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We grew up together.
Not in the conventional way.
It was so much more than age.
We grew up together in the way a person does when they lose a parent, when they lose their best friend, when they experience their first love, when they experience their last and when they finally realise that emotions were just as capable of ruining someone as they were of making someone.
Growing up together for the two of us meant learning that darkness was your left hand, light your right and that the hardest choices we would make were between giving in or giving up.
One day I felt like I’d aged just a little bit more than Dean.
One day I had made a choice that Dean never had to think twice about, or chose not to think about.
One day I’d given up on us.
The greatest rule of life was a simple one, to gain something you had to sacrifice something of equal importance.
But that day it seemed as if I'd sacrificed something of greater importance for something that had once sacrificed me.
Dean and I met in school.
Both 12 years old, one abandoned at will and the other abandoned by circumstance.
Dean had lost his mother to a fire, his father to heartbreak and his brother to the system.
All I remember seeing were his moss green eyes angry and reckless, resentful of the world and heartbreakingly sad. It was the first time I realised that a person’s heart could ache for the suffering of another’s.
I had lost my father to his muses and my mother to her flings and indifference. Dean once said that the saying “feeling blue” must’ve come about after someone looked into my eyes.
The two of us had no-one in a world where everybody had someone.
Dean and I eventually became each other’s and the world ceased to matter.
It wasn’t easy with us.
Stubborn, hateful, vindictive and indecisive the two of us ripped each other to shreds in order to rebuild the other to our satisfaction.
Dean had made me needy. I had made him possessive.
Where he lead, I manipulated. Where either one of us failed, the other succeeded.
During one of our worst fights, I ran away from him, knowing once again that he would chase me down.
He landed up at a bar, got into a fight and ended up in the hospital with a broken beer bottle wedged between his ribs.
When he saw me standing at the door to his ward, shaking and nauseous, fear the only thing keeping me standing, he smiled that stupid smile of his and said, “Every time I need to keep you around, I should probably go and get myself stabbed. It’s a lot easier than trying to look for you.”
I hit him so hard his stitches opened up. The doctors weren’t impressed. Dean was less so.
I suppose the decision I made today was far worse than any decision I made before.
A couple of months ago I got a letter from a girl named Anna.
She said that she was my younger sister or rather half-sister.
Apparently my mother, Naomi, was dying and she wanted to see her son one last time. Retribution. Forgiveness. There was only so much she could get.
Dean read the letter and ripped it into pieces.
“Fat load of good it’s going to do for that bitch to clear her conscience now.”
I kept the return address hidden away under my thigh.
Letters turned into emails and emails to Skype conversations.
I saw a lot of myself in her. And she a lot of herself in me.
I realised I was growing fond of her, even if I resented her.
“You should come home, I need you here,” she said.
Home.
A part of me craved for it.
One day, while lying in bed with Dean, our mouths pressed lightly together in a soft kiss, the phone rang.
“She’s in the hospital. She doesn’t have any time left. Please come home, Castiel.”
“Are you going?” Dean whispered looking up at me through his lashes, his eyes knowing and so quietly furious all at once.
“You knew?”
“I know you better than you know yourself, Cas, which is why I’m telling you it’s stupid for you to go see that person. She doesn’t care about you Cas, she cares about making it to heaven when in all likelihood she’s going to land up in hell.”
“She’s my mother, Dean.”
“She stopped being a mother the second she picked her fucking boy toy over her son. She stopped being your mother the second she left you half-starved in that big old mansion with a father that was never around.”
I didn’t listen.
The next day I packed a bag, while Dean smoked a cigarette in the balcony, his back stiff and fingers white-knuckled against the railing.
“You’re a fool, Cas. Why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you going back to that woman when she hasn’t bothered coming back for you in fifteen years?”
“I want to know what it’s like to have a family. I want to save Anna from becoming lonely like me. I want a home.”
“What about us, huh? Aren’t we a family? Isn’t this your home? Our home?"
“If your mother was alive, you’d know exactly what I was going through. Don’t pretend you understand what this is like!”
That day I learned that words couldn’t break bones, but they could shatter hearts.
“Don’t bother coming back, Cas. You go stay with your sister and your family. I’m tired of trying to catch smoke."
Words were a double edged sword.
Anna greeted me with a hug and a hesitant smile. I wondered whether all teenagers were destined to look this tragic.
"Thank you," is all she whispered before we both turned to look at out mother and I realised that I felt nothing for the woman lying on the bed.
Naomi held out a frail hand for me to take.
I mistakenly believed that mothers had warm hands.
Maybe this one didn’t.
“I’m sorry.”
I realised that Dean was right. She wanted the forgiveness without the atonement.
“I forgive you.”
I didn’t.
And then she was gone.
Anna cried like she’d lost a part of herself.
I realised that I'd lost Dean.
And it all came crashing down in wracking sobs and burning lungs.
Love was destined to kill.
It was built to drown.
Six months later I found myself in front of our, no, Dean’s apartment.
Six months of sorting out Anna’s life so that we could get here in one piece.
Nervous and ready for rejection.
Dean opened the door and stared blankly at me before taking in the frightened looking Anna behind me, his eyes softening seeing the same sad-blue eyes staring back at him.
“Your stuff’s in the guest room, you and Anna can sleep in there. I’m going to go get something for you’ll to eat,” he said before grabbing his worn leather jacket and keys.
I didn’t know what to address first.
He’d lost weight. So much weight.
In the process of looking after strangers, I’d neglected him.
Dean who had no one but me, who’d built his life solely around me, I’d left him to look for more.
Guest room.
Years to build and a second to destroy.
A fragile love.
The three of us ate dinner quietly and I watched as he rubbed his engagement ring unconsciously, as if reminding himself that it was still there.
I looked down at my own and felt an odd emotion stir within me.
Hope.
That night I lay on a mattress on the guest room floor, listening to Anna’s quiet snores.
Sleep elusive with Dean only so many feet away.
I pushed myself up and walked quietly into the hall.
I saw him in the balcony again, another cigarette in hand.
Painfully reminiscent of that day six months ago.
I walked forward and lay my head against his shoulder, wrapping my arms tight around his waist and muttering apologies against his neck.
My cheeks hot against his cool skin.
I remembered what breathing felt like.
“Never again, Cas. You’re mine. My family. You can’t do that again. Not after everything. Not after all these years.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I love you, Dean.”
Nothing else mattered, no-one else mattered when Dean was the only person I breathed for.
Growing up with Dean meant learning that love meant rebuilding everything that you destroyed and reinventing it over and over again till you got it right.
I think I'm finally starting to get it right.