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Cas shows up while Sam is out, killing two birds with one stone by following up a few leads on the wave of missing persons cases, and snagging breakfast for the both of them. Not that Dean’s been particularly hungry lately. Seeing Cas out of the corners of his eyes, in his sleep, on the backs of his eyelids…he could barely stomach coffee at this point.
Except, now he’s seeing Cas, alive and warm and covered in mud, face still scruffy, clothes a mess. He’s just a reflection in the mirror, so far, just a specter over his shoulder, but Dean knows better. He feels the energy rolling off of him, the heat of his body so close to Dean’s back. Cas is here, and he’s real.
“Hello, Dean,” Cas says, because he’s Cas, and he doesn’t understand what any of this means to Dean, who has been grieving, secondary only to the guilt he’s been chewing like cud.
Dean turns around, and it puts them inches from each other. He’s so close that he can still smell the stink of Purgatory on his coat, the hospital scrubs he was wearing when they got blasted into that nightmare.
“Cas,” Dean chokes out, hands drawn to his shoulders, to his chest, like there are magnets embedded in his palms, like one of those bendy little figurines that came in cheap fast food kids meals, meant to be latched onto a refrigerator next to colorful alphabet magnets and chintzy souvenirs from Myrtle Beach, maybe clamping a grocery list at eye level, where your mom can reference it easily. Sammy had some of those magnetic figurines. He played with them in the dirt, the Impala’s hubcaps a poor substitute for the reliable flat plain of a refrigerator. “Cas, what the hell? What happened?"
"I don’t know,” Cas admits, staring at Dean in open bewilderment at his touch, the insistence of it.
“You don’t know? I told you, I told you I would get you out – I did everything I could,” a traitorous sob rises in his throat, cutting off the flow of his words. He refuses to let it out, so it remains there, stuck like a cork in the spout of a wine bottle. “I never meant to leave you, Cas, you gotta,” he manages to add, words hissing out around the pressure in his throat, too harsh to be a whisper, too quiet to be anything else.
“So, you think this was…your fault?” Cas asks, something awful twisting behind his expression, something Dean’s own guilt can only interpret as disgust. He can’t bear to watch the inevitable click of understanding, so he closes his eyes, lets himself fall forward against Castiel’s chest, buries his face in the putrid fabric of his coat. “Dean…” Cas murmurs, and if Dean didn’t know better, he’d say he sounds tender. His brain is cruel, for making him think this.
“I’m so sorry,” Dean breathes, tears itchy on the hot blush of his cheeks. “I never meant to leave you, Cas,” he repeats, “I’m so sorry.”
Castiel’s hands come up to touch his shoulders, and Dean can’t handle the prospect of being pushed away, of being dismissed. If this is the last time he touches Cas, he wants it to last longer. He sags, his knees twitching in protest as he sinks to the dusty motel carpet, hands trailing Cas's lapels, fresh tears streaking clean lines into the caked dirt on his shirt, until his face comes to rest on Castiel’s stomach, nose to navel, mouth trembling against the soft of his middle, forehead resting on the light resistance of his abdominal wall.
“I was not your responsibility,” Cas says at last, hands not quite touching Dean, though he can feel them hovering over the tops of his shoulders, like he’s not sure what will happen when they land at last. “Getting me out of Purgatory, it wasn’t your responsibility.”
“But it’s my fault,” Dean insists, because he needs Cas to understand. Cas didn’t get out, and it was Dean’s weakness that doomed him. Whatever brought him back now, he knows in his heart it must be something dreadful, and it all could have been avoided, if only he’d been able to hold on to the one thing that mattered most. “Cas, it’s my fault.”
“It’s not about fault, Dean. It’s about will.” Cas argues, and he can practically hear the pinch between the angel’s brows as he speaks. “Do you really not remember?” Cas asks, something anxious tightening his voice.
“I lived it, Cas,” Dean would laugh if he didn’t feel like his lungs were going to stop drawing oxygen from the air at any moment. “I’ve been living it, over and over in my head. I know what happened.”
“You think you know…” Cas mutters, almost bitter, “but…you don’t. You remembered it how you needed to.”
“No – I – “ Dean can’t get his mouth to cooperate, and he grunts his frustration before continuing, each word a battle. “I failed you, Cas – I failed you, like every other godforsaken thing that I care about. That’s what happened, and I’m so – “
“Dean.” Cas cuts him off, hands coming down on either side of his neck, not pushing him away. Just stilling him. “Just – look at it. Really look at it.”
Through his palms, a current of power flows, and Dean submits to it without a second thought. Cas could be smiting him, churning him to ash, and Dean would let him. He follows the current of the grace into his own mind, into his own memories, and watches what Castiel wants him to see. He watches Castiel let go of his hand.
“See?” Cas says from above him, the word a single raindrop on a tin roof, and Dean flinches from it, burrows his face further into Cas’s stomach, comforted by the musk of his skin beneath the thin fabric of the scrubs he’s wearing. “You were not weak. Neither was I. You did not leave me…I just…pulled away.”
