Work Text:
“Mark me again,” Dean says as Cas collapses beside him on the bed. They lie in a sweaty, breathless tangle, and this is new enough that the wonder of it is yet undiminished.
It took courage to say the words, and although they came out all in a rush (his tongue loosened by the intensity of his feelings in that ecstatic moment), the request was premeditated. He takes Cas’s hand and places it on his deltoid approximately where the print had once emblazoned his skin before it disappeared on that fateful day when the apocalypse was thwarted.
The silence in response makes Dean quickly regret speaking. “Cas?” he ventures at last, certain he’s made a mistake, said the wrong thing, angered or upset this man (creature of Heaven in man’s guise) whose happiness has become tantamount to his own. “Did you—”
“I heard you,” Cas cuts him off, but his soft voice holds no anger. “That … Dean, you know that was an accident, right? I meant neither to hurt you nor claim you. Neither is in my nature. Even now, with what’s between us, with what we’ve become, you belong to you.”
Has Dean ever belonged to himself alone, he wonders? He doesn’t think so, and he thinks the notion that he could to be naïve. He’s not sure he wants to belong only to himself, because when you live for someone else, you belong to them, whether they claim you or not. In the grander (and more idealistic) sense, Dean has lived for the world and the people he protects, but in the practical (and more accurate) sense, he’s always lived for his brother, and now he lives for Cas too. Belonging to another does not equal being owned.
But he doesn’t say any of this. “It was an accident?” he asks, and he’s almost (absurdly) disappointed at the notion that the handprint hadn’t been calculated, that Cas hadn’t branded him as though to say, ‘Never forget that I’m the one who saved you.’
“Yes,” Cas says, and he shifts to raise himself on one elbow, but his hand never moves from Dean’s arm. “The battle had been hard fought, and when I finally won through to you, you resisted me. But I refused to let our battle be in vain, so I seized you to pull you away from where you stood over …” His voice falters, as though he realized too late what he was about to say aloud.
“The rack,” Dean finishes for him. He can acknowledge it. He has come as near to terms with it as he will likely ever be, but he’ll never be fully free from the guilt, the horror.
“Yes,” Cas says.
“I don’t remember this.”
“I didn’t want you to,” Cas states simply. “When I seized you, you struggled, and my grace surged with—well, the nearest thing you would know to call it would be adrenaline. It seared you. You screamed in agony and went limp in my arms. I gathered your naked soul to myself and took wing. The wound must have run deep, because later when I knit your flesh back together, the injury manifested as a handprint, like a brand on your shoulder. Of all the damage done to you in Hell, only the damage I had done remained visible. I’m sorry. I should have removed it before I did.”
Cas turns contrite eyes on Dean, and Dean hates that look. He’s seen it far too often in the years they’ve known each other, and he’s tired of them having remorse between them.
“I didn’t ask you to remove it,” he says.
“I know.”
“I didn’t want you to remove it.”
Cas frowns at him then, and he removes his hand from where Dean placed it, sitting up fully and turning away. Cool air rushes between them with the loss of nearness, and Dean hates that too, this pulling away from each other that they do when there’s any sort of expression of deep emotion.
It’s with shame that he realizes Cas learned it from him.
But Dean understands better than anyone, perhaps, so he respects that little boundary that Cas has drawn around himself. He tries not to grow impatient.
“Why?” Cas asks at length. “Why would you want to remember pain—pain born of my error—with a permanent scar?”
“Scars can be beautiful,” Dean points out. “You’d understand if you were human.”
And that was the wrong thing to say. Dean knows it the moment the words pass his lips, and Cas’s expression, crestfallen as though he received a physical blow, confirms it.
“I’m sorry,” Dean quickly amends, and isn’t that testimony to how much Cas means to him, that he’d so swiftly swallow his pride and apologize rather than let that expression linger on Cas’s beloved face? He sits up and places a hesitant hand on Cas’s where it rests atop his knee. “I didn’t mean—”
“Teach me, then,” Cas interrupts, and the hurt is gone from his eyes, although a touch of sadness remains. Gently, he slides his palm back in place on Dean’s arm, his touch hesitant and feather-light. “I’m not human, and in some ways you’re still inscrutable to me. Sometimes it seems like for all my millennia of knowledge, it will never be enough to let me truly understand you, to let me be what you need. I fear that. So teach me.”
You are what I need, Dean thinks, but his progression toward emotional honesty has only advanced so far, and will likely ever remain to some degree stunted. So he says nothing and instead lays himself back against the pillows again, pulling Cas down with him to lay his head on Dean’s chest. If the change of position affords Dean a reprieve from eye contact, well, it’s purely coincidental.
