Fic: every piece of you
every piece of you (ao3 link)
pairing/characters: 2014!Dean/Cas
genre: the end!verse
rating: R
word count: 4600
summary: That lesson that the angels tried to teach him - the one where you can't change the past - never really sunk in.
a/n: Inspired by one line from The End (5.04): "I'm begging you. Say yes. But you won't. Cause I didn't. Because that's just not us, is it?"
If 2014!Dean is willing to say yes and he knows that 2009!Dean won't, what if he did something about it?
Dean Winchester says no.
For five long years, they manage to get by without the world ending and the thought never crosses his mind that he's doing the wrong thing, but then January 2014 rolls around and his entire world goes to hell. The croats had been popping up in small batches here and there, with Dean, Cas, and Bobby in one group traversing the country to clean them up and Jo, Ellen, and Sam doing the same in another, but in 2014 the croat population explodes and they become a problem that the world can't ignore. The supernatural isn't secret anymore but becomes headline news and demons and croats are something everyone believes in. Hunters can no longer keep up with their growing numbers. The military deals with the threat their own way - by destroying the affected area and anyone inside of it - and are a new danger unto themselves for anyone caught in the crossfire. In short succession, Bobby dies, Sam says yes, Cas' gets hooked on any dugs he can get his hands on, and, finally, the angels abandon the Earth to it's fate.
Dean Winchester says yes, but there's no one - no angels - left to hear him. He says yes and yes again, screams it over and over to the uncaring sky. When he knows definitively that no one left in Heaven is willing to listen, that's when he starts to pray.
Regret hounds him for months. If onlys accompany him at breakfast - more often than not, canned spam and whatever sort of vegetable they'd been able to scrounge up in precious, undamaged cans or find growing wild near their camp at Chitaqua - while what ifs follow in his footsteps as he and his paltry band of survivors do what they can to keep the croats' numbers down.
It's a losing battle and he knows it. When rumors of the Colt start to surface, he does what he has to find out where it is and get his hands on it. Even as he's torturing them - pouring holy water down their throats, cutting them open with Ruby's knife and rubbing salt into their wounds - the demons won't stop laughing as they scream out in pain.
"Alastair would be so proud," they tell him and Dean doesn't even blink because it’s true, he really was an excellent pupil. Eventually, they all tell him what he wants to know.
They're so close to finding the colt that Dean can taste it when he senses a new change in the air, a tingle of electricity that raises the hair on the back of his neck.
He goes by Cas' cabin and asks, "do you feel it too?" He can't bring himself to come all the way in, simply leans his back against the door frame, scuffing his boot against the rough grain of the unfinished floorboards and waits for Cas to answer, but Cas only stares at him blankly, pupils blown wide from the drugs. Dean shakes his head and turns to leave when Cas does finally speak up, but only then to ask if Dean might loosen up if he took a few of Cas’ Percocet. His actual words involve a stick and Dean’s ass, but as time has passed and the more naturally Cas’ foul language has flown off his tongue, the less inclined Dean is to pay him any mind.
The strange, electric feeling doesn't go away and Dean can't say he's all that surprised to find his past self lurking around in the dark a few days later. Blah, blah, time-travel, blah, he could really care less why the-Dean-from-his-past is there. Zachariah, though, that part is interesting. He can't say he's at all concerned about Zach's plans with Dean's past self, but an angel - one strong enough to send someone through time - that he can work with.
He knows what it is going to take to convince his past self to say yes, and he knows this little jaunt to the future, it’s simply not going to do. That Dean will never say yes to Michael, not until he's seen what Dean has seen, knows what Dean knows, carries the scars that Dean carries. Has lost the ideals that Dean used to hold dear, the idea that any one life is precious, including his. This Dean would die a thousand deaths, spend a thousand years in Hell on the rack if only to give humanity any kind of small, fighting chance.
So he bides his time, goes about his mission to retrieve the Colt, and waits until he has his past self alone. He figures he has two choices here - he can take his people on a suicide mission or he can put an end to things now. He chooses the later. Deep in his heart he'd known - even if he could track down the gun, he could never put a bullet in Sam's heart if there was any chance his baby brother was still in there somewhere. And if somehow, he had managed to deaden his heart enough to do it, what kind of world would he be saving? One in which every single person he loves is gone, not to mention a huge percentage of the population is dead or worse, a world under attack by the croat virus. No, this is the only way.
His past self is going on and on about making compromising and how he never would and Dean’s not going to argue. He knows it’s true. Instead, he smiles; a reckless baring of his teeth that’s more an acknowledgement he’s got nothing left to lose than any demonstration of pleasure or satisfaction. “You should shut up now,” he say, bringing the Colt up to press the muzzle against his past-self's forehead and cocking it before pitching his voice to call, “Hey Zach, why don't you come on down here. There's something I need to discuss with you. Don't move, by the way,” he tells his past self, “or I'll blow our brains out in a way that scumbag will never be able to bring us back from.”
Zachariah appears with the flutter of distant wings, suit as pristine as it was the last time Dean had seen it, five years ago. “Ah, Dean,” he greets. “Why am I not surprised that’d you pull something like this just to goad me into talking to you? What exactly are you hoping to accomplish here? Suicide? If you kill him, you kill yourself.”
