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Dean Winchester had been torn to shreds by hell-hounds, he had spent 4 months in hell (though, it felt like 40 years), and he had said yes to Micheal. He had survived more than any one human should be able to, he actually shouldn’t have survived any of it. Somehow, the torture in hell was worse than when he was left alone with his thoughts.
Alone was actually the entirely incorrect term.
He actually hated sitting with his thoughts when the only other interaction he had was Castiel’s insistent, unblinking focus.
The bunker’s (The Batcave – as Dean called it) library was incredibly quiet. It was the kind of quiet that pressed right up against a person’s ears and wouldn’t budge, not far off from the quiet that surrounds someone while swimming. Sam Winchester had been out on a supply run for what felt like an eternity (he had been gone for about an hour, but silence plays funny tricks on the mind), so there had been no distractions – no research to hide behind, no sarcastic commentary, and no easy exits.
Just Dean and Cas.
Castiel sat across from him at the long wooden table, hands folded, the sleeves of his trench coat brushing against old lore books that Sam had left out for his return. He was an angel, he was used to simply sitting and waiting – hell, it was more or less part of his job description. And so, he sat and watched Dean with that same steady, unblinking focus that made him feel like a dead bug that had been pinned to a nice, red velvet backdrop.
Which, having an angel stare wasn’t exactly helping him with his current train of thought.
“I don’t understand what you’re thinking about – or why its causing you so much stress,” Castiel stated mildly. “Your heart-rate has increased by about 12.”
Dean snorted, “yeah, well, maybe don’t monitor my heart-rate like a Fit-bit.”
Castiel tilted his head, “you don’t own a Fit-bit.”
“Cas.”
Silence fell heavy over them as Dean glared at Castiel (playfully, though that’d be hard thing to get him to admit, not that Cas knows it either). Cas simply looked back at him, his expression somehow blank and yet expectant and wanting at the same time – he doubted Jimmy was able to convey multiple expressions at one time, so Dean had always chalked this ability up to some fucked up angelic telepathy.
Dean scrubbed a hand down his face in frustration. He had rehearsed this conversation in the shower, in the impala, and in the half-second before sleep pulled him under so many times, having actually only had the conversation once with Sammy, purely as a joke. Every version sounded stupider and stupider out loud. However, he didn’t mind talking to Cas about it, they were basically conjoined at the, you know, everything, anyways.
“I just,” he swallowed. “Do you ever feel like something is wrong with you? Fundamentally?” He’d wanted to bring this topic back up to Sam before, and it was much harder when there actually was something fundamentally wrong with him now.
Castiel didn’t hesitate, “no.”
Dean barked out a humorless laugh, “must be nice.”
The angel frowned faintly, “I was created as I am, there is no template I’m failing to match. Angels just are.”
“Yeah, well,” Dean’s jaw tightened. “Humans don’t get that luxury.”
Castiel leaned forward slightly. “Explain.”
Dean stared at the table instead of him, the wood grain blurring, the idea of actually putting his thoughts into words making him almost nauseous.
“I don’t fit,” he said finally. “Anywhere. Not the way I’m supposed to.”
“You are a hunter,” Castiel replied. “You are --”
“Not that.” Dean’s voice sharpened before he could stop it. He had to pause and force himself to breathe. “Not the job, me.”
Castiel went still, trying to even begin to comprehend what he might mean like that. It was common for humans to feel out of place, of course, Castiel never fully understood why, but he was aware that it was incredibly common.
Dean’s fingers drummed against the table, relentless with nowhere to go. “There’s this picture, right? Of what I’m supposed to be. A guy like me. Grew up the way I did. Dad like mine. I know the script.”
He could hear it in his own voice – the gravelly tone that John used to carry, the barrooms he was drug into, the locker rooms back in Truman High, he knew the expectations.
“Tough. Straight. Don’t think too hard. Don’t feel too much. Definitely don’t..” He trailed of.
“Do not what?” Castiel prompted, purely out of a desire to understand Dean that much more.
Dean, however, hesitated, the correct phrasing getting stuck in his throat.
“Don’t want things I’m not supposed to want?”
Castiel blinked slowly for the first time in what might’ve been hours. “This is about desire? From everything I’ve seen you have no problem with just… finding someone.” He said “finding someone”, delicately. Though, Dean knew he more or less meant “hooking up with girls”.
