The Cabin, (2/4)
Title: The Cabin
Author: bookkbabyhttp://bookkbaby.livejournal.com
Artist: chosenfire28http://chosenfire28.livejournal.com/
Fandom/Genre: Supernatural
Pairing(s): Dean/Castiel
Rating: NC17
Word Count: Approx. 16K
Warnings: Slight wingkink, explicit sex, mentions of soulbonding, angst, misunderstandings
Summary: For an angel, the building of a Nest is sacred. Dean doesn't understand.
Part 1
Part 2
It had started as a just vague curiosity, but over the days that Dean had been trapped in the same half-mile of woods, it had ignited into full-blown needtoknow.
After all, one did not stick Dean Winchester in a small box and warn him against investigating a corner. That just made the corner very, very suspicious, and Dean was a hunter. He ate suspicious corners for breakfast.
He eyed the door to Cas's room. Dean had tried turning the door handle once, the first morning he and Sam had been here. He’d wanted to know what was inside the room, so he’d tried the door in hopes that he’d get to open it and get a good eyeful before Cas shooed him back out. Knocking might have been more polite, but not nearly as satisfying.
Dean twisted the handle, but his hand just slid around the metal ball. It wouldn’t budge. He jimmied it, hoping it was just a finicky knob, but nothing happened.
The sounds of movement beyond the door stopped. Wingbeats sounded behind him.
Had Cas really just flown out rather than open up?
"Yes?" Cas asked impassively. Dean looked from him to the locked room.
"What, you forget how to use a door?" he asked. Cas's expression tightened almost imperceptibly.
"No," he said. "What was it you needed?" His voice was stiff and formal, more like the angel Dean had first met, back when the Apocalypse was still gearing up and Dean hadn't known that Heaven was just as eager to end Earth as Hell was. For a moment, Dean almost longed for the days of the failed Apocalypse. At least back then (before Raphael, before Crowley, before the Leviathan and Purgatory and losing Cas over and over and over again), Dean had been able to talk to Cas. Now things were strained, and worse... Cas was keeping secrets again.
"Don't suppose you'll give me the grand tour of this place?" Dean asked. Cas looked confused for a moment, tilting his head.
"Very well," he said, and Dean felt a moment of surprise before Cas turned and began pointing to the various rooms. "There's the kitchen. The bathroom is over there. There's the door outside. This is my room, and that's the second bedroom." Castiel looked at him again, still puzzled. "The cabin isn't large.”
"I don't get to see your room?" Dean asked, already certain he knew the answer. Castiel's confusion melted away, replaced by an oddly wistful, oddly sad resignation.
"No."
"What, is it like the West Wing or something?" Dean asked. "Forbidden?"
The confusion was back, but this time, magnified. Cas opened his mouth to say something, but another voice beat him to speaking.
"Did you seriously just reference a Disney movie?" Sam asked, appearing in the doorway to his room. Sam yawned and stretched a bit, then shook his head. "Since you're the one that's stuck here, does that make you Belle?"
"Bitch," Dean replied, without heat. His face may have reddened slightly, but thankfully neither Cas nor Sam called him on it.
The door to Cas's room had remained shut tight. Dean had occasionally heard movement from inside, but whenever he called Cas, the angel would fly out instead of walk out. Dean had to know what was inside that room, if Cas was going to this much trouble to keep it out of sight.
There was no time like the present. Sam had gone out for a hike, since he could leave the small clearing Cas's cabin was situated in, and since he claimed that Dean's grumpiness and moping were getting annoying.
So maybe Dean was a little grumpy. He figured he had a right to be.
Cas was rarely around during the day. He'd come when they called, but otherwise made himself pretty scarce. Cas always had this slightly guilty look Dean didn't like whenever he was in the cabin, and Dean would bet money that it was tied to whatever Cas didn't want him to see.
His lockpick set was, as always, hidden inside the lining of his jeans, and it was the work of a moment to slide them free. It took only two minutes to pick the lock and then, with a deep, anticipatory breath, Dean opened the door. He half-expected there to be some form of 'human-proofing', but either such a thing didn't exist or Castiel had trusted the locked door to be enough of a barrier for the short time Dean and Sam were expected to be at the cabin. Or maybe he'd underestimated Dean's curiosity or overestimated his own ability to act like there was nothing hidden inside the small cabin.
In any case, the door opened easily and Dean stepped in without incident.
The first thing that struck him was how bare the room was. It seemed more like an empty wooden box than a bedroom. There was no furniture, no posters or paintings, no decorations of any kind.
