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Dean was fairly certain that Sam had assigned him some vitally important task before heading off to the library to research chupacabras. He hadn’t really been paying attention, though, because he was convinced that the “chupacabra” Sam had seen out of the corner of his eye during their wendigo hunt was a coyote. So instead of doing his vitally important task, Dean was lying on the bed, drinking whiskey out of the motel’s plastic cups and watching Jurassic Park on TV for the twentieth time.
“Hello, Dean,” Cas said from right beside the bed. Dean jumped about a foot.
“I swear I’m going to hang a bell on you,” Dean said. They’d only been doing . . . this, whatever this was, for a couple of months, ever since the return trip from Purgatory shook the puzzle pieces of Castiel’s brain back into their accustomed slots, but in that time Cas had become eerily good at showing up whenever Dean was alone and bored. It made Dean uneasy, like maybe Cas never entirely left him.
Cas just stood there, awkward even by his standards, and apparently without anything more to say for himself. Dean took a swig of whiskey. “So, what have you been up to?” he asked finally.
“I spent some time at the bottom of the North Atlantic. I’ve always found it a good place for contemplation.” Castiel spent much of his time in “contemplation” lately, and Dean wasn’t sure what to make of it. Sometimes Cas tasted like honey when they kissed, and Dean wondered if he’d ever really gone sane, or if he’d just gotten better at hiding his madness. Then again, Dean was pretty sure that was all he was doing himself, some days.
Cas fished in the pocket of his trench coat. “I brought you this.” He handed Dean an oyster shell half the size of his hand, its inner surface coated in mother-of-pearl. Dean couldn’t quite suppress his smile as he accepted it.
“Thank you,” he said. A while back, Cas had shown up to one of these . . . whatevers, and told Dean that he’d just come from watching earthrise on the moon. When he took off his coat, a pebble had fallen out of the folds, and Dean had snatched it up, gleeful as a kid. He’d wanted a moon rock since he was eight, when The Right Stuff taught him that astronauts were fighter pilots in space.
Castiel had seen how happy Dean was without really understanding why, and ever since he’d been bringing Dean souvenirs: an iridescent blue-green feather from a bird on Mount Everest, a Roman coin from Italy, an orchid from the Amazonian rain forest. Dean told himself that he thought it was funny, but he kept them, anyway, hidden in a ziplock bag beneath his porn mags, where Sam would never look.
After giving him the shell, Castiel’s well of casual conversation, such as it was, seemed to have run dry again, and Dean couldn’t think of anything to say. They lapsed into their default mode of staring at each other.
“Do you want to have sex?” Castiel asked after a moment, completely deadpan.
Dean couldn’t help it, he cracked up. He knew no guy wanted to feel like he was being laughed at when it came to this kind of thing, and he really did try to keep a straight face with Cas most of the time, but coming after the awkward silence that question was just too much.
“Man, there’s such a thing as setting a mood,” he managed once he’d gotten his breath back. “You can’t say that.”
“Then how am I supposed to know?” Castiel squared his shoulders and stepped back, very much standing on his dignity.
He was clearly more than a little offended by Dean’s reaction.
“It’s natural. You just . . . do.” Dean said, like it was obvious, but he was partly covering for the fact that he wasn’t sure either. He knew a lot about picking people up in bars, but in the time he’d spent with Lisa he’d realized that when it came to an actual relationship he still had the skill set of a seventeen year old boy.
Castiel cocked his head to the side and examined Dean skeptically. “But I don’t, and you’ve made it exceptionally clear that you don’t want me to read your mind. What if I guess wrong? I don’t understand why the way you do everything has to be so complicated and dangerous.”
Dean wasn’t sure if the “you” in that last sentence meant Dean or the entire human race. It applied either way. And Cas had a valid point buried in there somewhere. Dean’s time in Hell had left him a mess of triggers when it came to sex. Half the time he didn’t know himself what would set him off. Maybe telling Cas, of all people, that he should be able to just know what Dean wanted without asking him was flirting with disaster.
Dean reached out a placating hand that landed on Castiel’s arm with less confidence than he intended. Part of him was still surprised every time Cas didn’t pull away from his touch. “You know what, it’s cool if you want to ask. It seriously doesn’t bother me at all.” Dean shrugged. “Just, uh, we’ll work on finding a smoother way for you to say it.”
Cas nodded. “So, then, do you?” he asked.
Dean grinned. “Yes, please.”
Cas smiled back, in that way that was as much about the brightening light in his eyes and the crinkle of his eyelids as it was about the slight upward quirk of his lips. “Good.”
