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Dean rolls off him, breathing heavily. Cas reaches over to stroke his hair, feeling as he moves the wet stickiness of Dean’s mess sliding out of his vessel, beginning to cool. He could disintegrate it with a thought, if he wished, but he actually enjoys the grossness, the physicality of it. And he likes it when Dean marks him as his own.
Cas likes Dean best like this: after they make love, exhausted and still wanting. These are the times when the anxiety that seems to nip at Dean’s heels all hours of the day and night melts away, and Dean shows a softness he doesn’t normally allow himself. When under cover of darkness he lets Cas touch him, comfort him, without shooing away Cas’ hands. Lets Cas kiss his neck, and bury his face in Dean’s shoulder. Lets Cas love him.
-
When Cas stumbled into that basement room, his first reaction had been confusion. He wasn’t meant to be awake. He had promised eternal sleep to the Empty, and it had promised him the same.
Sam and Dean stood before him, side by side, and said nothing, for one single, interminable moment.
And then Dean hugged him, swept him up into his arms, clutched at him like he would never let go, and Cas had just stood there, stiff and brittle. All he could think about was the look he’d last seen on Dean’s face.
Sam hugged him as well, and both brothers clapped him on the back and said I’m glad you’re back, man, and other usual things. Cas was glad for the way they were both holding his arms, since he was fairly certain he would have collapsed on the floor without the both of them supporting his weight. Dean tossed him a beer once they reached the bunker’s kitchen, and they stood around like old times.
Like very old times.
Cas did not ask the Winchesters where Jack was, because he had a feeling that that would be a Hard Question. He didn’t want to lose his welcome quite so soon after getting it back.
-
In the mornings, Dean likes to cook a long, leisurely breakfast. The last egg leaves the pan like clockwork just as Sam gets in from his morning run, unless Dean is trying something new and fancy, like the sticky buns he made on Christmas Eve.
Sam and Cas sit at the table, and Dean feeds them; he piles Sam’s plate with food, and although he knows Cas does not eat, that he gains no pleasure from consumption, he makes sure to give Cas a bite sized portion of each thing he makes, “because I know you’ll learn to like it someday.” The eggs and bacon and toast and butter and jam taste like complex arrangements of atoms: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur. Sodium, potassium, calcium, iron. But more importantly, much more importantly: they taste like love.
In the evenings Dean wants to spend time with Cas. Usually a movie, because Dean is very invested in catching Cas up on all the things he still doesn’t understand about human culture. They sit on the little loveseat that Dean bought for The Dean Cave, and Dean gives a running commentary, and as the movie goes on, Dean allows Cas to rest his head upon Dean’s shoulder.
Sometimes Dean doesn’t want to watch a movie, he wants to go for a drive, speeding around the Kansas highway system with his hand out the window, or coasting down dirt backroads. Sometimes Cas hopes that Dean will stop the car in a quiet clearing, and Dean will strip Cas of his coat and tie and press him down into the Impala’s backseat like he used to with the girls he would take out as a young man, but he never does. Still, Cas loves the way Dean sings along to the radio, and lets Cas rest a hand on his thigh.
Cas’ favorite type of evening, however, is when Dean wants to go for walks. In the darkness and loneliness of the woods outside the bunker, Dean will hold Cas’ hand. The absolute isolation allows Dean to be a little more free. The eyes he seems to feel don’t extend all the way out there. Once, he swung Cas around on an impulse and kissed him against a tree. Dean is never so spontaneous, conducting their life on a rigid schedule, within rigid boundaries. There is something freeing for him about being alone, outdoors, and Cas reaps the benefits with pleasure.
Nights belong to Dean completely. There is lovemaking, of course, and the aftermath. But once all that is done with, and Dean is asleep, Cas watches over him, just as he once had. Though without the clueless innocence the habit had originally held.
When he was far more naive, he had never even had the impulse to touch Dean’s sleeping form - not because he didn’t want to, but because he had no context through which to process that nascent desire. Now he can touch as much as he likes: comb his fingers through Dean’s hair, run a hand down his side, brush the pad of his thumb against Dean’s lips… He can even press a cheek to Dean’s shoulder blade and hide himself there, that so-human gesture of desperation for total union, expression of the urge to crawl inside another, to become one with him.
Afternoons are the only time when Cas must exist for himself. Dean is aging, and always retires to his room for an hour or two after lunch. He has never allowed Cas to follow him - Cas knows that he fears any appearance of weakness, and he does not want anyone to know that afternoon naps are starting to become less of a luxury, more of a necessity. Regardless, Cas can smell sleep on him when he returns (and if he doesn't, he prepares for a Bad Night). While Dean sleeps, Cas uses the time to allow himself emotions that he knows Dean would never countenance.
