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Dean doesn’t play any music on their way back to the bunker.
He parks the Impala in the garage and then, without even thinking about it, waits for Sam to get out first, like he’s following Sam’s lead. And he basically is. He’s back on Sam’s permission. He almost feels like he’s intruding; he’s still not sure Sam wanted him to come back. He’s never been able to read his little brother the way his little brother can read him, and the disparity is particularly intense right now.
He tries not to think about it. He locks the Impala and follows Sam. He reminds himself of what he told Garth, about holding on to what you’ve got even when it’s weird, or really, really fucked up. A part of him hates what he’s doing, thinks he doesn’t deserve to hold on to anything after all that’s happened. After Gadreel. After Kevin. After he went off and branded himself with the fucking mark of Cain without even reading the terms and conditions first. (He tries not to think about that, either.) But he needs Sam. He can’t be alone. He’d been alone for almost two weeks and it’s just too fucking sad to think about, how much of him is missing when Sam isn’t there.
Thing is, Dean’s used to self-loathing being a part of everything he tries to do anyway. He’s always been swimming against this current. There’s no reason now would be any different, any easier. He’s broken. So’s Sam. So’s Garth, and Garth sort of worked it out. So maybe Dean and Sam can too.
Dean’s state of mind goes from uncertain to determined to doubtful to uncertain again just in the time it takes to walk down the stairs and through the bunker hallways, out into the communications/maps/war/chess room. The sound of his boots echoing on the cement and off of the wall tiles makes Dean strangely nervous all of a sudden. There’s something unfamiliar about the place, something distinctly uncomfortable. But that’s ridiculous.
Then he realizes: he never confirmed with Sam whether Cas was still in the bunker. He hadn’t asked about Cas at all. Hadn’t even let himself think about him.
“Is, uh. Cas still here?”
“He was when I left. He was researching.”
For some reason, that doesn’t help Dean’s nerves. Dean’s eyes sweep the room. The map-table, the chairs around the edges and at the switchboards, the doorway across from them, the balcony overhead. All empty. Sam heads toward the library.
“Cas?” Sam calls, before Dean can.
Dean feels like something’s been taken from him. He starts to wonders what Sam and Cas have been doing while he’s been away, but then stops himself abruptly, deciding firmly that he doesn’t care.
--
Cas had not been researching when they’d returned. Not in the strict, find-Gadreel-and-Metatron sense, anyway.
“Oprah,” says Dean. “Seriously?”
“Dean.” Cas turns around sharply in his chair, like some sort of… advanced security camera. He stares at Dean for a moment, the way he does without asking any questions, like he can arrive at the answer all on his own, just by looking. Then his face rests a little (as much as Cas’s face can) and he lifts his chin slightly. “You’re back.”
“Yeah.” Dean looks at his shoes, rubs the back of his head. “Well. It’s, uh.” He glances at Sam. “Well, I’m back, anyway.”
Cas frowns a little at the glance, but doesn’t intrude. “I’m glad,” is all he says, but he clearly means it.
The woman on the page of the magazine standing next to Oprah, just over Cas’s shoulder, has fucking enormous hair. Dean can’t look at it for long. His eyes stray and then he’s looking at the way Cas’s top button isn’t done, the way the fabric tugs open a little due to the awkward shoulder twist Cas is maintaining. Dean adjusts his gaze quickly. “How’s it… Any progress on the Gadreel front?”
With Sam there, Dean’s not sure he’d be willing to let the conversation go in any other direction anyway, but he’s still angry at himself.
“No.” Cas lowers his eyes. “I got frustrated so I took a break. Frustration; it was something I’d only really felt as a human. Now that I have the memory of it, though, it’s almost like I can feel it even now.”
Dean just kind of nods stupidly. Silence sets in, against which Dean is stunningly helpless. “I’m gonna go drop my stuff off in my room,” he says abruptly, hoping it sounds more casual to them than it does to him. “And maybe hit the sack for a few hours.” Then he flees.
