Heart of Glass

by omphalos

Summary:

He's the one who was punished, severely, because of his feelings for Dean, but who still gave up everything for him in the end. Surely there should exist between them a better level of comprehension than this.

Notes:

• For c00kie.

This was as a pinch hit for the deancas_xmas exchange. The original request can be found here. Written and set after Abandon All Hope (5:10)

"So, this disk thing," Dean asks in a low voice, "you really think it could work?"

"No." Castiel answers without much thought, his attention elsewhere as he feels out through the door with his mind, disarming every security device and magical warding he can find. "I think I'm clutching at dried grass."

"Huh?" He can feel Dean staring at him. "Oh, at straws? So why are we even here?"

"Because all I have to clutch at is straws, Dean, and this is the longest straw available. At the least, it could make me useful to you again."

"How many times have I gotta tell you that-"

"Has your denial of plain facts ever changed anything?" Castiel hears the irritation in his own voice and forces it back to a more even tone. It doesn't help that his reaction, when finding himself exhibiting human annoyance, is generally to feel yet more human style annoyance. "The longer I'm cut off from the Host, the closer I become to an unskilled human, the kind of person you do your best to protect, not work along side."

"Dude, you're not unskilled. You've got more languages and lore stored in that fluffy head of yours than's on the whole fricking Internet." Dean's hand lands on Castiel's shoulder for a few seconds before he starts striding about again in the small space of this corridor. "You've still got plenty of mojo anyway. You got us here, didn't you? You're undoing all the security shit okay? You're still way on the plus side of the awesome scale, Cas."

Fluffy? Castiel's pretty sure that adjective doesn't fit any part of him. Still, it isn't entirely unpleasant having his self-doubt blasted by Dean's confidence in him, however unrealistic. He disengages the final electrical defense with a touch of deft telekinesis. "It's only a matter of time," he says with a pleasing level of calmness, "before I lose even those abilities."

He hears Dean shuffle around on the stone floor, and Castiel returns his focus to his immediate surroundings to see Dean looking at him with an unidentifiable expression. Unidentifiable, at least, for Castiel, who has long since decided that the more he 'hangs' with humans, the less he understands them. Or maybe that's just Dean Winchester, who is somehow a little more human than most humans, as if the qualities of humanity are somehow distilled and condensed within him.

It's true that Castiel frequently and increasingly turns to Sam for translation services when Dean manages to baffle him yet again. It's... frustrating. He is the one who carried Dean's shredded soul from Perdition, who patched it up to the best of his ability and reformed a healthy body around it. He's the one who was punished, severely, because of his feelings for Dean, but who still gave up everything for him in the end. Surely there should exist between them a better level of comprehension than this. He wants – no, he needs – to understand Dean.

After a few moments spent openly staring at each other, the all too human Dean sighs and looks away, his gaze skidding across the plain cream walls of this corridor, the only exterior access way to the underground vault they've come to plunder. "Explain to me again," Dean asks, "just what this sun disk mirror thing can do? Or maybe do?"

"Aten's Sun Disk is rumored," Castiel stresses, "to be a hotline to Heaven among other things, which, if so, could allow me to 'recharge my batteries' as Sam put it. It also may have the capacity to create a direct line to my Father, which is the reason I've been seeking it. More generally, it's a lens that's said to allow messages and signals to be sent over great distances and through otherwise impassible barriers."

"Yeah, got that, celestial broadband. But there was more than that when Sam told it, something about a siege?"

"A siege perilous."

"Which is...?"

Castiel sighs silently. He'd suspected Dean hadn't understood that part. "It's an analogy Sam drew from British mythology, meaning a challenge that will either prove your worth once and for all, or kill you. The same papyrus that speaks of the powers of the disk mentions also that if someone deemed unworthy attempts to use the disk to talk to God, they will be... unmade."

"Unmade as in killed?"

"Unmade as in removed from time and space completely. They will never have existed."

"You're kidding me."

"I am not."

Dean folds his arms, his expression belligerent. "No way did Sam tell us that part."

"He did, but I suspect him of deliberate obfuscation since his wording was far from clear, and he seemed to wait to tell us until your attention was largely elsewhere." Castiel pulls up the corners of his lips in what is probably an entirely inadequate wry smile. "There were women with large breasts on the television, if I recall..."

"Right." Dean seems to be fighting a grin at the memory, but a frown wins out in the end. He leans back against the wall by the door. "So, no way are we doing this. You might as well quit breaking into Fort Knox here; we're heading out."

Castiel tips his head slightly and studies Dean. Sam clearly anticipated this reaction from his brother, yet it still mystifies Castiel. "You don't have to accompany me if you don't wish to," he says slowly, "but I'm not... 'heading out'."

Dean raises his gaze upwards and to the side, clearly exasperated with Castiel. "Look. You don't get it," he says. "I'm not gonna let you kill yourself just so you can be more 'useful'. Fuck that, Cas! I wish, I really wish, you weren't losing your mojo, man. I hate that that's happening to you 'cause of me. But I'd rather have you completely fricking powerless than dead. Worse still, never having existed at all!"

"You wouldn't remember ever knowing me. Another angel would have rescued you from Hell."

"Fuck that!" Dean reiterates fiercely. He seems to be growing increasingly upset, his folded arms having given way to the apparent need to gesticulate. "Look, you're the one who told me you weren't a tool, a hammer or whatever, so why the hell do you keep trying to treat yourself like you are one? You're worth more than that to us, Cas. In case you haven't noticed, we're not exactly awash in friends and allies, and... Well, don't be in such a goddamn hurry to leave us, okay?"

Dean's gaze slides away from Castiel's as he finishes talking, and Castiel wonders what it is that Dean isn't saying. He's sure there's something.

"I need to do this, Dean." Because it really is that simple. "Is it your belief that I'm unworthy to speak with my Father?"

"I never said that." Dean's reply comes gratifyingly fast. "If anyone's worthy, it's you. You're the only one of his dickish kids who's even trying to do the right thing. But, Cas, we don't know for sure that that's even what this stupid disk does. Some Ancient Egyptian equivalent of the Weekly World News is a long way off what I call trustworthy lore!"

"The scroll has a little more more credence to it than that," Castiel says gently, looking deeper into Dean's unsettled soul for clues. "We take risks every day. Every fight we enter into could end up with one or all of us dead, but we still do it. Why is that, Dean?"

"Kill or be killed?" The answer sounds more than a little flippant.

"And when it isn't? When it's a fight we could avoid if we wanted?"

Dean shrugs. "To help people, to draw a line through another name on the long list of evil sons of bitches needing ganking." He sighs heavily, tipping his head back against the wall. "I know what you're getting at, but there's a difference."

"There isn't for me." Castiel puts his hand on the door handle, but then pauses. "I consider this a risk worth taking, but if you don't, you shouldn't be here. I'll take you back to your brother."

"No way!" Dean backs away from him, holding up his hands. "Don't you dare bench me. You're not doing this alone."

Sometimes Dean doesn't make any sense at all. Castiel sighs softly to himself and gestures at the door. "Then shall we?"

Dean shrugs and moves forward again. Castiel opens the door, and together they go into what turns out to be a very large space with strip lighting, a low ceiling, and many square pillars. The floor's covered in a cream-colored padded linoleum, and the walls painted almost the same color. All around the walls and around each pillar are uniform display cases made from reddish wood framing glass. There's a smell of something sharp and man-made.

"We can still talk," Castiel says, possibly unnecessarily. "I've disarmed all the sensors in here, and the nearest living thing is miles away."

Dean grunts and strides out into the space, pulling a face at whatever is in the first case he looks down upon. "So what's this Ancient Egyptian game of Russian roulette look like?"

"Like a small polished gold disk with hieroglyphics around the circumference, possibly in some sort of setting. Dean, do you really think I'd risk my life unnecessarily?" Castiel asks as he watches Dean move around. "It was given back to me for a reason, and I-"

"Whatever." Dean waves a dismissive hand back at Castiel without looking around. "You wanna play with possibly evil artifacts, it's no skin off my back."

Castiel finds his lips pursing. He tries again, stalking after Dean. "Whatever else it is, Aten's Disk is not demonic. 'Aten' is simply the name the Ancient Egyptians of a certain era gave to my Father."

"Right," Dean says in a way that's only one step up from 'whatever'. "And he's not just Satan with his hat off."

"Right," Castiel repeats firmly, coming to stand behind him. "Etymologically, 'Satan' derives from a Semitic root meaning 'accuser'. This itself derives from the Babylo-"

"Cas!" Dean turns around and holds his hand up, flat palm only a few inches from Castiel's face. "Do we really have to have the Conversation?"

Knowing he's going to regret asking, Castiel nonetheless asks, "What conversation?" as he carefully pushes Dean's hand aside.

"The Rules Conversation." Dean uses his still raised hand to count off the numbers. "One: no doomed to failure attempts to educate me. Two: no unnecessary riffing on subjects so old, dry and dead they don't even need to be salted and burned to stop them from walking around. Three: no words longer than three syllables. In short, stick to the point and make the point clear."

"'Unnecessary' has five syllables," Castiel points out, turning his back on Dean and walking away, starting his own hunt for the correct display case. He's annoyed with himself again, with his reaction to Dean's current attitude. It... hurts. Why is it that he finds human qualities in Dean so fascinating, yet in himself so off-putting? He thinks that what he's currently experiencing may be the sting of rejection. He doesn't like the sensation at all.

"I never said the rules applied to me." Dean sounds... smug? "Just angels. And occasionally little brothers."

Castiel should never have told Dean he was free to talk during this illicit activity. "Maybe I have rules too," he says, feeling how the muscles of his face have become taut.

"Yeah, well, good luck with that. You're the obedient little soldier boy in this partnership, dude. I'm the rebel with a capital-C cause."

Moving faster than Dean's human eyes will be able to process, Castiel backs Dean into a display case, hard, the metal in Dean's jacket pinging against the glass. "Have you forgotten what I did for you, or do you just not care?" he demands. "Do you see my sacrifices as your God-given right? To be presumed on, not thanked for?"

"I said thank you," Dean says, trying and failing to meet Castiel's eyes. His soul is full of panic suddenly. "Kinda. Look, I'm sorry I called you an... what I called you, all right?"

