Fic: We Who Were Living (Supernatural)
Jan. 31st, 2015 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: We Who Were Living
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Dean/Cas(ish)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Major character death (offscreen)
Word count: 5700
Summary: After the end of days, there are... more days. Castiel takes them one at a time. Sometimes Dean is there with him. Mostly he isn't.
AU from 5.18 "Point of No Return". Dean said 'yes', Sam was killed along with Lucifer, and Michael checked out. Cas and Dean try to live in the aftermath.
Author's Notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
deancas_xmas, for liliaeth's Michael!Dean prompt. Reveals are now up, so while I'm here, I'm going to put in a plug for the wonderful, trippy piece that TKodami wrote for me: find it here.
Thanks, as always, tofrozen_delight for all her beta help and encouragement. ♥
“We have eggs today.” Castiel sets down his burden on the tabletop. “I’ll make omelets later.”
There is no reply. He reaches into the bag and lifts the eggs out one by one, cradling each one carefully before he places it in the battered plastic bowl sitting in front of him.
All of their crockery is plastic. But that they have it at all—that they have nearly enough food, and a place to eat it in safety, let alone anything more luxurious—is more than Castiel would have dared hope for a few months ago. He still handles each piece as though it is breakable.
“The sky is clouding over,” he says. “It should rain soon. That’s good. We need water.”
Silence.
“Giulia is going to come by tomorrow,” he goes on. “She wants to show me how to fix the generator. I fear that she overestimates my practical abilities.” He glances in the direction of the couch. “You would be able to do it, I think.”
Still no reply. He’s accustomed to that.
Dean is sitting on the couch with his legs drawn up in front of him, knees hugged to his chest, the polar opposite of his old easy sprawl. Sometimes, it seems that he is trying to take up as little space as possible; to subtract himself from the world.
More often, Castiel thinks, there is no trying about it. Dean simply isn’t here. He looks empty, his eyes fixed blankly on the space where a television would be if they had one, if there were such a thing as television anymore. His moments of lucidity are few and far between. Most of the time he doesn’t speak; barely responds at all, except when Castiel addresses him directly, and even then it’s mechanical, as though he’s acting on ingrained impulse, not conscious thought.
Right now, he’s barefoot, still in the sweatpants and holey t-shirt he slept in. It’s only within the last couple of weeks that Castiel has decided it’s safe for them not to sleep fully-clothed, with their boots on. He still keeps emergency packs stashed close to the door, in case they need to make a quick escape, and he’s aware that even this small concession may be unwise. But he finds that he needs the illusion of security, the idea of a home, in a way that he didn’t before he found Dean again. Or before Dean found him.
He still isn’t sure that either is really true.
He finishes unpacking the food—corn and tomatoes from Beth’s garden, as well as the eggs, plus a few cans from the informal market in the center of Haven—and hangs up his rucksack.
“Dean,” he says. “You should get dressed.”
Dean continues staring at the absence of a TV. Castiel waits a moment, then walks over and plants himself in front of Dean. Gently, he reaches down to tip Dean’s face upward, and looks into his eyes. It’s like staring through the windows of an abandoned house.
“Dean,” he tries, again. “Go get dressed.”
This time, Dean stands and shuffles off obediently into the bedroom. Castiel closes the door behind him.
----
“I don’t understand why you insist on giving this place a name,” Castiel says.
Giulia shrugs. “You don’t like it, nobody’s making you stay.” She is carving the word ‘Haven’ into a flat piece of wood, slow and diligent, with every appearance of being absorbed in her task—though Castiel knows from experience that the barest suggestion of sound in the undergrowth will have her on her feet. Later, she will nail it to a tree beside the path into their little settlement, their fragile remnant of human civilization, clinging to the edge of a world gone into chaos.
Gone into chaos—but not gone. The distinction would not have seemed important, once.
He watches Giulia carve. “That’s not what I said.”
She shrugs at him; offers no further answer.
He will come to understand, in time.
The people in Haven already line their homes with salt. Castiel will show them how to draw devil’s traps and how to ward against angels—because the Host may be gone from Earth, but their memory is seared into humanity’s retina like the afterimage of a nuclear blast. He will volunteer as a sentinel in his turn, as everybody else here does. He will see the fierceness in their eyes as they look upon their home. The hope that it will prove to be more than a temporary fortress, a last outpost of a doomed species.
The buildings are their shelter. The sentinels are their reassurance. The wards and the salt-lines are their fortifications and their boundaries.
But the sign that reads, ‘Haven’: that is a statement of intent.
----
Castiel neatens the salt-lines underneath their windows and looks out at the sky. It’s iron-grey, heavy with rain. The air is sharp with ozone.
By the time he has checked the devil’s trap by the door, boiled water on the gas stove with which to clean the vegetables, and gathered candle stubs enough to see them through an evening without generator power, rain is battering the windows, thunder like an omen far above. Lightning shudders in the sky, rendering the trees and buildings in brief, startling monochrome.
Dean still hasn’t emerged from the bedroom.
Castiel forces himself to wait a moment longer, until the brief flutter of hope he feels is gone. He opens the door with some caution.
Dean has gotten dressed. He stands at the window, looking out at the storm. His back is to the door, but the desolate slump of his shoulders tells Castiel everything he needs to know.
The storm that raged on that night felt as though it might be the end of all things. It was vast and elemental, and hearing it roar in the sky, Castiel felt his helplessness keenly. He can only imagine what it meant to Dean; what memories it triggers in him now.
And yet the sight of all that sorrow makes his heart swell with joy.
This is so rare—too rare not to be grasped with both hands and held tightly, no matter how painful it might be. In any case, sadness has been woven into the fiber of Dean Winchester’s being since Castiel first laid eyes on him and longer. Without it, he would be somebody else. Castiel would have him in this world defeated, broken, lost, temporary—all of those things, rather than not at all.
There is a name for that, he knows.
Before Castiel can open his mouth to speak, Dean hears his footsteps and turns to face him.
“Cas,” he says. His voice is hoarse.
Castiel wants to reach out and touch him; to pull him into a comforting embrace; to kiss away the pain that shines in his eyes. He feels it like a physical ache. He does none of those things.
“Hello, Dean,” he says, in place of them.
Now, for this moment, Dean is here, with him. He will never dare hope for more.
----
Castiel shakes the can of spraypaint and holds it out to Giulia. “Here. Your turn.”
They’re running low on paint. They’ll have to find something else to use for their wards, soon. Giulia will come up with something, he expects. She’s practical, always busy, her clever hands never still.
She takes the can from him and begins to draw the symbol steadily, her brow furrowed in concentration. She’s on the last stroke when the shout from the gate comes, and she startles and the line veers off at a wild angle.
“Shit!” she says, frowning. “Shit, shit, shit.” She sets down the can, looking up as Marcus sprints toward them. “What’s up?”
“Come check it out,” he says, breathless. “We got company.”
“How many?” Giulia’s hand darts to her weapon, and Castiel blinks in surprise. He’s sensed no supernatural presences—though whether he can even do that anymore is questionable.
“Just one guy,” Marcus says. “Right out in the open. Looks pretty beat up, but—” He frowns. “I think he might be human.”
