother’s staring resentfully back at him as he parroted whatever lie he’d been fed by his father.

He’d always been told that submissives were too weak to make their own decisions, and that dominating them by force was acceptable when it was for their own good. With a sudden surge of panic, Cas wonders if all his efforts to push away from who he was growing up have been for nothing, and if he’s become a mirror to everything he claims to stand against.

“It’s- it’s not that simple,” Cas stutters uselessly, a claim he’d been so sure of a few minutes ago when he’d been holding Dean down, but the evidence for which has seemed to have fled under the man’s misery. “We…it’s not…I don’t want to be doing this.”

It contradicts the transparent enjoyment he’d felt while dominating Dean, the man raises his eyebrows at him, obviously thinking the same thing. Cas winces, self-doubt hitting him as he struggles to put it aside.

That’s not what I meant, he reminds himself, dragging himself away from the spiral of shame threatening him.

Yes, he’d enjoyed the experience of dominating a submissive, but that isn’t a crime, as much of a guilt complex he has about his desires. The only crime is enjoying the fact that Dean can’t decide to give him his submission, and that’s a fact he truly gets no pleasure from.

“I don’t want to be keeping you here,” he clarifies after a moment, shoving the words out of his chest. “Or…be dominating you when you get no say in it.”

Shaking his head, he bears the brunt of Dean’s disbelief in silence, trying not to let it cave in his own certainty that he’s doing the right thing.

His own certainty about anything related to domination is dangerously unsteady, after all, and he knows he has every reason to second guess himself.

He’s unused to being confronted this directly about it by his patients, though, hasn’t had to deal with such explicit demands to be let go since Claire. It throws him off, sends him reeling into insecurity and guilt, forcing him to confront the aspects of his own job that he’s never felt comfortable with.

He doesn’t know how to hold on to the idea that he has the right to override Dean’s autonomy for his own good when the man himself is telling him that he doesn’t. He doesn’t know how to stop feeling like he’s following in the footsteps of his father when he has to articulate that he thinks he can force his domination where it isn’t wanted because it’s in Dean’s best interest.

It is different. Dean is literally dying. He’s actually unstable to the point that he can’t make decisions for himself, rather than just existing as a submissive living in a way father doesn’t like.

I’m not trying to override his autonomy, I’m trying to give it back to him. I’m trying to strengthen his own control of his submission to the point that he doesn’t have to give it to anyone he doesn’t want to.

Shutting his eyes, Cas tries to center himself, more shaken by his own issues catching up to him than he knows he should ever let himself be in front of a patient. After all, he knows very well that being too timid and uncertain in his own domination is just as dangerous for the submissives in his care as being too aggressive and overconfident.

It’s a fine line, a tightrope he’s constantly on the verge of falling off of, and not for the first time Cas wishes he’d just been born undesignated so he wouldn’t have to deal with all this.

But then…if he were undesignated, he wouldn’t have the power to help people like Dean either.

Opening his eyes again, he looks over to the submissive, who’s staring back at him with some mix of alarm and concern on his face.

“Uh…” he falters. “Are you ok?”

There’s something startlingly…real, about how he asks it, not just in that it seems genuine but that there’s some strange clarity to it that hadn’t been there before. Free from aggression, free from fear and panic, it sounds like something that had been pulled from underwater, heard and seen clearly in the air for the first time.

Cas looks at Dean in surprise, getting the distinct impression that this is the man’s real voice, said with a body and expression that display his real mannerisms, as they would exist in the regular world. It’s like he’s forgotten who he’s speaking to, and where he is, and what situation he’s in, like his empathy had snapped him back to being whoever he’d been before he’d gotten sick.

It touches Cas more than he’s prepared for, and he smiles shakily at Dean, embarrassed at how easily he’d been pushed off balance. It’s not like Dean hadn’t made it clear already that he doesn’t want him here, but hearing it stated with such lucidity had brought back guilt-laden memories he’s never fully dealt with.

“Yes,” he promises Dean, “Yes, I’m fine, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

Be so strange.

“Seem so unsettled.”

Dean just keeps frowning at him, defensive position forgotten, bent legs lowered to the side, tied wrists left relaxed on top of them, looking almost heart wrenchingly normal if not for the bruises that still decorate his face.

“I, um…” Cas continues, shaking his head to clear it. “I know it may be hard to believe, Dean, but I actually care about your well being very much. And I do truly find the situation you are stuck in horrifying, and it upsets me to not be able to help you more.”

The man seems taken aback by hearing his own predicament described so bluntly, and he twitches nervously like he thinks Cas might be crazy, careful distrust descending over his face again.

“Sure, man. Sir. Uh…”

Dean draws back in on himself, and Cas sighs, rubbing his own temples again.

The stress headache is coming back. Actually, he thinks it might have been there the whole time, but Cas had been too distracted to think about it.

God, I’ve done this day all backwards. We should have had this conversation first thing.

It’s what he’d planned on, but instead he’d been drawn by Dean’s drama into launching directly into the most intense version of a scene. He’s never punished a submissive he’s had literally no relationship with before, but no submissive had literally woken up lucid and immediately strangled him to unconsciousness before he’d even gotten a chance to re-introduce himself.

But no wonder Dean is scared shitless of him, when he hasn’t even explained who he is, and what he will expect from the submissive.

“We should probably talk,” he tells the man, who looks disproportionately anxious about this development.

But there’s no way they’re going to be able to move forward if Cas can’t clarify to Dean where they both stand. So he smiles at the man, and just adds, “And eat, too. It’s been a long day for both of us.”

Chapter Text

Dean stares at him like he’s done a magic trick when he returns to their table with a tray of food, like he didn’t believe Cas was actually going to come back with some, or come back to him at all.

“I just got some of everything,” Cas tells him, as the man blinks up at him from where he’s squeezed into the corner of the booth. “They’re not serving their full menu because it’s Sunday, but they still had the salad bad and some pre-wrapped sandwiches and soups.”

After a moment of indecision, he slides into the booth across the table from Dean rather than into the one beside him, deciding to give him some space right now. He seems a bit shell shocked, and Cas doesn’t want to stress him out further.

Not that they’re in a particularly stressful environment; Cas had chosen this cafeteria for a reason, expecting it to be essentially deserted this late on a Sunday, and he was right. Sitting in the corner booth of the smallest dining room, the area is completely empty aside from the two of them, the muffled noises of someone doing the dishes somewhere around a few corners the only sign of human activity.

Still, Dean seems about as relaxed as a rabbit in a lion cage, and Cas frowns as he places the tray in between them and the man doesn’t even look at the food.

He must be hungry, Cas thinks warily, knowing the man hasn’t eaten all day. But Dean’s attention doesn’t even flicker towards the meal between them, staying locked somewhere past Cas’s shoulder.

Cas’s gut sinks as he turns to follow Dean’s gaze and is met with the sight of an elderly janitor sweeping up a few pieces of trash.

Looking back at Dean’s taut form, he starts to wonder if this was a bad idea.

He’d wanted to have this conversation in a neutral space, somewhere Dean could feel a little closer to being on equal footing. And he’d figured bringing him somewhere new could show Dean he doesn’t plan on keeping him trapped like some sort of experiment, even when he misbehaves.

Now, though, he’s wondering again how long exactly it has been since Dean was allowed in public in any way. He doesn’t even seem terrified as much as he just seems completely overwhelmed, like he’d forgotten reality outside of the rooms he’s been kept in existed.

Smiling at the young man awkwardly, Cas pushes the tray forward, and watches the submissive jump. His gaze snaps away from the apparently suspicious janitor and back to the food, a disoriented expression on his face.

“What?” he asks, alarmed. “Sorry, what?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Cas reassures him, and Dean’s shoulders tense.

It’s strange to see him as he is, looking almost like he belongs, yet obviously out of place at the same time. Dressed in pajamas but now swamped in a dark hoodie on top of it, he could almost be nothing more than a hungover college student in the dining hall the morning after a late night. Even the bruises on his face could be imagined away into sleep-deprived shadows, if not for the haunted way his eyes peer out from under the hood of the sweatshirt he’s hiding in.

That, and the way his hands are still strung together in front of him, and how the now-metal collar around his neck is connected by a thin chain to a pole underneath the table.

“I just wanted to know if you have a preference on what to eat,” he elaborates when Dean just stares at him, gesturing at the loaded tray between them.

Dean takes in the food blankly, like he doesn’t even recognize that it’s something he should want.

He doesn’t reply to Cas’s query, just sinks down further into his hoodie, pulling his knees up to his chest like he’s trying to hide away. After a few seconds pass without a reaction, Cas takes pity on him, and chooses for him.

“Why don’t you have the peanut butter and jelly?” he prompts the man, picking up the seran wrapped sandwich and placing it in front of Dean on the table.

It’s not the healthiest option that he has, but it should be the easiest to eat with wrists that can’t separate farther than about a foot.

Dean picks the sandwich up slowly and turns it over in his hands in fascination, like he’s studying it, like he’s never seen a cafeteria sandwich before in his life.

“You’re not allergic, are you?” Cas asks. “To peanuts?”

“Naw,” Dean mumbles. “But Sammy is.”

He’s speaking like he’s not really aware of what’s coming out of his mouth, so Cas hesitates when he remembers Jo had told him Sam is Dean’s brother. Unsure if this is an invitation to ask about the sibling or if asking will cause Dean to shut down, Cas contemplates the man uncertainly. Eventually, time makes the decision for him after too much of it has passed by, and Cas moves on, tucking the question away for a later date.

“Do you need help unwrapping that?” he asks instead, because Dean still hasn’t moved to actually peel the plastic away from the sandwich and it’s making Cas wonder if he’s forgotten how.

The submissive shakes his head, though, and looks up tentatively like he’s confused.

“This is for me?” he clarifies, and Cas feels his heart wilt at the words.

“Of course, Dean,” he confirms. “You haven’t eaten all day.”

Dean just frowns at him, uncomprehending, then frowns down at the sandwich, like it is some foreign curiosity he isn’t sure how to make sense of.

“Don’t think I’m allowed,” he murmurs, threadily. “Don’t get food here. They put a tube in my nose, I think.”

Cas stills.

“Oh.”

He hadn’t known that. His stomach churns at the inhumanity of it, wondering what possible justification Naomi could have for such a policy.

I’m lucky he didn’t throw up the fast food the other day, he thinks, eyeing the PB&J uncertainly.

Maybe it would be a better idea to insist he eat something lighter, like the soup or salad.

But Dean doesn’t strike him as one to go for kale or lentil soup, so he lets it be, figuring that if the man had managed to keep down greasy McDonalds, a meal of mostly white bread can’t do much harm.

“Well. You’re allowed to eat real food with me,” Cas tells the man resolutely.

Dean slouches further in his seat, picking nervously at the edge of the wrapper without actually committing to pulling it away.

“K,” he says generically, and doesn’t say anything else.

“Eat, Dean,” Cas eventually commands, when it becomes clear that the man won’t on his own.

He gets pinned with a betrayed look for his efforts, though Dean does let the sandwich plop back down on the table between them in order to start peeling at the saran wrap.

“You’re gonna get me in trouble,” he complains half-heartedly, unhappy but clearly resigned to his fate. The chain drooping between his wrists clinks together as it moves, like a little bell chiming the sound of Cas’s guilt.

“I’m not,” he promises. “You have no one to answer to but me anymore.”

Dean shrugs, clearly not ready to believe him.

Cas can’t blame him. He’s been here for months and months, and Cas had only arrived a few days ago. He barely even knows who Cas is, barely even knows who anyone is, having existed in a haze of SRS symptoms possibly much longer than he’s been admitted to the center for.

Who knows how much he even understands of his own situation? Or what he remembers, after all this time?

Sighing, Cas considers the man across from him, who looks now about as threatening as a mouse.

“I feel like we should start from the beginning,” he prompts gently. “We’ve…sort of gotten off on the wrong foot, I think.”

Dean doesn’t answer him, or look up from his task, just finishes peeling back the plastic so the sandwich sits on the wrinkled mess like it’s a plate.

Cas continues on, unfettered by his silence.

“Like I said earlier, my name is Castiel,” he tells the man. “You can call me Cas if you’d like, or Sir, if that’s what you feel more comfortable with. Titles are not a requirement, with me, and you’ll never be punished for not using them.”

Dean nods blandly in acknowledgement, but doesn’t pick up his food. Instead, his eyes drift anxiously back over to the janitor, who’s paying neither of them any mind.

He’s obviously nervous about eating in front of anybody, or existing in front of anybody, really. Cas considers redirecting his attention back to the food, but decides against it, knowing his order will catch up to the young man sometime in the next minute or so.

Having been properly dominated again can only do so much for his strength, when he’s still yet to have gone into subspace.

“Dean, do you know where you are right now?” he asks gently. “Or who I am, besides my name?”

There’s a delay of a few seconds between when he asks the question and when Dean answers, almost like it takes him a moment to register that he’s being spoken to.

When he does, he drops his eyes back to the table nervously, fiddling with the edge of his sleeve.

“Yeah, but I don’t remember coming here,” he admits. “There’s a lot I don’t remember, I think.”

Cas folds his hands on the table and leans forward, equal parts concerned and intrigued.

“What’s the last thing you do remember?” he asks the man, who shrugs, and looks with tired eyes out the window they’re sitting besides.

“Dunno,” he mutters. “Alastair, I guess, but I dunno how far back that was. He kept me in the basement. Was hard to keep track of time.”

Dean speaks casually, offhand, like there’s nothing particularly unusual about this information. Cas’s gut sinks as it occurs to him that for Dean, there might not be.

“He kept you in the basement,” he repeats dumbly, and Dean nods.

“Yeah. Was too much of a slut to let upstairs.”

Cas doesn’t have the slightest idea what that’s supposed to mean, and doesn’t want to find out, at least not right now. Swallowing, he looks towards the tray of food and tries not to show how affected he is by what Dean is saying, picking up the lentil soup and opening it so he has something to do with his hands.

It’s not like he hasn’t had patients that have suffered this level of captivity and abuse. But the nonchalant way Dean speaks about this treatment is chilling, like he thinks it is somehow normal, or deserved.

“Well,” he says unsteadily. “You’ve been here five months, if that helps you place your memories on a timeline.”

Dean doesn’t react to this beyond shaking his head a little.

“Don’t even know how old I am,” he murmurs, and finally turns back to the sandwich to pick it up.

He takes a bite, chewing it and swallowing it rotely, like he gets no enjoyment from the act. It prompts Cas to remember that he has his own meal in his hands, and he takes a small bite of the lukewarm soup.

“You’re twenty-four,” he tells the submissive quietly, watching carefully for his reaction.

It’s not very dramatic. He just pauses, and his face twitches, and he glances outside once again.

“Oh,” he says flatly, and takes another bite of his sandwich. “Lost track around twenty-one.”

Hunched inside his sweatshirt, he looks tiny, dark hood framing his pale face in a way that only emphasizes how gray and thin he is. With all the energy and fight drained out of him, it’s suddenly clear how close he is to death’s door. Cas has to fight off the feeling that he’s done something horrible by bringing the man back to himself, unnerved by the idea that his rabid defiance had been the only thing tethering him to life.

Now, he just looks defeated, exhausted beyond belief. As Cas watches, he curls into himself even more, looking as lost as a ghost.

“You’ve been sick for a very long time,” Cas offers.

“Yeah,” the submissive agrees absently. “Not much longer, I hope.”

It’s a sentiment that Cas agrees with, of course, but something about the way Dean says it sets off his alarm bells. It’s said without any enthusiasm, like he’s just resigned to it, and Cas feels concern twist inside of him.

“What do you mean?”

Dean shrugs.

“I’m dying, right?” he asks casually, like he doesn’t care much about the answer. “Figure that’s why they stopped beating on me, and why you’re being all nice and shit. They gave up on fixing me, I guess.”

Cas’s plastic spoon pauses in the air, halfway between his food and his mouth. Dean looks at his own food with a lackluster expression.

“I’m really not supposed to be eating this,” he says unenthusiastically. But when Cas doesn’t answer, he just sighs and takes another unhappy bite.

It takes Cas a moment to remember how to speak, so thrown by Dean’s assumptions that he doesn’t know how to deny them.

Because it’s not- well. It’s not like Dean isn’t dying. He…definitely is, at least right now. It wouldn’t be fair to lie to him about it, especially when the man clearly already knows it, and probably can feel it in his bones.

But the cynicism with which Dean must be filled to assume the only reason someone is being kind to him is because they have already given up…

What kind of assumptions must one have about what submission is, to believe that being…held, being fed, is evidence that Cas has already abandoned him?

“No,” Cas says at last, finally remembering to put down his spoon. He isn’t feeling hungry anymore. “No, Dean, that’s not right at all. I was hired to help you get better.”

Dean glances at him with sunken eyes before his gaze slides back down to the saran wrap on the table.

“Look, you don’t have to lie,” the submissive says flatly. “I know what I got. Always knew I was gonna get it eventually.”

Frowning, he chews and swallows another small bite of mostly bread, before he puts the sandwich down on the plastic and sits back in his seat.

His legs slide down from where they’d been up against his chest, but it seems less like a conscious decision and more like they’d just collapsed down. He doesn’t seem to have any strength left in him to do anything, and even contemplating lifting his food again seems to be to him a herculean task.

It only proves how badly he needs his strength, so Cas doesn’t release the submissive from the command to eat. But he doesn’t reiterate it either, knowing the man will be prompted by his own need eventually. It’s enough for now that he’s been pulled back from the edge enough that he can take a break at his own pace, rather than compulsively following Cas’s order through to the end.

“Do you know what you’re suffering from?” Cas asks him gently, and Dean shrugs, staring out the window.

“Kinda,” he admits. “I’m sure there’s some fancy name for it. But my mom got it too. That’s how she died.”

“It’s not genetic.”

“Nah, but it sure runs in the family.”

It’s a joke, but it falls flat, even with the ironic smirk Dean tacks onto it. That only makes it worse to hear, because the smile is so pathetic that it hurts to see.

Dean seems to realize this after a moment, and he drops it, head turning a little to gaze out the window with something between apathy and longing.

“I know what it is. It’s that shit that happens to subs when they’re ba…when they’re broken.”

He was going to say bad.

Cas doesn’t know why broken would be any better.

“When we don’t- don’t fuckin’ listen and. Don’t ‘submit’ or whatever. We go nuts and keel over like fucking lemmings.”

Dean purses his lips.

“Fuckin’ pathetic,” he murmurs, seemingly mostly to himself.

Cas hears it anyway, and his heart clenches.

“Dean, it’s not pathetic,” he whispers, wishing he’d sat besides the submissive so he could squeeze his hand. “It’s a medical issue, and it’s not your fault.”

“Sure,” Dean mutters, and beyond that, doesn’t reply.

He just keeps staring out the window, eyes impossibly tired, the silvery light of the overcast day spilling over him like gossamer spiderwebs. He blinks quietly, at the trees fluttering slightly in the wind, at the cars moving like toys down the highway. Cas watches his tired eyes drink it all in hungrily like the man’s pretty face is the view.

“I mean it, Dean,” he insists softly. “I’m a professional, I know what I’m talking about.”

Dean lets out a breath, and picks up his sandwich again. He takes a bite, and puts it back down.

Without another word, Cas grabs his bag from under the table, and slides out of the booth to slide in on the other side.

Dean flinches when he does, then pretends that he hadn’t, ducking his head but angling it towards Cas, window forgotten in favor of the new threat.

Cas doesn’t take it personally, though his heart clenches at the way the submissive stiffens besides him, thinking of how much overwhelming stress the man must be in every minute of every day.

Even before he’d bend abandoned at the center. Even before he’d been sold into a claim.

It’s clear that he’s terrified of dominants, of all dominants no matter who they are, and no wonder, with the illness he has.

Complete submissive rejection syndrome is rare enough that it’s hard to make comparisons because there are so few recognized cases, but in the patients he’s worked with, compulsive obedience has usually set in at least two years before the true downwards spiral begins. Dean is such an unusual case though that he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been suffering such a symptom since early adolescence, each phase of the illness seeming to have been extended in him far longer than is average for it’s progression.

How many dominants have taken advantage of his inability to resist their demands? How long has he been living in a world of predators he has no defense against, lying in wait around every corner?

Cas moves with intentional restraint as he puts his bag in his lap and pulls a folder out of it, not wanting to alarm the young man besides him more than he already has.

“There are two kinds. One is called simple submissive rejection syndrome. The other, much rarer version, is called complete submission rejection syndrome, or C-SRS.”

He flips open the file and pulls out a paper, pushing the seran plastic aside to put the document in front of Dean.

“This much rarer version is what you have,” he explains, pointing to the nonexistent diophendramine levels on his hormone chart. “See this line? This indicates your body’s production of diophendramine, which is one of the two main submission hormones. Even in advanced stages of simple SRS, there should be some limited amount of diophendramine being produced. But there isn’t. Do you know why?”

Dean, who’s still leaned back in his seat, rolls his eyes.

“Obviously not,” he mutters, without sitting forward, refusing to show interest in what Cas is showing him.

Cas pushes on anyway, undeterred, lifting the chart and holding it up to the submissive’s face so Dean has to look at what he’s pointing at.

“Man,” Dean whines, but he does look, at both the flat line on the hormone chart and then where Cas’s finger drags over to next.

His own handwriting, having scribbled above the alarming numbers: Never gone into subspace.

“I can’t fucking read that,” Dean snaps, and he does sit up then, pushing Cas’s hand away with more aggression than he’s shown this entire time.

“Oh,” Cas says, pulling his paper back, ashamed of himself.

Jo had already told him Dean never attended school.

He shouldn’t have assumed anyone had ever bothered to teach Dean to read.

“I’m sorry.”

“Whatever,” Dean grumbles. His cheeks are pink, but he seems less offended than Cas would be.

He’s probably used to it. Used to being caught in situations like that.

Cas only feels worse for Dean’s lack of anger, like he’s picking on someone who’s been so consistently discarded that he doesn’t even know anymore how to recognize when he should be mad.

It just goes to show that every outburst he’s had so far really has been reflexive, because the submissive seems to accept genuine instances of mistreatment as a matter of course, like he doesn’t even see that there’s anything wrong with them.

“No, I shouldn’t have assumed,” Cas apologizes, completely genuine, “All it is is a note I wrote a few days ago about why your diophendramine levels are nonexistent. Dean, the only way that could even be possible is if you’d never gone into subspace at all.”

It’s quite the dramatic statement, even if the submissive doesn’t react like it is. Dean doesn’t seem to be surprised by this information, and just looks at Cas, unimpressed.

“Yeah, never have, never will,” he says flatly, sounding once again unnervingly resigned. “Mom never did that shit neither.”

Cas raises his eyebrows, thrown off by the dismissive way Dean refers to something that for many is so sacred. He seems almost…derisive at the idea, as if being unable to achieve this state is some kind of badge of pride.

“She must have, at least a few times,” Cas informs him, a little critically. “I don’t think you understand how exceedingly unusual your circumstances are, Dean. C-SRS makes up less than one tenth of a percent of overall SRS cases, and the chances of a submissive surviving to your age without ever achieving subspace…they’re astronomical.”

Dean scowls.

“Well whoop-de-doo for me,” he says unhappily. “Whatever. I’ll be outta your hair in a few weeks, I guess.”

He speaks so flippantly that it almost feels rude, and for a moment Cas feels the attitude push against his own latent instincts, calling for some minor display of dominance to reassert his authority. It’s only his professionalism that keeps him from giving Dean a Look before he even makes sense of what he’s talking about, something he’s deeply grateful for a moment later when he untangles the words from Dean’s cavalier tone of voice.

Cas feels his stomach drop, both at the implication and the easy way Dean speaks of his own death. He turns his whole body towards the young man, disturbed and concerned in equal amounts, wondering at how deep someone’s defensive instincts have to go to be so sarcastic about their own demise.

Straight down to the heart, Cas guesses sadly, looking at the man sitting besides him.

Body all scrunched up and crinkled like the discarded plastic wrapper on the table, Cas considers him mournfully as he flinches under the dominant’s gaze, picking nervously at the seran wrap all the while.

“Dean, I am not here to wait for you to die,” Cas tells him earnestly, “I am one of the world’s top experts in C-SRS, and I was brought in to treat you, not as some kind of hospice care.”

Dean frowns like it isn’t what he wants to hear.

Cas keeps going anyway.

“You are no longer being harmed the way you were because that kind of abusive treatment is totally ineffective. My methodology doesn’t rely any sort of violence or corporal punishment, and I have found it to be much more successful in enabling patient recovery.”

Rolling his eyes, Dean stretches a bit of the seran wrap he’s picking at between his pointer and thumb, the latter of which eventually punctures a hole through the material.

“So, what, you’re some kind of hippie?” he asks critically.

“I’m a scientist,” is what Cas replies, though he knows there are plenty who would agree with Dean’s assessment. “My practice is based on what works, not my personal opinions on what should.”

Dean scoffs.

“Sure.”

He doesn’t look happy with Cas’s assurances, and Cas can only imagine it’s because he doesn’t believe them. That, or he doesn’t believe they can help him, though between his apathy and his sarcasm over the subject Cas is more inclined to think it’s the former.

Still, he pushes forward, prompting, “You don’t think I’m telling the truth?”

The submissive stiffens before him, and Cas remembers what a delicate creature he is handling.

Going still, the man visibly swallows, like he’s anxious.

“I believe you’re telling the truth,” he says carefully, not looking Cas’s way. “I just don’t believe you know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Yet another challenge. Dean clearly expects some kind of rage in response, has tensed his muscles and curled in his shoulders like he’s bracing himself for inevitable blows.

Cas doesn’t rise to the occasion, not the slightest bit offended by Dean’s skepticism. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before, after all.

“And yet,” he says calmly. “My methods seem to be working quite well already, don’t they?”

It’s a rhetorical question, because it should be plain to absolutely anybody that Dean is responding better to him than anyone could have reasonably hoped. Yet the submissive only looks at Cas like he has no idea what he’s talking about, and a little bit like he thinks that Cas is insane.

He opens his mouth as if to argue, but seems to hesitate, suddenly looking uncertain, like he’s somewhat ashamed of himself.

Dropping his eyes, he worms thumb through the little hole he’s made in the plastic, widening it like it’s the gap in his own understanding.

“All I been doin’ is backtalkin’ you,” he mutters, voice wavering again like it can’t decide if it wants to sound aggressive or shy. “And you ain’t doin’ nothin’ about it…”

He trails off like he wants Cas to fill in the blanks, but Cas doesn’t, and after a moment, he picks his words up again, uncomfortable enough to fill in the blanks himself.

“That ain’t domination,” he decides eventually, still looking down. “You’re not even…trying to make me do what you want.”

What exactly do you think that I want from you, Dean? Cas thinks sadly, considering the young man fading like a tragedy before him.

The ideas that come to mind aren’t pretty, when he thinks of what he knows of Dean’s childhood, what he knows of Dean’s last dominant. The offhand comments he’s made already paint a brutally disturbing picture, and Cas thinks it’s no wonder the submissive has no idea what a healthy relationship might look like.

“Making you do what I want isn’t my goal, Dean,” he corrects gently. “My goal is to help you recover.”

Dean snorts, but even his dismissiveness is halfhearted, drained of whatever life it once may have had outside of the center’s walls.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” he mutters obstinately. “I ain’t that kinda gal, Romeo.”

He seems to enjoy talking in turns of phrase that leave Cas staring after them blankly, and this new response is no exception to this recently discovered rule. Even so, it’s obvious the words are supposed to be some kind of comeback, and it’s depressing to see them delivered with such lackluster energy.

Without the slightest idea what this is supposed to mean, though, Cas can only frown at the submissive, who looks irritated when he realizes Cas is lost.

“Jesus, who are you, Data?” Dean complains under his breath, another colloquialism Cas can’t make heads or tails of. “It means I ain’t gonna bend over and be your fuckin’ whore just because you paid for dinner on the first date. Not literally, holy fuck,” he adds when he sees Cas opening his mouth to argue.

He runs a hand down his face, frustrated, and Cas watches in fascination as the man seems to genuinely struggle to find a way to say what he means without hiding it behind some kind of sarcasm or pop-culture reference.

It’s like he honestly doesn’t know how to speak normally, or at least, like he honestly doesn’t know how to speak normally about something that makes him feel vulnerable.

His jaw works, and his words come out very deliberate and slow, like they’re physical objects he’s struggling to place in front of himself in a sequence that will translate to Cas’s literal brain.

“I mean,” he says carefully, purposefully. “You ain’t gonna…convince me. To listen to you. Just ‘cause you. You’re. ‘Cause you’re nice to me.”

He purses his lips then, and gives Cas an intense look of suspicion, like he actually sees kindness as a serious threat.

What on earth? Cas thinks, baffled, as Dean picks up the last bit of his sandwich pointedly and raises it like he’s Socrates holding a goblet of hemlock.

“This don’t mean shit to me,” he grunts, and then shoves the rest of the PB and J in his mouth without breaking eye contact with Cas.

Cas watches, baffled, as he chews and swallows the last bite as if it’s a suicide pill, and then points aggressively to the document Cas is still absently holding in his hand.

“And this means even less,” the submissive adds once his mouth isn’t full of food anymore.

He pokes the chart still facing towards him as if to make a point, and the paper makes a sharp little wobbling noise that sounds anticlimactically silly against the muffled silence of the empty room.

“Ok?” Cas says, still unclear on what point Dean is trying to make or why he seems so determined to make it now all of a sudden.

A little more insight comes when he again gestures accusingly at the paper, like the graph on it displays some sort of challenge.

“Earlier was a fluke,” he says very quietly. “I don’t. I don’t do that kind of shit. Not for anyone.”

Then he drops his eyes again, looking something between ashamed and afraid, and any slight comedy Cas had sensed in the situation quickly evaporates.

“Submitting?” Cas asks nonjudgmentally, though it’s abundantly clear that that’s what the man had been referring to, dancing around the word like it is dirty somehow, or would hurt his mouth to force it out.

It really might have, if the submissive had tried. The term seems to have spikes on it that only Dean can sense, and he flinches like they are cutting into him after Cas speaks, truth stabbing deep like thorns.

“No,” Dean snaps aggressively, and then he turns red, scowling at his lap like it has wronged him.

“Yes,” he concedes half a second later. He winds himself up like an angry little ball of string.

He twists himself entirely, hunching his knees up to his chest and scooting around, so his back is against the window and his socked feet are on the fake plastic leather of the booth. It bends under the man’s heels, red and limp and cracked all over just like the submissive who sits upon it.

Cas watches him with some confusion, and some sadness, surprised that this is what has prompted Dean to define himself physically as opposed to Cas’s presence. It couldn’t be more clear if he tried, now, that he’s moved himself to face Cas because Cas is the enemy, backed up against the glass behind him, legs bent in front of him defensively like mountains.

There’s no way Cas can reach out to casually comfort him now, no way he can brush his hair or wrap an arm around his shoulders without purposefully invading the young man’s space. Even his hands become occupied, as Dean grabs the now empty plastic wrap besides him to start aggressively playing with it. The submissive stares down at it resolutely as he starts to rip holes in it, apparently fascinated, as if to show off how disinterested he is in whatever Cas’s response is going to be.

“That’s a shame,” is all Cas says, backing off. “I found your submission to be quite lovely.”

Dean’s lip wobbles, but he only scowls even harder, fighting off his urge to give in to the praise.

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it, Dr. Phil,” he grumbles, twisting the wrapper up like his conflicted face. “You ain’t gettin’ the drop on me again.”

Cas feels his own eyebrows raise at Dean’s phrasing, not convinced this time that he’s just not following what is being said.

“Getting the drop on you?” he echoes, voice somewhat incredulous. Not entirely able to hide his perplexity at Dean’s relentless levels of suspicion, he knows he looks doubtful, so it’s a good thing that the submissive forgoes looking up at him in favor of continuing to glare at his ball of plastic.

“I ain’t as dumb as you think,” Dean mutters resentfully at it. “I know you did somethin’ to me. Did somethin’ to my head. You did it today, and you did it yesterday too. When you got me to give you the gun.”

Cas blinks at Dean in something close to actual disbelief, and he feels his own body turning as he puts down the document in his hand, looking at the submissive with a feeling approaching indignation.

It’s unprofessional, but he can’t help but feel somewhat genuinely offended at the way the man is openly accusing him of- of drugging him or hypnotizing him or something.

He knows it isn’t fair to expect much trust at this point, or even any, considering what Dean has been through, but it’s hard not to feel hurt at the obvious insinuation that Cas had employed some sort of nefarious means to compel Dean to submit.

“I dominated you, Dean,” Cas says, straining for the patience that usually comes so naturally.

Dean’s gaze flies up, and he seethes at Cas from under his lashes with a suspicion that unnerves the dominant with its intensity. It’s such a contrast to how sweetly he’d looked up at him barely an hour ago from his kneel, and Cas wonders how quickly all that trust had evaporated, dissolving as quickly as the rush of sertranialine in his bloodstream.

“You fucked with my head,” the submissive reiterates, with steely eyes. “Roofies, some voodoo shit, I don’t know. But there ain’t nothin’ natural about how you got me actin’ round you. Fuck if I’m gonna let you convince me there is.”

He speaks so coldly that it almost has Cas flinching back this time, stung by the callousness in the man’s attitude.

He’d thought- well. He’d known that Dean is volatile, and distrustful, and that one successful session of domination isn’t enough to ease him into comfort. But he’d thought, honestly, that they’d formed some kind of connection today, that Dean had been put at ease through the experience of being gently guided through submission.

The man had seemed settled, subdued and not exactly happy but settled, enough that Cas had thought it safe to take him out to the cafeteria to get him dinner, feeling secure in the belief that Dean had been internally steadied.

Apparently he was wrong, and for an insecure, painful moment he remembers Naomi’s taunt; That he’d become so desperate to connect with someone who’d be satisfied with his gentle version of domination that he’d started projecting his own desires on his patients, projecting his desire for companionship on Dean.

It smarts like a slap, and he has to crush the feeling very carefully inside of him to keep it from interfering with how he responds, pushing down on the urge to snap back at Dean defensively in an attempt to hide his own hurt.

“That was simply domination, Dean,” he says tightly, wounded pride straining in his chest. “I’m sorry that you’re so unfamiliar with the feeling that you do not recognize it, but that doesn’t make it unnatural.”

“The fuck it doesn’t,” Dean grunts back at him immediately, untwisting the seran wrap and digging both his thumbs into it to stretch a bit between them. “I ain’t unfamiliar with the feeling, you dick.”

Cas purses his lips, but doesn’t react to the insult, significantly less bothered by being called generic names than being accused of using roofies to ensure his patient’s obedience. So he just stays quiet, sensing that Dean has more to say, and that it will come as long as Cas waits him out.

As he watches, the plastic between Dean’s thumbs is pulled tighter and tighter like the tension building in the silence. It breaks at the same time the wrapper does, fingers snapping through as the material gives way to the pressure being put on it.

Dean wiggles his thumbs once through the holes, before he huffs and pulls them back, looking childish as he fidgets absently with the trash.

“Been dominated a million fucking times,” he confides, voice low and defeated. “Never felt nothin’ like that before. Never felt…good.”

He looks ashamed after the word wobbles out of him, trailing unsteadily after the rest of his sentence like it hadn’t been made to be seen. But it had been anyway, and Cas gapes after it in startled confusion, unexpected admission tumbling straight into him like a little ball of light that illuminates them both.

Dean doesn’t like being illuminated. As if he’s confessed to murder, he curls in on himself and lifts one hand to tug his hood farther down over his head, as if he’s trying to hide from what he’s said.

“You made me want it,” he accuses resentfully. “No one ever managed to do that before.”

It could be a compliment if said in a different tone of voice, but Dean is obviously outraged at the idea. Nonetheless, the admission is so obliviously touching that Cas feels himself soften immediately, soothed by the inadvertent acknowledgement that he hadn’t imagined the way Dean had been made content.

“That’s how it’s supposed to feel,” Cas tells the submissive, who, unsurprisingly, doesn’t listen.

“I don’t care how it’s supposed to feel,” he mumbles, clearly unhappy. “That ain’t…I don’t do that shit, alright?”

His voice doesn’t…break, exactly, on “do,” but it comes close, and Cas notes with some surprise that he sounds more upset than angry, now.

Something like fear is starting to leak into his mannerisms, but not the sharp terror of violent retribution that has him cringing.

Rather, Cas thinks as he looks at the man, this is more like….an underlying dread, a nightmare that’s been haunting him for years finally seeping into the light of day.

Curled up and stiff against the window like a dead spider that’s been left to rot, Dean looks almost nauseous as he’s confronted with his own submission. He seems to know, on some level, that Cas isn’t lying to him, but he seems to find his own desires fundamentally repulsive.

“Why not?” Cas asks honestly, truly blown away by how inverted Dean’s psyche is, an impression that only deepens when the man literally shudders.

“It ain’t right,” the submissive croaks, looking genuinely disturbed by the idea.

It goes beyond fear. It’s almost like he thinks there’s something….wrong with submission, morally wrong, approaching the idea of giving in to it like he’d be giving in to some sort of bloodlust.

What on earth…?

Behind Dean, it starts to rain outside the window, starts to pour all at once in a deluge. The gray scene in the window dwarfs Dean’s body in front of it, and it seems to frame his pale form like he’s on the cover of a horror novel. The man himself doesn’t seem to know whether he’s supposed to be the horror or the victim, chained hands digging tense into the crunched up plastic between them as his face flickers through a myriad of emotions.

Eventually, it settles back where they started, with exhaustion settling over him heavy as time.

“It’s bad,” he whispers eventually, sounding thready like moth-eaten wool. “It’s pathetic and weak and bad. Listening to some stranger over your own damn family…all ‘cause you’re stupid brain can’t stop fuckin’...fuckin’ groveling for approval from fuckin’ anyone…”

Dean inhales very sharply, and, to Cas’s horror, he sees the submissive’s eyes fill with tears.

“Damn it,” the man hisses. Throwing the plastic he’s holding aside, he shoves his face in his hands.

He breaths harshly, once, twice, and then he gives up like the rain, and he’s weeping, weeping openly into his hands with sharp, silent shakes that wrack his body.

It’s almost noiseless, or at least it seems to be noiseless, under the sound of the pounding downpour. He just shudders erratically, entire body tense like it will shatter if touched, but touch it Cas does, putting a hesitant hand on the man’s knee.

His own heart splits open like an overripe berry when the sensation punches a wheezing, torn apart gasp from Dean’s throat, like it’s being pulled up through something that is shredding it. The man jerks like he wants to pull away but can’t remember how to, and Cas doesn’t know if it would be cruel to gather the man up in his arms when he’s so overwhelmed with pain at the idea of letting himself be loved.

“Sweetheart,” he murmurs, feeling his own pain start to gather in the back of his throat.

But Dean shakes his head, moaning into his hands like something is hurting him.

“St-stop calling me that,” he cries, miserable. “I ain’t your sweeth-heart, I ain’t your f-fuckin’ anything. I ain’t nobody’s fuckin’ a-anything.”

Falling apart on the last word like a rocket dissolving in a space disaster, Dean sobs with transparent despair as it sinks in that he’s been abandoned. His crying rises in pitch as reality closes in on him, becoming loud enough to be heard over the relentless rain behind him.

“They l-left me here,” he bawls, looking tiny against the darkening backdrop. “Dad left me with A-Alistair and Alastair left me h-here ‘cause I’m such a disobedient crazy piece of shit!”

It feels like having a lung punctured, and Cas’s hand tightens on Dean’s knee.

“That’s not true, Dean,” he insists, surging forward, “That’s not true, you’re such a good boy-”

He’s cut off by a shriek, and Dean ducking away from his outstretched hand, making a dive for one of the undrunk sodas and hurling it violently across the empty room.

“Fuck off!” the man shouts, and Cas jerks back in alarm. “Stop saying that shit, stop it, stop it! You can’t make me listen to you! I know who I belong to!”

Then he claps his hands over his ears, chain between his wrists rattling like a snake. Burying his face in his knees, Dean suddenly goes quiet, and Cas is left staring at him in confusion, dizzy with whiplash, trying to keep up with the submissive’s erratic emotions.

Quiet under the judgment of nothing but the storm and each other, Cas realizes he’s gripping the edge of the table tight enough that his own knuckles are white. Shaken, he turns his head to look at the soda the man had thrown, which predictably is busy soaking into the floor across the room, making more work for the cleaners.

Usually, Cas would make Dean go clean it up, but gets the feeling that that order would not go over well right now. So he gets up himself, telling Dean’s balled up figure that he’ll be right back, and goes to soak up as much of the mess as he can with the napkins they have.

He gets most of it, he thinks. It’s hard to tell, dim storm-filtered light draping everything in more shadows than there would usually be this time of day. Still, he does what he can, and picks up the cup, cap, and straw, bringing them over to the trashcan to throw away.

When he turns back to the table, he almost has a heart attack, because it looks at first glance like Dean is gone.

But then Cas catches a flicker of movement coming from beneath the table, and his heart starts pounding again.

Right. Right. This is why he’d attached Dean by his collar to the pole beneath the flat surface. So he can’t just disappear on him in the blink of an eye like before.

Still, he feels wary as he approaches the man under the table, and when he crouches down besides it, sees that he has a good reason to be.

The acrid smell of vomit hits him before anything else does, though his eyes adjust a moment later to take in exactly what his nose had already warned him about. The meager amount of food he’d managed to get into Dean’s stomach is sitting in half-digested chunks within a pool of yellow bile. Dean himself is kneeling besides it, bent over and with his fingers stuck down his throat, and as Cas watches, he hacks up what seems to be the last of his unenthusiastically consumed dinner, and it falls out of his mouth with a stream of spit.

Dean coughs a little, then turns his head away from Cas, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Cas just stares at him in shock, too dumbfounded to even be upset.

“Why did you do this?” he asks Dean after a moment, and Dean sniffles, still hunched over and looking at the wall.

“I told you I’m not supposed to eat this,” he says, sounding resigned. His voice is still wet, like he hasn’t quite finished crying, but the sobs don’t start up again when he finishes talking, and Cas thinks it’s safe to move on.

“And I told you you don’t have to listen to Michael or Gordon anymore.”

Dean scoffs, still refusing to look his way.

“I never listened to them.”

It’s the truth, or close enough to it, proof enough painting every inch of Dean’s torn apart back. The follow up question is on the tip of Cas’s tongue when Dean answers it, finally turning to acknowledge Cas’s presence.

His eyes and nose are red again, and Cas wonders how long it’s been since Dean went more than a few hours without crying.

“My dad gets mad at me when I…give in. To the sub shit,” he murmurs, eyes low. “I ain’t supposed to eat if I let a dom tell me what to do.”

Oh.

Oh.

He got punished for letting himself submit.

That might explain a lot.

“Your dad is undesignated?” Cas guesses, understanding dawning on him.

He’d assumed that the submissive’s father had been a dominant. That’s almost always the case, in the kinds of trauma cases he takes on, SRS symptoms having been invoked and begun by bigoted, cruely dominant parents.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case here, and Dean confirms that he’s right, sniffling again as he nods, head bowed low.

“I’m not allowed to listen to you,” Dean admits at last, in a mumble. “Not allowed to listen to any doms at all.”

Cas remembers that cruelty isn’t unique to dominants.

Everything starts to fall into place, puzzle pieces suddenly making sense as a picture now that this one crucial part has been filled in.

All Dean’s comments about disloyalty and weakness unravel themselves into straight lines all at once, each one pointing straight at this John Winchester as the source for every damn one of their current problems.

“That sounds like a very hard rule to follow,” Cas suggests, and Dean pulls the hood of the sweatshirt that had fallen behind him back up to cover his face.

“I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout my dad to some dom.”

Sighing, Cas decides he doesn’t have the energy to push right now, reaching his hand out towards the submissive instead.

“Come out of there, Dean,” he commands softly, and Dean does, scowling at the ground the whole time.

Cas crawls in after him to unlock the chain from where it’s attached under the table. He comes back out with the end held in his hand, and Dean stares at it like it’s something he doesn’t understand.

“You gonna beat me now?” he says unhappily, deflated, fidgeting with the edge of his sleeve.

Cas shakes his head, and Dean doesn’t seem to understand this either, staring after his response like it’s nonsense.

“You should,” he insists. “You should belt me.”

Again with the belts.

“Is that what your father did to you? When you submitted?”

Dean doesn’t answer, and Cas sighs again. Overcome with pity for the broken young man before him, he reaches his hand out to pet Dean’s hair again.

The submissive lets him, this time, though he shies away a little at first. Cas doesn’t pull back though, and a moment later Dean seems to accept the inevitability of his affection.

“Just ‘cause you’re bein’ nice don’t mean I’m gonna do what you say,” he protests half-heartedly, even as leans into Cas’s touch.

“Of course not,” Cas agrees absently, just glad to feel Dean’s weight tentatively leaning against him again.

“You can’t make me.”

“Ok.”

“You can’t make me.”

“Ok.”

Dean drops his head into the crook of Cas’s neck and goes limp as Cas rubs his back.

They sit there for a while in silence as Dean’s breath evens out, face hidden against the dominant’s shoulder. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that the hood of his sweatshirt has drooped backwards again, pushed aside by Cas’s hand in his hair.

Eventually he pulls away, and wipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand. He looks childish, and lost, like a kid who’s wandered out of his room past his bedtime.

“I’m hungry,” he admits very quietly, dropping his hands to his lap.

He doesn’t seem to know what kind of response to expect from that confession, or that there will be one at all. It seems more like he’d been talking to himself.

But Cas had heard him loud and clear nonetheless.

“There’s lots more food,” he tells the submissive. “I’ll get you something else to eat from the kitchen.”

Dean shrugs apathetically.

“I’ll just throw it up again.”

He doesn’t sound excited about the idea.

But he doesn’t seem to know how to do anything else.

“I won’t let you,” Cas assures him, and it is an assurance, not a threat, because it’s the help that Dean is crying out for.

The submissive seems to know it too. He doesn’t start shouting again, or get defensive, but just looks at Cas with a dead sort of longing in his eyes, an empty hope that had been drained a long time ago.

“What, you’re gonna order me?” he asks, with a very very weak attitude.

“Yes,” Cas confirms, and Dean drops his gaze.

There’s a pause, where the submissive seems to consider this answer, seems to turn it over this way and that as if looking for traps or trip wires.

But there aren’t any, and eventually Dean’s shoulders slump in recognition, and he shrugs down at his lap, fingers tugging anxiously at the hem of his hoodie.

“Ok,” he mumbles, and it could sound defeated, but Cas can hear the relief underneath the word like a bell.

He figures that’s as close to any sort of real consent that Cas is going to get right now, so he helps Dean stand up, and guides Dean out of the kitchen with an arm wrapped gently around his shoulders.

Chapter Text

A small gaggle of reporters is still outside when he leaves, which sort of startles him, because it’s been such a long day that he’d sort of forgotten about the minor media frenzy Dean’s case had brought down on him. Despite the rain, there are also more people here now than there had been this morning for some reason, and they call out to him about something called “the punch” as he waves them off and heads to his car.

Eager to get away from the cameras and not at all interested in speaking to anyone after the day he’s had, Cas doesn’t try to figure out what they’re talking about until he’s driven around the corner and is well out of sight of any more nosey journalists.

Then he pulls over, and takes his phone out to google the term.

The first thing he sees is a video taken from outside the center of Dean’s arm punching out the conference room window, and Cas groans, covering his face with his hand.

He does not have the energy to deal with this on top of everything else.

Briefly, he considers driving back to the center to try to explain what happened or convince the reporters that that wasn’t Dean, before realizing that with his level of people skills it probably would be more helpful to just drive off a bridge.

Steeling himself to face the music, Cas drops his hand and looks back at the screen.

“The Punch” is trending on twitter.

A video taken at the Shurley Retraining Center of a window being punched out from the inside sparks speculation after reports that the world’s longest surviving C-SRS patient is being treated at the facility.

A quick scroll through the tag on the social media website reveals a plethora of comments, most assuming, correctly, that the person who’d punched the window out had been Dean.

This is what happens when submissives are treated by damn hippies.

Didn’t they give him to that new age submissive rights guy who said he doesn’t hit?? What the hell is he doing then that has the kid trying to jump out a window??

Interesting how we didn’t see this kind of behavior when we trusted the centers to do their jobs. Really goes to show that subs don’t want the kind of nonsense quacks like @CastielNovak are peddling.

A handful of people seem to be looking at the incident as an indictment of the center as a whole.

Guys, there’s no reason to think that was the C-SRS patient everyone is talking about. I’d be more worried about literally every other sub stuck in that center right now.

Literally what the fuck are they doing to them in there??

My girlfriend got sent to one of these places once. From what she told me, punching out a window to try to get away is a totally reasonable response.

Sighing, Cas clicks his phone off, and rests his head on the steering wheel. The sound of cars rushing by and rain pounding on the roof surrounds him, insulating him momentarily from the reality he’s found himself in.

He is so so so not the kind of person who can deal with a media circus.

It’s like having cold water thrown on him, the infinitely long day spent with Dean having become so all consuming that he’d almost forgotten anything else outside the building existed.

It must be how the submissive feels too, having been dragged back to reality today after months of being trapped in his own world. Cas has more sympathy all of a sudden for his patient’s erratic behavior, feeling the same kind of stress bearing down on him now.

What is my family going to think? he wonders briefly, before he shoves the thought very firmly from his mind.

The likelihood that anyone from his family besides Gabriel is going to hear about this is very low, considering this seems to mostly be turning into some kind of internet drama. The idea of his father or mother or any of his other siblings scrolling through twitter is almost comical, and even if they did hear about this, it’s not like Cas cares what they think.

He does not care what they think, after all this time.

He’s just…anxious. It stresses him out to think about his father getting angry at something he’s done, even though Cas has been well out of his reach for years.

What if he tries to get in contact with me again?

The last time he’d heard from his family was after the People Magazine interview. That…had not gone well.

But it’s not like they know where he lives anymore. He’s not going to have to move again.

He’s not.

Sitting up straight again, Cas stares out the front windshield to the pouring gray rain. He can literally feel his own neurosis starting to consume him in the form of his blood pressure rising, and he very deliberately unclenches his hands from the white knuckle grip they’d had on the steering wheel.

This case is really getting to him. Being back in this kind of environment is really getting to him, and the pressure of the unexpected media scrutiny isn’t helping at all. The migraine he’s been flirting with all day is in full swing now, and Cas rubs between his eyebrows as he fumbles with his other hand for the Ibuprofen bottle he keeps in the cup holder.

Opening it, he dry swallows the recommended two pills, then when his migraine doesn’t evaporate immediately, swallows a third for good measure.

It’s not like a dose and a half of over the counter meds are going to kill him, especially considering the myriad of much more high-powered drugs he takes in order to be able to function.

Most of them are back at the rental house in his cabinet, but he keeps his Xanex on him wherever he goes. He tries not to take it too often, but his hands are shaking and it’s pouring rain, and he’s not confident in his ability to make it home like this.

Deciding it’s better to take half a pill and drive with his mind a little foggy than not taking anything and risk flying off the freeway because he’s spiraled into a panic attack, Cas reaches for his bag on the seat besides him automatically before he realizes that it isn’t there.

Shutting his eyes again, Cas lets himself go limp in exasperation as he realizes he left it back at the center.

Arm dropped and draped over the center console, Cas groans again as his head falls back on the headrest.

He’d been so preoccupied with calming Dean’s second meltdown and getting him fed again that he hadn’t remembered to take it with them as they’d left the cafeteria. His anxiety spikes as he realizes that he’d left both his computer and Dean’s medical files behind, things he not only needs to do his work but that contain sensitive and private information.

Checking the time, he thinks about turning around before he recognizes that at past 8PM there isn’t going to be anyone around to let him back into the building. So he calls, hoping someone can at least collect his things for him and hold them somewhere private, but is met with only an answering machine.

“Damn it,” he mutters, after he leaves a message, knowing it’s unlikely to be checked until the morning when he’ll be back anyway. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s yet another thing to stress about, especially with the public interest in Dean’s case and the leak that has already happened.

The fact that his medication to deal with stress is also sitting locked in an empty cafeteria along with everything else isn’t helping. Not for the first time, Cas wishes he weren’t as crazy as he is, and again he has another burst of sympathy for Dean.

He relates to the young man more than he wishes he did.

Because he’s trapped anyway for the time being, unwilling to risk his life driving with trembling hands in an enormous storm, Cas turns the little overhead light on so he can better see his prison for the time being. The concentrated orange glow does illuminate the area around him better, but it mixes in an ugly steril dome with the tinted green darkness pouring through the shut windows like the rain would if he were to open them.

It lets him see the into the pits underneath the dashboard and into the crevices between the seats though, and he starts looking around for the extra phone charger he knows he’s left somewhere in the car. Not seeing it anywhere obvious, he turns around to look in the back seat, and then eventually when that provides nothing either, turns back and opens the glove compartment.

He’s about to shove his hand into it to rifle through when he sees the big dark blue file blocking most of the chaos behind it. Now half bent, it looks unassuming under the dim, halfhearted light, and Cas pauses, realizing he’d forgotten about it in the chaos of the past few days.

Somewhat hesitantly, he pulls it out of the compartment, which requires some strength because of how firmly he’d james it in there. It comes out somewhat warped into an unfortunate “C” shape and thoroughly crumpled around the edges, and Cas winces at his own disorganization, hoping this isn’t something Naomi is going to want back.

Once it’s dislodged, he sees the charger he’d been searching for poking out of the mess of crumpled papers and forgotten knick-knacks, and he puts the file aside for the moment to pull it out of the jumble and plug his phone in.

Then he turns back to the file, sitting harmlessly on the seat besides him, considering it like it might become dangerous if he touches it.

Dean Winchester, it’s titled unceremoniously.

Archived Files, 2013-2016

Cas frowns at the dates he hadn’t thought much about before, only recognizing now what they imply. Doing the math in his head, he feels discomfort twist in his stomach, picking up the file and opening it in his lap.

Skimming through it, he can see right away that these are short records of previous times that Dean has been admitted to the center. None of them seem to last very long, documenting mostly day visits, with a handful of overnight stays. Each visit is separated with a paperclip, and starting from the back, Cas counts 33 visits over the course of four years.

It wouldn’t be an unusual history for a “defiant” submissive if not for the dates of the records, only one year of which overlaps with when Dean would have been 18 and claimed.

But the records start when Dean was only 15, well before he’d had a dominant.

“Fuck,” Cas says quietly, feeling his stomach flip as he works backwards looking at the names and dates on the records.

There are a handful of states where it is still legal to submit minors of a certain age for “retraining,” a trauma he remembers all too well that his own parents had put Gabriel through. He’s never in his life though heard of a submissive under the age of 18 attending without being forced by a legal guardian, or a retraining center that would take a fifteen year old without a guardian’s consent.

Yet that’s what he’s seeing here, over and over, on the top of the front page of every document:

Self admission

Self admission

Self admission

Self admission

Even the records of the year he was claimed by his dominant note Dean himself as the one signing himself up, not Alastair Masters, and Cas can’t help but think back to what Dean had told him about being kept in the basement because he had been “too much of a slut” to let upstairs.

Is this what had prompted such a move?

Baffled, Cas flips back to some of the earliest files, and pulls out a random one from the year 2013. Opening it to the page documenting the “treatments” that had been inflicted on Dean, Cas finds himself stunned at not only the intensity of what is being described, but also the note that comes after almost every item on the list:

Patient requested

Patient requested

Patient requested

“My god,” Cas murmurs to himself, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. He doesn’t think what had been done to Dean is even legal to do to minors in most cases, but he doesn’t know if the rules change if the patient is specifically requesting such cruelty, because he’s never heard of something like this before.

On a hunch, Cas pulls out a much later file and looks again at the list of treatments, which seem to have only escalated in violence over time. Again, Cas finds that almost every single item is listed as Patient requested, as if that justifies what is being done.

Some of the “treatments” are so obscure and extreme that they can’t be described as anything but flat out torture, and Cas wonders at what on earth would prompt Dean to subject himself to such brutality for what seems to be no reason at all.

It doesn’t make sense. The violence being described is so dramatic that it goes beyond what anyone sane could submit to, and Dean himself is a deeply sensitive submissive for which this could only have been even more excruciating.

Unless he had misjudged Dean so completely?

