Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The unwavering, eternal rumble of an ancient car's engine fades into the background of a weary mind, tapering into a comforting hum that buzzes all throughout the weathered, darkened leather interior of an ebony black '67 Chevy Impala. Belligerent 80s rock music stutters through a staticky radio, turned as low as the volume dial will allow as not to interrupt the droning of all-consuming, ever-present road noise. The creaking chassis lurches at random intervals as an unlikely group of four individuals storm across an empty Kansas backroad, miles and miles left on a seemingly never-ending journey across God's big, great, blasphemous country.

Your skull is bobbing against the driver's side backseat window, temple knocking uncomfortably against tinted glass with every jerking movement a flannel-clan Dean Winchester makes at the wheel. Your eyes lazily fall open to watch him, his fingers drumming casually against any surface he can comfortably reach. He's humming. It's off-key and very far from tempo, but a staple of any ride with Dean manning the radio.

You want to wring his neck.

There was no way you could sleep like this, the suspension in this damn car was too low for one to ignore a pebble in the road - much less the barely-paved, glorified desire paths that you were currently speeding down. It seems like you're the only one craving rest here, judging by Sam's consistent, annoying as hell tapping at his phone and Castiel's Castiel...ness. You side eye him the best you can from your awkward position, swallowing a scoff.

What a character, that one!

He's sitting almost completely still across the bench from you, idle hands folded politely in his lap. His eyes are transfixed somewhere out the window, steely irises flashing with the synchronous, blinking red lights from far off fields of wind turbines. They beat together against a pitch, spiraling darkness - an alien skyline that resembles something you could imagine populating the depths of hell.

These three would know. You were still, and hoped to forever be, blissfully unaware of what horrors wait there.

Moving skyscrapers stretch across the horizon on all sides, neat arrays that have Castiel's full, undivided attention. He's a statue, all cramped up behind Sam's seat - pushed back as far as it can go.

You sigh, attempting in vain to prop yourself back up against the window. Scarlet beads stain from behind your eyelids. Frustrated hands slap to wipe across your face, roughly rubbing tired eyes. You huff.

"Can't sleep?" Dean's baritone disrupts the peaceful humming of the car, his eyes flickering to meet yours in the rearview mirror. You expect that shit-eating smirk of his to greet you, always acting as if he knew something the rest of the world didn't. It's not there when you meet his gaze, however, just genuine curiosity and a twinge of concern.

You weren't as used to this lifestyle as they were, the lack of sleep was getting to you.

Dean's got his right hand loosely grasped over the top of the wheel, his left forearm resting on the sill of the door's window. Every few minutes he takes inventory of the vehicle, you've noticed over the passing hours you've spent stuck in this miniscule fucking backseat. A darkened soul periodically glazes worriedly over every occupant, lingering for a few seconds before turning back to the road. You assume he's checking for movement, signs of life. Sam always gets a little more attention. It's... sweet. He plays it off incredibly well each time, acting as if his eyes never left the sprawling asphalt at all. That small habit shows you all you will ever need to know about him, all you knew him to be - always a protector.

An asshole, but a protector.

You hum dismissively, turning your head to avoid muddy green eyes that were currently too soft for your liking.

You know how to fix that!

"You drive like a maniac," You hyperbolize, punctuating your comment with an uncontrollable yawn. Sam chuckles lowly, finally taking a break from staring at his phone to read Dean's reaction. The older Winchester simpers at the casualness of your insult, wryly tonguing his bottom lip as his eyes fall to the driver's side mirror. He shakes his head before returning to digest Sam's response.

A response that, arguably, gets him more riled up than your bite.

Dean's hand shoots off the wheel without warning to land a sucker punch over Sam's shoulder. His little brother recoils at the impact with a high pitched noise of surprise, before gearing up to return the blow. Sam grants you an amused grin as they continue to scuffle recklessly in the front seat. You scoff a laugh at their childishness, lifting your head from the window to properly watch the squabble. The car slowly veers out of its lane and into where oncoming traffic would be, if only there happened to be a single other vehicle around for miles. Dean doesn't seem to notice, more focused on attempting to smack Sam upside the head than anything else.

Tires roar as they cross into the gravel-ridden aggregate of the opposite lane's shoulder.

Castiel's gaze whips up at the swerving, his palm flying to brace over the seat in front of him as the car jerks back and forth over the uneven road. He lurches to lean over the center console, narrowed brows and sardonic grimace in full view. You watch him with an entertained, though tired, smile.

"Dean," Castiel warns, his voice dripping with the same sentiment a father would have when disciplining his child. You chortle loudly at his involvement, pulling your knees up to your chest with a girlish grin wiped across your face.

Oh, you loved it when he did that!

Dean scrambles to begrudgingly pull it together, though he can't resist a few more petty swings in his brother's direction. Sam leans away from him with a laugh, attempting to catch each strike in his palms before Dean ultimately listens to 'Father' and settles. The interior of the car overflows with the sounds of fabric on leather.

"She started it!" He hooks a thumb in your direction, drawing a betrayed gasp from your lips.

"No!" You whine. "I was just pointing out the obvious! This damn car-"

"Heyheyhey! Not the car, sweetheart! Never the car! You're sittin' in my babygirl, here," he cuts you off with vigor, prompting a scoff from Sam. Dean runs his free hand over the dash, casually grinning at your discourse. You roll your eyes and try to return to the drilling sameness of the road, but you can't hide the way your lips twitch in some imitation of a smile. Though, you're too tired to continue to chide him: Your favorite pastime.

Castiel resumes his position with a disapproving stare, gracefully settling back into his seat. Your smile gradually fades as you watch him, critical of his brazen disregard for basic vehicle safety. He never wears a seatbelt. You must've scolded him for it a hundred times: 'What if we get in an accident, Cassie? Cassie, what if we break too hard and you go flying through the window? What are we going to do then, Cassie? Go and find you a new meat-suit?'

He would always respond in a confused sort of reverence:

"I'm an Angel of the Lord, it can't truly hurt me."

You yawn the biggest yawn that has ever yawned, which apparently draws the attention of every soul in the car. Dean glances at you through the rearview, Sam turns his head, Castiel pries his eyes away from the wind turbines. Your brows twitch, puzzled by the attention and feeling vulnerable under the potentially scrutinizing lens of men who were handling the all-nighter far better than you.

You've never known hunters so comfortable sleeping in a car while it was moving. Did their backs not ache? Were their joints not stiff? You weren't sure you could do another nap where your eyes were closed but you weren't actually sleeping - 'Non-Naps,' as you were beginning to call them.

"I've got melatonin in my go-bag?" Sam casually offers, turning over his shoulder to look you in the face. His facade may be bright eyed and bushy tailed, but the bags underneath his eyes betray him - he's just as exhausted as you are, though on an eternal level, you were sure. He could skip a night or two of rest, but his soul ached for it. Does he see it too? When he looks in the mirror? It was hard to miss: a characteristic of a good hunter.

Dean hides it far better.

Hazel-green irises glint red to black, red to black, red to black. You grant Sam a soft smile, opening your mouth to respond before Dean oh-so very politely cuts you off once again.

"You take melatonin? Who the fuck takes melatonin?" he speaks the word like it's the grossest thing he's ever heard, wrinkling his nose and crinkling his brow. Sam sighs, responding in an exasperated tone.

"I'm sorry not all of us can survive on four hours like you do," he prods. "I'd like to sleep longer than six for once in my life-"

"Means you're not working hard enough during the day, Sammy! But really, you take melatonin? You-"

"I work hard enough, Dean. Sometimes at night I just need a little push-"

"Okay, Sam," Dean mocks. "You drink like two beers and then act all tipsy and pass out on the couch-"

"Shut the fuck up, Dean - you ass!" You drone absently, annoyed at the sound of Dean's grating voice. That man sure loved to hear himself talk, but you knew he loved to scuffle just as much as you did. He continues as if you never said anything at all.

"What? Melatonin's for old people and pus-"

"Finish that fucking sentence, I dare you!" You shoot forward to poke at his arm, prompting him to slap your finger away. He puts his free hand up in surrender, the pitch of his voice rising exponentially.

"What? I wasn't going to say anything bad! I-"

"You always say something bad, Dean-" Your voice is raising in pitch too, hand gesturing pointedly at the side of his head as you take up the space of the center console.

"You're distracting the driver, you know that? That's real dangerous, you know," Dean continues, your voices overlapping and far too loud for the close quarters. He loves bickering with you, it must be some strange love language that's gone undocumented. Sam's learned to tune it out, but Castiel...

"Dean," he speaks again, more exasperated than anything else. He rubs over his eyes and lolls his head to the side, completely unamused by your back and forth. You've never known an angel to be so impatient and... unforgiving.

"Cas, really? I-"

"Dean," He insists, firmer. Dean scowls, both hands returning to their proper place over the steering wheel. His jaw clenches. You've never met a man that despises authority as much as this one, but Dean shuts his mouth all the same.

"Fine."

And that ends that conversation.

You settle back into your seat, satisfied with your win - even if it is by proxy.

"Thank you, Sam," You respond posthumously, crossing your arms in front of your chest. "But melatonin makes me nauseous. I'm sure I'll crash from exhaustion soon," You mutter your discontent, finding a place to focus your bleary eyes out the window.

"Can't wait," Dean mumbles cheekily. You don't have the energy to retort, though every fiber of you is fighting back the urge to flick his skull so hard you'd hear the one brain cell in there rattle around like a maraca.

He's safe, for now.

The car falls silent for a long few minutes. You let the open field of wind turbines and tall grass blur into one mass, a muddy mural of bleeding colors. Blinking arrays watch over it all:

Red.

Red.

Red.

The sounds of rustling next to you catches your dazed attention, dragging your gaze away from an apocalyptic horizon. Castiel is shuffling over the bench beside you, awkwardly sliding across leather to occupy the middle seat and close the distance between you both. You eye him curiously, brows knitted together.

You were no stranger to men sidling up next to you like you were a piece of thoughtless meat, slinging arms around your shoulders, leaning to whisper dirty, disgusting things in your ear. Most of the time you were preyed on in grungy dive bars or gross, crowded diners off the interstate. Most of the time the culprits were egotistical men who were far, far too old to be acting like horny teenage creeps: grimy smiles and poorly groomed facial hair. Most of the time they were shortly met with Dean's fist in the parking lot, or your knee to their balls. Most of the time they weren't Castiel in the backseat of a tall, dark torture chamber, staring at you with wide eyes that were almost, just barely too big for his face.

Castiel, who you had an inconveniently apparent soft spot for. Castiel, who had no filter and no detectable sense of embarrassment. Castiel, who you theorized was actively avoiding attempts at improving his people skills in the name of blissful ignorance. Castiel, who would look down at you with such a deep reverence when you called his name that you had stopped meeting his eye. Castiel, for whom you would tend to his vessel's wounds before even your own. Castiel, who anticipated your prayers with such an accuracy that it was beginning to creep you out.

Castiel, who was way, way too close to you right now.

"You good?" You blink owlishly at him, craning your neck so he would remain some semblance of a respectable distance away from your face. He ends his endeavor with the side of his thigh pressed up against your own, finally breaking eye contact in order to situate himself better.

"The window is too hard," he articulates in that gruff voice of his, clicking the middle seat's seatbelt into place before turning back to fully face you. Your expression morphs into something closer to 'impressed confusion,' rather than where it was bordering on 'just a tad creeped out.'

Ah, so he was listening to your safety rants!

"You may sleep on me, if you'd like," he readjusts his coat over his shoulder with a little shimmy - you assume to make it more comfortable for you.

And how could you possibly deny an offer like that?

Acts of service. You had pegged it long ago, back when he was only answering Dean's prayers. Sam was injured, he had healed him at Dean's request and vanished as quickly as he came. You were intrigued by his 'no questions asked' sense of loyalty.

He wasn't properly introduced to you until months later, when he was powerless and you desperately needed healing as well - taken by some freak fever that wouldn't break no matter what you did. Dean asked him to stay at your bedside, make sure you didn't go under while him and Sam were gone on a pertinent, world-saving hunt. For two weeks Castiel remained by your side, helped to nurse you back to health from a sickness that was taking everything from you with gentle, graceless blessings. You'd never seen that much empathy in an angel before, at that point you had only known them to be recklessly violent and hopelessly vengeful. But there this one was, replacing a cool cloth over your forehead every time it warmed with a stoic expression painted across his face, urging you to eat and hydrate, trying with all the limited human knowledge he had to help you get better - all at Dean's request.

This one was different. Very, very different.

"You're sweet, Cassie," You mumble, graciously taking his offer and tentatively leaning to rest your temple over top of his shoulder. He was, in fact, significantly more comfortable than the window, leaving you slowly relaxing into him. His clothes smell overwhelmingly of heavenly essence and ozone when your head naturally falls to press your nose into his coat, something bleachy and fresh - like you're breathing in straight oxygen that's took a tumble in a washing machine. And a dryer. With laundry sheets.

You huff it like a junkie.

Castiel's hands politely fold in his lap, as they were before, when he believes that you've found your place, returning to sit as still as a statue once again. His breathing is measured, you realize, heartbeat too. Must be an angel thing. You can't help but to become transfixed by the synchronicity of it all, echoing through your brain as you try to get some real rest for the first time in days. It works, adding to the white noise of the car. His breathing falters a tad as he inhales to speak.

"You're the only one that refers to me by that name," He notes in a whisper, quiet enough so that only you could hear. You can feel every exhale he produces over your hair, rustling wild strands there. He's closer than you thought, he only ever really invades Dean's personal space like this. The statement hangs stale in the air as you try to find the right words to respond. You have a better view of the horizon through the front windshield at the position. Your gaze wanders:

Red.

Red.

Red.

Castiel has no understanding of intimacy - romantic or platonic. That was painfully clear in the manner in which he would constantly jump over that line of 'too far.' Angels don't have a need for connection in the ways that humans do, there was no substantiated reason for his closeness. Angels don't need to hug, to hold. All they seemed to do was bitch about their daddy issues and slaughter their siblings, as far as you were aware. Though, you had the sneaking suspicion that Castiel enjoyed the proximity to the three of you, the humanity that came with touch.

You doubted angels got any of that up in heaven.

He was always so still when you would tend to his injuries, eyes trained over the places where your fingers would hold to his skin: Brushing over a bruise, stitching together a gash, bandaging a cut. It was like he was transfixed, holding his stare even when you would flicker your focus to make sure he was alright. That one time you fixed up that nasty slash over his temple was a doozy of an endeavor, you're not sure someone's ever made that intense of eye contact with you in your entire life.

"This might sting," You had said, to the effect of null.

"No, it won't," He'd say dejectedly with weary eyes...

Like he wanted to feel the pain.

He never flinched, just stared and put pressure where you told him to put pressure. He always thanked you kindly when you were finished, helped you clean up afterwards. Clean and simple, no dramatics.

You, on the other hand, were a mess when you had to get patched up, a different person. In the field, you were brazen and fearless - the Yin to Sam's calculated and measured Yang. But on the table afterwards...

The idea of a needle having to stitch your wounds back together made your brain short circuit, and you would lose yourself beyond reason. It was never your intention to thrash and jerk away like you did, no matter how intentional it all seemed. God only knows how badly you wished that tears didn't stream down your cheeks, that you could hold back your whimpers and yelps. But you couldn't. It all reminded you of... worse times.

The 'Before Sam, Dean, and Castiel' times. When you were hunting alone, captured by demons, and tortured for information as if you were nothing less than a piece of meat...

Dean had once joked that they really needed to find something stronger to sedate you when you were having 'surgery' and, fuck, if that didn't sound enticing. Whiskey could only do so much to help severe flashbacks and inklings of past traumas.

Maybe morphine would do the trick.

The system consisted of Steady-Hand-Sam trying his best to sew you back together while Castiel did everything in his God-given power to distract you and, in worse cases, hold you down so you would keep still. His senseless apologies still ring through your ears - all breath and low pleading. He had found a less physical way to keep you down this last time:

He had suddenly taken your hand tight in his after a particularly bad bought of uncontrollable spasms, with all the care that he could muster from this world that he was not familiar with. You were expecting myriads of 'I'm sorry' and 'Please, don't cry,' but they never came. Instead, he just kneeled at your side, almost in a position of prayer and... Peace. Warmth, in stormy blue waves. You believed in God, sure, but never once had you been this close and personal with his essence, his-his-

Grace.

It was just a sliver of it, dripping from his palm and into you - not to keep, just to hold.

Your head drooped to the side so fast it felt like you were falling, eyes descending to rest over his ever-so concerned face fixated entirely on you. A state of euphoria beyond all others swept you anew, leaving you reigning Castiel as the new Messiah of pain mitigation. His whispers echoed when he tried to speak to you, always so close and completely unintelligible in your state. You were vaguely aware of how he had begun stroking his fingers up and down your arm, rhythmically squeezing your palm with the other in a manner that you swore was putting you in a trance. Tears stained your cheeks all at once, a collective effervescence of Heaven's best parts rushing through your overstimulated mind, your lacking body.

It was like drugs. Better than drugs. You woke up in such a state of euphoria that Dean could only make fun of you, asking if the "mojo was good shit" because of the way your pupils were blown out and your movements had become lethargic. Castiel beamed up at you, continuing his stroking until your eyes had opened all the way and your pulse had returned to normal. His palm had traveled to where your shoulder had been ripped open, decimated, by the rage of another cocksucking demon, now patched up the best it was going to get.

You had lost a lot of blood, judging by how white Sam's face had gotten whilst he initially carried you to the crusty armchair in the corner of the old motel room you were staying in. There was a point where you weren't sure you were going to make it, but you're sure Castiel knew. He always knew.

"You're stronger than you think you are," he had told you, staring into your soul with stormy blue eyes that could heal all. You nearly died when he reached out to brush your hair away from your eyes - just about the most intimate thing you had ever seen him do besides accidently invading Dean's personal space at every second of every day.

He had kept a hand to you for the rest of the night to stave off the pain, staying by your bedside until you fell asleep and then some.

You chuckle, smiling into his coat as you provide closure to his comment.

"S'cause I like ya," You match his volume, tilting to catch his eye. His mouth twitches into a humble, almost dutiful closed-mouth smile, gazing down on you from the corner of his eye. You hum, readjusting to rest more comfortably over him. The muscle in your neck and shoulder twinges uncomfortably in the process, leftovers from your old injury combining with new ones. You wince.

Castiel, of course, notices. He doesn't bring any attention to the fact that he notices, but you are sure that he does.

All-knowing angel bullshit...

This last hunt had involved a fist around your throat and the slamming of your body against the wall with said fist around your throat. Then another wall. And another. And the floor as well. There had to be bruising, you were sure, but it hadn't had enough time to develop over your skin yet. You were so looking forward to waking up tomorrow morning and using the last of your good concealer to cover it up so you wouldn't be asked strange questions in the gas station about why you were hitching around the country with three men twice your size: 'Are you safe? Blink twice if these boys are keeping you.'

The muscle behind your throat, however, that pain was developing and developing quickly. You guessed you weren't as good at hiding it as you thought you were.

Castiel hesitantly lifts his hand from where it rests stiffly on his lap and maneuvers it to touch at the back of your neck, a movement just large enough to force you to leave the warmth of his shoulder. You look up at him whilst pitching forwards to accommodate, confused as he settles his arm between your back and the squeaking leather of the seat before urging you to lean on him again.

"Cassie?" You breathe with an edge of irritation to your tone, though follow his lead. God, your body really was aching without all of that adrenaline keeping you going...