He took off his trench coat and suit jacket, and laid them over a chair. He started tugging at his tie matter-of-factly, and Dean almost stopped him and said, no, no, no, that’s not right, either, that’s not how you’re supposed to undress when you’re about to have sex with someone, but he let it be. He didn’t want to derail the afternoon into an argument about the inscrutability of human customs. Besides, there was something sweet about the ordinariness of the way Cas was undressing in front of him. He looked like a man who’d just come home from the office and was changing clothes before dinner. It was as if they’d been doing this far longer than they had.
The tie apparently posed something of a challenge, and when Cas finally loosened it enough he just lifted it off over his head and started in on the shirt. He fumbled with the buttons, slow and uncertain. Dean suspected that this was the only time he ever undressed. Certainly it was the only time he undressed by hand.
Once, early on, Cas had stripped him using his mojo, eager to get to him and tired of relying on his awkward, inexperienced fingers. Dean had taken it very, very badly, far worse than even he would have predicted. One of the most consistent parts of Hell was its inconsistency, the way that one moment turned into another without any point of transition, like a dream. That switch flip of clothed to naked was enough to send him into a full-on flashback. He’d spent the next twenty minutes shouting, while Cas sat there with his head in his hands, looking like he’d started another apocalypse. God only knows what Dean said to him; he didn’t remember it all that clearly. He just knew that ever since, Cas had been studiously careful that he didn’t use magic during sex.
Cas had managed to vanquish most of his shirt buttons when his eye was caught by the TV, and he stopped for a moment to watch.
“That’s not what velociraptors looked like,” he said, sounding amused.
Dean turned the TV off. “How would you know?”
Cas had moved on to the buttons at his cuffs, which were always a special problem because he couldn’t really use both hands. He picked at them futilely with a furrowed brow.
“My garrison was tasked with watching the earth, Dean. I spent millions of years looking at dinosaurs.”
At some level, Dean knew from the things Cas had said that he was millions of years old. Maybe billions. Dean generally tried not to think about it. “What did they look like, then?” Dean asked.
Cas almost angled one of the buttons out of its hole, only to have it pop back into place as he turned his wrist. He sighed. “They had feathers. They looked rather like man-sized, carnivorous chickens.”
“That must have been cool,” Dean said noncommitally. He was torn between the fact that it was, indeed, cool to see dinosaurs, and his inability to wrap his mind around the idea that Cas had done it.
“They were even duller than humans.” Cas tugged at his cuffs in frustration, like he was ready to tear the buttons off by main force.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Dean, amused by Cas’s losing battle with his clothes. “Give them here.” He reached out from where he was lying on the bed and waved him over.
Cas held his hands out to him, palms up, as if in supplication. Dean unfastened the buttons on one of the cuffs and it fell open, exposing the strangely vulnerable wrist underneath. Dean was startled by the raw force of the emotion that hit him with this tiny intimacy, how it made his heart pound in his throat and his skin prickle with sweat. He swiped his thumb over the tender skin, following the pale blue line of the vein to where it disappeared, and then ran his fingertips lightly over the palm, and the soft, elegant fingers. It wasn’t the hand of a soldier at all. It struck Dean that the nails were just a little too long, as if Jimmy Novak had been planning to cut them the last night that they were his.
The hand closed around Dean’s, and he looked up. Cas was gazing back at him, focused and unreadable. He laid his other hand against Dean’s cheek, and his thumb stroked across Dean’s lips. Dean sucked it into his mouth, and Cas’s breath caught with a click. After a moment, Dean gently lifted the hand away and undid that cuff, too. He swallowed hard, his throat dry.
“There,” he said.
Cas stepped back, eyes still on Dean, and pulled off the shirt. The rest of the clothes came off easily in comparison, with fewer knots and buttons to serve as obstacles. He stood before Dean naked in the afternoon light, pale skin tawny where the sun striped across it through the blinds. When they’d started, Dean had expected him to be shy, but there was no difference between Cas in clothes, and Cas out of them. The body itself was what covered him.
Dean turned on his side and motioned him over. Cas always waited for an invitation. He slid across the bed and curled into hollow formed by Dean’s body. His left arm falling naturally around Dean’s neck, the hand catching in his hair. Dean was still entirely dressed, except for his shoes. He loved the slide of bare skin against denim and flannel, the layers protecting him and the seeming vulnerability of the man in his arms.
Cas kissed him, soft and careful, like Dean was a girl of prom night, like he was something easily broken. Dean hated that Cas’s fear wasn’t entirely unjustified, that Dean really might break if he was handled wrong. There’d been a time when sex was one of the few things he’d been confident he’d do right. One more thing that Hell had taken from him.
