fic, Lost/SPN: down in a hole (Jack/future!Castiel), NC17 for missy_useless
Okay. I HAVE LUAU STUFF TODAY. I might have more before I need to be out to see Patti Smith today. And since I'm on a roll, apparently, I might have some tomorrow. Sorry in advance for spamming. This = the first.
Title: Down In A Hole
Rating: NC17
Warnings: sex, drugs usage, generous alcohol usage, mentions of orgies.
Pairing: Jack/Castiel [-> Nirvana!Jack/future!Cas.], implied one sided future!Cas/future!Dean
Words: 3260
Summary: Castiel doesn’t tell Jack that he sees himself in the way Jack’s hands shake, and that he has an Oxycodone bottle neatly lined on his nightstand, too. Or, the one where the Oceanic Six never went back to the island, Jack never detoxed and he's at Camp Chitaqua, too.
Spoilers: for 5x04, The End, for SPN, for the S3 finale and the O6 stuff for Lost. Except that then it goes AU, but I'd say you're safe if you saw S4.
Disclaimer: neither Lost nor SPN are mine. I swear.
A/N: for Queen missy_useless at lostsquee, who asked for crossovers. And I know she likes Jack. And... er. I'll admit. I had sort of decided that this pairing was a doable crossover pairing ages ago but I never went there for some reason, but I had this other idea that you might have liked it, so... I really hope you do? <33333 for the rest.. idek when I decided I liked the idea. I just hope it makes sense. ;) title from Alice In Chains.
Castiel doesn’t really notice the doctor until he’s forced to.
It’s not like he actually keeps track of who gets in and who gets out. He lost track of that after Bobby got out, and he’d like to keep it this way. Alright, he has lost track of a lot of things since Dean stopped giving a damn about what he does, but that’s not really the matter. Whenever he thinks about it, it’s usually the point when he goes searching for alcohol, because he really doesn’t need to think about the times when Dean used to care and Bobby used to be around and Sam didn’t use to be a prom dress, as Dean put it.
There are a lot of things that Castiel doesn’t need, like breaking his foot. Not that before he felt much useful, but when he hears the bones cracking as he runs and falls (and at least Risa had the presence of mind to cover for him and haul him into the car), well, that’s when he realizes that he’s really, really useless.
Someone gives him morphine and before he passes away, he wonders if at least Dean will take the effort to put a cast on him. He used to bandage his cuts, when Castiel first started bleeding.
He wakes up and no, it isn’t Dean putting a cast on him. It’s a guy he has never seen before, whose beard is pretty much hideous, whose eyes are as bloodshot as Castiel thinks his might be, whose right hand shakes once in a while and whose breath stinks of Jack Daniels.
Then Castiel remembers that some time ago someone said they found a doctor, and it’s just fitting that this would be the kind of doctor someone finds now.
“Who… what…” he tries, and clearly he can’t manage. He feels groggy and unfocused, and except for the doctor’s face, everything is fuzzy. He can only feel pain in his foot, though it’s dulled, and the rest spins.
“Be thankful that it was a clean break and you didn’t damage any tissue. You’ll be walking again in a month. Maybe two. I’d like to say one, but the equipment is what it is. Also, next time you go on a mission, I’d suggest going sober because that was sheer luck. Damn, I really need a drink,” the guy mutters, and there’s a bottle of something nearby from which he takes one.
“If you meant to ask who am I, name’s Jack. I used to do this for a living,” he almost snarls, and then puts the bottle away and his shaking hands are on Castiel’s foot again. Castiel thinks he’s putting a cast on it. He can’t say.
“And now?” Castiel manages, and Jack just laughs.
“Now I apparently do that anyway, but I guess it’s because you can’t afford any better.”
That’s a point, Castiel thinks before closing his eyes, and then everything blacks out again.
When he wakes up, feeling much more focused, he’s alone and his foot hurts like nothing ever hurt in his life except for the moment the last of his Grace was torn away from him, and he can’t help a scream coming out of his mouth. He breaks into a cold sweat and then the door opens. It’s heavy steps, and then a flashlight is turned on and Castiel can make out Jack’s face.
“Just woke up, huh?”
Castiel nods, feeling too distressed to talk. He’s shaking all over, he doesn’t even want to know what it is that his body aches for, of all the bottles neatly parading on his nightstand in his own cabin, and he’s in so much pain that he just wants to scream himself hoarse.