Castiel tries to swallow down the emotion that's blazing within him like an explosion. Anger, it is. Rage. It feels alien, like something from outside taking control of him. Dean just makes him so- "You don't even know why you should be sorry." He pushes the words out between the pinched muscles of his lips.

"Well, why don't you tell me?" Dean seems to try again to focus on Castiel with little success.

"In short words?" Castiel shakes his head in exasperation. "An obedient soldier is exactly what I should be and what I've failed to be, thanks to you."

He watches as Dean's eyes close for a few moments, Dean inhaling with a pained expression. "And I slapped you in the face with that. Okay, I hear you."

Castiel backs off as Dean's appeasing words quash the flames inside him a little.

"Do you regret it?" Dean asks softly.

"I'm not proud of it." Castiel looks down for a few moments. The shame is far from the worst of it though. He'd thought it would be, but it isn't. It's the lack of other voices in his mind, this terrible silence, that hurts the most. Sometimes the vacuum they've left inside him seems to threaten to eat him whole.

"I'm sorry," Dean says in a voice so tight it's almost inaudible.

With a shaky exhale, Castiel tries to breathe out the tension developing again in his vessel. Then he raises his head, lifting his chin. "But my only regret is that I failed to rebel sooner, soon enough that maybe you could've stopped Sam."

Dean screws up his face and looks away. "Yeah, well, that was my fuck-up."

Oh, how typical of Dean. One moment infuriatingly smug, the next wandering the shadowed ruins of his broken self-esteem. "It was not," Castiel tells him firmly. "If I'd gotten you there sooner, if I'd stopped obeying orders earlier-"

"Cas, stop it, man!" Dean raises a hand to cut him off, finally meeting Castiel's gaze. "It's done with. We've got more than enough to deal with right now without 'if only's that we can't do anything about."

Castiel nods; Dean's right. He so often is – illogical, coarse, stubborn and irreverent, but right. When others dither, or stride confidently off down futile tangents, Dean goes straight to the heart of a matter and knows just what to do.

That's why Castiel's so prepared to follow him, even into a den of iniquity. He's not sure even now that Dean was right about that one exactly, but the end result was a happier Dean than Castiel has ever previously witnessed, and so, ultimately, it was the right thing to do. If he can only make Dean that happy again and for longer, Castiel will sing untold praises to his missing Father.

"You better not be reading my mind," Dean says, frowning at Castiel now, and Castiel realizes he's been staring again in that way that makes humans so uneasy. It's useful sometimes, but not when he doesn't intend it.

"I've told you before," he reminds Dean. "I see your soul, not your thoughts." Dean's thoughts are, unfortunately, locked away in his skull where no one can understand them, frequently not even Dean himself. Once, Castiel could have forced his way in if necessary, but no longer.

"Keep it that way."

What's in Dean's thoughts that he doesn't want Castiel to see? Curiosity has always been Castiel's abiding sin. It was his curiosity about humanity as represented by Dean Winchester that started his downward slide into rebellion. He sighs softly to himself. "Let's find the disk."

They walk in opposite directions around the sides of the room. When they meet again at the halfway point, neither of them having found anything even vaguely disk-like, Dean laughs. "After all the fuss, it'll be downright hilarious if the damned thing isn't even here."

"'Hilarious' is not the word I'd use."

"Maybe you should. It'd do you good to laugh more. Or, you know, at all. If you're gonna go all plain white bread on us, you might as well experience the best bits of being human along with the crap." Dean grins at him. "We need to work on your humor, dude."

Dean's soul is calmer now, and Castiel's starting to feel something akin to shame for his loss of equanimity. "I think I may be destined to remain one of life's straight men," he says and has another try at that wry smile.

Snorting, Dean claps Castiel on the back. "It's a talent, man. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise." The smile fades quickly though, some thought process maybe that's darkening Dean's expression.

Together, they move to the nearest pillar and the display cases that surround it. Castiel looks down unhappily upon yet another shard of broken vase. "It's hard to believe that some of these exhibits are worthy of the amount of security here, no matter how ancient."

"You're right, of course," a voice says from behind them. "But I was hardly going to leave anything valuable here when I'd already sent out the invites to the 'Bring a Crowbar' Party, was I?"

Castiel and Dean whirl around as one to see the demon, Crowley, standing a few feet away from them. He's leaning against a display case and throwing a gold-colored object up in the air and casually catching it. There's no question in Castiel's mind regarding what that object is.

Crowley grins at them, or at least his vessel does, and the demon inside the flesh throws back its head and laughs like the fiend it is. "Well, well, if it isn't Hardy boy the elder and the little angel who could but can't anymore. Delighted you could pop by."

"You," Castiel growls, striding towards him.

"Uh, uh, uh," Crowley scolds, waggling a finger. Castiel finds himself floating slowly backwards through the air to land softly back beside Dean. "I'd hardly have gone to this much trouble if all I'd wanted was an excuse to kill you. You do realize that, in your depleted state, attacking me would be suicide? Hmm?"

"What do you want?" Dean asks, scowling and moving to stand closer to Castiel.

"Well, it's more a question of what you want, isn't it?" Crowley throws the gold thing into the air and catches it again. It's ellipsoid in shape and roughly the size of a baseball. "The Sun Disk of Aten ringing any bells in the gray sludge you like to call a brain?"

"We're not making any deals, Crawley," Dean says, presumably getting the demon's name wrong deliberately. "Been there, done that, not doing it again."

Crowley manifests a complex expression somewhere between smirk and sympathy. "Two score years with Alistair's enough to put anyone off an honest deal. Oh, I can understand that. Alistair was an artist of his craft, a positive maestro, but me? I'm just a business man." He winks at them. "A very, very rich and remarkably powerful business man, but the good news for you is that I? – want what you want." He gives them a brilliant smile, sharing it equally between them.

Castiel thinks he may be learning a new subtlety of human expression just from watching the demon. "You want Lucifer dead, the Apocalypse stopped," he says to Crowley. "Or has that part of your supposed agenda changed now?"

"Lucifer, his life and works, stopped dead, sooner rather than later, and while we're on this subject..." Crowley catches the disk again and slips it into his pants pocket. Then his whole demeanor suddenly changes, the demon roaring up inside the vessel like a flash storm. "WHAT - THE FUCK - HAPPENED? I gave you the most powerful one-on-one weapon in creation, for free, and you... blew it?"

Dean's lips are pursed. He folds his arms. "I put the damn gun to the Devil's forehead and pulled the damn trigger, douche merchant. IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!"

Crowley blinks. "When you say 'it didn't work'...?"

"Didn't you hear?" Dean sneers. "I thought you were the master of the underground grapevine or somesuch shit. Well, here's the newsflash you missed. I shot the Devil through the head. He fell down, dead as any of us might like. Then he got up again and blasted me into a fricking tree."

"Oh." Crowley slouches back against a display case, pulling a screwed up face. "Well, that explains a lot. Mostly the annoying swarm of gnats he's been sending my way since then. Suppose I should be glad he hasn't cattle-prodded Death in my direction yet." He tuts and then shrugs. "I ask you, just what's the use in a gun that can kill anything if it can't actually kill the one thing you want it to kill?"

"Five things," Castiel says since he can see no reason to withhold the information. "He claims there are five entities the Colt can't kill, and he's one."

"One thing I'm sure of," Dean says, patting his jacket and smiling coldly at the demon, "you ain't one of the other four."

Crowley snorts and rolls his eyes. Suddenly he's behind them, the Colt in his hand. "Here's a hint, Dumb and Dumber," he says as they whirl around to see him. "You want to kill a demon of my caliber? Don't ever talk first. Empty posturing just makes you look like you should be wearing whiteface. Oh, you want this back?" He lets the Colt sway from his finger through the trigger guard. "Tell you what, I'll give you back the gun too once things are all signed and sealed."

Castiel moves a hand out quickly to catch Dean's arm as he starts to surge towards Crowley. He holds Dean firmly and ignores the look of outrage being directed his way. "Maybe you could get to the point?"

"Ah, a man – and I use the word loosely – who understands business." Crowley slips the Colt inside his jacket. "Simply put, the disk is yours in return for a lick and a promise."

"I hope you don't mean that literally," Castiel replies, widening his eyes pointedly.

Crowley chuckles. "I'll try to ease up on the tongue just for you, angel. I need an oath from the two of you. Make it, seal it in the usual way, and the direct line to the Big Man is yours."

"Already told you," Dean growls. "No deals."

"Don't you at least want to hear the terms?" Crowley asks. "No? Oh well." He shrugs and starts to turn from them. "I won't have much trouble finding another buyer for this." He pulls the disk out of his pocket and starts to toss it in the air again as he walks away.

Castiel watches it glint in the light as it tumbles through the air. He swallows and momentarily looks down.

"Wait," he forces out, his voice low. "State your terms."

***

"Hey," Sam says as he and the motel room appear around Dean and Cas. Dean doesn't have time for social niceties right now though. He pushes off like an athlete from starting blocks and is in the bathroom with his toothbrush in his mouth in what would have to be a record time if, you know, they kept records for desperate sprints to the Colgate.

"What the hell?" He hears Sam shut the laptop and stand up.

"We got any unopened brushes?" Dean calls out, or at least attempts to with his mouth full of bristles, plastic and reassuringly minty foam.

"Huh?" Sam appears in the doorway. "Dude, brush out of mouth if you actually want me to understand you."

Irritated, Dean pulls the brush free in a spray of froth. "Cas needs a toothbrush. Give him one." Then he gets right back to a brushing so thorough it's more like a deck scrubbing.

"Why?" Sam asks, but he's already heading to his washbag.

Cas appears at the doorway. "I do not." Both Dean and Sam give him confused looks, and Cas adds, "Need a toothbrush. My powers may be failing, but I can still keep my vessel clean and microbe free."

"Don't argue," Dean tells him with another spray of foam. "Just do it. Not having you wandering around with demon cooties all over you."

Cas sighs, but he takes the new toothbrush Sam has found for him and holds it. "I don't have demon cooties, and neither do you."

"Going to tell me why either of you might have them?" Sam says, frowning.

"We were obliged to kiss the demon, Crowley," Cas says matter-of-factly. "He made a point of using his tongue with Dean."

"Christ, Cas. Like I needed to relive it." Dean pushes out another long white slug of Colgate onto his brush and puts the brush back into his mouth.

Sam's pulling a predictable face. "You were what?"