Castiel and Giulia follow him to the lookout post, Giulia peering through the binoculars Marcus hands her. The figure approaching them is that of a man, ragged and apparently unarmed. He doesn’t stop to look around him; gives no sign of being aware of his surroundings at all. He just stumbles onward, unsteady but inexorable, like a zombie in one of the late-night movies Dean used to watch when he couldn’t sleep.
“What do you think?” Giulia passes him the binoculars. Castiel looks through them. The stumbling figure comes into focus.
And then the shock of recognition steals away all his other thoughts.
It only later occurs to him that the zombie comparison is apt. After all, he is looking at a dead man walking.
----
Dean isn’t disoriented, doesn’t ask where he is—or where Sam is, which is always worse—and Castiel allows himself to be relieved. Dean must have been back a while, for the initial shock of consciousness to wear off. Since the rain began, perhaps.
Castiel has learned to be careful with him. It’s better to let him come back to himself unaided, let the pieces fall where they will and be there to pick them up afterwards, than to force awareness. There is no gentle way to say it, after all.
You said yes. You both did. And now the world is still here, but Sam’s gone, and most of the time so are you.
The first time Castiel approached the subject, Dean lapsed back into silence and stayed there for the better part of a fortnight. Now, he doesn’t push the subject, doesn’t ask whether Dean remembers where he is or why they’re here. He just places his hand on Dean’s shoulder and steers him away from the window.
“I was going to make lunch,” he says. “Would you like something to eat?”
“Sure,” Dean says, after a moment. He sounds uncertain, but Castiel knows better than to take offense, just nods and turns for the kitchen.
“I keep forgetting you can cook now,” Dean says, then. It’s quiet, but it makes Castiel blink, startled. When he looks around, there’s a faint, sad smile on Dean’s face. Sad; but then Castiel has never seen Dean smile without sadness in his heart, and probably never will. Seeing him smile at all is an unexpected blessing, like a patch of wildflowers in the middle of the woods, a ray of sunshine peering through slate-grey sky.
Castiel returns his smile. “Still not well,” he says.
To hear Dean acknowledge anything about this world—this world that is still here, in which he and Castiel are still here, and Sam isn’t—is surprise enough. He doesn’t do so often. Castiel understands that well enough to know that he can’t understand, not really. This world is strange to him, and often painful, but it is bearable.
The world is not exactly saved. The angels are departed. The hordes of Hell are scattered without their leader, some in hiding, others running amok. The monsters have crept from the shadows, and some of them even dare hunt in daylight now. But there is human life, too, clinging to the surface of the planet with a tenacity by which Castiel never ceases to be surprised. He knows how fragile humans are, knows the many easy ways in which their short lives can be snuffed out—and yet they fight tooth and nail for their survival.
So maybe the world is not exactly doomed, either.
Without Dean, it might have been, though the one time Castiel tried explaining that, he got a bloody nose for his trouble.
Dean had looked down at his hands, turned pale, and begun to stammer an apology, and Castiel had forgotten himself enough to clutch desperately at his arms. “It’s okay,” he’d said, over and over, and he’d meant please don’t go, but Dean was already gone and Castiel couldn’t blame him.
He didn’t see it that way himself, for a long time. The memory of his rage, when he first learned what Dean planned to do, has never really faded, though now it’s accompanied by a rush of shame. How selfish he was in his anger. How little he understood what he was angry about.
I gave everything for this, he meant to say. For this idea, for free will, because you say it’s the right thing to do—and now you throw it all away? But, I gave everything for you, was what came out of his mouth. He knew, then, and he’s been regretting the blood on his knuckles ever since.
Sometimes he wonders whether things would have been different, if he’d known what it was he felt before then. If he’d just confessed; if he could have won Dean over with kisses instead of fists.
He suspects not. But sometimes he wonders.
He turns back to Dean. “Come on,” he says. “You can help me crack eggs.”
----
“You look like you just saw a ghost,” Giulia says in his ear. “You know this guy or something?”
Castiel swallows. “Yes,” he manages. “Yes, he’s—an old friend.” It surprises him that his voice is steady. A dam has burst somewhere inside of him and there’s a waterfall thundering in his ears. Dean is alive. This can’t be real. This can’t be real, but it is.
“Okay.” Gently, Giulia pries the binoculars from his hands. She turns to Marcus. “Bring him in.”
Marcus nods and heads down toward the road, motioning for two of the other guards to follow him, reaching into the back of his jeans for his gun as he goes.
Castiel’s eyes follow the motion. Giulia must see it, because she lowers her head apologetically, and says, “We have to check your guy out. Can’t risk it.”
“Of course,” he says. He already knows that won’t be a problem.
Dean was limping. He looks as though he has walked here. If he were something other than himself, that would make no sense. Even in his weakened state, Castiel would surely feel something if Michael were here.
He’d feel anger, if nothing else.
They bring Dean into the town and Marcus splashes him with holy water and chants and shines a light in his eyes and eventually confirms what Castiel already knows: “If anything was possessing this guy, it’s checked out.”
It takes Castiel days to accept what everyone else sees right away: that Michael may have checked out, but that doesn’t mean that Dean has checked back in.
----
They eat in silence. Castiel tries not to watch too closely.
He knows that Dean used to find his scrutiny unnerving. He thinks that he might welcome a terse, What? or a C’mon, man, that’s creepy, but not enough to take the risk of scaring Dean back inside of himself.
The storm outside rattles the windows. It’s early afternoon, but dark enough for evening. Castiel lights a candle.
Dean finishes eating. He sets down his fork and sits watching the flickering of the flame.
“You should let me cut your hair,” Castiel says, to break the silence. He’s been waiting for one of Dean’s lucid periods to suggest it. Perhaps it would be just as easy to do it when Dean is not-here, sitting still and silent. Dean probably wouldn’t object.
Castiel never does it, though. It wouldn’t seem right.
Dean glances at the window, and after a moment Castiel realizes he’s looking at his reflection. “Yeah,” he says. “Should probably get on that. I’m starting to look like—”
He goes quiet.
Castiel stands up. He takes a half-step toward Dean, lifts his hand as though to place it on Dean’s shoulder, then lets it drop to his side. He turns and digs in the emergency medical kit for scissors.
Dean sits very still as Castiel drapes a towel around his shoulders to catch the offcuts. He runs his fingers through Dean’s hair. It’s soft, without the gel he used to put in it, and Dean’s breath catches quietly as Castiel’s fingers run over his scalp. As though of their own accord, they find the warm skin at the nape of Dean’s neck, and they linger there a moment, just barely touching.
Once, Dean would have pulled away from him. His expression would have shuttered itself off, and he would have made a wisecrack about not being that kind of girl or don’t touch what you can’t afford. Castiel wouldn’t have understood. Not really; not then.
He understands now. What it is to fear the thing you want, the way it will weaken you.
He catches sight of Dean’s reflection in the window and sees that his eyes are closed, his expression unreadable. He pulls his hand away and reaches for the scissors.
The soft scritch-scritch they make as he cuts is hypnotic. He listens to it and tries not to think.
