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“Mary, Sam, Dean. What happened?” Cas leans over the railing, taking in their bruised faces, their puffy eyes. Dean feels relief ripple through him, aftershocks from the earthquake this day has become.
“What happened?” Sam scoffs, a shade shy of mocking, tears still drying on his cheeks. As he so often does, he defers to Dean.
“Well, there’s a story.” Dean’s nervous tongue darts out over his lower lip, grazing painfully at the point where it splits, where it was split by Castiel just hours ago. He wonders if there’s still blood on Cas’s clothes, or if he mojoed himself clean.
Cas descends the staircase, eyes clouded, expression inscrutable and still. He reaches out to Sam, hand not even making contact with his shoulder before the flicker of his grace branches forth and mends his skin, erases his bruises.
“Thanks, Cas,” Sam wheezes, voice still raw from crying. He doesn’t make eye contact with him, but Dean isn’t sure if it’s because he’s hung up on the fight in the restaurant, or because he’s too cracked open from everything with John to look anyone in the eye just yet. Mary, for all her shortcomings when it comes to these kinds of emotional moments, has the good sense to usher Sam back to the kitchen under the pretense of ‘cleaning up’.
“What happened?” Cas asks again, once it’s just the two of them, and even though it’s the same question, the way he says it makes Dean feel like it’s a whole new sentence, a whole different idea being conveyed in those same words. He isn’t quite pleading with Dean, but it’s as close as Cas gets to that kind of thing.
“We, uh. Sam and I found this item that might have helped with the whole Michael thing. A pearl, that grants ‘your greatest desire’, or whatever.”
“And you used it,” he surmises, more than asks.
“Yeah. Probably should have looped some people in, but I didn’t expect it to, uh, backfire like it did.”
“I take it that it had no effect on Michael, then?”
“Nothing. Woulda been too easy, I guess.” Dean can hear the bitterness poisoning his own tone, but he can’t help it. This bullshit would only ever happen to him. To find some ridiculous MacGuffin wishing pearl, just to end up not only burning the damn thing on a childish fantasy, but on a fantasy that nearly ruins their timeline, undoes their life’s work. “No, it didn’t fucking touch Michael. It, uh. It brought back my Dad. From 2003. Just zapped him out of his time and into ours.”
If he weren’t in such a shit mood, the vigilant scan that Cas conducts, eyes narrowed, proverbial hackles raised, would have Dean laughing. As it is, it only inspires a fond smirk.
“Your father?” Cas grits, and Dean pats him reassuringly on the shoulder, not sure why the motion feels so natural, not sure why he can just tell that Cas needs it.
“Yeah, but he’s back where he belongs. We fixed the timeline and all that crap. You’re back to normal, everything’s like it was before.”
“I’m back to normal?” Cas looks troubled, and Dean feels caught, a child who’s broken a window with a baseball, trying to hide his mitt behind his back as the adults flock to the scene.
“Well, yeah, Cas. You, uh, you were different, because of the change in the timeline. You and Zach showed up at the pizza place in town, threatening to kill people and shit. You were trying to find out who fucked with the timeline.” He takes the opportunity to move their conversation into the library, leading them both in as he speaks.
“Zachariah?” He inhales the word, more than speaks it. Dean rubs the back of his neck, a nervous tic he’s been endeavoring to quit.
“Sam kicked his ass, don’t worry. But, yeah, he ordered you to take me and him out, since we were the ones that brought Dad back. So…you tried to…”
“I tried to…kill you and Sam?” Cas places his palm flat on the library table beside him, seeming to anchor down through his arm, not so much using it for support as he is trying to root down into the surface, like he needs to be connected to something real while he absorbs the news.
“You didn’t succeed,” Dean offers through a loose grin, half-hearted bid to assuage his guilt. The smile tugs on his split lip, and Cas doesn’t miss the wince.
“This…” Cas brings the hand that isn’t glued to the table up, reaches towards Dean’s face, but seems unable to close the gap, leaving his big hand frozen in the air. Dean has the unaccountable urge to grab his wrist, to plant a kiss on the palm of his hand. He blinks a few times to chase the thought away. “I did this to you? And Sam, that’s why he was injured?”
“It wasn’t really you, Cas,” Dean hedges, but Cas’s clenched jaw and flared nostrils reflect a rage that demands more from him than that. “You were like, you from before I knew you. You had wings and stuff. It wasn’t like you were trying to be a dick. You didn’t recognize me.”
Whatever Dean had been hoping to clarify with that elaboration, he failed more spectacularly than he ever thought possible. Cas’s expression crumples, and for a terrifying moment, he thinks the angel might burst into tears.
