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Every once in a while, Dean visits a rehab clinic. He goes in in days when he does the afternoon rounds and gets out of work early enough that Cas won’t be there when he gets home. They don’t live in the fancier of neighborhoods, so it’s easy to find kids who are no older than fourteen loitering around the alleys, wariness seeping into their bones the closer it gets to going home. They have learned things no kid their age should learn, and Dean knows a thing or two about skipped childhoods.
Ricardo is one of those kids. Barely sixteen and already his shoulders sag under the weight of a harsh life, mixed with pills and violent fathers and bouts of alcoholism.
“Hey, kid,” Dean greets him that afternoon, dropping a bag of Doritos and some peanut M&M’s in the room where they are scheduled to meet. There aren’t many people around; it looks like a slow day, even for the late hour, which suits both Dean and Ricardo just fine.
“It’s Ricardo,” the kid frowns, taking the bag of Doritos and opening it very carefully despite the eager look in his eyes. Dean smiles warmly at him.
“Fine, Ricardo,” he says, awkwardly rolling the Rs. Ricardo looks pleased at this, and munches his treat with a smug look upon him. He pockets the M&M’s (to give to his sister, Dean knows), and waits expectantly for Dean to indicate it’s time to go.
As usual, they go through Adela, the caretaker, who gives Dean the same indications she does every three weeks, and reminds them of their curfew with a tired smile. Dean nods solemnly every time: he values her work. He has been on every side of the fence before.
So they take off. Ricardo likes the Impala better than he has liked any other car, and unlike all his previous substitute Older Brothers, Dean likes the kid just as well, even when he spills crumbs all over the upholstery. They drive around the city, following less travelled roads and then some. There’s a sort of silent companionship between them that has been the cementing aspect of their growing bond, even a year back when Dean was new and awful at this, and Ricardo had been burned too many times to allow himself to open up. Now, though? They click. Dean treats Ricardo like an adult, tries to say his full name without a sneer on his mouth, takes him to the movies and lets him have all the popcorn and most of his sodas, and Ricardo follows Dean around without expecting anything from him, respects his silences and is grateful for the simple fact that Dean is there, and nothing else.
Some other times Dean takes him to empty lots or more desolate places and they spend the few hours they have together listening to music (although Ricardo is strictly into hip hop and reggaeton and Dean is desperately trying to teach him to listen to real music, to no avail), eating junk food and chatting and sharing silly anecdotes of their spectacularly slow lives. Dean will show Ricardo a silly picture he’s snapped of Cas’ grumpy face and Ricardo will answer with a story about his lovely baby sister or his dork of a best friend. Every now and then Ricardo slips into Spanish, calls Dean his hermano.
Dean would be lying if he said that Ricardo doesn’t help him as much as Dean does him.
He drops the kid back at the clinic with five extra minutes to say goodbye. Ricardo is not prone to affectionate displays, but he smiles at Dean in a way that tells Dean he wishes he was. So Dean grabs his arm and pulls him into a hug, ruffles his hair like he used to do to Sam before he grew his last mile. “Take care kiddo,” he says. This past week must have been especially taxing because Ricardo actually hugs him back.
“It’s Ricardo,” he says, without punch. He seems loathed to leave, so Dean squishes his arms, pulls him against his chest, tight.
“See you in a couple of weeks.”
It’s a bit hard to leave, some times. Dean stands in front of the run down building and just watches all those kids going in and out, most of them just freshly out of elementary school, if they even attend that. All of them forgotten cases of addiction, abandonment, abuse.
It makes Dean wonder if they’ve ever really gone after the right kind of monsters.
--
Once the sun goes down, Dean drives the Impala home but takes a walk before going in. He needs to unwind, needs to stop thinking he’s mindlessly substituting his brother--he’s not, Dean knows. He’s done good in that kid’s life. He’s being like a real big brother, for once. He respects the kid, he lets him choose, be his own self. He’s doing all the things he should have done with Sam. He’s learning, too. But Dean’s mind is not always a comfortable space.
It isn’t after forty or fifty minutes of walking that he notices them. Once his knee starts aching more than usual, the cold and dampness doing nothing to quell the dull throb that runs through his upper leg, he turns back to go home. He’s being followed, he can tell, by at least two or three individuals. He snorts.
