Myself Reflected In You
Title: Myself Reflected In You
Summary: AU to 5.04. After Lucifer kills Dean, Sam manages to wrest back control of his own body. The world stops ending, people start putting things back in order. Alone together amidst a society that's trying to rebuild itself, Sam and Cas -the sole survivor of the kamikaze assault on the Jackson County Sanatorium- retreat back to Camp Chitaqua, where they've managed to build a semblance of a life together. Now, more than a year later, they're still trying to glue back the pieces of lives that have been irretrievably shattered.
Characters: Sam/Cas
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 5,681
Disclaimer: I tried to make them all mine, but Sera hung onto them and growled at me, so I decided discretion was the better part of valour. ;)
Warnings: Uh, there's a situation that I'm going to classify as dub-con in order to err on the side of caution. At the very least, it qualifies as unhappy sex. There's angst. Aaaaaangst. Oh God, there's angst. And lots of recreational drug use. Sick!Sam. Oh, and kittens. Because kittens totally deserve their own warning.
Neurotic Author's Note #1: I AM LATE. Oh God. /o\ I am SO SORRY. Um, but I wrote it anyway? Thank God 13chapters is understanding. Gaaaaaaah. This story fought me for every inch once I got close to the end.
Neurotic Author's Note #2: This is a sequel to my fic After The End. You don't need to read it in order to understand this one, I don't think. I'm almost positive it stands on its own, but since it's unbeta'd I can't tell for sure. The first fic is not as depressing as this one, for what it's worth.
Neurotic Author's Note #3: Um, apparently I really love to read happy fluffy Sassy, but whenever I write it, it ends up being a giant waterfall of angst and woe. I am sorry.
Cas wakes up every morning to Sam wrapped around him like a blanket, a little too warm and a little too close. They don't fall asleep that way, but inevitably sometime during the night one of Sam's arms will end up draped over his chest, and by the time morning comes Cas' legs will be trapped under one of Sam's, too, the rest of Sam plastered up against him like he's trying to fuse them together into one person. Sometimes Cas finds himself wondering how Dean ever put up with it, the cloying closeness, the enforced intimacy. Then again, maybe Sam wasn't quite this clingy before the world ended and they all managed to keep on going. Almost all of them, anyway.
He shoves Sam off him, gets to his feet by the simple expedient of rolling off the mattress to the floor and shoving himself upright, stumbles half-blind toward the outhouse behind his cabin. Their cabin. It was his cabin before, but now the inviolate nature of his space is no longer enforced. It's not as awful in the outhouse as when there were better than fifty people living at Camp Chitaqua, a little more liveable, but even after all these years Cas still hasn't quite gotten used to the unpleasantness of basic human bodily functions. Eating isn't so bad, but elimination is messy and seems rather pointless, all told. Not to mention it's hard to maintain decent hygiene when the only running water is a couple of hand-pumps in the cabin -one that was already installed in the kitchen sink, and one that Sam put in later so that they could have a bathroom of sorts. It's rudimentary, but it's better than it used to be, and a lot of that is because of Sam. Credit where it's due, Cas supposes, although there are days when he can't help but think that it's all Sam's fault to begin with. So on those days, when he's feeling uncharitable, he thinks that putting in a water pump is the least that Sam could do, all things considered.
When he gets back, the smell of cooking ham and eggs greets him. Sam is already in the kitchen, standing over the stove, spatula in hand. The eggs are from the chickens he's been raising for the better part of a year, the ham the result of a trade with people several miles up the road who started raising pigs and agreed to exchange one full-grown pig a year in exchange for a dozen eggs every two weeks for a year. So far it's worked out pretty well. Having a reliable source of protein is a good thing. Cas washes his hands in the sink, cold water trickling over his fingers, turns in time to see Sam sliding the eggs and ham onto a plate at his usual spot at the rough wooden kitchen table.
"Coffee's nearly ready," Sam says, breaking the silence for the first time this morning. It comes out as a hoarse croak, as though he hasn't spoken in weeks or months. His voice will even out a little as the day goes by and he uses it more, but his vocal cords have never really recovered entirely from all the damage he inflicted on them over a year ago.
Cas just nods, sits at the table and picks up his fork, uses it to cut into his eggs and watches the yellow of the yolk trickle out and ooze under his slice of ham. Sometimes he complains that Sam's cooking is terrible -to which Sam usually replies mildly that he can cook his own damned food if he wants something else- but that's not it, exactly. He doesn't like ham, doesn't like any food at all, even. It tastes too much like death and decay, even though he knows that's not what it is. Seven years, and it's all he can do to keep his gorge from rising every time he puts another bite in his mouth. He likes it better when Sam makes vegetarian dishes, but there's not enough protein in those, for either of them.
Sam sets the metal coffee maker on the table, heedless of any scorch marks it might leave. It's not like the table is in good condition to begin with, already scratched and gouged, with marks in the legs from too many booted heels knocking against it. In one corner there are distinctive scratches in the form of the letters DW, and sometimes Cas finds himself tracing them with his finger, remembers Dean sitting on the table and carving away at it with the pointy end of a rusted nail, all while planning out their next raid. Cas was high at the time, he doesn't even remember what he took now, but he remembers every minute with crystal clarity. One of the few angelic traits he's got left, along with perfect health he neither wants nor deserves. He's pretty sure that Sam has gone over those letters, making sure they can't ever be entirely worn away unless someone takes a belt sander to the table, or just burns it entirely. Cas tears his gaze away from the letters, forces himself to eat his eggs before they congeal completely.
"Fuck," Sam says softly from where he's standing by the stove. He still hasn't made a move to come to the table.
Cas glances up in time to see him grab hold of the counter, his grip so tight his knuckles are turning white. He can't see Sam's face from this angle, can't gauge his expression. He sighs, shoves his chair back from the table and crosses the tiny kitchen in two steps. He puts a hand on Sam's arm, can feel the muscles trembling under his fingers from the strain. Sam is blinking rapidly, far too fast for it to be normal, his gaze gone blank. It's not the first time this has happened, won't be the last.
"Come on," he says, even though Sam probably can' t hear him by now.
He pries Sam's fingers away from the edge of the counter, moves him back just in time before Sam's knees give out, stretches him out on the floor and shoves the table as far out of the way as possible before settling cross-legged on the floor beside him, leaning his back against the wall. Sometimes Sam seizes when he's not around, and those are the times that scare him -inasmuch as anything scares him anymore. He's come back to find Sam bleeding from where he cracked his head from falling over, or nursing a fresh batch of bruises or a sprained shoulder, and he figures that one of these days he's going to find Sam dead somewhere with a fractured skull or maybe drowned outside in the rain because he wasn't there to watch out for him. He doesn't know whether it's cause for dread or hope. Sam is convulsing quietly now, long limbs jerking spastically, his eyes rolled back so that only the whites are showing under half-closed lids. Cas doesn't bother counting the seconds or the minutes anymore -it's not like there are any emergency services to call if the seizure does last too long.