Dean gives him a one-sided shrug with his free shoulder. “Strangely enough, I think I’d be okay with that. But I had something else in mind. I want to make a deal.”
“There’s very little you have to offer us now,” Zachariah notes, disinterested.
“You’d be surprised. You want a willing vessel, don't you? Well, you got one. This guy,” Dean says, giving a little push against the other Dean's head with the muzzle of the Colt causing his past self to flinch slightly away, “he'll never be what you want.”
“And why do you say that? I thought this little exercise was going perfectly to plan.”
“Because you’re just showing him a brief little glimpse of something that I’ve lived. I know exactly what it's going to take to get this little shit to give in to Michael. And a little jaunt to the future to witness the mess he’s made of it, that's not going to do it. He’s going to go home, sleep in his warm bed with heat, electricity, and fucking toilet paper, and he’s going to thing, that won’t be me. I can change that future some other way. But we both know that’s not going to happen.”
“But you, you’d say yes?”
“I'm ready and willing, baby, just take me back and I’ll be Michael's bitch. I'm only asking for one thing. You give me one week. One week with my brother, the way he used to be, and you can have my yes.”
“How do we know we can trust you? You did say and I quote, ‘he’s going to go home, sleep in his warm bed with heat, electricity, and toilet paper and think that he’s going to be able to change the future some other way.’ How do we know that a warm bed and a hot meal isn’t going to get you thinking that way too?”
“Because it won’t. What do you need to me say? I would do absolutely anything to keep this future from happening, and I know that letting Michael wear me to the prom is my best bet. If you want a contract signed in blood, I’d be more than happy to draw one up for you.”
“As you know, that contract thing is more Hell’s cup of tea than Heaven's,” Zachariah says, mildly. “One last question, what do you intend to do with your past self? Leaving him here would be akin to killing him, you know.”
“You can't honestly-“ Dean's past self starts to say, but a wave of Zachariah’s hand silences him instantly.
“You think I give a shit, after all I've been through, about one more death when the entire world is at stake? Who the fuck cares if it's me. Do whatever you want with him.”
Zachariah smiles, slick and shady, the expression fitting on the business man he's wearing. “I believe you. I think we have a deal, Mr. Winchester,” he says as he reaches out a hand to Dean's forehead and sends him slamming back half a decade.
He arrives in 2009 empty-handed, dizzy and disoriented, thinking he'd blacked out until he sees the streetlights. The world hums here, in a way that his hadn't - at least not until Zachariah had shown up again so recently - in a way that feels like home. His knees wobble and he feels about to collapse when a strong hand wraps around his arm, holding him steady.
"Cas," he breathes when his eyes focus on Cas' face, and oh god, it's him - the Cas he hasn't seen for months, years - the too literal man with the intent gaze, the one who would do anything, anything for Dean and has, the one Dean's been in love with since the moment they met and before - when Cas had put his hands on Dean's soul and pulled him from the fire and brimstone of Hell, even if Dean doesn't remember that part - and he finds himself leaning forward to kiss this Cas, he can’t stop himself. This was never something he'd intended, not before the croats and not when he'd been planning to force Zachariah to send him back instead of his past self. His love for Cas is something private, something he'd kept locked away inside of himself like some kind of precious metal that would tarnish and decay in the grim reality of Dean's world if he kept taking it out to look at it or if he even touched it.
Dean's heart had done nothing but ache when he'd been around the very human and vice-ridden Cas from his time, longing for the man he'd used to be, the angel that Dean had respected. But now that he's here again, right in front of him with his hand gripping Dean’s arm right above the mark he’d left there, something inside Dean breaks and there's nothing he can do to resist.
Cas' lips taste like fresh rain and when Dean sweeps his tongue inside Cas' yielding mouth, it tingles like static electricity, barely there but somehow Dean can feel it down to his bones. Cas stands still for a moment, relaxed but unresponsive, then returns the kiss with a fervor few would believe possible from him. Dean, though, he’s not surprised, not about that at least, just surges into the returned kiss that astonishes himself. He burns with a desire that he hasn’t felt in years, not just those five long years that separates his memories from this moment, but before he sold his soul to save his brother.
“What, how,” Dean asks when he breaks away, shaky and exhausted but so, so turned on, and what he means is, why did Zach deliver him here of all places, but Cas says, simply, “we had an appointment,” and suddenly, there, burning in his mind as if it had happened just yesterday and not five years before, is a conversation in which Cas tells Dean he has news and Dean begs for sleep. It occurs to him that Zach never intended to deliver him, literally, into Cas’ waiting arms, but somehow their cosmic lines must have crossed and Cas had stolen him away. Dean briefly wonders if this buys him more time or less, but decides now is not the time to be thinking those kind of thoughts, not when Cas’ mouth is still reddened from Dean’s own lips.
“Cas,” he says, speaking his name as reverently as a prayer, “don't ever change,” and, because the memory of an apathetic, drug-addled Cas is still sharp in his mind, pulls him in for another scorching kiss to burn those images from his mind.
“Can we,” he says, whispered against the interference of Cas’ questing lips, “do you… we need a bed!”
“Of course,” Cas answers, and they’re back in the room that this Dean had supposedly occupied just yesterday, not so many years ago that he couldn’t say what was the color of the wallpaper or the bedspread. Blue, his mind supplies, as if it had been just yesterday, but Dean doesn’t have the brainpower to spare on the thought, not when Cas is pushing him backwards until the back of his knees collide with the bed, Cas’ mouth hot pressure on his neck.