This is when he visits Jack.
“Visits” is perhaps a strong term. But he sits before the small altar he constructed in a disused room of the bunker, and he lights the candle that he had to disable the smoke detector for, and he stares into Jack’s photograph, and he prays.
Cas doesn’t know what, if anything, hears him. Certainly nothing responds. And the little boy he knew - his son, a child, in human terms barely done with teething - is certainly something like dead. Cas hopes that he is closer to dead than not dead. He knows, excruciatingly first hand, that taking in that kind of power, it’s less like being the master of anything, and more like being worn as a thin skin suit. Godhood is not a power Cas would entrust to anyone. It’s not a fate he would wish on anyone, either.
So he prays. And he hopes - for what, he doesn’t know. Perhaps for this new god to spit out the chewed remnants of his son and allow Cas’ love to piece him back together again. Perhaps for a quick and merciful death to the parts of Jack that still live. Perhaps just that Cas’ prayers give him solace, wherever, whatever he is now.
And after, he composes himself and returns to the bunker’s kitchen, readying himself to become Dean’s once more.
-
A few days later, Cas had almost convinced himself that his parting words were forgotten. That Dean had excised them from his memory, whitewashing the events of Cas’ sacrifice, turning him back into the chaste, self-abnegating creature he pretended to be. It wouldn’t be the first time Dean’s need for a truth had created it in his mind.
Choking, icy relief filled him at the thought. They really could just go back to the way things had always been. Never having to speak of it. There would be no irreparable crack. No schism. Only more of the same.
This little fantasy lasted until Dean pulled him aside after dinner one evening. Sam had retired to his room; was, Dean said, “calling that new girl he likes so much.” Cas had wondered if he meant Eileen, or if there’s someone else in the picture now. It didn’t occur to him to ask. He would find out in time.
But Dean put a hand on Cas’ arm as he was getting up from the table.
“Sit.”
Dean himself was standing. Gripping the back of a chair, leaning over it, as though there was something he needed to see more clearly on the other side of the room.
Cas looked up at him, hands folded in his lap, and waited.
“Cas I gotta- I gotta say something. We need to- I’ve had a lot of time to think about what you said. You know. Back then.”
Cas froze. He did not move from his pose, but the casual arrangement of limbs changed instantaneously from a relaxed, ready posture, to a prison from which he was unsure he would ever free himself.
So, this was it. Would Dean eject him from the bunker? He didn’t sound angry, but Cas had never found reading Dean to be an easy task.
Or would he simply humiliate Cas? Draw away from him? Break off their friendship? Never touch him again? Was the brush on the shoulder that Dean had told him to sit down with the last time Cas would feel Dean’s warmth against his vessel.
Cas watched Dean as he bit his lip and glanced to his left, the opposite direction from where Cas was sitting.
“I thought about it and I… I didn’t do so well, when you were gone, Cas. And I thought about Dad. How- how he used to get. When I was a little kid. After- you know. And you said- you said you couldn’t have it. But I’ve thought about it, and I think you can, Cas, buddy, I think you can have as much as you like.”
Cas was lost. He must have. Something was wrong with his… perceptions? His human language capacity? His interpretation of the words? He- this wasn’t-
Dean reached down into Cas’ lap, and lifted one of the hands that lay there unmoving. Dead. And he laced the fingers with his own. And he tugged the hand still higher. And he brought it to his lips.
Dean still wasn’t looking at Cas when the lightbulb just over his head burst.
-
Dean doesn’t hunt so much anymore. It might be because there is simply less brutality in a post-Chuck world. But Sam still seems to find hunts for himself.
The first time the three of them went out on a hunt together after he saved Cas from the Empty, Dean had seemed to draw into himself. He was angry. Touchy. He didn’t touch Cas or talk to him beyond the required, and he didn’t meet Cas’ eye once. When a random civilian tried to speak with him, instead of charming them, he would snap, or brush them off. When, once they were back at the motel, Cas tried to stroke his hair to calm him, Dean shook him off with a short, “don’t.” Halfway through, Dean ordered Cas to stay in the motel room, and just wait for him and Sam.
It wasn’t until they returned to the bunker that Dean looked at him again.
Cas isn’t sure what he did wrong, on that first hunt, but since then, Dean doesn’t invite him along.
Instead, Cas waits.