Finally Sam relaxes with a sigh, body going limp, and Cas checks him in a cursory fashion to make sure he hasn't bitten his tongue or vomited into his mouth or pissed himself. They've gotten off easy this time. The day is shot, though. Sam's going to sleep for the rest of the morning, and be shaky for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Cas shifts his weight uncomfortably, the foot he broke all those years ago informing him that it's probably going to rain later. Sometimes Sam wakes up after only a few minutes, after which it's fairly easy to just steer him back to bed, but sometimes it takes up to half an hour, which never fails to be mind-numbingly boring. Cas risks getting up to go rummage in his stash, tucks a tab of LSD into the pocket of his flannel shirt for later, comes back to find Sam still out for the count. Ten minutes later Cas has recited as many capitals of as many countries as he can remember in his head -he used to know them all without so much as having to think about it, including all the countries that ever existed in the history of mankind, recorded or otherwise- and Sam's eyelids begin to flutter.
"Cas?"
"Welcome back," Cas says drily, the way he does every time. He gets to his feet, puts his hands under Sam's armpits. "Come on, get up."
Sam does as he's told. He's surprisingly docile after a seizure, even though he's quiet for the most part otherwise. When he's not screaming himself hoarse at night from nightmares, that is. These days, it doesn't even wake Cas completely anymore -he just rolls over and goes back to sleep. There's nothing that makes the nightmares go away, nothing that helps to ease the terror. Such is the price of letting the Devil himself ride you for two and a half years, and Cas has never felt the need to really look into a remedy for it. His own dreams are bad enough without worrying about Sam's. He half-carries Sam back to the mattress that's been their bed ever since the world stopped ending, drops him unceremoniously onto his own side and sits next to him, knees drawn up to his chest, and carefully places the tab of LSD on his tongue. Sam curls up and goes back to sleep, and Cas watches the walls warp and change colour for the rest of the morning, not caring that he hasn't bothered to feed the chickens. Sam's the one who worries about that sort of thing.
For all that he's quiet, Sam still has the ability to surprise Cas sometimes. He'll pull Cas in when he's not expecting it, sometimes in the dark of night when Cas is half-asleep, will reach for his dick and stroke him until he's hard and leaking, then him on his back so he can suck and bite at his nipples and ignore his aching cock until Cas is writhing and gasping and cursing beneath him, eyes rolling back in his head. He likes to pin Cas' hands in place to either side of him on the bed and Cas lets him, because inevitably Sam moves down his stomach, licking and sucking and biting, worries at a spot on Cas' hip with his teeth until bruises blossom bright-red that will eventually turn purple and fade to nothing, before swallowing his dick like it's the only thing he's ever wanted in the whole world. He works his tongue along the shaft, traces the outline of his balls, laps at the precome pearling at the tip before swallowing him again, his tongue soft against the thick vein. By then Cas doesn't care that his hands are trapped, just so long as Sam lets him thrust over and over again into the warm, wet heat of his mouth until he comes apart entirely, blood roaring in his ears. Afterward, Sam wraps himself around Cas, holds him in place for the few minutes it takes for Cas to fall asleep.
The only time Sam isn't silent during sex is when Cas is fucking him. He's still quiet, but Cas can hear him panting against the mattress, arms trembling too hard to hold him up properly, can hear the quiet litany of "C'mon, Cas, come on!" that he murmurs only just loud enough to be audible to the two of them -if there was anyone within miles who even cared to listen. Sam doesn't let Cas touch him even then, just keep a firm grasp on his hips as he drives into him. It's not as though Cas doesn't know that Sam hasn't once gotten hard in all the times they've slept together. He's not quite that wilfully blind. Sometimes he doesn't know if Sam is urging him on or asking him to get it over with, and most of the time he tells himself he doesn't care, although he's careful to try and brush against Sam's prostate with every thrust, enjoying the way it makes Sam shudder and shift and moan deep in his throat. Cas sometimes pulls him up and into his lap, and Sam lets his head fall back onto Cas' shoulder, groping with one hand until he can lock their fingers together while Cas' hips roll up at an almost punishing rhythm. If Cas tries to reach around with his other hand Sam catches him by the wrist, gently keeping his hand away and turning his head instead to distract him with a kiss that's all tongue and heat and passion.
One night Cas tries to insist Sam face him, tired of feeling like just another nameless, faceless fuck. He's surprised and more than a little annoyed when Sam pulls away, gently at first, then more roughly, eyes widening in near-panic when Cas doesn't let go of his wrist.
"Cas, don't..."
Cas leans in to kiss him, pushes him backward on the mattress, catches him by the shoulders when he tries to sit up. Sam squirms, resisting him, and there's no question at all that he's not reciprocating in the slightest, but he's not doing much more than simply avoiding Cas, turning aside every attempt he makes without quite forcing him off. Finally Cas stops what he's doing, still straddling Sam's hips, hands pinning his shoulders to the mattress, feeling his stomach muscles jerk with every hitch in his breath.
"What?" he demands.
Sam just shakes his head, tongue-tied as he always is in bed. For a man who seemed to have no problem fucking demons, he certainly seems to have trouble doing the same to an angel, no matter how moot the point may be now that Cas is nothing more than meat and bones waiting to die, just like the rest of them.
Finally Sam swallows, relents a little under Cas' glare. "I don't... not like this," he says, and the roughness in his voice makes Cas' dick twitch, because apparently it can't tell the difference between sex and vocal cord damage. "Please don't make me. Not like this."
"So you can't look me in the eye when we're fucking?" Cas asks, deliberately nastily, and he doesn't miss the way Sam flinches. "Is it so you can imagine someone else here instead?" he makes his tone mocking, even as Sam shakes his head more emphatically. "What is this to you, then? If you can't look at me you can tell yourself that you haven't really said yes? Is that it? This way, you can rationalize to yourself that it's all me? That I'm making you do all of this? That I'm raping you, Sam?"
"No."
"No?" Cas shifts on top of him, his own dick still hard and throbbing, bobbing between them, obscene and a little ridiculous, under the circumstances. "No as in I'm not raping you, or no as in 'no means no?' It's a ridiculous slogan -you of all people should know that, eventually, we all say yes. Come on, enlighten me, Sam," he taunts, "you spent a few years as the Morningstar, who had more knowledge than all of the other angels combined. I figure you should know all of this, shouldn't you? Don't you?"
He forces himself to look right at Sam's face, to see the exact expression he's put there, and damn if he doesn't feel satisfaction curling up inside him, all tangled up with the guilt and anger and want. The next thing he knows he's staring up at the wooden beams on the cabin ceiling. One of them is beginning to suffer from dry-rot, he notes a little dazedly -they're going to have to do something about that. Sam is looming over him from where he neatly flipped Cas on his back; he shouldn't look so damned menacing while stark naked and his dick still soft, but Cas can feel his own heart trying to make a hasty exit through his mouth when Sam kneels and carefully places a hand on Cas' chest, just below his throat. His eyes have gone dark, and Cas feels his mouth go dry.
