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Cas leaves, because it’s easier than staying, or from force of habit. He leaves because it hurts to watch that slick petrol ooze leaking out from the red scar on Dean’s arm and diffusing through his veins. He leaves because that’s what he does, because that’s what is expected of him.
He leaves because he can feel Dean’s longing, pulsing in and out of every thought in his head, sputtering and sparking with his erratic grace. There’s no way of telling just by feeling exactly what Dean longs for from Cas, but he can hazard a guess. Dean longs for Castiel, or the image he’d once held of Castiel – someone who could fix things, provide a get out of jail or a solution or at least a hint of some kind.
Cas leaves because he wants to help, to carefully gather every pebble of information relating to the Mark and fit them together until they form a castle, something with battlements and turrets and defensible positions. A place from which to fight a war, and maybe even win it.
Cas leaves because he wasn’t asked to stay.
*
Dean stays because he knows, from experience, that if you ignore certain problems for long enough they fade away. You ignore a problem like this one for long enough and it becomes a part of your personality, gets internalised and buried deep beneath the surface. Becomes a permanent, but somehow less visible for it, tear in the fabric of your psyche.
He watches as Cas walks away, smiling and nodding like he agrees that it’s best they split up and search for clues, like the idea doesn’t make him want to put his fist through every screen from here to Maine. He must be growing, because he doesn’t even try and lie to himself, pretend this reaction is because he’s watched too many horror films and they’re breaking rule #1. Don't split up if you want to survive.
Bottom line is, if Cas wanted to stay, he’d stay— simple as. Dean isn’t going to chase him, parcel up his heart with a neat little bow and hand it on over. Cas would see right through the pretty wrapping and to the chewed up, bloody mess underneath— hand it back before the gore could soak through the paper and get onto his blame retardant hands. Because somehow despite all the bad things he’s done, none of them ever seem to stick. Dean's glad for it— at least one of them should get out of this before they’re too bloody and cracked to be repaired. He used to think that honour would fall to Sam, but the longer this goes on, the more he thinks neither he nor his brother have a hope. There’s always something pulling them back in— usually each other.
For the sake of argument, say he bares himself to Cas, and say Cas decides not to reject him outright, say Cas takes the proffered heart and treats it like a fucking gift, that would be the cruellest thing, the worst thing. Because in a month, or two, maybe even three, it’s not going to matter how happy they’ve been. It’s not going to matter how carefully Cas has been handling Dean’s heart, how many stitches and tubes and patches he’s invested in it trying to bring it back to something normal, because Dean is going to go off the rails again and Cas is going to have to insert a fucking angel blade into him, carefully placed to do the most damage in the cleanest, most pain-free way.
So Dean’s going to stay here and marinate in his own sulphuric juices, pour over texts he knows don’t contain the answer, because if he lets himself put a foot over the bunker’s threshold he’s afraid his feet are going to walk themselves all the way to wherever Cas is currently holed up. And then his stupid mouth will open and he'll let out The Big Secret in such a transparently, desperately, obvious way that Cas, beautiful fucking oblivious Cas, will blink at him as dumb as that prehistoric fish he claims to have watched struggle on up out of the ocean.
And then it’ll be decision time. The universe will flip its coin, draw its fucking line, reveal its cards. Whose heart gets to go through the blender this time? Who gets spat out the other end of this conversation as so much raw fucking mince? Dean, or Cas, or maybe even both?
Dean isn’t going to deliberately put himself in a position where the end result can only be a broken heart, regardless of which of them it belongs to. He’s not a fucking monster. Not for now, at least.
*
Dean spends a week, filling time, filling his head with useless knowledge that skirts around the peripheries of what he needs to know. Useless information that’s just close enough to what he wants to grant some sort of illusion of productivity.
He doesn’t pick up his phone when Cas calls, lets it ring out until he gives up and dials Sam instead. He pretends it’s because he’s busy, he has more important things to. And he does— important things like making sure the shrapnel from his coming detonation doesn’t bite too deeply.
