There's a musty smell, the air thick with dust and humidity. Everything feels thick. Dean's tongue is thick in his mouth, and his clothes stick to his back, his skin tacky with sweat and grime.
There's a table in the center of the room, a knife with an ugly edge and a handle carved from antler jutting from the wood. Beside him is a man, threadbare clothes and careworn features. He holds Dean's hand, long, blunt fingers woven into his. His hair curls around his ears with rough-shorn edges, his beard in need of trimming. He releases Dean, walks over to the table, and, with some effort, tugs the knife from the wood. He looks up, a dreamy smile on his lips. His eyes are dark, wide pupils rimmed with blue.
Castiel, human, beckons him closer.
Dean goes. He goes until he's close enough to smell Castiel, the liquor on his breath, woodsmoke and stale sweat. Water is a precious resource, bathing a luxury, but after a few years of that, you get accustomed to the smell of unwashed bodies. Castiel takes his hand again, peels his fingers apart, and folds the handle of the knife into them, then cradles Dean's fist like it's precious.
"Dean," Castiel says, like there's nothing that brings him more joy. Just saying his name. He holds Dean's hand, knife pointed down at their feet, against his sternum, stepping close enough to share breath. Castiel's lips are dry and chapped, parted open on a sigh. "Dean."
Dean lowers the knife between them. Cas steps even closer, into the circle of Dean's arms. His temple nudges Dean's cheek, his beard scratching Dean's chin.
"Dean, please," Cas begs. "Please."
"I can't," Dean croaks.
"Yes you can. You can. I want you to." Castiel's nose nudges his. He breathes out. Dean breathes in.
At his side, Dean's arm moves. The knife arcs. Castiel's hands snake up Dean's chest, weaving around his neck, pulling them flush. Castiel's lips crack and bleed under Dean's, copper and rot.
The blade pierces skin. Hot blood blooms through Castiel's gauzy shirt, over Dean's clenched knuckles, from the incision point. Right past the ribs, just under the arm. Cas convulses against him, groans into Dean's open mouth.
"You can have it. It's okay," Cas murmurs.
Bang. A sound splits the close air, drowning out the sound of Castiel's labored breathing in his ear. Bang.
The knife falls from Dean's hand. He slides slick fingers over the wound. They slip inside easily. Castiel gasps.
Bang.
"Yes."
Bang.
"Dean, please."
Bang.
"Dean—"
—
Something is pounding on the door. Dean recoils from the sound, cowering. Irrational little-kid fear surges through him, and he wipes at his eyes with the backs of his hands, holding his arms over his head. A second later, it occurs to him that he has a gun, that he needs to get his gun now— but he gropes under his pillow to find that it's gone. He lurches out of bed, regretting it immediately when his head throbs with pain.
"Dean? Dean, are you there?"
He doesn't recognize the voice right away. He scans the room through a squint. It's a motel, like hundreds of others he's slept in. His pants are on the floor, his shirt draped over the AC unit. He can't tell what time it is by the light through the crooked blinds.
The door explodes open. The sound is unbearable, the light flooding in even worse. It stays intact, but the doorframe creaks and splits with the force. Castiel bursts through the doorway, eyes glowing blue with holy furor.
"What the fuck," Dean yelps, and his voice comes out raw and choked.
"Dean," Cas says, and rushes to the bedside. "Are you all right?"
Dean holds his hand in front of his eyes, wincing away from her. His head shakes, not as an answer, but as a question. The motion makes him heave, his stomach turning. Cas sits, grasping his head in her hands, and cooling energy melts into his temples, rushing over and through him, like drinking a cold glass of water. He instantly feels better, more clear-headed. He's also pissed. He yanks himself away, her hands falling from his face.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"You told me to come back."
Dean gapes. "Yeah, to the bunker. Not— here." Wherever here is. Now that he's apparently cured of his hangover, he's starting to remember stumbling down the road towards this motel from the bar. He winces, realizing he left the car in the other parking lot. That's probably where his gun is now.
"Sam said you disappeared, and that you weren't responding to his calls."
Dean pushes past Cas to grab his pants off the floor, fishing his phone out of the pocket. There are seven missed calls, and twice as many texts. He turns off the screen, running his fingers over his face.