"Cas," he says quietly, and all Cas can hear is the familiar rasp of Sam's voice and the roaring of the blood in his ears, "you can't make me do anything I don't really want to. My terms, or none at all."
Cas forces himself to lie very still, blinking in the dim light, and wonders if maybe next time he won't try taking something a little more mellow. Sam is getting dressed, just sweats and a t-shirt, but it's enough. By the time Cas has gathered himself enough to sit up, get his bearings, clamber to his feet, the room is empty. Sam isn't far, that much he knows, but it may as well be the other side of the earth. He gives up on going to find him, just stretches back out onto the mattress and wraps his own hand around his cock, which annoyingly has shown no signs of softening at all during this whole mess. It's almost insulting, this body that pays no attention to the mind's desires and commands. It's at times like these when he wonders most if this is how all humans are, or if it's the one maddening flicker of his remaining grace that makes him this damned powerless against the rebellion of the flesh he long ago chose to inhabit.
In spite of himself his eyes close when he thumbs at the head of his dick, smearing his own pre-come over his palm as a makeshift lubricant. He shudders a bit, can't help but imagine it's Sam's large hand grasping him instead of himself, speeds up his movements. It would probably be easier if it were Dean, he thinks, even as the image of Sam swallowing him down flits in front of his mind's eye. There was something pure about Dean, even when he returned to the tricks of the trade he learned in hell, a clarity of purpose that Sam always lacked. Cas has lost track of the times he thought he might be half in love with the terrible, broken creature that he ripped, screaming and cursing and struggling from Alastair's embrace, that he remade into a whole man and watched fall right back apart in a fraction of the time it took in hell. Sam accomplished in one minute what it took Alastair thirty years to do. If Alastair were alive, Cas tells himself, panting hard as he thrusts into his own fist, he would be beside himself with rage. His orgasm almost takes him by surprise -it strikes him that that should be next to impossible, given what he's doing, but stranger things have happened. He wipes his hand off on the sheet, allows himself to succumb to the pull of sleep, and dreams of the sound of cartilage snapping under the sole of a white loafer.
It's not in Cas' nature to apologize, so he doesn't, and Sam doesn't say anything about it the next day, or the day after that, or in any of the days following. Sam doesn't say much of anything at all, not that Cas is really paying all that much attention. He's not sure where Sam is sleeping, but it can't be all that far -Sam doesn't ever venture much more than a quarter mile from the cabin- and every morning Sam is back in the kitchen, quietly cooking eggs or oatmeal on the stove. Summer is cooling off into fall, though the trees haven't yet begun to change colour, and Sam spends almost every waking moment outside, tending the vegetable garden he planted in the spring and feeding the flock of chickens that Chuck had insisted should be kept so they could have some fresh food when they couldn't go on supply runs. In retrospect, it was a lucky break.
Cas makes a point of driving to the nearest town once a month. It's more of a village than anything else, but everyone there knows who he is, and they conveniently pretend not to know that Sam is living with him. He doesn't talk to them much beyond the strict minimum of words necessary to acquire whatever it is they're currently missing at the cabin -soap, flour, oil for their lanterns- but sometimes he gets drawn into conversations in spite of his best efforts. That's how he finds himself behind one of the stalls at the makeshift street market in town, staring down at a box full of squirming kittens, wondering just how the hell he went from asking about the price of salt to agreeing to take on four orphaned cats. The bravest of the bunch is a tawny brown kitten with bright green eyes that clambers over the side of the box and tumbles headlong onto the ground before making a valiant attempt to scramble over his booted foot and up his leg. Cas bends over and picks it up by the scruff of the neck, only to have it squirm and bat at him indignantly.
"I guess you're coming with me, then."
It takes all of an hour for the kitten to adopt Sam. The others are all a little more shy, but they seem to take well enough to the shed where Cas sets them down, but the brown kitten quickly latches onto Sam, climbing him like a tree until it can perch on his shoulder and rub its head against his jaw, purring more loudly than Cas would have thought possible for a creature that size. Sam's smile is surprised, small but genuine, and Cas realizes he doesn't actually remember the last time he saw Sam actually smile. Sam names the kitten Renegade.
Later on, Cas discovers that petting kittens just after taking ecstasy is the best thing ever, but he can't convince Sam to try it.
There is some sort of ironic cosmic balance at work in the world, is Cas' theory on the subject. If he as a fallen angel occupying the human vessel unlucky enough to say 'yes' to him before he fell gets to have an iron constitution, then apparently the reverse is true for the hapless human vessel who got left behind after saying yes to an already-fallen archangel. Sam doesn't even see people, so Cas will be damned (hah) if he knows how he ever manages to get sick, how he ever comes into contact with whatever virus happens to be going around at the time. There's no rhyme nor reason to it, since it doesn't always correspond with Cas' forays into town, or anything else traceable for that matter. Cas supposes that it's like the seizures -another inexplicable side effect of being Lucifer's vessel for nearly three years.
Just one more shitty thing for them both to deal with, Cas thinks, watching Sam drag himself in from a day in the garden, face flushed and hair sticking to his head with sweat. It's obvious even from across the room that Sam's running a fever, but neither of them say a word, and Cas doesn't get up from his chair. Sam moves mechanically across the room, unconsciously shuffling his feet in such a way as to avoid the kitten twining around his legs, pulls out a pot and fills it with water, although Cas doesn't have the faintest idea what he's planning on cooking. He's not hungry anyway. Water sloshes over the side of the pan, and Sam curses under his breath, which is Cas' cue to get up, go over and lean against the counter next to Sam. If Cas had been Dean, he'd probably put a hand on Sam's back or his shoulder, but he keeps his arms crossed and his tone rougher than he probably should.
"Why don't you just go to bed, already?"
Sam shrugs, and Cas thinks he gets it. After that one huge capitulation, Sam doesn't like surrendering to anything or anyone anymore, not even something as uncontrollable as a fever. He's wavering, though, unsteady on his feet, and they both know that, inevitably, he'll have to do as Cas tells him. At least, Cas tells himself as he nudges Sam out of the kitchen, Renegade close on their heels, it means Sam is going to start sleeping in their bed again. It's ridiculous to be missing what he resented only a couple of weeks ago, but Cas is starting to become accustomed to being ridiculous. He helps Sam out of his jeans and overshirt, lies down next to him on the bed, and carefully places a hand over his heart, letting the slightly too-fast thumping lull him to sleep.
