Chapter Text
CASTIEL
According to the clock on the nightstand, it was 3:19 a.m. Castiel had been in bed for hours without any hint of sleep. She had tried meditating. She had tried reading the book Sam had suggested to her, but it was far too interesting and did more to keep her awake than relax her. No matter that the human body in which she now found herself needed sleep, it stubbornly, inexplicably, refused to sleep. This was the second night in a row of no sleep at all, the third week of fighting to get even scraps of restful sleep. She’d been managing the nightmares. But this obdurate refusal by her body and brain to let her have what her body clearly needed was profoundly frustrating. If her body didn’t relent soon and let her sleep, she’d have a ferocious headache by the time the sun came up.
She hated all of it. The physical aches and pains of a human body. The need for sleep that simply wouldn’t come. The need to eat, drink, bathe, excrete, all of it. Six weeks of this now and it was getting no easier.
Worse yet, alone in the deep, quiet parts of night, she couldn’t escape her own memories. Despite all of the things she no longer had, her perfect angelic memory remained relentlessly intact. She could recall in exquisite detail every horrible choice and every horrible deed. Betraying the angels who’d believed in her. Deceiving and betraying the only true friends she’d ever had. At night, those memories were as strong as if they were happening right now.
Once the memories started coursing through her brain, the feelings that followed them burned like fire and acid. Regret. Remorse. Guilt. Angels didn’t feel those things, or at least didn’t feel them the way humans did. As an angel, her feelings had been muted and distant unless they were useful feelings like righteous fury. “Useful” being “useful to Heaven’s agenda,” of course. Feelings such as compassion or empathy were experienced only at a careful distance and anything like regret or guilt barely even that. She was sure now that she had been sent back (again) as a human, with a perfect memory and all of these complicated, intense, harrowing human feelings, as her punishment.
Her body informed her of its need to use the toilet and she sighed in frustration. Perhaps getting out of the bed was for the best, though. She could take a walk around the back yard then sit outside for a time and look at the stars, which always seemed to settle her. If she were very lucky, Dean might still be awake. She’d never wake him up for company, but if he were also awake and struggling to sleep, well, then he might appreciate companionship too. If he were in a good enough mood, she might even convince him to show her one of the television shows or movies he loved. Watching Dean react to a story was often better than watching the story itself.
Dean was sleeping on the couch, curled on his side so his legs fit. They’d argued over that twice now. In this new body, she was shorter and smaller and could sleep (or more likely not sleep) comfortably on the couch, while the king-sized bed in the master bedroom fit Dean’s larger frame. But Dean had insisted that he’d slept in worse places and that she deserved the extra comfort of a proper bed while she was still adjusting to being human and needing sleep. Rather than being helpful, Sam had simply shrugged in amused exasperation at his brother’s stubbornness.
She could tell at a glance that Dean wasn’t sleeping well at all. He was fidgeting and talking in his sleep, not intelligibly, but clearly enough that Castiel could tell the dream wasn’t a good one. She had seen him like this many times. Before, it had just taken the slightest breath of grace to ease him. Now? Now he was in pain and she was useless.
Perhaps, if the angel way of doing things no longer worked, a human way might. She knelt beside the couch and laid a hand on Dean’s arm, right at the spot where she had left her mark when she dragged him out of Hell. “Dean, it’s just a dream. None of it is real. Let it go,” she whispered. He flinched. “Dean,” she repeated as gently as she could, “it’s all right. I’m here. I’ll protect you.” It sounded foolish, ridiculous almost, coming out of her graceless human mouth, but she said it anyway, hoping that Dean’s dream logic would remember her as an angel.
“Cas? Izzat you?” he murmured, still mostly asleep. His eyes cracked open halfway but she wasn’t sure he was seeing anything.
“Yes. It’s me. You were having a nightmare. Go back to sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
“Okay.” Dean shifted, pressing himself deeper into the couch cushions and folding his arms across his chest. Castiel let her hand fall away from his arm.
After a few minutes of kneeling beside the couch, listening to the deep steady breathing that told her Dean was sleeping peacefully, Castiel felt her joints begin to object. This was new too, these physical aches and pains from doing things that had once been effortless, and it was profoundly unwelcome. Despite the discomfort, she was reluctant to leave. Better sitting here, watching over Dean, than spending more stubbornly wakeful hours in bed. She settled into a more comfortable sitting position against the couch. She would wait there until the sun came up, then go try again to catch a few hours of rest.
DEAN
Dean was sure he was dreaming but not sure enough. It had to be a dream because Alastair was dead, he’d watched Sam ice that fucker, so Alastair couldn’t possibly be here, putting Dean on the rack again, flaying, slicing and laughing at his screams. But that was Alastair’s touch and Alastair’s way with pain and Alastair’s smug snake smile so maybe everything else was the dream and this was real and he’d never been rescued from Hell and Alastair was going to keep at him until his soul shattered into a thousand jagged black pieces. He was small and broken and hurt and afraid, even more so because he knew what was coming, what always came, what always happened no matter how loudly he screamed and how hard he fought. Any minute now Alastair would turn those cold, dead shark eyes on him and tell him again how it could all be over if he’d just agree to take up the blade himself and torture someone else and this time he’d break and say yes and the whole ball would start rolling down the hill towards The End and it was all his fault because he was weak and pathetic and . . .
