Chapter Text
rating: M
warnings: None.
notes: Completely fictional write-up of Parker Indian Hospital--they actually only employ a few doctors, not the larger roster described here.
epilogue
"Maybe to fix it."
-- "The Born-Again Identity," 7.17
"Holy crap! Are those all yours, Dr. N?"
Castiel looks up. Ava is leaning inside with her brown support staff coat half on, one arm pushed through the sleeve and one not as she gapes at the row of Venti-sized Starbucks cups sitting next to Castiel's keyboard.
"Ah," he says guiltily. "Yes."
Ava shoves her other arm into her coat. "What's the matter, had a long day?"
"Long days." Castiel scrubs his jaw with one hand, looking at the clock at the bottom of his computer screen. His shift began at seven a.m. Thursday, and it's now nearly eleven p.m., Friday. "Dr. Uriel came down with the flu."
"Should've gotten his flu shot," Ava says with a grin. There's no love lost between her and the other doctor, who consistently calls the emergency support staff members you or girl rather than by their names. "So, what, are you stuck here for the rest of the weekend?"
Castiel looks at the clock again. "No, I called in a favor to Rachel." The other radiologist usually practices in Page, but she sometimes picks up shifts in Parker. When Castiel called and told her about his situation, she agreed to drive over and take a twelve-hour shift so he could get some sleep. "She should be here shortly."
"All right." Ava glances at the cups again. "You need another one to make it till she gets here? I can run downstairs."
"I think the barista has already closed up for the night. But thank you, Ava."
She dimples at him. "Just buttering you up for my letter of rec," she says, and disappears back out the door.
Castiel smiles vaguely and turns back to the computer screen, checking to see whether another image has come in.
He hasn't been in Arizona long, perhaps six months. Long enough for him to find out there's not much to do here, with the closest shopping centers, and what his mother would call civilization, at least an hour away. But the isolation is an advantage in its own way, providing long quiet hours in which to write. He sent off his second book only a few weeks ago, and has fifty pages of a third sitting on the hard drive of his laptop to send to his father for feedback when he gets a chance. He thinks this one may be more interesting as a graphic novel than a conventional text, and he's already sent Jesse an e-mail asking if he would be interested in taking on the project as co-creator.
Of all the people he met that summer in Kansas, Ruby and her boys ended up being the only ones with whom he still has any real contact. Even his correspondence with Sam fell off after that summer, Sam transferring to Vanderbilt to continue working for Gabriel Milton. They never spoke of Dean, but the thought of him dwelt in every uncertain pause in their phone conversation, in every absent emoticon in Sam's increasingly less frequent texts. But Ruby's e-mail address popped up in Castiel's inbox one day not long after he left Lawrence--My blabbermouth son won't stop asking how you're doing, so if you'd please email him a message back we'd all be a lot happier--and they've been in contact ever since. Ruby's been working as an NP for a while now, after taking classes part-time for years, and Castiel recently wrote a letter of recommendation for Adam for the University of Wisconsin. He gets weekly texts from all of them, but most frequently from Jesse, who's finishing up a sequential art degree and sends Castiel picture messages of his portfolio items as he finishes them.
None of them live in Lawrence anymore, so the city, and the summer he spent there, aren't on Castiel's mind nearly as much as they used to be. Still, Castiel would be lying if he said he doesn't still think of Dean Winchester now and then. When he glimpses drawn-looking patients reading books in hospital waiting rooms, or on hot days when he had to wait for his car to air out before getting in. But it's become more memory than bruise, now, something to appreciate rather than be pained by, to resent or stew in guilt over.
Which is why he doesn't expect the violence of his reaction, when he sees the provider identifier on the chest X-ray that comes in while he waits for Rachel.
Usually he only checks which provider ordered the X-ray when it's a complicated case. But today, for some reason, he glances at it before looking at the X-ray itself, and there it is in the tiny cramped font of their electronic charting system: WINCHESTER, DEAN--ARNP.
His swivel chair clatters to the floor behind him.
Rachel's coming down the hallway when he bursts out of the door. She stops short, saying, "Castiel, what--?"
But he's already pounding past her, breathing hard. There's a strange feeling burgeoning inside him, as he races down the hallway with his white coat flapping behind him: For a fleeting moment he feels like the angel in his father's books, coat heavy with memories and mistakes and burdens and hopes.
Then he's bursting through the double doors and jerking to a stop right in front of the nurses' station because Dean's there. Right in the very first Intensive Care room, the sleeves of his white coat rolled up to his elbows as he stitches closed a laceration on the patient's leg, his bottom lip drawn under his teeth in concentration.
He glances up at the patient after a moment, saying something to her as he ties off the suture with his forceps. Castiel can't hear the words, but his voice carries through the half-open door, thrums in Castiel's bones like the vibrations from a tuning fork. He's curling his hands into fists against the sound when Dean turns and their eyes meet through the Plexiglas.
Dean's eyes fly wide. Castiel takes an automatic step back. They stare at each other for a moment longer, their faces mirrors of uncertainty. Then Dean turns and says something to the patient.
A moment later he's slipping out of the door, pulling the curtain and door both closed behind him. "Cas?"
"Ah." Cas's hands spasm; he scrabbles into his pocket for the print-out he'd grabbed from the printer on the way here. "Right lateral decubitus film shows blunted cardiophrenic angle consistent with right-sided pleural effusion. Fluid noted in the horizontal fissure..." He trails off as he realizes what he's doing, heat spreading up his neck. "Uh. Hello, Dean."
"Hey yourself!" Dean's smiling then, pushing forward. He's grabbing Cas's shoulder, giving him a shake. "The hell're you doing here, man?"
"I work here." Cas slowly regains his equilibrium, clears his throat as Dean lets go of his shoulder. "Radiology."
"No kidding, I could tell from the recitation." Dean gives him a wry look. "You just start your shift? Because I'm about to get off, and I--"
"I'm off," Cas blurts out as Dean finishes, "could use a burger."
They stare at each other. Then Dean's mouth hooks up in a grin, and Cas feels his own doing the same, and Dean is grabbing his shoulder again.
"Damn, it's good to see you." He gives Castiel another shake, holding on like he can't quite bring himself to let go. "I'm digging the peach fuzz, by the way. It's a good look on you."
Cas's hand comes up to his face, feeling the prickles along his jaw. "It's called the I've been here since Friday morning look," he says dryly. He looks at Dean, fondness swelling behind his ribs, up his throat to push at the corners of his lips. "Dean."
"Cas," Dean mimics, grinning.
"Dean." Cas takes an uncertain step closer. "We didn't part...friends."
Dean's eyes are clear and serious. "No."
Cas falters. Closes his mouth.
"But I'm not exactly the same guy I was." Dean is watching him, carefully. "And call me on it if I'm wrong, Cas, but I'm betting you aren't, either."
Cas looks down, studying his hands. He's touched more patients with them, typed more words with them, than he ever could have fathomed when he was twenty-two, trapped in the tunnel vision of grief and anger and a desperate need to escape. They're at once rougher and gentler, more calloused and more deliberate than they were then. But they're also still the hands that once cupped Dean's rough jaw, stroked through his sweaty hair and traced down his soft skin.
"What do you say?" Dean says. Holds out his hand, palm up. "Should we give it another try?"
Cas looks down at Dean's hand. Traces his fingers along the new calluses he doesn't remember, the old ones that he does.
Then he closes his own hand around it and looks up at Dean. "I'd like that."
"Let me tell you my story.
Let me tell you everything."
-- "The Man Who Would Be King," 6.20