Dean deepened the kiss, pressing in with his tongue, trying to force a stronger reaction. Cas sighed against Dean’s lips and pressed back. Dean didn’t think he’d ever been with someone so easily excited, so sensitive to every touch. Just running a hand down his flank to rest on his hip made him shiver and gasp. Dean pulled away from Cas’s mouth and started to suck bruises onto his neck, biting down gently on the rapid pulse under his lips. Cas’s breath came hot and ragged against Dean’s ear, and then Castiel flicked his tongue inside it and Dean bucked and produced a noise that he didn’t intend to sound so much like a squeak. The hand in his hair tightened, and Dean felt the body next to him tense, muscles locking, and then Castiel threw his leg over Dean’s thigh and pushed him onto his back.
Castiel rose up over him, fierce and commanding, the gentleness that was never really in his nature burned away. Dean could almost see through the skin to the angel that crouched inside the rib cage of the body above him. It was suddenly impossible to forget what Castiel was–an ancient, alien creature that spent millions of years being bored by dinosaurs, but that was utterly rapturous to be in this miserable motel room, gazing down at Dean Winchester from behind the beautiful blue eyes of a dead accountant.
Dean pressed his hand against Castiel’s chest. “Wait, wait a second,” he said. Cas stopped, still lying on top of Dean, like he was waiting for further instructions.
“What do you look like?” Dean blurted out. He hadn’t known he was going to say it until it was out of his mouth. Castiel looked bewildered, and Dean couldn’t blame him. The question sounded crazy, even to him.
“Look like?” Cas echoed, as if it were a language he didn’t speak.
“I mean, the real you. Not, you know . . .” Dean gestured vaguely in the direction of Castiel’s face.
“Oh.” He was confused, but not annoyed, which meant that he was taking this interruption of his afternoon delight a lot more graciously than Dean would have if their roles were reversed.
“It’s hard to express in human language,” he said, after considering it. “I’m about a thousand feet tall . . .” he began, and then seemed at a loss for how to go on.
“Wings?” Dean asked.
“I’m an angel, of course of I have wings,” Castiel said, as if Dean would know.
“Arms, legs, head?” Dean asked hopefully.
“No, no head.” Dean didn’t find that at all reassuring. “I have prehensile limbs. The number varies depending on my needs, but it’s definitely more than four.”
When Dean succeeded in translating the phrase “prehensile limbs” from Cas to English, he didn’t like what he got: “You have tentacles?” he demanded.
Cas was shocked. “Angels don’t have tentacles,” he said sharply, appalled at the thought. “I have prehensile limbs.”
Dean could never resist the chance to get a rise out of Castiel, and making a joke was easier than dealing with the possibility that he was in bed with Cthulhu. “You’re an octopus, aren’t you?” he asked. “A Godzilla-sized, winged octopus.”
“I’m not an octopus, Dean!” He folded his armed on Dean’s chest and lifted himself up, more dignified that a naked man lying on top of a clothed one should ever be. “In my youth I was considered quite beautiful, even for an angel.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any way to prove that?” Dean asked.
“No. My true form would burn your eyes out.” There was a note of regret in his answer.
“You could show me your wings, at least,” Dean said. He wasn’t sure why it was suddenly so important to him to see some part of the real Castiel. Maybe he’d just reached his limit on having sex with someone he’d never actually met.
“I couldn’t. They’re part of my true form.”
“That can’t be right, though. I saw them in the barn the first time we met,” Dean insisted.
“That?” Cas asked, surprised. “That wasn’t my wings. It was a projection of them. Something like seeing their shadow on the wall. You want to see that?”
Dean looked up at Castiel, who was still flushed, his mouth swollen, his throat bruised in the shape of Dean’s mouth, and felt ridiculous. He had a naked angel in his arms and a brother who could come back at any time. There were better things to do than force Cas to make shadow puppets. On the other hand, Cas seemed willing, and if Dean let it go he didn’t know when he’d have it in him to raise the issue again.
“Yeah, if you can.”
Dean wasn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t for the wings to unfold immediately from Castiel’s back. And then keep unfolding. They blotted out the ceiling in black shadow. They reached the walls and passed through them. Dean hoped they weren’t visible on the other side, or else the people in the neighboring rooms were suddenly having a very strange afternoon.
When they were fully extended, hardly anything remained visible in the room but Castiel and the arc of his shadow wings.
“Whoa,” Dean said, when he was capable of saying anything. “I thought they’d be more . . . Cas-sized.”