----
Castiel wakes and the ground beneath him is moving. He’s lying flat on his back. His guts churn.
He opens his eyes. A pale expanse of sky greets him. Voices, somewhere to the right of him, outside his field of vision. He breathes in. The dank, salt smell of ocean catches in his throat and he rolls to the side, retching. There is a gasp of surprise. Someone mutters, “But he wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t breathing.”
Castiel hauls himself to his feet, doubles over the side of the boat and coughs up watery bile into the sea.
This is a boat. He is at sea.
The last thing he remembers is pain. Pain and light; the sensation of being flung to all the corners of the earth at once. The feeling that he was dust. Spiraling through the spaces between the stars. Lost in the infinite.
It was oddly comforting.
He turns and there are men staring at him. They trade glances, fear and consternation. One of them runs to the cabin, saying something about a radio. Castiel ignores him. Turns back to the sea and tries to remember.
Before the light and the pain. Dean. Watching Sam and Dean walk right into Heaven’s gilded trap, and the sick certainty that Dean had no intention of walking back out of it. At least, not in any way that counted.
But there would be signs, if the Apocalypse had begun. The sky is clear. No fire rains from Heaven; no Hell boils up from beneath the sea. And Castiel feels a flicker of hope that—
“Hello, brother.”
A flicker of hope that dies the moment it’s born, because Castiel knows that voice.
He knows the voice, but its tone is unfamiliar, its inflections different. He clutches the side of the boat and steels himself. “Why are you here?” he asks, without turning around.
“My vessel placed some—conditions on his consent.” Michael almost sounds bored, as though this is no more than an everyday discussion of strategy or Heavenly bureaucracy. Castiel stiffens. “One of them was that I ensure you escape unharmed.”
There is a hand on Castiel’s shoulder, then. Dean’s hand, but Dean is not touching him.
The hand grasps his shoulder and turns him around. He doesn’t want to look, but he can no more resist than a leaf can resist the wind. He tries to glower, but finds his anger dying within him at the sight of Dean’s face, its unfamiliar expression of flinty-eyed command. The absence that looks back at him.
There are so many things he didn’t say. Or he said wrong, said with fists and with cold fury when he should have offered patience, offered love.
“Dean,” he says, and his voice comes out hoarse. “Dean. You didn’t have to do this.”
Silence. He realizes he is trembling.
“You don’t have to do this,” he ploughs on. “I know you’re still in there. Fight back. You can fight back, we’ll find a way—”
More silence. Castiel’s words die in his throat. Still he stands staring, searching his brother’s face for a trace of his beloved and meeting no spark of recognition.
Michael takes a step forward, then. He touches Castiel’s forehead. (Dean’s hand touches Castiel’s forehead, but Dean doesn’t.) There’s a flash of actinic white, and then Castiel’s physical pains are gone. His nausea recedes; he feels renewed strength in his limbs; he only realizes that his head was aching because it has stopped. He’s alive with power again, Heaven thrumming in his veins.
It is a kind of agony.
Michael’s hand (Dean’s hand) drops back to his side.
“You should run, brother,” he says. “Stay out of this. I’m aware that I made a promise, but if you insist on involving yourself after I’ve warned you away, I may not be able to keep it.” His voice (Dean’s voice) suggests that that possibility wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome.
Castiel ignores him. “Dean,” he says again, more softly now. “I’m sorry. I wish—I wish I said something different. I wish I had been able to—” He pauses. Closes his eyes. “Dean. When this is over, if you’re still here—find me. I’ll be here for you. I’ll wait for you.” His voice breaks a little. “I’m sorry.”
Michael vanishes with a flutter of wings that sounds like distant thunder.
Castiel stares out at the grey, empty sea.
----
“There. All done.” Castiel sets down the scissors. Dean reaches up to brush the hair from his cheeks, and Castiel’s fingers itch with the desire to reach out and do it himself.
He intends to hang back as Dean moves to look at his own reflection in the windowpane, but he finds himself following unconsciously, studying Dean’s face for his reaction. For a reaction that he can recognize as Dean’s.
He struggled with the nuances of human emotion, once; found them frustrating, impenetrable. Now, he hoards the evidence of them as carefully as he hoards food and water and clothing, and thinks they might even be more necessary to his survival.
A brief smile tugs at the corners of Dean’s mouth. He touches his hair. “Yeah, that’s better,” he says. “We might be camping out but this ain’t Woodstock.”
Castiel blinks in surprise.
He doesn’t dare ask himself whether this is Dean beginning to adjust to the world. He’s already been lucid for longer than usual, today. It’s unusual for him to be present longer than a few hours at a time. It’s understandable.
The world still exists because he said yes. That is quite possibly true.
The world is still here, and they are still here, and Sam isn’t. That is definitely true, and that Dean could stand to live in a world where it is true—where the rage of angels was stronger than the love of men—seems like an impossibility.
Dean turns where he stands, then. His hand finds Castiel’s forearm, lingers there, wrapped around his wrist. He’s smiling. It is such a small, faint thing. His fingers tighten around Castiel’s arm as though he is afraid Castiel will disappear if he lets go.
Castiel knows the feeling.
“Dean,” he says, quietly.
“Yeah, Cas?” Their faces are close together—closer than Dean would have allowed, in former days. Dean doesn’t quite meet Castiel’s eyes.
It would be easier to believe that this means nothing. That wherever Dean goes, inside of his head, when he isn’t here, must be lonely. That Dean has always needed others, and Castiel is simply the closest available other.
That, after all, maybe he doesn’t know what Castiel feels for him. Castiel didn’t know himself until it was too late, after all.
He turns his hand palm-up. Dean’s fingertips brush the skin underneath his wrist. An inch or two more and they would be holding hands.
It would be easier to believe that this means nothing. But that Dean stays with him, clings to him like a lifeline, when death would be so much kinder—that makes it impossible.
He takes a step back, leading Dean away from the window. The rain is beginning to ease. There is a break in the clouds, a crack of pearly grey light.
“Giulia was supposed to come help me with the generator,” he says. “I guess she thought it was better to stay indoors. Dean, could you take a look? I think you would know what to do.”
Dean blinks at him. After a moment, he slumps a little, but he nods and drops Castiel’s arm.
----
Castiel runs, as Michael told him to. He runs to the plains of Antarctica and watches the aurora australis unfold across the sky. He runs to the Black Rock Desert and watches the sun rise over the Jackson Mountains; runs to the other side of the world to watch that same sun slip below the horizon. He stands on the shore of the Minas Basin and watches the tide eat away at the mudflats.
Dean is gone, and the world ticks on like clockwork, and he is helpless to stop it.
He runs and runs; and in the end, he runs to Sam.
He materializes in Bobby’s front room, the air disturbed by his arrival rustling papers on the table. He has his strength again—the flight does not drain him—but the hopeful expression with which Sam looks up from his laptop makes Castiel droop as though the world sits on his shoulders.
Sam’s face falls when he sees that Castiel is alone. It takes him a moment to school his expression into calm.
“What happened?” he says, at last. “I got Adam out of there and then the door shut and I couldn’t—” He scrubs at his eyes, as though he could erase the grief there. “I couldn’t.”