Waiting is simple for Cas. He is still, by his essence, an angel, even if he has long worshiped the wrong god. The absent-yet-alert mental hibernation of an angel awaiting its orders is something easy for Cas to access. It is perhaps the only part of him left that is still a soldier of God. Or perhaps more accurately, a soldier of Dean in the way he had once been a soldier of God. He has been so twisted and warped by… well, everything, that it often seems strange to call himself an angel. But waiting - for orders, for the apocalypse, for God - that’s something angels were created for. It’s something Cas is meant for. Waiting for Dean in the bunker is only a half-step to the left of what he was intended to do with eternity.
Dean asked him, once, guiltily, if he had even moved while the brothers were gone. Cas had, of course, lied. But now he always makes sure, a few hours before the Winchesters’ return, to create a small, insignificant mess in the Dean Cave, or the library, or Dean’s bedroom, in order to give a more human appearance to his waiting, and alleviate Dean’s concerns.
This time he makes it in the kitchen. Dean knows he drinks tea sometimes - the brothers call it tea, but Cas almost never actually adds the teabag. It’s the experience of drinking straight boiling water that he enjoys, not the extracted essence of tea leaves. Cas pulls the electric kettle out of the cabinet, and places a single mug on its side in the sink.
Sam and Dean arrive home after the sun has set. Cas waits at the bottom of the staircase. When they come in, Sam looks upset. Dean’s face is stony.
“I mean the kid was- Oh, hey, Cas.” Sam’s composure snaps into place as he looks down, and he smiles in his apologetic way.
Dean has blood splashed across the front of his favorite jacket. But it’s not his, not even human. Cas can smell it. Vampire.
He also has a split lip, a black eye, and a long cut on his right arm.
Cas wishes he could greet Dean with a kiss. Sam has made it clear that he plans to move out of the bunker soon. Until that time, Cas will greet Dean and Sam with the same nod at the door, and kiss Dean later.
Dean pats Cas’ elbow as they walk past, and Cas turns his head to hide a private smile. He trails after them to the map table, where Sam pulls out a chair and sits, while Dean just leans with a groan.
Wordlessly, Cas extends a hand and brushes it against Dean's sleeve, letting grace flow through his fingertips and heal Dean’s cut arm. Dean gives him a look, lips pursed, eyebrows raised, and Cas looks down. He knows Dean doesn’t like him using up his limited grace on what Dean would consider small things, but Cas could see that Dean had already popped out three of the stitches that Sam had put in just driving back to the bunker, and he wanted to forestall any more pain. He leaves the black eye and the split lip, and busies himself retrieving cold beers from the fridge.
When he returns, the brothers are arguing again.
“So you think we should just let some fang run around?” Dean has turned to face Sam, still leaning on the map table.
“I’m saying he had a plan of action, Dean. He was gonna drink cattle blood. He was gonna buy a bus ticket to Texas and live on the plains. It’s not like vampires get heat stroke.” Cas hands Sam his beer. “Thanks, Cas.” Sam says, glancing in his direction.
“He would’ve started with cattle blood.” Dean’s eyes are narrowed now. Cas offers Dean his own beer, but it takes a second for him to notice. When he does, he swipes it out of Cas’ hand with brutal swiftness. Cas can’t keep himself from licking his lips as Dean cracks the top and takes a swig.
“Plenty of vampires do it, remember Lenore?”
“Yeah, I do, and I remember that it only took a couple years for her to fall off the wagon.”
“Because she was being mind controlled by Eve! ” Sam’s voice has gone high with frustration. Cas pulls out a chair on Dean’s other side and sits down, folding his hands in his lap.
“Besides, we had good reason to trust Lenore. Her nest’d been living like that for years. This guy was a new vamp, they can’t control themselves like that.” Dean’s hand finds the top of Cas’ head, seemingly without meaning to, and begins absently carding through his hair. Cas leans into it.
“‘ Guy ?’ What the hell do you mean, ‘ guy ?’ He was a kid, Dean. He was fifteen.”
“Dean is right,” Cas says. He can’t see Sam’s face, Dean is between them. “A newly turned vampire is particularly dangerous. They have almost no control over their own actions.” Cas licks his lips again. “They’re… they’re all hunger. They have to be put down.” Dean’s hand takes an affectionate handful of Cas’ hair. Cas presses his face into Dean’s side, hiding the world from his gaze.
“He was a child.” Sam’s voice is plaintive now. Defeated.
“Hunters do what they must. You know that,” Cas says, his voice muffled in Dean’s shirt.
-
Cas crumpled beneath Dean, slain not by a blade but by desire. He tipped over backward, landing hard on Dean’s bed and pulling Dean down after him. He hoped his vessel could provide Dean with a soft landing.
Dean fell on Cas with an audible thump. Being crushed beneath him was exhilarating. Cas took the time to feel each swell and dip of Dean’s still-clothed body against his own.