He closes the door behind him and busies himself with putting away his clothes and his weapons. It’s a while before his heart calms down and the nervousness ebbs. His hands continue to shake.
He’s not sure he could take it if Cas rejected him. If Cas said no. He’d managed to come back with Sam by the skin of his teeth; Sam had actually partially rejected him. He’s not sure he can go through that again. And if there’s no chance at all; hell, if Cas just ups and leaves again, like he did all those other times—
Damn it.
Dean had known he hadn’t just been committing to keeping Sam close, when he’d said those things to Garth. He’d known it wouldn’t just end with Sam, even if Sam was at the heart of it. But he hadn’t been thinking about it. He’d put off thinking about it. And now he’s. Fuck, he doesn’t know what to do.
He has this vague but persistent sense that time is running out, that the dynamics between him and Cas are shifting and if he doesn’t do something soon they’ll end up farther away from each other instead of closer to each other. Maybe it’s because they have been getting farther apart. Maybe it’s because Dean fucking put them on that trajectory.
And then Dean’s thinking about every shitty horrible thing he’s done since the angels fell again, feeling sorry for all the things he’s already apologized for because deep down he’s never really believed apologies are enough.
(So why the fuck is his life one long sorry train of them? Why are they the thread stitching him together?)
He lies on his back on the bed and stares up at the ceiling until he drifts into a restless sleep.
--
It’s not that Sam’s ignoring him. It’s simply that Sam isn’t really talking to him.
They talk research and job stuff the same as they always have. But the spaces in between are empty. The jokes and teasing are missing. Dean’s Looks are not returned, Sam’s eyes are silent. When they’re not working, they’re off in their own worlds, like cousins who only see each other once a year and have nothing in common and have no idea how exactly to interact.
Dean hadn’t expected much else. From the way Sam had talked, the whole partners-not-brothers thing, Dean knew it would take time. More than time. There’s a conversation they need to have, that neither of them are ready for yet. That they need to ease in to, before they brutally go at. He knows it. He knows also that this silence is a sort of penance. You don’t complain about doing penance; a part of you even welcomes it.
As for Cas, Dean’s not making much progress there, either, but through no fault of Cas’s. Dean doesn’t talk to him. Actually finds himself intentionally avoiding him.
Not because he can’t make up his mind, but because he already has.
And he’s scared shitless, scared almost as much as he’d been when he’d approached Sam. Maybe more; maybe the two relationships are incomparable, maybe they’re equally terrifying in different ways. He cleans his guns and sharpens his knives and cleans the kitchen and cleans the library and organizes (organizes? C’mon, seriously?) boxes and documents and he puts a new bulb in the lamp he’d smashed and he stocks up on a shitload of frozen burritoes and only realizes as he’s putting them into the freezer that Cas can’t eat them. And then he feels like something stabbed him in the chest and he holes himself off in his room again.
He thinks about Cas as a human, mainly because he tries so hard not to. It’s his fault that Cas couldn’t stay human, had to angel up to keep himself safe because Dean didn’t. That’s on Dean.
Shit, if Dean hadn’t belittled Cas’s job at the gas station, hadn’t nagged him to hunt with him, maybe Cas wouldn’t have got the idea to get back in the game in the first place. Maybe he’d still be working at the gas station if Dean hadn’t been so selfish and needy and tried to pull him out.
Dean doesn’t drink. He doesn’t try to drown out these thoughts. He doesn’t want to have them, but once they’re there and fleshed out he doesn’t fight them. They fill the space over his bed and he doesn’t know if this is penance, too, maybe. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
When Cas knocks on the door, it’s enough of a surprise to make Dean bolt upright but curiously predictable enough that Dean knows it’s Cas knocking.
For a moment, Dean considers not answering.
“Yeah,” Dean yells.
Cas opens the door and instead of saying “Dean, --” he just walks in and shuts the door quietly behind him. “Can I sit down?” he asks.
