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Dean is lying awake in his bed. His bed, his room, a complete four walls all to himself.
The last time he had that… his mother was still alive.
He keeps yawning, but he can’t sleep. Whenever he tries, there’s always a nightmare waiting for him. Purgatory. Hell. Good old fashioned real-world memories, bloody days on the job. Even further back, to when he was a kid, when he couldn’t drive or drink and couldn’t shoot a gun bigger than a pistol without it jumping out of his hands.
He sighs, runs a hand through his hair.
He knows what he’s supposed to do. He knows what he promised he would do.
He promised Castiel, his boyfriend- god that’s still weird- that he would talk about these things. Even if there was nothing either of them could do about it. Cas was adamant. And Dean promised.
He sits up and passes a hand over his face. Here goes. He opens his bedroom door and peeks out into the hallway. It’s dark, but never completely; lights along the floorboards illuminate just enough to see by. The Winchesters know better than to surround themselves with the unknown.
On the far end of the hall, he sees a stripe of light peeking from under Cas’s door, hears the soothing muffled thump of music.
He lingers there in the hallway for a moment. Man, he wants to go over there. Dean pictures Cas sitting at his desk reading. Haphazardly tapping his foot to the beat and pursing his lips in that adorable way he does when he’s completely lost in a book. A part of Dean wants more than anything to go and see him. But another part of him is pulling him back.
Don’t be a baby. Once you need him, what are you going to do when you don’t have him?
He lingers.
Castiel is busy. He’s an angel and a warrior and he’s got bigger problems than dealing with you.
And lingers.
Are you 6 again? 21? Running off to someone else’s bed because you’re hurting?
Eventually what gets to him is the emptiness of his own room. He can’t bring himself to return to his cold bed and lay awake for the rest of the night, so he finds himself walking towards Cas’s room.
He stops outside the door. Raises his hand to knock. Puts it down again. Raises his hand again.
Before he can really get started on an emotional meltdown, the door opens and Cas is sitting there in his rolling office chair, staring up at Dean with one elbow propped on the arm rest, the end of a ballpoint pen caught between his teeth.
That’s a habit Cas has picked up recently, chewing on pens. Dean presumes he must have seen it on TV. Never in a million years would he have guessed that a badass warrior nerd angel would love daytime TV so much.
“Can’t sleep?”
“…yeah.”
Cas pushes his chair back towards his desk with his feet and spins down the volume on the radio, lowers the light from the lamp on his desk.
“Come in.”
Dean shuts the door behind him.
Cas sees the reluctance in his stance, probably written all over his face, and he sets the pen beside a notebook filled with perfect lettering and stands up. God he looks good just in his dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up.
Dean almost jumps when Cas steps close and takes his face in his hands. His blue eyes are big and soft. “I thought we talked about this.”
How is it that Cas can read him so well when he misses social cues more often than Spock?
He closes his eyes and lets himself melt in Cas’s hands, pushing aside the voices that whisper to him that this is weakness, this is softness that will wear his edge away. “I know. It’s hard.”
Dean circles his hands around Cas’s wrists and Cas leans in and presses a kiss against his cheekbone. This warm feeling bubbles up in his chest and he opens his eyes, almost overwhelmed. He’s so used to dealing with pain, with getting up and fighting even when there’s no hope left, even when the pain is drowning him. But this, it’s the opposite. It’s this overwhelming goodness, this safeness. He doesn’t know what to do with it.
Cas’s hands loosen. “All you have to do is lie down.”
Basically, no pressure. A smile touches Dean’s lips and he kisses Cas before saying, “Ok,” in the small space between them.
They pull apart and Dean walks over to Cas’s bed, brushes a hand over the blanket before laying down and folding his hands over his stomach, looking up at the ceiling.
He remembers when Cas had first gotten the bed months ago.
“Hold on, you put a bed in here?”
“Yes.”
Dean smiled and leaned against the doorway with his hand on his hip. “You don’t sleep.”
Cas turned in the center of the room, looking at the bookshelves, the lamps, the single wall he meticulously painted a soothing blue. He looked back at Dean. “I wanted a bedroom like yours and Sam’s. A bedroom requires a bed.”