“Clearly. Someone told me you weren’t exactly used to feeling pain, were you?”
Castiel shakes his head and just wishes for Jack to do something.
Jack looks at him for a second and then kneels near the bed.
“Okay, listen, you can try to ride this out or I can give you some more morphine. Sorry but…” he trails, taking out a bottle of pills from his pocket and swallowing two small, white, round ones dry, “it’s the only offer I can make. From your face, I’d say you want the morphine.”
Castiel nods frantically, unable to even form words.
“Fine. I won’t be the one saying anything to you for taking the fucking easy way out,” Jack says, and a minute later Castiel feels a needle in the crook of his arm and he just hopes that Jack doesn’t comment on the other faint needle tracks that Castiel knows must be visible.
The pain lessens then, and everything is fuzzy again, except maybe for Jack’s face, but fuzzy is better than suffering that much. Especially when Castiel has spent the last four years trying to do everything in order not to feel that kind of pain.
He doesn’t really feel coherent. Or, at least not as coherent as he could. He doesn’t know when he starts to talk and he doesn’t really even get what he’s saying except that he’s pretty sure if he asked whether Dean ever was here.
“Sorry, haven’t seen the fearless leader in three days or so,” Jack asks, and Castiel would snort at the nickname if he just didn’t feel so tired.
Then he blacks out.
--
Jack refuses to keep on giving him morphine a week later and sends him to his cabin.
The first thing Castiel does is reaching for the Valium bottle and grant himself twelve hours of dreamless sleep.
--
He doesn’t see Jack for a while after that, mostly because he doesn’t get out of the cabin much; actually, he doesn’t get out of the cabin at all, and if he has to rely on some girl whose name he can’t remember in order to be brought some food in, then he doesn’t care.
Jack actually does come himself, to take the cast off.
His eyes are always bloodshot and his breath always stinks of whiskey, and his clothes are remarkably dirty, but when he speaks he sounds coherent.
Castiel thinks he envies him that.
“You haven’t even tried to walk, have you?”
Castiel shakes his head, exhaling smoke from the cigarette he had between his lips when Jack got in, and then Jack shakes his head and hauls him up without a warning.
Castiel doesn’t scream when his foot touches the ground just out of sheer force of will.
Also, he notices, Jack’s hands shake. The one on Castiel’s hip and the one around his wrist.
“What… what are you…”
“If I have to do my job I’m going to finish it. Also, I don’t know if anyone told you, but you’re shit at taking care of yourself.”
For being a doctor, Castiel thinks, he is most definitely the blunt kind.
“Excuse me,” Castiel spits back, “but you don’t seem much better off than I am.”
“That’s a point,” Jack concedes, his lips almost smiling but not quite, “but at least I’m functioning. I can’t say the same about you.”
Castiel doesn’t have an answer for that, and so he grits his teeth and starts walking while leaning on Jack and smelling alcohol all the way.
--
Castiel does get back on his feet, and the two times he meets Dean in the following month, the latter barely acknowledges his presence.
It shouldn’t hurt anymore but it does, and that’s when Castiel asks where Jack’s cabin is and brings cheap gin along with him.
He finds Jack in a dirty white shirt, sitting on a mattress, and staring out of his window.
There’s a bottle near the bed. The label reads Oxycodone. Jack’s hands are shaking. Not a surprise.
“What are you doing here?” Jack asks, sounding merely bored, and Castiel hands him the bottle.
“I found this. And you did put me back on my feet, so I wondered if you might want to share it.”
Castiel doesn’t tell Jack that he sees himself in the way Jack’s hands shake, and that he has an Oxycodone bottle neatly lined on his nightstand, too, and that he doesn’t grow a beard out of laziness just because he likes his meaningless sex too much and all the girls he’s been with hated beards.
Jack looks at him for one second, then he moves a bit and pats the other side of the bed. After Castiel sits, he takes the bottle, takes a long drink and hands it over. Castiel mimics him.
They don’t say anything and it’s better like this because there’s no need to talk. Sometimes Castiel misses the quiet and the silences that he used to share with Dean so nicely. It felt good, when they shared silences. Now Dean is all screams and harshness and roughness, and the girls whose name he doesn’t remember are soft and willing and noisy; this, right now, seems like the best he’ll get, and so he asks Jack whether he can steal a couple of pills. He’s starting to feel itchy.