Dean’s mouth doesn’t quite manage to form around a word so he just nods. He could scooch back a little to give Cas more room, to put space between them. But he doesn’t. His heart is suddenly pounding in his chest. He wonders if Cas can hear it. He realizes Cas probably can. Angel-Cas is so ridiculously unfair it’s almost funny.
Cas sits. It’s almost like when they’d sat across from each other on the beds in that hotel room, except that this time they’re on the same bed.
“You and Sam aren’t back to the way you were,” Cas says, with a quiet sort of sadness. It’s not a statement, it’s an invitation.
“Sam doesn’t think – he thinks our roles should change.” Dean raises his hands and drops them again. “He doesn’t think we should act like brothers anymore because we just screw each other up.”
Cas’s eyes widen even as his brow knits. “But you are brothers.”
“Yeah. No. I think he means we should stop acting like dysfunctional brothers. Like. Like whatever it is that makes us sell our souls to demons and trick each other to bring each other back.”
“Isn’t that love?” Even so, Cas sounds a little hesitant.
“Honestly. I dunno anymore. Love’s a part of it.” Dean says the ‘L’ word before he can catch himself and then he feels stunned, suddenly lost at sea. “Maybe, you know,” he clears his throat, “it’s at the heart of it. But.”
“Why don’t you talk to him?” Cas asks, like it really is that simple. Like maybe Cas’s grasp of the matter is a little more innocent and rosy than Dean realized. God, he’s sitting so close; Dean finds himself staring at the spot just above Cas’s temple, the vulnerably soft skin just below his dark hairline. Dean stops himself.
“It’s kinda. Sam and me, we’ve spent so much time not talking to each other that sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to anymore. It sounds stupid, but it can be really hard to talk about important things with the people you’re close to.”
Cas looks down, silent. “Is that why you haven’t been talking to me?” He glances up again and it’s like he’s looking right inside Dean, straight to his thoughts, like maybe Dean won’t have to say anything after all, maybe Cas will just do him the favor of reading his mind.
“You’re not poison,” Cas insists. Like it’s something he’s wanted to say for a while. And Dean’s not sure whether this is Cas telling him some deep truth or whether it’s Cas telling him some horrible lie. Cas has done both. Or maybe it’s Cas being naïve. “The things you’ve done, the mistakes you’ve made, don’t even begin to compare to what I have done. If anyone is poison, it’s me.”
“Cas--”
“I have murdered my own brothers and sisters and I have done it willingly. I have stolen Grace flowing inside me.”
“Cas, damn it, that’s my fault, that’s on me. I should have protected you. You shouldn’t have had to angel-up again.” Dean’s voice gets that hard edge to it. He feels tired and angry. This is—this hurts. Dean doesn’t want to hear any of this because it all comes back to him again in the end, anyway. He remembers pushing that angel statue off the table and watching it shatter; he knows he’d had good reasons for roping Cas in but what a fucking idiot he’d been anyway. And it had been all about Sam then, too. Well, more or less. “I shouldn’t have kicked you out. I shouldn’t,” he just says it, “have pushed you away.”
Cas’s brow scrunches up. “You’ve already apologized for that.”
“Yeah, well, that was some stellar apology. I was only using it as a distraction. Goddamnit, I am so fucked up.”
“And I already forgave you,” Cas continues. “Dean, you need to let it go.”
“I can’t just let it go,” Dean snaps.
“Well, you should learn.” Cas’s words are firm.
But the hands he closes over Dean’s own are soft.
Dean freezes. But Castiel has quite nearly the same effect on him as sunshine on ice. Maybe Cas is using some angel therapy magic on him, maybe that’s why Dean’s muscles relax and warmth flows from his fingers up his arms to spread out in his chest like a warm breath. Maybe not. Maybe it doesn’t really make a difference. Dean feels himself gently sinking. His eyelids grow heavy, he lets his head fall a little…
He doesn’t mean to tear his hands out of Cas’s so roughly, so abruptly, but it happens, he does. He just freaks.