He's not surprised to be awoken when it's so dark that he can barely see his own hand in front of his face. Sam is breathing hard next to him, radiating heat like a furnace. Renegade is prowling along the edges of the room, a tiny shadow moving among the other shadows. As usual when these things start, Sam is quiet -he almost never talks at first, just lies there and suffers in silence. Cas refuses to read anything into it. Instead he gets up, lights the lamp near the bed, and tries to gauge just how high the fever is. It's just a question of keeping it manageable, of preventing Sam from damaging his brain even further than Lucifer already has. It's a waiting game more than anything. Sometimes the fever will break in a few hours, sometimes in a few days.
Cas doesn't do much more than sit on the bed next to Sam, chain-smoking one of the packs of cigarettes he bought in town and ignoring the way the smoke makes Sam cough pathetically in his sleep. After a few hours, when it's obvious they're in this for the long haul, Cas stubs out his cigarette and goes to fill a basin with cold water from the pump. He rummages in the drawer where they keep a few spare linens, finds cloths to wet in the water and lays them on Sam's chest, wipes his face with the cleanest one he can find. Sam doesn't waken, although he does stir a little with an uncomfortable sigh, mutters something indecipherable under his breath. It won't be long now, Cas thinks, and finds some phenobarbital, because that's the only thing that makes it all tolerable. Then he floats.
"Cas."
The nice fog in which he's been floating lifts a little at the sound of Sam's voice. He turns his head to look at Sam still lying on the mattress next to him, one hand hooked around Cas' shin. He looks terrible, even in the dim light of the gas lamp that's sitting in the corner. It occurs to Cas that the next time he should probably extinguish it before taking pills that put him out. Sam's fingers scrape against his pants.
"Cas, what'd you take?"
"Downers. Don't worry about it," he says, a little more sharply than he intended. He brushes the backs of his fingers against Sam's forehead. "You better?"
"'m hot." It comes out as a quiet moan. Sam curls on his side, oblivious to Cas' hands still on his neck just where it joins his shoulder.
"I can tell. You want anything?"
Sam shakes his head. "No. Sorry."
"You're starting early," Cas comments. "What are you sorry for this time?"
He wishes the pills were still working. He hates this part, when Sam loses track of what's happening, because all that comes out of his mouth is a litany of apologies, a senseless string of 'I'm sorry's, one after the other after the other. He retrieves the cloth from where it fell, leaving a wet patch on the mattress, wets it again and tries to lay it back on Sam's forehead, only to be met with resistance, much to his surprise.
"All of it," Sam says hoarsely, shoving himself upright until he manages to list awkwardly against Cas. The heat from the fever is still rolling off him, and Cas is torn between wanting to shove him back down on the bed and pulling him close. He settles on doing nothing, letting Sam lean on him. "Are you going to leave?" he asks, the way he always does, and Cas shakes his head.
"I'm not leaving."
"Why not?"
Cas shrugs. "Where would I go?"
"Dunno. The whole world." Sam obviously isn't thinking all that clearly. "You could leave any time. Find something better. You deserve something better."
"And you don't?"
Sam coughs and shrugs. "It's like I got hollowed out -all my insides scooped out to make room for him, and even then it wasn't enough. I had to... God, the things he did with me, and it was barely enough to keep him contained. I thought we were going to burst and take out the whole world like a flash of lightning."
Cas bites down on his own tongue so hard he tastes blood. In the last year, Sam hasn't so much as uttered a word about Lucifer, or Dean, or any of it. Not unless he was screaming in his sleep, or out of his mind with fever. Cas has never seen him in this odd, in-between state. He doesn't want to hear any of this, but finds himself waiting for Sam to finish anyway.
"You remind me of him. When you... I don't know," Sam's words are slightly muffled now against Cas' shirt. "I miss him. It's fucking awful -I don't want it, not for a second, but I'm always goddamned empty, Cas, and you... I don't know," he finishes lamely, but Cas understands him anyway.
"I get it," he says after a minute or so has passed. Heat is seeping from Sam right through Cas' shirt where they're pressed up together, and for the first time in a very long time, Cas lets himself look right at Sam without trying to see if there's any flicker there of Lucifer, or Dean. He brings up his hand to brush against Sam's forehead again, checking his fever. "It won't feel as bad when your fever breaks."
Sam huffs. "How do you know?"
"I just do," he sighs. He runs his tongue along the back of his teeth. "We don't have to do it anymore, if it hurts you," he says finally. "Have sex, I mean." It takes all his willpower to say it, but Cas knows he's the one that started it, that Sam never would have asked him for this on his own. It's Cas who wants it, who can taste that tiny flicker of grace -no matter how tainted- at the back of his own throat whenever they're together.
Sam lets out a tiny noise that's halfway between a sob and a laugh. "That's not... I'm not supposed to want things. I'm not supposed to get what I want."
"Neither am I, but it doesn't appear to have stopped me at all."
"Cas-"
"No, shut up," Cas interrupts him. "I mean it. I know, okay? I already know, you don't need to say it. Look," he struggles for his words. Somehow, this all used to be much easier, before. Back when he couldn't feel the inexorable entropy of every passing second. "You and me, there is no atonement. You get that, right?"
Sam nods, presses up tighter against him. "I thought it was just me," he murmurs, and Cas just shakes his head.
Renegade stops prowling along the walls, apparently satisfied that there's no threat. He clambers up onto the mattress, noses at Cas' kneecap, then flops unceremoniously in Sam's lap, purring lustily. Sam wheezes out a quiet laugh, and Cas feels a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"Stupid cat. Can't it tell that we're busy feeling sorry for ourselves?" Cas rolls his eyes, grateful for the opportunity to change the subject, no matter how transparent he's being.
"I don't think he cares," Sam points out, shifting his weight a little, all while trying not to disturb the kitten, which has started kneading its paws against Cas' thigh, claws digging painfully through the fabric. He coughs again, settling more heavily against Cas' shoulder. "D'you feed the chickens?" Apparently Cas isn't the only one who doesn't want to talk about Dean or Lucifer or any of it anymore.
"No. You're the one who likes them." Cas never feeds the chickens, not even when Sam is sick. "They hate me, and the feeling is mutual. I don't even like eating them. You can feed them tomorrow if you're better."
"Gee, thanks." Sam scratches Renegade behind the ears, making him purr even more loudly.
"Anytime. I'll even let you make breakfast."
"Generous."
"You have no idea. Your cooking sucks."
Sam mumbles something Cas doesn't catch, so Cas turns in order to get a better grip on him, ignoring Renegade's mewl of discontent at being dislodged, and slides them both down onto the bed. He smooths Sam's hair away from where it's clinging to his forehead, pulls the blankets up until they're both well-covered. He pulls Sam close, settles with a feeling that's perilously close to contentment when Sam automatically wraps an arm around his waist and hooks a knee around both of Cas' legs. It's hot to the point of almost being stifling, but he doesn't care. His bed hasn't felt safe -just empty and cold and dark- in well over a week. It'll be nice, he thinks drowsily, to have someone there when he wakes up from the constant nightmares.
So he lets Sam wrap himself around him like a blanket, and goes to sleep secure in the knowledge that, come morning, Sam will still be there. They both will.
