We, Reborn
Title: We, Reborn
Author:
signalfire
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: R
Words: 5050
Spoilers: Mainly 504
Warnings: Naughty words.
Summary: “What did you just call me?” Dean asks turning to stare at Cas' profile.
“Assbutt,” Cas replies. “It's what you are.”
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
A/N: Written for p_sharkbait's everlasting birthday challenge prompt. Happy Birthday, sweetheart, it's been an absolute pleasure getting to know you over the last little while. I hope that this is everything you wanted, and if it's not I'll just write you something else. Seriously, you're wonderful, I hope you had a lovely day. x
There's going to be a soundtrack to accompany this. Check the journal in a few hours =)
There is another bump in the road and no matter how slowly Cas drives it still jolts Dean and he grunts in pain.
“Sorry,” Cas says from the driver's seat, glancing across to Dean riding shotgun. Behind him, in the distance, smoke rises in thick plumes from the very last town they will burn to the ground. No m ore clean ups, no more mass burials. The land will reclaim itself and one day they will build again.
The clean up after Lucifer's death has been slow and meticulous. The virus has spread at least twenty miles from it's point of origin and they have checked fifty. The last town was fifteen from the source and now it's gone. It has gone, Lucifer has gone and now they are going too.
In the four weeks since the final battle with Lucifer Dean has been unstoppable, unresting, fiercer than ever. Out of guilt and shame. Because he spent the last battle bloody and unconscious only to wake up and find it over without any hand in it. He felt without purpose after everything was over, his pride hurting more than his broken arm and the constant ache in his chest and the unceasing strain in his muscles. His absence from the final showdown is like a knife in his chest and he thinks he will never be satisfied, he'll never have closure, no matter what Cas or any of the others tell him. Now he is exhausted from trying to prove himself and prove his worth even with a broken arm, two fractured ribs and a mild concussion. From lifting and digging and running on nothing more than his adrenaline. From wanting to burn out, supernova style.
Cas was the shmuck nominated to drive Dean to his new home, sourced and signed for in a town just outside Sioux Falls. It has been regenerated just for them. For the survivors and the workers, the new heroes. People will want to shake their hands and talk to them, thank and praise them. So they build them a town. . And the place isn't a coincidence. It's home for Dean. For both of them. The closest thing they've ever had. But the praise feels hollow. The praise is worth shit.
The drive so far has been silent. Barely a word has passed between them this side of the battle, though in all fairness Dean has been powering through tasks in a robotic state that has left no room for conversation. Cas has become so used to the silent stoicism of the man beside him that he feels no need to force conversation. years ago they could speak with a look or touch or gesture. Years ago Dean would call just to talk.
Now the only noise is the engine and the tinny sound rasping from the wrecked speakers of a CD of Cas' choosing. It's his jeep, after all.
“Cas, this music is abominable,” Dean mumbles after three quarters of an hour, his voice sounding all the more strained from it's lake of use as much as it is from deviating into the silence between them.
“Driver picks the music,” Cas replies without humour, and if the words hurt Dean he doesn't care. Dean doesn't react, but then Cas can't tell if he feels anything these days. So there is more silence, but for the engine and the whispered words of a band from their old lives. The landscape outside the window is dull, browns and pale greens, grey sky pending rain, but it's different and it's not a war zone.
“You liked him, didn't you?” Dean asks at length, staring out of his window at the passing trees and fields that stretch carelessly into the distance. His voice sounds as far away as the horizon and were it any other question Cas may have pretended he didn't hear.
Instead, he heaves a sigh. “To whom are you referring?” he asks, gaze focussed on the road.
“Dean- the Dean who...the old me.” It's a blast from the past, a hark back nearly a year and a half to the surprise visit that had irrevocably changed everything.
“Oh, yeah,” a grin breaks out over Cas' face as he casts himself back. Not that he hasn't thought of it often, that Dean. Those few days. “Yeah, I did. Very much.”
Dean turns his head slowly., pulling his eyes away from the muted landscape to the man-angel at the wheel.
“Oh, Dean, come on, you know the answer to that,” Cas says, grin still in place. “You know damn well.”
“Yeah, you were in love with him,” Dean snorts, resuming his lookout, unable to keep his eyes on Castiel any longer.
“He was awesome. He was charming, his head and his heart were in the right place. And he liked me back.” Cas nods sagely. The lightness in his tone is deceptive. “He said I made him laugh.”
“I like you,” Dean frowns, looking around again.
“Yeah, I don't know, Dean. I don't think you understand that feeling anymore,” Cas turns as well and their eyes meet just for a second. “It doesn't mean I love you any less, though. You know that, right?” his tone softens but it doesn't match the expression in his gaze, that ever searching force in his eyes that pulls the air from Dean's lungs and makes his heart hammer.
Dean snorts and breaks eye contact. “Don't.”
“Just because I don't like you very much, if at all, it doesn't mean I ever stopped loving you, assbutt.” Cas says, forcing a smile.
“What did you just call me?” Dean asks turning to stare at Cas' profile.
“Assbutt,” Cas replies. “It's what you are.”
There is humour in Cas' expression, and though Dean thinks he should be offended there are more concerning things to talk about.
“You still love me?” he questions, still staring hard, desperate for the other man to turn and look at him. “Why?”
“That's a very egotistical question, Dean. You should never ask someone why they love you. Sometimes it just can't be explained.” Cas glances over quickly just to catch Dean's eye, to push the words home.
“Try,” Dean insists. “Please?” He doesn't know why, because Cas is right, it's egotistical and the chances are he needs to know the reasons like he needs a hole in the head. But so much has passed between them and he feels so lost inside himself that to know there is even a little something of the old Dean in him is a lifeline he could really use.
Cas sighs and throws in a little shrug of his shoulders. “Because, Dean. Because it's you and there was never going to be anyone else for me. Ever.”
Dean has been expecting something a little fruity or sarcastic, but the simplicity of Cas' statement is humbling and makes him feel guilty. It's harsher than knowing Cas is clinging on to a fragment of a memory of how things were. He's just clinging on because he has no choice.