"I was just at a bar. I didn't want to drive drunk. Cause I'm fucking responsible," Dean adds petulantly.
"Responsible?" Now that Dean can stand to look at Cas without it hurting, he can see she's furious. "This is what you call responsible? Drinking yourself half to death every night while your family worries about you?"
"I don't need a lecture from you." Dean yanks his pants on, then goes for his shirt, shaking it out and shimmying into it. "You disappeared first."
"That's not how I remember it," Cas says. "I knew you were lying, when you said the problem was solved, but— Dean, it's just getting worse."
"I can handle it myself just fine."
"Clearly you can't! So why won't you let anyone help you?"
"Help me? How are you gonna help me?" Dean sits on the edge of the bed to yank his boots on, tying the laces with enough strength to hurt his feet. "You can zap me all you want, you can't fix this shit," he says, and gestures to his head, to the swirling buzz inside it.
"I know that. I know I can't. Should I just stand by and watch you kill yourself again? I can't do that either."
Dean looks up at her. Her shoulders are set, her face glowing with frustration and helplessness. How many times has Cas watched him die? How many times has he done the same? Part of him wants to reach out, to admit that he can't do this anymore, that he's so tired of this endless cycle of loss and sacrifice. The other part knows that the common denominator is him. That everyone he cares about gets hurt, because that's all there is to him. Weapons aren't made to heal.
"How did you even find me?" All the fury has dulled into resignation. He's gonna get it from Sam, too, when he goes back home, and that's an exhausting thought.
"Just because I lost my wings doesn't mean I can't feel you." Cas sits on the bed next to him and places a hand on his shoulder. She's speaking softly, but there's still a thread of anger in her voice and in her grip. "I hear you, calling out to me. I will always find you, Dean."
Dean's chest aches, remembering a future that never came to pass. A flightless angel who willingly followed him to the literal end of the earth, to his own death.
But he also remembers nightly prayers, and searching desperately through a hundred bloody fights just to find a man who didn't want to be found. Castiel can always find him, but when Cas wants to disappear, what has Dean ever been able to do about it?
He stands, shrugging on his jacket in the ruined doorway. Someone's going to be mad about that when they see it, and Dean doesn't want to be around for that.
"I'm going home," Dean says, his voice ruined by drink and poor sleep. "I'll tell Sam I'm not dead."
Cas doesn't stop him. He texts Sam as he walks up the road.
Call off the search party
He hears the blip of Sam responding, but he doesn't look at his phone again until he's back at the bunker. Sam's waiting for him in the garage, looking like a disappointed parent, which is really a hilarious role-reversal for the two of them.
"You already know what I'm gonna say, right?"
"Yeah, so why don't we skip it," Dean says, slamming the car door shut. "Cas already Hulked out on me."
Sam huffs, his head nodding while he works up towards whatever he wants to say. "Okay, well, how about this — You're acting exactly like Dad right now."
"That supposed to hurt my feelings?"
"You really don't have a problem with that? You're just gonna give up? You wanna be a drunk who just peaces out when things get too hard?"
"It's in our blood, Sammy," Dean says, stalking out the door and down the hall. "It's what we're good at!"
"No, fuck you, Dean," Sam says, and spins him around with a hand on his shoulder. Dean throws a fist up, ready to defend against a punch, but Sam throws an arm around him, pulling him into a violent hug, trapping Dean's arm between them. "Fuck you. You're all I've got right now, don't fucking do this again."
Dean shoves against him, but Sam just holds him tighter. Tears prick at Dean's eyes.
"I don't know what's going on with you. But we don't have to talk about it right now. I'm just asking you to stick around. Just be here. Can you please just do that? For a little while?" Sam's voice resonates in his chest. Dean gets him to let go long enough that he can wipe at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He gives one curt nod. Sam breathes out haltingly.
"Okay, good. Cause we've got Lucifer's son and an evil witch living in our house, and they're eating all our olives. I can't deal with that by myself," he says with a wet laugh.
That startles Dean into a weak smile. More than anything, he's just relieved Sam is giving him an out not to explain himself, because he doesn't know that he could if he tried. It's all such a stupid, tangled mess in his head.