"What's the matter, Sammy?" Dean asks through his mouthful. "Scared you've lost your monopoly on evil tonsil hockey?" Seeing that Sam just stares at him with mild distaste while wiping a splutter of foam from his face, Dean doesn't think his message got through loud and clear.

"We... made a deal with the demon," Cas states, still just holding the toothbrush in its packaging. "He insisted the deal was sealed with a kiss. Apparently, that's an aspect he has no control over. I'm not sure I believe that. He seemed to enjoy kissing Dean very much."

Dean groans. He would really like everyone to stop talking about it now.

"You made a deal," Sam repeats flatly. "Are you insane?"

"Don't look at me," Dean declares, experimenting with taking the brush from his mouth to see if he feels clean yet. "Ask Nice Guy Eddie Angel there. It was his awesomely bad idea."

The bitchface to end all bitchfaces is turned on Cas. "You, an angel of the Lord, thought it was a good idea to enter into a deal with a powerful demon?" Sam shakes his head slowly as Cas fails to deny it. "Am I dreaming? Have I accidentally slipped into an alternate dimension where blue is red?"

Dean snickers. "Yeah, Sammy. You've been magicked away into some mirrorverse where, I dunno, I'm a space pirate with a dashing eyepatch, you're a girl, and Cas is rocking the devilish goatie."

"Girl?" Sam glares down sidetrack alley.

"Dude, you're already so close to being one it'd be type-casting."

"Blue is still blue," Cas says, sounding, Dean thinks, a little put out. "It was necessary to make the deal to obtain Aten's Sun Disk."

Okay, so the sidetrack detour didn't last. Sam looks like not only has he been slapped around the face by Cas, but also like he keeps getting slapped, again and again. "God, Castiel, how far have you fallen?"

"Hey!" Without even thinking, Dean puts himself between his brother and his friend. "That was out of line."

Sam gapes at him. "That was...? What? Okay, that's it. You don't get to say another word." He holds up his hand to Dean and then glares over Dean's shoulder at Cas. "Let me see if I've got this right. In return for an obscure artifact that you don't even know will work, you not only entered into a deal with a senior demon, but you dragged my dumbass brother into it with you? Seriously? Dean? In a deal with the king of the crossroad demons? I... I... How the HELL could you do this, Castiel?"

Dean opens his mouth to defend both Cas and himself and finds Sam's huge hand in his face again. While he's trying to escape it, he hears Cas say calmly, "I understand your concern, Sam, but it's unfounded. This was not a deal for souls, merely a... a mutual non-aggression pact."

That seems to take the defcon level down a notch or two and moves the Goliath palm from out of Dean's vision. "Like a... an alliance?" Sam asks eventually, sounding calmer and almost hopeful.

"No," Dean says bluntly before spitting into the sink. "He's a demon and therefore an evil, lying scumbag, not to mention a fricking pervert. That douche is no ally of mine." He pauses and then adds, "Or of Cas'," for good measure, and then, "Or yours," because he hadn't liked that note of hope in Sam's voice. The last thing he wants is Sammy all pally with a demon again.

Sam blinks at him for a few seconds before turning back to Cas. "What were the terms?"

"We agreed not to deliberately cause, or to attempt to cause, either directly or indirectly, harm upon each other until the Apocalypse is over. The penalty for breaking the contract is simply the end of the contract, which would seem to make the whole thing pointless, but it was all he wanted from us in return for the disk. There was no small print. I checked carefully."

"Huh." Sam's thoughtful expression is turned back to Dean. "So all this dental hygiene urgency is because you kissed a male demon?"

Dean screws up his face at his brother. "Dude, he kissed me. Hell, he went to town in my mouth, and his hands were fricking everywhere. There's no way you would've reacted any different even with your major demon kink."

"Yeah, anytime you wanna quit making comments like that would be a good time."

"What can I say, Sammy? I tell it like I see it."

Sam purses his lips and heads back to his laptop. He says nothing more for some time.

***

Hours later, Dean is beginning to regret pissing off Sam. He's increasingly sure his brother's deliberately drawing out the research he's gotten Cas all wrapped up in, and Dean is finding it increasingly hard not to demand Sammy gets his own fricking friends and stops stealing Dean's. Cas and Sam have been poring over books and parchments since they left the bathroom. Sam has his laptop open, and Cas is sitting way too close so he can look at the screen too while they discuss... oh, something hieroglyphic-y or some other mystical bullcrap to do with that stupid disk. Dean stopped listening an hour and a rerun from season two of Dr Sexy M.D. ago.

"Can't we just do this already?" he asks and not for the first time. He'll even admit to himself that he's starting to sound whiny.

"This isn't something we can afford to mess up," Cas tells him seriously, like he hasn't already said that three times already in slightly different words. At least Cas is patient with him; Sam isn't even bothering to answer anymore. "We have to make sure we don't cause inadvertent offense by getting the ritual wrong."

Dean stands up from where he's been couch-potatoing on the sofa for so long now that he's all but growing sprouts. He wanders over to the table where they're working. "Dude, either you're worthy or you're not. God's not gonna delete you from history just because you forgot to dot an 'i' somewhere."

Cas tips his head to one side. "You could be right," he says after a few moments. "Sam, maybe we should-"

"Don't give in to his attention ploys, Cas," Sam says without looking up. "You know as well as I do, we have to get this right." Dean tries his very best to burn holes through the top of Sam's skull with his eyes, but sadly the lasers don't seem to be working today.

Cas gives him a vaguely sympathetic look. "I'm sorry, Dean. I... I don't want to be in a hurry to leave you."

Dean knows he's having his own words quoted back at him, and he flinches a little. In truth, some the antsyness he's currently feeling could be worry about Cas. Too often recently, it's been Cas taking the role of fall guy in their encounters with the enemy or even run of the mill monsters, and the guy's not exactly indestructible these days, even if he still likes to act as if he is.

Dean hasn't forgotten the Cas of the awesomely bad future that will never, ever happen, at least if he has anything to say about it. That Cas had been lost and broken to the point of being almost unrecognisable, and yet he was still following Dean blindly. No, not blindly. There's no doubt in Dean's mind that future-Cas had known he was heading to his death at the end there. Hell, it had probably been a relief to him, knowing it would all finally be over. Dean never wants to see his Cas grow like that, so lost in a haze of drugs and sex and pain.

He wishes now he'd never taken Cas to that stupid brothel. It could've started something, some tumbling down there'd be no coming back from. It was as much a mistake as letting Sam go off on his own for those months. Oh yeah, Zach's guided tour of Dire Future Consequences Land totally opened Dean's eyes, just not in the way Zachariah wanted. Because now Dean knows two things for certain – one, he and Sam have to stay together, stay wrapped right up in each other, no matter what, and two, Castiel cannot be allowed to fall any further.

Typically of Dean's fucked up life or psyche or something, it was only after deciding this that Dean finally realized just how he was starting to feel about Cas, when an incredibly vivid and detailed dream made it so fricking obvious that even he had to wake up and smell the... wet sheets. He's pretty sure he's gonna be remembering that dream for years during whatever rare alone times he gets because Jesus, mind-blowing doesn't even begin to cover it. And it's been no good yelling inside his head that he's not gay, and that anyway, Cas is an angel of the Lord, for crissakes. It makes no difference to anything. So Dean's just given up now, is just letting the feelings be there, but they're not getting out of his head, not ever.

See, the thing is he has a feeling, a strong feeling, that he could get more if he wanted it. He got Cas to hook up with a whore, didn't he? Hell, future-Cas had still been with him, following him, even when Dean had all but lost his humanity in that nightmare of a future. Yeah, he's pretty sure he could persuade Cas into almost anything if he wanted to, but that's not good. That's the opposite of good. 'Cause it means he's the one who's got to keep Cas all pure and shiny like a good angel should be. He's the only one who could, and Dean's the fricking poster boy for 'impure'.

Yeah, Dean's as sullied and messed up as they come. Thanks to Hell, there's almost no kind of depravity that he hasn't tried at least once, and he's the one to keep the angel pearly white? It'll be like trying to wipe a plate clean with a cloth he's just found in the sewer.

And all the time that he's trying to do this impossible task, he's also trying to stop himself from getting fixated on Cas' lower lip, or his graceful hands, or how it feels every time Cas gets right in his space. God, when Cas had pushed him into that display cabinet earlier...

Dean has to remember now to stare at attractive chicks, just so Sam doesn't notice something's wrong. He hardly even sees them in reality, his head is so full of Cas, Cas, Cas, and he hopes to God Cas is telling the truth when he says he can't read Dean's mind 'cause if he ever does, Dean is so, so paddleless in a freaking ocean of shit.

"What's wrong?"

He shakes himself out of his thoughts to find Cas frowning at him, and he can feel himself blushing. Fuck that.

"Not a thing," he claims. "Not a damn thing." With a pointed sigh, he puts his beer bottle down on the table and picks up the disk that's the cause of all this fuss. It looks like a giant golden M&M. It's too light to be solid metal but too heavy to be hollow, so maybe there's something inside, and it undoes somehow. He starts to try to unscrew the top of the disk from the bottom. Nothing moves. He holds it closer and peers at it, trying to find any kind of line to show where two sides may be joined.

"Dean, don't do that!" Cas says urgently after a few moments, having apparently only just noticed. "Anything could happen."

Guiltily, Dean puts the disk down again more carefully. "Right. Well, I'm no help here; that's obvious. Guess I'll head up the road a way and see if I can find a place to hustle some pool. Have fun with your books, guys, and try not to get so dull you stop reflecting light at all. I'd keep tripping over you." He heads to get his jacket from where he threw it earlier.

"Jeez, you're being an ass today," Sam says. "What's gotten into you? Other than some demon tongue, that is."

"Ha ha, Sammy. That's so totally hilarious. Coming from the founder of the demon diet plan and all."

"Nice," Sam says flatly, his mouth an equally flat line when Dean turns around. "Thanks."

"Any time, Sammy. You know you can rely on me."

So Dean heads out to the nearest bar, doesn't get in any games of pool, but he does drink what might be considered way too much beer for this time in the afternoon if, you know, you're a weak-livered douchenozzle. He manages not to think about angels hardly at all. Long enough, in fact, to get the number of the busty brunette bringing him his beer. He may even call her later if things haven't livened up back at chez geek.