“Oh,” he whispers, fidgeting in his seat. “I wasn't- I um-”
“It's fine, Dean. We've spent nearly ten years not dealing with our feelings, there's no need for us to start now,” Cas replies, his voice so void of emotion that it is painful to hear. And again Dean feels guilty, to the point of nausea.
“Cas,” Dean starts, though he'll be damned if he knows what he wants to say. “I-I'm sorry I changed.” It sounds pathetic, it's not even an apology, but he has to say something.
“We all changed, Dean. It was inevitable. I don't blame you for that. You did what you needed to and I was always going to be pissed off that you weren't the same boy I dragged from Hell but it's hardly my place to want.” Again Cas is so sure, so matter-of-fact that Dean can only assume he's thought this through too many times.
They sit in silence for a while, listening to the whisper of the music and the grinding of metal as the jeep goes over bumps in the road.
“Sam made this for you, didn't he?” Dean asks, indicating the crackling stereo and the music coming from a CD inside it.
“Yep,” Cas confirms. “For my first birthday.”
Dean smiles slightly at the memory that seems like a decade ago- well, it must be pushing six years at least. Sam decided that if they were going to keep Cas around he needed to have a birthday like everyone else. To have all the people things. That if they were all going to be a family they needed to start celebrating things together and not just fighting and patching each other up. Sam had been so enthusiastic about it. But then he had been the one to break up the family, to rip away the bonds they had taken so long to forge.
“You said birthday celebrations were frivolous and a waste of time until we took you out for steak and gave you presents.” Dean tries to force a light hearted tone to his voice as he goes through the memories, but everything is shrouded in bitterness. Everything.
Cas laughs though. It's only short but it's a laugh nonetheless. “Yeah, I remember. You both worked out how old I was supposed to be. You found Jimmy's birth records-” the lightness vanishes from his voice and he lets out a sigh. “It seems like a lifetime ago. When I spoke to you - the other you - it was strange to think that I was an angel when he last saw me. He thought I was an angel.” The sting of that has never quite faded. The words and the look of disappointment in Dean's eyes. “I almost didn't remember myself.”
“You forget you were- are an angel?” Dean asks, correcting himself quickly and leaning back in the chair, letting the back support his head as he looks at the man beside him. Man, angel, he's a little bit of both, never quite one or the other. “How?”
“Well, this is a far cry from Heaven,” Cas replies, his eyes staying on the road despite seeing Dean in his peripheral vision watching him. “He reminded me of everything we've lost.”
“Everyone,” Dean adds (or corrects), picking at the loose end of the bandage on his arm when Cas refuses to look at him. “Ourselves. Sam.”
This time Cas does glance over, but Dean's face is rigid and his eyes are lowered.
“Stupid sonofabitch had to say yes. Why'd he do it, Cas? We'd have been ok.”
Aside from the inconsolable few weeks after Sam had gone, had agreed to Lucifer's request Dean has never spoken of it. He's never brought it up on his own, never attached sentiment to it. And just for that step Cas reaches over across the car and places his hand on Dean's leg. It's a gesture neither of them are all that familiar with, and physical contact has been off the table for them for years. But Dean doesn't flinch and Cas' hand rests with a familiarity born long, long ago.
“It wasn't your fault,” he says. “You weren't his keeper, Dean.”
The next moment seems to stretch out between them for a lifetime, but it is only a moment. One second. One heartbeat and then Dean's hand, though hesitant, rests upon Cas', perching like a nervous butterfly. “I miss him,” Dean says, though the feeling is so much stronger than that. He just doesn't know the words.
“I know,” Cas whispers. He misses Sam too. More than he's ever let on because it probably pales in comparison to the way Dean misses him. But for all of the brothers and sisters Castiel has lost or killed he mourns none of them the way he mourns Sam.
“We killed him.” Dean speaks, his voice rasping as it fights against the emotions that have been bottled up inside him for too long.
Cas shakes his head, looking away from the road. “He killed himself, Dean. He made the choice. And he wasn't in there with Lucifer when we took him out. He was long gone.” It was only his brother there.
Dean seems to take some small comfort from this though, and his face softens just slightly. He wasn't there, he doesn't know, though he always swore it would be him that ganked the devil. Perhaps it's best he wasn't. His ability to tell the difference between his brother and Lucifer may not have been as on the mark as he'd have liked. Cas though - he believes Cas.
Their hands retreat, Dean's to his lap and Cas' back to the wheel.
The song changes. The road is smoother.
“We've been through much together, you and I,” Cas says after a pause worth a verse and a chorus.
“You've said that to me before,” Dean replies, putting himself into the memory. The room. Zachariah. Castiel. The day everything changed.
“I know,” Cas nods. “It doesn't make it any less true.”
“No,” Dean agrees, back to picking at his bandage as his mind walks through one scene after another, a montage of their relationship. “We're so complicated.”
“Not really,” Cas shrugs, the straight road ahead allowing him more time to look at Dean. “Angel loves boy, boy doesn't know, everyone is miserable.”
Dean laughs bitterly. “Fuck.”
“Mmhm,” Cas agrees with an air of forced nonchalance. “Short of proposing to you I had no idea of how to make you see. Then this happened.” He gestures at nothing in particular and everything at once.
Dean doesn't let Cas' words sink in before he starts; “I couldn't afford to love you.” The words slip out easily because he's practiced them so many times in his head, used them as reasoning over and over again.
“Oh Dean, that's such bullshit. Don't insult me,” Cas snorts, shaking his head. “You never wanted me back and it's fine. It doesn't change a damn thing but it's fine.”
“Cas. I-”
“I don't want your excuses or your explanations, Dean. Like everything else I gave up on that a long time ago.” Cas' grip on the wheel has tightened significantly, his knuckles white against the faded black leather.
“You got on okay,” Dean says, but there is a bitterness still lingering in his voice. “You didn't look too heartbroken.”