“Help yourself,” Jack says, and Castiel does.
--
“Not to ask anything personal, but what brings you here?” Castiel asks one day, always in Jack’s cabin, always a bottle between them, even if it isn’t gin this time.
“Here to your camp, or here in the sense of I-am-a-doctor-but-I-don’t-look-like-it?”
“Whatever you want,” Castiel answers sincerely.
“You’ll think it’s crazy.”
“I know crazy, don’t you worry about that,” Castiel chuckles, and doesn’t he just.
Jack says that he was on a plane that crashed on an island. Some of the survivors, including him, escaped. Then he realized they needed to go back to get the others, but it never happened and that’s what guilt does to you. He never was back on that island and he never stopped drinking too much since the day he lost his job, and then years passed, and then an apocalypse started. And then, apparently, when apocalypses start, if you still know how to patch someone, your conditions aren’t a problem.
“And what about you?” Jack asks before Castiel can comment.
Castiel shrugs and swallows dry another Oxycodone pill. “I used to be an angel. Then all the others left and I stayed. Therefore, I lost my wings. I apparently don’t cope with it very well. The end,” he answers, and for a second Jack flinches.
“What?”
“Nothing. You just, reminded me of someone I knew. Ages ago. He told me stuff once. He phrased it like that, more or less.”
“Aren’t you freaking out?”
Jack shakes his head, takes a drink as his right hand shakes more than usual and then takes a breath before answering.
“On the island, there was goddamn black smoke that took form of dead people. Said island fucking disappeared before my eyes. Now, there’s the devil walking the earth, I’m living through a zombie apocalypse and I should be surprised if angels exist or that you were one? Please, just hand me the fucking bottle.”
Castiel does.
--
Jack tastes like whiskey and Oxycodone and disinfectant, and Castiel knows that he probably stinks of more than one variety of pills, of gin and of sex, himself, but apparently Jack doesn’t care and that’s just fine with Castiel.
Castiel can’t even remember how one evening they went from drinking-and-sharing-pills to this, but for some reason he doesn’t try to fight it one second.
It’s just that Jack gets it, and Castiel doesn’t even need to explain him.
(Just so we’re clear about that, I’m not our fearless leader, Jack had said after they kissed first.
Fantastic, Castiel had answered, because that’s not what I’m searching for.)
The beard is hideous and in the way and Castiel is pretty sure he’ll have a rash on his chin tomorrow, but it doesn’t really mind. Jack tastes also like all the despair Castiel has been swallowing up until this point, and their clothes are torn and dirty more or less in the same way. Jack’s hands shake hard as he grips Castiel’s hair and Castiel lets him. It feels painful, but it feels more real than the girls do, and so Castiel kisses Jack hard, so hard that at some point Jack’s lower lip splits and Castiel feels blood on his tongue.
Jack doesn’t really seem to mind that.
“So what?” Jack breathes when they part; Castiel is practically straddling him and he feels like he’s going to explode. He feels high on feeling like this, like he’s with someone who fell as low as Castiel did and who isn’t ashamed of wearing it on his sleeve, and so he grips Jack’s shoulders harder.
“Just fuck me,” Castiel breathes, the words coming easily after a good almost-two-years of practice, and Jack nods and they turn and Castiel is on his back, and Jack does.
He does exactly like Castiel hoped. He’s not too slow but he isn’t even too harsh; he’s almost clinical while stripping off and while stripping Castiel off, but he reaches out for the drawer and gets some of the few Vaseline that’s left before actually doing anything.
(Castiel provides the condoms. Front left pocket of his jeans. Jack doesn’t seem too surprised when Castiel gives indications.)
Jack thrusts into him hard, though, starting fast and ending up faster, his hands touching him everywhere they can reach (and he has nice hands, Castiel thinks; long fingers, skin which is rough but only recently became so, and Castiel also likes how Jack’s arms feel around his shoulder as Castiel’s hips push up to meet his pace); Castiel moans harder with each thrust, unable to keep his mouth shut or to be silent. If it’s slightly painful, he doesn’t mind. It’s fine. He likes it painful; it makes everything more real.