Summary: AU to 5.04. After Lucifer kills Dean, Sam manages to wrest back control of his own body. The world stops ending, people start putting things back in order. Alone together amidst a society that's trying to rebuild itself, Sam and Cas -the sole survivor of the kamikaze assault on the Jackson County Sanatorium- retreat back to Camp Chitaqua, where they've managed to build a semblance of a life together. Now, more than a year later, they're still trying to glue back the pieces of lives that have been irretrievably shattered.
Characters: Sam/Cas
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 5,681
Disclaimer: I tried to make them all mine, but Sera hung onto them and growled at me, so I decided discretion was the better part of valour. ;)
Warnings: Uh, there's a situation that I'm going to classify as dub-con in order to err on the side of caution. At the very least, it qualifies as unhappy sex. There's angst. Aaaaaangst. Oh God, there's angst. And lots of recreational drug use. Sick!Sam. Oh, and kittens. Because kittens totally deserve their own warning.
Neurotic Author's Note #1: I AM LATE. Oh God. /o\ I am SO SORRY. Um, but I wrote it anyway? Thank God 13chapters is understanding. Gaaaaaaah. This story fought me for every inch once I got close to the end.
Neurotic Author's Note #2: This is a sequel to my fic After The End. You don't need to read it in order to understand this one, I don't think. I'm almost positive it stands on its own, but since it's unbeta'd I can't tell for sure. The first fic is not as depressing as this one, for what it's worth.
Neurotic Author's Note #3: Um, apparently I really love to read happy fluffy Sassy, but whenever I write it, it ends up being a giant waterfall of angst and woe. I am sorry.
Cas wakes up every morning to Sam wrapped around him like a blanket, a little too warm and a little too close. They don't fall asleep that way, but inevitably sometime during the night one of Sam's arms will end up draped over his chest, and by the time morning comes Cas' legs will be trapped under one of Sam's, too, the rest of Sam plastered up against him like he's trying to fuse them together into one person. Sometimes Cas finds himself wondering how Dean ever put up with it, the cloying closeness, the enforced intimacy. Then again, maybe Sam wasn't quite this clingy before the world ended and they all managed to keep on going. Almost all of them, anyway.
He shoves Sam off him, gets to his feet by the simple expedient of rolling off the mattress to the floor and shoving himself upright, stumbles half-blind toward the outhouse behind his cabin. Their cabin. It was his cabin before, but now the inviolate nature of his space is no longer enforced. It's not as awful in the outhouse as when there were better than fifty people living at Camp Chitaqua, a little more liveable, but even after all these years Cas still hasn't quite gotten used to the unpleasantness of basic human bodily functions. Eating isn't so bad, but elimination is messy and seems rather pointless, all told. Not to mention it's hard to maintain decent hygiene when the only running water is a couple of hand-pumps in the cabin -one that was already installed in the kitchen sink, and one that Sam put in later so that they could have a bathroom of sorts. It's rudimentary, but it's better than it used to be, and a lot of that is because of Sam. Credit where it's due, Cas supposes, although there are days when he can't help but think that it's all Sam's fault to begin with. So on those days, when he's feeling uncharitable, he thinks that putting in a water pump is the least that Sam could do, all things considered.
When he gets back, the smell of cooking ham and eggs greets him. Sam is already in the kitchen, standing over the stove, spatula in hand. The eggs are from the chickens he's been raising for the better part of a year, the ham the result of a trade with people several miles up the road who started raising pigs and agreed to exchange one full-grown pig a year in exchange for a dozen eggs every two weeks for a year. So far it's worked out pretty well. Having a reliable source of protein is a good thing. Cas washes his hands in the sink, cold water trickling over his fingers, turns in time to see Sam sliding the eggs and ham onto a plate at his usual spot at the rough wooden kitchen table.
"Coffee's nearly ready," Sam says, breaking the silence for the first time this morning. It comes out as a hoarse croak, as though he hasn't spoken in weeks or months. His voice will even out a little as the day goes by and he uses it more, but his vocal cords have never really recovered entirely from all the damage he inflicted on them over a year ago.
Cas just nods, sits at the table and picks up his fork, uses it to cut into his eggs and watches the yellow of the yolk trickle out and ooze under his slice of ham. Sometimes he complains that Sam's cooking is terrible -to which Sam usually replies mildly that he can cook his own damned food if he wants something else- but that's not it, exactly. He doesn't like ham, doesn't like any food at all, even. It tastes too much like death and decay, even though he knows that's not what it is. Seven years, and it's all he can do to keep his gorge from rising every time he puts another bite in his mouth. He likes it better when Sam makes vegetarian dishes, but there's not enough protein in those, for either of them.
Sam sets the metal coffee maker on the table, heedless of any scorch marks it might leave. It's not like the table is in good condition to begin with, already scratched and gouged, with marks in the legs from too many booted heels knocking against it. In one corner there are distinctive scratches in the form of the letters DW, and sometimes Cas finds himself tracing them with his finger, remembers Dean sitting on the table and carving away at it with the pointy end of a rusted nail, all while planning out their next raid. Cas was high at the time, he doesn't even remember what he took now, but he remembers every minute with crystal clarity. One of the few angelic traits he's got left, along with perfect health he neither wants nor deserves. He's pretty sure that Sam has gone over those letters, making sure they can't ever be entirely worn away unless someone takes a belt sander to the table, or just burns it entirely. Cas tears his gaze away from the letters, forces himself to eat his eggs before they congeal completely.
"Fuck," Sam says softly from where he's standing by the stove. He still hasn't made a move to come to the table.
Cas glances up in time to see him grab hold of the counter, his grip so tight his knuckles are turning white. He can't see Sam's face from this angle, can't gauge his expression. He sighs, shoves his chair back from the table and crosses the tiny kitchen in two steps. He puts a hand on Sam's arm, can feel the muscles trembling under his fingers from the strain. Sam is blinking rapidly, far too fast for it to be normal, his gaze gone blank. It's not the first time this has happened, won't be the last.
"Come on," he says, even though Sam probably can' t hear him by now.
He pries Sam's fingers away from the edge of the counter, moves him back just in time before Sam's knees give out, stretches him out on the floor and shoves the table as far out of the way as possible before settling cross-legged on the floor beside him, leaning his back against the wall. Sometimes Sam seizes when he's not around, and those are the times that scare him -inasmuch as anything scares him anymore. He's come back to find Sam bleeding from where he cracked his head from falling over, or nursing a fresh batch of bruises or a sprained shoulder, and he figures that one of these days he's going to find Sam dead somewhere with a fractured skull or maybe drowned outside in the rain because he wasn't there to watch out for him. He doesn't know whether it's cause for dread or hope. Sam is convulsing quietly now, long limbs jerking spastically, his eyes rolled back so that only the whites are showing under half-closed lids. Cas doesn't bother counting the seconds or the minutes anymore -it's not like there are any emergency services to call if the seizure does last too long.