The rest of the day is quiet. There's a tension at the edge of everything he and Sam do, like if they stop acting like it's okay for a second, it's going to shatter the illusion. It'll come up again, Dean knows it has to, but neither of them want it to right now, so they're in a holding pattern. Cas hasn't come home yet, but Dean can guess from the way Sam keeps glancing at his phone and then nervously back at Dean that she's keeping in touch. As long as one of them knows where she is, he guesses he'll have to let that go, no matter how much it makes him want to hit something.
Rowena is starting to look better, now that Dean's actually paying attention. She's taken to sitting in one of the leather chairs in the library while Sam distracts himself with cataloguing everything on the shelves. Right now she's reading through one of the books with a mug of tea beside her. Her hair's grown out a bit more, and she's got enough energy to start looking like a gilded beetle again, her eyelids glittering with powder. She can get around more easily by herself, too, which is both good and bad, because now they really have to make sure they watch her around the books. Sam's started hiding the really dangerous stuff in the basement store room and keeping the door locked.
It's a week until Dean sees Castiel again. A week of Sam skirting around him like Dean used to skirt around their dad, a week of Jack asking him if Castiel will be back soon like Sam used to ask Dean about their dad, and a week of Dean looking at his tired, bearded face in the mirror every morning and seeing his fucking dad staring back at him. Sam took after their dad more in looks, whereas Dean always favored Mary, but it's impossible not to see the resemblance with dark circles under his eyes, sweating because he's trying to dry out even though all he wants is another drink.
So yeah, after a week of that, Cas steps into the library, and Dean looks up from the laptop, where he's been skimming the news for jobs, and does a double-take.
"Hey," he says eloquently. "Uh, you cut your hair."
"I did." Her hair is a mess. It's been shorn up to the nape of her neck, the ends uneven and choppy. At this length, it's started to curl into an uncontrollable mop.
"Okay. Cool." Dean closes the laptop and turns the chair a little to face her. "Where you been?"
"Around." Cas approaches the table, placing a hand on the surface on front of him. Her jaw is set in a challenge. Right, Dean almost definitely deserves that. She looks at him defiantly for a minute before she seems to grow awkward, looking down and around at the rest of the room instead of meeting his eyes. "How have you been?"
"Oh, you know. Babysitting. Getting babysat. Tit for tat." Dean gestures at her hair. "You, uh, you do that with a machete or something?"
Cas frowns at him. "No. I used scissors."
"Right. You want any help with—"
"No," Cas says, and takes a step away. Dean's stomach sinks. Right, of course, he should have known better. He'd be surprised if Cas ever let him close again after the way he's been acting.
"Jack's been asking after you," Dean says, redirecting the attention from his failures.
That sobers Castiel's demeanor a little. "Is he all right?"
"Yeah, sure, he's fine. Him and Rowena are practically best friends. He knows more about Star Wars than I do, now. Pretty sure he just misses his… you know, his dad."
Dean regrets saying it, because Cas looks as heartbroken as he's ever seen her to hear it. She turns around, cradling her elbows, her fingers digging into the sleeves of her coat.
"I should have explained myself to him."
"What would you even say? 'Mommy and daddy aren't fighting, they're having a discussion'?" Dean scrubs at his cheeks, feeling them heat.
"It's not… it's not that," Cas says. "It's just hard to face him when I look like… this." She throws her hands up, a helpless little motion, and her shoulders sink when her hands fall. Dean stands up, circling around to see her face.
"What does that mean?"
"It's means I've been avoiding him, just as much as—" She looks up, then away, lips thinning. "Whenever I remember that I'm in this body, I feel so much guilt. Like… like I haven't earned the right to be his father."
"What, just because you look like a girl, he stops being your kid?"
"No, Dean, that's not—" Cas huffs, frustrated. "You don't understand."
"Enlighten me, then."
"I took this vessel only once, for eight hours, one hundred years ago. Do you know what I did in those eight hours?"
Realization creeps in, cold and sharp. Cas looks up at him, face drawn, and trembles.
"I sentenced an angel to death and stood by while my brother murdered an innocent child."
"Lily Sunder's daughter," Dean says. Castiel's head drops between her shoulders, and, despondent, she stares down at her splayed hands.