The warmth of the hand on his arm cut through the dream, banishing Alastair and all the pain. “Dean, it’s just a dream. None of it is real. Let it go.” The voice wasn’t quite right but it was right in all the ways that mattered and he knew what that hand meant. He was saved. Cas was here, pulling him out of Hell. “Dean, it’s all right. I’m here. I’ll protect you.” Cas was here. He was safe. He could sleep.
Someone who wasn’t Dean was snoring lightly and that didn’t make any sense because he knew he hadn’t gone home with anyone last night. He should still be curled up on the couch in the Minnesota ranch house where they were crashed while they worked out things with Cas’s new life and looked for their next case. But there was a definitely a dead weight against his chest and the softness of long hair against his hand, and those little snores sure as hell didn’t belong to his Sasquatch baby brother. He opened his eyes slowly, inching one hand towards the gun stowed between the couch cushions, but then pulled up short. Cas was sitting on the floor next to the couch and had fallen asleep with her head resting against his chest.
The way he’d managed to break out of last night’s nightmare made a lot more sense now. Cas really had been here to pull him out of it. Then, of course, because it was Cas, she’d sat here all night watching him sleep until she’d eventually fallen asleep herself. Stupid, sentimental crap. But kinda sweet too. And he had to admit that, up close like this, her hair smelled nice, like a grassy field after the rain, which wasn’t the worst thing to wake up to.
The clock on the television stand read 6:40 a.m. He had no idea how long Cas had been here. One thing for sure, though, he definitely didn’t want Sam finding them like this. His brother had already made one too many pointed references to Dean and Cas finally going beyond “two solid years of eye-fucking” now that Cas was in a female body, and he was sick of telling Sam to shut the hell up. Yeah, sure, Cas 2.0 was a babe, and if she’d been some random woman he’d met while out on a case, he’d have been all in. But this wasn’t some random woman he was never going to see again. This was Cas. Regardless of what meat suit Cas was wearing, there were hundreds of good reasons to keep it in his pants. An angel, even a fallen one, deserved better than a broken mess like him. Okay, there had been Anna, but that had been a foxhole “last night on earth” thing that he hadn’t expected to last. If he actually started something with Cas it would be . . . well . . . not that. And right there was another good reason to keep Cas safely at arms’ length – he couldn’t afford to have anyone else besides Sam inside his defenses, couldn’t allow himself to get too close to someone else who could be used against him. So even though she smelled nice and even though his fingers had been stroking her hair for the last few minutes without consulting his brain first about whether that was okay, it was time to get back on the “personal space” train. He had managed to keep his hands to himself just fine for more than two years now, even though original Cas had been way hotter (not that Dean would admit this anywhere except in his own head because Dad had made it very very clear that no son of his wanted to have sex with men and that was that). He’d just keep on doing that.
“Hey, time to wake up, buddy,” he said, doing his best to sit up slowly without dumping Cas’s head too hard onto the couch cushions.
She raised dopey, half-lidded eyes to him and he wondered how little rest she’d actually gotten last night. “I saw that you were having a nightmare. You seemed to sleep better when I was here, so I stayed,” she explained. “I meant to go back to my room once you’d settled. What time is it?” She rubbed her eyes and tried to focus on the clock.
“Little after six-thirty. You’ve got some time yet if you wanna go back to your bed,” Dean responded.
Cas laid her hand on his knee, probably just a gesture of concern, probably because his knee was the closest thing to her right now, but it still too much for his comfort level. He gently moved her hand to the couch, then shifted away by a few inches.
“Look, no harm no foul this time, but you can’t do stuff like this, Cas. Watching me sleep? Falling asleep on me? It’s weird and a little creepy,” Dean objected.
Cas gave him the head tilt, confusion written all over those big (gorgeous – nope, don’t go there, he chided himself) blue eyes. “I don’t understand. You slept better after I was here. The only good night’s sleep I’ve had since becoming human was our first night in this house when you stayed with me. If being near each other lets us both sleep without nightmares, what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s not something we do, okay?!” He knew he sounded angry but maybe a little anger would drive the point home. “God, I need coffee,” he grumbled, not waiting for Cas’s answer.
He thought he caught a hurt look flash across her face, but it was gone quickly enough that he might have imagined it. “I’m going to try to get another hour or so of sleep before I have to talk to the lawyer about the house and the money,” she said. “I know you and Sam can’t be happy sitting around waiting for this all to be resolved.” She picked herself up off the floor and retreated to the master bedroom without another word, leaving Dean feeling a little bit like an ass even though he knew he was doing the right thing.