Dean's never done this before, had sex with another man. If he’d spared any thought about it at all it would be to think it’s probably uncomfortable and not at all desirable, but as they shed clothes, Cas’ hands in Dean’s most intimate places, all he can feel is bliss.
“How’re you, how do you…” is all he can get out, his voice trailing off into a moan as he lies prone and spread-eagle on the bed, one hand still tangled in his shirt sleeve, letting Cas do all the work.
“How do I know what I’m doing when I haven’t done this before?” Cas finishes for him. “I may be a virgin but I’ve had millennia to observe. Believe me when I say that’s long enough.
It is uncomfortable, at least as first, but as soon as Cas’ dick starts hitting his prostate, he doesn’t even care. All he wants is more, more of this feeling. His eyes roll back and his eyelids keep fluttering shut, refuse to cooperate and stay open and focused when Dean wants to meet Cas’ eye, see him, the Cas he’s been missing for years.
It’s over all too quickly so Dean convinces Cas to do it again, as soon as possible, and is trying to persuade him that he’s not too tired for a third when he falls asleep mid-sentence.
He blows Cas in the morning, his hand working furiously between his own legs, and the only thing he needs to tip him over the edge is the thought that Cas’ dick, thick and heavy on his tongue, had been inside of him last night, and he’s done, that’s it. He let’s Cas fuck his face because that’s about all he can do until Cas follows him over the edge a few minutes later.
He rushes through a shower and a quick shave, the first close shave he’s been able to have in weeks, months. A shave with a real razor, shaving cream and hot water, only sparing enough time to note that a nasty scar on the underside of his chin he’d gotten six months ago must not have been too bad because it’s gone now. He calls Sam and kisses Cas sweetly.
“You’ll call me tonight?” he questions, earning a nod before Cas flutters away in a way that is shockingly normal and shockingly different all at the same time.
Before Dean drives off to meet Sam, he spends a good long while in the Impala, running his hands over her familiar leather and vinyl, cool metal and smooth glass, relearning the touch of his baby under his fingertips. He’d lost the Impala months ago, when gas was nearly impossible to come by and she needed more repairs than he had access to parts, the roads gone to rubble and potholes in the danger zones - the most infested - without people willing or able to repair them.
Dean thinks maybe he should have a speech prepared, something meaningful to say to tell Sam he’s been admitted back into the fold because the opposite is just too dire to imagine, but all his words fly right out the window, so to speak, when he sets eyes on his baby brother, back in flannel and jeans and not that atrocious white suit. Just like all he could do was lean forward and kiss Cas, all he can do with his baby brother is step forward and wrap Sam in the biggest bear hug he can manage. Sam allows this for a moment, even hugs back, before releasing him and obviously expecting Dean to do the same.
“Dude,” Sam says in a strained voice when Dean doesn’t release his desperate grip, patting him on the back, “you’re squeezing me so tight I can breathe.”
“Right, sorry,” Dean says, stepping back and looking off into the distance, unable to meet Sam’s eyes.
“It’s only been a couple of weeks,” Sam says, meaning to be comforting.
Dean nods, and for a moment, that’s really what it feels like, just a few weeks separating him from the last time he had seen Sam rather than years and years and that feeling is the only thing that lets the tightness in his chest loosen up enough for him to look Sam in the eye, give him an easy-going nod and say, “Yeah. I bet you missed me more than I missed you.”
*
For the next three days, Dean spends his days with Sam and his nights with Cas, doing all the things he’d missed over the past couple years. On the third morning, Sam gives him a worried look as Dean digs in to his fourth side of bacon, drinks coffee topped with whipped cream and so sugared there are lumps stuck to the bottom of cup.
“Haven’t you ever heard the word ‘cholesterol’ before?” Sam asks.
Dean lets out a huge, satisfied burp in response, smiles, and heads to the bathroom.
He’s whistling as he relives himself at the urinal, only to look up and see the reflection of Zachariah standing behind him in the mirror in front of him.
“Holy fucking shit!” he yells, zipping up as quickly as possible. “What the hell are you doing?”
“No need to be self-conscious, Dean,” Zach says. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“Is there a reason you’re popping up behind me in the restroom?” Dean demands as he moves to the sink to wash his hands. “I still have four days.”
“Just wanted to let you know we could still find you. In case you were having any second thoughts.”
Dean narrows his eyes in the mirror. His question is unspoken, but it’s enough for Zachariah, creepy, fucking bastard that he is.
“Those sigils don’t work once we have eyes on you. You and your little boy toy should have maybe thought about going to another motel.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dean curses under his breath. “You were watching.”
“Mmm,” Zachariah answers, unimpressed. “We were all rather surprised you had it in you,” he says, giving Dean a one-sided smile at his own innuendo.
Dean, unamused, glares at Zach’s reflection. “Is there a rule that says I can only have one angel riding me? Because otherwise, I still got four days to do what I like.”
Zachariah gives him that same, smarmy smile, says, “Don’t forget, you’ll be seeing me again, Dean,” and disappears.
“And stop watching us, prick,” Dean calls after him, adding a “voyeuristic bastard,” under his breath for good measure.