Jack comes first, inside him, hard and fast and with a sound that Castiel can’t identify; when Jack’s hand reaches down and starts jacking him off with short, quick strokes, Castiel’s eyes roll back and he comes, too, long and hard and definitely messy. Castiel closes his eyes and for that handful of seconds he lets himself feel pleasure and nothing else.
At least it isn’t empty pleasure.
--
“You know,” Jack says some time later, the both of them naked and not wanting to move, and if they stink tomorrow, well, it’s nothing new, for Castiel at least, “I hadn’t done that. In a while. Maybe five years or so.”
“Well, that’s a fucking long time you went without.”
(Castiel went a much longer time without, but if he dwells about that, then he’ll think about the time Dean brought him to a whorehouse and that’s not what he needs. So he just licks his lips and doesn’t expand on that.)
“Once, I used to want to fix things. Or, well, people, maybe. I don’t think it went that well.”
“Seems to me like it obviously didn’t. You can see it in a nicer light, though.”
“And that would be?”
“I think we’re both so beyond it that you don’t even have to take it into account,” Castiel mutters, not exactly looking at Jack, but then Jack half-laughs and smiles, and it’s quite empty for a smile. Castiel knows the art of doing that, and he can just appreciate that Jack knows it, as well.
“That’d be it, I guess.”
“Well,” Castiel says before turning on his side, “I’d suggest shaving if you want to get laid more. It isn’t even hard to find the occasion, but that thing fucking itches.”
He turns on his side and doesn’t see Jack’s face, but the laugh coming after that sounds a bit more genuine.
--
Shaved, Jack doesn’t look much better. His eyes are always bloodshot, his cheeks are hollow and you can see it, and he’s pale and his skin’s color at times looks close to ash. It’s not like Castiel isn’t the same, though.
“That better?” Jack asks, two round tablets in his hand, before he brings it up to his mouth.
Castiel can feel absinthe on his own tongue as he stands from the bed in his cabin. Jack just appeared outside his doorstep, and it’s the first time that he comes here instead of the contrary.
Castiel raises his hand and runs his knuckles along Jack’s cheek. It’s not exactly smooth, but it’s just stubble. Not so different from his own.
Also, Castiel definitely has a rash on the right side of his chin, but it barely itches.
“Yeah,” Castiel whispers, “that’s definitely better. So, what now, are you going to ask someone out?” he asks, his own tone feeling falsely cheerful even to his own ears. Jack raises his eyes and stares at him, and for a second neither of them moves. Castiel takes in the sight meanwhile; Jack’s white shirt is half-open and definitely dirty, with blood, too. He’s too thin for his jeans. His eyes are red and tired and there are bags under them but they’re at least focused, and those hands with long, fine fingers are shaking again. That’s when Castiel realizes his left hand is twitching, too. Strange. He never noticed it before now. Maybe it’s getting to him, too, after all.
“I think I’d like something a bit more real than that,” Jack says, and Castiel envies him. For all he has learned to drop his carefully crafted and thought speech and for all Dean’s way of talking rubbed on him (and it means always getting straight to the point and being blunt and if it hurts, then you suck it up and deal), he never had the courage to actually say things like this out loud. He never told any of that to any of the girls that slept in his bed. He never told Dean that, and maybe he should have.
“And before you ask me, you don’t look like anyone I tried to save and failed. Or anyone I tried to keep, and failed anyway. And you don’t remind me of anyone. It’s just that I’m really done with pretenses,” Jack says, and Castiel nods and figures it’s good enough for him.
--
Jack always tastes like disinfectant. He might be drunk, he might be high, he might have put all kinds of things in his mouth, but he always tastes like that, underneath. It never goes away. Castiel never presumes that one day that will somehow seep into him. He knows he’ll never see the day when he feels cleansed as he once was.
He also knows that this will end sooner than later and that it will end badly because that’s how things go and he doesn’t really believe that good things do happen much anymore.
For now it doesn’t matter and as he lets Jack push him down into his bed, he tries to find the disinfectant among the whiskey and the despair and the Oxycodone that he can always taste on Jack’s lips and in his mouth, and if that’s as good as it gets, then he’ll take it.
Wanting things that you can’t have, Castiel has found, is overrated. Working with what you actually can get, is something he has learned to deal with. He thinks that Jack is on the same page, here.