There’s something wrong with that boy, Mr. Novak, beyond just defiance, he remembers Naomi saying with a shiver. You think you’re helping, but you’re bringing him back towards being something you aren’t going to like at all.

Cas flicks the edge of some of the pages in nervous confusion, trying hopelessly to make sense of the young man who’s supposed to be under his care. He’s uncomfortably aware of the ring of bruises still aching around his throat, and he wonders if he really is just living in denial, thinking that Dean’s true self is anything close to the softness he’d seen a few days before.

This certainly seems to contradict that. But then, how had the submissive been brought under his control so easily if what Cas had first judged isn’t true? Someone who can only reach submission with the level of violence these documents suggest wouldn’t have been calmed by just holding a gag in their mouth.

Right?

Shutting the file in frustration, Cas picks his phone back up. Opening the dreaded folder had done absolutely nothing to lower his stress levels, but neither would just sitting here and worrying himself to death. Research is just about the only work he can get done right now, with most of his stuff either back at the center or at home, so he might as well try to solve some of the mysteries he’s being presented with while he has some captive time.

Flicking the screen showing his last google search had brought him to before he can work himself into a panic about it again, Cas brings up a new screen and typed in John Winchester to the search bar.

The results don’t turn up much. The man doesn’t seem to have any social media, nor does he show up on any sort of professional website. The man seems to be mostly a drifter, judging by the various locations of the handful of drunk driving and assault arrest records he finds, and the scattered references to him on various odd jobs that never seem to last more than a month.

The most solid information he can find on the man is on what he can only assume is an extremely outdated website that shows up on the sixth page of his search results. He’s listed as an employee at “Singer Salvage Yard,” though since it looks like the site hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s.

The many much more recent references to John Winchester in a variety of prisons out of state imply that he has not actually worked here for a very long time, but Cas clicks on the website anyway, and finds himself very glad that he did.

Because as ancient as the webpage is, it does display a picture of the owner, and a phone number, and Cas finds himself straightening up at the number provided, because he’s sure he just saw it five minutes ago.

That number is somewhere in this file, Cas thinks as he reaches for it again, opening it up and scanning the pages for the 785 area code.

He finds it almost immediately, because as it turns out, it’s listed on every admission record as Dean’s emergency contact number.

It’s also listed as the phone number associated with the billing statements on the records dated from 2013-2014, and Cas closes the file again feeling more confused than ever.

What is Dean’s father’s one-time boss doing paying for Dean’s admission to the retraining center? he wonders skeptically.

It doesn’t seem like Dean would even have any reason to know the man, much less have him listed as emergency contact and be…relying on him to pay for what amounts basically to torture.

This is just getting stranger and stranger, Cas thinks, but he bookmarks the website anyway, making a plan to call the shop tomorrow.

It’s been six years since he has evidence that it was active, but whoever this guy is, he doesn’t seem like the kind to be very friendly towards change. It’s a start, in any case, and it satisfies him enough that he feels like he’s accomplished something, so he puts the file away again and takes a look at his hands, wondering if he’s ready to drive home.

He’s not shaking anymore, at least, and the rain has lessened, so he decides it’s as good a time as ever. He drives back very slowly, on the lookout for anymore spirals of panic, but eventually makes it home in one piece.

********

His house is silent and dark when he enters it, and he feels a bit uncomfortable flicking on the lights, almost like he might be disturbing some ghost who lives here and was sleeping.

But not even ghosts hang around him to keep him company, and he feels doubly lonely with the silent kitchen illuminated in front of him, like some sad abstract painting from the 30s.

Standing soaking wet in the mudroom with the back door shut behind him, Cas feels stupid for forgetting his umbrella, and feels stupid for the strange melencholy circling around like a lost bird inside his chest. It’s such a strange way to feel, after the day he’s had, like he’s surprised and disappointed to come home to an empty house after everything.

Which is silly. He’s well aware that there’s no one here waiting for him. There never has been, so he’s not sure why he feels so let down.

Stomping his feet on the mat inside the doorway, Cas takes his wet shoes off, and hops around with his bare feet cold on the tiles as he peels off his uncomfortably soaked socks. The storm is still coming down outside like someone’s ringing the clouds out like rags, so he’s dripping wet, clothes and hair alike, having had to run from his car down the street to the house.

He’d had to park around the corner. He’d forgotten when booking online to make sure the place he was renting has a driveway, and it turns out it doesn’t.

He’s always forgetting stuff like that.

His psychiatrist has said it’s because he’s trying to juggle too much on his own, but he doesn’t know what choice he has. It’s not like he can just abandon his patients, and he doesn’t have anyone else in his life to help him keep it together.

Holding his gross wet socks, Cas only takes about one step into the kitchen before he decides he doesn’t want to drip all over the house. There’s no one around he’s trying to impress anyway, so he just strips down to his underwear right there in the foyer, and bundles all his wet clothes up into a pile and carries it down the stairs to the laundry in the basement.

Dumping it into the wash, he sets it on the spin cycle on autopilot, only remembering that he hadn’t put detergent in when he’s already halfway up the stairs again.

Jesus, I’m a mess today, he thinks bitterly as he comes back and resets the cycle.

He’s a pretty big mess every day when it comes to things outside of work, but the energy he’d spent not dying today had really drained him to dust.

He’s exhausted when he climbs up the second flight of stairs to his bedroom, and a large part of him wants to just slip out of his briefs and climb right into bed, collapsing nude and unfed and unwashed at the late late hour of 9:37 PM.

But he knows from experience that totally ignoring how he needs to take care of himself isn’t a good idea, so he takes a quick shower and changes into his pajamas before coming back down to the kitchen.

It’s been four days since he landed in Kansas, but he still hasn’t gone grocery shopping, so he microwaves his last packet of ramen and tries to pretend the meal isn’t depressing.

Sighing, he pulls back the chair at the kitchen table with a scrape, and sits down heavily as he waits for his food to heat up. The loneliness comes back as he listens to the low hum of the machine, feeling the silence of the room worse than usual because of it.

It’s strange how despondent he feels for no real reason. He has so much to occupy his mind right now.

Instead, his eyes keep drifting over to the empty chair across from him, and he feels pointlessly sad at the absence it’s existence implies.

It’s not like it’s anything new to him, living alone. He has patients living with him quite often, but they always leave eventually, and the empty gaps between their stays are something he’s become accustomed to. He doesn’t like it, but he’s gotten used to it, had accepted a long time ago that he isn’t the kind of person who someone is going to stick around for.

It used to bother him more, but he’s become more comfortable in his loneliness since he stopped hoping that it was going to change. He misses his patients when they leave, but it doesn’t devastate him anymore. Not like it had when he’d had to let Claire go.

Now, though, he finds his mind drifting to his last patient, wondering how she’s doing. Hannah had been quite a gentle soul, and he’d enjoyed her company, and her submission. Her needs had been milder, and he hadn’t had to push himself so hard to meet them, hadn’t had to stretch his own inadequate domination so much to satisfy her towards the end. Despite his best intentions, Cas thinks he did hope a little bit that she might want to stay with him after she healed, at least for a little while.

She hadn’t, though, and Cas had taken some time off after that, ostensibly to write up her case study and publish some papers, but in reality to give himself time to mope.

He’s starting to think that might have been a mistake, though. The two months he’d spent holed up in his house had been the longest gap he’d taken between seeing patients since he started officially practicing after Claire. It had felt alright at the time, but the truth is that he doesn’t really have any regular friends or family he actually speaks to, so working with patients is the closest thing to social interaction he actually gets.

It had been nice to talk to Dean today, to have a real conversation with him for the first time. But it only highlighted for Cas how starved he is for that kind of interaction, and how lonely he is outside of work.

The microwave beeps, indicating that it’s finished, so Cas grabs the bowl out of the microwave and goes to eat it in the living room. He doesn’t have his computer, so he turns on the TV and channel surfs for a while, uninterested by everything that comes up.

It feels pretty pathetic, which he supposes it is. He ends up watching some nature documentary for a while, but turns it off when they start talking about dominance and submission in animals.

He can get pretty sick of hearing about dynamics all the time, to tell the truth.

Rubbing his eyes, Cas stands up, unwilling to fall asleep on the couch when he hasn’t taken his meds or double checked that the doors are locked.

Especially now, it’s hard not to worry that someone might break in again, after the publicity this case has brought. It’s something he’s been trying not to think about, but that he keeps coming back to, despite every attempt to keep his attention diverted.

His family really doesn’t like being associated with him, and they really don’t like it when he gets enough attention to be embarrassing.

You’re in a sublet in the middle of nowhere. They have no way of getting your address.

But then, he doesn’t know how they got his address last time either.

Cas ends up checking every door twice, and making sure all the first floor windows are bolted before he heads upstairs. It’s better to be safe than sorry, and though he has no intention of going anywhere regardless of how his family feels about it, he’d prefer not to be threatened again if it can be avoided.

It’s stressful enough, though, that he ends up again regretting that he’d left his Xanex at work, knowing it’s going to be hard for him to get any rest tonight with everything weighing on his mind. He takes some benadryl instead, along with his prozac, and hopes that that will be enough to knock him out.

He’s brushing his teeth when he hears his phone ding somewhere in his room with the sound that tells him he’s gotten a text, and he half glances behind himself in surprise before he spits into the sink and wipes his face with a towel.

Who’s texting me at 10:30? he wonders, walking over to his bed to pick the phone up.

Typing in his password, he sits down on the bed and opens his messages, even more surprised to see that the notification is from Gabriel.

It’s rare enough that he hears from Gabriel at all, let alone two days in a row. The last time Gabe had contacted him before yesterday had been in March, when he’d received a short “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” text, along with about 70 different emojis.

Cas had sent his own “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” text back, with the little clover emoji, and that had been the end of that interaction, and extent of their contact until 24 hours ago.

He hadn’t been able to respond to Gabe’s message about being on the news immediately, but he’d given the text a thumbs up a few hours later in acknowledgement, not knowing what else to say. Unsure if sending anything else would be overstepping, he’d just left it alone, and had assumed he wouldn’t hear from Gabe again for a while.

It’s rather startling to hear from him again so soon, and Cas opens the text quickly, somewhat concerned that something is wrong.

But it’s just a link to one of the videos of Dean punching out the window, and Cas stares at it incomprehensibly, not knowing what to make of it.

Just then, though, another text appears as he’s watching, and Cas jumps at the unexpected noise, having never received a message in real time before.

You good? Is all it says, but it has the sideways looking eyes emoji next to the words, and Cas feels himself crack a smile at the unusual humor of it, remembering that Gabe has always been funny.

It’s been quite a long time since he experienced that humor in person, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone away, even after everything. He feels strangely touched to be on the receiving end of it, remembering how cold and formal Gabe had been the last time he’d seen him face to face.

That had been a long time ago. It feels odd now to be trying to text him back so immediately, knowing his brother will see it right away. Almost like talking on the phone or something, closer to real contact than they had been in fourteen years.

Cas bites his lip, struggling to think of how to respond, not knowing how to match the casual tone Gabe wears so naturally.

Yes, he types eventually. It was just a misunderstanding. All is well, and everyone is safe.

It’s not casual at all, and Cas knows it, but he can’t figure out a way to make himself sound like an actual person. So he puts the star emoji next to his words for no real reason, hoping that will give the message the easy attitude found in Gabe’s.

Then he hits send, surprised by how nervous he is, realizing that his brother is likely to see his text right away. He jumps again when three dots appear in front of him, indicating that Gabe is typing, and he watches them intently until the message appears on his screen.

So it was your patient??

This is accompanied by the side-eye emoji agan.

Cas snorts, and sends back a Yes. Don’t tell.

He doesn’t overthink it as much this time, not stopping to second guess himself until after the text has already gone through.

Then he freezes, looking at his own message, the words Don’t tell staring up at him like guilt.

Fuck, he thinks. Don’t tell. That’s an order. He hadn’t meant it like that, but what if Gabe takes it the wrong way?

His brother has every reason to be defensive around him, after all, and Cas holds his breath as he sees the three dots pop up again, anxious that he’s already fucked this up two seconds into their first real conversation in years.

But when the message appears, it’s just the thumbs up emoji, and the winking face, and Cas exhales in relief.

You’re secret’s safe with me, Gabe sends next, and Cas smiles again at the regular answer.

*Your, he types out, but then deletes it after a moment of hesitation.

That’s too much. It’s not Gabe’s fault he had to stop going to school in 8th grade.

He’s still thinking of what to say instead, flabbergasted by the realization that he’s actually talking to Gabriel for real, when another text appears and lets him off the hook.

Seriously, though, are you safe?

And then,

Can’t have by bigshot kid brother getting beaten to death by some nutcase

Cas just blinks down at the screen for a few seconds after that, rereading the words, and his hand tightens around the phone involuntarily, overwhelmed by the transparent affection in the message that he never thought he’d hear from Gabe again.

Bigshot kid brother.

He’d almost forgotten that Gabe used to call him his kid brother, like some sort of 1950s TV character. Cas had hated it back then, but it brings tears to his eyes now as he’s blindsided with it, memories tugging at his tear ducts like needy children.

He’d been maybe…maybe ten, the last time they’d had that kind of relationship? Even then, he can remember that it was strained, made strange by the way Gabe would be intermittently sent off to some retraining center, made tense by how easily Cas would regurgitate whatever bullshit bigotry he’d been fed.

But he’d been young enough back then that Gabe hadn’t held it against him, and he’d been small enough that the power dynamic between them in their household hadn’t had a chance to take shape. That had changed in the next few years though, as Cas had grown older, and their father had grown more aggressive, both with trying to subdue Gabe and trying to force Cas into being a “real dominant.” He’d never really lived up to those expectations, and had suffered the consequences, but it hadn’t been anything like what he now knows Gabe had been put through.

He’d just accepted it all blindly, though, back then, accepted that his father must be right and that having Gabe sent off to be “retrained” was ultimately in his best interest. And he’d told him so too, told Gabe that things would be better if he just listened, that it was only natural that their father kept him completely isolated and out of sight, and that it was his duty to obey their six other dominant siblings as well as the rest of the world.

He hadn't known what was going on behind closed doors, and hadn’t realized the extent of the “punishments” Gabe had suffered, both at the hands of his father and at the various “schools” he was sent to. But that’s no excuse, really, and he knows he’s lucky Gabe is willing to still speak with him at all after what he’d dealt with.

It’s more than Cas really deserves, and he’d been pretty shocked when Gabe had reached out to him about a month after he’d graduated from his accelerated master’s program.

Heard you quit the family business, the text had said.

It’s Gabe had been tacked on as an afterthought.

To say that Cas had been taken by surprise by the messages would be an understatement. Gabe had disappeared when Cas had been 14, only a few months after having been sold into a claim. No one had ever been able to find him in the seven years he’d been gone, and Cas had assumed he was never going to hear from him again.

But he had. Gabe had been very very guarded, and wouldn’t tell him where he was, or pretty much anything about his life. He’d wanted to hear about Cas’s though, and had said Congrats on getting out of the cult when Cas had confirmed that he’d cut off contact with the rest of their family.

That had felt good. It had been the first time since he’d made his decision that anyone had confirmed it was the right one.

But it had taken months of very limited contact before Gabe had told him where he was in even the vaguest sense. Looking back, Cas can recognize that it was more likely the publicly available information about how his career was taking shape that influenced this decision, rather than anything Cas actually said.

In any case, he’d been told in very unspecific terms about how Gabe had run away, that he was living in Maine under a pseudonym he wouldn’t share and that he was working in a sub-friendly candy store.

The idea that Gabe was still in hiding and legally vulnerable had stressed Cas out enormously, and he’d offered to buy Gabe’s claim from the dominant he’d run away from so he couldn’t ever be caught and brought back.

Gabe had texted back simply, No.

And then he hadn’t heard from his brother for another six months.

Cas had gotten the hint. Gabe doesn’t trust him as far as he can throw him, and Cas can’t blame him at all. He hadn’t brought it up again, and he hadn’t texted Gabe despite his worry, not wanting to overstep after being shut down.

It had been on his own birthday when Gabe had finally texted again, a simple Happy Birthday! Which had let Cas know he was ready to talk again.

Their interactions since then have been stilted, to say the least. It had taken three years until Gabe had actually given him the specifics about where he’s living and working, and another two until he’d linked his instagram. It mostly seems to be pictures of candy and of himself making faces at customers behind their backs, but Cas still checks it relatively frequently, happy to see that Gabe is doing well.

They’ve never met in person. They’ve never spoken on a phone call. Gabe just texts him out of the blue every few months, and Cas responds in whatever way he thinks isn’t too overbearing.

So he can be forgiven, he thinks, for his emotional response to Gabe’s texts now, and for wasting several minutes blinking the blurriness out of his eyes before he even tries to figure out how to reply.

It’s been a long, long time since Gabriel was this friendly with him, and he doesn’t know where it’s coming from, or how to keep it from going away.

I am safe, he tries eventually, which is quite a lackluster way to respond.

Suddenly afraid that the conversation is going to peter out forever if he doesn’t find a way to keep it afloat, he flings another message out there just to see if Gabriel will catch it.

Dean is making good progress. He panicked this morning, but was able to hold a conversation with me by the afternoon. I’m hopeful that he’s going to make a full recovery, despite everything he’s been through.

It’s a long text, possibly the longest he’s ever sent to Gabe in one go, and he feels nervous about it after it’s been put out there, not sure if his brother remotely cares.

Maybe he’s just being polite by reaching out?

Though Gabe has never really been the polite type.

The three dots appear again, for only a second, before the message pops up.

That’s great! Gabe sends first. Then, a moment later: You’re a good therapist.

Flustered, Cas types out “thank you,” but doesn’t send it, instead clicking on one of the overly sparkly gifs that pop up boasting the same text in a much fancier font. He’s not sure whether or not it’s appropriate to use such a thing, but again, he’s trying awkwardly to match Gabriel’s much more natural casual attitude.

Gifs are casual, right? And fun?

Cas sends it uncertainly, feeling like he's taking a big risk.

A “haha!” reaction appears on the corner of it, which Cas has never seen before. He doesn’t have many people to text, so he’s not very familiar with many of his phone’s functions.

He’s not sure what to make of it, feeling a bit self conscious, but then Gabe sends about 15 different smiley emojis back, and Cas remembers that his brother was never one to make fun of him for being a bit odd.

Feeling more encouraged than he has in quite a while, Cas leans back against the bedspread, so he’s holding his phone up above his face. It makes him feel a bit like a teenage girl texting her school friends, but he figures there’s nothing wrong with that.

Floating on the high of receiving so many positive responses to his attempts at communication, Cas throws caution to the wind and gambles on sending the riskiest text he’s sent in years.

How are you?

And then he waits, uncertain how his inquiry will be received, tension rising in his chest again at the idea that he could be crossing a line.

He’s really not sure how such an inquiry will be received. He hasn’t fished for information that Gabe hasn’t freely offered since not long after they reestablished contact, when he’d still been in part the pushy and demanding child he’d been raised as, not yet entirely unwound from his own entitlement.

Gabe had not responded well to such insistence, and Cas had learned quickly that he needed to back off if he didn’t want his brother to completely disappear again.

Since then, he’s been careful to let Gabe set the terms of their relationship, not wanting to come off again like he is demanding more from his brother than he is willing to share. He feels hopeful, now, that Gabe won’t take his question the wrong way, but still finds himself waiting with tense muscles until the response comes through on the screen.

Good! Gabe answers, and Cas chews the inside of his cheek, unsure if that’s all he’s going to get.

But then another message comes through immediately after.

I got promoted!

Under the words, an image accompanies them, of a nametag against a dark blue bedspread. It displays Gabe’s name, and his apparently new role as the Assistant Manager at the company, which is supposed to be the focus of what’s being said.

Cas finds himself staring, though, staring up at his phone, fascinated by the hints of the home he can see in the background of the image. Rolling over on the bed so he can bring his face closer as he lies on his stomach, Cas takes in every detail of the picture, searching for signs of life.

He can’t see the light source in the image, but he can tell that it’s coming from some kind of bedside lamp, with the overhead lights turned off. The duvet the glow is spilling over on looks to be of good quality, and he can tell from the flatness of it underneath the name tag that the bed is made.

It’s so strikingly…adult, and it feels strange to see, strange to compare with his own memories of Gabe’s room and behavior as a teenager. He was always the kind to leave his room a giant mess, and to be staying up all night long sneaking out to parties or playing video games.

But he’s 35 now, and has clearly grown up more than the images on his instagram would imply. It makes something in Cas’s heart ache as he realizes how little he knows his brother anymore, as he realizes how his own mistakes and youthful bigotry has cost him a real relationship with someone he once loved.

Behind the name tag, at the edge of the image, Cas can see how the blankets start to rise like a mountain in the distance, like there is somebody under the covers.

It can’t be Gabe, who’s clearly the one taking the picture. But he can’t see anything else besides the vague shape that might tell him anything about the person resting in his brother’s bed.

Who’s that? Cas types out, before realizing with a pang that that isn’t something he can ask.

That’s not what Gabe had been trying to share with him. He doesn’t want his brother to shut down.

Congratulations! He types out instead, and sends it, feeling suddenly empty again all at once.

Gabe sends back a smiley face, and Cas likes it. He doesn’t know what to do after that.

He waits a few minutes, feeling inadequate and uncertain, not knowing how to keep the discussion going. Gabe had always been the charismatic one, but he doesn’t send anything back either, and after about ten minutes Cas wilts, recognizing that the conversation has probably faded.

Sighing, Cas puts his phone down, and pushes himself up on his elbows to stand. Checking the time on the clock on the nightstand, he sees it’s just past 11 now.

Unlike the man Gabe seems to have grown into, Cas is still the same mess he was as a kid. He usually stays up much later than this, and just suffers for it the next day. But he’s feeling depressed, and not really invested in being conscious any longer than he has to. So he puts himself to bed, figuring he has a long day ahead of him tomorrow in any case, between tracking down the mysterious Mr. Singer and dealing with Dean in the afternoon.

Pulling the covers down, Cas wonders about how he’s going to fit the time to do the investigating he needs to do into his schedule, with Dean being so reliant on him. It starts to give him a headache again, so he tries not to worry about it, pushing the thought aside as a problem for tomorrow as he crawls into his bed.

He’s just leaned over to turn the bedside lamp off when he hears his phone ding once again. Surprised, Cas clicks off the light before picking the device back up, screen glowing bright in the dark.

It’s Gabe again. Nothing exciting; Just a Goodnight followed by a bunch of sleep related emojis.

But it makes Cas smile a little as he lays down against his pillows, feeling a little better at having the end of their conversation acknowledged.

Opening up his messages one more time, Cas types out Goodnight as well, and sends it, with the suggested zzz emoji by its side.

He’s about to click his phone off when he hesitates, remembering how Claire had signed off the last time they had conversed.

She’d had to explain to him what it meant, but he assumes Gabe will know, hoping that the informal lingo will take the pressure off what might otherwise be interpreted as a demand.

Ttyl :), he types into the chatbox, hitting send before he can talk himself out of it.

Almost immediately, another “haha!” reaction appears on the message, and Cas knows for sure this time that he’s being somewhat teased.

But it doesn’t feel cruel, and he’s ready to accept it for the acknowledgement it is, when all of a sudden the little reaction symbol changes into a heart.

And Cas didn’t know you could do that either, change a reaction after it’s already been clicked, but he’s glad he got to find out this way. It chases off some of the loneliness once again, and he puts down his phone feeling satisfied.

Chapter Text

In the night time, the strange man stays with him until he thinks Dean falls asleep. It takes Dean almost an hour to figure out that that’s what’s going on, to figure out that the man’s not just lurking by the couch as some kind of long, drawn out foreplay.

Even then, it’s hard to force himself to relax, to shut his eyes and untense his muscles, not entirely sure that this isn’t what the man has been waiting for. He keeps expecting to feel the man’s hands sneaking under the soft pajamas he’s been clothed in, to snake under the elastic of the sleep pants, and more than once Dean knows he gives himself away by tensing, feeling some shift of weight on the couch.

But the man- Castiel, or, or Cas, he’d said Dean could call him- Cas never gets around to molesting him, and his fingers never drift to stroke lower than Dean’s cheek. Even after the man must think he’s well into sleep, he never climbs on top of Dean or tries to put his cock in his mouth.

He just, eventually, packs up his stuff, and leaves out that ugly mauve door. Dean blinks his eyes open after he hears it shut, so lost that he’s almost upset.

Because that was his last theory, really, that all this is some sort of elaborate kink thing. That the therapist gets off on taking care of him, that it’s all some gratuitous ritual that will still end with Dean speared on the end of his dick.

It had almost made sense there, for a moment, when Cas had been sitting besides him on the couch and touching his hair. The pajamas, the food in his stomach, the blankets and gentle cuddling. If it were all just some kind of intricate roleplay, at least that was something Dean could understand, and he’d felt some sick sense of relief for a second at the idea that he’d figured the man out.

But he hadn’t, apparently, and now Dean is back to square one, left circling his mind hopelessly, having no idea what to think.

What the fuck is going on? he wonders helplessly, staring up at the pretty gray sky.

It’s pouring rain down on everything, dark and cloudy and dusk-burnt, and it’s still more dynamic and colorful than anything Dean has seen in seven years.

He drinks the image in hungrily, letting it fill him up from the inside out and spill over in the form of wet eyes. It’s nice to look at, to imagine feeling on his skin again, nice to watch the clouds roll on and on like weathered soldiers on the long march home.

It reminds him that the world outside is real. That his memories from before are real as well. He’d started to wonder, after so much time locked in the dark. Alastair liked to tell him he was going crazy.

And. Well. Clearly the man wasn’t wrong.

But he was wrong about that aspect of it at least, was lying when he told Dean he’d been making his memories up. Dean could feel himself disintegrating back then, had felt himself becoming less and less real with every passing hour that couldn’t be tracked. But he’d tried to hang on to his conviction that there had been more, once, and that he’d been a part of it, even if he’d never see any of it again.

Sammy. His dad. His mom, what little he remembers of her. His car, and the man who’d helped him fix it, the salvage yard, the crappy motels they’d all jumped between. It had been real, and he’d tried to keep it all protected inside him, sacred, but it had all faded from him one memory at a time.

Between the monotony of the basement and the monotony of the pain inside of it, between Alastair's gentle whispers telling him he’d never been anywhere else. He’d failed at keeping his own love from evaporating, the way he always knew he would eventually, losing himself to the pathetic need even his dad had given up on protecting him from.

Dean feels empty now, having been given it all back out of the blue, stunned and disoriented and afraid of what the gift will cost him. It all washes over him in wave after wave of gratefulness and dread, and he struggles to keep himself from being drowned.

The hole where he’d punched through the window is still there, and it looks surreal, because it forces him to confront that the morning had been real too.

It had all happened so fast, in such a haze of panic and confusion. He knows he was starting to lose himself again, and it’s strange to look back on, now that he feels solid once more.

And he does feel solid. He feels…grounded, feels, despite his grief, more anchored in his own mind than he has been in so many years.

Since maybe he can ever remember.

Everything feels sharper, feels clearer and more objectively true, even from how he’d felt this morning, even from how he’d felt yesterday afternoon.

That had seemed a miracle to him, when he’d woken up with any ability to access true thought, but it all looks like a crazed, hazy jumble now, in comparison to the state of his mind right now.

Dean feels…

Dean feels better.

He feels better, and he doesn’t understand why.

He’s not stupid enough not to know that it has something to do with the therapist man, Castiel. That he’s…done something that has made Dean…strong.

But he doesn’t know what, and that’s what’s really scaring him, what’s really making him flinch from the thought of today.

Because if he thinks back, nothing that has happened in the past few hours has made any kind of sense, despite Dean being better able to think it through than he maybe has ever been in his life. It’s still all irrational, and frightening, and insane, and he wants to cry at his own mixed up feelings.

He didn’t even hit me, Dean thinks, lost and small. He didn’t even fuck me when I offered.

No one’s ever turned his mouth down before, and Dean isn’t sure what his emotions are doing in response. He feels embarrassed that he even offered, to a dom of all people, one who had just, just…put a gag in between his teeth and made him hold it there.

He didn’t make you. You did it without being ordered.

But that just makes it worse, and Dean feels himself start to burn in shame.

He knows what his dad would say, if he saw that. Knows the kind of beating he’d get.

Stupid slut. Good for nothing bitch. What kind of man are you, that you’re begging to choke on some dom’s dick? What kind of son? Was all your training for nothing?

Part of him knows that that ship had sailed a long time ago, and that his dad had watched it leave. There’s a reason the man had sold his stupid sub ass to Alastair, and it wasn’t because Dean showed he could be loyal.

Still, it makes him so sick to think about that he almost can’t bear it, and he’d tried to punish himself for his submission at least a fraction of the way his father would have done, just to alleviate some of the shame.

But he’d given in to the dom on that too, had let the man feed him a second time and hadn’t even tried to throw the food up after he’d been ordered not to.

He wouldn’t have been able to. But still. He should have tried.

He should have, right?

Everything feels so strange.

The food in his stomach doesn’t feel as heavy as it should. It doesn’t sit inside him like a guilty rock, that can’t come up only because a command has sewn his mouth shut.

It feels. Good.

It feels good, not to go to bed hungry. He can’t remember the last time he didn’t. Dean was very rarely good enough to be fed, even before he got locked away, and he doesn’t know what on earth he did to deserve it this time around.

But the command not to vomit it back up isn’t constricting like such things usually are, strangling him into a submission he knows conflicts with the rules he should truly obey. It should feel like that, this time too, he knows it should, but for some reason it doesn’t at all.

Instead, the order feels comforting, like the patter of the rain on the street outside or the heavy weight of the blanket over his body. Dean feels…contained, in a way that doesn’t make him feel trapped, like he’s being held, rather than held down.

It’s so easy to be lulled into a false sense of security, just because the orders don’t hurt right now. It’s so easy to forget why he’s fighting so much, while the rain lulls him to sleep on the couch he’s not allowed to move off of.

He feels so comfortable and warm. Even the ropes around his body don’t bother him so much, when they only keep him in a place he likes so much.

He’s being so nice to me, Dean thinks weakly, his only defense against the shame of his own capitulation, the only argument in favor of letting it continue like he wants to so badly.

Alastair was nice to him too, sometimes. If Dean was a good bitch and begged like he was supposed to. The dom would fuck him genty, and run his cold hands up and down Dean’s bare body without scratching him or digging his nails in at all. Sometimes he didn’t even get mad when Dean choked on his cock, and laughed at him instead of beating him black and blue.

Sometimes he called Dean a good slut, or a good hole, and Dean would cry because he wanted to hear it again so badly.

He never got called a good boy before, though, and Dean feels shy and strange as he thinks about the words said in Cas’s voice. Something inside of him does a fluttering little somersault at the memory, confused and uncertain but pleased all the same.

Pathetic.

The voice in his head sounds suspiciously like dad, and Dean flinches as physically as if the man had been there to strike him.

Bad boy. Bad boy.

He’s not supposed to listen to doms. He’s not supposed to try to please them.

It's shameful, to be taken in like this, by kindness he knows he doesn’t deserve. Like some kind of two-faced bootlicker, who switches sides and sells out their homeland to the enemy the second the enemy offers a bigger paycheck.

I ain’t like that, he tries to convince himself, unconvincingly, squirming half-heartedly against his bonds. I ain’t no dom’s bitch.

Even as he thinks it, though, he knows it’s a lie. It had taken less than a year after he was sold off to Alastair before he had given in completely, before he was begging for any scrap of affection as shamelessly as a two dollar whore.

That’s what he’d always been, after all. He can’t blame his dad for seeing it.

He knows the man was right to give up on him being anything more than that.

Shutting his eyes, Dean feels himself cringing, suddenly feeling so disgusting and small that he doesn’t want to see the sky looking back at him. He can’t fool it into thinking he’s anything more than what he is, anymore than he can fool his dad, or this dom, or even himself.

The truth is, Dean doesn’t know who he’s kidding. He doesn’t know who he’s trying to convince here, that he isn’t the stupid sub bitch that he is.

He’d talked big with Cas in the cafeteria, but they both know what a whore he is, and Dean knows he’s already given himself away as a mindless slut by folding so easily at the hints of kindness.

It’s overwhelming him, blindsiding him so completely that he can’t brace himself to resist it. No one’s ever treated him like this before, and it’s sending him into a tailspin he can’t control. The food, the gentleness, the cuddling, even the company, unthreatening and mildly awkward…

It’s all disarming him more than he can afford to be disarmed, is making him long for things he knows he doesn’t have the right to long for.

He has got to be messing with me, Dean thinks uneasily, painfully aware of every kindness he’s been granted by the dom that he’s done absolutely nothing to earn.

Doms aren’t nice to Dean for no reason. Hell, doms aren’t nice to Dean at all. He’s learned that lesson over and over again throughout his life, ‘cause he was too stupid to get it through his thick skull.

Drove his dad nuts. Didn’t matter how many times he told Dean to stay away from doms, that they ain’t to be trusted, that they ain’t looking for a piece of shit like him anyway. Dean kept wandering back into their arms anyway, like the needy fucking slut that he is, unable to keep from hoping that maybe this time would be different, that maybe this time he might manage to be good.

Stupid, disobedient bitch that he is. He deserved what he got, every damn time.

He’s just lucky his dad was so patient. That he forgave Dean so many times before getting fed up.

Could’a happened a lot earlier. Should’a happened a lot earlier, judging by Dean’s behavior. And then what would have happened? Sammy would’a been left on his own way before he was ready. At least when Dean finally got sold off, the kid was 14, not 10. Starting to act like a proper dom, if the way he was screaming at Dad and Dean was anything to go by.

Could’a been worse. Would’a been worse, with anyone else.

That’s always what he tried to tell himself, after Alastair really started to lay into him.

At least Dean got 18 whole years livin’ free and alive and open in the world, before he started falling apart so bad he had to be handed over to someone strict as Alastair. At least he got to grow up, for the most part, before he really started to die.

More than a lotta subs get. ‘Specially round these parts. Dean always saw them on the street, with their bruises and their collars, staring at the ground like it was all they knew how to see.

It always scared the shit outta him.

He had bruises of his own, of course, from how often he fucked up, from how hard his dad had to beat him to keep him from falling in with that broken lot.

But at least he didn’t have a collar around his neck, signaling how he was owned. At least he got to stare out at whatever he wanted to, drink in the whole world for a few years before he keeled over like his mom.

He’s grateful for that. Grateful to his dad for giving him that, no matter how it all ended up. Wouldn’t’a had it any other way, no matter what Sammy said.

Kid was always getting all up in arms about it, ‘specially towards the end, always going on about neglect and abuse every time Dean got his hide belted after crawling home from a dom. His brother never got it, that dad was absolutely right, that there just wasn’t a happy ending out there for Dean when it came to being a sub.

Doms don’t…

Doms don’t like him.

He’s not a good boy. He doesn’t listen.

He gets beat all the time and gets fucked ‘til he bleeds, because there ain’t nothing else to do with a brat like him. They can sense that he’s the disobedient type a mile away, and they lay into him because of it.

And that’s if they even let him around at all.

Most doms don’t want anything to do with him. The ones that are willing to put up with him aren’t usually willing to for very long, when it becomes clear how much Dean will fight and cry when they try to punish him the way he deserves.

Even the rough ones don’t like him. He’s just too pathetic. Instead of getting hard and begging to suck them off when he gets whipped, he just begs them to stop, and to be allowed to go home.

“What a buzzkill,” a dom had muttered once, as he’d honored Dean’s request and thrown him out on his ass.

It had hurt, so painfully badly that he’d almost turned around and pleaded to be let back inside. But he’d known he wouldn’t be able to do any better if he was, so he’d just stumbled behind the building and been sick on the ground, then waited for 13 hours for the waves nausea and trembling to pass.

Rejection is never something he’s been able to tolerate well.

He’s such a greedy bitch.

Getting hit and fucked and punished; it’s what someone disobedient as him is crying out for, according to what everyone says. Taking whatever a dom wants to give him in response is supposed to…satisfy the need inside him, at least, if not be something he enjoys.

But Dean doesn’t like pain. Being called names makes him so upset he can’t even talk. The defiant types are supposed to like being put in their place, but Dean’s desires are broken like a compass that points in a direction he isn’t allowed to travel.

When he dreams, he dreams about making someone happy.

It’s as out of reach as learning how to fly.

…It’s not like Dean has never tried before. To please someone.

To. Be good. To earn the affection good subs get.

Dean likes to be…kissed. He likes it when people smile at him. He likes being told he did a good job.

When he was younger. Sometimes he really made an effort, to earn that kind of gentleness. When the need got bad enough that he couldn’t be good for his dad anymore, he figured he might as well try to be good for the doms he found to pick him up.

But he couldn’t be. He was never enough. He always wanted things they weren’t interested in giving him, like kisses, and smiles, and praise. Doms don’t get off on stuff like that, though, and Dean just got fucked and caned and passed around like a toy.

He didn’t like it. That made them mad, usually, and they hit him more when they noticed, no matter how hard he tried to be good. Not fighting it wasn’t enough, when most subs get hard and beg for more, and Dean never earned the rewards he always hoped for, no matter how much pain he took.

He was just always in trouble. They were always hitting him, or shouting at him for being bad, which was even worse. The one time he got up the confidence to ask to be held after his beating, the man slapped him, and then put him in a cage and didn’t touch him again all night.

Dean never asked again, and he eventually learned his lesson. That he isn’t ever going to be given the kind of gentleness he desires, because he isn’t ever going to be good enough to earn it.

Even wanting such a thing is pathetic, and totally unobtainable, at least for someone like him. A used up whore, a shit-talking brat who doesn’t know how to listen at all. He’s not the kind of sub who gets rewarded, or who’s enough to please anyone, really.

His dad knew that. It’s why he tried for so long to break Dean of his stupid sub habits, and why he was so hard on him whenever he’d found out Dean had given in to them.

He was just trying to protect Dean from the reality his dumb instincts didn’t know how to accept, which is that there’s never been any peace waiting for him inside of submission, no matter how deep. Only pain and degradation and death.

Sam always got so mad at dad when he said shit like that, especially in the last couple of years. He would get so angry whenever Dean had to get punished for listening to a dom again, saying shit about how it wasn’t fair and that there isn’t anything wrong with being a sub.

It was the stupidest shit that Dean had ever heard, and he fought with Sam about it enough times himself. The kid was always so insistent that dad was doing something wrong by trying to train this shit out of Dean, like Dean was being deprived somehow.

Deprived of what? A lifetime of misery? The chance to have his own willpower overruled and his existence stomped all over ‘til it faded completely?

As if Dean didn’t want to be free of the compulsion that ruled his life, that had him mindlessly obeying strangers and sent him tailspinning into their control. As if he just loved being driven to seek out further and further cruelty in some desperate effort to satisfy the need inside of him.

It was so painfully condescending Dean could only find it enraging, being told his dad was neglecting him by training him to try to break through this curse. Only a dom could see it that way, and it made Dean see red, to be told what was best for him by his little brother.

Because Sam had no idea what it was like to live the way Dean did, being driven slowly insane by a need you can never satisfy. He didn’t know what it felt like to be like this, to literally need the same mistreatment that scares the crap out of you.

The kid never understood that Dean doesn’t want to live like that. That he was never going to be happy under the thumb of the kind of domination a sub like him requires, that his submission is a sickness he never wanted to survive.

And it was a sickness, no matter what Sam had to say about it. It always was, even before the symptoms really drove him out of his mind. Submission is a sickness, a perverse, horrifying condition, one that his dad had been trying to save him from, but that Dean was too weak to fight off.

That was another thing dad would say that would make steam come out of Sam’s ears, but it was the truth, even if the kid didn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t know what else you would call something that makes you hurt yourself the way Dean has been forced to hurt himself, what else you would classify a condition that has been killing you slowly since the fucking day you were born.

It’s a parasite inside of him, eating him from the inside out, and there ain’t nothing natural about it, no matter what the hippies say.

Maybe it’s manageable, for some people, but it wasn’t for Dean. It was driving him out of his mind with pain by the time he was in his early teens, and nothing he subjected himself to was enough to quench it, no matter how extreme.

He’s supposed to like getting hit, and supposed to like getting fucked. Or at least, it’s supposed to…be what he’s looking for. It’s supposed to give him relief, supposed to tip him under into that subspace shit and slake the goddamn misery. But it never had, no matter how extreme the pain, no matter how much he was degraded. Nothing had ever been enough for him, and nothing had ever made him feel anything but repulsion and self hatred, and it hadn’t made a dom feel anything but those things towards him either.

Sam was always yelling at Dad about how he was neglecting Dean by not letting him sub for anyone, but the truth is Dean had subbed a million times, and always come away feeling worse.

Dean had accepted a long time ago that he’s broken, knowing that if even the sick shit he’d go looking for couldn’t take the edge off, in all likelihood nothing would. He’d always been grateful to his dad for trying to cure him of what he was, because he didn’t want to live like that, he really didn’t.

He’d tried for years to be more than that. He tried so fucking hard. He rejected all this sub shit as best he could, not wanting to end up like his mom.

Not wanting to put his dad through that again. Dad never…dad never wanted this for him, Dean knows that, and so he’d tried to be more than what he always was.

But he’d failed. All the training from dawn to dusk, all the drills and self-defense, all the tests of willpower and domination resistance and screaming matches with Sam. It had all been for nothing, in the end.

Dad hadn’t wanted to sell Dean to Alastair, but Dean hadn’t given him a choice. It became clear that he wasn’t going to be able to fight off what he’d been born as, that it was consuming him like it had consumed his mom.

Like a black hole inside of him that couldn’t be sated, it was sucking away everything that he was. He was exhausted, and disoriented, totally unable to make decisions for himself. Worse than useless, dad stopped even trusting him to look after Sam on his own, so weak had he become to dominant influence.

The last straw came when he was supposed to be picking the kid up from school. Walking, ‘cause Dean couldn’t drive anymore without there being a damn good chance he was gonna crash.

But even taking his baby away from him hadn’t been enough of a wakeup call, and even knowing Sam was relying on him hadn’t been enough to keep his head on straight. He’d left the kid hanging for 3 hours while the school tried to contact him, before they had to move on to trying to get in contact with dad.

They couldn’t, and it was Bobby who eventually had to collect his brother, and who had to drive around looking for Dean.

The two of them found him on his knees in some alleyway, totally out of it, slutting it up for some dom. He’d forgotten what he was doing and wandered off to find a total stranger to submit to, so disoriented he barely recognized his own family when they picked him up.

It was the most humiliating, horrifying experience of his life, and when he came back to himself a few hours later he felt like he’d never be able to look anyone in the eye ever again.

As it turns out, he wouldn’t really have to. It was only a couple of days before his claim had been sold to Alastair, and only a bit more than a month before his 18th birthday came along. Dean waited out that time silent as the ghost he knew he was becoming, afraid but mostly just so ashamed of how he’d let his father down.

He’d put so much work into Dean, into trying to make him human. But Dean had never been anything more than a groveling animal, and even his dad had to accept that, in the end. He gave up on him, and gave him up, to the only man who seemed like he might be able to keep Dean under control.

Alastair wasn’t the kind of dominant who gave kisses. But he didn’t mind that Dean was so bad. He said he knew how to handle a sub like Dean, that he knew how to make the defiant ones submit.

Honestly, that’s all Dean had really wanted at that point. Relief.

Kisses had been a pipe dream for a long time.

He’d folded away even the fantasy of receiving them for seven years, knowing they aren’t something someone like him will ever deserve. Knowing they aren’t something someone like him can even handle. Dean isn’t made for gentleness.

The trajectory of his life had made that perfectly clear, as much as his daydreams might protest. He’d never once earned the affection he knows deep down that he wants, and has never found the limit of how violently he needs to be treated in order to fully submit.

Alastair was supposed to help him with that. He was supposed to be enough. But it seems that literally nothing is, for Dean, and he can’t help the hurt that blooms in his chest as he thinks once again of how he’s been abandoned.

It blurs the dimly lit ceiling above him as his eyes begin to sting, feeling something between betrayal and a sharp sense of disgust at himself as the fact that he’s dying settles into him like dust.

He’s dying, just like he always knew he would. Dad was wrong. Not even Alastair’s methods were enough for his sick broken heart.

The past seven years are a black blur in his mind, the past five months a similar haze of bright white. The basement, then that fluorescent-lit room; The only two places he was kept for so long. The only two places fit to contain someone as crazy as him.

And now. Now there’s the office. Now there’s the window he’s still staring out of. It’s probably the last place he’s going to be kept.

He doesn’t want to die here, all by himself, institutionalized, trapped inside the building he always knew he’d one day be forgotten in. He’s not stupid enough to think there’s any hope for him, really, but he doesn’t want to spend the last weeks of his life locked away.

I wish I could go outside, he thinks weakly, knowing it’s even more of a pipe dream than kisses.

No one trusts a sub like Dean to be let out of confinement. He’d dashed any chances of earning that kind of trust this morning, when he’d strangled his new therapist to unconsciousness.

Dean feels bad about that now, after the man had been so nice to him in response. He feels even worse knowing he’d do it again, given the chance.

He would. He would.

Probably, he would.

He…would have to. ‘Cause it’s what dad would want.

Dean presses his lips together, feeling guilt churning inside of him.

Fuck.

Blinking his eyes back open, Dean feels the guilt intensify as he sees that the sky is still staring blatantly down at him in judgment.

The sky he can see because the therapist had tied him up on his back, and angled him so he could look up at it.

Dean doesn’t believe what the man said for a second, about being here to help him get better. It’s obvious that he only got the new guy assigned as his doc because all the legit ones have given up.

But maybe Castiel doesn’t know that. Dean sort of feels bad for him, if that’s the case.

If Dean is honest with himself, it doesn’t really seem like the guy is messing with him, or trying to fuck with his head for the fun of it. Castiel…Cas…seems kinda…sweet, he supposes, though it feels weird to think of a dom that way.

He knows there’s a handful out there like that though. Who are just sort of softies. Sammy was kinda the same, back in the day.

It’s just that those soft types don’t do well with subs like Dean. They get sick of him much faster than the ones who like it rough.

And they get mean, when they realize Dean ain’t gonna be good for them. Dean breaks them, the way they’re supposed to break him.

It hurts worse to get shouted at by someone who’d tried smiling at him first, though, so Dean hasn’t sought out the sweeter kinda doms in a long time. None’a them really wanted much to do with him anyway, once his reputation got around.

Dean wonders how long it will take for Cas to get sick’a him too. He wonders how bad it will hurt.

Pretty badly, judging by how much Dean already misses the gentling, which he knows he doesn’t deserve. Even with how much of a slut he’s been, he ain’t never found a dom who treated him so nice, even only at the start.

Dean shuts his eyes.

Stupid.

Stupid to care. Stupid to start to let himself.

He ain’t supposed to care about no dom’s approval anyway.

But jesus christ, it’s hard. It’s hard when the new therapist makes it seem like it might be in reach.

It isn’t. Or if it is, it won’t be for long. Dean is going to knock it aside with all his strength.

Because Dean knows who he belongs to, and he knows it ain’t no hippie psych. It ain’t no dom at all, no matter what his stupid hormones tell him.

Dean belongs to his dad, not any dom. He forgot that once, and ended up in a basement for seven years. He doesn’t plan on forgetting again.

Listening to the heavy hiss of the rain like a snake deciding whether to bite, Dean pushes halfheartedly at his bonds. Feeling the pressure of the ropes on his skin through the sleep clothes, he struggles to fit the sensation somewhere into his sense of self, which is flipping like a penny in the air at the contradicting realities.

Though he’s been tied up a million times, he’s never been clothed while also restrained. It seems to defeat the purpose, because why else would you tie someone up except to hit them or fuck them, both which are impeded by the presence of clothing?

Am I an animal to you or not? He wonders, frustrated, but he doesn’t truthfully know who the question is being directed at.

Because while it’s Castiel who keeps treating him with nothing but contradictions, it’s Dean who feels like he can’t make up his mind.

It’s overwhelming, the way he’s being handled, like he’s human, but also like he belongs to the dom. As if the therapist thinks those things can coexist, and doesn’t see the paradox at all.

Being tied up isn’t new to him, not by a long shot, but it’s always made him panic, not calmed him down.

But Cas had just…he’d been so calm, when tying Dean up, like there was nothing unusual or shameful about it. He hadn’t lorded the fact that Dean was going to be restrained over him like he was trying to make a point about power, had just brought the ropes out without comment and started wrapping them around him like it was as natural a routine as brushing his teeth.

Which had…made Dean feel something for sure, as he’d been bound, but it hadn’t been anger, or fear. The man had just been too gentle with him, too firm without being threatening.

He acts like these things aren’t degrading. Like there’s nothing humiliating about holding a gag in your mouth or being tied up.

But of course there is. Isn’t there?

Isn’t there?

He feels so turned around, all the lines between what he is and what he wants to be becoming more knotted the more he tries to untangle them. Because the truth is, Cas isn’t treating him like an animal, even though he is treating him like a sub, and Dean doesn’t know what the difference is, or if there even is one at all.

None of it makes sense, and he feels so shy and confused, flustered by how safe he feels in his own docility. He doesn’t understand it, but he feels less frightened than he should be, like his panic is being held back by the ropes.

He sort of…sort of likes not being able to move around. He sort of likes having to stay where Cas has put him.

He’s very comfortable here.

Dean shuts his eyes.

His pajamas are warm. And soft. They feel nice against his skin.

No one’s put clothes on him in such a long time. He’d almost forgotten what it feels like, to not be naked.

It makes him feel like a person again, and he’s not sure if he likes that. In some way it was easier, not to be.

Now he’s stuck in some strange middle ground he can’t make sense of, where he has to be conscious of the fact that he doesn’t mind being tied up as much as he knows he should. Where he has to be present in his mind as decisions are made for him, and be aware of how he feels guilty glad that they are.

Which is. Wrong. Dad would be mad at him. Dean shouldn’t be fed and comfortable. He should be on the ground.

But there’s something so comforting about having the choice to hurt himself taken out of his hands, even if he knows he deserves it. It’s frightening, how easy it is to give in to, and Dean wonders how long he’ll have the energy to project an outrage he doesn’t really feel.

He wonders if he would be doing something wrong if he just let himself stop fighting so hard against everything. If he….didn’t strangle the therapist, if he somehow gets another chance. If he just lets the guy keep being nice to him, even if he knows he shouldn’t.

It’s not like he’s gonna be alive much longer anyway. It’s not like there’s anyone his acceptance could hurt anymore.

Dean’s pride went up in flames a long time ago, along with the rest of his future. There’s no one left, really, who is really gonna give a shit if Dean acts like the bitch he always was.

Except maybe Dean himself. But even that resistance is teetering precariously against the pure exhaustion of being what he is, and against the temptation of not being relentlessly hurt.

It just feels so nice to be allowed to lie warm and comfortable on the couch, instead of cold and bloody and broken on the floor of some cell. Everything feels so good right now, under the soft weight of the blanket, and his own will to try to be angry about it is melting away like butter into bread.

No one’s let him sleep like this in such a long time. No one’s let him sleep pretty much at all in what feels like forever and ever.

The rain patters outside like fingers tapping on wood. Dean likes it, and his mind starts to drift.

It’s not going to last, he tries to remind himself. You’ll fuck it up somehow eventually.

Even that feels faint and wispy against the stark reality of his own comfort.

Everything feels nice. He’s so relieved, he’s so so relieved. He’s so relieved that he gets to die warm instead of freezing, even if he doesn’t get to go outside before he’s gone.

It’s still nice. Castiel is still nice to him.

He likes Castiel. Even if that’s bad.

Dean already knew he was bad a long time ago. His dad isn’t around to be ashamed anymore. And that’s…that’s sort of a relief as well.

Which is also bad. Bad bad bad.

Dean doesn’t care.

He feels warm.

Chapter Text

The number to the Singer Salvage Yard has been disconnected. Cas discovers this in the morning before he heads to work, and he sighs with frustration as he hangs up his phone and puts it down on the diner table before him.

Slumping down a little in his seat, he taps anxiously on the edge of his coffee cup, looking absently out the large window he’s sitting besides.

It’s the exact same view he’d been looking out at last time he’d come to The Roadhouse, without even the slightest shift in perspective. He hadn’t thought twice about tucking himself into the same booth he’d sat in last time, right down to being on the same side of the table.

Cas is very much a creature of habit.

He likes familiarity. He likes knowing what he’s doing, and having a routine, and sticking to it.

Even not knowing exactly what he’s going to order off of a menu sets him a little bit on edge. So he feels more than a little bit unsettled right now, in a totally new town and a totally new situation, with an unpredictable patient he knows almost nothing about.

Looking out at the bustling morning, Cas wonders what it was like for Dean growing up here in this small, conservative town. He wonders if the man will ever tell him, or if he’ll be left flying completely blind the whole time.

“Order up,” he hears, and Cas turns away from the window to see Jo sliding into the opposite booth.

She’s clearly on-duty, in uniform and holding his breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. Nonetheless, she doesn’t hesitate to make herself at home, sitting down with a huff and stealing one of the slices of buttered toast off his plate before pushing the meal across the table to him.

It’s a little too forceful, and Cas has to stop it with his hand before it slides off the edge and into his lap.

“Hello Jo,” he says mildly.

“Yo,” she replies, and takes a bite of the crunchy brown bread.

“This is gross,” she says almost immediately. “Wheat bread sucks.”

But she doesn’t offer to return the stolen food.

“Sorry,” is all Cas says, once again finding himself unsure if he’s observing normal human behavior.

It’s not like he’s the best judge of such things, but he’s never had someone act so casual with him so quickly. He doesn’t mind it, exactly, but he’s a little worried that it might mean something he doesn’t understand.

Does Jo…dislike him? Is she trying to put him in his place?

If so, Cas can’t say he has much of an idea on how to back off. It’s not like he’s the one who keeps approaching her.

“So our boy is a big celebrity now,” she says offhandedly, raising her eyebrow at Cas across the table. “That thanks to you?” she asks, and Cas frowns back at her, a bit affronted even though the girl doesn’t sound mad.

“No, of course not,” he tells her truthfully. “I would never break patient confidentiality like that. It was one of the other therapists I think, a man named Gordon Walker.”

Jo hums, and Cas starts to scoop up the “archived files” about Dean’s previous relationship with the center that he’d had strewn across the table. Though they don’t give much useful information about Dean’s background, there’s a lot of details in here he can’t imagine his patient would appreciate being shared.

It’s bad enough that the man is all over the tabloids. At least his name has been kept out of the press thus far.

“Well, give him a kiss for me if you see him,” Jo tells him, raising the toast slightly as if to say “cheers.” “‘Cause it seems like he did Dean a favor.”

Shuffling the papers into a pile, Cas looks at her curiously, and the girl rolls her eyes like she thinks he’s stupid.

“You’re like, in charge of him now, aren’t you?” she prods, taking another bite of the self-proclaimed “gross” toast. “There was like a whole press conference about it the other day.”

With seemingly no qualms about speaking with her mouth full, Jo’s words come out muffled, but Cas still understands them perfectly, and understands their implications.

There was, in fact, a whole press conference the other day, in which Naomi had announced the transfer of care. Cas is surprised Jo had even heard about it, much less watched it. Not many people did, world having mostly moved on from Dean’s story within a day or two.

It tells Cas she must be tracking the ongoings of Dean’s case pretty closely, and he feels somewhat touched on his patient’s behalf. The impression he’s gotten so far is that Dean had been a pretty isolated, lonely kid, but it seems he has people who care about him rather a lot.

“I am,” Cas confirms, putting the papers back into the folder they’d come from. “I have primary control of Dean’s care now, though my powers are still quite limited since his claim is still officially registered to the center.”

Jo hums again, and takes another bite of the toast. Cas pushes the folder aside.

“How is he doing?” she asks after a few seconds have passed. Her voice is quiet now, obviously searching.

Letting out a long breath through his nose, Cas glances out at the street again as he contemplates what he could possibly tell her.

It was a good decision to wear a turtleneck today, despite the heat. Otherwise he might have to explain the bruises.

“It’s been less than a week,” he eventually settles on, though it feels unbelievable as he says it. “For the amount of time that I have been treating him, Dean has made enormous progress.”

He declines to tell her that that progress had involved the man becoming conscious and present enough to almost kill two different people, one of them being himself. He has a feeling that information would not go over too well if he shared it, and would also be quite a violation of that patient confidentiality he had just been boasting about.