Dean kissed him, holding his face with both hands and taking. After a short moment rendered motionless, Cas had no choice but to fist both hands in the thin fabric of Dean’s t-shirt, and give as good as he got.
“Hey- hey Cas,” Dean panted, breaking away for a moment. “Cas you’re- you like men, right?” Cas squinted at that. Wasn’t their current pose answer enough? But Dean barrelled on. “You’re- you like guys, so you want to be the girl, right? You can be the girl, and I can be your guy?”
“What?” Cas blinked, but before he could ask anything more, Dean had grabbed him and kissed him again.
Dean deftly undid Cas’ tie, and whipped it across the room. He hooked a finger into the closure of Cas’ collar and yanked, hard enough that the buttons popped. Cas shivered with arousal. All his hair stood on end.
Dean pulled away, and began to mouth at Cas’ neck instead, leaving Cas free to speak.
“Yeah,” he gasped “I want you to… ‘be my guy.’”
-
“Dean. Dean, ” Cas gasps. Dean is blaspheming in him with force and purpose, and as always, it renders him helpless, able only to cant his hips and beg for more.
Grace pools in every part of his vessel Deal touches. In his collarbone, under Dean’s lips; in his shoulder, under Dean’s hand; in his guts, where Dean penetrates him. Everything that makes up Cas is straining against the thin membrane of his vessel. Attempting to make itself one with Dean .
For millennia, he had no thought of self , only the song of the holy host, and the angel Castiel as a single member of that vast chorus. He only perceived himself during those few terrifying times he had by some accident fallen out of harmony.
Now, after years of struggle with his newly minted individuality, all he can feel is that overwhelming need to become one with Dean, to become a part of him, to be consumed by him, to be in harmony again. Cas wonders if this is the closest any angel has ever been to the object of its worship.
He is helpless, too, to keep from feeling a sense of triumph. As he writhes, trying to get Dean deeper, he sees in his mind a much younger Dean, locked in this same pose with another, smaller, softer body.
In his many unseen vigils, Cas only entered the bedroom of that household once. He understood that to see this, the interlocking of lovers, was to transgress something sacred. But he was also unable to turn away as she kissed Dean, spread her legs for him, gasped with desire for him.
On that day a sickness with no name descended upon him. He knew only that he hated her, that he longed desperately to take her as his vessel, that thinking of Dean with her made him itch.
It was nothing like it was with Anna. Once, he and Anna spoke, in the way angels do, consciousness to consciousness, a merging of thoughts and knowledge. And she had shown him - Dean, in the back of the Impala, sweat and heat and wet sounds filling that tiny space. These many years later, Cas suspects that Anna that day noticed something growing within him that he himself had not. That she gave him that memory, those desires and sensations, to bring him lower, hasten his fall. At the time, all Cas knew was that she had opened something in him, something new and dangerous, something that he didn’t understand. A ravenous pit he feared would eventually consume him.
(From far on the other side of that consumption, Cas thinks it wasn’t so bad. If one loses one’s entire self, if one is nothing but a thin skin suit around that hunger… well, the experience of satiation is like nothing else .)
But when he stood in her house, he knew exactly what it was he wanted, even if he could not say it. He nearly lost dominion over his vessel when she reached out to hold Dean’s waist as he thrust into her.
A year later, when Dean asked Cas to remove him from her mind, he had sifted through her memories as he was taking them. He saw that she had wanted as well, that there was togetherness in wanting. Like with Anna, he found himself in communion with her, though she did not choose it, was not even really present.
Like Anna, she gave him her experiences. But instead of one moment as Dean’s lover, she showed him a life built as Dean’s woman. With a home. With a child. (She also showed him a home destroyed and a child harmed, but he had paid no attention at the time.)
Cas wonders if Dean will allow him to reach out and hold his waist. He wants to grasp Dean, to feel the flex and strain of his muscles as he thrusts. He lifts his hand.
But Cas has come to know that sex is an emotionally delicate time for Dean. He decides not to risk it.
-
Dean held Cas on the couch. Sam was out for the night, gone on a date. It was the first time the two of them had had the bunker to themselves since Dean had told him he could have what he wanted, and Cas relished the opportunities afforded. He lay with his head in Dean’s lap, Dean stroking his shoulder with one hand, the other cupping the back of his head.
On the TV, Dallas and Leeloo made love in the recovery chamber, and the credits rolled. Cas nestled closer to Dean.