“Shut up, Dean,” Cas snaps, his eyes narrowed and focussed intently on the road ahead.
“The orgies, Cas? For fuck's sake.” Dean doesn't let up. A little crack in his stone walls and his emotions are starting to leak out.
“Oh, oh-ho,” Cas sneers, casting Dean a stone cold glare. “That's rich from you. You've never had sex to forget some pain? Some anguish?”
“Orgies, Cas?”
“Well, maybe I was in a lot of fucking pain, Dean.” Cas snaps, pulling over to the side of the road, the sudden swerve of the jeep pushing Dean against the door and his bad arm. “I need to take a piss.” He gets out, ignoring Dean's little hiss of pain like he just doesn't give a shit anymore.
Dean frowns at his lap as the car door creaks open and the jeep rocks with the shift of Cas' weight. The guilt is back and weighs heavily in his chest. He feels immobile with it. Perhaps Cas is right and after so many years he shouldn't try and analyse their relationship. But it's a new era now. A new world for the both of them. And though nearly everyone else has gone they still have each other. They always had each other.
Dean skips ahead on the CD, track by track. They're not to his taste at all, but he knows them from Sam and that's enough. And now Cas has them. Before his brother had said yes to Lucifer he and Cas had been thick as thieves. They'd grown impossibly close and Dean had been jealous, but of whom he couldn't decide. And it was another reason he had thought Sam wouldn't go through with it. Because not only did he have Dean he had Cas. A brother and a best friend. He thought Cas would have taken it harder. Had thought Cas hadn't felt a damn thing for months and Dean hated him so much. Until the day he'd visited Cas' room, before they'd all had to move, and seen the chess set as Sam had left it, saw the CDs Cas kept close to hand. It didn't bring them closer. Perhaps it should have, but Dean at least understood that, fallen or not, Cas was a fierce guard of his emotions, just like himself, and that would never pave a good path for them.
Cas climbs back into the car, and though Dean notices, he is stuck in these thoughts and can't bring himself to turn and acknowledge him. Cas starts up the jeep again and they pull out into the road, the metal rattling over the uneven surface.
“Cas?” Dean starts after nearly a mile, fidgeting again in the way that used to suggest he had something personal he wanted to get off of his chest, the sheer prospect of talking about feelings making him physically uncomfortable.
“Dean?”
“I thought sometimes that there might have been something between u-”
“Dean, don't. Don't. No more of this,” Cas interrupts, shaking his head sadly.
“You made me feel dif-”
“Dean, I just told you, don't.”
“But Cas-”
“But nothing,” Cas pulls over again, turning in his seat to face Dean. “Just because you're suddenly ready to talk about it it doesn't mean I am. I've spent years trying to stop feeling for you. Don't assume that you have any idea what it's like.”
“But we-”
“No,” Cas jumps in. “No, Dean. 'We' nothing. There's no 'we' here. There's you and there's the man that is in love with you, but there is no 'we'.”
“Cas,” Dean says the other man's name regardless, suddenly desperate for his attention, desperate to hold on to it now that he has it fully. “I know that things got awkward between us-”
“Oh really, genius?” Cas bites back, glaring out of the front window, though his body remains pointed towards Dean. That should have been enough, a hint at something amicable, something small Dean could work with.
Instead, he says “But come on, you changed too.”
Cas turns his head slowly and Dean feels his chest tighten, alarmed at the anger in Cas' eyes.
“I tried, Dean,” he whispers, his voice taunt and his eyes suddenly damp with frustrated tears he fights to hold back. “I tried so fucking hard over and over to be what you needed. Your best friend, your brother, your comrade, but no. Nothing. I lost myself trying to keep up with you and you have the fucking balls to sit there and tell me I changed? Like you were the one watching the person you loved disappear. Well fuck you, Dean.”
“Well maybe I was, too,” Dean snaps, flinging up any defence he can at the torrent of anger Cas is directing at him. “Maybe I was watching you love me, watching you break yourself for me and knowing I couldn't love you like th-”
“Bullshit,” Cas growls, slamming his hands down on the wheel hard enough to jog the jeep slightly. “Bull-shit. Don't give me any of that 'oh, I was afraid to lose you like I lost everyone else' crap, Dean. Do not insult me. I am not and I never was 'everyone else' and you knew, you fucking knew you just had to say the words and we could have had everything. Don't insult my feelings for you with your little sob stories.” Cas fumes, his fingers gripping the wheel tightly, his knuckles white. “Because I've given you my whole life. Literally, all of it. Eternity. For you. And now you're just throwing it back at me like you don't know me at all. Like we haven't literally been through Hell together. And you think that wasn't enough? Did you think after that I wouldn't stick around? Really?”
He reaches down and turns off the engine. He looks across the car to Dean. There's so many emotions burning in his eyes that Dean recoils slightly against the passenger door, but he refuses to accept that he's completely wrong, that the hypothesis he has been working to for forever can have such a big fucking anomaly.
“The people I love die.” Dean's voice is a heck of a lot surer than he feels because he's certain that Cas can't dispute the evidence. He does.
“Well you just said you loved me and look, still here, still kicking. Because, Dean-” Cas' voice is suddenly very soft and he inches closer, as well as he can in the space they have, his grip on the wheel relaxing until his hands fall away completely. “Because you and I were never the same as anyone else. We're not just two people who wandered the earth and into each others lives. We were put together, Dean, by God. By fucking God. I was no archangel. I was no leader, even, and yet he chose me to pull you out and he sent me back to you time and time again. Don't you understand that? Did you never understand that we were more? That I was never going to leave you.”
Their eyes meet and two million conversations happen and once and every inch of the path they've walked together spirals out behind them, behind their jeep on the highway, back, back to the Hell that a garrison of angels marched into to pull out the Righteous Man. Where, in the end, one reached in and pulled. It started with just the two of them-
“Will you leave me now?” Dean asks quietly, though his voice sounds so loud in the silence.