“But he’s still dying,” Jo guesses, sounding flat. Her voice doesn’t betray the anxiety that is clearly present in her eyes.

Cas sighs.

“I don’t know, Jo,” he says honestly. “The physical manifestation of the illness is almost entirely dependent on his hormone levels. I haven’t been given an updated report since I arrived, and I don’t know when I can expect that to come.”

Leaning forward with her elbows on the table, Jo munches on her piece of toast absently as she seems to think something over. As Cas watches, her green familial-bonded claim bracelet slips lower on her arm.

His mind drifts to his conversation with Gabriel, and the hints of an unshared life he’d seen in that photo he’d been sent. He wonders what color claim bracelet his brother wears now, or if he even wears one at all.

“They run the bloodwork about every week, I think,” Jo says eventually. “You got here Wednesday, yeah? And it’s Monday now. So they should probably be doing the tests within the next couple’a days.”

She speaks without looking at him, eyes a little to the side, like she’s sort of embarrassed that she knows this. Cas stares at her without comprehension for a moment, before explanations start to appear in his mind.

“You were a patient?” he asks, and maybe he sounds more distressed by this than is regular, because Jo shoots him a somewhat incredulous look.

But Jo just seems so…spirited, and he doesn’t like to think of her locked up in that horrible place, even if he doesn’t know her very well.

“Once,” she admits uncomfortably. “A couple of years ago, for a few shitty days. Some customer here got a bit too handsy, and I punched him. That didn’t go over well with the cops.”

Cas purses his lips together, not knowing what to say. “Sorry” doesn’t really seem to cut it, knowing what she’d likely been put through just because she tried to defend herself.

Even if it wasn’t as bad as what’s been done to Dean. It’s all so horribly unjust.

Up in Vermont, at least, her mother would have been able to veto the institutionalization, as her claim holder, and just paid whatever fine was applied. Not here, though. Here in Kansas, the government can temporarily seize submissives whenever they see fit, having them “corrected” for “public outbursts” and other such transgressions against the social hierarchy.

“That should not have happened to you,” he eventually settles on saying, though it too feels like much too little.

Jo just scoffs at him, which doesn’t discourage that interpretation.

“Yeah, whatever,” the girl says, with dismissiveness she can’t possibly feel. “Didn’t stop me. I’d slug the guy again, no problem.”

Tossing her half eaten toast onto his untouched plate without thought, Jo reaches across the table to steal his napkin now, and grab the pen he’d brought along to make notes on Dean’s files.

“Point is, I met this chick while I was there. Name’s Charlie. She runs the numbers. Not as bad as the rest of the lot there, at least.”

As Cas watches, Jo scribbles something that looks like an email address on the napkin, then a phone number underneath the words.

“If you want the report put together stat, this is the girl to talk to. Tell her Jo sent you, and she’ll know you’re good for it.”

Good for what? Cas wants to ask, baffled, not sure why they’re talking like they’re in the mob all of a sudden. But he doesn’t ask, not wanting to compromise what has thus far turned out to be his best contact in terms of both Dean and the center, knowing he needs an ally within the building.

Jo’s assurance that this Charlie is “not as bad as the rest” sounds promising, even if it isn’t a glowing review. At this point, though, anyone who won’t assault Dean given the chance is more than enough for him, and he takes the napkin gratefully, trying to shake off the feeling that they’re playing out a drug deal.

“Thank you,” he says genuinely, tucking it into his pocket. Jo grunts, and slumps in her seat.

Carelessly, she starts tugging at her hair, gazing out the window. She doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, so Cas accepts the indefinite company and finally picks up his fork.

The food is good. Better than anything he would have made himself. He’s not a terrible cook, though he certainly could have been, growing up with a family chef and the mantra that such domestic activities are submissive’s work. But he’d had to learn to take care of himself once he’d been cut off from his family, and had had to learn the basics of how to keep a home with a traumatized nine year old running around in it.

Claire has been out of his house for more than six years now, though, and he only really bothers looking after himself when he has someone else living with him who he’s looking after as well. He doesn’t usually have the time or energy when it’s just him, and he probably would have just skipped breakfast entirely if he hadn’t wanted to try contacting Mr. Singer before heading over to work.

Not that that had led much of anywhere, thus far. Thoughtfully, he looks over at the girl sitting across from him, who’s now braiding her own hair while staring into space.

She’s happily oblivious to the dirty looks the both of them are receiving from other customers, who are clearly getting annoyed at waiting for the one waitress who’s on staff to finish her chat. Cas isn’t interested in getting a fork stabbed through his throat, though, so he doesn’t even consider pointing this out to her.

“Jo, did you ever hear Dean mention a place called the Singer Salvage Yard?” he asks instead, taking another bite of his food.

Jo glances at him absently, but not hostilely, which Cas is pretty sure is an improvement.

“Sure,” she offers, shrugging, still mostly occupied with her hair. “Dean picked up work over there whenever he was in town.”

She frowns out at the pedestrians crossing the street outside like they’re significantly more interesting to watch than Cas.

“Stopped when he was like sixteen or seventeen, though. I think his dad had some sort of falling out with the guy that ran the place.”

Interesting, Cas thinks, itching to take the pen back from Jo, but wary after remembering her disapproval of his notetaking last time. He doesn’t try, worried that the girl will get annoyed and go back to work. She doesn’t seem to like him very much, and he feels like her willingness to talk to him is precarious.

“His father used to work for Mr. Singer, right?” he asks instead, deciding that he can mentally hold on to the information that Jo is providing until he gets back to his car.

It’s not like it’s not significant: That Dean used to work for this mysterious Mr. Singer, after his dad had already been fired.

“Yeah,” Jo confirms for him, finishing her braid. She immediately starts undoing it as soon as it’s done. “They were like, army friends or something. But John was always drinking. Could never hold a job for long, including that one. Didn’t stop him from dumping his kids on the guy, who wasn’t gonna win best parent of the year either, for the record.”

He must look surprised, because Jo glances back over at him, and smirks at whatever expression is on his face.

“Like I said last time, it’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone’s business around here. Bobby’s sort of a character in the area.”

“Oh,” Cas probes curiously, partially because he wants to know, and partially because he can tell Jo wants to tell him.

Bobby- who he assumes is Mr. Singer- isn’t his patient, but he certainly seems to have a connection with him. Cas is a little relieved to find out that the man isn’t some client of Dean’s who’d paid to have him “retrained,” though he still has a hard time imagining what possible reason a teenager’s boss would have for funding the disturbing trips.

Jo nods, and sits up straight, suddenly perking up. There’s a mischievous tilt to her lips that tells him she’s excited to be sharing some gossip she’s not really supposed to know.

“He’s the only decent mechanic in the area, unless you wanna drive to Topeka. So he does good business, even though he’s kind of a mess.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s kinda one of those survivalist guys. Super paranoid, all about livin’ off the land. Dean said he has like 150 guns. He shot one at my mom’s car once, ‘cause he thought she was an undercover cop.”

She says this with a bit too much enthusiasm than he thinks a story about one’s mother nearly being shot really should invoke, especially considering the woman seems to be quite close to her daughter. But the severity of the situation seems to be lost on Jo, as do the implications of some of the other things she’s saying. It seems clear that for whatever reason, the girl does not consider Bobby to be an actual threat.

“And…he still has your mother’s business, after that?” Cas asks her, perplexed. Jo looks at him like he’s crazy.

“Well it’s not like she’s gonna drive an hour over to the next city every time her car makes a weird noise,” she tells him critically, like this is a perfectly logical line of reasoning.

Alright then.

He forgot that people in small towns always seem to have their….quirks.

“Besides,” she continues casually, as Cas takes another bite of his eggs. “It’s not like it’s that out of the ordinary. He’s a nut. My mom’s not the first customer he’s shot at, and won’t be the last, but he’ll fix whatever you bring him, long as you can catch him sober.”

Cas starts to see what Jo was saying about this man not being parent of the year either.

“And John left his children with this man?” he asks, with doubt in his voice, though nothing he knows about John Winchester would suggest this is something he wouldn’t do.

It’s not like the man seemed to care about their safety, if Dean’s scars are anything to go by.

“Yeah, whenever he got sick’a them,” Jo answers carelessly. “I know Sam liked the guy, even though he was crazy. Said he didn’t make them train, whateverthehell that meant. Didn’t ask, ‘cause I didn’t wanna know.”

Cas can’t say he wants to know either, but he makes a note of it anyway, knowing it’s likely connected to the bizarre set of self defense skills that Dean has thus far displayed. He wonders if Dean would answer him, if he asked about it, and then wonders if he’s looking to be strangled again.

Sighing, Cas takes a sip of his now lukewarm coffee, contemplating the benefits of conveniently having an issue with his car later today.

But that won’t work. It’s a rental, and he’d have to bring it back to the dealer. Anyway, he’s not sure how he’d explain a bullet hole in the door upon returning it.

Jo leans forward, and Cas braces himself, waiting for her to drop another bomb.

But all she says is, “Are you gonna eat your bacon?” Cas isn’t, so he pushes the plate towards her side.

The girl makes quick work of the meat, like she’s hungry. Cas worries briefly that she isn’t being fed enough. Then he remembers who holds her claim, and figures that that’s pretty unlikely.

It’s not an unreasonable thing to be concerned about, though, generally. Malnourishment in submissives is so common it’s almost standard, especially in more conservative areas. Around here, submissives don’t even need a collar or claim bracelet to be identifiable. Cas can pick them out just by the hollowness of their cheeks, the bruises on their faces, the way they walk with their heads tilted towards the ground.

Glancing out towards the rest of the dining area, depression fills him as he takes in the sad figures scattered quietly around the bustling room. None of the submissives he spots are being made to kneel, thankfully, though he notices several sitting without any food in front of them while the dominant they accompany eats their fill.

Even of the ones who are eating, only one or two look comfortable. The rest shovel food in their mouths like they’re just waiting for it to be taken away, heads bowed, bodies cringing, some with bruises peeking out from under their clothes.

Not a single one is eating alone, or with only other submissives for company. It’s not illegal for submissives to go out by themselves in Kansas, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be common.

It’s not much different from the midwest that Cas remembers from his childhood, though he’d lived several states away in Wisconsin. The general attitude towards submissives doesn’t seem to be very different around here, though, and it doesn’t seem to have changed much in the last eight years.

Unhappily, Cas sips on his coffee, and contemplates whether there’s any way that he can get Dean the hell out of this entire area of the country. It makes Cas unbearably sad to imagine the man as one of the submissives around him, even those who seem better taken care of.

You really hate being a submissive, don’t you? he’d asked the man yesterday.

Of course I hate it, Dean had replied.

Of course he hates it, when this is the world he lives in. When even recovery only promises a life of more pain and unhappiness, of having his choices squashed and his relationships controlled.

Even if the person who ends up claiming Dean isn’t a monster like Alastair, Cas has a hard time picturing the submissive ever being happy under the thumb of some bigoted, postering dom. For a moment, Cas feels a swoop of real panic as he starts to realize he can’t picture what a healthy relationship would look like for someone as unique as Dean at all.

He’s such a sensitive submissive, and clearly has such a high level of need, but is so deeply spirited as well. Could he ever be content in a life where his domination needs were actually met?

Cas has a hard time picturing it. Uncomfortable, he feels uneasiness churn in his stomach when he remembers the sickening roster of “treatments” this Mr. Singer had apparently paid for, that Dean had supposedly requested of his therapists himself.

“Do you know if Mr. Singer has a more recent number than the one listed on his website?” he asks eventually, pushing the far off issue of Dean’s life post-recovery away for now. “The only one I could find seems to have been disconnected, and I was hoping I’d be able to speak to him at some point.”

Jo gives him a doubtful look, which Cas can’t blame her for. He’s starting to second guess the sanity of that plan as well, now that he’s heard what the man’s like.

“Honestly? I didn’t even know the guy had a website. If his number isn’t working, it’s because he took the phone off the hook. He doesn’t want to be contacted.”

Shaking her head, Jo takes one of the sugar packets meant for coffee out from the little box on the table. She rips it open and pours its content out into her hand.

“Look, he’s been kinda weird forever, but he really went off the rails in the past couple’a years. Mom’s had to wait weeks to get the truck fixed sometimes, ‘cause he barely takes customers anymore.”

“I see,” Cas says, even though he doesn’t, frowning at this new information.

This doesn’t sound promising, and he’s starting to doubt the efforts to contact this man are worthwhile. He doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who might provide reliable information, even if he did know Dean before he was sick.

“If you ask me, I think he’s a wackjob,” Jo announces defiantly, as if this isn’t supremely self evident already. “Dunno why Sam liked the guy so much, ‘cept that his own dad sucked so bad. I doubt you’re gonna get anything useful outta him, even if you do find a number that works. You’re more likely to end up with buckshot in your ass, if you know what I mean.”

Cas does, in fact, know what she means. She means he’s likely to end up with buckshot in his ass if he contacts Mr. Singer.

There’s no subtext to her words, nor any exaggeration, going by what she’s already told him. He’s more than happy to accept the warning for what it is, and takes another sip of his coffee while reconsidering his original idea entirely.

“I understand,” he says mildly. “Thank you for the advice.”

Jo nods, and then throws the sugar back into her mouth.

She brushes her hands off on the skirt of her uniform dress after she swallows as if eating entire packets full of straight sugar is a matter of course.

“I better get back to work,” she says abruptly. “Baldy over there’s been giving me the evil eye for the past five minutes, and mom will be pissed if she gets another complaint.”

Cas nods in understanding.

“Of course. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me again, Jo,” he answers her, and Jo waves him off.

“Anytime, man. Say hi to Dean for me.”

“I will,” he agrees, hoping whatever he’s facing today will allow him to keep his promise.

****

He sits in his car for a little while after that, contemplating the number Jo had written down on the coffee-stained napkin. It’s his best bet for any sort of ally in the center, thus far, and he really does want to get an update on Dean’s hormone report.

He hesitates, though, for no real reason that he can understand, wondering what he’s really getting himself into here and if he’s truly prepared to deal with it.

No matter what Jo says, a center employee is a center employee, and Cas…hasn’t had the best experience with those.

But what choice do I have? He thinks unhappily, looking out through the dashboard window. Dean’s stuck in there, and so for now, I am too.

For a few seconds, he just watches the pedestrians milling about in front of him, crossing the street, eating lunch on the sidewalk benches, walking their dogs while it’s sunny. They look happy, and carefree for the most part, out enjoying the post-storm weather. Cas feels it like a punch to the gut, how badly Dean wants to be out here too.

But Cas doesn’t know how long it’s going to be until the man can be, again. His initial petition to treat Dean at home had obviously been denied, and even his request that he be allowed to take Dean out to the garden had been vetoed when he’d asked.

Ache in his chest, Cas taps absently on his leg as he watches some little girls play hopscotch. He wonders how much better Dean will have to be before the center grants him any of the freedom he desires. He wonders how much data he will need to prove that the man deserves to feel the sun on his face.

Rubbing his forehead, Cas looks down at the napkin on his lap as he pulls his phone out of his pocket.

He feels anxious about opening it, though, even though he isn’t sure why, and he hesitates for a moment before typing his password in to unlock it.

Only after he’s staring vacantly down at the blank screen does he wonder what he’d been anticipating, taking in the lack of notifications, lack of banners indicating missed calls or texts.

It looks the same as it almost always does, generic and bland, little apps sitting quietly untouched against the pre-loaded background that had never been changed. There’s no flurry of missed calls for him to sort through, no comically large numbers hovering over his various mailboxes.

Back to normal, I guess, he thinks, but the relief he feels is shallower than he would have expected it to be.

There’s something sort of bleak about how quickly the world has moved on from the drama of the past few days, and he can’t help the odd pang of disappointment that comes when he opens twitter and sees nothing new.

“The Punch” isn’t trending anymore, nor is his own name. Without thinking much about it, Cas clicks out of the site and opens his text messages, but there’s nothing new there either.

Just his own final message sent off to Gabriel hours ago, and below that, Jody’s last text from a week earlier. After that, the dates on the messages quickly start to jump backwards in time by matters of months, representing age old conversations with dentists and doctors that aren’t worth the data they keep to save them.

Cas isn’t sure why he expected anything else. Pushing down the slight twinge of disappointment, he scrolls absently for a moment downwards with no real intent, moving backwards through his limited communications with disinterested exhaustion.

It only takes one or two flicks of his thumb before he’s more than a year back in time, and less than a minute before he reaches the end of the records. He’s left blinking with some sense of hollowness at the earliest conversation, from some old classmate of his he’d never responded to.

It unsettles him a little to see how little life there has been between then and now, to see how small the distance is between the person he was back then and the person he is today.

Shaking his head as if to dispel his wandering thoughts, Cas scrolls back up to the top of the screen and clicks the little plus sign that will let him send a new message.

He types in the number on the napkin before he can talk himself out of it, texting quickly so he doesn’t once again overthink.

Hello. Is this Charlie?

Then,

I have been anxious to get my hands on an updated hormonal report for my patient. I was told you were the person to speak to in regards to this matter.

The two texts appear on the white background with a small sound effect, one after the other in quick succession. Cas stares at them a little anxiously as the phone confirms they’ve been received, second guessing his wording.

Almost immediately, those three little dots appear in response, and it’s barely half a second before the answering text message appears.

Who is this? The words read, and Cas raises his eyebrows in surprise, belatedly realizing he hadn’t introduced himself.

Castiel Novak, he answers her quickly. I was given your contact information by my friend Jo.

The words come out naturally, typed without thought, but he stares down at them after they’ve appeared, thumb hovering over the “send” button.

He backspaces quickly.

I was given your contact information by Jo, he corrects, then sends the message without letting himself dwell on it.

A thumbs up appears at the corner of his text.

Got it, Charlie replies. Then, I’ll move ur guy to the top of the list. Will get it done today or tomorrow.

Cas’s eyebrows jump higher, not quite believing it could be that easy.

He’s never successfully navigated asking someone for a favor before, awkward and generally unpopular as he is.

But it seems throwing Jo’s name in the mix really was the VIP card the girl had claimed, because Charlie doesn’t ask anything else of him, just sends him another thumbs up.

Giving her thumbs up a thumbs up, Cas sends another sparkly “thank you” gif, choosing a mostly pink one from the several that pop up.

A “haha” appears at the corner of it, and Cas frowns down, remembering how Gabe had reacted the same way last night.

Maybe he should stop using those. They don’t seem to be the casual interactions that he’d hoped.

Oh well, he thinks, sighing, clicking his phone off as he puts it away. It’s not like fumbling social interactions is anything particularly new.

He doesn’t seem to have screwed it up badly enough to have ruined his chances at gaining an ally, tentative though that connection seems to be. It already seems to be paying off, and Cas feels buoyed at the idea that he could be receiving Dean’s updated hormonal chart within a number of hours, a landmark that he desperately needs.

The disturbing revelations he’d discovered last night about Dean’s past interactions with the center have shaken him, throwing even more doubt on the way he’s been handling his patient up until now. Almost nothing about the way Dean has reacted to anything he’s done has been expected, and now more than ever he feels like his confidence in his methods has been rattled.

The hormone chart will be able to tell him whether or not he’s heading in the right direction, or if Naomi really was right, and he’s been dealing with Dean completely wrong. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do if that is the case, because he knows in his bones he isn’t capable of treating Dean with the sickening roughness the man has apparently been seeking out.

But at least he will know, soon, if he’s up against something he can’t handle, will have some kind of objective gauge to tell him if the gentleness he sees in Dean is completely insane.

Mood slightly improved at the prospect of having some kind of light to follow in this storm, he briefly contemplates the idea that the worst of this confusion could be over, especially if he really does have a contact on the inside of the center who might be willing to be on his team. Shifting the car into drive as he pulls out of the parking space, Cas looks out at the sunny road with more optimism than he’d started with, praying his good attitude isn’t misplaced, and that he’ll see Dean out on these streets sometime soon.

Chapter Text

He meets Dean in the sunroom the next morning, because there’s a handyman installing a new window in the office. Two orderlies bring him in, and he comes quietly, hands bound together with the men each gripping one of his arms.

With damp hair, wearing fresh pajama bottoms with the same sweatshirt from yesterday, the young man looks a bit spooked. He’s clearly just been washed, and Cas feels protective anger at the pale pallor of the sub’s face, sending a glare at the handlers attending his patient.

Realistically, he knows it’s unreasonable to expect that no one will ever be dealing with Dean but himself. Dean has needs that have to be addressed when Cas isn’t around, and Cas isn’t the best person to deal with many of them. He also knows the orderlies could very well have behaved entirely professionally around Dean, and Dean would still be deeply alarmed. It doesn’t sit right with him anyway, thinking of the sub being manhandled, hosed down like an animal, even if he wasn’t being physically harmed.

“Thank you,” he says tightly, before the men retreat, but is relieved when they shut the door behind them.

Then he’s left with Dean standing quietly in the middle of the enormous room, bathed in sunlight with his head bowed towards the carpet. Cas thought he would like the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out at the woods behind the center, but as Cas watches, the sub doesn’t even glance up at the view.

Discomfort twists in his stomach.

“Did they touch you?” he asks, with transparent concern, not knowing what else could have put Dean into such a state of disquiet.

The man bites his lip, and just shrugs.

“Blondie’s handsy,” he quips, with an unconvincing smile he doesn’t even try to shoot at anything but the floor.

The concern in Cas’s chest turns red and molten hot.

“I’m sorry,” he says, with as much gravity as he can muster. “I will ensure that man isn’t allowed near you again.”

He means it, already mentally drafting the email to Naomi demanding the molester be removed from Dean’s care team.

She won’t be happy. This will be the third orderly he’s banning from interacting with his patient already, and deep down he knows it’s possible there won’t be anyone left within a matter of days.

It’s hard to believe there are many people here who can be trusted not to cause Dean harm.

But he can’t just stand by and allow his patient to be groped and fondled like an object whenever he has to be bathed or have his bandages changed.

The young man in question bites his lip, brittle smile dropping like a rock.

“Oh,” he mutters uncertainly. “Ain’t. Ain’t nothin’. Just copped a feel is all.”

The outrage from yesterday is totally gone. He seems startled by Cas’s serious response, and not a little thrown off. Cas knows it’s unlikely anyone has ever responded to him being groped like it’s anything more than a joke.

“That shouldn’t have happened to you,” is all Cas says in response, because it most certainly isn’t a joke to him.

It seems to be unnerving Dean a little, so he doesn’t press further, holding back the indignation he knows such treatment deserves.

Cas knows subs experience such pawing all too frequently, especially around these parts, and Dean is more used to brushing such things off than he is to addressing them as a serious problem. From unfortunate experience, Cas knows that making too big of a deal out of something a patient has been habituated to is more likely to make them shut down than open up. The best he can do is be clear that he finds such behavior unacceptable before allowing the conversation to move on.

“Oh,” the sub says nervously, glancing to the side, then up at Cas like he’s gauging the situation. “Oh, uh. Thanks.”

He fidgets in place like he isn’t sure how to respond.

Cas waits him out, sitting quietly upon one of the oddly modern stuffed chairs placed precariously around the open room.

There’s an indoor fountain placed like a centerpiece among the furniture a few yards to his right, and it bubbles peacefully in the silence as Dean fidgets, bridging the gap between the sub’s far flung words.

“Thought you’d be mad at me,” he admits eventually, rather abrupt like his own confession has gotten the drop on him. He cringes after he says it, like the acknowledgement might belatedly make it come true.

“Of course not, sweetheart,” Cas assures him, and Dean’s shoulders drop in relief.

It’s disturbing to see how much tension leaves him in an instant, to see how much of it had been caused more by the fear of being berated than by any actual assault that had taken place.

He’s a strange young man, sensitive and prickly all at once, strikingly dangerous and strikingly vulnerable in turns that flip fast as a coin in the air.

Cas had come in today knowing that, determined to put yesterday behind them as much as possible to try to start to crack open the mystery that is Dean Winchester. His conversation with Gabriel had left him feeling hopeful, reminding him that it is possible to make progress against even the highest of internal walls, and that so much of that progress really boils down to finding smaller ways to put someone at ease.

Which…isn’t something he’s the best at, in general. He’s never really been the charismatic or intuitive type.

But he’s been working with mistreated subs for a long time, and he isn’t flying completely blind here. Dean may be one in a million in some ways, but he’s not a complete anomaly.

Ultimately, he needs to build a relationship with the young man before they can make any real headway. He’d shown Dean yesterday that he can be trusted as a dom, but now he has to show him he can be trusted as a person as well.

If Dean is to open up to him at all, he has to see Cas as a friendly face, outside of any dynamic based interactions. As such, Cas’s plan is to back off as much as possible today, determined to steer their time together in a much more casual direction than it had gone the day before.

“How did you sleep?” he asks, instead of further pursuing what he knows would be a severely stress invoking conversation.

Dean looks surprised to be asked something so normal, which Cas can’t really fault him for. The intensity of yesterday’s events hangs over them like an elephant in the room, but Cas is perfectly happy to ignore it if Dean is willing to as well.

It seems that he is, even as he shifts uncomfortably, bound hands twitching in front of him in confusion.

“Uh, good, I guess,” he says self consciously, digging his toes into the carpet under his bare feet. “Was nice to be on the couch.”

Cas is sure it was, after months of being kept on the floor, but he finds it hard to believe Dean’s claim that this kindness led to a night of rest. The submissive looks exhausted, and is white as a ghost, freckles standing out against his pale cheeks with a contrast they shouldn’t have.

He seems almost shell-shocked, like he just staggered out of a war zone, and Cas feels a clench of pity at the knowledge that this is pretty damn close to the truth.

“That’s good,” Cas responds gently, and sends the man a sympathetic smile. “Did you eat yet?”

Predictably, the answer is no, and Cas pulls out the McMuffin he’d bought on his way to the center.

He doesn’t plan on forcing Dean to eat this time, not unless they get to the end of the day and the young man is still on a hunger strike. He’s hoping to temp the submissive into eating willingly, though, by offering the unhealthy, greasy food he’s clearly so partial too.

“Why don’t you come have some breakfast, then?” he asks, undemanding, wiggling the grease stained bag a little in enticement.

Dean stares at it with an uncertain hunger, like he’s not sure if such a simple thing will really be allowed.

“What do I gotta do for it?” he asks, transparently suspicious, and Cas feels his own playful attitude freeze in place.

Already he’s fumbling like an idiot, his attempts at coming off as “casual” managing to stomp all over Dean’s delicate issues. Feeling like an asshole for dangling food in front of Dean like some sort of dog treat, his arm lowers in shame as he brings the paper bag down to rest against his knees.

“Nothing, sweetheart,” he tells the man honestly, cursing himself for being so flippant. “I just want to make sure you get fed.”

Dean frowns at him like he has no idea what Cas is talking about. His eyebrows furrow like he’s trying to figure something out.

“Oh,” he says slowly, mouth forming slowly around the word as it comes out of him. “Like…like last night?” he adds tentatively, clearly not certain about the connection between the two instances.

But Cas feels relieved immediately, first that Dean has been able to hold on to his memory of yesterday, and second that the night hadn’t warped his miraculously neutral feelings towards essentially being force fed twice.

“Yes,” he agrees, with obvious relief, nodding in agreement with the man’s suggestion. “Yes, Dean, just like that. You never have to do anything to earn food, with me.”

It’s clear that Dean doesn’t really believe him, but he cautiously approaches anyway when Cas holds out the bag of food to him in offer.

Padding light across the floor, his bare feet are silent against the solid gray carpet that covers the ground like an ocean. Light falls over him in waves that move silently as he does, passage marked only by the strips of shadow he walks through, cast by the checkerboard pattern window frames.

He shoots Cas a hesitant look before he reaches up to take the crumpled brown bag, like it’s some sort of overwhelmingly precious gift he can’t really believe he’s being given. Cas smiles in assurance as the submissive’s bound hands close awkwardly around it, placing a gentle hand on the man’s forearm before he retreats.

Dean freezes in place, obviously frightened that he’s done something wrong, but Cas just starts tugging at the ropes around the submissive’s wrists.

“You’re not allowed to try to hurt me,” he reminds his patient without aggression, as the only bindings fall away from the man’s skin.

The submissive doesn’t answer him, but just stares down at his bare wrists like they’re incomprehensible. For several long seconds that drip away like water from a faucet, he doesn’t move his hands from the position they’d been tied in.

“Ok,” the man says mildly, belated in a way he doesn’t seem to notice. Still clutching the bag within one of his fists, Dean uncrosses his arms very slowly.

He seems fascinated by his untied wrists, and as Cas watches, he turns them both over in front of him to stare at his visible veins. There are scars over them on both of the outstretched limbs, thicker ones built up over years of ropeburn, as well as thin, sharper ones Cas doesn’t want to think about.

“I suppose it’s been a while since you haven’t been restrained in some way,” he says uncomfortably, when the silence stretches too long for him to bear.

“Yeah,” Dean says absently. “Years.”

Then he shuts his eyes, and brings his arms up to press the vulnerable underside of his wrists to his cheeks.

He seems to be soaking in the feeling of having some soft sensation against them, McDonalds bag hanging forgotten between his fingers. It’s like he’s forgotten that there’s anyone who can see him, behaving with such an intimate strangeness that Cas feels like he’s doing something wrong by watching him.

Dropping his eyes to give the man privacy, he feels uncomfortably aware of how grateful Dean must feel to be allowed to move totally freely after such a long time.

His commitment to treating Dean as normally as possible today might be backfiring, because it doesn’t seem there’s anything normal about being treated as a human being to Dean at all.

Just as he starts to worry that he’s made a mistake, though, the man opens his eyes again, and they seem clearer.

“Thanks,” he says simply, dropping his wrists from his cheeks. It’s one of the more stable sounding things to come out of his mouth thus far, and Cas gets the impression that he really means it.

“Of course, sweetheart,” he says back, and Dean shoots him a tired but grateful look, before plopping down on the floor by Cas’s feet.

Sitting with his legs crossed on the ground, he digs around absently in the McDonalds bag, oblivious to the surprise on Cas’s face.

He doesn’t seem to register that there might be anything notable about his seating choice, unselfconscious and comfortable like he’s forgotten he’s supposed to be ashamed.

“I used to love this stuff,” the man says casually, pulling the wrapped McMuffin out of the bag like a prize. “Would go to the drive-thru all the time with my brother, whenever we could scrounge up the money.”

His eyes go distant for a moment, like he’s remembering something, and the pale apathy on his face gives way to a small huff.

“My brother called it all a McHeartattack,” he says sardonically. “But he always liked rabbit food anyway.”

Cas just stares at him as he unwraps the sandwich, unexpected confession clinging to his ribcage like spiderwebs. It’s an old, forgotten thing, and he’s not sure where the confidence to share it has come from, but he finds himself hoping there will be more tumbling out of Dean’s worry-bitten lips.

But Dean only pulls off the wax paper with the same tired movements with which he’s done everything else, silence settling back over him like dust.

He eats the food with sad, unnerving indifference, like he’s too strung out to even remember how to enjoy it.

When he finishes, Cas holds his hand out for the trash, and Dean stares vacantly before leaning forward to try to suck the fingers into his mouth.

Cas pulls his hand back.

“The garbage, Dean,” he corrects gently.

Dean doesn’t seem to have the presence of mind to even be embarrassed.

All he says is, “Oh,” very quiet and very dull, before he crumples the paper up in his lap and hands it over.

He watches as Cas stands to walk across the room to the waste bin, and watches as he makes his way back.

“I gotta blow you now?” he asks, as soon as Cas is seated again, sounding totally resigned to the idea.

Something inside of his own heart twists up a little further at the miserable assumptions the submissive has been conditioned to accept.

“No,” he promises, for what has to be at least the hundredth time. “You don’t have to do anything to earn food here, and you never have to repay me with sex.”

His patient just stares at him without comprehension, bags under his eyes like punched-in bruises.

“I’m good at it,” the man offers, without acknowledging Cas’s denial at all. “Everyone says so. Ain’t had no gag reflex since I was like, eight.”

Pinching his lips together, Cas internally debates whether he should press on the obvious implications of that information. He’d seen records indicating Dean was engaging in prostitution as young as 14, but what he seems to be implying now is suggesting he was taken advantage of much earlier.

Cas wonders who it was. That father of his, who he worships so much? This brother he seems to adore? Maybe this mysterious Mr. Singer, who’s number had been disconnected when he called it, but who’d been for some reason paying for Dean to be professionally “put in his place” as a teen?

“It’s sweet of you to offer, Dean,” he says, instead of asking, knowing in all likelihood that the submissive will only shut down. “But there are other ways to please me besides sex, you know. Just finishing your food has made me very proud of you, sweetheart,” he tries.

It worked yesterday, when he’d been feeding Dean again before bed. The man had soaked up such praise like a dried out sponge, but he’d also been teetering on the edge of sub-drop.

Now, Dean is more present, more himself, and he just shoots Cas a withering look.

“Dude, I’m not five,” he bites, and then flinches.

He seems constantly convinced he’s about to be struck.

Cas doesn’t acknowledge it, because it will only make Dean defensive.

“I didn’t mean to make you feel like you were,” is all he says.

But neither does he retract his earnest praise, nor does he apologize for having offered it to begin with. He is proud of Dean, and Dean is going to hear it, even if he gets prickly about it right now.

He knows that underneath the distrust, the submissive is drinking up every hint of approval. He’ll stop balking at compliments when he starts believing that they are real.

Right now, though, he only scoffs, visibly irritated.

“Come on, man, you can take off the kid gloves,” he snaps, scowling. “I know how this kinda shit works. I got fed. Gotta be a good bitch now and say thank you. Jesus Christ, man. Fuck.”

He curses when Cas gently pushes his face back from his crotch.

The young man is obviously getting aggravated and anxious about the fact that this interaction is not going the way he expected it to, having pushed himself up quickly to shuffle forward on his knees as he spoke. There’s obvious hurt in his expression when he looks up after Cas stops his progress, and he snatches his hands back from Cas’s knees like he’s been burned.

“What’s your problem, huh?” he demands, belligerent. “Thought you said you weren’t mad ‘bout me bein’ a fuckin’ slut!”

His voice is rising rapidly, eyes bright, face burning red red, humiliation that he doesn’t know what to do with spilling out of him as a mockery of anger. The shame of being rejected is quickly getting the better of him, and Cas grabs him firmly by the shoulders, steadying, realizing that with Dean’s volatile emotions, this situation is spiraling quickly out of control.

“I’m not mad,” he says sternly. “I don’t have any problem, Dean. Come, put your head on my knee.”

Dean knocks his hands aside in one erratic, panicked motion, and jerks away, eyes bright and hurt.

“Stop fuckin’ lying! Don’t tell me you ain’t got a problem with me when you obviously fuckin’ do! If you didn’t want damaged goods you shouldn’t’a fucking- hey!”

The man yelps as he is tugged forwards, trying to yank himself out of the dom’s grip as his head is pressed down onto Cas’s knee.

“Jesus fuck, man, get off me! I said get the fuck off!”

Cas doesn’t let go of him, even as Dean whacks at his shin with his fist, growling and shoving at the chair.

“I was just trying to thank you!” he shouts furiously, reaching up to his hair to try to rip Cas’s hand out of it.

But Cas won’t let him move it, concern building steadily at how quickly Dean has fallen apart.

“Dean, calm down. It’s alright, sweetheart. Sweetheart.”

The submissive screeches, starting to punch helplessly at Cas’s arm.

“I was just trying to thank you!” he screams again, voice dangerously wet, panic peeling the anger away to reveal the devastation beneath it. “You can’t punish me, I was trying to say thank you!”

It’s such a startling accusation that Cas does release Dean then, surprise getting the better of him as his muscles unlock.

“What?” he says, blindsided, but Dean doesn’t hear it, tearing himself out of the dom’s hold almost instantly and scrambling backwards, kicking at the chair as he goes.

“Fuck you!” he cries, foot slamming into the chair hard enough that Cas oofs at the force as it slides backwards several inches. “Leave me alone!”

Heart pounding at how incredibly fast this interaction is veering off the road and becoming a repeat of yesterday, Cas jumps up as Dean does, order ready on his lips.

“Dean,” he booms, suddenly much more severe, the word stop on the tip of his tongue.

He doesn’t get a chance to speak it. Dean’s eyes go wide at the tone of his voice, realizing he’s about to be hit with the full force of Cas’s domination, and panic seems to seize him like a spasm.

“No!” he gasps, and at the same time Cas opens his mouth, the submissive’s fist slams into it.

Cas stumbles back a few feet at the force of the hit, blindsided, nearly falling back into the seat behind him. He doesn’t, though, managing to catch himself on one of its big upholstered arms with a grip that nearly tears the fabric.

Stunned, Cas stands there in shock for a moment, half pushed over, as a wave of dizziness passes over him. It sends his vision spinning for a few seconds, and he waits with dumbfounded silence as his vertigo sets itself straight.

What the fuck, he thinks, against the muffled background, suddenly so quiet that you could hear a pin drop.

Which is a good thing, because he doesn’t have even the slightest hint of the awareness that would be needed right now if Dean were to decide to keep attacking him.

He hasn’t been hit straight on like that since he was a child, and most of him is trying to catch up to what the hell just happened. Slowly, very slowly, Cas raises the hand that isn’t being used to hold his body upright up to his lip, feeling dazed when it comes away red.

How did he do that? Cas thinks, in something close to disbelief. It shouldn’t be possible for Dean to hurt him, only a few minutes after he was ordered not to, and Cas looks up at the man with a helpless sort of confusion, looking for some kind of explanation.

But it’s clear at first glance that Dean hadn’t known he could do that either, and is as taken aback as Cas is. The man is white as a sheet, eyes shining with shock and fear, half stepped away as if appalled by his own actions.

“You didn’t listen to me,” Cas says stupidly, without thinking for a moment before the words come out.

It’s nothing more than a baffled observation, the result of a stupified sort of awe at the willpower that seems to defy all scientific predictions. But Dean responds like it’s the threat Cas belatedly realizes it seems like, face draining of any remaining blood and feet finally committing to finishing that backwards step.

“I- I didn’t- I didn’t-” Dean stutters, defenseless, terror quickly ballooning in his expression as the reality of what he just did dawns on him. “I didn’t- I didn’t- didn’t mean-”

He takes another step back.

The man’s breathing picks up, and his gaze starts to shoot around like he’s looking for an exit. Cas tenses at the same time that Dean does, realizing the black hole of fear is about to reach its singularity.

When Dean bolts, Cas isn’t remotely surprised. He’s only relieved that the direction Dean rushes is away from him, rather than towards, that his fight or flight response has fallen backwards towards flight this time around.

He doesn’t follow the submissive, nor does he try to order him to stop, not stupid enough to escalate this situation even more than he already has. The door is locked anyway, and it seems Dean has already guessed this, because he doesn’t make a run for the exit.

Instead, he makes a beeline towards one of the large bookcases that are bolted into the opposite wall. There are several of them scattered around the room, made of mahogany and cedarwood, filled with texts the submissive has never been taught to read.

That they’ve been put here more for the dominant clients than the submissive patients becomes painfully clear as Dean scrambles up the side of the one he’s run towards like it’s a ladder rather than a bookshelf. Launching himself up it like there’s a tiger hot on his heels, Cas becomes uncomfortably aware as he watches of how little the object means to Dean in its original context, of how the submissive seems to take for granted that it’s only purpose to him is to act as an escape route.

His mind does a strange little tilt as Dean reaches the top of it, and he knows before it happens that the man is going to try to lift one of the ceiling panels to climb into it. It’s something he’d done once or twice as a child, in an effort to get away from his father, before he’d learned that it was much better in the end just to accept whatever was coming.

He’d forgotten about that, until just now, and his stomach swoops with an unnerving sense of Deja Vu as he watches Dean stand up. But the modern center is a very different place from his old childhood bedroom, and predictably, this panel doesn’t budge.

Eyes widening, Dean shoves at it again, frantic. It’s obvious that he’s been counting on being able to get away like this, and doesn’t know what to do now that that isn’t working.

Panicked, Dean tries shoving upwards again with what is clearly all his strength, and when that doesn’t work, starts punching at the painted board in a frenzied flurry, fist shaking with increasing visibility.

The command to stop sits once again on the tip of his tongue, but something feels too tight around his throat all of a sudden for it to come out, now that he knows Dean would be able to push through it.

It’s unlikely that he’d be able to resist at least eventually obeying an order Cas actually threw the full force of his domination behind. But then, the submissive hadn’t been able to directly disobey even the gentlest of orders only yesterday, yet something has clearly changed since then.

He wants to believe that that’s a good thing, that it must mean he’s doing something right. But it’s hard not to feel unsettled as the submissive claws in desperate despair at the ceiling, so afraid of what he’s proved himself capable of that he’s tearing up his own hands trying to get away from it.

There’s a reason that submissives prefer to have much of their control entrusted to someone else. Cas feels sick to his stomach as he watches Dean fall apart.

“It’s not going to lift,” He says mildly, avoiding another order despite his doubts. He’d committed today to trying to avoid commanding Dean as much as possible, and so he swallows the urge now, even as it pushes at him.

Perhaps predictably, Dean ignores him, trying to jam his thumb between the edges of the paneling to pry them loose.

Cas winces as he does, feeling the phantom pain of sudden splinters under his own nailbed.

“It’s not built like that,” he tries again, a little more urgent. “The panels aren’t real, it’s just decorative trim. It’s all drywall, Dean, you’re just pushing at the floor of the next story up.”

Now, Dean does pause, hesitating as he looks upwards. The stillness allows Cas to see how hard his arms are shaking, either from strain or plain old fear.

He looks a wreck, eyes sunken and red against face white as the ceiling. Guilt hugs Cas like a friend as he wonders how he’d let things get out of control so quickly, when Dean had just barely begun to open up to him.

“You’re not in trouble,” he tries quietly, and Dean’s lip wobbles as tears spring up against his irises like flowers.

“Liar,” he snarls, and then finally lets go of the ceiling panel, only to crouch down and launch a book in Cas’s general direction.

It lands nowhere near him, aim erratic and throw undetermined, and Cas watches as the softcover thumps sadly onto the carpet and slides another few feet towards where he’s standing.

He just looks quietly at the novel for a moment, contemplating its unthreatening position, before raising his eyes again to his patient.

The man has once again gone white, and he swallows visibly as he sees Cas looking back at him. As Cas watches, Dean pushes himself backwards so he’s pressed against the wall, and slides down it so he’s sitting hunched up in a defensive little ball.

He gazes openly at the dominant, obviously expecting him to retaliate, to come over and yank him down and beat him with some horrible instrument for the pathetic little show of defiance.

Instead, Cas just bends over slowly, picking the book off the ground and turning it over.

Pride and Prejudice. He always liked that one. Liked how the submissive was portrayed as a well rounded person with her own will.

He’d tried to read it to Claire for that exact reason, thinking she’d relate to such a headstrong young woman like herself. It had been a disaster, of course, and Cas can see in retrospect what a ridiculous idea it was, trying to bond with a nine year old by making her sit through a reading of a classic novel.

But he hadn’t known much about children, back then, or subs in general, having interacted with both groups up until then in very limited amounts. He’d been flying completely blind, and he feels strange and sad remembering how lost he had felt, remembering how scared he was all the damn time.

“You know, you remind me a lot of my first patient,” he says absently, brushing the dust off the book’s cover. “She wasn’t afraid to try to punch me in the face when I was being stupid either.”

He hears Dean’s breath hitch at the acknowledgement of what had just happened, but keeps his eyes on the pretty painting printed on the dust cover.

Of an early 19th century house in the distance, surrounded by a wide expanse of natural land dotted with trees, it reminds him a bit of the estate on which he’d grown up, sheltered and ignorant of the entire world.

He’d been so lonely back then.

He’s still lonely now, but at least he knows the truth. At least he isn’t actively causing people harm anymore.

At least, he hopes he isn’t. It can feel hard to tell sometimes.

Looking up at Dean, his gaze softens.

“I really never thought I’d meet another person as brave as she was in my entire life,” he admits, admiring. “But you’re giving her a run for her money.”

This is not what Dean expected to hear, not in the slightest. Braced for degradation, for cruelty and pain beyond what Cas can even bear to think about, the man’s face flickers, and he looks back at the dominant with a confused, startled look in his eyes.

Cas smiles back at him gently from across the room, the truth of his words unarguable in the silence.

Putting the book in his hands aside, he sits down slowly, and holds out his hand towards the submissive.

“Dean,” he says quietly. “You can come down from there, it’s alright. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”

Dean shakes his head, breath hitching as he does, fingers digging into the fabric of his sleep pants. Frantically, the man wipes at his rapidly reddening eyes, trying to hide the fear that is springing to it quick as a flood.

“You’re just gonna hit me,” he accuses hysterically. “You’re just gonna start hitting me if I come back over there.”

“I won’t.”

“Then you’ll yell at me!” he insists, just as loud, just as histrionic, as if this is equally as bad.

Cas’s heart aches in his chest.

“Dean, I won’t, I promise. You weren’t in any trouble before, and I’m still not angry at you now. I just want to hold you, and help you calm down.”

Jaw locked in false defiance, the submissive across from him stares at him, pale and trembling, curling in tighter on himself like he’s trying to protect the soft parts of him. He gazes at Cas with an edge of desperation under the terror, cornered despair as the unhappy undercurrent to every twisted up show of defiance.

He clearly wants to believe Cas, wants to believe he isn’t going to be beaten to hell and back, but is too traumatized for it to seem possible.

“I-I hit you and threw things at you….” the submissive whispers uncertainly, very quiet. “Gotta. Gotta get disciplined.”

“Yes,” Cas says calmly, and Dean jerks. “I’d like you to come sit on my lap, so I can help you calm down.”

Silence.

“That’s all, sweetheart, I promise.”

As Cas watches, the flickering confusion alights itself on Dean’s face like a flame. The visible emotions dance and stretch, leaning with outreached arms towards disbelief in one moment, then hope in the next, then embarrassment, shame, and finally anger.

It’s false, though, like it all has been, forcibly outraged like the rest of Dean’s psyche.

“The- the fuck?” the man splutters, cheeks pinkening before Cas’s eyes. “I- I ain’t gonna come over and- and fuckin’ sit on your lap like some bitch.”

Cas raises his eyebrow at Dean, who shrinks back at the sight.

“Won’t you?” he asks conversationally. “Considering you just punched me in the face because I asked you to put your head in my lap, I don’t think this is an unreasonable consequence.”

It isn’t- as with everything else, he isn’t asking this of Dean to exert control over him or upset him, but because he thinks it will help the man return to a more stable equilibrium. It’s clear that the man is pathologically repulsed by his own submission, which results in him lashing out violently when he starts to sense it being invoked.

Cas has more than enough experience to know that such a fundamental disgust could only have developed from repeated negative reinforcement, and he doesn’t doubt that Dean has good reason to associate the vulnerability of submission with rejection and cruelty.

But it doesn’t change that Dean is going to die if he doesn’t learn to let down his walls, or that pushing at those boundaries at least a little bit is the only way the submissive will learn what they are shielding him from doesn’t have to bring pain.

“Sweetheart,” he says sympathetically. “You need to learn to be close to someone and know they’re not going to hurt you.”

Dean, who’s already looking sufficiently chastised, cringes away from the truth.

“Like hell I do,” he retorts.

His voice is very very quiet though, and Cas doesn’t pay it much attention.

He doesn’t like ordering distressed subs around, and it makes him uncomfortable to think he could be pushing at something that Dean truly doesn’t want. Ultimately, though, the fact that the man had been able to hit him is the best proof he has that what he’s been doing is working, and that his doubts are only that- doubts.

You’re not your father, he reminds himself as he levels Dean with a steady gaze. He’s already able to defy your orders to some extent. What you’re doing is working.

“Dean,” he says, still kindly, but nonetheless stern, “Come down from there. Come over here, and let me hold you.”

Dean shoots him a red-eyed betrayed look at the command, which, despite his miraculous punching feat, he’s basically helpless to ignore. The strain of breaking through the order not to harm Cas combined with the anxiety of the aftermath has clearly drained him of any energy he would have had left to resist, and he starts climbing down after only a few moments, sniffling and rubbing at his eyes.

“Fuckin’ liar,” he mutters wetly as he climbs down off his perch, “You’re gonna hit me. Think I’m fuckin’ stupid.”

He speaking mostly under his breath, though loud enough for Cas to hear without straining. He doesn’t respond to the taunts, knowing Dean is still very afraid, knowing he’s just trying to save face in the event that Cas does turn around and start beating him.

It’s clearly taking a lot for him to allow himself to give in, and Cas knows he must feel very vulnerable.

There’s nothing worse than having trusted someone who betrays you, except having your betrayed trust displayed for all to see.

So Cas just keeps his arm outstretched, ignoring the ache in his muscles, knowing there’s no true way to convince Dean he’s being honest than showing him with his actions, over and over and over again.

No matter how long it takes.

The submissive blinks at him sulkily for a moment besides the bookcase once he’s back on the ground next to it, looking small and swamped in the pajama pants and sweatshirt he’d clearly clung on to through this morning’s ordeal of a bath. Cas smiles at him again, and the look in his eyes goes from sulking to shy, nervous and unsure all at once.

He starts shuffling over, though, when Cas beckons for him, still endlessly obedient and desperate to please, under it all.

That fact is only accentuated when Dean finally reaches the chair, and instead of resentfully curling up against Cas with his legs hanging off the side, climbs up onto the chair to straddle the dominant’s lap.

Surprised, but unwilling to say anything and scare Dean right back into defensiveness, Cas only reaches out to help steady the soft body as it settles timidly against him. Knees spread and pressed into the seat cushion on either side of Cas, the young man ends up intimately close to him, head ducked, hands curled uncertainly against the dominant’s shoulders.

“Good boy,” Cas praises him gently, bringing his hand to wipe at the man’s wet cheek.

Holding his lip between his teeth, Dean sniffles again. Cas also feels him start to get hard through his pants.

But he doesn’t say anything about it, because Dean is already shy, and must be very confused.

“Fuck off,” the submissive says weakly, but when he cringes after saying it, he looks more embarrassed than afraid.

Cas just hums, and leans forward to place a kiss against Dean’s forehead. Dean moans, a soft, helpless noise, and drops his head against Cas’s shoulder.

“Good boy,” Cas says again, wrapping his arms delicately around the submissive’s back.

Dean melts further, his own hands coming up timidly to curl into the back of Cas’s shirt. Something settles inside Cas at the feeling, at finally having the submissive pliant and placated, subdued and quiet in his arms.

“Why ain’t you hittin’ me?” the man asks, so soft and vulnerable that Cas almost cries.

“I promised I wouldn’t, didn’t I?” he responds, rubbing Dean’s back very gently.

The submissive shivers against him, clearly enjoying the feeling, of being touched gently, but also of being cared for.

“Yeah, but…” he says uncertainly. “I…I started it….”

“None of that,” Cas scolds without heat, kissing Dean again on his hair. “You don’t deserve to be hit. You’re my good boy.”

“I ain’t,” Dean insists. “I don’t listen.”

Humming, Cas smiles down at the puddle the submissive has turned into, that he’d become the instant kindness was offered.

“You’re listening now,” he points out easily, content with the experience of having gentled Dean so unforcefully into a state of submission.

He doesn’t mean the words as a show of domination, but they seem to do something to Dean nonetheless. The man in his lap makes a small, embarrassed noise, like he’s not sure what to make of his own behavior, and he pushes his face deeper into Cas’s neck to hide.

He also gets obviously harder, a fact that seems to confuse him even more.

“Fuck off,” he mutters again, petulant, and after a conflicted moment, tries to pull away in some sort of attempt to save face.

Cas doesn’t let him, keeping his arms encircled firmly around Dean’s shoulders, pinning him back against his own chest.

“Hey!” Dean protests as he’s tugged back forward, but he makes little effort to resist.

Scooting forward on his knees as Cas guides him in by his shoulders, he only really scowls when Cas presses his head back against his shoulder. Dean tries to pull away halfheartedly, and smacks the side of Cas’s arm once to make his point, but quickly gives in when he isn’t released.

“It’s alright,” Cas reassures him as the submissive goes petulantly limp. “You’re alright, sweetheart.”

Dean sniffles, and lets out a breath that’s half a huff of irritation and half a sigh of relief.

“Never said I wasn’t,” he mumbles, as if announcing to the world when he’s unhappy is the only possible criteria one could use for measuring his mood. It seems to throw him off that this is not in fact the case, like no one has ever been able to guess when he’s upset if he hasn’t said so, or at least, like no one has ever responded to it.

Like his pain is just background noise, even to him. It confuses him into complacency to have it properly addressed.

But his eyes flutter as Cas lifts his hands from their pressing hold to start carting through his now barely-damp hair. Unconsciously, the hand that had whacked Cas’s calf curls into the fabric of the shirt it had hit.

Cas smiles as he feels the clutch of the fingers through the thick fabric, but is careful not to address it. Dean becomes instantly defensive when his own inclinations are pointed out- inclinations towards submission, yes, but also just towards human comfort.

So Cas just lets him bask in the attention for a few minutes, letting the young man calm himself down. Over time, he can feel Dean’s heartbeat start to slow against his chest, can see his panicked pulse stop pounding in the veins on the side of his neck.

He can also feel Dean’s erection clearer than ever pressing into his thigh.

He’s so sensitive, Cas thinks, gently rubbing Dean’s back as the man struggles not to moan at even a motion as simple as that.

It’s sweet, and Cas can’t help but feel fond as Dean huffs softly against his neck.

“Does this feel good, sweetheart?” he murmurs warmly, as he continues to stroke the man through his sweatshirt.

Against him, Dean tenses slightly, but doesn’t open his eyes.

“No,” he says defensively, voice muffled against Cas’s skin. “Go fuck yourself.”

Cas doesn’t say anything in response, just keeps petting at the sub’s bowed head. After a few moments pass without any retaliation, Dean seems to soften, though he refuses to pick his head up from where he’s hidden it away.

Slowly, slowly, Cas feels something shift in Dean, and he feels the brush of the man’s eyelashes against his neck become wet.

Against him, Dean starts to sniffle, and hot tears start to land on Cas’s skin.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, choked. “Sorry. I shouldn’t’a said that, Sir.”

Like a little star tumbling freely from Dean’s mouth, Cas treasures the unexpected superlative just as he had the day before.

“It’s alright, Dean,” he says easily, but Dean shakes his head, upset.

“It ain’t,” he insists, words shaking and strained with guilt. “It ain’t, I shouldn’t’a said that, and I shouldn’t’a hit you either, you’re so, you’re so fuckin’ nice to me, I-”

He dissolves into real crying then, shaking against Cas with helpless abandon, and Cas can only hold him as the waves of guilt batter him, shushing him gently until he cries himself out.

There’s not much more he can do, he knows, but it still makes him want to cry too, having such a sweet submissive so soft and confused and unhappy in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” Dean keeps saying, over and over and over again. “I’m sorry, sir, sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry.”

“I know, my dear,” he whispers, as the man’s breath hitches erratically. “It’s ok, it’s alright, I understand.”

But I don’t, Cas hears Dean saying, through the softly jumping breath that seem to exist only to break his heart.

“Sir,” he croaks, sounding very small. “I didn’t mean to hit you.”

The confession is vulnerable and lost. It doesn’t seem like he understands his own behavior, or knows what’s happening to him, and Cas closes his eyes feeling sad.

“You’ve been conditioned to expect violence from domination,” he explains gently. “I’m not mad at you for trying to defend yourself.”

Dean sniffles, curling into him a little closer.

“Ok,” he mumbles, unsure.

Cas lets him process that without pressuring him to react further, kissing his hair and petting his back as the silence envelopes them like the sunlight. Whether or not he really understands what Cas is telling him, Cas doesn’t know, but the truth is he doesn’t have to right now. He’s safe to be confused, and to lash out, and be scared, even without knowing why.

And perhaps Dean can’t really grasp his own actions like Cas can, but he can grasp that he isn’t in trouble. His body melts as the seconds tick by quietly into minutes, and his muscles untense, and Cas smiles over his shoulder, knowing for certain that he’s on the right track.

Chapter Text

“Tell me about yourself,” Cas says mildly, after a few minutes have passed in silence.

Dean looks surprised to be spoken to, flushed red where he’s still straddling Cas’s lap.