“Sam,” Castiel says, and then he can’t say anything else, but he sees that Sam understands.
Sam doesn’t say anything. His lips thin; he squares his shoulders. “Bobby?” he calls.
Bobby emerges from the next room, his habitual frown deepening as he catches sight of Castiel and Sam and the absence of Dean.
“We gotta hit the books,” Sam tells him. “Find out if there’s some way to track an archangel.” His voice is almost steady.
“You won’t find Michael unless he wants to be found,” Castiel tells them. He knows it would be better to lie, but finds himself unable to do so.
Sam just nods. There’s grim determination in his eyes, and Castiel realizes he was prepared for this. He has another plan, and there is only one thing that plan can be.
“You can’t,” he says. “Sam, you can’t. It’s suicide.”
“It’s the only option I got.”
“We’ll find others. There has to be a way. I’ll speak to the other angels—”
“And then they’ll kill you,” Sam says. “And I’m the last person they’re gonna help.” He sighs. “I’m sorry, man. I really am. I wish we could’ve shown you better than this. But I don’t have a choice. I have to do this.”
“Do what?” demands Bobby. “What’s in your head, son?”
Castiel feels a sick inevitability. Hears a sound like things falling into place.
“We won’t find Michael unless he wants us to,” Sam says. “And there’s only one person he wants to be found by.”
“No way in hell,” Bobby says, but Sam is standing at the window and there’s a gun in his hand that Castiel didn’t know he was holding. His lips move, but Castiel can’t hear the words over the screaming in his head. He pulls the trigger and the angel warding on the windowpane shatters into a million pieces that shower down on him like rain.
Sam’s face is perfectly calm.
It is the last time Castiel sees him.
----
There is no altruism in the way Castiel keeps his distance. He’s well aware of that.
It would seem wrong to give Dean the kind of comfort he sometimes seems to want. Like taking advantage of his loss and his lostness. That isn’t it, though. Not really. It’s about how Dean is always temporary, how he could slip back inside of himself at any moment, and how each time he does Castiel fears that this time it’s permanent.
It’s about how he isn’t sure he could survive losing any more of Dean.
He watches Dean poke at the insides of the generator, then nod and pick up a screwdriver and get to work, and his mind feels like it’s split down the middle. Half of him is calm, watching Dean’s hands and listening to his explanations with the occasional nod or hum or understanding. Yet at the same time, his heart is in his mouth. When Dean isn’t looking at him he finds himself staring, studying the back of Dean’s head as though he could pin Dean to consciousness with the weight of his gaze. He can’t help it.
He keeps it up all evening, while Dean helps him prepare vegetables from the garden, while they eat and collect water from the rain tank to wash their dishes.
They end up sitting at opposite ends of the threadbare couch.
Castiel has a small stack of books, collected from the ruin of what was once a public library on a foraging expedition. He plucks one from the top of the pile and opens it on his knee.
After a moment’s careful consideration, Dean follows him. He chooses his own carefully—a battered Kerouac paperback, which Castiel has never read and chose only because the stretch of road pictured on the cover reminded him of Dean—and bends his head over it in the lamplight.
Castiel watches him. It’s only when Dean looks up and says, “You okay, dude? You haven’t turned a page in ten minutes,” that it occurs to him he doesn’t even know what he’s pretending to read.
“Oh,” he says. “I. I’m tired.”
He’s still a hopeless liar. Sometimes he wonders if he would have gotten better at it, if he’d had longer with Sam and Dean, longer in the human world.
Dean sighs and puts down his book. “I get it,” he says. “Cas. I do.” He shifts where he sits; sinks toward the center of the couch. “I’m tired, too.”
He looks Castiel in the face and his eyes glitter in the lamplight. The sadness in them is depthless.
I’m sorry, Castiel wants to say. I want to give you peace, he wants to say. Stay with me, he wants to say. Stay with me, and maybe we would be okay.
“You should go to bed,” he says, and his voice catches in his throat. Every time Dean closes his eyes, every time he leaves the room, Castiel is afraid. And yet he doesn’t dare hold on.
He closes his own eyes, but opens them again when it is Dean who says, “Stay with me?” Low and unsure, a question.
Castiel should say no. It would be better for both of them if he says no. It would be less selfish. It would be more sensible.
“Yes,” he says. He lets Dean take his hand and lead him into the bedroom.
----
They undress without looking each other in the eye. Dean changes into his sweatpants and t-shirt. Castiel just unlaces his shoes and pulls off his jeans, leaving himself in a soft t-shirt and boxers. He closes the mismatched curtains and doesn’t look back into the room until he hears Dean climb under the bedcovers.
They lie on far sides of the bed, breathing through the silence. Castiel finds himself acutely aware of Dean’s every movement. Every change in his breathing, every shift of the mattress when he turns over or reaches for his glass of water. Each one is a small relief, proof that Dean hasn’t gone to sleep yet. Hasn’t left him yet. He feels as though he will vibrate out of his skin with waiting.
At length, Dean groans and turns to face him. He props himself up on an elbow, and Castiel can feel Dean’s eyes on him, even as he lies looking up at the ceiling.
He doesn’t know what he expects. An admonishment, probably, or a weak attempt at making a joke of the situation.
Or silence. That would be worse.
Dean doesn’t say anything, at first, and Castiel’s insides twist uncomfortably. Eventually, he turns to lie on his side, facing Dean.
“I don’t want to,” Dean says, then. “Not always.”
Castiel frowns at him.
“I don’t want to go.”
At that, Castiel can’t help but stare. “You’d choose to be—here?” he says, disbelieving.
Dean lets out a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Hell no,” he says. “But trust me, it beats the other place.”
Is Dean more alone in the other place, Castiel wonders, or less?
“I’m sorry,” he says, instead of asking.
Dean shrugs. “I don’t—go there because I want to,” he says. “I just. I wanted you to know that, I guess.”
Castiel nods. He takes a breath. Reaches out in the darkness and lays his hand on Dean’s side, on top of the bedcovers. It’s just enough like touching for him to be sure that Dean is there, warm and real beside him. Dean doesn’t shrug his hand off. He inches closer, until all Castiel can see of him are his eyes, clear as green glass, until Castiel can feel his breathing. Then he stops.
They look at each other for a moment.
“Okay,” Castiel says. He isn’t sure what he’s saying okay to, but he feels Dean relax fractionally under his hand.
He closes his eyes.
----
When he wakes, Dean is sleeping. He’s on his back, breathing deep and even, and Castiel’s arm is slung across his middle. Sunlight creeps in between the curtains, paints a stripe of gold across his face.
Castiel never dared dream of seeing him like this, back when it could have been more than a dream.
Carefully, he extricates himself from Dean and the bedcovers. As he sits up, Dean makes a sleepy noise and stirs, and Castiel freezes and holds his breath until Dean subsides into stillness again. Then he climbs out of bed. The floor is cold on his bare feet.
He leaves Dean to sleep, and heads for the kitchen to heat up water and busy himself with breakfast.
He doesn’t know whether Dean will still be here—really here—when he opens his eyes. Statistically, it’s unlikely.