Cas’s face goes strangely blank, loses its confidence and gentle sincere reassurance, like a thread being tugged out.
Dean stands up angrily and walks out without a word, slamming the door behind him, leaving Cas there like that.
--
Cas’s attitude toward Dean grows cold in the days following.
It’s nothing too dramatic or gamechanging; it’s subtle and sneaky and consistent, which is worse. Privy to Dean’s habit of stress/frustration cleaning, Cas does things like not push his chair in after he stands up or not put books away after he’s done with them. When Dean calls him out for it Cas just shrugs and says he’ll get to it, and then Dean cleans it up anyway because he knows Cas won’t. And Dean doesn’t want to argue, not really, doesn’t feel entirely justified.
He doesn’t even really argue when Cas casually criticizes every other fucking thing he has to say about a case or about the research for Gadreel when all three of them are brainstorming. Dean can feel Sam’s eyes darting from him to Cas, back again. Sam doesn’t intrude; that’s normal. Sam doesn’t clear his throat or change the topic to bring an end to it; that’s not. He lets Dean sink lower and lower beneath the weight of it, lets Dean end it by not ending it, by taking it.
Sam’s tired of him. Things have got a little better between them, but not enough to make any real difference. And Dean’s tired of himself, too. Sam doesn’t understand everything, but it sinks into Dean anyway, this air of disappointment mixed with exasperation and finally apathy.
Dean can’t look Sam in the eye, let alone have any deep conversation with him. And he doesn’t know when that’s gonna change.
And Cas.
He doesn’t think about it. About what happened in his room. About the look on Cas’s face and the way there’s been absolutely no trace of it since. He doesn’t think about Cas because if he does he gets this burning feeling in his stomach like he’s going to throw up.
He prays desperately (figuratively, of course) for a case, and when it turns out they’re in an inexplicable dry spell, with all the interesting cases are already being taken care of by their ever growing network of other hunters, he drinks. He drinks in plain sight and neither Sam nor Cas try to stop him, which makes him at once relieved and resentful.
Gradually, the nervous stomach-gnawing feeling begins to numb, to fade.
Except that it gets worse.
--
Dean wakes up late one morning, just after ten thirty, and can’t find Sam or Cas anywhere.
Their rooms are empty and there’s no one in the kitchen. Or the communications room. There are no books left open on the library tables, no chairs pulled out and then intentionally left that way. He checks the garage and it betrays him by being deserted. So do the little side rooms and an alarming amount of hallways. His heart starts to pound. It’s all he can do to keep calm, to stop from shouting out their names.
Did they figure out where Gadreel is? Did they go after him? Fuck. Did they go after Metatron? Dean hasn’t been helping as much with the research as he should have been. Maybe they got a lead yesterday when he’d been busy IV dripping the beer. Maybe they’d been so annoyed with him they’d decided not to tell him. To leave him behind. Fuck. Would they do that?
He doesn’t even know, which is telling in itself.
It’s just occurring to him that maybe they simply went out for like, groceries or something, and maybe he should have looked for a note, when he finds Cas down in one of the B rooms, watching some old tape on an old projector, a dark, intent shilouette in front of the wide bright screen.
Dean stops in the doorway and breathes out, letting his shoulders sag in relief. His pulse calms, reintegrates back into his system until it’s unnoticeable. He’s about to say something when Cas looks over his shoulder.
Dean closes his mouth. Chooses something else to say, opens it again. “Have you seen Sam?”
“He went out to buy groceries.”
So Dean had been half-right.
“We’re running low on — certain things,” Cas says pointedly.
Dean stares at him for a moment, a little taken aback that Cas is actually going there, all of a sudden. “And what are you up to? Is this supposed to help you find Gadreel or Metatron?” He motions at the screen. Which features, vaguely and unhelpfully, a single very hairy arm being prodded and poked with metal instruments to the tune of two very monotonous scientific voices.
“No. I gave up. This is just. Something I found interesting.”
“You gave up? Well, that’s the spirit.”