"Yes?" He responds with those big blue eyes, oblivious as always. You don't have the option to be upset with his shuffling when you feel his fingers tenderly brush the hair off of the back of your neck and situate it to sit on your far shoulder. A shudder runs through you, anticipating his next move:

Warmth, bliss, euphoria in the smallest of doses. You're numb with it, intoxicated by the power pulsating through you.

"Oh..." You melt into Castiel, fingers finding the edge of his coat as he sucks the ache away with small stroking motions over the nape of your neck. The sigh that passes through your lips is involuntary, as is the turning of your nose to press into his collar. Tension leaves you in waves, and you can finally relax for the first time in days. Castiel lets it pulse through you for what seems like hours, though the logical side of your brain knows it was something closer to seconds. You weren't strong enough to have that much of heaven's unimaginable glory going through you for that long, you'd probably go brain dead with it.

You grasp his coat more firmly to keep from completely slumping over, your cheeks flushing at this intoxicating, buzzing glimpse of his power. He lets you grab him almost graciously, head turned just enough so that you can still feel his breath over your hairline. Goosebumps prick your arms, all the way up to your shoulders as he exhales. His stroking leisurely slows alongside his miniscule onslaught, leaving you dazed and giggling into the collar of his coat like you're high out of your fucking mind because you are high out of your fucking mind.

And, just like that, your pain is gone and you are actively teetering off the diving board, ready to fall head-first into that sweet, sweet sleep you were craving.

"Cassie," You whine drunkenly, tightening your grip over him and hiding your nose in the residual scent of heaven, ozone, and atmosphere. You recognize this feeling he's pushing through you intimately. "You're healing me?"

He's not supposed to be performing miracles like this, especially not insignificant ones that do nothing for the advancement of, well, anybody's wishes but your own. His battery is low, he shouldn't be fulfilling frivolous, unimportant shows of power like this.

But you're too out of your mind to truly give a damn. You're just happy to be pain-free for a moment, to have someone like Castiel care enough to do something so thoroughly stupid.

"Well, you did most of the work. I just took away the pain," He explains like it's the simplest thing on Earth, his fingers ceasing their movements in favor of tentatively stroking across your shoulder and down your arm in a manner that has full body shivers screaming over your skin. It's a comfort thing as much as it is a preventative measure to keep you from sagging over, judging by the pressure and attentiveness of his movement. You hum drowsily, eyelids heavy as you feel his journey end with his arm slewn ever-so cautiously around your shoulder.

Like you were going to run away.

"S'Funny, Cassie," You mumble, though you can feel yourself falling faster than you ever have in your life. Nothing makes sense anymore, you're just coasting on grace and the feel of a divine warmth at your side. Something is pulling you, guiding you with a touch that is so gentle and pure, so trustworthy and seraphic that you're drowning in it. "You're f-funny."

Castiel is silent above you, though you can feel his Neptune-blue eyes trained over the little of your face that he can properly see. He watches you for a long moment, listening to your labored breathing, feeling the weight of your head over his chest, your fingers continuing to grip the weathered tan fabric of an old coat he had amassed long ago from some poor, poor soul. You are still restless even like this, fighting the call of darkness as if doing so would keep it at bay when it one day would inevitably return to reap you for your eternity.

He dislikes watching you struggle.

A solemn hand, made in the likeness of a Father that once foresaw this very moment and all events that led up to it, reaches to caress the wrinkle in your brow.

"Sleep."

You're out like a light.

Chapter Text

It's late into the morning when you wake up to the distinctive, far off sounds of a busy highway and the Impala jostling to an aggressive stop. All passengers lurch forwardS, your eyes flying open as you jerk to steady yourself and remain in the strange, twisted position you were in before.

"Easy on the brakes, Sammy," Dean drowsily chastises from the passenger seat, roughly wiping his hand across his face to rid it from the remnants of his incredibly apparent exhaustion. Your eyes are just barely open, brain not quite catching up with your situation as you blearily take in the sight of some dirt cheap motel through dust-ridden windows - equipped with 'Color TV' and 'Air Conditioning,' as foretold by the chipped, brightly colored neon sign Sam had parked under.

Home for the next few days, you presumed.

"Shut up," Sam mumbles under his breath in return, clearly just as dead as the rest of you. He abruptly throws the car into park in a definitive jerking movement and begins to gather his things to exit with a hefty sigh. You groan as he opens the door, hiding from the onslaught of sunlight that streams in by turning your cheek into Castiel's -

Oh.

Oh, fuck!

You have somehow found yourself hugging Castiel's arm to your chest with both of your own, the rest of you shoved as closely to his side as you can get. Hm, no wonder you were so warm...

You lift your head from its home over his shoulder, knocking astray a jacket that had mysteriously found itself slewn over your lap. You free one of your arms in order to catch it before it falls, finally recognizing it in your haze as Sam's Carhart when you pull it up to sit on the seat beside you in a lethargic movement. When did that get there? What time is it? What state is this?

A shuffling in the adjacent seat sounds like its a million miles away, somewhere dull and fuzzy. "How do you feel?" Castiel asks you with all the sincerity in the world, his voice cutting through the buzzing white noise coating your stumbling brain and making you jump. You unfurl your other arm from around him to rub the smoke out of your eyes, attempting to free yourself from a cruel captor: Delirium. You are far from successful.

"Like I've been hit by a sledgehammer," You snark, referring to the disillusionment you were experiencing, the lethargy infecting your aching limbs. You stop pressing at your eyes when stars start to join thick streaks of painted darkness behind your lids, something that marks the beginning of a throbbing headache at your temples. "How long was I out?"

"Five hours," You startle at Dean's opening of your door, confused to how you missed his exiting of the vehicle, the bull in a china shop he is. He nods at you as he leans over the cab, a duffel already thrown over his shoulder. He looks like he's biting back a laugh, that bastard.

"Fuck you," You gripe, whining when he claps a hand over your back with far too much force. (It's on purpose, you were sure. He does this when you're hungover too, just to watch you scowl.)

"Ah, you love me!" He tuts through his teeth, a sly grin spreading across his lips as he tosses his head in Castiel's direction. "Now quit canoodling with 'Clarence' over here, we've got a job to prep for," he reaches behind your head to grab the go-bag sitting there, before turning to join Sam's rummaging through the trunk. The straps of the bag collide with the back of your head when he yanks at it, a move that you fully believe to be 100% intentional. You whip around to yell at him with a groan.

"'It's a Wonderful Life?' Really?"

His grin morphs into a childish smile of which you can only see a part of with your obscured view. You have half the mind to clamber out of this car and smack it off of him, but Castiel lays his hand over your arm so kindly that you think your body must reset. He always did have that quality about him, it freaked you out sometimes. You offer him a remedial smile, scooping up his fingers where they burn your skin and squeezing them tightly.

"I'm fine, Cassie. Thank you," You placate in regards to his previous question, not missing the scrutinizing gaze he always seemed to press upon you. His brows narrow, head cocking to the side to evaluate the validity of your statement. You have to fight the urge to roll your eyes: Bleeding heart Castiel, he's never satisfied until he's sure there's not a whiff of conflict in the air.

And maybe you're delirious, maybe you're just the right amount of dazed, or maybe he's pulling at just the right heartstring, but you find yourself breaking just a small piece of yourself off for him and laying it as his feet.

You abandon his hand in favor of taking his cheek in your palm, responding with a sincerity that you reserved for a very few lot of people. "I'm great," He stills entirely the millisecond you make contact with the warmth of his skin, blinking rapidly at the touch. Stormy blue eyes that carry millennia of stories, libraries of heartache and war and suffering, fluster and widen as you cautiously thumb over the apex of his cheekbone. "Thank you, really."

You can't help but flickering between those eyes for a moment, before removing your attentions.

You pick up Sam's jacket and your discarded bag resting at your feet, before climbing out of the car and awkwardly attempting to stretch your sore limbs in a pale imitation of a normal walking movement.

"Here."

A handful of cargo - in this case a lumpy duffel bag which was definitely, totally not filled with various, poorly concealed firearms - is thrust into your arms by an exhausted, impatient Sam the moment you round the back of the car. It serves to wake you up a small bit, opening your eyes to the fact that you were supposed to work a job tonight: A job that required focus, agility, and a sharp eye.

Fuck.

You prayed the vending machines here had Red Bull.

When Dean closes the trunk, you are granted the sight of a distinctly Castiel-less backseat through the back window. The side door is also still wide open, as you had left it, failed to be shut by Castiel's assumed exiting. Dean notices and reaches to shut it for you. You shrug your shoulders at him with your limited range of mobility, jerking your chin at the cab.

"Where did he go?" You ask, incredulous. Dean doesn't grant you even a simple glance. He just walks past you and towards the check-in lobby, his bottom lip pouted out absentmindedly as he mimics your shrug. His eyes are tired, gait slowed and heavy when he steps. You could see his plans for the day formulating in his head: Two generous pours of whiskey and a nice, long nap.

"Not sure," he admits as you turn to follow him. "Probably Heaven. Hopefully a liquor store."

The quip sounds like a joke, but it falls flat coming out of his mouth.

A liquor store? Since when does such holiness indulge in the liquid form of human sin?

"Angels drink?" You choke in a high tone, causing Dean to chuckle. He turns his head to look at you, a half-grin infecting his face even in his fatigue. He speaks out of the corner of his mouth, green eyes playfully catching yours just as he holds the door to the motel check-in office open for you.

"This one does."

---

"Bobby, have I ever told you that I love you?" You jest to the man through a cracked car window, though you're so serious it might as well be the most honest admission you've made in years. You are just about jumping up and down, buzzing with excitement as Bobby parks the single greatest gift to vehicular society, and perhaps man itself, at the curb of some crusty motel off the interstate that you were burdened to call home. He is shaking his head in disbelief as he throws the perfect specimen of an automobile into park and hops out, though the exasperated, coy simper wiped across his lips is not lost upon you.

"Probably," he sighs affectionately, tossing his arms around you in one of those big bear hugs you missed so much. The flannel he's wearing reeks of engine oil, gasoline, and whiskey where it presses against your nose - like nothing had changed at all since the last time you saw him so many months ago. You can't hide the smile on your face if you tried. "Here ya go, darlin'."

Bobby skims his calloused palm over your forearm, grasping your hand in order to place a set of keys absolutely riddled with keychains into your grip. They clank loudly against each other as you bring them to your chest, eyes flickering up to watch his head bob in amused disbelief.

"I can't believe you have this hunk 'a junk still running," he drawls teasingly, running the tips of his fingers over the dusty hood of your car. He draws a smiley face in it with his pointer finger while he talks, quickly erasing it before bringing focus back to you. "You know your gas mileage is shit, right? Drove 50 miles and she's almost empty!"

You gasp in feign offense, dramatically clutching your pearls at his insulting.

"This is my child, Bobby. How could you say something like that?" You inspect the tread of your tires, which you had freshly replaced right before you had dropped the beauty off for an indefinite work trip with your boys. Around eight months had treated it fine, thanks to Bobby's willingness to stow it in the garage with his collection of other vintage cars - rent free, of course.

He didn't have the heart to charge you for something like that.

You were aching for the break that would come after this next hunt, when you could hit the road in your own driver's seat and get out of the office for a little while - You could only handle so much of Dean's driving. Being out on jobs like this all the time was also beginning to take a toll on your body, you weren't used to activity this strenuous. Your version of hunting was never usually this hands-on, those Winchester boys were something else. You needed a reliable sleep schedule, some food that didn't come out of a gas station, and some sun on your skin for once.

"Woah, who's beater is this?" Dean saunters up beside Bobby, one hand in his jacket pocket and the other grasping the strap of the very apparent bag of weapons slewn over his shoulder. Bobby slaps the back of his hand over Dean's bicep in warning of his words.

"Watch out, boy, that's her 'child,'" he mocks sarcastically, before crossing his arms across his chest and returning those blue eyes back to you. Bobby put on a good front, with that hardened brow and country hick getup, but his eyes gave him away. Something changes in them when he looks at you, at Dean, at Sam. He softens. Walls come down, leniency wins. He talked big talk, but his actions always said something else entirely. You could see through those blue eyes, maybe that's why you got along so well. Sam and Dean would never notice a thing like that.

Dean makes a little noise of recognition as his gaze rakes across your car, absently nodding his head. You tsk loudly at his lack of enthusiasm.

"This masterpiece of European technology just happens to be the one and only 1985 Range Rover Classic, restored to its original Land Rover Russet Brown paintjob WITH..." You open the driver's door with a flourish, showing off the worn upholstery. Keychains clack with each movement. "Black and khaki interior. Not to mention the fully refurbished V8 engine, brand new Weber Carburetor, and..." You swing around to knock your knuckles against the side of the car, right next to an existing dent you couldn't seem to buff out no matter what you did. "New tires."

You are met with a moment of unamused silence.

Fucking posers.

Dean rocks to his toes, shoulders pulling up awkwardly.

"O...kay," he vocalizes, clearly not sharing your enthusiasm in the reuniting of you and your beloved car. Mischief flashes in his eyes, a wry grin wiping across his lips. "I could still hear it coming from a mile away."

You relent, focus distracted by the reminiscing of your journey with this car at your side. Your fingers play with the peeling steering wheel cover, baked from the sun, the hole sliced into the seat from where you were almost stabbed during a hunt, the broken speedometer that always displayed that you were going a little too fast. You were fully aware of how your car almost seemed to be begging for reprieve after what was normally a standard drive for your current occupation. Something under the hood groans, even though it had been minutes since Bobby had turned off the car. You wince, putting your hands on your hips and grimacing.

"Yeah, she's not in her prime," You reach out to stroke the door, silently looking back at all the washes of evidence of your adventures. Dead man's blood stains the mats on the passenger side from where you had spilt a vial, all of your road trip stickers collected from gift shops across the country all lined up over the back bumper, that musty 'old car' smell permeates the interior.

You loved it.

"But she's mine. Thanks for bringing her for me, Bobby."

"At least someone's thanking me for something around here," Bobby complains, throwing a pointed look in an oblivious Dean's direction. He gestures to the bag over Dean's shoulder, head nodding in acknowledgement as he slurs a query. "You boys working a case?"

"Sure are, why? You want in?" Dean teases, sauntering over to where the Impala is parked nearby and tossing his duffel into the trunk. The unmistakable noise of metal hitting metal gives away exactly what is in the bag. Bobby barks a laugh, fixing his trucker hat to sit right over his head before brushing his palm against his beard.

"Why you askin'? You need assistance?" He prods right back with that smug grin that you had been missing as of recent. You missed having him around, missed running jobs with the closest thing to a father figure you've ever had. That was actually how this all started, the whole 'Sam and Dean' thing.

You were just a damsel then, saved from a demon's torture chamber by another hunter and taken to Bobby's for aid. He had taken you in, brought you back to health with the only tools he knew how to use: whiskey straight from the bottle and a whole lot of rest. He was sweet to you, and yeah, maybe coddled you a little bit, but who were you to complain? One day turned into a week, a week turned into a month, and you had found yourself helping Bobby with smaller cases - just ones within the state at first. You had a good amount of experience, saw things in cases that others didn't immediately see. He liked that about you, it made you a good partner. As time went on, sticking around just seemed like the right thing to do. Bobby was getting more calls, you had nothing better to do, it was a perfect partnership.

When Sam and Dean came swinging by, needing an extra set of hands, you went with. They hated it, of course, those independent, lone rangers. But you had knowledge and skills.

A whole lot of skills.

So you kept up, took the odd job with them when Bobby wasn't available. One cross-country trip turned into another, then another, then another. The adrenaline rush of it all was addicting, that need for maroon tinged revenge dripping down over the flesh of the less-than-human. Your lack of guilt, of remorse for all that was dark in this world fueled you. You were a spitfire: reckless, brutal, sloppy. Sam had lectured you endlessly. Your kills were most often successful, yes, but also bloody and inefficient. 'One-track mind,' he called it.

A homing missel.

A haphazard, heedless, impulsive homing missel.

"We think it's Djinns. Should be a simple stab and go," You finally leave the caressing of your car to join the conversation, turning to help Dean where he begins to attempt to organize the absolute mess that is the Impala's trunk. Bobby meanders over for a gander, jutting his chin out at the hefty arsenal in front of him. You can feel the silent judgement radiating off of him, see the thought process going on behind his eyes.

"You've got the right knives? Lamb's blood?" he queries in a tone verging on a parent asking their child if they reapplied sunscreen at the beach. You can't help but mess with him.

"Yes, Mom. We've got antidote too, in case you were wondering if we had a side of 'death wish' with our main entree of 'unimaginable suffering,'" You groan sarcastically, smirking over your shoulder at him. If either of the boys had said something like that, he would have popped them upside the head. Not you, though. Not Bobby's soft spot, not the closest thing to a little girl he'd ever had.

Instead, he slips his palm over your shoulder and squeezes just a little tighter than necessary.

Engine oil, gasoline, whiskey.

"You ever shut up?" he bites with a sigh. You scoff, rolling your eyes and shaking his hand off of you.

"Quit nagging, you two," Sam squeezes in beside you, startling you as he slings his day bag into the slim open space in the trunk - beside the equalizers, demon blades, salt rifles, and holy water. "You coming, Bobby?" he asks without looking up.

"Yeah, need a ride somewhere?" You add, turning your head to watch Bobby's gaze lower and his hands find their way to his pockets. He shakes his head, pressing his lips together.

"Another hunter needs me up North, gonna find a ride up there in case they need my expertise."

You sneer at the word, earning the well-deserved smack to your shoulder. He points an incredibly stern finger in your face, giving you a good ol' Appalachian stare down.

"You call me if you get into trouble, alright?" He says, as if the three of you already didn't do that in the face of any minor inconvenience. You take his wrist, directing his point somewhere else than your nose.

"Of course, Mother," The chuckle that leaves your lips is nothing but loving as you hear the click of his boots retreating on asphalt, off to find a worthy car to hotwire.

These hunters really know how to ruin an innocent person's day, but with all the world-saving they do...

Maybe they deserve it. You know Bobby does more than most others.

"Bobby!" You call, turning on a pin to regard the back of his head with a grin. He must be waiting for you to toss another snarky comment in his direction, as he refuses to stop his march. But you know he hears you. "There's a Firebird parked in the back lot."

He stops in his tracks, and you can almost feel in the air how his mood immediately shifts. His shoulders sit straight, his spine lengthens.

"'82?" You watch as his head tilts diminutively in your direction, that trucker's hat pointed at the ground over his right boot. You can't help but laugh.

"Nope. '69," Your grin morphs into an ear-to-ear smile as you watch him bust ass to get to the classic before it's owner does.

Yes, well deserved.

Dean barking your name from an open window bursts your bubble, leaving you hustling to the Impala's embrace. It's already running when you reach the door, spewing exhaust in your face as you round the chassis. You can't help but to risk a glance in the direction of your one true love, just sitting there unprotected in the front of that crusty motel parking lot, as you open the door to Dean's one true love.

Your Range Rover is bound to the curb for now, until you return for that much needed break that had been promised to you many months ago: Take out the Djinn invasion, then we can have a little time off. You desperately needed some me-time away from these men and their tail-chasing, terrible jokes, and rampant alcoholism. Maybe you'd take your baby to a nice beach, or perhaps a national park? You weren't sure how much you cared, just somewhere pretty, somewhere warm.

Anywhere that wouldn't freeze that damn engine.

"How many doses do you have?" Sam asks with furrowed brows as he flips through the pages of some old journal in the passenger seat. He's turned towards the center console, hovering while he waits for Dean to decipher the miles of map in his lap. You slam the door behind you, shuffling to sit within peeping distance of Sam's research. He tilts it towards you for better viewing, letting you grab the half of the notebook closest to you.

