To Call Your Own - Part One
The Estate’s infirmary had become something of a home away from home. The décor was comparatively lacking but the Adlers were a “spare no expense” kind of governing family. Even their sick room was gilded in gold and the tiny cot was easily the most comfortable thing Dean Winchester had ever had the pleasure of getting stitched up on.
“You look like you had fun,” Nurse Meg said.
Dean blinked at her, still coming down from the night before. More often than not the two of them met under these exact circumstances - Dean bloody and bruised, sometimes to the point Meg had to phone in for a more advanced medi-bot to take care of the injuries she wasn’t qualified to heal. As lucid as Dean wished he could be, something about the white walls and the soft mattress, the adrenaline and pain and humiliation, always dropped him into a stupor.
Meg had taken advantage a couple of times. Word had it she’d been Alistair’s toy for years before she fell off a wall and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men failed to patch her up. Dean had known she was jealous since the first hour he spent here being carefully stitched back together without so much as a swig of whiskey to numb the pain.
In the months since then, Meg had figured out that Dean wasn’t as gung-ho about belonging to Alistair as she had been. Not that this knowledge sparked anything resembling empathy, but what could a person expect from someone who missed being the slave to a sadistic, evil son-of-a-bitch?
A shock of pain zipped down Dean’s spine and startled him enough that Meg growled and slapped a tender spot on his thigh to keep him still.
“If you want it in the shape of a lightning bolt, just ask,” she muttered.
The Dean of old would’ve had something witty to say to that. Well, maybe not witty, but scathing at least. Instead, the Dean of now had to watch the words that crossed his mind and his lips, lest his neural training collar give him a little love-tap to remind him of who he belonged to.
These days Dean was usually too tired to be a mouthy pain in anyone’s ass anyway, but he hadn’t quite reached the point where he was okay with that. If he ever did, God help him, he hoped someone came along to put him out of his misery not long after.
Meg hummed to herself while she worked; every pass of the needle through Dean’s skin was hell on his frayed nerve endings and she smiled like she was well aware of it. Dean closed his eyes and tried to find that macho zen place his dad had shown him back when he was a kid and pain was another part of life in the colonies outside the Estates. Back there, everyone was scraping the bottom of the same barrel to survive and the people up here? They loved to watch it happen.
That was how the Winchesters had gotten the notice of the Adler family in the first place. They’d settled into the KC Colony for a while. It was little more than a dozen square blocks of dilapidated buildings at the foot of the Adler Estate, but the people had been less ruthless and cutthroat than those Dean and his family had grown up running from. The only problem with that was the fact that everyone else knew it, too. They spent more time than not fighting off anyone who had a big gun and a dumb idea to keep their territory.
The Winchesters proved themselves to their new Colony, showing off the kind of combat skills only a former soldier would know. Even Sammy, who’d been too little then to get in the thick of the fighting, had impressed people with his stealth and tech-fu. It would’ve been better if they’d turned out to be useless.
Dean blinked his eyes open at a sound in the hallway and glanced over at the door as it burst open. The figure in the doorway was familiar but Dean couldn’t place the face right away. Part of that may have been due to the fact that he was about five minutes from unconsciousness.
“The prodigal son returns,” Meg said without glancing up.
“What is he doing here?” the stranger asked.
His voice was a deep, jagged rumble, like someone’d dipped it in tar and rolled it down a gravelly road for a few miles. Dean had heard voices like it before - whiskey-and-war rough - but none of them had ever come from a frame as slight or a mouth as pretty as this one.
“Your cousin got bored early,” Meg said. “I guess even a little bloodletting wasn’t enough to keep him interested.”
She looked at Dean as she spoke, eyebrows lifted in a challenge. Dean mustered up the energy to stare right back, trying to convey with his eyes just how unimpressed he was with her attempt to make him feel like he’d done something wrong here. Alistair’d found plenty to do in the short time he’d kept Dean last night; to a guy like that, boredom was just a challenge.
“And who gave Alistair permission to take this man in?” the man demanded.
Meg hummed. “I don’t know if “man” is an applicable adjective here. I’m still not sold on him having a spine, let alone a functioning set of balls.”
“Fuck you,” Dean grumbled, ignoring the zap of pain from his neural collar.