He makes quite the pretty picture, sitting in his oversized hoodie, clutching nervously at Cas’s shoulders with his legs bent and spread. He’s still hard, which Cas finds quite sweet, blushing and biting his lower lip as they both ignore the tenting in the front of his pants.

Well, Dean ignores it, or does his best to. Cas can’t help but tease him a little, stroking a careful thumb against the elastic waistband of the thin scrubs, just barely flirting with the idea of sneaking under the edge to touch him beyond it.

He wouldn’t, not without permission, but it’s charming to watch how flustered Dean gets just at the idea.

“Uh,” the man says uncertainly, eyes wide as they glance up at the dom. “Not much to say, really.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”

Cas smiles at him, and Dean blushes further, like no one’s ever taken interest in him before.

“Um,” he mumbles. “Well whatdya. Uh. Whatdya wanna know?”

He stares quite obviously down at Cas’s teasing thumb in fascination, and Cas’s lips twitch in amusement.

He can’t help but find it incredibly sweet, how turned on Dean gets from the gentlest of touches. He’s obviously an incredibly sensitive submissive, responsive as static, for whom any praise or positive attention is like an aphrodisiac.

It’s a genuine sensuality, unlike the terror filled offers of sexual service Cas is accustomed to, and it’s endearing to watch it bloom for what seems to be pretty much the first time.

“I’m happy to hear anything you want to tell me, sweetheart,” he assures the submissive, but Dean only blinks up at him shyly, turned on and helpless and obviously unclear on what exactly Cas wants him to say.

“Um. I- I dunno,” he answers uncertainly, eyes trailing down again to focus on Cas’s hand. “I mean, I get fucked a lot and stuff. Guess I’m a good lay, when I ain’t runnin’ my mouth.”

The answer is genuine, soft and earnest, like he honestly cannot think of anything else about himself that might be of interest to Cas.

That he has no sense of identity outside of how he’s been used had already been abundantly clear, but it just makes Cas infinitely sadder to hear the words come out of the man’s mouth so sincerely, sweet and bashful like he’s hoping they will please.

They don’t, of course, because Cas is never going to find mistreatment appealing, but he’s very careful not to show his distress, not wanting to upset Dean again.

The submissive obviously has no idea that anything he’s said could be disturbing, had clearly meant to answer Cas’s question as best he could. It’s not his fault he doesn’t understand what’s he’s being asked about, that he doesn’t know who he is or what he likes.

“You don’t run your mouth,” is how Cas chooses to answer. “You just talk, Dean, and I like when you talk.”

Dean blushes.

“K,” he mumbles, sounding unconvinced. Sighing, Cas moves his hand away from the man’s waistband and lets it rest unprovocatively on his leg.

Watching it go, Dean bites his lip and curls in, seeming to suspect that he’s done something wrong. It’s the last thing he wants the man to feel right now, and Cas starts to reconsider his angle, trying to think of a way to make this conversation easier on the submissive.

“How about I ask you some questions, sweetheart?” he asks coaxingly. “Would that be easier?”

Dean, perhaps predictably, nods, relief in line with a submissive who’s hoping to be led.

One day, maybe even a day very soon, Dean won’t need help to answer a simple inquiry about who he is. Even with his high level of submission, making small talk doesn’t have to be hard, if he’s properly taken care of and dominated in his everyday life.

But right now it seems that everything is hard for the man, everything is overwhelming, without clear steps to follow. He’s been so completely deprived of the praise and structure he needs that even a conversation becomes something he can fail at, in his eyes.

But Cas doesn’t intend to abandon him to even the smallest of choices until he is stable enough to handle them.

He scrounges around in his mind for a small question to start with, something clear cut and simple that there’s no way to answer wrong.

“Where were you born?” is what comes to mind first, and so it comes to his mouth first as well, since it will do fine as an opener.

It’s something Dean must know the answer to, that doesn’t require him to offer an opinion. He’ll be asking for those too, in a few minutes, but he wants to begin with something as safe as possible so Dean doesn’t worry he might somehow screw up.

It seems to work, for the most part, though the man still seems self-conscious, apparently unable to imagine himself as anything more than a let-down.

“Uh, just here, Sir. Lawrence, Kansas,” he mutters, like he’s worried Cas will find his answer disappointing. “Though I spent a lotta time on the road, growin’ up.”

“Oh?” Cas replies, pleased with the unprompted information. Dean looks down, a little nervous, and shrugs.

“Yeah. Dad got odd jobs and all, you know, was a drifter…got pretty familiar with crappy motels, if you know what I mean.”

Cas does know what he means, though it makes him sad to think about, especially when taken together with what he knows about the submissive’s father. Between the man’s drinking and stints in jail and apparent habit of uprooting his children’s lives, it doesn’t seem like Dean had almost any stability growing up.

That would be hard on any child, but for a submissive it must be almost tortuous, being constantly ripped from any sense of routine or consistency and thrown into new circumstances over and over again. It hurts Cas’s heart to consider, knowing how sensitive Dean is to such instincts, knowing how deeply disturbing the man must find it to be denied the security and routine of a home.

Not all submissives are domestic, he reminds himself firmly, but somehow has a hard time picturing the man on his lap as one that isn’t.

Even despite the defiance. Dean so clearly craves comfort and warmth. He’d like belonging somewhere, Cas thinks, would like nesting in a place he felt safe.

He’d like the house I’m renting.

The thought comes out of nowhere, but Cas waves it aside, along with the lingering loneliness.

“That must have been hard,” he says gently, instead of bringing it up. Dean shrugs again, looking uncomfortable at the idea that he might have to talk about his feelings.

“My dad did his best.”

Cas severely doubts that, but can tell that this is not the time to try to debate that point. He backs off, not wanting to push Dean away again, feeling like the man has had more than enough stress for the day already in any case.

“I’m sure he did,” he placates, and makes note of how Dean sags visibly in relief at the fact that he isn’t going to have to try to defend the abusive man.

It can’t be an easy task, and it must take a lot of energy out of him, bending over backwards to try to justify his own loyalty.

Pressing his lips together, Cas rubs his thumb along the inseam of Dean’s pants in comfort. The man huffs, and shifts a little in the dominant’s lap.

“What about your brother? Do you two get along?”

The submissive stiffens.

“I don’t wanna talk about Sam.”

There’s a defensive edge to his voice that wasn’t there only seconds before, and Cas retreats quickly, before Dean can start throwing up his walls once more.

Stupid to ask about family anyway. Cas knows better than most how touchy a subject it can be.

“What’s your favorite movie?” he blurts, moving on quickly, and feels Dean’s muscles relax again under his hands for his efforts.

Gently, Cas continues to soothe.

“I dunno, Fast and Furious, I guess…” The man frowns. “Why’d’ya wanna know all this stuff anyway? You tryn’a fuck with my head or somethin’?”

In general, Cas doesn’t take such accusations personally, but it’s particularly hard to be offended when it comes from Dean. He’s being completely serious, as if this is a normal thing to be worried about, sounding more concerned than angry about the possibility that he could be right.

“No, Dean,” Cas responds, trying not to sound tired. “I just want to get to know you, that’s all.”

Dean looks at him like he thinks Cas might be crazy, which to be fair, isn’t far off.

“Why?” he asks, fundamentally baffled, and Cas moves his hand up to brush the man’s cheek.

“Why not? We’ll be spending a lot of time together, so it would be nice to know who you are.”

Puzzled, Dean seems to try to make sense of this idea, though he’s distracted by the sensation of having his jaw cupped. He seems torn, between pulling away from Cas to better get his head on straight and think things through, and giving into the fog of being touched.

“I- But…that doesn’t-,” he murmurs, cheeks pinkening, “That doesn’t….”

Trailing off, his eyes flutter shut. Cas runs his thumb against his pretty pink lips, and they part, like they’re waiting for something to fill them.

“What was that, Dean?” he whispers, unable to keep the edge of mirth from his voice, but Dean is too preoccupied to notice. The man just huffs, breath warm against Cas’s skin, hardening visibly more through the thin fabric of his pants.

He’s such a sweet little thing, he thinks, both fond and amused at the same time, wondering at how easily the man is hypnotized by touch.

He seems to find almost everything arousing, like he’s never been caressed before, and Cas finds himself uncomfortably willing to believe that’s the case.

There’s such an earnest sort of curiosity about the man’s reactions, a shy, exploratory interest in every sensation that comes forth strangely without fear. Dean is…oddly trusting of him, in this area of sensuality, and Cas can only assume that it is so unfamiliar that he doesn’t have negative experiences to draw on.

Which seems counter intuitive, considering what the man has been put through, and certainly isn’t something he’s ever seen in a traumatized submissive before. Most of the time, he’s dealing with patients who’s own sexual desires had been warped and nearly ruined for them, their bodily reactions having been used against them to justify the abuse they were facing.

Dean, though…

Dean seems to be so wholly unattracted to pain or roughness that those wires hadn’t even been crossed in his brain. It’s like he’d never once experienced pleasure in his life, even in the worst of circumstances, so he’s approaching it with an almost innocent sort of trust, without flinching away from it as he does everything else.

Keeping his palm on Dean’s cheek and his thumb just barely pressed into those pretty lips, Cas splays his other hand possessively out against the man’s upper thigh.

Dean groans, and his breath hitches like it had run into something unexpected. His hips jerk a little towards nothing, and Cas smiles.

I’m going to have you falling apart, lovely, he promises in his mind, wondering how Dean would respond to being kissed.

It seems clear to Cas at this point that the soft eroticism Dean seems to find in almost every aspect of being cared for isn’t something it would be kind to try to avoid.

He’s too needy, too responsive to the touch he craves like water, and it would border on neglect to deny it to him, or to dance around his arousal day after day.

Dean might even end up ashamed of himself, if Cas did that, which neither of them would be able to bear.

No, Cas promised the man that he would take care of him, and that’s exactly what he’s going to do.

“Fast and Furious, hm?” he asks the submissive coaxingly, moving the hand up his thigh very slowly until it’s pushing under the hem of where his sweatshirt drapes down.

The man pants, eyes still closed, face still red. His clutch on Cas’s shoulders is very very tight.

“I- I like the Dodge Charger that Vin Diesle drives,” he murmurs quietly, movement of his soft lips tickling the edge of Cas’s thumb.

His words surprise a huff of laughter from Cas’s gut, entertained by this information about Dean and rather impressed he still has the presence of mind to string so many words together.

I need to up my game, he thinks, with a mix of arousal and mirth, happy with how the submissive is letting himself be looked after.

“You like cars, baby?” Cas asks him softly, petting the crease between the man’s thigh and groin, skin hot through the paper-thin lining of the scrubs.

Dean squirms, flushed and shy, and Cas has to bite his lips not to hiss in response. It’s not easy to remain unaffected, with a pretty submissive wriggling around in his lap.

“Y-yeah,” Dean admits, breath jumping a little as he speaks. “I’m pretty good at f-fixing them, too.”

His face is very very warm. The tent in the front of his pants is bigger than before.

“That’s very impressive,” Cas says, and he means it thoroughly.

Dean’s eyes flutter open, and he looks bashful.

“Thanks,” he whispers against Cas’s thumb.

Smiling at him, Cas waits patiently as the man takes in the sight of the dominant’s hand pushed under his sweatshirt, the visible pressure of his digit against the man’s parted lips. Dean suddenly looks painfully timid, conflicted and embarrassed and deeply aroused all at once.

After a moment of overwhelmed debate, though, he just makes a small noise, and drops his eyes. His pupils blow wider, his vulnerability only arousing him more, and his hips jerk again in a more desperate, fluttering motion.

Cas waits until the submissive calms himself, one second, two seconds, enjoying every instant of the man’s writhing. Dean settles, though, after only a few moments, as soon as he can control himself, just like the good boy he is.

Proud of him, Cas moves his thumb away from the man’s lips to run along his freckled cheek.

“You like sitting on my lap, sweetheart?” he asks, very gently.

Dean bites his lip with obvious self-consciousness, ears pink, pretty eyes sliding off to the side.

“Naw,” he mumbles eventually, hands curled nervously into Cas’s shirt. “Just get turned on talkin’ ‘bout Vin Diesel, is all.”

Cas throws his head back and laughs, and Dean startles, but relaxes when he sees the dominant grin.

Smiling back, the submissive ducks his head, looking pleased with himself. Glowing under the attention, he seems to preen.

“You’re so funny,” Cas tells him with crinkled eyes, the tail end of his chuckle still present in his voice.

Dean looks at him like he’s done a magic trick.

“Am I?” the man echoes, sounding breathless.

“Yes.”

And then he kisses Dean, before the man can start trying to make him laugh again, knowing they have plenty of time for that later on.

For now, though, Dean is still hard as a rock in his pants, cock needy and neglected, having been teased to the limit by Cas’s refusal to touch it. It must be excruciating, but Dean hasn’t even thought to beg for more, so patient and obedient and good that it’s almost heady to have him in his arms.

It could be easy to get carried away, with Dean. He’s so docile, and Cas will have to be so careful not to push him too far. The man’s defiance has evaporated into smoke against his desire to be pleasing, and so it will be up to Cas to make sure he’s comfortable and safe.

“You’ve been such a good boy, Dean,” Cas whispers as he pulls away, the man shivers intensely in his arms.

They’re wrapped around the submissive now, holding him close against his body, and Dean drops his head against Cas’s shoulder as he struggles not to rock his hips, ever intent on doing as he should.

But “what he should” is dependent on what Cas allows, and he intends to allow quite a lot, for such an earnest, obedient submissive.

“You can move, sweetheart,” he permits, and the man makes a soft noise, sliding his arms around Cas’s neck as he buries his face against the soft skin.

“Move…how?” he asks meekly, still motionless, still unsure, unwilling to risk being bad for a moment of pleasure, no matter how desperate that pleasure may be burning.

It’s so endearing that Cas wants to bury him inside his ribcage, wants to just push the man right through his chest and into his heart.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmurs, kissing the top of Dean’s head with overflowing emotion. “You can move your hips, baby, you can make yourself feel good.”

The very concept seems to baffle Dean, and for another several seconds, he stays frozen, still clearly confused.

Then, very very tentatively, he lets his hips rock, just once, grinding again Cas’s crotch with a small gasp.

He goes still again, breath hot against Cas’s shoulder.

“You’re hard too,” he observes, sounding surprised.

Obviously, Cas thinks dryly, but Dean is very genuinely perplexed. It seems to be a novel idea to him, that a dom could get hard just from petting him, that his pleasure could be arousing to someone, rather than only his pain.

“Of course I am, baby. You’re beautiful.”

Dean’s arms tighten dramatically around his neck.

“I…do. Do you want me to….?” he asks uncertainly.

Without knowing what Dean is offering, Cas knows the answer is no.

Cas shakes his head, and Dean ducks his own. Kissing the man’s hair again in comfort, Cas smiles.

“I’ll be fine, sweetheart,” he tells the submissive truthfully. “I’ll probably come when you do, or I can take care of myself later. I just want you to worry about making yourself feel good, alright?”

Against his chest, Cas feels Dean’s whole body twitch.

“I- I can come?” he wonders, sounding completely shocked. His voice is muffled against the dominant’s shoulder, but there’s no hiding how blindsided he is.

Going still, Cas looks down at the young man limp against him, speechless, not knowing how to respond.

Had Dean really thought this whole time that Cas was just teasing him with no intent of allowing him relief? That he’d just been playing with the man’s body for his own entertainment, happy to leave the submissive needy and tortured when he got bored?

And he still let me drive him crazy without complaining. He didn’t even get mad, or try to avoid the teasing at all.

He’d even joked with Cas, and been over the moon when he’d made the dominant laugh, nothing on his mind this whole time but being pleasing and pliant, even against treatment he’d thought would leave him in pain.

Floored by how excruciatingly loyal Dean had become so quickly, he wonders again how someone could ever reach the unspeakable cruelty that must have been needed to drive this man into defiance.

“Oh, Dean, of course you can come, baby,” he promises. “I’d never tease you like that and leave you wanting, sweetheart.”

Dean huffs, wriggling a little without giving in to a full thrust, and suddenly kisses Cas against his neck, unexpectedly adoring.

Cas rubs his back as the man does it again, and again, and then finally lets his hips rock, slow and hard.

It feels- good, against his own groin, and Cas struggles not to moan, keeping his arms carefully gentle around Dean as the man moves at his own hesitant pace.

He’s such a lovely little thing, panting with breaths that don’t know how not to be greedy, relieved and desperate after being denied for who knows how long. It’s his pleasure that matters, not Cas’s, as strong as it is right now in response, and so Cas breathes deeply as Dean kisses his neck again, resisting the urge to use his strength to pull the man back against his own bulge.

Dean isn’t some- some sex toy for Cas to rut against, so he lets the submissive take his halting time.

It’s not long, though, before the man’s motions start to speed up, his arousal getting the better of him too.

“Sir,” Dean gasps against him, as he grinds with helpless little jerks, and Cas groans, grabbing the man’s neck and holding it down.

Not that Dean was trying to pull away to begin with, but oh, he likes that, likes being manhandled and restrained quite a lot. Just the pressure makes him keen like a little animal, the knowledge that he can’t move his head away now enough to have his hips suddenly rutting with triple speed.

“Sir- Sir- Please-”

Cas buries his face in Dean’s neck too, squeezing him with all his might.

“You can come, baby,” he assures, panting quickly. “You can come, whenever you want.”

Dean does, seconds later, suddenly twitching like his body has gone white with light, electricity coursing through him as he tumbles over into pure heat. Cas holds him through it, petting his back and shushing him as he silently spasms, until the sweet, squirming body has gone soft.

Finally limp, finally drained, Dean twitches once or twice more with the aftershocks, tiny movements barely more than a flinch.

“Good boy,” Cas tells him quietly, “Good boy, such a good boy.”

The man pants against him, spent and splayed out, dampness at the front of his pants seeping through. He’s clearly exhausted, but enormously happy, and Cas lets the man’s emotions fill his own heart, feeding off the knowledge that he’d taken care of his submissive, that he’d ensured Dean’s comfort and contentedness.

“Did that feel good?” he asks the submissive, smile transparent in his voice.

Dean wriggles a little against him, and nods.

“Mhm,” he murmurs, sighing breathily like he might go to sleep, and Cas finds himself hoping he does, finds himself looking forward to holding the man’s weight as he naps.

To his surprise, though, Dean’s only still for another few seconds, before he lifts his head up very slowly like it’s heavy. Blinking slowly, he looks down, pupils still blown and unfocused and lovely, frowning down at what Cas at first thinks is the stain on his pants.

But Dean’s hand slips past that, when it moves, to come rest gently against Cas’s clothed erection. Eyes widening, Cas has to force himself not to jerk, and force himself not to abruptly pull Dean’s hand away.

“Baby, don’t worry about that,” he says gently, reaching out carefully for Dean’s wrist to move it without startling him. “Like I said, I’ll take care of it later.”

Trance-like, subspace like, Dean looks up at him and frowns, obviously not pleased with this idea.

“Wanna suck it,” he slurs, sulky, and Cas really has to work to keep from laughing, then, the pouting on Dean’s face too cute not to kiss.

So he does kiss it, kisses the pout right off of it, kisses Dean until he is sufficiently distracted from his (very bad) idea of sucking Cas’s dick.

The man has obviously been deeply affected by his domination, and is again hovering just on the edge of subspace, thoughts swirling and loopy like he’s a little drunk. Though it’s not the first time Dean has demanded the right to put Cas’s penis in his mouth, he’s equally as unable to think that thought through as he was last time, and so Cas is going to have to think it through for him.

Dean is not ready for that, and so Cas vetos that idea without hesitation, kissing the thought away until the submissive melts.

When he finally pulls away, Dean stares back at him with kiss swollen lips, and then smiles suddenly, dopy and soft.

“You like me!” he announces proudly, clearly thrilled with where all the evidence is pointing, and Cas laughs again, finding Dean’s transparency sweet.

“Very much so,” he says truthfully, and Dean looks so happy he seems like he could faint, so Cas pulls him back to his chest to rest his head on his shoulder so the man doesn’t slip off his lap.

If Dean’s going to fall unconscious, he’s going to fall unconscious securely held, thank you very much. He has no intention of letting Dean slip away anywhere, either on accident or on purpose, and feels most secure about it with the man settled right in his arms, safe and sound.

Dean seems content to allow this for now, all thoughts of Cas’s erection gone, sleepy enough and so fuzzy around the edges that he doesn’t seem to have many thoughts at all at this point.

“Go to sleep, Dean,” Cas tells him, very warmly, threading just the slightest bit of domination into his voice to guarantee the man will obey.

Not that Dean really seems in danger of slipping back into defiance right now, but he might as well make the idea of a nap seem more appealing if he can.

It seems to work, because Dean nods, but doesn’t seem to notice that he’s been given an order, just minds it with the simple trust in him that Cas hopes he will one day feel all the time.

“Ok,” the man sighs, pushing himself just a little closer against the chest he’s rested upon, snuggling into it like it’s his childhood bed.

“Good boy,” Cas whispers back, and Dean sighs with what can only be called relief, before drifting off into peaceful acceptance and slumber like it’s where he’s always belonged.

Chapter Text

It’s about twenty minutes later when Naomi finds him, getting a drink by the water cooler in the corner of the room.

She comes in at a particularly peaceful moment: Dean, asleep on the couch with the sunlight draped over him like a blanket, Cas a few yards away, quietly refilling his water bottle, back turned to his patient and the doorway as if he isn’t worried about what could come from either of them.

It couldn’t be further from the truth, of course, but it makes him look good, and he sees the note of surprise on Naomi’s face when he turns around from the dispenser.

Hovering in the doorway with a pile of documents held in her arms, she looks obviously taken aback by the serenity, thrown off by the lack of visible chaos. Businesslike as ever in her lab coat and sleek, professional bun, Cas feels a surge of gratefulness that she’d walked in now rather than when Dean was on top of the bookcase, or worse, grinding in his lap.

He has a feeling she wouldn’t be nearly as impressed with either of those scenes, no matter how proud Cas himself is of the latter.

Trying to act like he has nothing to hide, Cas raises his water bottle to his lips and drinks slowly as the woman looks around, as if completely unbothered by this visit. As if there’s been nothing but calm all day, he makes a conscious effort not to tense as the woman scans the room, wiping his mouth as he pulls the bottle away.

“Hello, Dr. Shurley,” he says casually, after he swallows, going for pleasant and unbothered in the quiet.

He doesn’t raise his voice much louder than he would in a public library, the hushed bubbling of the decorative fountain in the center of the room sounding like whispers reminding him to keep his volume low.

He wouldn’t want to disturb the peace. Naomi seems to be under the impression that Dean is under control right now, despite being unrestrained, and he’d hate to tempt fate by waking the man up to see if that will hold true.

“Things seem to be going well in here,” the woman observes, still sounding neutral, but with far more acknowledgement than Cas has gotten from her so far.

Her eyes are critical, scanning the room with sharp perception, but she doesn’t seem to find much that she can object to. The closest thing to leftover evidence of the morning’s ruckus is the novel dropped besides the chair he’d been sitting in, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to catch her eye.

“Yes, they are,” Cas agrees easily, starting to twist the cap back onto his bottle as he nods.

Self-consciously, he licks his lower lip where Dean had punched him, hoping that the swelling isn’t noticeable yet.

It doesn’t seem to be, at least with Naomi standing several yards away by the door, and she hums in eventual approval.

“Interesting,” she says mildly, sounding contemplative, sharp eyes calculating as she takes in the tranquil scene. She seems rather more ready to see the accomplishments written in the silence of the room that Cas would have expected, looking intrigued, but not astounded.

Why that might be becomes clear a moment later as she steps fully into the room, and Cas’s eyes drop down to what she’s holding.

It’s his computer, and the files he’d left in the cafeteria, which no one had returned to him yet, but that had clearly made their way into Naomi’s possession.

The pensive look in her eyes starts to become less mysterious as it dawns on him that she’d almost certainly read through his notes.

Defensive despite the woman’s better-than-average attitude, Cas finishes tightening the metal cap on his bottle with an abrupt motion, dropping his arm to let the heavy thing hang loosely at his side.

It makes an unusual sounding glug at the sudden movement, water sloshing around inside the canister, room quiet enough for the unusual noise to become audible.

“You found my things,” he says without intonation.

He’s not sure if he should be worried.

Naomi gives him a strange look, almost as if she isn’t sure either. As if she hasn’t made up her mind what to think about what she’d found.

“I did,” she says slowly, oddly careful as she speaks. Her expression is guarded like she thinks Cas can get past it.

But he can’t. He just ends up staring back at her awkwardly in silence as she seems to consider him, with a critical eye he finds much more uncomfortable than her disdain.

Hyper aware the entire time of Dean off the side, breathing evenly on the couch, he has to push back his instinct to posture in defense of him.

She’s not here for him. She’s obviously here for you, he tells himself furiously, trying to shake the lingering domination hormones Dean’s submission had invoked in him out of his head.

It’s hard, but the truth of his logic gets through to him because of how clear it is. Naomi isn’t paying any mind to Dean at all.

Her gaze is trained only on Cas, who feels his hackles rise in answer, trying not to seem unnerved.

“Your notes were very interesting,” the woman continues eventually, still careful. “You’ve made a lot of progress with Dean in a very short period of time.”

It’s not an acknowledgement Cas expects from her, and he knows he must look surprised. Naomi doesn’t address his confusion, though, merely pursing her lips.

“Is he really speaking in full sentences already?” she asks after a moment.

Raising his eyebrows, Cas nods.

“More than that,” he adds honestly, thinking back to the conversation he’d just had with the sub. “He’s regained his language abilities almost entirely.”

It’s not something he would have been confident saying only yesterday, erratic as Dean’s mental capacity had been. But it’s something he feels confident of now, after being on the receiving end of the man’s witty quips, knowing how much linguistic nuance such humor requires.

But Naomi clearly is not interested in hearing about how clever and funny Dean is, even in a diagnostic setting. She “hmm”s absently as she considers the sleeping submissive from across the room, peering at him like he’s a particularly interesting science experiment.

Eventually, she turns back to Cas with a strange look in her eye, considering him thoughtfully.

“If Mr. Winchester has regained his language abilities, even partially, it means we no longer have to classify him as feral,” Naomi tells him slowly.

Cas stares at her blankly, and after a moment, she continues.

“If he is no longer classified as feral,” she says. “He is eligible to be adopted by anyone licensed to work with defiant submissives.”

It takes Cas a few seconds to understand what she is implying, so unexpected is the suggestion. When he does understand, his throat goes dry, the surprise offer taking him off guard.

“You’re suggesting that I adopt him?” he asks, baffled, sounding more incredulous than he would like.

He hears the sound of it in his own voice, and feels guilty almost immediately, especially when Naomi immediately scowls at him, obviously annoyed that the hippie isn’t jumping at this chance.

“Is that so horrible?” she asks sharply, as if she’s judging him for his moment of doubt. Which is hypocritical beyond belief, of course, but it doesn’t stop Cas from feeling ashamed.

He didn’t mean to recoil like the idea of taking Dean home with him was something bad, and he’s quickly grateful that the man hadn’t been awake to hear him. It’s not how Cas intended to respond, or would have intended to respond, if he’d been given a moment to think. But the offer had been sprung upon him so expectedly that he’d merely reacted on instinct.

He hadn’t expected to have to think about Dean’s eventual custody for a long, long time. The man has made rapid progress, but he’s still nowhere near true recovery, and the center isn’t legally allowed to put him up for sale while he still represents any sort of threat.

Or, they aren’t allowed to put him up for sale to the general public. Cas hadn’t considered that they might try to conduct a private sale to someone with a DSR license, much less to him personally.

“Of course it’s not horrible,” he says, after a beat too long has passed. “I just…”

Wasn’t prepared for this.

Naomi frowns at him, looking extremely critical, and Cas shrinks, feeling ashamed.

He should be jumping at the chance to get Dean out of this awful, abusive environment. To take the man home and work with him in a setting where the sub can thrive. It’s what he’s wanted this whole time, after all, what he’s been telling everyone the sub needs.

Except, that’s not right, exactly, is it? About what Dean needs, and what he’s wanted. He’s been asking to be allowed to take Dean home to work with him there. What Naomi is offering….is not that.

“I just-” he stutters, thrown off. “I can’t afford your clinic's adoption fees.”

The response comes out sounding like a feeble excuse, even though it is objectively true.

“We are prepared to transfer Mr. Winchester’s claim to you at a net price of zero,” Naomi answers bluntly. “If you will take him, and all liability he encompases.”

Cas feels like he needs to sit down.

Rubbing his forehead, he glances back towards the young man on the couch, who’s sleeping peacefully through Cas’s turmoil. He looks soft and young in the light, chest rising and falling in an even pattern, like there’s nothing haunting that beautiful mind.

It’s hard to believe that this is the same man who’d punched him a few hours ago, or the same man who’d nearly killed him the other day. The sweet, docile sub who’d sat on his lap and asked to be kissed can’t be the same person who’d strangled Cas to unconsciousness, who’d taken down a whole fleet of armed guards with the use of nothing but a blanket.

But he is. He is. He is the same person.

You like cars, sweetheart?

Nah. Just get turned on talkin’ ‘bout Vin Diesel, is all.

“I need to think,” Cas says quietly, without looking at either Naomi nor Dean now. There’s an angel on top of the fountain in the center of the room, and Cas considers it like it might give him advice.

Off to his right, he hears Naomi huff. She clearly isn’t happy with his hesitant reaction, and he wonders for the first time what on earth her motive is here.

“I thought you’d be thrilled to take the boy,” she critiques, sounding disapproving.

So did I, Cas thinks guiltily, not knowing what to do.

Wandering over to the fountain without answering her, he finds himself staring down at the pool of ripping water, and at the shiny pennies glinting in the light.

If wishes were fishes, he thinks unhappily, stupidly, sighing as he rests his water bottle on the ground and sits down on the edge.

He has to turn around to do it, and ends up looking back towards Naomi by the door now on his left, with Dean in the corner of his eye on his right.

“It’s not that I don’t want to take him,” he clarifies uncertainly. “It’s just…this is very unexpected.”

Which is an understatement, but he doesn’t know how else to put it, his confusion, his lack of preparedness, his underlying suspicion that there is some reason for this offer that he isn’t going to like.

Continuing, he tries to lay his cards on the table as honestly as he can, feeling like Naomi may be more inclined to do the same.

“You were quite adamant that Dean remain here, when I initially requested leave to treat him in my home,” he explains. “I was not prepared to be offered complete custody barely a week into treatment. Nor to have the price of his adoption waived…”

There’s an obvious question in his words, and Cas can see Naomi thinking about whether or not to answer it. Outside, the wind sweeps silently through the huge trees visible through the window, a muted dance like an old screensaver waiting for something to load.

The woman taps her nails on the file she’s still holding.

“Dean is a serious liability to us right now,” she admits eventually, tilting her head towards the patient in acknowledgement. “The number of worker’s comp payments we have had to make over his behavior alone has half bankrupted us. And now with this incident involving a gun…”

She shakes her head.

“Kubrick has agreed not to press charges, for a considerable monetary settlement. But we can’t keep gambling our institution’s reputation on a ticking time bomb, especially with the media attention his case has brought.”

So. This is about money, yet again. Cas can’t say he’s surprised.

Still, it gives him pause. Naomi has more of a point that he would like to admit.

If the center is so certain they can’t control Dean anymore, what makes him think he can?

“I see,” he says, slowly, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

Frowning in thought, he looks back over to Dean, apparently still deep in his slumber. He’d been so certain, when coming here, that it would be best to take Dean home with him. But now that that has actually become an option, he wavers.

Dean had been painfully sweet on his lap, and that makes him feel all the worse for second guessing himself now. There isn’t a doubt in his mind that the young man is a gentle soul, in his heart.

But he has tendencies towards violence that Cas hadn’t expected, and an expertise in this area that he’d never seen before. He doesn’t hold the “gun incident” against the man, or even the strangling, really. Yet both instances illuminate what Cas has been suspicious of ever since Dean woke up truly conscious- that the man has some kind of military-type background and training, as if he had been raised in some kind of cult that trained for the end of the world.

Uneasily, his mind drifts once again to the information he’d discovered last night, about the extraordinary cruelty Dean had apparently sought out and paid for, before he was committed here permanently.

Is he really prepared to care for someone like this in his own home? Does he really know what he’s getting into here?

“Is full adoption the only option you are offering at the moment?” he asks after a few seconds, because that’s yet another issue with this plan.

It’s one thing to treat Dean at his home while the center still holds his claim. It’s quite another to become fully responsible for his claim, with all the liability and long term consequences that entails.

Cas has worked with many hospitals and facilities before, sharing custody, sometimes gaining full temporary guardianship while he treated his patients at his home. The understanding was always that someone else would eventually become responsible for the submissives he works with, that he was not permanently assuming the role of the dominant in their lives.

Not that that’s always been something unappealing to him, or that it isn’t something he’s daydreamed about before. But he knows he isn’t an ideal companion for any submissive in the long run, and knows he shouldn’t be even considering it when it comes to Dean.

Dean deserves better than him, deserves a real dominant to care for him permanently. If Cas accepted Naomi’s offer, the submissive might end up stuck with Cas forever.

Naomi looks annoyed that he’s even asking about the more standard shared-claim situations, giving him the answer before she speaks.

“We cannot accept the legal liability of being responsible for Mr. Winchester while he is not under our supervision,” she says stiffly. “If you are not interested in our offer, it can certainly be rescinded. I’m sure there will be someone interested in his adoption eventually, considering all the publicity.”

Groaning, Cas puts his head in his hands. That’s the last thing in the world that he wants to happen- for Dean to end up with some rich jerk only interested in him because he was on the news.

“No, no,” he says quickly. “Don’t- I just need to think about this. The logistics. I need to talk to Dean.”

Naomi audibly scoffs at that, like the idea of asking a submissive for their input on their own life is ridiculous. It’s not just idealism driving his thought process, though. Dean needs to be onboard for this plan.

There are- restrictions, when it comes to claiming a submissive still marked as defiant. Laws, that he can’t get around.

He’s not familiar with all of them, because they vary by state, but Kansas has some of the most restrictive. As if he’s a rabid dog, Dean will be subject to rules and personal violations Cas will be held responsible for enforcing, with severe consequences for both of them if they are broken.

Dean will have to wear a collar that keeps him within certain bounds, and Cas is pretty sure he won’t be able to move the man out of state. He has no idea how difficult it will be to have Dean un-classified as defiant, but he has no doubt that it will take a long time.

He also has no doubt that he won’t be able to control Dean the way the state wants him to without Dean’s individual cooperation. He doesn’t want to lose both Dean’s custody and his own therapeutic license because Dean decided to run away, or- bite someone’s fingers off because they got too close.

And then of course, there’s his own safety to think of.

Which isn’t something he usually worries about, pretty much at all, but his conversation with Gabriel last night is still lingering in his mind. He’d promised his brother that he wasn’t in danger, and that he wouldn’t put himself in harm's way. He knows Gabe isn’t exactly tearing his hair out in worry, but Cas would still feel guilty if something went wrong.

“I need time,” he says more firmly, lifting his head up from his hands. “I need to talk to Dean about this, before I agree to anything.”

Naomi continues to look unimpressed, but she doesn’t have much ability to push back.

“Fine,” she acquiesces, unhappily. “But I need an answer by tomorrow at the latest.”

Cas doubts that she’d really be able to enforce that, but he nods anyway, just to get her out of his hair.

“Fine,” he agrees back, and Naomi purses her lips.

“You can come to my office to pick up your things later. Give me your decision then.”

Then she leaves, without giving Cas back his computer. He stares after her, wondering ruefully what the hell is going on.

Chapter Text

Cas wakes up to the sound of a thump in the night that sounds like a body hitting the ground.

He stares up at the ceiling for a long long moment, ears straining through the sound of the rain.

It was nothing, he tries to convince himself uncertainly. You’re just being paranoid again.

But when he hears a second thump, he knows that he isn’t, and his heart jerks in his chest in deep terror.

Sitting straight up in bed, Cas freezes with his hands curled into fists in his sheets. Adrenaline rushes him like a bull as he feels the panic start to come, bleeding out all rational thoughts of what to do.

They found me again, he thinks, silent and petrified. They’re not gonna let me go this time.

Wildly, his thoughts fling themselves around like a kite in the storm that’s still raging. His mind flashes wildly like the lightning with half shattered confusion, disoriented and afraid and unsure.

Call the police! No, don’t, they’ll take their side, they always do! Grab the gun! No, you left that back home!

Pulse in his throat, Cas flings the covers off himself as he stands, looking wildly around for something he can use as a weapon. His eyes land on the lamp on his bedside table, and he rips the wire out of its socket as he picks it up.

Dropping its cloth shade on the ground besides him, Cas stands soundless and still as he listens with all his might for sounds of the intruder downstairs. He hears nothing, but is far too accustomed to being stalked to brush it off, and he creeps towards the door with his heart still pounding.

The door creaks on its hinges as he opens it carefully, and peeks down the stairs towards the living room.

He doesn’t see anything but the green gray tinted light of the early morning, filtered damp and dull through the rain.

Slowly, slowly, Cas shuts the door behind him, and tiptoes carefully down the stairwell. Still holding the lamp half-raised like he’s ready to swing it, his arms strain with the stress of an imagined fight.

But when he gets to the bottom of the stairs, no one jumps out to attack him, and when he looks around the area, he doesn’t see any obvious menacing figures.

It’s just his living room, quiet and peaceful, dull and dusky in the absence of light.

Hesitantly, Cas lowers his lamp to chest-level, scanning the room again with wary cautiousness as his adrenaline rush starts to peeter out. Clad only in pajamas and socks with little bees printed on them, he starts to feel stupid against the lack of threats he’s encountering.

That is, until his eyes land on what they hadn’t seen right away: A cracked window on the other side of the room.

Cas’s breath catches in his chest.

I locked all the windows.

But it seems that this one has been broken.

Dread thickening in his stomach, his gaze drops to it like a rock, then travels lower, lower down to the floor.

And then it stops, eyes landing on the huddled figure on the ground, dripping wet, peering back up at him from the shadows.

Cas drops the lamp in shock.

They both listen in the silence as it rolls heavily away.

“Wh- Dean?” he stammers, blindsided and baffled.

Dean stares back up at him with huge eyes, pale as the ghosts that are haunting him. He looks disoriented, soaked to the bone and shivering, blinking back at Cas like he isn’t entirely sure where he is.

Cas’s heart drops in his chest.

“Dean- What? What are you doing here? What happened?”

He asks, even though he’s already starting to suspect the answer.

Dean’s eyes drop, and he tenses, like he isn’t sure how to respond, or how to explain his appearance in the middle of the night. His breathing is labored, and Cas can see the whites around his green irises in the gun-grey lighting, betraying how afraid he is.

“I- I- I don’t, I wasn’t, I’m…I’m not, please don’t…”

The sub trails off, mumbling incomprehensibly, fidgeting in obvious anxiety with the edge of his thoroughly drenched sweatshirt. He’s clearly reluctant to say what he needs to, or else, he doesn’t have any idea how to start, petrified and turned around as he is.

His feet are covered in mud and all scratched up, like he’s been wandering, or running, for hours. He’s panting, chest rising and falling with a heaving desperation that Cas is belatedly realizing isn’t from fear.

Gut sinking, he takes in the wild glint in Dean’s eye that underlies the obvious panic. There’s a shard of metal held in his hand like a knife, grip so tight that there’s blood dripping down the back of his hand, and Cas starts to wonder if it was a bad idea to let go of the lamp.

With a jolt, he notices that there is blood dripping down his leg, from small wounds that have punctured through his left calf. Almost like….he’s been bitten by an animal.

“You’re hurt,” Cas murmurs in shock, and moves forward half a step on instinct, the desire to help the young man overriding momentarily all other thoughts or concerns. It’s a mistake, though, and Dean’s frightened eyes only get wider, and he jumps up as if on cue to brandish the makeshift knife in front of him.

“Don’t come any closer!” he snaps, voice wavering like a flag. “Don’t- You get away from me, I swear!”

His gaze jumps around erratically, landing on everything but the dominant’s face, like a fly trying to get out of a room.

Paying the threat no mind, Cas takes another step forward in concern, peering down at the injured leg with alarm.

“Did something bite you?” he asks, moving over to the lamp nearby and groping for the lightswitch as Dean stiffens in obvious fright.

He flinches when the light turns on, and stumbles backwards a step, hitting the wall behind him with a thump and sliding down it to crouch once again. The metal shard in his hand looks even more pathetic under the sudden yellow light, glinting at all the wrong angles as if to emphasize how blunt it is.

It’s obvious under the sudden brightness that something really had dug its teeth into Dean’s flesh, but the man only ducks his head at Cas’s question.

Something deep inside of him starts to sink rapidly at the image, twisting with simultaneous rushes of pity and guilt. Explanations start to form rapidly in his mind, none of them certain, but none of them good.

Exhausted and horrified, Cas shuts his eyes, stomach churning with what he already knows.

“Sweetheart, did they try to sell you?”

He pauses, and the rain patters.

“Did you have to run away from the dogs?”

Dean doesn’t answer, even after he waits several seconds, just lets the drumming coming from outside fill in the blanks for him. When Cas opens his eyes, he’s met with the sub staring back at him with transparent panic on his face, the direct question breaking through his muddled haze of defensiveness to rip his true emotions straight out of him.

“Please don’t make me go back to him.”

The whisper comes horrified, shaking, dredged up from the deepest parts of the man’s battered heart. He looks sick, like he’s going to vomit, and Cas feels his own emotions mirror the sub’s.

“Who, Dean?” he asks gently, and Dean answers the way only a broken man would.

“...my dom.”

The words are hissed like they are something gut churningly terrifying, like there is nothing more frightening in the entire world.

It’s the exact opposite of the emotions those words should ever invoke, and Cas feels rage on his patient’s behalf start to boil up in him.

“Alastair,” he confirms. “They tried to sell you back to Alastair.”

Dean flinches from the name like it’s a curse.

It takes everything in Cas for him to actually keep from cursing now, disgusted outrage taking over his mind.

Of course. Of course. He should have known Naomi wouldn’t wait for him to sleep on it, to talk this over with Dean when they had time. No, as soon as Cas hadn’t jumped at the chance to take Dean off her hands, she’d turned around and contacted the only other person who might be interested right away.

Nevermind that this was the man who had been responsible for driving Dean to this state to begin with. Nevermind that handing Dean over to someone like this while still only half recovered is the equivalent of signing his death warrant.

No, Naomi doesn’t care, she doesn’t care about what happens to Dean and neither does anyone else. Neither does anyone else, apparently, except maybe Cas, and even he had dropped the ball on that spectacularly.

It’s not a small amount of guilt that hits him now, taking in Dean’s wrecked, miserable state. He knows he’s responsible for this, at least in part, having waited too long to make up his mind about taking the young man home.

And for what? His own safety? Dean poses no real threat to him. He sees that now, within the curled up fold of the man’s body, can hear it under the rumble of the storm like a call that’s being screamed but barely made out.

It feels obvious, coming off the rush of real terror he’d just felt thinking his family had found him once again. He’s been in real danger, has seen what real intent to harm looks like. How could he be so stupid as to mistake the trembling boy before him for that?

The blood dripping down Dean’s leg moves sluggishly. He breathes harshly, looking like he’s either going to panic, or faint.

“I’ll be good,” he murmurs weakly, as Cas moves away from the lamp. “I’ll be good, I can be good, I swear to god I can. I just can’t…please don’t…”

He moans, and hides his head in his hands. Dropping the shard of metal as he does so, he makes no attempt to pick it back up, or pretend that he’s doing anything else than what he is: Begging.

It makes Cas feel nauseous, to see it, on this prideful, aggressive young man. This isn’t the kind of submission that comes from trusting someone to take care of you. This is the kind of submission that comes only from being horrifically afraid.

It almost makes Cas feel afraid himself, makes his hair stand on end like electricity. Because Dean had fought back against everything, against Michael and Lucifer and Naomi and even Cas himself. He’d been uncowed after months of being beaten and starved, had still been fighting back when met with the wrong ends of six different guns.

So what the hell had Alastair done to him, to have him behaving like this? What possible tortures had he put Dean through that have scared him so badly, when seemingly nothing else ever has?

Cas’s blood runs cold.

“Do they know where you are?” he asks, surging forward, suddenly feeling alarmed. Dean flinches, but Cas moves in close anyway, insistent, crouching besides the sub on the ground.

“Dean, did they follow you? Do they know that you’re here?”

Dean opens his mouth, but doesn’t get a chance to respond. As if on cue, the sub’s answer is interrupted before it begins by a sudden thump thump thump at the door.

The knock startles them both, but Dean jumps so dramatically that his foot knocks into his makeshift knife, sending it scattering.

It makes the ringing noise of metal on a hard surface as it clatters away from them, like a little alarm bell going off. But Dean pays it no mind, eyes glued steadily on where the knocking had come from, like he’s waiting for the grim reaper to walk in.

He’s so transparently petrified that Cas feels entranced by it, can’t rip his own gaze away from the man’s face to follow where it is looking. For a moment, there’s only silence, interrupted by nothing but the storm, and it feels like something being stretched and stretched and stretched, obviously about to snap.

Then it does.

Thump thump thump.

Deam jumps again, and his hand shoots out to grip Cas’s arm.

“Don’t answer it,” he hisses, but the plausibility of that being an option quickly evaporates, when the knocking comes again, more insistent.

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump.

“Castiel? Castiel, open up!”

Naomi’s shrill voice filters through the wall muffled, but still more than audible to them both. Cas almost feels relieved, for a moment, before he notices that Dean doesn’t, and he realizes that the woman has almost certainly brought along company.

“Damnit,” he curses, and he starts to stand up, but is stopped by the hand on his arm tightening like a viper.

Turning halfway back around, he’s met with the sight of Dean looking straight at him, still terrified, but with abruptly more clarity in his eyes. It’s like something about Cas actually moving towards the danger has snapped him out of his stupor, and he seems more present than he’d been up until now.

“Sir, don’t,” he whispers, suddenly urgent, suddenly conscious like he hadn’t been before. His grip is painful on Cas’s forearm, nails digging in like stakes trying to keep him held down where he is.

But Cas can’t be held down like that, and Naomi can’t be dealt with by being ignored.

“It’s alright, Dean,” Cas assures him quietly. “I’ll handle this. You stay here.”

Gently peeling the man’s hand away, he stands up, and heads as soon as he’s free towards the door. He hears the submissive hiss out the superlative again, once, but doesn’t turn back around.

At the door, though, he’s already halfway to opening it when the abrupt cry of “Cas!” reaches his ears. And then Dean is suddenly there besides him, grabbing Cas’s arm as he turns the handle and pulls.

The sub is too late to stop it from swinging open, though, and Cas doesn’t have any time to wonder over the use of his name before the door is open. Dean himself just barely manages to duck out of the way before he’s seen, plastering himself to the wall besides the entryway like paint that has long gone dry.

Cas can only spare him a glance of concern before he is bombarded by what is in front of him, and thoughts of the submissive’s strange behavior disappear from his mind.

Because on the other side of the door is a manhunt gone wild, like they are looking for a FBI’s most wanted instead of a terrified, mixed up submissive.

There are six police cars on his lawn, with their alarms off but their lights on, flashing aggressively like a bleeding out pulse. Five of the twelve or so police officers present are standing around with K-9 units held back on leashes, growling and pacing and clearly having done their terrible job.

And then. On his porch. A man Cas doesn’t recognize, but somehow knows, through just the thinness of his smirk and the cruelty in his eyes.

Alastair, Cas has no doubt about it. He feels a chill run down his spine.

Besides him, like some kind of berserk lawyer, is Naomi, looking like she wants to tear Cas’s throat out with her teeth.

Seething with anger and soaked to the bone, she stands there dripping, more disheveled than he has ever seen her. Her usual red bun has slipped out of it’s updo to hang limp and dripping in a sad ponytail. The pantsuit she’s still wearing despite the late hour is completely ruined, hems mud-caked from stomping through the storm.

Drenched, furious, and obviously sleep deprived, she looks less put together and more terrifying than Cas has ever seen her before. Her face is so red with anger that he thinks she might catch flame any moment, and she bares her teeth at him when she sees him like she’s barely restraining herself from eating him alive.

“Where is he?” she growls, eyes bright with obvious hatred. “You bring him out here, Castiel, right now.”

There’s so much rage in her voice that Cas almost takes a step back from it, shocked by the intensity of her fury. She’s so angry it almost seems like she wants to kill him, and Cas has to physically brace himself against the force of it, wanting nothing more than to slam the door back in her face.

He almost does, alarm nearly getting the better of him, confronted so suddenly by so much dominant anger. He’s never been good at this kind of confrontation, and there are so many of them out there, it sends his heart racing too rapidly in his chest.

“I- don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, which would be weak even if he was a good liar, which he isn’t.

Her eyes flash at his nonanswer, and he sees her hands curl into fists at her sides.

“Don’t you lie to me Castiel!” she screeches. “We know you’re hiding him here!”

Cas physically flinches from her shout.

She’s throwing all the domination she can into her voice, which is quite a lot, and quite a sound. It doesn’t work on him, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t frightening. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Dean flinch too.

It takes all his willpower to resist looking over to the young man, but he bares it. He can’t give the fact that Dean is right here away, or they will just order him to come outside directly.

The thought of that makes him angry enough that he stands up straighter, and is able to snap back at Naomi with a bit more conviction.

“Hiding who?” he asks, snapping. “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

It’s not much more convincing than the first lie, but at least it sounds stronger.

But it doesn’t seem to matter, to Naomi. Her eyes flash, and she takes a step forward. Cas has to grip the doorframe to keep from taking a step back.

“You know exactly who I’m talking about!” she shouts. “You know exactly what I am talking about, Castiel!”

Red in the face, strands of wet hair blown about by the wind, she seems truly unhinged for the first time. The cool but polite woman from earlier is gone, driven away by yet another failure to get Dean off her hands.

“Do you know how much damage that boy has done to our institution? Do you know how much damage you have done? Mr. Masters has offered $70,000 dollars in compensation for the brat, and by god we are going to take it!”

“If you can find him,” Cas snaps back at her. “If I am understanding correctly, it seems you have lost my patient, yet again, and yet somehow I am responsible for this.”

Naomi takes another step forward. She looks like she’s on the verge of launching herself at him, like she’s not going to be able to stop herself from strangling him right here.

Perhaps he’s not the only one who’s thinking this, because it’s at this moment that one of the police officers takes over, coming up from behind and sliding deftly in front of her.

“Son, we have reason to believe that Mr. Dean Winchester has sought shelter here,” he cuts in artfully, steering the conversation away from the violence it seemed to be leading to. “Ms. Shurley is not being hyperbolic.”

He seems a little uncomfortable, and he moves his hand awkwardly as he speaks.

Probably fearing an attack from behind, Cas thinks dryly. Naomi doesn’t seem too happy about being cut off, even by the head of the police unit.

“Reason enough to be on my property at 5AM without a warrant?” he snaps back at the man.

The police officer only raises his eyebrows, and reaches into his coat.

“Possibly,” the man says, pulling out a piece of paper. It’s half soaked, but thankfully it unfolds.

Cas takes it when the man holds it out, concerned that it may in fact be an emergency warrant. Up north they don’t give such things out just to track down runaways, but who knows how things work around here.

When he skims it, though, he’s relieved to see it isn’t a court order, but just a preliminary incident report.

The suspect was being transported from the Shurley Center to the recipient’s car….

…..restraints deemed unnecessary due to the suspect’s current inability to disobey orders….

….ordered by Ms. Shurley to go with his owner, did not specify…

…..ran at approximately 10:06 PM….

Cas’s eyes flicker over the words quickly, illuminated by only the porchlight and the moon. Something close to understanding starts to creep up on him as he reads, but he swallows around it, too stunned to accept it right away.

“What is this?” he says instead, very carefully, looking back up at the officer. His own heart teeters precariously in his chest like a spinning top, and he can’t quite feel it beating anymore.

The officer shrugs.

“Kid bolted off after being told to go to his owner,” the man answers. “We figure there can’t be too many people that could be.”

The breath in his chest hitches, and it takes every ounce of his will not to look over and blatantly stare at Dean in surprise. As it is, he can’t help his gaze flickering over briefly in shock, and is greeted with Dean looking some mix of confused and mortified.

That settles it for Cas, and his heart stops spinning wildly, to slam solidly into him in with grateful truth. Warmth spills up and over inside of him and settles down in his veins like sediment, making his whole body feel more solid than it had been.

Dean was told to go with his owner, and he came after Cas. He came to Cas not only for help, but because his instincts recognized that he could.

He’s mine, Cas thinks weakly, and something in his chest does a somersault, before strengthening like iron in a fire.

He draws himself up.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” he says coldly, flatly, suddenly feeling much more prepared to take the entire calverley on. “Dean has had many people in his life act as his dominant, and who he’s belonged to. Any of them could have fit the bill.”

The police officer puts his hands up, as if to acknowledge that this could be true. Behind him, Naomi glares, knowing it isn’t.

“He. Is. Here,” she barks angrily. “The brat doesn’t respond to anyone else. It’s against the law to harbor a runaway, Castiel.”

I’m aware, he thinks angrily, unswayed by her transparent threats. He could lose his license over this, if it was discovered that he’s lying, but that fear feels far off and distant right now.

What feels real is Dean right besides him, pale and pleading, begging with both his mind and soul to be kept.

It’s like a flame lighting up every cavern inside of him, every latent and unused instinct he’s never seen. It all roars to life all at once at the evidence of Dean’s true trust in him, and he feels strange knowing this urge to protect had ever been something he’s been scared of.

“I’m not harboring anyone,” he snaps again, blatantly lying. The falsehood doesn’t feel so heavy anymore, though, as it rolls sharp and barbed off his tongue.

Naomi tries to step forward again, trying to strike like a viper, but the police officer moves sideways, blocking her path.

“We’re not saying you are,” the man cuts in again, sensing that things are getting heated. “The suspect could be here without your knowledge.”

Behind him, Naomi laughs out loud.

The police officer doesn’t acknowledge her skepticism, and for once, Cas has to agree with him. It does seem comical, initially, that Cas might not know Dean is here, especially with Dean staring right at him, directly in his line of sight.

But as the police officer looks at Cas with something akin to actual concern in his eyes, it dawns on Cas how reasonable a thought it actually is. Dean is a man of both incredible willpower and incredible skill, who’s more than capable of keeping himself out of sight. The order he’d deliberately misinterpreted hadn’t specified that he had to present himself to his owner, only go to him, and there’s no reason to think he would have done anything but that.

So why didn’t he? He wonders, glancing over at the young man still shivering against the wall. Why didn’t he hide when he heard me coming downstairs? Why didn’t he hide somewhere in the garden?

Outside, the storm rages, a flash of thunder punctuating the downpour. Dean stares back at him, hidden away from it, teeth chattering and absolutely soaked.

He looks so tired, and so cold, so exhausted of the entire world being after him. Like he knows what Cas is thinking, he shivers once, freezing, and drops his eyes as if he’s ashamed.

He wants a home, Cas realizes, heart wrenching painfully in his chest. He wants to be taken care of.

He wants to be warm and dry and to sleep in a bed, to be cuddled and kissed like he’d been earlier.

It’s that simple. Dean is cold, and he’s scared, and he’s in pain, and he’d come to Cas because he doesn’t want to be miserable anymore. And Cas has been nice to him, so maybe he’ll be nice to him again.

Maybe he’ll be nice to him again, and apparently that’s worth the gamble.

Everything behind Cas’s ribcage hurts. His eyes drop like Dean’s, to land on the thin shard of metal the man is still desperately clutching in his shaking hand. Abruptly, Cas recognizes it as the snapped off piece of a trailer hook-up.

Like…he’d been somewhere else before coming here. Like he hadn’t found what he’d been looking for, or like he’d changed his mind.

The pain intensifies.

“He’s not here,” he says sharply, at last responding to the police man’s proposal. “If you want to search, come back with a warrant.”

The officer looks surprised at his hostility. Naomi absolutely does not.

“I told you he wouldn’t cooperate,” she growls.

Eyes narrowing, the officer looks at Cas with significantly less sympathy in his expression.

“Son, I don’t think you understand the severity of the situation,” he says, irritated. “The submissive in question is classified as highly dangerous.”

“Yes, I am aware, thank you. I am his therapist, after all.”

“Not anymore you’re not,” Naomi interjects. “You’re fired.”