“I just keep thinking about Sammy and that girl of his,” Dean said, giving Cas’ shoulder a squeeze. “He’s gonna move in with her, I think. Not like us. I’m gonna die right here in this bunker, with you right next to me. Boys club forever, ‘til I’m ninety. But Sam, he’s gonna settle down. Get himself that white picket fence, some babies, the whole nine yards. A real happy ending. You know?” Dean looked down, and kissed Cas on the forehead. “Or maybe you don’t. I don’t think angels retire, do they? Don’t fantasize about setting up in a cabin and making little nephilim, huh?”
Cas’ breath caught in his throat.
In lieu of replying, he buried his face in Dean’s shirt.
-
“Hey, Cas,” Sam says. Cas stops in his tracks. He is making his way from the library to his secret shrine. He has no excuse, no reason, no explanation for why he is in this particular hallway.
“Sam,” he says, mind blank.
“It’s, uh, hey, it’s great running into you. Can we… can we talk?”
“Of course,” Cas says, calming slightly, but also baffled by Sam’s anxious demeanor.
“So… how are you doing, lately?” The weight with which Sam asks what Cas is aware is a “small-talk” question baffles Cas.
“I am well. And yourself?”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean… are you okay? Is something going on with you, lately?”
“I’m alright, Sam. Nothing’s… going on.” Cas cocks his head.
“Okay. Okay. I just mean… I’m really happy for you and Dean. Like, I’m glad that you’re together now. I know you’ve had feelings for him for a long time, and I’m glad that you finally get… a happy ending for yourself.” Sam looks down. Cas is suddenly frozen. There is a “but” coming.
He nods.
“But are you guys… good?” Sam pauses. “I mean… are you happy?”
“Of course I’m happy. My life with Dean is everything I could ever have asked for and more.”
“I- Look, I’m not asking if you’re, I don’t know, unhappy dating him, or something. I just mean… I know you’re new to this kind of relationship, and it’s not exactly like Dean has been on a lot of second dates. It can be… tough to figure these things out. And it can be tough to work on stuff like, I don’t know, setting boundaries.”
“What?”
“I mean… the way Dean is? You’re okay with that?” Sam is looking away from him.
“Of course. I love him. I would never wish that he was any different.”
“No, no, I get that, but… I just- he doesn’t let you leave the bunker, Cas.” Sam sighs, seemingly in relief.
“That’s not true, Dean often takes me on drives or walks.” Cas gives a small nod to emphasize his point, and Sam looks up at the ceiling.
“Yeah but… Cas, he doesn’t let you leave without supervision. He doesn’t let you go out in public, or talk to anyone, or…” Sam seems to run dry in defeat as he watches Cas’ unchanging expression.
“Why would I need to go out in public? I have everything I need here. You and Dean are my family.”
Sam takes in a sharp breath, and lets it out through his nose.
“That’s not- Okay. That’s another thing I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. You know you can… talk to us, right? About stuff that’s upsetting you. About Jack.”
Cas’ whole body jerks. The words are a slap in the face.
Sam continues on, oblivious: “It’s just that the other day, I found a room full of pictures of him, and candles, and those candy bars he used to eat-”
“That’s private,” Cas snaps, and Sam jumps a little.
“I didn’t mean to- but are you… mourning him? I know that he was gone when you came back, but it’s not like he’s dea-”
“That’s private,” Cas repeats, louder, the hallway beginning to spin around him.
“I know, and I get that, I’m sorry I pried and I didn’t mean to, but I just wanted you to know I’m here for you. I mean, he was my kid too, and Dean’s, but he was yours most of all, you were closest to-”
“My loyalties,” Cas is shouting now, he can’t stop himself, “are not divided.”
But they are, and terribly so. He has taken as a lover the man who killed his child. If he could save his child, he would give anything, even consigning the said lover to the child’s fate.
Cas is breathing heavily. Sam is staring at him in confusion. He opens his mouth, closes it again.
“What? I didn’t- that’s not what this is about, Cas,” he says, and there is a slowness in it, like Sam is approaching a wild animal. Cas supposes that that is, in a sense, what he is to Sam. To a human. A half-domesticated feral creature.
So he plays the part, and runs. Runs from Sam, who killed Jack as much as Dean did. Runs from his own words, which still ring in his head. Runs from the contradiction that he lives in and can’t stand.
He locks himself in an empty room, and stands there, back against the door. He finds that he is panting. Not from exertion, but from something else. A weight pressing in on him from all directions. This cannot continue.
Great, wracking sobs finally spill from his chest. This cannot continue.
He slides to the floor. This cannot continue.
The problem, of course, is that the child is beyond his reach, and the lover is warm and breathing.
So Cas allows himself twenty minutes to weep. Then he stands. He brushes off his coat. He snaps away the tears. And he makes himself Dean’s again.