Finally Sam relaxes with a sigh, body going limp, and Cas checks him in a cursory fashion to make sure he hasn't bitten his tongue or vomited into his mouth or pissed himself. They've gotten off easy this time. The day is shot, though. Sam's going to sleep for the rest of the morning, and be shaky for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Cas shifts his weight uncomfortably, the foot he broke all those years ago informing him that it's probably going to rain later. Sometimes Sam wakes up after only a few minutes, after which it's fairly easy to just steer him back to bed, but sometimes it takes up to half an hour, which never fails to be mind-numbingly boring. Cas risks getting up to go rummage in his stash, tucks a tab of LSD into the pocket of his flannel shirt for later, comes back to find Sam still out for the count. Ten minutes later Cas has recited as many capitals of as many countries as he can remember in his head -he used to know them all without so much as having to think about it, including all the countries that ever existed in the history of mankind, recorded or otherwise- and Sam's eyelids begin to flutter.
"Cas?"
"Welcome back," Cas says drily, the way he does every time. He gets to his feet, puts his hands under Sam's armpits. "Come on, get up."
Sam does as he's told. He's surprisingly docile after a seizure, even though he's quiet for the most part otherwise. When he's not screaming himself hoarse at night from nightmares, that is. These days, it doesn't even wake Cas completely anymore -he just rolls over and goes back to sleep. There's nothing that makes the nightmares go away, nothing that helps to ease the terror. Such is the price of letting the Devil himself ride you for two and a half years, and Cas has never felt the need to really look into a remedy for it. His own dreams are bad enough without worrying about Sam's. He half-carries Sam back to the mattress that's been their bed ever since the world stopped ending, drops him unceremoniously onto his own side and sits next to him, knees drawn up to his chest, and carefully places the tab of LSD on his tongue. Sam curls up and goes back to sleep, and Cas watches the walls warp and change colour for the rest of the morning, not caring that he hasn't bothered to feed the chickens. Sam's the one who worries about that sort of thing.
For all that he's quiet, Sam still has the ability to surprise Cas sometimes. He'll pull Cas in when he's not expecting it, sometimes in the dark of night when Cas is half-asleep, will reach for his dick and stroke him until he's hard and leaking, then him on his back so he can suck and bite at his nipples and ignore his aching cock until Cas is writhing and gasping and cursing beneath him, eyes rolling back in his head. He likes to pin Cas' hands in place to either side of him on the bed and Cas lets him, because inevitably Sam moves down his stomach, licking and sucking and biting, worries at a spot on Cas' hip with his teeth until bruises blossom bright-red that will eventually turn purple and fade to nothing, before swallowing his dick like it's the only thing he's ever wanted in the whole world. He works his tongue along the shaft, traces the outline of his balls, laps at the precome pearling at the tip before swallowing him again, his tongue soft against the thick vein. By then Cas doesn't care that his hands are trapped, just so long as Sam lets him thrust over and over again into the warm, wet heat of his mouth until he comes apart entirely, blood roaring in his ears. Afterward, Sam wraps himself around Cas, holds him in place for the few minutes it takes for Cas to fall asleep.
The only time Sam isn't silent during sex is when Cas is fucking him. He's still quiet, but Cas can hear him panting against the mattress, arms trembling too hard to hold him up properly, can hear the quiet litany of "C'mon, Cas, come on!" that he murmurs only just loud enough to be audible to the two of them -if there was anyone within miles who even cared to listen. Sam doesn't let Cas touch him even then, just keep a firm grasp on his hips as he drives into him. It's not as though Cas doesn't know that Sam hasn't once gotten hard in all the times they've slept together. He's not quite that wilfully blind. Sometimes he doesn't know if Sam is urging him on or asking him to get it over with, and most of the time he tells himself he doesn't care, although he's careful to try and brush against Sam's prostate with every thrust, enjoying the way it makes Sam shudder and shift and moan deep in his throat. Cas sometimes pulls him up and into his lap, and Sam lets his head fall back onto Cas' shoulder, groping with one hand until he can lock their fingers together while Cas' hips roll up at an almost punishing rhythm. If Cas tries to reach around with his other hand Sam catches him by the wrist, gently keeping his hand away and turning his head instead to distract him with a kiss that's all tongue and heat and passion.
One night Cas tries to insist Sam face him, tired of feeling like just another nameless, faceless fuck. He's surprised and more than a little annoyed when Sam pulls away, gently at first, then more roughly, eyes widening in near-panic when Cas doesn't let go of his wrist.
"Cas, don't..."
Cas leans in to kiss him, pushes him backward on the mattress, catches him by the shoulders when he tries to sit up. Sam squirms, resisting him, and there's no question at all that he's not reciprocating in the slightest, but he's not doing much more than simply avoiding Cas, turning aside every attempt he makes without quite forcing him off. Finally Cas stops what he's doing, still straddling Sam's hips, hands pinning his shoulders to the mattress, feeling his stomach muscles jerk with every hitch in his breath.
"What?" he demands.
Sam just shakes his head, tongue-tied as he always is in bed. For a man who seemed to have no problem fucking demons, he certainly seems to have trouble doing the same to an angel, no matter how moot the point may be now that Cas is nothing more than meat and bones waiting to die, just like the rest of them.
Finally Sam swallows, relents a little under Cas' glare. "I don't... not like this," he says, and the roughness in his voice makes Cas' dick twitch, because apparently it can't tell the difference between sex and vocal cord damage. "Please don't make me. Not like this."
"So you can't look me in the eye when we're fucking?" Cas asks, deliberately nastily, and he doesn't miss the way Sam flinches. "Is it so you can imagine someone else here instead?" he makes his tone mocking, even as Sam shakes his head more emphatically. "What is this to you, then? If you can't look at me you can tell yourself that you haven't really said yes? Is that it? This way, you can rationalize to yourself that it's all me? That I'm making you do all of this? That I'm raping you, Sam?"
"No."
"No?" Cas shifts on top of him, his own dick still hard and throbbing, bobbing between them, obscene and a little ridiculous, under the circumstances. "No as in I'm not raping you, or no as in 'no means no?' It's a ridiculous slogan -you of all people should know that, eventually, we all say yes. Come on, enlighten me, Sam," he taunts, "you spent a few years as the Morningstar, who had more knowledge than all of the other angels combined. I figure you should know all of this, shouldn't you? Don't you?"
He forces himself to look right at Sam's face, to see the exact expression he's put there, and damn if he doesn't feel satisfaction curling up inside him, all tangled up with the guilt and anger and want. The next thing he knows he's staring up at the wooden beams on the cabin ceiling. One of them is beginning to suffer from dry-rot, he notes a little dazedly -they're going to have to do something about that. Sam is looming over him from where he neatly flipped Cas on his back; he shouldn't look so damned menacing while stark naked and his dick still soft, but Cas can feel his own heart trying to make a hasty exit through his mouth when Sam kneels and carefully places a hand on Cas' chest, just below his throat. His eyes have gone dark, and Cas feels his mouth go dry.