He went out for a drive to clear his head, using the excuse that they were almost out of coffee beans, a definite red alert situation. He was going to miss this whole “drinking freshly ground coffee in the morning” thing once they returned to their normal hunter lifestyle of crapsack motels and truck stop food.
They’d all agreed it made sense to stay in Minnesota, in a comfortable house they didn’t have to pay for, while the weird situation with Cas and her new meat suit got worked out. There was a substantial amount of money relating to the accident that had killed Michelle Swanson’s family and put her into the coma that had left her body empty for Cas to inhabit. Plus, her body had been out of it for long enough that the hospital had a legal guardian appointed and Cas couldn’t do anything for herself until she established she was competent. There always seemed to be one more phone call with a lawyer or one more set of papers to sign before any of it got worked out. So, for the last three weeks they’d been all nice and domestic, like taking a vacation in an old sitcom.
Even though he was getting a little antsy, Dean had to admit that the down time was doing them all some good. For one thing, camped out safely in the suburbs, Sam was able to use sleeping pills to dodge his Hell flashbacks without worrying that he was leaving Dean without someone to watch his back. The more rest Sam got, the better he seemed to be handling his visions of the Cage. They were also making good use of the downtime to teach Cas normal people stuff, like how to drive a car, how to do laundry, how to use a computer, as well as a handling few hunter things like teaching her how to shoot and basic firearms safety, and getting her an anti-possession tattoo. He was immensely thankful that her first driving lessons had been in a piece of crap car instead of his Baby because he didn’t think he could have handled it otherwise. It had been almost as bad as teaching Sam – his brother only ten, just barely tall enough to reach the pedals, him a cocky fourteen, sitting in the passenger seat trying to hide his white knuckles as Sam drove around an empty parking lot in an ancient stolen junker with no seat belts.
By the time he returned to the house, armed with coffee beans, dinner fixings and a couple of other necessities, Cas was showered, dressed and sitting at the kitchen table frowning at the laptop they’d bought for her. At glance at the screen told him she was staring at blocks of text in a language he didn’t understand. She seemed to be getting the hang of the computer research thing pretty well, all things considered. “Whatcha readin’?” he asked as he stowed the groceries.
“A university in Europe recently digitized several early Ugaritic tablets on the nature of souls and soul-based magic. This one is much better than the usual human attempts to understand such things, but far from as helpful as I’d hoped it would be,” she answered.
“Ya know, you don’t have to be all heavy lifting all the time. Download some cat videos or something.” He caught himself before he repeated what he usually said to Sam in situations like this – go watch some porn – because that was not something he wanted to discuss with Cas right now. Or ever. Instead, he focused on the very safe task of making a fresh pot of coffee. They’d already blown through the one he made first thing this morning.
“I do like animal videos and nature programs. Sir David Attenborough has an exceptionally soothing voice. But watching nature shows isn’t going to help Sam. Reading Ugaritic tablets might,” Cas said.
“Speaking of Sam, is he up and about yet?”
“He didn’t have a good night either. He said he was going to try to sleep a little more,” Cas answered. “I’m very worried about him,” she added after a moment.
“You and me both, but I’m outta good ideas. Hell, I’m outta bad ideas.” Dean scanned the counters for his coffee mug from earlier, couldn’t find it, so gave up and grabbed a new one from the cabinet. “Hey, I don’t suppose any of your old angel buddies –“
She cut him off sharply. “I don’t have any more ‘old angel buddies.’ I killed most of them. If you really want to talk to Heaven about helping Sam, I’m of no use to you. No one in Heaven answers when I call, remember?”
Every word she’d said was true, but Dean hated watching her kick herself. “Hey. Cas. Uh, well, uh, I didn’t mean to make you feel like crap. Not now and not this morning,” he offered. It was feeble but it was something.
Cas was quiet for a while, staying focused on what she was reading. When the coffee maker signaled the new pot, Dean poured fresh coffee over the dregs in her mug and filled a new mug for himself. He’d taught her to drink it black like he did – all the better to heat up later when you let it get cold and easier to clean off your shirt when you spilled it while driving.
“I think I am the one who should be apologizing to you,” she said, catching his eye as she wrapped both hands around the now steaming mug. “I misunderstood human social customs yet again.”
“Before everything went wrong, I was a good angel,” Cas continued. “I didn’t lead a strike force into Hell because I was expendable. I was chosen because I was very good at my job. I knew what I was supposed to do and I did it in the most effective way possible and I was content. But now? Now I can’t seem to get anything right. I can’t help you and I can’t fix Sam and I can’t even sleep properly. There are all of these rules and unspoken things I’m supposed to know, but I don’t, so I keep making mistakes like I did this morning. It’s frustrating and exhausting and I hate it.”
“Cas …” Dean really didn’t know what to say, so he let his words trail off into nothing. He wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, just a gesture to let her know he wasn’t really angry with her, but how could he do that after he’d pushed her away just a few hours ago?
With his usual perfect timing, Sam chose that moment to stroll into the kitchen. “Hey guys, I think I finally found us a case!”