Castiel smiled a little. “I’m a thousand feet tall. They are ‘Cas-sized.’”
Dean lifted his hand cautiously toward one of them. “Is it okay for me to touch them?”
Cas nodded, and Dean put his hand up to a point near Castiel’s back, where the wings were still in arm’s reach. They looked like a silhouette, if a silhouette could exist in three-dimensional space. His hand passed into it and disappeared. It felt like water, denser and warmer than the surrounding air, and it roiled with energy. It was rather like putting his fingers into a hot tub. It was only when he felt cool air again on the other side that it occurred to him that he’d just stuck his hand entirely through a part of Castiel’s body.
“This doesn’t hurt, does it?” he asked.
Castiel didn’t respond immediately. He was entranced, looking at Dean with a mixture of surprise and wonder. Dean thought he had his answer, but he repeated himself anyway.
“Hurt?” Castiel said finally, as he pulled himself together. “No, not at all. Your hand is a material object and my wing isn’t. They pass right through each other. But your soul runs through you like blood at a spiritual level, just as my grace runs through me. I can’t feel it when your body touches my vessel, but it seems that I can feel it like this.”
“And it’s good, huh?” Dean guessed.
“I haven’t touched your soul since I raised you,” Cas said. He hesitated. “And it didn’t mean the same thing to me then.”
The wings sank until they were drooping through the floor, giving Dean better access. He took the hint and carded his fingers through as much of them as he could reach. His hands tingled with the heat. He found it soothing in a primal way, almost–and he knew Castiel would rankle at the comparison–like petting a dog.
Now that the initial shock had passed, Dean noticed how much damage he could see silhouetted in the wings. The afternoon light peeked through countless rends and tears. There were translucent places where the skin seemed almost to have worn through. The right wing had a large, roughly triangular chunk missing from the bottom, as if a shark had taken a bite out of it, and a kink at the top that looked like a poorly set bone. The left wing had a long, lacy pattern stretching across its bottom half. At first Dean thought it was beautiful, like the veining on a butterfly’s wing, and then he felt ill as he realized what he was seeing in shadow. The flesh had been carefully sliced away, leaving only the delicate structure of bones behind. It was no battle scar; Castiel would have had to be tied down. Dean knew. He’d done it himself many times, although never to a wing. He swallowed hard.
“Who did that to you?” he asked, trying to sound neutral.
“Hmm?” Castiel looked half-drugged, but he roused himself enough to understand what Dean was gesturing at. He looked back at over his shoulder as if he’d forgotten the scar was there, which Dean thought was bullshit. Even an angel couldn’t forget pain like that.
“I was captured briefly, in the early years of our siege on Hell. My brothers soon freed me.” The early years. For some reason Dean had always assumed that it had been four months for Castiel. He wondered why he hadn’t bothered to ask before.
“Is all of this damage from when you rescued me?” Dean asked.
“Some of it,” Castiel said. “Some of it is from when I rescued Sam.” He winced. “What I thought was Sam. Some of it is from the civil war in Heaven. Some of it is from when the Leviathan possessed me. Some of it is from when Lucifer fell, and other battles long ago. I’m old, Dean. Not everything bad that’s ever happened to me was because of you.”
Dean nodded, although he wasn’t so sure. Castiel kissed him on the lips and then laid his head on Dean’s chest, the wings blanketing them. They lay entangled, as Dean stroked the wings from the place where they joined Castiel’s back, out as far as his hand could reach. The tingling heat that started in his hands burned its way gradually through the rest of his body, warm as sunshine, sweet as bourbon. His limbs were heavier and lighter, and he was acutely aware of every point of contact with Castiel’s bare skin.
After a time Dean sensed that, while the wings were still in the same position, something within them had shifted. Their stillness was no longer relaxation, but tension. Every so often a twitch ran through them, as if they were the tail of a cat about to pounce. Dean looked down into Castiel’s eyes and was met with a raw, almost frightening hunger. And yet even now he was waiting for Dean’s permission. The thought made Dean’s chest tighten.
“Come on, then,” he said, and Castiel was on him. His mouth locked onto Dean’s like he was trying to crawl inside. His wings beat the air, up through the ceiling and down through the floor, terrible and prehistoric, far too big to be contained within the confines of this little room. He started to tug at Dean’s flannel button down with hard hands, and Dean pulled it off and threw it aside. Cas seemed unwilling to let go of Dean’s mouth long enough to get the t-shirt off, and Dean had to push him away for a moment just to get it over his head. They both went for the button on Dean’s jeans at the same time, and four hands struggled with each other to undo it. Finally it opened, and Cas managed to slide the jeans and underwear simultaneously off Dean’s hips. Dean kicked himself free, finally naked.