Sam offers him snippets.
“Cas says hi.”
“Cas wants to know how you’re feeling?”
“Cas says there’s a really good bakery outside Minneapolis, if you’re ever passing through.”
Eventually Dean snaps, bites out, “Why don’t you go and fucking marry him already?”
Sam raises his hands placatingly and backs out of the room.
Two hours later he’s back with a case and a never say die attitude. Dean argues, but he recognises this look on Sam, knows it’s futile to fight back so he gives in, grudgingly.
*
They drive in comfortable silence for the most part. More Dean’s doing than Sam’s. Every time he tries to start a conversation Dean heads him off abruptly. He’s tried living healthy, emotionally and physically, and as the stacked soda cans and Mexican takeaway boxes in his room will attest to, he’s decided it isn’t for him. A lifetime of repressing his emotions hasn’t killed him quite yet, he’s going to stick to what he knows.
“How—”
“Nope.”
Sam waits twenty miles and tries again.
“Do—”
“Nope.”
His next attempt causes Dean to flip the radio on so loud it makes the ears of the people in the car next to them bleed.
“CAN—” Sam tries to yell over the noise.
“NOPE.”
Sam slaps Dean’s hand away from the radio and turns it off.
“I was asking you to turn the radio off, you jerk.”
Dean just grins his shittiest grin, fingers tapping on the wheel and humming something that sounds suspiciously like You Can’t Always Get What You Want.
*
The first witness turns out to be a bust, and by bust Dean means a couple of spaceships short of a fleet. He and Sam split up, and somehow he ends up being the one who goes to the bar. He orders a drink as an excuse to talk to the bartender, and somehow it ends up being a whiskey, and somehow it ends up getting tossed down his throat. It’s only one drink, and so are all the others after it until you add them up.
Besides, he’s not drinking for pleasure. He’s drinking to accompany Tina. He likes her. She’s a lot like him, only marginally less fucked up. The sort of person he might sleep with, maybe even keep in causal contact with afterwards, were the circumstances different. They aren’t though, and she leaves with a wry joke and without his phone number.
He’s on the phone with Sam when he notices the guy slinking out after her, a man who couldn’t look any more like a grizzled old sea captain if he had a belt made of anchor chain and he was dragging a harpooned shark behind him. Dean rushes out after them, hears the scream and knows he’s already too fucking late. He crouches down by the smoking heap of clothes, mentally beating himself up for being a failure, once again.
Dean hears footsteps behind him and jumps to his feet, but it’s already too late. He gets a brief glimpse of the Skipper Ahab wannabe before he’s enveloped in white light, and then he’s out.
*
He feels condensed, like his brain is packed into a hole half the size of his skull, like his skin is stretched too taut over his skeleton, compressing his bones and forcing them to try and reform into something smaller. He flexes his fingers and feels them crack and shudder, not enough space between the joints to allow smooth movement. He feels like the cheaper, compact version of one of those high-end smartphones, all the same juice packed into a shell half the size and struggling for it.
He wonders if this is what Cas felt like, when he stuffed himself into Jimmy Novak’s body. Like he was leaking bits of himself out of every pore, like he couldn’t help but be diminished by it, because this space is finite and he can’t exist outside it, he’s going to have to adapt, slice off any overhang and hope it isn’t too important.
He looks around but he can’t see anything, just hints of shapes and colours under the darkness. He tries to touch his face but it isn’t there, there’s just an empty space. He tries to touch other parts of himself and is met with nothing. He can’t make tactile contact with his body, but he knows it still exists, can feel his eyes squeezed into sockets that they don’t fit, feel his heart pumping like a jackrabbit's as it presses against his splintered ribcage, his soft internal organs and brittle skeletal structure battling out for space in this too small vessel.