"Cas," he says quietly, and all Cas can hear is the familiar rasp of Sam's voice and the roaring of the blood in his ears, "you can't make me do anything I don't really want to. My terms, or none at all."
Cas forces himself to lie very still, blinking in the dim light, and wonders if maybe next time he won't try taking something a little more mellow. Sam is getting dressed, just sweats and a t-shirt, but it's enough. By the time Cas has gathered himself enough to sit up, get his bearings, clamber to his feet, the room is empty. Sam isn't far, that much he knows, but it may as well be the other side of the earth. He gives up on going to find him, just stretches back out onto the mattress and wraps his own hand around his cock, which annoyingly has shown no signs of softening at all during this whole mess. It's almost insulting, this body that pays no attention to the mind's desires and commands. It's at times like these when he wonders most if this is how all humans are, or if it's the one maddening flicker of his remaining grace that makes him this damned powerless against the rebellion of the flesh he long ago chose to inhabit.
In spite of himself his eyes close when he thumbs at the head of his dick, smearing his own pre-come over his palm as a makeshift lubricant. He shudders a bit, can't help but imagine it's Sam's large hand grasping him instead of himself, speeds up his movements. It would probably be easier if it were Dean, he thinks, even as the image of Sam swallowing him down flits in front of his mind's eye. There was something pure about Dean, even when he returned to the tricks of the trade he learned in hell, a clarity of purpose that Sam always lacked. Cas has lost track of the times he thought he might be half in love with the terrible, broken creature that he ripped, screaming and cursing and struggling from Alastair's embrace, that he remade into a whole man and watched fall right back apart in a fraction of the time it took in hell. Sam accomplished in one minute what it took Alastair thirty years to do. If Alastair were alive, Cas tells himself, panting hard as he thrusts into his own fist, he would be beside himself with rage. His orgasm almost takes him by surprise -it strikes him that that should be next to impossible, given what he's doing, but stranger things have happened. He wipes his hand off on the sheet, allows himself to succumb to the pull of sleep, and dreams of the sound of cartilage snapping under the sole of a white loafer.
It's not in Cas' nature to apologize, so he doesn't, and Sam doesn't say anything about it the next day, or the day after that, or in any of the days following. Sam doesn't say much of anything at all, not that Cas is really paying all that much attention. He's not sure where Sam is sleeping, but it can't be all that far -Sam doesn't ever venture much more than a quarter mile from the cabin- and every morning Sam is back in the kitchen, quietly cooking eggs or oatmeal on the stove. Summer is cooling off into fall, though the trees haven't yet begun to change colour, and Sam spends almost every waking moment outside, tending the vegetable garden he planted in the spring and feeding the flock of chickens that Chuck had insisted should be kept so they could have some fresh food when they couldn't go on supply runs. In retrospect, it was a lucky break.
Cas makes a point of driving to the nearest town once a month. It's more of a village than anything else, but everyone there knows who he is, and they conveniently pretend not to know that Sam is living with him. He doesn't talk to them much beyond the strict minimum of words necessary to acquire whatever it is they're currently missing at the cabin -soap, flour, oil for their lanterns- but sometimes he gets drawn into conversations in spite of his best efforts. That's how he finds himself behind one of the stalls at the makeshift street market in town, staring down at a box full of squirming kittens, wondering just how the hell he went from asking about the price of salt to agreeing to take on four orphaned cats. The bravest of the bunch is a tawny brown kitten with bright green eyes that clambers over the side of the box and tumbles headlong onto the ground before making a valiant attempt to scramble over his booted foot and up his leg. Cas bends over and picks it up by the scruff of the neck, only to have it squirm and bat at him indignantly.
"I guess you're coming with me, then."
It takes all of an hour for the kitten to adopt Sam. The others are all a little more shy, but they seem to take well enough to the shed where Cas sets them down, but the brown kitten quickly latches onto Sam, climbing him like a tree until it can perch on his shoulder and rub its head against his jaw, purring more loudly than Cas would have thought possible for a creature that size. Sam's smile is surprised, small but genuine, and Cas realizes he doesn't actually remember the last time he saw Sam actually smile. Sam names the kitten Renegade.
Later on, Cas discovers that petting kittens just after taking ecstasy is the best thing ever, but he can't convince Sam to try it.
There is some sort of ironic cosmic balance at work in the world, is Cas' theory on the subject. If he as a fallen angel occupying the human vessel unlucky enough to say 'yes' to him before he fell gets to have an iron constitution, then apparently the reverse is true for the hapless human vessel who got left behind after saying yes to an already-fallen archangel. Sam doesn't even see people, so Cas will be damned (hah) if he knows how he ever manages to get sick, how he ever comes into contact with whatever virus happens to be going around at the time. There's no rhyme nor reason to it, since it doesn't always correspond with Cas' forays into town, or anything else traceable for that matter. Cas supposes that it's like the seizures -another inexplicable side effect of being Lucifer's vessel for nearly three years.
Just one more shitty thing for them both to deal with, Cas thinks, watching Sam drag himself in from a day in the garden, face flushed and hair sticking to his head with sweat. It's obvious even from across the room that Sam's running a fever, but neither of them say a word, and Cas doesn't get up from his chair. Sam moves mechanically across the room, unconsciously shuffling his feet in such a way as to avoid the kitten twining around his legs, pulls out a pot and fills it with water, although Cas doesn't have the faintest idea what he's planning on cooking. He's not hungry anyway. Water sloshes over the side of the pan, and Sam curses under his breath, which is Cas' cue to get up, go over and lean against the counter next to Sam. If Cas had been Dean, he'd probably put a hand on Sam's back or his shoulder, but he keeps his arms crossed and his tone rougher than he probably should.
"Why don't you just go to bed, already?"
Sam shrugs, and Cas thinks he gets it. After that one huge capitulation, Sam doesn't like surrendering to anything or anyone anymore, not even something as uncontrollable as a fever. He's wavering, though, unsteady on his feet, and they both know that, inevitably, he'll have to do as Cas tells him. At least, Cas tells himself as he nudges Sam out of the kitchen, Renegade close on their heels, it means Sam is going to start sleeping in their bed again. It's ridiculous to be missing what he resented only a couple of weeks ago, but Cas is starting to become accustomed to being ridiculous. He helps Sam out of his jeans and overshirt, lies down next to him on the bed, and carefully places a hand over his heart, letting the slightly too-fast thumping lull him to sleep.
He's not surprised to be awoken when it's so dark that he can barely see his own hand in front of his face. Sam is breathing hard next to him, radiating heat like a furnace. Renegade is prowling along the edges of the room, a tiny shadow moving among the other shadows. As usual when these things start, Sam is quiet -he almost never talks at first, just lies there and suffers in silence. Cas refuses to read anything into it. Instead he gets up, lights the lamp near the bed, and tries to gauge just how high the fever is. It's just a question of keeping it manageable, of preventing Sam from damaging his brain even further than Lucifer already has. It's a waiting game more than anything. Sometimes the fever will break in a few hours, sometimes in a few days.