He's hardly finished that thought when his phone rings. Sam tells him to meet them at the deserted house that they scoped out yesterday. With a last wink and grin at 'Sylvie', Dean pays his tab and heads out into a chill wind that seems to have blown up from nowhere. He makes a detour to a small store and a pizza joint for supplies, but then heads right there.

When he opens the door to the house and goes in, he sees immediately that things have progressed a long way from laptop-staring. The kitchen is full of mouldering and thoroughly unkitcheny furniture all stacked up, and the whole of the large main room has been cleared. Sam's at the far end of that room. He has a glass bowl of something orange in his hands and is pressing into it with the butt end of a hunting knife. Cas is on his knees on the floor inside a large circle drawn in thick lines of some kind of reddy orange powder. There's a heady stink in the air that maybe comes from it, like Indian restaurant meets high church incense.

"Hello, Dean," Cas says. He's lost the ever-present trench somewhere, as well as his suit jacket and tie. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up, and he looks... Yeah, Dean doesn't need to be thinking about that right now.

He puts the pizza boxes and bags of beer on the floor beside the door, frowning as a floorboard partially lifts from the weight of them. He presses it back down again with his boot heel. "This mean you're finally done with the books?" he asks, stepping carefully into the circle – necessary if he wants to get anywhere in the room 'cept back out. He tries to keep his gaze firmly above Cas' shoulder line, but he can't help noticing his amulet dangling free of Castiel's shirt while the angel draws.

"Yes," Cas replies, sounding pleased. "We'll soon be ready to make our first attempt."

Dean nods and then looks over at the safer prospect of Sam. "Pizza for you here, bro. Plenty of gross green crap on it, just the way you like."

"Thanks." Sam smiles over at him in a way that makes it obvious Dean's earlier transgressions have been forgiven. Yeah, he knows he should lay off the demon blood jibes. He seriously means to, but they keep slipping out when he's not looking. He smiles back, the beer he's drunk helping make the smile gentle. He hopes Sam will get the unspoken apology. Sam just frowns down at the bowl he's holding. "I'll have to wash real well before I eat. This stuff is all kinds of toxic."

"Lovely." Dean looks down to where Cas is carefully spilling more powder to form a complex symbol by the rim of the circle.

"If this works," Cas says, "I'll be able to remove all trace of the remaining incense once we're done."

"What is it?" Dean asks, crouching down beside Cas to look closer.

"Gamboge and white copal resins," Cas tells him as he finishes the sign and sits back on his haunches, "mixed with red lead, cinnabar, some gold dust, saffron, and a lot of Indonesian mace as a base. We've had to make a few careful substitutions from the original recipe. They're all components associated with God in his aspect as the great sun deity."

Dean pulls a face. "Mace as in mace spray?"

"As in the spice, it's from the nutmeg plant." Cas tips his head to the side, studying Dean in that way that does things to Dean's insides. "So that Sam can take time to eat, would you help me with the final preparations, Dean?"

"Sure. What d'you need me to do?"

As Dean watches with increasingly boggled eyes, Cas puts his fingers to his shirt and starts to unbutton it. "Two symbols need to be painted onto my skin, one on my chest and one on my back."

Oh Joseph, Mary and the fricking donkey, what has he said yes to now? "You want me to paint on you?" he asks in a thin voice as Cas stands and pulls the shirt from his pants before slipping it off. Cas is lean, but not skinny in a weedy way, and Dean thanks God that Jimmy wasn't resurrected with his ex-body when Cas came back from the smitted. Probably not the most tactful of things to thank the Almighty for, but at least Dean doesn't have to feel guilty about perving on the poor guy.

"Dean?" Cas says carefully after a few moments, and Dean drags his gaze up from the thin line of hair that leads down into Cas' pants.

"Yeah?"

"Would you prefer it if Sam did this for me?"

Sam snorts as he strides over to the two of them. "I think even Dean can draw symbols, Cas, bear of very little brain though he is."

"Dean is far from stupid, Sam," Cas says in his stern teacher voice. "You shouldn't say things like that." Both brothers stare at Cas for a few moments, but Dean's smiling. His angel stood up for him, just another small proof that Cas is awesome.

Of course, now he has to paint the damn symbols. He gets to his feet. "What am I painting with?"

Sam passes him the bowl, which contains a grainy paste more or less the same color as the powder Cas has been using. "Here. You can use your fingers, just wash them well afterwards. Kinda important this stuff goes nowhere near your mouth. Talking of which..." He heads off to the doorway and presumably the bathroom beyond. There's no mains water, but they discovered earlier that there's still plenty in the attic tank that runs to the hot water faucet.

Dean stares down dubiously at the red paste. If this ritual doesn't kill Cas, will the toxic waste they're playing with do it instead?

"Everything will be all right, Dean," Cas says gently. "There's no need to worry."

"Who's worried?" Dean sticks his fingers in the gunk as if he does this kind of thing everyday. He looks up and winks at Cas. "Just don't wanna have to break in a new angel to our way of doing things, that's all." Something uncertain flickers over Cas' face, and Dean sighs to himself. "Joke, Cas. Just like it was when Sam called me Pooh Bear back there."

A frown appears. "Sometimes I find it very hard to tell the difference between your 'jokes' and your passive aggressive assertions, especially when you're speaking to each other."

Dean blinks. Well, that told him. "It can be a narrow dividing line, I guess. Now what's this symbol look like?"

"Like the one on the floor. You just need to copy it twice."

He studies Cas' chest, trying to see it like a canvas or something and not skin that he never really thought he'd get to see, let alone touch. "Any rules on size or position?"

"None. Just do it, Dean."

He lifts sticky fingers from the bowl, and looking back and forth between skin and floorboards, starts to finger paint. He draws large, covering the width of Cas' chest. It's easier not to get distracted than he thought it would be, his worry about copying it wrong and hurting Cas enough to overwhelm the erotic thrill of what's basically a forbidden touch.

Still, he can't help noticing a few things, like how smooth Cas' skin is and how warm. As a sticky-out bit of the symbol pulls his fingertips over the top of one of Cas' nipples, the delicate skin there puckers and pulls tight. Dean freezes for a second or so, but then carries on. He's not sure he's ever touched another male like this except for Sam – caring for him when they were kids, sewing him up after yet another monster-related injury as adults – but it doesn't feel as weird as it maybe should. Because it's Cas, and the thing about Cas is he just accepts Dean, almost unconditionally, and so that makes it easy to do it for Cas in return.

It's a pretty amazing gift to be given really. Cas has seen Dean at his absolute worst and yet... Dean shakes his head as he moves round to Cas' back. "Hope this works for you, man."

The room is quiet enough that he hears Cas inhale deeply before talking. "I hope so too. I would like..."

After a pause, Dean asks, "What would you like?"

Cas snorts softly, his ribs moving under Dean's touch. "So much, it seems. How human of me."

"Yeah, that's what drags us puny mortals through this crappy life: our wants, our ambitions and dreams. It's the carrot that keeps us pulling the cart. Some of us even get them eventually. Not often, but yeah, can happen. There, you're done." Dean puts a hand on Cas' hips and turns him. Cas has very sharp hips, he discovers, before letting go and stepping back.

"Thank you, Dean." Cas manages an understated smile, and from Cas that feels like a huge grin, so Dean rewards him with a warm grin of his own, looking him up and down.

"It's a good look on you, man. If, you know, cold." He winks then turns away before his grin can get either heated or sappy. It could go either way, right now. God, what the hell is wrong with him? He can't remember having a crush this strong since he was fourteen, and never, ever, on someone without boobs. As Sam returns to the room, Dean slips out so he can wash his fingers clean of the red stain.

The water swirls around the sink looking like that wrong-colored blood you get in some old horror films, way too much pink in it to be real. Dean scrubs until it runs clear and his hands are going kind of numb in the cold water.

Back in the main room, Sam's eating pizza, crouching near the door, and Cas is standing quietly in the middle of the orange circle with his arms slightly lifted to the sides.

"Dude, you're gonna freeze," Dean tells him. "What's next? Let's get this done."

"I just need the disk," Cas says, walking closer to Dean, who can see the lean muscles moving below the painted skin. It's hard to lift his gaze. Cas stops by the edge of the circle. "It's in the bag by the kitchen, wrapped in one of your T-shirts."

One of his? Typical. "I'll get it," Dean says, heading to do just that. "Don't worry, I'll be careful."

The disk is exactly where Cas said. Dean unwraps it cautiously, making a mental note to flick Sammy's ear for using his Master of Puppets tee. Holding the disk securely, Dean closes his eyes and mutters a short prayer to a deity he's far from sure he believes in even now.

"Hey, listen up, big man. Way to be a bad dad. Castiel's the best by far of your lousy kids, the only one who gives a fuck about obeying your will. I know that if you won't listen to him, no way are you gonna listen to me, but I'm saying it anyway. He deserves some kind of reward for his loyalty, for what it's lost him, and, oh Hell, can't you at least give him a pat on the back for once? Tell him 'well done, son, you did good'? Is that really too much to ask? Oh, and don't blame him for any disrespect I'm showing here. It's not his fault I'm a dick. He's not. He's awesome."

Sighing, Dean straightens up and heads back to the main room.

"Hey, Cas," he starts as he enters the room, but he doesn't get a chance to finish what he started since his foot catches in something. It sends him flying forward into the powder circle. The last thing he sees is the golden disk leaving his outstretched hand and spinning through the air. Then there's a wooshing noise and a flare of impossibly bright light, and Dean knows nothing more.

***

Castiel is feeling again, and he still doesn't like it. He'll never understand how Anna found this condition so desirable.

He and Sam are sitting in silence at Dean's bedside. Dean is still unconscious, and neither of them know why. Apart from a small bruise on his forehead, Dean is physically unharmed. Castiel has investigated carefully and is sure of that. He brought them to Bobby's house since it seemed a kinder place to convalesce than the motel room. Bobby's not here, away meeting with other hunters, but he's planning on cutting that short and heading straight back in the morning out of concern for Dean.

Castiel had been prepared to suffer harm himself if the ritual went wrong, but he never thought Dean could be at risk. The whole thing – the search, the deal with Crowley, the research and preparation – has come to nothing, thanks to one raised floorboard. Now the disk is broken in two; Dean is lost somewhere in his own head, and Sam has that clenched teeth, sucked-in cheeks look that Castiel has long since learned to worry about. Sam, he thinks, is getting ready for revenge.