The space on his arm that the Mark takes up throbs, hot and raw and as he thinks about it the darkness gains a crimson hue, just barely there enough to be noticeable.
Oh shit, he thinks, this is it, he thinks. This isn’t a dream. I died again and this is the part where I wait a few minutes and then when I come to I’m the demon again, and Cas is too far away to take me out. This is the part where I probably get set loose on Sammy, and this time he’s not going to be expecting me.
The darkness starts to get less absolute and Dean grits his teeth, trying to resist the incipient pull of consciousness. He’ll stay here in fucking limbo forever if he has to, getting squashed down bit by bit until all that’s left are atoms.
*
He jack-knifes back to consciousness, frantically patting himself down for signs of injury. No wounds and he’s locked in a cell. So he wasn’t dead, just knocked out. Something isn’t right, though. He still feels compressed, but not in the same way as before. Before he didn’t fit, before he was two gallons of water trying to fit into a one gallon container. Now he’s more like one gallon that remembers being two.
There’s a mirror on the wall and he tries to reach out and clean the dust away, but his hands pull up short, swiping at the air in front of it. He’s wearing strange clothes too, now that he looks down at his arms. They’re familiar from somewhere, but he can’t place them. He lurches forward to the mirror again, correctly estimating how far it is this time. He swipes off the dust and a familiar face stares back at him, but it hasn’t been familiar for a while, say something in the region of twenty years.
He’s a fucking teenager again.
*
The nagging in the back of Cas’s skull comes in ebbs and flows. Sometimes it’s Claire, not often though. Mostly it’s Dean. He tries not to read anything into the specific times it peaks and troughs, how it’s usually at its strongest when Dean’s phone is ringing out to silence. He doesn’t know what to do with that. Dean clearly wants to talk to him, but he doesn’t. He lets Sam handle all the calls and, if Sam is to be believed, replies tersely and with irritation when Sam passes on his greetings and requests.
Today Dean is all over the place. Cas can tell he’s trying not to think about something. He gets lots of short little pulses, cut off suddenly like Dean’s thinking of something unpleasant and trying to blank his mind. Towards midday there’s a steady tailing off, a sudden huge spike and then it all gets very strange.
Cas doubles over, weakened, foreign grace insufficient to deal with the barrage of uncontrolled craving directed his way. It’s from someone he faintly recognises, but can’t place. It smothers Dean's signal entirely. It’s so unchecked and wild that he'd think it was coming from a child, unconscious and too immature to regulate their emotions, if he actually knew any children.
He’s attracting some strange stares from other patrons of the library, so he folds himself into a chair, grimacing. His first instinct is to fly directly to the source, calm whoever’s calling to him. He can’t do that, though, and he’s in no shape to drive, so he just leans forward, placing his head between his knees, and waits until it’s over.
It takes maybe a half hour to lessen to a manageable level. It’s still a thick, heavy pulse in the back of his head, but it’s no longer painful. Now that there's room in his brain to think he can tell it's definitely an immature mind, what he can't place is who. He doesn't know any children, as far as he can think, and there certainly aren't any out there who know him well enough to call out with that strength of feeling.
He’s torn. As an angel it is his duty to search out this child, find out what they need and see if they’re okay. It's what he wants to do, but he's a poor example of an angel right now. If he's in the car and the child becomes unconscious again, sends another wave of need like that his way, he'll crash the vehicle and he will hurt people, probably kill them.
Grimacing, Cas turns back to his book; resolving to do nothing unless to child prays to him directly. They're so familiar with him, they must know his name. Whoever it is would call out to him if they really, truly needed help. He repeats this to himself over and over, guiltily trying to ignore the sense of dereliction of duty that haunts him with every pulse of longing that comes his way.
*
Okay, maybe it’s a little insensitive to be stuffing his face with cake when another kid has just been taken, but man it is good cake, until Tina decides to announce that it’s probably poisoned. Dean tries to rationalise it, like someone would go to the bother of age warping them, locking them up and then poisoning them for shits and giggles, but he puts the plate down anyway.