Cas looks at her flatly, unimpressed with the extreme redundancy.

“Oh no,” he says back to her, without any emotion at all.

It’s devolving into stupidity, their conversation, and he knows it, but he can’t stop himself from sniping back and forth like a child. He can’t get these people off his porch anyway, and he’s tired, and he’s hated Naomi from the start.

So he’s fully prepared for her to start shouting at him again, is fully prepared for whatever cursing she yells back. He’s braced himself for it, for his ears to ring and face to wince, as she hammers him angrily with more abuse.

But at the moment she opens her mouth to scream at him, the man who’d been standing silently beside her finally steps forward.

Tall and thin and ominous, he melts out of the shadows like a waterfall. He lifts his hand slightly, in a smooth, silent movement, one slim finger lifting delicitaly into the air.

It’s like watching an artist touch the tip of their paintbrush to a pool of watercolor, and seeing all the dye rush towards the bristles all at once. The noise of the next moment is sucked out of it by that signal, stolen like he’s diverted the course of time.

Naomi falls silent, and Cas can feel the gaping absence of her voice. It’s unsettling, like a face without eyes.

“It’s alright, Ms. Shurley,” he says calmly, in a nasal, sickly sweet voice. “Dean already knows who he belongs to.”

To his right, he sees Dean jerk with a sudden flinch of terror. The man gasps silently, and and his hand shoots out to grab Cas’s wrist.

Thankfully, Cas is already leaning with that arm against the doorframe, so it isn’t like Dean throws his arm right out into Alastair’s line of sight. It’s still so surprising that Cas can’t help but glance over in confusion, disturbed by the way the frantic tugging doesn’t stop.

One of Medusa’s victims looks back at him, face turned to horrified stone.

Run, the pale face mouths at him, which is so alarming that Cas’s eyes snap back to the matter at hand right away.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean,” he barks, angry and protective, but the man doesn’t even look his way.

Instead, he seems to stare with pointed thoughtfulness at some spot hovering just above their heads. Like he’s listening for something, Alastair tilts his head at a slight angle, a small smile playing along his lips.

Dean seems to know what’s about to happen a second before Cas does, grip tightening around his wrist like a vice.

“Dean,” the dom calls, voice lilting as Cas’s gut drops. “I know you’re there, Dean. Time to come out now, my dear.”

There’s a teasing, almost playful note to his voice. Like this is a game of hide-and-seek, to him. It makes the way Dean literally convulses with fear as if hit by a taser all the more horrifying to see.

Freezing in shock, Cas’s breath jerks itself to a stop in his chest. His own grip on the doorframe goes white-knuckle tight as his mind buzzes in panic and confusion.

“I-” he stutters. “I- You- You don’t….”

He trails off, having nothing to say.

Because Alastair wasn’t talking to him. He was talking to Dean. He was talking to Dean, one on one.

Petrified, exhausted Dean, who’s lost the ability to say no a long time ago. Dean, who looks like he’s about to faint.

They make eye contact, then, him and Dean, and Cas keeps it, not seeing much of a point in trying to hide it anymore. Alastair already knows the sub is hiding around the corner, somehow, like some kind of horrifying sixth sense, and there isn’t any way Cas knows how to push back against it besides blatant denial.

Plausible deniability- it’s the only thing he has left on his side, now, that keeps the man legally out of his house. It catches his tongue in a horrible catch-22 twister, knowing that the words Dean so desperately needs him to say right now are the only one’s he can’t.

Don’t listen to him, Dean. Stay where you are.

The admission of guilt Naomi needs to barrel her way inside.

Even without them, she’s quick on the uptake, realization dawning on her much faster than it does on the confused cop.

“What?” she says sharply, surprise quickly making way to outrage. “Is he- is he here?”

“No.”

But no one is talking to Cas anymore.

“Dean, you get out here this instant!” the woman commands, furious. “You come out here right now, do you hear me?”

He obviously does, close as he is, and Cas sees him start to move against his will.

Don’t, Cas thinks, panicked, and without another moment’s thought, moves his hand so he’s pinning Dean’s wrist against the wall.

Having twisted his own wrist out of the sub’s grip, the switch in position ends with him holding the man’s arm in place just inside of the doorway. Though it’s not nearly enough to actually keep Dean from moving away if he wants to, it seems to be enough of a signal to snap him out of his obedience for now.

Silently, the man gasps, and pushes himself back against the wall. As Cas watches, he seems to brace himself, shutting his eyes against whatever force he can feel.

Cas moves his hand up, to lace his fingers with Dean’s against the wall. Dean laces his fingers right back

Good boy, Cas thinks, and Dean shivers almost like he can hear them.

Emboldened, Cas turns back to Naomi defiantly, knowing she knows exactly what’s going on on the other side of the wall. But it doesn’t matter, because Dean isn’t listening to her, even for all her strength.

He’s listening to me, Cas thinks fiercely, something hot running through him. Even without me having to say a word.

Cas’s gestures mean more to him than Naomi’s shouting, mean more than Alastair’s coaxing grin. Without having to raise his voice or even open his mouth to speak, his dominance has more power over Dean than theirs does.

He lets the silence grow for a few seconds longer, just to prove the point that no one is coming. Alastair doesn’t seem perturbed, but Naomi’s cheeks redden, and the police officer looks increasingly confused.

“Shout all you want,” Cas tells them flatly. “There’s no one to here to hear you.”

“My mistake,” Alastair says, smooth, silken, and calm.

There’s an amused sort of twinkle in his eye that Cas doesn’t like at all, like he isn’t bothered by his apparent failure at drawing Dean out. It’s more alarming than any anger or shouting could be, and Cas tenses against it, uncertain what it means.

“This is an outrage,” Naomi huffs beside him. “You should be under arrest for harboring a runaway. Officer, do something, for god’s sake!”

The officer looks between the three of them doubtfully, like he’d rather be anywhere else than in the middle of whatever this is.

“Ma’am, there’s gotta be probable cause of a crime being committed…”

“The runaway is right around the corner!”

But there’s no proof of that, and everyone seems to know it well enough, because there’s no shock when the policeman shakes his head.

Just frustration, and Naomi stomps her foot in indignation, the most undignified motion Cas has ever seen her make. Like he had before, Alastair inexplicitly holds his hand out to placate her, and like before, it inexplicably works.

“It’s all right, Dr. Shurley,” he says, the kind of soothing that makes one numb. “Dean just needs some time to remember his place.”

Pulling a folded piece of paper from his pocket, he makes sure Cas is watching as he unfolds it, revealing that it’s the very check intended for Dean’s sale.

He also makes sure Cas is watching as he hands it over to a surprised Naomi, who blinks twice before snatching it up.

The implication is clear, and Cas swallows against it, against the goosebumps that appear on his arms. That Alastair is so sure, for whatever reason, that he’s going to be able to reclaim Dean at some point, that he’s willing to bet $70,000 dollars on that belief.

Distantly, Cas is glad Dean is still hidden behind the doorway and hadn’t seen what had just happened, knowing it would only add to the man’s feeling of impending doom.

“Are we done here?” Cas says shortly, before someone can vocalize the transaction, and Alastair smiles with a benevolent nod.

“I see no reason not to be. Dr. Shurley?”

But Naomi is preoccupied with tucking the check away somewhere dry.

“I think we’re done,” Cas reiterates, and Alastair tilts his head in agreement.

“Of course. We apologize for disrupting your night.”

Looking Cas straight in the eye, his lips unpeel in a slit-cut smile that most only see before death.

“I’ll see you soon, Dean,” he says gently, clear as a bell in springtime.

Cas shudders, and slams the door in his face.

Chapter Text

Cas shuts every window in the house after that, checking the locks, closing the shades, slamming the shutters shut. He puts up sheets over the ones that don’t have curtains, and stuffs rags between the cracks of the ones that do, panic making him paranoid enough to remember how to act when being hunted.

He’s been through this song and dance before, but it doesn’t make it any less terrifying. The sound of Dean hyperventilating in the background isn’t helping, though Cas is trying his best to ignore that part.

“I have to- I have to- Sir, I have to call my dad, he, he can do something, he’ll help us, I- I- I-”

Cas ignores the sub as he trails off into nonsense again, hyper focused on duct taping the slits in the shutters. Carefully, he peeks out of one before he sets the cover in place, eyes narrowing in on what he can see through the cut.

The car is still there. Dark, well kept. A classic. He can see the outline of Dean’s previous dom in the driver’s seat.

Parked across the street, it doesn’t seem to be planning on going anywhere any time soon.

“Damnit,” Cas mutters, pulling his eye away.

With more aggression than is really necessary, he tapes the slit so it’s completely blocked off, finishing the work that had begun close to an hour ago. The result is a household made artificially dark with paranoia, but it does the job of keeping the eyes of their new stalker out of their home and lives.

No vision inside, no proof that the sub is here. Just like the last time around.

He rubs his eyes, exhausted and resigned, Dean still chattering on somewhere behind him. Turning around, he tosses the duct tape onto the coffee table besides the doorway, bracing himself for the rest of the night.

“-he’s not gonna go away and, and, and, Cas, you don’t know, he’s fucking crazy, he’ll set the fucking house on fire if he can’t get to me, oh my god-”

Pacing around the room like he’s trying to dig a hole in it, Dean looks just as ravaged as he did when he’d come in. There’s a note of hysteria in his voice that compliments the dried blood and tears he’s so covered in, and Cas feels emptiness pang inside himself where pride used to be.

This is my fault, he thinks miserably, even though he knows it isn’t entirely, but the guilt of failed responsibility eats at him anyway. Perhaps it wouldn’t, so much, if he hadn’t rejected Naomi’s offer so quickly, if he’d at least given it enough consideration that he could call it unreasonable that the woman had moved on.

But he hadn’t given it that consideration, and it isn’t unreasonable, from a business perspective. That she’d assumed his “I’ll think about it” was a “no” and found another option. And now they’re in this mess because of it, no, Dean’s in this mess because of Cas, with a man from his nightmares stalking him across the street and waiting for the first opportunity to drag the sub away.

Cas could lose his license to practice for this. For hiding him. Probably will, to be honest, even if he manages to keep Dean out of Alastair’s paws. But he can’t just abandon the man after being the reason he’s in such trouble, after getting the man into this horrorshow by already abandoning him once.

“Is he still there? He’s still there, isn’t he, oh my god, fuck fuck fuck, Cas please let me call my dad, please, oh my god-”

Making a terrified noise, Dean hunches halfway over where he’s standing, tugging at his hair like he’s trying to tear it out. He looks only half present, eyes wide and red and distant, like they are reliving something awful that is so far out of where Cas can reach.

This is my fault, Cas thinks again, dissonance hitting him hard as he remembers Dean’s loose smile and pleasure in his lap. It’s hard to believe that was only this morning. It feels like an eon ago.

Sighing, he moves forward, crossing the room to grip Dean’s panicked form. The man flinches as he’s held, as his shoulders are steadied and maneuvered, so he’s looking straight at Cas instead of the floor.

“Dean,” he says firmly. “Your father cannot help you.”

Dean sort of twitches, like he’s hearing what Cas is saying and flicking the words away. His gaze is distant, unfocused and strange.

“No- I- you don’t understand- I, I belong to him, he’ll, he’ll help me…”

Frustrated, Cas purses his lips.

Your father is the one who abandoned you to that man! He wants to shout, wants to shake, wants to make Dean look him in the eye and understand.

But that would be insurmountably cruel, especially at a time like this, when Dean is looking desperately for some proof that he isn’t going to be left to fall into Alastair’s clutches again. It would be cruel, and it isn’t what Dean needs, though he does need to understand that there’s no easy way out of this.

He can’t have Dean running out and away to try to get back to his father, while Alastair is sitting with his phone ready across the street.

“Dean, listen to me,” Cas tells him, holding the sub’s shoulders very tight. “You do not belong to your father. You may feel like you do, but you don’t.”

Dean stares back at him uncomprehendingly, tear tracks and dirt on his face. Cas feels the overwhelming urge to look after him, to wash him up and brush his hair and send him to bed to rest.

He’ll get to that, he will, and that placates the part of himself who’s instincts are screaming in pain. The more logical part knows they have to have this conversation first, that all his care and protections will be for nothing if Dean runs off in the middle of the night and gets himself caught.

“I- no, you don’t get it, he’s not like you think,” the man continues doggedly, proving that Cas is right to be concerned. “He- he was trying to help me, he didn’t want Alastair to be my dom.”

The sub shakes his head, too hard to really be a natural movement, like he’s trying to get some thought out of his mind.

“But I’m. I’m better now,” he insists, shaking his head again quickly. “He’ll want me back now that I’m better. He won’t let Alastair take me again. He won’t.”

Cas severely doubts that that would be true, even if Dean were actually better, which he isn’t, in any way shape or form. Tucking this entire conversation and the delusions that accompany it away for a later date, Cas pushes on, recognizing that this isn’t the time to unpack all of that.

“It isn’t up to him,” he says instead, getting straight to the point. “Your father has no authority over you anymore, nor over what happens to you. Do you understand?”

Dean doesn’t.

“I belong to him.”

Like the belief is a mantra.

A mantra that’s going to get him killed.

That had always been true, but now it is more urgently so, with a lunatic haunting their doorstep like a wolf. Cas can’t guarantee Dean’s confinement here like he could back at the high-security center, needs to make sure the man understands why he has to stay here.

Exasperated, Cas abandons the sub’s right shoulder to instead clutch gently at his chin. Carefully but insistently, he tilts Dean’s ducked head up, so the man has no choice but to look him in the eye.

“In your heart, you may belong to whoever you want,” Cas informs him sternly. “But on paper, that isn’t the same thing. Legally, you belong to no one but the center, and thus it is only the center who has the authority to end this sale.”

Rubbing his thumb along Dean’s jaw, he tries to sound comforting, even as he insists on making the danger they’re both in now very clear.

“If you run off looking for your father, the center will have both of us arrested. Your claim will be transferred to Alastair, and there will be nothing that I can do.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“There will be nothing your father can do either, even if he wants to. He lost his legal rights to you when he sold you to Alastair the first time.”

He doesn’t mean to be harsh, but he’s always been bad at judging when tact is required, and it seems that this was one of those times. Dean scowls at him like he’s hurt, and jerks his head out of Cas’s grasp, who only belatedly recognizes how sore a subject that first sale must be.

“My dad can do anything,” Dean says fiercely, truly defiant, like what Cas had said had really made him mad. He stops short of trying to pull his arm out of Cas’s grip, though, just glaring off to the side with a clenched jaw.

Cas doesn’t try to grab it again.

“I’m sure he can,” he placates gently, giving the man’s shoulder a soft squeeze. “But let’s not run the experiment, please, not with your safety. We don’t need to get your father involved.”

We can’t get your father involved, is what Cas actually means of course, though he stops short of saying it out loud. Dean seems to hear the implication though, because he bars his teeth like he’s being attacked.

“Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?” he hisses, furious, tears of fright springing quick to his eyes. “Just fucking wait here for him to get me? Wait for you to get pissed enough to throw me out? Fuck off!”

Wrenching his arm from Cas’s hold, he stumbles away.

Cas lets him go, watching him as he trips backwards, as he staggers across the room like he has somewhere to go. It only takes a few seconds before he seems to realize he doesn’t, though, at which point he just collapses on the ground in despair.

It’s a pathetic image, the man still soaking wet and miserable, and Cas can only wonder at the fact that he has any energy left for any kind of defiance at all. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself without it, looking lost as a child, like it’s only now dawning on him how trapped he is, and at what mercy he’s thrown himself upon.

“Fuck,” he whispers, miserable, hiding his head in his hands. It’s so pitiful that Cas feels the urge to look away, like he’s violating the man just by seeing this.

It makes him feel like he’s done something wrong, taking away the man’s hope. Even if that hope was the kind of nonsense that would get him killed, he’s clearly injured Dean almost as badly by destroying it.

“I am not going to throw you out, sweetheart,” he says after a few moments have passed in silence. It’s all he has to offer in consolation to the young man, who’s clearly realizing how powerless he is.

Unsurprisingly, the promise doesn’t make Dean doesn’t look any less despondent, shaking his head in unhappy disagreement.

“You don’t get it, man.”

The sub’s voice is threadbear, now, tired.

“He’s not gonna go away. He knows where I am, and he knows what I am, and my dad’s the only one who might be able to…”

He trails off, like he doesn’t know how to finish his sentence. Or perhaps like he does know how, but doesn’t have the courage to go through with it.

It leaves Cas wanting. For all his so-called brilliance, he’s struggling to keep up with Dean’s thought process right now, and isn’t sure what the man must be trying to tell him beyond that he’s scared out of his mind.

“Might be able to what, sweetheart?”

Make the man leave him alone?

Is it possible that Dean’s idolization of his father is so childish, that he would imagine him a slayer of monsters that wait in the dark?

Or is there something real, something literal behind the man’s incomprehensible babbling, that might be worth picking up the phone for?

Cas doesn’t know, and maybe Dean doesn’t either, because he only looks up at Cas like he’s just noticed he’s there.

“What?” the man asks softly, like he’s forgotten what they are talking about. With pity, Cas crouches down low where he is so he’s not hovering so far above the submissive.

“You were saying your father might be able to do something about Alastair,” he prompts gently. “Might…be able to stop him?”

“Oh,” Dean replies, looking mildly surprised. “No, he might be able to stop me.”

It’s not what Cas expects him to say, though he doesn’t really know what he was expecting. The phrase doesn’t make much sense to him, and he peers at Dean searchingly, as if he can parse out the contents of the man’s mind just through thought.

He can’t, of course, and Dean recognizes this before Cas does, or at least he recognizes the fact that Cas has never been one to understand what words imply.

“If I don’t belong to my dad, I belong to Alastair,” he explains tonelessly. “And I…I don’t know how not to listen, to who I belong.”

Almost vapid, his words are spoken without any emphasis, colorless and flat, like they hold no meaning. That more than anything illustrates the resignation Dean is rapidly falling into, much more frightening to witness than the fear.

It takes Cas a few beats to catch up to what Dean is telling him, but when he does, the alarm bells start ringing. Very fast, his mind flashes back to the smug calmness with which Alastair had left the premises, as if having failed to reclaim Dean hadn’t bothered him at all.

Or, perhaps, like he hadn’t failed. Like he was fully convinced he’d already won.

Cas looks back at Dean in alarm, taking in his limp body language, his sudden lethargy. He hadn’t made a move towards the door since Cas had pinned his wrist to the wall, but was it possible he was still feeling the urge?

“Dean, you do not have to go to that man,” he says sternly, clarifying what he’d thought had been abundantly clear. “You’re not allowed to go to him, do you understand me?”

Dean just shrugs, like it’s all the same to him.

“Don’t belong to you.”

Cas’s eyebrows jump up.

Concerned, he scoots forward, just enough to be within arm’s reach. Though he moves slowly, Dean still flinches from his approach like it’s going to hurt.

He shoots Cas a wounded look, like he thinks he’s going to be slapped for arguing back at him, like it isn’t by far the most worrying thing he’s said all evening.

It’s not the first time Dean has attempted to reject his authority, but it’s the first time Cas is concerned the rejection might hold any water. It shouldn’t be possible for Dean to refuse Cas’s commands at this point in his recovery, but stranger things have happened, especially when it comes to this sub.

Wasn’t it only yesterday morning that Dean had punched him in the mouth after being told not to cause him any harm? While that was an exceptional situation, it had still been a good sign for his autonomy, which now becomes, in the face of Alastair’s influence, a bad one.

“Dean,” he says seriously, pushing real dominance into his voice. “Touch your nose.”

Dean jerks away automatically from the sound of power.

Then he blinks, confused, as the words settle into his psyche, obviously quite different from whatever cruelty he’d come to expect.

“What?” he asks, baffled, but Cas is too worried about him to explain. Troubled by the lack of immediate obedience, he just repeats himself, making sure to sound sterner.

“Touch. Your. Nose.”

There’s no threat behind the words, but there is complete authority, without any room for rejection or debate. Dean shrinks at the sound of it, and capitulates after only a few seconds of glaring, huffing in irritation as the press of authority slips away.

Cas’s shoulders loosen. Relieved, he sits back on his haunches.

So it is a bluff. Or at least, another delusion. Dean has no power to disobey him, still, which for once has become a great blessing.

His mind may recognize Alastair as his “true” authority in the absence of his father, but the symptoms of his illness hold him back from being able to choose to listen. A nightmare in any regular situation, but a blessing in this one- Dean can’t put himself back into danger even if he thinks it’s what he’s supposed to do.

“Dean, for all intents and purposes, you do belong to me,” he tells the man. He speaks gently, in a comforting tone. “I’m the only authority you have the freedom to recognize, at least for now. As long as you’re in this house, you’re mine.”

It could be a threat, if he was talking to anyone else, if it wasn’t Dean, who’s so submissive and so insane. As it is, though, his words are meant as a great consolation, an assurance to a young man who’s out of control.

It seems to serve its function; Dean looks at him after he says it without any real fear in his eyes- Only the doubt of someone hearing a promise they don’t think will be kept.

“Yeah, ok Sergeant Sweetheart,” he snips back with dry skepticism. “I’m sure you got the nuts to show me who’s boss. Mr. Psycho outside whips the skin off my back for lookin’ at him, but sure, he’s got nothin’ on you.”

It’s meant to hurt, and it does, in a way, if only because it hits on what Cas is insecure about. The implication that he’s not “dom enough” to keep Dean under his control when faced with Alastair isn’t one he entirely enjoys having lobbed at him.

More blatantly, though, the insult lays bare just how confused Dean is about what gives someone the power to control him. He seems convinced that Alastair has the power to take him away from Cas simply by virtue of being crueler, like the ability to compel the submissive into obedience is associated with violence rather than mere proximity.

The misunderstanding makes sense, to a certain extent. If he wasn’t sick, they may be having more of a problem. Submissives do feel the urge to obey whoever they recognize as their dominant, much more strongly than they feel compelled to obey other people. And it’s quite common for victims of abuse to conflate violence with authority, in the absence of any trust to compare it to.

But Dean isn’t anywhere near healthy enough to make such distinctions, whether they are good for him or not. The luxury of recognizing one authority as more valid than another is not a milestone he’s stable enough to have reached.

For better or for worse, Dean has no choice but to obey one power and one power alone: that being the voice of whichever dominant happens to be physically closest to him and who has most recently given him a command.

Thankfully, that role is held by Cas right now, not Alastair, and he intends to keep it that way for the indefinite future if he has anything to say about it.

“I don’t need to ‘show you who’s boss,’” Cas informs the sub bluntly, making air quotes around the words as he speaks. “Alastair cannot access you here, and I don’t intend to allow him to. You cannot leave, because I have ordered you to stay put. I don’t see how the level of abuse he has put you through has any bearing on these circumstances, which will not change regardless of how you pout.”

It’s a bit rude, perhaps, but he is very tired at this point, and very anxious to get Dean washed and put to bed. The man’s panic that is quickly devolving into obstinance is only a roadblock to such necessities, which Cas has to prioritize over any deranged opinions the man may hold.

Still, he’s not surprised when the man splutters in indignance, clearly not appreciating having his input dismissed. The fact that that input involves him insisting he, by default, belongs to a psychopath unless his father says otherwise doesn’t seem to factor into the strength of his offense.

“He paid 70 grand for me, Cas!” he insists, flushing red with outrage.

“That isn’t relevant. It doesn’t change that I have you, and he does not.”

“Not relevant? How is the fact that he owns me not relevant?”

“Because he doesn’t,” Cas says flatly. “I do.”

Like he’s startled, Dean sits back a bit when he hears that, apparently stunned momentarily into silence. He doesn’t seem to know how to make sense of that declaration, though it’s clearly significant enough to him that it stops him short.

“....What?” he says eventually, after more than a few seconds have passed without speaking. His voice sounds uncharacteristically small.

Cas himself hesitates for a moment after he hears it, reminded of how precarious this all is for Dean. Softening, he reaches out to the submissive slowly and carefully, not wanting to scare him away.

“Sweetheart,” he sighs, moving forward a few inches on his knees, so he’s kneeling right besides the young man on the ground. “You think I’m going to let that man get his hands on you again? After how he treated you?”

Brushing his thumb along Dean’s freckled cheek, he shakes his head.

“There’s no world in which I let you go back to him, baby. Even if you beg to be allowed.”

That does something to Dean, who clearly has no desire to return to his old dominant, but doesn’t know how not to try. The promise that he’ll be kept safe, even against his bruised, twisted up will- it quiets something inside him all at once.

His eyes drop to the floor on instinct, all remnants of defiance quickly melting away.

“It-” he stutters. “What if it ain’t up to you?”

“It is,” Cas replies. “I’ve made it so.”

It’s self-evident, what he means, what he intends Dean to understand. That he’s taken over this operation from anyone else who was involved in it, be it Naomi or Alastair or Dean himself.

The second Dean appeared in his home asking for help, he gave up whatever stake he had in the situation’s outcome, handing it off to Cas for safekeeping. And Cas is going to handle it, is not going to allow Dean to be pulled back out to the cold, even if he has to barricade every doorway to protect him.

Swallowing, Dean bites his lip, looking uncertain now that his hysteria is gone. It seems to be sinking in to him, slowly, finally, that he isn’t going anywhere. The idea seems novel to him, like he isn’t used to having someone else take control.

“So, what, I’m like some fuckin’ princess in a tower now?” he mutters, uncertain. “And you’re the big bad dragon, keepin’ me in and them out?”

Cas snorts.

“I guess if you want to think of it like that,” he says, somewhat amused.

But Dean doesn’t seem to be joking.

With red eyes, he’s staring at Cas searchingly, a strange expression taking over his face. Like a comet, something flashes over it abruptly, before fading back into that oddly serious look.

“Well you better step up your game, King Kong. Empire State ain’t as tall as it looks.”

The tone is heavy like lead.

Somewhat confused and a little alarmed, Cas pulls back from the young man for a moment to study him briefly, not sure what to make of the strange response. Dean just blinks at him with an odd look that Cas consciously chooses to think of as disoriented, too uncomfortable at the immediate thought that it looks more like an accusation.

“Sweetheart, I was just teasing you,” he says, worried, moving his hand to pet Dean’s matted hair. “I’m not any kind of monster, you know that.”

Chewing his lip, Dean doesn’t look at him.

“You could be,” he mutters. “If you wanted to. But I guess I ain’t no Ann Darrow.”

Cas frowns.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He slumps over as he says it, in a sad sort of defeated position, as if what he’s saying makes any sort of sense at all. Concerned, Cas puts his hand on the man’s forehead to check his temperature, not sure that he’s entirely present.

There’s no obvious sign of a fever, but then, that’s far from the only explanation. The poor thing is beaten to hell and still shivering from the rain-chill, and must be exhausted beyond all belief.

“Baby, you’re not thinking straight anymore,” he says gently, and Dean doesn’t argue the point. “Let’s get you to bed, alright? Get you cleaned up so you can sleep. You’ll feel better after you’ve rested.”

Shooting him a tired look, the sub sighs with the resignation of someone who knows there’s no point left in fighting. Like he’s seeing something sad but sweet, Cas is startled to see the lines of the man’s face soften suddenly into something that could almost be described as tender.

“Sure, little monsterman,” he agrees, with soft acceptance. “Let’s go to bed. I ain’t gonna argue with the big boss. You be as sweet on me as you want.”

Chapter Text

The sun has come firmly up by the time Dean is washed and patched up again, but it doesn’t change that Cas is sending the man straight to bed. He turns down the comforter and fluffs the pillows on the bed in the guest room, as the sub stands hovering nervous by the door.

“Is this your room?” the man asks quietly, and Cas looks up in slight surprise at the sound of his voice. It hasn’t been heard much ever since he took Dean upstairs a half hour ago, exhausted as they both have been.

“No, it’s yours.” Cas gestures to the bed he’s unmaking. “I wanted you to have some privacy, so…”

Dean doesn’t seem taken with this explanation. Looking around the room like it is a gaping mouth that might eat him, the sub fidgets like he’s not entirely unafraid.

“Oh,” he says uncertainly. “What’s the bed for.”

Cas stares him, not knowing what on earth he could mean.

“Sleeping?”

It comes out sounding like a question, though he doesn’t intend it to. He doesn’t know what else a bed could be used for.

Except.

Well….

But Dean doesn’t look too enthusiastic about that at the moment, despite their little adventure yesterday morning. He’s staring at the bed warily, glancing between it and Cas with obvious suspicion, like he doesn’t trust that he’s not gonna be thrown down onto it.

“Subs don’t sleep in beds,” he says, with a flat, unarguable tone that implies he is just stating a commonly known fact. It’s so far from the truth that Cas feels his heart sink in his chest as he says it, not knowing what such a belief suggests about the life he’s led.

Swallowing, Cas flattens the last crimp in the folded down comforter before stepping away from it, wanting to separate the idea of himself from the mattress. While there have always been cruel dominants who make their subs sleep on the floor, the way Dean seems to think this is standard treatment doesn’t bode well for what he thinks of Cas overall.

“Subs sleep in beds, Dean. Subs can sleep anywhere they feel comfortable, just like anyone else.”

Dean frowns at this explanation like it is something worth being suspicious of, and crosses his arms, defensive.

“You don’t gotta try’an trick me if you wanna fuck my ass, you know,” he says sullenly, sending Cas a confused sort of glare. “It ain’t like I’m goin’ anywhere, with Mr. Psycho outside. You could pull out a set’a knives, and I’d be stayin’ put.”

He sounds genuinely confused, like he doesn’t understand why Cas wouldn’t have thought through how thoroughly trapped Dean is in the event that he wanted to assault him. Almost like it bothers him, he frowns at Cas like there’s something wrong with the dom before dropping his eyes and ducking his head.

“Anyway, it’s not like I ain’t grateful,” he continues, quieter. “I ain’t so much of a brat that I’d fight you, or somethin’, after everything you’ve done to help me.”

There’s real shame in his voice, like it actually hurts his feelings that Cas might think he would dare to resist being raped. It’s so slavish and broken that Cas feels bile starting to gather in his throat at the sound of it, wanting more than anything to wish this conversation over.

“The bed is for you, Dean,” he says, trying to sound firm about it, rather than as shaken as he actually is. “Please get into it. It’s where you’re going to sleep, and nothing else, I promise.”

He takes another step away from the mattress, to prove his point.

Dean still looks conflicted, for a few, uncertain seconds, until Cas reiterates his point by raising his brow. At that, Dean unexpectedly blushes a little, and uncrosses his arms very quickly, shuffling over to the bed without any more protesting and climbing into the folded down pocket of blankets.

Then he looks up at Cas, not as if wondering what’s going to happen next, but just like he’s seeking approval.

“Uh. Like that?”

As if there’s any possible way to get into bed the wrong way.

Cas sighs, and smiles, feeling sad.

“Yes, just like that, Dean,” he says softly. “Good job. Good boy.”

Dean’s bites his lip, blushing even more.

He also does nothing else, makes no move to cover himself with the sheets or make himself comfortable, acting like a doll that just stays where it’s put.

So Cas comes back over to him, waving away his worries of scaring the young man, deciding there’s not much he can do at all that won’t scare him. Pushing up the blankets, he tucks them close around the young man’s neck, where there’s no way any part of him might get cold.

With the collar of the soft new pajama shirt he’d changed into peeking out over the top of the covers, Dean looks young and sweet where he lies underneath the dom now, big green eyes staring up with an odd kind of trust.

There’s something painfully vulnerable about it, like he really wouldn’t fight back if Cas were to climb on top and have his way with him. Like he wouldn’t even be angry. It’s an uncomfortable thought, and Cas tries not to think about how quickly Dean’s loyalty had expanded to include him, apparently unconditionally.

“You want me?” the sub wonders, acutely genuine, and Cas has to bite his tongue to keep from saying yes I do.

Because it’s not that simple, and that’s not really what Dean is asking, he knows that, though a simple “No” would be as devastating to him as the opposite.

Cas softens, and sits down on the bed.

Putting his hand against Dean’s forehead, he pushes backwards, carding his fingers through the clean, shower-damp hair. The sub clearly loves that, and he shivers, his eyes fluttering shut in pleasure as blatant as the kind he’d had sitting on Cas’s lap.

“You’re a good boy, Dean,” Cas says gently. “And I’m very happy you’re here with me, now.”

Both true, though he’d prefer different circumstances.

“All I want from you right now, though, is for you to stay in bed and get some sleep. You’ve had a long, exhausting day, and you need your rest.”

“In a bed.” Dean snorts, like something is funny. “Ha.”

It’s not a sarcastic laugh.

More, he seems genuinely blown away by whatever is happening now, like sleeping in a bed is as crazy as being on the moon.

Cas’s heart bleeds with every color it can think of, and he tries to hold back the looming threat of tears.

“Yes, sweetheart. In a bed. You’re not to leave it, is that understood?”

Dean opens his eyes.

“What if I have to pee?”

The question is immediate, and serious, and it makes Cas snort in amusement.

“Ok, if you need to use the bathroom, you can get up to go to the bathroom. You can get up if there’s any sort of emergency, too.”

“Like Alastair setting the house on fire,” he quips, which makes Cas hesitate, because that’s the second time he’s mentioned that idea.

“Do you think he actually might do that?”

He’s not sure what he’s going to do if Dean says yes.

But the man just shakes his head, snuggling lower down into the sheets.

“Nah,” he says, with enough ease that Cas doesn’t doubt he’s sure of it. “Not yet at least. He’ll try to wait me out. He’s gonna want me to have to come to him.”

Which is. Also concerning. Also not a normal thing to have to think about. But Dean doesn’t seem worried about it anymore, which is good.

His eyes are quickly drooping again, exhaustion getting the better of him as Cas watches, the feeling of being pet making him soft and unafraid. It settles something inside of Cas to see it, makes him feel in some instinctual part of him like he’s done something right, for once, makes him feel like he’s done his job as a dominant to have gentled Dean into comfort and rest.

You did that, Cas thinks glowingly, and some of the pride that had evaporated when he’d seen the miserable state Dean had come to him in condenses right back into him from the air.

Because yes, he screwed up, and yes, it was his fault that Dean was put through this nightmare. But it was also him who talked the sub out of the conviction he would have to return to Alastair just because he was ordered to, him who constructed a castle of safety around the man with his own orders that is sturdy enough to have the sub drifting off within it.

“Well, he’s going to be sorely disappointed, because you’re not going anywhere, sweetheart, are you?”

Dean hums absently in agreement, too sleepy to be any more articulate, and Cas smiles at the trust it implies.

“Got. Got the big bad wolf, protecting me, right?” the man says belatedly, after a few quiet seconds have passed. It surprises a chuckle out of Cas, because it’s unexpected, and because it’s funny, because Dean is funny, when he’s allowed to be himself.

“Oh, yeah, you better believe it. No one bigger or badder than me.”

The sarcasm is obvious, and Dean cracks a sleepy smile at it. A moment later, he again opens his eyes.

The look he gives Cas then is so gentle and affectionate that it almost stuns him, a sweet sort of fondness shining through. It’s the same expression teenage girls get when they watch videos of baby pandas sneezing on the internet, and Cas starts to feel like he’s being seen as something close to cute.

Which is. Strange. He’s not used to being seen in any sort of diminutive manner, especially not by his patients. But then, Dean isn’t really his patient any more, is he now? He’s…something more than that. He’s entirely Cas’s own.

He’s my sub.

The thought comes feeling more natural than Cas ever would have believed it could, settling comfortably in his heart like it’s meant to hold it. Only his mind gives it any sort of trouble, wrestling antagonistically with it before it gets too ingrained in him, knowing there’s more complexity to their situation than his feelings want to admit.

Like the stalker who’s probably still hanging around across the street in that old car of his. Like the fact that Dean is hiding here, not living here for good.

Like the fact that the man’s affection is entirely dependent on the fact that Cas is protecting him, and is mixed as thoroughly with fear as it is with love.

It feels dissonant, to know this now, to see Dean smiling at him with such gentle warmth. As if he hadn’t just asked with complete earnestness if Cas was about to rape him, promising genuinely that he wouldn’t fight back if he did.

Sighing, Cas pulls his hand out of Dean’s hair and sits up again, trying not to let his worry show on his face.

“Go to sleep, baby,” he says gently, and starts to stand, intending to make himself useful somewhere else.

He’s stopped, though, almost as soon as he starts the movement, Dean’s hand coming out quickly to grip his wrist.

“Wait,” the man says, asks, demands without noticing, as if he’s not scared of being retaliated against. Hesitating only for a second, Cas does wait, and then sits back down again, as it becomes clear the man is making to sit up.

It seems to be difficult, though, and Cas remembers with a pang how hurt he still is under the borrowed pajamas that cover most of his skin. The man had let him attend to his leg, but had been too shy to let Cas look again at the rest of him, and too scared to take the pills Cas had again offered.

Conflicted on whether he should have pushed the issue more, he helps Dean sit up by lifting the sub’s weight from under his arms. Dean makes a little noise as he does so, and then sends him a crooked grin in the aftermath, wiggling his eyebrows with a flirty attitude that Cas doesn’t see coming.

“You’re strong,” the sub comments, and Cas laughs a little, amused despite his worry over Dean’s state.

“Well, you sort of have to be when you’re wrestling a headstrong sub every day, don’t you?”

The words are out of his mouth before he can second guess if he should say them.

But like a testament to how suddenly and firmly Dean has decided to like him, the sub doesn’t fall apart, or even flinch. His eyes crinkle, and he snorts a little like his attempts at murder are an inside joke now, which to be fair, Cas had just decided they are.

“Guess so,” he laughs, a little shyly, a little flustered, as if thinking about Cas restraining him makes his stomach flip. It’s more than a little endearing, and Cas has to resist the urge to kiss him, knowing that now is very much not the time.

Dean doesn’t seem to be as sure of that, though, despite having been so recently put through the ringer. He bites his lip as he glances at Cas from under his eyelashes, obviously bashful, like he’s too pleased to yet go to sleep.

“You’re really nice, aren’t you,” he says suddenly, words coming out in a jumbled sort of rush. Like they’d escaped the pen the sub had been trying to keep them behind, his eyes widen as he realizes they’ve made it out.

His hand slides off Cas’s wrist, then, to grip the sheet underneath it, fingers knotting into the fabric in a nervous, fidgeting clutch.

Cas looks down after it, and puts his own hand on top of the moving tangle, not liking how quickly the digits seem to start to turn on themselves.

“What do you mean, sweetheart,” he asks gently as he separates them from one another, nonverbally signaling to the submissive to undig his nails from his flesh.

Dean listens, though he doesn’t bother looking down at that drama, instead keeping his gaze glued with intense sincerity on Cas’s face.

“I just mean, uh, you really don’t like all that hitting stuff, like you said, I guess. You’re- you really don’t like it when subs are afraid.”

Humming in agreement, Cas tangles his own hand with Dean’s to keep it from getting antsy, just like he had earlier at the doorway. Glancing up, he sees the softness in Dean’s expression is back, just as fond and endeared as before.

Cas doesn’t mind. If Dean needs to think of him as something soft and cute to find him unintimidating, Cas isn’t going to let his own pride get in the way. It is true, after all, what Dean is saying about his attitude towards roughness, and it isn’t wrong of the man to think that Cas is unusually thin-skinned.

About tolerating cruelty, that is. He would like to believe he has more of a backbone when it comes to standing up to it, and the like. But Dean has been hurt badly enough that any sort of strength is likely to be something that scares him indiscriminately, so Cas can’t begrudge him being happy to see the dom he’s stuck with completely without it.

“Thought it was an act, but I guess it isn’t,” the man is saying, voice softening. “You’re real sweet, Cas, you know that? You’re real sweet.”

“Thank you, Dean,” Cas answers him, indulgent. He squeezes the man’s hand a little in response.

Recognizing the slight slurring that’s creeping into the man’s words as the sign of extreme exhaustion that it is, he starts to gently try to push Dean down back towards the pillow on the bed. Dean doesn’t budge, though, eyes oddly bright as he continues to stare at the dom, continuing on like he absolutely has to say his piece.

“I mean it, Cas. No one else would’a helped me. No one else ever has, you know.”

Cas does know.

“I’ve been nothin’ but a pain in your ass, and you’ve been way nicer than you really should’a been about it, but you don’t gotta worry about that anymore, ok? Ok?”

Dean gets more insistent when Cas doesn’t answer, so he answers, nodding with a little concern.

“Ok, Dean, I understand, sweetheart. Let’s go to bed now, baby, alright?”

This time, Dean does allow himself to be pushed down again, slowly, though he grabs Cas’s forearm as he hits the sheets.

“You gotta know how good you are, Cas,” he continues, insistent. “How rare it is? That you’re so nice? That you don’t like to hit?”

There’s a kind of urgency in the way he speaks that Cas doesn’t entirely feel comfortable acknowledging, especially combined with the awkward truth of his words.

“Yes, Dean, I know,” he agrees anyway, because Dean is frantic, projecting a calmness in response to that franticness he doesn’t really feel.

“You gotta know,” the sub says again. “You gotta know. There’s no one else like you in the whole world, I don’t think.”

Cas swallows, and pulls his arm out of Dean’s clutch, a little abruptly, but Dean doesn’t seem to notice, thank god.

Trying not to think about what the sub had just said, he consciously softens his demeanor to something more appropriate. Something a dominant responding to what are supposed to be complements might have.

“Alright, Dean,” he says, pushing the strain somewhere distant. “It’s bedtime for real now, I think.”

Dean tries to sit up again, but Cas pushes him back down before he can get very far, keeping his hand on the sub’s chest to hold him steady.

“But-”

The sub tries halfheartedly to sit up again, and then tries a third time, and then stops trying when he realizes he’s not going anywhere.

And then he sighs.

His body relaxes, and his eyes flutter shut for what Cas hopes will be the last time tonight. He puts his own hand over the one Cas is holding him down with, like he wants it to stay where it is.

“I don’t want to go,” he mumbles.

Or is it, “I don’t want you to go”? Cas isn’t sure. He can’t hear the words very well, under the slurring.

“I’ll stay right here until you fall asleep, sweetheart,” he promises, and Dean sighs again, like that sounds good to him.

“Alright. I’ll miss you.”

Nonsensical, but that’s expected. He’s very close to falling asleep.

“I’ll be right here,” Cas repeats again, reassuring the sub.

Dean hums, and then is quieter and quieter, and then his breathing evens out like the rain.

Chapter Text

Maybe he shouldn’t be shocked, considering the events that had happened leading up to it. Maybe he shouldn’t be shocked, considering it’s what Dean was scared of, and what they talked about for half the night.

Maybe he shouldn’t be shocked, but he is shocked, shocked like the victim of a lighting strike is shocked, like someone who’s been hit by a car.

Because Dean is gone, despite his illness, despite his obedience. Despite his obvious desire to stay. Dean is gone, and it is so wildly unexpected that Cas wastes precious seconds just staring at the man’s empty bed where he’d last seen him, politely made like the sub had tucked all the blankets back in before he’d left.

When he does startle out of his confusion, it’s only because he hears a clap of thunder far off in the distance, like a smack besides his ear snapping him out of it.

Fuck, Cas thinks, and then he bolts as fast as he can down the stairs, half hoping that Dean might still be in the living room.

He isn’t, though, of course, which isn’t really surprising, considering Cas had only been alerted to Dean’s escape because he’d heard the sound of a door clicking shut. It hadn’t been loud at all, but had awoken him anyway, paranoid as he is from years of running, something he’s ironically grateful now as he realizes his paranoia had this time been right.

Dean is gone, he left, even though it shouldn’t be physically possible, even though Cas hadn’t thought it was possible, only a few morning hours ago. Scrambling to shove his shoes on, he almost trips over himself with how fast he races out the door after the man, heart pounding double time in his chest like it’s trying to catch up to something too.

Outside, he only makes it down the staircase before he realizes he doesn’t know where the hell he’s going. Thank god, thank god, the car across the street left hours ago, so he knows at least that Dean hasn’t already evaporated for good.

The rain has stopped, though the sky is still cloudy. Cas’s footsteps make shocked splashing noises in the puddles he passes through running out towards the street. Looking left, then looking right, for a moment he’s too panicked to see anything more than silent suburbia, the ominous quiet of an early morning weekend breathing down his neck like a ticking bomb.

Then he looks left again, and then he looks right again, and then he spots him, the figure in the distance. Walking firmly and unflinchingly away from his household, maybe two or three blocks out from where Cas stands.

Relief hits him like a truck.

Thank god.

The man hasn’t gotten farther than the first stop sign.

Cas runs like he’s almost out of time all the same.

Dean doesn’t hear him for a very long time, despite the silence, despite the fact that Cas isn’t trying to be quiet. As if in his own world, he walks without awareness, head down and shoulders hunched like he’s ashamed.

And perhaps he is ashamed, but that’s far from all he is, Cas discovers very quickly when he catches up. He’s also devastated, and disoriented, and most clearly of all, shocked, spinning around in panic when Cas grabs his shoulder and stumbling backwards into a puddle where he nearly slips.

The alarm in Cas’s mind pinwheels faster when he takes in the sight of the man’s tear stained face. There are scratch marks all over his cheeks and neck that hadn’t been there earlier, and his fingers have blood caked under their nailbeds.

“Dean,” he says to the sub, flat and taken aback. Dean’s eyes widen in panic, and he again tries to stumble away.

Cas doesn’t let him, grabbing his wrist and holding the man fast as he tugs at it fruitlessly, yanking in frantic jerks like he’s compelled.

“I have to, Cas, I have to, you don’t understand, I’m sorry I have to, I have to go to him, I don’t have a choice.”

“No, you don’t,” Cas agrees grimly. “Come on, Dean, we’re going home.”

He tries to pull Dean along, then, by the wrist, intending to march him right back to where he’d come from despite his protesting. But Dean’s compulsion to obey Alastair is much more than a mere passing urge, and before either of them can blink, the sub has taken an instinctual swing at him.

But Cas has learned, over the past week, what to expect with Dean, finally. He sees the attack coming, and catches it before it can land, pulling the man’s arm down in a way that twists his body around and ends with both wrists pinned against his back.

Obviously not seeing this coming, Dean makes a terrified noise as it happens, and lurches forward in an attempt to get away that has so much force behind it it almost brings Cas tumbling down on top of the man.

He manages to keep his footing, though, and it is Dean who ends up slipping and sliding against the mud as he wobbles, bare feet unable to gain traction in the wet dirt.

So Cas catches him, keeping the sub’s wrists pinned with one hand as the other arm comes up to wrap around the man’s chest. Pulling him backwards, he pins Dean’s torso against his own, stabilizing them both, and making it all the more difficult for the sub to break away.

“Cas, please!” Dean cries out, sounding hurt and betrayed. Guilt blooms to life hot and heavy inside Cas’s soul.

“Dean, you do not want to go to him,” Cas says out loud to placate it. It’s much for his own benefit as it is for the submissive’s- Like he needs the reminder after Dean’s obvious distress that he’s doing this for the right reasons.

Dean just groans. A choked sort of sound makes its way out of him, and he collapses forward with all his weight like he’s trying to buck Cas off.

“I have to,” he sobs, choked and miserable, like he really is in excruciating pain being held back.

Cas doesn’t doubt it, though he doesn’t understand how this can even be possible. Somehow, though, Dean’s desperation to stay loyal to his “owner” is overriding the immediate commands he’s being given.

However it is happening, it is obvious that Dean is feeling as much of a need to obey his old dominant as he does hearing Cas here and now. More, if the way the man is struggling against his current orders is anything to go by, like they are just small ripples against a tsunami inside of him.

“I have to,” he chokes again, voice scraped out and painful. “I have to, I have to! Sir, please, please, I HAVE TO!”

The shout is loud enough that it causes a dog somewhere to start barking, and makes Cas finally worry about the scene they’re creating. While manhandling a runaway submissive is in no way illegal, unfortunately, Cas still has no desire to draw unwanted attention to their escapades.

Damn it, Cas thinks, and then before he can second guess himself, he claps a hand over Dean’s mouth to keep him quiet.

Dean immediately bites him, which Cas thinks is fair enough, though it doesn’t prompt him to remove the makeshift gag.

He just grimaces through the pain as Dean hisses and struggles, obviously bordering on feral again from the stunted need. How miserably he doesn’t want to be doing this is evident from the way he’d apparently tried to claw his own skin off before leaving, but the willpower to fight back against whatever he’s feeling has obviously been completely drained.

So Cas is going to have to be his willpower for him, and protect him the way he promised he would.

“Come on, Dean,” he says gruffly, hauling the man backwards as he’s kicked and elbowed for his efforts, muffled protests of anger-shame-despair making their way out from under his hand. He only manages to keep the upper hand because of how incredibly exhausted and hurt Dean still is from what he’s been through, though it takes a lot to hang onto the sub all the same.

Still, they’re close enough to the house that it only takes a few minutes (and more than a few bruises) before he’s slamming the front door shut once again with his foot. He’s not stupid enough, though, to let go of the still fighting submissive just yet, instead dragging the man towards and up the stairs.

Dean almost manages to slip away as they’re climbing by letting his weight drop and trying to throw himself down the carpeted steps. Cas manages to catch him under his armpits, though, and then haul him up fast enough to throw the man over his shoulder, rushing his way up the rest of the distance to his bedroom before the sub can recover from the shock and squirm away.

Yelping as he’s tossed carelessly onto the bed, Dean has jack-knifed back up before Cas has made it even a few feet back towards the doorway, and nearly manages to dive in between him and the lock. Cas makes it by the skin of his teeth, though, bolting the door shut and then hauling Dean up again immediately, grabbing the sub around his waist and picking him up while the man is occupied with trying to undo the latch.

Seeming to know he’s lost, Dean sobs in despair as Cas pushes him down onto the bed again, starting to cry for real as a rope is wrapped neatly around his wrists. He bucks and struggles halfheartedly as that same rope is then attached to the gated headboard, but there’s no hope in the movements anymore.

“You said you liked me,” he accuses, betrayed, words choked and wet through his tears. “You said you liked me, I hate you, I thought you were nice!”

It gets under Cas’s skin more than he would like to admit, the urge to prove he is nice overwhelming him, wanting Dean’s affection back so badly that it aches. But that would mean letting Dean hurt himself, and he’s not ever going to do that, no matter how vicious the sub gets.

“I am trying to be nice, Dean,” he answers, more than a little frustrated. “You aren’t thinking straight, it wouldn’t be nice to let you leave.”

Dean sobs again.

“Please, it hurts, you don’t understand!”

But Cas does understand, more than most. He knows what Dean is dealing with right now, knows what kind of pain the man must be in. This is subsickness, in its purest form.

The man is being assaulted by an urge that isn’t truly his own, as helpless to it as an addict undergoing withdrawal. It’s consuming him from the inside, or at least, Dean must feel like it is, a fire only obedience can put out.

And yet it is that very obedience that would condemn him, should he actually follow it, leaving him trapped again with the psychopath he’d fought so hard to escape. Cas isn’t going to abandon him to that, isn’t going to abandon him to the doom his illness has in store for him, be it Alastair or death himself.

“It will pass,” Cas assures him, though that is only partially true. This wave of pain will abate, but the urge will still be there.

It will be there until Dean has truly recovered completely, which could take months to see all the way through. The sub obviously knows this, knows from experience that unfilled commands don’t just go away if he waits them out long enough, because he cries louder and shakes his head back and forth very hard.

“It won’t,” he insists. “Sir, it’s gonna kill me, please, I gotta listen. It’s gonna kill me if I don't, it really is.”

“That’s not going to happen, sweetheart.”

This time, his words are the full truth.

It’s not possible for a sub to die from resisting an order, no matter how much it hurts them. He’s not shocked that it feels that way to Dean, though, with how sick he is.

The man just moans in pain in response to his explanation, breath hitching before he suddenly slams his head down backwards against the mattress with extreme force. He does it again and again and again, as if he’s fruitlessly trying to knock himself out, bound hands twisting and clawing helplessly at naked air.

Cas’s stomach churns.

Before he can second guess himself, he’s climbing up on the bed beside Dean, cupping the man’s lightly freckled cheek with his hand.

“Here,” he says gently. “This should help.”

Then he slides his arms around Dean’s back and shifts his weight so he’s lying on top of the man, inadvertently holding him down. Dean sort of gasps, and his legs kick up in a knee-jerk sort of panic, but he doesn’t manage to throw Cas off.

The sub only keeps trying to for a few more seconds before it seems to sink in that Cas is right. That the weight of having the dom on top of him is helping to take the edge off, at least for now. The struggling stops momentarily, and Dean gazes up at him with glassy eyes, need radiating from them like heat from a fire.

He breathes heavily.

“I gotta…I gotta….”

His threadbare words trail off into ghosts. Wandering off, like they’ve forgotten where they are going.

Cas swallows heavily, and steels his heart against the plea in Dean’s expression. Knowing this is going to be a long few hours, he braces himself for the guilt.

Similarly, he does his best to brace Dean against the oncoming wave as physically as he can, settling himself low and flat on top of the man’s body and reaching up to grab the tied up wrists.

Chest pressed against Dean’s own, arms framing the sub’s head, caging him in, the man is as contained as Cas can reasonably make him. It should help reduce the pain of resisting another dom’s order, or at least make the wave of subsickness that is just beginning to wrack him abate somewhat faster. He hopes.

“You don’t have to do anything, Dean,” he tells the sub soothingly, whispering down to the scratched up face just beneath his own. “You can’t do anything. I’m not letting you go, sweetheart, just like I said I wouldn’t. You’re staying right here, with me.”

It’s meant to calm him, to remind him that he doesn’t have a choice in the matter and ease the burden of responsibility from his mind. As it is, though, Dean is so caught in the grip of his obedience that the words seem to backfire, only reigniting his desire to get away.

His eyes widen, like he’s being reminded of his one-track drive all at once.

“No!”

With a screm-burst of energy, he surges up to head-butt Cas as hard as he can, slamming his forehead into the soft cartilage of the dom’s nose. Slinging his legs around the dom’s torso, he flings himself sideways before releasing his limbs, throwing Cas off the bed and onto the ground.

Cas lands with an oof, and a surge of frustration, both at Dean and himself for not seeing that coming. When he looks up, it’s just in time to see the man wrench himself off the bed to make another run for it, though he’s caught by the bonds on his wrists.

Yanking frantically at where they are tied to the headboard, his expression is wild, and he spares no glance at Cas’s prone form. Instead, he seems to be trying with one bound hand to dislocate the thumb of the other, a move Cas recognizes instantly from the man’s last escape attempt as something that will allow him to slip out of the ropes.

It’s a pitifully desperate thing, and Cas knows he should only find it disturbing, knows he shouldn’t in any world see Dean’s affliction as an affront against himself. But he does, in a way, he can’t help it, something about the blatant dismissal twisting up inside him and making him mad.

Or, perhaps, not mad exactly, but something close to it that he rarely feels: Possessive. Instinctually dominant. It surges through him like a bright light, and Cas stands up as it takes hold of him, for once not trying to beat it back with a stick.

It’s his unwillingness to take true possession of Dean that had gotten them into this mess, and clearly, asserting himself now is the only way to get them both out of it. Stalking back over to the man, he grabs him by the waist from behind and flips him back onto the bed in one smooth motion, climbing up after him and straddling his hips.

Dean yelps, and stares up at him in shock, but Cas doesn’t acknowledge it, instead reaching down to untie the man’s wrists from the headboard.

“I know I told you not to hurt yourself, Dean,” he says sternly. “Are you under the impression following that command was optional?”

The sub just gapes up at him with large eyes, obviously taken aback.

It’s not a fair thing to ask him, maybe. Nothing he’s doing right now is truly of his own volition, and Cas knows that the man doesn’t so much as see Cas’s orders as “optional” as much as they have been “overridden.”

But they only were able to be “overridden” because Dean doesn’t see Cas as truly in charge of him, because he doesn’t see anything less than abject cruelty as the kind of domination he has to obey.

The endeared, almost protective way Dean had been talking to him earlier comes to mind, making sense as the reaction of someone realizing they’re speaking to someone only play-acting at power. Sighing in frustration, Cas finishes disconnecting Dean’s bound wrists from the headboard, and hauls him up halfway so his face is very close to Cas’s own.

“This is your problem, Dean,” he continues, gentle but firm. “You think domination has to equal pain, and thus that kindness isn’t ‘real domination.’ You think how I handle you isn’t real domination, that I’m not a real dominant because I won’t cause you harm.”

