On the other side of the table, Sam makes a defeated noise.

“Where the hell is she?” He picks up his empty beer bottle, puts it down again. “Oh, fuck it - I’m beat.”

Dean glances up at him and then, inevitably, at Cas, his face too close to the screen, his skin slightly blue from the computer light.

“The nephilim is cloaking itself,” Cas says, and he still sounds like he hasn’t spoken to anyone for weeks.

Which, yeah.

Dean is not thinking about that.

“Wait - can it do that?”

Cas frowns, moves the mouse and clicks on something, slowly and carefully.

“The pregnancy won’t come to term for another two months, but that thing is not a human child. It’s likely it’s already controlling Kelly in some way.”

“Great,” Sam says, standing up. “Dean, you found anything?”

“No,” Dean grunts, switching tabs just in case. “Nothing.”

Sam stretches, looks back towards his room.

“Hey - dishes in the sink, bottles in the trash,” Dean says, pointing vaguely at the mess on Sam’s side of the table.

Sam makes his Chill, I’ve got this face.

“I was about to clean up.”

“No, you weren’t.”

Sam shuts his laptop, pushes his hair back.

“And we’ve got, like, six hundred plates,” he mumbles, but Dean shakes his head.

“Sink,” he says again, curtly.

There is a vague noise coming from Sam, something that sounds vaguely like control freak and also jerk, and Dean looks up again.

“Something wrong?”

“No.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“Goodnight, Cas,” Sam says pointedly, disappearing towards the kitchen with his laptop in one hand and a mess of crunched-up take-away boxes and cutlery and beer bottles in the other.

As soon as he’s gone, Dean relaxes back into his chair, switches tabs again. He knows he’s not supposed to look at this stuff, that it’s not important in any way, because that witch is dead and Cas is safe and Dean’s got no right -

(But, yeah.)

He licks his lips, zooms in.

The thing is, it’s not even a good photograph. It’s grainy, and the woman - the woman could be anyone, really.

Except she isn’t.

Cassiel, says a carefully handwritten note at the bottom of the page, and Dean’s eyes pass over the woman’s demure dress, her high cheekbones.

“Dean,” Cas says, and something in his voice - a touch of his old impatience - tells Dean it’s not the first time Cas’ tried to get his attention.

“Sorry, I - you need something?”

“Is there another way to pirate security cameras? I’m doing what Sam taught me, but it doesn’t seem to work.”

Dean tears his eyes away from the screen, and that’s a mistake, because Cas looks -

“Uh, I’m not sure.”

Cas frowns.

These days, his hair is wilder than ever, but not in a good way. Cas is not wearing his tie or his jacket, and one of his sleeve is rolled up, but even that doesn’t look - it just doesn’t make it any better -

(more human)

- because it’s like he simply stopped caring. And, sure, in the end he’d fought back, saved their lives (again), but Dean had seen the way his shoulders had slumped when that Lily person had looked at him, an angel blade still in her hand - how he’d just stood there and said, I'll be waiting - and it’s not like Dean knows what to do, or how to fix it, but he’s sick and tired to see Cas bleed, to see his face break from the inside out, a quiet scream of What’s the point and I’m not good enough and Just leave me turning Dean’s stomach, making him nauseous.

(Making him so worried he can barely function, because he’s seen Sammy like this before, okay? And he remembers how Dad had been like, those first few years - remembers finding him on the bathroom floor in the morning, his eyes still red and puffy.

And Cas -)

“What are you reading?” Cas asks in the end and that’s not what Dean was expecting.

“Reading?”

“You’ve been looking at the same page for a while, I assumed you were -”

“I found it. You. Whatever,” Dean blurts out, and at that, Cas’ frown deepens; he stands up, moves behind Dean to look at the screen, and this was clearly a mistake, okay, something that wasn’t even a plan to begin with and yet it’s gone horrendously wrong all the same and fuck - Cas leans forward slightly, his left hand closing on the back of Dean’s chair, his fingertips brushing the collar of Dean’s shirt.

“I don’t remember this,” he says, and he makes an unhappy noise in the back of his throat. “That was careless.”

“They never found you, though,” Dean says, and he wonders what will happen if he relaxes into the chair - will Cas move his hand away?

“Still - Ishim was right to reprimand me.”

Dean is barely listening to him. He moves back, only just. If he looked up now, he could probably nose at Cas’ throat, and -

“Yeah, but - they didn’t even get your name right,” he says, zooming out so the word Cassiel will be visible again.

What if - asks a stupid voice in his brain, and Dean hopes Cas can’t see him blushing.

“Technically, they did. There is no official way to transliterate Enochian into a Germanic language. Or any human language. And that’s not my name, anyway,” Cas adds, before Dean can think of an objection.