Still, Castiel will be waiting for him.
Author:
anactoriaCharacters/pairing: Dean/Cas(ish)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Major character death (offscreen)
Word count: 5700
Summary: After the end of days, there are... more days. Castiel takes them one at a time. Sometimes Dean is there with him. Mostly he isn't.
AU from 5.18 "Point of No Return". Dean said 'yes', Sam was killed along with Lucifer, and Michael checked out. Cas and Dean try to live in the aftermath.
Author's Notes: Written for
deancas_xmas, for liliaeth's Michael!Dean prompt. Reveals are now up, so while I'm here, I'm going to put in a plug for the wonderful, trippy piece that TKodami wrote for me: find it here.Thanks, as always, to
frozen_delight for all her beta help and encouragement. ♥“We have eggs today.” Castiel sets down his burden on the tabletop. “I’ll make omelets later.”
There is no reply. He reaches into the bag and lifts the eggs out one by one, cradling each one carefully before he places it in the battered plastic bowl sitting in front of him.
All of their crockery is plastic. But that they have it at all—that they have nearly enough food, and a place to eat it in safety, let alone anything more luxurious—is more than Castiel would have dared hope for a few months ago. He still handles each piece as though it is breakable.
“The sky is clouding over,” he says. “It should rain soon. That’s good. We need water.”
Silence.
“Giulia is going to come by tomorrow,” he goes on. “She wants to show me how to fix the generator. I fear that she overestimates my practical abilities.” He glances in the direction of the couch. “You would be able to do it, I think.”
Still no reply. He’s accustomed to that.
Dean is sitting on the couch with his legs drawn up in front of him, knees hugged to his chest, the polar opposite of his old easy sprawl. Sometimes, it seems that he is trying to take up as little space as possible; to subtract himself from the world.
More often, Castiel thinks, there is no trying about it. Dean simply isn’t here. He looks empty, his eyes fixed blankly on the space where a television would be if they had one, if there were such a thing as television anymore. His moments of lucidity are few and far between. Most of the time he doesn’t speak; barely responds at all, except when Castiel addresses him directly, and even then it’s mechanical, as though he’s acting on ingrained impulse, not conscious thought.
Right now, he’s barefoot, still in the sweatpants and holey t-shirt he slept in. It’s only within the last couple of weeks that Castiel has decided it’s safe for them not to sleep fully-clothed, with their boots on. He still keeps emergency packs stashed close to the door, in case they need to make a quick escape, and he’s aware that even this small concession may be unwise. But he finds that he needs the illusion of security, the idea of a home, in a way that he didn’t before he found Dean again. Or before Dean found him.
He still isn’t sure that either is really true.
He finishes unpacking the food—corn and tomatoes from Beth’s garden, as well as the eggs, plus a few cans from the informal market in the center of Haven—and hangs up his rucksack.
“Dean,” he says. “You should get dressed.”
Dean continues staring at the absence of a TV. Castiel waits a moment, then walks over and plants himself in front of Dean. Gently, he reaches down to tip Dean’s face upward, and looks into his eyes. It’s like staring through the windows of an abandoned house.
“Dean,” he tries, again. “Go get dressed.”
This time, Dean stands and shuffles off obediently into the bedroom. Castiel closes the door behind him.
“I don’t understand why you insist on giving this place a name,” Castiel says.
Giulia shrugs. “You don’t like it, nobody’s making you stay.” She is carving the word ‘Haven’ into a flat piece of wood, slow and diligent, with every appearance of being absorbed in her task—though Castiel knows from experience that the barest suggestion of sound in the undergrowth will have her on her feet. Later, she will nail it to a tree beside the path into their little settlement, their fragile remnant of human civilization, clinging to the edge of a world gone into chaos.
Gone into chaos—but not gone. The distinction would not have seemed important, once.
He watches Giulia carve. “That’s not what I said.”
She shrugs at him; offers no further answer.
He will come to understand, in time.
The people in Haven already line their homes with salt. Castiel will show them how to draw devil’s traps and how to ward against angels—because the Host may be gone from Earth, but their memory is seared into humanity’s retina like the afterimage of a nuclear blast. He will volunteer as a sentinel in his turn, as everybody else here does. He will see the fierceness in their eyes as they look upon their home. The hope that it will prove to be more than a temporary fortress, a last outpost of a doomed species.
The buildings are their shelter. The sentinels are their reassurance. The wards and the salt-lines are their fortifications and their boundaries.
But the sign that reads, ‘Haven’: that is a statement of intent.
Castiel neatens the salt-lines underneath their windows and looks out at the sky. It’s iron-grey, heavy with rain. The air is sharp with ozone.
By the time he has checked the devil’s trap by the door, boiled water on the gas stove with which to clean the vegetables, and gathered candle stubs enough to see them through an evening without generator power, rain is battering the windows, thunder like an omen far above. Lightning shudders in the sky, rendering the trees and buildings in brief, startling monochrome.
Dean still hasn’t emerged from the bedroom.
Castiel forces himself to wait a moment longer, until the brief flutter of hope he feels is gone. He opens the door with some caution.
Dean has gotten dressed. He stands at the window, looking out at the storm. His back is to the door, but the desolate slump of his shoulders tells Castiel everything he needs to know.
The storm that raged on that night felt as though it might be the end of all things. It was vast and elemental, and hearing it roar in the sky, Castiel felt his helplessness keenly. He can only imagine what it meant to Dean; what memories it triggers in him now.
And yet the sight of all that sorrow makes his heart swell with joy.
This is so rare—too rare not to be grasped with both hands and held tightly, no matter how painful it might be. In any case, sadness has been woven into the fiber of Dean Winchester’s being since Castiel first laid eyes on him and longer. Without it, he would be somebody else. Castiel would have him in this world defeated, broken, lost, temporary—all of those things, rather than not at all.
There is a name for that, he knows.
Before Castiel can open his mouth to speak, Dean hears his footsteps and turns to face him.
“Cas,” he says. His voice is hoarse.
Castiel wants to reach out and touch him; to pull him into a comforting embrace; to kiss away the pain that shines in his eyes. He feels it like a physical ache. He does none of those things.
“Hello, Dean,” he says, in place of them.
Now, for this moment, Dean is here, with him. He will never dare hope for more.
Castiel shakes the can of spraypaint and holds it out to Giulia. “Here. Your turn.”
They’re running low on paint. They’ll have to find something else to use for their wards, soon. Giulia will come up with something, he expects. She’s practical, always busy, her clever hands never still.
She takes the can from him and begins to draw the symbol steadily, her brow furrowed in concentration. She’s on the last stroke when the shout from the gate comes, and she startles and the line veers off at a wild angle.
“Shit!” she says, frowning. “Shit, shit, shit.” She sets down the can, looking up as Marcus sprints toward them. “What’s up?”
“Come check it out,” he says, breathless. “We got company.”
“How many?” Giulia’s hand darts to her weapon, and Castiel blinks in surprise. He’s sensed no supernatural presences—though whether he can even do that anymore is questionable.
“Just one guy,” Marcus says. “Right out in the open. Looks pretty beat up, but—” He frowns. “I think he might be human.”