“Say that again,” Meg told him, her eyes glinting with something that made Dean’s stomach roll. “I dare you.”
Dean was tempted to do it but he was supposed to be getting less hostile. It was Alistair’s job to break him, make him into the obedient little toy that the eldest Adler son had put on his Christmas list. In sheer physical terms, Dean was definitely Michael’s type. He’d never get anywhere near the future patriarch if he kept shooting off his mouth, though, and that was kinda the point.
“He’s new,” the stranger said.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Meg said with a roll of her eyes. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
The man stepped into the room. For someone who was shorter and leaner than Dean and looked like he’d slipped on his father’s oversized coat to play dress-up in, the guy had a presence. Dean had met plenty of people and he knew men and women who could command a room with a look. Their ability to demand respect and attention was an intangible one, invaluable inside the Estates and the lowly colonies.
This guy had that magnetic pull, dragging Dean’s focus away from Meg and her stitches. Dean looked at him, the tousled dark hair and the bright blue eyes, and felt a tug in his stomach like that jolt of sensation that accompanied a long fall. It was easy to blame it on the adrenaline crash, but Dean had never felt anything like it before so he had his doubts.
“All new arrivals are supposed to be approved by myself and Anna,” the man said.
Meg sighed as she finished up the last stitch. “If you’re fishing for details, you’re shit outta luck. You know no one around her tells me anything. All I’m good for is putting band-aids on boo-boos and giving out orgasms to whoever wants them.”
The bitterness in her voice almost made Dean feel bad. Maybe she’d been a fan of Alistair’s particular brand of treatment and there was no mistaking her for nice, but they weren’t all that different. One way or another, they were both a product of their environment and they were here because of the shitty hand life dealt anyone outside of the Estates.
“I’m not . . . fishing,” the stranger said, the words stilted in his mouth like he wasn’t quite sure what they meant. “Are you finished?”
Meg gave Dean a pat on the waist, right over the recently stitched gash that Alistair had carved just below his ribs. The flare of pain made Dean groan, the sound caught behind his teeth but still audible enough to make Meg laugh.
“Sure thing, angelface. Why? You want him?”
There was a pause and then the man nodded. Meg laughed again but this time there was something shocked and almost delighted in the sound.
“Why, Castiel,” she said, pushing to her feet and tugging Dean up with her. “You’re just full of surprises.”
She shoved Dean forward, her hand small but firm against the middle of his back. Somehow his legs understood what they were supposed to do without him telling them. He walked forward until a hand on his shoulder stopped him and he kept his eyes on his feet so he wouldn’t look up and give himself away.
The face was only vaguely familiar but that name was unforgettable and recognition hit Dean like brass knuckles to the gut. He should’ve known those eyes and that voice, was intimately familiar with the body hidden under that ugly coat, but it had been years and this was the last place Dean could have expected to run into someone he’d first met in a colony bar a hundred miles away from here.
Dean was holding up as well as could be expected under Alistair’s care, but maybe he was more cracked than he’d thought if a part of him actually hoped that Castiel remembered him. It would be a very, very bad thing if he did and Dean almost couldn’t bring himself to care.
“Get him out of here,” Meg said. “I’ve got other shit to do.”
That probably wasn’t true, but Meg waved them off with her robotic arm and it wasn’t like Dean was interested in hanging out. He chanced a glance up at Castiel but the other man just spun on his heel and led them out of the room and down the hall. Dean followed, careful to keep a step behind.
Castiel didn’t say a word as they walked but he glanced back a few times, his eyes flashing with something that made Dean’s skin prickle with awareness. They turned a few unfamiliar corners, Castiel taking them farther into the Estate’s main building than Dean had been so far. For almost two months Dean had only seen the inside of Alistair’s chambers, his own tiny hole of a room, or the infirmary. The one time Dean had attempted to check out the rest of the place for himself, his neural collar had zapped him unconscious.
It was blessedly quiet right now, nothing but a light weight around the base of Dean’s throat. He stared at the tense lines of Castiel’s back. The collar wouldn’t react, not when Dean was being handled by another member of the Adler family. Dean’s stomach churned and he fought down the urge to vomit all over the glossy marble floors of the hallway. Castiel was one of them and the knowledge made Dean want to punch something.