They’re probably vandals or gang members or common little thieves, and Dean knows that even in this less than ideal state, they’re still no match for him. Still, he wishes for them to leave. He doesn’t want to fight, not today. After a few minutes, he turns around a dark corner, mentally mapping the block he’s on and missing now, more than ever, the ice cold metal of his pearl Colt against the skin on his lower back. His fists will have to do, tonight.
When it’s obvious that he’s aware of his stalkers, they come to light. As Dean imagined, three drunk kids in their mid twenties, looking for a bit of fun. He feels a pang of disappointment; he hasn’t met a Supernatural being in quite a long time.
“Hey, old man,” one of them sneers, walking slowly towards Dean. His accent is thick but Dean can’t place where it’s from. Cas would know, he reminds himself, before the second and third men appear under the lone working street light. There is nobody else in the street, at least not for another block, and Dean wonders if he’ll be able to outrun them if he just escapes. Probably not with his knee in its current state. Shit.
“Hey kids,” Dean replies, as cocky as he would have been ten years ago, “isn’t it past your bedtimes?”
The first man attacks him, tries to go for his arm, but Dean catches his fist and turns it around, slams him against a wall.
“Hey, hey, I don’t want to hurt any of you, so why don’t you all just scram?” he says, gentler than he thought he would, as he presses the man—boy—, against the brick wall. The kid struggles against his hold, and Dean wonders how long will his knee hold before giving, but the boy deflates, defeated, and Dean lets him go.
Barely a second later, both other kids charge against him. They are rabid and drunk in vitriol, angry and delirious and violent for the sake of violence. Dean hates it, but he fights, because that’s what he does. It doesn’t last long and it looks like any common street fight, until one of them produces a knife. He tries to get Dean, whose knee finally gives after a low blow to it, and with an anguished cry he falls to the ground. The kid throws himself against Dean, and the little silver blade in his hand makes it way into Dean’s knowledgeable fist, where it turns into a lethal weapon. Dean feels it, the rush. He hadn’t felt it in a long time, but he also hadn’t been involved in a pointless fight in a long time. It pumps through his veins, strong and impossible to ignore, and he punches the kid off of him, the strike so hard that he draws blood out of the kids’ mouth. And then he’s off. He launches himself on the strongest of the three, drives his fist hard into the boy’s cheek and continues to put bruise after bruise into his already bloody face. His body is going on muscle memory alone, and when he lifts the hand with the blade, hard and unforgiving, one of the other kids yells something in some strange language, maybe a threat or a plea to stop, and Dean’s mind says, yet again: Cas would understand that. And suddenly the last few minutes come crashing on him and the boy beneath him groans—alive, he’s alive,—and Dean lets go of the knife. He drops it like it’s burning, and he’s shaking, and his fist is shaking, and he knows there’s movement behind him but he can’t move. He can’t stop the blood pouring from the boy’s mouth, and he sure as hell can’t stop the swinging glass bottle that connects to the back of his head.
He falls.
--
It’s very late when he tries to stumble back home. He limps a couple of blocks, initially, and then mindlessly tries to hail a cab, but nobody will pick up a beaten up adult man. He’s got blood on his nose and mouth, but the worst of it is on his still clenched fist that he can’t seem to open. His knee is burning with pain, his head throbs, and he’s shivering, trembling with cold or fear or regret. A woman on the street takes pity of him and tries to take him to the hospital, but he refuses. He wants to go home. He’s confused and dizzy, and the only thing he knows for sure is that he needs to go to Cas, pronto.
“You have a concussion,” the woman insists. Dean shakes his head, stubborn. After much negotiating, the woman—Monica, she says—manages to punch Cas’ phone number. Through the haze in his head, Dean can hear her as she mumbles her way through an address.
--
Dean comes to again briefly in small light blue room with dirty wallpaper that reminds him of home, and then much later on his bed, under his stained ceiling and his heavy mustard duvet.
He has but to groan, before a pair of worried blue eyes come his way.
“Dean,” a voice says. Cas voice. Relief washes over Dean when Cas’ face shows up on his periphery, but he’s still overwhelmed by the earlier episode and the thirst that had wrecked through his entire body, sensitive to sound and light and especially to Cas’ hand gently touching his face. It’s too much.