How true this is is obvious from the complete shock Dean is staring at him with now, from the way he’s gone temporarily still. He seems completely blindsided by the show of domination, like he really had expected Cas to just let him leave.

Or at least, that Cas wouldn’t be able to pull him back inside, that he wouldn’t be willing to quite literally keep him prisoner. The resentful comments about Cas’s inability to act as a monster come back to him in a completely new light.

Frowning, he holds Dean’s torso up with one arm, while the other comes up to cup his jaw.

“Did you think I wouldn’t come after you? That because I don’t hurt you, I wouldn’t have the strength to stop you from hurting yourself?”

Dean’s eyes fill with tears, and he tries halfheartedly to pull away. But Cas doesn’t let him go.

He’s learned his lesson about letting Dean get away with too much because he feels sorry for him. The man is all over the place, and needs control.

Keeping the man’s head held steady, he makes sure that the sub is, if not looking at him as he speaks, at least isn’t able to hide.

“I thought you were nice,” the sub repeats, voice wavering.

“I am nice. You thought I was a pushover.”

To be honest, Cas thought he was a pushover too, and it’s with a sudden burst of certainty that he knows that he isn’t.

It’s almost as much of a surprise to him as it must be to Dean, his own mind tripping in surprise over the strength of his own conviction. After all, how many times has to been called weak by his family? By the media? How many times has he been left behind by another submissive who sees him as too soft to meet their needs?

He’s never liked violence, and he’s never liked cruelty, and that has always left him on the outside of society, seen as spineless. He’d internalized that, believing the very lie he’s now scolding Dean for buying into, which is that gentleness itself is a sign of weakness.

But domination isn’t about violence, it’s about control. And control comes first and foremost from the conviction that you know what you’re doing.

For maybe the first time in his life, Cas finds himself truly unshakable. He knows what he’s doing, here. He knows who Dean is. This isn’t another sub he can’t handle, another masochist he’s too spineless to hit. This is Dean, who is delicate, who needs to be handled delicately- and who needs to be shown gentleness isn’t a choice Cas is going to allow him the luxury of rejecting.

With an uncharacteristic burst of confidence in his own innate instincts, Cas unceremoniously flips Dean around and pushes him back down on the bed. Climbing on top of him, he again lays down flat over the man’s body, this time draped over the sub’s back with his face in the crook of Dean’s neck.

“I’m not a pushover, sub,” he whispers, harsh and heated. “And you’re not going anywhere I don’t want you to.”

Dean gasps, and shivers, like the words feel good and greedy.

Then his shoulders start shaking once again with sobs.

Chapter Text

He hauls Dean into the bathroom with the man still crying and half struggling to get away, anguished in a way that would usually leave Cas’s heartstrings in shreds. Right now, though, the fighting only fuels the possessiveness inside of him, leaving him even more determined to assert his claim on the sub.

It makes him angry, because it’s not really Dean trying to get away, but Alastair, having taken over the man’s mind like a parasite. How badly Dean needs to be claimed to soothe the need inside of him is obvious, especially when the sub almost launches them both down the stairs.

“No, Dean,” Cas growles, keeping his balance, and he yanks the sub backwards, carting him back down the hall. Dean only sobs in response, stumbling and tripping his way along the path he’s being pulled down, reluctance making his footsteps drag behind like a weight.

But it’s no matter. The man is too exhausted to really present any sort of challenge, and Cas doesn’t let his unwillingness hold them back. He manhandles the sub into the bathroom without acknowledging the protests, releasing the squirming form only to turn and quickly lock the door behind them both.

Dean staggers backwards the second he’s released, like something limp that’s only puttering forwards because of momentum. His muddy feet leave footprints across the white tile floor, continuing until he bumps into the cabinet behind him.

Like he’s startled, the man jumps, then clutches at the sides of it by his waist.

“I- I- You can’t just keep me here!” he protests, but there’s no outrage in his voice, just alarm. The fact that Cas absolutely can keep him here isn’t lost on him, though he still seems to be in disbelief that the dom would.

Mere hours ago, that assumption wouldn’t have bothered Cas the way it does now, knowing it in itself implies a kind of trust Dean rarely gives in to. Now, though, it raises his hackles, having seen the end result of not being viewed as a ‘real dom.’

“Are you sure about that?” he shoots back, testily. The locked door behind him speaks for itself.

It speaks to how sick and tired he is of not being taken seriously that he isn’t tripping over himself to explain what he means by that, to add asterisk after asterisk qualifying the particular circumstances leading him to trap Dean here.

Maybe he should be explaining all of that, rather than just letting the sub think he’s a kidnapper, but the truth is that Cas is fed up with having to justify every order he gives to Dean rather than just being obeyed.

Brutish it may be, but Cas is a dom, underneath it all. And right now, his instincts are rearing their heads like a hydra.

Dean seems to sense this, because he shrinks as Cas lifts a brow at him, trying and failing to take another step backwards and pushing himself into the cupboard he’s up against.

It seems to be dawning on him that he’s made a mistake, the possessiveness the dom is exhibiting now clearly doing its job. Like he’s realizing how badly he’d miscalculated the way Cas would respond to him trying to run away, his shoulders come up to his ears, and he drops his eyes.

He’s clearly petrified, and Cas knows he should feel worse about it, should want to reassure the man that everything is alright. But the truth is that everything isn’t alright, and while he’s not going to hurt Dean because of it, he also can’t deny that it’s probably not a bad thing that the sub recognizes he’s in a huge amount of trouble.

“I- I ain’t yours.”

Dean’s voice is an echo of the defiance he usually projects, but it still makes Cas growl and step forward. He doesn’t stop when the sub flinches visibly in fear like he usually would, but strides forward to crowd the man up against the cupboard.

“Yes,” he says, speaking very close to Dean’s lips, “You are.”

Then, as Dean gapes up at him in shock, he leans in, and presses his hand to the man’s bare throat.

The sub goes completely still, staring up at him with huge, stunned eyes. As Cas leans in further, he presses their chests together shamelessly, and feels the rabbit-fast thumping of Dean’s heart.

It could be fear, or it could be arousal, or it could be something else entirely. In any case, Cas soaks it in like a vampire, feeling his own confidence grow at the response.

Got you, Cas thinks, and he goes in for the kill, moving forward so his mouth brushes against Dean’s ear, whispering his breath straight into it:

“I stole you, from everyone else who tried to claim you, and I’m not letting you go anywhere now that you’re mine. I’m keeping you here with me, and I’m going to treat you gently, and there’s nothing you can do about it at all.”

Dean makes a quiet little noise, a helpless sound that can’t decide if it’s frightened or happy. Though he’s not putting an ounce of pressure against the man’s throat, Cas feels it clearly when he swallows against the hand surrounding it.

“Do you understand?” Cas adds on, equally low and heated. Dean swallows again, then nods, very small.

It seems like he really does understand, when Cas pulls back a few inches to study his face, pupils blown like they’ve been put under a spell. It makes Cas want to smirk, but he doesn’t, feeling like that could come off as cruel or dismissive, if there’s any part of Dean still aware enough to notice.

“Good,” he says instead, “Good boy.”

The sub shivers, exactly as Cas knew that he would. Cas soaks that in too, the ethical part of him too buried under his instincts to wonder if he should be feeding on Dean’s surrender.

It’s more possessive than he’s ever been, than he’s ever let himself be, the doubt over whether Dean’s acceptance comes from trust or fear paling in the face of how good it feels to have it. He can’t deny there’s satisfaction in having his authority truly recognized at last, after days of having it ignored by the sub in front of him, after a lifetime of having it dismissed by the whole world.

It feels good to put his foot down, to have a real reason to do so, feels good to watch the panicked need to acknowledge another dom’s claim drain from Dean’s body as it is replaced by an acknowledgement of his own. Maybe he should worry more about how he’s establishing that claim, should be worried about how he’s overriding someone’s autonomy. But the truth is he doesn’t need Dean’s permission, when he’s making decisions that are for the unstable man’s own good.

I’m done with this battle of wills I was never going to win, Cas thinks with finality. Done arguing in circles to try to get Dean to accept the help he needs.

As long as Dean is allowed to talk, he’s going to find a way to talk his way out of it. As long as there is a fight to be had, he will fight his way to the top.

He’s stronger than Cas, in that aspect of his personality, which is why Cas can’t keep letting him have any sort of say in how he’s handled. It just leads to him thinking he gets to make the call on who he belongs to, leads to him deciding he deserves to be hurt.

But he doesn’t get to make that decision. He can’t, with how desperate to please the man is. Cas has never so completely had to confiscate a sub’s personal autonomy before, but he’s also never met anyone so determined to self-destruct.

“You don’t get to self-destruct anymore,” he says outloud, murmuring. Like Dean has been following his train of thought, he just bites his lip and ducks his head.

He seems to understand what Cas is saying, seems, as he looks back at the dom, almost grateful for it, even as there is still unarguable fear in his eyes. Cas has no doubt, though, that if he really does understand, he knows he’s better off stolen than allowed to go free.

Better the devil you know isn’t a saying that works when that devil has kept you locked in the basement for seven years. Even now, with Cas showing an entirely new possessive side of himself Dean hasn’t seen yet, there’s a kind of desperate relief to the man’s surrender.

“I- how can you….stop me?” the sub asks. The words play at defiance, but there’s a genuine plea in them that he doesn’t bother to try to hide.

“All kinds of ways,” Cas threatens, reassures. “I have an alarmed collar for you, you know.”

It’s the truth- he’d picked it up from the security guard at the center, when he’d been picking up his files and computer. Still undecided, he hadn’t been able to say no directly when it was handed to him, not ready to shut the door on the possibility of taking Dean home.

Something he’s glad for now, with the sub’s runaway tendencies. It would be mandatory for a “dangerous sub” to wear if he was Cas’s officially, but even without the bureaucracy involved, it’s probably a good idea.

And one that Dean likes, as well, judging by the way he reacts. As if on instinct, he claps his own hand over the hand still resting on his throat, eyes searching Cas’s face for signs of weakness.

But Cas is dead serious, and after a few moments the man’s eyes fill with overwhelmed tears.

“Fuck you,” he whispers, but the words are totally meaningless. He slumps in what is obviously relief.

Cas hums, as if considering, and rubs his thumb along the side of Dean’s neck.

“Maybe later. I’ve never been penetrated by a sub before, but I’m always open to new experiences.”

It takes Dean a moment to understand what he’s saying, but when he does, he huffs out a surprised little breath.

Not quite a laugh, it nonetheless relieves some of the pressure bearing down on them both, like the man is recognizing that he’s no longer being chastised. It breaks the tension somehow without breaking the newfound dynamic between them, the joke only serving to establish that Cas knows he’s taken control.

Dean’s de-facto acceptance that he would be collared and kept marked a shift that Cas intends to keep permanent. But it’s only a matter of keeping the sub where he is, now, and Cas has the confidence that he can do that while being as gentle and friendly as he had been before.

He just also has to keep a tight hold on the man. He just has to show Dean that gentleness is firmly in charge.

Stepping away from Dean slightly, he lets his hand drop from the man’s still-bruised throat. He’s not surprised when the sub’s hand chases his own.

So he doesn’t let go of it, just letting them hang together between the two of them, entwining skinny fingers with his own.

“I’m going to wash you,” he tells the sub simply, who looks up at him in doubt.

“I just showered.”

“It’s not about getting clean.”

The meaning of that seems to sink in pretty quickly, and Dean’s eyes darken with a confused sort of lust.

“You wanna fuck me?”

“I want to wash you,” Cas repeats, and then rephrases his sentence. “I’m going to wash you. Please take off your clothes.”

The please is there for politeness, not because the words are a request. He doubts Dean is going to fight him, but he still makes that very clear.

The sub blushes, but doesn’t argue, just untangling his hand from Cas’s and bringing it to his chest. Slowly, he starts unbuttoning his pajama shirt.

His eyes flicker nervously back and forth between Cas and the floor as his skin is revealed, and he bites his lip, like he’s not sure what’s going on. Cas is sure he isn’t, and is alright with that, since the sub doesn’t seem petrified in any case. He has no intention of “fucking” Dean, but he does intend to assert his own claim.

That doesn’t have to be sexual, but he knows it is likely to go that direction, with how sensitive the sub has proved to be every time he is touched. And Cas is going to touch him, unarguably he is going to put his hands on his body, because Dean needs to see what it feels like to belong to someone good.

He’s been too hesitant in this area, because he knows how badly the man had been hurt, and because he thinks it’s important that subs know they are valued for more than just their physical form. But it isn’t healthy for someone like Dean to think there’s no one who cares about what happens to his body but him. It’s only made him think it’s ok for him to scratch himself up when he gets stressed, and that medical treatment is something he has the option of rejecting.

That’s Cas’s own fault, because he’s been allowing it. He’s been allowing Dean to fall apart under the guise of respecting him, and only now does he realize it’s just neglect.

The evidence of that neglect becomes increasingly obvious with every button the sub deftly undoes, each inch of skin revealed showcasing the scars and scratches Dean had given to himself, on top of the older injuries he’d never sufficiently treated.

It looks awful, the bruising from the dislocated shoulder still unhealed, raw scrapes of flesh pink and red under the cold light. Perhaps the worst sign of neglect is Dean himself, though, hesitant and unsure as he disrobes.

“I’m ugly,” he mumbles, tugging anxiously at the hem of the now unbuttoned pajama shirt. He doesn’t seem to want to pull it off his shoulders, for obvious reasons.

“You’re not ugly, sweetheart,” Cas assures him, but in his heart he knows Dean isn’t going to hear him. He’s left the man too long thinking his body is something he even has the right to be ashamed of, and it’s going to take a lot more than a few words of comfort to undo the damage.

How true this is is illustrated a moment later by Dean scowling at him, and trying halfheartedly to cover up his chest with his hands.

“Easy for you to say,” he mutters, unhappily. “You ain’t even seen the merchandise yet. Gonna be pissed off, once you see what you got. Not gonna be so proud of yourself then.”

Sullen and anxious, he so transparently needs to be owned that it’s like he’s screaming for it, and Cas feels like an idiot for having left this part of his care ignored. Determined not to make the same mistake twice, he sees the man’s bitterness as the cry for help that it is, and steps forwards into his space before it can get any worse.

“Dean,” he says firmly. “You don’t get to hide yourself from me.”

Though it’s his own fault that the man has gotten so mixed up.

Reasserting his possession as best he can, he reaches up then, and starts tugging Dean’s shirt off his shoulders. The sub tenses momentarily as he does so, not sure whether he likes this development.

But Cas doesn’t care whether he likes it, because he’s obviously hurt, and Cas needs to see. Still, he doesn’t want to startle the sub, and moves slowly as he tugs the shirt down the man’s arms, giving him a chance to think about what’s happening.

That pays off. With Dean’s arms still crossed stubbornly in front of him, the sleeves quickly end up pooled at his elbows, caught. Cas would have had a hard time forcing the man to untangle himself if he decided not to, but it’s only a few seconds of patience before the sub seems to give in.

Accepting the hand on his bare shoulder for the sign of domination it is, Dean sinks down a little, and lets his arms drop so loosely to his sides that the shirt just slides right off of them.

“Good boy,” Cas says again, as it hits the ground with a quiet noise. Dean doesn’t shiver this time, just hums doubtfully like he doesn’t believe it, but goes silent when he finds himself shushed.

And he doesn’t argue when Cas slips his hands into the sides of his elastic waistband, sliding the pajama pants down his legs.

He just blushes, making no effort to cover himself up, and steps out of the pants without having to be told.

“Told you I’m ugly,” he says to the ground, and seems startled when Cas lifts his chin with his fingers.

“Stop speaking badly about yourself. You are not ugly.”

Dean blushes brighter.

“Okay,” he agrees, very soft.

He doesn’t really seem to believe it, but seems equally unwilling to argue, seeming to hear the hint of steel underlying Cas’s voice and knowing he really means business.

An accurate evaluation, though Cas isn’t entirely sure what he would do if Dean did continue to defy him about this. Maybe make him kneel. Maybe spank him a few times.

Certainly something more direct and concrete than he would have usually responded with yesterday, when he would have likely just repeated himself in a sadder voice. Now, though, he understands that even though Dean is someone that needs to be handled gently, he’s also someone who needs clear and consistent control.

How much better the sub feels when he’s getting it is obvious, if only from the fact he isn’t giving Cas any reason to have to actually figure out how he would respond to defiance.

Pushing that thought aside for another day, he kisses Dean lightly on the lips. Partially in reward for doing something difficult, and partially just to show the man that he wants to.

Dean leans into it with complete abandon, all shyness and worry over his nudity suddenly lost. Like a lover reunited after spending eons apart, he melts as a candle under a flame.

Cas melts too, feeling how passionate Dean becomes so quickly, and how eager he is to be held in the dom’s arms.

I’ve been neglecting you, Cas thinks again, rubbing his hands lightly along the man’s shoulders. It’s the only part of the man’s body that doesn’t have some open skin ripped raw.

He needs, so badly, to be looked after, to have his body looked after as well as just his mind. The sub had confessed that he thinks he’s ugly, but what he really is is just hurt, and Cas can barely stomach the thought of how long he’d allowed the sub to go without any treatment for his pain.

That all ends now, though. Just like he’d thrown his weight around to keep Dean here with him, he has no qualms about throwing his weight around to get him fixed up. There isn’t going to be another moment for the rest of Dean’s life where the man doesn’t know that he belongs to someone who cares about him.

Pulling away from the kiss, he cups Dean’s dazed face gently, looking with worry at the scratches he sees. They aren’t deep, thankfully, but they still ignite some possessive worry inside of him, which only deepens as his gaze drops down to the man’s bruised torso.

“Let’s get you cleaned up, sweetheart,” is all he says to the man out loud, not knowing how to even start addressing his thoughts.

He’s never been good at that, at translating what’s in his mind into what comes out of his mouth, never been good at turning his rolling emotions into something communicable. For once, though, Cas doesn’t worry that his awkwardness is going to stop him from making himself understood, feeling in his gut that his instincts will be more than enough.

Like a 6th sense, Cas feels, with near certainty, that his hands can make all that he wants to say understood. When it really comes down to it, all he really needs to make sure Dean understands is that he is owned, and that Cas is going to handle him more carefully than the sub has ever handled himself.

It’s almost a statement, the event of washing Dean clean, a performance of his own domination and how capable he is of caring for the sub well. Dean seems to sort of understand this, or at least he understands enough not to argue against it, recognizing that this isn’t something he can fight.

So he doesn’t. Even though he doesn’t seem to understand it, he just obeys, and lets Cas claim him like he’s wanted to from the start. He gets in the shower when told to and waits patiently for the dom to undress and step in after him, translating his nerves into fidgeting rather than defiance.

Which is good. It’s a good sign, for Dean’s psychological state, but also for Cas’s own instincts. It makes that possessive feeling surge up inside him again, but now there’s nothing defiant pushing back against it, so it expresses itself in a flood of affection and praise.

And Dean puts up with it- Hell, he seems to dissolve into it, the sensation of being so thoroughly made Cas’s obviously melting any resistance away. He molds to Cas’s touch like warm wax in a sculptor’s hands, like he knows he’s being formed into something new.

What that thing is, he doesn’t seem to know, but he trusts Cas to make sure it’s good. With his hands rested tentatively on Cas’s hips, he leans forwards in obvious desire, like a plant reaching out for the sun.

It feels good. It feels good, to have Dean give in to him, to stop fighting and accept what he is.

A sub, yes, but more importantly Cas’s sub, made to take whatever sweet things his dom will give him.

That those sweet things will never stop is something Cas will have to prove with time, but he starts establishing it now, under the water’s warmth. He runs the sudsy washcloth all along the man’s freckle-clean skin, applying only as much pressure as will feel good.

It’s more pressure than might feel good to another person, but few have been as deprived of affectionate touch as Dean. The sub moans as he’s washed, petted, caressed like a canvas, eyelashes fluttering as his body goes limp.

Loosening like a tongue that’s been lost in sweet wine, the man forgets not to trust him as the minutes pass by. He stays quiet, and Cas stays happy, and they both learn each other’s forms, through sight and touch and then eventually through taste as Dean kisses him with a dizzy sort of need.

Cas kisses him back, and reaches down to stroke the man’s cock, only once with the washcloth before that pretense gets abandoned. Content to acknowledge freely what he thinks of Dean’s arousal, he drops the cloth and plays with the member as if it were his own.

Because it is, Cas thinks darkly, feeling more ownership over the sub’s pleasure than he’s ever had over another’s. Perhaps because he’s gone through so much to keep him, or perhaps just because Dean is so eagerly on board.

He makes no attempt to touch himself, or comment on the fact that Cas has chosen to. He makes no attempt to hide that he likes being owned.

By Cas, at least, which seems to make all the difference. Gone is the crying and fighting of before.

Now, he just pants, pretty and shy and submissive. Like he can’t help himself, he rocks his hips against Cas’s fondling once or twice.

“Lovely,” Cas murmurs, and he shifts his hand to cup Dean’s cock from below. Lifting it a little, he studies the organ curiously, taking in what he’s stolen for his own.

Dean looks down at it too, shy but totally passive. His breath hitches when Cas’s fingers start tracing a gentle pattern on the soft skin, over the white lines of its scars.

“Do you- like touchin’ me like that?” he breathes, as if fascinated. “I mean. You like playin’ with my dick? Instead of hitting it?”

It seems a novel idea to him, that a dom might want to touch him there to bring him pleasure rather than pain. Trying not to let Dean’s amazement get the better of him, Cas confirms what the man’s asking.

“Very much so, my dear.”

He strokes the sub’s cock a bit more then, as if just to prove that he’s being truthful, knowing there’s no way his own arousal at Dean’s pleasure could be missed.

It doesn’t seem to alarm the man, just has him staring with dark eyes down at the dom’s erection. His fingers twitch where they are clutching Cas’s shoulders, like he’s considering reaching down to touch.

But that isn’t the purpose of what they are doing right now, and Dean needs to learn that he isn’t the director of their sexual encounters. Becoming more insistent in his handling of the sub’s penis, he pets between the man’s legs until he seems sufficiently distracted.

Panting, Dean tucks his head against Cas’s shoulder.

“Gonna- gonna make me cum again,” the sub stutters, and Cas hums in agreement. He most certainly is, and Dean might as well know.

It should be self-explanatory, but nothing ever is, with Dean. Even with Cas actively handling his penis, it’s not enough to make him entirely submit.

With a little burst of obstinance Cas didn’t know he still had in him, the sub pulls away, or at least tries to. Not intending to let him lose sight of who he belongs to again, Cas doesn’t let him get very far.

One hand around Dean’s waist and another still cupping the sub’s shaft, he keeps the sub held close to him while he waits. Dean halfheartedly tugs only once more before he recognizes he’s being held still on purpose, and he ducks his head, accepting the dominant’s touch.

That the message of possession still hasn’t entirely settled in is clear, though, from what he actually wanted to say.

“I ain’t done nothin’ to deserve that kinda reward,” he protests softly. “You gotta stop- stop bein’ nice to me like that, like it ain’t gonna make me a brat.”

Self-depreciating as he is, it doesn’t seem to register that he’s yet again telling Cas what to do.

Cas does notice, though, the demand sticking out to him like a sore thumb, out of place among Dean’s otherwise total submission. That the argument is part of the man’s relentless campaign against his own happiness only makes it more frustrating, predictable though it may be.

It’s like a compulsion, this need of Dean’s to debate every good thing that happens to him, to reject any and all kindness like it’s the plague. If Cas thought this was remotely about the man not wanting to be touched, that would be different, but as it is, it’s just more evidence of his old dom’s influence clinging on.

“Is that what Alastair told you?” he asks, without loosening his hold on Dean’s arm. “That pleasure would make you a brat for some reason?”

The skepticism in his voice isn’t lost on the sub, who starts to look embarrassed before he even opens his mouth.

“It’s true, ain’t it?” he replies, somewhat sullenly. “Made me think I could walk all over you.”

Cas seriously doubts that there is any direct connection between him having jerked Dean off yesterday and his recent or ongoing escape attempts. What’s important, though, is that Dean seems to think there is, perhaps unsurprisingly correlating enjoyment to disobedience.

It’s the exact kind of thinking that Cas is trying to override right now, and exasperation takes hold of him at its continued persistence. Shoving the sub up against the wall of the shower with not a small amount of forcefulness, he crowds in close, soaking in the man’s gasp.

“But you can’t walk all over me, sub,” he growls, grinding the heel of his palm against Dean’s eager cock. “You get no say in the pleasure I give you.”

Eyes widening at the sudden aggression, Dean whines into Cas’s mouth as he’s suddenly kissed hard enough to have trouble breathing. Cas enjoys the noise, and enjoys the feeling of Dean’s cock rapidly swelling to it’s limit against his palm, twitching and jerking as the man tries not to shift his hips.

Something he does on instinct, just like last time, unwilling to chase what feels good without being told he can. This time, Cas doesn’t grant him that freedom, because he doesn’t feel like it, and because he wants to take Dean’s enjoyment for himself.

“Do you think you’re the one who decides what you deserve?” he asks as he pushes his hand against the hardness. “Did I not make it clear that everything about you is up to me?”

Dean’s whole body shudders as his legs part for Cas’s touch.

“No, I, yes, but, but, you shouldn’t, I shouldn’t be- oh, fuck-”

The man gasps as he’s shoved upwards against the wall behind him.

With a surge of passion, Cas shoves his knee between the sub’s legs as he hauls him upwards, kissing him again just to shut him up. Dean keens into his mouth as he does, aroused and made to mind.

Squirming helplessly, the sub clutches desperately at Cas’s shoulders as his cock is ground into the dominant’s bare thigh. Moaning into and moaning as he’s hoisted up further by his hips, his legs kick out helplessly as he realizes his feet no longer touch the ground.

“Cas!” he cries out, pulling away from the kisses, but Cas immediately pulls him back in to claim his lips. The man whimpers, a sound that jerks with arousal as he’s jostled and resettled, frantic kicking quickly turning into something rhythmic and hot.

He obviously enjoys it, the manhandling, the domination, erection almost burning as it squirms against Cas’s bare thigh. Even so, the sub still struggles for several seconds with a helpless sort of panic, legs twisting and kicking in an effort to reach the ground.

He’s not really trying to get away from Cas, just trying to get down to where both his feet touch the floor, clearly not certain about allowing the dom to support his weight.

But that’s his problem, right there in a nutshell. Dean’s always, always too scared to give up control. Only when he isn’t given a choice about it does he start to see that he wasn’t in danger, that he’s not going to be dropped, that he’s not going to be let go.

So Cas just keeps kissing him, and pins the man’s wrists above his head with one hand. And he just waits out the five or so seconds it takes for Dean to realize that he isn’t getting down, and that he doesn’t have to fight to get down, because he’s held and safe.

Only then, when the man has finally gone limp in acceptance, does Cas pull away from the kiss.

It leaves them both panting, catching their breaths for a long time, twin kiss-swollen lips so close they nearly still touch. Heavy and heated, Cas drinks in the sight of Dean’s flushed, pleasure-dazed face, feeling something within himself settle down.

“You don’t get to argue about who’s in charge of you, baby,” he whispers softly, his own instincts wrapping around what he’s owed. “You don’t get to argue about anything, when it comes to how I take care of you. That’s not something you get to choose, anymore.”

It’s the most controlling, possessive thing he’s ever said to anyone in his life, and distantly, he knows he’s hormone-drunk. But the panic that usually comes any time he starts giving into the most base parts of him is nowhere to be found, like it had fled with the rest of his conscience.

It’s hard to feel like he’s doing something wrong while Dean looks so taken with him, pretty and blushing with his pink cock hard against Cas’s thigh. Arms pinned above him, water streaming down his face and chest, his whole body seems so beautifully vulnerable that it only increases Cas’s desire to mark his claim.

Which is strange, for him, because he’s never had to deal with feeling such possessive urges over subs who are already more trapped than they should be. But something about Dean is overriding his qualms like a stallion, making him feel fiercely that the sub needs to be owned.

Maybe it’s how vulnerable Dean is to exploitation. Maybe it’s just the satisfaction of having this wild thing finally tamed. There’s no denying now that the sub has given up fighting him, that he’s been made to submit. He certainly is not indulging Cas anymore.

No, he’s not indulging me, Cas thinks as he drinks in the sight of the young man he has pinned. I’m indulging myself now, with his body, and he knows it.

It’s turning them both on, but Dean especially seems like he can barely take it, the knowledge that he’s going to be brought to pleasure for Cas’s entertainment overrunning his eager-to-please little mind. Like it’s the most erotic thing he’s ever been told in his life, he strains helplessly in the hold that he’s caught in, fingers clawing at nothing while his hips twitch and jerk against Cas’s thigh.

“Sir,” he moans, desperate, blushing red as a tomato. “Sir, please, whatever you want.”

“Yes,” Cas agrees. “Whatever I want.”

Then he rubs his thigh against the soft skin of the sub’s cock.

Dean’s breath hitches, and Cas smiles at him.

“Do you want to come, sweetheart?” he asks. “Tell me the truth.”

No room for performances, anymore.

Like he’s been struck by something electric, the sub breathes in harshly, and jerks his hips, a sweet sort of need bleeding out of him like the water pouring down over them both.

“Yes,” he confesses, voice cracking like sharp static. “Yes, Sir. Please. I- I want to.”

Cas puts his free hand on Dean’s hip and leans in close.

“Good boy,” he whispers against the man’s neck. Then he drops the man’s hands from where they’ve been pinned.

And Dean immediately folds forward, wrapping his arms around Cas’s shoulders with the desperation of someone being carried out of burning flames. He tucks his face against Cas’s neck and curls in as if he’s hiding, and Cas thinks that maybe he is.

That’s ok. He can hide all he wants, and Cas will find him. There’s no world in which he lets Dean disappear for good.

As if just to prove it, Cas takes this opportunity to readjust their positions, grabbing Dean under his thighs and lifting him upwards again as he shoves his knee further up the wall. They’d been slipping, and Dean yelps as he’s manhandled yet again, squirming a bit as his toes disappear from the ground.

With Cas’s foot finding rest on a groove in the wall, though, there’s no amount of wriggling that will inch him back down again this time.

“Cas, wait– Sir, I- fuck.”

Cas kisses Dean silly again, enjoying the feel of Dean’s thighs spread and helpless and writing against his own. Hard as a rock, it takes less than a few seconds before the man’s panicked kicking turns back to rocking, and he’s moaning into Cas’s mouth like a sub should.

Cas smirks as he feels it, against Dean’s pliant lips, that so easily have forgotten their objections. With his cute little bottom pressed firmly against Cas’s knee, the sub rocks eagerly, riding the dom’s thigh as he whines.

Finally breaking the kiss between them, he rests his forehead against Dean’s as the man pants.

“What were you saying, sweetheart?” he asks innocently, but the sub doesn’t answer, clutching Cas close as his toes strain and curl.

Hanging several inches above the ground, they can’t do anything to support his weight, which is rested almost entirely on the leg Cas has him writhing on. Ducking his face into Cas’s neck, the sub lets out another noise of overwhelmed pleasure, unable to do anything to take the treasonous weight off his cock.

“I- n-nothing,” he mumbles, breath hot and heated. “Wasn’t sayin’ anything, I wasn-ah, ohmygodohmygodohmygo-hod.”

Dean’s words dissolve into rambled little gasps as Cas shoves his thigh up further and grinds it slowly, smiling at the way the sub’s legs erratically jerk. As even his stuttered out mumbling collapses into moaning, his hips shudder like they’re what is pulling him along.

Clawing at Cas’s back with the kind of desperation that leaves evidence, the sub cries out, and flings his legs up to come curl around the dom’s waist. They stay there, even as moving becomes harder for him, so overwhelmed that it’s like he’s completely glitched out.

Panting with his own arousal, Cas laughs a little at the reaction, because he knows it’s his own erection that caused it. Having slid their hips so close together that they’d come into contact, it’s his cock pressing into Dean’s inner thigh that has the sub blanking white.

It’s sweet, the man so turned on by the idea of pleasing someone that it’s like he can’t even function when he receives evidence that he has. Cas lets him process it, rubbing his back as Dean tilts forward into him, still too shy to lift his burning face out of the dom’s neck.

“You okay baby?” he asks in a gentle tone, kissing the man’s ear when he only gets a tiny nod.

“You feel good,” the sub whispers, and it’s such an endearingly honest thing to say that it makes Cas want to kiss him again, so he does, on top of his head.

“I’m glad. You feel good too.”

Dean huffs, and his cock twitches against Cas’s abdomen. Warm and hard, it’s as hot as the water running over them both.

He’s starting to slip again, so Cas adjusts them, grabbing Dean under his bottom to lift him up. Pushing himself closer so he has a better angle to support the man, he resets his foot against the low groove in the wall where soap is supposed to go.

While it’s a steadier position, it’s also a steeper one, resulting in Dean being forced to lean his weight entirely against Cas’s torso. With his back no longer rested against the wall, his hips follow the rest of his shy, curled up form, sliding down the dom’s thigh until their pelvises are as tucked together as the face against Cas’s neck.

The position leaves their cocks smushed up against each other with such pressure that it chokes a moan out of Cas for the first time, and he rolls his hips against the sub’s before he can think better of it.

Unlike last time, though, he doesn’t worry so much about using Dean’s body to get himself off, feeling the sub’s own desire pressed against him. He can see now how badly the man wants to be claimed by him, how desperately turned on he gets at just the idea of being played with.

He just wants to be pleasing, and so Cas shows him how pleasing he is, rolling his hips again and letting Dean feel the strain of his cock. They rub roughly against each other, wet and unlubed save for rivulets of hot water, which stream down their torsos and off their shoulders to run down their members like veins.

It feels good, both the movement and the heat from the shower, as well as the rush of power he gets from pushing Dean around. For once he lets himself indulge in it, nervousness soothed by Dean’s positive response, which shudders out of him in a broken whine and twitching cock.

“Fuck, Sir,” he whispers, and the feet that can now skim the ground twitch where they hang by Cas’s ankles. Fully held, though, the man doesn’t try again to strain them down to reach the ceramic, accepting his fate on Cas’s lap.

He seems fascinated by it, now, or at least fascinated by the feel of the dom’s cock, tilting his head down from where it had been hiding against Cas’s shoulder to look. Pulling slightly back so there is space between them, Cas looks too, rubbing Dean’s leg in comfort as he takes in the obvious desire between them.

There is something mesmerizing about it, the sight of his own large member squished up against Dean’s smaller one. Coarse and hot, it seems almost brutish with the sub’s cock pressed against it, several inches longer and twice the girth of what’s displayed.

It makes Cas feel rougher than he is, especially when Dean’s soft hand reaches out to rub at it gently, like it isn’t sure that it should. It feels good, but he can tell that Dean is intimidated, so doesn’t encourage the man to do it again.

Instead, he just lets the man explore at his own pace, shy and curious, with a hesitant sort of reserve. He seems intrigued by the very things that seem to intimidate him, like the heft of the member and the thickness of the hair at the base.

“You’re big,” the sub mumbles at one point, sliding his hand around the thick base. Cas bites his lip, trying not to groan, not to jerk and end up scaring Dean away.

It’s hard, though, the nervous desire in the man’s voice strumming every chord in his body. It takes all his willpower not to close his hand around the sub’s and rut into the shy grasp like an animal.

“Yes,” he says instead of doing that, hoping his voice doesn’t sound as strained as it is. “Does that scare you?”

The sub’s cock twitches a bit as he’s asked the question.

Like he knows what that says about him, Dean groans, and blushes with shame. The hand still clutching Cas’s shoulder releases its grip to come up and hide his face.

But Cas doesn’t like that at all, so he releases his own hold on Dean’s right hip to catch the sub’s wrist and pull his arm back down. Though he blushes, Dean lets it go without a fight.

“It’s alright,” Cas says as he lowers it, weirdly flattered. “You don’t have to be scared, Dean. And you don’t have to be embarrassed if that- turns you on.”

It’s normal, Cas means to add, but the words get caught in his chest and lost as he’s struck by the sight of how gorgeous Dean is. Naked and vulnerable, blushing and aroused.

He looks- beautiful, and vulnerable, and the fact that he’s so turned on by Cas is a little dizzying in its warmth.

“Told you I’m a slut,” the sub mutters, and ducks his head like he’s uncertain.

Cas inhales sharply.

“And I told you not to talk like that about yourself.”

And following through on his rules is something he’s going to have to learn to really do.

Starting now. He can’t let Dean get confused again. Putting the sub down finally, he grabs the young man’s chin with his right hand.

Dean looks uncertain, but doesn’t resist at all as Cas pushes his thumb slowly into his mouth.

“If that’s how you’re going to talk,” he murmurs. “Then you’re not going to talk at all for the time being, sweetheart.”

Staring back at him, Dean’s pretty green eyes are wide.

His lips, soft around the dom’s finger, part easily for the intrusion, unresisting. Almost like he was waiting for it, like his mouth is just a warm cavern aching to be filled.

The sub makes a soft noise. But it’s not at all a noise of protest. His gaze drops, in the same direction as the rivulets of water streaming over his lovely freckled face.

At first, Cas thinks it’s just a sign of submission, which is hard enough to take stoically like he needs to. It’s an entirely separate world of restraint when he notices where the young man’s eyes have pointedly landed.

Oh, god.

The member in question throbs as it notices Dean’s attention, and Cas inhales sharply. His clutch on the sub’s chin tightens involuntarily, causing the young man to look sharply back up.

Their gazes lock again, and Dean seems to be searching his face for some sign of approval or unhappiness. Clearly nervous, Cas’s attention switches from imagining that soft tongue on his cock to worrying that Dean isn’t ready.

But then Dean whines. His own cock is dripping, with more than just water from the shower. Cas’s dizziness clears briefly, or intensifies in a way that feels sharp.

He wants to, he realizes. Needs to, even. He wants to be a good boy for you.

The nervousness is fear of rejection, not anxiety. And Cas doesn’t have the heart to reject him even once more.

Cas slips his thumb out of Dean’s mouth, and moves his hand to the sub’s wet hair.

“You want to be a good boy for me, Dean?” he whispers, words almost lost against the background hiss of the shower.

But Dean seems to hear him loud and clear. His eyelashes flutter, and his lids become heavy. He looks at Cas with a semi-dazed expression, like he’s halfway into subspace already.

Distantly, Cas recognizes that that’s a very good thing. More pressingly, he can’t ignore the heat in his groin anymore, nor the heat in Dean’s.

“Beautiful.”

Dean shivers as Cas pushes him down to his knees.

Sinking down, unresisting, the sub keeps eye contact with Cas the whole way to the floor. Staring up at him from under his lashes, he breathes heavily.

“You’re so big,” the man murmurs again, slurring a little like he’s dizzy.

“Yes,” Cas agrees for the second time. “I won’t hurt you.”

It’s a promise, but Dean doesn’t need it.

“I know,” the man says absently, before leaning in to place an earnest kiss at the base of Cas’s cock.

It feels good, for both of them, but Dean doesn’t seem to know what to do after that, or at least, he doesn’t seem to have the presence of mind to do it alone. That’s ok, though, that’s natural, he’s Cas’s good boy now, and he’s allowed to be uncertain. He can afford to wait for Cas to show him what he wants from him, to let Cas take the lead without being afraid of where he’s led.

Cas pushes his cock into Dean’s pretty, waiting mouth like that’s where it’s belonged since the beginning, feeding it in slowly like he intends to feed the sub warm meals with his hands. Dean takes it into him like communion, lips spreading open soft and easy, his pink, warm mouth as pliant and needy as the rest of him, hungry and grateful like an animal starved.

The man makes a low, desperate noise in the back of his throat, and Cas can feel it reverberate against his member.

“Shit,” he hisses, struggling to stay standing. He sees stars, and sees Dean, dizzying the same.

Looking up at him through his thick, wet eyelashes, the sub is beautiful, flushed from submission and the heat of the shower and glistening with both water and need.

Cas figures he must look the same way to Dean, and wonders. What he looks like, from down there, what he feels like heavy in the sub’s mouth.

Good? Safe? Overwhelming? Perhaps all of it, but it’s most important that Dean isn’t afraid.

He doesn’t seem to be, even when Cas rolls his hips with clear intention, pumping his body in and out of Dean’s mouth like it’s his to own. The sub just moans again, and seems to surge closer, like he wants the member to push deeper down his throat.

That startles a huff of amusement out of Cas, which comes out as filled with heat as the shower’s steam. It’s flattering, and exhilarating, and makes his nerves feel like they’re on fire with need.

“You like having things in your mouth, don’t you baby?”

His words are breathy and possessive, clawing at the sub like the fingers tangled in his hair.

More direct than he would have been a few hours ago, when he still thought Dean needed him to tread lightly. Now, though, he knows the sub needs to confront himself. Even when the man’s cheeks blush bright red, he doesn’t let that pretty mouth pull away.

Rather, he keeps his hand knotted in Dean’s wet hair and holds it steady, waiting for the wave of embarrassment to pass. It does, pretty quickly, or at least his domination overrides it. Dean settles, like a good boy, and looks shyly back up at him with a flush that matches his spread pink lips.

There’s a soft whine, and then the man’s gaze drops again, and then Cas’s grip on his hair relaxes, and the sub timidly pushes himself further in. Taking Cas as far down his throat as he can and nuzzling his nose right into Cas’s pubic hair, he glances up nervously again with a pointed blink.

You, his look, his whole body seems to say. I like having you in my mouth.

Just to prove it, he sucks gently, and lets an uncertain hand come up to graze at Cas’s hip.

Cas sighs at the feel of it, at the pleasure of Dean’s obedience. Rolling his hips again, he lets his fingers cart through Dean’s hair.

He doesn’t grip the locks this time, because he doesn’t have to, because Dean is a good boy. Because he can be such a good boy when he feels safe, when he isn’t beaten and hurt and afraid.

He doesn’t have to hold Dean in place anymore, or tell him what to do, with either his words or his hands. Just enjoying himself, and petting Dean through his nervousness, he lets the sub show him how sorry he is in the way both their instincts are telling them is right.

Cas is very, very easily swayed.

“Good boy,” he murmurs, over and over and over again as Dean sucks him. “My good, good sweet boy. Beautiful, so obedient. You know who you belong to now, don’t you Dean?”

Dean nods slightly as he bobs his head, folding into Cas’s words like they are home.

“Sir,” the man murmurs, briefly pulling off Cas’s cock just to kiss the tip of it. “Yes, Sir. Yes, please, Cas, I can, I’m sorry, I’m- I’m…oh-”

He trails off as Cas guides his cock back in between Dean’s lips before the sub can agitate himself, less interested in hearing his babbled apologies than enjoying the fruits of Dean’s submission to him at last.

“I know, sweetheart,” he promises, as his cock fills Dean’s mouth again. “Don’t talk, baby, don’t worry yourself. Just focus on what you’re doing for me now.”

Dean does. Being told that’s all he needs to do clearly settles him. Some lingering tension in his shoulders drains away as his eyelids become heavy again, and he sighs with gentle pleasure as Cas cups his jaw and guides his head.

Carefully bobbing it for him now, Cas lets the sub drift in subspace as he takes his own pleasure from the sweet mouth around his member. When he feels the heat building to the point of no return, he tightens his grip and moves Dean’s jaw faster, but doesn’t pull back from him, only clenches his fist.

“I’m going to cum,” he warns briefly. “Be a good boy. Swallow.”

Breathing heavily through his nose, Dean attempts to nod.

He doesn’t get very far, with the white-knuckle grip Cas has on his hair now. Feeling electric-white and dizzy with domination, the dom grabs the back of Dean’s head and pulls him in as close as he can.

Pistoning in and out of the warm throat, he feels it in the base of his cock when Dean attempts to gasp around him, and feels it again when the gasp turns into a whine of acceptance as Cas’s clutch holds his warm mouth in place. It’s too much, and Cas joins Dean in gasping as he throws his head back, and shudders with white-hot pleasure as his orgasm overcomes him, shooting hot and fast down Dean’s throat.

Dean moans the whole way through it, a fact Cas is too far gone to note for several seconds, as his knees buckle and he has to grab at the shower wall to keep from collapsing. It feels so fucking good, to release himself into the sub’s body, after days of holding himself back around the beautiful man.

Not anymore. Overwhelmed with the feeling of letting himself go, Cas pants for several seconds as the black spots dancing in his vision fade back into sight. Chest rising and falling heavily, he finds himself staring straight up into the spray of the shower in a stupor, trying to remember when the last time was that he let himself indulge so heavily in his own needs.

Probably….never. He’d never allowed himself to. He’d never allowed himself to get carried away like that, in a way that could really release what he is out into the world.

Despite his relief, he feels a brief moment of panic at the realization, and a swoop of self doubt as he looks back down at Dean with anxiety.

Did I go too far?

Did Dean need that, or is Cas just a predator?

His eyes lock on the young man’s who’s still staring up at him with his lips wrapped around Cas’s soft cock.

His cheeks are bright red. His gaze looks dazed and needy. The hot shower hisses down around them still, clouding the space between their bodies with steam.

“Dean,” he whispers, and Dean blinks, eyes equally cloudy. Slow and soft, like a cat that feels safe.

Cas lets out a shaky breath, feeling some tight tension bleed out of him.

Such a good boy, he thinks, unknotting his fingers from the man’s damp hair.

Letting his shoulders drop, Cas closes his eyes briefly in deflated exhaustion, strangely comfortable with the state of limbo for a moment as he lets his chest rise and fall. He feels good, and he lets himself feel good, lets himself feel tired, and collapsed with unnecessary power. Absently, he pets at the sub who’s still waiting for him like he should be, warm and quiet with his soft mouth still cradling Cas’s limp cock.

This is what it should feel like.

The thought drifts into him, vague and certain, then back out of him before Cas can catch it and make it true.

Letting it go for now, he briefly marvels at how good it feels to be respected, before he pushes on past that emotion to the ones that know he has more work to do.

Opening his eyes up again, he leans forward with Dean still kneeling before him to turn the shower off, letting it drip in the sudden quiet as he pulls back and lays his attention back on Dean.

“Beautiful,” he murmurs, as the sub’s eyelashes flutter. “So obedient. You’ve been waiting, haven’t you, Dean?”

Waiting to be told he can pull his lips away, waiting to be told he deserves more.

Half-hypnotized, Dean doesn’t seem to know what to do other than blink up at him pleadingly. Keening softly, he spreads his knees without breaking eye contact, almost like he doesn’t notice what he’s doing at all.

It’s breathtaking, and Cas feels his cock twitch at the sight of it, and he hisses with oversensitivity as it’s met with an accommodating tongue.

“God, sweetheart, you’re something else, you know that?” he breathes without thinking.

Dean just huffs softly, so Cas cups the sub’s jaw and guides his head back, before that pretty mouth can get him hard all over again.

It’s still a big temptation, the gentle slide of Dean’s pink lips just as inviting coming off as going on. He’s almost overwhelmed completely when the sub makes a noise of disappointment once his mouth is unoccupied, this newfound freedom a curious unhappiness that he uses only to kiss the tip of Cas’s cock before it moves away.

He’d done something similar before, but it strikes Cas now as something both erotic and touching, the strange earnestness in the gesture only adding to the young man’s appeal.

“You really are beautiful,” he whispers, and Dean shudders down to the root of him. Wanting to see it, Cas pulls the sub’s head slightly back, gazing down now at the burning need between Dean’s legs.

It’s as pretty as the rest of him, pink and flushed and dripping with need. It’s lovely, flushed and swollen as his kiss-stained lips, and Cas finds himself wanting to kiss the tip of it the same way.

He doesn’t try to hide the way he’s staring, because Dean very clearly seems to enjoy it. The whole organ twitches as it's considered, and Dean gives a helpless moan as Cas crouches down and pushes his legs a little wider so he can see better.

“Lovely,” Cas murmurs, but he says it as he glances up, watching the way the submissive squirms and pants as he’s viewed. His entire body is beautiful, but it pales in comparison to his helplessly erotic reaction, turned on as easily as a faucet by the mere idea of being owned.

It’s incredibly arousing, and incredibly endearing too, and Cas finds himself wanting to sweep Dean away with him to keep him well kissed and well petted forever.

“Do you want me to touch you, sweetheart?” he murmurs coaxingly, stroking his fingers over Dean’s abdomen.

Dean ruts up a little seemingly on instinct, like he’s trying to push into the touch. He only ends up moving against Cas’s cock, sending an electric shock from himself to the dom.

“Sir,” Dean breathes. His mouth parts prettily around the word, and then stays that way, like it’s waiting for something to push into it.

Abiding happily, Cas leans forward to kiss the submissive, confidently claiming the lips that kiss back hesitant and shy.

“Sir,” the man breathes again, in a fractional moment when the dominant pulls away. But he doesn’t allow the submissive to keep talking, cupping the back of his head and kissing him passionately again, again and again and again until Dean is gasping for breath, and his hips are jerking up in helpless little movements in desperation as he seeks the friction that is just out of reach.

“Well?” Cas asks at last, when he finally pulls away, and Dean pants, dazed and out of breath and dizzy with lust.

The man nods, pupils huge and blown, and Cas quirks his lips, happy to tease.

“Use your words, Dean,” he chastises, and Dean shuts his eyes and groans, a sound that quickly turns into a moan as Cas trails his fingers further down.

From the young man’s abdomen, he flirts with moving lower, scratching lightly through Dean’s public hair only a few centimeters above the base of his cock.

Dean gasps, and tilts his whole body forward, coming to tuck his face into the crook of Cas’s neck once again. His arms, which had been held obediently against his thighs, abruptly fling themselves around Cas’s shoulders.

“Whatever you w-want,” he stutters, suddenly pressed up and cuddled tight. “Whatever. If you. If. If it pleases. If I deserve. If. Oh, fuck, Sir, oh, god, fuck.”

His hips make a helpless, aborted little jerking motion, but don’t seek out the friction Cas’s body could so easily provide.

It’s all so blindingly submissive, breathtakingly accepting of whatever Cas wants, which is just where Cas expected him to be. Finally, finally, and it feels so good that Cas almost comes again, and he groans against the pain of his cock trying to lengthen once more.

“Oh, fuck, Dean,” he breathes, echoing the sub. “Oh, fuck, you’re just- you’re so- Christ.”

He kisses Dean again, hard, and yanks the man’s whole body in against his lap with possessive arms grabbing tight around the man’s waist.

The yelp of surprise melts into Cas’s mouth like candy, the startled struggling turning to frantic whines as the dom’s hand finds its hot little prize between Dean’s legs. Making shocked, pretty sounds of pleasure, the sub turns into a confused little bundle of nerves as he’s touched and rocked and ground against Cas’s thigh.

For a few seconds, the man seems so overwhelmed that his squirming seems urgent to get away, but it isn’t long before he’s rubbing himself as fast as he can into Cas’s leg. Between his rutting and Cas’s hand aggressively pumping his slick cock, it’s less than a minute before the sub is cumming, going tight like a bow string as he strains in shock within the dom’s tight hold on his body.

“Ah,” the sub cries, but it’s into Cas’s mouth again, because Cas won’t let him turn his head away from where he’s being kissed. Relishing the sound of the muffled ecstasy, Cas moans himself, and rocks Dean’s slim hips once or twice more against his muscles, slowly, working him through his orgasm like it’s music to be played.

It takes longer than it would for most people, Dean so deprived and so excitable that his need takes its time exploding out of him. It’s just as intense as Cas would have expected it to be, but it’s like the explosion never ends, Dean’s body shuddering and shuddering for seconds and seconds and seconds that tick by, before he finally collapses entirely into Cas’s arms.

“Oh,” is all he manages to murmur, completely slack against the dom’s steady grip.

Feeling a flood of warmth at the sub’s vulnerability, Cas lets out his own huff, close to laughter, before he gently tilts Dean’s body back into him so the man’s head is resting against the dom’s chest.

“That’s one way to put it,” he whispers, without much sarcasm. Dean, immediately exhausted and sleepy, just hums a little in response.

But he cuddles in closer to Cas, seeking out the warmth of him, and Cas can feel the gentle breathing that’s slowly evening out to match his own. Finding himself dizzy again, he clutches Dean a little closer, never ever ever wanting to let go of him ever again.

********

He does have to let go of Dean, of course, eventually, if only to clean the evidence of the man’s orgasm off his thigh. That’s easy, just requiring him to turn the bath faucet back on and letting the water run over him, until they’re both clean and wet again as they’d initially been.

It’s a lot harder to do the rest of the movement required to get them both out of the tub and into bed, Dean having turned into an octopus over the past few minutes. Koala-like, he’s reluctant to let go of Cas, and Cas finds himself having to haul the man up and carry him over the ledge of the tub and into the other room.

It’s not exactly easy. As malnourished as Dean is, he’s also well over six feet tall, and Cas finds himself grateful for his own height as he lugs the young man to bed. He manages it eventually, though, and then slips with some relief back to the bathroom, to grab a few supplies to manage Dean’s pain.

“No pills,” the sub whispers after he’s done wrapping up his injuries. “No pills.”

But Cas isn’t having it anymore.

“Yes pills, Dean,” he says firmly. “It’s just Ibuprofen, look.”

He pops one into his own mouth and swallows it, then pops two more into Dean’s while the man is gaping at him in shock.

He grabs Dean’s arm before the man can pull away from him then, and claps his hand over the sub’s mouth when he tries to spit the medicine out.

“No,” he says firmly, pushing the pills back in and keeping his palm pressed firmly over where they might come out again.

Dean gives him a distinct look of betrayal, and though it affects him, Cas doesn’t budge.

“They’re for your pain, Dean. I’m sorry, but that isn’t negotiable. You’re not allowed to be in preventable pain anymore.”

“Nnn-hn,” Dean protests, halfhearted and muffled. But he drops his gaze when Cas raises his eyebrows at him, and doesn’t do one of his crazy jiu-jitsu moves or slit Cas’s throat to get out of it.

“Swallow, Dean,” Cas tells him firmly, for the second, and very different, time that night.

Whether Dean makes that connection, Cas doesn’t know for sure, but he does see Dean blush visibly.

There’s a pointed glare, and then a look of pleading, and then finally Cas sees Dean’s throat work.

“Good boy,” Cas assures him, pulling his hand away. Dean clears his throat.

“Fuck off,” the sub mutters, and for a moment Cas feels another swoop of self-doubt.

But then Dean looks at him, and there’s such relief in his expression, and Cas knows that he’s doing the right thing. Reaching out with gentle intent, he cups Dean’s face in his hand again and kisses him softly, and isn’t surprised at all when the young man bursts into wave after wave of tears.

Chapter Text

Cas doesn’t beat him after that, and for some reason that makes Dean cry, makes him weep like a child falling apart from a scraped knee, hysterical and exhausted and pushed past the tipping point.

“I’m in so much trouble,” he keeps insisting, over and over through wet gasps of breath. “I’m in so much trouble, so much trouble, please, Sir.”

Sitting besides him on the bed, Cas just hushes him, and rubs his scared back.

That doesn’t help at all, of course, and Dean hears his own voice rising in pitch and insistence, repeating himself completely in vain. The words are received the same way all the rest of his tantruming has been: unflinchingly, unangrily, but fundamentally unmoved.

All the screaming, all the fighting, all the throwing punches and running away. None of it had made a dent on Cas’s treatment of him, so there’s no reason Dean should expect his begging to change anything now.

Dean is completely helpless to Cas’s kindness towards him. If there’s anything he’s learned over the past few hours, it’s that.

He can’t provoke the dom into beating him, nor guilt him into letting him flee. He is held, tight tight tight against the man’s power, trapped unshakably within walls of protection that won’t even let Dean hurt himself.

Cas shushes, and Dean sobs, from how dizzy and undone he feels. Relief and shame and fear and humiliation all war within him like gladiators fighting for their lives.

“I’m in so much trouble,” he cries like an echo, as shame is crowned the victor yet again. Burning with it, Dean hunches over where he sits, or tries to, ducking down as far as his injured back will allow.

The pain is much worse on the inside, battering him with the certainty of the disgrace he knows he’s put himself into by trying yet again to reject the dominant’s authority. He can’t pretend anymore that he doesn’t know how badly he needs it, after what had just almost happened, and can’t hide from how thoroughly he’s been put back in his place.

And that’s….humiliating, for so many reasons, not least because of how condescending he’d been towards the dom. He feels so, so, so fucking stupid, as mortified by his overconfidence as he is horrified.