"All I see when I look at myself in this form is the hypocrisy, that I could call myself Jack's father, knowing the unforgivable things I might have done to him if everything had gone differently. If I had obeyed my orders, if I weren't defective, if I hadn't..."
Dean wants to reach out, to touch her elbow, to make her look up at him. He doesn't dare. "Hadn't what?"
"Hadn't met you." Cas says it so simply, like it's the key to everything. Dean's heartbeat thuds in his ears.
"That's bullshit, man." Dean ducks his head, trying to catch her eyes, but she doesn't move. "We're the ones who wanted you to—" He looks up, glancing around the room to see if anyone's around to hear them. He speaks again, a little lower. "We told you to kill him."
"I know that. That doesn't change the reason I didn't."
"That had nothing to do with us either, that was all you and— you and Jack."
"No," Cas says, and when she looks up, her eyes are so sad it makes his chest hurt. "I spoke to Jack, I learned what he could be, and I loved him. And then I did what you taught me. I fought for him."
The question that's been eating at Dean for ages now rears back up, burning at the back of his throat. He opens his mouth, closes it again. He doesn't know how to ask something this big. There's so much more to it than just the words: Did you mean what you said?
"Cas? You're back?" Sam's walking in from the hall. Dean sucks in a breath, stepping away and running a hand back through his hair. Fuck. He doesn't know if he should feel relieved or not. Jack's not far behind him, and Dean can see the way Cas reacts a little nervously, now that he's looking for it. He hadn't noticed until now.
"Yes," she says. "Sorry to worry you."
Jack comes forward to pull her into a hug, guilelessly happy. Cas hesitates before her arms come to rest on his shoulders. She presses a kiss to the crown of his head. Dean aches, remembering how his mom used to do the same thing, when he was still little, and new enough to be loved unconditionally.
"Oh! What a scene," coos Rowena from the entryway. She's leaning against the wall like it's alluring and not genuinely because she needs help standing up. "You are all just… nauseating."
Sam signs to Jack, mouthing the word "jealous" with his back turned to Rowena. Jack gives him a goofy smile.
"Did you lose a fight with a lawn mower, Castiel, my love?" Rowena asks. Castiel frowns at her in a way that says she's genuinely insulted. Rowena sighs and rolls her painted eyes. "Come with me, I can't stand looking at you like this. It's a tragedy that demands redress." When Cas doesn't go immediately, she raps her cane against the floor. "Now?"
To Dean's surprise, after a brief hesitation, Cas goes, following Rowena down the hallway to the bathroom.
Sam's eyes trail them as they leave the room. "I don't know if I should go over there to rescue him or not."
"Rowena kinda had a point, though."
"She really did," Sam says with a grimace. He gives Dean a measuring look. "Hey, um."
Dean expects him to ask, "You okay?" or "What happened with you guys?" or something like that. Instead, Sam says, "We're out of milk. Me and Jack were gonna take the car, do a grocery run. If you're okay with that."
Groceries are usually Dean's job. Not exclusively, but that just usually seems to end up being Dean's chore when they're back at home base, same as he's usually the one driving, nine times out of ten. But Sam's still giving him that funny look that tells Dean what's really going on. Dean doesn't think of himself as being especially smart, but he was raised by John Winchester, and he remembers what it was like to try to manage his drinking without letting him realize he was being managed.
"Yeah," Dean says, shoving his hands in his pockets and studying the scuffs in the floor. "Yeah, go on ahead."
Sam looks relieved, either at the idea that Dean hasn't caught on, or that Dean's cooperating. "All right, we'll be back in a little while. Don't, uh—" Sam laughs uneasily. "Don't let Rowena turn Cas into an underwear model or anything. I don't think either of us would be able to cope with that."
"I'd think Pyramid Collection is more Rowena's style than Victoria's Secret," Dean says, putting on a smile for Sam's benefit. As he and Jack head towards the garage, Dean calls up, "Hey, you mind picking me up something while you're out?"
Sam looks back at him over the railing. His forehead creases.
"Can of Cheez Whiz. Got a weird craving."
Sam visibly relaxes, then makes a disgusted face. "Really Dean? Spray cheese?"
"C'mon, you remember grilled cheese? You used to beg me to make that shit."