Maybe it’s as good as it gets for him, too. If, whenever Castiel thinks about it, for a second he feels like he used to feel back when he had wings and thought he had a purpose, well, then he usually tries to forget it soon after.
End.
Title: Down In A Hole
Rating: NC17
Warnings: sex, drugs usage, generous alcohol usage, mentions of orgies.
Pairing: Jack/Castiel [-> Nirvana!Jack/future!Cas.], implied one sided future!Cas/future!Dean
Words: 3260
Summary: Castiel doesn’t tell Jack that he sees himself in the way Jack’s hands shake, and that he has an Oxycodone bottle neatly lined on his nightstand, too. Or, the one where the Oceanic Six never went back to the island, Jack never detoxed and he's at Camp Chitaqua, too.
Spoilers: for 5x04, The End, for SPN, for the S3 finale and the O6 stuff for Lost. Except that then it goes AU, but I'd say you're safe if you saw S4.
Disclaimer: neither Lost nor SPN are mine. I swear.
A/N: for Queen missy_useless at lostsquee, who asked for crossovers. And I know she likes Jack. And... er. I'll admit. I had sort of decided that this pairing was a doable crossover pairing ages ago but I never went there for some reason, but I had this other idea that you might have liked it, so... I really hope you do? <33333 for the rest.. idek when I decided I liked the idea. I just hope it makes sense. ;) title from Alice In Chains.
Castiel doesn’t really notice the doctor until he’s forced to.
It’s not like he actually keeps track of who gets in and who gets out. He lost track of that after Bobby got out, and he’d like to keep it this way. Alright, he has lost track of a lot of things since Dean stopped giving a damn about what he does, but that’s not really the matter. Whenever he thinks about it, it’s usually the point when he goes searching for alcohol, because he really doesn’t need to think about the times when Dean used to care and Bobby used to be around and Sam didn’t use to be a prom dress, as Dean put it.
There are a lot of things that Castiel doesn’t need, like breaking his foot. Not that before he felt much useful, but when he hears the bones cracking as he runs and falls (and at least Risa had the presence of mind to cover for him and haul him into the car), well, that’s when he realizes that he’s really, really useless.
Someone gives him morphine and before he passes away, he wonders if at least Dean will take the effort to put a cast on him. He used to bandage his cuts, when Castiel first started bleeding.
He wakes up and no, it isn’t Dean putting a cast on him. It’s a guy he has never seen before, whose beard is pretty much hideous, whose eyes are as bloodshot as Castiel thinks his might be, whose right hand shakes once in a while and whose breath stinks of Jack Daniels.
Then Castiel remembers that some time ago someone said they found a doctor, and it’s just fitting that this would be the kind of doctor someone finds now.
“Who… what…” he tries, and clearly he can’t manage. He feels groggy and unfocused, and except for the doctor’s face, everything is fuzzy. He can only feel pain in his foot, though it’s dulled, and the rest spins.
“Be thankful that it was a clean break and you didn’t damage any tissue. You’ll be walking again in a month. Maybe two. I’d like to say one, but the equipment is what it is. Also, next time you go on a mission, I’d suggest going sober because that was sheer luck. Damn, I really need a drink,” the guy mutters, and there’s a bottle of something nearby from which he takes one.
“If you meant to ask who am I, name’s Jack. I used to do this for a living,” he almost snarls, and then puts the bottle away and his shaking hands are on Castiel’s foot again. Castiel thinks he’s putting a cast on it. He can’t say.
“And now?” Castiel manages, and Jack just laughs.
“Now I apparently do that anyway, but I guess it’s because you can’t afford any better.”
That’s a point, Castiel thinks before closing his eyes, and then everything blacks out again.
When he wakes up, feeling much more focused, he’s alone and his foot hurts like nothing ever hurt in his life except for the moment the last of his Grace was torn away from him, and he can’t help a scream coming out of his mouth. He breaks into a cold sweat and then the door opens. It’s heavy steps, and then a flashlight is turned on and Castiel can make out Jack’s face.
“Just woke up, huh?”
Castiel nods, feeling too distressed to talk. He’s shaking all over, he doesn’t even want to know what it is that his body aches for, of all the bottles neatly parading on his nightstand in his own cabin, and he’s in so much pain that he just wants to scream himself hoarse.
“Clearly. Someone told me you weren’t exactly used to feeling pain, were you?”