Dean laughed again, unsure if it was because of how simply Castiel was trying to put it, or the jab at him because of his habit to hook up with women the moment he was alone for few minutes. Which, with a bit of squinting, could’ve been one of the many reasons Castiel decided to stay by his side all of the time, some form of mild jealousy.
“You would boil it down to that.”
“I’m attempting to categorize the problem.”
“That’s the problem,” Dean muttered. “It’s not something you can categorize. It’s more… nuanced, I guess.”
He finally looked up from the nauseating swirls of the wood grain in the table to face Castiel. He wasn’t met with judgement or some crooked form of confusion that was poorly hidden disgust. Instead, he was met with pure, unguarded and open curiousity. It wasn’t a thing he got a lot of, and it made something in his chest ache.
“I don’t feel like..” He gestured helplessly at himself, hoping to at least convey something to Cas. “Like just this. Like ‘man’ as a term is supposed to fit and it just doesn’t. Some days it does – I guess. I think. Some days it feels like a costume thats just glued to my skin and when I try to pull it off it just rips off everything else with it. Ans I don’t know what that means, because I’m not --” He broke off his rambling.
Castiel, in turn, took a few minutes to absorb his words with silence. He wasn’t the greatest with advice when it came to human emotions, but at this rate he would try everything at least once for Dean.
After a moment, he asked, “When you say ‘man’, what exactly are you referring to?”
Dean stared at him, fully believing the question was mocking (even if he knew that honestly, Castiel didn’t exactly have the ability to pull out the kind of sarcasm required to mock someone).
“Cas. You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”
“I am not kidding you,” Castiel’s brow furrowed. “Humans assign roles, expectation, and aesthetic markers to just about everything. Those roles have also changed thousands of times across cultures and centuries. They are inconsistent. Therefore, your distress cannot be about an objective standard.” He spoke so plainly, not fully grasping just how much gender expectations make a person feel as if they have every single problem weighing down on them at one.
Dean just blinked, before slumping back into his chair in frustration – partially at Cas, partially at himself.
“It feels pretty objective,” he muttered. “Fine, how do you see yourself, then?”
Castiel shook his head. “I don’t. Angel’s do not possess gender. My vessel – Jimmy, is perceived as male because of it’s biological configuration, but that perception does not alter my selfhood.” He paused. “I do not experience myself as a man. Or as a woman, for that matter. I simply am.”
Dean’s breath caught. “You don’t..?” he said quietly.
“No.”
“And that doesn’t mess you up?”
Castiel looked genuinely puzzeled over the question. “Why would it?”
Dean huffed out a shaky breath and made some vague, far-off, frustrated gesture with his hands. “Because humans aren’t ‘just are’, Cas. We’re told what we are. Over and over. And if you don’t line up with it, something must be wrong with you.”
Castiel studied and observed him for a few moments.
“You’re scared of being ostracized,” the angel pointed out plainly. “More scared of that than anything, it seems.”
Dean paused again, frankly unhappy that Castiel had a way of psychoanalyzing him, and then just saying whatever he could figure out as plainly as possible. It was a trait Dean did grow to love, and find endearing, but by god it pissed him off.
When Dean didn’t response for a few moments too long, Castiel had to ask more to try to prompt answers out.
“Is that truly what you believe?” he asked softly. “That something is wrong with you?”
It was something Castiel could never fully understand – his pure self-loathing. It was something he had always been able to see, it was so plainly there that it was ingraved into his soul, definitely more than many other souls he had seen before. Castiel himsself, though, would never understand it. He just couldn’t. Dean had one of the most beautiful souls he had seen – and while he couldn’t exactly see his true form, he assumed it was beautiful too. His soul was actually so beautiful, Castiel got himself cast out of heaven only to become a seraphim later, because of – no, for him.
Castiel could never comprehend the idea of this beautiful soul – an array of colors and concepts, feeling as if he was something broken that had to be fixed. Not when Castiel could sit there and worship him as a diety in his own right. It just didn’t make sense so him.
Dean didn’t answer, he couldn’t. It was partially that he couldn’t handle how Castiel got under his skin.
Castiel’s voice, when it came out, was quieter. “Dean, I have watched you remake yourself countless times. I have – inadvertedly, helped you remake yourself. I have seen you resist heaven, defy hell, rewrite fate itself. Why is this… trivial matter what you’re worried will ostracise you?”
“That is not the same,” Dean argued.