Even with the screen backlighting Cas and making his face dark, Dean can see the shape of a piqued squint there.
“C’mon. You didn’t just give up,” Dean challenges.
“I gave up for today. I’m taking a break.” For one bizarre moment, Dean is sure Cas is gonna start talking about the stupid shit he’s watching on the projector like it’s something fucking fascinating. But then Cas just closes his mouth and turns around again. “Can you,” Cas says stiffly. “Please. I’m trying to watch this.”
Dean does.
He leans against the closed door, encased in the silence of the hallway. It hits him that this is the silence that will greet him once Cas does know where to find Gadreel or Metatron. Cas will find out eventually. Whether or not Sam would leave without him, Cas would. Cas’ll leave.
Not because Dean’s already probably scared Cas off; because Cas never stays anywhere without a good reason to stay. Because Cas has left so many times and Dean has never been able to stop him before. That’s the essential problem with Cas. He sacrificed everything for Dean, and yet he’s never been tethered to him. Not really.
Dean realizes like a swift punch in the gut that he’d been taking some comfort in the fact that Cas can’t fly, can’t just suddenly vanish on the spot. But the truth is Dean’s just as powerless to stop Cas from leaving as he’s always been. One day Cas will just be gone.
He’ll be gone and like all the other times, there’ll be no guarantee that Dean will see him again.
--
Dean had picked out a room for Cas the first chance he got when they’d returned to the bunker from the hospital. Partly he’d done it to get his mind off of the whole possession thing with Sam. But he’d also done it because, as far as he’d known, Cas was gonna show up in a few days and he was gonna be human. And he was gonna need certain things. Certain things of his own.
Things like a bed and a dresser. Some clothes already hanging in the closet, bedsheets already on the bed. A towel and razors and deoderant and a comb. A mirror. An alarm clock. A small, ancient television set Dean had found in a thrift shop on the way back. Cas probaby hadn’t need the painting of trees leaning over the bank of a river, the river reflecting the trees and the sky back up in greens and golden yellows. But it was kinda calming. And, he doesn’t know, it had kinda reminded him of Cas? Stupid, since it probably couldn’t begin to compare to half of the things Cas has seen over the thousand of years of his angelic existence. Dean had found it, randomly, in a closet of the bunker.
Dean hadn’t shown Cas the room before Gadreel had told him to give Cas the boot. (Damn it, that had been fucking bullshit. If the angels couldn’t find Cas out on his own unprotected working at a dumpy old gas station, how the fuck would they have been able to find him in the bunker? And where are they now, if he’s such a fucking ‘beacon’? Cas has been here at the bunker for weeks now; wouldja look at that, no angels dropping by for a visit. Amazing.) Sam must have shown Cas the room while Dean had been gone, because Cas’s been using it. He’s in it now.
Dean knocks three times and then hangs his head to like, hear better, like maybe Cas’s voice will be muffled and he won’t catch the response unless he’s very attentive. He stares at his shoes. He imagines them taking him off in the other direction.
Cas doesn’t give him the helpful momentum of walking in himself. He meets Dean at the door.
Dean already feels dead in the water. “Uhm. Hey Cas. Uh.” Dean’s eyes roam the room behind Cas. “Can we talk?”
“About what?”
Shit. “About what happened in my room the other night.”
“What about it?” Cas asks warily.
“Can I come in?”
Cas doesn’t budge, so, apparently not.
“I’m sorry I. Uh. I didn’t mean to leave you alone like that. Or slam the door.”
Cas’s face remains stone-hewn, but Dean realizes that Cas’s chest is rising and falling rather quickly. “Why don’t you believe me?” Cas asks. “Why can’t I help you?”
Dean doesn’t know what to say to that. He clamps his teeth together, hard, because otherwise he’s not sure what his face is gonna do, and blinks too rapidly.
Too much to explain. And yet he doesn’t know what that explanation would be, where it even is.