"'Grilled cheese,'" Sam says derisively. "Spray cheese on saltines that we stuck in the microwave."
"It was your favorite!"
"It was nothing but oil, salt, and preservatives."
"And Jack's never had it before, so since we're showing him the world, I'm getting started on the classics. You want spray cheese, Jack?"
Jack looks back and forth between them helplessly. "Yes?"
Sam grabs Jack by the shoulder and guides him out. "We're going, before Dean decides he wants you to try Ding Dongs."
"Ding Dongs would be great," Dean shouts as they disappear from view.
So. That's how it is now.
Dean wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, striding down the hall to make sure Rowena hasn't gobbled up Cas's grace or anything like that.
What she's actually done is taken a normal pair of scissors and taken them to Castiel's head like it's a topiary. She has Cas sitting on the edge of the bathtub, a towel wrapped around her shoulders and her coat and blazer draped over a towel rack, and there are clippings of dark hair littered all around her. Rowena frowns at Castiel like she's a particularly vexing passage in a book whose language Rowena cannot read.
"I gotta pair of clippers," Dean says. "Would that work better?"
Rowena sighs. "I suppose. I imagine it'll end up rather butch, but perhaps you'd prefer that," she says to Cas, who shrugs.
"I don't think it's worth bothering with."
"Well, maybe this isn't your body forever, Castiel, but it is your body now, so for the time being, it might be all right to settle in and make yourself at home, wouldn't you say?"
Cas looks up at that, brow furrowed, eyes round. She stares at Rowena thoughtfully. Rowena picks up a hand mirror from the edge of the tub and holds it in front of Castiel's face.
"Now, would you like it shorter?"
"I… yes."
"There, was that so hard?" Rowena sets the mirror and the scissors down. "All right, bring the blasted device over and see what you can do with this."
Dean swallows a surge of panic. "Oh, uh— I, maybe it's better if you do it."
"I've never used them before. You have. What's the issue?" She looks between the two of them impatiently. "Trouble in paradise again?"
Dean scrubs a hand over his face, ignoring her. "Look, Cas, you don't have to—"
"It's okay," she says, studying her hands in her lap. "I want you to."
Dean stops short. For some reason, the phrase makes him break out in a sweat, his stomach turning.
"You're sure?"
"Yes." Castiel looks up, full of quiet resolve. Like Dean can say no to that.
"Okay. I'll go get 'em."
Dean's been cutting his own hair for, shit, more than twenty years now, and he cut Sammy's, too, when they were kids. He cut his dad's hair a few times, when John let him. This… feels different.
The clippers buzz in Dean's hand, loud against the tile.
"Sit still, okay?"
"All right."
Dean places a hand on her shoulder to keep everything steady, but Castiel follows his directions, holding utterly still while he skims the heel of the clippers over her neck, letting the blades shear it down to centimeters of length and tapering up to the longer hair on top of her head. When he's got that even enough, he shortens the length of the blade enough to clean up around her hairline, her sideburns, and around the backs of her ears. Cas keeps her eyes closed, even when Dean clicks the clippers off and dusts off her neck with a towel. All said, it only takes about ten or fifteen minutes, but Dean feels every second of it.
"Okay, that's it."
When Cas opens her eyes again, Dean's heart stops for a second. There he is.
"Not bad," Rowena says mildly. Dean almost jumps. He'd sort of forgotten she was there. She comes over to show Castiel the mirror again. "Well?"
"Oh," says Castiel, cheeks pink. And, yeah, that's about where Dean's at, too. Oh. "It's… good. Thank you." Cas shrugs out of the towel, then flicks his hands. In a blink, all the hair clippings have vanished.
"Perfect," says Rowena. "That's much better. And you'll remember this next time I need a little help with my Enochian, yes?"
"Of course," Cas says. When he turns to Dean, Dean busies himself with packing the clippers away.
"Looks good, Cas," he says. "Suits you."
"Thank you, Dean."
Dean doesn't look back up, clearing his throat. "All right, well. I'm gonna be in the garage if you need me. Baby needs a tune-up." He neglects to mention he's given the car more tune-ups in the last month than he had in the previous three put together.