“I - what?”

Cas moves slightly - for a second, Dean’s irrationally certain Cas will bend down and kiss his hair - and then stands up, takes a step back to his side of the table.

“Angels’ names are simply something diviners have come up with over the centuries. We tend to respond to them because it makes things easier.”

Dean catches his arm.

“Seriously, what the hell?”

“I thought you knew. It’s mentioned in John Dee’s Genealogia Angelorum?”

Okay, so that sounded like an accusation and it’s not fair and shut up, because Dean’s been meaning to read that thing for years, but it’s boring as fuck and half of it are riddles and why would he want to go through the whole thing, anyway, when he’s got an honest to God seraph making himself coffee in his kitchen every damn morning?

(A seraph who generally cleans the coffee press, yeah - and that’s something else Sammy always forgets to do, by the way, so there.)

“So what’s your name?” Dean asks, and he shouldn’t feel angry, okay? He shouldn’t. This is completely -

Cas looks down at Dean’s hand on his arm, then away.

“You can’t hear it.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re - what is it with this family and its goddamn secrets?” Dean is not growling, exactly, but it’s a very close thing. He lets go of Cas’ arm, stands up, and all he wants is to shake Cas, hard, because he’s sick of it - of Cas’ pain, of something that’s seriously wrong and Dean can’t fix it and that hurts. “First it’s Sam cozying up with Tweety and Hector, then Mom disappearing God knows where and now you’re telling me -”

“Oh, I’m the one keeping secrets?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” asks Dean, and he does hear it in Cas’ voice - a hint of steel, that You should show me some respect thing that makes him want to go Yes sir and also Yes please - but he doesn’t exactly care, not now.

“You asked that Reaper to kill you,” Cas says, slow and dangerous, and now he’s the one crowding Dean back against the table.

“I just wanted her to get us out,” Dean snaps, and Cas very nearly sneers.

“You did not. You made a deal with her - you put your life on the line, again.”

“So what?”

“So you matter, Dean,” Cas says, and he’s about to add something else, and Dean can’t hear it.

“Tell me your name,” he says, and Cas clenches his jaw, looks down.

“I can’t. And I didn’t mean to imply - Dean, you’re human. Those are sounds you can’t hear and can’t survive.”

Dean suddenly feels stupid; wrong-footed. He thinks about Sam, and how his brother never forgets that Cas is - different. About how he’s never sure, himself, about what Cas is, exactly.

(About Ishim sneering at them both.

You know, when I knew Castiel, he was a soldier. He was a warrior. Now look how far he's fallen.)

“Yeah, I - sorry. I didn’t mean -”

“And I’m not sure I can still pronounce them myself,” Cas adds, in a low voice, as if he can just say that and it’s nothing.

Dean stares at him as Cas goes back to his chair and sits down, and he keeps staring as Cas makes a small frustrated noise when he finds he’s still stuck on that same security cam page he can’t crack. In fact, Dean can’t stop looking, and he suddenly wonders what that must be like - to renounce yourself so completely you even lose the right to your own name - remembers Cas did that for him, feels a black, bitter taste in his mouth.

(Everything Cas went through - Dean’s fault. All of it.)

“Hey, I - why don’t you crash in my room tonight?” he says, and Jesus fuck, what’s wrong with him - he never meant to say that, he only wanted to - Cas is so fucking lonely, is all, and that’s on him, and Dean’s been meaning to catch up on that Westworld thing and yeah, sure - so Cas’ been lowkey watching that as well, but that’s not - Dean should never have -

“Are you sure?”

There’s a sort of heavy caution in Cas’ words. Dean passes a hand on the back of his neck as he thinks about all those times he’s chucked Cas out of rooms - all those nights he’s shut motel doors in his face because no thank you, nobody was about to watch him sleep, angel or no angel, because Dean - because that’s just wrong, yeah - except -

Except -

(Fuck.)

“Yeah, uh - that Kelly thing - you don’t need to pull an all-nighter over that. We’ll find her, buddy. Just - come on.”

He can’t turn around and check if Cas is really following him - you never turn around, and them’s the rules - but as he leaves the room and walks down the Bunker’s corridor, a thing of silence and blue lights, Dean thinks he can hear it - Cas’ careful steps, that is, and, more than that, the immediate, inexorable weight of Cas’ Grace - that thing that had pressed down against Dean’s nose and mouth since day one, because there’s been something there from day one, goddammit, and Dean’s tried for years to understand it, and maybe it took all of this - years of war and grief - to make sense of it. Or, well - to get that it’s not something he can understand, exactly, because love, man - all you can do with that is to accept it and to feel it down to your bones and to fucking love in return.