Castiel and Giulia follow him to the lookout post, Giulia peering through the binoculars Marcus hands her. The figure approaching them is that of a man, ragged and apparently unarmed. He doesn’t stop to look around him; gives no sign of being aware of his surroundings at all. He just stumbles onward, unsteady but inexorable, like a zombie in one of the late-night movies Dean used to watch when he couldn’t sleep.
“What do you think?” Giulia passes him the binoculars. Castiel looks through them. The stumbling figure comes into focus.
And then the shock of recognition steals away all his other thoughts.
It only later occurs to him that the zombie comparison is apt. After all, he is looking at a dead man walking.
Dean isn’t disoriented, doesn’t ask where he is—or where Sam is, which is always worse—and Castiel allows himself to be relieved. Dean must have been back a while, for the initial shock of consciousness to wear off. Since the rain began, perhaps.
Castiel has learned to be careful with him. It’s better to let him come back to himself unaided, let the pieces fall where they will and be there to pick them up afterwards, than to force awareness. There is no gentle way to say it, after all.
You said yes. You both did. And now the world is still here, but Sam’s gone, and most of the time so are you.
The first time Castiel approached the subject, Dean lapsed back into silence and stayed there for the better part of a fortnight. Now, he doesn’t push the subject, doesn’t ask whether Dean remembers where he is or why they’re here. He just places his hand on Dean’s shoulder and steers him away from the window.
“I was going to make lunch,” he says. “Would you like something to eat?”
“Sure,” Dean says, after a moment. He sounds uncertain, but Castiel knows better than to take offense, just nods and turns for the kitchen.
“I keep forgetting you can cook now,” Dean says, then. It’s quiet, but it makes Castiel blink, startled. When he looks around, there’s a faint, sad smile on Dean’s face. Sad; but then Castiel has never seen Dean smile without sadness in his heart, and probably never will. Seeing him smile at all is an unexpected blessing, like a patch of wildflowers in the middle of the woods, a ray of sunshine peering through slate-grey sky.
Castiel returns his smile. “Still not well,” he says.
To hear Dean acknowledge anything about this world—this world that is still here, in which he and Castiel are still here, and Sam isn’t—is surprise enough. He doesn’t do so often. Castiel understands that well enough to know that he can’t understand, not really. This world is strange to him, and often painful, but it is bearable.
The world is not exactly saved. The angels are departed. The hordes of Hell are scattered without their leader, some in hiding, others running amok. The monsters have crept from the shadows, and some of them even dare hunt in daylight now. But there is human life, too, clinging to the surface of the planet with a tenacity by which Castiel never ceases to be surprised. He knows how fragile humans are, knows the many easy ways in which their short lives can be snuffed out—and yet they fight tooth and nail for their survival.
So maybe the world is not exactly doomed, either.
Without Dean, it might have been, though the one time Castiel tried explaining that, he got a bloody nose for his trouble.
Dean had looked down at his hands, turned pale, and begun to stammer an apology, and Castiel had forgotten himself enough to clutch desperately at his arms. “It’s okay,” he’d said, over and over, and he’d meant please don’t go, but Dean was already gone and Castiel couldn’t blame him.
He didn’t see it that way himself, for a long time. The memory of his rage, when he first learned what Dean planned to do, has never really faded, though now it’s accompanied by a rush of shame. How selfish he was in his anger. How little he understood what he was angry about.
I gave everything for this, he meant to say. For this idea, for free will, because you say it’s the right thing to do—and now you throw it all away? But, I gave everything for you, was what came out of his mouth. He knew, then, and he’s been regretting the blood on his knuckles ever since.
Sometimes he wonders whether things would have been different, if he’d known what it was he felt before then. If he’d just confessed; if he could have won Dean over with kisses instead of fists.
He suspects not. But sometimes he wonders.
He turns back to Dean. “Come on,” he says. “You can help me crack eggs.”
“You look like you just saw a ghost,” Giulia says in his ear. “You know this guy or something?”
Castiel swallows. “Yes,” he manages. “Yes, he’s—an old friend.” It surprises him that his voice is steady. A dam has burst somewhere inside of him and there’s a waterfall thundering in his ears. Dean is alive. This can’t be real. This can’t be real, but it is.
“Okay.” Gently, Giulia pries the binoculars from his hands. She turns to Marcus. “Bring him in.”
Marcus nods and heads down toward the road, motioning for two of the other guards to follow him, reaching into the back of his jeans for his gun as he goes.
Castiel’s eyes follow the motion. Giulia must see it, because she lowers her head apologetically, and says, “We have to check your guy out. Can’t risk it.”
“Of course,” he says. He already knows that won’t be a problem.
Dean was limping. He looks as though he has walked here. If he were something other than himself, that would make no sense. Even in his weakened state, Castiel would surely feel something if Michael were here.
He’d feel anger, if nothing else.
They bring Dean into the town and Marcus splashes him with holy water and chants and shines a light in his eyes and eventually confirms what Castiel already knows: “If anything was possessing this guy, it’s checked out.”
It takes Castiel days to accept what everyone else sees right away: that Michael may have checked out, but that doesn’t mean that Dean has checked back in.
They eat in silence. Castiel tries not to watch too closely.
He knows that Dean used to find his scrutiny unnerving. He thinks that he might welcome a terse, What? or a C’mon, man, that’s creepy, but not enough to take the risk of scaring Dean back inside of himself.
The storm outside rattles the windows. It’s early afternoon, but dark enough for evening. Castiel lights a candle.
Dean finishes eating. He sets down his fork and sits watching the flickering of the flame.
“You should let me cut your hair,” Castiel says, to break the silence. He’s been waiting for one of Dean’s lucid periods to suggest it. Perhaps it would be just as easy to do it when Dean is not-here, sitting still and silent. Dean probably wouldn’t object.
Castiel never does it, though. It wouldn’t seem right.
Dean glances at the window, and after a moment Castiel realizes he’s looking at his reflection. “Yeah,” he says. “Should probably get on that. I’m starting to look like—”
He goes quiet.
Castiel stands up. He takes a half-step toward Dean, lifts his hand as though to place it on Dean’s shoulder, then lets it drop to his side. He turns and digs in the emergency medical kit for scissors.
Dean sits very still as Castiel drapes a towel around his shoulders to catch the offcuts. He runs his fingers through Dean’s hair. It’s soft, without the gel he used to put in it, and Dean’s breath catches quietly as Castiel’s fingers run over his scalp. As though of their own accord, they find the warm skin at the nape of Dean’s neck, and they linger there a moment, just barely touching.
Once, Dean would have pulled away from him. His expression would have shuttered itself off, and he would have made a wisecrack about not being that kind of girl or don’t touch what you can’t afford. Castiel wouldn’t have understood. Not really; not then.
He understands now. What it is to fear the thing you want, the way it will weaken you.
He catches sight of Dean’s reflection in the window and sees that his eyes are closed, his expression unreadable. He pulls his hand away and reaches for the scissors.
The soft scritch-scritch they make as he cuts is hypnotic. He listens to it and tries not to think.