"This has to be a trick of Crowley's," Sam announces again. The last two times the silence was broken, it was to say the same thing.

"I don't think so," Castiel repeats. Sam frowns heavily, and Castiel looks back at Dean, whose soul seems as peaceful as his sleeping body. "This is not at all what the demon wants."

Sam makes a low noise in his throat and looks down at his hands. After a while, he asks, "How are you feeling now?" also not for the first time. Castiel wonders if they could be caught in some kind of behavioral loop.

"I'm fine," he says, though he isn't really. If he still had the power he'd had when part of the Host, he could dive inside Dean now, find him in whatever mental construct he's lost within, and drag him back out to the real world.

Sam exhales noisily. "Whatever that thing was that happened with the light and flare, it was as much around you as it was him."

"I know, but I am fine, and he... isn't."

"You really care about him, don't you?"

"Of course." That's not something Sam's asked before, and it makes Castiel look more carefully at Sam now. Is there some kind of extra meaning behind Sam's words? "In as much as I still have such duties, he's my charge. You both are."

"Yeah. Not talking about duty here, Cas."

"Then what?"

Sam leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "You and Dean are good friends. You know, close. You care what happens to him for personal reasons, not just the call of duty."

"You're... not wrong." Castiel stares down at Dean and feels uneasy. "Even the punishment of Heaven couldn't stop that. I was... ashamed about having such feelings, once."

"Not any more?"

"I don't know." He glances at Sam and is pleased to see the tense expression has given way to one of sympathy. "I feel so many things now, but I don't have the experience to identify all of them."

"You could always ask me, you know." Sam smiles gently at him. "Unlike my brother, I can talk about such things without breaking out in hives. I'm sure together we could figure out most of what you're feeling."

"Like you help me understand Dean's more obscure pronouncements?"

Sam snorts. "Yeah, like that. You do know he does that on purpose, don't you?"

"I don't understand."

"Dean deliberately couches important things, things that make him uncomfortable, in terms you're unlikely to understand, so that he can avoid talking any further about them."

"Oh." Castiel considers that. "He could just say when he doesn't want to talk about something."

"Saying he doesn't want to talk about something would mean acknowledging there's something to talk about," Sam says, leaning back in his chair. "He won't do that unless backed into a corner."

"Oh," Castiel says again. It seems so simple when Sam explains it.

"He can't just fly away when he doesn't want to discuss something, you see." Sam sounds vaguely amused, and Castiel recognizes that he's being teased.

He admits, "It concerns me, how little I seem to comprehend his actions at times."

Sam shakes his head. "Don't let it get to you. He doesn't make it easy to get to know the real Dean. I get him because he's been the one constant throughout my life. I've seen him in every kind of state, including more than a few that threatened to blind me for life." He snorts. "Even those times when he's not been here, he still has been. His voice is in my head. I hear his opinion on everything, whether I want to or not. I know him better than I know myself in some ways. You don't have that advantage."

Castiel wonders if what he's feeling now is jealousy. He glances at Dean and sighs. "I see his soul. I rebuilt his soul after Hell. I know him more intimately than any other human, and yet..."

"And yet you're frequently left feeling like you don't know what the hell is going on? It's smoke and mirrors, man. Deliberate distraction. He gets you to pay attention to one hand, so you don't notice what the other hand's getting up to."

"D'you mind not doing that, Sammy?" a voice says from the bed. Both their heads whip around to see Dean's eyes open, a wry smile on his face. "Giving away the trade secrets will get you thrown out of the Magic Circle, y'know."

"Dean," Castiel says, all his attention now directed at him.

"How're you feeling, bro?" Sam asks, his tone far more casual than Castiel's despite, Castiel knows, Sam's concern being as great if not greater than his own.

"I'm cool... if confused as hell." Dean sits up and looks down at himself, though there's nothing unusual to see. He's still dressed in the same clothes. All trace of the red incense burned away when the sun disk was broken so there seemed little point in changing them. Sam just took off Dean's boots and jacket and left it at that. "What happened?" Dean asks.

"You tripped," Sam tells him. "The ritual misfired. Whatever it did to you and Cas, it made you pass out."

Dean screws up his face and looks around. "Bobby's?"

"Yep."

He looks at Castiel. "So what happened with the ritual?"

"The sun disk is destroyed. It came apart in my hands when I caught it. Energy flashed out and covered us. I experienced a moment's disorientation, but you-"

"Passed out cold. Got it. It's broken? Shit, I'm sorry, Cas."

"It's not your fault."

"Isn't it? I was the one with two left feet apparently."

"A floorboard had gotten itself lifted by the weight of the bags," Sam says. "If that's anyone's fault, it's mine. I think it happened while I was grabbing a beer to have with my pizza."

'That floorboard I kicked back down earlier. My fault. Of freaking course.' Castiel hears Dean say the words clearly, but Dean's lips don't move. He frowns.

"You sure you're all right, dude?" Sam asks Dean, standing. "'Cause I better let Bobby know if you are, so he doesn't rush back here for no reason."

Dean looks up at him. "Yeah. I don't even have a headache. Don't suppose you thought to grab my pizza before we winged it back here?"

Sam makes an amused noise. "Yeah, you're okay. It's in the fridge. Want me to bring it up?"

"Nah, I'll follow you down in a sec. Just want to talk with Cas about something."

Sam nods and leaves the room. Castiel looks at Dean, waiting to see what they'll be talking about.

"So what really happened?"

Castiel tips his head to the side. "Only what I just said. Why would I lie about that?"

"I don't know, but something more has to have happened. I don't pass out for no reason."

"I agree, but I know no more than you do. Maybe we got the substitutions wrong. I was concerned about the copal."

Dean swings his legs off the bed. "It can't be mended, the disk?"

"I don't know that either." Castiel feels in his coat pocket and pulls out the two jagged halves of the sun disk. "I don't know why it broke in the first place. I caught it well. It didn't drop with force." He offers one half to Dean, who shuffles closer and takes it.

"It's like some kind of greenish crystal inside," Dean says, holding it up to the light.

"It's natural glass. A whole and unusually large specimen of Libyan sand glass, I believe, polished into the perfect disk shape and repeatedly plated in gold to form the finished artifact. I can only assume a pre-existing flaw."

He doesn't really believe that though. The disk had cracked open like an egg when it fell into his hands, and the light that blazed out... At first he'd thought he truly was about to speak with his Father, but the first face he'd discerned as the light faded enough to see through it was Dean's, eyes wide and unseeing as he dropped senseless to the floorboards.

"I'm sorry it was just me," Dean says quietly, looking up from the broken object in his hand. "I know how much you were were hoping that this was finally the answer you've been searching for."

Dean seems to be replying to a comment that Castiel didn't make out loud. His frown deepens, and he looks down at the other half of the sun disk, slowly moving his fingertips over the jagged peaks of broken glass.

"What's wrong?" Dean asks, and Castiel looks up to find he's being stared at.

"I'm not sure. Probably nothing. We should go down now to be with Sam. He's been worried about you and keen to blame Crowley." Dean snorts and mutters something about smoke and mirrors as he stands up from the bed. Castiel decides to pretend he never heard it.

Downstairs, Castiel watches Dean chat with his brother in the kitchen while apparently trying to break a speed record regarding pizza consumption. He seems fine, his normal self, but Castiel keeps watching, just in case. Dean's leaning back against the counter while Sam is half-sitting on the small table by the window. Castiel finds himself drifting closer until he's standing near to Dean, but on the other side of the pizza box. He watches the animated conversation without really hearing it, concentrating instead on Dean eating, the movement of his jaw as he chews, the bob of his Adam's apple as he swallows.

When he first started conversing regularly with Dean, Castiel still saw human bodies as mere vessels for the souls inside, unimportant or at least utilitarian things. He's learned now that, while they live, it's wrong to see humans as just their souls. They are composite beings, existing equally and simultaneously on physical and immaterial planes. Understanding them is impossible unless they are viewed holistically. It's through watching Dean's body that Castiel can, sometimes, feel like he's getting close to understanding Dean's soul.

Dean is talking animatedly through a full mouth about how he thinks the incense was really a kind of red gunpowder which ignited under a static discharge released when the disk broke. While Castiel listens to the engaging nonsense, he reaches out and takes the last slice of pizza.

A hand clamps down hard on his wrist, and Dean turns to stare at him. "Dude, what the hell? Would never have taken you for a food thief."

"I..." Castiel looks down at his hand in something approaching dismay. "I seem to be one, all the same." He has no idea why he did that.

Dean's hand loosens, but he doesn't let go. "You hungry, Cas?" he asks almost gently.

"I don't know. I didn't think I was." He looks between Sam and Dean's curious faces. "What does being hungry feel like?"

"Huh." Dean releases Castiel. "Try eating that slice, see how you feel then. Compare it to how you feel now and subtract the difference – that difference is 'being hungry'."

Castiel stares down at the pizza. "You want me to eat this?"

"You said you're getting more human. Maybe you're starting to feel hunger now like the rest of us." Dean smiles and pushes the box closer to Castiel. "Go on, try it. Cold or not, it's good."

"Go Cas," says Sam with a laugh. "You got given the last slice. You've no idea how honored you are."

He does have, at least, some idea. This feels like an important moment. It takes both his hands to get the thin slice to his mouth without it collapsing. Tentatively, he puts the pointed end between his teeth and bites.

So many different flavors in one mouthful. He doesn't even have names for most of them. Closing his eyes, he slowly chews, trying to analyze each component taste. It's difficult because he keeps getting distracted. Dean's right. The pizza is very good.

'Christ, look at his face. He's practically orgasmic. Shit, what else can I get him to try? Gotta keep this moment going. Oh fuck, no. No, I can't wipe that crumb from his lip, let alone lick it. Sam would think I'd lost it, and he'd be right, and Cas would probably smite me where I stood. Jesus, he looks hot though. Fridge. Look in the fridge for more food and try to cool down...'

Opening his eyes, Castiel watches Dean rummage in Bobby's fridge. A quick glance at Sam's impassive face convinces Castiel that Dean didn't say those things aloud. They were thoughts. Castiel was hearing Dean's thoughts about him, and Dean thinks Castiel looks hot.