*
Dean lasts another three days, seriously thinking he go through with his deal, not breathing a word of it to Cas or to Sam, knowing they would convince him not to do it. But with every hour he spends with Sam, working a case just like old times, as if this one isn’t going to be the last; and every minute with Cas, the angel’s mouth a burning brand against his skin, as if this new and precious thing isn’t something he’d give anything to keep, he feels his resolve shattering.
“Take us somewhere else,” Dean asks the night before Zachariah is supposed to show again and his week is up, while he and Cas are still mostly clothed, Cas’ mouth on his nipple.
“Where do you want to go?” Cas asks, looking up.
“Surprise me,” Dean says, tangling his fingers in Cas’ hair so that he can pull Cas’ head up and kiss his mouth. He closes his eyes as they kiss and when he opens them again, he finds himself in the Impala.
“Somewhere else,” Dean says, rolling his eyes, “besides the parking lot.”
“Look outside,” Cas tells him and when Dean does, he sees not the flat asphalt of the mostly empty motel lot but a tranquil lake surrounded by trees.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Dean says as Cas leans back in to pepper his neck with affectionate ate nips.
“And what is that?” Cas asks without stopping.
Dean thinks about asking Cas to stop, but really it’s easier to say without having to look him in the eye. “I made a deal,” he admits, “and now i don't think i can go through with it.”
His words do of course make Cas stop so that he can sit up and look at Dean.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?” Dean asks.
“You can tell me if that’s what you need to do,” Cas responds. “But I think I know.”
“You know?” Dean challenges. It’s not that he thinks Cas is in league with Zachariah, he knows he would never do that, but he thought they’d talked about this mind-reading thing and that Cas had promised to stop. It hadn’t been an issue really anymore in his own time, but he distinctly remembers that talk and Cas’ promise just a few months prior during this year.
“You told Zachariah you would say yes to Michael so that he would send you back in time to change the past.”
“And how do you know that?” Dean demands. He’s not angry, not really. More defensive. There are things in his memories he’s not proud of, things that he doesn’t want Cas to see. Already, he’s starting to come back around to his past-self’s way of thinking, that there are some lines you don’t cross, the lines that keep you from becoming no better than the thing that you’re fighting against. And Dean had crossed them, of course, more than once, without any remorse. There’s things that you can justify when you’re living in a shack in the wood with no running water, limited food supplies, and a couple thousand croats less than a mile away, just waiting to sink their teeth into you that you have a harder time accepting after a couple nights in a warm bed with a full stomach. Things such as saying yes to an archangel bent on destroying half the world in revenge.
Cas is silent for a moment. “I suspected,” he admits. “So I confirmed it.” He doesn’t sound at all judgmental, about his actions or any of Dean’s own.
It makes Dean sigh and say, “so you know. That I’m not in the time I’m supposed to be in.”
“No,” Cas says, leaning forward to place a light kiss on Dean’s lips. “You’re not.”
“I killed him, you know, or I might as well have. The Dean you love, the Dean from this time.”
Cas presses a kiss on each of Dean's cheeks and another on each eyelid, “Dean,” he says. “There is no you and he. There is only you.”
“I don't understand.”
“Time travel has rules. Angels can bend them, but not break them. Zachariah couldn’t bring you’re body back to 2009 and leave behind the dean that was supposed to be in this time, but he could supersede your memories.”
“You mean-”
“This scar,” Cas says, tracing the place on Dean’s chin where the scar used to be, “didn’t fade. The Dean from this time never got it in the first place.”
“And… that dean’s memories? Are they in my body?”
“That future changed as soon as your past self experienced it. The past can’t be changed, but the future is made of infinite possibilities. Your future, the future you lived, was just one of many.”
“So I, I didn’t have to come back? My past self - he had a chance to change things on his own?” Dean covers his eyes with a hand. Cas gently peels it away, kiss his mouth in a slow, decadent slid of lips, forces dean to look him the eye. Dean wonders if it would have been better that way, to melt away into a million other futures and give his past self the chance he deserved to try things his own way.
“Dean - the choices that you make are what make you who you are. I never expected anything less from you.”
“But you, the you in my time. You were different.”
“I can tell you, with absolute assurance, no matter what became of me or what happened between us, the me in the future never stopped loving you. And that is and always will be the core of myself.”
Dean's heart aches at the thought that he'd never been willing to give that Cas a chance, the Cas that had given up so much for him and stayed by his side of five years, wonders how things might have been different if he had. He clings to the Cas in front of him, the Cas he'd longed for and has again, praying to God in a way he'd only recently learned how to that he will never, ever be forced to give him up again.
“What do I do?” he asks, a near inaudible whisper against Cas' chest that of course Cas can hear.
“I think it’s fairly simple,” Cas says in his no-nonsense tone, the same voice he’d used when he pinned Dean to the wall and informed him that he’d given up everything for him and lost his link to heaven. “You don’t say yes.”
“It’s that easy, huh?”
“You did, after all, keep saying no for five years. I think you can manage as long as it will take for you and Sam to figure out a way to stop Lucifer and the coming apocalypse.”