Cas frowns. “Never, Dean,” he replies. The thought just- it isn't a thought. Not having Dean in his life in some way. But it seems to mean more to Dean. Cas waits.
“I'm serious,” Dean shifts, sits up straighter or leans in slightly, breeches Cas' personal space a little. “When we get to Sioux Falls, stay with me-”
“Dean-” Cas sighs, closing his eyes for a second before turning in his seat again, starting up the engine that gasps with fatigue, pulling out into the road to give himself something else to focus on whilst a thousand other things try to compete for precedence in his head. “I don't understand what you're asking.”
“Cas-” Dean says his name again, a simple plea. “I don't know how to live without you.”
Cas' jaw sets rigid and his eyes fix straight ahead. Dean knows he heard him, so he doesn't repeat himself. Just waits.
“What about me, Dean?” he asks finally, his voice no more than a whisper over the other sounds, the now perpetual rattle of a part of the jeep, the hum of the engine. Another song. “This could be my chance to start a life without you. Finally. Be free of...you. This.”
“You don't mean that-”
“No, I don't,” Cas say, affording Dean a sideways glance. “I wish I did, but I don't. I can't. I can't think of my life without you in it and I hate you for that.” Cas' voice is softer, his whole demeanor is softer, defeated. “I wish you understood.”
“Stay with me, Cas,” Dean asks again, emboldened by Cas' change and, admittedly, taking advantage of Cas' sudden emotional frailty.
“Because you don't want to be alone?” Cas asks, looking over, his expression so bittersweet. He can be with Dean. So that Dean isn't lonely. But he can be with Dean.
Dean shakes his head though, no. “Because I don't want to be without you, Cas. No one else would do. No one else ever has. Never will.”
Once more Cas pulls over to the side of the road and once more he turns in his seat to look at Dean.
“Tell me,” he says, no other indication of what he wants to hear, just that request.
Dean rises to the challenge.
“I saw the way you were with him and I remembered how it felt when you used to look at me before. I was so jealous, Cas. I was jealous because you liked him and I was jealous because he got to go back and make sure this never happened. To make sure he never lost you. And Hell, I hope he had the balls to tell his Cas he was in love with him because I sure didn't, even after all of that”
Cas tips his head. “Do you think he was?”
“I know, Cas. I know that since the moment you rewrote everything for me that this was love. Fucked up love, sure, but love. That time we were sitting on the benches in the park I knew you were something, but I knew I wanted more from you way back when you were still a bit of a dick. Because I used to imagine I'd hear you wings and...” Dean flushed, toying with the hem of his shirt and the old faithful bandage on his arm. “..and my heart would do this weird flipping thing and- y'know.”
Cas frowns, teetering between belief and denial of Dean's feelings. He's weighing them up. Dean continues.
“I didn't want you to die a virgin and I wanted- I remember thinking I wanted it, Cas. I wanted- Christ. Cas-”
Flushing, Dean looks out of the window, directing all of his attention as far away from Cas as he can. But Cas hasn't heard enough, despite being more than convinced now. Dean isn't the kind of guy to rattle off sentiments and admissions and that's all he needs to know. He reaches out a hand and touches Dean's leg, making the other man jump.
“Tell me more,” Cas says gently. “You've got nothing to lose now, Dean.”
“My pride? My manliness?” Dean replies, but there's a sudden hint of amusement in his eyes and he seems to be willing to comply. “I couldn't stand the thought of losing you. Not when I'd lost everyone else.”
“You didn't speak to me- you could have.”
“I'm emotionally stunted, Cas. When Sam went-” Dean sighs, composing himself. “You stopped calling me Dean. When I woke up after- that was the first time I remember you calling me by my name in years.”
“You weren't Dean anymore,” Cas replies. “You were our fearless leader, void of emotions and humour.” He looks out of the front window, tip-toeing over his own painful memories. His hand feels hot against Dean's leg but he doesn't move it.
“I watched us drift apart, but I missed you. I missed us.” Dean mumbles, prising out the last emotional stoppers.
Cas tips his head, his eyes wandering back to Dean. “There was an 'us'?”
“Of course,” Dean says, wondering how they could possibly only now be treading this path. “You said yourself we were always different from everyone else.”
“Yes, but-”
“There was an 'us', Cas. There was Sam and I, brothers, and you and I...something. I thought you were a douchebag at first but then you made me laugh. You made me feel good. Like I was worth something.”
“You still are,” Cas whispers.
“Then stay with me, Cas,” Dean turns, facing Cas, reaching over to touch his arm in a way they're both very unfamiliar with. “Let's do this together. I don't want anything to keep me from you anymore.”
Cas wants to scoff and say that Dean was the only thing keeping them apart anyway, but he doesn't. He doesn't because Dean reaches down and takes his hand, a simple gesture of reassurance that is so unlike him that Cas has to take him seriously.
“Cas, come on. We've wasted too much time.”
Cas pauses, considering these words, considering Dean and his pleading, his touching that is such a far cry from the man he's known the last few years and even further, it seems, from the man he fell in love with.
Then he turns his hand over slowly, letting their palms touch and their fingers knit together. They both watch, fascinated, as though it's the most miraculous image they've ever beheld. Cas' fingers are still pale, still oddly delicate despite the years of handling guns and digging holes. Dean's are rough, dark, cradling Cas' hand almost clumsily.
“You're an asshole,” Cas says very quietly, his eyes searching Dean's face for anything he should be wary of. But no, it's Dean. His Dean, a little older and worn and rough around the edges, but it's Dean. “Come on, if I keep stopping we'll never get there.”
He doesn't agree directly but there's a look they share, just one, the tiny beginnings of that silent communication the two of them used to have.
Dean rides shotgun with a broken arm. The radio plays a CD his brother made before he died. Beside him, his best friend drives them along the barren highway that slowly gives to civilisation and trees, houses and streets that look foreign to their worn eyes. They are soldiers back from a war they fought together, back from a Hell they traversed together. Going home. Finally together.