Castiel shakes his head and just wishes for Jack to do something.
Jack looks at him for a second and then kneels near the bed.
“Okay, listen, you can try to ride this out or I can give you some more morphine. Sorry but…” he trails, taking out a bottle of pills from his pocket and swallowing two small, white, round ones dry, “it’s the only offer I can make. From your face, I’d say you want the morphine.”
Castiel nods frantically, unable to even form words.
“Fine. I won’t be the one saying anything to you for taking the fucking easy way out,” Jack says, and a minute later Castiel feels a needle in the crook of his arm and he just hopes that Jack doesn’t comment on the other faint needle tracks that Castiel knows must be visible.
The pain lessens then, and everything is fuzzy again, except maybe for Jack’s face, but fuzzy is better than suffering that much. Especially when Castiel has spent the last four years trying to do everything in order not to feel that kind of pain.
He doesn’t really feel coherent. Or, at least not as coherent as he could. He doesn’t know when he starts to talk and he doesn’t really even get what he’s saying except that he’s pretty sure if he asked whether Dean ever was here.
“Sorry, haven’t seen the fearless leader in three days or so,” Jack asks, and Castiel would snort at the nickname if he just didn’t feel so tired.
Then he blacks out.
--
Jack refuses to keep on giving him morphine a week later and sends him to his cabin.
The first thing Castiel does is reaching for the Valium bottle and grant himself twelve hours of dreamless sleep.
--
He doesn’t see Jack for a while after that, mostly because he doesn’t get out of the cabin much; actually, he doesn’t get out of the cabin at all, and if he has to rely on some girl whose name he can’t remember in order to be brought some food in, then he doesn’t care.
Jack actually does come himself, to take the cast off.
His eyes are always bloodshot and his breath always stinks of whiskey, and his clothes are remarkably dirty, but when he speaks he sounds coherent.
Castiel thinks he envies him that.
“You haven’t even tried to walk, have you?”
Castiel shakes his head, exhaling smoke from the cigarette he had between his lips when Jack got in, and then Jack shakes his head and hauls him up without a warning.
Castiel doesn’t scream when his foot touches the ground just out of sheer force of will.
Also, he notices, Jack’s hands shake. The one on Castiel’s hip and the one around his wrist.
“What… what are you…”
“If I have to do my job I’m going to finish it. Also, I don’t know if anyone told you, but you’re shit at taking care of yourself.”
For being a doctor, Castiel thinks, he is most definitely the blunt kind.
“Excuse me,” Castiel spits back, “but you don’t seem much better off than I am.”
“That’s a point,” Jack concedes, his lips almost smiling but not quite, “but at least I’m functioning. I can’t say the same about you.”
Castiel doesn’t have an answer for that, and so he grits his teeth and starts walking while leaning on Jack and smelling alcohol all the way.
--
Castiel does get back on his feet, and the two times he meets Dean in the following month, the latter barely acknowledges his presence.
It shouldn’t hurt anymore but it does, and that’s when Castiel asks where Jack’s cabin is and brings cheap gin along with him.
He finds Jack in a dirty white shirt, sitting on a mattress, and staring out of his window.
There’s a bottle near the bed. The label reads Oxycodone. Jack’s hands are shaking. Not a surprise.
“What are you doing here?” Jack asks, sounding merely bored, and Castiel hands him the bottle.
“I found this. And you did put me back on my feet, so I wondered if you might want to share it.”
Castiel doesn’t tell Jack that he sees himself in the way Jack’s hands shake, and that he has an Oxycodone bottle neatly lined on his nightstand, too, and that he doesn’t grow a beard out of laziness just because he likes his meaningless sex too much and all the girls he’s been with hated beards.
Jack looks at him for one second, then he moves a bit and pats the other side of the bed. After Castiel sits, he takes the bottle, takes a long drink and hands it over. Castiel mimics him.
They don’t say anything and it’s better like this because there’s no need to talk. Sometimes Castiel misses the quiet and the silences that he used to share with Dean so nicely. It felt good, when they shared silences. Now Dean is all screams and harshness and roughness, and the girls whose name he doesn’t remember are soft and willing and noisy; this, right now, seems like the best he’ll get, and so he asks Jack whether he can steal a couple of pills. He’s starting to feel itchy.