Dean’s not sure where Cas’ unwavering faith in him comes from, but he finds himself strangely reluctant to let him down. “Well, one thing we’d better keep in mind,” Dean says. “We’d better stay the hell away from any Jehovah’s Witnesses from now on.”
pairing/characters: 2014!Dean/Cas
genre: the end!verse
rating: R
word count: 4600
summary: That lesson that the angels tried to teach him - the one where you can't change the past - never really sunk in.
a/n: Inspired by one line from The End (5.04): "I'm begging you. Say yes. But you won't. Cause I didn't. Because that's just not us, is it?"
If 2014!Dean is willing to say yes and he knows that 2009!Dean won't, what if he did something about it?
Dean Winchester says no.
For five long years, they manage to get by without the world ending and the thought never crosses his mind that he's doing the wrong thing, but then January 2014 rolls around and his entire world goes to hell. The croats had been popping up in small batches here and there, with Dean, Cas, and Bobby in one group traversing the country to clean them up and Jo, Ellen, and Sam doing the same in another, but in 2014 the croat population explodes and they become a problem that the world can't ignore. The supernatural isn't secret anymore but becomes headline news and demons and croats are something everyone believes in. Hunters can no longer keep up with their growing numbers. The military deals with the threat their own way - by destroying the affected area and anyone inside of it - and are a new danger unto themselves for anyone caught in the crossfire. In short succession, Bobby dies, Sam says yes, Cas' gets hooked on any dugs he can get his hands on, and, finally, the angels abandon the Earth to it's fate.
Dean Winchester says yes, but there's no one - no angels - left to hear him. He says yes and yes again, screams it over and over to the uncaring sky. When he knows definitively that no one left in Heaven is willing to listen, that's when he starts to pray.
Regret hounds him for months. If onlys accompany him at breakfast - more often than not, canned spam and whatever sort of vegetable they'd been able to scrounge up in precious, undamaged cans or find growing wild near their camp at Chitaqua - while what ifs follow in his footsteps as he and his paltry band of survivors do what they can to keep the croats' numbers down.
It's a losing battle and he knows it. When rumors of the Colt start to surface, he does what he has to find out where it is and get his hands on it. Even as he's torturing them - pouring holy water down their throats, cutting them open with Ruby's knife and rubbing salt into their wounds - the demons won't stop laughing as they scream out in pain.
"Alastair would be so proud," they tell him and Dean doesn't even blink because it’s true, he really was an excellent pupil. Eventually, they all tell him what he wants to know.
They're so close to finding the colt that Dean can taste it when he senses a new change in the air, a tingle of electricity that raises the hair on the back of his neck.
He goes by Cas' cabin and asks, "do you feel it too?" He can't bring himself to come all the way in, simply leans his back against the door frame, scuffing his boot against the rough grain of the unfinished floorboards and waits for Cas to answer, but Cas only stares at him blankly, pupils blown wide from the drugs. Dean shakes his head and turns to leave when Cas does finally speak up, but only then to ask if Dean might loosen up if he took a few of Cas’ Percocet. His actual words involve a stick and Dean’s ass, but as time has passed and the more naturally Cas’ foul language has flown off his tongue, the less inclined Dean is to pay him any mind.
The strange, electric feeling doesn't go away and Dean can't say he's all that surprised to find his past self lurking around in the dark a few days later. Blah, blah, time-travel, blah, he could really care less why the-Dean-from-his-past is there. Zachariah, though, that part is interesting. He can't say he's at all concerned about Zach's plans with Dean's past self, but an angel - one strong enough to send someone through time - that he can work with.
He knows what it is going to take to convince his past self to say yes, and he knows this little jaunt to the future, it’s simply not going to do. That Dean will never say yes to Michael, not until he's seen what Dean has seen, knows what Dean knows, carries the scars that Dean carries. Has lost the ideals that Dean used to hold dear, the idea that any one life is precious, including his. This Dean would die a thousand deaths, spend a thousand years in Hell on the rack if only to give humanity any kind of small, fighting chance.
So he bides his time, goes about his mission to retrieve the Colt, and waits until he has his past self alone. He figures he has two choices here - he can take his people on a suicide mission or he can put an end to things now. He chooses the later. Deep in his heart he'd known - even if he could track down the gun, he could never put a bullet in Sam's heart if there was any chance his baby brother was still in there somewhere. And if somehow, he had managed to deaden his heart enough to do it, what kind of world would he be saving? One in which every single person he loves is gone, not to mention a huge percentage of the population is dead or worse, a world under attack by the croat virus. No, this is the only way.
His past self is going on and on about making compromising and how he never would and Dean’s not going to argue. He knows it’s true. Instead, he smiles; a reckless baring of his teeth that’s more an acknowledgement he’s got nothing left to lose than any demonstration of pleasure or satisfaction. “You should shut up now,” he say, bringing the Colt up to press the muzzle against his past-self's forehead and cocking it before pitching his voice to call, “Hey Zach, why don't you come on down here. There's something I need to discuss with you. Don't move, by the way,” he tells his past self, “or I'll blow our brains out in a way that scumbag will never be able to bring us back from.”
Zachariah appears with the flutter of distant wings, suit as pristine as it was the last time Dean had seen it, five years ago. “Ah, Dean,” he greets. “Why am I not surprised that’d you pull something like this just to goad me into talking to you? What exactly are you hoping to accomplish here? Suicide? If you kill him, you kill yourself.”
Dean gives him a one-sided shrug with his free shoulder. “Strangely enough, I think I’d be okay with that. But I had something else in mind. I want to make a deal.”
