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Not night yet but the sun was just a paste of light coming thinly between the trees. After a while of walking, especially on quiet days, it was more obvious that the landscape changed but did not move. The path unfolded like a treadmill into a painted Hollywood backdrop that formed itself around them (hallucinogenic city, rattling industrial necropolis, an ocean of cornfields – gorgeous in low gold light and a complete bloodbath). Cas had explained; matter plus information is creation and purgatory was sensitive to intention. In particular to Dean's intention since he both possessed a human soul and was alive. Of course, Dean had demanded outright why he couldn't just think up a nice little door with a great green "exit" sign on it. Cas had given him a particularly flat look and tried to explain but none of it sunk in once things got into relativism.
Dean spent full days afterward thinking of cheeseburgers until he gave himself headaches, to no avail.
"This a good place to set up camp?" Benny asked.
Dean blinked, woke up a little. "Sure." He peered back over his shoulder. "What d'you think, Cas?"
Cas looked around the clearing slowly.
It was weird in here, sometimes Cas looked like his normal self, sometimes -– if Dean turned around too fast or caught him from the corner of his eye -– he got the impression of something enormous, a streak of light and colour, vaulted ceilings, trees growing backward in time, other things he couldn't name or explain. It was nauseating. Dean tried to avoid it happening.
"There's a group of ghouls about fifteen miles that way." Cas pointed. "We should be safe. Unless there's a breeze."
"Well alright then, sounds good to me." Dean flopped down against a tree, leaned his head back, closed his eyes.
"Unless there's a breeze," said Benny.
There was silence for a while, except for the sound of some crazy night bird singing its way up and down the scale in the branches. It might not be a bird at all, Dean considered. It might be a lure, that happened. Or it might be a recording of a bird ripped from his head, or from the head of any number of monsters. Even monsters dream of birdsong, clean sheets, ice cream -– what Dean wouldn't do for some ice cream right about now.
Like prisoners were supposed to do, Dean spent a good deal of time imagining his Last Meal, only for him it was the First Meal Post-Purgatory. In the absence of fighting, when things got quiet and he was sick of fielding matches between Benny and Cas, Dean plumbed considerable mental energy into this little exercise. There were many options, some sentimental; his mother's meatloaf and mashed potato, followed up with apple pie and ice cream, thick and cold, glowing with nostalgia, Americana, meal of the brave, supper of the free. Others were decadent; the Rocky's Rib Shack Rib Challenge, best barbeque sauce in Memphis, meal on the house if you finish the plate in under an hour fifteen – which, Dean thought, after however-long it had been down here in the wilds he could do easily. And coffee! Hot coffee and doughnuts, not to mention bacon and pancakes, tacos, burritos, steak with potatoes, grilled cheese, chips and dip, guacamole, nachos –- can't forget -– hot chocolate (overflowing with cream), candy bars, gummy worms, cola. He imagined bombing down a clear highway, passenger seat littered with snack wrappers, he imagined a deck chair in the sun and a cooler with a six-pack in it, he imagined roasting a whole chicken in lemon and thyme, carefully, lovingly, then eating the whole thing with his fingers like some kind of animal, crouched on the floor right in front of the oven.
The stream of the fantasy was not so much different from when he was much younger and dad was gone, three, four days longer than he said he'd be, sometimes as much as a week. Long enough for the hunger to really set in. Then he would lift sliced bread and peanut butter from the corner store and make up sandwiches and ration them, while Sammy kicked around the motel room with all the vast and baleful rage of an eight-year-old.
"Dean." A hand on his shoulder.
Dean opened his eyes. Cas was crouched by him, beaming out concern.
He sniffed, sat up straighter, looked around. It was dark now, he could barely make out Benny leaning against a tree on the other side of the clearing.
"Dean," said Cas again. "You need to eat, it’s been days."
"Nah, I'm alright."
"That's not true."
"I'm good," said Dean. "Just let it be."
"I'm with hotwings on this one," said Benny, pushing himself away from the tree. "You need to keep your strength up. You're looking a little peaky, brother."
Dean rubbed at his eyes, which stung. "Maybe if you two let me sleep for more than five minutes I wouldn't be so beat. You think of that?"
"I can go kill you one of them ghouls if you fancy something off-menu?" Benny asked.
Cas bristled. "That won't be necessary."
"Okay, alright, keep your shirt on." Benny picked up his ax, slung it over his shoulder, took a look up into the canopy, no rush. "I'll be around," he said. "You kids have fun now."