“You do see the irony of this, right?” Dean asks, opting for a touch of humor in the face of the responsibility Cas has (unwittingly) laid at Dean’s feet. “I’m the king of repression, dude. I’m the last person you should be learning about emotions from.”
“You give yourself too little credit,” Cas says, his hot breath making the little hairs on Dean’s sweat-cooled chest stand on end. “You may find it challenging to express, but you have great capacity for empathy, Dean, and you’re nurturing and intuitive.”
“Hmm,” Dean grunts noncommittally, knowing the futility of argument, and they fall into silence.
Minutes pass, and Dean rues every one. The burden of explanation still weighs on his mind, although Cas seems content to accept its abeyance. Cas doesn’t need sleep, but sometimes Dean swears he dozes when they’re like this, warm and intertwined. He becomes so still, his breathing slow and even, his heavy eyelids nearly shut.
“It felt like a goodbye,” Dean says at last.
“A goodbye?” Cas asks after a moment’s pause, his voice just a touch more gravelly and muddled than usual after his brief not-nap.
“When you removed it. It sort of, uh, sort of linked us, I guess. When I had it. When I’d see it in the mirror, it was like, somebody thought I was worth saving. I know it was The Plan, really—friggin’ fate or whatever—but it still seemed personal, somehow. You thought I was worth saving.”
“I did,” Cas says, his tone so intimate and gentle. “You were.”
“And when you removed it, it felt like a goodbye. It was a goodbye. You flapped off to Heaven ‘cause you had bigger fish to fry or whatever, and I …” Dean has to pause to steady his voice, the resurgence of old emotion more potent than he expected. “I had just said the worst goodbye of my life, and I didn’t need another.”
He didn’t mean to accuse; that wasn’t what this conversation was intended to be. But now that he’s said it, he realizes that it’s a hurt between them that they never properly addressed. Healing can only come after a brief revival of pain, like a bone that was never properly tended after a break and has to be broken again to set straight. So he doesn’t backpedal, but he does nuzzle his nose into Cas’s hair, an offering of tenderness to temper any harshness in his words.
Cas slides the hand that was resting on Dean’s sternum lower to encircle his waist—a gesture for a gesture. “You didn’t see Bobby for months either,” he says, but his soft tone isn’t defensive, merely searching.
“But that was my choice,” Dean says, knowing full well how selfish and illogical the statement sounds but willing Cas to understand.
Cas hums a throaty little sound of assent and falls into a contemplative silence that feels promising to Dean.
After a moment, he says, “I wouldn’t have called it a goodbye at the time, but now, I suppose it might have been, in a way. At the time I thought only to spare you any further conflict, and as the situation in Heaven became more desperate and I was lured astray, my acuity in everything became more compromised. I’m sorry. I knew little of real friendship, of how to maintain an ongoing relationship with a human. I’d like to say I was ignorant that my absence might hurt you, but I think a part of me knew. I’m sorry. You must know I regret all my actions that year and a half, the small as well as the big.”
“I know,” Dean says. “I know you do.”
“Forgive me.”
“Already done,” Dean says, and he’s amazed to find it’s true.
“But Dean, I promise you that the removal of my handprint wasn’t calculated as any sort of symbolic severing of our bond. I merely meant to restore you to perfect condition. I derided myself for selfish arrogance in not having removed it sooner.”
“There are times when it’s okay to be a little selfish, you know,” Dean says and nudges Cas playfully, finding his mood turned suddenly sunny with the relief of a weight lifted that he hadn’t realized he was carrying.
“I’m learning that,” Cas says warmly, relief present in his voice too.
Dean sits up abruptly, displacing Cas in the process, who then follows suit. “Mark me again,” Dean says once more, and this time, Cas doesn’t recoil.
“It will hurt,” he warns unnecessarily. “A lot.”
Good, Dean thinks. The better to remember it. He leans over the side of the bed and scrabbles for his discarded jeans. Once he locates them, he slides his belt out of the loops and straightens again. He folds the belt and bites down on it, meeting Cas’s eyes unwaveringly and giving a single sharp nod.
Cas nods back and reaches out his hand, grace already seeping from his palm. “Close your eyes.”
Dean obeys.
Sam notices, the next time Dean emerges from the bathroom and wanders through the bunker, towel slung low around his hips. He could have worn his robe or gotten dressed, but it’s summer, he reasons to himself, and it’s hot. He’s not trying to show off his new-old handprint scar or anything. Dean knows Sam notices, because what doesn’t he know about that kid? But Sam doesn’t say anything for several minutes, and he pretends to remain engrossed in the morning paper.
Nonchalantly, Dean goes about his business at the coffee pot, and at last Sam ventures a question.
“Did it hurt?”
“Yes,” Dean says simply, and he smiles.