"Just one," The pages crinkle and crunch where you run your fingers along them, following the terrible, indecipherable handwriting of some hunter that came long before. Sam reaches into his pocket and slips an additional syringe of thick, ocean blue, almost iridescent antidote into the webbing of your hand where it's grasping his journal. You raise your brows at him, though he doesn't break concentration for a moment. "Another?"

"Just in case, hate to see you poisoned," he offers you a half-shrug and a glance, though you notice him almost staring through the pages instead of at once he returns his focus. "Your neck looks better."

You unconsciously bring a hand to stroke at what should be a terrible bruise over your throat from your last job, flashing an awkward grin in his direction. There should be a dark mark there that would get worse with time, adorned with a tweak in your spine and an aching back, but nothing ever surfaced. You had even checked that morning, sitting on the bathroom counter in order to pick at what should have been purpling skin in the mirror: Not even a tinge.

"Yeah, I think - uhm... I think Castiel healed me last night." This is embarrassing to talk about. It feels strangely intimate, like you're sharing too much. The Winchesters barely talked about Castiel when he wasn't around, as if even invoking his name would cause him to appear. Dean would pray when they were in trouble, sure, but those instances were few and far between nowadays. When they did call for him, however, his stays were beginning to be a lot longer than what any of you were used to.

Hovering.

Castiel liked to hover.

He liked to hover around you.

Sam snickers, turning up the edge of his journal in order to lean towards you. Mischief dances in his eyes - a rare sight: "'Cassie,' you mean?"

Your nose wrinkles, lips pursing as you fight the blush that was beginning to settle over your cheeks.

Fucking bastards! Both of them!

"Fuck you," You bite, though all your conviction is lost with how flustered you become. You didn't realize he'd heard over the roar of the car, that was something of a secret pet name up until that point. Better Sam than Dean, you supposed. Dean would tear you apart with that sort of information.

Humiliation forces you to lean back, to disappear into the darkness of the back seat. The second syringe clicks against the first when you drop in into your pocket. It brings you back to focus.

You had to stay calm on this job. No more impulsivity, no more recklessness. You had thrown yourself into the deep end that last time, there would be no more of that. You were no junior hunter, and that meant no more homing missels. You were to remain calm, keep your head on straight, make good decisions like the good little hunter you know lived inside you. No more disappointment in Sam's eyes or angry lectures from Dean, you were all a team now. Had to work with these sons of bitches, the times of the lone wolf were over for all three of you.

The low rumble of the car's engine soothes your nerves and quiets your internal monologue, sending you into some strange fugue state where you are allowed to forget your pain, your struggle, if only for a moment. Action plans play out in your mind, perfect pictures of a person you were desperate to be: Stealthy, calculated, all-in.

A flawless doppelganger runs through every possible scenario in your mind, leaving no room for mistakes. You will prevail, you will succeed. There is no other option.

Chapter Text

This house is quite a bit less delipidated than what you're used to seeing in Djinn hideouts. Normally they enjoyed the rotted, caving-in ruins left by humanity, places with an abundance of areas to hide, to stalk, to drag victims to and slowly torture and drain. This mini-mansion was a far cry from the level of decay you were accustomed to, leaving the boys and you confused as to the reason this upper-class neighborhood had been targeted over all others. Was there intent? Or was it just opportunity? Empty house, no security, far away neighbors...

There had been a resurgence recently, Djinns that had been leaving the comfort of dirt, mold, and chaos and coming into the light. The three of you couldn't figure out why, and neither could the trail of white-eyed, decaying hunters with fear-stricken expressions rigor mortised into their faces. This was the sixth case in two months that the three of you had come across - practically a routine clean up at this point. This was supposedly the last lead, the last of the nest that had surfaced, as far as you were aware.

You'd never been more ecstatic for the chance at a massacre, especially when the end of it would be punctuated with a nice, long vacation.

Your eyes skim over a sprawling white picket fence, scalloped roofing, a two car garage - all the fittings of an affluent family's home now subjected to witness the slow, torturous draining of lives by Satan's favorite little monsters. The lights were on inside, only on the second floor, emanating a soft, warm glow behind the diffusion of expensive creme curtains. Every ten minutes or so, a figure's shadow darts across the window with inhuman speed - almost too fast to notice if you weren't actively watching.

Two syringes of antidote, a handgun, and a silver knife slathered in lamb's blood burns a hole in your pocket.

"Ready?" You ask the towering form of one Sam Winchester when he steps in line with you outside of the Impala, adjusting your gun where it sits heavy in your waistband. It would be borderline useless in this fight, but, as Dean had once said 'it never hurts.' Sam grins down at you, shaking his head at your eagerness in a manner that is so genuine, so warm, so him.

"Don't get comfortable, now," he chastises, the hand not tucked into his jacket pocket fiddling with a matching silver knife streaked with crimson as if it was the most normal thing in the world. You playfully shoulder check him, clicking your tongue at his words.

"Don't get protective, now," You quip with a matching smile, before taking off towards the side entrance of the house without the safety of your bodyguards to guide you. Sam knows better than to call out, to try and stop you from continuing onwards. Your stubborn nature wouldn't allow it.

You were faster than Sam and Dean, more agile. Being smaller than them had it's perks. You could easily hide, wriggle your way out of grasps, knock offenders off their feet just by going low. Underestimation was a strong tool for somebody like you, people tended to loosen their grip when someone of your build was in their sights. It wouldn't be a hunt without you running in first, the scout of the group. The boys hated it, but they couldn't deny how helpful it was to have someone inside to size up targets.

As long as you could keep it together once it came to the next step.

The rooms to the West of the house had their lights off, you gathered quickly whilst wading through thigh high bushes and egregious Grecian lawn ornaments. These sprawling living spaces were free from these particular monsters, though you didn't need to go peeping through windows to know that. The curtains were open and you could see right into modern, minimalist living rooms lacking substantiative furniture - nowhere for a Djinn to hide. They must have sequestered themselves to the upstairs bedrooms, where there were couches and beds and dressers to crouch behind.

And an attic to keep people captive in.

You turn over your shoulder at the shimmer of rustling leaves on the fence line. Dean stands there, crouched over, with his knife in his hand, unaware of the noise he's making. He sneaks as if he believes he's silent, looking to you for a go-ahead. You roll your eyes, though point at the far window, the one with zooming silhouettes and a soft glow. He nods once, motioning to his not-so-little brother to follow.

Sam makes eye contact with you and motions for you to go ahead, making a circular motion with his hand that you assumed meant he would meet you from the other side. You acknowledge him quickly before continuing to attempt to scout the inside of the house. Trailing around to the back porch, you find more darkened rooms and empty living spaces when you poke your head over immaculate windowsills full of bright flowers.

These Djinns haven't been here long, judging by how orderly everything seemed. There was a chance that the civilians were still alive up where they were creeping on the second floor, no doubt being tormented by either the most perfect fantasy of their already pretty perfect lives, or by their worst nightmares made reality. They were both torture, judging by Dean's heated recallings. But it didn't matter, when Djinns were low on prey they would draw out their victim's draining.

There could be survivors tonight.

The back door is quickly located amidst a field of flowing fountains, granite stepping stones, and Aphrodite statuettes, and subsequently picked open. Your knife is fished out of your pocket, and you are suddenly thrusting yourself into the throws of a danger that had stopped scaring you a long, long time ago.

A dangerous thing, that. A lack of self preservation had gotten you into trouble more times than you'd like to admit. You couldn't continue to save lives if you kept throwing yourself in front of others like some human shield, you knew that, but it didn't matter. It was no wonder you were so prone to injury, you'd rather kill yourself than for another to lose their life:

"That was stupid!" Dean had chastised you after one of your first real jobs with them, whilst screaming down the highway to reprieve. You were bleeding from the neck, a dirtied rag pressed into a nasty cut that had sliced through layers of skin there. His focus had erratically flickered from you to the road, his jerking of the wheel making you lightheaded in conjunction with the minor blood loss you were experiencing.

"Dean, I-"

"No! I don't want to hear it! We had a plan, you can't run in like that just because you see an opening. You're going to get yourself killed," he had spoke your name with such malice, it was as if you had scorned his entire family and then sucker punched him across the face. Dean tended to speed when he was angry, still does. It puts everybody on edge. You had gripped the edges of the passenger seat so tightly you remembered being surprised that you weren't pulling up chunks of leather and foam.

He would kill you if you threw up in his car, so you tried to deflect as a distraction.

"I got them, Dean, isn't that what matters? I cut the heads off or whatever, isn't that what we were supposed to do?"

You were yelling. He was yelling. Sam would be too if he weren't following some other half of the case across town.

You had been admittedly more reckless than usual during that time, running head first into a vampire den after Dean had specifically told you to wait had been the straw that broke the camel's back. The worst part? You didn't have an excuse. You came, you saw, you ran around with guns blazing until you got cornered and, thankfully, saved by one red-faced Dean Winchester.

"Not all of them! You could have been ripped apart! Turned! Then where would we be? A hunter down!"

"I can handle myself," Your voice was not nearly as convicting as you needed it to be. Dean had slammed his palms into the wheel so aggressively you thought he might break it in half, causing you to jump in your seat and regard his wild eyes with a pure shock that had struck you down to your spine.

You had seen Dean angry, but never like that.

"No, you fucking can't!" he had roughly wiped over his face with his palm, refusing to look you in the eyes for the rest of the journey back to whatever backwoods, molding motel you were staying at. A long trail of silence followed, one where he continually failed to find the right words and you couldn't focus on anything else besides keeping down your lunch. Dean ran one backroad red light, then a second before finally mustering up the gall to say what you probably both were thinking in a dejected, soft voice:

"You have a death wish, sweetheart, and there's nothing that can fix that kind of crazy."

A death wish.

The rest of the ride back to the motel and the ensuing night consisted of complete and utter silence from the both of you, even when Sam had returned to the room. You had nothing to say to that, he had nothing to add on. Because Dean was right, you did have a death wish. It was disguised by thinly veiled altruism and a thirst for revenge, but it was still there, sitting heavy right where your sternum should be. Sam had patched you up with gauze and alcohol wipes while you bit back your anger at Dean, at the world. Your fury just happened to materialize in dampness around your eyes and flushing cheeks, which made you even more enraged.

Tears made you weak. They made you vulnerable. That part of yourself must be neutralized, nobody needs to be privy to that sort of hurting. The only pain that's acceptable is of the physical kind, not whatever stupid shit you've got going on in your head.

After Sam had finished, he had taken your shoulder and offered you this lopsided, piteous smile with the intention of being reassuring. You had looked up at him with heavy eyes, gnawing at the inside of your cheek at the prospect of another lecture from the other Winchester brother. Thankfully, he had just crouched down before you, wiped the single tear that had traveled down your jaw away, and left you with a simple message:

"We fall, we learn, and we keep going - Okay, kid?"

You hated when he called you that.

The next morning, you remember getting the feeling that Dean had begun to feel remorseful at the tail end of it all, hence the uncharacteristic embrace he granted you when the three of you parted back at Bobby's bunker. You were still so mad, so disappointed in yourself for not correctly finishing the job, but you knew he was right. Dean was just in his reaction, you could see that now.

He knew what it felt like to have nothing left, for the fighting to be the only thing left guiding you. You shouldn't have let that listlessness be your beacon, your safety. You were smarter than that, better than that.

'Don't do it again' were the words he left you with, before your partnership took a long, well-needed hiatus. That must have been years ago when that all happened, you were still getting used to working in a team, to having people to fall back on. You were better the second time, and the third, and all others that came after that. Your improvement, your fire, was the reason they kept you around, acknowledged you as a friend more than a coworker. You sympathized with their pain, their loss, and them with your own. It was a great partnership, a useful team to be a part of.

You should probably wait for said team to catch up to you.

The living room to the house was even emptier when you were actually stepping through it, especially when slinking alone, but your 'one-track mind' was veering to more important matters.

The poor souls that owned this borderline villa before these creatures took over must have been some type of rich, judging by the expensive vases, the pristine white couch, the Persian rug. There was no clutter, nowhere to duck behind, nowhere to crouch and watch intruders like yourself slink through the house. You hated decor like this. Where was the heart? The flare? It's all so boring, so cookie cutter. Bleh!

Your eyes had luckily adjusted quickly to the darkness, allowing you to just make out the shapes of doorways and stretching halls among expensive, minimalist black and white paintings mounted on the walls. A staircase to the second floor catches your eye from within the blank nothingness, alongside the dim light bleeding from underneath a door at the far end of the ensuing hallway. Stretching shadows follow you as you move, caressing every strand of hair, every cut of your clothing, every weapon bulging from your pockets. You keep a tight grip on the hilt of your knife, taking small steps into the impeding grand foyer as not to impede your ability to hear the far off creaking from the floor above you.

You cautiously turn to check on the closest Winchester brother, Dean, who had barely passed the second window to the house. The distinctive silhouette of Sam's gigantic fisherman's jacket catches your eye from the window closest to the front door, located across the house - not even close to being inside yet.

God, these guys were slow.

Your gaze wanders back up to the very top of the staircase, your heart pounding as a rush of impulsiveness infects your brain. You were never good at resisting its draw.

You could just wait up there, at the top of the stairs. You could watch the door from there, make sure they don't have any plans to escape. Sam and Dean weren't as quiet as you. There was less of a chance they would make it up without the Djinn noticing. You can do it. You've got a blade. If anything happens, you can just-

A whooshing noise emanating from behind, like wind running through fingers, startles you beyond reason. You whip to meet the sound with your knife raised, expecting to see some ghoul waiting to slaughter you where you stand, but nothing manifests. Dilated pupils scorch what little of the foyer they can make out, relieved to find not a thing out of place, not a spec of dust on the move. Something tall casts a shadow across one of the paintings in the living room, making your heart beat even faster than before. You whip to identify its maker, only to find...

Dean.

It's just Dean.

He's passing the third window. He must have hit a branch or something, it must've scraped against the glass. Yeah, that's it! Just a branch. Or the door! You left the door ajar for him, you fucking idiot!

You let out a silent sigh, willing your breathing to return to normal, your heart rate to settle.

Damn your nerves. Why were you acting like this? This is not nearly your first rodeo, how is the wind streaming in from the door you left open causing your heart to beat this wildly? Your mouth is dry, breaths coming in short pants as you force yourself to calm down.

Fucking stop it! You're a hunter, for Christ's sake! Get a grip! Man up! You are made for murder, now fucking follow through.

Yes, follow through.

Always follow through.

You bound up the staircase, knife in hand, leaving whatever rationale besides that pertaining to cold blooded murder behind. You used to do much larger jobs alone, this was nothing! A little breaking and entering, a little slicing and dicing, easy!

The creme carpet runner covers the sound of your steps, allowing you to keep the element of surprise as you approach the only room in the whole house with a light on. You have to bite your lip to keep from chuckling to yourself. These fuckers didn't even know you were in the house yet, how exhilarating! Your heart is pumping a mile a minute when you catch sight of the moving shadows from underneath the door of the master bedroom: One pair of feet, followed by another.

They were in there, pacing in circles, judging by them tempo of their steps.

Two of them at least, you could hear the separation.

Okay, what was your plan? Just open the door and start slicing? That really didn't sound half bad. A couple shots from your gun would slow them down enough for you to off them both, but... If something went wrong nobody would have your back before it was too late. A Djinn's poison is fast acting in its effects, you could go under with something as simple as a touch. It's almost an infection of sorts, one that messes with the mind, leaves your body feverish and useless. Once exposed, victims are tortured from the inside out, until they're either drained entirely or their insides begin to melt from the heat. There was no way of telling if these particular Djinn's enjoyed the bitter taste of fear in their meat or not, that fact unnerved you.

Your worst fears brought to life and used to make you - what? Taste better?

God, shut up! You're procrastinating!

A few more shuffling steps to the door feel like miles. Your non dominant hand is trembling when you finally, after stretching minutes of hesitation, warily reach for the door knob, knife poised for destruction in the other. The lamb's blood slathered upon the outside is drying, but it will work just the same. One stab, that's all it takes. Two Djinns. Yes, you could do that.

Insert knife, extract knife, then insert again. Easy! You could be quick, especially if you could catch them off guard. And you had succeeded in that! You were in the house, in front of the room, with the Djinns none the wiser!

The sound of a door closing somewhere in the house causes you to freeze, almost biting through your lip in anticipation. It wasn't close enough to be the back door, it must be - Goddamit Sam! Entering through the kitchen door, really?! In what world is that useful?!

Moments pass, you're not sure how long you've been standing there with your hand on the door, itching to burst in. The movement inside of the room doesn't seem to change at the intrusion, they're still pacing as they were before.

They didn't hear it.

Thank God.

You huff a celebratory sigh of relief, readying yourself once again to enter the room. Sam would find you soon enough if something went wrong - if something went wrong - but you were fully confident that you could handle two Djinns by yourself. You've handled worse and survived, what was this little offshoot?

Your nerves are settled by the time you find the confidence to jerkily turn the knob and -

A sharp pain suddenly rips over your scalp before you have the door open any more than a crack, an indescribably strong force yanking you to the floor by your hair alone. You land heavily on your tailbone, your skull slamming into the expensive hard wood with a defined crack as you are taken completely off guard. There is no time to process, no time to scream for a Winchester-shaped savior to take this disorienting, thundering pain away from you. There's just the sound of blood rushing to your ears, and your arms flailing and failing to land a strike on an attacker you haven't quite identified yet. The trauma to your head blurs the world around you, fuzzing up your mind and stealing your strength.

Dean was right, you did have a death wish. You couldn't have waited one fucking second for -

Weight slams into your diaphragm, depriving you of both breath and thought as your wrists are pinned down harshly to the floor next to your head. Nails bite into your skin, branding you forever as the victim you always knew yourself to be. Your knife is wrenched away from you, the outline of a dark figure tossing it over its shoulder and right down the adjacent stairwell. The weapon's clattering against pristine, white tile flooring echoes through the foyer and permeates over the walls of the rest of the house. You're gasping, thrashing at the weight of what feels like somebody's knees harshly pressing into the joints where your shoulders meet.

Oh, fuck, this one's going to hurt. Please be a fantasy Djinn, please God be a fantasy Djinn.

You can barely push a whisper of a cry for help out of your collapsing lungs before a hand is clapped over your throat and a scorching fire of sensation stemming from that contact begins to fry the nerves centered there. Eyes bulge out of your head at the sight of a face contaminated with dark, swirling tattoos that seem to spread more with your staring, and a pulsating ocean mist that lights the darkness surrounding you. An alkaline taste floods your mouth when you begin to scream, staring into the eyes of a glowing, blue something.

You're overpowered. There's nothing grasp on to. It's hopeless, it's hopeless.

Darkness clouds your vision all too quickly, stars staining the closing ring of visibility that is clamoring, begging with all it has for amnesty. A fresh poison holding a pain that you had not yet experienced in your long life of suffering slowly, achingly paralyzes your body, one limb at a time, until just the blinking of your eyes remain. They water uncontrollably, tears running down your cheeks, not from the fear or the pain, but from the sensation of failure. From rage, all directed entirely at yourself.

This is what you would always be: A reckless nobody, someone who consistently falls short and disappoints and fucks it all up. Sam or Dean would shortly come bounding up those steps with an antidote, ready to save the day, but it didn't matter. You had already lost. You would never improve, never be anything more than you already were:

A lost cause.

A burden.

A fucking damsel.

Nobody worth saving even from the claws of demons, much less a low tier threat such as these fucking Djinns.

Your last sight before consciousness is ripped away from you is a malicious, toothy grin popping out from inky nothingness - a tall, dark, muscular monster with tendrils of markings licking at every open inch of skin and an ominous blue glow.