“There’s very little you have to offer us now,” Zachariah notes, disinterested.
“You’d be surprised. You want a willing vessel, don't you? Well, you got one. This guy,” Dean says, giving a little push against the other Dean's head with the muzzle of the Colt causing his past self to flinch slightly away, “he'll never be what you want.”
“And why do you say that? I thought this little exercise was going perfectly to plan.”
“Because you’re just showing him a brief little glimpse of something that I’ve lived. I know exactly what it's going to take to get this little shit to give in to Michael. And a little jaunt to the future to witness the mess he’s made of it, that's not going to do it. He’s going to go home, sleep in his warm bed with heat, electricity, and fucking toilet paper, and he’s going to thing, that won’t be me. I can change that future some other way. But we both know that’s not going to happen.”
“But you, you’d say yes?”
“I'm ready and willing, baby, just take me back and I’ll be Michael's bitch. I'm only asking for one thing. You give me one week. One week with my brother, the way he used to be, and you can have my yes.”
“How do we know we can trust you? You did say and I quote, ‘he’s going to go home, sleep in his warm bed with heat, electricity, and toilet paper and think that he’s going to be able to change the future some other way.’ How do we know that a warm bed and a hot meal isn’t going to get you thinking that way too?”
“Because it won’t. What do you need to me say? I would do absolutely anything to keep this future from happening, and I know that letting Michael wear me to the prom is my best bet. If you want a contract signed in blood, I’d be more than happy to draw one up for you.”
“As you know, that contract thing is more Hell’s cup of tea than Heaven's,” Zachariah says, mildly. “One last question, what do you intend to do with your past self? Leaving him here would be akin to killing him, you know.”
“You can't honestly-“ Dean's past self starts to say, but a wave of Zachariah’s hand silences him instantly.
“You think I give a shit, after all I've been through, about one more death when the entire world is at stake? Who the fuck cares if it's me. Do whatever you want with him.”
Zachariah smiles, slick and shady, the expression fitting on the business man he's wearing. “I believe you. I think we have a deal, Mr. Winchester,” he says as he reaches out a hand to Dean's forehead and sends him slamming back half a decade.
He arrives in 2009 empty-handed, dizzy and disoriented, thinking he'd blacked out until he sees the streetlights. The world hums here, in a way that his hadn't - at least not until Zachariah had shown up again so recently - in a way that feels like home. His knees wobble and he feels about to collapse when a strong hand wraps around his arm, holding him steady.
"Cas," he breathes when his eyes focus on Cas' face, and oh god, it's him - the Cas he hasn't seen for months, years - the too literal man with the intent gaze, the one who would do anything, anything for Dean and has, the one Dean's been in love with since the moment they met and before - when Cas had put his hands on Dean's soul and pulled him from the fire and brimstone of Hell, even if Dean doesn't remember that part - and he finds himself leaning forward to kiss this Cas, he can’t stop himself. This was never something he'd intended, not before the croats and not when he'd been planning to force Zachariah to send him back instead of his past self. His love for Cas is something private, something he'd kept locked away inside of himself like some kind of precious metal that would tarnish and decay in the grim reality of Dean's world if he kept taking it out to look at it or if he even touched it.
Dean's heart had done nothing but ache when he'd been around the very human and vice-ridden Cas from his time, longing for the man he'd used to be, the angel that Dean had respected. But now that he's here again, right in front of him with his hand gripping Dean’s arm right above the mark he’d left there, something inside Dean breaks and there's nothing he can do to resist.
Cas' lips taste like fresh rain and when Dean sweeps his tongue inside Cas' yielding mouth, it tingles like static electricity, barely there but somehow Dean can feel it down to his bones. Cas stands still for a moment, relaxed but unresponsive, then returns the kiss with a fervor few would believe possible from him. Dean, though, he’s not surprised, not about that at least, just surges into the returned kiss that astonishes himself. He burns with a desire that he hasn’t felt in years, not just those five long years that separates his memories from this moment, but before he sold his soul to save his brother.
“What, how,” Dean asks when he breaks away, shaky and exhausted but so, so turned on, and what he means is, why did Zach deliver him here of all places, but Cas says, simply, “we had an appointment,” and suddenly, there, burning in his mind as if it had happened just yesterday and not five years before, is a conversation in which Cas tells Dean he has news and Dean begs for sleep. It occurs to him that Zach never intended to deliver him, literally, into Cas’ waiting arms, but somehow their cosmic lines must have crossed and Cas had stolen him away. Dean briefly wonders if this buys him more time or less, but decides now is not the time to be thinking those kind of thoughts, not when Cas’ mouth is still reddened from Dean’s own lips.
“Cas,” he says, speaking his name as reverently as a prayer, “don't ever change,” and, because the memory of an apathetic, drug-addled Cas is still sharp in his mind, pulls him in for another scorching kiss to burn those images from his mind.
“Can we,” he says, whispered against the interference of Cas’ questing lips, “do you… we need a bed!”
“Of course,” Cas answers, and they’re back in the room that this Dean had supposedly occupied just yesterday, not so many years ago that he couldn’t say what was the color of the wallpaper or the bedspread. Blue, his mind supplies, as if it had been just yesterday, but Dean doesn’t have the brainpower to spare on the thought, not when Cas is pushing him backwards until the back of his knees collide with the bed, Cas’ mouth hot pressure on his neck.