There weren't any weirdly glowing roses floating in glass vases either, but Dean hadn't really expected that. He'd expected some kind of equivalent, but the only thing in the room was a pile of feathers and bunches of cloth in the middle of the floor.
Dean stepped closer and crouched next to it, studying it. There was old denim, some cotton bandaging like what he and Sam used when they could afford it, a couple of Tshirts, a sheet set. The pile looked almost like a nest crossed with a bed. Did Cas sleep in this, then? Dean had thought that angels didn't need to sleep, but what else could something like this be used for?
Dean's brain immediately offered several helpful suggestions, all of which involved Cas getting sweaty and horizontal with people who were not Dean and he booted the thoughts forcefully from his mind. Jealousy coiled thick and fierce around his stomach and he shook himself.
Something nagged at the back of his mind. The shirts seemed familiar, he just couldn't quite place them.
He frowned in thought. They looked a little like some old shirts of his, ones he'd thrown out over the past few years. Money was tight when you were a hunter and clothes for daily wear tended to be cheap and practical and worn until they were little more than rags. Dean picked up the nearest shirt, a gray one that looked just like the one he'd tossed out after their most recent (successful) hunt, and absently turned it over in his hands.
He stopped. Across the chest were three rough gashes, exactly like the ones he'd gotten on that last hunt. This didn't just look like his shirt, this was his shirt.
Dean looked at the other shirts again, and the jeans. His. They were all his. He'd be willing to bet the bandages had been his too, though he had no idea from what injury. Or when. How long had this been going on?
He hadn't gotten a bad enough injury to warrant a bandage like that in over a year. Some of the shirts were ones he recognized as having tossed out more than two years ago.
The knowledge settled like a sucker punch to the gut. This was what Cas had been hiding? The fact that he slept with clothes Dean had tossed out?
Why the hell was he sleeping with Dean's old clothes?
"Cas, get your feathery ass down here," Dean said. He heard the sound of flapping wings a few feet behind him as Castiel touched down. He didn't look up, hand still clenched in the grey shirt.
"What do you-" Cas started, then stopped abruptly as he realized where they were. He was silent for several heartbeats and when he spoke again, there was more than a touch of anger in his voice. "I told you not to come in here."
"I wonder why," Dean bit out as he stood. He turned to face Cas and thrust the shirt at him. "Was it because I'd find out that you've been stealing my trash to sleep with?"
Cas flinched. Maybe most people wouldn't have been able to read the angel well enough to tell that's what it was, but Dean could. He felt a flash of guilt, but his anger was strong enough to keep him pressing on.
There had been too many weeks of frustration, going back ages before Dean had ever set foot in the cabin, and Dean was fed up. It felt like ages since he and Cas had talked, really talked, about anything, and Dean was sick of the secrets and the lies.
Did he really know Cas at all?
"What the hell is this, Cas?" he asked flatly. Cas wouldn't meet his eyes. The angel shifted uncomfortably and made an aborted move to kneel, then thought the better of it.
"A Nest," Cas said finally. Dean fought the urge to roll his eyes.
"Yeah, I can see it's a nest. What I want to know is why you stole some of my clothes to make it." It didn't matter that the shirts would have been in the trash by the time Cas had taken them. They still hadn't been Castiel's to take.
Dean briefly wondered if he'd be so angry if he'd discovered that Cas had taken the clothes for some other purpose - to make rags with, to turn into makeshift bandages, whatever it was an angel would use old clothes for. He quickly decided that no, that was less weird than taking the clothes to sleep with.
Hell, why hadn’t Cas asked him?
"You no longer needed them," Cas answered. He looked shifty as all hell, reminding Dean uncomfortably of a circle of holy fire and ugly revelations. His scowl deepened.
"That doesn't answer my question," he said. Cas finally looked up at him and met his eyes. He seemed determined suddenly, though to do what Dean didn't know.
"I want to build a Nest with you," Cas said carefully. Dean stared at him, uncomprehending.
"To build something with me, don't I kind of need to know ahead of time?" he said. The question was rhetorical, the answer obvious, and Castiel looked away again. Dean felt frustration surge inside him again; he used to hate how Cas stared straight at him, straight into him, all the time, and now Cas wouldn't so much as glance at him more than once or twice a conversation. It was starting to really piss him off.
"Do you want me to take the Nest apart?" Cas asked quietly, like he didn't want to ask. Dean didn't even pause to think.
"Yes. No offense, Cas, but it's really fucking creepy."
