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“Which would be worse —to live as a monster, or to die as a good man? ” - 'Shutter Island'
Dean wakes up and he’s in a car. His head aches and aches. His throat itches with thirst. He must have been out of it for a day, maybe two. He closes his eyes and presses his temple to the cool glass of the window, but the vibration of the engine makes him feel like everything inside him has rattled loose. “S’this the part where you kill me and burn my body in the woods?” he rasps.
In the driver’s seat, Cas shifts. “I’m not going to kill you.”
The fire in Dean’s veins burns hotter and there’s no good pretending it doesn’t, not with Cas. “What fuckin’ good are you then.”
“Sam and I decided—”
“Sending me off to the booby hatch, huh? Well, I guess it was only a matter of time.”
“Sam and I decided,” Cas persists, knuckles tense around the steering wheel like he’s trying not to yell at Dean, and good, Dean thinks, let’s make him mad, “that you need a break. Until we can figure out our next step.”
He snorts derisively. “Cas and Dean’s infinite vacation? That’s hilarious.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Cas snarks. Dean scowls out of the window, wondering if he’d be able to make a break for it, ‘cept he’s got no clue where they are and no landmarks besides endless goddamn trees. But Cas drives like the fucking elderly and infirm, so he could always cut and run the next time they come to a stop sign.
“This is rich, Cas,” he sighs, “Don’t you have some sort of Holy mission to get back to? Or wait, is that what I am now? You gotta drag me up from Hell again, right? It’s like we’ve come full circle, I can appreciate that irony.”
Cas’s eyes remain glued to the road. Dean wonders if he’s scared of looking at him. Truth be told, he can’t blame him. His own heart skips every time he catches a glimpse of his reflection, just in case he sees black eyes blinking back at him.
“You’re not my mission,” Cas mutters softly. “You’re my best friend.”
Fuck. “Yeah, well, friends don’t break promises.”
To his surprise, Cas laughs. “Dean, if you think I’m capable of killing you then you clearly haven’t been paying much attention these last few years.”
They drive in silence for a while after that, and Dean tries to ignore the niggling itch to go and pick a fight and fight dirty until there’s blood and grit tearing up his knuckles and bruises blossoming under his skin. He pushes his fingers into the Mark and tries to breathe through it, tries to let the rumbling of Cas’s shitty ass car soothe him. He tries to change the subject. He tries.
“So how come you got stuck with babysitting duty? Sam must owe you big time for this, huh?”
“I volunteered,” Cas says, and wow, shocker. “Sam wanted to come but I suggested he stay behind at the bunker. I thought you could both do with a reprieve.”
He’s probably right. As much as Dean loves his brother, he knows full well that they only antagonize each other most of the time, or smother one another. There is no in between.
The road whips past. All trees and endless asphalt.
“So where’re you takin’ me, snowy wilderness or New Age health spa?”
“Neither,” says Cas, and keeps driving.
It’s late afternoon when they finally come to a stop and get out of the car. They’re in the boondocks of Maine, parked haphazardly on a sandy stretch of grass next to a rocky beach. Rainclouds loom heavy and purple overhead and the branches on the trees rustle and hiss in the wind. On a pebbly spit of land a little way out to sea stands an algae-coated lighthouse, a general air of abandonment in its faded blue and dirty white paint. “Are you serious?” Dean gapes, “You wanna hide me in a giant beacon of light?"
"We're not hiding," Cas stresses, like it's important Dean knows this. “And besides, it’s no longer a functioning lighthouse.”
Dean rubs a hand over his face. His eyes feel gritty and every breath he takes leaves salt in his lungs. In front of them there's nothing but the slate-gray churn of the ocean, gulls squawking overhead, and an endless stretch of sand littered with boulders and tide pools and driftwood; behind them long grass and distant tall pine trees and the badly surfaced track they arrived on. They’re completely alone. Dean doesn’t know, like, what the hell to do with that.
“Hannah and I tracked some angels here,” Cas is saying, taking his and Dean’s duffels from the trunk and hooking two plastic grocery bags over his wrist. When he had time to get those, Dean doesn’t know. “They agreed to return to Heaven, so it should be empty.”