Three Djinns.

There were three Djinns.

---

"You know I can't understand you when you cry like that, love."

Tears.

Sweat.

Blood.

Fire, all-consuming and merciless, rips through your abdomen, scorching a line from your hip to the very beginnings of your ribcage.

You sob.

Thrash.

Scream.

But it's not enough to stop the prodding of instruments into the laceration at your side, poking around for that sweet spot that would make you beg for mercy. It's inside you. There's no nerve endings on your insides, though you didn't really need them when the pressure was so excruciating. You go faint with it.

You would rather die a million gruesome deaths than experience one more measly second of-of this.

It was what flashed through your mind every time you closed your eyes, the thing that robbed you of the idea of ever living a normal life again, the experience that broke you forever.

A five inch long, silver blade, etched with symbols from a language you would never understand, cuts you open as if you were nothing more than a fish on a slab. Watching yourself being torn open, then mended together with rusting needles over and over again, it ruined you. It was ruining you. People shouldn't ever see the color of their insides, the pulsing of their own muscle while it sits in another's palm.

Once was more than enough.

Once was more than enough!

You can't do this again.

You'll die if you have to do this again.

You won't be the same. It took so long to get even somewhat over it, you can't do it again. You can't. You can't. You can't! You can't.

The way you are recklessly throwing your body weight around, squirming away from any singular touch to your skin, causes the chair you're bound to to rock and slide against deteriorating concrete flooring. The handler of your anguishes pauses his ministrations for a short second, whipping to grip the hair at the nape of your neck. He yanks the sweat and oil slicked follicles there so hard that you hear the joints pop, the base of your skull slamming into the backrest of the seat. The expression granted to you by black eyes is one of mild annoyance, nowhere near the appropriate response for the carnage decaying in that little wooden chair in a little hidden warehouse somewhere in the great state of South Dakota.

He speaks in an exasperated tone, something entirely too mundane for what you were currently being put through.

"Give it a rest, will you?"

You'll never forget his face, not for as long as you live. It'll be burned into your retinas until the end of time - that self-satisfied, curling grin, the acute lack of emotion in the mask of his cheeks when he peers down at you. It will haunt you forever. It'll make you flinch at tall, dark haired strangers in the grocery store, make you lose your breath at even the loosest of doppelgangers.

A whimper falls freely from your lips, any dignity you had left long gone by that point. You're pleading for your life with your eyes, attempting with any strength you had left to convince him that you were telling the truth.

"I-I don't know what you're talking about, please -" Your breath is punched out of your lungs by another turning of the mystery instrument shoved into your gaping wound. Any words morphed into blood-curling screams that would go on to haunt you for the rest of your life.

For every case.

Every hunt.

Every off-kilter obituary in every newspaper in every trashy diner off the side of the highway.

How could it not?

You hear yourself in every single victim, in their cries, in their begging.

In their screams.

Every life lost because of you being late was a part of that girl, strapped to a chair, dying. And if you let enough of them go, if you failed to save enough of them, that girl loses a little more of her soul, her will.

If you lose enough of them, then that demon wins.

The pain felt so real here, as if somebody was actually clawing at your insides, ripping stinging openings into any square inch of skin that wasn't already marred. Your cheek was swollen with the remnants of some blunt force trauma that you couldn't clearly recall, your right eye unable to open correctly with the pressure. Breathing is nearly impossible with the free fluid building up in your lungs, the eight inch gash in your side doing nothing in your venture to not suffocate.

It's too much to be just a dream. The restraints on your wrists are tangible, matching the lengths of rope at your ankles - cutting off any feeling to your feet. This disgusting warehouse, overwhelmed with the scent of blood, bile, and your own body odor, it was too real. Every detail of this repressed memory played out to perfection right in front of your eyes. Your clothes were torn in the same places, your body broken with the same methods.

You had severely underestimated the power of these Djinns.

"This isn't real, you aren't -" Another blow over your bruised temple rids you of any coherent thought, and you swear that you can literally feel your brain moving in ways it definitely should not be moving against the inside of your skull.

"Oh, darling, we've been through this."

He shoves his hand into the gaping wound in your side with a grunt.

You black out.

For an indeterminate amount of time.

It could have been hours, days, seconds.

You really weren't sure.

When your head inevitably falls forward without anything to keep it up, mouthfuls of metallic, syrupy liquid drips down from your parted lips. It surges through your nose like a faucet, depriving you of breath. You could drown on it if you weren't careful. There's too much of it, all pooled on the concrete below. Never, not once during all your years of hunting, had you ever seen that much blood come out of a person. That was supposed to stay inside, not staining the threads of your jeans and coating what was left of your shoes.

There shouldn't be enough of it to make splashing noises when you readjust your feet.

When it starts to run down your throat, you cough openly into the room until you can hardly breathe, saved only by a fist in your hair yanking your head upright.

You gasp for air, your breaths wet and sticky.

Shit-eating grin. Nothing in the eyes.

"Morning sunshine, you ready to tell me what I want to hear?"

Your heart stutters into panic mode so abruptly that bile begins to burn in your sinuses.

His devious, conceited, terrible voice.

The way his hands scraped across your skin.

His lust for suffering.

His... power.

Day in.

Day out.

For months.

You don't know how you survived it, what kept you going. You should have died there, slumped over in that chair whilst getting tortured for information you didn't have by one of Crowley's errand boys.

But your stubborn nature wouldn't let you.

"I-I dunno," You had lost the ability for intelligent conversation, cowering anytime he even lifted his hand to push back his hair. And he loved it. Oh, you know he did. It got him off when you bled, and it was even better when you begged. You still remembered the way that light infected his eyes for the first time the day you gave up, attempting to drown yourself in your own blood.

It never worked.

He always saved you, just to repeat the process over, and over, and over again.

"You... You're n-n-n-not real," Your tongue is too swollen to annunciate, lip too busted to even keep the string of reddened drool from spilling over your chin.

This poison had you pegged. Your worst nightmare, in every grimy, bruised, debilitating detail. You understood why people were dying from this, especially the fucked up few hunters that you had recently found. Another hunter's worst nightmare was nothing that you ever wanted to see, not if your own looked as rancid as this - some appalling snuff film of your own life playing out right in front of you.

Why couldn't you have gotten a normal Djinn? Why this bastard offshoot instead?

Another gash is sliced into your cheek, a fast and haphazard strike before your throat is seized by stained hands. He had touched his forehead to your own, guiding you by the neck like some ragdoll.

"You wish I wasn't real, baby."

Your eyes go cross from trying to keep eye contact, your mouth gaping as you struggle to down anything more than small gulps of air. You would pass out again soon, if not from the blood loss then from lack of oxygen. The whites of your eyes reveal themselves far too easily, your jaw going slack. Darkness was your only savior, sleep the only time you could escape the hell you were living. You craved it, tried to induce it at all costs.

Death was too merciful, a wish you would never be granted.

You can hear your heartbeat in your ears, slow and irregular. It drowns out any cruel remark he has to impress upon you. A sharp slap across your new cut brings you back, out from the charity that was the throes of sleep. Your eyes roll to focus from their place in the back of your head, struggling to zero in on those inky, oil-slicked irises that you had come to know so well.

"There you are."

That same whooshing noise, now far closer than before, invades the very edges of your psyche - like wind running through fingers. He doesn't seem to notice, licking his lips at the sight before him. But you do. You hear it, loud and clear.

Hmm.

You must have left the door open.

Don't worry, Dean will close it.

Bobby likes a breeze through the house, you could keep it open if you wanted to.

You liked a breeze too, liked having the windows down in your Rover.

That sounds peaceful...

An empty highway.

Your favorite songs playing.

Wind in your hair.

Your eyes fall closed, even with the sharp bite of a silver knife pressing against your chin. The palm at your throat has suddenly disappeared, the pressure from its wake causing you to forget to breathe. You were so used to that basic function being at the will of another, it was easy to overlook. Your head falls forwards without the support.

Blood washes your teeth, coats your tongue, creeps up your sinuses and out your nose.

The knife goes away too.

And you retreat somewhere far inside yourself. To dissociate. To escape. To stay alive.

You're at Bobby's house, out front working on your Rover. It's fall. The leaves have turned. The phone rings from inside. You go to answer it. It's Sam. He greets you like a friend. You advise him on his hunt and chit chat until he has to leave. You're fulfilled. Content.

Another slicing noise echoes across the warehouse, though you feel no pain. Then, gurgling, like somebody choking on their breath. And finally, something akin to a lightbulb short-circuiting.

A large mass falls heavily to the concrete. Then...

Your name.

It's spoken so delicately it might as well have been a hallucination. It's far away and staticky, like an in-between radio station in Dean's car. He liked to crank the volume on those stations, annoy Sam with the sound. You'll never hear that again.

You're going to die, right here, in a little wooden chair in a little hidden warehouse somewhere in the great state of South Dakota.

You have nothing left.

You can't lift your head.

You can't open your eyes.

You can't breathe.

You're going to suffocate.

And it's all your fault.

You are faintly aware of a sharp pinch in your arm. It is child's play in comparison to what was currently coursing through every cell in your body. You jerk and whine anyways.

Another needle? You didn't like needles. Needles meant pain. Needles meant another incision.

"Look at me," The words are not a command, they're a desperate request made by a gruff voice that sounded ever-so familiar. The radio station is clearer now, just a little bit of fuzz right over the top. You want to listen to it, but it's hard to get past all the other noise buzzing with it.

A hand comes to rest across your cheek, the most perfect personification of God's gentleness concentrated into one singular ministration.

That's no demon.

Demons aren't capable of being considerate.

Another drapes across the back of your head, feather-light touches as heavenly fingers begin to tenderly brush the hair off the back of your neck and situate it to sit on your far shoulder. A shiver is forced through you. Your name is whispered again in a voiceless beckoning, then -

"Please."

You know this touch.

You know this voice.

The light is right in front of you, but your hands are still tied.

You don't know how to escape.

"Let go of your fear," Your chin is tilted upwards, allowing you gasps of sweet, sweet oxygen. Blood, syrupy and thick, drips down your cheeks, out from your mouth, over your lips, your neck. It irritates previously dried scabs.

You don't know how.

You need help, it's the only way you'll survive.

"You're not alone anymore," Any evidence of suffering, of gore, is reverently wiped from your skin as best one can without the proper tools. The bruise over your eye aches and throbs with every movement, though you can't help but to lean in anyways.

This is your only chance. You're lost without this.

His fingers hook underneath your jaw to keep you from suffocating, a free hand skimming across your shoulder before venturing down to tug at the restraints around your wrists.

Please.

Oh, please!

"Someone will always be there to save you," They come undone easily, like it was nothing but string holding you there all along. It didn't matter anyways, you don't have any control over your arms. They fall limply to your lap. "I'll be there."

He catches you by your shoulder, helping you to properly lean back into the chair. There's desperation in every eternally intentional touch, a sentiment not matching what you deserve.

"That demon is dead." The static has fizzled out. You can hear him clearly, a live feed from his lips directly to your lonely ears. His resolute firmness vibrates through your skull, makes the hair at the back of your neck stand up.

Somehow, with your cloudiness slowly but surely dissipating, you manage to find the strength to open your eyes - Well, the one eye that wasn't swollen shut. The world is fuzzy and out of focus around you, red tinged and spinning like a kaleidoscope when you try to meet the husky, croaking voice of your savior.

"He's dead."

Your savior sounds shaken, unnerved, judging by the emphatic speaking and the throaty crackling. Palms skim to touch your face, a pair of thumbs relentlessly caressing the very tops of your cheekbones until you're sure they've left permanent marks. You paw at the attached wrists, holding them to you with every ounce of strength you have left.

This is it. This is your salvation, holding your face in its hands like you were something to be admired, something to be saved. This is deliverance, breaking your chains and walking you through ash and flame like Virgil did for Dante - to light.

There's breath fanning across your face, heated and far too close. Blood transfers so easily to virgin skin, especially when there was so much to give. It stains, making perfect circles in dark denim and rough smudges over the cuffs of unsullied, immaculately white sleeves. Your eyes struggle to make out the figure hunched over before you in the pool of your own letting: Dark hair, Neptune-blue eyes. You're still so bleary, so weak and faint, your mind refuses to catch up.

Maybe you'll just revel in this confusion for a little while longer, now that you're safe in the intoxicating refuge of your liberator's arms. The scent of ozone, of what you would imagine the very top of the earth's atmosphere might smell like, invades your senses.

Your name is punched from of a raw, hoarse voice for the final time.

Confusion fades, alongside scorching pain and dull throbbing.

He's hurting.

"Wake up."

Chapter Text

You are gasping for reprieve as you jerk forwards, wild eyes and burning lungs driving your sudden awakening.

You have to get out.

Escape!

Run.

You had gotten so used to not having any feeling in your hands, you almost smack yourself in the face while venturing to claw at the blood that was most definitely coating your skin and impeding your eyesight.

You can't see, how are you supposed to escape if you can't see?

It's on you, you have to get it off!

Get it off!

Somebody else's palms are in the way, desperately holding you steady against a wall now burning with residuals from your increased body temperature. You push at the stranger with urgency, cowering away whilst trying to get yourself into a position to where you would have enough control over your mind and body to flee. They refuse to leave you, now venturing down to press your shoulders flat against your perceived cage with a swift fwoomp.

No!

"Let. Me. Go!" You scream out loud, attempting to fight at the unwanted touch by recklessly swinging your fists and kicking your legs. You're too out of it to come up with a plan, to execute one singular movement that would go so far as to even mildly inconvenience your attacker. The only thing you succeed in doing is slamming the back of your head into the wall behind you, and knock your knees into somebody's unwavering chest.

"Heyheyheyhey!" A soberingly sincere voice tuts from somewhere above you, breaking you from your stupor. You're panting, shoulders flexing with every labored breath as the outline of Sam standing in the archway of the upstairs hallway finally comes into focus. He's holding an empty syringe in his hand, visible from where he's raising his palms to heed you. Your expression pinches in bewilderment, dilated irises flickering to read the bare concern etched across his achingly familiar face.

Sam - he's come to save you, just as you said. He's doused you with antidote, no doubt. Maybe that's why your arm is aching at its bend. It's all useless anyways, you had the wrong type of Djinn! Still, you want to reach for him, but he's so far away. Why is he so far away? And if he's over there, then...

Who's touching you?

You're startled by the migration of the connection over your shoulders, now ghosting over where the Djinn had branded you in what feels like a lifetime before. Recognition flushes through your positively buzzing body all at once when your hungry eyes flitter over the figure keeping you captive: A hardened brow, slightly downturned lips, and all-seeing, all-knowing muddy blue eyes that were just slightly, at a microscopic degree, too fucking big for his face. Your heart begins to pound, to stutter in place as your sensitive palms drag over sturdy cloth and grounding warmth.

Oh, God is real.

God is real and merciful and kneeling right before you.

"Cassie," His name is barely a whisper in between shrieking gasps of breath. Your arms are trembling when you go to throw them around him, bringing an uncharacteristically concerned Castiel into as tight of an embrace that you could manage. He reeks of atmosphere where you press your face into the collar of his coat - the only thing working to reel you in from completely jumping off the diving board of hysteria. You selfishly pull him with you in your journey to bring your back to rest once again over the hallway's wall, all gasps and wide eyes whilst he wholly complies to your demands. It only goes so far as to quell the wakes of fear, the aftershocks of your nightmare continuing to haunt, torment, and defile your mind.

"C-Cassie?" You still can't breathe, can't get rid of this ringing in your ears no matter how hard you hold him. You're nauseous with it, dizzy and shaking as you clamor to bring your friend impossibly closer.

He's going to take it away.

He can save you.

Handfuls of his coat are caught between your white-knuckles, your mouth pressed harshly into the curve of his neck. You're sitting awkwardly on your knees, practically in his lap, pressing as closely as you physically can. With the way you're hyperventilating, you're lucky you don't asphyxiate where you kneel.

All this panic, this rush of anxiety, of danger, of fear, he can take it away.

You're not sure your mind agrees with this rationale, but with the way you are clinging to him, your body certainly does. Though your heart won't stop racing, every muscle won't stop spasming with tremors, and you're so hot you might be sweating through your shirt.

Yeah, maybe your body's not the one to listen to right now.

Castiel's deep sigh breaks your concentration for a moment, the heavy burden of dread finally given permission to lift from his shoulders as you quake in his arms. You've never known him to be a hugger, never known him to have all this tension laced into the muscles of his back either, but the manner in which he reciprocates makes you reevaluate your judgements:

In a motion that feels far too close to a worship you are unworthy of, your angel carves his fingers across your jaw and through the mussed tresses of your hair in order to hold you in a manner you've never been held before. His hands, lonely and unused to sensation, clutch at the shiver-inducing stretch of skin right at the nape of your neck. They bring you in with a gentleness that is only known to those who have lived a lifetime of abstention, of holding back. He firmly presses you to his chest, his other palm venturing to rest over the back of your shirt - where the ridges of your spine are visible. Fingers, featherlight and hesitant, run over the outline. Your panic attack quells a peg.

Still, Castiel doesn't say a word.

You're not sure if he can't find the right words, or he just doesn't have anything to say. You have to fill the gap, you can't live in this silence anymore with Sam awkwardly watching over the two of you and Dean - Where the fuck is Dean? You don't - You can't -

"I'm sorry," You whine into Castiel's collar with a voice that's barely there, and that's where the dam breaks. Tears brim and fall over your cheeks with little effort. You sniffle, releasing your grip on his coat for a short moment to wipe them away. A part of you is surprised at the lack of blood on your hands when you scramble to bring them back to their resting place, like he was going to up and leave the second you let go. His grip in your hair tightens minutely. The palm at your spine flattens and falls to firmly lay at the small of your back. You can't stop your lips from forming words, nor can you keep the threat of a sob from spilling past your barricades. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry-"

"I didn't know."

It's the first thing he's said to you while not in Djinn dream-land.

Something awful wrenches into your stomach, churning all the guilt, anger, and self-loathing that lives there.

Castiel was never meant to know. None of them were ever meant to know! What you went through, in all its degrading, humiliating horror, was meant for you, Bobby, and God alone - the only beings that wouldn't look down on you in pity. That part of yourself was to be be locked away and hidden deep within, an anecdote that you would take to the grave and through to whatever hellish afterlife that was left for you at the end of this all. You didn't need Castiel's sympathy, you didn't need his help, you-

"Sam!" Dean's voice cuts through like a bell, centered somewhere close to the bottom of the stairwell. You don't know for sure, can't will yourself to move and confirm no matter what you do. The sharp sound of a blade being unsheathed, alongside incessant shuffling, breaks through your impending downfall and provides some much needed distraction. "Come give me a hand, I caught it!"

And suddenly, it's as if you've pressed pause on the world. Your symptoms, though still wracking and gutting, fade into some background version of yourself existing in the same body, but positioned far, far away. Your head lifts off of Castiel's shoulder, lethargic fingers releasing their death-grip on his coat to allow your blood to rush somewhere significantly more... helpful. He retreats the smallest bit, and you can feel the touch at the back of your head migrate to hold the junction where your jaw meets your neck. This causes your blood to rush somewhere significantly less helpful.

You don't want to meet his eyes.

You can't, in fact:

You're concentrating.

Sam pads off to join his brother downstairs without a second thought, though you are stricken still by his verbiage.

'It?'

What does he mean ' caught It?'

'It' as in singular?

'It' as in one?