Dean's never done this before, had sex with another man. If he’d spared any thought about it at all it would be to think it’s probably uncomfortable and not at all desirable, but as they shed clothes, Cas’ hands in Dean’s most intimate places, all he can feel is bliss.
“How’re you, how do you…” is all he can get out, his voice trailing off into a moan as he lies prone and spread-eagle on the bed, one hand still tangled in his shirt sleeve, letting Cas do all the work.
“How do I know what I’m doing when I haven’t done this before?” Cas finishes for him. “I may be a virgin but I’ve had millennia to observe. Believe me when I say that’s long enough.
It is uncomfortable, at least as first, but as soon as Cas’ dick starts hitting his prostate, he doesn’t even care. All he wants is more, more of this feeling. His eyes roll back and his eyelids keep fluttering shut, refuse to cooperate and stay open and focused when Dean wants to meet Cas’ eye, see him, the Cas he’s been missing for years.
It’s over all too quickly so Dean convinces Cas to do it again, as soon as possible, and is trying to persuade him that he’s not too tired for a third when he falls asleep mid-sentence.
He blows Cas in the morning, his hand working furiously between his own legs, and the only thing he needs to tip him over the edge is the thought that Cas’ dick, thick and heavy on his tongue, had been inside of him last night, and he’s done, that’s it. He let’s Cas fuck his face because that’s about all he can do until Cas follows him over the edge a few minutes later.
He rushes through a shower and a quick shave, the first close shave he’s been able to have in weeks, months. A shave with a real razor, shaving cream and hot water, only sparing enough time to note that a nasty scar on the underside of his chin he’d gotten six months ago must not have been too bad because it’s gone now. He calls Sam and kisses Cas sweetly.
“You’ll call me tonight?” he questions, earning a nod before Cas flutters away in a way that is shockingly normal and shockingly different all at the same time.
Before Dean drives off to meet Sam, he spends a good long while in the Impala, running his hands over her familiar leather and vinyl, cool metal and smooth glass, relearning the touch of his baby under his fingertips. He’d lost the Impala months ago, when gas was nearly impossible to come by and she needed more repairs than he had access to parts, the roads gone to rubble and potholes in the danger zones - the most infested - without people willing or able to repair them.
Dean thinks maybe he should have a speech prepared, something meaningful to say to tell Sam he’s been admitted back into the fold because the opposite is just too dire to imagine, but all his words fly right out the window, so to speak, when he sets eyes on his baby brother, back in flannel and jeans and not that atrocious white suit. Just like all he could do was lean forward and kiss Cas, all he can do with his baby brother is step forward and wrap Sam in the biggest bear hug he can manage. Sam allows this for a moment, even hugs back, before releasing him and obviously expecting Dean to do the same.
“Dude,” Sam says in a strained voice when Dean doesn’t release his desperate grip, patting him on the back, “you’re squeezing me so tight I can breathe.”
“Right, sorry,” Dean says, stepping back and looking off into the distance, unable to meet Sam’s eyes.
“It’s only been a couple of weeks,” Sam says, meaning to be comforting.
Dean nods, and for a moment, that’s really what it feels like, just a few weeks separating him from the last time he had seen Sam rather than years and years and that feeling is the only thing that lets the tightness in his chest loosen up enough for him to look Sam in the eye, give him an easy-going nod and say, “Yeah. I bet you missed me more than I missed you.”
*
For the next three days, Dean spends his days with Sam and his nights with Cas, doing all the things he’d missed over the past couple years. On the third morning, Sam gives him a worried look as Dean digs in to his fourth side of bacon, drinks coffee topped with whipped cream and so sugared there are lumps stuck to the bottom of cup.
“Haven’t you ever heard the word ‘cholesterol’ before?” Sam asks.
Dean lets out a huge, satisfied burp in response, smiles, and heads to the bathroom.
He’s whistling as he relives himself at the urinal, only to look up and see the reflection of Zachariah standing behind him in the mirror in front of him.
“Holy fucking shit!” he yells, zipping up as quickly as possible. “What the hell are you doing?”
“No need to be self-conscious, Dean,” Zach says. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“Is there a reason you’re popping up behind me in the restroom?” Dean demands as he moves to the sink to wash his hands. “I still have four days.”
“Just wanted to let you know we could still find you. In case you were having any second thoughts.”
Dean narrows his eyes in the mirror. His question is unspoken, but it’s enough for Zachariah, creepy, fucking bastard that he is.
“Those sigils don’t work once we have eyes on you. You and your little boy toy should have maybe thought about going to another motel.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dean curses under his breath. “You were watching.”
“Mmm,” Zachariah answers, unimpressed. “We were all rather surprised you had it in you,” he says, giving Dean a one-sided smile at his own innuendo.
Dean, unamused, glares at Zach’s reflection. “Is there a rule that says I can only have one angel riding me? Because otherwise, I still got four days to do what I like.”
Zachariah gives him that same, smarmy smile, says, “Don’t forget, you’ll be seeing me again, Dean,” and disappears.
“And stop watching us, prick,” Dean calls after him, adding a “voyeuristic bastard,” under his breath for good measure.