Even now, crescendos of embarrassment and disgust with himself crash over him like waves as he remembers the way he’d spoken to the dom, how he’d called him “man” and “dude” and even had the audacity to find his insistence that he owned Dean now endearing.

Like it wasn’t real, like he was some sort of child play acting rather than an actual dominant who can control anything Dean does with a word, like he wouldn’t be finding out just how willing the man is to assert that control in a few hours.

It seems fucking insane, now, seems so so fucking idiotic now that he’s sitting on the other side of that power. Sitting naked and collared on the comforter besides Cas’s fully clothed form, it’s abundantly clear to Dean that it’s the man rubbing his shoulders who is in charge.

What the fuck was I thinking, Dean thinks frantically, rubbing his eyes as the hiccups rattle his chest. What the fuck was I thinking, talking all disrespectful, running off like I don’t gotta stay.

But, of course, he knows what he’d been thinking. He’d been thinking that Cas’s refusal to be violent made him weak.

Now, with the dom possessively pulling him closer as his breath hitches, he knows how completely wrong he was. The dom owns him, had taken over Dean’s custody as soon as he’d found him huddled in the living room, and he isn’t going to let go of him now just because Dean thinks he can change his mind.

Dean can’t change his mind. He doesn’t- he doesn’t want to change his mind, doesn’t want to be allowed to change his mind, to have to go back to the basement. It’s a fucking relief to be kept here by force, a relief like the flood of a creek, and he clutches instinctually at the collar around his neck as if to remind himself that he can’t take it off.

It has an alarm. Cas promised it has an alarm.

He promised he won’t let Dean get away from him again.

Dean doesn’t want to be allowed to get away.

Maybe this is obvious, and maybe it always had been, but the difference is that before he hadn’t believed that he could be kept. Without the kind of brutality he’s accustomed to, it had been hard to see how Cas could assert his authority, especially in the face of Alastair trying to get Dean back.

Dean….hadn’t trusted there was much help to be found in this dom against that maniac, no matter how kind the man was. Which is why he hadn’t even come here, at first, but searched out the old Knollwood trailer park, the last address he remembers living with his dad.

But Dad hadn’t been there. Dad hadn’t…. There had been no one home.

Or at least, no one had opened the door.

So he’d moved on, the command to “go to his dom” nipping at his heels, trying to drag him back down to hell where he’d come from.

He’d pushed so hard past it, wrestling the need into a shape that had some hope to it, into something that could bring him to Cas. Dean had barely been able to hold on through it, though, even after he had arrived, a urge that only got ten times worse once Alastair appeared at the fucking door to reiterate the command.

God, fuck, fuck he’s so scared of going back there. But it had taken so much strength to keep the need inside him from springing back into its original shape.

Be good for your dom. Go with your dom.

His true dom is his dad. And his dad didn’t sell his claim to Cas.

But to Alastair. Alastair, who beat him so fucking badly Dean could hardly remember how to breathe. Alastair, who said he would take care of him the way he needed to be taken care of, and then dumped him off at the center after Dean was even too crazy for him too.

Dean wishes he didn’t want to go back to him. He wishes he wasn’t still so fucking broken, and compelled to obey.

But he is what he is, and after 24 years of denying it it’s finally caught him, finally cornered him against something so frightening that he’d carve the truth on his ribs if it would at last keep him safe.

Swallowing, Dean pushes the collar against his adams apple as it bobs, pretending to himself that the fit is much tighter than it is. He’d asked Cas to adjust it like that, to tighten it until it was nearly choking him, but the dom had refused, like he’d refused anything else close to harm.

Knowing now that this kind of gentleness is held as firm as steel against Dean’s urge to be hurt, he hadn’t argued with the dom, nor does he argue about it now, though he can see Cas watching him out of the corner of his eye.

“Are you alright, Dean?” the man asks softly. Ironic, how he asks only after Dean’s sobs have stilled.

But he seems to understand what Dean is just starting to, that such release can be cathartic and good for him, while it’s the stoic moments that cause the most damage.

Knowing this isn’t enough for Dean to be able to let go of it. Sniffling quietly, he nods quickly, wiping his eyes.

“Yeah,” he mumbles. “Yeah, sure. I’m sorry.”

I still want to go to him.

The urge isn’t as strong as before.

It still scares him, and he almost wants Cas to get angry again just so that scare can be bigger, and he can hold onto it like he’d held onto the dom pushing him around. That hadn’t hurt, though Dean had thought it was going to, at first, and he sort of craves the intimidation he’d felt.

You can still feel it now, he tries to tell himself. You know he owns you.

He concentrates on the feeling of Cas’s hands on his skin.

It’s not enough, though, and he feels his grip tighten on the collar almost involuntarily, seeking out the security he knows it can invoke.

“Does this really have an alarm?” he asks his knees quietly, but it’s Cas who answers next to him, nodding yes.

“I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”

The words are reassuring, like they know what they mean to Dean. Like they know, as everyone does now, that he’s scared shitless of being set free.

With a shaky breath, Dean nods once, and then nods again, trying to convince himself that he’s as safe as he wants to feel.

“It’s loud, yeah? You’ll hear it if I try to leave again?”

Cas turns towards him with a slight look of worry on his face.

Nodding once more, he also tilts his head, like there’s something about Dean that he’s trying to figure out. Whether he wants the man to have guessed what is happening inside of him or not, Dean can’t really tell, but just like he’s starting to become accustomed to with Cas, he doesn’t get a say.

“Are you very worried that that will happen again?” he asks, voice no more threatening than a moment earlier. He sounds concerned, but not angry, Dean is relieved to say.

So he doesn’t have to fight so hard against the urge to avoid being honest, pushing through his own walls with minimal effort to force himself to be good.

“I- kinda. Kinda. Yes.”

Very quiet, he speaks knowing it’s not what the man wants to hear.

And Dean feels like shit for it, feels yet again as broken as shattered glass, knowing Cas has already pushed himself to the brink of domination to soothe his soul.

Though he may not have been pushed into beating or burning him, Dean knows the severity Cas had displayed isn’t really his nature. While he’s much more capable of asserting himself than Dean had initially realized, he also clearly prefers to be soft with his subs.

Yet again, though, the man surprises him, or maybe surprises them both. He seems to be tapping into some source inside his instincts that shows him how softness can be turned into something strong, and the possessiveness he’d displayed with Dean when angry all of a sudden becomes translated to patience like iron.

“Come lay down, Dean,” he says, commands, very warmly and very very kind. His hands are firm and soothing on Dean’s body as he’s pushed and pulled to where Cas wants him, like violin strings being played in a hall.

“Oh,” Dean mumbles, as he’s settled into place, with his torso draped over the dom’s thighs. Face pressed nervously into the comforter a few inches past the man’s leg, he finds himself looking backwards, uncertain.

It’s a strangely vulnerable position to be in, bare as he is, draped across Cas’s lap almost like he’s going to be spanked. Though his chest is too low, pressed where his bottom should be, it doesn’t change much in the grand scheme of how it feels.

His body is still spread out like butter, and his blush is still hot as the sun. The slight fear such exposure brings mixes nicely with the shyness, going down inside him like wine that settles his nerves.

Shivering, his eyelashes flutter when he feels Cas’s fingers tracing the scars on his lower back, and his breathing starts to even, calming down.

“How about now? Do you still want to leave now?”

I never wanted to, Dean thinks blearily. I just gotta.

But he’s still awake enough to parse out what Cas is really asking, and still paranoid enough to feel the rock of dread in his gut.

“A little, I guess,” he admits, because there isn’t really a way for him to truly ignore it. Even as he speaks, however, he feels the ball of anxiety in his chest shrinking, and the unmet urge of obedience starting to fade away.

It’s still there, like an unmet ache, a hunger, a haunting, but it eases as the seconds pass almost as noticeably as it initially had.

Like when Cas had pushed him against the wall and laid his claim on his soul and his body, he feels the urge lessening, lessening, the pressure against his ribs lifting away. The same way the hysterically desperate need to obey Alastair had been banished when Cas had forcefully made him his own, the lingering pain of what’s left is being dissolved now by gentleness, as possessive and firm as iron walls.

It feels so good to be free of it, even momentarily, that Dean feels his still aching eyes grow wet again with relief. The idea of being owned isn’t something he’d ever found comfort in before, but he finds it now, a hot tear like loneliness slipping down his cheek.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a brat,” he mumbles, trying to keep his voice from sounding as choked as it feels. It’s not an easy task, the warmth of being touched and owned and cared for strangling him almost as viscerally as Alastair’s hands on his throat.

He finds that the feeling doesn’t frighten him the same way, though, despite the similar sensations. It’s just nice to know no one is hurting him, maybe.

“You’re not a brat,” the dom says above him, which is a nice lie to hear, even though they both know it’s not true. Dean doesn’t feel like this is the time to argue, though, much too subdued to want to risk it, risk disturbing the nice peace he’s somehow found.

So he just makes a non-committal noise, that turns shy when it’s lightly reprimanded, the slight squeeze on his ass tipping Dean off to the fact that not arguing was a good idea.

Even a hum doesn’t seem to be too close to disagreement right now to be permissible, though admittedly the consequence for it isn’t something he doesn’t enjoy. Squirming a little, Dean bites his lip when he realizes the hand on his bottom isn’t leaving, resting softly against his skin as if to say “this is mine.”

Pushing his face further into the blue duvet cover it’s already smushed against, Dean becomes aware of how he must look to the dominant’s eyes. Feeling his cock give a little valiant twitch against the pants they’re pressed up against, he feels abruptly grateful that he’d so recently cleaned the pipes.

“You’re not gonna hit me? Even though I was bad and tried to leave?”

He asks abruptly, already almost certain what the answer is going to be. Hearing it outloud seems like it could be sort of exciting, though, and sort of sacred, something concrete to hang the rest of his tangled hopes on at last.

“I don’t hit,” the man replies, as expected, and Dean shivers a bit like they had touched him somewhere sensitive and soft. While it’s at least the 4th time he’s been told this, it’s the first time it feels like anything meaningful, settling in against his doubt like a flame.

The doubt doesn’t catch, not just yet, not just now. Not so early, while he still has so much chaos to show. Dean has too much experience being a punching bag not to know how easy it is for him to tip the gentle types into anger, and he knows he’s going to feel Cas’s hands slamming into him eventually like he knows the sky he hasn’t seen in years is bright blue.

But there’s something to it. There’s something in Cas’s words that holds some kind of weight. He sees it now, how kind the dom really is, against all odds and all intuition. He doesn’t want to hit Dean, will really have to be pushed to it, and all of a sudden the future seems bright.

Sighing into the blanket, Dean curls up a little towards the man’s legs, scooting himself lower and closer until he’s angled his face to push into Cas’s side. Turning towards the dom’s stomach, he winds his body up so he’s half-curled into the flannel-covered torso, legs drawing in so his knees touch the figure’s lower back.

And he starts to daydream, or maybe just dream, close to sleep as his battered body is. Dean isn’t sure, and he doesn’t think it matters, as long as what he thinks of is pleasant.

He thinks about a life in which he’s not in pain all the time, and a house where everything is warm and clean and neat. He thinks about belonging to someone who will only beat him when he’s really bad, not just ‘cause he choked while sucking cock.

He thinks about Sammy. How Sammy was nice like Cas is, and how Dean thought he was the only one like that in the world.

But he was wrong. He thinks, he thinks he was wrong, and now he’s been stolen away into a future that might. Might be worth fighting to live for.

“Cas, if I’m good, will you let me go outside?” he wonders quietly. The idea comes to him like a spiderweb caught on a hand.

Once it’s there, he can’t get rid of it, even as it becomes tangled with other daydreams in knots. They all tangle together into one big question he doesn’t have the courage to even identify, but is something along the lines of Will I be happy here?

What a terrifying thought. What a huge thing to want.

Dean knows well that the more you want, the more you have to lose.

But he’s never been able to train himself out of it. Out of wanting things, no matter how hard he tried. Now it’s coming back to bite him, the way he resisted Alastair’s attempts to train away his mind. He can’t trust that there isn’t anything worth dreaming of. Not while Cas is so nice.

“Baby….”

Cas’s voice sounds pained, and trails off into nothing, the kind of nothing that means you’re supposed to know what’s missing there. Dean doesn’t, though, thoughts drifting away like leaves in autumn, carried away by winds of exhaustion and sleep.

Struggling to keep his eyes open, he tries to pull some of his mind back together, to regain the past few moments of time that are already long gone. He’s tired enough, though, that he only remembers what he’d asked once Cas is answering it, path backwards recreating itself as the man speaks.

“You’re in hiding, Dean,” the dom continues eventually, strained like it’s not what he wants to have to say. “Of course I want you to be able to go outside, my dear, but…we have to be careful. It has nothing to do at all with being good.”

The stress in Cas’s words puts them into the context exhaustion had stolen, and Dean wakes up a little more as their meaning tugs at his sleeve.

Oh yeah, he remembers blearily. I’m like, on the FBI’s most wanted list.

“When the fuck did I get so popular,” he mumbles, thoughtlessly. It prompts a small chuckle from Cas’s lips, which Dean likes.

But the anxiety Cas’s touch and his own exhaustion had blissfully erased starts to come back as soon as he’s aware that it had been gone. The daydreams of being trapped somewhere pleasant don’t evaporate, but they start to morph, becoming twisted up with reality once again.

It scares him, and he wishes it didn’t, because he wants the way Cas establishes his ownership to be more than enough. That would be nice, if it was, if all it took to banish the rest of the world from Dean’s mind was being pet, if his own fucked up brain would let him rest and accept this as proof.

But it doesn’t, it can’t, and Dean feels the distant urge to return to Alastair coming back, seven years of training and his dad’s authority not so easily overruled. It feels sort of traitorous now, like it’s encroaching on Cas’s claimed territory, which makes it hard for Dean to not just feel mad at himself.

“He’s outside,” he croaks anxiously, the paranoid rumble quickly gaining ground on him. “He’s- he’s waiting for me outside, he’s there.”

Who he’s talking about is not something that needs to be explained, apparently, and Cas’s face darkens at the same moment Dean looks up at it.

“No, he isn’t,” the dom replies, hand carting possessively through the sub’s hair. “He was long gone when you tried to leave this morning.”

His voice is held awkwardly tight, like he’s hard trying not to sound upset about it.

He’s a bad actor, though, and Dean hears his stress loud and clear.

It makes Dean’s own stress quadruple, and he sits up suddenly with a burst of adrenaline, cutting through his sleepy haze like the stroke of a clock.

“But what if he came back?” he asks, suddenly fearful. “He- He will come back, Cas, what if he came back already?”

Cas scowls, and pushes him back down to his lap very firmly.

“It wouldn’t matter, because you aren’t getting anywhere near him either way.”

It’s an easy thing for Cas to say, but quite another for Dean to internalize, the idea of the man of his nightmares lurking outside almost too much to bear. Heart pounding, he tries to squirm around against the dom’s legs so he can look towards the boarded up window across the room, the task turned into a tall order to complete with the dominant’s hands refusing to let him up.

How horribly compelling he still finds Alastair to be, however, is indirectly put on display through the struggle. Without much thought at all for the insistent pressure trying to keep him in place, Dean twists and turns against the grip.

“Dean, settle down,” the dom tells him after a few seconds of this, interjecting where Dean’s obsession has gotten the better of him. It startles Dean out of it, seeing him twitch a little under the grip on his shoulders, as surprised to find himself struggling against Cas again as he would be to find himself in outer space.

Dazed, Dean goes still against the lap he’s pushed against, looking up with some confusion at the dom who’s keeping him there. That confusion quickly twists into embarrassment, though, when he realizes he’d so easily slipped into old habits, forgetting in an instant who he belongs to now when distracted by Alastair yet again.

“Sorry,” Dean croaks. “Sorry.”

Cas frowns down at him with transparent concern.

“Dean, I checked barely twenty minutes ago, when we came out of the bathroom,” he says soothingly. “There’s no one there right now, I promise, sweetheart.”

Which is all Dean really wanted to hear, and he immediately feels better, going limp with relief where he lies. Cas, on the other hand, doesn’t un-furrow his eyebrows, just continuing to look down like something is wrong.

It’s hard for Dean to concentrate on what that might be, now that his immediate concern has been put to rest. Having squirmed around enough to end up with most of his body off of Cas’s lap now, almost all his remaining energy reroutes to figuring out what to do about this.

He likes being close to Cas. He liked being all over him. But on the other hand, he likes Cas’s hands in his hair.

With just his head cradled in the dom’s lap, it’s undeniable that this part of him is receiving extra attention, and he’s not sure that would continue if he changed his position back to what it had been before.

“I’ve really, really been neglecting you.”

The words come out of the dom’s mouth nonsensically, and Dean struggles to give them his attention.

With the hand in his hair petting him like he’s done something good, it’s hard to think about anything else.

“Nah,” is what he settles on eventually, too tired and dazed to find a more articulate response.

He doesn’t even have to, probably, hopefully. Not now that he’s kinda been made a real sub.

Good subs don’t gotta fight and argue and be quick on their feet about what they’re trying to say. Good subs just shut up, and then no one gets mad at them.

That would be nice. If no one got mad at him. Someone’s always so fucking mad at him, all the time.

Maybe Cas won’t be, if he’s a good sub and shuts up. Maybe he’ll keep touching Dean’s face.

“It’s true. I haven’t been taking care of you the way you need to be taken care of. That’s obvious now, from how hard it still is for you to just. Stay here with me.”

More words. They sound important, so Dean tries to stay awake to hear them. Tries to sort them out into meanings and phrases and ideas.

It’s not so easy, because everything is getting droopy around him, like it’s falling closed, or maybe that’s just his eyes. The thought that it might matter is distant and fading rapidly, along with something else in his head, like maybe his sense of time.

Get up, he thinks. Get up.

Cas is still talking to him. He has to be good.

But he can’t shake the feeling that maybe he is being good, even though he’s so tired. Because Cas is still touching his face and his hair and is being all nice.

Definitely staying here. Definitely staying with my head in his lap.

He likes being the center of attention like this.

Contentedly, he hums, and closes his eyes.

Cas rubs his thumb along where his freckles are thickest, or where they used to be thickest, when he was allowed to go outside. Maybe he’ll be allowed to go outside again, if he’s a good boy sometimes. Maybe he already asked about that, and got an answer.

He doesn’t remember what it was, but he doesn’t care, because it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he feels good with his head in Cas’s lap.

“Things are going to be different, now, sweetheart. I’m going to take better care of you. It might be hard for you to get used to at first, but I know it’s going to be ok.”

Dean hums again, not really hearing. He hears that Cas is calm, and not mad at him. And he’s touching Dean still like he’s a good boy, which must mean he did something right.

This conviction only glows stronger in his chest as the next few moments pass in silence, as he feels Cas’s seeking thumb trace lower and lower until it gets to Dean’s lips.

Then it just rests there for a moment, and Dean feels his mouth part very slightly as if from far away. As if it isn’t him controlling his body, but whoever is controlling it is someone he trusts.

“I’ve been neglecting you.”

The words repeat themselves like a refrain somewhere above Dean’s sense of consciousness. He doesn’t get a chance this time to think of a response before the thumb pushes halfway into his mouth.

So much for talking.

It’s a relief to have an excuse not to. Firmly untethered from the last vestiges of responsibility, Dean lets himself float as he closes his lips around the digit in his mouth.

He doesn’t suck it, or lick it, or do anything halfway arousing, far too out of it to even remember how, or if he should. The vague worry, though, that something is expected of his mouth now is soothed quickly, by the continued attention the rest of his face and torso receive from some other hand.

It’s all gentle, and it’s all nice. Dean’s so close to unconsciousness, and he isn’t scared.

Maybe that’s obvious, more obvious than it’s been in the past. The touch on his skin feels like it is praising him because of it, and the next words that come sound meaningless but so fond.

“I know, my dear. This is what you need, isn’t it? To feel safe, to be safe. You need to be touched, to be taken care of, to be held.”

Dean’s pushed so close and warm against the dom’s body that he can feel the vibrations of the man’s speech resonating in his own skull. It’s a frequency that brings him comfort, and delivers him ever closer to sleep.

“It’s what you were made for. This is what you were made for, sweetheart, don’t you see? Just to be loved. To be looked after. It’s written in your bones, how treasured you’re supposed to be.”

They’re warm, the words are all warm. He’s all warm, all over and inside his chest.

Something echoes in there, a reverberation of comfort. The empty tin drum that cavity had been thunders low and rolling with what he’s only half awake to hear.

Loved. Loved. Loved. Loved. Looked after. Treasured. Loved.

“Don’t leave,” Dean mumbles around the finger. “Don’t lemme go, please, please.”

Whatever comes out of his mouth aren’t words he’s conscious enough to understand.

But Cas understands them. He understands, even when Dean doesn’t. From the beginning, he’d understood Dean better than he understands himself, and it feels natural, now, that he understands this too.

“Not letting you go anywhere,” he soothes in answer, words simple and meaningful. “You don’t have to be scared of that, don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t.”

Slurred and sleepy, the words come out half melted around the thumb that they form around, like it’s something hot that turns solid things molten soft. It folds around the shape of the digit, around the shape of the feeling of it being there, escaping his lips with less structure to their skeleton but more conscious understanding of what’s being said.

He’s still far too dazed to wonder if Cas can hear the difference, or remember that he’s listening. He’s far too out of it to connect the pause in petting to what he speaks.

But it still happens, and his heart hurts for it, wondering is absence of thought if the attention stopped because he’s done something wrong.

Eyelids fluttering involuntarily open, he’s met with the blurred picture of the lower buttons on Cas’s pajama shirt. Without the energy or inspiration to even lift his eyes, Dean studies them closely, thoughtlessly taking in them and the plaid print cloth they’re sewed onto as he waits for the petting to resume.

It doesn’t, at least not immediately. For Dean, it feels like a very long time.

“That’s good, Dean,” he hears someone say above him in its absence. “You’re good, you know that? You’re very good.”

Am not, Dean thinks, but he doesn’t have the energy or will to talk back right now, even to correct such a grievous mistake.

It doesn’t feel like such a grievous mistake when he’s still getting pet so gently. It feels like maybe whoever is petting him really does think Dean’s a good boy.

What a strange thought. What a strange life. He should be getting fucked in a dirty basement by now, but instead he’s right here.

He’s glad for that. It’s hard to think anymore, but he knows he’s glad for that. No one can be happy getting fucked in a dirty basement, and he likes to be happy sometimes.

Happy sometimes. Happy now. His thoughts are like cotton candy, dissolved.

The disembodied voice comes back, softer, telling him things he can only understand with his gut.

“It’s alright to sleep, baby,” is the last of them, or maybe the first, or maybe the only, but it doesn’t matter because it’s the permission he hadn’t known he was waiting to hear.

Sighing slightly, he snuggles closer to the warmth of his dom’s body, and relaxes. The digit in his mouth gets pushed in a little farther, but Dean can’t say that he minds.

If anything is said to him after that, it’s said to a silent room. Dean hears nothing else, and sees nothing else but what he dreams.

He just drifts, carried by the tides of the ocean, which had long ago made a home inside his empty heart. They tug him onwards and onwards and endlessly onwards, and they stay calm until they rock his soul to sleep.

Chapter Text

The truth is that Dean remembers the first time he had sex better than he remembers his mom. That fact sits inside him like teeth that are eating away at him, and sometimes he wonders if that’s the real secret that’s killing him.

It feels more painful, most of the time, than the need to submit does, or at least, like they stem from the same root cause. That something is wrong with him, deeply deeply broken inside in a way that’s unfixable, and that there’s no way to cure the disease but give it more of what makes it sick.

He was nine the first time he’d had sex, and it was because he’d already let himself be molested more than once. In some truckstop bathroom the first time, and then behind the convenience store he’d been sent to. Dad caught him the second time, because he took so fucking long that he’d had to come looking for him, only to find his son standing completely motionless against the wall with some stranger’s hand down his pants.

It’s almost harder for Dean to think about dad’s reaction than it is to think about actually being groped for the first and second time. He’d looked at Dean like he was a bug squished under his shoe, so disgusted with his passivity that he’d just turned around and left.

He’d just walked away like he couldn’t even bear to look at who his son was becoming, which made Dean cry so hard that even the molester had gotten sick of it and let him go. Even then, Dean had been so scared to go home that he’d just hidden behind a trashcan for half an hour, nauseous with terror and guilt.

He’d known without a doubt in his mind what he was in for when he got home, and he’d known without a doubt in his mind that he deserved it. Dad hated it when Dean listened to strangers, hated how pathetically obedient he was. All he’d ever tried to do is train Dean out of it, and Dean had failed, over and over again.

It was the last straw, in terms of Dad’s tolerance. The next day, he was loaded into the car and dropped off at a stranger’s house.

“If you don’t want to be here, learn to leave,” Dad had told him flatly. “I’m not coddling your needy shit anymore.”

Then the man had come out, and money had exchanged hands, and dad had sped off without looking back.

That evening, Dean learned the lesson Dad had been trying to teach him his whole life, about what subs in this world are good for. It sunk in like a rock, that this was what his future was going to look like if he didn’t somehow learn to push back.

But Dean couldn’t. He literally couldn’t, and for the first time he had understood how horrifying that is. He saw what Dad must have seen, when he found Dean behind that convenience store getting fondled, saw his own nature as the revolting, nightmarish thing it had always been.

There’s nothing natural about how completely he was unable to resist anything. There’s nothing natural about how, deep down, he still was so eager to please.

It made him sick, the tinge of happiness he’d felt when the man called him good so strong that it had colored the whole terrifying experience. More self aware than he wanted to be, it was like watching himself from the outside and wondering what was wrong with that kid, who was being manipulated into feigning eagerness in exchange for praise.

This is what you’ll be as long as you let yourself give into it, he’d realized. This is what you are, unless you let Dad help you change.

When Dad had come to pick him up, Dean had cried his eyes out in absolute terror, and Dad had comforted him for the first time in years. He’d been understanding, and kind, and Dean had loved him for it, and for helping him see the truth before it was too late.

That was the first and last time dad had given him to someone on purpose. It wasn’t something he’d done to be cruel. Dean had known that then, and knows it now in the same heartbeat. That dad had loved him, and had been trying to save his life.

He didn’t want Dean to end up like mom. He didn’t want Dean to be nothing but something to fuck. He wanted Dean to be more than that, wanted him to live, and live freely, and after what had happened to him Dean finally found that he wanted that too.

So he tried. He tried to be what Dad said could save him, tried so hard to fight the fate that the world had in store. Throwing himself into his training, Dean had lived and breathed for his family, his father, his fighting instinct, manually drowning out all the others as best he could.

Sometimes, it worked. Sometimes, there would be weeks at a time where Dean wasn’t a screw up, where he could pretend to walk and talk like a real boy. Those were the good days, fueled by the approval he could see in John’s eyes when he acted normal, acting like the independence he play-acted wasn’t draining him dry.

But it was. It was, and it wasn’t even happening deep down. More like just under his skin, something you barely had to scratch the surface to see. Sam could see it, always, tried to insist to them both that it wasn’t going anywhere, humiliating Dean even when things were going well.

He was right, though. Dean’s mockery of autonomy never lasted very long, always falling apart as dramatically as a plane crash. There would be a cycle, where he would starve himself of the submission he craved for as long as he could bear it, only to finally buckle under the weight of his withdrawal in some spectacular manner of screw up.

That was when Dad would get really, really mad again. When it seemed like Dean wasn’t even trying. He would find Dean under the thumb of some completely random dom he’d run into, or catch him coming home in the middle of the night all beaten up, and his face would go white with anger and disgust.

It was then that Dean would get another reminder of what was at stake if he stopped fighting so hard, ever. When he had to be taught the lesson of his own helplessness again, so it might actually sink in and stick. Though Dad never arranged for anything bad to happen to Dean again, he didn’t have to, because it didn’t matter, the very fact of Dean’s own nature driving him right into danger’s path every time.

All he had to do was abandon Dean. To leave him without the protection of being told what to do. When he got pissed enough about Dean forgetting this, he’d just load him into the car and dump him somewhere shady, and Dean would self destruct without him having to even say a word.

It never failed to get the message through once again, though Dean never managed to hold onto it for more than a month or so. But that month was always driven by fervor, Dean having been absolutely convinced of his own inadequacy. The experience of just being left somewhere alone was more than enough to remind him what his life would be like if he didn’t snap out of it, never managing to go an entire night without ending up at least once on his knees.

Pushed around by guys that liked that he couldn’t say no, Dean was never anything but convinced of Dad’s crusade by the time the man came back around to pick him up. Even once he got smart about the whole thing and started asking guys for money, the cash he was able to hand Dad in the morning never covered the utter helplessness that he felt.

Yet as he got older, the cycles of purging and binging and being abandoned never lengthened. In fact, the loops just got shorter and shorter over time. He never lost hope, though, not completely, never stopped trying. He knew what was waiting for him if he did.

Once, when he was 15, Sam asked him what he was so scared of. What he could be put through, that he hadn’t already suffered and come out alive.

“Emptiness, Sam,” he’d answered bluntly. “Without your own life, you’re just empty. If I let them carve me outta myself, there ain’t anything worth fighting for anymore.”

*********************

When Dean wakes up, he feels bigger on the inside, something had expanded inwards inside of him while he’d slept.

For a long time, he just stares at the ceiling, shocked and shaky. Not sure what to make of himself, or who he is anymore.

Everything from last night is a blur. It all feels like one huge huge storm in his mind. The memories pelt down on him like the raindrops he’d nearly frozen under, and Dean feels scared to remember them, like he knows they’re going to hurt.

I tried to go back to him.

He has the thought as he blinks at the ceiling fan. Directly above him, Dean just stares at it as it cartwheels like he never could.

It pushes cool air around the room in a lazy pattern, tired and unmoved by Dean’s plight.

Dean can’t blame it. He’s pretty pathetic. His own heart can’t muster up much sympathy either. Too wrung out to make excuses, reality settles over him like a weight, one he doesn’t have the energy anymore to fight off.

Really? You’re just figuring this out now?

The fan seems to be judging him as it continues to whir above.

Yeah, Dean thinks blearily, unable to defend himself. Guess I really am a dumb fuck.

A dumb fuck, and a pathetic one. A submissive one, as if those adjectives all aren’t the same. Why it had taken Dean twenty four years to accept this, he really could not fucking tell you, except that denial is one hell of a drug.

But he can’t afford to play that game anymore, can’t afford to stick his fingers in his ears and keep singing. Not with Alastair once again breathing down his neck like an animal, waiting with open jaws for Dean to give in.

The consequence of pretending he isn’t going to is just too fucking terrifying, finally forcing him to confront the truth like he never really has before. That something is- something is deeply, deeply wrong with Dean, deeply submissive, and he isn’t ever going to snap out of it no matter how hard he tries and tries and tries.

God has he tried. Jesus Christ, he’s tried so fucking hard. For such a long time, Dean has done nothing but try to fight every instinct that drives his soul forward in life, and it feels- it feels horrifically good to give in.

Like the ache that comes after holding some strained position for too long, the burn of relief nearly brings tears to Dean’s eyes. Too scared to move from where Cas had put him, he curls up in the soft covers, seeking the warmth he’s never dared admit to himself that he needs.

And he feels terrified. He feels terrified, and miserably defeated, emotions the relief of giving up can’t override. How dependent he is on Cas now for everything isn’t lost on him, and he can’t help but think that his future looks bleak.

Cas is nice. Or, he wants to be nice, it seems like. He’d been nice to Dean at the center, and had been nice to him last night as well.

But he’s still a dom, and Dean is…not good at pleasing doms, no matter how kind. It’s why dad tried so hard to break him out of this compulsive submission. Because Dean is bad at submission, and is never going to get the approval he needs.

Dean is…

Jesus christ.

Dean is, like, really fucking crazy. He’s really…submissive, if he’s finally being honest with himself. Whatever Cas is going to have to do to him now to keep him from going AWOL again, it isn’t going to be pretty, and there’s nausea growing in his stomach before he even finishes the thought.

I’ve been neglecting you.

Hadn’t the man said something like that, last night? Dean glances over to the sleeping form besides him, wondering with dread what that will turn out to mean.

Nothing pretty, if Dean’s experiences are anything to go by. The affection the man had showered on him last night seems to fade in the cold light of day.

Dean feels himself shrink, and feels himself wonder. Coming up, his fingers clutch at the new collar around his bruised throat.

This is stupid, he thinks to himself, frustrated. The guy’s a softie, it won’t be that bad.

No, it- it shouldn’t be, if Dean’s fucked up head can settle down.

But stress knots and knots inside him as he considers the likelihood of that being the case. How deeply messed up he is feels like a burden he doesn’t have the strength anymore to bear.

He’s not ignorant of the fact that Cas had had to fucking lose it to keep him here. He’s not oblivious to how hard he is to keep control of.

The collar around his neck feels conspicuously heavy. The will it locks inside of it feels painfully bare.

How do I live with myself, when I’m so much more vicious than I want to be?

The truth of his vulnerability seems to weigh heavy on this precarious peace.

Swallowing heavily, Dean feels tears spring to his eyes as he stares openly at the man sleeping besides him, feeling more torn open than he thinks he ever has in his life. The memories of what had happened yesterday bombard him like explosives, with the way Cas had taken care of him at the forefront of his mind.

It had felt so good, to be owned like that. To be kept and pet and told he was safe. But reality is bearing down on him now like an angry animal, aggressively hunting him, and Dean doesn’t know how to pretend he isn’t living his worst fears.

Not his. Not his worst fear, maybe. That would be having to go back with Alastair again. Back to the basement.

That threat, though, is forcing him at knifepoint to accept literally any other treatment that might keep him here, forcing him to accept what he’s been trying to get away from his entire goddamn life.

That he. Is someone….

Who needs to be owned.

Whatever…whatever that means.

How long he’s been in denial about this only makes it that much harder to deal honestly with now, and his mind keeps trying to settle with it like a lawsuit behind closed doors.

It’s not just the fear. It’s everything. It’s the shock of it.

There’s something close to grief tightening like a knot in his throat.

For what, Dean wishes he didn’t know, but he does. He misses his family, and the hope he’d once had that they were all he would need.

He has to pry his own love off of them now as everything dawns on him, as he admits to himself that both Sam and dad had long ago left him behind. The memory of Sam’s anger at him for how hard he tried to be what dad wanted feels more acute now, in retrospect, now that he can see the truth of it, and that he’ll never get to prove his brother wrong.

Even worse, though, is the phantom feeling of disappointment that he knows his father would have if he were here. Self consciously, Dean lets go of the collar and buries himself deeper under the covers, hyper aware of how he’s bare besides Cas like a real sub would be.

Dad would be so pissed off at me, Dean thinks weakly, but even that is something closer to wishful thinking than what’s now the truth. Recalling painfully how he’d stood outside of his father’s old trailer last night, pounded by freezing rain, it sinks in to him that dad hasn’t been around at all for years and years.

He’s long gone. Moved away, probably, not long after he’d pawned Dean off. It occurs to Dean then how stupid it was not to realize that that’s when he’d been abandoned, and how vapidly pathetic it is of him to only understand now that he’s the last person to give up on himself.

What the fuck am I even still fighting for? he thinks tiredly, the question burrowing its way into his heart like a hungry bug. It bites at him once it’s settled, carnivorous and craving, consuming whatever remnants of resistance are still left.

Only once they’re gone does Dean stop living in denial, letting go of the delusion of happiness that has only ever made his situation worse. He’s not ever going to be free, he sees that now, at last unfiltered, humming with the sharp angles of pain that reality brings.

He is what he is.

I am what I am.

It’s not going to be pretty, or good. But it at least will be real, and perhaps less exhausting. That’s all Dean can really bear to want, anymore.

It’s….all he’s really wanted for a long time, he thinks, and there’s some catharsis in letting go of his fantasies. They don’t feel good peeling off of him, but once they’re gone Dean feels lighter, like he’s abandoned some great weight he’s been dragging for years.

He’s never going to see his family again. He’s never going to see Bobby, or Jo, or anyone else. That’s a good thing, because it means there isn’t anybody who’s expecting him to be better than this anymore, and accepting that feels like a long-anticipated collapse.

The house just caves in on him, then, and with it comes everything else he’s been pretending not to know. That he’s never going to make his dad proud of him, and he’s never going to have a job or a family. That there’d never been any future that he could be losing, now, beyond the daydreams that have propped him up for so long.

Just like that, they evaporate. They’re all gone, and Dean is too burnt out to care.

None of them were real to begin with. He was an idiot for pretending they could be. You can’t change nature, no matter how hard you fight it, and Dean was never meant to be anything but totally owned.

There’s no joy in that. There’s no happiness. But there is relief, flying up like a cloud of smoke in its wake.

I don’t want to pretend anymore.

He’s too…he’s too fucking tired. Tired of running, always running away.

Slowly, creakily, Dean reaches his arm up to touch the collar that’s around his neck now, careful like either he or it might shatter apart. Neither of them do, and Dean is left to face the reality of its weight against his throat, heavy and metallic, cool to the touch where he runs his finger along its edge.

He doesn’t know how he feels about it. He doesn’t know if it matters.

Dad abandoned him. Cas had stolen him. It’s not like he has anywhere else he can go.

Weakly, Dean blinks a few times in succession in a halfhearted effort to clear his blurring eyes. He doesn’t make much progress, and gives up after a few seconds, allowing a tear to escape and run down the side of his face.

It hits the soft comforter besides his ear with a wet plop, and it makes Dean aware of how warm he is under the sheets.

And bare. Warm and bare. Like a real sub.

Something he’s never before just let himself be.

And for what? For what?

Some false hope he’d never been promised? It had done nothing for him but land him in a psych ward the second after he was thrown away.

Dean just can’t be what he isn’t, and he- he doesn’t want to be anymore, is sick of trying so hard to be some other version of himself that only falls farther and harder when he inevitably fails.

He’s- he’s tired of it, tired of all of it, and it feels so fucking good to just give up on himself. He was never anything more than an echo, nor did he ever really want to be.

Can’t I just be ok with this? he thinks miserably, almost begging. Can’t I just be what I already am?

Who the fuck he’s even talking to, Dean has no idea, but he gets to answer, and so he covers his face with his hands.

There’s such a huge amount of shame in his chest that for an insane second it almost starts feeling like rage, at the unfairness of everything, at how inadequate he always is. Then it morphs into fear, and then it morphs into nothing, and Dean hides under the covers, just because he can.

“Dean.”

Cas is awake. Dean must have woken him up.

Moving around too much, probably. Maybe he’ll get in trouble, and finally get beat.

“No, I’m not going to beat you.”

Had he been speaking out loud?

“Fuck off,” Dean says back, for no reason at all.

Which is so unfair, he’s always such a damn brat, and he doesn’t even know why he’s cursing Cas out first thing in the fucking morning. Baiting, him, probably, but he should know by now that the dom doesn’t give in to that kind of stuff, and it isn’t good of him to be trying that again either way.

But that doesn’t stop Dean. Overly sensitive, it’s all too much.

“I hate you.”

Spoken under the covers, the muffled words don’t carry much weight.

He still says them, though, without having any good reason to, just overwhelmed at the knowledge that the dom is conscious again. He wishes he wouldn’t be, feeling way too vulnerable all of a sudden, not knowing how to exist in the man’s presence after what had happened between them last night.

That’s why he flings out the stupid insult. It’s a pointless attempt at saving face. Which doesn’t work, of course, because there’s no way to save face after that.

Regretting even trying to almost immediately, Dean waits the beat it takes for Cas to react completely tense. Just when he starts to think he’s actually in trouble, though, the dom finally moves, pulling the duvet Dean’s hiding under down once again.

Or, he tries to pull it down, at least. Dean doesn’t really let him. Making a noise of alarm, he grabs the edges of the blanket above his head and yanks them away from the dom, clutching them close over himself in open defiance.

So much for giving in, Dean thinks ruefully, confused and conflicted. He doesn’t even know why he’s behaving like this, when he’d been so sure of his resignation a few minutes ago.

That’s how he still feels. But he doesn’t…he doesn’t know how to act on it.

He doesn’t know how to do anything but be bad all the time, and hoping that someone will beat him into his place.

But Cas doesn’t beat. At least, not over stuff like this. Feeling like he’s going to start crying again, Dean realizes he’s not even surprised when he’s just scooped up in a hug.

The man had exploited a flaw in Dean’s dubiously thought out plan, here, and just wriggled under the blankets himself.

“Cas,” he whines slightly, as he’s tugged in by his torso. His voice is too choked, though, to be anything more than a plea.

Cas shushes him, and Dean wishes he didn’t like it so fucking much. He wishes he could at least pretend to be mad. But he can’t, and he gives in to the manhandling almost immediately, going limp in the heat of the dom’s hold.

“Stop being nice to me,” he mumbles, unhappily.

There’s a hum, like Cas is pretending to consider.

“I like being nice to you, though.”

It’s such a sweet thing to say that Dean can’t handle it, and he scowls, kicking the dom in the shins to get him to cut it out.

Cas swats his ass, not terribly hard, but it still startles Dean into trying impulsively to buck up and away. He gets two more swats for his trouble, and then is yanked back into the position he’d started in, just with a much firmer grip now keeping him in place.

“No,” the dom says, firmly enough that it makes Dean go limp again.

Eyes wide, the sub blinks blankly in mild surprise.

Panting a bit, he blushes as the feeling of having been chastised rushes over him, hot and warm as the flush of his cheeks. It doesn’t feel- bad, or frightening, but it does make him feel very, very owned.

“Sorry,” he offers in a small voice, entirely meaning it. He doesn’t know why he kicked Cas, and wishes he hadn’t.

The anger he usually feels at himself when he acts out isn’t quite there though, for some reason. When Cas says “You’re forgiven,” even the echo of it seems to disappear.

And he feels- calmer, then. Less rattled and like he’s falling apart. It feels strangely good to be handled like he’s just a pouting sub in need of correction, the abruptness of getting his ass smacked making him feel more certainly that’s all that really needed to be done.

It’s so- condescending, almost, but in a good way, like Cas is just refusing to take Dean’s aggression too seriously. Which is kind of embarrassing, but also kind of a huge relief, considering what they both know he’s actually capable of.

But Cas just…doesn’t seem to care, a fact that has Dean wondering in a shy kind of disbelief as he’s cuddled. The dom doesn’t seem remotely afraid of him anymore, nor remotely nervous about setting Dean off. He’s handling him like he would any other sub, possessive and confident and tactile.

Huffing slightly, Dean turns his face to hide it against the dom’s chest as he feels the hands that had been stroking his back come down to cup his bottom. He wriggles a little as the grip tightens and knees into the stinging flesh, the freshness of his punishment feeling highlighted as Cas makes no effort to avoid rubbing it in.

Dean feels his whole body heat up in surprise, and in simmering desire he’d always been led to believe was something bad. Cas seems to like it, though, humming in enjoyment when Dean’s breathing starts coming harder, petting him rather than punishing him when he feels the sub’s growing member pressing into his thigh.

Squirming in confusion and distracted enjoyment, Dean looks up at Cas partially panting, not certain of what’s going on.

“What are you doing?” he asks, genuinely not following.

Cas smiles at him, sleep ruffled and soft.

“Touching you,” he says without stopping. “You respond very well to such intimacy.”

His kneading softens into gentle strokes that trail down Dean’s bare thighs.

It feels nice, and it feels sensitive, and it feels intimate, just as Cas had said. Not knowing what Cas means by “respond very well” makes Dean antsy, but he’s too distracted to press on the topic all that hard.

“Oh,” he mumbles, squirming a little in search of some friction. It comes, a shoot of energy that has him freezing in his tracks against the dom.

Didn’t get told he could do that.

Alastair would’a beat the shit out of him, cause he’s so slutty.

Cas isn’t Alastair, though, and he just encourages Dean to do it again with a gentle push.

But Dean feels too shy now that he knows he’s being observed for something. Trying to pull away a little, he puts a few inches of space between his cock and Cas’s body, mildly surprised when the man lets him go without a word.

“Are you alright?”

It’s so warm under the covers.

“Yeah,” he mumbles, swallowing. “Just- I’m naked, is all.”

“I know.”

Dean knows Cas knows.

He doesn’t know what he’s feeling anymore, except very very owned.

He rubs his eyes. He sits up. Cas doesn’t try to stop him.

For a few seconds that feel like a few hours, Dean just sits there, bare chested, staring blankly off into space. With the fan still circling above him, he brings his knees slowly up to his chest, hyper aware of the covers bunched loosely around his waist and of the dom still lying besides him, taking him in.

He can see all the scars on my back.

But no. That’s wrong. They’re covered in bandages.

They’d been exposed last night, though, when Cas had patched him up like a moth eaten blanket.

Sentimental value made him worth saving, apparently, despite the many holes in his body and soul.

Dean shuts his eyes.

“Fuck,” he whispers, and maybe he’s not supposed to curse or something, because it’s that that prompts Cas to sit up after him.

Feeling the mattress shift beneath him, he cringes, waiting to meet the retaliation he’s learned dominant attention always brings.

But Cas’s hands don’t bring any violence. They just rest on his shoulders, warm and safe.

“Oh, sweetheart,” a voice says gently just behind him. “It will be alright.”

No it won’t.

It’s hard to hold onto that certainty, though, when he can feel the bodyheat behind him encircling his soul. Leaning close, Cas’s clothed chest comes as close to leaning against his back as is physically possible while also keeping his weight entirely off the injured skin beneath.

It’s so fucking thoughtful that Dean doesn’t know how to handle it, and he curls up to hide his face against his own knees.

Putting his hands over his head, he makes a pathetic noise that he can’t stand knowing had come from him, humiliated confusion rocking everything he’d ever pretended to be.

“You said you wouldn't hit me.”

Cas huffs behind him.

Having followed the curve of Dean’s back as he’d hunched over, the breath still arrives directly against the sub’s skin to tickle his ear.

“I meant I wouldn’t hurt you, sweetheart, not that I wouldn’t swat your bottom if you started it by kicking me in the shin.”

There’s a hint of amusement in his voice that Dean would be more bothered by if not for the heaviness now underpinning his words. However he’s trying to tease, Dean’s despair seems to have made itself obvious enough that he knows it won’t work, and the man sighs heavily only seconds after he speaks.

“I’m sorry,” he says, dropping the attempt at levity entirely. “I should have spoken to you about it before doing that. You seemed like you were starting to spiral, and I acted on instinct. I thought it would snap you out of it.”

And it did.

That fact hangs between them like an elephant in the room, heavy and nonsensical and there. Dean’s scared of addressing it, but even more scared of letting it go ignored, knowing it could trample them both.

He feels his eyes start to sting, and curls his fists into his hair in confusion, scared of what he’s known about himself for years and years.

“I don’t like pain.”

It hurts to admit, because he’s supposed to, because it’s apparently what he needs anyway, though it’s never been enough.

Cas rubs his shoulders.

“I know, baby. I won’t do that again if it really upset you.”

“But you will do it again if it didn’t.”

There’s silence after he speaks, and the hands on his shoulders come to a standstill. In the absence of being able to close his already-shut eyes, Dean instead opens them, and looks down unhappily at the far-too while duvet covering his knees.

He’s never seen anything so white before. So fucking clean, without a spot of dirt to marr it.

I don’t belong here.

But here he is all the same.

The whir of the ceiling fan above stretches the silence out thinner.

“Dean.”

Cas grasps his chin, and turns his face sideways. Dean tries to pull it from his grasp, but the dom just catches it again and moves it back where it was.

Because that’s how things are going to be now, apparently. Unarguable.

The churning mix of relief-despair-fear rolls out before him like a red carpet, the future he’d never prepared himself to be braced for stretching out long and lonely and unknown.

I miss Sam.

He misses everyone.

“Look at me.”

Dean obeys without putting up a fight.

It’s painful, how sympathetic Cas looks. How much pity and understanding there is in his gentle blue eyes. It cracks Dean open again in a way that nearly brings him to tears, the recognition of how frightening this all is for him making it real in a way his psyche had been trying hard to deny.

But there’s no denying it, when Cas looks at him like that. There’s no pretending this isn’t something to cry about, when Cas looks like he might start crying himself.

“Things have to change, Dean.”

Dean feels the stinging in his eyes get stronger at those words.

“Fuck off,” he mumbles again.

Sort of waiting to see what will happen when the bait isn’t accompanied by a kick.

If he’s waiting to be spanked again, though, he’s to be sorely disappointed. A beat passes without anything happening, and then Cas just sighs and drops his cheek.

Standing up, the man disappears from beside Dean in a movement that has the mattress shifting beneath the sub’s weight. Dean watches him go with an uncertain wariness, not sure if he’s going to come back.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Cas tells him, as he starts to unbutton his shirt besides the bed. “I didn’t get a chance to wash my hair last night.”

The because I was busy dealing with you remains unspoken, but Dean hears it anyway, and feels guilty for being such an ungrateful brat.

“Ok,” is all he says, though, in a voice smaller than he expects of himself.

The only acknowledgement is the light sound of the man’s clothes hitting the bed.

Sort of surprised by Cas’s lack of body-shyness, Dean blushes as he avoids looking up. Why he’s acting like a blushing virgin now, he doesn’t know, except that his confused half-erection is still very much alive.

Which is embarrassing, and confusing enough to verge on distressing. Combine that with the memory of how Cas had touched him in the shower last night, and he’s a stone throw away from having to admit how much he likes being owned.

Deep down, he’s already more than aware of it, but it’s not something he knows how to openly address. Flustered and shy and still hyper-aware of the slight sting in his asscheeks, Dean lets his eyes slide over to Cas’s discarded pajamas as soon as the dom walks away.

When he hears the bathroom door click shut, he raises his head, eyes still locked on them. When he hears the shower turn on, his hand slides over almost against his own will.

But it’s not against his own will that he bunches the fabric up and brings it to press against his cheek. And it’s not against his will that he flops back down against the bed, kicking off the covers so he’s lying there totally bare.

With the pajama shirt bundled against his face, Dean breathes in, and gives in, all at once. He stops pretending he doesn’t know what he’s doing and turns his head so his nose is buried in the fabric.

Fuck it. Fucking hell, fuck it. He knows what he is now. What he’s supposed to be.

There’s not much more he can do but admit it to himself, and indulge in the things he’s always pretended he didn’t want while he waits for the other shoe to drop.

He’s not stupid enough to think that it won’t.

But this is some comfort, at least. At least while Cas isn’t looking. Before he gets pissed off enough at Dean to start beating him up too.

God, he thinks, breathing in against the shirt. Get over yourself. Things could be so much worse.

He’s still grateful.

He’s grateful, that Cas is nice to him, even though he doesn’t know how long that treatment will last. It’s still pleasant now, and still worlds better than what Alastair would be inflicting on him, and some small hooked thing inside of him recaptures a bit of the hope he’d felt last night.

Dean snuggles a little closer into the sheets around him as he feels it’s echo, the edges of his terror at least slightly melting away. It can’t be that bad, belonging to Cas, when the man clearly loves being gentle. It can’t be that bad, no matter what violence Dean needs.

He’d put Dean back in his place last night, after all, and that hadn’t been awful, or at least it hadn’t hurt. Yes, it’s pretty devastating to know he won’t ever be let out of the house ever again, but it’s also kind of flattering, in a way.

Dean…wishes he hadn’t run off. He wishes he wasn’t crazy, and could be let outside sometimes. But at least he knows he’s wanted, now. At least he really is being kept safe, from his own fucked up, obedient brain.

Maybe I can still look out the window sometimes.

Maybe it won’t be so bad, being trapped here. It’s a nice house, after all, from what Dean had seen of it. And it’s not Cas’s fault Dean’s too crazy to let out the door.

Blinking the wetness from his eyes, Dean tries not to let any more come, sick and tired of crying over nothing and wringing himself out like a rag. It’s not Cas’s fault that he’s crazy, and not Cas’s fault he’ll have to be stern. Just because Dean had deluded himself into believing he could sort of be a person doesn’t mean the dom is doing anything wrong.

He’s doing the opposite of anything wrong. He’s doing everything right, and has been so much more tolerant than he’s ever needed to be. It’s ridiculously ungrateful for Dean to be working himself into a fit over the man fucking helping him, as if he isn’t thankful beyond all human belief.

It’s not like any of this is going to be easy on the dom either. It’s not like it has been easy, with how crazy and aggressive Dean has been. Between Dean attacking him every other day and the midnight visits from the police, it’s a miracle he hadn’t thrown in the towel long ago.

The fact that he hadn’t only speaks to how kind he is, and how determined he’s been to help Dean, no matter the cost. It’s more dedication than anyone but his dad had ever shown him, and it hurts Dean’s chest now to think of how many times he’d thrown that back in Cas’s face.

Well, that all ends now. With conviction like iron, Dean promises himself he’s not going to be so ungrateful anymore.

No matter what he has to do to me, I’m not going to resent him.

No matter how much he hates being a submissive, he won’t…he won’t let Cas know.

It would only hurt him for no reason, to see how desperately unhappy Dean is with his lot in life. There’s no reason to show him, when there’s nothing that can be done in any case.

Dean will keep it to himself. Dean will be good, as much as he can. He won’t make this harder on Cas than it’s already going to be, and won’t make the man hurt him more than absolutely is needed.

That, Dean feels sure of. More than the acceptance of his own needs, he accepts Cas’s.

Cas, who doesn’t like inflicting pain on anyone. Cas, who’s more gentle and good-hearted than anyone else Dean thinks he’s ever known in his life.

It’s a novelty, to be worried for a dominant in general, and a double novelty to be worried that that dominant will be worried about him. Only with Sam has Dean ever felt the need to hide his own hurt, or avoid having it inflicted, because no one else had ever cared either way.

But Cas is….different. He’s like Sam, but even softer, Dean thinks. Despite the fact that he’d shown very well last night that he’s as much a dominant as anyone, it doesn’t change that there’s a sweetness to him that he doesn’t even seem to know how to hide.

He doesn’t have to.

Vowing to make this as easy on the dom as he can, Dean crushes the dread in his stomach down into something that can at least pass as strength. So far, he’s brought nothing to Cas’s life but headaches and a brand new stalker, but that isn’t something he plans to let go unchanged.

Again letting his hand come up to curl around his collar, Dean wipes his eyes, and wipes his moping away.

There’s nothing worth crying about, or at least, nothing worth making Cas sad over. The man deserves to see gratefulness, not a sub crying in fear.

Pull yourself together, Dean thinks to himself, and half manages. Pushing down on his complete sense of instability, he tries to convince himself he’s ok with what he is.

He’s known his entire life that he’s a submissive, and has been owned for the better part of a decade. Just because he’s only now giving up on the fantasy of personhood doesn’t mean that anything has been lost.

And it doesn’t mean there’s anything to be gained by sulking. His fear is unwarranted, compared to what he’s been through before.

Compared to what’s waiting for him just outside, that he’d tried to return to. There’s a better life locked away for him in here than there is with any illusion of freedom out there.

Dean clenches his jaw. Rubbing at his eyes aggressively, he forces himself to sit up.

You’re done.

He’s done being nothing but a hysterical burden. There are worse things in the world than belonging to some bleeding-heart sap.

There are.

There are, and Dean gets closer and closer to convincing himself of that as he sits up and turns himself on the bed.

Digging his fingers into the comforter, he resists the urge to try to cover up his ugly scars.

Cas had wanted him naked. It’s…fine. That’s fine.

Not like you ain’t ever pranced around naked before, Dean thinks dryly, not sure why he feels so strangely self conscious.

No one’s here to even be looking at him, right now, with Cas showering in the bathroom. Looking over at the bathroom door with an uncertain affection, he wonders if the dom would mind all that much if he covers up.

But no. Better not risk it. Good boys don’t override their dom’s decisions like that.

Dean doesn’t have a lot of experience being a good boy, but he’s determined to at least give it his best shot. Sliding out of bed, his feet hit the carpeted ground silently as he stands up, fully naked, feeling embarrassed and vulnerable in a way he knows he has no right to be.

His body belongs to Cas, and he has no right to hide it if the dom doesn’t want him to. The self-consciousness he feels is uncharacteristic of him anyway, having been dragged around naked for a good chunk of his life.

It’s the room, Dean realizes belatedly, as he looks around and finally takes it in. Comfortable and neat, there’s just something surreal about standing in it all beaten up and bare.