The events that occur in the following thirty or so seconds conduct themselves in a manner that is almost dreamlike, magical, where everything else fades away - pain, fear, any thought based in emotion - and all that's left is a hunter's trigger-happy instinct. Time slows almost to a complete halt, and you're moving so fast you think your mind might be playing tricks on you.

Your gun is in your hand before your mind can produce the command that tells your body to move, every synapse in your brain firing at lightspeed at the sound of another pair of footsteps coming from the darkened upstairs hallway. Your knees draw up, and you're suddenly standing tall with your dominant arm extended, finger on the trigger- a movie running with a couple of the in-between frames missing. Castiel pitches forwards without your weight, catching himself with a hand to the wall.

You don't even spare him a glance.

One shot.

Two shot.

Three.

Two Djinns come scuttling out of the shadows and into the lowlight, ready to pounce. One's younger, a little brunette girl with big brown eyes and a wicked grin. The other's quite a bit older, well over six foot and wearing a matching, ravenous smirk. Three bullet holes mar the shirt over his chest, but there's no blood, no injury at all. He scents the air casually, shoulders squared and surprisingly calm as he continues to approach. It all clicks very quickly.

He doesn't think you're a threat.

He can smell your fear.

Your trembling returns.

Four shot.

Five.

Your heightened nerves make you flinch with each shot.

You know, behind this overtaking wave of intuition and impulse, that a gun will do nothing to a Djinn. They're too fast, too strong, and painfully agile - as you've recently experienced first-hand. The need to survive trumps that logic: Your knife is downstairs, cast aside by the first Djinn. That's not going to help you. Sam and Dean are bounding up the stairs, but they'll be no match for the Djinn's fast acting poison if one managed to touch you. You'd be dead before they even made it to the first landing. What else do you have?

Castiel finally makes it to his feet, narrowly avoiding the trajectory of your prior shot. He ducks as it leaves the barrel.

You have an angel.

Everything whirls back to speed.

"Your sword!" You exclaim, holstering your gun in your non-dominant hand in favor of grasping at Castiel's right sleeve. He regards you with raised brows and parted lips, his eyes shining with uncertainty. You're not even sure he's fully processed what you've said before he's summoning the razor sharp, triple edged dagger and letting you rip it from his palm.

He trusts you too much.

The big one goes down first, taking a moment to gape in surprise when you chuck the blade through the air and into his chest from a good few feet away, before disintegrating into a pile of ash in a flash of bluish-white energy. The little one is taken off guard by the swiftness of the attack, gawking at her dusted companion in shock for just a moment too long. The last of your clip keeps her back long enough for you to pick up the blade once again, approach, and whip it across her neck.

She screams like a human would, throaty and terrified, before any evidence of her existence dissolves into cinders. Your chest seizes, both Castiel's blade and your gun biting marks into your palms.

You can't move.

She sounds like you. She sounds like you!

The symptoms of your panic attack contaminate your psyche in a manner that is a million times worse than before, with a vengeance that threatens to make your heart to stop.

You're not breathing, and you know you're not breathing because your lungs are kind of trapped in this eternally expanded position - too full to let anything else in and refusing to collapse. Something of a squeaking gasp slips through your lips, mouth agape and failing to force a remedy. Tears rush to your eyes, and they're brimming before you have the chance to fight them off.

If you thought you were trembling before, then you aren't sure you ever knew what trembling was. It's in your sternum, emanating from the very top of your spine and dispersing down to infect the rest of your body. Your legs go weak with it, knees buckling, and all at once the floor seems a lot closer. Somebody catches you by your arms before you hit it too hard, guiding you to the hardwood with a much too rough touch.

"Breathe, sweetheart."

It's Dean, still panting with his sprint from the first floor. He's helping to lower you to your knees, forcing an intense eye contact that you fucking hated was coming from him. He's supposed to be making fun of you, teasing and squabbling with you as if you've known each other your entire lives. He shouldn't have the capacity to look so... concerned.

Once safety sitting, Dean assists in prying both the gun and the blade from your limp hands, one at a time, and letting them clatter to the floor behind him. You flinch with each hit, immediately overstimulated by the noise, overstimulated by his hands, overstimulated with every fucking scrape of fabric against your skin.

Dean's had this happen before, he told you about it once a long, long time ago whilst you were accompanying him on a supply run. He told you about his mother, the fantasy dream life that was shown to him by the mystical power of a Djinn. It was heartbreaking, spoken all too casually between rather aggressive bites from a long expired Slim Jim. The second trickster he encountered years later wasn't so much rainbows and sunshine as it was his worst fear being shown to him in terrifyingly clear hallucinations. Dean's torture was in the shape of a demon too, that yellow-eyed one from before your time chasing him around some neighbor's house until Sam rescued him - a very familiar story. Ripped out of some nightmare and thrown directly into a panic attack, it must be a common symptom. Now, to get out of it without passing out...

"Dean, you're smothering her," Sam sighs from behind his brother, the exhaustion in his voice more than audible. You can't find the will to look up at him, to watch the disappointment settle in his eyes as you cower pathetically on the fucking floor like another one of those fucking victims you had sworn to protect. Your worldview is so small, you didn't realize he had rejoined you until he spoke in that painstakingly sincere voice of his. Dean doesn't even offer him a glance. His eyes bore holes into your skull.

"You're afraid, and you're panicking because you're afraid," he explains nevertheless, though it's all to deaf ears. There's not a singular logical thought going through your brain. Dean is too harsh when he tries to calm someone down, his hands grasp you too hard, his voice is too loud. It's better when he lets Sam do all the coddling, he has this gentle disposition that could calm the mad in just a few words.

That look on his face doesn't help, the wrinkle in his brow, that abrupt down turning of his lips. He looks mad. He takes both of your hands anyways as your body begins to hunch inwards with the amount of effort it takes to remain upright. He grasps them too hard, his voice proving grating rather than comforting. It doesn't help you calm in the slightest. "It's fucking terrifying, but it's not dangerous anymore. I-"

"Cas-" You interrupt him with a gasp, an unconscious call that you're not even aware you're making until it's ripped from your throat. Everything is simultaneously moving too fast and not fast enough, and the lack of oxygen brings stars to the corners of your vision - a greyish vignette of walls closing in and too many people surrounding you. Trembling hands rip out of a much stronger grasp, favoring the icy coolness of the hardwood. Fingernails catch on the gaps between the boards, threatening to break with the pressure as you try with everything in you to get them to stop shaking. Your head hangs low, inches away from kissing the floor. You look like you're bowing in prayer, though God was the furthest thing from your mind. There was no God here to begin with, what would prayer possibly do? Myriads of tears fall alongside your dignity, seeping into dark oak crevices. "Cas..."

It's pathetic.

You're pathetic.

A burden.

A damsel.

Scum of this godforsaken earth.

You can hear Dean sigh, hear his hands slap against his thighs in defeat when he leans back to respect your distance. There's a moment, between wracking, disgusting sobs, and unsatisfied gasps, where you begin to feel yourself somehow start to slip out of your body. The panic is still there, the weight of dread still heavy over your chest, but you're... sort of detached from yourself: A wall between your consciousness and your body. Its presence was not unknown to you. A certain demon had created it with the help of excruciating scars and brands that could never be cleaned off your skin. It existed when you were dropped off to Bobby all those years ago, persisted for months. Persisted until...

Until you met Sam. Until Dean started coming around. Until you found the energy to start fixing up your car again. Until you started taking calls and distributing cases. Until you started going out for jobs again. Until you started meeting other hunters, other allies.

Until you met Castiel.

You need him to fix it again.

Footsteps, quiet and calculated, break you of your spiral.

He hadn't left you here, hadn't fucked off to God only knows after Dean took over. He was going to fix it, fix you.

A tan coat flutters to sit in a near perfect circle before you, bringing a waft of bleachy, biting, borderline electric fragrance across your flushed cheeks. You gasp with it, your heartbeat pulsating in your throat, and you have to force yourself to not clench your eyes shut. Too much, this was too much! It's all too overwhelming! There's too many eyes on you, too many sensations. You have to get out, but you can't seem to get yourself to do much more than shiver and convulse with false breaths where you're crouched.

Your angel, an emancipator working tirelessly to lift the binds intent on strangling the air from your lungs, kneels before you on unworthy grounds. You watch him the best you can, teeth clamped down over your lip to keep it from quivering, fingernails making clicking noises against wood. His eyes are chillingly serious where they squint back at you, carefully evaluating your position, your quivering, the arch in your back that was preventing any flow of oxygen. They soften when they settle over the irritation at the very corners of your eyes, the trembling of your jaw.

God, you could frame that expression.

In a movement that is effortlessly graceful, as if it's the most natural, normal thing in the world, Castiel leans down to mirror your position. His legs fold underneath himself, his palms skim over tear-stained oak until his fingers are resting calmly just inches from where yours splay restlessly. He's peering up at you through his eyelashes, chin tilted up just enough to make eye contact. It breaks you of your mounting fit of terror for a moment, makes you blink owlishly at him.

He looks... stupid.

Stupid in an intensely, heart wrenchingly human way. Not that he would care, the whole 'no sense of embarrassment' thing. If you told him this was a normal position that humans routinely rested in, he'd probably believe you - though, the absolutely broken expression washing your face might lead him to think otherwise.

"Yes?" His head tilts in a small movement that is so familiar, so overwhelmingly 'Castiel' that it distracts you from the caving in of those perfectly sanitized walls. This is connection for him, doing this for you. Being here. Saving you. Acts of service, it was the way he communicated best. You know that well. There's no selfish intent here, however, not a doubt in your mind that he was kneeling here on the ground before you in something of a 'downward dog' position for anything other than the small chance that it might, maybe help calm you down.

When you lift your head to meet his curious gaze, burning hot tears drip shamelessly down your face. The intrusive thought that it might still be blood staining your cheeks forces you to upright yourself in one terribly jerky movement and scrape your sleeve across the sensitized skin there. A choked sob slips out when you look down at them, finding nothing but a smattering of dampness there. There's no blood, no new scarring over any part of your body that didn't already exist. Your eye wasn't swollen shut, no blunt force trauma to your skull to impede your thoughts. It was all in your head.

Everything hazes over.

Your ribs ache.

You miss breathing.

Your mouth opens to speak, but no discernable words fall out. A whisper is all you can muster, punctuated by a quivering chin and desperate eyes. It all serves to take Castiel off guard, judging by the hesitation in his hands as he moves to sit back on his haunches - continuing to mirror you. Wrinkles appear over his forehead and his pupils can't find a place to settle, that's how you know he's concerned. There's no discernable emotion over his face otherwise.

"Out..." You rasp in your hyperventilation, staring at him through your brows. "P-Please..."

Castiel's lips flatten into a straight line, and you wonder for a second if he's able to read your mind judging by the haste he makes. He hitches over without a moment's delay, coaxing you without words to meet his eyes. You do, however glassy and reddened your own may be, you do. It's the closest thing to confirmation you can provide, but it's all he needs.

His hand swiftly hooks over the back of your head, and before you can blink, your hair is rustling with the flapping of unseen wings, a chilled wind masking your skin. A whooshing noise drowns out the sound of blood rushing in your ears, so thoroughly disorienting that you have to clench your eyes shut to keep the stars from completely overtaking your eyesight. They remain shut for a long while, even after the wind dies down and the wings cease their flapping.

He's taking it all away.

He's going to save you.

Chapter Text

When you finally find the will to open your eyes, you are standing outside of the Impala on trembling legs, that damned house just as it was when you entered - as if nothing had happened at all. You stare at it blankly, continuing to hold a breath that your body was refusing to let you release.

"You need to breathe, you'll faint," Castiel notes bluntly, punctuating the statement with a sigh that holds far too much emotion for somebody who's normally so... robotic. You nod frantically, clawing at your collar and creating some much needed space between the two of you. He lets you go easily, as if he had never been touching you in the first place, a testament to how gentle he was being.

You've improved the smallest bit, graduating from not being able to breathe at all to punching frantic, high-pitched gasps out of your scorching lungs. They've been expanded for too long, you're lightheaded with it.

"T-Trying," Is the word that you squeeze out between stunted sobs, the entirety of your face wrinkling now that it was just you and Castiel, alone with nobody besides him to witness this unsightly mess you had become. He would never judge you for something as irrelevant as your appearance however, not when you were sure he could see into your wretched, disgusting soul every time he even glanced at you.

His continued presence was the biggest mystery known to man and heaven alike.

It's better out here, even if your body still hadn't gotten the message. There's no walls threatening to collapse in on you, no Winchesters to unintentionally make you feel like the worst person to ever walk this earth by comparison. The night is cold, sending a chill down your spine and working to soothe the flush that's infecting your skin. Though it does nothing to stop your hazing mind, your racing heart, and the extraordinary weakness running through your veins.

Castiel hums lightly, his hands fidgeting restlessly at his sides as he watches you struggle. That stupid, piteous haze is still in his eyes. You want to smack it off of him. Or, you know, maybe get away from it by hiding in his neck, his coat, preferably somewhere warm...

Woah! Okay, intrusive thought there!

He's calculating. You always had this underlying fear that he was perpetually calibrating something in his mind when he was looking at you: What you were thinking, what you were feeling, what the fuck he was going to do with you. That theory is not nearly laid to rest here.

Your hands are on your knees before you have time to evaluate him any further, and for a long moment you think that you might actually faint with the effort it takes to remain upright. Is it normal for people to pass out from panic-attack induced hyperventilation? You've never heard of it before, but with the way your heart was hammering, unconsciousness was about to hit you like a train.

You're not bent over for more than a few seconds before Castiel snaps out of his trance, the logic that tainted him giving way to something much stronger and far more compelling with nothing more than a gentle nudge: his sense of empathy.

"This will be a little uncomfortable," he warns as he crashes to one knee on uneven, grating asphalt in front of you. He's frantically rolling up his right sleeve, sloppily freeing his wrist as you watch on in confusion. His neck cranes to make fuzzy, unfocused eye contact with you - a camera's aperture struggling to find something to properly center on. He slowly raises his right palm in what you in your muddied mind could only guess would be a sweet caress of your cheek.

God, yes! He could hold you any day of the week, you'd welcome him with open arms. If it was anything like that night in the Impala, you would be more than willing. Anything for another night of sleep like that - you'd pay real, American dollars to do that again. What are you saying? You'd kill for that again.

The yellowy-white glow emanating from the center of it quickly steers you in a different direction, however. He wets his lower lip before finishing his sentence. Your bleary eyes and hazed mind can't help but fixate on it. Oh, lord, what an amazing distraction...

"But if you follow me, it'll be okay."

You trust him implicitly. You shouldn't, but you do. You'd do anything he asked you to, especially in such a vulnerable state. Fuck, you'd let him to that horrifying soul touching thing to you a thousand times over if it would mean that this extended nightmare would cease, if it meant he would hold you close and stroke you to sleep again.

" 'kay," You rasp, knees trembling while he reaches forwards with his freaky, glowing, ET alien hand and presses it to your chest. A lightning-like jolt twists through your sternum with contact, thrumming somewhere deep in the cavity of your chest. You wince as it settles over you, a dull intrusion that your body is unused to.

The first pass is warmth. Warmth like standing a little too close to a space heater after treading through miles of snow. Warmth like the first sunny day of the year after a dry winter. Warmth like sheets fresh out of the dryer. Warmth identical to that of Castiel's sweet, sweet grace. He's trying to soothe you with it, a distraction to keep you placated and buzzing. You recognize that, though you are in no position to be mad about it - not when it feels this good. It licks over every inch of your skin, enrapturing you in such a deep sense of calmness that for a second you think that you might be dreaming, or floating, or dying. And Castiel's just staring up at you with an expression that you can't clearly read, watching intently as your pupils dilate and your face flushes. You might be leaning towards him, you're not really sure. He just smells so good, looks so good...

Wait.

Where the fuck are all these feelings coming from? The constant state of stress you were under rarely let them manifest, it's shocking to hear them spoken by that nagging little voice in the back of your head so freely. These are things you repressed, things you pushed to the dusty closet in the back of your mind and left to rot there. This is an Angel of the Lord! It's sacrilegious to want him this badly, to want to know what it might feel like for him to kiss you, to run his hands over your - No! These are inside thoughts, don't you dare let fucking angel drugs make them outside thoughts!

"Brace yourself," You watch his mouth move with these words, though they don't quite reach your brain in time for you to follow his directions. Instead, you are met with his free hand shooting out to grasp your hip, doing all of the steadying for you. The touch is much firmer than what you're used to being met with from him, like his fingers are digging through to the bone there. A whine squeezes its way out of your throat.

Without the warmth of his grace to make you forget your ailments, your breaths fall back into the staccato, unsteady rhythm from before, your heart beating so quickly and with such a vengeance that your body hiccups with it. The tears never left, now infinitely scored into your face. You would begin to panic again, if not for the presence of your savior keeping you steady.

He was going to fix you.

He was going to-

"Ah!" A sharp shriek of pain pierces through the surrounding silent night. Castiel's grip at your hip tightens, his back straightening as he fights to keep eyes on your contorted features. He hates what this is doing to you, hates that his hands are at fault. You can feel it in his gaze, in the way he holds you.

"I'm sorry," Is all he can properly express.

The second pass is decidedly less pleasant than the first, and a few steps more severe than the 'uncomfortable' you had been promised. It's in your organs, you swear - this shifting, churning sensation that acts as if every major structure of your insides was floundering in place. Your liver, your lungs, stomach, heart, your fucking spleen - all twisting and squirming in place. Something is moving them inside you.

Flashes of your demon sticking his hand into the cut he had made into your torso, shoving it in and then spreading his fingers, puts you over the edge.

You grab at where Castiel is holding you, mouth agape in some silent scream that doesn't want to escape. He's talking to you. You can hear the drone of his voice, but nothing's penetrating. You want to curse, to yell, to beg for mercy, but you're not in control.

It's been seconds, fucking seconds of this and you're already tapping out. The pain wasn't even that bad - you'd been through worse - it was just the sensation that was killing you. It brought back too much, brought that demon's face back into the forefront of your mind.

A dry heave smarts through your abdomen at all the motion, jumpstarting your diaphragm and making your lungs reset. The small slivers of vision you had been subsisting off of surrender, the lightheadedness that had been dancing at the back of your brain taking over and pushing forwards.

And that's the end of you standing on your own two feet.

You're not quite sure how you end up draped over Castiel's chest, but the tight-lipped grunt that is punched out of him and the death grip that suddenly appears over your back as his palm presses even harder into your sternum gives you a few ideas. Your knees burn from where they hit the street a little too hard, dead weight over your angel's shoulder. He readjusts quickly, the warmth of his hand on your chest leaving a trail of glowing, warm light as it travels to hold the back of your head firmly to him.

Castiel holds you to himself dutifully, even with your uncontrollable writhing from the aftershocks. You're panting by the time your organs have stopped moving inside of you, desperately grasping at his coat as you lay slumped against him in the cold with wide eyes.

God, you want to crawl inside of it, warm your freezing hands against his skin. And he'd let you if you wanted to, he'd just fucking let you. Let you touch and caress and kiss-

INTRUSIVE! Beyond intrusive! That's just - That's just something else all together. Put a pin in that, you can address it later. Right now, you can focus on the fact that this is crazy. Insane, even. You should slap him for doing this to you, especially after what you had just been through! Nobody in their right mind would ever, ever, never in a million fucking years -

"Woah."

You're inhaling. Like, really, truly inhaling. The blockage that was there is gone, as if it never existed in the first place. Your lungs stutter from misuse, body finally given permission to relax with Castiel's silent command as he strokes you through the aftermath of his onslaught. More dead weight is pressed into him. And he just takes it, as if you weigh nothing more than a cat purring on his lap.