*
Dean lasts another three days, seriously thinking he go through with his deal, not breathing a word of it to Cas or to Sam, knowing they would convince him not to do it. But with every hour he spends with Sam, working a case just like old times, as if this one isn’t going to be the last; and every minute with Cas, the angel’s mouth a burning brand against his skin, as if this new and precious thing isn’t something he’d give anything to keep, he feels his resolve shattering.
“Take us somewhere else,” Dean asks the night before Zachariah is supposed to show again and his week is up, while he and Cas are still mostly clothed, Cas’ mouth on his nipple.
“Where do you want to go?” Cas asks, looking up.
“Surprise me,” Dean says, tangling his fingers in Cas’ hair so that he can pull Cas’ head up and kiss his mouth. He closes his eyes as they kiss and when he opens them again, he finds himself in the Impala.
“Somewhere else,” Dean says, rolling his eyes, “besides the parking lot.”
“Look outside,” Cas tells him and when Dean does, he sees not the flat asphalt of the mostly empty motel lot but a tranquil lake surrounded by trees.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Dean says as Cas leans back in to pepper his neck with affectionate ate nips.
“And what is that?” Cas asks without stopping.
Dean thinks about asking Cas to stop, but really it’s easier to say without having to look him in the eye. “I made a deal,” he admits, “and now i don't think i can go through with it.”
His words do of course make Cas stop so that he can sit up and look at Dean.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?” Dean asks.
“You can tell me if that’s what you need to do,” Cas responds. “But I think I know.”
“You know?” Dean challenges. It’s not that he thinks Cas is in league with Zachariah, he knows he would never do that, but he thought they’d talked about this mind-reading thing and that Cas had promised to stop. It hadn’t been an issue really anymore in his own time, but he distinctly remembers that talk and Cas’ promise just a few months prior during this year.
“You told Zachariah you would say yes to Michael so that he would send you back in time to change the past.”
“And how do you know that?” Dean demands. He’s not angry, not really. More defensive. There are things in his memories he’s not proud of, things that he doesn’t want Cas to see. Already, he’s starting to come back around to his past-self’s way of thinking, that there are some lines you don’t cross, the lines that keep you from becoming no better than the thing that you’re fighting against. And Dean had crossed them, of course, more than once, without any remorse. There’s things that you can justify when you’re living in a shack in the wood with no running water, limited food supplies, and a couple thousand croats less than a mile away, just waiting to sink their teeth into you that you have a harder time accepting after a couple nights in a warm bed with a full stomach. Things such as saying yes to an archangel bent on destroying half the world in revenge.
Cas is silent for a moment. “I suspected,” he admits. “So I confirmed it.” He doesn’t sound at all judgmental, about his actions or any of Dean’s own.
It makes Dean sigh and say, “so you know. That I’m not in the time I’m supposed to be in.”
“No,” Cas says, leaning forward to place a light kiss on Dean’s lips. “You’re not.”
“I killed him, you know, or I might as well have. The Dean you love, the Dean from this time.”
Cas presses a kiss on each of Dean's cheeks and another on each eyelid, “Dean,” he says. “There is no you and he. There is only you.”
“I don't understand.”
“Time travel has rules. Angels can bend them, but not break them. Zachariah couldn’t bring you’re body back to 2009 and leave behind the dean that was supposed to be in this time, but he could supersede your memories.”
“You mean-”
“This scar,” Cas says, tracing the place on Dean’s chin where the scar used to be, “didn’t fade. The Dean from this time never got it in the first place.”
“And… that dean’s memories? Are they in my body?”
“That future changed as soon as your past self experienced it. The past can’t be changed, but the future is made of infinite possibilities. Your future, the future you lived, was just one of many.”
“So I, I didn’t have to come back? My past self - he had a chance to change things on his own?” Dean covers his eyes with a hand. Cas gently peels it away, kiss his mouth in a slow, decadent slid of lips, forces dean to look him the eye. Dean wonders if it would have been better that way, to melt away into a million other futures and give his past self the chance he deserved to try things his own way.
“Dean - the choices that you make are what make you who you are. I never expected anything less from you.”
“But you, the you in my time. You were different.”
“I can tell you, with absolute assurance, no matter what became of me or what happened between us, the me in the future never stopped loving you. And that is and always will be the core of myself.”
Dean's heart aches at the thought that he'd never been willing to give that Cas a chance, the Cas that had given up so much for him and stayed by his side of five years, wonders how things might have been different if he had. He clings to the Cas in front of him, the Cas he'd longed for and has again, praying to God in a way he'd only recently learned how to that he will never, ever be forced to give him up again.
“What do I do?” he asks, a near inaudible whisper against Cas' chest that of course Cas can hear.
“I think it’s fairly simple,” Cas says in his no-nonsense tone, the same voice he’d used when he pinned Dean to the wall and informed him that he’d given up everything for him and lost his link to heaven. “You don’t say yes.”
“It’s that easy, huh?”
“You did, after all, keep saying no for five years. I think you can manage as long as it will take for you and Sam to figure out a way to stop Lucifer and the coming apocalypse.”
Dean’s not sure where Cas’ unwavering faith in him comes from, but he finds himself strangely reluctant to let him down. “Well, one thing we’d better keep in mind,” Dean says. “We’d better stay the hell away from any Jehovah’s Witnesses from now on.”