“Help yourself,” Jack says, and Castiel does.
--
“Not to ask anything personal, but what brings you here?” Castiel asks one day, always in Jack’s cabin, always a bottle between them, even if it isn’t gin this time.
“Here to your camp, or here in the sense of I-am-a-doctor-but-I-don’t-look-like-it?”
“Whatever you want,” Castiel answers sincerely.
“You’ll think it’s crazy.”
“I know crazy, don’t you worry about that,” Castiel chuckles, and doesn’t he just.
Jack says that he was on a plane that crashed on an island. Some of the survivors, including him, escaped. Then he realized they needed to go back to get the others, but it never happened and that’s what guilt does to you. He never was back on that island and he never stopped drinking too much since the day he lost his job, and then years passed, and then an apocalypse started. And then, apparently, when apocalypses start, if you still know how to patch someone, your conditions aren’t a problem.
“And what about you?” Jack asks before Castiel can comment.
Castiel shrugs and swallows dry another Oxycodone pill. “I used to be an angel. Then all the others left and I stayed. Therefore, I lost my wings. I apparently don’t cope with it very well. The end,” he answers, and for a second Jack flinches.
“What?”
“Nothing. You just, reminded me of someone I knew. Ages ago. He told me stuff once. He phrased it like that, more or less.”
“Aren’t you freaking out?”
Jack shakes his head, takes a drink as his right hand shakes more than usual and then takes a breath before answering.
“On the island, there was goddamn black smoke that took form of dead people. Said island fucking disappeared before my eyes. Now, there’s the devil walking the earth, I’m living through a zombie apocalypse and I should be surprised if angels exist or that you were one? Please, just hand me the fucking bottle.”
Castiel does.
--
Jack tastes like whiskey and Oxycodone and disinfectant, and Castiel knows that he probably stinks of more than one variety of pills, of gin and of sex, himself, but apparently Jack doesn’t care and that’s just fine with Castiel.
Castiel can’t even remember how one evening they went from drinking-and-sharing-pills to this, but for some reason he doesn’t try to fight it one second.
It’s just that Jack gets it, and Castiel doesn’t even need to explain him.
(Just so we’re clear about that, I’m not our fearless leader, Jack had said after they kissed first.
Fantastic, Castiel had answered, because that’s not what I’m searching for.)
The beard is hideous and in the way and Castiel is pretty sure he’ll have a rash on his chin tomorrow, but it doesn’t really mind. Jack tastes also like all the despair Castiel has been swallowing up until this point, and their clothes are torn and dirty more or less in the same way. Jack’s hands shake hard as he grips Castiel’s hair and Castiel lets him. It feels painful, but it feels more real than the girls do, and so Castiel kisses Jack hard, so hard that at some point Jack’s lower lip splits and Castiel feels blood on his tongue.
Jack doesn’t really seem to mind that.
“So what?” Jack breathes when they part; Castiel is practically straddling him and he feels like he’s going to explode. He feels high on feeling like this, like he’s with someone who fell as low as Castiel did and who isn’t ashamed of wearing it on his sleeve, and so he grips Jack’s shoulders harder.
“Just fuck me,” Castiel breathes, the words coming easily after a good almost-two-years of practice, and Jack nods and they turn and Castiel is on his back, and Jack does.
He does exactly like Castiel hoped. He’s not too slow but he isn’t even too harsh; he’s almost clinical while stripping off and while stripping Castiel off, but he reaches out for the drawer and gets some of the few Vaseline that’s left before actually doing anything.
(Castiel provides the condoms. Front left pocket of his jeans. Jack doesn’t seem too surprised when Castiel gives indications.)
Jack thrusts into him hard, though, starting fast and ending up faster, his hands touching him everywhere they can reach (and he has nice hands, Castiel thinks; long fingers, skin which is rough but only recently became so, and Castiel also likes how Jack’s arms feel around his shoulder as Castiel’s hips push up to meet his pace); Castiel moans harder with each thrust, unable to keep his mouth shut or to be silent. If it’s slightly painful, he doesn’t mind. It’s fine. He likes it painful; it makes everything more real.
Jack comes first, inside him, hard and fast and with a sound that Castiel can’t identify; when Jack’s hand reaches down and starts jacking him off with short, quick strokes, Castiel’s eyes roll back and he comes, too, long and hard and definitely messy. Castiel closes his eyes and for that handful of seconds he lets himself feel pleasure and nothing else.