“Oh yeah definitely.”
Cas half rolled his eyes. He’s gotten better at that. He’s gotten better at a lot of human things lately.
He stepped up to Dean and slipped his hands onto his hips, that sly little smile on his face. Dean felt that panic he always feels, the one he’s been working to get rid of for weeks now, panic at this closeness, at what it means and what it could mean, at Cas being so unlike anyone he’s every dated. But he also felt that bubbly fuzziness in his chest, that ecstatic, sweeping, head-over-heels rush, and he smiled when Cas pressed up to him.
Cas looked up at him through lidded eyes and said, completely innocuously, “Beds are used for more than sleeping, Dean.”
Dean laughed. Cas has upped his flirting game. “And the Padawan becomes the Jedi.”
Cas tilted his head. “I still don’t understand that reference.”
“Ok, watching Star Wars is now our next top priority. We need a movie night.”
Cas smiled and said, “I’d like that.”
Dean savors those little moments. He has to, with the shit he’s been through, with the shit all of them have been through. Cas might be the most put together of the three of them, still the most naïve and innocent, but some of his mistakes are the size of Sam’s, even bigger. And there was a time when he lost his mind; that’s something not even Dean has experienced.
Cas spins in his chair. “Is it Purgatory?”
Dean lifts his head to look at Cas. He’s nudged the door closed and he’s twirling his pen in his fingers, looking between an open file and his meticulous notes.
“Always.”
Cas looks over at him and after a moment’s pause, says completely seriously, “I’ll watch over you.”
Dean smiles, drops his head back on the pillow. “You really like saying that.”
“I really like doing it.”
Dean raises his eyebrows. He’s pretty sure a million other humans are more enjoyable to watch over than his dumb ass.
Cas doesn’t like that look. His eyebrows draw in. “I like protecting you, Dean. Contrary to what you believe,” he says, poking the pen towards him, “you are not a burden.”
He sighs. He has complicated feelings on that topic. In one respect, he feels like he deserves every bad thing that’s ever been thrown at him. In another… he wonders if he can really blame himself so totally. Mental trauma hurts just as much as physical trauma, and what has he done to try to heal? Is it right to blame everything on himself when he gets beat up just like everyone else, probably more than most everyone else?
“I’ve been thinking about that lately,” he admits. He folds his fingers over his stomach, and he doesn’t know what it is, he doesn’t know if it’s the softness of the bed or the comfort of Cas’s presence, but he speaks words he rarely feels comfortable saying. “I think some of it came from my Dad. Okay, maybe a lot of it. He was….” A jackass. A heartless son of a bitch. Someone who brainwashed me so totally I’d begun losing sight of who I really was, what I really wanted. “We’re all complicated.”
The music, some kind of pop station, drops lower. “What do you mean?” Cas asks.
This is when all the red flags should go off. The lowered music, the careful questions, the danger-free environment. He’s been down this road a million times with Sam. But it just isn’t the same. Not with Cas.
He chews his lip, afraid of what he’ll say. He’s kept this quiet for thirty years. Why should he break now? He shakes his head. “It’s stupid.”
Cas does something Sam could never; he lets it go. He leaves his question hanging there and as the minutes tick by, as pages flip and his pen writes, Dean itches to answer him.
He sighs again, frustrated this time. “I don’t know why I want to talk about it. It’s over.”
“It isn’t, as long as it still means something.”
In another life, Cas could’ve been a philosopher. Or a poet.
Dean starts talking. He can’t believe he is, but he doesn’t stop himself. “Dad, he used to…. Well, he used to drink a lot. Always hunting, always drinking. Sound familiar?” He finishes bitterly. “Me and Sam made plenty of screw ups on our first hunts. I mean, we were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
He hears a soft rolling across the floor, Cas drifting towards the bed, his blue eyes focused on him.
Dean keeps talking. “Sammy, he always got a pass. He was Dad’s favorite. I don’t know why. Maybe….” He licks his lips, and it stings to say this but it rings with so much truth, “Maybe I reminded him too much of when Mom was still alive.”