The collar hummed a warning and Dean quieted any rebellious thoughts.
“In here,” Castiel finally said, opening a door with an ornate handle.
Dean waited but Castiel nodded for him to enter first. It was a direct violation of everything Alistair had been attempting to literally hammer into Dean, but his reflexes were still those of a free man. He walked forward without thinking and flinched as he crossed the threshold, expecting a reaction from the collar that never came.
Castiel closed and locked the door behind them.
“You’re safe here,” he said.
There was something earnest in his voice but Dean wasn’t an idiot. His life depended on making the right call here and trusting some asshole who’d lied to him the first time they’d met definitely wasn’t it.
“Right,” Dean said, but he imbued the word with enough sarcasm to test the theory.
A half-hour session with Alistair usually resulted in the collar responding to everything from an eyeroll to a backhanded insult. Dean didn’t get the science of the thing and nobody’d bothered to explain it to him. There may have been a monologue from Alistair that first day about brainwaves and breaking people down so they could be built back up the right way, but Dean had been a little preoccupied at the time. He’d never been strung up from a ceiling before. The novelty of the experience had been overwhelming.
The collar was sensitive to pretty much every one of Dean’s thoughts and a lot of his actions. It always responded accordingly. When it didn’t so much as buzz at Dean’s disrespectful tone, he realized Castiel may not have been telling the complete truth, but he wasn’t lying.
Castiel raised an eyebrow and Dean shrugged.
“So I can call you a dick without getting electrocuted,” Dean said. “Should I be grateful?”
“Dean,” Castiel said, quiet and firm.
Dean’s throat clicked when he swallowed and his hands felt clammy. “You do remember me then.”
Castiel nodded and didn’t look surprised when Dean strode forward and punched him right in the fucking face. His head jerked back but he didn’t even lift a hand to his cheek, just turned to look at Dean with something like regret in his eyes.
“Dean,” he said again, but Dean didn’t want to hear it.
“You’re one of them,” he hissed. “You asshole.”
“It’s not like that,” Castiel said.
“So you’re not a member of the illustrious Adler estate? Alistair’s not your cousin?”
Castiel looked away, his jaw clenching with what might’ve been guilt. Dean scoffed and turned around, stalking over to the other side of the room just to put some space between them.
“You can sleep here,” Castiel eventually said.
“Alistair’ll kick my ass if I’m not in my own bed when he wants me,” Dean said. “Not that I expect you to care.”
“Alistair has a habit of breaking my brothers’ toys before they can be fully appreciated. Zachariah will grant a transfer of you to another training master when I speak with him.”
Castiel’s voice was full of a quiet confidence that Dean remembered from their first meeting. That guy would’ve slit his own wrists before offering a slave the use of his bed instead of freedom but it was obvious that this Castiel wasn’t the same Cas that Dean met all those years ago.
“You’re a real piece of work,” Dean said.
He reveled in the ability to imbue the words with all of the disdain he could muster. When Castiel flinched, that was its own little victory.
“Get some rest,” Castiel said.
The door closed with a quiet click behind him. Dean stared at it for an hour, waited for someone to barge in and drag him off for punishment or another lesson. When no one came, he fell back onto the huge bed that dominated the room. The mattress welcomed him with blissfully soft, open arms but Dean couldn’t waste time with sleep. Instead he stared up at the ceiling and thought about all of the things he’d had to keep under mental lock and key since Alistair had first slipped the collar around his throat.
_._
“Look after Sammy,” Dad had said.
The first time, Dean had been little more than a toddler. Estate Officials came in the middle of the night on an anonymous tip to arrest Mary Winchester for conspiracy against the Governing Body. They’d burst into the house but Dean’s mom was long gone. So the men with the guns, the same ones who were supposed to protect the colonists and the members of the Estate equally, set fire to Sammy’s nursery.
Dean didn’t know how they got out, though Pastor Jim always called it a miracle. He remembered the smoke and the heat, the tear tracks that felt slick and shameful on his cheeks, and then the comforting, wriggling weight of his little brother in his arms. Dad ushered them out of the house and made Dean promise to take care of Sam.