“No,” Castiel reluctantly agreed. “I guess not. Those were external threats. This is more internal dissonance.” The angel looked as if he was genuinely struggling to find the words or the idea to even grasp the concept. Every “internal conflict” he had ever had, let to a physical threat. He second guessed God, the other angels in the garrison, and suddenly he was being stripped of his powers.
Dean wasn’t going to have that kind of threat, even if he believed he would.
Dean clicked his tongue and slowly nodded. “Internal dissonance. That’s a way to put it, I guess.”
“You aren’t fighting a demon, you’re attempting to reconcile competing truths about yourself. That is not weakness.”
“Sure feels like it.” Dean’s fingers curled against the table, hoping the strain of his fingernails dragging against the wood grain would magically give him the words he needed. Instead, he dragged his other hand down his face. “You make it sound so simple.”
“It is not simple,” Castiel said. “It is merely real.”
Dean let out a shaky breath. “I don’t even know what I’m asking for. I don’t want to be --” he gestured vaguely at himself once again. “Different. I just don’t want to feel like I’m lying all of the time.”
Castiel stilled for a brief moment.
“Lying to whom?”
Dean hesitated before speaking, actually trying to give it real thought.
“Myself,” he admitted.”
“When do you feel the lie most acutely?” Castiel asked with a full want for understanding in his voice.
Dean stared past all the books and up at the ceiling above him, as if the answer (and the exact words he needed) would be written in the stone.
“Sometimes when people call me ‘man’ and it just… lands entirely wrong. Sometimes it lands just fine and I move on about my day. Sometimes – actually, every other time, I’ll look in the mirror and then I cant tell if I can even recognize the guy looking back at me or if I’m just good at playing as him. You know, for everyone else’s satisfaction.”
Castiel absorbed the information for a moment without interruption, wanting to hear what Dean actualy thought so he could try his hardest to help. What else was a guardian angel for?
“Do you wish to be percieved differently?” he asked carefully.
“I don’t know,” Dean said immediately, a hint of frustration lacing his voice. Nothing that was aimed at Cas, likely to be instead aimed at himself for feeling so helpless with words. He added, in a quieter voice, “maybe. Sometimes.”
“Then your experience is fluid.”
Dean blinked at him.
“Fluid,” Castiel repeated. “Variable. Not fixed.”
“Yeah – Cas. I know what ‘fluid’ means,” Dean huffed out, trying to process the idea.
Fluid wasn’t an option. You get one or the other, not both. Though, even if Dean had every thought engrained into him growing up that went againt everything Cas was proposing to him, he didn’t hate the idea. It almost made him feel at peace when he didn’t think too hard about what John might’ve said.
This, and Castiel had picked up on the way his rapid heart had slowed down by a few beats, indicating a brief sense of relief.
Castiel tilted his head. “Does having a framework for it reduce the sensation of being broken?”
Dean hesitated.
“...Yeah,” he admitted. “A little.”
Castiel nodded once, decisive. “Then you are not broken, you are complex.” He spoke with the self satisfaction of someone who had just solved the worlds hardest math equation.
“You say that like it’s a compliment.”
“It is.”
For a long moment, they just looked at eachother. It was hard to not have a lot of moments like that when it came to them.
Under Castiel’s non-judgemental gaze (one of the very few he knew), he felt raw and exposed. As if he was awake for when that hell-hound slashed him open and left exposed viscera out for his brother and Ruby to see. Except this time, he didn’t feel dissected, just seen. He knew Castiel had always seen right through him, literally or not. Or, maybe looking right at him was the better phrase, looking at a version of him that most people had never even gotten to. Somehow, that was worse, and better.
“I don’t want this to change anything,” Dean said finally, voice low. “Between us.”
“Why would it?”
“Because you’ll see me differently. Like I’m weak.”
“Dean,” Castiel softly called his name to grab his attention. “I have been trying to get through to you this whole time that it doesn’t. Your gender – or whatever you’d like to label it as, does not alter your soul. Your soul is something I have always been able to percieve clearly.”
Deans throat tightened. “Percieved my soul, huh?”
Castiel’s brow furrowed faintly, as if Dean had missed the obvious. “Yes.”
He leaned back slightly when Dean gave him an inquisitive look, considering how to explain something that, to him, was as natural as breathing.
“When I first gripped onto you and raised you from perdition,” Castiel continued evenly. “I did not see man or woman, I saw a soul. Righteaus and frayed and luminous. Angry. Devoted. Achingly self-sacrificing.” He tried, almost desperately, to try to explain how he saw Dean.
