Work Text:
Glistening and watery, steely blue eyes overflowing with emotion never left the emerald green ones reflecting contempt and panic. He couldn't read his expression, his body language, it was so suddenly standoffish. Despite these little things that would normally pinpoint holes in all the wrong places, Cas felt nothing but unconditional admiration and love still. If he could only hear the thoughts wracking his brain, if he could only touch him, be touched. But that would bring the end on too soon, before the words have even left his mouth. In the face of a man who could not swallow this, the angel spoke his truth.
"I love you," his voice is gravelly as he squeezes it past the lump in his throat and the way Dean's face breaks wrenches at his heart. He swallows thickly, visibly, his eyebrows knit together and his lips tighten. Words. He’s trying to form words. His soft expression is cold compressed by a thousand strands of new emotions, but still he cannot find words.
In a way Cas’ face mirrors this, his eyebrows crinkle and his wet eyes are a juxtaposition to the smile painted over his lips, trembling and vulnerable. They spend too long just staring at each other and the angel is elated when pinpricks of tears glisten in the man’s eyes, a hint of reciprocation. Finally his jaw works, his eyelids flutter, Cas thinks he might even take a step forward or is that his hopeful imagination?
“Cas-”
The banging on the door stops longing enough for a slorping noise to bubble from behind, ripping Dean from this little world they carved out if not only for a moment. Cas never left it, was always immersed in it, could never escape the way Dean made him feel. He doesn’t look away from Dean as Dean whips around, eyes still glistening in the low light, to catch a glimpse of whatever might be this cursed place. Like a talisman of their work life, their work, his everything, it is no more than a disembodied amporphum of black ink, dripping and crawling and cognitive. Resembling of ectoplasm and darkness and leeches, of leviathan and death. It was new but not new at all. Same old beasts coming after his loved ones.
“Don’t do this-” The words are leaving his mouth as he’s looked back to Cas, as Cas has already started moving forward. Panicked and wide, green eyes search desperately for a way to fix this, to save him, to bide more time, to speak, dammit, speak.
Words allude him. “Cas-” he says again dumbly.
The angel’s expression is unshifting, dotingly loving. Free. Dean’s heart thrums in his ears and against his ribcage, tears finally blur his vision. Castiel’s hand marks a familiar spot on Dean’s bicep. Running out of time, Dean loses his breath, the world closes in on him, he blinks feverishly. If they weren’t so close he might not have heard what Castiel says over the adrenaline, the heartache and butterflies, the hearthrob and dread.
“Goodbye, Dean.”
Because words refuse to come to him, Dean does the next best thing he knows how. He uses his body, his wordless actions. He can feel weight distributed unevenly behind the angel’s grip so he knows he has no time but the present, acting entirely on impulse and whim and an urgent need to save someone.
As the door behind Castiel slams open Dean takes up the angel’s jaw with both hands and pulls him into a hard kiss, slamming their lips together a little too hard, teeth knocking mindlessly as he looks to taste the angel, if not only for a moment, if not only to take away the tears. To take away the looming end.
The angel stills only long enough to favor it, kissing back with more force than Dean thought he was capable of. Even in the end he still thought of him as less knowing, less human, but sometimes he realizes, Cas was more human than he was. Still he was learning from him in ways he’d never learned from anyone else.
An explosion behind Dean’s eyes lasts centuries but their time together was at an end now. When the angel pulls away and pushes him down and out of the way, the ebony threat inches from smiting her objective, Dean sees how he is smiling.
“Thank you,” Castiel breathes, taking the words from Dean’s mouth, still dumb on the ground, staring in horror as the angel turns his beautiful eyes away for the very last time. The ink spikes forward and takes them both, vacuuming them each from existence as if they were sucked into themselves beneath a goop mess. Dean stares forever, unblinking, heart racing, words still lost on him. He’s afraid if he blinks he’ll miss that moment when Castiel reappears, stands over him and tells him it’s all okay, it’s over.
The moment never comes. A distant ringing draws him back to the present and finally he blinks once the ringing floods his ears fully, eyes darting across the room, swimming until finding the perpetrator. Sam’s name is illegible to him as tears spill forward and he pulls himself into himself, head in his hands. If only he knew they would meet again in heaven when he dies so fucking stupidly, because apparently offscreen he was just with jack pimping out heaven.
Finally his voice works, however a cracked rasp.
“Y YO A TI CAS.”