Castiel wakes and the ground beneath him is moving. He’s lying flat on his back. His guts churn.
He opens his eyes. A pale expanse of sky greets him. Voices, somewhere to the right of him, outside his field of vision. He breathes in. The dank, salt smell of ocean catches in his throat and he rolls to the side, retching. There is a gasp of surprise. Someone mutters, “But he wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t breathing.”
Castiel hauls himself to his feet, doubles over the side of the boat and coughs up watery bile into the sea.
This is a boat. He is at sea.
The last thing he remembers is pain. Pain and light; the sensation of being flung to all the corners of the earth at once. The feeling that he was dust. Spiraling through the spaces between the stars. Lost in the infinite.
It was oddly comforting.
He turns and there are men staring at him. They trade glances, fear and consternation. One of them runs to the cabin, saying something about a radio. Castiel ignores him. Turns back to the sea and tries to remember.
Before the light and the pain. Dean. Watching Sam and Dean walk right into Heaven’s gilded trap, and the sick certainty that Dean had no intention of walking back out of it. At least, not in any way that counted.
But there would be signs, if the Apocalypse had begun. The sky is clear. No fire rains from Heaven; no Hell boils up from beneath the sea. And Castiel feels a flicker of hope that—
“Hello, brother.”
A flicker of hope that dies the moment it’s born, because Castiel knows that voice.
He knows the voice, but its tone is unfamiliar, its inflections different. He clutches the side of the boat and steels himself. “Why are you here?” he asks, without turning around.
“My vessel placed some—conditions on his consent.” Michael almost sounds bored, as though this is no more than an everyday discussion of strategy or Heavenly bureaucracy. Castiel stiffens. “One of them was that I ensure you escape unharmed.”
There is a hand on Castiel’s shoulder, then. Dean’s hand, but Dean is not touching him.
The hand grasps his shoulder and turns him around. He doesn’t want to look, but he can no more resist than a leaf can resist the wind. He tries to glower, but finds his anger dying within him at the sight of Dean’s face, its unfamiliar expression of flinty-eyed command. The absence that looks back at him.
There are so many things he didn’t say. Or he said wrong, said with fists and with cold fury when he should have offered patience, offered love.
“Dean,” he says, and his voice comes out hoarse. “Dean. You didn’t have to do this.”
Silence. He realizes he is trembling.
“You don’t have to do this,” he ploughs on. “I know you’re still in there. Fight back. You can fight back, we’ll find a way—”
More silence. Castiel’s words die in his throat. Still he stands staring, searching his brother’s face for a trace of his beloved and meeting no spark of recognition.
Michael takes a step forward, then. He touches Castiel’s forehead. (Dean’s hand touches Castiel’s forehead, but Dean doesn’t.) There’s a flash of actinic white, and then Castiel’s physical pains are gone. His nausea recedes; he feels renewed strength in his limbs; he only realizes that his head was aching because it has stopped. He’s alive with power again, Heaven thrumming in his veins.
It is a kind of agony.
Michael’s hand (Dean’s hand) drops back to his side.
“You should run, brother,” he says. “Stay out of this. I’m aware that I made a promise, but if you insist on involving yourself after I’ve warned you away, I may not be able to keep it.” His voice (Dean’s voice) suggests that that possibility wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome.
Castiel ignores him. “Dean,” he says again, more softly now. “I’m sorry. I wish—I wish I said something different. I wish I had been able to—” He pauses. Closes his eyes. “Dean. When this is over, if you’re still here—find me. I’ll be here for you. I’ll wait for you.” His voice breaks a little. “I’m sorry.”
Michael vanishes with a flutter of wings that sounds like distant thunder.
Castiel stares out at the grey, empty sea.
“There. All done.” Castiel sets down the scissors. Dean reaches up to brush the hair from his cheeks, and Castiel’s fingers itch with the desire to reach out and do it himself.
He intends to hang back as Dean moves to look at his own reflection in the windowpane, but he finds himself following unconsciously, studying Dean’s face for his reaction. For a reaction that he can recognize as Dean’s.
He struggled with the nuances of human emotion, once; found them frustrating, impenetrable. Now, he hoards the evidence of them as carefully as he hoards food and water and clothing, and thinks they might even be more necessary to his survival.
A brief smile tugs at the corners of Dean’s mouth. He touches his hair. “Yeah, that’s better,” he says. “We might be camping out but this ain’t Woodstock.”
Castiel blinks in surprise.
He doesn’t dare ask himself whether this is Dean beginning to adjust to the world. He’s already been lucid for longer than usual, today. It’s unusual for him to be present longer than a few hours at a time. It’s understandable.
The world still exists because he said yes. That is quite possibly true.
The world is still here, and they are still here, and Sam isn’t. That is definitely true, and that Dean could stand to live in a world where it is true—where the rage of angels was stronger than the love of men—seems like an impossibility.
Dean turns where he stands, then. His hand finds Castiel’s forearm, lingers there, wrapped around his wrist. He’s smiling. It is such a small, faint thing. His fingers tighten around Castiel’s arm as though he is afraid Castiel will disappear if he lets go.
Castiel knows the feeling.
“Dean,” he says, quietly.
“Yeah, Cas?” Their faces are close together—closer than Dean would have allowed, in former days. Dean doesn’t quite meet Castiel’s eyes.
It would be easier to believe that this means nothing. That wherever Dean goes, inside of his head, when he isn’t here, must be lonely. That Dean has always needed others, and Castiel is simply the closest available other.
That, after all, maybe he doesn’t know what Castiel feels for him. Castiel didn’t know himself until it was too late, after all.
He turns his hand palm-up. Dean’s fingertips brush the skin underneath his wrist. An inch or two more and they would be holding hands.
It would be easier to believe that this means nothing. But that Dean stays with him, clings to him like a lifeline, when death would be so much kinder—that makes it impossible.
He takes a step back, leading Dean away from the window. The rain is beginning to ease. There is a break in the clouds, a crack of pearly grey light.
“Giulia was supposed to come help me with the generator,” he says. “I guess she thought it was better to stay indoors. Dean, could you take a look? I think you would know what to do.”
Dean blinks at him. After a moment, he slumps a little, but he nods and drops Castiel’s arm.
Castiel runs, as Michael told him to. He runs to the plains of Antarctica and watches the aurora australis unfold across the sky. He runs to the Black Rock Desert and watches the sun rise over the Jackson Mountains; runs to the other side of the world to watch that same sun slip below the horizon. He stands on the shore of the Minas Basin and watches the tide eat away at the mudflats.
Dean is gone, and the world ticks on like clockwork, and he is helpless to stop it.
He runs and runs; and in the end, he runs to Sam.
He materializes in Bobby’s front room, the air disturbed by his arrival rustling papers on the table. He has his strength again—the flight does not drain him—but the hopeful expression with which Sam looks up from his laptop makes Castiel droop as though the world sits on his shoulders.
Sam’s face falls when he sees that Castiel is alone. It takes him a moment to school his expression into calm.
“What happened?” he says, at last. “I got Adam out of there and then the door shut and I couldn’t—” He scrubs at his eyes, as though he could erase the grief there. “I couldn’t.”