At least it isn’t empty pleasure.
--
“You know,” Jack says some time later, the both of them naked and not wanting to move, and if they stink tomorrow, well, it’s nothing new, for Castiel at least, “I hadn’t done that. In a while. Maybe five years or so.”
“Well, that’s a fucking long time you went without.”
(Castiel went a much longer time without, but if he dwells about that, then he’ll think about the time Dean brought him to a whorehouse and that’s not what he needs. So he just licks his lips and doesn’t expand on that.)
“Once, I used to want to fix things. Or, well, people, maybe. I don’t think it went that well.”
“Seems to me like it obviously didn’t. You can see it in a nicer light, though.”
“And that would be?”
“I think we’re both so beyond it that you don’t even have to take it into account,” Castiel mutters, not exactly looking at Jack, but then Jack half-laughs and smiles, and it’s quite empty for a smile. Castiel knows the art of doing that, and he can just appreciate that Jack knows it, as well.
“That’d be it, I guess.”
“Well,” Castiel says before turning on his side, “I’d suggest shaving if you want to get laid more. It isn’t even hard to find the occasion, but that thing fucking itches.”
He turns on his side and doesn’t see Jack’s face, but the laugh coming after that sounds a bit more genuine.
--
Shaved, Jack doesn’t look much better. His eyes are always bloodshot, his cheeks are hollow and you can see it, and he’s pale and his skin’s color at times looks close to ash. It’s not like Castiel isn’t the same, though.
“That better?” Jack asks, two round tablets in his hand, before he brings it up to his mouth.
Castiel can feel absinthe on his own tongue as he stands from the bed in his cabin. Jack just appeared outside his doorstep, and it’s the first time that he comes here instead of the contrary.
Castiel raises his hand and runs his knuckles along Jack’s cheek. It’s not exactly smooth, but it’s just stubble. Not so different from his own.
Also, Castiel definitely has a rash on the right side of his chin, but it barely itches.
“Yeah,” Castiel whispers, “that’s definitely better. So, what now, are you going to ask someone out?” he asks, his own tone feeling falsely cheerful even to his own ears. Jack raises his eyes and stares at him, and for a second neither of them moves. Castiel takes in the sight meanwhile; Jack’s white shirt is half-open and definitely dirty, with blood, too. He’s too thin for his jeans. His eyes are red and tired and there are bags under them but they’re at least focused, and those hands with long, fine fingers are shaking again. That’s when Castiel realizes his left hand is twitching, too. Strange. He never noticed it before now. Maybe it’s getting to him, too, after all.
“I think I’d like something a bit more real than that,” Jack says, and Castiel envies him. For all he has learned to drop his carefully crafted and thought speech and for all Dean’s way of talking rubbed on him (and it means always getting straight to the point and being blunt and if it hurts, then you suck it up and deal), he never had the courage to actually say things like this out loud. He never told any of that to any of the girls that slept in his bed. He never told Dean that, and maybe he should have.
“And before you ask me, you don’t look like anyone I tried to save and failed. Or anyone I tried to keep, and failed anyway. And you don’t remind me of anyone. It’s just that I’m really done with pretenses,” Jack says, and Castiel nods and figures it’s good enough for him.
--
Jack always tastes like disinfectant. He might be drunk, he might be high, he might have put all kinds of things in his mouth, but he always tastes like that, underneath. It never goes away. Castiel never presumes that one day that will somehow seep into him. He knows he’ll never see the day when he feels cleansed as he once was.
He also knows that this will end sooner than later and that it will end badly because that’s how things go and he doesn’t really believe that good things do happen much anymore.
For now it doesn’t matter and as he lets Jack push him down into his bed, he tries to find the disinfectant among the whiskey and the despair and the Oxycodone that he can always taste on Jack’s lips and in his mouth, and if that’s as good as it gets, then he’ll take it.
Wanting things that you can’t have, Castiel has found, is overrated. Working with what you actually can get, is something he has learned to deal with. He thinks that Jack is on the same page, here.
Maybe it’s as good as it gets for him, too. If, whenever Castiel thinks about it, for a second he feels like he used to feel back when he had wings and thought he had a purpose, well, then he usually tries to forget it soon after.
End.