Castiel tries very hard to repress the broad smile that seems to want to bloom on his face and largely succeeds, but it's still there inside him, burning away like a miniature sun. It's a highly inappropriate reaction, but it's undeniable. He takes another bite of pizza.

When Dean turns back, his arms full of beer bottles and various packets, Castiel waits for him to look his way and then slowly licks his lower lip clean. It's a sensual action he's seen made by humans in the past, and he's pretty sure it's intended to be seductive.

Not laughing when Dean stumbles in reaction and drops several packets on the floor is an act of sheer will, and that's another new sensation. There is, Castiel's rapidly realizing, something wrong with him, more wrong than the usual wrongness since his resurrection. Is his intention truly to seduce Dean? The idea tightens his chest muscles, makes his breath shallow.

"Huh?" Dean says, looking at him as he puts the bottles on the counter. "What did you say?"

Castiel feels his eyes widening. "Nothing. I said nothing."

"I heard you say something, Cas. I'm not hearing voices from nowhere." Dean frowns at him and looks at Sam as if for confirmation. Sam just shrugs, and Dean frowns some more before walking over to pick up the dropped packages.

Castiel finds himself staring at Dean's denim-clad ass in a way that seems even more inappropriate than his pleasure at being thought 'hot'. He turns quickly away so that he is facing Sam and says, "This is wonderful," before eating the last morsel of pizza.

"Is it really the first time you've eaten?" Sam asks as he saunters over to grab a beer.

Castiel shakes his head and, after swallowing, says, "Not at all, but it's the first time I've enjoyed it."

"You've drunk stuff though – all those shots with Ellen to start with." Sam passes him an open beer. Nodding, Castiel takes it, washing down the last fragments of chewed pizza as he remembers the hunter. He'd liked her, appreciated the way she'd accepted him, and he'd hardly had a chance to know her or her daughter before they were dead.

He had always accepted human ephemerality without question before meeting Dean. Now, he suspects he may be learning to hate it.

"Got more for you to enjoy here," Dean says, standing back beside Castiel at the counter. "We can do tastings, see what you like and what you hate."

Castiel looks at the various bags and plastic packets with alarm. "Uh..."

"Not hungry anymore?"

"I'm not sure." His fingers are sticky. He puts the beer down and lifts them to his mouth to lick them clean of food, the way he's seen Dean do many times.

'Oh, for crying- His tongue, his fricking tongue. He has to be doing that deliberately.'

"I am not," Castiel says before he realizes Dean didn't say that out loud, and now both brothers are looking at him suspiciously. "Hungry any more," he adds quickly before picking up his beer and gulping about half of it down.

"Hey, Cas," Sam says after a few moments. "Don't feel like you need to totally remodel yourself in Dean's image, huh?"

Dean straightens up against the counter. "Are you implying I'm a bad role model, Sammy?"

"I'm not implying it; I'm saying it. We both are. Sure, it's just junk food and alcohol today, and that's bad enough, but what if it's pool-hustling tomorrow, or porn, or credit card fraud, or hell, a brothel! Yeah, let's introduce the angel to sex he has to pay for."

Wanting to defend Dean, Castiel tells Sam, "That was an educating experience."

Dean chokes and spits beer in an impressive spray across the room, and Sam stares at his brother in something that looks like horror. "Dean, you didn't."

"Hey," Dean says weakly between coughs. "It was a fun evening."

"It was," Castiel agrees, nodding. "Especially when we had to, uh, run for it."

Sam groans and holds up his hands. "Forget I asked. I never, ever want to know about this." He straightens up from the table. "I'm going to bed. You two can just... do whatever it is you two do when I'm not around." He looks between them and shakes his head before heading off upstairs.

Dean and Castiel look at each other, and Dean raises his beer towards Castiel. As it seems to be expected of him, Castiel mirrors the action, and they clink the bottles together. "Dude," Dean says and grins, but then something uneasy passes over his expression. "Sam's right though. You shouldn't use me as your, I dunno, your template for being human. Hell, you know how messed up I am. No one knows that better than you. I mean, you've seen..."

Castiel looks at him fondly. "My eyes are open to your faults, Dean, but I consider them insignificant compared to your heroism."

"What? No. No way, Cas. That's not..." Dean holds up his hands, seeming distressed. "Look, I'm no shining knight, man. I'm about as packed with flaws and sin as you can get and still walk around. Just don't... I mean, aim higher. Aim way higher than me, okay?"

Castiel decides to use a word he's heard Dean use many times. It seems appropriate to the moment. "Bullshit."

Dean's expression is pained. He casts his gaze around the room, apparently looking for something to settle it on, and then he just lifts his hands in a gesture of defeat. "Come on, let's at least be comfortable if we're gonna do this."

Going to do what, Castiel wonders as he watches Dean get more beer from the fridge. He then follows Dean into the living room, and they sit down on the sofa together. Dean opens a couple of bottles and gives Castiel one.

After a while spent in silence, Dean gulps the last of his beer and puts the bottle down on the table. "So," he starts. "So, I never told you much about that awesome vacation Zachariah gave me."

"That's true." It had been obvious from Dean's soul that whatever Zachariah had put Dean through, it had been traumatizing, and Castiel hasn't wanted to push. "You said it was a version of the future that would never now happen because you'd made up with Sam."

"Yeah. In Zach's future, we'd never made up. In fact, we'd stopped talking altogether, and then one day, in Detroit, Sam had said yes to Lucifer. No one knew why. Maybe he was back on the demon blood and all darkened up, or maybe he was just dying of the lonely. Whatever it was, it was my fault. I'm sure of it." Dean stares down at his hands. "I saw him, Cas. Spoke to him, Lucifer in Sammy's body. It broke my fricking heart."

"I'm sorry, Dean."

"Why? It's not your fault. And anyway, that's not what I want to tell you about. This awesome future had me and you in it too. I was... I was a complete dick, cold and brutal, and I don't know where my humanity had gone, but gone it had. I guess there's only so much death and loss anyone can experience before they become unrecognizable. And you..."

Obviously this isn't going to be good to hear. "What had happened to me?"

"The angels had gone and taken the last of your mojo with them. You were near as damnit human, and you hated it. It was pure misery for you, and the only way you'd found to cope with the pain was sex and drugs. You were constantly high or drunk or both, and you had this sick love guru thing going. You held orgies, Cas. Fricking orgies! And you were still with me, even then, though far as I could tell, I treated you like... like our friendship meant nothing, and... And at the end, I – future me – led you deliberately into death, and you went willingly."

"I..." Castiel frowns. He was going to say he finds it hard to imagine becoming that mess, but actually he finds he can imagine it. Because he can see it, see himself that lost and hopeless, his vessel now truly his body, his eyes shot, his unkempt face grinning and laughing in a way that did nothing to hide the crazy paving inside. He's seeing himself through Dean's eyes. He's seeing Dean's memories. "I'm sorry."

"No, Cas. I'm the one who should be saying sorry. Hell, I'm the one who should be on my knees begging forgiveness. Thanks to me, you've lost your home and your family, and now you're losing your mojo, and that's why, however human you get, I'm begging you with all I have to stay pure. Keep your faith in your Dad. Don't let me drag you down with me into the fucking gutter." Dean looks at him with intense emotion, his voice thick and cracking. "Please."

Castiel thinks that he's beginning to understand what humans mean when they claim their heart is breaking. "You won't, Dean. You can't and won't do that to me. It is through you, again and again, that I find the truth of things. Heaven... lied to me, used me to act against my Father's will. You open my eyes and let me learn for myself. You let me love and hold faith in my Father, even when you don't have that for yourself."

Dean raises his hands to his head, clawing through his hair. "Cas, you're not listening. I'm no good."

"Dean, I am listening, and it's painful that you see yourself in such a tainted light."

'It's no good. He's blinded to the real me, despite everything. Despite seeing me in Hell, the scalpel in my hands still dripping. He's going to follow me and get himself more and more mired in the muck I walk in. I'm destroying an angel. Oh God, help me.'

Castiel feels a tightness in his throat and a wetness around his eyes. "Dean. Stop this. You have to stop this. I'm not blind. I see your soul clearly. I know it better than that of any other human. I know you. I might not always understand you, but that's my failing, not yours. You've been put under unbearable pressure, yet you're still going, still fighting, still sure in your heart about what's right and what is wrong. You're not perfect, far from it, but you're still the best argument for free will I've ever witnessed unfolding."

Dean's staring at him. He slowly raises a hand to almost but not quite touch Castiel's cheek. "You're crying."

"I know. I'm sorry." Castiel feels his lips pull out straight and flat in a sour expression. "I'm finding it hard to control these human emotions today, but that doesn't lessen the truth of what I just said."

Dean shakes his head slowly. "Why are you crying?"

"I don't know."

"How can you not know?"

Castiel tips his head back into the sofa and puffs out air. "I don't know that either." It's not as if he's sobbing or distraught, but the soft tears keep forming and falling. He wipes the moisture from his face. "I'm sorry if my lack of control is disturbing. I should go." He starts to rise.

"No." Dean's hand appears on Castiel's arm. "Don't, Cas. Stay. This one evening, be one of us."

"I thought that's just what you didn't want me to be."

Dean pulls a face and huffs, looking away and folding his arms. "I'm not suggesting we cozy up and watch hardcore together. Just... chill. Take that damn coat off for once. Relax. Shoes off and feet up."

Castiel sits back down on the edge of the sofa, facing towards Dean. He doesn't follow the rest of the instructions though. He's too busy watching the turbulence in Dean's soul. If souls had colors, Dean's would be the luminous green of deep ocean, the same color in fact as the desert glass inside Aten's disk. Tonight his soul is like the edge of a storm at sea, choppy and murky, full of stirred up debris, and Castiel longs to soothe it, to bring the sun out to brighten and warm. If Dean could only see himself the way that Castiel sees him, see the depth and strength and outright beauty that pulls Castiel to Dean like a lodestone...

"Dude, what the fuck was that? Poetry? That's so not us. You gotta pull yourself together, man."

Castiel's eyes widen as he focuses on Dean's embarrassed looking face. "I didn't say anything, Dean."

"Sure you did. Way too much of a thing."

"Did you see my lips move?"

Dean's own lips and facial muscles twitch as he stares back at Castiel. Then he slouches further back into the sofa, his folded arms held tightly across his solar plexus. "What's happening to us?"