As he walked away, the forest trembled, shifted, reformed into something like a playground in a shelled-out city. Where the trees had been there were collapsing metal foundations and concrete high-rises; fronts blown off, floors exposed and sagging like damp cardboard. Occasionally a little puff of wind blew a fine white dust into a tiny whirlwind.
Dean waited until he couldn't hear Benny's footsteps anymore before turning to Cas, who was sitting quite serenely next to him beneath the swing-set.
"You don't—" Dean took a breath.
Cas smiled at him with astonishing gentleness. "It's alright, Dean. I can give you what you need."
"Fuck." Dean scrubbed his hands down his face. Then he stripped his jacket off and his flannel. The jacket he balled up like a pillow and he lowered Cas down onto it.
"Oh, hold on." Dean tapped Cas's shoulder and he sat up again while Dean rummaged in his jacket for his knife. "Alright."
Cas lay back, smiling up at Dean, that calm and kind smile which made Dean feel like he was being skewered by pins of light, like his insides were naked on stage in front of everyone he'd ever known.
He put his left hand flat on Cas’s stomach, felt him warm, solid, and breathing, then he pulled up Cas’s hospital top and set the point of his knife just above his navel.
Cas rubbed Dean’s arm reassuringly. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
It was a treachery that Dean even needed to hear that.
He slid the knife home.
It was a mechanical affair, in a way, and in another -- a secret, alarming, wasp-sting thought that Dean kept bottled up and buzzing the whole time, every time -- in another way, there was no one else he had ever been so close with.
First, he opened Cas up from navel to sternum and put his hands in, and pulled out the guts, rubbery and slippery, steaming and hard to get in handfuls. There was a remarkable amount of blood. Dean knew if he’d clipped the intestines because Cas would start to cough up blood, and still, he’d touch Dean’s shoulder and rub his back and tell him he was doing well and it was going to be okay -- wetly, with red lips.
Dean blinked tears away, wiped his face roughly on his forearm, got back to cutting.
He took out the stomach and put it to one side, peeled the liver away from its moorings. He was more or less an expert at butchery after forty years under Alistair on the rack and he was a sick fuck, the sickest fuck there ever was because even though he shook throughout his whole body and he felt cold all down the middle of him for fear that maybe Cas wouldn’t be able to heal up this time and he’d killed his best friend after only just finding him again, he still kept right on cutting. Sawing and slipping with his little knife, hacking blind through inches of blood, pulling out what came away loose and soft in his hands.
“Take it, Dean, you need it,” said Cas, ghastly pale and perfectly tranquil, most of his insides arranged around him like some serial killer’s tableau.
Dean bent over him to get a good angle, felt around a bit, then pushed his knife up and through the diaphragm.
Cas gave a jolt and brought up a great spray of blood with a nasty wheezing, gurgling noise.
“Shit, shit.” Dean dropped the knife and reached out to cup Cas’s cheek, brush the hair away from his forehead.
Cas tried to say something and nothing came out but blood, so he laid his hand over Dean’s and held it, reassuring and vital.
“It's okay,” he whispered, just barely, his eyes filled from shore to shore with something enormous and strange.
It frightened Dean, he had to look away.
He kept hold of Cas’s hand as he pushed up through the tight lip of the diaphragm, he needed to feel Cas’s fingers on his, his steady and unbroken grip.
Dean was inside Cas’s chest up to the elbow, practically laying flat on top of him. It was hot and difficult work to rummage around in the close, wet environment of ribs and lungs until his fingers brushed up against the heart, rattling like a pebble in a tin can.
Dean dropped his knife, swore. He was panting, sweating quite freely.
Cas reached up and mopped his brow with the sleeve of his trench coat, like a goddamn nurse in an operating theatre.
It was so ridiculous Dean felt as if he might burst out laughing. Or else start screaming and never ever stop. Instead, his knuckles bumped against the knife and he took it up again, shuffled an inch or so closer on his knees, and then began hacking away at the various tubes holding the heart in place.
It was a tough old muscle, it took some work to get it free. The whole time Dean kept hold of Cas’s hand. He was afraid in a panicky, superstitious way that he hadn’t felt since he was a small child; if I let go of his hand he’ll die, he thought.
The heart came free.
Dean pulled it out with a squelchy, unspooling noise and sat back on his heels, looking at nothing in particular.