Growing up, that was his one responsibility. Their lives were constantly changing; they moved from colony to colony for most of Dean’s childhood. They lived with Uncle Bobby and Aunt Karen for a while, but Estate Officials showed up less than a year after, killed Karen and demolished Uncle Bobby’s place of business. Uncle Bobby disappeared, though Dad always insisted he wasn’t dead. Dean could still remember asking why they didn’t disappear, too, like Bobby and Mom.
It was probably always an option, but Dad kept them above-ground for years. They’d stay with Pastor Jim for a few weeks, with Ellen and Bill and Jo, with every single friend Dad or Uncle Bobby or Mom had ever made. Through it all, Dean looked after Sammy. Dad did whatever work it was he’d fallen into, things that would always bring Estate Officials sniffing around eventually. Dean learned to avoid asking questions or being a burden and he raised his little brother the best way he knew how.
If there was one thing in life that Dean was honestly good at, it was looking after Sam. Even when they found themselves joining the underground movement, following rumors about Uncle Bobby’s whereabouts and whispers about Mom from colony to colony, Dean never was good for much but shooting shit and keeping his brother alive.
That was Dean’s job, his only job, but he fucked it up in the end. Of course he did. Word on the many winding streets of the North American Union claimed that a Winchester wasn’t good for much except botching a job and screwing another man over. Dean couldn’t say that was an exaggeration. Not with a straight face, anyway.
Sometimes when Alistair had him strapped to this table or that wall, Dean wondered if he could atone for his mistakes in blood. On those days he welcomed the bite of Alistair’s blade, the crack of his whip, the endless stream of degradation that fell from those thin, cracked lips. It was no less than he deserved and there wasn’t a person in the world who wouldn’t agree on that point.
It was important, though, for Dean to remember that he still had a purpose. If he was ever going to make things right, he had to get off of Alistair’s rack. That was the thought that he clung to, the one that kept him going.
“Up and at ‘em, kid.”
The voice jerked Dean out of sleep so quickly he lost the thread of the dream he’d been having, but a strong sense of pain and loss lingered, tacky like glue. He sat up and did a visual sweep of the room, a holdover from years of training. The speaker stood next to the bed with an amused smile curling her mouth.
“You’re a jumpy one,” she said. “That’s good. You’ve still got some life in you.”
The figure by the bed was a woman. The only thing average about her was her height. Outside of that she was attractive in a way that was too gritty for the way she was put together. Her dark hair was pulled back in a loose knot and she wore a dress in a shade of ebony so rich it seemed to soak up the light in the room.
If it weren’t for the delicate-looking collar looped around the base of her neck and the fact that the dress was low-cut and sheer, revealing swathes of pale skin every time she moved, she might’ve been another Adler or a friend of a friend.
“Guess the training’s not working,” Dean said before he could think about it.
She snorted. “Good.”
It felt odd to be talking to a slave who clearly had some sort of self-identity. Dean hadn’t come into contact with many and every single one was the perfect example of what an Adler slave should behave like. The obvious exception was Meg, but most of her attitude was directed at Dean because he still hadn’t rolled over and bared his belly to her favorite sadist. She could get away with being opinionated because it was clear where her loyalties lay.
This woman was different. For more than one reason, Dean realized. She had a pair of dark sunglasses perched on her nose, an odd accessory considering. It became clear they weren’t for aesthetics, though, when the sound of Dean’s voice had her adjusting the tilt of her head. If he had to guess, she hadn’t been able to pinpoint his exact location until just then.
“Figured it out, did you?” she asked into Dean’s silence, sliding the glasses off and winking at him.
Her eyes were a cloudy blue, no iris, no pupil, just glass. It was such a strange choice given the resources the Adlers had at their disposal. One of the lines the collection agent had fed Dad had been that Dean would receive the finest in care from the Adlers, that it would be an upgrade from the life he lived in the colony.
At the time they’d both thought it was bullshit - not that the Adlers had access to that kind of medical care, but that they would use it to enhance the living conditions of their slaves. So far it looked like maybe that hadn’t just been a pretty selling point. Between Meg’s arm - a full, robotic replacement - and a few of Dean’s own emergency surgeries, the Adlers didn’t seem the type to half-ass it when taking care of their slaves.
“My girl likes ‘em,” the woman said, tapping the corner of one eye.
“Your girl?”