Cas flinched again, this time visibly enough that anyone would have noticed. A half-formed impulse to take back his answer crossed Dean's mind, but his irritation with Cas squelched it.
Besides, it was a little weird that Cas was sleeping with Dean's cast-offs. It was creepy, or so he tried to convince himself, and made Dean's stomach do odd little flips and think things he really, really shouldn't hope for. Hoping made him imagine meaning where there was none and he couldn't. Not with Cas. Not again.
Cas turned away from Dean.
"Your things will be returned to you by the morning," he said formally, voice stiffer than Dean had heard it in years. "You've got what you came for. Now go."
Cas didn't stick around to see that the order was followed. He was gone between one breath and the next, leaving Dean alone with the nest.
Dean took one more look at it and then, still holding the ruined grey shirt, he left. He shut the door behind himself and, after a moment, locked it as well. The secrets of the room had been discovered, so it’s not like anything was being hidden. Besides, maybe Cas would cool down once he had his space back.
When Sam returned from his hike, Dean was back on the couch and holding the battered copy of 'Slaughterhouse Five' he kept in his duffle. The grey shirt poked out of the top of the bag.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Dean woke up. It had been his turn to use the bedroom last night and he was damn grateful for it.
He'd tossed and turned a lot, mind still one door over and on the nest Cas had built. Dean hadn't managed to quiet his thoughts and fall asleep for hours and he would've hated to keep Sam awake.
Or worse, pique Sam's curiosity.
Cas stealing Dean's old clothes was creepy. Dean knew that. He knew it was weird. He knew he should be a hell of a lot more weirded out by it than he was, but he couldn't find it in himself to freak out over it. He saw freaky shit day in and day out; in comparison to a wendigo or a ghoul, a little clothes-stealing between friends was nothing.
He wasn't sure if Sam would understand. Hell, Dean didn't understand.
He yawned and stretched, then swung his legs over the side of the bed. His feet hit something soft and he looked down.
Cas had done as promised. He'd returned Dean's things. Dean scowled faintly; he'd been hoping Cas would return the items in person and give Dean the chance to talk to him, but apparently Cas had decided to sulk. Fine. Whenever he wanted to show up, Dean was prepared to be generous and act like nothing had happened. The freaky angel-nest-whatever didn't change anything. They were still friends. Or at least, Dean wanted to be.
A lot of shit had happened, but Dean wanted to believe that they could get back to how things used to be. The good times, back before a year of separation and shady deals with Crowley had put a strain on things. Before holy fire and Dean’s refusal to listen.
Dean had to believe it was possible.
He tried not to think about what else he'd once thought 'possible' between him and Cas. That led to hope and hope led to misinterpreting things and they had enough communication issues as it was.
Still, repairing anything would need to wait until Cas decided to show up again. He'd get over his sulk and be back; it probably wouldn't even take a day.
Dean carefully didn't think about how upset Cas had seemed upon finding Dean in his room.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Dean opened up one of the cabinets and scowled darkly at the contents, as though the cans of soup and Spaghetti-Os were at fault for Cas's continued absence.
It had been two days since the incident in Cas's room and Dean hadn't seen so much as a flap of tan fabric since.
The cans of food were new. The cabinet had been running low on food just yesterday and considering Dean couldn't leave the house and Sam couldn't go into town (nor did he have any idea where town was), Cas had to have stopped by.
Was he not even talking to Dean anymore?
Dean practically slammed the cabinet shut.
"This is getting old," he said, staring up towards the ceiling.
No response.
Dean pushed himself to his feet, appetite lost, and headed for Cas's room. Dean hadn't heard any movement from inside in days, but he wasn't going to discount the possibility that Cas was hiding right under his nose.
He knocked. At least, he tried. The door was just barely ajar, the latch not engaged, and so at the first touch of his knuckles, it slid open.
The room was empty.
Not just empty as in 'lacking Cas', but empty.
The nest was gone completely. Not even a feather remained.
Something uneasy slid down the back of Dean's neck and along his spine. It nagged at the back of his mind; what the hell did a nest mean to an angel? What did it mean that he'd wanted to build one with Dean?
Whatever it meant, it was bigger than Dean had realized. Just how much had he upset Cas...?
But no. This wasn't his fault. He'd asked his stuff to be returned, not for Cas to take the whole damn thing apart. If Cas had decided to get rid of it, it wasn't Dean's problem.
The uncertain guilt that lingered at the bottom of Dean's gut could just go away.
On to Part 3