Without being able to think about it, he chokes on a dry sob, remembering times when he was a mindless killing machine, when he had enjoyed the thrill of the hunt, of destroying, ravaging and so many other things. He can’t turn into that thing again, he just can’t.
“Cas,” he sobs, “I nearly killed a boy. I almost did.”
Cas looks sick with worry, holds on to Dean like Dean is about to vanish from their bed. Dean feels shame, hot and burning in his stomach. How could he even think about coming back home after something like this.
“What happened?” Cas croaks, searching Dean’s eyes as he tries to keep Dean’s body from shivering. Dean takes as big a breath as he can muster, and tells Cas the bits he can remember between gasps. Cas holds him through it all. Gives him space when Dean looks like he needs it, but never goes far for long. Dean can see the regret in his eyes, can see Cas looking at the bruises on Dean’s arms and gingerly passing tanned fingers through them, wishing he could vanish them with only touch. Dean thinks Cas ought to be upset. Dean could have run from that fight. He could have tried, but he chose not to. And now the damage is done.
When the story comes to an end, Cas doesn’t say “It’s not your fault”. He doesn’t placate Dean with empty promises of “It’ll get better” or “It’s going to be okay”. He gently dabs Dean’s more beaten eye with the wet cloth in his hand, thoughtful for a moment.
“Dean,” he says, putting the cloth down, in that gravelly voice that has sung psalms and prayers and quietly murmured Dean’s name in the dark, “what you did does not define who you are.”
There is silence after that. Dean is exhausted. He doesn’t feel like arguing with Cas, but is still moved by the faith that Cas continues to put on him, despite ever lasting evidence that he’s wrong. He sighs.
He doesn’t feel like he deserves to be coddled right now, but he still lets Cas hold his face with care, lets him wipe the dried blood out of his face and kiss his mouth, because he doesn’t know what he would do if Cas wasn’t here doing all this shit for him. If there was no tenderness, only violence, if there was nobody here to pick his shattered pieces up.
And then he gets it. He remembers Ricardo and his reluctant hugs, and how he always looked surprised whenever Dean did something nice for him. And he sees himself, at nineteen, and twenty eight, and thirty six, and now. He sees a lifetime of addiction and pain, and he understands that the little kid he visits every three weeks isn’t the only one who’s trying to heal. Perhaps he, too, is on his own path of recovery.
Unwillingly, he falls asleep being held by Cas.
--
Cas is already up when Dean opens his eyes the next morning. Dean isn’t sure whether either should be at work, but he’s willing to pretend like they don’t. He searches for Cas with no little trepidation, and spots him on the balcony, eyes closed and facing what little sun he can. He tries to call Cas but his body is a wreck, and what was intended to be a soft sound comes out as a painful groan and a bitter grimace. You aren’t twenty three anymore, Winchester.
Instead of ignoring him like Cas usually does when he’s into one of his balcony trances, he rushes inside in alarm, but slows down as soon as he sees Dean smiling ruefully at him.
“You should see the other guy.”
Cas rolls his eyes. Already a good sign. He sheds the few clothes he’s wearing and slips into bed next to Dean, careful not to touch his still tender bruises. Once inside, he folds them together, chest to chest, and noses Dean’s neck, trying to burrow into Dean’s heat. Dean kisses the crown of his head, a million things going through his mind.
Neither get out of bed for whatever remains of the day. They watch TV in silence, take naps and see after Dean’s more profound wounds. Cas doesn’t seem upset, just worried, and Dean realises he’s incredibly grateful for this small mercy.
At night, before turning in, Dean holds on to Cas’ warm, naked body, and presses his face against his back.
“I‘ve been thinking,” he says, tentative. Cas hums an affirmative, so Dean continues, “Been talking to Adela these past weeks. Ya know, the lady from the rehab clinic. She said there was this… uh, recovery program. For people with…,”
Dean rakes his mind for the words she used, but it’s Cas who supplies them: “PTSD.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that. Like, counseling and stuff. So anyway I, um. I think I might sign up. For a bit. See how it goes...”
Cas turns so fast in Dean’s arms that he doesn’t give Dean a chance to prepare for his big, blue, hopeful eyes.
“Okay,” Cas says, but his eyes say so much more. Dean gives him a tight smile.
It doesn’t feel easy, but when Cas closes his eyes and kisses him, it feels like a start.
---
fin