"I think... I think it's Aten's Disk." Castiel takes the pieces from his pocket again and gazes down at them. "It is – was – an artifact dedicated to communication, a lens or conductor for messages that couldn't get through any other way. When our ritual misfired, the energy was released with nowhere to go. It connected the two closest entities and burned itself out through us."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that we have a new line of communication between us, a telepathic link and – I think – an empathic one. It may be only temporary or may be hardwired into us for life. I've no way of knowing." He strokes his thumb thoughtfully over the jagged edges of the glass. He's been longing to understand Dean better, hasn't he? Is this really an accident, or is it a gift?

"We can hear each others thoughts and feel each others feelings?"

"Occasionally." Castiel nods, not looking up as he tries to discern some truth inside the murky glass. "Not all of them though, for which we should be thankful. It could be very... distracting. But we could talk telepathically now, I think, should we want to. It could be useful when we're on missions together but separated."

Dean snorts loudly. "I'm way more interested in getting you out of my head right now, Cas, than in playing walkie-talkies."

"Why?" Castiel looks up at Dean from under a lowered brow, a slight smile tugging his lips. "Because you don't want me hearing your thoughts about how hot I am?"

"Fuck!" The word explodes from Dean like a bullet. "Cas, for crissakes!"

"I like you thinking I'm hot. Is it really such a terrible thing?"

Dean makes a noise a little like a sob, though there are no sign of tears in his eyes. If anything, he looks and feels angry. "You're an angel," he says flatly.

"It's true that Heaven forbids its soldiers human lovers, but I'm no longer under Heaven's command. Dean, it's how I feel about you that would be, and is, considered so wrong, not the physical act. Angels – proper, obedient angels – don't care either way about physical bodies. To them, their vessels are unpleasantly organic tools and nothing more. When we – when they – look at humans, they see the soul."

"But you see my body?"

"I'm starting to, more and more. You have a very attractive body, Dean. I like many things about it."

'Corrupter. Torturer. You lead, and he follows you down.' "And did you, before this afternoon? Or is this you feeling my feelings?"

Castiel doesn't particularly want to be honest here, not after hearing those thoughts, but lying to Dean these days is unthinkable. "The attraction has become a lot more... defined since the ritual went wrong. I'm okay with that."

"So I've infected you with horniness. That is so fucked up, Cas."

"Dean." His head tipped to the side, Castiel reaches out and places a hand on Dean's thigh. "You wanted me to lose my virginity, and I was willing to follow your lead, but how much better for you to be the one to... relieve me of it?"

"Christ." Dean stares down at his leg. "I think... Uh, I guess you were right. You should go now, Cas. Yeah, I think it's best. Give us both a chance to calm the fuck down. I want you t- I want you to go."

"Seriously?" Castiel asks, taking his hand back and trying to swallow down the unpleasant feelings that suddenly fill him. "That's what you really want?" If it was, why did Dean's soul reach out for Castiel's grace like the hand of someone drowning?

'God, no. I want you to stay. I want to kiss you so hard we taste blood. I want to rip all that crappy tax accountant gear from your leanness and taste your skin, feel it sliding against mine. I want to make you messy. I want to mark you as mine. I want to fuck you or be fucked or- Shit, you're listening to every fricking word of this, aren't you?'

Castiel nods. "I want those things too, Dean." He leans forward, his hand back on the taut hardness of Dean's thigh, his lower lip caught between his teeth.

"Fuck," Dean swears again. "I can't think straight with you sitting so close."

Castiel wants to sit closer still. He can see the twitching bulge in Dean's jeans and knows what it means, knows his vessel is the same way. He wants to straddle Dean's legs and press their bodies together while they kiss. He wants Dean to want this too.

"I do," Dean says, sounding like he's in pain. "God, do I. But that's the trouble, isn't it?"

"Why?"

"Because I shouldn't! You're an angel! And in a male body too. It's wrong. It's all so fucking wrong."

"Who says it's wrong, Dean?" Castiel gives in to temptation and moves, twisting and rising onto his knees, moving one leg over. He slots himself tight into Dean's lap, their bodies aligned. "Heaven? I know you think they're a bunch of dicks. Fundamentalist cults? The moral majority? I'm pretty sure you don't think much of them either."

Dean's hands come up to circle Castiel's waist, his breathing suddenly ragged. "Dude," he says in a low and cracking voice, "are you seducing me?"

"I don't know. Is it working?" He can't quite believe he's really doing this. When he arrived at Dean's side yesterday with his news of the disk, he never dreamed that just a few hours later he would be pushing possessive hands up Dean's shirt front, feeling the heaving ribcage, the muscles below the cloth. He wriggles a little against Dean, finding something very compelling about the solidity of Dean's body wherever he touches it. "Let me do this," he says. 'Let us both have this thing.'

Dean swallows visibly and lifts a trembling hand to Castiel's shoulder. "Could at least have taken this damn coat of yours off first."

Arching his back a little, Castiel reaches up and pushes both his coat and his jacket from his shoulders. He lets them fall behind him to slide over Dean's legs. "Better?"

"Yeah, a bit. I'll do the tie." Dean takes hold of Castiel's tie, but instead of unknotting it, he tugs gently, wrapping it around his hand and pulling Castiel's head towards his own.

Their lips come together painfully slowly, meeting like tectonic plates, even the soft but building pressure enough to send minor quakes through both their bodies.

'Cas. Cas. Oh God, Castiel, tell me this is all right. I don't wanna hurt you. It'd kill me, I think.'

'I promise, Dean. I vow on my grace. This is my choice, and it's not wrong, just the opposite.' He doesn't know how he could possibly know that, but it feels like truth. He has been given a gift, or Dean has. Maybe they both have, but either way, there's no wrong to be found in the press of Dean's lips against his own, in the taste of him, all beer and pizza and something provocatively metallic. There's no sin in the feel of their tongues slip-sliding over each other, no corruption in the surge of hope he sees deep in Dean's soul.

Castiel closes his eyes, and as their mouths press harder against each other, he reaches out with tendrils of his grace, and for the first time since just after escaping the fumes and grasping fingers of Hell, he touches Dean's soul.

Dean bucks up under him, a hard noise grunted into Castiel's mouth. Castiel pulls back to look at him, and a panting Dean asks, "What the hell was that?"

"Me, in you." He smiles a small smile. "Spiritually speaking."

"You gonna do it again?"

"I'd like to."

Dean still has Castiel's tie wrapped around his hand. He tugs Castiel back down, attacking Castiel mouth almost viciously. 'Do it then. Do it now.'

When Castiel does it again, Dean makes an animal noise, and a hard hand welds itself to the small of Castiel's back. Castiel is turned and lowered. He finds himself with his back on the sofa, Dean still between his legs, but lying above him and grinding down.

'Again. Don't stop.'

Castiel would love to do it again, but he's finding focus almost impossible to come by. He wraps a hand round to Dean's back, pulling him down closer, wanting to feel Dean's full weight upon him, and he writhes. 'Dean. Dean, oh.'

'Again, Cas.'

He tries, he really does, but with Dean heavy above him, mashing their trapped erections together and filling Castiel full of this almost unbearable burn of lust, it's as much as he can do to clutch and whimper. Before Dean can demand it for the third time, Castiel takes desperate action, lifting and moving them both with angel speed so that their positions are reversed.

Dean huffs as his back hits the sofa, and he looks around with wild eyes. "What the-?"

'I'm trying to give you what you want.' Castiel grips Dean's head between his hands and dives in, swooping his awareness inside Dean and wrapping himself around the calling soul. He caresses and stimulates, using his superior strength to stop Dean from rolling them both off the sofa with the force of his reaction. He doesn't even know how Dean can feel this soul touch. He didn't know this was possible before today, before now.

As Dean writhes and curses and pants out Castiel's name again and again, Castiel slides down his body and then kneels, his legs on either side of one of Dean's. He pushes up Dean's shirts a little way and quickly undoes his belt and zipper. He has to stand to tug off Dean's pants and underthings from his legs, so he removes his own while he's at it, leaving his shirt. Now, when he spreads himself back over Dean, their cocks touch.

"Fuck." To Castiel's surprise, that came from his own mouth. Dean stares up him, looking drunk, giddy on the things Castiel has been doing to him. Castiel presses their groins together, thrusting gently because he doesn't seem to be able to help it. "Dean. Oh, this is- I'm not sure... Dean, I don't know how to do this."

Dean laughs raggedly. "So you took control and now don't have a clue? Think you're gonna have to let me be the man in this, at least 'til you get used to what you're doing."

Castiel frowns. "Meaningless human gender stereotyping..."

Rolling his eyes, Dean grabs Castiel's tie again and yanks him down. "Bite me." As they begin to consume each other's mouths again, Dean keeping the tie taut, he adds, 'You just keep doing whatever that thing is inside of me. Let me take care of this.' He reaches between them with his free hand, and Castiel feels the warmth and pressure of a hand wrapping around that part of his vessel that, until today, has had little significance to him at all.

'Dean!'

'Like that?' Dean chuckles into Castiel's mouth and starts to tug on his cock.

Castiel forgets to breathe and ends up gasping loudly when his vessel takes back the reins of the autonomic respiratory system. "Dean, that- Oh." He gives up trying to talk and tries to give Dean more of what he asked for instead. Every time he touches Dean's soul with his grace, a terrible thrill runs through both of them, making them shudder and stutter against each other.

'That's fricking amazing, Cas,' Dean thinks, and it is, but it's amazing also how quickly Dean has picked up and accepted telepathic speech. 'D'you want to fuck?'

'Okay,' Castiel replies, not sure if he's agreeing to be penetrated or to penetrate and happy with whichever it turns out to be. He pulls back and drags his attention out to the surface of Dean again. He's immediately caught by how Dean looks: a pink flush amongst the freckles, his lips swollen and reddened, his pupils huge. 'Beautiful. So beautiful. This is God's work in the flesh.'

Dean snorts. "Did you mean me to hear that?"

Castiel shakes his head, but he's smiling as he moves up to his knees and waits for Dean to arrange things.

Dean gets to his feet and strips off his shirts in a quick motion, leaving himself naked bar his green-grey socks. He moves close to Castiel, looping his hand around Castiel's neck and moving his hips in lazy circles, rubbing cock against cock. Talking almost in a whisper, he says, "How about I'm inside your body while you're inside my... my soul?"

"Okay," Castiel says breathlessly. "I mean, yes. I want that."