Things stay quiet for a while after that. Now that Rowena's sleeping through less of the day, she and Sam start putting their heads together to figure out ways to access alternate dimensions. Dean helps them with that a little when he's got the brain for it, and when he's been at it for hours and can't stand it anymore, he gets up and makes coffee or lunch for the three of them.
Other days, Dean finds Rowena in the library with Cas, and the two of them go silent until he leaves again. He doesn't want to stick his nose in Castiel's business right now, he figures he owes him at least that much, but he's curious and more than a little bit worried about it all the same. He can guess what it is they intend to do, once Rowena's up to the task. He just wishes he could ask how Cas feels about it without upsetting things even more than he already has.
When he gets sick of listening to Sam and Rowena snipe at each other over cost versus benefit, he slips down the hallway to the TV room only to find it thoroughly occupied. Jack and Castiel have moved all the furniture to the far walls, and there's a dusty mat laid out in front of the television. Jack is in sweats, and Castiel has stripped down to just his shirt and slacks, and the both of them are bent over, asses in the air and hands flat on the ground. They're playing some kind of goofy-ass elevator music with ocean sounds layered over it.
"Uh… Having fun, guys?"
Jack's head peeks at him from between his knees, his hair sticking straight down from his head. "We're experiencing one-ness with our bodies!"
Dean's eyes go round. "Well. I don't need to stick around for that talk."
"Jack has expressed some… difficulties in finding where he fits into things, into humanity, into a human body," Cas explains, lowering his knees until they touch the floor, then evening out his back. He slides down until he's flush to the floor. Dean tilts his chin up, focusing on the ceiling. "I admit, it's… not an unfamiliar struggle."
Jack, who has hopped back up from the little pretzel he'd contorted himself into, turns around. "I read on the internet that meditation and exercise can make people feel more 'centered'? Which is good, I think?"
"Yeah, all yoga ever really did for me was put a kink in my back." He scratches at the back of his neck. It's embarrassing, frankly. Like, he's not in bad shape. He did sports growing up. He kills monsters for a living. He's fucking fought the Devil. Why's "downward-facing dog" gotta be his achilles heel? Then he remembers Lisa and her sweet laughter at his terrible stance and the way he tipped over and knocked into a coffee table when he tried to do her routine with her, and he regrets saying anything in the first place. "You ever wanna learn a useful way to exercise, I'll show you how to wrassle."
"Wrassle?"
"Uh. Wrestling. I was on the wrestling team for a hot minute back when I was a little younger than—" Dean stops himself. "Okay, not actually younger than you, you're— You know what I mean. When I was like, sixteen. But you know, we get into fights a lot, and you can't always rely on a gun, or… crazy magic grace powers. Good to know how to handle yourself hand-to-hand."
"The intent was something... low-impact," Castiel says. "Non-violent."
"Oh." Dean nods slowly. "Right, sure. Non-violent. Got it."
"That isn't to say wrestling isn't a perfectly—"
"No, hey, I get it. It's cool. Stepping on your, you know, touchy-feely mindfulness session. I'll butt out."
"Dean," Cas says, like he's disappointed. Dean's face heats, and he grits his teeth, turning around to escape the way he came.
He ends up in the kitchen, and he's about to go into the cabinet when he remembers that if Sam catches him drinking alone at— what time is it— one in the afternoon, he might actually try to stage an intervention rather than just giving him worried looks every so often and leaving the keys to the Impala in hard-to-find places "accidentally," like there aren't any other cars Dean could take instead. So, okay. Trash that instinct. What else is there to drink. He opens the fridge. There is milk, there is almond milk, which Dean doesn't think should legally be allowed to be called milk and he's sure the cattle farmers of the good state of Kansas would agree with him, and there is seltzer.
Dean takes a bottle of seltzer. He hates seltzer, but maybe it will be distracting in how much it tastes like licking a drain pipe full of pop rocks.
Cas walks in when he's grimacing through his third sip, still dressed down to his shirt and slacks. He's not even wearing shoes, Dean notices now. He freezes mid-motion.
"Dean, you didn't let me finish speaking," Cas says, a little line of frustration between his eyebrows.
"I wasn't trying to be an asshole." Dean says, screwing the cap back into the bottle. He's not drinking that shit.