Cas doesn't do much more than sit on the bed next to Sam, chain-smoking one of the packs of cigarettes he bought in town and ignoring the way the smoke makes Sam cough pathetically in his sleep. After a few hours, when it's obvious they're in this for the long haul, Cas stubs out his cigarette and goes to fill a basin with cold water from the pump. He rummages in the drawer where they keep a few spare linens, finds cloths to wet in the water and lays them on Sam's chest, wipes his face with the cleanest one he can find. Sam doesn't waken, although he does stir a little with an uncomfortable sigh, mutters something indecipherable under his breath. It won't be long now, Cas thinks, and finds some phenobarbital, because that's the only thing that makes it all tolerable. Then he floats.
"Cas."
The nice fog in which he's been floating lifts a little at the sound of Sam's voice. He turns his head to look at Sam still lying on the mattress next to him, one hand hooked around Cas' shin. He looks terrible, even in the dim light of the gas lamp that's sitting in the corner. It occurs to Cas that the next time he should probably extinguish it before taking pills that put him out. Sam's fingers scrape against his pants.
"Cas, what'd you take?"
"Downers. Don't worry about it," he says, a little more sharply than he intended. He brushes the backs of his fingers against Sam's forehead. "You better?"
"'m hot." It comes out as a quiet moan. Sam curls on his side, oblivious to Cas' hands still on his neck just where it joins his shoulder.
"I can tell. You want anything?"
Sam shakes his head. "No. Sorry."
"You're starting early," Cas comments. "What are you sorry for this time?"
He wishes the pills were still working. He hates this part, when Sam loses track of what's happening, because all that comes out of his mouth is a litany of apologies, a senseless string of 'I'm sorry's, one after the other after the other. He retrieves the cloth from where it fell, leaving a wet patch on the mattress, wets it again and tries to lay it back on Sam's forehead, only to be met with resistance, much to his surprise.
"All of it," Sam says hoarsely, shoving himself upright until he manages to list awkwardly against Cas. The heat from the fever is still rolling off him, and Cas is torn between wanting to shove him back down on the bed and pulling him close. He settles on doing nothing, letting Sam lean on him. "Are you going to leave?" he asks, the way he always does, and Cas shakes his head.
"I'm not leaving."
"Why not?"
Cas shrugs. "Where would I go?"
"Dunno. The whole world." Sam obviously isn't thinking all that clearly. "You could leave any time. Find something better. You deserve something better."
"And you don't?"
Sam coughs and shrugs. "It's like I got hollowed out -all my insides scooped out to make room for him, and even then it wasn't enough. I had to... God, the things he did with me, and it was barely enough to keep him contained. I thought we were going to burst and take out the whole world like a flash of lightning."
Cas bites down on his own tongue so hard he tastes blood. In the last year, Sam hasn't so much as uttered a word about Lucifer, or Dean, or any of it. Not unless he was screaming in his sleep, or out of his mind with fever. Cas has never seen him in this odd, in-between state. He doesn't want to hear any of this, but finds himself waiting for Sam to finish anyway.
"You remind me of him. When you... I don't know," Sam's words are slightly muffled now against Cas' shirt. "I miss him. It's fucking awful -I don't want it, not for a second, but I'm always goddamned empty, Cas, and you... I don't know," he finishes lamely, but Cas understands him anyway.
"I get it," he says after a minute or so has passed. Heat is seeping from Sam right through Cas' shirt where they're pressed up together, and for the first time in a very long time, Cas lets himself look right at Sam without trying to see if there's any flicker there of Lucifer, or Dean. He brings up his hand to brush against Sam's forehead again, checking his fever. "It won't feel as bad when your fever breaks."
Sam huffs. "How do you know?"
"I just do," he sighs. He runs his tongue along the back of his teeth. "We don't have to do it anymore, if it hurts you," he says finally. "Have sex, I mean." It takes all his willpower to say it, but Cas knows he's the one that started it, that Sam never would have asked him for this on his own. It's Cas who wants it, who can taste that tiny flicker of grace -no matter how tainted- at the back of his own throat whenever they're together.
Sam lets out a tiny noise that's halfway between a sob and a laugh. "That's not... I'm not supposed to want things. I'm not supposed to get what I want."
"Neither am I, but it doesn't appear to have stopped me at all."
"Cas-"
"No, shut up," Cas interrupts him. "I mean it. I know, okay? I already know, you don't need to say it. Look," he struggles for his words. Somehow, this all used to be much easier, before. Back when he couldn't feel the inexorable entropy of every passing second. "You and me, there is no atonement. You get that, right?"
Sam nods, presses up tighter against him. "I thought it was just me," he murmurs, and Cas just shakes his head.
Renegade stops prowling along the walls, apparently satisfied that there's no threat. He clambers up onto the mattress, noses at Cas' kneecap, then flops unceremoniously in Sam's lap, purring lustily. Sam wheezes out a quiet laugh, and Cas feels a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"Stupid cat. Can't it tell that we're busy feeling sorry for ourselves?" Cas rolls his eyes, grateful for the opportunity to change the subject, no matter how transparent he's being.
"I don't think he cares," Sam points out, shifting his weight a little, all while trying not to disturb the kitten, which has started kneading its paws against Cas' thigh, claws digging painfully through the fabric. He coughs again, settling more heavily against Cas' shoulder. "D'you feed the chickens?" Apparently Cas isn't the only one who doesn't want to talk about Dean or Lucifer or any of it anymore.
"No. You're the one who likes them." Cas never feeds the chickens, not even when Sam is sick. "They hate me, and the feeling is mutual. I don't even like eating them. You can feed them tomorrow if you're better."
"Gee, thanks." Sam scratches Renegade behind the ears, making him purr even more loudly.
"Anytime. I'll even let you make breakfast."
"Generous."
"You have no idea. Your cooking sucks."
Sam mumbles something Cas doesn't catch, so Cas turns in order to get a better grip on him, ignoring Renegade's mewl of discontent at being dislodged, and slides them both down onto the bed. He smooths Sam's hair away from where it's clinging to his forehead, pulls the blankets up until they're both well-covered. He pulls Sam close, settles with a feeling that's perilously close to contentment when Sam automatically wraps an arm around his waist and hooks a knee around both of Cas' legs. It's hot to the point of almost being stifling, but he doesn't care. His bed hasn't felt safe -just empty and cold and dark- in well over a week. It'll be nice, he thinks drowsily, to have someone there when he wakes up from the constant nightmares.
So he lets Sam wrap himself around him like a blanket, and goes to sleep secure in the knowledge that, come morning, Sam will still be there. They both will.