Cas gave his hand a squeeze. He couldn’t speak, there was no air in his lungs, he had no pulse, he was as pale as any corpse Dean had seen but he was smiling with a calm joy and a pride that made Dean feel more than a little strange.
Cas squeezed his hand again then pulled away and sat up, his guts in his lap, his whole torso one wide-mouthed gaping red horror.
The heart was warm in Dean’s hand, he closed his eyes as he brought it to his mouth, bit into it, teeth meeting in flesh, rubbery and tough. It was hard to chew. Mostly he had to choke down whole chunks of it, sat there on his knees, blood dripping off his chin.
Cas held him while he ate, ran his fingers through Dean’s hair, rubbed circles on his back.
Dean shouldn’t have let him, he should have laid down some sort of ground rules to stop this being any weirder than it absolutely had to be, but he never had because he needed to know it was okay, that it was going to be okay. At this point, he needed the touch as much as he needed the meat, which was a truth he couldn’t think about in words but felt in his bones every time they went through this whole ordeal.
So this was how they went about it.
Cas would stroke his hair, his back, hold him close, watching him with wide eyes while Dean ate; the smell of blood thick in his nose, his jaw aching from chewing. The salt and iron of it was hard to swallow, but Dean’s body knew better than he did what he needed and his mouth watered at the taste. He licked the blood from his lips and his fingers, he ate every bite.
When Dean was done eating, Cas would put himself back together again.
He had trouble with it, trouble Dean had not anticipated. He had remade Dean's body atom by atom in alarming perfection, not a scar or a mark or a crooked angle on him. Like he had been pulled out of marble by Michael-fucking-Angelo.
His own daily resurrection was slapdash and brutal. The first time it had nearly been too much and Dean had struggled to keep down what he had just eaten.
First, he would stuff his organs back up into his abdomen, any old way, upside-down even, it did not seem to bother him. Then he would reel in armful over armful of guts, grey-blue and glistening, checking around to make sure all his insides were inside him in a distant and distracted manner — as if he had misplaced his house keys — all the while gazing gently and reassuringly up at Dean, no colour in him at all except for the dark points of his eyes and the naked red of his blood.
Then he would pinch, with slick fingers, the skin of the wound together and there would be a little flare of light, but only a little.
Dean supposed he was being so frugal to avoid attracting the attention of the leviathan, or anything else that might want to get in on dinnertime, but he wished Cas could do more to heal himself.
It was a selfish wish, mostly so that he didn’t have to watch while Cas guttered and gasped as he brought up the blood in his lungs, or listen to the sick wet flapping sound as his organs slapped around inside him before getting reattached.
All Dean could do was grip his shoulder to hold him steady and say; “Easy, easy, buddy. I gotcha.”
When it was over, Cas reeled Dean in and held him against his chest, so he could hear the steady, regular thumping of his heart. Sometimes, Dean would sleep like this, and when he did it was peaceful and he dreamed of nothing at all.
Later, much, much later -- in a bed with cool blue sheets and an open window through which came the pitch and trill of the evening birds -- Dean was lying with his head on Cas’s chest watching drowsily as he stroked the scar that still puckered down his stomach.
“Don’t.” Dean put his hand out to stop him.
“Why?”
“You know I didn’t want to hurt you, right?”
Cas ran his fingers through the hair at the nape of Dean’s neck, it made him shiver.
“Of course I knew that,” said Cas. “I wanted to give you what you needed.”
“How come -- the scar? I mean, couldn’t you heal it up?”
“I could. If I wanted to.”
Dean twisted to try and look at him. “You don’t want to?”
Cas moved to lie on his side, they were nose to nose, chest to chest. He tilted Dean’s head down to press a hot little kiss to his forehead.
“I liked it,” he said.
He kissed the corner of Dean’s mouth, then the other corner, and dodged away when Dean tried to meet his lips full on.
“I liked to feel your hands inside me.”
Dean’s breath caught as Cas nipped gently at the skin of his neck.
“I liked to watch you eat. To eat my heart.”
Cas licked a stripe along Dean’s collarbone.
“I liked the idea that I was part of you, your organs, and your cells. I wanted to take you inside me and keep you there, where you would be safe and loved. This was--” He broke off to apply his mouth to Dean’s nipple in a way that made Dean writhe under him. “This was almost as good.”
“Jesus, fuck,” Dean said.
Cas came up and kissed him, sweet and deep, and then they were through with talking for some time.