Dean rolls his eyes. Should be. Trust Cas to not have even bothered to scope the place out first. The last thing he needs right now is a couple of pissed off angels angling for a fight. Or, y’know. Maybe. Maybe he sort of does.
Under his sleeve, the Mark twinges.
“All right,” Dean says, clearing his throat, “lead the way, Shutter Island.”
Cas closes the trunk and looks at him for the first time in hours. He looks tired. Of course he is, dealing with Dean’s shit. Anyone would be tired of him. He’s tired of himself. But then Cas’s mouth does, like, this little thing. This little smiling thing. “I’m just bones in a box, Dean.”
And goddamn it, Dean laughs. He doesn’t mean to, it comes as a surprise and it sort of catches in his throat and chokes him, but he laughs and laughs because Cas getting Dean’s pop culture references is ridiculous and Cas is ridiculous for doing this and Dean fucking hates that they’re here but he’s exhausted, feels hollowed out and raw, doesn’t have the energy to keep fighting him. So he follows, trudges out over the beach and along the spit, slipping on the stones left damp from sea spray and wincing as his boots fill with sand.
The little cabin attached to the lighthouse smells of damp and mothballs and kinda like fish and Dean wrinkles his nose. It’s pretty much a studio, wrought-iron bedframe in the corner beside a chipped and unorganized bookcase, white-washed walls gone off-color with age, an aged kitchen unit the likes of which Dean has seen in a hundred motels, and a faded blue couch with stuffing leaking out of it. But the windows are wide and let in plenty of light and the tiny bathroom seems clean and functional when Dean pokes his head around the door.
“What do you think?” Cas asks, as he takes bed sheets and blankets out one of his many bags, a regular Martha Stewart.
“Home sweet home,” Dean sighs, and goes to unpack the groceries.
They quickly find out that the faucet leaks and the tiny refrigerator makes this weird buzzing sound and then Cas burns a frozen pizza in the oven so Dean banishes him from the kitchen area after that. He makes them both dinner; what he can salvage of the pizza and some homemade fries from the farmers’ market bag of potatoes Cas produced. He chops and slices and the knife is in heavy and sharp in his fingers but Cas is asking him why is Jurassic Park even a thing, Dean? from the couch as he squints at the ancient TV, and Dean’s hands don’t shake at all because he’s too busy rolling his eyes and explaining the concept of trashy movies, and huh. There you go.
“These are good,” Cas hums around a mouthful of crispy fry twenty minutes later. “I will happily accept my exclusion from the kitchen if it means we’ll be eating food like this every night.”
“Yeah, don’t count on it, buddy,” Dean scoffs, but the compliment is sort of nice to hear. He doesn’t know if the fries really are that good, he hasn’t been able to properly taste food for a while now, but it’s good to see Cas smiling again.
He makes Cas do the dishes and instructs him to use the scourer on the pans but the soft cloth on the plates which Cas does carefully and thoroughly except for when he puts in slightly too much dishwashing liquid and for a while the sink becomes a towering mountain of foam and panic.
It’s actually—well, it’s not horrible. Spending time with Cas like this. Dean could lie and say he hasn’t missed Cas lately but what would be the fucking point in that? They’re both running out of time and he’s so goddamn tired of pretending.
“Hey,” he says later, swaying into Cas’s shoulder when they’re about two-thirds of the way through a Friends marathon because the TV only picks up, like, three channels and one of them just had to be Comedy Central. “Thanks for... y’know.” He gestures loosely with his hand.
Cas looks at him, eyes soft. “You’re welcome.”
Dean’s dreams are bad. He always dreams badly these days, blurred pain and rage and his own hands yanking the life out of people and his own laugh mirthless and cold. This time it’s Cain, gurgling blood when Dean plunged the blade into his back. The inexplicable grief Dean felt in that moment. For himself, for some part of him he could feel slipping between his fingers. The cold, aching loss that came after.
He jolts awake all twisted up in sheets that smell like the bunker but feel wrong and he kicks at them, pushes at the hands grabbing him, growling behind bared teeth that carry the phantom taste of blood.
“Dean, Dean, stop fighting me.”