“So I nearly beat you to death, but it’s alright because I wasn’t the same as I am now?” Cas scrapes out, voice tight. He clasps his free hand over his own eyes, as though overwhelmed by the very sight of Dean. Or, perhaps, the sight of Dean’s injuries, which he hasn’t healed yet. “Did you at least defend yourselves?” He asks, eyes still covered.
“Oh, I got a few good licks in with a metal cake stand thing. And Sam used a banishing sigil to get you to stop choking me out. We made it out okay.”
“You both own angel blades…but you fought me off with a cake stand?” Cas drops his hand back to his side, just to glare at Dean with unguarded exasperation.
“I wasn’t gonna kill you, Cas,” Dean snorts, incredulous.
“You just said it wasn’t ‘me’. How can it be both? You don’t blame me for it, because it wasn’t me, but you wouldn’t protect yourself because you couldn’t hurt me?” Abruptly, Cas pulls out the chair beside him and sits down in it with a thud. Dean mirrors the action, uncomfortable being the only one standing. The new position puts them much closer together, their arms touching on their respective arm rests, their faces just about a foot apart. Dean can feel the heat of Cas’s leg against his own where they brush against each other under the table.
“C’mon, don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same thing. Remember when I beat you up, when I had the Mark? It’s like that – maybe even more forgivable, considering you had no idea who the hell I was. When I did that...man, I knew you, and I still…” The familiar grip of his own guilt clutches at his chest again, and Dean finds himself unable to finish the thought. Cas seems to understand this, and he extends a few fingers from his own armrest to wrap around Dean’s, until their fingers are clumsily intertwined, Cas’s palm flush with the back of Dean’s hand.
“That was a long time ago. You don’t have to keep reminding yourself of it.”
“The hell I don’t,” Dean grumbles, looking down at the tabletop just to escape Cas’s tender gaze. “I’m always dragging you down, man. Even today…that wasn’t your fault. I’m the one with the stupid wish, I’m the one who didn’t consider the consequences until it was almost too fucking late.”
“Is everything your fault, Dean?” Cas asks, and Dean knows by the lightness of his tone that he’s trying to lead him to some kind of affirmation, some modicum of forgiveness for himself, but he can’t let himself be led there, not now. He knows he’s supposed to look chagrined and say ‘no, not everything,’ and then let Cas pull him back from the ledge. But in light of recent events – Michael, now this pearl nonsense, to say nothing of the last ten years or so – Dean’s not so sure that everything isn’t his fault.
“Maybe,” Dean mutters, and Cas clenches his jaw so hard that Dean hears his molars click.
“Really?” He asks, daring Dean to be as melodramatically self-hating as he’s insinuating he is.
“I dunno, maybe, yeah. I mean, forget everything else – the Michael shit, the pearl shit, everything big. Even if we just focus on one point of contact – Bobby, Mom, Sam, you, whoever. I just. I look at the parts of your lives that I’ve touched and all I see is…rot.” Dean shrugs, looking up at Cas, who’s gone eerily still. His eyes are trained on Dean, and he’s struck once again by the depth of them, the way his gaze lands on Dean like a physical thing, something he could run his hands through, like water from a faucet. Cas is drenching him in his attention, and Dean feels it like ice water, all over his skin, all the way down into his bones. Dean continues, unsure what else to do.
“Since you’ve met me, look at what’s happened to you, you know? You’ve died, and almost died, plenty of times. You lost your grace – got it back, but it wasn’t looking likely. You lost your wings. You got tangled up with Heaven so many ways, so many times, lost so many angels, just because you were trying to keep us from Apocalypse Part Two. And I haven’t done shit for you. I mean, how many times have I even said ‘thanks’? The things you did for me, before I even knew you very well, before I even let myself trust you…I didn’t understand, back then, what you were giving up, to help me. What that meant. But I do now, and I still haven’t come close to showing you how much it means to me.”
“Dean – “ Cas starts, but he can tell just from the shape of the word that he’s going to dismiss it all, to say that Dean’s wrong, that the bad things that’ve happened to Cas have nothing to do with Dean. Or worse, that Dean tried to prevent some of these things, that Cas could have avoided them if he’d listened to him. And intellectually, Dean understands this, can even agree with it, on some level. But deeper than the facts of these things, Dean needs Cas to understand that these situations, these choices, would not have even crossed Castiel’s desk, if Dean had not been a part of his life. Cas would have been plugging along in Heaven, wings intact, angels as populous and meticulous as always. He needs Cas to understand what Dean has finally come to accept - that he has ruined him, just as he's ruined everything else.