“Anna,” the woman answered. “You haven’t met.”
“Neither have we,” Dean said.
That got him another smile. “Pamela. And you must be the lucky duck who gets to spend the night with Castiel.”
Dean blinked and said, “It’s just Dean, actually.”
Pamela laughed and reached out to clap him on the shoulder. It was the first time anyone other than Alistair or Meg had laid a hand on him since he’d gotten here; Dean was surprised when he responded by flinching away from it.
“Sorry,” Pamela said, pulling her hand back and holding it up to show she meant no harm. “Come on, I’ll take you to him.”
Dean didn’t want to leave this room but he knew he didn’t have a choice. Freedom wasn’t really a concept that applied to him anymore. If someone told him he had to be somewhere, he went. He wasn’t allowed to ask questions.
Pamela led the way. She moved confidently - no help from a cane, no cautious steps, not even a hand on the wall to guide her - and it occurred to Dean that she either had the path memorized or was getting some help from an invisible implant. It would explain why she had the glass eyes instead of a set of replacements; maybe it was less about the Adlers denying her the medical care and more about some kinky fake-eye fetish of her master’s.
Those thoughts were enough to keep Dean in a neutral state of mind as they made their way down the hall. Being able to think about whatever he wanted the night before had been an unexpected break, but he needed to remember his place if he didn’t want to end up right back at lesson one. Losing all the progress he’d made would be a waste of time. That and he didn’t like the idea of being punished for it.
They didn’t walk very far and Dean made sure to pay attention to how many turns they made and which direction they were going. He’d done the same last night as Castiel had led him to the safe room. It was mostly out of habit, but Dean couldn’t help hoping the information would be useful someday. They turned one last corner down yet another hall Dean didn’t recognize and stopped in front of a set of double-doors.
Pamela lifted a hand and knocked once before turning to Dean with another grin. How anyone could be so good-humored in a situation like theirs, Dean didn’t know. Then again, the way Pamela had said her master’s name had been full of warmth and affection. Maybe that had something to do with it.
“Have fun,” Pamela said.
Dean had a feeling she was winking again, but he couldn’t tell behind the dark lenses of her glasses. She gave him one last smile and turned on her heel as the door swung open.
Castiel stood on the other side. He’d ditched the coat somewhere, but he still didn’t look anything like the guy who’d approached Dean over Ash’s contraband homebrew. That man had been dressed in jeans and a threadbare t-shirt just like any other poor colony-bound bastard. This man wore a white button-down shirt that probably cost more than Dean’s family had ever made in a month tucked into a pair of dark, fitted slacks that hugged his hips.
The fact that the sight of him, with his shirt open at the collar and his feet bare beneath the slightly too-long hems of his pants, made Dean’s heart thud painfully in his chest was embarrassing. Dean ducked his head and waited to be invited in, calling on all of the lessons he’d learned since coming here. There was a soft sound from Castiel, dismayed and frustrated.
“You can come in,” he said.
There wasn’t enough room for Dean to cross the threshold without brushing Castiel on the way. That brief moment of contact made his breath catch and he had to wonder if Alistair had secretly reprogrammed him into a touch-needy animal when he wasn’t paying attention.
“Zachariah granted the transfer,” Castiel said.
Dean nodded. He’d figured that much out on his own but he wasn’t gonna say anything smart about it. He knew the collar would respond, could feel it waiting for Dean to make one wrong verbal or mental step.
“And now?” Dean asked, doing his level best to keep his voice deferent.
There was a pause and then Castiel said, “Now you’re mine.”
The swell of red-hot emotion that swelled up at those words was unexpected, dizzying in its intensity.
Dean had watched his father sign the papers relinquishing his son’s basic human rights. He’d been poked and prodded by a team of physicians and scientists before he was found suitable for the Adler heir; his parting gift had been the collar they’d fitted around his neck and hooked up to his brain. After all of that he’d been turned over to Alistair who had said and done much worse than to inform him of the very obvious fact that he wasn’t a free man anymore.
It had been difficult for Dean to mind his tongue and his manners, to keep his head down and his eyes lowered, to follow all of the bullshit rules that kept slaves in their place around here. There were days his fingers twitched against thin air, desperate for the heft of his gun and its responsive trigger. And yet none of that had filled Dean with the kind of rage that Castiel’s matter-of-fact claim on him just had.