Cas' CD
Author:
signalfire
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: R
Words: 5050
Spoilers: Mainly 504
Warnings: Naughty words.
Summary: “What did you just call me?” Dean asks turning to stare at Cas' profile.
“Assbutt,” Cas replies. “It's what you are.”
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
A/N: Written for p_sharkbait's everlasting birthday challenge prompt. Happy Birthday, sweetheart, it's been an absolute pleasure getting to know you over the last little while. I hope that this is everything you wanted, and if it's not I'll just write you something else. Seriously, you're wonderful, I hope you had a lovely day. x
There's going to be a soundtrack to accompany this. Check the journal in a few hours =)
There is another bump in the road and no matter how slowly Cas drives it still jolts Dean and he grunts in pain.
“Sorry,” Cas says from the driver's seat, glancing across to Dean riding shotgun. Behind him, in the distance, smoke rises in thick plumes from the very last town they will burn to the ground. No m ore clean ups, no more mass burials. The land will reclaim itself and one day they will build again.
The clean up after Lucifer's death has been slow and meticulous. The virus has spread at least twenty miles from it's point of origin and they have checked fifty. The last town was fifteen from the source and now it's gone. It has gone, Lucifer has gone and now they are going too.
In the four weeks since the final battle with Lucifer Dean has been unstoppable, unresting, fiercer than ever. Out of guilt and shame. Because he spent the last battle bloody and unconscious only to wake up and find it over without any hand in it. He felt without purpose after everything was over, his pride hurting more than his broken arm and the constant ache in his chest and the unceasing strain in his muscles. His absence from the final showdown is like a knife in his chest and he thinks he will never be satisfied, he'll never have closure, no matter what Cas or any of the others tell him. Now he is exhausted from trying to prove himself and prove his worth even with a broken arm, two fractured ribs and a mild concussion. From lifting and digging and running on nothing more than his adrenaline. From wanting to burn out, supernova style.
Cas was the shmuck nominated to drive Dean to his new home, sourced and signed for in a town just outside Sioux Falls. It has been regenerated just for them. For the survivors and the workers, the new heroes. People will want to shake their hands and talk to them, thank and praise them. So they build them a town. . And the place isn't a coincidence. It's home for Dean. For both of them. The closest thing they've ever had. But the praise feels hollow. The praise is worth shit.
The drive so far has been silent. Barely a word has passed between them this side of the battle, though in all fairness Dean has been powering through tasks in a robotic state that has left no room for conversation. Cas has become so used to the silent stoicism of the man beside him that he feels no need to force conversation. years ago they could speak with a look or touch or gesture. Years ago Dean would call just to talk.
Now the only noise is the engine and the tinny sound rasping from the wrecked speakers of a CD of Cas' choosing. It's his jeep, after all.
“Cas, this music is abominable,” Dean mumbles after three quarters of an hour, his voice sounding all the more strained from it's lake of use as much as it is from deviating into the silence between them.
“Driver picks the music,” Cas replies without humour, and if the words hurt Dean he doesn't care. Dean doesn't react, but then Cas can't tell if he feels anything these days. So there is more silence, but for the engine and the whispered words of a band from their old lives. The landscape outside the window is dull, browns and pale greens, grey sky pending rain, but it's different and it's not a war zone.
“You liked him, didn't you?” Dean asks at length, staring out of his window at the passing trees and fields that stretch carelessly into the distance. His voice sounds as far away as the horizon and were it any other question Cas may have pretended he didn't hear.
Instead, he heaves a sigh. “To whom are you referring?” he asks, gaze focussed on the road.
“Dean- the Dean who...the old me.” It's a blast from the past, a hark back nearly a year and a half to the surprise visit that had irrevocably changed everything.
“Oh, yeah,” a grin breaks out over Cas' face as he casts himself back. Not that he hasn't thought of it often, that Dean. Those few days. “Yeah, I did. Very much.”
Dean turns his head slowly., pulling his eyes away from the muted landscape to the man-angel at the wheel.
“Oh, Dean, come on, you know the answer to that,” Cas says, grin still in place. “You know damn well.”
“Yeah, you were in love with him,” Dean snorts, resuming his lookout, unable to keep his eyes on Castiel any longer.
“He was awesome. He was charming, his head and his heart were in the right place. And he liked me back.” Cas nods sagely. The lightness in his tone is deceptive. “He said I made him laugh.”
“I like you,” Dean frowns, looking around again.
“Yeah, I don't know, Dean. I don't think you understand that feeling anymore,” Cas turns as well and their eyes meet just for a second. “It doesn't mean I love you any less, though. You know that, right?” his tone softens but it doesn't match the expression in his gaze, that ever searching force in his eyes that pulls the air from Dean's lungs and makes his heart hammer.
Dean snorts and breaks eye contact. “Don't.”
“Just because I don't like you very much, if at all, it doesn't mean I ever stopped loving you, assbutt.” Cas says, forcing a smile.
“What did you just call me?” Dean asks turning to stare at Cas' profile.
“Assbutt,” Cas replies. “It's what you are.”
There is humour in Cas' expression, and though Dean thinks he should be offended there are more concerning things to talk about.
“You still love me?” he questions, still staring hard, desperate for the other man to turn and look at him. “Why?”
“That's a very egotistical question, Dean. You should never ask someone why they love you. Sometimes it just can't be explained.” Cas glances over quickly just to catch Dean's eye, to push the words home.
“Try,” Dean insists. “Please?” He doesn't know why, because Cas is right, it's egotistical and the chances are he needs to know the reasons like he needs a hole in the head. But so much has passed between them and he feels so lost inside himself that to know there is even a little something of the old Dean in him is a lifeline he could really use.
Cas sighs and throws in a little shrug of his shoulders. “Because, Dean. Because it's you and there was never going to be anyone else for me. Ever.”
Dean has been expecting something a little fruity or sarcastic, but the simplicity of Cas' statement is humbling and makes him feel guilty. It's harsher than knowing Cas is clinging on to a fragment of a memory of how things were. He's just clinging on because he has no choice.