“Why?” Dean croaks, and the hands Cas has resting beside his neck slide up into his hair, fingernails scratching soothing lines along his scalp. Dean shudders out an exhale. He hasn’t been touched with such care in so long. He can’t stifle the whimper that follows his breath from his body.
“I didn’t want to be saved,” Cas replies, too simply, too clearly. “Nothing you could have done would have saved me.”
“No,” Dean groans, not so much an objection to Cas’s assertion, more a refusal of the principle, of the underlying ethos represented by it.
“I needed to do penance,” Cas insists, a hollowness creeping into his tone, “it was where I belonged. Where I belong,” he amends. Dean shakes his head, his nose digging into Cas’s gut as he does. His fingers scrub harder through his hair, perhaps to still him. Dean lets himself be stilled.
“No,” Dean repeats, “no, you – I would’ve done anything.”
“You did,” Cas soothes, fond and aching and amused, despite himself, by Dean’s commitment to him, after all that he’s done. “You did everything you could. I didn’t deserve it.”
Dean’s arms drop from his coat, only so he can wrap them around Cas, around his back, clasped above his coccyx, hugging him tight, like he can hold him in place just this way, with the pressure of his palms.
“How can you say that?” Dean demands, desolated, voice raw with it. His throat is scraped clean, the gritty steel-wool passage of his guilt down into the core of him finally allowing something else to sprout in its place. Indignation – righteous, of course. The only kind Dean knows. “Of course you deserved it – you should have let me pull you out. You should have let me save you, Cas.”
“No, I – “ Cas pauses, contemplative. Like he knows how crucial the wording will be, to Dean’s reaction. “I had planned to stay,” he confesses, “all along. After the things I did on Earth…in Heaven…I didn’t know how to tell you. But I knew I had to stay. I didn’t deserve to be saved.”
“And I did?” Dean retorts, not sure if he’s talking about Purgatory anymore, or if this is something else, some vestigial fear, gnarled with age. He’s not sure he ever fully got over being pulled out of Hell, all those years ago, blade echoing in his fist.
“You can’t save everyone, Dean,” Cas sighs, avoiding the question. Perhaps sensing the duality it contains, a trap set to spring, no answer correct enough to skirt its rusty jaws. “Though you try,” he adds, admiring. His hands are softer in his hair, now, smoothing, idle and proprietary. A hunter’s reassurance to his trusted hound.
“Don’t leave,” Dean begs, after too long in silence, after doubt has had a chance to dig its hooks into him again. He tightens his grip. “I don’t know why you came back, I don’t know how you came back, just – don’t leave. Please.”
“After everything I’ve done,” Cas starts, tinged with disbelief, and Dean can’t hear the end of that thought. He refuses to.
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care, about any of it – just – I forgive you. Okay? I forgive you, and I’m sorry about – about all of it.”
“It’s not your fault,” Cas reminds him, and he’s missing the point, and Dean can’t take it. He claws at him, tugging and dragging until Castiel relents and sinks down to his level, down onto the floor in front of him, so that they’re face to face.
His hands slide up from Cas’s waist, up his chest, up to cup his face, the scratch of his beard still so unfamiliar. Everything was so dull in Purgatory – feelings, colors, touches – and here, everything seems to be almost cruelly vivid. His eyes lock onto Cas’s, embarrassingly blue – there can be no river, no sea, no patch of sunny sky that does not feel inadequate by comparison, that does not shrink from the brilliance of his gaze.
“Just – please, stay,” Dean pleads, and Castiel stares at him for a long moment, too long for the anxious animal of Dean’s heart, trembling in the confines of his ribs.
Cas doesn’t say anything that indicates his answer, but it blooms, on his face, and Dean speaks the language of him well enough by now to know what it means. Relief ripples through him, and he can’t keep his hands from drawing Cas’s filthy face closer, can’t keep his lips from seeking the assurance of Castiel’s, and they meet in the middle, joined where a body draws breath.
They stay like that, leaning into one another there on the floor, perched on their knees, mouths moving against one another with an ease and grace that neither of them has ever had with words. Dean’s still holding onto his cheeks, still running his thumbs over the uneven fuzz of his beard. Cas’s hands come around to cradle his shoulder blades, to play at the base of his skull, fingertips tracing the tiny hairs there, sending warmth tingling through him.
He doesn’t look up when he hears the door open, his brain behind the present, tuned out of his surroundings, focused on Cas alone.
“What the fuck?” Sam says, to himself more than Dean or Castiel. Dean pulls away long enough to acknowledge him, standing in the doorway, greasy paper bag in one hand, cardboard drink carrier with two coffees steaming balanced on his other arm, keys dangling from limp fingers. The door is still open behind him, the bright morning swirling so invitingly, all green and blue and crisp and sweet.
“Cas is back,” Dean says, the only explanation he can muster before he’s overcome all over again, drawing him back in for another kiss.