“Everything I say,” – and Dean has heard that voice before, heard it in the motel room, before Sam had accidentally interrupted them, the voice that would be on the verge of tears if Cas were capable of them – “you ignore.”
“I don’t ignore it,” Dean says with a slight growl.
I just don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what it means.
I know what it means and it’s just too fucking much. I don’t deserve it. You don’t get how much I don’t deserve it.
Dean pushes his sleeve up and shows Cas the mark. “This is what I’m carrying around now. Little souvenir I picked up while I was traveling.”
Cas only has to see it for a moment before his gaze is sharp and focused again, alert, no trace of self-pity or hurt left. “Dean, how did you get that?” It’s clear from his tense tone that Cas knows exactly what it is.
“Present from the man himself. Help for killing Abaddon.”
“Do you even know what it does?” In the past, Cas might have been all anger at Dean’s stupidy, Dean’s recklessness. But now he’s sharp and stressed mainly out of worry. Now he’s so alarmed that Dean would almost feel sorry if he didn’t feel freaked out.
“Didn’t have time to read the warning label.”
“How could you have accepted it?”
“I just did.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? All this time we could have been.” Cas huffs furiously. “Do you know what it’s been doing to you? Even now? It’s—”
“Don’t, Cas,” Dean says very firmly. “Don’t.”
“But Dean—”
“I said drop it.” Fuck, Dean hadn’t come here for this. He pushes down his growing fear. Every single time, something else gets in the way. They always get derailed. That’s what Dean fucking means. That’s the damn point he’s just tried to make. (He thinks.) “Listen.”
There’s always some goddamn problem. Because he’s a goddamn problem.
That’s never gonna go away.
“We’ll worry about it later, okay? But right now.” But right now he is so fucking tempted to talk about the mark anyway because he knows what’s coming, this is it. His heart is fucking jackhammering in his chest and he’d rather be anywhere but here oh fucking shit. “We have something, Cas,” he blurts out. “And whatever the fuck it is, I don’t wanna let it go. Not ever. You hearin’ me? So this is me not, you know, letting.” His breath gets very shallow and his head starts to spin. “Cas I really need to sit down.”
--
Dean is sitting on Cas’s bed with his head between his knees.
It’s so fucking embarrassing. He regrets everything. He has a very strong sense of being somewhere he has no right to be, but he can’t even stand up, let alone leave. He stares at the bed quilt between his legs, trying to distract himself from how badly he’s fucked everything up. It’s the same one he put on the bed himself, pale blue with a darker blue edge. It’s probably, he thinks, been sitting there untouched since he put it there; Cas, being an angel again, doesn’t sleep.
He breathes in and out, in and out and aggressively does not think about Cas watching him, probably still standing by the door, probably with an expression of stone. He’s beginning to feel a little better, physically, when he hears Cas sit down next to him.
Or, feels him.
Cas’s thigh is pressed flush against his own.
The rest of Dean’s panic drains away and he uncurls himself slowly. After a long minute, he can hear a clock ticking somewhere. He doesn’t remember getting Cas a wall clock. He wonders what use a partially omniscient angel could possibly have for an old-fashioned human-made clock.
“Did you hang that painting on the wall?” Cas asks, after more silence.
“Wha?”
Cas is staring at the painting of the river and the trees.
“Oh, well. Yeah. I found it in a closet,” Dean admits. “Do you, uh.” Dean’s nervous again. “Do you like it?”
Cas doesn’t answer. He just looks at him and tilts his head in a faint smile. No. Tilts his head for.
Oh.
Cas’s mouth is soft, soft like his hands had been. Dean hadn’t realized how much he’d missed Cas’s touch once it was gone. He doesn’t pull away this time; he turns toward Cas, burrows his fingers in Cas’s hair and brings him closer. Cas puts one leg up the bed. His hand finds Dean’s arm and wraps firmly around the mark, neither ignoring it nor adorning it.
Of course, his hand doesn’t stay there for long.
Dean sinks back into the quilt, pulling Cas down with him.