“Oh,” he whispers, fidgeting in his seat. “I wasn't- I um-”
“It's fine, Dean. We've spent nearly ten years not dealing with our feelings, there's no need for us to start now,” Cas replies, his voice so void of emotion that it is painful to hear. And again Dean feels guilty, to the point of nausea.
“Cas,” Dean starts, though he'll be damned if he knows what he wants to say. “I-I'm sorry I changed.” It sounds pathetic, it's not even an apology, but he has to say something.
“We all changed, Dean. It was inevitable. I don't blame you for that. You did what you needed to and I was always going to be pissed off that you weren't the same boy I dragged from Hell but it's hardly my place to want.” Again Cas is so sure, so matter-of-fact that Dean can only assume he's thought this through too many times.
They sit in silence for a while, listening to the whisper of the music and the grinding of metal as the jeep goes over bumps in the road.
“Sam made this for you, didn't he?” Dean asks, indicating the crackling stereo and the music coming from a CD inside it.
“Yep,” Cas confirms. “For my first birthday.”
Dean smiles slightly at the memory that seems like a decade ago- well, it must be pushing six years at least. Sam decided that if they were going to keep Cas around he needed to have a birthday like everyone else. To have all the people things. That if they were all going to be a family they needed to start celebrating things together and not just fighting and patching each other up. Sam had been so enthusiastic about it. But then he had been the one to break up the family, to rip away the bonds they had taken so long to forge.
“You said birthday celebrations were frivolous and a waste of time until we took you out for steak and gave you presents.” Dean tries to force a light hearted tone to his voice as he goes through the memories, but everything is shrouded in bitterness. Everything.
Cas laughs though. It's only short but it's a laugh nonetheless. “Yeah, I remember. You both worked out how old I was supposed to be. You found Jimmy's birth records-” the lightness vanishes from his voice and he lets out a sigh. “It seems like a lifetime ago. When I spoke to you - the other you - it was strange to think that I was an angel when he last saw me. He thought I was an angel.” The sting of that has never quite faded. The words and the look of disappointment in Dean's eyes. “I almost didn't remember myself.”
“You forget you were- are an angel?” Dean asks, correcting himself quickly and leaning back in the chair, letting the back support his head as he looks at the man beside him. Man, angel, he's a little bit of both, never quite one or the other. “How?”
“Well, this is a far cry from Heaven,” Cas replies, his eyes staying on the road despite seeing Dean in his peripheral vision watching him. “He reminded me of everything we've lost.”
“Everyone,” Dean adds (or corrects), picking at the loose end of the bandage on his arm when Cas refuses to look at him. “Ourselves. Sam.”
This time Cas does glance over, but Dean's face is rigid and his eyes are lowered.
“Stupid sonofabitch had to say yes. Why'd he do it, Cas? We'd have been ok.”
Aside from the inconsolable few weeks after Sam had gone, had agreed to Lucifer's request Dean has never spoken of it. He's never brought it up on his own, never attached sentiment to it. And just for that step Cas reaches over across the car and places his hand on Dean's leg. It's a gesture neither of them are all that familiar with, and physical contact has been off the table for them for years. But Dean doesn't flinch and Cas' hand rests with a familiarity born long, long ago.
“It wasn't your fault,” he says. “You weren't his keeper, Dean.”
The next moment seems to stretch out between them for a lifetime, but it is only a moment. One second. One heartbeat and then Dean's hand, though hesitant, rests upon Cas', perching like a nervous butterfly. “I miss him,” Dean says, though the feeling is so much stronger than that. He just doesn't know the words.
“I know,” Cas whispers. He misses Sam too. More than he's ever let on because it probably pales in comparison to the way Dean misses him. But for all of the brothers and sisters Castiel has lost or killed he mourns none of them the way he mourns Sam.
“We killed him.” Dean speaks, his voice rasping as it fights against the emotions that have been bottled up inside him for too long.
Cas shakes his head, looking away from the road. “He killed himself, Dean. He made the choice. And he wasn't in there with Lucifer when we took him out. He was long gone.” It was only his brother there.
Dean seems to take some small comfort from this though, and his face softens just slightly. He wasn't there, he doesn't know, though he always swore it would be him that ganked the devil. Perhaps it's best he wasn't. His ability to tell the difference between his brother and Lucifer may not have been as on the mark as he'd have liked. Cas though - he believes Cas.
Their hands retreat, Dean's to his lap and Cas' back to the wheel.
The song changes. The road is smoother.
“We've been through much together, you and I,” Cas says after a pause worth a verse and a chorus.
“You've said that to me before,” Dean replies, putting himself into the memory. The room. Zachariah. Castiel. The day everything changed.
“I know,” Cas nods. “It doesn't make it any less true.”
“No,” Dean agrees, back to picking at his bandage as his mind walks through one scene after another, a montage of their relationship. “We're so complicated.”
“Not really,” Cas shrugs, the straight road ahead allowing him more time to look at Dean. “Angel loves boy, boy doesn't know, everyone is miserable.”
Dean laughs bitterly. “Fuck.”
“Mmhm,” Cas agrees with an air of forced nonchalance. “Short of proposing to you I had no idea of how to make you see. Then this happened.” He gestures at nothing in particular and everything at once.
Dean doesn't let Cas' words sink in before he starts; “I couldn't afford to love you.” The words slip out easily because he's practiced them so many times in his head, used them as reasoning over and over again.
“Oh Dean, that's such bullshit. Don't insult me,” Cas snorts, shaking his head. “You never wanted me back and it's fine. It doesn't change a damn thing but it's fine.”
“Cas. I-”
“I don't want your excuses or your explanations, Dean. Like everything else I gave up on that a long time ago.” Cas' grip on the wheel has tightened significantly, his knuckles white against the faded black leather.
“You got on okay,” Dean says, but there is a bitterness still lingering in his voice. “You didn't look too heartbroken.”