“Sam,” Castiel says, and then he can’t say anything else, but he sees that Sam understands.
Sam doesn’t say anything. His lips thin; he squares his shoulders. “Bobby?” he calls.
Bobby emerges from the next room, his habitual frown deepening as he catches sight of Castiel and Sam and the absence of Dean.
“We gotta hit the books,” Sam tells him. “Find out if there’s some way to track an archangel.” His voice is almost steady.
“You won’t find Michael unless he wants to be found,” Castiel tells them. He knows it would be better to lie, but finds himself unable to do so.
Sam just nods. There’s grim determination in his eyes, and Castiel realizes he was prepared for this. He has another plan, and there is only one thing that plan can be.
“You can’t,” he says. “Sam, you can’t. It’s suicide.”
“It’s the only option I got.”
“We’ll find others. There has to be a way. I’ll speak to the other angels—”
“And then they’ll kill you,” Sam says. “And I’m the last person they’re gonna help.” He sighs. “I’m sorry, man. I really am. I wish we could’ve shown you better than this. But I don’t have a choice. I have to do this.”
“Do what?” demands Bobby. “What’s in your head, son?”
Castiel feels a sick inevitability. Hears a sound like things falling into place.
“We won’t find Michael unless he wants us to,” Sam says. “And there’s only one person he wants to be found by.”
“No way in hell,” Bobby says, but Sam is standing at the window and there’s a gun in his hand that Castiel didn’t know he was holding. His lips move, but Castiel can’t hear the words over the screaming in his head. He pulls the trigger and the angel warding on the windowpane shatters into a million pieces that shower down on him like rain.
Sam’s face is perfectly calm.
It is the last time Castiel sees him.
There is no altruism in the way Castiel keeps his distance. He’s well aware of that.
It would seem wrong to give Dean the kind of comfort he sometimes seems to want. Like taking advantage of his loss and his lostness. That isn’t it, though. Not really. It’s about how Dean is always temporary, how he could slip back inside of himself at any moment, and how each time he does Castiel fears that this time it’s permanent.
It’s about how he isn’t sure he could survive losing any more of Dean.
He watches Dean poke at the insides of the generator, then nod and pick up a screwdriver and get to work, and his mind feels like it’s split down the middle. Half of him is calm, watching Dean’s hands and listening to his explanations with the occasional nod or hum or understanding. Yet at the same time, his heart is in his mouth. When Dean isn’t looking at him he finds himself staring, studying the back of Dean’s head as though he could pin Dean to consciousness with the weight of his gaze. He can’t help it.
He keeps it up all evening, while Dean helps him prepare vegetables from the garden, while they eat and collect water from the rain tank to wash their dishes.
They end up sitting at opposite ends of the threadbare couch.
Castiel has a small stack of books, collected from the ruin of what was once a public library on a foraging expedition. He plucks one from the top of the pile and opens it on his knee.
After a moment’s careful consideration, Dean follows him. He chooses his own carefully—a battered Kerouac paperback, which Castiel has never read and chose only because the stretch of road pictured on the cover reminded him of Dean—and bends his head over it in the lamplight.
Castiel watches him. It’s only when Dean looks up and says, “You okay, dude? You haven’t turned a page in ten minutes,” that it occurs to him he doesn’t even know what he’s pretending to read.
“Oh,” he says. “I. I’m tired.”
He’s still a hopeless liar. Sometimes he wonders if he would have gotten better at it, if he’d had longer with Sam and Dean, longer in the human world.
Dean sighs and puts down his book. “I get it,” he says. “Cas. I do.” He shifts where he sits; sinks toward the center of the couch. “I’m tired, too.”
He looks Castiel in the face and his eyes glitter in the lamplight. The sadness in them is depthless.
I’m sorry, Castiel wants to say. I want to give you peace, he wants to say. Stay with me, he wants to say. Stay with me, and maybe we would be okay.
“You should go to bed,” he says, and his voice catches in his throat. Every time Dean closes his eyes, every time he leaves the room, Castiel is afraid. And yet he doesn’t dare hold on.
He closes his own eyes, but opens them again when it is Dean who says, “Stay with me?” Low and unsure, a question.
Castiel should say no. It would be better for both of them if he says no. It would be less selfish. It would be more sensible.
“Yes,” he says. He lets Dean take his hand and lead him into the bedroom.
They undress without looking each other in the eye. Dean changes into his sweatpants and t-shirt. Castiel just unlaces his shoes and pulls off his jeans, leaving himself in a soft t-shirt and boxers. He closes the mismatched curtains and doesn’t look back into the room until he hears Dean climb under the bedcovers.
They lie on far sides of the bed, breathing through the silence. Castiel finds himself acutely aware of Dean’s every movement. Every change in his breathing, every shift of the mattress when he turns over or reaches for his glass of water. Each one is a small relief, proof that Dean hasn’t gone to sleep yet. Hasn’t left him yet. He feels as though he will vibrate out of his skin with waiting.
At length, Dean groans and turns to face him. He props himself up on an elbow, and Castiel can feel Dean’s eyes on him, even as he lies looking up at the ceiling.
He doesn’t know what he expects. An admonishment, probably, or a weak attempt at making a joke of the situation.
Or silence. That would be worse.
Dean doesn’t say anything, at first, and Castiel’s insides twist uncomfortably. Eventually, he turns to lie on his side, facing Dean.
“I don’t want to,” Dean says, then. “Not always.”
Castiel frowns at him.
“I don’t want to go.”
At that, Castiel can’t help but stare. “You’d choose to be—here?” he says, disbelieving.
Dean lets out a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Hell no,” he says. “But trust me, it beats the other place.”
Is Dean more alone in the other place, Castiel wonders, or less?
“I’m sorry,” he says, instead of asking.
Dean shrugs. “I don’t—go there because I want to,” he says. “I just. I wanted you to know that, I guess.”
Castiel nods. He takes a breath. Reaches out in the darkness and lays his hand on Dean’s side, on top of the bedcovers. It’s just enough like touching for him to be sure that Dean is there, warm and real beside him. Dean doesn’t shrug his hand off. He inches closer, until all Castiel can see of him are his eyes, clear as green glass, until Castiel can feel his breathing. Then he stops.
They look at each other for a moment.
“Okay,” Castiel says. He isn’t sure what he’s saying okay to, but he feels Dean relax fractionally under his hand.
He closes his eyes.
When he wakes, Dean is sleeping. He’s on his back, breathing deep and even, and Castiel’s arm is slung across his middle. Sunlight creeps in between the curtains, paints a stripe of gold across his face.
Castiel never dared dream of seeing him like this, back when it could have been more than a dream.
Carefully, he extricates himself from Dean and the bedcovers. As he sits up, Dean makes a sleepy noise and stirs, and Castiel freezes and holds his breath until Dean subsides into stillness again. Then he climbs out of bed. The floor is cold on his bare feet.
He leaves Dean to sleep, and heads for the kitchen to heat up water and busy himself with breakfast.
He doesn’t know whether Dean will still be here—really here—when he opens his eyes. Statistically, it’s unlikely.
Still, Castiel will be waiting for him.