Dean swallowed hard, his gaze darting back down to the table.
“It did not have a gender,” Cas went on. “It did not present itself as ‘male’, it was simply Dean”
Castiel’s words settled into the quiet bunker air as Dean tried to process them himself. He hadn’t even truly considered before that Castiel never saw him as anything besides just ‘Dean’. He’d wondered in his head many times if the reason they always kept eachother at a small distance was because Castiel had a fear of being homosexual being something that would cast him into hell. Though, as Castiel spoke, he realized it was actually damn near impossible for Castiel to even be considered homosexual.
He wondered for a brief moment if he had just been projecting his own fear onto the angel.
Dean let out a shaky breath. “Yeah, well. The rest of the world doesn’t exactly run on soul-vision.”
“I am aware,” Castiel replied. “Humans rely heavily on visual and social cues. But those cues are imprecise. They are approximations.”
“Feels like more than an approximation when you grow up getting yelled at for ‘not being man enough,’” Dean muttered.
Castiel’s expression shifted – something sharper, protective flickering beneath his perpetually calm gaze. He had watched over Dean since he was a kid (to some degree). By God, for many reasons, was John Winchester lucky that Azazeal got to him before Castiel did. “That was cruelty, not the truth.”
Dean glanced up at him.
“You do not owe the world a preformance,” Castiel said. “If there are days when you feel aligned with what humans call ‘man’, then so be it. If there are days when you do not, it is all the same. Variability does not equal malfunction.”
Dean huffed. “You make it sound like I’m a software update.”
Castiel tilted his head. “You are far more sophisticated.”
The small comment almost got a smile out of Dean before he leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling again. “I don’t even know what I’d do with it. If I let myself… feel it. Explore it. Whatever.” He grimaced at the term ‘feel it’, wondering if it was too soft for the whole macho-man persona that Castiel was full on trying to help him break down.
“You would observe,” Castiel said simply. “You would note what brings relief versus what causes constriction.”
“Con – what?”
“Constriction,” Castiel repeatedly patiently. “You tense when you speak of being forced into a role. Your shoulders drop when you speak – and think of fluidity.”
Dean blinked, startled. “You’re tracking my shoulders now?”
“I have always tracked your shoulders.”
Dean barked a laugh before he could stop himself, though, it faded quickly.
What if it’s selfish?” he asked quietly. “To even think about this. Theres demons out there. Apocalypse-level crap on the regular. And im sitting here having a crisis about, what, pronouns?”
“Dean Winchester,” Castiel said, his voice firm in a way that brooked no dismissal, “you have carried the fate of humanity on your back since you were a child. You are permitted to examine your own existence. You are not selfish for wanting to understand youself. You are alive. That is just what mortals do.”
“It’s going to change how people see me,” Dean pointed out.
“Sam drank demon blood for a little over a year, that definitely changed how people saw him, but they didn’t stop caring about him, either.”
The words hit Dean like a truck. He didn’t want to be compared to Sam’s addiction. However, when he thought about it, it was possibly the close enough comparison that Castiel could muster up for something he couldn’t even understand. He couldn’t really blame the guy for that.
“Sometimes,” Dean said, the words scraping against the roof of his mouth on the way out. “I wish someone could just glance at me and get it. Without me having to hand them a manual. Like they could just clock how I feel in the moment and the days that how I feel sits different. And not make it freakin’ spell it out.”
Castiel regarded him with that steady, piercing attention that always made dean feel transparent.
“You wish to be recognized without translation,” Castiel said.
Dean let out a quiet huff. “Yeah. That.”
“I have never reqcuired translation to percieve you,” he said, no confusion in his expression or hesitation in his voice. Dean’s eyes flicked back up to meet his gaze. “Your presentation varies subtly. Your posture changes. Your vocal cadence shifts. The way your inhabit your vessel fluctuates.”
“My --” Dean blinked. “My vessel?”
Castiel inclined his head. “Your body.”
Dean stared at him. “You can tell?”
“Yes,” he answered, immediately. “But not in the way that humans might, I do not assign value to those shifts. I simply observe them.”
“And you don’t think it’s… weird?”
“Weird implies deviation from a correct standard,” Castiel replied. “I do not believe in a correct standard.”
“So on days when it’s,” he hesitated. “Different.”
“I notice,” Castiel assured him.
“And?”
“And you are still you, Dean.”