“Shut up, Dean,” Cas snaps, his eyes narrowed and focussed intently on the road ahead.
“The orgies, Cas? For fuck's sake.” Dean doesn't let up. A little crack in his stone walls and his emotions are starting to leak out.
“Oh, oh-ho,” Cas sneers, casting Dean a stone cold glare. “That's rich from you. You've never had sex to forget some pain? Some anguish?”
“Orgies, Cas?”
“Well, maybe I was in a lot of fucking pain, Dean.” Cas snaps, pulling over to the side of the road, the sudden swerve of the jeep pushing Dean against the door and his bad arm. “I need to take a piss.” He gets out, ignoring Dean's little hiss of pain like he just doesn't give a shit anymore.
Dean frowns at his lap as the car door creaks open and the jeep rocks with the shift of Cas' weight. The guilt is back and weighs heavily in his chest. He feels immobile with it. Perhaps Cas is right and after so many years he shouldn't try and analyse their relationship. But it's a new era now. A new world for the both of them. And though nearly everyone else has gone they still have each other. They always had each other.
Dean skips ahead on the CD, track by track. They're not to his taste at all, but he knows them from Sam and that's enough. And now Cas has them. Before his brother had said yes to Lucifer he and Cas had been thick as thieves. They'd grown impossibly close and Dean had been jealous, but of whom he couldn't decide. And it was another reason he had thought Sam wouldn't go through with it. Because not only did he have Dean he had Cas. A brother and a best friend. He thought Cas would have taken it harder. Had thought Cas hadn't felt a damn thing for months and Dean hated him so much. Until the day he'd visited Cas' room, before they'd all had to move, and seen the chess set as Sam had left it, saw the CDs Cas kept close to hand. It didn't bring them closer. Perhaps it should have, but Dean at least understood that, fallen or not, Cas was a fierce guard of his emotions, just like himself, and that would never pave a good path for them.
Cas climbs back into the car, and though Dean notices, he is stuck in these thoughts and can't bring himself to turn and acknowledge him. Cas starts up the jeep again and they pull out into the road, the metal rattling over the uneven surface.
“Cas?” Dean starts after nearly a mile, fidgeting again in the way that used to suggest he had something personal he wanted to get off of his chest, the sheer prospect of talking about feelings making him physically uncomfortable.
“Dean?”
“I thought sometimes that there might have been something between u-”
“Dean, don't. Don't. No more of this,” Cas interrupts, shaking his head sadly.
“You made me feel dif-”
“Dean, I just told you, don't.”
“But Cas-”
“But nothing,” Cas pulls over again, turning in his seat to face Dean. “Just because you're suddenly ready to talk about it it doesn't mean I am. I've spent years trying to stop feeling for you. Don't assume that you have any idea what it's like.”
“But we-”
“No,” Cas jumps in. “No, Dean. 'We' nothing. There's no 'we' here. There's you and there's the man that is in love with you, but there is no 'we'.”
“Cas,” Dean says the other man's name regardless, suddenly desperate for his attention, desperate to hold on to it now that he has it fully. “I know that things got awkward between us-”
“Oh really, genius?” Cas bites back, glaring out of the front window, though his body remains pointed towards Dean. That should have been enough, a hint at something amicable, something small Dean could work with.
Instead, he says “But come on, you changed too.”
Cas turns his head slowly and Dean feels his chest tighten, alarmed at the anger in Cas' eyes.
“I tried, Dean,” he whispers, his voice taunt and his eyes suddenly damp with frustrated tears he fights to hold back. “I tried so fucking hard over and over to be what you needed. Your best friend, your brother, your comrade, but no. Nothing. I lost myself trying to keep up with you and you have the fucking balls to sit there and tell me I changed? Like you were the one watching the person you loved disappear. Well fuck you, Dean.”
“Well maybe I was, too,” Dean snaps, flinging up any defence he can at the torrent of anger Cas is directing at him. “Maybe I was watching you love me, watching you break yourself for me and knowing I couldn't love you like th-”
“Bullshit,” Cas growls, slamming his hands down on the wheel hard enough to jog the jeep slightly. “Bull-shit. Don't give me any of that 'oh, I was afraid to lose you like I lost everyone else' crap, Dean. Do not insult me. I am not and I never was 'everyone else' and you knew, you fucking knew you just had to say the words and we could have had everything. Don't insult my feelings for you with your little sob stories.” Cas fumes, his fingers gripping the wheel tightly, his knuckles white. “Because I've given you my whole life. Literally, all of it. Eternity. For you. And now you're just throwing it back at me like you don't know me at all. Like we haven't literally been through Hell together. And you think that wasn't enough? Did you think after that I wouldn't stick around? Really?”
He reaches down and turns off the engine. He looks across the car to Dean. There's so many emotions burning in his eyes that Dean recoils slightly against the passenger door, but he refuses to accept that he's completely wrong, that the hypothesis he has been working to for forever can have such a big fucking anomaly.
“The people I love die.” Dean's voice is a heck of a lot surer than he feels because he's certain that Cas can't dispute the evidence. He does.
“Well you just said you loved me and look, still here, still kicking. Because, Dean-” Cas' voice is suddenly very soft and he inches closer, as well as he can in the space they have, his grip on the wheel relaxing until his hands fall away completely. “Because you and I were never the same as anyone else. We're not just two people who wandered the earth and into each others lives. We were put together, Dean, by God. By fucking God. I was no archangel. I was no leader, even, and yet he chose me to pull you out and he sent me back to you time and time again. Don't you understand that? Did you never understand that we were more? That I was never going to leave you.”
Their eyes meet and two million conversations happen and once and every inch of the path they've walked together spirals out behind them, behind their jeep on the highway, back, back to the Hell that a garrison of angels marched into to pull out the Righteous Man. Where, in the end, one reached in and pulled. It started with just the two of them-
“Will you leave me now?” Dean asks quietly, though his voice sounds so loud in the silence.