"You're not an asshole," Cas says firmly.
Dean coughs out a humorless laugh. "I kinda am."
Cas rolls his eyes. "Okay, you're an asshole." That makes Dean laugh for real, because it's always at least a little funny when Castiel curses. "But you were trying to share something with Jack. Something that's important to you. Right?"
Dean looks down at Castiel's socked feet on the tile, because it's easier than looking him in the eye.
"And I sounded like I was shooting you down. So in this instance, I'm the one who's an asshole."
"No you're not," Dean scoffs.
"All right, so we can go around like this in circles, forever, or we can agree that either we're both assholes, or neither of us are, and say we're even."
"Gap-free logic, buddy," Dean says, embarrassed. "Can't argue with you, can I." When he drags his eyes back up, Castiel is studying him quietly. Dean feels uncomfortably split open, like Cas could just reach into his head and empty it of everything rattling around in there bit by bit, like a game of Operation.
"I think I'm beginning to understand it."
"What's that?"
"Wrestling. It was important to you. I know that. Something you were good at. Something your father didn't own."
Dean flinches at that. Okay, so he's really getting dissected.
"But it's not…" Cas continues, pausing in frustration at the limitations of language. "...it isn't based in violence for you. Maybe it came out of that, but that's not what it's about."
Dean remembers being a desperate kid, thinking for the first time, Wrestling, I could do that. How many kids his age could say they already had a kill list? He had plenty of combat experience, so another kid would be a piece of cake to take down, compared to a ghoul or a werewolf. But of course, life-or-death fights don't call for much in the way of sportsmanship, so he was actually what you'd call really fucking bad at wrestling at first.
It wasn't until he learned how to play by the rules, how to take someone down without really hurting them, that he started to win. And when it was over, some guys would shake his hand and say, "Good match, man," or, "You were awesome," and then it was like they were… y'know. Friends. No bodies to bury. No blood filling his mouth. And when he brought back a certificate with his name on it, there was someone there to tell him they were proud of him.
"Jesus, Cas," Dean says, blinking to keep from letting his eyes water. "Where's this all coming from?"
"I hurt you," Cas says. "I'm trying to understand how. I don't ever want to hurt you, Dean."
Dean frowns in confusion. "You didn't hurt me, Cas."
"But you're hurt." Cas takes a few steps forward. Dean's pinned in spot by the counter behind him. Cas keeps walking, until he's close enough that Dean can see the hard set of his smooth jaw, the faint lines by his mouth.
You don't deserve to get saddled with this, Dean thinks. Castiel's head moves like he's listening for a distant sound, like Dean's thoughts are just a whisper Castiel can pluck from the wind. Déjà vu hits him like a kick to the gut, takes him back to the moment, ten years ago, when an angel first looked into his eyes and casually unraveled him with the words, You don't think you deserve to be saved.
Castiel takes a step closer.
"I don't need you to fix me," Dean says.
Cas stops, arms stiff at his sides. His eyes are bright and very still.
"You can't," Dean says. Castiel opens his mouth to speak. Dean barrels right past him. "You can't fix me, and I wish everyone would stop fucking trying to. Everyone's always so careful, all the time, all this sneaking around. At least when I'm pissing you off you say what you're really thinking."
"I am not trying to fix you," Cas says, flushed with anger, "because you are not broken."
Dean wants to ask him. He can feel it, bubbling up again, the need to know. What do you see when you look at me? What the hell is it about me that makes you want to stay? What would it take to get you to leave for good? They've crossed that threshold so many times, then crossed right back over it again.
Then Dean remembers— something Cas said a few days before.
"No— you are."
Cas flinches.
"You think you're the one who's broken," Dean says. "That's what you said before. You think you're 'defective.'"
A thought forms, cruel in its simplicity: You think I'm the best you can do.
Something in Castiel's expression shutters. Dean waits for him to respond, but he doesn't. He just watches Dean, maybe imagining that Dean will think better of it and apologize, or say something to make it better. But that's not the kind of man Dean is. Better Cas finally realizes it, even if it is years too late. Dean's always going to disappoint him. That's what he does best.
He slides to the side to escape the closeness of their bodies. He doesn't look back.