"And out," It should be illegal for Castiel to speak in that tone, so gentle, yet commanding. You'd follow him anywhere, do anything he told you to as long as he'd promise to stay.

Goosebumps flush over your arms and shoulders, your neck. He soothes whatever raised skin he can reach there with the pads of his fingers when you obey with an exaggerated, shaking exhale. Then, in a gentle praise that makes you melt into him even further: "Good."

"How did you-" Your words, whispered weakly into his shoulder, are cut off with a quiet hushing, and you decide right then and there that Castiel is the only man on this planet allowed to interrupt you, let alone shush you.

Well, not man: angel. Lest it not be forgotten, an angel crafted by the hands of God himself was currently stroking his fingers over your back so delicately that shivers are racing down your spine. An angel crafted by the hands of God himself was fucking playing with your hair, tutting in your ear and sympathizing like he intimately knew the pain you were experiencing.

"Just breathe for me."

Fuck, you're sinking into the floor. You wrench yourself into the crook of his neck to keep upright, nosing at his collar with your eyes clenched shut in order to keep your focus and avoid the mortifying prospect of actually making eye contact with him while you look like this - so flustered and powerless. He makes a small noise, something in the back of his throat that teeters between a surprised grunt and pleased sigh.

The thought passes through your mind that Castiel might have never had someone he cared about saddled up this close to him before, that all the warmth he's exuding is involuntary - a completely new experience. It's that pesky draw he has towards humanity, that big, bleeding heart of his always pulling him along by the neck.

Your angel loves it, loves you touching him in any capacity. It was just about as obvious as a slap in the face, though he was trying his best to bite it down.

You're burning with the blushing at your cheeks, now breathing in healthy cycles that no longer sound like you're choking on your own tongue. The tension in your shoulders eases, though you can't find it in yourself to let go of him. He's just so close, you're not sure when you'll ever get this side of him again, not sure you wouldn't drift away if you weren't plastered so close to him.

Though, no angel mojo could seem to stop your crying. You're not even sure he knows that you still are, not with the way you're pressing yourself into his neck. His gentle hum morphs into a light chuckle when you nuzzle in impossibly closer, one that reverberates through your skull, making your knees weak where they push into the biting asphalt. He tilts his head in the opposite direction to give you more room to hide, and you can feel the adoring grin over his lips that he's attempting to bite back without having to look at him.

He liked you like this, you could tell. He liked you needy, not for any reason involving having power over you, however. You were human, if he wanted to he could snap your neck, blind you, break your mind, he could do anything his little glorified heart desired. You were lucky it seemed to want nothing more than this. It was simple: He liked you needy because he liked being needed, any touch that came with it was just another positive.

He liked taking care of you, liked making sure you were alright. And by God, would you let him.

"Again," he instructs, the warmth of his breath in your hair, over your ear making you shudder with some other emotion that you swore you had killed inside of yourself a long time ago. He sounds breathless, gasping at honeyed gulps of air just as desperately as you were when your lips unknowingly press at just the right junction of his neck.

Click, file, save for later. You didn't realize he was sensitive in all the same places a human was, this is important information!

You faithfully comply, your chest warming as you feel your breathing slowly begin to match his steady, dragging breaths over your ear. This continues until you are almost perfectly synchronized to his, a robotic imitation of real, human aspiration guiding you. His similarly perfectly steady pulse thrums over your temple when he turns his head to touch his chin to your hair in some sort of indication of presence - a continuation of the embrace you were sharing. It's slow, firm, unyielding, as if he was completely and entirely relaxed and that this was a past time that the two of you shared as often as often could be. It juxtaposes your own: ragged and speeding, falling completely out of tempo.

You're out of tempo. And here's Castiel, a perfect template of what you should be, what your body should be doing, teasing you without realizing.

"Follow mine," That siren-like tone entrances you, makes your brain freeze over with grace-addled obedience. The apex of his lips brush over the curve of your ear, and all logic flies out the window. God, he has no idea what he's doing to you, what things are going through your mind with your inhibitions lowered like this. "Can you feel it from there?"

You can feel a lot of things from here, in fact. And all of them are working together to transform you into a gooey pile of mush.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you realize that he's talking about his heartbeat.

Castiel is asking if you can physically feel his heartbeat from where you are pressed into his neck. And the worst part is that you can. It's right there, beating against your skin so tangibly that it might as well belong to you as well.

"Cassie," You protest the intimacy in a staggering act of self-sacrifice, lifting your head off of his shoulder to catch his soft, soft eyes. Too soft, they're too soft. That raging heartbeat of yours doesn't come close to settling once you do. Those deep blue eyes of his are half lidded, resting low on your face, accompanied by mussed hair and - your favorite - a light flush over the curve of his cheeks. It's so faint, you probably wouldn't have noticed if you weren't sitting so close, if his warmth wasn't mingling with your own, tainting him. All of these details combined make you forget your objections.

You're distracted, pulling at his coat until your limp hands find the strength to reach for his neck. You need to touch him, to feel that he is real and with you and not just some figment of your imagination - not some demon in a savior's skin. Castiel's bowing forward to meet you, lowering his head and positioning his arms over your back to where you have unadulterated access to touch and clutch and hold any part of him you could ever want. Goosebumps erupt over what flesh at the back of his neck you are able to see with contact, created by your freezing fingers.

You hadn't a clue he could do that, that function was far too human for an angel to replicate so flawlessly. He swallows audibly when your knuckles skim to brush against the curve of his jaw, inciting a delicious shiver that you would pay real, actual money to see again and again and again.

This is close, closer than before.

You're thumbing over his chin with dead, teary eyes, watching as he lets you manipulate his head's position with a finger hooked underneath his jaw without qualm. You coax him closer, closer, closer, until your eyes go cross from trying to look at him. His hair is soft where is scratches at your palm, a hitch in his breath when you ever-so lightly run your fingernails over the nape of his neck. He tilts his head minutely, eyes falling partway closed, lips parting to release a slow, drawn out breath.

You've not seen him like this, so hungry, unfocused.

Besotted, almost.

There's heat here, heat like a furnace you want to curl up beside and fall asleep with. Heat in his eyes, heat from his mouth where you just barely touch the underside of his bottom lip with your thumb. He sighs into your hand once you finally flatten it to run over his face, and his skin is burning hot. Those eyes, the stormy ones that could see right through you, are swallowed by his dilated pupils, and staring at you so unabashedly that you think you might explode. There's a moment, a long, drawn out moment, where you think he might be leaning in to kiss you, but you blink and that flicker of intention in his face is gone, replaced by a concerned bunching of his brow.

Don't get your hopes up, nothing can ever be that simple. Especially not with this clueless excuse for an angel.

Still, he's... pretty like this. Most of the time, his masquerading as a human is so terrible that you have to hide your face in your hands to keep from cringing. But here, he moves like one, talks like one, fucking blushes like one. His reactions are so acutely mortal, it makes you a little sad.

God created humans in his image, created an earth for them to roam, and left his other children none of the simple pleasures he had blessed man with. It's unfair at best, to have them forced to spend eternity trapped in the many paradises of those who lived on earth without ever allowing them to find a paradise of their own. Other angels you had come across were so cold, so deprived of any real love that they had begun to fight each other for the mere prospect of it from their Father. You related in some strange, though less violent, manner.

Castiel was different, however. He was warm, full of soul and a bleeding heart that would rival even that of the most charitable. When Castiel defected, he lost the only family he had ever known in exchange for... for what? So he could be closer to Dean? To you? So he could finally experience these prophesized simple pleasures? You could never get a straight answer from him, he always responded vaguely or changed the subject.

Nevertheless, you could always sort of guess what he was going to say. It was written in his eyes every time you'd caught him standing in the rain, watching as water beaded off of his hands and onto oil-slicked asphalt. It was plastered over the undersides of every flock of birds that soared hundreds of feet over his head. It was etched into every curious manmade structure he passed, coated over every mile of roadway driven over in that shitty, shitty car, woven into the fabric of every gust of cool wind through his fingers, floating at the surface of every ocean's lapping waves observed from out the window, whispered in every moment of connection between him and the people he holds near:

This angel had found a way out, even through all that he had been subjected to - every loss, every torturous second of war, heartbreak, everything in his being that told him he would never be more than what he was specifically created to be. Why can't you? Why can't the only species that God created to have free will leave this cycle? Why can't you be fucking normal?

"You're still crying," Castiel's voice is always gruff and low, as if every word he speaks is the first thing he's said in days. He punctuates the statement with the stroke of his thumb over the very obvious staining underneath your eyes. They must be sunken in, swollen from tears and red at the corners. You'd be embarrassed, if only he wasn't looking at you in such a reverent manner. "Why?"

What a loaded question.

You could lie, say you don't know or that it's just residual from the Djinn's poison, tell him that you just are. You're human, humans cry over nothing all the time. He's an angel, angels don't cry like this - it's just a cultural misunderstanding. You could redirect, maybe kissing his stupid face would shut him up, he's right there after all. This all has been in the making for so long, he'd probably just let you. He'd probably kiss you back so roughly you'd forget your name, forget all of this. He's done it before, you've seen it - a weird phase that he went through a long time ago. Or...

"I-I'm scared," That perfectly synchronized breathing falls off tempo at that. Everything, in fact, goes out of tempo. Breaths stutter, your skin burns, that heart of yours starts punching out of your chest with the admission. You would never normally outright tell somebody that, but sitting here with him is like sitting in a confessional. You can't lie to him, it's not worth it. You'd only be hurting yourself.

This is all a little bit heavier here, not as urgent and high-strung as before. The panic isn't whirring like a tornado siren as it was before, it's more like church bells. It vibrates throughout your skull, sinks into your chest, and pulls down, down, down. It's dull, a dark wash of greyish-blue hopelessness that paints your insides and squeezes mercilessly your heart. You cry a little harder.

"Of what?" Castiel's hands move now that he trusts you can keep yourself upright, firm touches turning impossibly delicate when he skims to hold your face in both hands. It's... intimate, far more so than anything he'd done before in the strangest way. Perhaps it's the attention, the tone of his voice when he's talking this close. He feels human, feels present, your very own tether to reality. "Demons? Djinns?"

He's never been this confident in his touch, it's bringing you to another plane of existence.

"I-uhm," You don't have an answer for him. It's all bigger than that, isn't it? Bigger than creatures and physical pain. There's a larger figure looming above it all, you can feel its infection in every step, in every breath. It's in Dean's eyes every time he glances at you in the rearview mirror, in Bobby's weekly 'just checking in' calls, in every extra syringe of antidote Sam shoves into your hands. "I-"

Castiel's expression softens all at once, and you are left cluelessly evaluating it from about six inches too close. What is that? Did you say something? Do something? Why does he suddenly look like you've told him his dog died? This man rarely emotes so aggressively, which stands to say that when he does something like this, you're going to notice. Your palms drift back down to lay over his collar, confusion arresting your own outpouring of emotions. You've seen this before, a long, long time ago. He used to look at Dean this way, all soft eyes and pity.

Oh.

Oh! This fucking angel!

You grasp his collar, now more menacing than comforting as you put a few more inches between the two of you. "You're reading my mind, aren't you? Don't you dare fucking read my mind, Castiel, or I swear-"

"I can't read minds-" He shakes his head, bewildered at your accusation and the sudden tonal shift of your conversation. His brows lift, mouth gapes with his flustering.

"Liar! I've seen you do it, you used to do it to Dean all the time-" You narrow your eyes at him, reaching to grasp at the wrists currently holding your face while you talk over one another.

"I wasn't reading his mind, it's Dean. I pulled him out of Hell, it's all just a little different with him-" His head tilts sheepishly, gaze evading yours for a split second.

"Oh yeah, your Vulcan mind meld buddy and your 'connection', how could I forget? You want me to get your little boyfriend? He's right inside, I can go get him for you if you'd rather him sitting here instead of me-"

"That is a highly inaccurate choice of wording-"

"What? The Vulcan or the boyfriend? Because I'm beginning to think-"

"I'm beginning to think you like to argue," Castiel is grinning down at you, exasperated, as he puts an end to your back and forth with an uncharacteristic raising of his voice, something all too kind and containing none of that teasing aftertaste that Dean would always grant you. You have to chuckle at him, huffing out a breath that had been stuck in your lungs. You're caught off guard, forced to revel in this almost domestic back and forth. It's a saving grace, it's exactly what you need.

His lips purse as he takes a moment to look you over, reverent hands curling to hold yours between the two of you. His thumbs rubs over your knuckles, before moving to play with the ring over your middle finger - an act of curiosity more than comfort. A long moment passes as you watch him twist and poke at it aimlessly. When he does speak, it's solemn and breathy, like an admission he's afraid to let sit in the air. "You're not crying anymore."

"Not fair, you distracted me," You mumble, sniffling the remnants of your tears away. He hums a laugh, though the humor there is gone:

"Good."

Another crawling moment passes, and you find yourself looking up from your intertwined hands to admire him in a rare moment of silence, of the closest a hunter and angel can get to that elusive ideal of peace.

Castiel follows, warm eyes resting upon you with such a comforting undertone that you find yourself yearning to melt back into him, to let him take this all away. Grace or not, you didn't care. Your body and soul was hardwired to know the touch, the presence of an angel, though perhaps not at this level of closeness. You gravitated towards it, drawing you in like a siren song. It's not an urge that you can fight, not if you had all the strength in the world. Do other humans feel this way when sitting so close to godliness? Awestruck? Like they're drowning in it?

He just lets you, even gathers you up in his arms and guides the two of you backwards a few feet until his back is able to lean up against one of the Impala's tires - all so you can be more comfortable. He corrals you into his lap with your prompting, even huffs a laugh when you immediately thrust your fingers underneath his coat to warm them against his ribs. The ebony suit jacket he wears beneath it is a perfect hiding place, hands lodged between it and the crisp white collared shirt underneath.

It's dizzying, the draw you have to him, the reliance. Dangerous didn't begin to describe it.

It was going to kill you one day.

You're straddled over his hips on your knees, hovering a few inches above him as his hands skim up to caress the part of your body you were beginning to think he liked most: Your face.

Exaltation is the word that comes to mind in regards to the way he is treating you, especially with the manner in which you were currently looking down at him. Angels weren't supposed to be looked down upon, they weren't supposed to be bowing down before you over hard wood floors in creepy Djinn murder houses, or offering themselves up as pillows in old, uncomfortable cars, or kneeling in prayer positions before you while you seize at even the prospect of stitches. Angels weren't supposed to be this close to humans, to glorify and worship one as useless and broken as yourself. But here this one is...

It's like he's trying to massage every bad memory out of your head, replace it with something lighter and happier, something uniquely Castiel. There's no grace flowing through you anymore, judging by how cold you had become without it. Something else is keeping you here, something terrifying and endlessly comforting all at the same time. He's not even looking you in the eyes anymore, more preoccupied with brushing your hair to sit perfectly behind your ears, with making sure there's no more tears he needed to wipe away from your cheeks:

Acts of service.

He's sweet like that, attentive like that. You wish you could tell whether this was just an angel trait, or a Castiel trait. Is this in his nature? Or was it a choice? The healing, the holding, the saving; did he do it because he wanted to, or because he needed to?

These hands, the ones worshipping your skin, were capable of so much. You've seen it: Seen him burn a demon right out of its vessel, seen him stab and kill more of his brothers than he would probably like to admit, seen him murder and destroy and cause irreparable chaos. They'd terrify you if they weren't attached to such a kind face, if you hadn't known Castiel the way you did, if you hadn't known him to also be the healer of all healers - both spiritually and physically.

Those hands cured far more often than they caused harm.

You untuck one of your own hands from underneath his suit jacket whilst watching him fuss over you, skimming your palm up the shirt over his chest, the buttons over his sternum, his loosened tie, lingering against the curve of his throat in such a treacherously slow movement that his concentration breaks. He confusedly stops stroking your face, eyes wide and curious where they come to meet you. He hesitantly places his hand over your own - just to feel, to touch, to know, to learn - and follows your journey with an electric anticipation that he can't seem to hide no matter what he does.

His hands are larger than yours, the tips of his fingers curl over the ends of your own and hold there when you finally reach his neck. Those normally even breaths of his are nowhere near synchronous when your head slowly dips down the smallest bit, testing just how far he would let you go. His lips part the smallest bit when you tease a kiss - close, but not close enough. It gives him away.

As far as you wanted seemed to be the answer.

His heartbeat is uncharacteristically erratic under your thumb where it presses just a little harder than necessary into his throat, though he makes no show of it on his face. He appears calm. Cool, calm, collected, and oh-so willing.

You can clearly feel him swallow underneath your palm, that blush over his cheeks becoming more and more apparent.

Looking down on him like this, with his eyes drowning in such a deep breadth of devotion, an awestruck stupor unreplicable by any mere mortal man, it makes you feel like more than the bare nothing you were destined to be. It makes you feel wanted, admired, needed. His head is tilted up to you: watchful, expectant, eager to see or feel what you would do next. Like he couldn't wait for the next move you would make, as long as it involved you touching him.

Chills break out over his skin once again when your palm starts skimming up towards his jaw, a mouthwatering shiver arching his back and forcing his chest to press flat against yours. He's losing his composure way faster than you would've thought. That angel resiliency and stubbornness was doing nothing for him here, not in the face of desire, of hunger, of the cure to his starvation from touch. The corners of your lips quirk diminutively, surprised by this moment of complete command he was affording you.

Castiel's so pretty, so attentive, so pliable when he wants to be. For a being so powerful, he sure seemed responsive to some lowly human's touch. This angel once led armies, started and ended wars, could kill you in an instant if he wanted to. But now, now he's here: Crouched up against the side of his little boyfriend's sorry excuse for a car, pathetically extending that beautiful neck of his up towards you in hopes of what, a kiss?

"Cassie," You thumb at his chin, turning his head to meet your eyes. He goes obediently, dutifully. Your breath leaves you all at once at the sight of them, so dilated and longing where they stare holes through you, like he'd been wanting this for a millennia. He audibly swallows again, lips parted and cheeks flushing darker the longer you look at him. His palms push modestly at your hips, a gentleman trying to keep his bearings, keep control. He looks like a lost puppy dog, begging for something it couldn't truly ever wrap its mind around.

"Yes?" His voice is a rough growl, sending a mind bending shudder down your spine. His breath is on your lips, hot and erratic. It seems his perfect synchronicity is out of time, something in himself almost buzzing with anticipation for something you hadn't given him even a taste of yet. Did he look at his past partners like this? Like he wanted to eat them? Did he even have past partners?

You'd never really thought too hard about you and Castiel... together. How could you? He was a fucking angel, for Christ's sake! He had charges and other angels to worry about, wars and heavenly duties to attend to! You had only met him because Dean started bringing him around, it's not like he ever answered your prayers in the beginning. You were the least of his worries, not even a blip on the radar. Any attention he had shown you was simply out of a heavenly kindness that was hardwired into his stupid angel brain, surely not any real affection existed inside of him. That would be too human. But now, with him like this...

Everything was changing.

You always thought he was handsome, soft, somebody that you naturally gravitated towards, but that was just because of what he was - that 'be not afraid' type of beauty exuded in every movement, every step he took. Charming, in a clueless sort of way. Sure, a part of you always wondered what he looked like when he smiled, how a real laugh of his might sound, what his eyes might look like in the sun, what he felt like to hold, how he tasted...

Oh.

You're fucked.

His eyes are half lidded, the gaze he grants you overflowing with a desire that was rare in angels. How could it be anything but? Angels weren't supposed to desire anything! They were supposed to follow the chain of command for nothing else but the fact that it was 'God's Will'! But this one is choking on it! Drowning in it! He's eyeing your mouth, tongue darting out to wet his bottom lip as he lets you tilt his chin up higher to regard you. He'd let you do anything to him right now, you were positive.