The feeling bubbled in Dean’s gut like boiling water, roiling and tossing until it slid up his throat and over his tongue in words he couldn’t bite back.
“You think just because you fucked me once you can waltz in here and take me?”
Obviously he could - anyone had that ability if they were granted permission by the head of the family - and it was something Alistair had put painstaking effort into making sure Dean didn’t forget. The fact that Dean still thought like a free man wasn’t a secret, but he usually wasn’t so stupid as to let it slip like that.
It was worse, still, because the neural collar lit up like a fucking firework, sending pulse after electric pulse skittering across every single nerve-ending in Dean’s body. The sensation dazed him, whiting out his vision at the edges and sending him to his knees.
A mistake like that usually took five or ten minutes to recover from on its own and Alistair always liked to reinforce the lesson with a more hands-on punishment. Dean sucked in a shallow breath and tensed himself for a blow to follow up the collar’s love-tap. Instead, fingertips brushed the damp skin at his temples. The touch was gentle but unexpected and Dean ducked away from it, fighting the urge to curl up and make himself as small as possible.
“You can’t speak to me like that,” Castiel said.
The guy really had a knack for stating the obvious and the inanity of the statement startled a laugh out of Dean.
“Yeah, you’d think that lesson would’ve stuck already,” he said, grateful that his voice was too breathless and his brain too sluggish from the shock to trigger another response from the collar.
There was a pause while Dean caught his breath and his body stopped shaking. Castiel stayed where he was, hovering in a way Alistair never did. Dean was almost surprised to look up and see that Castiel wasn’t wringing his hands in distress.
“I thought you’d appreciate being released from Alistair’s . . . care,” he said.
There was a thread of distaste woven through the words, like Castiel had opinions on Alistair’s methods of training slaves and none of them were positive.
“I am,” Dean forced himself to say.
It was what Castiel wanted to hear, what a good slave would tell his new master. It wasn’t even untrue; Dean was happy as a goddamn clam to be spending the night outside of Alistair’s chamber of horrors. He was still trading one master for another and there was nothing comforting about being owned.
“You’d rather be with someone else?” Castiel asked.
Yeah, with my family and friends, Dean thought.
The collar buzzed a warning and Dean shuddered, the light stimulation too much for his frayed nerves.
There was another pause. Dean could feel Castiel’s eyes on him, the gaze heavy and assessing. It was the first time in months anyone had looked at him like they were seeing something more than flesh, blood, and bone to be used however they saw fit. There was no way to tell if Castiel saw an equal when he looked at Dean, the not-quite-a-kid-not-quite-a-man who’d first crossed his path, not without breaking the rules and meeting the other man’s stare.
In the end, it didn’t matter but there was something about being looked at and seen that warmed Dean up with a feeling suspiciously like comfort.
“Are you aware of the rules of the Adler Estate?” Castiel finally asked.
His voice was clipped and authoritative, a far cry from the soft and perplexed tones from earlier. This was Castiel the training master and while all evidence indicated he was kinder than Alistair, Dean still didn’t know what to expect.
“Yes,” Dean answered, straightening his spine and sitting back more comfortably on his knees.
“First rule.” It wasn’t a question.
“All property of the Adler Estate will behave in accordance with the First Amendment of the North American Union and will follow the Governing Body’s Statute of Slavery to the letter of the law.”
“Good.”
Castiel shifted his weight, distributing it more evenly between both legs. Dean watched the movement roll through the soles of the man’s feet, up through his knees, and out of Dean’s peripheral vision. In his mind’s eye, he imagined Castiel standing straight and tall, now. It was like he was putting on the skin of someone else - first voice, then posture, and Dean didn’t know what came next.
“So you can recite a few words from memory,” Castiel said. “But do you understand what it means?”
Dean wanted to retort that he wasn’t an idiot but just the barest thought was enough to get the neural collar to tag him with a bite of pain. An idiot would let the words fly knowing what would come after. Dean bit his tongue.
“It means,” he said, “that all of my basic human rights were sold to the Adler Estate.”
“We own you,” Castiel said.
His voice was low and sure but Dean knew he was expecting a response. It tore at his throat, one tiny little word, but there was no denying it.