Cas frowns. “Never, Dean,” he replies. The thought just- it isn't a thought. Not having Dean in his life in some way. But it seems to mean more to Dean. Cas waits.
“I'm serious,” Dean shifts, sits up straighter or leans in slightly, breeches Cas' personal space a little. “When we get to Sioux Falls, stay with me-”
“Dean-” Cas sighs, closing his eyes for a second before turning in his seat again, starting up the engine that gasps with fatigue, pulling out into the road to give himself something else to focus on whilst a thousand other things try to compete for precedence in his head. “I don't understand what you're asking.”
“Cas-” Dean says his name again, a simple plea. “I don't know how to live without you.”
Cas' jaw sets rigid and his eyes fix straight ahead. Dean knows he heard him, so he doesn't repeat himself. Just waits.
“What about me, Dean?” he asks finally, his voice no more than a whisper over the other sounds, the now perpetual rattle of a part of the jeep, the hum of the engine. Another song. “This could be my chance to start a life without you. Finally. Be free of...you. This.”
“You don't mean that-”
“No, I don't,” Cas say, affording Dean a sideways glance. “I wish I did, but I don't. I can't. I can't think of my life without you in it and I hate you for that.” Cas' voice is softer, his whole demeanor is softer, defeated. “I wish you understood.”
“Stay with me, Cas,” Dean asks again, emboldened by Cas' change and, admittedly, taking advantage of Cas' sudden emotional frailty.
“Because you don't want to be alone?” Cas asks, looking over, his expression so bittersweet. He can be with Dean. So that Dean isn't lonely. But he can be with Dean.
Dean shakes his head though, no. “Because I don't want to be without you, Cas. No one else would do. No one else ever has. Never will.”
Once more Cas pulls over to the side of the road and once more he turns in his seat to look at Dean.
“Tell me,” he says, no other indication of what he wants to hear, just that request.
Dean rises to the challenge.
“I saw the way you were with him and I remembered how it felt when you used to look at me before. I was so jealous, Cas. I was jealous because you liked him and I was jealous because he got to go back and make sure this never happened. To make sure he never lost you. And Hell, I hope he had the balls to tell his Cas he was in love with him because I sure didn't, even after all of that”
Cas tips his head. “Do you think he was?”
“I know, Cas. I know that since the moment you rewrote everything for me that this was love. Fucked up love, sure, but love. That time we were sitting on the benches in the park I knew you were something, but I knew I wanted more from you way back when you were still a bit of a dick. Because I used to imagine I'd hear you wings and...” Dean flushed, toying with the hem of his shirt and the old faithful bandage on his arm. “..and my heart would do this weird flipping thing and- y'know.”
Cas frowns, teetering between belief and denial of Dean's feelings. He's weighing them up. Dean continues.
“I didn't want you to die a virgin and I wanted- I remember thinking I wanted it, Cas. I wanted- Christ. Cas-”
Flushing, Dean looks out of the window, directing all of his attention as far away from Cas as he can. But Cas hasn't heard enough, despite being more than convinced now. Dean isn't the kind of guy to rattle off sentiments and admissions and that's all he needs to know. He reaches out a hand and touches Dean's leg, making the other man jump.
“Tell me more,” Cas says gently. “You've got nothing to lose now, Dean.”
“My pride? My manliness?” Dean replies, but there's a sudden hint of amusement in his eyes and he seems to be willing to comply. “I couldn't stand the thought of losing you. Not when I'd lost everyone else.”
“You didn't speak to me- you could have.”
“I'm emotionally stunted, Cas. When Sam went-” Dean sighs, composing himself. “You stopped calling me Dean. When I woke up after- that was the first time I remember you calling me by my name in years.”
“You weren't Dean anymore,” Cas replies. “You were our fearless leader, void of emotions and humour.” He looks out of the front window, tip-toeing over his own painful memories. His hand feels hot against Dean's leg but he doesn't move it.
“I watched us drift apart, but I missed you. I missed us.” Dean mumbles, prising out the last emotional stoppers.
Cas tips his head, his eyes wandering back to Dean. “There was an 'us'?”
“Of course,” Dean says, wondering how they could possibly only now be treading this path. “You said yourself we were always different from everyone else.”
“Yes, but-”
“There was an 'us', Cas. There was Sam and I, brothers, and you and I...something. I thought you were a douchebag at first but then you made me laugh. You made me feel good. Like I was worth something.”
“You still are,” Cas whispers.
“Then stay with me, Cas,” Dean turns, facing Cas, reaching over to touch his arm in a way they're both very unfamiliar with. “Let's do this together. I don't want anything to keep me from you anymore.”
Cas wants to scoff and say that Dean was the only thing keeping them apart anyway, but he doesn't. He doesn't because Dean reaches down and takes his hand, a simple gesture of reassurance that is so unlike him that Cas has to take him seriously.
“Cas, come on. We've wasted too much time.”
Cas pauses, considering these words, considering Dean and his pleading, his touching that is such a far cry from the man he's known the last few years and even further, it seems, from the man he fell in love with.
Then he turns his hand over slowly, letting their palms touch and their fingers knit together. They both watch, fascinated, as though it's the most miraculous image they've ever beheld. Cas' fingers are still pale, still oddly delicate despite the years of handling guns and digging holes. Dean's are rough, dark, cradling Cas' hand almost clumsily.
“You're an asshole,” Cas says very quietly, his eyes searching Dean's face for anything he should be wary of. But no, it's Dean. His Dean, a little older and worn and rough around the edges, but it's Dean. “Come on, if I keep stopping we'll never get there.”
He doesn't agree directly but there's a look they share, just one, the tiny beginnings of that silent communication the two of them used to have.
Dean rides shotgun with a broken arm. The radio plays a CD his brother made before he died. Beside him, his best friend drives them along the barren highway that slowly gives to civilisation and trees, houses and streets that look foreign to their worn eyes. They are soldiers back from a war they fought together, back from a Hell they traversed together. Going home. Finally together.
Cas' CD