“How can you not get it? It’s like that one angel – Hester? – said. I’m fuckin’ poison, Cas, ‘the very touch of me corrupts’. You know, when we realized we had to smash the pearl, and fix the timeline, at first I felt guilty, because I knew it meant you’d lose your wings again. But then? I was relieved. Because it meant I’d get you back. How selfish could I possibly – “
Cas cuts him off by lurching across the gap between them, one hand on either side of Dean’s face, gripping hard enough that he feels each individual fingertip against his cheek and jaw. From the outside, such a gesture might look tender, loving, the moments before a particularly relishsome kiss. From where Dean is sitting, it is a naked command, stripped of social pretense. He is being stilled, silenced, by force, trapped by Cas’s eyes, somehow heated despite their glacial blue.
“Dean.” He says it like a mandate, and the need to obey it has Dean sitting up a little straighter, the rest of his unfinished sentence sliding back down his throat. “I don’t care about my wings. I don’t even care about the restoration of Heaven. A world where I – “ Cas stops, and if he were human, he would take a breath, but instead he just clips his thought short, closes his eyes in one intentional grounding blink, then barrels forward, “Where I never knew you. Where I kill you before I ever – before we ever – before – “
Cas does it again, sentence snapping like a bone as it breaks off. He closes his eyes again, and there’s some flicker in his expression, some pulpy give to it, and Dean feels like he’s seeing something secret that Cas has constructed an elaborate mechanism to keep hidden. He’s like Dorothy, peeking behind the curtain to view the ordinary man masquerading as Oz, the Great and Powerful. Cas is an angel, sure, but he’s not just an angel. He hasn’t been just an angel in a very long time. Maybe since he first met Dean. He’s surprised it’s taken this awful experience to hammer that point home at long last, that he’s needed this side by side comparison of Cas as he was before with Cas as he is now, to see the way he’s become something else entirely, something more than the sum of his parts.
“Cas,” Dean whispers, and Cas doesn’t move, or open his eyes, but the furrow in his brows disappears, smoothing his forehead.
“Don’t you understand?” Cas asks, not whispering, but much quieter than he ever speaks. He opens his eyes, and Dean is drowning in the endless blue of his attention. “Going back to how I was before you, before I knew you? That’s the worst thing I can imagine.” It is a declaration. It isn’t an exaggeration – Cas is not really someone predisposed to disproportionate statements.
His hands are still pressed against Dean’s cheeks, and as Dean opens his mouth to respond, he’s flooded with grace. It cascades through his cellular structure, a rainstorm in a desert, riling up the sand. He’s healed, but more than that, he’s replenished in some metaphysical sense, assured to the very center of his soul that Castiel means what he said, that he is thankful for Dean, somehow, despite everything they’ve done to one another.
And Dean does understand, all of a sudden, what this is all about, what it has perhaps always been about. It isn’t about transgression and forgiveness. It isn’t about wasted potential, or being ungrateful, or even loss and recovery. It’s about choice. It’s about free will. As it turns out, Hester had it half right, in that the very moment Cas touched Dean, the course of their lives shifted irreconcilably.
They knocked each other off their respective axes, two bumbling planets, atmospheres colliding, sucked into one another’s orbital path. Maybe they were the only forces capable of pulling the other off of the predestined track in front of them, or maybe it could have been any number of minor interactions. It doesn’t matter, either way, because the only reason this brief stumble, this strange hiccup in the divine plan amounted to anything was because they decided it would. They chose each other, over and over and over again. At great cost to themselves, and at times, at greater cost besides. It wasn’t one sided. It wasn’t Dean dragging Cas down, and it wasn’t Cas undermining Dean. It was sacrifice after sacrifice, to keep what they’d managed to carve out for themselves.
And what was that? What were they fighting for and grieving after and talking past each other about for all these years? The grace pulsing through him tapered off, and the ecstatic buzz of it disappeared, leaving him in the peace of his body, his thoughts. He was left staring into Cas’s eyes, face cradled in his warm palms. Michael could be smashing beer kegs into that freezer door with the strength of ten men, and Dean wouldn’t notice it at this moment.
Dean doesn’t so much lean in and kiss Castiel as he simply succumbs to the gravitational pull that had been tugging at him for years now. Their lips touch, and the thrill it sends through him has nothing to do with grace or magic or any other supernatural anything. It’s just Cas, finally as close as he was meant to be. When he draws back, he’s almost disappointed to feel Cas’s hands slide off of his face, though they come down to clasp his own hands where they lay in his lap.
“I understand, Cas,” he manages to say, though all he wants is to kiss him again, now that it’s something he’s capable of. The corners of Cas’s mouth tilt up in a small smile, though Dean knows him well enough to understand the depth of joy that microexpression contains.
For a moment, he thinks Cas is going to say something – he sits back, pressed against the chair behind him, like he’s composing a thought, but something shifts in those bright blue eyes, and he leans forward again, capturing Dean in another perfect kiss. The last coherent thought Dean has before he gives himself over completely to the sensation is that maybe that stupid pearl worked after all, in its circuitous way, because this may very well have been his greatest desire, even if he hadn’t known it yet.