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He looks Sam in the eyes and says, look, maybe I can fight this, maybe I can be my own solution. And Sam looks back at him and rattles off a list of other, tenuous, shot in the dark, last chance saloon solutions. It’s a fucking gut punch. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t get what Dean means. Maybe it’s because he just doesn’t think he can.
He voluntarily tries to talk with Sam about his problems. He fights off thirty fucking years of a man is an island, a man fights his own battles and hides the damage from even those closest to him, and Sam replies with, “but Cas will fix you.”
Dean doesn’t fucking want Cas to fix him. He doesn’t want to reinforce himself in Cas’s head as a thing that needs a solution. Here is Dean, fucking Rubik’s cube of humanity, puzzle to be chopped and slotted and fidgeted with until everything’s all clear and blocked and nothing is a jumbled, demonic mess.
Sam thinks he’s helping, adding Cas to Dean. What he’s doing is presenting Dean as an unbalanced equation. Dean, when he thinks of Cas and Dean at all, wants it to be Dean = Cas. Not Dean < Cas, or Dean needs to be solved by Cas. Castiel’s fucking theorem.
Sam tries to help, but he just fucking hurts.
*
Sam can see the mental path that Dean is heading down. He’s decided, not that the solution lies within himself, but that the solution is himself alone. He tries to help, remind Dean that he and Cas are here, supporting and standing shoulder to shoulder with him. Judging by the sudden tightening of Dean’s hands on the wheel it doesn’t help. He’s reverting back to an old, well-traversed route. The cancerous certainty that an offer of help from the people he loves is a rebuke.
He is supposed to be the one who looks after people. That’s what he builds his world around, whether it’s the general populace he saves through hunting, or the people he loves through grand gestures and little touches, saving lives and hand-making favourite foods.
The minute that same attention turns back on him, it’s an admission that he’s failed.
*
Cas has his hand over a demon’s face, divine fury burning it away from the inside out, when it stops. His angelic power sputters out, leaving the job half done, the demon’s true self half melted. An inky sludge, congealed in its vessel’s veins. A mirror for Cas’s own situation, something half killed, irradiated now by a cracked core.
It gapes up at him. All the hell forged bluster shrivels away, now there’s just fear. The expectation of some new torture devised to crack it open and dig down to that tiny reforming kernel of independent thought. Heaven has colluded with hell before. Hell is, or at least it was, run by something that used to straddle the highest spheres of heaven.
This demon is fresh, doesn’t know who Castiel is. Thinks this is just another test, another chance to prove its latent disloyalty to hell and get yanked back for re-education.
Cas manifests his angel blade, coughing at the sudden catch in his breath, gripping extra tight to compensate for his inexplicably slippery palms. He stabs the demon in the heart. A mercy killing.
When the body is slumped onto the floor and the danger passed, Cas automatically goes to sheathe the blade, send it to whichever alternate slip in time it rests in when he isn’t wetting it with the blood of his family and other unsavoury beasts. He stops himself, puts it in his pocket instead. The silver tip pokes out a little, still visible.
The end is coming around again, he needs to be careful. It’s happening much faster this time. The cells of his body, or his vessel, the lines blurred a long time ago- no Jimmy Novak knocking around his skull to remind him that he doesn’t own the skin he’s itching under, are already worn and frayed by prolonged exposure to something so wrong.
His ability to smite will come back. He hasn’t drained himself dry; he’s just overexerted himself. This demon was one of a long line, a stab and blaze chain reaching from Missouri to Salt Lake City, north almost all the way to Canada and ending here in Davenport. He’s closing in; he can practically smell the evil— ancient and nearly as absolute as the devil himself.
Cas will be fine once he’s rested, but this isn’t a good sign. Angelic strength isn’t like human muscle, doesn’t need to rest and recover. It is ceaseless and constant, no ebb and flow. That he is started to lose this divine tenacity is a warning. That he lost it in the middle of a fight is carelessness. There will have been other warning signs, other little tears in the fabric of his divinity, but he has been so relentlessly focussed on his purpose that he hasn’t stopped to catalogue himself.
Cain must be found, Dean must be cured. What’s a day or two off Cas’s life weighed against that. He was ready to die before this, this extra time has been a gift. He will not waste his days in trying to prolong them. He’s going to get this one last good deed under his belt, another tally scratched up on the side of right, still woefully outmatched by the forest of gashes the other way.
He’s covered in little nicks and tears from the fight, has a black eye blooming under his skin. He feels them trying to heal but he stops the process as soon as he notices. Not out of self-castigation or punishment, to save what little energy he has left. He thought that when he reached Cain he’d still be blazing with power, sparking out, spilling over the core. It looks like that isn’t going to be the case anymore, but he’ll save what little he can, take the aches and scratches and little niggles that’ll heal on their own.
He loads himself into the Nova and points himself in the direction of Illinois.