He’s relieved Tina’s alive. It’s a good start; he hasn’t failed her quite yet. He casts around the room, looking for a way out. The walls are solid, but the bars on the window look a bit rusty. He kicks off a chunk of bed frame and uses it to chip away at them. He’s got one of the window bars open, nearly enough to slip through, when the footsteps come again.
He tries to get Tina to come with him, but she’s right, it’ll take too long to bust through the wood on her side.
He saves his own skin; telling himself over and over that he’ll be back in time to save hers too.
*
Everything is going so well, right up until the point Hansel grabs Dean in the cells. He’s surprised and more than a little bit pissed off at being caught so easily unawares, and then all of a sudden a familiar feeling ignites in his arm. Rage and bloodlust pour out of the space where the Mark used to be, only this time the body that houses it isn’t strong enough to do anything with them. It makes it worse, adds frustration to multiply the fury by.
Dean hadn’t lied to Sam, not intentionally, he’d thought the Mark was really gone. It wasn’t visibly there; he wasn’t feeling any of the effects. He thought that meant he was free. It had been a fucking relief for all of about an hour.
When Sam rescues his pathetic, runty arse he doesn’t mention it. He’ll probably turn back when they kill the witch anyway so what does it matter. He’s sick of being the bad news.
*
Hansel betrays them, of course, and Dean’s stupid, midget fucking hands proves no use whatsoever. He can’t even flip the lighter properly, gets the witch killing juice scattered all over the floor.
At least he hasn’t lost his ability to mouth off, and he uses it to decent effect to distract her while Sam flips out a knife. Not that it fucking helps much. Sam makes his move and the Mark stokes itself up under Dean’s skin and pushes him forward. He flings himself at Hansel, forgetting in his bloodlust that at the age of fourteen he had about as much muscle on him as the average houseplant.
Hansel shrugs Dean off with ease, smashing him against the ground and then slamming him into the fridge. He feels the pain acutely in this fresh body, no forty years of hell or a lifetime of hunting to temper it, but he forces himself to keep lucid, to battle down the rage and bloodlust for long enough to grab the bag from around Hansel’s neck.
He squeezes the bag, flashes back to himself and surges forward, dispatching Hansel in the most painful way he knows how. Disembowels him with a two inch slice along the gut. It won’t be a quick death, or a clean one. It will take him hours of screaming pain to die.
He’s no more merciful with the witch. He doesn’t just kill her. He’s not allowed to, that’s not enough. He shoves her hex bag into her mouth, gagging her so she won’t be able to scream, and then he stuffs her into the furnace and shuts the door. Poetic justice, just deserts, he doesn’t care. He just wants to hear her fucking scream.
He chants a mantra to himself, over and over, get it out on the bad guys, get it out on the bad guys. If he tears this pair of black and white pure evil bastards apart with his teeth, he’s going to be less likely to do it to some normal human who crosses his path. Fuck abstinence, fuck control, it’s all about letting the anger out in controlled bursts.
The Mark rages under his skin, it doesn’t want controlled bursts, it wants build up and explosion and carnage. Hansel is dying slowly on the floor and the witch is burning alive but it isn’t satisfied. Dean's hand twitches, shaking with the need to pick up the knife again. It's too light and it's too modern but it'll do. He stays there, vibrating with nervous energy for a few beats, and then suddenly his feet are moving and he's leaning against the Impala, breathing quick and shallow.
*
They see Tina off and he shows Sam the Mark, back and proud on his arm. Sam seems disappointed, but so relieved at the same time.
“You didn’t hulk out.” He says.
He’s right, this time. But he can’t feel what Dean feels. The Mark itches on his arm, unsatisfied. It feels cheated, and it’s not going to let him off so lightly next time. He only hung on by the barest thread of his humanity this time, and it’s only going to get harder.