The hands uncurl the sheet from around Dean’s body. Dean gasps for air like a fish who’s been thrown onto land, thrashing about desperately, until eventually Cas’s face appears in the moonlight, creased in pity.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Dean snarls, sitting up and scrubbing a hand over his eyes.
“Like what?”
“Like you feel sorry for me.” There’s no reason for him to feel this angry but he is, he really is. “You can’t try’n tell me you don’t have nightmares too, Cas. I know you do—or did.”
“Yes,” Cas says, and what sort of a fucking answer is that.
Dean huffs and rolls over to face the wall. “You can go back to the couch now.”
Except that isn’t what Cas does because Cas never has learnt to listen to orders and so he lies down on the empty side of the bed and pulls the covers over himself instead and says, “My neck was hurting on the couch.”
Yeah fucking right. Dean reminds him, “You don’t even need to sleep,” but he rolls over and looks at Cas’s shoulders and back for a long time and thinks yeah, okay, this isn’t so bad. Having Cas right there isn’t so bad. He stares at the spot between Cas’s shoulder blades and he thinks about what Cain said, about how he’s going to—he squeezes his eyes shut. He won’t do it. There’s no way. It’s not in him to hurt Cas, or Sam. No matter how many times they’ve driven him crazy, or hurt him in return. Cas is—Cas is there. Intermittently, sure, but there’s that bond there between them that just won’t break. Jesus. Dean can’t become the thing that would do that. He’ll kill himself before he lets that happen.
He takes a shaky breath and shuffles forward, presses his forehead right there between Cas’s shoulder blades over his shirt. The rest of him stays a safe distance away, his hands curled up under his chin, but he breathes against Cas’s back and Cas doesn’t say anything so he figures he’s allowed this one small point of contact.
Rain patters the windows. The waves crash and ripple over the pebbles outside, an ebb and flow that Dean synchronizes his breathing to. Inhale. Exhale. Maybe he’ll read one of those books tomorrow. Maybe he’ll go out for a walk and bring back a souvenir for Cas. A sea-smoothed piece of glass or a weird-shaped bit of driftwood or something. That seems like the sort of thing Cas would appreciate. Maybe they’ll find Shutter Island playing on the TV and will argue about Leonardo DiCaprio’s best movie. Maybe he can be normal for a while. Maybe.
“Hey. Hey,” Dean whispers, pushing his temple into the knob of Cas’s spine. “I don’t wanna live as a monster.”
Cas tenses, just subtly. “I didn’t realize we were still quoting—”
“I mean it, Cas.”
“Dean, you’re not going to die, not again. I won’t allow it.”
Dean’s face feels hot and prickly. “If I can’t then you don’t get to either.”
For a while Cas is quiet and Dean is sure that he isn’t going to answer but then he says simply, “Okay.”
Dean breathes out.
They go out on the beach at dawn to watch the pale sunrise, all pastel pinks and oranges and blues. They sit on a huge smooth bit of rock, shoulder to shoulder. Cas’s bare toes wriggle in the sand. Dean feels brittle, like his skeleton is about to shatter into a thousand chips of bone, and his eyes burn as he gazes out at the horizon but—he can see Cas’s hand out of the corner of his eye and he’s tempted, really goddamn tempted. To just... take it. While his own hands are steady enough to still do so.
“What happens now?” Cas asks. His hair catches the sun and turns it golden brown and Jesus, Dean wants.
“I dunno, man.”
Cas shifts. He picks up a shell and delicately brushes the sand off with his fingers as he says, “We will figure something out, Dean. We always do.”
Dean wonders whether either of them really believe that. He sure as hell doesn’t. Not this time. “Yeah,” he says anyway, because this is the first morning in a long time where he hasn’t woken up and wished he didn’t, “maybe.”
And then Cas does the damnedest thing—just reaches up and gently touches Dean’s hair and kisses his temple, then his cheek, then the corner of his mouth, soft and warm. Like they’re people who do that.
So Dean grabs that hand and holds it tight, anchors himself to Cas and presses in closer and closes his eyes and feels the breeze on his face and the sun warming his skin and lets himself hope.