It makes him feel like he doesn’t belong in this picture, a cutout from some violent porno mag pasted into a “Better Homes and Gardens” type scene. There should be some nice, obedient housesub kneeling patiently by the decorative plant, not Dean, standing obscene and large and bloody by the bed.

Well. Not so bloody anymore.

Blushing a little, Dean wriggles his toes into the nice thick carpeting underneath them as he inspects the bandages that had been wrapped around his feet.

No more neglecting yourself like this, he remembers the dom telling him sternly. You’re not allowed to deny yourself medical care anymore.

The memory of how firmly that lesson had been imparted on Dean comes back to him, and he looks down at himself in some amazement. Sort of surprised to see how much of his body is covered in bandages now, he feels flustered, and more than a little grateful at the lack of pain he finds he can drag up.

Suddenly feeling a bit lighter, his feeling of embarrassment starts to fold in on itself as a nervous sort of curiosity takes over him. Something slightly optimistic takes over his vision, then, and he fidgets slightly as he takes where he is in.

He’s been…stolen. Stolen by someone who’s always so nice to him. The nerves he feels at the idea of being truly owned for once start to fade a little in favor of something calmer.

This is where I live, now, Dean thinks as he gazes around, fascinated. He doesn’t think he’s even ever been somewhere as nice and homey as this, and now this is his home, the home he can’t leave.

That fact starts to feel good again, like it had last night, and Dean sets off to poke around the room with a shy kind of interest. It’s not like him to be so interested in stupid stuff like bedding and furniture, but he finds it’s more exciting when it’s stuff he might get to touch.

He touches now. Getting down on his knees, he pushes his hands flush into the thick, fluffy carpet, letting himself flop on the ground. Rolling back into a kneel after a few seconds, he peeks his head under the bed and takes a look into some of the boxes, feeling weirdly relieved when he just finds some old clothes and books.

No toys.

Not the kind Dean dislikes, anyway. They could be tucked away somewhere else, of course, but it’s a promising sign that they aren’t in obvious reach.

Maybe he won’t have to deal with that kind of stuff all too often. Even if he’s giving in now and tolerating it all.

Pleased with that likelihood, Dean pulls out from under the bed again, and looks around, wondering if he should risk looking into the other drawers.

Is it bad, to go poking through Cas’s things like this? Dean isn’t certain. He’s never been owned so intimately before.

Back with Alastair, he wasn’t really supposed to touch anything, especially after the dom got sick of him and locked him away. Even before that, Dean was supposed to do shit like cook and clean and fold laundry, but still got in trouble a lot for going into his owners stuff all the same.

But he knows that’s not how it always is, with subs, and good subs especially are housekeepers as much as they are whores.

That Better Homes and Gardens sub would be allowed to go into the drawers.

Is that what Dean is supposed to be like, now?

Biting his lip, he looks over at the bathroom door, only debating for a few seconds before deciding to go for it.

Good subs take care of the home, he justifies to himself as he slides the first open. I have to know where everything goes.

It’s not entirely why he’s doing this, he knows deep down in his gut. There’s something- very domestic driving him forward right now, guiding his hands to trace along the seams of the man’s clothes.

But it’s as good an excuse as any, and Dean bites his lip as he makes careful note of where each piece of clothing goes. Mumbling to himself and doing his best to commit it to memory, he tries hard not to wonder too much about how good this feels.

Hesitating over the sweaters, he lets his head duck as some dizzy contentment washes over him. Listening to the sound of birds chirping somewhere outside the windows, he feels intrinsically like he’s where he’s supposed to be.

Like deja vu, Dean! The Romans thought it meant you had reached a kind of check point, and meant you were on the right track in life.

Sammy’s overexcited voice comes back to him like an echo now, and Dean’s heart hurts for it, but he also smiles, bittersweet.

Yeah, kid, he thinks, stroking one of the sweaters. Maybe the Romans were right, after all.

But it’s not the Romans who told Dean he was never going to be more than this. That he just…has to accept what he is.

Aching, Dean feels a sharp stab of melancholy as it dawns on him that he should have listened years ago. It would have saved him a lot of pain, and it’s not like there was ever any hope of escape.

He’s never…he was never going to get to see Sam again, after he was sold. Sam knew that, and now Dean knows it too, and it…it hurts, but it’s a relief to admit.

Trying to push the pain aside, Dean curls his hands around the sweater he’s stroking. Lifting it slowly, he blinks twice before letting his eyes flutter shut as he presses the soft fabric against his cheek.

This is what you are now.

Just…owned.

Just….kept, as a good sub should be.

There are worse things in the world. Much, much worse things. Dean lets himself float, feeling sad but finally at peace.

“Dean.”

The voice fits so naturally into the moment, like a brushstroke, that for a few seconds Dean doesn’t think to respond. When he does, he has to make a conscious effort to push his eyes open, and a conscious effort to turn his head.

He doesn’t immediately lower the sweater, knowing it’s too late to hide what he’s doing. If he’s going to get in trouble, he’d rather have another few seconds of pleasantness first, with the warmth pressed so nice against his skin.

But Cas doesn’t seem angry, when they make eye contact. Standing in the doorway with damp hair and a towel around his waist, the dom’s face is open, and soft as the moon.

“Hi,” Dean whispers to the man, who walks slowly from behind him to stand on the opposite side of the bed. With the mattress between them, only the dom’s waist and torso are visible from Dean’s vantage point on the ground.

The dom can see all of Dean, though, see his position, how he’s kneeling, what he’s holding against his cheek. That seems fitting, considering what they are to each other. Dean isn’t allowed to hide from Cas anymore.

Maybe that won’t be such a bad thing.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Cas tells him, and his voice feels like coffee. Dean hasn’t had coffee in years and years.

Shivering at the memory of it, Dean drops his eyes, and then drops his arms after them as if the movements are meant to be synchronized. With the sweater in his lap, now, he feels small and vulnerable, still completely naked, now with his heart on display as well.

He ducks his head, feeling his eyes start to sting.

“I see you found my sweater collection,” Cas says from above him. He doesn’t sound mad, but Dean’s so unfamiliar with anything else that it’s hard to be sure.

“Yeah. I was just…just looking.”

Only after he says it does he realize what a stupid excuse that really is. Uncertain, he hunches in on himself further, fiddling with the sweater’s thick, corded sleeve.

He hears the mattress shift as the man sits down on it.

“Did you find anything you like?”

As if the answer isn’t excruciatingly obvious.

Of course I did, he thinks, shyly, transparently seen.

Shrugging, he fidgets in place without raising his head again, poking his finger through a hole in the sweater’s loose weave.

He expects Cas to move on after a few seconds have passed, or at least get angry, and yell at Dean not to ignore him. The dom does neither, though, instead just waiting and waiting, unaffected by the building pressure in the room.

It gets to Dean first.

“Yeah,” he admits, mumbling. “Yeah, I like your sweaters and stuff, I guess. I- I was touchin’ ‘em for a few minutes while you were in the shower, Sir.”

The confession is one he’s not sure is going to be received well.

Cas clearly already knows, though, and he doesn’t seem to be bothered. Humming in slight amusement, Dean gravitates towards the smile in the sound.

“That’s alright, sweetheart,” the dom assures him. “I know how tactile you are. Were you looking for something soft to nest with?”

Dean has no idea what that means.

It sounds submissive, though, and it sounds embarrassing, and on reflex he starts to scowl and shake his head. He doesn’t get a chance to put up a fight about it, though, because Cas doesn’t wait for an answer.

“I bet you’ll like this one,” he says, suddenly flinging his legs to hang off the opposite side of the bed. “My brother gave it to me years and years ago for Christmas.”

Sliding off the bed to kneel down besides Dean, Cas digs around in the pile of clothes until he finds what he’s looking for, pulling it out from the very bottom of the pile.

Then he presents it to Dean, looking so proud of himself that Dean doesn’t know how to say no to it, even though he’s still kind of embarrassed.

Hyperconscious of Cas watching him, he takes the sweater slowly, holding it awkwardly in his hands without knowing what to do with it. A Christmas gift from a family member seems like something important, and Dean is scared he’s gonna do something wrong.

But when he just stares at Cas, uncertain, the man just stares right back at him.

“Go on,” the dom says, smiling, as if Dean has any idea what that means.

Looking down at the worn fabric uncertainty, he glances between it and its owner a few times before accepting he’s not going to get any more hints. A little desperate, he’s about to bite the bullet and ask for a clue before something sort of- tugs at him, in his stomach, and in his gut.

…Oh?

Very lightly, Dean rubs the fabric between his fingers, sort of quietly fascinated. It feels- really nice, really soft, and the tugging thing inside his chest pulls a little harder.

Following some instinct he didn’t even know he had, Dean brings the sweater up to his cheek. It’s the same seeking gesture he’d done before without knowing what he was doing, and he does it again now, insides going fuzzy and warm.

This is even better. This is even better than the sweater from earlier, and he lets his eyes shut again, curling close into himself. Clutching the fabric tight against his neck and collarbone, Dean can’t stop himself from cuddling into it, the embarrassment of being watched nothing in comparison to how good this feels.

It’s so soft.

“Is that nice, Dean?” Cas asks him gently, sounding very pleased with himself.

Dean nods, because it is nice, still unwilling to open his eyes.

He feels the warmth of the dominant’s hand resting on his thigh, but just leans into it, the easy possession only feeding into whatever wave of instinct he’s caught in. Breathing in, he smells Cas, and feels calm.

For a little while, he just sits there, indulging in the overwhelming enjoyment. Curled into the softness and grounded by the dominant’s touch, everything feels blurry and nice.

“Why don’t you put it on, baby?” Cas whispers to him after some time passes.

Dean’s heart lurches with longing and confusion, tender to the touch as a bruise.

“Can I?”

More hopeful than he’s ever been about something as stupid as a clothing item. But this one- this one is soft, and it smells like Cas.

He wants to put it on. Wants to feel as owned and loved as the sweater.

“Here, Dean, let me help you.”

The fabric is tugged gently from his hands.

Dean is too scared to open his eyes, scared that this is a joke or a daydream. Not wanting to see the reveal if that’s the case, he just waits with his eyes shut and head ducked towards the ground.

But the sweater returns not even three seconds later, accompanied by Cas’s firm and unbruising hands. They move Dean’s arms where they want them, and tilt his head up with a tap under his chin, and Dean stays where he’s put like a good boy as Cas dresses him like a well cared for doll.

He. He likes feeling like that. Likes staying still as he’s taken care of and covered.

Stupid.

I can dress myself. I’m not a damn kid.

The words don’t come out of his mouth any time over the next minute, though, and Dean doesn’t find himself trying very hard to make them.

And then the opportunity is gone, Cas’s hands tugging the hem down over his ass before pulling away. Relieved that it’s large enough to cover the family jewels, Dean blinks his eyes open as he drops his raised arms.

“You look cute,” Cas tells him, a compliment to which Dean doesn’t know how to respond.

Cute is not a word that’s often applied to him, scared up and big and lethally trained as he is.

It makes him feel small, in a way, but not….not exactly bad. Flustered, he looks down at his bare knees and fidgets a little, tugging the hem of the sweater to cover a bit more of his freckled thighs.

“Thanks,” he finds himself whispering, the urge to protest dying before it can grow. Kneeling collared besides the dom in nothing but the man’s old sweater, he feels more owned than he ever has before.

What the fuck is wrong with me, Dean thinks, lifting his hand to finger the sweater’s neckline. But even as he fiddles with it, he already knows the answer.

Kneeling on the ground in nothing but the man’s soft sweater, he feels owned, and feels strange, and feels warm. With soft knit cable jumpers and stolen pajamas strewn around him on the carpet, he finds it hard to reclaim the panic of last night.

“So this is how it’s gonna be from now on, huh?” he mumbles, bashful. “You gonna dress me up in your clothes and spank me when I’m bad?”

Sort of teasing, sort of genuine, the question comes out much more timidly than he intends.

Cas tilts his head.

“Is that what you want?” he asks, and Dean doesn’t know how to answer.

So he doesn’t, just shrugging, knowing his face is as hot as it can possibly get.

Shrugging, he shifts awkwardly on his knees to relieve some of the weight, and to try to hide the outline of the half-erection he’s still uncomfortably sporting. Knowing his face is already as red as it can possibly get, his eyes slide away as he feels the blush spread down his neck and chest.

“I dunno,” he mumbles eventually. “Maybe. If that’s what- if that’s what you want.”

Humming, Cas seems to contemplate this. Dean feels his whole body heat up as he’s studied.

“That’s the key thing, isn’t it, sweetheart?” the man says after some quiet, listless time has passed. “That it’s what I want. That you’re being cornered into that kind of soft submission.”

Not knowing what to say, Dean doesn’t bother trying to say anything, feeling exposed and humiliated and turned on and safe all at once. Confused as hell, he reaches up to tangle his hand into his hair, only to be stopped by Cas’s gentle touch unwinding his grip before he can start to pull hard enough to feel any pain.

Breath hitching, Dean doesn’t resist.

“Sir.”

The word falls out from his mouth without permission, dropping like a penny in a wishing well. The ripples are quiet and peaceful like everything else, and his hand drops back to his lap still intertwined with Cas’s.

“Is that what you need, sweetheart?” the dom asks him gently. “To be given no choice? Is that the only time you can let yourself be taken care of without fighting back tooth and nail?”

The questions are rhetorical. Dean can see that from Cas’s expression, and from the metal collar already locked around his own neck. Still, though, it hurts his heart to hear it so plainly said.

“Sorry,” he says quickly, but Cas just gives him a sad smile and squeezes his hand.

“It’s alright, sweetheart. That’s what I’m here for. I’m going to take care of you, and make sure you remember that you’re mine from now on.”

Leaning in without warning, he gives Dean a quick peck on the lips that leaves him blinking, then panting, when his lips part automatically and Cas comes back to give them their claim.

Moaning a little, his eyes have just fluttered shut when he feels himself pushed back. Allowing the pressure to guide him, his breath hitches as the kiss parts, and he realizes Cas is not following him down.

“Cas-” he starts, but Cas shushes him, and lays him back until he’s spread out against the ground. With his eyes still shut, he feels the presence of the dom kneeling besides him, feels the man moving his hands down to untangle his legs.

“You can’t be trusted with yourself, sweetheart,” he hears, as the warm hands part his thighs like soft butter. Panting, Dean throws an arm over his face.

“Can too,” he mumbles, but Cas simply ignores him. Continuing to maneuver his legs, they spread inch by hesitant inch.

Dean can feel them sliding open, shy but totally nonresistant, his bare feet sliding slowly against the rug as they’re pushed apart. It makes him whine, but he quiets when Cas shushes him gently, feeling breathless and heated at how quickly this interaction had turned.

“You’re far too reckless to properly care for someone as precious as you are,” the man’s voice reverberates, sounding unarguable. “That’s why I stole you, Dean, that’s why it’s now me in charge.”

As he speaks, Dean feels his blood rushing to his head, and the warmth of Cas’s palms sliding up his inner thighs to his knees. Apparently satisfied that the sub’s legs are fully open, they move down to his shins then and start pushing them back.

“Sir,” he whines again, as the hem of his sweater slides down his bent thighs. With his legs spread and fully bent, he’s putting everything on blush-drunken display.

But Cas doesn’t mind his embarrassment.

“This is mine, Dean,” he says, fully gripping Dean’s member without warning. Bucking up into it, Dean makes a choked-off noise, the hand flung across his face flying down to grip at the rug.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

Knotting his fingers deep deep into the carpet, they contort like the rest of his body as Cas starts to steadily stroke.

Again!?

How many times can Cas make him come before he’s spoiled for anything but the man’s electric hand?

How many times can Cas make him come before his mind breaks in half after being denied for so many years?

“Cas- I can’t- so many t-t-oh, fuck.”

His bent legs push out in helpless pleasure as Cas strokes him like Dean’s cock really is his.

“No, Dean. You’re mine,” the dom tells him. “Your body is mine, your care is mine. You’ve been denied for too long, denied yourself for too long. It’s not good for you. From now on, you’re going to come at least once a day.”

The idea is dazzling, and terrifying, and Dean makes some pitiful noise of confused pleasure as his heels slide and dig against the rug. Helplessly jerking, he finally flings his arm off from over his eyes as he feels Cas’s pumping speed up, tangling his fingers into the rug above his head like he would a lover’s hair.

“Oh, fuck. Oh, f-f-uck.”

No one’s ever owned him like this before. Making him. Making him feel good. Making him mind who he belongs to, without pain.

Is this what it’s going to be like?

This- this, every fucking day?

It’s too much, but he doesn’t get to choose what’s too much, Cas chooses what’s too much for him, and the choices he’s making feel so so fucking good.

“I’m going to make you mine, baby,” the dom whispers to him, heatedly. “I’m going to make you feel so owned you never think about Alastair ever again.”

“By- by je-erkin me off?” Dean stutters back, somewhat incredulous. But Cas just smirks at him, and heat seems to rise from inside his own bones.

“Amongst other things.”

The dom speaks with such confidence it’s hard not to believe him. Twisting as it slides up Dean’s member, the man’s hand teases out so much pleasure that it doesn’t feel like he’ll ever need to do anything else.

“Like- like what?” he still gasps out, hips canting upwards. Cas indulges him, the smirk deepening on his bed-head graced face.

“Like keeping you all ‘dressed up,’ as you called it, in my clothes, however much I decide to give you that day. Like letting you wander around in just a big sweater like this, and touching you underneath it whenever I want to, pulling you into my lap and playing with your pretty cock whenever I feel like making you cum.”

“Jesus fuck-”

Dean tries to sit up, but Cas pushes him back down with a solid hand against his chest. Keeping him pinned there, Dean is left tugging pointlessly at the dom’s wrist as he writhes beneath him, now stuck staring up at the blue eyes drinking his overwhelmed pleasure in.

“Your life is going to be so filled with pleasure, now, Dean, you’re not even going to know what to do with it,” Cas breathes down at him. “I’m going to hold you so tightly, and you’re going to love it so much.”

That does it. With a frantic cry, he’s throwing his head back and orgasming for the third time in as many days, dazed and squirming and feeling as owned as Cas said he would. Hot spurts of cum pulse out of him like light beams, and his chest heaves, feeling a heady rush of heat that fills him from head to toe as the dom pumps him through the aftershocks and waves.

Then it’s over, and he’s lying there, panting. Panting, with his sweater pushed all the way up his bruised chest.

With streaks of cum cooling on his stomach now, he’s retroactively glad the dom had tugged it up and out of the way when he started orgasming. More pressingly, though, he’s having a hard time thinking much of anything, his brain fried from the shock of feeling so good.

Cas rubs his side.

“Mine,” the dom mumbles, and his pupils are blown.

Yours, Dean thinks back, floating and warm.

Chapter Text

Hello everyone. It’s been a while.

I am going to try to keep this as brief as I can, which is not very brief at all. I am Jewish. The past ten months have been the most stressful ten months of my life, as I have watched a community that I once trusted and loved completely and utterly turn its back on Jews and allow antisemitism to flourish, in the name of activism. People I have personally developed friendships with and who have left dozens of cutsey comments on my writing with heart and sparkle emojis are now unironically, literally advocating for terrorism and ethnic cleansing in Israel, under the logic that the IDF commits war crimes, and so celebrating pogroms against Jews is justice.

I have taken a long break from writing and from most internet spaces in general because of the overwhelming aggression Jews have been facing in leftist spaces since Oct 7th. This absolutely includes fandom spaces. I cannot believe I have to say this, but the very real atrocities that the IDF and Israeli government have committed and continue to commit against the Palestinian people is not an excuse to start advocating for atrocities against Jews world wide. It is not an excuse to start celebrating terrorists as freedom fighters, to cheer on even religious extremist factions from COMPLETELY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES like the Yemeni Houthis, who have made it abundantly clear through both their messaging and their actions that killing all Jews globally is their primary goal.

I have no idea when people started thinking that Jews control the world again, but this sentiment has clearly been creeping up in leftist spaces for a long time if even the most blatant forms of violent, murderous antisemitism globally are now dismissed on the basis that this is “punching up.” Antisemitism is not “speaking truth to power.” AIPAC, though it is a negative influence on US politics, is not the illuminati.

It seems at this point that about 50% of people in leftist spaces genuinely and whole heartedly support terrorist factions who target Jewish civilians, on the basis that “this is what decolonization looks like.” (Hint: It isn’t.) It further seems that the other 50%, even if they do not agree with this sentiment, are fully dedicated to either covering for or downplaying the existence of and antisemitism of the first group. It is incredible how many times I've been told that “No one supports Hamas” when we all know full well how many people do. But nearly every post with over a few hundred notes on tumblr about antisemitism is some gentile rambling about how whatever most recent antisemitic hate crime the left has committed didn’t really happen, and it is just Zionist Jews who are conspiring to smear the movement lying again. And everyone believes it! And Jews, when we push back, are immediately told that we are genocide supporters who love killing babies.

The amount of antisemitism I, personally, have been met with by so called “leftists” since October 7th is astounding. And almost every time I’ve tried to speak about my experiences, I’ve been accused, by “leftists,” of being a paid Israeli double agent. My neighborhood is filled with so much antisemitic graffiti that it feels like the lead up to Kristallnacht. Swastikas have been painted on the mailbox outside of my apartment, along side “Free Palestine” stickers and “Hamas will succeed.” My dad was harassed by a group of Columbia student protesters who yelled “We are Hamas” at him while he was on his way to get a damn coffee. I am genuinely scared for my safety, and the gaslighting that Jews as a community have been met with from people we thought were our allies leaves me feeling very certain that we are entering a very scary new golden age of antisemitism.

I thought long and hard about posting this essay here, for obvious reasons. I know most people won’t even read it, and most who do will come out of it with the same angry attitude I’ve been met with over and over both offline and in person. But to be frank, I cannot stomach the idea of writing for people who would cheer on my and my family’s deaths as a liberating act of decolonization.

I am not going to sit here and entertain people who want me dead, or for whom my community’s extermination would not be a deal breaker for. I am not going to sit here and write little gay stories to entertain people who ally themselves with people who blatantly hate Jews, who will downplay and ignore this because it is no longer politically convenient to acknowledge.

I will try to get to the point. If you are laboring under the delusion that Hamas are freedom fighters, and that the Oct 7th terror attacks against civilians either did not happen or were justified, please stop reading my writing. I know I cannot force you to, but I am asking you to. If you are the kind of person who does not support Hamas but doesn’t have a problem allying with people who do, please stop reading my writing. If you are the kind of person who goes out of your way to delegitimize and downplay the very real global surge of antisemitism that is happening right now, because you don’t want to slow down the momentum of the pro-Palestine movement, please. Stop. Reading. My. Writing.

I’m not interested in hearing it. I am not interested in hearing about how I’m a “Zionist” because I don’t cheer for organizations that explicitly want me dead, who’s platform is and has always been to murder/ethnically cleanse all Jews from the entire Israel/Palestine area at all costs. I am not interested in hearing about how Hamas is not anti-Jew, just anti-Zionist, if we ignore the fact that the definition of “Zionist” has now been expanded so wildly that it includes literally every Jewish person on the entire planet, and if we ignore that this is patently false information that the leaders of Hamas themselves have never claimed to be true. I know this is going to whittle my audience down to maybe a handful of people, and possibly zero. I don’t care anymore though. If you are more committed to your idea of a Jew-controlled world than to dealing with the uncomfortable complications of reality, I do not want to write for you.

For obvious reasons, I will be moderating the comments both here and on my other works. I have set my tumblrs to private, so don’t bother trying to harass me there.

For the handful of people who might actually still be reading this. I have been too stressed to work on SSBMS, I am sorry. I don’t know if I’m coming back to it. I have written a new fic, though, that is already complete, that I posted chapter one of and will be posting chapter by chapter over the coming weeks if I don’t immediately get driven off this site too. It is also possible that I will delete my Ao3 account in the coming days, though, as I know it is likely I am inviting enough harassment to destroy my interest in fandom writing for good. So you might want to download some of my stories if you’d like to save them.

We will see. For now, I hope that I can still find some joy in writing for at least a portion of my audience. If you have read this far, thank you. I hope we can find some way to build a future for both Palestinians and Jews without inviting even more hate into this god awful world.

Sincerely,
Alyssa

Chapter Text

It’s not even 9 AM yet when he gets the first two texts, which pop up in quick succession on his screen.

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Did something happen?

Then,

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There are police all over the place around here!!

Cas stares at that second message, freezing with his spoonful of oatmeal halfway to his mouth. Blinking down at where his phone is gazing innocently back up at him, he wonders if it’s wishful thinking to hope it’s just a wrong number.

His question answers itself a second later, when a third message pops up on his screen.

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When he flicks the screen open, he’s met with a picture of exactly what was described.

Clear skies, blue and sunny, oversaturating the busy morning scene. The photo was clearly taken by someone standing outside of The Roadhouse Diner, looking down the street towards the Center’s ominous looming structure.

Jo, then.

Cas quickly saves her number to his sparse contacts page in his phone. Then he goes back to staring at the photo, feeling his anxiety grow as he does.

The girl is right about what she’s describing. There are at least a half a dozen cop cars pockmarking the scene. One close enough that it takes up a good chunk of the foreground, and another parked a bit further down by an unused meter. The remaining handful take up what little he can see of the Center’s parking lot at this angle, implying there are probably more just out of the frame.

Fuck.

What the fuck?

He thought he had more time.

Are they publicizing Dean’s escape already?

Cas thought for sure they would try to hide it for as long as they could.

But bad publicity doesn’t seem to be a deterrent in situations where Naomi feels personally affronted. Anxious, he immediately picks up the phone and calls the center, with some vague intent of running damage control, but the call just rolls over to voicemail like the phone isn’t even on its hook.

“Damn it,” Cas mutters to himself, hitting the red hang up button. Putting the phone back on the table face-down, he rests his elbows on the fake wood surface and grips his hair.

This is bad. He wasn’t prepared to have to fend off another wave of media scrutiny on top of everything else. He has enough on his plate without nosey reporters going after all the crap he has hidden beneath it.

Unhappy with this turn of events, he pushes his bowl of rapidly cooling instant oatmeal away from himself, no longer having the willpower to stomach the already-unappetizing congealed mess. With his thoughts cartwheeling about what could be happening downtown and if he should be there, he finds himself glancing up towards the living room, where he can just see Dean’s bent knees sticking out off the couch.

The sub has been napping there for the better part of the morning. Cas had let him come down against his better judgment at the young man’s own insistence.

No way I can leave him right now, he thinks apprehensively. The sub can’t handle being on his own while he’s in such a fragile state.

Evidence of that makes itself abundantly clear when the knees, still up until now, twitch slightly. Like he has some sort of sixth sense detecting the changes in Cas’s mood, Dean pushes himself up on his elbows and leans forward, peeking over towards Cas.

“Everything alright?”

There’s apprehension in his voice, audible despite how soft it is underneath the low sounds coming from the TV. Hearing the nervousness in the sub’s question, Cas does his best to give him a reassuring smile, trying to push his worries about this whole situation out of his head for now.

He’s not sure how much he succeeds. Dean doesn’t look particularly reassured.

It’s easier said than done, though, especially when he has a jumpy patient who’s clinging desperately to him for reassurance. There’s no question in his mind of how freaked out Dean will get if he catches even a whiff of the stress mounting in Cas’s mind.

So Cas crinkles his eyes to go with the smile.

“Everything’s fine, sweetheart,” he says, trying his best to bleed comfort into his voice.

Dean still looks uncertain, so Cas straightens himself up a little.

“Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

The words are warm and meant to soothe him, but have domination laced underneath the syllables strong enough to weigh heavy on the sensitive sub. He would have hesitated to use such power yesterday, but a lot has changed since then, for what he hopes is the better. In any case, Dean doesn’t rankle like he might have earlier, more subdued after what Cas can only assume was a significant scare.

Still, the sub resists obeying him for a few more seconds, his brow furrowing in concern as he studies the persona Cas is putting on. Eventually satisfied, or at least overwhelmed by the command, he says, “Kay,” and lays back down like he was told.

As soon as the sub’s face disappears out of view, Cas lets his shoulders slump. The smile slips, and he sits back in his chair, feeling somehow exhausted just from that five second interaction.

There’s so much on his shoulders, the vast majority of which he can’t share with his unexpected roommate. Dean’s newfound obedience is endearing, but also sort of frightening in how thoroughly it looks to Cas to guide it’s way.

That kind of trust doesn’t leave Cas any room to drop it, or screw up the way he always eventually does. Paired with the….unusual circumstances they’ve found themselves in, it’s a recipe for disaster he doesn’t know how to avoid.

Rubbing his temples, Cas stands up, chair scraping abruptly as it’s pushed backwards with too much force. Leaving his unappealing oatmeal for now, he crosses over to the window, peeking out of the shut blinds through a thin slit.

He sees the same thing he saw this morning. A dark, sleek, old fashioned car glinting in the sun.

It’s empty, now, and has been since the black-early hours of the morning, but it doesn’t lessen the ominousness of the threat.

Huffing, he lets the blinds drop, rolling back his shoulders in an effort to unwind the muscles pulled taut. It doesn’t make much of a difference, but he does it again anyway, because he doesn’t have anyone to rub his back.

Not like you can afford a masseuse now that you’ve lost your job.

It’s weighing on him more than he wants to reveal.

A lot is weighing on him. Dean’s safety, and his own. Money and mayhem and his license to practice, as well as the now sizable threat of legal action.

In all honesty, it’s more than he feels capable of really handling, and he becomes aware of his hands shaking a little before he shoves them in his jean pockets to make them stop.

Or at least, to avoid thinking about it. That’s all he can really do with any of this, which isn’t a great solution. Avoid thinking about it, and hope for the best.

Ironic. It’s a terrible coping skill. Not one any good therapist would ever recommend in good faith.

But Cas isn’t a very good therapist, at the end of the day, nor a very good dom. He’s always known he’s no expert, and has just been fumbling his way to the top.

The lurking feeling that he’s a fraud feels more prominent than ever, now, as he takes a deep breath and tries to talk himself out of taking a xanax before nine. His own doctor has told him enough times that he’s too dependent on them, a criticism he’s well aware of. But the pressure on his chest is overwhelming, as well as the nagging doubt in his mind.

“Cas?”

Cas jumps a little, having been lost in his panic. Looking up, he’s surprised to see Dean hovering in the doorway across the room.

“Didn’t I tell you to go back to sleep?”

The words come out harsher than he means them to, and he winces as Dean does. The sub shrinks a little, like he’s been caught doing something wrong.

“I….yeah. But I did, so I thought I could…”

He gestures vaguely at the room around him. Cas interprets this to mean he thought he could get up again, and his eyes flicker over to the digital clock on the stove.

9:34.

Oh.

He’s been staring blankly into space for a lot longer than he thought.

That explains the bedhead.

And the man’s ability to get up off the couch again.

Shaking his head, he waves off Dean’s apologies, again straining to smile in that way that subs like.

“It’s fine, Dean. I’m sorry, I must have lost track of time. If you napped, you listened. Are you feeling any better after your rest?”

As he speaks, he crosses the room again, moving back over to the table and pulling out the displaced chair to make room for the sub. Dean watches this in confusion, looking startled as Cas gestures at him, and then nervous, like the idea of sitting down at a table throws him off.

“Been resting all morning,” he mutters, crossing one arm over his chest to rub his own shoulder. “And all night. Never rested so much in my life.”

He sounds genuine, and hoarse, voice rough with sleep and trauma. How much he’s been through feels put on display in front of Cas, his state of relative safety now feeling all the more fragile against it all.

The pressure on his chest tightens.

“Well, you can never have too much sleep,” he says amicably, in a tone that he hopes doesn’t sound as strained as it feels.

Dean just blinks at him, skittish and wary. How well Cas is keeping his stress under wraps seems to be in doubt.

After a few seconds, though, Dean seems to give into him, mumbling a bewildered, “I guess,” before limping over to where Cas is holding the chair.

“Thought subs were supposed to kneel?” he asks, sounding slightly disappointed.

Cas’s heart aches a little at how painfully sweet Dean is without any awareness at all.

“I’m worried about your leg,” Cas explains to him patiently. “I don’t want you putting your weight on it like that for now. Once you’ve healed, though, you are welcome to kneel for me. In fact, I’d like that very much.”

Probably he should have said that stricter, like it wasn’t an option. But he doesn’t have the heart for the sternness Dean really needs from him. He keeps tripping up, and sliding backwards, and doubting his own instincts. They aren’t really as controlling as his adrenalin fueled aggression had made them seem last night.

In truth, he prefers what had happened between them this morning, where he’d taken Dean apart in his hands like a tangerine. Pushing his subs back to pleasure when they wander away from it, and looking after their desires. He wishes he could indulge like that always, and that no one else ever needed anything more.

But Dean wasn’t built like that. That’s been clear from the start. Last night had just forced Cas to confront it, and grow a fucking pair.

Before Dean gets himself killed trying to obey every impulse he’s ever felt, every stern or disappointed look from random strangers. They’re both going to end up in prison or worse if Cas can’t get the wild sub under control.

“Sit, Dean,” he says, more directly when he sees Dean still hesitating.

Dean ducks his head, but does as he’s told like he’s a wind up toy, programed to do nothing more than what he’s told.

Cas holds back his disappointment.

What an unfair thing to feel. It’s not Dean’s fault he’s this submissive, not Dean’s fault he can’t handle being spoken to like he’s real. The short conversations Cas had latched onto in his loneliness aren’t the sub’s responsibility to continue, no matter how much he’d like the young man to talk like he had before.

A little frustrated with himself, a little frustrated with Dean, Cas purses his lips as he drags the other chair around the side of the table so it’s next to the sub. Dean shrinks when he sits down, like he thinks he’s in trouble, or just doesn’t like being the same height as Cas.

“Everything okay?”

The man repeats himself in a smaller voice than earlier. Like he knows he’s just echoing himself, but doesn’t know what else to do.

He obviously senses that something’s up, that Cas is more stressed than he’s admitting. But he doesn’t know how to push for something he seems to accept he doesn’t have the right to know.

Cas eyes him doubtfully.

“Everything’s fine, Dean.”

His phone buzzes on the table. Then it buzzes again, and again, and again.

There’s a moment of silence where they both stare at the little black rectangle. The heaviness of what Cas isn’t saying weighs in the room.

Dean’s eyes drift over to the phone, and Cas wonders if he’s going to call him on it. Or even try to grab the phone and make a run for it, as he wouldn’t have put past the sub of two days before.

But this Dean seems to have crumbled, finally, under the strain of holding himself up like that for so long. With the same sweet obedience he’d displayed earlier as Cas stroked him to pleasure, he lowers his gaze and bites his lip, letting himself trust.

Cas tries to fight back the feeling that that’s disappointing him, somehow. That Dean is trusting him, rather than demanding to know what’s going on.

“You really should get a case for that,” the boy quips instead of asking. Then he flinches, and backtracks, stammering, “Uh, I mean, if you want.”

Even that little comment seems to be too much for him now, the implicit questioning in it rubbing up against the blind obedience his instincts demand.

That Cas had demanded. To keep them both safe from Dean’s own self-destruction.

God. It had felt good in the moment, but there’s something lost underneath it all. Despite what he tries to tell himself about submission being healthy, nonetheless, at this level, there’s something lost.

Cas grimaces a little, and then tries to hide it, turning away briefly before thinking better of the move. Dean is so sensitive now, he might take even that as rejection. Forcing himself to face the sub, Cas picks up his forgotten mug of coffee, long gone cold.

“You’re right,” he says, “I should get a case.”

Then he takes a long, bitter sip, hiding from the sub for as long as he can.

He wishes he didn’t feel so stressed, and so lonely. It had felt good to see Dean learn to mind him, when he’d been playing with the man’s abused body upstairs.

But that had been before the reality of the situation had sunk in, and the isolation of it. They’re so screwed, and Cas is so screwed, for a patient he barely knows who can now barely even look his way.

It doesn’t feel like a good thing. That Dean has finally given in to such pressure. It feels more like giving up, like something that’s collapsed inwards rather than bent.

That’s not fair, though, not to Dean and not to any sub who lives in such deep submission. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of 24/7 dynamic, if it’s really what the sub wants and needs.

Cas just…didn’t think Dean was like that. He didn’t think he was one of those subs, that needed not to be allowed his own mind. He doesn’t know why he thought that. He saw the medical documents, saw the state the man was in. If anyone needed serious, serious domination, it had always, always been Dean.

Yet something about the man had seen Cas carried away. By his own desires first and foremost, but also by the flashes of what he’d seen underneath.

A young man with a sharp mind and a fierce, brilliant personality. A self-righteous, stubborn, bravehearted survivor with a willpower to match his strength.

Despite the obvious desire to please, Dean had just seemed so alive underneath his illness. It’s hard not to feel like he’s smothered something now that the defiance is gone, no matter how much safer they both are.

Cas puts down his mug. He’s still grimacing. But Dean still has his eyes down anyway, luckily or not.

“Are you hungry?”

It’s rhetorical, really, but Dean doesn’t get that. He freezes like he’s been asked to shoot someone, and then, obviously lying, shakes his head.

“Nah. I don’t cost much to keep.”

Cas doesn’t want to know what that means, so he doesn’t ask. Instead he just gets up again, going to grab a pack of instant oatmeal from the cabinet.

“You need to eat,” he says simply, not leaving any room for argument. Like he should have the first time, instead of asking and letting Dean say no.

That’s not how this is going to work anymore. Not how it ever should have, with someone so fragile. Dean has the highest submission needs of anyone he’s ever met, and it’s on Cas to look after that for him now.

His phone buzzes again on the table. It buzzes again as Cas shuts the cabinet and brings down the box of oats.

“Your phone is going off,” Dean says quietly when the dom doesn’t react to the notifications.

“I know,” Cas replies flatly at the same time as it starts to ring.

Both of them let it, ignoring the incessant chiming that insists like angry banging on the door. Cas resists the urge to ask Dean to check who’s calling, if it’s the cops or Naomi or worst of all his parents who might finally be tracking him down.

“It’s probably just my brother,” he says in forced reassurance. “He likes to spam me sometimes when I don’t pay enough attention to him.”

Lying through his teeth. Gabriel hasn’t spoken to him more than a few times a year since they were kids.

“Oh.”

The ringing stops, but Cas’s hand is still trembling slightly as he rips open the paper package and pours the oats into a bowl. Unable to get a handle on it, he decides to go for the xanax.

It’s after nine at least, now, he thinks halfheartedly, as he dumps water quickly into the bowl and shoves it in the microwave. Punching in 90 seconds, he ignores the sound of it’s humming as he goes for the drawer next to the dishwasher, groping for the medication with the same kind of forced calmness as someone tasked with diffusing a bomb.

He’s freaked out enough at this point that he’s just going to shake out a pill and dry swallow it right at the counter, but stops himself halfway into twisting off the safety cap. Pausing, he looks up at the tiled wall and hesitates, letting the microwave drone over the sound of his brain.

You have an observer.

Can’t forget that for a second now. How he’s ever managed to do this before, Cas has no idea.

Treat a patient in his house, that is. It feels dramatically more difficult now, like it had the first time around with Claire. Of course, he hadn’t felt the way he does for Dean about Claire, yet he feels that same burning sense of responsibility.

He tightens his grip around the pill bottle. Hunching over, he’s careful not to let Dean see what he’s doing as he shakes one out.

Better not do this here, he thinks carefully, as he stands in front of the drawer to shove the bottle back into it. The microwave goes off, beeping with shrill insistence, and Cas gets a hold of himself, breathing in long through his nose.

He hides the pill in his closed hand as he turns around, sending Dean another smile he doesn’t feel. Stepping over to the appliance, he opens the microwave with a pop and pulls the oatmeal out, steaming hot and mostly gray.

“Sorry it’s not anything special,” he says apologetically, meaning it truthfully as he sets the food in front of the sub. “I can cook a little, but I wasn’t expecting guests or anything. I mean. I just mean I haven’t been shopping.”

Wincing at his jumbled words, he pulls away from the bowl like it burned him, expecting Dean to give him one of those sad, rejected looks. But his faux-pas about how unprepared he is to have Dean here seems to go unnoticed, with the sub too enchanted with the lackluster food.

“This isn’t…for me.”

He says it almost like a statement. But it’s too weak to really stand on its own.

Uncomfortable, Cas curls his hand tighter around his pill.

“Of course it’s for you, Dean. Please eat.”

When Dean doesn’t move, Cas corrects himself again.

“Eat, Dean.”

Dean picks up his spoon.

“Thank you,” he mumbles, sounding far too grateful for the tasteless mess for Cas’s comfort, and far too earnest.

But Dean is earnest about most things, Cas has learned, under the snark and the defensiveness. With those things apparently gone, now, Cas doesn’t know why he’s surprised by the way Dean behaves.

He shouldn’t be. He can’t afford to be. God, he can’t afford to be this uncomfortable with Dean’s groveling if he’s going to be keeping the man sane in any way.

He wouldn’t be uncomfortable, if it was anyone else, and a large part of him isn’t.

Sad. Maybe he’s just sad. And he’s calling it discomfort to avoid confronting why he feels so let down.

Letting out a long sigh, he lets himself deflate somewhat as Dean eats in front of him, because the young man doesn’t seem to be paying attention to him in any case.

What am I even doing?

All this acting and lying and performing to convince the sub everything is under control. He doesn’t have to act and lie and perform for Dean. The man will believe anything he says.

Rubbing the back of his neck with the hand not holding the pill, Cas looks up towards the ceiling with something caught in his chest. Unable to unwind it and unable to breathe freely, he steps back so he’s directly behind Dean and pops the pill in his mouth.

It’s thick in his throat as it goes down, and doesn’t start working instantly like he always prays it will. Still, just the act of taking it calms him down slightly, and he unstiffens somewhat as he looks at Dean hunched over his food.

“I, um, I might have to run a quick errand today,” he says carefully after a minute or so has passed. Watching the man’s body closely for his inevitable reaction. He’s not surprised when Dean stiffens, looking afraid.

“Oh.”

That’s all the sub says. No protesting, or asking about what Cas needs to do so urgently. Way too accepting, in a way Cas doesn’t like at all.

He rubs his neck.

“I won’t be gone long. I just need to…”

Figure out what the hell is going on downtown and maybe do some damage control.

“I just need to get some things. Supplies and things, you know.”

Dean obviously isn’t sure he does. He sends a wary look over his shoulder.

“Right,” he says uncertainly. Then he adds, almost impulsive, “Like, whips, and stuff?”

Cringing from his own words.

Cas’s heart clenches, and his anxiety spikes. Feeling Dean’s doubt like a punch to his gut, his own doubt about being able to take care of the man deepens like physical dent as a result.

“No, no!” he reassures the sub quickly, surging forward and around so he’s moved in front of Dean within half a second. Startled, Dean drops his spoon and jerks backwards, scooting the chair backwards like he wants to jump out of it but feels like he’s glued to his seat.

He probably does. Cas had told him to sit, after all. Wincing, Cas resists the urge to release the sub from that order, not wanting a repeat of yesterday, or of having to chase the sub around the house.

“I don’t- Sorry. Sorry. I know you don’t like to hit.” The sub stutters nervously, dropping his eyes as Cas hovers over him. “You’re- leaving, though? You’re mad?”

Obviously, he’s not sure if whatever’s going on is his fault.

Suspecting that it is, though, he flinches, and Cas watches as his hand starts to worry again at the edge of his sweater. Cas remembers, belatedly and painfully, that the initial documents he’d been given had listed effective punishments for Dean, the number one of which was listed as “being ignored.”

Cas drops down to his haunches. Crouching in the space Dean had created when scooting back, he reaches out to take the man’s hand.

“Dean, no,” he promises, voice thick with the urge to be honest. “This has nothing to do with…I’m not mad at you, sweetheart. I just have to take care of some things, I promise that’s all.”

The desire to explain himself is strong enough that he considers it, debating the pros and cons of actually telling Dean there’s some sort of nonsense happening downtown.

But the thought is derailed before it really even gains much traction, when he notices the way Dean is looking at him. Deer in the headlights, tense and pale and almost sick.

“Please get up,” the man mumbles, after a few seconds have passed in silence. It seems to take all his strength to do it, like making a request of Cas is physically painful to do.

Cas takes a moment to comply. Just staring at Dean’s drawn expression as his heart sinks. It’s difficult to realize how easy it is to disturb Dean now, and how easily disturbed he probably always was.

But Cas hadn’t noticed, somehow, because he’d been fooled by Dean’s veneer of strength and defiance. He’s not anything close to what he’d been projecting, though, and it’s time they both accept that. Pursing his lips, Cas swallows back down the idea of explaining what’s going on downtown right now, standing back up before Dean falls apart.

He doesn’t say anything about it, not wanting to rub in how fragile Dean is. But he doesn’t miss the way the sub’s shoulders drop in relief as soon as Cas is off the ground, doesn’t miss the way Dean’s whole body untenses.

He’s made for submission, Cas thinks, and hopes he can handle it, because there’s no one else either of them can turn to anymore for help.

He pulls another chair around and sinks down into it.

“You’re alright, Dean,” Cas says, vapidly soothing. Then, correcting himself, “You’ll be alright.”

Dean just sits back in his seat, looking almost more exhausted by what had just happened than all of last night’s drama. His chest rises and falls visibly, and the idea of sharing any information at all with the sub completely evaporates from Cas’s mind.

The sub rubs his face.

“Sure,” he says unconvincingly.

But he still seems to have the urge for bravado, even if the rest of his act has fallen.

“Sure, I’ll be fine. You go do…whatever it is you need to do. I’m good here. It’s, uh. It’s a real classy joint you got. The ritz.”

He smiles halfheartedly, waving his hand around at their surroundings like that’s supposed to reassure Cas he can be left on his own. It most certainly does not, and Cas narrows his eyes.

“I hope you don’t think you’ll be exploring it,” he says, somewhat critically. “I’m putting you back to bed as soon as you're finished eating. And tying you down, for the record. There will be no more escape attempts while I’m out.”

“‘Course not,” Dean says, in an audibly smaller voice. Embarrassed. But he looks relieved, rather than frightened, and Cas knows he’s doing the right thing by keeping him in the dark.

Letting his heart deflate a bit, Cas sends the young man a tired sort of smile. It’s not as hard to fake as he expects it to, the practiced persona uncomfortable but well worn.

“I won’t be more than half an hour, and I’ll have my phone with me if you need anything.”

“‘Course.”

“It will also send me an alert if you move too far from where I put you, so don’t think you’re unsupervised just because I’m not here.”

Dean’s eyes widen slightly, but Cas doesn’t break eye contact as they look at each other. Knowing he can’t back down, the dom just raises his eyebrows, pointedly nodding at the new collar locked around the sub’s neck.

The man had cried for it yesterday, in relief once it was on him, but he looks startled now to be reminded of it, of its ever present supervision like Big Brother’s eyes. Not entirely comfortable with it, it takes some effort on Cas’s part to act so blase about the fact that he’s fully intending to make use of it’s tracking. But he meant it when he said he’s not going to tolerate any more escape attempts, not with both of their safety on the line.

He watches with mild curiosity as Dean reacts to his reminder, flinching slightly and dropping his eyes like he’s been reprimanded in some way. The shame of it only seems to last a moment, though, before the warmth of safety seems to take the feeling’s place.

That does relax Cas. Watching Dean melt into his control again. Despite the overwhelming responsibility of it, and his own doubt.

It still soothes something primal in him to see how the sub sinks down into his own seat sort of bashfully, his fingers coming up to curl around the collar shyly like it’s an object of confusedly timid pride.

Cas’s lips quirk.

“You can see where I am with this?” the sub asks, mumbled.

“Yes,” Cas confirms. “On an app on my phone.”

“Oh.”

Dean doesn’t seem to know how to react to that, but he doesn’t seem horrified. A little conflicted, he blushes, chewing his lip.

He looks soft, like this, Cas thinks, half-dressed and sleep-disheveled. Swamped in Cas’s pajamas and fidgeting, padded collar locked firm but comfortable around his throat.

“Thought Candid Camera got canceled,” the sub mutters, halfheartedly prodding.

He’s not fooling anyone, though. His shoulders drop in visible relief.

It makes something pinch in Cas’s heart, and winds his certainty up tighter inside him like a twisted rubber band.

“Not here it didn’t,” he says grimly. “I don’t think it will be for a very long time.”

The thought of that is daunting, but firm inside of him, like a pillar. Feeling its pressure where it’s wedged between his ribcage, Cas does his best not to show it as he leans forward and flicks the tiny button on the side of Dean’s collar on.

It blinks to life, the little red flicker on the lock suddenly turning green and holding steady. Unable to see what he’s doing, Dean pulls away from him slightly, looking down in confusion and then submission as Cas’s phone on the table blinks to life.

Face up, they’re both clearly able to see the little icon that appears on top of the other dozen ignored notifications.

Tracking enabled

The minimalist map picture that accompanies it leaves no room for illiteracy to confuse what it means.

“Guess that makes me Jim Carrey,” Dean mutters, staring at it. But again, he doesn’t seem like he’s disturbed.

Just mollified, and embarrassed, and safe.

Sighing, Cas rubs his face.

“Not sure what Jim Carrey has to do with anything, but if that’s what makes sense to you. You can call me Ashton Kutcher for all I care, as long as you know to stay where you’re put.”

The pop culture references feel awkward in his mouth, unnatural and garbled. Not sure how else to speak Dean’s language, though, he throws it out there, before regretting that he’d tried.

Sort of embarrassed by his attempt, Cas grabs his phone quickly, turning the screen off before either he or Dean can catch sight of whatever notifications have been blowing up his phone. It presses the urgency of dealing with whatever’s happening into him, but he can’t figure any of it out here, not with the sub right in front of him and watching his every move.

“We should get you back to bed,” Cas says instead of addressing it. “You must be exhausted.”

“I’m not,” Dean protests, but Cas pays him no mind.

“You’re hurt and you're sick,” he insists. “You need to rest if you’re going to get better.”

And I need to go downtown and deal with the mess we’ve made, which I can’t do until you’re back to bed and asleep.

Shoving his phone in his pocket for the time being, he resigns himself to not looking at it until he’s gotten Dean taken care of and squared away.

“Are you finished eating?”

The sub looks at him like a deer caught in the headlights.

“...Yes?”

Like it’s a question.

Suppressing a sigh, Cas picks up the forgotten bowl of oatmeal and shoves it into the man’s nervously curled-up hands.

“Eat,” Cas commands for the second time. “Until you’re full, unless you really can’t stand it.”

He wouldn’t blame the man for finding the cooling gray mush unappetizing, but Dean doesn’t seem to know what he means.

In the midst of a renaissance of obedience, though, the man doesn’t question it as he bows his head and begins shoveling the oats in his mouth like he’d never been interrupted. Resisting the urge to watch him like a creep, Cas gathers up the rest of the empty dishes and leaves them unwashed in the sink.

He adds Dean’s to the pile once the man is finished, figuring he’ll deal with it later, assuming he returns from his PR trip unscathed. Not willing to think about that yet, he ushers Dean out of his seat and wraps his arm around the man’s back carefully, encouraging the sub to lean his weight on Cas’s torso as they make their way towards and up the stairs.

“I’m fi- Cas, Sir, I can walk by myself.”

The sub sounds halfway between embarrassed and scandalized at how he’s being half-carried around.

Cas doesn’t know why. He’d taken Dean down the stairs the same way, with the sub’s arm slung over his shoulders. The man had been quieter, though, then, more subdued.

He’s regained a bit of his confidence now, a bit of his attitude, which Cas figures he should find reassuring. He’s not sure he knows how, anymore, though, with the evidence of Dean’s overall state weighing heavily on his chest.

Not nearly as heavy as the man’s physical body. Too thin, still, but it hasn’t been much more than a week.

“I’m not letting you injure yourself anymore than you already have,” he says firmly, dismissing the man’s protesting. He’s prepared to manhandle Dean if he has to to keep weight off his injured leg, but the sub doesn’t resist him anymore than a kitten would.

It softens Cas, and he feels less wound up by the time they get upstairs, something warm creeping up on him as he deposits Dean on the bed.

It’s either the submission or the Xanex, he thinks, a little wry, a little truthful. Not sure which influence to give credit to, he stares down at Dean for a few seconds with his anxiety starting to cool.

Dean looks back up at him.

“Ashton Kutcher was Punk’d.”

Blinking, Cas furrows his brows.

“Sorry?” he asks, not following, and Dean flinches.

After a second, though, he repeats himself, looking back up.

“Ashton Kutcher,” he whispers, almost inaudible. “Before, when I said the shit about Candid Camera. You said I could call you Ashton Kutcher. But Ashton Kutcher wasn’t on Candid Camera. He was on Punk’d.”

The sub says this matter of factly, sort of quiet, but endearingly earnest. Cas is struck by how pretty he looks in the muted light of the morning coming in through the drawn curtains, his long eyelashes reflecting low and long with stretched shadows on his cheeks.

His heart softens a bit more. A bit surprised by the comment, and a bit taken with it.

“Silly me,” he says, with less irony than such a statement should really have. “I’m always mixing up my pop culture references.”

“I know,” Dean answers, and then lays back down on the bed.

Obedient to Cas’s implied command, to the vague gesture that the dom had made. Endeared, Cas feels his muscles untense marginally as he watches the young man settle back into the pillows, safe and cared for under his domination at last.

And, at least for now, perhaps not entirely lost to his submission. The comments about Cas’s knowledge of mid-2000s reality TV shows are more daring than Cas had assumed the sub still had the strength for now that he’s given in.

But perhaps Dean’s grit is stronger than Cas had given him credit for, at least in how it translates to his backtalk and strangely opinionated manner of speaking. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that Cas might see his comments as defiance, in any case, and Cas feels comforted at the idea.

“Maybe you can educate me later,” Cas tells him gently, smiling a little. “I’m sure at least one of the thousands of streaming services has invested in mid-2000s reality TV.”

Dean snorts, shifting his weight a little.

“Sure. Whatever you want, man. I mean, Sir.”

Snuggling into the pillows without protesting as Cas briefly brushes some imaginary hair off his face.

The collar around the sub’s neck blinks green. It’s thick and heavy, but Dean doesn’t complain.

He doesn’t even seem to notice it. Cas tells himself that’s a good thing. That he’s better than a kidnapper, and still better than his dad.

His smile turns into a grimace. He pulls away from Dean and shoves his hands into his jean pockets.

“I’ll be back soon, sweetheart. Rest if you can.”

The sub hums noncommittally, but curls into the strewn sheets.

It has to be enough. Cas leaves him with just a quick glance over his shoulder, shutting the bedroom door behind him with a click. After just a moment of hesitation, he locks it from the outside, with a key that had been collecting dust on a nearby shelf.

It’s what he needs, he tells himself, but he can’t deny his confusion, nor the heavy sadness that weighs on him as he leaves the house. There’s anxiety underneath it at the enormity of the burden that’s been handed to him, but at least for the moment, it’s drowned by melancholy and loss.

Chapter Text

Cas pulls up to the Center’s parking lot with anxiety pounding in his head like a hammer, more forceful than Dean’s fists against his chest and more blinding than the way the sun glints off the asphalt. He has to park his car well outside of the white-striped lines of the actual parking spots, because there are so many cars, both civilian and police, crowded around the lot.

News reporters, again. God, always the local fucking news reporters, don’t they have anything better to do? Them, and the cops, and more than half a dozen looky-loos.

The police are milling around pointlessly, looking like they don’t have anything in particular they need to be doing. One of them is talking to Naomi by the entrance, but no one seems very much like they care.

The journalists are packing their things up. Some people seem to be headed back to their cars. Whatever seems to have happened seems to be mostly over, though the small-ish crowd has yet to really disperse.

Cas jumps out of his own vehicle as he vaguely recognizes all this, slamming the door behind him as he goes. His heart rate doesn’t slow down for the lack of urgency he senses, his own worries much more pressing than those of some curious lookers-on.

He makes eye contact, briefly, with Naomi across the wave of cars between them. For a second, he thinks she’s going to point him out, set either the cops or the press on him. But after a moment passes, she doesn’t, and just turns back to her conversation like she hadn’t noticed him at all.

So strange.

Cas scans the crowd. Not sure if he’s looking for Jo, or anything at all.

“Hey, are you the psychiatrist?”

The voice comes out of nowhere, and Cas almost jumps.

Turning slightly to look at the stranger, he blinks, for a few seconds too long.