Dean looks at him a bit longer then nods. "Get that shirt off, " he says, heading to the kitchen. Castiel looks at the brand of his hand on Dean's shoulder with interest. It's still so raw looking. "In what way is that 'off'?" Dean asks quietly, coming back with what looks like cooking oil.

Castiel removes the shirt and tie from his body with a thought. "In that way."

Dean rolls his eyes and pulls Castiel to him again. "Show off. God, Cas, I want you bad." He buries his face in Castiel's neck, and Castiel feels suction and the scrape of teeth. Together with the sheer amount of naked skin being rubbed against his own, he's finding it hard again to do anything but react.

He's pushed down onto the sofa and his legs parted, Dean sitting on the sofa between them. As Dean lowers his head, Castiel closes his eyes. As lips close around his cock, Castiel slams his head back into the cushions. There's warmth, so much warmth, and wetness and pressure and suction, and it feels amazing, almost too good. It steals all his attention, takes control of him so that he feels helpless. He's just breathing his way through that onslaught when oil-coated fingers are pressed inside him with a sensation unlike anything he's ever felt before.

He gasps and whimpers and clutches at Dean who shushes him softly and soothes him with thoughts. 'Let it happen, Cas. Let me in. I'm going to look after you, show you how good this can be. Not gonna hurt you. Never want to do that. Please, God, don't let me ever hurt you.'

Castiel thinks he wasn't meant to hear that last bit, but he responds to it anyway. 'You won't. You can't hurt me by loving me.'

Dean seems to stumble a little at Castiel's wording, but regroups quickly enough, and Castiel persuades his flesh to relax under Dean's touch. He stares down the length of his naked body, watching his cock disappear within Dean's mouth and then reappear, glistening and taut. He understands it all now, the lure of sex, how it compels humans like a lash on their back, transcending common sense, morality, even survival instinct. But despite that, this remains an act of love. A peace, if temporary, between two souls, a communion, and even the cheapest, most casual sex, must surely still be that at some level. This is why humans crave it so very much.

For Castiel, cut off from his brothers, from the song that has sustained him since the moment of his creation, it's succor and balm and the answer to a prayer he didn't know he'd been praying.

'Dean. Dean, oh, you are the world to me. You are the key and the window, the church and the choir...'

'Cas, for crissakes. Enough with the Harlequin crap already. It's beyond distracting.'

Castiel laughs. Honest, true laughter, and the pleasure from it merges with the pleasure of his body and becomes a single thing, an up-welling of joy.

Dean looks up, offering a slanted smile as he pulls his fingers from Castiel's body. 'You taste like the air after a storm.' As comments go, it's Harlequinny enough that Castiel knows it's a kind of apology, and he smiles back.

Dean kneels on the sofa between Castiel's legs, taking hold of them one at a time, and resting them against his shoulders. It's an uncomfortable and ungainly position, but when Dean pushes himself slowly and steadily inside, Castiel quickly decides he doesn't care at all about either thing. Dean's inside him now, moving, and Castiel is so centered within his vessel, his human body, that for the moment he thinks he finally understands what it is to be truly human.

"Dean," he whispers when Dean starts to thrust. 'Dean!' again when Dean starts to push against a bundle of nerve endings around and within a small gland, and it feels explosively intense, heat and pressure building within Castiel with every press of Dean's cock against that spot.

'Christ, Cas, look at you. So fucking hot, so wrecked, writhing like that. Your hair all mussed, your pupils blown so big I could fall into them, and I made you like this. I did it. Shit, Oh God, you're so tight around me. So hot, so perfect. Nothing will ever compare to this. Nothing. You're the one. You're the fucking one. I don't deserve this. I could never deserve this. Jeez, you feel so good. Want you always. Want you...' Dean's thoughts continue on in an apparently endless loop of increasingly incoherent, amazing blather. Castiel's almost certain he's not meant to be hearing them because these are things Dean would never say aloud, and yet Dean has to know that Castiel's listening.

It doesn't matter. Castiel moans, writhes, trembles under the touch of Dean's body and Dean's wonderful, exciting words. He knows he's approaching some peak of this Himalayan experience. There's a knot of burning pleasure that keeps growing and unraveling, spreading out tendrils inside of him, making his veins surge, his muscles tense, his human vision narrow.

Inside Dean, Castiel spreads out his grace, surrounding Dean's soul, penetrating it with a myriad tiny filaments, filling Dean with a different kind of heat and energy. Different but similar enough to make Dean groan and shudder much as Castiel himself is doing.

They are in each other. He's never felt anything so right, so incontrovertibly right. He's known little but doubt and questions since dragging Dean out of Hell, but there's no doubt here, no questioning. This is meant to be.

'Not keen on that destiny shit, Cas.' Dean's thought comes through loud, the words seeming to pass over Castiel's flesh leaving goose bumps in their wake.

'This was never foretold, Dean. Chuck will not have seen this, for which we can both be thankful. It's only with hindsight that its inevitability can be seen.'

'You're thinking way too much for a time like this.' Dean's mental voice is rough and intense. He starts fucking Castiel in earnest, pounding into him, the sofa complaining beneath them. Castiel gasps in breath where he can, but when Dean grabs hold of Castiel's cock and starts to pump it in counterpoint to the thrust of his hips, Castiel has to repress something not unlike a scream.

'Dean, Dean. Dean, Dean, Dean...'

He ignites sparks in Dean's soul, charging him up further, and it's becoming hard now to tell where soul or grace leaves off and bodies begin. They are moving within each other, filling each other with a gathering power, with a channeling wall of pressure and pleasure and even some pain, pushing them both forward, upward, inward and onward, closer and closer, until they're moving as one, spilling thoughts of love and awe and promises of more, always more, with abandon.

Then comes a Moment, the silence before the crash of the giant wave. Dean is laid bare above him, completely open, nothing hidden, no smoke, no mirrors. Castiel knows Dean now like he knows himself. No, better, clearer. Every nook is revealed, every cranny brightened and filled and known.

Then it is as if Aten's Sun Disk breaks open again before them as white, consuming light blazes out, filling their every cell, burning with the power of a universe of tiny suns.

***

Crowley watches as the younger Winchester slips through the door and out into the moonlit salvage yard, a beer bottle in his hands. He waits until Sam gets closer and then steps forward. "Couldn't sleep?"

"What the-" Sam stumbles back a few steps. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Crowley snorts and pursing his lips to partially repress a smile. He can hear the lad's heart thumping from here. "Curiosity, mainly, and lo and behold, you boys have messed it up again, haven't you?" He shakes his head. "Why do I even bother?"

"I don't know. Why do you?" Sam looks positively pouty, and that is, Crowley has to admit, pretty damn adorable. He'll be honest; he can see what the late, unlamented Ruby saw in the lad. Art Brut at its finest.

"Well, it's that or kill you both, and frankly, I don't have much hope that the latter will stick." Crowley leans back against the shell of a Dodge Lancer and smiles pleasantly at Sam. "Lucifer will bring you back; the angels will return your genius of a brother to his skin, and way too much pressure will be put on both of you to say 'yes'. So I thought I'd try something a little different from all the usual blood and screams and offer a helping hand."

Sam snorts. "Not so different as all that."

He knows Sam is referring to Ruby, but he just concedes the point with a wave of his hand and moves on. "So what went wrong this time?"

Sam shrugs, taking a single step closer. "The disk broke." He pauses. "Uh, could it have done something when it did that?"

Crowley raises an eyebrow. "Are you asking me if your brother and his angel are currently breaking all the laws of God and man on Uncle Bobby's sofa because of the sun disk?"

Sam's face ripples through several expressions before settling on chagrin. "Kinda, yeah."

Nodding, Crowley pushes away from the wreck. "Possibly. But only if this was something they both secretly wanted anyway. The disk doesn't transform or create; it just facilitates. Excuse me one moment, would you?"

He teleports away, and when he returns, Sam's looking broodier than ever. Crowley appears close behind the lad and says, "If you ask me, it's a blessing." He smiles as Sam's straightens bolt upright. "Maybe not as much of one as we'd all been hoping for, but hardly a bad thing."

Sam glares at Crowley when he turns around. "D'you get a special kick from making me jump out of my skin?"

Crowley lifts his hands, a piece of Aten's Disk in each one. "Demon here. You've got to allow me a small thrill occasionally. It's only fair. Anyway, you look delightful when you're flustered." Sam's face is a moving picture par excellence after that last comment, and Crowley enjoys every single delicious twitch and clench.

"What are you doing with that?" Sam growls, looking at the pieces of the disk.

"Well, it's no good to you anymore, is it? Still has value to me as an exhibit though."

"Why is it a blessing, Dean and Cas doing... what they're doing?"

"Hmm?" Crowley pretends to be distracted as he pockets the sun disk, but then he says casually, "Oh, because Castiel's the wild card in the Apocalypse deck, Sam. Didn't you realize? Talk to that prophet friend of yours; he'll tell you. Each time events around you two have veered off script, it's had something to do with Castiel. And believe me, you two don't-want-to-be-vessels need to be doing as much ad-libbing as you can possibly manage. So, stick to your wild card and make him stick with you." He winks and swirls a quick tongue over his lower lip. "You know it makes sense."

Sam just stares at him, his huge brow furrowed.

Crowley rolls his eyes. "I thought you were meant to be the bright one? Well, I guess when compared to Team Dean, everyone gets bonus points on the IQ leader board." He takes out a card from his pocket and hands it to Sam. "Your brother and his angel can get hold of me on this number. It won't work for you, I'm afraid, since you haven't agreed to our nice little white-flag treaty. Any time you feel like making out, however, just let me know."

"Yeah, like that's going to happen," Sam says dismissively, taking the card with obvious reluctance.

Crowley tuts softly. "Never say never, Sam. You know better than that." He gives the boy a doff of his imaginary hat and takes himself away with a thought.

Back in his current luxury hideout, he sits behind his desk. After pouring himself a large cognac, he takes out the two halves of Aten's Sun Disk. Fitting them back together with a sharp click, he puts the restored artifact down on his blotter and then leans back in his chair to sip his drink. Every few moments he finds himself chuckling with good humor.

Oh, those Winchester boys and their angel are going to be just so much fun.

Notes:

Thanks to: Wesleysgirl and Wolfling for their beta-skills and advice. I'd be lost without you two.