He sits up, resting his arms in his lap. “I was supposed to protect Sam and he was supposed to lead. That’s what Dad always told me. Sam was the brains and I was just the muscle. I was replaceable. Sammy wasn’t.”
“How could he say that?”
The raw fury in Cas’s eyes… that’s how he should’ve felt. That’s how he should feel now.
Dean looks down. “I don’t know.”
Cas is silent for a moment. Dean can feel him thinking, putting the pieces together. He knows Dean never backs down from a fight. Never… unless he’s hopeless. Unless he’s been broken.
Cas leans down and catches Dean’s eye. And he does it again, he reads Dean like no one else can. “Your father did worse, didn’t he?”
Dean closes his eyes. With the secret half-spilled, the rest of it pours out. “He was always rough with me behind moms back, but after she was gone….” Cas gets up from his chair and sits on the edge of the bed. Dean shakes his head, tears pinching at his eyes. “I never did a thing,” Dean says, keeping his voice low as if he might be caught even now. “Even when it got bad. I never fought him. I never tried to run. I… I believed him when he told me I was nothing, when he showed me. I thought I deserved it.”
Cas takes his hand and Dean just breaks further. “When Sammy screwed up, Dad gave him a second chance, a third, a fourth, but when I screwed up….”
Tears brim up in his eyes and spill over and he doesn’t know what to feel when Cas tears up too. He looks at Cas, at the pain and protective rage so clear in his face, and he speaks the truth. “He hurt me, Cas,” he says, and his voice breaks when he speaks that truth, the one he’s never spoken and the one he never thought he would. He sobs out, “Sam never knew, because how could he, with how often we got injured, and I, I never told him.” He can’t see clearly with the tears blurring his vision and streaking down his cheeks. “I never told anyone.”
Silent tears slip down Cas’s cheek and he wraps his arms tight around Dean and Dean cries. Cas runs his fingers through Dean’s hair, says against his ear with fury underlying the sadness, “He shouldn’t have done that to you.”
“I know,” he whispers, his chest still shaking.
“He was wrong.”
Dean nods, sniffling against Cas’s shirt.
“I hate him for hurting you.” Cas pulls back and takes Dean’s face in his hands, so tightly he squeezes his cheeks. “You’re amazing, and kind, and smart, and I love you.”
Dean laughs through his tears. “So you’ve said.”
Cas gives him a serious look. “Not enough, apparently.”
Dean smiles and sinks back into Cas, burying his face into his neck and circling his arms around him. He’s warm and solid and real. Someone he can trust. Someone he can hold on to. Someone he can love. “You’re adorable, you know that? I just gotta find a way to believe it, you know?”
Cas brings his fingers back up to Dean’s hair, threading up and then smoothing down. “Hm.”
Dean closes his eyes and holds on to Cas. It’s been a dream too good to be true, having him like this. Dean has had his fair share of relationships; he’s no stranger to love. But this, this is something else.
He’s never been in love with someone who’s seen all of him, who knows all of him. Who’s stronger than him. He doesn’t have to hide anything with Castiel. He doesn’t have to pretend his darkness isn’t a pit inside him that he can never find the bottom of. He doesn’t have to be someone he’s not.
Cas presses his cheek against Dean’s. “I’m glad you told me.”
“I’m… I’m glad I said it.” He’s a little surprised that it’s true. But there’s a weight lifted. A relief, just knowing he’s not accepting that abuse in silence, like he always has.
And even though the pain he endured is in the distant past of an endlessly traumatic childhood, Cas now knows and understands that piece of his life. He knows Dean that much better, and nothing he’s learned about Dean so far has made him want to turn tail.
Dean will be Cas’s, for as long as Cas will have him.
They stay there together, sitting on the edge of the bed in each other’s arms, until Dean is ready. Ready to accept, at least a little bit, that Castiel is right about him. That he deserved more, that he still deserves more.
Being with Castiel is more than he could’ve dreamed of asking for.
It’s a damn good start for him. For them.