You wanted to do so much.

It's almost magnetic, the way you're leaning into him, like you couldn't stop this even if you wanted to. Is this the grace talking? You know deep down that it isn't, he would never push enough through you to alter your state of mind, but it seems like the only reasonable explanation. Is grace responsible for this feeling in your chest like you're about to explode into a million tiny pieces? For how fucking edible he looks right now, all disheveled and hopelessly turned on? Does Castiel even know what 'turned on' means?

He's not going to make the move, you know that he won't. It has to be you, he's too careful for that, too calculated to allow even the smallest probability that something would go wrong. But he's begging you with his eyes where they blink rapidly up at you, his hands where they suddenly begin to pull at your hips, his breath where it caresses over your mouth. You're surprised by a sudden intake of air, something of a gasp rasping from behind his parted lips after a moment of unabashed staring.

"I know what you're afraid of," He whispers in a low tone that's barely there, almost into your mouth at this angle. You go quiet, too enraptured to fight with him using words. He thinks too much, holds on to things too much. If only this pretty boy would shut up, let you do what he was begging you to do with his eyes, then all would be well. But no, there's too many thoughts, too many questions that his childlike, annoyingly curious mind needed answers to. "You're scared of getting attached-"

"What?" You reel back, a record scratch moment.

Here?

You're doing this here? Now?

"To me. Dean. Sam. Bobby," he's grasping the wrist that has complete control over his head, acting as if he has no say over the words currently spilling out of his mouth. But he does. He's too calculated to let anything but exactly what he means leave his lips. "You're scared of getting hurt again, scared you're not enough. Scared that we'd just let you die somewhere, alone and afraid," he takes a pause, seemingly taken by the weight of his own words. "But we wouldn't. I wouldn't."

"Get out of my head, Cas," You growl lowly, pressing your thumb a little harder into his chin than necessary to make your point. He shakes his head minutely, licking over his lips and eyeing your mouth where it twists downwards into a tight scowl. For an angel so intent on psychoanalyzing your every move, he sure did seem desperate for you to kiss him.

"I'm not in your head," He's too sincere when he speaks, too heartfelt and doe-eyed. "I just know you."

You push his head away, disbelieving and frustrated. Why'd he have to ruin such a potentially delectable moment? And with something as stupid as talking? Ugh, you could slap him!

"No, you don't. Not really, not everything," Your attempt at crawling off of his lap is thwarted just as soon as it begins, and you are hauled forwards impossibly closer than before by battle-hardened hands clasped over your hips. He won't let you dismiss this, won't let you run away from him when he finally has you this close.

"I know enough." Castiel grabs you by the neck in one fluid motion and pulls you to him with a grunt. You collapse over him, forced onto your haunches and ridding you of the height advantage you had been teasing him to death and back with in the position before. There's a moment of hesitation on his end, a pause just as he wrenches his lips to barely touch your own, and it's enough for you to try and fight his words.

"I'm broken, Cas, you have no idea-"

"Oh, shut up," He breathes, exasperated and exhausted, before he's lurching to close the gap between the two of you. Your mind stutters, every part of you that's still poised to resist and bite and bark dying all at once when he finally, finally presses his mouth to you. All that fight, that anger and fear that's coiled up tight inside of your chest, ready to spill out, melts without anything to keep it there. You go weak without its support.

God, he's warm.

Castiel is gripping the fabric at your hip tightly, his fist is balled with the excess from your top. Now that he has you, he's going to do everything within his power to keep you as close as physically possible. His other hand is lost somewhere in the mess of hair at your scalp, pulling and tugging there in a manner that is so thoroughly self-serving and un-angellike that it makes heat pool in the pit of your stomach.

You're making him break, making him desperate and grabby and selfish and, fuck...

You were proven wrong. He would in fact be making the first move, especially after a little accidental provoking.

You were also simultaneously proven right. He was going to kiss you senseless. Senseless and rough and frenzied: a man starved.

He shouldn't be this good at it, not when this is something he had just recently started learning how to do in his infinite existence, but desperation proved to be a great teacher. He's taken an immediate infatuation with your bottom lip, teasing it with his tongue and nipping with his teeth in between bruising kisses that coax little noises that you weren't aware you were even capable of making from your throat. His body reacts with each one.

His jaw seems to be the best place for you to hold him, if not only just to keep him from pressing into you too harshly and potentially splitting your lip. He was good, but not perfect. Castiel kissing you, especially from a place of frustration and fury and relief, was a far cry from the gentleness he had shown you in all other aspects of life. He's demanding and fiery, groaning into your mouth when you finally find the courage to flick your tongue against his.

And it occurs to you, in a fleeting thought as he begins to lean up off the car and onto his knees to retain the dominance you had once deprived him of, that this has been in the making for far too long. The glances, the prayers, the healing, the attentiveness; it's all been building and building over the course of years. He treated you differently than he did other humans - always just a little bit closer than necessary, always just a little too eager to be using that grace he should have been saving, always a little too willing to come to your aid. You should've known that all those offerings to keep you company in the back seat on long road trips, the volunteering to be the one to hold you down whilst getting stitched up, they didn't mean nothing. They were everything, in fact.

There was a reason he answered your prayers so quickly, even quicker than Dean's in some instances. He had connected himself to you, whether intentionally or not was beyond you. Castiel 'No Understanding of Intimacy' was confused, bewildered and lost by the feelings that struck through him every time he looked at you. You always wondered why he went so soft, why he folded the minute you opened your mouth. You made him feel special, wanted, even gave him his very own nickname as the cherry on top. No wonder he had reacted this way with your prompting!

He had been craving it ever since he first met you.

Castiel's positively beaming with electricity when he regrettably parts to strip off his trench coat for a better range of mobility, chuckling breathily when you immediately lean back to eagerly help him. It must be mojo, the way he sparks every time you touch him, the pleasant hum that's settled over every inch of your skin. Does he even know he's doing it? That it's making your head dizzy and any miniscule, and you mean miniscule, ounce of pain in your body ebb away as if it never existed in the first place?

His lips are a dark rosy color, a tad swollen, and parted perfectly when he returns them to your skin with fervor, impulsively pressing his mouth to your jaw as you struggle with his tie. You've always loved the suit jacket underneath the coat, far more than the coat itself. It was a treat when he would take it off for you to tend to the odd wound, you were sure he wasn't ignorant to your ogling. He looked more put together without the trench coat, like a man on his way to church, dressed in his Sunday best.

You want to swallow him whole.

Those wandering hands of his find the hem of your top all too quickly, and push up to hide over the warm skin of your waist, stomach, and back. Your breath hitches as he makes contact, driven mad by the static-like shock that jolts through your abdomen.

'Turned on' must really mean 'turned on' for angels, he's bleeding electricity like a faucet; all sharp edges and burning surfaces. Your hazed mind wakes up as his hands begin to warm a little more than what's comfortable.

"Cassie," You sigh as he sucks a mark at the junction between your jaw and your neck. Fuck, that's good. He's too good at this, you're overheating. Do angels get a handbook or something when they come down to earth? Something about how to pinpoint the ergoneous zones in a woman? Or did he really just watch that much porn to know exactly where to touch you to make you keen? Either way, you couldn't complain.

He drags his canines across your skin with such a resolute drive that you feel like you're going mad with it, every celestial cell in him trying everything to make up for the millennia he's gone touch starved and alone - mind-numbingly celibate. Your fingers twitch where they come to rest in his hair.

He's going to devour you whole, ruin you beyond recognition, then bring you back to life just before you stray too far. You can feel it in every feverish, fervent caress, every debauched sound that he chokes back inside of himself before they're allowed to be released into the night sky - he's going to replace every drop of suffering in your body by means of his own hands, lips, teeth, and tongue, even if it takes him the rest of eternity and then some. He's going to fill every fearful space inside of you, make you forget what it ever felt like to be lonesome and wanting and -

God, this is getting a little weird, a little 'codependent'-y.

Your eyes slowly blink open, free hand stroking firmly through his hair until he's groaning, and immediately something is off. You freeze for a second, struggling to pinpoint what exactly was causing your mind to fade out of the lust-addled haze you'd been happily falling into. Then, you catch it.

Castiel is brighter than before, though not metaphorically.

He was physically brighter than before, and overflowing with something unnaturally electric, something otherworldly.

"Cassie, you're glowing."

Chapter Text

"I'm - what?" Castiel's pupils are the size of dinner plates when he reluctantly breaks away from you, dazed and panting with his incredibly apparent arousal. A white light burns from the very center of his irises where they meet you with a gaze that is less than focused, lighting up the mask of his face with golden fluorescence and casting deep shadows over the hollows of his cheeks. You fight a gasp at the confrontation, almost missing the rest of his flushed face and swollen lips as you quickly avert your gaze from the potentially blinding light. He's burned someone's eyes out of their skull before, Sam had warned you in abundance after you'd almost lost your own eyesight the first time he showed his power in front of you during a fight: Anytime a heavenly body starts 'charging up,' cover your face or risk permanent disfigurement.

Castiel makes a flicker of a movement to check himself over, swallowing thickly as he dislodges his hands from where they had been intently groping underneath your top to inspect. He is, in fact, glowing. Glowing like some fucked up, celestial glowstick.

"Oh."

It's subtle, though incredibly noticeable in the almost complete darkness of night. Something akin to sunlight bounces off of his skin with no source, yellowy-white light permeating around the immediate area like the warm glow of an undisturbed candle. His silhouette is hazing at the edges in an effect that reminds you of heat emanating off of asphalt in the summer, little waves of energy that you can't properly focus your eyes upon. Something is vibrating in the air around the two of you, something colossal and overflowing with a power you could never truly fathom, something that you can't seem to clearly identify. It blurs your perception of the surrounding neighborhood, like wearing glasses that don't match your prescription. And for a moment, just a singular, forgettable nanosecond - so fast you could have been imagining it - you swear you see leaves of feathers hanging in the air over his shoulder, but they are gone before you can confirm.

Oh, sweet Jesus. This is unprecedented! You've not seen this in him before, never seen any modicum of his power escape without his express permission - complete, calculated control.

He's warm to the touch when you go to rest your hand over the back of his neck in something of a comforting motion, an almost feverish temperature if he were, you know, human. He peels his arms away from where they'd been wrapped around you in order to inspect his hands, radiating white-hot like molten metal in a furnace. His chest is rising and falling as if he had just ran a mile, heartbeat thrumming unnaturally fast underneath your fingers.

"Has this - uhm - Has this happened to you before when..." You're cringing. You're curling in on yourself and cringing. "You know?" You ask, hesitating at the thought of referring to his past sexual partners. You know they existed, but you didn't need to know the specifics. You really didn't need to know the specifics.

"No," he answers lowly after a moment, smoothly pushing his sleeve up to watch the almost pulsating, golden, heavenly glow emanating from himself and tainting the surrounding night sky. He's not afraid of it, not even particularly surprised by it, more confused than anything else judging by the pinch in his brow and his accompanying twisted mouth. Any residuals - heavy breaths and a wild heartbeat - seem to be coming from the aftermath of your encounter rather than the fluorescence seeping from his skin. His demeanor is too calm to be associated to the symptom he's now casually inspecting over his forearm. "I normally have better control over it."

"'It?' What is 'It?'" You let your hands drop to your lap, scooting away to allow him the distance he seemed to be wanting from you whilst he figured himself out. Was it dangerous? You'd been passionately making out with him for how long now? Was it radiation? Something that could blind you? Kill you? Should you avert your eyes? Run away? Wash out your mouth?

"Grace," he speaks as if it's the most normal thing in the world, distractedly running the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip to soothe the slight swelling there caused by your teeth. Heat rushes through you, no doubt showing on your face considering the warmth that floods your cheeks.

Retrospect is the root of all embarrassment, you suppose. You weren't expecting to have to stare your damage in the face in this awkward aftermath, maybe you wouldn't have bit him as hard if you'd known differently...

No.

You probably still would've. Anything to hear him moan again.

He touches at the borderline bruise absentmindedly with the pads of his fingers, staring off at the ground somewhere vaguely by your feet whilst enraptured in clouds of thought you'd never be able to truly deduce. He could see through you, why couldn't you see through him? It seems as if he's struggling to place his focus, mind hazed with other thoughts that surely, absolutely, without a doubt were not centralized around you.

"I was... abnormally distracted."

Distracted?

Distracted?

By you?

God, you're going to remember this for the rest of your life - how you distracted an angel to the point he was struggling to keep his essence inside of his vessel.

"Is it dangerous?" You're curious, who can blame you? Though, it's a struggle for you to keep your thoughts pure and focused at the task on hand. Your lips are still buzzing with the aftermath, the phantom sensation of his tongue running over the roof of your mouth making you shudder.

He really was too good at that - that kinky motherfucker.

Castiel places his hand on his chest and takes a deep, dragging breath, shaking his head in a manner that is far too nonchalant for the situation - as usual. The glow dims the smallest bit with each calm intake, every second he goes without being lost in the throes of sensation. Every second he's allowed where he's not touching you.

"Not like this..." he still hasn't looked back to you, not properly. "Though it could burn you, or blind you if I were to lose control."

"Yeah, okay. Burning and blinding, got it," Those aren't dangerous at all! You should be soothed by that! By the notion that if you had kissed him for any longer that his essence could have burned through your retinas! Or taken off the top layer of your skin!

The edge of his discarded trench coat is over your thigh, a perfect distraction from the agonizingly uncomfortable conversation that was currently happening. You bring it to sit in your lap. It's still warm, like it's come out of the dryer not too long ago. Smells like him too, overwhelmingly. You hide your hands in it, try to act normal and shove down the urge to bury your nose in it.

That's creepy: Creepy and intrusive.

"You've kissed other people, how has this never happened before?" You won't look at him properly either, focus locked in on the fading blush over his throat. Deft hands crawl up to loosen the tie there, clawing at the knot and pulling until it unfurls to hang limp over the back of his neck. You want to sink your teeth into the stretch of skin there, listen to him groan and feel him grasp your hips so impossibly tight...

Okay, maybe you understand how he came to be so distracted.

He shrugs.

"They weren't you," he offers in that insufferable growl of a voice, alongside a glimpse of that hungry gaze that was edging on possessive in this light. You swallow a lump in your throat; a deer in the headlights.

An angel with possessive and impulsive tendencies?

Never!

It was endlessly shocking and a little unnerving that you were at the center of those possessive and impulsive tendencies, however. And it was downright terrifying that you were staring it down so intimately, that it was making you feel the way you were: All shaky and unbalanced.

Castiel was the single most compelling heavenly heretic to exist, exhibiting in multitudes the sinful traits of lust, greed, and gluttony whilst preaching that 'Angel of the Lord' bullshit like his life depended on it. You weren't sure he was drinking the Kool-Aid anymore, he seemed to defect more and more every day. You couldn't relate.

God died the second that demon put a knife to your throat and took you from your home, nothing but dust by the time he'd tied you down and brought you to the edge of death.

Could one still be an apostate while knowing and wholeheartedly believing that God, Demons, Archangels and everything between exist? Or at least did exist? You were sitting before irrefutable proof that the Bible and religion had some standing, though it was still hard for you to swallow.

Castiel's Father abandoned him. Brought him back from death a couple times, sure, but that could only make up for so much.He still left his thousands of children, alone and lost and confused. So why did Castiel still search, still preach the same tropes that were not once reflected back onto him? Why did he act so thoroughly, heart-wrenchingly human? He sins like one, shows an unshakable sense of empathy like one, loves like one.

Angels you were familiar with didn't have any empathy, you'd seen them slaughter innocents before in order to follow some ineffable plan that most likely didn't really exist in the first place. Castiel saw through it all, showed a rare sense of forgiveness that his brothers didn't have the capacity for.

He had a merciful heart, one he could not have inherited from a Father as vengeful and absent as his own.

With another few seconds and a myriad of dragging breaths, the glow seems to have died down completely. You're sitting with your knees to your chest a good foot away, though close enough to where if he were to reach an arm out, you could easily return to him. And you would, probably would even if he did burn you or blind you or accidently broke all of your bones. Because he wouldn't have meant it, and he would've done everything he could to fix it.

You find yourself clambering to stand before him with his coat tucked underneath your arm, now sober from the throes of passion and exhausted from the events of the past hour. Achy joints and sore muscles creak and cramp as you do so, complaining and sending dull throbs of painful sensation up your legs and back. The adrenaline and dopamine could only do so much, and now you were crashing. Hard.

Physical pain was an old friend, this was nothing. It was what was happening in your mind that was causing your knees to quake.

Flashes of that demon's face, splattered with your own blood and overflowing with giddy, childish amusement, still taints your mind. It had been so long, you thought you had let go of that fear, that living with Bobby and going on odd jobs with much scarier creatures had rid you of the torture of remembrance, but in this rare moment of stillness it's consuming you. You were able to shake it for a moment, with a certain angel's guidance, but now it's back as if it had never left: Simmering, waiting to haunt those crawling minutes before you fall asleep. Would it ever truly leave you? This dull, throbbing panic?

Your neck is sore from where the djinn had strangled you, the grace Castiel had infected you with fleeting and accidental.

You assumed any long-lasting effects required intention, but that was just a working theory.

Your heart and lungs ache from your panic attack, your cheeks dry and irritated from the salt of your tears. Your limbs are heavy and almost unyielding whenever you try to move them. Sleep deprivation is catching up to you, alongside your hunger. And, God, is it fucking cold out here.

It all serves to make you feel alive: Painfully, dreadfully alive.

Castiel joins you on his feet once he figures himself out, approaching sheepishly with an unreadable expression that you don't have the energy to try and crack at the moment. You wordlessly hold out his coat in one hand, wrapping your other arm around yourself in a sorry attempt to keep warm. A chill rushes down your spine without it. You watch his jaw tick with curious eyes, his gaze skimming over the goosebumps over your arms so intimately it feels like he might actually be touching you there. You're not surprised in the slightest when he suddenly pushes forwards to take his jacket from you, stepping firmly into your space whilst doing so. A part of you expects his skin to burn you where your fingers brush together, but he's just as pleasantly warm as he always is - like a hearth you want to curl up with and fall asleep against.

Your angel doesn't meet your eyes, just sheepishly stares at the ground, and for that you are strangely grateful. You can't do another confrontation, can't stomach another pass of 'Are you alright?' from him.

No! You're not alright! You're dying inside! There, happy now?

Instead, Castiel slowly unfurls his coat with reverent hands that've intimately known a couple lifetimes worth of patience, shakes it out, and places it over your shoulders in one swift, gentle movement. The fabric makes a curious noise, something akin to the fluttering of feathers, when it fights to resist the wind. Adoring hands skim over your arms and hold there to ensure that it remains draped in place over you whilst you distractedly thread your arms through the sleeves.

Acts of service. You could never deny him of it, not when his eyes went all soft and his fingers would start to twitch in hesitation - like you might reject him entirely or dart away.

And suddenly you understand why people and fallen angels alike seem to crave touch, connection, proximity. You understand why Castiel shuddered when you'd touch his back while moving behind him, why he sat so still when you'd lean on him, why he broke down into nothing when you finally kissed.

Oxytocin is one hell of a drug, and a presumably addicting one to deprived celestial bodies.

"It's cold out here," he whispers with that stupid, scratchy voice, dark gaze focused somewhere over your matching swollen lips. He can't seem to look anywhere else, can't seem to pull himself away no matter what conflicting information his brain is feeding to him. It forces you to remember the fact that he's still just a man - an angel in a man's body, sure, but the point remains. "You may take this, if you'd like."