Castiel grabbed him under the arms and propped him up against the headboard, kneeling over him. Dean knew what Cas wanted. This was his favorite position. “Hang on a second,” Dean gasped, when he finally managed to break away long enough to suck in some air. “I’ve got you.”
He fumbled the bedside drawer open and grabbed some lube, and he heard Cas sigh. Dean was never entirely sure whether this kind of preparation was necessary for Cas, whether it was even physically possible to hurt him this way. Cas certainly didn’t seem to think so when he got impatient, and he was more than impatient now, the beating of his wings a pounding pulse of frustration. Dean smeared the lube across his fingers and slid them inside Cas anyway, quick but careful. It just felt like the normal, human thing to do. He slicked himself up and held onto Castiel’s hips as he slid himself down over Dean.
One hand caught in Dean’s hair and the other grabbed his thigh. Both legs wrapped around him. The wings loomed above, beating furiously. Dean shuddered at the tight heat, but he fought the urge to grad Cas’s hips and thrust up. Cas let his forehead fall against Dean’s, his parted lips, breathing raggedly, a fraction of an inch from Dean’s. Dean tried to catch them, but Cas pulled away, just out of reach, the hand in Dean’s hair tugging him back. Dean groaned.
“Cocktease,” he murmured, not that Castiel knew what that meant.
The wings flapped one last time, back through the wall behind the bed, and then they folded forward, wrapping around Dean’s back. He found himself surrounded by surging energy. His skin was no barrier; it flowed through him like water through a sponge, a hot liquid that filled his chest and stomach. He’d never known how many cold places there were inside him until he felt them grow warm.
Cas tightened his hold on Dean’s thigh and finally began to move. The wings fluttered in Dean’d chest every time Cas lifted himself up and sank down. It was unbearably, deliciously hot inside the cocoon, and Dean felt sweat gather on his brow and drip in ticklish rivulets down his sides. He tipped his head back, and could see nothing above him but Castiel and the shadowy darkness of his wings. Cas took advantage of his bared throat, biting down, leaving marks to match the ones that Dean had given him earlier.
Dean stroked Cas with one hand, and with the other forced his way out to the cold air, and scratched down Castiel’s back, straight through the place where flesh met wing. Cas whimpered, face still buried in his neck.
Dean was close, so close, and he tried to drag Castiel into a kiss, but he resisted, taking Dean’s face in both his hands. He knew what Cas wanted. It was the same thing he always wanted, no matter what they were doing. He wanted to watch Dean. Dean tried to pull away, but the fingers held him like a vice. He didn’t know how they could be as strong as steel, when he could feel them trembling against his skin. He always resisted this, found reasons to bow his head and hide from those old, impossible eyes in his moment of vulnerability, but now he felt warm and whole for the first time in forever, and he remembered his shame without remembering why it had seemed so important. He yielded this once, and let Castiel have what he needed, let himself be seen. It wasn’t a choice, really, just an inevitable overflow, bright and eternal one moment, and over the next.
Castiel transformed. His hands lost their restraining grip and traced down Dean’s face. The intensity of his gaze softened to something almost human, almost tender, as if a window had opened behind his eyes. He bent forward and locked onto Dean’s mouth, finally, just as he came, silent and shaking.
After a long moment Castiel pulled away, and the wings folded back out of Dean and disappeared. Dean shivered in the sudden cold, and Cas pulled him down and curled around him.
Dean was, as usual, the one to break the silence. “So, we’re definitely doing that again.”
“I’m glad you thought of it,” Cas said to the back of his neck. “It would never have occurred to me.”
Dean sighed. “Sam will be back soon,” he said reluctantly. Cas lifted his head and gazed out the window, eyes fixed on some unseen point. Dean thought he might vanish directly out of the bed. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Instead he said, “Sam is still at the library.” Then he looked at Dean and added, “but I should go.” Dean hated the thought that one of the first things he’d taught Castiel about sex was how to know when he was getting kicked out afterward.
“No, you should stay,” he said, and turned to wrap his arms around him, holding him in place. “Ten more minutes.”
Castiel studied his face and seemed satisfied with what he saw, because he settled back down.
“I’m going to talk to Sam about this,” Dean said. “Soon.”
Castiel didn’t answer, but he twined himself around Dean more completely. Legs entangled, arms interlocked, it was easy to believe that Castiel had more than four limbs.
“Octopus,” Dean muttered.
The silence that followed was long enough that he no longer expected an answer when Castiel said, “Monkey.”
Dean smiled in spite of himself.