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Sam dipped his finger in the jar of peanut butter and licked it off, his pink tongue darting out past his lips to scrape the last bits of the spread from the pad of his fingertip. It wasn’t the best peanut butter he had ever had, but it certainly wasn't the worst, and poor Cas was sitting at the bunker’s table with his sandwich in his hand like the fact that it wasn’t tasting good to him was the most terrible thing to ever happen to him.
“So, what? Now you can’t taste PB and J?” he asked, gesturing to the sandwich with his chin.
“No,” Castiel responded. “I taste every molecule.”
“Not the sum of its parts, huh?”
The newly-restored angel tossed the offensive slab of bread in front of him, looking more despondent than Sam had ever seen him. “It’s overwhelming,” he grumbled. “It’s disgusting. I’ll miss you, PB and J.” With a wistful sigh, he pushed himself to his feet and crossed the room to, it seemed, find something else to entertain himself with. Now that food was out of the question, he would need to find joy in something that would appeal to his angelic sensibilities. The bunker’s library was full of books, but Sam doubted Cas would find anything there that he didn’t already know. The books the shelves housed were full of lore and cases of the supernatural — things that angels were generally well versed in. Now, if they had the Harry Potter books, or maybe Sam could find his copies of A Song of Fire and Ice…
Judging by the hunch of Castiel’s shoulders as he perused the bookshelves, his hand falling listlessly to his side after trailing along the spines of the books and not finding anything to his liking, though, Sam doubted that there was anything between the walls of the bunker that would cheer up his friend. The only thing that probably could coax Cas into smiling was somewhere on the open road in a shiny black car, miles away from where they were and running further away with every minute. He wondered why the angel had stayed with him, if not for the first time since the night he had liberated himself from Gadreel. Sure, he was in pretty bad shape, but he was holding up just fine. It was his brother — his great big lummox of a brother — who needed his very own angel to stitch up the pieces where his own self-loathing was leaking out like a poison.
“Hey Cas?” he said, capping the jar of peanut butter closed as he did so.
Castiel turned to look at him, expression open.
Sam swallowed back the lump in his throat that threatened to choke off his air supply. Angels weren’t supposed to look that broken. “I just wanted to say thanks.”
A frown creased Castiel’s brow. “I do not understand what you’re thanking me for.”
Of course. Trust him to not only have to deal with his brother, but to also be stuck with the least emotionally educated of all of the angels in heaven — er, on earth. How was he to explain that he knew that Cas was hurting just as badly as he was, if not worse? How was he to make an offer that he understood how painful it was to be separated from someone you loved?
Sam gestured between the two of them before letting his hand plop back in his lap. “For, y’know. For staying with me.”
Castiel took a few steps closer and rest both of his hands on the tabletop as he regarded the younger Winchester with curiosity, his head tilted to the side. “You are my friend, Sam. You weren’t — aren’t well, so of course I had to stay and make sure you were healthy. You need to be healed properly, and after everything that’s happened…” He visibly swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “It’s the least I can do.”
Of course, Cas must’ve still blamed himself for things that happened in years past, like when Sam’d lost his soul and Cas had broken down the wall that Death had put up, but that was ages ago, and hadn’t the poor angel already repented enough? He’d taken on the suffering that having Lucifer in Sam’s mind had given him for himself and he’d died multiple times for them… Cas was a true Winchester in the way that he cared for people who weren’t himself. He couldn’t possibly think that he still had to do penance to make it up to him.
“No, Cas… That’s not what I meant,” said Sam.
Castiel looked confused, his head tilted impossibly further and his eyes narrowed.
Sam ran a hand through his thick hair and let out an exasperated breath. “What I mean is…” He paused, steeling himself to continue. “I know you’d rather be with him.”
“Now Sam,” Castiel began, his posture stiffening, indignant lines creasing the corners of his mouth.
“No, man, stop. Listen. I get it. You two have always had your freaky profound bound, or whatever. I get that you miss him.”
“Sam—”
He plowed on. “And you care about him. You might think you’re good at hiding it, but you’re not. You and I are friends, I’ll agree to that, but Cas… You and my brother… It’s more than that. I see the way you look at him, how he looks at you. I’ve seen the same look in the mirror before; it’s not that much different from how I used to look at…” His voice trailed off and his fingers fluttered uselessly by the already-closed jar of peanut butter. “How I used to look at Jess.”
Castiel went completely silent and his shoulders once again regained that slouched forward look. His lip twitched, as if he wanted to say something, anything, yell and scream about how Sam was wrong and how he didn’t care if Dean thought that he was toxic and wanted to distance himself from them because good fucking riddance, but knew that saying any of that would be a lie. He collapsed, dejected, into one of the seats by the table.
“Hey, man,” Sam said, standing up and walking closer to Cas. He clasped the seated man’s shoulder in his hand and gave it a firm squeeze. “We’ll get him back, okay? You might not be able to taste PB and J ever again, and there’s nothing that I can do about that… But we’ll get him back.”