You lazily tilt your head up to meet him, to watch those stormy, half-lidded eyes center in on what he desired most in that moment. He's unable to bite it down, though you can tell in his hesitation just how hard he's trying. And it's enough. It's always enough. Sincerity radiates from him - pure, unadulterated feeling and candor bleeding from every touch, glance, every word that leaves his mouth. And, in an instant, you're lost.

This is the start of something insatiable, isn't it? You'd given in, caved so quickly at any miniscule amount of attention he provided that you were dizzy with it. And now that it's begun, what were you to do? What did the next part of this extended conjugal visit look like? Stolen kisses and free grace-healings whenever you called? Or, like tonight, even when you didn't call? Was he going to disappear suddenly again? Or hang around a little bit longer before leaving you orphaned for weeks at a time?

You could handle the separation then, but you were attached now. You didn't want him to leave, only to come back when one of the three of you were injured. You wanted his stoic comments, the fleeting touch, and this. Oh, you wanted this so, so badly!

You craved his calmness, his attentiveness, the peace he exuded. It made this chaotic world so much easier to trek, you never realized how much more relaxed you were when he was around, how he was the one you turned to before any other.

How were you supposed to function without him? Especially after you've tasted this-this forbidden fruit?

"You're sweet," Is what comes out of your mouth instead, in a crackling voice that's fatigued from long forgotten sobs. Your fingers automatically reach out to caress over the very edges of his suit jacket, which brush against your stomach with the proximity. God, he's pretty. Especially when he's looking down on you with half-closed eyes, swallowing the lump in his throat as he continues to press forwards until your hips are touching. You're basically standing in between his legs now, wearing his signature coat like he actually was some chivalrous boyfriend trying to charm you on a date. It's maddening, and it makes flashes of some twisty-churning anger-like sensation ball up in the pit of your stomach.

What is this?

What the fuck are the two of you doing?

Why is an angel here, comforting you like you're some lost child of God? Like pieces of broken glass he is destined to try and pick up to mold back together? Why is he looking at you like that? Like at any moment he's going to tell you... tell you he's in love with you or something?

And why are you mirroring it?

You have to ask, you can't keep it in any longer.

"But, why?"

"Why?" He parrots inquisitively, confused. His head tilts with the question in that infuriating 'Castiel' way that makes your heart flutter without your permission.

"Why are you doing this, Cas?" It comes out a tad more defensive than intended, but he doesn't seem to pick up on the nuance either way.

Castiel's lips twitch after a drawn out, pregnant pause, like he's going to say something, but can't quite find the right words. His thumbs stroke gentle lines over layers and layers of fabric over your arms, and his eyes slowly flicker down to watch the movement in a lame attempt at deflecting your attention. You stare him down anyways, mimicking the manner in which he would always seem to look through you. He's not very good at hiding his expressions when distressed, you're realizing. And suddenly you understand how he's able to read your mind. It's written all over his face with no walls to keep you out - a trait the two of you shared.

Your angel doesn't have an answer. You can tell. He chooses his words so carefully, he wasn't going to respond unless he had the perfect verbiage, the perfect reply that would completely and entirely express exactly what he wanted to say.

So he just watches.

Watches and avoids and imitates a past conversation that you can't quite recall to full accuracy.

"Because... I like you."

It's not a love confession, he speaks it too casually for it to be anything but exactly what it seems to be. It's your own words, being thrown back at you for means of deflection and to give him an extension on his journey to find those elusive 'perfect words.' He even grins a little when he says it, like it's some joke he's expecting you to snicker at. He folds when you don't return his amusement, shutting down in the face of your perceived scrutiny.

"I'm-I'm sorry," his hands drop robotically to his sides at your intense gaze, but he doesn't leave your space. You're not sure he ever really truly left it, now that you were thinking about it. Not since you've met him. He's always occupied a part of you. And suddenly it hits you:

Fuck this.

Fuck labels and nightmares and demons and Djinns and fears of attachment and the guilty look on his face! What the fuck were you so afraid of? You've faced much scarier monsters than your rising feelings for Castiel. Who the fuck cares if you've become reliant or, God forbid, attached? It's about fucking time that somebody's actually given a shit about you! You do so much for everybody around you, it was your turn for a sliver of gratitude in recompense. And the fact that said gratitude came in such a devoted, handsome tin? Well, that was just luck. You're tired of being afraid. Castiel can take pieces of that burden off your plate, if only you'd let him do what he was obviously so desperate to.

"Shut up," You scoff at his useless apology, rolling your eyes and reaching to take his face in your hands. The wash of surprise over his slightly-too-big eyes is captivating, as is the little gasp that is pulled from his throat when you selfishly pull him close. You don't get to revel in it for more than a second as you lean in and firmly press your lips to his.

Castiel freezes for a moment before letting go of a little dreamy sigh in the back of his throat that sounds something like a strange mix between relief and contentment, as if he'd been waiting for you to come back to him for a millennia. He once again eagerly pushes into you with just a tad too much pressure, before finding his footing and leveling out to kiss you like a normal person. Or, how he thinks a normal person might kiss you. It's too unbridled to be truly human, like he's trying to spell out how much you mean to him with the press of his mouth. There's no holding back, no reservations or detectable embarrassment for what might happen if he does something that might not be perfectly correct or pleasurable. He's not trying to impress you, to make you moan or swoon. He just wants to be close, to heal you in ways that grace couldn't quite reach. It's unfathomably grounding, a tether keeping you from spiraling into your own self loathing. It's protection, a promise made in your nightmare now reiterated without words: "I'll be there."

Two hands grasp your hips and pull until you're forced to step impossibly closer. And suddenly you're sighing too, stroking over his jaw and cheeks and neck like doing so might placate the strange feelings welling up in your own chest. His palm slides to hold the small of your back, the other ghosting up to press into your spine. And your mind goes blank, the tightness in your chest eases, and that otherworldly peace he exudes begins to infect you in waves.

This one is slower, less 'this is our last night on earth' and more 'it's okay, I'm here. Don't float away.' His breath hitches when you curl your fingers into his hair, his head jerking forwards in some sort of reaction that you don't think he can really control. You huff a laugh at his eagerness, to which he immediately surges to kiss your teeth, your chin, your jaw, until your giggling morphs into incredibly unattractive chortles and wheezes. He doesn't seem deterred, not until you start pushing at his shoulders.

"Cassie!"

God, his smile is so disarming. It lights up his entire face, shines in his eyes and brings cute little wrinkles to the corners of them. He does it so rarely, there's not much to be happy about in your line of work: No time for any shows of joy. He's obviously done this just to see you laugh, but you find yourself willfully ignoring the intention as he chuckles lowly.

You want to bottle it up and keep it forever.

Castiel hums his contentment with that large grin plastered over his face, nosing over your cheek and downwards in order to place one last, lingering kiss over your lips. You mold together perfectly. It's devastating. He speaks against your mouth breathily when he finds the wherewithal to properly part, sliding his hands up underneath his coat that you're now properly wearing while he finally finds the words he's looking for. He looks between your eyes listlessly, his brows slowly pinching together the more he stares at you, through you. And you're treated to the rare sight of that ever-elusive emotion over his face, currently morphing into something that's unable to be hidden.

There's a desperation there, as he pushes in to tease your mouth more than once before pausing again.

"I'm fond of that name," he admits with a shy, almost embarrassed smirk, his lips twitching in intrigue once he catches the shiver that runs through you. You've never seen him self-conscious before, let alone embarrassed. You swear a flicker of that glow returns.

Oh, Lord...

"I'm fond of you," You whisper your reply automatically, and you're not even embarrassed of how clingy and childish that makes you sound. Because the seriousness in Castiel's face melts as if you've said something incredibly endearing and impossibly heartfelt, as if you've professed some greater love to him here on the dark street of this rich ass neighborhood. You guide him into one last tender kiss to escape that 'bleeding-heart' expression that threatens to end you every time.

He leans into you immediately, obediently, with an aching undertone of naive hope that makes your heart flutter rabidly in your chest. His palms skim to your lower back whilst your hands find where his tie hangs loosely over his neck and pulls. He's smiling into you, nipping at your lip and shuddering when your fingernails run over just the right spot over his scalp. And you're lost again, sighing into him like some lovesick little girl who's just met her knight in shining armor.

So lost, you don't hear approaching footsteps. Or the accompanying surprised gasps.

"Oh... kay," Sam's voice cuts through your heated haze, sending you flying away from where your angel and you had been intimately fondling against the back door of Dean's car.

"Woah! Cas!"

Speaking of Dean.

Fuck.

Fuck!

You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, averting your gaze and flying to fix your mussed hair and clothes. The heat over your cheeks won't leave no matter what you do, giving way to a deep blush that tattoos into your skin. Castiel does not make the same effort. He just stands there with his lips pursed, confused at the distance and seemingly unphased by the Winchester's sudden appearance.

Dean is standing beside his brother with his hands frozen in a heeding position in the air, slack-jawed and unable to create discernable sentences. You two might as well have strangled Sam in front of him judging by the caliber of his reaction and the dramatic unhinging of his jaw. He's sputtering, brows furrowed, and finger a-pointing accusatorily between you and Castiel.

"Wh-What the - fucking - fuck? You - You fuckers! When did - What the fuck?" He struggles aimlessly, thrusting his blame vaguely in your direction.

"Dean," Sam warns with a roll of his eyes, clapping his hand over his brother's bicep to keep him from approaching and potentially saying or doing something he might later regret. Your heart is pumping wildly at the confrontation, frozen where you stand. This is too embarrassing for you to stomach. Dean's like a brother to you, and Castiel's like some strange, too-close-for-comfort brother to him.

A strange, too-close-for-comfort brother that he just caught you making out with.

It's all disgustingly uncomfortable.

"Hey! He kissed me first!" Is what, regrettably, comes out of your mouth instead, accompanied by another accusatory point at one terribly bewildered angel. What can you say?

Dean brings out the worst in you.

Castiel's eyes go wide with the attention, and he looks to you, puzzled. His tone is too even when he speaks.

"You reciprocated enthusiastically-"

"Castiel!" You hiss, whipping around to glare at him and flicking your hand to smack his shoulder.

"Yes?" He responds in ignorance, bunching his brows up in confusion when you groan and go to hide your face in your hands. Dean aggressively barks Castiel's name and makes a movement to approach, though he's immediately shoved to the side by his brother. He stumbles to catch himself, huffing and crossing his arms to quell his anger.

"What he means is 'are you okay?'" Sam swoops in to save you the embarrassment, and Dean finally seems to understand how to prioritize the situation. His eyes soften, his shoulders release a bit of their tension, and he reluctantly shuffles over to join his brother.

A part of you thinks he still might make a move to wring Cas' neck, but he just tongues his cheek and places his hands over his hips whilst eyeing the angel.

"I-I'm fine," You promise as you lean into the gentle, relieved hug Sam offers, gaze intentionally flickering away from where Dean stands.

"Are you?" Sam presses, taking a little longer than he should before releasing you. He's so sincere when he talks, it drives you insane. He takes both your shoulders, looking over your flushed face and hunched figure for visible marks before deciding that whatever injuries you had sustained weren't bad enough for him to fret over in this moment. You hold his arms, shaking your head.

"I promise, Sam. I just needed some air," You're lying through your teeth. What you really needed was an angel with healing powers to restart your lungs and distract you until you forgot how to breathe. Which, mission accomplished!

Dean barks a laugh.

"HA! Air? Yeah, I'm sure you're getting a lot of air with your tongue down his throat," He mumbles under his breath as he stomps over to the trunk of his car, roughly swinging it open and tossing the bag over his shoulder in. A dizzying flush rushes down your spine at the bite, and you can't stop the tremble in your hands where they brush at Sam's elbows, or the tears that prick at the very back of your eyes. This was already so much for you to take, did he really need to make it worse?

You hate that you know where his anger is stemming from, that it's not just from a simple kiss with his best friend.

Because you failed.

You'd rushed in, gone rouge, went recklessly. And it went just how Dean told you it would go, because you did have a death wish. Haphazard, heedless, impulsive, and it got you exactly where he said it would get you: one foot in the grave. If Castiel wasn't there, you're sure the poison would have boiled your insides, made you a pile of mush for Sam to find. You saw an opening, you disregarded the plan, it-it's all your fault. People could be dead up there, and it's all your fault.

Your angel hesitates when watching your visceral reaction, torn between comforting you and padding after the Winchester brother that was currently hiding his anger about as well as neon in the middle of the forest. But Sam has you close, and he doesn't want to upset you anymore than you already were, so the decision is made for him.

"Dean," Castiel sighs, exasperated. He follows as his counterpart angrily rounds to the driver's side of the car, and you hear a round of hushed, unintelligible arguing rise up between the two of them.

Oh, God...

You wipe over your face, harshly pressing your fingers into your eyes in an attempt to rub away the terrible nightmare of a day you've had. You want to melt into the floor, explode into a million tiny pieces, drop fucking dead - anything to get you out of this horrible situation that you had found yourself in. You crave sleep like you never have before, the thought of a nice, warm, mildewy motel bed enough to bring tears to your eyes. But you knew what was waiting patiently in the darkness, aching to haunt your dreams and infect what was left of your sanity. There was no escape, not really, not truly.

Not that you deserved it anyways.

Sam offers a comforting squeeze over your arms, his expression one of awkward placation: A tight smile, raised brows, worried eyes. It's a wonder that he's related to that asshole, that he's put up with him for so many years. You loved Dean, you really did, but sometimes his antics pushed you over the brink. You'd bite down any disagreements this time, however. Dean's discontent was justified in this case. You'd messed up, again. How many more strikes was he going to allow you before you were kicked to the curb, forced into desk duty? You'd already greatly overstayed your welcome.

"Don't worry about him, he's just..." Sam sighs deeply, the stress of the past few weeks etched into his brow. "Dean," Sam shrugs, eyes flickering over the fading mark of the djinn's hand over your neck. His lack of alarm leads you to believe that it's fading nicely as your body breaks down the remnants of the poison.

You're just hoping he doesn't see the mark that Castiel's no doubt left over your jaw, that wasn't fading anytime soon.

"I know," You nod in acknowledgement, letting your hands fall to your sides as he finally lets go of you. You'd fought back the threat of tears, barely able to stomach the guilt that Dean's behavior was causing to rise back up. You could cry later, hate yourself later, just keep it together until this hellish day is over. Then, almost sheepishly: "Thanks."

Sam flashes a smile, a forced one, but a smile nonetheless. He tucks his hands into his pockets, allowing you a little bit of space before responding with a tone of nonchalance that you were ever-so grateful for. "Yeah."

A moment of awkward silence settles, sticky and thick, and you can no longer look him in the eye with the additional weight of it all. Your eyes wander to where the boys are quietly arguing behind the Impala to check on the angel that was currently taking the brunt of your lecture for you. Dean is unabashedly whisper yelling at Castiel, making wild gestures and intermittently pushing roughly at his shoulders. You swear you hear him hush the words 'how could you' and 'she's like my sister' through clenched teeth whilst grabbing at Cas' shirt collar. Their conversation quickly shifts to include the phrase 'she could have gotten herself killed,' and that's your cue to stop listening in.

Castiel's just standing there silently, taking it. His head is tilted to the side, that little wrinkle in his brow giving away his bewilderment to Dean's reaction. His hair is disheveled still, a flush settled from the hollows of his cheeks all the way down to his collarbones.

"I wouldn't let that happen," Reaches you even as you attempt to fade out of their argument, and the dizziness rushes back to overtake you. His voice is low, growling and insistent as he stands up to Dean's chiding. It makes you want to crumple away into nothing. This is what you've been reduced to? Something that needs protection, monitoring?

"I mean, I don't know why he's so surprised," Sam watches with you, shaking his head in disbelief. The conversation he hears is much different than the one that you hear, you assume by his choice of words. You quirk a brow when he casually gestures to your current choice of attire. "I could see it coming from a mile away."

Okay, that's enough to distract you.

"What? How?" Your eyes go wide as Sam huffs a gentle laugh, shrugging his shoulders. He flashes you a sly look that screams 'really?

"C'mon, the healing? The nicknames? The way he just randomly shows up to jobs? The longing glances?" He speaks sarcastically, eyeing you down with a smirk. You can feel that blush crawling back up your cheeks as you tuck your hands into Castiel's coat pockets. The slightly oversized sleeves get caught on your fingers, the scent of ozone wafting up when you move.

"I-What? That doesn't mean-"

Sam brings you to reality with the speaking of your name, and you go quiet to spare you the embarrassment of him spelling out the lead up to this outburst to you.

You pull the lapels of Castiel's coat over yourself as a wind breezes by, crossing your arms and praying that the crescendoing argument ensuing just feet away ceases before you or Sam are forced to intervene. Perfectly trimmed trees roar their discontent at the draft, boughs of branches and leaves casting restless shadows over the matching perfectly paved asphalt.

And that mini-mansion is just sitting there, with that stupid light in the upstairs bedroom still glowing; a beacon of a reminder that brings a dull throb of panic back over you. There are no more moving silhouettes, no more fluttering curtains. It's just... empty.

"Did we get them all?" You willingly change the subject, blurring eyes focused over the domestic dream sitting just behind Sam's shoulder. You expect him to go into the details, to debrief you about the death of the third djinn and the status of the two you had slaughtered, as he would normally do after an intense job like this one, but he doesn't. He just nods slowly, silently, though you can tell that there's something else simmering behind the motion.

Sam's very good at hiding the important, world-ending things, but in smaller situations like this...

"Yeah... Yeah," He says simply, with too much enthusiasm, the way his teeth dig into his bottom lip making you uneasy. Dread blooms in your sternum, a pool of heat that churns your stomach and accelerates your heart. You hate that you know what his reaction means, but you can't stop yourself from confirming:

"Any victims?"

You can't look at him in the eyes. Won't, in fact.

But Sam's silence is telling enough.

You intake a sharp breath, clenching your eyes shut and forcing down the agonizing guilt that threatens to burn a hole through your chest. Tears burn behind your eyes, a lump builds in your throat that you aren't able to properly swallow. That familiar sense of panic flirts at the very edges of your psyche, threatening to flood back into your lacking body, your broken mind. Your ears are ringing, screams of victims-past blurring with your own. Everything fades, and you stare, lost and listless, at the little light shining in that too-big house.

It's all your fault. Dean's right. You're no hunter, you're just some scared little girl who's been craving death since the second Bobby pulled you from that Demon's den. You're nothing, reckless, impulsive, a sad excuse for a human that doesn't deserve a modicum the kindness you've been afforded. You have blood on your hands, congealing alongside remnants that you never seemed to be able to completely wash off. You deserve nothing. You're a liability. You-

You have to get out of here. You have to go far, far away. You have to put down the knives and guns and the antidotes and just... go.

You want your bed. You want to sleep into next week. You want your little room in Bobby's attic. You want a nice, warm meal. You want a heavier jacket. You want a handful of Advil and a fifth of whiskey. You want melatonin. You want Sam to stop looking at you with that pitiful expression. You want Dean to shut his stupid fucking mouth and quit raising his voice at your angel. Speaking of it, you want your angel. Cas.You want his warmth. You want his presence. You want him to gather you up into his arms, to kiss you too hard, to tell you that it's all going to be okay and whisper some endearingly blunt virtue over your lips. You want him to come with you.

But you aren't about to admit any of that to anybody, especially not Sam. Instead, you say (bluntly, and with no room for frills or misunderstanding):

"I want my car."

"Hey, it's not your fau-"

"I want my car."