Work Text:
Early morning had the world painted in the shadowed hues of pre-dawn gray, burnt orange just beginning to peak over the horizon. The gravel road by the silent railroad tracks was nearly deserted at this hour, save for Sam, Dean, and Castiel. They’d just finished taking out a vampire nest at an old farm nearby, and, still covered in blood, were having beer.
Castiel had shown his concern that beer wasn’t a “breakfast drink” to which Dean had replied by taking a long sip, staring Cas dead in the eyes. Sam broke up the moment—as he usually tried to—by making a joke.
That was how the morning was going, the three of them joking, and laughing, their voices like wind in the pines that were alighting with birdsong. Yet Sam felt like he looked out through the eyes of a faraway stranger; distant, remote.
He knew Dean and Castiel, he was sure, but they didn’t know him. Not after everything he’d been through.
Usually the loneliness wasn’t something Sam tried to think about, but he always felt it all around him, trying to pierce his chest even when Dean gave him a friendly smile, or Cas helped him out with something. He didn’t understand. It had been there since his childhood to some degree, but since the Cage… It had grown worse.
Sam started as Dean nudged him. “Sammy, you okay?”
“What?”
Apparently there was a joke that he hadn’t laughed at.
“Your eyes got all far away and stuff,” Dean said, ever the master of eloquence.
“I’m just tired,” Sam said.
“You’re not hurt, are you?” Castiel asked.
Yes. No.
No.
Not by the recent hunt, but hurt inside, and as he saw the concerned looks on his family’s faces, he realized that hurt made him feel more alone than ever.
Dean didn’t know why it happened, but he craved attention, craved to know that there were people around him, and that they knew him. He would bug Sam until Sam locked him out of his room. He’d pray to Castiel until Cas would show up just to give him an exasperated look at first.
And even then…
Even then he wanted more. Needed more. He didn’t understand it. Sometimes—all the time—he just got lonely.
He was on his bed now, Castiel on the couch in his room, and he’d just introduced Castiel to The Fellowship of the Ring .
“Okay, favorite character. Go.”
“I find that all of them have remarkable and interesting qualities.”
Dean rolled his eyes affectionately; he’d known Castiel would say something like that.
“Fine, favorite part?”
“Any scene with Arwen, I think.”
Dean grinned. “Oh yeah, she’s gorgeous.”
Castiel shifted. “No, I didn’t mean it like… I feel like I understand her.”
“Huh.”
Dean had a small idea about why that could be, but he was too afraid to touch upon it, so he just pretended it wasn’t there. That’s what he did with a lot of things, even his trauma (pfft, what was that word? He didn’t have trauma!).
“So I really like Frodo,” Dean stated.
“You do?”
“I mean, he has this huge burden to carry, you know? And it—it…” Suddenly Dean paused, recognizing the feeling in himself that he saw in Frodo. Loneliness. Even now he felt like he was talking to an empty room, a being that could, and would, never understand him no matter how hard he tried. Sammy was exactly the same. They didn’t know his every nightmare, his every torment, didn’t know what pain he carried.
“It’s cool,” Dean finished lamely.
Castiel raised his eyebrows at him, but he let it go. Thankfully. Dean wasn’t ready to admit to Cas how alone he felt.
Castiel was always eager to help out the Winchesters, no matter what it entailed. They were his family. So whether that meant defending them, fighting for them, bleeding for them—he didn’t care. He was ready to do it. He loved them, and he hoped they loved him.
The three of them were in the bunker library, doing research. Castiel was helping Sam search through books for a particular bit of info. So far they hadn’t had any luck and the pile of discarded books was too high for Castiel’s liking.
“Maybe this thing is attracted to pain,” Dean said suddenly, referring to the monster they were hunting.
Castiel scrunched up his face at him, not so readily prepared to be drawn from the books.
“How do you mean?” he asked
“You know, like, any kind of pain. Emotional, physical…”
Would that explain why the monster had gone after Castiel earlier? He was rife with pain to the edge of his wings, though he never spoke of it. He couldn’t. Dean wasn’t the kind of person you talked to about the sort of pain he suffered from. He would say to bury it or move on or bemoan that he was turning the moment into a chick flick moment. And Sam, well, Sam seemed fragile. Castiel did his best to not treat him that way, but he’d seen how he’d been after Lucifer.
Besides, they had their own pain, surely; were too burdened to listen to him. He saw it in their eyes day by day, saw it in their sometimes tired movements and slumped figures. He saw it in Dean’s drinking, saw it in Sam’s sometimes self-induced sleepless nights. And this hunt, they just…
No, there was no time for it. Besides, they were human. How could they understand the pain of an angel? The pain Heaven had wrought?
Castiel agreed with Dean’s idea, which set him and Sam off searching on a different tangent through the books.
All the while, Castiel ignored the strange sense he had that the emptiness had crawled out of his heart and into the very room.