“Yes,” he said.
It wasn’t the first time Dean had admitted aloud that he belonged to someone else. There’d been a night, one of the first ones, when Alistair had made Dean do little more than repeat some variation on the words over and over. It was supposed to help the idea sink in. It must’ve worked on Alistair’s other slaves, but Dean was more stubborn than that.
Shame trickled down Dean’s spine every time, cold and slimy. Usually it was followed up by one of Alistair’s sick, twisted smiles and some particularly cruel torture, just to reinforce the idea. Maybe Dean hadn’t broken yet, and he hoped to a God he didn’t even believe in that he never did, but he’d learned to expect the pain. With Alistair, that was all there was. Punishments, rewards, and casual lessons all came at the end of a cane or on the edge of a blade. They fell from the tails of a whip, danced on the tip of a flame.
When Castiel moved, Dean expected more of the same. He managed to keep from shying away from the hand that rested against the back of his neck but he tensed beneath the other man’s warm, broad palm.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Castiel said, hushed like he was sharing a secret. “Those are Alistair’s methods, not mine.”
Fingers massaged the base of Dean’s skull in the firmest, sweetest touch he’d felt in longer than he could remember. His head tipped even further forward without any conscious thought and it occurred to him too late just how vulnerable he was here.
“I’m not going to fuck you, either,” Castiel continued.
It was a simple and easy statement, but the words still jolted down Dean’s spine in a way he wasn’t comfortable with. In all the time Dean had spent with Alistair, he’d been lucky enough to avoid any unwanted sexual contact. The implication was always there that if Alistair wanted, he would take. Dean’s body belonged to whoever had permission to use it within the Adler Estate, after all, and there was no such thing as non-consensual.
For whatever reason, though, Alistair had left him alone. Sometimes Dean had to wonder if it was because the guy didn’t get off on sex so much as he got off on making people bleed. Other times he figured Alistair was just biding his time, waiting until Dean was a little bit more broken in before he took it to the next level. Meg had assured him it would happen, though she always seemed to derive a certain satisfaction from Dean telling her she wouldn’t have to look him over for more intimate wounds.
“Why?”
The question slipped out but Dean was either too relaxed or too genuinely curious for the collar to sense a threat and if Castiel minded, it was impossible to tell.
“Are you disappointed?” he asked.
There was something to his voice that dared Dean to challenge him but it was more of a tease than the deliberately cruel baiting Dean was used to. He lifted his eyes in response and found Castiel staring down at him, his expression caught somewhere between implacable and fond.
“No,” Dean said.
Castiel’s lips curved up at the corners and he tugged lightly on Dean’s hair. “Liar,” he said.
Dean wanted to deny it but he didn’t have the right. There was also a traitorous part of him that perked up and pointed out that if he was going to have demeaning sex while in captivity, wouldn’t he rather it be Castiel than anyone else?
Clearly he’d been without his freedom for too long.
“We’ll start off simply,” Castiel said. “I need to know what Alistair’s managed to teach you.”
Alistair’s lessons had revolved around breaking Dean’s spirit to the point that he no longer felt like himself, but somewhere in there he’d picked up on a few other essential tools of the trade. Like the eye thing and keeping at least one step behind one’s master at all times. He’d learned to speak softly and he knew that he wasn’t allowed to make demands or requests. Asking questions wasn’t generally permitted, though that didn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule for Castiel. It was all straightforward enough that Dean probably could’ve picked it up on his own. He was just obstinate enough that none of it was doing a good job of sticking.
Castiel withdrew his hand from Dean’s hair and took a step back.
“We’re going for a walk. I’d like to see how you behave beyond closed doors.”
Dean rose to his feet in a motion that had become fluid with practice. Alistair’d made him practice it one night until his knees were bruised and bleeding. Castiel hummed in what might have been approval - though if that was the case then the guy was probably pretty easy to please - and then led the way to the door. Dean lifted his head so he’d be able to follow Castiel without bumping into anything, but tried to keep it at an angle that was still submissive.
All the fucking rules a slave had to follow just to make a bunch of glorified pet owners happy. The thought generated a shock from the collar but Dean hid his grimace and waited for Castiel to take two steps before following.
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